Abbie Farwell Brown

A meeting at the Boston Authors’ Club is something to remember. The faces one sees are largely of New England. It is as if one had stepped back to a different period when English blood in America had not quite so great a foreign infusion. In this Colonial, or perhaps Victorian atmosphere, Abbie Farwell Brown is a gay, active figure. It was in this atmosphere that Josephine Preston Peabody Marks was beloved and influential. They were great friends. Miss Abbie Brown has written many books for children. She has written short stories. She has published volumes of poems. Her muse is a fanciful one. It springs from the sources of the Cambridge School. It is gentle, quiet, and not without its charm. Its place in America cannot yet be shaken by the Menckens and the Untermeyers.

JOSEPHINE PEABODY, “THE PIPER”

In the summer of 1910 I streaked across Ireland and half England on a joyful errand. I had already crossed the Atlantic toward the same end. For it seemed to me then, and it seems to me now, that the prize performance of Josephine Peabody’s “Piper” was one of the significant events in modern English letters: an American triumph in a new field.

Was it not amazing that an American, and a woman, should win a prize offered by Shakespeare’s own town and open to the English speaking world, for the best poetic drama? There were three hundred competitors sending manuscripts. Imagine the astonishment of those English men of letters who were the judges when they found that “The Piper” was conceived in Cambridge (Massachusetts, not England), and that the author was the wife of a Harvard professor, being indeed that fair young poet of whom Austin Dobson had written when she first visited England:

The prize, three hundred pounds, carried with it the promise that the successful play should be given a performance at the Stratford Memorial Festival during the spring of 1910. I think it was this promise that chiefly attracted J. P. For Shakespeare was the hero of her worship, and Stratford her Mecca, though she loved festivals for any sake. She had already in 1900 published a one act play founded on Shakespeare’s Sonnets, “Fortune and Men’s Eyes”. She knew her Stratford well, through a lonely girlhood pilgrimage to that shrine. And she dared believe that her dramatic fancy, making of the old Pied Piper legend a beautiful biting arraignment of materialism, might be worthy of the high company at a Shakespeare Memorial. I believe she was confident from the first that fate was with her in this dear desire. Her self-confidence was one of her strongest assets in a life of counter-circumstance.

It was a tense year for my friend. “The Piper” was already in print, though not yet published (it was written in 1907, the year following her marriage), when she heard almost by chance of the prize offer. Having ascertained that a printed book was eligible, she sent it off, just barely in time to get by. Then came weeks of eager waiting. She heard from headquarters that “The Piper” was still among the final half dozen plays in the survival of the fittest. Then, that there was but one other rival. At this juncture J. P., as usual in a crisis, consulted her Shakespeare oracle. The final judge in the contest was the Duke of Argyle. And the page chosen at random from “Midsummer Night’s Dream” declared cryptically, “All that I will tell you is that the Duke hath dined!” This sounded promising. But when on his return that night J. P. showed the oracle to her husband, he turned to the page that followed, and found this, in the same speech of Bottom: “For the short and the long is, our play is preferred.... And I do not doubt but to hear them say, it is a sweet comedy!” No more anxiety.

She resolved to be present at the performance and receive the prize in person. But the public announcement of the prize winner found her absorbed in her newest poem, a wee Lionel Marks Junior. A less spirited adventurer might have hesitated. But she took the eight weeks old baby and her tiny daughter and made the voyage alone. She confessed afterward that she almost died on the journey. But her courage never wavered.

Arrived in Stratford she met disappointment, hope deferred. For early in May King Edward fell ill, and died on the very eve of the day announced for the performance of “The Piper”. All England went into mourning, of course. No chance for a spring festival at Stratford. Everything postponed till midsummer. It was to be a midsummer night’s dream, after all! Meanwhile, with her two small babies, and with the gay little frocks that she loved, J. P. was obliged to go into official mourning, and to possess her soul in as much patience as a poet can summon under such circumstances.

One pleasant thing at least happened in that trying interval of waiting. Little Lionel was baptized in old Stratford church, in the very same font where Shakespeare himself had been baptized 345 years earlier. By such intimate and picturesque association between life and symbolism J. P. loved to vary the course of her earthly pilgrimage. As she once expressed it, “Every day ought to be a festival for one reason or another.” Another favorite slogan was: “Let us turn routine into rhythm!” She believed passionately in life as a thrilling adventure. Tragic it might be at times, painful or cruel. But she could not for a moment have allowed it to be dull. The Piper says:

The performance itself turned out a personal triumph for J. P. as well as an artistic triumph for the play and its distinguished actors. Marion Terry—sister of Ellen Terry, who was in the audience—took the chief woman’s part, and F. R. Benson, veteran actor and manager, had the title rôle and produced the play. Violet Farebrother, Eric Maxon, and other favorites shared the honors. A brilliant audience had gathered in Stratford town from all parts of England for the unique occasion. As scene followed beautiful scene in the tender, whimsical drama, Bottom’s prophecy was verified. It was indeed a “sweet comedy”. Gradually unfolded the symbolic meaning of the captured children and their rainbow, the little lame boy with his winged shoes, the one mother who understood, the Lonely Man, and the selfless idealist, the Piper, bent on setting things right. The Piper was, of course, Josephine Peabody herself speaking in character:

Throughout her life J. P. could truly say, as she said in this play:

I shall never forget the surprised thrill that rippled over the tense audience when, after the play was over and acclaimed, J. P. stepped out to receive her prize in its handsome silver box. She was so young and beautiful in her white wedding gown: scarcely, I imagine, the preconceived British idea of an American bas bleu. Amazing her poise and gracious dignity. And when she spoke her voice, with its honey sweetness, its clear inflections void of Yankee twang, must have been still more of a surprise. She made the most graceful little speech, apparently offhand, though of course it had been most carefully considered. For she had a message to deliver. She told those British folk (there were few Americans to share my pride) what most of them probably had never thought before. That she came not as a stranger to Stratford, for Shakespeare was our Shakespeare, too. That we had as great a pride as our British kin in the development of our common literature. (She might well have added that our country was founded by folk who left England just after Shakespeare died, bringing hither his idiom, still current in certain Yankee seaboard hamlets—and perhaps nowhere else.)

It was a new Declaration—not of Independence but of Heirship. They cheered her with rapture. And I feel sure that this acceptance of her dictum by at least one representative British audience was the beginning of a new rapprochement with American letters. Perhaps this victory made easier the way and more cordial the welcome to still “newer” poets who came flocking very shortly. Robert Frost, for instance, was hailed and understood and published there as early as 1912, before he was known in his own country. Why do we make so little of our literary assets, when we grow hysterical so easily over things that count for much less? Had Josephine Peabody been a Frenchwoman her proud country would never have let this victory be forgotten by anyone. Had “The Piper” been the name of a winning yacht, our cup defender, it would have captured the public imagination and have become a watchword. Had J. P. been a Marathon runner or a heavyweight champion, her success would have filled the daily press, and her recent passing (with half a dozen unfinished plays in her fertile brain) would have sent a nation into mourning.

She achieved the climax of her “success” with that performance of “The Piper”. And few persons, I doubt, have had so unsullied a triumph. Certainly I have never seen a face so radiant with happiness as was hers that night. It was no doubt a disappointment that her plays were not thereafter sought out for stage presentation by her own country. “The Piper” had a short run in New York. This and her other nine volumes are read and loved by many. But her best dramatic work in “Marlowe”, nobly conceived and skilfully handled, remains still like her “Nightingale,—Unheard”. “The Wolf of Gubbio”, a moving and picturesque drama most originally developed, “Fortune and Men’s Eyes”, and “Wings”—each brimming with lovely poetry and dramatic effectiveness—have waited all these years for their professional chance. “The Portrait of Mrs. W.” (that cleverest dramatic study in prose of Mary Wollstonecraft and her circle) is still untried after the first year of its life, which was the last year of our poet.

Poetic drama was her chosen medium, and she stuck valiantly to her ideal in the face of all temptation to more popular and lucrative expression. At the end of her busy life she could “proudly boast, I never wrote just for money”. For, as the Piper declares again:

The taste of her time and the physical difficulties in the way of producing the kind of play she elected to make; the prejudice of the average producer, manager, and actor, and the unintelligence of the modern audience in respect to spoken poetry—she discounted all these, and was willing to bide the renascence of opportunity for the poet with a dramatic imagination. There are some who feel that maybe the time is not distant when her plays will emerge as a fresh and delightful surprise to audiences who are tired of things so very, very different.

She was always a master of poetic technique. I don’t know how or where she acquired it. But when I first knew her, a school girl, she was already publishing graceful, musical lyrics in the accepted forms. They were unusually thoughtful, if rather youthfully melancholy. She had not yet realized the power of her gayer, at times almost mischievous muse, which was quite as characteristic of herself. From the publishing of her first book “The Wayfarers”, her reaction to her fellow men and women developed rapidly through a too brief but eventful life. Out of a rather detached young disciple of æsthetic and spiritual beauty, she became a passionate and militant apostle of the beauty spelled in human justice and sympathy. The whole burden of her later books was a sense of responsibility toward folk less fortunate than herself.

Though she clung to traditional poetic forms she was no reactionary in spirit. She was indeed, as one realizes with some surprise on considering the whole content of her ten volumes, more revolutionary than many of the “newer” poets. No stanza perhaps expresses with more direct simplicity and good humor her spiritual challenge to her times than this song, again of the Piper: