XI

FREDERIC LAWRENCE KNOWLES

MR. FREDERIC LAWRENCE KNOWLES is one of the younger poets about whose work there is no veneer. This is not to imply that it lacks finish, but rather that the foundation is genuine; it reflects its native grain, and not an overlaid polish. One feels back of the work the probity and directness that underlie all soundly conditioned literature; for while Mr. Knowles has the poet’s passion for the beauties of the art he essays, the primary value is always in that to be conveyed rather than in the medium of transmission.

This sincerity is at once Mr. Knowles’ distinction and his danger. He is so manifestly in earnest that one feels at times in his work a certain lack of the imaginative leaven which should lighten the most serious thought; to put it in a word, there is often an over-strenuous note in his poetry; but were it put to a choice between this mood and the honeyed artificialities to which one is often treated, there would be no hesitancy in choosing the former, for

not morbidly, but finding within his own spirit daily manna, and living by this aliment and not by the mere nectar of things. Everything in life bestows this manna and daily renews it; and the poet is he who assimilates and transmutes it to personal needs until his thought is fed from his own heart as in Emerson’s couplet.

This is Mr. Knowles’ ideal of growth, evidenced by the eager interest and open sympathy with which he seeks from life its elements of truth, and from experience its developing properties. It is, of course, an ideal beyond his present attainment, probably beyond his ultimate attainment, gauged by absolute standards, for the “elements of truth” are hardly to be separated from life by one magnet. They are variously polarized, and though one may possess the divining wand that shall disclose the nature and place of certain of them, there is no wand polarized for all; but it is the poet’s part to pass that magnet of truth which is his by nature over the field of life, that it may attract therefrom its range of affinities, and this Mr. Knowles is doing.

Before taking up his later work, however, we may glance at his matin songs, On Life’s Stairway, which have many indicative notes worthy of consideration. This volume, that called forth from John Burroughs, Richard Henry Stoddard, Joaquin Miller, and others, such hearty commendation, has an individuality that makes itself felt. First, perhaps, one notes its spontaneity and the evident love of song that is its primal impulse. The fancy is fresh and sprightly, not having yet thought’s heavier freight; the optimism is robust, the loyalty to one’s own time impassioned and absolute, and the democracy and Americanism distinguishing it are of the commendable, if somewhat grandiloquent, type belonging to youthful patriotism. Another feature of Mr. Knowles’ work, manifest in both volumes, is that its inspiration is from life rather than nature, which is refreshing in view of the fact that the reverse obtains with most of the younger poets. When, however, he comes to this theme, it is with a lightness of touch and a pleasant charm of mood that give to the few poems of this subject an airy delicacy and an unpremeditated note, as in these lines:

In his poems upon love, Mr. Knowles touches some of his truest and surest notes; those in the second volume have a broader and more sympathetic appeal, and yet have not lost the confessional note which alone gives value to the subject. They are not invariably of a more inspired touch than are several in the first collection, such as “Lost Knowledge,” “A Song for Simplicity,” and “Love’s Prayer;” now and again they combine some newly minted phrase flashing with unsullied lustre, with such as have passed from hand to hand in the dulling commerce of language; but it is perhaps too much to demand that all fancies shall be newly stamped with the die of imagination. One of Mr. Knowles’ strongest poems from the group in question is entitled “Love’s World;” but for greater brevity I shall quote instead these charming lines which introduce the collection called Love Triumphant:

Of this group, however, it is in the sonnet, “If Love Were Jester at the Court of Death,” that Mr. Knowles’ most genuine inspiration has visited him.

The conception of the sonnet is unique, and its opening line of epigrammatic force and suggestiveness:

Here are originality, strength, and white heat of feeling, though the sestett is less artistic than the octave, which holds the creative beauty of the sonnet.

Of the lyrical poems in the second volume there are many clear of tone, having not only a pure, enunciative quality musically, but also color and picturesqueness, as that beginning:

with its succession of pictures such as these:

Admirable phrasing is that of “wave-defeated oars”! But before taking up the more strenuous side of his work, there is another lyric rich in melody and emotion,—a lyric in which one feels the under-current of passion. It is named, “A Song of Desire”:

Mr. Knowles is a modern of the moderns, and his Whitmanesque conviction that “we tally all antecedents;” that “we are the scald, the oracle, the monk, and the knight;” that “we easily include them and more,”—finds expression in each of his volumes, in poems ranging from boyish fustian, at which he would now smile, to the noble lines of “Veritas” and other poems in the later work. There are certain subjects that hold within them percussion powder ready to explode at the touch of a thought,—subjects which, to one’s own peculiar temperament, seem to be provocative of a fulminant outburst whenever one collides with them, and this is such an one to Mr. Knowles. However, it is well to be shaken up occasionally by such detonating lines as these:

One will hardly deny that this is sound doctrine, as are the stanzas necessarily omitted, which trace the qualifications of the bard of to-day. Assuredly one touches the question of questions when he seeks the cause for the apparent waning of poetic inspiration in our own time. There is certainly no wane in the diffusion of the poetic impulse; but the poet who is answering the great questions of the age, speaking the indicative words of the future,—to quote Mr. Knowles,

is hardly being heard at the present hour. There are voices and voices which proclaim truths, but the voice that enunciates Truth in its larger utterance—as it is spoken, for example, in the words of Browning—seems not to find expression in our day. From this the impression has come to prevail that Art is choking virility of utterance, and that a wholly new order of song must grow from newer needs,—song that shall express our national masculinity, our robust democracy, our enlarged patriotism, and our sometimes bumptious Americanism; that labor must have its definite poet, and the “hymn to the workman’s God” contain some different note from that hitherto chanted. To put it in Mr. Knowles’ stirring words from another poem:

These are fine, swinging strophes, proclaiming the modern ideal from Whitman to Kipling that “the song that is fit for men” must have in it some robust timbre, some resonant fibre, unheard before; that a sturdier race of bards must arise, “sprung from the toilers at the bench and plough,”—that, in fine, the new America must have a more orotund voice to sing her needs.

This has a convincing plausibility on the face of it; but do the facts bear it out,—are virility and democracy and modernity the essential elements of the “song that is fit for men”? If so, then Whitman, who is the apogee of the elemental and democratic, or Kipling, whose tunes blare in one’s ears like the horns of a band, and whose themes are aggressively of the day and hour, would be the ideal types of the new-day poet, and we should find the sturdy laborer and the common folk in general coming to these sources for refreshment, inspiration, and aid in tracing their dreams; but, on the contrary, Whitman, by a frequent paradox of letters, is a poet for the most cultivated and deeply reflective minds. Only such can understand and embrace his universality, and, on the poetic side, enjoy his splendid diction and the wave-like sweep of his rhythms. His formlessness, which was reactive that he might come the nearer to the common heart, is one of the chief barriers that prevent this contact. The unlettered nature, more than all others, demands the ordered symmetry of rhythm as a focus and aid to thought; it demands elemental beauties as well as truths, and hence not only is Whitman ruled out by his own measure, but Kipling also, for again it needs the broadly cultivated mind to take at his true and at his relative value a poet like Kipling. The common mind might be familiar with some poem of occasion, the English laborer might be found singing “Tommy Atkins;” but Kipling’s finer shadings would escape in the beat of his galloping tunes and in the touch-and-go of his subjects.

If, then, Kipling, who outmoderns the moderns in singing what is presumably a song fit for men, and if Whitman, who is as robustly, democratically American as a poet can well be, and trumpeting ever that note,—if these poets do not reach the typical man, if they are not the ones to whom the stalwart laborer comes, or the busy man of affairs, there must be a need anterior to that of which they sing; song must spell something else besides virility, democracy, achievement. It evidently is not the men who do, not the men who act, that write “the song of fact” for the laborer and the great class of our strong, sincere, common folk. They do not want the song of fact more than do we; they have no other dream to trace than have we. They want the primal things,—love, hope, beauty, the transforming ideal; they want the carbon of their daily experience turned to the crystal; and for this they go to a poet like Burns, who spoke the universal tongue, who took the common ideals and touched them simply, tenderly, not strenuously, to a new form at the will of his fancy. You shall find the boatman or the woodsman knowing his Burns, often his Shakespeare, for he is quick to grasp the human element, or his Scott, for he loves romance, when the strident cry of a Kipling, or of a modern idealist singing of democracy, or of the newer needs of the laborer himself, will be wholly lost on him; and hence this note that one is meeting so often in the recent poets seems to me to be a false and superfluous one.

The “song that is fit for men” is any song that has the essence of truth and beauty in it, and no other is fit for men, no matter where sung. We have not evolved a new genus homo by our conquest of arms; our democracy is not changing human nature; we need virility in song, as Mr. Knowles has said in the earlier poem quoted; we need that “cosmic stuff whence primitive feeling glows,” but we need beauty and spirituality to shape it. Poetry must minister first of all to the inner life. Tennyson and Browning were not concerned with matters of empire, or the passing issues of the day; they were occupied with the essential things,—things of humanity and of the soul, that shall outlast empire, democracy, or time. Heaven forefend that our bards shall spring from a race

rather let them spring from the very ripest, richest-natured class of men and women, not servile to custom, but having the breadth of vision, the poise, the fine and harmonious development that flowers from the highest cultivation, whether in the schools or in life. It did not emasculate the work of Browning or Milton or Goethe, nor of our own Lowell, or many another, that he had the most profound enrichment that education and traditional culture could give him. Originality is not crushed by cultivation, nor will native impulse go far without it. The need is of a poet who shall divine the underlying harmonies of life, who shall stimulate and develop the higher nature, and disclose the alchemizing truth that shall transmute the gross ore of experience into the fine metal of character and spiritual beauty,—such a poet as Mr. Knowles himself may become when his idealism shall have taken on that inner sight of the mystic which now he shows so definitely in certain phases of his work.

He is readier in general to see life’s benign face than its malign one, even though shapen by pain and guilt; and this brings us to the group of poems from his new volume, Love Triumphant, turning upon Sin and Remorse, and presenting an element of human passion at once the most provocative of degradation and the most susceptible of spiritual elevation.

Whitman approached this theme from the cosmic standpoint as he would approach any of the universalities of life, not specifically from the spiritual side, in its destiny-shaping effects. It is from this side that Mr. Knowles essays its consideration, presenting chiefly the reactive, retributive phase of guilt,—the sudden spiritual isolation of the soul that has sinned, as if the golden doors that opened on the world had transformed to iron bars imprisoning the soul within its cell of memory. This sense of detachment, of having unwittingly plucked oneself from the flowering beauty of life, of being irrevocably cut off from sap and stem, which is the first and most palpable phase of guilt, predominates in several of the poems. To consider it first, then, the stanzas called “Lost” may be cited as illustrative:

Here is strong and vivid imagery, especially in the third stanza,

which is a bold and fine stroke not merely in its metaphorical phrasing, but as a symbol of human passions. The entire poem is a vivid piece of symbolism; it is, however, but one phase of the subject, and in “One Woman” and “Sin’s Foliage” one comes again face to face with the same phase, with that terrible memory-haunted eidolon, the visage of one’s own defaced soul. It is in the poem “Betrayed” that a truer perspective begins to be manifest, of which one stanza—

introduces a truth that strikes deeper than the mere spell of impulse,—a truth that suggests the mystery of election in crime: whether one is wholly responsible for the choice which in a moment becomes the pivotal event of his destiny, or whether what Maeterlinck has called the “conniving voices that we cherish at the depths of us” summoned the event, and impelled him inevitably toward its hazard; and, further, whether these voices are not often the commissioned voices, calling one thus to arouse from the somnolence of his soul. On the morrow of the hour in which he has

and finds himself in the isolation of his own spirit,—consciousness will awaken, life will be perceived, sympathy will be born, and Pain, with the daily transfiguring face, will companion him, until in the years he again meet Love and the other fair shapes of his destiny. Since no one remains in the hell to which he has fallen, but by his own choosing, Life rebukes the Art that leaves this sense of finality; for the hour of tragedy is rather the beginning than the end, and often so manifestly the birth of the soul into spiritual consciousness that it may well seem that apparent sin is the mere agency of the higher forces of the nature, the shock that displaces ignorance and smug self-complacency and both humanizes and deifies the soul.

In other poems of the group, however, the developing power of sin, and the remedial forces which it evokes for the renewal of the nature, are dwelt upon, so that the poems are redeemed at the last from the impression of hopeless finality which obtained in the earlier ones.

Few of the younger poets have a more vital and personal conviction of spiritual things than Mr. Knowles, and its evolution is interesting to note. There is abundant evidence in his earlier verse that he was bred after the strictest letter of the law; but while his faith was “fixed to form,” it was seeking “centre everywhere,” and the later volume widens to an encompassing view worthy the vision of a poet,—the view that finds nothing impervious to the irradiation of spirit. It is variously sung, but most nobly, perhaps, in the following poem:

Mr. Knowles has not embraced the diffusive faith that has no faith to stay it, but is endeavoring to read the newer meaning into the older truths, which is the present-day office of singer and seer. In the matter of personal valor, of optimistic, intrepid mood, Mr. Knowles’ work is altogether commendable. He awaits with buoyant cheer what lies beyond the turn o’ the road. His poem “Fear,” from the first collection, was widely quoted at the time because of its heartening tone, and in his new volume, “A Challenge,” “A Twofold Prayer,” and many another sounds the same invincible note. “Laus Mortis” is a hymn to death holding within it the truer acceptation of that natural and therefore kindly change:

Mr. Knowles’ work is virile, earnest, individual, free from affectation or imitation; modern in spirit, recognizing the significance of to-day, and its part in the finer realization of to-morrow; sympathetic in feeling, and spiritual in vision. Its limitations are such as may be trusted to time, being chiefly incident to the earnestness noted above, which now and again borders on didacticism. Excess of conviction is, however, a safer equipment for art than a philosophy already parting with its enthusiasms by the tempering of life, being more likely to undergo the shaping of experience without losing the vital part.

XIII

RICHARD BURTON

ABOUT a decade ago there came from the press a demure little book clad soberly in Quaker garb, and hight gravely and mysteriously, Dumb In June. The title alone would have piqued one’s curiosity as to the contents of the volume, but the name of the author, Richard Burton, was already known from magazine association with most of the songs in the newly published collection, and also as literary editor of the “Hartford Courant,” whence his well-considered criticisms were coming to be quoted.

There was, then, a circle of initiates into whose hands Dumb In June soon made its way, and quite as unerringly, in most cases, to their hearts, and certain of these will tell you that Dumb In June still represents him most adequately; that it has a buoyancy and lyric joy such as less often distinguishes his later work; and this point is well taken from the consideration of magnetic touch and disillusioned fancy; but is it quite reasonable to demand that “the earth and every common sight” shall continue to be “apparelled in celestial light” to the eyes of the poet when the years have brought the sober coloring to our own? that Art shall be winged with the glory and the dream when Life’s wings droop to the dust? Would it be the truest art that should communicate only this impulse? Mr. Burton has not thought so: he has set himself to incorporate, in the life that he touches, the glory and the dream; to lift the weight, if ever so little, from the laden wings, and he uses his gifts to that end.

This is not an ideal that can embody itself in lightsome, dawn-fresh songs, as those that came, unsullied of pain, inviolate in hope, from out his nature-taught years; but it is an ideal for which one should barter, if need be, the mere lyric joy of that earlier time. To divine the dumb emotion, the unexpectant desire, of the man of the streets, and to become his interpreter, is a nobler achievement than to catch in delicate fancies the airiest thoughts of Pan. The poet who remains merely the voice of the wood-god, or the voice of the mystic, or the voice of the scholar dreaming and aloof, may float a song over the treetops, but it will not be known at the hearth, which is the final test. Not to anticipate Mr. Burton’s later ideal, however, let us return to Dumb In June and go with him upon the way of nature, unshadowed and elate.

It is interesting to note, in studying the formative time of many poets, that nature is the first mistress of their vows, and a less capricious one than they shall find again; hence their fealty to her and their ardor of surrender. Life has not yet come by, and paused to whisper the one word that shall become the logos of the soul; truth is still in the cosmos, the absolute, and one despairs of reducing it to the relative as he might of detaching a pencil of light from the rays of the sun. Nature alone represents the evolved intelligence, the harmony, the soul of the cosmos, and its ideal made real in law; where, then, shall one begin his quest for truth more fittingly than at the gate of nature, where Beauty is the portress and Beauty is the guide?

Mr. Burton feels the vitality, the personality, of objects in the outer world. There is no such thing in his conception as inert matter; it is all pulsing with life and sensibility. To him May is a

and henceforth we picture her as coming blithely by with flower-filled hands. This glimpsing of the May is from one of Mr. Burton’s later songs, “The Quest of Summer,”—a poem full of color and atmosphere. After deploring the spring’s withholding, it thrills to this note of exultation:

The very breath of spring is in this; one inhales it as he would a quickening aroma; it thrills him with the sensuous delight in the color, the perfume, the warmth, of the expanding air; and what delicate feeling for the atmospheric value of words is that which condenses a May twilight into “an odorous hush at nightfall.” The words “odorous hush,” in this connection, have drawn together by magnetic attraction; substitute for them their apparent equivalents, “perfumed silence,” “fragrant quiet,” and the atmosphere has evaporated as breath from a glass; but an “odorous hush” conveys the sense of that suspended hour of a spring twilight when day pauses as if hearkening, and silence falls palpably around,—that spiritual hour when the flowers offer up their evening sacrifice at the coming of the dew.

Apropos of the feeling for words and their niceties of distinction as infusing what we term atmosphere into description, it may be said in passing that while Mr. Burton’s sense of these values which is so keen in his prose does not always stand him in equal stead in his poetry, it is seldom lacking in his songs of nature.

One may dip into the out-of-door verse at random and come away with a picture; witness this “Meadow Fancy”:

While the metaphorical idea in these strophes is not new, they record with freehand strokes one of those suddenly suggestive moods that nature assumes, one of the swift similitudes she flashes before us as with conscious delight. Mr. Burton’s nature-outlook is all open-air vision; no office desk looms darkly behind it, as is sometimes the case in his other verse. It is the sort of inspiration that descends upon one when he is afoot with his vision, roaming afield with beauty. A leaf torn hastily from a notebook serves to catch the fleeting spell; magnetism tips the pencil; and ink and type, those dread non-conductors of impulse, cannot retard or neutralize its current. This is, in a word, the charm that rests upon the little volume, Dumb In June, in its various subjects. It would be idle to assert that it is as strong work as Mr. Burton has done; but it is vivid and magnetic, and touched but lightly with the weltschmerz which life is sure to cast upon maturer work. There is pain, but it is merely artist-pain, in the ode that gives its name to the collection.

Among the few love poems in Mr. Burton’s first volume, “The Awakening” is one of the truest in feeling; “Values” one of the blithest and daintiest; “Still Days and Stormy,” reminiscent of Emily Dickinson in manner, one of the most delicate, catching in charming phrase one of the unanalyzed moods of love. The earlier volume has also a captivating poem in the lighter vein, that sings itself into the memory by its lilting rhythm and graceful rhyme-scheme, as well as by its subject. It is the story of Shakespeare’s going a-wooing “Across the Fields to Anne”:

Dumb In June has many foregleams of the wider vision which distinguishes Mr. Burton’s present work, as shown in his sonnet upon the Christ-head by Angelo, in “Day Laborers,” and in that noble poem, “Mortis Dignitas,” imbued with reverence and touched with the simplicity of the verities. It must be appraised with the best work of his pen, not only for its theme, but for the direct and unadorned word and measure so integral with the thought:

This is a fitting transition to Lyrics of Brotherhood, which, together with his latest volume, presents the phase of Mr. Burton’s work most representative of his feeling toward life. Any poet worthy of the name will come at last to a vision that only his eyes can see. Life will rise before him in a different semblance from that she presents to another; and if Beauty has lured him on, votary to that he might not wholly see, Life’s yearning face wears no disguise, and, once having looked upon it with seeing eyes, it is an image not to be effaced. There are many who look and never see,—the majority, perhaps. Their eyes are holden by the shapes that cross the inner sight, by hope and memory and their own ideal. They shall see only by one of those “flashes struck from midnight” of a personal tragedy—and often enough we gain our vision thus.

There is a penetrative insight, that of the social economist, for example, that may possess no ray of sympathetic divination. It may probe to the heart of a condition, correlate causes and tendencies and divine effects, all from a scientific motive as professional as the practice of law, and as keen and cold. One may even be an avowed philanthropist and never come in sight of a human soul, as will the poet who looks upon the individual not as a case to be classified and tabulated, but as one walking step to step with him, though more heavily, whom he may reach out and touch now and then with the quickening hand of sympathy, and whose load he may bear bewhiles on the journey.

Such a poet is Mr. Burton, whose nature is shapen to one image with his fellows. To him literature is not an entity to be weighed only in the scales of beauty by the balances of Flaubert; it is to-day’s and to-morrow’s speech. In his prose, especially, this directness is marked; but in his poems one feels rather the inner relation with their spirit, for the magnetism of touch is less communicative than in the more flexible medium of prose. What is communicative, however, is the feeling that Mr. Burton is living at the heart of things where the fusion is taking place that makes us one. Lyrics of Brotherhood is a genuine clasp of hand to hand, nor is he dismayed by the grime of the hand, for the primal unities are primal sanctities to him. Longing, strife, defeat, achievement, are all interpreted to him of personal emotion, solvent in personal sympathy.

Lyrics of Brotherhood opens with a poem that redeems from odium one opprobrious symbol as old as time. It is that catch-penny epithet, “black sheep,” that we bandy about with such flippancy, tossing it as loose change in a character appraisal and little recking what truth-valuation may lie behind it. It is good to feel that the impulse to redeem this symbol came to Mr. Burton and wrought so well within him, for “Black Sheep” is one of his truest inspirations in feeling and expression:

Throughout Mr. Burton’s work there is a warm feeling for the simple tendernesses, the unblazoned heroisms of life; the homely joys, the homely valors, the unknown consecrations, the unconfessed aspirations,—in a word, for all that songless melody of the common soul whose note we do not catch in the public clamor. There is a tendency, however, in his later work that, from an artistic standpoint, is carried too far,—the tendency to analogize. Everything in life presents an analogy to him who is alert for it; and the habit of looking for analogies and symbols and making poems thereon grows upon one with the fatal facility of punning, upon a punster. A symbol, or the subtler and more profound analysis that seeks the causal relation of dissimilar things, which we term analogy, must have the magic of revelation; it must flash upon the mind some similitude unthought or unguessed. Emerson is the past-master of this symbolistic magic; they bring him rubies, and they become to him souls, of

Here is the eye of the revelator, for who, looking upon rubies, would have seen in them what Emerson saw, and yet what a truth bides at the heart of this symbol!

Mr. Burton has several analogies, such as “On the Line,” “North Light,” and “Black Sheep,” quoted above, that are excellently wrought; indeed, it is not so much the manner in which the analogy is elaborated that one would criticise, as the frequently too-obvious nature of it.

The danger to a poet in dropping too often into analogy is that he will become a singer of effects, a watcher of manifestations, and forget to look for the gleam within himself and make it the light of his seeing. If poetry become too much a matter of observation, of report, vitality goes from it; for imagination is stultified and emotion quenched, and poetry at its best is a union of imagination and emotion. Mr. Burton’s poems in the main escape this indictment, but their danger lies along this line. His perception of identities is so acute, his sympathy so catholic, that not only is nothing human alien to him, but there is nothing in which he cannot find a theme for poetry. For illustration, there is an imaginative beauty in the symbol of the homing bird, but its artistic value is lost from over-use. Mr. Burton has some pleasing lines upon it, reaching in the final couplet a stronger tone, but from the nature of the case they cannot possess any fresh suggestion; on the contrary in such lines as “Nostalgia,” “In The Shadows,” “The First Song,” “If We Had The Time,” though less poetic in theme, there is a personal note; one feels back of them the great weariness, the futile yearning of life. Some of the elemental emotion is in them, the personal appeal that is so much Mr. Burton’s note when he does not give himself too much to things without. Even though one use the visible event but as a sign of the spirit, as the objective husk of the subjective truth, it is a vision which, if over-indulged, leads at length away from the living, the creative passion within. One philosophizes, one contemplates, but the angel descends less often to trouble the waters within one’s own being, and it is, after all, for this movement that one should chiefly watch.

Message and Melody, Mr. Burton’s latest collection, opens with perhaps his strongest and most representative poem, “The Song of the Unsuccessful.” It is a poem provocative of thought, and upon which innumerable queries follow. Its opening lines utter a heresy against modern thinking; our friends, the Christian Scientists and Mental Scientists and Spiritual Scientists, would at once cross swords with Mr. Burton and wage valiant conflict over the initial statement that God has “barred” from any one the “gifts that are good to hold.” Indeed, the entire poem would come under their indictment for the same reason. But something would be won from the conflict; the stuff from which thought is made is in the poem. In the mean time let us have it before we consider it further. Here are the types marshalled before us; we recognize them all as they appear:

The ease of the poem, the crisp Anglo-Saxon which it uses, the forthright stating of the case for the weaker side, and the humanity underlying it, are admirable; and, further, from an artistic standpoint it is a stronger piece of work than it would have been had its philosophy chimed better with modern thinking. The unsuccessful are speaking; their view-point and not necessarily the author’s is presented. To have tacked on a clause additional, with a hint of the inner laws that govern success, might have saved the philosophy from impeachment as to falling back upon Providence; but it would have been a decidedly false note put into the mouth of the unsuccessful. We may say at once that

were the Amiels who suffered paralysis of the will to benumb them, rather than those whom it was the will of the Creator to “harrow in soul;” but it would scarcely be expected of the Amiels themselves to analyze their deficiencies thus openly to the multitude. Impotence of will, however, is not at the root of all failure; who can deny that there is

that there are

and

who put forth apparently more effort to score than did many of the victors, but who were waylaid by some invidious circumstance, or who failed to “grasp the skirts of happy chance” as the flying goddess passed them?

Mr. Burton’s poem is too broad to discuss in the limits of a brief sketch; it would furnish a text for the sociologist. All the complexities of modern conditions lie back of its plaint, which becomes an arraignment. One feels that if God be not within the shadow, he should at least have given Responsibility and Will surer means of keeping watch above their own. The Omaric figure of the Wheel “busied with despite” rises before one as a symbol of this whirling strife where only the strongest may cling, and where the swift revolving thing, having thrown the weakest off, makes of them a cushion for its turning; or, in Omar’s phrase, “It speeds to grind upon the open wound.”

This is the apparent fact; but within it as axle to the Wheel is the law upon which it rotates, the law of individual choice. Each was given his supreme gift; his word was whispered to him; if he failed to hear it, or heed it, or express it in the predestined way, the flying Wheel casts him to the void, but the law is not impeached thereby. Outside this law, however, as spokes to the Wheel, are the innumerable radiations of human laws and conditions, so that one may scarcely obey the primary command of his nature if he would, and often loses sight of it as the principle upon which his destiny is revolving. Mr. Burton’s poem goes beyond the cold-blooded outlook upon the unsuccessful as merely those who are cast from the Wheel, and presents the truer view that they are by no means always the incompetents or degenerates:

Why? Let the sociologist or the psychologist determine; in the mean time we have the quickened sympathy that follows upon the poem.

Message and Melody has a group of songs turning upon some music theme; of these “Second Fiddle” is the most notable. “In A Theatre” discloses a narrative vein and shows that Mr. Burton has a keen sense of the dramatic in daily life. He has for some time been working upon a group of narrative poems with a prologue connecting them, which are soon to be issued, and which, judging from the fugitive examples in his other volumes, will disclose an interesting phase of his talent.

To leave the impression of Mr. Burton’s work that is most characteristic,—the impression of its tenderness, its sympathy, its emphasis upon the essential things,—one can scarcely do better than to summarize it in his own well-known lines, “The Human Touch”:

XV

MARY MCNEIL FENOLLOSA

TO be a poet of the East, one must be a painter, using words as a colorist uses pigment. His poem must be a picture wherein form and detail are subjected to the values of tone and atmosphere; like the dawn-crest of Fujiyama it must glow, it must dazzle with tints and light. To convert the pen into an artist’s brush, the vocabulary into a palette, is an end not to be gained by striving; it is a talent a priori, a temperamental color, a temperamental art.

So vividly is this shown in the work of Mrs. Mary McNeil Fenollosa that whereas in her Eastern poems she is every whit the artist, in her Western, her Occidental poems, she is without special distinction. Certain of her Western poems have a conventional, mechanical tone, while those of the East are abrim with vitality and impulse. They were not “reared by wan degrees;” the craftsman did not fashion them; and although varying in charm, there are few that lack the Eastern spirit.

Mrs. Fenollosa’s bit of the Orient is Japan, where nature is ever coquetting,—laughing in the cherry, sighing in the lotos. Nature in the Orient is invested with a personality foreign to Western countries, a personality reminiscent of the gods. Then, too, nature is given a more prominent place in the poetry of the East than is love, or any of the subjects, so infinite in variety, which engross a Western singer; and it happens that Mrs. Fenollosa, catching this spirit during her life in Japan, gives us chiefly nature poems in her Eastern collection. With artist-strokes where each is sure, she flashes this picture before us:

or this vision of—

One great charm of the imagery in Mrs. Fenollosa’s Japanese poems is its subtlety of suggestion. The imagination has play; something is left for the fancy of the reader, which can scarcely be said of some of the highly wrought verse of our own country. The first lyric in the collection hints of a score of things beyond its eight-line scope:

“To-day my soul’s a dragon-fly,”—a wingÉd incarnation of liberty and joy; “the world a swaying reed,”—a pliant thing made for my delight, an empery of which I am the sovereign and may have my will.

But these Japanese songs have not wholly the lighter melody; there are those that sing of the devastation of the rice-fields after the floods, a grim and tragic picture; and there are interpretations of the dreams of the great bronze Buddha, looking with sad, inscrutable eyes upon the pilgrims who, with the recurrent seasons, come creeping to his feet like insects from the mould; and there is a story of “The Path of Prayer,”—a Japanese superstition so human that one is glad of a religion where sentiment overtops reason. It pictures one walking at evening under gnarled old pines until he chances upon a hidden path leading through a hundred gates that keep a sacred way; and as he passes he is amazed to see along the route, springing as if from the earth, fluttering white papers, tied

The poem continues:

It is to be regretted that Mrs. Fenollosa gives us so little of the religious or mystical in Japanese thought, since no country is richer in material of the sort, and especially as the isolated poems and passages in which she touches upon it are all so interpretative. She has one poem, a petition of old people at a temple, that strikes deep root both in pathos and philosophy. Perhaps the Japanese excel all other peoples in the reverence paid to age, and yet no excess of consideration can supplant the melancholy of that time. The second stanza of Mrs. Fenollosa’s poem expresses the aloofness of the old,—

And the last stanza is imbued with the Buddhistic resignation, the desire to pass, to be reabsorbed, reinvested, reborn. It is philosophical after the Karmic law, and beautiful in spirit even to a Western mind:

This is symbolism which upon a cursory reading one might lose entirely, thinking its import to be, let the old die and give place to the young; whereas it is, let the old in oneself, the outworn, the material, the inefficacious, die, and give place to the new.

that out of physical decay a regrowth of the spirit may spring; for already,

the soul is quickening for the upper air and making ready to burst its detaining mould. How beautiful is the recognition that

the young eternal self, that, having fulfilled the conditions of Karma in its present embodiment of destiny, is obeying the resistless law that calls it to new modes of being. It is unnecessary to be of the Buddhistic faith to feel the spell and the beauty of its philosophy.

Mrs. Fenollosa’s gift is chiefly lyrical, although her sonnets and descriptive poems have many passages of beauty; the picturesque in fancy and phrasing is ever at her command, and there are few poems in which one is not arrested by some unique expression, or bit of imagery, as this from “An Eastern Cry”:

Or that in which the rain

Or the fir-tree stood,

Or when Fujiyama seen at dawn is pictured as

and again as

So true in color and vision are Mrs. Fenollosa’s lyrics that one cannot understand how in a sonnet she can be guilty of so mixed a metaphor as this describing a “Morning On Fujisan”:

The first two lines are unimpeachable, but when the “lotos-peak” is amplified into a “swan-like rhapsody,” one is swept quite away from his bearings. It is but an illustration of the effort that often goes to the building of a sonnet and renders forced and inept what was designed to be artistic. Mrs. Fenollosa’s sonnets, however, do not often violate congruity, for while the sonnet is by no means her representative form, she handles it with as much ease as do most of the modern singers, and occasionally one comes upon her most characteristic lines in this compass; but it is true of the sonnet form in general, except in the hands of a thorough artist, that the mechanism is too obvious and obscures the theme.

To know Mrs. Fenollosa at her best one must read “Miyoko San,” “Full Moon Over Sumidagawa,” “An Eastern Cry,” “Exiled,” and this song “To a Japanese Nightingale,” full of mystic, wistful beauty, of suggestive spiritual grace. How delicate is its fashioning, and yet how it defines a picture, silhouettes it against the Orient night!

XVI

RIDGELY TORRENCE

MR. RIDGELY TORRENCE, whose poetic drama, El Dorado, brought him generous recognition, gave earlier hostages to fame in the shape of a small volume with the caption, The House of a Hundred Lights, and gravely subtitled, “A Psalm of Experience after Reading a Couplet of Bidpai.”

Into this little book were packed some charming whimsicalities, together with some graver thoughts—though not too grave—and some fancies full tender. It had, however, sufficient resemblance to Omar KhayyÁm to bring it under a Philistine indictment, though its point of view was in reality very different. It was a clever bit of ruminating upon the Where and How and Why and Whence, without attempting to arrive at these mysteries, but rather to laugh at those who did. Mr. Torrence is so artistic as to know that only the masters may go upon the road in search of the Secret, and that the average wayfarer may not hope to overtake it, but rather to suggest it by a hint now and then. The philosophy of The House of a Hundred Lights is in the main of the jocular sort; and Bidpai of indefinite memory may well chuckle to himself in some remote celestial corner that any couplet of his should have been so potent as to produce it.

Mr. Torrence has not, that I can see, filched the fire from Omar’s altar to kindle his hundred lights; this, for illustration, is pure whimsicality, not fatalistic philosophy, as a similar thought would be in Omar:

But best of all is that quatrain in which he exonerates Providence:

If a cleverer bit of humor than that has been put into four lines, I have not seen it, nor a more delightful epitome than this of the inconsistent moralizing of youth:

Mr. Torrence’s quatrains penetrate into the nebulous dreams of youth, or rather, interpret them, since The House of a Hundred Lights was reared in that charmÉd air, and carry one through the realm of rainbows to the land of the gray light, to which every pilgrim comes anon. Love receives its toll, the costliest and most precious as youth fares on; and Mr. Torrence proves himself a poet in his picture of this tribute-giving at the road-house of Love. Not only the visioning, but the lucidity of the words, and their soft consonance, prove him sensitive to the values of cadence and simplicity:

But much more delicate is this quatrain which follows the last, and traces the unfolding of a young girl’s nature in the years that shape the dream. It is a bit of genuine artistry:

This is a deftly fashioned lyric, rather than a stanza conjoined to others, though, for that matter, the thread of conjunction in the poem is slight; almost any of the quatrains might be detached without loss of value save in atmosphere, as they are arranged with a certain logical view and grow a bit more serious as they progress. We spoke, for instance, of the path of youth leading to the grayer light, and incidentally that Youth acquaints himself with pain as a wayfellow:

No one will deny an individual grace of touch upon these strings. The artistic value of the quatrains is unequal; they would bear weeding; and there is a hint of spent impulse in the latter part of the volume, though it may be only by virtue of the grouping that the cleverer stanzas chance to be massed toward the front, as they were probably not written in the order in which they appear. Here and there in the latter part of the volume one comes upon some of Mr. Torrence’s most unique fancies; and, too, if they do not always give one the same pleasurable surprise, they are more thoughtful and the verities are in them. Indeed, Mr. Torrence’s “Psalm of Experience” is not altogether born of a happy insouciance; look a bit more closely and you penetrate the mask, and a face looks out at you, like to your own face, questioning and uncertain. We should be glad to quote more of Mr. Torrence’s quatrains, but must look at El Dorado, his more mature work, which won so kindly a reception from the critics and public.

It would be idle to assert that El Dorado is a great achievement, but it is a fine achievement, and notably so as a first incursion into a field beset with snares for the unwary. Into some of these Mr. Torrence has fallen, but the majority of them he has avoided and has proven his right to fare upon the way he has elected.

As to plot, one may say that El Dorado is a moving tale, full of incident and action, and sharply defining the characters before the mind. The action is focused to a definite point in each scene, making an effective climax, and in the subtler shading of the story, where Perth, the released prisoner, mistaking the love of Beatrix d’Estrada for the young officer of the expedition, thinks it a requital of his own, Mr. Torrence has shown himself sensitive to the effects that are psychological rather than objective; and, indeed, in this quality, as evinced throughout the drama in the character of Perth, the essence of Mr. Torrence’s art consists.

It is more or less an easy artifice for the dramatist to reduce his hero to the verge of despair just as his heroine is conveniently near to save him from leaping over a precipice; but artifice becomes art when the impalpable emotions of a nature lost almost to its own consciousness begin to be called from diffusion and given direction and meaning. While the characterization of Perth is not altogether free from strained sentiment, one recognizes in it a higher achievement than went to the making of the more spectacular crises of the play. The dramatic materials of El Dorado are in the main skilfully handled, and there is logical congruity in the situations as they evolve, assuming the premise of the plot. As an acting play, however, it would require the further introduction of women characters, Beatrix sustaining alone, in its present cast, the feminine element of the drama.

As to the play as literature, as poetry, there is much to commend, and somewhat to deplore. If it remain as literature, it must contain elements that transcend those of its action; if a well-developed plot were literature, then many productions of the stage that are purely ephemeral would take their place as works of art. Between the dramatic and the theatrical there is a nice distinction, and only an artist may wholly avoid the pitfalls of the latter. Mr. Torrence’s drama seems to me to blend the two qualities. For illustration the following outpouring of Coronado, when he returns for a last hour with Beatrix, then disguising to follow his army, and finds her faithless to the tryst, is purely melodramatic. The Friar Ubeda reminds him that the trumpets call him, whereupon Coronado exclaims:

In the same scene, however, occurs this fine passage, compact of hopelessness, and having in it the whole heart-history of Perth, who speaks it. He is urged by the friar to hasten that they may join the expedition as it passes the walls:

This passage recalls another memorably fine,—that in which Perth upon his release would return to his dungeon, being oppressed by the light:

This is divining a sensation with subtle sympathy. But to return to the consideration of the literature of Mr. Torrence’s drama from the standpoint of his characters. Beatrix is a natural, elemental type of girl, untroubled by subtleties. Impulse and will are one in her understanding, and she counts it no shame to follow where they lead. The love that exists between herself and Coronado discloses no great emotional features, no complexities; but it is not strained nor unnatural, and in the scene where Beatrix discloses her identity to Coronado, as he in desperation at the failure of the quest for El Dorado is about to throw himself over the cliff,—while the situation itself has elements of melodrama, the dialogue is wholly free from it, and indeed contains some of the truest poetry in the play. Coronado, with distraught fancy, thinks it the spirit of Beatrix by whom he is delivered, and fears to approach her lest he dissolve the wraith, whereupon Beatrix, among other reassurances, speaks these lovely lines:—

The counter-passion of Mr. Torrence’s drama, in which its tragedy lies, the passion of Perth for Beatrix, is so manifestly foredoomed on the side of sentiment that one looks upon it purely from a psychological standpoint, but from that standpoint it is handled so skilfully that the dramatic feeling of the play centres chiefly in this character. The Friar Ubeda is also strongly drawn, and one of the motive forces of the drama. It is he who reveals to Perth that he has a son born after his incarceration who is none other than the young leader of the expedition, Don Francis Coronado, although his identity is not revealed by the priest, and only the clew given that on his hand is branded a crucifix, as a foolish penance for some boyhood sin. Many of the finest passages of the play are spoken between Perth and Ubeda.

The temptation to Shakespearize into which nearly all young dramatists fall, Mr. Torrence has wholly avoided, nor has his verse any of the grandiloquent strain that often mars dramatic poetry. It is at times over-sustained, but is flexible and holds in the main to simplicity of effect. Such a passage as the following shows it in its finest quality. Here are feeling, consistent beauty, and dignity of word. The lines are spoken by Perth in reply to Coronado’s parting injunction to remember that the Font is there, pointing in the direction of their quest:

Passages of this sort might be duplicated in El Dorado, were they not too long to quote with the context necessary to them.

The passage cited above holds a deep suggestion in the lines:—

Here is human longing epitomized; and again the words in which Coronado speaks, as he thinks, to the shade of Beatrix,—

are subtly typical of the fear in all joy, the trembling dread to grasp, lest it elude us. That, too, is a fine passage in which Coronado replies to Perth, who seeks to cheer him with thought of the Water of all Dreams:

“The thing called Youth” is often “deadly bitter;” and Mr. Torrence has well suggested it in the revulsion from hope to despair which follows upon the knowledge that El Dorado is but a land of Dead-Sea fruit. The atmosphere with which Mr. Torrence has invested the scene where all are waiting for the dawn to lift and reveal the valley of their desire is charged with mystery and portent; one becomes a tense, breathless member of the group upon the cliff, and not a spectator.

Mr. Torrence is occasionally led into temptation, artistically speaking, by the seduction of his imagination, and is carried a bit beyond the point of discretion, as in this passage taken from the scene where the expedition awaits the dawn on the morning when its dream is expected to be realized. Perth and Coronado are looking to the mist to lift. Perth speaks:

Buds in the common day do not usually bloom with a “rumor of hidden trumpets.” In the same scene Coronado asks:

It is at least a new conception that gems should thunder upon one’s blinded sight! In another scene Mr. Torrence has the “devouring sun” deepen its “wormlike course” to the world’s edge. Again, his heroine’s mouth is a little tremulous “from all the troubled violets in her veins.” We are a bit uncertain, too, as to the significance of a “throne-galled night;” but these are, after all, minor matters when weighed with the prevailing grace and beauty of Mr. Torrence’s lines.

The last act of El Dorado has to my mind less of strength and beauty than its predecessors, and dramatically one may question its conception and construction. In a general study of Mr. Torrence’s plot it seemed that the situations were all developed to the best advantage, but an exception must, I think, be made in regard to the last act. One of the vital requisites of drama is that the suspense of the action shall hold to the end; there may be minor dÉnouements, but the plot must not be so constructed that the element of mystery shall have been eliminated ere the close, and this is exactly what has been done in El Dorado. The two great scenes have already taken place: El Dorado has been proven a myth, and Beatrix has been united to her lover; there remains but one thread to unravel, the love of Perth for Beatrix; and of that the audience has already the full knowledge and clew, having seen her rejoined to her lover. The only motive of the last act is that the audience may see the effect upon Perth when the revelation of his loss is made to him; and it is more than a question whether a scene depending so entirely upon the psychology of the situation could hold as a climax to the play.

There is a revelation, however, logically demanded by the premises of the plot, in expectation of which the interest is held, and in whose nonfulfilment I cannot but think that Mr. Torrence has lost the opportunity for the most humanly true and effective climax of his play,—the disclosure to Coronado of his parentage. Ubeda, earlier in the drama, has enjoined Perth not to reveal his identity to his son, lest it injure his public career; but in the hour when the supreme loss has come, when Beatrix, as the wife of Coronado, rejoins the homeward detachment of Perth and his friend, and the mortal stroke has fallen,—then Ubeda should have declared the relationship and placed to Perth’s lips ere he died the one draught that would not “shudder into mist” ere he had drained it,—the draught of love from the heart of his child. The bird of hope and light should hover just above the darkest tragedy,—should brood above it with healing in its wings. This is partially realized in the lines in which Mr. Torrence has chosen to veil, and yet hint, the relationship which Coronado does not understand:

The impression left upon one by El Dorado is that of poetic distinction, and the drama in its character drawing, plot and action is an augury of finer possibilities in the same branch of art.

XVIII

ARTHUR UPSON

WHEN a volume of verse by Mr. Arthur Upson, entitled Octaves In An Oxford Garden, was first brought to my notice by a poet friend with what seemed before reading it a somewhat extravagant comment as to its art, it evoked a certain scepticism as to whether the poet in question would be equally enthusiastic, had he read, marked, learned, and inwardly digested some eighty or more volumes of verse within a given period, thus rendering a more rarely flavored compound necessary to excite anew the poetry-sated appetite; but Mr. Upson’s Octaves proved to be a brew into which had fallen this magic drop, and moments had gone the way of oblivion until the charm was drained.

The volume consists of some thirty Octaves written in Wadham Garden at Oxford in the reminiscent month of September; and so do they fix the mood of the place that one marvels at the restfulness, the brooding stillness, the flavor of time and association which Mr. Upson has managed to infuse into his musing, sabbatical lines. One regrets that the term “atmosphere” has become so cheapened, for in the exigent moment when no other will serve as well, he has the depressing consciousness that virtue has gone from the word he must employ. Despite this fact, it is atmosphere, in its most pervasive sense, that imbues Mr. Upson’s Octaves, as the first will attest:

What else than a touch of genius is in those three words, “paved with afternoon,” as fixing the tempered light, the drowsy calm, of the place?

The Octaves are written in groups, the poems of each having a slight dependence upon one another, so that to be quoted they require the connecting thought. In many cases also the first or the second quatrain of the Octave is more artistic than its companion lines, as in the one which follows, where the first four lines hold the creative beauty:

This Octave illustrates also what may be made as a general statement regarding its companions in the volume, that while the glamour may not rest equally upon the poems, they do not lack charm and distinction even in their less creative touches; and there are few in which there does not lurk some surprise in the way of picturesque phrasing.

In the ordering of his cadences Mr. Upson shows a musician’s sense of rhythm; note, for example, how the transposition in the following lines enhances their melody and conveys in the initial one the sense of a river flowing:

Mr. Upson not only obeys by artist instinct the laws of counterpoint, but employs the word with the music in it, and his effects are achieved by the innate harmony of his diction and the poetry in the theme he is shaping. Take as an illustration of this his Octave upon the “Roman Glassware Preserved in the Ashmolean.” Doubtless those fragments of crystal, sheathed, by centuries in the earth, in a translucent film through which shine tints of mother-of-pearl, have met the eyes of many of us, but it needed a poet to deduce from them this illustration:

One notes in Mr. Upson’s work a restraint that is the apogee of good taste. He conveys the mood, whether of love or other emotion, and makes his feeling another’s, but the veil of the temple is never wholly rent; one may but divine the ministries and sacrifices of its altar. He is an idealist, not yet come to the place of disillusion; though wandering at times near to the border of that chilly realm, he wraps his seamless robe of dreams more closely about him and turns back. Mr. Upson is not, however, an unthinking singer to whom all is cheer because he has not the insight to enter into those phases of life that have not yet touched him; on the contrary, his note is not a blithe one, it is meditative, inclining to the philosophical, and tinctured with a certain pensiveness.

Now and again the cosmos thrusts forward a suggestion which becomes the motive of one of the Octaves, as when the garden breeze loosens from the chink a

which, in turn, induces a reflection upon the microcosm:

Again one has the applied illustration both of the pains and requitals that cling about the sod in its “strange estate of flesh,” in these lines declaring that

Mr. Upson has one of his characteristic touches in the words “old forfeit hopes,” pictured as starting suddenly before one in the new path that has beguiled him. In looking over the Octaves, which embrace a variety of themes, one doubts if his selections have adequately represented the finely textured lines, pure and individual diction, and the ripe and mellow flavor of it all.

Mr. Upson’s work has had its meed of recognition abroad: his first volume, Westwind Songs, contained a warmly appreciative introduction by “Carmen Sylva,” the poet-queen of Roumania, and his drama, The City, just issued in Edinburgh, is introduced by Count LÜtzow of the University of Prague, a well-known scholar and authority upon Bohemian literature. Taking a backward glance at the first volume before looking at The City, one finds few of the ear-marks of a first collection of poetry, which it must become the subsequent effort of the writer to live down.

The lines “When We Said Good-Bye” are among the truest in feeling, though almost too intimate to quote; and this sympathetic lyric, entitled “Old Gardens,” has a delicate grace:

Westwind Songs, however, waft other thoughts than those of love. There is a heavier freight in this “Thought of Stevenson”:

How fine is the imaginative thought of October wooing the valleys till they blurred with mist, as one’s “eyes upfill under a too sweet memory,” and still finer the touch of the “alien breeze” turning

So one might imagine the journeying winds blowing hither from Vaea, and the intensely human soul of Stevenson yearning to the vital sympathies of earth.

Mr. Upson has recently published in Edinburgh and America a poem-drama entitled The City, and containing, as previously mentioned, a scholarly introduction by Count LÜtzow of the Bohemian University of Prague, who points out the historical and traditional sources of the story.

The drama is embraced in one act, and covers a period of but one day, from dawn to dusk; nevertheless, it is not wanting in incident, since its operative causes reach their culmination in this period. The “conditions precedent” of the plot, briefly summarized, show that Abgar, King of Edessa, has married Cleonis, an Athenian, whose foster-sister, Stilbe, having been an earlier favorite of the king, is actuated by jealousy of the pair, and although dwelling as an inmate of the royal household, plots with her lover, Belarion, against the government of the king, ill at his palace outside the city and awaiting the arrival of Jesus to heal him of his disease.

The subjects of Abgar have rebelled not only at his protracted absence from the city, in dalliance, as they deem it, with the Athenian queen, but because of measures of reform instituted by him which had done despite to their ancient idolatries and desecrated certain shrines in the public improvements of the city.

Not only had the king progressed beyond his day in the material advancement of his realm, but his eager, swiftly conceiving mind had imaged a spiritual ideal even more vital; and at the opening of the drama he awaits the coming of the Nazarene to heal him, that he may devote himself to the development of his people.

The scene opens at the dawn in the portico of the palace, where the queen’s women, attired in white pepli, have spent the night singing soft music to the accompaniment of the lyre to charm the fevered sleep of the king. They are dismissed by Agamede, cousin of the queen, who detains Stilbe to learn the cause of her discontent. Sufficient is revealed to indicate that Belarion, the betrothed of Stilbe, whom the oracle has declared a man of promise, is plotting against the life of the king, aided in this design by Stilbe, who has been summoned almost from the marriage altar to attend the queen.

The second scene takes place four hours later, in the palace garden, and pictures the return of the messenger and his attendants sent to conduct Jesus to Edessa. The opening dialogue occurs between Ananias, the returned messenger, and the old and learned doctor of the court, who details with elaborate minuteness the ministries of his skill since the departure of the former to Jerusalem. While this dialogue is characteristic, well phrased, and indirectly humorous, it is a dramatic mistake to introduce it at such length, retarding the action, which should be focused sharply upon the essential motive of the scene,—the conveying to the queen the message of the Nazarene and the incidents of his refusal. The literary quality of the dialogue between the queen and Ananias has much beauty, being memorable for the picture it conveys of Jesus among his disciples at Bethany, “a hamlet up an olive-sprinkled hill,” where, guided by Philip, the Galilean, the messenger found him. The description of the personality and manner of Christ is a subtle piece of portraiture. To the question of Cleonis,—

Ananias replies:

Ere the departure of the king’s embassy from Jerusalem, the tragic drama of the crucifixion had been enacted and in part witnessed by them, which Ananias also describes with graphic force; in it appears an adaptation of the Veronica story. The lines well convey the picture:

In the third scene of the drama, occurring in the afternoon, Abgar is informed of the Healer’s refusal to accede to his request, but in the presence of the queen and the attendants assembled in the royal garden, the letter of the Nazarene, promising healing and peace, is read to him by the returned envoy, and at length the linen, received from the hand of Berenis, and upon whose folds the healing power of Christ had been invoked, is given into the keeping of Abgar, through whose veins, as by the visible touch of the divine hand, the current of new life throbs and courses. The moment is fraught with intense reality, which Mr. Upson has kept as much as possible to such effects as transcend words. Just previous to the vital transformation Abgar has said:

but the supreme end was not wrought by contemplation, nor could its processes be resolved by analysis, or other words be found to proclaim it than the simple but thrilling exclamation:

From this period the incidents of the drama develop with all the tensity of action which previous to this scene it has lacked, giving to the close a certain sense of crowding when compared with the slow movement of the previous scenes consisting chiefly of recital, well told, but with little to enact, making the work to this point rather a graphically related story than a drama. The incidents which come on apace in the latter part of the play have, to be sure, been foreshadowed in the earlier part, but one is scarcely prepared for the swift succession of events, nor for their bloody character after the sabbatical mood into which the earlier scenes of the work have thrown him. If the drama covered a longer period, giving time between scenes for the development of events, even though such development were but suggested by a statement of dates, the impression of undue haste in the climax would be obviated; but in the interval of one day, even though all events leading to the issue have been working silently for months or years, their culmination seems to come without due preparation to the reader’s mind, and one is swept off his feet by consummations with whose causes he had scarcely reckoned.

Immediately following the healing of Abgar, the queen’s cousin, Agamede, enters breathless and announces to the king the plot on foot to overthrow him, which inspires the king with a resolve to set forth at once to the city. Upon the attempt of the queen to deter him, Abgar relates a prophetic dream of his city and its destiny through him, which is one of the finest conceptions, both in spiritual import and elevation of phrase, contained in the drama. The dream is related as having appeared to the king in three distinct visions, glimpsing his city in its past, present, and future. It is too long to follow in detail, but this glimpse is from the vision of the past, where

The next vision is of the city in its present state, “builded on like dust,” but teeming with activity and material purpose, through which a glimmering ideal begins to dawn:

Then is revealed to the mind of Abgar the high commission intrusted to him:

Here surely is keen spiritual psychology, that “for the restless souls he made in them” they slew him. All martyrdoms are traced to their source in this line, which holds also the suggestive truth as to the final acceptance of that for which the prophet dies. Once having planted the seed whose stirring makes the “restless soul,” its growth is committed to the Law, and can no more be prevented than the shining of the sun or the flowing of the tides. Abgar was granted a third vision, of the city in its embodied ideal; its ultimate beauty and achievement were given definite shape before him, and the recital ends with the triumphal note:

The last scene is enacted an hour later in the garden lighted only by the moon, and opens with the lyric sung by Agamede to the blossoming oleander-tree ’neath which her child lies buried. These are lines of a pathos as delicate and spiritual as the moonlight, the fragrance, the memory inspiring them:

Then follows a dialogue of warmly emotional feeling between the king and queen, in the interval of waiting for the chariot and attendants to be brought to the gate. All the physical side of the healing of Abgar has now been resolved into its spiritual meaning, and he reinterprets the words of the Nazarene’s message that of his infirmity he shall know full cure and those most dear to him have peace; but while Abgar speaks of his changed ideal, looking now to a “city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God,” a clamor is heard at the gate, and the body-slave rushes to the king with the tidings that armed troops approach the palace, and begs him to flee in the waiting chariot. Spurning thought of escape, the king and queen mount the dais and stand calmly watching in the moonlight the heroic spectacle of the approaching army. At this moment the queen’s women rush into the garden, demanding flight; the conflict begins along the wall; the gate bursts open, and Ananias retreats to the garden, wounded, and shortly dies. A brief interval of quiet, but full of portent, succeeds, when Stilbe, who had plotted with the king’s enemies, rushes through the gate, pursued by the soldiers and bleeding from wounds of their sabres. She is shot, apparently by the hand of her former lover, Belarion, and falls dead at the king’s feet. Here Mr. Upson leaves an unravelled thread of his plot, or at least one for whose clew I have sought vainly. No cause has been shown for violence toward her on the part of the soldiers whom she aids, nor on that of her supposed lover and betrothed, Belarion. Why, then, she should become his victim, or why he should look upon her dead body and exclaim:

is at least a riddle past my solving. If, as the results indicate, Belarion has been using Stilbe as a tool to aid his ambitions, it should scarcely have been related in good faith in the beginning of the drama that their marriage was to be celebrated the week in which the action of the play falls. If logical reasons exist for this change of front, Mr. Upson should have indicated them more clearly.

The climax of the play follows immediately upon the death of Stilbe, when the king, called to account by the insolent Belarion, in righteous indignation strikes him down. It may be questioned whether such a deed could follow so quickly upon the rapt spiritual state to which the king had been lifted; but one inclines to rejoice that the natural man, impelled by who shall say what higher force, triumphed, ere the queen, pointing to the dead body of the trusted messenger, Ananias, and repeating the Nazarene’s words, “Those most dear to you have peace,”—demanded of the king his blade.

As they stand defenceless but assured, the soldiers, awed by the might of some inner force in the king, shrink back, and the drama closes with the victorious words,—

Though the play, looked upon from a dramatic standpoint, lacks in the earlier scenes a certain magnetism of touch and vividness of action, and in the last scene is somewhat overcharged with them, it has many finely conceived situations which strike the golden mean, and the characterization throughout is strongly defined. Its literary quality must, however, take precedence of its dramatic in the truer appraisal. In diction it shows none of the strained effort toward the supposed speech of an earlier time, which usually distinguishes poetic dramas laid far in the past, but has throughout a fitting dignity and harmony, combined with ease and flexibility of phrase and frequent eloquence of dialogue, especially in the passages spoken by Abgar.

It is a play rather of character and high motive than of plot, a piece of sheer idealism, notable alike for its spiritual and its poetic quality.

BIOGRAPHICAL INDEX

BROWN, Alice. Born Hampton Falls, N. H., Dec. 5, 1857. Graduated Robinson Seminary, Exeter, N. H., 1876. On staff of Youth’s Companion. Author: Fools of Nature; Meadow-Grass; By Oak and Thorn (English travels); Life of Mercy Otis Warren; The Road to Castaly (poems); The Days of his Youth; Robert Louis Stevenson, A Study (with Louise I. Guiney); Tiverton Tales; King’s End; Margaret Warrener; The Mannerings; Judgment. Resides in Boston.

BURTON, Richard. Born Hartford, Conn., March 14, 1859. Graduated Trinity College, Hartford. Ph.D. Johns Hopkins, 1887. Married Oct. 7, 1889. Taught Old English Johns Hopkins, 1888. Managing Editor N. Y. Churchman, 1888-89. Travelled in Europe, 1889-90. Literary Editor Hartford Courant, 1890-97. Associate Editor Warner Library World’s Best Literature, 1897-99. Professor English Literature, University of Minnesota, 1898-1902. Editor Lothrop Publishing Co., 1902-04. Lectures upon literature and the drama. Author: (verse) Dumb in June, 1895; Memorial Day, 1897; Lyrics of Brotherhood, 1899; Message and Melody, 1903; (prose) Literary Likings, essays, 1898; Life of Whittier, in Beacon Biography Series, 1900; Forces in Fiction, essays, 1902. Resides in Boston.

CARMAN, Bliss. Born Fredericton, N. B., April 15, 1861. Graduate University of New Brunswick, 1881. Postgraduate student University of Edinburgh, 1882-83, and of Harvard, 1886-88. Studied law, practised civil engineering, taught school. Office Editor N. Y. Independent, 1890-1902. For past four years has contributed a weekly column, called “Marginal Notes,” to the Evening Post, Chicago, The Transcript, Boston, and the Commercial Advertiser, N. Y. Unmarried. Author: Low Tide on Grand PrÉ, 1893; A Sea-Mark, 1895; Behind the Arras, 1895; Ballads of Lost Haven, 1897; By the Aurelian Wall, 1897; Songs from Vagabondia, in collaboration with Richard Hovey, 1894; More Songs from Vagabondia, 1896; Last Songs from Vagabondia, 1900; St. Kavin, a Ballad, 1894; At Michaelmas, 1895; The Girl in the Poster, 1897; The Green Book of the Bards, 1898; Vengeance of Noel Bassard, 1899; Ode on the Coronation of King Edward, 1902; From the Book of Myths, 1902; Pipes of Pan No. 1, 1902; Pipes of Pan No. 2, 1903; The Word at St. Kavins, 1903; Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics, 1903. Resides in New York.

CAWEIN, Madison Julius. Born Louisville, Ky., March 23, 1865. Graduated at High School in Louisville, 1886. Since then has confined himself to the writing of verse. Author: Blooms of the Berry, 1887; The Triumph of Music, 1888; Accolon of Gaul, 1889; Lyrics and Idyls, 1890; Days and Dreams, 1891; Moods and Memories, 1892; Red Leaves and Roses, 1893; Poems of Nature and Love, 1893; Intimations of the Beautiful, 1894; The White Snake (translations from German poets), 1895; Undertones, 1896; The Garden of Dreams, 1896; Shapes and Shadows, 1898; Idyllic Monologues, 1898; Myth and Romance, 1899; Weeds by the Wall, 1901; One Day and Another, 1901; Kentucky Poems (selections published in London with an Introduction by Edmund Gosse), 1902; A Voice on the Wind, 1902. Resides Louisville, Ky.

FENOLLOSA, Mary McNeil. Born in Alabama. Graduated Irving Academy, Mobile. Married, 1895, Ernest F. Fenollosa. Resided in Japan about eight years. Author: Out of the Nest: A Flight of Verses, 1899; and Child Verses on Japanese Subjects. Wrote Monograph upon Heroshige, the Artist of Mist, Snow, and Rain; also verses, sketches, and stories in many magazines.

GUINEY, Louise Imogen. Born Boston, Jan. 7, 1861. Graduated Elmhurst Academy, Providence, R. I., 1879. Studied afterwards under private tutors and abroad. Contributor since 1885 to Harper’s, Atlantic, and other magazines. Author: The White Sail and Other Poems, 1887; Monsieur Henri: A Footnote to French History, 1892; A Roadside Harp, 1893; A Little English Gallery, 1894; Patrins, essays, 1897; England and Yesterday, 1898; A Martyr’s Idyl, and Shorter Poems, 1899; Editor James Clarence Mangan, His Selected Poems, with Study by the Editor, 1897; of the Matthew Arnold (in small Riverside Literature Series); of Dr. T. W. Parsons’ Translation of Divina Commedia of Dante, 1893; of Henry Vaughn’s Mount of Olives, 1902. Resides since 1901 in Oxford, England.

HALL, Gertrude. Born Boston, Sept. 8, 1863. Educated private schools in Florence, Italy. Author: (verse) Far from To-day; Allegretto (light verse): Foam of the Sea; Age of Fairygold; Translator Paul Verlaine’s Poems, and of Cyrano de Bergerac; (prose) The Hundred, and Other Stories; April’s Sowing; The Legend of Sainte Cariberte des Ois. Resides New York City.

HOVEY, Richard. Born Normal, Ill., 1864. Educated Dartmouth College. Author: Poems, privately printed, 1880; Songs from Vagabondia; More Songs from Vagabondia; and Last Songs from Vagabondia (in collaboration with Bliss Carman); Seaward: An Elegy (on the death of Thomas William Parsons); The Quest of Merlin: A Masque; The Marriage of Guenevere: A Tragedy; The Birth of Galahad; A Romantic Drama; Taliesin: A Masque; Along the Trail: A Book of Lyrics; Translator the Plays of Maeterlinck (in two series). Died 1900.

KNOWLES, Frederic Lawrence. Born Lawrence, Mass., Sept. 8, 1869. Graduated Wesleyan University, 1894. Harvard, 1896. In editorial department Houghton, Mifflin and Co., from February to September of 1898. Literary adviser of L. C. Page and Co., 1899-1900. Since that time adviser for Dana Estes and Company. Unmarried. Author: (prose) Practical Hints for Young Writers, Readers, and Book Buyers, 1897; A Kipling Primer, 1900. (Republished in England); (verse) On Life’s Stairway, 1900; Love Triumphant, 1904. Edited Cap and Gown Second Series, 1897; Golden Treasury of American Lyrics, 1897; Treasury Humorous Poetry, 1902; The Famous Children of Literature Series, 1902. Resides in Boston.

PEABODY, Josephine Preston. Born in New York. Educated Girls’ Latin School, Boston, and at Radcliffe College, 1894-96. Instructor in English Literature at Wellesley College, 1901-03. Author: Old Greek Folk-Stories (Riverside Lit. Series) 1899; The Wayfarers, a book of verse, 1898; Fortune and Men’s Eyes; New Poems with a Play, 1900; Marlowe, A Drama, 1901; The Singing Leaves, 1903. Contributor to leading magazines. Resides Cambridge, Mass.

REESE, Lizette Woodworth. Born in Baltimore Co., Md., Jan. 9, 1856. Teacher of English, West High School, Baltimore. Author: A Branch of May; A Handful of Lavender, 1891; A Quiet Road, 1896. Resides in Baltimore.

ROBERTS, Charles George Douglas. Born Douglas, N. B., Jan. 10, 1860. Graduated University of New Brunswick, 1879 (A. M. 1880). Married 1880. Head Master Chatham Grammar School, 1879-81; York St. School, Fredericton, 1881-83. Editor Week, Toronto, 1883-84. Professor English and French Literature, King’s College, Windsor, N. S., 1885-88. Professor English and Economics, same, 1888-95. Associate Editor Illustrated American, 1897-98. Author: (verse) Orion and Other Poems, 1880; In Divers Tones, 1887; Ave: An Ode for the Shelley Centenary, 1892; Songs of the Common Day, and Ave, 1893; The Book of the Native, 1896; New York Nocturnes, 1898; Poems, 1901; The Book of the Rose, 1903; (prose) The Canadians of Old; Earth’s Enigmas; The Raid from BeausÉjour; A History of Canada; The Forge in the Forest; Around the Camp-fire; Reube Dare’s Shad Boat; A Sister to Evangeline; Appleton’s Canadian Guide-Book, 1899; By the Marshes of Minas, 1900; The Heart of the Ancient Wood, 1900; The Kindred of the Wild, 1902; Barbara Ladd, 1902; The Bird Book, 1903; The Watchers of the Trails, 1904. Editor the Alastor and Adonais of Shelley with Introduction and Notes, 1902. Resides New York City.

SANTAYANA, George E. Born in Spain, 1863. Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University. Author: (verse) Sonnets and Other Poems, 1894; Lucifer: A Theological Tragedy, 1899; The Hermit of Carmel and Other Poems, 1901; (prose) The Sense of Beauty, 1896; Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, 1900. Resides Cambridge, Mass.

SCOLLARD, Clinton. Born Clinton, N. Y., Sept. 18, 1860. Graduated from Hamilton College, 1881. Also studied at Harvard and at Cambridge, England. Professor of English Literature at Hamilton College, 1888-96. Author: (verse) Pictures in Song, 1884; With Reed and Lyre, 1888; Old and New World Lyrics, 1888; Giovio and Giulia, 1891; Songs of Sunrise Lands, 1892; The Hills of Song, 1895; A Boy’s Book of Rhyme, 1896; Skenandoa, 1896; The Lutes of Morn, 1901; Lyrics of the Dawn, 1902; The Lyric Bough, 1904; Ballads of Valor and Victory, 1904 (in collaboration with Wallace Rice); Footfarings (prose and verse), 1904; (prose) Under Summer Skies, 1892; On Sunny Shores, 1893; A Man-at-Arms, 1898; The Son of a Tory, 1900; A Knight of the Highway; The Cloistering of Ursula, 1902; Lawton, 1900; Editor Ford’s Broken Hearts, 1904, and of Ballads of American Bravery, 1900. Resides Clinton, N. Y.

THOMAS, Edith Matilda. Born Chatham, O., August 12, 1854. Educated Normal School, Geneva, Ohio. Removed to New York, 1888. Author: (verse) A New Year’s Masque and Other Poems, 1885; Lyrics and Sonnets, 1887; Babes of the Year, 1888; The Inverted Torch, 1890; Fair Shadow Land, 1893; A Winter Swallow, 1896; The Dancers, 1903; (prose) The Round Year. Resides West New Brighton, Staten Island.

TORRENCE, Frederic Ridgely. Born Xenia, O., Nov. 27, 1875. Educated under private tutors and at Miami University, O., also Princeton. Librarian Astor Library, 1897-1901. Librarian Lenox Library, 1901-03. At present Associate Editor of The Critic, New York. Unmarried. Author: (verse) The House of a Hundred Lights, 1900; El Dorado, A Tragedy, 1903. Resides in New York.

UPSON, Arthur. Born in Camden, N. Y., 1877. Graduated from Camden Academy, 1894. B. A. University of Minnesota. Author: Poems (with George Norton Northrop); Westwind Songs (with an Introduction by “Carmen Sylva”); Octaves in An Oxford Garden; The City, a Poem-Drama (with Introduction by Count LÜtzow). Resides Minneapolis, Minn.

WOODBERRY, George E. Born Beverly, Mass., May 12, 1855. Graduated Harvard, 1877. Professor of English at University of Nebraska, 1877-78, and 1880-82. On editorial staff of the Nation, 1878-79. Author: History of Wood Engraving, 1883; Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1885; Studies in Letters and Life, 1890; The North Shore Watch and Other Poems, 1890; Heart of Man, 1899; Wild Eden, 1899; Makers of Literature, 1900; Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1902; Poems (collected edition), 1903. Editor: Complete Poems of Shelley; Complete Works of Poe (with Mr. Stedman); National Studies in American Letters; Columbia Studies in Comparative Literature; Lamb’s Essays of Elia; Aubrey de Vere’s Selected Poems, and Bacon’s Essays. Editor of the Journal of Comparative Literature. From 1891 to 1903 Professor of Comparative Literature at Columbia University.