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Webster has always admired and often drawn circus people. He particularly liked one clown who, making him up with all the sweeping care of a Renaissance Master, swiped a smile-line down his cheek, stepped critically back and asked, anxiously, "How do you like it?" The amateur consulted the mirror and said it looked fine. The clown glowed. "That line's my own," he said.
Critic, with Six Radios. Webster gets up fairly late in the morning, breakfasts lightly except when the cook irresistibly serves up hamburger & onions, gets to work around 2 p.m., is through by 6. Most of the time he works in a room at the rear of the house, its walls thick with signed originals of such old friends or idols as A. B. Frost (who illustrated Uncle Remus), "Zim" (Eugene Zimmerman) of the old Judge, John T. McCutcheon, Thomas Nast, George Bellows.
Ideas, on the whole, are the hardest part of his job. Fans mail in quite a few, for which he is grateful, but only rarely is one usable. In a sense, like Einstein, Webster is at work all the time: listening to the radio (the Websters have six in the house, though only three work) and, even more relaxedly, keeping an eye & ear open around the house and the neighborhood, and the bridge tables of his gregarious evenings. By the time he is done with each day's work, it looks pretty good to Webster. When he sees his cartoons in print, however, he suffers the reaction of most conscientious workmen: "They look filthy after they're made. I can't understand how I could do such dreadful work. The idea is all right but the execution is painful."
A Trifle Apologetic. Even when Webster's figures are meant to be solid, rather than insecure, they often have an air of being a trifle apologetic; and this mitigative, tentative quality shows as clearly in their personalities as in their stance and overall shape. Even Webster's most crashing bores never suggest their real-life brutality; the wives are always at least trying to understand the jokes even if they never will; the bridge players are, in their own curious ways, so genuinely enjoying themselves that the fact outbalances all censure.
In all Webster's years of preoccupation with the psychology of timidity he seldom points up, even gently, the littleness, meanness and guile which timidity so often develops, and almost never touches on the propensity for bullying. You have to go back at least 15 years to find Milquetoast rampant. This might be merely the shrewdness of a man who makes his living through comedy. But in Webster's case it is the innocence of a man whose powers of observation are limited by his kindness.
Non-Practicing Moralist. H. T. Webster, gently gifted, is somewhere near an average man, working, in a way never quite possible to the extraordinarily gifted, for somewhere near average people. He has done them no average service, merely in amusing them; a greater one still, very likely, as the kind of moralist who almost never moralizes.
This is sometimes said to be the Century of the Common Man. Webster was the first to recognize that it is certainly, by some cruel coincidence, the Era of the Timid One.