(7) Be neat, truthful, civil and on the square.
(8) Preach the Gospel of Beauty.
These appeared at the head of a little pamphlet entitled “Rhymes to be Traded for Bread,” the only baggage he carried besides a further printed statement called “The Gospel of Beauty.” In smiling defense of his course Mr. Lindsay has said that up to date there has been no established method for implanting beauty in the heart of the average American. “Until such a way has been determined upon by a competent committee, I must be pardoned for taking my own course and trying any experiment I please.” Mr. Lindsay has not limited himself to this way of circulating his ideas. He has posted his poems on billboards, recited them from soap boxes and on the vaudeville stage, and has even descended to select club audiences. He has, however, not allowed the calls of the lyceum managers to convert him from a poet to an entertainer.
His books have been six in number and, according to his own advice, are to be read in the following order: “A Handy Guide for Beggars,” "Adventures while Preaching the Gospel of Beauty,” “The Art of the Moving Picture,” “General William Booth Enters into Heaven,” “The Congo,” and “The Chinese Nightingale.” The first three are prose statements of his social and religious philosophy; the second three are poems. His seventh volume is announced as “The Golden Book of Springfield.” In its title it is a reaffirmation of what appears in many of his poems and of what he stated in “The Gospel of Beauty” (1912): “The things most worth while are one’s own hearth and neighborhood. We should make our own home and neighborhood the most democratic, the most beautiful, and the holiest in the world.”
The obvious first point about the poetry of Mr. Lindsay is that in it he lives up to his own instructions. He keeps quite as close to his own district as Mr. Masters and Mr. Frost do and he indulges in as wide a play of imagination as does Mr. Robinson. In the rôle of an apostle he tries to implant beauty in the heart of the average American. Yet “implant” is not the proper word; his own word is “establish,” for he re-enforces a latent sense of beauty in hearts that are unconscious of it and he reveals it in the lives of those whom the average American overlooks or despises. On the one hand, he carries whole audiences into an actual participation in his recitals and, on the other, he discloses the “scum of the earth” as poets and mystics.
Thus “General William Booth Enters into Heaven” tells of Booth’s apotheosis as it is seen and felt by a Salvation Army sympathizer. Booth with his big bass drum, followed by a motley slum crowd, leads to the most impressively magnificent place within the ken of a small-town Middle Westerner. This is an Illinois courthouse square. As a matter of fact, it is bleak, treeless, dust-blown, mud-moated—the dome of the courthouse in the middle, flanked on all sides with ugly brick blocks and alternating wooden shacks with corrugated iron false fronts; but this is splendor to the mind of the narrator. And so in all reverence he says:
(Sweet flute music)
Jesus came from out the court-house door,
Stretched his hands above the passing poor.
Booth saw not, but led his queer ones there