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The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century

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Title: The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century

Author: William Lyon Phelps


        
Release date: April 1, 2005 [eBook #7930]
                Most recently updated: December 30, 2020

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ADVANCE OF ENGLISH POETRY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY ***




Tiffany Vergon, Cam Venezuela and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.





THE ADVANCE OF ENGLISH POETRY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

BY

WILLIAM LYON PHELPS

Lampson Professor of English Literature at Yale

Member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters


  _O! 't is an easy thing
         To write and sing;
  But to write true, unfeigned verse
  Is very hard!_

  --HENRY VAUGHAN, _1655_




TO
MY FRIEND FOR FORTY YEARS

FRANK W. HUBBARD




ACKNOWLEDGMENT


The publishers of the works of the poets from whom illustrative
passages are cited in this volume, have courteously and generously
given permission, and I take this opportunity of expressing my thanks
to The Macmillan Company, who publish the poems of Thomas Hardy,
William Watson, John Masefield, W. W. Gibson, Ralph Hodgson, W. B.
Yeats, "A. E.," James Stephens, E. A. Robinson, Vachel Lindsay, Amy
Lowell, Edgar Lee Masters, Sara Teasdale, J. C. Underwood, Fannie
Stearns Davis; to Henry Holt and Company, who publish the poems of
Walter De La Mare, Edward Thomas, Padraic Colum, Robert Frost, Louis
Untermeyer, Sarah N. Cleghorn, Margaret Widdemer, Carl Sandburg, and
the two poems by Henry A. Beers quoted in this book, which appeared in
_The Ways of Yale_; to Charles Scribner's Sons, publishers of the
poems of George Santayana, Henry Van Dyke, Corinne Roosevelt Robinson,
Alan Seeger; to Houghton, Mifflin and Company, publishers of the poems
of Josephine Peabody, Anna Hempstead Branch, and W. A. Bradley's
_Old Christmas_; to The John Lane Company, publishers of the
poems of Stephen Phillips, Rupert Brooke, Benjamin R. C. Low; to the
Frederick A. Stokes Company, publishers of the poems of Alfred Noyes,
Robert Nichols, Thomas MacDonagh, Witter Bynner; to the Yale
University Press, publishers of the poems of W. A. Percy, Brian
Hooker, W. E. Benét, C. M. Lewis, E. B. Reed, F. E. Pierce, R. B.
Glaenzer, L. W. Dodd; to the Oxford University Press, publishers of
the poems of Robert Bridges; to Alfred A. Knopf, publisher of the
poems of W. H. Davies; to John W. Luce and Company, publishers of the
poems of John M. Synge; to Harper and Brothers, publishers of William
Watson's _The Man Who Saw_; to Longmans, Green and Company,
publishers of the poems of Willoughby Weaving; to Doubleday, Page and
Company, publishers of the poems of James Elroy Flecker; to the
Bobbs-Merrill Company, publishers of the poems of W. D. Foulke; to
Thomas B. Mosher, publisher of the poems of W. A. Bradley, W. E.
Henley; to James T. White and Company, publishers of William
Griffiths; Francis Thompson's _In No Strange Land_ appeared in
the _Athenaeum_ and _Lilium Regis_ in the _Dublin
Review_; the poem by Scudder Middleton appeared in _Contemporary
Verse_, that by Allan Updegraff in the _Forum_, and that by D.
H. Lawrence in _Georgian Poetry_ 1913-15, published by The Poetry
Bookshop, London.

The titles of the several volumes of poems with dates of publication
are given in my text.

I am grateful to the Yale University Librarians for help on
bibliographical matters, and to Professor Charles Bennett and Byrne
Hackett, Esquire, for giving some facts about the Irish poets.

W. L. P.




PREFACE


The material in this volume originally appeared in _The Bookman_,
1917-1918. It is now published with much addition and revision.

The Great War has had a stimulating effect on the production of
poetry. Professional poets have been spokesmen for the inarticulate,
and a host of hitherto unknown writers have acquired reputation. An
immense amount of verse has been written by soldiers in active
service. The Allies are fighting for human liberty, and this Idea is
an inspiration. It is comforting to know that some who have made the
supreme sacrifice will be remembered through their printed poems, and
it is a pleasure to aid in giving them public recognition.

Furthermore, the war, undertaken by Germany to dominate the world by
crushing the power of Great Britain, has united all English-speaking
people as nothing else could have done. In this book, all poetry
written in the English language is considered as belonging to English
literature.

It should be apparent that I am not a sectarian in art, but am
thankful for poetry wherever I find it. I have endeavored to make
clear the artistic, intellectual, and spiritual significance of many
of our contemporary English-writing poets. The difficulties of such an
undertaking are obvious; but there are two standards of measure. One
is the literature of the past, the other is the life of today. I judge
every new poet by these.




CONTENTS


I SOME CONTRASTS--HENLEY, THOMPSON, HARDY, KIPLING

II PHILLIPS, WATSON, NOYES, HOUSMAN

III JOHN MASEFIELD

IV GIBSON AND HODGSON

V BROOKE, FLECKER, DE LA MARE, AND OTHERS

VI THE IRISH POETS

VII AMERICAN VETERANS AND FORERUNNERS

VIII VACHEL LINDSAY AND ROBERT FROST

IX AMY LOWELL, ANNA BRANCH, EDGAR LEE MASTERS, LOUIS UNTERMEYER

X SARA TEASDALE, ALAN SEEGER, AND OTHERS

XI A GROUP OF YALE POETS

APPENDIX

INDEX




THE ADVANCE OF ENGLISH POETRY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY




CHAPTER I

SOME CONTRASTS--HENLEY, THOMPSON, HARDY, KIPLING


  Meaning of the word "advance"--the present widespread interest
  in poetry--the spiritual warfare--Henley and Thompson--Thomas
  Hardy a prophet in literature--_The Dynasts_--his
  atheism--his lyrical power--Kipling the Victorian--his future
  possibilities--Robert Bridges--Robert W. Service.

Although English poetry of the twentieth century seems inferior to the
poetry of the Victorian epoch, for in England there is no one equal to
Tennyson or Browning, and in America no one equal to Poe, Emerson, or
Whitman, still it may fairly be said that we can discern an advance in
English poetry not wholly to be measured either by the calendar and
the clock, or by sheer beauty of expression. I should not like to say
that Joseph Conrad is a greater writer than Walter Scott; and yet in
_The Nigger of the Narcissus_ there is an intellectual sincerity,
a profound psychological analysis, a resolute intention to discover
and to reveal the final truth concerning the children of the sea, that
one would hardly expect to find in the works of the wonderful Wizard.
Shakespeare was surely a greater poet than Wordsworth; but the man of
the Lakes, with the rich inheritance of two centuries, had a capital
of thought unpossessed by the great dramatist, which, invested by his
own genius, enabled him to draw returns from nature undreamed of by
his mighty predecessor. Wordsworth was not great enough to have
written _King Lear_; and Shakespeare was not late enough to have
written _Tintern Abbey_. Every poet lives in his own time, has a
share in its scientific and philosophical advance, and his
individuality is coloured by his experience. Even if he take a Greek
myth for a subject, he will regard it and treat it in the light of the
day when he sits down at his desk, and addresses himself to the task
of composition. It is absurd to call the Victorians old-fashioned or
out of date; they were as intensely modern as we, only their modernity
is naturally not ours.

A great work of art is never old-fashioned; because it expresses in
final form some truth about human nature, and human nature never
changes--in comparison with its primal elements, the mountains are
ephemeral. A drama dealing with the impalpable human soul is more
likely to stay true than a treatise on geology. This is the notable
advantage that works of art have over works of science, the advantage
of being and remaining true. No matter how important the contribution
of scientific books, they are alloyed with inevitable error, and after
the death of their authors must be constantly revised by lesser men,
improved by smaller minds; whereas the masterpieces of poetry, drama
and fiction cannot be revised, because they are always true. The
latest edition of a work of science is the most valuable; of
literature, the earliest.

Apart from the natural and inevitable advance in poetry that every
year witnesses, we are living in an age characterized both in England
and in America by a remarkable advance in poetry as a vital influence.
Earth's oldest inhabitants probably cannot remember a time when there
were so many poets in activity, when so many books of poems were not
only read, but bought and sold, when poets were held in such high
esteem, when so much was written and published about poetry, when the
mere forms of verse were the theme of such hot debate. There are
thousands of minor poets, but poetry has ceased to be a minor subject.
Any one mentally alive cannot escape it. Poetry is in the air, and
everybody is catching it. Some American magazines are exclusively
devoted to the printing of contemporary poems; anthologies are
multiplying, not "Keepsakes" and "Books of Gems," but thick volumes
representing the bumper crop of the year. Many poets are reciting
their poems to big, eager, enthusiastic audiences, and the atmosphere
is charged with the melodies of ubiquitous minstrelsy.

The time is ripe for the appearance of a great poet. A vast audience
is gazing expectantly at a stage crowded with subordinate actors,
waiting or the Master to appear. The Greek dramatists were sure of
their public; so were the Russian novelists; so were the German
musicians. The "conditions" for poetry are intensified by reason of
the Great War. We have got everything except the Genius. And the
paradox is that although the Genius may arise out of right conditions,
he may not; he may come like a thief in the night. The contrast
between public interest in poetry in 1918 and in 1830, for an
illustration, is unescapable. At that time the critics and the
magazine writers assured the world that "poetry is dead." Ambitious
young authors were gravely advised not to attempt anything in
verse--as though youth ever listened to advice! Many critics went so
far as to insist that the temper of the age was not "adapted" to
poetry, that not only was there no interest in it, but that even if
the Man should appear, he would find it impossible to sing in such a
time and to such a coldly indifferent audience. And yet at that
precise moment, Tennyson launched his "chiefly lyrical" volume, and
Browning was speedily to follow.

Man is ever made humble by the facts of life; and even literary
critics cannot altogether ignore them. Let us not then make the
mistake of being too sure of the immediate future; nor the mistake of
overestimating our contemporary poets; nor the mistake of despising
the giant Victorians. Let us devoutly thank God that poetry has come
into its own; that the modern poet, in public estimation, is a Hero;
that no one has to apologize either for reading or for writing verse.
An age that loves poetry with the passion characteristic of the
twentieth century is not a flat or materialistic age. We are not
disobedient unto the heavenly vision.

In the world of thought and spirit this is essentially a fighting age.
The old battle between the body and the soul, between Paganism and
Christianity, was never so hot as now, and those who take refuge in
neutrality receive contempt. Pan and Jesus Christ have never had so
many enthusiastic followers. We Christians believe our Leader rose
from the dead, and the followers of Pan say their god never died at
all. It is significant that at the beginning of the twentieth century
two English poets wrote side by side, each of whom unconsciously waged
an irreconcilable conflict with the other, and each of whom speaks
from the grave today to a concourse of followers. These two poets did
not "flourish" in the twentieth century, because the disciple of the
bodily Pan was a cripple, and the disciple of the spiritual Christ was
a gutter-snipe; but they both lived, lived abundantly, and wrote real
poetry. I refer to William Ernest Henley, who died in 1903, and to
Francis Thompson, who died in 1907.

Both Henley and Thompson loved the crowded streets of London, but they
saw different visions there. Henley felt in the dust and din of the
city the irresistible urge of spring, the invasion of the smell of
distant meadows; the hurly-burly bearing witness to the annual
conquest of Pan.

  Here in this radiant and immortal street
  Lavishly and omnipotently as ever
  In the open hills, the undissembling dales,
  The laughing-places of the juvenile earth.
  For lo! the wills of man and woman meet,
  Meet and are moved, each unto each endeared
  As once in Eden's prodigal bowers befel,
  To share his shameless, elemental mirth
  In one great act of faith, while deep and strong,
  Incomparably nerved and cheered,
  The enormous heart of London joys to beat
  To the measures of his rough, majestic song:
  The lewd, perennial, overmastering spell
  That keeps the rolling universe ensphered
  And life and all for which life lives to long
  Wanton and wondrous and for ever well.

The _London Voluntaries_ of Henley, from which the above is a
fair example, may have suggested something to Vachel Lindsay both in
their irregular singing quality and in the direction, borrowed from
notation, which accompanies each one, _Andante con moto, Scherzando,
Largo e mesto, Allegro maestoso._ Henley's Pagan resistance to
Puritan morality and convention, constantly exhibited positively in
his verse, and negatively in his defiant Introduction to the Works of
Burns and in the famous paper on R. L. S., is the main characteristic
of his mind and temperament. He was by nature a rebel--a rebel against
the Anglican God and against English social conventions. He loved all
fighting rebels, and one of his most spirited poems deals
affectionately with our Southern Confederate soldiers, in the last
days of their hopeless struggle. His most famous lyric is an assertion
of the indomitable human will in the presence of adverse destiny. This
trumpet blast has awakened sympathetic echoes from all sorts and
conditions of men, although that creedless Christian, James Whitcomb
Riley, regarded it with genial contempt, thinking that the philosophy
it represented was not only futile, but dangerous, in that it ignored
the deepest facts of human life. He once asked to have the poem read
aloud to him, as he had forgotten its exact words, and when the reader
finished impressively

  I am the Master of my fate:
  I am the Captain of my soul--

"The _hell_ you are," said Riley with a laugh.

Henley is, of course, interesting not merely because of his paganism,
and robust worldliness; he had the poet's imagination and gift of
expression. He loved to take a familiar idea fixed in a familiar
phrase, and write a lovely musical variation on the theme. I do not
think he ever wrote anything more beautiful than his setting of the
phrase "Over the hills and far away," which appealed to his memory
much as the three words "Far-far-away" affected Tennyson. No one can
read this little masterpiece without that wonderful sense of melody
lingering in the mind after the voice of the singer is silent.

  Where forlorn sunsets flare and fade
    On desolate sea and lonely sand,
  Out of the silence and the shade
    What is the voice of strange command
  Calling you still, as friend calls friend
    With love that cannot brook delay,
  To rise and follow the ways that wend
    Over the hills and far away?

  Hark in the city, street on street
    A roaring reach of death and life,
  Of vortices that clash and fleet
    And ruin in appointed strife,
  Hark to it calling, calling clear,
    Calling until you cannot stay
  From dearer things than your own most dear
    Over the hills and far away.

  Out of the sound of ebb and flow,
    Out of the sight of lamp and star,
  It calls you where the good winds blow,
    And the unchanging meadows are:
  From faded hopes and hopes agleam,
    It calls you, calls you night and day
  Beyond the dark into the dream
    Over the hills and far away.

In temperament Henley was an Elizabethan. Ben Jonson might have
irritated him, but he would have got along very well with Kit Marlowe.
He was an Elizabethan in the spaciousness of his mind, in his robust
salt-water breeziness, in his hearty, spontaneous singing, and in his
deification of the human will. The English novelist, Miss Willcocks, a
child of the twentieth century, has remarked, "It is by their will
that we recognize the Elizabethans, by the will that drove them over
the seas of passion, as well as over the seas that ebb and flow with
the salt tides.... For, from a sensitive correspondence with
environment our race has passed into another stage; it is marked now
by a passionate desire for the mastery of life--a desire,
spiritualized in the highest lives, materialized in the lowest, so to
mould environment that the lives to come may be shaped to our will. It
is this which accounts for the curious likeness in our today with that
of the Elizabethans."

As Henley was an Elizabethan, so his brilliant contemporary, Francis
Thompson, was a "metaphysical," a man of the seventeenth century. Like
Emerson, he is closer in both form and spirit to the mystical poets
that followed the age of Shakespeare than he is to any other group or
school. One has only to read Donne, Crashaw, and Vaughan to recognize
the kinship. Like these three men of genius, Thompson was not only
profoundly spiritual--he was aflame with religious passion. He was
exalted in a mystical ecstasy, all a wonder and a wild desire. He was
an inspired poet, careless of method, careless of form, careless of
thought-sequences. The zeal for God's house had eaten him up. His
poetry is like the burning bush, revealing God in the fire. His
strange figures of speech, the molten metal of his language, the
sincerity of his faith, have given to his poems a persuasive influence
which is beginning to be felt far and wide, and which, I believe, will
never die. One critic complains that the young men of Oxford and
Cambridge have forsaken Tennyson, and now read only Francis Thompson.
He need not be alarmed; these young men will all come back to
Tennyson, for sooner or later, everybody comes back to Tennyson. It is
rather a matter of joy that Thompson's religious poetry can make the
hearts of young men burn within them. Young men are right in hating
conventional, empty phrases, words that have lost all hitting power,
hollow forms and bloodless ceremonies. Thompson's lips were touched
with a live coal from the altar.

Francis Thompson walked with God. Instead of seeking God, as so many
high-minded folk have done in vain, Thompson had the real and
overpowering sensation that God was seeking him. The Hound of Heaven
was everlastingly after him, pursuing him with the certainty of
capture. In trying to escape, he found torment; in surrender, the
peace that passes all understanding. That extraordinary poem, which
thrillingly describes the eager, searching love of God, like a father
looking for a lost child and determined to find him, might be taken as
a modern version of the one hundred and thirty-ninth psalm, perhaps
the most marvellous of all religious masterpieces.

  Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art acquainted with
    all my ways.
  Thou hast beset me behind and before, and laid thine hand upon me.
  Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy
    presence?
  If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there; if I make my bed in hell,
    behold, thou art there.
  If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts
    of the sea;
  Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right hand shall hold me.

The highest spiritual poetry is not that which portrays soul-hunger,
the bitterness of the weary search for God; it is that which reveals
an intense consciousness of the all-enveloping Divine Presence.
Children do not seek the love of their parents; they can not escape
its searching, eager, protecting power. We know how Dr. Johnson was
affected by the lines

  Quaerens me sedisti lassus
  Redemisti crucem passus
  Tantus labor non sit passus.

Francis Thompson's long walks by day and by night had magnificent
company. In the country, in the streets of London, he was attended by
seraphim and cherubim. The heavenly visions were more real to him than
London Bridge. Just as when we travel far from those we love, we are
brightly aware of their presence, and know that their affection is a
greater reality than the scenery from the train window, so Thompson
would have it that the angels were all about us. They do not live in
some distant Paradise, the only gate to which is death--they are here
now, and their element is the familiar atmosphere of earth.

Shortly after he died, there was found among

His papers a bit of manuscript verse, called "In No Strange Land." Whether
it was a first draft which he meant to revise, or whether he intended
it for publication, we cannot tell; but despite the roughnesses of
rhythm--which take us back to some of Donne's shaggy and splendid
verse--the thought is complete. It is one of the great poems of the
twentieth century, and expresses the essence of Thompson's religion.

  "IN NO STRANGE LAND"

  O world invisible, we view thee:
    O world intangible, we touch thee:
  O world unknowable, we know thee:
    Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!

  Does the fish soar to find the ocean,
    The eagle plunge to find the air,
  That we ask of the stars in motion
    If they have rumour of thee there?

  Not where the wheeling systems darken,
    And our benumbed conceiving soars:
  The drift of pinions, would we harken,
    Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.

  The angels keep their ancient places--
    Turn but a stone, and start a wing!
  'Tis ye, 'tis your estrangèd faces
    That miss the many-splendoured thing.

  But (when so sad thou canst not sadder)
    Cry; and upon thy so sore loss
  Shall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder
    Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.

  Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,
    Cry, clinging heaven by the hems:
  And lo, Christ walking on the water,
    Not of Gennesareth, but Thames!

Thompson planned a series of Ecclesiastical Ballads, of which he
completed only two--_Lilium Regis_ and _The Veteran of
Heaven_. These were found among his papers, and were published in
the January-April 1910 number of the _Dublin Review._ Both are
great poems; but _Lilium Regis_ is made doubly impressive by the
present war. With the clairvoyance of approaching death, Thompson
foresaw the world-struggle, the temporary eclipse of the Christian
Church, and its ultimate triumph. The Lily of the King is Christ's
Holy Church. I do not see how any one can read this poem without a
thrill.

  LILIUM REGIS

  O Lily of the King! low lies thy silver wing,
  And long has been the hour of thine unqueening;
  And thy scent of Paradise on the night-wind spills its sighs,
  Nor any take the secrets of its meaning.
  O Lily of the King! I speak a heavy thing,
  O patience, most sorrowful of daughters!
  Lo, the hour is at hand for the troubling of the land,
  And red shall be the breaking of the waters.

  Sit fast upon thy stalk, when the blast shall with thee talk,
  With the mercies of the king for thine awning;
  And the just understand that thine hour is at hand,
  Thine hour at hand with power in the dawning.
  When the nations lie in blood, and their kings a broken brood,
  Look up, O most sorrowful of daughters!
  Lift up thy head and hark what sounds are in the dark,
  For His feet are coming to thee on the waters!

  O Lily of the King!  I shall not see, that sing,
  I shall not see the hour of thy queening!
  But my song shall see, and wake, like a flower that dawn-winds shake,
  And sigh with joy the odours of its meaning.
  O Lily of the King, remember then the thing
  That this dead mouth sang; and thy daughters,
  As they dance before His way, sing there on the Day,
  What I sang when the Night was on the waters!

There is a man of genius living in England today who has been writing
verse for sixty years, but who received no public recognition as a
poet until the twentieth century. This man is Thomas Hardy. He has the
double distinction of being one of the great Victorian novelists, and
one of the most notable poets of the twentieth century. At nearly
eighty years of age, he is in full intellectual vigour, enjoys a
creative power in verse that we more often associate with youth, and
writes poetry that in matter and manner belongs distinctly to our
time. He could not possibly be omitted from any survey of contemporary
production.

As is so commonly the case with distinguished novelists, Thomas Hardy
practised verse before prose. From 1860 to 1870 he wrote many poems,
some of which appear among the Love Lyrics in _Time's
Laughingstocks,_ 1909. Then he began a career in prose fiction
which has left him today without a living rival in the world. In 1898,
with the volume called _Wessex Poems,_ embellished with
illustrations from his own hand, he challenged criticism as a
professional poet. The moderate but definite success of this
collection emboldened him to produce in 1901, _Poems of the Past and
Present._ In 1904, 1906, 1908, were issued successively the three
parts of _The Dynasts,_ a thoroughly original and greatly-planned
epical drama of the Napoleonic wars. This was followed by three books
of verse, _Time's Laughingstocks_ in 1909, _Satires of
Circumstance,_ 1914, and _Moments of Vision,_ 1917; and he is
a familiar and welcome guest in contemporary magazines.

Is it possible that when, at the close of the nineteenth century,
Thomas Hardy formally abandoned prose for verse, he was either
consciously or subconsciously aware of the coming renaissance of
poetry? Certainly his change in expression had more significance than
an individual caprice. It is a notable fact that the present poetic
revival, wherein are enlisted so many enthusiastic youthful
volunteers, should have had as one of its prophets and leaders a
veteran of such power and fame. Perhaps Mr. Hardy would regard his own
personal choice as no factor; the Immanent and Unconscious Will had
been busy in his mind, for reasons unknown to him, unknown to man,
least of all known to Itself. Leslie Stephen once remarked, "The
deepest thinker is not really--though we often use the phrase--in
advance of his day so much as in the line along which advance takes
place."

Looking backward from the year 1918, we may see some new meaning in
the spectacle of two modern leaders in fiction, Hardy and Meredith,
each preferring as a means of expression poetry to prose, each
thinking his own verse better than his novels, and each writing verse
that in substance and manner belongs more to the twentieth than to the
nineteenth century. Meredith always said that fiction was his kitchen
wench; poetry was his Muse.

The publication of poems written when he was about twenty-five is
interesting to students of Mr. Hardy's temperament, for they show that
he was then as complete, though perhaps not so philosophical a
pessimist, as he is now. The present world-war may seem to him a
vindication of his despair, and therefore proof of the blind folly of
those who pray to Our Father in Heaven. He is, though I think not
avowedly so, an adherent of the philosophy of Schopenhauer and von
Hartmann. The primal force, from which all things proceed, is the
Immanent Will. The Will is unconscious and omnipotent. It is
superhuman only in power, lacking intelligence, foresight, and any
sense of ethical values. In _The Dynasts,_ Mr. Hardy has written
an epic illustration of the doctrines of pessimism.

Supernatural machinery and celestial inspiration have always been more
or less conventional in the Epic. Ancient writers invoked the Muse.
When Milton began his great task, he wished to produce something
classic in form and Christian in spirit. He found an admirable
solution of his problem in a double invocation--first of the Heavenly
Muse of Mount Sinai, second, of the Holy Spirit. In the composition of
_In Memoriam_, Tennyson knew that an invocation of the Muse would
give an intolerable air of artificiality to the poem; he therefore, in
the introductory stanzas, offered up a prayer to the Son of God. Now
it was impossible for Mr. Hardy to make use of Greek Deities, or of
Jehovah, or of any revelation of God in Christ; to his mind all three
equally belonged to the lumber-room of discredited and discarded myth.
He believes that any conception of the Primal Force as a Personality
is not only obsolete among thinking men and women, but that it is
unworthy of modern thought. It is perhaps easy to mistake our own
world of thought for the thought of the world.

In his Preface, written with assurance and dignity, Mr. Hardy says:
"The wide prevalence of the Monistic theory of the Universe forbade,
in this twentieth century, the importation of Divine personages from
any antique Mythology as ready-made sources or channels of Causation,
even in verse, and excluded the celestial machinery of, say,
_Paradise Lost_, as peremptorily as that of the _Iliad_ or
the _Eddas_. And the abandonment of the Masculine pronoun in
allusions to the First or Fundamental Energy seemed a necessary and
logical consequence of the long abandonment by thinkers of the
anthropomorphic conception of the same."  Accordingly he arranged a
group of Phantom Intelligences that supply adequately a Chorus and a
philosophical basis for his world-drama.

Like Browning in the original preface to _Paracelsus_, our author
expressly disclaims any intention of writing a play for the stage. It
is "intended simply for mental performance," and "Whether mental
performance alone may not eventually be the fate of all drama other
than that of contemporary or frivolous life, is a kindred question not
without interest."  The question has been since answered in another
way than that implied, not merely by the success of community drama,
but by the actual production of _The Dynasts_ on the London stage
under the direction of the brilliant and audacious Granville Barker. I
would give much to have witnessed this experiment, which Mr. Barker
insists was successful.

"Whether _The Dynasts_ will finally take a place among the
world's masterpieces of literature or not, must of course be left to
future generations to decide. Two things are clear. The publication of
the second and third parts distinctly raised public opinion of the
work as a whole, and now that it is ten years old, we know that no man
on earth except Mr. Hardy could have written it." To produce this
particular epic required a poet, a prose master, a dramatist, a
philosopher, and an architect. Mr. Hardy is each and all of the five,
and by no means least an architect. The plan of the whole thing, in
one hundred and thirty scenes, which seemed at first confused, now
appears in retrospect orderly; and the projection of the various
geographical scenes is thoroughly architectonic.

If the work fails to survive, it will be because of its low elevation
on the purely literary side. In spite of occasional powerful phrases,
as

  What corpse is curious on the longitude
  And situation of his cemetery!

the verse as a whole wants beauty of tone and felicity of diction. It
is more like a map than a painting. One has only to recall the
extraordinary charm of the Elizabethans to understand why so many
pages in _The Dynasts_ arouse only an intellectual interest. But
no one can read the whole drama without an immense respect for the
range and the grasp of the author's mind. Furthermore, every one of
its former admirers ought to reread it in 1918. The present world-war
gives to this Napoleonic epic an acute and prophetic interest nothing
short of astounding.

A considerable number of Mr. Hardy's poems are concerned with the idea
of God, apparently never far from the author's mind. I suppose he
thinks of God every day. Yet his faith is the opposite of that
expressed in the _Hound of Heaven_--in few words, it seems to be,
"Resist the Lord, and He will flee from you." Mr. Hardy is not content
with banishing God from the realm of modern thought; he is not content
merely with killing Him; he means to give Him a decent burial, with
fitting obsequies. And there is a long procession of mourners, some of
whom are both worthy and distinguished. In the interesting poem,
_God's Funeral_, written in 1908-1910, which begins

    I saw a slowly stepping train--
  Lined on the brows, scoop-eyed and bent and hoar--
  Following in files across a twilit plain
  A strange and mystic form the foremost bore

the development of the conception of God through human history is
presented with skill in concision. He was man-like at first, then an
amorphous cloud, then endowed with mighty wings, then jealous, fierce,
yet long-suffering and full of mercy.

    And, tricked by our own early dream
  And need of solace, we grew self-deceived,
  Our making soon our maker did we dream,
  And what we had imagined we believed.

    Till, in Time's stayless stealthy swing,
  Uncompromising rude reality
  Mangled the Monarch of our fashioning,
  Who quavered, sank; and now has ceased to be.

Among the mourners is no less a person than the poet himself, for in
former years--perhaps as a boy--he, too, had worshipped, and therefore
he has no touch of contempt for those who still believe.

    I could not prop their faith: and yet
  Many I had known: with all I sympathized;
  And though struck speechless, I did not forget
  That what was mourned for, I, too, once had prized.

In the next stanza, the poet's oft-expressed belief in the wholesome,
antiseptic power of pessimism is reiterated, together with a hint,
that when we have once and for all put God in His grave, some better
way of bearing life's burden will be found, because the new way will
be based upon hard fact.

    Still, how to bear such loss I deemed
  The insistent question for each animate mind,
  And gazing, to my growing sight there seemed
  A pale yet positive gleam low down behind,

    Whereof, to lift the general night,
  A certain few who stood aloof had said,
  "See you upon the horizon that small light--
  Swelling somewhat?" Each mourner shook his head.

    And they composed a crowd of whom
  Some were right good, and many nigh the best....
  Thus dazed and puzzled 'twixt the gleam and gloom
  Mechanically I followed with the rest.

This pale gleam takes on a more vivid hue in a poem written shortly
after _God's Funeral_, called _A Plaint to Man_, where God
remonstrates with man for having created Him at all, since His life
was to be so short and so futile:

  And tomorrow the whole of me disappears,
  The truth should be told, and the fact he faced
  That had best been faced in earlier years:

  The fact of life with dependence placed
  On the human heart's resource alone,
  In brotherhood bonded close and graced

  With loving-kindness fully blown,
  And visioned help unsought, unknown.

Other poems that express what is and what ought to be the attitude of
man toward God are _New Year's Eve, To Sincerity_, and the
beautiful lyric, _Let Me Enjoy_, where Mr. Hardy has been more
than usually successful in fashioning both language and rhythm into a
garment worthy of the thought. No one can read _The Impercipient_
without recognizing that Mr. Hardy's atheism is as honest and as
sincere as the religious faith of others, and that no one regrets the
blankness of his universe more than he. He would believe if he could.

Pessimism is the basis of all his verse, as it is of his prose. It is
expressed not merely philosophically in poems of ideas, but over and
over again concretely in poems of incident. He is a pessimist both in
fancy and in fact, and after reading some of our sugary "glad" books,
I find his bitter taste rather refreshing. The titles of his recent
collections, _Time's Laughingstocks_ and _Satires of
Circumstance_, sufficiently indicate the ill fortune awaiting his
personages. At his best, his lyrics written in the minor key have a
noble, solemn adagio movement. At his worst--for like all poets, he
is sometimes at his worst--the truth of life seems rather obstinately
warped. Why should legitimate love necessarily bring misery, and
illegitimate passion produce permanent happiness? And in the piece,
"Ah, are you digging on my grave?" pessimism approaches a _reductio
ad absurdum._

Dramatic power, which is one of its author's greatest gifts, is
frequently finely revealed. After reading _A Tramp-woman's
Tragedy,_ one unhesitatingly accords Mr. Hardy a place among the
English writers of ballads. For this is a genuine ballad, in story, in
diction, and in vigour.

Yet as a whole, and in spite of Mr. Hardy's love of the dance and of
dance music, his poetry lacks grace and movement. His war poem, _Men
Who March Away,_ is singularly halting and awkward. His complete
poetical works are interesting because they proceed from an
interesting mind. His range of thought, both in reminiscence and in
speculation, is immensely wide; his power of concentration recalls
that of Browning.

  I have thought sometimes, and thought long and hard.
  I have stood before, gone round a serious thing,
  Tasked my whole mind to touch and clasp it close,
  As I stretch forth my arm to touch this bar.
  God and man, and what duty I owe both,--
  I dare to say I have confronted these
  In thought: but no such faculty helped here.

No such faculty alone could help Mr. Hardy to the highest peaks of
poetry, any more than it served Caponsacchi in his spiritual crisis.
He thinks interesting thoughts, because he has an original mind. It is
possible to be a great poet without possessing much intellectual
wealth; just as it is possible to be a great singer, and yet be both
shallow and dull. The divine gift of poetry seems sometimes as
accidental as the formation of the throat. I do not believe that
Tennyson was either shallow or dull; but I do not think he had so rich
a mind as Thomas Hardy's, a mind so quaint, so humorous, so sharp. Yet
Tennyson was incomparably a greater poet.

The greatest poetry always transports us, and although I read and
reread the Wessex poet with never-lagging attention--I find even the
drawings in _Wessex Poems_ so fascinating that I wish he had
illustrated all his books--I am always conscious of the time and the
place. I never get the unmistakable spinal chill. He has too thorough
a command of his thoughts; they never possess him, and they never soar
away with him. Prose may be controlled, but poetry is a possession.
Mr. Hardy is too keenly aware of what he is about. In spite of the
fact that he has written verse all his life, he seldom writes
unwrinkled song. He is, in the last analysis, a master of prose who
has learned the technique of verse, and who now chooses to express his
thoughts and his observations in rime and rhythm.

The title of Mr. Hardy's latest volume of poems, _Moments of
Vision_, leads one to expect rifts in the clouds--and one is not
disappointed. It is perhaps characteristic of the independence of our
author, that steadily preaching pessimism when the world was peaceful,
he should now not be perhaps quite so sure of his creed when a larger
proportion of the world's inhabitants are in pain than ever before.
One of the fallacies of pessimism consists in the fact that its
advocates often call a witness to the stand whose testimony counts
against them. Nobody really loves life, loves this world, like your
pessimist; nobody is more reluctant to leave it. He therefore, to
support his argument that life is evil, calls up evidence which proves
that it is brief and transitory. But if life is evil, one of its few
redeeming features should be its brevity; the pessimist should look
forward to death as a man in prison looks toward the day of his
release. Yet this attitude toward death is almost never taken by the
atheists or the pessimists, while it is the burden of many of the
triumphant hymns of the Christian Church. Now, as our spokesman for
pessimism approaches the end--which I fervently hope may be afar
off--life seems sweet.

  "FOR LIFE I HAD NEVER CARED GREATLY"

            For Life I had never eared greatly,
              As worth a man's while;
              Peradventures unsought,
            Peradventures that finished in nought,
  Had kept me from youth and through manhood till lately
              Unwon by its style.

            In earliest years--why I know not--
              I viewed it askance;
              Conditions of doubt,
            Conditions that slowly leaked out,
  May haply have bent me to stand and to show not
              Much zest for its dance.

            With symphonies soft and sweet colour
              It courted me then,
              Till evasions seemed wrong,
            Till evasions gave in to its song,
  And I warmed, till living aloofly loomed duller
              Than life among men.

            Anew I found nought to set eyes on,
              When, lifting its hand,
              It uncloaked a star,
            Uncloaked it from fog-damps afar,
  And showed its beams burning from pole to horizon
              As bright as a brand.

            And so, the rough highway forgetting,
              I pace hill and dale,
              Regarding the sky,
            Regarding the vision on high,
  And thus re-illumed have no humour for letting
              My pilgrimage fail.

No one of course can judge of another's happiness; but it is difficult
to imagine any man on earth who has had a happier life than Mr. Hardy.
He has had his own genius for company all his days; he has been
successful in literary art beyond the wildest dreams of his youth; his
acute perception has made the beauty of nature a million times more
beautiful to him than to most of the children of men; his eye is not
dim, nor his natural force abated. He has that which should accompany
old age--honour, love, obedience, troops of friends.

The last poem in _Moments of Vision_ blesses rather than curses
life.

  AFTERWARDS

  When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay
    And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,
  Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the people say
    "He was a man who used to notice such things"?

  If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink,
    The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
  Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, will a gazer think,
    "To him this must have been a familiar sight"?

  If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,
    When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
  Will they say, "He strove that such innocent creatures should come to
        no harm,
    But he could do little for them; and now he is gone"?

  If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the
        door,
    Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees,
  Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,
    "He was one who had an eye for such mysteries"?

  And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom,
    And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,
  Till they rise again, as they were a new bell's boom,
    "He hears it not now, but he used to notice such things"?

Should Mr. Hardy ever resort to prayer--which I suppose is
unlikely--his prayers ought to be the best in the world. According to
Coleridge, he prayeth well who loveth well both man and bird and
beast; a beautiful characteristic of our great writer is his
tenderness for every living thing. He will be missed by men, women,
children, and by the humblest animals; and if trees have any
self-consciousness, they will miss him too.

Rudyard Kipling is a Victorian poet, as Thomas Hardy is a Victorian
novelist. When Tennyson died in 1892, the world, with approximate
unanimity, chose the young man from the East as his successor, and for
twenty-five years he has been the Laureate of the British Empire in
everything but the title. In the eighteenth century, when Gray
regarded the offer of the Laureateship as an insult, Mr. Alfred Austin
might properly have been appointed; but after the fame of Southey, and
the mighty genius of Wordsworth and of Tennyson, it was cruel to put
Alfred the Little in the chair of Alfred the Great. It was not an
insult to Austin, but an insult to Poetry. With the elevation of the
learned and amiable Dr. Bridges in 1913, the public ceased to care who
holds the office. This eminently respectable appointment silenced both
opposition and applause. We can only echo the language of Gray's
letter to Mason, 19 December, 1757: "I interest myself a little in the
history of it, and rather wish somebody may accept it that will
retrieve the credit of the thing, if it be retrievable, or ever had
any credit.... The office itself has always humbled the professor
hitherto (even in an age when kings were somebody), if he were a poor
writer by making him more conspicuous, and if he were a good one by
setting him at war with the little fry of his own profession, for
there are poets little enough to envy even a poet-laureat." Mason was
willing.

Rudyard Kipling had the double qualification of poetic genius and of
convinced Imperialism. He had received a formal accolade from the aged
Tennyson, and could have carried on the tradition of British verse and
British arms. Nor has any Laureate, in the history of the office,
risen more magnificently to an occasion than did Mr. Kipling at the
sixtieth anniversary of the reign of the Queen. Each poet made his
little speech in verse, and then at the close of the ceremony, came
the thrilling _Recessional_, which received as instant applause
from the world as if it had been spoken to an audience. In its
scriptural phraseology, in its combination of haughty pride and deep
contrition, in its "holy hope and high humility," it expressed with
austere majesty the genius of the English race. The soul of a great
poet entered immediately into the hearts of men, there to abide for
ever.

It is interesting to reflect that not the author of the
_Recessional_, but the author of _Regina Cara_ was duly
chosen for the Laureateship. This poem by Robert Bridges appeared on
the same occasion as that immortalized by Kipling, and was
subsequently included in the volume of the writer's poetical works,
published in 1912. It shows irreproachable reverence for Queen
Victoria. Apparently its poetical quality was satisfactory to those
who appoint Laureates.

  REGINA CARA

  Jubilee-Song, for music, 1897

  Hark! the world is full of thy praise,
  England's Queen of many days;
  Who, knowing how to rule the free,
  Hast given a crown to monarchy.

  Honour, Truth, and growing Peace
  Follow Britannia's wide increase,
  And Nature yield her strength unknown
  To the wisdom born beneath thy throne!

  In wisdom and love firm is thy fame:
  Enemies bow to revere thy name:
  The world shall never tire to tell
  Praise of the queen that reignèd well.

    O Felix anima, Domina pracclara,
      Amore semper coronabere
        Regina Cara

Rudyard Kipling's poetry is as familiar to us as the air we breathe.
He is the spokesman for the Anglo-Saxon breed. His gospel of orderly
energy is the inspiration of thousands of business offices; his
sententious maxims are parts of current speech: the victrola has
carried his singing lyrics even farther than the banjo penetrates, of
which latter democratic instrument his wonderful poem is the
apotheosis. And we have the word of a distinguished British
major-general to prove that Mr. Kipling has wrought a miracle of
transformation with Tommy Atkins. General Sir George Younghusband, in
a recent book, _A Soldier's Memories_, says, "I had never heard
the words or expressions that Rudyard Kipling's soldiers used. Many a
time did I ask my brother officers whether they had ever heard them.
No, never. But, sure enough, a few years after the soldiers thought,
and talked, and expressed themselves exactly as Rudyard Kipling had
taught them in his stories. Rudyard Kipling made the modern soldier.
Other writers have gone on with the good work, and they have between
them manufactured the cheery, devil-may-care, lovable person enshrined
in our hearts as Thomas Atkins. Before he had learned from reading
stories about himself that he, as an individual, also possessed the
above attributes, he was mostly ignorant of the fact. My early
recollections of the British soldier are of a bluff, rather surly
person, never the least jocose or light-hearted except perhaps when he
had too much beer."

This is extraordinary testimony to the power of literature--from a
first-class fighting man. It is as though John Sargent should paint an
inaccurate but idealized portrait, and the original should make it
accurate by imitation. The soldiers were transformed by the renewing
of their minds. Beholding with open face as in a glass a certain
image, they were changed into the same image, by the spirit of the
poet. This is certainly a greater achievement than correct reporting.
It is quite possible, too, that the _officers_' attitude toward
Tommy Atkins had been altered by the _Barrack-Room Ballads_, and
this new attitude produced results in character.

I give General Younghusband's testimony for what it is worth. It is
important if true. But it is only fair to add that it has been
contradicted by another military officer, who affirms that Kipling
reported the soldier as he was. Readers may take their choice. At all
events the transformation of character by discipline, cleanliness,
hard work, and danger is the ever-present moral in Mr. Kipling's
verse. He loves to take the raw recruit or the boyish, self-conscious,
awkward subaltern, and show how he may become an efficient man, happy
in the happiness that accompanies success. It is a Philistine goal,
but one that has the advantage of being attainable. The reach of this
particular poet seldom exceeds his grasp. And although thus far in his
career--he is only fifty-two, and we may hope as well as remember--his
best poetry belongs to the nineteenth century rather than the
twentieth, so universally popular a homily as _If_ indicates that
he has by no means lost the power of preaching in verse. With the
exception of some sad lapses, his latter poems have come nearer the
earlier level of production than his stories. For that matter, from
the beginning I have thought that the genius of Rudyard Kipling had
more authentic expression in poetry than in prose. I therefore hope
that after the war he will become one of the leaders in the advance of
English poetry in the twentieth century, as he will remain one of the
imperishable monuments of Victorian literature. The verse published in
his latest volume of stories, _A Diversity of Creatures_, 1917,
has the stamp of his original mind, and _Macdonough's Song_ is
impressive. And in a poem which does not appear in this collection,
but which was written at the outbreak of hostilities, Mr. Kipling was,
I believe, the first to use the name _Hun_--an appellation of
considerable adhesive power. Do roses stick like burrs?

His influence on other poets has of course been powerful. As Eden
Phillpotts is to Thomas Hardy, so is Robert Service to Rudyard
Kipling. Like Bret Harte in California, Mr. Service found gold in the
Klondike. But it is not merely in his interpretation of the life of a
distant country that the new poet reminds one of his prototype; both
in matter and in manner he may justly be called the Kipling of the
North. His verse has an extraordinary popularity among American
college undergraduates, the reasons for which are evident. They read,
discuss him, and quote him with joy, and he might well be proud of the
adoration of so many of our eager, adventurous, high-hearted youth.
Yet, while Mr. Service is undoubtedly a real poet, his work as a whole
seems a clear echo, rather than a new song. It is good, but it is
reminiscent of his reading, not merely of Mr. Kipling, but of poetry
in general. In _The Land God Forgot_, a fine poem, beginning

  The lonely sunsets flare forlorn
      Down valleys dreadly desolate;
  The lordly mountains soar in scorn
    As still as death, as stern as fate,

the opening line infallibly brings to mind Henley's

  Where forlorn sunsets flare and fade.

The poetry of Mr. Service has the merits and the faults of the "red
blood" school in fiction, illustrated by the late Jack London and the
lively Rex Beach. It is not the highest form of art. It insists on
being heard, but it smells of mortality. You cannot give permanence to
a book by printing it in italic type.

It is indeed difficult to express in pure artistic form great
primitive experiences, even with long years of intimate first-hand
knowledge. No one doubts Mr. Service's accuracy or sincerity. But many
men have had abundance of material, rich and new, only to find it
unmanageable. Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling succeeded where
thousands have failed. Think of the possibilities of Australia! And
from that vast region only one great artist has spoken--Percy
Grainger.




CHAPTER II

PHILLIPS, WATSON, NOYES, HOUSMAN


  Stephen Phillips--his immediate success--influence of
  Stratford-on-Avon--his plays--a traditional poet--his
  realism--William Watson--his unpromising start--his lament on
  the coldness of the age toward poetry--his
  Epigrams--_Wordsworth's Grave_--his eminence as a critic
  in verse--his anti-imperialism--his Song of Hate--his Byronic
  wit--his contempt for the "new" poetry--Alfred Noyes--both
  literary and rhetorical--an orthodox poet--a singer--his
  democracy--his childlike imagination--his
  sea-poems--_Drake_--his optimism--his religious faith--A.
  E. Housman--his paganism and pessimism--his modernity--his
  originality--his lyrical power--war poems--Ludlow.

The genius of Stephen Phillips was immediately recognized by London
critics. When the thin volume, _Poems_, containing _Marpessa,
Christ in Hades_, and some lyrical pieces, appeared in 1897, it was
greeted by a loud chorus of approval, ceremoniously ratified by the
bestowal of the First Prize from the British Academy. Some of the more
distinguished among his admirers asserted that the nobility,
splendour, and beauty of his verse merited the adjective Miltonic. I
remember that we Americans thought that the English critics had lost
their heads, and we queried what they would say if we praised a new
poet in the United States in any such fashion. But that was before we
had seen the book; when we had once read it for ourselves, we felt no
alarm for the safety of Milton, but we knew that English Literature
had been enriched. Stephen Phillips is among the English poets.

His career extended over the space of twenty-five years, from the
first publication of _Marpessa_ in 1890 to his death on the ninth
of December, 1915. He was born near the city of Oxford, on the
twenty-eighth of July, 1868. His father, the Rev. Dr. Stephen
Phillips, still living, is Precentor of Peterborough Cathedral; his
mother was related to Wordsworth. He was exposed to poetry germs at
the age of eight, for in 1876 his father became Chaplain and Sub-Vicar
at Stratford-on-Avon, and the boy attended the Grammar School. Later
he spent a year at Queens' College, Cambridge, enough to give him the
right to be enrolled in the long list of Cambridge poets. He went on
the stage as a member of Frank Benson's company, and in his time
played many parts, receiving on one occasion a curtain call as the
Ghost in _Hamlet_. This experience--with the early Stratford
inspiration--probably fired his ambition to become a dramatist. The
late Sir George Alexander produced _Paolo and Francesca_;
_Herod_ was acted in London by Beerbohm Tree, and in America by
William Faversham. Neither of these plays was a failure, but it is
regrettable that he wrote for the stage at all. His genius was not
adapted for drama, and the quality of his verse was not improved by
the experiment, although all of his half-dozen pieces have occasional
passages of rare loveliness. His best play, _Paolo and
Francesca_, suffers when compared either with Boker's or
D'Annunzio's treatment of the old story. It lacks the stage-craft of
the former, and the virility of the latter.

Phillips was no pioneer: he followed the great tradition of English
poetry, and must be counted among the legitimate heirs. At his best,
he resembles Keats most of all; and none but a real poet could ever
make us think of Keats. If he be condemned for not breaking new paths,
we may remember the words of a wise man--"It is easier to differ from
the great poets than it is to resemble them." He loved to employ the
standard five-foot measure that has done so much of the best work of
English poetry. In _The Woman with the Dead Soul_, he showed once
more the musical possibilities latent in the heroic couplet, which
Pope had used with such monotonous brilliance. In _Marpessa_, he
gave us blank verse of noble artistry. But he was far more than a mere
technician. He fairly meets the test set by John Davidson. "In the
poet the whole assembly of his being is harmonious; no organ is
master; a diapason extends throughout the entire scale; his whole
body, his whole soul is rapt into the making of his poetry.... Poetry
is the product of originality, of a first-hand experience and
observation of life, of a direct communion with men and women, with
the seasons of the year, with day and night. The critic will therefore
be well-advised, if he have the good fortune to find something that
seems to him poetry, to lay it out in the daylight and the moonlight,
to take it into the street and the fields, to set against it his own
experience and observation of life."

One of the most severe tests of poetry that I know of is to read it
aloud on the shore of an angry sea. Homer, Shakespeare, Milton gain in
splendour with this accompaniment.

With the words of John Davidson in mind, let us take two passages from
_Marpessa_, and measure one against the atmosphere of day and
night, and the other against homely human experience. Although Mr.
Davidson was not thinking of Phillips, I believe he would have
admitted the validity of this verse.

                       From the dark
  The floating smell of flowers invisible,
  The mystic yearning of the garden wet,
  The moonless-passing night--into his brain
  Wandered, until he rose and outward leaned
  In the dim summer; 'twas the moment deep
  When we are conscious of the secret dawn,
  Amid the darkness that we feel is green....
  When the long day that glideth without cloud,
  The summer day, was at her deep blue hour
  Of lilies musical with busy bliss,
  Whose very light trembled as with excess,
  And heat was frail, and every bush and flower
  Was drooping in the glory overcome;

Any poet knows how to speak in authentic tones of the wild passion of
insurgent hearts; but not every poet possesses the rarer gift of
setting the mellower years to harmonious music, as in the following
gracious words:

  But if I live with Idas, then we two
  On the low earth shall prosper hand in hand
  In odours of the open field, and live
  In peaceful noises of the farm, and watch
  The pastoral fields burned by the setting sun....
  And though the first sweet sting of love be past,
  The sweet that almost venom is; though youth,
  With tender and extravagant delight,
  The first and secret kiss by twilight hedge,
  The insane farewell repeated o'er and o'er,
  Pass off; there shall succeed a faithful peace;
  Beautiful friendship tried by sun and wind,
  Durable from the daily dust of life.
  And though with sadder, still with kinder eyes,
  We shall behold all frailties, we shall haste
  To pardon, and with mellowing minds to bless.
  Then though we must grow old, we shall grow old
  Together, and he shall not greatly miss
  My bloom faded, and waning light of eyes,
  Too deeply gazed in ever to seem dim;
  Nor shall we murmur at, nor much regret
  The years that gently bend us to the ground,
  And gradually incline our face; that we
  Leisurely stooping, and with each slow step,
  May curiously inspect our lasting home.
  But we shall sit with luminous holy smiles,
  Endeared by many griefs, by many a jest,
  And custom sweet of living side by side;
  And full of memories not unkindly glance
  Upon each other. Last, we shall descend
  Into the natural ground--not without tears--
  One must go first, ah God! one must go first;
  After so long one blow for both were good;
  Still like old friends, glad to have met, and leave
  Behind a wholesome memory on the earth.

Although _Marpessa_ and _Christ in Hades_ are subjects
naturally adapted for poetic treatment, Phillips did not hesitate to
try his art on material less malleable. In some of his poems we find a
realism as honest and clear-sighted as that of Crabbe or Masefield. In
_The Woman with the Dead Soul_ and _The Wife_ we have
naturalism elevated into poetry. He could make a London night as
mystical as a moonlit meadow. And in a brief couplet he has given to
one of the most familiar of metropolitan spectacles a pretty touch of
imagination. The traffic policeman becomes a musician.

  The constable with lifted hand
  Conducting the orchestral Strand.

Stephen Phillips's second volume of collected verse, _New Poems_
(1907), came ten years after the first, and was to me an agreeable
surprise. His devotion to the drama made me fear that he had burned
himself out in the _Poems_ of 1897; but the later book is as
unmistakably the work of a poet as was the earlier. The mystical
communion with nature is expressed with authority in such poems as
_After Rain_, _Thoughts at Sunrise_, _Thoughts at
Noon_. Indeed the first-named distinctly harks back to that
transcendental mystic of the seventeenth century, Henry Vaughan. The
greatest triumph in the whole volume comes where we should least
expect it, in the eulogy on Gladstone. Even the most sure-footed bards
often miss their path in the Dark Valley. Yet in these seven stanzas
on the Old Parliamentary Hand there is not a single weak line, not a
single false note; word placed on word grows steadily into a column of
majestic beauty.

This poem is all the more refreshing because admiration for Gladstone
had become unfashionable; his work was belittled, his motives
befouled, his clear mentality discounted by thousands of pygmy
politicians and journalistic gnats. The poet, with a poet's love for
mountains, turns the powerful light of his genius on the old giant;
the mists disappear; and we see again a form venerable and august.

  The saint and poet dwell apart; but thou
  Wast holy in the furious press of men,
  And choral in the central rush of life.
  Yet didst thou love old branches and a book,
  And Roman verses on an English lawn....

  Yet not for all thy breathing charm remote,
  Nor breach tremendous in the forts of Hell,
  Not for these things we praise thee, though these things
  Are much; but more, because thou didst discern
  In temporal policy the eternal will;

  Thou gav'st to party strife the epic note,
  And to debate the thunder of the Lord;
  To meanest issues fire of the Most High.

William Watson, a Yorkshireman by birth and ancestry, was born on the
second of August, 1858. His first volume, _The Prince's Quest_,
appeared in 1880. Seldom has a true poet made a more unpromising
start, or given so little indication, not only of the flame of genius,
but of the power of thought. No twentieth century English poet has a
stronger personality than William Watson. There is not the slightest
tang of it in _The Prince's Quest_. This long, rambling romance,
in ten sections, is as devoid of flavour as a five-finger exercise. It
is more than objective; it is somnambulistic. It contains hardly any
notable lines, and hardly any bad lines. Although quite dull, it never
deviates into prose--it is always somehow poetical without ever
becoming poetry. It is written in the heroic couplet, written with a
fatal fluency; not good enough and not bad enough to be interesting.
It is like the student's theme, which was returned to him without
corrections, yet with a low mark; and in reply to the student's
resentful question, "Why did you not correct my faults, if you thought
meanly of my work?" the teacher replied wearily, "Your theme has no
faults; it is distinguished by a lack of merit."

In _The Prince's Quest_ Mr. Watson exhibited a rather remarkable
command of a barren technique. He had neither thoughts that breathe,
nor words that burn. He had one or two unusual words--his only
indication of immaturity in style--like "wox" and "himseemed." (Why is
it that when "herseemed" as used by Rossetti, is so beautiful,
"himseemed" should be so irritating!) But aside from a few specimens,
the poem is as free from affectations as it is from passion. When we
remember the faults and the splendours of _Pauline,_ it seems
incredible that a young poet could write so many pages without
stumbling and without soaring; that he could produce a finished work
of mediocrity. I suppose that those who read the poem in 1880 felt
quite sure that its author would never scale the heights; and they
were wrong; because William Watson really has the divine gift, and is
one of the most deservedly eminent among living poets.

It is only fair to add, that in the edition of his works in 1898,
_The Prince's Quest_ did not appear; he was persuaded, however,
to include it in the two-volume edition of 1905, where it enjoys
considerable revision, "wox" becoming normal, and "himseemed" becoming
dissyllabic. For my part, I am glad that it has now been definitely
retained. It is important in the study of a poet's development. It
would seem that the William Watson of the last twenty-five years, a
fiery, eager, sensitive man, with a burning passion to express himself
on moral and political ideas, learned the mastery of his art before he
had anything to say.

Perhaps, being a thoroughly honest craftsman, he felt that he ought to
keep his thoughts to himself, until he knew how to express them. After
proving it on an impersonal romance, he was then ready to speak his
mind. No poet has spoken his mind more plainly.

In an interesting address, delivered in various cities in the United
States, and published in 1913, called _The Poet's Place in the
Scheme of Life,_ Mr. Watson said, "Since my arrival on these shores
I have been told that here also the public interest in poetry is
visibly on the wane." Now whoever told him that was mistaken. The
public interest in poetry and in poets has visibly _wox_, to use
Mr. Watson's word. It is always true that an original genius, like
Browning, like Ibsen, like Wagner, must wait some time for public
recognition, although these three all lived long enough to receive not
only appreciation, but idolatry; but the "reading public" has no
difficulty in recognizing immediately first-rate work, when it is
produced in the familiar forms of art. In the Preface that preceded
his printed lecture, Mr. Watson complained with some natural
resentment, though with no petulance, that his poem, _King
Alfred_, starred as it was from the old armories of literature,
received scarcely any critical comment, and attracted no attention.
But the reason is plain enough--_King Alfred_, as a whole, is a
dull poem, and is therefore not provocative of eager discussion. The
critics and the public rose in reverence before _Wordsworth's
Grave_, because it is a noble work of art. Its author did not have
to tell us of its beauty--it was as clear as a cathedral.

I do not agree with Mr. Watson or with Mr. Mackaye, that real poets
are speaking to deaf ears, or that they should be stimulated by forced
attention. I once heard Percy Mackaye make an eloquent and high-minded
address, where, if my memory serves me rightly, he advocated something
like a stipend for young poets. A distinguished old man in the
audience, now with God, whispered audibly, "What most of them need is
hanging!" I do not think they should be rewarded either by cash or the
gallows. Let them make their way, and if they have genius, the public
will find it out. If all they have is talent, and no means to support
it, poetry had better become their avocation.

Mr. Watson has expressly disclaimed that in his lecture he was
lamenting merely "the insufficient praise bestowed upon living poets."
It is certainly true that most poets cannot live by the sale of their
works. Is this especially the fault of our age? is it the fault of our
poets? is it a fault in human nature? Mr. Watson said, "Yet I am bound
to admit that this need for the poet is felt by but few persons in our
day. With one exception there is not a single living English poet, the
sales of whose poems would not have been thought contemptible by Scott
and Byron. The exception is, of course, that apostle of British
imperialism--that vehement and voluble glorifier of Britannic ideals,
whom I dare say you will readily identify from my brief, and, I hope,
not disparaging description of him. With that one brilliant and
salient exception, England's living singers succeed in reaching only a
pitifully small audience." In commenting on this passage, we ought to
remember that Scott and Byron were colossal figures, so big that no
eye could miss them; and that the reason why Kipling has enjoyed
substantial rewards is not because of his political views, nor because
of his glorification of the British Empire, but simply because of his
literary genius. He is a brilliant and salient exception to the common
run of poets, not merely in royalties, but in creative power.
Furthermore, shortly after this lecture was delivered, Alfred Noyes
and then John Masefield passed from city to city in America in a march
of triumph. Mr. Gibson and Mr. De La Mare received homage everywhere;
"Riley day" is now a legal holiday in Indiana; Rupert Brooke has been
canonized.

Mr. Watson is surely mistaken when he offers "his poetical
contemporaries in England" his "most sincere condolences on the hard
fate which condemned them to be born there at all in the latter part
of the nineteenth century." But he is not mistaken in wishing that
more people everywhere were appreciative of true poetry. I wish this
with all my heart, not so much for the poet's sake, as for that of the
people. But the chosen spirits are not rarer in our time than
formerly. The fault is in human nature. Material blessings are
instantly appreciated by every man, woman, and child, and by all the
animals. For one person who knows the joys of listening to music, or
looking at pictures, or reading poetry, there are a hundred thousand
who know only the joys of food, clothing, shelter. Spiritual delights
are not so immediately apparent as the gratification of physical
desires. Perhaps if they were, man's growth would stop. As Browning
says,

  While were it so with the soul,--this gift of truth
  Once grasped, were this our soul's gain safe, and sure
  To prosper as the body's gain is wont,--
  Why, man's probation would conclude, his earth
  Crumble; for he both reasons and decides,
  Weighs first, then chooses: will he give up fire
  For gold or purple once he knows its worth?
  Could he give Christ up were his worth as plain?
  Therefore, I say, to test man, the proofs shift,
  Nor may he grasp that fact like other fact,
  And straightway in his life acknowledge it,
  As, say, the indubitable bliss of fire.

One of the functions of the poet is to awaken men and women to the
knowledge of the delights of the mind, to give them life instead of
existence. As Mr. Watson nobly expresses it, the aim of the poet "is
to keep fresh within us our often flagging sense of life's greatness
and grandeur." We can exist on food; but we cannot live without our
poets, who lift us to higher planes of thought and feeling. The poetry
of William Watson has done this service for us again and again.

In 1884 appeared _Epigrams of Art, Life, and Nature_. I do not
think these have been sufficiently admired. As an epigrammatist Mr.
Watson has no rival in Victorian or in contemporary verse. The epigram
is a quite definite form of art, especially cultivated by the poets in
the first half of the seventeenth century. Their formula the terse
expression of obscene thoughts. Mr. Watson excels the best of them in
wit, concision, and grace; it is needless to say he makes no attempt
to rival them as a garbage-collector. Of the large number of epigrams
that he has contributed to English literature, I find the majority not
only interesting, but richly stimulating. This one ought to please Mr.
H. G. Wells:

  When whelmed are altar, priest, and creed;
    When all the faiths have passed;
  Perhaps, from darkening incense freed,
    God may emerge at last.

This one, despite its subject, is far above doggerel:

  His friends he loved. His direst earthly foes--
    Cats--believe he did but feign to hate.
  My hand will miss the insinuated nose,
    Mine eyes the tail that wagg'd contempt at fate.

But his best epigrams are on purely literary themes:

  Your Marlowe's page I close, my Shakespeare's ope.
    How welcome--after gong and cymbal's din--
  The continuity, the long slow slope
    And vast curves of the gradual violin!

With the publication in 1890 of his masterpiece, _Wordsworth's
Grave_, William Watson came into his own. This is worthy of the man
it honours, and what higher praise could be given? It is superior,
both in penetration and in beauty, to Matthew Arnold's famous
_Memorial Verses_. Indeed, in the art of writing subtle literary
criticism in rhythmical language that is itself high and pure poetry,
Mr. Watson is unapproachable by any of his contemporaries, and I do
not know of any poet in English literature who has surpassed him. This
is his specialty, this is his clearest title to permanent fame. And
although his criticism is so valuable, when employed on a sympathetic
theme, that he must be ranked among our modern interpreters of
literature, his style in expressing it could not possibly be
translated into prose, sure test of its poetical greatness. In his
_Apologia_, he says

                           I have full oft
  In singers' selves found me a theme of song,
  Holding these also to be very part
  Of Nature's greatness, and accounting not
  Their descants least heroical of deeds.

The poem _Wordsworth's Grave_ not only expresses, as no one else
has expressed, the quality of Wordsworth's genius, but in single lines
assigned to each, the same service is done for Milton, Shakespeare,
Shelley, Coleridge, and Byron. This is a matchless illustration of the
kind of criticism that is in itself genius; for we may quarrel with
Mr. Spingarn as much as we please on his general dogmatic principle of
the identity of genius and taste; here we have so admirable an example
of what he means by creative criticism, that it is a pity he did not
think of it himself. "For it still remains true," says Mr. Spingarn,
"that the aesthetic critic, in his moments of highest power, rises to
heights where he is at one with, the creator whom he is interpreting.
At that moment criticism and 'creation' are one."

All great poets have the power of noble indignation, a divine wrath
against wickedness in high places. The poets, like the prophets of
old, pour out their irrepressible fury against what they believe to be
cruelty and oppression. Milton's magnificent Piedmont sonnet is a
glorious roar of righteous rage; and since his time the poets have
ever been the spokesmen for the insulted and injured. Robert Burns,
more than most statesmen, helped to make the world safe for democracy.
I do not know what humanity would do without its poets--they are the
champions of the individual against the tyranny of power, the cruel
selfishness of kings, and the artificial conventions of society. We
may or may not agree with Mr. Watson's anti-imperialistic sentiments
as expressed in the early days of our century, he himself, like most
of us, has changed his mind on many subjects since the outbreak of the
world-war, and unless he ceases to develop, will probably change it
many times in the future. But whatever our opinions, we cannot help
admiring lines like these, published in 1897:

  HOW WEARY IS OUR HEART

  Of kings and courts; of kingly, courtly ways
  In which the life of man is bought and sold;
  How weary is our heart these many days!

  Of ceremonious embassies that hold
  Parley with Hell in fine and silken phrase,
  How weary is our heart these many days!

  Of wavering counsellors neither hot nor cold,
  Whom from His mouth God speweth, be it told
  How weary is our heart these many days!

  Yea, for the ravelled night is round the lands,
  And sick are we of all the imperial story.
  The tramp of Power, and its long trail of pain;
  The mighty brows in meanest arts grown hoary;
  The mighty hands,
  That in the dear, affronted name of Peace
  Bind down a people to be racked and slain;
  The emulous armies waxing without cease,
  All-puissant all in vain;
  The pacts and leagues to murder by delays,
  And the dumb throngs that on the deaf thrones gaze;
  The common loveless lust of territory;
  The lips that only babble of their mart,
  While to the night the shrieking hamlets blaze;
  The bought allegiance, and the purchased praise,
  False honour, and shameful glory;--
  Of all the evil whereof this is part,
  How weary is our heart,
  How weary is our heart these many days!

Another poem I cite in full, not for its power and beauty, but as a
curiosity. I do not think it has been remembered that in the _New
Poems_ of 1909 Mr. Watson published a poem of Hate some years
before the Teutonic hymn became famous. It is worth reading again,
because it so exactly expresses the cold reserve of the Anglo-Saxon,
in contrast with the sentimentality of the German. There is, of
course, no indication that its author had Germany in mind.

  HATE

  (To certain foreign detractors)

  Sirs, if the truth must needs be told,
  We love not you that rail and scold;
  And, yet, my masters, you may wait
  Till the Greek Calends for our hate.

  No spendthrifts of our hate are we;
  Our hate is used with husbandry.
  We hold our hate too choice a thing
  For light and careless lavishing.

  We cannot, dare not, make it cheap!
  For holy uses will we keep.
  A thing so pure, a thing so great
  As Heaven's benignant gift of hate.

  Is there no ancient, sceptred Wrong?
  No torturing Power, endured too long?
  Yea; and for these our hatred shall
  Be cloistered and kept virginal.

He found occasion to draw from his cold storage of hate much sooner
than he had anticipated. Being a convinced anti-imperialist, and
having not a spark of antagonism to Germany, the early days of August,
1914, shocked no one in the world more than him. But after the first
maze of bewilderment and horror, he drew his pen against the Kaiser in
holy wrath. Most of his war poems have been collected in the little
volume _The Man Who Saw,_ published in the summer of 1917. He has
now at all events one satisfaction, that of being in absolute harmony
with the national sentiment. In his Preface, after commenting on the
pain he had suffered in times past at finding himself in opposition to
the majority of his countrymen, he manfully says, "During the present
war, with all its agonies and horrors, he has had at any rate the one
private satisfaction of feeling not even the most momentary doubt or
misgiving as to the perfect righteousness of his country's cause.
There is nothing on earth of which he is more certain than that this
Empire, throughout this supreme ordeal, has shaped her course by the
light of purest duty." The volume opens with a fine tribute to Mr.
Lloyd George, "the man who saw," and _The Kaiser's Dirge_ is a
savage malediction. The poems in this book--of decidedly unequal
merit--have the fire of indignation if not always the flame of
inspiration. Taken as a whole, they are more interesting
psychologically than as a contribution to English verse. I sympathize
with the author's feelings, and admire his sincerity; but his
reputation as a poet is not heightened overmuch. Perhaps the best poem
in the collection is _The Yellow Pansy_, accompanied with
Shakespeare's line, "There's pansies--that's for thoughts."

  Winter had swooped, a lean and hungry hawk;
    It seemed an age since summer was entombed;
  Yet in our garden, on its frozen stalk,
    A yellow pansy bloomed.

  'Twas Nature saying by trope and metaphor:
    "Behold, when empire against empire strives,
   Though all else perish, ground 'neath iron war,
     The golden thought survives."

Although, with the exception of his marriage and travels in America,
Mr. Watson's verse tells us little of the facts of his life, few poets
have ever revealed more of the history of their mind. What manner of
man he is we know without waiting for the publication of his intimate
correspondence. It is fortunate for his temperament that, combined
with an almost morbid sensitiveness, he has something of Byron's power
of hitting back. His numerous volumes contain many verses scoring off
adverse critics, upon whom he exercises a sword of satire not always
to be found among a poet's weapons; which exercise seems to give him
both relief and delight. Apart from these thrusts edged with personal
bitterness, William Watson possesses a rarely used vein of ironical
wit that immediately recalls Byron, who might himself have written
some of the stanzas in _The Eloping Angels_. Faust requests
Mephisto to procure for them both admission into heaven for
half-an-hour:

  To whom Mephisto: "Ah, you underrate
    The hazards and the dangers, my good Sir.
  Peter is stony as his name; the gate,
    Excepting to invited guests, won't stir.
  'Tis long since he and I were intimate;
    We differed;--but to bygones why refer?
  Still, there are windows; if a peep through these
  Would serve your turn, we'll start whene'er you please...."

  So Faust and his companion entered, by
    The window, the abodes where seraphs dwell.
  "Already morning quickens in the sky,
    And soon will sound the heavenly matin bell;
  Our time is short," Mephisto said, "for I
    Have an appointment about noon in hell.
  Dear, dear! why, heaven has hardly changed one bit
  Since the old days before the historic split."

The excellent conventional technique displayed in _The Prince's
Quest_ has characterized nearly every page of Mr. Watson's works.
He is not only content to walk in the ways of traditional poesy, he
glories in it. He has a contempt for heretics and experimenters, which
he has expressed frequently not only in prose, but in verse. It is
natural that he should worship Tennyson; natural (and unfortunate for
him) that he can see little in Browning. And if he is blind to
Browning, what he thinks of contemporary "new" poets may easily be
imagined. With or without inspiration, he believes that hard work is
necessary, and that good workmanship ought to be rated more highly.
This idea has become an obsession; Mr. Watson writes too much about
the sweat of his brow, and vents his spleen on "modern" poets too
often. In his latest volume, _Retrogression_, published in 1917,
thirty-two of the fifty-two poems are devoted to the defence of
standards of poetic art and of purity of speech. They are all
interesting and contain some truth; but if the "new" poetry and the
"new" criticism are really balderdash, they should not require so much
attention from one of the most eminent of contemporary writers. I
think Mr. Watson is rather stiff-necked and obstinate, like an honest,
hearty country squire, in his sturdy following of tradition. Smooth
technique is a fine thing in art; but I do not care whether a poem is
written in conventional metre or in free verse, so long as it is
unmistakably poetry. And no garments yet invented or the lack of them
can conceal true poetry. Perhaps the Traditionalist might reply that
uninspired verse gracefully written is better than uninspired verse
abominably written. So it is; but why bother about either? He might
once more insist that inspired poetry gracefully written is better
than inspired poetry ungracefully written. And I should reply that it
depended altogether on the subject. I should not like to see Whitman's
_Spirit that formed this Scene_ turned into a Spenserian stanza.
I cannot forget that David Mallet tried to smoothen Hamlet's soliloquy
by jamming it into the heroic couplet. Mr. Watson thinks that the
great John Donne is dead. On the contrary, he is audibly alive; and
the only time he really approached dissolution was when Pope
"versified" him.

Stephen Phillips, William Watson, Alfred Noyes--each published his
first volume of poems at the age of twenty-two, additional evidence of
the old truth that poets are born, not made. Alfred Noyes is a
Staffordshire man, though his report of the county differs from that
of Arnold Bennett as poetry differs from prose. They did not see the
same things in Staffordshire, and if they had, they would not have
been the same things, anyhow. Mr. Noyes was born on the sixteenth of
September, 1880, and made his first departure from the traditions of
English poetry in going to Oxford. There he was an excellent
illustration of _mens sana in corpore sano_, writing verses and
rowing on his college crew. He is married to an American wife, is a
professor at Princeton, and understands the spirit of America better
than most visitors who write clever books about us. He has the
wholesome, modest, cheerful temperament of the American college
undergraduate, and the Princeton students are fortunate, not only in
hearing his lectures, but in the opportunity of fellowship with such a
man.

Mr. Noyes is one of the few poets who can read his own verses
effectively, the reason being that his mind is by nature both literary
and rhetorical--a rare union. The purely literary temperament is
usually marked by a certain shyness which unfits its owner for the
public platform. I have heard poets read passionate poetry in a
muffled sing-song, something like a child learning to "recite." The
works of Alfred Noyes gain distinctly by his oral interpretation of
them.

He is prolific. Although still a young man, he has a long list of
books to his credit; and it is rather surprising that in such a
profusion of literary experiments, the general level should be so
high. He writes blank verse, octosyllabics, terza-rima, sonnets, and
is particularly fond of long rolling lines that have in them the music
of the sea. His ideas require no enlargement of the orchestra, and he
generally avoids by-paths, or unbeaten tracks, content to go lustily
singing along the highway. Perhaps it shows more courage to compete
with standard poets in standard measures, than to elude dangerous
comparisons by making or adopting a new fashion. Mr. Noyes openly
challenges the masters on their own field and with their own weapons.
Yet he shows nothing of the schoolmasterish contempt for the "new"
poetry so characteristic of Mr. Watson. He actually admires Blake, who
was in spirit a twentieth century poet, and he has written a fine poem
_On the Death of Francis Thompson_, though he has nothing of
Thompson in him except religious faith.

In the time-worn but useful classification of versemakers under the
labels _Vates_ and _Poeta_, Alfred Noyes belongs clearly to
the latter group. He is not without ideas, but he is primarily an
artist, a singer. He is one of the most melodious of modern writers,
with a witchery in words that at its best is irresistible. He has an
extraordinary command of the resources of language and rhythm. Were
this all he possessed, he would be nothing but a graceful musician.
But he has the imagination of the inspired poet, giving him creative
power to reveal anew the majesty of the untamed sea, and the mystery
of the stars. With this clairvoyance--essential in poetry--he has a
hearty, charming, incondescending sympathy with "common" people,
common flowers, common music. One of his most original and most
captivating poems is _The Tramp Transfigured, an Episode in the Life
of a Corn-flower Millionaire_. This contains a character worthy of
Dickens, a faery touch of fantasy, a rippling, singing melody, with
delightful audacities of rime.

  _Tick, tack, tick, tack_, I couldn't wait no longer!
  Up I gets and bows polite and pleasant as a toff--
  "Arternoon," I says, "I'm glad your boots are going stronger;
  Only thing I'm dreading is your feet 'ull both come off."
  _Tick, tack, tick, tack_, she didn't stop to answer,
  "Arternoon," she says, and sort o' chokes a little cough,
  "I must get to Piddinghoe tomorrow if I can, sir!"
  "Demme, my good woman! Haw! Don't think I mean to loff,"
  Says I, like a toff,
  "Where d'you mean to sleep tonight? God made this grass for go'ff."

His masterpiece, _The Barrel-Organ_, has something of Kipling's
rollicking music, with less noise and more refinement. Out of the
mechanical grinding of the hand organ, with the accompaniment of city
omnibuses, we get the very breath of spring in almost intolerable
sweetness. This poem affects the head, the heart, and the feet. I defy
any man or woman to read it without surrendering to the magic of the
lilacs, the magic of old memories, the magic of the poet. Nor has one
ever read this poem without going immediately back to the first line,
and reading it all over again, so susceptible are we to the romantic
pleasure of melancholy.

  Mon coeur est un luth suspendu:
  Sitôt qu'on le touche, il résonne.

Alfred Noyes understands the heart of the child; as is proved by his
_Flower of Old Japan_, and _Forest of Wild Thyme_, a kind of
singing Alice-in-Wonderland. These are the veritable stuff of
dreams--wholly apart from the law of causation--one vision fading into
another. It is our fault, and not that of the poet, that Mr. Noyes had
to explain them: "It is no new wisdom to regard these things through
the eyes of little children; and I know--however insignificant they
may be to others--these two tales contain as deep and true things as
I, personally, have the power to express. I hope, therefore, that I
may be pardoned, in these hurried days, for pointing out that the two
poems are not to be taken merely as fairy-tales, but as an attempt to
follow the careless and happy feet of children back into the kingdom
of those dreams which, as we said above, are the sole reality worth
living and dying for; those beautiful dreams, or those fantastic
jests--if any care to call them so--for which mankind has endured so
many triumphant martyrdoms that even amidst the rush and roar of
modern materialism they cannot be quite forgotten." Mr. William J.
Locke says he would rather give up clean linen and tobacco than give
up his dreams.

Nearly all English poetry smells of the sea; the waves rule Britannia.
Alfred Noyes loves the ocean, and loves the old sea-dogs of
Devonshire. He is not a literary poet, like William Watson, and has
seldom given indication of possessing the insight or the
interpretative power of his contemporary in dealing with pure
literature. He has the blessed gift of admiration, and his poems on
Swinburne, Meredith, and other masters show a high reverence; but they
are without subtlety, and lack the discriminating phrase. He is,
however, deeply read in Elizabethan verse and prose, as his _Tales
of the Mermaid Tavern_, one of his longest, most painstaking, and
least successful works, proves; and of all the Elizabethan men of
action, Drake is his hero. The English lovers of the sea, and the
German lovers of efficiency, have both done honour to Drake. I
remember years ago, being in the town of Offenburg in Germany, and
seeing at a distance a colossal statue, feeling some surprise when I
discovered that the monument was erected to Sir Francis Drake, "in
recognition of his having introduced the potato into Europe." Here was
where eulogy became almost too specific, and I felt that their Drake
was not my Drake.

Mr. Noyes called _Drake_, published in 1908, an English Epic. It
is not really an epic--it is a historical romance in verse, as
_Aurora Leigh_ is a novel. It is interesting from beginning to
end, more interesting as narrative than as poetry. It is big rather
than great, rhetorical rather than literary, declamatory rather than
passionate. And while many descriptive passages are fine, the pictures
of the terrible storm near Cape Horn are surely less vivid than those
in _Dauber_. Had Mr. Noyes written _Drake_ without the
songs, and written nothing else, I should not feel certain that he was
a poet; I should regard him as an extremely fluent versifier, with
remarkable skill in telling a rattling good story. But the
_Songs_, especially the one beginning, "Now the purple night is
past," could have been written only by a poet. In _Forty Singing
Seamen_ there is displayed an imagination quite superior to
anything in _Drake_; and I would not trade _The Admiral's
Ghost_ for the whole "epic."

As a specific illustration of his lyrical power, the following poem
may be cited.

  THE MAY-TREE

  The May-tree on the hill
    Stands in the night
  So fragrant and so still,
    So dusky white.

  That, stealing from the wood,
    In that sweet air,
  You'd think Diana stood
    Before you there.

  If it be so, her bloom
    Trembles with bliss.
  She waits across the gloom
    Her shepherd's kiss.

  Touch her. A bird will start
    From those pure snows,--
  The dark and fluttering heart
    Endymion knows.

Alfred Noyes is "among the English poets." His position is secure. But
because he has never identified himself with the "new" poetry--either
in choice of material or in free verse and polyphonic prose--it would
he a mistake to suppose that he is afraid to make metrical
experiments. The fact of the matter is, that after he had mastered the
technique of conventional rime and rhythm, as shown in many of his
lyrical pieces, he began playing new tunes on the old instrument. In
_The Tramp Transfigured_, to which I find myself always returning
in a consideration of his work, because it displays some of the
highest qualities of pure poetry, there are new metrical effects. The
same is true of the Prelude to the _Forest of Wild Thyme_, and of
_The Burial of a Queen_; there are new metres used in _Rank and
File_ and in _Mount Ida_. The poem _Astrid_, included in
the volume _The Lord of Misrule_ (1915), is an experiment in
_initial_ rhymes. Try reading it aloud.

  White-armed Astrid,--ah, but she was beautiful!--
  Nightly wandered weeping thro' the ferns in the moon,
  Slowly, weaving her strange garland in the forest,
  Crowned with white violets,
  Gowned in green.
  Holy was that glen where she glided,
  Making her wild garland as Merlin had bidden her,
  Breaking off the milk-white horns of the honeysuckle,
  Sweetly dripped the new upon her small white
  Feet.

The English national poetry of Mr. Noyes worthily expresses the spirit
of the British people, and indeed of the Anglo-Saxon race. We are no
lovers of war; military ambition or the glory of conquest is not
sufficient motive to call either Great Britain or America to arms; but
if the gun-drunken Germans really believed that the English and
Americans would not fight to save the world from an unspeakable
despotism, they made the mistake of their lives. There must be a
Cause, there must be an Idea, to draw out the full fighting strength
of the Anglo-Saxons. Alfred Noyes made a correct diagnosis and a
correct prophecy in 1911, when he published _The Sword of
England_.

  She sheds no blood to that vain god of strife
    Whom tyrants call "renown";
  She knows that only they who reverence life
    Can nobly lay it down;

  And these will ride from child and home and love,
    Through death and hell that day;
  But O, her faith, her flag, must burn above,
    Her soul must lead the way!

I think none the worse of the mental force exhibited in the poetry of
Alfred Noyes because he is an optimist. It is a common error to
suppose that cheerfulness is a sign of a superficial mind, and
melancholy the mark of deep thinking. Pessimism in itself is no proof
of intellectual greatness. Every honest man must report the world as
he sees it, both in its external manifestations and in the equally
salient fact of human emotion. Mr. Noyes has always loved life, and
rejoiced in it; he loves the beauty of the world and believes that
history proves progress. In an unashamed testimony to the happiness of
living he is simply telling truths of his own experience. Happiness is
not necessarily thoughtlessness; many men and women have gone through
pessimism and come out on serener heights.

Alfred Noyes proves, as Browning proved, that it is possible to be an
inspired poet and in every other respect to remain normal. He is
healthy-minded, without a trace of affectation or decadence. He
follows the Tennysonian tradition in seeing that "Beauty, Good, and
Knowledge are three sisters." He is religious. A clear-headed,
pure-hearted Englishman is Alfred Noyes.

Although _A Shropshire Lad_ was published in 1896, there is
nothing of the nineteenth century in it except the date, and nothing
Victorian except the allusions to the Queen. A double puzzle confronts
the reader: how could a University Professor of Latin write this kind
of poetry, and how, after having published it, could he refrain from
writing more? Since the date of its appearance, he has published an
edition of _Manilius_, Book I, followed nine years later by Book
II; also an edition of _Juvenal_, and many papers representing
the result of original research. Possibly

  Chill Pedantry repressed his noble rage,
  And froze the genial current of his soul.

Alfred Edward Housman was born on the twenty-sixth of March, 1859, was
graduated from Oxford, was Professor of Latin at University College,
London, from 1892 to 1911, and since then has been Professor of Latin
at Cambridge. Few poets have made a deeper impression on the
literature of the time than he; and the sixty-three short lyrics in
one small volume form a slender wedge for so powerful an impact. This
poetry, except in finished workmanship, follows no English tradition;
it is as unorthodox as Samuel Butler; it is thoroughly "modern" in
tone, in temper, and in emphasis. Although entirely original, it
reminds one in many ways of the verse of Thomas Hardy. It has his
paganism, his pessimism, his human sympathy, his austere pride in the
tragedy of frustration, his curt refusal to pipe a merry tune, to make
one of a holiday crowd.

  Therefore, since the world has still
  Much good, but much less good than ill,
  And while the sun and moon endure
  Luck's a chance, but trouble's sure,
  I'd face it as a wise man would,
  And train for ill and not for good.
  'Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
  Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
  Out of a stem that scored the hand
  I wrung it in a weary land.
  But take it: if the smack is sour,
  The better for the embittered hour;
  It should do good to heart and head
  When your soul is in my soul's stead;
  And I will friend you, if I may,
  In the dark and cloudy day.

Those lines might have been written by Thomas Hardy. They express not
merely his view of life, but his faith in the healing power of the
bitter herb of pessimism. But we should remember that _A Shropshire
Lad_ was published before the first volume of Mr. Hardy's verse
appeared, and that the lyrical element displayed is natural rather
than acquired.

Though at the time of its publication the author was thirty-six years
old, many of the poems must have been written in the twenties. The
style is mature, but the constant dwelling on death and the grave is a
mark of youth. Young poets love to write about death, because its
contrast to their present condition forms a romantic tragedy, sharply
dramatic and yet instinctively felt to be remote. Tennyson's first
volume is full of the details of dissolution, the falling jaw, the
eye-balls fixing, the sharp-headed worm. Aged poets do not usually
write in this manner, because death seems more realistic than
romantic. It is a fact rather than an idea. When a young poet is
obsessed with the idea of death, it is a sign, not of morbidity, but
of normality.

The originality in this book consists not in the contrast between love
and the grave, but in the acute self-consciousness of youth, in the
pagan determination to enjoy nature without waiting till life's summer
is past.

  Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
  Is hung with bloom along the bough,
  And stands about the woodland ride
  Wearing white for Eastertide.

  Now, of my threescore years and ten,
  Twenty will not come again,
  And take from seventy springs a score,
  It only leaves me fifty more.

  And since to look at things in bloom
  Fifty springs are little room,
  About the woodlands I will go
  To see the cherry hung with snow.

The death of the body is not the greatest tragedy in this volume, for
suicide, a thought that youth loves to play with, is twice glorified.
The death of love is often treated with an ironical bitterness that
makes one think of _Time's Laughingstocks_.

  Is my friend hearty,
    Now I am thin and pine,
  And has he found to sleep in
    A better bed than mine?

  Yes, lad, I lie easy,
    I lie as lads would choose;
  I cheer a dead man's sweetheart,
    Never ask me whose.

The point of view expressed in _The Carpenter's Son_ is
singularly detached not only from conventional religious belief, but
from conventional reverence. But the originality in _A Shropshire
Lad_, while more strikingly displayed in some poems than in others,
leaves its mark on them all. It is the originality of a man who thinks
his own thoughts with shy obstinacy, makes up his mind in secret
meditation, quite unaffected by current opinion. It is not the poetry
of a rebel; it is the poetry of an independent man, too indifferent to
the crowd even to fight them. And now and then we find a lyric of
flawless beauty, that lingers in the mind like the glow of a sunset.

  Into my heart an air that kills
    From yon far country blows:
  What are those blue remembered hills,
    What spires, what farms are those?

  That is the land of lost content,
    I see it shining plain,
  The happy highways where I went,
    And cannot come again.

Mr. Housman's poems are nearer to the twentieth century in spirit than
the work of the late Victorians, and many of them are curiously
prophetic of the dark days of the present war. What strange vision
made him write such poems as _The Recruit_, _The Street Sounds
to the Soldiers' Tread_, _The Day of Battle_, and _On the
Idle Hill of Summer_? Change the colour of the uniforms, and these
four poems would fit today's tragedy accurately. They are indeed
superior to most of the war poems written by the professional poets
since 1914.

Ludlow, for ever associated with. Milton's _Comus_, is now and
will be for many years to come also significant in the minds of men as
the home of a Shropshire lad.




CHAPTER III

JOHN MASEFIELD


  John Masefield--new wine in old bottles--back to Chaucer--the
  self-conscious adventurer--early education and
  experiences--_Dauber_--Mr. Masefleld's remarks on
  Wordsworth--Wordsworth's famous Preface and its application to
  the poetry of Mr. Masefield--_The Everlasting
  Mercy_--_The Widow in the Bye Street_ and its
  Chaucerian manner--his masterpiece--_The Daffodil
  Fields_--similarities to Wordsworth--the part played by the
  flowers--comparison of _The Daffodil Fields_ with
  _Enoch Arden_--the war poem, _August 1914_--the
  lyrics--the sonnets--the novels--his object in writing--his
  contribution to the advance of poetry.

Poets are the Great Exceptions. Poets are for ever performing the
impossible. "No man putteth new wine into old bottles ... new wine
must be put into new bottles." But putting new wine into old bottles
has been the steady professional occupation of John Masefield. While
many of our contemporary vers librists and other experimentalists have
been on the hunt for new bottles, sometimes, perhaps, more interested
in the bottle than in the wine, John Masefield has been constantly
pouring his heady drink into receptacles five hundred years old. In
subject-matter and in language he is not in the least "traditional,"
not at all Victorian; he is wholly modern, new, contemporary. Yet
while he draws his themes and his heroes from his own experience, his
inspiration as a poet comes directly from Chaucer, who died in 1400.
He is, indeed, the Chaucer of today; the most closely akin to
Chaucer--not only in temperament, but in literary manner--of all the
writers of the twentieth century. The beautiful metrical form that
Chaucer invented--rime royal--ideally adapted for narrative poetry, as
shown in _Troilus and Criseyde_, is the metre chosen by John
Masefield for _The Widow in the Bye Street_ and for
_Dauber_; the only divergence in _The Daffodil Fields_
consisting in the lengthening of the seventh line of the stanza, for
which he had plenty of precedents. Mr. Masefield owes more to Chaucer
than to any other poet.

Various are the roads to poetic achievement. Browning became a great
poet at the age of twenty, with practically no experience of life
outside of books. He had never travelled, he had never "seen the
world," but was brought up in a library; and was so deeply read in the
Greek poets and dramatists that a sunrise on the Aegean Sea was more
real to him than a London fog. He never saw Greece with his natural
eyes. In the last year of his life, being asked by an American if he
had been much in Athens, he replied contritely, "Thou stick'st a
dagger in me." He belied Goethe's famous dictum.

John Masefield was born at Ledbury, in western England, in 1874. He
ran away from home, shipped as cabin boy on a sailing vessel, spent
some years before the mast, tramped on foot through various countries,
turned up in New York, worked in the old Columbia Hotel in Greenwich
Avenue, and had plenty of opportunity to study human nature in the
bar-room. Then he entered a carpet factory in the Bronx. But he was
the last man in the world to become a carpet knight. He bought a copy
of Chaucer's poems, stayed up till dawn reading it, and for the first
time was sure of his future occupation.

John Masefield is the real man-of-war-bird imagined by Walt Whitman.
He is the bird self-conscious, the wild bird plus the soul of the
poet.

  To cope with heaven and earth and sea and hurricane,
  Thou ship of air that never furl'st thy sails,
  Days, even weeks untired and onward, through spaces, realms gyrating,
  At dusk that look'st on Senegal, at morn America,
  That sport'st amid the lightning-flash and thunder-cloud,
  In them, in thy experiences, had'st thou my soul,
  What joys! what joys were thine!

They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great
waters, these see the works of the Lord, and His wonders in the deep.
They do indeed; they see them as the bird sees them, with no spiritual
vision, with no self-consciousness, with no power to refer or to
interpret. It is sad that so many of those who have marvellous
experiences have nothing else; while those who are sensitive and
imaginative live circumscribed. What does the middle watch mean to an
average seaman? But occasionally the sailor is a Joseph Conrad or a
John Masefield. Then the visions of splendour and the glorious voices
of nature are seen and heard not only by the eye and the ear, but by
the spirit.

Although Chaucer took Mr. Masefield out of the carpet factory even as
Spenser released Keats it would be a mistake to suppose (as many do)
that the Ledbury boy was an uncouth vagabond, who, without reading,
without education, and without training, suddenly became a poet. He
had a good school education before going to sea; and from earliest
childhood he longed to write. Even as a little boy he felt the impulse
to put his dreams on paper; he read everything he could lay his hands
on, and during all the years of bodily toil, afloat and ashore, he had
the mind and the aspiration of a man of letters. Never, I suppose, was
there a greater contrast between an individual's outer and inner life.
He mingled with rough, brutal, decivilized creatures; his ears were
assaulted by obscene language, spoken as to an equal; he saw the
ugliest side of humanity, and the blackest phases of savagery. Yet
through it all, sharing these experiences with no trace of
condescension, his soul was like a lily.

He descended into hell again and again, coming out with his inmost
spirit unblurred and shining, even as the rough diver brings from the
depths the perfect pearl. For every poem that he has written reveals
two things: a knowledge of the harshness of life, with a nature of
extraordinary purity, delicacy, and grace. To find a parallel to this,
we must recall the figure of Dostoevski in the Siberian prison.

Many men of natural good taste and good breeding have succumbed to a
coarse environment. What saved our poet, and made his experiences
actually minister to his spiritual flame, rather than burn him up? It
was perhaps that final miracle of humanity, acute self-consciousness,
stronger in some men than in others, strongest of all in the creative
artist. Even at the age of twenty, Browning felt it more than he felt
anything else, and his words would apply to John Masefield, and
explain in some measure his thirst for sensation and his control of
it.

  I am made up of an intensest life,
  Of a most clear idea of consciousness
  Of self, distinct from all its qualities,
  From all affections, passions, feelings, powers;
  And thus far it exists, if tracked, in all:
  But linked, in me, to self-supremacy,
  Existing as a centre to all things,
  Most potent to create and rule and call
  Upon all things to minister to it;
  And to a principle of restlessness
  Which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all--
  This is myself.

Although the poem _Dauber_ is a true story--for there was such a
man, who suffered both horrible fear within and brutal ridicule
without, who finally conquered both, and who, in the first sweets of
victory, as he was about to enter upon his true career, lost his life
by falling from the yardarm--cannot help thinking that Mr. Masefield
put a good deal of himself into this strange hero. The adoration of
beauty, which is the lodestar of the poet, lifted Dauber into a
different world from the life of the ship. He had an ungovernable
desire to paint the constantly changing phases of beauty in the action
of the vessel and in the wonders of the sea and sky. In this passion
his shy, sensitive nature was stronger than all the brute strength
enjoyed by his shipmates; they could destroy his paintings, they could
hurt his body, they could torture his heart. But they could not
prevent him from following his ideal. Dauber died, and his pictures
are lost. But in the poem describing his aims and his sufferings, Mr.
Masefield has accomplished with his pen what Dauber failed to do with
his brush; the beauty of the ship, the beauty of dawn and of midnight,
the majesty of the storm are revealed to us in a series of
unforgettable pictures. And one of Edison's ambitions is here
realized. At the same moment we _see_ the frightful white-capped
ocean mountains, and we _hear_ the roar of the gale.

  Water and sky were devils' brews which boiled,
  Boiled, shrieked, and glowered; but the ship was saved.
  Snugged safely down, though fourteen sails were split.
  Out of the dark a fiercer fury raved.
  The grey-backs died and mounted, each crest lit
  With a white toppling gleam that hissed from it
  And slid, or leaped, or ran with whirls of cloud,
  Mad with inhuman life that shrieked aloud.

Mr. Masefield is a better poet than critic. In the New York
_Tribune_ for 23 January 1916, he spoke with modesty and candour
of his own work and his own aims, and no one can read what he said
without an increased admiration for him. But it is difficult to
forgive him for talking as he did about Wordsworth, who "wrote six
poems and then fell asleep." And among the six are not _Tintern
Abbey_ or the _Intimations of Immortality_. Meditative poetry
is not Mr. Masefield's strongest claim to fame, and we do not go to
poets for illuminating literary criticism. Swinburne was so violent in
his "appreciations" that his essays in criticism are adjectival
volcanoes. Every man with him was God or Devil. It is rare that a
creative poet has the power of interpretation of literature possessed
by William Watson. Mr. Masefield does not denounce Wordsworth, as
Swinburne denounced Byron; he is simply blind to the finest qualities
of the Lake poet. Yet, although he carries Wordsworth's famous theory
of poetry to an extreme that would have shocked the author of it--if
Mr. Masefield does not like _Tintern Abbey_, we can only imagine
Wordsworth's horror at _The Everlasting Mercy_--the philosophy of
poetry underlying both _The Everlasting Mercy_, _The Widow in
the Bye Street_, and other works is essentially that of William
Wordsworth. Keeping _The Everlasting Mercy_ steadily in mind, it
is interesting, instructive, and even amusing to read an extract from
Wordsworth's famous Preface of 1800. "The principal object, then,
proposed in these poems was to choose incidents and situations from
common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was
possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the
same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination,
whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual
aspect; and, further, and above all, to make these incidents and
situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not
ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature; chiefly, as far as
regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of
excitement. Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, because, in
that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil
in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and
speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition
of life our elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater
simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated,
and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life
germinate from those elementary feelings, and, from the necessary
character of rural occupations, are more easily comprehended, and are
more durable; and, lastly, because in that condition the passions of
men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of
nature."

When Wordsworth wrote these dicta, he followed them up with some
explicit reservations, and made many more implicit ones. Mr.
Masefield, in the true manner of the twentieth century, makes none at
all. Taking the language of Wordsworth exactly as it stands in the
passage quoted above, it applies with precision to the method employed
by Mr. Masefield in the poems that have given him widest recognition.
And in carrying this theory of poetry to its farthest extreme in
_The Everlasting Mercy_, not only did its author break with
tradition, the tradition of nineteenth-century poetry, as Wordsworth
broke with that of the eighteenth, he succeeded in shocking some of
his contemporaries, who refused to grant him a place among English
poets. It was in the _English Review_ for October, 1911, that
_The Everlasting Mercy_ first appeared. It made a sensation. In
1912 the Academic Committee of the Royal Society of Literature awarded
him the Edmond de Polignac prize of five hundred dollars. This aroused
the wrath of the orthodox poet Stephen Phillips, who publicly
protested, not with any animosity toward the recipient, but with the
conviction that true standards of literature were endangered.

It is unfortunate for an artist or critic to belong to any "school"
whatsoever. Belonging to a school circumscribes a man's sympathies. It
shuts him away from outside sources of enjoyment, and makes him
incapable of appreciating many new works of art, because he has
prejudged them even before they were written. Poetry is greater than
any definition of it. There is no doubt that _Marpessa_ is a real
poem; and there is no doubt that the same description is true of
_The Everlasting Mercy_.

In _The Everlasting Mercy_, the prize-fight, given in detail, by
rounds, is followed by an orgy of drunkenness rising to a scale almost
Homeric. The man, crazy with alcohol, runs amuck, and things begin to
happen. The village is turned upside down. Two powerful contrasts are
dramatically introduced, one as an interlude between violent phases of
the debauch, the other as a conclusion. The first is the contrast
between the insane buffoon and the calm splendour of the night.

  I opened window wide and leaned
  Out of that pigstye of the fiend
  And felt a cool wind go like grace
  About the sleeping market-place.
  The clock struck three, and sweetly, slowly,
  The bells chimed Holy, Holy, Holy;
  And in a second's pause there fell
  The cold note of the chapel bell,
  And then a cock crew, flapping wings,
  And summat made me think of things.
  How long those ticking clocks had gone
  From church and chapel, on and on,
  Ticking the time out, ticking slow
  To men and girls who'd come and go.

These thoughts suddenly become intolerable. A second fit of madness,
wilder than the first, drives the man about the town like a tornado.
Finally and impressively comes the contrast between the drunkard's
horrible mirth and the sudden calm in his mind when the tall pale
Quakeress hypnotizes him with conviction of sin. She drives out the
devils from his breast with quiet authority, and the peace of God
enters into his soul.

From the first word of the poem to the last the man's own attitude
toward fighting, drink, and religion is logically sustained. It is
perfect drama, with never a false note. The hero is one of the
"twice-born men," and the work may fairly be taken as one more
footnote to the varieties of religious experience.

I have been told on good authority that of all his writings Mr.
Masefield prefers _Nan_, _The Widow in the Bye Street_, and
_The Everlasting Mercy_. I think he is right. In these
productions he has no real competitors. They are his most original,
most vivid, most powerful pieces. He is at his best when he has a
story to tell, and can tell it freely in his own unhampered way, a
combination of drama and narrative. In _The Everlasting Mercy_,
written in octosyllabics, the metre of _Christmas Eve_, he is
unflinchingly realistic, as Browning was in describing the chapel. The
_Athenaeum_ thought Browning ought not to write about the
mysteries of the Christian faith in doggerel. But _Christmas Eve_
is not doggerel. It is simply the application of the rules of realism
to a discussion of religion. It may lack the dignity of the _Essay
on Man_, but it is more interesting because it is more definite,
more concrete, more real. In _The Everlasting Mercy_ we have
beautiful passages of description, sharply exciting narration, while
the dramatic element is furnished by conversation--and what
conversation! It differs from ordinary poetry as the sermons of an
evangelist differ from the sermons of Bishops. Mr. Masefield is a
natural-born dramatist. He is never content to describe his
characters; he makes them talk, and talk their own language, and you
will never go far in his longer poems without seeing the characters
rise from the page, spring into life, and immediately you hear their
voices raised in angry altercation. It is as though he felt the
reality of his men and women so keenly that he cannot keep them down.
They refuse to remain quiet. They insist on taking the poem into their
own hands, and running away with it.

When we are reading _The Widow in the Bye Street_ we realize that
Mr. Masefield has studied with some profit the art of narrative verse
as displayed by Chaucer. The story begins directly, and many necessary
facts are revealed in the first stanza, in a manner so simple that for
the moment we forget that this apparent simplicity is artistic
excellence. The _Nun's Priest's Tale_ is a model of attack.

  A poure wydwe, somdel stope in age,
  Was whilom dwellynge in a narwe cottage,
  Beside a grove, stondynge in a dale.
  This wydwe, of which I telle yow my tale,
  Syn thilke day that she was last a wyf,
  In pacience ladde a ful symple lyf,
  For litel was hir catel and hir rente.

Now if I could have only one of Mr. Masefield's books, I would take
_The Widow in the Bye Street._ Its opening lines have the
much-in-little so characteristic of Chaucer.

  Down Bye Street, in a little Shropshire town,
  There lived a widow with her only son:
  She had no wealth nor title to renown,
  Nor any joyous hours, never one.
  She rose from ragged mattress before sun
  And stitched all day until her eyes were red,
  And had to stitch, because her man was dead.

This is one of the best narrative poems in modern literature. It rises
from calm to the fiercest and most tumultuous passions that usurp the
throne of reason. Love, jealousy, hate, revenge, murder, succeed in
cumulative force. Then the calm of unmitigated and hopeless woe
returns, and we leave the widow in a solitude peopled only with
memories. It is melodrama elevated into poetry. The mastery of the
artist is shown in the skill with which he avoids the quagmire of
sentimentality. We can easily imagine what form this story would take
under the treatment of many popular writers. But although constantly
approaching the verge, Mr. Masefield never falls in. He has known so
much sentimentality, not merely in books and plays, but in human
beings, that he understands how to avoid it. Furthermore, he is
steadied by seeing so plainly the weaknesses of his characters, just
as a great nervous specialist gains in poise by observing his
patients. And perhaps our author feels the sorrows of the widow too
deeply to talk about them with any conventional affectation.

I should like to find some one who, without much familiarity with the
fixed stars in English literature, had read _The Daffodil
Fields_, and then ask him to guess who wrote the following stanzas:

  A gentle answer did the old Man make,
  In courteous speech which forth he slowly drew;
  And him with further words I thus bespake,
  "What occupation do you there pursue?
  This is a lonesome place for one like you."
  Ere he replied, a flash of mild surprise
  Broke from the sable orbs of his yet-vivid eyes.

  "This will break Michael's heart," he said at length.
  "Poor Michael," she replied; "they wasted hours.
  He loved his father so. God give him strength.
  This is a cruel thing this life of ours."
  The windy woodland glimmered with shut flowers,
  White wood anemones that the wind blew down.
  The valley opened wide beyond the starry town.

And I think he would reply with some confidence, "John Masefield." He
would he right concerning the second stanza; but the first is, as
every one ought to know and does not, from _Resolution and
Independence_, by William Wordsworth. It is significant that this
is one of the six poems excepted by Mr. Masefield from the mass of
Wordsworthian mediocrity. It is, of course, a great poem, although
when it was published (1807, written in 1802), it seemed by
conventional standards no poem at all. Shortly after its appearance,
some one read it aloud to an intelligent woman; she sobbed
unrestrainedly; then, recovering herself, said shamefacedly, "After
all, it isn't poetry." The reason, I suppose, why she thought it could
not be poetry was because it was so much nearer life than "art." The
simplicity of the scene; the naturalness of the dialogue; the
homeliness of the old leech-gatherer; these all seemed to be outside
the realm of the heroic, the elevated, the sublime,--the particular
business of poetry, as she mistakenly thought. The reason why John
Masefield admires this poem is because of its vitality, its
naturalness, its easy dialogue--main characteristics of his own work.
In writing _The Daffodil Fields_, he consciously or unconsciously
selected the same metre, introduced plenty of conversation, as he
loves to do in all his narrative poetry, and set his tragedy on a
rural stage.

It is important here to repeat the last few phrases already quoted
from Wordsworth's famous Preface: "The manners of rural life germinate
from those elementary feelings, and, from the necessary character of
rural occupations, are more easily comprehended, and are more durable;
and, lastly, because in that condition the passions of men are
incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature." If Mr.
Masefield had written this preface for _The Daffodil Fields_, he
could not have more accurately expressed both the artistic aim of his
poem and its natural atmosphere. "The passions of men are incorporated
with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature." In this work, each
one of the seven sections ends with the daffodils; so that no matter
how base and truculent are the revealed passions of man, the final
impression at the close of each stage is the unchanging loveliness of
the delicate golden flowers. Indeed, the daffodils not only fill the
whole poem with their fluttering beauty, they play the part of the old
Greek chorus. At the end of each act in this steadily growing tragedy,
they comment in their own incomparable way on the sorrows of man.

  So the night passed; the noisy wind went down;
  The half-burnt moon her starry trackway rode.
  Then the first Are was lighted in the town,
  And the first carter stacked his early load.
  Upon the farm's drawn blinds the morning glowed;
  And down the valley, with little clucks and rills,
  The dancing waters danced by dancing daffodils.

But if, consciously or unconsciously, Mr. Masefield in the composition
of _The Daffodil Fields_ followed the metre and the manner of
Wordsworth in _Resolution and Independence_, in the story itself
he challenges Tennyson's _Enoch Arden_. Whether he meant to
challenge it, I do not know; but the comparison is unescapable.
Tennyson did not invent the story, and any poet has the right to use
the material in his own fashion. Knowing Mr. Masefield from _The
Everlasting Mercy_ and _The Widow in the Bye Street_, it would
have been safe to prophesy in advance that his own Enoch would not
show the self-restraint practised by the Tennysonian hero. Reserve and
restraint were the trump cards of the Typical Victorian, just as the
annihilation of all reserve is a characteristic of the
twentieth-century artist. In the _Idylls of the King_, the
parting of Guinevere and Arthur was what interested Tennyson; the
poets of today would of course centre attention on the parting of
Guinevere and Lancelot, and like so many "advances," they would in
truth be only going back to old Malory.

"Neither in the design nor in the telling did, or could, _Enoch
Arden_ come near the artistic truth of _The Daffodil Fields_,"
says Professor Quiller-Couch, of Cambridge. I am not entirely sure of
the truth of this very positive statement. Each is a rural poem; the
characters are simple; the poetic accompaniment supplied by the
daffodils in one poem is supplied in the other by the sea. And yet,
despite this latter fact, if one reads _Enoch Arden_ immediately
after _The Daffodil Fields_, it seems to be without salt. It
lacks flavour, and is almost tasteless compared with the biting
condiments of the other poem, prepared as it was for the sharper
demands of twentieth-century palates. We like, as Browning thought
Macready would like "stabbing, drabbing, _et autres
gentillesses_," and Mr. Masefield knows how to supply them. Yet I
am not sure that the self-denial of Enoch and the timid patience of
Philip do not both indicate a certain strength absent in Mr.
Masefield's wildly exciting tale. Of course Tennyson's trio are all
"good" people, and he meant to make them so. In the other work Michael
is a selfish scoundrel, Lion is a murderer, and Mary an adulteress;
and we are meant to sympathize with all three, as Mr. Galsworthy
wishes us to sympathize with those who follow their instincts rather
than their consciences. One poem celebrates the strength of character,
the other the strength of passion. But there can be no doubt that
Enoch (and perhaps Philip) loved Annie more than either Michael or
Lion loved Mary--which is perhaps creditable; for Mary is more
attractive.

One should remember also that in these two poems--so interesting to
compare in so many different ways--Tennyson tried to elevate a homely
theme into "poetry"; whereas Mr. Masefield finds the truest poetry in
the bare facts of life and feeling. Tennyson is at his best outside of
drama, wherever he has an opportunity to adorn and embellish; Mr.
Masefield is at his best in the fierce conflict of human wills. Thus
_Enoch Arden_ is not one of Tennyson's best poems, and the best
parts of it are the purely descriptive passages; whereas in _The
Daffodil Fields_ Mr. Masefield has a subject made to his hand, and
can let himself go with impressive power. In the introduction of
conversation into a poem--a special gift with Mr. Masefield--Tennyson
is usually weak, which ought to have taught him never to venture into
drama. Nothing is worse in _Enoch Arden_ than passages like
these:

  "Annie, this voyage by the grace of God
  Will bring fair weather yet to all of us.
  Keep a clean hearth and a clear fire for me,
  For I'll be back, my girl, before you know it."
  Then lightly rocking baby's cradle, "and he,
  This pretty, puny, weakly little one,--
  Nay--for I love him all the better for it--
  God bless him, he shall sit upon my knees
  And I will tell him tales of foreign parts,
  And make him merry, when I come home again.
  Come, Annie, come, cheer up before I go."

One of the reasons why twentieth-century readers are so impatient with
_Enoch Arden,_ is because Tennyson refused to satisfy the all but
universal love of a fight. The conditions for a terrific "mix-up" were
all there, and just when the spectator is looking for an explosion of
wrath and blood, the poet turns away into the more heroic but less
thrilling scene of self-conquest. Mr. Masefield may be trusted never
to disappoint his readers in such fashion. It might be urged that
whereas Tennyson gave a picture of man as he ought to be, Mr.
Masefield painted him as he really is.

But _The Daffodil Fields_ is not melodrama. It is a poem of
extraordinary beauty. Every time I read it I see in it some "stray
beauty-beam" that I missed before. It would be impossible to translate
it into prose; it would lose half its interest, and all of its charm.
It would be easier to translate Tennyson's _Dora_ into prose than
_The Daffodil Fields._ In fact, I have often thought that if the
story of _Dora_ were told in concise prose, in the manner of Guy
de Maupassant, it would distinctly gain in force.

No poet, with any claim to the name, can be accurately labelled by an
adjective or a phrase. You may think you know his "manner," and he
suddenly develops a different one; this you call his "later" manner,
and he disconcerts you by harking back to the "earlier," or trying
something, that if you must have labels, you are forced to call his
"latest," knowing now that it is subject to change without notice. Mr.
Masefield published _The Everlasting Mercy_ in 1911; _The Widow
in the Bye Street_ in 1912; _Dauber_ in 1912; _The Daffodil
Fields_ in 1913. We had him classified. He was a writer of
sustained narrative, unscrupulous in the use of language, bursting
with vitality, sacrificing anything and everything that stood in the
way of his effect. This was "red blood" verse raised to poetry by
sheer inspiration, backed by remarkable skill in the use of rime. We
looked for more of the same thing from him, knowing that in this
particular field he had no rival.

Then came the war. As every soldier drew his sword, every poet drew
his pen. And of all the poems published in the early days of the
struggle, none equalled in high excellence _August 1914,_ by John
Masefield. And its tone was precisely the opposite of what his most
famous efforts had led us to expect. It was not a lurid picture of
wholesale murder, nor a bottle of vitriol thrown in the face of the
Kaiser. After the thunder and the lightning, came the still small
voice. It is a poem in the metre and manner of Gray, with the same
silver tones of twilit peace--heartrending by contrast with the
Continental scene.

  How still this quiet cornfield is to-night;
    By an intenser glow the evening falls,
  Bringing, not darkness, but a deeper light;
    Among the stocks a partridge covey calls.

  The windows glitter on the distant hill;
    Beyond the hedge the sheep-bells in the fold
  Stumble on sudden music and are still;
    The forlorn pinewoods droop above the wold.

  An endless quiet valley reaches out
    Past the blue hills into the evening sky;
  Over the stubble, cawing, goes a rout
    Of rooks from harvest, flagging as they fly.

  So beautiful it is I never saw
    So great a beauty on these English fields
  Touched, by the twilight's coming, into awe,
    Ripe to the soul and rich with summer's yields.

The fields are inhabited with the ghosts of ploughmen of old who gave
themselves for England, even as the faithful farmers now leave scenes
inexpressibly dear. For the aim of our poet is to magnify the lives of
the humble and the obscure, whether on land or sea. In the beautiful
_Consecration_ that he prefixed to _Salt-Water Ballads,_ he
expressly turns his back on Commanders, on Rulers, on Princes and
Prelates, in order to sing of the stokers and chantymen, yes, even of
the dust and scum of the earth. They work, and others get the praise.
They are inarticulate, but have found a spokesman and a champion in
the poet. His sea-poems in this respect resemble Conrad's sea-novels.
This is perhaps one of the chief functions of the man of letters,
whether he be poet, novelist or dramatist--never to let us forget the
anonymous army of toilers. For, as Clyde Fitch used to say, the great
things do not happen to the great writers; the great things happen to
the little people they describe.

Although Mr. Masefield's reputation depends mainly on his narrative
poems, he has earned a high place among lyrical poets. These poems, at
least many of them, are as purely subjective as _The Everlasting
Mercy_ was purely objective. Rarely does a poem unfurl with more
loveliness than this:

  I have seen dawn and sunset on moors and windy hills
  Coming in solemn beauty like slow old tunes of Spain;
  I have seen the lady April bringing the daffodils,
  Bringing the springing grass and the soft warm April rain.

In _Tewkesbury Road_ and in _Sea Fever_ the poet expresses
the urge of his own heart. In _Biography_ he quite properly
adopts a style exactly the opposite of the biographical dictionary.
Dates and events are excluded. But the various moments when life was
most intense in actual experience, sights of mountains on sea and
land, long walks and talks with an intimate friend, the frantically
fierce endeavour in the racing cutter, quiet scenes of beauty in the
peaceful countryside. "The days that make us happy make us wise."

As Mr. Masefield's narratives take us back to Chaucer, so his
_Sonnets_ (1916) take us back to the great Elizabethan sequences.
Whether or not Shakespeare unlocked his heart in his sonnets is
impossible to determine. Wordsworth thought he did, Browning thought
quite otherwise. But these sonnets of our poet are undoubtedly
subjective; no one without the necessary information would guess them
to come from the author of _The Everlasting Mercy._ They reveal
what has always been--through moving accidents by flood and field--the
master passion of his mind and heart, the worship of Beauty. The
entire series illustrates a tribute to Beauty expressed in the first
one--"Delight in her made trouble in my mind." This mental disturbance
is here the spur to composition. They are experiments in relative,
meditative, speculative poetry; and while they contain some memorable
lines, and heighten one's respect for the dignity and sincerity of
their author's temperament, they are surely not so successful as his
other work. They are not clearly articulate. Instead of the perfect
expression of perfect thoughts--a gift enjoyed only by
Shakespeare--they reveal the extreme difficulty of metrically voicing
his "trouble." It is in a way like the music of the _Liebestod_.
He is struggling to say what is in his mind, he approaches it, falls
away comes near again, only to be finally baffled.

In 1918 Mr. Masefield returned to battle, murder and sudden death in
the romantic poem _Rosas_. This is an exciting tale told in over
a hundred stanzas, and it is safe to say that any one who reads the
first six lines will read to the end without moving in his chair.
Although this is the latest in publication of our poet's works, it
sounds as if it were written years ago, before he had attained the
mastery so evident in _The Widow in the Bye Street_. It will add
little to the author's reputation.

I do not think Mr. Masefield has received sufficient credit for his
prose fiction. In 1905 he published _A Mainsail Haul_, which
contained a number of short stories and sketches, many of which had
appeared in the Manchester _Guardian_. It is interesting to
recall his connection with that famous journal. These are the results
partly of his experiences, partly of his reading. It is plain that he
has turned over hundreds of old volumes of buccaneer lore. And humour
is as abundant here as it is absent from his best novels, _Captain
Margaret_ and _Multitude and Solitude_. These two books,
recently republished in America, met with a chilling reception from
the critics. For my part, I not only enjoyed reading them, I think
every student of Mr. Masefield's poetry might read them with
profitable pleasure. They are romances that only a poet could have
written. It would be easier to turn them into verse than it would be
to turn his verse-narratives into prose, and less would be lost in the
transfer. In _Multitude and Solitude_, the author has given us
more of the results of his own thinking than can be found in most of
the poems. Whole pages are filled with the pith of meditative thought.
In _Captain Margaret_, we have a remarkable combination of the
love of romance and the romance of love.

In response to a question asked him by the _Tribune_ interviewer,
as to the guiding motive in his writing, Mr. Masefield replied: "I
desire to interpret life both by reflecting it as it appears and by
portraying its outcome. Great art must contain these two attributes.
Examine any of the dramas of Shakespeare, and you will find that their
action is the result of a destruction of balance in the beginning. It
is like a cartful of apples which is overturned. All the apples are
spilled in the street. But you will notice that Shakespeare piles them
up again in his incomparable manner, many bruised, broken, and maybe a
few lost." This is certainly an interesting way of putting the
doctrine of analysis and synthesis as applied to art.

What has Mr. Masefield done then for the advance of poetry? One of his
notable services is to have made it so interesting that thousands look
forward to a new poem from him as readers look for a new story by a
great novelist. He has helped to take away poetry from its
conventional "elevation" and bring it everywhere poignantly in contact
with throbbing life. Thus he is emphatically apart from so-called
traditional poets who brilliantly follow the Tennysonian tradition,
and give us another kind of enjoyment. But although Mr. Masefield is a
twentieth century poet, it would be a mistake to suppose that he has
_originated_ the doctrine that the poet should speak in a natural
voice about natural things, and not cultivate a "diction." Browning
spent his whole life fighting for that doctrine, and went to his grave
covered with honourable scars. Wordsworth successfully rebelled
against the conventional garments of the Muse. Chaucer, Shakespeare,
and Browning are the poets who took human nature as they found it; who
thought life itself was more interesting than any theory about it; who
made language appropriate to the time, the place, and the man,
regardless of the opinion of those who thought the Muse ought to wear
a uniform. The aim of our best twentieth century poets is not really
to write something new and strange, it is to get back to those poets
who lived up to their conviction that the business of poetry is to
chronicle the stages of all life. This is not the only kind of poetry,
but it is the kind high in favour during these present years. The
fountain-head of poetry is human nature, and our poets are trying to
get back to it, just as many of the so-called advances in religious
thought are really attempts to get back to the Founder of
Christianity, before the theologians built their stockade around Him.
Mr. Masefield is a mighty force in the renewal of poetry; in the art
of dramatic narrative he goes back to the sincerity and catholicity of
Chaucer. For his language, he has carried Wordsworth's idea of
"naturalness" to its extreme limits. For his material, he finds
nothing common or unclean. But all his virility, candour, and
sympathy, backed by all his astonishing range of experience, would not
have made him a poet, had he not possessed imagination, and the power
to express his vision of life, the power, as he puts it, of getting
the apples back into the cart.




CHAPTER IV

GIBSON AND HODGSON


  Two Northumberland poets--Wilfrid Wilson Gibson--his early
  failures--his studies of low life--his collected poems--his
  short dramas of pastoral experiences--_Daily Bread_--lack
  of melody--uncanny imagination--whimsies--poems of the Great
  War--their contrast to conventional sentimental ditties--the
  accusation--his contribution to the advance of poetry.--Ralph
  Hodgson--his shyness--his slender output--his fastidious
  self-criticism--his quiet facing of the known facts in nature
  and in humanity--his love of books--his humour--his respect
  for wild and tame animals--the high percentage of artistic
  excellence in his work.--Lascelles Abercrombie.

Wilfrid Wilson Gibson--a horrible mouthful--was born in Hexham,
Northumberland, in 1878. Like Walt Whitman's, his early poetry was
orthodox, well groomed, and uninteresting. It produced no effect on
the public, but it produced upon its author a mental condition of
acute discontent--the necessary conviction of sin preceding
regeneration. Whether he could ever succeed in bringing his verse down
to earth, he did not then know; but so far as he was concerned, he not
only got down to earth, but got under it. He made subterranean
expeditions with the miners, he followed his nose into slums, he
talked long hours with the unclassed, and listened sympathetically to
the lamentations of sea-made widows. His nature--extraordinarily
delicate and sensitive--received deep wounds, the scars of which
appeared in his subsequent poetry. Now he lives where John Masefield
was born, and like him, speaks for the inarticulate poor.

In 1917 Mr. Gibson collected his poems in one thick volume of some
five hundred and fifty pages. This is convenient for reference, but
desperately hard to read, on account of the soggy weight of the book.
Here we have, however, everything that he has thus far written which
he thinks worth preserving. The first piece, _Akra the Slave_
(1904), is a romantic monologue in free verse. Although rather short,
it is much too long, and few persons will have the courage to read it
through. It is incoherent, spineless, consistent only in dulness.
Possibly it is worth keeping as a curiosity. Then comes
_Stonefolds_ (1906), a series of bitter bucolics. This is
pastoral poetry of a new and refreshing kind--as unlike to the
conventional shepherd-shepherdess mincing, intolerable dialogue as
could well be imagined. For, among all the groups of verse, in which,
for sacred order's sake, we arrange English literature, pastoral
poetry easily takes first place in empty, tinkling artificiality. In
_Stonefolds_, we have six tiny plays, never containing more than
four characters, and usually less, which represent, in a rasping
style, the unending daily struggle of generation after generation with
the relentless forces of nature. It is surprising to see how, in four
or five pages, the author gives a clear view of the monotonous life of
seventy years; in this particular art, Strindberg himself has done no
better. The experience of age is contrasted with the hope of youth.
Perhaps the most impressive of them all is _The Bridal_ where, in
the presence of the newly wedded pair, the man's old, bed-ridden
mother speaks of the chronic misery of her married life, intimates
that the son is just like his dead father, and that therefore the
bride has nothing ahead of her but tragedy. Then comes the conclusion,
which reminds one somewhat of the close of Ibsen's _Lady from the
Sea_. The young husband throws wide the door, and addresses his
wife as follows:

  The door is open; you are free to go.
  Why do you tarry? Are you not afraid?
  Go, ere I hate you. I'll not hinder you.
  I would not have you bound to me by fear.
  Don't fear to leave me; rather fear to bide
  With me who am my father's very son.
  Go, lass, while yet I love you!

    ESTHER (closing the door). I shall bide.
  I have heard all; and yet, I would not go.
  Nor would I have a single word unsaid.
  I loved you, husband; yet, I did not know you
  Until your mother spoke. I know you now;
  And I am not afraid.

The first piece in _Stonefolds_ represents the tragic
helplessness of those newly born and those very old, a favourite theme
with Maeterlinck. A lamb and a child are born on the same night, and
both die before dawn. The lamb is a poetic symbol of babyhood.
Nicholas, the aged shepherd, who longs to go out into the night and do
his share of the work that must be done, but who is unable even to
move, thus addresses the dying lamb:

  Poor, bleating beast! We two are much alike,
  At either end of life, though scarce an hour
  You've been in this rough world, and I so long
  That death already has me by the heels;
  For neither of us can stir to help himself,
  But both must bleat for others' aid. This world
  Is rough and bitter to the newly born,
  But far more bitter to the nearly dead.

In _Daily Bread_ (1908-09), there are eighteen brief plays,
written not in orthodox blank verse, like _Stonefolds_, but in
irregular, brittle, breathless metres. Here is where art takes the
short cut to life, sacrificing every grace to gain reality; the
typical goal and method of twentieth-century poetry. So long as a
vivid impression of character and circumstance is produced, the writer
apparently cares nothing about style. I say "apparently," because the
styleless style is perhaps the one best adapted to produce the
sought-for effect. There is ever one difference between life and
"art"--between drama and theatre--that Mr. Gibson has, I suppose,
tried to cancel in these poems of daily bread. In art, the bigger the
drama, the bigger the stage; one could not mount
_Götterdämmerung_ in a village schoolhouse. But Life does not fit
the splendour of the setting to the grandeur of the struggle. In bleak
farm cottages, in dull dwellings in city blocks, in slum tenements,
the greatest of life's tragedies and comedies are enacted--love, hate,
avarice, jealousy, revenge, birth, death--the most terrific passions
known to human nature are fully presented, without the slightest care
for appropriate scenery from the Master of the show. Thus our poet
leads us by the hand into sea-girt huts, into hovels at the mouths of
mines, into garrets of noisy cities, and makes us silent witnesses of
elemental woe. Here Labour, man's greatest blessing, takes on the
aspect of the primal curse, since so many tragedies spring from the
simple root of poverty. The love of money may be the root of all evil,
but the lack of it is the cause of much pain.

It was a happy inspiration that made Mr. Gibson call these scenes
_Daily Bread_; for it is the struggle, not for comfort, but for
existence, that drives these men from mother, wife, and child into the
thick of the fight. Many novels and plays are written nowadays against
"big business," where, among other real and imagined evils, the
Business itself is represented as the villain in the home, alienating
the husband's affections from wife and children. Whatever may be the
case with the private soldiers, the Captain of Industry does not, and
by the nature of things cannot, confine his labours to an eight-hour
day--when he finally comes home, he brings the business with him,
forming a more well-founded cause of jealousy than the one usually
selected for conventional drama. Mr. Gibson, however, is not
interested in the tragic few, but in the tragic many, and in his poems
the man of the house leaves early and returns late. The industrial war
caused by social conditions takes him from home as surely and as
perilously as though he were drafted into an expeditionary force. The
daily parting is poignant, for every member of the family knows he may
not come back. Perhaps the most dramatic illustration of this
corroding worry is seen in _The Night-Shift_, where four women
with a newly-born baby spend a night of agonized waiting, only to have
their fears confirmed in the dawn.

The wife, weak from childbirth, sits up in bed, and speaks:

  Will no one stop that tapping?
  I cannot sleep for it.
  I think that someone is shut in somewhere,
  And trying to get out.
  Will no one let them out,
  And stop the tapping?
  It keeps on tapping, tapping....
  Tap ... tap ... tap ... tap....
  And I can scarcely breathe,
  The darkness is so thick.
  It stifles me,
  And weighs so heavily upon me,
  And drips, and drips....
  My hair is wet already;
  There's water all about my knees....
  As though great rocks were hanging overhead!
  And dripping, dripping....
  I cannot lift my feet,
  The water holds them,
  It's creeping ... creeping ... creeping....
  My wet hair drags me down.
  Ah, God!
  Will no one stop that tapping....
  I cannot sleep....
  And I would sleep
  Till he comes home....
  Tap ... tap ... tap ... tap....

These poems were, of course, composed before the war. In the greater
tragedy, some of the lesser ones disappear. For example, Mr. Gibson
represents young, able-bodied, healthy and temperate men as unable to
find work of any kind; their wives and children starve because of the
absence of employment. Surely, since August, 1914, this particular
cause of suffering has been removed.

In _Womenkind_ (1909), dedicated to Rabbi and Mrs. Wise, we have
a real play, not only dramatic in character and situation, but fitted
for stage representation without the change of a word. The theme is
just the opposite of Middleton's old drama, _Women Beware Women_.
Here the two young women, one the mistress-mother, and one the bride,
join forces against the man, and walk out of his house on the
wedding-day. They feel that the tie between them is stronger than the
tie which had united them severally to the man, and depart to live
together. The play closes on a note of irony, for Jim, his blind
father, and his weary mother repeat in turn--but with quite different
emphasis--the accusation that women are a faithless lot.

The long series of poems called _Fires_ (1910-11) differ in
matter and manner from the earlier works. The form of drama is
abandoned, and in its place we have vivid rimed narrative, mingled
with glowing pictures of natural scenery, taken at all hours of the
day and night. Each of his poems must be taken as a whole, for each
poem strives for a single effect. This effect is often gained by
taking some object, animate or inanimate, as a symbol. Thus, in _The
Hare_, the hunted animal is the symbol of woman. _The Flute_,
_The Lighthouse_, and _The Money_ mean more than their
definition. Mr. Gibson is somewhat kinder to his readers in this
collection, for the monotony of woe, that hangs over his work like a
cloud, is rifted here and there by a ray of happiness. In _The
Shop_, the little boy actually recovers from pneumonia, and our
share in the father's delight is heightened by surprise, for whenever
any of our poet's characters falls into a sickness, we have learned to
expect the worst. Still, the darker side of life remains the author's
chosen field of exploration. Two pieces are so uncanny that one might
almost think they proceeded from a disordered imagination. The blind
boy, who every day has rowed his father back and forth from the
fishing-grounds, while the man steered, one day rows cheerfully toward
home, unaware that his father is dead. The boy wonders at his father's
silence, and laughingly asserts that he has heard him snoring. Then
his mirth changes to fear, and fear to horror.

  Though none has ever known
  How he rowed in, alone,
  And never touched a reef.
  Some say they saw the dead man steer--
  The dead man steer the blind man home--
  Though, when they found him dead,
  His hand was cold as lead.

Another strange poem describes how a cripple sits in his room, with a
mother eternally stitching for bread, and watches out of the window
the giant crane swinging vast weights through the sky. One night,
while he is half-dead with fear, the great crane swoops down upon him,
clutches his bed, and swings him, bed and all, above the sleeping
city, among the blazing stars.

Following Mr. Gibson's development as a poet, year by year, we come to
_Thoroughfares_ (1908-14). These are short poems more
conventional in form than their predecessors, but just as stark and
grim as chronicles of life. Every one remembers the torture inflicted
on women in the good-old-times, when they were strapped to posts on
the flats at low tide, and allowed to watch the cruel slowness of
approaching death. The same theme, with an even more terrible
termination, is selected by Mr. Gibson in _Solway Ford_, where
the carter is pinned by the heavy, overturned wagon on the sands;
while the tide gradually brings the water toward his helpless body. He
dies a thousand deaths in imagination, but is rescued just as the
waves are lapping the wheels. Now he lies in bed, an incurable idiot,
smiling as he sees gold and sapphire fishes swimming in the water over
his head.... That rarest of all English metres--which Browning chose
for _One Word More_--is employed by Mr. Gibson in a compound of
tragedy-irony called _The Vindictive Staircase_. Unfortunately
the rhythm is so closely associated with Browning's love-poem, that
these lines sound like a parody:

  Mrs. Murphy, timidest of spectres,
  You who were the cheeriest of charers,
  With the heart of innocence and only
  Torn between a zest for priest and porter,
  Mrs. Murphy of the ample bosom,--
  Suckler of a score or so of children.

It seems best to leave this measure in the undisturbed possession of
the poet who used it supremely well. Yet some of the verses in
_Thoroughfares_ are an advance on Mr. Gibson's previous work. No
reader will ever forget _Wheels_.

Passing over _Borderlands_ (1912-14) which, with the exception of
_Akra_, is the least successful of Mr. Gibson's works, we come to
his most original contribution to modern poetry, the short poems
included under the heading _Battle_ (1914-15). These verses
afford one more bit of evidence that in order to write unconventional
thoughts, it is not necessary to use unconventional forms. The ideas
expressed here can be found in no other war-poet; they are
idiosyncratic to the highest degree; yet the verse-forms in which they
are written are stanzaic, as traditional as the most conservative
critic could desire. There is, of course, no reason why any poet
should not compose in new and strange rhythms if he prefers to do so;
but I have never believed that originality in thought
_necessarily_ demands metrical measures other than those found in
the history of English literature.

These lyrical poems are dramatic monologues. Each one is the testimony
of some soldier in the thick of the fight as to what he has seen or
heard, or as to what memories are strongest in his mind as he lies in
the filth of the trenches. Conventional emotions of enthusiasm, glory,
sacrifice, courage, are omitted, not because they do not exist, but
simply because they are taken for granted; these boys are aflame with
such feelings at the proper time. But Mr. Gibson is more interested in
the strange, fantastic thoughts, waifs of memory, that wander across
the surface of the mind in the midst of scenes of horror. And we feel
that the more fantastic these thoughts are, the more do they reflect
the deep truths of experience. Home naturally looms large, and some of
the recollections of home take on a grim humour, strangely in contrast
with the present environment of the soldier.

  HIS FATHER

  I quite forgot to put the spigot in.
    It's just come over me.... And it is queer
  To think he'll not care if we lose or win.
    And yet be jumping-mad about that beer.

  I left it running full. He must have said
    A thing or two. I'd give my stripes to hear
  What he will say if I'm reported dead
    Before he gets me told about that beer!

It would appear that the world has grown up, or at all events, grown
much older, during the last forty years. It has grown older at a high
rate of speed. The love of country is the same as ever, because that
is a primal human passion, that will never change, any more than the
love of the sexes; but the expression of battle-poems seems more
mature, more sophisticated, if you like, in this war than in any
preceding conflict. Most of the verses written in England and in
America are as different as may be from "Just before the battle,
mother," which was so popular during our Civil War. Never before has
the psychology of the soldier been so acutely studied by national
poets. And instead of representing the soldier as a man swayed by a
few elemental passions and lush sentiment, he is presented as an
extraordinarily complex individual, with every part of his brain
abnormally alert. Modern poetry, in this respect, has, I think,
followed the lead of the realistic prose novel. Such books as
Tolstoi's _Sevastopol_, and Zola's _La Débâcle_, have had a
powerful effect in making war poetry more analytical; while that
original story, _The Red Badge of Courage_, written by an
inspired young American, Stephen Crane, has left its mark on many a
volume of verse that has been produced since August, 1914. The
unabashed realism of the trenches, together with the psychology of the
soldier, is clearly and significantly reflected in _From the
Front_ (1918), a book of poems written by men in service, edited by
Lieut. C. E. Andrews.

What is going to become of us all if the obsession of
self-consciousness grows ever stronger?

There is not a trace of cheap sentiment in _Battle_. Even the
poems that come nearest to the emotional surface are saved by some
specific touch, like the sense of smell, which, as every one knows, is
a sharper spur to the memory than any other sensation.

  Tonight they're sitting by the peat
    Talking of me, I know--
  Grandfather in the ingle-seat,
    Mother and Meg and Joe.

  I feel a sudden puff of heat
    That sets my ears aglow,
  And smell the reek of burning peat
    Across the Belgian snow.

Browning wrote of Shelley, who had been dead eleven years,

    _The air seems bright with thy past presence yet._

A similar effect of brightness in life and afterglow in death, seems
to have been made on every one who knew him by Rupert Brooke. No young
poet of the twentieth century has left such a flaming glory as he. The
prefatory poem to Mr. Gibson's _Friends_ (1915-16), beautifully
expresses the common feeling:

  He's gone.
  I do not understand.
  I only know
  That as he turned to go
  And waved his hand
  In his young eyes a sudden glory shone:
  And I was dazzled by a sunset glow,
  And he was gone.

The fine sonnets that follow strengthen the strong colour, and are
among the most authentic claims to poetry that their author has set
forth. The second one, contrasting the pale glimmer of the London
garret with the brilliant apparition of Brooke at the open door, "like
sudden April," is poignant in its beauty. The verses in this volume
are richer in melody than is customary with Mr. Gibson, yet _The
Pessimist_ and _The Ice-Cart_ show that he is as whimsical as
ever. He has no end of fun with his fancy.

_Livelihood_ (1914-16) takes us back to the bitter pessimism of
_Stonefolds_ and _Daily Bread_; only instead of being
dialogues, these stories are given in descriptive form, and for the
most part in regular pentameter rime. The best of them is _In the
Orchestra_, where the poor fiddler in the band at the cheap
music-hall plays mechanically every night for his daily bread, while
his heart is torn by the vulture of memory. This poem shows a firm
grasp of the material; every word adds something to the total
impression.

Mr. Gibson's constantly repeated pictures of the grinding,
soul-crushing labour of the poor seem to say _J'accuse_! Yet he
nowhere says it explicitly. He never interrupts his narrative with "My
Lords and Gentlemen," nor does he comment, like Hood in _The Song of
the Shirt_.

Yet the effect of his work is an indictment. Only, whom does he
accuse? Is it the government; is it society; is it God?

Mr. Gibson's latest book of poems, _Hill-Tracks_ (1918), differs
from his previous works in two respects. It is full of pictures of the
open fields of Northumberland, the county where he was born; and
nearly every piece is an attempt at a singing lyric, something seldom
found in his _Collected Poems_. I say an "attempt" with
deliberation, for song is not the most natural expression of this
realistic writer, and not more than half of the fifty lyrics in this
handsome volume are successfully melodious. Some are trivial, and
hardly deserve such beauty of type and paper; others, however, will be
gladly welcomed by all students of Mr. Gibson's work, because they
exhibit the powers of the author in an unusual and charming manner. I
should think that those familiar with the topography and with the
colloquialisms constantly appearing in this book, would read it with a
veritable delight of reminiscence.

  NORTHUMBERLAND

  Heatherland and bent-land--
  Black land and white,
  God bring me to Northumberland,
  The land of my delight.

  Land of singing waters,
  And winds from off the sea,
  God bring me to Northumberland,
  The land where I would be.

  Heatherland and bent-land,
  And valleys rich with corn,
  God bring me to Northumberland,
  The land where I was born.

The shadow of the war darkens nearly every page of this volume, and
the last poem expresses not the local but the universal sentiment of
us who remain in our homes.

  We who are left, how shall we look again
  Happily on the sun, or feel the rain,
  Without remembering how they who went
  Ungrudgingly, and spent
  Their all for us, loved, too, the sun and rain?

  A bird among the rain-wet lilac sings--
  But we, how shall we turn to little things
  And listen to the birds and winds and streams
  Made holy by their dreams,
  Nor feel the heart-break in the heart of things?

An interesting feature of the _Collected Poems_ is a striking
unfinished portrait of the author by Mrs. Wise; but I think it was an
error to publish all these verses in one volume. They produce an
impression of grey monotony which is hardly fair to the poet. The
individuals change their names, but they pass through the same typical
woe of childbirth, desertion, loveless old age, incipient insanity,
with eternal joyless toil. One will form a higher opinion if one reads
the separate volumes as they appeared, and not too much at a time.

His contribution to the advance of English poetry is seen mainly in
his grim realism, in his direct, unadorned presentation of what he
believes to be the truth, whether it be the facts of environment, or
the facts of thought. Conventional war-poetry, excellently represented
by Tennyson's _Charge of the Light Brigade_, which itself harks
back to Drayton's stirring _Ballad of Agincourt_, has not the
slightest echo in these volumes; and ordinary songs of labour are
equally remote. Face to face with Life--that is where the poet leads
us, and where he leaves us. He is far indeed from possessing the
splendid lyrical gift of John Masefield; he has nothing of the
literary quality of William Watson. He writes neither of romantic
buccaneers nor of golden old books. But he is close to the grimy
millions. He writes the short and simple annals of the poor. He is a
poet of the people, and seems to have taken a vow that we shall not
forget them.



Ralph Hodgson was born somewhere in Northumberland about forty years
ago, and successfully eluded the notice of the world until the year
1907. He is by nature such a recluse that I feel certain he would
prefer to attract no attention whatever were it not for the fact that
it is as necessary for a poet to print his songs as it is for a bird
to sing them. His favourite companions are Shelley, Wordsworth, and a
bull terrier, and he is said to play billiards with "grim
earnestness." In 1907 he published a tiny volume called _The Last
Blackbird_, and in 1917 another and tinier one called _Poems_.
During this decade he printed in a few paper booklets, which some day
will be valuable curiosities, separate pieces such as _Eve_,
_The Bull_, _The Mystery_. These are now permanently
preserved in the 1917 book. This thin volume, weighing only two or
three ounces, is a real addition to the English poetry of the
twentieth century.

It is impossible to read the verse of Ralph Hodgson without admiration
for the clarity of his art and respect for the vigour of his mind.
Although many of his works are as aloof from his own opinions as a
well-executed statue, the strength of his personality is an immanent
force. He writes much and publishes little; he is an intellectual
aristocrat. He has the fastidiousness which was the main
characteristic of the temperament of Thomas Gray; and he has as well
Gray's hatred of publicity and much of Gray's lambent humour, more
salty than satiric. His work is decidedly caviare to the general, not
because it is obscure, which it is not, but because it presupposes
much background. Lovers of nature and lovers of books will love these
verses, and reread them many times; but they are not for all markets.
No contemporary poet is more truly original than he; but his
originality is seen in his mental attitude rather than in newness of
form or strangeness of language. The standard metres are good enough
for him, and so are the words in common use. His subjects are the
world-old subjects of poetry--birds, flowers, men and women. Religion
is as conspicuously absent as it is in the works of Keats; its place
is taken by sympathy for humanity and an extraordinary sympathy for
animals. He is as far from the religious passion of Francis Thompson
as he is from the sociological inquisitiveness of Mr. Gibson. To him
each bird, each flower appears as a form of worship. Men and women
appeal to him not because they are poor or downtrodden, but simply
because they are men and women. He is neither an optimist nor a
pessimist; the world is full of objects both interesting and
beautiful, which will pay a rich return to those who observe them
accurately. This is as near as he has thus far come to any philosophy
or any theology:

  THE MYSTERY

  He came and took me by the hand
    Up to a red rose tree,
  He kept His meaning to Himself
    But gave a rose to me.

  I did not pray Him to lay bare
    The mystery to me,
  Enough the rose was Heaven to smell,
    And His own face to see.

It is the absolute object that interests this poet, rather than vague
or futile speculation about it. The flower in the crannied wall he
would leave there. He would never pluck it out, root and all,
wondering about the mystery of the life principle. No poet is more
clean-eyed. His eyes are achromatic. He has lost his illusions gladly;
every time he has lost an illusion he has gained a new idea. The world
as it is seems to him more beautiful, more interesting than any
false-coloured picture of it or any longing to remould it nearer to
the heart's desire. He faces life with steady composure. But it is not
the composure either of stoicism or of despair. He finds it so
wonderful just as it is that he is thankful that he has eyes to see
its beauty, ears to hear its melodies--enough for his present mortal
state.

  AFTER

  "How fared you when you mortal were?
     What did you see on my peopled star?"
  "Oh, well enough," I answered her,
     "It went for me where mortals are!

  "I saw blue flowers and the merlin's flight
     And the rime on the wintry tree,
  Blue doves I saw and summer light
    On the wings of the cinnamon bee."

There is in all this a kind of reverent worship
without any trace of mysticism. And still less of
that modern attitude more popular and surely
more fruitless than mysticism--defiance.

There is a quite different side to the poetry of
Mr. Hodgson, which one would hardly suspect
after reading his outdoor verse. The lamplit
silence of the library is as charming to him as
the fragrant silence of the woods. He is as much
of a recluse among books as he is among flowers.
No poet of today seems more self-sufficient. Although
a lover of humanity, he seems to require
no companionship. He is no more lonely than a
cat, and has as many resources as Tabby herself.
Now when he talks about books, his poetry becomes
intimate, and forsakes all objectivity.
His humour, a purely intellectual quality with him,
rises unrestrainedly.

  MY BOOKS

  When the folks have gone to bed,
    And the lamp is burning low,
  And the fire burns not so red
    As it burned an hour ago,

  Then I turn about my chair
    So that I can dimly see
  Into the dark corners where
    Lies my modest library.

  Volumes gay and volumes grave,
    Many volumes have I got;
  Many volumes though I have,
    Many volumes have I not.

  I have not the rare Lucasta,
    London, 1649;
  I'm a lean-pursed poetaster,
    Or the book had long been mine....

  Near the "Wit's Interpreter"
    (Like an antique Whitaker,
  Full of strange etcetera),
    "Areopagitiea,"

  And the muse of Lycidas,
    Lost in meditation deep,
  Give the cut to Hudibras,
    Unaware the knave's asleep....

  There lies Coleridge, bound in green,
    Sleepily still wond'ring what
  He meant Kubla Khan to mean,
    In that early Wordsworth, Mat.

  Arnold knows a faithful prop,--
    Still to subject-matter leans,
  Murmurs of the loved hill-top,
    Fyfield tree and Cumnor scenes.

The poem closes with a high tribute to Shelley, "more than all the
others mine."

The following trifle is excellent fooling:

  THE GREAT AUK'S GHOST

  The Great Auk's ghost rose on one leg,
    Sighed thrice and three times winkt,
  And turned and poached a phantom egg,
    And muttered, "I'm extinct."

But it is in the love of unextinct animals that Mr. Hodgson's poetic
powers find their most effective display. His masterpiece on the old
unhappy Bull is surprisingly impressive; surprisingly, because we
almost resent being made to feel such ardent sympathy for the poor old
Bull, when there are so many other and more important objects to be
sorry for. Yet the poet draws us away for the moment from all the
other tragedies in God's universe, and absolutely compels our pity for
the Bull. The stanzas in this poem swarm with life.

From a certain point of view, poets are justified in calling attention
to the sufferings of our animal brothers. For it is the sufferings of
animals, even more than the sorrows of man, that check our faith
either in the providence or in the love of God. Human suffering may
possibly be balanced against the spiritual gain it (sometimes) brings;
and at all events, we know that there is no road to greatness of
character except through pain. But what can compensate the dumb
animals for their physical anguish? It is certainly difficult to see
their reward, unless they have immortal souls. That this is no slight
obstacle in the way of those who earnestly desire to believe in an
ethical universe, may be seen from the fact that it was the sight of a
snake swallowing a toad that destroyed once for all the religious
beliefs of Turgenev; and I know a man of science in America who became
an agnostic simply from observation of a particular Texas fly that
bites the cattle. The Founder of Christianity recognized this problem,
as He did every other painful fact in life, when He made the remark
about the sparrow.

Yet even the pessimists ought not to be quite so sure that God is
morally inferior to man. Even their God may be no more amused by human
anguish then men are amused by the grotesque floppings of a dying
fish.

The villains in the world are those who have no respect for the
personality of birds and beasts. And their cruelty to animals is not
deliberate or vindictive--it arises from crass stupidity.

  STUPIDITY STREET

  I saw with open eyes
    Singing birds sweet
  Sold in the shops
    For the people to eat,
  Sold in the shops of
    Stupidity Street.

  I saw in vision
    The worm in the wheat,
  And in the shops nothing
    For people to eat;
  Nothing for sale in
    Stupidity Street.

The poet's attitude toward the lion in the jungle, the bull in the
field, the cat in the yard, the bird on the tree is not one of
affectionate petting, for love and sympathy are often
mingled--consciously or unconsciously--with condescension. There is no
trace of condescension in the way Mr. Hodgson writes of animals. He
treats them with respect, and not only hates to see them hurt, he
hates to see their dignity outraged.

  THE BELLS OF HEAVEN

  'Twould ring the bells of Heaven
  The wildest peal for years,
  If Parson lost his senses
  And people came to theirs,
  And he and they together
  Knelt down with angry prayers
  For tamed and shabby tigers
  And dancing dogs and bears,
  And wretched, blind pit ponies,
  And little hunted hares.

I confess that I have often felt a sense of shame for humanity when I
have observed men and women staring through the bars at the splendid
African cats in cages, and have also observed that their foolish stare
is returned by the lion or tiger with a dull look of infinite boredom.
Nor is it pleasant to see small boys pushing sticks through the safe
bars, in an endeavour to irritate the royal captives. One remembers
Browning's superb lion in _The Glove_, whom the knight was able
to approach in safety, because the regal beast was completely lost in
thought--he was homesick for the desert, oblivious of the little
man-king and his duodecimo court.

Although the total production of Ralph Hodgson is slight in quantity,
the percentage of excellence is remarkably high. The reason for this
is clear. Instead of printing everything he writes, and leaving the
employment of the cream-separator to his readers, he gives to the
public only what has passed his own severe scrutiny. He is a true
poet, with an original mind.

As for the work of Lascelles Abercrombie, which has been much praised
in certain circles, I should prefer to leave the criticism of that to
those who enjoy reading it. If I should attempt to "do justice" to his
poetry, I should seem to his friends to be doing just the
opposite--the opposite of just.




CHAPTER V

BROOKE, FLECKER, DE LA MARE, AND OTHERS


  Rupert Brooke--a personality--the spirit of youth--his horror
  at old age--Henry James's tribute--his education--a
  genius--his poems of death--his affected cynicism--his nature
  poems--war sonnets--his supreme sacrifice--his charming
  humour--his masterpiece, _Grantchester_.--James Elroy
  Flecker--the editorial work of Mr. Squire--no posthumous
  puffery--the case of Crashaw--life of Flecker--his fondness
  for revision--his friendship with Rupert Brooke--his skill as
  a translator--his austerity--art for art's sake--his
  "brightness"--love of Greek mythology--steady mental
  development--his definition of the aim of poetry.--Walter De
  La Mare--the poet of shadow--Hawthorne's tales--his
  persistence--his reflective mood--his descriptive style--his
  Shakespeare characters--his sketches from life.--D. H.
  Lawrence--his lack of discipline--his subjectivity--absence of
  reserve--a master of colour--his glaring excesses.--John
  Drinkwater--the west of England--his healthy spirit.--W. H.
  Davies--the tramp poet.--Edward Thomas--his death--originality
  of his work.--Robert Nichols--Willoughby Weaving.--The young
  Oxford poets.

Rupert Brooke left the world in a chariot of fire. He was something
more than either a man or a poet; he was and is a Personality. It was
as a Personality that he dazzled his friends. He was overflowing with
tremendous, contagious vitality. He was the incarnation of the spirit
of youth, wearing the glamour and glory of youth like a shining
garment. Despite our loss, it almost seems fitting that he did not
live to that old age which he never understood, for which he had such
little sympathy, and which he seems to have hated more than death. For
he had the splendid insolence of youth. Youth commonly feels
high-spirited in an unconscious, instinctive fashion, like a kitten or
a puppy; but Rupert Brooke was as self-consciously young as a decrepit
pensioner is self-consciously old. He rejoiced in the strength of his
youth, and rolled it as a sweet morsel under his tongue. He was so
glad to be young, and to know every morning on rising from sleep that
he was still young! His passionate love of beauty made him see in old
age only ugliness; he could not foresee the joys of the mellow years.
All he saw consisted of grey hairs, wrinkles, double chins, paunches.
To him all old people were Struldbrugs. We smile at the insolence of
youth, because we know it will pass with the beauty and strength that
support it. Ogniben says, "Youth, with its beauty and grace, would
seem bestowed on us for some such reason as to make us partly
endurable till we have time for really becoming so of ourselves,
without their aid; when they leave us ... little by little, he sees fit
to forego claim after claim on the world, puts up with a less and less
share of its good as his proper portion; and when the octogenarian
asks barely a sup of gruel and a fire of dry sticks, and thanks you as
for his full allowance and right in the common good of life,--hoping
nobody may murder him,--he who began by asking and expecting the whole
of us to bow down in worship to him,--why, I say he is advanced."

Henry James--whose affectionate tribute in the preface to Brooke's
_Letters_ is impressive testimony--saw in the brilliant youth,
besides the accident of genius, a perfect illustration of the highest
type of Englishman, bred in the best English way, in the best
traditions of English scholarship, and adorned with the good sense,
fine temper, and healthy humour of the ideal Anglo-Saxon. He indeed
enjoyed every possible advantage; like Milton and Browning, had he
been intended for a poet from the cradle, his bringing-up could not
have been better adapted to the purpose. He was born at Rugby, on the
third of August, 1887, where his father was one of the masters in the
famous school. He won a poetry prize there in 1905. The next year he
entered King's College, Cambridge; his influence as an undergraduate
was notable. He took honours in classics, went abroad to study in
Munich, and returned to Grantchester, which he was later to celebrate
in his best poem. He had travelled somewhat extensively on the
Continent, and in 1913 went on a journey through the United States and
Canada to the South Seas. I am glad he saw the Hawaiian Islands, for
no one should die before beholding that paradise. At the outbreak of
war, he enlisted, went to Antwerp, and later embarked on the
expedition to the Dardanelles. He was bitten by a fly, and died of
bloodpoisoning on a French hospital ship, the day being Shakespeare's,
the twenty-third of April, 1915. He was buried on a Greek island.

Rupert Brooke lived to be nearly twenty-eight years old, a short life
to show ability in most of the ways of the world, but long enough to
test the quality of a poet, not merely in promise, but in performance.
There is no doubt that he had the indefinable but unmistakable touch
of genius. Only a portion of his slender production is of high rank,
but it is enough to preserve his name. His _Letters_, which have
been underestimated, prove that he had mental as well as poetical
powers. Had he lived to middle age, it seems certain that his poetry
would have been tightly packed with thought. He had an alert and
inquisitive mind.

Many have seemed to think that the frequent allusions to death in his
poetry are vaguely prophetic. They are, of course--with the exception
of the war-poems--nothing of the kind, being merely symptomatic of
youth. They form the most conventional side of his work. His cynicism
toward the love of the sexes was a youthful affectation, strengthened
by his reading. He was deeply read in the seventeenth-century poets,
who delighted in imagining themselves passing from one woman to
another--swearing "by love's sweetest part, variety." At all events,
these poems, of which there are comparatively many, exhibit his least
attractive side. The poem addressed to _The One Before the Last_,
ends

  Oh! bitter thoughts I had in plenty,
     But here's the worst of it--
   I shall forget, in Nineteen-twenty,
     You ever hurt a bit!

He was perhaps, too young to understand two real truths--that real
love can exist in the midst of wild passion, and that the best part of
it can and often does survive the early flames. Such poems as
_Menelaus and Helen_, _Jealousy_, and others, profess a
profound knowledge of life that is really a profound ignorance.

His pictures of nature, while often beautiful, lack the penetrative
quality seen so constantly in Wordsworth and Browning; these greater
poets saw nature not only with their eyes, but with their minds. Their
representations glow with enduring beauty, but they leave in the
spectator something even greater than beauty, something that is food
for reflection and imagination, the source of quick-coming fancies.
Compare the picture of the pines in Brooke's poem _Pine-Trees and
the Sky: Evening_, with Browning's treatment of an identical theme
in _Paracelsus_, remembering that Browning's lines were written
when he was twenty-two years old. Brooke writes,

  Then from the sad west turning wearily,
    I saw the pines against the white north sky,
  Very beautiful, and still, and bending over
    Their sharp black heads against a quiet sky.

Browning writes,

  The herded pines commune, and have deep thoughts,
  A secret they assemble to discuss,
  When the sun drops behind their trunks which glare
  Like grates of hell.

Both in painting and in imagination the second passage is instantly
seen to be superior.

The war sonnets of 1914 receive so much additional poignancy by the
death of the author that it is difficult, and perhaps undesirable, to
judge them as objective works of art. They are essentially noble and
sincere, speaking from the depths of high-hearted self-sacrifice. He
poured out his young life freely and generously, knowing what it meant
to say good-bye to his fancy. There is always something eternally
sublime--something that we rightly call divine--in the spendthrift
giving of one's life-blood for a great cause. And Rupert Brooke was
intensely aware of the value of what he unhesitatingly gave.

The two "fish" poems exhibit a playful, charming side to Brooke's
imagination; but if I could have only one of his pieces, I should
assuredly choose Grantchester. Nostalgia is the mother of much fine
poetry; but seldom has the expression of it been mingled more
exquisitely with humour and longing. By the rivers of Babylon he sat
down and laughed when he remembered Zion. And his laughter at Babylon
is so different from his laughter at Grantchester. A few felicitous
adjectives sum up the significant difference between Germany and
England. Writing in a Berlin café, he says:

  Here tulips bloom as they are told;
  Unkempt about those hedges blows
  An English unofficial rose;
  And there the unregulated sun
  Slopes down to rest when day is done,
  And wakes a vague unpunctual star,
  A slippered Hesper; and there are
  Meads toward Haslingfleld and Coton
  Where _das Betreten'_s not _verboten_....
  Oh, is the water sweet and cool,
  Gentle and brown, above the pool?
  And laughs the immortal river still
  Under the mill, under the mill?
  Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
  And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
  Deep meadows yet, for to forget
  The lies, and truths, and pain? ... oh! yet
  Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
  And is there honey still for tea?

When Hamlet died, he bequeathed his reputation to Horatio, the
official custodian of his good name. He could not have made a better
choice. Would that all poets who die young were equally fortunate in
their posthumous editors! For there are some friends who conceive it
to be their duty to print every scrap of written paper the bard left
behind him, even if they have to act as scavengers to find the
"remains"; and there are others who think affection and admiration for
the dead are best shown by adopting the methods and the language of
the press-agent. To my mind, the pious memoir of Tennyson is injured
by the inclusion of a long list of "testimonials," which assure us
that Alfred Tennyson was a remarkable poet. Mr. J. C. Squire, under
whose auspices the works of Flecker appear in one handsome volume, is
an admirable editor. His introduction is a model of its kind, giving
the necessary biographical information, explaining the chronology, the
origin, the background of the poems, and showing how the poet revised
his earlier work; the last paragraph ought to serve as an example to
those who may be entrusted with a task of similar delicacy in the
future. "My only object in writing this necessarily rather disjointed
Introduction is to give some information that may interest the reader
and be useful to the critic; and if a few personal opinions have
slipped in they may conveniently be ignored. A vehement 'puff
preliminary' is an insolence in a volume of this kind; it might
pardonably be supposed to imply either doubts about the author or
distrust of his readers."

As a contrast to the above, it is interesting to recall the preface
that an anonymous friend contributed to a volume of Crashaw's verse in
the seventeenth century, which, in his own words, "I have impartially
writ of this Learned young Gent." Fearing that readers might not
appreciate his poetry at its true value, the friend writes, "It were
prophane but to mention here in the Preface those under-headed Poets,
Retainers to seven shares and a halfe; Madrigall fellowes, whose onely
business in verse, is to rime a poore six-penny soule a Suburb sinner
into hell;--May such arrogant pretenders to Poetry vanish, with their
prodigious issue of tumorous heats, and flashes of their adulterate
braines, and for ever after, may this our Poet fill up the better
roome of man. Oh! when the generall arraignment of Poets shall be, to
give an accompt of their higher soules, with what a triumphant brow
shall our divine Poet sit above, and looke downe upon poore Homer,
Virgil, Horace, Claudian; &c. who had amongst them the ill lucke to
talke out a great part of their gallant Genius, upon Bees, Dung,
froggs, and Gnats, &c. and not as himself here, upon Scriptures,
divine Graces, Martyrs and Angels." Our prefatory friend set a pace
that it is hopeless for modern champions to follow, and they might as
well abandon the attempt.

James Elroy Flecker, the eldest child of the Rev. Dr. Flecker, who is
Head Master of an English school, was born on the fifth of November,
1884, in London. He spent five years at Trinity College, Oxford, and
later studied Oriental languages at Caius College, Cambridge. He went
to Constantinople in 1910. In that same year signs of tuberculosis
appeared, but after some months at an English sanatorium, he seemed to
be absolutely well. In 1911 he was in Constantinople, Smyrna, and
finally in Athens, where he was married to Miss Skiadaressi, a Greek.
In March the dreaded illness returned, and the rest of his short life
was spent in the vain endeavour to recover his health. He died in
Switzerland, on the third of January, 1915, at the age of thirty. "I
cannot help remembering," says Mr. Squire, "that I first heard the
news over the telephone, and that the voice which spoke was Rupert
Brooke's."

He had published four books of verse and four books of prose, leaving
many poems, essays, short stories, and two plays, in manuscript. All
his best poetry is now included in the _Collected Poems_ (1916).

Flecker had the Tennysonian habit of continually revising; and in this
volume we are permitted to see some of the interesting results of the
process. I must say, however, that of the two versions of _Tenebris
Interlucentem_, although the second is called a "drastic
improvement," I prefer the earlier. Any poet might be proud of either.

Flecker liked the work of Mr. Yeats, of Mr. Housman, of Mr. De La
Mare; and Rupert Brooke was an intimate friend, for the two young men
were together at Cambridge. He wrote a sonnet on Francis Thompson,
though he was never affected by Thompson's literary manner. Indeed, he
is singularly free from the influence of any of the modern poets. His
ideas and his style are his own; he thought deeply on the art of
writing, and was given to eager and passionate discussion of it with
those who had his confidence. His originality is the more remarkable
when we remember his fondness for translating verse from a variety of
foreign languages, ancient and modern. He was an excellent translator.
His skill in this art can only be inferred where we know nothing at
first hand of the originals; but his version of Goethe's immortal
lyric is proof of his powers. The only blemish--an unavoidable one--is
"far" and "father" in the last two lines.

  Knowest thou the land where bloom the lemon trees?
  And darkly gleam the golden oranges?
  A gentle wind blows down from that blue sky;
  Calm stands the myrtle and the laurel high.
  Knowest thou the land? So far and fair!
  Thou, whom I love, and I will wander there.

  Knowest thou the house with all its rooms aglow,
  And shining hall and columned portico?
  The marble statues stand and look at me.
  Alas, poor child, what have they done to thee?
  Knowest thou the land? So far and fair.
  My Guardian, thou and I will wander there.

  Knowest thou the mountain with its bridge of cloud?
  The mule plods warily: the white mists crowd.
  Coiled in their caves the brood of dragons sleep;
  The torrent hurls the rock from steep to steep.
  Knowest thou the land? So far and fair.
  Father, away! Our road is over there!

Fletcher was more French than English in his dislike of romanticism,
sentimentalism, intimate, and confessional poetry; and of course he
was strenuously opposed to contemporary standards in so far as they
put correct psychology above beauty. Much contemporary verse reads and
sounds like undisciplined thinking out loud, where each poet feels it
imperative to tell the reader in detail not only all his adventures,
and passions, but even the most minute whimsies and caprices. When the
result of this bosom-cleansing is real poetry, it justifies itself;
but the method is the exact opposite of Flecker's. His master was
Keats, and in his own words, he wrote "with the single intention of
creating beauty." Austerity and objectivity were his ideals.

Strangely enough, he was able to state in a new and more convincing
way the doctrine of art for art's sake. "However few poets have
written with a clear theory of art for art's sake, it is by that
theory alone that their work has been, or can be, judged;--and rightly
so if we remember that art embraces all life and all humanity, and
sees in the temporary and fleeting doctrines of conservative or
revolutionary only the human grandeur or passion that inspires them."

Perhaps the best noun that describes Flecker's verse is
_brightness_. He had a consumptive's longing for sunshine, and
his sojourns on the Mediterranean shores illuminate his pages. The
following poem is decidedly characteristic:

  IN PHAEACIA

  Had I that haze of streaming blue,
    That sea below, the summer faced,
  I'd work and weave a dress for you
    And kneel to clasp it round your waist,
  And broider with those burning bright
    Threads of the Sun across the sea,
  And bind it with the silver light
    That wavers in the olive tree.

  Had I the gold that like a river
    Pours through our garden, eve by eve,
  Our garden that goes on for ever
    Out of the world, as we believe;
  Had I that glory on the vine,
    That splendour soft on tower and town,
  I'd forge a crown of that sunshine,
    And break before your feet the crown.

  Through the great pinewood I have been
    An hour before the lustre dies,
  Nor have such forest-colours seen
    As those that glimmer in your eyes.
  Ah, misty woodland, down whose deep
    And twilight paths I love to stroll
  To meadows quieter than sleep
    And pools more secret than the soul!

  Could I but steal that awful throne
    Ablaze with dreams and songs and stars
  Where sits Night, a man of stone,
    On the frozen mountain spars
  I'd cast him down, for he is old,
    And set my Lady there to rule,
  Gowned with silver, crowned with gold,
    And in her eyes the forest pool.

It seems to me improbable that Flecker will be forgotten; he was a
real poet. But a remark made of Tennyson is still more applicable to
Flecker. "He was an artist before he was a poet." Even as a small boy,
he had astonishing facility, but naturally wrote little worth
preserval. The _Collected Poems_ show an extraordinary command of
his instrument. He had the orthodox virtues of the orthodox poet--rime
and rhythm, cunning in words, skill in nature-painting, imagination.
The richness of his colouring and the loveliness of his melodies make
his verses a delight to the senses. His mind was plentifully stored
with classical authors, and he saw nature alive with old gods and
fairies. In one of his most charming poems, _Oak and Olive_, he
declares,

  When I go down the Gloucester lanes
    My friends are deaf and blind:
  Fast as they turn their foolish eyes
    The Maenads leap behind,
  And when I hear the fire-winged feet,
    They only hear the wind.

  Have I not chased the fluting Pan,
    Through Cranham's sober trees?
  Have I not sat on Painswick Hill
    With a nymph upon my knees,
  And she as rosy as the dawn,
    And naked as the breeze?

His poetry is composed of sensations rather than thoughts. What it
lacks is intellectual content. A richly packed memory is not the same
thing as original thinking, even when the memories are glorified by
the artist's own imagination. Yet the death of this young man was a
cruel loss to English literature, for his mental development would
eventually have kept pace with his gift of song. His cheerful Paganism
would, I think, have given place to something deeper and more
fruitful. Before he went to Constantinople, he had, as it is a fashion
for some modern Occidentals to have, a great admiration for
Mohammedanism. A friend reports a rather naïve remark of his, "this
intercourse with Mohammedans had led him to find more good in
Christianity than he had previously suspected." I have sometimes
wondered whether a prolonged residence among Mohammedans might not
temper the enthusiasm of those who so loudly insist on the superiority
of that faith to Christianity. Mr. Santayana speaks somewhere of "the
unconquerable mind of the East." Well, my guess is that this
unconquerable mind will some day be conquered by the Man of Nazareth,
just as I think He will eventually--some centuries ahead--conquer even
us.

Flecker died so soon after the opening of the Great War that it is
vain to surmise what the effect of that struggle would have been upon
his soul. That it would have shaken him to the depths--and perhaps
given him the spiritual experience necessary for his further
advance--seems not improbable. One of his letters on the subject
contains the significant remark, "What a race of deep-eyed and
thoughtful men we shall have in Europe--now that all those millions
have been baptized in fire!"

The last stanza of his poem _A Sacred Dialogue_ reads as follows:

  Then the black cannons of the Lord
    Shall wake crusading ghosts
  And the Milky Way shall swing like a sword
    When Jerusalem vomits its horde
  On the Christmas Day preferred of the Lord,
    The Christmas Day of the Hosts!

He appended a footnote in December, 1914, when he was dying:
"Originally written for Christmas, 1912, and referring to the first
Balkan War, this poem contains in the last speech of Christ words that
ring like a prophecy of events that may occur very soon." As I am
copying his Note, December, 1917, the English army is entering
Jerusalem.

Flecker was essentially noble-minded; and without any trace of
conceit, felt the responsibility of his talents. There is not an
unworthy page in the _Collected Poems_. In a memorable passage,
he stated the goal of poetry. "It is not the poet's business to save
man's soul, but to make it worth saving."

Walter De La Mare, a close personal friend of Rupert Brooke, came of
Huguenot, English and Scotch ancestry, and was born at Charlton, Kent,
on the twenty-fifth of April, 1873. He was educated at St. Paul's
Cathedral Choir School. Although known today exclusively as a poet, he
has written much miscellaneous prose--critical articles for
periodicals, short stories, and a few plays. His first poetry-book,
_Songs of Childhood_, appeared in 1902; in 1906, _Poems_; in
1910, _The Return_, which won the Edmond de Polignac prize;
_The Listeners_, which gave him a wide reputation, appeared in
1912; _Peacock Pie_, in 1917, and _Motley and Other Poems_
in 1918. When, in November, 1916, the Howland Memorial Prize at Yale
University was formally awarded to the work of Rupert Brooke, it was
officially received in New Haven by Walter De La Mare, who came from
England for the purpose.

If Flecker's poems were written in a glare of light, Mr. De La Mare's
shy Muse seems to live in shadow. It is not at all the shadow of
grief, still less of bitterness, but rather the cool, grateful shade
of retirement. I can find no words anywhere that so perfectly express
to my mind the atmosphere of these poem

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