Science may conquer the stars, but it does nothing by jumps. As a
Scientist, as well as a philosopher, I am accustomed to reaching the
Transcendental by winding paths. It is characteristic of me that I
should have consented to preface this remarkable Sonnet Cycle only after
supreme deliberation, and that I should at last have determined to speak
in behalf of the Car Conductor for the following reasons:
1. As a Botanist I am fascinated by the phenomenon of Genius flourishing
from bud to flower, from flower to seed.
2. As a Psychologist I am anxious to establish once and for all, both by
plano-inductive and precoordinate systems of logic, the Status of Slang.
What position does Slang occupy in the thought of the world? Let us turn
to Zoology for an answer.
No traces of Slang may be found among mollusks, crustaceans or the lower
invertebrates. Slang is not common to vertebrate fishes or to whales,
seals, reptiles or anthropoid apes--in a word, slang-speaking is
nowhere prevalent among lower animals. It may, then, be definitely and
clearly asserted that Slang is the natural, logical expression of the
Human Race. If Man, then, is the highest of created mammals, is not his
natural speech (Slang) the highest of created languages? It is generally
conceded that Literature is the most exalted expression of Language.
Would not the Literature, then, which employs the highest of created
languages (Slang) be the supreme Literature of the world?
By such logical, irrefutable, inductive steps have I proven not only the
Status of Slang, but the literary importance of these Sonnets which it
is at once my scientific duty and my esthetic pleasure to introduce.
The twenty-six exquisite Sonnets which form this Cycle were written,
probably, during the years 1906 and 1907. Their author was William Henry
Smith, a car conductor, who penned his passion, from time to time, on
the back of transfer-slips which he treasured carefully in his hat (1).
We have it from no less an authority than Professor Sznuysko that the
Car Conductor usually performed these literary feats in public, writing
between fares on the rear platform of a Sixth Avenue car. Smith's
devotion to his Musa Sanctissima was often so hypnotic, I am told, that
he neglected to let passengers on and off--nay, it is even held by some
critics that he occasionally forgot to collect a fare. But be it said to
his undying honor that his Employers never suffered from such
carelessness, for it was the custom of our Poet to demand double fares
from the old, the feeble and the mentally deficient.
Even as the illimitable ichor of star-dust, the mysterious Demiurge of
the Universe, keeps the suns and planets to their orbitary revolutions,
so must environment mark the Fas and Nefas of Genius. Plato's Idea of
the Archetypal Man was due, perhaps, as much to the serene weather
conditions of Academe as to the marvelous mentality of Plato. What had
Job eaten for breakfast that he should have given utterance to his
magnificent Lamentation? Was he the discoverer of Human Sorrow or the
pioneer of Human Dyspepsia?
It is not altogether radical on my part, then, for me to assert that
many of the stylistic peculiarities found in these Sonnets are
attributable to the locale of their inspiration the rear platform of a
Sixth Avenue car. One can plainly hear the jar and jounce of the
elliptical wheels, the cry, "Step lively!" the six o'clock stampede, the
lament of the strap-hanging multitude in such lines as these:
"Three days with sad skidoo have came and went,
Yet Pansy cometh nix to ride with me.
I rubber vainly at the throng to see
Her golden locks--gee! such a discontent!
Perhaps she's beat it with some soapy gent--"
Where are lines like these to be found in the Italian of Petrarch? Where
has Tasso uttered an impassioned confession to resemble this:
"But when I ogle Pansy in the throng
My heart turns over twice and rings a gong"?
Of the human or personal record of William Henry Smith very little has
been discovered. Looking over the books of the Metropolitan Street
Railway I unearthed the following entry:
"Nov. 1, 1907:"
"W. H. Smith, conductor, discharged."
"Remarks:--Car No. 21144, William Smith, conductor, ran into large
brewery truck at So. E. cor. Sixth Ave. It is reported that Smith, to
the neglect of his duty, was reading poetry from a book called 'Sonnets
of de Heredia' at the time of the accident. Three Italians were slightly
injured by the accident, and Ethelbert Pangwyn, an actor starring in
'The Girl and the Idiot,' a musical comedy, was killed."
"Smith was held for manslaughter, but Judge O' Rafferty, who had seen
'The Girl and the Idiot,' discharged the defendant, averring that the
killing of Pangwyn did not constitute a crime."
What, then, has become of this minstrel who sang the Minnelieder of the
Car-barns? Like Homer, like Omar, like Sappho, like Shakespeare, he is a
Voice singing out of the mists. He was but a Name to his employers; and
his friends, if he has friends, remember him not. These Sonnets, written
neatly on twenty-six violet transfer-slips, were discovered, together
with a rejection blank from a leading magazine, in the Dead Letter
office. According to the current folk-lore in Harlem and the Bronx,
Smith is now living in California employed as a brakeman on the Southern
Pacific Railroad. Some aver that Pansy fell heiress to a sausage
establishment and moved to Italy with her Poet. Still others maintain
that Pansy, Gill the Grip and Maxy the Firebug never existed in real
life--were merely the mind-children of a Symbolist and a dreamer of
dreams.
To the latter theory I incline at a scholarly angle. This Cycle may be
taken, perhaps, not so much as a living record of human experience as a
lofty parable sounding the key-note of all human life. Gill the Grip is
the Iago, the Mefistofele, the symbolism of a malevolent destiny. Maxy
the Firebug may be the Poet's interpretation of the Social Unrest, of
Doubt, of progressive irresponsibility. Would it be going too far, then,
to say that Pansy stands to us as the symbol of Pan-girlism--as an
almost Anacreontic yearning for the type? Or may not these Sonnets be
taken, in a way, as a modern Vita Nuova wherein a Sixth Avenue Alighieri
calls to his Beatrice and mourns within when,
"Pansy-girl refuses to occur?"
So much for the Poet and his Purpose. Should any one of the readers of
this Cycle doubt the enduring greatness of the lines, let him consider
that I, Wolfgang Copernicus Addleburger, have seen fit to introduce them
to immortality.
(1) Since the salary-books of the Metropolitan Street
Railways show, during the year 1906, 182 conductors named
Smith in their employ, 38 of whom were named William Smith
and 12 William Henry Smith, it is easy for the reader to
conceive my task in establishing the identity of our Poet.
W. C. A.