In the summer of 1910 I streaked across Ireland and half England on
a joyful errand. I had already crossed the Atlantic toward the same
end. For it seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, that the prize
performance of Josephine Peabody’s “Piper” was one of the significant
events in modern English letters: an American triumph in a new field.
Was it not amazing that an American, and a woman, should win a prize
offered by Shakespeare’s own town and open to the English speaking
world, for the best poetic drama? There were three hundred competitors
sending manuscripts. Imagine the astonishment of those English men
of letters who were the judges when they found that “The Piper” was
conceived in Cambridge (Massachusetts, not England), and that the
author was the wife of a Harvard professor, being indeed that fair
young poet of whom Austin Dobson had written when she first visited
England:
She came to my poor garden bower,
She bloomed like a new garden flower;
I know not how the time was spent,
I know she came ... I know she went.
The prize, three hundred pounds, carried with it the promise that the
successful play should be given a performance at the Stratford Memorial
Festival during the spring of 1910. I think it was this promise that
chiefly attracted J. P. For Shakespeare was the hero of her worship,
and Stratford her Mecca, though she loved festivals for any sake. She
had already in 1900 published a one act play founded on Shakespeare’s
Sonnets, “Fortune and Men’s Eyes”. She knew her Stratford well, through
a lonely girlhood pilgrimage to that shrine. And she dared believe that
her dramatic fancy, making of the old Pied Piper legend a beautiful
biting arraignment of materialism, might be worthy of the high company
at a Shakespeare Memorial. I believe she was confident from the first
that fate was with her in this dear desire. Her self-confidence was one
of her strongest assets in a life of counter-circumstance.
It was a tense year for my friend. “The Piper” was already in print,
though not yet published (it was written in 1907, the year following
her marriage), when she heard almost by chance of the prize offer.
Having ascertained that a printed book was eligible, she sent it off,
just barely in time to get by. Then came weeks of eager waiting. She
heard from headquarters that “The Piper” was still among the final
half dozen plays in the survival of the fittest. Then, that there was
but one other rival. At this juncture J. P., as usual in a crisis,
consulted her Shakespeare oracle. The final judge in the contest was
the Duke of Argyle. And the page chosen at random from “Midsummer
Night’s Dream” declared cryptically, “_All that I will tell you is that
the Duke hath dined!_” This sounded promising. But when on his return
that night J. P. showed the oracle to her husband, he turned to the
page that followed, and found this, in the same speech of Bottom: “_For
the short and the long is, our play is preferred.... And I do not doubt
but to hear them say, it is a sweet comedy!_” No more anxiety.
She resolved to be present at the performance and receive the prize
in person. But the public announcement of the prize winner found her
absorbed in her newest poem, a wee Lionel Marks Junior. A less spirited
adventurer might have hesitated. But she took the eight weeks old
baby and her tiny daughter and made the voyage alone. She confessed
afterward that she almost died on the journey. But her courage never
wavered.
Arrived in Stratford she met disappointment, hope deferred. For early
in May King Edward fell ill, and died on the very eve of the day
announced for the performance of “The Piper”. All England went into
mourning, of course. No chance for a spring festival at Stratford.
Everything postponed till midsummer. It was to be a midsummer night’s
dream, after all! Meanwhile, with her two small babies, and with the
gay little frocks that she loved, J. P. was obliged to go into official
mourning, and to possess her soul in as much patience as a poet can
summon under such circumstances.
One pleasant thing at least happened in that trying interval of
waiting. Little Lionel was baptized in old Stratford church, in the
very same font where Shakespeare himself had been baptized 345 years
earlier. By such intimate and picturesque association between life and
symbolism J. P. loved to vary the course of her earthly pilgrimage. As
she once expressed it, “Every day ought to be a festival for one reason
or another.” Another favorite slogan was: “Let us turn routine into
rhythm!” She believed passionately in life as a thrilling adventure.
Tragic it might be at times, painful or cruel. But she could not for a
moment have allowed it to be dull. The Piper says:
It keeps me searching. ’Tis so glad and sad
And strange to find out, What-Will-Happen-Next!
The performance itself turned out a personal triumph for J. P. as well
as an artistic triumph for the play and its distinguished actors.
Marion Terry--sister of Ellen Terry, who was in the audience--took
the chief woman’s part, and F. R. Benson, veteran actor and manager,
had the title rôle and produced the play. Violet Farebrother, Eric
Maxon, and other favorites shared the honors. A brilliant audience had
gathered in Stratford town from all parts of England for the unique
occasion. As scene followed beautiful scene in the tender, whimsical
drama, Bottom’s prophecy was verified. It was indeed a “sweet comedy”.
Gradually unfolded the symbolic meaning of the captured children and
their rainbow, the little lame boy with his winged shoes, the one
mother who understood, the Lonely Man, and the selfless idealist,
the Piper, bent on setting things right. The Piper was, of course,
Josephine Peabody herself speaking in character:
For all who wear the motley in the heart
Or on the body, for all cagèd glories,
And trodden wings, and sorrows laughed to scorn.
Throughout her life J. P. could truly say, as she said in this play:
’Twas not the thousand guilders that I wanted--
Life, life I wanted! Safety, sun and wind!
And but to show them how their daily fear
They call their faith, is made of blasphemies
That would put out the Sun and Moon and Stars
Early, for some last judgment!--And the Lord,
Where would He get His harpers and singing men
And them that laugh for joy? From Hamelin guilds?
I shall never forget the surprised thrill that rippled over the tense
audience when, after the play was over and acclaimed, J. P. stepped
out to receive her prize in its handsome silver box. She was so young
and beautiful in her white wedding gown: scarcely, I imagine, the
preconceived British idea of an American _bas bleu_. Amazing her poise
and gracious dignity. And when she spoke her voice, with its honey
sweetness, its clear inflections void of Yankee twang, must have been
still more of a surprise. She made the most graceful little speech,
apparently offhand, though of course it had been most carefully
considered. For she had a message to deliver. She told those British
folk (there were few Americans to share my pride) what most of them
probably had never thought before. That she came not as a stranger to
Stratford, for Shakespeare was _our_ Shakespeare, too. That we had
as great a pride as our British kin in the development of our common
literature. (She might well have added that our country was founded by
folk who left England just after Shakespeare died, bringing hither his
idiom, still current in certain Yankee seaboard hamlets--and perhaps
nowhere else.)
It was a new Declaration--not of Independence but of Heirship. They
cheered her with rapture. And I feel sure that this acceptance of
her dictum by at least one representative British audience was the
beginning of a new rapprochement with American letters. Perhaps this
victory made easier the way and more cordial the welcome to still
“newer” poets who came flocking very shortly. Robert Frost, for
instance, was hailed and understood and published there as early as
1912, before he was known in his own country. Why do we make so little
of our literary assets, when we grow hysterical so easily over things
that count for much less? Had Josephine Peabody been a Frenchwoman her
proud country would never have let this victory be forgotten by anyone.
Had “The Piper” been the name of a winning yacht, our cup defender, it
would have captured the public imagination and have become a watchword.
Had J. P. been a Marathon runner or a heavyweight champion, her success
would have filled the daily press, and her recent passing (with half a
dozen unfinished plays in her fertile brain) would have sent a nation
into mourning.
She achieved the climax of her “success” with that performance of “The
Piper”. And few persons, I doubt, have had so unsullied a triumph.
Certainly I have never seen a face so radiant with happiness as was
hers that night. It was no doubt a disappointment that her plays
were not thereafter sought out for stage presentation by her own
country. “The Piper” had a short run in New York. This and her other
nine volumes are read and loved by many. But her best dramatic work
in “Marlowe”, nobly conceived and skilfully handled, remains still
like her “Nightingale,--_Unheard_”. “The Wolf of Gubbio”, a moving
and picturesque drama most originally developed, “Fortune and Men’s
Eyes”, and “Wings”--each brimming with lovely poetry and dramatic
effectiveness--have waited all these years for their professional
chance. “The Portrait of Mrs. W.” (that cleverest dramatic study in
prose of Mary Wollstonecraft and her circle) is still untried after the
first year of its life, which was the last year of our poet.
Poetic drama was her chosen medium, and she stuck valiantly to her
ideal in the face of all temptation to more popular and lucrative
expression. At the end of her busy life she could “proudly boast, I
never wrote just for money”. For, as the Piper declares again:
When we sell our hearts
We buy us nothing.
The taste of her time and the physical difficulties in the way of
producing the kind of play she elected to make; the prejudice of the
average producer, manager, and actor, and the unintelligence of the
modern audience in respect to spoken poetry--she discounted all these,
and was willing to bide the renascence of opportunity for the poet with
a dramatic imagination. There are some who feel that maybe the time
is not distant when her plays will emerge as a fresh and delightful
surprise to audiences who are tired of things so very, very different.
She was always a master of poetic technique. I don’t know how or where
she acquired it. But when I first knew her, a school girl, she was
already publishing graceful, musical lyrics in the accepted forms. They
were unusually thoughtful, if rather youthfully melancholy. She had
not yet realized the power of her gayer, at times almost mischievous
muse, which was quite as characteristic of herself. From the publishing
of her first book “The Wayfarers”, her reaction to her fellow men and
women developed rapidly through a too brief but eventful life. Out of
a rather detached young disciple of æsthetic and spiritual beauty, she
became a passionate and militant apostle of the beauty spelled in human
justice and sympathy. The whole burden of her later books was a sense
of responsibility toward folk less fortunate than herself.
“You four walls, wall not in my heart!”
Though she clung to traditional poetic forms she was no reactionary
in spirit. She was indeed, as one realizes with some surprise on
considering the whole content of her ten volumes, more revolutionary
than many of the “newer” poets. No stanza perhaps expresses with more
direct simplicity and good humor her spiritual challenge to her times
than this song, again of the Piper:
Out of your cage,
Come out of your cage,
And take your soul on a pilgrimage!
Peas in your shoes, an if you must!
But out and away before you’re dust!
Scribe and Stay-at-home
Saint and Sage,
Out of your cage,
Out of your cage!
_Keith Preston_
Keith Preston is a Latin professor with a sense of humor. In my
experience this is a usual combination. I have known two others, but
neither of them conducted colyums nor wrote humorous verses and essays.
Mr. Preston is a native of Chicago, he is a graduate of the University
of Chicago, he teaches in Northwestern University. He is small, quick
of movement, highly entertaining--a most diverting luncheon companion.
He is an enthusiastic member of the Chicago group of writers, eats with
them at their luncheons, boosts them when he can; but seems never quite
to lose his sense of humor about it all. His verse is gay, pointed,
graceful. His paragraphs are considered by many persons to be the best
written in the country. As a story-teller he is unexcelled, though his
wit has a mordant touch which is alarming in large companies. A person
of great vitality, wit, and buoyancy, he yet is domestic and thoroughly
tame when seen in the atmosphere of Evanston, Illinois, where he lives.
In this cynical bit which he wrote for me on H. G. Wells, he shows his
colors. His laughter at the world is often a little bitter; but at the
same time it rings with wholesome reproof.