The mind trudges patiently behind the senses. Day by day a thousand
oddities and charms outline themselves tenderly upon consciousness,
but it may be long before understanding comes with brush and colour
to fill in the tracery. One learns nothing until he rediscovers it
for himself. Every now and then, in reading, I have come across
something which has given me the wild surmise of pioneering mingled
with the faint magic of familiarity--for instance, some of the
famous dicta of Wordsworth and Coleridge and Shelley about poetry. I
realized, then, that a teacher had told me these things in my
freshman year at college--fifteen years ago. I jotted them down at
that time, but they were mere catchwords. It had taken me fifteen
years of vigorous living to overhaul those catchwords and fill them
with a meaning of my own. The two teachers who first gave me some
suspicion of what lies in the kingdom of poetry--who gave "so sweet
a prospect into the way as will entice any man to enter into
it"--are both dead. May I mention their names?--Francis B. Gummere
and Albert Elmer Hancock, both of Haverford College. I cannot thank
them as, now, I would like to. For I am (I think) approaching a
stage where I can somewhat understand and relish the things of which
they spoke. And I wonder afresh at the patience and charity of those
who go on lecturing, unabated in zest, to boys of whom one in ten
may perhaps, fifteen years later, begin to grasp their message.
In so far as any formal or systematic discipline of thought was
concerned, I think I may say my education was a complete failure.
For this I had only my own smattering and desultory habit of mind to
blame and also a vivid troublesome sense of the beauty of it all.
The charm of the prismatic fringe round the edges made juggling with
the lens too tempting, and a clear persistent focus was never
attained. Considered (oddly enough) by my mates as the pattern of a
diligent scholar, I was in reality as idle as the idlest of them,
which is saying much; though I confess that my dilettantism was not
wholly disreputable. My mind excellently exhibited the Heraclitean
doctrine: a constant flux of information passed through it, but
nothing remained. Indeed, my senses were so continually crammed with
new enchanting impressions, and every field of knowledge seemed so
alluring, it was not strange I made little progress in any.
* * * * *
Perhaps it was unfortunate that both in America and in England I
found myself in a college atmosphere of extraordinary pictorial
charm. The Arcadian loveliness of the Haverford campus and the
comfortable simplicity of its routine; and then the hypnotizing
beauty and curiosity and subtle flavour of Oxford life (with its
long, footloose, rambling vacations)--these were aptly devised for
the exercise of the imagination, which is often a gracious phrase
for loafing. But these surroundings were too richly entertaining,
and I was too green and soft and humorous (in the Shakespearean
sense) to permit any rational continuous plan of study. Like the
young man to whom Coleridge addressed a poem of rebuke, I was
abandoned, a greater part of the time, to "an Indolent and Causeless
Melancholy"; or to its partner, an excessive and not always tasteful
mirth. I spent hours upon hours, with little profit, in libraries,
flitting aimlessly from book to book. With something between terror
and hunger I contemplated the opposite sex. In short, I was
discreditable and harmless and unlovely as the young Yahoo can be.
It fills me with amazement to think that my preceptors must have
seen, in that ill-conditioned creature, some shadow of human
semblance, or how could they have been so uniformly kind?
Our education--such of it as is of durable importance--comes
haphazard. It is tinged by the enthusiasms of our teachers, gleaned
by suggestions from our friends, prompted by glimpses and footnotes
and margins. There was a time, I think, when I hung in tender
equilibrium among various possibilities. I was enamoured of
mathematics and physics: I went far enough in the latter to be
appointed undergraduate assistant in the college laboratory. I had
learned, by my junior year, exploring the charms of integral
calculus, that there is no imaginable mental felicity more serenely
pure than suspended happy absorption in a mathematical problem. Of
course I attained no higher than the dregs of the subject; on that
grovelling level I would still (in Billy Sunday's violent trope)
have had to climb a tree to look a snake in the eye; but I could see
that for the mathematician, if for any one, Time stands still
withal; he is winnowed of vanity and sin. French, German, and Latin,
and a hasty tincture of Xenophon and Homer (a mere lipwash of
Helicon) gave me a zeal for philology and the tongues. I was a
member in decent standing of the college classical club, and visions
of life as a professor of languages seemed to me far from unhappy. A
compulsory course in philosophy convinced me that there was still
much to learn; and I had a delicious hallucination in which I saw
myself compiling a volume of commentaries on the various systems of
this queen of sciences. "The Grammar of Agnostics," I think it was
to be called: it would be written in a neat and comely hand on
thousands of pages of pure white foolscap: I saw myself adding to it
night by night, working _ohne Hast, ohne Rast_. And there were other
careers, too, as statesman, philanthropist, diplomat, that I
considered not beneath my horoscope. I spare myself the careful
delineation of these projects, though they would be amusing enough.
But beneath these preoccupations another influence was working its
inward way. My paramount interest had always been literary, though
regarded as a gentle diversion, not degraded to a bread-and-butter
concern. Ever since I had fallen under the superlative spell of
R.L.S., in whom the cunning enchantment of the written word first
became manifest, I had understood that books did not grow painlessly
for our amusement, but were the issue of dexterous and intentional
skill. I had thus made a stride from Conan Doyle, Cutcliffe Hyne,
Anthony Hope, and other great loves of my earliest teens; those
authors' delicious mysteries and picaresques I took for granted, not
troubling over their method; but in Stevenson, even to a schoolboy
the conscious artifice and nicety of phrase were puzzingly apparent.
A taste for literature, however, is a very different thing from a
determination to undertake the art in person as a means of
livelihood. It takes brisk stimulus and powerful internal fevers to
reduce a healthy youth to such a contemplation. All this is a long
story, and I telescope it rigorously, thus setting the whole matter,
perhaps, in a false proportion. But the central and operative factor
is now at hand.
* * * * *
There was a certain classmate of mine (from Chicago) whose main
devotion was to scientific and engineering studies. But since his
plan embraced only two years at college before "going to work," he
was (in the fashion traditionally ascribed to Chicago) speeding up
the cultural knick-knacks of his education. So, in our freshman
year, he was attending a course on "English Poets of the Nineteenth
Century," which was, in the regular schedule of things, reserved for
sophomores (supposedly riper for matters of feeling). Now I was
living in a remote dormitory on the outskirts of the wide campus
(that other Eden, demi-paradise, that happy breed of men, that
little world!) some distance from the lecture halls and busy heart
of college doings. It was the custom of those quartered in this
colonial and sequestered outpost to make the room of some central
classmate a base for the day, where books might be left between
lectures, and so on. With the Chicagoan, whom we will call "J----,"
I had struck up a mild friendship; mostly charitable on his part, I
think, as he was from the beginning one of the most popular and
influential men in the class, whereas I was one of the rabble. So it
was, at any rate; and often in the evening, returning from library
or dining hall on the way to my distant Boeotia, I would drop in at
his room, in a lofty corner of old Barclay Hall, to pick up
note-books or anything else I might have left there.
What a pleasant place is a college dormitory at night! The rooms
with their green-hooded lights and boyish similarity of decoration,
the amiable buzz and stir of a game of cards under festoons of
tobacco smoke, the wiry tinkle of a mandolin distantly heard, sudden
clatter subsiding again into a general humming quiet, the happy
sense of solitude in multitude, these are the partial ingredients of
that feeling no alumnus ever forgets. In his pensive citadel, my
friend J---- would be sitting, with his pipe (one of those new
"class pipes" with inlaid silver numerals, which appear among every
college generation toward Christmas time of freshman year). In his
lap would be the large green volume ("British Poets of the
Nineteenth Century," edited by Professor Curtis Hidden Page) which
was the textbook of that sophomore course. He was reading Keats. And
his eyes were those of one who has seen a new planet swim into his
ken. I don't know how many evenings we spent there together.
Probably only a few. I don't recall just how we communed, or
imparted to one another our juvenile speculations. But I plainly
remember how he would sit beside his desk-lamp and chuckle over the
Ode to a Nightingale. He was a quizzical and quickly humorous
creature, and Keats's beauties seemed to fill him not with
melancholy or anguish, but with a delighted prostration of laughter.
The "wormy circumstance" of the Pot of Basil, the Indian Maid
nursing her luxurious sorrow, the congealing Beads-man and the
palsied beldame Angela--these and a thousand quaintnesses of phrase
moved him to a gush of glorious mirth. It was not that he did not
appreciate the poet, but the unearthly strangeness of it all, the
delicate contradiction of laws and behaviours known to freshmen,
tickled his keen wits and emotions until they brimmed into puzzled
laughter. "Away! Away!" he would cry--
For I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards--
and he would shout with merriment. Beaded bubbles winking at the
brim; Throbbing throats' long, long melodious moan; Curious
conscience burrowing like a mole; Emprison her soft hand and let her
rave; Men slugs and human serpentry; Bade her steep her hair in
weird syrops; Poor weak palsy-stricken churchyard thing; Shut her
pure sorrow-drops with glad exclaim--such lines were to him a
constant and exhilarating excitement. In the very simplicity and
unsophistication of his approach to the poet was a virgin naïveté of
discernment that an Edinburgh Reviewer would rarely attain. Here, he
dimly felt, was the great key
To golden palaces, strange minstrelsy,
... aye, to all the mazy world
Of silvery enchantment.
And in line after line of Endymion, as we pored over them together,
he found the clear happiness of a magic that dissolved everything
into lightness and freedom. It is agreeable to remember this man,
preparing to be a building contractor, who loved Keats because he
made him laugh. I wonder if the critics have not too insistently
persuaded us to read our poet in a black-edged mood? After all, his
nickname was "Junkets."
* * * * *
So it was that I first, in any transcending sense, fell under the
empire of a poet. Here was an endless fountain of immortal drink:
here was a history potent to send a young mind from its bodily
tenement. The pleasure was too personal to be completely shared; for
the most part J---- and I read not together, but each by each, he
sitting in his morris chair by the desk, I sprawled upon his couch,
reading, very likely, different poems, but communicating, now and
then, a sudden discovery. Probably I exaggerate the subtlety of our
enjoyment, for it is hard to review the unself-scrutinizing moods of
freshmanhood. It would be hard, too, to say which enthusiast had the
greater enjoyment: he, because these glimpses through magic
casements made him merry; I, because they made me sad. Outside, the
snow sparkled in the pure winter night; the long lance windows of
the college library shone yellow-panelled through the darkness, and
there would be the occasional interruption of light-hearted
classmates. How perfectly it all chimed into the mood of St. Agnes'
Eve! The opening door would bring a gust of lively sound from down
the corridor, a swelling jingle of music, shouts from some humorous
"rough-house" (probably those sophomores on the floor below)--
The boisterous, midnight, festive clarion
The kettle-drum, and far-heard clarionet
Affray his ears, though but in dying tone--
The hall-door shuts again, and all the noise is gone.
It did not take very long for J---- to work through the fifty pages
of Keats reprinted in Professor Hidden Page's anthology; and then
he, a lone and laughing faun among that pack of stern sophomores--so
flewed, so sanded, out of the Spartan kind, crook-knee'd and
dewlapped like Thessalian bulls--sped away into thickets of Landor,
Tennyson, the Brownings. There I, an unprivileged and unsuspected
hanger-on, lost their trail, returning to my own affairs. For some
reason--I don't know just why--I never "took" that course in
Nineteenth Century Poets, in the classroom at any rate. But just as
Mr. Chesterton, in his glorious little book, "The Victorian Age in
Literature," asserts that the most important event in English
history was the event that never happened at all (you yourself may
look up his explanation) so perhaps the college course that meant
most to me was the one I never attended. What it meant to those
sophomores of the class of 1909 is another gentle speculation. Three
years later, when I was a senior, and those sophomores had left
college, another youth and myself were idly prowling about a
dormitory corridor where some of those same sophomores had
previously lodged. An unsuspected cupboard appeared to us, and
rummaging in it we found a pile of books left there, forgotten, by a
member of that class. It was a Saturday afternoon, and my companion
and I had been wondering how we could raise enough cash to go to
town for dinner and a little harmless revel. To shove those books
into a suitcase and hasten to Philadelphia by trolley was the
obvious caper; and Leary's famous old bookstore ransomed the volumes
for enough money to provide an excellent dinner at Lauber's, where,
in those days, the thirty-cent bottle of sour claret was considered
the true, the blushful Hippocrene. But among the volumes was a copy
of Professor Page's anthology which had been used by one of J----'s
companions in that poetry course. This seemed to me too precious to
part with, so I retained it; still have it; and have occasionally
studied the former owner's marginal memoranda. At the head of The
Eve of St. Agnes he wrote: "Middle Ages. N. Italy. Guelph,
Guibilline." At the beginning of Endymion he recorded: "Keats tries
to be spiritualized by love for celestials." Against Sleep and
Poetry: "Desultory. Genius in the larval state." The Ode on a
Grecian Urn, he noted: "Crystallized philosophy of idealism.
Embalmed anticipation." The Ode on Melancholy: "Non-Gothic. Not of
intellect or disease. Emotions."
Darkling I listen to these faint echoes from a vanished lecture
room, and ponder. Did J---- keep his copy of the book, I wonder, and
did he annotate it with lively commentary of his own? He left
college at the end of our second year, and I have not seen or heard
from him these thirteen years. The last I knew--six years ago--he
was a contractor in an Ohio city; and (is this not significant?) in
a letter written then to another classmate, recalling some
waggishness of our own sophomore days, he used the phrase "Like Ruth
among the alien corn."
In so far as one may see turning points in a tangle of yarn, or
count dewdrops on a morning cobweb, I may say that a few evenings
with my friend J---- were the decisive vibration that moved one more
minor poet toward the privilege and penalty of Parnassus. One cannot
nicely decipher such fragile causes and effects. It was a year later
before the matter became serious enough to enforce abandoning
library copies of Keats and buying an edition of my own. And this,
too, may have been not unconnected with the gracious influence of
the other sex as exhibited in a neighbouring athenæum; and was
accompanied by a gruesome spate of florid lyrics: some (happily)
secret, and some exposed with needless hardihood in a college
magazine. The world, which has looked leniently upon many poetical
minorities, regards such frenzies with tolerant charity and
forgetfulness. But the wretch concerned may be pardoned for looking
back in a mood of lingering enlargement. As Sir Philip Sidney put
it, "Self-love is better than any gilding to make that seem gorgeous
wherein ourselves be parties."
* * * * *
There is a vast deal of nonsense written and uttered about poetry.
In an age when verses are more noisily and fluently circulated than
ever before, it might seem absurd to plead in the Muse's defence.
Yet poetry and the things poets love are pitifully weak to-day. In
essence, poetry is the love of life--not mere brutish tenacity of
sensation, but a passion for all the honesties that make life free
and generous and clean. For two thousand years poets have mocked and
taunted the cruelties and follies of men, but to what purpose?
Wordsworth said: "In spite of difference of soil and climate, of
language and manners, of laws and customs, in spite of things
silently gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed, the Poet
binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human
society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time."
Sometimes it seems as though "things violently destroyed," and the
people who destroy them, are too strong for the poets. Where, now,
do we see any cohesive binding together of humanity? Are we nearer
these things than when Wordsworth and Coleridge walked and talked on
the Quantock Hills or on that immortal road "between Porlock and
Linton"? Hardy writes "The Dynasts," Joseph Conrad writes his great
preface to "The Nigger of the _Narcissus_," but do the destroyers
hear them? Have you read again, since the War, Gulliver's "Voyage to
the Houyhnhnms," or Herman Melville's "Moby Dick"? These men wrote,
whether in verse or prose, in the true spirit of poets; and Swift's
satire, which the text-book writers all tell you is so gross and
savage as to suggest the author's approaching madness, seems tender
and suave by comparison with what we know to-day.
Poetry is the log of man's fugitive castaway soul upon a doomed and
derelict planet. The minds of all men plod the same rough roads of
sense; and in spite of much knavery, all win at times "an ampler
ether, a diviner air." The great poets, our masters, speak out of
that clean freshness of perception. We hear their voices--
I there before thee, in the country that well thou knowest,
Already arrived am inhaling the odorous air.
So it is not vain, perhaps, to try clumsily to tell how this
delicious uneasiness first captured the spirit of one who, if not a
poet, is at least a lover of poetry. Thus he first looked beyond the
sunset; stood, if not on Parnassus, tiptoe upon a little hill. And
overhead a great wind was blowing.
[Illustration]