But, for a long while, he labored in Crane’s pages, without discovering the secret flame of spiritual insight that others had spoken of so confidently, and he began to suspect that the profundity which had allured so many minds was simply the fatal lure of the weirdly incomprehensible, which is the inspiration of a good many schools of art and new religions. He had looked for a burst of spiritual light that should spur his tired imagination to renewed efforts in setting forth the superior qualities of a certain brand of coal tar soap which was the inspiration of his Muse for so much a week. He sank into the rocker by the fire, and fell into a mood of despondent reminiscence, weaving all the sad strands of his life into haunting fancies. Then, as he says in his letter, a change suddenly came over him, and he sprang up feeling oppressed and dizzy with a flood of crimson thoughts that inspired his brain.—Ed.

Here is his account of what happened.

There is something irresistible about this new mysticism in poetry, which those who have not pondered over its potent fascinations cannot understand. It seizes upon the mind suddenly and without warning. For years all my dreams of literary achievement and fame had lain buried, and as I thought, a little sadly, dead—strangled by cruel circumstance and devoured by an ever increasing family. I had become completely reconciled to writing on tar soap and other commodities. But all of a sudden my thoughts seemed to plunge into an abyss of mystical yearnings after the impossible and infinite, and then I recalled some of Crane’s verses with a new and vivid realization of their photographic fidelity to perplexity of mind. Then, to my amazement, I felt the divine afflatus rise overpoweringly within me, and for the first time in my life I produced two lines which rhymed. They ran as follows:

A goblin hung on to the horn of the moon

A-singing a love song composed by a coon.

I had never performed such a feat as this in my whole life before, for even in my hours of transcendent ambition I had recognized the essentially prosaic bent of my mind. I had always expected to be a great prose writer, and I had felt a rather indulgent condescension toward contemporary poets—especially those of my acquaintance. I used to think prose was the only vehicle of modern thought, and that all the great poets were dead. But when a man finds himself beginning to lisp in poetry at a belated age, his views on the significance of modern poetry are apt to undergo some important modification.

I thought this couplet a very fair beginning; but no well rounded thought would come that had any relevance to the goblin, the moon or the love song. So I leave the couplet to stand by itself as a picture, suggestive of the fact that ambition may miss its mark, but a love song will surely live in some heart. My next attempt—for I was on fire with symbolic rhapsody—was a little more successful. I submit it without comment. The lesson is so obvious.

I saw a bleeding head grinning,

It grinned at me; I grinned at it,

In fact, we both grinned irreverently.

But the smiling sun shone on!

I find the longer one delves in mystic poetry the deeper philosophical problems one can sound in a very few poignant flashes of symbolic description. Here is one of my happiest efforts:

As my worn soul lay wriggling in the dust,

I cried aloud to God in indignation

That he had so mistreated me;

But God only laughed, until He’d like to bust

And pointed out that dirt was all creation.

I turned off a number of other things, quite as profound and fantastical, and I find that in mystical poetry the Deity lends Himself to picturesque treatment a good deal more readily than any other person or subject of immediate and contemporary interest. So that in this way it leads the mind of the masses away from the frivolities of the hour to the larger considerations of life and destiny, and chastens folly with thoughts of the over-ruling immutable providence that is too often forgotten in the bustling cities of civilization.

I send you only one more piece, to which I have given the dignity of a title. It is “The Dissatisfactions of Luxury,” and is in two stanzas:

I heard a man mumbling in the horrid silence of the night.

He was chaffering aloud with the good God;

But God in the darkness vouchsafed no sign.

And I asked him, scoffing, what he desired of the Omnipotent.

“I am rich, I am Plutus,” answered he, angrily,

“And I am bargaining for the moon.”

“And why do you want it?” asked I in amaze.

“Because I am tired of all my other toys.”

“And the price?” asked I, scoffing, for I bore the badge of Lazarus.

“Untold millions, heaped up to Heaven’s gate.”

“Fool!” I cried in bitter derision;

“Offer the good God your corrupt soul.”

I can make affidavit I never wrote a line of poetry before in my life, and so I am sorely troubled at this writing. This is a crisis in my career. I do not know whether to continue in my employment as a writer of soap and medicine “ads,” or to devote myself wholly to the service of the Muses. The question is, am I a genius, or is this new mystic poetry, which is so uplifting and inspiring, merely some delusive imposture of bubbling verbiage?

Jonathan Penn.

THE YELLOW GIRL.

The advent of the Yellow Girl—the mad, fantastic siren who is beginning to haunt the hoardings and our dreams—is calling forth a good deal of an outcry among those who hold the cure of morals in the English public press. It is rather a difficult undertaking to attempt to import a ray or two of cheer and fantasy into the gloom and drab of English life, but some of the English artists, touched with the spirit of the age, have had the audacity to import the Yellow Girl from Paris. There she is—on every hoarding and bare wall a gleam of light and color and deviltry, under those dull gray skies, that must awaken a flash of fantasy here and there in some toil-worn heart in the crowd, and cheer some fog born pessimists who would fain forget the necessities and narrowness of their drab existence. Instead of the old monotonous clumsy pictures and unescapable rivers of hideous black and white catch words, that seemed to emphasize the limited horizon and freedom of the millions bound to spend their whole lives in the great cities, there are ten thousand variations of the Eternal Feminine in her latest glamor of gold and yellow, and even under the pall of a London sky, the very walls open out into the land of Fantasia.

But the moralists are shocked, and they are fearful for the future intellectual and moral stability of England, simply because the Yellow Girl is the embodiment of an artist’s dream of the modern Circe—a reminiscence of the Bacchantic dreams that used to fill the poets’ heads in the old days, before they were all become so very respectable. It is the artist who now puts a little diversion and unreal distraction from the invading ugliness and melancholy of modern metropolitan life into the passing current of our fancies. The poets used to serve this purpose, but they are all so anxious to stand well with Mrs. Grundy nowadays, whereas Mrs. Grundy and the artists have never really arrived at any amicable understanding. Old England and civilization are in no danger from the Yellow Girl.

The moralists, unluckily, have no sense of humor, and so they fail to perceive that the masses accept the Yellow Girl as an unreal fantastic abstraction without any sort of relevance to the reality of life, which yet stirs the imagination and puts a little splash of fitful joy into reality.

A writer in one of the leading English journals assails the Yellow Girl in a tremendous tirade, that shows the English intellectual incapacity for appreciation of the light and good humored caricature of the superficial aspects of life, which, by exaggeration, puts the permanent and beautiful things of life into their true proportions and tempers sanity of thought with a gleam of insight into the fantastic range of human nature that lies always just below the drab surface of the show of things. The English mind only seems to understand the coarse and brutal caricature of Hogarth, with its savage insistence upon a moral. Hogarth was too great an artist and observer, however, not to have enjoyed and made capital of the Yellow Girl himself, if he were alive today. The caricature of today is less obvious, and we may thank our stars it is. The moralists, like the poor, we have always with us, and they make modern life one perpetual din that leaves us no time for thought, meditation or merriment. We should be grateful that the hoarding places do not assail us at every turn with the sort of caricature that bites into the heart and soul. There is quite enough sadness in life in the all absorbing struggle for existence, and I think that the Yellow Girl is one of those Providential gifts that keep human life sweet and sane in the stress of the heartless strife for bread and riches. She is the creation of the law of compensation that gives us love and poetry, dreams and religion, and every other refuge from life. The moralists and the realists and the rest of them who would forever pin our minds in the narrow and sordid round of reality would drive us all to madness if they had their way. The fantasy of art and poetry keep life balanced and sane. Human nature requires this outlet from the horrid nightmare of sordid sorrow it has created in civilization. The so-called mad poets and unhinged artists give us that distraction from ourselves and our monomaniac absorption in money-making that saves the world from becoming one immense lunatic asylum.

The English moralist describes the Yellow Girl in somewhat of the fierce contumely of an ancient Hebrew prophet—but the Yellow Girl is not really to be spoken of in the same breath with Ashtaroth. She is but the phantom of dreams that pictured or unpictured lives ever in the heart of youth. But she does not rule life as did Aphrodite. The moralists should remember that youth and sorrow must have their dreams. And all the commonplace virtues of domesticity are fed upon them. The English writer bemoans the decadence of soberness in life in this fashion: