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CONTEMPORARY POETS

ERNARD SHAW says-and like most of his sayings, it is an interesting half-truth:

"Nevertheless, journalism is the highest form of literature; for all the highest literature is journalism. The writer who aims at producing the platitudes which are not for an age, but for all time,' has the reward of being unreadable in all ages; while Plato and Aristophanes trying to knock some sense into the Athens of their day, Shakespeare peopling that same Athens with Elizabethan mechanics and Warwickshire hunts, Ibsen photographing the local doctors and vestrymen of a Norwegian parish, Carpaccio painting the life of St. Ursula exactly as if she were a lady living in the next street to him, are still alive and at home everywhere among the dust and ashes of thousands of academic, punctilious, archæologically correct men of letters and art who spent their lives haughtily avoiding the journalist's vulgar obsession with the ephemeral.

“I also am a journalist, and proud of it, deliberately cutting out of my works all that is not journalism, convinced that nothing that is not journalism will live long as literature or be of any use while it does live. I deal with all periods, but I never study any period but the present, which

I have not yet mastered and never shall; and as a dramatist, I have no clue to any historical or any other personage save that part of him which is myself, and which may be nine tenths of him or ninety-nine hundredths, as the case may be (if indeed I do not transcend the creature), but which, anyhow, is all that can ever come within my knowledge of his soul. The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.”

The other half of the truth, which Shaw forgets, or chooses for the moment to ignore, is that the man who writes for all time must, in his contemporaneousness, express also the immortal sameness of human life and emotion. When Shakespeare lightheartedly transfers Warwickshire yokels and Elizabethan young ladies and gentlemen to the Athens of Theseus, their importance and eternal interest lies not alone in the fact that they are highly contemporaneous English folk, and that future ages must be enormously interested in knowing how simples and gentles of that day really thought and felt; but that these later readers will be moved and touched by the proofs that on all fundamental questions these British folk feel and act as do the English and Americans of the twentieth century. This link of the human heart makes them immortal through their eternal actuality.

Compare those wanderers in the Midsummer

Night with the crowd on its way to the Festival of Adonis, in the idyl of Theocritus, and one realizes how like Bottom and his friend the Joiner were to Praxinoë and Gorgo; how like both Bottom and Praxinoë are to New Yorkers of the same class taking the trolley to Coney Island on the Fourth of July, or the Londoner celebrating Lord Mayor's Day. The beads are separate, but the cord of life and feeling on which they are strung is continuous and unbroken.

It is just through this immortality in contemporaneousness that the Poets- those properly spelled with a capital letter- have kept their high place in the life of the world throughout the ages. Their expression of the emotions of their time does not lag behind by even a day. The yellow journal's flaming extra is belated and stale by comparison. For not only are poets recorders of their own day : they run before with a torch to show the next steps in the paths we are treading, so that, instead of putting down our feet darkly and with timidity, we step boldly and safely forward on the road of existence. Before we, who are dumb, have dreamed of the blind changes taking place within our own souls, they, the poets, have clarified the chaos of our longings into ideals, and lit the aspirations by whose flame we push on to higher levels.

To the four-square man of affairs the value given to these rhymes in the treasury of the world's valuables has always been a matter of impatient astonishment. That a mere stringer of phrases - a "wordbraider" should outlive the doer of deeds, the creator of actual things, seems, by all the tests with which he is familiar, to be a mere fantastic twist of events contradicting every lesson of his life's experience. That the men who have ruled and warred, have wrought and builded, should, nine times out of ten, be remembered only because some rhymemonger chose to praise or blame them, seems to him like the witless mockery of a fool. And yet the practical man does see, if he ever stops to think about it, that the slow furnace of elapsing time calcines all the concrete things he reverences to dust and nothingness, and almost the only things the world saves from the universal destruction are the golden words of some maker of phrases, in his own day scarcely known by name to one in a thousand of his contemporaries.

Bernard Shaw has put his careless but penetrating finger upon the reason of the weakness and evil days of our practisers of the gentle art, among whom there are but two really male voices—and they not of the first order; poets who have in any sense adequately expressed the life and aspiration of our time.

UNIV. OF

Can anything be more tragically unimportant than the outgivings of most of our singers? A good half of them are employed merely as "fillers" between the prose articles of the magazines; and the man who can express his diluted little drop of thought in one verse of from four to six lines is the poet who can best count upon disposing of his wares. For in the making up of the pages of a magazine there is frequently at the end of some article upon travel, at the conclusion of a short story, a small space which must, for the sake of symmetry, be filled, and a poem costs less than a colophon!

These little verses all appear to be made according to a fixed recipe—a mild sketch of landscape with a tag of moral. Three barred sunset-clouds, and a hope for something beyond them,-a morning mist, and an aspiration that sadness and clouds will melt before the sun of a fuller day,- one knows what these fragments of preciosity will be before one reads them; the formula of their manufacture being so invariable and so simple. This is the sort of pillule of poetical bread our soul's need of song is fed upon :

"The road winds over the hill

Where sets a rose-white star;

O tired heart, be still:

The end is far.