X. CLEAR BLUE
Aftertelling me how he “ate down” the farmer, Vachel rested and passed into a halcyon mood. We had a heavenly day climbing towards a heaven of unclouded blue. Swinburne flowed more naturally from the poet’s lips than conversation:
Before the beginning of yearsThere came to the making of manTime with a gift of tears,Grief with a glass that ran.
Before the beginning of yearsThere came to the making of manTime with a gift of tears,Grief with a glass that ran.
Before the beginning of years
There came to the making of man
Time with a gift of tears,
Grief with a glass that ran.
His thought soared with our steps.
As the sea gives her shells to the shingleThe earth gives her streams to the sea,
As the sea gives her shells to the shingleThe earth gives her streams to the sea,
As the sea gives her shells to the shingle
The earth gives her streams to the sea,
he declaimed to the streams. I promised to arrange a Swinburne recital for him next time he came to England. For I soon found that he knew as much Swinburne by heart as he did of his own poetry. Ellery Sedgwick wrote me from Boston that to tramp with a poet would be “Some punkins,” and one may say it was when the poet all day long was a living fountain of verse. I had but to mention a poem and Lindsay poured it forth to the skies. We bathed in a waterfall in the heat of noon, which was also a Swinburnian joy, and we splashed in melting snow whilst our shoulders were burned by the sun and inured ourselves to sun and ice.
The sun literally blistered the skin, and we reclined in it on scarlet shelving rocks and cooked our luncheon. All the while Vachel recited Swinburne’s “Ode to Athens,” addressing the walls of a great mountain cirque which drooped in snow curtains and hanging gardens of silver water.
Up there came to us after lunch a yellowish-greyanimal with sprawling hind legs and stupid benevolent snout and whistled at us—fee-fo, fee-fo,—a whistling marmot. As I tried to approach him he snuggled off to the snow-field whence he had come, disappeared under the crust, and presently reappeared from a hole in the midst of the snow and began chasing chipmunks in and out of the snow holes.
Weresumed our journey upward, and all was well. The grass was emerald, the paint-brush was bright ruby. Swallow-tailed butterflies aeroplaned to our feet. The valley was broad and clear without mystery or horror. The waterfalls hung like the gardens of Babylon. An opal lake below us changed and waxed in iridescent glory and caused whispers of rapturous interest. And the mountain we were on was the one of the great figure nine made of snow, which had so thrilled us and appalled us when we saw it afar at night some days before. When we had gone to the top of it we had reached the great divide, where the waters flow north, south, and west toward Hudson’s Bay, the Gulf of Mexico, and thePacific. At least, so the topographers assure us, and we must take their word. Vachel says we will not wait for rain and see the rain-drops hit the mountain-top and divide automatically into three parts.
So we descended at dusk into a verdant valley, with low trees growing wide apart, and waist-high flowering daisies and basket grass, and sunflowers—all as fresh and fair as if gardened for us yesterday. There were serried ranks of flowers. The tall mullein stalks became so thick that they looked like a wooden fencing in the twilight. Looking upward we saw a crimson mountain, a brown mountain, and a green mountain. Looking downward, afar, we saw many forests, separated by streams, sleeping before us. And we slept in a thicket and were made music to by the nymphs of the seven waterfalls of Shadow Mountain.
Vachel Lindsaybelongs to a sect of primitive Christians called “Disciples of Christ.” They are followers of Alexander Campbell, and are called “Campbellites” in America, much as members of the Catholic and Apostolic community are called Irvingites in England. Theyare akin to the Baptists, being emphatically “immersionists.” Among other notable people who belong to this brotherhood is Mr. Lloyd George, and it has been suggested that the British statesman be asked to address a general convention of the Disciples if he comes to America. The chief virtue in the sect lay doubtless in an attempted return to primitive historical Christianity in all its simplicity. Not that the poet is a narrow sectarian. How could a poet be? But he has drunk deep of the primitive spirit in Christianity, and is very near to children, negroes, Indians, and the elemental types in men and women. He loves oratory more than reason, and impulse more than thought. Hence, no doubt, the well of his poetry.
We talked of the modern cult of mediævalism and the Chesterton-Belloc group as we resumed our tramp, and we discussed G. K. Chesterton’s visit to America. Lindsay felt that Chesterton counted for a great deal in America. He was not merely a celebrity. He had the reputation of a Socrates eager to converse with youth. But when he came to America he did not really come. “He has been Barnumisedas Oliver Lodge was Barnumised,” said the poet. “It’s the worst of commercialised lecturing. Literary lions are imported by speculative impresarios and then put to the American people entirely from a dollar point of view. The organisations that can pay five hundred dollars for a visit get their Chesterton. But how about the universities and colleges and small groups, the real intelligentsia of America—the people who have a creative interest in what a thinker and critic has said and in what he says? A similar mistake was made with Alfred Noyes, who was booked as the man who made poetry pay. It created a false impression and did much injury when there was an opportunity for great good.” Vachel Lindsay’s idea is that two or three literary men and women should be chosen each year as the guests of the nation, and that they should be sponsored by the magazines and the universities. In that way they would meet the American nation and not merely the brassy front of American business.
Withthis subject we plunged through the rank undergrowth of the forest, following ournorth-westerly way, which should bring us to St. Mary’s Lake and the steps of “Going to the Sun Mountain.” We gathered our first potful of black currants and stewed them with sugar for our luncheon, and we had our daily dip in the rushing waters of Red Eagle Creek. It was a warm valley, and the west wind, surcharged with moisture from the Pacific, had expressed itself in a great floral exuberance, in ripe raspberries, currants, and gooseberries, and in forests of firs, which lay against the steep mountain-sides like feathers against a bird’s wing.
Vachel indulged his passion for the West and all that the West means to an American. He has memorised at some time or other the map of the United States, and can draw it and put in all the States in a few minutes. He drew it on a scrap of paper as we rested at sunset, putting in the far Western States first—Washington and Oregon like two sugar-boxes on top of one another, and then the key-shape of Utah, whose southern line is roughly the southern line of Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky, and Virginia, and whose northern line is the northern line of California andNevada, and approximately of Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.
“California,” says he, “is a whale swimming around the desert of Nevada; Idaho is a mountain throne and its curve is the curve of Montana. Wyoming fits into the angle of Utah. New Mexico is under Colorado, and its capital, Sante Fé, is the spiritual capital of America. Texas plunges southward like a root—don’t draw it too small. Oklahoma is a pistol pointing west. Nebraska is another pistol pointing west. North and South Dakota are western blankets. Louisiana is a cavalier’s boot. Illinois is like an ear of Indian corn. Arkansas, Missouri, and Iowa move westward with the slant of the mountains and the rivers. All America, as you will see, has a grandiose north-westerly-south-easterly direction or kink caused by the Rocky Mountains primarily, and by the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers secondarily. The Rocky Mountains control the continent. That is why we are travelling north-west. It is quite natural. It is America’s way. It is written in her rocks and by her waters.
“As the families migrated from Virginia to Kentucky and Illinois and Minnesota—sowe go following nature’s trail out to the wilderness.”
North-west, north-west!Give us north-westerly breezes.Let us be mad north-north-west,Rather than southerly sober and sane.Some one once wrote on a madhouse wall,That the madder we were the nearer to God;The saner, the further from Man.God give us the divine kinkNorth-north-west, north-north-west,When you can’t tell a hawk from a handsaw,—Hamlet only became Hamlet when he learned the secret.
North-west, north-west!Give us north-westerly breezes.Let us be mad north-north-west,Rather than southerly sober and sane.Some one once wrote on a madhouse wall,That the madder we were the nearer to God;The saner, the further from Man.God give us the divine kinkNorth-north-west, north-north-west,When you can’t tell a hawk from a handsaw,—Hamlet only became Hamlet when he learned the secret.
North-west, north-west!
Give us north-westerly breezes.
Let us be mad north-north-west,
Rather than southerly sober and sane.
Some one once wrote on a madhouse wall,
That the madder we were the nearer to God;
The saner, the further from Man.
God give us the divine kink
North-north-west, north-north-west,
When you can’t tell a hawk from a handsaw,—
Hamlet only became Hamlet when he learned the secret.