Critical Woodcuts/Don Marquis, Poet
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 man who is essentially one thing should be devoting himself, however successfully, to something else.
My curiosity, however, was aroused, for I had sat once within eyeshot of Don Marquis for an hour or so; and having in surreptitious sidelong glances studied his bulk—I like to see letters represented by men and women whom the wind won't blow away—the silvery grizzle of his solid head, his tawny temperamental skin, and a certain gravity of the ensemble—a gravity illumined by occasional lambencies of smoldering eyes—I had wondered then what else he was besides the creator of the aspiring Hermione, the Red-Haired Lady and such Falstaffian poetry as the Old Soak. Something else, I was sure; for he was a visible reminder of George Meredith's discovery that all the great wits have been grave men. Several feet away one could feel that there was some one there. If I had possessed the sang-froid of the representative of the press who interviewed the sanguinary Cleopatra, in "Famous Love Affairs," idly flicking a slave, from time to time, from her roof garden to the crocodiles below as she chatted with the journalist, I might then and there have boldly accosted the daimonic mask and have plucked at the heart of his mystery, saying, "What are you, essentially?"
That sort of pike and cutlass boarding of a personality might have been attempted by Mme de Stael or by the late Amy Lowell; and, of course, if they had attempted it they would have got away with it. But I was deterred by two considerations. In the first place, the natural savage intrepidity of my character has been mollified by contact with belles-lettres: I have read "Hermione," and know what arrows its author has in his quiver for persons who go about
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inquiring with earnest frivolity into the mysteries of art and into the natures which "we best give the clouds to keep." In the second place, I doubted whether Don Marquis could have answered my question if I had ventured to put it to him, and if he had cared to try.
He interested me, indeed, because he is, I suspect, like most modernized and well sophisticated men, a good bit puzzled himself by what he is. In several of the most striking of his personal poems he exhibits a kind of desperate amusement and bewilderment over the classical task of self-knowledge. Something—what is it?—has knocked our tight, snug little personalities to pieces. We see our fragments strewn all about us; but where is our core? In "Heir and Serf" Don Marquis speaks of his Self as "a chance loose knot in the skein of life where myriad selves combine"; he feels a heart quivering "with hatred not mine own"; he thinks of his Self as a house haunted by old doubts, old faiths, old lusts of the blood, unreconciled, and he ends his rummaging from basement to garret of that ancestral dwelling of spirit and flesh which he inhabits with a blank question—"What is this Self of mine?"
If the occupant of the tenement doesn't know, what should I learn by knocking at his door? Shall I turn to another poem called "The Struggle"? It describes a terrific combat with a spirit in a Dantean "dark valley" under frowning cliffs, a combat terminating in the death of the fell adversary, but—"He that lay upon the ground was—I!" That suggests much. So does the poem called "The Jesters," which speaks of disillusions and acrid tears and numb moments of despair, drowned in "an incorrigible mirth." So does the poem called "A Gentleman of Fifty Soliloquizes," which bids affection stand a little farther off:
Then, should it change, no heart will bleed or burn.
Give me your wits. I want no heart of thine.
You'll ask too much of life-blood in return.
We foiled self-seekers, we shattered fragments of personality, have devised ways to conceal our frustration and to keep impertinent curiosity from ascertaining whether the inner chamber of our lives contains a shrine or a tomb, or whether it is merely vacant. As for Don Marquis, he walks habitually in a defensive cloud of the humorous butterflies that his brain gives birth to; behind his whimsy moods and his satirical laughter he is, you will find if you pry into the matter, reticent—for a lyric poet, very reticent—about himself.
The only legitimate way to get at these reticent authors is to sit down before their complete works and read them straight through. It is infinitely better sport than cross-word puzzles, I conjecture, never having tried the latter. It is like big game hunting, when you get a soul at bay. When you have done that, you are in a position to tell the author all sorts of things about himself which he doesn't know—some of which may be true. I have tried this method with Don Marquis, and shall report my discoveries presently. But first let us consider the immediate occasion for subjecting a humorist to treatment so cruel and so unusual.
The occasion is this: Don Marquis has just proved by the severest of tests that he is a poet of very nearly the rarest sort—a dramatic poet. He has published a drama of poignant beauty and memorable reality on the betrayal, trial and crucifixion of Jesus, "The Dark Hours." Whether any other poet in America could have approached his achievement on this theme, I do not know. No one has. He has accomplished what I had thought was impossible: He has thoroughly dramatized the chief narrative of the New Testament, developing with marked originality several of the principal characters, notably Judas, and freely inventing incidents and speeches for subordinate figures, yet—to my sense, which is reasonably sensitive—without striking a note which is not in harmony with the tone and atmosphere of the Gospels. In the case of the central figure, he attempts no interpretation that devi ates a hair's breadth from the Christian tradition. The character and personality of the Son of Man, the Son of God, are left quite inviolate; and this makes the more marvelous the congruity of his own developments. His feeling about the delicate ethical and artistic questions involved in handling this material he discusses with admirable taste and insight.
I have almost nothing strictly parallel to compare with the effect of "The Dark Hours" except a Passion Play which I saw a few years ago solemnly presented in a canyon of southern California, with the Crucifixion dim on the hilltop above it. With its elaborate reproduction of Palestinian dwellings, costumes and scenery, it was pictorially correct, like the colored illustrations in a modern Bible, of which it constantly reminded me, and the lines were gravely and eloquently recited, yet somehow it seemed remote and it left me cold—as cold as a colored picture in a Bible.
"The Dark Hours," on the other hand, even silently read, is of a seizing and transporting reality. Its tremendous dramatic stress is intensely felt. It puts one there—in ancient not modern Palestine. I am there—with Judas, with Peter, with Lazarus. I feel within myself the suspicious spleen of the high priest, the impotent deprecation of Pilate, the anguish of Procla, the nonchalance of the Roman soldiers gambling for the seamless garment, all the troubled confusion of blind men, lepers, and possessed men healed, the mocking scoffs and panic blood-lust of the rabble—and the stark solitude of one crying: "It is finished." As for the question whether this was indeed the Son of God who was crucified, at the end of the play one is facing it again with freshly astonished mind and senses, like the centurion standing there aghast at the foot of the cross. I believe this to be a great tragedy, greatly conceived and written with austere sincerity. When it is adequately produced, as I hope it may be, it should affect us as the tragedies of Æschylus and Sophocles affected the Greeks—religiously.
Socrates argued all night on one occasion to prove that the type of mind best adapted for tragedy is also the type of mind best adapted for comedy. If you reflect just a little about "The Dark Hours" you recover from your first surprise at the thought of its coming out of a mind which had just produced "The Old Soak's History of the World." In a sense which Charles Lamb understood when he shocked Carlyle by expressing regret that the Royalists didn't hang Milton, the Crucifixion, the execution of Socrates—all such incidents in history may be conceived of as tragic and stupendous jokes. In order fully to appreciate them one must be endowed with a comic poet's comprehension of the immensity of human folly, which is the prime source of all tragedy. To put the matter in more familiar terms, no one can adequately know how dreadful the World War was who does not at the same time adequately know how absurd it was, how ridiculous, what an inexhaustible subject for the laughter of gods and men. In Don Marquis the tragi-comic spirit is very strong. He respects gods because he knows fools so well, so intimately; indeed, he knows them so affectionately that, as he suggests somewhere, he will be found fighting on their side "against the millennium" till the Judgment Day.
But it is time we had a little more definite information about the author of this notable religious drama.
Don Marquis is a typical New Yorker—that is to say, he was born in Walnut, Bureau County, Ill.—some sixty miles southwest of F. P. A., and three years earlier. Where and when he was educated I do not know. The book with which he seems to be most familiar is the Bible. Next to that, I should say the most obvious influences traceable in his prose and poetical styles and in the form of his humor are Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer," the various yarns of Frank Stockton, O. Henry, perhaps H. C. Bunner, the poems of Swinburne, Kipling and Arnold, and an extensive study of prosody.
His first published book, "Danny's Own Story," 1912, is a picturesque narrative with an earthy Mid-Western flavor, Illinoisian, and much in the vein of Huck Finn, whose domain lies in the same rich humor belt, to the south. This is the soft drawling tune of it:
Old Hank mostly was truthful when lickered up, for that matter, and she knowed it, fur he couldn't think up no lies excepting a gineral denial when intoxicated up to the gills. . . . A man has jest naturally got to have something to cuss around and boss, so's to keep himself from finding out he don't amount to nothing. Leastways, most men is like that. And Hank, he didn't amount to much, and he kind of knowed it, way down deep in his inmost gizzards, and it were a comfort to him to have me around.
In 1915 Don Marquis made the first collection of his serious poems, under the title "Dreams and Dust." In 1916 he uttered a farcical Stocktonian yarn, "The Cruise of the Jasper B.," which relates the adventures of a romantic journalist attempting to sail his schooner, scow or canal boat—it isn't quite clear which—from her moorings on a brick pier in Long Island. In the same year appeared "Hermione and her Little Group of Serious Thinkers," asking themselves at bedtime many heart-searching questions. In 1919 a volume of "Prefaces"—thirty-two of them, introducing A Check Book, A Cook Book. The Works of Billy Sunday, etc. In 1921 appeared the first records of "The Old Soak"; also a notable collection of short stories, "Carter and Other People," and a volume of humorous verse, "Noah an' Jonah an' Cap'n John Smith." Next year, 1922, a second collection of serious verse, "Poems and Portraits," in which Don Marquis takes the war seriously, and adds thirty-three satires with teeth. In 1922, "The Revolt of the Oyster," containing some capital stories of dogs and boys and the ripe tale of "The Saddest Man"; also "Sonnets to a Red-Haired Lady." In 1924, "The Old Soak's History of the World," "The Dark Hours," and, with Christopher Morley, "Pandora Lifts the Lid."
There are some things among these fourteen volumes of a sort which I never read except in the line of duty. With me, a very little Stocktonian extravaganza goes a long way. So does a very little of the ordinary run of humorous verse. Practically all the rest goes very well, including the satires in "Savage Portraits," which are as neat and sharp as those of the Roman masters. But I enjoy Don Marquis most when he is enjoying himself most, and that is obviously when his imagination is at work and he is creating something, if it is only—a prolific cat, a loquacious cockroach, or a special kind of thoroughbred dog: "Any dog can be full of just one kind of thoroughbred blood. That's nothing! But Spot here has got more different kinds of thoroughbred blood in him than any dog you ever saw." I admire the creative energy with which Don Marquis steers his elderly inebriate through his barroom reminiscences; I prefer the Old Soak's gorgeous, glowing historical style in his account of Ancient History to that of Gibbon, Wells or Van Loon, and I admire immensely the masterly poetizing stroke in the invention of "that damn little athyiss, Hennery Withers." That is Shakespearean—no less.
But previous to "The Dark Hours" I suspect the most memorable writing that Don Marquis has done is in eight or ten short stories: "Old Man Murtrie," "Never Say Die," "McDermott," "Looney, the Mutt" and "The Locked Box"—in "Carter and Other People"; and "The Saddest Man" and the dog and boy stories in "The Revolt of the Oyster." In reading this group of stories I have no compunctious feeling that I am enjoying humor by the sacrifice of a poet; for in the wider sense of the word these stories are poetry. Several of them are, I think, the kind of poetry in which Don Marquis expresses himself most adequately, that is, tragi-comic poetry.
Take Old Man Murtrie dying behind his prescription counter in a Brooklyn drug store, with God and the Devil disputing as to which of them has got to take in his miserable soul; first neither of them wants him; then both of them want him, and Death peevishly urges them to settle it somehow—pure poetry! Take the story of the man who, when he has killed his wife out of jealousy set in motion by the Locked Box, finds that it contains only a tender letter to him, marked "Not to be opened till after my death," confessing that now, after five years of marriage, she has begun to love him passionately; she has sealed the confession only because she does not wish him to know there was ever a time when she did not love him. Take the story of "Looney the Mutt": a half-witted tramp who has lost his pal seeks him, seeks him, following false clews, scoffed at, mocked at, fondly, eagerly, hungrily—seeks him as a man seeks a God who forever eludes him.
We are, I think, on the main trail that runs from "The Dark Hours" back to "Dreams and Dust." In 1915, when this volume was published, Don Marquis was both technically and essentially a poet. I am struck by the sort of poet he was then. There is in this first collection little indication of historical passions, little indication of locality, no very particular or specific attachment to "Nature," and no significant love-interest. The dominant note is an almost Arnoldian concern about God and the soul and their relations in a world which has lost faith in supernatural guidance.
Whenever he turns from polishing a rondeau or a triolet, which he does very nicely, to grappling with a theme, he is idealistic and religious. He sounds the silver trumpet to "paladins, paladins, youth, noble-hearted." He scornfully bids farewell to the "lost leader." He sees that man has "at his noblest an air of something more than man." He is the receiver of mystical intimations. He speculates on the mystery of the Self. Disillusioned, he yet sees man as the god-seeker, the god-maker, and he respects man's aspiration, in the face of "the hissing hate of fools, thorns, and the ingrate's scoff"—
And low at the shrine where my brothers bow,
There will I bow too;
For no form of a god, and no fashion
Man has made in his desperate passion
But is worthy some worship of mine;
Not too hot with gross belief,
Nor yet too cold with pride,
I will bow me down where my brothers bow,
Humble—but open-eyed!
The only trouble about bowing down "open-eyed" is that presently you notice every one else has his eyes open, too; and you see such funny things going on around you, that the first thing you know you are conducting a Column. And if you will insist upon giving people a choice between Jesus and the Old Soak—well, you know what people are.