Memories of William Vaughn Moody
I
IN William Vaughn Moody, America has had a poet whom Americans are in danger of forgetting. The neglect is natural, in view of the poetic revolution which occurred just after his death, and in which death alone prevented his participation. It is none the less regrettable. And in forgetting the poet we also lose the man, who as a person combined the most engaging and inspiring traits of pagan and of mystic. To those who have read him well, Moody marks an important development in American literature. To those who have known him well, he represents all that and, in addition, the happy human embodiment of the art which was both root and flower of his being.
It is difficult to think of a person more perfectly endowed in mind and body than Moody. Physically he was of medium height, graceful and well proportioned, with a strength beyond his stature and great power of endurance. His hands were unusually deft and sensitive, his eyes a clear blue, radiant beneath the light brown hair that waved above his forehead. In youth his habitual expression was one of calm self-possession. Yet a guarded joy looked out from his eyes with gleams of ironical amusement, and occasionally his whole being would flame up in laughter. Later in life his face took on the more melancholy aspect made familiar by his portrait of himself, in which the Vandyke beard adds to the gravity of his appearance.
It would be hard to say whether his delight in nature or in art was greater, but there is no doubt that his senses, naturally keen, were schooled to richer enjoyment by his training in music, painting, poetry. His sensuous equipment he respected as part of his endowment for his vocation. He was very fond of smoking, but once he declared that if he thought tobacco tended to dull the senses he would never light his pipe again. With the extraordinary gusto which he brought to experience he coupled a personal reserve, an exact sense of values, a fundamental seriousness, which set him apart from others, and constituted an essential element of his character as poet.
II
My own recollection of Moody goes back to his freshman year at Harvard. We were reading the Phormio when Professor Smith called, ‘Mr. Moody next,’and for the first time I heard the vibrant, musical voice which always expressed so perfectly the man and the poet. He sat behind me, and for many weeks remained only a voice. Presently I read his first poem in the Harvard Monthly, and as I was a candidate for the Monthly myself, the thought of having Moody for a colleague lent energy to my striving. I had come to know him by sight, and I suppose he knew me likewise, but it was characteristic of Harvard in the nineties that we never spoke. Robert Herrick and Norman Hapgood divided the editorship of the Monthly that year, and under their somewhat skeptical guidance Moody and I were admitted to the board.
He was not an organization man. A figure of speech or a flawless line of verse meant more to him than any institution. But, as if he recognized this bias as a danger, he showed heroic patience in performing whatever task was laid upon him. You had only to say, ‘You ought to do that,’ and with dogged obedience he went about it. His courses he chose with fine economy, selecting subjects in which guidance counted most, and avoiding those, such as English literature or composition, which he could master by himself. Next to David S. Muzzey, now Professor of History at Columbia, he was first in his class, and he held the largest scholarship.
Dedicated to poetry from early youth, Moody faced his long apprenticeship with both confidence and humility. Once when I pointed out the difficulty of distinguishing one’s self in a crowded world, he replied with boyish solemnity, ‘No man can refuse to run at Olympia.’ In preparation he was not ashamed to learn from the masters. Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning, Rossetti, Swinburne — each was for the moment his model, to be imitated with an accuracy which has done some wrong to his later fame. Subsequently the robust manner of Kipling appealed to him, and his mediæval fancy turned from Tennyson to William Morris. After he had come to Chicago, he read us the poems of Francis Thompson, and I am told that Thompson once asked Professor Hart of Wellesley about Moody, ‘ the man in America who writes like me.’ A fine passage would haunt his mind for years. I remember on our walk through the Black Forest his quoting quite suddenly the lines from Dante which stand as text for ‘A Dialogue in Purgatory,’ written much later.
During these middle years of Eliot’s presidency, Harvard offered a life of extraordinary variety and freedom. The stiffness between Harvard and what was then the Annex had broken down. On nights when the Browning Club forgathered, the austere corridors of Hollis and Thayer rustled with ladies’ skirts. Moody belonged to this and another mixed group, the Comedy Club, as well as to the Signet, the Delta Upsilon, and the O. K. In those days also there was free exchange between the faculty and such of the undergraduates as cared to trade. The Hapgoods were great friends of William James; I think it was Norman Hapgood who introduced Moody to him and to the Crawford Howell Toys, who were generously hospitable to us all. Several younger men had recently brought back from Europe a new learning: George Santayana in philosophy, Edward Cummings in sociology, Arthur R. Marsh in comparative literature, and a little later, in English, Lewis E. Gates, who became Moody’s close friend and critic.
Moody prepared for his degree in three years and spent his fourth abroad with Ingcrsoll Bowditch, whom he tutored. That summer Norman Hapgood, Louis Dow, and I joined them for a walking trip through the Black Forest and Switzerland. I remember particularly Moody’s enthusiasm when, after an early morning climb through mist and sleet on the Cima di Jazzi, we came out on the sunny slopes above Domodossola, to be confronted by our first view of the Italy he was to love so much. Italy and Greece were associated in his mind with a sense of humanity and the unseen powers which rule its fate: Italy with the mediaeval mysticism of Dante’s theology, Greece with joy in life restrained by classic measure and the decrees of the gods. One is the inspiration of The Masque of Judgment, the other of The Fire-Bringer.
During his absence Moody was elected class poet, and returned to deliver his poem on Class Day, 1893. In the summer he and I undertook to revise Bulfinch’s Age of Fable, and sought relaxation in cruising about Buzzards Bay. He remained at Harvard for two years as graduate student and assistant to Lewis Gates, finding new companions in Trumbull Stickney, already giving promise of the poetic career to be so untimely ended, in Josephine Preston Peabody and Daniel Gregory Mason. A special chapter should be written on Moody’s friendships, and it should be written by a poet. His companionship was a precious thing and he gave it generously to many. But he was at his best in association with makers — those who, like himself, had seen the vision and not been disobedient to it.
Personal intercourse gave scope to his faculty for making all communication a sort of fine art. Of such intimacy his play with words was a distinct promotion. About him there inevitably grew up a special vocabulary, a kind of secret language. His relish for words, both noble and base-born, was amusingly illustrated when we stepped into a Chicago bar one day. A habitue displayed a familiarity which Moody discouraged with some accentuation of the Cambridge manner; whereupon the aggrieved stranger asked why he was so ‘abrupt.’ That adjective delighted Moody. Indeed, much of the spice of our conversation in those days was his play with words. His delight in both Hardy and Francis Thompson was partly verbal.
Moody undoubtedly exposed his own work to criticism by his use of archaic or unfamiliar terms, but he had the spirit of the pioneer and was willing to take chances. He always dissented from Wordsworth’s theory that there should be no difference between the diction of poetry and that of prose. The word was for him an element of poetry, to be employed with a reverent sense of its use in the past, by the poets and by the people. His equally vivid feeling for contemporary colloquial values is brought out in ‘The Menagerie,’ which for that reason has a unique worth to those who knew him. Always his aim was precision, and if le mot juste was unfamiliar or had to be reminted, he yielded to the necessity, which with him was one of feeling as well as thought.
Akin to this zest for words was his pursuit of the figures of speech to which they invited him. Once, coming back from a walk, he said with satisfaction, ‘We chased a metaphor all across Harvard Bridge and back.’
III
Coming to Cambridge from the Middle West, Moody had seized with genuine hunger upon its rich civilizing influence. He was spiritually homesick at leaving, but family obligations compelled him to increase his resources. Of the two openings offered, he chose to join Robert Herrick and me at the University of Chicago. The crudeness of the Western scene oppressed him sorely, and he resented still more at first the somewhat forced and pretentious quality of its nascent culture. In the end, however, it is impossible to doubt that the result, even in his own eyes, was good. His years in Chicago were years of growth as a human being, and humanity was the essence of his art. Hitherto his inspiration had been literary and the result largely imitative; now he began to draw from his own experience and to achieve a freer, more personal manner.
His new environment offered from the beginning an intellectual companionship and stimulus fully as valuable as that which Harvard had to give. The colleagues whose knowledge he laid most fruitfully under contribution were Paul Shorey in Greek, Ferdinand Schevill in the Middle Age and Renaissance, and John Matthews Manly in English literature. Among other influences must be set down his own teaching. Instead of reading papers for a large course, he taught classes limited to thirty, involving contact with a variety of human types — close, conscientious, but seldom intimate. One of his pupils writes of the ‘dreamy aloofness, the habit of slow, impersonal, vivid epigram, which we associated with Mr. Moody.’ His lectures were carefully organized and delivered in perfect form. I have seen hundreds of students’ themes painfully corrected in red ink, with elaborate comment written in his clear, beautiful hand.
That year we had a coöperative household managed by my wife, with Moody and Ferdinand Schevill as members. We were all poor, but living was cheap after the World’s Fair. When the weekly budget worked out to $8.38 apiece for rent, service, and food, we felt entitled to a celebration in a private room at the Bismarck, where real Pschorrbrau tempered our exile from Jakey Wirth’s ale in Boston. We used, for some reason, to dress for these parties, and I remember Moody in his tail coat doing a dance to the tune of ‘Twinkle, twinkle, little star,’ with a humorous solemnity that was most engaging. The guitar was often in play as accompaniment to his varied store of songs, especially in Chicago, whose freer atmosphere brought to all of us a certain expansion of mood. I had never known Moody so natural, so easy, so blithe.
Moody’s second year in Chicago is chiefly memorable for his editing of Milton’s poems, English and Latin, which he did with a thoroughness that lifted the task far above hack work. His contract called for the conventional text with introductions and notes, but Moody could not let it go at that. He scrutinized the text in its various readings, and returned to Milton’s original spelling. He made a new translation of the Latin poems. His essays introducing each division are fine examples of critical prose. All this was done for the fee originally set, which the publishers, however, voluntarily increased. But Moody’s real compensation was far greater. Milton was not one of the poets for whom in his youth he greatly cared, preferring the more lavish art of Shakespeare or Shelley. Moreover, Milton’s theology was repulsive to him. But through conscientious effort to enter into the spirit of the Puritan poet he learned to know his greatness, and later, in his own best poetry, profited by Milton’s influence. By virtue of this economy, which consisted in putting his full strength into every undertaking, nothing he ever did was without value to him.
These first eighteen months in Chicago were rewarded by half a year of freedom, which saw the beginning of his career as a recognized poet. He sailed for Naples, and at Sorrento had the experience recorded in ‘Good Friday Night,’ which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly for May 1898. A morning ride out of Orvieto, during a bicycle trip with Ferdinand Schevill, inspired his ‘Road-Hymn for the Start,’ published in the Atlantic for June 1899.
Later he joined us in Venice at the Casa Frollo, where insect life tormented him by night, but nightingales sang beneath his window. In our gondola, manned by one Luigi, we set out every morning for the Lido, or took longer trips to Torcello and Murano, where Moody was endlessly enthralled by the glass blowers. Craftsmanship in every form delighted him. Occasionally we went to an exhibition of modern art which included a triptych representing the Last Judgment: in the centre, the Deity in his wrath, on the sides the contorted bodies of the damned. I wondered at the fascination which that gruesome picture held for Moody. Later I recognized it as one of the sources of The Masque of Judgment.
From Venice, Moody and I bicycled to Asolo, and later joined my family at Cortina, with Cristallo, Tofana, and Sorapis menacing above the joyous valley. Here Moody began to write The Masque of Judgment, the origins of which are clear. The picture at Venice gave the emotional shock — indignation that ‘God’ could so treat his creatures. The Dolomites furnished the setting. Milton supplied the intellectual background: as attorney for the defense, justifying the ways of God to men, he challenged Moody to argue for humanity, the plaintiff.
Moody wrote industriously through the mornings, complaining of Raphael’s loquacity and wishing he would have done, so that we might further explore the Dolomites. At length the Archangel stayed his speech and we set out afoot. Once we lay for an hour confronting a mass of tawny rock with huge red stains like congealed blood on its face, as if it had been gashed by an axe. Another glorious morning, walking around the Marmolada, we came to a spot where the retreating snow field met the green grass in a sharp edge. Moody at once proposed that we should strip and take our morning bath by rolling down the slope, to feel the stinging cold of the snow and the sudden release of the sun-warmed earth.
It was on this day that I found in my mail the Boston Transcript with William James’s oration on the dedication of the Robert Gould Shaw monument, which gave the keynote to the ‘Ode in Time of Hesitation,’ published in the Atlantic for May 1900.
Our final exploit was an ascent of the Gross-Venediger. We found ourselves disappointed in our hopes for another glimpse of Venice, and we were shockingly unprepared for high altitudes. After I started back to Cortina, leaving Moody at Innsbruck alone, he was ill from exposure for some days. It was the first breach in his magnificent health.
Riding by night because of the heat, he made his way to Ravenna, whose mosaics may also have figured in The Masque of Judgment, and finally to Genoa, where he was again ill, lying half conscious for days. One morning he realized that his steamer was due to sail, whereupon he got up, packed, and made his way to the quay, to fall again unconscious in his berth.
IV
In the succeeding years Moody found conditions at Chicago more favorable to poetry, thanks largely to Professor John M. Manly, who became head of the English Department and Moody’s close friend. He found also a group of Chicago writers: Harriet Monroe, Hamlin Garland, Henry R. Fuller, William Morton Payne. To Hamlin Garland, with whom he took a horseback trip in the mountains of Colorado, Moody owed his introduction to wild nature, and, at the other end of the scale, his interest in social problems, of which ‘Gloucester Moors,’ published in Scribner’s Magazine for December 1900, is unmistakable evidence. In these years after the Spanish War there was strong feeling in Chicago against the annexation of the Philippines, of which Henry B. Fuller was the mouthpiece and which Moody shared. His poem ‘On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines,’ published in the Atlantic Monthly for February 1901, was a very bold utterance, and in a university less tolerant than Chicago would have cost an instructor his position.
In 1900 appeared The Masque of Judgment, in 1901 his first collected Poems. The next year we spent the winter together in Boston completing our History of English Literature, a fortunate venture, since it rendered Moody independent of teaching, which he forthwith renounced. President Harper made him a standing offer for a single quarter at full professor’s salary, and Manly patiently arranged courses for him, but these were always withdrawn.
Aside from the necessity of saving himself for his true work, he recoiled from the formal teaching of literature. ‘I cannot do it,’ he told Manly. ‘At every lecture I slay a poet.’
In the spring of 1902, while visiting Mrs. Brainerd at Cape Henry, Moody spoke one evening of the Prometheus legend as another approach to the problem of man’s separation from God, treated in The Masque of Judgment. This was the origin of The FireBringer. Next morning he started for Greece, where he traveled afoot through the Peloponnesus. At Corinth he felt that power of human love to annihilate distance which is the subject of ‘The Moon Moth,’ and in Crete he had again a vision of the actual presence of Christ, recorded in ‘Second Coming.’ No one who knew Moody can doubt that these were real experiences, ‘closer to him than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.’ In July, I found him in Paris, rereading the entire body of Greek tragedy with Trumbull Stickney, who was then engaged on his thesis in Greek literature for the doctorate at the Sorbonne, and who was an incomparable guide and stimulus. Stickney had himself written a lyric drama, Prometheus Pyrforos, the influence of which is discernible in Moody’s larger, full-bodied work.
Returning to America, Moody made his headquarters in New York, where he was the centre of a group of younger poets, especially Ridgely Torrence, Edwin Arlington Robinson, and Percy Mackaye. He was also a frequent visitor at Mrs. Brainerd’s home in Chicago. Most of this time he drew a small income from the two books on English literature, but until the success of The Great Divide his livelihood was far from assured. Magazines offered a steady market for his verse, but nothing could bring him to publish a poem which he considered beneath his best. Up to the time of his death, the bulk of his writing was destroyed. It is true, he never starved, but he did meet hardship and denial like a good soldier in a cause he would not betray, even by compromise.
V
The Fire-Bringer was published in 1904, and it is not too much to say that critics accepted it as placing Moody at the head of American poetry. In England, William Archer had included the ‘Ode in Time of Hesitation ’ in an anthology of modern verse, and May Sinclair now wrote enthusiastically, hailing him as first of the ’American trio,’the others being his friends, Robinson and Torrence. At this time, however, he turned to prose drama, a form which had always fascinated him as a vehicle for representing human experience, and as a challenge to his craftsmanship. As early as 1896 he was following newspaper accounts of a Western faith healer named Schlatter and discussing him as dramatic material. But before embodying this conception he wrote The Sabine Woman, renamed The Great Divide.
The play was shown to Margaret Anglin, then playing in Chicago, who resolved to try it out in the last days of her engagement. No one who was present on the opening night wall forget the circumstances, as exciting as the play itself. After the first curtain went down amid a whirlwind of applause, the management presented Moody with a contract, threatening to stop the performance unless he signed. But Moody had been warned against hasty engagements. A lawyer, plucked from the audience, scanned the document while the house awaited the outcome of this drama-between-acts. At last an agreement was effected. The principals carried off the second act lairly well, but the supporting cast had gone cold during the delay. Forgetting their lines, they wandered vaguely about, opening and shutting windows or reading newspapers. Toward midnight the third act staggered to a lamentable conclusion. It was a harrowing experience for a man of Moody’s temperament.
That summer at Cornish I saw the play grow anew under his hand. I had known him as a most meticulous craftsman, but I had not known, nor ever have seen since, anything like his power of fierce concentration. There were many friends near by, — the Herricks, the Hapgoods, the Churchills, Miss Ethel Barrymore, — but Moody was not to be diverted for more than an occasional set at tennis or a plunge in the swimming pool. The revised play, triumphantly produced in New York by Margaret Anglin and Henry Miller, remains a landmark in American drama.
Moody’s health had been perfect until after the ascent of the GrossVenediger, and the effects of that seemed to pass away completely. He had, however, a severe fall while traveling in the Peloponnesus in 1902. Four years laterl met him in New York, walking quite unconcernedly to Doctor Bull’s hospital to have a growth removed from his injured leg. Probably the growth was malignant, for symptoms returned later and at last appeared in the brain. It was the same terrible malady from which Trumbull Stickney had died, and Moody must have had its horror clearly before him, but he bore himself always with stoicism.
My last meeting with him was in the winter of 1909, when he came out to Jackson Park for an afternoon of skating, a pastime he always relished. After twenty minutes he drew up at the bank, took off his skates, and we walked slowly away under the trees, which suddenly reminded him of the snowy woods on Arlington Heights above Cambridge, where we had spent many winter afternoons.
That winter he went to California, where he painted with William Wendt. He was married to Mrs. Brainerd in May, and her devoted care and the companionship of Ferdinand Schevill were his last happiness. To the latter he confided his constant regret that he had given so much precious time to prose, which he, like Milton, reckoned to be ‘but the work of his left hand.’ Once he said, ‘It is perhaps a judgment that this confusion has fallen upon me,’
He died on October 17, 1910. The night before his death there came to him one of those visions which he always held as the source of his highest poetry, as commands not to be disobeyed — a vision of Saint Paul, commemorated in a stanza of Percy Mackaye’s Uriel.
VI
It is Moody’s strength and glory that he worked in the great tradition of poetry. A scholar by instinct, he went to the past not only with his mind but with his heart. Its learning, its technique, he brought to the service of a spirit essentially modern. Even those poems ‘ reminiscent ’ in manner — ‘Harmonics,’ ‘A Grey Day,’ ‘The Brute,’ ‘The Menagerie’ — deal with experiences and thoughts entirely his own, and mark the growth of a form in which imitation has given way to genuine assimilation. From these tentative beginnings he progressed through the lavish abundance of his middle period to the severe restraint and sheer concentrated energy of ‘I Am the Woman’ and ‘The Death of Eve.’
This ultimate fusion of abundance and austerity is found only in the greatest poets. It is perhaps superfluous to point out that the two elements reflect two aspects of Moody’s character: on the one hand, a natural paganism to which the visible, tangible world made urgent appeal; on the other, a solemn sense of the mystery behind the external frame. It was his task to show that the two could be reconciled; that the separation of man from God was not of the senses, but of the intellect.
This theme, the essential unity of the world with God, is the subject of his trilogy of poetic dramas, presented through conceptions which as myths or theologies have expressed mankind’s sense of its relation to God. The Fire-Bringer deals with the striving of man, in his great prototype Prometheus, to rise and take part in the creative struggle. The Masque of Judgment reveals the tragedy of a God who denies this element in his creation, and who through his annihilation of his world is himself undone. ‘The Death of Eve,’ of which only the first act was finished, was to have set forth the search of mankind for reconciliation with God, through Eve, the first means of separation.
The criticism of his poems and plays, as they appeared, showed Moody’s contemporaries fairly unanimous in accepting his work as part of the poetry which will live. That his present popularity is in no way commensurate with his achievement is due partly to the lack of public interest in poetry during his lifetime, partly to the poetic revolution instigated by the Imagists immediately after his death. It was natural that they should adopt a certain militancy against poetic conventions and t hose who in any way countenanced them. I remember that once when Miss Amy Lowell was asking about Moody, whom she had never met, she murmured as if to herself, ‘I wonder if he could have kept us back.’
There is, however, a special poignancy in the obliviousness or hostility of his successors toward a poet who, if he had lived, would have sympathized with much in the new programme. Some of the objectives declared by the Imagists Moody had already achieved; toward others he was clearly progressing. True, he would never have accepted the visible world as a spectacle merely, with no curiosity about its meaning. But the aesthetic principle that the form of poetry should grow out of the subject, rather than that subject should be fitted to a given form, was and had long been entirely his own. As early as 1898 he wrote of Samson Agonistes, ‘The idea might naturally have occurred to [Milton] of casting away the fixed form altogether as a useless fiction.’ In many other aspects his poetry anticipates the most modern of his successors. To-day the Imagists themselves have been outmoded by those who deem it truly modern to accept certain conventions, provided one views them with enlightenment and a touch of disdain; who in their verse cultivate the verbal and technical virtuosity which in Moody was subjugated to prophetic fire, while in their critical prose they deplore the absence of that flame from their contemporaries.
With all his forward-looking qualities, Moody was distinctly a poet of his age. In summing up his work it is interesting to note how the forces of the time wrote themselves out in the form and substance of his verse. There is the eclecticism of the dying Victorian period and its self-consciousness, its moral energy. There is something of the realism which reflected the influence of science, and the tendency of realism to extend itself into symbolism through the intimations which it carries of the world beyond that which we see and touch. Moody passed from the realm ruled by Tennyson and Browning, Rossetti and Swinburne, to that in which he was akin to Maeterlinck, Francis Thompson, and Ernest Dowson. Like the latter, he confronted the eternal problem of the dualism of flesh and spirit and their inevitable union, although his solution was different. I feel sure that he wrote ‘Good Friday Night’ and ‘Second Coming’ before he knew Dowson’s poetry, but the kinship of the two poets is unmistakable. Like Dowson and Symons, he was a lover of Verlaine and the early symbolists. In The Masque of Judgment and The Fire-Bringer he contributed to the revival of the poetic drama as a literary form, and his prose plays were at the time the most important contribution in the United States to the movement initiated by Ibsen to make the stage once more a vehicle for serious and significant criticism of life. Historically, Moody has an important place in American literature — and we may believe that, like Milton, he ‘has left something so written to after times as they should not willingly let it die.’