Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/190

 extension of familiar conversation. It must introduce no topic that can't be made current. It must be light enough to be digested with coffee and rolls. It must be pointed enough to wake up the man from New Jersey crossing the ferry in the cool, sleepy-eyed morning. It must be amusing enough to relax the tension of the tired business man and make him forget, when he goes up to bed, to mourn for his lost night cap.

The "colyumist" blazed out the way to the new public. And cannibalistic critics among the elder bigwigs like to dispose of the "colyumist" as Dr. Johnson in his loftier vein disposed of his friend Garrick: "Davy hath a pleasant wit, but he is a futile fellow." Now the "colyumist," taken singly and in detail, is not very formidable, to be sure. But let us first analyze our specimens, and then construct the species.

Christopher Morley chats me some forty chats, from which I recall that he went to Haverford, that he formed himself on R. L. S. and Joseph Conrad; that he likes lunching in odd places about town with fellow-craftsmen; that he likes Captain Bone and all tales of the sea, and that he loves the pungent odors and mellow tints of old shops and streets around the Post Office and Bowling Green. I thrust my thumb into the plum pudding of this professional amateur of the city, this Jim Hawkins of Broadway, so keen to make Manhattan a treasure island, and I fetch out a plum on the best way to clean an old pipe, or I fetch out this