IV
In his own estimation Field was distinctively a Western poet; he gave to his poetry the name "Western verse"; and he refused the offers of Dana and others because he was not at all in sympathy with the Eastern ideals. To quote his biographer, he felt that Chicago "was as far East as he could make his home without coming within the influence of those social and literary conventions that have squeezed so much of genuine literary flavor out of our literature."[144]
What New York might have made of Field we may learn, perhaps, from the career of Henry Cuyler Bunner, for nearly twenty years the most brilliant poetic wit in the East. He, too, had approached literature from the journalistic entrance. At eighteen he had left school to begin an apprenticeship on the brilliant but short-lived Arcadian, and at twenty-two he was editor of the newly established Puck, a position that he held until his death at forty-one.
No man ever turned off verse and prose with more facility or in greater quantity. "The staff of the paper was very small, and little money could be spent for outside contributions; and there were many weeks when nearly half the whole number was written by Bunner."[145] Like Field, he could write a poem while the office boy, who had brought the order, stood waiting for the copy to carry back with him. For more than ten years he furnished nearly all the humorous verse for the periodical, besides numberless paragraphs, short stories, and editorials. But he was more fastidious than Field, inasmuch as he kept this journalistic material strictly unconnected with his name. It was a thing alone of the editorial office, no more to be mingled with his more literary product than Charles Lamb's India office books were to be brought into his Elia essays. The greater number of those who laughed over the verses of the whimsical "V. Hugo Dusenberry, professional poet," never once dreamed that he was H. C. Bunner, author of the exquisite lyrics in Airs from Arcady and Rowen, and the carefully wrought stories—French in their atmosphere and their artistic finish—Short Sixes and Love in Old Cloathes. The skilful parodies and timely renderings, the quips and puns—all the voluminous mélange, indeed, of the poetic Yorick—lie buried now in the files of Puck. Their creator refused to republish them, and we to-day can but yield to his wish and judge him only by that which he himself selected for permanence.
Judged by this, Bunner undoubtedly is our chief writer of vers de société, our laureate of the trivial. He is restrained, refined, faultless. He is of the artificial world, where fans flutter and dancers glide and youth is perennial. Triolets penciled in the program while the orchestra breathed its melody, epigrams over the tea-cups, conceits for a fan, amours de voyage, lines written on the menu, amoretti, valentines—these are his work, and no one has done them more daintily or with more skill of touch. Trifles they are, to be sure, yet Bunner, like every master of the form, makes of them more than trifles. A hint of tears there may be, the faintest breath of irony, the suspicion, vague as an intuition, of satire or facetiousness or philosophy, the high spirits and the carelessness of youth, yet a flash here and there into the deeps of life as, for instance, in "Betrothed" and "A Poem in the Programme," and "She was a Beauty in the Days when Madison was President."
The French forms, imported echoes of Dobson and Lang and Gosse—ballades, rondels, rondeaux, and the like, that so bewitched the younger poets of the mid-eighties—found in Bunner perhaps their most skilful American devotee. Perhaps no one but he has ever succeeded in English with the chant royal, or has found it possible to throw into that most trivial of all verse forms, triolets, a throb of life, as in "A Pitcher of Mignonette":
A pitcher of mignonette
In a tenement's highest casement:
Queer sort of flower-pot—yet
That pitcher of mignonette
Is a garden in heaven set,
To the little sick child in the basement—
The pitcher of mignonette,
In the tenement's highest casement.
The period, especially in its later years, has run abundantly to these trivial, though difficult, forms of verse. As poetry ceased more and more to be a thing of vision and compelling power, it became more and more a thing of daintiness and brilliancy. The American Lyra Elegantiarum for the period has been more sparkling and abundant than the English, more even than the French. John Godfrey Saxe (1816–1887) belongs almost wholly to the days of Holmes and Lowell, but the greater number of our trivial makers fall into the group that was active during the closing quarter of the century. To mention all of them would be to call the roll of the younger American poets. Perhaps the most noteworthy, however, are Mary Mapes Dodge (1838–1905), whose dainty and tender "The Minuet" gives her a place in the choir; James Jeffrey Roche (1847–1908); Walter Learned (1847——); Richard Kendall Munkittrick (1853–1911); Samuel Minturn Peck (1854——), in many respects the most delightful of the group; Clinton Scollard (1860——); John Kendrick Bangs (1862——), and such modern instances as Oliver Herford, Gelett Burgess, and Carolyn Wells. One might, indeed, collect a notable anthology of vers de société from the files of Life alone.