A Poet's Life: Seventy Years in a Changing World

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A POET'S LIFE

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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY OF CANADA, LJ111TSD TOJ:OMTO

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HARlllET MONROE

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eAcknowledgments

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For permission to include in this book letters and excerpts by Harriet Monroe's co11 espondents, gratitude is due to Miss Zoe Akins, the executors of the estate of William Archer (through Curtis Brown, Ltd.), Mr. Morris Bishop, Mr. Witter Bynner, the executors of the estate of Rupert Brooke (through Mr. Geoffrey Keynes), Mr. H. L. Davis, Mr. Arthur Davison Ficke, Mr. Roswell Field (for a letter by Eugene Field), Mr. Harrison Grey Fiske ( for a letter by Minnie Maddern Fiske), Miss Rosamond Gilder ( for a letter by Richard Watson Gilder), Mr. Francis Hackett, Miss Ruth Hall (for a letter by Hazel Hall), The Viking Press ( for letters by D. H . Lawrence included in The LettMs of D. H. Lawrence, edited by Aldous Huxley), Mrs. Elizabeth Conner Lindsay (for letters by Vachel Lindsay), the executors of the estate of Amy Lowell ( through Mrs. Harold Russell and Houghton, Mifflin Company), Mr. Edgar Lee Masters, Mrs. Harold Monro ( for letters by Harold Monro), Mr. Ezra Pound, Miss Elizabeth Robins, the estate of Edwin Arlington Robinson ( through the Macmillan Company), Miss Eloise Robinson (Mrs. Corda A. Muchmore), Charles Scribner's Sons (for three letters by Robert Louis Stevenson), Mr. Paul Sifton, the estate of George Sterling ( through Mrs. Guy H. Liliencrantz), Mr. Ridgely Torrence, Mr. D. P. Trench (for a letter by Herbert Trench), Mr. Malcolm Vaughan, Dr. William Carlos Williams, and Mr. William Butler Yeats. The manuscript of A Poet's Life has been prepared for the press by Miss Geraldine Udell, the Business Manager of Poetry: A Magtnine of Verse, in whose charge it was placed by Harriet Monroe when she left Chicago for Buenos Aires in August,

1936.

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Contents

* CJa.,1,r

I: IN THE BEGINNING

I

2: THE EAllLY WOllLD

IO

3:

MY FATHEll AND MOTHEll

18

4:

THE FLOWElllNG YEAllS

28

5:

SCHOOL DAYS IN GEORGETOWN

46

6:

THE BEGINNING OF WISDOM

7:

ROBERT LOUIS S'l'EVENSON

53 62

8:

LITER.AllY LIFE IN NEW YORK: THE EIGHTIES

78

9:

THE FIR.ST OF EUROPE

98

10: JOHN WELLBORN llOOT

108

I 1: A COMMISSION: THE COLUMBIAN ODE

I 16

12: THE OPPOSITION

123

1892-93

13:

THE FESTIVAL YEAll:

14:

A POET IN THE COUllTS

15:

LONDON IN

16:

AllT AND ARTISTS: PARIS

17 ."

DISCOVElllNG THE WEST

163

18:

HOPI LAND

170

19:

POETRY AND THEATER

20: THE MIDDLE YEARS

175 185

2 I: ART AND ARCHI'l'El..1'URE IN AMERICA

204

128

1 39

1897

145 156

FLORENCE-ROME

(vii)

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Contents c1a.,,-

Pq•

22:

CDICUNG THE WOllLD

218

23:

THE BEAUTY OF PEJtING

230

2 4: THE BDlTH OF AN mEA

240

25: Poetry: ii Mag,rr,me of Verse

251

26:

FillST CONTUBUTOllS

283

27:

COMPUMBN'n AND CONT'llOVltllSIES

302

28: S.f.3 29:

316

CASS fflll:ET

32 9

A BANQUET: YEATS AND UNDSAY

JO: THE BREAKING OF THE STOllM

J 1:

COMBAT AND COMPANY

32:

DDCOVEIW

340 362 386 412 429

JJ: SEllIOUS IS.,UES

1922-1936

34:

THE LAST FIFl'EJ!;N YEARS:

35:

LAST WORDS: PAST AND FUTUllE

449

36:

EPILOGUE

459

INDEX

477

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l llustrations

* Harriet Monroe l'fflfllP.,.

Henry S. Monroe Martha Mitchell Monroe Picture of Harriet Monroe, taken in I 892 William Stanton Monroe, taken during his college years Dora Louise Monroe ( Mrs. John Wellborn Root) Lucy Monroe C'.alhoun Henry Stanton Monroe, John Wellborn Root and Lewis Mitchell Harriet Monroe, in her thirties Henry B. Fuller William J. Calhoun, taken in 1911 Letter from Edwin Arlington Robinson Ezra Pound H. C. Chatfield-Taylor Vachel Lindsay Letter from Vachel Lindsay Carl Sandburg William Butler Yeats Rupert Brooke Joyce Kilmer Amy Lowell Sara Teasdale James Joyce Ford Madox Ford Arthur Davison Ficke An Early Picture of Witter Bynner Wal lace Stevens Poetry's Associate Editors Edna St. Vincent Millay Elinor Wylie

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22 23

58

59 92 93 132

133 198 199

254 266 267 286

287 312 313

342 343 370 37 1 402 403 424 425 444 445 470 471

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A POET'S LIFE

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Chapter

I

IN THE BEGINNING

of which each detail has a glamour. cJ.: Every incident has a continuing history reaching backward and forward to remotenesses of time, which has no beginning or end. When and where did my life begin? For convenience one may give it a date and a place; one may say that I was born one Sunday morning two days before Christmas of 1860, in the little rapidly growing city of Chicago, even then conscious of its destiny. But that is a fiction of speech, for it began in the will to life of parents, grandparents, tho,isands of ancestors, reaching back through many races of recorded and unrecorded history. Even ten generations pile up nearly four tho,,sand of these ancestors, assembling all kinds of people, representatives inevitably of every social class and every kind of faith and motive to be found in their parts of the world. Ten generations cover three centuries where and what was I three centuries ago? Part of me was ranging the Scottish hills with a daredevil highland clan. which would later rebel against usurping Hanoverian kings, and, in desperate fealty to the Stuarts, would send three Munro brothers to new colonies across the sea. Part of me came over in the Mayflower with John Alden and P~scilla, and somewhere along the far-reaching trail of their numerous progeny one Mary Alden married a youth named Thomas, and their son became the father of my father's mother. The Munro clan had proved prolific in the New World, and a few generations down nIFE IS A DISCOVERY

( 1)

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cA Poet's Life the line we hear of a Rothbotham Munro who moved with his family from Connecticut to the growing commonwealth of New York. Rothbotham became almost a legend for his mighty strength and stature: at eighty-four he leaped on the back of a fractious colt and rode off to master him. His grandson was my grandfather, born October 1O, 1798, who, as a young doctordentist-surgeon, married Sylvia Thomas, five years younger, and carried her off on a health trip to Baltimore, where my father, their eldest child, was born, February 9, 1826. But half of me was being fashioned by my mother's tribe, and family tradition tells little about them. Mitchell is a lowland Scotch name, so some adventurous Mitchell must have braved the Atlantic, and I hope there were vagabonds and artists in his progeny. My grandfather, during a business trip to Ogdensburg, New York, met a local beauty, and returned later for the wedding. In her there may have been a vagabondish strain, for she lived in the passing moment to the end of her long life, and did her share of work in pioneer times, with never an idea in her head to bother her. She used to tell us of the long honeymoon drive from Ogdensburg to the village of Akron, Ohiothe rough roads through endless primeval forests profoundly impressed her memory. In Akron the young William B. Mitchell had already founded the Cascade Mill, ancestor, I have been told, of the modem city's great milling industry. There he established a home, begat ten children, and died suddenly, at forty-five, of ''inflammation of the bowels,'' recognized long after by his eldest daughter as appendicitis. He was a leading citizen of the town, prosperous, owning a fine house, driving his own horses. But Azenath, his widow, was relieved by his partner of her interest in the business and other properties, and while she was grief-stricken and ill small creditors carried away various possessions, even the clock on her mantelpiece. However, she recovered her health and courage, and took in boarders to support her growing family. The two ( 2)

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In the 'Beginning

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older sons, still under twenty, departed for Chicago, to ''go into business'' and make their fortune, while the eldest daughter married at sixteen and went to live in Ogdensburg. The two little boys, aged about seven and five, were sent to boarding school, from which, pathetically homesick, they soon tramped back toward Akron and were picked up by a farmer and deposited at home only to be sent to school again, to forget their sorrows, and become the liveliest of the little students. The second daughter, Martha, my mother, then ten years old, was kept at home, with little thought of schooling, to help with the housework and look after little Dora, who, at the mature age of four, was already singing like a lark. So the family was broken up, the seven living children were rearranged, and in a few years Azenath Mitchell, still young and beautiful, had learned her domestic trade and saved ten tho\1sand dollars, then quite a sum, at her business of feeding and housing people for two or three dollars a week. · ( I love one story of my ever-young-and-beautiful grandmother: while nursing her youngest son during a voyage on T,akc Erie, she was asked by an admiring passenger, ''ls that your first child?'' Her proud reply was, ''No, it's my ninth.'') While thus the Mitchell part of me was losing all and starting again, the Monroe part, far away in Central New York, was farming and doctoring and raising two sons .and two daughters. Dr. Henry Monroe, my grandfather (by that time the name had taken a new arrangement of letters) seems to have been a fairly good country doctor, as the practice went at that time at least he saved his own son's life after an accident by rejecting the advice of three other physicians called in for consultation. The young Henry Stanton, a daredevil boy with horses, had leaped on the bare back of an untrained colt for a ride, and had been brushed ofF by the limb of a tree and picked up unconscious with broken bones and other severe in juries which brought him to death's door. The three consultants pre( 3)

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eA Poet's Life scribed a heavy dose of calomel, and advised that a grief«rickcn parent should not take the decision out of their hands in so desperate a case. In spite of them my grandfather renmed to give the drug, feeling that the patient could not survive so severe a shock, and probably modea 11 experts will confum his judgment, and ag1ee that my life also, and many others, hung on that decision. However, my paternal grandfather was only middling elective throughout his eighty years; but his wife, hating housework and lacking everything she must have secretly longed for, had that uncomfortable possession, a mind, and this she succ:ccded in passing on to her first child, a son, and somewhat also to her two daughters. Sylvia Monroe had nothing of Azcna.th Mitchell's beauty or charm, but she loved knowledge and sought it in boob, there in a region where boob were scarce and cash to buy them scarcer. She saved pennies from the butter money and bought a volume now and then; a small one of philosophic moralizing, now in my library, is signed with her finely written name and labeled ''Book No. 13.'' With all the energy of a thoroughly aroused strong will she resolved that her clever eldest son should have what she lacked, what all women lacked at the time---an education. The doctor-farmer was not enthusiastic but not unwilling, and the keen-minded Henry Stanton got whatever schooling was to be had in the neighborhood, earning money meantime by training colts, for he was a marvel with horses. In due time he started in college at Geneva, New York, where mostly he worked his way through its four years and ended as valedictorian of his class. Andrew D. White was ~ affluent student there one year below him-afterwards a famous educator, first president of Cornell University and ambassador to Germany. In White's old age he told me that of all the thousands of students he had known, the young men in this little college at that time were beyond all question the most brilliant group. And my father used to tell gay, wild stories of (4)

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In the 'Beginning two or three of them who, driving headlong to ~ were wasted and died young. The law was to be my father's profession, so after graduation he entered the office of Henry R. Mygatt, a man of distinction in western New York whose large practice gave the youth a 6.ne training. Chicago, at the southern end of I -ake Michigan, was said to be an energetic growing town, so the young lawyer journeyed thither in 18S2, armed with diplomas and letters, among the latter one from Mygatt to his friend Stephen A. Douglas, already prominent in politics. It happened that Douglas was the first person the young lawyer met in Chicago, for as he was signing the hotel register a short stocky man with a big head was looking over his shoulder. Douglas recognized the name his friend Mygatt had told him to look out for, and saluted the newcomer with a welcoming handshake. A close friendship began which continued until Douglas died in 1861, and I could reel off many picturesque stories of this powerful and magnetic leader whose glittering eye allured followers like that of the ancient mariner. My father made other contacts, both social and professional, set up an office with, I think, a partner, and was· soon recognized as an advocate of exceptional ability. One of my father's anecdotes of the ''Little Giant'' may interrupt the general narrative here bec:aU!C of its historic interest. It was Douglas' convivial habit to call a group of friends together for an informal stag party on the eve of any important speech, and to draw out their somewhat lubricated opinions on the subject he intended to discuss. One evening in 18S8 my father was among the friends enrolled, and the talk was very spirited about the impending series of political debates with a comparatively obscure opponent from down state. The talkers became very scornful-Douglas was to have a walk-away-his advisers grew hilarious over the coming discomfiture of his presumptuous rival. ( 5)

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eA Poet's Life Suddenly the great man stopped the contemptuous laughter with a slow and serious word: ''You don't know Abraham Lincoln. I do. And I tell you I've got the hardest job on my hands that I ever undertook.'' During the early 18SO's my mother's family had journeyed from Akron to Chicago. Azenath Mitchell's two older sons, Wallace and Richard, wrote her of the rising town's magnificent prospects, and of excellent opportunities for profitable investment of the ten thousand dollars she had saved. Wallace had social talents, but little interest in business. He became a thirtythird-degree Mason, a quartermaster officer at the beginning of the war, and died of too much conviviality and charm when he and all the victorious North were celebrating, with high spirits of various kind, the victory of Appomattox. Richard, to the end of his long life, was a Colonel Sellel'.5 expecting the impossible and pursued by ill luck and too ambitious dreams. Between them they so successfully invested their mother's little fortune that she never saw a dollar of it again, and the education of her four younger children-Martha, I.ester, Lewis, and Dora-became a matter of slight concern to anybody. Martha had been left in Cleveland for a year with a wealthy spinster who had become interested in the widowed Azenath and her family. This tall and stately lady lived with her mother in a Euclid Avenue mansion, whose lofty, large, formal, and empty rooms were rather overpowering to a desolate young girl accustomed to a clutter of children and boarders and the small but urgent business of helping her mother. She was fourteen or fifteen years old, and she achieved great respect and a certain fondness for the stately spinster; but the old mother, probably resenting the intrusion of youth in their strictly ordered household, always presented a formidable and terrifying front. These two wealthy women never sent the girl to school or engaged tutors for her, or brought in young people to give her a good time, so it was no wonder that the homesick Martha was de( 6)

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In the 'Beginning lighted when her mother sent for her after a year of exile. In Chicago she became once more her mother's helper, and education was still a much neglected second thought. The pretty widow, then about fifty, had been well received into the young city's gayest social circle, where her sons, since their arrival a few years before, had been easily popular. Wallace was always a bachelor, but Richard had married an erudite young woman whose literary ambition was drowned early in a maternal flood. Martha was very soon a ''young lady'' in the complete Victorian sense of the word, and in happy fulfillment of the role she went to a party one evening of 1853 or '4, and met a rising young lawyer named Henry Stanton Monroe. It was all over with the young man at the first glance of Martha's eyes, for he was susceptible to beauty and she had the most beautiful eyes in the world. They were the darkest brown, large, soft, lustrous, heavily shaded with long lashes and crescent eyebrows---eye:s that melted or flamed at the heart's signal. Also she had masses of wavy dark brown hair, parted and combed down over brow and cheeks and tilted up behind the ears to meet the heavy coil in the back. Her skin was finely touched with pink, and full lips, curving widely to the corners, covered her worst feature, too prominent imperfect teeth. Her figure was not so good as her face-average height, but a bit short-waisted, with hips a little too large and a carriage not quite firmly erect. The young man liked the girl's innocence, her inexperience of the world. He had no use for coquetry, or even for the kind of charm which attracts a crowd of suitors around certain daughters of Eve. His sister always insisted that a girl of this type in New York state had tried in vain to add him to her string, and had lived unmarried because of her failure; and I have often thought that she would probably have made him a tactful and companionable wife for such women know their job. The young man had firm ideas about marriage. In his early youth ( 7)

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eA Poet's Li/e Dr. Monroe had taken him through a syphilis hospital, and this bitter warning had protected him from sexual indulgence. Besides, he had a eugenic respect for the race, the blood stream; he wanted strong untainted children, and he held himself aloof from cheap love affairs, and demanded no more sexual continence of the woman he married than he brought to her. The wooing went on apace-Henry and Martha were soon engaged. Already he was buying books, and one of his presents to the very unbookish Miss Mitchell was a set of lndilms of North Amme11, illustrated with beautiful colored portraits, bound in full tooled morocco, and now quite valuable. Whenever I read the inscription on the flyleaf of Volume I, I hardly know whether to laugh or cry over the blind masculinity of the gift. Soon he began to wonder why Martha's notes to him were w,itten by her sister-in-law, until at last, when a brief few lines came in the young girl's own hand, he knew the reason. Manifestly, their tastes were not alike, and it might have been wiser to break the engagement. Instead, he proposed that his sweetheart should go to school for two years and he would pay the cost of it. But when this experiment was tried, Martha found herself with younger girls she was eighteen or nineteen-and so far behind them that she felt incompetent and ashamed. The plan did not work out well, so she left school and they were married-on September 27, 18S5; and the pair went honeymooning to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky. My mother loved travel above all other indulgences, and it may have been on this same tripor not long after-that they visited Niagara Falls, and my father drove a horse and buggy, against my mother's protest, out on that strange projection called Table Rock, which broke away a few days later and fell into the torrent. In Chicago they rented a house on Wabash Avenue near 12th Street, and there, a year later, their first child, a son, was stillborn. In another year-on October 4, 18S7-my powerful sister Dora Louise, afterwards Mrs. John W ellbom Root, took pos( 8)

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In the 'Beginning session of the household and was named aher two aunts, maternal and paternal. Another son died two weeks aher his birth in December, 18S9, and the next year it was my turn-on December 23, 1860, a diminutive but healthy nobody appeared and was christened Hattie, as the nearest approach to Henry, my father despairing of a junior aher the loss of two sons. The death of a third beautiful boy baby-of diphtheria, now so easily cured-at six months, when I was two years old, almost broke my mother's heart and threatened her reason. However, two more children came to console her-my sister Lucy, who became the wife of William J. Calhoun, and finally my brother William Stanton, who, at the ripe age of two, had managed to survive diphtheria, scarlet fever, measles, and most of the other infantile hurdles known to medical science. In maternity Martha Monroe-or Mattie, as she was nicknamed-found her true vocation. Her days and hours were busy with us and for us, including incidentally her husband. She was not overindulgent-in one way or another we had to ''mind''; and it was no soh household, free of clashes and quarrels, that made my little world in those first years. As we children grew older, and Dora Lo11ise went away to boarding school, my mother could not bear to shock her with ill> and invited me to spend a few November days with her in her home near La Ferte sous Jouarre. We talked of her early acq11aintance with George Sand as we walked through the brown woods along a quiet misty river called the Marne. Aher dinner she asked me what I was doing, and made me read aloud my two one-act plays, At the GoJ and It Passes By. ''Profondement original-dechirtmt,'' she called them-''Mai.r comment powunr ~ H E AUTUMN IN

occuper de petites choses en ,prose quand 'VOUS pOU'Vn faire des poesies comme celles-ci!'' And she advised me to drop the

'VOUS

prose and ''work in ways where you are strong''-give readings, conferences, and write more plays and poems. To the deep discouragement of my mood she administered balm-I felt hopeful again and newly inspired. ( 156)

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eArt and cArti.rt.r: Paris---Florence

Rome

One raw November afternoon Sara Hallowell took my sister, Mrs. Root, and me to the studio of her friend Auguste Rodin. I remember the short paunchy thick-bearded figure of the great sculptor as he showed us the unfinished Dante gates and a number of other sketches in plaster: an Argentine monument, T 118 WtWe, A Poet Dying in thB Arms of the Muse, and the symbolically massive Balzac which had recently been rejected by a French committee to a fierce accompaniment of protests from the sculptor's admirers. He took us into the marble room, where stood the Victor Hugo monument and various groups, and especially the profoundly moving Hand of God. manipulating its little human figures, a work now familiar through replicas in many museums. Also there was a wounded Greek head of Juno-''For me it is not broken,'' he said; ''the beauty is in the spirit, and the spirit is there.'' Returning to the smaller studio, he showed us many swift outline drawings of his nude models-poses caught on the instant, studies of life in motion, done in pencil with touches of pale color. We lingered long; the great man was gracious to the two friends of his friend. A period was ending in Paris with Rodin, with Victor Hugo who had died twelve years before, with Alphonse Daudet whose funeral procession I witnessed. The Barbizon painters had gone, the impressionists Monet, the dead Manet, the aged Renoirwere mounting to the peak of fame, while the ''post-impressionists''-Cezanne, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, and the rest-were not yet heard of. The feeling in the air was fin de siecle a prelude to g1 eat changes, to a new epoch-as I left Paris alone for Italy on the eve of the new year. It was a white New Year's Day as my train threaded the St. Gothard tunnel and began my Italian sojourn which was to include visits to Florence, Venice, Milan, Naples, Rome. I yielded promptly to the charm of Florence. The Palazzo Vecchio was a new architectural style to me, as fresh as when the early Florentines first watched its piling of stone on stone a ( 157)

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eA Poet's Life style I was to recognize and love once more, thirteen years later, in the many-towered walls of the Kremlin. Brunelleschi's striped Duomo with its octagonal dome, the lovely Baptistry, Giotto's Campanile these also seemed to belong to me by a special deed of gift. And, like countless other American pilgrims, I adored the springtime freshness of Botticelli and the other painten of the early Renaissance-Gentile da Fabriano, Lippo Lippi, Fra Angelico, Benozzo Gozzoli, Perugino, reserving for a much later second visit a closer appreciation of. their subtleties of motive and method. Through these winter weeks of sunshine it was all magic-I watched at the dawn of Italy's great period, when the sky trailed many colors and the whole world sparkled with dew. The human arena offered a rather amusing contrast. In Florence at that time gathered an international group of sophisticates mostly writers on art, experts rejecting romantic loyalties and working out new realistic methods of criticism. An older, more metaphysical but equally un-Ruskinian school was represented by Miss Violet Paget, better known as Vernon Lee, who invited me for luncheon at her villa on the slopes of Fiesole. She and her friend Miss Anstruther wore clinging gowns more graceful than the fashion of the period prescribed; a stuttering young Italian actor was there, and a clever ''Mr. Balfour''perhaps later the Prime Minister:. We talked in paradoxes-it was rarefied air we breathed as our hostess searched for esthetic causes and consequences in sentences delicately trimmed with metaphor and uttered rapidly in a soft melodious voice. She seemed singularly unaware of the clamorous everyday worldI followed with some difficulty her ethereal flights. Bernhard Berenson and Charles Loeser were the leaders of a sterner school of criticism which, at a hint from Germany, founded its attributions on the various painters' handling of anatomical and other details. The two men cordially hated each other, plucking Baws in each other's armor as delicately as a ( 158)

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eArt and eArtists: Paris·-Florence-Rome skillful fencer, and rejoicing as courteously in consequent drops of blood. Berenson had the advantage of more diligence at his business, being obliged to earn his living at it; whereas Loeser had somehow persuaded his father, a department-store owner in Boston, to let him live liberally abroad and become the world's greatest art critic. Berenson's authority in his chosen field was already beginning, whereas Loeser continually postponed putting on paper the results of his ardent and enlightened studies. Meantime he gave me the benefit of them in talk which sometimes became almost an eloquent harangue. He led me one day through the Bargello, certain old churches, and a great antiquity shop full of treasures, especially a naive St. George and the Dragon by Paolo Uccelli, now in the Louvre. Later he challenged the Uffizi Titians, studiously admired the Botticellis, and down in the basement showed me a wonderful portfolio of drawings by Pontormo. Yet the old masters were not his only preference; in his discreetly furnished apartment the library belonged to them, but there was a Whistler room, and the dining room was hung with Japanese prints. Also he introduced me to Cezanne; two or three landscapes by the queer French recluse struck for me a new note in art. One warm morning we went to Santa Croce to see Brunelleschi's Pozzi chapel and the lovely Rossellino tomb, lunching afterwards at the Kerr-Lawsons' near Settignano. While we were talking later on a sunny hillside, Berenson and a party of ladies came along, and there was a salty episode of ill-concealed enmity between him and my escort. The Kerr-Lawsons were friends of ''both their houses,'' Mrs. Kerr-Lawson had told me reverently of Berenson's ''fineness, his mind, psychology, discoveries,'' etc., and had discussed the long-standing feud with regret. Berenson, • during a first call, had told me of his hatred of France and the French; so, on visiting his villa, I was prepared for an Italian entourage. Nothing, however, could have prepared me for its superesthetic early-Florentine dewy-rosebud daintiness, espe( 159)

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d Poet's Life cially the bedroom curtained with old silver-gray taffeta patterned at intervals with a single tiny flower. The villa had three stars in Baedeker, and deserved them. In the garden Mrs. KerrLawson was taking snapshots of Berenson and his guest Mrs. Costello, and we all whiled away a sunny half-hour in talk. An accent tense, and a little strained in the life of the foreign colony, began to pall on me before I left Florence. There was a bit too much heavily perfumed ''atmosphere,'' and it was with a mixture of regret-ah, sad regret!-and vaguely acknowledged relief that I took a slow train, after my few ecstatic weeks, for Pisa, Lucca, Siena, Orvieto, Rome. At last-Rome! but after all these authentic old towns I hated Rome. After the consistent medievalism of Siena, the early Renaissance harmony of Florence, Rome saluted me with Bernini, still my pet abomination, whose heavy hand seemed to have scattered draped and ornamented statues all over the place. It took me weeks to overlook him, and to ignore Rome's surrender to the baroque and all the spawn of more recent architecture which must have afilicted the ghosts of the old gods; weeks before I could get down to the Rome of the great popes and painters; and another series of weeks before I could reach the Rome of the Caesars, which finally seemed nearest akin to my democratic temperament-indeed, the busts of emperors seemed modeled, not from Latin types, but from American businessmen such as I had left at home. If this were a book of art criticism I could go on for many pages about the pictures in Roman galleries large and small, and in churches on whose shadowy walls they darkly bloomed. I saw old friends and made new ones in Rome. The Elliotts - John and Maud Howe, both as beautiful to look at as when I first had met them at the Pretymans', had an apartment in the Palazzo Rusticucci near St. Peters; and the venerable Julia Ward Howe, still vigorous and witty as ever, was spending the winter with them and enlivening the teas they gave on Sunday ( 160)

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·eArt and eArtists: Paris.__Florence:- Rome afternoons. I saw the large blond jolly Elihu Vedder in his studio, among sketches for new solemn decorations and certain basreliefs in color which he was experimenting with at the time. At Mrs. Vedder's invitation I went to a dancing club, and stepped out with two or three Italians and with my compatriot Hermon MacNeil, sculptor of American aborigines, who was incongruously studying in Rome. There was much talk of theosophy everywhere, and I heard Annie Besant give in imperfect French a lecture on its past, present, and future, but failed to discern in ' her unimposing personality the magnetic spark,which must have been there to win disciples to her Oriental cult in the city of the popes and Caesars. By way of contrast, at one of Mrs. Heywood's grand functions I saw cardinals in full regalia of scarlet, and other dignitaries of the established order. And with two women I formed enduring friendships one a quiet English spinster named Eleanor Metcalfe, whose low-pitched voice and perfect French pleased me at the Hayden Pension; and the other the Romanized Countess Elizabeth Phelps Resse, noted as connoisseur and collector, whose apartment was almost a museum. It was a privilege to be her guest for a few days between trips to medieval Viterbo and modern, hopeful Naples. Her Dnrer etchings started in me an enduring love for the inscrutable German. In Naples the soft-voiced Eleanor met me at the train and we did the usual things together. On April 29th I heard with deep emotion of the United States' declaration of war against Spain; and my plan to sail for home that week was checked by a request from my sister at Vevey to look after her three children in June so she could take the cure at Carlsbad. Thus my course was northward again; another look at Rome, a journey to Perugia and Assisi-with Giotto and St. Francis twinned serenely in their high blue heaven, while Cimabue, Simone Martini, and the other primitives stood like a singing choir around them; then ten more sunny days at ( 161)

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eA Poet's Life Florence with friends of the present and masterpieces of the past. There was an uprising to the north-''bread riots'' were reported, and ''Do you dare go to Prato?" Charles Loeser and I were asked when we planned an excursion to find Donatello, Rosscllino, Fra Lippo Lippi et tu. The cathedral was open when we arrived, but the gallery, we were told, was ''in possession of the military.'' However, my escort, not to be baffled, smilingly sought an interview with the captain in command; and this portly and amiable officer chuckled and passed us in-if we would excuse the cots exclaiming to underlings, ''Look at them -they won't harm us!'' The Italians took their little uprising with a due sense of drama. Florence, though quiet as usual, officially was in ''a state of siege'' as I departed for Turin and Switzerland. The sky was blue over Brunelleschi's pink dome and the purple hills as I waved a good-by. More than thirty years were to pass-a new king, the World War, Mussolini-before I should see Italy • again. The two months in Vevey with the Root children and older friends were pleasant but uneventful. When my sister returned from Carlsbad somewhat improved in health, I took a train to Brieg and a diligence to the very top of the Simplon Pass, where the Metcalfe ladies, who had rented a tiny cottage, gave me three sparkling days on the heights. Then it was downhill to Genoa, and the North German Lloyd steamer Kaiser Wilhelm 11, which sailed for New York over summer seas from July 29th to the twelfth of August, 1898.

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Chapter I7

DISCOVERING THE WEST

l7T SEEMED STRANGE to be at home again in the little Hotel c:/ Plaza apartment with my father and Lucy, facing rather vaguely and without much confidence the problem of earning a living after my year and a half abroad. I had traveled frugally; from leaving Paris to sailing from .Genoa, more than seven months, my expenses had averaged-journeys, lodgings, meals, tips, and all incidentals a trifle less than two dolla.n a day; which seems incredible, considering that I had subsisted quite comfortably. But now even a frugal living was a problem, as journalistic jobs were hard to find, I had no talent or liking for teaching, and the essays and poems which might-so rarely-be accepted by magazine editors could not be relied on for more than an occasional srpall check. My sister was now secretary and literary adviser in the office of a brilliantly progressive young firm of publishers Herbert S. Stone & Co.; but my father's affairs were going from bad to worse, and he was now, at seventy-two, entitled to relief from care. However, my problem was postponed by illness, for scarcely more than a month after my return an attack of pleuropneumonia laid me low. A slow convalescence held me down throughout the autumn and early winter. On Hallowe'en I was permitted, all trussed up in flannels, to attend my brother's wedding; and later fine days would lure me out for a brief walk or drive. But it became evident that warmth and sunshine were necessary for a cure, and ( 163)

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eA Poet's Life at the end of January a kind friend secured for me a round-trip pass on the Santa Fe Railroad to Phoenix, Arizona. Thus it happened that an illness gave me the West-a gift of incalculable value. The journey brought me my first view of the massive Mississippi and its fertile plains beyond, and of the snow-capped Rockies as we rounded great gorges at the comer of Colorado. And one morning, lifting the window shade in my berth, I saw at last desert country, the silver desert of the northern Arizona plateau, patterned like a tied quilt with bunches of gray-green sagebrush. The spectacular sunset ride from Ash Fork downward was like a descent into hell, so black and fearsome was the welter of rocks and gorges thrown into chaos by madcap devils of long ago. And after darkness had obscured the change into a softer region, I alighted at Phoenix, the nondesaipt American-Spanish-Indian capital of the territory. There, domiciled in a small boarding house at the edge of the desert, I lay for houn every day in a sea-chair out in the sun watching the blue mountains to the left and the pink mountains to the right as their veils of color waved and shifted from dawn to darkness. Willows were pale green with new leaves along the irrigation ditches, and almond trees covered their dark lacework of boughs with purple-pink blossoms. The rich fruitage of my special mulberry tree fed red-winged blackbirds as they made love to demure little brown mates. The celestial play of color was a perpetual drama. There were human dramas also. A little faded-out cypher of a lady was manifestly exiled to our pension by her ~octorhusband in Chicago, who so oversolicitously guarded her ill health that the landlady and I used to suspect the medicines he sent her. A couple arrived from Wisconsin, in exile for cure of the man's lungs, the wife so resentfully longing for her own green countryside that her emotions must have been very mixed when he died a year or two later and left her free to return to her beloved woods and fields. And six weeks after my arrival ( 164)

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an interesting quartet took possession of our best rooms-a young man very ill, attended by a trained nurse, his sister, and the girl who had quite recently promised to marry him. These were a very congenial group; the girl and I talked, walked, and • rode together. We were close companions during the month that passed before her lover died and they took his body home. Gradually I became strong enough to ride horseback into the desert, or to drive out for the day with friends. The region, so strange, so different, lured me to an allegiance I have never lost. I yielded to the austere fascination of the magic wonderland I had entered for the first time. The desert, lying silver in the sunlight, had a weird and hoary beauty of its own, very unlike the beauty of green fields and thick forests but quite as potent. It seemed the most ancient thing on earth. It suggested immensities of time. One measured it not by years but by geological ages, so strong was the spell of its antiquity. Yet this was not the desert of my dreams, not a Sahara waste of sand in which no seed could take root; for here was a rich soil washed down through many centuries from the mountains, luxuriant with everything that could grow in that thirsty land. Not only pale sagebrush, ragged mesquite, and lacy paloverde were there to emphasize rather than relieve the barrenness, but an hundred varieties of cactus pricked into the shining air, all presided over by the giant cactus, the formidable s"gwro, which stood erect, a tall fluted column in the waste, bulging near the top like the squat pillars of the Temple of Karnak, as if the Egyptian builders had studied it from across the world. I never tired of wondering at these monoliths. At first they seemed monstrous, foolish, taking the desert in vain with their steel-sharp growth of thorns and their anachronistic peak of bloom in April-as if a tombstone should flower. But gradually I felt convinced of entering another world, accepting unfamiliar laws. Here were not companionable trees and shrubs, but the aftergrowth of an ancient earth, of some planet outworn in the sun and heavy with ( 165)

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eA Poet's Life the bones of nations. Humanity had no rights in this enormous desolation; I intruded upon its profound mysterious beauty. Before long I was conscious of feeling magnified by these immensities of space and time. A year before I had been in Italy, where students were still devoting their lives to the analysis of Giorgione's color and Donatello's silver line. And the year before that I had seen the aged Queen of England make"'"~n impressive show of power at her jubilee, upheld by world-wandering soldiers and the an,bassadors of all nations. Under the new influence I began to feel dissatisfied with my long absorption in such details. The inspiration of the future seemed to seize me, and carry me beyond reach of any inspiration of the past. And I could not regret having seen Italy before Arizona, for only thus could I be sure that Arizona was more stimulating than Italy, that for us of the new world and the new century it had the richer and profounder and more mysterious message of beauty. For Italy presents the realization of certain human ideals, gives one a sense of things achieved rather than a stimulus toward a new revelation. Its beauty is selfs roar; dropped muleback to the river along a switchback much steeper and narrower then than now; followed the long hot mesa trail to cross the torrent above the granite on a swinging little Bimsy rope-braided bridge, and once across, urged my reluctant steed up the rocky cascading Bright Angel Canyon toward the steep North Rim. Above all, one 0£ my visits was during a rare season of heavy rains; and I stood, by good luck, at one of the great viewpoints while a thunderstorm trailed its gray robes up and down the vast abyss, concealing and revealing the prodigious Temple of Vishnu in front of me, filling and draining the lesser gorges, surrendering at last to the sun, and finally veiling the whole chasm in white foam which steamed upward from wet depths. For two hours I watched the great drama-the most sublime spectacle I ever expect to see. They call me an ''old-timer'' at the Canyon, which I love and ( 168)

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'TJiscovering the West revere and have to return to as a sailor to the sea or a mountaineer to his peaks. El Tovar has replaced the rough little inn I first slept in, and tourist crowds invade the solitudes. But to my last visit I shall feel as rhapsodical as in the first of many articles about it, which Th6 Atlantic printed in November, 1899. There I observed, as Galsworthy did many years later, that the Grand Canyon is ''art added to nature''-who can doubt it that looks on Vishnu's Tower, or studies the sweeping curves of those foundation terraces which support the Temple of Isis! Behind closed eyes I continually renew the vision, seeing once more those blues and purples playing over prodigiously shapely edifices of primeval rock. Leaving it, I may as -well repeat a few sentences from my earliest tribute: From mountain-tops one looks across greater distances, and sees range after range lifting snowy peaks into the blue. The ocean reaches out into boundless space, and the ebb and flow of its waters have the beauty of rhythmic motion and exquisitely varied color. And in the rush of mighty cataracts are power and majestic peace. Yet for grandeur appa11ing and unearthly, for ineffable impossible beauty, the Canyon transcends all these. It is as though to the glory of nature were added the g1ory of art; as though, to achieve her utmost, the proud young world had commanded architecture to build for her and color to grace the building. • . • Lovely and majestic beyond the cunning of human thought, the mighty monuments rise to the sun as lightly as clouds that pass. And forever glorious and forever immutable, they must rebuke man's pride with the vision of ultimate beauty, and fullil earth's dream of rest after her work is done.

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Chapter 18

HOPI LAND

to Phoenix was a key which un• (!:/ locked Arizona for me, that early Atlantic essay was a further aid in my conquest of the West-or rather, the West's conquest of me . for the Santa Fe gave me passes for later trips as long as the pass system lasted, charging them to the advertising department, which considered magazine and newspaper pu~ licity an adequate return for free transportation. An essay on Arizona appeared in The Atlantic for June, 1902; ''To the Snake Dance'' in the London Fortnightly Revi8w of October, 190S; and various articles, not to speak of poems, in other magazines and Chicago newspapers. The trip to the ''sky city'' of Walpi, to see the Hopi tribe in its annual ritual, was perhaps my most authentic experience of our wildest West. That time it was in August of 1901-1 had passes for two, and my sister Lucy was with me. As we left the sleeper at our forlorn little stopping place, the disgusted porter remarked, ''It done beats me that you two ladies should come all the way from Chicago to get off at Winslow, Arizona!'' And when we tried to eat at the poor little hotel, and lay awake all night to the raucous music of switching cars, we also began to wonder at our hardihood. We had bought tickets for the five-0ay excursion from some liveryman recommended by our railroad friend, and the sight of his fragile old vehicle increased our wonder. However, we embarked, rather envious of the Lowell out( 170) (7F MY ROUND-TR.IP PASS

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Hopi. Land fit in front of us-for Percival Lowell the astronomer (brother of Amy, had I only known her then! ) and a lawyer friend from Flagstaff were also starting for W alpi, armed with one hundred and forty pounds of ice and luxurious drinkables and eatables which looked from afar like a Newport picnic as we ate our scantier meals on the desert. One of our two horses soon balked and was changed at a ranch; next, our shabby surrey broke its backbone in crossing a V-shaped arroyo, but luckily we traded it for a returning stouter wagon and proceeded hopefully on our way. A faintly tinted line on the horizon grew slowly into a rocky escarpment of colors so vivid-jade, green, cobalt and turquoise, amethyst, yellow ocher and gold-that suddenly I leaped in my seat with a cry-this was the Painted Desert! Here nothing grew-no weed or stalk challenged the desolation; those surprising chips and boughs on a crest proved heavy to our touch, petrified a million years ago. We camped the first night under the steep cone of a volcano zigzagged with lightning lines of black and white, in a tiny oasis where there were bushes and a spring of cool water, and a trader who told us yarns and sold us blankets. The second day the rocks were no longer levelstratified but volcanic in strangely sculptured buttes-the Inverted Cup, the Rameses-like Giant's Chair. We lost our way, by chance met a beautiful Navajo horseman who caracoled ahead of us all afternoon, and finally, high on a crest against the sunset, pointed across the valley to the ''sky city'' that rose on its knife-blade mesa seven miles away. We alighted and ran gayly down the little slope. But Professor Lowell ordered his cowboy driver to move ''on to Walpi,'' and marched melodramatically up and down while that rugged individualist mutinously loosed his weary team for a rest and feed, and set about preparing supper which his chief heroically refused to eat.. I fear that tall lank cowboy, who had lost his front teeth in ''driving greasers out of Arizona,'' may have failed to appreciate Boston, for he took refuge with Chi( 171 )

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eA Poet's Life cago and connded to us his irritation over the professor's city clothes and imported accent. ''If he was a real Englishman, I could stand it,'' he drawled, ''but for an American to talk like that-by blazes, it gets me!'' Also he resented thr castr system which was more or less in evidence; had been obliged to explain to his fellow travelers that he was "no nigger but as good a white man'' as they, and that only on terms of social equality would he continue to drive and cook for them. So it was we who heard at intervals chapters of his satirical Arizona saga, and laughed over his adventures as cowboy, section hand, prospector and all-round fighter against the hated Mexican-a saga told in true American richly salted with humor of a strictly indigenous brand. At last, when all but Mr. Lowell had supped and rested, the word was indeed ''On to W alpi !'' and our two parties slept at last on the board floors of two tin-roof cabins which our kindly but most unesthetic government provided for its Hopi wards at the stony foot of their mesa. My sister and I rose before dawn and climbed the steep stair path to see the sunrise race. We halted near a seated priest, who, silent and immobile as sculpture, guarded the entrance to the snake khiva beneath him. The desert lay six hundred feet below us, and the sun was just under the red horizon as we watched the antlike racers start far away, grow larger, fleeter, receive the virgins' corn salute under the cliff, disappear up the stair path, and finally emerge and run past us to their goal~m boys, their bodies painted, bright feathers in their hair-just as the sun gave its mighty leap upward and turned the world to gold. Free and wild and beautiful beyond words was the spectacle. The Snake Dance just before sunset was the climax of the Hopis' nine-day ritual. We climbed the stair trail again after our noon siesta, found seats and powerful new friends on a rough balcony over the Jeisi or snake altar, and waited two hours ( 172)

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Ho,pi Land in the sun before the weird opening strain of the most ancient rite on earth a strange survival of primitive animal worship in this age and country of colleges and automobiles. Today many tourists motor to Hopi I.and for the Snake Dance, and it may have become corrupted by popularity. But in 190 I the rite was still unscathed, the audience chiefly Navajo rather than white; and there, six hundred feet above the plain, it seemed as if all the arts had united in a symphony of the desert as authentic, as humanly expressive in its dramatic beauty and violence, as any great national festival of any clime or time. I remember the procession of gancJi)y painted snake priests and antelope priests curving around the little plaza below ustheir stamping, chanting, and the rhythm of their rattling shells. I remember the swaying of the long double line as the snake men and antelopes faced each other for many minutes with a slow quiet movement of bodies and voices the most beautiful part of the ritual. I remember the stirring to violence, the corn salute of the girls as the lines broke, the release and seizing of the snakes, and the wild climax as the serpent bearers leaped around the little plaza with a rush of fierce dark music, and dashed out and down to the four corners of the earth to give back the squirming reptiles to the desert. We were living in an earlier day when old Time was young-this was not our familiar modern world. Soon it would be over forever-nothing so perfect, so ancient, could survive without loss, without change, against the waves of alien life, against intruders like ourselves. We found interesting people everywhere. An Arizona lawyerpioneer-Judge Richard E. Sloan-one of the gallant trio who shared their roof ledge with us at the Snake Dance and followed us soon after to the Canyon, became my friend for life. Leaving an Ohio law school for the West in 1884, he drifted finally into Phoenix, became a leader there, and under President Taft the last territorial governor of Arizona. For years he was on the bench, and the dramatic dialect stories of early trials in pioneer ( 173)

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d Poet's Life towns, which made us laugh o' nights at the Canyon, he afterwards put into a very atmospheric book, M6fllON6s of 1111 Arizona Judge, published by the Stanford University Press in 1932, only a year before he died. Indeed, there were always a few choice characters among the Canyon tourists, a larger percentage then than in later El Tovar seasons of ease and luxury. Our old friends Hamlin Garland and his wife surprised us one morning and camped out with us far down the trail the night we heard the mountain lion roar. A party of geologists, chemists, and artists went down to the river, cheered on their way by Rector's merry partner, an expert cocktail mixer. Railroad engineers were superintending their last eight miles to unfinished El Tovar when we reached it, and a trio of younger men let us ''carry the chain'' one day while they surveyed a section of the Rim. There were grand gallops through the Coconino Forest with some of these, and long drives or rides to this or that view-point. And there was always the famous first settler Captain Johnny Hance with his tall Paul Bunyan-like stories. Later visits to that fabulous gorge have never quite matched the interest and variety of human contacts which my sister and I enjoyed during th09C three weeks of August and September, 1901.

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Chapter 19

POETRY AND THEATER

of seeing the world-by travel and lolJ other adventures intellectual and emotional; and of trying, without very gratifying success, to earn a modest living through journalism, magazine articles, lectures, readings--anything that might offer-I was not forgetful of more ambitious hopes. I wanted to write plays plays of modern life, whether in prose or verse. I had had enough of ''unconscious Shakespearean imitation,'' enough also of subjects resuscitated from the past or adapted to a classic environment. Modern humanity seemed to me as fit for dramatic poetry as the familiar ancient stories which had inspired so much of the world's literature, and which, when first used, were as modern as airplanes are today. Certain episodes, actual or imaginary, of life as I had observed it, appealed to me as inherently poetic, demanding interpretation in verse, usually a rather loosely framed conversational blank verse, a kind of ''heightened speech.'' Thus five brief plays-four in one act and one in two-were slowly written in the intervals between more lucrative engagements or the more immediate inner call for essays and poems. This was between the midnineties and 1900, and in 1903 they were published by the Houghton MifBin Company under the title The Passing Slww--a very risky venture financed by an elderly friend who dated from convent days. The motives of three of these were indirectly related to my own emotional experience, which had ( 175) t7ruR.1No THESE YEAR.S

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e4 Poet's Life been more vivid than appeared during those quietly controlled years of my waning youth. The earliest of them, It Passes By, was suggested partly by an episode of my winter in New York, and partly by a politician's funeral. Its theme was the brevity of emotion, the baffling contradictions in human experience. The thing I like best about this one-act drama is its background-the showing-up of other things that were going on in that Chicago house, and in the crowd outside of it, while the play's two young people in the front living room were thinking only of themselves; the unconscious child wondering at the crush of people gathering in the street; the honeymoon couple coming in blithely to see the show; the sick man upstairs; his wife entering the scene a moment with thoughts only of him; and outside in the sunny street the funeral procession with its drums and dirges--of an important politician who, though not quite spotless, had been powerful and adored. I wished to set the little personal affair, so important to two lives but of no consequence to the rest of the world, against larger interests of life and death, and I tried to link the two together and make the chanted dirge symbolically expressive of both. I can only hope that something of this symbolic essence gets through to the reader with a suggestion of the essential poetry of the everyday events of life. That phrase, ''gets through to the reader,'' may be a confession of weakness. A play's fate should lie with the spectator, rather than the reader, and my five essays in modem poetic drama may be hardly ''theater.'' Yet Minnie Maddern Fiske wrote me, after reading 1t Passes By in typescript in 1897, a letter which made even a stage production seem not impossible. I transcribe it from her spacious chirography: Dear woman, I have just finished reading your play. I shall not try to tell you how glad I would be to see it acted upon ( 176)

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Poetry and Theater the stage provided you were able to select actors worthy of your lines. The spirit of modern art escapes the actor, and the reason thereof is simple enough. The actor is rarely an anist. Tradition lends him a cenain appreciation, and therefore he is able sometimes to interpret Shakespeare with fair grace and understanding; but Ibsen is as yet beyond his ken, and It Passes By would be also. Still we may hope that a good time is coming, and perhaps you and I may be here to sec a little of it. It is well to attain truths by ways of beauty, but better far to attain beauty by ways of truth. As an American woman ( or as any sort of woman) I am proud of you. Sincerely,

M. M. Fiske However, Elizabeth Robins, then a leading new-school Ibsen actress, of London though an American, was doubtful about the play's stage quality. She wrote, on New Year's Day of 1898: I have read your poem-play with a peculiar interest. • . . I do not frankly think the outlines are quite sharp enough to be certain of that quick recognition that should be J>$ible from the audience. Some of the passages I like best I do not feel sure will get across the footlights. It is a curious and for me elusive quality-this winged something in language that you know will fly. It is apan from beauty of form and beauty of thought, and is in its essence of the theatre.

Miss Robins inclosed a note from William Archer, then powerful in the theatrical world. He wrote: I very well remember the play you mention. It seemed to me to show marked ability and originality, though I confess the process of thought and feeling rather baffled me toward the close. The setting seemed to me eminently dramatic-the passing cortege, the approaching and retreating music, the touches of social comedy against the large political background. And the dialogue interested me the lowtoned unemphatic unstilted blank verse. I can't in the least tell how it would come out on the stage, but it seemed to me to show literary ingenuity and a real sense of style. What I did not quite follow was the emotional drama in the minds of the two leading characters. No

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Poet's Life

doubt on a second and more careful reading it would become clearer to me, but I certainly received the impression that it was too subtle and Browningesque for the stage.

The second play according to the calendar, At tlu Go•l, is less than two hundred lines long, and has only two characters. At present I consider it the best of the five, although even less adapted to stage presentation than the ~o longer ones. I remember finishing it one midnight of 1897 in London, and it was this brief deathbed dialogue and It Poss6s By which I read to Madame Blanc-Bentzon a few months later at La Ferte sous Jouarre, when she encouraged me by pronouncing them ''profoundly original'' and protesting, ''Why do you busy yourself writing little things in prose when you can do poetry like that?'' I still believe in At tlu Goal as a complete achievement of what I meant to do-an interpretation of the two forever-opposed life motives, the will to power and the will to truth; or more specifically, power as it is sought and won today through control of vast wealth, and truth as it sternly appears through agonizing disillusionment. I believe that this brief spiritual drama deserves more attention than it has as yet received, and that, if anything I have ever written may live beyond me, it will be remembered. I had observed in my own home town the futile tragedy of industrial leadership, the creative mind drawn into the pursuit of wealth as power, and turning immense imaginative energies toward industrial control. To confront such a mind with its failure, with its betrayal of its own youthful dreams, I brought to the man's deathbed as a nurse a woman whom he had wooed in boyhood and forgotten, now grown cold and hard after the bitter disillusion and struggle of many years. And when he finally accepts relinquishment of all his plans under the sudden dispensation of death, and takes control of the situation as he looks back upon his youth and hers, she is herself warmed to new life by the last flaming of the man's tremendous emotional power. ( 178)

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Poetry and 'Iheater In its way it is a drama of resurrection, of new life springing from stone and ashes. Henry B. Fuller, reading At the Goal in mansucript after my return from Europe, called it, in a letter of 1898, ''one of those modern situations which seems, now that it is actually presented to us, to have been long crying, in its inevitability, for recognition. It is an achievement to have been the first to give place to a conjunction that sometime must have been brought about.'' A ''conjunction,'' I might remark, which Archibald MacLeish has recently ''brought about'' in his play Panic. Another brevity, After All, was written mostly in Rome and Vevey in 1898, and published in the summer number of Poet Lore in 1900. It is in rhymed lyrics a dialogue and choruses of spirits in hell and the theme is the spiritual weakness of two lovers who, in their earthly life, had accepted neither passion nor its defeat, but had taken contrasting paths of compromise, so that even the choral comments of lost souls express contempt for them. One or two of the book reviewers liked this tragic operetta' the best of all. It should have a musical setting, and somewhere out West such a production was given to it. The only comedy of the series, A Modern Minuet, was suggested by my youthful liking for costume parties and masked ba]]s, when I always felt more free in assuming another personality than I ever could be in my own, shy and shut in as I was. This playful dialogue was a rather amateurish essay in eighteenth-century manners and mannerisms at least its modern lovers used that disguise. The Thunderstorm, which opens The Passing Show, was the latest written of the ''Five Modern Plays in Verse,'' and the only one in two acts. It was begun in Phoenix in 1899, and finished in Chicago a year and a half later. Its theme-if genius were not a pretentious word, unpersuasive and incredible, I might say its theme is the frustration of genius, the way environment and circumstances may nullify and silence a man born for ( 179)

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eA Poet's Life aeative art, in this case the art of poetry. I wished to express in its hero, John Mather, a rare personal charm, and in a recent icily critical rereading of the play after many years, I seemed to detect, at least in the last few pages, a certain degree of sua:ess in that difficult aim. I made no effort to get a stage production of T lu T hunJerstorm, and even publication of the five dramatic brevities proved impossible until my old friend insisted on financing the venture and the Houghton Mifflin Company was willing to accept the esthetic responsibility on that basis. The reviewers gave the book perfunctory praise, as a rule, although few or none dug below the surface to the essentials of its meaning or the significance of its experiments in the use of verse for modern dialogue; and the public left most of its edition of five hundred unsold. A writer in T h6 Atlantic infuriated me with an opinion which inspired a reply in the same magazine, later reprinted as the brief essay ''Contemporaneousness'' in my book Poets and T"'1ir A.rt. He wrote: No great dramatic poetry, no great epical poetry, has ever dealt with contemporary conditions. Only the austere processes of time can precipitate the multitude of immediate facts into the priceless residuum of universal truth. The great dramatists have turned to the past for their materials, not of choice, but of necessity. Herc and there in the dark backward and abysm of time, some human figure, some human episode, is seen to have weathered the years, and to have taken on certain mysterious attributes of truth; and upon this foundation the massive structure of heroic poetry is builded.

I have dwelt upon this long-obscured volume not so much in protest against the public and professional neglect of it as to make clear the apathetic attitude prevailing through that period toward poetry, and especially any work in poetry which stepped out of the beaten tracks laid down by Victorian practice and ( 180)

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Poetry and 'Iheater prejudice. The comments of experts had warranted my feeling some confidence in these dramatic experiments, and the stony lack of comprehension or sympathy which greeted their publication brought a discouragement so profound as to prevent further thinking in that direction. Other evidences of indifference toward poetic art brought me constantly against a stone wall. For example, after two years' absence from home in Europe and Arizona, I hoped for a Chicago welcome, and with too sanguine audacity hired a small hall and mailed to my friends and others hundreds of notices that I would give two readings of my poems. When not enough tickets were sold to pay expenses, and I was saluted with rows of empty chairs, there was nothing to do but weep out my woes on the shoulder of a loyal friend and patroness. But I did not yet give up the drama. Since plays in verse were so unmarketable, I tried three or four in prose. One in four acts was suggested by the melodramatic Sturges-Farwell lawsuit, my father's last great battle of the early '90's. Another, The ManEagle, which actually had a ''little-theater'' tryout by Walter Hampden and Iden Payne, presented the tragedy of simultaneous invention, my hero achieving a successful machine flight only to learn that the Wright brothers had reached the goal just ahead of him. The third, probably the strongest of these futile efforts at a serious stage play, dramatized a tragic story I had heard of the Iroquois Theater fire: a Chicago businessman, possessed of a childless wife and (secretly) of a mistress who had given him a son, is devoted to this fine ten-year-old boy. He gives the woman three tickets for a matinee for herself and her mother and son. In the fire only the old woman is saved. However, nothing came of all this. The agents who praised Littl6 Davy could not place it. A theater fire or perhaps any other such calamity-is taboo on the stage; and besides, the three acts are too brief to cover an evening. As I read it today, ( 181)

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cA Poet's Life certain details essential to its structure for example, the old woman's ride in a slow sleigh instead of a swift automobile-cdate it almost in another century. Mrs. Fiske, whose genuine belief that I could write for the stage was a real encouragement, wrote to me suggesting a political motive for a play she might use, and I sketched out a scenario to submit to her. She sent for me to meet her in South Bend, Indiana, where she was playing Becky Sharp on April 9, 1901. After the performance we discussed my scheme for two hours over a midnight supper, and she liked it well enough to say, ''You must not waste your time; when we get a scenario we'll make a contract on that.'' And we discussed also a plan for dramatizing the novel by Auerbach, On the Heights, which she was considering for a New York production. After our agreement upon the main points of the ''politicalmotive'' play, I naturally worked very hard over it. Briefly, the plot showed a politician unexpectedly nominated for a great office at a time when his wife had been on the point of divorcing him for adultery; and the climax involved the difficulties of their reconciliation. My diary (I used to keep a brief record) records that on February 27, 1902, I read to her the first act, and that she declared herself ''perfectly delighted,'' saying, ''I am almost afraid to hear such a good first act for fear the others will not equal it.'' After this interview I wrote: ''She lies on the couch, her great eyes looking through me and picturing the scene. She makes suggestions about the other woman being foreign, and other details. And we talk about b11siness.'' On October 31st, after she had read the complete first draft, we had another conference, in which she praised the first two acts and the comedy scenes, but criticized the last two acts, making a number of suggestions which I endeavored to work out. A few months later, after passing favorably on the revised version, she either sent it, or told me to send it, to her husband and his advisers. Considering that the subject was her sugges( 182)

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Poetry and Theater tion, and that we had consulted together in working out the play, the verdict of these gentlemen was surprising, to say the least : they balked at the political motive as dangerous, and would have none of it. Thus, in spite of Mrs. Fiske's faith in me, her near collaboration on this play, my time was wasted after all; and all our friendly counsels, and my months of enthusiastic labor, came to nothing. · A session later with Richard Mansfield, less specifically suggestive, also led me but only a little way this time along the pathway of false hopes. Still I did not quite throttle my hope of writing for the stage. If serious plays were so hard to place I would try a comedy, and in February, 1906, I began The Ham Isles, based on my Sierra Club experience of hiking in the mountains, and deriving its title from the flowery islands of that name in the Yosemite Valley. On a recent rereading of this full-length four-act play after its long seclusion in an old trunk, I still find it vivid and actable, on a theme so fresh and vital, against its wild Sierran background, as not to have lost its immediacy after nearly thirty years. Ethel Barrymore had greatly admired Little Dwy-indeed had called it ''tremendous''-when she heard me read it at the house of a common friend in Chicago; so when we were both passing the summer of 1906 in beautiful Cornish, I read her the first draft of two or three acts of the new play, and a synopsis of the rest, and asked her if she thought she would •

want It.

''It's enchanting,'' she replied, ''and of course I want it, if I am allowed to have it-the Frohmans would have to be consulted.'' ''What is the best thing to do?'' ''Finish the play,'' she advised. ''They never do anything with scenarios. I will help you all I can.'' William Vaughn Moody, author of The Great Di'Vide, which became a resounding success the next season, also read The ( 183 ) ·

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cA Poet's Life H "P'P'Y lsus that summer and made certain suggestions. And others. Much work went into it, with many amendments and revisions, before I was satisfied to offer it to the Frohmans, to Mrs. Fiske's managers, to Henry Miller, and fi.nally, together with Little Drwy, to Alice Kauser, the theatrical agent, who wrote me December 17, 1909: ''I am certain these plays can be placed, and properly, in time.'' But they were never placed, and these persistent rejections were the last straw-I made no further efforts at the professional stage. Perhaps I ought to have been more pcrserving-one hears of stage succases which have suffered many rejections. But by this time discouragement had bitten deep.

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Chapter

20

THE MIDDLE YEARS

I UACHED my fortieth year and entered, with the hopev-J. fu1 world, the new century, the professional outlook was rather discouraging. Nobody seemed to want very much what I could do; there was no certainty or permanence in any employment, and always, for anything I offered or any job I secured, there was very meager pay. My days were crowded with life's lesser experiences, those minor occupations of the mind and spirit which keep one distracted or half-reconciled on the lower level. But if life was to be sustained at a high pitch through this period of full maturity, of greatest physical and intellectual power, I had need of more profound consolations than these. Underneath the varied texture of my days I was aware of two sources of power. One of these was nature, with its corollary, art. I never tired of the beauty of I .ake Michigan, its play of color and light on the rhythmic motion of the waves. The trimly paved esplanade leading to Lincoln Park along its shore was my favorite and ever-refreshing promenade; and two or three times I saw the full red moon leap over its smooth horizon line. Travels through my own prairie region, and in the farWestern wilderness, and around the world, were, as I have said and shall say again, an unfailing enlargement of mind and soul, ·a lift to infinitudes of beauty. The other hidden source of power, the deepest and highest experience of my life, was the rapture and agony of an emotion f?"\S

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shared in perfect sympathy and complete in the incompleteness of inevitable separation; a feeling which united for years a man and woman who rarely saw each other, yet whom even death, when at last the blow struck, was powerless to separate utterlyso long as the other lives and remembers. A few lyrics and sonnets may have told the story-if not, it can never be told. I had need of such consolations when my father died in February, 1903, on the eve of his seventy-seventh birthday. The grandeur of his face in death carried me back over his unfulfilled career-his youthful struggle and early professional distinction, his high repute as an advocate in many ca~ Joca)Iy famous, his liberal and profoundly humane mind and sympathetic, democratic ways, his humorously affectionate and instructive companionship with his children and grandchildren; and gradually the fading away of his practice and loss of whatever it had earned, until there was nothing left for him but his family and two or three old friends. It still gives me a pang to remember the cheerfulness with which he lived out his last years, enjoying his four little grandchildren more than anything else in the graying texture of his life. When one of these little ones, my brother's beautiful fouryear-old son, dropped his toys and left us a year later, his death brought a sorrow more poignant still These were dark days. Professionally also I had need of consolations against continual disappointment and the distracting effort to earn a living in various small ways. A little private tutoring, and a few years of senior English classes in a girls' school, convinced me that I was not born to teach. As a lecturer, I had hardly yet learned to talk informally to an audience; at that time I could only read a carefully prepared essay, which is a very different thing; or offer a program of poems classic or modern which few or none apparently cared to hear. Perhap'S my style as a reader, always simple, rhythmical, and observant ( 186)

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The 9diddle rears of the line, was too diametrically opposed to the melodramatic ''elocutionary'' methods which were still debauching the public taste, which indeed are favored even now in the less enlightened women's clubs and in many radio broadcasts. Besides, I always lack: perseverance in such business, the systematic drive and push to work up a profitable clientele for private or public readings. So the few courses I gave added little to my income. They showed, however, a leaning toward contemporary poetry, although the period was not rich. In a talk on British poets given to a small class in February, 1904, my diary credits me with considering ''Yeats, Douglas Hyde, Fiona McLeod, John Davidson, Henley, Laurence Hope, Alice Meynell, and others''; and American poets discussed in the same course were William Vaughn Moody ( chiefly The Firebringer), Edwin Arlington Robinson (Capuun Craig and earlier poems); Josephine Peabody (her dramatic verse), George Santayana (Lucifer), Edwin Markham, John Vance Cheney, Charles Edward Russell, Charles Henry Webb, Richard Hovey, Bliss Carman, and one or two other Canadians. If Riley's name was in this very mixed American group my diary does not mention it; and my friend Eugene Field, dead since 1895, was no longer ''contemporary.'' . One little episode of dramatic success gave me much pleasure. During a short residence at Hull House, I was asked by Eleanore Smith, composer and head of the music school, to write the text-the dialogue and songs-for a children's operetta. So I wrote a fairy-and-mortal comedy, The Troll's Holiday, based remotely on Norwegian myth; and it was given with Miss Smith's beautiful music by the Hull House children and young people in May, 1905. The performance was charming beyond all expectation. The seven-year-old hero, and indeed other children, were worthy of Hollywood, and the play worked out to a happy and exciting climax. This pretty thing was given many times, and repeated with a new cast in later seasons, and one ( 187)

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eA Poet's Life would think it might be used by many schools. But the music publishers said it was too difficult for most children and im~ sible for grown-ups; so it is still unpublished. Looking over the brief records of this first twentieth-century decade, I wonder how I managed to live on such small returns; indeed, even my frugal habits did not yet make me wholly self. supporting. In 1900 my earnings from all sources were $S73; in 1903 they had mounted to $7S0, in 1905 to $1380, and in 1910 to $1636. Of these amounts very little came from magazines for either prose or verse. In 1906, perhaps a typical year, of twenty-five poems and prose articles sent out, three were accepted, two of these by an English magazine, The Fortnightly Rew,u,, which held them and the small check in payment for two years. That year my magazine account netted me five dollars for a quatrain. It am,ised me to try the lyric, ''l Love My Life,'' now in many anthologies and probably my most quoted poem, on almost every reputable magazine; but a rejection slip was usually the only answer, and at last it made its first appearance in Poetry in February, 1914. A review of the lists of poems submitted to magazines, which I find at the end of my small diaries, makes me realize again what a desperate fight for recognition poets had to make, and make mostly in vain, through the score of years before 1912. A correspondence with H am,pton's Magazine may be cited to illustrate this point. The editor commented on the ''distinction of the verse which you have been publishing in other magazines,'' and asked me to submit some to Hampton's, adding, ''We prefer lyric stanzas and verses of a rather informal type.'' But the lyrics I submitted came back promptly, the editor explaining: ''The verses we print are rather of the progressive, uplift type, the kind that Kipling might do if he were writing in this country. Anything more graceful and delicate is unbecoming to the contents of our magazine.'' My grief over being unbecoming to Hampton's was modified ( 188)

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'l'he $diddle Tears by a smile or two, but other magazines were equally inhospitable. This niggardly attitude of publishers and the public toward poetry was emphasized by so many rejections that by 1910 I had well-nigh ceased sending poems to periodicals. And only the ''vanity publishers'' showed any willingness to sponsor a book of poems. One of these appealed to my inexperience in the '90's with a note praising some magazine lyric and asking copy for a volume the kind of deceptive invitation which this publisher is still mailing to unsophisticated young poets. I carefully arranged and sent the manuscript, but when the publisher demanded some hundreds of dollars for his suffrages my eyes were opened, and I withdrew it. Efforts with representative publishers were equally fruitless, the following letter from one of the best-known firms, written in 191 O, being typical of all: We are sorry to have to reply somewhat dubiously to your letter of March 5th. You know, I think, how much we like your work and believe in it. But in the present state of public inattention to anything in verse form, it would, we fear, be out of the question for us to undertake a volume of your poems on any other basis than the commission one. It is with very great reluctance that we are forced to make this reply, but it is a condition, not a theory, that confronts us.

So it was not until 1914, nearly two years after the beginning of Po11try, that The Macmillan Company brought out my book of poems, You and I, which opened with ''The Hotel.'' But this was not quite the whole story during those fifteen or twenty lean years. There were brighter episodes, though hardly enough to confirm my indomitable faith in a literary vocation. Some of my essays-''The Chapd of Nicholas V,'' ''Prato,'' ''Arizona,'' ''To the Snake Dance,'' ''The Bigness of the World,'' ''A Bit of Old France,'' ''Poe and Whistler,'' appeared in important places like Tiu Atltmtic, Th11 Cmtury, Po11t Lor6, The Fortnightly Rffll1f». A local dancer, the late Lou Wall Moore, ( 189)

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eA Poet's Life suggested a subject which appealed to me, a poem to accompany ·her dance sequence of the four seasons; and I wrote my symphonic ode, ''Dance of the Seasons,'' which she and I gave together in January, 1907, at the Art Institute, each season's poem preceding the dance, and which Tiu Fortnightly Re'Vieu, published the next year. And occasionally other poems of some length and importance were accepted-''The Shadow Child,'' "Nancy Hanb''-the latter for the Lincoln centenary number of The Century. One of my trips to New York inspired my prose-poem ''The Hotel,'' which Bliss Perry of The Atumtie accepted ''with particular pleasure'' and printed in March, 1909, after it had been turned down by McClure's, Scribner's, and The North Americlln Re'Vieu,. I had been staying in a modest hotel in 34th Street, and had two hours to spare after sending my baggage to the train; so I strolled over to the Waldorf-Astoria, then the ne plus ultra, to see what was going on in its spacious hal 1s. After a time I sat down at one of the desks in the English room and wrote most of the strophes before train time, rearranging and completing them afterwards. The form was suggested by the subject-details from the grotesque to the spiritual overwhelmed my imagination ( as they did later that of Vicki Baum). I conceived of the enormous and complicated hostelry as an epitome of modern life, each detail demanding separate presentation in a long line of appropriate rhythm staccato, legato, allegro, andante sweeping on toward a kind of slow organ finale at the climax. But free verse was then an adventurous departure in modem poetry-''The Hotel'' was written five or six years before Ezra Pound and the imagists, Carl Sandburg and many other experimenters, began in Poetry their campaign for a loosening of metrical rules; so I was somewhat surprised when Bliss Perry and other critics unhesitatingly classed it as a poem. When the next number of Li/e, and other papers as well, copied it entire, and the brilliant Charles Zeublin read it from an Ethical So( 190)

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The $diddle Years ciety pulpit, I decided that it must have a varied appeal. Was it possible that undercurrents in the art were worlcing for a change in verse technique and in the lcind of trivialities most of the magazine poets were dealing in? A year or two later-in June, 1910-The Atl"nti& published another long poem on another of the prodigious works of modern man-''The Turbine.'' This was dedicated to my brother, builder of record-breaking power plants, whose talk about a dangerously injured generator inspired the poem. I have always been interested in machinery, and in the marvelous and really affectionate dexterity of the born machinist; and this poem tries to show how such a man humanizes his huge creature of steel and makes it the point of departure for his imaginative and spiritual life. When a number of engineering journals reprinted the poem, I felt that I had not strayed far from the professional point of view. In winning acceptance for three long poems on important and unusual modern subjects one of them in the leading English review and two in The Atl"nti&-1 probably had better luck than other poets of the period, even though acceptances came far apart, and the money paid for them was a ridiculous return for the time and work involved. Yet these and a few other acceptances of poems and essays brought me but slight relief through the blankness of twenty years. However, among minor consolations through this disappointing period, there were always episodes of travel. Somehow or other, even during lean years of very frugal living, I managed to get W estem trips with the help of the Sante Fe Railroad and space-work articles about my wanderings; and occasionally I could even squeeze out a week or a summer vacation ''down East.'' Two summer sojourns at beautiful Cornish-one at a modest boarding house and the other by invitation-were especially provocative of pleasure salted by emotions somewhat satirical. The classic-colonial houses were so discreetly designed ( 191 )

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cA Poet's Life and furnished, always with lovely adjacent trees and gardens and a view of Mount Ascutney; and the artists and writers who owned or rented these places took themselves so seriously! The one great man of the colony, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, was already ill throughout my 6.nt season, and during my secondon August 3, 1907-he died, leaving his hilltop home and studio workshop, and the entire village of his neighbors, bereft of their honored chief. Saint-Gaudens was as simple and unpretentious as most men of genius, but Cornish's sc1£-sufficient group of superjournalists, aspiring artists, novelists, playwrigh~ould not afford to be so indifferent to their own importance. I find a diary entry about the ''ironies of the placc''-the ''solemn offishness of the little-great,'' the portentousness of a dramatist who was living on advance royalties of plays which later always failed, the Aubrey Beardsley costumes worn by the esthetic chatelaine of the colony's most beautiful estate, the patronizing pity expressed by almost everybody for a popular novelist among them whose best sellers had won him a fortune. However, the lovely young Ethel Barrymore was welcomed, William Vaughn Moody crashed all gates with ease and brought in for a few days his quietly austere friend Edwin Arlington Robinson, then little known, whom I met for the 6.nt time; even my own credentials, through my friends the Robert Herricks who had a house there in 1906, seemed to be sufficient; and the whole village . turned out for Jane Addams the next summer, when she and the beautiful Mary Rozet Smith visited their friend my hostess. A young poet, Florence Wilkinson, and I became good friends, and one grand night we roamed until dawn over the moonlit hills and meadows. I had some stimulating talks with various members of the colony, and more or less encouragement as poet and playwright from Miss Barrymore, Mr. Moody, and others. On the whole, I felt inclined to crush the temptation to irony, or indulge it, with some inward amusement, at my own expense. For was I not one of these pathetically small human aspirants, ( 192)

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'Ihe tMiddle Tears one of the would-be great? And would I ever do the perfect thing we were all striving for? And in Comish there were a few who, if not great, were finely simple, and of heroic quality under difficult stress. Lucia Fuller, the miniature painter, was one. Ridgely Torrence, a spirit delicate and rare, came for a few days. Robinson, author of Caphlin Craig and other poems, was taking his own way through an obstinately obstructive worId. I had met a few of the world's great, sometimes with a thrill which ratified their repute. In my early girlhood General Grant gave me that emotion, though our encounter was brief and casual. General Sherman was in a merry mood when I met him while a guest of the Merricks in Washington; and General Sheridan, who was scarcely taller than I, was often my solemn dancing partner while he was stationed in Chicago. Grover Cleveland imparted an impression of courage and power when he and his fair young bride were received with a grand party in Chicago. Jane Addams always seemed to me, by right of sheer personality in disregard of all she has done, a great woman; and a brief three months' residence at Hull House and somewhat closer acquaintance never shook that conviction. And her friend Mary Rozet Smith, who never did anything conspicuous, always gave me the lift one feels in contact with a character perfectly and loftily poised. For a time, during brief sojourns in New York, I knew Albert Pinkham Ryder, who was not only a great painter but a great spirit. One morning I called by appointment at his ''studio'' -a mere sunlit south bedroom in a shabby boarding house. There was a bed in the corner, a poor chair or two, a number of canvases face-back against the walls, and one rich guest chair whereon he enthroned me like a queen. The rubbishy place with its litter of masterpieces faded away, as we talked, in the finer light diffused by a man so absorbed in his art, so devoted and selBess, as to rank with the saints of the church or the ( 193)

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cA Poet's Life martyrs of science. I shall never forget the sweetness of his

voice as he surprised me by repeating a paragraph I had published somewhere about his Siegfried; there was something innocent and remote in the tone of it, like the song of a bird. He turned his paintings around and talked about them with complete absorption, telling how he could not-could not-get on canvas the fineness of his subject, the beauty in his mind. None of them was finished as yet, though to us they seemed complete -he would scrape them out and begin again. One picture the subject was Chaucer's Costanza drifting away in her boat-had been ordered two or three years before, and the patron was eager to take it away, but the painter was not yet satisfied. I think Ryder was the most heavenly spirit I have ever known, the most happily detached from all earthly and fleshly ties, the most devoted to the acceptance and working out of his particular revelation of truth and beauty. But he loved also the other arts. I cherish a poem he wrote afterwards and sent to me, with a letter full of a high nobility. A great painter, and a great soul. Certain memorable experiences of beauty shine like stars in my thoughts of these years. Two American women, both revolutionary spirits returning from European triumphs to their native land-indeed, to the city they had started from-first made me aware of the rank of the dance as one of the great arts. I had seen many operatic ballets, a few quite famous -premieru dM1St1USes, but these had convinced me only of a minor art rigidly conventionalized and apparently static. Loie Fuller made me feel that something new was on the way. With her the dance was not pure, so to speak; it was accompanied by a rainbow play of colored lights shifting and changing. But the grace of the dancer twirling her voluminous robes was the most important part of it; her dancing was different, and her bloom of loveliness in rhythmic motion gave living beauty to the kaleido• scop1c sequence. ( 194)

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The $diddle rears And when Isadora Duncan arrived I knew that the revolution was on. She had started it in Chicago during the early '90's, trying out her strange experiment before a few rather shocked ladies in a drawing room; and in spite of their advice to give it all up, she had continued her studies and begun her career. Before going abroad she had returned to Chicago in 1899 for a week of dance recitals which thrilled some of my friends, but which I did not hear of alas till they were over. These were given in what is now the Studebaker Theater, and Isadora's friend and manager, Jean Waldron, read poems another innovation-to accompany some of the dances. A year or two later Isadora went to Europe, as all the world knows, and her dancing in various cities-Paris, St. Petersburg, Berlin, Budapestexcited her audiences to wild enthusiasm, and started dance maestros and students on the quest for new ideas and methods, for a less stilted technique. It was her magic touch which gave a vigorous push to a weary and stiffly formalized art, and to her more than anyone else is due its rank on the modern stage. Her laurels were fresh when she came back to us; the Auditorium filled for her its remotest seat. But I was not prepared for the sheer ecstatic beauty of her Iphigenia in Aulis, done with her group of girls to Gluck's music. The grace and loveliness of every movement, from her little round head to her lightly shifting bare feet; the game of ball and the crouching game of jackstones; all in fluttering gray chiffon draperies; then the bacchanal in red, and finally a waltz to the ''Blue Danube'': it was all such a revelation of great art, of what the dance might be, as I had never dreamed of. When, after the waltz, the audience would not cease applauding, she smiled and said, ''That was an encore, you know-would you like another? When it is over you must go home, for I could dance all night.'' And indeed she seemed as tireless as a lily in the wind. Later I was to see Diaghilev's Russians Pavlova, Mordkin, ( 195)

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eA Poet's Life Adolf Bohn, the incomparable Nijinsky. Pavlova's Dt11J1h of tlu SfDtln will always be for me the exquisite ultimate of the traditional school; and Nijinsky's L'•-p,Js-mitu d'w, FMm4 takes in my memory a place by itself, classic as the Apollo pediment at Olympia, and yet timeless and modern as the rhythm of living waves. I have seen other dancers attempt the SflXIII or the FMm only to desecrate my memories. Such dancing ranked with the most perfect actiPg in the pleasure it gave---still gives me. The drama can outrank its pantomimic beauty only when it offers g1eat poetry, and the poetry must be uttered with every perfection of voice and gesture. Of course, during this period I added many theatrical entries to the long list of plays and actors which had begun in childhood. Once more Bernhardt chanted Phedrt1, the perfect French classic, in her golden voice it was twenty-four years since her first American season, when I had seen her faint away in one of the great scenes of this play. Duse brought to us D'Annunzio's Fr1m&esca da Rimini-beautiful, but not the best medium for her perfect art. Ada Rehan, whose utterance was like a summer fountain, played Rosalind and Lady Teazle. I saw Tiu Gre/JI Dwidt1, William Vaughn Moody's first and only stage play, when it had its tryout in Chicago; and another first, St.utJIJlion Nell, by my young friend Edward Sheldon. And one evening of 1909 I went to a dramatic school performance expecting the usual nondescript program, and was caught up to the heights by a masterpiece as T ht1 Pltryboy of thtl W t1stem World. unrolled its perfect rhythms before me. How could it be that I had never heard of this great Irish poet, this John Millington Synge, already two months in the grave! The opera was sometimes very exciting. A ''fine new tenor,'' Caruso, sang with Sembrich in dear old silly Lucia, Farrar and Scotti in Puccini's new Madams Buttt1rfty, Nordica and Jean de Reszke in Tristan, Burgsteller and Nordica in Chicago's 6.rst long sessions with Parsift.d, later Mary Garden and Muratore ( 196)

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'I'he 9,1iddle rears in the lace-blown delicacy of Pelleas tmd Melisande. Great occasions with crowded houses, all of these. But on the whole I am deficient in appreciation of music. The pleasure I get from music is less close and intimate than from architecture, sculpture, painting. Of course poetry, which holds my first allegiance, combines, in its play of sounds, syllables, and cadences, a rare and subtle music with the emotional appeal of the poet's images and ideas, his feeling and message; and this music reaches me more directly than any play upon instruments. It is strange that few poets have been accomplished musicians; and some of them, Shelley for example, could not tell one tune from another. There were friendly groups of artists in Chicago at this time, and they were less divided by cliques and professional barriers and jealousies than in certain other cities. The Little Room, named from a story by that painter, metalworker, embroiderer, storyteller and all-round artist Madeline Yale Wynne, was an informal association of workers in all the arts. We used to meet on Friday afternoons in Ralph Clark:son's fine two-story studio to talk and drink tea around the samovar, sometimes with a dash of rum to strengthen it, and every visitor to Chicago who was anybody in any of the arts would be brought to the Little Room by some local confrere. On Twelfth Night, and perhaps another date or two each season, we would have a hilarious play or costume party. There was no lack: of wit in the club for concoction of parodies, with such famous word fanciers to call on as Henry B. Fuller, Roswell Field, Hobart C. Chatfield-Taylor, John and George McCutcheon, Edith Wyatt, Fannie Bloomfield Zeisler the pianist, Irving Pond the architect, Lorado Taft the sculptor, and other whose names are less conspicuous. I remember a screamingly funny Bird Centre farce, parodying McCutcheon's series of cartoons, which, if it had been given on Montmartre instead of in Chicago, would have resounded around the world in reports by all the Paris correspondents. ( 197)

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ell Poet's Life At rare intervals, Fuller was induced to mount a platform in Anna Mor~'s studio and give an informal talk on some modern writer, his wit playing like colored lights around the profound intdligence of his criticism. He would wastefully throw away his notes as he went on, instead of preserving them as the basis for an illuminating book of critical essays. Meantime the author of Penneri Vani that minor classic-wa& writing realistic novels of Chicago life The Cliff-dwellers, With the Procession, or a book of satirical short stories, Under the Skylights (wherein The DO'Wnfa/,l of Almer Joyce, which points an accusing finger at Hamlin Garland, is a masterpiece in that kind); or The Puppet Booth-Twel'Ve Plays, most of them wittily parodying such still obscure playwrights of the '90's as Maeterlinck, Ibsen, Bernard Shaw. For Fuller had to try each new literary mode, never content to live out or write out the whole truth about himself. The social tact and genius for hospitality of my sister Lucy was a solvent of all troubles in these Little Room affairs. But an acquaintance with William J. Calhoun, a brilliant lawyer who had come to Chicago from Decatur, diverted her interests from the arts to law. Their marriage in December, 1904, gave her wider fields to conquer; she shared diplomatic honors with her husband when ''T.R.'' asked him to smooth out a governmental tangle in Venezuela, and later when President Taft sent him to the Legation in Peking. It was a fortunate and most happy union which gave to an able diplomat his match in diplomatic delicacies, and to my sister the complete development of her powers. Their marriage interrupted somewhat our sisterly intimacy, for they were off and away much of the time, and she was completely absorbed in her new problems. There were various enterprises to attest the city's progressive spirit in the arts. I pass over the Art lnstitute's persistently effective struggle after its capture of a downtown site: its accumulation of a fine permanent collection, its annual exhibitions ( 198)

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Boisso11nas & Caponirr \VILLIAM

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'Ihe /Middle Tears with large prizes, and its development of an art school ranking as the largest, and on the whole one of the best, in the country. The luring of Theodore Thomas from his Eastern home to found the Chicago Orchestra might also be mentioned. And our architects, as I have shown, had long since led the modem movement and built the first skyscrapers. The drama is more in our province; Chicago's efforts in that art deserve a special chapter. In that category belongs Anna Morgan1s dramatic school-the first players in America to give, back in the 190's, by special permission, early plays by Bernard Shaw and some of Richard Hovey's beautiful translations of Maeterlinck, which Stone & Kimball had published in 1894. And another group of students, under the ambitious Donald Robertson, an Anglo-American actor who was evolving out of the old school into the new, included in its repertory a few poetic plays. I remember especially a beautiful presentation of scenes from Bjornson1s Sigurd Slembe, with Robertson as Sigurd and a gifted Chicago girl, Florence Bradley, as Audhild. The Hull House Players also were a progressive influence. They gathered youthful talent from all the racial groups around the famous settlement, and under the skillful direction of Laura Dainty Pelham, a retired actress, they gave spirited performances of plays old and new, some of the latter offering what every playwright nee.ds an experimental stage to try out his work. Besides these student groups, the drama had powerful friends who drew upon professional actors. Arthur Aldis, H. C. Chatfield-Taylor, and other generous citizens made an effort to lift the art out of the commercial-theater rut by subsidizing brief seasons of plays by Echegaray, Ibsen, Pinero, Sudermann, and other foreigners, and a few Americans. The last of these seasons, under Iden Payne as director, produced, among other things, my own somewhat symbolic play, The MMJ-Eagle, with Walter ( 199)

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Poet's Life

Hampden as the bafBed inventor-hero, but it failed to 'make much of a dent in theatrical records. A few yean later Theodore Hinckley told the story of these efforts in his quarterly, The Dr11m11, characterizing them as ''a series of unrelated dramatic unheaval5> each followed by its own particular collapse.'' However, the collapse was chiefly financial, and the undiscouraged backers proceeded to guarantee Miss Horniman's company from Manchester, The Irish Players from Dublin, and that exquisite adaptation from the Orient, The YellO'llJ J11tlee1. A less costly local effort for dramatic art was maintained a little later for six or eight summer seasons by Mary Aldis, the wife of Arthur, above mentioned. While her husband was in Europe one springtime, she tore out partitions in an old frame cottage on their I ,ake Forest place, and converted it into a practicable little playhouse, with a stage, tiny dressing rooms, and scats for about one hundred persons. This done, she proceeded to make actors out of some of her neighbors in the fashionable suburb, in some cases with extraordinary suc:cess, holding them to a rigid schedule of rehearsals, and soothing agitated amateur nerves by posting a motto in the green room, ''Remember, this is for fun.'' They had a great deal of fun, and the I.ake Forest Playhouse developed into a progressive ''little theater'' before that term became generic. ''We never had a director,'' says Mrs. Aldis; ''we worked out the action entirely by a process of mutual cri~cism.'' The previous highly subsidized dramatic experiments had used foreign plays almost entirely, but Mrs. Aldis began bravely with a fantasy in verse by her neighbor, the poet Frances Shaw. ''It was lovely but obscure; the three Dudley sisters gave an eerie mystical presentation, draping the stage with layer upon layer of black net, a few inches apart, through which the ghostly figures approached as from another world. The audience was deeply impressed-we had started something.'' ( 200)

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'Ihe e!Middle rears Many of the one-act plays in their monthly bills were written or translated or adapted by Mrs. Aldis or some other member of the company, and the scenery was entirely homemade, and shifted by the actors. Thus the little playhouse was a truly experimental theater, where playwrights, scenic artists, etc., could try out their work and test its effect on an audience. They captured plays wherever they could find them; hearing of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, they promptly imported all its plays and produced many of them, delighting in I .ady Gregory's comedies, and giving, as·I well remember, impressive performances of RiJMs to the Sea, CotlJ.een ni H oulihon, and other masterpieces of the school. And I recall as indescribably lovely a moonlight performance of Ernest Dowson's Pierrot of tlu Minut8 on an improvised clasmc terrace under the Aldis trees, where the two Linn sisters floated through their delicate roles, uttering the lines with a rhythmic beauty rare on any stage. Indeed, the list of plays given by Mrs. Aldis and her ardent amateurs-their own, or by other student playwrights here and there ( Harvard's ''47 Workshop,'' for example), or taken from English, French, Italian, Russian, or other sources-is extremely varied and interesting. Also, the players developed astonishing competence; when the Toy Theater invited them to Boston for a few performances, the Transcript's dramatic critic wrote: ''They act with an freedom and variety rare among amateurs; with simplicity, directness and sincerity not too frequent among any players. . . • As with the acting, so with the plays. The regular theatre is beset by precedent, tradition, and imitation. It is handicapped by haunting compunctions and imitations.'' And he showed in detail how a company of clever amateurs may be more free. These dramatic activities gave the city front rank in that art, and brought about the establishment in 1912 of the Chicago Little Theater, which, under Maurice Browne, led the long pro-

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eA Poet's Life cession of American ''little theaters'' whose work has influenced and vitalized the professional stage. Every art but poetry seemed to be more or less effectively encouraged and rewarded. Why were poets the butt of the para• graphers and caricaturists?-this question was troubling me more and more during two decades of fatuous indifference to a vital issue on the part of the publishers and public, and of declining values in the art itself a steadily increasing silence which seemed a natural response from men and women whose mufBed voices deserved utterance and an audience. Before the turn of the century our family-Monroes and Roots moved into the house in Astor Street where John Root had died, for me an agreeable change. We used to have Sundayevening suppers in faraway imitation of the Stedman parties of long ago, with clever people coming in informally and bringing visiting friends. The three Root children-Margaret, John, and Polly-made the household lively as they grew up under the temperate control of their widowed mother. When my sister Lucy and my niece Margaret Root married just before and after New Year's of 1905, my brother and his wife, Will and Anna Monroe, joined us in the family residence until we scattered in 1910. I had many casual friends, more than I can describe or even mention, and a few more intimate and precious-friends in my own trade of literature and others-through years which would have been too difficult without that solace. A few of the Little Room writers--Harry Fuller, Edith Wyatt, Margaret Potter, and one or two others used to meet and try out our stories and poems. There were beauty and affection in friendship and family companionship, beauty and delight in my brother's new son and my niece's little children. And T.ake Michigan's play of changing moods and colors was just around the comer. But I could discern little advance out of the routine of small day-by~ay occupations and earnings toward the larger exercise ( 202)

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'Ihe /Middle rears and recognition of powers within me which seemed to be going to waste. I did not utterly despair-there was consolation in mere living. But how could I reach out toward higher fu)6,))ment, more courageous adventure?-this was my spirit's query during a long period of compromise and self-critical discouragement.

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Chapter

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ART AND ARCHITECTURE IN AMERICA

rl/Jowma, if my prog1 css as poet and essayist seemed to go 'O L at a snail's pace and bring me starveling returns, there was some consolation, a little money, and many amusingly varied contacts with different kinds of people, in journalism. In 190 I William Randolph Hearst started his first Chicago newspaper, the Ammctm, and engaged me, with other local authors, to furnish brief special articles. Following the city editor's suggestions or my own, I interviewed this or that celebrity; attended a Dowie revival and meeting; wrote a violent slam for the new County Building with its useless and perfunctory superimposed columns; discussed some new play or book or picture; presented phases of the divorce problem; spent a dramatic hour at the Juvenile Court; listened in at a meeting of theosophists; sympathized with Booth-Tucker's denunciation of slum dwellings; sat through graduation exercises at the Art Institute, with the Reverend Henry Van Dyke giving a smug address on ''The Moral Law in Art''; had an amusing talk with the marriage-license clerk; attended a librarians' convention in Waukesha and met Herbert Putnam and others of the guild; and welcomed home one Charles Cecil Fitzmaurice, a nice boy who had just excited the world by encircling it for Mr. Hearst in sixty days! Also the Evening Post used for a while specials on topics literary or artistic-George Meredith, French cathedrals, colonialism in American art, etc. If these ''little things in ( 204)

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cA.rt and cA.rchitecture

mcA.merica

prose'' were meagerly paid, barely enough to keep me going, there was yet much education in them, and more or less battering experience in different phases of life. But my journalistic engagements were always fitful and elusive. The Hearst papers-the Chicago Ameri&MI and later the E-¥11miMr-B.irted with me evasively from 1901 to 1906, but we never achieved a marriage; as in more human love affairs, these newspaper suitors were not my chief interest, so my grief was merely mercenary when we separated. For a time, during H. H. Kohlsaat's ownership of the Herald, I wrote special editorials for his paper. But with him a charming adventurer in journalism-a newspaper was a romance rather than a business, and like other romances, it was blasted by cold fact. So I was surprised when James Keeley, managing editor of the more stable Tributu, asked me in 1909 to resume the position of art critic from which I had been so summarily dismissed about fifteen years before. It was still probably the most precarious situation in the paper's entire list a highbrow specialty, unsupported by advertising, and appealing to a small proportion of readers. But it was the one department which suited me best, and during the five years I held it-with one eight months' interruption to go around the world-I enjoyed the work and attained some reputation in it. It was space work-Sunday reviews and a few week-day notices, with no regular salary and little to do in summer; but it did not chain me 6.rmly to a desk and a regular routine, it brought me interesting friendships and other contacts, and left me free time enough for travel and even for the founding of a magazine. As for the money, I was born frugalminded and my very narrow income was made a little more commodious by this new job. As I look over the yellowed and fragile clippings of those art reviews, I realize that those five years were a period of revolutionary change in the arts of painting and sculpture, with the allegiance of connoisseurs and collectors ranging from the Bar( 205) ,

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eA Poet's Life bizon group and the romantic impressionists, to the rampant but still somewhat remote and unsuspected cubists. One of my earliest articles written in August, 1909, after my last mountain camping trip with the Sierra Clulr-told of a talk with Keith in San Francisco, surely a faithful and excellent Barbizonian if ever there was one. And four years later the grand climax of my service as an art critic was the famous international show at the Armory in New York. That first summer-1909-there was a Saint-Gaudens exhibition at the Art Institute, and my review was a rhapsody as I reca Iled his death in Cornish two years before: ''To add glory to fame, to divine and express and perpetuate the heroic spirit of an age-this is the supreme service of art•••• Saint-Gaudens achieves for his age this service he makes its heroism fecund, productive; he gives our aspiration to the future.'' In October of that year I urged my beloved city to ful611 the ''plan for the future of Chicago designed by D. H. Burnham & Co. for the Commercial Club''-the plan now partly carried out in process of further development. And I uttered a plea and plaint for metropolitan beauty in this great city of the future: Her fate cries out--she cannot grub along with eyes to the ground, weighing dust and counting pennies. She must look forward, with quick imagination and prophetic vision; she must do big things for big results, make large expenditures to gain an enormous increase in values and prestige. We should live in the future, as our fathers did when they saw a great city in the little mudhole of a village at the end of the lake. They planned a metropolis strategically; we should plan it commercially and anistically.

In April, 1911, a few months after my return from the Orient, I was interviewing the Spanish painter, Joaquin Sorolla, and he was saying: ''You are in the full tide of the Renaissance. This is your moment, you Americans, in the an of the world. It is not coming-it is come. ( 206)

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cArt and drchitecture in cAmerica We older nations, we have had our little hour; each one of us, at the moment of greatest wealth and power, held a brief scs.,ion with the spirit and felt the brush of her wings. Now it is your turn and you can't escape. Nothing can prevent it. ''Art always accompanies wealth, industrial and political supremacy. No, I did not say follows-I said accompanies.''

He reviewed the great periods, of Italy, Spain, Holland, France, England. ''Today it is your tum-there is no escape!'' Where did he find evidence of this? In every exhibition, even the little ones I would almost say especially the little ones. Do you know how good that little show of the Art Students' League is how many exquisite things, especially landscapes, are to be found there? So many people, obscure little men and women, doing beautiful things-with a new note in them, original and expressive, the American note in modern art.

· The next autumn George Bellows was given his first special exhibition in Chicago, and I was introducing him as ''a man who had something to say and a vigorous way of saying it.'' Through all the heterogeneous confusion of New York's skyscrapers, low buildings, crowds, traffic, scaffoldings, sunlight and shadow, magnificence and squalor, he seems to have a vision of unity, harmony, and power, and to get that vision joyously on canvas with a certain rash fervor. If he is a poet, his muse is epic rather than lyric. We have many artists who paint more finely, more subtly, but it would be difficult to find one who strikes a big instrument so boldly and starts out so bravely with a mighty theme, nothing less than the story which our inventors, engineers, builders, scientists have been shouting in our ears for nearly a century-the vastness of the modern world.

When John Lavery, the English painter, came to Chicago with his beautiful wife, who had been born here as Hazel Martyn, I interviewed him in their high hotel room which over( 207)

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d Poet's Life looked Michigan Avenue and the ''sea-souled'' lake beyond. To him, as to me, it was all ''beautiful and very paintable,'' and I rejoiced in his enthusiasm: ''That great lake out there with its changing colon, the tall buildings, crowded streets, the life, the effect of bignes., I wish I could stay and try my hand at it. ''These great Olympian buildings strike me as having beauty of a very high order--there had been nothing like it on earth since Egypt built the pyramids.'' He gazed down at the criss cr09S of lights reflected in the wet surface of Michigan Avenue, and continued: ''There is only one other street in the world which seems to me as impressive as this, and that is Prince's Street in Edinburgh. That is beauty of the old time and this is beauty of the new, but the parallel • • • IS mterestmg. ''Both streets have buildings at only one side, low and old in one case, high and new in the other. Both have an open expanse at the other side, in one case the lake, in the other the valley; broken in each case by just one building, your Art Institute, the Edinburgh University. Edinburgh castle rises as a majestic monument .of the old time, whereas these high buildings stand quite as impressively for the new.''

''Look at that-wouldn't that make a picture!'' he exclaimed, looking down as the automobiles whizzed through tho11sands of gleaming lights. ''And I have been tempted in that way at every turn. I should like to paint some pictures here, and then show London the beauty of Chicago.'' The annual exhibitions which the Architectural Club held at the Institute always tended to emphasize in my mind the essential originality and imposing beauty of some of our ''Olympian buildings.'' Ever since John Root's marriage to my sister in the early 'So's, I had watched with keenest interest the gradual development of the skyscraper, with its riveted steel skeleton supporting the many stories. Now, in reviewing local manifestations of art, I often turned to the most conspicuous show of allthe new buildings along our streets. ''What are we doing in ( 208)

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drt and drchitecture in dmerica architecture?'' I asked, apropos of an exhibition of the Architectural Club in April, 1912: Architecture and poetry are the basic, the fundamental arts. Sculpture and painting are children of the one, music and drama of the other. All the special pleaders in the world, all the lighter fashions of the age, cannot lessen the importance of these two in the expression of human needs and aspirations. Architecture in this country has encountered at least one new need and expressed it in colossal terms. This need is the insistent and enormous demand of commerce. As modern commerce dwarfs any earlier conception of the possibilities of trade, so our skyscrapers make puny and petty the commercial buildings which sufficed for earlier needs. And as our business in the modern sense is a development of the last half century, so our architects have been obliged to move with incredible speed that they might present the eager world with a forced growth, a plant overpowering and gigantic, an enormous and splendid and spectacular hybrid. There have been advantages and disadvantages in the swiftness and inevitability of the process, the advantages being much the more important. Architecture has been forced to express our own age, has felt the push of the crowd behind it, while the other arts, lacking more or less this essential stimulus, have expressed the age only incidentally and as it were by accident. The poets especially, thrown back upon themselves by the dead wall of public apathy, have wandered mostly in by-paths or taken refuge in the past, since the most heroic muse can offer only fitful gleams of inspiration to a man whom that dead wall shadows. So on the whole the architect's importunate clients have been an immense help to his art. The stimulus has been excessive, perhaps, and far from delicate or sensitive, but it has forced the artistic temperament out into the vast new world of invention, of science, of worldwide trade and international neighborliness, of immeasurable and incalculable forces. The American architect, in short, has had a bigger job on his hands than any other artist of our time. And, on the whole, he has met his opportunity, has done a bigger job than any other artist.

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eA Poet's Life The death of Daniel H. Burnham in June emphuized the big job he had been doing. I drew a parallel between ''Cecil Rhodes, who gave his country a continent, and this American whose devotion to city planning was opening up to his fcllow Afll . .-._

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