A Great Pilgrim-Pagan
George Soule
Shakespeare in red morocco seems always wan and pathetic. I see him looking gloomily out of his unread respectability, bored with his scholarly canonization and his unromantic owners. How he longs for the irresponsible days when he was loved or ignored for his own sake! Now he is forever imprisoned in marble busts and tortured in Histories of English Literature. There is no more tragic fate in the annals of imagination. Terrible is the vengeance taken by institutional culture on those who are great enough to command its admiration.
Therefore, a genius who has not been tagged unduly by the pundits inspires me with a profound delicacy, in a sense akin to the reverence for a beautiful child. Here is a virtue which the world needs. One would like to proclaim it from the housetops. Yet there are the rabble, ready with their election-night enthusiasm, and the scholars, with their pompous niches. If one could only find all those whom the man himself would have selected as friends and whisper the right word in their ears! But, after all, we must speak in public, remembering that even misunderstanding is the birthright of the genius. It is better that power should be expressed in devious and unforeseen channels than not at all.
A flippant friend once told me that he had never had the courage to read William Vaughn Moody because the poet had such a dark brown name. That is important because of its triviality. I have no doubt that if the gospel hymns had never been written, and if we had never on gloomy Sunday evenings seen those pale books with the scroll-work Moody-and-Sankey covers, bringing all their dismal train of musical and religious doggerel, we should have been spared many misgivings about the evangelist’s vicarious name-sake. Let it be firmly understood, therefore, that there is nothing dark brown, or evangelistic, or stupidly sober-serious about the new poet of the Fire-Bringer. May he never go into a household-classics edition!
But there is a tinge of New England about him, just the same. Only one who has in his blood the solemn possibilities of religious emotion can react against orthodox narrowness without becoming trivial. It is the fashion to blame all modern ills on puritan traditions. We should be wise if in order to fight our evils we should invoke a little of the Pilgrim Fathers’ heroism. Too many of us take up the patter of radicalism with as little genuine sincerity as a spearmint ribbon-clerk repeats the latest Sunday-comic slang. If you have ever walked over a New England countryside the endless miles of stone walls may have set you thinking. Every one of those millions of stones has been laboriously picked out of the fields—and there are still many there. Before that the trees had to be cleared away, and the Indians fought, and the ocean crossed without chart or government buoy. For over two centuries our ancestors grimly created our country for us, with an incessant summer- and winter-courage that seems the attribute of giants. What wonder if they were hard and narrow? We scoff at their terminal morraine; but we should be more deserving of their gift if we should emulate their stout hearts in clearing away the remaining debris from the economical and spiritual fields. In spite of injurious puritan traditions there is something inalienably American and truly great about old New England. It is the same unafraid stoutness of heart that is at the bottom of Moody’s personality. It gives him power; it gives him unconscious dignity.
Yet Moody was indeed a rebel against the religious and social muddle in which he found himself. Something red and pagan poured into his veins the instinct of defiance to a jealous god and to pale customs. The best of the Greek was his; instinctively he turned at last to Greek drama for his form and to Greek mythology for his figures. There was in him that σπονδη which Aristotle believed essential for the poet—a quality so rare among us that the literal translation, “high seriousness,” conveys little hint of its warmth, its nobility and splendor. He believed in the body as in the soul; and his conception of the godly was rounded and not inhuman. Dionysus was every bit as real to him as the man of sorrows. Is not this the new spirit of America which we wish to nourish? And is there not a peculiar virtue in the poet who with the strong arm of the pilgrim and the consecration of the puritan fought for the kingdom of joy among us? In The Masque of Judgment he pictures a group of heroic unrepentant rebels against divine grace who have not yet fallen under the sword of the destroying angel. Of them one, a youth, sings:
Better with captives in the slaver’s pen
Hear women sob, and sit with cursing men,
Yea, better here among these writhen lips,
Than pluck out from the blood its old companionships.
If God had set me for one hour alone,
Apart from clash of sword
And trumpet pealéd word,
I think I should have fled unto his throne.
But always ere the dayspring shook the sky,
Somewhere the silver trumpets were acry,—
Sweet, high, oh, high and sweet!
What voice could summon so but the soul’s paraclete?
Whom should such voices call but me, to dare and die?
O ye asleep here in the eyrie town,
Ye mothers, babes, and maids, and aged men,
The plain is full of foemen! Turn again—
Sleep sound, or waken half
Only to hear our happy bugles laugh
Lovely defiance down,
As through the steep
Grey streets we sweep,
Each horse and man a ribbéd fan to scatter all that chaff!
How from the lance-shock and the griding sword
Untwine the still small accents of the Lord?
How hear the Prince of Peace and Lord of Hosts
Speak from the zenith ’mid his marshalled ghosts,
“Vengeance is mine, I will repay;
Cease thou and come away!”
Or having seen and hearkened, how refrain
From crying, heart and brain,
“So, Lord, Thou sayest it, Thine—
But also mine, ah, surely also mine!
Else why and for what good
The strength of arm my father got for me
By perfect chastity,
This glorious anger poured into my blood
Out of my mother’s depths of ardency?”
So the sanctity of the warrior. And the sanctity of other passions is there, too. A woman says:
O sisters, brothers, help me to arise!
Of God’s two-hornéd throne I will lay hold
And let him see my eyes;
That he may understand what love can be,
And raise his curse, and set his children free.
But quotations crowd upon me. Most of Moody’s best work bears witness to his glorification of man’s possible personality in rebellion against man’s restrictive conception of society and god. We have had many such rebels; the peculiar significance of Moody lies in the fact that he lacks utterly the triviality of the little radical, and that his is a power which springs from the most heroic in American quality.
Of course all this would be worth nothing unless Moody had the authentic utterance of the poet. His fulness of inspiration, combined with his sensitive editing, has left us scarcely a line which should have gone to oblivion. As an example of his magic take three lines from I Am the Woman, in which the woman is walking with her lover:
But I was mute with passionate prophecies;
My heart went veiled and faint in the golden weather,
While universe drifted by after still universe.
Or the woman’s response to Pandora’s singing in The Fire-Bringer:
Hark, hark, the pouring music! Never yet
The pools below the waterfalls, thy pools,
Thy dark pools, O my heart—!
Fragmentary, mystic, unrelated with the context; yet who that has heard perfect music can fail to understand that cry? It is indeed this mystic richness, these depths below depths, that make a large part of Moody’s individual fascination. He rarely has the limpid clarity or the soaring simplicity which make the popular lyricist such as Shelley. There is too much grasp of the mind in his work for the large public; only those who have in some degree discovered the beauty of the wide ranges can feel at home in him. One breathes with the strength of great virility,—an able and demanding body, a mind which conquers the heights, and those infinitely subtle and vibrating reaches of spirit which belong especially to the poet.
To me the thought of Moody is satisfying not only because he typifies those qualities which I like to think we ought to find in American literature, but because he exemplifies my ideal of a poet. There have been many insane geniuses; men whose glory has shone sometimes fitfully through bodily or mental infirmity. Some of us are accustomed to the idea that genius is in fact insanity or is akin to it. Certainly the words “wholesome” and “healthy” have been applied so many times to mediocre productions that we are wary of them. But is not the insanity of genius after all merely the abnormal greatness and preponderance of a single quality in a man? If by some miracle his other qualities could have been equally great, would he not have been a still nobler artist? To me the Greek impulse of proportionate development has an irresistible appeal. To be sane, not by the denial of a disproportionate inspiration, but by the lifting of all the faculties to its level: that is a dream worthy of the god in man. To be an artist not by the denial of competing faculties, but by the fullest development of all faculties under an inexorable will which unites them in a common purpose: that is a rich conception of personality. The perfect poet should be the perfect man. He should be not insane, but saner than the rest of us. Moody not only expressed this ideal in his life, but in his work. He was strong and sound, physically, mentally, spiritually. No one who has read his letters can miss the golden roundness of his humor, his humanity, his manliness. Yet never for a moment did he make a comfortable denial of the will to soar. In his poem The Death of Eve he has burningly expressed the development of personality. Eve, an aged woman, has not succumbed to the view that she committed an unforgivable sin in disobeying God to taste the apple. Taking old Cain with her, she fearlessly enters the garden again to show herself to God before she dies. In her mystic song she sings:
Behold, against thy will, against thy word,
Against the wrath and warning of thy sword,
Eve has been Eve, O Lord!
A pitcher filled, she comes back from the brook,
A wain she comes, laden with mellow ears;
She is a roll inscribed, a prophet’s book
Writ strong with characters.
Behold, Eve willed it so; look, if it be so, look!
And after singing of her life and of how she had been sensitive to the love of her husband and children, she goes on:
Still, still with prayer and ecstasy she strove
To be the woman they did well approve,
That, narrowed to their love,
She might have done with bitterness and blame;
But still along the yonder edge of prayer
A spirit in a fiery whirlwind came—
Eve’s spirit, wild and fair—
Crying with Eve’s own voice the number of her name.
Yea, turning in the whirlwind and the fire,
Eve saw her own proud being all entire
Made perfect by desire;
And from the rounded gladness of that sphere
Came bridal songs and harpings and fresh laughter;
“Glory unto the faithful,” sounded clear,
And then, a little after,
“Whoso denyeth aught, let him depart from here!”
And only thus does Eve find god—in her perfect self—
Ready and boon to be fulfilled of Thee,
Thine ample, tameless creature,—
Against thy will and word, behold, Lord, this is She!
Here, indeed, is the religion of our time. A faithfulness that is deeper than the old faithfulness; and that challenge which of all modern inspiration is the most flaming:
Whoso denyeth aught, let him depart from here!
This is not the balance of a personality that denies itself! Like Nietzsche, Moody is shaken with the conviction that the most deadly sin is not disobedience, but smallness.
There is a striking similarity between the religious attitude of Moody and that of Nietzsche. Moody mentions Zarathustra only once in his published letters. Certainly he was not obsessed by the German, or a confessed follower. Nor did Moody elaborate any social philosophy, beyond a general radicalism quite different from Nietzsche’s condemnation of socialism. But, like Nietzsche, Moody was in reaction against a false and narrow culture. And like him, Moody found in Hellenic ideals a blood-stirring inspiration. He found not the external grace of the Greek which Keats celebrated, not the static classical perfection which has furnished an anodyne for scholars. It was the deeper, cloudy spirit of Aeschylus, the heaven-scaling challenge of Euripides, the Dionysiac worship of joy and passion. Take, for instance, the chorus of young men in The Fire-Bringer which Professor Manly has called “insolent”—though it seems to me of a divine insolence:
Eros, how sweet
Is the cup of thy drunkenness!
Dionysus, how our feet
Hasten to the burning cup
Thou liftest up!
But O how sweet and how most burning it is
To drink the wine of thy lightsome chalices,
Apollo! Apollo! To-day
We say we will follow thee and put all others away
For thou alone, O thou alone art he
Who settest the prisoned spirit free,
And sometimes leadest the rapt soul on
Where never mortal thought has gone;
Till by the ultimate stream
Of vision and of dream
She stands
With startled eyes and outstretched hands,
Looking where other suns rise over other lands,
And rends the lonely skies with her prophetic scream.
Moody, too, transvaluates values everywhere. The Death of Eve is an example of it. It is to “The Brute” that he looks for the regeneration of society. Prometheus is a heroic saviour of mankind; rebellion is his virtue, not his sin. Pandora is not a mischievous person who through her curiosity lets out all the troubles on the world, but a divine, wind-like inquirer, the inspiration of Prometheus. The God of judgment-day is himself swept away by the destruction of mankind for the sins of commission. And the insignificance of man compared with what he might be is satirically shown in The Menagerie.
But let me not create the impression that Moody cannot be delicate. From Heart’s Wild Flower:
But where she strays, through blight or blooth, one fadeless flower she wears,
A little gift God gave my youth,—whose petals dim were fears,
Awes, adorations, songs of ruth, hesitancies, and tears.
From the gentle poem of motherhood, The Daguerreotype:
And all is well, for I have seen them plain,
The unforgettable, the unforgotten eyes!
Across the blinding gush of these good tears
They shine as in the sweet and heavy years
When by her bed and chair
We children gathered jealously to share
The sunlit aura breathing myrrh and thyme,
Where the sore-stricken body made a clime
Gentler than May and pleasanter than rhyme,
Holier and more mystical than prayer.
Or from The Moon-Moth:
Mountains and seas, cities and isles and capes,
All frail as in a dream and painted like a dream,
All swimming with the fairy light that drapes
A bubble, when the colors curl and stream
And meet and flee asunder. I could deem
This earth, this air, my dizzy soul, the sky,
Time, knowledge, and the gods
Were lapsing, curling, streaming lazily
Down a great bubble’s rondure, dye on dye,
To swell that perilous clinging drop that nods,
Gathers, and nods, and clings, through all eternity.
Here, surely, is an American poet who speaks in eternal terms of the new inspiration; one who was sane and blazing at the same time; one who in order to be modern did not need to use a poor imitation of Whitman, screech of boiler factories and exalt a somewhat doubtful brand of democracy; one who was uncompromisingly radical without being feverish; above all, one who succeeded in writing the most beautiful verse without going to London to do it. When one is oppressed with the doubt of American possibilities it is a renewal of faith to turn to him. If Whitman is of our soil, Moody is no less so; through these two the best in us has thus far found its individual expression.
The temptation to quote is one that should not be resisted. And I can think of no better way to send readers to Moody in the present world crisis than to quote the song of Pandora:
Of wounds and sore defeat
I made my battle stay;
Wingéd sandals for my feet
I wove of my delay;
Of weariness and fear
I made my shouting spear;
Of loss, and doubt, and dread,
And swift oncoming doom
I made a helmet for my head
And a floating plume.
From the shutting mist of death,
From the failure of the breath,
I made a battle-horn to blow
Across the vales of overthrow.
O hearken, love, the battle-horn!
The triumph clear, the silver scorn!
O hearken where the echoes bring,
Down the grey disastrous morn,
Laughter and rallying!
If they (men) were books, I would not read them.—Goethe.
My Friend, the Incurable
II.
On Germanophobia; on the perils of Monomania; on Raskolnikov and Alexander Berkman; on surrogates and sundry subtleties
Ἑυρηκα!—shouted the Incurable, when I came on my monthly call. I have solved the mystery that has baffled your idealists since the outbreak of the War. The puerile effusions of Hardy, Galsworthy, and other Olympians who in the mist of international hostilities confused Nietzsche with Bernhardi, are quite explainable. It is well known that our successful writers have no time or inclination to read other fellows’ books: they leave this task to journalists and book-reviewers. Hence their splendid ignorance of Nietzsche. The advent of great events showered upon the innocent laymen problems, names, and terms that have been a terra incognita to most of them, and justly so: for what has the artist to do with facts and theories,—what is Hecuba to him? But of late it has become “stylish” for men of letters to declare their opinions on all sorts of questions, regardless of the fact that they have as much right to judge those problems as the cobbler has the right to judge pastry. To the aid of the English novelists who wanted to say “something about the war,” but whose information on the subject was zero, came the dear professor Cramb. A quick perusal of his short work[1] supplied the students with an outlook and a view-point, and out came the patriotic cookies to the astonishment of the world. Such, at least, is my interpretation of the mystery.
[1] Germany and England, by J. A. Cramb. [E. P. Dutton and Company, New York.]
Professor Cramb’s lectures are not an answer to Bernhardi, as the publisher wants us to believe, but rather a supplement to the work of the barrack-philosopher whose theory of the biological necessity of war is beautifully corroborated with numerous quotations from the most ancient to the most modern philosophers, historians, statesmen, and poets. The general splendidly demonstrates the efficiency of German mind, the ability to utilize the world culture for the Fatherland, to make all thinkers serve the holy idea of war, from Heraclitus’s πὸλεμος πατήρ πάντων to Schiller’s Bride from Messina. Yet I, in my great love for Germany, should advise the Kaiser’s government to appropriate a generous sum for the purpose of spreading far and wide Cramb’s “Answer,” as the highest glorification of Teutonia. No German has expressed more humble respect and admiration for Treitschke, Bernhardi, and other eulogists of the Prussian mailed fist than this English dreamer of a professor. For what but a fantastic dream is his picture of modern Germany as that of a land permeated with heroic aspirations, a mélange of Napoleonism and Nietzscheanism? Nay! it is the burgher, the “culture-philistine” that dominates the land of Wilhelm and Eucken, the petty Prussian, the parvenu who since 1870 has been cherishing the idea of Weltmacht and of the Germanization of the universe.
Pardon me, friend, I cannot speak sina ira on this question; out of respect for Mr. Wilson’s request, let us “change the subject.” Come out where we can observe in silence the symphony of autumnal sunset. The Slavs call this month “Listopad,” the fall of leaves; do you recall Tschaikovsky’s Farewell Ye Forests? Sing it in silence, in that eloquent silence of which Maeterlinck had so beautifully spoken. I say had, for my heart is full of anxiety for that Belgian with the face of an obstinate coachman. His last works reveal symptoms of Monomania, that sword of Damocles that hangs over many a profound thinker, particularly so if the thinker is inclined towards mysticism. Maeterlinck, as no one else, has felt the mystery of our world; his works echoed his awe before the unknown, the impenetrable, but also his love for the mysterious, his rejoicing at the fact that there are in our life things unexplainable and incomprehensible. His latest essays[2] show signs of dizziness, as of a man who stands on the brink of an abyss. I fear for him; I fear that the artist has lost his equilibrium and is obsessed with phantasms, psychometry, and other nonsense. The veil of mystery irritates him, he craves to rend it asunder, to answer all riddles, to clarify all obscurities, to interpret the unknowable; as a result he falls into the pit of charlatanism and credulity.
[2] The Unknown Guest, by Maurice Maeterlinck. [Dodd, Mead and Company, New York.]
If there were no more insoluble questions nor impenetrable riddles, infinity would not be infinite; and we should have forever to curse the fate that placed us in a universe proportionate to our intelligence. All that exists would be but a gateless prison, an irreparable evil and mistake. The unknown and unknowable are necessary to our happiness. In any case I would not wish my worst enemy, were his understanding a thousand times loftier and a thousandfold mightier than mine, to be condemned eternally to inhabit a world of which he had surprised an essential secret and of which, as a man, he had begun to grasp the least atom.
These words were written by Maeterlinck a few years ago in his essay, Our Eternity. He has surely gone astray since. The last book is written in a dull pale style, in a tone of a professional table-rapper, enumerating legions of “facts” to prove the theory of psychometry or whatever it may be, forgetting his own words of some time ago: “Facts are nothing but the laggards, the spies, and camp followers of the great forces we cannot see.” What a tragedy!
Was Dostoevsky a mystic? Undoubtedly so, but not exclusively so. Far from being a monomaniac, he applied his genius to various aspects of life and wistfully absorbed the realistic manifestations of his fellow-beings as well as the inner struggles of their souls. Dostoevsky is the Cézanne of the novel. With the same eagerness that Cézanne puts into his endeavor to produce the “treeness” of a tree, brushing aside irrelevant details, does Dostoevsky strive to present the “soulness” of a soul, stripping it of its veils and demonstrating its throbbing nudeness before our terrified eyes. We fear him, for he is cruel and takes great pleasure in torturing us, in bringing us to the verge of hysteria; we fear him, for we feel uneasy when we are shown a nude soul. Perhaps he owed his wonderful clairvoyancy to his ill health, a feature that reminds us of his great disciple, Nietzsche. I do not know which is more awesome in Raskolnikov[3]: his physical, realistic tortures, or his mysterious dreams and hallucinations. In all his heroes: the winged murderer who wished to kill a principle; the harlot, Sonya, who sells her body for the sake of her drunkard father and her stepmother; the father, Marmeladov, whose monologues in the tavern present the most heart-gripping rhapsody of sorrow and despair; the perversed nobleman, Svidrigailov, broad-hearted and cynical, who jokingly blows out his brains—in the whole gallery of his morbid types Dostoevsky mingles the real with the fantastic, makes us wander in the labyrinth of illusionary facts and preternatural dreams, brings us in dizzily-close touch with the nuances of palpitating souls, and leaves us mentally maimed and stupefied. I think of Dostoevsky as of a Demon, a Russian Demon, the sorrowful Demon of the poet Lermontov, the graceful humane Mephistopheles of the sculptor Antokolsky.
[3] Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoevsky. [The Macmillan Company, New York.]
The tragedy of Raskolnikov is twofold: he is a Russian and an intellectual. The craving, religious soul of the child of the endless melancholy plains, keened by a profound, analytic intellect seeks in vain an outlet for its strivings and doubtings in the land where interrogation marks are officially forbidden. The young man should have plunged into the Revolution, the broad-breasted river that has welcomed thousands of Russian youth; but Dostoevsky willed not his hero to take the logical road. The epileptic Demon hated the “Possessed” revolutionists; he saw the Russian ideal in Christian suffering. “He is a great poet, but an abominable creature, quite Christian in his emotions and at the same time quite sadique. His whole morality is what you have baptised slave-morality”—this from Dr. Brandes’s letter to Nietzsche,—a specimen of professorial nomenclature.
I am thinking of a threefold—nay, of a manifold—tragedy of a young man, who, besides being a Russian and an intellectual, is a revolutionist and is a son of the eternal Ahasver, the people that have borne for centuries the double cross of being persecuted and of teaching their persecutors. What makes this tragedy still more tragic is the element of grim irony that enters it as in those of Attic Greece: the Russian-Jewish-Anarchist is hurled by Fate into the country of Matter-of-Fact, your United States. The boy is poetic, sentimental, idealistic; imbued with the lofty traditions of the Narodovoltzy, the Russian saints-revolutionists, he craves for a heroic deed, for an act of self-sacrifice for the “people.” “Ah, the People! The grand, mysterious, yet so near and real, People....”[4] He attempts to shoot an oppressor of the people, is delivered to the Justice, and is sentenced to twenty-two years of prison confinement. The curtain falls, but does the tragedy end here? No, it only begins.
[4] Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist, by Alexander Berkman. [Mother Earth Company, New York.]
For he who lives more lives than one
More deaths than one must die.
Raskolnikov wanted to kill a principle; he wanted to rid the world of a useless old pawnbroker, in order to enable himself to live a useful life. He failed; the principle remained deadly alive in the form of a gnawing conscience. “I am an aesthetic louse,” he bitterly denounces himself. Alexander Berkman wanted to die for a principle, to render the people a service through his death. He has failed. At least he has thought so. The Attentat produced neither the material nor the moral effect that the idealist had expected. Society condemned him, of course; the strikers, for whose benefit he eagerly gave his life, looked upon his act as on a grave misfortune that would augment their misery; even his comrades, except a very few, disapproved of his heroic deed. The icy reality sobered the naïve Russian. Was it worth while? For the “people?”
The Memoirs have stirred me more profoundly than Dostoevsky’s Memoirs from a House of the Dead, far more than Wilde’s De Profundis: the tragedy here is so much more complex, more appalling in its utter illogicality. On the other hand the book is written so sincerely, so heartedly, so ingenuously, that you feel the wings of the martyr’s soul flapping upon yours. Berkman becomes so near, so dear, that it pains to think of him. You are with him throughout his vicissitudes; you share his anguish, loneliness, suicidal moods; your spirit and your body undergo the same inhuman tortures, the same unnecessary cruelties, that he describes so simply, so modestly; you rejoice in his pale prison joys, your heart goes out to the gentle boy, Johnny, who whispers through the dungeon wall his love for Sashenka; you weep over the death of Dick, the friendly sparrow whose chirping sounded like heavenly music to the prisoner; you are filled with admiration and love for the Girl who hovers somewhere outside like a goddess, “immutable,” devoted, noble, reserved; you are, lastly, out in the free, and how deeply you sympathize with the sufferer when he flees human beings and solicitous friends.... When I read through the bleeding pages, I felt like falling on my knees and kissing the feet of the unknown, yet so dear, martyr. Surely, thou hast known suffering....
Don’t sneer at my incurable sentimentality, you happy normal. The tragedy of Alexander Berkman is common to all of us, transplanted wild flowers. It is the tragedy of getting the surrogate for the real thing. Berkman and the Girl passionately kissing the allegorical figure of the Social Revolution—isn’t this the symbol of the empty grey life in this normal land? What do you offer the seeking, striving, courageous souls but surrogates, substitutes? Your radicals—they are nauseating! They chatter about Nietzsche and Stirner and Whitman, wave the red flag and scream about individual freedom; but let one of them transgress the seventh commandment or commit any thing that is not comme il faut according to their code, and lo, the radicalism has evaporated, and the atavistic mouldy morality has come to demonstrate its wrinkled face. Has not John Most repudiated the act of his disciple, Berkman, because it was a real act and not a paper allegory? Of course, Most was German....
Hush! Were we not going to observe in silence the purple-crimson crucifixion of autumnal Phoebus? I have been as silent as the Barber of Scheherezade. Woe me, the Incurable!
Ibn Gabirol.