That aid to love from quaint Japan- Ah! me, if you but only knew The toil of setting out to hew From words-as I shall try to do— A lyric verse. Fleet metric ghosts I must pursue, And reckon rimes and think and plan Some of the "Songs of the City" are richly original, but in view of the later Mencken the lyric "Il Penseroso" is more significant: Love's song is sung in ragtime now The soft reproach and yearning up-turned gaze The poet of twenty-one already was passing into the sear and yellow leaf. Romantic love was made in knightly fashion once with stately vows and tall vocabulary, but now, alas, Now to his girl the ragtime lover says, The while he strums his marked-down mandolin, "Is you ma lady love?" and she, his girl, Makes answer thus: "Ah is!" Gadzooks! it makes me sad! That any one-except me, and that recentlyever read a line of the book there is no evidence. Evidently it is still considered valuable in certain quarters: the only copy in New York City, so far as I could discover, was stolen from the public library a year ago. The book is extinct, almost totally extinct. When it was issued it made no more impression upon the reading public than if it were a schoolgirl's yearnings published by Badger. The title was effeminate and timid; apologetic even. Had it been, say, "Hell after 8:15," some poor devil of a newspaper reviewer might have glimpsed it in the heap, but "Ventures into Verse"-it is to be rated in literary statistics as still-born. Yet show me a more promising bit of poetic workmanship put to press that year by an American. Even the poet must live. Henry Louis Mencken. became, of all things, a reporter on a city daily; a Baltimore daily. The muse drooped and faded and disappeared. Journalism is the antonym of poetry, as completely as city is the antonym of country. To set a young lyric poet to gathering gutter-sweepings and offal for the maw of the "Gomorrah Gazette" of to-day is like harnessing an aeroplane to a swill-cart. Imagine a poet, say Swinburne, put to slavery under an American city editor whose ideal of a perfect paper is a front page covered, half of it, with red block letters and screamers. Send him out for material, say to the East Side. Contrast if you can what he might bring back with this recent picture of Swinburne by Max Beerbohm: "He spoke to us of his walk; spoke not in the strain of a man who had been taking his daily exercise on Putney Heath, but rather in that of a Peri who had at long last been suffered to pass through Paradise. And rather than that he spoke, would I say that he cooingly and flutingly sang of his experience. The wonders of this morning's wind and sun and clouds were expressed in a flow of words so right and sentences so perfectly balanced that they would have seemed pedantic had they not been clearly as spontaneous as the wordless notes of a bird in song." Swinburne was a poet and not a journalist. Though a reporter Mencken was still a poet, but he was in protest now, in plaintive protest. At twenty-one, despite the newspaper game, he was still not wholly disillusioned. Kipling he called "Master," but he bemoaned his lapse into twentiethcenturyism. The poet of his dream was turning into "poetaster," but perhaps it was not too late to recall him. He voiced his disappointment in a "Ballade of Protest." I wish I had space for it all: Sing us again in rhymes that ring, In Master-Voice that lives and thrills; Of temple bells and jungle trills: Master, regard the plaint we bring, The newspaper game is as swiftly changing in its players and their positions as collegiate foot-ball. Youngsters are continually dropping from the lineup, or soaring after intense periods into specialized leadership. After four years young Mencken was city editor-this in his native Baltimore-and a year later he was dramatic critic. No more poetry; criticism now, criticism for the theater pages: actors, actresses, first nights, new plays. But the young critic reporter's ambition soared above the newspaper column. In 1905-he was twenty-five then and sensitive for revolt-he essayed a volume of dramatic criticism, a study of the new Heliogabalus of the British Parnassus, Bernard Shaw, the first full-length picture to be drawn of the man. Brilliant work for a youngster, but it was mild of tone and it was received mildly. Its neglect set its author to thinking, and the final result was revolutionary. Henry Louis Mencken became H. L. Mencken. In a moment of confession, rare indeed for the man, he has told us of the evolution: "Aspiring, toward the end of my nonage, to the black robes of a dramatic critic, I took counsel of an ancient whose service went back to the days of Our American Cousin, asking him what qualities were chiefly demanded by the craft," and the ancient told him above all things else to be interesting: "all else is dross." It would do him, he conceded, no real harm to read the books of the great critics or even the works of masters like Shakspere, "But, unless you can make people read your criticisms, you may as well shut up your shop. And the only way to make them read you is to give them something exciting." "You suggest, then," I ventured, "a certain ferocity ?" "I do," replied my venerable friend. "Read George Henry Lewes, and see how he did it-sometimes with. a bladder on a string, usually with a meat-ax. Knock somebody in the head every day-if not an actor, then |