A KELTIC TALE[78]
[From _The Evolution of Literature_ (New York, 1911)]
Here is an old Keltic tale of farewell. It was a night of mist, a low moon brooding over the braes, the heathery braes. The man sat by the seashore, as he sang quaint ballads of a land across the water, where men never see death. There was none to reveal the secrets of the glens, nor could any one tell him what the eagle cried to the stag at the corrie, while the burn wimpled on with its song of sobbing. He sat and listened, but he was knowing naught of sadness. To his ears came only the accents of the fairies of joy, and they called him to seek the fountain where song had its birth. Away from the sea he climbed till its voice came faint, faint across the bracken. At last, full weary, he slept. The night passed, and a leveret stood up, gazing upon his face without fear. A deer came to the stream, beheld the sleeping figure, and fled not. A grey linnet perched upon the pale hand lying across the bosom; it looked the sun in the face, and sang, but the man did not awake. Again the shadows melted into the night of stars, and the hills said to one another, "He has found Death and Life. For we know, and God knows, all his dreams. He has found the secret of the sea, the message of all the streams, and the fountain-head of song."
In quest of literary strivings and achievements, lowly as well as exalted, we have journeyed through all the principal lands of the globe.
The forests of Africa have shaded us from the scorching sun, and the tang of the salt sea has smitten us off Cape Horn. Visions of scenes familiar have mingled with sights and sounds of cities that flourished forty centuries ago. Wherever we have gone, we have noticed that vitality is the quality which gives permanent value to all true art.
Popular opinion, blind perhaps to the qualities of art as art, caring nothing about the more elusive charms of verse and prose, is quick to detect the presence or absence of a vital relationship between literature and humanity. Literary art voices life and gives life. The higher the art the more effectively does it fill the onlooker with a sense of life, personal and racial, dignified, wholesome, inexhaustible.
Apparently it is the ideal within the real that becomes ever more manifest in the course of the evolution of literature.
FOOTNOTE:
[78] Copyright, 1911, by Thomas Y. Crowell and Company.
LAURA SPENCER PORTOR
Miss Laura Spencer Portor, poet and short-story writer, was born at Covington, Kentucky, in 1875. She lived at Covington until ten years old, when she was taken to Paris, France, where she attended private schools for two years. She returned to Kentucky, and attended school at Cincinnati, but she afterwards entered the old Norwood Institute, Washington. Her education being finished, Miss Portor again made her home at Covington, where she resided until a few years ago, when she went to New York, her home at the present time. She has worked in many literary fields. Children's work; essays; short-stories; feature and editorial work of all kinds; and verse for children and "grown-ups."
Miss Portor is now children's editor of _The Woman's Home Companion_.
She has been so very busy with her magazine work that she has found time to publish but one book, _Theodora_ (Boston, 1907), a little tale for children, done in collaboration with Miss Katharine Pyle, sister of the famous American artist, the late Howard Pyle, and herself an artist and author of ability and reputation. The next few years will certainly see several of Miss Portor's manuscripts published in book form. Among her magazine stories and verse that have attracted attention may be mentioned her purely Kentucky tales, such as "A Gentleman of the Blue Grass," published in _The Ladies' Home Journal_; "The Judge," which appeared in _The Woman's Home Companion_; "Sally,"
a Southern story, printed in _The Atlantic Monthly_; and "My French School Days," an essay, also printed in _The Atlantic_, are thought to be the best things in prose Miss Portor has written so far. Her poems, "The Little Christ" (_Atlantic Monthly_), and "But One Leads South"
(_McClure's Magazine_), are her most characteristic work in verse. She has written much for children in both prose and poetry. Miss Portor is one of Kentucky's proudest hopes in fiction or verse, and the books that are to be published from her pen will bring together her work in a manner that will be highly pleasing to her admirers.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. _Harper's Magazine_ (August, 1900); _St. Nicholas Magazine_ (October, 1912).
THE LITTLE CHRIST[79]
[From _The Atlantic Monthly_, December, 1905]
Mother, I am thy little Son-- Why weepest thou?
_Hush! for I see a crown of thorns, A bleeding brow._
Mother, I am thy little Son-- Why dost thou sigh?
_Hush! for the shadow of the years Stoopeth more nigh!_
Mother, I am thy little Son-- Oh, smile on me.
The birds sing blithe, the birds sing gay, The leaf laughs on the tree.
_Oh, hush thee! The leaves do shiver sore That tree whereon they grow, I see it hewn, and bound, to bear The weight of human woe!_
Mother, I am thy little Son-- The Night comes on apace-- When all God's waiting stars shall smile On me in thy embrace.
_Oh, hush thee! I see black starless night!
Oh, could'st thou slip away Now, by the hawthorn hedge of Death,-- And get to God by Day!_
BUT ONE LEADS SOUTH[80]
[From _McClure's Magazine_, December, 1909]
So many countries of the earth, So many lands of such great worth; So stately, tall, and fair they shine,-- So royal, all,--but one is mine.
So many paths that come and go, Busy and freighted, to and fro; So many that I never see That still bring gifts and friends to me; So many paths that go and come, But one leads South,--and that leads home.
Oh, I would rather see the face Of that dear land a little space Than have earth's richest, fairest things My own, or touch the hands of kings.-- I'm homesick for it! When at night The silent road runs still and white,-- Runs onward, southward, still and fair, And I know well it's going there, And I know well at last 'twill come To that old candle-lighted home,-- Though all the candles of heaven are lit, I'm homesick for the sight of it!
FOOTNOTES:
[79] Copyright, 1905, by Houghton, Mifflin Company.
[80] Copyright, 1909, by S. S. McClure Company.
LEIGH GORDON GILTNER
Miss Leigh Gordon Giltner, poet and short-story writer, was born at Eminence, Kentucky, in 1875. She is the daughter of the Rev. W. S.
Giltner, who was for many years president of Eminence College, from which the future writer was graduated. She later pursued a course in English at the University of Chicago, and studied Shakespeare and dramatic art with Hart Conway of the Chicago School of Acting. Miss Giltner's book of lyrics, _The Path of Dreams_ (Chicago, 1900), brought her many kind words from the reviewers. This little book contained some very excellent verse, but, shortly after its appearance, the author abandoned poesy for the short-story. Her stories and sketches have appeared in the _New England Magazine_, _The Century_, _Munsey's Overland Monthly_, _The Reader_, _The Era_, and several other periodicals. Within the last year or so she has had quite a number of short-stories in _Young's Magazine_ "of breezy stories." At the present time Miss Giltner has a Kentucky novel and a comedy in preparation, both of which should appear shortly. She is one of the most beautiful of Kentucky's writers: her frontispiece portrait in _The Path of Dreams_ is said to have disarmed many carping critics who untied the little volume with malice aforethought. But back of her personal loveliness, is a mind of much power, cleverness, and originality.
BIBLIOGRAPHY. _The Nation_ (September 6, 1900); _Munsey's Magazine_ (October, 1902); _The Overland_ (October, 1910).
THE JESTING GODS[81]
[From _Munsey's Magazine_ (July, 1904)].
From the first it had been, in the nature of things, perfectly patent to every member of the party gathered at Grantleigh for the shooting that Tompkins' bride cared not a whit for Tompkins--which, if one happened to know the man, was scarcely a matter for surprise.
Tompkins, though a good fellow on the whole, was an unmitigated idiot.
Not a mere insignificant unit in the world's noble army of fools, but a fool so conspicuous and of so infinite a variety as to be at all times the cynosure of the general gaze.
When a man is a fool and knows it, his folly not infrequently attains the measure of wisdom. Let him but conceal his motley beneath a cloak of weighty silence and he will presently acquire a reputation for solid intelligence and a wise conservatism. But Tompkins was not one of these. He joyously jangled his bells and flourished his bauble, wholly unaware the while of the spectacle he was making of himself. If he could have been persuaded to take on a neutral tint and keep himself well in the background, inanity might, in time, have assumed the dignity of intellectuality: but he lacked the sense of proportion, of values. He was always in the foreground and always a more or less inharmonious element in the _ensemble_.
Tompkins had published an impossible volume of prose, followed by a yet more impossible volume of verse: his crudely impressionistic essays at art made the judicious grieve: he dabbled in music and posed as a lyric tenor, though he had neither voice nor ear. A temperament essentially histrionic kept him constantly in the centre of the stage.
With no remote realization of his limitations, he aspired to play leads and heavies, when Fate had inexorably cast him for a line of low comedy. He contrived to make divers and sundry kinds and degrees of an idiot of himself on all possible occasions--and even when there was no possible occasion therefor. He had a faculty for doing the wrong thing which amounted to inspiration.
We had been wont to speculate at the Club as to whether Tompkins would ever find a woman the measure of whose folly should so far exceed his own as to impel her to marry him. We wondered much when we heard that he had at last achieved this feat. We wondered more when we saw the woman who had made it a possibility.