VACHEL LINDSAY AND ROBERT FROST
Lindsay the Cymbalist--first impression--Harriet Monroe's
Magazine--training in art--the long vagabond tramps--correct
order of his works--his drawings--the "Poem Game"--_The
Congo_--_General William Booth_--wide sweep of his
imagination--sudden contrasts in sound--his prose works--his
interest in moving pictures--an apostle of democracy--a
wandering minstrel--his vitality--a primary man--art plus
morality--his geniality--a poet and a missionary--his
fearlessness--Robert Frost--the poet of New England--his
paradoxical birth--his education--his career in England--his
experiences on a farm--his theory of the spoken word--an
out-door poet--not a singer--lack of range--interpreter as
well as observer--pure realism--rural tragedies--centrifugal
force--men and women--suspense--the building of a poem--the
pleasure of recognition--his sincerity--his truthfulness.
"But you--you can help so much more. You can help spiritually.
You can help to shape things, give form and thought and
poignancy to the most matter-of-fact existence; show people
how to think and live and appreciate beauty. What does it
matter if some of them jeer at you, or trample on your
work? What matters is that those for whom your message is
intended will know you by your work."
--STACY AUMONIER, _Just Outside_.
Of all living Americans who have contributed to the advance of English
poetry in the twentieth century, no one has given more both as prophet
and priest than Vachel Lindsay. His poems are notable for originality,
pictorial beauty, and thrilling music. He belongs to no modern school,
but is doing his best to found one; and when I think of his love of a
loud noise, I call him a Cymbalist.
Yet when I use the word _noise_ to describe his verse, I use it
not only in its present, but in its earlier meaning, as when Edmund
Waller saluted Chloris with
While I listen to thy voice,
Chloris! I feel my life decay;
That powerful noise
Calls my flitting soul away.
This use of the word, meaning an agreeable, harmonious sound, was
current from Chaucer to Coleridge.
My first acquaintance with Mr. Lindsay's poetry began with a
masterpiece, _General William Booth Enters into Heaven_. Early in
the year 1913, before I had become a subscriber to Harriet Monroe's
_Poetry_, I found among the clippings in the back of a copy of
the _Independent_ this extraordinary burst of music. I carried it
in my pocket for a year. Nothing since Francis Thompson's _In No
Strange Land_ had given me such a spinal chill. Later I learned
that it had appeared for the first time in the issue of _Poetry_
for January, 1913. All lovers of verse owe a debt of gratitude to Miss
Monroe for bringing the new poet to the attention of the public; and
all students of contemporary movements in metre ought to subscribe to
her monthly magazine; the numbers naturally vary in value, but almost
any one may contain a "find"; as I discovered to my pleasure in
reading _Niagara_ in the summer of 1917.
Nicholas Vachel Lindsay--Vachel rimes with Rachel--was born at
Springfield, Illinois--which rimes with boy--on the tenth of November,
1879. His pen name omits the Nicholas. For three years he was a
student at Hiram College in Ohio, and for five years an art student,
first at Chicago, and then at New York. This brings us to the year
1905. From that year until 1910 he drew strange pictures, lectured on
various subjects, and wrote defiant and peculiar "bulletins." At the
same time he became a tramp, making long pilgrimages afoot in 1906
through Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, and in 1908 he invaded in a
like manner some of the Northern and Eastern States. These wanderings
are described with vigour, vivacity, and contagious good humour in his
book called _A Handy Guide for Beggars_. His wallet contained
nothing but printed leaflets--his poems--which he exchanged for bed
and board. He was the Evangelist of Beauty, preaching his gospel
everywhere by reciting his verses. In the summer of 1912 he walked
from Illinois to New Mexico.
To understand his development, one should read his books not according
to the dates of formal publication, but in the following order: _A
Handy Guide for Beggars_, _Adventures While Preaching the Gospel
of Beauty_, _The Art of the Moving Picture_--these three being
mainly in prose. Then one is ready for the three volumes of poetry,
_General William Booth Enters into Heaven_ (1913), _The
Congo_ (1914), and _The Chinese Nightingale_ (1917). Another
prose work is well under way, _The Golden Book of Springfield_,
concerning which Mr. Lindsay tells me, "The actual Golden Book is a
secular testament about Springfield, to be given to the city in 2018,
from a mysterious source. My volume is a hypothetical forecast of the
times of 2018, as well as of the Golden Book. Frankly the Lindsay the
reviewers know came nearer to existing twelve years ago than today, my
manuscripts are so far behind my notes. And a thing that has helped in
this is that through changing publishers, etc., my first prose book is
called my latest. If you want my ideas in order, assume the writer of
the _Handy Guide for Beggars_ is just out of college, of
_Adventures While Preaching_ beginning in the thirties, and
_the Art of the Moving Picture_ half-way through the thirties.
The Moving Picture book in the last half embodies my main social ideas
of two years ago. In mood and method, you will find _The Golden Book
of Springfield_ a direct descendant of the general social and
religious philosophy which I crowded into the photoplay book whether
it belonged there or not. I hope you will do me the favour and honour
to set my work in this order in your mind, for many of my small public
still think _A Handy Guide for Beggars_ the keynote of my present
work. But it was really my first wild dash."
The above letter was written 8 August, 1917.
Like many creative writers, Mr. Lindsay is an artist not only with the
pen, but with the pencil. He has made drawings since childhood;
drawing and writing still divide his time and energy. The first
impression one receives from the pictures is like that produced by the
poems--strangeness. The best have that Baconian element of strangeness
in the proportion which gives the final touch to beauty; the worst are
merely bizarre. He says, "My claim for them is that while laboured and
struggling in execution, they represent a study of Egyptian
hieroglyphics and Japanese art, two most orthodox origins for art, and
have no relation whatever to cubism, post-impressionism, or
futurism.... I have been very fond of Swinburne all my life, and I
should say my drawing is nearer to his ornate mood than any of my
writing has been. But that is a matter for your judgment." I find his
pictures so interesting that I earnestly hope he will some day publish
a large collection of them in a separate volume.
One of his latest developments is the idea of the _Poem Game_,
which is elaborated with interesting poetic illustrations in the
volume called _The Chinese Nightingale_. In giving his directions
and suggestions in the latter part of this book, he remarks, "The
present rhymer has no ambitions as a stage manager. The Poem Game
idea, in its rhythmic picnic stage, is recommended to amateurs, its
further development to be on their own initiative. Informal parties
might divide into groups of dancers and groups of chanters. The whole
might be worked out in the spirit in which children play King William
was King James's Son, London Bridge.... The main revolution necessary
for dancing improvisers, who would go a longer way with the Poem Game
idea is to shake off the Isadora Duncan and the Russian precedents for
a while, and abolish the orchestra and piano, replacing all these with
the natural meaning and cadences of English speech. The work would
come closer to acting than dancing is now conceived."
Here is a good opportunity for house parties, in the intervals of Red
Cross activities; and at the University of Chicago, 15 February, 1918,
_The Chinese Nightingale_ was given with a full chorus of twelve
girls, selected for their speaking voices. From the testimony of one
of the professors at the university, it is clear that the performance
was a success, realizing something of Mr. Lindsay's idea of the union
of the arts, with Poetry at the centre.
Among the games given in verse by the author in the latter part of
_The Chinese Nightingale_ volume is one called _The Potatoes'
Dance_, which appears to me to approach most closely to the
original purpose. It is certainly a jolly poem. But whether these
games are played by laughing choruses of youth or only by the
firelight in the fancy of a solitary reader, the validity of Vachel
Lindsay's claim to the title of Poet may be settled at once by
witnessing the transformation of a filthy rumhole into a sunlit
forest. As Edmond Rostand looked at a dunghill, and saw the vision Of
Chantecler, so Vachel Lindsay looked at some drunken niggers and saw
the vision of the Congo.
Fat black bucks in a wine-barrel room,
Barrel-house kings, with feet unstable,
Sagged and reeled and pounded on the table,
Pounded on the table,
Beat an empty barrel with the handle of a broom,
Hard as they were able,
Boom, boom, BOOM,
With a silk umbrella and the handle of a broom,
Boomlay, boomlay, boomlay, BOOM.
THEN I had religion, THEN I had a vision,
I could not turn from their revel in derision.
THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK,
CUTTING THROUGH THE FOREST WITH A GOLDEN TRACK.
Then along that river bank
A thousand miles
Tattooed cannibals danced in flies;
Then I heard the boom of the blood-lust song
And a thigh-bone beating on a tin-pan gong....
A negro fairyland swung into view,
A minstrel river
Where dreams come true.
The ebony palace soared on high
Through the blossoming trees to the evening sky.
The inlaid porches and casements shone
With gold and ivory and elephant-bone....
Just then from the doorway, as fat as shotes,
Came the cake-walk princes in their long red coats,
Canes with a brilliant lacquer shine,
And tall silk hats that were red as wine.
And they pranced with their butterfly partners there,
Coal-black maidens with pearls in their hair,
Knee-skirts trimmed with the jassamine sweet,
And bells on their ankles and little black-feet.
There are those who call this nonsense and its author a mountebank. I
call it poetry and its author a poet. You never heard anything like it
before; but do not be afraid of your own enjoyment. Read it aloud a
dozen times, and you, too will hear roaring, epic music, and you will
see the mighty, golden river cutting through the forest.
I do not know how many towns I have visited where I have heard "What
do you think of Vachel Lindsay? He was here last month and recited his
verses. Most of his audience were puzzled." Yet they remembered him.
What would have happened if I had asked them to give me a brief
synopsis of the lecture they heard yesterday on "The Message of John
Ruskin"? Fear not, little flock. Vachel Lindsay is an authentic
wandering minstrel. The fine phrases you heard yesterday were like
snow upon the desert's dusty face, lighting a little hour or two, is
gone.
_General William Booth Enters into Heaven_--with the accompanying
instruments, which blare out from the printed page--is a sublime
interpretation of one of the varieties of religious experience. Two
works of genius have been written about the Salvation Army--_Major
Barbara_ and _General William Booth Enters into Heaven_. But
_Major Barbara_, with its almost appalling cleverness--Granville
Barker says the second act is the finest thing Shaw ever composed--is
written, after all, from the seat of the scornful, like a metropolitan
reporter at a Gospel tent; Mr. Lindsay's poem is written from the
inside, from the very heart of the mystery. It is interpretation, not
description. "Booth was blind," says Mr. Lindsay; "all reformers are
blind." One must in turn be blind to many obvious things, blind to
ridicule, blind to criticism, blind to the wisdom of this world, if
one would understand a phenomenon like General Booth.
Booth led boldly with his big bass drum--
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)
The Saints smiled gravely and they said: "He's come."
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)....
Walking lepers followed, rank on rank,
Lurching bravoes from the ditches dank,
Drabs from the alleyways and drug fiends pale--
Minds still passion-ridden, soul-powers frail:--
Vermin-eaten saints with mouldy breath,
Unwashed legions with the ways of Death--
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)....
And when Booth halted by the curb for prayer
He saw his Master thro' the flag-filled air.
Christ came gently with a robe and crown
For Booth the soldier, while the throng knelt down.
He saw King Jesus. They were face to face,
And he knelt a-weeping in that holy place.
(Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?)
Dante and Milton were more successful in making pictures of hell than
of heaven--no one has ever made a common conception of heaven more
permanently vivid than in this poem. See how amid the welter of crowds
and the deafening crash of drums and banjos the individual faces stand
out in the golden light.
Big-voiced lassies made their banjos bang,
Tranced, fanatical they shrieked and sang....
Bull-necked convicts with that land make free...
The lame were straightened, withered limbs uncurled
And blind eyes opened on a new, sweet world....
Gone was the weasel-head, the snout, the jowl!
Sages and sibyls now, and athletes clean,
Rulers of empires, and of forests green!
It is a pictorial, musical, and spiritual masterpiece. I am not afraid
to call it a spiritual masterpiece; for to any one who reads it as we
should read all true poetry, with an unconditional surrender to its
magic, General William Booth and his horde will not be the only
persons present who will enter into heaven.
Vachel Lindsay needs plenty of room for his imagination--the more
space he has in which to disport himself, the more impressive he
becomes. His strange poem, _How I Walked Alone in the Jungles of
Heaven_, has the vasty sweep congenial to his powers. _Simon
Legree_ is as accurate an interpretation of the negro's conception
of the devil and of hell as _General William Booth_ is of the
Salvation Army's conception of heaven, though it is not so fine a
poem. When he rises from hell or descends from heaven, he loves big,
boundless things on the face of the earth, like the Western Plains and
the glory of Niagara. The contrast between the bustling pettiness of
the artificial city of Buffalo and the eternal fresh beauty of Niagara
is like Bunyan's vision of the man busy with the muck-rake while over
his head stood an angel with a golden crown.
Within the town of Buffalo
Are prosy men with leaden eyes.
Like ants they worry to and fro,
(Important men, in Buffalo).
But only twenty miles away
A deathless glory is at play:
Niagara, Niagara....
Above the town a tiny bird,
A shining speck at sleepy dawn,
Forgets the ant-hill so absurd,
This self-important Buffalo.
Descending twenty miles away
He bathes his wings at break of day--
Niagara, Niagara.
True poet that he is, Vachel Lindsay loves to show the contrast
between transient noises that tear the atmosphere to shreds and the
eternal beauty of unpretentious melody. After the thunder and the
lightning comes the still, small voice. Who ever before thought of
comparing the roar of the swiftly passing motor-cars with the sweet
singing of the stationary bird? Was there ever in a musical
composition a more startling change from fortissimo to pianissimo?
Listen to the iron-horns, ripping, racking,
Listen to the quack-horns, slack and clacking.
Way down the road, trilling like a toad,
Here comes the _dice_-horn, here comes the _vice_-horn,
Here comes the _snarl_-horn, _brawl_-horn, _lewd_-horn,
Followed by the _prude_-horn, bleak and squeaking:--
(Some of them from Kansas, some of them from Kansas)
Here comes the _hod_-horn, _plod_-horn, _sod_-horn,
Nevermore-to-_roam_-horn, _loam_-horn, _home_-horn,
(Some of them from Kansas, some of them from Kansas)
Far away the Rachel-Jane
Not defeated by the horns,
Sings amid a hedge of thorns:--
"Love and life,
Eternal youth--
Sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet,
Dew and glory,
Love and truth,
Sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet."
Of Mr. Lindsay's prose works the one first written, _A Handy Guide
for Beggars_, is by all odds the best. Even if it did not contain
musical cadenzas, any reader would know that the author was a poet. It
is full of the spirit of joyous young manhood and reckless adventure,
and laughs its way into our hearts. There is no reason why Mr. Lindsay
should ever apologize for this book, even if it does not represent his
present attitude; it is as individual as a diary, and as universal as
youth. His later prose is more careful, possibly more thoughtful, more
full of information; but this has a touch of genius. Its successor,
_Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty_, does not quite
recapture the first fine careless rapture. Yet both must be read by
students of Mr. Lindsay's verse, not only because they display his
personality, but because the original data of many poems can be found
among these experiences of the road. For example, _The Broncho That
Would not Be Broken_, which first appeared in 1917, is the rimed
version of an incident that happened in July, 1912. It made an
indelible impression on the amateur farmer, and the poem has a
poignant beauty that nothing will ever erase from the reader's mind. I
feel certain that I shall have a vivid recollection of this poem to
the last day of my life, assuming that on that last day I can remember
anything at all.
A more ambitious prose work than either of the tramp books is _The
Art of the Moving Picture_. It is rather singular that Mr. Lindsay,
whose poetry primarily appeals to the ear, should be so profoundly
interested in an art whose only appeal is to the eye. The reason,
perhaps, is twofold. He is professionally a maker of pictures as well
as of chants, and he is an apostle of democracy. The moving picture is
the most democratic form of art that the world has ever seen. Maude
Adams reaches thousands; Mary Pickford reaches millions. It is clear
that Mr. Lindsay wishes that the limitless influence of the moving
picture may be used to elevate and ennoble America; for here is the
greatest force ever known through which his gospel may be
preached--the gospel of beauty.
Like so many other original artists, Mr. Lindsay's poetry really goes
back to the origins of the art. As John Masefield is the twentieth
century Chaucer, so Vachel Lindsay is the twentieth century minstrel.
On the one occasion when he met W. B. Yeats, the Irishman asked him
point-blank, "What are we going to do to restore the primitive singing
of poetry?" and would not stay for an answer. Fortunately the question
was put to a man who answered it by accomplishment; the best answer to
any question is not an elaborate theory, but a demonstration. As it is
sometimes supposed that Mr. Lindsay's poetry owes its inspiration to
Mr. Yeats, it may be well to state here positively that our American
owes nothing to the Irishman; his poetry developed quite independently
of the other's influence, and would have been much the same had Mr.
Yeats never risen above the horizon. When I say that he owes nothing,
I mean he owes nothing in the manner and fashion of his art; he has a
consuming admiration for Mr. Yeats's genius; for Mr. Lindsay considers
him of all living men the author of the most beautiful poetry.
Chants are only about one-tenth of Vachel Lindsay's work. However
radical in subject, they are conservative in form, following the
precedents of the ode from its origin. It is necessary to insist that
while the material is new, the method is consciously old. He is no
innovator in rime or rhythm. But the chants, while few in number, are
the most individual part of his production; and up to the year
1918--the most impressive.
For in _The Congo_ we have real minstrelsy. The shoulder-notes,
giving detailed directions for singing, reciting, intoning, are as
charming in their way as the stage-directions of J. M. Barrie. They
not only show the aim of the poet; they admit the reader immediately
into an inner communion with the spirit of the poem.
Every one who reads _The Congo_ or who hears it read cannot help
enjoying it; which is one reason why so many are afraid to call it a
great poem. For a similar reason, some critics are afraid to call
Percy Grainger a great composer, because of his numerous and
delightful audacities. Yet _The Congo_ is a great poem,
possessing as it does many of the high qualities of true poetry. It
shows a splendid power of imagination, as fresh as the forests it
describes; it blazes with glorious colours; its music transports the
listener with climax after climax; it interprets truthfully the spirit
of the negro race.
I should not think of attempting to determine the relative position of
Percy Grainger in music and of Vachel Lindsay in poetry; but it is
clear that both men possess an amazing vitality. Is it not the lack of
vital force which prevents so many accomplished artists from ever
rising above the crowd? I suppose we have all read reams on reams of
magazine verse exhibiting technical correctness, exactitude in
language, and pretty fancy; and after a momentary unspoken tribute the
writer's skill, we straightway forget. But a poem like _Danny
Deever_ appears, it is to call it a music-hall ballad, or to
pretend it is not high art; the fact is that the worst memory in the
world will retain it. Such a poem comes like a breeze into a close
chamber; it is charged with vitality. We are in contact with a new
force--a force emanating from that mysterious and inexhaustible stream
whence comes every manifestation of genius. To have this
super-vitality is to have genius; and although one may have with it
many distressing faults of expression and an unlimited supply of bad
taste, all other qualities combined cannot atone for the absence of
this one primal element. Indeed the excess of wealth in energy is
bound to produce shocking excrescences; our Springfield poet is
sometimes absurd when he means to be sublime, bizarre when he means to
be picturesque. The same is true of Walt Whitman--it is true of all
creative writers whom John Burroughs calls _primary_ men, in
distinction from excellent artists who remain in the secondary class.
Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Walt Whitman, John Masefield, Vachel
Lindsay are primary men.
I have often wondered who would write a poem worthy of the Grand
Canyon of the Colorado. Vachel Lindsay is the only living American who
could do it, and I hope he will accept this challenge. Its awful
majesty can be revealed only in verse; for it is one of the very few
wonders of the world which no photograph and no painting can ever
reproduce. Who ever saw a picture that gave him any conception of this
incomparable spectacle?
In order to understand the primary impulse that drove Mr. Lindsay into
writing verse and making pictures, one ought to read first of all his
poem _The Tree of Laughing Bells, or The Wings Of the Morning_.
The first half of the title exhibits his love of resounding harmonies;
the second gives an idea of the range of his imagination. His finest
work always combines these two elements, melody and elevation, "and
singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest." I hope that the
picture he drew for _The Tree of Laughing Bells_ may some time be
made available for all students of his work, as it was his first
serious design.
Vachel Lindsay is essentially honest, for he tries to become himself
exactly what he hopes the future American will be. He is a Puritan
with a passion for Beauty; he is a zealous reformer filled with
Falstaffian mirth; he goes along the highway, singing and dancing,
distributing tracts. "Apollo's first, at last the true God's priest."
We know that two mighty streams, the Renaissance and the Reformation,
which flowed side by side without mingling, suddenly and completely
merged in Spenser's _Faery Queene_. That immortal song is a
combination of ravishing sweetness and moral austerity. Later the
Puritan became the Man on Horseback, and rode roughshod over every
bloom of beauty that lifted its delicate head. Despite the genius of
Milton, supreme artist plus supreme moralist, the Puritans managed
somehow to force into the common mind an antagonism between Beauty and
Morality which persists even unto this day. There is no reason why
those two contemporaries, Oscar Wilde and the Rev. Charles H.
Spurgeon, should stand before the London public as the champions of
contending armies; for Beauty is an end in itself, not a means, and so
is Conduct.
In the best work of Vachel Lindsay, we find these two qualities
happily married, the zest for beauty and the hunger and thirst after
righteousness. He made a soap-box tour for the Anti-Saloon League,
preaching at the same time the Gospel of Beauty. As a rule, reformers
are lacking in the two things most sedulously cultivated by commercial
travellers and life-insurance agents, tact and humour. If these
interesting orders of the Knights of the Road were as lacking in
geniality as the typical reformer, they would lose their jobs. And yet
fishers of men, for that is what all reformers are, try to fish
without bait, at the same time making much loud and offensive speech.
Then they are amazed at the callous indifference of humanity to "great
moral issues."
Vachel Lindsay is irresistibly genial. Nor is any of this geniality
made up of the professionally ingratiating smile; it is the foundation
of his temperament. What has this got to do with his poetry? It has
everything to do with it. It gives him the key to the hearts of
children; to the basic savagery of a primitive black or a poor white;
to peripatetic harvesters; to futurists, imagists, blue-stockings,
pedants of all kinds; to evangelists, college professors, drunken
sailors, tramps whose robes are lined with vermin. He is the great
American democrat, not because that is his political theory, but
simply because he cannot help it.
His attitude toward other schools of art, even when he has nothing in
common with them, is positively affectionate. Could there be two poets
more unlike in temperament and in style than Mr. Lindsay and Mr.
Masters? Yet in the volume, _The Chinese Nightingale_, we have a
poem dedicated "to Edgar Lee Masters, with great respect." He speaks
of "the able and distinguished Amy Lowell," and of his own poems
"parodied by my good friend, Louis Untermeyer." He says, "I admire the
work of the Imagist Poets. We exchange fraternal greetings.... But
neither my few heterodox pieces nor my many struggling orthodox pieces
conform to their patterns.... The Imagists emphasize pictorial
effects, while the Higher Vaudeville exaggerates musical effects.
Imagists are apt to omit rhyme, while in my Higher Vaudeville I often
put five rhymes on a line."
Impossible to quarrel with Vachel Lindsay. His stock of genial
tolerance is inexhaustible, and makes him regard not only hostile
humans, but even destructive insects, with inquisitive affection.
I want live things in their pride to remain.
I will not kill one grasshopper vain
Though he eats a hole in my shirt like a door.
I let him out, give him one chance more.
Perhaps, while he gnaws my hat in his whim,
Grasshopper lyrics occur to him.
During his tramps, the parents who unwillingly received him
discovered, when he began to recite stories to their children, that
they had entertained an angel unawares; and I have not the slightest
doubt that on the frequent occasions when his application for food and
lodging was received with a volley of curses, he honestly admired the
noble fluency of his enemy. When he was harvesting, the singing
stacker became increasingly and distressingly pornographic; instead of
rebuking him for foulness, which would only have bewildered the
stacker, Mr. Lindsay taught him the first stanza of Swinburne's
chorus. "The next morning when my friend climbed into our barge to
ride to the field he began:
When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces,
The mother of months, in meadow or plain,
Fills the shadows--
'Dammit, what's the rest of it? I've been trying to recite that piece
all night.' Now he has the first four stanzas. And last evening he
left for Dodge City to stay overnight and Sunday. He was resolved to
purchase _Atalanta in Calydon_ and find in the Public Library
_The Lady of Shalott_ and _The Blessed Damozel_, besides
paying the usual visit to his wife and children."
If a man cannot understand music, painting, and poetry without loving
these arts, neither can a man understand men and women and children
without loving them. This is one reason why even the cleverest
cynicism is never more than half the truth, and usually less.
Mr. Lindsay is a poet, and a missionary. As a missionary, he wishes
all Americans to be as good judges of poetry as they are, let us say,
of baseball. One of the numerous joys of being a professional
ball-player must be the knowledge that you are exhibiting your art to
a prodigious assembly of qualified critics. John Sargent knows that
the majority of persons who gaze at his picture of President Wilson
are incompetent to express any opinion; his subtlety is lost or quite
misunderstood; but Tyrus Raymond Cobb knows that the thousands who
daily watch him during the summer months appreciate his consummate
mastery of the game. Vachel Lindsay, I suppose, wants millions not
merely to love, but to detect the finer shades of the poetic art.
If he set out to accomplish this dream by lowering the standards of
poetry, then he would debase the public and be a traitor to his guild.
But his method is uncompromising--he taught the harvester not Mrs.
Hemans, but Swinburne. He calls his own verse the higher vaudeville.
But _The Congo_ is the higher vaudeville as _Macbeth_ is the
higher melodrama. And there is neither melodrama nor vaudeville in
_Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight_--a poem of stern and solemn
majesty.
Mr. Lindsay is true to the oldest traditions of poetry in his
successful attempts to make his verses ring and sing. He is both
antique and antic. But he is absolutely contemporary, "modern," "new,"
in his fearlessness. He has this in common with the practicers of free
verse, with the imagists, with the futurists; he is not in the least
afraid of seeming ridiculous. There can be no progress in art until
artists overcome wholly this blighting fear. It is the lone
individual, with his name stamped all over him, charging into the
safely anonymous mass; but that way lies the Advance.
When Thomas Carlyle took up the study of Oliver Cromwell, he found
that all previous historians had tried to answer this question: What
is the mask that Oliver wore? And suddenly the true answer came to him
in the form of another question: What if it should prove to be no mask
at all, but just the man's own face? So there are an increasingly
large number of readers who are discerning in the dauntless gambols of
Vachel Lindsay, not the mask of buffoonery, worn to attract attention,
but a real poet, dancing gaily with bronchos, children, field-mice and
potatoes.
Such unquenchable vitality, such bubbling exuberance, cannot always be
graceful, cannot always be impressive. But the blunders of an original
man are sometimes more fruitful than the correctness of a copyist.
Furthermore, blunders sometimes make for wisdom and truth. Let us not
forget Vachel Lindsay's poem on Columbus:
Would that we had the fortunes of Columbus,
Sailing his caravels a trackless way,
He found a Universe--he sought Cathay.
God give such dawns as when, his venture o'er,
The Sailor looked upon San Salvador.
God lead us past the setting of the sun
To wizard islands, of august surprise;
God make our blunders wise.
COLD PASTORAL!
The difference between Vachel Lindsay and Robert Frost is the
difference between a drum-major and a botanist. The former marches
gaily at the head of his big band, looking up and around at the crowd;
the latter finds it sweet
with unuplifted eyes
To pace the ground, if path be there or none.
Robert Frost, the poet of New England, was born at San Francisco, and
published his first volume in London. Midway between these two cities
lies the enchanted ground of his verse; for he belongs to New England
as wholly as Whittier, as truly as Mr. Lindsay belongs to Illinois. He
showed his originality so early as the twenty-sixth of March, 1875, by
being born at San Francisco; for although I have known hundreds of
happy Californians, men and women whose love for their great State is
a religion, Robert Frost is the only person I ever met who was born
there. That beautiful country is frequently used as a springboard to
heaven; and that I can understand, for the transition is less violent
than from some other points of departure. But why so few natives?
Shamelessly I lift the following biographical facts from Miss Amy
Lowell's admirable essay on our poet. At the age of ten, the boy was
moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts. He went to school, and disliked the
experience. He tried Dartmouth and later Harvard, staying a few months
at the first and two years at the second. Between these academic
experiences he was married. In 1900 he began farming in New Hampshire.
In 1911 he taught school, and in 1912 went to England. His first book
of poems, _A Boy's Will,_ was published at London in 1913. The
review in _The Academy_ was ecstatic. In 1914 he went to live at
Ledbury, where John Masefield was born, and where in the neighbourhood
dwelt W.W. Gibson. His second volume, _North of Boston,_ was
published at London in 1914. Miss Lowell quotes a sentence, full of
insight, from the review in the _Times._ "Poetry burns up out of
it, as when a faint wind breathes upon smouldering embers." In March,
1915, Mr. Frost returned to America, bringing his reputation with him.
He bought a farm in New Hampshire among the mountains, and in 1916
appeared his third volume, _Mountain Interval._
Was there ever a better illustration of the uncritical association of
names than the popular coupling of Robert Frost with Edgar Lee
Masters? They are similar in one respect; they are both poets. But in
the glorious army of poets, it would be difficult to find two
contemporaries more wholly unlike both in the spirit and in the form
of their work than Mr. Frost and Mr. Masters. Mr. Frost is as far from
free verse as he can stretch, as far as Longfellow; and while he
sometimes writes in an ironical mood, he never indulges himself in
cynicism. As a matter of fact, Mr. Frost is nearer in his art to Mr.
Lindsay than to Mr. Masters; for his theory of poetry, which I confess
I cannot understand, requires the poet to choose words entirely with
reference to their spoken value.
His poetry is more interesting and clearer than his theories about it.
I once heard him give a combination reading-lecture, and after he had
read some of his poems, all of which are free from obscurity, he began
to explain his ideas on how poetry should be written. He did this with
charming modesty, but his "explanations" were opaque. After he had
continued in this vein for some time, he asked the audience which they
would prefer to him do next--read some more of his poems, go on
talking about poetry? He obtained from his hearers an immediate
response, picked up his book, and read in admirable fashion his
excellent verse. We judge poets by their poems, not by their theories.
Robert Frost is an out-door poet. Even when he gives a picture of an
interior, the people are always looking out of the windows at
something or other. In his poems we follow the procession of the
seasons, with the emphasis on autumn and winter. One might be
surprised at the infrequency of his poems on spring, were it not for
the fact that his knowledge of the country is so precise and definite.
Spring is more beautiful in the city than in the country; it comes
with less alloy. No one has ever drawn a better picture of a country
road in the pouring rain, where "the hoof-prints vanish away."
In spite of his preoccupation with the exact value of oral words, he
is not a singing lyrist. There is not much _bel canto_ in his
volumes. Nor do any of his poems seem spontaneous. He is a thoughtful
man, given to meditation; the meanest flower or a storm-bedraggled
bird will lend him material for poetry. But the expression of his
poems does not seem naturally fluid. I suspect he has blotted many a
line. He is as deliberate as Thomas Hardy, and cultivates the lapidary
style. Even in the conversations frequently introduced into his
pieces, he is as economical with words as his characters are with
cash. This gives to his work a hardness of outline in keeping with the
New England temperament and the New Hampshire climate. There is no
doubt that much of his peculiarly effective dramatic power is gained
by his extremely careful expenditure of language.
It is, of course, impossible to prescribe boundary lines for a poet,
although there are critics who seem to enjoy staking out a poet's
claim. While I have no intention of building futile walls around Mr.
Frost's garden, nor erecting a sign with the presumptuous prohibition
of trespassing beyond them, it is clear that he has himself chosen to
excel in quality of produce rather than in variety and range. In the
first poem of the first volume, he concludes as follows:
They would not find me changed from him they knew--
Only more sure of all I thought was true.
This is certainly a precise statement of the impression made on the
reader who studies his three books in chronological order. _A Boy's
Will,_ as befits a youth who has lived more in himself than in the
world, is more introspective than either _North of Boston_ or
_Mountain Interval;_ but this habit of introspection gave him
both the method and the insight necessary for the accurate study of
nature and neighbours. He discovered what other people were like,
simply by looking into his own heart. And in _A Boy's Will_ we
find that same penetrating examination of rural scenes and common
objects that gives to the two succeeding the final stamp of veracity.
I do not remember ever having seen a phrase like the following, though
the phrase instantly makes the familiar picture leap into that empty
space ever before the reader's eye--that space, which like bare
wall-paper, seems to demand a picture on its surface.
_Or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand._
It is fortunate that the law of diminishing returns--which every
farmer is forced to heed--does not apply to pastoral poets. Out of the
same soil Robert Frost has successfully raised three crops of the same
produce. He might reply that in the intervals he has let the ground
lie fallow--but my impression is that he is really working it all the
time.
The sharp eye of the farmer sees nothing missed by our poet, but the
poet has interpretation as well as vision. He not only sees things but
sees things in their relations; and he knows that not only is
everything related to every other thing, but that all things are
related to the eternal mystery, their source and their goal. This is
why the yellow primrose is so infinitely more than a yellow primrose.
This also explains why the poems of Mr. Frost, after stirring us to
glad recognition of their fidelity, leave us in a revery.
His studies of human nature are the purest realism. They are
conversations rather than arias, for he uses the speaking, not the
singing voice. Poets are always amazing us, and some day Robert Frost
may astonish me by writing a romantic ballad. It would surely be a
surprise, for with his lack of operatic accomplishment, and his
fondness for heroes in homespun, he would seem almost ideally unfitted
for the task. This feeling I find strengthened by his poem called
_An Equal Sacrifice_, the only one of his pieces where anything
like a ballad is attempted, and the only one in all three books which
seems to be an undeviating failure. It is as flat as a pancake, and
ends with flat moralizing. Mr. Frost is particularly unsuccessful at
preaching.
No, apart from his nature poems, his studies of men and women are most
impressive when they follow the lines of Doric simplicity in the
manner of the powerful stage-plays written by Susan Glaspell. The
rigidity of the mould seems all the better fitted for the suppressed
passion it contains, just as liquid fire is poured into a vessel with
unyielding sides. His two most successful poems of this kind are
_Home Burial_, in _North of Boston_, and _Snow_, in
_Mountain Interval_. The former is not so much a tragedy as the
concentrated essence of tragedy. There is enough pain in it to furnish
forth a dozen funerals. It has that centrifugal force which Mr.
Calderon so brilliantly suggests as the main characteristic of the
dramas of Chekhov. English plays are centripetal; they draw the
attention of the audience to the group of characters on the stage; but
Chekhov's, says Mr. Calderon, are centrifugal; they throw our regard
off from the actors to the whole class of humanity they represent.
Just such a remark applies to _Home Burial_; it makes the reader
think of the thousands of farmhouses darkened by similar tragedies.
Nor is it possible to quote a single separate passage from this poem
for each line is so necessary to the total effect that one must read
every word of it to feel its significance. It is a masterpiece of
tragedy. And it is curious, as one continues to think about it, as one
so often does on finishing a poem by Robert Frost, that we are led
first to contemplate the number of such tragedies, and finally to
contemplate a stretch of life of far wider range--the broad, profound
difference between a man and a woman. Are there any two creatures on
God's earth more unlike? In this poem the man is true to himself, and
for that very reason cannot in his honest, simple heart comprehend why
he should appear to his own wife as if he were some frightful monster.
He is perplexed, amazed, and finally enraged at the look of loathing
in the wide eyes of his own mate. It was a little thing--his innocent
remark about a birch fence--that revealed to her that she was living
with a stranger. Grief never possesses a man as it does a woman,
except when the grief is exclusively concerned with his own bodily
business, as when he discovers that he has cancer or toothache. To the
last day of human life on earth, it will seem incomprehensible to a
woman that a man, on the occasion of a death in the family, can sit
down and eat with gusto a hearty meal. For bodily appetite, which is
the first thing to leave a woman, is the last to leave a man; and when
it has left every other part of his frame, it sometimes has a
repulsive survival in his eyes. The only bridge that can really cross
this fathomless chasm between man and woman is the bridge of love.
The dramatic quality of _Snow_ is suspense. The object through
which the suspense is conveyed to the reader is the telephone,
employed with such tragic effect at the Grand Guignol. Mr. Frost's art
in colloquial speech has never appeared to better advantage than here,
and what a wave of relief when the voice of Meserve is heard! It is
like a resurrection.
In order fully to appreciate a poem like _Mending Wall_, one
should hear Mr. Frost read it. He reads it with such interpretative
skill, with subtle hesitations and pauses for apparent reflection,
that the poem grows before the audience even as the wall itself. He
hesitates as though he had a word in his hands, and was thinking what
would be exactly the best place to deposit it--even as the farmer
holds a stone before adding it to the structure. For this poem is not
written, it is built. It is built of separate words, and like the wall
it describes, it takes two to build it, the author and the reader.
When the last line is reached, the poem is finished.
Nearly every page in the poetry of Robert Frost gives us the pleasure
of recognition. He is not only sincere, he is truthful--by which I
mean that he not only wishes to tell the truth, but succeeds in doing
so. This is the fundamental element in his work, and will, I believe,
give it permanence.
GOOD HOURS
I had for my winter evening walk--
No one at all with whom to talk,
But I had the cottages in a row
Up to their shining eyes in snow.
And I thought I had the folk within:
I had the sound of a violin;
I had a glimpse through curtain laces
Of youthful forms and youthful faces.
I had such company outward bound.
I went till there were no cottages found.
I turned and repented, but coming back
I saw no window but that was black.
Over the snow my creaking feet
Disturbed the slumbering village street
Like profanation, by your leave,
At ten o'clock of a winter eve.
A poem like that gives not only the pleasure of recognition; it has an
indescribable charm. It is the charm when joy fades, not into sorrow,
but into a deep, abiding peace.