OTHER MATTERS, SACRED AND PROFANE
The World's Musqueteer: To Marshal Foch
We Are With France
Satan: 1920
Under Which King?
Man, the Destroyer
The Long Purposes of God
Ballade to a Departing God
Ballade of the Absent Guest
Tobacco Next
Ballade of the Paid Puritan
The Overworked Ghost
The Valiant Girls
Not Sour Grapes
Ballade of Reading Bad Books
Ballade of the Making of Songs
Ballade of Running Away with Life
To a Contemner of the Past
INTRODUCTION
One Spring day in London, long before the invention of freak verse and Freudism, I was standing in front of the Cafe Royal in Regent Street when there emerged from its portals the most famous young writer of the day, the Poet about whose latest work "The Book Bills of Narcissus" all literary London was then talking.
Richard Le Gallienne was the first real poet I had ever laid eyes upon in the flesh and it seemed to my rapt senses that this frock-coated young god, with the classic profile and the dark curls curving from the impeccable silk "tile" that surmounted them as curve the acanthus leaves of a Corinthian capital, could be none other than Anacreon's self in modern shape.
I can see Le Gallienne now, as he steps across the sunlit sidewalk and with gesture Mercurian hails the passing Jehu. I can even hear the quick clud of the cab doors as the smartly turning hansome snatches from my view the glass-dimmed face I was not to behold again until years later at the house of a mutual friend in New York.
In another moment the swiftly moving vehicle was dissolved in the glitter of Regent Street and I fell to musing upon the curious interlacement of parts in this picture puzzle of life.
Here was a common Cabby, for the time being combining in himself the several functions of guide-book, chattel-mortgage and writ of habeas corpus on the person of the most popular literary idol of the hour and all for the matter of maybe no more than half a crown, including the pourboire!
Who would not have rejoiced to change places with that cabman! And how might not Pegasus have envied that cab-horse!
* * * * * *