Part 6

I would I might forget that I am I, And break the heavy chain that binds me fast, Whose links about myself my deeds have cast. What in the body’s tomb doth buried lie Is boundless; ’tis the spirit of the sky, Lord of the future, guardian of the past, And soon must forth to know his own at last. In his large life to live, I fain would die. Happy the dumb beast, hungering for food, But calling not his suffering his own; Blesséd the angel, gazing on all good, But knowing not he sits upon a throne; Wretched the mortal, pondering his mood, And doomed to know his aching heart alone.

The much-mooted, but vaguely understood, sub-conscious mind, speaks in this sonnet in terms of the conscious. It is a subtle bit of philosophy, but not more so than several others in the same sequence which show the evolution of Mr. Santayana’s attitude toward life. One may not in a brief space follow out the clews to this development, whose beginning was in religious emotion:

* * * * * My sad youth worshipped at the piteous height Where God vouchsafed the death of man to share; His love made mortal sorrow light to bear, But his deep wounds put joy to shaméd flight, And though his arms outstretched upon the tree, Were beautiful, and pleaded my embrace, My sins were loth to look upon his face. So came I down from Golgotha to thee, Eternal Mother; let the sun and sea Heal me, and keep me in thy dwelling-place.

The succeeding sonnet traces the winding of the new way, the reluctance, the

… many farewell pious looks behind, And dumb misgivings where the path might wind, And questionings of nature, as I went,—

which every life duplicates as it leaves its well-guarded walls of belief and ventures out upon undiscovered ways. The pain of letting go the old, the loneliness of the new, the alien look of all the heights that encompass one, and the psychology of that impulse by which one is both impelled to retrace his way and withheld from it,—are suggested by the sonnet. In the next occurs one of Mr. Santayana’s finest lines, the counsel

To trust the soul’s invincible surmise.

It would be difficult to define intuition more succinctly than this. It is not, as less subtle poets would have put it, the soul’s assurance that one is to trust; this would be to assume, for what assurance have we but that which Mr. Santayana has so subtly termed the “invincible surmise”?

Lines which lead one out into speculative thought are frequent in Mr. Santayana’s sonnets. His philosophy is constructive only in so far as it unifies a succession of moods and experiences; but it is pregnant with suggestion to a psychological mind. One of the sonnets which questions:

Of my two lives, which should I call the dream? Which action vanity? which vision sight?—

after declaring that

Some greater waking must pronounce aright

and blend the two visions to one seeing, continues:

Even such a dream I dream, and know full well My waking passeth like a midnight spell, But know not if my dreaming breaketh through Into the deeps of heaven and of hell. I know but this of all I would I knew: Truth is a dream, unless my dream is true.

The thought in this passage is elusive, but it is more than a play upon words. It is another way of putting the question, which shall be trusted, which shall become the reality, the objective or the subjective world? One knows that his “waking,” his sense perception, is transitory, that it apprehends but the present, which “passeth like a midnight spell,” but how far does the other and finer sight penetrate

Into the deeps of heaven and of hell?

No answer from the void to this query, but by the mystical conclusion that

Truth is a dream, unless my dream is true.

In simpler phrase, unless the vision and conviction are to be trusted, unless, to revert to Mr. Santayana’s former words, the soul’s “invincible surmise” be taken as truth, that which we know as truth is but a phantasm.

The sonnet sequence is the intimate record of an individual soul in its evolving spiritual life, and has the significance belonging only to art which interprets a personality, an experience, in whose development one finds some clew to his own labyrinth. It reveals the many phases of speculation, reflection, questioning, through which one passes in the transition from beliefs indoctrinated in the mind at its earliest consciousness, to convictions which follow thought liberated by life, by intimacy with nature, and by recognition of its own spiritual authority. It is the winning of this conviction, with its attendant seeking and unrest, allayed by draughts from the wayside springs of beauty, memory, and imagination,—which comprises the record of the first sonnet sequence, whose conclusions, as “strewn thoughts” springing along the way, are gathered into a final chaplet for the brows of the “Eternal Mother,” Nature, whose peace he sought when he came down from Golgotha, and whose larger meaning, synonymous with the primal freedom of the soul, is conveyed in the sonnet:

These strewn thoughts, by the mountain pathway sprung, I conned for comfort, till I ceased to grieve, And with these flowering thorns I dare to weave The crown, great Mother, on thine altar hung. Teach thou a larger speech to my loosed tongue, And to mine opened eyes thy secrets give, That in thy perfect love I learn to live, And in thine immortality be young. The soul is not on earth an alien thing That hath her life’s rich sources otherwhere; She is a parcel of the sacred air. She takes her being from the breath of Spring, The glance of Phœbus is her fount of light, And her long sleep a draught of primal night.

Aside from Mr. Santayana’s philosophical sonnets he has a second sequence, upon love, which, too, is philosophically tinged. In the matter of beauty this is perhaps the more finished and artistic work; but I have chosen rather to dwell upon the subtlety of his speculations in those phases of thought less universally treated of by poets than is love. It has not been possible, however, to follow the sequence in its order, or to present more than certain individual notes of its philosophy.

Thus far it has been the matter, rather than the manner, of Mr. Santayana’s verse that has been considered; but before glancing at the later sonnet sequence, what of his touch upon the strings of his instrument? One can scarcely have followed the extracts quoted without noting the mellow suavity, the ease, the poise of his work. There is everywhere assurance of expression, nothing tentative, nothing halting. His lines are disposed by the laws of counter-point into well-ordered cadences where nothing jars; his words are rich and mellifluous, in short, he has, as a sonneteer, a finish, a classical command of the vehicle reminiscent of Petrarch and Camoens. The sonnet is, by the nature of the case, a somewhat inadaptable instrument, and yet it is susceptible of great individuality, as one may note by recalling an intricate sonnet by Rossetti and a sweeping, sonorous one by Milton. The criticism which is, perhaps, most apposite to Mr. Santayana’s sonnets is that they are “faultily faultless;” they are so finished that one would welcome a false note now and then, that suggested a choke in the voice, or a heart-beat out of time.

There is an atmosphere about all of Mr. Santayana’s work that conveys a sense of wandering in the moonlight; it is tempered, softened, stilled; it is like an Isis-veil cast over the eyes; but at times one becomes oppressed with the consciousness of himself, and of the impalpable visions glimpsed in the wan light, and longs to snatch the veil away and flee to the garish world again. One may seek Mr. Santayana’s poetry when his mood demands it, and it will be as a cooling hand in fever; but when the pulse of being is low, and one needs the touch to vitalize, he must turn to others, for Mr. Santayana’s work is not charged with the electricity that thrills.

Because he is not inventive in metre nor sufficiently light in touch, Mr. Santayana is not a lyrist. He has scarcely any purely lyrical verse in his collections, and what is contained in them is too lacking in spontaneity to be classed with his best work. It is not wanting in lines of beauty and in English undefiled; but the sense of tone and rhythm, except of the smoothly conventional sort, is absent. There are no innovations in form and the impulse is too subdued for a true lyric. That called “Midnight” has more warmth than the others. Several of his odes in the Sapphic metre have great charm, especially the first. His elegiac verse has often rare elevation of thought; but it, also, has too set a measure, too much of the “formed style” to be vital. It brings well-conceived, well-imaged thought, as in this stanza:

How should the vision stay to guide the hand, How should the holy thought and ardour stay, When the false deeps of all the soul are sand, And the loose rivets of the spirit, clay?

but it rarely shocks one into thinking for himself.

In relation to diction, there are few American writers who use English of such purity and finish as does Mr. Santayana; but it is the scholar’s English, the English drawn from familiarity with the great masters and models, and hence lacks the creative flexibility, the quick, warm, ductile adaptability, that a much less accomplished poet may give to his words. It keeps to the accepted canons, the highest, the purest, and uses the consecrated words of literature with an artist’s touch; but the racy idiom, the word which some daring poet coined yesterday in an exigent moment—with these it has naught to do.

Mr. Santayana has several dramatic poems, “The Hermit of Carmel,” “The Knight’s Return,” and a dialogue between Hermes and Lucifer, in which the latter relates the details of his banishment from heaven for his daring arraignment and interrogation of God. The dialogue has little dramatic coloring; one hearing it read aloud would have difficulty in determining from the outward change of expression and personality where Lucifer leaves off speaking and Hermes begins, but it puts into the mouth of Lucifer some words full of the challenge of thought, and speaks through both some beautiful fantasies, such as this reply of Lucifer to Hermes’ question as to the state of bliss in which the angels dwell:

A doubtful thing Is blessedness like that…. Their raptured souls, like lilies in a stream That from their fluid pillow never rise, Float on the lazy current of a dream.

Mr. Santayana has not written “The Hermit of Carmel” or “The Knight’s Return” with a theatrical manager in view. They are stories told in verse, tales of gentle melancholy, pleasant to the ear; but when all is said, one returns to his sonnets as the true expression of his nature and the consummation of his gifts. He is a sonneteer, by every phase of his temperament and every canon of his art. His work in all other forms is cultivated, philosophical, finely finished, but pervaded by an atmosphere of cultured conventionality; whereas in the sonnet he finds a medium whose classic distinction and subtlety are so harmonized to his nature and his characteristic mode of thought, that it becomes to him the predestined expression. A glance, then, in closing, at the flexile phrases, the psychological analyses of the later sonnet sequence, turning chiefly upon love.

But, first, let me cite from one of the earlier sonnets, an image drawn from this theme, a jewel-like flash of beauty, not to be overlooked. The first line of the metaphor is commonplace; but note the succeeding ones:

Love but the formless and eternal Whole From whose effulgence one unheeded ray Breaks on this prism of dissolving clay Into the flickering colors of thy soul.

This is defining the individual spirit in exquisite terms.

The second sequence teems with beautiful passages, now and again with a note of the _trovatore_, as in the sestett of this sonnet:

Yet why, of one who loved thee not, command Thy counterfeit, for other men to see, When God himself did on my heart for me Thy face, like Christ’s upon the napkin, brand? O how much subtler than a painter’s hand Is love to render back the truth of thee! My soul should be thy glass in time to be, And in my thought thine effigy should stand. Yet, lest the churlish critics of that age Should flout my praise, and deem a lover’s rage Could gild a virtue and a grace exceed, I bid thine image here confront my page, That men may look upon thee as they read, And cry: “Such eyes a better poet need!”

This has art and charm, but in contrast note the impassioned nobility of utterance which imbues the one that follows. Here are lines of pure emotion and beauty:

We needs must be divided in the tomb, For I would die among the hills of Spain, And o’er the treeless, melancholy plain Await the coming of the final gloom. But thou—O pitiful!—wilt find scant room Among thy kindred by the northern main, And fade into the drifting mist again, The hemlocks’ shadow, or the pines’ perfume. Let gallants lie beside their ladies’ dust In one cold grave, with mortal love inurned; Let the sea part our ashes, if it must, The souls fled thence which love immortal burned, For they were wedded without bond of lust, And nothing of our heart to earth returned.

Such sonnets as this mark Mr. Santayana as a master of this form, and while his other work has value, it is as a sonneteer that he has made his really individual contribution to literature.

VI

JOSEPHINE PRESTON PEABODY

A BEAUTIFUL and delicate art is that of Miss Josephine Preston Peabody, but somewhat elusive of analysis, so much is its finer part dependent upon the intuition which one brings to it; for Miss Peabody is a poet-mystic, sensitive to impressions from which the grosser part has slipped away,—impressions which come to her clothed upon with a more ethereal vesture than the work-a-day garment of thought,—and while she would fain reveal their hidden import, they often elude her and grow remote in the telling, as if fearful of betraying too openly their secret.

Her first volume, _The Wayfarers_, revealed at the outset a poet’s imagination, and a technique so finished that it had already the touch of the artist, but its vision was that of the novice who looks at the morning from beneath her white veil and wonders at the world of sin and strife and passion whose pain has never reached her. It was the work of one who had not yet met her revealing crisis, not yet been identified to herself, of one reaching out after truth with the filament of fancy until the ductile thread had often been spun too far before it found anchorage. The volume was, in short, an exquisite conjecture as to life, whose baffling, alluring mystery only now and again flashed upon her an unveiled glance of its eyes. This is not, however, to say that the conjecture was vain; indeed, the initial poem, “The Wayfarers,” in which, perhaps, it was most definitely embodied, is a thoughtful, suggestive song holding many truths worth pondering, and in phrasing and technique wrought with so much grace that it might stand beside any work of the later volumes. Indeed, this statement is apposite to nearly all the work in the first collection, which in that regard presents an unusual distinction, having from the first on its technical side a maturity that seemed not to belong to the tentative work of a young poet; it was, however, over-ornate, lacking directness and simplicity, and inclining to excess of elaboration in theme, so that one often became entangled in the weft of poetic artifice and lost the clew of thought. Take as a random illustration the following stanzas from the poem entitled “The Weavers,” under which Miss Peabody symbolizes the elusive hopes and fancies that come by night, weaving their weft of dreams:

Lo, a gray pallor on the loom Waxeth apace,—a glamourie Like dawn outlooking, pale to see Before the sun hath burst to bloom; Wan beauty, growing out of gloom, With promise of fair things to be.

* * * * *

The shuttle singeth. And fair things Upon the web do come and go; Dim traceries like clouds ablow Fade into cobweb glimmerings, A silver, fretted with small wings,— The while a voice is singing low.

Of the eight remaining stanzas several are equally lacking in anything that may be grasped, and while there is a certain art in imaging the elusive fancies which the weavers bring, there should be some more definite fancy or ideal to embody, rather than the mere intent to make beautiful lines. This is, perhaps, an extreme instance of the over-elaboration of the first volume, though it distinguishes the long poem which gives its name to the collection, and appears in many of the lyrics.

Miss Peabody is an inventive metrist, and her sense of rhythm is highly developed, or rather it is innately correct, being manifest with equal grace in the first collection; witness the music of these stanzas from “Spinning in April”:

Moon in heaven’s garden, among the clouds that wander, Crescent moon so young to see, above the April ways, Whiten, bloom not yet, not, yet, within the twilight yonder; All my spinning is not done, for all the loitering days.

Oh, my heart has two wild wings that ever would be flying! Oh, my heart’s a meadow-lark that ever would be free! Well it is that I must spin until the light be dying; Well it is the little wheel must turn all day for me!

All the hill-tops beckon, and beyond the western meadows Something calls me ever, calls me ever, low and clear: A little tree as young as I, the coming summer shadows,— The voice of running waters that I ever thirst to hear.

Oftentime the plea of it has set my wings a-beating; Oftentime it coaxes, as I sit in weary wise, Till the wild life hastens out to wild things all entreating, And leaves me at the spinning-wheel, with dark, unseeing eyes.

The poem has several other stanzas equally charming, but which detract from the artistic structure of the song by over-spinning the thought.

Among the simple, sincere lyrics which prevail more by their feeling than mechanism, are “One That Followed,” “Horizon,” “Dew-Fall,” “Befriended,” “The Song of A Shepherd-Boy at Bethlehem,” and the two stanzas called, “After Music,” whose intimate beauty renders them personally interpretative.

I saw not they were strange, the ways I roam, Until the music called, and called me thence, And tears stirred in my heart as tears may come To lonely children straying far from home, Who know not how they wandered so, nor whence.

If I might follow far and far away Unto the country where these songs abide, I think my soul would wake and find it day, Would tell me who I am, and why I stray,— Would tell me who I was before I died.

There is a mystical touch here in note with the opening reference to the subtlety of Miss Peabody’s sources of inspiration.

In the first volume is also a sonnet from the heart and to the heart, for who has not known the weariness that comes of long striving to image, or interpret the beautiful, and yet is loth to commit his unfulfilled dream to the oblivion of sleep. The sonnet is called, “To the Unsung.”

Stay by me, Loveliness; for I must sleep. Not even desire can lift such wearied eyes; The day was heavy and the sun will rise On day as heavy, weariness as deep. Be near, though you be silent. Let me steep A sad heart in that peace, as a child tries To hold his comfort fast, in fingers wise With imprint of a joy that’s yet to reap. Leave me that little light; for sleep I must, —And put off blessing to a doubtful day— Too dull to listen or to understand. But only let me close the eyes of trust On you unchanged. Ah, do not go away, Nor let a dream come near, to loose my hand.

Altogether, Miss Peabody’s first book of verse revealed strength, feeling, and imagination, though tentative in its philosophy, as the initial work of a young poet must necessarily be, and having but a slight rooting in life.

The second volume, _Fortune and Men’s Eyes_, opens with a cleverly written one-act play, turning upon an adventure of two maids of honor at Elizabeth’s court, with Master W. S., a player, whose identity is not far to seek, and William Herbert, son of the Earl of Pembroke, the scene being laid at the tavern of the Bear and the Angel, whither Mistress Anne Hughes and Mary Fyton have resorted on a merry escapade under cover of seeing the people celebrate the fête of the Bear.

The atmosphere of the time is well reproduced, the dialogue of the tapsters cleverly done, and the final scene between the Player and Mary is full of dramatic intensity.

In her second volume, Miss Peabody has also a dramatic monologue called, “The Wingless Joy,” which, though now and again Browningesque in tone, has many felicitous images and shows a true insight into human motive.

The lyrics in the second volume form a less important part of the collection, though there are several, such as “The Source,” “The Survivor,” “Psyche in the Niche,” and “In the Silence,” which rank with Miss Peabody’s best work, particularly the last, illustrating the truth that the Spirit manifests at the need, even the dumb and undivining need, and not alone at the call:

Where did’st Thou tarry, Lord, Lord, Who heeded not my prayer? All the long day, all the long night, I stretched my hands to air.

“There was a bitterer want than thine Came from the frozen North; Laid hands upon my garment’s hem And led me forth.

“It was a lonely Northern man, Where there was never tree To shed its comfort on his heart, There he had need of me.

“He kindled us a little flame To hope against the storm; And unto him, and unto me, The light was warm.”

And yet I called Thee, Lord, Lord— Who answered not, nor came: All the long day, and yesterday, I called Thee by Thy name.

“There was a dumb, unhearing grief Spake louder than Thy word, There was a heart called not on me, But yet I heard.

“The sorrow of a savage man Shaping him gods, alone, Who found no love in the shapen clay To answer to his own.

“His heart knew what his eyes saw not He bade me stay and eat; And unto him, and unto me, The cup was sweet.

“Too long we wait for thee and thine, In sodden ways and dim, And where the man’s need cries on me There have I need of him.

“Along the borders of despair Where sparrows seek no nest, Nor ravens food, I sit at meat,— The Unnamed Guest.”

Before leaving the second volume there is one other poem of which I cannot refrain from quoting a part, to show the subtlety with which a phase of the psychology of sentiment has been grasped and analyzed in these lines called “The Knot”:

Oh, I hated me, That when I loved you not, yet I could feel Some charm in me the deeper for your love: Some singing-robe invisible—and spun Of your own worship—fold me silverly In very moonlight, so that I walked fair When you were by, who had no wish to be The fairer for your eyes! But at some cost Of other life the hyacinth grows blue, And sweetens ever…. So it is with us, The sadder race. I would have fled from you, And yet I felt some fibre in myself Binding me here, to search one moment yet— The only well that gave me back a star,— Your eyes reflecting. And I grew aware How worship that must ever spend and burn Will have its deity from gold or stone; Till that fain womanhood that would be fair And lovable,—the hunger of the plant— Against my soul’s commandment reached and took The proffered fruit, more potent day by day.

And the lines which follow close with the wholly feminine query,

Will you not go?—and yet, why will you go?