Chapter VII: Part II: Interpretations (4)

The author does not dwell upon the locus and environment of his early days; he spares us the minutiæ of his drab and sordid surroundings, but we get a picture of them that is more informative than if it were painted in vivid colours. Years ago I saw it every day, that German-American home in the middle East Side, I ministered unto those who constituted it, and I gained an esteem and an affection for its members that required a world-calamity to alter. Now that it is presented to me anew through verbal medium my recollections are refreshed, my affections renewed and I praise the dexterity of the artist’s pen and the accuracy of his memory.

The picture he gives of New York is the thing that will give the book whatever permanency it will have. When Mouquin’s and the Hotel Algonquin shall be replaced with a Rotonde and a Café Michaud; when there will be a Boulevard Saint-Michel instead of a Greenwich Village; a rue la Boëtie instead of a 57th Street; when pagan practice shall have succeeded puritanic principle--then hedonists and students of manners and customs who would know what New York was like while big with the twentieth century, may turn to _Troubadour_ for enlightenment. When poets, now considered radicals or rhythmicals, shall have taken on conventionality, or professorships, and would tell their fellows or their students of the birth and early days of their art and show them the incubators in which the punies were put for development, they will take them for a walk in 14th Street and they will read to them from _Troubadour_. The latter will be more agreeable than the former for Kreymborg’s prose has much of the elusive loveliness of his poetry; for like his friend Sherwood Anderson, he knows how to string words together so that they make music for the reader; and Fourteenth Street is down at the heels, frayed at the cuffs and woozy in the head.

The author bears unnecessarily hard on the _forte_ pedal when he renders his hardship selections. It does not add anything to our picture of New York’s Bohemia to be told about the “awful stench one could never quite grow accustomed to” in Kiel’s Bakery, and one reader at least has not been able to guess the riddle of the Fourteenth Street studio. The occupant had been working at Æolian Hall and had progressed to orchestrelle leader, apparently content with his prospects. Then Eve came in ostensibly to buy some rolls for her pianola. They called her Tommy. She was twenty-seven or eight and “scarcely what worldly folks would have designated a sophisticated person but with one or two indisputable claims in the direction of Plymouth and the Mayflower.” “Krimmie” learned about women from her. I suspect it was to facilitate deeper knowledge rather than to gestate his art that he resigned his sinecure for the sake of a thing so quixotic as a studio, “not even a studio, but a room, less than a room--up the stairs of a dismal rickety building on West 14th Street.”

Be that as it may, it was from that day that he began to get that intimate knowledge of the habits of the wolf called want, which his autobiography shows us that he possesses, and of the world frequented by the wolf’s readiest prey. He reduced the beast to fictitious pacification by throwing him his winnings at chess and as he had become an expert player they were often considerable, and his germinating worldly love he embodied in a story called _Erna Vitek_, which brought him a mild _succès de scandale_. As strange a trio as could be assembled in New York at the time--George Francis Train having left Madison Square for the beyond--came forward to defend him. They were Frank Harris, Rev. Percy Grant and Dr. Frank Crane. Mr. Kreymborg observes parenthetically that he has not met the author of _My Life and Loves_ to this day. It is gratifying to know that amidst all the blows that he received in his quarter century of struggle, there was occasionally a caress!

Krimmie did not exactly tire of Tommy, nor did Tommy exactly tire of Krimmie. But the latter went West and the former East and the experience gave the lie to the poet who sang about the effect of absence on the heart. In East Lyme or thereabouts, Christine threw a dazzling light across Krimmie’s path. It flabbergasted him for a moment so that he could not distinguish her from others, but as soon as his eyes became adjusted to the illumination he knew the die was cast, the seal was set. He hastily sought a scrap of paper and embodied his emotion in six words, each a monosyllable:

Till you came,
I was I.

Thus did he disregard his oft-repeated admonition that simplicity should occur at the end of a long line of tradition. It reminds me of a picture that _Life_ published many years ago: a small boy gazing intently at a child’s garment (the name of which it is improper to mention in polite American society) hanging on the line of a tenement backyard and uttering ecstatically: “They’re hern.”

And so they were married. Krimmie did not distinguish then between infatuation and love, and Christine had no idea how rough the road would be from romance to reality, especially the part through Grantwood, N. J. So after a year of many detours they decided to try it alone--for a time at least. A young man whose adolescence was pitted with piety had returned from Rome whither he had gone to have love’s scars removed. He was keen to take Christine into his _matriomonale_ Ford in which he had invited her to ride before the priesthood beckoned to him. Day by day, in every way, Krimmie’s affectivity resembled more and more that of the late Mr. Barkis. It is not clearly apparent why Mr. Kreymborg gave up Christine with such readiness. I suspect she had an infantile personality, much like Dora who stole little Emily’s lover away. Adult infantilism and matrimony make an unpalatable emulsion.

One of the many fragments of knowledge that years bring is that man consoles himself readily, often quickly. Krimmie got a job in a Wall Street office as literary secretary to a Hungarian fourflusher, “high in the counsels of the Democratic Party,” to compose superfine notes, commensurable with the calling of the Boss. He had not been there long when he met Dorothy. If _Troubadour_ did not give us anything besides the picture of a person who looked like one of Goya’s ladies, and who had the gentleness of Ruth with the constancy of Penelope, it would still be a precious document. When I think of the many perfect wives of artists that I have known: Mark Twain’s Livy, James Joyce’s Lady; Paderewski’s alter ego, I shall always have a fancy that I have known Dorothy in the quick. One of the first things she did for him after orienting him on life’s pathway was to save for the world his “most quasi-popular composition,” _Lima Beans_. Then she married him and his days began to lengthen as his heart began to strengthen. They went West, he to intone his poems, and climb Parnassus on the lake; she to pull the strings of his marionettes and to encourage him when his feet slipped on the mountain.

Krimmie’s rejuvenation was more complete than anything Steinach has accomplished. He wrote plays, walked securely amongst the Provincetown Thespians, fraternised intimately with literary _arrivistes_ and puppet-people, encouraged youngsters who were yearning for self-expression and struggling against starvation, earned the good will of the _Dial_, “now the leading æsthetic periodical of the soil,” and gained the confidence of the young man who was to facilitate him in a long dreamed-of gesture: the founding of an international Magazine of the Arts which would stress the efforts of young Americans. So Krimmie and Dorothy went to Italy and brought forth _Broom_. Incidentally, they met Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Jean Cocteau, Tristan Tzara, the daddy of _Dada_, Gertrude Stein, the mammie of gibberish, and Gordon Craig, the master of marionettes, and others too numerous to mention. Krimmie liked them and they all liked Krimmie, or if they did not, one would never suspect it from Mr. Kreymborg’s book; I fancy they did for obviously he has a genius for friendship. If they did not like Dorothy, good taste has deserted the _habitués_ of the Quarter.

Among the many engaging episodes of their European trip none is more delightful than the description of their encounter with the world’s most famous poetic clown, Signor F. P. Marinetti, unless it be the meeting with the pompous Pound. Marinetti directing his fellow-players, totally oblivious of the vegetables that were hurled at him, insensitive of their obvious decay, deaf to the insults and imprecations that came from every quarter of the theatre, was a man risking his life for a reputation. Mr. Kreymborg knew the habits of the wolf, but he knew little of bears or their garden and he had never visited the Parliament of Italy when the House was in session. Later, when he was informed that the civil warfare which he had witnessed had been arranged by Marinetti in the subtle behalf of publicity--that he always hired a number of desperados to open the attack on the stage, and to arouse the audience to an emulation of activity, he realised that he had had a lesson in finesse. Such lessons are given nowhere in the world better than in Italy.

Krimmie came home a better man. No change was to be discerned in Dorothy on her return. She was the same as when she went: a bit of perfection. Then he published his latest book of poems _Less Lonely_, which caused some of his friends to fear that it indicated the consecration of approaching middle age. The verses observe too many maxims too carefully; they are too regularly iambic; their plethora of monosyllables cause them to lose the nuance of accent, etc. Others thought they showed the effect of Italian atmosphere so favourable to every form of classicism. He “made up” with Louis Untermeyer; and wrote the story of his own life. For one of these accomplishments, we can never cease to be grateful. It has contributed to our pleasure, our instruction and our welfare. Any one who will read _Troubadour_ will love his fellow man more easily, and more intensely.

_Troubadour_ is an album filled with pictures big and little of people we have known or would like to have known. Some of them are vignettes. Some are life-size portraits, all of them testify to the facile and the tender heart. There are few who have figured in the artistic life of this country in the past twenty years who do not come in for mention or characterisation. They all had to do in some way with the genesis, birth and development of his urge for expression,--an urge which is upon him imperiously and which no one, so far as may be judged from the text, has tried to impede. Indeed one of the striking features of the book is that it reveals no skunner against puritanism, no grouch against democracy, no belief in the existence of a cabal to strangle artistry, no ideas of persecution on the part of the author. The world has treated him fairly enough. If ever there was a writer who had no preparation for writing it was Alfred Kreymborg. What he learned he taught himself. If he had learned the piano or the violin without instruction or direction he would have had no fewer long days or lean nights than he has had.

It is a pity that Alfred Kreymborg could not have gone to Columbia University instead of Æolian Hall. Had he been judiciously advised and properly guided he might have been thrown into currents that would have carried him more quickly to success, as he would have developed his artistic consciousness more smoothly and harmoniously and would the more easily have been able to guess the poet’s secret: to be happy in his heightened power to see and feel.

The era of self-made men is passing; many regret it and amongst them are those who get pleasure from struggle, and happiness from contemplating it. As Mr. Kreymborg says, recalling the days when he first went to Fourteenth Street to the “studio:” “And there was absolutely no joy like it--nothing like it.” Writers and artists have no “corner” on that joy.

* * * * *

Writing in 1833, six years after William Blake, the poet-artist, had gone to immortality, Edward FitzGerald said, “To me there is a particular interest in this man’s writing and drawing, in the strangeness of the constitution of his mind.” That is the interest of William Blake to-day when his poetry fails to thrill or to inspire, and when his highest claim to be considered an artist rests on a series of drawings and engravings called _Illustrations to the Book of Job_.

William Blake had visual hallucinations. At least, he had the capacity to see the creations of his imagination with the same vividness as if they had been before his eyes, and he maintained that they were before his eyes. He contended that things whose reality cannot be proved, such as angels, people deceased for ages, and buildings demolished for centuries, presented themselves in his visual field. He maintained it with sincerity and determination and he drew what he said he saw. But the fact that a man has hallucinations is not sufficient to label him “insane.” Conduct that is prejudicial to others’ happiness, welfare, and comfort is an essential condition, and none of William Blake’s biographers or commentators has described such conduct. To many psychiatrists like myself, Mr. Bruce’s effort to show that William Blake was sane will undoubtedly seem an unnecessary labor, but a gratifying one, for sympathetic hero handling is a kindly thing to observe.

We never cease to marvel that persons who are “mad” can create or copy so masterfully that the admiration of contemporaries is compelled and the gratitude of posterity earned. This, despite the long list of accomplishments in the world of art and letters by men who have been potentially or actually mad.

Mr. Bruce opens one of his chapters with the sentence: “Blake, in other words, was neurotic.” Now, the word “neurotic” must have some very specific meaning for our young author, otherwise he would not declare himself in this dramatic way. If William Blake was neurotic, there is no indication of it in Mr. Bruce’s book. William Blake was psychotic. He had what is called for purposes of facile designation a manic-depressive temperament. The manic-depressive temperament can be described with the same specificity as pneumonia; practically the only thing about it that we do not know is its cause, but it is only very recently that we have known the cause of pneumonia. I do not consider that this is the proper place for the disquisition on the individual psychic functions, particularly on the one known as affectivity, which would be necessary were I to make a readily comprehensible description of the manic-depressive psychosis, whether it reveals itself in shadowy outlines or majestic proportions. Mr. Bruce writes, “To say confidently that Blake suffered from mythomania, or from automatism, or from occasional hyperæsthesia, or from manic-depressive tendencies, or that he did not tend toward a definite schizophrenia is to add polysyllables rather than illumination to the discussion of his state.” This is an attitude of preciosity on the part of Mr. Bruce that is very offensive to me. If he does not know what “schizophrenia” means, then he should consult a dictionary and not display his infirmities to the world. If he knows a better word, that is a more comprehensive or a more descriptive word for personality cleavage, I suggest that he submit it. What further illumination concerning the mental processes of an individual can be desired than is conveyed in the statement that he is a manic-depressive personality, or that he displayed the manifestations of the mental disorder known as the manic-depressive psychosis?

A few years ago, in a book entitled _Idling in Italy_, I said anent Giovanni Papini (who in 1920 was quite unknown to the American public) that no one unfamiliar with the disorder of the mind called manic-depressive psychosis could fully understand him.

There is no one more sane and businesslike than the
former Futurist, yet the reactions of his supersensitive
nature have great similarity with this mental disorder,
present, in embryo, in many people. In every display
of the manic-depressive temperament, there is a period
of emotional, physical and intellectual activity that
surmounts every obstacle, brushes aside every barrier,
leaps over every hurdle. During its dominancy, the victim
respects neither law nor convention; the goal is his only
object. He does not always know where he is going and
he is not concerned with it; he is concerned only with
going. When the spectator sees the road over which he has
travelled on his winged horse he finds it littered with
the débris that Pegasus has trampled upon and crushed.

This period of hyperactivity is invariably followed
by a time of depression, of inadequacy, of emotional
barrenness, of intellectual sterility, of physical
impotency, of spiritual frigidity. The sun from which
the body and the soul have had their warmth and their
glow falls below the horizon of the unfortunate’s
existence and he senses the terrors of the dark and
the rigidity of beginning congelation. Then, when hope
and warmth have all but gone and only life, mere life
without colour or emotion remains, and the necessity
of living forever in a world perpetually enshrouded in
darkness with no differentiation in the débris remaining
after the tornado, then the sun gradually peeps up,
illuminates, warms, revives, fructifies the earth, and
the sufferer becomes normal--normal save in the moments
or hours of fear when he contemplates having again to
brave the hurricane or to breast the deluge. But once
the wind begins to blow with a velocity that bespeaks the
re-advent of the tornado, he throws off inhibition and
goes out in the open, holds up the torch that shall light
the whole world, and with his megaphone from the top of
Helicon shouts: “This way to the revolution.”

I contend that any one who will read even the summaries of the chapters of Mr. Bruce’s book will need no further evidence to be convinced that William Blake, who had “everywhere the poet’s firm persuasion that things were so, who stuck to a choice that was contemned, to a taste that was laughed at”; who was as immune to ridicule as a tortoise is to admonition; who spoke his mind on all occasions even when it clashed with authority; who, like the master potter, knew, knew, knew; who swung backward and forward from high exaltation to pits of melancholy; who listened to messengers from heaven daily and nightly and composed under their dictation a poem which he considered the grandest that this world contained, even though he was never able to find one purchaser; who received Richard Cœur-de-Lion at a quarter past twelve, midnight, and painted his portrait though he had been dead several centuries; who displayed a persecutory state of mind when he was depressed, and a self-sufficiency that brooked no curbing when he was exalted; who took no thought for the morrow and was as unable to take care of himself as a two-year-old child, was of manic-depressive temperament. That he escaped being sent to Bethlehem Hospital, vulgarly called Bedlam, entitles him to our belated congratulations.

When Mr. Bruce ceases to be annoying about adjectives, he is both amusing and amazing. “William Blake had the neurotic’s need for dependence on some one outside himself.” A neurotic is an individual who has some nervous disorder or disease, functional or organic. A typical nervous disorder is migraine, sick headache. I could easily enumerate a score of the world’s great men and women who were thus afflicted. What was their need for dependence on some one outside themselves? “He had the neurotic’s sense of time.” What can that possibly be? Was it the sense of time that Dostoievsky had just before the convulsions appeared that attended his epileptic attacks? Dostoievsky was a neurotic--one of the most typical that ever lived, perhaps. He maintained that the few seconds previous to the motor manifestation of an attack were a timeless eternity. If it lasted another fractional part of a second, he could not possibly survive it. Did William Blake have this kind of sense of time?

He could not tolerate a pedantic, pretentious, stupid, pachydermatous patron, William Hayley. According to Sinclair Lewis there are only two races of people, the neurotic and the stupid: William Hayley was stupid, William Blake was neurotic. At least, it can be said of this reasoning that it offers a better foundation for Mr. Bruce’s thesis than that which he has heretofore provided.

William Blake was a happy man, for he believed in himself. He was a lucky man--his wife believed in him. He was a courageous man: he threw a trespassing sailor, emboldened by strong drink, out of his garden and was tried for high treason. Yet he patiently tolerated the inquisitive visits of the greatest bore of his time, Crabb Robinson, without even threat of assault. He did not get his just deserts from his contemporaries, but posterity has more than made up for their niggardliness, and Mr. Bruce has given posterity a leg-up. Had he dwelt more on the value and significance of Blake’s art and less on his “neurosis” he would have served us better. But his book is a snappy, concise, readable account of a man who had faith in himself and who, finally, compelled others to acknowledge his merit.

* * * * *

Students of Keats’ poetry and personality are not likely to admit that a new life of him was called for, in view of Sir Sidney Colvin’s searching and critical study which has just appeared in a third edition. Amy Lowell’s reason for putting forth a new biography was that she had new material; but what I say elsewhere about Barton’s _Lincoln_ applies here: the new material justified a brochure, not a life.

Miss Lowell wanted to write a life of Keats; that, aside from anything else, was reason enough for her. She had a vicarious mother-feeling for him and she was determined to display it. Her last book is an enduring monument to her industry, patience and perspicacity. She had a relish for criticism, but at times she confounded it with abuse and when she championed an individual, a cause, or a movement, she did it in the manner of a fellow-townsman, John L. Sullivan: with all her might and main. She “never trembled like a guilty thing surprised,” or if she did it was only when she was enraged by the stupidities and ignorance of others--those who did not agree with her.

From the sketch by Joseph Severn, January 28, 1821, which
Charles Cowden Clarke characterised as “a marvellously
correct likeness.”

_Engraved by Timothy Cole and reprinted by permission of
“The Century Magazine”_

Keats is a fascinating figure and always will be. The son of a stableman, the doors of the best literary society in London were opened wide to him; though he had but few years of mortal life, and few months of literary activity, he has become one of the greatest English poets. It was not the pathos of his existence, the diseases that ravaged him, the hopelessness of his love, or the relative isolation in which he was morally steeped that focusses our interest. It is his conception of poetry, his flight into the world of dreams untinged by reality, and the wondrous rapidity with which he scaled the heights of imagery. They made him immortal. In “the Armour of Words and with the Sword of Syllables” he fought a great battle and won. His personality had many facets and they were nearly all made to arrest attention, enlist sympathy and inspire admiration; but poet though he was, he was a man, and his human side is as deserving of study as his poetical nature; in the latter, there is primarily genius, and genius is not to be explained or understood, still less studied. In the former, there is the weakness of a mere mortal and the strength of an intelligence; the misery of bad health, and the victory of will-power; the alleged resignation to death and the desire to live; the heart break of the man whose ambitions were never fulfilled, and the exaltations of the lover who believes his love to be reciprocated; the grimace of the lip which finds gall in the cup from which it drinks, and the satisfaction of the heart which has faith in the world and confidence in friendship. All these aspects of the poet Amy Lowell has followed day by day, almost hour by hour, with the persistency of a detective. From the slightest cue, she lays a course which soon leads her to the exact day and the approximate hour when Keats accomplished the action she describes, and with the support of a clear conscience and the encouragement of proofs, to her irrefutable, she opposes the judgment of other biographers, and fearlessly and categorically contradicts them. This scarcely justifies her assertion “We may say, with something like certainty, that we know everything he did; for which reason, it is safe to assume that what we do not know of, he did not do.” I have encountered many foolish statements in literature; the one quoted is not the least of them. It would be far truer to say that we know every thought he had, and how foolish that would be! His letters reveal his sensations, his emotions and his thoughts, but they are singularly silent about what he did.

It would take a thorough knowledge of all the documents Miss Lowell brings to light, and require a deep study of all that has ever been written about Keats either to refute or to accept all her conclusions. Many of them will seem to the average reader an aggregation of useless details rather than an approach to the subject from a new angle, having a bearing on Keats the poet, or Keats the man. The task of discussing the foundation of her conclusions must be left to other biographers or students of the poet, of whom there are legions; and it can not be attempted at all until after the publication of all the notes of the poet’s friend, Brown.

John Keats’ brief life was singularly full, and the best of his record is to be found in the letters he wrote to friends, and to his brothers and sisters. Written from the fulness of the heart and with no other object than to relieve his mind and convey news, these constitute the most complete and comprehensive characterisation of the poet. Keats was modest about his genius, but he had an insatiable appetite for praise and love. And every one who knew him loved him and believed in him. It was the public that failed him. And sensitive as he was, its disdain, and the scorn of Lockhart and other critics, caused him profound suffering. To say that it killed him, as has been said countless times the past three generations, is to utter an absurdity. He had two most serious infectious diseases, and he had the kind of temperament that facilitates the progress of both of them.

Amy Lowell thinks that had he lived, he would probably not have been as great a poet as Browning. There seems small foundation for such a statement, and in this prophetless age, such pronouncements are worthless. What Keats produced in three years of poetic work, and less than one year of real inspiration, suggests at least that he would have been all the greater had he lived. He might not have developed emotionally, nor intellectually, but there is very little question that he would have developed critically and that his sense of values would have taken on keenness and profundity. Even as he was, his creative faculty was considerable. He could turn an inspirational current on at will. When it stopped flowing, or when it began to flow feebly, he could turn it off; then, while the Olympic dynamo was generating, and the Parnassian battery storing the divine fluid, he could turn on the light of criticism. Not all great poets can do that.

Early in life Keats lost his mother, who, by her attachment, represented for him the ideal of motherly love. For such love, he unceasingly sought. He had what the Freudians call a mother-complex. He needed the constant watchfulness, the untiring devotion and the profound understanding that a mother alone can bestow on a man. In Fanny Brawne, he found youth and beauty, brains and brilliancy, but none of the fondness and constancy that his nature demanded.

It was Miss Lowell’s unquenchable thirst for justice and honesty that made her attempt such thorough rehabilitation of Fanny Brawne. The effort seems useless and rather irrelevant, without much justification or foundation. Fanny Brawne’s love for Keats was such that, had he not been under the stupefying influence of the little Greek god who blindfolds his victims, he would have seen that Fanny was of similar calibre to the other women whose lack of motherly feeling for him prevented them from taking a permanent place in his heart. Miss Lowell realised the limitations of Fanny when she wrote: “One of the many reasons for Keats’ failure in his relations with Fanny Brawne was that he sought in her a mother as well as a lover, and she had not yet grown up enough to stand to him in both capacities.” This is the judgment of a mind, not of a heart; the judgment of a critic, not of a psychologist; the judgment of one who believes that years bring in their trend qualities and characteristics that do not exist in the embryo of maturity. A woman need not be of mother-age to be maternal any more than a pianist need be able to play Russian music at first sight to be an artist. The maternal instinct, when it exists, is revealed in childhood, and a love like that which united John Keats to Fanny Brawne, should have been the spark which caused her love to blaze. The letters of Fanny which have been published do not help to build a shrine around her and to rehabilitate her, since they were practically all written after Keats’ death--when memories and remorse might have vied to make her appreciate what she had lost. Moreover Fanny, who pretended to love him, did little to prove it; and none of Miss Lowell’s arguments can convince one reader that, had she really been seized of the same passion that possessed Keats, she would not have married him, when marriage meant happiness and bliss for him. Of course, Keats was ill, very ill, but no one knew it to be a fatal illness, and it may be safe to assume that either of Shelley’s wives would have surmounted the obstacle. Miss Lowell says: “Fanny lived in an age when well-brought-up daughters in her class of life did not jump over the traces and marry offhand; and suppose Fanny had happened to do this, neither she nor Keats had the money to run away, and was it to be contemplated that Fanny should move next door and let Brown support the pair of them! The idea is absurd. Fanny was not Harriet Westbrook, and Keats was no Shelley. They each did the best they could, as I think any one not hoodwinked by an unreasoning love for Keats can see.”

It was lucky for Keats that Fanny was no Harriet Westbrook, but what a pity she had not some of the virtues and qualities that made Mary Godwin the exquisite creature and inspirer that she was! Furthermore, there is no indication in Miss Lowell’s book that the question of marriage had ever been brought up for family consideration. It seems just to say that Fanny, with her limitations and light-heartedness, did the best she could, and was no heroine; but what we would have liked to see would have been a Fanny “hoodwinked by an unreasoning love of Keats,” who combined pulchritude and intelligence with a magnificent heart.

The picture that Miss Lowell paints of Keats is idealised. He is not vulgar as Watson said, not a howler and a sniveller as Swinburne said, and not “unmanly” as many said and thought after reading the Brawne letters. We are ready to believe he was none of them, but it is too much to ask that we shall believe “that the pure poet is a pure poet because he is a pure man.” White-washing poets is the meanest occupation in the world next to census-taking.

However, she has interwoven and blended the man with the artist in such manner that the one overlaps the other constantly, and the result is a homogeneous and substantial whole. When the man dominates, Keats is delightful; when the artist has the upper hand, he is admirable. She has rendered exquisitely the humanity of the poet who had belief in nothing but what he learned for himself, and who could be himself always. What she failed to convey was his profound self-consciousness and sensuousness, and how they influenced, one might almost say shaped, his life and his poetry.

Keats underwent a religious experience, conversion one may call it, that influenced his life and his work; so that one may cite him as evidence that poetic comprehension can not be complete unless it includes religious comprehension. It is to be regretted that Miss Lowell did not discuss this episode.

However, she made the most of her documentation, and of her subject from an intellectual and objective point of view. She has written a biography which is as powerfully conceived as it is intelligently realised, and it can never be repeated too often that, above all, Amy Lowell was an intelligence. Her capacity for work was astounding; her painstaking and thorough study an achievement of labour that reminds one of the monks of the Middle Ages who spent their lives in cells and cubicles, illuminating prayer books with the most exquisite figures and colours, bringing to their task the patience of angels, the piety of saints and the skill of artists. But her industry was as naught compared with the tenacity of her opinion and the legitimacy of her judgment.

From a subjective and emotional point of view, _John Keats_ is far from perfect; for the biographer has not made sufficient allowance for the fact that she was writing of a genius. She took his measurements with the same tape she would use if she were measuring William J. Bryan, and she would probably have approved of James Barrie’s _Tammas Haggart_ and his ideas in regard to “geniuses.” She did not allow for the spread of Keats’ wings, or the aureole of his genius. She explained his motives and his achievements with everyday words, and she brought to bear on her task the illumination of medicine and the testimony of psychology. She achieved a work of the head, not of the heart, and John Keats was above all a heart. In several instances she is at a loss to understand her subject, especially toward the end of his life, which takes in centuries of achievements in a few months of actual life. Keats moves too fast for her; his feet are too winged, the empyrean too rarefied.

She can not understand how life could have been “painful” for him since he had almost everything he needed, and had not received more than his share of misfortunes; and unless one attempts to read in the heart of Keats, nothing in his external life can corroborate the statement that his life was a tragedy. Human and material blessings are not enough to make life bearable, and Keats had not an excessive amount of either. It may be a comfort to think that nothing on earth would have made him really happy--save perhaps to possess Fanny as wife, but it is safe to assume that, unless such a marriage accomplished the miracle, Fanny bound to Keats would have failed him. Better for him in this instance to live in hope than to realise it.

Few things are more convincing of Miss Lowell’s inability really to appreciate the heart of her subject than the comment on one of Keats’ letters to Fanny in which she says that few persons could endure much longer the agonies and uncertainties which she was “so peculiarly made to create.” Miss Lowell follows this quotation with “Nobody with a grain of medical sense can fail to see this is delirium.” Perhaps not, but to use medical sense to judge John Keats is a mistake. It was agony of a sort that no medicine could relieve, and which no amount of sense could subdue.

Miss Lowell said that “Endymion suddenly finding his empty uplifted arms clasped about a naked waist is a beautiful flight of imagination astringently absorbingly expressed.” Her _John Keats_ is astringently absorbing, but its expressions are sometimes corrosive.

* * * * *

We may not know all Poe’s virtues and infirmities; time may be dealing too harshly or too leniently with him; it is possible that short-story writers do not acknowledge their indebtedness to him, and that students of style do not study him sufficiently; and it may be that some do not admit that he is one of a very small group constituting the world’s great writers. But none of these injustices of mind or heart will be remedied by Mr. Sherwin Cody’s book. The author may possess qualifications for writing a life of Poe, but his book does not testify them. The art of narrative has eluded him; style, which must give flavour and substance to all biography, seems to be beyond his reach, and he has no critical judgment in the use of the vast material that Professor Harrison and many other students of Poe have collected. The only qualification he would seem to have is “a confessed sympathy with Poe’s difficult personal character.” Even though this sympathy embraced Poe’s impersonal character, it would not suffice him as biographer.

It would be easy to characterize Mr. Cody’s book, but I shall refrain and call attention only to his intemperance of statement and his disregard of the rules governing grammatical construction. “Poe stood absolutely alone among American writers.” “It is probable that Poe has been the most venomously hated man of letters in the whole range of history. W. C. Brownell in his cold, impersonal way discusses Poe with a hatred as intense as Griswold’s.”

“Poe died of nervous breakdown rather than of the effects of over-indulgence in intoxicants.”

“Poe wrote but few poems the next fifteen years, but every one is a masterpiece.” There are scores of statements of similar texture, but none of them is true.

As an example of Mr. Cody’s lack of critical judgment and understanding, the following is offered: “The writer has in mind two young friends who, in recent times, struggling to attain literary recognition as Poe did, though with far less accomplishment than his, sank under the mental strain and died, one of paresis, one of apoplexy, and a careful study of literary history would reveal scores of such.” Paresis has one cause, and only one; apoplexy in early life has two, and one of them is the same spirochete that causes paresis.

There is a finality about the author’s statements that is at first irritating, then depressing. “No very excitable person, such as Poe was, could possibly give us calm and placid judgment that would harmonise with the crude impressions of common men and women.” Anatole France was a very excitable person, and he gave very calm and placid judgments, and it is up to “common women” to say whether such judgments harmonise with their “crude impressions” or not. Not all of Mr. Cody’s book is irritating. Some of it is amusing. Commenting on some of Poe’s well-known lies (his personal mendacity he calls it) he says, “Possibly he regarded this romancing about himself as harmless in itself and of some value as advertising, but the thoughtful critic can not refrain from severely blaming him.” Here speaks the author of _Business Correspondence and Advertisement Writing for Business Men_ and the critic who is not only thoughtful but moral!

The publishers say that Mr. Cody received a letter from Bliss Perry which contains the sentence, “You have done a real service to literature.” It is more difficult to believe, even, than many of the statements of his book.

Doctor Robertson says his study of Poe “contains something new which attempts to harmonise and to present in new aspects old and well established facts, and which further makes plain the neurosis from which he suffered.” The facts about Poe were stated temperately and judiciously forty years ago by a man whose labours have ornamented American letters, and few facts have been added since the time George E. Woodberry wrote:

“Poe, highly endowed, well-bred, and educated better
than his fellows, had more than once fair opportunities,
brilliant prospects, and groups of benevolent,
considerate, and active friends, and repeatedly forfeited
prosperity and even the homely honour of an honest
name. He ate opium and drank liquor; whatever was the
cause, these were the instruments of his ruin. He died
under circumstances of exceptional ugliness, misery and
pity. He left a fame destined to long memory. On the
roll of our literature Poe’s name is inscribed with the
few foremost, and in the world at large his genius is
established as valid among all men.”

To call his infirmity “dipsomania” and his genius a “neurosis” does not more securely enhance Poe in the hearts of his countrymen, or add to the lustre of his name.

The thesis of the psychopathic study is that Poe was the victim of a hereditary “neurosis,” which, the author claims, differs essentially from alcoholism; and that this neurosis rendered him at intervals non-responsible for his acts, at the same time giving him a personality as unlike his own in his normal condition as certain familiar forms of insanity are universally admitted to do. Entirely apart from the correctness of the author’s claims, they throw no additional light on the events of Poe’s life, nor do they add interest to his writings, either from the standpoint of literature or of psychopathology. It may be comforting to some of Poe’s admirers to think of him as a psychopath instead of a drunkard; an irresponsible victim of an inherited handicap, instead of a moral weakling who, under the influence of alcohol, sometimes committed dishonourable acts.

Dr. Robertson says: “Only those who are experienced in the study of patients thus afflicted, and who have had personal association with them, can fully understand and appreciate the nature of the neurosis from which Poe suffered and the difficulty in overcoming such obsessions.” A neurosis is a nervous disease not associated with or dependent upon alteration of the nerves demonstrable during life or after death. Dr. Robertson believes that Poe had such disease, that it was inherited, and that it was beyond his will or determination materially to influence or control it. What neurosis did he have? Was it periodic “spreeing,” called dipsomania? If so, one might legitimately, perhaps, call it a psychosis, if he is bound to give it a name. But “neurosis” seems to be wholly beyond justification. Just what he means by “the difficulty in overcoming such obsessions” is not evident, or to me conjecturable. Psychologists and psychiatrists use the term obsession to indicate a state of siege or torment which seeks to control the individual and to condition his conduct. I have never heard the word obsession used synonymously with impulsion to drink or compulsion to yield to the desire to drink.

“Dipsomania necessarily is an alcoholic inheritance.” It is to be presumed that Dr. Robertson means to say that individuals who have an uncontrollable desire to drink periodically are descended from stock who had similar desires and succumbed to them. But that does not advance us any further in our conception of what this so-called dipsomania is. The unwarrantable liberty the author of this book takes is that he speaks of dipsomania as if it were a definite disease which psychiatrists recognise and describe. Dr. Robertson is a bibliomaniac. I have Ruskin’s authority for saying if a man spends lavishly on his library, you call him mad, a bibliomaniac. If some of Dr. Robertson’s ancestry bought books when their more material neighbors thought they should have bought shoes, his neurosis might be called a bibliophilic inheritance. This characterisation would not particularly advance our knowledge of Dr. Robertson’s personality or aid us to interpret his conduct.

Alcohol plays an important rôle in the causation of mental diseases. Statistics seem to show that about 12 per cent. of the certified insane in this country were addicted to the intemperate use of alcohol. But it does not follow that their insanity was due to such addiction. It is but one of the many causes of insanity, and not the most important. “Dipsomania is a disease, and those suffering from it should be given such medical consideration as we give the insane.” This is purely a gratuitous assumption on the part of the author. Certainly dipsomania is Dis-Ease if you emphasise the etymology of the word (a thing which Dr. Robertson enjoys doing, as he is at some pains to point out to us that genius is derived from _genere_, to beget): but if the purpose is to convey that dipsomania is a mental disease, such as one of the manic-depressive psychoses, paranoia, or other recognisable and described mental diseases without anatomical foundation, it is both unjustified and misleading. Dr. Robertson quotes Spitzka, “one of our well-known authorities on insanity,” in support of some of his statements. The lay reader might legitimately infer that Spitzka was an authority of the present day, whereas in reality the science of psychiatry has been revolutionised since he wrote. The modern textbook of psychiatry has no chapter on dipsomania, nor does it recognise it as a distinct variety of insanity. Modern psychiatry recognises many forms of alcoholic insanity and it calls them alcoholic dementia, alcoholic pseudo-paresis, alcoholic pseudo-paranoia, alcoholic hallucinosis, etc. Dipsomania is used by the modern psychiatrist to indicate a periodical impulse to drink. So far as the writer knows, no one has ever denied that Edgar A. Poe had dipsomania. Why belabour this admission when he has been comfortably seated on Parnassus for half a century?

Again it might be asked, what medical consideration do we give the insane that dipsomaniacs should have? We deprive them of their liberty for their own benefit and for the benefit of the community, but that is a judicial consideration. We do not deprive dipsomaniacs of their liberty because we are not permitted to do so, though it is self-evident that it would be to their advantage and to the benefit of those dependent upon and associated with them. Dr. Robertson seems to think that it is not generally accepted that an uncontrollable inclination to drink is inherited, and that he must prove it. In order to prove it he feels that he must first prove that genius is inherited. The teachings of biology are against him.

As a rule biographers deem that they have completed their
work of establishing hereditary predispositions on which
later accomplishments depend, when they have constructed
a genealogy blazed with quarterings, and all the more
ornamental if marked with the bend sinister. They know
nothing of the Mendelian laws of heredity.

How Dr. Robertson can possibly know that biographers know nothing of the Mendelian laws of heredity is beyond any surmise on my part. I should say that if a biographer like Woodberry should indicate in his writing or allow it to be inferred that the Mendelian hypothesis was known to him, it would be safe to lay a handsome wager on it. But when Griswold, Poe’s first biographer, wrote his appreciation, or as Dr. Robertson would prefer to call it, his calumny, Gregor Mendel, the Austrian priest and Abbot of the Augustine Convent of Brünn, was quietly working in his garden making those observations that permitted him to formulate a law which has revolutionised our view of the principles of fertilisation in plants, and which may eventually revolutionise our ideas of heredity in higher organisms. He published a paper about them in the Natural History Society of Brünn, but it was lost sight of for many years and not until the principles of it were rediscovered in 1899 by De Vries, by Corens and by Tschermak was the epoch-making work of Mendel recognised. Although Dr. Robertson does not say it in so many words, he leaves the reader to infer that the Mendelian hypothesis is accepted and that it is the foundation of our theories and facts of heredity. In reality, however, the theories of heredity that must still be reckoned with are those of Darwin, Cope and Weismann, respectively, or the theories of pangenesis, perigenesis and the theory of the continuity of the germ plasm.

Biographers [says the author] ignore the fact that great
genius like that of Cæsar or Napoleón, or such mental
gifts as were bestowed upon Milton and Shakespeare, are
the results of what horticulturists call a sport and
occur only as an abnormality.

Biographers may ignore the alleged fact, but in doing so, they are in the company of such biologists as Francis Galton and his pupil and successor, Karl Pearson, to whom we owe much of our knowledge of heredity, acceptable and accepted.

Dr. Robertson has a way of making an arbitrary statement which savours of arrogance. For instance, “Genius develops early and is characterised by precocity.” I suppose Pasteur was a genius. He was the founder of the science of bacteriology, the architect of a diseaseless world. There is every reason for believing that he was not precocious. Few people would deny that Thomas Edison is a genius. He certainly was not precocious. Though the names of youthful dullards in the roll of men of achievement are not legion, I recall those of Davy, Linnæus, Humboldt, Watt, Fulton, Schiller, Heine, Goldsmith, Beecher, Whistler, Patrick Henry and Rousseau.

“Precocity of necessity foretells early decline,” says the author. John Stuart Mill, for instance, who could read Plato and Demosthenes with ease when he was eight and began a thorough study of scholastic logic when he was twelve! J. St. Loe Strachey is still going strong, and any one who doubts that he was precocious is referred to _The Joy of Living_. “I view brilliancy in the child as an abnormal heredity that must pay the price of premature decay.” Shades of Beethoven and Alexander Pope! No one would deny artistic genius to Richard Wagner. At the age of thirteen he translated the first twelve books of the Odyssey for amusement; at seventeen his first production as a composer was performed at the Leipzig theatre; and at sixty-nine the music of “Parsifal” was completed.

Dr. Robertson is bound to show that Poe did not die of delirium tremens, and he characterises the statement of Dr. J. J. Moran, who was resident physician of the Washington University Hospital, where Poe died, as “an intelligent statement covering the details of a death due to brain inflammation or engorgement.” But brain inflammation or engorgement is the condition of the brain and its membranes that is found in every case of delirium tremens that comes to autopsy, especially when the delirium has occurred in an individual whose resistance to alcohol has been impaired by prolonged use of that intoxicant or of drugs. The plain truth is that our greatest poet used alcohol intemperately and opium indiscreetly; that he died of delirium tremens; that his father drank excessively; that his conduct, drunk or sober, did not meet with the approbation of all those who knew him, possibly even not of the majority. But he put the United States of America on the literary map and he put it there more indelibly than any individual who preceded him or who has so far followed him. This is not the opinion or judgment of the writer, but of countless students and critics who have written of him during the past half century. Why whitewash the crown that posterity has put upon his brow? Why not leave the golden shimmer of the original burnish?

Merely to expose the quality of the whitewash which Dr. Robertson has applied to the poet’s crown, and not from any desire to call attention to the weakness of the man who wears it, one incident may be cited of Poe’s action as a critic. This is his estimate of Estelle Anna Lewis, a Brooklyn poetess, of whom he wrote:

All critical opinion must agree in assigning her a high,
if not the highest, rank among the poetesses of her land.
Her artistic ability is unusual; her command of language
great; her acquirements numerous and thorough; her range
of incident wide; her invention generally vigorous; her
fancy exuberant; and her imagination--that primary and
most indispensable of all poetic requisites--richer
perhaps than any of her female contemporaries.