Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/571

Rh will not name, an article by an English critic, whose pseudonymous modesty I will not unveil. (I might do so, however, without reproach, since in another issue of the same journal he revealed the secret of a pseudonym which I used myself in England, and did the same for one of my friends—an outrageous offence against literary good manners, had it not been committed with so discerning an air of amiability and benevolence.) To resume—this critic remarked that the slump in poetry here was very noticeable, and he added that "the poets still hurry each evening to the Café Royal, but "—I forget precisely in how pitiable a state of neglect he had seen them.

When I read this touch of picturesque detail, I own that I was somewhat comforted. There has been a boom in poetry, which, so I believe, continues and looks like continuing for some time to come. But, whatever may have happened to it and whether it be a good or an evil thing, the poets who have participated in it do not frequent the Café Royal. This place, though it still holds literary memories of twenty years ago, is now filled partly by painters and their models from Chelsea and, more largely, by quite ordinary persons, chiefly of the Latin races, about whom no one would trouble to write to an American paper. About half of our poets live in the country. The rest would do the same if they could but are instead hard-working men with no time for dalliance in cafés, even if they cared for it, as in nine cases out of ten they do not. Nothing was ever quite so dead as is Bohemianism with us to-day: I fancy that army discipline stamped out its last dully glowing embers. Strong poets have been known to blench on being accused of this vice, and their enemies more often complain of their extremely bourgeois habits. They wear short hair and clean linen, dress tidily and belong to good clubs, when their means allow. I remember that when M. Paul Fort was chosen to be Prince des Poètes in France, an opposition paper deplored the choice, alleging with bitterness that he had a wife and a family of daughters. But, added the malcontent, desiring to be fair, il est bon buveur. I fear that not even so much can be said of the English poets of this generation. They drink miserably, if at all; and it is time that most of them were married and some had children.

It may reasonably be urged, however, that a man's obvious ignorance of the subject he discusses does not prove the contrary of his