« p. 86-88: On Monday
A Well-Used Afternoon
p. 88-91
Things appear different to you up close than they do in the distance. I didn’t need to travel from Buffalo to East Aurora to learn that. I am only passing through, when I arrive in the colony of Roycrofters and someone says to me that Mr. Elbert Hubbard, whom I would have gladly seen, wouldn’t be at home today in East Aurora. “What a shame,” I say to myself, but an hour later I thank my good luck.
Elbert Hubbard is the founder of the Roycrofters. You can see his name in these cute little books which came over at Christmastime from America in great bunches to the finer bookstores on the European continent. The English and Americans never tire of printing their classics over and over again with renewed affection and diligence, and the Roycrofters do the very same. They print single, short essays by Emerson, Thoreau, Ruskin and others. They also print the Portugese Sonnets of Browning-Barrett and the inevitable Rubayat of Omar Khajjam, all of it printed in aesthetically pleasing letters on beautiful paper, which is then bound with leather bands. You can stroke this leather, it feels like a glove on a living hand. It would make a good gift for someone’s bedroom. The purpose is to make something pretty, and we shouldn’t be angry at the Roycrofters if they use the same style to publish everything that Elbert Hubbard says and thinks. They publish his aphorisms, his essays on people and life, his philosophical and social maxims and so on in small and large editions. They paint, carve and emboss his words on parchment paper, on wood and metal sheets, all done with great craftsmanship and distinguished taste. I myself have recorded a few of these sayings of worldly wisdom, but I really don’t like repeating them. I took them from the expensive parchment and wrote them in my notebook. Whether Ruskin said them or Mr. Hubbard, all it takes is that the words are printed on fine paper, and all of a sudden phrases like
The early bird gets the worm!
or
Home Sweet Home
will be instantly believed by those in this country who are bereft of style and beauty.
I didn’t go to East Aurora to watch the Roycrofters set and bind their books, but instead because people say that the Roycrofters are communists, even if they rely more on an artistic point of view than on outside socialist opinions.
Hubbard has renamed himself, somewhat coquettishly, Fra Elbertus, and we shouldn’t hold it against him, because Hubbard is not a pretty name for an artist. The old English nursery rhyme uses it like this:
Old Mother Hubbard
She went in the cupboard, etc.
He calls himself Fra like the monk from Fiesole, and the hotel next to his worker’s colony looks very similar to the cloister at Angelico. (I will note, however, that when anyone makes this sort of experiment in America, a hotel is built right next to it.)
Elbertus wears his hair flowing next to his eyes, which you see in countless illustrations. The dining hall of the hotel looks like a refectory. It’s a veritable cloister, and since there was no room for five o’clock tea on the Mount of Olives, the Fra quickly closed a pavilion built for this purpose behind the apsis of the chapel (which here is the music hall).
A German manager at a factory explained to me that all of the Roycrofter establishments operate under a common set of regulations and a division of profits. Since, however, this carefully advertised undertaking has been paying superbly, the aesthetic communists have hired a drove of salaried workers and clerks, building chapel after chapel to display all the artwork they have for sale.
Fra Elbertus doesn’t bother defending himself as he sits behind a typewriter, and I’ve seen this novitiate operate an adding machine. -- The Fra is an idealist and a pragmatist at the same time. He prints with utter simplicity the various placards which make him seem like a monk at one point and an entrepreneur at another. The whole affair is both ascetic and artistic, above Angelico, beneath Barnum.
Stepping out of the hotel into the hall, two well-known ladies in a picture sit on comfortable chairs in the cool shadows. In their middle sits a curly-haired youth, a well-made reproduction, reading out of the works of Fra. Portraits of good and wise men appear on mailboxes on this summer scene, and I think about the Daddy over there in Freeville, who is just much an American as Fra, with the difference that Daddy raises his work above his ego.