REFERENCES:
Marie Hansen-Taylor and H. E. Scudder: Life and Letters of Bayard Taylor, 1884.
A. H. Smyth: Bayard Taylor, ‘American Men of Letters’ [1896].
I
HIS LIFE
Bayard Taylor in 1841, when he was sixteen, contributed to the Philadelphia ‘Saturday Evening Post’ the verses entitled ‘Soliloquy of a Young Poet.’ In 1878, the year of his death, he was still planning new literary enterprises, and in so far as declining health permitted, carrying them out. If unwearied devotion through nearly forty years to the literary life, great fecundity in production, much taste, no little scholarship, and unquestioned sincerity in the exercise of his art entitle one to be called by the honorable name of man of letters, who is more deserving than the author of The Masque of the Gods? To be sure, only a few of his many books are read. But Taylor is in no worse case than many men who tower giant-fashion above him. They likewise have written forty volumes and are known and measured by two or three.
Taylor was partly of German, partly of English Quaker stock, and could boast an ancestor (Robert Taylor) who had come to America with William Penn. The fourth of the ten children of Joseph and Rebecca (Way) Taylor, he was born at Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, on January 11, 1825. His education was got at the neighboring academies of Westchester and Unionville. He was a rhymester at the age of seven, and had become an industrious writer by the time he was twelve.
Having no inclination towards school-teaching and still less towards his father’s vocation, farming, Taylor was apprenticed to a printer. He was presently seized with a passion for travel, and in 1844, with one hundred and forty dollars in his pocket, payment in advance for certain letters he was to write for Philadelphia journals, he set out on a pedestrian tour of Europe. He had a few remittances from home. Greeley promised to print some of his letters provided they were ‘not descriptive’ and that before writing them the young traveller made sure that he had been in Europe ‘long enough to know something.’ Seventeen of Taylor’s letters appeared in the ‘Tribune.’
By rigid economy Taylor managed to get on. But one must have youth to endure the hardships of such a journey. Especially must one have youth if he proposes, as Taylor did, to walk from Marseilles to Paris in the cold winter rains. The history of these two years of wandering is recounted in Views Afoot, or Europe seen with Knapsack and Staff (1846).
Taylor returned to America and took up journalism. Failing in an attempt to make of the ‘Phœnixville Pioneer’ a paper according to his ideal, he went to New York (December, 1847). After various experiences he secured a place on the ‘Tribune,’ was rapidly advanced, and became in time a stockholder. He was sent to California to report on the gold discoveries. This journey furnished him with the matter for his second book of travel, El Dorado, or Adventures in the Path of Empire (1850).
His whole subsequent career is but a variation on the themes of 1846 and 1850. He went everywhere,—to Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Asia Minor (1851–52); to Spain and India, then on to China, where he joined Perry’s expedition to Japan (1853). He was in Germany, Norway, and Lapland in 1856, in Greece in 1857–58, in Russia in 1862–63 (where for a while he held the post of secretary of legation), in Switzerland, the Pyrenees, and Corsica in 1868, and in Egypt and Iceland in the same year (1874).
All his adventures were transmuted into books: A Journey to Central Africa, 1854; The Lands of the Saracen, 1854; A Visit to India, China, and Japan in the Year 1853, 1855; Northern Travel, 1857; Travels in Greece and Russia, 1859; At Home and Abroad, 1859; At Home and Abroad, ‘second series,’ 1862; Colorado, 1867; By-Ways of Europe, 1869; Egypt and Iceland, 1874.
A part of the great success of these books was due to causes far from literature. Doubtless, if written to-day, the volumes would be read, but it were idle to suppose that they could have the vogue they enjoyed in the Fifties. The American public of a half-century ago was not nomadic. It had few ways of gratifying its thirst for knowledge of foreign lands. Photographs were so expensive that one seldom ran the risk of being obliged to sit down with a friend ‘just back from Europe’ to admire such novelties as the Leaning Tower and the Bridge of Sighs. The oxyhydrogen stereopticon was imperfect, the panorama clumsy and ill-painted. Therefore the writings of a man who had the knack of telling agreeably what he had seen were most welcome. The home-keeping public enjoyed also hearing the traveller talk. When Taylor lectured (for he became one of the most popular lecturers of the day) they crowded the hall and thought two hours of him not long enough.
Timeliness, however, does not explain all the success of Views Afoot and its companion volumes. Taylor was an excellent writer even when he wrote most hastily. If his word-pictures were often highly colored, they possessed, among other virtues, the great virtue of having been painted on the spot. Through their aid one could really see what Taylor had himself seen.
But Taylor was a poet before he was a traveller. In 1844 he published (under the patronage of R. W. Griswold, his first literary adviser) a little volume entitled Ximena, or, The Battle of the Sierra Morena, and Other Poems. It was followed by Rhymes of Travel (1848) and The American Legend, the Phi Beta Kappa poem at Harvard (1850). To these must be added A Book of Romances, Lyrics, and Songs, 1851; Poems and Ballads, 1854; Poems of the Orient, 1854; Poems of Home and Travel, 1855; The Poet’s Journal, 1862; The Picture of St. John, 1866; The Masque of the Gods, 1872; Lars, 1873; The Prophet, 1874; Home Pastorals, Ballads, and Lyrics, 1875; The National Ode (read by the author at the opening of the ‘Centennial’), 1876; and Prince Deukalion, 1878. The great translation of Goethe’s Faust, with the commentary, appeared in 1870–71.
Not content with his commercial success as a writer of travels, and his artistic triumphs in poetry, Taylor tried fiction. The first of his four novels, Hannah Thurston (1863), is in part a satire and shows in their most disagreeable light the people who abhor meat and swear by vegetables, the people who profess to hold communication with spirits, the people who think other people ought not to buy and sell human flesh, and so forth.
John Godfrey’s Fortunes (1864) embodies not a few of Taylor’s journalistic experiences in New York. Here are glimpses of literary society such as the soirées at the home of Estelle Ann Lewis, the Mademoiselle de Scudéry of that time and place. The Story of Kennett (1866) is a Pennsylvanian study, a true and lively picture of a phase of civilization which the author perfectly understood. Joseph and his Friend (1870) closed the series of efforts by which Taylor tried to earn money enough to free him from the thraldom of the lecture platform.
His other publications were Beauty and the Beast, and Tales of Home (1872), The Echo Club (1876), the posthumous Studies in German Literature (1879), and Essays and Studies (1880).
Of Taylor’s private life a few important facts remain to be recorded. The pathetic story of Mary Agnew, the beautiful girl whom he had loved since they were school-children together, and whom he married on her death-bed, is a romance which fortunately has been well told by both of Taylor’s biographers. In 1857 (seven years after Mary Agnew’s death) Taylor married Marie Hansen, daughter of Professor Hansen of Gotha, the astronomer. How devoted and helpful she was to him during his arduous life, and how loyal to his memory, are facts too well known to require emphasis.
The home at Kennett known as ‘Cedarcroft’ was built in 1859–60. Taylor lavished on it both money and affection; and while for a few years it gave him a deal of happiness, it proved in the end a burden he could ill afford to carry.
Robust and vigorous though he seemed in middle life, Taylor by unremitting activity had sapped his powers. He gave no evidence of declining literary ambition, but at fifty he was worn out by overwork. A notable recognition of his worth came to him in 1878, when President Hayes appointed him Minister to Germany. He was not to enjoy the honor for long. In May, 1878, he took up the duties of his office, and on the fifteenth of the following December he died while sitting in his armchair in his library.
II
HIS CHARACTER
Ambition was a ruling motive in Taylor’s life. Yet there has seldom been an ambition which, albeit as consuming as fire, was at the same time so free from selfish and ignoble elements.
Taylor aspired to fame through cultivation of the art of poesy. This was the real object of his life. To gain this object he toiled unceasingly and made innumerable sacrifices. Baffled in the attempt to reach his ideal, he was a little comforted when he could persuade himself that he had not fallen completely short of it. And there was exceeding great reward in the knowledge that if wide recognition as a poet was denied him, his friends, Whittier, Longfellow, Stoddard, Boker, and Aldrich, knew for what he was striving and commended him in no uncertain tones.
Whittier described Taylor as one who loved ‘old friends, old ways, and kept his boyhood’s dreams in sight.’ Life was intensely interesting to Taylor. Although the zest of travel disappeared and his large experience of the ways of men had had its customary disillusioning effect, he never really lost his youthful enthusiasm. And it is touching to find in his private correspondence the repeated proofs of how inexhaustible was his fund of hope and of courage, and how quick he was to recover after real or fancied defeat.
Notwithstanding his successes, and he had his share of the good things of life,—contemporary reputation, money of his own earning, and friends,—Bayard Taylor remains, with all his manly qualities, a somewhat pathetic figure in American letters. He led a restless and turbulent mental existence, and died the victim of ambition and overwork.
III
THE ARTIST
Taylor has been pronounced the most skilful of our metrists after Longfellow. One illustration only can be given of his interest in the mechanism of verse, and that is his poetic romance The Picture of St. John. The poem was not published until sixteen years after its first conception. Possibly its growth was a little retarded by the structural peculiarities.
The poem contains three hundred and fifty-five eight-line stanzas (iambic pentameter) grouped into four books. The ‘ottava rima’ was chosen as ‘better adapted for the purposes of a romantic epic than either the Spenserian stanza[57] or the heroic couplet.’ But the question with the poet was,—how to avoid the ‘uniform sweetness’ of a regular stanza while obtaining the ‘proper compactness and strength of rhythm’ which (in his belief) only a stanza could give. His device was to allow himself freedom of rhyme within the stanza, and this ‘not to escape the laws which Poetry imposes,’ but rather to impose a different law in the hope that the form would ‘more readily reflect the varying moods.’ When finally the poem was finished Taylor found that the three hundred and fifty-five stanzas contained ‘more than seventy variations in the order of rhyme.’
Only an enthusiast in the study of form would have undertaken the task of reproducing Faust in the original metres. Taylor’s success was so great that his work as a translator has obscured his fame as a poet. Doubtless so nearly perfect a version had been impossible without that wonderful grasp of the spirit of the original. But it must not be forgotten how much it owes to the years of study and practice Taylor gave to the technique of his art.
IV
POETICAL WORK
In 1855 Taylor published a selection from his earlier books of verse under the title Poems of Home and Travel. By this volume and its companion, Poems of the Orient, he wished, so he said at the time, to be judged. For all his other pieces he desired ‘speedy forgetfulness.’
Poems of Home and Travel shows very well the range of Taylor’s art. Here are rhymed stories (‘The Soldier and the Pard’ and ‘Kubleh’), graceful settings of classic or Indian legend (‘Hylas’ and ‘Mon-da-Min’), together with a pretty fancy from Shakespeare (‘Ariel in the Cloven Pine’). A deeper chord is struck in poems of human love and loss (‘The Two Visions’) and in poems expressing aspiration for the ideal (‘Love and Solitude’), or in those which voice the poet’s joy in a life of action and struggle (‘The Life of Earth’ and ‘Taurus’). There is an ode, ‘The Harp,’ lamenting the silence of song in our America where there is so much to sing. And there are yet other odes, songs, and sonnets.
Poems of the Orient is a typical volume, full of color, warmth, light, breathing the intoxication and glowing with the fantasy of that great vague region we call ‘the East.’ The charm of the verses is very pronounced. How much of what we relish in the volume is really the spirit of the East can best be told by one who knows both the East and the poems. Oriental lyrics and romances would be written otherwise to-day. Taylor was partly under the thrall of that roseate view of the Orient held by Thomas Moore and his contemporaries. Sir Richard Burton has popularized a more realistic conception in which love and roses are less prominent. The flavor of Poems of the Orient may be known by such pieces as ‘The Temptation of Hassan Ben Khaled,’ ‘Amran’s Wooing’ (an Oriental version of young Lochinvar), ‘El Khalil,’ ‘Desert Hymn to the Sun,’ and the popular ‘Bedouin Song.’
The Poet’s Journal, a group of twenty-nine lyrics connected by a poetic narrative and divided into First, Second, and Third Evenings, is plainly autobiographical. Its varying moods of despair and dumb grief, followed by the stirrings of hope and ambition, and, under the influence of awakened love, the triumph of the spirit to will and to do, connect it with the most intimate passages in Taylor’s life.
The Picture of St. John, an Italian romance, seems made for a popularity it somehow never attained. The worldly ambition of the artist transfigured by love, the death of the highborn girl who sacrifices wealth and pride of place for her lover, the unwitting murder of her child by his grandsire, and the redemption of the artist after months of conflict with the Power that Denies—these are elements in a work on which the poet lavished the best of his gifts.
Lars, a Scandinavian study, an idyl of the vales and fiords of Norway, illustrates Taylor’s cosmopolitanism. Passionately as he loved the South, he could also exclaim with Ruth,
I do confess
I love Old Norway’s bleak, tremendous hills,
Where winter sits, and sees the summer burn
In valleys deeper than yon cloud is high:
* * * * *
I love the frank, brave habit of the folk,
The hearts unspoiled, though fed from ruder times
And filled with angry blood.
Home Pastorals, Ballads, and Lyrics contains his fine studies of Westchester County life, ‘The Quaker Widow,’ ‘John Reed,’ and ‘The Old Pennsylvania Farmer,’ together with such happily conceived poems as ‘The Sunshine of the Gods,’ ‘Notus Ignoto,’ ‘Iris,’ ‘Implora Pace,’ and ‘Canopus,’ with its richly colored lines.
Taylor wrote three dramatic poems, none of which his critics are willing to admit is a success. The Masque of the Gods, a lofty conception, fails (if indeed it is a failure), not through feebleness of touch, but through brevity. So vast a design needs room to expand. As it stands, the Masque is a preliminary sketch of what might have become in the hands of its creator a great canvas. It is something that the poet has succeeded in awakening pity for the worn-out deities terrified because of their loss of power, terrified even more by the possibility that they have no principle of life and are only the creatures of men’s brains.
The Prophet was a courageous dramatic experiment, and will always be read with curiosity if not with pleasure. But to assume that Mormonism is wholly unfitted for poetic drama is perhaps to assume too much.
Prince Deukalion, written under the inspiration of Faust, is another of those gigantic conceptions with which Taylor’s imagination loved in later life to busy itself, as if eager to try its powers to the uttermost. A theme like this, wholly removed from human interest, dealing with titanic and mythical figures, is the most dangerous in the whole range of possible subjects. Taylor rises so easily to a high level of poetic achievement that it seems as if he must presently touch some mountain peak. Yet he always leaves the impression of really having the strength to do that in which he fails. He disappoints through the very display of power.
* * * * *
His poetic work lacks idiosyncrasy, and to credit him with having given rise to a ‘school’ is to be generous rather than just. His talent fell just short of his ambition. A busy life with its multitude of cares and interests left him too little time for brooding upon the great themes he affected, and there was wanting the gift for relentless self-criticism which operates almost like the creative power. None the less his countrymen have not begun to discharge the debt of gratitude they owe him. Taylor had great virtues. It should be imputed to him for literary righteousness that he was willing to undertake the long poem. He never, so far as is known, made the excuse our poets continually offer, and which is almost infantile, that the general public does not care for long poems,—as if a poet were under any obligation to the general public.