disputing a statement made by our American correspondent that Mr.
Nicholas Vachel Lindsay was the only "live" poet now writing in
America, and questioning the justice of the praise given to Mr.
Lindsay. On the assumption that our readers will be interested, we are
publishing in this issue a work by Mr. Lindsay which illustrates his
recent manner. It is a poem which presents some difficulties to English
readers. It evokes memories of a Presidential campaign long gone past,
and some of Mr. Lindsay's political references (not to speak of his
presumably mythical animals) will puzzle people; even those English
people who vaguely remember who Mark Hanna was will probably not have
the ghost of a vision of Altgeld.
* * * * *
A binding case for THE LONDON MERCURY is being prepared, and will, we
hope, be ready when the first volume (of six numbers) is complete. It
would be a convenience if readers who are preserving their sets and
will desire the official binding (which we can promise will not be an
offensive one) would let us know in advance by postcard so that we may
have some basis for our first order of cases.
* * * * *
For some time after publication we were obliged to refuse orders
for our first number. We have recovered a very few copies, and, as
we prefer that they should go to persons who are really anxious to
obtain them in order to complete sets, we offer them at 7_s._ 6_d._ a
copy. Applications will be dealt with in the order in which they are
received. No. 2 will shortly follow suit.
LITERARY INTELLIGENCE
We congratulate Mr. Austin Dobson, whose birthday was the eighteenth of
last month, on arriving at the full age of eighty. He has lived, for
the past twenty years, since his retirement from the public service,
so noiselessly that an idle world, always attentive to sensation, has
half-forgotten to regard his presence. He has always preferred to stand
a little out of the limelight, being by nature unobtrusive, and more
conversant with books than with men. Such serene natures miss some of
the rewards of their own age, but when they possess the quality of Mr.
Austin Dobson posterity gives them their revenge. No one in our time
has pursued the profession of literature with a more disinterested
fervour than he. Mr. Dobson has taken no part in controversy, he has
been mixed up with no sensational "movements"; his whole thought has
been fixed on the study of past times and on the perfecting of his own
delicate and lapidary art. He was not precocious in his development.
When his earliest volume of poems, _Vignettes in Rhyme_, appeared he
had reached his thirty-fourth year. He did not venture upon prose until
eleven years later, when he published his memoir of _Thomas Bewick_.
His latest volume, _A Bookman's Budget_, of 1917, combined both arts in
one.
* * * * *
The quality of Mr. Austin Dobson, both in verse and prose, is
curiously out of sympathy with the general tendency of literature
to-day. In prose--though we admit that his essays have had numerous
and distinguished admirers, Mr. Balfour, if we remember right, having
once praised them above his poems in the House of Commons--in prose he
seems to us to sacrifice freedom of movement to an intensely meticulous
accuracy and to a desire to leave no fact unrecorded. But in verse
Mr. Austin Dobson is, in his own restricted field, unsurpassed. He
carries on, through the second half of the nineteenth century, the
tradition of Prior and Anstey and Praed. It may be said that his poems
are metrical pastimes, but he lifts them to the dignity of poetry.
His happiest pieces are so polished, so delicate, and so felicitous
that not a word in them could be altered; they are, of their own kind,
perfect, and perfection is not relative but positive. So long as the
English language survives there will be readers of _The Ballad of
Beau Brocade_. We wish Mr. Austin Dobson many more years, and we hope
that he will yet be encouraged to give us specimens of his graceful
penmanship.
The writers of the obituary notices of Sir William Osler were strangely
silent as to the love of books which was one of his most marked
characteristics, and this although in _Who's Who?_ he had put down
"Bibliography" as his only "Recreation," and at the time of his death
had been President of the Bibliographical Society for seven years,
nearly three times as long as any of his predecessors. In the true
spirit of humanism his interest in bibliography was first aroused by
the books relating to his own profession, and widened out from this to
a fine catholicity. Within a year of his coming to England he delivered
an address on Sir Thomas Browne's _Religio Medici_ before the Physical
Society of Guy's Hospital (printed in _The Library_ for January, 1906),
and he was never tired of singing the praise of Burton's _Anatomy of
Melancholy_ as "a great medical treatise (the greatest ever written
by a layman), orderly in arrangement, intensely serious in purpose,
and weighty beyond belief in authorities." The quotation comes from a
paper he read before the Bibliographical Society on _The Library of
Robert Burton_ in November, 1909, in which he gave a summarised account
of the 580 books of Burton's preserved at the Bodleian and the 429
in the library at Christ Church. Unless we are mistaken, the picking
out of these books, and the grouping those at Christ Church round a
portrait of Burton, copied from the original in Brasenose College,
was due mainly to his initiative. He certainly took a keen interest
in both libraries, was an enthusiastic curator of the Bodleian, and a
generous supporter of the admirable _Bodleian Quarterly_, started by
Mr. Falconer Madan. A paper he contributed to this on the Bookworm,
illustrated by an admirable coloured plate exhibiting it in all its
stages, is by far the best study of that elusive "worm" ever printed.
* * * * *
After he became President of the Bibliographical Society he gave
another stimulating address on the medical books printed before the
close of the year 1480, its object being "to get an idea of the mental
attitude of the profession of medicine from the character of the books
printed." He had then been working on this subject for some time,
and even amid the countless activities into which he threw himself
during the war did not wholly neglect it. The description of the books
was practically finished some time ago; whether the introduction, in
which he aimed at clothing the bibliographical skeleton with flesh and
blood, had been written is not yet known. He had over forty medical
books of the fifteenth century in his own collection, and was forming
a specialist library to illustrate the history of science, and of
medicine in particular, on a strikingly original plan. Its completion
should have been the occupation of a leisurely old age, but he loved
his fellows too well to give himself any leisure, and left this for
others to complete.
* * * * *
We welcome from America the first number of the new _Dial_. The _Dial_
was founded at Chicago in 1880 by Francis F. Browne. Until a few years
ago it remained in the Browne family, who produced fortnightly a paper,
sober, academic, and informative, somewhat resembling our _Athenæum_ of
Victorian days. A few years ago the paper changed hands: its offices
were shifted to New York, and it has been at one time primarily an
organ of rebellious literary youth, and at another a Radical political
journal. The latest remodelling promises stability. The _Dial_ appears
as a purely literary and artistic monthly, in shape like one of our own
monthly reviews, and typographically superior to most of them. We await
its development with interest.
POETRY
_Fortunatus Nimium_
1
I have lain in the sun,
I have toiled as I might,
I have thought as I would,
And now it is night.
2
My bed full of sleep,
My heart of content
For mirth that I met
The way that I went.
3
I welcome fatigue
While frenzy and care,
Like thin summer clouds,
Go melting in air.
4
To dream as I may
And awake when I will,
With the song of the birds
And the sun on the hill.
5
Or death--were it death,
To what should I wake,
Who loved in my home
All life for its sake?
6
What good have I wrought?
I laugh to have learned
That joy cannot come
Unless it be earned:
7
For a happier lot
Than God giveth me
It never hath been
Nor ever shall be.
ROBERT BRIDGES
_To E. G._
Were I to pause and hesitate
For something "picked," "alembicate,"
I might, by chance, no further get
Than mere parade of epithet;
So I'll just wish to You and Yours
Strength to achieve while strength endures;
And, when the power to do is done,
Remembered radiance of the sun!
AUSTIN DOBSON
New Year's Eve, 1919.
_The Shadow_
Death, would I feared not thee,.
But ever can I see
Thy mutable shadow thrown
Upon the walls of Life's warm, cheerful room.
Companioned or alone,
I feel the presence of that following gloom,
Like one who vaguely knows
Behind his back the shade his body throws
'Tis not thy shadow only, 'tis my own!
I face towards the light
That rises fair and bright
Over wide fields asleep,
But still I know that stealthy darkness there
Close at my heels doth creep,
Ghostly companion, my still haunting care;
And if the light be strong
Before my eyes, through pleasant hours and long,
Then, then, the shadow is most black and deep.
EDWARD SHANKS
_By the Weir_
A scent of Esparta grass--and again I recall
The hour we spent by the weir of the paper-mill
Watching together the curving thunderous fall
Of frothing amber, bemused by the roar until
My mind was as blank as the speckless sheets that wound
On the hot steel ironing-rollers perpetually turning
In the humming dark rooms of the mill: all sense and discerning
By the stunning and dazzling oblivion of hill-waters drowned.
And my heart was empty of memory and hope and desire
Till, rousing, I looked afresh on your face as you gazed--
Behind you an old gnarled fruit-tree in one still fire
Of innumerable flame in the sun of October blazed,
Scarlet and gold that the first white frost would spill
With eddying flicker and patter of dead leaves falling--
I looked on your face, as an outcast from Eden recalling
A vision of Eve as she dallied, bewildered and still,
By the serpent-encircled tree of knowledge that flamed
With gold and scarlet of good and evil, her eyes
Rapt on the river of life: then bright and untamed
By the labour and sorrow and fear of a world that dies
Your ignorant eyes looked up into mine, and I knew
That never our hearts should be one till your young lips had
tasted
The core of the bitter-sweet fruit, and wise and toil-wasted
You should stand at my shoulder an outcast from Eden too.
WILFRID WILSON GIBSON
_Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan!_
A RHYME IN THE AMERICAN LANGUAGE
(_The campaign of Eighteen Ninety-six, as viewed by a sixteen-year-old_)
I
In a nation of one hundred fine mob-hearted, lynching, relenting,
repenting millions
There are plenty of sweeping, swinging, stinging, gorgeous things
to shout about,
And knock your old blue devils out.
I brag and chant of Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,
Candidate for President who sketched a silver Zion,
The one American poet who could sing outdoors.
He brought in tides of wonder, of unprecedented splendour,
Wild roses from the plains that made hearts tender,
All the funny circus silks
Of politics unfurled,
Bartlett pears of romance that were honey at the cores,
And torchlights down the street, to the end of the world.
There were truths eternal in the gab and tittle-tattle;
There were real heads broken in the fustian and the rattle;
There were real lines drawn:
Not the silver and the gold,
But Nebraska's cry went eastward against the dour and old,
The mean and cold.
It was Eighteen Ninety-six, and I was just sixteen,
And Altgeld ruled in Springfield, Illinois,
When there came from the sunset Nebraska's shout of joy:
In a coat like a deacon, in a black Stetson hat,
He scourged the elephant plutocrats
With barbed wire from the Platte.
The scales dropped from their mighty eyes.
They saw that summer's noon
A tribe of wonders coming
To a marching tune.
Oh, the long horns from Texas,
The jay hawks from Kansas,
The plop-eyed bungaroo and giant giassicus,
The varmint, chipmunk, bugaboo,
The horned toad, prairie-dog and ballyhoo,
From all the new-born States arow,
Bidding the eagles of the West fly on,
Bidding the eagles of the West fly on,
The fawn, prodactyl and thing-a-ma-jig,
The hellangone,
The whangdoodle, batfowl and pig,
The coyote, wild-cat and grizzly in a glow,
In a miracle of health and speed, the whole breed abreast,
They leaped the Mississippi, blue border of the West,
From the Gulf to Canada, two thousand miles long:
Against the towns of Tubal Cain,
Ah--sharp was their song!
Against the ways of Tubal Cain, too cunning for the young,
The long-horn calf, the buffalo and wampus gave tongue.
These creatures were defending things Mark Hanna never dreamed:
The moods of airy childhood that in desert dews gleamed,
The gossamers and whimsies,
The monkeyshines and didoes
Rank and strange
Of the cañons and the range,
The ultimate fantastics
Of the far western slope,
And of prairie schooner children
Born beneath the stars,
Beneath falling snows,
Of the babies born at midnight
In the sod huts of lost hope,
With no physician there
Except a Kansas prayer,
With the Indian raid a-howling through the air.
And all these in their helpless days
By the dour East oppressed,
Mean paternalism
Making their mistakes for them,
Crucifying half the West,
Till the whole Atlantic coast
Seemed a giant spider's nest.
And these children and their sons
At last rode through the cactus,
A cliff of mighty cowboys
On the lope,
With gun and rope.
And all the way to frightened Maine the old East heard them call,
And saw our Bryan by a mile lead the wall
Of men and whirling flowers and beasts,
The bard and the prophet of them all.
Prairie avenger, mountain lion,
Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,
Gigantic troubadour, speaking like a siege gun,
Smashing Plymouth Rock with his boulders from the West,
And just a hundred miles behind, tornadoes piled across the sky,
Blotting out sun and moon,
A sign on high.
Headlong, dazed and blinking in the weird green light,
The scalawags made moan,
Afraid to fight.
II
When Bryan came to Springfield, and Altgeld gave him greeting,
Rochester was deserted, Divernon was deserted,
Mechanicsburg, Riverton, Chickenbristle, Cotton Hill,
Empty: for all Sangamon drove to the meeting--
In silver-decked racing cart,
Buggy, buckboard, carryall,
Carriage, phaeton, whatever would haul,
And silver-decked farm-waggons gritted, banged and rolled,
With the new tale of Bryan by the iron tyres told.
The State House loomed afar,
A speck, a hive, a football,
A captive balloon,
And the town was all one spreading wing of bunting, plumes and
sunshine,
Every flag in town, and Bryan's picture sold,
When the rigs in many a line
Reached the town at noon,
And joined the wild parade against the power of gold
We roamed, we boys from High School,
With mankind,
While Springfield gleamed,
Silk-lined.
Oh, Tom Dines, and Art Fitzgerald,
And the gangs that they could get!
I can hear them yelling yet
Helping the incantation,
Defying aristocracy,
With every bridle gone,
Bidding the eagles of the West fly on,
Bidding the eagles of the West fly on,
Ridding the world of the low-down mean:
We were bully, wild and woolly,
Never yet carried below the knees.
We saw flowers in the air,
Fair as the Pleiades, bright as Orion,
Hopes of all mankind,
Made rare, resistless, thrice refined.
Oh, we bucks from every Springfield ward!
Colts of democracy--
Yet time-winds out of Chaos from the star-fields of the Lord.
The long parade rolled on. I stood by my best girl.
She was a cool young citizen, with wise and laughing eyes.
With my necktie by my ear, I was stepping on my dear,
But she kept like a pattern, without a shaken curl.
She wore in her hair a brave prairie rose.
Her gold chums cut her, for that was not the pose.
No Gibson Girl would wear it in that fresh way,
But we were fairy Democrats, and this was our day.
The earth rocked like the ocean, the sidewalk was a deck.
The houses for the moment were lost in the wide wreck.
And the bands played strange and stranger music as they trailed
along.
Against the ways of Tubal Cain,
Ah, sharp was their song!
The demons in the bricks, the demons in the grass,
The demons in the bank-vaults peered out to see us pass.
And the angels in the trees, the angels in the grass,
The angels in the flags peered out to see us pass.
And the sidewalk was our chariot, and the flowers bloomed higher,
And the street turned to silver and the grass turned to fire,
And then it was but grass, and the town was there again,
A place for women and men.
III
Then we stood where we could see
Every band,
And the speaker's stand.
And Bryan took the platform,
And he was introduced.
And he lifted his hand
And cast a new spell.
Progressive silence fell
In Springfield,
In Illinois,
Around the world.
Then we heard these glacial boulders across the prairie rolled:
"_The people have a right to make their own mistakes ...
You shall not crucify mankind
Upon a cross of gold._"
And everybody heard him--
In the streets and State House yard.
And everybody heard him
In Springfield,
In Illinois,
Around and around and around the world,
That danced upon its axis
And like a daring broncho whirled.
IV
July, August, suspense.
Wall Street lost to sense.
August, September, October,
More suspense,
And the whole East down like a wind-smashed fence.
Then Hanna to the rescue,
Hanna of Ohio,
Rallying the roller-tops,
Swivel chairs, bulls and bears,
Rallying the bucket-shops,
Threatening drouth and death,
Promising Mannah.
Rallying the trusts against the bawling flannelmouth;
Invading misers' cellars,
Tin-cans, socks,
Melting down the rocks,
Pouring out the long green to a million workers,
Spondulicks by the mountain-load to stop each new tornado,
And beat the cheapskate, blatherskite,
Populistic, anarchistic,
Deacon-desperado.
V
Election night at midnight:
Boy Bryan's defeat.
Defeat of western silver,
Defeat of the wheat.
Victory of letterfiles
And plutocrats in miles
With dollar signs upon their coats,
Diamond watchchains on their vests
And spats on their feet.
Victory of custodians,
Plymouth Rock,
And all that inbred landlord stock.
Victory of the neat.
Defeat of the aspen groves of Colorado valleys,
The bluebells of the Rockies,
And blue bonnets of old Texas,
By the Pittsburg alleys.
Defeat of alfalfa and the Mariposa lily.
Defeat of the Pacific and the long Mississippi.
Defeat of the young by the old and silly.
Defeat of tornadoes by the poison vats supreme.
Defeat of my boyhood, defeat of my dream.
VI
Where is McKinley, that respectable McKinley,
The man without an angle or a tangle,
Who soothed down the city man and soothed down the farmer,
The German, the Irish, the Southerner, the Northerner;
Who climbed every greasy pole, and slipped through every crack;
Who soothed down the gambling hall, the bar-room, the church,
The devil vote, the angel vote, the neutral vote,
The desperately wicked, and their victims on the rack,
The gold vote, the silver vote, the brass vote, the lead vote,
Every vote....
Where is McKinley, Mark Hanna's McKinley,
His slave, his echo, his suit of clothes?
Gone to join the shadows, with the pomps of that time,
And the flame of that summer's prairie rose.
Where is Cleveland whom the Democratic platform
Read from the party in a wonderful hour?
Gone to join the shadows with pitchfork Tillman
And sledge-hammer Altgeld, who wrecked his power
Where is Hanna, bull-dog Hanna,
Low browed Hanna, who said: "Stand pat"?
Gone to his own place with Pierpont Morgan.
Gone somewhere ... with lean rat Platt.
Where is Roosevelt, the young dude cowboy,
Who hated Bryan, then aped his way?
Gone to join the shadows with pious Cromwell
And tall King Saul, till the Judgment Day.
Where is Altgeld, brave as the truth,
Whose name the few still say with tears?
Gone to join the ironies with Old John Brown,
Whose fame rings loud for a thousand years.
Where is that boy, that _Heaven-born_ Bryan,
That _Homer_ Bryan, who sang from the West?
Gone to join the shadows with Altgeld the Eagle,
Where the Kings and the slaves and the troubadours rest.
VACHEL LINDSAY
BLIND THAMYRIS
By T. STURGE MOORE
Since my father was a hero and my mother a goddess of the woods, I
was sent when twelve years old to the cave of Chiron, that he might
instruct me in wisdom and valour. This life, divorced from all female
tenderness, appealed to my pride, and only at night were my eyes ever
moistened with regret. I was now free to follow a stream until, too
weary to advance further, some cradle of scented herbs would lure me
to rest and doze. At length twilight brought me an energy, winged
with dread of the dusking forests, that carried me right home to the
cavern. The sources were always my goal, the more easy descent seawards
never tempted my morning moods: and, as he taught me the lyre or the
control of my voice, Chiron remarked that a similar bent was evinced by
an instinctive preference for those words and cadences that lead the
spirit away from the high-roads of thought and feeling. Surely emotions
well up in the fastnesses of tranquillity, close under the blue and
white of heaven, more virginal than can be experienced in lowland
retreats? As time wore on, Chiron, the daily lesson being ended, began
to speak to me of a rhapsodist, former pupil and great favourite of
his. "Agenor," he began, "like thyself, Thamyris was ever striving
to reach the summits before joint and sinew were sufficiently tough.
Alas, though he has often brought back with him the rarest strophes and
melodies, men have refused to listen to them! They prefer a music that
better harmonises with their garish sea-board towns, and he wanders
shrouded in an ever deeper gloom." With a sigh he paused, and I waited,
expecting to be warned not thus to estrange myself from humanity by
persistently climbing among the hills. But he seemed unable so to
conclude, and presently bid me run away and practise throwing the spear.
One forenoon when wind, so strong as to seem foreign to the settled
brilliance of the weather, was bowing the fir-trees, and now here, now
there, their backs arched silverly, flashing like waves on the dark
green ridges, while the sound was that of a chorus of Titans rejoicing
in violence (so much so that we had to retreat well back within the
cave before we could hear ourselves play or sing), Chiron broke off the
lesson, still disturbed it may be by the hurly-burly without, though
it strained but faintly through the stillness held under that roof of
rock. He sat gazing forth into the sunny turbulence, so grandly though
jaggedly framed; and I, leaning back against his flank, watched his
moved visage worn with much living. Then for the first time he began
to recite me actual words of Thamyris, recalling how their public
delivery had proved that those who thronged round the other rhapsodists
would never collect about him.
Untouched white cloud,
Like a task acclaimed
When the heart is young,
Thou fliest higher
Than the eagle deed
That is praised by men
Unheeded silence,
In the night or at noon,
Thou singest to the hilltops
A song that is richer
Than the tales of war
Which men crowd to hear.
Magnificent joys
Lie about like garments
Amazingly broidered;
A god has discarded them
Before launching upward
In naked loneliness.
But no human hand
Lifts a single tunic;
No man's heart prefigures
The deep satisfaction
Of moving vested
In the pictured raiment
That a god walked the earth in.
Chiron was silent, and I dreamed of finding and putting on the slough
of Apollo. I saw myself in a sultry glare climbing boulders with grey
lichen-crusted cheeks, and dark moss-bearded cavities down which I
peered in hopes of finding a cupful of collected dew. At last I arrived
on the crest, and there, at the bottom of a crater of wild tumbled
blocks, lay gleaming somewhat silver and violet and blue. I scrambled
down; a pattern of scaled serpents was looped inextricably over white
samite. I lifted it, and from the inside there slipped with a swish a
body-vest of pale vermilion rippled with gold in a device of arrows,
each drawn to the head in a sturdy bow: an armoury of the proper size
for an host of mice had it been real instead of pictured. I gasped; and
Chiron's eyes met mine, so that I blushed all down my neck.