Ponkapog Papers Part 5

This is the land the sunset washes, These are the banks of the Yellow Sea; Where it rose, or whither it rushes, These are the western mystery!

Night after night her purple traffic Strews the landing with opal bales; Merchantmen poise upon horizons, Dip, and vanish with fairy sails.

The little picture has all the opaline atmosphere of a Claude Lorraine. One instantly frames it in one's memory. Several such bits of impressionist landscape may be found in the portfolio.

It is to be said, in pa.s.sing, that there are few things in Miss d.i.c.kinson's poetry so felicitous as Mr. Higginson's characterization of it in his preface to the volume: "In many cases these verses will seem to the reader _like poetry pulled up by the roots_, with rain and dew and earth clinging to them." Possibly it might be objected that this is not the best way to gather either flowers or poetry.

Miss d.i.c.kinson possessed an extremely unconventional and bizarre mind.

She was deeply tinged by the mysticism of Blake, and strongly influenced by the mannerism of Emerson. The very gesture with which she tied her bonnet-strings, preparatory to one of her nun-like walks in her garden at Amherst, must have had something dreamy and Emersonian in it. She had much fancy of a quaint kind, but only, as it appears to me, intermittent flashes of imagination.

That Miss d.i.c.kinson's memoranda have a certain something which, for want of a more precise name, we term _quality_, is not to be denied. But the incoherence and shapelessness of the greater part of her verse are fatal. On nearly every page one lights upon an unsupported exquisite line or a lonely happy epithet; but a single happy epithet or an isolated exquisite line does not const.i.tute a poem. What Lowell says of Dr. Donne applies in a manner to Miss d.i.c.kinson: "Donne is full of salient verses that would take the rudest March winds of criticism with their beauty, of thoughts that first tease us like charades and then delight us with the felicity of their solution; but these have not saved him. He is exiled to the limbo of the formless and the fragmentary."

Touching this question of mere technique Mr. Ruskin has a word to say (it appears that he said it "in his earlier and better days"), and Mr.

Higginson quotes it: "No weight, nor ma.s.s, nor beauty of execution can outweigh one grain or fragment of thought." This is a proposition to which one would cordially subscribe if it were not so intemperately stated. A suggestive commentary on Mr. Ruskin's impressive dictum is furnished by his own volume of verse. The substance of it is weighty enough, but the workmans.h.i.+p lacks just that touch which distinguishes the artist from the bungler--the touch which Mr. Ruskin, except when writing prose, appears not much to have regarded either in his later or "in his earlier and better days."

Miss d.i.c.kinson's stanzas, with their impossible rhyme, their involved significance, their interrupted flute-note of birds that have no continuous music, seem to have caught the ear of a group of eager listeners. A shy New England bluebird, s.h.i.+fting its light load of song, has for the moment been mistaken for a stray nightingale.

THE MALE COSTUME OF THE PERIOD

I WENT to see a play the other night, one of those good old-fas.h.i.+oned English comedies that are in five acts and seem to be in fifteen. The piece with its wrinkled conventionality, its archaic stiffness, and obsolete code of morals, was devoid of interest excepting as a collection of dramatic curios. Still I managed to sit it through.

The one thing in it that held me a pleased spectator was the graceful costume of a certain player who looked like a fine old portrait--by Vand.y.k.e or Velasquez, let us say--that had come to life and kicked off its tarnished frame.

I do not know at what epoch of the world's history the scene of the play was laid; possibly the author originally knew, but it was evident that the actors did not, for their make-ups represented quite antagonistic periods. This circ.u.mstance, however, detracted only slightly from the special pleasure I took in the young person called Delorme. He was not in himself interesting; he was like that Major Waters in "Pepys's Diary"--"a most amorous melancholy gentleman who is under a despayr in love, which makes him bad company;" it was entirely Delorme's dress.

I never saw mortal man in a dress more sensible and becoming. The material was according to Polonius's dictum, rich but not gaudy, of some dark cherry-colored stuff with tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs of a deeper shade. My idea of a doublet is so misty that I shall not venture to affirm that the gentleman wore a doublet. It was a loose coat of some description hanging negligently from the shoulders and looped at the throat, showing a tasteful arrangement of lacework below and at the wrists. Full trousers reaching to the tops of buckskin boots, and a low-crowned soft hat--not a Puritan's sugar-loaf, but a picturesque shapeless head-gear, one side jauntily fastened up with a jewel--completed the essential portions of our friend's attire. It was a costume to walk in, to ride in, to sit in. The wearer of it could not be awkward if he tried, and I will do Delorme the justice to say that he put his dress to some severe tests. But he was graceful all the while, and made me wish that my countrymen would throw aside their present hideous habiliments and hasten to the measuring-room of Delorme's tailor.

In looking over the plates of an old book of fas.h.i.+ons we smile at the monstrous attire in which our worthy great-grandsires saw fit to deck themselves. Presently it will be the turn of posterity to smile at us, for in our own way we are no less ridiculous than were our ancestors in their knee-breeches, pig-tail and _chapeau de bras_. In fact we are really more absurd. If a fas.h.i.+onably dressed man of to-day could catch a single glimpse of himself through the eyes of his descendants four or five generations removed, he would have a strong impression of being something that had escaped from somewhere.

Whatever strides we may have made in arts and sciences, we have made no advance in the matter of costume. That Americans do not tattoo themselves, and do go fully clad--I am speaking exclusively of my own s.e.x--is about all that can be said in favor of our present fas.h.i.+ons. I wish I had the vocabulary of Herr Teufelsdrockh with which to inveigh against the dress-coat of our evening parties, the angular swallow-tailed coat that makes a man look like a poor species of bird and gets him mistaken for the waiter. "As long as a man wears the modern coat," says Leigh Hunt, "he has no right to despise any dress. What snips at the collar and lapels! What a mechanical and ridiculous cut about the flaps! What b.u.t.tons in front that are never meant to b.u.t.ton, and yet are no ornament! And what an exquisitely absurd pair of b.u.t.tons at the back! gravely regarded, nevertheless, and thought as indispensably necessary to every well-conditioned coat, as other bits of metal or bone are to the bodies of savages whom we laugh at. There is absolutely not one iota of sense, grace, or even economy in the modern coat."

Still more deplorable is the ceremonial hat of the period. That a Christian can go about unabashed with a s.h.i.+ny black cylinder on his head shows what civilization has done for us in the way of taste in personal decoration. The scalplock of an Apache brave has more style. When an Indian squaw comes into a frontier settlement the first "marked-down"

article she purchases is a section of stove-pipe. Her instinct as to the eternal fitness of things tells her that its proper place is on the skull of a barbarian.

It was while revolving these pleasing reflections in my mind, that our friend Delorme walked across the stage in the fourth act, and though there was nothing in the situation nor in the text of the play to warrant it, I broke into tremendous applause, from which I desisted only at the scowl of an usher--an object in a celluloid collar and a claw-hammer coat. My solitary ovation to Master Delorme was an involuntary and, I think, pardonable protest against the male costume of our own time.

ON A CERTAIN AFFECTATION

EXCEPTING on the ground that youth is the age of vain fantasy, there is no accounting for the fact that young men and young women of poetical temperament should so frequently a.s.sume to look upon an early demise for themselves as the most desirable thing in the world. Though one may incidentally be tempted to agree with them in the abstract, one cannot help wondering. That persons who are exceptionally fortunate in their environment, and in private do not pretend to be otherwise, should openly announce their intention of retiring at once into the family tomb, is a problem not easily solved. The public has so long listened to these funereal solos that if a few of the poets thus impatient to be gone were to go, their departure would perhaps be attended by that resigned speeding which the proverb invokes on behalf of the parting guest.

The existence of at least one magazine editor would, I know, have a shadow lifted from it. At this writing, in a small mortuary basket under his desk are seven or eight poems of so gloomy a nature that he would not be able to remain in the same room with them if he did not suspect the integrity of their pessimism. The ring of a false coin is not more recognizable than that of a rhyme setting forth a simulated sorrow.

The Miss Gladys who sends a poem ent.i.tled "Forsaken," in which she addresses death as her only friend, makes pictures in the editor's eyes.

He sees, among other dissolving views, a little hoyden in magnificent spirits, perhaps one of this season's social buds, with half a score of lovers ready to pluck her from the family stem--a rose whose countless petals are coupons. A caramel has disagreed with her, or she would not have written in this despondent vein. The young man who seeks to inform the world in eleven anaemic stanzas of _terze rime_ that the cup of happiness has been forever dashed from his lip (he appears to have but one) and darkly intimates that the end is "nigh" (rhyming affably with "sigh"), will probably be engaged a quarter of a century from now in making similar declarations. He is simply echoing some dysthymic poet of the past--reaching out with some other man's hat for the stray nickel of your sympathy.

This morbidness seldom accompanies genuine poetic gifts. The case of David Gray, the young Scottish poet who died in 1861, is an instance to the contrary. His lot was exceedingly sad, and the failure of health just as he was on the verge of achieving something like success justified his profound melancholy; but that he tuned this melancholy and played upon it, as if it were a musical instrument, is plainly seen in one of his sonnets.

In Monckton Milnes's (Lord Houghton's) "Life and Letters of John Keats"

it is related that Keats, one day, on finding a stain of blood upon his lips after coughing, said to his friend Charles Brown: "I know the color of that blood; it is arterial blood; I cannot be deceived. That drop is my death-warrant. I must die." Who that ever read the pa.s.sage could forget it? David Gray did not, for he versified the incident as happening to himself and appropriated, as his own, Keats's comment:

Last night, on coughing slightly with sharp pain, There came arterial blood, and with a sigh Of absolute grief I cried in bitter vein, That drop is my death-warrant; I must die.

The incident was likely enough a personal experience, but the comment should have been placed in quotation marks. I know of few stranger things in literature than this poet's dramatization of another man's pathos. Even Keats's epitaph--_Here lies one whose name_ _was writ in water_--finds an echo in David Gray's _Below lies one whose name was traced in sand_. Poor Gray was at least the better prophet.

WISHMAKERS' TOWN

A LIMITED edition of this little volume of verse, which seems to me in many respects unique, was issued in 1885, and has long been out of print. The reissue of the book is in response to the desire off certain readers who have not forgotten the charm which William Young's poem exercised upon them years ago, and, finding the charm still potent, would have others share it.

The scheme of the poem, for it is a poem and not simply a series of unrelated lyrics, is ingenious and original, and unfolds itself in measures at once strong and delicate. The mood of the poet and the method of the playwright are obvious throughout. Wishmakers' Town--a little town situated in the no-man's-land of "The Tempest" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream"--is shown to us as it awakens, touched by the dawn. The clangor of bells far and near calls the townfolk to their various avocations, the toiler to his toil, the idler to his idleness, the miser to his gold. In swift and picturesque sequence the personages of the Masque pa.s.s before us. Merchants, hucksters, players, lovers, gossips, soldiers, vagabonds, and princes crowd the scene, and have in turn their word of poignant speech. We mingle with the throng in the streets; we hear the whir of looms and the din of foundries, the blare of trumpets, the whisper of lovers, the scandals of the market-place, and, in brief, are let into all the secrets of the busy microcosm.

A contracted stage, indeed, yet large enough for the play of many pa.s.sions, as the narrowest hearthstone may be. With the sounding of the curfew, the town is hushed to sleep again, and the curtain falls on this mimic drama of life.

The charm of it all is not easily to be defined. Perhaps if one could name it, the spell were broken. Above the changing rhythms hangs an atmosphere too evasive for measurement--an atmosphere that stipulates an imaginative mood on the part of the reader. The quality which pleases in certain of the lyrical episodes is less intangible. One readily explains one's liking for so gracious a lyric as The Flower-Seller, to select an example at random. Next to the pleasure that lies in the writing of such exquisite verse is the pleasure of quoting it. I copy the stanzas partly for my own gratification, and partly to win the reader to "Wishmakers'

Town," not knowing better how to do it.

Myrtle, and eglantine, For the old love and the new!

And the columbine, With its cap and bells, for folly!

And the daffodil, for the hopes of youth! and the rue, For melancholy!

But of all the blossoms that blow, Fair gallants all, I charge you to win, if ye may, This gentle guest, Who dreams apart, in her wimple of purple and gray, Like the blessed Virgin, with meek head bending low Upon her breast.

For the orange flower Ye may buy as ye will: but the violet of the wood Is the love of maidenhood; And he that hath worn it but once, though but for an hour, He shall never again, though he wander by many a stream, No, never again shall he meet with a dower that shall seem So sweet and pure; and forever, in after years, At the thought of its bloom, or the fragrance of its breath, The past shall arise, And his eyes shall be dim with tears, And his soul shall be far in the gardens of Paradise Though he stand in the Shambles of death.

In a different tone, but displaying the same sureness of execution, is the cry of the lowly folk, the wretched p.a.w.ns in the great game of life:

Prince, and Bishop, and Knight, and Dame, Plot, and plunder, and disagree!

O but the game is a royal game!

O but your tourneys are fair to see!

None too hopeful we found our lives; Sore was labor from day to day; Still we strove for our babes and wives-- Now, to the trumpet, we march away!

"Why?"--For some one hath will'd it so!

Nothing we know of the why or the where-- To swamp, or jungle, or wastes of snow-- Nothing we know, and little we care.

Give us to kill!--since this is the end Of love and labor in Nature's plan; Give us to kill and ravish and rend, Yea, since this is the end of man.

States shall perish, and states be born: Leaders, out of the throng, shall press; Some to honor, and some to scorn: We, that are little, shall yet be less.

Over our lines shall the vultures soar; Hard on our flanks shall the jackals cry; And the dead shall be as the sands of the sh.o.r.e; And daily the living shall pray to die.

Nay, what matter!--When all is said, Prince and Bishop will plunder still: Lord and Lady must dance and wed.

Pity us, pray for us, ye that will!

It is only the fear of impinging on Mr. Young's copyright that prevents me reprinting the graphic ballad of The Wanderer and the prologue of The Strollers, which reads like a page from the prelude to some Old-World miracle play. The setting of these things is frequently antique, but the thought is the thought of today. I think there is a new generation of readers for such poetry as Mr. Young's. I venture the prophecy that it will not lack for them later when the time comes for the inevitable rearrangement of present poetic values.