Poems | Page 7

be of a more pleasure-loving and adventurous disposition; and there exists a letter to his mother in which, after contrasting, with obvious allusion to Chaucer's "Prologue", the mediaeval ideals of the Knight and the Clerk, he adds: "C. is the Knight and I the Clerk, deriving more keen pleasure from the perusal of a musty old volume than in pursuing adventure out in the world." But about the middle of his Harvard career, a marked change came over his habits of thought and of action. He emerged from his shell, made many friends, and threw himself with great zest into the social life of his comrades. It is evident, however, that this did not mean any slackening in his literary interests. His work gives ample proof of real, if not of systematic, culture. He genuinely loves and has made his own many of the great things of the past. His translations from Dante and Ariosto, for example, show no less sympathy than accomplishment. Very characteristic is his selection of the Twenty-sixth Canto of the `Inferno', in which the narrative of Ulysses brings with it a breath from the great romance of the antique world. It is noteworthy that before he graduated he took up with zeal and with distinction the study of Celtic literature -- a corrective, perhaps, in its cooler tones, to the tropical motives with which his mind was stored. He was one of the editors of the `Harvard Monthly', to which he made frequent contributions of verse.
There followed two years (1910-12) in New York -- probably the least satisfactory years of his life. The quest of beauty is scarcely a profession, and it caused his parents some concern to find him pausing irresolute on the threshold of manhood, instead of setting himself a goal and bracing his energies for its achievement. In 1911 his mother and sister left Mexico, a week or two before Porfirio Diaz made his exit, and the Maderists entered the capital. They returned to New York, to find Alan still unsettled, and possessed with the thought, or perhaps rather the instinct, that the life he craved for was not to be found in America, but awaited him in Europe. In the following year he carried his point, and set off for Paris -- a departure which may fairly be called his Hegira, the turning-point of his history. That it shortened his span there can be little doubt. Had he settled down to literary work, in his native city, he might have lived to old age. But it secured him four years of the tense and poignant joy of living on which his heart was set; and during two of these years the joy was of a kind which absolved him for ever from the reproach of mere hedonism and self-indulgence. He would certainly have said -- or rather he was continually saying, in words full of passionate conviction -- One crowded hour of glorious life Is worth an age without a name.
It was in the spirit of a romanticist of the eighteen-forties that he plunged into the life of Paris. He had a room near the Musee de Cluny, and he found himself thoroughly at home among the artists and students of the Latin Quarter, though he occasionally varied the `Vie de Boheme' by excursions into "society" of a more orthodox type. Paris has had many lovers, but few more devoted than Alan Seeger. He accepted the life of "die singende, springende, schoene Paris" with a curious whole-heartedness. Here and there we find evidence -- for instance, in the first two sonnets -- that he was not blind to its seamy side. But on the whole he appears to have seen beauty even in aspects of it for which it is almost as difficult to find aesthetic as moral justification. The truth is, no doubt, that the whole spectacle was plunged for him in the glamour of romance. Paris did not belong to the working-day world, but was like Baghdad or Samarcand, a city of the Arabian Nights. How his imagination transfigured it we may see in such a passage as this: By silvery waters in the plains afar Glimmers the inland city like a star, With gilded gates and sunny spires ablaze, And burnished domes half seen through luminous haze. Lo, with what opportunity earth teems! How like a fair its ample beauty seems! Fluttering with flags its proud pavilions rise: What bright bazaars, what marvellous merchandise, Down seething alleys what melodious din, What clamor, importuning from every booth: At Earth's great mart where Joy is trafficked in Buy while thy purse yet swells with golden Youth!
Into this fair he sallied forth, not as one to the manner born, but with the eagerness of a traveller from a far country, who feels