Arts and Letters

In the death of William Vaughn Moody the Academy has lost a poet of rich endowment and great distinction. Like Colonel Higginson, Mrs. Howe, and Mr. Crawford, he had the cosmopolitan temper, and he was haunted by the beauty of Greek literature. Unlike them, he was perplexed by our modern world, and was never fully at home in it. Perhaps this is only saying that he was a poet. As a Harvard undergraduate, Moody revealed a mind of uncommon richness and complexity of pattern; but even at forty he had not wholly succeeded in bringing that mind into lucid order, into a steady grasp of structural design. A lover of Milton, Shelley, and Euripides, he was enraptured of beautiful words. His lyrics sing in burdened, thrush-like cadences which are too heavy with thought, too deeply drenched with passionate feeling; the wet boughs of his fragrant verse bend low, blinding the eyes of his readers. But more than once, as in the masterly Ode in Time of Hesitation, in Gloucester Moors, and in some of the songs in his dramas, feeling and form were wrought into consummate perfection of expression. Here were "thoughts that voluntary moved harmonious numbers."

Moody's incompleted trilogy, The Fire-Bringer, The Masque of Judgment, and The Death of Eve, contains memorable passages, but the key to his cosmologies and mythologies is hard to find, and perhaps—perhaps there was none. One of his prose plays, The Great Divide, had notable success upon the boards, but at the time of his death he seems to have abandoned the ambitions of a playwright. Never quite at ease in our contemporary America; teaching literature with abundant scholarship, but with no love for his profession; writing poetic dramas which few persons read; dear beyond most men to his friends, but shy and wilful; splendidly courageous in hazarding every sacrifice in the service of poetry, William Vaughn Moody lost much that other men of letters care for, but he won, who shall say how much more, in inner power and in creative mastery over the forms of his art. His friend Mr. Percy Mackaye has nobly written his eulogy in Uriel; and surely it is in verse only, and not in prose, that we should fitly record the passing of this strong, perturbed spirit. He chose high and hard paths, but paths which were surely leading to serenity of vision, as they had already led him into the secret places of beauty and close to the passionate and troubled heart of the sons of Eve.