Penguin Persons & Peppermints Part 2

We've a bigger, better Buddha in a cleaner (!), greener (!!) land, Many miles from Mandalay.

There is no romance in an antique, be it G.o.d or chair or China plate, when it is exposed for sale in a shop-window. And there is no romance in it amid its native surroundings when you realize that any day it may be carried _off_ and so exposed. Thus do shop-windows destroy romance.

But in the humbler windows off the Avenue there is an equal, if grosser, element of immorality. For these are the windows where price-tags are displayed. The tag has always two prices, the higher marked through with red ink, the lower, for this very reason, calling with a siren voice. The price crossed off is always just beyond your means, the other just within it. "Ah," you think, swallowing the deception with only too great willingness, "what a bargain! It may never come again!" And you enter the fatal door.

Perhaps you struggle first. "Don't buy it," says the inhibition of prudence. "You have more neckties now than you can wear."

"But it's so cheap," says impulse, with the usual sophistry.

And you, poor victim that you are, tugged on and back by warring factions in your brain,--poor refutation of the silly old theological superst.i.tions that there is such a thing as free will,--vacillate on the sidewalk till the battle is over, till your mythical free will is down in the dust. Thus do shop-windows overthrow theology.

Then you enter that shop, and ask for the tie. Or perhaps it is something else, and they haven't your size. You ought to feel glad, relieved. Do you? You do not! You are angry. You feel as if you had lost just so much money, when in reality you have saved it. Thus do shop-windows destroy logic.

This has been a particularly perilous season for the man with a pa.s.sion for shirts. By some diabolic agreement, all the haberdashers at one and the same time filled their windows with luscious lavenders and faint green stripes and soft silk shirts with comfortable French cuffs, and marking out $2.00 or $3.00, as the case might be, wrote $1.50 or $2.50 below. The song of the shirt was loud in the land, its haunting melody not to be resisted. Is there any lure for a woman in all the fluffy mystery of a January "white sale" comparable to the seduction for a man of a lavender shirt marked down from $2.00 to $1.50? I doubt it. Heaven help the woman if there is! So the unused stock in trunk or bureau drawer acc.u.mulates, and the weekly reward for patient toil at an office dribbles away, and the savings-bank is no richer for your deposit--and the shop-windows flare as shamelessly as ever. There is only one satisfaction. The man who sells shirts always has a pa.s.sion for jewelry. And that keeps him poor, too!

[Ill.u.s.tration]

_A Forgotten American Poet_

I have written the t.i.tle, "A forgotten American poet," and I shall let it stand, though I am not sure that he was ever well enough known to be spoken of now as forgotten. Ten or a dozen years ago a friend of mine who was working on an anthology of American poetry, at the John Carter Brown library in Providence, wrote to me with great enthusiasm of a poet he had "discovered," and of whom he had never heard before.

"His name is Frederick G.o.ddard Tuckerman," my friend said, "and you will not find him in Stedman's anthology, though it seems incredible that Stedman left out anybody or anything. Get a copy of his poems if you can--Ticknor and Fields, 1860."

I sent in my order for the book, to Goodspeed's, and then forgot the incident. But Goodspeed didn't. A year later the book came. Evidently it is an infrequent item at the auctions. The copy I received was a second edition, dated 1864 (which seems to indicate the poems had found some readers), but still in the familiar brown of Ticknor and Fields, matching my first American editions of _The Angel in the House_. This copy was of special interest because it was a presentation copy from the author to Harriet Beecher Stowe. The leaves had been opened, but if Mrs. Stowe read, she had made no marginal comments. The only addition to the book was an old newspaper clipping pasted in the back--a condensed history of the Beecher family! I read the volume myself with increasing interest and enthusiasm, and at the close I desired to learn more of Frederick G.o.ddard Tuckerman, not of the Beechers. Mr. Stedman's complete omission of these poems could only have been explained, I felt, by an equally complete ignorance of their existence. Compared to the poems of Henry T. Tuckerman, included by Stedman, the verses of his unknown cousin were as gold to copper.

Why, I wondered, had this man been so completely obliterated by Time, or why had he failed in his life to reach a niche where Time could not utterly efface him?

I wrote to Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who, I discovered, had been a cla.s.smate of Tuckerman's at Harvard, and who of course knew practically everybody of consequence in the literary world of his generation. Colonel Higginson was able to supply some data, but not much. Tuckerman was born in 1821, of a rather well-known Boston family. Joseph Tuckerman, philanthropist and early Unitarian clergyman, was his uncle. He was a younger brother of Edward Tuckerman, long famous as a professor of botany at Amherst College, and who gave his name to Tuckerman's Ravine on Mount Washington.

Frederick G.o.ddard Tuckerman entered Harvard with the cla.s.s of 1841, but remained only a year, pa.s.sing over to the Law School a little later where he secured his LL.B. in 1842, and for a period evidently practised law in Boston. "I remember he came back among us at some kind of gathering during our college course," Colonel Higginson wrote, "and seemed very friendly and cordial to all. I remember him as a refined and gentlemanly fellow, but did not then know him as a poet. I see him put down as a lawyer in Boston (in Adams's _Dictionary of American Authors_), but I have no recollection of that fact."

It was not until I had written and published in the _Forum_ magazine a little appreciation of his poetry that I learned from his son, now a resident of Amherst, Ma.s.sachusetts, that Frederick Tuckerman, even as his verses seemed to imply, early moved away from cities to the beautiful valley under the shadow of the Holyoke Range, and there pa.s.sed his days, evidently the world forgetting, and by the world forgot. He issued his single volume of poems in 1860, when he was thirty-nine, just before the outbreak of the Civil War, but no shadow of that coming contest crosses their pages, as it crossed the pages of Whittier and Emerson, or as it affected the active life of his cla.s.smate Colonel Higginson. The second edition, in 1864, was still unaffected by the great struggle. He produced his slender sheaf of poems amid the fields, in quiet introspection, and he might well be accused of a species of Pharisaism, were these poems not so artlessly and pa.s.sionately sincere, and often so tinged with religious awe. His withdrawal, in his verse, from the life of his times was the act of a natural recluse.

At the time Tuckerman's poems were issued, it is interesting to consider briefly some of the poetic influences which affected the public. The two best-selling poets just then, even in America, were Tennyson and Coventry Patmore, the latter represented, of course, by _The Angel in the House_. Indeed, the poems of these two sold better than novels! Whitman was hardly yet an influence. Julia Ward Howe had written, and Booth had accepted, a drama in blank verse. Our minor poets still wrote in the style of Pope, and the narrative shared honors with the moral plat.i.tude in popular regard. Tennyson, of course, was a great poet, and Patmore no mean one, even at that time, but it is questionable whether the huge popular success of their works, such as _The Princess_ and _The Angel in the House_, was due to their strictly poetic merits. At any rate, the poetry of Frederick G.o.ddard Tuckerman, lacking narrative interest, palatable plat.i.tudes, lyric lilt, but being, rather, contemplative, aloof, delicately minor and in many ways curiously modern, must have fallen on ears not attuned to it. He had none of the Bolshevik revolutionary vitality of Whitman, to thrive and grow by the opposition he created. He could have aroused no opposition. It would have been his happy fate to find men and women who could appreciate his delicate observation of nature, his golden bursts of imaginative vigor, his wistful, contemplative melancholy, his disregard of academic form less because it hampered him than because he was careless of anything but the exact image. Such readers it was apparently not his fate to find in sufficient numbers to bring him fame. He was, in a sense, a modern before his time, but without sufficient consciousness of his modernity to fight. He was a mute, inglorious Robert Frost--like Frost for one year a Harvard student, like him retiring to the New England countryside, like him intent chiefly on rendering the commonplace beauty of that countryside into something magical because so true. Only he lacked Frost's dramatic sense, and interest in human problems.

Tuckerman's favorite medium was the sonnet; but a sonnet to him was a thing of fourteen five-foot iambic lines, and there all rules ended.

Sometimes he even crowded six feet into a line. It is possible his laxness of form was due to ignorance, but more likely that it was due to a greater interest in his mood than in the "rules" of poetry. Many of his sonnets were in sequence, one flowing into the next. Here are two, thus unified, which show in flashes his sweep of imaginative phrase, and his transcendental bent:

The starry flower, the flower-like stars that fade And brighten with the daylight and the dark-- The bluet in the green I faintly mark, The glimmering crags with laurel overlaid, Even to the Lord of light, the Lamp of shade, Shine one to me--the least, still glorious made As crowned moon or heaven's great hierarch.

And so, dim gra.s.sy flower and night-lit spark, Still move me on and upward for the True; Seeking through change, growth, death, in new and old The full in few, the statelier in the less, With patient pain; always remembering this-- His hand, who touched the sod with showers of gold, Stippled Orion on the midnight blue.

And so, as this great sphere (now turning slow Up to the light from that abyss of stars, Now wheeling into gloom through sunset bars) With all its elements of form and flow, And life in life, where crown'd yet blind must go The sensible king--is but a Unity Compressed of motes impossible to know; Which worldlike yet in deep a.n.a.logy Have distance, march, dimension and degree; So the round earth--which we the world do call-- Is but a grain in that which mightiest swells, Whereof the stars of light are particles, As ultimate atoms of one infinite Ball On which G.o.d moves, and treads beneath His feet the All!

Turning the page we come on a poem called _The Question_. "How shall I array my love?" he asks, and ranges the earth for costly jewels and silks from Samarcand; but because his love is a simple New England maid, he rejects them all as unworthy and inappropriate, and closing sings:

The river-riches of the sphere, All that the dark sea-bottoms bear, The wide earth's green convexity, The inexhaustible blue sky, Hold not a prize so proud, so high, That it could grace her, gay or grand, By garden-gale and rose-breath fanned; Or as to-night I saw her stand, Lovely in the meadow land, With a clover in her hand.

Have not these lines a magic simplicity? It seems so to me. They flow rippling and bright to the inevitable finish, and there is no more to say.

Tuckerman's power of close yet magical observation, used not so much in the Tennysonian way (for Tennyson was a close observer, make no mistake about that) as in what we now think of as the modern way, that is, as a part of the realistic record of homely events, with beauty only as a by-product, is well ill.u.s.trated in the opening lines of a narrative poem called _The School Girl, a New England Idyll_. Here again a kinship with Frost is seen, rather than with Tuckerman's contemporaries:

The wind, that all the day had scarcely clashed The cornstalks in the sun, as the sun sank Came rolling up the valley like a wave, Broke in the beech and washed among the pine, And ebbed to silence; but at the welcome sound-- Leaving my lazy book without a mark, In hopes to lose among the blowing fern The dregs of headache brought from yesternight, And stepping lightly lest the children hear-- I from a side door slipped, and crossed a lane With bitter Mayweed lined, and over a field Snapping with gra.s.shoppers, until I came Down where an interrupted brook held way Among the alders. There, on a strutting branch Leaving my straw, I sat and wooed the west, With breast and palms outspread as to a fire.

These powers of observation are again ill.u.s.trated in a poem of quite different import, called _Margites_, a lyric of thirteen stanzas, some of which are inexcusably crude. It begins:

I neither plow the field nor sow, Nor hold the spade nor drive the cart, Nor spread the heap, nor hill nor hoe, To keep the barren land in heart.

After four more stanzas in similar vein, comes this bit of magic word-painting, so instinct with our New England Autumn, yet so entirely the work of a realist, with his eye on the object:

But, leaning from my window, chief I mark the Autumn's mellow signs-- The frosty air, the yellow leaf, The ladder leaning on the vines.

The maple from his brood of boughs Puts northward out a reddening limb; The mist draws faintly round the house; And all the headland heights are dim.

The poem then continues to its close:

And yet it is the same as when I looked across the chestnut woods, And saw the barren landscape then O'er the red bunch of lilac buds;

And all things seem the same. 'Tis one To lie in sleep, or toil as they Who rise beforetime with the sun, And so keep footstep with their day;

For aimless oaf and wiser fool Work to one end by differing deeds;-- The weeds rot in the standing pool; The water stagnates in the weeds;

And all by waste or warfare falls, Has gone to wreck, or crumbling goes, Since Nero planned his golden walls, Or the Cham Cublai built his house.

But naught I reck of change and fray; Watching the clouds at morning driven, The still declension of the day; And, when the moon is just in heaven,

I walk, unknowing where or why; Or idly lie beneath the pine, And bite the dry brown threads, and lie And think a life well lost is mine.

"A life well lost"! The phrase is perhaps pathetically revealing--and prophetic. Or are we stretching the poet's ambitions to be known as a poet? That he published what he wrote indicates a normal desire for recognition, yet it can hardly be doubted, either, that he was an amateur in verse, whose life was rather centred in his contemplative, retiring existence among the fields and hills of Amherst. There may even seem to some a delicate Pharisaism about this sonnet, a Pharisaism removed from the robustness of Th.o.r.eau, who would certainly have argued the point with the farmer:

"That boy," the farmer said, with hazel wand Pointing him out, half by the hayc.o.c.k hid, "Though bare sixteen can work at what he's bid From sun till set, to cradle, reap or band."

I heard the words, but scarce could understand Whether they claimed a smile or gave me pain; Or was it aught to me, in that green lane, That all day yesterday, the briers amid, He held the plough against the jarring land Steady, or kept his place among the mowers; Whilst other fingers, sweeping for the flowers, Brought from the forest back a crimson stain?

Was it a thorn that touched the flesh? or did The poke-berry spit purple on my hand?

Yet, as we have said, Tuckerman was far from Pharisaism of any sort, either of the aesthete or nature-lover. His mind was too genuinely occupied with spiritual problems. Take, for example, this closing sonnet in a sequence depicting the discords of Nature:

Not the round natural word, not the deep mind, The reconcilement holds: the blue abyss Collects it not; our arrows sink amiss; And but in Him may we our import find.

The agony to know, the grief, the bliss Of toil, is vain and vain! clots of the sod Gathered in heat and haste, and flung behind, To blind ourselves and others--what but this, Still grasping dust and sowing toward the wind?

No more thy meaning seek, thine anguish plead; But leaving straining thought and stammering word Across the barren azure pa.s.s to G.o.d; Shooting the void in silence, like a bird-- A bird that shuts his wings for better speed!

Here, surely, is poetry that would not seem the least among the myriad hosts in Mr. Stedman's hospitable anthology! The rhyme scheme may be quite unorthodox, but the poet's lips have been touched by a coal from the high altar, none the less.

The volume closes with a sonnet sequence which is poignantly intimate; almost it is a diary of the poet's grief for the loss of the woman he loved, and in its stabbing intensity holds a hint of such poems as Patmore's _The Azalea_. Here is one:

Again, again, ye part in stormy grief From these bare hills and bowers so built in vain, And lips and hearts that will not move again-- Pathetic Autumn and the writhled leaf; Dropping away in tears with warning brief: The wind reiterates a wailful strain, And on the skylight beats the restless rain, And vapour drowns the mountain, base and brow.

I watch the wet black roofs through mist defined, I watch the raindrops strung along the blind, And my heart bleeds, and all my senses bow In grief; as one mild face, with suffering lined, Comes up in thought: oh, wildly, rain and wind, Mourn on! she sleeps, nor heeds your angry sorrow now.

Such use of pictorial observation as "the raindrops strung along the blind," and "the wet black roofs through mist defined," is something you will look for in vain through the pages of Longfellow, for instance. This is the sonnet of a realist. So, also, is this one, which does not seem to me to deserve oblivion, and certainly so long as my memory retains its power will have that little span of immortality: