Part 13
The brown earth’s my book, and I ride forth to read it. Good-bye! The stream runneth fast, but my will shall outspeed it. Good-bye! I love thee, dear lass, but I hate the hag Sorrow. As sun follows rain, and to-night has its morrow, So I’ll taste of joy, though I steal, beg, or borrow! Good-bye!
This is as admirable a bit of nonchalance as Wither’s,
Shall I, wasting in despair, Die because a woman’s fair?
or Suckling’s,
Why so pale and wan, fond lover, Prithee, why so pale?
with its salient advice to the languishing adorer.
Miss Brown’s small volume is by no means lacking in variety, either in theme or form; it is full of spontaneous music, rarely forcing the note in any lyric inspiration. In the sonnet she is less at ease: here one feels the effort, the mechanism; but only four sonnets are included in the volume, which shows her to be a true critic. There are certain poems that might, perhaps, with equal advantage have been eliminated, such as the over-musical numbers to Dian and Endymion; but in the main, Miss Brown has done her own blue-pencilling, and _The Road to Castaly_, as stated in the beginning, maintains a fine and even grade of workmanship.
In such poems as are touched to tenderness and reverence, half with the sweetness and half with the pain of life, Miss Brown makes her truest appeal. The fine ideality, the spiritual fealty of her nature, as shown in her work, always relates itself to one on the human side. It is not the fealty that shames a weaker nature by its rigid steadfastness, but that in which one sees his own wavering strife reflected. Her lines called “The Artisan,”[2] written since the publication of her volume, are instinct with such feeling as comment would profane. One can but feel, with a quick pang of sympathy, that he, too, makes the appeal:
O God, my master God, look down and see If I am making what Thou wouldst of me. Fain might I lift my hands up in the air From the defiant passion of my prayer; Yet here they grope on this cold altar stone, Graving the words I think I should make known. Mine eyes are Thine. Yea, let me not forget, Lest with unstaunchèd tears I leave them wet, Dimming their faithful power, till they not see Some small, plain task that might be done for Thee. My feet, that ache for paths of flowery bloom, Halt steadfast in the straitness of this room. Though they may never be on errands sent, Here shall they stay, and wait Thy full content. And my poor heart, that doth so crave for peace, Shall beat until Thou bid its beating cease. So, Thou dear master God, look down and see Whether I do Thy bidding heedfully.
These lines well illustrate the fact that true emotion is not literary nor self-observant, and does not cast about for some rare image in which to enshrine itself. Here is the simplest Saxon, and wholly without ornament, yet who could be unconscious of the heart-beat of life in the words? In her poem, “In Extremis,” one is moved by the same intensity of feeling expressed in the litany imploring deliverance from fear.
Of the more purely devotional poems, “Hora Christi” is perhaps the most reverent, and instinct with delicate simplicity. It is a song of the spirit, interpreting a mood whose springs are deep in the pain of life, but whose hidden wells have turned to sweetness and healing. It is not philosophically penetrative, but a tender, beautiful song warm with sincerity of feeling:
Sweet is the time for joyous folk Of gifts and minstrelsy; Yet I, O lowly-hearted One, Crave but Thy company. On lonesome road, beset with dread, My questing lies afar. I have no light, save in the east The gleaming of Thy star.
In cloistered aisles they keep to-day Thy feast, O living Lord! With pomp of banner, pride of song, And stately sounding word. Mute stand the kings of power and place, While priests of holy mind Dispense Thy blessed heritage Of peace to all mankind.
I know a spot where budless twigs Are bare above the snow, And where sweet winter-loving birds Flit softly to and fro; There with the sun for altar-fire, The earth for kneeling-place, The gentle air for chorister, Will I adore Thy face.
Loud, underneath the great blue sky, My heart shall pæan sing, The gold and myrrh of meekest love Mine only offering. Bliss of Thy birth shall quicken me; And for Thy pain and dole Tears are but vain, so I will keep The silence of the soul.
In glancing over _The Road to Castaly_, one notes many poems that might perhaps have represented it better than those chosen, such as “The Return,” “The Unseen Fellowship,” “Mariners,” “Forewarned,” and “Seaward Bound;” but sufficient have been cited to show the quality of the volume and the sympathetic touch which Miss Brown possesses. Her nature poems range from the most exuberant fancy to a Keats-like richness and ripeness of phrase; and her miscellaneous verse from the tender, reverential note of the lyric last quoted to the trenchant scathing lines of “The Slanderer.” It is, in brief, such work as combines feeling and distinction, and leaves one spiritually farther on his way than it found him.
[2] Copyright, 1903, by Harper and Brothers.
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
Sweet comer With the mood of a love-plighted lass,
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:
But it came, In a garment of sensitive flame In the west, and a royal blue sky overhead, With exuberant breath and the bloom of all things Having wonders and wings, Being risen elate from the dead. Yea, it came with a flush Of pied flowers, and a turbulent rush Of spring-loosened waters, and an odorous hush At nightfall,—and then I was glad With the gladness of one who for militant months has been sad.
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”:
In the meadows yonder the wingéd wind Makes billows along the grain; With their sequence swift they bring to mind The swash of the open main,
Till I smell the pungent brine, and hear— Mine eyes grown dim—the cry Of the sailor lads, and feel vague fear Of the storm-wrack in the sky.
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”:
How often in the summer-tide, His graver business set aside, Has stripling Will, the thoughtful-eyed, As to the pipe of Pan, Stepped blithesomely with lover’s pride Across the fields to Anne.
It must have been a merry mile, This summer stroll by hedge and stile, With sweet foreknowledge all the while How sure the pathway ran To dear delights of kiss and smile, Across the fields to Anne.
The silly sheep that graze to-day, I wot, they let him go his way, Nor once looked up, as who should say: “It is a seemly man.” For many lads went wooing aye Across the fields to Anne.
The oaks, they have a wiser look; Mayhap they whispered to the brook: “The world by him shall yet be shook, It is in nature’s plan; Though now he fleets like any rook Across the fields to Anne.”
And I am sure, that on some hour Coquetting soft ’twixt sun and shower, He stooped and broke a daisy-flower With heart of tiny span, And bore it as a lover’s dower Across the fields to Anne.
While from her cottage garden-bed She plucked a jasmine’s goodlihede, To scent his jerkins brown instead; Now since that love began, What luckier swain than he who sped 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:
Here lies a common man. His horny hands, Crossed meekly as a maid’s upon his breast, Show marks of toil, and by his general dress You judge him to have been an artisan. Doubtless, could all his life be written out, The story would not thrill nor start a tear; He worked, laughed, loved, and suffered in his time, And now rests peacefully, with upturned face Whose look belies all struggle in the past. A homely tale; yet, trust me, I have seen The greatest of the earth go stately by, While shouting multitudes beset the way, With less of awe. The gap between a king And me, a nameless gazer in the crowd, Seemed not so wide as that which stretches now Betwixt us two, this dead one and myself. Untitled, dumb, and deedless, yet he is Transfigured by a touch from out the skies Until he wears, with all-unconscious grace, The strange and sudden Dignity of Death.
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:
From their folded mates they wander far, Their ways seem harsh and wild; They follow the beck of a baleful star, Their paths are dream-beguiled.
Yet haply they sought but a wider range, Some loftier mountain-slope, And little recked of the country strange Beyond the gates of hope.
And haply a bell with a luring call Summoned their feet to tread Midst the cruel rocks, where the deep pitfall And the lurking snare are spread.
Maybe, in spite of their tameless days Of outcast liberty, They’re sick at heart for the homely ways Where their gathered brothers be.
And oft at night, when the plains fall dark And the hills loom large and dim, For the Shepherd’s voice they mutely hark, And their souls go out to him.
Meanwhile, “Black sheep! Black sheep!” we cry, Safe in the inner fold; And maybe they hear, and wonder why, And marvel, out in the cold.
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
Friends to friends unknown: Tides that should warm each neighboring life Are locked in frozen stone.
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:
We are the toilers from whom God barred The gifts that are good to hold. We meant full well, and we tried full hard, And our failures were manifold.
And we are the clan of those whose kin Were a millstone dragging them down. Yea, we had to sweat for our brother’s sin And lose the victor’s crown.
The seeming-able, who all but scored, From their teeming tribe we come: What was there wrong with us, O Lord, That our lives were dark and dumb?
The men ten-talented, who still Strangely missed of the goal, Of them we are: it seems Thy will To harrow some in soul.
We are the sinners, too, whose lust Conquered the higher claims; We sat us prone in the common dust, And played at the devil’s games.