Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 Part 26

I think, however, that since the dawn of the Hoffman administration, when the best elements were automatically sifted out through the secession of most of the confirmed politicians, we have been gradually acquiring a policy and a tradition which will endure. The printing-press, political and frivolous phases have been pa.s.sed through; and our aspirations seem to be crystallising into a form more worthy than any of our past aspirations.

Judging from the majority of our truly active members, the United now aims at the development of its adherents in the direction of purely artistic literary perception and expression; to be effected by the encouragement of writing, the giving of constructive criticism, and the cultivation of correspondence friends.h.i.+ps among scholars and aspirants capable of stimulating and aiding one another's efforts. It aims at the revival of the uncommercial spirit; the real creative thought which modern conditions have done their worst to suppress and eradicate. It seeks to banish mediocrity as a goal and standard; to place before its members the cla.s.sical and the universal and to draw their minds from the commonplace to the beautiful.

The United aims to a.s.sist those whom other forms of literary influence cannot reach. The non-university man, the dwellers in distant places, the recluse, the invalid, the very young, the elderly; all these are included within our scope. And beside our novices stand persons of mature cultivation and experience, ready to a.s.sist for the sheer joy of a.s.sisting. In no other society does wealth or previous learning count for so little. Merit and aspiration form the only criterion we apply to our members, nor has poverty or primitive crudity ever r.e.t.a.r.ded the steady progress of any determined aspirant among us. We ask only that the goal be high; that the souls of our band be seeking the antique legacy of verdant Helicon.

Practically, we are aware of many obstacles; yet we think we are in the main fulfilling our functions. Naturally, we do not expect to make a Sh.e.l.ley or Swinburne of every rhymer who joins us, or a Poe or Dunsany of every teller of tales; but if we enable these persons to appreciate Sh.e.l.ley and Swinburne and Poe and Dunsany, and teach them how to shed their dominant faults and use words correctly and expressively, we cannot call ourselves unsuccessful and only genius can lead to the heights; it is our province merely to point the way and a.s.sist on the gentler, lower slopes.

The United, then, stands for education in the eternal truths of literary art, and for personal aid in the realisation of its members' literary potentialities. It is a university, stripped of every artificiality and conventionality, and thrown open to all without distinction. Here may every man s.h.i.+ne according to his genius, and here may the small as well as the great writer know the bliss of appreciation and the glory of recognised achievement.

H. P. LOVECRAFT.

THE UNITED AMATEUR

Official Organ of the United Amateur Press a.s.sociation

VOLUME XX ELROY, WIS., SEPTEMBER, 1920 NUMBER 1

Poetry and the G.o.ds

ANNA HELEN CROFTS AND HENRY PAGET-LOWE

A damp, gloomy evening in April it was, just after the close of the Great War, when Marcia found herself alone with strange thoughts and wishes; unheard-of yearnings which floated out of the s.p.a.cious twentieth-century drawing-room, up the misty deeps of the air, and Eastward to far olive-groves in Arcady which she had seen only in her dreams. She had entered the room in abstraction, turned off the glaring chandeliers, and now reclined on a soft divan by a solitary lamp which shed over the reading table a green glow as soothing and delicious as moonlight through the foliage about an antique shrine. Attired simply, in a low-cut evening dress of black, she appeared outwardly a typical product of modern civilisation; but tonight she felt the immeasurable gulf that separated her soul from all her prosaic surroundings. Was it because of the strange home in which she lived; that abode of coldness where relations were always strained and the inmates scarcely more than strangers? Was it that, or was it some greater and less explicable misplacement in Time and s.p.a.ce, whereby she had been born too late, too early, or too far away from the haunts of her spirit ever to harmonise with the unbeautiful things of contemporary reality? To dispel the mood which was engulfing her more deeply each moment, she took a magazine from the table and searched for some healing bit of poetry. Poetry had always relieved her troubled mind better than anything else, though many things in the poetry she had seen detracted from the influence. Over parts of even the sublimest verses hung a chill vapour of sterile ugliness and restraint, like dust on a window-pane through which one views a magnificent sunset.

Listlessly turning the magazine's pages, as if searching for an elusive treasure, she suddenly came upon something which dispelled her languor.

An observer could have read her thoughts and told that she had discovered some image or dream which brought her nearer to her unattained goal than any image or dream she had seen before. It was only a bit of _vers libre_, that pitiful compromise of the poet who overleaps prose yet falls short of the divine melody of numbers; but it had in it all the unstudied music of a bard who lives and feels, and who gropes ecstatically for unveiled beauty. Devoid of regularity, it yet had the wild harmony of winged, spontaneous words; a harmony missing from the formal, convention-bound verse she had known. As she read on, her surroundings gradually faded, and soon there lay about her only the mists of dream; the purple, star-strown mists beyond Time, where only G.o.ds and dreamers walk.

"Moon over j.a.pan, White b.u.t.terfly moon!

Where the heavy-lidded Buddhas dream To the sound of the cuckoo's call....

The white wings of moon-b.u.t.terflies Flicker down the streets of the city, Blus.h.i.+ng into darkness the useless wicks of round lanterns in the hands of girls.

"Moon over the tropics, A white-curved bud Opening its petals slowly in the warmth of heaven....

The air is full of odours And languorous warm sounds....

A flute drones its insect music to the night Below the curving moon-petal of the heavens.

"Moon over China, Weary moon on the river of the sky, The stir of light in the willows is like the flas.h.i.+ng of a thousand silver minnows Through dark shoals; The tiles on graves and rotting temples flash like ripples, The sky is flecked with clouds like the scales of a dragon."

Amid the mists of dream the reader cried to the rhythmical stars of her delight at the coming of a new age of song, a rebirth of Pan. Half closing her eyes, she repeated words whose melody lay hid like crystals at the bottom of a stream before the dawn; hidden but to gleam effulgently at the birth of day.

"Moon over j.a.pan, White b.u.t.terfly moon!

"Moon over the tropics, A white-curved bud Opening its petals slowly in the warmth of heaven.

The air is full of odours And languorous warm sounds ... languorous warm sounds.

"Moon over China, Weary moon on the river of the sky ... weary moon!"

Out of the mists gleamed G.o.dlike the figure of a youth in winged helmet and sandals, caduceus-bearing, and of a beauty like to nothing on earth.

Before the face of the sleeper he thrice waved the rod which Apollo had given him in trade for the nine-corded sh.e.l.l of melody, and upon her brow he placed a wreath of myrtle and roses. Then, adoring, Hermes spoke:

"O Nymph more fair than the golden-haired sisters of Cyane or the sky-inhabiting Atlantides, beloved of Aphrodite and blessed of Pallas, thou hast indeed discovered the secret of the G.o.ds, which lieth in beauty and song. O Prophetess more lovely than the Sybil of c.u.mae when Apollo first knew her, thou hast truly spoken of the new age, for even now on Maenalus, Pan sighs and stretches in his sleep, wishful to awake and behold about him the little rose-crowned Fauns and the antique Satyrs. In thy yearning hast thou divined what no mortal else, saving only a few whom the world reject, remembereth; _that the G.o.ds were never dead_, but only sleeping the sleep and dreaming the dreams of G.o.ds in lotos-filled Hesperian gardens beyond the golden sunset. And now draweth nigh the time of their awaking, when coldness and ugliness shall perish, and Zeus sit once more on Olympus. Already the sea about Paphos trembleth into a foam which only ancient skies have looked on before, and at night on Helicon the shepherds hear strange murmurings and half-remembered notes. Woods and fields are tremulous at twilight with the s.h.i.+mmering of white saltant forms, and immemorial Ocean yields up curious sights beneath thin moons. The G.o.ds are patient, and have slept long, but neither man nor giant shall defy the G.o.ds forever. In Tartarus the t.i.tans writhe, and beneath the fiery Aetna groan the children of Ura.n.u.s and Gaea. The day now dawns when man must answer for his centuries of denial, but in sleeping the G.o.ds have grown kind, and will not hurl him to the gulf made for deniers of G.o.ds. Instead will their vengeance smite the darkness, fallacy and ugliness which have turned the mind of man; and under the sway of bearded Saturnus shall mortals, once more sacrificing unto him, dwell in beauty and delight. This night shalt thou know the favour of the G.o.ds, and behold on Parna.s.sus those dreams which the G.o.ds have through ages sent to Earth to show that they are not dead. For poets are the dreams of the G.o.ds, and in each age someone hath sung unknowing the message and the promise from the lotos-gardens beyond the sunset."

Then in his arms Hermes bore the dreaming maiden through the skies.

Gentle breezes from the tower of Aiolos wafted them high above warm, scented seas, till suddenly they came upon Zeus holding court on the double-headed Parna.s.sus; his golden throne flanked by Apollo and the Muses on the right hand, and by ivy-wreathed Dionysus and pleasure-flushed Bacchae on the left hand. So much of splendour Marcia had never seen before, either awake or in dreams, but its radiance did her no injury, as would have the radiance of lofty Olympus; for in this lesser court the Father of G.o.ds had tempered his glories for the sight of mortals. Before the laurel-draped mouth of the Corycian cave sat in a row six n.o.ble forms with the aspect of mortals, but the countenances of G.o.ds. These the dreamer recognised from images of them which she had beheld, and she knew that they were none else than the divine Maeonides, the Avernian Dante, the more than mortal Shakespeare, the chaos-exploring Milton, the cosmic Goethe, and the Musaean Keats. These were those messengers whom the G.o.ds had sent to tell men that Pan had pa.s.sed not away, but only slept; for it is in poetry that G.o.ds speak to men. Then spake the Thunderer:

"O daughter, for, being one of my endless line, thou art indeed my daughter, behold upon ivory thrones of honour the august messengers that G.o.ds have sent down, that in the words and the writings of men there may still be some trace of divine beauty. Other bards have men justly crowned with enduring laurels, but these hath Apollo crowned, and these have I set in places apart, as mortals who have spoken the language of the G.o.ds. Long have we dreamed in lotos-gardens beyond the West, and spoken only through our dreams; but the time approaches when our voices shall not be silent. It is a time of awaking and of change. Once more hath Phaeton ridden low, searing the fields and drying the streams. In Gaul lone nymphs with disordered hair weep beside fountains that are no more, and pine over rivers turned red with the blood of mortals. Ares and his train have gone forth with the madness of G.o.ds, and have returned, Deimos and Phobos glutted with unnatural delight. Tellus moans with grief, and the faces of men are as the faces of the Erinyes, even as when Astraea fled to the skies, and the waves of our bidding encompa.s.sed all the land saving this high peak alone. Amidst this chaos, prepared to herald his coming yet to conceal his arrival, even now toileth our latest-born messenger, in whose dreams are all the images which other messengers have dreamed before him. He it is that we have chosen to blend into one glorious whole all the beauty that the world hath known before, and to write words wherein shall echo all the wisdom and the loveliness of the past. He it is who shall proclaim our return, and sing of the days to come when Fauns and Dryads shall haunt their accustomed groves in beauty. Guided was our choice by those who now sit before the Corycian grotto on thrones of ivory, and in whose songs thou shalt hear notes of sublimity by which years hence thou shall know the greater messenger when he cometh. Attend their voices as one by one they sing to thee here. Each note shalt thou hear again in the poetry which is to come; the poetry which shall bring peace and pleasure to thy soul, though search for it through bleak years thou must. Attend with diligence, for each chord that vibrates away into hiding shall appear again to thee after thou hast returned to earth, as Alpheus, sinking his waters into the soil of h.e.l.las, appears as the crystal Arethusa in remote Sicilia."

Then arose Homeros, the ancient among bards, who took his lyre and chaunted his hymn to Aphrodite. No word of Greek did Marcia know, yet did the message fall not vainly upon her ears; for in the cryptic rhythm was that which spake to all mortals and G.o.ds, and needed no interpreter.

So too the songs of Dante and Goethe, whose unknown words clave the ether with melodies easy to read and to adore. But at last remembered accents rebounded before the listener. It was the Swan of Avon, once a G.o.d among men, and still a G.o.d among G.o.ds:

"Write, write, that from the b.l.o.o.d.y course of war, My dearest master, your dear son, may hie; Bless him at home in peace, whilst I from far, His name with zealous fervour sanctify."

Accents still more familiar arose as Milton, blind no more, declaimed immortal harmony:

"Or let my lamp at midnight hour Be seen in some high lonely tower, Where I might oft out.w.a.tch the Bear With thrice-great Hermes, or unsphere The spirit of Plato, to unfold What worlds or what vast regions hold Th' immortal mind, that hath forsook Her mansion in this fleshy nook.

Sometime let gorgeous Tragedy In sceptred pall come sweeping by, Presenting Thebes, or Pelops' line, Or the tale of Troy divine."

Last of all came the young voice of Keats, closest of all the messengers to the beauteous faun-folk.

"Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter: therefore, ye soft pipes, play on....

When old age shall this generation waste, Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty'--that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

As the singer ceased, there came a sound in the wind blowing from far Egypt, where at night Aurora mourns by the Nile for her slain son Memnon. To the feet of the Thunderer flew the rosy-fingered G.o.ddess, and kneeling, cried, "Master, it is time I unlocked the gates of the East."

And Phoebus, handing his lyre to Calliope, his bride among the Muses, prepared to depart for the jewelled and column-raised Palace of the Sun, where fretted the steeds already harnessed to the golden car of day. So Zeus descended from his carven throne and placed his hand upon the head of Marcia, saying:

"Daughter, the dawn is nigh, and it is well that thou shouldst return before the awaking of mortals to thy home. Weep not at the bleakness of thy life, for the shadow of false faiths will soon be gone, and the G.o.ds shall once more walk among men. Search thou unceasingly for our messenger, for in him wilt thou find peace and comfort. By his word shall thy steps be guided to happiness, and in his dreams of beauty shall thy spirit find all that it craveth." As Zeus ceased, the young Hermes gently seized the maiden and bore her up toward the fading stars; up, and westward over unseen seas.

Many years have pa.s.sed since Marcia dreamt of the G.o.ds and of their Parna.s.sian conclave. Tonight she sits in the same s.p.a.cious drawing-room, but she is not alone. Gone is the old spirit of unrest, for beside her is one whose name is luminous with celebrity; the young poet of poets at whose feet sits all the world. He is reading from a ma.n.u.script words which none has ever heard before, but which when heard will bring to men the dreams and fancies they lost so many centuries ago, when Pan lay down to doze in Arcady, and the greater G.o.ds withdrew to sleep in lotos-gardens beyond the lands of the Hesperides. In the subtle cadences and hidden melodies of the bard the spirit of the maiden has found rest at last, for there echo the divinest notes of Thracian Orpheus; notes that moved the very rocks and trees by Hebrus' banks. The singer ceases, and with eagerness asks a verdict, yet what can Marcia say but that the strain is "fit for the G.o.ds"?

And as she speaks there comes again a vision of Parna.s.sus and the far-off sound of a mighty voice saying, "By his word shall thy steps be guided to happiness, and in his dreams of beauty shall thy spirit find all that it craveth."

Mr. Paul J. Campbell deserves the most unstinted thanks of the United this year, for besides serving as First Vice-President he has furnished free of charge a supply of recruiting booklets and application blanks, thus relieving us of one of our most onerous burdens. Mr. Campbell's eighteen years of undiminished devotion to amateurdom form a thing worthy of emulation.

THE UNITED AMATEUR NOVEMBER 1920