Edited, with introduction, by Daniel Gregory Mason. (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.)
I shall never forget how, at sixteen, I read Stevenson’s letters and thought them the most beautiful things in the world. I shall never forget similar experiences with Keats and Browning, and finally with Meredith; and now comes another volume of letters by the man who might be called the American Henley (though that only does him half justice) to keep one up at night and teach him unforgettable things. People have been saying that this collection doesn’t represent the best letters Moody wrote. Certainly if he wrote more interesting ones the world ought to be allowed to see them, for these are valuable enough to become an American tradition.
The following is typical:
To Daniel Gregory Mason.
Dear Dan:
I have just heard from your sister-in-law of your enforced furlough. I am not going to help you curse your luck, knowing your native capabilities in that direction to be perfectly adequate, but my Methodist training urges me to give you an epistolary hand-shake, the purport of which is “Keep your sand.” I could say other things, not utterly pharisaical. I could say what I have often said to myself, with a rather reedy tremolo perhaps, but swelling sometimes into a respectable diapason. “The dark cellar ripens the wine.” And meanwhile, after one’s eyes get used to the dirty light, and one’s feet to the mildew, a cellar has its compensations. I have found beetles of the most interesting proclivities, mice altogether comradely and persuadable, and forgotten potatoes that sprouted toward the crack of sunshine with a wan maiden grace not seen above. I don’t want to pose as resourceful, but I have seen what I have seen.
The metaphor is however happily inexact in your case, with Milton to retire to and Cambridge humming melodiously on the horizon. If you can only throttle your Daemon, or make him forgoe his leonine admonition “Accomplish,” and roar you as any sucking dove the sweet vocable “Be”—you ought to live. I have got mine trained to that, pardee! and his voice grows not untunable. I pick up shreds of comfort out of this or that one of God’s ashbarrels. Yesterday I was skating on a patch of ice in the park, under a poverty stricken sky flying a pitiful rag of sunset. Some little muckers were guying a slim raw-boned Irish girl of fifteen, who circled and darted under their banter with complete unconcern. She was in the fledgling stage, all legs and arms, tall and adorably awkward, with a huge hat full of rusty feathers, thin skirts tucked up above spindling ankles, and a gay aplomb and swing in the body that was ravishing. We caught hands in midflight, and skated for an hour, almost alone and quite silent, while the rag of sunset rotted to pieces. I have had few sensations in life that I would exchange for the warmth of her hand through the ragged glove, and the pathetic curve of the half-formed breast where the back of my wrist touched her body. I came away mystically shaken and elate. It is thus the angels converse. She was something absolutely authentic, new, and inexpressible, something which only nature could mix for the heart’s intoxication, a compound of ragamuffin, pal, mistress, nun, sister, harlequin, outcast, and bird of God,—with something else bafflingly suffused, something ridiculous and frail and savage and tender. With a world offering such rencontres, such aery strifes and adventures, who would not live a thousand years stone dumb? I would, for one—until my mood changes and I come to think on the shut lid and granite lip of him who has had done with sunsets and skating, and has turned away his face from all manner of Irish. I am supported by a conviction that at an auction on the steps of the great white throne, I should bring more in the first mood than the second—by several harps and a stray dulcimer.
I thoroughly envy you your stay at Milton—wrist, Daemon, and all. You must send me a lengthy account of the state of things at Cambridge.... If the wrist forbids writing, employ a typewriter of the most fashionable tint—I will pay all expenses and stand the breakage. I stipulate that you shall avoid blonds, however, they are fragile.
William Vaughn Moody.
There are over a hundred letters here, written to Mr. Mason, Percy MacKaye, Richard Watson Gilder, Josephine Preston Peabody, Edmund Clarence Stedman, Henry Miller, Robert Morss Lovett, Ferdinand Schevill, and others; and every one of them shows Moody’s remarkable gift of metaphor, his constant striving to “win for language some new swiftness, some rare compression,” his belief in the positive acceptance of life, his paganism, “deeply spiritual, and as far as possible removed from the sensualism the thoughtless have found in it.” Mr. Mason furnishes an introduction that is masterly; and the first and final drafts of Heart’s Wild Flower are included, proving vividly how this poet disciplined his rich imaginative gifts, training away from a native tendency to the rococo to the high, pure dignity that marks his finished verse. This volume is invaluable. Certainly with two such authentic voices to boast of as Whitman’s and Moody’s this young country of ours has reason to be proud.