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.