Part 15

How we chafed at delay! How we itched to be on! How we yearned for the fray where the battle-reek shone! It was _forward_, not _halt_, stirred the fire in our veins, When our horses’ feet beat to the clink of the reins; It was _charge_, not _retreat_, we were wonted to hear; It was _charge_, not _retreat_, that was sweet to the ear; Those who rode with Kilpatrick had never felt fear!

At last the word came, and troop tossed it to troop; Two squadrons deployed with a falcon-like swoop; While swiftly the others in echelons formed, For there, just ahead, was the line to be stormed. The trumpets rang out; there were guidons ablow; The white summer sun set our sabres aglow; Those who rode with Kilpatrick charged straight at the foe!

We swept like the whirlwind; we closed; at the shock The sky seemed to reel and the earth seemed to rock; Steel clashed upon steel with a deafening sound, While a redder than rose-stain encrimsoned the ground; If we gave back a space from the fierce pit of hell, We were rallied again by a voice like a bell, Those who rode with Kilpatrick rode valiantly well!

Rang sternly his orders from out of the wrack: _Re-form there, New Yorkers! You, Harris Light, back! Come on, men of Maine! we will conquer or fall! Now, forward, boys, forward, and follow me, all!_ A Bayard in boldness, a Sidney in grace, A lion to lead, and a stag-hound to chase— Those who rode with Kilpatrick looked Death in the face!

Though brave were our foemen, they faltered and fled; Yet that was no marvel when such as he led! Long ago, long ago, was that desperate day! Long ago, long ago, strove the Blue and the Gray! Praise God that the red sun of battle is set! That our hand-clasp is loyal and loving—and yet Those who rode with Kilpatrick can never forget!

The Lochinvar key is also struck in the description of Kilpatrick. Mr. Scollard sounds a less sanguinary note in most of the ballads, as that of “The Troopers” or “King Philip’s Last Stand.”

“On the Eve of Bunker Hill,” while recording no thrilling story, has a note of pensive beauty in its quiet description of the preparation for battle before that memorable day, and of the prayer offered in the presence of the soldiers, “ranged a-row” in the open night. The initial stanza gives the setting and key:

’Twas June on the face of the earth, June with the rose’s breath, When life is a gladsome thing, and a distant dream is death; There was gossip of birds in the air, and the lowing of herds by the wood, And a sunset gleam in the sky that the heart of a man holds good; Then the nun-like twilight came, violet-vestured and still, And the night’s first star outshone afar on the eve of Bunker Hill.

Taking the volume throughout, it is a stirringly sung _résumé_ of all the chief deeds in American history to which attach valor and romance, and is not only attractive reading, but should be in the hands of every lad as a stimulus to patriotism, and to focus in his mind, as textbooks could never do, the exploits of the brave and the strong.

In the lyrical narrative poem, such as “Guiraut, the Troubadour,” Mr. Scollard has one of his most characteristic vehicles. The adventures of the singer who sought a maid in Carcassonne are, no doubt, romantically enhanced by association of the name with that of the hapless one who “had not been to Carcassonne;” but it is certain that one follows the troubadour in his “russet raimentry,” drawn by his charm as

Unto the gate of Carcassonne (Ah, how his blithe lips smiled upon The warded gate of Carcassonne!) As light of foot as Love he strode; The budding flowers along the road Bloomed sudden, with his song for lure; And softlier the river flowed Before Guiraut, the troubadour.

* * * * *

Unto a keep in Carcassonne (No sweeter voice e’er drifted on That frowning keep in Carcassonne!) Anon the singer drew anigh,—

but we may not follow his propitious fortunes, glimpsed but to show the manner of their telling. The parenthetical lines, recurring in each stanza, impart a peculiar charm to the recital, but the diction and phrasing, while pleasant and in harmony, have no especial distinction in themselves, and this illustrates a frequent characteristic of Mr. Scollard’s work that the melody often carries the charm rather than the expression or basic theme. He is primarily a singer, he has the “lute in tune,” and the song is so spontaneous as sometimes to outsing the motive. There is always a felicitous, and often unique, turn of phrase and a most imaginative fancy, but one feels in a good deal of the work a lack of acid; it is too bland to bite as deeply as it ought. Just a bit sharper tang is needful.

The message should also inform more vitally the melody, wedding more subtly the outer and inner grace. A poet is a teacher, whether he will or no, and the heart should be the vital textbook of his expounding. It is because of their deeper rooting in life, though a life foreign to us, that the Oriental poems of Mr. Scollard have often greater vitality than the Occidental ones, whose inspiration is found chiefly in nature. His ballads show that he has a sympathetic insight into character and a knowledge of human motive that would, if infused more widely through his work, give to it a warmth of personal appeal and a subjectivity which in many of its phases it now lacks. The golden thread of Joy is woven so constantly into the web of his song that those whose woof is crossed with the hempen thread of Pain are likely to feel that he has no word for them, no hint as to the subtle transformation by which the hempen thread may merge into the gold, when the finished fabric hurtles from the loom. In other words, Mr. Scollard’s work is too objective to carry with it the spiritual meaning that it would if ingrained more deeply in the hidden life of the soul. Along this line lies its finer development: not that it shall lose a jot of its cheer, but that it shall constantly inform it with a richer and deeper meaning.

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:

The day unfolds like a lotos-bloom, Pink at the tip, and gold at the core, Rising up swiftly through waters of gloom That lave night’s shore;

or this vision of—

The cloud-like curve, The loosened sheaf, The ineffable pink of a lotos leaf.

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:

O let me die a singing! O let me drown in light! Another day is winging Out from the nest of night. The morning glory’s velvet eye Brims with a jewelled bead. To-day my soul’s a dragon-fly, The world a swaying reed!

“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

As banners pendent from a mimic wand.

The poem continues:

I wondered long; when, from the drowsy wood, A whisper reached me, “’Tis the Path of Prayer, Where, nightly, Kwannon walks in pitying mood, To read the sad petitions planted there.”

Ah, simple faith! The sun was in the west; And darkness smote with flails his quivering light. Beside the path I knelt; and, with the rest, My alien prayer was planted in the night.

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,—

For thy comfort, Lord, we pray, Namu Amida Butsu! In the rice-fields, day by day, Now the strong ones comb the grain; Once we laughed there in the rain, Stooping low in sun and cold For our helpless young and old; In the rice-fields day by day, Namu Amida Butsu!

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:

For thy mercy, Lord, we pray, Namu Amida Butsu! Let the old roots waste away, That the green may pierce the light! Life and thought, in withered plight, Choke the morning. Far beneath Stirs the young blade in its sheath. Let the old roots pass away! Namu Amida Butsu!

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 the green may pierce the light:—

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

Far beneath Stirs the young blade in its sheath:—

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

Life and thought, in withered plight, Choke the morning,

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”:

Beneath the maples crickets wake, _And chip the silence, flake on flake_.

Or that in which the rain

Brimmed great magnolias up with scented wine.

Or the fir-tree stood,

With clotted plumage sagging to the land.

Or when Fujiyama seen at dawn is pictured as

A crown … self poised in mist,

and again as

A frail mirage of Paradise Set in the quickening air.

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”:

Through powdered mist of dawn-lit pearl and rose There lifts one lotos-peak of cleaving white, The swan-like rhapsody of dying night, Which, softly soaring through the ether, blows To hang there breathless….

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!

Dark on the face of a low, full moon Swayeth the tall bamboo. No flute nor quiver of song is heard, Though sheer on the tip a small brown bird Sways to an inward tune.

O small brown bird, like a dusky star, Lone on the tall bamboo, Thou germ of the soul of a summer night, Thou quickening core of a lost delight, Of ecstasy born afar,

Soar out thy bliss to the tingling air, Sing from the tall bamboo! Loosen the long, clear, syrup note That shimmers and throbs in thy delicate throat; Mellow my soul’s despair!

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:

“Doubt everything,” the Thinker said, When I was parch’d with Reason’s drought. Said he, “Trust me, I’ve probed these things; Have utter faith in me,—and doubt!”

Though the sky reel and Day dissolve, And though a myriad suns fade out, One thing of earth seems permanent And founded on Belief: ’tis—Doubt.

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

What! doubt the Master Workman’s hand Because my fleshly ills increase? No; for there still remains one chance That I am not His Masterpiece.

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:

Yet what have I to do with sweets Like Love, or Wine, or Fame’s dear curse? For I can do without all things Except—except the universe.

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:

Last night I heard a wanton girl Call softly down unto her lover, Or call at least unto the shade Of Cypress where she knew he’d hover.

Said she, “Come forth, my Perfect One; The old bugs sleep and take their ease; We shall have honey overmuch Without the buzzing of the bees.”

Ah, Foolish Ones, I heard your vows And whispers underneath the tree. Her father is more wakeful than She ever dreamed, for I—was he.

I saw them kissing in the shade And knew the sum of all my lore: God gave them Youth, God gave them Love, And even God can give no more.

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:

At first, she loved nought else but flowers, And then—she only loved the Rose; And then—herself alone; and then— She knew not what, but now—she knows.

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:

Yet even for Youth’s fevered blood There is a certain balm here in This maiden’s mouth: O sweet disease! And happy, happy medicine!

And maiden, should these bitter tears You shed be burdensome, know this: There is a cure worth all the pain, —To-night—beneath the moon—a kiss.

Girl, when he gives you kisses twain, Use one, and let the other stay; And hoard it, for moons die, red fades, And you may need a kiss—some day.

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:

It is no call, but rather do their sounds Lash me like brazen whips away from her. They shriek two names to me, Honour and Hell; They drive me with two words, Duty and Death. These are the things that I can only find Outside her arms.