Various

“ Thus, after the tale is told, comes the realization of the ultimate isolation of man. Gabrielle had gone away alone. Penn-Raven too had disappeared. Each was bound from the other by ineradicable law. There never could have been a golden house with two to build it. It is not thus we are made. Bartholow was to come to understand that he could not build but by himself, that his renascence was a gift to him alone. ”

“ Who sees the new and cannot leave the old! Thus, previous to Roman Bartholow, Mr. Robinson, believing that man can rarely leave his old surroundings for the new, has developed his philosophy from the negative side. He has not treated of the attainment of the Light, but has showed the struggle of the man who is making the choice. He has been interested in the man’s failure and in consequence he has written of Merlin, Lancelot, and of Seneca Sprague.
With Roman Bartholow, however, he has represented in Gabrielle a complete and final expression of the positive side of his philosophy. ”

“ Gabrielle too should receive rebirth and with him build that house. Poor Bartholow!
Bartholow is a man upon whom the Light has fallen. What he will do with it is the subject of the poem. Where Lancelot was the study of a man in pursuit of the Light, Roman Bartholow is the study of a man after the Light had come. If both men were heroes in the sense that Galahad was a hero, no suffering would be entailed. But these are mortal men and mortal men are plagued with ignorance and frailty. Each has to learn that when the Light gleams before him he must follow it alone. ”

“ Yet the exhilaration and the spell that belong to climbing even a civilized mountain are there; the civilized climbers get out of their lorry and feel it. The German Countess feels it in a glad, pagan abandonment: she likes the wind in her face, and she likes to see “away beyond, the lake lying far off and small, the wall of those other rocks like a curtain of stone, dim and diminished to the horizon. ”

“ If we are correctly informed, they consider it a fact, however unpleasant, that the average Yale student feels a very real, if unofficial, compulsion to attend whichever Sunday service is held at a later hour than the other. The Troubled Spirits defy the University to hold the short service at eleven o’clock, and the long one at ten—believing that their position would be more than vindicated by the lack of attendance at the earlier service. ”

“ He it is, with his solid face, thick lips and violet eyes, upon whom “one may not wholly look and live”, for in Penn-Raven there is more of the devil than is safe to investigate. The devil only knows why he came to Bartholow, why he possessed those violet eyes withal, and, after he had met Gabrielle, why the devil he ever went away. He was large and muscular and imbued with a healthy-mindedness which could purge the soul of Roman. ”

“ But, even supposing there was a word of truth in these extreme views, it seems to us that, while The Senior Class, The Troubled Spirits, and ourselves are agreed in desiring a football victory as soon as possible, we may as well take pleasure in a certain aspect of these defeats which is very desirable in a quiet way. It has always been held that football victories help to stimulate enrollment, and it is universally admitted that the enrollment of the University is far too large as it is. ”

“ Robinson can no longer see climax in life, for to him destinies are decided well in advance of any catastrophe, so that the climax that does appear in the poem is one miraculously cast in overtones. No word comes from the poet that it is at hand. No word comes from the characters. The word is found in the reader’s mind, forcing him to believe its presence. He knows that Gabrielle, though she would “shrivel to deny it”, is come to the end of all her hopes. He knows she can only accept her fate. There is nothing more to say. ”

“ Here, in Roman Bartholow, in the magic loveliness of Gabrielle it has come to a noble conclusion.
Previous to this poem Mr. Robinson’s philosophy has expressed itself negatively. It is his belief that evil is the result of moral choice. He does not call disease, accident, or war by the name of evil, because it is possible to look forward to a day when such excrescences will be removed. Evil, to Mr. Robinson, is that which is ineradicable and the ineradicable is the situation resulting from moral choice. Man has little free will. ”

“ Does the greatest of generals receive the same amount of encouragement from his people no matter if his success be large or small? The Troubled Spirits have put these questions to many of us, and, without waiting for reply, answered them almost vulgarly in the negative. They remark that it is fundamentally self-evident that one must spur one’s charger, not feed him lumps of sugar, before going into battle. ”

“ They may not go so far as [248] to admit, with The Troubled Spirits, that football at Yale has become not the most manly but the most sentimental of sports, yet they do attach great weight to the matter. The Troubled Spirits, I understand, go much further, and assert that year after year the University is expected to have confidence, trust, or perhaps blind faith in the team. They would have us believe that Yale has been taught to accept defeat with a pious resignation that savors of slave morality. ”

“ Robinson has discovered that to take Nature as she is is not necessarily to say to the player that he may sit on the piano.
Yet this taking of Nature as she is, despite the fact that Mr. Robinson calls the theme a “good deal of a mix up”, in no wise complicates the bare plot. Roman Bartholow, an ailing descendant of an old Maine family, is brought to know again the joy of life by acquaintance with a man that comes to visit him and forgets to go away. ”

“ It has been usual, in the past, for Editors of The Yale Literary Magazine to express themselves as strongly opposed to something, when engaged in writing a leader. Two recent leaders have varied this procedure to the extent of declaring the opposition of their authors to opposition, but the principle of being opposed to something remains. At the present moment, it occurs to us that it might be interesting to suppose correct a few of the pessimistic opinions held by that rather noisy group whom we shall call The Troubled Spirits. ”

“ No one had known the flower that grew within the weed. No one had cared to search beyond a certain libidinous examination. She, however, was aware. The command was come that she save Bartholow. She accepted. With her determination made she resisted two trying interviews with Penn-Raven and her husband, who successively tried to wound her sensitivity more deeply. The Raven groaned about his tragedies and disillusions, while Gabrielle was going out to die. There was nothing more in life for her than an austere duty, implacable and dark.
Where the Light falls, death falls ”

“ In cantos IV and V Gabrielle is very far from any taint of superficiality. It is only at the outset that she gives the impression. This is done by Mr. Robinson in order that the reader may understand the attitudes of Bartholow and Penn-Raven toward her. What Gabrielle really is the reader will shortly discover. But the touch of the weed, nevertheless, remains. It was part of Gabrielle and she employed it as a protection against her lovers. Fearing lest Penn-Raven find her suffering, she preferred to be tortured by him rather than reveal herself. ”

“ Robinson’s recent popularity had not gone to his head and would for the future endanger his work, no one then reading could fully comprehend the ineptitude of her fear. Perhaps the reader severely questioned her, but he could not be convinced until Roman Bartholow appeared to prove that any such statements as Miss Lowell’s were erroneous. Miss Lowell has based her fear, curiously enough, upon the melodramatic poem Avon’s Harvest, in which, though the poet was but playing with dime novel effects, his verse was more masterfully composed than in any of his earlier poems. ”

“ The flowers of rhetoric, when blended skillfully into a delicately fragrant and perfumed discourse, are, indeed, far more expensive than a bouquet of orchids—few of us will ever be able to afford them again. ”

“ There is no middle way nor any synthesis. To accept the new situation and leave the old, that is the way of truth. Only by that way can man hope to achieve happiness. If he attempt to mediate, then he will lash himself and cry in Lancelot’s words ”

“ Lives hidden in our walls.
...
Even a phantom house if made unwisely
May fall down on us and hurt horribly.
A different light was come to Gabrielle. As she spoke these words, a “pale fire” descended upon her, shriveling the weed, giving luxuriance to the flower. A miracle alone could have revealed to her the truth, and if it was not a miracle, it was the light from her own tragedy. She had failed, in marrying Bartholow, to find the being she sought. Likewise Penn-Raven had disappointed her. But she loved her husband for the light that had come to him. The Light was greater than herself. ”

“ It seems, then, that this matter might very well rest by allowing The Troubled Spirits to admire Osborn Hall as a sample of the latest phase in unrepressed art, while the rest of us respect it as an example of what our grandfathers were fond of, and of what our grandsons will treat with veneration. But to return to things less trivial—
As this is written, the Senior class have voted that the most important thing needed by Yale is football victories, and we are, for once, in accord with The Troubled Spirits in thinking that our gridiron defeats are dreadful things. ”

“ However stupid and unthinking The Troubled Spirits may find the highly cultured, and in many cases highly paid, gentlemen who speak at Yale, they will find the less highly paid, and not infrequently less cultured, type of man to whom they are destined, infinitely more stupid, and perhaps positively unpalatable. ”

“ Here is a book—the first for many years, so far as our knowledge goes—which can legitimately be compared with that classic of regional literature, Thoreau’s “Cape Cod.” Its author’s subject, like Thoreau’s, is one of the quaintest and most fascinating provincial districts of the continent; a district which has the literary advantage of being to this day less known than Cape Cod was, even at the time when Thoreau tramped its length. ”

“ A woman guilty as she could never hope to build a spiritual house.
Such an explanation of Gabrielle’s lack of enthusiasm is at first glance somewhat superficial. The Gabrielle of the poem who has moved us so profoundly is not the woman Penn-Raven describes in this manner. Gabrielle was not motivated by selfishness and cowardice. She did not die because she feared her husband. [263] Yet, however one interpret Gabrielle, this judgment of her, which Penn-Raven voiced, remains partially correct. Gabrielle was essentially “flower and weed together”. ”

“ In short, so far as The Troubled Spirits are concerned, Sunday service is at eleven o’clock, and contains a sermon varying in length from twenty minutes to half an hour.
But after allowing all that, and allowing, too, that the visiting clergymen are attempting to foist opinions of their own upon the undergraduate body, there is still something to be said. In the first place, we imagine that The Troubled Spirits, on leaving college, will perform their undoubted duty of attacking Christianity with every resource in their power. ”

“ Robinson, evil must overtake us—with this one exception, however, that whereas Aeschylus believed the gods brought man to his doom, Mr. Robinson maintains that it is man’s own frailty. Take Lancelot for an example. Lancelot has come to a point where he must make a moral choice. ”

“ There is, in all living literature, a kind of between-the-lines expression of the atmosphere belonging to the described period and the described place. With the advent of literary interest in thought as well as action, the point of view peculiar to the time, the race, and the situation has been present also. ”

“ This Penn-Raven, though he works a cure for Bartholow, succeeds in doing the opposite for Roman’s wife. He falls in love with her and, before the opening of the poem, has for some time possessed her adequately. Gabrielle is a peculiar [257] character, but let it suffice here to say that the liaison with Penn-Raven is no answer to her problem. In Bartholow she married the wrong man, and the Raven she comes to find intolerable. She is one who has always suffered disappointments. ”

“ What is your secret that charms each new listener back to life’s pages
Men scrawled out in blood and carousel, love and the brine of the north wind?
...
“We are the keepers of secrets, sighed to us out of the darkness ”

“ Roman Bartholow, because of its complete and extensive objectivity, impresses one most signally with its inevitability, a characteristic which Mathew Arnold termed the basis for all great poetry. From the opening lines where Bartholow gazes down upon “a yellow dusk of trees” to the close of the last canto there is never a moment when the story does not move silently ahead, dynamically, inevitably, since the author has been able to withhold comment, and since he has purposely avoided an obvious climax. Mr. ”

“ Hence, were we in their place, we should ask nothing better than to have all the foremost of our enemies brought before us, at great expense, and exposed in such a manner that we could most easily detect the flaws in their armor, which we were later to pierce. ”