'Tis but the vagrant wind that makes thee start,
The pleasure-loving south, the freshening west;
The willow's woven veil they softly part,
To fan the lily on the stream's warm breast:
No ruder stir, no footstep pressing near—
Pan has not passed this way for many a year.
Unlooked-for music indeed from the banks of the Ohio. Her muse was remote, unimpassioned, classical, yet no lyrist of the period has had more of the divine poetic gift of expression. She seems curiously out of place in the headlong West in those stormy closing years of the nineteenth century.
V
Belated singers of the mid-century music were Richard Watson Gilder (1844–1909), Edward Roland Sill (1841–1887), George E. Woodberry (1855——), and Henry Van Dyke (1852——), all of them poets like Miss Thomas, who were remote from their era, workers in art and beauty rather than voices and leaders.
One may pause long with Gilder. No other man of his generation did so much to turn the direction of the period and to determine its nature. As managing editor of Scribner's Monthly from the first number to the last, and then after the death of Holland, editor of the Century Magazine, he exerted for twenty-eight years an influence upon American letters that cannot be overestimated. In a way he is the central literary figure of the period, even more so than Dr. Holland. More than any one else he was responsible for the revolution in magazine management for which the period stands, and more than any one else he helped to gather the new school of novelists and short story writers and poets that made the era distinctive. He was the James T. Fields of the national period.
He was first of all an editor, then he was a humanitarian, active in all movements for city betterment, then he was a poet. Beginning with The New Day in 1875, he issued many small volumes of delicate verse, mystical often in tone, always serious, always artistic. That he knew the divine commission of the poet he revealed in his volume The Celestial Passion, 1878:
Dost thou not know this is the poet's lot:
Mid sounds of war—in halcyon times of peace—
To strike the ringing lyre and not to cease;
In hours of general happiness to swell
The common joy; and when the people cry
With piteous voice loud to the pitiless sky,
'Tis his to frame the universal prayer
And breathe the balm of song upon the accursed air?
But he himself seemed not bound by this ideal of the poet. His carefully wrought verses add little that is new, and little that may be understood by those for whom a poet should sing. They lack substance, the Zeitgeist, masculinity. Stedman could say that they are "marked by the mystical beauty, intense emotion, and psychological emotion of the elect illuminati," but the criticism, even were it true, was condemnatory. Gilder's definition did not mention the "elect illuminati."
It is depressing to think that this most virile of men, who was the tireless leader of his generation in so many beneficent fields of activity, must be judged in the coming periods solely by this volume of poems. For classic poetry was not his life-work, not his enthusiasm, not himself—it was a rarely furnished room in the heart of his home, rather, where at times he might retire from the tumult and enjoy the beauty he had gathered in the realms of gold. He was not a poet, singing inevitable lines, spontaneous and inspired. His poems lacked lyric distinction, that compelling quality that sinks a poem into the reader's soul, and, lacking it, they have little hope for permanence. They are finished always and coldly beautiful, but finish and beauty are not enough. So it is with George E. Woodberry's polished work, and Father Tabb's. It is not vital with the life of an epoch, it is not the voice of a soul deeply stirred with a new and compelling message. All too often it has come from deliberate effort; it is a mere performance.