Confessions of a Book-Lover Part 5

_Dunque, senza merce di lor costume, locati son per gradi differenti, sol differendo nel primiero ac.u.me._

_Bastava si nei secoli recenti con l'innocenza, per aver salute, solamente la fede dei parenti;_

_poiche le prime etadi fur compiute, convenne ai maschi all' innocenti penne, per circoncidere, acquistar virtute._

_Ma poichee il tempo della grazia venne, senza battesmo perfetto di Cristo, tale innocenza laggiu si ritenne._

And then remembering the innocence of the little children Dante turns to that face "which is most likest unto Christ's" the face of Mary the Mother, who is the protectress and friend of all children. If the strict Calvinists had known the "Paradiso" of Dante as well as they knew their Old Testament, their theology might have found more adherence among the merciful, for the "Paradiso" is a triumphant song of mercy, of love, and of the final triumph of every soul that has sincerely hoped in, or sought, the truth, even if the truth were not crowned in its fullness in this world.

And Dante, put by Raphael without protest from the Church Militant, among the Doctors of the Faith, glorifies Trajan among the Saved and opens Heaven to Cato. This shows, by the way, the falsity of the Voltairean _mauvais mot_, that all the people worth meeting are in h.e.l.l!

And Dante sees Constantine in Heaven, although he thinks that this Emperor's donation of territory was an evil gift. Dante, who, by the way, was nearer to the old records and this tradition of the older time, is a witness against Lord Bryce's a.s.sertion that the doc.u.ments of Constantine's donation were mediaeval forgeries. Dante believed, however, that the donation was invalid, because the successor of St. Peter, being of the spirit, could not accept temporal power. This he a.s.serts in his "De Monarchia," which was for a time on the "Index." Times have changed, and "De Monarchia" and Milton's "Paradise Lost" are no longer in the "Index," though Balzac and Dumas, in French, are. But many of the Faithful in the United States console themselves by a.s.suming that, as in the case of Dr. Zahm's "Religion and Science," this the method of the Sacred Congregation is not without its distinctions. Dr. Zahm's book, suppressed in Italian, received the proper "imprimatur" in English! So may "The Three Musketeers" and may "Monte Cristo" be regarded as coming under the ban in the original, but as tolerated in the translation?

Dante's bitterness against certain Popes made no rift in his creed, nor does it seem to have made him less respected by the Roman Court. There is in the "Paradiso" that great pa.s.sage on the poet's faith--

_Cos spir di quell' amore acceso; indi soggiunse: "a.s.sai bene e trascorsa d'esta moneta gia la lega e il peso; ma dimmi se tu l' hai nella tua borsa."

ed' io: "Si, l'ho, si lucida e si tonda, che nel suo conio nulla mi s' inforsa."_

_Appresso usci della luce profonda, che li splendeva; "Questa cara gioia, sopra la quale ogni virtu si fonda, onde ti venne?" Ed io: "La larga ploia dello Spirito Santo, ch' e diffusa in su le vecchie e in su le nuove cuoia,_

_e sillogismo, che la mia ha conchiusa acutamente si, che in verso d' ella ogni dimostrazion mi pare ottusa."_

If the reading of the "Paradiso" turns one to other books, so much the better. Aristotle is worth while; he holds the germ of what is best in modern life; and St. Thomas Aquinas, his echo, with new harmonies added the Wagner to Aristotle's Mozart. No--that is going too far!--the musical comparison fails. "If thou should'st never see my face again, pray for my soul," is King Arthur's prayer. It is the prayer of Pope Gregory that saved Trajan.

When we come to the "Purgatorio," like the "Paradiso" too neglected, we find much that illuminates our minds and touches our hearts. The "Purgatorio" is not without humour, and it is certainly very human. For instance, there is the case of the negligent ruler, Nino de' Visconti.

Dante is frankly pleased to meet him, but his address is hardly tactful.

He is evidently surprised to find that Nino is not in h.e.l.l,

When he came near to me I said to him; gentle Judge Nino, how I'm delighted well that I have seen thee here and not in h.e.l.l.

Nino begs that his innocent daughter, Giovanna, may be asked by Dante, on his return to earth, to pray for him. He is not pleased that his widow should desire to marry

the Milanese who blazoned a viper on his shield.

He thinks that his wife has ceased to love him as she has discarded her "white wimples," which, if she marries this inferior person, she may long for once again! And he adds, rather cynically, for a blessed soul in Purgatory, that through her one may mightily well

know how short a time love may last in woman, if the eye and the touch do not keep it alive.

One must admit that there is an element of humour--not for the victim--in the "Inferno," when Dante puts Pope Boniface VIII. into h.e.l.l three and a half years before he died! Nicholas III., whom Dante thought guilty of the unpardonable sin of simony, had preceded Boniface; and he says,

_E se non fosse ch' ancor lo mi vieta la riverenza delle somme chiavi, che tu tenesti nella vita lieta l' userei parole ancor piu gravi--_

But for consolation, there is no great poem so good as the "Paradiso."

_English and American Verse_

Edmund Clarence Stedman tells us how thrilled the youths of his generation were when the new poet, Tennyson, "swam into their ken." It is difficult for the young of to-day to believe this. There is no great reigning poet to-day; there are great numbers of fair poets, who are hailed as crown princes by the groups that gather about them. Whatever the old may say, this is a good sign. Any evidence of a sincere interest in poetry is a good sign. Tennyson's "Dream of Fair Women" and his portrait studies broke in on the old tradition. "The Lady of Shalott,"

with its pictures of silence and its fine trans.m.u.tation of commonplace into something very beautiful, was new.

We who succeeded Stedman by some years loved all the beauty of Tennyson while we were not especially struck by those mediaeval lay figures which he labelled "King Arthur" and "Sir Galahad" and "Sir Percival." They were too much like what the English people at that time insisted that the Prince Consort was. Even Sir Lancelot would have profited in our eyes by a touch of the fire of Milton's "Lucifer." But the lyricism of Tennyson, the music of Tennyson, is as real now as it was then. It is the desire for "independence," the fear of following a conventionality, a fear that calls itself audacity, which brushes away the delicate and scientific of this exquisite poet simply because he does not represent a Movement. And yet all these new movements are very old movements. The result of the education given me by books was to convince me that the man of culture proclaims himself third-rate if he looks on any literary expression as really new and if he cannot enjoy the old, when the old is of all time. The beautiful and the real can never be old or new because they are the same through the movement of time. To explain what I mean, let me come suddenly down to date and permit me to quote from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch's "On the Art of Reading." He is writing of the Bible, which is never old:

I daresay, after all, that the best way is not to bother a boy too early and overmuch with history; that the best way is to let him ramp at first through the Scriptures even as he might through "The Arabian Nights": to let him take the books as they come, merely indicating, for instance, that Job is a great poem, the Psalms great lyrics, the story of Ruth a lovely idyll, the Song of Songs the perfection of an Eastern love-poem. Well, and what then? He will certainly get less of "The Cotter's Sat.u.r.day Night" into it, and certainly more of the truth of the East. There he will feel the whole splendid barbaric story for himself: the flocks of Abraham and Laban; the trek of Jacob's sons to Egypt for corn; the figures of Rebekah at the well, Ruth at the gleaning, and Rizpah beneath the gibbet; Sisera bowing in weariness; Saul--great Saul--by the tent-prop with the jewels in his turban:

"All its lordly male-sapphires, and rubies courageous at heart."

Or consider--to choose one or two pictures out of the tremendous procession--consider Michal, Saul's royal daughter: how first she is given in marriage to David to be a snare for him; how, loving him, she saves his life, letting him down from the window and dressing up an image on the bed in his place; how, later, she is handed over to another husband Phaltiel, how David demands her back, and she goes:

"And her husband (Phaltiel) went with her along weeping behind her to Bahurim. Then said Abner unto him, Go, return. And he returned."

Or, still later, how the revulsion takes her, Saul's daughter as she sees David capering home before the ark, and how her affection had done with this emotional man of the ruddy countenance, so p.r.o.ne to weep in his bed:

"And as the ark of the Lord came into the city of David, Michal, Saul's daughter"--

Mark the three words--

"Michal, Saul's daughter looked through a window, and saw King David leaping and dancing before the Lord; and she despised him in her heart."

Mr. Galsworthy or Mr. W. L. George or Mr. Maxwell, who are rapidly becoming too old-fashioned for the young, or Mrs. Wharton, or Mrs.

Gertrude Atherton would treat this episode in sympathy with what they might conceive to be the trend of present emotion; for it is with the emotions and not with the mind or the will that the novelist of the day before yesterday mostly deals. If Mr. James Huneker had translated this into the prose of his moment, it would have flamed with minutely carved jewels, glowed with a perfume and colour of crushed roses, and choked the reader with the odour of musk. But could he have made it any "newer"? Or if he could have made it "newer," could he have made it more splendid and appealing?

The old is new, and the new is old in art and literature--in life itself, and the man who scorned Keats because Swinburne and Rossetti were new; or who scorns Browning--the best of Browning--lacks the first requisite of true cultivation which is founded on the truth that beauty is beyond the touch of time. The women in Francois Villon's "Ballade of Dead Ladies" are gone, but their beauty remains in that song. This beauty might be none the less beautiful if expressed in _vers libre_; its beauty might take a new flavour from our time. The fact only that it was of our time and treated in the manner of our time, could not give it that essential and divine something which is perennial, universal, and perhaps eternal.

Much affectionate reading of poetry--and poetry read in any other way is like the crackling of small sticks under a pot in the open air on a damp day--leads one to consider the structure of verse and to ask how singing effects are best produced. This inquiry has led some of the sincerest of the younger poets to throw aside the older conventions, and, imitating Debussy, Richard Strauss, and even newer composers, to produce that "free verse" which, in the hands of the inexpert, the lazy, or the ignorant, becomes lawless verse. It is exasperating to the intolerant to find writers, young in experience if not always young in age, talking of themselves as discoverers--brave or audacious discoverers--as adventurers, reckless as Balboa, or Cortez, or Ponce de Leon; and then, to hear some of the old and conventional violently attacking these verse makers as if they were new and dangerous revolutionists.

The truth is that _vers libre_ has its place, and it ought to have a high place; but the writer who attempts it must have a very perfect ear for the nuances of music and great art in his technique applied to the use of words. Some of the disciples of Miss Amy Lowell have this, but they are few. Whether Miss Lowell has mastered the science or not, she has the fine art of producing musical effects, delicate and various and even splendid. But there are others!

It may have been Tennyson, or Theocritus, or Campion that led me to read Coventry Patmore. I know that it was not his "The Angel in the House"

which led me on. That seemed as little interesting or important as the proverbial sayings of Martin Farquhar Tupper; but one day I found "The Unknown Eros" and a little later "The Toys," and then his "Night and Sleep," one of the most musical poems in our language.

How strange at night the bay Of dogs, how wild the note Of c.o.c.ks that scream for day, In homesteads far remote; How strange and wild to hear The old and crumbling tower, Amid the darkness, suddenly Take tongue and speak the hour!

Although the music of "Night and Sleep" is not dependent upon the rime, it is plain--as the form of poetry appeals to the ear--that the rime is a gain. Yet one does not miss it in the fifth and seventh lines of each stanza. The real musical charm of the poem--only one stanza, of four, is given here--lies in the management of the rhythm.

We have only to fill up the measure in every line as well as in the seventh, in order to change this verse from the slowest and most mournful to the most rapid and high-spirited of all English, the common eight-syllable quatrain,

says Mr. Patmore in his "Essay on English Metrical Law,"

a measure particularly recommended by the early critics, and continually chosen by poets in all times for erotic poetry on account of its joyful air. The reason of this unusual rapidity of movement is the unusual character of the eight-syllable verse as acatalectic, almost all other kinds of verse being catalectic on at least one syllable, implying a final pause of corresponding duration.

Mr. Patmore here shows that the rime in this lovely "Night and Sleep" is merely accessory, a lightly played accompaniment to a song which would be as beautiful a song without it, yet which gains a certain accent through this accompaniment; and that the real questions in verse are of rhythm and time. Tennyson, whose technique, even in the use of sibilants, will bear the closest scrutiny, often proves the merely accessory value of rime, but in no instance more fully than in

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, Tears from the depth of some divine despair Rise in the heart and gather in the eyes, In looking on the happy autumn fields, And thinking of the days that are no more.

There is every reason why the modern reader should have become tired of academic poetry. When poetry divorced itself from music and became the slave of fixed rules of metre which could not be imitated with any real success in English, it sealed its own fate as a beloved visitant to the hearts of the people. Pope and his coterie closed the door on lyrical poets like Thomas Campion, and in their hearts they, like Voltaire, rather despised Shakespeare for his vulgarisms.

The truth that poetry was primarily written to be sung is forgotten, and even in France the chant of the Alexandrine, which both Rachel and Sarah Bernhardt restored, was lost in a monotonous recitation. For myself, I tried to get to the root of the matter by reading Thomas Campion--Charles Scribner's Sons print a good edition of his songs, masks, etc., edited by A. H. Bullen--as an antidote to Walt Whitman. In fact, my acquaintance with the Poet of Camden convinced me that his use of what is to-day called _vers libre_ resembled somewhat Carlyle's Teutonic contortions of style. It was impossible to get from the "Good Gray Poet" the reasons of his method. I gathered that he looked on rhythm as sometimes a walk, a quick-step, a saunter, a hop-and-skip, a hurried dash, or a slow march; it seemed to depend with him on the action of the heart, the acceleration of the pulse, or the movement of the thought.

But no one who knows the best in Walt Whitman's poems can fail to perceive that there were times when he understood thoroughly that poetry, expressed poetically, must be musical. It is a great pity that some of our newer poets do not understand this. In their revolt from the outworn academic rules, they have gone the length of the most advanced Cubists, and do not realize that no amount of splendid visualization compensates for a lack of knowledge of the art of making melodies. It is unfortunate, too, that the imitators of Amy Lowell, many of whom have neither her feeling for colour, her great power of concentration, nor her naturally good ear, should imagine that _vers libre_ means the throwing together of words in chaos. Even Strauss's "Electra" is founded on carefully considered rules; his discords are not accidents.