The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century Part 17

Vachel Lindsay needs plenty of room for his imagination--the more s.p.a.ce he has in which to disport himself, the more impressive he becomes. His strange poem, _How I Walked Alone in the Jungles of Heaven_, has the vasty sweep congenial to his powers. _Simon Legree_ is as accurate an interpretation of the negro's conception of the devil and of h.e.l.l as _General William Booth_ is of the Salvation Army's conception of heaven, though it is not so fine a poem. When he rises from h.e.l.l or descends from heaven, he loves big, boundless things on the face of the earth, like the Western Plains and the glory of Niagara. The contrast between the bustling pettiness of the artificial city of Buffalo and the eternal fresh beauty of Niagara is like Bunyan's vision of the man busy with the muck-rake while over his head stood an angel with a golden crown.

Within the town of Buffalo Are prosy men with leaden eyes.

Like ants they worry to and fro, (Important men, in Buffalo).

But only twenty miles away A deathless glory is at play: Niagara, Niagara....

Above the town a tiny bird, A shining speck at sleepy dawn, Forgets the ant-hill so absurd, This self-important Buffalo.

Descending twenty miles away He bathes his wings at break of day-- Niagara, Niagara.

True poet that he is, Vachel Lindsay loves to show the contrast between transient noises that tear the atmosphere to shreds and the eternal beauty of unpretentious melody. After the thunder and the lightning comes the still, small voice. Who ever before thought of comparing the roar of the swiftly pa.s.sing motor-cars with the sweet singing of the stationary bird? Was there ever in a musical composition a more startling change from fortissimo to pianissimo?

Listen to the iron-horns, ripping, racking, Listen to the quack-horns, slack and clacking.

Way down the road, trilling like a toad, Here comes the _dice_-horn, here comes the _vice_-horn, Here comes the _snarl_-horn, _brawl_-horn, _lewd_-horn,

Followed by the _prude_-horn, bleak and squeaking:-- (Some of them from Kansas, some of them from Kansas) Here comes the _hod_-horn, _plod_-horn, _sod_-horn, Nevermore-to-_roam_-horn, _loam_-horn, _home_-horn, (Some of them from Kansas, some of them from Kansas)

Far away the Rachel-Jane Not defeated by the horns, Sings amid a hedge of thorns:-- "Love and life, Eternal youth-- Sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet, Dew and glory, Love and truth, Sweet, sweet, sweet, sweet."

Of Mr. Lindsay's prose works the one first written, _A Handy Guide for Beggars_, is by all odds the best. Even if it did not contain musical cadenzas, any reader would know that the author was a poet. It is full of the spirit of joyous young manhood and reckless adventure, and laughs its way into our hearts. There is no reason why Mr. Lindsay should ever apologize for this book, even if it does not represent his present att.i.tude; it is as individual as a diary, and as universal as youth. His later prose is more careful, possibly more thoughtful, more full of information; but this has a touch of genius. Its successor, _Adventures While Preaching the Gospel of Beauty_, does not quite recapture the first fine careless rapture. Yet both must be read by students of Mr. Lindsay's verse, not only because they display his personality, but because the original data of many poems can be found among these experiences of the road. For example, _The Broncho That Would not Be Broken_, which first appeared in 1917, is the rimed version of an incident that happened in July, 1912. It made an indelible impression on the amateur farmer, and the poem has a poignant beauty that nothing will ever erase from the reader's mind. I feel certain that I shall have a vivid recollection of this poem to the last day of my life, a.s.suming that on that last day I can remember anything at all.

A more ambitious prose work than either of the tramp books is _The Art of the Moving Picture_. It is rather singular that Mr. Lindsay, whose poetry primarily appeals to the ear, should be so profoundly interested in an art whose only appeal is to the eye. The reason, perhaps, is twofold. He is professionally a maker of pictures as well as of chants, and he is an apostle of democracy. The moving picture is the most democratic form of art that the world has ever seen. Maude Adams reaches thousands; Mary Pickford reaches millions. It is clear that Mr. Lindsay wishes that the limitless influence of the moving picture may be used to elevate and enn.o.ble America; for here is the greatest force ever known through which his gospel may be preached--the gospel of beauty.

Like so many other original artists, Mr. Lindsay's poetry really goes back to the origins of the art. As John Masefield is the twentieth century Chaucer, so Vachel Lindsay is the twentieth century minstrel.

On the one occasion when he met W. B. Yeats, the Irishman asked him point-blank, "What are we going to do to restore the primitive singing of poetry?" and would not stay for an answer. Fortunately the question was put to a man who answered it by accomplishment; the best answer to any question is not an elaborate theory, but a demonstration. As it is sometimes supposed that Mr. Lindsay's poetry owes its inspiration to Mr. Yeats, it may be well to state here positively that our American owes nothing to the Irishman; his poetry developed quite independently of the other's influence, and would have been much the same had Mr.

Yeats never risen above the horizon. When I say that he owes nothing, I mean he owes nothing in the manner and fashion of his art; he has a consuming admiration for Mr. Yeats's genius; for Mr. Lindsay considers him of all living men the author of the most beautiful poetry.

Chants are only about one-tenth of Vachel Lindsay's work. However radical in subject, they are conservative in form, following the precedents of the ode from its origin. It is necessary to insist that while the material is new, the method is consciously old. He is no innovator in rime or rhythm. But the chants, while few in number, are the most individual part of his production; and up to the year 1918--the most impressive.

For in _The Congo_ we have real minstrelsy. The shoulder-notes, giving detailed directions for singing, reciting, intoning, are as charming in their way as the stage-directions of J. M. Barrie. They not only show the aim of the poet; they admit the reader immediately into an inner communion with the spirit of the poem.

Every one who reads _The Congo_ or who hears it read cannot help enjoying it; which is one reason why so many are afraid to call it a great poem. For a similar reason, some critics are afraid to call Percy Grainger a great composer, because of his numerous and delightful audacities. Yet _The Congo_ is a great poem, possessing as it does many of the high qualities of true poetry. It shows a splendid power of imagination, as fresh as the forests it describes; it blazes with glorious colours; its music transports the listener with climax after climax; it interprets truthfully the spirit of the negro race.

I should not think of attempting to determine the relative position of Percy Grainger in music and of Vachel Lindsay in poetry; but it is clear that both men possess an amazing vitality. Is it not the lack of vital force which prevents so many accomplished artists from ever rising above the crowd? I suppose we have all read reams on reams of magazine verse exhibiting technical correctness, exact.i.tude in language, and pretty fancy; and after a momentary unspoken tribute the writer's skill, we straightway forget. But a poem like _Danny Deever_ appears, it is to call it a music-hall ballad, or to pretend it is not high art; the fact is that the worst memory in the world will retain it. Such a poem comes like a breeze into a close chamber; it is charged with vitality. We are in contact with a new force--a force emanating from that mysterious and inexhaustible stream whence comes every manifestation of genius. To have this super-vitality is to have genius; and although one may have with it many distressing faults of expression and an unlimited supply of bad taste, all other qualities combined cannot atone for the absence of this one primal element. Indeed the excess of wealth in energy is bound to produce shocking excrescences; our Springfield poet is sometimes absurd when he means to be sublime, bizarre when he means to be picturesque. The same is true of Walt Whitman--it is true of all creative writers whom John Burroughs calls _primary_ men, in distinction from excellent artists who remain in the secondary cla.s.s.

Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling, Walt Whitman, John Masefield, Vachel Lindsay are primary men.

I have often wondered who would write a poem worthy of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. Vachel Lindsay is the only living American who could do it, and I hope he will accept this challenge. Its awful majesty can be revealed only in verse; for it is one of the very few wonders of the world which no photograph and no painting can ever reproduce. Who ever saw a picture that gave him any conception of this incomparable spectacle?

In order to understand the primary impulse that drove Mr. Lindsay into writing verse and making pictures, one ought to read first of all his poem _The Tree of Laughing Bells, or The Wings Of the Morning_.

The first half of the t.i.tle exhibits his love of resounding harmonies; the second gives an idea of the range of his imagination. His finest work always combines these two elements, melody and elevation, "and singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest." I hope that the picture he drew for _The Tree of Laughing Bells_ may some time be made available for all students of his work, as it was his first serious design.

Vachel Lindsay is essentially honest, for he tries to become himself exactly what he hopes the future American will be. He is a Puritan with a pa.s.sion for Beauty; he is a zealous reformer filled with Falstaffian mirth; he goes along the highway, singing and dancing, distributing tracts. "Apollo's first, at last the true G.o.d's priest."

We know that two mighty streams, the Renaissance and the Reformation, which flowed side by side without mingling, suddenly and completely merged in Spenser's _Faery Queene_. That immortal song is a combination of ravishing sweetness and moral austerity. Later the Puritan became the Man on Horseback, and rode roughshod over every bloom of beauty that lifted its delicate head. Despite the genius of Milton, supreme artist plus supreme moralist, the Puritans managed somehow to force into the common mind an antagonism between Beauty and Morality which persists even unto this day. There is no reason why those two contemporaries, Oscar Wilde and the Rev. Charles H.

Spurgeon, should stand before the London public as the champions of contending armies; for Beauty is an end in itself, not a means, and so is Conduct.

In the best work of Vachel Lindsay, we find these two qualities happily married, the zest for beauty and the hunger and thirst after righteousness. He made a soap-box tour for the Anti-Saloon League, preaching at the same time the Gospel of Beauty. As a rule, reformers are lacking in the two things most sedulously cultivated by commercial travellers and life-insurance agents, tact and humour. If these interesting orders of the Knights of the Road were as lacking in geniality as the typical reformer, they would lose their jobs. And yet fishers of men, for that is what all reformers are, try to fish without bait, at the same time making much loud and offensive speech.

Then they are amazed at the callous indifference of humanity to "great moral issues."

Vachel Lindsay is irresistibly genial. Nor is any of this geniality made up of the professionally ingratiating smile; it is the foundation of his temperament. What has this got to do with his poetry? It has everything to do with it. It gives him the key to the hearts of children; to the basic savagery of a primitive black or a poor white; to peripatetic harvesters; to futurists, imagists, blue-stockings, pedants of all kinds; to evangelists, college professors, drunken sailors, tramps whose robes are lined with vermin. He is the great American democrat, not because that is his political theory, but simply because he cannot help it.

His att.i.tude toward other schools of art, even when he has nothing in common with them, is positively affectionate. Could there be two poets more unlike in temperament and in style than Mr. Lindsay and Mr.

Masters? Yet in the volume, _The Chinese Nightingale_, we have a poem dedicated "to Edgar Lee Masters, with great respect." He speaks of "the able and distinguished Amy Lowell," and of his own poems "parodied by my good friend, Louis Untermeyer." He says, "I admire the work of the Imagist Poets. We exchange fraternal greetings.... But neither my few heterodox pieces nor my many struggling orthodox pieces conform to their patterns.... The Imagists emphasize pictorial effects, while the Higher Vaudeville exaggerates musical effects.

Imagists are apt to omit rhyme, while in my Higher Vaudeville I often put five rhymes on a line."

Impossible to quarrel with Vachel Lindsay. His stock of genial tolerance is inexhaustible, and makes him regard not only hostile humans, but even destructive insects, with inquisitive affection.

I want live things in their pride to remain.

I will not kill one gra.s.shopper vain Though he eats a hole in my shirt like a door.

I let him out, give him one chance more.

Perhaps, while he gnaws my hat in his whim, Gra.s.shopper lyrics occur to him.

During his tramps, the parents who unwillingly received him discovered, when he began to recite stories to their children, that they had entertained an angel unawares; and I have not the slightest doubt that on the frequent occasions when his application for food and lodging was received with a volley of curses, he honestly admired the n.o.ble fluency of his enemy. When he was harvesting, the singing stacker became increasingly and distressingly p.o.r.nographic; instead of rebuking him for foulness, which would only have bewildered the stacker, Mr. Lindsay taught him the first stanza of Swinburne's chorus. "The next morning when my friend climbed into our barge to ride to the field he began:

When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces, The mother of months, in meadow or plain, Fills the shadows--

'Dammit, what's the rest of it? I've been trying to recite that piece all night.' Now he has the first four stanzas. And last evening he left for Dodge City to stay overnight and Sunday. He was resolved to purchase _Atalanta in Calydon_ and find in the Public Library _The Lady of Shalott_ and _The Blessed Damozel_, besides paying the usual visit to his wife and children."

If a man cannot understand music, painting, and poetry without loving these arts, neither can a man understand men and women and children without loving them. This is one reason why even the cleverest cynicism is never more than half the truth, and usually less.

Mr. Lindsay is a poet, and a missionary. As a missionary, he wishes all Americans to be as good judges of poetry as they are, let us say, of baseball. One of the numerous joys of being a professional ball-player must be the knowledge that you are exhibiting your art to a prodigious a.s.sembly of qualified critics. John Sargent knows that the majority of persons who gaze at his picture of President Wilson are incompetent to express any opinion; his subtlety is lost or quite misunderstood; but Tyrus Raymond Cobb knows that the thousands who daily watch him during the summer months appreciate his consummate mastery of the game. Vachel Lindsay, I suppose, wants millions not merely to love, but to detect the finer shades of the poetic art.

If he set out to accomplish this dream by lowering the standards of poetry, then he would debase the public and be a traitor to his guild.

But his method is uncompromising--he taught the harvester not Mrs.

Hemans, but Swinburne. He calls his own verse the higher vaudeville.

But _The Congo_ is the higher vaudeville as _Macbeth_ is the higher melodrama. And there is neither melodrama nor vaudeville in _Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight_--a poem of stern and solemn majesty.

Mr. Lindsay is true to the oldest traditions of poetry in his successful attempts to make his verses ring and sing. He is both antique and antic. But he is absolutely contemporary, "modern," "new,"

in his fearlessness. He has this in common with the practicers of free verse, with the imagists, with the futurists; he is not in the least afraid of seeming ridiculous. There can be no progress in art until artists overcome wholly this blighting fear. It is the lone individual, with his name stamped all over him, charging into the safely anonymous ma.s.s; but that way lies the Advance.

When Thomas Carlyle took up the study of Oliver Cromwell, he found that all previous historians had tried to answer this question: What is the mask that Oliver wore? And suddenly the true answer came to him in the form of another question: What if it should prove to be no mask at all, but just the man's own face? So there are an increasingly large number of readers who are discerning in the dauntless gambols of Vachel Lindsay, not the mask of buffoonery, worn to attract attention, but a real poet, dancing gaily with bronchos, children, field-mice and potatoes.

Such unquenchable vitality, such bubbling exuberance, cannot always be graceful, cannot always be impressive. But the blunders of an original man are sometimes more fruitful than the correctness of a copyist.

Furthermore, blunders sometimes make for wisdom and truth. Let us not forget Vachel Lindsay's poem on Columbus:

Would that we had the fortunes of Columbus, Sailing his caravels a trackless way, He found a Universe--he sought Cathay.

G.o.d give such dawns as when, his venture o'er, The Sailor looked upon San Salvador.

G.o.d lead us past the setting of the sun To wizard islands, of august surprise; G.o.d make our blunders wise.

COLD PASTORAL!

The difference between Vachel Lindsay and Robert Frost is the difference between a drum-major and a botanist. The former marches gaily at the head of his big band, looking up and around at the crowd; the latter finds it sweet

with unuplifted eyes To pace the ground, if path be there or none.

Robert Frost, the poet of New England, was born at San Francisco, and published his first volume in London. Midway between these two cities lies the enchanted ground of his verse; for he belongs to New England as wholly as Whittier, as truly as Mr. Lindsay belongs to Illinois. He showed his originality so early as the twenty-sixth of March, 1875, by being born at San Francisco; for although I have known hundreds of happy Californians, men and women whose love for their great State is a religion, Robert Frost is the only person I ever met who was born there. That beautiful country is frequently used as a springboard to heaven; and that I can understand, for the transition is less violent than from some other points of departure. But why so few natives?

Shamelessly I lift the following biographical facts from Miss Amy Lowell's admirable essay on our poet. At the age of ten, the boy was moved to Lawrence, Ma.s.sachusetts. He went to school, and disliked the experience. He tried Dartmouth and later Harvard, staying a few months at the first and two years at the second. Between these academic experiences he was married. In 1900 he began farming in New Hampshire.

In 1911 he taught school, and in 1912 went to England. His first book of poems, _A Boy's Will,_ was published at London in 1913. The review in _The Academy_ was ecstatic. In 1914 he went to live at Ledbury, where John Masefield was born, and where in the neighbourhood dwelt W.W. Gibson. His second volume, _North of Boston,_ was published at London in 1914. Miss Lowell quotes a sentence, full of insight, from the review in the _Times._ "Poetry burns up out of it, as when a faint wind breathes upon smouldering embers." In March, 1915, Mr. Frost returned to America, bringing his reputation with him.

He bought a farm in New Hampshire among the mountains, and in 1916 appeared his third volume, _Mountain Interval._