The Love Sonnets of a Hoodlum | Page 2

has in time created for a single
word ("cleave," for instance) two exactly opposite meanings. A line
from John Webster's Appius and Virginia might be cited as showing
how near his diction approached modern slang:

"My most neat and cunning orator, whose tongue is quicksilver;"
and, for an analogy similar, though elaborate, compare lines 5-8 in
Sonnet XI. In Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster,
"A pernicious petticoat prince"
is as close to "Mame's dress-suit belle" of No. VII as modern costume
allows, and
"No, you scarab!"
from Ben Jonson's Alchemist gives a curious clue to the derivation of
the popular term "scab" found in No. VI. Webster's forcible picture in
The White Devil -
"Fate is a spaniel; we cannot beat it from us!"
finds a rival in Mr. Irwin's strong simile - "O Fate, thou art a lobster!"
in No. IV. And, to conclude, since such similarities might be quoted
without end, note this exclamation from Beaumont and Fletcher's
Woman's Prize, written before the name of the insect had achieved the
infamy now fastened upon it by the British Matron:
"These are bug's words!"
Not only does this evidently point out the origin of "Jim-jam bugs" in
No. IX, and the better known modern synonym for brain, "bug-house,"
but it indicates the arbitrary tendency of all language to create
gradations of caste in parts of speech. It is to this mysterious influence
by which some words become "elegant" or "poetic," and others
"coarse" or "unrefined," that we owe the contempt in which slang is
held by the superficial Philistine.
In Mr. Irwin's sonnet cycle, however, we have slang idealized, or as
perhaps one might better say, sublimated. Evolution in the argot of the
streets works by a process of substitution. A phrase of two terms goes
through a system of permutation before it is discarded or adopted into

authorized metaphor. "To take the cake," for instance, a figure from the
cake-walk of the negroes, becomes to "capture" or "corral" the "bun" or
"biscuit." Nor is this all, for in the higher forms of slang the idea is
paraphrased in the most elaborate verbiage, an involution so intricate
that, without a knowledge of the intervening steps, the meaning is often
almost wholly lost. Specimens of this cryptology are found in many of
Mr. Irwin's sonnets, notably in No. V:
"My syncopated con-talk no avail."
We trace these synonyms through "rag-time," etc., to an almost
subliminal thought - an adjective resembling "verisimilitudinarious,"
perhaps, qualifying the "con" or confidential talk that proved useless to
bring Mame back to his devotion.
In the masterly couplet closing the sestet of No. XVIII, Mr. Irwin's
verbal enthusiasm reaches its highest mark in an ultra-Meredithian
rendition of "I am an easy mark," an expression, by the way, which
would itself have to be elaborately translated in any English edition.
Enough of the glamors of Mr. Irwin's dulcet vagaries. He will stand,
perhaps as the chief apostle of the hyperconcrete. With Mr. Ade as the
head of the school, and insistent upon the didactic value of slang, Mr.
Irwin presents in this cycle no mean claims to eminence in the truly
lyric vein. Let us turn to a contemplation of his more modest hero.
I have attempted in vain to identify him, the "Willie" of these sonnets.
The police court records of San Francisco abound in characters from
which Mr. Irwin's conception of this pyrotechnically garrulous
Hoodlum might have been drawn, and even his death from
cigarette-smoking, prognosticated in No. XXII, does not sufficiently
identify him. Whoever he was, he was a type of the latter-day lover,
instinct with that self-analysis and consciousness of the dramatic value
of his emotion that has reached even the lower classes. The sequence of
the sonnets clearly indicates the progress of his love affair with Mary, a
heroine who has, in common with the heroines of previous sonnet
cycles, Laura, Stella and Beatricia, only this, that she inspired her lover
to an eloquence that might have been better spent orally upon the object

of his affections. Even the author's scorn does not prevent the reader
from indulging in a surreptitious sympathy with the flamboyant
coquetry of his "peacherino," his "Paris Pansy." For she, too, was of the
caste of the articulate; did she not
"Cough up loops of kindergarten chin?"
and could we hear Mame's side of the quarrel, no doubt our Hoodlum
would be convicted by every reader. But Kid Murphy, the
pusillanimous rival, was even less worthy of the superb Amazon who
bore him to the altar. "See how that Murphy cake-walks in his pride!"
is the cri-du-coeur the gentlest reader must inevitably render.
But "the Peach crops come and go," as Mr. George Ade so eloquently
observes. We must not take our hero's gloomy threats too seriously.
There are other babies on