Santayana’s verse that has been considered; but before glancing at the
later sonnet sequence, what of his touch upon the strings of his
instrument? One can scarcely have followed the extracts quoted without
noting the mellow suavity, the ease, the poise of his work. There is
everywhere assurance of expression, nothing tentative, nothing
halting. His lines are disposed by the laws of counter-point into
well-ordered cadences where nothing jars; his words are rich and
mellifluous, in short, he has, as a sonneteer, a finish, a classical
command of the vehicle reminiscent of Petrarch and Camoens. The sonnet
is, by the nature of the case, a somewhat inadaptable instrument, and
yet it is susceptible of great individuality, as one may note by
recalling an intricate sonnet by Rossetti and a sweeping, sonorous one
by Milton. The criticism which is, perhaps, most apposite to Mr.
Santayana’s sonnets is that they are “faultily faultless;” they are so
finished that one would welcome a false note now and then, that
suggested a choke in the voice, or a heart-beat out of time.
There is an atmosphere about all of Mr. Santayana’s work that conveys
a sense of wandering in the moonlight; it is tempered, softened,
stilled; it is like an Isis-veil cast over the eyes; but at times one
becomes oppressed with the consciousness of himself, and of the
impalpable visions glimpsed in the wan light, and longs to snatch the
veil away and flee to the garish world again. One may seek Mr.
Santayana’s poetry when his mood demands it, and it will be as a
cooling hand in fever; but when the pulse of being is low, and one
needs the touch to vitalize, he must turn to others, for Mr.
Santayana’s work is not charged with the electricity that thrills.
Because he is not inventive in metre nor sufficiently light in touch,
Mr. Santayana is not a lyrist. He has scarcely any purely lyrical
verse in his collections, and what is contained in them is too lacking
in spontaneity to be classed with his best work. It is not wanting in
lines of beauty and in English undefiled; but the sense of tone and
rhythm, except of the smoothly conventional sort, is absent. There are
no innovations in form and the impulse is too subdued for a true
lyric. That called “Midnight” has more warmth than the others. Several
of his odes in the Sapphic metre have great charm, especially the
first. His elegiac verse has often rare elevation of thought; but it,
also, has too set a measure, too much of the “formed style” to be
vital. It brings well-conceived, well-imaged thought, as in this
stanza:
How should the vision stay to guide the hand,
How should the holy thought and ardour stay,
When the false deeps of all the soul are sand,
And the loose rivets of the spirit, clay?
but it rarely shocks one into thinking for himself.
In relation to diction, there are few American writers who use English
of such purity and finish as does Mr. Santayana; but it is the
scholar’s English, the English drawn from familiarity with the great
masters and models, and hence lacks the creative flexibility, the
quick, warm, ductile adaptability, that a much less accomplished poet
may give to his words. It keeps to the accepted canons, the highest,
the purest, and uses the consecrated words of literature with an
artist’s touch; but the racy idiom, the word which some daring poet
coined yesterday in an exigent moment—with these it has naught to do.
Mr. Santayana has several dramatic poems, “The Hermit of Carmel,” “The
Knight’s Return,” and a dialogue between Hermes and Lucifer, in which
the latter relates the details of his banishment from heaven for his
daring arraignment and interrogation of God. The dialogue has little
dramatic coloring; one hearing it read aloud would have difficulty in
determining from the outward change of expression and personality
where Lucifer leaves off speaking and Hermes begins, but it puts into
the mouth of Lucifer some words full of the challenge of thought, and
speaks through both some beautiful fantasies, such as this reply of
Lucifer to Hermes’ question as to the state of bliss in which the
angels dwell:
A doubtful thing
Is blessedness like that….
Their raptured souls, like lilies in a stream
That from their fluid pillow never rise,
Float on the lazy current of a dream.
Mr. Santayana has not written “The Hermit of Carmel” or “The Knight’s
Return” with a theatrical manager in view. They are stories told in
verse, tales of gentle melancholy, pleasant to the ear; but when all
is said, one returns to his sonnets as the true expression of his
nature and the consummation of his gifts. He is a sonneteer, by every
phase of his temperament and every canon of his art. His work in all
other forms is cultivated, philosophical, finely finished, but
pervaded by an atmosphere of cultured conventionality; whereas in the
sonnet he finds a medium whose classic distinction and subtlety are so
harmonized to his nature and his characteristic mode of thought, that
it becomes to him the predestined expression. A glance, then, in
closing, at the flexile phrases, the psychological analyses of the
later sonnet sequence, turning chiefly upon love.
But, first, let me cite from one of the earlier sonnets, an image
drawn from this theme, a jewel-like flash of beauty, not to be
overlooked. The first line of the metaphor is commonplace; but note
the succeeding ones:
Love but the formless and eternal Whole
From whose effulgence one unheeded ray
Breaks on this prism of dissolving clay
Into the flickering colors of thy soul.
This is defining the individual spirit in exquisite terms.
The second sequence teems with beautiful passages, now and again with
a note of the _trovatore_, as in the sestett of this sonnet:
Yet why, of one who loved thee not, command
Thy counterfeit, for other men to see,
When God himself did on my heart for me
Thy face, like Christ’s upon the napkin, brand?
O how much subtler than a painter’s hand
Is love to render back the truth of thee!
My soul should be thy glass in time to be,
And in my thought thine effigy should stand.
Yet, lest the churlish critics of that age
Should flout my praise, and deem a lover’s rage
Could gild a virtue and a grace exceed,
I bid thine image here confront my page,
That men may look upon thee as they read,
And cry: “Such eyes a better poet need!”
This has art and charm, but in contrast note the impassioned nobility
of utterance which imbues the one that follows. Here are lines of pure
emotion and beauty:
We needs must be divided in the tomb,
For I would die among the hills of Spain,
And o’er the treeless, melancholy plain
Await the coming of the final gloom.
But thou—O pitiful!—wilt find scant room
Among thy kindred by the northern main,
And fade into the drifting mist again,
The hemlocks’ shadow, or the pines’ perfume.
Let gallants lie beside their ladies’ dust
In one cold grave, with mortal love inurned;
Let the sea part our ashes, if it must,
The souls fled thence which love immortal burned,
For they were wedded without bond of lust,
And nothing of our heart to earth returned.
Such sonnets as this mark Mr. Santayana as a master of this form, and
while his other work has value, it is as a sonneteer that he has made
his really individual contribution to literature.
VI
JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY
A BEAUTIFUL and delicate art is that of Miss Josephine Preston
Peabody, but somewhat elusive of analysis, so much is its finer part
dependent upon the intuition which one brings to it; for Miss Peabody
is a poet-mystic, sensitive to impressions from which the grosser part
has slipped away,—impressions which come to her clothed upon with a
more ethereal vesture than the work-a-day garment of thought,—and
while she would fain reveal their hidden import, they often elude her
and grow remote in the telling, as if fearful of betraying too openly
their secret.
Her first volume, _The Wayfarers_, revealed at the outset a poet’s
imagination, and a technique so finished that it had already the touch
of the artist, but its vision was that of the novice who looks at the
morning from beneath her white veil and wonders at the world of sin
and strife and passion whose pain has never reached her. It was the
work of one who had not yet met her revealing crisis, not yet been
identified to herself, of one reaching out after truth with the
filament of fancy until the ductile thread had often been spun too far
before it found anchorage. The volume was, in short, an exquisite
conjecture as to life, whose baffling, alluring mystery only now and
again flashed upon her an unveiled glance of its eyes. This is not,
however, to say that the conjecture was vain; indeed, the initial
poem, “The Wayfarers,” in which, perhaps, it was most definitely
embodied, is a thoughtful, suggestive song holding many truths worth
pondering, and in phrasing and technique wrought with so much grace
that it might stand beside any work of the later volumes. Indeed, this
statement is apposite to nearly all the work in the first collection,
which in that regard presents an unusual distinction, having from the
first on its technical side a maturity that seemed not to belong to
the tentative work of a young poet; it was, however, over-ornate,
lacking directness and simplicity, and inclining to excess of
elaboration in theme, so that one often became entangled in the weft
of poetic artifice and lost the clew of thought. Take as a random
illustration the following stanzas from the poem entitled “The
Weavers,” under which Miss Peabody symbolizes the elusive hopes and
fancies that come by night, weaving their weft of dreams:
Lo, a gray pallor on the loom
Waxeth apace,—a glamourie
Like dawn outlooking, pale to see
Before the sun hath burst to bloom;
Wan beauty, growing out of gloom,
With promise of fair things to be.
* * * * *
The shuttle singeth. And fair things
Upon the web do come and go;
Dim traceries like clouds ablow
Fade into cobweb glimmerings,
A silver, fretted with small wings,—
The while a voice is singing low.
Of the eight remaining stanzas several are equally lacking in anything
that may be grasped, and while there is a certain art in imaging the
elusive fancies which the weavers bring, there should be some more
definite fancy or ideal to embody, rather than the mere intent to make
beautiful lines. This is, perhaps, an extreme instance of the
over-elaboration of the first volume, though it distinguishes the long
poem which gives its name to the collection, and appears in many of
the lyrics.
[Illustration: Josephine Preston Peabody]
Miss Peabody is an inventive metrist, and her sense of rhythm is
highly developed, or rather it is innately correct, being manifest
with equal grace in the first collection; witness the music of these
stanzas from “Spinning in April”:
Moon in heaven’s garden, among the clouds that wander,
Crescent moon so young to see, above the April ways,
Whiten, bloom not yet, not, yet, within the twilight yonder;
All my spinning is not done, for all the loitering days.
Oh, my heart has two wild wings that ever would be flying!
Oh, my heart’s a meadow-lark that ever would be free!
Well it is that I must spin until the light be dying;
Well it is the little wheel must turn all day for me!
All the hill-tops beckon, and beyond the western meadows
Something calls me ever, calls me ever, low and clear:
A little tree as young as I, the coming summer shadows,—
The voice of running waters that I ever thirst to hear.
Oftentime the plea of it has set my wings a-beating;
Oftentime it coaxes, as I sit in weary wise,
Till the wild life hastens out to wild things all entreating,
And leaves me at the spinning-wheel, with dark, unseeing eyes.
The poem has several other stanzas equally charming, but which detract
from the artistic structure of the song by over-spinning the thought.
Among the simple, sincere lyrics which prevail more by their feeling
than mechanism, are “One That Followed,” “Horizon,” “Dew-Fall,”
“Befriended,” “The Song of A Shepherd-Boy at Bethlehem,” and the two
stanzas called, “After Music,” whose intimate beauty renders them
personally interpretative.
I saw not they were strange, the ways I roam,
Until the music called, and called me thence,
And tears stirred in my heart as tears may come
To lonely children straying far from home,
Who know not how they wandered so, nor whence.
If I might follow far and far away
Unto the country where these songs abide,
I think my soul would wake and find it day,
Would tell me who I am, and why I stray,—
Would tell me who I was before I died.
There is a mystical touch here in note with the opening reference to
the subtlety of Miss Peabody’s sources of inspiration.
In the first volume is also a sonnet from the heart and to the heart,
for who has not known the weariness that comes of long striving to
image, or interpret the beautiful, and yet is loth to commit his
unfulfilled dream to the oblivion of sleep. The sonnet is called, “To
the Unsung.”
Stay by me, Loveliness; for I must sleep.
Not even desire can lift such wearied eyes;
The day was heavy and the sun will rise
On day as heavy, weariness as deep.
Be near, though you be silent. Let me steep
A sad heart in that peace, as a child tries
To hold his comfort fast, in fingers wise
With imprint of a joy that’s yet to reap.
Leave me that little light; for sleep I must,
—And put off blessing to a doubtful day—
Too dull to listen or to understand.
But only let me close the eyes of trust
On you unchanged. Ah, do not go away,
Nor let a dream come near, to loose my hand.
Altogether, Miss Peabody’s first book of verse revealed strength,
feeling, and imagination, though tentative in its philosophy, as the
initial work of a young poet must necessarily be, and having but a
slight rooting in life.
The second volume, _Fortune and Men’s Eyes_, opens with a cleverly
written one-act play, turning upon an adventure of two maids of honor
at Elizabeth’s court, with Master W. S., a player, whose identity is
not far to seek, and William Herbert, son of the Earl of Pembroke, the
scene being laid at the tavern of the Bear and the Angel, whither
Mistress Anne Hughes and Mary Fyton have resorted on a merry escapade
under cover of seeing the people celebrate the fête of the Bear.
The atmosphere of the time is well reproduced, the dialogue of the
tapsters cleverly done, and the final scene between the Player and
Mary is full of dramatic intensity.
In her second volume, Miss Peabody has also a dramatic monologue
called, “The Wingless Joy,” which, though now and again Browningesque
in tone, has many felicitous images and shows a true insight into
human motive.
The lyrics in the second volume form a less important part of the
collection, though there are several, such as “The Source,” “The
Survivor,” “Psyche in the Niche,” and “In the Silence,” which rank
with Miss Peabody’s best work, particularly the last, illustrating the
truth that the Spirit manifests at the need, even the dumb and
undivining need, and not alone at the call:
Where did’st Thou tarry, Lord, Lord,
Who heeded not my prayer?
All the long day, all the long night,
I stretched my hands to air.
“There was a bitterer want than thine
Came from the frozen North;
Laid hands upon my garment’s hem
And led me forth.
“It was a lonely Northern man,
Where there was never tree
To shed its comfort on his heart,
There he had need of me.
“He kindled us a little flame
To hope against the storm;
And unto him, and unto me,
The light was warm.”
And yet I called Thee, Lord, Lord—
Who answered not, nor came:
All the long day, and yesterday,
I called Thee by Thy name.
“There was a dumb, unhearing grief
Spake louder than Thy word,
There was a heart called not on me,
But yet I heard.
“The sorrow of a savage man
Shaping him gods, alone,
Who found no love in the shapen clay
To answer to his own.
“His heart knew what his eyes saw not
He bade me stay and eat;
And unto him, and unto me,
The cup was sweet.
“Too long we wait for thee and thine,
In sodden ways and dim,
And where the man’s need cries on me
There have I need of him.
“Along the borders of despair
Where sparrows seek no nest,
Nor ravens food, I sit at meat,—
The Unnamed Guest.”
Before leaving the second volume there is one other poem of which I
cannot refrain from quoting a part, to show the subtlety with which a
phase of the psychology of sentiment has been grasped and analyzed in
these lines called “The Knot”:
Oh, I hated me,
That when I loved you not, yet I could feel
Some charm in me the deeper for your love:
Some singing-robe invisible—and spun
Of your own worship—fold me silverly
In very moonlight, so that I walked fair
When you were by, who had no wish to be
The fairer for your eyes! But at some cost
Of other life the hyacinth grows blue,
And sweetens ever…. So it is with us,
The sadder race. I would have fled from you,
And yet I felt some fibre in myself
Binding me here, to search one moment yet—
The only well that gave me back a star,—
Your eyes reflecting. And I grew aware
How worship that must ever spend and burn
Will have its deity from gold or stone;
Till that fain womanhood that would be fair
And lovable,—the hunger of the plant—
Against my soul’s commandment reached and took
The proffered fruit, more potent day by day.
And the lines which follow close with the wholly feminine query,
Will you not go?—and yet, why will you go?
It is a human bit of dramatic analysis, and reduces inconsistent
femininity to a common denominator.
In her third volume, _Marlowe_, a drama, founded upon the life of the
lovable but erratic poet and playwright, Miss Peabody essayed an
ambitious undertaking, but one which, as literature, carries its full
justification. As drama, one must qualify. In characterization, aside
from Marlowe himself, who comes before one vividly, there is a lack of
sharp definition. Nashe, Lodge, Peele, and Green, Marlowe’s fellow
playwrights and friends, might, from the evidence of the dialogue, be
the same character under different names, so alike are they in speech
and temperament. Next to Marlowe himself, Bame, who through jealousy
becomes his enemy, and brings on the final tragedy, is the most
individually drawn. Of the women characters, the drama presents
practically but one,—Alison, the little country maid who loves Marlowe
secretly, and becomes in a way his good angel,—as “Her Ladyship” of
the Court, object of his adoration, is introduced but twice in the
play, and that veiled, so that only for a moment at the last may one
see the beauty that—under guise of Helen—inspired Marlowe’s lines:
Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burned the topless towers of Ilium!
While the two brief comings of “Her Ladyship” impart an artistic touch
of mystery, it is to be doubted if in a play so intangible a heroine
could become a vital factor, and if she were not, the woman element of
the drama must be sustained wholly by Alison, the little “Quietude,”
who, until the one beautiful scene with Marlowe after her marriage,
remains an artless undeveloped child, with too little color, too weak
a human pulse-beat, to compel interest and sympathy. She is delicately
drawn, in her unsophisticated sweetness and purity, and the inner
strength of her nature is finely shown at the last, but up to this
period of revelation one does not feel her; she lacks the touch of
life essential to a character in drama.
In plot the work presents somewhat the same limitation. It is, until
the two final scenes, after Marlowe’s downfall, literature without
action: nothing happens in the earlier part of the play to create an
element of suspense forelooking to the developments at the close.
Marlowe’s triumphs are detailed to one another by his friends, but
they are not _shown_ in some great scene where he might receive the
acclamations of the people and so contrast sharply with his downfall
at the end: story suffices for action. The sentiment of the play
presents also no intricacies: Alison, although loving Marlowe, is not
for a moment a factor of love in his life, since he neither suspects
her attachment nor reciprocates it, and hence the jealousy of her
suitors has no effect either upon him or upon the supposed audience.
“Her Ladyship” is not pitted against Alison, since the latter knows
that Marlowe’s heart is given to his veiled divinity; hence there are
no complexities arising from the love-element. For the purpose of
acting, therefore, the play seems to me to lack movement, suspense,
variety of characterization, and, except in the drawing of Marlowe,
definiteness of type. It has, however, a strong and vivid scene at the
close, leading up to and including Marlowe’s tragic death, and a scene
of rare beauty and of intense dramatic reality, of which I shall speak
later, in the visit of Marlowe to Alison after his downfall.
On the side of literature, the drama contains work of admirable
strength and quality, work that in its beauty of phrase and subtlety
of penetration is not unworthy to be put into the mouth of Marlowe of
the “mighty line.” Miss Peabody never falls into the Shakespearizing
strain which many writing of that epoch assume; her dialogue is vivid,
direct, and full of original imagery, as when Marlowe speaks of Alison
as having for him—
Snowflake pity,
Destined to melt and lose itself in fire
Or ever it can cool my tongue,
and thus describes her:
Why, she was a maid
Of crystalline! If you looked near enough,
You’d see the wonder changing in her eyes
Like parti-colored marvels in a brook,
Bright through the clearness!
Note now in contrast the impassioned words in which he pictures his
divinity:
Hers is the Beauty that hath moved the world
Since the first woman. Beauty cannot die.
No worm may spoil it. Unto earth it goes,
There to be cherished by the cautious spring,
Close folded in a rose, until the time
Some new imperial spirit comes to earth
Demanding a fair raiment; and the earth
Yields up her robes of vermeil and of snow,
Violet-veinéd—beautiful as wings,
And so the Woman comes!
And this beautiful passage addressed to her after the triumph of
“Faustus”:
Drink my song.
Grow fair, you sovran flower, with earth and air;
Sip from the last year’s leaves their memories
Of April, May, and June, their summer joy,
Their lure for every nightingale, their longing.
And finally these words spoken to her in splendid scorn, after his
downfall and her rejection:
I took you for a Woman, thing of dust,—
I—I who showed you first what you might be!
But see now, you were hollow all the time,
A piece of magic. Now the air blows in,
And you are gone in ashes.
At once the most beautiful and artistically drawn scene is that
previously referred to, in which Marlowe, his star in eclipse, visits
Alison after her marriage. Here is a dramatic situation, human and
vital, and Miss Peabody has developed it with rare feeling and skill.
The picture of Marlowe in his disgrace and despondency, coming to the
woman who had believed in him, and whose love had shone upon his
unseeing eyes, is drawn with fine delicacy and pathos. In the flash of
revelation that comes to him from her white spirit, he speaks these
words:
Thou hast heard
Of Light that shined in darkness, hast thou not?
And darkness comprehended not the Light?
So. But I tell thee why. It was because
The Dark, a sleeping brute, was blinded first,
Bewildered at a thing it did not know.
* * * * *
Have pity on the Dark, I tell you, Bride.
For after all is said, there is no thing
So hails the Light as that same blackness there,
O’er which it shines the whiter. Do you think
It will not know at last?—it will not know?
Those, too, are noble passages, though too long to quote, in which
Marlowe unburdens his overcharged heart to Alison, and intrusts to her
faith the keeping of that higher self she had divined in him; and when
Marlowe, early in the scene, referring to his misfortunes, says:
You do not know
The sense of waking down among the dead,
Hard by some lazar-house,—
note the hidden meaning in Alison’s reply:
Nay; but I know
The sense of death. And then to rise again
And feel thyself bewildered, like a spirit
Out of the grave-clothes and the fragment strewings.
Passages of subtle significance, wistful, tender, and pathetic,
distinguish this scene.
Miss Peabody has visualized Marlowe clearly wherever he appears, and
created him as the lovable, impulsive, generous-spirited, but
ill-starred genius that he was. It is a life-study, in its conflicts,
its overthrown ideals, its appealing humanity, and should take its
place as one of the permanent interpretations of his character.