"Tell me, ye muses, what hath former ages
Now left succeeding times to play upon,
And what remains unthought on by those sages
Where a new muse may try her pinion?"
So Complained Phineas Fletcher in his Purple Island as long ago as 1633.
Three centuries have brought to the development of lyric passion no
higher form than that of the sonnet cycle. The sonnet has been likened
to an exquisite crystal goblet that holds one sublimely inspired thought
so perfectly that not another drop can be added without overflow. Cast
in the early Italian Renaissance by Dante, Petrarch and Camoens, it was
chased and ornamented during the Elizabethan period by Shakespere, and
filled with its most stimulating draughts of song and love during the
Victorian era by Rossetti, Browning and Meredith. And now, in this first
year of the new century, the historic cup is refilled and tossed off in
a radiant toast to Erato by Wallace Irwin.
The attribute of modernity is not given to every new age. The cogs in
the wheels of time slip back, at times. The classic revival may be
permeated with enthusiasm, but it is a second edition of an old
work--not a virile essay at expression of living thought. The later
Renaissance was but half modern in its spirit; the classic period of the
eighteenth century in England was half ancient in its mood. But the
twentieth century breaks with a new promise of emancipation to English
Literature, for a new influence has freshened the blood of conventional
style that in the decadence of the End of the Century had grown dilute.
This adjuvant strain is found in the enthusiasm of Slang. Slowly its
rhetorical power has won foothold in the language. It has won many a
verb and substantive, it has conquered idiom and diction, and now it is
strong enough to assault the very syntax of our Anglo-Saxon tongue.[*]
[*] Note, for instance, the potential mood used indicatively in the
current colloquial, "Wouldn't that jar you!"
Slang, the illegitimate sister of Poetry, makes with her a common cause
against the utilitarian economy of Prose. They both stand for lavish
luxuriance in trope and involution, for floriation and adornment of
thought. It is their boast to make two words bloom where one grew
before. Both garb themselves in Metaphor, and the only complaint of the
captious can be that whereas Poetry follows the accepted style, Slang
dresses her thought to suit herself in fantastic and bizarre caprices,
that her whims are unstable and too often in bad taste.
But this odium given to Slang by superficial minds is undeserved. In
other days, before the language was crystallized into the idiom and
verbiage of the doctrinaire, prose, too, was untrammeled. Indeed, a
cursory glance at the Elizabethan poets discloses a kinship with the
rebellious fancies of our modern colloquial talk. Mr. Irwin's sonnets
may be taken as an indication of this revolt, and how nearly they
approach the incisive phrases of the seventeenth century may easily be
shown in a few exemplars. For instance, in Sonnet XX, "You're the real
tan bark!" we have a close parallel in Johnson's Volpone, or The Fox:
"Fellows of outside and mere bark!"
And this instance is an equally good illustration also of that curious
process which, in the English language, has in time created for a single
word ("cleave," for instance) two exactly opposite meanings. A line from
John Webster's Appius and Virginia might be cited as showing how near
his diction approached modern slang:
"My most neat and cunning orator, whose tongue is quicksilver;"
and, for an analogy similar, though elaborate, compare lines 5-8 in
Sonnet XI. In Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster,
"A pernicious petticoat prince"
is as close to "Mame's dress-suit belle" of No. VII as modern costume
allows, and
"No, you scarab!"
from Ben Jonson's Alchemist gives a curious clue to the derivation of
the popular term "scab" found in No. VI. Webster's forcible picture in
The White Devil--
"Fate is a spaniel; we cannot beat it from us!"
finds a rival in Mr. Irwin's strong simile--"O Fate, thou art a
lobster!" in No. IV. And, to conclude, since such similarities might be
quoted without end, note this exclamation from Beaumont and Fletcher's
Woman's Prize, written before the name of the insect had achieved the
infamy now fastened upon it by the British Matron:
"These are bug's words!"
Not only does this evidently point out the origin of "Jim-jam bugs" in
No. IX, and the better known modern synonym for brain, "bug-house," but
it indicates the arbitrary tendency of all language to create gradations
of caste in parts of speech. It is to this mysterious influence by which
some words become "elegant" or "poetic," and others "coarse" or
"unrefined," that we owe the contempt in which slang is held by the
superficial Philistine.
In Mr. Irwin's sonnet cycle, however, we have slang idealized, or as
perhaps one might better say, sublimated. Evolution in the argot of the
streets works by a process of substitution. A phrase of two terms goes
through a system of permutation before it is discarded or adopted into
authorized metaphor. "To take the cake," for instance, a figure from the
cake-walk of the negroes, becomes to "capture" or "corral" the "bun" or
"biscuit." Nor is this all, for in the higher forms of slang the idea is
paraphrased in the most elaborate verbiage, an involution so intricate
that, without a knowledge of the intervening steps, the meaning is often
almost wholly lost. Specimens of this cryptology are found in many of
Mr. Irwin's sonnets, notably in No. V:
"My syncopated con-talk no avail."
We trace these synonyms through "rag-time," etc., to an almost
subliminal thought--an adjective resembling "verisimilitudinarious,"
perhaps, qualifying the "con" or confidential talk that proved useless
to bring Mame back to his devotion.
In the masterly couplet closing the sestet of No. XVIII, Mr. Irwin's
verbal enthusiasm reaches its highest mark in an ultra-Meredithian
rendition of "I am an easy mark," an expression, by the way, which would
itself have to be elaborately translated in any English edition.
Enough of the glamors of Mr. Irwin's dulcet vagaries. He will stand,
perhaps as the chief apostle of the hyperconcrete. With Mr. Ade as the
head of the school, and insistent upon the didactic value of slang, Mr.
Irwin presents in this cycle no mean claims to eminence in the truly
lyric vein. Let us turn to a contemplation of his more modest hero.
I have attempted in vain to identify him, the "Willie" of these sonnets.
The police court records of San Francisco abound in characters from
which Mr. Irwin's conception of this pyrotechnically garrulous Hoodlum
might have been drawn, and even his death from cigarette-smoking,
prognosticated in No. XXII, does not sufficiently identify him. Whoever
he was, he was a type of the latter-day lover, instinct with that
self-analysis and consciousness of the dramatic value of his emotion
that has reached even the lower classes. The sequence of the sonnets
clearly indicates the progress of his love affair with Mary, a heroine
who has, in common with the heroines of previous sonnet cycles, Laura,
Stella and Beatricia, only this, that she inspired her lover to an
eloquence that might have been better spent orally upon the object of
his affections. Even the author's scorn does not prevent the reader from
indulging in a surreptitious sympathy with the flamboyant coquetry of
his "peacherino," his "Paris Pansy." For she, too, was of the caste of
the articulate; did she not
"Cough up loops of kindergarten chin?"
and could we hear Mame's side of the quarrel, no doubt our Hoodlum
would be convicted by every reader. But Kid Murphy, the pusillanimous
rival, was even less worthy of the superb Amazon who bore him to the
altar. "See how that Murphy cake-walks in his pride!" is the
cri-du-coeur the gentlest reader must inevitably render.
But "the Peach crops come and go," as Mr. George Ade so eloquently
observes. We must not take our hero's gloomy threats too seriously.
There are other babies on the bunch, and no doubt he is, long ere this,
consoled with a "neater, sweeter maiden" to whom his Muse will sing
again a happier refrain. In this hope we close his dainty introspections
and await his next burst of song!
Gelett Burgess.