Page:The Family Album.pdf/14

6 of illuminating exaggeration, but with Baer the exaggeration is in a phrase, not in an incident. The Government bureau of hopeless statistics having informed him that two-dollar bills do not last long, he writes that it is not news; “one-dollar bills turn up right in your hand and fifty-cent pieces explode on contact.” This sentence is unusual for him in that it contains all the customary parts of speech; a much more representative sentence is his question: “Are motion picture directors robustly correct when they claim that average skull age of public is but eight slender years?” His whole work is a cable-language of his own.

He is neither a satirist nor an ironist. What he has is an exceptionally oblique outlook upon the world and an elliptical expression which gives the same effect as small and agreeable galvanic shocks. In the Glutt he has created a wild roughneck and a home-town hero, exaggerated beyond all imagination, a mad bull of caricature. HIs daily comment on sport has the same quality, slightly toned down. Recently he said, after describing an inning in which nearly every player hit safely that if any more had passed first base they would have opened a United Cigar Store there. He has the extraordinary faculty of seeing the relation between the most incongruous objects, and his elliptical method jams them up against each other in such a way as to make pleasure follow swiftly on surprise.