Shandygaff | Page 9

mots would adorn any
pay-envelope anthology. Some of his casual comments on whiskey
would do more to discourage the decanterbury pilgrims than a bushel
of tracts.
By the time a bartender knows what drink a man will have before he
orders, there is little else about him worth knowing.
If you go to sleep while you are loafing, how are you going to know
you are loafing?
Because majorities are often wrong it does not follow that minorities
are always right.
Young man, if she asks you if you like her hair that way, beware. The
woman has already committed matrimony in her own heart.
I am tired of being a promising young man. I've been a promising
young man for twenty years.
In most of Don Marquis's japes, a still small voice speaks in the
mirthquake:
If you try too hard to get a thing, you don't get it.
If you sweat and strain and worry the other ace will not come--the little
ball will not settle upon the right number or the proper colour--the girl
will marry the other man--the public will cry, Bedamned to him! he
can't write anyhow!--the cosmos will refuse its revelations of
divinity--the Welsh rabbit will be stringy--you will find there are not

enough rhymes in the language to finish your ballade--the primrose by
the river's brim will be only a hayfever carrier--and your fountain pen
will dribble ink upon your best trousers.
But Don Marquis's mind has two yolks (to use one of his favourite
denunciations). In addition to these comic or satiric shadows, the
gnomon of his Sun Dial may be relied on every now and then to
register a clear-cut notation of the national mind and heart. For instance
this, just after the United States severed diplomatic relations with
Germany:
This Beast we know, whom time brings to his last rebirth Bull-thewed,
iron-boned, cold-eyed and strong as Earth ... As Earth, who spawned
and lessoned him, Yielded her earthy secrets, gave him girth, Armoured
the skull and braced the heavy limb-- Who frowned above him, proud
and grim, While he sucked from her salty dugs the lore Of fire and steel
and stone and war: She taught brute facts, brute might, but not the
worth
Of spirit, honour and clean mirth ... His shape is Man, his mood is
Dinosaur.
Tip from the wild red Welter of the past Foaming he comes: let this
rush, be his last.
Too patient we have been, thou knowest, God, thou knowest. We have
been slow as doom. Our dead Of yesteryear lie on the ocean's bed-- We
have denied each pleading ghost-- We have been slow: God, make us
sure. We have been slow. Grant we endure Unto the uttermost, the
uttermost.
Did our slow mood, O God, with thine accord? Then weld our diverse
millions, Lord, Into one single swinging sword.
I have been combing over the files of the Sun Dial, and it is
disheartening to see these deposits of pearl and pie-crust, this sediment
of fine mind, buried full fathom five in the yellowing archives of a
newspaper. I thought of De Quincey's famous utterance about the press:

Worlds of fine thinking lie buried in that vast abyss, never to be
disentombed or restored to human admiration. Like the sea, it has
swallowed treasures without end, that no diving-bell will bring up
again.
Greatly as we cherish the Sun Dial, we are jealous of it for sapping all
its author's time and calories. No writer in America has greater of more
meaty, stalwart gifts. Don, we cry, spend less time stoking that furnace
out in Port Washington, and more on your novels!
There is no more convincing proof of the success of the Sun Dial than
the roster of its contributors. Some of the most beautiful lyrics of the
past few years have been printed there (I think particularly of two or
three by Padraic Colum). In this ephemeral column of a daily
newspaper some of the rarest singers and keenest wits of the time have
been glad to exhibit their wares, without pay of course. It would be
impossible to give a complete list, but among them are William Rose
Benét, Clinton Scollard, Edith M. Thomas, Benjamin De Casseres,
Gelett Burgess, Georgia Pangborn, Charles Hanson Towne, Clement
Wood.
But the tragedy of the colyumist's task is that the better he does it the
harder it becomes. People simply will not leave him alone. All day long
they drop into his office, or call him up on the phone in the hope of
getting into the column. Poor Don! he has become an institution down
on Nassau Street: whatever hour of the day you call, you will find his
queue there chivvying him. He is too gracious to throw them out: his
only