POETS AND POETRY
_France--Of Maurice de Gu['e]rin_
In 1872, the attention of readers was forced on a few great names. These
were generally the names of Frenchmen. The sympathy of Americans during
the Franco-Prussian War had been with France, and during the latter days
of the French Empire, before the war, Americans had been much more
interested in France than in any other part of the world. There were
letters from Paris in the newspapers. The Empress Eug['e]nie and her
coterie at the Tuileries, the Operas of Offenbach, and the gossip about
literary magnets of the time, which included a great deal of Victor
Hugo, had been a constant subject of conversations.
One could buy French books easily in Philadelphia; and the Mercantile
Library--now dreadfully shorn of its former pretensions, reduced in
size, no longer so comfortable, so delightfully easy of access as to
its shelves--had an excellent collection of volumes in French.
How often in later life I blessed the discriminating collectors of that
library! Nothing worth while at that time, even "L'Homme" of Ernest
Hello, seemed to have been left out; I fear that I was not always guided
by the critics of the period. I found Am['e]d['e]e Achard as interesting as
Octave Feuillet; George Sand bored me; I could never get through even
"La Petite Fadette," although the critics were constantly recommending
her for her "vitality." I found Madame de G['e]rardin's "La Femme qui
D['e]teste Son Mari" one of the cleverest plays I had yet read. I have not
seen it since; but, outside of some of the pieces of Augier, it seemed
to me to be the best bit of construction I knew, and the human interest
and the suspense were so admirably kept up. There were some plays by
Octave Feuillet--"Redemption" was one and "Le Roman d'un Jeune Homme
Pauvre," which divided my admiration with the management of "Adrienne
Lecouvreur," by Scribe, and "Mademoiselle de la Seigli[`e]re," by Jules
Sandeau. The French playwrights of to-day have not even the technique of
their predecessors.
At this time I was very royalist, an infuriated partisan of the Comte de
Chambord--Henry V., as a few of us preferred to call him. And this
reminds me of my partisanship in things English--if I may turn for the
moment from things French--and of a little incident not without humour.
I was ardently devoted to the cause of the Stuarts, and was for a time
attached to the White Rose Society, whose correspondents in England
invariably sent their letters, with the stamp turned upside down, to
indicate their contempt for the Guelf dynasty. But when, at a small and
frugal reunion at Mr. Green's restaurant in Philadelphia, our host--he
was an American Walsh of the family of de Serrant--insisted on waving
his glass of beer over the finger bowls, to insinuate that we were
drinking to the last of the Stuarts across the water--whoever he might
be--and another member suggested that, if it were not for the brutal
Hanoverians on the throne of England, we, in the British Colonies, might
be still enjoying the blessedness of being ruled by a descendant of Mary
Stuart, I resigned! I was still devoutly faithful to the divine Mary of
Scotland; but I would not have her mixed up in American politics!
Octave Feuillet satisfied my taste for elegance. Some of his people were
not above reproach--notice the lady in "Redemption," who becomes
suddenly converted to a belief in God because her twenty-fifth lover is
suddenly restored to her. I thought that, though he was somewhat
corrupted by the influence of the Tuileries, he was socially so
admirably correct.
Everybody at this time talked of Renan. This went by me as an idle
dream, for I could never understand why anybody should take a man
seriously who was palpably wrong. To-day, when Renan's "Life of Jesus"
seems almost forgotten, it is strange to recall the fury of interest it
excited in the seventies. Louis Veuillot interested me much more than
Renan, whom I avoided deliberately because I understood that he had
attacked the Christian religion. Now, Louis Veuillot, in "Les Odeurs de
Paris" and "Les Parfums de Rome" delighted me almost beyond bounds. I
did often wonder how such a good man as Louis Veuillot could have
acquired such un-Christian use of language. When he announced that if
his wife wrote such novels as George Sand, he would hesitate to
recognize her children, it seemed to me that he had gone too far--still
it was a pleasant thing to shock the chaste Philadelphians by quoting
these trenchant words when the novels of the lady in question were
mentioned with rapt admiration.
But to come to the poets!
It was, I think, through the reading of the "Lundis" of Sainte-Beuve
that I discovered Maurice de Gu['e]rin. He almost drove my beloved Keats
from my mind. Somebody warned me against Maurice de Gu['e]rin on the ground
of his pantheism. I had been warned against the poems of Emerson on
account of their paganism; but as I had been brought up on Virgil, I
looked on pantheism and paganism as rather orthodox compared to Renan's
negation and the horrors of Calvinism. And, after all, the Catholic
Church had retained so much that was Jewish and pagan that I was sure to
find myself almost as much at home among the pagans as I was in the Old
Testament at times.
Keats and Maurice de Gu['e]rin will be always associated in my mind. I
discovered them about the same time. I had been solemnly told by an
eminent Philadelphian that Wordsworth was the only poet worth
considering, after Shakespeare, and that Keats had no intellectual value
whatever. But I was not looking for intellectual value. I mixed up the
intellect with a kind of scientific jargon about protoplasm and natural
selection and the survival of the fittest, and bathybius, which was then
all the fashion; so I promptly devoted myself to De Gu['e]rin.
I had already found great pleasure in the "Journal" of his sister
Eug['e]nie. The "Journal" ought never to be allowed to go out of fashion,
and probably it is only out of fashion in those circles which Mr.
Mencken so scorns, that devote themselves to imitations of Marie
Bashkirtseff or Sarah McLean. I had begun to enjoy the flavour of the
calm life of Eug['e]nie at La Cayla when I found it necessary, in order to
understand the allusions, to plunge again into the journals, letters,
and poems of Maurice de Gu['e]rin. Thus it happened that I had fallen upon
"Le Centaure" first. It is very short, as everybody knows. It was to me
the most appealing poem I had ever read.
Keats's Greece seems somehow to be a Greece too full of modern colour,
too unclassical. This was a mistake, of course, due to the fact that all
my Greek reading had been filtered through professors and textbooks; and
all my Greek seeing had been centred on pale white statues. It did not
occur to me then--at least I did not know it--that the great Greek
statues were not colourless, and that at Delphi there were statues that
glowed with the hues of life. Strange to say, though "Le Centaure"
seemed to me to be Greek in the classical sense, yet it palpitated with
human emotion. Who that has read it can forget the simplicity of the
opening? Says the Centaur:
I received my birth in the fastnesses of these mountains. As the
stream of this valley of which the primitive drops run from the
rocks which weep in a deep grotto, the first moment of my life fell
among the darkness of a secluded place in which the silence was not
troubled. When our mothers come near the time of their deliverance,
they flee towards the caverns, and in the depth of the most remote,
in the darkest of shadows, their children are born without a moan
and the fruits of their womb are as silent as themselves. Their
strong milk enables us to overcome without weakness or a doubtful
struggle the first difficulties of life; however, we go out from
our caves later than you from your cradles. It is understood among
us that we must hide and envelope the first moments of existence as
days filled by the gods. My growth followed its course almost among
the shadows where I was born. The depth of my living place was so
lost in the shadow of the mountain that I would not have known
where the opening was if rushing sometimes into this opening the
winds had not passed about me certain movements suddenly and
refreshing breezes. Sometimes, too, my mother came back carrying
the perfume of the valleys, or dripping with the waves of the water
she frequented. Now these returns of hers gave me no knowledge of
the valleys or the stream, but their suggestions disquieted my
spirit, and I paced agitatedly in my shades.
After all, it requires leisure to enjoy fully the writings of Eug['e]nie de
Gu['e]rin and her brother--I inevitably think of this brother and sister
together. There always lingers about the genius of these two delicate
and sensitive beings a certain perfume of the white lilac which Maurice
loved. It happened that through the amiability of my father, when I read
the Journals of the De Gu['e]rins, I had leisure. A period of ill health
stopped my work--I had begun to study law--and there were long days that
could easily be filled by strolls in Fairmount Park in the early spring
days, when it seems most appropriate to associate one's self with these
two who ought to be read in the mood of the early spring, and they ought
to be read slowly and even prayerfully. I hope I may be pardoned for
quoting a sonnet which had a great vogue in the late 'seventies showing
the impression that Maurice de Gu['e]rin made. It was a great surprise to
find part of the sestette copied in the "Prose Writings" of Walt
Whitman, who very rarely quoted any verse.
The old wine filled him, and he saw, with eyes
Anoint of Nature, fauns and dryads fair
Unseen by others; to him maidenhair
And waxen lilacs, and those birds that rise
A-sudden from tall reeds at slight surprise,
Brought charm[`e]d thoughts; and in earth everywhere
He, like sad Jacques, found a music rare
As that of Syrinx to old Grecians wise.
A pagan heart, a Christian soul had he:
He followed Christ, yet for dead Pan he sighed,
Till earth and heaven met within his breast;
As if Theocritus in Sicily
Had come upon the Figure crucified
And lost his gods in deep, Christ given rest.
I found, too, satisfaction of the taste which Hamerton had corroborated,
in Eug['e]nie de Gu['e]rin's little sketches of outdoor scenery--sketches
which always have a human interest. I had not yet begun to take any
pleasure in Wordsworth; and, in fact, all the poets who seemed to be
able to enjoy nature for itself--nature unrelieved or unimproved by
human figures--had no attractions for me. And here the dear Edward Roth
came in, and confirmed my taste. And there were heavy arguments with
other clever Philadelphians, Doctor Nolan, the scientist who loved
letters, and that amateur of literature, Charles Devenny.
As for Pope and his school, they seemed to represent an aspect of the
world as unreal as the world of Watteau, and with much less excuse; but
pictures of the kind I found in the "Journal" of Eug['e]nie de Gu['e]rin
had a living charm. At this time, I had not seen Matthew Arnold's paper
on Maurice de Gu['e]rin, and I did not know that any appreciation of his
sister had been written in English. I had seen a paragraph or two
written by some third-rate person who objected to her piety as
sentimental, and incomprehensible to the "Anglo-Saxon" world! That her
piety should be sentimental, if Eug['e]nie's sentiment can be
characterized by that term, seemed to me to be questionable; and it was
evident that any one who read French literature at all must be aware
that there were hundreds of beautiful sentiments and phrases which the
average "Anglo-Saxon" world found it impossible to comprehend.
The beloved home of Eug['e]nie, La Cayla, was not a gay place. It was even
more circumscribed than Miss Mitford's "Village"; but Eug['e]nie, being
less "Anglo-Saxon" than Miss Mitford, had more sentiment and a more
sensitive perception of the meaning of nature--though, when it comes to
sentimentalism, the English man or woman, who often masquerades under
the shelter of "Anglo-Saxonism," is as sentimental as the most
sentimental of sentimentalists. This is what I mean by the landscape
charm of Eug['e]nie de Gu['e]rin, and yet the picture in this case is not a
landscape, but the interior of a room:
I was admiring just now a little landscape, presented by my room,
as it was being illuminated with the rising sun. How pretty it was!
Never did I see a more beautiful effect of light on the paper,
thrown through painted trees. It was diaphanous, transparent. It
was almost wasted on my eyes; it ought to have been seen by a
painter. And yet does not God create the beautiful for everybody?
All our birds were singing this morning while I was at my prayers.
This accompaniment pleases me, though it distracts me a little. I
stop to listen; then I begin again, thinking that the birds and I
are alike singing a hymn to God, and that, perhaps, those little
creatures sing better than I. But the charm of prayer, the charm of
communion with God, they cannot enjoy that; one must have a soul to
feel it. This happiness that the birds have not is mine. It is
sorrow. How little time is needed for that. The joy comes from the
sun, the mild air, the song of birds, all delights to me; as well
as from a letter of Mimi's (who is now at Gaillac), in which she
tells me of Madame Vialar, who has seen thee, and of other cheerful
things.
And again:
However, I had a delightful waking this morning. As I was opening
my eyes a lovely moon faced my window, and shone into my bed, so
brightly that at first I thought it was a lamp suspended to my
shutter. It was very sweet and pretty to look at this white light,
and so I contemplated, admired, watched it till it hid itself
behind the shutter to peep out again, and then conceal itself like
a child playing at hide-and-seek.
Emerson tried to teach us that there can be infinite beauties in a
little space--untold joys within a day--and he asks us to take short
outlooks. Saint Teresa and Saint Francis de Sales were before him in
this; but Eug['e]nie de Gu['e]rin exemplifies its value much more than any
other modern writer. Her soul was often sad, but it never ceased to find
joy in the little happinesses of life. In our country, we are losing
this faculty which the best of the later New Englanders tried to
recover. It is a pity because it deprives us of the real _joie de vivre_
which is not dependent on ecstasies of restless emotions or violent
amusements.
The devotion of Eug['e]nie de Gu['e]rin to her brother resembles that of
Madame de S['e]vign['e] for her daughter, the peerless Pauline. It was
George Sand who discovered the genius of that brother, though her
characterization of the qualities of his genius did not please the
Christian soul of his sister. It was left to Sainte-Beuve to fix De
Gu['e]rin's place in French literature; and I recall now that the
reading of Sainte-Beuve led me to find the poems of David Gray, now
probably forgotten, and to go back to Keats.
After Maurice de Gu['e]rin's "Le Centaure" I found Keats even less Greek
than I thought he was, because he was less philosophical than De Gu['e]rin,
and because he did not concern himself with the gravest questions of
life; but, after all, Keats is the poet for the poets!
My dear friend, Edward Roth--whom James Huneker celebrates in his
"Steeplejack"--named Spenser as "the poet of the poets"; but Spenser is
too hard to read--even harder than Chaucer, and certainly more involved,
while no poets that ever lived can make pictures so glowing, so full of
a sensitive and exquisite light as Keats. Later, it seemed absurd for
the French poets of a certain _genre_ to call themselves symbolists.
When Keats wrote, he saw and felt, and he saw because he felt. It was
not necessary for him to search laboriously for the colour of a word.
The thing itself coloured the word--and Keats, working hard in a verbal
laboratory, would have been an anomaly. It was not necessary for him to
study carefully the music of his verse as Campion did or Coventry
Patmore or as Sidney Lanier is supposed to have done--though one cannot
have suspected that Sidney Lanier's elaborate laboratory was erected
after his best verse had been written.
Maurice de Gu['e]rin, a very Christian soul, was probably disturbed in
his religious sentiments by the defection of his old friend and
director, P[`e]re de Lamennais--the "M. F['e]li" of the little paradise
of la Ch['e]nie. To the delight of some of the more independent and
emancipated of the literary circle at Paris, which included George Sand,
Maurice was becoming more pantheistic than Christian. He seemed to have
tried to make for humanity an altar on which Christ and Nature might be
almost equally adored, and this gave Eug['e]nie great pain, although it
did not change her love or make a rift in her belief in him.
De Gu['e]rin is a singing poet in a language which is used by few singing
poets for serious themes. There are few lyric poems in French, like the
"Chanson de Fortunio" of Alfred de Musset. It was not strange that the
great Sainte-Beuve found the verse of De Gu['e]rin somewhat too unusual.
Sainte-Beuve calls it "the familiar Alexandrine reduced to a
conversational tone, and taking all the little turns of an intimate
talk." Eug['e]nie complains that "it sings too much and does not talk
enough." However, one of the most charming of literary essays, to which
Matthew Arnold's seems almost "common," is that preceding Tr['e]butien's
"Journals, Letters, and Poems of Maurice de Gu['e]rin." It would be folly
for me to try to permeate the mind of any other person with the
atmosphere which still palpitates in me when I think of the first
delight of reading at leisure the poems of Maurice and the letters of
Eug['e]nie. I might just as well attempt to make a young man of our time
feel the thrill that came when we were young and first heard the most
beautiful of all love songs--"Come into the Garden, Maud!"
One can hear the amazed laughter, the superior giggles that would arise
from a group of Greenwich Villagers if they did me the honour to read
this page; but the real Quartier Latin has better taste and is not so
imitative--and paraphrases of this lovely lyric still find admirers in
the gardens of the Luxembourg and on the heights of Montmartre.
Tennyson, like De Gu['e]rin, had bent the old classic form to newer usage,
and one can hardly help seeing, in spite of the fact that the admirers
of Swinburne claim this laurel for him, that Tennyson discovered the
secret of making lyrical verse musical while discarding rime. Both
Maurice de Gu['e]rin and Tennyson, who have superficial characteristics in
common, send us back to Theocritus, the most human, the most lyrical,
the most unaffectedly pagan of all the poets who wrote before Pan said
his despairing good-bye to all the Grecian Isles. But what a mixture is
this!--Maurice and Eug['e]nie de Gu['e]rin, Keats, Madame de S['e]vign['e],
Theocritus, and Tennyson, the Elizabethan Campion--and yet they are all
related.
In fact, ladies and gentlemen, I have never read any good book that was
not related intimately to at least a score of other books. It is true
that in a measure a book gives to us what we take to it; and we can only
take much out of it when we approach the group of ministering authors
who alone make life both cheerful and endurable.
The received methods of "teaching" the classics in what people call "the
dead languages" nearly always weaken the faculties of the soul, while
they may develop certain hidden abilities of the mind. This favourite
process of pedagogues very often defeats itself. Mr. Edward Roth
honestly believed that the Roman Empire had risen, declined, and fallen
in order that the Latin language might live! The logical result of this
teaching on the eager young mind, at once logical, ductile, and
obstinate, was to induce it to discover something about the Roman
Empire, in order that it might cease to yawn over the declensions, and
to be bored by prosody; to discover why the glorious Empire had lived
and died in order to produce an elaborate mound of charred bones! Mr.
Roth himself, though a classicist of the classicists, managed to make
the Romans interesting in conversation; he always impressed one that the
Roman baths, or the chariot races, or the banquets, which he admitted
were full of colour and life, were by comparison faded and pale in the
glow and aroma of the sentences invented by the Latins to describe them!
The impossibility of getting anything out of the study of Greek by hard
work, sent me, after I had read Maurice de Gu['e]rin's "Centaure," to read
joyously an edition of the "Idyls of Theocritus" in French. While
browsing I found on the shelves of the Mercantile Library the novels of
Tourgu['e]neff in the same language. This delayed me a little. I found
Theocritus and Bion and Moschus in the Bohn Edition, which I think has
now become the beneficent "Everyman's Library." I revelled! The Mimes of
Herondas had not yet been discovered, but some of the dialogues in these
poems contained all the best of their essences. My friends among the
hard workers at the "Classics" scorned me. The elderly gentleman from
Oxford who gave us lessons three or four times a week and held that,
when we were able to translate at sight a certain page of Greek which he
had composed himself from various great authors, that we were perfect,
treated me as a pariah; but that made no difference. I continued, in
merciful leisure, to saturate myself in the golden glow of the Sicilian
poets. I tried hard to express my devotion to Theocritus by paraphrases,
very slightly from the original Greek, mostly from the French, and
partly from the Bohn Edition. I quote a result which Mr. Edmund Clarence
Stedman said was too paraphrastic. It is from the "Cyclops":
Softer than lambs and whiter than the curds,
O Galatea, swan-nymph of the sea!
Vain is my longing, worthless are my words;
Why do you come in night's sweet dreams to me,
And when I wake, swift leave me, as in fear
The lambkin hastens when a wolf is near?
Why did my mother on a dark-bright day
Bring you, for hyacinths, a-near my cave?
I was the guide, and through the tangled way
I thoughtless led you; I am now your slave.
Peace left my soul when you knocked at my heart--
Come, Galatea, never to depart!
Though I am dark and ugly to the sight--
A Cyclops I, and stronger there are few--
Of you I dream through all the quick-paced night,
And in the morn ten fawns I feed for you,
And four young bears: O rise from grots below,
Soft love and peace with me forever know!
Last night I dreamed that I, a monster gilled,
Swam in the sea and saw you singing there:
I gave you lilies and your grotto filled
With the sweet odours of all flowers rare;
I gave you apples, as I kissed your hand,
And reddest poppies from my richest land.
Oh, brave the restless billows of your world:
They toss and tremble; see my cypress-grove,
And bending laurels, and the tendrils curled
Of honeyed grapes, and a fresh treasure-trove
In vine-crowned AEtna, of pure-running rills!
O Galatea, kill the scorn that kills!
Softer than lambs and whiter than the curds,
O Galatea, listen to my prayer:
Come, come to land, and hear the song of birds;
Rise, rise, from ocean-depths, as lily-fair
As you are in my dreams! Come, then, O Sleep,
For you alone can bring her from the deep.
And Galatea, in her cool, green waves,
Plaits her long hair with purple flower-bells,
And laughs and sings, while black-browed Cyclops raves
And to the wind his love-lorn story tells:
For well she knows that Cyclops will ere long
Forget, as poets do, his pain in song.
No sensitive mind can dwell on Theocritus, even when interpreted in
English prose, without feeling something of the joy of the old Syracusan
in life. His human nature is of the kind that makes the nymphs and
swains of Alexander Pope dull and artificial. There are flies in this
delicious ointment, one must admit, touches of corruption which a
degenerate paganism condoned and palliated, but we must remember, as an
extenuation of the Greek attitude, that the oracle of Delphi protested
against them. The cyprus plains of Theocritus yet echo with the call of
the cicada, and the anemones still bloom. The pipes of Pan are not all
silent. The world would lose some of its beauty if Theocritus and the
Sicilian poets did not entice us to hear their echoes.
But to how many links of a long chain does Maurice de Gu['e]rin lead us!
Here is another link--Jos['e] de Her['e]dia, and his jewelled and chiselled
sonnets--the "Antique Medal" with its peerless sestette, which combines
the essential meanings of Keats's "Ode to a Grecian Urn."
_Le temps passe. Tout meurt. Le marbre m[^e]me s'use.
Argrigente n'est plus qu'une ombre, et Syracuse
Dort sous le bleu linceul de son ciel indulgent;_
_Et seul le dur m['e]tal que l'amour fit docile
Garde encore en sa fleur, aux m['e]dailles d'argent,
L'immortelle beaut['e] des vierges de Sicile."_
A translation of which reads:
Time goes; all dies; marble itself decays;
A shadow Agrigentum; Syracuse
Sleeps, still in death, beneath her kind sky's shades;
But the hard metal guards through all the days,
Silver grown docile unto love's own use,
The immortal beauty of Sicilian maids.
I always felt that Dante would have been less devoted to Virgil had he
known Theocritus. The artificial Roman seems faded when one compares his
rural elegies with the lovely pictures of the first of all the Syracusan
poets. Horatius Flaccus had more of the quality of Theocritus than of
Virgil; and though Virgil might have been a good guide for Dante in his
sublime wanderings, he was a guide of the intellect rather than of the
heart. It requires some courage, perhaps, to confess that one reads
Theocritus in English rather than in Greek. The French rendering is too
paraphrastic; but, although my classical friends, or rather my friends
_enrag['e]_ of the "Classics," honestly despise me for making this
confession, I shamelessly enjoy Theocritus in the Bohn Edition, without
even using it as a "crib" to the forgotten Greek text rather than begin
a course of Grecian philology and to lose the perfume of the crushed
thyme or the sight of the competing shepherds on the shrub-dotted
prairie.
_Dante_
A constant reader is one who always returns to his first loves. He may
find them changed because he has changed; but the soul of that reader is
dead who never goes back to "Ivanhoe" to renew the thrill of the famous
tournament or to discover whether Leather Stocking is the superman he
once seemed to be. I find myself, in old age, divided between two
conflicting opinions. "There is no leisure in this country," I am told.
"A great change has taken place. The motor car has destroyed the art of
reading, and, as for the good old books--nobody reads them any more." On
the other hand, I hear, "People do read, but they read only frivolous
books which follow one another like the hot-cakes made at noon in the
windows of Mr. Child's restaurants."
Personally, I cannot accept either opinion. In the first place, the
winter is the time for reading--I recall Robert Underwood Johnson's
"Winter Hour" when I think of this--and the motor car, especially in
country places, does not function violently in the winter time. Many
journeys from Boston, through New England, to the Middle West have
taught me that folk are reading and discussing books more than ever.
Whatever may be said of the mass of American people, who are probably
learning slowly what national culture means, there are at the top of
this mass thousands of Americans who love good books, who possess good
books, and who return each year to the loves of their youth.
The celebration of the sixth centenary of the death of Dante Alighieri
proves this. It is true enough that Dante and Goethe and Milton are more
talked about in English-speaking countries than read, and when the
enthusiasm awakened in honour of the great Florentine reached its
height, there were found many people in our country who were quite
capable of asking why Dante should be read.
Looking back I found it easy to answer this question myself, for,
perhaps, beginning with a little gentle aversion to the English rimed
translations of the "Divine Comedy," my love for Dante has been a slow
growth. The Dante specialists discourage us with their learning. There
are few who, like Mr. Plimpton, can lucidly expose the foundations of
the educations of Dante to us without frightening us by the sight of a
wall of impregnable erudition. Naturally, one cannot approach Dante in
order to begin an education in the Middle Ages and the Renascence which
one never began in one's own time; but to be consoled by Dante it is not
necessary to be erudite. In fact, to the mind bent on spiritual
enlightenment, the notes of the erudite, above all, the conjectures of
the erudite, are frequently wrong. Even Israel Gollancz, in his three
valuable volumes in the Temple Edition, nods over his notes
occasionally. And by the way, for all amateurs in the reading of the
"Divine Comedy" nothing can be better than this Temple Edition, which
contains the Italian on one page and a lucid prose translation into
English on the next. As I grew older I grew more and more enamoured of
Longfellow's Dantean Sonnets, but not of his translation, for all rime
translations must be one half, at least, the author and the other half
the translator. Gollancz is best for anybody who does not enjoy poetic
_tours de force_.
In his note on the most popular lines in the "Divine Comedy,"
_Nessun maggior dolors,
che ricordarsi del tempo felice
nella miseria;_
Gollancz says:
Although these words are translated literally from Bo[:e]thius, and
although we know that Dante had made a special study of Bo[:e]thius,
yet we cannot well identify the _dottore_ with this philosopher:
for how can we be expected to assume that Francesca was acquainted
with these two facts? The reference is probably to Virgil, and to
his position in Limbo.
Into this Limbo Christ descended fifty-two years after Virgil's death
and drew certain souls up with him to Heaven. We are, however, by no
means certain that Virgil was happier on earth than he was "upon the
green enamel" (_verde smalto_) in this place of quiet leisure which was
the vestibule to Hell, but not Hell itself, and which, to some chosen
souls, had already been a vestibule to the Palace of the Beatific
Vision. If Dante had been translated in the old days of rigid Calvinism
in Scotland and New England, his tolerance of the pagans who found parts
of Hell not entirely uncomfortable would have caused him to be looked on
as a corruptor of the faith. But what would they have said to the
"Paradiso" which I have always found more full of consolation than any
sermon that was ever preached? Let us take the description of the Church
Triumphant in Canto XXXII. How sweetly Dante disposes of the heresy that
all children unbaptized by material water are doomed:
_Dunque, senza merce di lor costume,
locati son per gradi differenti,
sol differendo nel primiero acume._
_Bastava si nei secoli recenti
con l'innocenza, per aver salute,
solamente la fede dei parenti;_
_poiche le prime etadi fur compiute,
convenne ai maschi all' innocenti penne,
per circoncidere, acquistar virtute._
_Ma poichee il tempo della grazia venne,
senza battesmo perfetto di Cristo,
tale innocenza laggiu si ritenne._
And then remembering the innocence of the little children Dante turns to
that face "which is most likest unto Christ's" the face of Mary the
Mother, who is the protectress and friend of all children. If the strict
Calvinists had known the "Paradiso" of Dante as well as they knew their
Old Testament, their theology might have found more adherence among the
merciful, for the "Paradiso" is a triumphant song of mercy, of love, and
of the final triumph of every soul that has sincerely hoped in, or
sought, the truth, even if the truth were not crowned in its fullness in
this world.
And Dante, put by Raphael without protest from the Church Militant,
among the Doctors of the Faith, glorifies Trajan among the Saved and
opens Heaven to Cato. This shows, by the way, the falsity of the
Voltairean _mauvais mot_, that all the people worth meeting are in Hell!
And Dante sees Constantine in Heaven, although he thinks that this
Emperor's donation of territory was an evil gift. Dante, who, by the
way, was nearer to the old records and this tradition of the older time,
is a witness against Lord Bryce's assertion that the documents of
Constantine's donation were mediaeval forgeries. Dante believed, however,
that the donation was invalid, because the successor of St. Peter, being
of the spirit, could not accept temporal power. This he asserts in his
"De Monarchia," which was for a time on the "Index." Times have changed,
and "De Monarchia" and Milton's "Paradise Lost" are no longer in the
"Index," though Balzac and Dumas, in French, are. But many of the
Faithful in the United States console themselves by assuming that, as in
the case of Dr. Zahm's "Religion and Science," this the method of the
Sacred Congregation is not without its distinctions. Dr. Zahm's book,
suppressed in Italian, received the proper "imprimatur" in English! So
may "The Three Musketeers" and may "Monte Cristo" be regarded as coming
under the ban in the original, but as tolerated in the translation?
Dante's bitterness against certain Popes made no rift in his creed, nor
does it seem to have made him less respected by the Roman Court. There
is in the "Paradiso" that great passage on the poet's faith--
_Cos[`i] spir[`o] di quell' amore acceso;
indi soggiunse: "Assai bene [`e] trascorsa
d'esta moneta gi[`a] la lega e il peso;
ma dimmi se tu l' hai nella tua borsa."
ed' io: "Si, l'ho, si lucida e si tonda,
che nel suo conio nulla mi s' inforsa."_
_Appresso usci della luce profonda,
che li splendeva; "Questa cara gioia,
sopra la quale ogni virt[`u] si fonda,
onde ti venne?" Ed io: "La larga ploia
dello Spirito Santo, ch' [`e] diffusa
in su le vecchie e in su le nuove cuoia,_
_[`E] sillogismo, che la mia ha conchiusa
acutamente si, che in verso d' ella
ogni dimostrazion mi pare ottusa."_
If the reading of the "Paradiso" turns one to other books, so much the
better. Aristotle is worth while; he holds the germ of what is best in
modern life; and St. Thomas Aquinas, his echo, with new harmonies added
the Wagner to Aristotle's Mozart. No--that is going too far!--the
musical comparison fails. "If thou should'st never see my face again,
pray for my soul," is King Arthur's prayer. It is the prayer of Pope
Gregory that saved Trajan.
When we come to the "Purgatorio," like the "Paradiso" too neglected, we
find much that illuminates our minds and touches our hearts. The
"Purgatorio" is not without humour, and it is certainly very human. For
instance, there is the case of the negligent ruler, Nino de' Visconti.
Dante is frankly pleased to meet him, but his address is hardly tactful.
He is evidently surprised to find that Nino is not in Hell,
When he came near to me I said to him;
gentle Judge Nino, how I'm delighted well
that I have seen thee here and not in Hell.
Nino begs that his innocent daughter, Giovanna, may be asked by Dante,
on his return to earth, to pray for him. He is not pleased that his
widow should desire to marry
the Milanese who blazoned a viper on his shield.
He thinks that his wife has ceased to love him as she has discarded her
"white wimples," which, if she marries this inferior person, she may
long for once again! And he adds, rather cynically, for a blessed soul
in Purgatory, that through her one may mightily well
know how short a time love may last in woman, if the eye and the
touch do not keep it alive.
One must admit that there is an element of humour--not for the
victim--in the "Inferno," when Dante puts Pope Boniface VIII. into Hell
three and a half years before he died! Nicholas III., whom Dante thought
guilty of the unpardonable sin of simony, had preceded Boniface; and he
says,
_E se non fosse ch' ancor lo mi vieta
la riverenza delle somme chiavi,
che tu tenesti nella vita lieta
l' userei parole ancor pi[`u] gravi--_
But for consolation, there is no great poem so good as the "Paradiso."
_English and American Verse_
Edmund Clarence Stedman tells us how thrilled the youths of his
generation were when the new poet, Tennyson, "swam into their ken." It
is difficult for the young of to-day to believe this. There is no great
reigning poet to-day; there are great numbers of fair poets, who are
hailed as crown princes by the groups that gather about them. Whatever
the old may say, this is a good sign. Any evidence of a sincere interest
in poetry is a good sign. Tennyson's "Dream of Fair Women" and his
portrait studies broke in on the old tradition. "The Lady of Shalott,"
with its pictures of silence and its fine transmutation of commonplace
into something very beautiful, was new.
We who succeeded Stedman by some years loved all the beauty of Tennyson
while we were not especially struck by those mediaeval lay figures which
he labelled "King Arthur" and "Sir Galahad" and "Sir Percival." They
were too much like what the English people at that time insisted that
the Prince Consort was. Even Sir Lancelot would have profited in our
eyes by a touch of the fire of Milton's "Lucifer." But the lyricism of
Tennyson, the music of Tennyson, is as real now as it was then. It is
the desire for "independence," the fear of following a conventionality,
a fear that calls itself audacity, which brushes away the delicate and
scientific of this exquisite poet simply because he does not represent a
Movement. And yet all these new movements are very old movements. The
result of the education given me by books was to convince me that the
man of culture proclaims himself third-rate if he looks on any literary
expression as really new and if he cannot enjoy the old, when the old is
of all time. The beautiful and the real can never be old or new because
they are the same through the movement of time. To explain what I mean,
let me come suddenly down to date and permit me to quote from Sir Arthur
Quiller-Couch's "On the Art of Reading." He is writing of the Bible,
which is never old:
I daresay, after all, that the best way is not to bother a boy too
early and overmuch with history; that the best way is to let him
ramp at first through the Scriptures even as he might through "The
Arabian Nights": to let him take the books as they come, merely
indicating, for instance, that Job is a great poem, the Psalms
great lyrics, the story of Ruth a lovely idyll, the Song of Songs
the perfection of an Eastern love-poem. Well, and what then? He
will certainly get less of "The Cotter's Saturday Night" into it,
and certainly more of the truth of the East. There he will feel the
whole splendid barbaric story for himself: the flocks of Abraham
and Laban; the trek of Jacob's sons to Egypt for corn; the figures
of Rebekah at the well, Ruth at the gleaning, and Rizpah beneath
the gibbet; Sisera bowing in weariness; Saul--great Saul--by the
tent-prop with the jewels in his turban:
"All its lordly male-sapphires, and rubies courageous at heart."
Or consider--to choose one or two pictures out of the tremendous
procession--consider Michal, Saul's royal daughter: how first she
is given in marriage to David to be a snare for him; how, loving
him, she saves his life, letting him down from the window and
dressing up an image on the bed in his place; how, later, she is
handed over to another husband Phaltiel, how David demands her
back, and she goes:
"And her husband (Phaltiel) went with her along weeping behind her
to Bahurim. Then said Abner unto him, Go, return. And he returned."
Or, still later, how the revulsion takes her, Saul's daughter as
she sees David capering home before the ark, and how her affection
had done with this emotional man of the ruddy countenance, so prone
to weep in his bed:
"And as the ark of the Lord came into the city of David, Michal,
Saul's daughter"--
Mark the three words--
"Michal, Saul's daughter looked through a window, and saw King
David leaping and dancing before the Lord; and she despised him in
her heart."
Mr. Galsworthy or Mr. W. L. George or Mr. Maxwell, who are rapidly
becoming too old-fashioned for the young, or Mrs. Wharton, or Mrs.
Gertrude Atherton would treat this episode in sympathy with what they
might conceive to be the trend of present emotion; for it is with the
emotions and not with the mind or the will that the novelist of the day
before yesterday mostly deals. If Mr. James Huneker had translated this
into the prose of his moment, it would have flamed with minutely carved
jewels, glowed with a perfume and colour of crushed roses, and choked
the reader with the odour of musk. But could he have made it any
"newer"? Or if he could have made it "newer," could he have made it more
splendid and appealing?
The old is new, and the new is old in art and literature--in life
itself, and the man who scorned Keats because Swinburne and Rossetti
were new; or who scorns Browning--the best of Browning--lacks the first
requisite of true cultivation which is founded on the truth that beauty
is beyond the touch of time. The women in Fran[c,]ois Villon's "Ballade of
Dead Ladies" are gone, but their beauty remains in that song. This
beauty might be none the less beautiful if expressed in _vers libre_;
its beauty might take a new flavour from our time. The fact only that it
was of our time and treated in the manner of our time, could not give it
that essential and divine something which is perennial, universal, and
perhaps eternal.
Much affectionate reading of poetry--and poetry read in any other way
is like the crackling of small sticks under a pot in the open air on a
damp day--leads one to consider the structure of verse and to ask how
singing effects are best produced. This inquiry has led some of the
sincerest of the younger poets to throw aside the older conventions,
and, imitating Debussy, Richard Strauss, and even newer composers, to
produce that "free verse" which, in the hands of the inexpert, the lazy,
or the ignorant, becomes lawless verse. It is exasperating to the
intolerant to find writers, young in experience if not always young in
age, talking of themselves as discoverers--brave or audacious
discoverers--as adventurers, reckless as Balboa, or Cortez, or Ponce de
Le['o]n; and then, to hear some of the old and conventional violently
attacking these verse makers as if they were new and dangerous
revolutionists.
The truth is that _vers libre_ has its place, and it ought to have a
high place; but the writer who attempts it must have a very perfect ear
for the nuances of music and great art in his technique applied to the
use of words. Some of the disciples of Miss Amy Lowell have this, but
they are few. Whether Miss Lowell has mastered the science or not, she
has the fine art of producing musical effects, delicate and various and
even splendid. But there are others!
It may have been Tennyson, or Theocritus, or Campion that led me to read
Coventry Patmore. I know that it was not his "The Angel in the House"
which led me on. That seemed as little interesting or important as the
proverbial sayings of Martin Farquhar Tupper; but one day I found "The
Unknown Eros" and a little later "The Toys," and then his "Night and
Sleep," one of the most musical poems in our language.
How strange at night the bay
Of dogs, how wild the note
Of cocks that scream for day,
In homesteads far remote;
How strange and wild to hear
The old and crumbling tower,
Amid the darkness, suddenly
Take tongue and speak the hour!
Although the music of "Night and Sleep" is not dependent upon the rime,
it is plain--as the form of poetry appeals to the ear--that the rime is
a gain. Yet one does not miss it in the fifth and seventh lines of each
stanza. The real musical charm of the poem--only one stanza, of four,
is given here--lies in the management of the rhythm.
We have only to fill up the measure in every line as well as in the
seventh, in order to change this verse from the slowest and most
mournful to the most rapid and high-spirited of all English, the
common eight-syllable quatrain,
says Mr. Patmore in his "Essay on English Metrical Law,"
a measure particularly recommended by the early critics, and
continually chosen by poets in all times for erotic poetry on
account of its joyful air. The reason of this unusual rapidity of
movement is the unusual character of the eight-syllable verse as
acatalectic, almost all other kinds of verse being catalectic on at
least one syllable, implying a final pause of corresponding
duration.
Mr. Patmore here shows that the rime in this lovely "Night and Sleep" is
merely accessory, a lightly played accompaniment to a song which would
be as beautiful a song without it, yet which gains a certain accent
through this accompaniment; and that the real questions in verse are of
rhythm and time. Tennyson, whose technique, even in the use of
sibilants, will bear the closest scrutiny, often proves the merely
accessory value of rime, but in no instance more fully than in
Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart and gather in the eyes,
In looking on the happy autumn fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
There is every reason why the modern reader should have become tired of
academic poetry. When poetry divorced itself from music and became the
slave of fixed rules of metre which could not be imitated with any real
success in English, it sealed its own fate as a beloved visitant to the
hearts of the people. Pope and his coterie closed the door on lyrical
poets like Thomas Campion, and in their hearts they, like Voltaire,
rather despised Shakespeare for his vulgarisms.
The truth that poetry was primarily written to be sung is forgotten, and
even in France the chant of the Alexandrine, which both Rachel and Sarah
Bernhardt restored, was lost in a monotonous recitation. For myself, I
tried to get to the root of the matter by reading Thomas
Campion--Charles Scribner's Sons print a good edition of his songs,
masks, etc., edited by A. H. Bullen--as an antidote to Walt Whitman. In
fact, my acquaintance with the Poet of Camden convinced me that his use
of what is to-day called _vers libre_ resembled somewhat Carlyle's
Teutonic contortions of style. It was impossible to get from the "Good
Gray Poet" the reasons of his method. I gathered that he looked on
rhythm as sometimes a walk, a quick-step, a saunter, a hop-and-skip, a
hurried dash, or a slow march; it seemed to depend with him on the
action of the heart, the acceleration of the pulse, or the movement of
the thought.
But no one who knows the best in Walt Whitman's poems can fail to
perceive that there were times when he understood thoroughly that
poetry, expressed poetically, must be musical. It is a great pity that
some of our newer poets do not understand this. In their revolt from the
outworn academic rules, they have gone the length of the most advanced
Cubists, and do not realize that no amount of splendid visualization
compensates for a lack of knowledge of the art of making melodies. It is
unfortunate, too, that the imitators of Amy Lowell, many of whom have
neither her feeling for colour, her great power of concentration, nor
her naturally good ear, should imagine that _vers libre_ means the
throwing together of words in chaos. Even Strauss's "Electra" is founded
on carefully considered rules; his discords are not accidents.
It seems to me that the study of Sidney Lanier's "Science of English
Verse" would suppress the art of expression, even in a genius. By the
time he learned how to write verse he would be too old to write verse at
all! There are less intricate books. I learned from the theories and the
odes of Coventry Patmore and the "Observations in the Art of English
Poesy" of Thomas Campion and his practice that the best _vers libre_ has
freedom, unexpectedness, lyrical lightness, and an apparently unstudied
charm, because the poet had striven, not to sing as a bird sings,
without art, but to sing in a civilized world as a great tenor in the
opera sings, because he had acquired his method of almost perfect
expression through science and art. And, if one wants an example of the
intangible "something," expressed artistically, why not take Benet's
"Immoral Ballad"? A little thing, sir; but a poet's own and so,
incapable of being analyzed by any rules known to the pundits. But it is
not _vers libre_. If it were, its intangible appeal would not exist.
Nearly every versifier who disregards those models of form in verse
which include rime, or whose cadences are informal, is set down as an
imitator of Walt Whitman. When I was young, Walt Whitman seemed to have
been established as a strange, erratic, and godless person, whose
indecencies were his principal stock in trade. Emerson's practical
repudiation of him had had its effect, and the very respectable--that
is, gentlemen of the class of the vestrymen of Grace Church in New York
of his time--looked on him with horror. He had, it seems, attacked
established religion when he made his onslaught in the Brooklyn _Eagle_
on that eminently important body.
The shock of the arrival of Walt Whitman had been broken by the time
that I had begun to read poetry wherever I found it; and I accepted the
curious mixture of prose and poetry in Walt Whitman just as I accepted
the musical Wagner. At that time we had not yet learned to know that
Wagner's music was melodious; we had not yet discovered that
"Lohengrin," for instance, was woven of many melodies, for they were not
detached and made into arias. What could be expected of young persons
brought up on "The Bohemian Girl" and "Maritana"?
And yet we soon found out without any help from the critics that Walt
Whitman was essentially a poet, and we suspected that his roughness had
been deliberately adopted as the best possible form in which to clothe
ideas which were not conventional, and to attract attention. Most of the
young at that time thought that he had as much right to do this as
Browning had to be wilfully inarticulate. The critics did not concern us
much. There was always a little coterie of students at the University of
Pennsylvania or at Jefferson College, or young men under the influence
of Mr. Edward Roth or Mr. Henry Peterson. Among these was a brilliant
Mexican, David Cerna; Charles Arthur Henry, who died young; Daniel
Dawson, whose "Seeker in the Marshes" ought still to live. He was a
devout Whitmanite. Much younger was Harrison Morris, whose opinions,
carrying great weight, occasionally floated to us. As I have said,
Whitman neither startled nor shocked us nor did he cause us to imitate
him. At this time, I was deep in Heinrich Heine, whose prose was not
easy to read, but whose lyrics, with a very slight help from the
dictionary, were entrancing! I could never understand, being enraptured
with Heine's lyrics at that time, why Whitman should have chosen such a
poor medium for lyrical expression or such a rude utterance for some
noble ideas. That he chose at times to put into speech sensual dreams or
passing shadows of evil thoughts astonished us no more than the
existence of the photographic reproductions, then the fashion, of the
gargoyles from the Cathedral of Notre Dame, or the strange and very
improper representations of the Seven Deadly Sins which were sometimes
carved on the backs and the undersides of the stalls in old cathedrals.
We Philadelphians thought that it was not a gentlemanly performance.
There were persons who wallowed in pools of de-civilization, and, though
they might whisper of their mental wallowings in intimate circles, there
was no point whatever in putting them into print. But the great
passages--there are very many--and the noble complete poems--there are a
few--of Whitman were chosen and recited and enjoyed.
Besides, Whitman lived just across the Delaware River, and one could
meet him almost at any time in a street car or lounging about his haunts
in Camden. As he was part of our everyday life he did not for us
represent anything essentially new. When Swinburne and Rossetti and the
Preraphaelites, however, came into our possession, it was quite another
thing! There was no Whitman movement among our young. There was a
marked, but not concentrated, reflection of the Preraphaelites.
Swinburne's music took us by storm! It did not mean that a young man had
a depraved mind because he spouted "Faustine" or quoted verse after
verse of the roses and raptures of Swinburne. It simply meant that a
breath of rich, sensuous odours from an exotic island had swept across
the conventional lamp-posts and well-trimmed gardens of his life. I
wonder if any young man feels to-day, in reading Masefield's poems, or
Walter de la Mare's, or Seeger's, or Amy Lowell's, or Robert Frost's, or
even Alfred Noyes's, the thrill that stirred us when we heard the
choruses in "Atalanta in Calydon" or Rossetti's "Blessed Damozel"? And
there was William Morris and "The Earthly Paradise!"
The first appearance of Kipling's poems recalled the old thrills of
"new" poets, but of late, though the prospects of poetry are beginning
to revive, no very modern poet seems to have become a part of the daily
lives of the young, who declare that the world is changed, and that the
Old hold no torches for them by which they can discover what they really
want! The more things change, the more they remain the same! And the
young woman who read Swinburne surreptitiously and smoked a cigarette in
private now reads Havelock Ellis on summer porches, and puffs at a
cigarette in public whenever she feels like it. She is really no more
advanced than the girl of the period of the eighties, and not any more
astonishing. It's the same old girl! And the young men who discovered
Swinburne and Rossetti, and who were rather bored by the thinness of
their aftermath, the aesthetic poets, really got more colour and
amazement and delight out of the flashing of the meteors than the youth
of to-day seem to get. It was the fashion then to be blas['e] and cynical
and bored with life; but nobody was really bored because there were too
many amusing and delightful things in the world--as there are now.
Joaquin Miller, with his gorgeous parrots and burning Southern lights
and his intensities and his simulated passion, did not last long. In
England he was looked on as a typical American poet, more decent than
Walt Whitman, less vulgar, but with the charm Whitman had for the
English--that no Englishman could ever be like him! In England they
wanted the Americans raw and fresh and with a savage flavour about them.
I read the poems of Richard Watson Gilder, of Edith Thomas, of Robert
Underwood Johnson--whose "Italian Rhapsody" and "The Winter Hour" can
never be forgotten--and certain verses of Edmund Clarence Stedman. But
_les jeunes_ prefer the new verse makers. There is even a kind of cult
for the Imagists. A spokesman for the Imagists tells us briefly that
"free verse" is a term that may be attached to all that increasing
amount of writing whose cadence is more marked, more definite, and
closer knit than that of prose, but which is not so violently or so
obviously accented as the so-called "regular verse." Richard Aldington's
"Childhood" is a very typical example of _vers libre_. It is also an
Imagist poem. It will be remarked that it is so free that there is no
cadence that any musician could find. It is a pretty little joyful
trifle!
There was nothing to see,
Nothing to do,
Nothing to play with,
Except that in an empty room upstairs
There was a large tin box
Containing reproductions of the Magna Charta,
Of the Declaration of Independence,
And of a letter from Raleigh after the Armada;
There were also several packets of stamps,
Yellow and blue Guatemala parrots,
Blue stags and red baboons and birds from Sarawak,
Indians and Men-of-war
From the United States,
And the green and red portraits
Of King Francobollo
Of Italy.
I don't believe in God
I do believe in avenging gods
Who plague us for sins we never sinned
But who avenge us.
That's why I'll never have a child,
Never shut up in a chrysalis in a match-box
For the moth to spoil and crush its bright colours,
Beating its wings against the dingy prison-wall.
Alfred Kreymborg is also very free, and only sometimes musical, but he
hammers in his images with a vengeance. But of all the new Americans,
Vachel Lindsay's jolly fantasies, with a slightly heard banjo
accompaniment, are the most fascinating and least tiresome of all the
New.
When one has wallowed for a time with the Imagists and carefully
examined the _vers librists_, with the aid of a catalogue and
explanations, one turns to the "Collected Poems" of Walter de la Mare.
Come, now! Listen to this:
When slim Sophia mounts her horse
And paces down the avenue,
It seems an inward melody
She paces to.
Each narrow hoof is lifted high
Beneath the dark enclustering pines,
A silver ray within his bit
And bridle shines.
His eye burns deep, his tail is arched,
And streams upon the shadowy air,
The daylight sleeks his jetty flanks,
His mistress' hair.
Her habit flows in darkness down,
Upon the stirrup rests her foot,
Her brow is lifted, as if earth
She heeded not.
'Tis silent in the avenue,
The sombre pines are mute of song,
The blue is dark, there moves no breeze
The boughs among.
When slim Sophia mounts her horse
And paces down the avenue,
It seems an inward melody
She paces to.
It is difficult for the simple minded to understand why Walter de la
Mare, who is a singer with something to sing about, cannot be classed as
an Imagist. He uses the language of common speech and tries always to
say exactly what he means; he suits his mood to his rhythm, and his
cadences to his ideas; he believes passionately in the artistic value of
modern life; but he does not seem to see why he should not write about
an old-fashioned a[:e]roplane of the year 1914, if he can make it the
centre of something interesting.
The professional Imagist tries to produce poetry that is hard and clear
and never blurred or indefinite, and he holds that concentration is the
very essence of poetry. The Imagist fights for "free verse" as for the
principle of liberty. But why does he fight? If "free verse" is musical,
if it expresses a mood or an emotion or a thought in terms that appeal
to the mind or the heart or the imagination, why should it be necessary
to fight for it? It may suit certain verse makers to make men of straw
in order "to fight" for them; but all the world loves a poet, if the
poet once touches its heart. "The Toys" of Coventry Patmore is a good
example of what "free verse" ought to be. But it is not free because it
is lawless; its freedom is the freedom of all true art which does not
ignore, which obediently accepts, certain laws that govern the
expression of the beautiful. Mr. Richard Aldington's "Daisy" is
certainly a less appealing poem than that one in which Swinburne sings
of the lady who forgot his kisses, and he forgot her name!
Jos['e] de Her['e]dia, in "Les Troph['e]es," is both an Imagist and a
Symbolist. He has the inspiration and the science of the Sibyl without
her contortions. It is unfortunate that the truculent attitude of the
professional makers of "free verse" should have arrayed a small and
angry group against them; and this group will have none of Robert Frost,
who is certainly a poet and a poet of great courage and originality.
There are others, however, who may not be imitators of Robert Frost, but
who seem as if they were. Tennyson's "Owl," which is looked on to-day as
an example of Victorian idiocy, is really better than Mr. T. S. Eliot's
"Cousin Nancy":
Miss Nancy Ellicott
Strode across the hills and broke them,
Rode across the hills and broke them--
The barren New England hills--
Riding to hounds
Over the cow-pasture.
Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked
And danced all the modern dances;
And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it,
But they knew that it was modern.
Upon the glazen shelves kept watch
Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith,
The army of unalterable law.
The Imagist does not believe in ornament, and this glimpse of character
might be uttered in one sentence. Perhaps, however, a tendency to
ornamentation might have made the poem at least decorative. After all,
when one has emerged from the rarefied atmosphere of the Imagist, the
Symbolist, and the _vers librist_, one swims into the splendours of
Francis Thompson as one might take refuge from a wooden farmhouse
unprotected by trees, in a Gothic spire, a Byzantine altar-piece, or a
series of Moorish arabesques. It is a frightful descent from the heaven
of Crashaw and the places of the Seraphim in "The Hound of Heaven," by
Francis Thompson, to Richard Aldington.
Each lover of poetry has his favourite poem and his favourite poet, and
it has always seemed to me that one of the hardest tasks of the critic
is to decide on the position of a poet among poets, or of a poet in
relation to life. For myself, to speak modestly, I cannot see how I
could condemn the taste of the man who thinks that Browning and
Swinburne and Tennyson, and, in fact, nearly all the modern English
poets, deserve to be classed indiscriminately together as "inspiring."
And I cannot even scorn the man who declares that Tennyson is _demod['e]_
because his heroines are in crinoline and conventional, and his mediaeval
knights cut out of pasteboard.
By comparison with the original of the "Idylls of the King" this
statement seems to be true. Sir Thomas Malory's knights and ladies--by
modern standards they would hardly be called "ladies"--do not bear the
test of even the most elemental demands of modern taste. They are as
different as the characters in Saxo Grammaticus's "Hamblet" are from
those in Shakespeare's "Hamlet." But I may enjoy the smoothness of the
"Idylls of the King," their bursts of exquisite lyricism, their
cadences, and their impossibilities, and at the same time read Sir
Thomas Malory with delight. When I hear raptures over Browning and
Swinburne, when people grow dithyrambic over John Masefield and Alfred
Kreymborg and others new--_chacun [`a] son go[^u]t_--I feel that by
comparison with Francis Thompson, these poets are not rich. They are
poor because they seem to leave out God; that is, the God of the
Christians.
Swinburne could never be a real pagan, because he could not escape the
shadow of the Crucifixion. Theocritus was a real pagan because he knew
neither the sorrow of the Crucifixion nor the joy of the Resurrection.
Keats was a lover of Greece, was ardent, inexpressibly beautiful,
sensuously charming; but Keats could no more be a real Greek than
Shakespeare, in "Julius Caesar," could be a real Roman. Nor could
Tennyson, nor Browning, nor William Morris, nor the Preraphaelites be
really out of their time, for they could not understand the essentially
religious qualities of the times into which they tried to project
themselves.
If you compare the "Idylls" of Tennyson with those idylls of Theocritus
he imitated, you easily see that his pictures are not even bad copies of
the originals; they are not even paraphrases--to turn again from
painting to literature. They are fine in themselves, and the critics of
the future, more reasonable than ours and less reactionary, will give
them their true place. As for Browning, it is only necessary to read the
Italian writers of the Renascence, to find how very modern he is in his
poems that touch on that period. He is always modern. With all his
efforts he cannot understand that mixture of paganism and Catholicism
which made the Renascence possible. He seems to assume that the Catholic
Church in the time of the Renascence produced men in whom paganism
struggled with Christianity. The fact is that paganism had melted into
Christianity and Christianity had given it a new light and a new form.
It was not difficult for an artist of the Renascence to look on a
statuette of Leda and the Swan or Dana[:e] and the Descent of Jupiter as a
shower of gold, as prefiguring the Incarnation. There was nothing
blasphemous in this pagan symbolism of a pagan prophecy of the birth of
a God from a virgin. It does not follow that Browning is not powerfully
beautiful and essentially poetical, even when he reads modern meanings
impossibly into the life of older days. Nevertheless, he is
unsatisfactory, as almost all modern poets, when they interpret the
past, are unsatisfactory. A great poet may look into his heart and
write, but with Tennyson, with Browning, with Swinburne, one feels that
very often they mistake the beating of their own hearts for the sound of
the pulsations of the hearts of others.
Similarly, modern Christians who claim to be orthodox are sometimes
shocked when they are told that Saint Peter, for example, did not
believe that a man might not be both circumcised and baptized. According
to a common belief, the two could not exist together among the converted
Jews. And the modern man of letters seems to think that paganism and
Christianity were at odds at all points. A deeper knowledge of the
manifestations of religion, before the Reformation, would dissipate an
illusion which spoils so much fine modern poetry.
Another point, in applying my canons of criticism to poets whom I love
in spite of this defect, is that I find that they have no desire to be
united with God--you may call him Jehovah, Jove, or Lord, to quote Pope.
They are, as a rule, without mysticism and constantly without that
ecstasy which makes Southwell, Crashaw, and the greatest of all the
mystical poets writing in English, Francis Thompson, so satisfactory.
Wordsworth may have been transcendental, as Emerson certainly was, but
in different ways they made their search for the Absolute, and the
search, especially in Wordsworth's case, was fervent. Neither had the
splendours, the ecstasies of that love that casteth out fear, the almost
fierce and violent fervour of desire, reflected from the Apocalypse of
Saint John and the poems of Saint Teresa and of Saint John of the Cross,
which we find in Francis Thompson. In this respect, all modern poets
pale before him. He sees life as a glory as Baudelaire saw it as a
corpse. After a reading of "The Hound of Heaven," with its glorious
colour, its glow, its flame, all other modern poets seem to me to be a
pale mauve by comparison to its flaming gold and crimson.
To many of my friends who love modern poets each in his degree, this
seems unreasonable and even incomprehensible; but to me it is very real;
and all literature which assumes to treat our lives as if Christianity
did not exist lacks that satisfactory quality which one finds in Dante,
in Calderon, in Sir Thomas More, and in Shakespeare. It is possible that
the prevalence of doubt in modern poetry is the cause of its lack of
gaiety. There is a modern belief that gaiety went out of fashion when
Pan died or disappeared into hidden haunts. This is not true. The Greeks
were gay at times and joyous at times, but if their philosophers
represent them, joyousness and gaiety were not essential points of their
lives.
The highest cultivation of its time could not save Athens from
despondency and destruction, and when the leaders in the city of Rome
came to believe so little in life that only the proletariat had
children, it was evident that their very tolerant system of adopting any
god that pleased them did not add to the joy of life. The poet, then,
who misunderstands the paganism of the Greeks, who does not desire to be
united to an absolute Perfection, who is sad by profession, cannot be,
according to my canons, a true poet. I speak, not as a critic, but as a
man who loves only the poetry that appeals to him.