Chapter IX: Part THREE: La Closerie De Lilas (1)

Divine Tuesday! I had wondered if those remarkable evenings of conversation in the rue de Rome with Mallarmé as host, and Henri de Regnier as guest, among many others, had been the inspiration of the evenings at the Closerie de Lilas, where I so often sat of an evening, watching the numbers of esthetes gather, filling the entire café, rain or shine, waiting unquestionably, for it pervaded the air always, the feeling of suspense, of a dinner without host, of a wedding without bridegroom, in any event waiting for the real genius of the evening, le grand maitre prince de poètes, Paul Fort. The interesting book of Amy Lowell's, "Six French Poets," recalls these Tuesday evenings vividly to my mind, and a number of episodes in connection with the idea of poetry in Paris.

Poetry an event? A rather remarkable notion it would seem, and yet this was always so, it was a constituent of the day's passing, there was never a part of the day in this arrondissement, when you would not find here, there, everywhere, from the Boul-Mich up, down Montparnasse to Lavenue's, and back to the Closerie, groups of a few or of many, obviously the artist or poet type, sometimes very nattily dressed, often the reverse, but you found them talking upon one theme, art, meaning either poetry or painting, cubistes, futuristes, orphistes and doubtless every "iste" in poetry from the symboliste period up to the "unanimistes" of the present time, or the then present time nearly two years before the war. It was a bit novel, even for a sensitive American, sitting there, realizing that it was all in the name of art, and for the heralding of genius--a kind of sublimated recruiting meeting for the enlistment in the army of expression of personality, or for the saving of the soul of poetry.

It was a spectacle, edifying in its purport, or even a little distressing if one had no belief in a sense of humour, for there were moments of absurdity about it as there is sure to be in a room filled with any type of concerted egotism. But you did not forget the raison d'etre of it all, you did not forget that when the "prince" arrived there was the spirit of true celebration about it, the celebration not only of an arrived artist, but of an idea close to the hearts and minds of those present, and you had a sense, too, of what it must have been like in that circle of, no doubt, a higher average of adherents, in the drawing room of the genius Mallarmé, who, from all accounts, was as perfected in the art of conversation, as he was in expression in art. When I read Miss Lowell's chapter on Henri de Regnier, I find myself before the door of the Mallarmé house in the rue de Rome, probably the only American guest, on that Sunday morning in June, just one given a privilege that could not mean as much as if I had been more conversant with the delicacies of the language.

It was the occasion of the placing of a tablet of homage to the great poet, at which ceremony Henri de Regnier himself was the chief speaker: a tall, very aristocratic, very elegant looking Frenchman, not any more to be called young, nor yet to be called old, but conspicuously simple, dignified, dressed in a manner of a gentleman of the first order, standing upon a chair, speaking, as one would imagine, with a flow of words which were the epitome of music itself to the ear. I had been invited by a poet well known in Paris, with several volumes to his credit and by a young literary woman, both of whom spoke English very creditably. After the ceremonies, which were very brief, and at which Madame Mallarmé herself was present, standing near the speaker, de Regnier, the entire company repaired to a restaurant near the Place Clichy, if I remember rightly. My hostess named for me the various guests as they appeared, Madame Rachilde, Reynaldo Hahn, André Gide, and a dozen other names less conspicuous, perhaps, excepting one, Léon Dierx, who was an old man, and whose death was announced about the city some days later. It was, needless to say, a conspicuous company and the dinner went off very quietly, allowing of course for the always feverish sound of the conversation of many people talking in a not very large room.

But all these suggestions recall for me once more what such things mean to a people like the French, or, let one say, Europeans as well. I wonder what poetry or even painting will do, if they shall rise to such a state in this country that we shall find our masters of literature holding audience with this degree of interest like Fort, or as did all the great masters of literature in Paris, hold forth in the name of art, a divine Tuesday set apart for the admirable worship of poetry, or of things esthetic. I can imagine Amy Lowell doing something of this sort after the custom of those masters she so admires, with her seemingly quenchless enthusiasms for all that is modern in poetry. I think we shall wait long for that, for the time when we shall have our best esthetics over the coffee, at the curbside under the trees with the sun shining upon it, or the shadow of the evening lending its sanction, under the magnetic influence of such a one as Paul Fort or Francis Jammes, or Emile Verhaeren--as it was once to be had among such as Verlaine, Baudelaire and that high company of distinguished painters who are now famous among us.

The studio of Gertude Stein, that quiet yet always lively place in the rue de Fleurus, is the only room I have ever been in where this spirit was organized to a similar degree, for here you had the sense of the real importance of painting, as it used to be thought of in the days of Pissarro, Manet, Degas, and the others, and you had much, in all human ways, out of an evening there, and, most of all, you had a fund of good humour thrust at you, and the conversation took on, not the quality of poetic prose spoken, as you had the quality of yourself and others, a kind of William James intimacy, which, as everyone knows, is style bringing the universe of ideas to your door in terms of your own sensations. There may have been a touch of all this at the once famed Brook Farm, but I fancy it was rather chill in its severity.

There is something of charm in the French idea of taking their discussions to the sunlight or the shadow under the stars, either within or outside the café, where you feel the passing of the world, and the poetry is of one piece with life itself, not the result of stuffy studios, and excessively ornate library corners, where books crowd out the quality of people and things. You felt that the café was the place for it, and if the acrobat came and sang, it was all of one fabric and it was as good for the poetry, as it was for the eye and the ear that absorbed it. Despite the different phases of the spectacle of Tuesday, at the Closerie de Lilas, you had the feeling of its splendour, its excellence, and, most of all, of its reality, its relationship to every other phase of life, and not of the hypersensitivity of the thing as we still consider it among ourselves in general; and if you heard the name of Paul Fort, or Francis Jammes, it was a definite issue in daily life, equal with the name of the great statesmen in importance, you were being introduced into a sphere of activities of the utmost importance, _that_ poetry was something to be reckoned with.

It was not merely to hear oneself talk that artists like Mallarmé held forth with distinction, that artists like de Regnier and Fort devote themselves, however secretly, or however openly to the sacred theme. They had but one intention, and that to arrive at, and assist in the realization of the best state of poetry, that shall have carried the art further on its way logically, and in accordance with the principles which they have created for their time; endeavoring always to create fresh values, new points of contact with the prevailing as well as with the older outlines of the classics. It was, then, a spectacle, from our removed point of view, the gathering of the poetic multitude around the café tables, over the Dubonnet, the grenadines, and the café noir, of a Tuesday evening. It gave one a sense of perpetuity, of the indestructibility of art, in spite of the obstacles encountered in the run of the day, that the artist has the advantage over the layman in being qualified to set down, in shapes imperishable, those states of his imagination which are the shapes of life and of nature.

We may be grateful to Amy Lowell for having assembled for our consummation, in a world where poetry is not as yet the sublime issue as it was to be felt at every street corner, much of the spirit of the rue de Rome, the Café Novelles D'Athènes, and the Closerie de Lilas, as well as the once famed corner of the Café D'Harcourt where the absinthe flowed so continuously, and from which some very exquisite poetry has emanated for all time. It is the first intimation we have of what our best English poetry has done for the best French poets of the present, and what our first free verse poet has done for the general liberation of emotions and for freedom of form in all countries. He has indicated the poets that are to follow him. He would be the first to sanction all this poetic discussive intensity at the curbside, the liberty and freedom of the café, the excellence of a divine Tuesday evening.

EMILY DICKINSON

If I want to take up poetry in its most delightful and playful mood, I take up the verses of that remarkable girl of the sixties and seventies, Emily Dickinson, she who was writing her little worthless poetic nothings, or so she was wont to think of them, at a time when the now classical New England group was flourishing around Concord, when Hawthorne was burrowing into the soul of things, Thoreau was refusing to make more pencils and took to sounding lake bottoms and holding converse with all kinds of fish and other water life, and Emerson was standing high upon his pedestal preaching of compensations, of friendship, society and the oversoul, leaving a mighty impress upon his New England and the world at large as well.

I find when I take up Emily Dickinson, that I am sort of sunning myself in the discal radiance of a bright, vivid, and really new type of poet, for she is by no means worn of her freshness for us, she wears with one as would an old fashioned pearl set in gold and dark enamels. She offsets the smugness of the time in which she lived with her cheery impertinence, and startles the present with her uncommon gifts. Those who know the irresistible charm of this girl--who gave so charming a portrait of herself to the stranger friend who inquired for a photograph: "I had no portrait now, but am small like the wren, and my hair is bold like the chestnut burr, and my eyes like the sherry in the glass that the guest leaves," this written in July, 1862--shall be of course familiar with the undeniable originality of her personality, the grace and special beauty of her mind, charm unique in itself, not like any other genius then or now, or in the time before her, having perhaps a little of relationship to the crystal clearness of Crashaw, like Vaughan and Donne maybe, in respect of their lyrical fervour and moral earnestness, yet nevertheless appearing to us freshly with as separate a spirit in her verse creations as she herself was separated from the world around her by the amplitude of garden which was her universe. Emily Dickinson confronts you at once with an instinct for poetry, to be envied by the more ordinary and perhaps more finished poets. Ordinary she never was, common she never could have been, for she was first and last aristocrat in sensibility, rare and untouchable if you will, vague and mystical often enough, unapproachable and often distinctly aloof, as undoubtedly she herself was in her personal life. Those with a fondness for intimacy will find her, like all recluses, forbidding and difficult, if not altogether terrifying the mind with her vagueries and peculiarities.

Here was New England at its sharpest, brightest, wittiest, most fantastic, most wilful, most devout, saint and imp sported in one, toying with the tricks of the Deity, taking them now with extreme profundity, then tossing them about like irresistible toys with an incomparable triviality. She has traced upon the page and with celestial indelibility that fine line from her soul which is like a fine prismatic light, separating one bright sphere from another, one planet from another planet, and the edge of separation is but faintly perceptible. She has left us this bright folio of her "lightning and fragrance in one," scintillant with stardust as perhaps no other before her, certainly not in this country, none with just her celestial attachedness, or must we call it detachedness, and withal also a sublime, impertinent playfulness which makes her images dance before one like offspring of the great round sun, fooling zealously with the universes at her feet, and just beyond her eye, with a loftiness of spirit and of exquisite trivialness seconded by none. Who has not read these flippant renderings, holding always some touch of austerity and gravity of mood, or the still more perfect "letters" to her friends, will, I think, have missed a new kind of poetic diversion, a new loveliness, evasive, alert, pronounced in every interval and serious, modestly so, and at a bound leaping as it were like some sky child pranking with the clouds, and the hills and the valleys beneath them, child as she surely was always, playing in some celestial garden space in her mind, where every species of tether was unendurable, where freedom for this childish sport was the one thing necessary to her ever young and incessantly capering mind--"hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou ever wert"!

It must be said in all justice, then, that "fascination was her element," everything to her was wondrous, sublimely magical, awsomely inspiring and thrilling. It was the event of many moons to have someone she liked say so much as good morning to her in human tongue, it was the event of every instant to have the flowers and birds call her by name, and hear the clouds exult at her approach. She was the brightest young sister of fancy, as she was the gifted young daughter of the ancient imagination. One feels everywhere in her verse and in her so splendid and stylish letters an unexcelled freshness, brightness of metaphor and of imagery, a gift of a peculiarity that could have come only from this part of our country, this part of the world, this very spot which has bred so many intellectual and spiritual entities wrapped in the garments of isolation, robed with questioning. Her genius is in this sense essentially local, as much the voice of the spirit of New England as it is possible for one to hold. If ever wanderer hitched vehicle to the comet's tail, it was the poetic, sprite woman, no one ever rode the sky and the earth as she did in this radiant and skybright mind of her.

She loved all things because all things were in one way or in another way bright for her, and of a blinding brightness from which she often had to hide her face. She embroidered all her thoughts with starry intricacies, and gave them the splendour of frosty traceries upon the windowpane in a frigid time, and of the raindrop in the sun, and summered them with fragrancing of the many early and late flowers of her own fanciful conjuring. They are glittering garlands of her clear, cool fancies, these poems, fraught in some instances, as are certain finely cut stones, with an exceptional mingling of lights coursing swiftly through them. She was avid of starlight and of sunlight alike, and of that light by which all things are illumined with a splendour not their own merely, but lent them by shafts from that radiant sphere which she leaned from, looking out gleefully upon them from the window of that high place in her mind.

To think of this poet is to think of crystal, for she lived in a radianced world of innumerable facets, and the common instances were chariots upon which to ride widely over the edges of infinity. She is alive for us now in those rare fancies of hers, with no other wish in them save as memorandum for her own eyes, and when they were finished to send them spinning across the wide garden, many of them to her favorite sister who lived far, far away, over beyond the hedge. You shall find in her all that is winsome, strange, fanciful, fantastic and irresistible in the eastern character and characteristic. She is first and best in lightsomeness of temper, for the eastern is known as essentially a tragic genius. She is perhaps the single exponent of modern times of the quality of true celestial frivolity. Scintillant was she then, and like dew she was and the soft summer rain, and the light upon the lips of flowers of which she loved to sing. Her mind and her spirit were one, soul and sense inseparable, little sister of Shelley certainly she was, and the more playful relative of Francis Thompson.

She had about her the imperishable quality that hovers about all things young and strong and beautiful, she was the sense of beauty ungovernable. What there are of tendencies religious and moral disturb in nowise those who love and have appreciation for true poetic essences. She had in her brain the inevitable buzzing of the bee in the belly of the bloom, she had in her eyes the climbing lances of the sun, she had in her heart love and pity for the innumerable pitiful and pitiable things. She was a quenchless mother in her gift for solace and she was lover to the immeasurable love. Like all aristocrats she hated mediocrity, and like all first rate jewels, she had no rift to hide. She was not a maker of poetry, she was a thinker of poetry. She was not a conjurer of words so much as a magician in sensibility. She has only to see and feel and hear to be in touch with all things with a name or with things that must be forever nameless. If she loved people, she loved them for what they were, if she despised them she despised them for what they did, or for lack of power to feel they could not do. Silence under a tree was a far more talkative experience with her than converse with one or a thousand dull minds. Her throng was the air, and her wings were the multitude of flying movements in her brain. She had only to think and she was amid numberless minarets and golden domes, she had only to think and the mountain cleft its shadow in her heart.

Emily Dickinson is in no sense toil for the mind accustomed to the labours of reading, she is too fanciful and delicious ever to make heavy the head, she sets you to laughter and draws a smile across your face for pity, and lets you loose again amid the measureless pleasing little humanities. I shall always want to read Emily Dickinson, for she points her finger at all tiresome scholasticism, and takes a chance with the universe about her and the first rate poetry it offers at every hand within the eye's easy glancing. She has made poetry memorable as a pastime for the mind, and sent the heavier ministerial tendencies flying to a speedy oblivion. What a child she was, child impertinent, with a heavenly rippling in her brain!

These random passages out of her writings will show at once the rarity of her tastes and the originality of her phrasing. "February passed like a kate, and I know March. Here is the light the stranger said was not on sea or land--myself could arrest it, but will not chagrin him"--

"The wind blows gay today, and the jays bark like blue terriers."

"Friday I tasted life, it was a vast morsel. A circus passed the house--still I feel the red in my mind though the drums are out."

"The lawn is full of south and the odors tangle, and I hear today for the first the river in the tree."

"The zeros taught us phosphorus
We learned to like the fire
By playing glaciers when a boy
And tinder guessed by power

"Of opposite to balance odd
If white a red must be!
Paralysis, our primer dumb
Unto vitality."

Then comes the "crowning extravaganza.... If I read a book, and it makes my whole body so cold no fire will ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. Is there any other way? These are the only ways I know it."

No one but a New England yankee mind could concoct such humours and fascinatingly pert phrases as are found here. They are like the chatterings of the interrupted squirrel in the tree-hole at nut-time. There is so much of high gossip in these poetic turns of hers, and so, throughout her books, one finds a multitude of playful tricks for the pleased mind to run with. She was an intoxicated being, drunken with the little tipsy joys of the simplest form, shaped as they were to elude always her evasive imagination into thinking that nothing she could think or feel but was extraordinary and remarkable. "Your letter gave no drunkenness because I tasted rum before--Domingo comes but once," etc., she wrote to Col. Higginson, a pretty conceit, surely to offer a loved friend. The passages offered will give the unfamiliar reader a taste of the sparkle of this poet's hurrying fancy and set her before the willing mind entrancingly, it seems to me. She will always delight those who find it in their way to love her elfish, evasive genius, and those who care for the vivid and living element in words will find her, to say the least, among the masters in her feeling for their strange shapes and the fresh significance contained in them. A born thinker of poetry, and in a great measure a gifted writer of it, refreshing many a heavy moment made dull with the weightiness of books, or of burdensome thinking. This poet-sprite sets scurrying all weariness of the brain, and they shall have an hour of sheer delight who invite poetic converse with Emily Dickinson. She will repay with funds of rich celestial coin from her rare and precious fancyings. She had that "oblique integrity" which she celebrates in one of her poems.

ADELAIDE CRAPSEY

One more satellite hurried away too soon! High hints at least, of the young meteor finding its way through space. Here was another of those, with a vast fund of wishing in her brain, and the briefest of hours in which to set them roaming. Brevities that whirl through the mind as you read those cinquains of Adelaide Crapsey, like white birds through the dark woodlands of the night. Cameos or castles, what is size? Is it not the same if they are of one perfection of feeling? Such a little book of Adelaide Crapsey, surely like cameos cut on shell, so clear in outline, so rich in form, so brave in indications, so much of singing, so much of poetry, of courage.

"Just now,
Out of the strange
Still dusk--as strange, as still,
A white moth flew; Why am I grown
So cold?"

Isn't the evidence sufficient here of first rate poetic gifts, sensibility of an exceptional order? Contrast in so many ways with that perhaps more radiant and certainly more whimsical girl, with her rarest of flavours, she with her "whip of diamond, riding to meet the Earl"! I think geniuses like Keats or Shelley would have said "how do you do, poet?" to Adelaide Crapsey and her verse, lamenting also that she flew over the rainbowed edge of the dusk too soon, like the very moth over the garden wall, early in the evening. It is sure that had this poet been allowed her full quota of days, she would have left some handsome folios bright enough for any one caring for verse at its purest. Pity there was not time for another book at least, of her verses, to verify the great distinction conferred. She might have walked still more largely away with the wreaths of recognition. Not time for more books, instead of so much eternity at her bedside. She would surely have sent more words singing to their high places and have impressed the abundant output of the day with its superficiality by her seriousness. There is no trifling in these poetic things of hers. Trivial might some say who hanker after giantesque composition. Fragile are they only in the sense of size, only in this way are they small.

Those who know the difficulties of writing poetic composition are aware of the task involved in creating such packed brevities. Emily Dickinson knew this power. "H. D." is another woman who understands the beauty of compactness. Superb sense of economy, of terseness the art calls for, excessive pruning and clipping. Singular that these three artists, so gifted in brevity were women. There is little, after all, in existence that warrants lengthy dissertation. Life itself is epigrammatic and brief enough. No volumes needed by way of explanation. The fascinating enigma diverts and perplexes everyone alike. The simple understand it best, or at least they seem to do so. Segregation, aloofness, spiritual imprisonment, which is another name for introspection, the looking out from bars of the caged house, all this discovers something through penetration. Walking with life is most natural, grazing its warm shoulder. There is little room for inquiry if one have the real feeling of life itself. Poetry is that which gleans most by keeping nearest to life. Books and firesides avail but little. Secretaries for the baggage of erudition do not enhance poetic values, they encumber them. Poetry is not declamation, it is not propaganda, it is breathing natural breaths. There is nothing mechanical about poetry excepting the affectation of forms. Poetry is the world's, it is everybody's. You count poetry by its essence, and no amount of studied effect, or bulging erudition will create that which is necessary, that which makes poetry what it is. The one essential is power to sing, and the intelligence to get it down with degrees of mastery or naturalness, which is one and the same thing.

Real singing is unusual as real singers are rare. Adelaide Crapsey shows that she was a real singer, essentially poet, excellent among those of our time. She impresses her uncommon qualities upon you, in the cinquains of hers, with genuinely incisive force. She has so much of definiteness, so much of technical beauty, economy, all very valuable assets for a true poet. She had never been touched with the mania for journalistic profusion. She cared too much for language to ride it. She cared too much for words to want to whip them into slavery. She was outside of them, looking on, as it might be, through crystal, at their freshness. She did not take them for granted. They were new to her and she wanted the proper familiarity. She worked upon a spiritual geometric all her own. She did not run to the dictionary for eccentricities, she did not hunt words out of countenance. They were natural to her. She wanted most their simple beauty, and she succeeded. She had dignity, a rare gift in these times. She raises herself above the many by her fine feeling for the precision. That is her artistry, the word, the thing of beauty and the joy forever with her.

It is to be regretted that Adelaide Crapsey had no more time for the miniature microscopic equations, the little thing seen large, the large thing seen vividly. She might have spent more hours with them and less with her so persistent guest, this second self at her side; ironic presence, when she most would have strode with the brighter companion, her first and natural choice. Her contribution is conspicuous among us for its balance and its intellectualism tempered with fine emotions. She had so much to settle for herself, so much bargaining for the little escapes in which to register herself consistently, so much of consultation for her body's sake, that her mind flew the dark spaces about her bed with consistent feverishness.

Reckoning is not the genius of life. It is the painful, residual element of reflection. One must give, one must pay. It is not inspiring to beg for breath, yet this has come to many a fine artist, many a fine soul whose genius was far more of the ability for living, with so little of the ability for dying. You cannot think along with clarity, with the doom of dark recognition nudging your shoulder every instant. There must be somehow apertures of peace for production. Adelaide Crapsey's chief visitant was doom. She saw the days vanishing, and the inevitable years lengthening over her. No wonder she could write brevities, she whose existence was brevity itself. The very flicker of the lamp was among the last events. What, then, was the fluttering of the moth but a monstrous intimation. If her work was chilled with severity, it was because she herself was covered with the cool branches of decision. Nature was cold with her, hence there is the ring of ice in these little pieces of hers. They are veiled with the grey of many a sunless morning.

"These be
Three silent things;
The falling snow,--the hour
Before the dawn,--the mouth of one
Just dead."

Here you have the intensity once more of Adelaide Crapsey. It haunts you like the something on the dark stairway as you pass, just as when, on the roadway in the dead of night, the twig grazing one's cheek would seem like the springing panther at one's throat. Dramatic vividness is certainly her chief distinction. No playfulness here, but a stout reckoning with austere beauty. The wish to record the element at its best that played so fierce a rôle in her life. She writes her own death hymn, lays her own shroud out, spaces her own epilogue as if to give the engraver, who sets white words on white stone, the clue, stones the years stare on, leaving the sunlight to streak the old pathos there, and then settles herself to the long way of lying, to the sure sleep that glassed her keen eyes, shutting them down too soon on a world that held so much poetry for her.

The titles of her cinquains, such as "November night", "The guarded wound", "The warning", "Fate defied", and the final touch of inevitability in "The Lonely Death", so full of the intensity of last moments, intimate the resolute presence of the grey companion of the covering mists. It must be said hurriedly that Adelaide Crapsey was not all doom. By no means. The longer pieces in her tiny book attest to her feeling for riches, and the lyrical wonders of the hour. Her fervour is the artist's fervour, the longing, coming really to passion, to hold and fix forever the shapes that were loveliest to her. That is the poet's existence, that is the poet's labour, and his last distress. No one wants to give in to a commonplace world when the light that falls on it is lovelier than the place it falls on. If you cannot transpose the object, transport it, however simply, however ornately, then of what use is poetry? It is transport!

Adelaide Crapsey was efficient in her knowledge of what poetry is, as she was certainly proficient as workman. She was lapidary more than painter or sculptor. It was a beautiful cutting away, and a sweeping aside of the rifts and flaws. That is to say, she wanted that. She wanted the white light of the perfect gem, and she could not have been content with just matrix, with here and there embedded chips. She was a washer of gold, and spared no labours for the bright nuggets she might get, and the percentage of her panning was high. But the cloud hung on the mountain she clomb, and her way was dimmed.

"In the cold I will rise, I will bathe
In the waters of ice; Myself
Will shiver, and will shrive myself
Alone in the dawn, and anoint
Forehead and feet and hands;
I will shutter the windows from light,
I will place in their sockets the four
Tall candles and set them a-flame
In the grey of the dawn; And myself
Will lay myself straight in my bed,
And draw the sheet under my chin."

There could be no more of resolute finality in this chill epilogue. There is the cold of a thousand years shuddering out of this scene, it is the passing, the last of this delicate and gifted poet, Adelaide Crapsey. If she has written more than her book prints, these must surely be of her best. She took the shape of that which she made so visible, so cold, so beautiful. With her white wings she has skirted the edge of the dusk with an incredible calm. No whimpering here. Too much artistry for that; too much of eye to let heart rule. The gifts of Adelaide Crapsey were high ones, and that she left so little of song is regrettable, even though she left us a legacy of some of the best singing of the day. It is enough to call her poet, for she was among the first of this hour and time. She had no affectations, no fashionable theories and ambitions. She simply wrote excellent verse. That is her beautiful gift to us.

FRANCIS THOMPSON

If ever a meteor fell to earth it was Francis Thompson. If ever a star ascended to that high place in the sky where sit the loftier planets in pleasant company, it was this splendid poet. Stalking through the shadows of the Thames Embankment to find his clear place in the milky way, is hardly the easiest road for so exceptional a celebrity. It is but another instance of the odd tradition perpetuating itself, that some geniuses must creep hand and knee through mire, heart pierced with the bramble of experience, up over the jagged pathways to that still place where skies are clear at last. Thompson is the last among the great ones to have known the dire vicissitude, direst, if legends are true, that can befall a human being. We have the silence of his saviour friends, the Meynells, saying so much more than their few public words, tender but so careful. What they knew, and what the walls of the monastery of Storrington must have heard in that so pained stillness, there, is probably beyond repetition for pathos. De Quincey had taught him much in the knowledge of hardship. Whether it is just similarity of experience or a kind of imitation in nature, is not easy to say. It was hardly the example to repeat. It is singular enough also, that De Quincey's "Ann" should have become so vivid a repetition to Thompson, in just the same terms.

London has no feeling for the peace of poets. They are the little things in the confused maelstrom of human endeavor. Poets are taught with the whip. They must bleed for their divine idea, or so it was then. Sometimes it seems as if a change had come, for so many poets sit in chairs of ease these days. Science produces other kinds of discomfort, and covers the old misery with a new tapestry of contrasts. I doubt if many poets are selling matches these days, living on eleven pence a day. There is still the poet who knows his cheap lodging. There seems enough of them still for high minds to crawl into, and yet there is another face to the misery.

Thompson was seraph from the first. You see the very doom burning out of his boy's eyes in the youthful portrait, and you see the logical end in that desperate and pitiful mask, the drawing of the last period in the Meynell Book. His was certainly the severed head, and his feet were pathetically far away, down on a stony earth. That he should have forfeited the ordinary ways of ease, is as consistent with his appearance, as it was necessary to his nature. That he should find himself on the long march past the stations of the cross, to the very tree itself, for his poetic purpose, if it is in keeping with tradition, is not precisely the most inspiring aspect of human experiences. Human he was not, as we like to think of human, for he was too early in his career marked for martyr. There is the note of cricket-time in his earlier life, and how long this attached to the physical delights of his being cannot be told here. His eyes were lodged too far in heaven to have kept the delights for long, to have comprehended all that clogged his impatiently mercurial feet.

"The abashless inquisition of each star" was the scrutiny that obsessed his ways, the impertinence that he suffered most; for he had the magnitude of soul that hungered for placement, and the plague of two masters was on him. Huntress and "Hound" he had to choose between, beauty and the insatiable Prince; harsh and determined lovers, both of them, too much craving altogether for an artistic nature. The earth had no room for him and he did not want heaven so soon. He was not saint, even though his name followed him even, for recognition.

"Stood bound and helplessly, for Time to shoot his barbed minutes at me, suffered the trampling hoof of every hour," etc., all this confided to some childish innocent in "The child's kiss". Whom else should he tell but a child? Where is the man or woman with understanding but has the "child" lodged somewhere for sympathy, for recognition? The clearest listener he could find, and the least commiserative, happily. "The heart of childhood, so divine for me", is but typical of a being so dragged, and emaciate with the tortures of the body, in earth places where no soul like his could ever be at home. What was Preston, or Ashton-under-Lyne to him, more than Kensall Green is to him now? What is such dust in his sky but some blinding and blowing thing? What is there for singer to do but sing until the throat cracks? Even the larks and the thrushes do that. They end their morning and evening with a song. He was brother to these birds in that loftiness. He sang, and sang, and sang, while flesh fainted from hunger and weakness.

Had not Storrington come to him in the dark places of London, we should have had no "Hound of Heaven", and without that masterpiece what would modern poetry do? He sang to cover up his wounds with climbing music. That was his sense of beauty. He filled his hollowing cheek with finer things than moaning. He might have wept, but they were words instead of drops.

It will be difficult to find loftier song as to essences. We shall have room for criticising stylistic extravagances, archaisms of a not interesting order for us, yet there will be nothing said but the highest in praise of his genius. Excess of praise may be heaped upon him without cessation, and it may end in the few cool yet incisive words that fell from the lips of Meredith, with the violets from another's worshipped hands, "a true poet, one of a small band." Poets of this time will have much to gather from Thompson in point of sincerity. There is terrific mastery of words, which is like Shakespeare in felicity we do not encounter so often it seems to me.

Thompson has scaled the white rainbow of the night, and sits in radiant company among the first planetary strummers of song. His diamond is pure, and the matrix that hid him so long from showing his glinted facets is chipped away of miseries carried down with death. They will soon be forgotten by the multitude as death itself made him forget them. We have his chants and his anthems and plainsongs to remind us of the one essential, of how lofty a singer passed down our highroad. "Dusty with tumbling about amid the stars!" That is what he is for us now, if he rolled in too much clay of earth. Shelley might have turned his own handsome phrase on him, for they both strode the morning of their bright minds like sun the sky, with much of the same solemn yet speedy gait. There are times when they are certainly of the one radiance, lyrical and poetical. Their consuming intellectual interests were vastly apart, as were their paths of spirit.

I think we shall have no more "dread of height". Poetry has passed into scientific discovery. Intellectual passions are the vogue, earth is coming into its own, for there is no more heaven in the mind. We are showing our humanities now, and the soul must wait a little, and remain speechless in some dull corner of the universe. Thompson was the last to believe. We are learning to think now, so poetry has come to calculation. Rhapsody and passion are romantic, and we are not romantic. The last Rhapsodist was Francis Thompson, and in the sense of lyrical fervour, the last great poet was Francis Thompson.

ERNEST DOWSON

It is late to be telling of Dowson, with the eighteen-nineties nearly out of sight, and yet it is Dowson and Lionel Johnson that I know most of, from the last of this period. Poles apart these two poets are, the one so austere and almost collegiate in adherence to convention, the other too warm to let a coldness obsess his singing. There doesn't seem to be anything wonderful about Dowson, and yet you want to be saying a line of his every now and then, of him "that lived, and sang, and had a beating heart," ere he grew old, and he grew old so soon. "Worn out by what was really never life to him," is a prefatorial phrase I recall. There was a genuine music in Dowson, even if it was smothered in lilies and roses and wine of the now old way of saying things. "Come hither child, and rest--Behold the weary west," might have been the thing he was saying to himself, so much is this the essence of his lost cause.

There is a languor and a lack of power to lift a hand toward the light, too much a trusting of the shadow. "I have flung roses, roses riotously with the throng, to put those pale lost lilies out of mind." Always verging on a poetic feeling not just like ourselves in these days, and yet Dowson was a poet. He caressed words until they sang for him the one plaint that he asked of them. That he was obsessed of the beauties and the intimations of Versailles, is seen in everything he did, or at least he imbibed this from Verlaine. He was himself a pale wanderer down soft green allées, he had a twilight mind struggling toward the sun, which was too bright for him, for the moon was his brightest light. Echoes of Verlaine linger through his verse and a strain of Poe is present, poet whom he with his French taste admired so much, two very typical idols for a young man with a sentimental journey to pursue. Lost Adelaides, to keep him steeped in the sorrow that he cherished, for he petted his miseries considerably; or was it that he was most at home when he was unhappy? He would rather have seen the light of day from a not quite clear window, for instead of a clear hill, he might see a vague castle of his fancy somewhere. He hadn't the sweep of a great poet, and yet somehow there was the linnet in him, there was the strain of the lute among the leaves, there was the rustle of a soft dress audible, and the passing of hands he could not ever hold.

He was the poet of the lost treasure. "Studies in Sentiment" is, I think, the title of a small book of prose of his. He might have called his poems "Studies in sentimentality". And yet, for his time, how virile and vigorous he sounds beside "Posies out of Rings", of his friend Theodore Peters, of the renaissance cloak, the cherry coloured velvet cloak embroidered in green leaves and silver veinings, so full of the sky radiance of Dowson himself, this cloak. Cherry sounds red and passionate. But it was a cherry of olden time, with the bloom quite gone, the dust of the years permeating its silken warp. It reposes here in America, the property of an artist of that period.

One likes Dowson because of his sincerity, and a clear beauty which, if not exactly startling, was in its way truly genuine. It was merely too late for Dowson, and it was probably too soon. Swinburne had strummed the skies with every kind of song, and Verlaine had whispered every secret of the senses there was, in the land of illusion and vaguery. Dowson was worshipper of them both, for it was sound first and last that he cared most for, the musical mastery of the one and the sentimentality of the other. He was far nearer Verlaine in type. He had but the one thing to tell of, and that was lost love, and he told it over and over in his book of verse. His Pierrot of the Minute was himself, and his Cynara was the ever vanishing vision of his own insecurity and incapability. He perished for the love of hands. He is so like someone one knows, whom one wants to talk to tenderly, touch in a friendly way, and say as little as possible. He comes to one humanly first, and asks you for your eye to his verse afterward, something of the "Little boy Lost", in his so ineffectual face, weak with sweetness and hidden in shyness, covered with irresponsibility, or lack of power to be responsible.

He was a helpless one, that is certain. He resorted to the old-fashioned methods of the decadents for maintaining the certain requisite melancholy apparently necessary to sing a certain way. In the struggle of that period, he must have seemed like a very clear, though a very sad singer. There were no lilies or orchids in his buttonhole, and no strange jewels on his fingers, for you remember, it was the time of "Monsieur Phocas", and the art of Gustave Moreau. He was plain and sincere, and pathetic, old-fashioned too in that he was bohemian, or at least had acquired bohemianism, for I think no Englishman was ever really bohemian. Dieppe and the docks had gotten him, and took away the sense of mastery over things that a real poet of power must somehow have. He was essentially a giver-in. His neurasthenia was probably the reason for that. It was the age of absinthe and little taverns, for there was Verlaine and the inimitable Café d'Harcourt, which, as you saw it just before the war, had the very something that kept the Master at his drinks all day.

Murger, Rimbaud, Verlaine had done the thing which has lasted so singularly until now, for there are still echoes of this in the air, even to the present day. Barmaids are memories, and roseleaves dried and set in urns, for that matter, too. How far away it all seems, and they were the substance of poetry then. Sounds were the important things for Dowson, which is essentially the Swinburne echo. Significant then, that he worshipped "the viol, the violet, and the vine" of Poe. There was little else but singing in his verse however. His love of Horace did less for him than the masters of sound, excepting that the vision comes in the name "Cynara". But it was all struggle for Dowson, a battle with the pale lily. It was for this he clung to cabmen's lounging places. He was looking for places to be out of the play in. He couldn't have survived for long, and yet there is a strain of genuine loveliness, the note of pure beauty in the verse of Dowson. He was poet, and kept to his creed with lover-like tenacity.

He helped close a period that was distinguished all over the world, the period of the sunflower. Apart from its wildest and most spectacular genius, it has produced Lionel Johnson with his religious purity, and Aubrey Beardsley. It was the time of sad and delicate young men. They all died in boyhood really. These were, I think, with Dowson the best it offered. We never read Arthur Symons for his power in verse, he with so much of the rose-tinted afterglow in him, so much of the old feeling for stage doors and roses thrown from the boxes, and the dying scent of lingerie. His essays will be a far finer source of delight for a much longer time, for therein is the best poetry he had to offer.

Dowson was, let us say not mockingly, the boyish whimperer in song. He was ineffectual, too much so, to take up the game of laughter for long. That would have been too strenuous for him, so he had to sit and weep tears of wordy rain. "Il pleut dans mon coeur" was the famous touch of his master, it was the loudest strain in him. That was the lover-strain, and Dowson was the lover dying of love, imaginary love probably, and saw everywhere something to remind him of what he had pathetically lost. If there had been a little savage in him, he would have walked away with what he wanted. He maybe did have a try or two, but they couldn't have endured, for he wasn't loving a particular Adelaide. That was the name he gave to love, for it was woman's lips, and eyes and hands that he cared most for, or at least seemed most to care.

It was in the vision that crossed his ways in the dark and boisterous taverns where love finds strange ways for expression, that the singleness of feeling possessed him. It was among the rougher elements of dock life that his refinements found their level. Dowson sang and sang and sang, until he grew old at thirty-three, "worn out by what was never really life to him". Aged pierrot, gone home to his mother, the Moon, to bask forever in the twilight of his old and vague fancies. There might he strum his heart out in the old way, and the world would never hear, for it has lost the ear for this kind of song. Perhaps in two hundred years, in other "golden treasuries" there may appear the songs of Dowson as among the best of those early and late singers of the nineteenth century. We cannot say now, for it cloys a little with sweets for us at this time, though it was then the time of honey and jasmine, and the scent of far away flowers. Pierrot of the glass, with the hours dripping away in fine, gold rain. That was the genius of poets like Dowson, and pierrot was the master of them all.

HENRY JAMES ON RUPERT BROOKE

Henry James on Rupert Brooke! Here is certainly a very wide interval, separated, artist and subject, by the greatest divergence of power, and one may be even amazed at the contrast involved. He is surely, James, in all his elaborateness, trying to square the rose and compute the lily, algebraical advances upon a most simple thesis. Brooke--a nature so obvious, which had no measure at all for what the sum had done to him, and for all that about him, or for those stellar ecstasies which held him bound with fervour as poet, planetary swimmer, and gifted as well with a fine stroke for the sea, and runner of all the beautiful earth places about the great seas' edge.