'Georgeade as a Summer Drink'

While looking for something else I blundered on an Anglo-American writer and cartoonist new to me whose name and one-time popularity long ago evaporated: Oliver Herford (1860-1935), author, co-author and illustrator of more than sixty books for adults and children. There was a time when a modestly gifted writer with a sense of humor, a bush-league Oscar Wilde, could earn a respectable living writing for the magazines of his day and publishing the occasional volume. The secret of the trade, apart from having a ready wit and not taking oneself too seriously, was balancing the universal and timeless with the merely topical. Gags about the Second Boer War will inevitably have a short shelf life. The foremost example of this extinct species, who transcended the merely journalistic, is Max Beerbohm. 

In 1906, Herford published A Little Book of Bores, thus addressing a subject that remains forever pertinent. Bores reproduce at an alarming rate and often mutate into superficially new forms, but they are forever with us. Herford, who also provided the illustrations, documents them alphabetically. “H is a Humorist glum . . .,” he writes:

 

“. . . Why sits he so silent and dumb?

He’s concocting some Gay

Impromptu to say

When the Opportune Moment shall come.”

 

Here he takes on a subject still sensitive in certain quarters, the brat:

   

“T is a Terrible Tot

Who says things he’d much better not.

A child of that age

Should be kept in a cage,

And fed—if at all—through a slot.”

 

The illustrations in An Alphabet of Celebrities (1899) are better than the verses, though Herford works in a reference to Dr. Johnson:

 

“J is for Johnson, who only says ‘Pish!’

To Jonah, who tells him his tale of a fish.”

 

And in Confessions of a Caricaturist (1917), Herford proves himself a better artist than writer. Some of his choices are unlikely: Arnold Bennett (treated as the Joyce Carol Oates of his day), Guglielmo Marconi and Dante. For sheer exhilarating silliness, “George Ade” is tops:

 

“Somehow I always like to think

Of Georgeade as a Summer Drink,

Sparkling and cool, with just a Tang

Of Pleasant Effervescent Slang;

A Wholesome Tonic, without question,

And Cure for Moral Indigestion.

In Summer-time, beneath the shade,

We find Refreshment in Georgeade.

And 'mid the Scorching City's roar

We drink him up and call for more.

I often wonder what the ‘Trade’

Buys half so precious as Georgeade.”