Read Ebook: The Yale Literary Magazine (Vol. LXXXVIII No. 8 May 1923) by Various

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Poor Bartholow and proud! Stung with the malevolent implications with which Penn-Raven sought to gain Gabrielle, Bartholow once leaped upon him, feeling his "thick neck luxuriously yielding to his fingers", and in his absurd pride thought to throttle him. At that time he was experiencing more pain than ever he had through the long winter before. He as a proud idealist was waking up to the fact that to be bathed in a new light is not to be external to sorrow.

Imagine his position. During the months previous to the spring when he "ached with renovation", Bartholow had suffered from the malady of the sick-soul. His hopes were dulled, his ideals gone crashing. In his wife, for whom he cherished a desire to bring her closer to his thoughts, he found a woman cold and bitter from the disappointments she had suffered. Plainly she knew she had married the wrong man, plainly he did not know it. For to him life meant no more than disillusion, until one day, perhaps in April, life brought Penn-Raven with his zest for living, with his red-corpuscular religion of healthy-mindedness. To Bartholow, ready to catch at anything, this formidable spirit was the light. He grasped and claimed it. The light was his remaking. He was of the elect of earth, the twice-born. With joy gleaming in his eyes, he was up at dawn that spring morning,

Affirming his emergence to the Power That filled him as light fills a buried room When earth is lifted and the light comes in.

Penn-Raven was the Friend! Blessed Penn-Raven! He had given him gold with which to build the city of his desires. There was Gabrielle. How glad she would be to help him build that city, that house of gold in particular where he and she should live! She should be partner to his every mood. Gabrielle too should receive rebirth and with him build that house. Poor Bartholow!

Bartholow is a man upon whom the Light has fallen. What he will do with it is the subject of the poem. Where Lancelot was the study of a man in pursuit of the Light, Roman Bartholow is the study of a man after the Light had come. If both men were heroes in the sense that Galahad was a hero, no suffering would be entailed. But these are mortal men and mortal men are plagued with ignorance and frailty. Each has to learn that when the Light gleams before him he must follow it alone. Alone he must live in the Light. Alone he must fight for it. Few men know this and of all men Bartholow was the most unaware.

Bartholow then, because he did not know that his new position demanded the leaving of the old, still clung, but with added eagerness, to the hope of entering into spiritual communion with his wife. He was ever besieging her with his hopes and reproving her for delinquency, but by degrees he came to perceive that she would never erect that house with him. Gabrielle had two reasons, neither of which he knew. She was no longer his wife and she alone realized that the Light for him might mean the night for her. Roman was too wrapt up in himself to discover the first, the second he could learn, as Gabrielle had learned, only through suffering. So on he hoped and thought about it. Then Gabrielle, revealing that weakness, that was so peculiarly hers, of telling preferably the wrong and obvious reason for her delinquency to the right and subtle one, made it out to him that she could not share his light because Penn-Raven was hers too intimately. Anon came the Raven himself and forced the truth upon the husband, making a darkness to cover him that was far more agonizing than any he had known. When Bartholow saw this and would abandon the Light to seek again a less tormented existence, Penn-Raven said to him, "There is no going back". He said, with an insight and eloquence unusual to him,

Your doom is to be free. The seed of truth Is rooted in you, and the seed is yours For you to eat alone. You cannot share it Though you may give it, and a few thereby May take of it and so not wholly starve.

...

Like Job, when Jehovah spoke to him out of the heavens, Bartholow listened to the sentence placed upon him by one who had brought him light only to obscure it darkly. He listened and behold he was like a man that understands. He was quickly to know what Gabrielle in her suicide had done for him, and it was well he understood, before he learned of her, that he was free to live a life of knowledge and of sympathy with man, that he was alone, and that not even Gabrielle could build a golden house with him. Sadly he replied,

When a man's last illusion, like a bubble, Covered with moonshine, breaks and goes to nothing, And after that is less than nothing, The bubble had then better be forgotten And the poor fool that blew it be content With knowing he was born to be a fool.

Poor Bartholow! It was a hard road along which he forced himself to go, proud, defiant, hopeful, until the night when he found the Raven, like a reproving older child, pinning him to his chair lest he again try to annihilate him. After that he knew what was before him, for he was no longer hopeful, defiant, or proud. He had learned as Lancelot and like him

in the darkness he rode on Alone; and in the darkness came the Light.

Penn-Raven had brought the Light and showed Bartholow how it must be followed. But it was Gabrielle who was "too beautiful to be alive" that revealed to him its incessant worth. It was Roman's wife who failed and died, Gabrielle whom Penn-Raven loved, for whom Roman hungered, Gabrielle, whose

dark morning beauty Was like an armor for the darts of time Where they fell yet for nothing and were lost Against the magic of her slenderness,

Gabrielle in whom there was much of spring, much of chilly fall, much of Botticelli--a shadowed mingling of violets and wintergreen. Bartholow saw this and that morning, when she stood in the doorway, half awake, watching his springtime antics of adoration of his new self in his looking-glass, he found her irresistible and

crushed The fragrant elements of mingled wool And beauty in his arms and pressed with his A cool silk mouth, which made a quick escape, Leaving an ear--to which he told unheard The story of his life intensively.

"He told unheard". There, there was the cloud that must bring him darkness. Gabrielle did not heed him.

For the sake of an explanation, let us first attribute her listlessness to a dislike of physical affections from her husband. Let us say, along with Penn-Raven, that she retreated from Roman because she was an adultress, that she told him she would never build that house because that house would be founded on a lie. Infidelity must out. How great then would be the tumbling down of Roman's house! A woman guilty as she could never hope to build a spiritual house.

Such an explanation of Gabrielle's lack of enthusiasm is at first glance somewhat superficial. The Gabrielle of the poem who has moved us so profoundly is not the woman Penn-Raven describes in this manner. Gabrielle was not motivated by selfishness and cowardice. She did not die because she feared her husband. Yet, however one interpret Gabrielle, this judgment of her, which Penn-Raven voiced, remains partially correct. Gabrielle was essentially "flower and weed together". In the eyes of the men the weed was uppermost and, provokingly at that, discouragingly beautiful. Wintergreen and violets! This weed to Bartholow was just a bit shallow and colder than any fish in any ocean. She mocked his renascent gestures, his Greek, and even mistook Apollo for Narcissus when she found him looking in his mirror. She even had a cursed habit of innuendo, so it seemed, for after a pretty speech of his about a soul groping in its loneliness, out she came with a furtive remark that the fish upon her plate was "beautiful, even in death".

Shallow Gabrielle! Selfish, faithless, beautiful Gabrielle! Thus men saw her until it was too late to see her again. Like Flammonde, what was she and what was she not?

Gabrielle, indeed, is worthy of infinite pity. Beset at once by the Raven's exhortations that she go away with him, and by her husband with his mysticism, her situation was precarious. No light had come to her, but since it had fallen blessedly upon her husband, to aid him in his holding it was her duty. That she might desert him to sink again into the night she refused to consider. That she might do nothing but remain with him she pondered carefully. If so she stayed she could not save him. She was not worthy, as he himself had bitterly reproached her, of his mysteries. Yet how he prayed she might be! Without her all would be as it had been, though Gabrielle knew differently. She knew he must follow the Light alone. Such was the law. It was decreed that she look with "tired and indolent indifference" upon the spring that was for Roman the beginning of a new life. "I am not worthy of your mysteries", she had said with an insight at once supreme. Afterwards she told him,

You understand it You and your new-born wisdom, but I can't; And there's where our disaster like a rat, Lives hidden in our walls.

...

Even a phantom house if made unwisely May fall down on us and hurt horribly.

A different light was come to Gabrielle. As she spoke these words, a "pale fire" descended upon her, shriveling the weed, giving luxuriance to the flower. A miracle alone could have revealed to her the truth, and if it was not a miracle, it was the light from her own tragedy. She had failed, in marrying Bartholow, to find the being she sought. Likewise Penn-Raven had disappointed her. But she loved her husband for the light that had come to him. The Light was greater than herself. Wherefore of Bartholow she thought,

If my life would save him, And make him happy till he died in peace, I'm not so sure he mightn't have it.

No one had known the flower that grew within the weed. No one had cared to search beyond a certain libidinous examination. She, however, was aware. The command was come that she save Bartholow. She accepted. With her determination made she resisted two trying interviews with Penn-Raven and her husband, who successively tried to wound her sensitivity more deeply. The Raven groaned about his tragedies and disillusions, while Gabrielle was going out to die. There was nothing more in life for her than an austere duty, implacable and dark.

Where the Light falls, death falls; And in the darkness comes the Light.

But a cruel farewell to her husband and the faces were for her no more. This woman, greater in every way than Vivian or Guinevere, Gabrielle, the one complete and incisive expression of a poet's ideal, the crowning achievement to a brilliant tier of characters, Gabrielle who stepped above the broken ruins of her life to save a weak man, this Gabrielle crept stilly from the house and, before descending, paused a moment in the night.

Now she could see the moon and stars again Over the silvered earth, where the night rang With a small shrillness of a smaller world, If not a less inexorable one, Than hers had been; and after a few steps Made cautiously along the singing grass, She saw the falling lawn that lay before her, The shining path where she must not be seen, The still trees in the moonlight, and the river.

Yes, she was surely dead before she died. Tragedies had been her secret playthings and there was nothing left, nothing but to follow her peculiar light. Like Juliet her dismal scene she must act alone. She must go--forever. But the going was not difficult, for she was dead before she died.

Previous to this poem Mr. Robinson's philosophy has expressed itself negatively. It is his belief that evil is the result of moral choice. He does not call disease, accident, or war by the name of evil, because it is possible to look forward to a day when such excrescences will be removed. Evil, to Mr. Robinson, is that which is ineradicable and the ineradicable is the situation resulting from moral choice. Man has little free will. He is continuously obliged to make a choice against his wish, a choice that will bring disappointment. We have seen how Orestes was locked in evil perplexity when the alternative was presented: either to obey heaven, slay his mother, and be damned by earth, or to obey earth, forgive his mother, and be damned by heaven. Whichever road he followed evil overtook him. Whichever road we choose, says Mr. Robinson, evil must overtake us--with this one exception, however, that whereas Aeschylus believed the gods brought man to his doom, Mr. Robinson maintains that it is man's own frailty. Take Lancelot for an example. Lancelot has come to a point where he must make a moral choice. Either he can accept the Light and forsake Guinevere, or he can retain the Queen and lose the Light. The alternative is implacable. The one or the other, it says. There is no middle way nor any synthesis. To accept the new situation and leave the old, that is the way of truth. Only by that way can man hope to achieve happiness. If he attempt to mediate, then he will lash himself and cry in Lancelot's words,

God, what a rain of ashes falls on him Who sees the new and cannot leave the old!

Roman, of course, in finding the Light, was obliged to abandon his earlier hopes of building that house with Gabrielle. Roman like Lancelot was unable to meet that requirement. He failed, and would have perished had it not been for Gabrielle. She was to reveal to him her incessant worth. The Light for Gabrielle demanded a mad sacrifice. There was no happiness entailed. There was alone the recompense of that cold, resistless river. Leaving an inexorable world as she followed the light, she was, to complete the list of the poet's figures, the one

who had seen and died, And was alive now in a mist of gold.

Thus, after the tale is told, comes the realization of the ultimate isolation of man. Gabrielle had gone away alone. Penn-Raven too had disappeared. Each was bound from the other by ineradicable law. There never could have been a golden house with two to build it. It is not thus we are made. Bartholow was to come to understand that he could not build but by himself, that his renascence was a gift to him alone. It was Umfraville, who saw what he could see and was accordingly alone, who summed it up when he said,

There were you two in the dark together And there her story ends. The leaves you turn Are blank; and where a story ends it ends.

So Bartholow left him there on the steps of the old house that he had sold after the others had disappeared. Umfraville was free and Bartholow, with his memories before him, was alone and free. A cold fire was his light to prove, but he knew it never would go out. There would always be with him the memories of Gabrielle, the cool fragrance of her body, the silent beauty of her deed. The key he held in his hand was the key to the ivied house. The key he held was his no longer. For the last time it had locked for him a door that once had opened to so much pain. But a tide was come and there were no more sand castles. All was as it had been and was to be.

They are all gone away, The House is shut and still, There is nothing more to say.

LEWIS P. CURTIS.

It was one of those blistering July afternoons that sometimes descend upon people who have traveled a long way in the palatial discomfort of a Pullman, only to find themselves completing the last leg of their journey amid the democratic rattle-ty-bang of an antique, plush-lined day-coach. Several cars in advance, the energetic branch line locomotive was belching clouds of smoke and whistling shrilly at each spralling crossroad; while within the day-coach itself, a faded sign proclaimed that persons of color would only be tolerated on the last three seats of each car, and thus localized the scene to one of those down at the heel Southern railroads that have not yet recovered from the Civil War.

The greater part of the passengers were negroes, prosperously dressed, and covertly taking pains to be as obnoxious as possible to the little group of whites entrenched in a compact and strategic position among the last three seats of the car. Of the latter, one was a grey-haired gentlewoman of the old South, her expression combining with the pride of blood a certain indefinable mellow sweetness. A blue-eyed child of six sat by her side, and perhaps he too was conscious of his descent, but he kept his nose glued close to the window for all that. Behind these two, in a little compartment formed by turning two seats together, sat three ruddy farm girls in uncomfortable attitudes of acute self-consciousness. They had been giggling and overflowing with spirits during most of the trip, but the appearance of a young man in the seat opposite, at the last junction, had reduced their exuberance and heightened their curiosity. For, on one side of the neatly strapped suitcase which he had erected beside him as a sort of barrier from the negroes, appeared the legend, "P. R. Melton, N. Y. C."

Thought Philip Melton, "Niggers ... niggers and heat ... the Devil putting collars of mustard plaster on damned souls....

"Common, common, common sort of girls ... perfectly decent, but not my class ... too muscular, or maybe it's fat....

"Nice little chap ... eyes, hair, skin ... football some day ... wonder if his grandmother's a Carroll ... aristocrat....

"Hot ... gosh....

"Marion ... letters ... letters in my pocket ... mush, but not common ... my class ... glad I'm a gentleman ... 'known by what he does not do' ... clickety clack, clickety clack, clickety clack....

"Marion ... never wrote a girl stuff like that before ... laps it up all right ... must practice on some one ... my class, not common at all....

"Clickety clack, clickety clack, clack, click.... Fool train had to get here some time...."

As he clattered down the precipitous steps of the day-coach, the last of which was a clear jump of at least two feet, Philip saw the tall, still vigorous figure of his uncle detach itself from the crowd and come forward with its perpetually surprising grace.

"Glad to see you, boy." The words had something soothingly restful about them that betrayed the unhurried country gentleman.

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