Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
file which includes the original illustrations.
See 55447-h.htm or 55447-h.zip:
(https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/55447/pg55447-images.html)
or
(https://www.gutenberg.org/files/55447/55447-h.zip)
Images of the original pages are available through
Internet Archive. See
https://archive.org/details/youngeramericanp00rittuoft
Transcriber’s note:
Text in italics is surrounded by underscores, _like this_.
THE YOUNGER AMERICAN
POETS
[Illustration: Richard Hovey]
THE YOUNGER AMERICAN POETS
by
JESSIE B. RITTENHOUSE
Illustrated with Portraits
Boston
Little, Brown, and Company
1904
Copyright, 1904,
By Little, Brown, and Company.
All rights reserved
Published October, 1904
The University Press
Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A.
To
LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON
WHO HAS ENRICHED AMERICAN LITERATURE WITH HER SONG,
AND MY LIFE WITH HER FRIENDSHIP,
THESE STUDIES OF THE YOUNGER POETS
ARE INSCRIBED
WITH THE WARM AFFECTION OF
JESSIE B. RITTENHOUSE
FOREWORD
TO attempt, in one volume, to cover the entire field of present-day
poetry in America, will be recognized the more readily as impossible
when one reflects that in Mr. Stedman’s American Anthology over five
hundred poets are represented, of whom the greater number are still
living and singing.
One may scarcely hope, then, in the space of one volume, to include
more than a representative group, even when confining his study to the
work of the younger poets, for within this class would fall the larger
contingent named above. It has therefore been necessary to follow a
general, though not arbitrary, standard of chronology, of which the
most feasible seemed that adopted by Mr. Archer in his admirable study
of the English “Poets of the Younger Generation,”—the including only
of such as have been born within the last half-century, and whose
place is still in the making. The few remaining poets whose art has
long since defined itself, such as Mr. Aldrich, Mr. Stedman, and
Mrs. Moulton, need no further interpretation; nor does the
long-acknowledged work of Mr. Richard Watson Gilder, nor that of James
Whitcomb Riley, whose final criticism has been pronounced in every
heart and at every hearth.
The work of Mr. Edwin Markham, the poet of democracy, whose fraternal
songs embody many of the latter-day ideals, and that of John B. Tabb,
the lapidary of modern verse, who cuts with infinite care his delicate
cameos of thought, were also beyond the chronological scheme of the
volume. Nor of those who fell within its scope could a selection be
made that would not seem to some invidious, since it must chance among
so great a number that many would be omitted who should, with equal
right, have been included; it returns, therefore, to the earlier
statement, that one must confine himself to a representative group,
with whose work he chance to be most familiar, and upon which he has,
therefore, the truer claim to speak.
It seemed, also, that the volume would have more value if it gave to a
smaller number such a study as would differentiate and define their
work, rather than to a larger group the passing comment of a few
paragraphs. It was a great regret, however, that circumstances
incident to the copyrights prevented me from including the admirable
work of William Vaughn Moody, which reveals by its breadth,
penetration, and purpose, the thinker and not the dreamer. Indeed, Mr.
Moody’s work, in its vitality of touch, fine imagination, and
spiritual idealism, proves not only the creative poet but one to whom
the nobler offices of Art have been entrusted, and the critic given to
inquiring why the former times were better than these may well keep
his eye upon the work of Mr. Moody.
It was also a regret that those inexorable arbiters, space and time,
deprived me of the privilege of including the strongly individual work
of Helen Gray Cone; the artistic, thoughtful verse of Anna Hempstead
Branch; the sincere and sympathetic song of Virginia Woodward Cloud;
the spiritual verse of Lilian Whiting, with its interpretation of the
higher imports; the heartening, characteristic notes of Theodosia
Garrison; and the recently issued poems of Josephine Dodge Daskam,
which prove beyond peradventure that the Muses, too, were at her
christening,—indeed, the “Songs of Iseult Deserted,” which form a
group in her volume, are lyrics worthy of any hand.
Had it been possible in the space at command, I should also have had
pleasure in considering the work of Frank Dempster Sherman, who is not
only an accomplished lyrist, but who has divined the heart of the
child and set it to music; the cheer-giving songs of Frank L. Stanton,
fledged with the Southland sunshine and melody; and the verse-stories
of Holman F. Day, bringing from the pines of Maine their pungent aroma
of humor and pathos. Mr. Day covers an individual field, representing
such phases of New England life as have been little celebrated
hitherto, even by writers of fiction. He is familiar with every corner
of Maine from the mountains to the sea, and writes of humanity in the
concrete, sketching his types equally from the lumber camp or from the
sailors and fishermen of the shore. In his latest volume they are
drawn from the “Kin o’ Ktaadn,” and hold their way throughout its
pages with a reality provoking both laughter and tears; indeed, one
must seek far to find a keener humor, or one more infectious, than
that of Mr. Day, or a more sympathetic penetration into the pathos of
life. The heart is the book of his reading, and, in turn, the heart is
the book of his writing.
There is no attempt in these studies of the younger poets to group
them into schools, to define them in relation to one another, or to
hazard prophecies concerning them. Each is considered in his present
accomplishment, whether the work be fresh from the pen, or come
bringing with it the endorsement of time, since the song of yesterday
may carry farther than that already borne on the wings of the years,
and has equal claim to consideration in a volume devoted to the work
of the younger singers; for only by such consideration shall we learn
what is being done in our own day.
J. B. R.
CONTENTS
PAGE
FOREWORD vii
I. RICHARD HOVEY 1
II. LIZETTE WOODWORTH REESE 27
III. BLISS CARMAN 46
IV. LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY 75
V. GEORGE E. SANTAYANA 94
VI. JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY 110
VII. CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS 132
VIII. EDITH M. THOMAS 151
IX. MADISON CAWEIN 177
X. GEORGE E. WOODBERRY 196
XI. FREDERIC LAWRENCE KNOWLES 212
XII. ALICE BROWN 235
XIII. RICHARD BURTON 248
XIV. CLINTON SCOLLARD 269
XV. MARY MCNEIL FENOLLOSA 290
XVI. RIDGELY TORRENCE 299
XVII. GERTRUDE HALL 315
XVIII. ARTHUR UPSON 325
BIOGRAPHICAL INDEX 347
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
RICHARD HOVEY _Frontispiece_
LIZETTE WOODWORTH REESE _Facing page_ 28
BLISS CARMAN “ “ 48
LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY “ “ 76
JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY “ “ 112
CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS “ “ 134
MADISON CAWEIN “ “ 178
GEORGE E. WOODBERRY “ “ 198
FREDERIC LAWRENCE KNOWLES “ “ 214
ALICE BROWN “ “ 236
RICHARD BURTON “ “ 250
CLINTON SCOLLARD “ “ 270
MARY MCNEIL FENOLLOSA “ “ 292
RIDGELY TORRENCE “ “ 300
The Younger American Poets
I
RICHARD HOVEY
RICHARD HOVEY was a poet of convictions rather than of fancies, in
which regard he overtopped many of his contemporaries who were content
to be “enamored architects of airy rhyme.” Hovey was himself a skilful
architect of rhyme, an imaginative weaver of fancy; but these were not
ends, he does not stand primarily for them. He stands for comradeship;
for taking vows of one’s own soul; for alliance with the shaping
spirit of things; for a sane, wholesome, lusty manhood; a hearty,
confident surrender to life.
He is the poet of positivism, virile, objective, and personal to a
Whitmanesque degree, and answers to many of the qualifications laid
down by Whitman for the testing of an American poet. His performance
is eminently of the sort to “face the open fields and the seaside;” it
does “absorb into one;” it “animates to life,” and it is of the
people. It answers also to the query, “Have you vivified yourself from
the maternity of these States?” for Hovey was an American of the
Americans, and his patriotic poems are instinct with national pride,
though one may dissent from certain of his opinions upon war.
Hovey, to the degree of his development when his hand was stayed, was
a finely balanced man and artist. The purely romantic motives which
form the entire basis, for example, of Stephen Phillips’ work, and
thus render him a poet of the cultured classes and not of the people,
were foreign to the spirit of Hovey. He, too, was recasting in
dramatic form some of beauty’s imperishable traditions; but this was
only one phase of his art, it did not cause him to approach his own
time with less of sympathy; and while he had not yet come deeply into
the prophet gifts of song, their potency was upon him, and in the
Odes, which contain some of his strongest writing, his passion for
brotherhood, for development through comradeship, finds splendid
expression. In the best known of his odes, “Spring,” occurs this
stirring symbol:
For surely in the blind deep-buried roots
Of all men’s souls to-day
A secret quiver shoots.
* * * * *
The darkness in us is aware
Of something potent burning through the earth,
Of something vital in the procreant air.
It is in this ode, with the exception of his visioning of “Night” in
_Last Songs from Vagabondia_, that the influence of Whitman upon Hovey
comes out most prominently; that is, the influence of manner. The
really vital influence is one much less easily demonstrated, but no
less apparent to a student of both poets. It is not of the sort,
however, to detract from the originality of Hovey, but rather an
intensifying of his characteristics, a focalizing of his powers, and
is in accordance with Whitman’s declaration that
“He most honors my style
Who learns under it to destroy the teacher.”
Hovey’s own nature was so individual that he rarely failed to destroy
the teacher, or he was perhaps unconscious of having one; but in the
opening lines of the ode in question the Whitman note is unmistakable:
I said in my heart, “I am sick of four walls and a ceiling.
I have need of the sky.
I have business with the grass.
I will up and get me away where the hawk is wheeling,
Lone and high,
And the slow clouds go by.
* * * * *
Spring, like a huntsman’s boy,
Halloos along the hillsides and unhoods
The falcon in my will.
The dogwood calls me, and the sudden thrill
That breaks in apple blooms down country roads
Plucks me by the sleeve and nudges me away.
The sap is in the boles to-day,
And in my veins a pulse that yearns and goads.”
Could volumes of conventional nature poetry set one a-tingle like
this? The crowning excellence of Hovey’s nature poems is that they are
never reports, they do not describe with far-sought imagery, but are
as personal as a poem of love or other emotion. Such passionate
surrender, such intimate delight as finds expression, for example, in
“The Faun,” could scarcely be more communicative and direct. It
becomes at once our own mood, an interchange which is the test of art:
… And I plunge in the wood, and the swift soul cleaves
Through the swirl and the flow of the leaves,
As a swimmer stands with his white limbs bare to the sun
For the space that a breath is held, and drops in the sea;
And the undulant woodland folds round me, intimate, fluctuant, free,
Like the clasp and the cling of waters, and the reach and the effort
is done;—
There is only the glory of living, exultant to be.
In such words as these one loses thought of the merely picturesque,
their infection takes hold upon him, particularly in that line
befitting the forest spirit as a garment, in which
The undulant woodland folds round me, intimate, fluctuant, free,—
a line wherein the idea, feeling, movement, and diction are wholly at
one. It is impossible for Richard Hovey to be aloof and analytical in
any phase of his work, and when he writes of nature it is as the
comrade to whom she is a mystic personality. A stanza of “The Faun”
illustrates this; still in the wood, he asks:
Oh, what is it breathes in the air?
Oh, what is it touches my cheek?
There’s a sense of a presence that lurks in the branches.
But where?
Is it far, is it far to seek?
The first two collections of the _Vagabondia_ books contain Hovey’s
most spontaneous nature verse; they have also some of the lyrics by
which he will be known when such a rollicking stave as “Barney McGee,”
at which one laughs as a boyish exuberance, is forgotten. The quips of
rhyme and fancy that enliven the pages of the earlier volumes give
place, in the _Last Songs_, to a note of seriousness and artistic
purpose which sets the collection to an entirely different key; not
that the work is uniformly superior to that of the former songs, but
it is more earnest in tone; dawn is giving place to noon.
From the second collection may be cited one of the lyric inspirations
that sometimes came to Hovey, all warmth and color, as if fashioned
complete in a thought. It is called “A Sea Gypsy,” and the first of
its quatrains, though perhaps not more than the others, has a haunting
charm:
I am fevered with the sunset,
I am fretful with the bay,
For the wander-thirst is on me
And my soul is in Cathay.
There’s a schooner in the offing,
With her topsails shot with fire,
And my heart has gone aboard her
For the Islands of Desire.
I must forth again to-morrow!
With the sunset I must be
Hull down on the trail of rapture
In the wonder of the sea.
Aside from the dramas, and the noble elegy, “Seaward,” Hovey’s most
representative work is found in his collection, _Along the Trail_,
which opens with a group of battle-hymns inspired by the
Spanish-American war. With the exception of “Unmanifest Destiny,” and
occasional trumpet notes from the poem called “Bugles,” these
battle-songs are more or less perfunctory, nor are they ethically the
utterance of a prophet. There is the old assumption that because war
has ever been, it ever will be; that because the sword has been the
instrument of progress in past world-crises, it is the divinely chosen
arbiter. There is nothing of that development of man that shall find a
higher way, no visioning of a world-standard to which nations shall
conform; it is rather the celebration of brawn, as in the sonnet
“America.” The jubilant note of his call of the “Bugles,” however,
thrills with passionate pride in his country as the deliverer of the
weak, for the ultimate idea in Hovey’s mind was his country’s
altruism; but, as a whole, the battle-songs lack the larger vision and
are unequal in workmanship, falling constantly into the commonplace
from some flight of lyric beauty. The best of them, and a worthy best,
both in conception and in its dignified simplicity, is “Unmanifest
Destiny,” which follows:
To what new fates, my country, far
And unforeseen of foe or friend,
Beneath what unexpected star,
Compelled to what unchosen end,
Across the sea that knows no beach
The Admiral of Nations guides
Thy blind obedient keels to reach
The harbor where thy future rides!
The guns that spoke at Lexington
Knew not that God was planning then
The trumpet word of Jefferson
To bugle forth the rights of men.
To them that wept and cursed Bull Run,
What was it but despair and shame?
Who saw behind the cloud the sun?
Who knew that God was in the flame?
Had not defeat upon defeat,
Disaster on disaster come,
The slave’s emancipated feet
Had never marched behind the drum.
There is a Hand that bends our deeds
To mightier issues than we planned,
Each son that triumphs, each that bleeds,
My country, serves Its dark command.
I do not know beneath what sky
Nor on what seas shall be thy fate;
I only know it shall be high,
I only know it shall be great.
Hovey’s themes are widely diverse, but they are always of the
essential purports. He seems not only integral with nature, but
integral with man in his ardor of sympathy for his fellows, and the
swift understanding of all that makes for achievement or defeat. He
had the splendid nonchalance that met everything with confident ease,
and made his relation to life like that of an athlete trained to
prevail. Not to be servile, not to be negative, not to be vague,—these
are some of the notes of his stirring song. Even in love there is a
characteristic dash and _verve_, a celebration of comradeship as the
keynote of the relation, that makes it possible for him to write this
sonnet, so refreshing and wholesome, and so far removed from the
mawkish or effeminate:
When I am standing on a mountain crest,
Or hold the tiller in the dashing spray,
My love of you leaps foaming in my breast,
Shouts with the winds and sweeps to their foray;
My heart bounds with the horses of the sea,
And plunges in the wild ride of the night,
Flaunts in the teeth of tempest the large glee
That rides out Fate and welcomes gods to fight.
Ho, love, I laugh aloud for love of you,
Glad that our love is fellow to rough weather,—
No fretful orchid hothoused from the dew,
But hale and hardy as the highland heather,
Rejoicing in the wind that stings and thrills,
Comrade of ocean, playmate of the hills.
And that other sonnet, “Faith and Fate,” with its Valkyr spirit, and
its words like ringing hoofbeats:
To horse, my dear, and out into the night!
Stirrup and saddle and away, away!
Into the darkness, into the affright,
Into the unknown on our trackless way!
And closing with one of his finest lines—
East, to the dawn, or west or south or north!
_Loose rein upon the neck of Fate—and forth!_
What valor in that line—“Loose rein upon the neck of Fate—and forth!”
This is the typical mood, but I cannot refrain, before considering the
last phase of his work, the dramas, from quoting another sonnet in
another mood, because of its beauty and its revelation of the
spiritual side of his nature:
My love for thee doth take me unaware,
When most with lesser things my brain is wrought,
As in some nimble interchange of thought
The silence enters, and the talkers stare.
Suddenly I am still and thou art there,
A viewless visitant and unbesought,
And all my thinking trembles into nought,
And all my being opens like a prayer.
Thou art the lifted Chalice in my soul,
And I a dim church at the thought of thee;
Brief be the moment, but the mass is said,
The benediction like an aureole
Is on my spirit, and shuddering through me
A rapture like the rapture of the dead.
“The Quest of Merlin,” Hovey’s first incursion into drama, and indeed
one of his earliest works, having been issued in 1891, is most
illustrative of his defects and least of his distinctions. It is
unnecessary to the subsequent dramas, though serving as an
introduction to them, and has in itself very little constructive
congruity. In the songs of the fairies, the dryads, the maenads, there
is often a delicate airy beauty; but the metrical lapses throughout
the drama are so frequent as to detract from one’s pleasure in the
verse. This criticism is much less apposite to the subsequent works of
the cycle.
Hovey’s Arthurian dramas must be judged by the manner rather than
motif, by the situations through which he develops the well-known
story, and the dramatic beauty and passion of the dialogue, since the
theme is his only as he makes it his by the art of his adaptation. He
has given us the Arthur of Malory, and not of Tennyson, the Arthur of
a certain early intrigue with Morgance, the Queen of Orkney, outlived
in all save its effect, that of bitterness and envy cherished by her
against the young Queen Guinevere, and made use of as one of the
motives of the drama.
While Tennyson’s Arthur, until the final great scene with Guinevere in
the convent, and Bedivere by the lake, has a lay-figure personality,
placidly correct, but unconvincing,—in these scenes, and in the
general ideal of the Round Table, as developed by Tennyson, there is
such profound spiritual beauty that Arthur has come to dwell in a
nebulous upper air, as of the gods. It is a shock, then, to see him
brought down to earth, as he is in Hovey’s dramas. However, the lapses
are but referred to as incidental to the plot, not occurring during
its action, and Arthur becomes to us a human, magnanimous personality,
commanding sympathy, if he does not dominate the imagination as does
Tennyson’s hero. The handicap under which any poet labors who makes
use of these legends, even though vitalizing them with a new touch,
and approaching them from a new standpoint, is that the Tennyson
touch, the Tennyson standpoint, has so impressed itself upon the
memory that comparison is inevitable.
The fateful passion of Lancelot and Guinevere is enveloped by Tennyson
in a spiritual atmosphere; but in the dramas of Hovey, while
delicately approached, it lacks that elevation by which alone it lives
as a soul-tragedy, and not as an intrigue. There is, indeed, a strife
for loyalty on the part of Lancelot, when he returns from a chivalrous
quest and learns that the King’s bride is his unknown Lady of the
Hills; but it is soon overborne by Galahault’s assurance that Arthur
is to Guinevere—
A mere indifferent, covenanted thing,
and that she
Is as virgin of the thought of love
As winter is of flowers.
Ere this declaration, Lancelot, in conflict with himself, had
exclaimed:
Oh, Galahault, for love of my good name,
Pluck out your sword and kill me, for I see
Whate’er I do it will be violence—
To soul or body, others or myself!
But to Galahault’s subtle arguments he opposes an ever-weakening will,
and seeing the Queen walking in the garden, exquisite in beauty,
As if a rose grew on a lily’s stem,
So blending passionate life and stately mien,—
he is persuaded to seek her, and, ere the close of the interview, half
confessions have orbed to full acknowledgment by each. The scene is
artistically handled, especially in the ingenuous simplicity of
Guinevere.
Hovey occasionally makes the mistake of robbing some vital utterance
of its dramatic value by interlarding it with ornament. True emotion
is not literary, and Guinevere, meeting Lancelot alone at the lodge of
Galahault, for the first time after their mutual confession, having
come hither disguised and by a perilous course, would scarcely have
chosen these decorative words:
Oh, do not jar with speech
This perfect chord of silence!—Nay, there needs
Thy throat’s deep music. Let thy lips drop words
Like pearls between thy kisses;
and Lancelot, of the overmastering passion, would scarcely have
babbled this reply:
Thy speech breaks
Against the interruption of my lips
Like the low laughter of a summer brook
Over perpetual pebbles.
But when the crisis of the play is reached, when the court is rife
with rumors of the Queen’s disloyalty, and Lancelot and Guinevere,
under imminent shadow of exposure, meet by chance in the throne
room,—there is drawn a vital, moving picture, one whose art lies in
revealing the swift transition from impulse to impulse through which
one passes when making great decisions. First, the high light is
thrown upon the stronger side of Guinevere, in such meditative
passages as these, tinged with a melancholy beauty:
We have had a radiant dream; we have beheld
The trellises and temples of the South,
And wandered in the vineyards of the Sun:—
’Tis morning now; the vision fades away
And we must face the barren norland hills.
_Lancelot._ And must this be?
_Guinevere._ Nay, Lancelot, it is.
How shall we stand alone against the world?
_Lancelot._ More lonely in it than against!
What’s the world to us?
_Guinevere._ The place in which we live.
We cannot slip it from us like a garment,
For it is like the air—if we should flee
To the remotest steppes of Tartary,
Arabia, or the sources of the Nile,—
It still is there, nor can it be eluded
Save in the airless emptiness of death.
And fortressed with resolve, she speaks of war, of rending the
kingdom, of violating friendships, of desecrating the family bond, to
all of which Lancelot opposes his own desires:
And I—
I, too, defend it when it _is_ a family,
As I would kneel before the sacred Host
When through the still aisles sounds the sacring bell;
But if a jester strutted through the forms
And turned the holy Mass into a mock,
Would I still kneel, or would I rise in anger
And make an end of that foul mimicry?
This but adds strength to Guinevere’s argument,
Believest thou, then, the power of the Church?
The Church would give our love an ugly name.
_Lancelot._ Faith, I believe, and I do not believe.
The shocks of life oft startle us to thought,
Rouse us from acquiescence and reveal
That what we took for credence was but custom.
_Guinevere._ You are Arthur’s friend, your love—
Stands this within the honor of your friendship?
_Lancelot._ Mother of God—have you no pity?
_Guinevere._ I would
I could be pitiful, and yet do right.
Alas, how heavy—your tears move me more
Than all—(what am I saying? Dare I trust
So faint a heart? I must make turning back
Impossible);
and with a final resolve she adds:
But know the worst! I jested—
I—God!—I do not love you. Go! ’Twas all
Mockery—wanton cruelty—what you will—lechery!—
I—
(_Lancelot looks at her dumbly, then slowly turns to go. As he draws
aside the curtain of the doorway_—)
_Guinevere._ Lancelot!
_Lancelot._ What does the Queen desire?
_Guinevere._ Oh, no, I am not the Queen—I am
Your wife!
Take me away with you! Let me not lie
To you, of all—my whole life is a lie,
To one, at least, let it be truth. I—I—
O Lancelot, do you not understand?
I love you—Oh, I cannot let you go!
This swift change of front, this weakening, this inconsistency, is yet
so human, so subtly true to life, under such a phase of it, that the
entire scene vibrates with emotion which gathers force in the
declaration of Guinevere:
Love, I will fly with thee where’er thou wilt!
and reaches its climax in the sudden strength with which Lancelot
meets the Queen’s weakness. During her pleading that he should leave
her, his selfish wish had been uppermost; but her weakness recalls him
to himself and evokes his latent loyalty to the King:
Speak not of flight; I have played him
False—the King, my friend.
I ne’er can wipe that smirch away.
At least I will not add a second shame
And blazon out the insult to the world.
And Guinevere, casting about for her own justification, replies:
What I have given thee was ne’er another’s.
How has another, then, been wronged?
To which Lancelot:
What’s done
Is done, nor right nor wrong, as help me, Heaven,
Would I undo it if I could. But more
I will not do. I will not be the Brutus
To stab with mine own hand my dearest friend.
It must suffice me that you love me, sweet,
And sometime, somewhere, somehow must be mine.
I know not—it may be in some dim land
Beyond the shadows, where the King himself,
Still calling me his friend, shall place your hand
In my hand, saying, “She was always thine.”
No surplusage, no interposition of the merely literary, cumbers this
scene, which immediately precedes the final one, in which Lancelot and
the Queen are publicly accused before the King, sitting with Guinevere
beside him on the throne.
The opportunity for a great dramatic effect is obvious; but through
the magnanimity of Arthur, in waiving the impeachment, and exonerating
from suspicion the Queen and Lancelot, the effect is not of the clash
and din order, in fact, it is anti-climax in action, the real climax
being a spiritual one whose subtlety would be lost on the average
audience.
Lancelot (half aside, partly to Guinevere and partly to himself):
Be less kingly, Arthur,
Or you will split my heart—not with remorse—
No, not remorse, only eternal pain!
Why, so the damned are!
Guinevere (half apart):
To the souls in hell
It is at least permitted to cry out.
Whatever one may think of the ethical side of the play as wrought out
by Hovey, there is no question of its human element. As a whole, “The
Marriage of Guenevere” leaves upon one a more concrete and vital
impression than do the other dramas of the cycle, though it has less
of action and intricacy of plot than the succeeding one, “The Birth of
Galahad,” and would probably, for stage purposes, be less effective.
The action of the latter play takes place chiefly with Arthur’s army
occupied in the siege of Rome, and unfolds an ingenious plot, turning
upon the capture of Dagonet, the Queen’s jester, who has been sent
with a letter to Lancelot, informing him of the birth of his son, and
announcing that Guinevere, having left the child with her friend, the
Princess Ylen, had set out to join the army. The Romans at once
conceive the plan of holding Dagonet; capturing the Queen for the
palace of Caesar; and giving to Lancelot the alternative of forsaking
Arthur, placing himself at the head of the army and becoming tributary
king of Britain, with Guinevere as his queen; or of being publicly
dishonored by the conveyance to Arthur of the incriminating letter.
All of which was artfully planned, and might have been executed as
artfully, had not Dagonet, the jester, in an act of jugglery, stolen
the Emperor’s cloak and escaped, and, in the guise of a scrivener,
attached himself to the service of a young poet of Caesar’s household.
Guinevere is captured by the Romans, and after many unsuccessful
machinations on Caesar’s part to subdue her to his will, and on the
part of his advisers to win Lancelot to their ends, the letter, which
may, according to the law of Britain, bring death to the Queen and
banishment to Lancelot, is given to Dagonet to copy for Caesar, and is
burned by the jester with the taper given him to heat the waxen
tablet. Then comes on apace the sacking of Rome by Arthur; the taking
of the city; the rescue of Guinevere by Lancelot; the slaying of
Caesar and the crowning of Arthur as Emperor of Rome with Guinevere as
Empress. The scene closes with the entrance of a messenger with
letters from Merlin, to Arthur and Guinevere, scanning which the Queen
says apart to Lancelot:
All’s well with him.
Thus ends the drama, again with no suspicion on the part of Arthur
that his faith has been betrayed, and with no remorse on the part of
Guinevere at having betrayed it, only increasing joy in the love of
Lancelot. It is Lancelot himself who has the conflict, and in his
character lies the strength of the drama.
It is evident that Hovey intended to create a flesh-and-blood Arthur,
to eliminate the sanctimonious and retain the ideal; but the task
proved too difficult, and after opening the reader’s eyes to the human
weaknesses of the King, thereby inflicting a shock, he returns to the
other extreme, lifts him again into upper air, and leaves him abstract
and unconvincing. Lancelot, on the contrary, if too palpably human at
the start, grows into a more spiritual ideal, and when for the first
time he meets Guinevere transfigured with maternal joy, he greets her
with these exquisite words:
How great a mystery you seem to me
I cannot tell. You seem to have become
One with the tides and night and the unknown.
My child … your child … whence come? By
What strange forge
Wrought of ourselves and dreams and the great deep
Into a life? I feel as if I stood
Where God had passed by, leaving all the place
Aflame with him.
And again he says,
The strangeness is
That I, who have not borne him, am aware,
I, too, of intimacy with his soul.
The dramas abound in quotable passages, nor are they lacking in those
that make the judicious grieve. The work is unequal; but as a whole it
lives in the imagination, and remains in the memory, especially “The
Marriage of Guenevere,” in that twilight of the mind where dwell all
mystic shapes of hapless lovers.
The last of the dramatic cycle, “The Masque of Taliesin,” is regarded
by most of Mr. Hovey’s critics as the high-water mark of his verse,
and it has certainly some of the purest song of his pen, and
profoundest in thought and conception; but it has also passages of
unresolved metaphysics, whose place, unless the poet had the patience
to shape them to a finer issue, should be in a Greek philosophy.
The Masque turns upon the quest of the Graal by Percival, and is in
three scenes, or movements, set in the forest of Broceliande, Helicon,
and the Chapel of the Graal. It introduces the Muses, Merlin, Apollo,
Nimue, King Evelac, guardian of the Graal, and lesser mortals and
deities, but chief in interest, Taliesin, a bard, through whom are
spoken the finest passages of the play. As the work is cast in the
form of a Masque, to obviate the need of adhering to a strict dramatic
structure, one may dispense with a summary of its slight plot, and
look, instead, at the verse.
The passages spoken by Apollo to Taliesin, in other words, Inspiration
defining itself to the poet, are full of glowing thought:
Greaten thyself to the end, I am he for whose breath thou art
greatened;
Perfect thy speech to a god’s, I am he for whom speech is made
perfect;
And my voice in the hush of thy heart is the voice of the tides of
the worlds.
Thou shalt know it is I when I speak, as the foot knows the rock that
it treads on,
As the sea knows the moon, as the sap knows the place of the sun in
the heavens,
As the cloud knows the cloud it must meet and embrace with caresses
of lightning.
When thou hearest my voice, thou art one with the hurl of the stars
through the void,
One with the shout of the sea and the stampede of droves of the wind,
One with the coursers of Time and the grip of God’s hand on their
harness;
And the powers of the night and the grave shall avail not to stand
in thy path.
Genius and its invincible assurance could scarcely be defined better
than in this passage.
The Masque contains a litany spoken by King Evelac, and responded to
by the choristers at the Chapel of Graal, which is one of its
achievements, in point of beauty, though too long to quote, and lyrics
of great delicacy are scattered throughout the work; but in the more
spiritual passages, spoken chiefly by Taliesin, one gets the finer
quality of the verse, as in this noble query addressed to Uriel, the
angel who holds the flaming sword before the Graal:
Thou who beholdest God continually,
Doth not his light shine even on the blind
Who feel the flood they lack the sense to see?
The lark that seeks him in the summer sky
Finds there the great blue mirror of his soul;
Winged with the dumb need of he knows not what,
He finds the mute speech of he knows not whom.
Is not the wide air, after the cocoon,
As much God as the moth-soul can receive?
Doth not God give the child within the womb
Some guess to set him groping for the world,
Some blurred reflection answering his desire?
We, shut in this blue womb of doming sky,
Guess and grope dimly for the vast of God,
And, eyeless, through some vague, less perfect sense,
Strive for a sign of what it is to see.
Had one space to follow Mr. Hovey’s philosophy in the more
metaphysical passages, though fashioned less artistically, the
individuality of his thought in its subtler and more speculative
phases would be revealed, but to trace it adequately one must needs
have the volume before him, rather than such extracts as may be given
in a brief study. I must therefore, in taking leave of his work,
content myself with citing the exultant lines with which the volume
closes, the splendid death-song lifting one on the wave of its
ecstatic feeling:
Unaware as the air of the light that fills full all its girth,
Yet crowds not an atom of air from its place to make way;
Growing from splendor to splendor, from birth to birth,
As day to the rose of dawn from the earlier gray;
As day from the sunrise gold to the luminous mirth
Of morning, and brighter and brighter, till noon shall be;
Intense as the cling of the sun to the lips of the earth,
And cool as the call of a wind on the still of the sea,
Joy, joy, joy in the height and the deep;
Joy like the joy of a leaf that unfolds to the sun;
Joy like the joy of a child in the borders of sleep;
Joy like the joy of a multitude thrilled into one.
* * * * *
Stir in the dark of the stars unborn that desire
Only the thrill of a wild, dumb force set free,
Yearn of the burning heart of the world on fire
For life and birth and battle and wind and sea,
Groping of life after love till the spirit aspire,
Into Divinity ever transmuting the clod,
Higher and higher and higher and higher and higher
Out of the Nothingness world without end into God.
Man from the blindness attaining the succor of sight,
God from his glory descends to the shape we can see;
Life, like a moon, is a radiant pearl in the night
Thrilled with his beauty to beacon o’er forest and sea;
Life, like a sacrifice laid on the altar, delight
Kindles as flame from the air to be fire at its core!
Joy, joy, joy in the deep and the height!
Joy in the holiest, joy evermore, evermore!
II
LIZETTE WOODWORTH REESE
MISS LIZETTE WOODWORTH REESE is an Elizabethan, not by affectation,
but by temperament. Sidney and Lovelace and Herrick and Marlowe are
her contemporaries, though she moves among them as a gray-robed figure
among gay cavaliers and knights, so restrained is her mood, so
delicate in its withholding.
Her first collection is aptly named, _A Handful of Lavender_, for the
fragrance of the elder time pervades it impalpably, as the scent of
lavender makes sweet the linen of some treasured chest. How Miss Reese
has been able, in the hurly-burly of American life, to find some
indesecrate corner, some daffodiled garden-close, holding always the
quiet and the glint of sunshine out of which these songs have come, is
an enigma worth a poet’s solving. She is a Southern woman, which may
furnish some clew to the repose of her work. There is time down there
to ripen, to let life have its own way of enrichment with one. She has
been content to publish three books of verse—although the first is now
incorporated with the second—in the interval in which our Northern
poets would have produced a half-dozen; nor does she much concern
herself, when once the captive melodies are freed, as to their flight.
She knows there are magnetic breezes in the common air, charméd winds
that blow unerringly, and in whose upper currents song’s wings are
guided, as the carrier-doves’, to their appointed goal.
There is a delicate harmony between Miss Reese’s poems and their
number, a nicety of adjustment between quality and quantity, that
bespeaks the artist. She has the critic’s gift of appraising her own
work before it leaves her hand, and thus forestalls much of the
criticism that might otherwise attend it. The faculty of self-analysis
would be a safety-valve to the high-pressure speed at which most
literature of to-day is produced—but, alas, the few that employ it!
“Open the throttle and let it drive!” is the popular injunction to the
genius within, and wherever it drives, one is expected to follow. How
refreshing it is, then, to come upon work with calm upon it!—work that
came out of time, culture, and artist-love, and trusts its
appreciation to the same standards.
[Illustration: Lizette Woodworth Reese]
Miss Reese’s verse shows constant affinity with Herrick, though it is
rarely so blithe. It has the singing mood, but not the buoyant one,
being tempered by something delicate and remote. The unheard melodies
within it are the sweetest; it pipes to the spirit “ditties of no
tone.” Even its least rare fancies convey more than they say, and it
must be confessed that much so-called poetry says more than it
conveys. Whitman’s mystical words: “All music is what awakes from you
when you are reminded by the instruments,” applies equally well to
poetry, to poetry of suggestion, such as Miss Reese’s. Yesterday’s
parted grace has been transmuted to poetry within us all, but it is a
voiceless possession, speaking to us in the soul. Miss Reese’s poems,
by a line or two, perhaps, put one in swift possession of that
vanishing beauty within himself. It floods back, perchance in tears,
but it is ours again. Take almost a random citation, for this quality
is rarely absent from her poems, whether they summon Joy or Pain,—her
lines “To A White Lilac”:
I know you, ghost of some lone, delicate hour,
Long-gone but unforgot;
Wherein I had for guerdon and for dower
That one thing I have not.
Unplucked I leave your mystical white feather,
O phantom up the lane;
For back may come that spent and lovely weather,
And I be glad again!
To analyze this, would be to pluck the mystical white feather that a
poet left untouched, that it might recall the grace of “some lone,
delicate hour, long-gone but unforgot;” but the soul of such an hour
has subtilized for each of us in that spiritual memory-flower, and it
needs no more than the opening line of this poem to invest the
disillusioned day with a mood the same—yet not the same. Miss Reese
has put it in two lines in her “Song of the Lavender Woman”:
Oh, my heart, why should you break at any thoughts like these?
So sooth are they of the old time that they should bring you ease.
In another brief poem, the spirit of grief, that transmutes itself at
last to music, to odor, to sunsets and dawns, becomes vital again in
the scent of the box, the garden shrub. The lines show Miss Reese’s
susceptibility to impression from the most intangible sources:
Dark, thinned, beside the wall of stone,
The box dripped in the air;
Its odor through my house was blown
Into the chamber there.
Remote and yet distinct the scent,
The sole thing of the kind,
As though one spoke a word half meant
That left a sting behind.
I knew not Grief would go from me
And naught of it be plain,
Except how keen the box can be
After a fall of rain.
Miss Reese’s art is its apparent lack of art, of conscious effort. Her
diction is as simple in the mere store of words which she chooses to
employ, as might be that of some poet to whom such a store was his
sole equipment; but what is that fine distinction between _simplesse_
and _simplicité_? One recognizes in her vocabulary the subtlest art of
choice and elimination, art that is temperament, however, that selects
by intuitive fitness and not by formulas or deliberate trying of
effects. The words she employs are thrice distilled and clarified,
until they become the essence of lucidity, and this essence in turn is
crystallized into form in her poems. Perhaps they have, for some, too
little warmth and color; they are not the rich-dyed words of passion,
they are rather the white, delicate words of memory, but no others
would serve as well.
In reading certain poems of Miss Reese’s, such as “Trust,” or her
lines “Writ In A Book Of Elizabethan Verse,” the clarity of the
language recalls a passage in a letter of Jean Ingelow’s in which she
exclaims: “Oh that I might wash my words in light!” The impression
which many of these lyrics convey is that Miss Reese _has_ washed her
words in light, so clear, so pure is their beauty. Take, for
illustration, the much-quoted lines “Love Came Back At Fall O’ Dew,”
and note the art and feeling achieved almost wholly in monosyllabic
words:
Love came back at fall o’ dew,
Playing his old part;
But I had a word or two,
That would break his heart.
“He who comes at candlelight,
That should come before,
Must betake him to the night
From a barréd door.”
This the word that made us part
In the fall o’ dew;
This the word that brake his heart—
Yet it brake mine, too!
A lyric imbued with charm, and into which a heart history is
compressed, and yet employing but five or six words of more than one
syllable! Is this not clarifying to a purpose? The lines called
“Trust,” illustrate with equal minuteness the gift of putting into the
simplest words some truth that seems to speak itself without calling
attention to language or form, and, though having less of charm, they
illustrate the point in question, that of absolute simplicity without
insipidity. This is not, however, to be taken as advice to all poets
to cultivate the monosyllabic style. Because Miss Reese can achieve
such an effect through it, when she chooses, as “Love Came Back At
Fall O’ Dew,” does not argue that another poet would not corrupt it to
nursery babble, nor would it be desirable to strive for it in any
case. Song is impulse, not effort, and back of it is temperament. Miss
Reese is a poet-_singer_; she is at her best in the pure lyric, the
lyric that could be sung, and therefore her most artistic poems are
such as are the least ornate, but have rare distinction in the purity,
fitness, and individuality of her words.
Very few modern lyrics possess the singing quality. The term “lyric
verse,” as used to-day, is a misnomer. It is as intricate in form and
phrase as if not consecrated to the lyre by poets in the dawn of art.
The divorce between poetry and song grows more absolute year by year;
composers search almost vainly through modern volumes of verse for
lyrics that combine the melody and feeling, the spontaneity and grace,
indispensable to song. It is not that the modern poet is unable to
produce such, but that he does not choose. It has gone out of fashion,
to state the case quite frankly, to write with a singing cadence;
something rare and strange must issue from the poet’s lips, something
inobvious. Art lurks in surprises, and the poet of to-day must be a
diviner of mysteries, a searcher of secrets, in nature and humanity
and truth, and a revealer of them in his art, though he reveal
ofttimes but to conceal.
Poetry grows more and more an intellectual pleasure for the cultured
classes, less and less a possession of the people. Elizabethan song
was upon the lips of the milkmaids and market-women, the common ear
was trained to grace and melody; but how many of the country folk of
to-day know the involved numbers of our poets, or, knowing, could
grasp them? Who is writing the lays of the people? One can only answer
that few are writing them because the spirit of poetic art has
suffered a sea-change into something rich and strange, and the poet of
to-day would be fearful of his laurels should he write so artless a
song as “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,” or “Come live with me and
be my love,” and yet these are beads that Time tells over on the
rosary of Art.
The question is too broad to discuss here. We should all agree,
doubtless, as to the increasing separation between poetry and song,
the increasing tendency of verse to appeal to the cultured classes;
but as to the desirability of returning to the simpler form, adapting
theme and melody to the common ear—how many modern poets would agree
upon that? There is a middle ground, however; the reaction against the
highly ornate is already felt, and a finer art may be trusted to bring
its own adjustments until poetry will again become of universal
appeal.
And how does this pertain to Miss Reese? It pertains in that her ideal
is the very return to clear, sympathetic song of which we have spoken.
She would recapture the blitheness of Herrick, the valor of Lovelace,
would lighten song’s wings of their heaviness and shift Care and
Wisdom to more prosaic burden-bearers. While the reminiscent mood is
prevalent in her work, it is not melancholy, but has rather the
iridescent glint of smiles and tears. Joy never quite departs,
although “with finger at his lip, bidding adieu.” Miss Reese’s strife
is toward a valiant cheer, whose passing she deplores in the poem
called “Laughter”:
Spirit of the gust and dew,
Herrick had the last of you!
Empty are the morning hills.
Herrick, he whose hearty airs
Still are heard in our dull squares;
Herrick of the daffodils!
* * * * *
Now the pulpit and the mart
Make an unquiet thing of Art,
For we trade or else we preach;
Even the crocus,’stead of song,
Serves for text the April long;
Thus we set it out of reach.
There is heartier food than ambrosia in this stanza. It is true that
when we use the crocus for a text we set it out of reach, or, in
common phrase, when poetry becomes didactic, Art flees. A dew-fresh
song would teach the crocus’ lesson, or many another lesson, without a
hint of teaching it, merely by beauty; by the creed of Keats. Pope’s
didactic, sententious lines are gone; but Keats, who never pointed a
moral in his life, sings on eternally. Miss Reese too is votary to
beauty for its own sake; she gives one the flower, and he may extract
the nectar for himself. The nectar is always there for one’s
distilling into the truth which is the essence of things. She does not
herself extract and distil it, for hers is the art of suggestion.