Barbarians and the Critic

FRANK MOORE COLBY

In Which the Late Mr. Juvenal Has Some Rather Cruel Things to Say

AS I remember it, at the Athenian Club that evening there had been a meeting of our Committee on House Management in which the question of buying awnings for the north windows was debated from nine o'clock till half-past ten, when it was unanimously referred to a sub-committee without power consisting of the chairman, the treasurer and the secretary, who were to make recommendations at the next meeting.

Then came supper and after that Mr. Harbington Dish read a paper on American verse reform in which, while deprecating the radical views of certain writers, he insisted that the situation was very serious and that something ought to be done.

I recall only two of his suggestions: First, that rhymes if retained at all in the new era that was now upon us should always be at the beginning and never at the end of the line; and, second, that the verse form once popular under the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy ought to be revived. There was much applause, but after it the meeting broke up rather suddenly, the members slipping away so quietly that Jarman and I who were seated in the two big armchairs by the fire did not realize at first that we were alone..

"It's the worst thing he ever wrote," Jarman was saying, "and it's by all odds the most successful—and not merely in sales, either. You should see his letters, from people really distinguished, people you'd never suppose. And all that talk about his vision, keen social criticism, sense of the underlying forces of modern life, breadth, depth, audacity! Why the whole thing's nothing but a compilation of the ideas in the air, without a single individual, distinctive,—"

JARMAN'S feet were on the fender, precisely in my line of vision and I remember noticing that he wore tan shoes. I closed my eyes for a few moments and when I opened them again the shoes had changed to a kind of bathslippers and as I glanced up I saw he was now clothed in a thin, loose, white, sleeveless garment of unusual cut.

"Why Jarman, what in the world—" said I. "Mr. Jarman went out ten minutes ago," said the person in white, in a low-pitched, resonant voice, and at the same time bent forward, revealing a swarthy wrinkled face, with prominent curved nose, thin lips, long gray hair, and dark eyes of extraordinary brilliance—a man over sixty-five, I should say, lean but vigorous.

"May I ask to whom I have the pleasure"— said I, edging my chair to a point from which I could reach the fire-tongs if necessary, meanwhile keeping my eye on him in case of some sudden movement on his part.

"The man of Aquinum," he said, "the Aquinas, not that upstart Christian dog, Thomas, I believe you call him. What right has that corruptor of my own tongue to the name of my own birthplace when my claim is prior to his by eleven centuries? But that's the justice of you barbarians to an honest man of letters. Who was the Aquinas for a thousand years before the jargon of the tiresome Thomas was ever read by anybody,

I'd like to know. Just answer me that."

"I am not acquainted in Aquinum," I said, "and I am sorry to say I know nothing about the Aquinas family, but perhaps if you mentioned your entire name—"

"Oh, well," said he, "if your modern thoughts can travel back any further than last week Wednesday, perhaps you will recall one D. Junius Juvenalis."

"Juvenal?" said I. "Why, yes; it was you, wasn't it, who said children should be treated with the greatest reverence and then wrote a lot of things that had to be cut out of every edition that was likely to fall into the hands of young people. Oh, and let me see, there was Dr. Johnson's poem London and the one on Vanity, and "Slow rises worth by poverty oppressed" and that sort of thing. You're in the dictionaries of familiar quotations—nearly half a page. I always get you mixed up with Oliver Goldsmith, I don't know why; but I believe people generally do get you mixed up with somebody else. If you will pardon my saying so, I think the prevailing impression of you at present is rather indistinct, and still fading perhaps, especially here—the war, you know, and electricity, aviation, submarines, breathless progress of the social sciences, new education, new woman, new poetry, the referendum and recall, world federation, eugenics, the rights of labor, and the democratic push— It seems rather an unfortunate time to choose for spending your—your outing, if I may call it that. I should have supposed that Oxford in 1760, say, would have been about the latest occasion for your—. In short you will find us, I fear, a little distrait, forgetful—"

"BE quiet for a little while, barbarian, and I will try to explain. It is precisely because I am not forgotten that I am here. My name, of course, is seldom mentioned and I have not heard for fifty years a correct quotation of any of my words, but my thoughts go on among you. They go on damnably. It is not for the pleasure of meeting them that I am come. I am sent back here in punishment like other poets that have sinned. Race hatred was my undoing, race hatred which I called my Roman patriotism, and I cursed those absurd Hebrews and the 'esurient Greekling' and those queer Egyptians and sneer at the Gauls and railed at all those ill-bred Eastern fellows that overran the town, and I felt quite virtuous in doing so. And for helping to perpetuate the great race lie and the geographical inhumanities which are still your curse, I am dammed to revisit my own thoughts as they float about in the world through the ages, the same old thoughts, dressed up in barbarous foolish phrases, passed from one silly mouth to another, turned into tinkling rhymes by the worst series of imitators that ever a man had—

Let observation with extensive view Survey mankind from China to Peru.

Great poetry, that. That man Johnson had no word-sense. I never said anything of the sort. What I said was

Omnibus in terris quae sunt a Gadibus—"

"Wait a minute," said I, "I don't quite—"

"Well, what I said didn't sound in the least like his pedantic, mincing, repetitious stuff, or Dryden's either for that matter, or Chapman's, or that series of Oxford dons. Why can't they let me alone? That's the curse of my thoughts. They are never forgotten. Not a day passes without some one's spinning them out in a literary essay for a magazine all about the discerning few and the undiscerning rabble or in tedious conversation at some club. Take, for instance, the talk of your critical friend, Jarmanus, what's his name, Jarman, about the mean rewards of merit and the triumph of mediocrity. You'll find the whole of it in Sat. VII, line 9 to 99—

Qui nihil expositum soleat deducere, nec qui Communi feriat—"

"Yes, yes," I interrupted, "but please don't fall into Yiddish or whatever it is. I am a modem New York man and I agree with our most progressive educators that any classic sentiment that cannot be adequately expressed in the English language is not worth—You were saying?"

(Continued on page 130)

(Continued from page 66)

"I was merely repeating something I said about the best selling fiction of my day."

"I THOUGHT I had put it rather better and more compactly than your Mr. Jarman did or that man in the Atlantic Monthly a while ago who spread four sentences of mine over eight pages, or any of the fifteen others within the last six months. Is there ever a moment when commercialism is not being lamented by your cultured critic of the day, who in a literary sense is no wise distinguishable from your cultured critic of the day before? Writing on this theme, they are as like as the white sow's litter, and I have to read them all. By the Great Girl's bow and quiver, by the salsipotent fork, by the javelin of the Wise Lady, by the Cirrhaean spikes, by the boiled head of my own baby served in Egyptian vinegar, I curse the whole insanable cacoethical cohort of scriptitating-"

"Hold on! What—what's the matter?"

"I was just thinking that I should have to read in the next number of the Edinburgh Review or the Nineteenth Century the self-same things, only ill expressed, that I said to Umbricius at the Capene arch that evening in the summer, I think, of 120, when he was moving his furniture out of town. Queer that I who wrote Occidit miseros crambe repetita—"

"There you go again."

"I say it's queer that I of all people should be condemned throughout all time to stuff myself with the warmed-over cabbage of my own commonplace. I didn't mind coming back for Shakespeare when he stole that thing about 'Imperial Caesar, dead and turned to clay,' but I haven't had an afternoon in Hades since Matthew Arnold wrote about Philistines, and nowadays with every dull person writing about the money-god there is no rest. Why, once when I hoped to pass the week-end in Hell I was called back to read Mr. Upton Sinclair on the sin of paying a thousand dollars for a toothbrush—a matter which I had settled finally in Sed plures nimia congcsta—"

"Please don't do that."

"And what with the constant reappearance of my ideas on mothers-in-law, the newly rich, success, waste, show, luxury, gambling, graft, the social climber, woman from the point of view of the antisuffragist, woman as the target for brightly cynical remarks, alcoholism, prostitution, country life, subsidization of authors, high cost of living and forty other burning modern questions, it looks as if I should never—. The monotony of the modem manner is terrible, but that is not the worst of it. What I can't stand is the stench—"

"Stench?" I asked.

"Smell of decaying reputations. Nothing worse to a fairly immortal nose than the smell of a passing modem reputation. Impossible to stay within a mile of your national capitol, and the literary people are almost as bad. I tried to drop in on a group of Imagist poets on my way here just now, but I nearly fainted."

"I hope," said I, drawing my chair away, "I haven't been too—"

"Oh, no, not you. That's why I chose you instead of a celebrity. People without any reputation to decay are comparatively odorless."

At that moment the room turned upside down and spilled him out of it and I was tossing about in space till I heard Jarman say, "I've been shaking you for fully five minutes. If you want to catch the 1:32, you'll have to hurry."