Markham v. Prodigy

What child is not, at one time or another, regarded as a prodigy? Let any baby spend an hour taking a twelve-jeweled watch apart, and no parent can fail to perceive in him the seed of potential engineering genius; let him draw in pencil on the nursery wall and his mother--unless she be crass indeed--will recognize that his painting may some day amaze the world. Thus every U. S. home has its potential Mozart. But a year ago, to a startled public, was revealed the most extraordinary prodigy of them all--Nathalia Crane, 11-year-old poet, "The Baby Browning of Brooklyn," whose first volume of verse, The Janitor's Boy, was heralded by critics to be a work of genius.

Such words as "blastoderm", "sindoc," "peris," "parasang," "sarcenet," "teazel," "nullah," "cantatrice," "barracan," "sistrum," writhed and hissed in her verses. One poem began with the nebular hypothesis and ended with prohibition; others cantered with a Eugene Fieldian humor; still others coldly glowed with the passion-weary detachment of a woman who has had her fill of life and its motley follies. Critic-Poet Louis Untermeyer chortled with elation. Poet William Rose Benet wrote a preface. The English Society of Authors and Playwrights (of which Thomas Hardy is President) asked Nathalia Crane to join them.

Now among those who did not lift their voices to welcome the prodigy was Edwin Markham, Honorary President of the Poetry Society of America. Poet Markham is old; a snow white beard depends from his chin; perhaps because his long experience has rendered him dubious of prodigies, he examined the little Crane girl's poems with critical attention. Of The Janitor's Boy he said nothing. But last week, when he read her second volume, Lava Lane, he hinted a courteous skepticism. Last week he said to a newspaper reporter:

"It seems impossible to me that a girl so immature could have written these poems. They are beyond the powers of a girl of twelve. The sophisticated viewpoint of sex . . . knowledge of history and archeology found in these pages place them beyond the reach of any juvenile mind. . . ."

How, then, did he think they had been written? That was what reporters wanted to know. Poet Markham winked. He expressed his confidence in the facility of Louis Untermeyer, of William Rose Benet, of Edna St. Vincent Millay, of other poets who dine together from time to time, all sitting around a table in a Manhattan grill while the elbows of the knowing onlookers dig the ribs of the innocent ones and murmurs float above the clatter of the table d'hote: "There's Oontermeyer!" "There's Bennett!" One afternoon, after the coffee, suggested Poet Markham, a joke went round the company; pencils flashed from waistcoat pockets, and the Child Genius, Nathalia Crane, was born upon the back of a menu-card.

To Brooklyn rushed reporters. They interviewed the prodigy--a spindling girl of twelve, physically immature, with solemn eyes, a quick tongue, a shrill treble voice. Her father explained how inspiration comes to her:

"Nathalia sort of sings her poems to herself--they come into being that way. She reads Kipling constantly, and Conan Doyle is her favorite. The only poet she likes is Longfellow, but she doesn't enthuse over him. She likes wild, imaginative tales.

"When she finds a word she likes or doesn't understand, she looks it up in every available dictionary and studies every possible meaning and use for it. Some of the words she does not fully comprehend, but she learns how to use them."

A temerarious pressman had a question. To give positive proof of her talent, would she--if she felt anything coming--let it out while the reporters were there? Certainly, smiled Nathalia. Thereupon she uttered:

"Lo and behold! God made this

starry wold,

The maggot and the mold; lo and

behold!

He taught the grass contentment

blade by blade,

The sanctity of sameness in a shade"

Said her father: "We have the doddering Markham with nothing to do but attack a little poetess he has never seen. . . . Libel claims will be instituted if anyone goes beyond the law."

Said Critic-Poet Louis Untermeyer: "Nathalia can explain practically every line she has ever written; I have heard her uncertain treble clarify passages that have puzzled erudite authors.

"No poet that ever lived delighted in amassing such curious, half-forgotten sounds; not even Francis Thompson had so great a vocabulary of rare and archaic terms. . . . The explanation here is simpler. Nathalia collects words the way a boy of her age collects postage stamps; she had thumbed Noah Webster's work (in various editions) and made a glossary of her own. The dictionary is her playbox and she knows exactly where every odd toy is concealed."

Zero

In Hamburg, Germany, lived a boa constrictor. He was the pride of the municipal zoo, and all day he reclined in his cell, staring down with absorbed eyes at his scaled and glittering body. The keeper, observing this, reflected: "How beautiful he is to himself, this hideous creature." One day, a few minutes late with the boa constrictor's supper, the keeper hurried into his cage to find him stretched on the floor, in the shape of a great stiff zero with one end of him inside the other. He had tried to eat his tail; his teeth had become caught on his scales; he had choked, writhed, and so--devoured by self-worship--choked to death.

Fire

At Tarascon, France, one Mile. Eugenie Dupont, alleged demimondaine, poured a litre of benzine over a parrot belonging to one of her rivals, and set fire to the bird. Amid a chorus of squawks and shrieks, the parrot flapped phoenix-like into the next room, igniting certain garments belonging to one M. La Rupelle. Doused with champagne, the fire was extinguished.