Part 7

It is a human bit of dramatic analysis, and reduces inconsistent femininity to a common denominator.

In her third volume, _Marlowe_, a drama, founded upon the life of the lovable but erratic poet and playwright, Miss Peabody essayed an ambitious undertaking, but one which, as literature, carries its full justification. As drama, one must qualify. In characterization, aside from Marlowe himself, who comes before one vividly, there is a lack of sharp definition. Nashe, Lodge, Peele, and Green, Marlowe’s fellow playwrights and friends, might, from the evidence of the dialogue, be the same character under different names, so alike are they in speech and temperament. Next to Marlowe himself, Bame, who through jealousy becomes his enemy, and brings on the final tragedy, is the most individually drawn. Of the women characters, the drama presents practically but one,—Alison, the little country maid who loves Marlowe secretly, and becomes in a way his good angel,—as “Her Ladyship” of the Court, object of his adoration, is introduced but twice in the play, and that veiled, so that only for a moment at the last may one see the beauty that—under guise of Helen—inspired Marlowe’s lines:

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships And burned the topless towers of Ilium!

While the two brief comings of “Her Ladyship” impart an artistic touch of mystery, it is to be doubted if in a play so intangible a heroine could become a vital factor, and if she were not, the woman element of the drama must be sustained wholly by Alison, the little “Quietude,” who, until the one beautiful scene with Marlowe after her marriage, remains an artless undeveloped child, with too little color, too weak a human pulse-beat, to compel interest and sympathy. She is delicately drawn, in her unsophisticated sweetness and purity, and the inner strength of her nature is finely shown at the last, but up to this period of revelation one does not feel her; she lacks the touch of life essential to a character in drama.

In plot the work presents somewhat the same limitation. It is, until the two final scenes, after Marlowe’s downfall, literature without action: nothing happens in the earlier part of the play to create an element of suspense forelooking to the developments at the close. Marlowe’s triumphs are detailed to one another by his friends, but they are not _shown_ in some great scene where he might receive the acclamations of the people and so contrast sharply with his downfall at the end: story suffices for action. The sentiment of the play presents also no intricacies: Alison, although loving Marlowe, is not for a moment a factor of love in his life, since he neither suspects her attachment nor reciprocates it, and hence the jealousy of her suitors has no effect either upon him or upon the supposed audience. “Her Ladyship” is not pitted against Alison, since the latter knows that Marlowe’s heart is given to his veiled divinity; hence there are no complexities arising from the love-element. For the purpose of acting, therefore, the play seems to me to lack movement, suspense, variety of characterization, and, except in the drawing of Marlowe, definiteness of type. It has, however, a strong and vivid scene at the close, leading up to and including Marlowe’s tragic death, and a scene of rare beauty and of intense dramatic reality, of which I shall speak later, in the visit of Marlowe to Alison after his downfall.

On the side of literature, the drama contains work of admirable strength and quality, work that in its beauty of phrase and subtlety of penetration is not unworthy to be put into the mouth of Marlowe of the “mighty line.” Miss Peabody never falls into the Shakespearizing strain which many writing of that epoch assume; her dialogue is vivid, direct, and full of original imagery, as when Marlowe speaks of Alison as having for him—

Snowflake pity, Destined to melt and lose itself in fire Or ever it can cool my tongue,

and thus describes her:

Why, she was a maid Of crystalline! If you looked near enough, You’d see the wonder changing in her eyes Like parti-colored marvels in a brook, Bright through the clearness!

Note now in contrast the impassioned words in which he pictures his divinity:

Hers is the Beauty that hath moved the world Since the first woman. Beauty cannot die. No worm may spoil it. Unto earth it goes, There to be cherished by the cautious spring, Close folded in a rose, until the time Some new imperial spirit comes to earth Demanding a fair raiment; and the earth Yields up her robes of vermeil and of snow, Violet-veinéd—beautiful as wings, And so the Woman comes!

And this beautiful passage addressed to her after the triumph of “Faustus”:

Drink my song. Grow fair, you sovran flower, with earth and air; Sip from the last year’s leaves their memories Of April, May, and June, their summer joy, Their lure for every nightingale, their longing.

And finally these words spoken to her in splendid scorn, after his downfall and her rejection:

I took you for a Woman, thing of dust,— I—I who showed you first what you might be! But see now, you were hollow all the time, A piece of magic. Now the air blows in, And you are gone in ashes.

At once the most beautiful and artistically drawn scene is that previously referred to, in which Marlowe, his star in eclipse, visits Alison after her marriage. Here is a dramatic situation, human and vital, and Miss Peabody has developed it with rare feeling and skill. The picture of Marlowe in his disgrace and despondency, coming to the woman who had believed in him, and whose love had shone upon his unseeing eyes, is drawn with fine delicacy and pathos. In the flash of revelation that comes to him from her white spirit, he speaks these words:

Thou hast heard Of Light that shined in darkness, hast thou not? And darkness comprehended not the Light? So. But I tell thee why. It was because The Dark, a sleeping brute, was blinded first, Bewildered at a thing it did not know.

* * * * *

Have pity on the Dark, I tell you, Bride. For after all is said, there is no thing So hails the Light as that same blackness there, O’er which it shines the whiter. Do you think It will not know at last?—it will not know?

Those, too, are noble passages, though too long to quote, in which Marlowe unburdens his overcharged heart to Alison, and intrusts to her faith the keeping of that higher self she had divined in him; and when Marlowe, early in the scene, referring to his misfortunes, says:

You do not know The sense of waking down among the dead, Hard by some lazar-house,—

note the hidden meaning in Alison’s reply:

Nay; but I know The sense of death. And then to rise again And feel thyself bewildered, like a spirit Out of the grave-clothes and the fragment strewings.

Passages of subtle significance, wistful, tender, and pathetic, distinguish this scene.

Miss Peabody has visualized Marlowe clearly wherever he appears, and created him as the lovable, impulsive, generous-spirited, but ill-starred genius that he was. It is a life-study, in its conflicts, its overthrown ideals, its appealing humanity, and should take its place as one of the permanent interpretations of his character.

Many of her critics have found in Miss Peabody’s latest volume, _The Singing Leaves_, an inspiration and charm exceeding that of her former work, and in delicacy, lyrical ease, simplicity, and ideality it must be accounted one of her truest achievements; but there is about the volume an impalpability, an airy insubstantiality, which renders it elusive and unconvincing. The mystical subtlety hitherto noted in Miss Peabody’s work has, in the latest volume, grown, until many of the poems have so little objectivity that they float as iris-tinted flecks of foam upon the deep of thought. They have beauty of spirit, beauty of word; but their motive is so subtle, their thought so intangible, that while they charm one in the reading, they have, with a few exceptions, melted into vapor, gone the way of the foam, when once the eye has left them. One feels throughout the volume an ingenuous simplicity, a _naïveté_, that is, in many of her poems, exceedingly charming, but which, becoming the pervasive note of the collection, communicates to it a certain artificial artlessness, as if June, disregarding the largess of the rose, yearned back to April and the violet; in short, the poems seem to me, with a few exceptions, to lack moving, vital impulse, and to bring few warmly imbued words from life. They are as the pale moon-flower, growing in the stillness of dreams, rather than the rose dyed with the blood of the heart.

But what is, to me, the limitation of the volume,—its over-subtilized mood and lack of definite, moving purpose,—must, to many of its readers, be granted to be its distinction; and for their very impalpability these delicate Leaves, that vibrate with impulse as ethereal as that which moves the aspen when the wind is still, have for many the greater charm.

To glance, then, at some of the finer achievements of the volume, one finds among the lyrics several turning upon love that catch in artistic words an undefined mood, such as “Forethought” and “Unsaid,” or in captivating picture-phrase, a blither fancy, such as “The Enchanted Sheepfold,” or, stronger and finer than these, that vision of love called “The Cloud,” which enfolds truth and wraps the heart in its whiteness. One can scarcely fancy a more exquisite bit of imagery in which to clothe the thought of these lines:

The islands called me far away, The valleys called me home. The rivers with a silver voice Drew on my heart to come.

The paths reached tendrils to my hair From every vine and tree. There was no refuge anywhere Until I came to thee.

There is a northern cloud I know, Along a mountain crest. And as she folds her wings of mist, So I could make my rest.

There is no chain to bind her so Unto that purple height; And she will shine and wander, slow, Slow, with a cloud’s delight.

Would she begone? She melts away, A heavenly joyous thing. Yet day will find the mountain white, White-folded with her wing.

* * * * *

And though love cannot bind me, Love, —Ah no!—yet I could stay Maybe, with wings forever spread, —Forever, and a day.

Here is delicacy enshrining one of the deeper truths of life.

Many of the lyrics have a seventeenth-century lilt, but not of imitation. There are no echoes in Miss Peabody’s song, its note, measure, and spirit are entirely her own, and a random stanza would carry its identification, so individual is her touch. Of the seventeenth-century mood, however, are “The Song Outside,” “Forethought,” “The Top of the Morning,” “The Blind One,” and other poems.

Nearly all the lyrics in _The Singing Leaves_ are very brief, showing, in their compactness and restrained use of imagery, just the opposite method from that prevailing in Miss Peabody’s first book, _The Wayfarers_. So marked is the contrast that, but for the personality imbuing them, they might have been written by another hand. Whereas the diction also in the earlier work inclined to beauty for its own sake, the reaction to its present simplicity is the more marked. It is doubtless for this reason that many of the poems carry with them a note of conscious ingenuousness, as if their simplest effects had been deliberately achieved. Not so, however, such poems as “The Inn,” “The Drudge,” “Sins,” “The Anointed,” “The Walk,” whose words are quick with native impulse, as the trenchant lines of the third:

A lie, it may be black or white; I care not for the lie: My grief is for the tortured breath Of Truth that cannot die.

And cruelty, what that may be, What creature understands? But O, the glazing eyes of Love, Stabbed through the open hands!

Two poems contained in _The Singing Leaves_ are of a note far more serious and vital than that of their fellows: the first, “The Ravens;” the second, and to my thinking, the more important, “The Fool,” which from the standpoint of strength, feeling, forceful expression, idealism, and the portrayal of human nature, seems to me the achievement of the book. It holds a truth bitten in with the acid of experience:

O what a Fool am I!—Again, again, To give for asking: yet again to trust The needy love in women and in men, Until again my faith is turned to dust By one more thrust.

How you must smile apart who make my hands Ever to bleed where they were reached to bless; —Wonder how any wit that understands Should ever try too near, with gentle stress, Your sullenness!

Laugh, stare, deny. Because I shall be true,— The only triumph slain by no surprise: True, true, to that forlornest truth in you, The wan, beleaguered thing behind your eyes, Starving on lies.

Build by my faith; I am a steadfast tool: When I am dark, begone into the sun. I cry, ‘Ah, Lord, how good to be a Fool:— A lonely game indeed, but now all done; —And I have won!’

Here speaks a word from life worth a score of “Charms: To Be Said In The Sun,” or other fanciful unreality; and because of such poems as this, fibred in human motive, one feels by contrast in many of the others that Miss Peabody has been playing with her genius, casting “Charms” and “Spells,” which are mere poetic sorcery.

Miss Peabody has a rare sympathy with child-life, and her group of poems of this nature could not well be bettered. With the exception of a line now and then which may be a bit beyond the expression of a child, they are fidelity itself to the moods that swayed _The Little Past_. “Journey,” “The Busy Child,” and “The Mystic” are among the best, though none could be spared, unless, perhaps, “Cakes and Ale.” Still another with the true child-feeling is that called “Late,”—a tender little song which, because of its brevity, must suffice to represent the group:

My father brought somebody up, To show us all asleep. They came as softly up the stairs As you could creep.

They whispered in the doorway there And looked at us awhile, I had my eyes shut up, but I Could feel him smile.

I shut my eyes up close, and lay As still as I could keep; Because I knew he wanted us To be asleep.

Miss Peabody’s work, considered in its entirety, is distinguished by an art of rare grace and delicacy, by imagination and vision, susceptibility to the finer impressions, and by an ever-present ideality; and while it lacks somewhat the element of personal emotion and passion, it has a sympathy subtle and spiritual, if less intimate in its revealing.

VII

CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS

MR. CHARLES G. D. ROBERTS presents so marked an example of evolution in the style of his work and the sources of his inspiration, that he has from volume to volume, like the nautilus, “changed his last year’s dwelling for the new,” and having entered the “more stately mansion” has “known the old no more.”

The first chamber which he fashioned for himself in the House of Art could not long contain him, as its walls were built of myths and traditions, incapable of further expansion. This was the period of _Orion and Other Poems_, such as “Ariadne,” “Memnon,” and “Launcelot And The Four Queens,” work done prior to 1880 and creditable to the initial effort of a young collegian.

The second lodging was scarcely more permanent; though structured less in myth, and showing a gain in workmanship, it was still too narrow a dwelling for an expanding spirit, and did little more than give foretokens of that which should succeed it. The volume contained, however, one admirable composition, one that remains as vital and apposite as when it was written,—the stirring stanzas to Canada. Indeed, the fine courage, the higher loyalty that distinguishes this appeal, lifts it from the mere grandiloquent utterance of a young man with over-hasty convictions, to a noble arraignment, and leads one to wonder why other poets of her domain do not turn their pens to revealing her to herself as does this fine utterance.

Mr. Roberts’ third volume, _Songs of the Common Day_, bore almost no relation to its predecessors, and might have been the work of a different hand, as regards both subject and style. Legend and myth had wholly disappeared, and experience had begun to furnish the raw material, the flax, for the poet’s spindle and distaff which earlier effort had been making ready. Not yet, however, had the work the virility and tang that smack in the very first line of its successor, _The Book of the Native_. It was graceful, artistic singing, but lacking, except in a few instances, the large free note that sounds in the later work. Among its lyrics is one of exquisite tenderness, as sad and sweet as Tennyson’s “Break, break, break,” and in the sifting of the volume, this remains, perhaps, the sand of gold:

Grey rocks and greyer sea, And surf along the shore— And in my heart a name My lips shall speak no more.

The high and lonely hills Endure the darkening year— And in my heart endure A memory and a tear.

Across the tide a sail That tosses and is gone— And in my heart the kiss That longing dreams upon.

Grey rocks and greyer sea, And surf along the shore— And in my heart the face That I shall see no more.

The simplicity and pathos of this lyric render it unforgettable.

“The Tide on Tantramar,” from the third volume, a ballad of the sea and the salt marshes, transfers to the page the keen pungence of the brine, as do the descriptive stanzas of Tantramar used illustratively in the “Ave” to Shelley. There is noble work in this elegy, and while it wanders over a good deal of Canadian territory, making inspired observations of nature before it discloses their relation to the subject—when the comparison is reached it is apposite, and the poem shows an insight into the character of Shelley that is gratifying, in view of the vagueness usually associated with his name.

Other _Songs of the Common Day_, forelooking to the later poet, are “The Silver Thaw,” “Canadian Streams,” and “The Wood Frolic,” having the first-hand, magnetic touch distinguishing every line of Mr. Roberts’ out-of-door verse in that volume which first truly reveals him,—_The Book of the Native_. So conscious is one of a new force in this book that it would seem to represent another personality. Its opening poem, “Kinship,” turns for inspiration,

Back to the bewildering vision And the border-land of birth; Back into the looming wonder, The Companionship of Earth,

and puts the query to nature:

Tell me how some sightless impulse, Working out a hidden plan, God for kin and clay for fellow, Wakes to find itself a man.

Tell me how the life of mortal, Wavering from breath to breath, Like a web of scarlet pattern Hurtles from the loom of death.

How the caged bright bird, Desire, Which the hands of God deliver, Beats aloft to drop unheeded At the confines of forever.

Faints unheeded for a season, Then outwings the farthest star, To the wisdom and the stillness Where thy consummations are.

This sounds the keynote to _The Book of the Native_, which is equally concerned with the enigmas of the soul and the mysteries of nature. The questing spirit is abroad in it; the unquenched faith, the vitality, the hidden import of life is in it; and while its metaphysics do not go to the point of developing a definite philosophy, they set one to thinking for himself, which is a better service. “Origins,” a speculation as to our coming from “the enigmatic Will,” and the “Unsleeping,” a vision of the Force brooding over life,—are among the strongest poems of this motive. To cite the second:

I soothe to unimagined sleep The sunless bases of the deep, And then I stir the aching tide That gropes in its reluctant side.

I heave aloft the smoking hill: To silent peace its throes I still. But ever at its heart of fire I lurk, an unassuaged desire.

I wrap me in the sightless germ An instant or an endless term; And still its atoms are my care, Dispersed in ashes or in air.

I hush the comets one by one To sleep for ages in the sun; The sun resumes before my face His circuit of the shores of space.

The mount, the star, the germ, the deep, They all shall wake, they all shall sleep. Time, like a flurry of wild rain, Shall drift across the darkened pane.

Space, in the dim predestined hour, Shall crumble like a ruined tower. I only, with unfaltering eye, Shall watch the dreams of God go by.

What a fine touch in the lines declaring that

Time, like a flurry of wild rain, Shall drift across the darkened pane!

Mr. Roberts has the rare pictorial gift of flashing a scene before one without employing an excess of imagery, and never that which is confused or cumbrous. His style is nervous, magnetic, direct, and has, in his later work, very little superfluous tissue. This statement, has, of course, its exceptions, but is sufficiently accurate to be made a generalization, and in no case is it better shown than in the descriptive poems of the Canadian country in _The Book of the Native_. What is there about Canada that sets the blood of her poets a-tingle and lends magic to their fingers when writing of her? What is there in Grand Pré’s “barren reaches by the tide,” or in the marshes of Tantramar, that such a spell should wait upon them, calling the roamer

“Back into the looming wonder, The Companionship of Earth”?

With the American poets of the present day, despite their feeling for nature, it is rather her beauty in the abstract than any particular locality with which they chance to be associated, that inspires them,—though Mr. Cawein, in his allegiance to Kentucky, furnishes a marked exception to this statement,—but the Canadian poets, with a passion like that of a lover, sing of the haunts that knew their first devotion: now with a buoyant infectious note, now with a reminiscent sadness; in short, the Canadian poets seem to have a sympathetic identity with their country, an interchange of personality by which they reciprocally express each other.

Particularly is this true of Bliss Carman, Duncan Campbell Scott, and Charles G. D. Roberts; and it was equally true of Archibald Lampman, whose untimely passing lost to Canada one of her anointed singers, to whose high promise justice has hardly yet been done. To illustrate Mr. Roberts’ nature-sympathy, and susceptibility to the mood of the year, let me put in contrast parts of two poems from _The Book of the Native_. The first belongs to the racy note pervading a good deal of the nature-verse of to-day, of which the Vagabondia books set the fashion: it is called “Afoot,” but might with equal aptness be named the “Processional,” since the second is the “Recessional”:

Comes the lure of green things growing, Comes the call of waters flowing,— And the wayfarer desire Moves and wakes and would be going.

Hark the migrant hosts of June Marching nearer noon by noon! Hark the gossip of the grasses Bivouacked beneath the moon!

Hark the leaves their mirth averring; Hark the buds to blossom stirring; Hark the hushed, exultant haste Of the wind and world conferring!

Hark the sharp, insistent cry Where the hawk patrols the sky! Hark the flapping, as of banners, Where the heron triumphs by!

Note the picturesque phrase and the compulsive, quickstep note in the lines above, as of the advancing cohorts of spring, and in contrast the slow movement, the sadness of the retreating year, in these beautiful “Recessional” stanzas:

Now along the solemn heights Fade the Autumn’s altar-lights; Down the great earth’s glimmering chancel Glide the days and nights.