Is the Muse
Fall'n to a thing of Mode, that must each year
Supplant her derelict self of yesteryear?
But he declines to see that the new thing which every generation rightly
asks of every new poet is by no means "mode," or empty fashion of
writing, but the one essential thing, personality, which can never be
twice the same. The reason why you will not find any two poets writing
in the same way is that every genuine poet has to express himself in his
own way, whether it be by offering his own "baseness for a gift," like
Villon, or by building a new heaven and a new hell, like Dante. The
maker of literature puts this new thing into his work, in the mere act
of making it, and it stands out, as plainly as his signature, in every
line he writes. Not to find it is to have fallen upon work which is but
literary, "books made out of books." Walt Whitman thought that such
"pass away."
In that "Apologia" from which we have already quoted, Watson indignantly
denounces those who think "all Art is cold" if "an ardor not of Eros'
lips" is in it, and he attempts to indicate that state of vision in
which man may know--
A deeper transport and a mightier thrill
Than comes of commerce with mortality.
Does he then,
In silence, in the visionary mood,
reach this ecstatic state? If so, it has left no impression on his
poetry. In his poetry there is no vision, only speculation about vision;
no ecstasy, only a reasonable meditation. He speaks of God, "the Whole,"
the "cosmic descant," and the large words remain empty. In such poems as
_The Unknown God_ and _The Father of the Forest_ we seem to have been
taught a lesson, read out in a resonant, well controlled voice; nothing
has been flashed upon us, we have overheard nothing.
And, indeed, of how little of this poetry can we say, in the words of
Mill's great definition, that it has been overheard! Its qualities,
almost, though not quite, at the best, are the qualities of good
oratory. Watson began by writing epigrams, admirable of their kind, with
a more lyric nineteenth century handling of the sharp eighteenth century
weapon. The epigram lies at the root of his work--that is to say,
something essentially of the quality of prose. He is a Pope who has read
Keats. Oratory or the epigram come into his most characteristic
passages, as in the well known and much admired lines on the greatness
and littleness of man:
Magnificent out of the dust we came
And abject from the Spheres.
Now that, striking and effective as it is, is an antithetical ingenuity
which a really fine poet would have gone out of his way to avoid. It is
oratory, not poetry, and it would make good oratory, for there point has
need of all its sharpness; oratory is action.
It is through this oratorical quality of mind that Mr. Watson's style,
though so ordered and measurably, often leaves an impression of having
been deliberately heightened above the level of ordinary speech. The
great things in poetry are song at the core, but externally mere speech.
Think of some actual, anonymous Elizabethan song, and then read the
piece which Watson has called "Song in Imitation of the Elizabethans."
It is not merely that he has not captured the exact note of the period,
but rather copied the note of a later period; such lines as
Idly clanged the sullen portal,
Idly the sepulchral door,
are not direct speech, and can therefore never become pure song. They
are dressed in poetical phraseology, which is a very different thing.
It is curious to find this quality in a writer who is in every sense so
critical. Behind a great deal of Watson's work there is the critical
intelligence, not the poetical temperament. _Wordsworth's Grave_ is
written in discipleship to Matthew Arnold, and it is not Arnold when he
is at his best--the Arnold of _Sohrab and Rustum_ and _The Sick King in
Bokhara_--that Watson has approached, but that half poet, half prose
writer who wrote the Obermann poems. The foundation of those poems is
prose, and a great deal of their substance is no more than rhymed prose.
But at times the poet flashes out, transfiguring material and form for
the moment, before he drops back into prose again. Watson's work is more
on a level; he neither falls so low nor rises so high. But, even more
than with Arnold, the substance of it is criticism, and the thinking and
the style suggest the best kind of prose. Set the poem, with its finely
chosen epithets and phrases--"Impassioned quietude, Thou wast home, Thou
hadst, for weary feet, the gift of rest, the frugal note of Gray," and
the like--beside Pater's essay on Wordsworth, and you will find many
points of resemblance, and not only in the echo of "impassioned
quietude" from Pater's "impassioned contemplation." Compare it with
Matthew Arnold's essay on Wordsworth and you will again find many points
of resemblance, not only in detail, which would not matter, but also in
the whole way of approaching and handling the subject. Does the rhyme
bring in any essential difference between specimens of fine prose and
this poem, so well thought out, so poetically expressed? There lies the
whole question, for if it does not bring such a difference, can it be
accepted as poetry, as an adequate kind of poetry?
Criticism, though it may find place in a poem (as in Shelley's Letter to
Maria Gisborne) can never be the basis of poetry. Pope tried to turn the
current of English poetry into this narrow channel, but the sea-force
soon had its way with the banks and dykes. Watson has tried to revive
that heresy; he has disguised its principles under new terms, but it
remains the same heresy. Poetry is even less a criticism of thought than
it is a "criticism of life," it must be at all points creation, creation
of life, creation of thought, if it is to be poetry in the true sense.
It is to Wordsworth, among many masters, that Watson tells us that he is
most indebted. Wordsworth is not always a safe master, and it is
apparently from him that Mr. Watson has accepted the main principles of
his blank verse. Wordsworth's blank verse was more often bad than good;
it was bad on principle, and good by the grace of a not infrequent
inspiration. At its best, it is not among the great specimens of blank
verse, or not for more than a very few lines at a time. It is without
vitality, it is without that freedom in beauty which can come from
vitality alone. Watson has learned from Wordsworth that it is possible
to write grave and impressive lines, sweeping up to fine perorations, in
which the pauses are measured, not by the vital pulses of the mood, but
by a conscious, cultivated method. Some of Wordsworth's blank verse "The
Prelude," though in itself tame and inefficient, takes hold of the
reader through a personal warmth which makes him almost forget that he
is reading verse at all. But we never feel personal warmth in Mr.
Watson; he succeeds or fails as an artificer, and as an artificer only.
It is probably not too much to say that there is not a cadence in his
verse which has not been heard before. By what miracle it is that out of
the same number and order of syllables no two cadences of Shakespeare
and of Browning, of Keats and of Herrick, of Crashaw and of Blake, can
be precisely matched no man knows or will ever know--least of all the
poet himself. He writes what comes to him, and he may work on his
writing until hardly a word of the original stuff remains; and with all
his care, or in spite of it, the thing turns doggedly into his own
manner of speech, and comes to us with a cadence that we have never
heard before. He may have read much or little, and it will make barely
an appreciable difference. The music that is not learned in books comes
from some unknown source which is as variable as the sea or the wind.
Music learned from books, however much beauty may be breathed into it by
the singer, keeps the taint of its source about it. It is by such music
that the literary artist, not the artist in literature, is known.
William Watson's _Odes and Other Poems_ is remarkable for precisely the
qualities which have distinguished his work since the time when, in
_Wordsworth's Grave_, he first elaborated a manner of his own. That
manner has some of the qualities of eighteenth century verse--its
sobriety, its strictness, its intellectual and critical interests; and
it also has certain of the richer and more emotional elements of the
nineteenth century revival of the Elizabethan passion, and splendor. The
reader is reminded of Gray, of Wordsworth, of Matthew Arnold, at moments
of Keats and of Rossetti. In spite of occasional and unaccountable
blemishes, Watson's work is, in the main, the most careful work of any
of the younger poets. Nor is it lacking in a poetic impulse. It does not
seem to us that this impulse is a very strong one, or one of special
originality, but it is there, undoubtedly; and Watson's verse, unlike
that of most of the people now writing, justifies its existence. Take,
for instance, these opening lines from the ode _To Arthur Christopher
Benson_:
In that grave shade august
That round your Eton clings,
To you the centuries must
Be visible corporate things
And the high Past appear
Affably real and near,
For all its grandiose airs, caught from the mien of
Kings.
The new age stands as yet
Half built against the sky
Open to every threat
Of storms that clamor by:
Scaffolding veils the walls,
And dim dust floats and falls,
As, moving to and fro, their tasks the masons ply.
But changeless and complete,
Rise unperturbed and vast,
Above our din and heat,
The turrets of the Past,
Mute as that city asleep,
Lulled with enchantments deep,
Far in Arabian dreamland built where all things
last.
The grave and equable sweep of this verse, so unlike most of the hot and
flurried rhyming of contemporaries, has the excellence of form which
gives adequate expression to a really poetic conception. Watson takes a
very serious view of things, except in a few attempts at satire or
playfulness, which are not quite fortunate either in idea or in
execution. He has the laudable desire to enter into competition with the
great masters on their own ground. And the result is by no means
ludicrous, as it would be with most people. Only it is a little as if
the accomplished copyist were to challenge comparison with the picture
which he has, after all, copied. Work done in the manner, and under the
influence, of previous writers may indeed, under certain circumstances,
attain the virtue of originality; but only under certain circumstances.
Chatterton, for instance, was original only when he copied, or when he
fancied he was copying; Keats was absolutely himself even at the period
when his form was entirely imitative. The personality of some men can
find no home in the present, can wear no dress of modern fashion; can
express itself only by a return to the ways of speech of an earlier age.
But this sort of spiritual nostalgia can only become effective when it
is a very deep and individual instinct, and not merely a general
literary sympathy. Watson has learned more from his masters than he has
brought to them. We have read his latest book with real appreciation of
its many admirable qualities, but, on closing it, we have no more
definite idea of Watson himself, of what he really is, apart from what
he chooses to express, than we had before opening it. And yet the
greater part of the book, in one sense, is quite personal. He tells us
what he thought of Stevenson's _Catriona_, how he felt in Richmond Park,
and of his friendly regard for one or two estimable men of letters. But
the real man, the real point of view, the outlook on life, the deeper
human sympathies: what do we learn of these? There is, indeed, one poem,
among the finest in the book, in which a touch of more acute personal
feeling gives a more intimate thrill to the verse--the poem called _Vita
Nuova_, of which we may quote the greater part:
O ancient streams, O far-descended woods
Full of the fluttering of melodious souls;
O hills and valleys that adorn yourselves
In solemn jubilation; winds and clouds,
Ocean and land in stormy nuptials clasped,
And all exuberant creatures that acclaim
The Earth's divine renewal: lo, I too
With yours would mingle somewhat of glad song.
I too have come through wintry terrors--yea,
Through tempest and through cataclysm of soul
Have come, and am delivered. Me the Spring
Me also, dimly with new life hath touched,
And with regenerate hope, the salt of life;
And I would dedicate these thankful tears
To whatsoever Power beneficent,
Veiled though his countenance, undivulged his thought,
Hath led me from the haunted darkness forth
Into the gracious air and vernal morn,
And suffers me to know my spirit a note
Of this great chorus, one with bird and stream
And voiceful mountain,--nay, a string, how jarred
And all but broken! of that lyre of life
Whereon himself, the master harp-player.
Resolving all its mortal dissonance
To one immortal and most perfect strain,
Harps without pause, building with song the world.
But this poem stands alone in the volume as an expression of very
interesting personal feeling, the rest being mainly concerned with
generalities.
Like all Watson's volumes of verse, these _Odes and Other Poems_ contain
some excellent literary criticism, conveyed in the neatest and briefest
fashion possible. In fact, Watson's verse is only too full of sane and
measured criticism--an excellent quality no doubt, but hardly one quite
compatible with poetry of a high order. But how fine, how exact, how
discriminating, is this piece of criticism, for instance, in verse!
Forget not, brother singer! that though Prose
Can never be too truthful or too wise,
Song is not Truth, not Wisdom, but the rose
Upon Truth's lips, the light in Wisdom's eyes.
It was in the epigram that Watson first did finished work, and his most
typical work is certainly to be found in forms more or less akin to the
epigram; in the sonnet, for example. There are so many good sonnets in
this volume that choice is difficult; here is one called "Night on
Curbar Edge":
No echo of man's life pursues my ears;
Nothing disputes this Desolation's reign;
Change comes not, this dread temple to profane,
Where time by aeons reckons, not by years,
Its patient form one crag, sole stranded, rears,
Type of whate'er is destined to remain
While yon still host encamped on night's waste
plain
Keeps armed watch, a million quivering spears,
Hushed are the wild and wing'd lives of the moor;
The sleeping sheep nestle 'neath ruined wall,
Or unhewn stones in random concourse hurled;
Solitude, sleepless, listens at Fate's door;
And there is built and 'stablisht over all
Tremendous silence, older than the world.
The breadth of phrasing here is noticeable; and it is by such qualities
as this, as well as by the careful accuracy with which every note is
produced, that Watson is distinguished alike from older men of the type
of Alfred Austin, and from younger men of such varying capacities as
John Davidson and Yeats. If he has not the making of a great poet, he is
already an accomplished poet; and if he does not possess the highest
qualities, he possesses several of the secondary qualities in the
highest degree.
Watson's _Ode on the Day of Coronation of King Edward the Seventh_ is a
fine piece of verse writing, and can hardly fail to remind the reader of
great poetry. It is constructed with care, it flows, it has gravity, an
air of amplitude, many striking single lines, and its sentiments are
unexceptionable. When we read such lines as these:
All these, O King, from their seclusion dread,
And guarded palace of eternity,
Mix in thy pageant with phantasmal tread,
Hear the long waves of acclamation roll,
And with yet mightier silence marshal thee
To the awful throne thou hast inherited----
we feel that this is at least workman-like work, written by a man who
has studied great masters, and who takes himself and his art seriously.
There is not an undignified line in the whole poem, nor a break in the
slow, deliberate movement. Watson has style, he is never facile or
common. He has frequent felicities of phrase, but he subordinates
separate effects to the effect of the whole, and he is almost the only
living writer of verse of whom this could be said. His ode is
excellently made, from every external point of view. Yet, after reading
it over and over, with a full recognition of its technical qualities, we
are unable to accept it as genuine poetry, as the equal of the thing
which it resembles.
Great poetry is not often written for official occasions, but that it
can be so written we need only turn to Marvell's _Horatian Ode upon
Cromwell's Return from Ireland_ to realize. Watson looks instinctively
to public events for his inspiration, and there is something in his
temper of mind and of style which seems to set him naturally apart as a
commentator upon the destinies of nations. He has never put any vital
part of himself into his work; he has told us nothing of what he is when
he is not a writer. All his utterances have been themselves official,
the guarded statement of just so much of his own thoughts and feelings
as he cares to betray to the public. His kind is rather critical than
creative, and it was by his epigrams that he first attracted attention.
His technique is so accomplished that he seems very often to be thinking
only of what he is saying, when it is evident, on a closer examination,
that he is thinking much more of how he is saying it. For the poet who
concerns himself with public events this might seem to be a useful part
of his poetic equipment. Court ceremonies demand court dress.
Undoubtedly, but the art of the courtier requires him to forget that he
is dressed for an occasion, to forget everything but the occasion.
Throughout the whole of his coronation ode Watson never forgets that he
is celebrating an important ceremony. His costume is perfectly adjusted,
he wears it with grace and dignity; his elocution, as he delivers his
lines, is a model of clearness and discreet emphasis. Everything that he
says is perfectly appropriate; good taste can go no further. But the
occasion itself, the meaning, the emotion, of the occasion? That does
not come into the poem; the poem tells us all about it.
Now look at Marvell's ode, and forget for the moment that it is a
masterpiece of poetry. What a passion fires the hard, convincing
thought! How the mere logic holds the attention! Every word lives, and
the cadences (creating a new form for themselves) do but follow the
motions of the writer's bright, controlling energy. It is impossible to
read the lines aloud without a feeling of exultation. In Watson's ode
there is not a breath of life; what is said--admirable and sensible, and
at times poetically conceived as it is--comes with no impetus from the
mind that has conceived it coldly. And it is to be noted that, though
thought and expression are fitted together with great skill and
precision, the expression is always rather above the pitch of the
thought. Take these lines:
O doom of overlordships! to decay
First at the heart, the eye scarce dimmed at all;
Or perish of much cumber and array,
The burdening robe of empire, and its pall;
Or, of voluptuous hours the wanton prey;
Die of the poisons that most sweetly slay;
Or, from insensate height,
With prodigies, with light
Of trailing angers on the monstrous night,
Magnificently fall.
There we find expression strained to a point to which the thought has
not attained. In other words, we find rhetoric. Weight and resonance of
verse do but drag down and deafen that which they should uplift and
sound abroad, when, instead of being attendants upon greatness, they
attempt to replace it.