II

It was useless to contend against Tomlinson, and our search for literary novelties went on. But after a while the club began to feel the retarding force of the law of diminishing returns. There came a faint suspicion that poets who took pains not to imitate their predecessors might yet imitate one another. People who are living in the same generation, and writing for the same public, cannot escape a certain taint of sameness.

When my turn came to present a new candidate for the Hall of Fame I racked my brain in vain to find some one sufficiently different to satisfy the exigent taste of our little society.

As a refuge from my anxieties I took up a well-preserved copy of Sir Philip Sidney's Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia. I had ventured a number of times into the Arcadia, but had always lost my way in the labyrinth. But this time I skipped the prose and picked out Sir Philip's curious experiments in verse.

With wits sharpened by the tuition of Tomlinson, I realized that here was something that would delight our club by its daring modernity. The chances were that they would never look into the Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia: It would be against their principles.

So I made a few extracts from the less regular poems of Sir Philip Sidney and presented them to the club for consideration.

'You know Sidney Philip, of course?' Some of the members looked eagerly anxious, as much as to say that they knew him quite well but had forgotten his name. Tomlinson was inclined to be scornful. 'Phillips'? he said. 'He's of the past generation. He edited the Poetry Review away back in 1910. He was writing at the beginning of the century. His work is old stuff.'

'Nonsense,' I said. 'I'm not talking

about Stephen Phillips, or Wendell Phillips, or Philip of Macedon. If you want something up-to-date, and that tests your intelligence, you must take up the last thing of Sidney Philip. It is n't written for the kindergarten class. Sidney Philip does n't waste words. His style has no adipose deposit or connective tissue. He's an artist in words and does n't waste his material. He's a post-futurist as much as any thing. He flings his nouns and verbs at you, and then it's "Catch as catch can. "The words mean something to Sidney Philip. If they don't mean any thing to you he does n't care. He's not writing for Main Street. He can take the dictionary just as it stands, and make poetry out of it. It's great stuff for those who can appreciate it. Yet I suppose there are not a dozen persons in this part of the country who know who Sidney Philip is. That's what comes of living in a country given over to common schools, and the Volstead Act. It is n't conducive to art. Let me read you a bit from Sidney Philip's last volume, and see what you can make of it.

'Virtue, beauty and speech did strike, wound, charm

My heart, eyes, ears, with wonder, love, delight First, second, last did bind, enforce, and arm His works, shows, suits, with wit, grace and vows. Might,

Thus honor, liking, trust, much far and deep, Held pierced possessed my judgment, sense and will,

Till wrong, contempt, deceit did grow, steal,

creep

Bands, favor faith, to break, defile and kill, Then grief, unkindness, proof, took, kindled, taught,

Well grounded, noble, due, spite, rage, disdain, But Ah; alas; (in vain) my mind, sight, thought Doth him, his face, his words, leave, shun, refrain For no thing, time, place can lose, quench, ease, Mine own, embraced, sought, knot, fire, disease.

'Now poetry like that is not milk for babes. It is strong meat for strong men. You must masticate it. Take the

words, one by one, and let each make its individual impression on your sensitized imagination. Then turn your mind into a motion-picture machine, and run the film through rapidly. Then see what you've got. When you do it several times, you'll begin to appreciate Sidney Philip. He tells us how that poem of his came to be written in this elusive style. It is supposed to be written and sung by a young lady who was very temperamental. "The verses," says Sidney Philip in his quaint way, were with some art curiously written to enwrap her secret and resolute woes." By confining herself to a list of disconnected nouns she was able to sing her secret and keep it too. The general public could not guess what it was all about, but to her lover the detached substantives were exquisitely meaningful. "The quintessence of each word distilled down into his inmost soul."

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'That's a good suggestion for study,' said Tomlinson. 'Let's take the words as they come and do some distilling. It's time for us to get results.'

'But don't think,' I said, 'that all his work is like that. He's as much at

home in prose as in poetry. But when he does write poetry, he is careful not to say anything in an obvious manner. He wants to keep you guessing. He keeps you on the jump. Thus apropos of nothing in particular he

says,

'Ah; that I do not conceive, to the Heaven where a mouse climbs.

Then may I hope to achieve grace of a Heavenly Tiger.

"The more you repeat those lines, the more of a mystery they become. Then follows swiftly,

'O sweet, on a wretch wilt thou be revenged, Shall such high planets tend to the loss of a worm?

"These sudden contrasts between the high and the low are characteristic of

Sidney Philip. He does n't care a rap for the commonplace middle classes. For him it's either the high planets or the worm, the climbing mouse, or the Heavenly Tiger. He does n't care which it is, so that it's the real thing. This is an age of extremes, and Sidney Philip is its prophet. It is the age of the soaring airman or the crushed strap-hanger in the subway car.

'Sometimes Sidney Philip uses the familiar forms of versification just to show his mastery of the medium, but even then he manifests the post-war mood of rebellion against things as they are, and even against things as they ought to be. He has all the charming perversity of untrammeled genius. Nothing that he can think of satisfies him. He insists on being consciously pathological.

'Like those sick folks, in whom strange humors

run,

Can taste no sweets, the sour only please,
So to my mind while passions daily grow,
Joys strangers seem, I cannot bide their show,
Nor brook all else but well acquainted woe.
Bitter griefs taste best, pain is my ease,
Sick to the death, still loving my disease.

'Could any thing express more penetratingly the mood of our presentday writers?

'But when Sidney Philip writes as an imagist, he never allows his emotion to intrude. Each image is clear cut and unrelated. There are no entangling alliances with moral ideas. It's pure art. Take this.

'O sweet woods the delight of solitariness; O how well do I like your solitariness; Yet dear soil, if a soul closed in a mansion As sweet as violets, fair as a lily is, Straight as a cedar, a voice strains the canary birds

Whose shade doth safely hold, danger avoideth her.

'What exquisite art! The first two lines strike that note of childish innocence which our best poets use as a foil to their perfect sophistication.

'O sweet woods the delight of solitariness;
O how well do I like your solitariness.

'It's just the kind of poetry a child of eleven would write. It's a class by itself. It puts you in the right frame of mind for what is to follow. Then the images come thick and fast, the dear soil, and the mansion, the violet, and the lily.

"Then comes a line that gives you pause, and tests the quality of your imagination.

'Straight as a cedar, a voice strains the canary birds."

""Straight as a cedar" is clear enough. Anyone could think of that. But what do you make of "a voice strains the canary birds"? You were n't expecting that? Sidney Philip does n't explain. There's something exquisitely cryptic in the phrasing. There is a faint suggestion of Chinese influence. I should like to try it on a Mandarin and get his reaction.'

'It sounds good to me,' said Tomlinson. 'It reminds me of that line of T. S. Eliot, we had such a time over.'

'His soul stretched tight across the skies. 'You remember that it took us a whole evening to work that out.'

Finding that Sir Philip Sidney under a slight disguise could satisfy the demands of the club for ultra modernism, I ventured further into the fashionable literature of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.

I introduced George Herbert by reading the opening lines of Artillerie.

'As I one evening sat before my cell,
Methought a starre did shoot into my lap,
I rose and shook my clothes, as knowing well
That from small fires comes oft no small mishap.'

"That's new to me,' said Tomlinson, 'a star shooting into your lap while you are sitting before your cell, so that you have to get up and shake your clothes.

There's something of the Wild West in that young poet. He's the kind that would shoot up the town.'

"Yes,' I said, 'and you'd like his titles. There's nothing commonplace or obvious about them. They don't give you a hint as to what he is writing about."The Quiddity ";"Superlinary"; "Charms and Knots." He ties up his words in a knot, and then lets you untie the knot if you can.'

"That's good,' said Tomlinson. 'Let's begin with the "Quiddity," and see what we can make of it.'

'I think we had better leave that for the next time, I said. Quiddities will keep.'

George Herbert's brother, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, gave much pleasure as a daring innovator.

'Here is a little thing of a new man named Cherbury, which I think you will like. It begins:

'Within an open sea of gold,
A bark of ivory one day I saw

Which striking with its oars did seem to draw
Toward a fair coast.'

"That sounds significant,' said Tomlinson.

'Yes; but significant of what?' 'Why it's significant of what it's about. By the way, what's the title of it?'

"The poem is entitled, "A vision of a lady combing her hair."

'Oh, I get it. The curled sea of gold is her hair; the bark of ivory is her comb, and the oars, are the teeth of the comb. That's quite an idea.'

III

By keeping in the byways of English literature, I think I could have come down to the present day, and provided novelties for the club without awakening suspicion, but after a while Tomlinson became critical. It is just possible

that he became a little jealous, and feared that I was setting a pace that he could n't keep up with.

One day he said, 'Your selection of new authors of the imagist and symbolist school is very stimulating, but I'm afraid the club is getting a little soft. We have n't had enough rough stuff lately. There must be some new writers in Oklahoma that you missed. We'd like something large and virile, and under-worldly, something with the lid off."

Instigated by his earnestness, I thought I would make a sudden jump into Tennyson, and see what happened. Every one in the club despised Tennyson, who was a synonym for sweetness and all the other childish things we had put away. I should not have ventured on May Day,' or 'Locksley Hall.' 'Come into the Garden, Maud' would have been the signal for a riot.

But there was a Darkest Tennyson which might be unknown to Tomlinson. So I said, 'Have you ever come across The Northern Cobbler by Alf Tenterton? If you are looking for some one who is realistic Alf's the boy. He's a man's man. He gives you poetry with a kick. He does n't care a rap for politeness or prettiness. He does n't aim to please. He aims to shock, and he hits the bull's eye every time.

'How Tennyson would gasp if he could see how the new generation faces life. You might say it outfaces life.

"The hero of the poem is a regular old soak. He gets drunk every night, and kicks his wife and breaks the furniture, and all that sort of thing. But Tenterton does n't lay it up against him. He makes you see all the while that the cobbler is n't a bad fellow at heart. It's just his way of working off his inferiority complexes. It's a heap better than having a lot of Puritanical suppressions and taboos. Tenterton is up on psychology, and then he looks at

things with the detached eye of an artist. He does n't mind when the cobbler breaks up the furniture - it is n't Alf's furniture. It's hard on Sally, but then she does n't come into the picture except incidentally.

'Just see how naturally the cobbler expresses himself. "I coom like a bull loose at a fair," he says. He just lets himself go. He's a genuine caveman.

'Once of a frosty night I slither'd an' hurted my huck

An' I coomed neck-an'-crop soometimes slaäpe down i' the squad an the muck: An' once I fowt wi' the Taäilor.

'Now a conventional poet with a standardized mind would have described the battle as a fist fight; something rather fine and Dempsey-like.

But Tenterton is a realist and he knew that the tailor would n't fight according to the rules of the ring.

'He scrawmed an' scratted my faäce like a cat, and it maäde 'er so mad

That Sally she turned a tongue-banger and raäted me, Sottin thy braäins

66

Guzzlin' an's oakin' an' smoakin' an' hawmin' about i' the laänes,

Soa sow-droonk that tha doesn't touch thy'at to the Squire."

"Then follows a strong line:

'An' I loook'd cock-eyed at my noase an' I seed I'm a-gittin' o' fire.

'You see there the conscience of the literary craftsman. There's no squeamishness. If there was anything to smash the cobbler smashed it. If there was anything to kick he kicked it. Tenterton's business was to set it all down just as it occurred. The poem is authentic.

'As for Sally, we see her just as she was, sloppy in her draggle-tailed gown.

'An' the babby's faäce wurn't washed an' the 'ole 'ouse hupside down.

'Of course the cobbler felt bad after his spree:

'Like a graät num-cumpus I blubbered away o' the bed,

Weant niver do it naw moor, and Sally loookt up an' she said,

thou 'art laike the rest o' the men Thou 'll goa sniffin' about the tap till thou does it ageën.

Theer's thy hennemy, man, an' I knaws it and knaws thee sa well

That if thou seeas 'im an' smells 'im tha 'll follow

him slick into hell."'

"That's a strong line,' said Tomlinson. ""Slick into hell!" Tenterton is a little too rough for the Atlantic Monthly crowd, but he'll be heard from. He strikes out from the shoulder. You can't keep that kind of fellow down.'

Then the talk fell naturally into selfcongratulations over our freedom from the old Tennysonian conventions.

IV

I think I should have established my position as a fearless explorer of the wild frontier of modern literature if it had not been for an unlucky association of ideas. While Tennyson was delighting the cultured Victorian public, Martin Farquhar Tupper was enjoying the

rewards of the best seller. The members of the club were accustomed to use his name as a term of reproach, but it was not likely that they had looked into the Proverbial Philosophy.

As there was a ruder Tennyson who would delight the admirer of the caveman in literature, why should there not be an esoteric Tupper to reward the lover of the wilfully obscure?

I introduced a new author who should be nameless. 'He is just trying out his instrument, but he shows promise. He is a rebel not only against all literary traditions, but also against all previous and all contemporary rebels. He scorns ordinary verse patterns, yet he uses them as it suits his purpose. He takes over the whole field of knowledge by right of eminent domain. He delights

in paradoxes which he clothes in language so demure that the undiscerning public accepts them as truisms. But beneath the demureness there is a sardonic spirit that laughs bitterly and vanishes. There is a subtle irony which masquerades as commonplace. The humor is so dry, that it seems to belong to the permanently arid belt. Then there are sudden sublimities for those who like such things. It's like being in an aeroplane. One minute you are running along the ground, and then suddenly you are off into the sky.

'Let me read you these lines on seaweed:

"The sea-wort floating on the waves, or rolled up high along the shore,

Ye counted useless and vile, heaping on it names of contempt;

Yet it hath triumphed gloriously, and man has been humbled in his ignorance.

For health is in the freshness of its savor, and it cumbereth the beach with its wealth Comforting the tossings of pain with its violettinctured essence,

And by its humbler ashes enriching the proud.

"There's what I call an intriguing kind of poetry. Some of it you can

understand. You have seen the seaweed heaped up on the beach, and you may have sufficient agricultural knowledge to be aware that its ashes have value as a fertilizer, or as the writer cleverly puts it, alluding to the Cape Cod farmer, "by its humbler ashes enriching the proud." You visualize the humble seaweed, and the proud farmer.

'But what do you make of the previous line?

'Comforting the tossings of pain with its violettinctured essence."

I read the line slowly, watching the reaction of the club members.

"This line,' I said, 'is intriguing. We all all recognize its beauty. "Violettinctured essence," contrasts poignantly with "the tossings of pain."