Part 20 (1/2)
This does not mean that he lacks originality. It was a daring stroke--body-s.n.a.t.c.hing in 1914. To produce a work like _Spoon River Anthology_ required years of acc.u.mulated experience; a mordant power of a.n.a.lysis; a gift of shrewd speech, a command of hard words that will cut like a diamond; a mental vigour a.n.a.logous to, though naturally not so powerful, as that displayed by Browning in _The Ring and the Book_. It is still a debatable proposition whether or not this is high-cla.s.s poetry; but it is mixed with brains. Imagine the range of knowledge and power necessary to create two hundred and forty-six distinct characters, with a revealing epitaph for each one!
The miracle of personal ident.i.ty has always seemed to me perhaps the greatest miracle among all those that make up the universe; but to take up a pen and clearly display the marks that separate one individual from the ma.s.s, and repeat the feat nearly two hundred and fifty times, this needs creative genius.
The task that confronted Mr. Masters was this: to exhibit a long list of individuals with sufficient basal similarity for each one to be unmistakably human, and then to show the particular traits that distinguish each man and woman from the others, giving each a right to a name instead of a number. For instinctively we are all alike; it is the Way in which we manage our instincts that shows divergence; just as men and women are alike in possessing fingers, whereas no two finger-prints are ever the same.
Mr. Masters has the double power of irony and sarcasm. The irony of life gives the tone to the whole book; particular phases of life like religious hypocrisy and political tr.i.m.m.i.n.g are treated with vitriolic scorn. The following selection exhibits as well as any the author's poetic power of making pictures, together with the grinning irony of fate.
BERT KESSLER
I winged my bird, Though he flew toward the setting sun; But just as the shot rang out, he soared Up and up through the splinters of golden light, Till he turned right over, feathers ruffled, With some of the down of him floating near, And fell like a plummet into the gra.s.s.
I tramped about, parting the tangles, Till I saw a splash of blood on a stump, And the quail lying close to the rotten roots.
I reached my hand, but saw no brier, But something p.r.i.c.ked and stunned and numbed it.
And then, in a second, I spied the rattler-- The shutters wide in his yellow eyes, The head of him arched, sunk back in the rings of him, A circle of filth, the color of ashes, Or oak leaves bleached under layers of leaves, I stood like a stone as he shrank and uncoiled And started to crawl beneath the stump, When I fell limp in the gra.s.s.
This poem, with its unforgettable pictures and its terrible climax, can stand easily enough by itself; it needs no interpretation; and yet, if we like, the rattler may be taken as a symbol--a symbol of the generation of vipers of which the population of Spoon River is mainly composed.
In the _Anthology_, the driving motive is an almost perverted pa.s.sion for truth. Conventional epitaphs are marked by two characteristics; artistically, when in verse, they are the worst specimens of poetry known to man; even good poets seldom write good epitaphs, and among all the sins against art perpetrated by the uninspired, the most flagrant are found here; to a bad poet, for some reason or other, the temptation to write them is irresistible. In many small communities, one has to get up very early in the morning to die before the village laureate has his poem prepared. This depth of artistic infamy is equalled only by the low percentage of truth; so if one wishes to discover literary ill.u.s.trations where falsehood is united with crudity, epitaphs would be the field of literature toward which one would instinctively turn.
Like Jonathan Swift, Mr. Masters is consumed with hatred for insincerity in art and insincerity in life; in the laudable desire to force the truth upon his readers, he emphasizes the ugly, the brutal, the treacherous elements which exist, not only in Spoon River, but in every man born of woman. The result, viewed calmly, is that we have an impressive collection of vices--which, although inspired by a sincerity fundamentally n.o.ble--is as far from being a truthful picture of the village as a conventional panegyric. The ordinary photographer, who irons out the warts and the wrinkles, gives his subject a smooth lying mask instead of a face; but a photograph that should make the defects more prominent than the eyes, nose, and mouth would not be a portrait.
A large part of a lawyer's business is a.n.a.lysis; and the a.n.a.lytical power displayed by Mr. Masters is nothing less than remarkable. Each character in Spoon River is subjected to a remorseless autopsy, in which the various vicious elements existing in all men and women are laid bare. But the business of the artist, after preparatory and necessary a.n.a.lysing, is really synthesis. It is to make a complete artistic whole; to produce some form of art.
This is why the _Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard_, by Thomas Gray, is so superior as a poem to _Spoon River Anthology_.
The rich were buried in the church; the poor in the yard; we are therefore given the short and simple annals of the poor. The curious thing is that these humble, rustic, unlettered folk were presented to the world sympathetically by a man who was almost an intellectual sn.o.b. One of the most exact scholars of his day, one of the most fastidious of mortals, one of the shyest men that ever lived, a born mental aristocrat, his literary genius enabled him to write an immortal masterpiece, not about the Cambridge hierarchy, but about illiterate tillers of the soil. The _Elegy_ is the genius of synthesis; without submitting each man in the ground to a ruthless cross-examination, Gray managed to express in impeccable beauty of language the common thoughts and feelings that have ever animated the human soul. His poem will live as long as any book, because it is fundamentally true.
I therefore regard _Spoon River Anthology_ not as a brilliant revelation of human nature, but as a masterpiece of cynicism. It took a genius to write the fourth book of _Gulliver's Travels_; but after all, Yahoos are not men and women, and horses are not superior to humanity. The reason why, in reading the _Anthology_, we experience the constant p.r.i.c.king of recognition is because we recognize the baser elements in these characters, not only in other persons, but in ourselves. The reason why the Yahoos fill us with such terror is because they are true incarnations of our worst instincts.
There, but for the grace of G.o.d, go you and I.
The chief element in the creative work of Mr. Masters being the power of a.n.a.lysis, he is at his best in this collection of short poems. When he attempts a longer flight, his limitations appear. It is distinctly unfortunate that _The Spooniad_ and _The Epilogue_ were added at the end of this wonderful Rogues' Gallery. They are witless.
Even the greatest cynic has his ideal side. It is the figure of Abraham Lincoln that arouses all the romanticism of our poet, as was the case with Walt Whitman, who, to be sure, was no cynic at all. The short poem _Anne Rutledge_ is one of the few that strictly conform to the etymological meaning of the t.i.tle of the book; for ”Anthology” is a union of two Greek words, signifying a collection of flowers.
Like Browning, Mr. Masters forsook the drama for the dramatic monologue. His best work is in this form, where he takes one person and permits him to reveal himself either in a soliloquy or in a conversation. And it must be confessed that the monologues spoken by contemporaries or by those Americans who talk from the graveyard of Spoon River, are superior to the attempts at interpreting great historical figures. The Shakespeare poem _Tomorrow Is My Birthday_ is not only one of the worst effusions of Mr. Masters'
pen, it is almost sacrilege. Good friend, for Jesus' sake, forbear!
Outside of the monologues and the epitaphs, the work of Mr. Masters is mainly unimpressive. Yet I admire his ambition to write on various subjects and in various metres. Occasionally he produces a short story in verse, characterized by dramatic power and by austere beauty of style. The poem _Boyhood Friends_, recently published in the _Yale Review_, and quite properly included by Mr. Braithwaite in his interesting and valuable Anthology for 1917, shows such a command of blank verse that I look for still finer things in the future. With all his twisted cynicism and perversities of expression, Mr. Masters is a true poet. He has achieved one sinister masterpiece, which has cleansed his bosom of much perilous Stuff. Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.
Louis Untermeyer was born at New York, on the first of October, 1885.
He produced a volume of original poems at the age of twenty-five. This was followed by three other books, and in addition, he has written many verse-translations, a long list of prose articles in literary criticism, whilst not neglecting his professional work as a designer of jewelry. There is no doubt that this form of art has been a fascinating occupation and an inspiration to poetry. He not only makes sermons in stones, but can manufacture jewels five words long. Should any one be dissatisfied with his designs for the jewel-factory, he can ”point with pride” to his books, saying, _Haec sunt mea ornamenta_.
Somewhere or other I read a review of the latest volume of verse from Mr. Untermeyer, and the critic began as follows: ”One is grateful to Mr. Untermeyer for doing what almost none of his contemporaries on this side of the water thinks of doing.” This sentence stimulated my curiosity, for I wondered what particularly distinguis.h.i.+ng feature of his work I had failed to see. ”For about the last thing that poets and theorizers about poetry in these days think of is beauty. In discussion and practice beauty is almost entirely left out of consideration. Frequently they do not concern themselves with it at all.”
Such criticism as that starts with a preconceived definition of beauty, misses every form of beauty outside of the definition, and gives to Mr. Untermeyer credit for originality in precisely that feature of his work where he most resembles contemporary and past poets. I believe that beauty is now as it always has been the main aim of the majority of American poets; but instead of legendary beauty, instead of traditional beauty, they wish us to see beauty in modern life. For example, it is interesting to observe how completely public opinion has changed concerning the New York sky-sc.r.a.pers. I can remember when they were regarded as monstrosities of commercialism, an offence to the eye and a torment to the aesthetic sense. But I recall through my reading of history that mountains were also once regarded as hideous deformities--they were hook-shouldered giants, impressive in size--anything you like except beautiful. All the mountain had to do was to go on staying there, confident in its supreme excellence, knowing that some day it would be appreciated:
Somebody remarks: Morello's outline there is wrongly traced, His hue mistaken; what of that? or else, Rightly traced and well ordered; what of that?
Speak as they please, what does the mountain care?