Early Writings

Despite such reins and checks I’ll do my best,

  An art! You all respect the arts, from that infant tick

  Who’s now the editor of The Atlantic,2

  From Comstock’s self,3 down to the meanest resident,

  Till up again, right up, we reach the president,

  Who shows his taste in his ambassadors:

  A novelist, a publisher, to pay old scores,

  A novelist, a publisher and a preacher,4

  That’s sent to Holland, a most particular feature,

  Henry Van Dyke, who thinks to charm the Muse you pack

  her in

  A sort of stinking deliquescent saccharine.

  The constitution of our land, O Socrates,

  Was made to incubate such mediocrities,

  These and a taste in books that’s grown perennial

  And antedates the Philadelphia centennial.

  Still I’d respect you more if you could bury

  Mabie, and Lyman Abbot and George Woodberry,5

  For minds so wholly founded upon quotations

  Are not the best of pulse for infant nations.

  Dulness herself, that abject spirit, chortles

  To see your forty self-baptized immortals,

  And holds her sides where swelling laughter cracks ’em

  Before the “Ars Poetica” of Hiram Maxim.6

  All one can say of this refining medium

  Is “Zut! Cinque lettres!” a banished gallic idiom,

  Their doddering ignorance is waxed so notable

  ’Tis time that it was capped with something quotable.

  Here Radway grew, the fruit of pantosocracy,7

  The very fairest flower of their gynocracy.

  Radway? My hero, for it will be more inspiring

  If I set forth a bawdy plot like Byron

  Than if I treat the nation as a whole.

  Radway grew up. These forces shaped his soul;

  These, and yet God, and Dr. Parkhurst’s8 god, the N.Y.

  Journal

  (Which pays him more per week than The Supernal).

  These and another godlet of that day, your day

  (You feed a hen on grease, perhaps she’ll lay

  The sterile egg that is still eatable:

  “Prolific Noyes”9 with output undefeatable).

  From these he (Radway) learnt, from provosts and from

  editors unyielding

  And innocent of Stendhal, Flaubert, Maupassant and Fielding.

  They set their mind (it’s still in that condition)—

  May we repeat; the Centennial Exposition

  At Philadelphia, 1876?

  What it knew then, it knows, and there it sticks.

  And yet another, a “charming man,” “sweet nature,” but was

  Gilder,

  De mortuis verum,10 truly the master builder?

  From these he learnt. Poe, Whitman, Whistler, men, their

  recognition

  Was got abroad, what better luck do you wish ’em,

  When writing well has not yet been forgiven

  In Boston, to Henry James, the greatest whom we’ve seen

  living.

  And timorous love of the innocuous

  Brought from Gt. Britain and dumped down a’top of us,

  Till you may take your choice: to feel the edge of satire or

  Read Bennett or some other flaccid flatterer.

  Despite it all, despite your Red Bloods, febrile concupiscence

  Whose blubbering yowls you take for passion’s essence;

  Despite it all, your compound predilection

  For ignorance, its growth and its protection

  (Vide the tariff), I will hang simple facts

  Upon a tale, to combat other tracts,

  “Message to Garcia,” Mosher’s propagandas11

  That are the nation’s botts, collicks and glanders.

  Or from the feats of Sumner cull it? Think,

  Could Freud or Jung unfathom such a sink?

  My hero, Radway, I have named, in truth,

  Some forces among those which “formed” his youth:

  These heavy weights, these dodgers and these preachers,

  Crusaders, lecturers and secret lechers,

  Who wrought about his “soul” their stale infection.

  These are the high-brows, add to this collection

  The social itch, the almost, all but, not quite, fascinating,

  Piquante, delicious, luscious, captivating:

  Puffed satin, and silk stockings, where the knee

  Clings to the skirt in strict (vide: “Vogue”) propriety.

  Three thousand chorus girls and all unkissed,

  O state sans song, sans home-grown wine, sans realist!

  “Tell me not in mournful wish-wash

  Life’s a sort of sugared dish-wash!”

  Radway had read the various evening papers

  And yearned to imitate the Waldorf capers

  As held before him in that unsullied mirror

  The daily press, and monthlies nine cents dearer.

  They held the very marrow of the ideals

  That fed his spirit; were his mental meals.

  Also, he’d read of christian virtues in

  That canting rag called Everybody’s Magazine,

  And heard a clergy that tries on more wheezes

  Than e’er were heard of by Our Lord Ch . . . . J ....

  So he “faced life” with rather mixed intentions,

  He had attended country Christian Endeavour Conventions,

  Where one gets more chances

  Than Spanish ladies had in old romances.

  (Let him rebuke who ne’er has known the pure Platonic

  grapple,

  Or hugged two girls at once behind a chapel.)

  Such practices diluted rural boredom

  Though some approved of them, and some deplored ’em.

  Such was he when he got his mother’s letter

  And would not think a thing that could upset her....

  Yet saw an “ad.” “To-night, THE HUDSON SAIL,

  With forty queens, and music to regale

  The select company: beauties you all would know

  By name, if named.” So it was phrased, or rather somewhat so

  I have mislaid the “ad.,” but note the touch,

  Note, reader, note the sentimental touch:

  His mother’s birthday gift. (How pitiful

  That only sentimental stuff will sell!)

  Yet Radway went. A circumspectious prig!

  And then that woman like a guinea-pig

  Accosted, that’s the word, accosted him,

  Thereon the amorous calor slightly frosted him.

  (I burn, I freeze, I sweat, said the fair Greek,

  I speak in contradictions, so to speak.)

  I’ve told his training, he was never bashful,

  And his pockets by ma’s aid, that night with cash full,

  The invitation had no need of fine aesthetic,

  Nor did disgust prove such a strong emetic

  That we, with Masefield’s vein, in the next sentence

  Record “Odd’s blood! Ouch! Ouch!” a prayer, his swift

  repentance.

  No, no, they danced. The music grew much louder

  As he inhaled the still fumes of rice-powder.

  Then there came other nights, came slow but certain

  And were such nights that we should “draw the curtain”

  In writing fiction on uncertain chances

  Of publication; “Circumstances,”

  As the editor of The Century says in print,

  “Compel a certain silence and restraint.”

  Still we will bring our “fiction as near to fact” as

  The Sunday school brings virtues into practice.

  Soon our hero could manage once a week,

  Not that his pay had risen, and no leak

  Was found in his employer’s cash. He lea
rned the lay of

  cheaper places,

  And then Radway began to go the paces:

  A rosy path, a sort of vernal ingress,

  And Truth should here be careful of her thin dress—

  Though males of seventy, who fear truths naked harm us,

  Must think Truth looks as they do in wool pyjamas.

  (My country, I’ve said your morals and your thoughts are

  stale ones,

  But surely the worst of your old-women are the male ones.)

  Why paint these days? An insurance inspector

  For fires and odd risks, could in this sector

  Furnish more data for a compilation

  Than I can from this distant land and station,

  Unless perhaps I should have recourse to

  One of those firm-faced inspecting women, who

  Find pretty Irish girls, in Chinese laundries,

  Upstairs, the third floor up, and have such quandaries

  As to how and why and whereby they got in

  And for what earthly reason they remain....

  Alas, eheu, one question that sorely vexes

  The serious social folk is “just what sex is.”

  Though it will, of course, pass off with social science

  In which their mentors place such wide reliance.

  De Gourmont12 says that fifty grunts are all that will be

  prized.

  Of language, by men wholly socialized,

  With signs as many, that shall represent ’em

  When thoroughly socialized printers want to print ’em.

  “As free of mobs as kings”? I’d have men free of that invidious,

  Lurking, serpentine, amphibious and insidious

  Power that compels ’em

  To be so much alike that every dog that smells ’em,

  Thinks one identity is

  Smeared o’er the lot in equal quantities.

  Still we look toward the day when man, with unction,

  Will long only to be a social function,

  And even Zeus’ wild lightning fear to strike

  Lest it should fail to treat all men alike.

  And I can hear an old man saying: “Oh, the rub!

  I see them sitting in the Harvard Club,

  And rate ’em up at just so much per head,

  Know what they think, and just what books they’ve read,

  Till I have viewed straw hats and their habitual clothing

  All the same style, same cut, with perfect loathing.”

  So Radway walked, quite like the other men,

  Out into the crepuscular half-light, now and then;

  Saw what the city offered, cast an eye

  Upon Manhattan’s gorgeous panoply,

  The flood of limbs upon Eighth Avenue

  To beat Prague, Budapesht, Vienna or Moscow, f

  Such animal invigorating carriage

  As nothing can restrain or much disparage....

  Still he was not given up to brute enjoyment,

  An anxious sentiment was his employment,

  For memory of the first warm night still cast a haze o’er

  The mind of Radway, whene’er he found a pair of purple

  stays or

  Some other quaint reminder of the occasion

  That first made him believe in immoral suasion.

  A temperate man, a thin potationist, each day

  A silent hunter off the Great White Way,

  He read The Century and thought it nice

  To be not too well known in haunts of vice—

  The prominent haunts, where one might recognize him,

  And in his daily walks duly capsize him.

  Thus he eschewed the bright red-walled cafés and

  Was never one of whom one speaks as “brazen’d.”

  Some men will live as prudes in their own village

  And make the tour abroad for their wild tillage—

  I knew a tourist agent, one whose art is

  To run such tours. He calls ’em.... house parties.

  But Radway was a patriot whose venality

  Was purer in its love of one locality,

  A home-industrious worker to perfection,

  A senatorial jobber for protection,

  Especially on books, lest knowledge break in

  Upon the national brains and set ’em achin’.

  (’Tis an anomaly in our large land of freedom,

  You can not get cheap books, even if you need ’em).

  Radway was ignorant as an editor,

  And, heavenly, holy gods! I can’t say more,

  Though I know one, a very base detractor,

  Who has the phrase “As ignorant as an actor.”

  But turn to Radway: the first night on the river,

  Running so close to “hell” it sends a shiver

  Down Rodyheaver’s13 prophylactic spine,

  Let me return to this bold theme of mine,

  Of Radway. O clap hand ye moralists!

  And meditate upon the Lord’s conquests.

  When last I met him, he was a pillar in

  An organization for the suppression of sin....

  Not that he’d changed his tastes, nor yet his habits,

  (Such changes don’t occur in men, or rabbits).

  Not that he was a saint, nor was top-loftical

  In spiritual aspirations, but he found it profitable,

  For as Ben Franklin said, with such urbanity:

  “Nothing will pay thee, friend, like Christianity.”

  And in our day thus saith the Evangelist:

  “Tent preachin’ is the kind that pays the best.”

  ’Twas as a business asset pure an’ simple

  That Radway joined the Baptist Broadway Temple.

  I find no moral for a peroration,

  He is the prototype of half the nation.

  HOMAGE TO SEXTUS PROPERTIUS

  Orfeo

  “Quia pauper amavi. ”

  I

  Shades of Callimachus, Coan ghosts of Philetas1

  It is in your grove I would walk,

  I who come first from the clear font

  Bringing the Grecian orgies into Italy,

  and the dance into Italy.

  Who hath taught you so subtle a measure,

  in what hall have you heard it;

  What foot beat out your time-bar,

  what water has mellowed your whistles?

  Out-weariers of Apollo will, as we know, continue their

  Martian generalities,

  We have kept our erasers in order.2

  A new-fangled chariot follows the flower-hung horses;

  A young Muse with young loves clustered about her

  ascends with me into the æther, ...

  And there is no high-road to the Muses.

  Annalists will continue to record Roman reputations,

  Celebrities from the Trans-Caucasus will belaud Roman

  celebrities

  And expound the distentions of Empire,

  But for something to read in normal circumstances?

  For a few pages brought down from the forked hill unsullied?

  I ask a wreath which will not crush my head.

  And there is no hurry about it;

  I shall have, doubtless, a boom after my funeral,

  Seeing that long standing increases all things

  regardless of quality.

  And who would have known the towers

  pulled down by a deal-wood horse;

  Or of Achilles withstaying waters by Simois3

  Or of Hector4 spattering wheel-rims,

  Or of Polydmantus, by Scamander, or Helenus and

  Deiphoibos?5

  Their door-yards would scarcely know them, or Paris.6

  Small talk O Ilion, and O Troad7

  twice taken by Oetian gods,8

  If Homer had not stated your case!

  And I also among the later nephews of this city

&nb
sp; shall have my dog’s day,

  With no stone upon my contemptible sepulchre;

  My vote coming from the temple of Phoebus in Lycia,9 at Patara,

  And in the meantime my songs will travel,

  And the devirginated young ladies10 will enjoy them

  when they have got over the strangeness,

  For Orpheus tamed the wild beasts—

  and held up the Threician river;

  And Cithaeron shook up the rocks11 by Thebes

  and danced them into a bulwark at his pleasure,

  And you, O Polyphemus?12 Did harsh Galatea almost

  Turn to your dripping horses, because of a tune, under Aetna?

  We must look into the matter.

  Bacchus and Apollo in favour of it,

  There will be a crowd of young women doing homage to my

  palaver,

  Though my house is not propped up by Taenarian columns13

  from Laconia (associated with Neptune and Cerberus),

  Though it is not stretched upon gilded beams:

  My orchards do not lie level and wide

  as the forests of Phaeacia,

  the luxurious and Ionian,

  Nor are my caverns stuffed stiff with a Marcian vintage,14

  My cellar does not date from Numa Pompilius,15

  Nor bristle with wine jars,

  Nor is it equipped with a frigidaire patent;

  Yet the companions of the Muses

  will keep their collective nose in my books,

  And weary with historical data, they will turn to my

  dance tune.

  Happy who are mentioned in my pamphlets,

  the songs shall be a fine tomb-stone over their beauty.

  But against this?

  Neither expensive pyramids scraping the stars in their route,

  Nor houses modelled upon that of Jove in East Elis,16

  Nor the monumental effigies of Mausolus,

  are a complete elucidation of death.

  Flame burns, rain sinks into the cracks

  And they all go to rack ruin beneath the thud of the years.

  Stands genius a deathless adornment,

  a name not to be worn out with the years.

  II

  I had been seen in the shade, recumbent on cushioned

  Helicon,17