poetic gift of imagination which can vividly portray, body forth in
clear form, what others can only feel in a vague and misty way while
lacking the power to express it--in this gift also the great poet is
known, not at the first reading, nor at the second, nor at the third. An
image, a metaphor, which seems most perfect when first met, may lose
much of its apparent completeness and depth when the mind examines it;
whereas upon many another, which appeared at first so easy and obvious,
there is revealed the very stamp of that godlike genius which creates,
as if without effort, the one unsurpassable, soul-satisfying "name."
If, the more we return to a poet's work, the more it grows upon us and
the more we see in it, then, as Longinus truly declares, it possesses
the quality of the sublime. Without that result the poet may be great,
but not of the greatest. To employ once more that definition which I
still find the best yet constructed, true poetry is the "exquisite
expression of an exquisite impression." For a reader to reach the
apprehension of such an impression in all its exquisiteness, and to
recognize the full exquisiteness of its expression, requires some
effort. Under the pellucid diction may lurk amazing depths. We must
therefore read a poet, and read him anew. This is the way to attain to a
reasoned and discriminating judgment, and to escape those vain and vague
impressions which we can neither trust ourselves nor impart to others.
So much for the heads of the sermon. The application is to Tennyson's
successors. Of William Watson and John Davidson as men, I know
practically nothing. I am fain to confess that I have no desire to know
anything. There is too much personal gossip already interfering with our
enjoyment of literature. These men's work is presumably their best
selves, and except for such hints of their personality as occur in their
poems, I know not "whether they be black or white." Incidentally, Mr.
Watson lets us learn that he is from the North of England, and I gather
that Mr. Davidson is a Scot from the fact that he scans "world" as two
syllables, uses "I mind" in the sense of "I remember," and talks
unpatriotically enough of his nurture in that easily identifiable region
where are to be found--
A chill and watery clime; a thrifty race
Using all means of grace
To save their souls and purses.
Among their many points of difference, the two men have this prime
quality in common, that they are ready to rely upon their own poetical
resources. Their work contains, indeed, many an echo of their great
predecessors, many a suggestion of familiarity with Milton or Pope,
Wordsworth, Shelley, or Tennyson. It is evident that both have steeped
themselves in the literature which is best calculated to make an English
poet. But it is equally evident that they have mastered their material,
and not allowed their material to master them. Watson, it is true, has
attained to a much less firm and spontaneous style than Davidson, but it
would be false to say of him that he is, in point of diction, the
imitator of any poet in especial, or that he moulds his style upon
Tennyson more than on Milton, or upon Milton more than on Wordsworth.
And what is true of their form is true of their matter. They think with
their own brains and feel with their own natures. They fall back upon no
master and no fashion to direct them what to say or leave unsaid.
Whatever opinion we may form of their force and range, we cannot but
recognise that it is themselves whom they are expressing. And it may be
taken as an axiom that nothing so commends the man who speaks to the
interest of the man who listens as this--the fact that the speaker is
telling his own thought. That, I believe, is the secret of the hold
which Browning possesses upon his votaries, and which Goethe will for
all time exercise.
We recognise with both our poets that this initial charm is theirs, and
if we find in Davidson the richer nature and the more robust, the more
infused with Browning's rough, virile strain, we are no less confident
that Watson's verse is the natural cream gathered from his daintier and
more purely intellectual moods. But in thus comparing the men I
anticipate my evidence.
The poems of John Davidson upon which I have based my judgment are those
contained in the _Fleet Street Eclogues_ (the first and second series),
and in the volume of _Ballads and Songs_. The name of the latter
explains itself. In the former are contained some dozen pieces, written
in dialogue, in various metres. The interlocutors are London journalists
and poets, who meet in Fleet Street on such holidays as Lammas, May Day,
Michaelmas, and the New Year, and there hold a kind of discursive
symposium on such themes as then and there present themselves. I mildly
call the discussion "discursive," though it would be fair in one or two
instances to dub the piece frankly a medley. Usually the special holiday
suggests a reference to the charms of nature as they are to be seen in
the country at that date, and as they are, alas! not to be seen in Fleet
Street. This device affords scope for not a few charming word-pictures,
as simple in outline and as complete in suggestion as the drawings of
flowers and tree sprays made by the Japanese, and as effective in the
artistic directness and simplicity of the language as if they had been
written by Burns or by a Greek lyrist. I do not think that it would be
possible to find anywhere in the English language more pure and fresh
delight in the sights and sounds of rural nature expressed with such
apparent naivete. And all the time the mind's eye is kept so closely, so
distinctly, on the object that the result is often the sublimity of art
as defined by Longinus, the selection and combination of exactly those
features which are the most essential and most telling. For instance, no
man who did not feel and realize with vividness, no man who lacked a
genius for expression, could so select and place just the touches which
describe the sudden descent of the lark in the evening sky. The lines
occur in the song of "Spring" in _Ballads and Songs_:--
High, O high, from the opal sky,
Shouting against the dark,
"Why, why, why, must the day go by?"
Fell a passionate lark.
The words "opal," "shouting," "fell," and "passionate," are exactly the
words, and all the words, which could be demanded in an ideal
word-picture by those who have been familiar with the scene itself. And
to make the ideal twice ideal, the very sound of the bird is brought
before one's mind after a score of years, by the whole passage, and
particularly in the reiterated "Why, why, why." If there is more
consummate simplicity of art anywhere contained in as small a compass of
words, I confess I do not know where it is to be found. Shelley does not
surpass this.
Throughout Davidson's poems there is this same positive revelling in
those delights of the eye and ear and smell which meet the wanderer in
the country. They are fresh to him every time; and he realizes and
fulfils that function of the poet, the bringing back of new freshness
into things common, at which he hints when he makes one of his
characters say:--
Dear Menzies, talk of sight and sound,
And make us _feel_ the blossom-time.
In these more sensuous moods he is so filled with the simple Chaucerian
gladsomeness of spring that he can sing, or make one of his characters
sing--for after all, his characters are but so many sides of himself--
I have been with the nightingale;
I have learned his song so sweet;
I sang it aloud by wood and dale,
And under my breath in the street.
And again--
I can hear in that valley of mine,
Loud-voiced on a leafless spray,
How the robin sings, flushed with his holly-wine,
Of the moonlit blossoms of May.
In all such passages there is the genuine note of the vernal joy which
stirs naturally in the blood of all men who are men. The writer feels as
the birds feel, nay, as the burgeoning hedges feel, when--
The blackbirds with their oboe voices make
The sweetest broken music, all about
The beauty of the day, for beauty's sake,
And all about the mates whose love they won,
And all about the sunlight and the sun.
Or when--
A passionate nightingale adown the lane
Shakes with the force and volume of his song
A hawthorn's heaving foliage.
But this sensuous rapture, which reminds us of Keats, though of a Keats
whose expression is more like that of Shelley, is by no means all that
Davidson can feel in nature. Through the eyes and other senses the
influence of nature penetrates to his soul and spirit. He touches
Wordsworth in such lines as these:--
All my emotion and imagining
Were of the finest tissue that is woven,
From sense and thought....
I seemed to be created every morn.
A golden trumpet pealed along the sky:
The sun arose: the whole earth rushed upon me.
Sometimes the tree that stroked my windowpane
Was more than I could grasp; sometimes my thought
Absorbed the universe.
It is true that these words are put in the mouth of that one of his
dramatis personae who is of the most melancholy and brooding disposition;
but he who can make another say--
I am haunted by the heavens and the earth;
... I am besieged by things that I have seen:
Followed and watched by rivers; snared and held
In labyrinthine woods and tangled meads;
Hemmed in by mountains; waylaid by the sun;
Environed and beset by moon and stars;
Whispered by winds and summoned by the sea.
--he who can put this thought in another's mouth has necessarily first
experienced some measure of it himself.
But it is not merely about external nature that our Fleet Street
journalists talk. They speak of such questions of man and life and
destiny as are wont to engage any gathering of thoughtful men, and
particularly those who are poetically disposed. The contrasts between
the beauty of rural nature and the squalor of life, especially the life
of the town, these and other matters receive such suggestive treatment
as can be given to them by a poet who has no desire to become a
preacher, and no desire to pose as an exhaustive philosopher. Upon such
questions the many-sided poet, whose sympathies are wide, and whose
moods are varied, will touch with a certain suggestiveness; he will
flash a ray of cheerfulness into the haunts of pessimism, or throw a new
pathos into common situations. And Mr. Davidson possesses a large
measure of this many-sidedness, this versatility of sympathy. He appears
a very human man, a man unfettered by cant or creed, observing men and
things from various sides, and entering into their circumstance. Is he
without a creed? From his verses on the _Making of a Poet_ it would
appear so--
No creed for me! I am a man apart:
A mouthpiece for the creeds of all the world;
* * * * *
A martyr for all mundane moods to tear;
The slave of every passion, and the slave
Of heat and cold, of darkness and of light;
A trembling lyre for every wind to sound.
I am a man set to overhear
The inner harmony, the very tune
Of nature's heart; to be a thoroughfare
For all the pageantry of Time: to catch
The mutterings of the Spirit of the Hour
And make them known.
* * * * *
Nevertheless he, or one of his avatars, can also say of the celebration
of Christmas with its "sweet thoughts and deeds"--
A fearless, ruthless, wanton band,
Deep in our hearts we guard from scathe
Of last year's log a smouldering brand,
To light at Yule the fire of faith.
He makes no vulgar boast about escaping from the fetters of religion. He
spares us any flouts of intellectual superiority. He is apparently an
evolutionist, but withal finds little saving grace in that doctrine, and
is not uninclined to envy the old days
When Heaven and Hell were nigh.
It is true that behind his Basil and Herbert and Brian and Sandy and
Menzies and Ninian, who converse there in Fleet Street, we find it hard
to discover any definite synthetic philosophy of Davidson himself. On
the other hand, we have no particular wish to discover one. He is a
poet, not a Herbert Spencer. We may reasonably be content to catch the
side-lights which a poet throws from a large and liberal nature; to be
led by him to different points of view. If the result is that we find
the man himself to evade us, we can only admit that the same result
occurs with Shakespeare. Indeed, there is a hint that a synthetic
philosophy is exactly what Davidson never seeks to attain. Says
Ninian:--
Sometimes, when I forget myself, I talk
As though I were persuaded of the truth
Of some received or unreceived belief;
But always afterwards I am ashamed
At such lewd lapses into bigotry.
And though another immediately ejaculates
Intolerantly tolerant!
we have a feeling that the poet has betrayed an attitude of mind not
wholly unlike his own.
His outlook is both bright and dark. The modern dragons, it has been
said, are dooming "religion and poetry." The answer comes--
They may doom till the moon forsakes
Her dark, star-daisied lawn;
They may doom till Doomsday breaks
With angels to trumpet the dawn;
While love enchants the young
And the old have sorrow and care,
No song shall be unsung,
Unprayed no prayer.
Nature is full of joy, man may find abounding delight of life in the
midst of it; but what of his destiny?
For the fate of the elves is nearly the same
As the terrible fate of men;
To love, to rue, to be, and pursue
A flickering wisp of the fen.
We must play the game with a careless smile,
Though there's nothing in the hand;
We must toil as if it were worth our while
Spinning our ropes of sand;
And laugh, and cry, and live, and die
At the waft of an unseen hand.
And again--
I am not thinking solely of myself,
But of the groaning cataract of life,
The ruddy stream that leaps importunate
Out of the night, and in a moment vaults
The immediate treacherous precipice of time,
Splashing the stars, downward into the night.
And apart from destiny, which is beyond human control, society is much
at fault. Not only is Davidson plainly democratic, he expresses the
complaints and aspirations of the higher type of those who might be
socialists, if socialism were allowed to be a development, and not
tyrannously imposed as a system. He talks of--
... Slaves in Pagan Rome--
In Christian England--who begin to test
The purpose of their state, to strike for rest
And time to feel alive in.
And--
Hoarsely they beg of Fate to give
A little lightening of their woe,
A little time to love, to live,
A little time to think and know.
There are other wrong elements in society besides poverty, and the poet
finds occasion to express one in particular. But what Mrs. Grand
requires three volumes to discuss is treated with infinitely more effect
by him in a dozen lines. The purport may be gathered from these three:--
... My heart!
Who wore it out with sensual drudgery
Before it came to me? What warped its valves?
It has been used; my heart is secondhand.
This is not the time to exhaust the Davidsonian philosophy, if there be
such. We are treating the writer as a poet, and the examples which I
have quoted of his joy in nature and his fellow-feeling with mankind,
should, I think, demonstrate that he has the gifts of vivid seeing, of
vivid feeling, and of vivid expression. If genuine poetry consists of
two essentials, substance and form, we cannot deny the substance in Mr.
Davidson. He has the gift of "high seriousness," which Arnold declares
to be a requisite of all that is classic. He is not always deep; he is
not faultless. The same writer who can condense a thought thus--
On Eden's daisies couched, they felt
They carried Eden in their heart,
is also capable of writing, as poetry, these lines:--
For no man ever understood a woman,
No woman ever understood a man,
And no man ever understood a man:
No woman ever understood a woman,
And no man ever understood himself;
No woman ever understood herself.
We can only surmise that Mr. Davidson had just been reading Whitman, and
was under the temporary hallucination that this poor stuff was profound
thinking. But all poets, nay, all prose-writers, even the greatest,
have their lapses into bathos. Yes, even--and I say it with
trembling--even Shakespeare.
Let us look, now, for a few moments, more closely, in order to
appreciate the particular elements of his genius, as manifested in the
form which is his style.
And first, his language. To be perfect, expression must be luminous yet
terse, vigorous, yet in taste and keeping. It must be without
mannerisms, without inadequacy, without flatness, without obscurity.
"Clear, but with distinction," is the brief definition of Aristotle.
Davidson has learned his lesson well from Shelley and Wordsworth and
Arnold. He cultivates all the virtues, and not without success. He has
not been tempted to leave the true path and court singularity, whether
in the shape of Browning's verbal puzzles or of Swinburne's luscious and
alliterative turgidness. His diction is of the simplest. Says one of his
personae--
I love not brilliance; give me words
Of meadow-growth and garden plot,
Of larks and black-caps; gaudy birds,
Gay flowers and jewels like me not.
It is astonishing how expressive the simple word can become in the
hands of a master. Dante's verb and noun are now proverbial. As for Mr.
Davidson, Gray's clear-cut lines in the _Elegy_ can supply no more
instances of perfect aptness than those which I quoted some time ago of
the lark. Notice the exactness of choice in--
The patchwork sunshine _nets_ the lea,
The flitting shadows _halt and pass_
Forlorn, the mossy humble-bee
_Lounges_ along the flowerless grass,
and in "I heard the _husky_ whisper of the corn." Yet I am disposed to
think that, like many another finished artist, he has passed through
stages of various practice, and has exercised much self-restraint before
attaining to that naturalness which, as Goethe reiterates, is the last
crown of art-discipline. From sundry indications I conclude that
passages of his _Fleet-street Eclogues_ were written independently at
different dates, and have been fitted later into the dialogue form.
However that may be, it is possible to detect instances in which he
falls below his own maturer ideal of natural language. The diction, that
is to say the choice of mere vocables, is eminently natural, except for
the odd words "muted," "writhen," "watchet-hued," "dup," "swound,"
which I have collected with a rather laborious captiousness. But diction
is only part of expression, and, as I have just hinted, it would seem as
if, before his lesson in pure style was fully learned, he had passed
under the fascination of the mannerists, and particularly of Pope.
Otherwise it is hard to account for such entirely eighteenth century
lines as--
And brimming echoes spill the pleasant din,
or--
The sloping shores that fringe the velvet tides;
and (speaking of steamers)--
Or, fiery-hearted, cleave with iron limbs
And brows precipitous the pliant sea.
How different are these mechanical constructions from that expression of
the birds
hid in the white warm cloud
Mantling the thorn.
Whether I am right or wrong as to the process of his development, the
fact remains that he can be, if he chooses, a master in language of
poetic simplicity. Even a fire of garden rubbish can be expressed
without becoming altogether unpoetical when one speaks of
the spicy smoke
Of withered weeds that burn where gardens be.
Perhaps there do exist some things which cannot be made poetical in any
diction whatsoever. Tennyson could only express "tea" by "and on the
board the fluttering urn," and if Mr. Davidson has to speak of whisky
and calls it
amber spirit that enshrines the heart
Of an old Lothian summer,
we have to recognise that he has come very well out of a difficulty. If
at another time he refers to it as
things which journalists require,
we must remember that the context implies a certain humour.
"Clear, but not flat," is an easy maxim to utter, but, as Wordsworth too
often shows, the danger of falling from studied simplicity into bald
prose is always present; and for that reason do smaller artists rather
choose to trick their thoughts in verbal jewellery. We cannot say that
Davidson, who undertakes to run the risk, never makes the fatal step. In
the address to the daisy--
Oh, little brave adventurer!
We human beings love you _so_,
the last word, and indeed the whole line, verges on the infantile. So it
is a shock when, after a passage of some pretensions, we come upon the
lines--
My way of life led me to London town,
And difficulties, which I overcame;
or--
But yet my waking intuition,
That longed to execute its mission.
It is extremely difficult to realise that the same man wrote these sorry
lines who, in another place, adopts this for his style--
... Here spring appears
Caught in a leafless brake, her garland torn,
Breathless with wonder, and the tears half dried
Upon her rosy cheek.
For our comfort and his let us remember that it was the same Wordsworth
who wrote both the _Ode on the Intimations of Immortality_ and also the
lines--
I've measured it from side to side:
It's three feet long and two feet wide!
Nevertheless flaws of this kind are few, and it is almost unfair for me
to be the means perhaps of conveying even thus much impression of
faultiness about verses which sustain so high a general level of
excellence of language.
In point of melody and harmony and flow of verse there can be no doubt
that our poet is, for instance, an excellent writer of songs, in which a
vigorous simplicity is the prime requisite. They lilt along with great
vivacity and ease. But elsewhere I could wish that here and there he
would amend his rhymes. "Reviewer" and "literature," "pierced" and
"athirst," "noise" and "voice," "inquisition" and "division," "trees"
and "palaces," "shade is" and "ladies," "giftless" and "swiftness," are
far from pleasing; and though I am almost ashamed to play the detective
in work which is mostly full of charm, I find myself distressed by such
cacophonies as--
Hid in its hoard of haws,
and--
Pierces a rushlight's ray's length into it.
John Davidson, then, is a genuine son of his age; free in his thought,
wide in his sympathies, eager for the amelioration of man's estate,
divided between the hopes of science and the regret for a lost religion,
compelled to fall back on the everlasting consolations of love and
nature, an ardent lover of the country and its sights and sounds,
constrained to draw word-pictures of the things which thus delight him,
and drawing them with the consummate skill of the man who keeps his eye
on the essentials of the thing he draws. His charm lies in his frank
sincerity, and in the clear healthy sweetness of his utterance. That he
is a poet none can doubt; if he is comparatively young, as I surmise he
is, and if he pursues his true development, he may, I believe, easily
take his place in the first rank, not only as a successor, but as the
successor, of Tennyson.
On William Watson I shall dwell less long. To begin with, he is already
better known. Moreover, his special virtues as a poet are more easy to
apprehend, for they lie somewhat prominently upon the surface. Better
still, he apparently apprehends them himself, and is in that unusually
happy position for an artist, of knowing exactly where his own strength
lies. And undoubtedly in those departments his strength is great. We
need not hold the mention of them in reserve. I have already quoted a
passage of admirable rhetorical and musical skill and taste from the
_Lachrymae Musarum_. That was sufficient to illustrate one of this
poet's great gifts--the gift of writing splendid verse, as harmonious as
Milton's and as choice in expression as Tennyson's. His other chief
endowment is that of literary critic. On Burns, Shelley, and Wordsworth
he has said almost the final saying, and assuredly in almost the final
language. We may pick faults now and again in his expression, and we may
suspect a mannerism here and there, especially when we read large
quantities of his verse at one time; nevertheless, each individual piece
which fairly represents him is very nearly perfect in its way.