are free-hand strokes with pigment. Note the picturesque quality, for
illustration, in the words,
Bright from the mast, a scarf unwound,
The lined gulls in the offing ride,
and their imaginative vision with no hint of the fantastic; for one
need only have it glimpsed before him to know that he has seen the
same effect a score of times. Miss Guiney comes to the world without,
as if no eyes but hers had looked upon it; she brings no other image
upon the lens of her vision, and hence the imprint is as newly
mirrored, and as fresh with each changing view as a moving reflection
upon the surface of the water.
The subjective touch in the above poem:
I cry to Thee,
Whose heart
Remembers each of these: Thou art
My God who hast forgotten me!—
articulates the cry which life wrings at sometime from each of us,
noting the infinite solicitude that writes self-executing laws in the
hearts of the creatures, while man goes blundering after intimations
and dreams. One comes at times face to face with the necessity to
justify the ways of God to man, when he notes throughout nature the
unerring certainty of instinct, and the stumbling fallibility of
reason. He questions why the bee excels him in wisdom and force and
persistence, in shaping conditions for its maintenance, and in
intuitions of destiny; or why the infinite exactness that established
the goings of the ant in the devious ways of her endeavor should have
left man to follow so fatuous a gleam as human intuition in finding
his own foot-path among the tortuous ways of life. And these queries
Miss Guiney’s poem raises, though not with arraignment, rather with
the logical demand:
As to a weed, to me but give
Thy sap! lest aye inoperative
Here in the Pit my strength shall be:
And still,
Help me endure the Pit until
Thou wilt not have forgotten me.
There is sinew and brawn in Miss Guiney’s work; she is not dallying in
the scented gardens of poesy, but entering the tourney in valorous
emprise. Not a man of them who can meet fate in a braver joust than
she, and he must needs look well to his armor if he come off as
unscathed. She never stops to bewail the prick of the spear, though it
draw blood, but enters the field again for the
“Hope not compassed, and yet not void.”
There is tonic in her work for the craven heart, a note to shame one
back to the ranks. Each is a “Recruit” and should take to himself this
marching order:
So much to me is imminent:
To leave Revolt that is my tent,
And Failure, chosen for my bride,
And into life’s highway be gone
Ere yet Creation marches on,
Obedient, jocund, glorified:
And, last of things afoot, to know
How to be free is still to go
With glad concession, grave accord,
Nor longer, bond and imbecile,
Stand out against the Gradual Will,
The guessed ‘Fall in’! of God the Lord.
And the plea of Saint George, awaiting the hour to essay his quest,
O give my youth, my faith, my sword,
Choice of the heart’s desire:
A short life in the saddle, Lord!
Not long life by the fire,—
sets one’s sluggish blood in responsive motion,—as do the succeeding
lines:
I fear no breathing bowman,
But only, east and west,
The awful other foeman
Impowered in my breast.
The outer fray in the sun shall be,
The inner beneath the moon;
And may Our Lady lend to me
Sight of the dragon soon.
At the outset of her work Miss Guiney sang an electrifying song of
which men begrudged her the glory, being theft of Jove’s thunder. It
was hight valiantly “The Wild Ride,” and has the spirit of all the
knights and troopers in Christendom packed within its tense and
vibrant lines:
_I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses,
All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses;
All night from their stalls, the importunate tramping and neighing._
Let cowards and laggards fall back! but alert to the saddle,
Straight, grim, and abreast, go the weather-worn galloping legion,
With a stirrup-cup each to the lily of women that loves him.
The trail is through dolor and dread, over crags and morasses;
There are shapes by the way, there are things that appal or entice us:
What odds? we are knights, and our souls are but bent on the riding.
_I hear in my heart, I hear in its ominous pulses,
All day, on the road, the hoofs of invisible horses;
All night from their stalls, the importunate tramping and neighing._
We spur to a land of no name, outracing the storm-wind;
We leap to the infinite dark, like the sparks from the anvil,
Thou leadest, O God! all’s well with Thy troopers that follow!
“The Kings” and “The Perfect Hour” are other trumpet notes of Miss
Guiney’s, illustrating the individuality of her point of view and the
personality of her expression.
A poet’s words may be wind-blown feathers, or they may be flint-tipped
arrows singing to a mark. The defect with much of present-day poetry
is that it is not aimed, it is content to be a pretty flight of
feathers, blown by the breath of fancy, and reaching no vital spot.
To test Miss Guiney’s marksmanship with words, one may separate her at
once from the class who are flying airy illusions nowhither, for she
concentrates, instead of diffusing, and has, at the outset, a definite
point in view. She works upon the arrow principle, but now and again
glances from the mark. In such a poem as “The Recruit,” in “The Wild
Ride,” or the “Saint George” quoted from, in her stirring poem
“Sanctuary,” beginning,
High above Hate I dwell,
O storms! farewell,
and in many others, she cleaves straight to her aim with no
deflection. The same may be said of many of her lighter poems, the
charming “Lilac Song,” or this delicately wrought love-song, speeding
to the heart:
When on the marge of evening the last blue light is broken,
And winds of dreamy odor are loosened from afar;
Or when my lattice opens, before the lark has spoken,
On dim laburnum-blossoms, and morning’s dying star,
I think of thee (O mine the more if other eyes be sleeping!)
Whose great and noonday splendor the many share and see,
While, sacred and forever, some perfect law is keeping
The late and early twilight alone and sweet for me.
In poems of this kind and in deeper ones from the spiritual side of
her nature, as well as in those of valor and daring, she uses such
words as are tipped with a penetrative point; but in some of her
sonnets, such as “The Chantry,” in a narrative poem, such as “The
Vigil in Tyrone,” though not without picturesque quality, in “The
Squall,” despite its frequently fine imagery, and often in the
dramatic poem, “A Martyr’s Idyl,” the words are too much weighted to
carry to the mark; they suggest undue care in selection which
interposes between the motive of the poem and the sympathy of the
reader. One pauses to consider the words; and the initial impulse,
like a spent shell, falls at his feet. Miss Guiney’s diction is, in
the main, peculiarly crisp and apposite; but she does not always hold
to the directness of appeal that distinguishes her truest work, but
withdraws herself into subtleties, often beautiful, but too remote. “A
Martyr’s Idyl” is a dramatically conceived incident, well wrought as
to scene and character, and having many passages of great beauty; but
the effort to keep the expression to the manner of the time results in
a lack of flexibility in the style that is now and then cumbrous. On
the whole, it is not in a dramatic poem of this sort that Miss Guiney
best reveals herself, but in such inspirations as she has taken—
Neither from sires nor sons,
Nor the delivered ones,
Holy, invoked with awe.
Her best work answers, by practical demonstration, her own query:
“Where shall I find my light?”
“Turn from another’s track,
Whether for gain or lack,
Love but thy natal right.
Cease to follow withal,
Though on thine upled feet
Flakes of the phosphor fall.
Oracles overheard
Are never again for thee,
Nor at a magian’s knee
Under the hemlock tree,
Burns the illumining word.”
The term “original” is one to be used charily and with forethought,
but it is one that belongs without danger of challenge to Miss
Guiney’s work. There is a distinct quality, both of treatment and
conception, that is hers alone, a rare, unfamiliar note, without
reminiscent echoes. While it has a certain classic quaintness, it has
also vitality and concrete forcefulness.
Her metrical command is varied, and she employs many forms with
assurance of touch. She has a group of Alexandrian songs in _A
Roadside Harp_, most of them with beauty of measure and atmosphere.
Here, in three lines, is a rhythmic achievement:
Me, deep-tresséd meadows, take to your loyal keeping,
Hard by the swish of sickles ever in Aulon sleeping,
Philophron, old and tired, and glad to be done with reaping!
How the “swish of sickles” conveys their very sound! This ability to
put into certain words both the music and the picture distinguishes
Miss Guiney. In her sonnet upon the “Pre-Reformation Churches about
Oxford,” even the names that would seem to suggest an inartistic
enumeration are made to convey the sense of sabbatical sweetness and
calm and to visualize the scene.
_The Sonnets Written at Oxford_ mark, as a whole, her finest work in
this form, although the twelve London sonnets are full of strong lines
and images, and several of them, such as “Doves” and “In The Docks,”
take swift hold upon one’s sympathy. The former flashes a picture at
the close, by way of rebuke to the over-solicitous mood, which is not
only charming from the artistic side, but opens the eyes in sudden
content and gladness.
Ah, if man’s boast, and man’s advance be vain,
And yonder bells of Bow, loud-echoing home,
And the lone Tree foreknow it, and the Dome,
The monstrous island of the middle main;
If each inheritor must sink again
Under his sires, as falleth where it clomb
Back on the gone wave the disheartened foam—
I crossed Cheapside, and this was in my brain.
What folly lies in forecasts and in fears!
Like a wide laughter sweet and opportune,
Wet from the fount, three hundred doves of Paul’s
Shook their warm wings, drizzling the golden noon,
And in their rain-cloud vanished up the walls.
“God keeps,” I said, “our little flock of years.”
This note of spiritual assurance appears throughout Miss Guiney’s
work, speaking in her sonnet, “The Acknowledgment,” and again and
again in other poems. She has the mystic’s passion for the One Good,
the One Beauty—
O hidden, O perfect, O desired, the first and the final fair!—
and gives it impassioned expression in the lines, “Deo Optimo Maximo,”
All else for use, one only for desire;
Thanksgiving for the good, but thirst for Thee:
Up from the best, whereof no man need tire,
Impel Thou me.
Delight is menace, if Thou brood not by,
Power a quicksand, Fame a gathering jeer.
Oft as the morn, (though none of earth deny
These three are dear,)
Wash me of them, that I may be renewed,
Nor wall in clay mine agonies and joys;
O close my hand upon Beatitude!
Not on her toys.
And here at the last is the tenderest Nativity song for which
dedicated words were ever found; so quaint, so gentle, so reverent, so
blended of sweet and sad. The second stanza is an artist’s grouping
from life:
The Ox he openeth wide the doore
And from the snowe he calls her inne,
And he hath seen her Smile therefore,
Our Lady without sinne.
Now soone from sleepe
A starre shall leap,
And soon arrive both King and Hinde;
_Amen_, _Amen_:
But O, the place co’d I but find!
The Ox hath husht his voyce and bent
Trewe eyes of Pitty ore the Mow,
And on his lovelie Neck, forspent,
The Blessed lays her Browe.
Around her feet
Full Warme and Sweete
His Bowerie Breath doth meeklie dwell;
_Amen_, _Amen_:
But sore am I with Vaine Travél!
The Ox is Host in Juda’s stall,
And Host of more than onelie one,
For close she gathereth withal
Our Lorde, her littel Sonne:
Glad Hinde and King
Their Gyfte may bring,
But wo’d to-night my Teares were there;
_Amen_, _Amen_:
Between her Bosom and His hayre!
To sum up Miss Guiney’s work, as well as one may, in a sentence,—it
has no flaccid thought. There is fibre in all she writes; fibre and
nerve. Were the fervor and passion which she throws into her songs of
valor to be diffused throughout her verse, making its appeal more
intimate and personal, she would speak more widely, but scarcely to
more appreciative readers than now delight in her individuality.
V
GEORGE E. SANTAYANA
“EMOTION recollected in tranquillity,” perfectly defines the work of
Mr. George Santayana. He is a musing philosopher environed by himself.
He
‘shuts himself in with his soul
And the shapes come eddying forth,’
shapes that have no being in the world of sense, but are rather
phantasms materialized in the ether of dreams. There is no evidence in
Mr. Santayana’s work that he is living in America in the twentieth
century—and upon his own testimony he is not; he has withdrawn from
the importunity of things:
Within my nature’s shell I slumber curled,
Unmindful of the changing outer skies,—
and in this inviolate seclusion he enamels the pearl with the nacre of
his own spirit.
Mr. Santayana’s poet-kinsmen are not to be found in contemporary
literature; he is alone in the midst of the singers as regards
temperament and attitude toward life. His school is that of beauty;
his time that of the gods; his faith the sanctity of loveliness; and
his creed the restoration of the fair. He would shut out all the
obtrusive shows of nature and life, and dwell in the Nirvana of his
own contemplation:
A wall, a wall around my garden rear,
And hedge me in from the disconsolate hills;
Give me but one of all the mountain rills,
Enough of ocean in its voice I hear.
Come no profane insatiate mortal near
With the contagion of his passionate ills;
The smoke of battle all the valleys fills,
Let the eternal sunlight greet me here.—
and once enshrined in this Nirvanic close, where the strife of living
had merged into the poise of being, he would repeople the desolated
earth and air with the forms of his imagination:
A thousand beauties that have never been
Haunt me with hope and tempt me to pursue;
The gods, methink, dwell just behind the blue;
The satyrs at my coming fled the green.
The flitting shadows of the grove between
The dryads’ eyes were winking, and I knew
The wings of sacred Eros as he flew,
And left me to the love of things not seen.
’Tis a sad love, like an eternal prayer,
And knows no keen delight, no faint surcease,
Yet from the seasons hath the earth increase,
And heaven shines as if the gods were there.
Had Dian passed, there could no deeper peace
Embalm the purple stretches of the air.
It is no exaggeration to say that were Mr. Santayana in a cloister, or
upon a mid-sea island with his books and dreams, he could scarcely be
less in touch with the passing world than he is in the midst of the
clamor and insistence of modern life, where he keeps the tranquillity
of the inner silence as if there were no voices dinning in his ears.
He is subjective to the degree of transfusing himself with another’s
consciousness, and looking upon his own nature from an impersonal
standpoint:
There we live o’er, amid angelic powers,
Our lives without remorse, as if not ours,
And others’ lives with love, as if our own,—
says one of the sonnets, imaging the passion-stilled world of
reflection.
There is a subtlety in Mr. Santayana’s processes of thought that
demands intuitive divination on the part of the reader; there is so
little objectivity to the idea that its essence may almost escape him.
His illustrative symbolism is almost never drawn from nature or the
world of men and events, but from the treasure of beauty at the depth
of his spirit, where, by some mystic chemistry, he has separated all
the elements not in harmony with him. There must at some time have
been reaction and repulsion, ferment and explosion, in the laboratory
of Mr. Santayana’s mind; but he awaited the subsidence of the action;
awaited the period when emotion, thought, and learning had distilled
and crystallized before he shaped them forth before the world.
This gives to his work a certain fixity both of mood and form; his
thoughts are as gems that flash without heat, not the ruby-hearted,
passion-dyed gems, but the pale topaz or the amber, holding the
imprisoned glow of reflection. If this may seem to limit Mr.
Santayana’s achievement, it is not so intended, but rather to reveal
his distinction. He is not only a true poet, but one of rare
accomplishment; his work, however, is for those who are deeply
subjective, who trance themselves with the beautiful as an anodyne for
pain; those who subordinate to-day to the storied charm of yesterday,
and look backward to the twilight of the gods, rather than forward to
the renewing sunrise. It is not for those whose creed of poetry is
that it should be all things to all men; that life, in travail to
deliver truth, should utter its cries through the poet. It is for
those who know that poetry can no more be adapted to all than could
the spoken words of a great teacher reach equally the diverse minds of
a multitude whom he might address; and that while it may be the office
of one poet to interpret the struggles, the activities, the aims of
life, it may be equally the part of another to penetrate to that calm
at the depth of the soul where throes have brought forth peace. Not
only are there various natures to whom poetry speaks, but natures
within natures, so that all poets speak to different phases of our
consciousness: some to the mind,—and here the range is infinite,—some
to the heart, and some to the soul, and of the last is Mr. Santayana.
He is for the meditative hours when we are sounding the depths of
ourselves and come back to the surface of things, bringing with us the
unsatisfied pain of being. Hours when we turn instinctively to a
sonnet like this to find our mood expressed:
I would I might forget that I am I,
And break the heavy chain that binds me fast,
Whose links about myself my deeds have cast.
What in the body’s tomb doth buried lie
Is boundless; ’tis the spirit of the sky,
Lord of the future, guardian of the past,
And soon must forth to know his own at last.
In his large life to live, I fain would die.
Happy the dumb beast, hungering for food,
But calling not his suffering his own;
Blesséd the angel, gazing on all good,
But knowing not he sits upon a throne;
Wretched the mortal, pondering his mood,
And doomed to know his aching heart alone.
The much-mooted, but vaguely understood, sub-conscious mind, speaks in
this sonnet in terms of the conscious. It is a subtle bit of
philosophy, but not more so than several others in the same sequence
which show the evolution of Mr. Santayana’s attitude toward life. One
may not in a brief space follow out the clews to this development,
whose beginning was in religious emotion:
* * * * *
My sad youth worshipped at the piteous height
Where God vouchsafed the death of man to share;
His love made mortal sorrow light to bear,
But his deep wounds put joy to shaméd flight,
And though his arms outstretched upon the tree,
Were beautiful, and pleaded my embrace,
My sins were loth to look upon his face.
So came I down from Golgotha to thee,
Eternal Mother; let the sun and sea
Heal me, and keep me in thy dwelling-place.
The succeeding sonnet traces the winding of the new way, the
reluctance, the
… many farewell pious looks behind,
And dumb misgivings where the path might wind,
And questionings of nature, as I went,—
which every life duplicates as it leaves its well-guarded walls of
belief and ventures out upon undiscovered ways. The pain of letting go
the old, the loneliness of the new, the alien look of all the heights
that encompass one, and the psychology of that impulse by which one is
both impelled to retrace his way and withheld from it,—are suggested
by the sonnet. In the next occurs one of Mr. Santayana’s finest lines,
the counsel
To trust the soul’s invincible surmise.
It would be difficult to define intuition more succinctly than this.
It is not, as less subtle poets would have put it, the soul’s
assurance that one is to trust; this would be to assume, for what
assurance have we but that which Mr. Santayana has so subtly termed
the “invincible surmise”?
Lines which lead one out into speculative thought are frequent in Mr.
Santayana’s sonnets. His philosophy is constructive only in so far as
it unifies a succession of moods and experiences; but it is pregnant
with suggestion to a psychological mind. One of the sonnets which
questions:
Of my two lives, which should I call the dream?
Which action vanity? which vision sight?—
after declaring that
Some greater waking must pronounce aright
and blend the two visions to one seeing, continues:
Even such a dream I dream, and know full well
My waking passeth like a midnight spell,
But know not if my dreaming breaketh through
Into the deeps of heaven and of hell.
I know but this of all I would I knew:
Truth is a dream, unless my dream is true.
The thought in this passage is elusive, but it is more than a play
upon words. It is another way of putting the question, which shall be
trusted, which shall become the reality, the objective or the
subjective world? One knows that his “waking,” his sense perception,
is transitory, that it apprehends but the present, which “passeth like
a midnight spell,” but how far does the other and finer sight penetrate
Into the deeps of heaven and of hell?
No answer from the void to this query, but by the mystical conclusion
that
Truth is a dream, unless my dream is true.
In simpler phrase, unless the vision and conviction are to be trusted,
unless, to revert to Mr. Santayana’s former words, the soul’s
“invincible surmise” be taken as truth, that which we know as truth is
but a phantasm.
The sonnet sequence is the intimate record of an individual soul in
its evolving spiritual life, and has the significance belonging only
to art which interprets a personality, an experience, in whose
development one finds some clew to his own labyrinth. It reveals the
many phases of speculation, reflection, questioning, through which one
passes in the transition from beliefs indoctrinated in the mind at its
earliest consciousness, to convictions which follow thought liberated
by life, by intimacy with nature, and by recognition of its own
spiritual authority. It is the winning of this conviction, with its
attendant seeking and unrest, allayed by draughts from the wayside
springs of beauty, memory, and imagination,—which comprises the record
of the first sonnet sequence, whose conclusions, as “strewn thoughts”
springing along the way, are gathered into a final chaplet for the
brows of the “Eternal Mother,” Nature, whose peace he sought when he
came down from Golgotha, and whose larger meaning, synonymous with the
primal freedom of the soul, is conveyed in the sonnet:
These strewn thoughts, by the mountain pathway sprung,
I conned for comfort, till I ceased to grieve,
And with these flowering thorns I dare to weave
The crown, great Mother, on thine altar hung.
Teach thou a larger speech to my loosed tongue,
And to mine opened eyes thy secrets give,
That in thy perfect love I learn to live,
And in thine immortality be young.
The soul is not on earth an alien thing
That hath her life’s rich sources otherwhere;
She is a parcel of the sacred air.
She takes her being from the breath of Spring,
The glance of Phœbus is her fount of light,
And her long sleep a draught of primal night.
Aside from Mr. Santayana’s philosophical sonnets he has a second
sequence, upon love, which, too, is philosophically tinged. In the
matter of beauty this is perhaps the more finished and artistic work;
but I have chosen rather to dwell upon the subtlety of his
speculations in those phases of thought less universally treated of by
poets than is love. It has not been possible, however, to follow the
sequence in its order, or to present more than certain individual
notes of its philosophy.