Baltimore Evening Sun (9 September 1911): 6.

THE FREE LANCE

From a moralist with no jot or tittle of a strong man’s delight in honest swearing:

Profanity is nothing more (less?) than unreasonable and unmanly sin.

If this earnest virtuoso of virtue will kindly furnish me with his theological reasons for regarding swearing as a sin, giving chapter and verse, I shall be very glad to embalm them in print. Also, I shall be glad to give him a good five-cent cigar.

The American language, so loose, so lovely:

Jobs ain’t been working none lately. The arabin’ business ain’t hardly nothin’ compared to what it used to be.


Deception is the misdemeanor that may be justly laid to Miss Maurine Hathaway, “the poetess of the pines,” for she gives the appellation of “Passion Lyrics” to her collection of pomes and incloses the volume in a cover marked “asbestos,” and yet the pomes themselves, when the eager reader gets to them, turn out to be very ladylike and harmless things, such as any romantic high-school girl might send to a handsome soda water clerk. Such benign chicaneries deserve the highest critical censure. When a reader pays for literary sulphuric acid, he should get it, and not merely dill pickles. If we had wise laws in this republic, it would be forbidden to put an asbestos cover upon any save a truly white-hot book. Meanwhile, in the absence of such legislation, the only thing to do is to express pained surprise that one so charming as Miss Maurine (her portrait is her frontisilece) should stoop to such subterfuges.


But to the poems. Here is an octet voicing Miss Maurine’s bitter revolt against etiquette:

I want to be free to grasp pleasures I see,
Which a God-given nature impels,
And to scorn what society thrusts upon me,
’Gainst which soul, brain and body rebels.

My soul was not meant to be captive, I know,
And ’twill never be reconciled.
So I tear at the bonds that are holding me so,
For I long to go back to the wild.


Ah, the courage of youth, the impatience of youth, the iconoclasm of youth! Ah, love! Ah, deviltry! Ah, the weltschmerz!


Alas, there is no cure for that thumping fever--no cure save time alone. A slow treatment, but sure. In 20 years, I dare say, Miss Maurine will be writing sedate sonnets in the manner of Alfred Austin, and by the time she is 75 she may be a distinguished hymnodist. The moral, the homiletic note, indeed, is already visible in her verse. For example, in this exquisite apostrophe to Temptation, that viper:

Temptation, thou rank, nauseous weed,
Clad in a flower’s guise,
How prone we are to pluck thee,
Thou’rt lovely to our eyes.

So luscious that we fain would drink
The nectar from thy cup,
But from the depths of grief and pain
And sin thou springeth up.

We crave thy brilliant color
And we cast a lily white
Aside to pull thee from thy stem,
Then, in our mad delight,

We grasp thee--in a moment
Thou’rt withered with a breath.
We hold a faded, poisonous bloom,
Chilled from the stalk of death.


A bitter thought, and yet how true, alas how true! Who has not been tempted? And who has not lived to rue the day? Oh, the matutinal headache! Oh, the waste of money!


To gentler themes--for example, to the high joy of truthfulness. Miss Mary C. Burke deals with it in her “School-Room Echoes,” Lib. 2, fol. 180, a collection of moral strophes for the use of the young. Here we see a thoughtless child galloping across his father’s lovely flower bed, leaving hoof prints innumerable and crushed “tender plants to the ground.” At once remorse eats into his vitals:

“What shall I do?” said he sorrowfully,
“My father’s priceless plants!
He will know that I’ve done some mischief
By my rueful countenance.”


Thinking it over the young varmint decides to confess, and confess he does to the great joy and pride of his papa. Says that noble parent:

You are forgiven, my dear, honest boy,
For your manly truthfulness;
I had no knowledge of the affair,
But you’ve spared me much suspense.

I would not have known what happened to them,
I would here been filled with pain
To find the plants* I prized so highly
Were never to bloom again.

Now you have delivered the open truth;
You knew that it would cause me woe;
But the knowledge of your truthfulness
Will eliminate the blow.

I truly regret the loss of the plants,*
For which I tenderly cared;
But my boy’s brave and candid story,
The loss has almost repaired.

I have found that my son is a hero,
In whom I’ll be confident;
May he always willingly confess,
As in this sad incident.


Sweet, sweet stuff! More in the same chemically pure manner is to be found in “Temperance Torchlights,” by Matilda Erickson, though Miss Erickson herself is not its author, but only its editor. The cigarette and the rum demon, tobacco chewing and wine-bibbing--these are the things Miss Erickson’s doggerel lines lambast. Thus:

Throw that filthy pipe away,
You can never make it pay;
Ever smoking as you go,
Where’s the good? I’d like to know.

Now I say–and ’tis no joke--
Half your plans will turn to smoke;
All you earn from day to day,
You’ll chew up and spit away.


Sweet, sweet stuff! More in the same chemically pure manner is to be found in “Temperance Torchlights,” by Matilda Erickson, though Miss Erickson herself is not its author, but only its editor. The cigarette and the rum demon, tobacco chewing and wine-bibbing--these are the things Miss Erickson’s doggerel lines lambast. Thus:

Throw that filthy pipe away, You can never make it pay; Ever smoking as you go, Where’s the good? I’d like to know.

Now I say–and ’tis no joke-- Half your plans will turn to smoke; All you earn from day to day, You’ll chew up and spit away.


Marvelous spitting, that! The most expensive chewing tobacco on the American market costs 10 cents a plug, and the average American makes $1.50 a day. Would it be possible for one man to chew 15 plugs in 24 hours? I doubt it. The most accomplished tobacco chewer I know–a man distinguished throughout Maryland for his talent–tells me that he averages but 25 plugs a week, or 3.57142 a day. And this man devotes practically his whole time to the art. He is of independent means and chews tobacco as other rich men play golf or collect hand-painted oil paintings. Certainly Miss Erickson’s poet (whose name, by the way, is C. M. Willis) is here stretching the truth a bit. Tobacco chewing may be filthy and disgusting, as the virtuosi of virtue tell us, but it is grossly unfair to call it expensive. On the contrary, it is essentially a sport for the humble–a vice in which the poor man may still make a respectable showing against the plutocrat.

*If the printer makes this word “pants” it’s not my fault. I wrote it “plants,” and “plants” it should be.