Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 09.pdf/446



CURRENT TOPICS. ILLEGAL POETRY. — The Chairman always feels a sympathy with a lawyer who writes poetry, for two reasons : first, because the fatal gift hurts him with his clients, and second, it does not help him with the public. So the wisest lawyers have suppressed the inclination or concealed its fruits. Blackstone and Story crushed the deleterious spirit rising in them. (The consequence was that Story's one thin volume of commonplace verse is worth more in the book market than any two of his thick commentaries on law.) Successful poetry depends more upon mellifluous ut terance than upon originality of ideas, and so the melodious Longfellow is more popular than the rugged Browning. Lawyers are frequently men of poetic ideas, but seldom have the felicity of phraseology es sential to the distinction between poetry and prose. As Landor said in effect to Wordsworth, prose is none the worse for a poetical idea or expression, but one drop of prose in poetry precipitates the whole. The foregoing reflections are renewed in the Chair man's mind by the perusal of a recent volume of poems by a lawyer — " Echoes of Halcyon Days," by Maximus A. Lesser of the city of New York. Mr. Lesser has done some creditable professional work, and it is interesting to know that he has a purely literary side. Mr. Lesser has the poetical conception very frequently; not so often the poetical execution. He has considerable ingenuity and expertness in meters, and a remarkable affluence of rhyme, and the movement is frequently unconstrained and graceful. Some of his poems are poetic throughout, and give unalloyed pleasure. Scholarship, culture, and travel are apparent on almost every page. In short, the poet is recognizable in Mr. Lesser, as distinguished from a mere versifier. His poems are not mere har monious jingles without meaning, as is too frequently the case among the minor poets — and indeed among some of our modern major poets. He always has something to tell us, and tells it more or less felici tously and impressively, albeit occasionally a little mystically, affectedly, or imitativcly. He is at the best in the shorter and more unpretentious poems; in them is least perceptible the one fatal drop of prose. We like him better when he is familiar and

semi-playful than when he essays to be grand and deep. Thus we take more pleasure in his extremely clever parody of Poe's "The Bells" ("The Flutes"), than in his " Ode to Liberty," which might have been written to order for the Fourth of July. It may answer for a major poet, like Lowell, to pub lish his merest twaddle and scrap-basket droppings; not so for a minor poet, and therefore Mr. Lesser might better have omitted "Album Leaves," with their acrostic qualities. Some eccentricities of rhym ing are noticeable: "uncouth" and "mouth" for example; " woe " and " unto " remind one too much of the Rev. Mr. Chadband; and "glades" and "Hades " -will never do," although a footnote as sures the reader that it was done deliberately. Some accents also are not in consonance with modern au thority; for example, " contemplate " should not be accented on the first syllable, nor "incomparable" or "Pantagruel" on the third. In conclusion, let us say that the tendency to imitate Poe, which Mr. Lesser himself acknowledges in one of the playful poems, and which is so apparent in " The Course of Fate," is one of which he stands in no need and which he should eschew. The volume of 165 pages is very elegantly printed.

A MODEL LEGAL BIOGRAPHY. — In this era of fusome and false eulogy of deceased lawyers it is a pleasure to read so candid, discriminating and evi dently truthful a sketch as that of the late ChiefJustice Park of Connecticut, by John Hooker, formerly reporter of the Supreme Court of that State. It is almost startling in its bold and unconventional esti mate of the dead chief. It is quite refreshing to learn that when he "entered on his judicial life he had acquired but a very limited practice and probably never would have attained a very high success at the bar. . . his mind was slow in its movement, and he was wholly without grace of speech or manner. Withal he had but a very limited knowledge of law. Judge Park was far from being an ideal chief justice. Our State has rarely, if ever, had a judge of its high est court, much less a chief justice, of so limited early education and so little culture. He seemed to 409