The circus, and other essays and fugitive pieces

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Title: The circus, and other essays and fugitive pieces

Author: Joyce Kilmer

Commentator: Robert Cortes Holliday

Release date: March 10, 2012 [eBook #39103]

Language: English

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THE CIRCUS
AND OTHER ESSAYS
AND FUGITIVE PIECES

JOYCE KILMER

_Uniform with this Volume_

JOYCE KILMER: Poems, Essays
and Letters

_Edited with a Memoir by_
ROBERT CORTES HOLLIDAY

VOLUME ONE:
MEMOIR AND POEMS

VOLUME TWO:
PROSE WORKS

THE CIRCUS
AND OTHER ESSAYS
AND FUGITIVE PIECES

BY
JOYCE KILMER

EDITED WITH INTRODUCTION BY
ROBERT CORTES HOLLIDAY

NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO
ALINE KILMER

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Credit is gratefully accorded the _New York Times_, _America_,
_Contemporary Verse_, and _Poetry: A Magazine of Verse_, for permission
to reprint several of the pieces collected in this volume. For the
privilege of reprinting poems quoted by Kilmer in his articles and
lectures, acknowledgment is made to the following publishers: E. P.
Dutton & Company, Dodd, Mead and Company, Charles Scribner's Sons, John
Lane Company, The Macmillan Company, Methuen and Company, Boni and
Liveright, and Burns and Oates. And the permission of George Sterling is
greatly appreciated for the right to reproduce his three sonnets on
Oblivion. The article on Thomas Hardy, prepared as the Introduction to
the Modern Library Edition of "The Mayor of Casterbridge," is reproduced
by special arrangement with Boni and Liveright. The publishers of
"Warner's Library of the World's Best Literature" have courteously
extended permission to reprint here the four essays, originally written
for that work, which conclude this volume.

R. C. H.

_New York, 1921._

CONTENTS

PAGE

INTRODUCTION BY ROBERT CORTES HOLLIDAY 13

THE CIRCUS, AND OTHER ESSAYS

THE CIRCUS 45

THE ABOLITION OF POETS 60

NOON-HOUR ADVENTURING 70

SIGNS AND SYMBOLS 83

THE GREAT NICKEL ADVENTURE 88

THE URBAN CHANTICLEER 96

DAILY TRAVELING 105

INCONGRUOUS NEW YORK 110

IN MEMORIAM: JOHN BUNNY 116

THE DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS 125

FUGITIVE PIECES

THE ASHMAN 137

THE BEAR THAT WALKS LIKE A MAN 146

ABSINTHE AT THE CHESHIRE CHEESE 153

JAPANESE LACQUER 159

SAPPHO REDIVIVA 168

THE POETRY OF GERARD HOPKINS 180

PHILOSOPHICAL TENDENCIES IN ENGLISH LITERATURE 186

TWO LECTURES ON ENGLISH POETRY:

THE BALLAD 197

THE SONNET 203

GILBERT K. CHESTERTON AND HIS POETRY 222

LIONEL JOHNSON, ERNEST DOWSON, AUBREY BEARDSLEY 237

SWINBURNE AND FRANCIS THOMPSON 253

A NOTE ON THOMAS HARDY 268

MADISON JULIUS CAWEIN 275

FRANCIS THOMPSON 282

JOHN MASEFIELD 288

WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY 302

INTRODUCTION

Since last I took up my pen in the service of my friend who on July 30,
1918, laid down his sword in the service of his country, fame, and yet
greater fame, has been busy with his name. Any further eulogy by my hand
would have only the point of being altogether superfluous and the
foolish effect of being very much at the rear of the situation. Further,
the story of Joyce Kilmer, doubtless in very fair measure, is known to
nearly everyone. An account of his career is not to be appreciably
elaborated here.

There are, however, some facts in explanation of the appearance of this
volume at this time which require to be set down. And a number of
circumstances in relation to the material here collected may be told, I
think, to general interest. With these matters I am probably as familiar
as anyone, and so have the great privilege of undertaking to record
them.

The ten highly humorous and altogether charming essays which form the
first part of this volume have led a rather queer life so far--though I
think their existence will be a very happy one from now on. First, they
were not "essays" at the time of their birth. They came into the world
as "articles." So they were spoken of by the young journalist who at
various times and with very little to do about the matter wrote them in
the course of a bewildering variety of other activities. Or, to be still
more frank, he was perhaps more apt to refer to them, when he did refer
to them at all, as "Sunday stories," done as a part of his job with the
_New York Times Sunday Magazine_. What they were called, however, is
neither here nor there. The thing is that they are here.

At the time they were offered for book publication their author, then
about thirty years of age, was well established as the author of "Trees
and Other Poems"--poems which had been appearing for some time in
various publications, collected and issued in book form in 1914. He had
been for several years a conspicuous figure and an invaluable worker in
the Poetry Society of America and the Dickens Fellowship. He was a
member of the Authors Club, and several other organizations. He had
been a lexicographer and an associate magazine editor. He was a "star"
book reviewer, conducted the Poetry Department of _The Literary Digest_,
associated much with literary celebrities, and appeared in _Who's Who_.
The point I am getting at is that he had a good deal of what is called a
"name."

Satan finds mischief for idle hands to do. I suppose that is why the
thought occurred to Joyce to get out a book of prose. So, as the
professional literary term has it, he "pasted up" ten of his
articles--that is, cut them out of the newspaper and stuck them column
width down the middle of sheets of "copy" paper. He typed a title page,
"The Circus and Other Essays," and submitted his manuscript to a
publisher. It was promptly "turned down." Joyce again did up his
manuscript, gummed on some fresh stamps, and again away it went to
another leading publishing house. And--well, and so on. I do not know
precisely how many times this manuscript was submitted for publication;
but I know it was a number, a good number, of times.

That, however, "The Circus" seemed likely not to find any publisher at
all at that time is not a matter for anything like astonishment. Not
when one bears in mind a publishing hobgoblin of the day. The book was
labeled "essays" and therefore damned. And here, perhaps, it may not be
too irrelevant to take a brief glance at the whole history of this
mysterious thing, the light, familiar essay in English. In the Augustan
age of English prose, we remember, appeared the easy, graceful style of
Steele and Addison, so admirably suited to the pleasant narrative form
of essay which they introduced. And in the nineteenth century in
England, when Johnson and Goldsmith were followed by Lamb, Hazlitt, De
Quincey, Leigh Hunt, Macaulay, Carlyle, Ruskin and all the rest, the
essay certainly appears to have been, so to say, very much the go.

Irving, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Lowell, Holmes--certainly our
fathers were not afraid of essays. Nevertheless, somewhere about the
opening of our own day an iron-bound tradition became erected in the
publishing business, at least in the United States, that books of essays
would not sell; could not be made to sell even sufficiently to avoid a
considerable loss on the investment of manufacture; in fact, were quite
impossible as a publishing venture. No matter how much a publisher
himself, or his manuscript reader, might enjoy a collection of essays
that chanced to turn up in his shop, his conviction as to its
unmarketability as a book was not altered--not even stirred. A few, a
very few, essayists there were, indeed, who got published. Agnes
Repplier and Samuel McChord Crothers most prominent, perhaps, among
them. But these writers had somehow got established as essayists. They
were found on the lists only of a house with peculiarly "literary"
traditions, which it was business policy to capitalize and perpetuate
for the sake of the firm's "imprint." I have heard scoffers among
publishers ask if "anybody outside of New England" bought the books of
these writers. Maybe their prime function was, in the publishing term,
to "dress the list." The volumes of essays by Dr. Henry van Dyke, I know
from experience as a bookseller, sold in popular measure. And now and
then a volume of collected papers by, say, Meredith Nicholson would bob
up for a short space of time. But such instances as these did not affect
the general situation.

In general, when the manuscript of "The Circus" was "going the rounds"
it was (supposedly) economic madness, at any rate professional heresy,
not to regard books of essays as what the trade terms "plugs," and a
drug on the market. Doubtless, the publishing position in this matter
was evolved from cumulative facts of experience in the past. But a screw
was loose somewhere. The publishing barometer had, it would seem, failed
to note a change in the weather of the public mind.

That "The Circus" would not have made a fairly popular book at the time
it was first submitted for publication, it seems to me, there is a good
deal of reason to believe was a fallacy. Not a couple of years afterward
a collection of random articles in general character not dissimilar to
"The Circus," by another young man of greatly likable nature, but then
practically unknown outside the circle of his personal friends, was in
some idiosyncratic moment accepted, and directly won its way to a very
considerable sale and a very fair degree of fame. About then, too, along
came another book of pasted-up "papers" (about which I happen to know a
good deal), which after having been rejected by nearly every publishing
house in America was taken in a spirit of generous friendliness by a
publisher of much enterprise, began almost at once to sell as well as a
fairly successful novel, has been numerous times reprinted, and in the
way of luck brought its altogether obscure author something of a name.
And just now the light, personal, journalistic-literary essay is having
quite a brisk vogue.

If Joyce stood to-day merely where he stood five years ago "The Circus,"
without doubt, would be snapped up by anybody. More; some publisher's
"scout" very likely would get a "hunch" about the probability of Joyce's
having sufficient material in his scrap-book for such a volume and "go
after" it even before Joyce had submitted it to the house of this
fellow's connection. But, alas! for "ifs" and "might have beens." Fair
fortune did not attend "The Circus."

Failing of placing the book with any large house having an extensive and
organized machinery for carrying it to a wide audience, Joyce welcomed
the opportunity of having the book published by his friend Laurence J.
Gomme. Mr. Gomme had been for several years the proprietor of the Little
Book Shop Around the Corner, at number two East Twenty-ninth Street,
directly across the street from the Protestant Episcopal Church of the
Transfiguration, so altogether charming in its Old World effect,
nestling in a tiny green spot hemmed in by high buildings, and known to
fame and legend as the Little Church Around the Corner. This was a shop
conducted in excellent taste, a sort of salon for pleasant persons of
literary breeding, and its "circulars" were written by no less an
advertising man than Richard Le Gallienne. In addition to selling the
best books of other publishers, Mr. Gomme (at a good deal of risk to
himself) served the cause of good literature by himself issuing now and
then a volume of a nature close to his heart.

In the autumn of 1916 he published, in a very attractive form, the
American edition of Mr. Belloc's poems. The volume was entitled
"Verses," by Hilaire Belloc. The introduction to the book by Kilmer was
reprinted in the two volume set, "Joyce Kilmer: Poems, Essays and
Letters," under the title "The Poetry of Hilaire Belloc." That same fall
Mr. Gomme published "The Circus and Other Essays." He made a charming
little book: a thin volume in size betwixt and between what the book
trade calls a "16mo" volume and a duodecimo; bound in plain tan boards,
with olive cloth back stamped in gold; very neatly printed on soft cream
paper in rather small type. The book had a rather fantastically amusing
and somewhat lurid "jacket," picturing in black and yellow the
professional activities of several clowns.

A very pleasant bibelot, but, I felt then, not a volume effective in
catching the popular trade. For one thing, it looked very much like it
might be a book of verse. Also, the book was so thin that one would not
be likely to catch sight of it standing among other volumes in a row on
a bookstore shelf.

Mr. Gomme's means as a publisher at that time did not permit him to give
the book any paid advertising; it had no campaign whatever of free
publicity behind it. Nor had the publisher any traveling salesmen to
show the book to dealers over the country. He merely "covered" New York
City himself in the interests of the volumes he issued. Indeed, one
would not be making a hilarious exaggeration in saying that "The Circus"
was semi-"privately printed."

A fair number of copies of the book were sent out for review. And here
is a very interesting thing. The book, as has been said, was decidedly
insignificant in bulk. It was published at a time when the assumption
prevailed that there was no appreciable public for volumes of essays;
and consequently, the inference would be, the publication of such a book
was quite without news value. Further, it was issued at a period when
newsprint paper was appallingly scarce, newspaper space rigorously
conserved, and the war engrossing public attention. There was, too, as
we have seen, nothing about the launching of "The Circus" to tempt any
literary editor or reviewer to believe that the book was of any
consequence whatever. Indeed, half a "stick" of fairly favorable comment
here and there would have been all that anybody could reasonably have
expected in the way of a "press." But, as a matter of fact, all in all
the book got a surprising amount of space in the papers, and was awarded
the dignity of thoughtful appreciation. The _New York Evening Post_
devoted half the front page of its book review section to an article,
which was continued through a column of another page, to "The Circus"
and another book of essays with which it was grouped.

Shortly after the publication of "The Circus" the difficulties of the
business of bookselling and publishing at this time forced Mr. Gomme to
close out his business. And for a period his affairs were very much
involved. His stock in hand was scattered, and before long his recent
publications became exceedingly difficult to obtain. A couple of years
after the date of its imprint, Mr. Belloc, in the course of
correspondence which I had with him mainly relating to other matters,
repeatedly besought me to obtain for him a copy of his "Verses," the
volume containing Kilmer's introduction. Indeed, he was apparently much
put out by the fact that, as he expressed it, he had never even seen a
copy of the American edition of his poems. I had more than a little
difficulty in finding a copy to send to him. This he never received.
With some petulance he laid its loss to the German submarines, which he
declared sank everything that was being sent to him. I found the trail
to another copy of "Verses" still more elusive; and, to tell the truth,
I really don't know whether or not I got another copy off to him. This
story is to show that anyone who has a copy of that book now has a
volume far from readily found.

Copies of the original edition of "The Circus" are somewhat easier to
lay hold of. Doubtless, though, they will soon be scarce, as the
original edition could not have been large. And the book will not be
reprinted in its first form. With all the untoward circumstances of its
publication, however, "The Circus" did seem to find its way to no mean
circle of friends. When the memorial volumes, "Joyce Kilmer: Poems,
Essays and Letters," were published in the autumn of 1918, numerous
inquiries were received by the publishers as to why the essays which
comprised the volume "The Circus" were not included. The explanation is
this: In the continuance of the entanglement of the affairs of Mr.
Gomme's former business no clear title to the rights of this book was at
that time in sight. Since then these matters have all been straightened
out, and, I am happy to be able to say, this excellent friend of Joyce
Kilmer is again in circumstances more auspicious than before, and with
joy to his fine heart, effectively serving the cause of good books.

In direct critical appreciation of these ten essays there is not much
that I care to say. They were written by my friend, and are therefore
holy. That is, of course, to me. They may be charged with being very
youthful. Aye; even so.

For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting and for ever young.

Their youthfulness is to me a thing of very poignant, tender beauty. I
see again that radiant boy, trailing clouds of glory come from God who
was his home. His childhood spent in "a town less than a hundred miles
from New York," "now he feels himself actually a New Yorker," "enjoys
the proud novelty of working for wages," and "joyfully, therefore, he
goes forth every noon to explore the territory of his new possession."
The subway was to him "the great nickel adventure"; a ride on the
elevated railroad, "aerial journeying"; his alarm clock, "the urban
chanticleer." Again, as a commuter, I see him on the 5.24, flying across
"leagues" to his cottage in the "primeval forest" of New Jersey. On his
"red velvet chair" he sits, "enjoying with his neighbors tobacco smoke,
rapid travel, and the news of the world." None ever enjoyed these things
more, red velvet chair and all!

The connection which I may boast of having with the writing of some of
these essays illustrates in an amusing way the pleasantly pugnacious
character of Joyce's mind. Joyce held that I was offensively aesthetic in
regarding sign-boards about the countryside as ugly things. "Signs and
Symbols" was his hilarious and scornful rebuke. "The Gentle Art of
Christmas Giving" (a _New York Times_ article reprinted in the
two-volume set) had a similar origin. You remember with what amusing
gusto it begins:

If a dentist stuck a bit of holly in his cap and went through the
streets on Christmas morning, his buzzing drill over his shoulder
and his forceps in his hand, stopping at the houses of his friends
to give their jaws free treatment, meanwhile trolling out lusty
Yuletide staves--if he were to do this, I say, it would be said of
him, among other things, that he was celebrating Christmas in a
highly original manner. Undoubtedly there would be many other
adjectives applied to his manner of generosity--adjectives applied,
for instance, by the children whom, around their gayly festooned
tree, he surprised with his gift of expert treatment. But the
adjective most generally used (not perhaps in adulation) would be
"original." And the use of this adjective would be utterly wrong.

The holly-bedecked dentist would not be acting in the original
manner. He would be following the suggestion of his own
philanthropic heart. He would be acting in accordance with
tradition, a particularly annoying tradition, the evil and absurd
superstition that a gift should be representative of the giver
rather than of the recipient.

That "particularly annoying tradition," that "evil and absurd
superstition," I had been guilty of voicing a few days before he wrote
this article. He looked at me with withering commiseration.

If, in the days when he was writing the essays of "The Circus," Joyce
had the effect of being ridiculously young, he was also (with affection
I say it) ridiculously wise for his years. I can hear the sturdy sound
of his voice in the phrase (in the essay "The Abolition of Poets"),
"those ridiculous young people who call themselves Imagists and
Vorticists and similar queer names." And what joyous satire here:

Then, with the mellow humor of paternal experience he discusses (in "The
Day After Christmas") that hypothetical person who is three, and who, he
regrets to say, is "somewhat sticky"; who, further, had in all
confidence requested Santa Claus to bring him a large live baboon, but
who had been brought instead a small tin monkey on a stick. Or, again,
babies who at somewhere between six and eight in the morning, "seeing
that their weary parents are leaving them, decide at last that it is
time to go to sleep."

And even then, as throughout his later years, he had that (manly not
sentimental) intuitive sympathy for those by fortune afflicted. In "The
Circus":

The freaks get large salaries (they seem large to poets), and they
are carefully tended, for they are delicate. See, here is a man who
lives although his back is broken. There is a crowd around him; how
interested they are! Would they be as interested in a poet who lived
although his heart was broken? Probably not. But then, there are not
many freaks.

Nor did his perception of sorrow come to him solely by intuition. Far
from it. No, this very valiant and very young man himself had
experienced the fact that an alarm clock "can utter harsh and strident
grief, those know who lie down with Sorrow and must awaken with her."

To me there is something indescribably touching even in Joyce's most
hilarious flights of fancy in these essays. I cannot tell you why this
is so. Perhaps it is because his jocund humor, like all else, sprang
from a heart so woven of the common strands of humanity.

When Adam watched with pleased astonishment an agile monkey leap among
the branches of an Eden tree, and laughed at the foolish face of a
giraffe, he saw a circus. Delightedly now would he sit upon a rickety
chair beneath a canvas roof, smell the romantic aroma of elephant and
trampled grass, and look at wonders.

The most obvious thing, of course, about these essays is their
Chestertonian spirit and manner. In the matter of the manner, Mr.
Chesterton's trick of "reverse English," to employ the billiard player's
term, take this:

It would be the mere prose of our daily life for birds to fly about
close to the tent's roof, and for men and women to ring bells and
sit in rocking chairs. It is the poetry of the circus that men and
women fly about close to the tent's roof, and birds ring bells and
sit in rocking chairs.

Or, for both manner and spirit, this:

By faith the walls of Jericho fell down. By faith the Eight Algerian
Aerial Equilibrists stayed up.

Indeed, the whole fundamental temper of the book--its glorification
(almost deification) of everyday things; its militant persistence in
running counter to dull acceptance of current ideas; its sleight-of-hand
dexterity in bringing a thing to life by standing it on its head--is
Chestertonian. And right there is the point. Anybody, almost, can copy,
or parody, Mr. Chesterton's manner. But Kilmer's Chestertonism was
nothing of a superficial imitation. He was at heart quite Chestertonian
himself. What is still more to the point: He was, so to put it, more
Chestertonian than even Mr. Chesterton. That is, one cannot but feel
that for some considerable time Mr. Chesterton has been more or less
mechanically imitating himself. But Kilmer's rollicking pages have on
them the tender bloom of the natural fruit.

And they reek with the articles of his creed--are punctuated with the
touchstones by which he guided his life. Three words are most often
repeated in these essays. They occur again and again, one or more of
them on nearly every page. These words, you cannot fail to note, are:
faith, mirth, and democracy.

The poem, "The Ashman," which opens the second part of this book, was
not included in the collected set of Kilmer's poems, essays and letters
for the reason that it was overlooked at the time those volumes were
being prepared for publication. The poem was supplied for this volume by
Charles Wharton Stork, in whose magazine, "Contemporary Verse," it
originally appeared.

Among Kilmer's papers I have found a typewritten memorandum which shows
that he contemplated collecting into a volume the fugitive pieces here
reprinted. This is the memorandum:

LITERARY ADVENTURES

(1) Absinthe at The Cheshire Cheese; a consideration of Ernest Dowson
and his times. (America pasted up--_Times_ Book Review to be
obtained)

(2) Japanese Lacquer; an attempt to solve the Lafcadio Hearn riddle
(pasted up)

(3) SAPPHO REDIVIVA (pasted up)

(4) RABINDRANATH TAGORE AND THE NEO-MYSTICS (pasted up)

(5) THE BEAR THAT WALKS LIKE A MAN; Some aspects of the Russian novel
fad (pasted up)

(6) FRANCIS THOMPSON (pasted up)

(7)

I do not know that anything especial need be said concerning these
articles. They are exceedingly lively bits of journalistic literary
criticism, highly entertaining in their exhibition of Kilmer's pet
aversions, which, after all, sprang from his manly common sense. In a
letter written at about the time of these articles Joyce says: "My chief
pleasure in writing is to attempt to expose the absurdity of very modern
writers--materialists, feminists, Zolaists and all the rest of the
foolish crew."

As interesting examples of Kilmerana, several representative lectures
conclude this book. At the time Joyce entered the army his lecturing
activities had become pretty extensive. He makes frequent reference to
his lecture work in his correspondence of the time. In a letter written
in September, 1915, he says, "I can't make a spring tour--because in
February or March we're going to have another baby, I'm glad to say."
Further on in this same communication, to the Reverend James J. Daly, S.
J., he writes: "You see, I don't want to go into lecturing on so
extensive a scale as Dr. Walsh. I have my regular work to attend to, and
I'd rather not take more than three weeks off at a time. And I don't
want to lecture too often. I have not Dr. Walsh's readiness. I prepare
my lectures carefully, writing them out like essays, and memorizing them
so thoroughly that they give, I believe, the impression that they are
spoken ex-tempore." In another letter of about this time he speaks of
his "new profession"--"monologue artist in one night stands." In one
letter he speaks of a lecture, manuscript of which I have been unable to
find, as follows:

The lecture which I especially desire to give at Campion this year
is "The Poet of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Their
Successors." This is, I think, a better lecture than "Swinburne and
Francis Thompson." It is an attempt to show how Patmore (who was a
member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a friend of Rossetti and a
contributor to The Germ) carried the theories of the Pre-Raphaelites
to their logical conclusion, that Rossetti and Christina and Morris
and a lot of that bunch really paved the way for Francis Thompson
and Alice Meynell and Katherine Tynan and other modern Catholic
poets, by writing sympathetically, even if not always
understandingly, on Catholic themes. Incidentally, I trace "The
Hound of Heaven" back through "The Blessed Damozel" to "The Raven."
But if you don't want that lecture I'll lecture on any other subject
you may elect--the lighter lyrics of James J. Daly, for example.

In another letter he writes: "Next year I won't lecture at all; I'll
just recite my poems, which take better than the lectures, anyway. I'm
going on tour with Ellis Parker Butler, the 'Pigs Is Pigs' man, and
we'll have a regular manager."

And again:

I am glad that you are so forgiving as to be willing to have me at
Campion on the twenty-sixth. Unless I am commanded to the contrary,
I will give "The War and the Poets" at the College and "Francis
Thompson" at the Convent. "The War and the Poets" does not get the
goats of hyphenates of any sort--I gave it in Toronto and in Notre
Dame. Also I will read some of my own stuff, new and old, at both of
these lectures unless forcibly prevented.

The two lectures on poetry, "The Ballad" and "The Sonnet," were given at
New York University, and were to have been parts of a book on the art of
versification, which the University, I believe, was to publish. In the
manuscript of these lectures we find such phrases as "this book," and
Joyce referring to himself here as "the author of a textbook." The
lecture "The Ballad" as here printed is incomplete, as the typewritten
copy of the manuscript which came into my hands, and which is the only
copy I know to be in existence, ends thus:

I will call the reader's attention to the work of some of the poets
who, in our time, have been proving the falsity of Sir Arthur
Quiller-Couch's statement that

These lectures on poetry are admirably adapted to their end. They are
addressed to the student, especially "the apprentices of the craft of
verse making." They are devoted altogether to historical and technical
matters. And in the earnestness of his conception of his task here as
the author of a textbook, Joyce has very rigorously excluded anything
which could possibly be fancied as flippant. Just as sternly has he
refrained from allowing to enter his discourse any particle of color of
religious bias. He has not, however, in the slightest permitted his
independence of judgment to be subdued in his interpretation of purely
literary points. So these lectures do not lack for vitality, and exhibit
again, in a less known manner of his writing, his exceptional clarity of
style.

As in his life, so in his writings. Joyce moved in many circles, and
though always quite himself, so did he, too, always fit where he found
himself. An exceedingly active professional writer, he was called upon
to write for various audiences. When he was entrusted with writing the
articles on Madison Cawein, Francis Thompson, John Masefield, and
William Vaughn Moody for "Warner's Library of the World's Best
Literature," and when he was invited to contribute the introductory
essay to Thomas Hardy's novel "The Mayor of Casterbridge" in "The Modern
Library," he was to address a more or less popular audience of general
character, and he did that with ability and distinguished literary tact.

Naturally, Joyce became much in demand as a speaker before purely
Catholic audiences. And naturally before Roman Catholic schools,
colleges, universities and societies he loosed the spirit of his own
fervent Catholicism. Perhaps it will occur to some readers of this
volume who may not be Catholics that such lectures as "Lionel Johnson,
Ernest Dawson, Aubrey Beardsley" and "Swinburne and Francis Thompson"
are more in the nature of briefs for the Catholic Faith than they are of
the character of disinterested literary criticism. I do not think it
would have worried Joyce to have been told so. He was in such lectures
talking what was to him far more than literature. In a letter of his
before me, written by hand, he says, "There are in the universe only two
ecstasies. One is receiving Holy Communion." The other, he means, is his
love for his wife. "Poetry," he continues, "is not an ecstasy, but it is
a delight, a shadow and an echo of the two ecstasies. It certainly is a
delight to read and to make."

What, to his mind, was the use of writers, anyway? In the lecture
"Philosophical Tendencies in English Literature" he tells very
definitely his conviction as to this:

So writers may fulfill the purpose for which they were made by
writing--may know God better by writing about Him, increase their
love of Him by expressing it in beautiful words, serve Him in this
world by means of their best talent, and because of this service and
His mercy be happy with Him forever in Heaven.

III

Numerous letters written by Joyce to many of his friends, and kindly
loaned by their owners to the publishers, were received too late for
inclusion in the two-volume set of his poems, essays and letters. These
letters continue in greater detail, and give the emphasis of cumulative
effect, to the portrait of a beautiful and a joyous young manhood
revealed by the letters which were printed. A man has only one life to
live in this world, but (if he is anything like Kilmer) many friends.
And so it is that several groups of letters from his hand are more than
apt to tell, with some variations in expression, very much the same
story. Two stout volumes of collected letters sometimes are compiled as
an appropriate part of the literary remains of a notable life. Anything
approaching such a bulk of preserved correspondence, however, can only
be in order when that life has reflected something like three or four
times the number of working years that were Kilmer's.

Some few points I find in the unpublished letters which may be new to
many of Joyce's readers. In one place he says, referring to the
approaching publication of the volume which was issued as "Trees and
Other Poems," "My Book is to appear next October. It is called 'The
Twelve-forty-five and Other Poems.'" A little later he writes:

I wish you'd suggest a name for my book. In my contract it is called
"Trees and Other Poems" but I don't like that; it's too mild. I
wanted to call it "Delicatessen," since it contains a long poem of
that name, but the publishers think that name too frivolous. Then I
suggested "A Rumbling Wain" (after the third and fourth lines of the
first stanza of Patmore's "Angel in the House") but that's too
obscure. And "The 12.45 and Other Poems" is flat, I think. If you
select a title, you see, you can't roast the title when you review
the book in _America_!

In another place: "I don't like the book's jacket at all. I think it is
effeminate."

As an amusingly frank comment on his own "stuff" there is this:

My article in ---- was somewhat weak-minded. Have poor Christmas
poem in ---- and good Christmas poem ($50.00!!) in ----. And middling
Thanksgiving poem in ----. And trite but amiable poem about English
university at war in ----.

Of Chesterton he has this very quotable line, "He is the plumed knight
of literature with the sword of wit and burnished shield of Faith." All
about, of course, is the Kilmerian humor. He asks his wife to, "Remember
me to your new young infant Christopher." He says to a friend, "I'm
sending you some postcards. The person not Mike in the picture was
Mike's mother." And again:

Will you please tell me at your earliest convenience the name of an
asylum for blind orphans, or something of the sort, which wants
picture-postcards? I have a truckful of them, and there's no room in
the house for them and us, and yet I don't want to throw them away.

Occasionally he speaks of Rose, his little daughter afflicted with
infantile paralysis: "Rose is in good general health and spirits, thank
God. She can use one fore-arm a little. But I cannot talk much about
her, except to Our Lady." Over and over again, he says (ridiculously
enough), that he is much worried about his work, he is "disgustingly
lazy." And always he asked his friends to pray for him. He speaks of
Father Corbet:

He ran the retreat last week. I got my soul scraped pretty clean,
but it soils easily.

Remember me to everyone, and please pray very hard for,

Your affectionate friend.

In the Memoir prefixed to the two-volume set are a couple of errors of
fact. As a matter of record these should be corrected. The Memoir reads:

Kilmer was graduated from Rutgers College in 1904, and received his
A.B. from Columbia in 1906.... As a Sophomore Kilmer became engaged
to Miss Aline Murray.... Upon leaving Columbia he ... returned to
New Jersey and began his career as instructor of Latin at Morristown
High School.... He married and became a householder.

Kilmer never graduated from Rutgers College. He graduated from Rutgers
Preparatory School in 1904. He went to Rutgers College for two years,
finishing his Sophomore year. His Junior and Senior years were at
Columbia University. He graduated from there in 1908. Two weeks after
his graduation he married.

The date of Kilmer's death has not been exactly established. The Memoir
states, "Sergeant Kilmer was killed in action near the Ourcq, July 30,
1918." The date popularly accepted is Sunday, July 28. It was at the
dawn of this day that the 165th made its gallant and irresistible drive
into the five days' battle which followed. The Government telegram to
Joyce's widow gave the date of his death as August 1, as does also his
death certificate. His Citation for valor, however, names the date as
July 30.

At the time the Memoir was written Joyce was buried near where he had
fallen, perhaps ten minutes' walk to the south of the village of
Seringes. Later his body was removed to a cemetery. This cemetery is 608
at Seringes et Nesles, in the Province of Aisne. It is within walking
distance of a little village, Fere en Tardenois. The cemetery is a small
one. It is described as being in a beautiful location, on a little
elevation close by the road. The place is about ninety miles from
Paris.

THE CIRCUS AND OTHER ESSAYS

THE CIRCUS

Restraint is perhaps the most conspicuous literary virtue of the artists
in words who have the pleasant task of describing in programs, in
newspaper advertisements, and on posters the excellences of circuses.
The litterateur who, possessed of an intimate knowledge of the circus,
merely calls it "a new, stupendous, dazzling, magnificent, spectacular,
educational, and awe-inspiring conglomeration of marvels, mysteries,
mirth, and magic," deserves praise for a verbal economy almost Greek.
For he is not verbose and extravagant, he is taciturn and thrifty; he
deliberately uses the mildest instead of the strongest of the adjectives
at his disposal.

Shyly, it seems, but in fact artfully, he uses modest terms--"new," for
example, and "spectacular" and "educational." These are not necessarily
words of praise. An epidemic may be new, an earthquake may be
spectacular, and even a session of school may be educational. Yet the
adjectives proper to these catastrophes are actually applied--in
letters of gold and silver and purple--to the circus!

The laureate of the circus, with an aesthetic shrewdness which places him
at once on a level with Walter Pater (whose description of the "Mona
Lisa," by the by, is an admirable example of Circus press-agent writing)
considers, and rejects as too bewilderingly true, the mightiest of the
adjectives that fit his theme. Discreetly he calls it "new" instead of
"immemorial"; "educational" instead of "religious." He does not, as he
might, call the circus poetic, he does not call it aristocratic, he does
not call it democratic. Yet all these great words are, as he well knows,
his to use. The consciousness of his power makes him gentle.

His abnegation becomes the more startlingly virtuous when it is
considered that he resists the temptation to use that fascinating
device, paradox. For the circus is paradox itself--this reactionary and
futuristic exhibition, full of Roman chariots and motor cycles, of high
romance and grotesque realism, this demonstration of democracy and
aristocracy, equality and subordination, worldliness and religion.

The press agent may, without fear of logical contradiction, call the
circus religious. In the old days, he frequently called it a "moral
exhibition." This was to forestall or answer the attacks of the Puritan
divines of New England, who railed against the great canvas monster
which invaded the sanctity of their villages.

"Moral" was justly used. For surely courage, patience, and industry are
the three qualities most obviously exhibited by the silk-and-spangle
clad men and women who dance on the perilous wire, fly through space on
swiftly swinging bars, and teach a spaniel's tricks to the man-eating
lion.

But the religious value, the formally religious value, of the circus is
even more obvious than its moral value. For the circus, more than any
other secular institution on the face of the earth, exemplifies--it may
be said, flaunts--that virtue which is the very basis of religion, the
virtue of faith.

Now, faith is the acceptance of truth without proof. The man who is told
and believes that something contrary to his experience will happen has
faith. And he who considers the psychology of the audience at a circus,
he who (there are scientists sufficiently egotistic) looks into his own
soul while a troupe of aerial acrobats are before his physical eyes,
will see faith, strong and splendid.

It is not (as some pessimists who never went to a circus would have us
believe) the expectation that the performer will fall and be dashed to
pieces that makes people enjoy a dangerous act. People are like that
only in the novels of D. H. Lawrence and the merry pastoral ballads of
John Masefield. The circus audience gets its pleasure chiefly from its
wholly illogical belief that the performer will not fall and be dashed
to pieces; that is, from the exercise of faith. The audience enjoys its
irrational faith that Mme. Dupin will safely accomplish the irrational
feat of hanging by her teeth from a wire and supporting the weight of
all the gold and pink persons who theoretically constitute her family.
They enjoy the exercise of this faith, and they enjoy its justification.
They really believe, just because a particularly incredible-looking
poster tells them so, that there are in the side-show a man with three
legs, a woman nine feet tall, and a sword swallower. They give up their
money gladly, not to find that the poster was wrong, but because they
have faith that it is right. There are no rationalists at the circus.

The audience has faith, and the performers--where would they be without
it?--in small fragments, red and white on the tanbark floor. "If the
sun and moon should doubt," remarked William Blake, "they'd immediately
go out." If the lady who rides the motor cycle around the interior of
the hollow brass ball, or the gentleman who balances a pool table, two
lighted lamps and a feather on his left ear should doubt, they would go
out just as promptly. The Peerless Equestrienne believes that she will
land on her feet on the cantering white horse's broad rosined back after
that double cart-wheel. By faith the walls of Jericho fell down. By
faith the Eight Algerian Aerial Equilibrists stayed up.

You may, of course, try this on your son. As he absorbs the strawed
grape juice (degenerate substitute for the pink lemonade of antiquity!),
munches the sibilant popcorn and the peanuts which the elephants
declined, you may pour into his ears this disquisition on the
religiosity of the greatest show on earth. In fact, the best time to
preach to a child is while he is staring, with eyes as round as the
balloons he is soon to acquire, at the splendors of the three rings. For
then there is not the slightest chance of his answering you back, or
hearing you.

They are modern enough for anyone, these wandering players. The gymnasts
are at home on motor cycles, the clowns sport with burlesque
aeroplanes. Yet they are wholesomely reactionary in other respects than
those of having chariot races and such unaging feats of skill and
strength as may have cheered the hearts of Caesar's legionaries. They are
reactionary in that they turn man's newest triumphs into toys. The motor
cycle loses its dignity and is no longer an imposing proof of the truth
of materialistic philosophy when a girl, built, it seems, of Dresden
china, rides it on one wheel over hurdles and through a hoop of flame.
And see! Yorick himself, with his old painted grin and suit of motley,
makes a Bleriot the butt of infinite jest.

The circus is vulgar. Its enemies say so; its friends, with grateful
hearts assent. It is _vulgar_, of the crowd. To no play upon the stage
can this lofty praise be given. For the circus as it is to-day would
thrill and amuse and delight not only the crowd that to-day see it, but
the crowd that might come from the days before the Flood, or from the
days of our great-grandchildren's children. When Adam watched with
pleased astonishment an agile monkey leap among the branches of an Eden
tree, and laughed at the foolish face of a giraffe, he saw a circus.
Delightedly now would he sit upon a rickety chair beneath a canvas
roof, smell the romantic aroma of elephant and trampled grass, and look
at wonders.

So it is that the vulgarity of the appeal of the circus--its democracy,
if you prefer--has no temporal or geographic limits. And the performers
themselves are a democracy--the acrobat who somersaults before death's
eyes, the accomplished horseman, the amazing contortionist, the graceful
juggler--all these are made equal by the ring, and, furthermore, they
must compete for the applause of the throng with roller-skating bears,
trained seals, and chalk-faced clowns. Yet there is aristocracy of the
ring, and the subordination that Dr. Johnson praised. For here struts
the ringmaster, with cracking whip, imperious voice, and marvelous
evening clothes; the pageant with which the great show opened had its
crowned queen; and even every troop of performing beasts has its
four-footed leader.

The stage's glories have been sung by many a poet. But the circus has
had no laureate; it has had to content itself with the passionate prose
of its press agent. The loss is poetry's, not the circus's. For the
circus is itself a poem and a poet--a poem in that it is a lovely and
enduring expression of the soul of man, his mirth, and his romance, and
a poet in that it is a maker, a creator of splendid fancies in the minds
of those who see it.

And there are poets in the circus. They are not, perhaps, the men and
women who make their living by their skill and daring, risking their
lives to entertain the world. These are not poets; they are artists
whose methods are purely objective. No, the subjective artists, the
poets, are to be found in the basement, if the show is at the Garden,
or, if the show be outside New York they are to be found in the little
tents--the side-shows. This is not a mere sneer at the craft of poetry,
a mere statement that poets are freaks. Poets are not freaks. But freaks
are poets.

Rossetti said it. "Of thine own tears," he wrote, "thy song must tears
beget. O singer, magic mirror hast thou none, save thine own manifest
heart." Behold, therefore, the man on whom a crushing misfortune has
come. He puts his grief into fair words, and shows it to the public.
Thereby he gets money and fame. Behold, therefore, a man whom misfortune
touched before his birth, and dwarfed him, made him a ridiculous image
of humanity. He shows his misfortune to the public and gets money and
fame thereby. This man exhibits his lack of faith in a sonnet-sequence;
that man exhibits his lack of bones in a tent. This poet shows a soul
scarred by the cruel whips of injustice; this man a back scarred by the
tattooer's needles.

But the freaks would not like to change places with the poets. The
freaks get large salaries (they seem large to poets), and they are
carefully tended, for they are delicate. See, here is a man who lives
although his back is broken. There is a crowd around him; how interested
they are! Would they be as interested in a poet who lived although his
heart was broken? Probably not. But then, there are not many freaks.

When Tom Gradgrind (who had, you remember, robbed the Coketown Bank, and
been saved from punishment by the amiable intervention of Sleary's
Circus) was living out his exile somewhere in South America, he often
longed, Charles Dickens tells us in the engaging tale called "Hard
Times," to be back in England with his sister. But what phase of his
dismal boyhood and wasted later years did he see in his homesick dreams?
What episodes of his life in England did it give him pleasure to relive
in memory?

Dickens does not tell us. But no one who has read "Hard Times" and seen
a circus needs to be told. The repentant exile, toiling under the tropic
sun, had no affectionate recollections of Stone Lodge, his father's
dreary mansion in Coketown, with its metallurgical cabinet, its
conchological cabinet, and its mineralogical cabinet. Nor was it with
anything approaching happiness that he thought of the Coketown Bank, the
scene of some years of dull labor and of one moment of moral
catastrophe.

He remembered, we may be sure, two things. He remembered appearing, with
blackened face, an immense waistcoat, knee breeches, buckled shoes, and
a mad cocked hat, as one of the comic servants of Jack the Giant-Killer
at a certain Grand Morning Performance of Sleary's Circus. At the time
he had been a fugitive from justice, but not even his fear and shame
could keep his heart from stirring as he smelled the exhilarating odor
of tanbark, trampled grass, and horses, heard the blare of the band, saw
the glaring lights and the encircling tiers of applauding people, and
knew that he--he, Tom Gradgrind, the oppressed, the crushed, the
scientifically educated--was really and truly a circus performer!

And the other recollections, which, after the lapse of many years,
still made his heart beat more quickly, had to do with a gap in the
pavilion in which Sleary's Circus once held forth in a suburb of
Coketown--a gap through which young Tom Gradgrind delightedly beheld the
"graceful equestrian Tyrolean flower-act" of Miss Josephine Sleary, and
strained his astonished young eyes to watch Signore Jupe (none other
than Sissy's father) "elucidate the diverting accomplishments of his
highly trained performing dog Merrylegs."

And the reason why Sleary's Circus played so glorious a part in the
memory of this broken exile was that it had brought into his most
prosaic life all the poetry that he had ever known. Surrounded with
facts, crammed with facts, educated and governed according to a
mechanical system which was an extraordinary foreshadowing of our modern
"efficiency," he was allowed two visits to an enchanted realm, two
draughts of the wine of wizardry. Twice in his life he was mysteriously
in communion with poetry.

There has been much talk recently about a renascence of poetry, and
people have become excited over the fact that so many thousands of
copies of Edgar Lee Masters' book have been sold, and so many more
thousands of copies of the late Rupert Brooke's Collected Poems. This
is all very pleasant, but it doesn't mean that there has been a rebirth
of poetry. Poetry cannot be reborn, for poetry has never died.

The circus draws us by the thousands to watch "desperately dangerous
displays of unrivaled aerialism," and "the acme of expert equitation and
acrobatic horsemanship" beneath the Diana-guarded roof of Madison Square
Garden; even so it drew our fathers and their fathers before them to
rickety wooden benches propped against great swaying canvas walls, in
the days when Robinson and Lake displayed the wonders of the world in
glorious rivalry with Herrings, Cooper and Whitby. Even so will the
circus flourish in the days to come, when aeroplanes are cheaper than
motor cars, and the war that began in August, 1914, is but a thing of
dates and names in dusty textbooks. For poetry is immortal. And the
circus is poetry.

What is the function of poetry? Is it not to blend the real and the
ideal, to touch the commonplace with lovely dyes of fancy, to tell us
(according to Edwin Arlington Robinson), through a more or less
emotional reaction, something that cannot be said? And is not this
exactly what the circus does? Most of its charm is due to the fact that
all its wonders are in some way connected with our ordinary life. The
elephant in his enclosure at the Zoological Gardens is merely a marvel;
when he dances the tango or plays the cornet he allies himself with our
experience, takes on a whimsical humanity, and thus becomes more
marvelous. The elephant in the Zoo is an exhibit; the elephant tangoing
in the tanbark ring is poetry.

And there is Zipp, the What-is-it? most venerable of freaks, whose
browless tufted head and amazing figure have entertained his visitors
since Phineas Taylor Barnum engaged him to ornament his museum on Ann
Street. For all I know, Zipp is a poet--his smile is lyrical, and in his
roving eyes there is a suggestion of vers libre. But at any rate, Zipp
is a poem--a particularly charming poem when, in the procession of
freaks which opens the performance, he gallantly leads round the arena
that fantastically microcephalous young woman known to fame as the Aztec
Queen. The Bearded Lady and the Snake Charmer and the Sword Swallower
are poems--poems in the later manner of Thomas Hardy. And that
delightfully diminutive chocolate-colored person who rejoices in the
name of the Princess Wee-Wee--with her, in her dainty little
golden-spangled gown, what lyric of Walter Savage Landor can compare?

It is the splendor of incongruity that gives the equestrian and aerial
feats of the arena their charm, that incongruity which is the soul of
romance. The creatures we see are the creatures we know, but they have
most poetically changed places. It would be the mere prose of our daily
life for birds to fly about close to the tent's roof, and for men and
women to ring bells and sit in rocking chairs. It is the poetry of the
circus that men and women fly about close to the tent's roof, and birds
ring bells and sit in rocking chairs.

No one can describe a circus in prose. The industrious press agent of
the circus long ago gave up the attempt, and resorted to impressionistic
free verse, characterized by an ecstasy of alliteration. No one can
adequately describe the involved contortions, swings, and dashes of a
"family" of silk-clad adventurers on the flying trapeze. No faithful
narrative of the grotesque buffetings of the chalk-faced clowns is in
itself amusing--and yet the antics of these agile mimes have always
been, will always be, irresistibly mirth-compelling. The magic of the
circus is compounded of so many things--movement, sound, light, color,
odor--that it can never be put into words. It is absurd to attempt to
reflect it in prose, and it cannot be reflected in poetry because it is
itself poetry; it is the greatest poem in the world.

And just as Sleary's Circus was the cup of poetry which benevolent fate
held twice to the parched lips of young Thomas Gradgrind's soul, so is
the circus of our day, with its regiment of clowns, its roller-skating
bears and dancing elephants, its radiant men and women who pirouette on
horseback and dart above our heads like swallows, a most wholesome and
invigorating tonic for a weary and prosaic generation. We who every
morning at the breakfast table read of war and desolation need to cheer
our hearts with the burlesque battles of the clowns; we who ride in the
subway need to exult when the charioteer, with streaming toga, guides
his six white horses on their thunderous course; we whose eyes are daily
on our ledgers and sales records need to lift them, if not to the stars,
at least to the perilous wire on which a graceful pedestrian gayly
flirts with death. We whose lives are prose may well be grateful for the
circus, our annual draught of poetry; for the circus, the perennial,
irresistible, incomparable, inevitable Renascence of Wonder.

THE ABOLITION OF POETS

Ever since certain vivacious Frenchmen put on funny little red nightcaps
and remarked "Ca ira!" the inevitability of a reform has been the chief
article of its propaganda. The Socialist orator says: "Socialism is
coming upon us with the speed of the whirlwind and the sureness of the
dawn." Therefore he mounts a soap-box and passionately urges six small
boys, the town drunkard and a policeman to accelerate the whirlwind and
encourage the dawn in its commendable habit of punctuality. The
suffragist tells us: "The Votes for Women movement, like a mighty ocean,
will break down the barriers of prejudice and flood the country."
Therefore, like a perverted Mrs. Partington, she runs out with her
little broom to help the ocean along. And so, humbly following these
illustrious precedents, I advocate the abolition of poets because poets
are rapidly abolishing themselves.

For one thing, they have given up the uniform. In the old days it was
easy to recognize them. They wore velvet jackets and sombreros, they
let their hair hang over their shoulders, they were also, I believe,
picturesquely ragged. When you saw M. Paul Verlaine in his great cloak,
drinking absinthe at a table on the boulevard, you recognized him as a
poet. But when you see Mr. Clinton Scollard in his decorous cutaway
drinking a milk shake in a drug store, how are you to guess his
profession?

Of course, there are people who look like poets. When your literary
inclined maiden aunt from West Swansey, New Hampshire (by a sacred
convention all maiden aunts are literarily inclined), visits New York,
you take her to a restaurant which is supposed to be bohemian because it
is near Washington Square. The macaroni is buoyantly elastic, the
lettuce is wilted, the chicken tough, the wine a blend of acetic acid
and aniline. But your aunt enjoys it, and she is vastly interested in
the company.

She hunts for poets. "There!" she exclaims. "There is a poet! What is
his name?" And she points to a romantic-looking youth with great mop of
hair, a soft-collared flannel shirt, and a large black necktie.

You answer, wildly striving to keep your reputation for omniscience:
"That? Why, that's Alfred Noyes." Or "That's James Whitcomb Riley." Or
"That's Henry van Dyke." Your aunt is pleasantly thrilled, and she will
entertain all West Swansey with the tale of this literary adventure. And
you drown your lie in a beaker of acid claret.

As a matter of fact, who is this big-necktied, long-haired person?
Perhaps he is a cabaret performer, and will presently give your aunt a
novel insight into the habits of the literati by rising to sing with a
lamentable air of gayety, "Funiculi, Funicula." Perhaps he is one of
those earnest young men who have for their alma mater the dear old
Ferrer School. But in all probability he is merely an innocent bystander
who endeavors in his dress to commemorate a visit to East Aurora.

The two great steps in the abolition of poets were the shearing of Mr.
Richard Le Gallienne and the invention of East Aurora. When Mr. Le
Gallienne's hair waved, a black and curly banner, before the literary
legions of the world, then poets lived up to their traditional
reputation; courageously they were picturesque. But when the fell
scissors did their brutal work, then poets donned the garb of burgesses.

And then the more adventurous burgesses began to dress like poets. Mr.
Hubbard began the manufacture of large black neckties, and the Village
Atheists all over America put them on. Everyone who had queer ideas
about religion, economics, ethics or politics wore the necktie that had
previously confined only lyric throats. Now when you see a man wearing
two yards of black crepe in front of his collar, do not expect him to
sing you a madrigal. It is probable that his decoration signifies merely
that he is opposed to vaccination.

And when the poets took to wearing prosaic clothes, they took also to
following prosaic occupations. Is there now living a man who does
nothing but write verse? I doubt that the most thorough explorer of
contemporary letters could discover such an anachronism. Poets still
write poetry, but the ancient art is no longer their chief excuse for
existence. They come before the public in other and more commonplace
guises.

Mr. T. A. Daly was until recently business manager of a weekly paper.
Messrs. Bliss Carman, Richard Le Gallienne, Ford Madox Hueffer, Nicholas
Vachell Lindsay, and eight thousand other poets write literary
criticisms. Dr. Henry van Dyke preaches and is a diplomat. Mr. Rudyard
Kipling preaches and is not a diplomat. All the poets have regular jobs.
In the good old days it was different. Then Dr. Henry van Dyke, Mr. Tom
Daly, and the rest of them would have done nothing all day and all night
but write poetry and read it to each other as they sat and drank
anisette or some other sweet, sticky cordial in a club named the
Camembert Cheese, or something of the sort. They would have scorned
editing anything less precious than The Germ or The Yellow Book. And as
to writing book reviews--as well ask them to get married!

For a time Mr. Alfred Noyes kept the spirit of craft-integrity. He
alone, among book reviewing, story writing, magazine editing versifiers,
was solely a poet. But now even he has taken up a side line. First he
delivered the Lowell lectures; then he became a university professor.
Over his laurel wreath he has put a mortar-board.

But the departure of the poets from a strictly professional attitude
toward life is only one side of the shield. The poets have become
citizens; that is bad enough. But also the citizens have become poets.
They do not call themselves poets, they merely write verse as casually
as they write letters.

For one thing, the rhymed advertisement is more common now than ever
before. Formerly, when the proprietor or advertising manager of a
manufactory of automobiles or chewing gum or some other necessity of
American life desired to celebrate his wares in verse, he went to some
trouble and expense. He called in an impecunious literary man, that is,
a literary man, and with some trepidation made what business men
quaintly call a proposition. The poet considered the matter carefully,
arranged the terms of payment, and insisted upon the exclusion of his
name from the published composition, was supplied with material
descriptive of his subject, and departed to his conventional garret. In
the course of time he brought back the desired verses, was paid, and
treated with mingled curiosity and awe by the men of affairs who had
made use of his talents.

Now all is changed. The advertising managers started scabbing on the
unorganized and individualistic poets and actually drove them off the
job. Now, when a cough drop is to be made the subject of a
sonnet-sequence what happens? Does a regular professional poet get a
dollar a line for the work? He does not. The advertising manager sends
the office boy out for a rhyming dictionary and writes the verses
himself. Or else he lets the office boy write them.

But this is only one manifestation of this lamentable state of affairs.
Another is the fact that most people are the authors of books of verse.
People do not buy poetry, they do not read poetry, but they write it
with amazing enthusiasm and industry. There are now at least four
prosperous publishers who do nothing but bring out books at the expense
of the authors, and their lists contain practically nothing but volumes
of verse. The country clergyman, lawyer, or school teacher who has not
written a volume of verse and paid from $100 to $500 to have it printed
(with his portrait as frontispiece) is a rare bird indeed. These people
never buy books of verse, and, of course, almost no copies of their own
books are sold. But the fact remains that nearly everybody who can read
and write makes verse, carelessly, casually, without effort or emotion.
The shoemaker who wishes to call the attention of the public to his new
stock of canvas shoes with green leather inserts lisps in numbers and
the numbers come. And the man who has nothing to advertise but his own
personality seizes authoritatively upon the Muse's hair and pulls it
until she shrieks his praise.

It will be objected that what these people write is merely verse, not
poetry; that no one considers them poets and that they do not claim the
title. But this is not a valid objection, it is thoroughly in
accordance with my thesis. They write verse, and they are not poets;
therefore they--all people, that is--believe that one need not be a
professional poet to write verse any more than one need be a
professional dishwasher to wash dishes. So poetry, as a distinct craft,
utterly disappears; it does not even continue as a separate and special
branch of unskilled labor.

Of course, there still exist people who take the making of verse
somewhat seriously. But the loudest of them, those who most earnestly
insist upon the importance of themselves and their art, are those
ridiculous young people who call themselves Imagistes and Vorticists and
similar queer names. And they deliberately take from poetry its
characteristics of rhyme and rhythm and apply the name poetry to little
chunks of maudlin prose. So they, too, are working for the abolition of
poets and poetry.

There is an exquisite Socialist doctrine called "progressive poverty" or
something of the sort, according to which we are to let conditions get
worse and worse so that they may ultimately become unbearable. Then, it
is said, the cooperative commonwealth will almost automatically come
into being. Perhaps this suggests a solution for the problem now under
consideration. Let the few remaining professional poets resolutely
abstain from writing verse; let verse be made only by patent medicine
manufacturers and grocers and Imagistes and, in general, people totally
ignorant of poetry. They will produce it in abundance; they will
probably perfect some mechanical device, a poem-jenny, perhaps, which
will produce a standard poem in a short time and gradually do away with
the home-manufactured article.

In the course of time the patents on this device will be taken over by
the Standard Oil Company, and poems of uniform perfection will be
furnished at small cost to every house or apartment. Then, after some
twenty-five years, there will come a reaction, a sort of craftsman,
back-to-nature movement. Some adventurous person will make up a real
poem of his own, and his friends will say, "How quaint! That is the way
they did in the old days before the poem-jenny was invented. I rather
like this poem. It has strength, simplicity, a primitive quality that I
cannot find in the poems the Standard Oil Company sends up every week.
Go on, Rollo, and see if you can make another one."

Thus encouraged, Rollo will make another poem, and another, and rather
histrionically will assume the picturesque old title of poet. Other
poets will arise, and the Standard Oil Company will turn its attention
to perfecting devices for the construction of novels. Poems made by hand
by specialists will then be the only articles of the sort produced. In
this way only can there ever be a genuine renascence of the ancient and
honorable craft of poetry.

NOON-HOUR ADVENTURING

Sun worship, according to the latest religious census, is no longer a
popular cult. This is a pity, for it was more respectable and more
diverting than most of the forms of paganism that have superseded it.

But the sun is a good-humored deity; he showered his gifts no more
generously of old on Teheran, whose walls were resonant with his praise,
than now on faithless New York. Daily from his meridian he stretches
forth his shining scimitar and strikes the fetters from the feet of
young men, setting them free to walk the golden streets of an enchanted
city.

The feet, I said, of young men. For men no longer young the noon hour is
a time for the comfortable but unromantic occupation of eating. The man
who usually takes a car to get from Thirty-third Street to Times Square,
who occasionally lets the barber rub tonic on the top of his head, who
carries blocks and dolls home on Saturday, who is morbidly interested in
building loans and grass-seed, regards the noon hour as at worst a time
for shopping and at best a time for eating. But to the young man,
particularly to the young man for the first time a wage-earner in the
city, the noon hour is a time for splendid adventuring.

It may be that there are young women for whom the luncheon hour is a gay
thread of romance in the dull fabric of the working day. Of this I
cannot speak with certainty; my observation indicates that they regard
it merely as an opportunity to go, in chattering companies, to those
melancholy retreats called tea rooms to amuse themselves with gossip and
extraordinary ices. But the young man leaves his desk at the appointed
hour as bravely as ever pirate vessel left its wharf, and sails forth to
sparkling and uncharted seas.

Consider, for example, the case of James Jones. James spent his boyhood
in a town less than a hundred miles from New York. Visits to the city
were great events in his young life. He was taken there to buy clothing,
to go to the theater, to visit unusually exciting relatives who lived in
apartment houses, rode on elevators, and drew milk from dumb-waiters.
During his collegiate career James made occasional trips to New York,
always with the theater and the tavern as his objectives. Triumphantly
now he feels himself actually a New Yorker, a dweller in no mean city.
Joyfully, therefore, he goes forth every noon to explore the territory
of his new possession.

James is, let it be understood, nearer 20 than 25. He is beginning to
regard his diploma with some disrespect, but he still wears his
fraternity pin on an obscure corner of his waistcoat. Every Saturday
morning he gets an envelope containing a $10 bill and a $5 bill, and he
has already formulated in his mind an eloquent appeal which cannot fail,
he believes, to increase that amount to $18.50. James endeavors to seem
as sophisticated as the chauffeur of a taxicab; not for worlds would he
betray the innocent delight with which he regards the city of his
habitation.

With James's occupation from 9 in the morning until the luncheon hour we
have no concern. Perhaps he sits on a high stool and ciphers in a great
ledger, perhaps he haltingly dictates letters to a patronizing
stenographer, perhaps he urges certain necessities or luxuries upon a
suspicious public. The important fact of his life--for us and, in a
measure, for him--is that once every day he answers the welcome summons
of the unknown.

Luncheon is a tiresome obligation, quickly to be fulfilled. His mother
would be vexed to see him gulp his malted milk or bolt his sandwich. On
some occasions, with a pleasant sense of recklessness, he enters a bar,
and, with something of a flourish, consumes beer and free lunch. With
some difficulty he refrains from looking over the swinging doors before
leaving, as he did in his home town, to make sure that none of his
neighbors are coming down the street.

James left his desk only six minutes ago and his luncheon is already
over. There remain fifty-four precious minutes. Behold him tasting
rapturously of every second of these minutes! Behind a cheap but
decorative cigar he walks up, perhaps, Fifth Avenue, undeniably that
excellent thoroughfare's possessor. For his delight is Diana poised on
her tower of purple memories; the grass of Madison Square is greener
than that of his father's lawn; tulips more vivid than these never
bloomed in the rich gardens of Holland.

He is considered a sympathetic person, but at noon, I fear, his attitude
is that of a realist. For he watches with ingenuous interest the antics
of that drunkard on a park bench, and regards the arrival of the patrol
wagon and summary removal of the culprit as a drama got up solely for
his entertainment. Regrettable as it may seem, it is with heightened
spirits that he continues his stroll.

Now he has reached a great bookshop which even the penniless find
hospitable. "Some day," says James to himself, "two hundred copies of my
novel will draw a crowd around this plate glass window." Mentally he
arranges an effective window display and goes on to feast his eyes on
vellum and shagreen, on calf delicately tooled and parchment gay with
gold leaf and many colored inks. Sometimes he enters the shop (the
clerks are indulgent to James and his kind) and, over the merry pages of
_Jugend_ and _La Vie Parisienne_, rejoices that his father made him
study modern languages at college.

But literature must not claim too much of his fast-fleeting hour. There
are shops at hand whose windows show things stranger than books; chairs
and bedsteads eloquent of the genius of Adam and Heppelwhite; the
massive silver platter on which old Wardle carved a Christmas goose when
Mr. Pickwick was his guest; a mighty flagon that brimmed with red wine
for Pantagruel; a carved jade bracelet from the brown arm of the
Princess Badoura; the sword of Robert Bruce. All lands, all ages have
sent their treasures to New York this noon for the entertainment of
James Jones.

It may be that this square of Japanese embroidery, on which fantastic
knights thrust tremendous javelins at red and green dragons under
astonished willows, was made in Paterson, N. J. What of that? The colors
are not therefore less bright. James is not a purchaser, he is merely a
spectator of the greatest raree-show in the world. It is well for him to
be deceived in the splendors displayed before him. Not so many years ago
he would prefer a red glass ball to the Kohinoor and a hand organ with a
monkey to a piano with Paderewski. James yet retains a receptivity
almost infantile; but it would pain him to be told so.

They are not gregarious, at noon, these young discoverers of New York.
They are selfish in their adventuring, for a vision shared is only half
a vision. James, I know, is annoyed when he finds an acquaintance
gobbling a sandwich at his luncheon counter or staring in a jeweler's
window that he has come to regard as his own private property. On
Sundays he is sociable enough; he is glad of a companion on his journeys
across and up and down Manhattan, among the Italians and negroes of the
upper west side, through the loud ghetto and speciously weird Chinatown,
in the deliberate sylvanity of Central Park and the Bronx Gardens. In
the evening, too, he is not at all a recluse. But at noon he has no
appetite for conversation; he would not have his attention taken from
the strange streets by an accustomed human being.

James has never ridden on a London bus, yet I believe in the truth of
his unspoken thought, that a Fifth Avenue bus is the most excellent
vehicle in the world. The London bus depends for its charm on a number
of non-essential qualities; on the humor of its driver (are the
chauffeurs of London's electric buses also masters of epigram?), on the
quaintness and antiquity of the thoroughfare, on the military efficiency
of the traffic policemen, on the philmayishness of the passengers. The
Fifth Avenue bus has one reason for existence: it shows its passengers
Fifth Avenue. No bus can do more.

So one may (if one is young enough to be so foolish and so wise) ride,
like the Gaikwar of Baroda in his swaying howdah, high above the people
for a golden hour. He may start at uneasy Washington Square, where
ancient respectability wars with young bohemianism. Soon he looks down
on the throngs of new Americans that tramp the once proud pavement. From
his high seat he sees them, the small, dark men and women who, like him,
are for a time released from labor. They move slowly in great crowds,
they eat frugal meals, the wares of curb-side peddlers, they talk and
gesture incessantly. What does James think of them? I do not believe
that his opinion is worth knowing.

But he enjoys, I know, the tour through the traffic-filled intersection
of Broadway and Twenty-third Street, and he is not old enough to notice
with regret the gradual deterioration of the latter street. Freed from
the close company of baser vehicles, how triumphantly the bus whirrs up
the broad street past the square, among the splendid shops and clubs and
churches--the true New Yorker, I think, names them in this order. But
James must not give too much attention to the lovely Gothic lines of St.
Thomas's, or the lovely Byzantine lines of that pink chiffon lady in the
landau--the luncheon hour draws to a close, and punctuality, he still
believes, is a business virtue.

The brevity of this recess is essential to it. If the time be
indefinitely increased, if the young adventurer be allowed all the
morning and all the afternoon for his wandering, then all the zest goes
out of the adventure. There is that trusted veteran employee in the
corner of the office. He receives fabulous sums on pay day and may go
out to luncheon whenever he desires, with no time clerk to censor him.
He knows New York less than does James. But does his curiosity urge him
forth to long adventures? Over his stale morning's paper in the deserted
office, seated before his familiar task, he eats his sordid and
wife-made luncheon!

But the noon adventurer is not limited to Fifth Avenue. The antique
shops of Fourth Avenue charm him with pewter and brass, they cheer his
heart with sun dials from English rose gardens and crucifixes from
convents of Dante's land and time. At Twenty-third Street stalls he
reads bits of forgotten writings and breathes the pleasant scent of worn
calfskin. Perhaps on the 15-cent rack he comes upon a prize. Here is a
little book of English verse by a Japanese poet. What is this faded
inscription? "To Mary McLane from Yone Noguchi." The adventurer buys it,
as the late Mr. Morgan would buy a Nuremburg Bible, and salves his
economical conscience by rolling his own cigarettes for a while.

There are great sights for him, now and then. People who seemed, not so
long ago, as legendary as Cuchulain and Cinderella appear to him on
these noon expeditions, most startlingly human and real. He sees Mr.
Roosevelt leave the Charities Building to enter a waiting taxicab. He
visits the bootblack and in the chair next to him sits Mr. Bliss
Carman, crowned with the huge black hat that is the livery of
Vagabondia. On Fourteenth Street a big black-haired man and a little
spectacled woman stop to laugh at the fortune-telling paroquets. With a
delicious thrill the adventurer recognizes Mr. Ben Reitman and Miss Emma
Goldman.

Nor are his adventures confined to seeing. There is plenty of action,
sometimes. Once, as he stared into the windows of an Oriental rug shop,
he was aware of a thin, hunted-looking man who demanded his attention.

"I beg your pardon, Sir," said the hunted-looking man, "but can you tell
me where I can find a parnbroker?"

I do not know why the hunted-looking man said "parnbroker," instead of
"pawnbroker," but James always tells the story this way.

"No," said James, truthfully, "I can't."

"The reason I wanna know is," said the hunted-looking man very rapidly,
"I gotta very fine stone here. I got into a little trouble in a hotel
uptown; I gotta sell it right away very cheap."

And from a dirty pasteboard box he drew what seemed to be a large
diamond ring.

Now was the thoroughly interested James aware of yet another stranger
who sought his attention, a prosperous-looking man, who smoked a fat
cigar and flourished a silver-headed stick, who seemed trying to caution
James against buying the diamond.

James had only 35 cents in his pocket, and was not a buyer, but a
spectator of jewelry anyway. The hunted-looking man withdrew slowly.
Then said the prosperous-looking man to James:

"Excuse me for buttin' in, old man, but I didn't want to see you stung.
Sometimes these here fellers got real stones, sometimes they got fakes.
Now I'm a professional jeweler and I got my microscope that I look at
diamonds with in my pocket. Now, you call that guy back and tell him I'm
a friend of yours and I'll examine that stone and tell you if it's any
good."

The hunted-looking man gave rather too dramatic a start of surprise when
called back by the suspicious but curious James.

"It's worth $500," he said, "but I'll sell it for $50. I got into a
little trouble at a hotel uptown, and I gotta sell it cheap."

Professionally, elaborately, impressively, the prosperous-looking man
screwed a glass into his eye and squinted at the stone. Then, taking
James several yards away from the hunted-looking man, he said: "That's
a genuine stone worth easy $500 if it's worth a cent. I know a place
they'll give us $500 for it this afternoon on account of me being in the
trade. Now, you keep him here while I go round the corner and get $25
from my bank and then we'll buy that stone together and make $225 apiece
before two hours is gone. I'll be right back."

And the prosperous-looking man vanished.

Then--as might have been expected--the hunted-looking man offered James
the diamond for $25. "You can put one over on that big-guy," he said.
"Slip me $25 and we beat it before he gets back. You can clean up $450
on it. I'm afraid of that big guy; I think he's gone after a cop."

Now, these two confidence men had worked hard with James. He should not
have taken such delight in their discomfiture as he climbed the steps of
a bus and bade them farewell.

When he met the hunted-looking man and the prosperous-looking man
together on Broadway a few days later they cut him, and I do blame them.
But they gave him a real adventure, at any rate, an adventure not to be
met by those who squander their noon hour sitting dully in sedate
restaurants.

Then there was the adventure of the picture gallery. James went on one
occasion to a futurist exhibition in a tiny room not far from Madison
Square. Galleries are not crowded at noon, but from the room that James
approached came sounds not to be accounted for even by the crazy
canvases on its walls. Of course James went in, and found a futurist
painter wrestling with the agent of a collection agency. The combatants
rose, and demanded James's name and address, that he might be summoned
to court as a witness to assault and battery. But he never received
either summons. Perhaps it was because he gave his name as Henry Smith
of Yonkers.

Episodes like these have little charm for the middle-aged or for young
men prematurely aged by spending their childhood in New York. These have
their compensations, no doubt; their lives are not utterly bleak. But
not for them is the daily romance of the young man who has just come to
the city, who enjoys the proud novelty of working for wage, to whom
every noon come sweet and strange the streets' compelling voices.

SIGNS AND SYMBOLS

Those people whom an hostile fate has made both athletes and reformers
have among their aversions one which they proclaim with an enthusiasm so
intense as to be almost infectious. They dislike passionately the
harmless, unnecessary sign board when it has been so placed as to become
a feature of the rural landscape. Wooden cows silhouetted against the
sunset only irritate them by their gentle celebrations of malted milk;
the friendliest invitation to enjoy a cigarette, a corset or a digestive
tablet fills them with anger if it comes from the face of a
sea-shadowing cliff or from among the ancient hemlocks of a lofty
mountain.

There is, of course, a modicum of reason in their attitude. It is wrong
to paint the lily at all; it is doubly wrong to paint "Wear Rainproof
Socks" across its virgin petals. It is wrong to mar beauty; that is an
axiom of all aesthetics and of all ethics. It would be wrong, for example
(although it would be highly amusing), to throw by means of a magic
lantern great colored phrases against Niagara's sheet of foam; it would
be wrong to carve (as many earnest readers of our magazines believe has
been done), an insurance company's advertisement on the Rock of
Gibraltar.

But the aesthete-reformer, in condemning such monstrosities as these,
condemns merely an hypothesis. And since the hypothesis obviously is
condemnable, he starts a crusade against the innocent facts upon which
the purely hypothetical evil is based. It is wrong to mar the snowy
splendor of the Alps; therefore, he says, the Jersey meadows must not
bear upon their damp bosom the jubilant banner of an effective
safety-razor. The sylvan fastness of our continent must be saved from
the vandal; therefore, he says, you may not advertise breakfast food on
a hoarding in the suburbs of Paterson.

If the aesthete-reformers in question would examine the subject
dispassionately they would see that there is really nothing in the sign
board as it stands to-day about which they may justly complain.
Advertisers do not deliberately annoy the public; they would not be so
foolish as to seek to attract people by spoiling what was beautiful. It
must be remembered that a landscape may be rustic and yet not
beautiful.

The aesthete does not dislike, instead he hails with enthusiasm, a worn
stone bearing the dim inscription "18 Mil. To Ye Cittye of London." Why
then should he shudder when he sees a bright placard which shouts "18
Miles to the White Way Shoe Bazaar, Paterson's Pride"? To my mind there
is a vivacity and a humanness about the second announcement utterly
lacking in the first. The aesthete dotes upon the swinging boards which
with crude paintings announce the presence of British inns. If "The
Purple Cow, by Geoffrey Pump. Entertainment for Man and Beast" delights
his soul, why does he turn in angry sorrow from "Stop at the New Mammoth
Hotel when you are in Omaha--500 Rooms and Baths--$1.50 up--All
Fireproof"? It is a cheerful invitation, and it should bring to jaded
travelers through the track-pierced wastes a comfortable sense of
approaching welcome and companionship.

There are many things which might be said in favor of urban sign boards,
especially in favor of those elaborate arrangements in colored lights
which make advertisements of table waters and dress fabrics as
alluringly lovely as the electrical splendor of the first act of Dukas'
"Ariane et Barbe Bleu." But in the city the sign board is always
something supererogatory; it may be decorative, but it is not necessary.
One does not need a six-yard announcement of a beer's merit when there
are three saloons across the street; even the placards of plays line
almost uselessly the thoroughfares of a district in which the theaters
are conspicuous.

But in the country the sign boards are no luxuries but stern
necessities. This the aesthete-reformers fail to see because they lack a
sense of the unfitness of things. It is their incongruity which gives to
rustic sign boards the magic of romance. The deliberately commercial
announcement, firmly set in an innocent meadow or among the eternal
hills, has exactly the same charm as a buttercup in a city street or a
gray wood-dove fluttering among the stern eaves of an apartment house.

What a benefaction to humanity these rural sign boards are! To the
farmer they are (in addition to being a source of revenue) a piquant
suggestion of the wise and wealthy city. He loves and fears the city, as
mankind always loves and fears the unknown. Once he thought that it was
paved with gold. He must have thought so, otherwise how could he have
accounted for the existence of gold bricks? He is less credulous now,
but still the big signs down where the track cuts across the old
pasture pleasantly thrill his fancy.

And what would a railway journey be without these gay and civilizing
reminders? They hide the shame of black and suicidal bogs with cheery
hints of vaudeville beyond, they throw before the privacy of farmhouses
a decent veil of cigarette advertisements. He who speeds vacation-ward
from the city is glad of them, for they remind him that he is where
factories and huge shops may come only in this pictured guise, thin
painted ghosts of their noisy selves. He who gladly speeds back to
domesticity and the ordered comforts of metropolitan life sees them as
welcoming seneschals, glorious advance-posts of civilization. They are
the least commercial of all commercial things, they are as human and as
delightful as explorers or valentines.

THE GREAT NICKEL ADVENTURE

Whenever I read Mr. Chester Firkins' excellent poem "On a Subway
Express" I am filled with amazement. It is not strange that Mr. Firkins
turned the subway into poetry, it is strange that the subway does not
turn every one of its passengers into a poet.

There are, it is true, more comfortable means of locomotion than the
subway; there are conveyances less crowded, better ventilated, cooler in
Summer, warmer in Winter. A little discomfort, however, is an
appropriate accompaniment of adventure. And subway-riding is a splendid
adventure, a radiant bit of romance set in the gray fabric of the
work-a-day world.

The aeroplane has been celebrated so enthusiastically in the course of
its brief life that it must by now be a most offensively conceited
machine. Yet an aeroplane ride, however picturesque and dangerous, has
about it far less of essential romance than a ride in the subway. He who
sails through the sky directs, so nearly as is possible, his course; he
handles levers, steers, goes up or down, to the left or the right. Or if
he is a passenger, he has, at any rate, full knowledge of what is going
on around him, he sees his course before him, he can call out to the man
at the helm: "Look out for that cornet's hair! Turn to the left or the
point of that star will puncture our sail!"

Now, unseen dangers are more thrilling than those seen; the aeroplane
journey has about it inevitably something prosaic. This is the great
charm of the subway, that the passengers, the guards, too, for that
matter, give themselves up to adventure with a blind and beautiful
recklessness. They leave the accustomed sunlight and plunge into
subterranean caverns, into a region far more mysterious than the candid
air, into a region which since mankind was young has been associated
with death. Before an awed and admiring crowd, the circus acrobat is
shut into a hollow ball and catapulted across the rings; with not even a
sense of his own bravado, the subway passenger is shut into a box and
shot twenty miles through the earth.

Once there lived on West One Hundred and Eighty-second Street a man of
uncompromising practicality, a stern rationalist. He was as advanced as
anything! He believed in the materialistic interpretation of history,
economic determinism, and radium; this, he said, with some pride, was
his Creed. Often he expressed his loathing for "flesh-food," more
frequently for "Middle Class morality," most frequently for faith.
"Faith is stupidity," he would say. "Look before you leap! It makes me
sick to see the way people have been humbugged in all ages. The
capitalist class has told them something was true, something nobody
could understand, and they've--blindly accepted it, the idiots! I
believe in what I see--I don't take chances. I don't trust anybody but
myself."

Yet every day this man would give himself up to the subway with a sweet
and child-like faith. As he sat in the speeding car, he could not see
his way, he had no chance of directing it. He trusted that the train
would keep to its route, that it would stop at Fourteenth Street and let
him off. He could not keep it from taking him under the river and
hurling him out into some strange Brooklyn desert. When he started for
home in the evening, he read the words "Dyckman Street" on the car
window with a medieval simplicity, and on the guarantee of these printed
words, placed there by minions of the capitalist class, he gave up the
privilege of directing his course. The train, he believed, would not at
Ninety-sixth Street be switched off to a Bronx track; the sign told him
that he was safe, and he believed it.

So the subway caused him to exercise the virtue of faith, made him, for
a time, really a human being. Perhaps it is the sharing of this faith
that makes a subway crowd so democratic. Surely there is some subtly
powerful influence at work, changing men and women as soon as they take
their seats, or straps.

For one thing, they become alike in appearance. The glare of the
electric light unifies them, modifying swarthy faces and faces
delicately rouged until they are nearly of one hue. Then, the
differences of attitude are lost, and attitudes are great instruments of
subordination. The ragged bootblack does not kneel at the broker's feet;
he sits close beside him, or perhaps, comfortably at rest, watches the
broker clutch a strap and struggle to keep his footing.

"Tired clerks, pale girls, street-cleaners, business men, boys, priests
and sailors, drunkards, students, thieves"--all gain a new sincerity.
Neither the millionaire's imperiousness nor the beggar's professional
humility can make the train go faster, so both are laid aside.
Distinctions of race and caste grow insignificant, as in a company
confronting one peril or one God. This is not theory, it is fact. The
subway passenger purchases a nickel's worth of speed and he must take
with it a nickel's worth of democracy.

Perhaps it is the youthful romanticism of America which makes our
subways so much more exciting than those of Europe. The Englishman is
too cautious and too conservative to trust himself away from the earth's
surface more than two minutes at a time. So the trains that run through
the London tube are tame, cowardly things. They timidly run underground
for half a mile or so and pop their heads out into the air and sunlight
or fog at every station.

But the New York subway train is ready to take a chance. It dives into
the earth and "stays under," like a brave diver, for an hour at a time.
And when it does emerge, what splendor attends its coming! There is a
glimmer of sunshine at the One Hundred and Sixteenth Street Station; the
blue and white of the walls and pillars reflect a light not wholly
artificial. Then there is a brief stretch of fantastically broken
darkness. Passengers in the first car can see ahead of them, at
Manhattan Street, a great door of sunshine. At last there is a strange
change in the rumble of the wheels, for the echoing roof and walls are
gone, and the train leaves its tunnel not to run humbly over the ground,
but to rise higher and higher until it comes to a sudden halt above the
chimneys and tree tops. To say that the grub becomes a butterfly does
not fit the case, for the grub is a slow-moving beast and a butterfly's
course is capricious. Rather, it is as if, by some tremendous magic, a
great snake became a soaring eagle.

And how keenly all the passengers enjoy their few seconds in the open
air! When they hurried down the steps to the train, they were scornful
of the atmosphere they were leaving, they had no thought of tasting wind
and watching sunlight. Now they are become, for the moment, connoisseurs
of these delectable things; they wish the train would linger at
Manhattan Street, not inevitably plunge at once into its roaring cavern.
But the train is wise, it knows brevity is essential to all exquisite
things, so it gives its passengers only an evanescent glimpse of the
glories they have just now learned to appreciate.

This is a part of the great conspiracy of the subway. It is regarded
only as a swift and convenient and uncomfortable carrier, and it has no
wish to be otherwise interpreted. But those who have studied it know
the hidden purposes it constantly and effectively serves. It is showing
our generation the value of mankind's commonest and most precious gifts,
by taking them away.

Now, it is good for man or beast to stand on solid ground in the
sunlight, breathing clean air. Also fellowship is good, and the talk of
friends. We forgot the value of these, we shut ourselves up in dark
rooms and we spared no time to social exercise. Then--to punish and cure
our folly--came the subway, making our journeys things close and dark in
which conversation is a matter of desperate effort. And now how kind and
talkative are people who go home together from the subway station after
their daily disciplinary ride! They are grateful, too--although it may
be subconsciously--for the familiar sights and sounds of the earth, for
houses and streets and light that does not come from a wire in a bottle.
They take gladly the great common things; they are simple, natural,
democratic.

So they spend much of their leisure out of doors, these men and women
who are underground two hours every weekday. In the evenings and on
Sunday afternoons, they walk the pleasant streets with eager delight.
They are curious about the loveliness far beneath which they daily
speed. They have learned something of the art of life.

Of course, the subway has its incidental charms--its gay fresco of
advertisements, for instance, and its faint mysterious thunder when it
runs near the surface of the street on which we stand. But its chief
service to man--perhaps its reason for existence--is that it gives him
adventure. In this adventure he meets the spirit of faith and the spirit
of democracy, which is an aspect of charity. And by their influence he
becomes, surely though but for a time, as a little child.

THE URBAN CHANTICLEER

If the rooster selected tree-tops for his roosting, crowed mournfully at
the moon, and were a wild, unfriendly bird, every man's hand would be
against him. But we forgive him his ugliness and conceit, not only
because he is a dutiful citizen of the barnyard, but also because now,
as in the days of the noble Horatio, he obligingly acts as "trumpet to
the morn." On account of this romantic and sometimes useful custom, he
wears a sentimental halo. M. Rostand has made him the hero of a drama.
When will some wise playwright celebrate his urban prototype, the alarm
clock?

The spirit in which this question is asked is not wholly one of mockery.
For the alarm clock is close to humanity; in the city household, few
bits of furniture are more personal and necessary. It is a faithful
servant, this loud-voiced creature of steel and glass, obedient,
punctual, patient. And its association with its owner, I had almost
written its master, is so peculiarly intimate as to give it a
personality and an attitude toward life.

In the first place, it is irresistibly egotistic. There are some usual
possessions which become subconscious things, their identities merging
with the shadows of the vague land of habit. One may, for instance,
possess a watch and yet not be aware of the watch as he is aware of his
alarm clock. He lifts it from and returns it to his pocket; he winds it,
with a gesture almost involuntary; he takes his information from his
dial as thoughtlessly as he takes his breath from the atmosphere. Though
it be made of fine gold, cunningly chased and blazoned with precious
stones, it is to him, after the first delight of its acquisition, the
unregarded means to an important end. So long as it serves him
unprotestingly, he thinks of it no more than of his soul. People do not
specifically ask him to consult his watch, they ask, "What time is it?"
and even "Have you the time?"

Not thus does an alarm clock sink into oblivion. At least twice in
twenty-four hours its owner must be vividly aware of its existence. It
imperiously demands of him conscious action. In the morning
clangorously, at night dumbly, it insists on attention. He must with
thought adjust its mechanism, he must give it intelligent orders. And
whether he rises at its summons or instead shuts out with a pillow its
voice and that of conscience, he cannot ignore it. By no effort of will
could Frankenstein forget his monster.

Not that the alarm clock is always a thing monstrous and threatening. It
obeys orders with soldierly exactness but its sympathy is most
unmartial. Routine cannot deaden its sensitivity. True, its ordinary
note is something dry and monotonous. This comes from its perfect sense
of the fitness of things; the call to business should be business-like.
But what triumphant peals burst from its tiny belfry when it bids you
rise and put on robes of honor! It can mimic the proud mirth of wedding
bells; it knows the mighty song that rang from all the towers of London
to cheer Dick Whittington. And that it can utter harsh and strident
grief, those know who lie down with Sorrow and must awaken with her.

Even the most materialistic man has for his alarm clock a shame-faced
personal regard. He speaks of it deprecatingly, with a humorous show of
indignation. He tells how he maltreated it, knocked it from the mantel,
smothered it with blankets, and there is a note of almost paternal
exultation in his voice when he describes its persistence in ringing.

Franker souls actually parade what may be termed their
alarm-clockophilia. A friend of mine, one Carolus Dillingham, talks by
the hour of his Nellie. Nellie is not, to the casual observer, an alarm
clock of extraordinary merit. She was constructed many years ago and her
nickel-plating is nearly gone. She is a small, weak-looking thing, with
a great dome absolutely out of proportion to her rickety body. A result
of her ridiculous construction is that when the alarm rings, she becomes
slightly overbalanced, trembles, and moves a fraction of an inch forward
on her feeble legs.

This, according to Carolus, is her chief charm. "I put Nellie," he says,
"on the very edge of the shelf by the foot of my bed. When she rings in
the morning she topples off and lands on the blankets. So I don't need
to get up and walk across the cold floor. I can just reach out and choke
her. I think she is the most faithful alarm clock in the world."

One little regarded virtue of the alarm clock is its sturdy democracy.
It belongs irrevocably to the people, nothing can make it a snob. There
is a watch for every rank; there are coarse peasant watches, fat
bourgeois watches, and watches delicately aristocratic. But the alarm
clock in the tenement of the laborer is the exact duplicate of that
which wakens his employer; an alarm clock's an alarm clock for a' that.
America will never really be a decadent nation until its alarm clocks
are jeweled and soft-voiced.

The captious critic may object that the reason for the plainness of
alarm clocks is that their use is restricted to what is loosely called
"the working class." There is some truth in this.

Up to the present I have never witnessed the awaking of an aristocrat,
or even of a captain of industry, but, I suppose that they are hailed in
soft tones by liveried menials, who bring them golden trays absolutely
overflowing with breakfast food and remarkably thick cream. But
aristocrats and captains of industry are rare birds, and all other
people must have alarm clocks.

All other people, that is, who live in cities. For the alarm clock, in
spite of its numerous excellences, is as inappropriate in the country as
rouge on a milkmaid. The farmer must try to live up to his craft, and
one of the aesthetic duties is to depend on mechanism as little as
possible. His wife should rise when she hears the poultry saluting the
dawn. Then, so nearly as I remember her obligations, she should go out
on the front porch and blow a conchshell until her husband wakes up.

The dweller in the suburbs is a creature of compromise. He grows
vegetables and keeps chickens, perhaps he grows vegetables for the use
of the chickens, and he cultivates a rural manner of speech. But he
spends most of his waking hours in the city and every night he brings
out with him on the five-twenty-seven some device to alter the
simplicity of the country. He is an ambiguous creature, analogous to the
merman. And the conspicuous symbol of his ambiguity is his alarm clock.
It is in ruralia but not of it. It stands by a window that opens on an
orchard, but it indicates the factory and market-place. It is a link
between its owner's two personalities, it is the skeleton at the feast,
reminding him, when he comes in from weeding the strawberry patch, that
he must get up at a quarter to seven the next morning and hurry to the
noisy train. Never does an alarm clock look so blatantly mechanical as
when it stands in a cottage of one of the people barbarously termed
"commuters."

For in the city, where everything is mechanical, the alarm clock seems
pleasantly personal. It is at home there, it is perfectly in keeping
with its surroundings. It takes on as comfortable an air of domesticity
as the most ornate Swiss timepiece that ever said "Cuckoo"; it is
contented, sociable, a member of the family. There is a sense of
strangeness in the apartment that has no alarm clock; it is like a
catless fireside.

And by association with the other sounds of awaking life, which even in
the most sordid slum have about them something of energy and hope, the
morning chorus of alarm clocks, echoing down the paved canyons from six
to eight, make, in the ears of the unprejudiced listener, a cheerful
noise. With them comes the mysterious creaking of the dumb-waiter as it
ascends with the milk, an adequate substitute for the lowing of the
herd. Kitchens and kitchenettes take on new life, and issue grateful
odors of coffee and bacon. And babies, seeing that their weary parents
are leaving them, decide at last that it is time to go to sleep.

An alarm clock can, on occasion, preach a sermon that would arouse the
envy of Savonarola. When the jaded reveler returns to his home at
day-break, wastes ten minutes in a frantic attempt to awaken the
elevator boy, and climbs, with cursing and gnashing of teeth, the eight
flights of stairs that lead to his apartment, then nothing more sharply
reminds him of his truancy than the voices of the alarm clocks calling
to each other in the bedrooms of his virtuous neighbors.

Not even the laziest or the weariest man can hate the alarm clock as he
does the factory whistle. The shrill blast that comes every morning from
the iron throat of this monster has in it a note of contemptuous menace.
The tired laborers awaken at their master's bidding; there is something
unnatural about this abrupt wholesale termination of sleep. But the
discipline of the alarm clock is another matter; he who hears it
listens, it may be said, to his own voice. He himself has set it, he has
fixed the very moment of his own awaking. And there is dignity in
observing rules self-imposed, however irksome they may be. The alarm
clock is the symbol of civilization, that is, of voluntary submission,
of free will obedience.

The careful reader will be aware that many aspects of this excellent
device have been neglected in this brief consideration. I have said
nothing of the alarm clock's sense of humor and of its willingness to
become a party to practical jokes. I have said nothing of how it may be
pleased, of its pride, for instance, in being referred to as an "alarum
clock." But it has one characteristic which I must mention, its
usefulness to the suddenly rich.

There is a delightful sort of novel, Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote
one, and so did Mr. H. G. Wells, which deals with the adventures of a
young man who has unexpectedly inherited a fortune. Samuel Warren's "Ten
Thousand a Year" is perhaps the greatest example of this manner of
fiction. Well, if I were T. Tembarom, or Kipps, or Tittlebat Titmouse
(Dr. Warren's hero), my alarm clock would be necessary for my first act
of celebration. Perhaps I should throw it from a window, perhaps I
should remove its bell, perhaps I should merely enjoy letting it run
down. At any rate, its presence would be necessary to the complete
enjoyment of my new freedom.

DAILY TRAVELING

Give a dog a bad name and hang him. Call the custom of daily travel
"commuting" and deliver it over to the whips of the scorner. The
intransitive verb "to commute" is a barbarous thing; he who is called
"commuter" is thereby rudely and ungrammatically taunted with journeying
at reduced rates, with being (terrible thought!) the recipient of a
railway's charity.

It is lamentable that so picturesque a habit as daily railway travel
should be thus misnamed. That it is a picturesque habit is perceived by
anyone who takes the trouble to consider it scientifically, shutting
resolutely from his mind the odium brought upon it by its odious name.
Suppose, for instance, that you were to go into the tap-room of the
Mermaid Tavern some winter evening during the reign of the, so to speak,
Good Queen Bess. The venerable Mr. Alfred Noyes would lead you to the
table always reserved for Messrs. Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson. You
would take from your pocket your commutation ticket, and, holding aloft
that cabalistically inscribed oblong of colored cardboard, would
sonorously declaim:

"By means of this talisman I daily fly across leagues of the New World,
from my cottage in a primeval forest to the heart of a mighty city. It
enables me to lead two lives; I am on week days urban, sophisticated, a
man of commerce; at night and on Sundays I am a smocked yokel, innocent
among my innocent vegetables. This little square of cardboard enables me
to ride in a splendid vehicle propelled by Nature herself more swiftly
than the wind, a vehicle which laughs at time and obliterates space. The
masters of romance, bowing in homage, have bestowed upon me the mystic
and awful name 'commuter.'"

Such a tale would draw Marlowe from his Malmsey and thrill the stout
heart of mighty Ben. And Avon's bard, charmed by a fact more golden than
all his imaginings, would augustly murmur "Very good, Eddie!"

It is a picturesque thing, this daily trip between the meadows and the
pavements. By general consent, a vagabond is the most romantic of men;
an allusion to the open road, wandering feet or the starlight on one's
face is sufficient to turn an ordinary rhymer into that radiant being, a
"tramp-poet." Then what glory must cling to those habitual vagabonds,
those devotees of the steel highway, whom we call commuters. The common
tramp seldom covers more than ten miles from sunrise to sundown; as a
rule his pilgrimage is even briefer. Yet he is called a knight of the
open road and even the staidest householder has a sneaking admiration
for him. The gypsy is no true vagabond, for he takes with him his wife,
children, dogs, furniture, and even his canvas-roofed house. Yet our
writers, from Borrow to Kipling, delight to urge us to ha' done with the
tents of Shem, dear lass, and follow the Romany patteran. The only
authentic vagabond is he who every day goes thirty miles from his rural
home to the city and every night thirty miles back, diving through
mountains, plunging under rivers; twice on every week-day, a wanderer
more free and venturesome than Lavengro himself.

But its picturesqueness is not the sole recommendation of daily railway
travel. The greatest of its numerous virtues is that it is democratic,
the only absolutely democratic institution in the United States of
America. It is the mighty leveler, the irresistible enemy of social
subordination.

In a city, town or village in which the citizens remain night and day
there can be no true democracy. The intentions of its inhabitants may be
excellent, but circumstances will be stronger. There is the minister,
there is the banker, there is the doctor, there is the grocer, there is
the cobbler, there is the minister's hired man. If a New England rural
community is under observation there will also be noted the village
atheist, the village drunkard, and the village Democrat. The population
is sharply divided into classes; there may be friendliness among the
various grades of humanity, there may be liberty, but there can be no
fraternity, no equality.

How different is the community in which people merely dwell, having
their business elsewhere! What is their occupation? They go to The
City--that is sufficient answer to admit them to fellowship. If
curiosity be still unsatisfied, there is the mention of the name of a
great firm, and all is well.

The cobbler, you see, keeps his last in the city, away from his home and
his neighbors; he does not stick to it, as the unpleasant adage bids
him. As he sits on his red velvet chair, enjoying with his neighbors
tobacco smoke, rapid travel, and the news of the world, who shall say
whether he deals in shoes or in empires? Next to him is Dusenbury, who
in addition to going to New York, goes to Wall Street, rumor has it.
What does he do in Wall Street? Does he corner the wheat market or clean
out waste baskets? Those who know, who say to him, "Sir" or "Hey, you,"
are not his companions on the 7.57.

There is a certain charm about what is called, ridiculously enough, a
"commuting town," which is altogether lacking in other communities. A
"commuting town" is wholly a place of homes--not of homes diluted with
offices, factories and shops. It is therefore the quintessence of
domesticity, being domestic with an intensity which no village which is
remote from the centers of civilization, which furnishes employment and
supplies to its own citizens can hope to approach.

Such a town is daily divided and joined, diminished and completed,
thereby keeping in a state of healthy activity. The 7.57 takes away, the
5.24 brings back. These recurrent separations and reunions are not
without their ethical and emotional value.

INCONGRUOUS NEW YORK

That dislike of the obvious which is the chief characteristic of
American humor is clearly exemplified in the names of most of New York's
streets.

The dwellers in a great European city would give their proudest avenue
of great shops and rich clubs some dignified and significant title, like
the Rue de la Paix or the Friedrichstrasse. The Asiatics would give it a
name more definitely descriptive and laudatory, like "The Street of the
Thousand and One Mirrors of Delight." The New Yorkers, "laconic and
Olympian," designate it by a simple numeral. They call it Fifth Avenue.

It comes partly from the national reticence, this prosaic name of a
poetic thoroughfare. It is a manifestation of that attitude of mind
which makes us to call a venerated and beloved statesman merely "Old
Abe," when the English would call him "the Grand Old Man" and the
Italians "the Star-crowned Patriarch." Also it is a phase of our
democracy. We will not seem to exalt one avenue over another by giving
it a fairer name; Fifth Avenue sounds to the uninitiated no more wealthy
and aristocratic than Fourth Avenue. Indeed, if there be any partiality
in the awarding of names, it would seem to be exercised in favor of
First Avenue or Avenue A.

It may be objected that the sponsors of Fifth Avenue did not foresee its
destined splendor. But this fact does not alter the case; we continue to
call it Fifth Avenue, whereas Europeans would alter its name to
something more appropriate to its grandeur.

There was a pilgrim from the Five Towns who said that Fifth Avenue was
architecturally the finest street in the world. This might pass for a
guest's flattery, were it not that Mr. Arnold Bennett is of a nation
which does not count gracious insincerity among its vices. New York must
blushingly admit the truth of his judgment.

It is not (he said) harmonious. Its beauty is made up of units of beauty
related only by position. This, too, is characteristically American.
Each building must have its distinctive excellence.

To give a street of wonders an austere name, to build palaces and fill
them with offices and shops--these are the acts by which Americans are
known. And especially does the New Yorker delight in the whimsical, the
inconsistent, the unexpected. He is like a child who likes to dig in the
sand with a silver spoon and to eat porridge with a toy shovel.

And this delicate perversity has its refreshing aspect. Fifth Avenue,
surely, is a thing to admire in the new sense as well as the old. It
sometimes suggests, perhaps, the ill-natured definition of a New Yorker
as a man who, when he makes a set of chimes, puts it in a life insurance
building. But it more often suggests a restatement of this definition;
that is, that a New Yorker is a man who, when he makes a life insurance
building, puts a set of chimes in it.

Now, certain masters of the mirthless science of psychology teach that
humor depends on incongruity. Whether or not this is true, incongruity
has much to do with making life worth while. For incongruity is the soul
of romance.

Nobility, love, courage, beauty--the possession of these qualities does
not give to a man or a woman romantic charm. A person is a hero or a
heroine of romance because he or she lives in a contrasting place or
age. For example, a cowboy riding a bucking bronco and whirling his
lariat under a canvas roof in some sedate Eastern town is properly
considered by the spectators to be a romantic figure. A cowboy engaged
in the same interesting occupations on a Texas ranch would not be
considered a romantic figure by his neighbors. It is incongruity of
environment that romantically transforms him.

People and things of bygone ages are romantic to us because the years
have gilded them. They were not romantic to their contemporaries. Says
Edwin Arlington Robinson:

Minniver loved the Medici
And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the mediaeval grace
Of iron clothing.

Exactly. Minniver Cheevy was a true romanticist. A plumed knight, armed
cap-a-pie, is a romantic figure when we merely see him through the years
from our modern surroundings by means of imagination's powerful lens; he
would be a figure even more romantic if we could actually see him shake
his lance and lead his warriors against a drab-suited, machine-like
company of present-day soldiers. Why, even horse cars, commonplace
enough in their day, take on a certain sentimental luster when they lie
abandoned in the outskirts of cities proud with electricity. And a
subway train will one day be as romantic a spectacle as a stage coach.

Sometimes a building is deliberately given the romance of incongruity.
This certainly is the case with the New York Stock Exchange. This
splendid Grecian temple, with its lofty columns and noble facade, would,
if it stood in ancient Athens, be, of course, beautiful, but in no
respect romantic. It is romantic because it is in a place where it would
not naturally be expected and because it is devoted to uses for which it
does not seem to have been intended. If the god therein worshiped were
not Mammon, but altisonant Jupiter, if white-robed priests found the
future prefigured in the warm blood of the lambs therein
sacrificed--then the building which now houses the clamoring merchants
would be merely dignified and practical and not, as it is today,
romantic.

The use of this Grecian temple as a counting house is a splendid example
of the poetic tendency of a popular mind. The common business
terms--"Bull" and "Bear," for example--are incongruous, and therefore
romantic. And a successful business man is not realistically called a
successful business man; he is romantically called a "merchant prince"
or a "captain of industry."

But most of New York's romantic places get their glory not by plan, but
by the accident of design. You turn the corner from a sombre street
lined by tall concrete and steel structures that obviously are of your
own period and come suddenly upon a mellow bit of New Amsterdam. You
would not be surprised to see old Peter Stuyvesant stump down Coenties
Slip and drop in for his morning's Hollands at "22-1/2," across the way.
There are streets and squares and alleys in downtown New York that look
now exactly as they did when Times Square was a cow pasture and the
Bowery really bowery. But these places were not romantic to the citizens
of that time; they would not be romantic to us if by some strange
backward transmigration of souls we should inhabit a vanished century.

No, we are fortunate to live when Battery Place and Coenties Slip have
acquired romance's glamour. Incongruity is the soul of romance. And
these quaint time-hallowed places have the loveliest sort of
incongruity--the magical incongruity of archaisms.

IN MEMORIAM: JOHN BUNNY

There was a clown named Joseph Grimaldi. And when his agile limbs and
mobile features were stilled by death there lingered in the minds of the
thousands who had laughed at him in Sadler's Wells and Covent Garden
only the memory of their mirth.

There was a clown named John Bunny. Now he is dead. But we still may
see, and our children's children may see, the gestures and grimaces that
made him a welcome visitor in every quarter of the globe. For by grace
of the motion-picture camera, John Bunny's art endures.

It is art, this power of conveying ideas without the use of words, of
exciting laughter by actually being, instead of saying, a joke. It is
the difficult and venerable art of the clown, the art of the
shaven-headed mime in variegated robes whose antics drove care from
Caesar's furrowed brow, the art of Garrick's harlequin friend, John Rich,
and of the mirth-compelling Pinkethman, whose "frolic gestures" won the
praise of Alexander Pope.

Of course, John Bunny could play in speaking parts. Before he found his
real vocation, before the motion pictures claimed him as their great
comedian, he trod the boards of the "legitimate" stage, and with no
small success. He ran the theatrical gamut from minstrelsy to
Shakespeare. Annie Russell, Maude Adams, Weber and Fields--these are a
few of the stars whose radiance he augmented during the first
twenty-five years of his professional life. But to-day the regular drama
offers little opportunity to the true clown, and it was not until he
appeared on the screen that John Bunny reach his own public--that is,
the world.

The word clown has fallen of late years into unmerited disrepute.
Impressionistic critics of the drama attempt to disparage a comedian by
calling him a "mere clown." They might as well call Mr. Sargent a "mere
painter," or M. Rodin a "mere sculptor." What they mean is that the
comedian of their discontent is not a clown at all. For the grotesquely
clad men, with whitened, expressionless faces, who tumble about the
circus ring, have no right to the exclusive possession of their title.
Indeed, few of them are genuine clowns in the best sense of the word,
for most of them cause laughter by obvious horseplay, not by the true
clown methods of elaborate pantomime and striking facial contortions.

The greatest comedians have been the greatest clowns. Even the most
brilliant lines, spoken most winningly, fail of their effect upon the
audience unless the speaker has a clown's power to act with his
features. And if a clown be great enough he may safely dispense with
words--as John Bunny did.

The English pantomime even in Thackeray's day had fallen from its once
high place. The lovely Columbine remained and the sprightly Harlequin
and the grotesque Pantaloon. But there were songs and dialogue; the
entertainment was simply a sort of vaudeville, not genuine pantomime at
all. It was not until the huge, clicking camera made lasting the
gestures of the actors that the art of pantomime came back to its own.

There is a word used by men and women who have to do with this great
branch of the world's amusement which deserves immortality. It is the
verb "register." An actor registers grief, or amusement, or
astonishment. That is, he assumes an expression which, when recorded by
the camera and exhibited, will convey his emotion to the audience. In
that one word there is a valuable treatise on the dramatic art. The
inferior actor is content with expressing an emotion. The true actor
registers it.

And what a sense of permanence is in that word "register!" Alfred de
Musset and many another sentimental poet lamented the ephemeral nature
of the actor's fame. The painter, it has been said, the writer and the
sculptor, live in their works. But the actor's art perishes with him;
when he dies, the memory of his expressive face and graceful form goes
into the oblivion that keeps the echoes of his golden voice.

Well, we have changed all that. The number of people who lose their
cares under the spell of John Bunny's magic to-day is greater than it
was a year ago. The motion pictures have made the actor's chances for
immortality equal with those of his fellows in the other arts.

Enemies of the motion picture (there really are such people) say that
the humor of such entertainments is not true humor, but vulgar and
barbarous horseplay, requiring no art. Anyone, they say, can get a
laugh, as Charlie Chaplin does, by being knocked down by an automobile
or by being grossly fat, like John Bunny.

The adequate answer to a critic who makes such statements as these is
"Go out in the street and get knocked down by an automobile." This may
be the remark which actors (and sensitive producers) commonly feel like
making to dramatic critics, but in this case it should have no tinge of
bitterness. Go out in the street and get knocked down by an automobile.
See if the people laugh at you as they laugh at Chaplin. They will laugh
at you only if you are artist enough to be knocked down humorously--as
Chaplin is knocked down.

And, as to John Bunny's success being due to his fatness, that criticism
is generally made by people who never saw "Autocrat of Flapjack
Junction" or "Love's Old Dream," or by rival actors. It is true that
your true clown always is quick to utilize his physical peculiarities as
accessories to his acting. The jesters of Marie de Medici made fun of
their own hunched backs or dwarfed forms. John Bunny had as good a right
to turn his fatness into dramatic capital as Sarah Bernhardt has to do
the same thing with her slenderness. It is a principle of subjective
artistic expression--the same principle as that by which Heine made his
little songs out of his great woes.

But the physical peculiarity alone is not enough. John Bunny was gifted
by nature for his roles. But he would have been a great clown even had
he been built like John Drew. He would have made his shapeliness what he
made his unshapeliness--something ridiculously amusing.

If fatness alone was the source of his success, how crowded his
profession would now be! But this is not the case. Thousands, perhaps,
of motion-picture audiences have watched Mr. Taft serenely cross the
screen, or mutely seem to make a speech. Undoubtedly, they have thereby
been edified. But they have not rocked from side to side with
unextinguishable laughter, and thereafter burst into shouts of mirth at
the mention of the ex-President's name.

No, people did not laugh at John Bunny because he was fat, or because he
fell from horses and automobiles and aeroplanes, and submitted to
various picturesque forms of assault and battery for their amusement.
They laughed at him because he was fat humorously, because he fell from
vehicles humorously, because he was a great clown--that is, a master of
a difficult and important branch of dramatic art.

The motion-picture producers may not be aware of the fact, but they have
performed a valuable service to the stage in reviving the art of
pantomime. The actor in the spoken drama will be less likely to be a
mere voice when he sees his brother on the screen act with his whole
body.

Is it possible that the importance of the human voice has been
exaggerated? Certainly the mechanical reproduction of the spoken word
has not captured the world's attention as has the reproduction of
motion. The phonograph, of course, brings the lovely notes of the
singers to ears that otherwise would never thrill with melody. It has
been used as an instrument by which a political speaker might address at
one time twenty audiences scattered across the continent, and it has
delighted with humorous dialogue those who were far from theaters. But
as an interpreter of great literature, the needle revolves impotently
upon its waxen cylinder.

There have been successful attempts to synchronize the phonograph and
the motion-picture machine, to cause the words to accompany the action.
It may be that these devices will one day be widely popular. But I hope
not. For that would destroy the greatest value of motion-picture acting,
the silent but complete expression of thought. The motion picture is the
renascence of pantomime.

When Colley Cibber looked through his jeweled quizzing glass at a
strange dumb-show drama newly brought to England from merry France, a
representation of the legend of Venus and Mars, he said that it was
"form'd into a connected presentation of Dances in Character, wherein
the Passions were so happily expressed, and the whole Story so
intelligibly told, by a mute Narration of Gesture only, that even
thinking Spectators allow'd it both a pleasing and rational
Entertainment." It was this "pleasing and rational Entertainment" which
developed into the great English pantomime, which popular custom (always
fond of tradition and ritual) honored by association with the mighty
festival of Christmas.

And the English pantomime's greater descendant is to be seen on many a
modern film. Still the vivacious lover flees from the comic policemen
and the irate father, still Columbine is fair, although she bears a less
beautiful name and has changed her airy spangled draperies for a modern
garb.

Why has no enterprising producer given us a real old English pantomime
in the films, with all the conventional characters? What a Columbine
Mary Pickford would make! And how excellently would Charles Chaplin's
deft stumble suit Harlequin! There could be transformation scenes that
would delight the genial ghosts of Lamb and Thackeray. But who would be
clown--now that John Bunny is dead?

The written word sometimes loses its power to bring laughter as the
years roll by. Topical allusions, phrases, and sentiments that amuse us
will bring no mirth to the hearts of our grandchildren. But there are
certain things that are elementally funny, that make all people laugh
who have any laughter in their souls. And one of these things is the
face of John Bunny.

THE DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS

Of course, people still ride on the elevated railways. But not the
people who used to be taken over by their mothers from Jersey City on
the Cortlandt Street Ferry about once every month, and then up Sixth
Avenue by the elevated en route for the shops. These people now know the
swift and monotonous tube train instead of the rakish ferryboat, the
dull subway instead of the stimulating elevated railway. And even if
they knelt upon the seats of the subway car, their rubbers projecting
into the aisles and their faces pressed against the windows, they would
see only blank walls and dismal stations instead of other people's
Christmas trees.

These evanescent bits of glory lent special delight to aerial
journeyings for weeks after Christmas. For, in defiance of the Twelfth
Night convention, certain citizens were wont to keep their Christmas
trees in place until February. And, in the opinion of the tenants of the
third stories of the tenements (apartment houses is the more courteous
word) which bordered the elevated, the place of the Christmas tree was
close up against the front window, where all the world could enjoy its
green and gold and red.

Like nearly all genuine vulgar customs (vulgar is used in its most
honorable sense) this habit of showing the public the home's chief
splendor was (or is, for undoubtedly firs dressed for holiday still
brighten some lower Sixth Avenue windows) based on generous courtesy. It
was not possible for Mr. Tenement to keep open flat, so to speak, at
Christmas time; to summon all Sixth Avenue in to partake of a bowl of
wassail that steamed upon his gas range. But he performed all the
hospitality that his ungentle residence allowed; he placed his bit of
greenwood with its cardboard angel, its red paper bells, and its strings
of tinsel, where it would give to the greatest possible number the same
delight that it gave to its owner.

It is, you observe, in your own psychological way, the Rogers Group
principle. Your grandmother put "Going for the Cows," you remember, on
the marble top of the walnut table by the window in the front parlor.
The Nottingham lace curtains were parted just above the head of the boy
who was urging the dog after the woodchuck. And everybody who went up
or down Maple Avenue got a good view of that masterpiece of realism.
Therein your grandmother showed truer courtesy than did you when you put
Rodin's "Le Baiser" in that niche above the second landing of your
stairway.

The same quality of almost quixotic generosity is suggested by the
composition of the old-fashioned holly wreaths, which, hung in the
windows, showed to passers-by lustrous green leaves and scarlet berries,
and to those who hung them only a circle of pale stems and wire. Even
the lithographers maintain this courteous tradition; they stamp their
cardboard holly wreaths on only one side. And this is the side which is
to face the street.

Well, these fenestral firs and hollies exist, and they are among the
numerous joys of the days that follow Christmas. These post-Christmas
days shine with a light softer, but perhaps more comfortable, than that
of the great feast itself.

Particularly is this true of the first day after Christmas--especially
when that day is Sunday. In England, of course, as in the time of the
late Samuel Pickwick, Esq., who brought about the renascence of
Christmas, this is called Boxing Day, not because it is the occasion of
fistic encounters, but because it is the time appointed for the
distribution of those more or less spontaneous expressions of good will
which are called Christmas boxes. Its more orthodox title is Saint
Stephen's Day; it is, you know, the day on which the illustrious King
Wenceslaus, with the assistance of his page, did his noble almoning.
Says the old carol:

Good King Wenceslaus looked out
On the feast of Stephen,
When the snow lay round about,
Deep, and crisp, and even;
Brightly shone the moon that night,
Though the frost was cruel;
When a poor man came in sight,
Gathering winter fuel.

"Hither, page, and stand by me,
See thou dost it telling
Yonder peasant, who is he,
Where and what his dwelling?"
"Sire, he lives a good league hence,
Underneath the mountain,
Over by the forest fence,
By Saint Agnes fountain."

"Bring me flesh and bring me wine,
Bring me pine logs hither;
Thou and I will see him dine,
When we bear them thither."
Page and monarch forth they went,
Forth they went together
Through the night wind's wild lament
And the wintry weather.

We are not old English Kings, so instead of having our page bring flesh
and wine to the poor man on Saint Stephen's Day, we give a dollar to the
youth from the still vexed Bermuthes who chaperons the elevator in our
apartment house, and for weeks before Christmas we affix to the flaps of
the envelopes containing our letters little stamps bearing libelous
caricatures of Saint Nicholas of Bari. Theoretically this last process
provides a modicum of Christmas cheer for certain carefully selected and
organized poor people.

However this may be, the fact remains that the day after Christmas is a
very good day, indeed. The excitement of giving and receiving has passed
away; there remains the quieter joy of contemplation. And since this
year the day after Christmas is Sunday, this contemplation will not be
disturbed by the arrival of the postman, who, a relentless bill-bringer,
is, like the Greeks, to be feared even when bearing gifts.

And, in spite of the remarks of every humorist who ever borrowed from
his mother-in-law two cents to put on an envelope which should carry a
joke about her to an editor, this post-Christmas meditation nearly
always is pleasant. It is assisted by the consumption of wife-bestowed
cigars, which (again despite the humorists!) are better than those a man
buys for himself. It is a pleasant meditation, for its subjects are
things given and things received, good deeds done and good deeds
experienced.

It also contains, this day-after-Christmas feeling, a quality of
reconciliation. Not of reconciliation with ancient enemies--this was all
orthodoxly attended to on Christmas Eve--but of reconciliation with
affairs, of readjustment.

On Christmas Day there may have been some slight disappointment, some
fly in the ointment, or, worse still, in the punch. Forgetting for a
moment that you were just now pictured smoking cigars presented to you
by your wife, let us consider you to be, as you probably are, a young
woman of some eighteen Summers and perhaps an equal number of Winters.
It is the day after Christmas; it is (although you are unaware of the
fact) Saint Stephen's Day. Yesterday, although you endeavored to conceal
the fact, only revealing it in the unnecessary viciousness with which
you scrubbed the remains of a red and white striped candy basket from
the countenance of your infant brother--yesterday, I repeat, you were
annoyed. And the cause of your annoyance was that you received from the
amorous Theophilus a paltry dozen, instead of twenty-four or thirty-six,
American Beauties. Now, however, during your post-Christmas meditation,
your annoyance is swept away by the refreshing thought that Theophilus
will now have twelve or twenty-four dollars more to invest in that
extraordinary solitaire diamond ring with which he purposes to decorate
your not too reluctant hand as soon as people begin to see through your
bluff of not being engaged. This thought cheers you considerably, and
you dreamily give the aforesaid infant brother permission to consume a
barley sugar elephant, which makes him very unwell.

Or, let us, on the other hand, suppose that you, who are now reading
this inquiry into the theory of motives and ideas, are that infant
brother himself. Your age, we will say, is three, and you are, we regret
to say, somewhat sticky. Nevertheless, your frame of mind is, on the
whole, more satisfactory than it was yesterday. You had in all
confidence requested Santa Claus to bring you a large live baboon.
Instead, he brought you a small tin monkey on a stick.

This was a genuine disappointment, as poignantly felt as will be any
more obvious tragedy of your adult years. But, like all sorrows of
childhood, it had the blessed quality of brevity. Now, on the day after
Christmas, you contemplate with favor your tin monkey. One of his legs
is broken, but he has come off his stick, and is therefore the more
agreeable companion. Your father's apology for Santa Claus--to the
effect that the baboon of your desire would have walked off with your
stockings if he had been placed in them--seems reasonable. And there is
manna for your soul in the thought that your father will take you to the
Bronx Zoo this afternoon, and that you then can show your tin monkey to
the baboon that lives there.

This peaceful meditation is one of the most delightfully comfortable
features of the day after Christmas. This day has not the concentrated
excitement of Christmas. It is, I think, the most restful day in the
year. It is not marked, like January 2, with the shock of receiving
bills and the strain of keeping new resolutions. It is a delightfully
lazy day, a sort of sublimated Sunday afternoon.

And one conclusion which you should draw from your St. Stephen's Day
meditation is that the nobility of Christmas traditions and customs is
proved by their surviving the most unfavorable, even absurd, conditions
of life. It was not difficult for the Puritans to destroy the Maypole;
its gay garlands never rose from the dust into which their iron heels
trod them. But the Christmas tree--which even more than the Maypole was
an idolatrous abomination to those of our forefathers who turned "the
sword of the Lord and of Gideon" against the primitive red citizens of
New England--the Christmas tree blooms with new splendor every year. It
is set up even in the conventicle and New Salems which the Pilgrims
established, and as its green branches glow with their precious freight
of scarlet and gold, around it dance--tango, in fact--the descendants of
John Alden and Priscilla Mullens.

But the Christmas tree and its attendant glories have survived an
assault sterner than that of the Puritans. They are healthily surviving
modern metropolitan conditions--the deadly foe of many gracious things.
And the mere fact of survival is itself beautiful. It is very fine, of
course, for Santa Claus to clamber down the broad chimney of a great
farmhouse. But it is really noble of him to penetrate the mysterious
smokestacks of a New York building, and, making some subtle use, I
suppose, of the steam radiator, to visit every apartment which has its
complement of childhood. It is admirable for a country child to believe
in Santa Claus; but how much more admirable is the faith of the city
child, the faith which stands the shock of the imitation Santa Clauses
who strut about the department stores and beg at every corner!

These things, I said, are natural fruits of after-Christmas meditations.
And the Christmas tree remains--although the gifts that surrounded it
have been taken away, it is a pleasanter sight than it was yesterday,
because it is already a beautiful old friend, a friend to whom we are
grateful. It does not look ridiculous because its great day is gone, as,
for example, a fire-cracker looks ridiculous on July 5. For Christmas is
more than a day, it is a season, of which December 25 is only the
commencement. And as the Christmas tree seems pleasanter and more
friendly when some of its needles have formed little green aromatic
heaps on the carpet, and when the china angel and two or three of the
red glass balls have been taken down for the baby to play with--so does
the Christmas season seem pleasanter and more friendly when its first
great feast and pageant has come to its joyous close and become a part
of time's rich treasury of golden days.

FUGITIVE PIECES

THE ASHMAN

PEOPLE

AN ASHMAN.
A POLICEMAN.
A LITTLE GIRL IN GREEN.

SCENE: _A city alley. The ASHMAN is fastening a nosebag on his horse,
which is harnessed to a wagon half-filled with ashes. A POLICEMAN is
watching him._

TIME: _Noon._

POLICEMAN

What do you feed him? Ashes?

ASHMAN

No, I don't!
I feed him Harps. Come over here, you boob,
And let him bite your face, he's hungry!

POLICEMAN

Aw!
You're nothing but a Harp yourself, you poor
Old God-forsaken ashman; Or a wop,
Or some fool kind of foreigner.

ASHMAN

O Hell!
You make me sick, you big fat pie-faced mutt!
Get out, you spoil my horse's appetite!

POLICEMAN

I'd hate to be your horse, but then I guess
I'd rather be your horse than you. (_Exit._)

(_A LITTLE GIRL IN GREEN appears from behind the wagon._)

LITTLE GIRL

Hello!

ASHMAN

Hello there, kiddo! Where did _you_ come from?

(_Climbs to his seat on the wagon, takes out a tin pail, and begins to
eat his lunch._)

LITTLE GIRL

I think I'd like some bread and butter, please!

ASHMAN

All right, old girl, just take a bite of that.

(_Tosses his half loaf down to her._)

LITTLE GIRL

There isn't any butter on it.

ASHMAN

No.
I haven't got no butter. But it's good,
It's first-rate bread, all right.

LITTLE GIRL (_tossing back the loaf, from which she
has taken a bite_)

Thanks very much! Thanks, Captain Thunder!

ASHMAN

Huh?
You're a queer kid, all right, and hungry, too,
To eat dry bread. (_Eats some of the bread._) Why damn my eyes!
God's wounds!
Here's scurvy provender. (_Throws the bread down._) And scurvy mirth!
What, Kate! Dear Kate o' the Green, well met, well met.
Slip up and sit beside me, lass! It's not
The first time you have been upon this seat.

LITTLE GIRL (_climbing up beside him_)

No, Captain, I should know the Royal Mail,
But when did you take up the coaching trade?
I had as soon expect to see old Dick
Throw leg across your Monmouth's gleaming back,
Thrust pistols in his belt, and gallop off
To make his fortune in the light o' the moon,
As to find you, the Master of the Heath,
The Devil's Treasurer, the Velvet Mask,
The Silver Pistoleer, the Winged Thief,
Sitting with down-cast Sabbath-keeping eyes,
Sad lips, and nose all fixed for droning psalms,
In old Dick's place upon the Royal Mail.
A proper driver for a coach and four!

ASHMAN

Ha' done! God's mercy on us! Let me speak,
And I will tell you such a waggery
Will make you laugh and split your pretty sides:
I stole the Royal Mail!

LITTLE GIRL

You stole the Mail?

ASHMAN

Aye, prigged it, Kate! Why, here it is, you see,
Box, boot and wheels, four horses and a whip,
And on the door King George's coat of arms.
All mine, good lass, all mine. But for a price,
A bitter price, dear Kate. For Monmouth's dead!

LITTLE GIRL

What, Monmouth, best of horses, is he dead?
O Captain Thunder, never tell me that!
Why, all the world holds not another horse
So glossy black, so fleet, so wise, so kind!

ASHMAN

Yes, Monmouth's dead. Dick shot him through the heart,
And Monmouth dropped without a whinny. But
I paid Dick back. O Monmouth is avenged!
Now, hear me, Kate! I stopped the Royal Mail
Last night at twelve o'clock at Carter's Cross,
Says I, "Stand now! And let me have the bags--
That's all I want to-night! Hand over, there!"
Dick pulls his leaders on their haunches. "Why,"
Says he, "it's Captain Thunder! By my wig!
Just help yourself!" I prigged his pistol belt
And rode around to look inside the coach.
I got the bags. The passengers were three.
My Lord of Bath and Wells--

LITTLE GIRL

A Bishop, what?

ASHMAN

Aye, that he is; white wig and bands and all.
Yes, he's a Bishop. And there was his wife,
(A big fat monster of a wife) and then
There was a little wizened-looking thing,
A sort of curate. Well, I looked at them
And laughed to see them tremble in their shoes.
"Good e'en, my Lord," says I, and doffed my hat.
"How do you like the Royal Mail?" Says he:
"O good Sir Highwayman, pray let me go,
Our coach broke down at York, and so we took
This public carrier, this dreadful thing,
This Royal Mail. O will you let us pass?
I must get into Hull by dawn, and sleep,
For I confirm an hundred souls at noon."
I listened to him, Kate, and did not see
The old fox slip a pistol up to Dick.
But, bang! Hell's fury! Down fell Monmouth, dead.
And off I stumbled in the ditch! Well, Kate,
Dick aimed for me, you see, and got the horse.
And I got Dick. I got him through the head.
And then I joined the Bishop once again.
"Come out, my Lord, and strip!" says I. "What, strip?"
Says he, and let his jaw fall on his chest.
"Yes, strip!" says I, and pulls his great-coat off:
"Yes, strip!" says I, and throws his wig away:
"Yes, strip!" says I, and pulls his breeches off:
And there he stands and shivers, pink and fat.
"Now, Madame Bishopess," says I, "pray do
Poor Captain Thunder so much courtesy
As to ride by him on the way to town."
She screamed and fought. I took her in my arms
And heaved her up into the seat. "Now strip!"
I shouted to the curate. "Yes," says he,
"I'll strip," and strip he did. "Inside!" says I;
They stumbled headlong in, I cracked my whip
And, whoop! the Mail went rumbling on to Hull!
Well, just at dawn we passed the Southern Gate;
We galloped down the street and made a halt
Beside the Close. "Here's the Cathedral, dame!"
Says I, and helped the lady to the ground.
"Unbar the door, and help his Lordship out
And don't forget the curate!" How I laughed
To see the Bishop and the curate run
Stark naked, screaming, to the Chapter House!
Well, I was off at once and out of Hull
And never stopped to breathe the nags till now.

LITTLE GIRL

But, Captain Thunder! Captain! Are you mad?
They'll have the country after you! Be quick!
You can't make cover in a coach and four
As on a horse!

ASHMAN

Nay, Kate, rest easy now.
Red Will is out, and Davy Doublesword,
And Hieland Jock, and Dan the Drum and Ned,
And twenty gallant gentlemen beside.
And they have sworn to keep the roadway clear
By setting all the lobsters such a chase
Will scatter them till night. And Ned will blow
His bugle when the way is safe. Then, whoop!
I'll rattle off again and fill the coach
With gentlemen of fortune, comrades true,
And own the road from here to London town.

(_A horn is heard and a cry of "Fish, fish, fish, fine fresh fish!"_)

LITTLE GIRL

Down, Captain, loose the horses! There's the call!

(_The ASHMAN gets down, takes off the horse's
nosebag and unhitches the horse from the post._)

ASHMAN (_getting back on his seat_)

Now, Kate, we'll gallop off to Arcady.

POLICEMAN (_suddenly entering_)

Hello there, Ashes, who you talking to?

ASHMAN

Kate of the Greenwood.

POLICEMAN

Kate? You poor old boob!
You're crazy in the head. There's no one there!

ASHMAN (_driving off_)

Make way there, constable. (_Cracks his whip and sings._)
Come all ye jolly rovers
As wants to hear a tale
Will make your hearts as merry
As a bellyful of ale.

I'll sing of Captain Thunder,
And his dashing slashing way,
How he kissed the queen and he cuffed the king,
And threw the crown away!

(_Exit_)

POLICEMAN

Well, I'll be damned!

THE BEAR THAT WALKS LIKE A MAN

It would be a relief to meet a man who would tell honestly why he likes
Artzibashev and some of the rest of the modern Russian realists. It
would be a relief to have some young radical say: "Yes, I know Chekhov
is dull and prolix, but then the atmosphere of his work is delightfully
unwholesome, and every now and then there is something pleasantly
morbid, like the man with phosphorous poisoning in 'The Steppe,' and his
agreeable custom of eating live fish. And then there's dear Michael
Artzibashev. Of course his style is no better than that of Laura Jean
Libbey, and his plots are cheap melodrama, but you can't deny that he is
consistently nasty. And I do like to read about sexual depravity."

But the young radical of this sort is hard to meet. Instead we find the
lofty-foreheaded young man who praises Artzibashev's psychological
insight, Gorky's sympathy with humanity, and--actually!--Chekhov's
humor! Of course he does not mean what he says. He likes "Sanine" for
the same reason that he likes "Three Weeks." But he would not dare to
confess a liking for "Three Weeks" because that book is English trash.
And "Sanine" is Russian trash. And from the point of view of
intellectual snobbery, there's all the difference in the world between
these two sorts of trash.

Now, it would of course be absurd to condemn all modern Russian fiction,
or to characterize all admirers of contemporary Russian novelists as
hypocrites and sensualists. Americans and Englishmen who know almost by
heart the great poems and stories of Pushkin, who know Lermontov as they
know Byron, and Gogol as they know Dickens, who were brought up on the
novels of Turgenieff, have every right in the world to seek for new
delight among the outpourings of the presses of Petrograd and Moscow.
But the sort of person who is feverishly enthusiastic over Gorky and
Artzibashev has discovered Russian literature, in all probability,
during the few years which have passed since his graduation from
Harvard. His most serious offense is not that he prefers that which is
evil to that which is good, and praises untrue and inartistic work
because the worst part of his nature responds to its salacious appeal.
His most serious offense is that he thinks that the Hall Caines and
Marie Corellis of Russia really are representative writers, and that he
insults a race of great romanticists and great realists by calling works
that are thoroughly morbid and vile "very Russian."

What is the remedy for this unfortunate condition? The ideal course to
pursue would be, of course, to spank the serious-minded young men who
think that the Russian novel is a cross between Nijinsky's dancing and a
pogrom. They should be sentenced to a year in solitary confinement,
during which they should be obliged to read daily a very thoroughly
expurgated edition of all Artzibashev's works. This would convince them
that it was not Artzibashev's "power of psychological analysis" that
attracted them, and they would return to the world sadder and more
honest men.

But this most desirable course has not the virtue of practicality.
Perhaps some of the more or less recent activities of American
publishers will so educate the public that they will no longer be
impressed by critics whose acquaintance with Russian literature is
confined to "Sanine" and some of Gorky's plays. Not long ago was
published Stephen Graham's admirable translation of Gogol's "Dead
Souls," a novel which in its rich humor and sympathetic realism
suggests "Pickwick Papers," while its whimsical romanticism brings to
mind some parts of "Don Quixote." It is one of the world's classics; no
one who has not read it has a right to an opinion on Russian literature.
About the same time appeared Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyitch," a
book of short stories by the great novelist, half genius and half
mountebank, who wasted his genuine talent in developing a new religion,
which is merely a grotesque parody of Christianity. The stories in this
book are compelling, in spite of their somewhat mad philosophy, for they
faithfully reflect Russian manners and certain picturesque phases of
Russian idealism. Another volume issued at about this period is Maurice
Baring's "Russian Literature," the best one-volume work on the subject
in existence. And it is to be hoped that other publishers will publish
those Russian novels which really belong to literature, rather than
those which are of interest chiefly to the pathologist and alienist.

But meanwhile the market is flooded with viciously sensational works
which are tolerated only because their exotic quality gives them a
certain distinction in the eyes of the provincial. Here, for example, is
Maxim Gorky's "Submerged." Mr. Jerome's "The Passing of the Third Floor
Back," and Charles Rand Kennedy's "The Servant in the House" were
sentimental, but on the whole, effective treatments of a very dangerous
theme: that of the miraculous reformation of certain phases of modern
society or groups of individuals through the appearance on earth of a
man possessing Divine attributes. Gorky's plan has a similar plot, but,
of course, he differs from the two English writers in making vice
triumph in the end. The poor wretches who have endeavored to regain a
little of their lost decency are thrust back into the slime. The people
who make up this typical Gorky offering are drunkards, thieves, depraved
creatures of every kind. They are utterly lost and the author seems to
gloat over their depravity and misery. But then what else is he to do?
He must live up to his name. Gorky, you know, is a pen name meaning
"bitter," and Alexei Maximovitch Pyeshkov feels that he must justify the
title he has so proudly assumed. But ridiculous affectation it is! It is
as if Matthew Arnold had called himself "Matthew Sweetness and Light."

And there is a translation of Leonidas Andreiev, "The Red Laugh." This
was an attempt to flash upon the astonished world the novel idea that
war is a very, very unpleasant thing. Mr. Andreiev spills gore on every
page, and the publisher assists him by making the title of the book
blood red on a black ground. All the characters in the book go mad, and
the author's utter inaptitude for literature turns what might have been
passable third-rate melodrama into a farce. As a contribution to
letters, and as a piece of pacifist propaganda "The Red Laugh" is
inferior to "I Didn't Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier."

And then there is Artzibashev: so much boomed and press-agented; praised
by the radical magazines for his "assault on ordinary morality" and his
"desperately poignant artistry"; long-haired young men with large eyes
have told the women's clubs all about him. Well, of course, "desperately
poignant artistry" means nothing at all, and "artistry" is meaningless
when used in connection with a man like the author of "The Millionaire."
He doesn't write novels, he merely throws something evil-smelling into
the reader's face.

If the scene of "The Millionaire" and "Nina" were laid in the United
States, these stories would never have been printed. They are without
literary merit; they are the crudest melodrama, but their grossness
makes them appeal to the prurient, and their foreign origin charms the
literary snob. To say that they reflect Russian life is to insult Russia
grievously. They do reflect, it is true, the basest part of Russian
life, the part which no friend of Russia or of literature can wish
reflected. They reflect the gross and hideous bestiality of the Russian
criminal class, they reflect the life of people who have added to their
native savagery the vices of civilization. They call to mind a picture
of the Russian people as something at once bestial and human, a
monstrosity, a nightmare: perhaps the thing that Kipling had in mind
when he wrote of the bear that walks like a man.

ABSINTHE AT THE CHESHIRE CHEESE

Belonging rather to gossip than to literary history, the following
anecdote is nevertheless significant when considered merely as an
illustrative legend. A certain London publisher, it is said, recently
had in his possession a notebook that had been found, after his death,
among the effects of Lionel Johnson. The poet had scribbled in it
memoranda of all sorts: notes for essays, stray epigrams, rough drafts
of poems. He had also copied into it, from books and magazines, bits of
prose and verse that gave him pleasure. Well, one day this friend said
to Johnson's loyal friend, Miss Louise Imogen Guiney--and, by the way,
Miss Guiney is not my authority for this story--"Do you know, I have
found in this notebook an unpublished poem by Lionel Johnson! It is very
beautiful, far better than any of Johnson's published poems. I'll read
it to you." Thereupon he opened the notebook and began to declaim:

Last night, ah, yesternight, between her lips and mine
There fell thy shadow, Cynara!

Of course Lionel Johnson, like every other lover of good poetry, had
felt the charm of Ernest Dowson's now famous poem which is headed by the
phrase, "Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae," and had hastily
copied it in his notebook, perhaps from Dowson's manuscript at some
meeting of the Rhymers' Club. The point of this story is that the
publisher, knowing Johnson chiefly as a celebrant of the Catholic faith,
attributed to him not one of Dowson's poems about nuns, or Extreme
Unction, or the Blessed Sacrament, but a lyric which at least in
tradition and phrasing is obviously pagan.

Out of the mouths of babes and publishers! That wise and sympathetic
critic, Miss Katherine Bregy, has justly praised the lovely poetry which
resulted from Ernest Dowson's return to the faith of his ancestors. She
has demonstrated, for all time, the genuineness of his Catholicism, and
made Mr. Victor Plarr's recent sneer at his dead friend's conversion
seem the most futile thing in his entertaining but ineffective book. It
would be absurd for me to attempt to add to Miss Bregy's interpretative
appreciations of the "sculptural beauty" of Dowson's religious poems.
But, like the simple-minded publisher previously mentioned, I find
indications, if not of piety, at least of normality, sanity,
wholesomeness, virtue, in nearly every poem which this so-called
"decadent" wrote.

There are, and there have always been since sin first came into the
world, genuine "decadents." That is, there have been writers who have
devoted all their energies and talents to the cause of evil, who have
consistently and sincerely opposed Christian morality, and zealously
endeavored to make the worse appear the better cause. But every poet who
lays a lyric wreath at a heathen shrine, who sings the delights of
immorality, or hashish, or suicide, or mayhem, is not a decadent: often
he is merely weak-minded. The true decadent, to paraphrase a famous
saying, wears his vices lightly, like a flower. He really succeeds in
making vice seem picturesque and amusing and even attractive.

Now, this is exactly what Ernest Dowson never could do. He was a member,
it will be remembered, of that little band of "esthetic" poets which was
called the Rhymers' Club. With them he spent certain evenings at the
Cheshire Cheese and there he drank absinthe. This is a significant and
symbolic fact. Not in some ominous Parisian cellar, but beneath the
beamed ceiling of a most British inn, still stained with smoke from the
pipe of Dr. Samuel Johnson, among thick mutton chops and tankards of
musty ale, in a cloud of sweet-scented steam that rose from the parted
crust of the magnificent pigeon-pie, Ernest Dowson drank absinthe.

Of course it is true--more's the pity!--that in the melancholy years
just before his death he drank absinthe in places where it is terribly
fitting to drink absinthe. But this does not destroy the splendid
symbolism of his act of drinking absinthe in the Cheshire Cheese. The
wickedness in his poems and in his prose-sketches are always as affected
and incongruous as is that pallid medicine in any honest tavern.

He tried hard to be pagan. In the manner of Mr. Swinburne, he exclaimed:
"Goddess the laughter-loving, Aphrodite, befriend! Let me have peace of
thee, truce of thee, golden one, send!" And not even Mr. Swinburne ever
wrote lines so absolutely unconvincing. He said, "I go where the wind
blows, Chloe, and am not sorry at all." And from this lyric no one can
fail to get the impression that the poet was very sorry indeed. He
imitated, even less successfully than Oscar Wilde, the unpleasant prose
poems of Baudelaire, and he made the very worst of all English versions
of Paul Verlaine's "Colloque Sentimental."

When Dowson took hashish during his student days, Mr. Arthur Symons
tells us, it was before a large and festive company of friends. I do not
think that he convinced them that he was that supposedly romantic
character, an habitual user of the drug. The hashish, so to speak, in
his poems is similarly incongruous and unconvincing. He was an
accomplished artist in words, a delicate, sensitive and graceful genius,
but he was no more fitted to be a pagan than to be a policeman. And so,
in his best-known poem, he uses all the pagan properties, all the
splendors of sin's pageantry, but his theme, his over-mastering
thought--very different from the over-mastering thought of, say, Mr.
Arthur Symons in similar circumstances--is a soul-shaking lament for his
stained faithfulness, for his treason to the Catholic ideal of chastity.

He could not write poems that really were pagan. He was not a true
decadent. And for this undoubtedly he now is thanking God. He had his
foolish hours: he sometimes misused his gift of song. But--and this is
the important thing about it--he did not know how to misuse it
successfully. The real Ernest Dowson was not the picturesque vagabond
about whom Mr. Arthur Symons and Mr. Victor Plarr have written, but the
man who with all his heart praised "meekness and vigilance and
chastity," who "was faithful" in his pathetic, ineffective fashion, but
who knew at least the fidelity of his eternal Mother, who, in Miss
Bregy's beautiful words, "laid his broken body in consecrated ground and
followed this bruised soul with her pitiful, asperging prayers."

JAPANESE LACQUER

What was the matter with Lafcadio Hearn? No American has written prose
more delicate and vividly beautiful than his, nor has any one else--not
even Yone Noguchi--put into English so clear a revelation of Japan's
soul. Yet after an hour with "Kwaidan" or "Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan"
the normal reader is wearied and, instead of being grateful to the
erudite and skillful author, regards him with actual dislike.

Why is this? Is it because Hearn had a morbid fondness for the tragic,
and loved to dwell on mental, physical and spiritual disease? This is
partly the reason, yet De Quincey and Edgar Allan Poe inspire no such
aversion. Is it because Hearn's style is too rich, exquisite and
precious? Walter Pater had the same fault, but Walter Pater is read with
delight by Hearn's enemies. Is it because of Hearn's ridiculous
religious prejudices--his hatred for the Jesuits, for example? No,
Hearn's hatred for the Jesuits is simply a bad little boy's impudence
toward his schoolmaster. He had none of George Borrow's fiery, romantic
passion against the "Man in Black." And Borrow's "Lavengro" and "Romany
Rye" were loved even by so un-Protestant a writer as Lionel Johnson.

No, the reason lies deeper, and is simpler, than any of these. Hearn
failed, not because he was precious, not because he was morbid, not
because he was prejudiced, but because he had no imagination.

Lafcadio Hearn was, in the worst sense of the word, a realist. He had
thoroughly the materialistic attitude toward life; he could see only the
dull outside of things, not the indwelling splendor. An imaginative man
would have delighted in his mixed Greek and Irish blood, would have
realized that as a newspaperman he was a member of the most romantic
profession the world has known, would have seen that New Orleans was no
mean city. But Hearn was so prosaic and matter-of-fact that he saw only
the forms and outlines of the things about him, and so sentimentally
credulous that he believed that Japan contained greater wonders than
Louisiana. Dr. George M. Gould, in his interesting but unpleasant work,
"Concerning Lafcadio Hearn," blames many of his dead friend's faults on
his defective vision. But Hearn's myopia was spiritual as well as
physical: he could not see the soul.

What terrible results came from this spiritual myopia! Of course, its
worst result was the unspeakable tragedy of Hearn's rejection of
Christianity for that cruel burlesque on religion called Buddhism. But
the minor results were many and dreadful ... chief among them was the
loss to the world of a great writer.

Lafcadio Hearn might have been a great writer. If proof of this were
needed, it would be found in a posthumously published book of singular
interest--"Fantastics and Other Fancies." This is a collection of
Hearn's earliest writings, resurrected from the brittle yellow pages of
old New Orleans newspapers by Charles Woodward Hutson.

The brief essays in this book are as charmingly phrased as anything this
master of charming phrases ever wrote, and they are--unlike his later
work--imaginative. That is, they are interpretations and idealizations
of the things naturally familiar to Hearn. He had not yet committed the
artistic heresy of confusing strangeness with beauty. He was not yet
deluded into the belief that romance belongs exclusively to Nippon. He
still was loyal to the traditions of his own civilization.

The literary value of Hearn's work is not to be questioned. No living
writer (not even Algernon Blackwood) has so great and fiery an
imagination as had this quondam reporter of the New Orleans _Daily
Item_; no living writer (except Alice Meynell) understands so thoroughly
the art of putting together a few hundred words so as to form a
structure of enduring loveliness.

It was in 1878 that Lafcadio Hearn, half starved and dressed in rags,
persuaded Colonel John W. Fairfax, owner of the New Orleans _Item_, to
give him work. He was called "assistant editor," but it may be supposed
that the "assistant editor" of this little two-page paper did most of
the reportorial work. What treasures of glowing narrative its news
columns may hold can only be conjectured. But on its editorial page
appeared from time to time for several years brief sketches, some
whimsical, some sombre, all highly imaginative and beautifully phrased.
These, with other writings which Hearn contributed later to the New
Orleans _Times-Democrat_, Dr. Hutson has searched out and brought
together in this volume of real charm and value.

Any trivial incident of his daily round, any quaint bit of history or
legend that he came upon in his amazingly extensive reading, would
furnish this strangest of newspaper men with a theme. He saw in some
antique shop a faun and dryad pictured in enamel on a little golden
case, and, sitting at his littered, ink-stained desk in his noisy
office, he wrote the exquisite "Idyl of a French Snuffbox." Riding to
work in a clanging street car, he found on its floor a Japanese fan of
paper, and wrote of its unknown owner with a gay fervor surprising in
such an amateur of grief. Mark Twain came to New Orleans, and the result
was that masterpiece of vivid and sympathetic description, "A River
Reverie."

He was not always absolutely original, this obscure hack whose genius
was one day to surprise and delight the world. Subconsciously, he
remembered his spiritual brother, Edgar Allan Poe, when he wrote those
tales of the grotesque and arabesque, "The Black Cupid" and "The One
Pill Box." Also there are echoes of Coleridge, and of those Parnassian
Frenchmen whose methods and ideals Hearn always shared.

But no Frenchman of his time could match the tender humor of "The Post
Office," nor were Poe and Coleridge standing at his elbow when he wrote
"Hiouen-Thrang." These were written by Lafcadio Hearn himself, by that
strange nomad who called no one race his own, who looked at life with
huge and perilous curiosity, who gave to most un-English thoughts a
splendidly English dress, who just missed being a poet, who just missed
being a mystic, who just missed being happy.

Already, the "Fantastics" show, Hearn was hearing the Orient's alluring
voice. New Orleans, that brave old bright-colored Latin city, struggling
with the aftermath of war and pestilence, was just the place for a man
of his exotic tastes. "I cannot say how fair and rich and beautiful this
dead South is," he wrote. "It has fascinated me." But not the venerable
splendors of New Orleans, not the picturesque shores of Grand Isle,
could take the place of the radiant East, to which he continually
referred, of which clairvoyantly he seemed to know himself already a
citizen.

There are sketches in this extraordinary little book, notably "Les
Coulisses" and "The Undying One," which remind the reader, strangely
enough, of certain prose fancies of another son of Ushaw, Francis
Thompson. A healthier Lafcadio Hearn, with a broader vision and a
tradition more clearly English, might have written "Finis Coronat
Opus." And the thought makes one, perhaps, a little regretful that Hearn
was so sincerely a gypsy, that he was drawn away from the scenes of his
young manhood to a lovely but wholly alien land. Of course, he wrote
beautifully of Japan. But these youthful sketches show that Japan was
not necessary to his artistic expression. And to take on that strange
new culture he had to give up some heritages of thought and belief that
he could ill spare, the loss of which, it may be, is the cause of that
melancholy, shading sometimes into despair, which permeates even his
richest and most sympathetic Japanese studies.

Hearn did not ruin himself as a writer by writing about Japan. He ruined
himself by trying to be a Japanese. Now, one can write about Japan
without being a Japanese, just as one can write about hell without being
damned. But Hearn was not sufficiently imaginative to perceive this.

So he gave up European civilization for that of Japan. His Irish
father's faith held all that was noble of his Greek mother's pagan
tradition, but Hearn chose the novelties of Buddhism. He went to Japan:
he devoted the gifts that God had given him, and the technical skill
that the Jesuits had taught him, to the celebration of anti-Christian
legends and ceremonials. But cherry-blossoms bloom only for a
season--unlike Sharon's rose. And the tragic letters published after
Hearn's death show that this fantastic adventurer learned at last that
he had forsaken the splendid adventure first appointed for him. His
bitter revilings of the people and customs of the land he had spent
years in praising show that within Nippon's golden apples, too, are
ashes.

Hearn has been held up by the sentimentalists as a shining example of
humanity's cruelty to great artists. He is instead a shining example of
the minor artist's cruelty to humanity. He was not rejected of men. His
was not "divine discontent," his was the pernicious "desire for new
things." Therefore he became merely the maker of fair and futile
decorations, and he who might have been a poet, a creator, became a
clever wordsmith.

The essays in this little book of Hearn's earliest work show a strange
resemblance to the prose of Francis Thompson. What a contrast the lives
of the two men present! Both were vagabonds, both were physically
handicapped. But Francis Thompson was imaginative enough to be himself,
so he wrote "The Hound of Heaven." And Lafcadio Hearn was so lacking in
imagination as to want to be somebody else--so he wrote "Gleanings in
Buddha Fields."

It is not for a mere journalist to point out the moral significance of
the tragedy of Lafcadio Hearn. But I venture to suggest that the young
American and English poets who are kissing the silken hem of Mr.
Rabindranath Tagore's garment might profitably read Lafcadio Hearn's
later correspondence. Fame and happiness are not always the reward of
him who gives up the Occident for the Orient. Orientalism has its own
truths, its own splendors. But the writers whose words we cherish, whose
names are graven on our hearts, the makers of our literature, did anyone
of these sell his birthright for a mess of--rice?

SAPPHO REDIVIVA

Out of the dust of Egypt comes the voice of Sappho, as clear and sweet
as when she sang in Lesbos by the sea, 600 years before the birth of
Christ. The picks and spades of Arab workmen, directed by Bernard P.
Grenfell and Arthur S. Hunt of the Egypt Exploration Fund, have given
the world a hitherto unknown poem by the greatest woman poet of all
time.

Of course it is not a complete and legible manuscript, this buried
treasure unearthed at sunburnt Oxyrhyncus. It is a little pile of
fragments of papyrus, fifty-six in all. And on one of them is the
tantalizing inscription, "The First Book of the Lyrics of Sappho, 1,332
lines."

To piece these fragments together has been a task more delicate and
arduous than to dig them out of the earth. Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt
succeeded in combining some twenty shreds of papyrus, and thus in
showing the nature of the original manuscript. And the chief product of
their labor and skill was a poem of six stanzas in the form to which
Sappho's name is given, a poem, however, from which two entire lines and
many words were missing.

Then it was that J. M. Edmonds, an eminent Hellenist of Cambridge
University, gave his attention to the matter. He studied the possible
relationship of the words, parsing and analyzing as diligently as any
youth whom only the implacable Homer separates from a strip of parchment
marked with the university's seal and his own name parodied in Latin.

"Anactoria," he saw, was vocative--and that was greatly significant. He
added accents, syllables, words, and finally he supplied--it was pure
guesswork, of course--two entire lines. And the result is undoubtedly a
close approximation of the original lyric, more nearly complete, indeed,
than most of the poems which have made critics call Sappho "the Tenth
Muse."

For Sappho is known only by two brief odes and a few lyric
fragments--"two small brilliants and a handful of star dust," they have
been called. She wrote, it is believed, at least nine books of odes,
together with epithalamia, epigrams, elegies, and monodies.

To account for the disappearance of all this poetry several theories
have been advanced. One, which is largely accepted, is that Sappho's
poems were burned at Byzantium in the year A. D. 380 by command of
Gregory Nazianzen, who desired that his own poems might be studied in
their stead, for the improvement of the morals of his people.

J. M. Edmonds has contributed to an issue of _The Classical Review_ his
amended version of the poem. He gives also the following prose
translation:

The fairest thing in all the world some say is a host of horsemen,
and some a host of foot, and some, again, a navy of ships; but to
me, 'tis my heart's beloved, and 'tis easy to make this understood
by any.

When Helen surveyed much mortal beauty, she chose for the best the
destroyer of all the honor of Troy, and thought not so much either
of child or parent dear, but was led astray by love to bestow her
heart afar; for woman is ever easy to be bent when she thinks
lightly of what is near and dear.

Even so you to-day, my Anactoria, remember not, it seems, when she
is with you one of whom I would rather have the sweet sound of her
footfall and the sight of the brightness of her beaming face than
all the chariots and armored footmen of Lydia.

Know that in this world man cannot have the best; yet to pray for a
share in what was once shared is better than to forget it.

I have roughly rendered the poem into English verse as follows:

Unto some a troop of triumphant horsemen,
Or a radiant fleet, or a marching legion,
Is the fairest sight--but to me the fairest
Is my beloved.

Every lover must understand my wisdom,
For when Helen looked on the whole world's beauty
What she chose as best was a man, her loved one,
Who shamed Troy's honor.

Then her little child was to her as nothing.
Not her mother's tears nor her father's pleading
Moved her. At Love's word, meekly she surrendered
Unto this stranger.

So does woman yield, valuing but little
Things, however fair, that she looks at daily.
So you now, Anactoria, forget her,
Her, who is with you,

Her, to see whose face, fairer than the sunlight,
Her, to hear whose step ringing on the threshold,
I'd forego the sight of the Lydian army,
Bowmen and chariots.

Never in this world is the best our portion,
Yet there is a vague pleasure in remembrance,
And to long for joy that has passed is better
Than to forget it.

No one would venture to criticize Mr. Edmonds's treatment of the Greek
text; his ingenious additions are a distinguished, scholarly
achievement. Nor can any fault be found with his prose translation of
the poem. But to readers of poetry who have not that peculiar
literal-mindedness which characterizes scholars his interpretation of
the translated poem, his explanation of Sappho's meaning, is anything
but satisfactory.

It gives "point" to the piece, he says, if we imagine Anactoria to have
fallen in love with a soldier. Sappho, he explains, clearly is away in
exile. Anactoria and the other woman are living in the same town,
presumably Mitylene. He gives this interpretation of Sappho's supposed
address to Anactoria:

You, who are lucky enough to be with her still, have forgotten, it
seems, a friend whom I would give anything to see again. For you
have fallen in love. And yet it is natural enough; and I cannot
blame you. But O, that I might have the joy you are throwing away! I
know it is no use wishing; but still, past delights are better
missed than forgotten.

Now, it is the scholars that have brought the poets into disrepute. They
insist on interpreting them and in being at once too literal and too
imaginative. Take, for instance, the obvious example of Shakespeare.
Plays and poems written for the entertainment of the world have been
twisted and tortured by erudite commentators who have seen in them
supernatural prophecies, scientific treatises, political tracts,
and--what is in this connection especially important--personal
confessions. Mankind cannot be restrained, it seems, from the attempt to
interpret all poetry as rhymed autobiography.

Why, it is respectfully asked, does it give "point to the piece" to
imagine that Anactoria has fallen in love with a soldier? Why drag in
the soldier? Surely a poet may mention the panoply of war without having
in mind any particular fighting man. The poem is simple and direct; it
may be taken at its face value without the addition of any love affair
other than that which primarily it celebrates.

Mr. Edmonds is, it may be objected, too imaginative when he supplies
Anactoria with a mysterious military lover. He is perhaps too literal
minded in the very essence of his interpretation. Strangely enough, he
seems for the moment to forget that a poet is not compelled always to
speak in propria persona.

Why should we believe that Sappho meant this poem as a personal message
to a friend named Anactoria? Why is it not possible--even probable--that
Sappho meant the poem as the utterance of someone else, of someone who
existed only in her own splendid imagination?

If this were so the case would really not be without precedent. "My
mother bore me in the southern wild; And I am black, but O, my soul is
white," was not (as scholars of A. D. 2,000 may gravely state) the
outcry of a little colored boy, but the work of an elderly English
gentleman. Walter Savage Landor's "Mother, I Cannot Mind My Wheel," was
not a personal expression--Mr. Landor, as his mother was well aware, had
no wheel to mind. Shelley was not the daughter of Earth and Water and
Browning never choked a young woman named Porphyria with her own hair.

No, in spite of the excellent advice that has been given them, poets
refuse to look exclusively into their own hearts and write. They refuse
to be consistently subjective, they insist on voicing the thoughts of
others. Therefore, not all the scholars in Christendom and heathenry
need keep us from regarding Sappho's newly found poem as anything but
what, on the surface, it appears to be, the address of a rejected lover
to a friend or sister of his lady.

If Mr. Edmonds's admirable prose translation be regarded in this
light--which surely is the light of nature--what is there about it to
perplex? That Sappho used the name "Anactoria" in other poems does not
prove that in that shadowy school on Lesbos there was a girl so named.
It is a good rhythmical name, fitting excellently into the middle of a
lesser Sapphic strophe; why should not Sappho use it? Was Pompilia among
Browning's acquaintances, or does E. A. Robinson write letters to
Fleming Helphenstine and Minniver Cheevy?

Even if, because of the ode which Longinus praised and because of other
references, we believe that Sappho really had an Anactoria, among her
friends or pupils, we are under no obligation to believe that this poem
was meant for her. Leigh Hunt--not to speak of Rossetti!--knew many
Jennies, but none of them ever sued him for libel.

Sappho, whom a contemporary called "the flower of the Graces," suffered
first from her enemies and then from her friends. That "small, dark
woman" who wrote immortal lyrics and counted among her disciples such
famous singers as Erinna of Telos and Damophyla of Pamphylia, was, after
her death, grossly calumniated by the ribald writers of Athenian comedy.
Those who believe in the anecdotes of her which fill those scurrilous
but entertaining pages cannot consistently refuse to credit also
Aristophanes's interpretation of the character of Socrates.

If we are to take any of Sappho's poems as genuine personal expressions,
certainly we cannot pass by her ode to her brother Charaxus, in which,
in the most strict, not to say puritanical, fashion she rebukes him for
yielding to the charms of the courtesan Doricha.

Nor can her correspondence with that Alceus, that "fluent poet of
fluctuating moods," as E. B. Osborn calls him, be neglected. Alceus
wrote to her, in an ode of which a fragment is preserved:
"Violet-weaving, pure, sweet-smiling Sappho, I wish to say somewhat, but
shame hinders me." And Sappho answered, primly enough, in another ode:
"Hadst thou desire of aught good or fair, shame would not have touched
thine eyes, but thou wouldst have spoken openly thereof."

The famous story of Sappho's vain pursuit of Phaon, and her death by
leaping into the sea from the Leucadian promontory, were, it may safely
be stated, inventions of the comic poets. Charles G. D. Roberts, in his
introduction to Bliss Carman's exquisite reconstruction of Sappho's
lyrics, suggests that the Phaon story is perhaps merely an echo of the
legend of Aphrodite and Adonis--who is, indeed, called Phaon in some
versions.

But the modern admirers of Sappho have not hesitated to accept as
authentic such stories as that of her love for the mythical Phaon, in
spite of the fact that they originated 200 years after her death. The
Phaon myth, however, Sappho herself might forgive, because of the
literature it has begotten--Ovid's immortal epistle and Addison's
fantasy, to mention only two examples. But it is too doubtful whether
she would appreciate the eloquent but somewhat perfervid hysterical
dithyrambs of the late Algernon Charles Swinburne and his followers. The
"pure sweet-smiling" poet who scolded her naughty brother and snubbed
the ardent Alceus was not:

Love's priestess, mad with pain and joy of song,
Song's priestess, mad with joy and pain of love.

But she was a great poet. If it was not already known, the splendid
strophes recovered at Oxyrhyncus would prove it. E. B. Osborn, writing
in the London _Morning Post_, has called attention to their resemblance
to the Canticle of Canticles, to the way in which, as he says, Love
makes Lesbos and land-locked Sharon provinces in one principality. There
is a close kinship between the ideas expressed in the first and third
stanzas of Sappho's poem and those of these lines:

"I have compared thee, O my love, to a company of horses in Pharaoh's
chariots. (I., 9.)

Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as
the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?" (V., 10.)

Lesbos is on the sea, so the picture of the white-winged ships came
naturally to the mind of Sappho. But the poet of Sharon thought only of
Pharaoh's shining cavalry and of (magic phrase!) an "army with banners."

The world cannot be too grateful to Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt for their
literary mining, and to Mr. Edmonds for his marvelously ingenious work
of reconstruction. We may object to scholars and commentators, we may
regret their interpretations, but in this instance men of this sometimes
irritating class have made the world's literature their debtor. They
have recovered, they have almost recreated, one of the greatest poems of
the greatest poet of the greatest age of lyric poetry. It is already a
classic, this little song, whose liquid Greek syllables echo the music
of undying passion. It is a poem not unworthy of her whom the amazed
world called "the miracle"; of whom in our own time that true poet and
wise critic, the late Theodore Watts-Dunton, wrote:

Never before these songs were sung, and never since did the human
soul, in the grip of a fiery passion, utter a cry like hers, and,
from the executive point of view, in directness, in lucidity, in
that high, imperious verbal economy which only nature can teach the
artist, she has no equal, and none worthy to take the place of
second.

THE POETRY OF GERARD HOPKINS

That Gerard Hopkins is to-day little known, even among rhymers, is an
inevitable result of his manner of life and work. He was a priest of the
Catholic Church and a member of the Society of Jesus. His faith was the
source of his poetry, but his arduous labors in its service left him
little time for celebrating it in verse, and made him so indifferent to
applause that he never published. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch put his "The
Starlight Night" in the "Oxford Book of Victorian Verse," and he is
represented in Orby Shipley's "Carmina Mariana" and H. C. Beeching's
"Lyra Sacra." Several of his poems are included in Volume VIII of "Poets
and Poetry of the Century" with a critique by his friend Robert Bridges,
and Miss Katherine Bregy has made him the subject of an illuminative
essay in her admirable book "The Poet's Chantry." A scant bibliography
indeed for a genuinely inspired poet, the most scrupulous word-artist of
the nineteenth century!

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out like shining from shook foil.

These opening lines of a sonnet illustrate clearly Gerard Hopkins'
spirit and method. Like that other Jesuit, Robert Southwell, he was a
Catholic poet: for him to write a poem on a secular theme was difficult,
almost impossible. He sang "the grandeur of God," and for his song he
used a language which in its curious perfection is exclusively his own.

One may search his writings in vain for a figure that is not novel and
true. He took from his own experience those comparisons that are the
material of poetry, and rejected, it seems, such of them as already bore
marks of use. For him, the grandeur of God flames out from the world not
like light from stars, but like "shining from shook foil." He writes not
of soft hands, nor of velvety hands, but of "feel-of-primrose hands." He
writes not that thrush's eggs are blue as the sky, but that they "look
little low heavens." The starry skies of a winter night are "the dim
woods quick with diamond wells," or "the gray lawns cold where quaking
gold-dew lies." In Spring "the blue is all in a rush with richness," and
Summer "plashes amid the billowy apple-trees his lusty hands."

Now, it may be that these exquisite figures would not entitle their
maker to high praise if they were isolated bits of splendor, if (like
the economical verse-makers of our own day) he had made each one the
excuse for a poem. But they come in bewildering profusion. Gerard
Hopkins' poems are successions of lovely images, each a poem in itself.

This statement may give its reader the idea that of Gerard Hopkins'
poetry may be said, as Charles Ricketts said of Charles Conder's
pictures, "There are too many roses." No one who reads his poems,
however, will make this criticism. The roses are there of right--all of
them. They are, it may be said, necessary roses. They are the cunningly
placed elements of an elaborate pattern, a pattern of which roses are
the appropriate material. And the red and white of their petals come
from the blood and tears that nourished their roots.

It is the overwhelming greatness of this theme that justifies the
lavishness of his method. The word "mystic" is nowadays applied so
wantonly to every gossiper about things supernatural that it is to most
people meaningless. For the benefit of those who know the difference
between Saint Theresa and Miss Evelyn Underhill, however, it may be
stated that Gerard Hopkins was more nearly a true mystic than either
Francis Thompson or Lionel Johnson. The desire, at any rate, for the
mystical union with God is evident in every line he wrote, and even more
than his friend Coventry Patmore he knew the "dark night of the soul."

This being the case, his theme being God and his writing being an act of
adoration, it is profitless to criticize him, as Mr. Robert Bridges has
done, for "sacrificing simplicity" and violating those mysterious
things, the "canons of taste." A sane editor of a popular magazine would
reject everything he wrote. A verse-writer who does not know that "The
Habit of Perfection" is true poetry is not a poet. Here it is:

Elected Silence, sing to me
And beat upon my whorled ear;
Pipe me to pastures still, and be
The music that I care to hear.

Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb:
It is the shut, the curfew sent
From there where all surrenders come
Which only makes you eloquent.

Be shelled, eyes, with double dark,
And find the uncreated light:
This ruck and reel which you remark
Coils, keeps, and teases simple sight.

Palate, the hutch of tasty lust,
Desire not to be rinsed with wine:
The can must be so sweet, the crust
So fresh that come in fasts divine!

Nostrils, your careless breath that spend
Upon the stir and keep of pride,
What relish shall the censers send
Along the sanctuary side!

O feel-of-primrose hands, O feet
That want the yield of plushy sward,
But you shall walk the golden street,
And you unhouse and house the Lord.

And, Poverty, be thou the bride
And now the marriage feast begun,
And lily-colored clothes provide
Your spouse, not labored-at, nor spun.

Walter Pater, Gerard Hopkins' tutor at Balliol, had no keener
sensitivity to the color and music of language. Gerard Hopkins'
purpose--a purpose impossible of fulfillment but not therefore less
worth the effort--was "to arrange words like so many separate gems to
compose a whole expression of thought, in which the force of grammar and
the beauty of rhythm absolutely correspond."

There will always be those who dislike the wealth of imagery which
characterizes Gerard Hopkins' poetry, because they do not understand his
mental and spiritual attitude. Perhaps for some critics an altar cloth
may be too richly embroidered and a chalice too golden. Ointment of
spikenard is "very costly."

PHILOSOPHICAL TENDENCIES IN ENGLISH LITERATURE

Why do people write poems, stories and plays? The obvious and cynical
answer is that people write because they are paid for their writing; the
poet makes a poem for the same reason that the carpenter makes a bench,
and the dramatist has no motive other than that of the bootmaker. There
is some truth in this; if people do not begin to write because they
consider writing a means of livelihood they often continue to write for
that reason. Certainly it is easy to think of contemporary authors of
whom it may safely be said that they have no inspiration save the desire
for money.

But the existence of literature is not thus easily to be explained.
There are so many trades and professions easier and more profitable than
that of letters that he would be a very stupid person indeed who
selected it with nothing to influence him in that direction but the
desire to make money. There is something else beside the perfectly
legitimate desire to make a livelihood in the mind of the writer; there
is something that makes him undergo poverty and other tribulations for
the sake of his craft.

What is this influence? What is it that makes writers write? It is no
one thing. The will to write is related to nearly all the passions,
ambitions and desires of mankind; it is the result of instincts
immemorial and unchanging. There are those who hold a peculiar
inspirational theory about writing, who believe that an author is merely
the instrument used by some creative power. In so far as this theory
coincides with the truth that God is the source of all energy it is, of
course, sound. But those who hold it generally base it on some fantastic
idea of genius as a magic, unknowable power, irresponsibly wandering
through the world and selecting at random the men and women who are to
be through its mysterious spell creative artists. It is a fascinating
theory, but untrue, being supported only by the citation of numerous
particular cases, which cannot in logic establish a general rule.

A careful examination of the nature of genius would here be out of
place. It is sufficient for our purposes to consider genius as
extraordinary talent, and to know that it is by no means the inevitable
companion of the will to write. The great majority of writers, those
who are without skill and those who produce some interesting and even
important work, are without genius. Yet they have the will to write. And
there have been instances of men and women of undoubted genius so lazy
that they seemed absolutely to lack the creative urge present in the
minds of their less gifted brothers and sisters.

There would be writers if there were no such thing as genius just as
there would be writers if it were impossible to make money by writing.
Consider the earliest days when first by means of crude symbols chiseled
on a rock or by means of rough combinations of sounds a man endeavored
to convey to his fellows some message not necessitated by the ordinary
conditions of life--some message important for its own sake alone. What
caused this man to carve, to chant, to express ideas so that they would
be intelligible to his fellows? If we understand the motives for this
man's conduct, if we find out what made him a creative artist, we shall
understand why modern man writes. For the motives, emotions, essential
habits of mankind do not greatly change with the passing of the ages;
the soul of man has the changelessness of immortal things.

Motives are hard to trace and they are usually found in combination. We
cannot be sure that the first writer had only one motive, but we can
imagine many motives, any one of which would have been sufficient to
cause his literary adventure. These may be indicated as the urge to
chronicle, the urge to attract, the urge to worship, and the urge to
create. And all these are related to and possibly included by the need
of self-expression.

Among the simplest and least literary people, events that greatly
disturb the routine of life--wars, famines, pestilences,
earthquakes--seem to develop writers automatically. The great thing has
happened and must have a record safer than man's fickle memory. So
inevitably come the chronicler and his chronicle. The demand creates the
supply. But the desire to ensure remembrance of events is not in itself
sufficient to ensure the existence of literature. There is also what I
have termed the urge to attract. The savage warrior may carve on stone
or paint upon a strip of pale bark a record of his own brave victory or
ingenious escape. This he does to attract the attention and admiration
of his public, such as it is, to his courage and intelligence. And also
the mere making of the record is in itself an achievement certain to
bring to its maker the wonder and esteem of those lacking this strange
power. And this sort of admiration, he finds, comes to him even when the
things about which he writes are not his own doings. So subjective art
comes into existence. Man writes because of the urge

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