LIBRARY
OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA.
Class
THE LIFE OF
GEORGE CABOT LODGE
BY HENRY ADAMS
THE LIFE
OF
GEORGE CABOT LODGE
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HODGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
1911
COPYRIGHT, 1911, BY ELIZABETH LODGE
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published October ZQII
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I. CHILDHOOD ...... 1
CHAPTER II. CAMBRIDGE AND PARIS . . 19
CHAPTER III. "THE SONG OF THE WAVE" 47
CHAPTER IV. WAR AND LOVE .... 73
CHAPTER V. MARRIAGE ...... 92
CHAPTER VI. "CAIN" ...... 107
CHAPTER VII. "THE GREAT ADVENTURE" 119
CHAPTER VIII. "HERAKLES" ..... 155
CHAPTER IX. THE END . 183
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THE LIFE OF
GEORGE CABOT LODGE
CHAPTER I
CHILDHOOD
POETS are proverbially born, not made; and, be
cause they have been born rarely, the conditions
of their birth are singularly interesting. One ima
gines that the conditions surrounding the birth of
New England poets can have varied little, yet, in
shades, these conditions differ deeply enough to
perplex an artist who does not know where to look
for them. Especially the society of Boston has al
ways believed itself to have had, from the start,
a certain complexity, certain rather refined
nuances, which gave it an avowed right to
stand apart; a right which its members never hesi
tated to assert, if it pleased them to do so, and
which no one thought of questioning. One of the
GEQRGE CABOT LODGE
best-known and most strongly marked of these
numerous families, was and still is that of
the Cabots, whose early story has been told by
Henry Cabot Lodge in his life of the best-known
member of the family, his great-grandfather,
George Cabot, Senator of the United States.
George Cabot s son Henry married Anna
Blake, and had a daughter, Anna Sophia Cabot,
who married John Ellerton Lodge. The Lodges
were new arrivals in Boston. Giles Lodge, the
grandfather, having narrowly escaped with his life
from the San Domingo massacre, arrived, a young
Englishman and a stranger, in Boston in 1791.
There he established himself in business and mar
ried Mary Langdon, daughter of John Langdon,
an officer of the Continental Army and cousin
of President Langdon of Harvard College, who
prayed for the troops on the eve of Bunker Hill.
Through his mother John Lodge was descended
from the Walleys and Brattles and other Puritan
families of Boston, now for the most part extinct
and forgotten. But despite the paternal grand
mother, Henry Cabot Lodge, the only son of John
CHILDHOOD 3
Ellerton Lodge and Anna Cabot, felt himself Bos-
toman chiefly on the mother s side, as an off-shoot
of the prolific stock of the Cabots, who were really
all of Essex County origin. He marked the point by
making for himself a world- wide reputation under
the double name of Cabot Lodge. Of him the
public needs no biography, since he became a
familiar figure to millions of his fellow-citizens
from somewhat early youth to a fairly advanced
age; and, from the conspicuous stage of the Uni
ted States Senate, offered a far more conspicu
ous presence than his great-grandfather, George
Cabot, had ever done.
To Bostonians, in general, the Cabots altogether
are a stock too strong, too rich, too varied in their
family characteristics, to need explanation. Vol
umes might be written on them, without exhaust
ing the varieties of the strain.
That such a family should produce a poet was
not matter for surprise; but as though to make such
a product quite natural and normal, Henry Cabot
Lodge, who was born May 12, 1850, married, on
June 29, 1871, into another Massachusetts family
4 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
with history and characteristics as marked as those
of the Cabots themselves.
The Plymouth Colony produced Davises as
freely as the north shore produced Cabots. [Daniel
Davis, of the Barnstaple stock, was Solicitor-Gen
eral of Massachusetts in the days, about 1800,
when the Reverend James Freeman was the Uni
tarian minister of King s Chapel; and Daniel Davis
married Lois Freeman, who bore him thirteen chil
dren. The oldest, Louisa, married William Minot,
of a family more thoroughly Bostonian, if possible,
than all the rest. The youngest, Charles Henry
Davis, born January 16, 1807, in Somerset Street,
Boston, and, in due course, sent to Harvard Col
lege, left the College, in 1823, to enter the navy as
midshipman, in order to cruise in the old frigate,
the United States, in the Pacific, under the com
mand of his friend and patron, Commodore Isaac
Hull.
The life of Admiral Davis has been admirably
told elsewhere, and his victories at Hilton Head,
in November, 1861, at Fort Pillow, in May, 1862,
at Memphis and Vicksburg, afterwards, rank
CHILDHOOD 5
among the most decisive of the Civil War, as they
rank also among the earliest to give some share of
hope or confidence to the national government and
to the loyal voters; but his brilliant career in the
navy concerns his grandson-poet less than the do
mestic event of his marriage, in 1842, to Harriette
Blake Mills, daughter of still another United
States Senator, Elijah Hunt Mills, of Northamp
ton, Massachusetts, who was also a conspicuous
figure in his day.
The complications of this alliance were curious,
and among them was the chance that another
daughter of Senator Mills married Benjamin
Peirce, the famous Professor of Mathematics at
Harvard College, so that the children of Admiral
Davis became first cousins of the great mathema
tician Charles Peirce and his brothers. Among
these children of Admiral Davis was a daughter,
Anna Cabot Mills Davis, who grew up to girlhood
in Cambridge, under the shadow of Harvard Col
lege, where her father, the Admiral, lived while not
in active service; and when, after his appointment
to the Naval Observatory, he transferred his resi-
6 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
dence to Washington, she made her home there
until her marriage, in June, 1871, to Henry Cabot
Lodge.
Her second child, George Cabot Lodge, the
subject of this story, was born in Boston, October
10, 1873.
A poet, born in Boston, in 1873, saw about him a
society which commonly bred refined tastes, and
often did refined work, but seldom betrayed strong
emotions. The excitements of war had long
passed; its ideals were forgotten, and no other
great ideal had followed. The twenty -five years
between 1873 and 1898 years of astonishing
scientific and mechanical activity were marked
by a steady decline of literary and artistic intens
ity, and especially of the feeling for poetry,
which, at best, had never been the favorite form
of Boston expression. The only poet who could
be called strictly Bostonian by birth, Ralph
Waldo Emerson, died in the year 1882, before
young Lodge was ten years old. Longfellow, who
always belonged to Cambridge rather than to
Boston, died in the same year. James Russell
CHILDHOOD 7
Lowell survived till 1891, but was also in no strict
social sense a Bostonian. Young men growing up
on Beacon Hill or the Back Bay never met such
characters unless by a rare chance; and as the city
became busier and more crowded, the chances
became rarer still.
Not the society, therefore, could have inspired a
taste for poetry. Such an instinct must have been
innate, like his cousin s mathematics. Society
could strike him only as the absence of all that he
might have supposed it to be, as he read of it in the
history and poetry of the past. Even since the
youth of R. W. Emerson, the sense of poetry had
weakened like the sense of religion. Boston dif
fered little from other American towns with less
reputation for intellect, where, as a rule, not many
persons entered their neighbors houses, and these
were members of the family. A stranger was un
known.
The classic and promiscuous turmoil of the
forum, the theatre, or the bath, which trained the
Greeks and the Romans, or the narrower contact
of the church and the coffee-house, which bred
8 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
the polished standards of Dryden and Racine,
were unknown in America, and nearly extinct in
Paris and London. An American boy scarcely
conceived of getting social education from contact
with his elders. In previous generations he had
been taught to get it from books, but the young
American of this period was neither a bookish nor
a social animal. Climate and custom combined to
narrow his horizon.
Commonly the boy was well pleased to have it
so; he asked only to play with his fellows, and to
escape contact with the world; but the Boston
child of the Cabot type was apt to feel himself
alone even as a child. Unless singularly fortunate
in finding and retaining sympathetic companions,
his strong individuality rebelled against its sur
roundings. Boys are naturally sensitive and shy.
Even as men, a certain proportion of society
showed, from the time of the Puritans, a marked
reserve, so that one could never be quite sure in
State Street, more than in Concord, that the lawyer
or banker whom one consulted about drawing a
deed or negotiating a loan, might not be uncon-
CHILDHOOD 9
sciously immersed in introspection, as his ances
tors, two centuries before, had been absorbed in
their chances of salvation. The latent contrasts of
character were full of interest, and so well under
stood that any old Bostonian, familiar with family
histories, could recall by scores the comedies and
tragedies which had been due to a conscious or
unconscious revolt against the suppression of in
stinct and imagination.
Poetry was a suppressed instinct: and except
where, as in Longfellow, it kept the old character
of ornament, it became a reaction against society,
as in Emerson and the Concord school, or, further
away and more roughly, in Walt Whitman. Less
and less it appeared, as in earlier ages, the na
tural, favorite expression of society itself. In the
last half of the nineteenth century, the poet be
came everywhere a rebel against his surroundings.
What had been begun by Wordsworth, Byron, and
Shelley, was carried on by Algernon Swinburne
in London or Paul Verlaine in Paris or Walt
Whitman in Washington, by a common instinct
of revolt. Even the atmosphere of Beacon
10 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
Street was at times faintly redolent of Schopen
hauer.
The tendency of Bostonians to break away from
conventional society was fostered by the harshness
of the climate, but was vastly helped by the neigh
borhood of the ocean. Snow and ice and fierce
northwest gales shut up society within doors dur
ing three months of winter; while equally fierce
heat drove society to camp within tide- water, dur
ing three months of summer. There the ocean was
the closest of friends. Every one knows the little
finger of granite that points oceanward, some ten
miles north of Boston, as though directing the
Bostonian homeward. The spot is almost an
island, connected with Lynn by a long, narrow
strip of sand-beach; but on the island a small
township called Nahant has long existed, and the
end of this point of Nahant was bought by the
grandfather, John Ellerton Lodge, as a country-
place for summer residence.
The whole coast, for five hundred miles in either
direction, has since been seized for summer resi
dence, but Nahant alone seems to be actually the
CHILDHOOD 11
ocean itself, as though it were a ship quitting
port, or, better, just stranded on the rocky coast of
Cape Ann. There the winds and waves are alone
really at home, and man can never by day or night
escape their company. At the best of times, and
in their most seductive temper, their restlessness
carries a suggestion of change, a warning of
latent passion, a threat of storm. One looks out
forever to an infinite horizon of shoreless and
shifting ocean.
The sea is apt to revive some primitive instinct
in boys, as though in a far-off past they had been
fishes, and had never quite forgotten their home.
The least robust can feel the repulsion, even when
they cannot feel the physical attraction, of the
waves playing with the rocks like children never
quite sure of their temper; but the Lodge boy, like
most other boys of his class and breed, felt the sea
as an echo or double of himself. Commonly this /
instinct of unity with nature dies early in Ameri
can life; but young Lodge s nature was itself as ele
mentary and simple as the salt water. Throughout
life, the more widely his character spread in cir-
12 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
cumference, the more simply he thought, and even
when trying to grow complex, as was inevitable
since it was to grow in Boston, the mind itself
was never complex, and the complexities merely
gathered on it, as something outside, like the sea
weeds gathering and swaying about the rocks.
Robust in figure, healthy in appetite, careless of
consequences, he could feel complex and intro
spective only as his ideal, the Norse faun, might
feel astonished and angry at finding nature per
verse and unintelligible in a tropical jungle. Since
nature could not be immoral or futile, the immor
ality and futility must be in the mind that con
ceived it. Man became an outrage, society an
artificial device for the distortion of truth, civ
ilization a wrong. Many millions of simple natures
have thought, and still think, the same thing, and
the more complex have never quite made up their
minds whether to agree with them or not; but the
thought that was simple and sufficient for the
Norseman exploring the tropics, or for an exuber
ant young savage sailing his boat off the rude
shores of Gloucester and Cape Ann, could not long
CHILDHOOD 13
survive in the atmosphere of State Street. Com
monly the poet dies young.
The Nahant life was intensely home, with only a
father and mother for companions, an elder sister,
a younger brother, cousins or boy friends at
hazard, and boundless sea and sky. As the boy
passed his tenth year, his father possibly in
spired by the same spirit of restlessness turned
much of his time and attention to politics, and the
mother became all the more the companion and re
source of the children. From the earliest forms of
mammal life, the mothers of fauns have been more
in love with their offspring than with all else in ex
istence; and when the mother has had the genius
of love and sympathy, the passion of altruism, the
instinct of taste and high-breeding, besides the
commoner resources of intelligence and education,
the faun returns the love, and is moulded by it
into shape.
These were the elements of his youth, and the
same elements will be found recurring in all that
he thought and said during his thirty-six years of */
life. He was himself, both in fact and in imagina-
14 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
tion, "The Wave," whose song he began his liter
ary career by composing:
This is the song of the wave, that died in the fulness of life.
The prodigal this, that lavished its largess of strength
In the lust of achievement.
Aiming at things for Heaven too high,
Sure in the pride of life, in the richness of strength.
So tried it the impossible height, till the end was found,
Where ends the soul that yearns for the fillet of morning stars,
The soul in the toils of the journeying worlds,
Whose eye is filled with the image of God,
And the end is Death.
Had the "Song of the Wave" been written after
death instead of before the beginning of life, the
figure could not have been more exact. The young
man felt the image as he felt the act; his thought
offered itself to him as a wave. From first to last he
identified himself with the energies of nature, as
the story will show; he did not invent images for
amusement, but described himself in describing
the energy. Even the figure of the Norse faun was
his own figure, and like the Wave, with which it
belongs, was an effort at the first avowal of him-
CHILDHOOD 15
self to himself; for these things were of his youth,
felt and not feigned:
These are the men!
The North has given them name,
The children of God who dare. . . .
These are the men!
In their youth without memory
They were glad, for they might not see
The lies that the world has wrought
On the parchment of God. The tree
Yielded them ships, and the sky
Flamed as the waters fought;
But they knew that death was a lie,
That the life of man was as nought,
And they dwelt in the truth of the sea.
These are the men.
In conditions of life less intimate than those of
Boston, such a way of conceiving one s own exist
ence seems natural; indeed almost normal for
Wordsworths and Byrons, Victor Hugos and Wal
ter Savage Landors, Algernon Swinburnes and
Robert Louis Stevensons; but to the Bostonian
absorbed in the extremely practical problem of
effecting some sort of working arrangement be-
16 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
tween Beacon Street and the universe, the attitude
of revolt seemed unnatural and artificial. He could
not even understand it. For centuries the Bos-
tonian had done little but wrestle with nature for
a bare existence, and his foothold was not so secure,
nor had it been so easily acquired, nor was it so
victoriously sufficient for his wants, as to make
him care to invite the ice or the ocean once more to
cover it or himself; while, even more keenly than
the Scotchman or Norseman, he felt that he ought
not to be reproached for the lies that the world,
including himself, had wrought, under compulsion,
on the exceedingly rough and scanty parchment of
God.
Therefore the gap between the poet and the citi
zen was so wide as to be impassable in Boston, but
it was not a division of society into hostile camps,
as it had been in England with Shelley and Keats,
or in Boston itself, half a century before, with the
anti-slavery outbursts of Emerson and Whittier,
Longfellow and Lowell, which shook the founda
tions of the State. The Bostonian of 1900 differed
from his parents and grandparents of 1850, in own-
CHILDHOOD 17
ing nothing the value of which, in the market, could
be affected by the poet. Indeed, to him, the poet s
pose of hostility to actual conditions of society was
itself mercantile, a form of drama, a thing
to sell, rather than a serious revolt. Society could
safely adopt it as a form of industry, as it adopted
other forms of book-making.
Therefore, while, for young Lodge and other
protestants of his age and type, the contrast be
tween Nahant and Beacon Street was a real one,
even a vital one, life in both places was nor
mal, healthy, and quite free from bitterness or
social strain. Society was not disposed to defend
itself from criticism or attack. Indeed, the most
fatal part of the situation for the poet in revolt, the
paralyzing drug that made him helpless, was that
society no longer seemed sincerely to believe in
itself or anything else; it resented nothing, not
even praise. The young poet grew up without
being able to find an enemy. With a splendid phy
sique, a warmly affectionate nature, a simple but
magnificent appetite for all that life could give, a
robust indifference or defiance of consequences, a
18 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
social position unconscious of dispute or doubt,
and a large, insatiable ambition to achieve ideals,
with these ample endowments and energies, in
full consciousness of what he was about to attempt,
the young man entered deliberately upon what he
was to call his Great Adventure.
CHAPTER II
CAMBRIDGE AND PARIS
To all young Bostonians of a certain age and
social position, Harvard College opens its doors so
genially as to impose itself almost as a necessary
path into the simple problems of Boston life; and
it has the rather unusual additional merit of offer
ing as much help as the student is willing to accept
towards dealing with the more complex problems
of life in a wider sense. Like most of his friends and
family, young Lodge, at eighteen years old, went
to the University, and profited by it in his own
way, which was rarely, with Bostonians of his type,
precisely the way which the actual standards of
American life required or much approved. The
first two years seldom profit young men of this
class at all, but with the third year, their tastes,
if they have any, begin to show themselves, and
their minds grope for objects that offer them at
traction, or for supports that the young tendrils
20 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
can grasp. Every instructor has seen this rather
blind process going on in generation after gen
eration of students, and is seldom able to lend
much help to it; but if he is so fortunate as to
teach some subject that attracts the student s
fancy, he can have influence. Owing to some in
nate sympathies, which were apparently not due
to inheritance or conditions, Lodge seemed to care
less for English than for French or Italian or clas
sic standards; and it happened that the French de
partment was then directed by Professor B6cher,
who took a fancy to the young man, and not only
helped him to an acquaintance with the language,
but still more with the literature and the thought
of France, a subject in which Professor B6cher was
an admirable judge and critic.
At first, the student made the usual conscien
tious effort to do what did not amuse him. " I am
going to acquire the faculty of not minding apply
ing myself to uninteresting subjects, if I can, and I
am sure that it is possible," he wrote to his mother,
March 21, 1893; and then, pursuing the usual
course which started most Harvard students on
CAMBRIDGE AND PARIS 21
literary careers, he fell at once into the arms of
Thomas Carlyle. "I am making a study of the re
ligious and philosophical side of Carlyle, with a
view to writing a book on the same ; and it is a
most absorbing subject," he wrote on May 6,
1893. "My head is full of ideas which I want to
let out in that book. I propose to devote my
summer to it. Even if it is n t a success, it is
better than doing nothing, and it is profoundly in
teresting. I have read attentively almost every
thing he ever wrote except Cromwell/ and I am
taking notes on all the more philosophical ones,
like Sartor Resartus ; and I am also reading and
studying conjointly the French philosophers, Des
cartes, Malebranche and Spinoza, and the German
Schopenhauer and Fichte, and also Plato, so that
I shall get an idea of his relations to the celebrated
philosophies. I am going to read Froude s life of
him." The door by which a student enters the vast
field of philosophy matters little, for, whatever it
is, the student cannot stay long in it; but for one
of such wide views, Carlyle could serve a very
short time as the central interest.
22 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
"To-day Bourget came out here to a lecture in
French 7 by Sumichrast, and Sumichrast got him
to talk, which he did most charmingly. I have
been taking a course of Bourget, among other
things, *Mensonges ; and I feel as if I had been
living in the mire. Never have I read books whose
atmosphere was so unhealthy and fetid." This was
written to his mother, December 12, 1893, when
he was barely twenty years old, and marks the
steady tide of French influence that was carrying
him on to its usual stage of restlessness and de
pression. On February 28, 1894, he wrote again,
announcing that he had fairly reached the moral
chaos which belonged to his temperament and
years: "I am in very good health and very bad
spirits, and I am feeling pretty cynical. It is a con
stant struggle for me to prevent myself from be
coming cynical, and when I feel blue and depressed,
the dykes break and it all comes to the surface. I
suppose I have seen more of the evil and mean side
of men and things than most men of my age, which
accounts for my having naturally a pessimistic
turn. Really, though, I hate cynicism; it is a
CAMBRIDGE AND PARIS 23
compilation of cheap aphorisms that any fool can
learn to repeat; and yet the world does seem a
bad place."
A common place rather than a bad place was the
next natural and cheap aphorism which every im
aginative young man could look with confidence to
reach, but the process of reaching it varies greatly
with the temperament of the men. In Lodge it
soon took the form of philosophic depression ac
companied by intense ambition. The combination,
at the age of twenty, is familiar in Europeans, but
not so common among Americans, who are apt
to feel, or to show, diffidence in their own powers.
Lodge s letters will reveal himself fully on that
side, but what they show still better is the im
mense appetite of the young man for his intellect
ual food, once he had found the food he liked.
"Since I got back [to Cambridge]," he wrote
to his mother on March 14, 1894, "I have been
reading an immense quantity from variegated
authors, Balzac especially; also Flaubert, Alfred
de Vigny, Leconte de Lisle, and Musset, Hugo,
Renan (whom I am going to write a long French
24 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
theme about), Schopenhauer, and then the Upan-
ishads, etc. Next time French literature is dis
cussed, ask them what living poet equals Sully
Prudhomme." He was already in a region where
Boston society or indeed, any other society ex
cept perhaps that of Paris would have been
puzzled to answer his questions; but the sense of
reaching new regions excited him. "I am begin
ning to get beautifully into harness now," he
wrote on November 16, 1894, "and find that, out
side my College work, I can read from one hundred
and fifty to two hundred pages a day. ... If I
were living in Gobi or Sahara, with the British
Museum next door and the Louvre round the
corner, I think I could do almost anything. When
I work I have to fill myself full of my subject, and
then write everything down without referring to
any books. If I am interrupted in the agonies of
composition, it takes me some time to get into the
vein." The passion for reading passed naturally
into the passion for writing, and every new vol
ume read reflected itself in a volume to be written.
The last term of college began and ended in this
CAMBRIDGE AND PARIS 25
frame of mind. He wrote on January 17, 1895: "I
have a scheme of writing essays on Schopenhauer,
Swift, Moliere, Foe, Leconte de Lisle, Carlyle, Al
fred de Vigny, Balzac, Thackeray (perhaps) and
any others I may think of, and entitling the collec
tion * Studies in Pessimism, or some such title,
and treat them all, of course, from that point of
view. I could write them all except Swift and
Thackeray and Balzac with very little prepara
tion; and even with those three I should not need
much. I wish you would ask papa what he thinks
of my idea. Last night Max Scull and I took
Brun (the French teacher) to dinner and the thea
tre afterwards. He was quite entertaining, and I
improved my French considerably, as we spoke
nothing else. I told him I was going to France next
summer, and he told me to write to him and *qu il
me montrerait Paris a fond. I have been working
on my wretched story, and have gone over it about
8 times. It now seems to me to be quite valueless.
Also I have burst into song several times rather
lamely, I fear."
Then began, still in college, the invariable,
26 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
never-ending effort of the artist to master his art,
to attain the sureness of hand and the quality
of expression which should be himself. Lodge
plunged into the difficulties with the same appe
tite which he felt for the facilities of expression,
and felt at once where his personal difficulties
were likely to be greatest, in his own exuberance.
"I find I cannot polish my verses to any great ex
tent," he continued on March 20, 1895; "I write
when I feel in the mood, and then they are done
badly or well, as the case may be. If badly, they
must either be all written over, or else burnt, and a
new one written, generally the most appropriate
fate for most of them. However, I am indeed very
glad that you and papa think I am improving,
however slightly. I enclose three efforts in a more
lyrical strain. I find it rather a relief to be less
trammeled, and unfettered to so concrete and ab
solute a form as the Petrarchan sonnet, which
is the only kind I write now. I have been looking
over the few sonnets Shelley wrote. He had no
form at all in them. He seems to have built them
up with no preconceived idea of form whatever.
CAMBRIDGE AND PARIS 27
Take Ozymandias for instance, which I admire
intensely, and one finds no structure at all. Yet of
course we know that the whole, as read, is superb.
I wonder if most people notice the form of a sonnet.
I know I did n t, before I began to scribble my
self. Still, I do think, other things being equal, that
the Petrarchan form adds a dignity and beauty
to a sonnet which no other form possesses. The
contour is much more harmonious and symmet
rical."
Thus the young man had plunged headlong into
the higher problems of literary art, before he was
fairly acquainted with the commoner standards.
Whether he ever framed to himself a reason for pur
suing one form rather than another, might be a
curious question. Why should not Shakespeare and
the Elizabethans have appealed to him first? Was
it because the Petrarchan form was more perfect,
or because it was less English? Whatever the an
swer to this question may be, the fact is that,
throughout life, he turned away from the English
models, and seemed often indifferent to their exist
ence. The trait was not wholly peculiar to him,
28 GEORGE CABOT LODGED
for even in England itself the later Victorian poets,
with Algernon Swinburne at their head, showed a
marked disposition to break rather abruptly with
the early Victorian poets, and to wander away after
classical or mediaeval standards; but their example
was hardly the influence that affected Lodge.
With him, the English tradition possibly repre
sented a restraint, a convention, a chain that
needed to be broken, that jarred on his intense
ambition.
"Oh, I am devoured by ambition," he wrote in
the last days of his college life, to his mother: "I
do so want to do something that will last, some
man s work in the world, that I am constantly
depressed by an awful dread that perhaps I shan t
be able to. I am never satisfied with what I do,
never contented with my expression of what I
wish to express, and yet I hope and sometimes feel
that it is possible I may do something permanent
in value. I have got at last a scheme for the future
which I think it probable you will like, and papa
also; but I shall be better able to tell you when I
see you. I have read nothing lately outside my
CAMBRIDGE AND PARIS 29
work except the Theologia Germanica which
Mrs. Wintie [Chanler] sent me, and which has
many beautiful things in it. I have written even
less, just a few scraps of verse (one of which, a
sonnet, is coming out in the next * Monthly by
the way), and that article on Shakespeare which
went to papa. I am anxious to know what he
thinks of it."
With this, the college life closed, having given,
liberally and sympathetically, all it could give,
leaving its graduates free, and fairly fitted, to turn
where they chose for their further food; which
meant, for young Lodge, as his letters have told,
the immediate turning to Paris. The choice showed
the definite determination of his thought. England,
Germany, Italy, did not, at that stage, offer the
kind of education he wanted. He meant to make
himself a literary artist, and in Paris alone he could
expect to find the technical practice of the liter
ary arts. In Paris alone, a few men survived who
talked their language, wrote prose, and constructed
drama, as they modelled a statue or planned a
structure.
SO GEORGE CABOT LODGE
i
Thus far, as commonly happens even to ambi
tious young men, the path was easy, and the out
look clear; but the illusion of ease and horizon sel
dom lasts long in Paris. A few days completely
dispel it. Almost instantly the future becomes
desperately difficult. Especially to an American,
the processes and machinery of a French education
are hard to apply in his home work. The French
mind thinks differently and expresses its thought
differently, so that the American, though he may
actually think in French, will express his thought
according to an American formula. Merely the
language profits him little; the arts not much more;
the history not at all; the poetry is ill suited to the
genius of the English tongue; the drama alone is
capable of direct application; in sum, it is the
whole the combination of tradition, mental
habit, association of ideas, labor of technique, crit
icism, instinct that makes a school, and the
school, once mastered, is of only indirect use to an
American. The secret of French literary art is a
secret of its own which does not exist in America.
Indeed, the American soon begins to doubt whether
CAMBRIDGE AND PARIS 81
America has any secrets, either in literary or any
other art.
Within a few weeks all these doubts and difficul
ties had risen in young Lodge s face, and he found
himself reduced to the usual helplessness of the
art-student in Paris, working without definite pur
pose in several unrelated directions. At best, the
atmosphere of Paris in December lacks gayety
except for Parisians, or such as have made them
selves by time and temperament, more or less
Parisian. One flounders through it as one best can;
but in Lodge s case, the strain was violently ag
gravated by the political storm suddenly roused
by President Cleveland s Venezuela message, and
sympathy with his father s political responsibilities
in the Senate.
PARIS, December 26, 1895.
The study here is wholly different from any
thing I have been accustomed to and I am in some
ways much alone. It seems to me here as if I was
losing my grip, my aggressiveness, my force of mind,
and it is a feeling that has been gradually coming
over me, and that Venezuela has brought to a
32 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
crisis. I don t do anything here, nothing tangible.
I work five hours a day or six, and what on a
miserable little poetaster. I want to get home and
get some place on a newspaper or anything of that
kind, and really do something. I spend more
money than is necessary, and altogether don t
seem to lead a very profitable life. For me, loafing
is not fun except in a recognized vacation. I never
realized this until now. I thought I should like to
take it easy for a while and soi-disant amuse my
self. I am wretched. I want something real to do.
I don t want to become a mere Teutonic grind, and
it s necessary to do that if you are going to take
degrees here. Both you and papa told me to feel no
hesitation in coming home if I wanted to, and so
now that I have been here long enough to see I
have made an error, I write as I do. I am always
slow of comprehension, and if it has taken me a
long time to find this out, it s just that I am getting
experience rather slowly and stupidly. I have
not yet absolutely decided; If this appears to you
hasty or ill-advised, please let me know in the
shortest way possible.
CAMBRIDGE AND PARIS 33
Venezuela excites me horribly and my poor mind
is rather torn, as you may see by this somewhat
incoherent letter.
PARIS, January 6, 1896.
Since I last wrote you I have quieted down a
good deal more. I feel as if I had been through
three hideous weeks of madness and were become
on a sudden sane. You see the Venezuela affair
came on me on a sudden and filled me with such a
longing for home that I lost all pleasure in things
over here. So my poor mind whirled round and
round from one thing to another till I almost went
mad. Now Venezuela seems to be a danger only in
the future if at all, and I am realizing how much I
am getting here.
If papa is willing I should stay I can come back
with a good knowledge of German, Italian and
Spanish, and of Romance Philology and Middle
Age Literature all of which things I very much
need.
The thing which tore me worst in all this mental
struggle I have been going through was the con
tinual thought of money and my crying inability
34 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
to adapt myself to my time and to become a money
maker. I felt as if it was almost cowardly of me not
to turn in and leave all the things I love and the
world does n t, behind, and to adjust myself to my
age, and try to take its ideals and live strongly and
wholly in its spirit. It seems so useless being an
eternal malcontent. Unless one is a Carlyle, to
scream on paper generally ends in a thin squeak,
and I fought and fought to try to be more a man of
my age so that I might work with the tide and not
against it. But it s no use, I cannot stifle my own
self or alter it in that way. I said to myself that I
ought to go home in order to get into the tide of
American life if for nothing else; that I oughtn t to
be dreaming and shrieking inside and poetizing and
laboring on literature here in Paris, supported by
my father, and that I ought to go home and live
very hard making money. I said to myself that I
knew I could not be very quick at money-making,
but that at any rate in the eyes of men I should
lead a self-respecting life and my hideous, utter
failure would only be for myself and you, who
understand; But somehow all the while my soul
CAMBRIDGE AND PARIS 35
refused to believe the plain facts and illogically
clung to the belief that I might do some good in
creative work in the world after all, and so I
struggled with the facts and my faiths and loves
and there was the Devil of a row inside me and I
most wretched. Now it seems to me that my stay
ing here can do no harm, as I can just as well begin
to be 19th century next year as this, and I shall
have a very happy winter and acquire some know
ledge and much experience. And so now my mind
is comparatively calm and I am becoming happy
again and seeing things a little more in their proper
perspective.
Now like Marcus Aurelius I have come home to
my own soul and found there, I am glad to say,
sufficient strength and resource and calm to rees
tablish my equilibrium, and make me see how
cowardly it is not to have enough self-reliance to
bear such things as these with a tolerably good
grace. . . .
I might entitle this letter: "Of the entering,
passing through, and coming out of, the madness
of George Cabot Lodge." I really feel as if the
36 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
past two weeks were a great black hole in my life,
in which all my landmarks were blurred, and I
have just found them again.
PARIS, January 16, 1896.
I am now working principally on Romance Phi
lology, Spanish and Italian. I usually go to the
Bibliotheque in the morning and work on Spanish.
I am studying the history of the literature and
trying to read the most important things as I go
along. It is hard work reading the old Spanish of
the 12th to 15th centuries, but I am convinced it is
the only way to know the language or literature
really thoroughly. I also work on my Spanish
courses. In Italian I am reading Tiraboschi,
"Storia della litteratura Italiana," which of course
is the great history of the Italian literature. I also
work a good deal on Petrarch: he is one of my
courses, you know. Mr. Stickney sent to Italy for
me for a good edition of Dante, and when it comes
I shall begin the study of it. In the afternoon I go
to courses, and sometimes of course in the morn
ing too, and play billiards as a rule about five with
CAMBRIDGE AND PARIS 37
Joe, and in the evening work on my Romance
Philology. I have procured by good fortune a very
good dictionary of the old French.
Thus, you see, my work now is concentrated on
the Romance Languages and Literature, especially
before the 16th century. I shall keep on princi
pally on them, because I am sure by so doing I can
come home with a more or less thorough know
ledge of the Latin tongues and a little more than a
smattering of their literature. The Latin languages
attract me and I shall work hard on them. As for
German, I shall learn it if I can find time, but I
don t know. ... I see now that I must do the
best in me if I can; and if there is a best to do; and
at any rate I have n t the force or the weakness to
renounce everything without having one glorious
fight for what I want to do and believe is best to do.
It is this realization of my own self that has done
me most good, I think.
I went to the Franc.ais last night. It was the
birthday of Moliere and they gave the "ficole des
Femmes" and the "Malade Imaginaire," and
afterwards the ceremony of crowning the bust by
38 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
all the Societaires and pensionnairesof the Theatre.
It was most interesting. I think the best night of
theatre I ever had.
PARIS, January 27, 1896.
My languages get on very well. Italian and
Spanish I am really getting very smart in and read
with perfect ease, and I am sure when I come back
I shall know a good deal about the Romance Lan
guages. My German I am working on, and of
course it comes more slowly, but I think I can do it
all right.
PARIS, February 21, 1896.
I have just lived through the Carnival here,
which began on Saturday night with the bal de
Vopera (third of the name) and continued until
Wednesday morning. I took it in with consider
able thoroughness. There was the procession of
the Bceuf Gras the first time this has occurred
since the Franco-German war. It was very pretty
and the crowds in the street tremendous all
throwing paper confetti and long rolls of paper,
which one might throw across the boulevards.
CAMBRIDGE AND PARIS 39
\
Now the trees are all covered with long ribbons of
papers of all colors. It was a very pretty sight and
most amusing. I never imagined such a good-tem
pered crowd, and one so bound to have a good
time. I send by this mail a sort of programme with
an amusing picture by Caran D Ache. I was glad
of the Carnival. I think one gets into terrible ruts
and little habits close around one, and one gets
dull and mechanical. The Carnival just broke all
that up for me, and for three days I led a wholly
irregular life, that had a certain splendor in the un
expectedness of everything I did. . . .
C. and P. both wrote me very nice things about
my poems. I have just read over a lot and become
drearily conscious that they are far from deserving
any praise, so that it rather worries me to have
people so kind about them, as it seems as if I could
never live up to what they think I ought to do.
However, I have become an excellent critic of my
own work and diligently weed out from time to
time all that seems flat, so that I may some day
have something really poetry.
40 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
PARIS, April 5, 1896.
Here it s Easter Sunday and I have n t had a
happier day for a long time. The skies have been
bright blue and the sun pure gold, and the trees all
timidly "uttering leaves" everywhere, and so I
want to write to you. Early this morning Joe and I
went and rode horses in the Bois, which we had al
ready done last Sunday, and are going to do more
often. It was most marvellous all the little fresh
greening things looking out of the earth, and the
early sunlight coming wet and mild through the
trees, and the rare fresh air, and the sense of
physical glow and exercise.
I found an alley with about a dozen jumps in
it and whisked my old hired horse over the entire
lot, with the surprising result that he jumped
rather well, except the water-jump, into which
he flatly jumped, managing, however, to stand
up. Then I came home and read Petrarch and
Ronsard, and in the afternoon took a boat down
a bright blue Seine with white bridges spanning
it and a Louvre, etc., on either hand. I got off
CAMBRIDGE AND PARIS 41
at the He St. Louis, and "for the pure dramatic
effect, went into the "Doric little morgue" and
saw two terrible dead old women with the lower
jaw dropped on the withered breast and the green
of decomposition beginning about the open eyes.
Then I came out into the broad sunshine, with
that blessed Cathedral Apse in front of me, and its
little sun-filled garden with the old Gothic fountain
running pure water, and felt it was very good to
live. Then I went in and heard a splendid mass,
with the great organ rolling up by the front rose-
window, and saw the Host raised and the church
full (really full) of people fall on their knees, and
the thick incense come slowly out, and felt alas!
how far away I was from the substance of the
shadow of splendor I was feeling. But I was very
happy for all that, and wandered around some
more in the sunlight, and then came home, where I
am now writing to you.
This winter I have been realizing a copy-book
commonplace, which is at the same time a meta
physical profundity, viz.: that the present is all
42 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
that is and it is* not. One of the crowning meta
physical paradoxes. Of course the present is not.
While you are uttering "now," it is fled it never
existed. It is like a geometrical point, non-ex
istent. And the past that s the cruel thing, the
killing memories. Memories of yesterday, of the
moment just fled, which are as hopelessly dead, as
impossibly distant as memories of ten years gone.
The past is like a great pit, and the present like a
frittered edge which is continually crumbling and
falling utterly down into the pit. . . . For me
my past is all amoncele, nothing nearer, nothing far
ther. I have a more vivid memory of Sister with
long hair, driving old Rab up the side- walk by the
Gibsons at Nahant on a gray autumn day, than
of most things happened within the year. And my
memories are all sad sad with an infinite hope
less regret; that one of Sister for example has al
most made me cry. And then the present is the
past so facilely, so quickly, and I find myself some
times when I am not doing anything talking
perhaps or sitting idle or even reading, in fact
CAMBRIDGE AND PARIS 43
un pen toujours, suddenly turning sick and cold
and saying to myself, "See, your life goes, goes,
goes. Every day you get more memories to dwell
about you like mourning creatures, and still no
thing done with your youth, your strength, and
every minute the memories thickening and the
pain of them increasing, and still nothing done.
Man! Man! Your life is very short, already
twenty and two years; as many again, and you
will be hardened into your mould, and the mould
yet unmade! Up, up and do something!"
And the future it is the veriest of common
places to say the future does n t exist. It is nothing
but a probability at best a hope. And then did
it ever occur to you that the present is like a piece
of paper on which experience writes in invisible ink,
and that only when the heat of the pain of memory
and regret blfews upon it, do the characters come
out and you know how intensely alive, how happy,
or at any rate how miserable, or at least how un-
bored, you had been.
It seems to me all the happiness (except, of
44 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
course, physical) which we get is only the more or
less incomplete suggestion or partial realization
of some remembered happiness. For instance, the
slant of the western sun through green leaves some
times brings back one perfectly unimportant after
noon when I was very small, and Sister sat on the
grass under those willows, behind the little tool-
house in front of Mr. Locke s, and read a story
aloud to me.
She left off in the middle, and I can distinctly
remember the last words she said. Now when I
can get a vivid suggestion of something intensely
happy in my memory, infinitely richer and more
happy than I had any idea of when it occurred,
it makes me more happy than anything. Happi
ness is a continual thinking backward or forward,
memory or expectation.
This may all sound rather rhetorical, but I
assure you it is unintentional. If you knew how
intensely I have been feeling all this and much
more that I cannot express, you would know that
this is n t rhetoric, but pure crying out of the soul
such as I could only say to you.
CAMBRIDGE AND PARIS 45
Thousands of young people, of both sexes, pass
through the same experience in their efforts to
obtain education, in Paris or elsewhere, and are
surprised to find at the end, that their education
consists chiefly in whatever many-colored im
pressions they have accidentally or unconsciously
absorbed. In these their stock or capital of experi
ence is apt to consist, over and above such general
training as is the common stock of modern soci
ety; but most of them would find themselves puz
zled to say in what particular class of impression
their gain was greatest. Lodge would have said
at once that his gain was greatest in the friend
ship with young Stickney, to which the letters
allude.
Joseph Trumbull Stickney, who was then pre
paring his thesis for the unusual distinction of
doctorate at the Sorbonne, the University of
France, was a European in the variety and ex
tent of his education and the purest of Ameri
cans by blood, as his name proclaimed. Nearly of
Lodge s age, almost identical in tastes and con
victions, and looking forward to much the same
46 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
career, he and his companionship were among those
rare fortunes that sometimes bless unusually fa
vored youth when it needs, more than all else, the
constant contact with its kind.
CHAPTER III
EARLY in his college course, the young man had
acquired a taste for Schopenhauer. The charm of
Schopenhauer is due greatly to his clearness of
thought and his excellence of style, merits rare
among German philosophers, but another of
his literary attractions is the strong bent of his
thought towards Oriental and especially Buddhis
tic ideals and methods. At about the same time it
happened that Sturgis Bigelow returned to Boston
from a long residence in Japan, and brought with
him an atmosphere of Buddhistic training and
esoteric culture quite new to the realities of Boston
and Cambridge. The mystical side of religion had
vanished from the Boston mind, if it ever existed
there, which could have been at best, only in a
most attenuated form; and Boston was as. fresh
wax to new impressions. The oriental ideas were
full of charm, and the oriental training was full
48 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
of promise. Young Lodge, tormented by the old
problems of philosophy and religion, felt the influ
ence of Sturgis Bigelow deeply, for Bigelow was the
closest intimate of the family, and during the sum
mer his island of Tuckanuck, near Nantucket, was
the favorite refuge and resource for the Lodges. As
time went on, more and more of the young man s
letters were addressed to Bigelow.
Returning home after the winter of 1895-96 in
Paris, he found himself more than ever harrowed
by the conflict of interests and tastes. He went
to Newport in August, for a few days, and rebelled
against all its standards. "I hate the philistine-
plutocrat atmosphere of this place, and it tends
x
not to diminish my views anent modern civiliza
tion and the money power. I sincerely thank God
I shall never be a rich man, and never will I, if
my strength holds. The world cannot be fought
with its own weapons; David fought Goliath with
a sling, and the only way to kill the world is to fight
it with one s own toy sword or sling, and deny
strenuously contact with, or participation in, the
power it cherishes. Much more of the same nature
THE SONG OF THE WAVE 49
is yearning to be said, but I will spare you. ... If
I have n t it in me to write a poem, what a sordid
farce my life will be!" The expression is strong,
but in reality the young man had fairly reached the
point where his life was staked on literary success.
The bent of his energy was fixed beyond change,
and as though he meant deliberately to make
change impossible, he returned to Europe, to pass
the next winter, 1896-97, in Berlin.
A winter in Berlin is, under the best of circum
stances, a grave strain on the least pessimistic
temper, but to a young poet of twenty-two, fresh
from Paris, and exuberant with the full sense
of life and health, Berlin required a conscientious
sense of duty amounting to self-sacrifice, in order
to make it endurable. Socially it was complete
solitude except for the presence of Cecil Spring-
Rice, an old Washington intimate then in the
British Embassy. As a matter of education in art
or literature, the study of German had never been
thought essential to poets, or even to prose writers,
in the English language; and although, at about
the middle of the century, many of the best Eng-
50 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
lish and French authors, and some American, had
insisted that no trained student could afford to be
ignorant of so important a branch of human effort,
none had ever imposed it on their pupils as a
standard of expression. In that respect, a serious
devotion to the language was likely to do more
harm than good.
The New England conscience is responsible for
much that seems alien to the New England nature.
Naturally, young Lodge would have gone to Rome
to study his art, and no doubt he would have
greatly preferred it. He needed to fill out his edu
cation on that side, not on the side of Ger
many, and his future work suffered for want of
the experience. If he went to Berlin, he did it be
cause in some vague way he hoped that Germany
might lead to practical work. His letters show the
strenuous conscientiousness with which he labored
through the task.
TO HIS MOTHER
BERLIN, January, 1897.
It s a week now since I wrote you and I ve not
much more news than I had. I am very well off
THE SONG OF THE WAVE 51
here. All German bedrooms are bad and mine no
worse than the rest, I imagine large enough for
a bed and two tables for my books and papers, a
porcelain stove and bureau, washstand, etc. To be
sure, it has but one window, through which, by
leaning uncomfortably to one side, one can per
ceive the withered corner of a gray garden, but
otherwise facing a dirty wall of brick. But, as I
say, it seems this is a chronic malady of German
bedrooms, and besides I have the use of a very
pleasant front room where I work in the morning,
and afternoon, too, sometimes. The people here
are very nice, and eager to make me comfortable;
otherwise all my news is contained in the word
work. Nearer ten hours than eight of this have I
done every day written translations from Ger
man, reading of German Grammar, reading Schil
ler with the man or his Frau, talking, going to the
theatre, "Faust," "The Winter s Tale," very
good, and a translation of the "Dindon," etc. All
German, you observe, and in fact it seemed best
at first to let Greek and everything go, and devote
every energy to the acquisition of this tongue
52 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
infernally hard it is too. I found, right off, I did n t
know anything about it, and since then have really
made a good deal of progress.
It s wonderful how the soul clears itself up in
this sort of solitude in which I am living picks
up all the ravelled threads and weaves them care
fully together again, and gradually simplifies and
straightens itself out. All my life since last April
I have been going over, as I have some of my poems,
forcing the events into sequence and building a
sort of soul-history, fibrous and coherent. It s a
wonderful clearing out of refuse, and I feel strong
and self-reliant as I never did before. I have ac
quired the ability to write over poetry and work it
into shape, which is a great step forward, I believe,
and several of my poems have I been over in this
way with much advantage. And so I am almost
childlishly contented at getting back to an exist
ence of sleep and food at a minimum and work at
a maximum, and I really think I have never
worked harder or lived more utterly simply. And
oh! It is good with the entire spiritual solitude
and mental solitude that I abide in.
THE SONG OF THE WAVE 53
BERLIN, January 17, 1897.
I am now, after infinite pains and vast expense,
matriculate at the University here, with several
large and most beautiful diplomas certifying in
Latin that I am in fact matriculate. The diplomas
alone are worth the price of admission. It was
heavy, though four solid mornings work and
about 75 marks. First I went with the man I am
living with, and found I could n t hear any lectures
at all unless I did matriculate and that to matricu
late I had to have my degree from Cambridge,
which I had carefully left at home. Then the next
day I went to the Embassy and found Mr. Jack
son, who had very kindly written me a letter al
ready, saying he hoped I would come to see him
when I wanted to. Well, Mr. Jackson gave me a
letter certifying that I had a degree, and with this
and my passport I went again to the University,
and found I was too late that day and must come
the next. So the next this time alone I went
and passed oh, such a morning! First I sat in
a room while the Rector went over my papers; then
I and two Germans were called in to the Rector
54 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
and he gave us handsome degrees and swore us to
obedience to all the rules of the University, and
then we shook hands with him. Then some one
said, "Go to room 4." So I and the two Germans
went, and there they wrote my name and birth
place and papa s business, which I tried to explain
and failed, and so he is registered in the Berlin
University as anything from a coal-heaver up.
All this time my nerves were rasping like taxed
wires for fear I should n t understand what was
said to me.
And then I wrote my own name, birthplace, etc.,
in my own sweet hand in another big book, and
then was given a little card where I wrote my name
again, and a huge card filled with questions. When
I understood them I answered; when not, I put
"ja" and "nein" alternately. Then they said,
"Go to room 15." So I went and gave a man my
filled-out card and he wrote something which he
gave me and said, "Go to room 4 zurtick"; so I
went. There I got a book and another card, the
last one, and then I filled out all sorts of things
in the book and finally went to room 2, where I
THE SONG OF THE WAVE 55
paid out vast sums, got some receipts, and left,
a shattered man in mind and soul. The strain of
trying to understand and write correctly and being
always afraid you won t is really terrible. Then
to-day I had to go again to see the Dean of the
Philosophical Department in which I matriculated,
and he gave me another beautiful degree. And
now it s all over. I am an academischer Biirger,
and if the police try to arrest me all I ve got to do
is to show my card and they can t touch me. . . .
This place is gray, gray, gray. I have done a
constant stream of work, which has flowed in a
steady and almost uninterrupted course, with six
hours sleep-interval in the twenty-four. I have
been theatre-going a lot. I have seen a good deal
of Shakespeare, Schiller, and Sudermann.
BERLIN, January 26, 1897.
It is for the best my being here, of that rest as
sured. I am entirely convinced that it was and is
the very best thing possible for me in the circum
stances, and I find sufficient content and interest,
and especially work, to keep me far from stagnant.
56 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
As I wrote you, I feel a sense of increased strength
and reliance, which I don t explain and don t try
to. Sufficient that so it is. Much of my life have
I overlooked and condemned and profited by in
this solitude and I finally begin to feel a certain
strength that I trust will urge into expression fit
and simple and sufficient one day, and not be
trampled under in this awful struggle to acquire a
financial independence which I see is inevitable for
me. Writing prose is the only utterly depressing
thing I have done, and that, D. V., I shall learn by
mere gritting of teeth.
I ve this moment got back from Dresden, where
I ve been since Friday with Springy 1 a little va
cation. It s very pretty and the gallery very won
derful. Naturally there I spent my days, and twice
I went to the opera.
BERLIN, February 9, 1897.
I have written some new verse and written over
with much time and labor a good deal more old.
It s with the greatest difficulty that I can take any
1 Cecil Spring-Rice.
THE SONG OF THE WAVE 57
other form of literary endeavor seriously; and put
my heart in it, I can t. I live and breathe in an
atmosphere of imagination and verse here, all alone
when I am not a working-machine, and it s all
around me like a garment. It s hard to express
what I mean but the other day I went early to
the University and saw a radiant sunrise through
the snowy Thiergarten and sort of sang inside all
the rest of the day odd rhythms with here and
there a word. I was so content I did n t even want
to write down anything. I wonder if you have ever
had the feeling I suppose you have of having
a beautiful thing compose the scatteredness of
your mind into an order, a rhythm, so that you
think and feel everything rhythmically. My ex
pression is weak, but if you ve had it you ll know
what I mean.
I saw the whole of "Wallenstein" the other
day or rather in two successive evenings
first the "Lager" and the " Picolomini," and sec
ond evening the "Tod," which is certainly very
fine both dramatically and poetically, quite
the biggest German play I ve seen. I m reading
58 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
"Faust" with my teacher here, and admiring very
much of it.
BERLIN, February, 1897.
I have been reading over some of Schopenhauer
and Kant in the German and enjoying it im
mensely. I think the study and pursuit of pure
metaphysical thought makes a man more content
edly, peacefully happy than any other thing. There
is a white purity consisting in its utter lack of con
nection to the particular, in its entire devotion
to the pure, synthetical ideas which never touch
the feeling, individual world, which makes meta
physics the nearest approach to will-lessness, to
pure intellectual contemplation, that I know. And
of course, as all suffering is willful (in its essential
meaning) and emotional, pure intellectual contem
plation must be that privation of suffering in which
happiness consists for I become more than ever
convinced that in this world of evil and separation
happiness is only the privation of pain as good is
the privation of evil. Tis only the transcendent
emotion that you get in poetry or in great passions
such as pity and love, that can be called positive
THE SONG OF THE WAVE 59
happiness. Pity or love, I mean, so aggrandized
that the sense of individuality is lost in the feeling
of union with the whole where there is no space or
time or separation. That is, that only morally and
esthetically can one be positively happy all
other happiness must be simply the denial of pain.
Metaphysics is the completest expression of such
a denial, I think, and also with an almost esthetic
poetic value some times in some metaphysi
cians an undoubted poetic value, as for instance in
Plato and Schopenhauer. But it seems I am writ
ing you an essay on metaphysics, so I will stop.
BERLIN, February, late, 1897.
I am gradually digging a way into the language,
and you d be suprised at my fluent inaccuracy
in the German tongue, and I can write it pretty
well, too. Reading is thoroughly acquired, and I
am more than satisfied with my progress. I have
heard a good deal of music which always does me
good, though, as Joe tells me, I don t in the least
understand it. I saw the Emperor the other day for
the first time, and rather a fine strong face he has.
60 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
I really believe that nothing I ever did benefited
me as much as has this short time here. I have
grown more rigid and surer of myself, and withal
have acquired a certain capacity and love of a great
deal of work, which I never had before, and which
is only surpassed by my love of not doing work
after I have done a great deal. My poetry, I think,
shows that I have tried to hope so. Please tell
me if you think any of the things I sent you show
a clearer, firmer touch than before. As I say, I try
to think so and almost feel sometimes as if it
really was in me after all to speak a strong sincere
word clearly for men to hear; but then, on the other
hand, whiles I think I am going to dry up, and in
my perfectly lucid moments, I see with a ghostly
distinctness how far short all my work falls of what
I seem sometimes to know as an ideal.
The dear Springy came to see me yesterday and
I had a good talk with him and subsequently dined
with him. I Ve seen very little of him this month,
as society has been on the rampage, and he has
rampaged with it perforce. He went to London
for a week to-day, but when he comes back, the
THE SONG OF THE WAVE 61
world will be quiet and I expect to see a great
deal of him.
The German experience added little or nothing
to his artistic education, for Schopenhauer can be
studied anywhere, and neither Goethe nor Schiller
needs to be read in Berlin; but his letters show that
his enforced, solitary labor during this winter threw
him back upon himself, and led him to publish his
work before he fairly knew in what direction his
strength lay. During these three years of post-grad
uate education he had toiled, with sure instinct, to
learn the use of his tools, and chiefly of his tongue.
All art-students must go through this labor, and
probably the reason why so many young poets
begin by writing sonnets is that the sonnet is the
mode of expression best adapted for practice; it
insists on high perfection in form; any defect or
weakness betrays itself, and the eye can cover four
teen lines at once without too great an effort. Lodge
liked the labor of sonnet- writing, and it taught him
the intricacies of language and the refinements of
expression which every literary artist must try at
62 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
!/ least to understand, even when he does not choose
to practise them; but, at heart, Lodge was less a
poet than a dramatist, though he did not yet know
it; and the dramatic art is the highest and most ex
acting in all literature. The crown of genius belongs
only to the very rare poets who have written
successful plays. They alone win the blue ribbon
of literature. This was the prize to which Lodge,
perhaps unconsciously, aspired, and his labor in
sonnet-writing, however useful as training in verse,
was no great advantage for his real purpose, even
though he had Shakespeare for his model.
On the other hand, the lack of society in a man
ner compels the artist to publish before he is ready.
The artist, living in a vacuum without connection
with free air, is forced by mere want of breath to
cry out against the solitude that stifles him; and
the louder he cries, the better is his chance of
attracting notice. The public resents the outcry,
but remembers the name. A few very few
readers appreciate the work, if it is good, on its
merits; but the poet himself gets little satisfac
tion from it, and, ten years afterwards, will pro-
THE SONG OF THE WAVE 63
bably think of it only as a premature effort of his
youth.
To this rule a few exceptions exist, like Swin
burne s "Poems and Ballads," where the poet, at
the first breath, struck a note so strong and so new
as to overpower protest; but, as a rule, recognition
is slow, and the torpor of the public serves only to
discourage the artist, who would have saved his
strength and energy had he waited. When young
Lodge returned from Germany in the summer of
1897, he felt himself unpleasantly placed between
these two needs, that of justifying his existence,
on the one hand, and that of challenging prema
ture recognition, on the other. He chose boldly to
assert his claims to literary rank, and justified his
challenge by publishing, in the spring of 1898, the
volume of a hundred and thirty-five pages, called
"The Song of the Wave."
Here are some eighty short poems, one half of
which are sonnets, and all of which reflect the long
tentative, formative effort of the past five years.
Most of them have a personal character, like " The
Song of the Wave" itself, which has been already
64 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
quoted. From a simple, vigorous nature like
Lodge s, one would have expected, in a first effort,
some vehement or even violent outburst of self-as
sertion; some extravagance, or some furious protest
against the age he lived in; but such an attitude is
hardly more than indicated by the dedication to
Leopardi. The exordium, "Speak, said my soul!"
expresses rather his own need of strength and the
solitude of his ambitions:
Speak! thou art lonely in thy chilly mind,
With all this desperate solitude of wind,
The solitude of tears that make thee blind, ,
Of wild and causeless tears.
Speak! thou hast need of me, heart, hand and head,
Speak, if it be an echo of thy dread,
A dirge of hope, of young illusions dead,
Perchance God hears!
Most of these poems are echoes of early youth,
of the ocean, of nature: simple and vigorous ex
pressions of physical force, with an occasional re
currence to Schopenhauer and Leopardi; but the
verses that most concern the artist are those which
show his effort for mastery of his art, and his pro
gress in power of expression. He scattered such
THE SONG OF THE WAVE 65
verses here and there, for their own sake, on nearly
every page, as most young poets do, or try to do,
and such verses are more or less a measure, not only
of his correctness of ear, but of his patient labor.
Take, for instance, the first half-dozen lines of
"The Gates of Life," which happens to be written
in a familiar metre:
Held in the bosom of night, large to the limits of wonder,
Close where the refluent seas wrinkle the wandering sands,
Where, with a tenderness torn from the secrets of sorrow, and
under
The pale pure spaces of night felt like ineffable hands,
The weak strange pressure of winds moved with the moving of
waters,
Vast with their solitude, sad with their silences, strange with
their sound,
Comes like a sigh from the sleep . . .
This metre seems to call for excessive elabora
tion of phrase; a few pages further, the poet has
tried another metre which repels all such refine
ments; it is called "Age," and begins: -
Art thou not cold ?
Brother, alone to-night on God s great earth ?
The two last stanzas run:
66 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
Shalt thou not die,
Brother ? the chill is fearful on thy life,
Shalt thou not die ?
Is this a lie ?
This threadbare hope of death ?
A lie, like God, and human love, and strife
For pride, and fame, this soiled and withered wreath.
Art thou not cold ?
Brother ? alone on God s great earth to-night;
Art thou not cold ?
Art thou not old
And dying and forlorn ?
Art thou not choking in the last stern fight
While in divine indifference glows the morn ? "
The sonnet, again, offers a different temptation.
The verses tend of their own accord to group them
selves about the favorite verse. The first sonnet in
this series begins with what Mrs. Wharton calls
the magnificent apostrophe to Silence:
Lord of the deserts, twixt a million spheres,
and need go no further; the rest of the lines infalli
bly group themselves to sustain the level of the
first. So, the sonnet to his own Essex begins with
the singularly happy line,
THE SONG OF THE WAVE 67
Thy hills are kneeling in the tardy spring,
which leads to an echo in the last verse:
We know how wanton and how little worth
Are all the passions of our bleeding heart
That vex the awful patience of the earth.
The sonnet to his friend Stickney after reading
the twelfth-century Roman of "Amis and Amile,"
begins :
And were they friends as thou and I are friends,
in order to work out the personal touch of their
common ambition:
Ah, they who walked the sunshine of the world,
And heard grave angels speaking through a dream,
Had never their unlaurelled brows defiled,
Nor strove to stem the world s enormous stream.
The form of the sonnet tends to carry such
verbal or personal refinements to excess; they be
come labored; perhaps particularly so in denun
ciation, like the sonnet, "Aux Modernes," which
begins :
Only an empty platitude for God;
and ends with the line,
The hard, gray, tacit distances of dawn.
68 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
Such work marks the steps of study and attain
ment rather than attainment itself, as the second
"Nirvana" marks effort:
TO W. STURGIS BIGELOW
December 10, 1897.
I will trouble you with this poem, which here I
send to you. I wrote it without correction in half
an hour before dinner, and I feel of it, as I have felt
of so many of my things, that no one will under
stand it except you; also I know it s my fault and
not theirs that no one will understand it my im
plements are still so rude my ideas seem lumi
nous and limpid while they are wordless, and, I
think, owing to practice, most ideas come to me
now wordless but in words they become crude,
misty, and imperfect; whiles I feel quite hopeless.
But you have been there, have seen vividly all
I Ve half perceived and you can supply my lapses
in coherency. This was, I think, the result of an
hour s practice last night. Certainly if it has a
merit, it is that I have not been economical in this
poem, every word seems to me now over-full with
THE SONG OF THE WAVE 69
meaning. My soul has gone into the writing of it
and, good Lord, it s melancholy to feel how it
might have been said luminously and unavoid
ably and how it is said Well! perhaps, some
day! . . . if I could only be with you to try to tell
you all I have endeavored to say in these fourteen
lines !
NIRVANA
Woof of the scenic sense, large monotone
Where life s diverse inceptions, Death and Birth,
Where all the gaudy overflow of Earth
Die they the manifold, and thou the one.
Increate, complete, when the stars are gone
In cinders down the void, when yesterday
No longer spurs desire starvation-gray,
When God grows mortal hi men s hearts of stone;
As each pulsation of the heart divine
Peoples the chaos, or with falling breath
Beggars creation, still the soul is thine!
And still, untortured by the world s increase,
Thy wide harmonic silences of death.
And last thy white, uncovered breast of peace!
I will now, as did Michael Angelo, add a com
mentary:
Nirvana is the woof on which sense traces its
70 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
scenic patterns; it is the one, the monotone upon
which death and birth, both inceptions, in that
death is merely the beginning of changed condi
tions of life, and "the gaudy overflow of earth"
that is, all finite things and emotions sing their
perishable songs and, as rockets disperse their
million sparks which die on the universal night-
blackness, so they die and leave the constant un
changing monotone. Nirvana is in-create because
never created, and of course complete. Yesterday
spurs desire to a state of starvation-grayness be
cause desire and hope look back on every yesterday
as a renewed disappointment. The phrase meant
life. " When God grows mortal in men s hearts of
stone," has two meanings, first that when men
grow unbelieving God perishes God being the
creature of belief; and second that Nirvana endur-
eth when God himself perishes. The next three
lines are an embodiment of the idea that with every
beat of the heart divine a cosmos swells into exist
ence, and with every subsiding of this heart it
sinks, perishes into nothingness. Also from line
five to line eleven means that after everything and
THE SONG OF THE WAVE 71
through everything the soul is still Nirvana s, if I
can so express myself; thus reiterating the idea
suggested in the first quatrain, that the condition
of the finite is separateness and of the spiritual,
unity; and that all life, though clothed in diverse
forms, holds in it the identical soul which is Nir
vana s, attained or potential. The world s increase
is of course the cycle of life and death in its largest
sense. This is of course a mere shadowing forth of
the ideas I had in writing the poem. You will see
their possible amplifications.
January, 1898.
Poetry is an absolute necessity for me, but when
I think of dumping a volume of verse that nobody
will read on to a gorged world, I say to myself:
"A quoi bon?" The foolish publisher will have to
be found first, however, so I don t worry. Does
the enclosed ("The Wind of Twilight Tucka-
nuck") say anything to you? The long things
(Oh, be thankful) are too long to send, so I send
this. I ve done several of these sorts of things
lately.
72 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
To the cold critic, this stage of an artist s life is
the most sympathetic, and the one over which he
would most gladly linger. He loves the youthful
freshness, the candor, the honest workmanship, the
naif self-abandonment of the artist, in proportion
as he is weary of the air of attainment, of clever
ness, of certainty and completion. He would, for
his own amusement, go on quoting verse after
verse to show how the artist approaches each
problem of his art, what he gains; what he sac
rifices; but this is the alphabet of criticism, and
can be practised on Eginetan marbles or early
Rembrandts better than on youthful lyrics. The
interested reader has only to read for himself.
CHAPTER IV
WAR AND LOVE
IN January, 1898, young Lodge was in Wash
ington, acting as secretary to his father, varying
between office-work all day and composition the
greater part of the night. The outbreak of the
Spanish War drew him at once into the govern
ment service, and he obtained a position as cadet
on board his uncle Captain Davis s ship, the
Dixie. During the three summer months that
this war in the tropics lasted, he had other things
than poems to think about, and his letters convey
an idea that perhaps the life of naval officer actu
ally suited his inherited instincts best.
TO HIS MOTHER
FORTRESS MONROE, May, 1898.
Here I am and here I rest until Saturday, when
the ship will probably sail. I am, and feel like, a
perfect fool. Everybody knows everything and I
74 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
don t know anything; but they are kind and I
guess I shall get on when the thing gets fairly
started. I went over and saw the ship to-day
and she is fine at any rate while I am here in
this business, I am going to learn all I can.
NEWPORT NEWS, May 20, 1898.
I am getting on as well as possible and learning
a good deal all the time. There is plenty of room
for learning. These great golden days go over me,
and it seems as if all the real imaginative side of
me was under lock and key. The practical things
occupy me entirely.
FORTRESS MONROE, June 2, 1898.
We have been taking on coal all day, and before
it s all aboard we shall be chock-full. Uncle Harry
has got orders to be ready to sail at a moment s no
tice, and he is going to telegraph to-night that he
is all ready. I hope it may mean that we are to be
moved out of here very soon toward the scene of
action. A day or two ago we went out for thirty-
six hours and fired all the big guns. I fired both
mine myself, and was surprised to find the shock
WAR AND LOVE 75
not at all serious. The whole process was very
interesting, and I shall try to remember it all and
be able to tell you all about it when I get back. I
get on pretty well. There is one thing I am con
vinced of and that is that I can make my gun
crews fight and my guns effective, and that is after
all the principal thing.
The internal condition of Spain makes me be
lieve that the war must end soon. I only hope it
will last long enough to insure our possession of
Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines, and give
me one fight for my money.
OFF CIENFUEGOS, CUBA, June 25, 1898.
We reached the squadron the day after I wrote
from Mole St. Nicolas, and were immediately
sent down here to patrol. In fact, the Admiral
gave Uncle Harry discretion to do pretty much
what he ple ased. We came down and on our way
destroyed two block-houses which were at the
southern end of the Trocha. The next day we en
gaged a battery at a place called Trinidad, and
yesterday we engaged the same battery, a gun-
76 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
boat in the harbor, and a gun-boat that came out
at us, and used them up pretty badly. So you see
I am in it. Nothing very serious so far, but still we
have been under fire and have killed a good many
Spaniards. It is a most beautiful coast all along
here, great splendid hills close to the water s edge,
and splendid vegetation. The weather has been
hot, but very fine and to me excessively pleasant,
and I am quite happy to be on the scene of action
and in the way of seeing all that s going. My two
guns have behaved very well and I have had sev
eral very nice compliments from the First Lieu
tenant. We relieved the Yankee here and she
goes to-day to Key West for coal, which gives me
a chance to send this letter. I really enjoy the life
immensely, far more than I thought I should
the work interests me, and I am learning a good
deal every day. Last night Uncle Harry and I
dined with Captain Brownson on the Yankee and
it was very interesting.
August, 1898.
Many thanks for your letter which I have just
got to-day. I am more than delighted we are going
WAR AND LOVE 77
to Spain. We came up from Cape Cruz on the 6th
and saw the wrecks of the Spanish fleet lying up on
the beach below Santiago a great sight. It s a
great business to be here and see the wheels go
round and be a wheel one s self, even if not a very
big one. I am very glad on the whole I came as a
cadet and not as an ensign, for as a cadet I am not
supposed to know anything, which puts me in a
true position and not a false one. None of these
militia officers know any more than I do, and they
are in false positions. Anyway, I do a lot of work
and I think accomplish something. It hardly
seems as if the war could last now, and I only
hope it will hang on long enough to give us a
whack at Camara and the Spanish coast.
Yesterday we got the first ice we have had since
June 15, and to-day the first mail since we left Old
Point.
U. S. S. DIXIE, August 5, 1898.
We left Guantanamo after having coaled, and
went to Puerto Rico with the troops. On the way
we were detached from the convoy and sent all
round the island to hunt up transports, and so we
78 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
did not get to Guanica until after the army had
landed. We got there in the morning, and that
afternoon we were sent with the Annapolis and the
Wasp Uncle Harry 1 being the senior officer
down to Ponce, Puerto Rico. We got there about
four and went peacefully into the harbor. Then
Uncle Harry sent Mr. Merriam 2 in to demand
the surrender of the place, and I went along. We
landed under a flag of truce, and found that there
was a Spanish Colonel with about 300 men, who
said he would "die at his post." He was back in
the town, which is about two miles inland. How
ever, during the night delegates came off and sur
rendered the town, on condition that the troops be
allowed to withdraw, which we granted, and at six
o clock the next morning, we went in again and I
myself raised the flag over the office of the Captain
of the Port, amid immense enthusiasm of the popu
lace. Haines, 3 the marine officer, was put in charge
with a file of marines, and put guards and sentries
1 Captain Davis, commanding the Dixie.
2 Lieutenant and executive officer of the Dixie.
1 Lieutenant of Marines on the Dixie.
WAR AND LOVE 79
on the Customs House and other public places; and
then two other officers and I got into a carriage,
with a Puerto Rican friend, and drove up to the
town.
It was most picturesque. The town had been
deserted fearing a bombardment, and from every
nook and corner crowds appeared cheering and
crying, "Viva los conquistadores Americanos";
"Viva el Puerto Rico libre." We drove through the
town, the crowd and enthusiasm increasing always,
and finally returned and got Haines, who had for
mally delivered the town to General Miles when he
landed. . . . We then went back to Ponce with
Haines. We were taken to the club and to the
headquarters of the fire-brigade everywhere
amid yelling mobs. While we were there I heard
that there were some political prisoners confined
in the City Hall. I told Haines, who was senior
officer, and he went over to see about liberating
them.
Ponce is the largest town in Puerto Rico, about
40,000 people. The City Hall stands at one end of
a great square about as large as Lafayette
80 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
Square. In it is the Mayor s office and the court
room, with a dais and throne where the judges sat.
There Haines liberated sixteen political prisoners;
for the army, though supposed to be in possession
of the town, had not taken the City Hall. Finding
this to be the case, I got an American flag and told
Haines I was going to raise it over the City Hall. I
then went onto the roof where the flag-staff was,
taking with me the Mayor of Ponce. There with
great solemnity, the Mayor and I bare-headed, I
raised the flag. The whole square was swaying
with people, and as the flag went up they cheered
such a noise as I never heard. Then the Mayor
and I went below and the Mayor presented me
with his staff of office, the Spanish flag which flew
over the City Hall, and the banner of Ponce, and
formally delivered over to me his authority. I sent
to the barracks where were our soldiers, and got
some over to occupy the City Hall. I then, with
great ceremony, gave back to the Mayor his badge
of office and the town of Ponce. Shortly after we
left.
WAR AND LOVE 81
GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA, August 10, 1898.
I got your letter just a day or two ago, and
mighty glad I was to get it. The flagship has just
signalled "Associated Press dispatch states that
peace protocol has been arranged." I suppose this
is the end. If so, if hostilities cease and peace is
eventually certain, I wish you would find out if
the Dixie is to be put out of commission. I sup
pose it will take three or four months to patch
up the treaty and have it ratified, and if the Dixie
is to lie here or convoy transports during that time,
I should like very much to be detached and ordered
home on waiting orders, until my resignation is
sent in and accepted. I suppose there would be no
trouble about this. I came for the war, and as this
is n t and never will be my life when the war is over,
I want to get home as soon as possible, and pick
up life again where I left off. Of course if the Dixie
is to be put right out of commission, I should much
prefer to go out of active service with the ship, and
I should think that the Department would not
wish to keep these auxiliary ships, manned with
militia, in service any longer than was absolutely
82 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
necessary. Well, I have learned a good deal and I
am mighty glad I came. I have n t seen as much
fighting as some, but I have had my share of the
fun, I think, and anyway one does one s best and
takes the chances of war. I really think I have
made myself useful, and at least have not encum
bered or hurt the service by coming, and that s as
much as an amateur can hope for. Anyway I ve
worked hard. I shall have a great story to tell you
about Ponce, of which "Magna pars fui," and I
have got some splendid trophies. I have had a
good time and am happy now; but as peace grows
more certain I long to get home and see you all
again. It seems an enormous stretch of time since
I left you.
Extract from a letter of CAPTAIN DAVIS to H. c. L.
July 20, 1898.
. . . He [G. C. L.] shows unbounded zeal and
unflagging industry, and a great aptitude for the
profession. He has already developed the real
sailor s trick of being always the first on hand. No
one has ever been known to say, "Where is Mr.
WAR AND LOVE 83
Lodge ? " This is not the encomium of a fond uncle.
I see very little of him on duty except in working
ship, when his station is near mine. He is a daily
companion to me in hours of leisure, but on duty
he is the First Lieutenant s man, and I notice he is
always called on for duty where promptness and
intelligence are required. I could give you a much
higher estimate of his usefulness if I quoted Mer-
riam, than in recording my own observation.
Brought back again to the chronic divergence
between paths of life, the young man struggled as
he best could to assert his mastery over his own
fate, and developed a persistence of will that
amounted to primitive instinct rather than to rea
soning process. Constantly he threw himself with
all his energy in the direction which led away
from the regular paths of modern activity. He was
familiar with them all, if only as Secretary of a
Senate Committee, and he read science quite as
seriously as poetry, but when he came to action he
always widened the gap between himself and his
world. "The Song of the Wave" was his first
84 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
public act of divorce. Only the difficulty of find
ing a publisher prevented him from taking a tone
much more hostile to society, in novels, which he
wrote and burned one after another, because they
failed to satisfy him. His letters to his early friend,
Marjorie Nott, have much to say of this phase
of mind. On September 12, 1899, he wrote from
Tuckanuck :
TO MISS MARJORIE NOTT
Why do your letters make me so needlessly
happy ! I think it s because you believe in so much
and because I do too, and need to have some one
to tell me that it is so. Not that I doubt, what
would my life be if I doubted ! No, it s only that
pretty much everybody believes 1 5 m a crank or a
fool, or asks when I m going to begin to do some
thing; to which question, by the way, I invari
ably respond never! and oh! it s so good not to
be on the defensive, not to feel the good anger
rising in you, and step on it because you know they
won t understand; not to suffer with the desire to
insult the whole world; to lay its ugliness naked;
WAR AND LOVE 85
to say: "There, there! don t you see all the dust
and ashes that we re all admiring? don t you
see? don t you understand? " And then not say it,
because you know they can t see, and they won t
understand. Ah, yes! it s so good to sit here, and
write all this rot to you, and think that you ll
know, that you ll understand. Is n t it horrible to
get your mind twisted into cheap cynicisms while
the tears are falling in your heart? and it s what we
have to do, nous autres ! I shall certainly end
in publishing my book if I can find a bold enough
publisher. The temptation is too immense. I know
they won t understand, and yet I m young enough
to hope they will. Do you remember the book I
talked to you of last winter? Well, that s it! I ve
done it over again, and well! I don t know! I
don t know why I write all this. I am here so calm,
with my brother the sun and my sister the sea,
by the way, Tuckanuck, and I feel as if I was
anywhere except in the hither end of the nine
teenth century; and my book, I don t think of it
at all here. I write verse now nothing else.
86 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
Naturally, since man or bird began to sing, he
has sung to the woman, or the female. The male
is seldom a sympathetic listener; he prefers to do
his own singing, or not to sing at all. He is not
much to blame, but his indifference commonly ends
by stifling the song, and the male singer has to
turn to the female, or perish. In America, the male
is not only a bad listener, but also, for poetry, a
distinctly hostile audience; he thinks poorly of
poetry and poets, so that the singer has no choice
but to appeal to the woman. That young Lodge
should have done so with an intensity proportioned
to the repression of his instinct for sympathy and
encouragement elsewhere, was inevitable. Poets
have always done it, but they have not shown by
any means the surest instinct of poetry in their
affairs of love, so that perhaps a woman who should
criticise their work might feel tempted to use this
test as the surest proof of force or failure in their
instinct for art. By such a test, young Lodge would
take rank among the strongest. Little credit is due
to any man for yielding to altogether extraordin
ary beauty and charm in the perfection of femin-
WAR AND LOVE 87
ine ideals, although few men do it, but it is
far from being a rule that young men who rebel
against the world s standards, and with infinite
effort set up a standard of private war on the
world, and maintain it with long and exhausting
endurance, should go directly into the heart of the
society they are denouncing, and carry off a wo
man whom lovers less sensitive to beauty, and less
youthful in temperament, than poets or artists,
might be excused for adoring.
Elizabeth Davis another survival of rare
American stock: Davis of Plymouth, Frelinghuy-
sen of New Jersey, Griswold of Connecticut, with
the usual leash of Senators, Cabinet officers, and
other such ornaments, in her ancestry was in
truth altogether the highest flight of young Lodge s
poetry, as he constantly told her when her own
self-confidence naturally hesitated to believe it;
and since his letters to her strike a note which rises
high above the level of art or education, they can
not be wholly left out of his life. The man or wo
man who claims to be a poet at all, must prove
poetry to the heart, and neither Shakespeare nor
88 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
Shelley can be exempted from the proof, neither
Dante nor Petrarch, whatever their society
might think about it.
Lodge s letters began in March, 1899, when he
was starting with his father and mother on a trip
to Europe, which led to Sicily. From New York he
wrote to bid good-bye ; the engagement was not
yet avowed. And from Rome, a month later:
TO MISS DAVIS
I saw the grave of Keats the other day, and also
of Shelley. It was a very keen sensation more
living, I think, than anything I have felt since
you. My life is happy here, but my soul is very
dolorous and strenuous. In life nothing resolves
itself well. If a good issue is to come to anything,
so much must be struggled with and sacrificed, so
much confusion and distress, before serenity comes !
When one is very young, it does n t seem fitting.
One wants so much ! Heaven and Earth is hardly
enough for the large desire of youth, and the gates
of possible expansion close one by one, until at last
one runs through the last one just closing, without
WAR AND LOVE 89
perhaps its being the right one. The period of
choice is very short; then comes the short, sharp
stab of necessity, and then one has made one s
bed, and one must lie in it. It s all very eager and
restless, and perhaps better for being so.
From Rome in April he wrote:
"One makes oneself so very largely, and to
make oneself greater or better, one must believe.
Apply your religion: "Thy faith has made thee
whole!" That s the most wonderful thing Christ
ever said, and it applies everywhere in life. Be
lieve in yourself! it should be so easy for you. I
do it, and it is of course far harder for me, for
I ve less to believe in.
The young people had much need to believe in
themselves, for, in a worldly point of view, they
had not much else to believe in. He wrote in July:
TO HIS MOTHER
BOSTON, July, 1899.
I am almost crazed with the desire to be inde
pendent, and yet I won t do anything that I don t
90 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
approve and I won t give up my writing, God will
ing. I must keep at it and accomplish what I can in
my own way. I feel sure it s the only way for me,
and I know my intention is not low, whatever my
performance may be. I feel desperate sometimes
that it all comes so slowly and that I do no better;
but I grit my teeth and keep at it. The agony
of getting a thought into adequate expression is
enormous. However, I feel so much resolution
that I take heart, and now, too, I see my path
clearer ahead of me. I must write and write, and
as I say, I believe my purposes are good.
TUCKANUCK, September, 1899.
I have n t written for a long time, I am afraid,
but since I have been here the last ten days I
have been so happy in the sun and sea that I
have n t written to any one at all and have hardly
done any work. I have just lived very happily. I
have begun to write a tragedy in verse, and it s
terrible work and not very encouraging. However,
I get along I have in my head also a plot for a
prose play, very good, I think, and some other
WAR AND LOVE 91
things besides. Indeed my mind is quite fertile,
and physically I am in splendid condition. I got a
letter from Mr. Stedman this morning, who is
preparing an anthology of American poets and
wants to put me in it. J apporte un bagage assez
mince, but still if he can find anything he wants
to print he is welcome to it.
A few days afterwards, he wrote from Boston:
TO MISS DAVIS
To get away, very far from all this greasy gos
sip, this world of little motives and little desires !
We must do it very soon. Only men who live in the
constant strain of feeling alone against the world
are forced to concentrate their passions on an ob
ject that seems to them above the world.
CHAPTER V
MARRIAGE
NATURALLY, life cannot be lived in heroics. The
man who places himself out of line with the cur
rent of society sees most the ridiculous or grotesque
features of his surroundings, and finds most in
them to laugh at. The conviction that either he or
society is insane, or perhaps, both, becomes
a fixed idea, with many hunorous sides; and
though the humor tends to irony and somewhat
cruel satire, it is often genial and sometimes play
ful. Young Lodge laughed with the rest, at the
world or himself by turns. When Bigelow re
belled at his anarchic handwriting, he replied:
TO W. STURGIS BIGELOW
Ballade d ung excellent poete au Sieur Bigelow au sujet d ung
certain plaint dudit Sieur Bigelow a luy addresse.
BALLADE
I
I like to see the phrases flow
So smooth in writing round and plain
Pooh! Hang the time and trouble! Though
^ It gave me fever on the brain
MARRIAGE 93
And caused intolerable pain
In hand and wrist you set at nought
The beautiful, and still maintain
That writing must be slave to thought.
ii
I wrote for beauty and I know
That beauty is its own best gain;
"Art for art s sake," I cried, and so
My unintelligible train
Of words was writ you grew insane
Trying to read them, for you sought
A meaning and you swore again
That writing must be slave to thought.
in
You held the sheet above, below
Your head, and every nerve did strain
To read, and from your lips did go
Grim curses manifold as rain.
You should have known your toil was vain;
For Art s sole sake my writing wrought;
I scorned the axiom with disdain
That writing must be slave to thought.
IV
Prince, speak! Does anything remain
Now art is gone? No sense you ve caught!
Then tell not me, the pure inane,
That writing must be slave to thought.
Fin de la Ballade d ung excellent poete au Sieur Bigelow. Com-
posee et mise en escript ce neuvieme Decembre A. D. MDCCCXCIX.
04 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
From Washington, on April 28, he wrote again
to Bigelow:
Well! the point is here! one should learn that
it is not life that should be taken seriously, but liv
ing. In that way, one gets pleasure if not happi
ness. I wish I was going to Tuckanuck with you
right off; but I m not, and I have yards and miles
of drudgery that maketh the heart sick. I ve got
to write another play before June. I have written
several this winter, all on a steadily decreasing
scale of merit, and I hope this one will be bad
enough to be successful. The trees are full of
leaves, and the air full of sun, and only I am vile.
I wish I could pretend it was all somebody else s
fault, but I can t. Voilhl
A successful play needs not only to be fairly bad
in a literary sense, but bad in a peculiar way which
had no relation with any standard of .badness that
Lodge could reach. He toiled in vain*
When one is twenty-six years old, splendid in
health and strength, and still more splendid in
MARRIAGE 95
love, one enjoys the exuberant energy of complaint
with a Gargantuan appetite:
TO W. STURGIS BIGELOW
WASHINGTON, May 16, 1900.
Here it has been as high as 106 Why don t
you go to Tuckanuck? I would if I could, Gawd
knows. It is of course self-evident to you as it is to
me, that in the event of one s absence the world
will cease to function, but then who the Devil
cares whether it functions or not? Not you, nor yet
I. I would willingly barter the tattered remnants
of a devilish tried soul to be under one of the great
waves on the outside beach and, please Heaven, I
soon shall be doing it. Meanwhile I grovel along
in the living heat which I like, and do all the work
that s in me but after these months of it, the
supply is running a little short, I m afraid. I sup
pose I am here for about three weeks more and
then, with your permission, kind Sir! surf, Sir! and
sun, Sir! and nakedness! Oh, Lord! how I want
to get my clothes off alone in natural solitudes.
In this heavy springtime I grow to feel exquisitely
96 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
pagan, and worship the implacable Aphrodite, and
read Sappho (with considerable difficulty) in the
Greek.
From the beginnings of life, the poet and artist
have gone on, surprising themselves always afresh
by the discovery that their highest flights of poetry
and art end in some simple and primitive emotion;
but the credit of seeing and feeling it is the best
proof of the poet. In his next volume of Poems,
published in 1902, two years afterwards, he put
these emotions into verse, "for E. L.," no
longer Elizabeth Davis but Elizabeth Lodge.
She moves in the dusk of my mind, like a bell with the sweet
ness of singing
In a twilight of summer fulfilled with the joy of the sadness of
tears;
And the calm of her face, and the splendid, slow smile are as
memories clinging
Of songs and of silences filling the distance of passionate years.
She moves in the twilight of life like a prayer in a heart that is
grieving,
And her youth is essential and old as the spring and the fresh
ness of spring;
MARRIAGE 97
And her eyes watch the world and the little low ways of the
sons of the living,
As the seraph might watch from the golden grave height of his
heaven-spread wing.
The variations on this oldest of themes are end
less, and yet are eternally new to some one who dis
covers them afresh; so that very slight differences
of expression have artistic value. So, for example,
the sonnet beginning :
Why are you gone? I grope to find your hand.
Why are you gone? The large winds seaward-bound,
Tell of long journeying in the endless void.
Why are you gone? I strain to catch the sound
Of footsteps, watch to see the dark destroyed
Before your lustrous fingers that would creep
Over my eyes, and give me strength to sleep.
One does not venture to suggest a famous line of
a great poet for the sake of imitating the art, but
one does it readily for the sake of rivalling the
feeling. "You and I have gone behind the scenes
and beyond, where all is light. I say, grip my
hand always, for it is always laid in yours. Get
from me some of the joy you give, some of the
98 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
light and strength. I am overflowing with love,
which is force, and you must take from me for my
sake. Everywhere there is love, vast treasures of
love, that people deny and conceal, but cannot
kill, and in the earth and sea also. I am there for
you, and love is there!"
All this is the purest sentiment, and yet young
Lodge was not sentimental, and especially disliked
sentimentality in literature. He would have ruth
lessly burned any verse that offered to him the
suggestion of sentimentalism. His idyll was in
tense because it was as old and instinctive as na
ture itself, and as simple. If he ever approached
a sentimental expression, it was in the relation
between parent and child, not between lover and
mistress. Love was to him a passion, and a very
real one, not capable of dilution or disguise. Such
passions generally have their own way, and force
everything to yield. The marriage took place in
Boston, August 18, 1900. True to his instinct of
shrinking from close and serious contact with the
forms and conventions of a society which was to him
neither a close nor a serious relation, he was mar-
MARRIAGE 99
ried without previous notice, and without other
than the necessary witnesses, at the Church of the
Advent. The officiating clergyman is said to have
remarked that he had never seen a more beautiful
wedding; but he was the only person present to
appreciate its beauty.
They went off to Concord to pass the honey
moon, and thence to Tuckanuck. All the practical
difficulties in their way were ignored, and remained
ignored through life, without interfering with the
young couple s happiness. The world is still kind
to those who are young, and handsome, and in
love, and who trample on respectability. Natu
rally, as soon as the winter came, they set off for
Paris.
TO HIS MOTHER
PARIS, January, 1901.
We have found a most charming little apart
ment, furnished with only the indispensable,
thank Heaven! The superfluous in a furnished
apartment of modest price is horrible and for
only two hundred francs a month. We took it. It
is 46 Rue du Bac. The house is an old palace of the
100 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
days when the Ruedu Bac was a fashionable street.
It is built on three sides of an enormous court as
wide as Massachusetts Avenue without the side
walks. At the back of the court are large green
houses of a florist very pretty. Our apartment
is on the court, on a southwest corner, filled with
sun and very nice for us. It is at the top of the
house. The stair-case is really splendid, very
large, with three great windows on every landing
and fine wrought-iron railing, the first flight in
stone, the other two in bricks. The apartment it
self is the funniest nicest place you ever saw, a sort
of Vie de Bohme poetry about it, and sun and air
to waste. The walls are very thick, so that the
place is full of closets and the windows are all in
deep recesses. Some of the floors are stone, others
hardwood. We are delighted with it. The Rue du
Bac runs up from the Pont Royal, if you remem
ber, and 46 is near the river, and in fact within
striking distance of everywhere. Well, we got the
apartment, and you may imagine we have been
busy, and Mrs. Cameron has been kindness itself,
lending us things to cover the walls, etc. We are
MARRIAGE 101
having a bully time getting installed and altogether
I never had such fun in my life.
And there s for the practical side of things. I
have n t got round to the absorbing psychological
problems surrounding me, nor to the theatres
we ve seen, nor the work I ve done, a good deal,
nor the thoughts we ve thought.
TO HIS FATHER
PARIS, 1901.
We live quite alone and see hardly any one. I
am hard at work on one or two things. The law
against religious associations has at last passed
and all socialists are happy. The next move is to
confiscate Rothschild, then the manufacturers,
then the other bourgeois, and so on to socialism.
There are one or two new things here which would
interest you, I think such as casts of some of
the things found at Delphi, the new bridge over
the Seine, Pont Alexandre III, which is really very
good, and some other things too.
PARIS, 1901.
I have sent the Louis to Bourgouin, and I will at
once attend to the books. The socialists here have
102 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
started a "librairie socialiste." How it differs from
an ordinary book-shop neither they nor I know;
but as I live more or less among socialists, I find
myself obliged to get my books there and yours will
be sent from there. Curiously enough it is an ex
cellent shop. I was very glad to hear that you
expect to get through without an extra session. I
had been afraid that Cuba and the Philippines
might delay you and produce discord. You know,
however, how difficult it is to know what is hap
pening de par le monde in this most provincial capi
tal. The New York "Herald" had become merely
a vulgar sort of "Town Topics," published every
day, and has, I really think, less news than the
best French papers. In which connection I should
like extremely to know the truth about the row
Sampson has got himself into. I saw that Allen
attacked him in his usual polished way in the
Senate, which, coupled with the fact that I greatly
admire Sampson, warmed my heart for him. But it
seems impossible to find out what it was all about.
Here the whole of France is shaken over the
pending bill confiscating the property of the reli-
MARRIAGE 103
gious orders. It is going to pass and the Church
is pretty sick. The debate has produced one inter
esting piece of statistics: that there are three times
as many monks in France now as there were in
1789, whereas the population has not quite
doubled. My friend, Hubert, says, "C est curieux,
c.a demontre que nous retournions a la barbarie."
B saw some American colonist lady the other
day, who told her that Porter was a very bad
ambassador. B . Why? American colonist
lady. Because he is pro-Boer. B . But I
thought that was popular in France. American
colonist lady. Oh, no, all the Americans here are
pro-English. This strikes me as a very charac
teristic expression of the American colonist point
of view.
We see very few people and no society, and less
than no American colony, and we are very happy
indeed. We are looking forward very much to
your advent on the scene. There are some new
plays and things which may amuse you. Also they
have at last arranged the great series of Rubenses in
the Louvre, as decorations, which is what they are
104 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
meant to be. I am writing a good deal and study
ing the rest of the time. Please give my love to
Theodore when he takes the veil. I hope it will be
a fine day for him.
PARIS, 1901.
I am so glad you got through the session so well,
and I hope you are not worn out. I was very much
interested to see that England had refused our
treaty, and I wonder what is coming next. Is the
sentiment strong to abrogate the Clayton-Bulwer
treaty by resolution? I hope so. This refusal really
makes one believe that those whom the Gods wish
to destroy they first make mad.
PARIS, Spring f r 1901.
Many, many thanks for your kind letter, and
for all the trouble you have taken about my novel
and my play. I am very glad indeed to have R. S. s
criticism, and I think that dramatically you and he
are pretty nearly right. Indeed I think the action
in "Villon" is really too subjective for the stage.
It is far more the presentation of an idea than of
an action, and I doubt very much if it can be fitted
MARRIAGE 105
for acting. I should be very glad, however, if you
would bring it over when you come. I have so
much on my hands now that I could not attend to
it before then.
The other night I went to hear Jaures, the So
cialist, speak. He is, I think, a very remarkable
orator and a very sincere man.
The salon is open here and I have been through
it once. There are seven kilometers of canvas, I
think, and it s altogether a pretty poor showing, so
it seems to me. There are, however, one or two
good things, especially in the sculpture, and many
clever things.
I hope you will succeed in getting the Bayreuth
tickets. We are all very much looking forward to
going.
TO HIS MOTHER
PARIS, Spring, 1901.
Day before yesterday Hubert took us to St. Ger
main, where he is " attache" au Musee." It was very
interesting and we had a drive in the forest
superb. Hubert is the nicest little man in the
106 GEORGE CABOT LODGE)
world sympathetic, gentle, bright, and with a
preposterous amount of learning. He insists he is
going to make me collaborate in some scientific
magazine on an Egyptian topic. I hope not. How
ever, I am tolerably strong in Egyptian now. I can
read the texts with considerable fluency and the
inscriptions on tombs, etc., become very intelligi
ble. It is certainly a useless accomplishment, but
excessively interesting. At the same time I have
been reading up Chaldea and Syria, Babylonia,
etc., so that I have a pretty good idea of the classic
Orient. It s a point of departure I have always
lacked and needed. Meanwhile, I have written
considerably. I enclose a couple of things you may
like to see. I am very glad the "Atlantic" and
"Century" received me so well. I have just re
ceived Papa s letter with the letter from Gilder,
and shall answer it at once. Gissing has gone
away, I am sorry to say. I should have been glad
to see more of him. He is a real man.
CHAPTER VI
THE European part of the idyll ended with a
week at Baireuth and the return home in August,
1901. Thenceforward, the life at Washington in
winter, and at Nahant or Tuckanuck in summer,
the life of husband and father, becomes only
the background for literary work, and the work
alone remains to tell of the life. The poet s educa
tion was finished; what the poet could do with it
remains to be shown.
The first result appeared in the volume already
mentioned, entitled "Poems (1899-1902)," which
appeared in the winter of 1902-03. The next was
"Cain," published in November, 1904. The first
volume, of one hundred and fifty pages, consisted
of the short efforts of the poet s youth. The sec
ond volume is a single, sustained effort of drama,
and claimed attention less for its poetic than for its
dramatic qualities.
Like all the poets of the same school, Lodge con-
108 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
ceded nothing to mere decoration or ornament.
The vigorous standards of this severe Academy re
garded a popular or conventional flower as a blot.
Every verse must have its stress, or strain, and
every thought its intensity. This preliminary con
dition is something not to be discussed, but to be
accepted or rejected in advance, like the conditions
of a color-scheme, or an architectural or musical
composition; and, since few readers are trained to
such technical appreciation, at a moment when the
public refuses to make any mental effort that it
can avoid, the poet s audience is very small. In
reality the mental effort of reading is much less
than that of listening to Wagner or Debussy; but
the poet numbers his audience by scores, while the
musician, if he gets any audience at all, numbers
it by thousands. These restraints are a part of the
given situation under which the dramatic poet
works; conditions which he cannot change; they
are in reality far more severe and paralyzing than
the conditions imposed by the old unities. They
must be kept in mind by the reader, unless his
reading is to be waste of time.
CAIN 109
So, too, the dramatic idea is a condition given
beforehand, to be accepted or refused as a whole.
The poet does not want an audience that looks for
gems, that selects a pretty song or verse, and
rejects the whole, the unity. He has some one
great tragic motive, which he tries to work out in a
way he thinks his own, and he wants to be judged
by his dramatic effect, as an actor is judged by his
power of holding an audience. Properly he would
ask, not whether his drama is liked, but whether it
is dramatic; not whether the reader was pleased,
but whether he was bored.
Lodge s dramatic motive was always the same,
whether in "Cain," or in "Herakles," or in the
minor poems. It was that of Schopenhauer, of
Buddhism, of Oriental thought everywhere, the
idea of Will, making the universe, but existing
only as subject. The Will is God; it is nature; it is
all that is; but it is knowable only as ourself. Thus
the sole tragic action of humanity is the Ego,
the Me, always maddened by the necessity of
self-sacrifice, the superhuman effort of lifting him
self and the universe by sacrifice, and, of course, by
110 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
destroying the attachments which are most vital,
in order to attain. The idea is a part of the most
primitive stock of religious and philosophical
motives, worked out in many forms, as Prometheus,
as Herakles, as Christ, as Buddha, to mention
only the most familiar, but, in our modern con
ception of life, impossible to realize except as a
form of insanity. All Saviors were anarchists, but
Christian anarchists, tortured by the self-contra
dictions of their role. All were insane, because
their problem was self -contradictory, and because,
in order to raise the universe in oneself to its high
est power, its negative powers must be paralyzed
or destroyed. In reality, nothing was destroyed;
only the Will or what we now call Energy
was freed and perfected.
This idea, which probably seemed simpler than
shower or sunshine to a Hindoo baby two thousand
years ago, has never taken root in the western mind
except as a form of mysticism, and need not be
labored further. It was what the French call the
donnee of Lodge s drama, the condition to be
granted from the start; and it had, for a dramatist,
CAIN 111
the supreme merit of being the most universal
tragic motive in the whole possible range of
thought. Again and again, from varied points of
view, Lodge treated it in varied moods and tem
pers; but his two dramas, "Cain" and "Hera-
kles," were elaborately developed expansions of
the theme.
The general reader, who reads a Greek drama in
the same spirit in which he reads the morning
newspaper, can scarcely get beyond the first half-
dozen pages of such a theme; and, in fact, the sub
ject was never intended for him. The more serious
student, who reads further, can seldom escape a
sense of discomfort from the excessive insistence
on the motive, the violence with which it is
over and over again thrust before his eyes in
its crudest form; and, in fact, Lodge has what the
French call the faults of his qualities; he is exuber
ant, and exuberance passes the bounds of mesure.
Nature herself is apt to exaggerate in the same way.
We must take it or reject it as we take a
thunderstorm or a flood; it may be unnecessary,
but is it dramatic?
112 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
Every just critic will leave the reader to answer
this question for himself. Taste is a matter about
which the Gods themselves are at odds. American
taste is shocked by every form of paradox except
its own. Greek taste was lavish of paradox, espe
cially about the Gods. Saturn ate his children, and
Zeus dethroned his father. Questions of taste!
while Lodge s paradox, as developed in Cain, was
a question rather of logic, even almost of mathe
matics. Step by step, like a demonstration in ge
ometry, the primitive man is forced into the atti
tude of submission to destiny or assertion of self,
and Lodge develops each step as a necessary se
quence, in the nature of the Greek fate, but a re
sult of conscious Will. The paradox that Cain
killed Abel because, from the beginning, man had
no choice but to make himself slave of nature or
its master, is, after all, nothing like so paradoxical
as the philanthropist idea that man has gone on
killing himself since the world began, without any
reason at all.
This, then, is the paradox of Cain which Lodge
undertook to work out, as Byron had worked it out
CAIN 113
before him, in one of his strongest dramas; and the
readers who take it in this sense can hardly fail to
find it dramatic. They may not like the drama,
but they will probably not toss it aside. They will
admit its force. They may even, if particularly sen
sitive to this oldest of emotional motives, follow
the poet himself to the end.
Captain, my Soul, despair is not for thee!
Thou shall behold the seals of darkness lift,
Weather the wrathful tempest and at last,
Resolute, onward, headlong, dazed and scarred,
Reel through the gates of Truth s enormous dawn!
To develop this idea in its dramatic form, Lodge
took as his text the words of Genesis, and allowed
himself only the four characters, Adam, Eve, Cain
and Abel. He gave himself no favors; he intro
duced no light tones ; on his sombre background the
figures move in no more light than is strictly neces
sary to see them move at all; they follow the rules
of the mediaeval Mystery Play, rather than those
of the Greek drama. Yet any sympathetic work
man of literary effect will probably admit that they
do move, and even that at certain moments their
114 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
movement is highly dramatic; so much so as to be
genuinely emotional.
So also with the characters themselves! If there
is a character hard to deal with in the whole range
of dramatic effort, Adam is he! No artist has suc
ceeded in making Adam sympathetic, and very
few indeed have tried to do so. "The woman
tempted me and I did eat " has been his sentence
of condemnation as a figure of drama, since drama
was acted. Such a figure could not be heroic, and
only with difficulty could be saved from being
ridiculous on the stage. Even the twelfth-cen
tury "Mystery of Adam s Fall" dwelt only on
his weakness and abject submission to Eve on
one side, and to God on the other. Lodge ac
cepted the traditional figure, and made the best
of it.
Though my life is bruised with sore affliction
And dire repentance blast my happiness;
Though in remembrance Paradise forever
Blooms with fresh light and flowers ineffable.
Clear pieties and peaceful innocence,
Against the gloom of this grieved sentience
Of violence and starvation, yet I bear,
CAIN 115
Scornful of tears, the grief and scorn of life!
Faith is the stern, austere acknowledgment
And dumb obedience to the will of God:
Such faith my soul has kept inviolable!
What though he crush me, is not He the Lord!
The drama permitted little development of
Adam s character: he scarcely appears after the
first act, leaving the stage to the two brothers to
work out their inevitable antagonism, and their
contradictory conceptions of duty. Although
Cain s character necessarily had to be developed
to the point of insanity, it was a logical insanity;
while Abel s character remained also true to its
logical conditions of submission to a force or will
not its own. The two brothers represented two
churches, and the strife ended as such strife in his
tory has commonly ended, in the destruction of
one or the other, the victory of faith or free-will.
The character which Lodge developed with evi
dent sympathy was not masculine but feminine.
Cain might be himself, but Eve was the mother, a
nature far more to his liking. Upon her was thrown
the whole burden and stress of the men s weakness
116 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
or insanity. The drama opens upon her, bearing
the alternate reproaches and entreaties of Adam,
and trying to infuse into him a share of her own
courage and endurance; Adam implores her:
" Hold me I need thy tenderness, I need
Thy calm and pitiful hands to comfort me."
Eve answers :
"Be still a little; all will be well, I know."
A total inversion of r61es! and it is carried
through consistently to the end. All the men ap
peal to Eve, and then refuse to listen to her. In
the vehement dispute at the end of the first act,
Adam at last turns to Eve, and bids her to lecture
her son:
And thou, Eve, Woman, most perilously wandered
In weak delusion, now I charge thee speak
Lest thou should fall again in deathless sin,
Of God and man, God s all, man s nothingness!
EVE
Dear son, we are God s creatures every one
CAIN
Mother!
EVE
I ll speak no more!
CAIN 117
Except perhaps the somewhat undeveloped fig
ure of Abel, all these characters are personally
felt, to the dramatist they were real and living
figures, but that of Eve is the most personal of
all. As the drama opens on the wife bearing the
reproaches and supporting the weakness of the
husband, so it ends by the mother assuming the
insanities of the son. After the traditional devel
opment of the mediaeval drama, Eve is reproduced
in the Virgin. Lodge adhered closely to the medi
aeval scheme except in transposing the roles of the
brothers, and intensifying the role of the mother.
As, in the mediaeval conception, the role of the Vir
gin almost effaced the role of Christ, the drama of
Cain ends by almost effacing Cain in the loftier
self-sacrifice of the. woman:
"Go forth, go forth, lonely and godlike man!
My heart will follow tho* my feet must stay.
Yet in thy solitude shall there be a woman
To care for thee through the incessant days,
To lie beside thee in the desolate nights,
To love thee as thy soul shall love the truth!
In her thy generation shall conceive
Passionate daughters, strong and fierce-eyed sons.
118 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
To lift the light and bear the labor of truth
Whereof the spark is mine, the fire is thine."
Perhaps some readers would find more meaning
and higher taste in the drama had Lodge called it
"Eve" instead of calling it "Cain"; but here the
dramatist was developing his theme in philosophy
rather than in poetry, and the two motives almost
invariably stand in each other s light. The ma
ternal theme is the more poetic and dramatic, but
without the philosophy the poem and the drama
have no reason to exist. The reader must take it as
it is given, or must throw it aside altogether, and
compose a drama of his own, with a totally differ
ent donnee. In either case, he will search long, and
probably in vain, through American literature, for
another dramatic effort as vigorous and sustained
as that of "Cain," and, if he finds what he seeks,
it is somewhat more than likely that he will end by
finding it in "Herakles."
CHAPTER VII
THE GREAT ADVENTURE
COMPOSITION, and especially dramatic composi
tion, is an absorbing task. Night passes rapidly in
shaping a single phrase, and dawn brings a harsh
light to witness putting it in the fire. Lodge
worked habitually by night, and destroyed as
freely as he composed. Meanwhile life went on,
with such pleasures and pains as American life
offers; but, in narrative, the pains take the larger
place, and the pleasures are to be understood as a
background. The most serious loss to Lodge s life
was the illness and death of his friend, Trumbull
Stickney, whose companionship had been his best
support since the early days of Paris and the Latin
Quarter. Stickney owned a nature of singular
refinement, and his literary work promised to take
rank at the head of the work done by his genera
tion of Americans; but he had hardly come home
to begin it at Harvard College when he was struck
120 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
down by fatal disease. Lodge s letters had much
to say of the tragedy, and of the volume of verses
which he helped to publish afterwards in order to
save what relics remained of Stickney s poetry.
From Boston in August, 1904, he wrote his wife:
"Just after I wrote to you, John called me up on
the telephone and told me that Joe [Stickney] was
very seriously ill at the Victoria. I went down
there at once and saw Lisel, the doctor, and Lucy,
and I write to you now, in the greatest agony of
mind. Joe has got a tumor on the brain. For ten
days he has had almost constant terrific pains in
his head. They brought him to Boston last Thurs
day. You can imagine how dreadful a shock it
was to get this frightful news when I had hoped to
take Joe to Tuckanuck with us. I am completely
unnerved. . . . The doctor told me I should cer
tainly not be able to see him no one can. . . .
I feel at present utterly prostrated. Somehow I
have never conceived of Joe s dying."
From Tuckanuck, September 1: "You can
imagine better than I can tell you, with what a
tense and anxious hope I cling to the possibility
THE GREAT ADVENTURE 121
that Joe will be saved, and returned to life a well
man. I feel almost heart-broken when I think of
him, and my mind goes back through all the im
mense days and ways of life that we have seen to
gether. . . . Doc [Sturgis Bigelow] is, as you may
guess, the best and dearest companion in this
twilight of grief and anxiety in which I have my
present being, and this place is of course more
soothing than anywhere else to me. . . ."
From Nahant, November, 1904: "Don t get
carried away with the idea that Joe s death has set
the term to youth or is really the end of anything.
Life our life, his life, the life of the human soul
is quite continuous, I m convinced: one thing
with another, big and little, sad and gay, real and
false, and the whole business just life, which is its
own punishment and reward, its own beginning
and end. . . ."
From Nahant, November, 1904: "I ve finished
re-reading the Republic, and it is one of the few
books in which my sons shall be thoroughly edu
cated if I can manage it. There are not more than
a very few books from which every man can catch
122 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
a glimpse of the Great Idea, for there are only a
very few great torch-bearers. But the Repub
lic is one, and much more accessible than any
other, except the * Leaves of Grass ; for Christ is
deeply hidden in the rubbish of the Church, and
Buddha and Liao Tze are very far removed from
the processes of our minds."
From Boston, January, 1905: "I Ve had the
most warm and vivid delight in Dok s [Sturgis
Bigelow s] company, which has been constantly
with me since I came here. He has surpassed him
self in kindness and clear, warm, wise sympathy
and comprehensiveness. To-night I have passed a
long and superb evening with him, in which we
have together, in a manner of speaking, fait le tour
on the parapets of thought. It has renewed and
inspired me, given me, as it were, a new departure
and a new vista. ... I hate to leave to-morrow,
for he seems so glad to have me, and I, the Gods
know, get everything from being with him. He
does, as you might say, continually see me through,
through confusion, and through mistakes and
desperations, in fact, through life. It s im-
THE GREAT ADVENTURE 123
mense, what he has done and does for me. In short,
after two days of him I feel all straightened out,
and you, you best know how badly I needed this
beneficent process. Last night we saw Rejane in
*L Hirondelle, a play not at all superior, not of
any brilliancy of merit or originality of human
criticism, but so, after all, interesting by virtue of a
certain apparent and immense genuine reality,
so * written, with such glitter of words and phrase
and epigram, and so acted, above all, that we both
passed an evening of immense, contented, uncriti
cal delight."
From Mrs. Wharton s, New York, January,
1905 : " I left Boston rather sadly, for my days there
had been marvellous. A real readjustment and re-
coherence of all the immense pressure of great ex
perience which has, as you know, kept me strug
gling and a little breathless since Joe s death. With
Dok I really found my footing, brushed the night
from my eyes, and took a long glance forward. . . .
Mrs. Wharton was really glad to see me, and I to
see her, and we have had a good deal of the swift,
lucid, elliptical conversation which is so perfect
124 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
and so stimulating and so neatly defined in its
range. ... It is a great delight to be with her, as
I am a good deal, and to be clear and orderly and
correct in one s thought and speech, as far as one
goes. It s good for one, and vastly agreeable be
sides, indeed, it is to me a kind of gymnastic
excitement, very stimulating."
As these letters show, the death of Stickney
threw Lodge rather violently back on himself and
his personal surroundings, and he stretched out his
hands painfully for intellectual allies. A stroke of
rare good fortune threw a new friend in his way,
to fill the void in his life that Stickney had left.
Langdon Mitchell, another poet and dramatist,
with much the same ideals and difficulties, but
with ten years* more experience, brought him
help and counsel of infinite value, as his letters
show:
TO LANGDON MITCHELL
NAHANT (July, 1903).
DEAR MITCHELL, Before receiving your letter
and in an ecstasy of good manners, I wrote to your
THE GREAT ADVENTURE 125
wife to ask her if I might come to you on the 17th.
I can t very well come earlier for I am by way of
seeing my parents off to Europe, where my Dad is
going to assist in despoiling the virtuous Briton,
for whom the wrathful tears of the State Depart
ment abundantly flow, of what neither is nor ought
to be his except on the theory that everything of
value should belong to that people who, when
pressed, will blushingly confess that they are the
chosen of God. My father starts, then, on this
engaging mission l on the 17th, and after having
given him my blessing and those counsels gained
only by inexperience, without which no child with
any sense of responsibility should take leave of his
father, having in fact done all my duty, I shall at
once turn myself to pleasure and embark with a
mind wholly vague as to direction, you-ward. It s
mighty good of you, dear Mitchell, and of your
wife too to want me for a few days, and I can t tell
you with how great pleasure I look forward to see
ing you. We 11 have some great days.
1 The Alaskan Boundary Tribunal, which met in London in
the summer of 1903 and of which his father was a member.
126 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
1925 F ST., October, 1903.
DEAR MITCHELL, Good ! You understand
Beaudelaire as I do; indeed you say things about
him which make me realize as never before my own
comprehension of him. I am doubtful about
French poetry being, like Latin, "City poetry."
Think of Ronsard and his crowd, or Victor Hugo
or Leconte de Lisle but Beaudelaire, like Villon,
like Verlaine, is certainly a city poet. And why not?
The civilization of an old society is, I am certain,
the fair material of poems. The best is that Beau
delaire has given you pleasure, and I feel that you
have appreciated as I do that he is, in his best mo
ments, really a great poet, one of the torch-bearers.
"Allons! after the great companions and to belong
to them!" Ah! let us go and be of them if we can,
dear Mitchell. At least we can follow on the " great
road of the Universe." Which reminds me that I
have been reading your verses again and again and
I shall have, for what they re worth, some remarks
to make when we next meet.
THE GREAT ADVENTURE 127
1925 F ST., Spring, 1904.
DEAR MITCHELL, I largely agree with what
you say of Viele s book, though to my mind you
rate it a little too high. His delight in words seems
to me far his strongest trick. He says not very
much. Of course keep Cain till April 1st or as long
as you wish. As you may imagine, all that you say
about it in your letter is deeply interesting to me.
As I ve said to you, you are the only person from
whom I expect genuine criticism and get it. As
regards the stage directions I ll say this: Although
the thing has no quality of a real play, nevertheless
the action that is, the main points of the action
are essential to the expression of the idea, and
therefore it is necessary that there should be some
environment indicated, and that the characters
should perform certain motions (as few as possible,
of course). The question, then, is merely this:
whether the poem is more or less interrupted
and the reader subjected to more or less of a jar,
by having environment and action indicated as
briefly and technically as possible, in brackets, or
by having them introduced as verse into the body
128 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
of the poem. It seemed to me, despite the obvious
absurdities, the former was the method most frank
and honest, and least likely to mar the poetic and
intellectual integrity of the whole. Of course the
mere technicalities could be eliminated if they
seriously jarred. Thank you I wish I could
for all that you say, which I find very just and of
the utmost assistance to me in clarifying and en
lightening my own criticism; and thank you, above
all, for your interest, which is valuable to me be
yond words.
I m mighty sorry but not very greatly surprised
to hear your news of the condition of the stage.
It s depressing beyond measure to know that the
American theatre is reserved exclusively, either
for importations, or the worthless manufactures
of almost illiterate Americans who regard plays
merely as merchandise, and who would manufac
ture boots with equal enjoyment and success. In
deed it s most depressing; and what is to be done?
Your assertion that the American public will take
good plays as well as bad is I believe quite correct,
but unfortunately it doesn t help as long as they ll
THE GREAT ADVENTURE ,129
take bad plays as well as good. The stage situa-~|
tion is to me merely another sign of the intellectual,
moral and spiritual childishness of the American.
Indeed was there ever such an anomaly as the
American man? In practical affairs his cynicism,
energy and capacity are simply stupefying, and in
every other respect he is a sentimental idiot pos
sessing neither the interest, the capacity, nor the
desire for even the most elementary processes of
independent thought. Consider for one moment
his position as a domestic animal as it was fifty
years ago and as it is to-day. Then he was the
unquestioned head of his family, the master of his
house, the father of as many children as he wanted
to have. His wife s business was to bear his chil
dren and manage his household to suit him, and
she never questioned it. To-day he is absolutely
dethroned. A woman rules in his stead. His wife
finds him so sexually inapt that she refuses to bear
him children and so drivelling in every way except
as a money-getter that she compels him to expend
his energies solely in that direction while she leads
a discontented, sterile, stunted life, not because
130 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
she genuinely prefers it but because she cannot
find a first-rate man to make her desire to be the
mother of his children and to live seriously and
happily. I speak of course only of the well-to-do
classes, which as a matter of fact comprise most
real Americans, and of which the average number
of children per family is under two. We are, dear
Mitchell, a dying race, as every race must be of
which the men are, as men and not accumulators,
third-rate. American women don t fall in love with
the American men (I mean, really) and they re
quite right; only a woman won t have children by
a man she s not really in love with, and when you
think of the travail and the peril of death can you
blame her? It s an odd situation; we are a dying
race and really we ve never lived.
Forgive this long dissertation. I got started and
could not stop.
1925 F ST., April, 1904.
DEAR MITCHELL, I m nearly in a position
now to answer the question which we discussed
perhaps you remember last summer at Tucka-
nuck: namely whether or not Jesus Christ ap-
THE GREAT ADVENTURE 131
peared as the logical outcome of the Jewish reli
gious tradition. You remember I contended he
was wholly sporadic and attached to nothing. I
begin now to see I was in a measure quite wrong,
and perhaps to a small extent right. I am very
anxious to talk it over with you when you return
here, and also to discuss with you the whole state
of thought and feeling in Judsea at the time of
Christ s appearance. All this, you will guess, is
the result of work I ve been doing in preparation
for writing the Christ-play of which I spoke to you
and which, to my immense delight, you seem to
approve at least the idea in your last letter.
I ve already gone far enough to realize that no
subject could be more fascinating or more inter
esting. Jesus Christ and his teachings, which are
neglected and unknown, form a background
against which the dark threads of the lives and
passions and thoughts of worldly men should
stand out like the black bars on the solar spectrum.
I have re-read Kenan s "Vie de Jesus" and it s
interesting in many ways and a "beau livre"; but,
dear Mitchell, can you imagine a man spending
132 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
ten years on the study of Jesus Christ and at last
summing up his appreciation of the man in this
phrase: "C est un charmeur!" It s staggering.
1925 F ST. (Spring of 1904).
DEAR MITCHELL, I imagine what you say of
solitude is very true. "Tout se paie" in one
form or another. Certainly you have kept singu
larly balanced, singularly vital and sane in the
true sense. What I shall be in ten years there s
no guessing. One stakes one s life on the chance
of ransoming "one lost moment with a rhyme"
and the wheel turns
Of course keep "Cam" as long as you want. I
really feel ashamed to bother you with it when you
are so busy, but it s vastly important to me to
know precisely what you think; whether, in your
deliberate opinion, it s the real thing in any degree
whatever, and not merely and utterly litera
ture! But don t, I beg you, look at it until it s
convenient. I shan t write another long thing in
verse for some time. Since publishing " Cain" I ve
had a time of horrible reaction and "abattement"
THE GREAT ADVENTURE 133
the sort of thing we all go through occasionally.
This has become a drearily egotistical and dull
letter. . . .
My days in New York were glorious, the only
good days I ve had since finishing that poem. I
need hardly say how deeply I hope you will dis
pose of your plays to your satisfaction for your
sake and for the sake of the stage.
1925 F ST., WASHINGTON
(Spring, 1904).
I think, dear Mitchell, that we really about agree
as to the Sonnet. The first rate ones are terribly
few and in diverse forms. Witness Beaudelaire.
My dear man, I ve got hold of such a splendid
thing to write immense. I m shutting down on
Society, in which we ve been wandering this win
ter to the detriment of all I value in life, and I m
getting to work God be praised. I wish I could
have a talk with you about this and so many other
things. One gets glimpses, such glimpses, of in
credible, tremendous things. I wish you were by
134 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
so we might share them. I feel always tempted to
run over for a day to see you, but I m afraid it s
quite impossible now. Still if the desire pushes me
too hard I 11 turn up some afternoon. Spring-Rice
has been here for a week and I had one splendid
talk with him and wished more than ever you were
here. There s a man who does, really, keep up
wonderfully and by a very peculiar faculty he has
of remaining, au fond, quite detached from his own
circumstances and experience. He left to-night,
alas ! He goes back to Russia, about which he had
absorbing things to say. Now that he s gone,
once more the "void weighs on us," the dread
ful, blank, mild nothingness of this nice agreeable,
easy, spacious vacuity (comp. James). And here I
am again alone beyond belief, but, fortunately,
with a very interesting thing to do, so I m very
well off.
NAHANT, MASS., October, 1904.
DEAR MITCHELL, I was extremely glad to get
your note and I would have answered it before
had not events compelled me. On the eleventh my
friend Stickney died quite suddenly at the last.
THE GREAT ADVENTURE 135
On the fourteenth we buried him. He was thirty
years old by far the most promising man I have
known, his best work still and surely to come.
Under the terrible test of a mortal disease his
mind and character rose to higher levels than
they had ever touched before. He died, really, at
the height of his powers. The future held nothing
for him but suffering, mental and physical. He is
very well out of it. Dear Mitchell, what a life
it is ! what a life ! I am having an undoubtedly
hard time. So, it must be said, are other people.
I wish I could get to New York now and see you.
I feel more deeply than ever how invaluable your
friendship is to me and how incalculably better
than anything else in life, such friendship as I
think you and I share together is in the last analy
sis. I would come if I had the energy, but I am
pretty well done up morally and physically. I
shall be in New York, though, from November 9th
for some days. Could n t you be there then too?
It would be to me so true a happiness to see you
again.
136 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
Naturally, too, in the social and literary se
quence, young Lodge fell under the charm of
Henry James :
TO HIS MOTHER
WASHINGTON, May, 1905.
To this even existence of mine there has been
one delightful interruption, namely the lecture and
subsequent visions of Henry James. The lecture
was profoundly, and to one who writes himself,
wonderfully interesting; so many splendid things
which had been long at home in my own conscious
ness and which I first heard then, perfectly and
irresistibly expressed. The amiable Miss T
had asked us to tea for the next day; where I went
and found, besides James, old Mrs. , a most
original and charming and distinguished person,
conveying, through all her rather stiff but flatter
ing courtesy, the vivid impression that she might
be, on occasion, equally original and the reverse of
charming. There were besides some unremarkable
people who all left, leaving me the chance to talk
with James, which I did with the greatest delight
then and also the next morning when, at his invi-
THE GREAT ADVENTURE 137
tation, I went with him to the Capitol and the
Library for two most interesting hours. This, I
believe, can be said of James, though it is not the
most obvious remark to make of him, and is, at the
same time, the rarest and most important compli
ment that can be paid to any creative artist
namely, that he is, in matters of art, incorruptibly
honest, and in consequence hugely expensive. He
is, I mean, as an artist, built through and through
of the same material which you like or not
according to your fancy. His very style again
whether you like it or not bears by its mere tor
tuous originality, if by no other sign, infallible wit
ness that he has, at immense expenditure, done all
the work artistically and intellectually and
that all the work is his own. In ideas and art he
lives in a palace built of his own time and thought,
while the usual, you might say the ubiquitous,
average person and literary prostitute lives con
tentedly in one of an interminable row of hovels,
built, so to speak, on an endless contract from bare
material stolen from Time s intellectual scrap-
heap. What it all amounts to is that, whether you
138 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
like James or not, whether you think he is all on
the wrong track or not, you are bound to respect
him, for if you do not, whom, in this age of uni
versal machine-made cheapness, whom more than
James with his immense talent and industry and
his small sales, are you going to respect?
This is a long garrulous, egotistical (to a degree),
and perhaps you will say, rather incoherent letter.
So I will spare you any further palpitating details
of my obscure life.
WASHINGTON, June, 1905.
Indeed, I wish I might have been with you, but
on the other hand I have done an immense deal by
being quietly and in much long solitude just now
at this time. I have lived high most of my working
hours, and in consequence my volume of sonnets
- "The Great Adventure," I call it, which is, I
think, a good title lies before me all but finished
seventy-five sonnets or more, with which I am
pretty well pleased. I feel lonely, as I always do
when I am hard at work, but I also feel much ex
hilaration. These are my great years. Well, I am
sure I must have said all this before to you. My
THE GREAT ADVENTURE 139
interest in myself is so poignant that I elude it with
difficulty.
Joe s volume represents for me a good deal of
work and an experience of grief that neither gives
nor receives consolation, which has left its indelible
mark upon me which is good. For I believe there
are but two ways with real grief : get rid of it if you
can; but if you can t, then take all you can get of
it, live in it, work in it, experience it as far as you
are capable of experiencing anything. Let it nour
ish you! as it will, as anything will that is real, and
in direct proportion to its reality and significance.
I ll tell you that I sent my volume of sonnets to
Houghton & Mifflin, who wrote me that they held
my work in high consideration; which, I suppose,
indicates that some people they have seen think
well of "Cain." Also, perhaps you have seen
"Moriturus" (by me) in the July " Scribner."
"The Great Adventure" was published in
October, a small volume of ninety pages, of
which nearly one third were devoted to the mem
ory of Stickney:
140 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
He said: "We are the Great Adventurers;
This is the Great Adventure : thus to be
Alive, and, on the universal sea
Of being, lone yet dauntless mariners.
This is the Great Adventure!" All of us
Who saw his dead, deep-visioned eyes, could see,
After the Great Adventure, immanent,
Splendid and strange, the Great Discovery.
Love and Death were the two themes of these
sonnets, almost as personal as the "Song of the
Wave." Underneath the phrases and motives of
each, lay almost always the sense of striving against
the elements, like Odysseus, or against the myste
ries, like Plato :
"At least," he said, "we spent with Socrates
Some memorable days, and in our youth
Were curious and respectful of the Truth,
Thrilled with perfections and discoveries,
And with the everlasting mysteries
We were irreverent and unsatisfied,
And so we are!" he said . . .
The irreverence mattered little, since it was
mostly the mere effervescence of youth and health;
but the dissatisfaction went deep, and made a
THE GREAT ADVENTURE 141
serious strain on his energy, a strain which
Stickney s death first made vital. The verses be
gan to suggest discouragement:
In Time s cathedral, Memory, like a ghost,
Crouched in the narrow twilight of the nave,
Fumbles with thin pathetic hands to save j
Relics of all things lived and loved and lost.
Life fares and feasts, and Memory counts the cost
With unrelenting lips that dare confess
Life s secret failures, sins and loneliness.
And life s exalted hopes, defiled and crossed.
i "The Great Adventure" probably marked the
instant when life did, in fact, hover between the
two motives, the beginning and the end,
Love and Death. Both were, for the moment, in
full view, equally near, and equally intense, with
the same background of the unknown :
In the shadow of the Mystery
We watched for light with sleepless vigilance.
Yet still, how far soever we climbed above
The nether levels, always, like a knife,
We felt the chill of fear s blind bitter breath;
For still a secret crazed the heart of Love,
An endless question blurred the eyes of Life,
A baffling silence sealed the lips of Death.
142 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
Meanwhile life went on with what most people
would, at least in retrospect, regard as altogether
exceptional happiness. The small circle of sympa
thetic companions was immensely strengthened
by the addition of Edith Wharton, whose unerring
taste and finished workmanship served as a correc
tive to his youthful passion for license. Her fine
appreciation felt this quality as the most insistent
mark of his nature:
"Abundance, that is the word which comes
to me whenever I try to describe him. During the
twelve years of our friendship, and from the day
that it began, I had, whenever we were together,
the sense of his being a creature as profusely as
he was finely endowed. There was an exceptional
delicacy in his abundance, and an extraordinary
volume in his delicacy."
Life is not wholly thrown away on ideals, if only
a single artist s touch catches like this the life and
movement of a portrait. Such a picture needs no
proof; it is itself convincing.
"The man must have had a sort of aura about
him. Perhaps he was one of those who walk on the
THE GREAT ADVENTURE 143
outer rim of the world, aware of the jumping-off
place; which seems the only way to walk, but
few take it. Odd that your article should have
appealed so much to me, when I know so little of
the subject!"
The more competent the reader, and this
reader, though unnamed, was among the most
competent, the more complete is the conviction;
and the same simple quality of the truest art runs
through the whole of Mrs. Wharton s painting,
to which the critic was alluding. Every touch of
her hand takes the place of proof.
"All this," she continues, "on the day when he
was first brought to see me, a spring afternoon
of the year 1898, in Washington, was lit up by
a beautiful boyish freshness, which, as the years
passed, somehow contrived to ripen without fad
ing. In the first five minutes of our talk, he gave
himself with the characteristic wholeness that
made him so rare a friend; showing me all the sides
of his varied nature; the grave sense of beauty, the
flashing contempt of meanness, and that large
spring of kindly laughter that comes to many only
144 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
as a result of the long tolerance of life. It was one
of his gifts thus to brush aside the preliminaries of
acquaintance, and enter at once, with a kind of
royal ease, on the rights and privileges of friend
ship; as though one might think with a fore
boding of the short time given him to enjoy them.
"Aside from this, however, there was nothing of
the pathetically predestined in the young Cabot
Lodge. Then and to the end he lived every
moment to the full, and the first impression he
made was of a joyous physical life. His sweet smile,
his easy strength, his deep eyes full of laughter and
visions, these struck one even before his look of
intellectual power. I have seldom seen anyone in
whom the natural man was so wholesomely blent
with the reflecting intelligence; and it was not the
least of his charms that he sent such stout roots
into the earth, and had such a hearty love for all
he drew from it. Nothing was common or unclean
to him but the vulgar, the base, and the insincere,
and his youthful impatience at the littleness of
human nature was tempered by an unusually ma
ture sense of its humors."
THE GREAT ADVENTURE 145
While young Lodge, or any other young artist,
might find it the most natural thing in the world
to give himself without thought or hesitation to
another artist, like Mrs. Wharton, it by no means
followed that he could give himself to men or wo
men who had not her gifts, or standards, or sym
pathies. He could no more do this than he could
write doggerel. However much he tried, and the
more he tried, to lessen the gap between himself
his group of personal friends and the public, the
gap grew steadily wider; the circle of sympathies
enlarged itself not at all, or with desperate slow
ness; and this consciousness of losing ground,
of failure to find a larger horizon of friendship be
yond his intimacy; the growing fear that, be
yond this narrow range, no friends existed in the
immense void of society, or could exist, in the
form of society which he lived in, the suffocat
ing sense of talking and singing in a vacuum that
allowed no echo to return, grew more and more
oppressive with each effort to overcome it. The
experience is common among artists, and has often
led to violent outbursts of egotism, of self-assertion,
146 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
of vanity; but the New England temper distrusts
itself as well as the world it lives in, and rarely
yields to eccentricities of conduct. Emerson him
self, protesting against every usual tendency of
society, respected in practice all its standards.
"One is accustomed," continued Mrs. Wharton,
"in enjoying the comradeship of young minds, to
allow in them for a measure of passing egotism,
often the more marked in proportion to their sen
sitiveness to impressions; but it was Cabot Lodge s
special grace to possess the sensitiveness without
the egotism. Always as free from pedantry as
from conceit, he understood from the first the give
and take of good talk, and was not only quick to
see the other side of an argument, but ready to re
inforce it by his sympathetic interpretation. And
because of this responsiveness of mind, and of the
liberating, vivifying nature from which it sprang,
he must always, to his friends, remain first of all,
and most incomparably, a Friend."
This quality was strongly felt by others. One
who knew him intimately when he was Secretary
of the British Embassy in Washington and later
THE GREAT ADVENTURE 147
when they were together in Berlin, Sir Cecil Spring-
Rice, now minister of Great Britain in Stockholm,
wrote of him after his death:
"The first time I saw him was at Nahant when
the children were all there together; and since then
I have always seemed to know him closely and
intimately. We bathed together there, and I re
member so well the immense joy he had in jumping
into the water, and then lying out in the sun till he
was all browned as strong and healthy a human
creature as I have ever seen, and exulting in his
life. Then we rode together at Washington, and I
can see him now galloping along in the woody
country near Rock Creek. It did n t strike me
then that he was anything but a strong healthy
boy, absolutely straight, sincere, and natural.
"It was n t till I saw a good deal of him in Berlin
that I realized what a rare and extraordinary mind
he had. He was then studying hard at philosophy.
In an extraordinarily quick time he learnt German
and seemed to take naturally to the most difficult
books just as he had done to the sea, without any
conscious effort. We had many talks then, and his
148 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
talk was most inspiring. He constantly lived face
to face with immense problems, which he thought
out thoroughly and earnestly, things men often
read and study in order to pass examinations or
achieve distinction; but I am quite sure with him
there was no object except just the attainment and
the presence of truth. He had a most living mind,
and a character absolutely independent; resolved
on finding out things by himself, and living by his
own lights and thinking out his own problems.
Nothing would have stopped him or interfered
with him. In all my experience of people about the
world, I never knew anyone so detached, deaf to
the usual voices of the world; and so determined
to live in the light of Truth, taking nothing for
granted till he had proved it by his own original
thought. He had greatly developed when I last saw
him in Washington, during the few days I spent
there. I had two long talks with him in his house.
I think he was the sort of stuff that in the middle
ages would have made a great saint or a great
heresiarch I dare say we have no use for such
people now; I wonder if he found he was born out
THE GREAT ADVENTURE 149
of his time, and that ours was not a world for him.
I am not thinking of what he wrote or what he said,
but of the atmosphere in which he lived, and the
surroundings of his own soul what his thoughts
lived and moved in.
"In that detachment and independence and
courage I have never known any one like him. Yet
it was hardly courage: for he did n t give the en
emy a thought.
"I wonder if one often meets a man in these
times who is literally capable of standing alone, to
whom the noises and sights of the world, which
to most people are everything, are nothing, abso
lutely nothing the state of mind of some one
who is madly in love, but with him it seemed nor
mal and natural, an everyday habit of being.
"It was only last week I had a long think as I
was walking about through these lonely woods
here, and I was wondering whether I should see
you all soon again, and I was saying to myself: At
any rate Bay will have grown he won t disap
point me: he is the sort of man who is bound to get
bigger every day and he is younger and stronger
150 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
than I and he will last. And about how many
men of his age could one say that with certainty,
that time would surely improve and perfect him,
and that with every new meeting one could gain
something new?
"And that is how I thought of him naturally."
Like most of the clever young men of his time,
Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, Gilbert Chesterton,
he loved a good paradox, and liked to chase it
into its burrow. "When you are accustomed to
anything, you are estranged from it"; and his su
preme gift for liking was never to get accustomed
to things or people. By way of a historical paradox
he maintained that the Church was devised as a
protection against the direct rays of Christ s spirit,
which, undimmed, would compel to action and
change of character. By way of a poetical para
dox he loved Walt Whitman to fanaticism, and
quoted, as his favorite description of the world,
Walt s "little plentiful mannikins skipping about
in collars and tailcoats." Yet he sometimes de
clared that his favorite line in poetry was Swin
burne s :
THE GREAT ADVENTURE 151
Out of the golden remote wild west where the sea without shore
is.
Full of the sunset, and sad, if at all, with the fulness of joy.
Perhaps, too, if he had chosen a verse of poetry
to suggest his own nature, after the description of
Mrs. Wharton he might have found it in another
line of Swinburne s :
Some dim derision of mysterious laughter.
However remote he thought himself from his
world, he was, in fact, very much of his literary
time, and would not have been recognized at all
by any other. Like most of his young contempo
raries in literature, he loved his paradoxes chiefly
because they served as arrows for him to practise
his art on the social conventions which served for
a target; and the essence of his natural simple-
mindedness showed itself in his love for this boy s-
play of fresh life which he tired of only too soon, as
he will himself tell in his " Noctambulist." He
knew, at bottom, that the world he complained of
had as little faith in its conventions as he had; but,
apart from the fun and easy practice of paradox,
152 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
Lodge s most marked trait of mind lay in his in
stinctive love of logic, which he was probably not
even aware of, although often as is seen every
where in the "Cain" and "Herakles" the rea
soning is as close and continuous as it might be in
Plato or Schopenhauer.
This contrast of purposes disconcerted most
readers. The usual reader finds the effort of fol
lowing a single train of thought too severe for him;
but even professional critics rebel against a para
dox almost in the degree that it is logical, and
find the Greek severity of Prometheus, in its mo
tive, a worse fault than what they call the "ex- .~^.
cess of loveliness," which, in Shelley, "militates
against the awful character of the drama." In
modern society, the Greek drama is a paradox;
which has not prevented most of the greatest
nineteenth -century poets from putting their
greatest poetry into that form; and Lodge loved
it because of its rigorous logic even more than
for its unequalled situations. Lodge could be
exuberant enough when he pleased, but what he
exacted from his readers was chiefly mind.
THE GREAT ADVENTURE 153
With this preamble, such readers as care for in
tellectual poetry can now take up his work of the
years 1906 and 1907, published under the titles,
"The Soul s Inheritance" and "Herakles." "The
Soul s Inheritance" appeared only after his death,
but in the natural order of criticism it conies
first. Although the vigor of his verse was greater,
there were already signs that his physical strength
was less, and that he was conscious of it. His
health had begun to cause uneasiness; his heart
warned him against strains; but he scorned warn
ings, and insisted that his health was never bet
ter. Submission to an obnoxious fact came hard
to him, at all times; but the insidious weakness of
literary workmen lies chiefly in their inability to
realize that quiet work like theirs, which calls
for no physical effort, may be a stimulant more
exhausting than alcohol, and as morbid as mor
phine. The fascination of the silent midnight, the
veiled lamp, the smouldering fire, the white paper
asking to be covered with elusive words; the
thoughts grouping themselves into architectural
forms, and slowly rising into dreamy structures,
154 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
constantly changing, shifting, beautifying their
outlines, this is the subtlest of solitary temp
tations, and the loftiest of the intoxications of
genius.
CHAPTER VIII
" HERAKLES"
"THE SOUL S INHERITANCE" was a poem de
livered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at
Cambridge in 1906, and in delivering it, Lodge
discovered in himself a new power that would pro
bably have led him in time into a new field, where
he could put himself into closer relations with the
world. His delivery was good, his voice admira
ble, and his power over his audience was evident.
He was probably an orator by right of inheritance,
though he had never cared to assert the claim,
preferring to rest his distinction on his poetry.
In this poem he reiterated his life-long theme
that the Soul, or Will, is the supreme energy of
life:-
That here and now, no less for each of us,
That inward voice, cogent as revelation,
That trance of truth s sublime discovery,
Which in the soul of Socrates wrought out
Gold from the gross ore of humanity,
156 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
Still speak, still hold, still work their alchemy;
That here and now and in the soul s advance,
And by the soul s perfection, we may feel
The thought of Buddha in our mortal brain,
The human heart of Jesus in our breast,
And in our will the strength of Hercules!
Again, as always in his poetry, he recurred to the
sense of struggle, of
The multitudinous menace of the night,
and the soul s need to stand out,
Importunate and undissuadable,
over the utmost verge of venture:
There in our hearts the burning lamp of love,
There in our sense the rhythm and amplitude,
And startled splendor of the seas of song.
This last verse, the " startled splendor of the
seas of song," was one of the kind in which
he delighted, and which he had a rare power of
framing, but the thought was ever the same: the
Soul of Man was the Soul of God; and it was
repeated in various forms in the three sonnets
attached to the blank verse:
HERAKLES 157
Strangely, inviolably aloof, alone,
Once shall it hardly come to pass that we,
As with his Cross, as up his Calvary,
Burdened and blind, ascend and share his throne.
Again it was repeated in the poem called "Pil
grims," delivered at the annual dinner of the New
England Society, in New York, December, 1906.
The theme, on such an occasion and before such
an audience, in the fumes of dinner and tobacco,
was adventurous, but Lodge adhered to it bravely,
and insisted all the more on its value,
Lest we grow tired and tame and temperate.
He boldly asserted: "We are the Pilgrims," and
proved it by attaching to the blank verse three
sonnets, as beautiful as he ever wrote:
They are gone. . . . They have all left us, one by one:
Swiftly, with undissuadable strong tread,
Cuirassed in song, with wisdom helmeted.
They are gone before us, into the dark, alone. . . .
Upward their wings rushed radiant to the sun;
Seaward the ships of their emprise are sped;
Onward their starlight of desire is shed;
Their trumpet-call is forward; they are gone!
Let us take thought and go! we know not why
Nor whence nor where, let us take wings and fly!
158 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
Let us take ship and sail, take heart and dare!
Let us deserve at last, as they have done,
To say of all men living and dead who share
The soul s supreme adventure, We are gone!
These verses appeared in print only after his
death, as though he had intended them for his epi
taph; and perhaps he did, for he continued in the
same tone:
Let us go hence! however dark the way,
Haste! lest we lose the clear, ambitious sense
Of what is ours to gain and to gainsay.
Let us go hence, lest dreadfully we die!
Two poems cast in the same form followed: "Life
in Love," and "Love in Life"; which return to the
intensely personal theme. Readers who feel the
theme will probably feel the poetry as the highest
he ever reached in feeling. Again the three sonnets
follow, with their studied beauties of expression:
Her voice is pure and grave as song;
Her lips are flushed as sunset skies;
The power, the myth, the mysteries
Of life and death in silence throng
The secret of her silences;
Her face is sumptuous and strong,
And twilights far within prolong
The spacious glory of her eyes.
HERAKLES 159
On these themes of Love and Life Lodge had
dwelt without interruption from the start; and
now, suddenly, without apparent steps of transi
tion, he passed to a new motive, Doubt! "The
Noctambulist" suggests some change, physical or
moral; some new influence or ripened growth, or
fading youth. Perhaps he would himself have
traced the influence and the change, to the death
of Stickney. Mrs. Wharton says that "in its har
mony of thought and form, it remains perhaps the
completest product " of his art; and it is certainly
the saddest. The note is struck in the first line :
That night of tempest and tremendous gloom,
when,
Across the table, for it seemed to us
An age of silence, in the dim-lit room,
Tenantless of all humans save ourselves
Yet seeming haunted, as old taverns are,
With the spent mirth of unremembered men,
He mused at us. ... And then, "I know! ..." he said,
"I know! O Youth! ... I too have seen the world
At sunrise, candid as the candid dew;
. . . You look abroad,
And see the new adventure wait for you,
160 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
Splendid with wars and victories; for you
Trust the masked face of Destiny. But I!
I ve turned the Cosmos inside out! " he said;
And on his lips the shadow of a smile
Looked hardly human. . . .
Some two hundred lines of unbroken disillusion
ment follow, which should not be torn to pieces to
make easy quotations; but the passages that here
and there suggest autobiography may serve as
excuse for cutting up such a poem into fragments
which now and then resemble the letters in their
spontaneous outbursts.
Yes! and I feel anew the splendid zest
Of youth s brave service in truth s ancient cause,
When, with the self-same thunders that you use,
Edged with a wit at no time Greek! I too
Most pleasurably assailed and tumbled down,
With a fine sense of conquest and release,
The poor, one, old, enfeebled, cheerless God
Left to us of our much be-Deitied
And more be-Devilled past . . .
And all s well done I doubt not; though the times
Of life may well seem all too brief to waste!
But this comes later, when we learn, as learn
We must, if we go forward still from strength
To strength incessantly, to wage no more
HERAKLES 161
With phantoms of the past fortunate wars;
To die no longer on the barricades
For the true faith; to spend no more the rich
And insufficient days and powers of life
Striving to shape the world and force the facts,
Tame the strong heart, and stultify the soul,
To fit some creed, some purpose, some design
Ingeniously contrived to spare the weak,
Protect the timid and delude the fools.
The time must come
When we can deal in partialities
No more, if truth shall prosper; for we stand
Awfully face to face with just the whole
Secret, our unrestricted Universe,
Spirit and sense! . . . And then, abruptly then
Swift as a passion, brutal as a blow,
The dark shuts down!
Whether he felt the dark already shutting down,
brutal as a blow, or only divined it from the fate of
Stickney, one need not know. The verses prove
that he felt it personally, for he repeated it again
and again:
In the strict silence, while he spoke no more,
We heard the tumult of our hearts, and feared
Almost as men fear death, and know not why,
We feared, . . . until at last, while at the closed
Windows the wind cried like a frenzied soul,
162 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
He said: "I too have tried, of mortal life,
The daily brief excursions; . . .
and I have felt the one
Utterly loosed and loving woman s heart,
There where the twilight failed and night came on,
Thrill to life s inmost secret on my breast;
And I have known the whole of life and been
The whole of man! The Night is best!"
The letters will show that the "Noctambulist"
was meant as "a really new and large and valid
departure," which, if followed in its natural direc
tion, should have led to dramatic lyrics and prob
lems more or less in the feeling of "Men and Wo
men"; but, immediately, the "Noctambulist"
abuts on "Herakles," which properly closes the
cycle. In the " Herakles," the poet exhausted, once
for all, the whole range of thought and expression
with which his life had begun; it was an immense
effort; and in approaching the analysis of this
drama, which, in bulk, is nearly equal to all the
rest of the poet s writings together, and in sus
tained stress stands beyond comparison with them,
the critic or biographer is embarrassed, like the
poet himself, by the very magnitude of the scheme.
HERAKLES 163
Although no reader can be now safely supposed
to know anything of the Greek drama, he must be
assumed to have an acquaintance with ^Eschylus
and Euripides at least. Something must be taken
for granted, even though it be only the bare agree
ment that Shelley s "Prometheus Unbound" does
not interfere with "Empedocles on Etna" and
that neither of these Greek revivals jostles against
" Atalanta in Calydon." Here are five or six of the
greatest masterpieces of literature with which a
reader must be supposed to be acquainted ; and
perhaps he would do well to keep in mind that, in
bulk, Browning s "The Ring and the Book" is
large enough to contain them all, and the "Hera-
kles" too; while the methods and merits of all are
as distinct and personal as the poets.
The reader, too, who takes up the "Herakles"
for the first time, must be supposed to know that
the plot of the drama is not of the poet s making:
it is ^given, imposed; and the dramatist has
taken care to quote at the outset the words of the
historian, Diodorus, whose story he meant to fol
low. Herakles and Creon and Megara are familiar
164 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
characters in history as well as on the stage, and
as real as historians can make them. Herakles
did marry Megara, the daughter of Creon, King
of Thebes; he did refuse to obey the orders of
Eurystheus, King of Argos; he was actually ac
cording to the historian seized with frenzy, and
pierced his children with arrows; he submitted to
the will of God, performed his miracles, freed
Prometheus, and became immortal. All this is
fact, which the Greeks accepted, as they after
wards accepted the facts of the Christ s life and
death, his miracles and immortality; and for the
same reasons: for both were Saviors, Pathfinders,
and Sacrifices.
Lodge took up this dramatic motive, the
greatest in human experience, as it was given
him; and so the reader must take it, or leave it,
since he has nothing to do with the argument of
the play once he has accepted it. His interest is in
the dramatic development of the action, and the
philosophic development of the thought. As for
the thought, something has already been said; but
the reader must be assumed to know that it is the
HERAKLES 165
oldest thought that seems to have been known
to the human mind, and, in the Christian religion,
is the substantial fact which every Catholic sees
realized before his eyes whenever he goes to mass.
The God who sacrifices himself is one with the vic
tim. The reader who does not already know this
general law of religion which confounds all the dif
ferent elements that enter into ordinary sacrifice,
can know neither poetry nor religion. Christ car
ries the whole of humanity in his person. The
identification of subject and object, of thought
and matter, of will and universe, is a part of the
alphabet of philosophy. The conception of a God
sacrificing himself for a world of which he is him
self a part, may be a mystery, a confusion of
ideas, a contradiction of terms, but it has
been the most familiar and the highest expression
of the highest and perhaps also of the lowest
civilizations.
The reader s whole concern lies therefore not in
the poem s motive but in its action, the stages
of its movement, the skill and power with which
the theme is developed, the copiousness of the
166 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
poet s resources, the art and scope of his pre
sentation. The critic can do no more than sketch
an outline of the difficulties; he cannot attempt to
discuss the solutions. Scholars seem inclined to
think that Euripides himself failed in his treat
ment of this theme; that JSschylus scarcely rose
quite to its level; and that Shelley used it chiefly as
a field on which to embroider beauties wholly his
own. Where three of the greatest poets that ever
lived have found their highest powers taxed to the
utmost, a critic can afford to keep silence.
The play opens at Thebes in the empty agora,
at sunset, by a dialogue between the eternal poet
and the eternal woman, who serve here in the place
of the Greek chorus, each seeking, after the way of
poet or woman, for something, the light, and
so introducing the action, which begins abruptly
by a feast in the palace of Creon, the king, who has
called his people together to witness his abdication
in favor of his son-in-law, Herakles.
Creon is a new creation in Lodge s poetry, a
deliberate effort at character-drawing till now un-
attempted. Creon is the man-of-the-world, the
HERAKLES 167
administrator, the humorist and sage, who has
accepted all the phases of life, and has reached the
end, which he also accepts, whether as a fact or
a phantasm, whatever the world will, but
which has no more value to him than as being the
end, neither comprehended nor comprehensible,
but human. Perhaps it is only a coincidence that
^Eschylus vaguely suggested such a critic in
Okeanos, who appears early in the "Prometheus."
Creon speaks, "in an even, clear, quiet voice":
I am your King; and I am old, and wise.
And I can now afford your censure! Yes,
I can afford at last expensive things
Which cost a man the kingdoms of the world,
And all their glory! I have lived my life;
You cannot bribe me now by any threat
Of ruin to my life s high edifice,
Or any dazzled prospect of ambition. . . .
I think despite these sceptical strange words,
You will respect me, for I am your King,
And I have proved myself among you all
An architect. Therefore you will not say,
"This is the voice of failure!" - - Yet I know
That you will find some other things to say
Not half so true! For, when a man is old,
168 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
He knows at least how utterly himself
Has failed! But say what things of me you will
And be assured I sympathize! Indeed,
A voice like mine is no- wise terrible,
As might be the tremendous voice of truth
Should it find speech that you could understand.
Yet it may vex and dreadfully distress
Reflective men, if such indeed there be
Among you all, and therefore be assured,
I sympathize!
With that, Creon names Herakles as his suc
cessor, and the crowd departs, leaving the family
surrounding Herakles and congratulating him,
until Herakles, breaking away, turns fiercely on the
king with passionate reproaches for sacrificing him
to selfish politics :
Is this your wisdom, Sire? and is it wise.
Lightly, and thus with calm complacency,
Now to believe that I, that Herakles
Should hold himself so cheaply as your price?
The unshaped, mystical consciousness of a des
tiny to become the Savior, not the Servant, the
creator, not the economist, the source itself, not
the conduit for "these safe human mediocrities,"
forces Herakles to reject the crown. He will be
HERAKLES 169
fettered by none of these ties to common, casual
supremacies:
Sire, I will not serve the Gods or you!
Sire, I will not rule by grace of God
Or by your grace! I will be Lord of none,
And thus unto myself be Lord and Law!
Therewith the inexorable, tragic succession of
sacrifices, insanities, begins. The dramatist fol
lows up each step in the rising intensities of the
theme, with almost as much care as though he were
a professional alienist. He builds his climax from
the ground, that is to say, from the family,
which is always the first sacrifice in these mystical
ideals of the Savior. The first of the scenes is laid
at night before the house of Herakles, who listens
to Megara within, singing her children to sleep :
My children sleep, whose lives fulfil
The soul s tranquillity and trust;
While clothed in life s immortal dust
The patient earth lies dark and still.
All night they lie against my breast
And sleep, whose dream of life begins;
Before the time of strife and sins,
Of tears and truth, they take their rest.
170 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
The next scene is laid before a tavern door, at
dawn, where Herakles, in his sleepless wandering,
stops to listen to the men and women carousing
within. The poet is heard singing:
I know not what it is appears
To us so worth the tragic task:
I know beneath his ribald masque
Man s sightless face is grey with tears!
This tavern scene, to readers who know their
drama of sacrifice and redemption, "is grey with
tears"; and the more because, true to tradition, it
is the woman who first recognizes the Savior, and
putting an end to his anguish of doubt and self-
distrust, draws him on to his fated duty of self-
immolation. The messenger from Eurystheus ar
rives, while Herakles is parting from his wife and
children, bringing the order to submit to the King
of Argos and the gods, to perform the imposed
labors, and to remain a subject man; but the ac
tion of the drama is interrupted here by a discus
sion between Creon and the poet, of the drama
itself, the dilemma of Herakles, a discussion
which is, in a way, more dramatic than the drama
HERAKLES 171
because it broadens the interest to embrace hu
manity altogether. Like the chorus of Okeanids
in ^Eschylus, Creon sees the hero, and admires
him, but doubts what good will come of him to
man. He lays down the law, as a King and a Judge
must:
Crowds are but numbers; and at last I see
There are not merely players of the game;
There is not, high or low, only the one
Sensible and substantial prize, to which
The fiat of the world gives currency,
And which, in various ways, is always won!
There is, besides, the one, estranged, rare man,
Whose light of life is splendid in the soul,
Burns with a kind of glory in his strength,
And gives such special grandeur to ambition
That he will make no terms with fortune. . . .
Creon s reply to this "estranged, rare man," is
that " all men living are not ever free," and that, if
not pliant, they are broken. In a dozen lines, as
terse as those of ^Eschylus, he sums up the law of
life:-
Life, like a candle in a starless night,
Brightens and burns, or flutters and is spent,
As man s wise weakness spares the guarded flame,
172 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
Or man s rash strength resolves in all despite
To lift his torch into the spacious winds,
To blaze his path across the darknesses,
And force the elements to his own undoing . . .
Only the strong go forward and are slain!
Only the strong, defenceless, dare and die!
Only the strong, free, fain and fearless fail!
Remember this! lest a worse thing than mere
Passion and ecstasy of poems befall you!
"Listen to me," says Mercury to Prometheus,
at the close of the same dispute in ^Eschylus;
"When misfortune overwhelms you, do not accuse
fate; do not upbraid Zeus for striking you an unfair
blow! Accuse no one but yourself! You know what
threatens you! No surprise! No artifice! Your
own folly alone entangles you in these meshes of
misery which never release their prey." Creon, as
a wise judge, was bound to repeat this warning,
and the Poet in the poem makes but an un
convincing answer to it, in fact, loses his tem
per altogether, until both parties end, as usual, by
becoming abusive, in spite of Creon s self-control.
The action of the play repeats the motive of the
dialogue. Herakles is exasperated by the insolence
HERAKLES 173
of the messenger, to the point of striking him, and
threatening to destroy his master. Then, over
whelmed by the mortification of having yielded to
a degraded human passion, and of having sunk to
the level of the servitude against which he had re
belled, he sets out, in fury and despair, to chal
lenge the oracle of the God at Delphi.
The scene in the temple of Apollo at Delphi
follows, where Herakles drags the Pythia from her
shrine, and finds himself suddenly saluted as the
God.
THE PYTHIA
Yours is the resurrection and the life!
I am the God!
THE PYTHIA
There is no God but I!
I am whatever is!
I am despair and hope and love and hate,
Freedom and fate,
Life s plangent cry, Death s stagnant silences!
I am the earth and sea and sky,
The race, the runner and the goal;
There is no thought nor thing but IlJ
174 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
To the ecstasy of the Pythia, the chorus re
sponds in the deepest tones of despair:
Have we not learned in bitterness to know
It matters nothing what we deem or do,
Whether we find the false or seek the true,
The profit of our lives is vain and small ?
Have we not found, whatever price is paid,
Man is forever cheated and betrayed ?
So shall the soul at last be cheated after all!
"Coward and weak and abject," is the rejoinder
of Herakles, who rises at last to the full conscious
ness of his divine mission and of the price he must
pay for it:
, I am resolved! And I will stand apart,
Naked and perfect in my solitude
Aloft in the clear light perpetually,
Having afforded to the uttermost
The blood-stained, tear-drenched ransom of the soul!
Having by sacrifice, by sacrifice
Severed his bondage and redeemed the God!
The God I am indeed! For man is slain,
And in his death is God illustrious
And lives!
Then follows the Tenth Scene, the killing of the
children. On this, the poet has naturally thrown his
HERAKLES 175
greatest effort, and his rank and standing as a
dramatist must finally rest on it. The reader had
best read it for himself; it is hardly suited to ex
tracts or criticism; but perhaps, for his own con
venience, he had better read first the same scene
as Euripides rendered it. This is one of the rare
moments of the dramatic art where more depends
on the audience than on the poet, for the violence
of the dramatic motive the Sacrifice carries
the action to a climax beyond expression in words.
The ordinary reader shrinks from it; the tension of
the Greek drama overstrains him; he is shocked at
the sight of an insane man killing his children with
arrows, and refuses to forgive the dramatist for
putting such a sight before him. Insanity has al
ways been the most violent of tragic motives, and
the insanity of Herakles surpassed all other insan
ities, as the Crucifixion of Christ surpassed all other
crucifixions. Naturally, the person who objects to
the Crucifixion as a donnee of the drama, is quite
right in staying away from Ober-Ammergau; but
if he goes to Ober-Ammergau, he must at least
try to understand what the drama means to the
176 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
audience, which feels or should feel itself en-
globed and incarnated in it. The better-informed
and the more accomplished the critic may be,
who reads the "Herakles" for the first time,
knowing nothing of the author, the more discon
certed he is likely to be in reading it a second
time. His first doubts of the poet s knowledge or
merits will be followed by doubts of his own.
In one respect at least, as a question of dramatic
construction, the doubt is well founded. Critics
object to the "Herakles" of Euripides that it con
sists of two separate dramas. The same objection
applies to the myth itself. The Savior whether
Greek, or Christian, or Buddhist always repre
sents two distinct motives the dramatic and
the philosophic. The dramatic climax in the
Christian version is reached in the Crucifixion; the
philosophic climax, in the Resurrection and Ascen
sion; but the same personal ties connect the whole
action, and give it unity. This is not the case either
with Herakles or Buddha. The climax of the Greek
version is reached in the killing of the children, so
far as the climax is dramatic; while the philoso-
HERAKLES 177
phic climax the attainment is proved by the
freeing of Prometheus; and these two donnees are
dramatically wide apart, in fact, totally uncon
nected. Critics are Creons, and object to being
tossed from one motive to another, with an im
patient sense of wrong. As drama, one idea was
capable of treatment; the other was not.
Probably, the ordinary reader might find an ad
vantage in reading the Twelfth Scene of "Hera-
kles," the Prometheus, as a separate poem.
After the violent action of killing the children, the
freeing of Prometheus seems cold and uncon
vincing; much less dramatic than the raising of
Lazarus or even the Ascension. The Greek solu
tion of this difficulty seems to be known only
through fragments of the lost "Prometheus Un
bound" of ^Eschylus, which are attached to most
good editions of the poet. Lodge s solution is the
necessary outcome of his philosophy, and is worth
noting, if for no other reason, because it is per
sonal to him, or, more exactly, to his Oriental
and Schopenhauer idealism. Possibly perhaps
one might almost say probably it is both as
178 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
logic and as history the more correct solution;
but on that point, historians and metaphysicians
are the proper sources of authority. Literature has
no right to interfere, least of all to decide a ques
tion disputed since the origin of thought.
The "Prometheus Unbound" the Twelfth
Scene of " Herakles" opens, then, upon the At
tainment. Herakles has, by self-sacrifice, made
himself and the whole of humanity within him
one with the infinite Will which causes and main
tains the universe. He has submitted to God by
merging himself in God; he has, by his so-called
labors, or miracles, raised humanity to the divine
level. ^Eschylus puts in the mouth of Prometheus
the claim to have freed man from the terrors of
death and inspired him with blind hopes: "And
a precious gift it is that you have given them,"
responds the chorus! Lodge puts the claim into
the mouth of Herakles, and with it his own deifica
tion:
Not in vain, out of the night of Hell,
I drew the Hound of Hell, the ravening Death,
Into the light of life, and held him forth
HERAKLES 179
Where the soul s Sun shed lightnings in his eyes,
And he was like a thing of little meaning,
Powerless and vain and nowise terrible.
While with my inmost heart I laughed aloud
Into the blind and vacant face of Death,
And cast him from me, so he fled away
Screaming into the darkness whence he came!
Nothing is vain of all that I have done!
I have prevailed by labors, and subdued
All that man is below his utmost truth,
His inmost virtue, his essential strength,
His soul s transcendent, one pre-eminence!
Yea, I have brought into the soul s dominion
All that I am! and in the Master s House
There is no strength of all my mortal being
That does not serve him now; there is no aim,
There is no secret which He does not know;
There is no will save one, which is the Lord s!
The Church had said the same thing from the
beginning; and the Greek, or Oriental, or German
philosophy changed the idea only in order to
merge the universe in man instead of merging man
in the universe. The Man attained, not by ab
sorption of himself in the infinite, but by absorb
ing the infinite and finite together, in himself, as
his own Thought, his Will,
180 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
Giving to phases of the senseless flux.
One after one, the soul s identity;
so that the philosophic climax of the " Prometheus
Unbound" suddenly developed itself as a Prome
theus bound in fetters only forged by himself;
fetters of his own creation which never existed
outside his own thought; and which fell from his
limbs at once when he attained the force to will it.
Prometheus is as much astonished at his own
energy as though he were Creon, and, in a dazed
and helpless way, asks what he is to do with it:
I stand in the beginning, stand and weep.
Here in the new, bleak light of liberty . . .
And who am I, and what is liberty?
The answer to this question is that liberty, in
itself, is the end, the sufficient purpose of the
will. This simple abstract of the simple thought is
the theme of the last speech of Herakles on the
last page of the drama:
When the long life of all men s endless lives,
Its gradual pregnancies, its pangs and throes,
Its countless multitudes of perished Gods
And outworn forms and spent humanities,
HERAKLES 181
When all the cosmic process of the past
Stands in the immediate compass of our minds;
When all is present to us, and all is known,
Even to the least, even to the uttermost,
Even to the first and last, when, over all,
The widening circles of our thought expand
To infinite horizons everywhere,
Then, tenoned in our foothold on the still.
Supernal, central pinnacle of being,
Shall we not look abroad and look*within,
Over the total Universe, the vast,
Complex and vital sum of force and form
And say in one, sufficient utterance,
The single, whole, transcendent Truth, "I am! *
Not only philosophers, but also, and particu
larly, society itself, for many thousands of years,
have waged bloody wars over these two solutions of
the problem, as Prometheus and Herakles, Buddha
and Christ, struggled with them in turn: but
while neither solution has ever been universally
accepted as convincing, that of Herakles has at
least the advantage of being as old as the oldest,
and as new as the newest philosophy, as fa
miliar as the drama of the Savior in all his innu
merable forms, as dramatic as it is familiar,
182 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
as poetic as it is dramatic, and as simple as sac
rifice. Paradox for paradox, the only alternative
Creon s human solution is on the whole
rather more paradoxical, and certainly less logical,
than the superhuman solution of Herakles.
CHAPTER IX
THE END
THIS is the whole story! What other efforts
Lodge might have made, if he had lived into an
other phase of life, the effort he had made in this
first phase was fatal and final. He rebelled against
admitting it, refused to see it, yet was con
scious that something hung over him which would
have some tragic end. Possibly the encourage
ment of great literary success might have helped
and stimulated the action of the heart, but he
steeled himself against the illusion of success, and
bore with apparent and outward indifference the
total indifference of the public. As early as Sep
tember 30, 1907, he wrote to Marjorie Nott: "I
am, for one thing, and to open a subject too
vast to be even properly hinted at here, draw
ing to the close of the immense piece of work which
has held and compelled me for a year past. The
end looms large in my prospect and I am doing my
184 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
best, as you shall one day see. You, in fact, will
be one of only a half-dozen, at best, who will see it.
Which is, I imagine, all to my credit; and certainly
as much as I reasonably want. What I have
learned in the last year, through the work and the
days, I shall never live to express; which is, I take
it, illustrative as so much else is of the radi
cal inferiority of writing your truth instead of
being and living it, namely that by writing you
can never, at all, keep abreast of it, but inevitably
fall more and more behind as your pace betters.
So I shall eventually perish having consciously
failed, with (like Esme) * all my epigrams in me.
I wonder if Jesus consciously failed; I don t mean,
of course, his total, obvious, practical failure,
which the world for so long has so loudly recorded
in blood and misery and ruin; I mean, did he have
that consciousness of personal, solitary failure,
which one can hardly, with one s utmost imagina
tion, dissociate from the religious being of the soul
of man? I believe he did, though perhaps his
mind was too simple and single, as, to some
extent, apparently, was the mind of Socrates. I
THE END 185
sometimes think that the peasant of genius is,
perhaps, more outside our comprehension than
any other type of man. I perceive that I moon,
vaguely moon, and I shall soon be boring
you."
In June, 1908, he went abroad with his mother
and father, for change and rest, but his letters
show a growing sense of fatigue and effort. To his
wife he wrote from the steamer, before landing in
England :
"Our own voyage has come so warmly, so beau
tifully, back to me in these tranquil sea-days, our
own so clear and fine and high adventure into
strange new ways, our great adventure which is
still in the making. It seems to me, that gay glad
beginning, so alone and so one as we were, as
something, now, inexpressibly candid and lovely,
and humanly brave. And since then, how much,
how really much of our young, our confident and
defiant boast, flung, at that time, so happily,
and so, after all, grandly, at large, has been
proved and greatened and amplified!"
From London, in July: "London has given
186 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
me a new sense of itself, a flavor of romance and
adventure, and the pervading sense of a great,
dingy charm. Yes! it s all been quite new to me,
and wonderfully pleasant; which just satisfac
torily means, I surmise, that I come all new to it,
unimpeded by unimportant prejudices, and
prepared vastly more than I was, for life in all its
varieties and interests."
Later, from Paris: "I ve lunched and dined
everywhere; I ve been to what theatre there is, and
chiefly I ve drifted about the streets. And I find
essentially that I seem to demand much more of
life than I ever did, and in consequence take it all
here with a less perfect gayety and a more intense
reflection. I feel matured to an incredible degree,
as if I did now quite know the whole of life; and
when one s matured, really matured, there is, I
imagine, not much ahead except work. So, back to
you and to work I m coming soon."
In August, again from Paris: "This whole
Paris experience has been queer and wonderful.
Joe and you have been with me in all the familiar
streets and places, and my youth has appeared to
THE END 187
me in colors richer and more comprehensible than
ever before. . . . >!
He came home, and brought out "Herakles" in
November. In reply to a letter of congratulation
from Marjorie Nott, he wrote to her, on December
17: "Thank you! You know that I write for my
self, of course, and then, as things are in fact, just
for you and so few others. Which is enough ! and
sees me, so to speak, admirably through. Well!
I m glad you like it, and if you ever have anything
more to say of it, you know, my dear, that I want
to hear it. You 11 find it, of course, long; and you 11
strike, I guess, sandy places. Perhaps, though,
there are some secrets in it, and some liberties. . . ."
Six months afterwards he took up the theme
again, in the last few days of his life, making
Marjorie Nott his confidant, as he had done since
childhood.
He wrote from Nahant July 31, 1909:-
" Before all else I must thank you, my dear, for
the grave and deep emotions roused within me by
your letter with its fine, clear note of serious trust
and loving favor towards me. Than just that, there
188 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
is n t for me anything better to be had. I derive
from it precisely the intimate encouragement
which one so perpetually wants and so exception
ally gets. Moreover, in all your letter I don t find
a word with which I can possibly disagree. It oc
curs to me that there may have been, in my pages
to you, some note of complaint, which, in sober
truth, I did n t intend and don t feel. Every man
of us has the Gods to complain of; every man of us,
sooner or later, in some shape, experiences the
tragedy of life. But that, too obviously, is nothing
to cry about, for the tragedy of life is one thing, and
my tragedy or yours, his or hers, is another. All of
us must suffer in the general human fate, and some
must suffer of private wrongs. I ve none such to
complain of. At all events, I don t, as I said be
fore, disagree with a word of your letter, but I do,
my dear, find it dreadfully vague. You surely
can t doubt that I deeply realize the value of
human communion of any sort; but that does n t
take me far toward getting it. As I understand
your letter it says to me: Well! you might get
more and better if you tried more and better!
THE END 189
Perhaps ! at any rate, goodness knows I do try
and more and more as best I can. And surely I
don t complain of the solitude, which has, of course,
its high value; but I do, inevitably, well know it s
there. I 11 spare you more."
His letters to Langdon Mitchell expressed the
same ideas, with such slight difference of form as
one naturally uses in writing to a man rather than
to a woman :
TO LANGDON MITCHELL
WASHINGTON (Spring, 1906).
Thank you, my dear Langdon, for your kind and
so welcome letters. I want to thank you for your
generous offer of help should I try my hand at a
play. . . .
I should have but one personal advantage in
writing a play, namely a genuine indifference as to
its being played or being successful if played. I call
this an advantage because it eliminates the possi
bility of my mind being disturbed and my powers
consequently impaired by any influences external
to myself. I become so increasingly convinced that
precisely as perfection of being consists in a per-
190 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
fectly transparent reality, so artistic perfection
depends upon the degree to which the artist speaks
his own words in his own voice and is unhampered
by the vocabulary of convention and the mega
phone of oratory which exists and could exist
only on the theory of an omnipresent multitude.
Let any man speak his own word and he is as
original as Shakespeare and as permanently in
teresting as Plato. The whole core of the struggle,
for ourselves and for art, is to emerge from the
envelope of thoughts and words and deeds which
are not our own, but the laws and conventions
and traditions formed of a kind of composite of
other men s ideas and emotions and prejudices.
Excuse this dissertation ! . . .
Your first letter interested me profoundly, for
my winter has been curiously similar to yours as
you describe it. I have had very poignantly the
same sense of growth, of a revelation and of a con
sequent observable process of maturity. When
shall we meet and make some exchange of
thoughts? It seems absurd that so great a ma
jority of my life should be spent without you .
THE END 191
I Ve been asked (peals of Homeric and scornful
laughter from Mitchell) to deliver the poem at the
Phi Beta Kappa in Cambridge this spring June.
(Mitchell chokes with mirth and shows symptoms
of strangulation. Is patted on the back and re
covers. Lodge then good-naturedly continues:)
You observe how low I ve sunk and for a punish
ment for your superior sneers I m going to send
you my poem for the occasion to read and criti
cise. (Mitchell sourly admits that the joke is not
entirely on Lodge.) I shall send it soon, in fact it
may arrive any day. So I hope that your condi
tion of health is improved.
WASHINGTON, 2346 MASSACHUSETTS AVE.
(Winter, 1908).
MY DEAR, DEAR LANGDON, I shall never have
words and ways enough to thank you for your
letter. What it meant, what it means to me the
encouragement, the life, the hope and above
all the high felicities of friendship all these
things and other and more things, which you, my
dear friend, of your abundance so liberally afford,
192 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
have enriched and fortified me beyond expres
sion. . . .
My Herakles is done to the last three scenes and
hastens somewhat to its end. I won t write you
about it, for there is too much to say and finally
you 11 have to read it however much it s long
and dull.
It s too, too bad you should have been having
such a devil s time with this world. But, good
heavens, I know what it is to wait; how intolerable
it may become sometimes just holding on. But
the muscles of patience and that true daily cour
age which patience implies are fine muscles to have
well developed even at some cost is n t this so,
dear man? The living bread and the consecrated
wine must be earned and eaten day by day and
day by day; we are not made free of perfection by
any sudden moment s violence of virtue; the key
of the gate of Paradise is not purchased in any
single payment however heavy; the travail of God s
nativity within us is gradual and slow and labori
ous. It is the sustained courage, the long stern
patience, the intensest daily labor, the clear, per-
THE END 193
petual vigilance of thought, the great resolve,
tranquil and faithful in its strength, it is these
things, it is the work in short, the wonderful slow
work of man about the soul s business, which ac
complishes constantly as we both know so well
some real thing which makes us, however grad
ually, other and nobler and greater than we are,
because precisely it makes us more than we are.
All of which you know better than I, for better
than I you do the work and reap the result. But
it s a truth none the less which takes time to learn
if it is ever learned at all for the temptation
to think that the reward, the advance is to-morrow,
and that Paradise is in the next county, and that
both can be got by some adventurous extrava
gance, some single, tense deed of excellence, is very
great, I imagine, to us all. We never realize quite
at once that only patience can see us through, and
that if the moment is not eternity and the place
not Paradise it must be just because we are busy
about what is not, in the true strict test, our real
concern.
194 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
WASHINGTON, 2346 MASSACHUSETTS AVE.
(Spring, 1908).
O! MY DEAR LANGDON, Your letter thrilled
and moved me beyond expression. If I do not
thank you for it it is because it has roused within
me emotions nobler and more profound than grati
tude; and it is in the glamour and power of these
emotions which will remain permanently inter
fused with all that I am that I now write to you.
I tried to read your letter aloud to B. but it moved
me so much and to such depths that I was unable
to continue. This may seem strange to you, for you
will not have thought of all that it means to me;
you will not have been aware of the bare fact that,
apart from the immense inward satisfaction which
the effort of expression must always bring, your
letter is just all of real value I shall get for " Hera-
kles." And it is more, my dear friend, far more
than enough! That is certain. I speak to you with
an open heart and mind, which your letter has lib
erated, restored, revived, nourished and sustained.
You know as well as I how passionately we have
understanding and sympathy for what is best and
THE END 195
noblest within us. The conception of God the
Father, I believe, came from this longing in the
human heart. But the habit of solitude and silence,
which in this queer country, we perforce assume,
ends by making us less attentive to the heart s
need, and it is only when we are fed that we realize
how consuming was our hunger. For all that is
not what we at best and most truly are, we find
recognition enough, but the very soul within us is
like a solitary stranger in a strange land and
your letter was to me like a friendly voice speaking
the words of my own tongue and like the lights of
welcome. It is perhaps your criticisms that I re
joice in most, for I know them to be valid and just.
I feel the faults you find as you feel them, I believe;
and I keep alive the hope that I may learn to feel
them with sufficient force and clearness to correct
them. It would be of infinite advantage to me if
you would, some day, go over the whole thing
with me in detail. Nothing could so much im
prove my chances of better work in the future.
In fact it would be to me the most essential assist
ance that I could possibly receive; for if I had you
196 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
there to put your finger on the dreadful Saharas
and other undeniable shortcomings, it would il
luminate my understanding as nothing else could
do. ...
Just one thing more. It was a noble act of friend
ship for you to write me that letter amid all the
labors of your present days. Thanks for that with
all my heart.
With this single condition, the happy life went
on, filled with affection and humor to the end, as
his last letters tell:-
TO HIS MOTHER
NAHANT, June 13, 1909.
Our train was seven hours late to Boston, which
fact, when in the East River, after four hours of
open sea, at 6: 30 A. M., and by the dull glare of the
hot sun through a white fog, it first gradually and
at last with agonizing completeness possessed my
mind, produced in that sensitive organ emotions
too vivid to be here described.
I had retired to rest reconciled, or at least
steeled, to the thought of a two hours delay in our
THE END 197
journey; and when, on waking (abysmal moment!)
in the squalor of my berth I found that the fog had
changed the two hours delay to seven, I felt in the
first shock, other emotions besides surprise. . . .
Before emerging in unwashed squalor from my
section, I had determined, however, in view of
everything, to suppress my feelings and to be, for
my poor good children and their nurses, just the
requisite hope, cheer and comfort and this de
termination (it was the one consoling event of the
dreadful day) I did, to the end, successfully carry
out. Well, when at last from that dreadful boat
we were jerkily drawn once more onto firm land,
we fell of course inevitably into the mean hands of
the N. Y.,N.H. and H. R. R., which characteristi
cally decided that it would, of course, be both
cheaper and easier, to give us, instead of the din
ing car to which Heaven knows we seemed
entitled, a "fifteen minutes for refreshments" at
New Haven; and there, at ten o clock, in the heart
breaking, dingy dreadfulness of the waiting-room,
we that is the passengers of that luckless train
thronged four deep round a vastly rectangular
198 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
barrier like a shop-counter, girdled, for the public,
by high, greasy, "fixed" stools, covered with in
edible pseudo-foods under fly-blown glass bells,
and defended, so to speak, by an insufficient and
driven horde of waiters and waitresses. You can
imagine what chance there was dans cette galere for
the babes ! Fraiilein and the nurse secured, by pro
digious exertions, and wonderfully drank, cups of a
dim grey fluid which they believed to be coffee,
while I and the children got back to the train with
some apples, oranges, and sinister sandwiches,
which all, later, and with every accompanying de
gradation of drip and slop and grease, all mixed
with car dirt, we did devour, to avoid starva
tion. I was still further, however, to be in a posi
tion to appreciate the exquisite benefits of a rail
road monopoly, for when at last our interminable
journey did end at Boston, we found, of course, no
porters ! And with a heavy microscope, book, coat
and cane, my three poor unceasingly good, weary
and toy-laden children, and my two weary and
child-laden nurses, were, perforce, obliged to leave
our four bags on the platform, in charge of the
THE END 199
well-feed train porter, to be immediately "called
for" by Moore s man. Which man, young Moore
himself, I duly found and straitly charged about
the four bags, as well as about my seven pieces
in the "van." Then, somewhat cheered, and hav
ing renewed to Moore (who, as you will presently
perceive, I have come to regard as an abysmal
though quite well-intentioned young ass) my
charge as to the four bags, I drove off to the
North Station, stopping en route merely to reward
my lambs for their exemplary conduct by a rubber
toy apiece. Well ! at that point, I think you will
agree with me that the wariest might have been
lulled into a sense that the worst was over and
plain sailing ahead. Such at least was my condi
tion of confidence, and though in the North Sta
tion waiting-room, our bedraggled, dirty, worn-
out company waited a full hour for Moore and
the trunks, I just put it down as evidence that
the benefits of the railroad we had just left were
still accumulating, and hoped on. And then Moore
arrived arrived, having just merely forgotten
the four bags having in short left them one
200 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
of them containing Uncle Henry s manuscript and
all of mine, both irreplaceable just there on the
platform where I could n t have not left them.
Well! for a moment I didn t "keep up" a bit
and addressed to Moore a few how inadequate!
"feeling words." I then dispatched him back
to recover the bags, packed my poor babes into
the 3: 20 for Lynn, trusting, as I had to, to
Fraiilein s ability to get them out at Lynn, and
remained myself at the North Station, where I
waited for Moore for exactly one hour and fifteen
minutes. My state of mind I won t describe. At
the end of that vigil, however, I mounted al
ways with microscope, book, coat and cane in a
taxicab, went to the South Station, found Moore,
and after an interval of almost panic, when I
thought all the manuscripts were lost for good,
did, by dint of energy at last thank Heaven
find the bags. . . . Well ! I felt then a little "gone"
and went therefore to the Club, had a drink and a
sandwich, just in time, and got, at last, to Nahant,
at about seven o clock, to find that, by some mis
take, they had given me, for the nurse s bag, the
THE END 201
bag of a total stranger. In the nurse s bag was,
beside her own effects, some of Helena s, includ
ing a silver mug; and so as I lay, at last, in my
bath I heard, strangely concordant with my whole
horrible day s experience, Fraiilein and Hedwig
mourning, in shrill German, the loss. So Mon
day, I go to town to do some errands and to find if
possible the damned bag. The children are none
the worse for the journey and are already bene
fited by the good air. The house is incredibly clean
and charming and we are delighted with it.
TUCKANUCK, July, 1909.
I am having the most beautiful days endless
air and sea and sun and beauty, and best of
all with Langdon s splendid companionship. It s
all just what I ve wanted and needed for so
long. I have shown Langdon my latest work,
"The Noctambulist," etc., what I read to you
in Washington, and he is most splendidly en
couraging. He feels as strongly as I could wish
that I have made, both in thought and form, a
really new and large and valid departure. Which
202 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
endlessly cheers me, as you will believe. We talk
together of everything first and last, off and on,
but chiefly on, all day and night with the exception
of many hours of sleep. I do no work and just
take easily all my present blessings as greedily
as I can.
Langdon Mitchell was one of the half-dozen
readers, as he said, for whose approbation he
wrote, and this last companionship with him at
Tuckanuck in July, gave Lodge keen pleasure.
On returning to Nahant he wrote to Sturgis Bige-
low, who was then ill in Paris :
" I Ve just returned home from Tuckanuck,
browned to the most beautiful color by ten glorious
days of sun. Langdon and I went together, and ex
cept for one day of warm, sweet rain, and one morn
ing of fog, which cleared splendidly in time for
the bath, we had weather of uninterrupted mag
nificence. Immeasurable sky and sea and sun, warm
water, hot clean sand, clear light, transparent air,
Tuckanuck at its perfect best. I ve returned
made over in mind and body, feeling better in
THE END 203
every way than I ve felt since I can remember.
For this I have to thank you, for Tuckanuck,
and Langdon for his wonderful, interesting, vital
companionship. Together with every variety
of the best talk, the finest communion we lived
all day and night long immersed in the beneficent
elements, the prodigious light and air, the sounding,
sparkling, flowing sea; and the bathing was dif
ferent and better every day. The sea showed us
all its loveliest moods. On one day it was stretched
and smooth to the horizon, drawn away from the
shore, on a light north wind, in endless fine blue
wrinkles, with just the merest crisp, small ripple
on the beach. Another day, fresh southwest wind,
with a fine, high, lively, light surf. And even on
one day the biggest waves of the season too
big for comfort. Well! it was all glorious; you
will understand; we have had it just like that so
often together. Indeed your presence was the one
thing we longed for, and did n t have, throughout
our whole visit. There was hardly an hour down
there when I did n t think of you and long for you.
. Never had I more needed the restorative
204 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
magic of nature and companionship than when
I set forth for that blessed island, and never did it
more wonderfully work upon me its beneficent
spell. To judge by the way I feel now, I have n t
known what it was to be really rested and well
since I finished Herakles. I feel pages more of
enthusiasm at the end of my pen, but I will spare
you. I took down to the island with me my win
ter s work, which has taken the shape of a volume
of poems ready for publication, and read it to
Langdon, who, thank goodness, felt high praise
for them more enthusiastic approval, indeed,
than I had dared to hope for."
Langdon Mitchell s encouragement and sym
pathy were pathetically grateful to him, so rare
was the voice of an impartial and competent judge.
He wrote to his wife in the warmest appreciation
of it.
1" I have been having such good days ! Langdon
is of course the utmost delight to me, and the
presence of companionship day by day is fresh
and wonderful to me beyond measure. Also the
weather in general has been glorious, and the whole
THE END 205
spectacle of the world clothed in light and beauty.
I lead a sane and hygienic life. We go to bed before
twelve, and sleep all we can. We breakfast, read,
write perhaps an occasional letter, talk for long,
fine, clear stretches of thought, and regardless of
time, play silly but active games on the grass,
swim, bask in the sun, sail, and talk, and read
aloud, and read to ourselves, and talk, and talk.
. . . I m getting into splendid condition."
When his father, fagged by the long fatigues of
the tariff session, returned north, they went back
to Tuckanuck together in August, and there he
had the pleasure of a visit from a new and enthu
siastic admirer, Mr. Alfred Brown, lecturer and
critic, who brought him for the first time a sense
of possible appreciation beyond his personal
friends.
He never alluded to his own symptoms. Even
his father, though on the watch, noticed only that
he spared himself, and took more frequent rests.
To Sturgis Bigelow he wrote of his anxiety about
both Bigelow and his father, whom, he said, he
was helping to "get his much-needed rest and re-
206 GEORGE CABOT LODGE
cuperation, and I think he is getting them, both,
good and plenty, but the knowledge that you will
probably not get here this season makes the dear
island seem singularly deserted. ... It s all do
ing him good, and what is more, he thinks it is.
... I read a good deal, and take my swim, and
an occasional sail. Also, after a month s vacation
during which I have n t written a line, I ve now
begun again, 5 and write and meditate for four
or five hours every day ... so that life flows
evenly and quietly and cheerfully. Still, lacking
the stimulus of your prospective arrival, I shan t
be sorry to get back to my Pussy and my babes."
This seems to have been one of the last letters
he wrote. It was mailed at Nantucket, August 18,
and on the 19th he was seized at night by violent
indigestion, probably due to some ptomaine poison.
The next day he was better. The distress re
turned on the night of the twentieth. Twenty-
four hours of suffering ensued ; then the heart
suddenly failed and the end came.
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