Beneath arched brows his deep eyes twinkling bright,
Good dragoman (and eke good Mussulman)
And cried unto him, “May your day be white!”
“And yours, howadji!” came his swift reply,
A smile illumining the words thereof,
(All men are poets ’neath that kindling sky),
“As white as are the thoughts of her you love!”
The Oriental poems cover not only a varied range of subject, but pass
in review nearly every important city and shrine in the length and
breadth of that storied land, making poetical footnotes to one’s
history and filling his memory with pictures.
The second source of Mr. Scollard’s inspiration, doubtless the first
in point of time, is his delight in nature. Here, too, the objective
side predominates. He is footfaring, with every sense alert to see, to
hear, and to enjoy; he slips the world of men as a leash and becomes
the fetterless comrade of the vagrant things of earth. He stops to do
no philosophizing by the way,—the analogies, the laws, the evolving
purposes of nature, are rarely touched upon in his verse; nor is he
one of the poet-naturalists, intent to observe and record with
infinite fidelity the fact, with its mystic spirit of beauty. He finds
in the obvious side of nature such glamour and magic as suffice for
inspiration and delight; and it is this side which enthralls him
almost wholly. In other words, his nature vision is rather outlook
than insight, though always sympathetic in fancy and delicate in
touch. He seems to see only the gladness in the season’s phases, and
greets white-shrouded winter with all the ardor that he would bestow
upon flower-decked June.
He has one volume entitled _Footfarings_, written partly in prose and
partly in verse,—a book abrim with morning joy, and bringing with it
the aroma of wood-flowers and the minstrelsy of birds. The prose
predominates, and is worthy the pen of a poet: its imaginative grace,
its enthusiasm, and its quaint and delicate fancy impart to it all the
flavor of poetry while adhering to a crisp and racy style. Each
chapter is prefaced by a keynote of verse, such as that which conducts
one to the haunt of the trillium, where
These nun-like flowers with spotless urns,
That shine with such a snowy gloss,
Will seem, amid the suppliant ferns,
To bow above the cloistral moss.
Then Hope, her starry eyes upraised,
Will suddenly surprise you there,
And you will feel that you have gazed
On the white sanctity of prayer!
Were it within the province of this study, I should like to quote some
of Mr. Scollard’s prose from a “Woodland Walk,” “A Search for the
Lady’s Slipper,” or many another picturesque chapter. One loses
thought of print, and is for the nonce following his errant fancy
through meadow and coppice to the heart of the spicy fir-woods,
picking his way over the forest brooks, from stone to stone; following
the alluring skid-roads, latticed by new growths on either side and
arched above by interlacing green; penetrating into the tamarack
thickets at the lure of the hermit-thrush, that spirit-voice of song;
resting on a springy bed of moss and fern,—becoming, in short,
wayfellow of desire, and thrall but to his will. Mr. Scollard has also
published within the past year a book of nature verse called _The
Lyric Bough_, which contains some of his best work in this way; one of
its livelier fancies is that of “The Wind”:
O the wind is a faun in the spring-time
When the ways are green for the tread of the May;
List! hark his lay!
Whist! mark his play!
T-r-r-r-l!
Hear how gay!
O the wind is a dove in the summer
When the ways are bright with the wash of the moon;
List! hark him tune!
Whist! mark him swoon!
C-o-o-o-o!
Hear him croon!
O the wind is a gnome in the autumn
When the ways are brown with the leaf and burr;
Hist! mark him stir!
List! hark him whir!
S-s-s-s-t!
Hear him chirr!
O the wind is a wolf in the winter
When the ways are white for the hornèd owl;
Hist! mark him prowl!
List! hark him howl!
G-r-r-r-l!
Hear him growl!
One of the earlier books, _The Hills of Song_, contained a brief,
merry-toned lyric, with a cavalier note, that sung itself into the
_American Anthology_, and is perhaps as characteristic and charming a
leave-taking of this phase of Mr. Scollard’s work as one may cite:
Be ye in love with April-tide?
I’ faith, in love am I!
For now ’tis sun, and now ’tis shower,
And now ’tis frost, and now ’tis flower,
And now ’tis Laura laughing-eyed,
And now ’tis Laura shy.
Ye doubtful days, O slower glide!
Still smile and frown, O sky!
Some beauty unforeseen I trace
In every change of Laura’s face;—
Be ye in love with April-tide?
I’ faith, in love am I!
Balladry furnishes the third source of Mr. Scollard’s singing impulse.
The Oriental poems have somewhat of this phase of his work, though
more especially inclining to the narrative style; and the epic poem
“Skenandoa,” while written in a story-lyric, shows the ballad-making
qualities, which in their true note had been heard earlier in
“Taillefer the Trouvère,” and have been heard more definitely in
_Ballads of Valor and Victory_, recently written in collaboration with
Mr. Wallace Rice, and reciting the heroisms and adventures of soldier,
sailor, and explorer from Drake to Dewey.
Ballad-writing is an art calling for distinct gifts. The dramatic
element must predominate. The story first—and if this be colorless,
there is no true ballad; the verse next—and if this be flaccid, or if
it swing to the other extreme and become too strained and tense, there
is no true ballad; for the essence of ballad-writing is in the freedom
of the movement, the swing and verve with which one recounts a
picturesque story. Mr. Scollard’s contributions to the volume are sung
with spontaneity and with a virile note, and in the matter of
characterization, fixing the personality of the hero before the mind,
the work is especially strong; witness “Riding With Kilpatrick;”
“Wayne at Stony Point;” “Montgomery at Quebec;” the picture of Thomas
Macdonough at the Battle of Plattsburg Bay, or in more recent times of
“Private Blair of the Regulars,” the modern Sidney, who, dying, gave
the last draught of his canteen to his wounded fellows.
“The White November” and “The Eve of Bunker Hill” are among the best
of the ballads. The former brings with it a well-known note, but one
newly bedight with brave phrase; indeed, all the celebrated ballad
measures appear in these song stories, but well individualized in
diction and dramatic mood. They differ of course in the degree of
these qualities; some have too slight an incident to chronicle; some
might with better effect have been omitted, particularly “War in
April,” by Mr. Rice; but for this he atones by “The Minute-Men of
Northboro” and other vigorous contributions to the collection. The
ballads have the merit of structural compactness. While the necessary
portrayal of the incident renders many of the best of them too long to
quote, there are, in Mr. Scollard’s contribution to the book, few
superfluous stanzas; each plays its essential part in the development
of the story. They may not, then, be quoted without their full
complement of strophes, which debars us from citing the “White
November,” “Wayne at Stony Point,” and others mentioned as most
representative; but here is the tale of “Riding With Kilpatrick,” not
more valiant than many of the others, but celebrating a picturesque
figure. There are certain reminiscent notes of “How They Brought the
Good News from Ghent to Aix” in this galloping anapestic measure; and
its graphic opening line calls to mind that instantaneous picture, “At
Aershot, up leaped of a sudden the sun.”
Dawn peered through the pines as we dashed at the ford;
Afar the grim guns of the infantry roared;
There were miles yet of dangerous pathway to pass,
And Moseby might menace, and Stuart might mass;
But we mocked every doubt, laughing danger to scorn,
As we quaffed with a shout from the wine of the morn
Those who rode with Kilpatrick to valor were born!
How we chafed at delay! How we itched to be on!
How we yearned for the fray where the battle-reek shone!
It was _forward_, not _halt_, stirred the fire in our veins,
When our horses’ feet beat to the clink of the reins;
It was _charge_, not _retreat_, we were wonted to hear;
It was _charge_, not _retreat_, that was sweet to the ear;
Those who rode with Kilpatrick had never felt fear!
At last the word came, and troop tossed it to troop;
Two squadrons deployed with a falcon-like swoop;
While swiftly the others in echelons formed,
For there, just ahead, was the line to be stormed.
The trumpets rang out; there were guidons ablow;
The white summer sun set our sabres aglow;
Those who rode with Kilpatrick charged straight at the foe!
We swept like the whirlwind; we closed; at the shock
The sky seemed to reel and the earth seemed to rock;
Steel clashed upon steel with a deafening sound,
While a redder than rose-stain encrimsoned the ground;
If we gave back a space from the fierce pit of hell,
We were rallied again by a voice like a bell,
Those who rode with Kilpatrick rode valiantly well!
Rang sternly his orders from out of the wrack:
_Re-form there, New Yorkers! You, Harris Light, back!
Come on, men of Maine! we will conquer or fall!
Now, forward, boys, forward, and follow me, all!_
A Bayard in boldness, a Sidney in grace,
A lion to lead, and a stag-hound to chase—
Those who rode with Kilpatrick looked Death in the face!
Though brave were our foemen, they faltered and fled;
Yet that was no marvel when such as he led!
Long ago, long ago, was that desperate day!
Long ago, long ago, strove the Blue and the Gray!
Praise God that the red sun of battle is set!
That our hand-clasp is loyal and loving—and yet
Those who rode with Kilpatrick can never forget!
The Lochinvar key is also struck in the description of Kilpatrick. Mr.
Scollard sounds a less sanguinary note in most of the ballads, as that
of “The Troopers” or “King Philip’s Last Stand.”
“On the Eve of Bunker Hill,” while recording no thrilling story, has a
note of pensive beauty in its quiet description of the preparation for
battle before that memorable day, and of the prayer offered in the
presence of the soldiers, “ranged a-row” in the open night. The
initial stanza gives the setting and key:
’Twas June on the face of the earth, June with the rose’s breath,
When life is a gladsome thing, and a distant dream is death;
There was gossip of birds in the air, and the lowing of herds by the
wood,
And a sunset gleam in the sky that the heart of a man holds good;
Then the nun-like twilight came, violet-vestured and still,
And the night’s first star outshone afar on the eve of Bunker Hill.
Taking the volume throughout, it is a stirringly sung _résumé_ of all
the chief deeds in American history to which attach valor and romance,
and is not only attractive reading, but should be in the hands of
every lad as a stimulus to patriotism, and to focus in his mind, as
textbooks could never do, the exploits of the brave and the strong.
In the lyrical narrative poem, such as “Guiraut, the Troubadour,” Mr.
Scollard has one of his most characteristic vehicles. The adventures
of the singer who sought a maid in Carcassonne are, no doubt,
romantically enhanced by association of the name with that of the
hapless one who “had not been to Carcassonne;” but it is certain that
one follows the troubadour in his “russet raimentry,” drawn by his
charm as
Unto the gate of Carcassonne
(Ah, how his blithe lips smiled upon
The warded gate of Carcassonne!)
As light of foot as Love he strode;
The budding flowers along the road
Bloomed sudden, with his song for lure;
And softlier the river flowed
Before Guiraut, the troubadour.
* * * * *
Unto a keep in Carcassonne
(No sweeter voice e’er drifted on
That frowning keep in Carcassonne!)
Anon the singer drew anigh,—
but we may not follow his propitious fortunes, glimpsed but to show
the manner of their telling. The parenthetical lines, recurring in
each stanza, impart a peculiar charm to the recital, but the diction
and phrasing, while pleasant and in harmony, have no especial
distinction in themselves, and this illustrates a frequent
characteristic of Mr. Scollard’s work that the melody often carries
the charm rather than the expression or basic theme. He is primarily a
singer, he has the “lute in tune,” and the song is so spontaneous as
sometimes to outsing the motive. There is always a felicitous, and
often unique, turn of phrase and a most imaginative fancy, but one
feels in a good deal of the work a lack of acid; it is too bland to
bite as deeply as it ought. Just a bit sharper tang is needful.
The message should also inform more vitally the melody, wedding more
subtly the outer and inner grace. A poet is a teacher, whether he will
or no, and the heart should be the vital textbook of his expounding.
It is because of their deeper rooting in life, though a life foreign
to us, that the Oriental poems of Mr. Scollard have often greater
vitality than the Occidental ones, whose inspiration is found chiefly
in nature. His ballads show that he has a sympathetic insight into
character and a knowledge of human motive that would, if infused more
widely through his work, give to it a warmth of personal appeal and a
subjectivity which in many of its phases it now lacks. The golden
thread of Joy is woven so constantly into the web of his song that
those whose woof is crossed with the hempen thread of Pain are likely
to feel that he has no word for them, no hint as to the subtle
transformation by which the hempen thread may merge into the gold,
when the finished fabric hurtles from the loom. In other words, Mr.
Scollard’s work is too objective to carry with it the spiritual
meaning that it would if ingrained more deeply in the hidden life of
the soul. Along this line lies its finer development: not that it
shall lose a jot of its cheer, but that it shall constantly inform it
with a richer and deeper meaning.
XV
MARY MCNEIL FENOLLOSA
TO be a poet of the East, one must be a painter, using words as a
colorist uses pigment. His poem must be a picture wherein form and
detail are subjected to the values of tone and atmosphere; like the
dawn-crest of Fujiyama it must glow, it must dazzle with tints and
light. To convert the pen into an artist’s brush, the vocabulary into
a palette, is an end not to be gained by striving; it is a talent _a
priori_, a temperamental color, a temperamental art.
So vividly is this shown in the work of Mrs. Mary McNeil Fenollosa
that whereas in her Eastern poems she is every whit the artist, in her
Western, her Occidental poems, she is without special distinction.
Certain of her Western poems have a conventional, mechanical tone,
while those of the East are abrim with vitality and impulse. They were
not “reared by wan degrees;” the craftsman did not fashion them; and
although varying in charm, there are few that lack the Eastern spirit.
Mrs. Fenollosa’s bit of the Orient is Japan, where nature is ever
coquetting,—laughing in the cherry, sighing in the lotos. Nature in
the Orient is invested with a personality foreign to Western
countries, a personality reminiscent of the gods. Then, too, nature is
given a more prominent place in the poetry of the East than is love,
or any of the subjects, so infinite in variety, which engross a
Western singer; and it happens that Mrs. Fenollosa, catching this
spirit during her life in Japan, gives us chiefly nature poems in her
Eastern collection. With artist-strokes where each is sure, she
flashes this picture before us:
The day unfolds like a lotos-bloom,
Pink at the tip, and gold at the core,
Rising up swiftly through waters of gloom
That lave night’s shore;
or this vision of—
The cloud-like curve,
The loosened sheaf,
The ineffable pink of a lotos leaf.
One great charm of the imagery in Mrs. Fenollosa’s Japanese poems is
its subtlety of suggestion. The imagination has play; something is
left for the fancy of the reader, which can scarcely be said of some
of the highly wrought verse of our own country. The first lyric in the
collection hints of a score of things beyond its eight-line scope:
O let me die a singing!
O let me drown in light!
Another day is winging
Out from the nest of night.
The morning glory’s velvet eye
Brims with a jewelled bead.
To-day my soul’s a dragon-fly,
The world a swaying reed!
“To-day my soul’s a dragon-fly,”—a wingéd incarnation of liberty and
joy; “the world a swaying reed,”—a pliant thing made for my delight,
an empery of which I am the sovereign and may have my will.
[Illustration: Mary McNeil Fenollosa]
But these Japanese songs have not wholly the lighter melody; there are
those that sing of the devastation of the rice-fields after the
floods, a grim and tragic picture; and there are interpretations of
the dreams of the great bronze Buddha, looking with sad, inscrutable
eyes upon the pilgrims who, with the recurrent seasons, come creeping
to his feet like insects from the mould; and there is a story of “The
Path of Prayer,”—a Japanese superstition so human that one is glad of
a religion where sentiment overtops reason. It pictures one walking at
evening under gnarled old pines until he chances upon a hidden path
leading through a hundred gates that keep a sacred way; and as he
passes he is amazed to see along the route, springing as if from the
earth, fluttering white papers, tied
As banners pendent from a mimic wand.
The poem continues:
I wondered long; when, from the drowsy wood,
A whisper reached me, “’Tis the Path of Prayer,
Where, nightly, Kwannon walks in pitying mood,
To read the sad petitions planted there.”
Ah, simple faith! The sun was in the west;
And darkness smote with flails his quivering light.
Beside the path I knelt; and, with the rest,
My alien prayer was planted in the night.
It is to be regretted that Mrs. Fenollosa gives us so little of the
religious or mystical in Japanese thought, since no country is richer
in material of the sort, and especially as the isolated poems and
passages in which she touches upon it are all so interpretative. She
has one poem, a petition of old people at a temple, that strikes deep
root both in pathos and philosophy. Perhaps the Japanese excel all
other peoples in the reverence paid to age, and yet no excess of
consideration can supplant the melancholy of that time. The second
stanza of Mrs. Fenollosa’s poem expresses the aloofness of the old,—
For thy comfort, Lord, we pray,
Namu Amida Butsu!
In the rice-fields, day by day,
Now the strong ones comb the grain;
Once we laughed there in the rain,
Stooping low in sun and cold
For our helpless young and old;
In the rice-fields day by day,
Namu Amida Butsu!
And the last stanza is imbued with the Buddhistic resignation, the
desire to pass, to be reabsorbed, reinvested, reborn. It is
philosophical after the Karmic law, and beautiful in spirit even to a
Western mind:
For thy mercy, Lord, we pray,
Namu Amida Butsu!
Let the old roots waste away,
That the green may pierce the light!
Life and thought, in withered plight,
Choke the morning. Far beneath
Stirs the young blade in its sheath.
Let the old roots pass away!
Namu Amida Butsu!
This is symbolism which upon a cursory reading one might lose
entirely, thinking its import to be, let the old die and give place to
the young; whereas it is, let the old in oneself, the outworn, the
material, the inefficacious, die, and give place to the new.
That the green may pierce the light:—
that out of physical decay a regrowth of the spirit may spring; for
already,
Far beneath
Stirs the young blade in its sheath:—
the soul is quickening for the upper air and making ready to burst its
detaining mould. How beautiful is the recognition that
Life and thought, in withered plight,
Choke the morning,
the young eternal self, that, having fulfilled the conditions of Karma
in its present embodiment of destiny, is obeying the resistless law
that calls it to new modes of being. It is unnecessary to be of the
Buddhistic faith to feel the spell and the beauty of its philosophy.
Mrs. Fenollosa’s gift is chiefly lyrical, although her sonnets and
descriptive poems have many passages of beauty; the picturesque in
fancy and phrasing is ever at her command, and there are few poems in
which one is not arrested by some unique expression, or bit of
imagery, as this from “An Eastern Cry”:
Beneath the maples crickets wake,
_And chip the silence, flake on flake_.
Or that in which the rain
Brimmed great magnolias up with scented wine.
Or the fir-tree stood,
With clotted plumage sagging to the land.
Or when Fujiyama seen at dawn is pictured as
A crown … self poised in mist,
and again as
A frail mirage of Paradise
Set in the quickening air.
So true in color and vision are Mrs. Fenollosa’s lyrics that one
cannot understand how in a sonnet she can be guilty of so mixed a
metaphor as this describing a “Morning On Fujisan”:
Through powdered mist of dawn-lit pearl and rose
There lifts one lotos-peak of cleaving white,
The swan-like rhapsody of dying night,
Which, softly soaring through the ether, blows
To hang there breathless….
The first two lines are unimpeachable, but when the “lotos-peak” is
amplified into a “swan-like rhapsody,” one is swept quite away from
his bearings. It is but an illustration of the effort that often goes
to the building of a sonnet and renders forced and inept what was
designed to be artistic. Mrs. Fenollosa’s sonnets, however, do not
often violate congruity, for while the sonnet is by no means her
representative form, she handles it with as much ease as do most of
the modern singers, and occasionally one comes upon her most
characteristic lines in this compass; but it is true of the sonnet
form in general, except in the hands of a thorough artist, that the
mechanism is too obvious and obscures the theme.
To know Mrs. Fenollosa at her best one must read “Miyoko San,” “Full
Moon Over Sumidagawa,” “An Eastern Cry,” “Exiled,” and this song “To a
Japanese Nightingale,” full of mystic, wistful beauty, of suggestive
spiritual grace. How delicate is its fashioning, and yet how it
defines a picture, silhouettes it against the Orient night!
Dark on the face of a low, full moon
Swayeth the tall bamboo.
No flute nor quiver of song is heard,
Though sheer on the tip a small brown bird
Sways to an inward tune.
O small brown bird, like a dusky star,
Lone on the tall bamboo,
Thou germ of the soul of a summer night,
Thou quickening core of a lost delight,
Of ecstasy born afar,
Soar out thy bliss to the tingling air,
Sing from the tall bamboo!
Loosen the long, clear, syrup note
That shimmers and throbs in thy delicate throat;
Mellow my soul’s despair!
XVI
RIDGELY TORRENCE
MR. RIDGELY TORRENCE, whose poetic drama, _El Dorado_, brought him
generous recognition, gave earlier hostages to fame in the shape of a
small volume with the caption, _The House of a Hundred Lights_, and
gravely subtitled, “A Psalm of Experience after Reading a Couplet of
Bidpai.”
Into this little book were packed some charming whimsicalities,
together with some graver thoughts—though not too grave—and some
fancies full tender. It had, however, sufficient resemblance to Omar
Khayyám to bring it under a Philistine indictment, though its point of
view was in reality very different. It was a clever bit of ruminating
upon the Where and How and Why and Whence, without attempting to
arrive at these mysteries, but rather to laugh at those who did. Mr.
Torrence is so artistic as to know that only the masters may go upon
the road in search of the Secret, and that the average wayfarer may
not hope to overtake it, but rather to suggest it by a hint now and
then. The philosophy of _The House of a Hundred Lights_ is in the main
of the jocular sort; and Bidpai of indefinite memory may well chuckle
to himself in some remote celestial corner that any couplet of his
should have been so potent as to produce it.
Mr. Torrence has not, that I can see, filched the fire from Omar’s
altar to kindle his hundred lights; this, for illustration, is pure
whimsicality, not fatalistic philosophy, as a similar thought would be
in Omar:
“Doubt everything,” the Thinker said,
When I was parch’d with Reason’s drought.
Said he, “Trust me, I’ve probed these things;
Have utter faith in me,—and doubt!”