Poems of Philip Henry Savage / Philip Henry Savage [electronic text]

INTRODUCTION

THERE is no flower so difficult to dissect, so impossible to reconstruct, as the personality of a man. It defies analysis; as fast as we pluck apart its petals, their perfume exhales and they are left withered in our hands. When I first undertook to write, for the final edition of his poems, a short memoir of Philip Henry Savage, I little realized the elusiveness of the task. It seemed easy and pleasant to communicate to others my deep and lasting impression of my friend. But soon I found that his friendship was a possession I could not share, his gentle, strong personality a presence in my life that was after all incommunicable. His feminine perception, so sensitive to beauty and so rich in tact; his courageous manliness, daring to probe the grisliest places in life; his pure ardency of spirit; his gayety and quaintness of humor; his wide hospitality of mind; his stern and yet pagan personal ideal: all these elements made up a personality that might perhaps be suggested, but never could be livingly reproduced. He was young when he died; he developed slowly; his last year of life, when his poetic faculty was much more perfect than ever before, was a time of distraction and anxiety: so that even his poetry, a mirror of his very self for those who knew him, reflects him for others but brokenly and vaguely. But if I cannot hope that the most discerning

reader will discover completely the man behind the poems, yet my task here must be to aid, however slightly, such a quest. I shall outline in the following pages the salient features of Savage's mind and spirit, — features which, combined as nature knew how to combine them, revealed one of the best men I have known.

At first meeting, one saw that Savage was a man of refinement and of personal dignity, that he cherished ideals and respected himself. He seemed what we call a quiet man, though he always talked enough and with grace; his presence was bright and cheerfully courteous rather than brilliant. Gradually, deeper qualities revealed themselves. His steady blue eyes reassured one, his slender yet vigorous figure gave one a sense of manliness and fidelity. His face, with its rough-textured skin, well creased and of a sallow or ashen color, reinforced the impression of strength, and suggested, in spite of its mobility, a physical temperament of the melancholy type. Yet, so shifting were his moods and so responsive his features, an instant could turn sadness into expectancy, or fill the serious eyes with banter. His mind seemed to demand of his body a greater pliancy of expression than had been given it, its proper quality being strength rather than delicacy. In spite of the sensitiveness that was clearly written on every feature, it might be said that he would have been physically almost apathetic had he not been mentally so alert. And his talk emphasized the same contradiction. Though his voice was dull and unvibrant, and his enunciation indistinct, his pleasure in talking was so obvious, and his quaint doublings and sudden interjections and apostrophes and parentheses and self-interruptions so novel and characteristic, that

one loved to listen to him. Nor must I forget his little mannerisms and airs, — how he would cuff one foot against the other as he stood in the doorway, in deprecation or mock apology; how he would throw one hand into the air with a sudden exclamation; how in an evening walk, giving no warning, he would suddenly deafen us with a wild and hollow Indian war-whoop. In a thousand ways he had a knack of making his moods real to others, of enlivening them with his curious and lovable whims.

But Savage's social charm is interesting to us here chiefly because, like a vapor that exhales from a volatile liquid, it suggests what deeper quality permeated his mind and gave it its flavor. In the analysis we have promised ourselves, the first consideration must be this deeper quality of sensitiveness.

His every word and act was a revelation, now superficial, now profound, of his really feminine purity and delicacy of perception. It spoke alike in his quick sense of the moods of others and in his most exalted delight in natural beauty, though perhaps the latter was its more primal expression. One cannot read three pages of his book without seeing what a passionate disciple the beauty of the world found in him. His first word is

"Even in the city, IAm ever conscious of the sky";

and he returns to the same thought in the six lines that introduce the posthumous poems:

"Not all the world can banish from my eyesThe simple glories of the day's sunrise;

Not circumstance nor fate e'er drive awayThe clear perfection of one summer day,Nor blot quite wholly from my sightThe singing tumult of the mystic night."

The accuracy of his insight is unfailing; and whether he describes the forest which "through rain is green as it was ne'er before," or the early winter sun which "lays by every stem a hue most sagely, delicately blue," his page always reflects the object with fidelity and with the finest precision. Even the First Poems and Fragments, prosaic and diffuse as they often are, frequently charm us with a touch of this delicate observation. And his note-books and letters are full of scribbled memoranda that want only manipulation to make them into poems. Here is a botanical note in verse, found in the portfolio:

"Sand hill violets are paleLike the sunny innocents,Like the evening primrose frail,Wanting wholly the intenseAzure of the cousin-flower that standsIn the fertile bottom lands."'

And in letters I find the following characteristic bits of description:

"There is a little family of two — sparrows — nested in a sheltered angle of the water-spout on the house opposite my side-window; not thirty feet from me now. They are companions of mine, chirping early and late; happy; waiting for the eggs to hatch … Busy, busy, busy, about the fundamental things. N'est-ce pas?"

"I just had the finest hour of the autumn. I rode from Cambridge, in this wild wind out of the sunset;

and I'm going back after dinner, and home again at eleven. The Harvard Bridge is a rare spot, and the ducks like the river as well as I."

The half-boyish delight he took in the world of out-of-doors was so highly characteristic of him (little as it seems to comport with the sombre tone of his verses, so full of an Omar-like sense of the fleetingness of life) that it deserves illustration in a longer letter describing a July day on Mirror Lake in Wolfborough:

"DEAR ␣: We were up at three. At 3.05, though the room was so light I needed no candle to dress, I could not distinguish my red (right) garter from my black (left), which surprised me. A whippoorwill shouted busily, just under my window. He, besides the frog which sings all night long 'u-ung' like Neddie, is the only distinctive night-bird. We were on the lake an hour before sunrise, which was to-day at 4.29. The white lilies were unopened as I paddled the canoe among them. Shortly after venturing out irregular twitterings began in the low copse where the high white eastern light penetrated. The hills, Ossipee, began to show a glowing purplish hue. A bank of cloud over the sun (below the horizon) grew rosy with a sharp infusion of dust-color. From that time on this cloud was the centre of attention, and its whole progression was from the color named above through ever more brilliant golden rose, to so sharp and hot a metal that even before the edge of the sun himself appeared it was dazzling and overpowering to the eye.

"Troops of white mist came out of the shallow bay and moved in procession like the spirits among whom Francesca

was borne, down the lake in ever-diminishing line. They were a continual presence till long after the sun appeared, whether we turned to watch the bream on their nests under the shallow wake, or noted how the yet white light refracted into varying color on clouds and hills. Then through the flashing lights the fire itself was born. "Roll down, roll down, O night-enfolded, dewy earth,And wash thee clean in the east where the crystal waves of lightSweep from the mystical deep to the roseate throes of birth,Wake and redeem and transfigure the children of night.

---

"The afternoon saw a tramp through a sphagnum swamp, sleep, and the completion of a further arc of the shore. The evening twilight was soft and gray, through a curtain of clouds; with color, yellow and saffron to rose, to the west of Ossipee toward the Sandwich Mountains. Supper on a sand-beach facing west; and after, a long contemplation, while the fagots crumbled and fell. We left a little rosy heap on the sands, shining in the face of the late twilight. It was dark when we reached the plank wharf; we had taken seventeen hours to go round the lake two and a half miles.

---

"Oceans, awake! and hills; ye lakes and slumbrous valleys,Over ye all and the city's roofs, and the darkened town,Through the empurpurate air from the wealth of his aureate chalice,Lo! the sun has poured a magical influence down.Hooray!PHILIP."

As would be expected, Savage's sensitiveness to natural beauty involved pain as well as pleasure, in so far as he was constrained to an artificial and "civilized" life. There resulted a disharmony which he recognized now laughingly, now with sorrow. The reader cannot but have been struck with the undertone of sadness in the lines already quoted from the posthumous poems; and the same distaste of drudgery is quaintly voiced in a stray quatrain:

"Brick sidewalks and the stony street Make weary walking for the Muse. I cannot blame her halting feet; — God knows they were not meant for shoes."

Equally whimsical and equally sincere is a plaint Savage wrote from his office in the Public Library during alterations made there one muggy August:

"DEAR ␣: Observe the commercial method of dating this sheet, and realize the pace at which I began it. I now breathe three times and start anew.

"You cannot write too often. I love your letters, if I may say so; and you can have no idea how they come like a strain of music across the dull blows of iron hammer on granite which are the trunk and branch of the vibrations I hear. In the Library, truly, where plaster and granite-dust float like a palpable, visible atmosphere, the heavens and the earth (forgive me) are one flour."

The same sensitiveness that made Savage so responsive to natural beauty gave him a very tender sympathy with people. All his friends remember how prehensile he was,

how he never obtruded his own mood, but felt about for the mood of his companion. He had the liveliest interest for our fortunes and misfortunes, and his counsel, though always bracing and tonic, was never hard or self-blinded. His sympathy with men does not voice itself in the poems, to be sure, so eloquently as the scarcely less personal sympathy he felt with nature. He himself writes regretfully:

"I keep with loving eye and earAttention on the changing year.I cannot bid in numbers flowThe human passions that I know;Nor weave into the lyric lineThe sacrificial heart divine;Be mine the shame, the burden mine."

But even if the self-impeachment shadow a truth, it is a partial truth, and one far less applicable to his later than to his earlier work. In one of the poems to "G.S." there is keen appreciation of the "sacrificial heart divine," even if the lines into which it is woven lack something of lyric fire. And in the poem beginning "Day by day along the street," written several years later, the beauty of the style matches the tenderness of the emotion. The love-poems at the end of the book, also, are an earnest of what he might have done in this sort, had he lived.

But if we do not find that Savage's delicate perception failed him at any point, this does not mean that adverse criticism is not both possible and necessary. It is possible, because like others he had the defects of his qualities: it is necessary, because faults are the natural shadows that give body to virtues, and a portrait painted with high

lights alone will show a mere Sir Charles Grandison, both flat to look at and unprofitable to contemplate. Savage's mind, then, like many minds that act chiefly by intuition, was weak in logical power, unable to develop a long train of thought with sequence and coherence. His conversation was scrappy and unmortared; he brought out his thoughts singly, with little reference to what had just been said; minds that were strong where his was weak found talk with him baffling and unsatisfying. On the other hand, for those who did not demand sustained grasp, but accepted insight in its stead, he talked always with charm, and often persuasively. Like the heroine in the fairy story, his mouth dropped diamonds, and they were not less bright because they did not form a necklace. His exclamations and interjections and sudden turnings were delightful to us; we used to rejoice in his "asides," self-admonitory or abusive. "Tut, tut, Savage," he would cry, in the midst of something else, and cuff his feet together. Non-sequaciousness, however, was no doubt a more serious handicap to him in his writing: it was the infirmity which circumscribed his work to the short lyric form he cultivated with such success; every effort he made in the direction of larger outlines or more ambitious schemes was disappointing. He could not sustain and vitalize a long poem. Thoughts would not stay dissolved in his mind, but quickly formed into isolated crystals. They were perfect, but they were small. Still, it would be foolish to insist too much on the negative aspect. We have only to reverse our emphasis to see that, even if they were small, they were perfect. And then we shall accept Savage as a miniaturist, a worker in precious stones, just as we have accepted Her

rick and other kindred geniuses, not demanding of them a breadth of which they are incapable.

The reader should not infer, either from what I have said of Savage's logical shortcomings, or from my insistence upon his basically feminine qualities of mind, that there was about him any trace of the effeminate, any tendency to the feeble or the flabby. His weaknesses were intellectual rather than sentimental. They were the negative weaknesses of limitation, not the positive weaknesses of morbidness or sentimentality. Manliness reveals itself in sanity and balance of mind as well as in the main force we generally associate with it, and his manliness was of this sort, giving his smallest poems a tone of such solidity and health that we may without paradox apply to them the word "large." If a man have healthy and governed sense, his mental processes may be as intuitive as a woman's and we shall only admire the more that rare interaction of powers that produces an individuality at once finely sensitive and thoroughly wholesome. And if we needed any further testimony than we have in his poems that Savage's sensuous appreciations were thus made wholesome by a steady spiritual control, we could find it in a formulation of the principle of such control which he gives in his note-book.

"In order to enjoy life,"

he says,

"one must be a master of life. In order to enjoy the senses one must be a master of them. No ordinary pleasure is so great but its rejection serves to throw out into relief this greater; no task so stern but that endurance is sterner; no pain so fierce but it wakes the soul to secret laughter.

"In another mood, the kiss of the senses is beautiful beyond all and every abstraction; the touch of sunlight,

the glory of form and color, the magic of sound, the joy of human embraces, the passion of sex.

"These two moods are the great rhythmical heart-beat, the systole and diastole of human life. The one a gathering of materials from all the realms of beauty, the other a consumption of them to feed the most perfect flame. The one centrifugal, the other centripetal."

If Savage was feminine in his appreciation for beauty, if he was feminine also in his logical and constructive limitation, he was masculine in healthiness and normality of sense, and he was nobly masculine in that sort of spiritual enthusiasm which made him hold himself above the very gratifications that appealed so potently to one-half his nature, in order to give a perfect allegiance to its central authority.

Such is a brief analysis of the permanent and stable characteristics of the man. Now that it is made, however, we see only the more clearly that any such static analysis, especially of a personality so fluid, so evolving, so dynamic as Savage's, must be in the end unsatisfying. More characteristic of him than any trait that we can describe was the lapse, the flow, the ceaseless recrystallization of traits. His growth was not uniform, as in men of less quickness of mind, but many-sided, various, and unforeseen, like the ramifications of ice-crystals on a window-pane. So impressible was he, his development was almost as complex as the outer influences affecting him. He reacted on his environment, as the learned say, with unusual delicacy. Furthermore, he added to this native impressibility the habit of pondering his impressions. Meditation shaped his life nearly as much as circumstance.

Very remarkable was his intellectual alertness; he analyzed his feelings, returned upon his experiences, and perennially chewed the cud of introspection. Whether to dwell in the country or in the city; whether to mix with people or to take much solitude; whether to be a pagan or a Christian; what to renounce and whether to renounce anything, — these were problems that he recognized and grappled. Of the tirelessness of his thinking the jottings and memoranda in his note-books give a forcible impression. I select a few examples almost at random:

"I must break up my year into sections, and live according to season.

"Study the map for a tramp.

"I never take a step in the woods but I stop, jealous of advance, lest I lose some part of the joy and significance in beauty of each outward movement. Mystery and unexplained delight.

"Don't waste your spirit in impatience.

"I thought of Thoreau, and took my courage tight between my teeth.

"Every morning now I ought to sit at my desk.

"Now is the time to begin to walk, and with the note-book. Remember that hawk, and the ease with which the thoughts took form with him in sight — all gone now, alas!

"A continual quick shift between vital personal relationships and verse.

"Master of a little beauty which, because it is born and bearer of the divine essence, I will cherish at the expense of most of the concerns of life."

Savage's outward actions, again, bear witness to the same combination of sensibility and introspection, producing

his characteristic eclecticism. They were very various, and their variety resulted not from confusion or from deficient self-control, but from a deliberate desire to live sensitively, responsively. His idea was to trust the ultimate harmony of his instincts; each was to be obeyed as it revealed itself, and all were to produce an unconstrained evolution. From day to day he faced and interrogated the bewildering complex of a youth' s experience: observing, comparing, recording; conversing, reading, pondering; experimenting, practising, attempting. All his doings, at first sight surprisingly diverse, fall, when looked at as illustrating this eclecticism, into the unity of a series of educative experiences. Each was dictated by some inward necessity, some craving to be satisfied, some knowledge to be supplied, some weakness to be trained into strength.

Born in 1868, he did not enter Harvard College until 1889, that is, until he was already of age, but spent the years from '86 to '89 in business. For these three years he was what is technically known as a "drummer" of boots and shoes. He wrote home to his family, from remote towns in Maine or Pennsylvania, long letters in which news of the shoe business is oddly mingled with descriptive bits about sunsets and red-winged blackbirds. Of course the life was ultimately impossible for him, and getting from it a good deal of experience of some kinds of people he gave it up and entered college. Here he was shy and quiet, studious, friendly with but a few fellows of tastes like his own. He had developed little of the social skill which marked him later; he was thinking out the problems of the conduct of life, and of his art, literature. So seriously

did he take the former that for a year after graduation he studied divinity. Several of his sermons have been saved, — compositions which afford glimpses of his courage and manliness, through an atmosphere of conventional and rather prosaic piety. It was fortunate for him that he abandoned this profession. Though undoubtedly his ethical enthusiasm would have found expression in it, his mind was both too pagan and too original to attain free play in any organization; he was foreordained an intellectual free-lance. His next venture was more native. Becoming what he called a vagabond, he lived a free and outdoor life, a life of loving study of sky and forest as well as of books and men. That this life agreed with him we may assume from the appearance, in 1895, of his First Poems and Fragments.

Yet the other side of his nature, what I may call the moral side, soon demanded that he again relate himself to society by some more recognized service than poetry. He set about discovering how he might earn bread without sacrificing that other intangible possession that we are told is equally necessary to life. He strove faithfully to combine bread-winning with ideal-winning, or, in the expressive commonplace, to "keep body and soul together." He wished to be a worthy citizen of society, and yet he saw not how to be one without treason to his highest interests. It is a dilemma with which idealists are familiar. In all the rest of his life he was assaulting and reassaulting it, using against it all the ingenuity and courage and patience and hope he had, and leaving it unsolved when he died.

In '95-'96 he was an assistant instructor in English at Harvard, carrying on at the same time graduate

courses in composition and literature. The next year he was about to accept a similar post at the Institute of Technology, when he was offered the position of Secretary to the Librarian of the Boston Public Library. This he accepted, and held until his death three years later, working to such good effect that in 1899 he was made Clerk of the Corporation, and still managing in spare hours to produce the small but perfect book, the Poems of 1898. On the last day of May, 1899, he was suddenly taken with appendicitis, and after an illness of less than a week, died on June 4th, at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

It is easy enough to point out the disadvantageous effect of Savage's quicksilver-like mobility upon his life. He was not safeguarded by the usual limitations of interest from dissipating his energies. He cared so deeply for so many things that it was difficult for him to concentrate his forces on one undertaking. He read very widely, and blamed himself that he did not go even farther afield. All sorts of life appealed to him. At heart he desired, I think, to be at once a poet, a man of action, an athlete, a philosopher, a man of the world or of society, and a solitary thinker. He never brought himself to sacrifice all activities but one. Yet, although success is difficult to him who will not accept such a sacrifice, the very sensitiveness of enthusiasm that made Savage unable to give up anything is itself noble. It is his strength as well as his weakness. Without it he might have accomplished more; it is questionable whether he would have been as much.

If Savage's note-books and the events of his life show thus clearly the impressibility and the habit of self-consideration

that combined to make him eclectic, his poetical work is a third and even more striking testimony. The astonishing improvement found on comparing his first with his second volume was the fruit of conscious effort. It proceeded from a ceaseless exercise of taste, which is a faculty dependent on permeability to impressions and the habit of reflecting upon them. It is interesting to find Savage, while still in college, discovering for himself, and writing to his younger sister, that

"what is true and beautiful is absolute; and what is stupendous and gorgeous and impressive and wonderful is inferior to it."

It is interesting to find him awaking to the error of his first conceptions of literary art, and feeling out, at first helplessly, for sounder methods. In the autumn of 1895 he writes to a friend:

"DEAR ␣: I am the most unhappy man of men! Because I see, though this only now and again, how hopelessly weak was my ancient theory, that genius might be left to train itself, that original power in a man could express itself without education. You know that I practically believed that.

"To-day I am taking English 5, 2, and Anglo-Saxon in Cambridge, and marking special reports in English 9. My realest reason for going back was because I wanted to take some strong medicine, to take ␣'s censures with my eyes open, and find if I could not come out from under the cloud.

"Do you know what I mean by 'cloud'? I feel sometimes as though it were choking me, — I see other men in full career, coherent, strong, fluent, their power of expression running even with their conception —

while I labor and fall. The paltry inspiration that is in some of the First Poems does not comfort me. Where are power and beauty? Where, indeed, are simple purity and grace? Why, I hate most of those pieces! And yet I cannot see beyond them, nor take any clear step onward. I feel (again) like a man in the jungle; the ground under foot is a tangle of grass, the way ahead a tangle of vine and branch, the sky overhead obscured by the closely set tops of trees. I thought to fly over it all; to-day I must cut my way, and I have only a poor pen-knife! This is sincere, I do not anticipate any denial on your part, nor crave it. If I learn wisdom as the year goes by, I'll write it out and send you."

We know from his later work that Savage did in time learn wisdom, did find "simple purity and grace," but it was only by indefatigable application of his native taste. It will be interesting to analyze his progress in some little detail.

The evolution in his work is of two kinds: the advance in style from diffuse prosaicism to crystalline compactness, and the advance in thought from traditional theology to the independence and originality and courage of such pieces as "Believe in me" and "God, Thou art Good." The advance in style, in a sense the more important, since he was a lyrist rather than a thinker, he made by applying to everything he wrote his naturally keen sense for diction. How delicate and ardent was his love for words! He notes in his journal Thoreau's passion for the crystalline words in the language, such as "serene" and "ethereal"; it was a passion he shared. One summer he ransacked the first letters of the dictionary,

growing as enthusiastic as a child with a new toy at the discovery of such words as "azure," "alert," "aura," "ashen." When a friend sent him a sprig of everlasting, with a comment on the dignity of the words "everlasting" and "morning," he wrote a new stanza for his poem Processional in order to introduce them. A sentence in his note-book suggests the source of many of his own finest effects:

"The gracious quality of beauty comes like a bloom on words simple and specific."

As time went on, he adopted a more and more laborious mode of composition, bringing a rigorous self-criticism to bear upon his originally keen instincts. His later note-books are webbed and networked with revisions and variants. It is surprising to see him developing one of his perfect couplets out of a weak, commonplace germ. Two examples must suffice. The last couplet of March 20,

"Praise God I see them and can say,Another year, another day!"

was at first

"And I some little time will stayAnd mark them as I do to-day."

And from the comically prosaic lines

"Thus covertly, and day by day,My hours advance, my hair turns gray,"

grew the plain and noble couplet in the last stanza of Fagots,

"Thus covertly, and term by term,Like as the year, I grow infirm."

By such means, testing and rejecting and deliberating and revising, he gave his verse its fine compression, its elegance of phrase, its harmony of tone and symmetry of proportion.

Equally great, though less noticeable, was the advance he achieved in thought. Very open and fearless must be the mind which can in a few years think itself out of a stereotyped conventionality in belief and a shy isolation in action, into an independent, humane philosophy, and a gracious, cordial intercourse with men. Savage's invaluable habit of getting face to face with his impressions and interrogating them with unprejudiced curiosity vitalized his entire intellectual life, and disentangled him from tradition, to found him firmly upon truth. But further insistence on a fact so obvious is unnecessary. No reader can doubt Savage's originality, his mental self-dependence. What might be doubted by some is the efficacy of his beliefs, their fundamental worth for the purposes of life. Many people are fond of saying that all the results of a young man's untrammelled thinking are "very pretty, but unpractical," meaning useless in the stress of experience. Such thinking, they affirm, leads to opinions charming enough as conversational and literary ornaments, but hollow and brittle for any ultimate uses of the spirit. Savage's did not prove so. When he came to his early death, and it was necessary to leave his unfinished work and the friends he loved, he found his truth still true, and could reconcile death with the philosophy life had given him.

If we can fix our eyes, not on his fragmentary doings and his imperfect work, in which he shares the lot of all, and on his untimely death, which has the look of a

peculiarly cruel and empty fatality, but rather on his steady allegiance to ideal aims, on the quenchless courage with which he lived and died, we shall feel that he achieved his end after all, and that he does not so much need our pity as command our gratitude. For he was one of the faithful. He labored without misgiving, and when he had to die laid down his life with the same spirit of trust that had been his strength in meeting it. His friends, and those who can divine what he was, will in their thought of him quickly come to forget the incompleteness of his life and the insufficieney [sicinsufficiency] of his expression, and remember only that he is one of that great company whose faith and faithfulness have served the ideal.

D.G.M. Boston, November, 1900