According to my theory there is as much room for short-distance poetry as for the kind that rings around the world for centuries.
As I look over this small collection, I am impressed most with its clear sincerity, in feeling and expression. These verses are not cooked—they grew.
Then I feel anew the range of interests of the modern singer—so swiftly widening, so intensely human, and yet so sympathetic with nature. Democracy in literature is a good thing; not only in subject matter but in universal participation.
So that the contribution be genuine, the real speech of an honest soul, it has its own place in the literature of the day; and that is evidently the case with Philemon's Verses.
*
"The Lords of High Decision" is a title more high-sounding than descriptive. If the story had been called "The Slaves of Low Decision" it would be more recognizable.
Here is a man who wabbles through some thirty years of life without coming to any decision at all; a woman who at no time had any decision; another who decided wrong, then right, then wrong again, and was finally let out by an accident; a first-class pitcher who gives up his chosen field to be a chauffeur and general attache of the wabbler, and finally loses his life to save another man—perhaps he was a Lord of High Decision.
Perhaps Paddock, the settlement-running clergyman was. Or Walsh,—the suppressed parent. Colonel Craighill, the father of the Wabbler, is well drawn, evidently from nature.
A highly Episcopalian attitude toward divorce is taken; the heroine, who has been for some years free of a husband casually married in youth, is led to see her duty in going back to him; even though she deeply loves another man. As her ex-husband has more sense than she, he refuses to accept this living sacrifice. She succeeds in giving up something, however, for her lover, a man of considerable wealth, makes his proposal in this wise:
"I know I ask a great deal when I ask you to give up your work for me—and yet I ask it. Remember, there is no gratitude in this—you are a woman, and I am a man—and I love you."