DON MARQUIS, you know," Brander Matthews remarked to me the other day, "is essentially a poet." I didn't know it! I doubted it, on general principles. I regretted it, thinking the country overpopulated with essential poets on part-time, Apollos in the pressroom and that sort of thing. Instantly my imagination linked him with the melancholy company of Charles Lamb, Thomas Hood and Mark Twain, three gloomy men who, it is now suspected, secretly yearned to add to the world's woe, yet were hopelessly condemned by chance and circumstance and fatally unwise marriages and the economic theory of history and the depraved state of public taste—were hopelessly condemned to contribute to the sum of human happiness.
Tragic maladjustment!
I don't know—nobody knows—just how it came to be accepted as axiomatic that it is better to be even the worst kind of a poet than even the best kind of a humorist. Probably it is connected in some way with our deep-seated northern European conviction that there is no virtue where there is no suffering. And, confidentially, I think it is nonsense. All the same, when I was told that Don Marquis is essentially a poet I elevated my eyebrows in the conventional way and said, "Alas!"—meaning what a pity that a
