The quality of high seriousness, so dear to Matthew Arnold, was characteristic of everything that Mr. Moody gave to the public. At his best, there is a noble dignity, a pure serenity in his work, which make for immortality. This dignity is never assumed; it is not worn like an academic robe; it is an integral part of the poetry. An Ode in Time of Hesitation has already become a classic, both for its depth of moral feeling and for its sculptured style. Like so many other poets, Mr. Moody was an artist with pencil and brush as well as with the pen; his study of form shows in his language.
George Santayana was born at Madrid, on the sixteenth of December, 1863. His father was a Spaniard, and his mother an American. He was graduated from Harvard in 1886, and later became Professor of Philosophy, which position he resigned in 1912, because academic life had grown less and less congenial, although his resignation was a matter of sincere regret on the part of both his colleagues and his pupils. Latterly he has lived in France.
He is a professional philosopher but primarily a man of letters. His philosophy is interesting chiefly because the books that contain it are exquisitely written. He is an artist in prose and verse, and it seems unfortunate that his professorial activity—as in the case of A. E. Housman—choked his Muse. For art has this eternal advantage over learning. Nobody knows whether or not philosophical truth is really true; but Beauty is really beautiful.
In 1894 Mr. Santayana produced—in a tiny volume limited to four hundred and fifty copies on small paper—Sonnets and Other Poems; and in 1899 a less important book, Lucifer: a Theological Tragedy. No living American has written finer sonnets than our philosopher. In sincerity of feeling, in living language, and in melody they reach distinction.
A wall, a wall around my garden rear,
And hedge me in from the disconsolate hills;
Give me but one of all the mountain rills,
Enough of ocean in its voice I hear.
Come no profane insatiate mortal near
With the contagion of his passionate ills;
The smoke of battle all the valley fills,
Let the eternal sunlight greet me here.
This spot is sacred to the deeper soul
And to the piety that mocks no more.
In nature's inmost heart is no uproar,
None in this shrine; in peace the heavens roll,
In peace the slow tides pulse from shore to shore,
And ancient quiet broods from pole to pole.
O world, thou choosest not the better part!
It is not wisdom to be only wise,
And on the inward vision close the eyes,
But it is wisdom to believe the heart.
Columbus found a world, and had no chart,
Save one that faith deciphered in the skies;
To trust the soul's invincible surmise
Was all his science and his only art.
Our knowledge is a torch of smoky pine
That lights the pathway but one step ahead
Across a void of mystery and dread.
Bid, then, the tender light of faith to shine
By which alone the mortal heart is led
Unto the thinking of the thought divine.
ON A VOLUME OF SCHOLASTIC PHILOSOPHY
What chilly cloister or what lattice dim
Cast painted light upon this careful page?
What thought compulsive held the patient sage
Till sound of matin bell or evening hymn?
Did visions of the Heavenly Lover swim
Before his eyes in youth, or did stern rage
Against rash heresy keep green his age?
Had he seen God, to write so much of Him?
Gone is that irrecoverable mind
With all its phantoms, senseless to mankind
As a dream's trouble or the speech of birds.
The breath that stirred his lips he soon resigned
To windy chaos, and we only find
The garnered husks of his disused words.
Robert Underwood Johnson was born at Washington, on the twelfth of January, 1853, and took his bachelor's degree at Earlham College, in Indiana, at the age of eighteen. When twenty years old, he became a member of the editorial staff of the Century Magazine, and remained there exactly forty years. His first volume of poems, The Winter Hour, was published in 1891, since which time he has produced many others. Now he is his own publisher, and two attractive books "published by the author" appeared in 1917—Poems of War and Peace and Italian Rhapsody.
Mr. Johnson is a conservative, by which he would mean that as editor, publicist, and poet, he has tried to maintain the highest standards in art, politics, morality, and religion. Certainly his services to his country have been important; and many good causes that he advocated are now realities. There is no love lost between him and the "new" school in poetry, and possibly each fails to appreciate what is good in the other.