for the sea than any other poet of our time--"Sea-Fever" alone would
establish him as the sea's true lover. But also Masefield has expressed
with terrible force the cruelty of the sea, its brutal and terrifying
energy, its soul-shattering melancholy. And nowhere in English
literature is it possible to find more vivid pictures of the bitter
hardship of a seaman's life than in the "Salt Water Poems and Ballads."
Masefield is not elective nor selective in his attitude toward the sea;
his feeling toward the sea seems almost an obsession. The sea is not
subject to his genius; it speaks through him.
Masefield's life on shipboard did more than put him in the power of the
sea, it began his interest in the lives and thoughts of simple
hard-working people. And this interest has never left him. It is true
that he occasionally gives us something like "The Faithful" or "Philip,
the King" or "The Tragedy of Pompey the Great." But his heart is in
poems like "Dauber" and "The Everlasting Mercy" and in stories like "A
Deal of Cards," in which he writes of unsophisticated people who feel
strongly and do not conceal their emotions.
It was, perhaps, because of a real sense of the value and interest of
life among simple people that Masefield made the selection he did of
work to support himself during his first visit to the United States. In
Connecticut he was a farm laborer, in Yonkers he was a hand in a
carpet-factory and in New York City he was a sort of helper to the
bartender in the old Colonial hotel on Sixth Avenue near Jefferson
Market Court. This hotel is still in the possession of the family who
employed Masefield and their recollections of him are highly
entertaining. The writer once asked the eldest son of the family if
Masefield had written anything during the days of his employment there.
He had not, it seemed, and he was associated in the minds of the family
with the art of poetry, for one reason only--that being that he used to
sing to the fretful baby, holding it in his lap as he sat in a
rocking-chair in the kitchen, waiting for his employer's wife to serve
his dinner.
When Masefield went back to England he went to work as a clerk in a
London office. He was writing now, putting on paper the pictures that
had been etched in his brain and in his heart during his wander years.
Now he perceived the deep and abiding beauty and the deep and abiding
tragedy (to Masefield they were the same) of his experiences. How this
knowledge came to him he has told in twelve immensely sincere lines. E.
A. Robinson has said that poetry is a language which tells, by means of
a more or less emotional reaction, that which cannot be stated in prose.
And therefore it is better to let Masefield tell this in poetry than to
attempt to paraphrase it. He wrote, by way of preface to "A Mainsail
Haul":
"I yarned with ancient shipmen beside the galley range,
And some were fond of women, but all were fond of change;
They sang their quavering chanties, all in a fo'c's'le drone,
And I was finally suited, if I had only known.
I rested in an ale-house that had a sanded floor,
Where seamen sat a-drinking and chalking up the score;
They yarned of ships and mermaids, of topsail sheets and slings,
But I was discontented; I looked for better things.
I heard a drunken fiddler in Billy Lee's saloon,
I brooked an empty belly with thinking of the tune;
I swung the doors disgusted as drunkards rose to dance,
And now I know the music was life and life's romance."
Masefield's work soon attracted the attention of William Butler Yeats,
John Galsworthy, Sturge Moore, and other English men of letters, and
largely through their efforts was brought to the attention of the
public. American readers first became aware of him through the
publication of two long poems--"The Everlasting Mercy" and "The Widow in
the Bye Street." To say that these were long narrative, poems, dealing
with intensely tragic and dramatic events in the life of the British
poor, is not to describe them adequately. They were a poetry new to our
generation. They showed an intimate knowledge of the lives of the poor,
especially of the criminal poor, not to be found in the amiable poems of
Mr. W. W. Gibson and similar socialistic dilettantes. They were not
socialistic in message; rather they were individualistic. Saul Kane was
not a drunkard because of economic pressure; Jimmy's siren lived an evil
life merely because she was evil, not as a result of the injustice of
man-made laws or anything else of the sort. So precedents were violated
and Masefield scored a success of sensation. The savage colloquialisms
of the poems, their violent emotionalism, their melodrama--these things
brought them to the attention of a large number of people not ordinarily
interested in the work of new poets, and thus an audience was prepared
for the poet's later and more important work.
There can be no doubt that the work published later was more important.
There were crudities in these two narrative poems which seemed to be put
there deliberately, in order to startle and shock the reader. Masefield
followed these poems with other poems in the same manner done with much
greater technical skill and with a more convincing sincerity. "Dauber"
and "Biography" and the "Daffodil Fields" are more likely to be read by
the next generation than are "The Widow in the Bye Street" and "The
Everlasting Mercy," in spite of the fact that the last mentioned poem
was awarded the Edward de Polignac prize of $500 by the Royal Society of
Literature.
It is hard to tell just what form Masefield will finally select for the
expression of his genius. He has written ballads, lyrics, plays, novels,
short-stories, even histories, and all these forms he has molded to his
own use. At the time of writing he is in France actively engaged in Red
Cross work, and has begun to send to the magazines stories of the things
that he has seen which entitle him to be called a great reporter. The
quest for beauty has been and is his ruling passion--he is splendidly
explicit on this subject in the magnificent sequence of Shakespearean
sonnets printed in "Good Friday and Other Poems." He has searched for
this beauty on the boundless sea, in noisy barrooms, in English
meadows, in the streets of New York. He is seeking it now, we may
believe, in the tragedy and heroism of the battlefield. And always, his
sonnets tell us, it is evasive and very distant, because its real
dwelling place is his own soul.
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY
(1869-1910)
William Vaughn Moody was throughout his life regarded as the most
promising of the younger American poets. And when he died in 1810 most
critics mourned for the unwritten lyrics and poetic dramas of which
American literature had thus been robbed; they mentioned the author as a
gifted youth, whom fate had removed at the beginning of a splendid
career.
To a certain extent this attitude was a tribute to the youthful spirit
of William Vaughn Moody, to his vivacity, energy and cheerfulness. But
it was chiefly a new illustration of the fact that nowadays poets flower
late in the season. Moody was forty-one years old when he died--and
there was a time when the poet of forty was considered well past the
meridian of his genius. Most of the great poets established their fame
before they were thirty years old--Keats and Shelley died at twenty-five
and twenty-nine respectively. But nowadays the poet of forty-five is
still called young and the poet of thirty our kind critics consider a
precocious infant.
As a matter of stern fact, it is doubtful that American literature has
really lost much by Moody's death. He wrote "Gloucester Moors" and the
"Ode in Time of Hesitation" and "The Faith Healer." The conscientious
student of his work cannot escape the conviction that in these he gave
the world all that he really had to give. Of course he would have
written more--nature lyrics, poems on political and sociological
questions, poetical dramas dealing with philosophical themes, prose
plays of modern American life. But toward the end of his brief life his
work was not gaining in force. Readers of "The Death of Eve" have little
sorrow over the poet's failure to complete this play--the first two
members of the trilogy which it was to conclude are nobly phrased, but
they are so cloudy in thought and weak in dramatic construction that
they do their author's fame little service. Prometheus, Pandora,
Deucalion, Eve, Cain, Raphael, and Michael, angels and archangels,
thrones, dominions and powers, were characters too mighty for the talent
of this poet, who could handle adequately enough a problem of
contemporary politics or draw quaint lessons from the caged beasts in a
menagerie.
Perhaps the coldness which annoys some readers of Moody's poems, the
sense of aloofness from the common experience of mankind, the
artificiality which mars such expressions of sympathy for humanity as
are intended in "Gloucester Moors," are things for which it is unjust to
blame the poet. His friend, John M. Manly, wrote in the preface to his
"Poems and Plays": "He was an epicure of life, a voluptuary of the whole
range of physical, mental, and spiritual perfections." But in Moody's
poetry we find more of the mind than of the heart; we feel that we are
in the presence of a charming and cultured personality, but we have no
feeling of intimacy with the writer.
"Of thine own tears thy song must tears beget," wrote Rossetti. "O
singer, magic mirror hast thou none save thine own manifest heart." And
a greater poet than Rossetti exclaimed, "Ah, must (Designer Infinite!)
Thou char the wood ere thou canst limn with?" A similar thought was in
Horace's mind when in the _Ars Poetica_ he said, "if you wish me to weep,
you must first weep yourself."
Well, few tears are drawn by Moody's poems, nor did many tears go into
their making. His wood was not charred. But he was a conscientious and
accomplished artist, doing the best he could with the powers that were
his. His work is thoughtful, imaginative, and well-wrought, his "Great
Divide" is destined to periodic revivals, and the best of his lyrics are
sure of a place in the anthologies.
William Vaughn Moody was born in Spencer, Indiana, on July 8th, 1869. He
was the son of a prosperous retired steamboat captain. In 1871 the
family moved to New Albany, on the Ohio River. The elder Moody died in
1886. William Vaughn Moody went to Riverside Academy and entered Harvard
in 1889, being then twenty years old. In his senior year he went abroad
with a wealthy family as tutor to their son. During the trip he made a
walking tour of the Black Forest and Switzerland with a party of
friends, including Norman Hapgood. He also spent some time in Greece and
Italy.
He returned to Harvard to study for his master's degree and stayed on as
an instructor in English. In the autumn of 1895 he went to the
University of Chicago as instructor in English, reaching the rank of
assistant professor before his departure eight years later. His life at
the University of Chicago seems to have been rather leisurely. It was
varied by journeys abroad and bicycle tours in Illinois and Wisconsin.
Swimming, bicycling, golf, tennis, walking, and mountain-climbing are
mentioned by Mr. Manly as Moody's favorite sports, and it is not to be
wondered that he had little time for writing, however unexacting his
academic duties may have been.
Although his connection with the University of Chicago did not cease
until later, he taught no classes after 1902. He did, however, do a
certain amount of work academic in character, editing some editions of
the classics and collaborating with his friend Robert M. Lovett in a
"History of English Literature." He first became known to the general
public by the successful presentation of his prose play, "The Great
Divide." He died in Colorado Springs on the seventeenth of October,
1910. A few months before his death he married Miss Harriet C. Brainerd.
It is interesting to trace the influences in Moody's work. He was very
thoroughly a man of books, and some critics complain that there is more
ink than blood in the veins of the people of whom he writes. Certainly
it is possible to find traces of his reading on nearly every page that
he wrote. The lovely fourth stanza of "Gloucester Moors" is Coleridge;
"Faded Pictures" is Browning at his worst; and "The Daguerreotype" is a
deliberate effort to imitate the irregular ode-form of Coventry Patmore.
And of course "Heart's-Wildflower" and "A Dialogue in Purgatory," like
the lyrics in "The Masque of Judgment," are a Chicago version of
Rossetti.
In his prose plays we find Moody writing with an energy which he seldom
exhibited in his poetry. Not in Jerome K. Jerome's "The Passing of the
Third Floor Back," nor in Charles Rann Kennedy's "The Servant in the
House," is the idea of the beneficent effect of a powerful and virtuous
nature more plausibly presented than in "The Faith Healer." And Moody
obtained his effect more honestly than did Jerome and Kennedy; his
faith-healer is merely a faith-healer to the end of the play, there is
no suggestion that he is more than human. In many respects "The Faith
Healer" is Moody's most important work. There is more poetry in its
prose than in all his poetic dramas put together. When Michaelis makes
love to Rhoda and tells the story of his childhood home, when Beeler
describes the picture of Pan and the Pilgrim, and when Uncle Abe chants
his prophecies and visions, then there is real poetry--poetry not unlike
some of the best passages in Synge's plays. The "strange mounting
sing-song" of Uncle Abe's speech evidently was the inspiration of the
best parts of Mr. Ridgley Torrence's "The Rider of Dreams."
"The Great Divide" has been magnificently acted, but it _is_ inferior in
every respect to "The Faith Healer." Its theme--the contrast between the
Puritan spirit which Moody considered typical of the Eastern States, and
the generous paganism which he thought characteristically
Western,--might be, and probably will be, the basis of an important
play. But there never was a New Englander remotely resembling Ruth
Jordan, there never was a Westerner remotely resembling Stephen Ghent.
Hero and heroine, or villain and villainess, or whatever they are
supposed to be, have actuality, it is true--the actuality of figures
seen in a nightmare. And the other characters in the play have no
actuality whatsoever. And the author's total lack of humor never injured
his work more than in this play. It is painful to see situations
essentially humorous made banal and dull by the author's obtuseness. If
only the idea had occurred to Bernard Shaw instead of to William Vaughn
Moody!
Perhaps one reason why "The Great Divide," convincing enough when well
acted, is a lamentable thing on the printed page is because it is an
attempt to prove a theory. Moody was a Puritan, through and through,
and like all modern literary Puritans he was desperately ashamed of his
Puritanism. He glorified what he thought to be the pagan ideal, and in
"The Great Divide" he wanted to show that the large acceptances of Ghent
were nobler than the austere negations of Ruth. But paganism and
Puritanism are nothing but terms, almost meaningless from much
repetition, and "The Great Divide" is a play of terms, of symbols, of
lay figures. And the only things that it proves are Moody's total
inability to understand paganism and his reluctant but inevitable
sympathy with Puritanism.
It was his Puritanism that made Moody try to stimulate the conscience of
his land by means of "An Ode in Time of Hesitation," his best sustained
long poem, and his most passionate utterance. It was the Puritan who
wrote "On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines." It was the Puritan who
wrote "The Brute." And I think that it was the Puritan who wrote
"Gloucester Moors." A pagan, such as Moody desired to be, would not have
worried about the "souls distraught in the hold," nor would he have
worried over the fact that some of the crew had over-eaten. Also, a
pagan would have enjoyed the loveliness of the wild geranium and the
barberry without asking:
"Who has given to me this sweet,
And given my brother dust to eat?
And when will his wage come in?"
These things are manifestations of that Puritan characteristic known as
"the New England conscience"--the cause in recent years of many rather
frantic efforts at social and economic and philosophical readjustment.
Mr. John M. Manly says that "Gloucester Moors" is "a favorite poem with
workers in the slums,"--a significant and startling observation.
Moody's Puritanism gives strength to many of his poems, but in others it
produces strange inconsistencies and evasions. It helped him to write
"The Brute"--a strong and sincere poem. But it caused him to fail
ridiculously in "A Dialogue in Purgatory," in "Good-Friday Night," and
in "Song Flower and Poppy." In the second half of the last-named poem we
come upon the root of the matter--Moody's complete failure to understand
any religious system, any philosophy of life, more warm and
comprehensive than his own Puritanism. He rebelled against this
Puritanism, yet he could not escape it. He sought vaguely after
paganism, whereas he could no more have been a Bacchic reveller than he
could have been a Druid. In spite of his reading of early French and
Italian romances, he failed utterly to see the generous glories of the
Middle Ages, when all that was noble and beautiful in paganism was made
a part of the richest civilization the world has yet known. He thought
of intellectual development and spiritual freedom as things beginning
about 1517--and naturally this hampered him when he wrote about Michael,
Raphael, Azaziel, Eve, Jubal, and Cain.
A longer residence in Italy might have given him a more liberal culture
and a spiritual philosophy generous without being pagan, pure without
being Puritanical. And therefore the critics who said that a poet of
promise died in 1910 may have told the truth. A broader culture and more
extensive human sympathies would have enabled this deft artist in words
to give to the world a message of the kind it always welcomes--to
express beautifully the beauty that is truth.
* * * * *
TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES:
Text in italics is surrounded with underscores: _italics_.
Inconsistencies in spelling and hyphenation have been retained from
the original.
Obvious typographical and punctuation errors have been corrected
without note.