DOI Artikel:
A Birthday Letter
DOI Seite / Zitierlink:https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.26392#0023
From “The Yellow Dwarf”
19
triumph. Sometimes, for brief intervals, one forgets how elemen-
tally imbecile our Anglo-Saxon Public is ; and then things like
the success of 'Trilby come to make us remember it, and put on
mourning.
And now, hence loathed melancholy, and let me turn to the
more inspiriting business of congratulating the Yellow Book
upon the completion of the second year of its existence, and the
beginning of the third. I have followed your adventurous career,
sir, from the first, with sympathy, with curiosity, with amusement.
You have made a sturdy fight against tremendous odds. From the
appearance of your initial number until quite recently, you have
had all the newspapers of England, with half-a-dozen whimsical
exceptions, all the dear old fusty, musty newspapers of England
arrayed against you, striving in their dear old wheezy, cumbrous
way, to crush you, treating you indeed (please don’t run your pen
through this) as the book-emissaire of modern publications. You
have survived ; and many of your erstwhile enemies have become
your lukewarm friends. (I wish you joy of ’em \ I’m not sure you
weren’t better off without ’em.) That is surely a merry record.
It was always droll, the hysterical anger the Yellow Book
provoked in those village scolds, the newspapers. I remember
reading with peculiar glee an article which used to be inserted
periodically in the columns of the Pall Mall Gazette, before its
reformation, in which you were compared at once to the Desert
of Sahara and the Family Herald; my eye, what a combination !
The real truth is that in spite of many faults (I’ll speak of them
again in a minute), in spite of many faults, the Yellow Book
has been from the commencement a very lively and entertaining
sort of Yellow Book indeed ; in literary and artistic interest, and
in mechanical excellence, far and far and far-away superior to any
The Yellow Book—Vol. IX. b other
19
triumph. Sometimes, for brief intervals, one forgets how elemen-
tally imbecile our Anglo-Saxon Public is ; and then things like
the success of 'Trilby come to make us remember it, and put on
mourning.
And now, hence loathed melancholy, and let me turn to the
more inspiriting business of congratulating the Yellow Book
upon the completion of the second year of its existence, and the
beginning of the third. I have followed your adventurous career,
sir, from the first, with sympathy, with curiosity, with amusement.
You have made a sturdy fight against tremendous odds. From the
appearance of your initial number until quite recently, you have
had all the newspapers of England, with half-a-dozen whimsical
exceptions, all the dear old fusty, musty newspapers of England
arrayed against you, striving in their dear old wheezy, cumbrous
way, to crush you, treating you indeed (please don’t run your pen
through this) as the book-emissaire of modern publications. You
have survived ; and many of your erstwhile enemies have become
your lukewarm friends. (I wish you joy of ’em \ I’m not sure you
weren’t better off without ’em.) That is surely a merry record.
It was always droll, the hysterical anger the Yellow Book
provoked in those village scolds, the newspapers. I remember
reading with peculiar glee an article which used to be inserted
periodically in the columns of the Pall Mall Gazette, before its
reformation, in which you were compared at once to the Desert
of Sahara and the Family Herald; my eye, what a combination !
The real truth is that in spite of many faults (I’ll speak of them
again in a minute), in spite of many faults, the Yellow Book
has been from the commencement a very lively and entertaining
sort of Yellow Book indeed ; in literary and artistic interest, and
in mechanical excellence, far and far and far-away superior to any
The Yellow Book—Vol. IX. b other