XIII THE “SONG BALLADS” OF DICK

IT was “endurin of de feveh”—to use his own phrase by which he meant during the fever—that Dick’s genius revealed itself. Dick had long ago achieved the coveted dignity of being his master’s “pussonal servant.” It was Dorothy who appointed him to that position and it was mainly Dorothy who directed his service and saw to it that he did not neglect it.

For many of the services of a valet, Arthur had no use whatever. It was his habit, as he had long ago said, to “tie his own shoe strings.” He refused from the first very many of Dick’s proffered attentions. But he liked to have his boots thoroughly polished and his clothing well brushed. These things he allowed Dick to attend to. For the rest he made small use of him except to send him on errands.

The position suited Dick’s temperament and ambition thoroughly and he had no mind to let the outbreak of fever on the plantation rob him of it. When Arthur established himself at the quarantine camp, taking for his own a particularly small brush shelter, he presently found Dick in attendance, and seriously endeavoring to make himself useful. For the first time Arthur felt that the boy’s services were really of value to him. He was intelligent, quick-witted, and unusually accurate in the execution of orders. He could deliver a message precisely as it was given to him, and his “creative imagination” was kept well in hand when reporting to his master and when delivering his messages to others—particularly to those in attendance upon the sick. Arthur was busy night and day. He saw every patient frequently, and often he felt it necessary to remain all night by a bedside. In the early morning, before it was time for the field hands to go to their work in the crops, he inspected them at their new quarters, and each day, too, he rode over all the fields in which crop work was going on.

In all his goings Dick was beside him, except when sent elsewhere with messages. In the camp he kept his master supplied with fuel and cooked his simple meals for him, at whatever hours of the night or day the master found time to give attention to his personal wants.

In the meanwhile—after the worst of the epidemic was over—Dick made himself useful as an entertainer of the camp. Dick had developed capacities as a poet, and after the manner of Homer and other great masters of the poetic art, it was his custom to chant his verses to rudely fashioned melodies of his own manufacture. Unfortunately Dorothy, who took down Dick’s “Song Ballads,” as he called them, and preserved their text in enduring form, was wholly ignorant of music, as we know, and so the melodies of Dick are lost to us, as the melodies of Homer are. But in the one case as in the other, some at least of the poems remain to us.

Like all great poets, Dick was accustomed to find his inspiration in the life about him. Thus the fever outbreak itself seems to have suggested the following:

The simplicity and directness of statement here employed fulfil the first of the three requirements which John Milton declared to be essential to poetry of a high order, which, he tells us must be “simple, sensuous, passionate.” The necessary sensuousness is present also, in the reference made to the repulsiveness of the medicine. But that quality is better illustrated in another of Dick’s Song Ballads which runs as follows:

Here the reader will observe the instinctive dramatic skill with which the poet, having reached the climax of the situation, abruptly rings down the curtain, as it were. There is no waste of words in unnecessary explanations, no delaying of the action with needless comment. And at the end of the second stanza we encounter a masterly touch. Instead of telling us with prosaic literalness that the nigga succeeded in slaying his game, the poet suggests the entire action with the figurative phrase—“It’s ‘good-by, Mistah Possum.’ ”

There is a fine poetic reserve too in the abrupt shifting of the scene from tree to table, and the presentation of the denouement without other preparation than such as the reader’s imagination may easily furnish for itself. We are not told that the possum was dressed and cooked; even the presence of stuffing as an adjunct to the savor of the dish is left to be inferred from the purely casual suggestion made in the first stanza of the fact that stuffing tends to enrich as well as to adorn the viand.

These qualities and some others of a notable kind appear in the next example we are permitted to give of this poet’s work.

There is a compactness of statement here—a resolute elimination of the superfluous which might well commend the piece to those modern theatrical managers who seem to regard dialogue as an impertinence in a play.

Sometimes the poet went even further and presented only the barest suggestion of the thought in his mind, leaving the reader to supply the rest. Such is the case in the poem next to be set down as an example, illustrative of the poet’s method. It consists of but a single stanza:

Here we have in four brief lines an entirely adequate suggestion of the predatory habits of “Nigga,” and of his attitude of mind toward “watermillions.” With the bare statement of the fact that the fruit in question has attained its succulent maturity, we are left to discover for ourselves the causal relation between that fact and the intimated purpose of “Nigga” to continue his activities during the hours of darkness. The exceeding subtlety of all this cannot fail to awaken the reader’s admiring sympathy.

Perhaps the most elaborately wrought out of these song ballads is the one which has been reserved for the last. Its text here follows:

To gross minds this abrupt, admonitory ending of the poem will be disappointing. It leaves the reader wishing for more—more chicken, if not more poetry. And yet in this self-restrained ending of the piece the poet is fully justified by the practice of other great masters of the poetic art. Who that has read Coleridge’s superb fragment “Kubla Khan,” does not long to know more of the “stately pleasure dome” and of those “caverns measureless to man” through which “Alph the sacred river ran, down to a sunless sea”?

We present these illustrative examples of Dick’s verse in full confidence that both his inspiration and his methods will make their own appeal to discriminating minds. If there be objection made to the somewhat irregular word forms employed by this poet, the ready answer is that the same characteristic marks many of the writings of Robert Burns, and that Homer himself employed a dialect. If it is suggested that Dick’s verbs are sometimes out of agreement with their nominatives, it is easy to imagine Dick contemptuously replying, “Who keers ’bout dat?”