"C'Toonist"

Ox MY WAY--Art Young--Liveright ($4).

Cartoonist Art Young of Wisconsin, Chicago, Manhattan, Paris and Bethel, Conn., drew some-of-the-first daily political cartoons and the first colored news supplements in the U. S., for the oldtime Chicago Inter-Ocean.

He is still alive-&-kicking--alive enough to have gained and retained fame as a grand exalted past master of cartooning. His kicking is what has kept him from enjoying the mass reputation of men like Ding. Briggs, Bud Fisher. Something in Art Young resents contracts, syndication and orders as to what ideas he shall draw. He has free-lanced for 35 years in Life, Puck, Judge, Metropolitan and many another magazine, past and present, rather than earn the "big money" that Arthur Brisbane once told him he deserved as a syndicate artist. It was natural, perhaps. that just after giving this advice, Editor Brisbane haggled with Mr. Young over prices. But it helps explain why Young was at his happiest contributing without pay to that ironic monthly of vast name and small circulation, The Masses. He was best paid when contributing ("Trees at Night") to that weekly of vast circulation and relatively "reactionary" mentality, The Saturday Evening Post.

Capitalism, the profit system, bothers Mr. Young a good deal. He thinks society should be communal, that work should be held noble and money-getting base. These ideas, and his trial (at which he slept) for sedition with other Masses editors during the War, and his eccentricities, such as lying nakedly asprawl on his hill for sunbaths, make his Connecticut neighbors view "that c'toonist" with some alarm. They are reassured, though somewhat puzzled by his deep vein of quizzical, kindly humor. His life has been most unconventional, they feel, but they know it has been rich and gentle.

By the simple process of keeping a reminiscent journal for six months, "that c'toonist" has told his neighbors, who for him include all mankind, how life has been with him; whom he has known, what he has seen, read, heard, thought.

Among other things, he saw Greenwich Village before the realtors "improved" it. He attended the joyous nocturnal picnic given on top of the Washington Square arch by a beautiful girl called Woe.

He saw all the Presidents from Cleveland on and talked with several; also Senators, famed preachers, Mark Twain, P. T. Barnum and many another less famed but, to him, equally important.

He read Thoreau, Emerson and Whitman, Hugo, Dumas and Shakespeare. He remembers what he reads and lives by a lot of it. His god is one of Life and Laughter who belongs to no organized church.

He heard all there was to hear, in Paris, about Gustave Dore, the enormously popular and prolific illustrator who most influenced his own art. He reached Paris six years too late (1889) to see Dore. Bouguereau was one of his teachers.

He has heard Bill Nye tell stories and Frank Harris converse. Eugene Debs, Eugene Field, the late La Follette, James Whitcomb Riley, O. Henry, Helen Keller and numerous newsboys, janitors, cabbies, children were or are among his acquaintances.

A sculptor once portrayed Art Young with one side of his face crying, the other side laughing. The object of both these emotions in Art Young is the world, not himself. About the latter he entertains chiefly a healthy curiosity, a self-respecting skepticism. Like most artists, he finds the money thing the most troublesome, but like few he has learned this general truth: "Nature never composes a scene just right for an artist. Even a mountain must be shifted to one side if it is in the way."

Whether or not they are content with the human scene, readers of On My Way will find "that c'toonist's" informal record of his own mountain-shiftings a merry masterpiece of shirt-sleeve autobiography, sketched by a pen that achieves with words the same quaint economy for which its line is famed.