"HORSE SENSE."*
Trra practice of printing verse as prose is not new. In moments of emotional expansion it is sometimes indulged in (unintentionally) by serious writers. Thackemy resorted to it occasionally in whimsical or scrio-comic moods. And of late years the reports of Police Court proceedings in one of the evening papers were frequently served up in rhyme, though printed in ordinary paragraphs. But Mr. Walt Mason, the American humorist, stands in a special class among these disguised versifiers, since ho invariably discards the usual indications of lines and stanzas. It may be a concession to the man in the street who shies at poetry, or it may be from modesty ; but the motive does not really matter. It is the result that counts, and the result here is dis- tinctly exhilarating, and, let us add, characteristically American. Mr. Mason makes no pretence to literary finish. His style is colloquial, richly embellished with the most expressive slang, and marked by turns of phrase which are calculated to snake the precious and the fastidious reader writhe in agony. But he is a remarkably deft and ingenious rhymer ; his outlook is genial and wholesome ; and ho never fails to make his point—indeed, one may say of him that the more grotesque the image, the more effectively it drives home the moral. There is nothing very new or original about his philosophy ; it is simply that of "horse sense," as the title claims, leavened with kindly humanity. He preaches the gospel of hard work, cheerfulness, and contentment, of reverence for elders, of the charity that begins at home, and of honesty as the best policy. Ho expands the thought that lies at the root of Lucretius's suave man i mow into a page of spirited doggerel. As ho puts it : "There's nothing so soothing, so apt to be smoothing the furrows of grief from your brow, as sitting and gazing at folks who are raising out there in tho mud such a row ! To watch a mad neighbour through hurricane labour while you are all snug by the fire, to see him cavorting and pawing and snorting, what more could a mortal desire?" But this sentiment is not typical of his attitude, which is in the main generous and chivalrous. He has no mercy on spurious philanthropy, or on capitalists who grind the faces of their employees and subscribe lavishly to freak funds to provide Retreats for Maiden Aunts, or to furnish roasted ducks to suffragists in jail or pink pinafores for heathen in Cathay. He scarifies the miserly moralist, the croaker, the puffer of faked goods and quack medicines, and the food crank, and denounces the apologists of intemperance in lines which are worth a wilderness of tracts :—
"How many ringing songs there are that celebrate the wine, and other goods behind the bar, as being wondrous fine ! How many choruses exalt the brown October ale, which puts a fellow's wits at fault, and lands him in the jail ! A hundred poets wasted ink, and ruined good quill pens, describing all the joys of drink in gilded boozing hens. But all those joys are hollow fakes which wisdom can't indorse ; they're soon converted into aches and sorrow and remorse. The man who drains the brimming glass in haunts of light and song, next morning knows that he's an ass, with ears twelve inches long. An aching head, a pile of debts a taste that's green and stale, that's what the merry fellow gets from brown October ale. Untimely graves and weeping wives and orphans shedding brine ; this sort of thing the world derives
• " Horse Sense" in Verses Tense. By Welt Mason. London: Duckworth and Co. [2s. 6d. mt.]
from bright and sparkling wine. The prison cell, the scaffold near ; such features may be blamed on wholesome keg and bottled beer, which made one city famed. Oh, sing of mud or axle grease, but chant no fairy tale, of that disturber of the peace, the brown October ale ! "
Unfair criticism is another subject on which his views, as expressed in "The Thankless Job," may be commended to English readers at the present moment :—
"There's nothing but tears for the man who steers our ship o'er the troubled sea ; there's nothing but grief for the nation's chief, whoever that chief may be. Whatever he does, he can hear the bus of critics as thick as flies ; and all of his aims are sins and shames, and nothing he does is wise. There's nothing but kicks for the man who sticks four years to the White House chair ; and his stout heart aches and his wish-bone breaks and he loam most of his hair. There's nothing but growls and the knocker's howls, and the spiteful slings and slams and the vile cartoons and the dish of prunes and a chorus of tinkers' dams. Oh, we humble skates in our low estates, who fuss with our garden sass, should view the woes of men who rose above and beyond the mass, and be glad to-day that we go our way mid quiet and peaceful scenes ; should thankfully take the hoe and rake, and wrestle with spuds and greens ! "
We arc frequently reminded of Artemus Ward in this little book —by its hatred of cant, its high spirits, its underlying sanity, as well as by its grotesque imagery. We have never read a more trenchant indictment of the decorative, spoiled American woman than that to be found in "The Idlers" :— " Men labour against the hames, and sweat till they're old and grey, supporting the stall-fed dames who idle their years away. We've bred up a futile race of women who have no care, except for enamelled face, or a sea-green shade of hair, who always are richly gowned and wearing imported lids, who carry their poodles 'round, preferring the pups to kids. And husbands exhaust their frames, and strain till their journey's done, supporting the stall-fed dames, who never have toiled or spun. We're placed in this world to work, to harvest our crop of prunes ; Jehovah abhors the shirk, in gown or in trouaerloons. The loafers in gems and silk are bad as the fragrant vags, who pilfer and beg and bilk, and die in their rancid rags. The loafers at bridge-whist games, the loafers at purple teas, the hand-painted stall-fed dames, arc chains on the workers' knees. The women who cook and sew, the women who manage homes, who have no desire to grow green hair on enamelled domes, how noble and good they seem, how wholesome and sane their aim, compared with that human scream, the brass-mounted, stall-fed dame ! "
The only surprise in the book is the distinctly pacificist sentiment betrayed in such pieces as "War and Peace" and "Deliver Us "—the conviction that "war is merely woe," and that an army must live in "pompous folly." On this question Artemus Ward took a longer and broader view. But as to Mr. Mason's "wonderful fun and kindliness," of which Mr. Masefield speaks in a few words of intro- duction, there can be no doubt,
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