Books: Reciters

Kind, Genial, Harmless Creatures — Their Day Is Done

As the adding machine supplanted the Dickensian bookkeeper, as the automobile did away with landau and phaeton, so the radio, it is said, is rapidly evicting the old-fashioned reciter from his or her diminishing place in the sun. Oh, many are still to be found! Professors of elocution — even in New York, highly-skilled and successful monologists such as Ruth Draper.

But the reciter of our forefathers — the reciter magnificent — the lady of the awe-inspring brow and grave yard contralto who tore The Raven to tatters on the slightest provocation, the cadaverous youth who was so comic delivering Farmer Corn-tassel at the County Fair — these, with the hansom-cab-driver and the professor of penmanship who drew little birds with flowing scrolls in their beaks, are rapidly passing into oblivion. Alas!

Before us are two memorials to the vanished art. The Comic and Humorous Reciter, edited by Ernest Pertwee and published by Routledge, of London, and an American product, My Recitations, selected by Cora Urquhart Potter, published by Lippincott. Dipping into them revives odd memories — lambrequins and dadoes — gilded rolling-pins, dudes, croquet, the high-wheel bicycle, the game of Boston — a departed age.

The Comic and Humorous Reciter is catholic in its tastes — specimens of both English and American humor are admitted. Mark Twain and Bret Harte are represented, Dan Leno, Artemus Ward, and through out, that prolific writer, Anon. Would you convulse your hearers with an eight-page humorous de scription of the Oxford-Cambridge boat race? Or titillate them instead with misadventures attending a journey in a Pullman Palace Car? Here you are — a little memory and you can be funny in at least five dialects, all equally incredible.

My Recitations is more serious — in its purpose. Serious? Death, Villainy, Madness, the Grave here find their own. The soldier of the Legion is dying in Algiers, Sir Ralph the Rover visits the Inchcape Rock, "Charge Chester, charge!" "'We are lost!' the captain shouted as he stag gered down the stairs." Less well known morceaux deal with Blood (in quantity), with Wicked Atheists, with the Last Few Remarks of Pious Children.

Perhaps some former reciters will turn to broadcasting. Let us hope so. But there they would miss the applause, the laughter, the shrieks of terror from the baby as The Bells clanged inexorably on. Kind, genial, harmless creatures—their only pay was applause. It seems unfair that aerials and wavelengths should have done them down.

S. V. B.