APPROACHING JAPAN[41]
[From _The Lady of the Decoration_ (New York, 1906)]
Still on Board. August 18th.
DEAR MATE:
I am writing this in my berth with the curtains drawn. No I am not a bit sea-sick, just popular. One of the old ladies is teaching me to knit, the short-haired missionary reads aloud to me, the girl from South Dakota keeps my feet covered up, and Dear Pa and Little Germany assist me to eat.
The captain has had a big bathing tank rigged up for the ladies, and I take a cold plunge every morning. It makes me think of our old days at the cottage up at the Cape. Didn't we have a royal time that summer and weren't we young and foolish? It was the last good time I had for many a long day--but there, none of that!
Last night I had an adventure, at least it was next door to one. I was sitting up on deck when Dear Pa came by and asked me to walk with him.
After several rounds we sat down on the pilot house steps. The moon was as big as a wagon wheel and the whole sea flooded with silver, while the flying fishes played hide and seek in the shadows. I forgot all about Dear Pa and was doing a lot of thinking on my own account when he leaned over and said:
"I hope you don't mind talking to me. I am very, very lonely." Now I thought I recognized a grave symptom, and when he began to tell me about his dear departed, I knew it was time to be going.
"You have passed through it," he said. "You can sympathize."
I crossed my fingers in the dark. "We are both seeking a life work in a foreign field--" he began again, but just here the purser passed. He almost stumbled over us in the dark and when he saw me and my elderly friend, he actually smiled!
Don't you dare tell Jack about this, I should never hear the last of it.
Can you realize that I am three whole weeks from home! I do, every second of it. Sometimes when I stop to think what I am doing my heart almost bursts! But then I am so used to the heartache that I might be lonesome without it; who knows?
If I can only do what is expected of me, if I can only pick up the pieces of this smashed-up life of mine and patch them into a decent whole that you will not be ashamed of, then I will be content.
The first foreign word I have learned is "Alohaoe," I think it means "my dearest love to you." Anyhow I send it laden with the tenderest meaning. God bless and keep you all, and bring me back to you a wiser and a gladder woman.
FOOTNOTE:
[41] Copyright, 1906, by the Century Company.
JAMES D. BRUNER
James Dowden Bruner, editor of many masterpieces of French literature, as well as an original critic of that literature, was born near Leitchfield, Kentucky, May 19, 1864. He was graduated from Franklin College, Franklin, Indiana, in 1888, and then taught French and German at Franklin for two years. Professor Bruner studied a year in Paris and Florence and, on his return to this country, in 1893, he was elected professor of Romance languages in the University of Illinois.
Johns Hopkins University conferred the degree of Ph. D. upon him, in 1894, his dissertation being _The Phonology of the Pistojese Dialect_ (Baltimore, 1894, a brochure). From 1895 to 1899 Dr. Bruner was professor of Romance languages and literatures in the University of Chicago; from 1901 to 1909 he held a similar chair in the University of North Carolina; and since 1909 he has been president of Chowan College, Murfreesboro, North Carolina. Dr. Bruner has edited, with introductions and critical notes, _Les Adventures du Dernier Abencerage_, par Chateaubriand (New York, 1903); _Le Roman d'un Jeune Homme Pauvre_, par Octave Feuillet (Boston, 1904); _Hernani_, par Victor Hugo (New York, 1906); and _Le Cid_, par Pierre Corneille (New York, 1908), his finest critical edition of any French classic hitherto. His _Studies in Victor Hugo's Dramatic Characters_ (Boston, 1908), announced the advent of a new critic of the great Frenchman's plays. It is an excellent piece of work.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Library of Southern Literature_ (Atlanta, 1910, v.
xv); _Who's Who in America_ (1912-1913).
THE FRENCH CLASSICAL DRAMA[42]
[From _Le Cid_, par Pierre Corneille (New York, 1908)]
Corneille in the _Cid_ founded the French classical drama. Before the appearance of this masterpiece, a transition drama containing characteristics of the tragi-comedy as well as of the regular classical tragedy, of which Corneille's next three plays, _Horace_, _Cinna_, and _Polyeucte_, were to be perfect examples, the tragi-comedy prevailed in France. This tragi-comedy, or irregular drama, was a Renaissance product, having a history and characteristics of its own, being largely influenced by the tragedies of Seneca. Its most important characteristics are non-historic subjects, serious or tragic plots, the mixture of comic and tragic elements or tones, the high rank of the leading characters, the _style noble_, looseness of structure, the disregard of the minor or Italian unities of time and place, the classical form of verse and number of acts, romanesque elements, and a happy ending.
The most striking characteristic of the French classical drama of the seventeenth century, as of the modern short story, is that of compression. This statement is true both as to its form and its content. The accidental accessories of splendid decorations, magnificent costumes, subsidiary plots, and secondary characters that might detract from the main situation or obscure the general impression, are, as far as possible, sacrificed to the essential or necessary interests of dramatic art. Improbable and irrational elements are reduced to a minimum. Digressions, episodes, long soliloquies, oratorical tirades, minute descriptions of external nature, and complicated machinery that would encumber the plot or destroy proportion, are largely eliminated. The classical dramatist is too sensitive to the beautiful, the sublime, the essential, and the universal to admit into his conception of fine art either moral and physical deformity or the accidental and particular aspects of life.
Classical tragedy is furthermore narrow in its choice of subject and form, in its number and range of characters, in its representation of material and physical action on the stage, and in its number of events, incidents, and actions. Its subjects and materials are taken almost wholly from ancient classical and Hebrew sources. Mediaeval, national, and modern foreign raw material, whether life, history, legend, or literature, is seldom utilized. Its manners and ideas are those of the court and the _salons_, and its religion is pagan. Its language is general, cold, regular, and conventional, and its versification is confined to rimed Alexandrine couplets, with the immovable caesura and little _enjambement_.
The Frenchman's love of proportion, symmetry, restraint, and logical order led him to the cult of form. In striving after perfection of form, he naturally adopted compression as the best method of expressing this innate artistic reserve. This compactness and concentration of form, this compressed brevity, which the Frenchman inherited from the Latins, is well illustrated by the following lines from Wordsworth:
To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower; Hold infinity in the palm of hand, And eternity in an hour.
FOOTNOTE:
[42] Copyright, 1909, by the Author.
MADISON CAWEIN
Madison Cawein, whom English critics name the greatest living American poet, was born at Louisville, Kentucky, March 23, 1865. He was christened "Madison Julius Cawein," but he had not gotten far in the literary lane before his middle name was dropped, though the "J." may be found upon the title-pages of his earlier books. After some preparatory work he entered the Louisville Male High School, in 1881, at the age of sixteen years. At high school Madison Cawein began to write rhymes which he read to the students and teachers upon stated occasions, and he was hailed by them as a true maker of song. He was graduated in 1886 in a class of thirteen members. Being poor in purse, Mr. Cawein accepted a position in a Louisville business house, and he is one of the few American poets who wrote in the midst of such commercialism. His was the singing heart, not to be crushed by conditions or environment of any kind. The year after his graduation he collected the best of his school verse and published them as his first book, _Blooms of the Berry_ (Louisville, 1887). In some way William Dean Howells and Thomas Bailey Aldrich saw this volume, praised it, and fixed the future poet in his right path. _The Triumph of Music_ (Louisville, 1888), sounded after _The Blooms of the Berry_, and since that time hardly a year has passed without the poet putting forth a slender volume. The next few years saw the publication of his _Accolon of Gaul_ (Louisville, 1889); _Lyrics and Idyls_ (Louisville, 1890); _Days and Dreams_ (New York, 1891); _Moods and Memories_ (New York, 1892); _Red Leaves and Roses_ (New York, 1893); _Poems of Nature and Love_ (New York, 1893); _Intimations of the Beautiful_ (New York, 1894), one of his longest poems; _The White Snake_ (Louisville, 1895), metrical translations from the German poets; _Undertones_ (Boston, 1896), which contained some of the finest lyrics he has done so far; _The Garden of Dreams_ (Louisville, 1896); _Shapes and Shadows_ (New York, 1898); _Idyllic Monologues_ (Louisville, 1898); _Myth and Romance_ (New York, 1899); _One Day and Another_ (Boston, 1901), a lyrical eclogue; _Weeds by the Wall_ (Louisville, 1901); _A Voice on the Wind_ (Louisville, 1902). A glance at these titles, following fast upon each other, convinces the reader that Mr. Cawein was writing and publishing far too much, that he was not sufficiently critical of his work. Edmund Gosse, the famous English critic, has always been one of Mr. Cawein's most ardent admirers, and, in 1903, he selected the best of his poems, wrote a delightful introduction for them, and they were published in London under the title of _Kentucky Poems_. This volume brought the poet many new friends, as it assembled the best of his work from volumes long out of print and rather difficult to procure. _The Vale of Tempe_ (New York, 1905), contained the best of Mr. Cawein's work written since the publication of _Weeds by the Wall_ in 1901. _Nature-Notes and Impressions_ (New York, 1906), a collection of poems and prose-pastels, was especially notable for the fact that it contained the first and only short-story the poet has written, entitled "Woman or--What?"
_The Poems of Madison Cawein_ (Indianapolis, 1907, five volumes), charmingly illustrated by Mr. Eric Pape, the Boston artist, with Mr.
Gosse's introduction, brought together all of Mr. Cawein's work that he cared to rescue from many widely scattered volumes. He made many revisions in the poems, some of which (in the judgment of the writer) tend to mar their original beauty. But it is a work of which any poet may be proud; and it is not surpassed in quality or quantity by any living American.
Mr. Cawein's _Ode in Commemoration of the Founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony_ (Louisville, 1908), which he read at Gloucester in August, 1907, was rather lengthy, but it contained many strong and fine lines; and a group of New England sonnets, some of the best he has done, appeared at the end of the ode. His _New Poems_ (London, 1909), was followed by _The Giant and the Star_ (Boston, 1909), a small collection of children's verse, dedicated to his little son, who furnished their inspiration. _Let Us Do the Best that We Can_ (Chicago, 1909), was a beautiful brochure; and _The Shadow Garden and Other Plays_ (New York, 1910), was four chamber-dramas which have been highly praised, and which contain some of the most delicate work the poet has done. _So Many Ways_ (Chicago, 1911), was another pamphlet-poem; and it was followed by _Poems_ (New York, 1911), selected from the whole range of his work by himself, with a foreword by William Dean Howells. Mr. Cawein's latest volume is entitled _The Poet, the Fool and the Faeries_ (Boston, 1912). It brings together his work of the last two or three years, both in the field of the lyric and of the drama. And from the mechanical aspect it is his most beautiful book. The poet will publish two books through a Cincinnati firm in 1913, to be entitled _The Republic--a Little Book of Homespun Verse_, and _Minions of the Moon_.
In March, 1912, literary Louisville celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of _Blooms of the Berry_, and the forty-seventh birthday of its author, Madison Cawein, the city's most distinguished man of letters. This was the first public recognition Mr.
Cawein has received in the land of his birth, though it is now proposed to place a bust of him in the public library of Louisville. He is better known in New York or London than he is in Kentucky, but it will not be long before the people of his own land realize that they have been entertaining a world-poet, possibly, unawares. He is so far removed from any Kentucky poet of the present school that to mention him in the same breath with any of them is to make one's self absurd. Looking backward to the beginnings of our literature and coming carefully down the slope to this time, but two poets rise out of the mist of yesterday to greet Cawein and challenge him for the laureateship of Kentucky makers of song: Theodore O'Hara with his immortal elegy, and Daniel Henry Holmes with his sheaf of tender lyrics. These three are the nearest approach to the ineffable poets--who left the earth with the passing of Tennyson--yet nurtured upon Kentucky soil.
Mr. Cawein is, of course, a poet of Nature, a landscape poet in particular who paints every color on the palette into his work. Had he been an artist he would have exhausted all colors conceived thus far by man, and would fain have originated new ones. There are literally hundreds of his poems in which every line is as surely a stroke as if done with the brush of a painter. Color, color, is his shibboleth-scheme, and he who would woo Nature in her richest robes may read Cawein and be content.
Amazing as it may seem Mr. Cawein has thirty-four volumes to his credit--almost one for every year of his life. This statement stamps him as one of the most prolific poets of modern times, if not, indeed, of all time. And that it is not all quantity, may be seen in the recent declaration of _The Poetry Review_ of London: "He appears quite the biggest figure among American poets; his _return to nature_ has no tinge of affectation; it is genuine to the smallest detail. If he suffers from fatigue, it is in him, at least, not through that desperate satiety of town life which with so many recent poets has ended in impressionism and death."
BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Poets of the Younger Generation_, by William Archer (London, 1901); _The Younger American Poets_, by Jessie B.
Rittenhouse (Boston, 1904); _History of American_ _Literature_, by R. P. Halleck (New York, 1911); _The Poetry Review_ (London, October, 1912).
CONCLUSION[43]
[From _Undertones_ (Boston, 1896)]
The songs Love sang to us are dead: Yet shall he sing to us again, When the dull days are wrapped in lead, And the red woodland drips with rain.
The lily of our love is gone, That touched our spring with golden scent; Now in the garden low upon The wind-stripped way its stalk is bent.
Our rose of dreams is passed away, That lit our summer with sweet fire; The storm beats bare each thorny spray, And its dead leaves are trod in mire.
The songs Love sang to us are dead; Yet shall he sing to us again, When the dull days are wrapped in lead, And the red woodland drips with rain.