The New Yorker

(2 of 3)

"I, and my associates here, have never subscribed to the view that bad taste is any the less offensive because it is metropolitan taste. To me, urbanity is the ability to offend without being offensive, to startle composure and to deride without ribaldry. The editors of the periodical you forwarded are, I understand, members of a literary clique. They should learn that there is no provincialism so blatant as that of the metropolitan who lacks urbanity. They were quite correct, however, in their original assertion. The New Yorker is not for the old lady in Dubuque."

Insult?

When Robert Browning published his famed poem, The Ring and the Book, few could at first reading understand it. Many considered this insulting until one critic pointed out that the poem was, for its very difficulty, the most magnificent compliment that had ever been paid to the intelligence of the British public.

The editors of the Bronx Home News, paper of Manhattan surburbanites, have, like Robert Browning, a public. This public they discreetly attempted to increase, some weeks ago, by publishing the "probable answers" to a crossword puzzle contest which was being conducted by the New York Evening Graphic (TIME, Feb. 2). The crossword answers were simple, legible. They required merely to be copied, forwarded to the editors of the Graphic'. they revealed not what sort of compliment, what sort of insult, was relished by the public of the Home News.

The Graphic closed its crossword contest, commenced awarding munificent prizes to smirking victors, began a new, a different sort of contest, which was immediately copied by the New this was to win rich rewards by writing the last lines of incomplete limericks (TIME, Feb. 23). Forthwith, letters, telegrams, telephone messages, began to rain upon the editors of the Bronx Home News. "Help us to write the last line and skin the Graphic." This is what the Public wanted the Bronx editors to do. The editors sat in consultation. One man's version of the last line of a limerick was as good as another's, they feared. They were no Brownings. "We can give them words to rhyme," said one editor. "But they won't understand what they mean," dissented another. "Then we will tell them what they mean," cried the first. "They can read English, can't they?"