He was but a Name to his employers; and
his friends, if he has friends, remember him not. These Sonnets, written
neatly on twenty-six violet transfer-slips, were discovered, together
with a rejection blank from a leading magazine, in the Dead Letter
office. According to the current folk-lore in Harlem and the Bronx,
Smith is now living in California employed as a brakeman on the Southern
Pacific Railroad. Some aver that Pansy fell heiress to a sausage
establishment and moved to Italy with her Poet. Still others maintain
that Pansy, Gill the Grip and Maxy the Firebug never existed in real
life - were merely the mind-children of a Symbolist and a dreamer of
dreams.
To the latter theory I incline at a scholarly angle. This Cycle may be
taken, perhaps, not so much as a living record of human experience as a
lofty parable sounding the key-note of all human life. Gill the Grip is
the Iago, the Mefistofele, the symbolism of a malevolent destiny. Maxy
the Firebug may be the Poet's interpretation of the Social Unrest, of
Doubt, of progressive irresponsibility. Would it be going too far, then,
to say that Pansy stands to us as the symbol of Pan-girlism - as an
almost Anacreontic yearning for the type? Or may not these Sonnets be
taken, in a way, as a modern Vita Nuova wherein a Sixth Avenue Alighieri
calls to his Beatrice and mourns within when,
"Pansy-girl refuses to occur?"
So much for the Poet and his Purpose.
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