The Reviews

MR. SIMMS’S heart beat frightfully as he read the reviews. ‘A new planet,’ said the Thursday Review, ‘has swum into our ken. Arthur Simms in his recently published book of poems, Strange Opiates, has shown himself to be of the stuff that lasts. Not only is there a strangely penetrating quality in his little poems that will wake his readers with a start, for they are indeed strange opiates, but they show also the strength of structure that bespeaks the product of a keen mind. This careful building is concealed under an exterior so delicate that it may pass at first for a spontaneous fabric of the fancy.’ Mr. Simms reread some of his poems. They had taken on a new importance. There was, he thought, something eerie and penetrating about them, as the reviews said. He looked back to see whether they had used the word ‘eerie’ and found they had not.

Mr. Simms had come a long way. But it had not been a hard way, for he had never known he was on it until he arrived. And even now he felt himself tottering in his position as poet, as if it had not been by his own strength that he had attained it. Yet who else wrote the poems? he asked himself. And he answered, No one. It had always been his weakness that he could not feel worthy of praise. But neither could he feel that his betters who praised him could be entirely astray.

It was when he was twelve that Mr. Simms had written his first poem. He had dashed it off without much effort one hot afternoon and brought the result to his mother on a piece of yellows paper. The poor woman read it, astonished.

The mother put down the paper. ‘Did you write that?’ she said. ‘Yes.’ ‘Show it to your father,’ she said quietly. The father said very little in the boy’s presence, but let several of his own friends see the poem. It was smooth in sound, they said, and showed a depth of feeling that, in a child of twelve years, was nothing short of startling. He would go far. The women who saw the poem exclaimed much more than the men and said much less. ‘It just came over me,’ the boy told them, and, seeing that they liked the idea, he added, ‘It hardly seemed as if I wrote it myself. It was a funny feeling; it just came over me.’ The women seemed gratified. They had heard of people being possessed.

But, during the long poetic silence that followed, Arthur Simms had every reason to doubt that he had ever been possessed by the muse. Except for two poems which he wrote to commemorate Easter and Epiphany, the silence was absolute. Neither did the first of his college years bring forth anything. He did not care very much. He found versification difficult. Wild horses, he said, could not drag a respectable sonnet out of him, and as for the sestet, the triolet, and the Spenserian, they were to him like the labors of Hercules. But Simms would sometimes scribble on the backs of envelopes during chapel service, and one day did eight lines on God. After the service was over, he showed them idly to his roommate. The young man read them hurriedly, then reread them.

‘Jehu!‘ he said. ‘Show it to Binney.’ Professor Binney read the poem slowly aloud to the two young men, and did not speak again for some time. Then he suddenly passed the paper back to Simms. ‘You have done in poetry,’ he said, ‘what Einstein has done in mathematics.‘

‘Oh, fish!’ said Simms. Then, to give himself time to think, he added, ‘The form is poor, I mean; I shall have to work over it.’

When he was alone he read the poem again. It did perhaps infer what Einstein had demonstrated, then drew a conclusion which was not for the scientist to draw. The idea seemed hazy to Simms, but he thought it might be that the poet knew by a peculiar insight what the scientist labored long to prove. This poem, for it now seemed to be a poem, said much which even he himself did not fully understand, but Simms found that he could, nevertheless, have defended every word of it, if he had been put to it. Suddenly he slipped the poem into his notebook. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

His poem was the beginning of another spurt of activity. He continued to spend the chapel hour writing verses on whatever came into his head, and all of them were printed in the college literary paper. For Simms had found the form in which he could write: the trick was to let the thought determine the form as it went. His instructors, as well as his classmates, held him to be, without question, the outstanding writer of the college. In his careless way, they said, he went nearer the core of things than their like ever could. They did not always understand him fully, but his lines gave them a feeling that under them lay a world of thought which their minds were too blunt-edged to perceive. So most of Simms’s classmates, with beautiful unselfishness, admitted they were too slow for him. Simms generously claimed that he himself did not understand more than half he wrote, but no one believed him, ‘He’s a humble chap,’ they said.

Not until Mr. Simms was in his thirtieth year had he collected enough poems to make even a slender book, and, much to his surprise, Smith and Parsons had taken them. His book was reviewed far and wide. It was nothing new to Mr. Simms to be so acclaimed, for college had made much of him. But a college paper, Mr. Simms reflected, was, after all, a ground for easy victories. Now the papers with a national circulation were reviewing his work. ‘Mr. Simms will probably not,’ said the New Haven Daily, ‘become comparable to our major poets. His scope is limited, and he is notoriously lazy. But his startling insight and his power of suggestion, that gives the reader at times an excruciating glimpse into the meaning of life, have already placed him among our best minor poets. And for sheer penetration he has perhaps never been surpassed.’

Mr. Simms passed to the Olliphant Review. ‘I shall quote,’ it said, ‘a very short poem from Mr. Simms’s collection. It is called “In the Boston Athenæum”: —

‘Here,’ the review went on, ‘is expressed all the hopelessness of a living mind trying to draw nourishment from a dead past, and failing. It is the spirit seeking for life, but turning inevitably to death. For Mr. Simms does not stop with seeing the human being in relation to his present fellows; he sees him as part of the great nitrogen cycle that is somewhere echoed by a cycle of spirit.’

‘Yes,’ said Mr. Simms to himself after some time, ‘echoed by a cycle of the spirit. Man sees himself in the Granary, and he thinks that, since death is coming to him anyhow, he may as well die and get it over. He will die in flesh. He has already died in spirit. Then the cycle of the spirit precedes that of the flesh. The review said the other way round.’ Well, he would not split hairs. Mr. Simms was tired and went to bed.

Now the poet, in the very height of his fame, had begun to distrust himself. He read the encomium in the reviews and was torn between exhilaration and sadness. For when he wrote a poem it never seemed to him that it was coming from the depths of him, nor that he had even for a moment communed with the universe, but when the reviews said that ‘In the Boston Athenæum’ plunged carelessly into the secret of God, Mr. Simms kindled to the idea. The reviewers were wiser men than he, and who was he, anyhow, to have so much to say? But he lay in bed that night, and the more tired he became the more alert he became, and the more alert he became the brighter shone the figure of Truth before him. Yet he at last dozed. And when he was lying between waking and sleep, long, well-constructed sentences began to say themselves over in his mind. This had happened many times before, and he had ignored them and gone to sleep, but he now leapt out of bed and, putting on a light, wrote down the only one he remembered: — ‘From side to side Uncle Henry ran among the chocolates with a persevering attachment.’ Mr. Simms laughed as though he were nervous. This sentence seemed to him to be as utterly devoid of sense as anything he had ever heard. He was now too excited to go to sleep, and sat up expanding his sentence to a poem that could be included in the second edition of his book. It went like this: —

He went on and made quite a point of the phrase ‘from side to side,’ letting that be the theme, and echoing it constantly with ‘a persevering attachment.’

Mr. Simms went about in a constant state of excitement until his second edition, containing several new poems, was off the press. He was going to get to rock bottom, and know whether men were a bunch of fools or not; and he was terrified. As soon as the book was out, he bought the Thursday Review of Literature, and turned to the comment on his own book. ’The second edition of Mr. Simms’s book, Strange Opiates,‘ it said, ‘contains several new poems. The most remarkable of them is the poem entitled “Uncle Henry.” Mr. Simms is at the point in his development where he utterly abandons beautiful form and concentrates upon idea stripped of all decoration. I quote the first line from “Uncle Henry”: —

‘This at first baffles the intelligence, but Mr. Simms makes himself clear to the thoughtful. Uncle Henry is bewildered Man running blindly from side to side between the fine and the mean in life. But he is always dogged by his spirit that confuses him. It is not part of him, but an attachment. And here we find the very heart of Mr. Simms’s philosophy. The flesh and the spirit of man are both riders. There is an “I” outside of them both, and it is bewildered and pulled about, and it runs from side to side. We cannot but feel that we are in the presence of the keenest cynicism and truth.’ Mr. Simms turned to the Olliphant Review. It also quoted the new poem. ‘Mr. Simms,’ it began, ‘has either said practically nothing, or he has said a great deal. He has shown us Man, pathetic and silly among the hopeless worlds, his mind running from side to side among them. He has here reached the cracking point. Art cannot be whittled down to this thinness and long remain art. But no one will deny that the poet has again cut deep.’

Mr. Simms laid down the papers and rubbed his hands, which had grown cold. His heart was thumping. ‘Man,’ he said, ‘pathetic and silly among the hopeless worlds. I have cut deep. Cut deep.’ His throat felt tight when he thought of it.