Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/196

 These journalistic humanists are modest; they do not even attempt to reform the world. They are occupied rather in discovering how many likable things there are in the world as it is, and they seem satisfied if they make it no worse. Of all the sorts of their fellowmen they say, as Charles Lamb said of a certain not very prepossessing person: "How can we hate them? We know them." They recur to old things—old poetry, old customs, old streets—with an affectionate familiarity; and they touch vulgar things, the pompous and humdrum people, the annoying incidents, the tedious routine of daily life, with a humor which debrutalizes them and helps the man in a treadmill to see himself as a figure in a comedy. They are thus giving to New York City, for instance, a more genial and kindly air than it has had since the days of Diedrich Knickerbocker.

They refuse to have anything to do with notabilities, except in dressing-gown and slippers by the fire, in the disarming hours of the night, when a statesman will confidentially take back the lies he has been telling all day, and "Willy" Yeats, forgetting to chant about the silver apples of the moon, will gossip about his contemporaries with as spicy a malice as George Moore. They haunt that level, these humanists, where men are conscious of their common humanity; and they treat with equal respect all representatives who are great in their kind: Mr. Wells, Mr. Bryan, Charlie Chaplin, M. Viviani, Babe Ruth, Einstein, Pavlowa, Lloyd George, Jack Dempsey and Caruso. It is their habit to walk all