And so modern and exquisite a poet as Richard Le Gallienne has had much to say metrically of the follies of attempting to regulate by law the natural appetites of man. He sounds a warning in this tragic-comic ballade, spurning the busy-body reformers:
They took away your drink from you,
The kind old humanizing glass;
Soon they will take tobacco too,
And next they’ll take our demi-tasse.
Don’t say, “The bill will never pass,”
Nor this my warning word disdain;
You said it once, you silly ass—
Don’t make the same mistake again.
We know them now, the bloodless crew,
We know them all too well, alas!
There’s nothing that they wouldn’t do
To make the world a Bible class;
Though against bottled beer or Bass
I search the sacred text in vain
To find a whisper—by the Mass!
Don’t make the same mistake again.
Beware these legislators blue,
Pouring their moral poison-gas
On all the joys our fathers knew;
The very flowers in the grass
Are safe no more, and, lad and lass,
’Ware the old birch-rod and the cane!
Here comes our modern Hudibras!—
Don’t make the same mistake again.
ENVOI
Prince, vanished is the rail of brass,
So mark me well and my refrain—
Tobacco next! you silly ass,
Don’t make the same mistake again.
It would be sad indeed to lose such a song as “Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes!” How much poorer the garden of Poetry would be without such bibulous planters of rhyme as Burns and Poe and Verlaine! I suppose the paid Puritans would have even our poets walk the humdrum way, so that we would have no news of life from taverns and inns. The picturesque vagabond, the rapscallion son of song must be pulled in from the pleasant highways and made to “conform.”
Conform to what? A three-room flat with kitchenette and running water, and a clerk’s desk downtown, with methodical rides on a heaving Subway train at eight in the morning and again at six in the evening. Well, there are other modes of living that seem a trifle sweeter to the dreamers of dreams, the makers of beauty. Art is not produced like so many bricks or like so many waffles in a waffle iron. It is shot with wonder; and just as the water-lily emerges in its white perfection from dubious slimy stems, so a great work of loveliness may sometimes rise from the meanest sources. That is what your Pharisee does not—and cannot—understand. He would cast us all into one mess-pot, stew us all in the same juice, and bid us all conform to some stupid “ideal” which he has the effrontery to hold before the artist as the ultimate goodness.