the age of fifty-six removes after a long interval the second of the
two poets who were admiringly regarded by their contemporaries as
rivalling the literary partnership which once existed between Goethe
and Schiller. The Freiherr Detlev von Liliencron, who died in 1909,
was one of the initiators of a new movement in German literature; and
of this movement his much younger friend was often proclaimed the most
distinguished ornament. Dehmel was the son of a forest official in
the Mark of Brandenburg, and it has been speculated, without obvious
results, whether there was not some Slavonic admixture in his blood
which was reflected in his work. But there is little in his career
which requires further brought explanation than the conditions of its
time and place. He was educated at the University of Leipzig, where he
took his doctor's degree with a thesis on a point in the business of
insurance, and he worked for some years as secretary to an insurance
company, a period of his life which he regarded as having profitably
taught him discipline and orderliness of mind. He developed late
as a poet. He himself said that he wrote nothing worth having till
his twenty-sixth year, and many of the pieces in his first volume,
_Erlösungen_, published when he was twenty-eight, were afterwards
discarded or altered. His works consist of several collections of
poems, which he continually shuffled and regrouped with every new
edition (he was inclined to rebuff critics who wished to trace the
development of his powers); _Die Verwandlungen der Venus_, a series
of poetical visions of all types of love from the highest to the
lowest; _Zwei Menschen_, a novel in verse, describing the elopement
of a librarian with his employer's wife; _Der Mitmensch_, a modern
play in prose, to which he himself attached great importance; an
elaborate wordless play called _Lucifer; Michel-Michael_, a political
tract in dramatic form; a collection of short stories; a collection
of essays; and a collection of tales and verses for children. Like
most of his generation he was subject to many exotic influences,
ranging from Verlaine to Przybyszewski and from Shakespeare to Pierre
Louys; and his works contain many admirable translations, those from
Verlaine being among the best in the German language. His own poetry is
pre-eminently didactic and he preaches consistently, in allegory, in
direct narrative, and in direct precept, the doctrine of self-control
and of the full utilisation of all human faculties. He had passion and
vigour, a not always active power of psychological discernment and
an occasional perception of beauty. He is justly reproached with a
certain brutality and vulgarity and, one might add, with strange lapses
of humour. His courage and determination are beyond question; but in
his erotic, as well as in his mystical, rhapsodies (which are often
combined) there is too frequently a disagreeable element of frigid
calculation. His obscurity is sometimes tiresome and unnecessary,
and many of his allegories and symbols are incomprehensible without
an external key to their meaning. Some of his lyrics, however, are
extremely beautiful: there are passages of insight and dramatic force
in _Zwei Menschen_; some of his epigrams and aphorisms are wise
and terse; and a strain of earnest sincerity runs through all his
preaching. In August, 1914, though his class was not called up, he
volunteered for service, and, possibly as a reward for a great deal of
patriotic poetry, he received the Iron Cross. He died at Blankenese,
near Hamburg, where he had lived for several years before the war.
* * * * *
Those many who knew the late Edward Thomas, who fell in France in 1917,
will be glad to hear that a memorial is being prepared of an admirable
poet and essayist. It will take the form of a volume, biographical and
appreciative, of prose and verse, and the contributors will include,
amongst others, Messrs. W. H. Davies, Walter de la Mare, V. Locke
Ellis, Edward Garnett, James Guthrie, E. S. P. Haynes, and Edward Rhys.
Extracts are given from Thomas's letters to Mr. W. H. Hudson. The book
is being printed by Mr. Guthrie, whose beautiful work as draughtsman
and painter in _Root and Branch_ has not yet had the full recognition
it deserves. It will be a quarto, set in Caslon Old Face type, and
bound in dark green cloth, with a device in gold by Mr. Guthrie, who
has also designed a frontispiece, title-page, and initial letters. The
price is to be ten shillings, and prospective subscribers should apply
to the Secretary, Pear Tree Press, Flansham, Bognor.
* * * * *
Lady Burne-Jones, widow of the painter, died early last month. She was
the author of one of the most readable and delightful biographies in
the language. Her "Life" of her husband was written vivaciously rather
than brilliantly, and it revealed in Lady Burne-Jones no notable gift
for literary creation. But her two volumes contained no dull page, few
slipshod sentences, and a life-like portrait of one of the most lovable
of men.
* * * * *
The next number of THE LONDON MERCURY will contain the first of two
long contributions by Mr. Edmund Gosse embodying his reminiscences of
Henry James and an article by Sir George Henschel on Interpretation in
Singing. Either in that or the next number we hope also to publish a
first instalment of the last diary of the late W. N. P. Barbellion.
POETRY
_The Senses_
Lo, as a garden-wandering bee,
The soul seeks out her immortality
From all the growths and blossoms manifold
Which in this life men hold
As things material: plying busy rounds,
From the world's odours, sights, and sounds
To fill her honied stores.
From the perfume acrid-sweet of dead leaves burning
When autumn sunsets into dusk are turning:
From the breath of damp stone floors
And paraffin, pervading the cool porches
And aisles of village churches:
From the tepid, flat, mechanic exhalations
Of desolate tube-stations:
From woody savours stirred when children wrench
Tufts out of deep moss-beds: from the subtle stench
Of bad cigars and household slops, begetting
Delighted memory
Of sunny towns in France and Italy:
From the stronger, tawnier stink of dust and sweat
And camel-dung which haunts the glaring East;
And the heavy, sweet, heart-piercing odours breathed
From pale large lilies and narcissus wreathed
Round some dear head deceased.
Such smells as these, and of the sights,
The gleam on blue May nights
Of the young moon in high ancestral boughs
Among the scant young leaves:
And in the wake of the moving ploughs
The shining earth that, as the straight share cleaves,
Turns flowingly over: and the half-seen sweep
Of the high circles and the looming hollow
Of the dark opera-house, where through the leap
And lapse of the music unseen hundreds follow
The curtain's slow ascent:
And the rosy apple-blossom on the bent
And knotted bough, against the blue of heaven:
And the sudden rainbows riven
By the salt breeze from the billows many-leaping
In the sunny Mediterranean.
And of things heard,
The cooling whisper of summer breezes sweeping
The grey-green barley-fields: and the echoes stirred
By music interwoven in some dim-lighted
Cavernous cathedral: and the eighteen-pounders'
Buoyant drum-beats and hisses and whoops united
In a hurricane-barrage: and the clear laughter and shouting
Of girls in old green gardens playing rounders:
And the ripple of fountains spouting
Over marble nymphs and dolphins drenched and cool
To the sun-splashed fountain-pool,
Where golden in the Tuscan sun
The age-worn palace sleeps.
But deep in all the immortal Spirit leaps
Unquenchably, the Imperishable One
To whom through all this multiplicity
Of scattered universes longingly
The Soul, world-wandering mendicant, upreaches
Imploring hands, and as an alms beseeches
The humble coin which buys that one small treasure
Beyond all worldly measure.
MARTIN ARMSTRONG
_The Coming of Green_
Here like flame and there like water leaping
Green life breaks out again; in sunlight gleaming,
Small bright emerald flames through grey twigs creeping,
Little freshets of leafage shyly streaming
Among dark tangles. And sunlight grows serener
Daily, and wider extends the leafy awning,
And the green undying lawn beneath grows greener--
Greener and lovelier with lights and shadows dawning
Alternate, many-toned, born of the trooping
Of clouds o'er sun. Assembled Planes are bending
Long festoons high-hung and heavily drooping
From domes of luminous greenness. Willows are sending
Their fountains live and many-shafted swooping
Skyward, and lazily backward coolly showering.
Like tongues of flame, like water showering, dripping,
Green life slides down the branch, from bushes shaking
A verdant dew, or, out on a long curve slipping,
At the far extreme to a shivering soft foam breaking.
A spring in the desert, a fire in the darkness leaping,
Greenness comes transparently roofing and walling
Garden ways with an indolent downward-sweeping,
Or mounded high ... aspiring ... airily falling,
Or leaning fan over fan. A green and golden
Lucent cave enfolds us, cunningly vaulted,
With delicate-screened high chambers to embolden
Birds to flutter and sing or nest exalted
In swaying sanctuaries, and the lime-tree's clustering
Flowers to blow that the leafy ways be fragrant.
A dancing flood, a wild fire strengthening, mustering,
Over the gardens the young green life runs vagrant.
MARTIN ARMSTRONG
_The Modern Hippolytus_
Not, like poor monks, with fasting and the rod
To mortify the flesh for fear of God:
Not, like Sir Galahad, to run to waste
In sentimental worship of the chaste:
Not, like the Puritan, to hug disgust
And feast on others' sins to quench his lust:
Not, like the saint, with dreams of future bliss,
Lost in a fancied world, this world to miss.
But, like Hippolytus, in pride to make
The body servant for the body's sake;
Spurning the Cytheræan's toils, who craves
With servile heart the passion of her slaves,
Freely to render homage unto Her
Who, being free, desires no worshipper:
To render soul for soul, without pretence,
Not wooing sense through soul, nor soul through sense:
To shun the twilight of the world's mistrust
Where Lust for Love's mistaken, Love for Lust,
And seek Diana's cold and hueless light
That knows no difference save of dark and bright:--
There lay the man's will: but the unborn child
Cried in the darkness, and the old world smiled.
KENWORTH RUSHBY
_Nature's Fruitfulness_
This summer on our yard-wall there does swing
A groundsel-bush from one seed last year sown.
A burnet moth, sun-wakened in the Spring,
Flew out and laid its hundred eggs thereon.
An hundred seeds each blossom on it gives,
An hundred caterpillars eat its leaves.
Its plumed seeds scattered by the wind now fall
Into our yard on water and on stone.
Here too the caterpillars over blown
Gyrate and starve, for few can climb the wall.
Next year again there will be one of both:
One bush of groundsel and one burnet moth.
FRANCIS BURROWS
_Almswomen_
At Quincey's moat the squandering village ends,
And there in the almshouse dwell the dearest friends
Of all the village, two old dames that cling
As close as any trueloves in the spring.
Long, long ago they passed three-score-and-ten,
And in this doll's house lived together then;
All things they have in common being so poor,
And their one fear, Death's shadow at the door.
Each sundown makes them mournful, each sunrise
Brings back the brightness in their failing eyes.
How happy go the rich fair-weather days
When on the roadside folk stare in amaze
At such a honeycomb of fruit and flowers
As mellows round their threshold; what long hours
They gloat upon their steepling hollyhocks,
Bee's balsams, feathery southernwood and stocks,
Fiery dragons'-mouths, great mallow leaves
For salves, and lemon plants in bushy sheaves,
Shagged Esau's Hands with five green finger-tips!
Such old sweet names are ever on their lips.
As pleased as little children where these grow
In cobbled pattens and worn gowns they go,
Proud of their wisdom when on gooseberry shoots
They stuck egg-shells to fright from coming fruits
The brisk-billed rascals; waiting still to see
Their neighbour owls saunter from tree to tree
Or in the hushing half-light mouse the lane
Long-winged and lordly.
But when those hours wane
Indoors they ponder, scared by the harsh storm
Whose pelting saracens on the window swarm,
And listen for the mail to clatter past
And church clock's deep bay withering on the blast;
They feed the fire that flings a freakish light
On pictured kings and queens grotesquely bright,
Platters and pitchers, faded calendars
And graceful hour-glass trim with lavenders.
Many a time they kiss and cry, and pray
Both may be summoned in the selfsame day,
And wiseman linnet tinkling in his cage
End too with them the friendship of old age,
And all together leave their treasured room
Some bell-like evening when the May's in bloom.
EDMUND BLUNDEN
1920.
_Intimacy_
Since I have seen you do those intimate things
That other men but dream of; lull asleep
The sinister dark forest of your hair
And tie those bows that stir on your calm breast
Faintly as leaves that shudder in their sleep:
Since I have seen your stocking swallow up,
A swift black wind, the pale flame of your foot
And deemed your slender limbs so meshed in silk
Sweet mermaid sisters drowned in their dark hair:
I have not troubled overmuch with food
And wine has seemed like water from a well;
Pavements are built of fire, grass of thin flames;
All other girls grow dull as painted flowers,
Or flutter harmlessly like coloured flies
Whose wings are tangled in the net of leaves
Spread by frail trees that grow behind the eyes.
EDGELL RICKWORD
_The Soldier Addresses His Body_
I shall be mad if you get smashed about,
We've had good times together, you and I;
Although you groused a bit when luck was out
And women passionless, and we went dry.
Yet there are many things we have not done;
Countries not seen, where people do strange things,
Eat fish alive, and mimic in the sun
The solemn gestures of their stone-grey kings.
I've heard of forests that are dim at noon,
Where snakes and creepers wrestle all day long;
Where vivid beasts grow pale with the full moon,
Gibber and cry, and wail a mad old song;
Because at the full moon the hippogriff
With ivory-pointed snout and agate feet,
With his green eye will glare them cold and stiff
For the coward wyvern to come down and eat.
Vodka and kvas, and bitter mountain wines
We have not drunk, nor snatched at bursting grapes
To pelt slim girls among Sicilian vines
Who'd flicker through the leaves, elusive shapes.
Yes, there are many things we have not done,
But it's a sweat to knock them into rhyme.
Let's have a drink, and give the cards a run
And leave dull verse to the dull peaceful time.
EDGELL RICKWORD
_Night Rapture_
_For Florence Lamont_
How beautiful it is to wake at night
When over all there reigns the ultimate spell
Of complete silence, darkness absolute,
To feel the world, tilted on axle-tree,
In slow gyration, with no sensible sound,
Unless to ears of unimagined beings,
Resident incorporeal or stretched
In vigilance of ecstasy among
Ethereal paths and the celestial maze,
The rumour of our onward course now brings
A steady rustle as of some strange ship,
Darkling with soundless sail all set and amply filled
By volume of an ever-constant air,
At fullest night, through seas for ever calm,
Swept lovely and unknown for ever on!
How beautiful it is to wake at night,
Embalmed in darkness, watchful, sweet, and still
As is the brain's mood flattered by the swim
Of currents circumvolent in the void,
To lie quite still and to become aware
Of the dim light cast by nocturnal skies
On a dim earth beyond the window-ledge,
So, isolate from the friendly company
Of the huge universe which turns without,
To brood apart in calm and joy awhile
Until the spirit sinks and scarcely knows
Whether self is or if self only is
For ever....
How beautiful to wake at night
Within the room grown strange and still and sweet
And live a century while in the dark
The dripping wheel of silence slowly turns,
To watch the window open on the night,
A dewy silent deep where nothing stirs,
And, lying thus, to feel dilate within
The press, the conflict and the heavy pulse
Of incommunicable sad ecstasy
Growing until the body seems outstretched
In perfect crucifixion on the arms
Of a cross pointing from last void to void
While the heart dies to a mere midway spark!
All happiness thou holdest, happy night,
For such as lie awake and feel dissolved
The peaceful spice of darkness and the cool
Breath hither blown from th' ethereal flowers
That mist thy fields! O happy, happy wounds,
Conditioned by existence in humanity,
That have such powers to heal them!--slow sweet sighs
Torn from the bosom, silent wails, the birth
Of such long-treasured tears as pain his eyes
Who, waking, hears the divine solicitudes
Of midnight with ineffable purport charged.
How beautiful it is to wake at night,
Another night, in darkness yet more still
Save when the myriad leaves on full-fledged boughs,
Filled rather by the perfumes' wandering flood
Than by dispansion of the still sweet air,
Shall from the furthest utter silences
In glimmering secrecy have gathered up
An host of whisperings and scattered sighs
To loose at last a sound as of the plunge
And lapsing seeth of some Pacific wave
Which, risen from the star-thronged outer troughs,
Rolls in to wreath with languorous foam away
The flutter of the golden moths that haunt
The star's one glimmer daggered on wet sands!
So beautiful it is to wake at night
Imagination, loudening with the surf
Of the midsummer wind among the boughs,
Gathers my spirit from the haunts remote
Of faintest silence and the shades of sleep
To bear me on the summit of her wave
Beyond known shores, beyond the mortal edge,
Of thought terrestrial, to hold me poised
Above the frontiers of infinity,
To which in the full reflux of the wave
Come soon I must, bubble of solving foam,
Borne to those other shores--now never mine
Save for an hovering instant, short as this
Which now sustains me, ere I be drawn back,
To learn again and wholly learn I trust
How beautiful it is to wake at night.
ROBERT NICHOLS
The Black Mountains, 1919
_Elsie Inglis_
Who is it lies here
Betwixt the wind and the water,
Whom all Scotland mourns
As a mother for her daughter?
"I was Elsie Inglis
When I trod the ground;
Now I am lying here
In a long sleep and sound."
What did you do, Elsie Inglis,
To prove your heart's worth?
"I laboured all my life long
To serve women on earth."
And what was it you did
Earned you this requiem?
"When men went out to fight,
I went out with them."
What could a woman do
In such unholy revel?
"Men fought with each other,
And I fought with evil."
When men fought with men
What foe could you hold?
"The foe they left behind them.
Fever, Famine, and Cold."
Which was the bitterest
Of all you saw fight?
"My foe slew blindly,
But men in broad light.
"My foe slew blindly,
The children with the mother:
My foe slew men,
But men slew each other."
MAURICE HEWLETT
_Sorrowing for Childhood Departed_
Who is there among us who has found the key
Of the treasure that is locked in the hearts of men?
Only the poet lonely in his chamber
Or the man remembering his childhood again.
Hearing gay voices, my heart is hollow,
An empty room with bright colours on the walls;
The speech of my brother is no more than a traffic
That remote and coldly on my dull brain falls.
I am deaf to the song in the speech of my fellows,
I have outwitted my childhood's desires;
And where have I travelled that to the far horizon
Dead in the landscape are earth's bright fires?
Didst thou ever murder, Macbeth, thy sorrow,
Didst thou ever murder thy soul's young joy,
Thou hadst never flinched from the life of another,
Thou hadst but with laughter stol'n from him a toy!
Would that a Spirit had stolen from me
The glittering baubles of my cunning mind,
And left me the sweet forest of my wondering childhood,
Its transparent water in tall trees enshrined.
Then was I happy. Love was my companion;
I was in communion with star and stream;
With bird and with flower I was linked in rapture,
We stared at each other--the valley's dream.
Out of the mountains we were carven,
Birds and flowers, stream, rock and child--
O but I belong there! I am torn from my body,
In that far-away forest it lies exiled!
There falls the water transparently shining,
Hangs there a flower that blooms in my eyes.
Long have I been ready! let me go thither,
And unloosen my limbs to those dream-coloured skies.
O that it were possible! but that land has vanished;
The magic of that valley has crumbled away;
Bright crowds are there only, the mind's cold idola;
And my footprints on the dead ground startle the day.
W. J. TURNER
SERVANTS
By MAX BEERBOHM
It is unseemly that a man should let any ancestors of his rise from
their graves to wait on his guests at table. The Chinese are a polite
race, and those of them who have visited England, and gone to dine in
great English houses, will not have made this remark aloud to their
hosts. I believe it is only their own ancestors that they worship; so
that they will not have felt themselves guilty of impiety in not rising
from the table and rushing out into the night. Nevertheless, they must
have been shocked.
The French Revolution, judged according to the hope it was made in,
must be pronounced a failure: it effected no fundamental change in
human nature. But it was by no means wholly ineffectual. For example,
ladies and gentlemen ceased to powder their hair, because of it;
and gentlemen adopted simpler costumes. This was so in England as
well as in France. But in England ladies and gentlemen were not so
nimble-witted as to be able to conceive the possibility of a world
without powder. Powder had been sent down from heaven, and must not
vanish from the face of the earth. Said Sir John to his Lady, "'Tis a
matter easy to settle. Your maid Deborah and the rest of the wenches
shall powder their hair henceforth." Whereat his Lady exclaimed in
wrath, "Lud, Sir John! Have you taken leave of your senses? A parcel
of Abigails flaunting about the house in powder--oh, preposterous!"
Whereat Sir John exclaimed "Zounds!" and hotly demonstrated that since
his wife had given up powder there could be no harm in its assumption
by her maids. Whereat his Lady screamed and had the vapours and asked
how he would like to see his own footmen flaunting about the house in
powder. Whereat he (always a reasonable man, despite his hasty temper)
went out and told his footmen to wear powder henceforth. And in this
they obeyed him. And there arose a Lord of the Treasury, saying, "Let
Powder be taxed." And it was so, and the tax was paid, and powder was
still worn. And there came the great Reform Bill, and the Steam Engine,
and all manner of queer things, but powder did not end, for custom hath
many lives. Nor was there an end to those things which the Nobility and
the Gentry had long since shed from their own persons--as, laced coats
and velvet breeches and silk hose; forasmuch as without these powder
could not aptly be. And it came to pass that there was a great War. And
there was also a Russian Revolution, greater than the French one. And
it may be that everything will be changed, fundamentally and soon. Or
it may be merely that Sir John will say to his Lady, "My dear, I have
decided that the footmen shall not wear powder, and not wear livery,
any more," and that his Lady will say "Oh, all right." Then at length
will the Eighteenth Century vanish altogether from the face of the
earth.
Some of the shallower historians would have us believe that powder is
deleterious to the race of footmen. They point out how plenteously
footmen abounded before 1790, and how steadily their numbers have
declined ever since. I do not dispute the statistics. One knows
from the Table Talk of Samuel Rogers that Mr. Horne Tooke, dining
_tête-à-tête_ with the first Lord Lansdowne, had counted so many
as thirty footmen in attendance on the meal. That was a high
figure--higher than in Rogers' day, and higher far, I doubt not, than
in ours. What I refuse to believe is that the wearing of powder has
caused among footmen an ever-increasing mortality. Powder was forced
on them by their employers because of the French Revolution, but their
subsequent fewness is traceable rather to certain ideas forced by
that Revolution on their employers. The Nobility had begun to feel
that it had better be just a little less noble than heretofore. When
the news of the fall of the Bastille was brought to him, the first
Lord Lansdowne (I conceive) remained for many hours in his Study,
lost in thought, and at length, rising from his chair, went out into
the hall and discharged two footmen. This action may have shortened
his life, but I believe it to be a fact that when he lay dying, some
fifteen years later, he said to his heir, "Discharge two more." Such
enlightenment and adaptability were not to be wondered at in so
eminent a Whig. As time went on, even in the great Tory houses the
number of retainers was gradually cut down. Came the Industrial Age,
hailed by all publicists as the Millennium. Looms were now tended, and
blast-furnaces stoked, by middle-aged men who in their youth had done
nothing but hand salvers, and by young men who might have been doing
just that if the Bastille had been less brittle. Noblemen, becoming
less and less sure of themselves under the impact of successive Reform
Bills, wished to be waited on by less and less numerous gatherings of
footmen. And at length, in the course of the great War, any Nobleman
not young enough to be away fighting was waited on by an old butler and
a parlourmaid or two; and the ceiling did not fall.