Penguin Persons & Peppermints

The Passing of the Stage Sundial

My school and college days fell entirely in the Nineties, or almost entirely, for I finally emerged with a sheepskin written in Latin I could no longer translate, in June, 1900. I saw my first modern realistic play in 1893, when I was a little junior middler at Phillips Andover. It was Shore Acres, and I have not yet forgotten, after a quarter of a century, the thrill of that revelation. It was almost as if my grandfather's kitchen had been put upon the stage, and with Herne himself to play the leading rôle, to blow on the frosty pane that he could peer into the night, to bank the fires, tip the stove lids, lock the door, and climb slowly up to bed while the old kitchen, in semi-darkness, seemed like a closing benediction before the downrush of the final curtain, I caught the poetry of the commonplace, I had my first unconscious lesson in literary and dramatic fidelity. And I ended my college days, a much more sophisticated person, championing Pinero and Jones, rushing eagerly to special performances of Ibsen, and ardently admiring the plays of G. B. Shaw, two of which, Arms and the Man and The Devil's Disciple, had been acted in America by Richard Mansfield before the end of the century.

Considering these plays now, and their effect upon me—and not forgetting, either, the passionate admiration, almost the worship, we young men of twenty had in those days for the acting of Mrs. Fiske—it would be easy to infer that the whole period of the Nineties for us youngsters was a period of revolt and forward-urging, that we were crusaders for what Henry Arthur Jones called “the great realities of modern life” in art. Crusaders we were, to be sure. I well remember long debates with my father, a man of old-fashioned tastes in poetry, and a particular fondness for Burns, over the merits of Kipling's poems. (Think of considering Kipling's poems revolutionary! Indeed, think of considering some of them poems!). We debated from still more divergent viewpoints over the novels of d'Annunzio. In college, in my last year or two, some of us even adopted the views of Tolstoy in his What is Art? and under the urge of this new sociological passion we took volunteer classes in night schools. I remember instructing a group of Jewish youths in the principles of oral debate, or, rather, debating the principles of debating with them, for being unblessed with an expensive preparatory school and college education, and being Jews into the bargain, they did not propose to take anything on faith. I used to return to my room in the college Yard wondering just why it was that these working lads, mere “foreigners”, of a race infinitely inferior, of course, to the Anglo-Saxon, and without the precious boon of a Harvard training, had so much more real intellectual curiosity and mental grasp than any of us “superior” youths. These classes interfered seriously with my academic work, yet it seems to me now that they were infinitely more profitable.

However, it was a curious paradox of the Nineties that while we were discovering Pinero, Ibsen, Shaw, Tolstoy, we were also reading The Prisoner of Zenda and yielding ourselves with luxurious abandon into the arms of honey-sweet romance. At the very time when the new, realistic drama was leading us out of a pasteboard world into something approximating an intelligent comment on life, the cloak-and-sword drama was having a fine little reactionary renaissance, the calcium moon was shining down on many a gleaming garden and flashing blade, and ears were rapturously strained to catch the murmur of love-laden words. Then it was that the stage sundial flourished in all its glory, generally flooded, to be sure, with moonlight—that peculiar moonlight of the American theatre which turns grease-paint to a horrible magenta—and we youths, with the divine flexibility of imagination only youth can know, responded alike to Hedda Gabler and An Enemy to the King.

Do you remember the sundial, exactly at stage centre, in the latter play? In what dulcet tones, love-laden, the future Hamlet and Macbeth murmured to his lady fair! Even the sword duel in the last act, all over the chamber, across the great bed ripping down the curtains, back and forth with flash of steel and rattle of blade, was not so thrilling as that moonlit scene across the dial plate. My constant companion in those days was a boy who to-day preaches each week from a famous pulpit, with gravity and eloquence. He is a man of substantial parts, on whom life's bitter realities press very hard as he battles to relieve them. Does he now recall, I wonder, how for weeks after we had hung from the gallery rail at An Enemy to the King he even said “Thank you,” when somebody passed him a piece of bread, in the deep, long-drawn tones of Sothern's romantic passion? He was a handsome youth, and I know not what mischief he wrought that winter in gentle bosoms, with his vocabulary enlarged and romanticized, his tones colored with emotion, as he sought secluded corners at our dances and practised his new art. Our Tolstoian moods were not for dances, you may be sure! We lived in a dual universe. In one world were sundials and moonlight and the thrill of a woman's eyes; there was slow music and the ache of unfilled desire ever about to be gratified by some hoped-for miracle. In the other world were only facts, hard facts, and the scorn of considering them emotionally, of considering them in any way but with the intellect. I fear in those days our moods did not connect intellect and the fair sex. Perhaps youth never does. And perhaps youth is right, not in thus passing judgment on women, for that is not what is done, but in refusing to surrender any portion of the divine romantic mystery of sex at two-and-twenty to the cold light of reason. When Shaw and Ibsen wrote, they wrote of daily life, and we were learning to accept their contention that it should be written about truthfully. But there was no lie in these other plays, these sundial romances, for they were not daily life, they were ages long ago and far away, they belonged to the Never-Never-Land of romantic fable—of dreams and the heart's desire. There is no such thing as a complete realist at twenty. Or, if there is, he should be interned as an enemy alien.

A generation has passed since the Nineties, and there are no stage sundials any more. Perhaps that is but another way of saying that I am middle-aged, but, upon my word, I do not think so. Do you remember the sundial over which Dolly and Mr. Carter philandered, the one which bore the motto—

Horas non numero nisi serenas?

I reread that dialogue the other day, and captured some of the ancient thrill. No, the real trouble is that a generation of realism, or what has passed for realism on our American stage, has done its deadly work. It has killed romance. That is not at all what realism was intended to do. Indeed, to the larger view, romance is a part of the reality of life. Realism was a reaction against sham and falsity and sentimentalism, and, above all, perhaps, triviality of theme. But the net result, so far as the American drama is concerned, seems to have been the substitution of a realistic setting and dialogue for a false one, and then a continuance of the old sham, sentimentalism, triviality. How else can we account for the success of Mr. Belasco? But the taste engendered by the realistic settings and dialogue has banished the cloak and sword and sundial, stripped romance of its charm and allure; and once stripped of these, it ceases to be romance, for it ceases to reach the heart through the sense of beauty and of mystery. We have succeeded in substituting a chocolate caramel for the apples of Hesperides.

Yet it cannot be that this condition will be permanent. Comes a little play like The Gypsy Trail, wherein even through the realistic setting a strain of romance strikes, and all hearts respond. Youth will not be denied, but, like Sentimental Tommy, will “find a way.” It may be that the old dualism of the Nineties was the sane solution, as so many of the modern “art theatre” directors maintain, at least by their practice, and the realistic drama should stick relentlessly to its last, while romance flourishes untroubled by any fetters, in free, fantastic, perhaps poetic, form. I do not know. I only know that the sundial must come back to the stage, not, it may be, as the garden ornament of old, but in some guise to further the dreams and dear delusions of our beauty-hungry hearts. For, as you may have guessed, the sundial is a symbol.

On Singing Songs with One Finger

How true it is that unto him who hath shall be denied, and unto him who hath not shall be given what the other man could use to such advantage! The composer who can both pucker the lips of the gallery-gods and satisfy the ears of the musical critics, how infrequent a visitor on this planet! so that Offenbach and Sullivan must often have suffered from loneliness. The singer who can also act, how rare a song-bird! The interpreter of the lieder of Franz or Schubert or Grieg who will sacrifice vocal display to the composer's meaning, and who has the fineness of soul to grasp and make manifest the mood of the lyric, how welcome a guest! And yet those who could write undying comic music if only they were composers, who could lift the hearts of their hearers into the skies with “Hark, hark, the lark,” if only they could sing, are legion in number. How often, in short, like those two in Lord Houghton's poem, are temperament and technique—“strangers yet.”

So are they in me, alas! total strangers. From my earliest years I have been filled with the joyous impulse of song, but never were ears more false to the one true pitch than mine, never was voice less commensurate with ambition. My youthful dreams, when they were not of foot-ball or swimming, were all of the Sirens, and I deemed Ulysses, if prudent, none the less a lack-sentiment sort of hero, not inspiring to know, because he stopped his ears to their song. The jeers of my fellows long ago taught me the bitter lesson to keep my melody to myself, but the impulse is still in me to sing, the myriad moods of music are still mine, and I still consider Ulysses the first of the Philistines.

For some time I thought my own case unique, but acquaintance with a music critic who cannot hum a tune, and with a celestial tenor (such tenors are so rare I fear this may be too personal for print) who was the most stupid of men, without the slightest capacity for high passion of any sort, convinced me of my error: and many subsequent conversations with men and women like myself incapacitated by nature for self-expression, as well as much listening to bad singers with good voices, have but forced conviction home. And now, when unfeeling relatives and scoffing friends smile the superior smile of the “musically talented” at sight of my piano which I play with one finger, and at the pile of music upon it, I let them smile, calm in the assurance that songs and instrument are mine by better right, perhaps, than theirs, who can raise voices quite on pitch to the accompaniment of eight fingers and two thumbs.

For, when none of them is by, I play with my one finger the airs of the world's great lieder, and hear from that slight suggestion the songs as they should be sung. As I would rather read Hamlet in my library than see the average actor attempt the part, so I would rather play Der Atlas with one finger, with my own imagination calling forth the tragic power and grief, the superb climax of surprise and thunder, than hear it sung by any man at present on the concert stage. The poignant sadness cross-shot with humor of another of Schubert's songs, The Hurdy Gurdy, vanishes in the concert room, melts hopelessly into the dulcet tones of the young lady soprano, whose friends titter when she is done, “What a pretty song.” But my one-fingered rendering—aided in this song by occasional jabs with three fingers of the left hand—brings to my inward ear the pathos of the barrel-organ, heard over the distant hum of a careless city, laden with the sorrow of all the world; brings memories, too, of that consummate singer of songs, Marcella Sembrich. Under the touch of my blunt forefinger the songs of MacDowell distill their delicate melancholy, that in the homes of my friends, where daughters ripple well-dusted piano keys and display expensive voices, yield only treacle and honey. Why should I mind the supercilious smile of my neighbor next door when he occasionally catches me at my unidigital performance, he who is a soloist in a noted church choir, but who, I very well know, prefers The Palms or Over There to Purcell's I'll sail upon the Dog Star, if, indeed, he ever heard the madly melodious boast of the “roaring boy”?

After all, there is nothing wonderful in this. It but shows that the genius which creates and the imagination which appreciates are akin, even as Professor Spingarn has asserted. Even operas and symphonies were composed at a piano. Strauss heard the one hundred and five instruments which are called on to represent the cry of the baby in his Symphonia Domestica all tooting and scraping in the notes his ten fingers evoked from his piano keys. (Personally I should rather have heard them so!) And why cannot I hear at least a simple little song in the melody that my one finger plays? The numerical ratio is in my favor, surely, although my neighbor would doubtless rudely suggest that I am not Richard Strauss. At any rate, for me there is a great joy in singing songs as they ought to be sung, if only with one finger, which has done much to console me for the technical powers nature has so plentifully denied me. I offer the same solution to all others who are in my case, only suggesting that it would be wise of them, perhaps, to learn while they are yet plastic the use of all ten fingers. They will not thereby secure ten times as much enjoyment, but their families will thank them.

The Immorality of Shop-windows

This is especially true of the shop-windows on Fifth Avenue, New York. For these windows, even at night illuminated like silent drawing-rooms vacant of people, expose to the view of the most humble passer on the curb as well as to the pampered rich racing by in motors, the spoils of all the world. Here are paintings by the old masters and the new; rare furniture and marbles from Italian palaces; screens from Japan; jewels and rugs from the Orient; silk stockings, curios, china, bronzes, hats, furs; and again more curios, cabinets, statues, paintings; things rare and beautiful and exotic from every quarter of the globe, “from silken Samarcand to cedared Lebanon.” And they are not collections, they are not the treasures of some proud house, although they might have been once; they are for sale; they may be bought by anybody—who has the price.

But who has the price? That stout woman riding by in her limousine, with a Pomeranian on her lap instead of a baby? That fifteen-dollar-a-week chorus-girl in a cab, half buried under a two-thousand-dollar chinchilla coat? That elderly man who hobbles goutily out of his club and walks a few short blocks to his house on Murray Hill, “for exercise”? Assuredly, somebody has the price, for the shops are ever open, the allurement of their windows never less. But not you, who gaze hungry-eyed at these beautiful objects, and then go to a Sixth Avenue department store and wonder if you can afford that Persian rug made in Harlem, marked down from $50 to $48.87; or that colonial mahogany bookcase glistening with brand new varnish. Envy gnaws at your heart. And yet you had supposed that yours was a comfortable sort of income—maybe four thousand dollars a year. Your father, on that income, back in a New England suburb, was counted quite a man in the community, and you put on airs. He selected the new minister, and you set the style in socks. But now you are humiliated, embittered. You rave against predatory wealth. Thus shop-windows do make Socialists of us all.

Nor are you able to accept the shop-windows educationally, recalling that when you went to Europe you saw nothing that had not already stared at you through plate-glass on Fifth Avenue—for sale. Who wants to view one of the chairs that a Medici sat in, only to recall that months before he saw its mate in a shop-window at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-first Street; or to contemplate a pious yellow heathen bowed down before the image of Buddha, while the tinkly temple bells are tinkling, only to have rise in his mind the memory of a much larger and more venerable Buddha which used to smile out inscrutably at the crossing of Twenty-ninth Street, below a much sweeter string of tinkly temple bells?

There is no romance in an antique, be it god or chair or China plate, when it is exposed for sale in a shop-window. And there is no romance in it amid its native surroundings when you realize that any day it may be carried off and so exposed. Thus do shop-windows destroy romance.

But in the humbler windows off the Avenue there is an equal, if grosser, element of immorality. For these are the windows where price-tags are displayed. The tag has always two prices, the higher marked through with red ink, the lower, for this very reason, calling with a siren voice. The price crossed off is always just beyond your means, the other just within it. “Ah,” you think, swallowing the deception with only too great willingness, “what a bargain! It may never come again!” And you enter the fatal door.

Perhaps you struggle first. “Don't buy it,” says the inhibition of prudence. “You have more neckties now than you can wear.”

“But it's so cheap,” says impulse, with the usual sophistry.

And you, poor victim that you are, tugged on and back by warring factions in your brain,—poor refutation of the silly old theological superstitions that there is such a thing as free will,—vacillate on the sidewalk till the battle is over, till your mythical free will is down in the dust. Thus do shop-windows overthrow theology.

Then you enter that shop, and ask for the tie. Or perhaps it is something else, and they haven't your size. You ought to feel glad, relieved. Do you? You do not! You are angry. You feel as if you had lost just so much money, when in reality you have saved it. Thus do shop-windows destroy logic.

This has been a particularly perilous season for the man with a passion for shirts. By some diabolic agreement, all the haberdashers at one and the same time filled their windows with luscious lavenders and faint green stripes and soft silk shirts with comfortable French cuffs, and marking out $2.00 or $3.00, as the case might be, wrote $1.50 or $2.50 below. The song of the shirt was loud in the land, its haunting melody not to be resisted. Is there any lure for a woman in all the fluffy mystery of a January “white sale” comparable to the seduction for a man of a lavender shirt marked down from $2.00 to $1.50? I doubt it. Heaven help the woman if there is! So the unused stock in trunk or bureau drawer accumulates, and the weekly reward for patient toil at an office dribbles away, and the savings-bank is no richer for your deposit—and the shop-windows flare as shamelessly as ever. There is only one satisfaction. The man who sells shirts always has a passion for jewelry. And that keeps him poor, too!

A Forgotten American Poet

I sent in my order for the book, to Goodspeed's, and then forgot the incident. But Goodspeed didn't. A year later the book came. Evidently it is an infrequent item at the auctions. The copy I received was a second edition, dated 1864 (which seems to indicate the poems had found some readers), but still in the familiar brown of Ticknor and Fields, matching my first American editions of The Angel in the House. This copy was of special interest because it was a presentation copy from the author to Harriet Beecher Stowe. The leaves had been opened, but if Mrs. Stowe read, she had made no marginal comments. The only addition to the book was an old newspaper clipping pasted in the back—a condensed history of the Beecher family! I read the volume myself with increasing interest and enthusiasm, and at the close I desired to learn more of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, not of the Beechers. Mr. Stedman's complete omission of these poems could only have been explained, I felt, by an equally complete ignorance of their existence. Compared to the poems of Henry T. Tuckerman, included by Stedman, the verses of his unknown cousin were as gold to copper. Why, I wondered, had this man been so completely obliterated by Time, or why had he failed in his life to reach a niche where Time could not utterly efface him?

I wrote to Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who, I discovered, had been a classmate of Tuckerman's at Harvard, and who of course knew practically everybody of consequence in the literary world of his generation. Colonel Higginson was able to supply some data, but not much. Tuckerman was born in 1821, of a rather well-known Boston family. Joseph Tuckerman, philanthropist and early Unitarian clergyman, was his uncle. He was a younger brother of Edward Tuckerman, long famous as a professor of botany at Amherst College, and who gave his name to Tuckerman's Ravine on Mount Washington. Frederick Goddard Tuckerman entered Harvard with the class of 1841, but remained only a year, passing over to the Law School a little later where he secured his LL.B. in 1842, and for a period evidently practised law in Boston. “I remember he came back among us at some kind of gathering during our college course,” Colonel Higginson wrote, “and seemed very friendly and cordial to all. I remember him as a refined and gentlemanly fellow, but did not then know him as a poet. I see him put down as a lawyer in Boston (in Adams's Dictionary of American Authors), but I have no recollection of that fact.”

It was not until I had written and published in the Forum magazine a little appreciation of his poetry that I learned from his son, now a resident of Amherst, Massachusetts, that Frederick Tuckerman, even as his verses seemed to imply, early moved away from cities to the beautiful valley under the shadow of the Holyoke Range, and there passed his days, evidently the world forgetting, and by the world forgot. He issued his single volume of poems in 1860, when he was thirty-nine, just before the outbreak of the Civil War, but no shadow of that coming contest crosses their pages, as it crossed the pages of Whittier and Emerson, or as it affected the active life of his classmate Colonel Higginson. The second edition, in 1864, was still unaffected by the great struggle. He produced his slender sheaf of poems amid the fields, in quiet introspection, and he might well be accused of a species of Pharisaism, were these poems not so artlessly and passionately sincere, and often so tinged with religious awe. His withdrawal, in his verse, from the life of his times was the act of a natural recluse.

At the time Tuckerman's poems were issued, it is interesting to consider briefly some of the poetic influences which affected the public. The two best-selling poets just then, even in America, were Tennyson and Coventry Patmore, the latter represented, of course, by The Angel in the House. Indeed, the poems of these two sold better than novels! Whitman was hardly yet an influence. Julia Ward Howe had written, and Booth had accepted, a drama in blank verse. Our minor poets still wrote in the style of Pope, and the narrative shared honors with the moral platitude in popular regard. Tennyson, of course, was a great poet, and Patmore no mean one, even at that time, but it is questionable whether the huge popular success of their works, such as The Princess and The Angel in the House, was due to their strictly poetic merits. At any rate, the poetry of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, lacking narrative interest, palatable platitudes, lyric lilt, but being, rather, contemplative, aloof, delicately minor and in many ways curiously modern, must have fallen on ears not attuned to it. He had none of the Bolshevik revolutionary vitality of Whitman, to thrive and grow by the opposition he created. He could have aroused no opposition. It would have been his happy fate to find men and women who could appreciate his delicate observation of nature, his golden bursts of imaginative vigor, his wistful, contemplative melancholy, his disregard of academic form less because it hampered him than because he was careless of anything but the exact image. Such readers it was apparently not his fate to find in sufficient numbers to bring him fame. He was, in a sense, a modern before his time, but without sufficient consciousness of his modernity to fight. He was a mute, inglorious Robert Frost—like Frost for one year a Harvard student, like him retiring to the New England countryside, like him intent chiefly on rendering the commonplace beauty of that countryside into something magical because so true. Only he lacked Frost's dramatic sense, and interest in human problems.

Tuckerman's favorite medium was the sonnet; but a sonnet to him was a thing of fourteen five-foot iambic lines, and there all rules ended. Sometimes he even crowded six feet into a line. It is possible his laxness of form was due to ignorance, but more likely that it was due to a greater interest in his mood than in the “rules” of poetry. Many of his sonnets were in sequence, one flowing into the next. Here are two, thus unified, which show in flashes his sweep of imaginative phrase, and his transcendental bent:

Turning the page we come on a poem called The Question. “How shall I array my love?” he asks, and ranges the earth for costly jewels and silks from Samarcand; but because his love is a simple New England maid, he rejects them all as unworthy and inappropriate, and closing sings:

Have not these lines a magic simplicity? It seems so to me. They flow rippling and bright to the inevitable finish, and there is no more to say.

Tuckerman's power of close yet magical observation, used not so much in the Tennysonian way (for Tennyson was a close observer, make no mistake about that) as in what we now think of as the modern way, that is, as a part of the realistic record of homely events, with beauty only as a by-product, is well illustrated in the opening lines of a narrative poem called The School Girl, a New England Idyll. Here again a kinship with Frost is seen, rather than with Tuckerman's contemporaries:

These powers of observation are again illustrated in a poem of quite different import, called Margites, a lyric of thirteen stanzas, some of which are inexcusably crude. It begins:

After four more stanzas in similar vein, comes this bit of magic word-painting, so instinct with our New England Autumn, yet so entirely the work of a realist, with his eye on the object:

The poem then continues to its close:

“A life well lost”! The phrase is perhaps pathetically revealing—and prophetic. Or are we stretching the poet's ambitions to be known as a poet? That he published what he wrote indicates a normal desire for recognition, yet it can hardly be doubted, either, that he was an amateur in verse, whose life was rather centred in his contemplative, retiring existence among the fields and hills of Amherst. There may even seem to some a delicate Pharisaism about this sonnet, a Pharisaism removed from the robustness of Thoreau, who would certainly have argued the point with the farmer:

Yet, as we have said, Tuckerman was far from Pharisaism of any sort, either of the æsthete or nature-lover. His mind was too genuinely occupied with spiritual problems. Take, for example, this closing sonnet in a sequence depicting the discords of Nature:

Here, surely, is poetry that would not seem the least among the myriad hosts in Mr. Stedman's hospitable anthology! The rhyme scheme may be quite unorthodox, but the poet's lips have been touched by a coal from the high altar, none the less.

The volume closes with a sonnet sequence which is poignantly intimate; almost it is a diary of the poet's grief for the loss of the woman he loved, and in its stabbing intensity holds a hint of such poems as Patmore's The Azalea. Here is one:

Such use of pictorial observation as “the raindrops strung along the blind,” and “the wet black roofs through mist defined,” is something you will look for in vain through the pages of Longfellow, for instance. This is the sonnet of a realist. So, also, is this one, which does not seem to me to deserve oblivion, and certainly so long as my memory retains its power will have that little span of immortality:

It must not be supposed that the predominant note in Tuckerman's poetry is elegiac; rather is it a note of tender, wistful, and scrupulously accurate contemplation of the New England countryside, mingled with spiritual speculation. But as the volume closed with the elegiac poems, and as thereafter no more poems were published, it may be surmised that the poet's will to create was smothered in the poignant ripple of his personal sorrow. Had it not been, and had his pen continued to write, one cannot help wondering how much closer he would have come to the modern note in poetry. That he already felt a tendency to progress from the old metres to freer forms is constantly apparent; and this tendency, combined with his unconsciously scrupulous realism, might well have brought him near to the present. I should like to close this little paper to his memory with one of his lyrics which throws over rhyme altogether, and strictly formal metre, also, though the fetters are still there. It is the stab of grief which comes through to haunt you, the bare simplicity and the woe. Objective it certainly is not, as the modernists maintain they are. Yet the personal note will always be modern, for it has no age. This lyric belongs to you and me to-day, not in the pages of a forgotten book, on the shelves of a dusty library. I would that some of our vers libre practitioners could equal it: