The Love Sonnets of a Car Conductor

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Love Sonnets of a Car Conductor
by Wallace Irwin
(#2 in our series by Wallace Irwin)
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Title: The Love Sonnets of a Car Conductor
Author: Wallace Irwin
Release Date: March, 2004 [EBook #5332]
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0. START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK, THE LOVE
SONNETS OF A CAR CONDUCTOR ***
This eBook was produced by David Schwan
>.
The Love Sonnets of a Car Conductor
By
Wallace Irwin
Author of
The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum
The Rubáiyát of Omar
Khayyám, Junior
Etc.
With a harmless and instructive Introduction
by
Wolfgang
Copernicus Addleburger
Professor of Literary Bi-Products
University of Monte Carlo
Muse of my native land,
am I inspir'd?
- Keats.
Paul Elder & Company
San Francisco and New York
Mark what I say!
Attend me where I wheel!
- Troilus and Cressida.
Copyright, 1908
by Paul Elder and Company
Introduction
Science may conquer the stars, but it does nothing by jumps. As a
Scientist, as well as a philosopher, I am accustomed to reaching the
Transcendental by winding paths. It is characteristic of me that I should
have consented to preface this remarkable Sonnet Cycle only after
supreme deliberation, and that I should at last have determined to speak
in behalf of the Car Conductor for the following reasons:
0. As a Botanist I am fascinated by the phenomenon of Genius
flourishing from bud to flower, from flower to seed.
0. As a Psychologist I am anxious to establish once and for all, both by

plano-inductive and precoordinate systems of logic, the Status of
Slang.
What position does Slang occupy in the thought of the world? Let us
turn to Zoology for an answer.
No traces of Slang may be found among mollusks, crustaceans or the
lower invertebrates. Slang is not common to vertebrate fishes or to
whales, seals, reptiles or anthropoid apes - in a word, slang-speaking is
nowhere prevalent among lower animals. It may, then, be definitely and
clearly asserted that Slang is the natural, logical expression of the
Human Race. If Man, then, is the highest of created mammals, is not
his natural speech (Slang) the highest of created languages? It is
generally conceded that Literature is the most exalted expression of
Language. Would not the Literature, then, which employs the highest
of created languages (Slang) be the supreme Literature of the world?
By such logical, irrefutable, inductive steps have I proven not only the
Status of Slang, but the literary importance of these Sonnets which it is
at once my scientific duty and my esthetic pleasure to introduce.
The twenty-six exquisite Sonnets which form this Cycle were written,
probably, during the years 1906 and 1907. Their author was William
Henry Smith, a car conductor, who penned his passion, from time to
time, on the back of transfer-slips which he treasured carefully in his
hat[1]. We have it from no less an authority than Professor Sznuysko
that the Car Conductor usually performed these literary feats in public,
writing between fares on the rear platform of a Sixth Avenue car.
Smith's devotion to his Musa Sanctissima was often so hypnotic, I am
told, that he neglected to let passengers on and off - nay, it is even held
by some critics that he occasionally forgot to collect a fare. But be it
said to his undying honor that his Employers never suffered from such
carelessness, for it was the custom of our Poet to demand double fares
from the old, the feeble and the mentally deficient.
Even as the illimitable ichor of star-dust, the mysterious Demiurge of
the Universe, keeps the suns and planets to their orbitary revolutions,
so must environment mark the Fas and Nefas of Genius. Plato's Idea of
the Archetypal Man was due, perhaps, as much to the serene weather

conditions of Academe as to the marvelous mentality of Plato. What
had Job eaten for breakfast that he should