(_From “The Cosmopolitan” Magazine, September, 1907_)
Whatever length of days may be accorded to this magazine, it is not
likely to do anything more notable in literature that it accomplishes
in this issue by publication of Mr. George Sterling’s poem, “A Wine of
Wizardry.” Doubtless the full significance of this event will not be
immediately apprehended by more than a select few, for understanding of
poetry has at no time been a very general endowment of our countrymen.
After a not inconsiderable acquaintance with American men of letters
and men of affairs I find myself unable to name a dozen of whom I
should be willing to affirm their possession of this precious gift—for
a gift it indubitably is; and of these not all would, in my judgment,
be able to discern the light of genius in a poem not authenticated by
a name already famous, or credentialed by a general assent. It is not
commonly permitted to even the luckiest of poets to “set the Thames on
fire” with his first match; and I venture to add that the Hudson is
less combustible than the Thames. Anybody can see, or can think that
he sees, what has been pointed out, but original discovery is another
matter. Carlyle, indeed, has noted that the first impression of a work
of genius is disagreeable—which is unfortunate for its author if he is
unknown, for upon editors and publishers a first impression is usually
all that he is permitted to make.
From the discouraging operation of these uncongenial conditions Mr.
Sterling is not exempt, as the biography of this poem would show; yet
Mr. Sterling is not altogether unknown. His book, _The Testimony of
the Suns, and Other Poems_, published in 1903, brought him recognition
in the literary Nazareth beyond the Rocky Mountains, whose passes are
so vigilantly guarded by cismontane criticism. Indeed, some sense of
the might and majesty of the book’s title poem succeeded in crossing
the dead-line while watch-worn sentinels slept “at their insuperable
posts.” Of that work I have the temerity to think that in both subject
and art it nicks the rock as high as anything of the generation of
Tennyson, and a good deal higher than anything of the generation of
Kipling; and this despite its absolute destitution of what contemporary
taste insists on having—the “human interest.” Naturally, a dramatist
of the heavens, who takes the suns for his characters, the deeps of
space for his stage, and eternity for his “historic period,” does not
“look into his heart and write” emotionally; but there is room in
literature for more than emotion. In the “other poems” of the book
the lower need is supplied without extravagance and with no admixture
of sentimentality. But what we are here concerned with is “A Wine of
Wizardry.”
In this remarkable poem the author proves his allegiance to the
fundamental faith of the greatest of those “who claim the holy Muse as
mate”—a faith which he has himself “confessed” thus:
Remiss the ministry they bear
Who serve her with divided heart;
She stands reluctant to impart
Her strength to purpose, end, or care.
Here, as in all his work, we shall look in vain for the “practical,”
the “helpful.” The verses serve no cause, tell no story, point no
moral. Their author has no “purpose, end, or care” other than the
writing of poetry. His work is as devoid of motive as is the song of
a skylark—it is merely poetry. No one knows what poetry is, but to
the enlightened few who know what is poetry it is a rare and deep
delight to find it in the form of virgin gold. “Gold,” says the miner
“vext with odious subtlety” of the mineralogist with his theories of
deposit—“gold is where you find it.” It is no less precious whether
you have crushed it from the rock, or washed it from the gravel, but
some of us care to be spared the labor of reduction, or sluicing. Mr.
Sterling’s reader needs no outfit of mill and pan.
I am not of those who deem it a service to letters to “encourage”
mediocrity—that is one of the many ways to starve genius. From the
amiable judgment of the “friendly critic” with his heart in his
head, otherwise unoccupied, and the _laudator literarum_ who finds
every month, or every week—according to his employment by magazine
or newspaper—more great books than I have had the luck to find in a
half-century, I dissent. My notion is that an age which produces a
half-dozen good writers and twenty books worth reading is a memorable
age. I think, too, that contemporary criticism is of small service,
and popular acclaim of none at all, in enabling us to know who are
the good authors and which the good books. Naturally, then, I am not
overtrustful of my own judgment, nor hot in hope of its acceptance.
Yet I steadfastly believe and hardily affirm that George Sterling is a
very great poet—incomparably the greatest that we have on this side of
the Atlantic. And of this particular poem I hold that not in a lifetime
has our literature had any new thing of equal length containing so much
poetry and so little else. It is as full of light and color and fire as
any of the “ardent gems” that burn and sparkle in its lines. It has all
the imagination of “Comus” and all the fancy of “The Faerie Queene.”
If Leigh Hunt should return to earth to part and catalogue these two
precious qualities he would find them in so confusing abundance and
so inextricably interlaced that he would fly in despair from the
impossible task.
Great lines are not all that go to the making of great poetry, but a
poem with many great lines is a great poem, even if it have—as usually
it has, and as “A Wine of Wizardry” has not—prosaic lines as well. To
quote all the striking passages in Mr. Sterling’s poem would be to
quote most of the poem, but I will ask the reader’s attention to some
of the most graphic and memorable.
A cowled magician peering on the damned
Thro’ vials wherein a splendid poison burns.
’Mid pulse of dungeoned forges down the stunned,
Undominated firmament.
It is not for me to say what may be meant here by “undominated,” any
more than to explain what Shakspeare meant by
To lie in cold _obstruction_ and to rot.
A poet makes his own words and his own definitions: it is for the rest
of us to accept them and see to it that there is no interference by
that feeble folk, the lexicographers.
a dell where some mad girl hath flung
A bracelet that the painted lizards fear—
Red pyres of muffled light!
Dull fires of dusty jewels that have bound
The brows of naked Ashtaroth.
she marks the seaward flight
Of homing dragons dark upon the West.
Where crafty gnomes with scarlet eyes conspire
To quench Aldebaran’s affronting fire.
Red-embered rubies smolder in the gloom,
Betrayed by lamps that nurse a sullen flame.
silent ghouls,
Whose king hath digged a sombre carcanet
And necklaces with fevered opals set.
Unresting hydras wrought of bloody light
Dip to the ocean’s phosphorescent caves.
What other words could so vividly describe gleams of fire on a troubled
sea? Who but a masterful poet could describe them at all?
There priestesses in purple robes hold each
A sultry garnet to the sea-linkt sun,
Or, just before the colored morning shakes
A splendor on the ruby-sanded beach,
Cry unto Betelgeuze a mystic word.
Faith! I would give value to know that word!
Where icy philters brim with scarlet foam.
Satan, yawning on his brazen seat,
Fondles a screaming thing his fiends have flayed.
A sick enchantress scans the dark to curse,
Beside a caldron vext with harlots’ blood,
The stars of that red Sign which spells her doom.
halls
In which dead Merlin’s prowling ape hath spilt
A vial squat whose scarlet venom crawls
To ciphers bright and terrible.
ere the tomb-thrown echoings have ceased,
The blue-eyed vampire, sated at her feast,
Smiles bloodily against the leprous moon.
Of that last picture—ghastly enough, I grant you, to affect the
spine of the Philistine with a chronic chill if he could understand
it—I can only repeat here what I said elsewhere while the poem was
in manuscript: that it seems to me not inferior in power upon the
imagination to Coleridge’s
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover,
or Keats’s
magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faerie lands forlorn—
passages which Rossetti pronounced the two Pillars of Hercules of human
thought.
One of a poet’s most authenticating credentials may be found in his
epithets. In them is the supreme ordeal to which he must come and from
which is no appeal. The epithets of the versifier, the mere metrician,
are either contained in their substantives or add nothing that is
worth while to the meaning; those of the true poet are instinct with
novel and felicitous significances. They personify, ennoble, exalt,
spiritualize, endow with thought and feeling, touch to action like
the spear of Ithuriel. The prosaic mind can no more evolve such than
ditch-water in a champagne-glass can sparkle and effervesce, or cold
iron give off coruscations when hammered. Have the patience to consider
a few of Mr. Sterling’s epithets, besides those in the lines already
quoted:
“Purpled” realm; “striving” billows; “wattled” monsters; “timid”
sapphires of the snow; “lit” wastes; a “stainèd” twilight of the
South; “tiny” twilight in the jacinth, and “wintry” orb of the
moonstone; “winy” agate and “banded” onyx; “lustrous” rivers;
“glowering” pyres of the burning-ghaut, and so forth.
Do such words come by taking thought? Do they come ever to the made
poet?—to the “poet of the day”—poet by resolution of a “committee
on literary exercises”? Fancy the poor pretender, conscious of his
pretense and sternly determined to conceal it, laboring with a brave
confusion of legs and a copious excretion of honest sweat to evolve
felicities like these!