Comments of an Idler on Three New Books
Eris: A Dramatic Allegory, by Blanche Shoemaker Wagstaff (Moffatt, Yard), is, we are told on the cover, “full of vigorous enthusiasm, and embodies the philosophy of Henri Bergson,” to whom on a flyleaf the book is duly dedicated. It is in careful rhythmic blank verse; a dialogue, principally, between “Man” and “Thought,” with “Past” and “Future” now and then interrupting. The allegory is prefaced by a portrait of the author by Helleu; we trust an unfair one. A strangely bovine expression greets us from under a plumed black hat and from over shoulders and arms drawn like a Goops. Helleu made lovely things once; why this?
In Eris we find Man hurling defiance at Thought, who taunts him, “You cannot vanquish me while Life endures.” Discussion between them on this point covers some forty pages of melodious argument. Six of these (and they are consecutive) form a fairly comprehensive guide-book to a trip around the world, as Man, distracted, stops off at many well-known points seeking to escape pursuing Thought.
In Venice I spread sail with Capulet
And plied an oar across the green lagoons
The soft air vibrant with the minstrels’ song:
I dreamed in Pisa’s woodland and the gulf
Of Lerici, where once again I heard
The lyrich echo of pure Shelley’s voice.
On Pæstum’s glory and on Dougga’s mount
I studied metope and fluted frieze—
And so on. “Man” finally reaches Mount Parnassus—
The mighty throne of Zeus
Hides like a cloud-veiled mist within the heavens;
I am so near divinity it seems
That I could tread the pathway of the stars;
but “Thought” comes hurrying along, two pages later. Man cries to him desperately:
Envelope me within the cosmic heart
Freed of my separate hideous entity,
Blown with the wingéd dust from whence I came!
They struggle together, and Man plunges over the cliff. Thought, “assuming a sudden intenser magnitude, rises out of the dust of Man” (the stage directions seem a little confused here) and shouts:
At last to conquer after æons of strife—
The reeling stars man’s silent sepulchre.
There are graceful lines and pictures, occasionally a good simile. Technically the lines are too smooth, too neatly finished, each in its little five-iambic jacket. The lyrics lack singing quality. There is a tedious list, two pages, of famous ladies—Helen, Sappho, Salammbo, from Eve to the Virgin Mary—as Man cries to Past, “What woman are you in disguise?” Swinburne did this gorgeously somewhere, making each speak; but these do not—they do not even live.
Totally different is my second volume of verse—The Sea is Kind, by T. Sturge Moore (Houghton Mifflin). A letter from the publishers suggests that “like Noyes and Masefield, T. Sturge Moore may have a message to American lovers of poetry.” I am an American lover of poetry and an eager one; therefore, I was hopeful; but I am oppressed by the obligation of doing justice to the initial poem in the book, viz.: The Sea is Kind, because I cannot tell at all what it is about. Several people, by name Evarne and Plexaura, females, and Menaleas and Eucritos, males, seem to be talking high talk by the edge of the sea—about ships and storms and nymphs and kindred things. Evarne speaks at great length in rough pentameters, quoting others more obscure, if possible, than herself.
The handsome scowler smiled.
Then with a royal gesture of content
Addressed our wonder.
. . . . . . . .
“But devastation from mine inroads stretches
“Across Euphrates further than they dare.
“The industrious Ninevite, the huckster grey
“With watching scored tale lengthen down his wall
“Beneath his hatred Median debtor’s name,
“Dread me, and hang near casement, over door,
“To guard each southward-facing aperture,
“Rude effigies smaller than this of me.—
“Charm bootless ’gainst my veering pillared dust
“Which chokes each sluice in vainly watered gardens,
“Dessicates the velvet prudency of roses,
“And leaves green gummy tendrils like to naught
“But ravelled dry and dusty ends of cord”;
and so on for a long, long while. It may be wonderful; I dare say it is.
The last two-thirds of the volume is taken up with short poems arranged in groups addressed to various persons—Tagore, Yeats, and Moore, among them. There is more clarity here. One discerns an autobiographic wistfulness in these stanzas entitled: A Poet in the Spring Regrets Having Wed So Late in Life.
Some things, that we shall never know,
Are eloquent today,
Belittling our experience, though
We loved and were gay:
For those, whose younger hands are free
With a body not their own,
Taste delicacies of intimacy
Which we have not known.
Primrose, narcissus, daffodil,
In sudden April plenty,
Flourish as tender fancies thrill
Spouses at twenty!
There seems something strangely improper about this, considering the strict propriety of the theme.
One group of two is addressed to Charles Ricketts. The Serpent begins
Hail Pytho; thou lithe length of gleaming plates!
and The Panther thus:
Consider now the Panther, such a beast.
One question addressed to the Panther is:
Dost, cloyed by rich meats spicy as the south,
Expose thy fevered palate to the cool,
Which, like snow melting in an emperor’s mouth,
Helps make excess thy life’s ironic rule?
Consider now Sturge Moore, our bewilderment in trying to ascertain what you wish us to think about such things as these, and consider too a transposition of the first line of a well-known poem about a Tiger, to read, “Consider now the Tiger.”
The group to Yeats has one called The Phantom of a Rose. An explanatory footnote tells us that a girl returning from a ball drops a rose from her bosom and dreams that a youth, the perfect emanation of the flower, rises and invites her to dance.
She ached to rise, she yearned to speak,
She strove to smile, but proved too weak;
As one in quicksand neck-deep,
Wild with the will, has no power to leap;
Her limbs like a sunken ferry-boat
Lay logged with sleep, and could not float.
She had danced too often at the ball,
She had fluttered, nodded, and smiled too much.
Tears formed in her heart: they did not fall.
. . . . . . . .
He rose, and danced a visible song;
With rhythmic gesture he contended
Against her trance; and proved so strong
That the grapes of his thought wore the bloom of his mood,
While her soul tasted and understood.
“Her limbs like a sunken ferry-boat.” A happy simile! We recognize the sensation.
In Judith, one of the group to Moore, a vigorous note is sounded. This is good, and maybe the rest is too; I do not know. It rolls above my head.
The Spirit of Life, a series of nine essays by Mowry Saben (Mitchell Kennerley), is the kind of book that makes me savagely controversial and then cross for heeding it at all. Its platitudinous optimism meanders along through some two hundred and fifty pages under various chapter headings: Nature, Morals, Sex, Heroes, etc. The first sentence is: “There are many great Truths that can be expressed only by means of paradox”; and the last, “If life means nothing, if the universe means nothing, then reform is only an illusory word, which has come to confuse us upon the highway of Despair; but if in our highest ideals we may find the real meaning of our personal lines, because they are the quintessence of the spiritual universe, whose avatars we should be, there is nothing too glorious for the heart of man to conceive.” All in between is just like that.
All persons, and there are many, who are determined willy nilly to believe the world a nice place; who, confronted with the unlovely, the stark, gaping and horrid, cast down their eyes exclaiming “It is not there,” will take solid comfort in The Spirit of Life. It is like the millions of sermons droned out one day in seven all over the land to patient folk who no longer know why they come nor why they stay to hear.
But this is a review, not a diatribe—so “consider now” the Spirit.
The first essay is called Nature. It quotes freely from Peter Bell, and also reprints something about tongues in trees and sermons in stones. Turning the leaves we catch the names of Burroughs, Whitman, and Thoreau. Toward the end is this:
Everything exists for him who is great enough to envisage it. The life that now is reveals man as the crowning glory of Nature, the goal of evolution. In the end the earth does but shelter our bones, not our thoughts and aspirations.
Skipping the rest, we turn quickly to Sex, hoping something from the vitality of the theme, and come to this:
To attack Sex as one of the joys of life would be foolish and deservedly futile.... I am certain that sex is a sweetener of the cup of life, but one must not therefore infer that there can never be too much sweetening, for there can be, even to the point of danger from spiritual diabetes.
Immortal phrase, “Spiritual diabetes.” Several pages of this essay are devoted to episodes in the life of insects, all pointing a painful lesson to man:
... and there are spiders doomed to be eaten by the female as soon as they have demonstrated their masculinity. Thus are we taught how little permanence is possessed by an organization which yields only the instinct of passionate desire for sex.
Here is boldness,—
I cannot indorse the ascetic ideal that holds the love of man for woman to be but a snare for the spirit. The great poetry of Dante alone is sufficient to refute so baseless a claim.
Why quote further? There are indubitably certain good things in the book, but they are by Goethe, Carlyle, Emerson, Dante, Shakespeare, Whitman, et al.
A. M.