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HERMIONE AND HER LITTLE GROUP OF SERIOUS THINKERS
BY DON MARQUIS
CONTENTS
PROEM Introducing Some of Hermione's Friends
Sincerity in the Home
Vibrations
Aren't the Russians Wonderful?
How Suffering Purifies One!
Understanding and One's Own Home
Thoughts of Heredity and Things
The Swami Brandranath
Fothergil Finch, the Poet of Revolt
How the Swami Happened to Have Seven Wives
The Romantic Old Days
Hermione's Boswell Explains
Symbols and Dew-Hopping
The Song of the Snore
Ballads of Understanding
Hermione on Fashions and War
Urges and Dogs
Moods and Poppies
Concentration
Soul Mates
Hermione Takes up Literature
The World Is Getting Better
War and Art
A Spiritual Dialogue
Will the Best People Receive the Superman Socially?
The Parasite Woman Must Go!
The House Beautiful
Mamma Is So Mid-Victorian
Voke Easely and His New Art
Hermione on Superficiality
Isis, the Astrologist
The Simple Home Festivals
Citronella and Stegomyia
Hermione's Salon Opens (Verse)
The Perfume Factory
On Being Other-Worldly
Parents, and Their Influence
Fothergil Finch Tell of His Revolt Against Organized Society
The Exotic and the Unemployed
Souls and Toes
Kultur and Things
The Spirit of Christmas
Poor Dear Mamma and Fothergil Finch
Prison Reform and Poise
An Example of Psychic Power
Some Beautiful Thoughts
The Bourgeois Element and Background
Taking Up the Liquor Problem
The Japanese are Wonderful, If You Get What I Mean
She Refuses to Give UP the Cosmos
The Cave Man
The Little Group Gives a Pagan Masque
Sympathy
Blouses, Bulgars, and Buttermilk
Twilight Sleep
Intuition
Stimulating Influences
Politics
Hermione on Psychical Research
Envoy Hermione the Deathless
HERMIONE
PROEM
(Introducing some of Hermione's Friends)
I visited one night, of late,
Thoughts Underworld, the Brainstorm Slum,
The land of Futile Piffledom;
A salon weird where congregate
Freak, Nut and Bug and Psychic Bum.
There, there, they sit and cerebrate:
The fervid Pote who never potes,
Great Artists, Male or She, that Talk
But scorn the Pigment and the chalk,
And Cubist sculptors wild as Goats,
Theosophists and Swamis, too,
Musicians mad as Hatters be--
(E'en puzzled Hatters, two or three!)
Tame anarchists, a dreary crew,
Squib Socialists too damp to sosh,
Fake Hobohemians steeped in suds,
Glib females in Artistic Duds
With Captive Husbands cowed and gauche.
I saw some Soul Mates side by side
Who said their cute young Souls were pink;
I saw a Genius on the Brink
(Or so he said) of suicide.
I saw a Playwright who had tried
But couldn't make the Public think;
I saw a novelist who cried,
Reading his own Stuff, in his drink;
I saw a vapid egg-eyed Gink
Who said eight times: "Art is my bride!"
A queen in sandals slammed the Pans
And screamed a Chinese chant at us,
the while a Hippopotamus
Shook tables, book-shelves and divans
With vast Terpsichorean fuss . . .
Some Oriental kind of muss . . . .
A rat-faced Idiot Boy who slimes
White paper o'er with metric crimes--
He is a kind of Burbling Blear
Who warbles Sex Slush sad to hear
And mocks God in his stolen rhymes
and wears a ruby in one ear--
Murder to me: "My Golden Soul
Drinks Song from out a Crystal Bowl. . . .
Drinks Love and Song . . . my Golden Soul!"
I let him live. There were no bricks.
Or even now that Golden Soul
were treading water in the Styx.
A Pallid Skirt -- Anemic Wisp,
As bloodless as a stick of chalk --
Got busy with this line of talk:
"The Sinner is Misunderstood!
How can the Spirit enter in,
Be blended with, the Truly Good
Unless through Sympathy with Sin?"
"Phryne," I murmured, sad and low,
"I pass the Buck--I do not know!"
Upon a mantel sat a Bust. . . .
Some Hindu god, pug-faced and squat;
A visage to inspire disgust. . . .
Lord Bilk, the Deity of Rot. . . .
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