I
The Omnium Bar, near the Bourse,
Late July 1914.
MacBean, before he settled down to the manufacture of mercantile
fiction, had ideas of a nobler sort, which bore their fruit in a slender
book of poems. In subject they are either erotic, mythologic, or
descriptive of nature. So polished are they that the mind seems to slide
over them: so faultless in form that the critics hailed them with
highest praise, and as many as a hundred copies were sold.
Saxon Dane, too, has published a book of poems, but he, on the other
hand, defies tradition to an eccentric degree. Originality is his sin.
He strains after it in every line. I must confess I think much of the
free verse he writes is really prose, and a good deal of it blank verse
chopped up into odd lengths. He talks of assonance and color, of stress
and pause and accent, and bewilders me with his theories.
He and MacBean represent two extremes, and at night, as we sit in the
Cafe du Dôme, they have the hottest of arguments. As for me, I listen
with awe, content that my medium is verse, and that the fashions of
Hood, Thackeray and Bret Harte are the fashions of to-day.
Of late I have been doing light stuff, "fillers" for MacBean. Here are
three of my specimens: