I’M WRITING this garden arbor essay at my own discretion. Beautifully clothed imposing women appear garden-arborish standing at some slender, curtain-decorated window and mumbling to themselves, “The splendid lad is causing me immense sorrow.”
I’m alluding here to novels published in the early editions of The Garden Arbor,* and I do this with pleasure.
Do I adore The Garden Arbor?
Yes, I believe I do.
Sashes rush proudly over cleanly polished floors past the apparitions of cavaliers, who necessarily seem to have to admit to themselves they hadn’t made a sufficient enough impression on a sentimental heart.
Even as a boy I buried myself eagerly in such pieces. A certain preference for conscientiously educated, sophisticated young men, as well as for fastidious young beauties who are aloofness itself, has in no sense waned, is as alive in me as ever. A reputable person conveys to a snoozer regarding his earnings, etc., that he’s being ignored, while elsewhere a delicate one, a chastely loving one, settles for her revivifying piano playing. Somewhere an enthusiast presses the leaves of a bush to his mouth, in the delusion that his lady had touched them with the hem of her dress or with her hand, which to him is holy. In the novels that today have, as it were, faded, it happens that a housewife shouts into the kitchen in a relatively imperious tone, “Hey, what are you doing? Hurry up and bring the coffee!” “Leave immediately!” are words that might be spoken disdainfully by a sincere, self-respecting woman, while outside the extensive fields look like insouciance itself offering numerous opportunities for strolling.
In the course of time many pretty eyes have rested on the printed pages and illustrations that serve as an intelligence-inducing basis for the present attempt to say something pleasant.
Before they go to breakfast, the daughters of administrators of estates, their braids falling naively down their backs, inspect themselves in the mirror with a care that always affords them the same unshattered pleasure.
Tutors and horses are, subject to the requirements or circumstances, restrained. Little doves flutter. Lackeys stand at attention.
Has a more successful journal ever been published? Coming up with the title alone was ingenious; its endearing concept is what prompted this assignment.
(1928)
*Die Gartenlaube (The Garden Arbor) was a highly popular illustrated family weekly, founded in Leipzig in 1853, which ran well into the twentieth century.—TW