Previous to this poem Mr. Robinson’s philosophy has expressed itself negatively. It is his belief that evil is the result of moral choice. He does not call disease, accident, or war by the name of evil, because it is possible to look forward to a day when such excrescences will be removed. Evil, to Mr. Robinson, is that which is ineradicable and the ineradicable is the situation resulting from moral choice. Man has little free will. He is continuously obliged to make a choice against his wish, a choice that will bring disappointment. We have seen how Orestes was locked in evil perplexity when the alternative was presented: either to obey heaven, slay his mother, and be damned by earth, or to obey earth, forgive his mother, and be damned by heaven. Whichever road he followed evil overtook him. Whichever road we choose, says Mr. Robinson, evil must overtake us—with this one exception, however, that whereas Aeschylus believed the gods brought man to his doom, Mr. Robinson maintains that it is man’s own frailty. Take Lancelot for an example. Lancelot has come to a point where he must make a moral choice. Either he can accept the Light and forsake Guinevere, or he can retain the Queen and lose the Light. The alternative is implacable. The one or the other, it says. There is no middle way nor any synthesis. To accept the new situation and leave the old, that is the way of truth. Only by that way can man hope to achieve happiness. If he attempt to mediate, then he will lash himself and cry in Lancelot’s words,
God, what a rain of ashes falls on him
Who sees the new and cannot leave the old!
Thus, previous to Roman Bartholow, Mr. Robinson, believing that man can rarely leave his old surroundings for the new, has developed his philosophy from the negative side. He has not treated of the attainment of the Light, but has showed the struggle of the man who is making the choice. He has been interested in the man’s failure and in consequence he has written of Merlin, Lancelot, and of Seneca Sprague.
With Roman Bartholow, however, he has represented in Gabrielle a complete and final expression of the positive side of his philosophy. Many years ago in an exquisite lyric, Bon Voyage, he wrote fleetingly of a man who saw his light and claimed it. But the poem was only a scherzo, a dash down the hill. Mocking the “little archive men” who tried to extract therefrom a “system” of thought, it raced away. Yet it contained a seed that to-day has burst into a flower that Gabrielle is, or was. It told of a man who had left the old. He had been as courageous as Galahad. To-day Gabrielle is such.
Roman, of course, in finding the Light, was obliged to abandon his earlier hopes of building that house with Gabrielle. Roman like Lancelot was unable to meet that requirement. He failed, and would have perished had it not been for Gabrielle. She was to reveal to him her incessant worth. The Light for Gabrielle demanded a mad sacrifice. There was no happiness entailed. There was alone the recompense of that cold, resistless river. Leaving an inexorable world as she followed the light, she was, to complete the list of the poet’s figures, the one
who had seen and died,
And was alive now in a mist of gold.
Thus, after the tale is told, comes the realization of the ultimate isolation of man. Gabrielle had gone away alone. Penn-Raven too had disappeared. Each was bound from the other by ineradicable law. There never could have been a golden house with two to build it. It is not thus we are made. Bartholow was to come to understand that he could not build but by himself, that his renascence was a gift to him alone. It was Umfraville, who saw what he could see and was accordingly alone, who summed it up when he said,
There were you two in the dark together