W. P. E.

Twin Fires,

Sheffield,

Mass.

[Illustration]

_Penguin Persons_

After all, one knows so little about a man from his printed works!

They are the gleanings of his thoughts and investigations, the pick of

his mind and heart; and they are at best but an impersonal and partial

record of the writer. Even autobiography has something unsatisfactory

about it; one feels the narrator is on guard always, as it were, and,

aware of an audience cold and of strangers, keeps this back and trims

up that to make himself more what he should be (or, in some perverse

cases, what he should not be). But probably no man who is worthy of

attention sits down to write a letter to a good friend with one eye on

posterity and the public. In his intimate correspondence he is off

guard. Hence, some day, when he has died, the world comes to know him

by fleeting glimpses as he was,--which is almost as near, is it not,

as we ever get to knowing one another?--knows him under his little

private moods, in the spell of his personal joys and sorrows, sees his

flashes of unexpected humor,--even, it may be, his unexpected

pettinesses Thus dangerous and thus delightful is it to publish a

great man's letters.

Such letters were Ruskin's to Charles Eliot Norton, which Professor

Norton has given to the world. No one can fail from those letters to

get a more intimate picture of the author of _Modern Painters_ than

could ever be imagined out of that work itself, and out of the rest of

his works besides, not excepting the wonderful _Fors Clavigera_; and

not only a more intimate, but a different picture, touched with

greater whimsicality, and with infinite sadness, too. Not his

hard-wrung thoughts and theories, but his moods of the moment--and he

was a man rich in the moods of the moment--tell most prominently here.

And with how many of these moods can the Ordinary Reader sympathize!

Again and again as the Ordinary Reader turns the pages he finds the

great man under the thralldom of the same insect cares and annoyances

which rule us all, until he realizes as perhaps never before that poet

and peasant, genius and scribe, are indeed one in a common humanity,

and sighs, with a lurking smile of satisfaction, "So nigh is grandeur

to our dust!"

One of the points of convergence between Ruskin and the Ordinary

Reader which has appealed to me with peculiar force occurs in a

letter from London dated in 1860. "When I begin to think at all,"

Ruskin writes, "I get into states of disgust and fury at the way the

mob is going on (meaning by the mob, chiefly Dukes, crown-princes, and

such like persons) that I choke; and have to go to the British Museum

and look at Penguins till I get cool. I find Penguins at present the

only comfort in life. One feels everything in the world so

sympathetically ridiculous; one can't be angry when one looks at a

Penguin."

Why, of course one can't! It is absurdly true, when one comes to think

of it, this beneficent influence of penguins, stuffed penguins, at

that, which cannot even waddle. I dare say few readers ever thought of

this peculiar bird (if it is a bird) in just that light before Mr.

Ruskin's letter came to view; I'm sure I never did. But few readers

will fail to recall at a first reading of the words that picture of a

penguin which used to adorn the school geographies, and presently will

come to them the old sensation of amusement at the waddly fellow

propped up on his impossible feet, the smile will break over their

lips, and they will be one in mood with Mr. Ruskin. They may affirm

that of course the author was only indulging in a little whimsicality,

and they may two thirds believe it, as it is no doubt two thirds true;

but just the same, unless I am much mistaken, the image of a penguin

will persist in their minds, as it persisted in Ruskin's mind--else

how did he come to write of it in this letter?--and they will be the

better and the happier for the smile it evokes, as Ruskin was the

better and the happier. Indeed, that letter was his cheeriest for

months.

For me, however, the image has not faded with the passing of the mood,

or rather it has changed into something more abiding. It has assumed,

in fact, no less a guise than the human; it has become converted into

certain of my friends. I now know these friends, in my thoughts of

them, as Penguin Persons. I find they have the same beneficent effect

on me, and on others around them, as the penguins on Ruskin. I mean

here to sing their praises, for I believe that they and their kind

(since everyone enters on his list of friends, as I do, some Penguin

Persons) have, even if they do not know it, a mission in the world, an

honorable destiny to fulfill. They prevent us from taking life too

seriously; they make everything "sympathetically ridiculous"; they are

often "as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land."

But, at the very outset, I would not be misunderstood. I do not mean

that a Penguin Person must resemble the amusing bird in physical

aspect. There are, I know, certain people, a far more numerous class

than is generally supposed, who see in almost everybody a resemblance

to some animal, bird, or fish. I am one of these people myself. It is

on record as far back as the fourth generation that some one of my

successive ancestors had the same unhappy faculty, for it is unhappy,

since it imposes on the person who resembles for us a pig, in our

thoughts of him, the attributes of that beast, and so on through the

natural history catalogue. It is not pleasant to watch a puma kitten

sitting beside you in the opera house, especially when your mere brain

tells you she is probably a sweet, even-tempered little matron, or to

wait in pained expectancy for your large-eared minister to bray, even

though you know he will not depart from his measured exposition of

sound and sane doctrine. However, the Penguin Persons are such by

virtue of their moral and mental attributes solely, of the similar

effect they produce on those about them by their personalities. I have

never met a man yet who physically resembled a penguin, though I fancy

the experience would be interesting.

Still less would I have it understood that Penguin Persons are stupid.

Far from it. Dr. Crothers declares, in his _Gentle Reader_, that he

would not like to be neighbor to a wit. "It would be like being in

proximity to a live wire," he says. "A certain insulating film of

kindly stupidity is needed to give a margin of safety to human

intercourse." I do not think that Dr. Crothers could have known a

Penguin Person when he wrote that. The Penguin Person is not a wit,

there is no barb to his shafts of fun, no uneasiness from his

preternatural cleverness, for he is not preternaturally clever. You

never feel unable to cope with him, you never feel your mind keyed to

an unusual alertness to follow him; you feel, indeed, a sense of

comforting superiority, for, after all, you _do_ take the world so

much more seriously than he! And yet he is not stupid; he is bright,

alert, "kindly," to be sure, but delightfully humorous, deliciously

droll. Life with him appears to be one huge joke, and there is an

unction about him, a contagion in his point of view, that affects you

whether you will or no, and when you are in his presence you cannot

take life seriously, either,--you can but laugh with him. He does you

good. You say he is "perfectly ridiculous," but you laugh. Then he

smiles back at you and cracks another of those absurd remarks of his,

and you know he is "sympathetically ridiculous." Perhaps you were out

of sorts with life when you met him, but one cannot be angry when one

looks at a Penguin Person.

But do you say that the original bird is not like that at all, that he

is the most stupid of fellows? Ah! then you have never seen a penguin

swim! He is grace and beauty and skill in the water. If it were only

his stupidity that made us smile, not he, but the hen, would be the

most amusing of God's creatures. It is something more subtle, more

personal, than that. It can only be described as Penguinity.

Penguinity! The word is not in the dictionaries; it is beyond the pale

of the "purists"; in coining it I am fully aware that I violate the

canons of the Harvard English Department, that I fly in the face of

philology, waving a red rag. Yet I do it gladly, assertively, for I

have confidence that some day, when Penguin Persons have taken their

rightful place in the world's estimation, the world will not be able

to dispense with my little word, which will then overthrow the

dictionary despotism and enter unchallenged the leather strongholds of

Webster and Murray.

Yet before that day does come, and to hasten its coming, I would

record a tribute to my first and firmest Penguin friend,--my friend

and the friend of how many others?--long and lank of limb, thin and

high-boned of face, alert, smiling, ridiculous. On the nights when

steamships were sunk in the East River, or incipient subways elevated

suddenly above ground, or other exciting features of New York life

came clamoring for publicity, he would sit calm and smiling, coatless,

a corncob pipe between his teeth, and read "copy" with the speed of

two ordinary men. The excited night city editor would rush about,

shouting orders and countermanding them; reporters would dash in and

out; telegraph instruments would buzz; the nerve-wracking whistle of

the tube from the composing room would shrill at sudden intervals,

causing everybody to start involuntarily each time and to curse with

vexation and anger; the irritable night editor, worried lest he miss

the outgoing trains with his first edition, would look furtively at

the clock at three-minute periods and plunge his grimy hand over his

sweating forehead; but the Penguin Person would sit smiling at his

place by the "copy" desk, blue pencil in hand, serene amid the Babel.

And when the tension was greatest, the strain nerve-breaking to get

the big story, in all its complete and coherent details, into the

hungry presses that seemed almost visible, though they waited the

stroke of one, ten stories down, in the sub-basement, the Penguin

Person would sit back in his chair, grin amiably, and say with a

drawl, "Hell, ain't it, fellers? D' you know what I'm going to do

to-morrow, though? I'm going to put on my asbestos collar, side track

some beaut, take her to the theatre, and after the show, thanks to the

princely salary I'm paid for keeping split infinitives out of this

sheet, I'm going to rush her round to Sherry's or Delmonico's and

blow her to a glass of beer and a frankfurter."

Then as if by magic the drawn faces of all his associates would clear,

the night editor would laugh and forget to look at the clock, we would

resume our toil, momentarily forgetful of the high pressure under

which we labored, and working the better for the forgetfulness; and

the Penguin Person, the smile still expanding his mouth, would tilt

down his chair and work with us, only faster. If he had serious

thoughts, he never disclosed them to us--seriously. When he opened his

lips we waited always in the expectation of some ridiculous remark,

even though it should clothe a platitude or a piece of good,

common-sense advice. And we were never disappointed. Life with him was

apparently one huge joke, and it came about that when we thought of

him or spoke of him among ourselves, it was always with a smile. Yet

now he is gone--and what a hole! Other men can do his work as well, if

not as quickly. The paper still goes to press and the public sees no

change; but we, who worked beside him, see it nightly. By twelve

o'clock on a busy night, nervous, drawn faces surround the central

desk, and profanity is snapped crossly back and forth. There is no

alleviation of cheerful inanity. Presently somebody looks up,

remarking, "I wish Bobbie Barton was back." And somebody else replies

with profane asperity and lax grammar, "I wish he was!" Bobbie,

meanwhile has become a lawyer, and can now afford a whole plate of

frankfurters at Delmonico's. But we are the poorer, and, I do not

hesitate to declare, the worse men for the loss of his Penguinity.

Then there is David. David is penguinacious by fits and starts, not

wholly to be depended on, sometimes needing himself to be cheered with

the Penguinity of others, but, when the mood is on him, softly,

fantastically ridiculous, like the nonsense verse of Lewis Carroll, a

sort of _Alice in Wonderland_ person. I should not hesitate to

recommend him to Dr. Crothers as a neighbor; indeed I suspect the good

doctor is almost such a man himself,--too gentle, too fantastic in

humor to suggest, however remotely, a "live wire," and yet how far

from being stupid! David's mind works so unexpectedly. You are quite

sure you know what he is going to say, and yet he never says it,

giving his remark a verbal twist which calls up some absurdly

impossible picture, and evokes, not a laugh, but a deep, satisfying

smile. There is something quaint and refreshing about such a mind as

David's. It does not so much restore one's animal spirits, or one's

good nature, as it rejuvenates the springs of fancy, brings back the

whimsical imagination of childhood. David will people a room with his

airy conceits, as Mr. Barrie peopled Kensington Gardens with Peter Pan

and his crew; and it is as impossible not to forget anger and care,

not to feel sweeter and fresher, for David's jests, as for _The Little

White Bird_. Only a Penguinity like David's is subtle, a little

unworldly, and, like most gracious gifts, fragile. There are days when

the world is too much for David, when his jests are silent and his

conceits do not assemble. Then it is that he in turn needs the good

cheer of another's Penguinity, and it is then my happy privilege to

reward him by hunting up Bobbie Barton, if I can, and joining them at

a dinner party. Bobbie's Penguinity is based on an inexhaustible fount

of animal spirits, he is never anything but a Penguin. He usually has

David put to rights by the roast.

The other day, while Bobbie was running on in his ridiculous fashion,

in an idiom all his own that even Mr. Ade could not hope to rival,

telling, I believe, about some escapade of his at Asbury Park, where

he had "put the police force of two men and three niggers out of

business" by asking the innocent and unsuspecting chief the difference

between a man who had seen Niagara Falls, and one who hadn't, and a

ham sandwich, I fell to musing on Ruskin's unhappy lot, who did not

know Bobbie, nor apparently anybody like him. Poor Ruskin! After all,

there is more pathos than humor in his periodic visits to the

penguins. Isolated, from childhood, by parental care, from the common

friendships and associations of life, still further isolated in mature

years by his own genius and early and lasting intellectual eminence,

the wonder is that he was not more unhappy, rather than less. He had

few friends, and those few, like Professor Norton, were intellectual

companions as well, always ready and eager to debate with him the

problems of Art and Life which were forever vexing him. Their

companionship must often have been a stimulant--when he needed,

perhaps, a narcotic. Their intercourse drove him continually in upon

himself, where there was only seething unrest, when he needed so often

to be taken completely out of himself, where there was peace. And, in

his hours of need, he turned to the Alps, and the penguins. But both

were dumb things, after all, that could not quite meet his mood, could

not quite satisfy that hunger which is in all of us for the common

association of our kind, for the humble jest and cheery laugh of a

smiling humanity. Neither of them was Bobbie, who adds personality to

the penguin, and satisfies a double need.

Bobbie would not have talked Art with Ruskin, and for a very good

reason,--he knows nothing about it. Bobbie would not have cared a

snap about his Turners, though he would have been greatly reverent of

them for their owner's sake. But Bobbie would have enjoyed tramping

over the mountains with him, an eager and alert listener to all his

talks about geology and clouds, and ten to one Bobbie would have made

friends of every peasant they met, every fellow traveler on the road,

and taught Ruskin in turn a good bit about humdrum, picturesque

mankind. And he would have made him laugh! Possibly you think it

incongruous, impossible, the picture of happy-go-lucky, ridiculous

Bobbie, with his slang and his grin and his outlook on life, and

Ruskin, the great critic, the master of style, the intellectual giant.

But then you reckon without Bobbie's quality of Penguinity, and

without Ruskin's humanness. It is alike impossible to withstand the

contagion of Bobbie's Penguinity, and to fancy a genius so great that

he does not at times yearn for the common walks and the common talks

of his humbler fellow creatures. He may not always know how to achieve

them, his own greatness may be a barrier he cannot cross, or his

temperament and circumstances may hinder; but be sure that he feels

the loss, though he may not himself, for all his genius, be quite

aware of it. That Ruskin lived in moody isolation, while Shakespeare

caroused in an alehouse, does not prove Ruskin the greater man or the

deeper seer; it only shows that one knew how to achieve what the

other did not,--contact with the everyday, merry world, escape from

the awful and everlasting solemnity of life. Ruskin could not achieve

it for himself, he did not know how; but Bobbie, all unknown to either

of them, would have shown him. Bobbie would have made life for him

"sympathetically ridiculous," for Bobbie is a Penguin Person. And

Bobbie would have been a living, breathing human being, by his side

and ready to aid him, even to creep into his heart; not a stuffed

biped on a shelf in a musty museum. Poor Ruskin, how much life robbed

him of when it made it impossible for him to win in his youth the

careless, unthinking, but undying friendship of a few men like Bobbie,

a few Penguin Persons!

Ah, well! "The dice of God are always loaded." Doubtless we must

always pay for greatness by isolation, or some more bitter toll. And

for our insignificance, in turn, come the Bobbies as reward. It

behooves those of us, then, who are insignificant, to appreciate our

blessing, to cherish our penguins, the more since we, when "the world

is too much with us," when the tyranny of economic conditions

oppresses and the wrongness of life seems almost more than we can

bear, have not that inward strength, that Titanic defiance, which is

the possession of the great, ultimately to fall back upon, and so

sorely need to be shown a joke somewhere, anywhere, in the universal

scheme, to find something that is "sympathetically ridiculous." That

is why the Penguin Persons are sent to us; thus we can see in them the

swing of the Emersonian pendulum.

But they are naturally modest, and doubtless have no idea of their

mission, further than to realize that "people are glad to have them

around," as Bobbie would express it, and that it is "up to them" (in

the same idiom) to be cheerful,--not a hard task, since cheeriness

sits in their soul. It is awful to think how self-consciousness might

ruin the flavor of their Penguinity if they ever were awakened to a

realization of the fact that they were involved in anything so serious

as the Law of Compensation! Though I do believe that David at his best

could make the eternal verities look ridiculous. No, when the Penguin

Persons do become aware of their Penguinity, it is in a funny,

shamefaced fashion, as if they had been up to boyish tricks their

manhood should blush for. Came Bobbie to me the other day and

confessed that he had about made up his mind to be "serious."

"Everybody thinks I'm a joke," he said, with a melancholy grin; "they

always expect me to say something asinine, and get ready to laugh

before I speak. What shall I do?"

"Do!" I cried. "Do what you've been doing, only do it more. Keep right

on being a Penguin, and God bless you!"

Bobbie looked perplexed and a little hurt; but I was too wise to

explain, and three minutes later he was rattling off some delicious

absurdity to my four-year-old hopeful, who had fallen down on his nose

and needed comforting--and a handkerchief. Bobbie was supplying the

latter from his pocket, and from his penguinacious brain the former

was effectively coming in the shape of a description of Rocky Mountain

sheep, which, according to Bobbie, have right-side legs much shorter

than their left-side legs, so they can run along the mountain slopes

without ever falling on _their_ noses.

"But how do they get back?" asks the hopeful, still bleeding, but

eager for information.

"They put their heads between their hind legs and run backward," says

Bobbie. "They have long necks, you know."

That, of course, may be unnatural history, but it was a very present

help in time of trouble. Indeed, it made Bobbie, as well as the boy,

forget, and I have heard no more of his dreadful intention to be

serious.

Some one--probably it was Emerson--once said, "Each man has his own

vocation. The talent is the call." It is no small thing, in this grim

world, to make people smile, to be absurd for their alleviation, to

render all things "sympathetically ridiculous" for a time, to bear in

a chalice of mirth the water of Lethe. If one's talent lies that way,

why, the call should be clear! The Penguin Person should have no doubt

or shame of his vocation, nor should anyone else allow him to. Little

Joe Weber, who was on the stage the most perfect example of

Penguinity, was as a stage character beloved of all the thousands who

saw him. He heard his call and followed his vocation, and honor and

wealth and fame are now his. The merry host of Penguin Persons who

move outside the radius of the spluttering calcium, whose proscenium

is the door frame of a home, may earn neither wealth nor fame by doing

as he has done, but they will win no less a reward, for they will have

lightened for all around them the burdens of life, they will have

smoothed the gathering frown and summoned the forgotten laugh, they

will have made of the ridiculous a little religion, and out of

Penguinity brought peace.

[Illustration]

_Spring Comes to Thumping Dick_

When the ordinary American who "does things"--atrocious phrase, symbol

of our unrecking materialism that does not consider the value of the

things done--wants to give a place a name, he affixes his own, or that

of his sister-in-law or the congressman from his district. Thus our

noblest North American mountain is called McKinley, though it already

bore a beautiful Indian name--Denali, "The Great One"; and thus in

Glacier Park we find a Lake McDermott, a Lake McDonald, and a Mount

Jackson, to contrast painfully with such beautiful titles as

Going-to-the-Sun Mountain, Rising Wolf Mountain, and Morning Eagle

Falls. The Indians expressed their poetry in their names. The pioneers

and the colonial rural Americans expressed, if not poetry, at least a

fine, spicy flavor of the local tradition; their names grew out of the

place. In the corner of New England where I was born we had a Slab

City, a Tearbreeches Hill, a Puddin' P'int--well-flavored names, all

of them, descriptive and significant, even the last, which strangers

mispronounced Pudding Point. Even in old New York there were once such

names rich in historical association as Long Acre Square, now reduced

to Times Square to please the vanity or cupidity of a newspaper. But,

save the Indians, no body of people on this continent, not even the

old-time cowboys and prospectors with their Bright Angel Trail, have

ever rivaled the southern highlanders, the mountain folk of the Blue

Ridge, the Great Smokies and the Cumberlands, in the bestowal of

picturesque titles. It is hard, sometimes, to say whether the southern

mountaineers are poets or humorists or realists; they may be one or

the other, or all three at once. But they never fail with the

inevitable appellation. Not Flaubert with his one right word, not the

school "gang" with its nicknames, can equal them.

Thumping Dick Hollow, Milk-sick Hollow, Little Fiery Gizzard Creek,

Falling Water Cove, Maniac's Hell, Lost Creek Cove, Jump Off Point,

Rainbow Hollow, Slaughterpen Hollow--they come back to me in

picturesque array, and with them come back the memories of the gray

cabins, the clear bright water on the race, the silent forests, the

billows of laurel, the song of the brown thrashers, the shy children

in a dusky doorway, the lean pigs not shy at all, the bloodroot

underfoot, the soft, hazy sky overhead, the sense that here life was

always as it is, and always will be, with no change but the changing

seasons. I remember once more how I met the Spring at Thumping Dick,

like a dryad dancing through the wood, caught her in the very act of

climbing up from the cove below to find a road to take her north. So

we loitered together for one whole, blissful day, and when I came back

to the college campus I wore her violets in my hat.

But first I must tell you how Thumping Dick Hollow got its name. That

is more important even than knowing where it is. Many, many years ago,

so long ago that all traces of his cabin have disappeared, a man

called Dick dwelt beside the little brown brook which flows through a

slight hollow on its way to the cove below. Now, this Dick was averse

to over-much effort, unless it were effort connected with the pursuit

of bears or panther, and being of an ingenious turn of mind he

invented a labor-saving device to pound his corn. (Unfortunately, he

still had to grow it himself.) He took a hollow log and pivoted it

across the brook, at a little fall, in such a way that the upper end

would rest in the water while the lower end projected over the rocks

below the falls. Then he fastened a board across the lower half of

this lower opening, and underneath the log, also at the lower end, he

fixed a pestle. He then placed his mortar on a stone directly

beneath. The water, flowing into the hollow log, ran to the lower end

and piled up against the board till there was weight enough to tip the

entire log down. Then enough ran out to tilt the log back again. Of

course, each time the lower end of the log descended the pestle struck

a blow in the mortar. All Dick had to do was now and then to empty out

his pounded grain and put in a fresh supply. The log kept at its

solemn seesaw night and day, its dull thumps resounding through the

woods. So Thumping Dick Hollow it is to this day, and being close to

Sewanee, Tennessee, instead of New York City, Thumping Dick Hollow it

will remain, instead of becoming the Pratt Street section of Elmhurst

Manor.

To be precise, it is four miles from Sewanee, and to be more precise,

Sewanee is eight miles straight up hill from Cowan, and to be still

more precise, Cowan is thirty-five or forty miles from Chattanooga,

and now you begin to know where you are. Chattanooga, as you know, is

in Tennessee, and sits beside the superb Moccasin Bend of the

Tennessee River, under the shadow of Lookout Mountain, entirely

surrounded by freight trains. It runs Schenectady, New York, a close

race for the title of the noisiest city in the United States. But

after you have taken a west-bound train in the quaint old station of

the N. C. & St. L. railroad you pass rapidly into silence, down the

gorge of the splendid river, and then into the broken, ragged hills.

At Cowan a pig meets you on the platform, with the amiable curiosity

of the small-town resident toward the arriving stranger. Here you

change to the little branch line which runs north, up the side of the

gorge, to the coal mines. Up and up the train climbs, puffing and

straining, through a tall forest of hardwoods, and eventually reaches

an almost level plateau. Once on this plateau, you lose all sense of

mountain country and if you had not been aware of the steep climb to

get here, you would not believe that you were on the southern nose of

the Cumberland Range. Presently you reach a station--and that is

Sewanee.

There are no academic squatters at Sewanee, in their $100,000

cottages, as there are at Princeton. It is too far removed from any

cities, in the midst of its timbered mountain domain. There is a

little hotel, much frequented in summer, to be sure, but for the most

part the town is the university and its preparatory academy, and the

university is the town. Here is the Gothic chapel, the ivy-clad

scholastic buildings, the tree-shaded campus walks, the wandering

groups of hatless boys, the encircling street lined with professors'

houses--all the traditional flavor of a college, in a setting of

forest. For it is one of the unique charms of Sewanee that a walk of

a mile in any direction is a walk back into the ancient order, into

the wilderness of the southern mountaineer, into the eighteenth

century. A class that studies Shaw's plays in the morning may even

catch the vocabulary of Shakespeare in the afternoon, repeated

unconsciously by the lips of mountain children in the coves.

The word _cove_ is omnipresent here. Even the mountain folk are called

cove-ites. It needs but a short walk to show you why. The lower

Cumberlands, on the southern border of Tennessee, are unlike any other

mountain region, with a charm all their own, inherent in their

topography. Apparently an almost level stretch of timbered country

along the little railroad, in reality this level is the plateau top of

a great rock wall, a kind of huge mesa extending north and south. If

you walk to the edge, you discover that it suddenly falls away with

startling abruptness, sometimes in sheer descents of several hundred

feet till the top of the ancient shale pile is reached (now covered

deep with soil) and then dropping away more gradually with that lovely

curve of debris. But nowhere is this Palisade-like wall continuous,

and here is where the southern Cumberlands get their unique flavor.

The descending water from the plateau top has eroded deep into the

precipice every mile or even every half mile, each brook in the

course of ages eating far back into the mountain mass, forming a

V-shaped depression called a cove, and between two coves thus formed

is a reverse [symbol: upside-down V], called a point, always,

naturally, composed of the hardest rock, and not infrequently ending

in a literal point so sharp that it is like a vast granite bowsprit

thrust out into the green plains far below, terminating in a sheer

precipice of several hundred feet. Roughly, then, you may visualize

this section of the Cumberlands as a giant double-edged saw, a

thousand feet thick, laid down across the State, each tooth a "point,"

each V between the teeth a "cove." Standing far out on one of these

rock bowsprits, in the soft, hazy air of the southern mountains, you

look over the far valley lands below, you look north and south at the

other thrusting bowsprits growing bluer and more mysterious as they

recede, you look to left and right down into the timbered green

lushness of the coves, where invisible water tinkles.

But the simile of the saw is only a rough one, after all, because

erosion is never mathematical, some coves have bitten back far deeper

than others, side coves have developed, and if you follow down the

mystery of some brown brook, Little Fiery Gizzard Creek, let us say,

for love of the name, you may very soon precipitate yourself into such

a maze of coves, such a tangle of tough, tearing shrubbery (the term

"laurel hell" is the mountaineer as realist), that you will regret,

perhaps, the day you abandoned what in this region is euphemistically

called a road. But you will hardly forget the view from some inland

point, where you look, not out over the Tennessee plains, but over a

branching canyon of coves, cut like the Grand Canyon out of an apparent

plain, but, unlike that epic of naked magnificence, timbered with

great, upstanding hardwoods from floor to rim, a soft, silent, hazy

green hole where the forest floor has sunk a thousand feet, to rise

again in the smoky distance and melt into the blue. There is no sign

of human habitation, though in those coves, where the forest mould is

rich to clear and cultivate and the springs are never dry, the

cove-ites dwell, stock of the highlanders who are almost a race apart

in the fastnesses of our southern Appalachians. They have no roads,

only dim trails or footpaths. The protecting forest hides their little

clearings. Only a hawk sails on silent wings over the leafy depths,

and perhaps the faintest thread of smoke winds up and is lost in the

haze of the air, a haze which seems faintly tinged with the

all-pervading green.

But I wander as aimlessly as the enchanted visitor to Sewanee, and am

by way of forgetting that it was Spring I set out to recapture with my

pen--as if one could recapture the vanished Aprils! It _was_ April,

to be sure, early April, very cold in the Berkshires, with great,

dirty drifts of snow still lingering on the northern sides of walls

and hedges, and ice on the pools of a morning. Down here on the

Cumberland plateau the trees were still bare, too, and the mornings

chill, though you could easily find a blade of grass "big enough to

blow," and the brown thrashers sang in the dooryards. But there came a

day when the sun rose misty and hot, and I wandered out through the

woods, by a dim, sandy cart track, missing the solemn evergreen note

of our northern forests but happy in the fragrance of life reviving

under last year's leaves--that peculiar odor of the woods in Spring.

The little brown brook at Thumping Dick was softly vocal, and it, too,

smelled of leaves. After a time I reached a point which jutted out

directly over the tops of the trees growing on the debris pile below.

These trees were as tall as masts, and as straight, though they were

hardwoods, and from my rocky perch I looked through their upper

tracery of budding twigs, as through a veil of faint green and red,

out on the brown and green plains of Tennessee shining in the sun, or

left and right across the canyons of the coves to the stately

procession of receding headlands. Then I cast about for a way down

into one of the coves, and presently came upon a footpath.

It led down the headwall by sharp switchbacks till it reached the

easier declivity below, passed a gushing spring where a tin dipper

hung on a twig proclaiming unseen passers, and presently picked up the

bed of a tumbling brook. It was when I reached this brook that I was

aware of Spring coming up the slope. I could see ahead, and to either

side, a considerable distance through the open woods, and, lo! the

Judas trees were in flower, stray bursts of purplish pink lighting up

the forest floor like bright-robed, wandering dryads. (The mountain

folk call this shrub the red-bud.) I loitered on down the brook side,

through moist leaf-mould and rocks, while overhead the trees began to

cover me with their frail, new foliage, and under foot the forest

floor began to burgeon with bloom. Great double bloodroots came

first--I stepped suddenly into a garden of them and hastily stooping

crushed some juice on my fingers. Next the umbrella tops of the May

apple leaves began to push up. There was a great dogwood tree in full

bloom beside the path. A hedge-like bank of azaleas were showing bud.

Then came the violets, yellow violets, wood violets, but especially

the birdfoot variety, with their pink-tinged blue petals ubiquitous

amid the leaves. To me this violet is particularly dear, for it was

the flower which in my childhood was culled to fill those

bright-colored May baskets we hung upon our sweethearts' doors at the

festival of Spring, gathering them in the village cemetery, where they

grew in great beauty and profusion, quite as Omar would have expected.

Now I gathered a handful again, for memory's sake, and stuck them in

the band of my hat, before I resumed my journey down the cove.

The first intimation I had of coming habitation was a pig, a lean,

black, razor-back pig which grunted at my intrusion beneath his oak

tree and went racing off at a great pace, almost gracefully, I might

say, for even a pig which wanders on a mountainside develops something

of the agility of a wild creature. Not far beyond I came quite

suddenly upon such a picture as you may see nowhere in the world but

in our southern highlands, in the Spring. Aware of my coming, if I was

not aware of their proximity, six tow-headed, bare-footed,

single-garmented children, the eldest a girl not over ten, the

youngest an infant just able to stand, were ranged in solemn row, like

a flight of steps, upon the top of a large flat stone at the edge of a

little clearing, in perfect silence watching me approach, the violets

and bloodroot blossoms they had been gathering dangling in loose

bunches from their hands. Behind them, just across the brook which

ran, like a road, in front of the gate, stood a weathered-gray cabin,

of rough boards, with a central doorway and windows without sashes.

At one end was an outside chimney of field-stone, laid, it seemed,

with clay. Surrounding this cabin was a rough picket fence, again of

untrimmed boards, with a gate opening on the brook and stepping stones

across to the path. In the little compound thus enclosed, and almost

overtopping the cabin, were half a dozen peach and plum trees,

veritable geyser jets of pink and white bloom. Behind, in a small

clearing, was the stubble of last year's corn. Squalid and poor and

mean enough a dwelling, a shiftless clearing, a dirty family of

children--yes. But under its geyser jets of blossom that little gray

cabin was the essence of the picturesque, with the forest wall rising

behind it, and behind that the great headwall of the cove. It was

weathered and old and primitive and lovely; and the six little shy

ragamuffins on the stone, still staring at me with the eyes of timid

animals, were--well, they were six little shy ragamuffins, and that is

nice enough!

"Hello," said I, "I see you've got the baby out to gather wild

flowers, too."

The eldest girl found speech, after an effort. "That ain't the baby,"

she said, with a show of scorn for my ignorance. "The baby's in the

house with maw."

My respect for the capacity of that little cabin was still further

increased by this revelation. I asked the eldest girl some questions

about the way, finding her directions for spotting a trail in this

forest maze remarkably lucid, and went again on my wanderings, my last

backward glimpse of the mouse-gray cabin under its pink and white

geysers of blossom still showing the six little tow-headed, barefooted

youngsters standing like six little patiences on a pedestal, staring

after me. But when I had disappeared down the trail I heard from far

off, mingling with the murmur of the brook, the shrill sound of

childish glee, as they resumed their search for wild flowers. Then it

was that Spring smiled, and gave my fingers a little squeeze!

So I wandered on, with Spring for company, all that blissful day,

through forests of oak and chestnut where the Judas trees danced, past

dogwood thickets and over beds of violets, into unexpected little

clearings where always the same gray cabin of rough, weathered boards

sat under its geyser jets of pink and white, while shy, pretty

children peeped like startled rabbits from the dim doorway and the pig

ran off through the woods (when he did not follow me), and finally up

the steep slope at the head of a cove again, into the region of the

earliest bloodroots, and so to the final shin up the last precipitous

wall to the plateau above. As I reached the summit and looked back, I

saw the cove was green, and the veil I had gazed through that morning

was hazier now; Spring had climbed with me back up the slope and even

here on the two-thousand foot rim the trees were bursting into leaf.

There was a carpet of brilliant red stonecrop on the rock at my feet.

As I came once more to the brook in Thumping Dick I saw a bloodroot on

the bank, with the dead leaf it had that day pushed up still clinging

to it. Yes--and here was a tiny bed of violets, in a warm, sheltered

glade, opening to the sun. I gathered them all, and redecorated my

hat. Then I bathed my hot face in the brook and lay listening to a

thrasher for a while, as the long shadows of afternoon crept like

lean, ghostly fingers through the forest and between me and the sky I

could see the lacework of the budding twigs, with here and there a

tree that actually showed leaf. No one passed me on the trail. The

thrasher and I had the woods all to ourselves, except, of course, for

Spring, who sat beside me singing _mezza voce_, to herself, a song

curiously like the ripple of a brook.

At last I rose and followed the dim trail back toward the college,

entering the campus as the evening lights were coming on in the

dormitory windows, and somewhere a group of boys were singing, not

lustily but with the plaintive quality that sometimes steals into the

voices of the young and happy at the twilight hour. I tossed my hat on

a table, and saw my withered violets falling dejectedly over the

band. But I did not care. Back below Thumping Dick was a cove full on

the march, coming up the slope, the blue battalions of the Spring.

Outside, in the smoky, warm dusk, a thrasher still sang. Spring had

left me, for she had far to go, but all the way north I should see the

signs where her feet had trod, and when at last I reached once more my

northern mountain home, I should find her waiting with a smile,

perhaps with just a trillium in her hand to offer me, before she sped

on again toward Labrador. But, I thought, I could never know her quite

so well again as I had this day; she would not loiter with me quite so

familiarly, with her dear, friendly squeeze of my fingers as the

childish voices drifted with the brook song down the cove. I had kept

tryst with Spring at Thumping Dick, for once the favored of all her

myriad lovers.

[Illustration]

_The Passing of the Stage Sundial_

It has been many years since I have seen a sundial on the stage. There

was a time when the stage could not get along without them; but styles

have changed. "Iram indeed has gone with all his rose," and Eddie

Sothern, best beloved of romantic actors in your generation and mine,

has written his theatrical memoires, which is the player's method of

saying farewell. _The Melancholy Tale of Me_, he calls them, perhaps

because they are not in the least melancholy--a good and sufficient

reason. Yet Mr. Sothern strangely neglects the subject of sundials in

his book, although they were his prop in how many a play back in the

golden Nineties!--the golden, promise-laden, contradictory Nineties,

that _fin-de-siecle_ decade when Max Nordau thundered that we were

going to the dogs of degeneracy, and we youngsters knew that we were

headed not alone for a new heaven, but what is much more important, a

new earth.

My school and college days fell entirely in the Nineties, or almost

entirely, for I finally emerged with a sheepskin written in Latin I

could no longer translate, in June, 1900. I saw my first modern

realistic play in 1893, when I was a little junior middler at Phillips

Andover. It was _Shore Acres_, and I have not yet forgotten, after a

quarter of a century, the thrill of that revelation. It was almost as

if my grandfather's kitchen had been put upon the stage, and with

Herne himself to play the leading role, to blow on the frosty pane

that he could peer into the night, to bank the fires, tip the stove

lids, lock the door, and climb slowly up to bed while the old kitchen,

in semi-darkness, seemed like a closing benediction before the

downrush of the final curtain, I caught the poetry of the commonplace,

I had my first unconscious lesson in literary and dramatic fidelity.

And I ended my college days, a much more sophisticated person,

championing Pinero and Jones, rushing eagerly to special performances

of Ibsen, and ardently admiring the plays of G. B. Shaw, two of which,

_Arms and the Man_ and _The Devil's Disciple_, had been acted in

America by Richard Mansfield before the end of the century.

Considering these plays now, and their effect upon me--and not

forgetting, either, the passionate admiration, almost the worship, we

young men of twenty had in those days for the acting of Mrs. Fiske--it

would be easy to infer that the whole period of the Nineties for us

youngsters was a period of revolt and forward-urging, that we were

crusaders for what Henry Arthur Jones called "the great realities of

modern life" in art. Crusaders we were, to be sure. I well remember

long debates with my father, a man of old-fashioned tastes in poetry,

and a particular fondness for Burns, over the merits of Kipling's

poems. (Think of considering Kipling's poems revolutionary! Indeed,

think of considering some of them poems!). We debated from still more

divergent viewpoints over the novels of d'Annunzio. In college, in my

last year or two, some of us even adopted the views of Tolstoy in his

_What is Art?_ and under the urge of this new sociological passion we

took volunteer classes in night schools. I remember instructing a

group of Jewish youths in the principles of oral debate, or, rather,

debating the principles of debating with them, for being unblessed

with an expensive preparatory school and college education, and being

Jews into the bargain, they did not propose to take anything on faith.

I used to return to my room in the college Yard wondering just why it

was that these working lads, mere "foreigners", of a race infinitely

inferior, of course, to the Anglo-Saxon, and without the precious boon

of a Harvard training, had so much more real intellectual curiosity

and mental grasp than any of us "superior" youths. These classes

interfered seriously with my academic work, yet it seems to me now

that they were infinitely more profitable.

However, it was a curious paradox of the Nineties that while we were

discovering Pinero, Ibsen, Shaw, Tolstoy, we were also reading _The

Prisoner of Zenda_ and yielding ourselves with luxurious abandon into

the arms of honey-sweet romance. At the very time when the new,

realistic drama was leading us out of a pasteboard world into

something approximating an intelligent comment on life, the

cloak-and-sword drama was having a fine little reactionary

renaissance, the calcium moon was shining down on many a gleaming

garden and flashing blade, and ears were rapturously strained to catch

the murmur of love-laden words. Then it was that the stage sundial

flourished in all its glory, generally flooded, to be sure, with

moonlight--that peculiar moonlight of the American theatre which turns

grease-paint to a horrible magenta--and we youths, with the divine

flexibility of imagination only youth can know, responded alike to

_Hedda Gabler_ and _An Enemy to the King_.

Do you remember the sundial, exactly at stage centre, in the latter

play? In what dulcet tones, love-laden, the future Hamlet and Macbeth

murmured to his lady fair! Even the sword duel in the last act, all

over the chamber, across the great bed ripping down the curtains,

back and forth with flash of steel and rattle of blade, was not so

thrilling as that moonlit scene across the dial plate. My constant

companion in those days was a boy who to-day preaches each week from a

famous pulpit, with gravity and eloquence. He is a man of substantial

parts, on whom life's bitter realities press very hard as he battles

to relieve them. Does he now recall, I wonder, how for weeks after we

had hung from the gallery rail at _An Enemy to the King_ he even said

"Thank you," when somebody passed him a piece of bread, in the deep,

long-drawn tones of Sothern's romantic passion? He was a handsome

youth, and I know not what mischief he wrought that winter in gentle

bosoms, with his vocabulary enlarged and romanticized, his tones

colored with emotion, as he sought secluded corners at our dances and

practised his new art. Our Tolstoian moods were not for dances, you

may be sure! We lived in a dual universe. In one world were sundials

and moonlight and the thrill of a woman's eyes; there was slow music

and the ache of unfilled desire ever about to be gratified by some

hoped-for miracle. In the other world were only facts, hard facts, and

the scorn of considering them emotionally, of considering them in any

way but with the intellect. I fear in those days our moods did not

connect intellect and the fair sex. Perhaps youth never does. And

perhaps youth is right, not in thus passing judgment on women, for

that is not what is done, but in refusing to surrender any portion of

the divine romantic mystery of sex at two-and-twenty to the cold light

of reason. When Shaw and Ibsen wrote, they wrote of daily life, and we

were learning to accept their contention that it should be written

about truthfully. But there was no lie in these other plays, these

sundial romances, for they were not daily life, they were ages long

ago and far away, they belonged to the Never-Never-Land of romantic

fable--of dreams and the heart's desire. There is no such thing as a

complete realist at twenty. Or, if there is, he should be interned as

an enemy alien.

A generation has passed since the Nineties, and there are no stage

sundials any more. Perhaps that is but another way of saying that I am

middle-aged, but, upon my word, I do not think so. Do you remember the

sundial over which Dolly and Mr. Carter philandered, the one which

bore the motto--

Horas non numero nisi serenas?

I reread that dialogue the other day, and captured some of the ancient

thrill. No, the real trouble is that a generation of realism, or what

has passed for realism on our American stage, has done its deadly

work. It has killed romance. That is not at all what realism was

intended to do. Indeed, to the larger view, romance is a part of the

reality of life. Realism was a reaction against sham and falsity and

sentimentalism, and, above all, perhaps, triviality of theme. But the

net result, so far as the American drama is concerned, seems to have

been the substitution of a realistic setting and dialogue for a false

one, and then a continuance of the old sham, sentimentalism,

triviality. How else can we account for the success of Mr. Belasco?

But the taste engendered by the realistic settings and dialogue has

banished the cloak and sword and sundial, stripped romance of its

charm and allure; and once stripped of these, it ceases to be romance,

for it ceases to reach the heart through the sense of beauty and of

mystery. We have succeeded in substituting a chocolate caramel for the

apples of Hesperides.

Yet it cannot be that this condition will be permanent. Comes a little

play like _The Gypsy Trail_, wherein even through the realistic

setting a strain of romance strikes, and all hearts respond. Youth

will not be denied, but, like Sentimental Tommy, will "find a way." It

may be that the old dualism of the Nineties was the sane solution, as

so many of the modern "art theatre" directors maintain, at least by

their practice, and the realistic drama should stick relentlessly to

its last, while romance flourishes untroubled by any fetters, in

free, fantastic, perhaps poetic, form. I do not know. I only know that

the sundial must come back to the stage, not, it may be, as the garden

ornament of old, but in some guise to further the dreams and dear

delusions of our beauty-hungry hearts. For, as you may have guessed,

the sundial is a symbol.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

_On Singing Songs with One Finger_

James Huneker has pointed out that lovers of the drama, who are sound

judges as well, too frequently have so little taste in music that they

tolerate or even approve the most atrocious noises emitted in the name

of musical comedy; while lovers and sound judges of music are quite as

often woefully remiss in their knowledge of stagecraft, accepting

scenery and stage management in their opera which would put men less

skilled in the creation of theatric illusion than David Belasco to the

blush.

How true it is that unto him who hath shall be denied, and unto him

who hath not shall be given what the other man could use to such

advantage! The composer who can both pucker the lips of the

gallery-gods and satisfy the ears of the musical critics, how

infrequent a visitor on this planet! so that Offenbach and Sullivan

must often have suffered from loneliness. The singer who can also act,

how rare a song-bird! The interpreter of the _lieder_ of Franz or

Schubert or Grieg who will sacrifice vocal display to the composer's

meaning, and who has the fineness of soul to grasp and make manifest

the mood of the lyric, how welcome a guest! And yet those who could

write undying comic music if only they were composers, who could lift

the hearts of their hearers into the skies with "Hark, hark, the

lark," if only they could sing, are legion in number. How often, in

short, like those two in Lord Houghton's poem, are temperament and

technique--"strangers yet."

So are they in me, alas! total strangers. From my earliest years I

have been filled with the joyous impulse of song, but never were ears

more false to the one true pitch than mine, never was voice less

commensurate with ambition. My youthful dreams, when they were not of

foot-ball or swimming, were all of the Sirens, and I deemed Ulysses,

if prudent, none the less a lack-sentiment sort of hero, not inspiring

to know, because he stopped his ears to their song. The jeers of my

fellows long ago taught me the bitter lesson to keep my melody to

myself, but the impulse is still in me to sing, the myriad moods of

music are still mine, and I still consider Ulysses the first of the

Philistines.

For some time I thought my own case unique, but acquaintance with a

music critic who cannot hum a tune, and with a celestial tenor (such

tenors are so rare I fear this may be too personal for print) who was

the most stupid of men, without the slightest capacity for high

passion of any sort, convinced me of my error: and many subsequent

conversations with men and women like myself incapacitated by nature

for self-expression, as well as much listening to bad singers with

good voices, have but forced conviction home. And now, when unfeeling

relatives and scoffing friends smile the superior smile of the

"musically talented" at sight of my piano which I play with one

finger, and at the pile of music upon it, I let them smile, calm in

the assurance that songs and instrument are mine by better right,

perhaps, than theirs, who can raise voices quite on pitch to the

accompaniment of eight fingers and two thumbs.

For, when none of them is by, I play with my one finger the airs of

the world's great _lieder_, and hear from that slight suggestion the

songs as they should be sung. As I would rather read _Hamlet_ in my

library than see the average actor attempt the part, so I would rather

play _Der Atlas_ with one finger, with my own imagination calling

forth the tragic power and grief, the superb climax of surprise and

thunder, than hear it sung by any man at present on the concert stage.

The poignant sadness cross-shot with humor of another of Schubert's

songs, _The Hurdy Gurdy_, vanishes in the concert room, melts

hopelessly into the dulcet tones of the young lady soprano, whose

friends titter when she is done, "What a pretty song." But my

one-fingered rendering--aided in this song by occasional jabs with

three fingers of the left hand--brings to my inward ear the pathos of

the barrel-organ, heard over the distant hum of a careless city, laden

with the sorrow of all the world; brings memories, too, of that

consummate singer of songs, Marcella Sembrich. Under the touch of my

blunt forefinger the songs of MacDowell distill their delicate

melancholy, that in the homes of my friends, where daughters ripple

well-dusted piano keys and display expensive voices, yield only

treacle and honey. Why should I mind the supercilious smile of my

neighbor next door when he occasionally catches me at my unidigital

performance, he who is a soloist in a noted church choir, but who, I

very well know, prefers _The Palms_ or _Over There_ to Purcell's _I'll

sail upon the Dog Star_, if, indeed, he ever heard the madly melodious

boast of the "roaring boy"?

After all, there is nothing wonderful in this. It but shows that the

genius which creates and the imagination which appreciates are akin,

even as Professor Spingarn has asserted. Even operas and symphonies

were composed at a piano. Strauss heard the one hundred and five

instruments which are called on to represent the cry of the baby in

his _Symphonia Domestica_ all tooting and scraping in the notes his

ten fingers evoked from his piano keys. (Personally I should rather

have heard them so!) And why cannot I hear at least a simple little

song in the melody that my one finger plays? The numerical ratio is in

my favor, surely, although my neighbor would doubtless rudely suggest

that I am not Richard Strauss. At any rate, for me there is a great

joy in singing songs as they ought to be sung, if only with one

finger, which has done much to console me for the technical powers

nature has so plentifully denied me. I offer the same solution to all

others who are in my case, only suggesting that it would be wise of

them, perhaps, to learn while they are yet plastic the use of all ten

fingers. They will not thereby secure ten times as much enjoyment, but

their families will thank them.

[Illustration]

_The Immorality of Shop-windows_

At the heart of morality lies content. That is a statement either

optimistic or cynical, as you choose to look at it; but it is a

statement of fact. Even the reformer seeks to allay his discontent,

which does not arise from the morality in him, but from the immorality

in other people. Anybody who has lived with a reformer knows this.

Therefore are modern shop-windows--by steel construction made to

occupy the maximum amount of space, to assault by breadth and

brilliance the most callous eye--one of the most immoral forces in

modern city life.

This is especially true of the shop-windows on Fifth Avenue, New York.

For these windows, even at night illuminated like silent drawing-rooms

vacant of people, expose to the view of the most humble passer on the

curb as well as to the pampered rich racing by in motors, the spoils

of all the world. Here are paintings by the old masters and the new;

rare furniture and marbles from Italian palaces; screens from Japan;

jewels and rugs from the Orient; silk stockings, curios, china,

bronzes, hats, furs; and again more curios, cabinets, statues,

paintings; things rare and beautiful and exotic from every quarter of

the globe, "from silken Samarcand to cedared Lebanon." And they are

not collections, they are not the treasures of some proud house,

although they might have been once; they are for sale; they may be

bought by anybody--who has the price.

But who has the price? That stout woman riding by in her limousine, with

a Pomeranian on her lap instead of a baby? That fifteen-dollar-a-week

chorus-girl in a cab, half buried under a two-thousand-dollar

chinchilla coat? That elderly man who hobbles goutily out of his club

and walks a few short blocks to his house on Murray Hill, "for

exercise"? Assuredly, somebody has the price, for the shops are ever

open, the allurement of their windows never less. But not you, who

gaze hungry-eyed at these beautiful objects, and then go to a Sixth

Avenue department store and wonder if you can afford that Persian rug

made in Harlem, marked down from $50 to $48.87; or that colonial

mahogany bookcase glistening with brand new varnish. Envy gnaws at

your heart. And yet you had supposed that yours was a comfortable sort

of income--maybe four thousand dollars a year. Your father, on that

income, back in a New England suburb, was counted quite a man in the

community, and you put on airs. He selected the new minister, and you

set the style in socks. But now you are humiliated, embittered. You

rave against predatory wealth. Thus shop-windows do make Socialists of

us all.

Nor are you able to accept the shop-windows educationally, recalling

that when you went to Europe you saw nothing that had not already

stared at you through plate-glass on Fifth Avenue--for sale. Who wants

to view one of the chairs that a Medici sat in, only to recall that

months before he saw its mate in a shop-window at the corner of Fifth

Avenue and Fifty-first Street; or to contemplate a pious yellow

heathen bowed down before the image of Buddha, while the tinkly temple

bells are tinkling, only to have rise in his mind the memory of a much

larger and more venerable Buddha which used to smile out inscrutably

at the crossing of Twenty-ninth Street, below a much sweeter string of

tinkly temple bells?

We've a bigger, better Buddha in a cleaner (!), greener (!!) land,

Many miles from Mandalay.

There is no romance in an antique, be it god or chair or China plate,

when it is exposed for sale in a shop-window. And there is no romance

in it amid its native surroundings when you realize that any day it

may be carried _off_ and so exposed. Thus do shop-windows destroy

romance.

But in the humbler windows off the Avenue there is an equal, if

grosser, element of immorality. For these are the windows where

price-tags are displayed. The tag has always two prices, the higher

marked through with red ink, the lower, for this very reason, calling

with a siren voice. The price crossed off is always just beyond your

means, the other just within it. "Ah," you think, swallowing the

deception with only too great willingness, "what a bargain! It may

never come again!" And you enter the fatal door.

Perhaps you struggle first. "Don't buy it," says the inhibition of

prudence. "You have more neckties now than you can wear."

"But it's so cheap," says impulse, with the usual sophistry.

And you, poor victim that you are, tugged on and back by warring

factions in your brain,--poor refutation of the silly old theological

superstitions that there is such a thing as free will,--vacillate on

the sidewalk till the battle is over, till your mythical free will is

down in the dust. Thus do shop-windows overthrow theology.

Then you enter that shop, and ask for the tie. Or perhaps it is

something else, and they haven't your size. You ought to feel glad,

relieved. Do you? You do not! You are angry. You feel as if you had

lost just so much money, when in reality you have saved it. Thus do

shop-windows destroy logic.

This has been a particularly perilous season for the man with a

passion for shirts. By some diabolic agreement, all the haberdashers

at one and the same time filled their windows with luscious lavenders

and faint green stripes and soft silk shirts with comfortable French

cuffs, and marking out $2.00 or $3.00, as the case might be, wrote

$1.50 or $2.50 below. The song of the shirt was loud in the land, its

haunting melody not to be resisted. Is there any lure for a woman in

all the fluffy mystery of a January "white sale" comparable to the

seduction for a man of a lavender shirt marked down from $2.00 to

$1.50? I doubt it. Heaven help the woman if there is! So the unused

stock in trunk or bureau drawer accumulates, and the weekly reward for

patient toil at an office dribbles away, and the savings-bank is no

richer for your deposit--and the shop-windows flare as shamelessly as

ever. There is only one satisfaction. The man who sells shirts always

has a passion for jewelry. And that keeps him poor, too!

[Illustration]

_A Forgotten American Poet_

I have written the title, "A forgotten American poet," and I shall let

it stand, though I am not sure that he was ever well enough known to

be spoken of now as forgotten. Ten or a dozen years ago a friend of

mine who was working on an anthology of American poetry, at the John

Carter Brown library in Providence, wrote to me with great enthusiasm

of a poet he had "discovered," and of whom he had never heard before.

"His name is Frederick Goddard Tuckerman," my friend said, "and you

will not find him in Stedman's anthology, though it seems incredible

that Stedman left out anybody or anything. Get a copy of his poems if

you can--Ticknor and Fields, 1860."

I sent in my order for the book, to Goodspeed's, and then forgot the

incident. But Goodspeed didn't. A year later the book came. Evidently

it is an infrequent item at the auctions. The copy I received was a

second edition, dated 1864 (which seems to indicate the poems had

found some readers), but still in the familiar brown of Ticknor and

Fields, matching my first American editions of _The Angel in the

House_. This copy was of special interest because it was a

presentation copy from the author to Harriet Beecher Stowe. The leaves

had been opened, but if Mrs. Stowe read, she had made no marginal

comments. The only addition to the book was an old newspaper clipping

pasted in the back--a condensed history of the Beecher family! I read

the volume myself with increasing interest and enthusiasm, and at the

close I desired to learn more of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, not of

the Beechers. Mr. Stedman's complete omission of these poems could

only have been explained, I felt, by an equally complete ignorance of

their existence. Compared to the poems of Henry T. Tuckerman, included

by Stedman, the verses of his unknown cousin were as gold to copper.

Why, I wondered, had this man been so completely obliterated by Time,

or why had he failed in his life to reach a niche where Time could not

utterly efface him?

I wrote to Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who, I discovered, had

been a classmate of Tuckerman's at Harvard, and who of course knew

practically everybody of consequence in the literary world of his

generation. Colonel Higginson was able to supply some data, but not

much. Tuckerman was born in 1821, of a rather well-known Boston

family. Joseph Tuckerman, philanthropist and early Unitarian

clergyman, was his uncle. He was a younger brother of Edward

Tuckerman, long famous as a professor of botany at Amherst College,

and who gave his name to Tuckerman's Ravine on Mount Washington.

Frederick Goddard Tuckerman entered Harvard with the class of 1841,

but remained only a year, passing over to the Law School a little

later where he secured his LL.B. in 1842, and for a period evidently

practised law in Boston. "I remember he came back among us at some

kind of gathering during our college course," Colonel Higginson wrote,

"and seemed very friendly and cordial to all. I remember him as a

refined and gentlemanly fellow, but did not then know him as a poet. I

see him put down as a lawyer in Boston (in Adams's _Dictionary of

American Authors_), but I have no recollection of that fact."

It was not until I had written and published in the _Forum_ magazine a

little appreciation of his poetry that I learned from his son, now a

resident of Amherst, Massachusetts, that Frederick Tuckerman, even as

his verses seemed to imply, early moved away from cities to the

beautiful valley under the shadow of the Holyoke Range, and there

passed his days, evidently the world forgetting, and by the world

forgot. He issued his single volume of poems in 1860, when he was

thirty-nine, just before the outbreak of the Civil War, but no shadow

of that coming contest crosses their pages, as it crossed the pages of

Whittier and Emerson, or as it affected the active life of his

classmate Colonel Higginson. The second edition, in 1864, was still

unaffected by the great struggle. He produced his slender sheaf of

poems amid the fields, in quiet introspection, and he might well be

accused of a species of Pharisaism, were these poems not so artlessly

and passionately sincere, and often so tinged with religious awe. His

withdrawal, in his verse, from the life of his times was the act of a

natural recluse.

At the time Tuckerman's poems were issued, it is interesting to

consider briefly some of the poetic influences which affected the

public. The two best-selling poets just then, even in America, were

Tennyson and Coventry Patmore, the latter represented, of course, by

_The Angel in the House_. Indeed, the poems of these two sold better

than novels! Whitman was hardly yet an influence. Julia Ward Howe had

written, and Booth had accepted, a drama in blank verse. Our minor

poets still wrote in the style of Pope, and the narrative shared

honors with the moral platitude in popular regard. Tennyson, of

course, was a great poet, and Patmore no mean one, even at that time,

but it is questionable whether the huge popular success of their

works, such as _The Princess_ and _The Angel in the House_, was due

to their strictly poetic merits. At any rate, the poetry of Frederick

Goddard Tuckerman, lacking narrative interest, palatable platitudes,

lyric lilt, but being, rather, contemplative, aloof, delicately minor

and in many ways curiously modern, must have fallen on ears not

attuned to it. He had none of the Bolshevik revolutionary vitality of

Whitman, to thrive and grow by the opposition he created. He could

have aroused no opposition. It would have been his happy fate to find

men and women who could appreciate his delicate observation of nature,

his golden bursts of imaginative vigor, his wistful, contemplative

melancholy, his disregard of academic form less because it hampered

him than because he was careless of anything but the exact image. Such

readers it was apparently not his fate to find in sufficient numbers

to bring him fame. He was, in a sense, a modern before his time, but

without sufficient consciousness of his modernity to fight. He was a

mute, inglorious Robert Frost--like Frost for one year a Harvard

student, like him retiring to the New England countryside, like him

intent chiefly on rendering the commonplace beauty of that countryside

into something magical because so true. Only he lacked Frost's

dramatic sense, and interest in human problems.

Tuckerman's favorite medium was the sonnet; but a sonnet to him was a

thing of fourteen five-foot iambic lines, and there all rules ended.

Sometimes he even crowded six feet into a line. It is possible his

laxness of form was due to ignorance, but more likely that it was due

to a greater interest in his mood than in the "rules" of poetry. Many

of his sonnets were in sequence, one flowing into the next. Here are

two, thus unified, which show in flashes his sweep of imaginative

phrase, and his transcendental bent:

The starry flower, the flower-like stars that fade

And brighten with the daylight and the dark--

The bluet in the green I faintly mark,

The glimmering crags with laurel overlaid,

Even to the Lord of light, the Lamp of shade,

Shine one to me--the least, still glorious made

As crowned moon or heaven's great hierarch.

And so, dim grassy flower and night-lit spark,

Still move me on and upward for the True;

Seeking through change, growth, death, in new and old

The full in few, the statelier in the less,

With patient pain; always remembering this--

His hand, who touched the sod with showers of gold,

Stippled Orion on the midnight blue.

And so, as this great sphere (now turning slow

Up to the light from that abyss of stars,

Now wheeling into gloom through sunset bars)

With all its elements of form and flow,

And life in life, where crown'd yet blind must go

The sensible king--is but a Unity

Compressed of motes impossible to know;

Which worldlike yet in deep analogy

Have distance, march, dimension and degree;

So the round earth--which we the world do call--

Is but a grain in that which mightiest swells,

Whereof the stars of light are particles,

As ultimate atoms of one infinite Ball

On which God moves, and treads beneath His feet the All!

Turning the page we come on a poem called _The Question_. "How shall I

array my love?" he asks, and ranges the earth for costly jewels and

silks from Samarcand; but because his love is a simple New England

maid, he rejects them all as unworthy and inappropriate, and closing

sings:

The river-riches of the sphere,

All that the dark sea-bottoms bear,

The wide earth's green convexity,

The inexhaustible blue sky,

Hold not a prize so proud, so high,

That it could grace her, gay or grand,

By garden-gale and rose-breath fanned;

Or as to-night I saw her stand,

Lovely in the meadow land,

With a clover in her hand.

Have not these lines a magic simplicity? It seems so to me. They flow

rippling and bright to the inevitable finish, and there is no more to

say.

Tuckerman's power of close yet magical observation, used not so much

in the Tennysonian way (for Tennyson was a close observer, make no

mistake about that) as in what we now think of as the modern way, that

is, as a part of the realistic record of homely events, with beauty

only as a by-product, is well illustrated in the opening lines of a

narrative poem called _The School Girl, a New England Idyll_. Here

again a kinship with Frost is seen, rather than with Tuckerman's

contemporaries:

The wind, that all the day had scarcely clashed

The cornstalks in the sun, as the sun sank

Came rolling up the valley like a wave,

Broke in the beech and washed among the pine,

And ebbed to silence; but at the welcome sound--

Leaving my lazy book without a mark,

In hopes to lose among the blowing fern

The dregs of headache brought from yesternight,

And stepping lightly lest the children hear--

I from a side door slipped, and crossed a lane

With bitter Mayweed lined, and over a field

Snapping with grasshoppers, until I came

Down where an interrupted brook held way

Among the alders. There, on a strutting branch

Leaving my straw, I sat and wooed the west,

With breast and palms outspread as to a fire.

These powers of observation are again illustrated in a poem of quite

different import, called _Margites_, a lyric of thirteen stanzas, some

of which are inexcusably crude. It begins:

I neither plow the field nor sow,

Nor hold the spade nor drive the cart,

Nor spread the heap, nor hill nor hoe,

To keep the barren land in heart.

After four more stanzas in similar vein, comes this bit of magic

word-painting, so instinct with our New England Autumn, yet so

entirely the work of a realist, with his eye on the object:

But, leaning from my window, chief

I mark the Autumn's mellow signs--

The frosty air, the yellow leaf,

The ladder leaning on the vines.

The maple from his brood of boughs

Puts northward out a reddening limb;

The mist draws faintly round the house;

And all the headland heights are dim.

The poem then continues to its close:

And yet it is the same as when

I looked across the chestnut woods,

And saw the barren landscape then

O'er the red bunch of lilac buds;

And all things seem the same. 'Tis one

To lie in sleep, or toil as they

Who rise beforetime with the sun,

And so keep footstep with their day;

For aimless oaf and wiser fool

Work to one end by differing deeds;--

The weeds rot in the standing pool;

The water stagnates in the weeds;

And all by waste or warfare falls,

Has gone to wreck, or crumbling goes,

Since Nero planned his golden walls,

Or the Cham Cublai built his house.

But naught I reck of change and fray;

Watching the clouds at morning driven,

The still declension of the day;

And, when the moon is just in heaven,

I walk, unknowing where or why;

Or idly lie beneath the pine,

And bite the dry brown threads, and lie

And think a life well lost is mine.

"A life well lost"! The phrase is perhaps pathetically revealing--and

prophetic. Or are we stretching the poet's ambitions to be known as a

poet? That he published what he wrote indicates a normal desire for

recognition, yet it can hardly be doubted, either, that he was an

amateur in verse, whose life was rather centred in his contemplative,

retiring existence among the fields and hills of Amherst. There may

even seem to some a delicate Pharisaism about this sonnet, a

Pharisaism removed from the robustness of Thoreau, who would certainly

have argued the point with the farmer:

"That boy," the farmer said, with hazel wand

Pointing him out, half by the haycock hid,

"Though bare sixteen can work at what he's bid

From sun till set, to cradle, reap or band."

I heard the words, but scarce could understand

Whether they claimed a smile or gave me pain;

Or was it aught to me, in that green lane,

That all day yesterday, the briers amid,

He held the plough against the jarring land

Steady, or kept his place among the mowers;

Whilst other fingers, sweeping for the flowers,

Brought from the forest back a crimson stain?

Was it a thorn that touched the flesh? or did

The poke-berry spit purple on my hand?

Yet, as we have said, Tuckerman was far from Pharisaism of any sort,

either of the aesthete or nature-lover. His mind was too genuinely

occupied with spiritual problems. Take, for example, this closing

sonnet in a sequence depicting the discords of Nature:

Not the round natural word, not the deep mind,

The reconcilement holds: the blue abyss

Collects it not; our arrows sink amiss;

And but in Him may we our import find.

The agony to know, the grief, the bliss

Of toil, is vain and vain! clots of the sod

Gathered in heat and haste, and flung behind,

To blind ourselves and others--what but this,

Still grasping dust and sowing toward the wind?

No more thy meaning seek, thine anguish plead;

But leaving straining thought and stammering word

Across the barren azure pass to God;

Shooting the void in silence, like a bird--

A bird that shuts his wings for better speed!

Here, surely, is poetry that would not seem the least among the myriad

hosts in Mr. Stedman's hospitable anthology! The rhyme scheme may be

quite unorthodox, but the poet's lips have been touched by a coal from

the high altar, none the less.

The volume closes with a sonnet sequence which is poignantly intimate;

almost it is a diary of the poet's grief for the loss of the woman he

loved, and in its stabbing intensity holds a hint of such poems as

Patmore's _The Azalea_. Here is one:

Again, again, ye part in stormy grief

From these bare hills and bowers so built in vain,

And lips and hearts that will not move again--

Pathetic Autumn and the writhled leaf;

Dropping away in tears with warning brief:

The wind reiterates a wailful strain,

And on the skylight beats the restless rain,

And vapour drowns the mountain, base and brow.

I watch the wet black roofs through mist defined,

I watch the raindrops strung along the blind,

And my heart bleeds, and all my senses bow

In grief; as one mild face, with suffering lined,

Comes up in thought: oh, wildly, rain and wind,

Mourn on! she sleeps, nor heeds your angry sorrow now.

Such use of pictorial observation as "the raindrops strung along the

blind," and "the wet black roofs through mist defined," is something

you will look for in vain through the pages of Longfellow, for

instance. This is the sonnet of a realist. So, also, is this one,

which does not seem to me to deserve oblivion, and certainly so long

as my memory retains its power will have that little span of

immortality:

My Anna! when for thee my head was bowed,

The circle of the world, sky, mountain, main,

Drew inward to one spot; and now again

Wide Nature narrows to the shell and shroud.

In the late dawn they will not be forgot,

And evenings early dark; when the low rain

Begins at nightfall, though no tempest rave,

I know the rain is falling on her grave;

The morning views it, and the sunset cloud

Points with a finger to that lonely spot;

The crops, that up the valley rolling go,

Ever toward her slumber bow and blow!

I look on the sweeping corn and the surging rye,

And with every gust of wind my heart goes by!

It must not be supposed that the predominant note in Tuckerman's

poetry is elegiac; rather is it a note of tender, wistful, and

scrupulously accurate contemplation of the New England countryside,

mingled with spiritual speculation. But as the volume closed with the

elegiac poems, and as thereafter no more poems were published, it may

be surmised that the poet's will to create was smothered in the

poignant ripple of his personal sorrow. Had it not been, and had his

pen continued to write, one cannot help wondering how much closer he

would have come to the modern note in poetry. That he already felt a

tendency to progress from the old metres to freer forms is constantly

apparent; and this tendency, combined with his unconsciously

scrupulous realism, might well have brought him near to the present. I

should like to close this little paper to his memory with one of his

lyrics which throws over rhyme altogether, and strictly formal metre,

also, though the fetters are still there. It is the stab of grief

which comes through to haunt you, the bare simplicity and the woe.

Objective it certainly is not, as the modernists maintain they are.

Yet the personal note will always be modern, for it has no age. This

lyric belongs to you and me to-day, not in the pages of a forgotten

book, on the shelves of a dusty library. I would that some of our

_vers libre_ practitioners could equal it:

I took from its glass a flower,

To lay on her grave with dull, accusing tears;

But the heart of the flower fell out as I handled the rose,

And my heart is shattered and soon will wither away.

I watch the changing shadows,

And the patch of windy sunshine upon the hill,

And the long blue woods; and a grief no tongue can tell

Breaks at my eyes in drops of bitter rain.

I hear her baby wagon,

And the little wheels go over my heart:

Oh! when will the light of the darkened house return?

Oh! when will she come who made the hills so fair?

I sit by the parlor window,

When twilight deepens and winds grow cold without;

But the blessed feet no more come up the walk,

And my little girl and I cry softly together.

[Illustration]

_New Poetry and the Lingering Line_

I have one grave objection to the "new poetry"--I cannot remember it.

Some, to be sure, would say that is no objection at all, but I am not

of the number. It would hardly become me, in fact, since I have, in a

minor pipe, committed "new poetry" myself on various and sundry

occasions, or what I presume it to be, particularly when I didn't have

time to write in rhyme or even metre. The new poets may object all

they like, but it _is_ easier to put your thought (when you happen to

have one) into rhythm than into rhyme and metre. If, indeed, as the

_vers libre_ practitioners insist, each idea comes clothed in its own

inevitable rhythm, there can be very little trouble about the matter.

The poem composes itself, and your chief task will be with the

printer! I don't say the rhythmic irregularity is not, perhaps, more

suitable for certain effects, or at any rate that it cannot achieve

effects of its own; I certainly don't say that it isn't poetry because

it does not trip to formal measure. Poetry resides in deeper matters

than this. I recall Ibsen's remark when told that the reviewers

declared _Peer Gynt_ wasn't poetry. "Very well," said he, "it will

be." Since it now indubitably is, one is cautious about questioning

the work of the present, such work as Miss Lowell's, for instance. Of

course the mere chopping up of unrhythmic prose into capitalized lines

without glow, without emotion, is not poetry, any more than the blank

verse of the second-rate nineteenth-century "poetic drama," which old

Joe Crowell, comedian, described as "good, honest prose set up

hind-side foremost." We may eliminate that from the discussion once

and for all. But the genuine new poets, who know what they are about,

and doubtless why they are about it, I regard with all deference,

hailing especially their good fight to free poetry of its ancient

inversions, its mincing vocabulary, its thous and thees, its bosky

dells and purling streams, its affectations and unrealities, both of

speech and subject. But I do say they miss a certain triumphant

craftsman's joy at packing precisely what you mean, hard enough to

express in unlimited prose, into a fettered, singing line; and I do

say that I can't remember what they write.

At least, nobody can dispute this latter statement. He may declare it

the fault of my memory, which has been habituated to retain only such

lines as have rhyme and metre to help it out. But I hardly think his

retort adequate, because, in the first place, the memory is much less

amenable to training and much more a matter of fixed capacity and

action than certain advertisements in the popular magazines would have

the "twenty-dollar-a-week man" believe, and in the second place,

because my case, I find, is the case of almost everybody with whom I

have talked on the subject. The solution, I believe, is perfectly

simple. Nearly anyone can remember a tune; even I can, within limits.

At least, I can do better than Tennyson, who could recognize, he said,

two tunes; one was "God Save the Queen" and the other wasn't. But when

music is broken into independent rhythms, irregular and oddly related

phrases, it is only the person exceptionally endowed who can remember

it without prolonged study. The very first audience who heard

_Rigoletto_ came away humming "Donna e mobile." And the very last

audience who heard _Pelleas et Melisande_ came away humming--"Donna e

mobile." It is the law. Needless to say, I enjoyed _Pelleas et

Melisande_, but I cannot whistle it. What I recall is a mood, a

picture, a vague ecstasy, a hushed terror. It was James Huneker, was

it not, who, when asked what he thought of the opera, replied that

Mary Garden's hair was superb.

"But the music?" he was urged.

"Oh, the music," said he, "--the music didn't bother me."

But the new poetry does bother me, because I strive to remember not

the mere mood or picture of the poem, but the actual words which

created them, and I cannot. I want to compel again, at will, the

actual poetic experience, and I cannot, without carrying a library in

my pocket. The words hover, sometimes, just beyond the threshold of my

brain, like a forgotten name ("If you hadn't asked me, I could have

told you"--you know the sensation); but they never come. I have no

comfort of them in the still hours of the day when I would be

whispering them to myself. Instead, I have to fall back upon the

old-fashioned Golden Treasury. I cannot remember a single line that

Amy Lowell has written about her Roxbury garden, but I shall never

forget what Wordsworth said about that field of gold he passed; I

repeat his lines, and then my heart, too, with pleasure fills and

dances with his daffodils.

It is an immemorial delight, this pleasure in the lingering line, in

the haunting couplet, in the quatrain that will not let you forget. By

sacrificing it, the new poetry has sacrificed something precious,

something that a common instinct of mankind demands of the minstrel.

It will not suffice for the new poets to deny that they are minstrels,

to assert that they write for the eye, not speak for the ear, that it

is not their mission to emit pretty sounds but so to present their

vision of the world that it shall etch itself on men's minds with the

bite of reality. Such a creed is admirable, but defective. It is

defective because, in the first place, if the new poets did not write

for the ear quite as much as the old poets, there would be no excuse

even for rhythm. Any reader who is sensitive enough to care to read

poetry is sensitive enough to hear it with his inward ear even as he

sees it with his outward eye, and his after-pleasure, as it were, his

lingering delight, will be in proportion as his ear retains the echo

of the song. All poets are minstrels, still. Such a creed is

defective, in the second place, because it has always been the mission

of genuine poets to impress their vision of the world vividly on

mankind, though their vision included more, sometimes, than what the

realists choose to consider reality. There is nothing new in such an

effort. In slack ages of poetic inspiration, however, the versifiers

have no vision of the world, but only of its pale mirrored reflections

in visions dead and gone, and some jolt is needed to bring the poets

back to first-hand observation. Such a jolt are the new poets. _Spoon

River_ is a medicine, a splendid tonic. But the form of _Spoon River_

is not conditioned by eternal needs, only by temporary ones. Its

complete absence of loveliness, of lines that linger, will be its

greatest handicap to immortality--for poetic immortality to-day as

much as ever is not in the pages of a book on a library shelf, but on

the lips of men and women. A poem from which nobody ever quotes is a

poem forgotten.

Tennyson was something of an Imagist at times, presenting his mood or

picture with a Flaubertian precision of epithet that even Amy Lowell

could not criticise. Consider, for example, his famous _Fragment_ on

the eagle:

He clasps the crag with crooked hands

Close to the sun in distant lands,

Ringed with the azure world he stands.

Beneath, the wrinkled ocean crawls,

He watches from his mountain walls,

And like a thunderbolt he falls.

The precision of wording here, the tremendousness of scene evoked with

stark economy of means, the triumphant vividness of the adjective

"wrinkled," transporting the reader at once to a great height above

the plain of the sea, the complete absence of any touch of the

"poetic" (surely the beautiful word _azure_ may be admitted in modern

company), make this poem a masterpiece without date or time. It is as

"new" as the latest Imagist anthology. And, be it noted, I have quoted

it correctly, I feel confident, from memory. My copy of Tennyson is in

storage, and I have not read the fragment probably in ten or a dozen

years. Yet whenever I wish to relive its mood, to see again its

incomparable picture, I have only to move my lips, even only to repeat

the lines inwardly, in silence, and the poem is mine again.

But I have just been reading the latest Imagist anthology, especially

the _Lacquer Prints_ by Amy Lowell, not ten years, but hardly ten

minutes ago--and I cannot repeat one of them. I could learn them, of

course, by an effort. But that is not the way man desires to remember

music and poetry. It must come singing into his head and heart--and

remain there without his effort. Here is a "Lacquer Print" called

_Sunshine_. It is indeed vivid, though (quite properly, of course) a

little garden pool to Tennyson's vast ocean.

The pool is edged with blade-like leaves of irises.

If I throw a stone into the placid water

It suddenly stiffens

Into rings and rings

Of sharp gold wire.

Here is a vivid picture, here is economy and scrupulous selection of

epithet, here is no "poetic" diction of the despised sort. But

something is lacking, none the less. It does not haunt you, it does

not ingratiate itself with your ear, you do not find yourself

repeating it days and months later. Close the book--and the poem

perishes, even as those rings subside on the pool.

It would be only too easy to find much more striking examples in the

new verse. Take, for instance, the opening stanza of Ezra Pound's

poem, _The Return_:

See, they return; ah, see the tentative

Movements, and the slow feet,

The trouble in the pace and the uncertain

Wavering!

It is doubtful if any reader will fail to see the trouble in the pace

of these lines! No doubt it was exactly the effect the poet desired,

but it will forever effectually prevent the repetition of his poem by

anybody without the book. When a woman once boasted that she could

repeat anything on a single hearing, Theodore Hook rattled off the

immortal nonsense, beginning, "She went into the garden patch to get a

cabbage head to make an apple pie, and a great she bear coming up the

road thrust her head into the shop and cried 'What, no soap?' and so

he died--" and the woman was floored. Such a poem as _The Return_

would have floored her quite as completely. I find, after reading

carefully all the twenty pages assigned to Ezra Pound in _The New

Poetry Anthology_, edited by Miss Monroe (a greater space, I believe,

than was awarded to any other poet), that I can now repeat just one

line--or, rather, two lines, such is Mr. Pound's odd way of phrasing

his rhythms. Here they are:

Dawn enters with little feet

Like a gilded Pavlova.

There is a certain humorous charm of epithet here, and a rhythmic

suggestion of metrical beat to follow. That, no doubt, is why the line

has stuck in my memory. But the metrical beat did not follow, and the

rest of the stanza has gone from me. I am sure even a gilded Pavlova

would be at some difficulty to dance to Mr. Pound's rhythms.

But Miss Monroe is catholic in her choice of new poets. She includes,

for instance, Walter de la Mare, if in less than two pages. She

selects his wonderful poem _The Listeners_, and the quaint, haunting,

_Epitaph_. It is a little hard to see just why _The Listeners_ is new

poetry, except chronologically. Its odd, apparently simple but really

intricate and triumphantly fluid metrical structure, so unified that

there is no break from the first syllable to the last; its lyric

romanticism of subject; its obvious delight in tune; even its

occasional lapses into the ancient "poetic" vocabulary (the traveler

"smote" the door, the listeners "hearkened," and so on), are all a

part of the nineteenth-century tradition of English verse. It is no

more modern than _La Belle Dame Sans Merci_--which, to be sure, is

quite modern indeed to some of us. And it has lyric beauty, it has

lines of unforgettable musical loveliness, it creeps in through the

ear and echoes in the memory. You surely remember the close:

Never the least stir made the listeners,

Though every word he spake

Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house

From the one man left awake:

Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,

And the sound of iron on stone,

And how the stillness surged softly backward,

When the plunging hoofs were gone.

Is there really any loss of sharpness in the imagery here because of

the rhyme and metre? Could any phrase, of any rhythm, however free,

render any better and more economically the peculiar noise of a horse

turning on a hard drive and starting away in the night, than "the

sound of iron on stone"? The last two lines, surely, are close to

perfection. A genuine new poet would probably have hunted long for a

less hackneyed word than "plunging," but though it would possibly have

sharpened his final image, it would, at the same time, in all

probability, have robbed it of that very vagueness sought and

captured. No, the passage pictorially and emotionally is as near

perfection as it is often permitted mortals to approach, and it

lingers and echoes in the memory, it will not be forgotten. It has the

lilt of music, the chime of tune, the immemorial loveliness of song.

If the precise image, the desired emotional effect, the intellectual

content can be imparted in fettered verse, and, in addition, the

ancient loveliness can be retained, which the new verse lacks, can it

be possible that the world will long endure to read _vers libre_ when

_vers libre_ has done its work of bringing poets back to first-hand

reality for their subjects, relating the minstrels to the spirit of

their age? I cannot think so. I cannot but believe that any poetry

long to endure must be memorable, in the literal sense, and that is

just what the new poetry is not. Already, it seems to me from my

acquaintance with under-graduates and the just-graduated, _vers libre_

is a little the cult of the middle-aged, while youth, the future, is

swinging back gladly to the fetters of metre and rhyme, and probably

forgetful that the public which awaits their effort has been prepared

anew for poetry by this revolt from what was stale in tradition. I

believe that memorable poetry always has been, and always must be,

irradiated by

The light that never was on sea or land,

which is but another way of saying that it must have elevation and the

haunting mystery of beauty. The trouble is, of course, to catch this

authentic radiation, instead of some pale reflection from Patmore or

Rossetti. It was against the sham of second-hand mood and subject,

rather than the great truth of music and loveliness, that the new

poets broke into unmetrical protest. They have done a brave and needed

work,--but they have produced astonishingly little quotable poetry,

they have sung their way not far into the hearts of their listeners.

The lingering, lovely line is not for them. No, for still,

The soul of Adonais, like a star,

Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.

[Illustration]

_The Lies We Learn in Our Youth_

The world for a great many years has accepted the dictum of the poet,

that--

Of all sad words of tongue or pen,

The saddest are these: It might have been.

Even those people who refused to accept the rhyme have accepted the

reason. But the fact is that the reason of this copybook couplet is as

bad as the rhyme. It would be much nearer the truth to say that of all

sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: He's succeeded

again. Here, too, the rhyme may be questioned, but the reason is

sound. An entirely successful man is the most pitiful object in the

universe. Not only has he nothing to look forward to, but he has

nothing to look back upon. Having no regrets, no shadows, in his life,

he has no chiaroscuro, no depth, no solidity in his picture. It is

painted in the flat. "Regret," says George Moore, to change the figure

a little, "is like a mountain top from which we survey our dead life,

a mountain top on which we pause and ponder." He has no point of view,

then, either. So after all the words, "It might have been," do bear a

sadness about them in his case; his life might have been a success if

it had only been a failure. "It might have been" thus becomes sad when

it reflects back upon itself, when it means there might have been a

might have been but there was only a was. So life whirls into paradox!

Let any man in honesty retire into the solitude of his soul and

reflect on his joys that might have been and those that were, and let

him then answer whether any of his realizations were the equal of his

anticipations. Therefore, if he had achieved the anticipated but lost

delights which form the burden of his "Might have been," they, too,

would have been as ashes in the mouth. The truth is that the essence

of delight is in the anticipation, the best of life is the vision, not

the reality. It is pathetic not to have entertained the vision, but

more pathetic, perhaps, to have attained it. Wasn't it Oscar Wilde who

said that there is only one thing more tragic than failure--success?

Did our regretful poet dream at twenty-one of being the perfect lover?

In his dreams he was the perfect lover, then. Yet actually what was

he? What was she? What was their courtship, their marriage? You,

prosy, contented, forty and forgetful, by your prosy hearth or shaking

down the furnace fire, while the children are being put to bed, you

dare to call "It might have been" the saddest words of tongue or pen?

Those now almost forgotten dreams of what might have been are the best

you ever were. Remember them as often as you can, as bitterly, as

happily, for your soul's salvation. Without them you are the lowest of

God's creatures, a mere married man.

Or take the case of Maud Muller herself, and her judge. We learn that

the judge--

Wedded a wife of richest dower,

Who lived for fashion, as he for power.