Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/81

Rh severing his connection with the University of Chicago in 1902, when offered a professorship at full salary if he would lecture for a single quarter annually, he declined, valuing his independence so highly that he accepted hardship with it, rather than a prosperous subjection.

Before his early death in 1910 he had made his way to a mode of expression quite his own. His imitative and experimental period extended into his manhood years; it took this florid Westerner, for example, a curiously long time to pass from the shadow of Rossetti, and his debt to Browning is visible in some of his best work. Answering a friend's criticism of Wilding Flower (later named Heart's Wild Flower), he said : Paltry roof' is paltry I freely admit; 'wind-control' and 'moonward melodist' are rococo as hell." The remark has the downrightness, with a trace of humour, which is common in his letters, and which helped him to become more than a moonward melodist. The same letter contains another sentence that suggests at once the strength and the weakness of his work. "I think you are not tolerant enough for the instinct for conquest in language, the attempt to push out its boundaries, to win for it continually some new swiftness, some rare compression, to distill from it a more opaline drop." This eagerness of expression gives vitality to all of Moody's work; but it also gives it a sense of effort, of straining to obtain an intensity that must, after all, come inevitably and easily.

In his dramas in blank verse, this characteristic eagerness dominates not only style but theme. His trilogy of poetic dramas aims to do no less than to reveal the need of God to man and of man to God. The Fire-Bringer (1904) is concerned with the Prometheus legend; The Masque of Judgment (1900) with the eventual meaning to God of his decree of man's destruction; and The Death of Eve (1901), unhappily never completed, was to show the impossibility of separation. The plan is stupendous; there is perhaps none greater in literature; but certainly it may be questioned whether the problem is soluble at all, and if it is, whether Moody was the poet needed for so lofty an enterprise. It is true that the fragmentary member of the trilogy is finely done, in a manner grandly simple despite the complex and murky emotional states evolved, and that the conception of Eve as the instrument of reconciliation