Leader
There be two handles to all things in this world,
one called the good, and one the bad. But a man
may lay hold of anything by whichever handle shall
please him best.—Old Stoic Maxim.
It has been usual, in the past, for Editors of The Yale Literary
Magazine to express themselves as strongly opposed to something,
when engaged in writing a leader. Two recent leaders have
varied this procedure to the extent of declaring the opposition of
their authors to opposition, but the principle of being opposed to
something remains. At the present moment, it occurs to us that
it might be interesting to suppose correct a few of the pessimistic
opinions held by that rather noisy group whom we shall call The
Troubled Spirits. On the basis of these suppositions, we shall
then try to show that, bad as things are, there still remain a few
bright spots lurking in unsuspected corners of the very evils whose
existence we are admitting, for the sake of argument.
A convenient starting point may perhaps be found in the Compulsory
Sunday Chapel question. It can be urged that the two
services now provided prevent anyone from claiming that he is
forced to listen to propaganda in the form of a sermon, on Sunday.
But The Troubled Spirits, whose positions we are now admitting,
regard the matter differently. If we are correctly informed, they
consider it a fact, however unpleasant, that the average Yale
student feels a very real, if unofficial, compulsion to attend whichever
Sunday service is held at a later hour than the other. The
Troubled Spirits defy the University to hold the short service at
eleven o’clock, and the long one at ten—believing that their position
would be more than vindicated by the lack of attendance at
the earlier service. In short, so far as The Troubled Spirits are
concerned, Sunday service is at eleven o’clock, and contains a
sermon varying in length from twenty minutes to half an hour.
But after allowing all that, and allowing, too, that the visiting
clergymen are attempting to foist opinions of their own upon the
undergraduate body, there is still something to be said. In the
first place, we imagine that The Troubled Spirits, on leaving
college, will perform their undoubted duty of attacking Christianity
with every resource in their power. Hence, were we in their
place, we should ask nothing better than to have all the foremost
of our enemies brought before us, at great expense, and exposed
in such a manner that we could most easily detect the flaws in
their armor, which we were later to pierce.
Secondly, there will be certain of The Troubled Spirits whose
ardor will evaporate on leaving college, and who will allow the
public opinion of their friends and relatives to force them to
church again every Sunday. To these we should like to say that
observations upon the sermons of more than one pitifully underpaid
clergyman have convinced us, from The Troubled Spirits’
point of view, that in this respect “the worst is yet to come”.
However stupid and unthinking The Troubled Spirits may find
the highly cultured, and in many cases highly paid, gentlemen
who speak at Yale, they will find the less highly paid, and not
infrequently less cultured, type of man to whom they are destined,
infinitely more stupid, and perhaps positively unpalatable. The
flowers of rhetoric, when blended skillfully into a delicately fragrant
and perfumed discourse, are, indeed, far more expensive
than a bouquet of orchids—few of us will ever be able to afford
them again. And so, after a lapse of years, I can imagine an old
and embittered Troubled Spirit attempting a Drydonian paraphrase
to this effect:—
Battell to some faint meaning made pretense,
Elsewhere, they never deviate into sense.
That, of course, would happen to very few Troubled Spirits, but
it is not impossible.
Having attempted to prove, let us hope with some slight measure
of success, that even the most troubled of The Troubled Spirits
may find some crumb of consolation in present-day Sunday Chapel
conditions, let us pass on to another example. Perhaps, by way
of trivial digression, it might be interesting to speak of the feeling
among The Troubled Spirits that Osborn Hall should be summarily
destroyed as a relic of a past and barbarous age. Here,
though we might admit the contentions of The Troubled Spirits
as before, we think it more serviceable merely to recommend that
The Troubled Spirits go and look at Osborn Hall. If our own
spirits were troubled, we can imagine nothing more soothing than
to look at Osborn Hall for the first time. Around the front of
the main entrance runs a band of stonework carved with animals
and foliage exactly resembling the woodcuts in The Troubled
Spirits’ favorite magazines. One of the beavers, in particular, is
gnawing away at a capitalistic grapevine with a communistic fury
only to be called prophetic. Again, we have never seen anything
more “advanced” than the exquisite mosaiced representation of a
steamboat complete with paddle-wheels, which adorns the under
surface of one of the arches. It is exactly the same thing as the
“Painting Of A Train of Gear Wheels” sold recently in Paris as
the latest example of Da Da. It seems, then, that this matter
might very well rest by allowing The Troubled Spirits to admire
Osborn Hall as a sample of the latest phase in unrepressed art,
while the rest of us respect it as an example of what our grandfathers
were fond of, and of what our grandsons will treat with
veneration. But to return to things less trivial—
As this is written, the Senior class have voted that the most
important thing needed by Yale is football victories, and we are,
for once, in accord with The Troubled Spirits in thinking that our
gridiron defeats are dreadful things. They may not go so far as
to admit, with The Troubled Spirits, that football at Yale has
become not the most manly but the most sentimental of sports,
yet they do attach great weight to the matter. The Troubled
Spirits, I understand, go much further, and assert that year after
year the University is expected to have confidence, trust, or perhaps
blind faith in the team. They would have us believe that
Yale has been taught to accept defeat with a pious resignation that
savors of slave morality. And then they point to other fields of
endeavor. Is the student given a long cheer by his parents before
going into an examination, and assured that it won’t matter anyhow
if he fails? Does the greatest of generals receive the same
amount of encouragement from his people no matter if his success
be large or small? The Troubled Spirits have put these questions
to many of us, and, without waiting for reply, answered them
almost vulgarly in the negative. They remark that it is fundamentally
self-evident that one must spur one’s charger, not feed
him lumps of sugar, before going into battle. And therefore they
would attempt to excite the student body to such a pitch that to
be a member of a team defeated by Harvard would not be an
wholly enviable post.
But, even supposing there was a word of truth in these extreme
views, it seems to us that, while The Senior Class, The Troubled
Spirits, and ourselves are agreed in desiring a football victory as
soon as possible, we may as well take pleasure in a certain aspect
of these defeats which is very desirable in a quiet way. It has
always been held that football victories help to stimulate enrollment,
and it is universally admitted that the enrollment of the
University is far too large as it is. Likewise, victorious Harvard
is swamped with “race problems” and what not, which do not
trouble us. We are permitted to jog along without attacks from
“degraded races, who are trying to cast off the yoke of oppression
with the key of learning”, and want a look through our keyhole.
That, at least, is a consoling thought. May it bring a little peace
to The Troubled Spirits.
LAIRD SHIELDS GOLDSBOROUGH.
Gabrielle Bartholow
When Miss Amy Lowell, in an essay upon the poetry of
Edwin Arlington Robinson, expressed a doubt whether
Mr. Robinson’s recent popularity had not gone to his head and
would for the future endanger his work, no one then reading
could fully comprehend the ineptitude of her fear. Perhaps the
reader severely questioned her, but he could not be convinced
until Roman Bartholow appeared to prove that any such statements
as Miss Lowell’s were erroneous. Miss Lowell has based
her fear, curiously enough, upon the melodramatic poem Avon’s
Harvest, in which, though the poet was but playing with dime
novel effects, his verse was more masterfully composed than in
any of his earlier poems. Avon’s Harvest in its technique alone
revealed a tightening of the poet’s art. His cadences were more
definite, his vocabulary less elaborate, his construction certain and
replete with the artlessness of art. There was to be seen no
machinery in this poem, for it had vanished in the poet’s change
to an objective method. The faults of Merlin and of Lancelot
were due only to construction and that construction itself to an
intensely subjective method. In these poems Mr. Robinson did
not let the story tell itself as he was wont to do in the now famous
short poems, but he must, for Merlin and Lancelot are essentially
lyric dramas, sing for himself the love motifs, the tragedies as he
himself experienced them. For this reason he must weave the
story according to the whispering of his own moods. And in so
doing he must lay himself open to attack on the grounds of
incoherence of form. Miss Lowell was indeed one of the first
of his critics to notice this, yet it is surprising that she should
have refused to see in Avon’s Harvest the correction of the faults
she censured in the lyrics; to wit, the change of treatment, the
growth of sureness that the poet’s objective manner was displaying.
That essential objectivity which distinguishes Flammonde,
Richard Cory, and Zola, which previously was employed
only to etch a character in a paucity of strokes,—that objectivity,
with the publication of Avon’s Harvest, Mr. Robinson announced
to be the latest of his secrets for the writing of narrative poetry.
Though he followed this poem with others in the objective
manner, the most remarkable of which is the little known Avenel
Gray, no complete study has appeared until his last narrative
poem, Roman Bartholow, a work that is dramatic, expressive, and
yet holds about it more folds of dignity and power than even the
elegiac The Man Against the Sky. Roman Bartholow, because of
its complete and extensive objectivity, impresses one most signally
with its inevitability, a characteristic which Mathew Arnold termed
the basis for all great poetry. From the opening lines where
Bartholow gazes down upon “a yellow dusk of trees” to the close
of the last canto there is never a moment when the story does not
move silently ahead, dynamically, inevitably, since the author has
been able to withhold comment, and since he has purposely avoided
an obvious climax. Mr. Robinson can no longer see climax in
life, for to him destinies are decided well in advance of any
catastrophe, so that the climax that does appear in the poem is
one miraculously cast in overtones. No word comes from the
poet that it is at hand. No word comes from the characters. The
word is found in the reader’s mind, forcing him to believe its
presence. He knows that Gabrielle, though she would “shrivel
to deny it”, is come to the end of all her hopes. He knows she
can only accept her fate. There is nothing more to say. The poet
has only set down the theme, for the story has of its own force
driven itself to its conclusion with the majestic restraint of an
Aeschylean tragedy.
Mr. Robinson has discovered that to take Nature as she is is
not necessarily to say to the player that he may sit on the piano.
Yet this taking of Nature as she is, despite the fact that Mr.
Robinson calls the theme a “good deal of a mix up”, in no wise
complicates the bare plot. Roman Bartholow, an ailing descendant
of an old Maine family, is brought to know again the joy of life
by acquaintance with a man that comes to visit him and forgets
to go away. This Penn-Raven, though he works a cure for
Bartholow, succeeds in doing the opposite for Roman’s wife. He
falls in love with her and, before the opening of the poem, has
for some time possessed her adequately. Gabrielle is a peculiar
character, but let it suffice here to say that the liaison with Penn-Raven
is no answer to her problem. In Bartholow she married
the wrong man, and the Raven she comes to find intolerable. She
is one who has always suffered disappointments. It is no wonder,
therefore, that, realizing she cannot fully enter into Bartholow’s
renascence as he would have her do, in an effort to save for him
his new-found light she drowns herself. Thenceforward the
solution is cruelly plain. Bartholow, unaware of Gabrielle’s act
and provoked by Penn-Raven, pays him to leave the house. Word
is then brought that Gabrielle is drowned. That is in midsummer.
It is fall when Bartholow himself leaves the house forever to go
whither he will, cherishing the light of his regeneration the while
he thinks of Gabrielle who couldn’t follow his rebirth, not being
reborn in his manner, and who threw herself away.
These men and this one woman are the persons around whom
the whole power of Mr. Robinson’s poetry abides. Yet there is
one of whom I have not spoken, a fisherman who, though playing
a minor part, frets his useful time upon the stage. He makes his
appearance in the two opening cantos and again in the last two.
Once in the final scene between Penn-Raven and Gabrielle he is
referred to as one who knows more of their relation than even
Bartholow. Thus his function is immediately evident. He is the
chorus that gives its warning and advice. More than that, he is
the mouthpiece to Mr. Robinson’s own thoughts.
That spring when, out of a winter steeped in night, Bartholow
was
reborn to breathe again
Insatiably the morning of new life,
there came to him from across the river this prophet-fisherman,
this hobo scholiast with his face “to frighten Hogarth” who was
at once
Socratic, unforgettable, grotesque,
Inscrutable, and alone.
He came to Bartholow dressed in “a checkered inflammation of
myriad hues” and bearing as a peace-offering for his appearance
a catch of trout for breakfast. Presumably he came to bring the
fish and drink a glass, but incidentally he was curious to investigate
this new birth of Roman’s and to discover if it blinded his eyes
so that he saw nothing further than acquaintance between Penn-Raven
and his wife. Wherefore he sat with Roman and heard
recounted the glory of being alive once more. But Umfraville
was wise. He was in the eyes of the world “irremediably defeated”
and for that reason had hid himself back in the woods
where he
lived again the past
In books, where there were none to laugh at him
And where—to him, at least—a world was kind
That is no more a world.
Hence from this distance he was able to understand the flood of
human nature and capable of pronouncing judgment upon it. He
was gifted, as he said, with an “ingenuous right of utterance”
which gave him full license to speak his mind. He knew that
Gabrielle’s unfaithfulness must come to Roman’s ears. He knew
the tragedy that it would be to this proud, sensitive friend of his,
and, knowing it, offered his aid if ever Roman’s light should be
obscured.
It is in brilliant contrast to this “unhappy turtle” that Penn-Raven
appears, Penn-Raven, the bounder, archguest, corruptor
and healer in one breath. He it is, with his solid face, thick lips
and violet eyes, upon whom “one may not wholly look and live”,
for in Penn-Raven there is more of the devil than is safe to
investigate. The devil only knows why he came to Bartholow,
why he possessed those violet eyes withal, and, after he had met
Gabrielle, why the devil he ever went away. He was large and
muscular and imbued with a healthy-mindedness which could
purge the soul of Roman. Not only was he able to change this
man’s outlook upon life, bringing him light where only darkness
had lain, but he could worm his way to the heart of Gabrielle
and make her his for as long as he chose. He loved her with all
the force of his animal self, yet he could hint to her that she was
insufficient to Bartholow’s present needs. Callous Penn-Raven!
He never understood Gabrielle, though he later called her “flower
and weed together”. In her he saw mostly the weed, the woman
who had forsaken her husband and who might be expecting him
to take her away. So he thought and so he said to her, not
noticing the agony he caused. He did not know the woman he
later called the flower who, though she had surrendered herself to
his affections, yet saved for Roman a far transcending love. Thus
to hint that she go with him was perhaps insulting her. At any
rate it was a brutal intimation, a selfish one—and Penn-Raven was
always brutal and always selfish. He could cry aloud of his
tragedies and disillusions, the while the woman by his side was
preparing herself to die. He could confront the husband with
a nasty truth, looking upon him with those violet eyes, half
triumphant and half sad. “Setting it rather sharply,” he could
say, “you married the wrong woman.”
Poor Bartholow and proud! Stung with the malevolent implications
with which Penn-Raven sought to gain Gabrielle,
Bartholow once leaped upon him, feeling his “thick neck luxuriously
yielding to his fingers”, and in his absurd pride thought to
throttle him. At that time he was experiencing more pain than
ever he had through the long winter before. He as a proud idealist
was waking up to the fact that to be bathed in a new light is not
to be external to sorrow.
Imagine his position. During the months previous to the spring
when he “ached with renovation”, Bartholow had suffered from
the malady of the sick-soul. His hopes were dulled, his ideals
gone crashing. In his wife, for whom he cherished a desire to
bring her closer to his thoughts, he found a woman cold and
bitter from the disappointments she had suffered. Plainly she
knew she had married the wrong man, plainly he did not know it.
For to him life meant no more than disillusion, until one day,
perhaps in April, life brought Penn-Raven with his zest for living,
with his red-corpuscular religion of healthy-mindedness. To
Bartholow, ready to catch at anything, this formidable spirit was
the light. He grasped and claimed it. The light was his remaking.
He was of the elect of earth, the twice-born. With joy gleaming
in his eyes, he was up at dawn that spring morning,
Affirming his emergence to the Power
That filled him as light fills a buried room
When earth is lifted and the light comes in.
Penn-Raven was the Friend! Blessed Penn-Raven! He had
given him gold with which to build the city of his desires. There
was Gabrielle. How glad she would be to help him build that
city, that house of gold in particular where he and she should
live! She should be partner to his every mood. Gabrielle too
should receive rebirth and with him build that house. Poor
Bartholow!
Bartholow is a man upon whom the Light has fallen. What
he will do with it is the subject of the poem. Where Lancelot
was the study of a man in pursuit of the Light, Roman Bartholow
is the study of a man after the Light had come. If both men were
heroes in the sense that Galahad was a hero, no suffering would be
entailed. But these are mortal men and mortal men are plagued
with ignorance and frailty. Each has to learn that when the Light
gleams before him he must follow it alone. Alone he must live in
the Light. Alone he must fight for it. Few men know this and
of all men Bartholow was the most unaware.
Bartholow then, because he did not know that his new position
demanded the leaving of the old, still clung, but with added eagerness,
to the hope of entering into spiritual communion with his
wife. He was ever besieging her with his hopes and reproving
her for delinquency, but by degrees he came to perceive that she
would never erect that house with him. Gabrielle had two reasons,
neither of which he knew. She was no longer his wife and she
alone realized that the Light for him might mean the night for her.
Roman was too wrapt up in himself to discover the first, the
second he could learn, as Gabrielle had learned, only through
suffering. So on he hoped and thought about it. Then Gabrielle,
revealing that weakness, that was so peculiarly hers, of telling
preferably the wrong and obvious reason for her delinquency to
the right and subtle one, made it out to him that she could not
share his light because Penn-Raven was hers too intimately.
Anon came the Raven himself and forced the truth upon the
husband, making a darkness to cover him that was far more
agonizing than any he had known. When Bartholow saw this
and would abandon the Light to seek again a less tormented existence,
Penn-Raven said to him, “There is no going back”. He
said, with an insight and eloquence unusual to him,
Your doom is to be free. The seed of truth
Is rooted in you, and the seed is yours
For you to eat alone. You cannot share it
Though you may give it, and a few thereby
May take of it and so not wholly starve.
...
Your dawn is coming where a dark horizon hides it,
And where a new day comes with a new world.
The old place that was a place for you to play in
Will be remembered as a man remembers
A field at school where many victories
Were lost in one defeat that was itself
A triumph over triumph—now disowned
In afterthought. You know as well as I
That you are the inheritor to-night
Of more than all the pottage or the gold
Of time would ever buy. You cannot lose it
By gift or sale or prodigality
Nor any more by scorn. It is yours now,
And you must have it with you in all places,
Even as the wind must blow.
Like Job, when Jehovah spoke to him out of the heavens, Bartholow
listened to the sentence placed upon him by one who had
brought him light only to obscure it darkly. He listened and
behold he was like a man that understands. He was quickly to
know what Gabrielle in her suicide had done for him, and it was
well he understood, before he learned of her, that he was free to
live a life of knowledge and of sympathy with man, that he was
alone, and that not even Gabrielle could build a golden house with
him. Sadly he replied,
When a man’s last illusion, like a bubble,
Covered with moonshine, breaks and goes to nothing,
And after that is less than nothing,
The bubble had then better be forgotten
And the poor fool that blew it be content
With knowing he was born to be a fool.
Poor Bartholow! It was a hard road along which he forced
himself to go, proud, defiant, hopeful, until the night when he
found the Raven, like a reproving older child, pinning him to his
chair lest he again try to annihilate him. After that he knew what
was before him, for he was no longer hopeful, defiant, or proud.
He had learned as Lancelot and like him
in the darkness he rode on
Alone; and in the darkness came the Light.
Penn-Raven had brought the Light and showed Bartholow how
it must be followed. But it was Gabrielle who was “too beautiful
to be alive” that revealed to him its incessant worth. It was
Roman’s wife who failed and died, Gabrielle whom Penn-Raven
loved, for whom Roman hungered, Gabrielle, whose
dark morning beauty
Was like an armor for the darts of time
Where they fell yet for nothing and were lost
Against the magic of her slenderness,
Gabrielle in whom there was much of spring, much of chilly fall,
much of Botticelli—a shadowed mingling of violets and wintergreen.
Bartholow saw this and that morning, when she stood in
the doorway, half awake, watching his springtime antics of adoration
of his new self in his looking-glass, he found her irresistible
and
crushed
The fragrant elements of mingled wool
And beauty in his arms and pressed with his
A cool silk mouth, which made a quick escape,
Leaving an ear—to which he told unheard
The story of his life intensively.
“He told unheard”. There, there was the cloud that must bring
him darkness. Gabrielle did not heed him.
For the sake of an explanation, let us first attribute her listlessness
to a dislike of physical affections from her husband. Let us
say, along with Penn-Raven, that she retreated from Roman
because she was an adultress, that she told him she would never
build that house because that house would be founded on a lie.
Infidelity must out. How great then would be the tumbling down
of Roman’s house! A woman guilty as she could never hope to
build a spiritual house.
Such an explanation of Gabrielle’s lack of enthusiasm is at first
glance somewhat superficial. The Gabrielle of the poem who has
moved us so profoundly is not the woman Penn-Raven describes
in this manner. Gabrielle was not motivated by selfishness and
cowardice. She did not die because she feared her husband.
Yet, however one interpret Gabrielle, this judgment of her, which
Penn-Raven voiced, remains partially correct. Gabrielle was
essentially “flower and weed together”. In the eyes of the men
the weed was uppermost and, provokingly at that, discouragingly
beautiful. Wintergreen and violets! This weed to Bartholow
was just a bit shallow and colder than any fish in any ocean. She
mocked his renascent gestures, his Greek, and even mistook Apollo
for Narcissus when she found him looking in his mirror. She
even had a cursed habit of innuendo, so it seemed, for after a
pretty speech of his about a soul groping in its loneliness, out she
came with a furtive remark that the fish upon her plate was
“beautiful, even in death”.
Shallow Gabrielle! Selfish, faithless, beautiful Gabrielle! Thus
men saw her until it was too late to see her again. Like Flammonde,
what was she and what was she not?
Gabrielle’s superficiality, at first so evident, appears to be explained
by her later actions. In cantos IV and V Gabrielle is very
far from any taint of superficiality. It is only at the outset that
she gives the impression. This is done by Mr. Robinson in order
that the reader may understand the attitudes of Bartholow and
Penn-Raven toward her. What Gabrielle really is the reader will
shortly discover. But the touch of the weed, nevertheless, remains.
It was part of Gabrielle and she employed it as a protection against
her lovers. Fearing lest Penn-Raven find her suffering, she preferred
to be tortured by him rather than reveal herself. Against
Bartholow she adopted it because, knowing herself to be totally
outside his mystical experience, she hoped to ease his desires of
building impossible houses.
Gabrielle, indeed, is worthy of infinite pity. Beset at once by
the Raven’s exhortations that she go away with him, and by her
husband with his mysticism, her situation was precarious. No
light had come to her, but since it had fallen blessedly upon her
husband, to aid him in his holding it was her duty. That she
might desert him to sink again into the night she refused to consider.
That she might do nothing but remain with him she
pondered carefully. If so she stayed she could not save him. She
was not worthy, as he himself had bitterly reproached her, of his
mysteries. Yet how he prayed she might be! Without her all
would be as it had been, though Gabrielle knew differently. She
knew he must follow the Light alone. Such was the law. It was
decreed that she look with “tired and indolent indifference” upon
the spring that was for Roman the beginning of a new life. “I
am not worthy of your mysteries”, she had said with an insight at
once supreme. Afterwards she told him,
You understand it
You and your new-born wisdom, but I can’t;
And there’s where our disaster like a rat,
Lives hidden in our walls.
...
Even a phantom house if made unwisely
May fall down on us and hurt horribly.
A different light was come to Gabrielle. As she spoke these
words, a “pale fire” descended upon her, shriveling the weed,
giving luxuriance to the flower. A miracle alone could have
revealed to her the truth, and if it was not a miracle, it was the
light from her own tragedy. She had failed, in marrying Bartholow,
to find the being she sought. Likewise Penn-Raven had
disappointed her. But she loved her husband for the light that
had come to him. The Light was greater than herself. Wherefore
of Bartholow she thought,
If my life would save him,
And make him happy till he died in peace,
I’m not so sure he mightn’t have it.
No one had known the flower that grew within the weed. No
one had cared to search beyond a certain libidinous examination.
She, however, was aware. The command was come that she save
Bartholow. She accepted. With her determination made she
resisted two trying interviews with Penn-Raven and her husband,
who successively tried to wound her sensitivity more deeply. The
Raven groaned about his tragedies and disillusions, while Gabrielle
was going out to die. There was nothing more in life for her
than an austere duty, implacable and dark.
Where the Light falls, death falls;
And in the darkness comes the Light.
But a cruel farewell to her husband and the faces were for her
no more. This woman, greater in every way than Vivian or
Guinevere, Gabrielle, the one complete and incisive expression of
a poet’s ideal, the crowning achievement to a brilliant tier of
characters, Gabrielle who stepped above the broken ruins of her
life to save a weak man, this Gabrielle crept stilly from the house
and, before descending, paused a moment in the night.
Now she could see the moon and stars again
Over the silvered earth, where the night rang
With a small shrillness of a smaller world,
If not a less inexorable one,
Than hers had been; and after a few steps
Made cautiously along the singing grass,
She saw the falling lawn that lay before her,
The shining path where she must not be seen,
The still trees in the moonlight, and the river.
Yes, she was surely dead before she died. Tragedies had been
her secret playthings and there was nothing left, nothing but to
follow her peculiar light. Like Juliet her dismal scene she must
act alone. She must go—forever. But the going was not difficult,
for she was dead before she died.
Truly if one lingers over this pitiable death of Gabrielle’s, protesting
against a destiny that will enact such evil, there is bound
to rise in one’s mind the many instances in Mr. Robinson’s poetry
where the same story is told. It is in The Children of the Night
that this judgment of the world found its earliest expression,
thenceforward developing until it has now reached its culmination.
Here, in Roman Bartholow, in the magic loveliness of Gabrielle
it has come to a noble conclusion.
Previous to this poem Mr. Robinson’s philosophy has expressed
itself negatively. It is his belief that evil is the result of moral
choice. He does not call disease, accident, or war by the name of
evil, because it is possible to look forward to a day when such
excrescences will be removed. Evil, to Mr. Robinson, is that
which is ineradicable and the ineradicable is the situation resulting
from moral choice. Man has little free will. He is continuously
obliged to make a choice against his wish, a choice that will bring
disappointment. We have seen how Orestes was locked in evil
perplexity when the alternative was presented: either to obey
heaven, slay his mother, and be damned by earth, or to obey earth,
forgive his mother, and be damned by heaven. Whichever
road he followed evil overtook him. Whichever road we choose,
says Mr. Robinson, evil must overtake us—with this one exception,
however, that whereas Aeschylus believed the gods brought man
to his doom, Mr. Robinson maintains that it is man’s own frailty.
Take Lancelot for an example. Lancelot has come to a point
where he must make a moral choice. Either he can accept the
Light and forsake Guinevere, or he can retain the Queen and
lose the Light. The alternative is implacable. The one or the
other, it says. There is no middle way nor any synthesis. To
accept the new situation and leave the old, that is the way of truth.
Only by that way can man hope to achieve happiness. If he
attempt to mediate, then he will lash himself and cry in Lancelot’s
words,
God, what a rain of ashes falls on him
Who sees the new and cannot leave the old!
Thus, previous to Roman Bartholow, Mr. Robinson, believing
that man can rarely leave his old surroundings for the new, has
developed his philosophy from the negative side. He has not
treated of the attainment of the Light, but has showed the struggle
of the man who is making the choice. He has been interested in
the man’s failure and in consequence he has written of Merlin,
Lancelot, and of Seneca Sprague.
With Roman Bartholow, however, he has represented in
Gabrielle a complete and final expression of the positive side of
his philosophy. Many years ago in an exquisite lyric, Bon
Voyage, he wrote fleetingly of a man who saw his light and
claimed it. But the poem was only a scherzo, a dash down the
hill. Mocking the “little archive men” who tried to extract therefrom
a “system” of thought, it raced away. Yet it contained a
seed that to-day has burst into a flower that Gabrielle is, or was.
It told of a man who had left the old. He had been as courageous
as Galahad. To-day Gabrielle is such.
Roman, of course, in finding the Light, was obliged to abandon
his earlier hopes of building that house with Gabrielle. Roman
like Lancelot was unable to meet that requirement. He failed,
and would have perished had it not been for Gabrielle. She was
to reveal to him her incessant worth. The Light for Gabrielle
demanded a mad sacrifice. There was no happiness entailed.
There was alone the recompense of that cold, resistless river.
Leaving an inexorable world as she followed the light, she was, to
complete the list of the poet’s figures, the one
who had seen and died,
And was alive now in a mist of gold.
Thus, after the tale is told, comes the realization of the ultimate
isolation of man. Gabrielle had gone away alone. Penn-Raven
too had disappeared. Each was bound from the other by ineradicable
law. There never could have been a golden house with
two to build it. It is not thus we are made. Bartholow was to
come to understand that he could not build but by himself, that
his renascence was a gift to him alone. It was Umfraville, who
saw what he could see and was accordingly alone, who summed
it up when he said,
There were you two in the dark together
And there her story ends. The leaves you turn
Are blank; and where a story ends it ends.
So Bartholow left him there on the steps of the old house that
he had sold after the others had disappeared. Umfraville was
free and Bartholow, with his memories before him, was alone and
free. A cold fire was his light to prove, but he knew it never
would go out. There would always be with him the memories of
Gabrielle, the cool fragrance of her body, the silent beauty of her
deed. The key he held in his hand was the key to the ivied house.
The key he held was his no longer. For the last time it had locked
for him a door that once had opened to so much pain. But a tide
was come and there were no more sand castles. All was as it had
been and was to be.
They are all gone away,
The House is shut and still,
There is nothing more to say.
LEWIS P. CURTIS.
A Little Learning — I. — II. — III. — IV. — V. — VI. — VII. — VIII.
It was one of those blistering July afternoons that sometimes
descend upon people who have traveled a long way in the
palatial discomfort of a Pullman, only to find themselves completing
the last leg of their journey amid the democratic rattle-ty-bang
of an antique, plush-lined day-coach. Several cars in
advance, the energetic branch line locomotive was belching clouds
of smoke and whistling shrilly at each spralling crossroad; while
within the day-coach itself, a faded sign proclaimed that persons
of color would only be tolerated on the last three seats of each
car, and thus localized the scene to one of those down at the heel
Southern railroads that have not yet recovered from the Civil
War.
The greater part of the passengers were negroes, prosperously
dressed, and covertly taking pains to be as obnoxious as possible
to the little group of whites entrenched in a compact and strategic
position among the last three seats of the car. Of the latter, one
was a grey-haired gentlewoman of the old South, her expression
combining with the pride of blood a certain indefinable mellow
sweetness. A blue-eyed child of six sat by her side, and perhaps
he too was conscious of his descent, but he kept his nose glued
close to the window for all that. Behind these two, in a little
compartment formed by turning two seats together, sat three
ruddy farm girls in uncomfortable attitudes of acute self-consciousness.
They had been giggling and overflowing with spirits
during most of the trip, but the appearance of a young man in the
seat opposite, at the last junction, had reduced their exuberance
and heightened their curiosity. For, on one side of the neatly
strapped suitcase which he had erected beside him as a sort of
barrier from the negroes, appeared the legend, “P. R. Melton,
N. Y. C.”
Thought Philip Melton, “Niggers ... niggers and heat ... the
Devil putting collars of mustard plaster on damned souls....
“Common, common, common sort of girls ... perfectly decent,
but not my class ... too muscular, or maybe it’s fat....
“Nice little chap ... eyes, hair, skin ... football some day ...
wonder if his grandmother’s a Carroll ... aristocrat....
“Hot ... gosh....
“Marion ... letters ... letters in my pocket ... mush, but not common
... my class ... glad I’m a gentleman ... ‘known by what he
does not do’ ... clickety clack, clickety clack, clickety clack....
“Marion ... never wrote a girl stuff like that before ... laps it
up all right ... must practice on some one ... my class, not common
at all....
“‘The man who seduces a pure country girl because he fears
the diseases of the city deserves to be flayed alive’ ... funny ...
seduce is such a nasty word....
“Clickety clack, clickety clack, clack, click.... Fool train had to
get here some time....”
As he clattered down the precipitous steps of the day-coach,
the last of which was a clear jump of at least two feet, Philip
saw the tall, still vigorous figure of his uncle detach itself from
the crowd and come forward with its perpetually surprising grace.
“Glad to see you, boy.” The words had something soothingly
restful about them that betrayed the unhurried country gentleman.
“A very long, hot ride, I’m afraid, and the train late as usual.
Your mother well? And Don’ld?” The last name was slurred
with the paternal carelessness of the man who has lived to ask
his youngest brother’s son whether that brother is well.
“I brought Marion over in the car.” The clear eyes twinkled
mischievously. “She was sitting on the porch as I drove by, and
it seemed to me you rather liked her last summer. Mind she
doesn’t wind you around her little finger before your two weeks
are over. These ministers’ daughters—” The phrase melted
away, and his uncle turned to direct the chauffeur. But Philip
smiled inwardly. He knew his favorite uncle had once been “a
bad man among the ladies”, as they put it in the South.
That night Philip lay half smothered in his enormous feather
bed, and thought again, this time in retrospect. He was a boy
whom a nagging illness had kept secluded during most of his
early life, and the previous Freshman year at college had filled
him with restless new ideas. Adolescence, too long delayed, was
upon him with a vengeance, at last.
“Good move, coming here ... she’s certainly one of the most
naturally beautiful girls I ever saw ... skin a little off, perhaps....
Lord, how can people stand to eat sausages the way they do here
... we’ll have them to-morrow ... in July!
“Somehow I feel too overconfident.... God help us if she ever
really falls in love with me ... still, I don’t quite see why that’s
my lookout ... Don Juan....”
“See here, Philip Melton, you’re an ass!” (That was the voice
of common sense, speaking in crisp periods.) “You’ve never kissed
a girl in your life, and you’ve thought too much about it lately.
You’ve always been too bashful to even flirt with sub-debs. And
now that curiosity, not romance, has gotten hold of you, and
you’ve achieved the enormous conquest of receiving a few sloppy
letters from a country clergyman’s daughter, you think—! Don
Juan, blaah!” (And common sense disgustedly retired.)
But Philip’s thoughts soon began to drift in the old channel.
And egotism, which lies crushed into its corner during waking
hours, came out and sported in the land of demi-dreams.
“She blushed once, really.... I saw her do it ... and she let me
take her hand practically as long as I wanted to, to look at her
ring.
“Oh Phil, you’re not so bad ... you’ll learn ... learn ... lllle....”
Sleep.
The river was not very broad. It curved and twisted between
ranks of weeping willows, and, just as Philip grew tired of rowing,
a perfect grotto of a cove beckoned them to come in and rest.
Marion had taken off her ugly rubber bathing cap while Philip
rowed, and as they slid among the green and golden shadows of
the willows, he was almost startled at the beauty of her hair. It
seemed to flow about her shoulders in a leaping cascade of light
and shadow, and Philip’s throat tightened as he watched it. Then
he remembered that he was in search of love, not beauty, and
that with a girl one must “shoot a line”. The boat touched the
bank with a soft plash, and Philip summoned courage to mention
one of his poems, which he said had come to him while he was
rowing her up the river.
It began:
“Oh, how I wish I might transmute the arts,
And make of poetry a long caress—”
and, aside from the questionable novelty of addressing a short
poem to one’s love in Elizabethan blank verse, it was neither
better nor worse than the efforts of many young poets, not as yet
nipped in the bud.
A week later, Philip could lie out on the terrace of his uncle’s
garden, sunning himself, and muse somewhat as follows:
“I’m getting the hang ... not a doubt in the world ... last night,
now ... her hair is awfully nice when you feel it on your cheek....
“I think I’d better not try poetry ... again ... maybe ... it sounds
too well ... too as if I weren’t really feeling deeply....
“Still I’ve got her going mighty well ... last night she said,
‘Maybe, just one before you go’.... I’ve thought of an awfully
romantic way to do it....
“Poor Marion.... I wonder if I could really break her heart....
I mean I hope she’ll soon get over it when I’m gone....
“Anyhow I’ll never be afraid of Peggy Armitage again.... I’ve
got the hang ... damn it ... got the hang....”
The Gods seemed to have conspired with Philip to make his
last night in the South all that he could have wished. He and
Marion had been rowing again in the moonlight, and now that it
had really grown very late, they were sitting in a secluded arbor
at the far end of the garden, which looked out over the river.
The moon, which had been waxing ever since Philip’s arrival,
was now full. And great trailing strands of the weeping willows
shut them up alone, in a little secret lattice of moon shadows.
Her head was resting lightly against his shoulder, and they were
speaking only now and then in whispers. She was very lovely, a
pale lady of the moon, and he felt himself yearn strangely toward
her. The note in his voice was not forced now. She seemed to
feel it, and as his eager lips bent down to hers she met them firmly
with her own, warm and yielding. For a long, long minute the
kiss lasted. Philip’s sensations seemed to ebb and fuse together.
Then suddenly the moment passed. Habit reasserted itself, and
Philip thought, “Lord! The trapper trapped! Another minute
and I’d have proposed!”
It was afternoon on the broad, cool veranda. Philip had departed
northward by the morning train, and a twinkling-eyed old
gentleman was sipping great cooling sips of julep through a straw.
He had once been a bad man among the ladies, and perhaps a
casual observer might have thought he was so still. At least, the
laughing girl at his side seemed not to lack for entertainment.
“Ah but, my dear Maid Marion, you forget that after all
Philip is my nephew.”
“And that should make him quite invincible to my poor
charms?”
“Invincible! And you say he kissed you! Really, my dear,
these minsters’ daughters—”
“And you a vestryman! But seriously, Mr. Melton, Philip got
to making love awfully well toward the last—except the poetry—that
was always terrible! You are to be congratulated, sir! With
my aid you have started your nephew on the road to ruin!”
“Dear child! And have you never heard me say he is my
favorite nephew?”
LAIRD GOLDSBOROUGH.
Book Reviews — The Captain’s Doll. By D. H. Lawrence . (Thomas Seltzer.) — Members of the Family. By Owen Wister . (The MacMillan Company.) — A Book of British and American Verse. Edited by Henry Van Dyke . (Doubleday, Page & Co.) — The Goose Step. By Upton Sinclair . (Paine Book Co.)
There is, in all living literature, a kind of between-the-lines
expression of the atmosphere belonging to the described
period and the described place. With the advent of literary
interest in thought as well as action, the point of view peculiar to
the time, the race, and the situation has been present also. To
create these mysterious things by connotation from the written
word, so that the reader becomes, temporarily, contemporary and
incident with the characters of the story, is at least one of the
essentials of a permanent novel. And while I am not at all prepared
to predict permanency for The Captain’s Doll, I feel that
Mr. Lawrence has been particularly happy in this strange business
of evoking environmental atmosphere.
For instance, there is a moment in the first “novelette”—the
volume contains three—when the German Countess-heroine and
the Scotch Captain-hero are climbing a Tyrol Alp in a motorbus.
The Alps and a motorbus! Everywhere, against the naked looming
rocks and great glaciers, the blue sky and the blown clouds, are
bulky trucks, picknickers, and “the wrong kind of rich Jews”.
There are wild mosses and berry bushes among the rocks, but
“the many hundreds of tourists who passed up and down did not
leave much to pick”. Yet the exhilaration and the spell that
belong to climbing even a civilized mountain are there; the civilized
climbers get out of their lorry and feel it. The German Countess
feels it in a glad, pagan abandonment: she likes the wind in her
face, and she likes to see “away beyond, the lake lying far off and
small, the wall of those other rocks like a curtain of stone, dim
and diminished to the horizon. And the sky with curdling clouds
and blue sunshine intermittent”. She “breathes deep breaths”,
and says, “Wonderful, wonderful to be high up!” The English-Scot
feels it, but in a different way. “His eyes were dilated with
excitement that was ordeal or mystic battle rather than the
Bergheil ecstacy.” He looks soulfully out, out of the world,
hating the mountains for their excitement, and their “uplift” that
takes him beyond himself, and he feels bigger than the mountains.
All that, as Mr. Lawrence tells it, comes pretty close to “getting”
these races in a phase of our era, a phase which is important
because man in relation to nature is man at his best. And anyone
who has climbed mountains of late years will appreciate the realism
of the picture, and of the story’s atmosphere.
But I said I could not predict the future for The Captain’s Doll.
To me, Mr. Lawrence seems supremely able in handling the psychology
of the moment, but less effective with the dynamic
psychology necessary for his drama. I am not sure his characters
would act as they do; I think no others would. Through a series
of individual snapshots which are real to the life, Captain Hepburn
and Countess Hannele move in a manner I cannot take for
granted. More decidedly I should apply this criticism to the
principals in the second story, The Fox. Over time, these people
are all a little queer: it is the fault in most of this “new” kind
of writing.
D. G. C.
When the cauldron of contemporary American literature has
boiled down and the dross been skimmed off by the years,
there will be a special and enduring mold set aside for the works
of Owen Wister. In his writings and in the pictures of Frederick
Remington a richly romantic period of our national life will be
long preserved. The Virginia, Lin McLean, and Scipio Le Moyne,
even as the nightingale, were not born for death. As Scipio
himself remarked, “I ain’t going to die for years and years.”
The eight short stories included in Members of the Family are
typical of Mr. Wister’s most delightful and vivid manner. Those
who enjoyed The Virginian or Red Men and White will wax
happy over such tales as The Gift Horse and Where It Was.
Owen Wister’s characters are unusual to us, but like that most
fanciful of characters, Long John Silver, they live. For humor,
strength of plot, characterization, and general worth this collection
takes rank with the very highest.
F. D. A.
As a general rule anthologies are of a distinct sameness. The
most noticeable thing, therefore, in regard to this collection
of verse by Henry Van Dyke is his novel method of arrangement.
Instead of fitting the poems in chronologically he segregates them
according to their poetical form. The volume is divided into six
sections, devoted respectively to: ballads; idylls or stories in verse;
lyrics; odes; sonnets and epigrams; and elegies and epitaphs.
As to the selection, it is as judicious as one would expect coming
from Mr. Van Dyke. An attractive feature is the inclusion of a
considerable number of modern poems. In quantity the collection
lies between the Oxford Book of English Verse and Burton
Stevenson’s Home Book of Verse, being nearer to the former.
It is especially adapted for use in class-room work and is a valuable
addition to a small library, from a utilitarian as well as an aesthetic
viewpoint.
F. D. A.
Thorough discussion of this latest book by Upton Sinclair
is a task that would require many pages. A brief dissertation
upon his remarks about Yale, however, will suffice to shed considerable
light upon the book as a whole.
Commenting upon the University in general, Mr. Sinclair remarks:
“But the secret societies come in, and now Yale is just
what Princeton is, a place where the sons of millionaires draw
apart and lead exclusive lives.” Disregarding for the moment
the innuendo cast upon the societies here, it seemed best to interview
the millionaire we know in order to ascertain whether he was
really being secretly exclusive. The cause of research suffered
when he proved to be out for the evening wearing the dress suit
of his neighbor, who was working his way through college and
could not use it himself.
Concerning societies Mr. Sinclair further opines that they encourage
intoxication and venereal disease, but dictate the choice
of clothing, slang, and tobacco, while preventing originality of
cogitation. It is a sad thought, and the woeful plight of the
American college lad is typified by the brazen indifference with
which he bears his shame.
Mr. Sinclair certainly exaggerates—we are now speaking constrainedly,
ourself—but his sincerity no one can doubt, as no one
can sweepingly deny all his charges. He may irritate or he may
distress or he may merely edify, but he always gets a reaction.
F. D. A.
Editor’s Table
Han and Cherrywold came across the campus together.
“What do you think of our first issue?” asked Han.
“Well,” replied Cherrywold, “a little thin, to be sure, but very fine goods—and
mostly home-made, at that.”
“Yes,” mused Han, “and this one shall be better. I look forward to a
short and pleasant evening.”
So saying, they approached the luxurious and delicately heated office
confidently and in the best of spirits. But oh, what enemies lurk in the dark
places ever eager to strike a treacherous blow at the Muse! In the window
of her palace hung a filthy, yellow sheet advertising that altogether despicable
sport of debating. With a mighty oath both jammed their keys into the
lock, tore to the window, and stamped upon this latest outrage. That done,
with spirits not altogether as calm as before, they sat down to wait for the
others, who were, of course, late. In a short while they were joined by
ante-moral, pro-subjective Rabnon. The conversation turned, purely by
chance, upon bastard sons. The question before the house was: Whose
was the greater—Aaron Burr’s or Elihu Yale’s? So rife became the argument
that Cherrywold was dispatched to follow up certain clues and obtain
further information upon the question. In a short while he returned
greatly excited and out of breath. A number of prominent men
had been interviewed—one of whom, though it may be hard to believe, was
a professor. It was, however, decided to withhold the verdict on this remarkable
case until the following month. As we go to press, new evidence
is pouring into the office, owing to our expert secret service department, and
we fully expect to startle the world by an announcement of momentous
import at a near date.
In spite of this coup, our spirits were sorely tried by the sudden entrance
of Mr. and Mrs. Stevens—one hour late! Due to the latter’s persuasive
smile, we controlled our language. Beside, one must be cautious in the
presence of three aliases. Cherrywold re-read Han’s poem for the tenth
time.
“On reading this more and more,” he remarked, “I like it less and less.”
“Then read it less and less,” suggested Mr. Stevens. His wife tittered
approvingly.
After that there was comparative silence, broken only by the muttered
threats of Cherrywold each time he pulled out his watch. Another half-hour
smoked by. Suddenly out of the darkness there appeared in the doorway
a halo. With badly shaken nerves, all stared wildly at the light. Suddenly
the hushed expectancy was broken.
“Well, if it isn’t little sunshine,” cried Rabnon. “And two hours late
at that!”
“Then he’s the cause of all this daylight saving muddle,” asserted Mrs.
Stevens. “Land sakes! Who’d think it to look at him?”
“My gosh!” yelled Cherrywold. “Aren’t we ever going to get down to
work? If the rest of you don’t stop your giggling there won’t be any May
issue. Now, Han, what do you want after this title; I suppose dashes?”
“No, thank you,” replied Han sweetly. “I’ll take dots.”
Eventually something was done, but no one knew exactly what nor cared
much, for by that time it was far into the night and we were all three-quarters
asleep. Some unknown person by the name of Briggs likes to tell
people how to ruin a perfectly good day. He better look to his laurels, for
he’ll have to go some to beat a new series, entitled “How to ruin a perfectly
good evening,” by
CHERRYWOLD.
