The Little Review, December 1914 (Vol. 1, No. 9)

Shakespeare in red morocco seems always wan and pathetic. I see him looking gloomily out of his unread respectability, bored with his scholarly canonization and his unromantic owners. How he longs for the irresponsible days when he was loved or ignored for his own sake! Now he is forever imprisoned in marble busts and tortured in Histories of English Literature. There is no more tragic fate in the annals of imagination. Terrible is the vengeance taken by institutional culture on those who are great enough to command its admiration.

Therefore, a genius who has not been tagged unduly by the pundits inspires me with a profound delicacy, in a sense akin to the reverence for a beautiful child. Here is a virtue which the world needs. One would like to proclaim it from the housetops. Yet there are the rabble, ready with their election-night enthusiasm, and the scholars, with their pompous niches. If one could only find all those whom the man himself would have selected as friends and whisper the right word in their ears! But, after all, we must speak in public, remembering that even misunderstanding is the birthright of the genius. It is better that power should be expressed in devious and unforeseen channels than not at all.

A flippant friend once told me that he had never had the courage to read William Vaughn Moody because the poet had such a dark brown name. That is important because of its triviality. I have no doubt that if the gospel hymns had never been written, and if we had never on gloomy Sunday evenings seen those pale books with the scroll-work Moody-and-Sankey covers, bringing all their dismal train of musical and religious doggerel, we should have been spared many misgivings about the evangelist’s vicarious name-sake. Let it be firmly understood, therefore, that there is nothing dark brown, or evangelistic, or stupidly sober-serious about the new poet of the Fire-Bringer. May he never go into a household-classics edition!

But there is a tinge of New England about him, just the same. Only one who has in his blood the solemn possibilities of religious emotion can react against orthodox narrowness without becoming trivial. It is the fashion to blame all modern ills on puritan traditions. We should be wise if in order to fight our evils we should invoke a little of the Pilgrim Fathers’ heroism. Too many of us take up the patter of radicalism with as little genuine sincerity as a spearmint ribbon-clerk repeats the latest Sunday-comic slang. If you have ever walked over a New England countryside the endless miles of stone walls may have set you thinking. Every one of those millions of stones has been laboriously picked out of the fields—and there are still many there. Before that the trees had to be cleared away, and the Indians fought, and the ocean crossed without chart or government buoy. For over two centuries our ancestors grimly created our country for us, with an incessant summer- and winter-courage that seems the attribute of giants. What wonder if they were hard and narrow? We scoff at their terminal morraine; but we should be more deserving of their gift if we should emulate their stout hearts in clearing away the remaining debris from the economical and spiritual fields. In spite of injurious puritan traditions there is something inalienably American and truly great about old New England. It is the same unafraid stoutness of heart that is at the bottom of Moody’s personality. It gives him power; it gives him unconscious dignity.

Yet Moody was indeed a rebel against the religious and social muddle in which he found himself. Something red and pagan poured into his veins the instinct of defiance to a jealous god and to pale customs. The best of the Greek was his; instinctively he turned at last to Greek drama for his form and to Greek mythology for his figures. There was in him that σπονδη which Aristotle believed essential for the poet—a quality so rare among us that the literal translation, “high seriousness,” conveys little hint of its warmth, its nobility and splendor. He believed in the body as in the soul; and his conception of the godly was rounded and not inhuman. Dionysus was every bit as real to him as the man of sorrows. Is not this the new spirit of America which we wish to nourish? And is there not a peculiar virtue in the poet who with the strong arm of the pilgrim and the consecration of the puritan fought for the kingdom of joy among us? In The Masque of Judgment he pictures a group of heroic unrepentant rebels against divine grace who have not yet fallen under the sword of the destroying angel. Of them one, a youth, sings:

Better with captives in the slaver’s pen Hear women sob, and sit with cursing men, Yea, better here among these writhen lips, Than pluck out from the blood its old companionships. If God had set me for one hour alone, Apart from clash of sword And trumpet pealéd word, I think I should have fled unto his throne. But always ere the dayspring shook the sky, Somewhere the silver trumpets were acry,— Sweet, high, oh, high and sweet! What voice could summon so but the soul’s paraclete? Whom should such voices call but me, to dare and die? O ye asleep here in the eyrie town, Ye mothers, babes, and maids, and aged men, The plain is full of foemen! Turn again— Sleep sound, or waken half Only to hear our happy bugles laugh Lovely defiance down, As through the steep Grey streets we sweep, Each horse and man a ribbéd fan to scatter all that chaff!

How from the lance-shock and the griding sword Untwine the still small accents of the Lord? How hear the Prince of Peace and Lord of Hosts Speak from the zenith ’mid his marshalled ghosts, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay; Cease thou and come away!” Or having seen and hearkened, how refrain From crying, heart and brain, “So, Lord, Thou sayest it, Thine— But also mine, ah, surely also mine! Else why and for what good The strength of arm my father got for me By perfect chastity, This glorious anger poured into my blood Out of my mother’s depths of ardency?”

So the sanctity of the warrior. And the sanctity of other passions is there, too. A woman says:

O sisters, brothers, help me to arise! Of God’s two-hornéd throne I will lay hold And let him see my eyes; That he may understand what love can be, And raise his curse, and set his children free.

But quotations crowd upon me. Most of Moody’s best work bears witness to his glorification of man’s possible personality in rebellion against man’s restrictive conception of society and god. We have had many such rebels; the peculiar significance of Moody lies in the fact that he lacks utterly the triviality of the little radical, and that his is a power which springs from the most heroic in American quality.

Of course all this would be worth nothing unless Moody had the authentic utterance of the poet. His fulness of inspiration, combined with his sensitive editing, has left us scarcely a line which should have gone to oblivion. As an example of his magic take three lines from I Am the Woman, in which the woman is walking with her lover:

But I was mute with passionate prophecies; My heart went veiled and faint in the golden weather, While universe drifted by after still universe.

Or the woman’s response to Pandora’s singing in The Fire-Bringer:

Hark, hark, the pouring music! Never yet The pools below the waterfalls, thy pools, Thy dark pools, O my heart—!

Fragmentary, mystic, unrelated with the context; yet who that has heard perfect music can fail to understand that cry? It is indeed this mystic richness, these depths below depths, that make a large part of Moody’s individual fascination. He rarely has the limpid clarity or the soaring simplicity which make the popular lyricist such as Shelley. There is too much grasp of the mind in his work for the large public; only those who have in some degree discovered the beauty of the wide ranges can feel at home in him. One breathes with the strength of great virility,—an able and demanding body, a mind which conquers the heights, and those infinitely subtle and vibrating reaches of spirit which belong especially to the poet.

To me the thought of Moody is satisfying not only because he typifies those qualities which I like to think we ought to find in American literature, but because he exemplifies my ideal of a poet. There have been many insane geniuses; men whose glory has shone sometimes fitfully through bodily or mental infirmity. Some of us are accustomed to the idea that genius is in fact insanity or is akin to it. Certainly the words “wholesome” and “healthy” have been applied so many times to mediocre productions that we are wary of them. But is not the insanity of genius after all merely the abnormal greatness and preponderance of a single quality in a man? If by some miracle his other qualities could have been equally great, would he not have been a still nobler artist? To me the Greek impulse of proportionate development has an irresistible appeal. To be sane, not by the denial of a disproportionate inspiration, but by the lifting of all the faculties to its level: that is a dream worthy of the god in man. To be an artist not by the denial of competing faculties, but by the fullest development of all faculties under an inexorable will which unites them in a common purpose: that is a rich conception of personality. The perfect poet should be the perfect man. He should be not insane, but saner than the rest of us. Moody not only expressed this ideal in his life, but in his work. He was strong and sound, physically, mentally, spiritually. No one who has read his letters can miss the golden roundness of his humor, his humanity, his manliness. Yet never for a moment did he make a comfortable denial of the will to soar. In his poem The Death of Eve he has burningly expressed the development of personality. Eve, an aged woman, has not succumbed to the view that she committed an unforgivable sin in disobeying God to taste the apple. Taking old Cain with her, she fearlessly enters the garden again to show herself to God before she dies. In her mystic song she sings:

Behold, against thy will, against thy word, Against the wrath and warning of thy sword, Eve has been Eve, O Lord! A pitcher filled, she comes back from the brook, A wain she comes, laden with mellow ears; She is a roll inscribed, a prophet’s book Writ strong with characters. Behold, Eve willed it so; look, if it be so, look!

And after singing of her life and of how she had been sensitive to the love of her husband and children, she goes on:

Still, still with prayer and ecstasy she strove To be the woman they did well approve, That, narrowed to their love, She might have done with bitterness and blame; But still along the yonder edge of prayer A spirit in a fiery whirlwind came— Eve’s spirit, wild and fair— Crying with Eve’s own voice the number of her name.

Yea, turning in the whirlwind and the fire, Eve saw her own proud being all entire Made perfect by desire; And from the rounded gladness of that sphere Came bridal songs and harpings and fresh laughter; “Glory unto the faithful,” sounded clear, And then, a little after, “Whoso denyeth aught, let him depart from here!”