Chapter XVIII: Arthur Upson 325 (3)

Ah, if man’s boast, and man’s advance be vain,
And yonder bells of Bow, loud-echoing home,
And the lone Tree foreknow it, and the Dome,
The monstrous island of the middle main;
If each inheritor must sink again
Under his sires, as falleth where it clomb
Back on the gone wave the disheartened foam—
I crossed Cheapside, and this was in my brain.

What folly lies in forecasts and in fears!
Like a wide laughter sweet and opportune,
Wet from the fount, three hundred doves of Paul’s
Shook their warm wings, drizzling the golden noon,
And in their rain-cloud vanished up the walls.
“God keeps,” I said, “our little flock of years.”

This note of spiritual assurance appears throughout Miss Guiney’s work, speaking in her sonnet, “The Acknowledgment,” and again and again in other poems. She has the mystic’s passion for the One Good, the One Beauty—

O hidden, O perfect, O desired, the first and the final fair!—

and gives it impassioned expression in the lines, “Deo Optimo Maximo,”

All else for use, one only for desire;
Thanksgiving for the good, but thirst for Thee:
Up from the best, whereof no man need tire,
Impel Thou me.

Delight is menace, if Thou brood not by,
Power a quicksand, Fame a gathering jeer.
Oft as the morn, (though none of earth deny
These three are dear,)

Wash me of them, that I may be renewed,
Nor wall in clay mine agonies and joys;
O close my hand upon Beatitude!
Not on her toys.

And here at the last is the tenderest Nativity song for which dedicated words were ever found; so quaint, so gentle, so reverent, so blended of sweet and sad. The second stanza is an artist’s grouping from life:

The Ox he openeth wide the doore
And from the snowe he calls her inne,
And he hath seen her Smile therefore,
Our Lady without sinne.
Now soone from sleepe
A starre shall leap,
And soon arrive both King and Hinde;
_Amen_, _Amen_:
But O, the place co’d I but find!

The Ox hath husht his voyce and bent
Trewe eyes of Pitty ore the Mow,
And on his lovelie Neck, forspent,
The Blessed lays her Browe.
Around her feet
Full Warme and Sweete
His Bowerie Breath doth meeklie dwell;
_Amen_, _Amen_:
But sore am I with Vaine Travél!

The Ox is Host in Juda’s stall,
And Host of more than onelie one,
For close she gathereth withal
Our Lorde, her littel Sonne:
Glad Hinde and King
Their Gyfte may bring,
But wo’d to-night my Teares were there;
_Amen_, _Amen_:
Between her Bosom and His hayre!

To sum up Miss Guiney’s work, as well as one may, in a sentence,—it has no flaccid thought. There is fibre in all she writes; fibre and nerve. Were the fervor and passion which she throws into her songs of valor to be diffused throughout her verse, making its appeal more intimate and personal, she would speak more widely, but scarcely to more appreciative readers than now delight in her individuality.

V

GEORGE E. SANTAYANA

“EMOTION recollected in tranquillity,” perfectly defines the work of Mr. George Santayana. He is a musing philosopher environed by himself. He

‘shuts himself in with his soul
And the shapes come eddying forth,’

shapes that have no being in the world of sense, but are rather phantasms materialized in the ether of dreams. There is no evidence in Mr. Santayana’s work that he is living in America in the twentieth century—and upon his own testimony he is not; he has withdrawn from the importunity of things:

Within my nature’s shell I slumber curled,
Unmindful of the changing outer skies,—

and in this inviolate seclusion he enamels the pearl with the nacre of his own spirit.

Mr. Santayana’s poet-kinsmen are not to be found in contemporary literature; he is alone in the midst of the singers as regards temperament and attitude toward life. His school is that of beauty; his time that of the gods; his faith the sanctity of loveliness; and his creed the restoration of the fair. He would shut out all the obtrusive shows of nature and life, and dwell in the Nirvana of his own contemplation:

A wall, a wall around my garden rear,
And hedge me in from the disconsolate hills;
Give me but one of all the mountain rills,
Enough of ocean in its voice I hear.
Come no profane insatiate mortal near
With the contagion of his passionate ills;
The smoke of battle all the valleys fills,
Let the eternal sunlight greet me here.—

and once enshrined in this Nirvanic close, where the strife of living had merged into the poise of being, he would repeople the desolated earth and air with the forms of his imagination:

A thousand beauties that have never been
Haunt me with hope and tempt me to pursue;
The gods, methink, dwell just behind the blue;
The satyrs at my coming fled the green.
The flitting shadows of the grove between
The dryads’ eyes were winking, and I knew
The wings of sacred Eros as he flew,
And left me to the love of things not seen.
’Tis a sad love, like an eternal prayer,
And knows no keen delight, no faint surcease,
Yet from the seasons hath the earth increase,
And heaven shines as if the gods were there.
Had Dian passed, there could no deeper peace
Embalm the purple stretches of the air.

It is no exaggeration to say that were Mr. Santayana in a cloister, or upon a mid-sea island with his books and dreams, he could scarcely be less in touch with the passing world than he is in the midst of the clamor and insistence of modern life, where he keeps the tranquillity of the inner silence as if there were no voices dinning in his ears. He is subjective to the degree of transfusing himself with another’s consciousness, and looking upon his own nature from an impersonal standpoint:

There we live o’er, amid angelic powers,
Our lives without remorse, as if not ours,
And others’ lives with love, as if our own,—

says one of the sonnets, imaging the passion-stilled world of reflection.

There is a subtlety in Mr. Santayana’s processes of thought that demands intuitive divination on the part of the reader; there is so little objectivity to the idea that its essence may almost escape him. His illustrative symbolism is almost never drawn from nature or the world of men and events, but from the treasure of beauty at the depth of his spirit, where, by some mystic chemistry, he has separated all the elements not in harmony with him. There must at some time have been reaction and repulsion, ferment and explosion, in the laboratory of Mr. Santayana’s mind; but he awaited the subsidence of the action; awaited the period when emotion, thought, and learning had distilled and crystallized before he shaped them forth before the world.

This gives to his work a certain fixity both of mood and form; his thoughts are as gems that flash without heat, not the ruby-hearted, passion-dyed gems, but the pale topaz or the amber, holding the imprisoned glow of reflection. If this may seem to limit Mr. Santayana’s achievement, it is not so intended, but rather to reveal his distinction. He is not only a true poet, but one of rare accomplishment; his work, however, is for those who are deeply subjective, who trance themselves with the beautiful as an anodyne for pain; those who subordinate to-day to the storied charm of yesterday, and look backward to the twilight of the gods, rather than forward to the renewing sunrise. It is not for those whose creed of poetry is that it should be all things to all men; that life, in travail to deliver truth, should utter its cries through the poet. It is for those who know that poetry can no more be adapted to all than could the spoken words of a great teacher reach equally the diverse minds of a multitude whom he might address; and that while it may be the office of one poet to interpret the struggles, the activities, the aims of life, it may be equally the part of another to penetrate to that calm at the depth of the soul where throes have brought forth peace. Not only are there various natures to whom poetry speaks, but natures within natures, so that all poets speak to different phases of our consciousness: some to the mind,—and here the range is infinite,—some to the heart, and some to the soul, and of the last is Mr. Santayana. He is for the meditative hours when we are sounding the depths of ourselves and come back to the surface of things, bringing with us the unsatisfied pain of being. Hours when we turn instinctively to a sonnet like this to find our mood expressed:

I would I might forget that I am I,
And break the heavy chain that binds me fast,
Whose links about myself my deeds have cast.
What in the body’s tomb doth buried lie
Is boundless; ’tis the spirit of the sky,
Lord of the future, guardian of the past,
And soon must forth to know his own at last.
In his large life to live, I fain would die.
Happy the dumb beast, hungering for food,
But calling not his suffering his own;
Blesséd the angel, gazing on all good,
But knowing not he sits upon a throne;
Wretched the mortal, pondering his mood,
And doomed to know his aching heart alone.

The much-mooted, but vaguely understood, sub-conscious mind, speaks in this sonnet in terms of the conscious. It is a subtle bit of philosophy, but not more so than several others in the same sequence which show the evolution of Mr. Santayana’s attitude toward life. One may not in a brief space follow out the clews to this development, whose beginning was in religious emotion:

* * * * *
My sad youth worshipped at the piteous height
Where God vouchsafed the death of man to share;
His love made mortal sorrow light to bear,
But his deep wounds put joy to shaméd flight,
And though his arms outstretched upon the tree,
Were beautiful, and pleaded my embrace,
My sins were loth to look upon his face.
So came I down from Golgotha to thee,
Eternal Mother; let the sun and sea
Heal me, and keep me in thy dwelling-place.

The succeeding sonnet traces the winding of the new way, the reluctance, the

… many farewell pious looks behind,
And dumb misgivings where the path might wind,
And questionings of nature, as I went,—

which every life duplicates as it leaves its well-guarded walls of belief and ventures out upon undiscovered ways. The pain of letting go the old, the loneliness of the new, the alien look of all the heights that encompass one, and the psychology of that impulse by which one is both impelled to retrace his way and withheld from it,—are suggested by the sonnet. In the next occurs one of Mr. Santayana’s finest lines, the counsel

To trust the soul’s invincible surmise.

It would be difficult to define intuition more succinctly than this. It is not, as less subtle poets would have put it, the soul’s assurance that one is to trust; this would be to assume, for what assurance have we but that which Mr. Santayana has so subtly termed the “invincible surmise”?

Lines which lead one out into speculative thought are frequent in Mr. Santayana’s sonnets. His philosophy is constructive only in so far as it unifies a succession of moods and experiences; but it is pregnant with suggestion to a psychological mind. One of the sonnets which questions:

Of my two lives, which should I call the dream?
Which action vanity? which vision sight?—

after declaring that

Some greater waking must pronounce aright

and blend the two visions to one seeing, continues:

Even such a dream I dream, and know full well
My waking passeth like a midnight spell,
But know not if my dreaming breaketh through
Into the deeps of heaven and of hell.
I know but this of all I would I knew:
Truth is a dream, unless my dream is true.

The thought in this passage is elusive, but it is more than a play upon words. It is another way of putting the question, which shall be trusted, which shall become the reality, the objective or the subjective world? One knows that his “waking,” his sense perception, is transitory, that it apprehends but the present, which “passeth like a midnight spell,” but how far does the other and finer sight penetrate

Into the deeps of heaven and of hell?

No answer from the void to this query, but by the mystical conclusion that

Truth is a dream, unless my dream is true.

In simpler phrase, unless the vision and conviction are to be trusted, unless, to revert to Mr. Santayana’s former words, the soul’s “invincible surmise” be taken as truth, that which we know as truth is but a phantasm.

The sonnet sequence is the intimate record of an individual soul in its evolving spiritual life, and has the significance belonging only to art which interprets a personality, an experience, in whose development one finds some clew to his own labyrinth. It reveals the many phases of speculation, reflection, questioning, through which one passes in the transition from beliefs indoctrinated in the mind at its earliest consciousness, to convictions which follow thought liberated by life, by intimacy with nature, and by recognition of its own spiritual authority. It is the winning of this conviction, with its attendant seeking and unrest, allayed by draughts from the wayside springs of beauty, memory, and imagination,—which comprises the record of the first sonnet sequence, whose conclusions, as “strewn thoughts” springing along the way, are gathered into a final chaplet for the brows of the “Eternal Mother,” Nature, whose peace he sought when he came down from Golgotha, and whose larger meaning, synonymous with the primal freedom of the soul, is conveyed in the sonnet:

These strewn thoughts, by the mountain pathway sprung,
I conned for comfort, till I ceased to grieve,
And with these flowering thorns I dare to weave
The crown, great Mother, on thine altar hung.
Teach thou a larger speech to my loosed tongue,
And to mine opened eyes thy secrets give,
That in thy perfect love I learn to live,
And in thine immortality be young.
The soul is not on earth an alien thing
That hath her life’s rich sources otherwhere;
She is a parcel of the sacred air.
She takes her being from the breath of Spring,
The glance of Phœbus is her fount of light,
And her long sleep a draught of primal night.

Aside from Mr. Santayana’s philosophical sonnets he has a second sequence, upon love, which, too, is philosophically tinged. In the matter of beauty this is perhaps the more finished and artistic work; but I have chosen rather to dwell upon the subtlety of his speculations in those phases of thought less universally treated of by poets than is love. It has not been possible, however, to follow the sequence in its order, or to present more than certain individual notes of its philosophy.

Thus far it has been the matter, rather than the manner, of Mr. Santayana’s verse that has been considered; but before glancing at the later sonnet sequence, what of his touch upon the strings of his instrument? One can scarcely have followed the extracts quoted without noting the mellow suavity, the ease, the poise of his work. There is everywhere assurance of expression, nothing tentative, nothing halting. His lines are disposed by the laws of counter-point into well-ordered cadences where nothing jars; his words are rich and mellifluous, in short, he has, as a sonneteer, a finish, a classical command of the vehicle reminiscent of Petrarch and Camoens. The sonnet is, by the nature of the case, a somewhat inadaptable instrument, and yet it is susceptible of great individuality, as one may note by recalling an intricate sonnet by Rossetti and a sweeping, sonorous one by Milton. The criticism which is, perhaps, most apposite to Mr. Santayana’s sonnets is that they are “faultily faultless;” they are so finished that one would welcome a false note now and then, that suggested a choke in the voice, or a heart-beat out of time.

There is an atmosphere about all of Mr. Santayana’s work that conveys a sense of wandering in the moonlight; it is tempered, softened, stilled; it is like an Isis-veil cast over the eyes; but at times one becomes oppressed with the consciousness of himself, and of the impalpable visions glimpsed in the wan light, and longs to snatch the veil away and flee to the garish world again. One may seek Mr. Santayana’s poetry when his mood demands it, and it will be as a cooling hand in fever; but when the pulse of being is low, and one needs the touch to vitalize, he must turn to others, for Mr. Santayana’s work is not charged with the electricity that thrills.

Because he is not inventive in metre nor sufficiently light in touch, Mr. Santayana is not a lyrist. He has scarcely any purely lyrical verse in his collections, and what is contained in them is too lacking in spontaneity to be classed with his best work. It is not wanting in lines of beauty and in English undefiled; but the sense of tone and rhythm, except of the smoothly conventional sort, is absent. There are no innovations in form and the impulse is too subdued for a true lyric. That called “Midnight” has more warmth than the others. Several of his odes in the Sapphic metre have great charm, especially the first. His elegiac verse has often rare elevation of thought; but it, also, has too set a measure, too much of the “formed style” to be vital. It brings well-conceived, well-imaged thought, as in this stanza:

How should the vision stay to guide the hand,
How should the holy thought and ardour stay,
When the false deeps of all the soul are sand,
And the loose rivets of the spirit, clay?

but it rarely shocks one into thinking for himself.

In relation to diction, there are few American writers who use English of such purity and finish as does Mr. Santayana; but it is the scholar’s English, the English drawn from familiarity with the great masters and models, and hence lacks the creative flexibility, the quick, warm, ductile adaptability, that a much less accomplished poet may give to his words. It keeps to the accepted canons, the highest, the purest, and uses the consecrated words of literature with an artist’s touch; but the racy idiom, the word which some daring poet coined yesterday in an exigent moment—with these it has naught to do.

Mr. Santayana has several dramatic poems, “The Hermit of Carmel,” “The Knight’s Return,” and a dialogue between Hermes and Lucifer, in which the latter relates the details of his banishment from heaven for his daring arraignment and interrogation of God. The dialogue has little dramatic coloring; one hearing it read aloud would have difficulty in determining from the outward change of expression and personality where Lucifer leaves off speaking and Hermes begins, but it puts into the mouth of Lucifer some words full of the challenge of thought, and speaks through both some beautiful fantasies, such as this reply of Lucifer to Hermes’ question as to the state of bliss in which the angels dwell:

A doubtful thing
Is blessedness like that….
Their raptured souls, like lilies in a stream
That from their fluid pillow never rise,
Float on the lazy current of a dream.

Mr. Santayana has not written “The Hermit of Carmel” or “The Knight’s Return” with a theatrical manager in view. They are stories told in verse, tales of gentle melancholy, pleasant to the ear; but when all is said, one returns to his sonnets as the true expression of his nature and the consummation of his gifts. He is a sonneteer, by every phase of his temperament and every canon of his art. His work in all other forms is cultivated, philosophical, finely finished, but pervaded by an atmosphere of cultured conventionality; whereas in the sonnet he finds a medium whose classic distinction and subtlety are so harmonized to his nature and his characteristic mode of thought, that it becomes to him the predestined expression. A glance, then, in closing, at the flexile phrases, the psychological analyses of the later sonnet sequence, turning chiefly upon love.

But, first, let me cite from one of the earlier sonnets, an image drawn from this theme, a jewel-like flash of beauty, not to be overlooked. The first line of the metaphor is commonplace; but note the succeeding ones:

Love but the formless and eternal Whole
From whose effulgence one unheeded ray
Breaks on this prism of dissolving clay
Into the flickering colors of thy soul.

This is defining the individual spirit in exquisite terms.

The second sequence teems with beautiful passages, now and again with a note of the _trovatore_, as in the sestett of this sonnet:

Yet why, of one who loved thee not, command
Thy counterfeit, for other men to see,
When God himself did on my heart for me
Thy face, like Christ’s upon the napkin, brand?
O how much subtler than a painter’s hand
Is love to render back the truth of thee!
My soul should be thy glass in time to be,
And in my thought thine effigy should stand.
Yet, lest the churlish critics of that age
Should flout my praise, and deem a lover’s rage
Could gild a virtue and a grace exceed,
I bid thine image here confront my page,
That men may look upon thee as they read,
And cry: “Such eyes a better poet need!”

This has art and charm, but in contrast note the impassioned nobility of utterance which imbues the one that follows. Here are lines of pure emotion and beauty:

We needs must be divided in the tomb,
For I would die among the hills of Spain,
And o’er the treeless, melancholy plain
Await the coming of the final gloom.
But thou—O pitiful!—wilt find scant room
Among thy kindred by the northern main,
And fade into the drifting mist again,
The hemlocks’ shadow, or the pines’ perfume.
Let gallants lie beside their ladies’ dust
In one cold grave, with mortal love inurned;
Let the sea part our ashes, if it must,
The souls fled thence which love immortal burned,
For they were wedded without bond of lust,
And nothing of our heart to earth returned.

Such sonnets as this mark Mr. Santayana as a master of this form, and while his other work has value, it is as a sonneteer that he has made his really individual contribution to literature.

VI

JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY

A BEAUTIFUL and delicate art is that of Miss Josephine Preston Peabody, but somewhat elusive of analysis, so much is its finer part dependent upon the intuition which one brings to it; for Miss Peabody is a poet-mystic, sensitive to impressions from which the grosser part has slipped away,—impressions which come to her clothed upon with a more ethereal vesture than the work-a-day garment of thought,—and while she would fain reveal their hidden import, they often elude her and grow remote in the telling, as if fearful of betraying too openly their secret.

Her first volume, _The Wayfarers_, revealed at the outset a poet’s imagination, and a technique so finished that it had already the touch of the artist, but its vision was that of the novice who looks at the morning from beneath her white veil and wonders at the world of sin and strife and passion whose pain has never reached her. It was the work of one who had not yet met her revealing crisis, not yet been identified to herself, of one reaching out after truth with the filament of fancy until the ductile thread had often been spun too far before it found anchorage. The volume was, in short, an exquisite conjecture as to life, whose baffling, alluring mystery only now and again flashed upon her an unveiled glance of its eyes. This is not, however, to say that the conjecture was vain; indeed, the initial poem, “The Wayfarers,” in which, perhaps, it was most definitely embodied, is a thoughtful, suggestive song holding many truths worth pondering, and in phrasing and technique wrought with so much grace that it might stand beside any work of the later volumes. Indeed, this statement is apposite to nearly all the work in the first collection, which in that regard presents an unusual distinction, having from the first on its technical side a maturity that seemed not to belong to the tentative work of a young poet; it was, however, over-ornate, lacking directness and simplicity, and inclining to excess of elaboration in theme, so that one often became entangled in the weft of poetic artifice and lost the clew of thought. Take as a random illustration the following stanzas from the poem entitled “The Weavers,” under which Miss Peabody symbolizes the elusive hopes and fancies that come by night, weaving their weft of dreams:

Lo, a gray pallor on the loom
Waxeth apace,—a glamourie
Like dawn outlooking, pale to see
Before the sun hath burst to bloom;
Wan beauty, growing out of gloom,
With promise of fair things to be.

* * * * *

The shuttle singeth. And fair things
Upon the web do come and go;
Dim traceries like clouds ablow
Fade into cobweb glimmerings,
A silver, fretted with small wings,—
The while a voice is singing low.

Of the eight remaining stanzas several are equally lacking in anything that may be grasped, and while there is a certain art in imaging the elusive fancies which the weavers bring, there should be some more definite fancy or ideal to embody, rather than the mere intent to make beautiful lines. This is, perhaps, an extreme instance of the over-elaboration of the first volume, though it distinguishes the long poem which gives its name to the collection, and appears in many of the lyrics.

Miss Peabody is an inventive metrist, and her sense of rhythm is highly developed, or rather it is innately correct, being manifest with equal grace in the first collection; witness the music of these stanzas from “Spinning in April”:

Moon in heaven’s garden, among the clouds that wander,
Crescent moon so young to see, above the April ways,
Whiten, bloom not yet, not, yet, within the twilight yonder;
All my spinning is not done, for all the loitering days.

Oh, my heart has two wild wings that ever would be flying!
Oh, my heart’s a meadow-lark that ever would be free!
Well it is that I must spin until the light be dying;
Well it is the little wheel must turn all day for me!

All the hill-tops beckon, and beyond the western meadows
Something calls me ever, calls me ever, low and clear:
A little tree as young as I, the coming summer shadows,—
The voice of running waters that I ever thirst to hear.

Oftentime the plea of it has set my wings a-beating;
Oftentime it coaxes, as I sit in weary wise,
Till the wild life hastens out to wild things all entreating,
And leaves me at the spinning-wheel, with dark, unseeing eyes.

The poem has several other stanzas equally charming, but which detract from the artistic structure of the song by over-spinning the thought.

Among the simple, sincere lyrics which prevail more by their feeling than mechanism, are “One That Followed,” “Horizon,” “Dew-Fall,” “Befriended,” “The Song of A Shepherd-Boy at Bethlehem,” and the two stanzas called, “After Music,” whose intimate beauty renders them personally interpretative.

I saw not they were strange, the ways I roam,
Until the music called, and called me thence,
And tears stirred in my heart as tears may come
To lonely children straying far from home,
Who know not how they wandered so, nor whence.

If I might follow far and far away
Unto the country where these songs abide,
I think my soul would wake and find it day,
Would tell me who I am, and why I stray,—
Would tell me who I was before I died.

There is a mystical touch here in note with the opening reference to the subtlety of Miss Peabody’s sources of inspiration.

In the first volume is also a sonnet from the heart and to the heart, for who has not known the weariness that comes of long striving to image, or interpret the beautiful, and yet is loth to commit his unfulfilled dream to the oblivion of sleep. The sonnet is called, “To the Unsung.”

Stay by me, Loveliness; for I must sleep.
Not even desire can lift such wearied eyes;
The day was heavy and the sun will rise
On day as heavy, weariness as deep.
Be near, though you be silent. Let me steep
A sad heart in that peace, as a child tries
To hold his comfort fast, in fingers wise
With imprint of a joy that’s yet to reap.
Leave me that little light; for sleep I must,
—And put off blessing to a doubtful day—
Too dull to listen or to understand.
But only let me close the eyes of trust
On you unchanged. Ah, do not go away,
Nor let a dream come near, to loose my hand.

Altogether, Miss Peabody’s first book of verse revealed strength, feeling, and imagination, though tentative in its philosophy, as the initial work of a young poet must necessarily be, and having but a slight rooting in life.

The second volume, _Fortune and Men’s Eyes_, opens with a cleverly written one-act play, turning upon an adventure of two maids of honor at Elizabeth’s court, with Master W. S., a player, whose identity is not far to seek, and William Herbert, son of the Earl of Pembroke, the scene being laid at the tavern of the Bear and the Angel, whither Mistress Anne Hughes and Mary Fyton have resorted on a merry escapade under cover of seeing the people celebrate the fête of the Bear.

The atmosphere of the time is well reproduced, the dialogue of the tapsters cleverly done, and the final scene between the Player and Mary is full of dramatic intensity.

In her second volume, Miss Peabody has also a dramatic monologue called, “The Wingless Joy,” which, though now and again Browningesque in tone, has many felicitous images and shows a true insight into human motive.

The lyrics in the second volume form a less important part of the collection, though there are several, such as “The Source,” “The Survivor,” “Psyche in the Niche,” and “In the Silence,” which rank with Miss Peabody’s best work, particularly the last, illustrating the truth that the Spirit manifests at the need, even the dumb and undivining need, and not alone at the call:

Where did’st Thou tarry, Lord, Lord,
Who heeded not my prayer?
All the long day, all the long night,
I stretched my hands to air.

“There was a bitterer want than thine
Came from the frozen North;
Laid hands upon my garment’s hem
And led me forth.

“It was a lonely Northern man,
Where there was never tree
To shed its comfort on his heart,
There he had need of me.

“He kindled us a little flame
To hope against the storm;
And unto him, and unto me,
The light was warm.”

And yet I called Thee, Lord, Lord—
Who answered not, nor came:
All the long day, and yesterday,
I called Thee by Thy name.

“There was a dumb, unhearing grief
Spake louder than Thy word,
There was a heart called not on me,
But yet I heard.

“The sorrow of a savage man
Shaping him gods, alone,
Who found no love in the shapen clay
To answer to his own.

“His heart knew what his eyes saw not
He bade me stay and eat;
And unto him, and unto me,
The cup was sweet.

“Too long we wait for thee and thine,
In sodden ways and dim,
And where the man’s need cries on me
There have I need of him.

“Along the borders of despair
Where sparrows seek no nest,
Nor ravens food, I sit at meat,—
The Unnamed Guest.”

Before leaving the second volume there is one other poem of which I cannot refrain from quoting a part, to show the subtlety with which a phase of the psychology of sentiment has been grasped and analyzed in these lines called “The Knot”:

Oh, I hated me,
That when I loved you not, yet I could feel
Some charm in me the deeper for your love:
Some singing-robe invisible—and spun
Of your own worship—fold me silverly
In very moonlight, so that I walked fair
When you were by, who had no wish to be
The fairer for your eyes! But at some cost
Of other life the hyacinth grows blue,
And sweetens ever…. So it is with us,
The sadder race. I would have fled from you,
And yet I felt some fibre in myself
Binding me here, to search one moment yet—
The only well that gave me back a star,—
Your eyes reflecting. And I grew aware
How worship that must ever spend and burn
Will have its deity from gold or stone;
Till that fain womanhood that would be fair
And lovable,—the hunger of the plant—
Against my soul’s commandment reached and took
The proffered fruit, more potent day by day.

And the lines which follow close with the wholly feminine query,

Will you not go?—and yet, why will you go?

It is a human bit of dramatic analysis, and reduces inconsistent femininity to a common denominator.

In her third volume, _Marlowe_, a drama, founded upon the life of the lovable but erratic poet and playwright, Miss Peabody essayed an ambitious undertaking, but one which, as literature, carries its full justification. As drama, one must qualify. In characterization, aside from Marlowe himself, who comes before one vividly, there is a lack of sharp definition. Nashe, Lodge, Peele, and Green, Marlowe’s fellow playwrights and friends, might, from the evidence of the dialogue, be the same character under different names, so alike are they in speech and temperament. Next to Marlowe himself, Bame, who through jealousy becomes his enemy, and brings on the final tragedy, is the most individually drawn. Of the women characters, the drama presents practically but one,—Alison, the little country maid who loves Marlowe secretly, and becomes in a way his good angel,—as “Her Ladyship” of the Court, object of his adoration, is introduced but twice in the play, and that veiled, so that only for a moment at the last may one see the beauty that—under guise of Helen—inspired Marlowe’s lines:

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burned the topless towers of Ilium!

While the two brief comings of “Her Ladyship” impart an artistic touch of mystery, it is to be doubted if in a play so intangible a heroine could become a vital factor, and if she were not, the woman element of the drama must be sustained wholly by Alison, the little “Quietude,” who, until the one beautiful scene with Marlowe after her marriage, remains an artless undeveloped child, with too little color, too weak a human pulse-beat, to compel interest and sympathy. She is delicately drawn, in her unsophisticated sweetness and purity, and the inner strength of her nature is finely shown at the last, but up to this period of revelation one does not feel her; she lacks the touch of life essential to a character in drama.

In plot the work presents somewhat the same limitation. It is, until the two final scenes, after Marlowe’s downfall, literature without action: nothing happens in the earlier part of the play to create an element of suspense forelooking to the developments at the close. Marlowe’s triumphs are detailed to one another by his friends, but they are not _shown_ in some great scene where he might receive the acclamations of the people and so contrast sharply with his downfall at the end: story suffices for action. The sentiment of the play presents also no intricacies: Alison, although loving Marlowe, is not for a moment a factor of love in his life, since he neither suspects her attachment nor reciprocates it, and hence the jealousy of her suitors has no effect either upon him or upon the supposed audience. “Her Ladyship” is not pitted against Alison, since the latter knows that Marlowe’s heart is given to his veiled divinity; hence there are no complexities arising from the love-element. For the purpose of acting, therefore, the play seems to me to lack movement, suspense, variety of characterization, and, except in the drawing of Marlowe, definiteness of type. It has, however, a strong and vivid scene at the close, leading up to and including Marlowe’s tragic death, and a scene of rare beauty and of intense dramatic reality, of which I shall speak later, in the visit of Marlowe to Alison after his downfall.

On the side of literature, the drama contains work of admirable strength and quality, work that in its beauty of phrase and subtlety of penetration is not unworthy to be put into the mouth of Marlowe of the “mighty line.” Miss Peabody never falls into the Shakespearizing strain which many writing of that epoch assume; her dialogue is vivid, direct, and full of original imagery, as when Marlowe speaks of Alison as having for him—

Snowflake pity,
Destined to melt and lose itself in fire
Or ever it can cool my tongue,

and thus describes her:

Why, she was a maid
Of crystalline! If you looked near enough,
You’d see the wonder changing in her eyes
Like parti-colored marvels in a brook,
Bright through the clearness!

Note now in contrast the impassioned words in which he pictures his divinity:

Hers is the Beauty that hath moved the world
Since the first woman. Beauty cannot die.
No worm may spoil it. Unto earth it goes,
There to be cherished by the cautious spring,
Close folded in a rose, until the time
Some new imperial spirit comes to earth
Demanding a fair raiment; and the earth
Yields up her robes of vermeil and of snow,
Violet-veinéd—beautiful as wings,
And so the Woman comes!

And this beautiful passage addressed to her after the triumph of “Faustus”:

Drink my song.
Grow fair, you sovran flower, with earth and air;
Sip from the last year’s leaves their memories
Of April, May, and June, their summer joy,
Their lure for every nightingale, their longing.

And finally these words spoken to her in splendid scorn, after his downfall and her rejection:

I took you for a Woman, thing of dust,—
I—I who showed you first what you might be!
But see now, you were hollow all the time,
A piece of magic. Now the air blows in,
And you are gone in ashes.

At once the most beautiful and artistically drawn scene is that previously referred to, in which Marlowe, his star in eclipse, visits Alison after her marriage. Here is a dramatic situation, human and vital, and Miss Peabody has developed it with rare feeling and skill. The picture of Marlowe in his disgrace and despondency, coming to the woman who had believed in him, and whose love had shone upon his unseeing eyes, is drawn with fine delicacy and pathos. In the flash of revelation that comes to him from her white spirit, he speaks these words:

Thou hast heard
Of Light that shined in darkness, hast thou not?
And darkness comprehended not the Light?
So. But I tell thee why. It was because
The Dark, a sleeping brute, was blinded first,
Bewildered at a thing it did not know.

* * * * *

Have pity on the Dark, I tell you, Bride.
For after all is said, there is no thing
So hails the Light as that same blackness there,
O’er which it shines the whiter. Do you think
It will not know at last?—it will not know?

Those, too, are noble passages, though too long to quote, in which Marlowe unburdens his overcharged heart to Alison, and intrusts to her faith the keeping of that higher self she had divined in him; and when Marlowe, early in the scene, referring to his misfortunes, says:

You do not know
The sense of waking down among the dead,
Hard by some lazar-house,—

note the hidden meaning in Alison’s reply:

Nay; but I know
The sense of death. And then to rise again
And feel thyself bewildered, like a spirit
Out of the grave-clothes and the fragment strewings.

Passages of subtle significance, wistful, tender, and pathetic, distinguish this scene.

Miss Peabody has visualized Marlowe clearly wherever he appears, and created him as the lovable, impulsive, generous-spirited, but ill-starred genius that he was. It is a life-study, in its conflicts, its overthrown ideals, its appealing humanity, and should take its place as one of the permanent interpretations of his character.

Many of her critics have found in Miss Peabody’s latest volume, _The Singing Leaves_, an inspiration and charm exceeding that of her former work, and in delicacy, lyrical ease, simplicity, and ideality it must be accounted one of her truest achievements; but there is about the volume an impalpability, an airy insubstantiality, which renders it elusive and unconvincing. The mystical subtlety hitherto noted in Miss Peabody’s work has, in the latest volume, grown, until many of the poems have so little objectivity that they float as iris-tinted flecks of foam upon the deep of thought. They have beauty of spirit, beauty of word; but their motive is so subtle, their thought so intangible, that while they charm one in the reading, they have, with a few exceptions, melted into vapor, gone the way of the foam, when once the eye has left them. One feels throughout the volume an ingenuous simplicity, a _naïveté_, that is, in many of her poems, exceedingly charming, but which, becoming the pervasive note of the collection, communicates to it a certain artificial artlessness, as if June, disregarding the largess of the rose, yearned back to April and the violet; in short, the poems seem to me, with a few exceptions, to lack moving, vital impulse, and to bring few warmly imbued words from life. They are as the pale moon-flower, growing in the stillness of dreams, rather than the rose dyed with the blood of the heart.

But what is, to me, the limitation of the volume,—its over-subtilized mood and lack of definite, moving purpose,—must, to many of its readers, be granted to be its distinction; and for their very impalpability these delicate Leaves, that vibrate with impulse as ethereal as that which moves the aspen when the wind is still, have for many the greater charm.

To glance, then, at some of the finer achievements of the volume, one finds among the lyrics several turning upon love that catch in artistic words an undefined mood, such as “Forethought” and “Unsaid,” or in captivating picture-phrase, a blither fancy, such as “The Enchanted Sheepfold,” or, stronger and finer than these, that vision of love called “The Cloud,” which enfolds truth and wraps the heart in its whiteness. One can scarcely fancy a more exquisite bit of imagery in which to clothe the thought of these lines:

The islands called me far away,
The valleys called me home.
The rivers with a silver voice
Drew on my heart to come.

The paths reached tendrils to my hair
From every vine and tree.
There was no refuge anywhere
Until I came to thee.

There is a northern cloud I know,
Along a mountain crest.
And as she folds her wings of mist,
So I could make my rest.

There is no chain to bind her so
Unto that purple height;
And she will shine and wander, slow,
Slow, with a cloud’s delight.

Would she begone? She melts away,
A heavenly joyous thing.
Yet day will find the mountain white,
White-folded with her wing.

* * * * *

And though love cannot bind me, Love,
—Ah no!—yet I could stay
Maybe, with wings forever spread,
—Forever, and a day.

Here is delicacy enshrining one of the deeper truths of life.

Many of the lyrics have a seventeenth-century lilt, but not of imitation. There are no echoes in Miss Peabody’s song, its note, measure, and spirit are entirely her own, and a random stanza would carry its identification, so individual is her touch. Of the seventeenth-century mood, however, are “The Song Outside,” “Forethought,” “The Top of the Morning,” “The Blind One,” and other poems.

Nearly all the lyrics in _The Singing Leaves_ are very brief, showing, in their compactness and restrained use of imagery, just the opposite method from that prevailing in Miss Peabody’s first book, _The Wayfarers_. So marked is the contrast that, but for the personality imbuing them, they might have been written by another hand. Whereas the diction also in the earlier work inclined to beauty for its own sake, the reaction to its present simplicity is the more marked. It is doubtless for this reason that many of the poems carry with them a note of conscious ingenuousness, as if their simplest effects had been deliberately achieved. Not so, however, such poems as “The Inn,” “The Drudge,” “Sins,” “The Anointed,” “The Walk,” whose words are quick with native impulse, as the trenchant lines of the third:

A lie, it may be black or white;
I care not for the lie:
My grief is for the tortured breath
Of Truth that cannot die.

And cruelty, what that may be,
What creature understands?
But O, the glazing eyes of Love,
Stabbed through the open hands!

Two poems contained in _The Singing Leaves_ are of a note far more serious and vital than that of their fellows: the first, “The Ravens;” the second, and to my thinking, the more important, “The Fool,” which from the standpoint of strength, feeling, forceful expression, idealism, and the portrayal of human nature, seems to me the achievement of the book. It holds a truth bitten in with the acid of experience:

O what a Fool am I!—Again, again,
To give for asking: yet again to trust
The needy love in women and in men,
Until again my faith is turned to dust
By one more thrust.

How you must smile apart who make my hands
Ever to bleed where they were reached to bless;
—Wonder how any wit that understands
Should ever try too near, with gentle stress,
Your sullenness!

Laugh, stare, deny. Because I shall be true,—
The only triumph slain by no surprise:
True, true, to that forlornest truth in you,
The wan, beleaguered thing behind your eyes,
Starving on lies.

Build by my faith; I am a steadfast tool:
When I am dark, begone into the sun.
I cry, ‘Ah, Lord, how good to be a Fool:—
A lonely game indeed, but now all done;
—And I have won!’

Here speaks a word from life worth a score of “Charms: To Be Said In The Sun,” or other fanciful unreality; and because of such poems as this, fibred in human motive, one feels by contrast in many of the others that Miss Peabody has been playing with her genius, casting “Charms” and “Spells,” which are mere poetic sorcery.

Miss Peabody has a rare sympathy with child-life, and her group of poems of this nature could not well be bettered. With the exception of a line now and then which may be a bit beyond the expression of a child, they are fidelity itself to the moods that swayed _The Little Past_. “Journey,” “The Busy Child,” and “The Mystic” are among the best, though none could be spared, unless, perhaps, “Cakes and Ale.” Still another with the true child-feeling is that called “Late,”—a tender little song which, because of its brevity, must suffice to represent the group:

My father brought somebody up,
To show us all asleep.
They came as softly up the stairs
As you could creep.

They whispered in the doorway there
And looked at us awhile,
I had my eyes shut up, but I
Could feel him smile.

I shut my eyes up close, and lay
As still as I could keep;
Because I knew he wanted us
To be asleep.

Miss Peabody’s work, considered in its entirety, is distinguished by an art of rare grace and delicacy, by imagination and vision, susceptibility to the finer impressions, and by an ever-present ideality; and while it lacks somewhat the element of personal emotion and passion, it has a sympathy subtle and spiritual, if less intimate in its revealing.

VII

CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS

MR. CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS presents so marked an example of evolution in the style of his work and the sources of his inspiration, that he has from volume to volume, like the nautilus, “changed his last year’s dwelling for the new,” and having entered the “more stately mansion” has “known the old no more.”

The first chamber which he fashioned for himself in the House of Art could not long contain him, as its walls were built of myths and traditions, incapable of further expansion. This was the period of _Orion and Other Poems_, such as “Ariadne,” “Memnon,” and “Launcelot And The Four Queens,” work done prior to 1880 and creditable to the initial effort of a young collegian.

The second lodging was scarcely more permanent; though structured less in myth, and showing a gain in workmanship, it was still too narrow a dwelling for an expanding spirit, and did little more than give foretokens of that which should succeed it. The volume contained, however, one admirable composition, one that remains as vital and apposite as when it was written,—the stirring stanzas to Canada. Indeed, the fine courage, the higher loyalty that distinguishes this appeal, lifts it from the mere grandiloquent utterance of a young man with over-hasty convictions, to a noble arraignment, and leads one to wonder why other poets of her domain do not turn their pens to revealing her to herself as does this fine utterance.

Mr. Roberts’ third volume, _Songs of the Common Day_, bore almost no relation to its predecessors, and might have been the work of a different hand, as regards both subject and style. Legend and myth had wholly disappeared, and experience had begun to furnish the raw material, the flax, for the poet’s spindle and distaff which earlier effort had been making ready. Not yet, however, had the work the virility and tang that smack in the very first line of its successor, _The Book of the Native_. It was graceful, artistic singing, but lacking, except in a few instances, the large free note that sounds in the later work. Among its lyrics is one of exquisite tenderness, as sad and sweet as Tennyson’s “Break, break, break,” and in the sifting of the volume, this remains, perhaps, the sand of gold:

Grey rocks and greyer sea,
And surf along the shore—
And in my heart a name
My lips shall speak no more.

The high and lonely hills
Endure the darkening year—
And in my heart endure
A memory and a tear.

Across the tide a sail
That tosses and is gone—
And in my heart the kiss
That longing dreams upon.

Grey rocks and greyer sea,
And surf along the shore—
And in my heart the face
That I shall see no more.

The simplicity and pathos of this lyric render it unforgettable.

“The Tide on Tantramar,” from the third volume, a ballad of the sea and the salt marshes, transfers to the page the keen pungence of the brine, as do the descriptive stanzas of Tantramar used illustratively in the “Ave” to Shelley. There is noble work in this elegy, and while it wanders over a good deal of Canadian territory, making inspired observations of nature before it discloses their relation to the subject—when the comparison is reached it is apposite, and the poem shows an insight into the character of Shelley that is gratifying, in view of the vagueness usually associated with his name.

Other _Songs of the Common Day_, forelooking to the later poet, are “The Silver Thaw,” “Canadian Streams,” and “The Wood Frolic,” having the first-hand, magnetic touch distinguishing every line of Mr. Roberts’ out-of-door verse in that volume which first truly reveals him,—_The Book of the Native_. So conscious is one of a new force in this book that it would seem to represent another personality. Its opening poem, “Kinship,” turns for inspiration,

Back to the bewildering vision
And the border-land of birth;
Back into the looming wonder,
The Companionship of Earth,

and puts the query to nature:

Tell me how some sightless impulse,
Working out a hidden plan,
God for kin and clay for fellow,
Wakes to find itself a man.

Tell me how the life of mortal,
Wavering from breath to breath,
Like a web of scarlet pattern
Hurtles from the loom of death.

How the caged bright bird, Desire,
Which the hands of God deliver,
Beats aloft to drop unheeded
At the confines of forever.

Faints unheeded for a season,
Then outwings the farthest star,
To the wisdom and the stillness
Where thy consummations are.