Major and Minor Bards

FOR those who believe there is no such thing is a long poem, that the mere attribute of length renders it not a poem, this must seem the day of great things in verse. If there was ever a time when the short poem was a main staple of production, that time is now upon us. And not only does this brevity mark the separate pieces of verse, but it is a day, too, of small books. Perhaps there will not be a great lamentation over the passing of epics and five-act tragedies. Economists would tell us that the railroad and the telegraph have changed all that. It must be, then, in answer to some call from the law of supply and demand that the output of thin books of verse, very thin books, is so plentiful. It is, in a word, the day of the Minor Bard. The expression of moods is possibly more than ever a necessity for man. Moods have taken a territory of their own in the chart of the emotions, and it is the mission of the Minor Bard to give them the outward semblance which may or may not keep them from passing into the unexplored regions where many a mood in the previous history of the race must have been lost.

Will it savor too strongly of juggling with words to remark that the term Minor Bard may be taken with some subtler reference to the key in which many of the songs of the hour are pitched ? It has been our fortune to read in a comparatively short space of time a large number of these thin books, and it takes no searching eye to detect as their prevailing characteristic that distinct quality of sadness which we are all wont to recognize as a note of our decadent century. If the poet truly fulfills his mission, according to all good authority, he mirrors the spirit of his age, and in the batch of books to be passed forthwith in review necessarily not exhaustive, the singer will be found in many instances to be engaged in this his proper task. The sequence is easy to follow : first, a spirit of sadness abroad in the world ; second, a band of singers ; third, a collection of books that do not make for joy.

One hardly need say that there are bright exceptions to this tendency. Far be it from us, moreover, to say that in the longer productions some of the truest poetry is not found, and still farther that the bards are completely minor. Where the line of demarcation between the greater and the less should be made, their own consciences and the insight of careful readers will usually tell.

Let us begin with one whose place is, fortunately, not open to question. A new book from Mr. Aldrich is a thing to be thankful for, and in his Unguarded Gates and Other Poems ¹ there is a bountiful share of the work which possesses just the kind of beauty one has learned to expect. Most of the poems, if we mistake not, have had their first readings in the magazine. It is of course in a volume that their total impression is first to be felt. There is in them ample evidence of the familiar delicacy of imagination and touch. None but the most sensitive hand could have written such verses as A Shadow of the Night, El Moulok, Broken Music, and parts of Elmwood and White Edith ; and rarely, in the lighter vein, does one come upon such gracefulness in narrative as At Nijnii-Novgorod and Nourmadee display. Indeed, it may be said, and especially of some of the more serious poems, that the technique bears so many marks of a master in the singer’s art that the poems could be well liked even if their inspiration lacked the charm it holds. This feeling makes us the bolder to wonder how so careful a critic of his own writing as Mr. Aldrich could have let one line in the verses — to be sure, rather informal — on The Sailing of the Autocrat creep into the book.

would pass in many books without causing the moment of disappointment it gives one here ; but it is not our purpose to cavil at motes when there is so much to enjoy, or to pass on to another book without a word of appreciation of Footnotes as the happiest of titles for the hard-worked quatrain.

A younger poet, to whom we turn with interest and expectation, is Mr. William Watson, in whose volume of Odes and Other Poems ² many will look for an answer to the hope that the good promise of earlier work is bearing itself out. The answer must be that in the best poems of the book this hope is abundantly carried on, if it is not raised to greater heights. Ode, as used by Mr. Watson, is a rather swelling title for what others might call a poetical epistle to a friend. The volume opens with several such pieces of verse, and in one of them, to H. D. Traill, the poet is seen, as before, at his best, or something very like it, in writing of his art of poetry. Again, in stanzas of The First Skylark of Spring he sings of song with an equally true note. But this is no longer the distinguishing note of his work. His eye is perhaps more than before turned inward, and some of the intensity of self-knowledge finds its way clearly into such lines as his Vita Nilova and the latter part of Lakeland Once Move. A sterner gift is shown forth in some of the sonnets, notably in the three called The World in Armour, which may surely be said to have a kinship, which the author would prize, with Wordsworth, in the vigor of their conception of man in his larger political relations. These are really noble sonnets, and a few of the others do not fall below them in impressiveness. Such passion as Mr. Watson’s work reveals is still intellectual rather than emotional. He is still a disciple of the school in which Matthew Arnold studied under Wordsworth. Was it not Matthew Arnold himself who likened style to wellfitting, comfortable clothes, showing a man at his best, and hampering none of his movements ? Somewhat in this way Mr. Watson has style. His movements are not nimble ; they are rather those of a dignified, clear, unhurried person, thoughtful more than impulsive, yet not lacking in intensity of feeling, —

There are, again, a few poems which might have been spared, but the book, as a whole, makes an impression of firmness and power. The poet must not be left, however, as a person with all the virtues, and none of the graces, and to show that the less rigorous emotions are not wholly stricken from his creed, we must quote a graceful lyric, one of the few lighter bits in the volume : —

THE PROTEST.

It is but a part of Mr. Watson which one finds here. In Five Books of Song³ one has the grateful opportunity of seeing Mr. Gilder in "the altogether.”and of noting the complete progress of his poesy. The tendency which has been noticed in his later work towards very occasional poems is happily found to be in large measure, indeed, a later tendency. In the five books here done into one there are many poems heartily to be liked, and a few to which it is a genuine pleasure to return more than once. Perhaps nowhere more than in the second book, The Celestial Passion, are these to be found. The feeling, in this volume religious, is very true, as Holy Land, a sonnet, and The Voice of the Pine will show. In the next book, A Woman’s Thought is welcome as an old friend ; and still farther on, who will not be glad again to “ hear the barking of Leo ” ? The subdivisions of each book into parts is, to a reader’s sense, somewhat subtle, and the rivulets of text and meadows of margin do not always please the eye ; but having seen the body of the work, one may be sure that a single smaller book of high excellence could easily be made by judicious selections, — and of how many contemporary poets can this be said ?

After this manner two poets from overseas are presented to American readers, though in the case of the first, Aubrey de Vere,⁴ the selection has not been carried to such a point as to make the volume a small one. From his total work, however, Mr. Woodberry has chosen such poems as body forth the qualities pointed out with insight and skill in the Introduction. The poet is clearly shown "on his own recognizances “ to be worthy of the place he has taken as a pure worker in high themes. These, as many know, are largely drawn from Irish history and tradition, especially in the days of early Christianity. Without a strong element of popular appeal, the work has dignity and elevation. That it is not altogether modern one may partially infer from the fact that little of it belongs to the family of short poems : indeed, the greater part of the book is made up of long extracts from longer works. The sonnets, songs, and personal verses which follow them, all speak from a sensitive heart, capable of warm and understanding friendships. To what Mr. Woodberry has said of the poet it might not be amiss to add at least the conclusion of the sonnet to him, in William Watson’s book, at which we have just glanced : —

The second book of selections from a poet not thoroughly known in America will give many readers a first acquaintance with Arthur O’Shaughnessy.⁵ Mrs. Moulton’s account of his life and work is sympathetic and temperate. To all her recognition of the poet’s qualities of tenderness and fine sense, his modern yet mediævally mystic thoughts of the soul, and, no less, of the body before and after death, we would add a word touching a power in him which we should not expect a woman to overlook. This is his strange understanding of women, whose souls he seems to have read as they could hardly have read them for themselves or from one another. Perhaps as well as any other the selection from Chaitivel will show this inner knowledge. The Dream and A Love Symphony are wholly the work of a poet and a lover, as The Fountain of Tears is the song of a true singer. Withal it must be said that O’Shaughnessy touched rather than attained the element of permanence, and is a poet for the few, not for the many.

Related by nationality and mystical flavor to his work is the thinnest book of our collection, The Land of Heart’s Desire,⁶ by Mr. W. B. Yeats. It is a little Irish play in verse, and tells the story of a new wife called on May eve to join the fairies, with whom more than with her matter-of-fact relations all her kinship lay. It is an attractive piece, with the true poetic feeling which must thrive by the side of a true flavor of fairyland. Nor is it undramatic in its way ; one can easily conceive the effect upon spectators, as upon the characters in the play, of the troops of fairies, unseen but felt, coming to the door and dancing through the house. In all the play there is a sort of modern oldworldness that sets it apart as having a charm of its own.

From these singers of other lands let us turn to a few of the New World. In one of his sonnets, Mr. Aldrich, peeving into the future of “this young Land,” asks : —

With a dozen or more new books of new bards under our eyes we cannot fear that the reaping is to be given over. The value of the harvest remains still to be seen. In Mr. Carman’s Low Tide on Grand Pré ⁷ one of the most individual new notes may be detected. When one has complained of the mannerisms, of the evasions, as they seem at times, of sense in sound, of the suspicions that the poet himself is not always quite sure of his intentions, the fact persists that the writer is a poet, and that the volume as a whole casts over the reader the spell which poetry only can effect. One does not care greatly for words like “ unhaste,” for phrases — later than Spenser — like “ the footing of her feet,” and for finding the singer and his themes so often in what the Concord philosophers would call a state of betweenness.

These are three of the states, and there is yet another, but in a stanza which has a characteristic charm : —

One does not care to get out a geography and place these roads ; it is enough that they lead one into the vague land of imaginings. Many verses in the book might well be pointed out as showing this land to be far too vague. Yet the impression left by a few such poems as The Eavesdropper. The End of the Trail, and The Vagabonds, and through them by the entire volume, is that of a singer filled with the mystery of the north, with a spirit of unrest, — “unhaste,” too, if you will,—in vast sympathy with the persons Stevenson spoke for in the Apology for Idlers, and one — shall we not say ? — with the class of vagabonds described by the Old English Statute printed with the charming poem in their praise. Inaction and dreams demand their song no less than stirring life, and of them Mr. Carman sings in this book. Of the means to his end all praise is to be spoken, for invariably he uses the simplest metres, so musically woven that one does not stop to think of their simplicity, and the restraint which by reason of it is put upon the writer. A more careful criticism of his own work will bring him one day, we hope, to drawing clearer distinctions between the really beautiful parts of it, and the exercises of imagination and expression from which the restraint so well borne in his rhythms is absent.

On the title-page of Songs from Vagabonds⁸ Mr. Carman’s name is joined with that of Mr. Richard Hovey, or, as the verses within the volume show his more familiar name to be, “ Black Richard,” or “ Dickon.” Perhaps the book is best to be regarded as a piece of elaborate fooling ; for certainly the three men in the waning moon whose images appear on its cover cannot take it very seriously. “ Free ” is the note struck at the outset, and the shaking off of conventional trammels is the constant theme of rejoicing. The liberty that is sung is apparently of the kind which Milton identified with something else. Yet after all, like certain collegians who make a boast of wickedness, the singers do not quite convince one of being as bad as they wish to seem. Of the bee in their More Ancient Mariner it is written, —

Their intention, too, is very firm, but the mixing of the morals seems a little more amusing than dreadful. It must be frankly said that there is a good share of rubbish in the book, though one cannot but admire the ingenuity of such rhymes as tree-toad, three-toed, vetoed, and Gounod’s, Bluenose, who hnows. Now and then, moreover, there is a note, if we mistake not, in which Mr. Carman is recognized at his best, as for example in The Mendicants: —

These capital lines of the poem speak from his confessed love of vagabondage, which here has brought his verse into inferior company, and shown his own less creditable work. So “ young ” an enterprise seems a pity, but it cannot really matter very much.

Another writer with whom “ freedom ” is a watchword is Mr. Hamlin Garland, and in his Prairie Songs ⁹ one may taste firstfruits of that “ Great Middle West “ with which Mr. Garland’s hopes for American literature are so bound up. He says in a “ Foreword,” “ I do not expect . . . to have these verses taken to represent my larger work ; ” but for the Middle West they may surely speak. The songs are largely of the sort which spring out of “remembered emotion.”From what Mr. Garland calls “ the rancuous tumult of the street,” his mind turns back to boyhood and the prairies, and many a verse about them is the result. Most of them have a genuine ring, and some are vivid and some impressive. But through all there is a note of abiding sadness, the note so well known to be characteristic of the prairies. The dull tragedies of the women’s lives is again shown clearly forth. To say that this effect of dreary monotony is produced is to say that Mr. Garland has done his work well ; but to join with him in the hope that the Middle West will provide us henceforth with American literature is to give melancholia the first place as the national disease of the future.

From the prairies to the schools is a far cry. Several books have come to us, however, bearing unmistakable marks of the study. Sonnets and Other Verses,¹⁰ by Mr. Santayana, is one of the best of these. In the “ other verses ” there is something less of distinction than in the sonnets. These, it seems to us, are possessed of a clear, cold beauty of form, and in their thought have an equal elevation. The most considerable group of them reveals a person who has been forced to turn away from the earlier things of faith, and now, though he respects them, and half envies those who hold to them, seeks such solace as nature and abstract thought can afford. The singer’s attitude towards the world is best summed up in the three lines, —

Four sonnets on the death of a friend must also especially be mentioned for their beauty. The writer’s themes and skill alike lend themselves to the sonnet form, and if the work is to be thought

yet the plane on which it moves is high and pure.

Another volume clearly from the schools is Mr. Hugh McCulloch’s The Quest of Heracles.¹¹ Here, too, there are poems which do not so much concern us as the one thing which is best in the book. This is found in the several long poems of which classical stories are the theme. At their best, as in Antinous and parts of Phaeton, these show a distinct narrative gift, a power to tell old stories in a direct yet imaginative way, with skill in construction not only in the larger plan, but in the technique of episodes and lines. Of the shorter verses in the collection, it is certainly to be remarked with gratefulness that the world is looked upon in an aspect not altogether gray. A few stirring songs of action and love and a group of five sonnets are really attractive. But it is the more sustained work which encourages one to hope for still better things from the new writer. As in Mr. Santayana’s book, there is here enough good work to remind us of the creditable place “ Earlier Poems ” have sometimes taken in the collected writings of men who have “ arrived.”

Linked with Mr. McCulloch’s book by its classicism and its promise is The Wind in the Clearing, and Other Poems,¹² by Mr. Robert Cameron Rogers. Here, too, the best things are based upon classic models, and, for example, in Hylas and Odysseus at the Mast the result is effective. Some of the shorter poems have strength and delicacy, and in the lighter verse it is interesting to find the most attractive bit, An Open Question, a sort of eclogue which turns the memory immediately back to Vergil. Mr. Rogers seems a man with something to say, and if his message and his way of delivering it are not supreme, he has a pleasant skill, from which more important results may yet spring, presumably along the lines which here display most of promise.

Neither from the prairies nor from the schools, but from the factory comes a small book, Skipped Stitches,¹³ Verses by Anna J. Grannis, which may remind us how independent of surroundings the gift of poetry can be. The writer, we are told, has worked in a New England mill since she was fifteen, and naturally many of the songs have to do with mill life. There is also a share of the “ homely domestic,” in which cradles and armchairs play their parts ; but throughout the book there are evidences of genuine poetic feeling, of true insight, and here and there is a touch of lyric beauty. The source, if nothing else, would justify us in reprinting this bit: —

APRIL.

This lyric brings us to a book which is all lyrical, Poems ¹⁴ by John B. Tabb. Father Tabb has found metaphors for very many phenomena of nature and experiences of life. These he has put into small verses, rarely exceeding the length of a sonnet, usually shorter, and frequently a mere quatrain. Many of the conceits are attractive, and the work is nearly always skillfully polished, but the little poems are things best read where many of them first appeared, at the end of a page of prose in a magazine. There they are welcome bits of fancy ; here their effect is to leave one feeling as if one had risen from a dinner of crumbs. But it is a pretty little book, and has in it many graceful images which may well be looked at one by one.

Father Tabb is a Southern singer ; so, too, is Mr. William Hamilton Hayne, whose Sylvan Lyrics and Other Verses¹⁵ has at least a kindred fanciful quality. Mr. Hayne has a pleasant, imaginative way of seeing analogies in birds, winds, and trees, and putting them into easy verses. There is little in the book, however, that has marked individuality. It is an “ oaten stop or pastoral song" with which he soothes our “ modest ear,” and as one may expect of the music blown through an oat-stalk, strength is not its conspicuous quality. A few tender tributes to the singer’s father, a poet himself, mark out some of the best pages in the book.

Through the poetic inheritance the world comes rightly, also, by the volume of Poems ¹⁶ by Langdon Elwyn Mitchell, Dr. Weir Mitchell’s son. It is a book which would have been more effective had some of the longer productions been spared, for they are by no means always the best things in the collection. Such shorter poems us True Captivity and My Comrade are proof enough of a genuine gift in verse. Mr. Mitchell, however, does not come to us with the only collection which would have gained strength by abridgment. Such another is Poems, New and Old,¹⁷ by William Roscoe Thayer. A few verses like The Last Hunt and the series Echoes from a Garden, which we take to be adaptations of Hafiz, show the writer capable of really poetic work. The pity is the greater, therefore, that several long productions have found their way into the volume, and have made it one which may be expected to add little to the gayety even of towns.

There is, nevertheless, in both of these books a more personal note than one finds in The Flute-Player and Other Poems,¹⁸ by Mr. Francis Howard Williams. There is attractive writing in the book, and a few bits of it stand out by ample reason of their own charm. Such are Servus Servorum Dei and An Ionian Frieze. But much of the work is of the sort that could not possibly have been but for previous poets. For example, the narrative Woman o’ the Watch is as good an echo of Enoch Arden as if it had been produced specifically as an exercise in Tennysonian art. In other poems the reminders of the past come through separate phrases, and one finds that Shelley, Milton, George Eliot, Carlyle, and others have lodged their words or turns of speech irretrievably in Mr. Williams’s mind. It is not unpleasant to have one’s memory of so much that is good renewed, but it does impair a sense of freshness in the book with which the process begins.

Only in its plan A Lover’s Diary,¹⁹ by Gilbert Parker, is remindful, too, and that of no less formidable an object of comparison than George Meredith’s Modern Love. We say only in plan, for this present series of sonnets, though it tells of the separation and coming together again of lovers, falls infinitely short of the intensity of sense and phrase which stung itself into every line of George Meredith’s sequence. In every way it is a less serious “ affair ” with which Mr. Parker has dealt, and the apparent ease of his sonnet-writing gives the impression that neither the depths nor the heights of the soul were touched in preparation. This may be merely the effect of a “ fatal facility ;” for surely the verses are so written as to leave one thinking the author might have done them with or without a potent draught from the experience out of which they should at least seem to spring. Many of them are attractive in fancy, as they are fluent in form, and one, calling upon the beloved to know the best things in the singer as the trace of his mother upon him, is of a particularly happy vein.

One more book, another collection of sonnets, and we are done. In Mr. Eugene Lee-Hamilton’s Sonnets of the Wingless Hours ²⁰ there is all the rigor which Mr. Parker’s collection lacks. From the world, as Mr. Lee-Hamilton sees it, faith, hope, and most of love, except for his art, are gone. Yet to this he hardly brings all which, in his just conception, it deserves. To the sonnet, as his medium, we look for a high expression of art, and find more of desperate vigor than of beauty in his cultivation of the “ scanty plot of ground.” He has, moreover, the doubtful habit of writing sonnets in pairs, not as separate though allied verses, but as single poems of two stanzas. Yet there is certainly strength in the best pages of the book, and a sort of grim consolation and encouragement for those who would see life as it has appeared to this undefeated singer. For all such persons, especially when they seek consolation in writing verse, perhaps it is well to reflect, “ The worst is not

So long as we can say, ‘ This is the worst.’" Reviews, like books, must have a beginning, middle, and end. We have had to do mainly with the middle of the volumes at hand. Now it is time to speak of their end, and come to our own. How can we better call attention and pay tribute to a new fashion, restored like many other fashions of our day from the Middle Ages, than by bringing our notice to a close imitated as nearly as possible from the last page of half a dozen of the books at which we have glanced ? Then let us write : —

Here endeth this notice of a score of bards, read with sympathy, and reviewed with candor in January the year of our Lord 1895