Trolley Cars and Kings

OLIVER WAKEFIELD

Reflections on Poets, Critics and Professors

IF the appearance of the people on both sides of the car shakes your confidence in the future of democracy; if, while your eye travels along those two deadly parallels of blank-featured human latitude, you mutter to yourself, "Blood will tell, and after all class systems are necessary," and wonder what the world will come to when it is left to the plain people, such exceedingly plain people, for example, as those five awful ones nearest the door; and if you feel all your radicalism oozing out of you, including the initiative and referendum, recall of judges, short ballot, and proportionate taxation of swollen fortunes; and if, as six more of them get in; each with a face like a boiled potato, you begin to distrust the whole foundation of popular rights, even trial by jury, even habeas corpus; if, I say, this sort of thing happens to you now and again, as no doubt it does, there is always an easy means of consolation.

Photographs of European royal families are published almost every week. Clip them and paste them properly and they will cure this phase of democratic melancholy.

Here are Hapsburgs whose faces if placed side by side would be as desolating as anything ever contemplated in the subway. Line a trolley-car with these Hohenzollern heads (without any helmets on them, naturally) and no one would suspect the presence of any person above the rank of gasfitter. He would merely suspect that the car was headed for the Bronx.

Add to the rich supply of wooden visages in the various branches of these two families, all the pudgy, inane, commonplace, unpleasant or commercial countenances possessed by a fair proportion of every other royal dynasty; place them in two rows with only the heads showing, and you will feel as you would feel on the way to Coney Island on a Sunday afternoon, except perhaps that you will miss the kingly features of the L. I. R. R. conductor, or the royal bearing of his youthful heir apparent, the brakeman.

My own collection of Sunday supplement royal personages—and I have no reason to think the photographs inaccurate—makes every morning subway trip seem like a royal progress. Fortunately, portraits of royal personages will soon become rare, and so, nobody need tell me that the war has brought us no benefits.

Mr. Garnett Among Poets

IN Mr. Untermyer's poem entitled "Truce" the dusk on entering a room is said to touch with "reverent hand" a lady's hair. While this poetic feat is perhaps a little less entertaining than some others that may be found in recent verse, there would seem to be nothing about it that should made a reader angry. Yet it goads Mr. Edward Garnett to sudden fury. Not only does he place "reverent hand" in indignant italics, but he calls it a "cheap, sentimental image" that "clashes and jars"; and on the strength of it and some similar formalities he says Mr. Untermyer "has so weighed down his craft with heavy stocks and stones that it has already sunk to the bottom of the river."

At first thoughts as one goes on reading Mr. Garnett, it is hard to account for this flash of indignation. Many other poets drop into commonplace and some of them never come out again, without ruffling his temper in the least. Indeed at times he seems to like them all the better for it, to judge from the sort of things he quotes.

"Entering the Hall, she meets new wife,

Leaving the gate she runs into former husband. Words stick; she does not manage to say anything."

He says this is altogether charming. Follow Mr. Garnett a little way along the line of his literary approbations, and you will soon be astonished by the sweetness of his disposition. T-he last person in the world, you would say, to be annoyed by anybody's platitudes. Under far worse literary provocations than Mr. Untermyer's "reverent hand" his temper is as a rule perfectly angelic. Why then fly out like that at only Mr. Untermyer?

Yet perhaps it is not strange that one should scold the wrong poet occasionally when one is worrying over two or three dozen of them at a time. Probably Mr. Garnett before he wrote that article for the Atlantic had read five hundred of the freshest poems of twenty-five of the newest poets, with the conscientious determination that his jaded bosom should warm to every worthy one of them. Nobody ought to judge harshly of any man to whom that sort of thing has occurred. For Mr. Garnett's relation to current literature is not at all like that of the mere piecemeal reviewer who can take one book at a time and at once forget it. Nor is it that of those old-fashioned critics who make time do some of the sifting for them—let oblivion take a part of the drudgery off their hands. His relation to current literature is more like that of the Department. of Agriculture toward the current beet crop. He has his eye on the whole of it when it is barely out of the ground. Never can he ask himself the simple question, What do I think of So-and-So the novelist or such-and-such a book of verse. He must ask himself, Out of the three hundred and ten respectable novels of the fiscal year ending June 30, 1917, which are the seventeen that reveal a "genuine artistry?" or, Which are the twelve imperishable volumes in yonder hundred-weight of last year's verse?

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YET many a strong man who has set out to follow merely the fiction of his contemporaries has sunk down under the strain of it, and old hands who have tried to follow the whole of minor poetry month by month have told me flatly that the thing is impossible. Try as you will, they said, to overtake the fugitive poems of poets who in themselves are by no means fugitive, a good deal of it will, for one reason or another, always get away. They complained too of very disagreeable sensations as a result of overspeeding in pursuit of poets—vertigo, strange and sudden periods of numbness, and as they put it, a sort of "buzzing in the brain."

Looking at Mr. Garnett's peculiar situation all around and sympathetically, as indeed it deserves to be looked at, you cannot blame him for swearing at the wrong new poet now and then; you could scarcely blame him if he swore at all of them. The mothering of these new generations is such a trying thing to do. You often find him in a scene of contemporary literary confusion, worse than the old woman's who lived in a shoe. Pulled about by forty sprawling present-day romancers, upset by dozens of scurrying Imagists, worried to death lest something of Miss Amy Lowell's should escape or lest the "spiral form'' of Mr. J. G. Fletcher should wriggle away from him, he has not an easy time of ic. And who else could take care of this whole vast brood of coming authors in Mr. Garnett's all-inclusive way without sometimes speaking crossly to a harmless one or letting some guilty ones go free? On the whole it is wonderful that he does the thing with so much patience; though it is perhaps still more wonderful that he should do the thing at all.

"Bone-weary, many-childed, trouble-tried Mother of nine that lived and two that died.'

Could any one have blamed this dear good woman, if sometimes she had cuffed the wrong child?

Lack of Subtlety

MPAVLOVSKI in his new book on life at the front seems hardly better pleased than was M. Henri Barbusse with the manners of the people at home. When you come back on leave, says he, they say, "How well you are looking!" They are innocent words in themselves no doubt, but they are spoken with an air of "veterinary satisfaction." When you are dead you are a hero. You can always count on that. But if through no fault of yours you happen to be still living, you are quite generally regarded as a slacker. People who like you usually advise you to wear a silk neck-cloth to avoid taking cold, which, says M. Pavlovski, is very nice of them but really a little disproportionate. Then the letters from the rear—why are they so horribly irrelevant? One day while fishing in a placid little stream he opened a letter and xead, "We share your anguish!" On another occasion just after having escaped a hundred and fifty shells which fell on the sugar refinery in which he was stationed, he received, by an irritating coincidence, the following line from home, "It is impossible to get any powdered sugar." They are lacking in subtlety, these dear friends at home, says M. Pavlovski with commendable mildness.

Those Others

A PROFESSOR of English says he never attends a concert at a certain New England city, whose name he withholds lest he hurt the feelings of the population, without finding himself among serious gentlemen in black and ladies in Alexandrian frizzes, who have a look of "holy boredom," and regard the occasion as one of "initiation and awe." This, says he, marks them off as outsiders. Then he sets forth his own atttitude as an insider which certainly seems altogether reasonable. "Art," he says, "is a matter of life, and to understand it we must be alive." He himself had a pleasant time at one of those concerts, where they played a thing by Cesar Franck which, he perceived, was lively and amusing. But nobody else there knew it; they merely knew that they were "being educated." Evidently he is on the right track himself, but why attack the people in the Alexandrian frizzes?

Artists' joys are beyond my depth, but I do believe I understand this sort of critic's secret pleasures. The fun begins with the sideglance at those neighbors. How little they are getting out of it, poor, self-improving things, whereas 1—No taste, gaiety, abandon, sense of humor in this whole penal colony of propriety, whereas I—And happy thought for publication soon mingle with the music or the text—thoughts of the great abysmal difference—and in two weeks there appears in a British or American periodical for the thoughtful few an article in which you separate yourself from the goats and call the sheep around you. And the beauty of it is that it can be done over and over wherever English is printed, precisely as if Sentimental Tommy, that very brutal attempt to extinguish the harmless sport, had never been written or published.