Part 2

But when the crisis of the play is reached, when the court is rife with rumors of the Queen’s disloyalty, and Lancelot and Guinevere, under imminent shadow of exposure, meet by chance in the throne room,—there is drawn a vital, moving picture, one whose art lies in revealing the swift transition from impulse to impulse through which one passes when making great decisions. First, the high light is thrown upon the stronger side of Guinevere, in such meditative passages as these, tinged with a melancholy beauty:

We have had a radiant dream; we have beheld The trellises and temples of the South, And wandered in the vineyards of the Sun:— ’Tis morning now; the vision fades away And we must face the barren norland hills.

_Lancelot._ And must this be?

_Guinevere._ Nay, Lancelot, it is. How shall we stand alone against the world?

_Lancelot._ More lonely in it than against! What’s the world to us?

_Guinevere._ The place in which we live. We cannot slip it from us like a garment, For it is like the air—if we should flee To the remotest steppes of Tartary, Arabia, or the sources of the Nile,— It still is there, nor can it be eluded Save in the airless emptiness of death.

And fortressed with resolve, she speaks of war, of rending the kingdom, of violating friendships, of desecrating the family bond, to all of which Lancelot opposes his own desires:

And I— I, too, defend it when it _is_ a family, As I would kneel before the sacred Host When through the still aisles sounds the sacring bell; But if a jester strutted through the forms And turned the holy Mass into a mock, Would I still kneel, or would I rise in anger And make an end of that foul mimicry?

This but adds strength to Guinevere’s argument,

Believest thou, then, the power of the Church? The Church would give our love an ugly name.

_Lancelot._ Faith, I believe, and I do not believe. The shocks of life oft startle us to thought, Rouse us from acquiescence and reveal That what we took for credence was but custom.

_Guinevere._ You are Arthur’s friend, your love— Stands this within the honor of your friendship?

_Lancelot._ Mother of God—have you no pity?

_Guinevere._ I would I could be pitiful, and yet do right. Alas, how heavy—your tears move me more Than all—(what am I saying? Dare I trust So faint a heart? I must make turning back Impossible);

and with a final resolve she adds:

But know the worst! I jested— I—God!—I do not love you. Go! ’Twas all Mockery—wanton cruelty—what you will—lechery!— I—

(_Lancelot looks at her dumbly, then slowly turns to go. As he draws aside the curtain of the doorway_—)

_Guinevere._ Lancelot!

_Lancelot._ What does the Queen desire?

_Guinevere._ Oh, no, I am not the Queen—I am Your wife! Take me away with you! Let me not lie To you, of all—my whole life is a lie, To one, at least, let it be truth. I—I— O Lancelot, do you not understand? I love you—Oh, I cannot let you go!

This swift change of front, this weakening, this inconsistency, is yet so human, so subtly true to life, under such a phase of it, that the entire scene vibrates with emotion which gathers force in the declaration of Guinevere:

Love, I will fly with thee where’er thou wilt!

and reaches its climax in the sudden strength with which Lancelot meets the Queen’s weakness. During her pleading that he should leave her, his selfish wish had been uppermost; but her weakness recalls him to himself and evokes his latent loyalty to the King:

Speak not of flight; I have played him False—the King, my friend. I ne’er can wipe that smirch away. At least I will not add a second shame And blazon out the insult to the world.

And Guinevere, casting about for her own justification, replies:

What I have given thee was ne’er another’s. How has another, then, been wronged?

To which Lancelot:

What’s done Is done, nor right nor wrong, as help me, Heaven, Would I undo it if I could. But more I will not do. I will not be the Brutus To stab with mine own hand my dearest friend. It must suffice me that you love me, sweet, And sometime, somewhere, somehow must be mine. I know not—it may be in some dim land Beyond the shadows, where the King himself, Still calling me his friend, shall place your hand In my hand, saying, “She was always thine.”

No surplusage, no interposition of the merely literary, cumbers this scene, which immediately precedes the final one, in which Lancelot and the Queen are publicly accused before the King, sitting with Guinevere beside him on the throne.

The opportunity for a great dramatic effect is obvious; but through the magnanimity of Arthur, in waiving the impeachment, and exonerating from suspicion the Queen and Lancelot, the effect is not of the clash and din order, in fact, it is anti-climax in action, the real climax being a spiritual one whose subtlety would be lost on the average audience.

Lancelot (half aside, partly to Guinevere and partly to himself):

Be less kingly, Arthur, Or you will split my heart—not with remorse— No, not remorse, only eternal pain! Why, so the damned are!

Guinevere (half apart):

To the souls in hell It is at least permitted to cry out.

Whatever one may think of the ethical side of the play as wrought out by Hovey, there is no question of its human element. As a whole, “The Marriage of Guenevere” leaves upon one a more concrete and vital impression than do the other dramas of the cycle, though it has less of action and intricacy of plot than the succeeding one, “The Birth of Galahad,” and would probably, for stage purposes, be less effective.

The action of the latter play takes place chiefly with Arthur’s army occupied in the siege of Rome, and unfolds an ingenious plot, turning upon the capture of Dagonet, the Queen’s jester, who has been sent with a letter to Lancelot, informing him of the birth of his son, and announcing that Guinevere, having left the child with her friend, the Princess Ylen, had set out to join the army. The Romans at once conceive the plan of holding Dagonet; capturing the Queen for the palace of Caesar; and giving to Lancelot the alternative of forsaking Arthur, placing himself at the head of the army and becoming tributary king of Britain, with Guinevere as his queen; or of being publicly dishonored by the conveyance to Arthur of the incriminating letter. All of which was artfully planned, and might have been executed as artfully, had not Dagonet, the jester, in an act of jugglery, stolen the Emperor’s cloak and escaped, and, in the guise of a scrivener, attached himself to the service of a young poet of Caesar’s household.

Guinevere is captured by the Romans, and after many unsuccessful machinations on Caesar’s part to subdue her to his will, and on the part of his advisers to win Lancelot to their ends, the letter, which may, according to the law of Britain, bring death to the Queen and banishment to Lancelot, is given to Dagonet to copy for Caesar, and is burned by the jester with the taper given him to heat the waxen tablet. Then comes on apace the sacking of Rome by Arthur; the taking of the city; the rescue of Guinevere by Lancelot; the slaying of Caesar and the crowning of Arthur as Emperor of Rome with Guinevere as Empress. The scene closes with the entrance of a messenger with letters from Merlin, to Arthur and Guinevere, scanning which the Queen says apart to Lancelot:

All’s well with him.

Thus ends the drama, again with no suspicion on the part of Arthur that his faith has been betrayed, and with no remorse on the part of Guinevere at having betrayed it, only increasing joy in the love of Lancelot. It is Lancelot himself who has the conflict, and in his character lies the strength of the drama.

It is evident that Hovey intended to create a flesh-and-blood Arthur, to eliminate the sanctimonious and retain the ideal; but the task proved too difficult, and after opening the reader’s eyes to the human weaknesses of the King, thereby inflicting a shock, he returns to the other extreme, lifts him again into upper air, and leaves him abstract and unconvincing. Lancelot, on the contrary, if too palpably human at the start, grows into a more spiritual ideal, and when for the first time he meets Guinevere transfigured with maternal joy, he greets her with these exquisite words:

How great a mystery you seem to me I cannot tell. You seem to have become One with the tides and night and the unknown. My child … your child … whence come? By What strange forge Wrought of ourselves and dreams and the great deep Into a life? I feel as if I stood Where God had passed by, leaving all the place Aflame with him.

And again he says,

The strangeness is That I, who have not borne him, am aware, I, too, of intimacy with his soul.

The dramas abound in quotable passages, nor are they lacking in those that make the judicious grieve. The work is unequal; but as a whole it lives in the imagination, and remains in the memory, especially “The Marriage of Guenevere,” in that twilight of the mind where dwell all mystic shapes of hapless lovers.

The last of the dramatic cycle, “The Masque of Taliesin,” is regarded by most of Mr. Hovey’s critics as the high-water mark of his verse, and it has certainly some of the purest song of his pen, and profoundest in thought and conception; but it has also passages of unresolved metaphysics, whose place, unless the poet had the patience to shape them to a finer issue, should be in a Greek philosophy.

The Masque turns upon the quest of the Graal by Percival, and is in three scenes, or movements, set in the forest of Broceliande, Helicon, and the Chapel of the Graal. It introduces the Muses, Merlin, Apollo, Nimue, King Evelac, guardian of the Graal, and lesser mortals and deities, but chief in interest, Taliesin, a bard, through whom are spoken the finest passages of the play. As the work is cast in the form of a Masque, to obviate the need of adhering to a strict dramatic structure, one may dispense with a summary of its slight plot, and look, instead, at the verse.

The passages spoken by Apollo to Taliesin, in other words, Inspiration defining itself to the poet, are full of glowing thought:

Greaten thyself to the end, I am he for whose breath thou art greatened; Perfect thy speech to a god’s, I am he for whom speech is made perfect; And my voice in the hush of thy heart is the voice of the tides of the worlds. Thou shalt know it is I when I speak, as the foot knows the rock that it treads on, As the sea knows the moon, as the sap knows the place of the sun in the heavens, As the cloud knows the cloud it must meet and embrace with caresses of lightning. When thou hearest my voice, thou art one with the hurl of the stars through the void, One with the shout of the sea and the stampede of droves of the wind, One with the coursers of Time and the grip of God’s hand on their harness; And the powers of the night and the grave shall avail not to stand in thy path.

Genius and its invincible assurance could scarcely be defined better than in this passage.

The Masque contains a litany spoken by King Evelac, and responded to by the choristers at the Chapel of Graal, which is one of its achievements, in point of beauty, though too long to quote, and lyrics of great delicacy are scattered throughout the work; but in the more spiritual passages, spoken chiefly by Taliesin, one gets the finer quality of the verse, as in this noble query addressed to Uriel, the angel who holds the flaming sword before the Graal:

Thou who beholdest God continually, Doth not his light shine even on the blind Who feel the flood they lack the sense to see? The lark that seeks him in the summer sky Finds there the great blue mirror of his soul; Winged with the dumb need of he knows not what, He finds the mute speech of he knows not whom. Is not the wide air, after the cocoon, As much God as the moth-soul can receive? Doth not God give the child within the womb Some guess to set him groping for the world, Some blurred reflection answering his desire? We, shut in this blue womb of doming sky, Guess and grope dimly for the vast of God, And, eyeless, through some vague, less perfect sense, Strive for a sign of what it is to see.

Had one space to follow Mr. Hovey’s philosophy in the more metaphysical passages, though fashioned less artistically, the individuality of his thought in its subtler and more speculative phases would be revealed, but to trace it adequately one must needs have the volume before him, rather than such extracts as may be given in a brief study. I must therefore, in taking leave of his work, content myself with citing the exultant lines with which the volume closes, the splendid death-song lifting one on the wave of its ecstatic feeling:

Unaware as the air of the light that fills full all its girth, Yet crowds not an atom of air from its place to make way; Growing from splendor to splendor, from birth to birth, As day to the rose of dawn from the earlier gray; As day from the sunrise gold to the luminous mirth Of morning, and brighter and brighter, till noon shall be; Intense as the cling of the sun to the lips of the earth, And cool as the call of a wind on the still of the sea,

Joy, joy, joy in the height and the deep; Joy like the joy of a leaf that unfolds to the sun; Joy like the joy of a child in the borders of sleep; Joy like the joy of a multitude thrilled into one.

* * * * *

Stir in the dark of the stars unborn that desire Only the thrill of a wild, dumb force set free, Yearn of the burning heart of the world on fire For life and birth and battle and wind and sea, Groping of life after love till the spirit aspire, Into Divinity ever transmuting the clod, Higher and higher and higher and higher and higher Out of the Nothingness world without end into God.

Man from the blindness attaining the succor of sight, God from his glory descends to the shape we can see; Life, like a moon, is a radiant pearl in the night Thrilled with his beauty to beacon o’er forest and sea; Life, like a sacrifice laid on the altar, delight Kindles as flame from the air to be fire at its core! Joy, joy, joy in the deep and the height! Joy in the holiest, joy evermore, evermore!

II

LIZETTE WOODWORTH REESE

MISS LIZETTE WOODWORTH REESE is an Elizabethan, not by affectation, but by temperament. Sidney and Lovelace and Herrick and Marlowe are her contemporaries, though she moves among them as a gray-robed figure among gay cavaliers and knights, so restrained is her mood, so delicate in its withholding.

Her first collection is aptly named, _A Handful of Lavender_, for the fragrance of the elder time pervades it impalpably, as the scent of lavender makes sweet the linen of some treasured chest. How Miss Reese has been able, in the hurly-burly of American life, to find some indesecrate corner, some daffodiled garden-close, holding always the quiet and the glint of sunshine out of which these songs have come, is an enigma worth a poet’s solving. She is a Southern woman, which may furnish some clew to the repose of her work. There is time down there to ripen, to let life have its own way of enrichment with one. She has been content to publish three books of verse—although the first is now incorporated with the second—in the interval in which our Northern poets would have produced a half-dozen; nor does she much concern herself, when once the captive melodies are freed, as to their flight. She knows there are magnetic breezes in the common air, charméd winds that blow unerringly, and in whose upper currents song’s wings are guided, as the carrier-doves’, to their appointed goal.

There is a delicate harmony between Miss Reese’s poems and their number, a nicety of adjustment between quality and quantity, that bespeaks the artist. She has the critic’s gift of appraising her own work before it leaves her hand, and thus forestalls much of the criticism that might otherwise attend it. The faculty of self-analysis would be a safety-valve to the high-pressure speed at which most literature of to-day is produced—but, alas, the few that employ it! “Open the throttle and let it drive!” is the popular injunction to the genius within, and wherever it drives, one is expected to follow. How refreshing it is, then, to come upon work with calm upon it!—work that came out of time, culture, and artist-love, and trusts its appreciation to the same standards.

Miss Reese’s verse shows constant affinity with Herrick, though it is rarely so blithe. It has the singing mood, but not the buoyant one, being tempered by something delicate and remote. The unheard melodies within it are the sweetest; it pipes to the spirit “ditties of no tone.” Even its least rare fancies convey more than they say, and it must be confessed that much so-called poetry says more than it conveys. Whitman’s mystical words: “All music is what awakes from you when you are reminded by the instruments,” applies equally well to poetry, to poetry of suggestion, such as Miss Reese’s. Yesterday’s parted grace has been transmuted to poetry within us all, but it is a voiceless possession, speaking to us in the soul. Miss Reese’s poems, by a line or two, perhaps, put one in swift possession of that vanishing beauty within himself. It floods back, perchance in tears, but it is ours again. Take almost a random citation, for this quality is rarely absent from her poems, whether they summon Joy or Pain,—her lines “To A White Lilac”:

I know you, ghost of some lone, delicate hour, Long-gone but unforgot; Wherein I had for guerdon and for dower That one thing I have not.

Unplucked I leave your mystical white feather, O phantom up the lane; For back may come that spent and lovely weather, And I be glad again!

To analyze this, would be to pluck the mystical white feather that a poet left untouched, that it might recall the grace of “some lone, delicate hour, long-gone but unforgot;” but the soul of such an hour has subtilized for each of us in that spiritual memory-flower, and it needs no more than the opening line of this poem to invest the disillusioned day with a mood the same—yet not the same. Miss Reese has put it in two lines in her “Song of the Lavender Woman”:

Oh, my heart, why should you break at any thoughts like these? So sooth are they of the old time that they should bring you ease.

In another brief poem, the spirit of grief, that transmutes itself at last to music, to odor, to sunsets and dawns, becomes vital again in the scent of the box, the garden shrub. The lines show Miss Reese’s susceptibility to impression from the most intangible sources:

Dark, thinned, beside the wall of stone, The box dripped in the air; Its odor through my house was blown Into the chamber there.

Remote and yet distinct the scent, The sole thing of the kind, As though one spoke a word half meant That left a sting behind.

I knew not Grief would go from me And naught of it be plain, Except how keen the box can be After a fall of rain.

Miss Reese’s art is its apparent lack of art, of conscious effort. Her diction is as simple in the mere store of words which she chooses to employ, as might be that of some poet to whom such a store was his sole equipment; but what is that fine distinction between _simplesse_ and _simplicité_? One recognizes in her vocabulary the subtlest art of choice and elimination, art that is temperament, however, that selects by intuitive fitness and not by formulas or deliberate trying of effects. The words she employs are thrice distilled and clarified, until they become the essence of lucidity, and this essence in turn is crystallized into form in her poems. Perhaps they have, for some, too little warmth and color; they are not the rich-dyed words of passion, they are rather the white, delicate words of memory, but no others would serve as well.

In reading certain poems of Miss Reese’s, such as “Trust,” or her lines “Writ In A Book Of Elizabethan Verse,” the clarity of the language recalls a passage in a letter of Jean Ingelow’s in which she exclaims: “Oh that I might wash my words in light!” The impression which many of these lyrics convey is that Miss Reese _has_ washed her words in light, so clear, so pure is their beauty. Take, for illustration, the much-quoted lines “Love Came Back At Fall O’ Dew,” and note the art and feeling achieved almost wholly in monosyllabic words:

Love came back at fall o’ dew, Playing his old part; But I had a word or two, That would break his heart.

“He who comes at candlelight, That should come before, Must betake him to the night From a barréd door.”

This the word that made us part In the fall o’ dew; This the word that brake his heart— Yet it brake mine, too!

A lyric imbued with charm, and into which a heart history is compressed, and yet employing but five or six words of more than one syllable! Is this not clarifying to a purpose? The lines called “Trust,” illustrate with equal minuteness the gift of putting into the simplest words some truth that seems to speak itself without calling attention to language or form, and, though having less of charm, they illustrate the point in question, that of absolute simplicity without insipidity. This is not, however, to be taken as advice to all poets to cultivate the monosyllabic style. Because Miss Reese can achieve such an effect through it, when she chooses, as “Love Came Back At Fall O’ Dew,” does not argue that another poet would not corrupt it to nursery babble, nor would it be desirable to strive for it in any case. Song is impulse, not effort, and back of it is temperament. Miss Reese is a poet-_singer_; she is at her best in the pure lyric, the lyric that could be sung, and therefore her most artistic poems are such as are the least ornate, but have rare distinction in the purity, fitness, and individuality of her words.

Very few modern lyrics possess the singing quality. The term “lyric verse,” as used to-day, is a misnomer. It is as intricate in form and phrase as if not consecrated to the lyre by poets in the dawn of art. The divorce between poetry and song grows more absolute year by year; composers search almost vainly through modern volumes of verse for lyrics that combine the melody and feeling, the spontaneity and grace, indispensable to song. It is not that the modern poet is unable to produce such, but that he does not choose. It has gone out of fashion, to state the case quite frankly, to write with a singing cadence; something rare and strange must issue from the poet’s lips, something inobvious. Art lurks in surprises, and the poet of to-day must be a diviner of mysteries, a searcher of secrets, in nature and humanity and truth, and a revealer of them in his art, though he reveal ofttimes but to conceal.