Part 58 (1/2)

Now I have a theory of my own in regard to what we are pleased to call ”minor poets”; namely, that poetry is a natural form of expression to most human beings, and should be used as such.

Why do we imagine that the best method of ensuring our output of poetry is to have a few huge monoliths of poets--and no more? Is the great poet surer of recognition, safer in his unparalleled superiority because there is nothing between him and the unpoetical? Is a vast audience of the dumb and verseless, who do not care enough for poetry to write any of it, the best for the great poet?

According to my theory there is as much room for short-distance poetry as for the kind that rings around the world for centuries.

As I look over this small collection, I am impressed most with its clear sincerity, in feeling and expression. These verses are not cooked--they grew.

Then I feel anew the range of interests of the modern singer--so swiftly widening, so intensely human, and yet so sympathetic with nature.

Democracy in literature is a good thing; not only in subject matter but in universal partic.i.p.ation.

So that the contribution be genuine, the real speech of an honest soul, it has its own place in the literature of the day; and that is evidently the case with Philemon's Verses.

”The Lords of High Decision” is a t.i.tle more high-sounding than descriptive. If the story had been called ”The Slaves of Low Decision”

it would be more recognizable.

Here is a man who wabbles through some thirty years of life without coming to any decision at all; a woman who at no time had any decision; another who decided wrong, then right, then wrong again, and was finally let out by an accident; a first-cla.s.s pitcher who gives up his chosen field to be a chauffeur and general attache of the wabbler, and finally loses his life to save another man--perhaps he was a Lord of High Decision.

Perhaps Paddock, the settlement-running clergyman was. Or Walsh,--the suppressed parent. Colonel Craighill, the father of the Wabbler, is well drawn, evidently from nature.

A highly Episcopalian att.i.tude toward divorce is taken; the heroine, who has been for some years free of a husband casually married in youth, is led to see her duty in going back to him; even though she deeply loves another man. As her ex-husband has more sense than she, he refuses to accept this living sacrifice. She succeeds in giving up something, however, for her lover, a man of considerable wealth, makes his proposal in this wise:

”I know I ask a great deal when I ask you to give up your work for me--and yet I ask it. Remember, there is no grat.i.tude in this--you are a woman, and I am a man--and I love you.”

Poor girl! She has struggled through poverty, a broken marriage, long years of valiant endeavor for this work of hers; it was the innocent and easily domesticated task of drawing children's faces--she was an ill.u.s.trator. Yet the first thing her ”lover” does, in the very height of his new virtue, in the very act of offering himself, is to a.s.sume as a matter of course that she would give it up. And she did--for this Lord of High Decision.

”The Lords of High Decision,” by Meredith Nicholson. Doubleday, Page & Co. $1.50.

PERSONAL PROBLEMS

Here is a ”Personal” of distinct interest.

May it reach its mark!

”WANTED:

”By a Socialist woman of mature years, a congenial person of similar s.e.x, education and tastes to share with her the expense of a country home in the mountains, and the study--as far as may be agreeable--of nature, music, literature, sociology and socialism. No objection to Suffragette or Vegetarian, but advocates of Anarchism or Free Love are hereby contra-indicated. Credentials to be frankly exchanged with personal history. Address: The Widow Baucis, Care of The Forerunner, 67 Wall St., New York City.”

Apropos of the above, there are no more intimate and pressing problems than those of the business of living, the mere every day processes.

We are still so hampered by the customs and habits of the proprietary family that we a.s.sume as a matter of course that one must live, first, in childhood and youth, with one's parental family; second, in middle life, with one's matrimonial family; and third in age, with one's descendants.