THE MINOR POET
The term “minor poet” is inexact at best, but during the Eighteen
Nineties it was used very widely, and a little unnecessarily, to
distinguish the younger generation of poets from the generation still
represented by Tennyson, Swinburne, William Morris, George Meredith,
and from among whom Robert Browning and Dante Gabriel Rossetti were
but lately removed. The distinction, like the term “decadent,” began
as a disparagement and, despite well-meaning protests, it lived on
with a difference. Richard Le Gallienne lectured on “The Minor Poet,”
proving him of importance; and many critics were of the same mind,
including William Archer. In the preface to _Poets of the Younger
Generation_, a book written in 1899, but not published until 1902,
owing to the outbreak of the Boer War, he said: “Criticism has made
great play with the supercilious catchword ‘minor poet.’ No one denies,
of course, that there are greater and lesser lights in the firmament of
song; but I do most strenuously deny that the lesser lights, if they be
stars at all and not mere factitious fireworks, deserve to be spoken of
with contempt. Now a shade of contempt has certainly attached of late
years to the term ‘minor poet,’ which has given it a depressing and
sterilising effect.”
Zeal to stigmatise a calumny has here led to over-statement of its
effect. The very book in which the above words appear, with its
excellent review of the work of thirty-three poets, disproves at least
any suggestion of sterilising results; and, though the survey is
both comprehensive and catholic, one might add without much fear of
cavil the names of another twelve poets or more to William Archer’s
hierarchy. The truth of the matter is that the poets so labelled were
indifferent to the term; but less discerning members of the reading
public may have suffered by allowing it to prejudice them against
new poetry which was certainly in the tradition of the great British
bards. Indeed, it is not easy to discover another decade in which
English literature possessed so numerous and so meritorious a body of
young poets. There were splendid outbursts of song in the Elizabethan
and Caroline epochs, and another in the early years of the nineteenth
century, when such poetic planets as Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge,
Keats and Shelley swam into human ken, but I know of no other decade
with such a variety and ebullience of song as that under review. How
much of it will survive the test of the passing years no critical
judgment can say; nor is that our concern. The future will have its
own tastes and its own criteria. It is our business to recognise that,
according to existing standards and modern predilections, the Nineties
were prodigal of poets and distinguished in poems.
Already several of the so-called minor poets of the time have won
something like the indisputableness of classics. Every survey of recent
poetry takes willing and serious account of Francis Thompson, Ernest
Dowson, Lionel Johnson and John Davidson; and for greater reasons
than that these poets are no longer living. Unhesitating also is the
recognition of William Watson, Alice Meynell, A. E. Housman, Henry
Newbolt and W. B. Yeats. There may be some who would still withhold
the bays from Rudyard Kipling, as there are others who deal niggardly
justice to Stephen Phillips, whose poetic achievement is higher than
the valuation of the moment, if lower than that of the time when he
gave us _Christ in Hades_, _Marpessa_, and _Paolo and Francesca_: poems
surely destined to outlive detraction and neglect.
But the natural acceptance of such poets only touches the fringe of
the _fin de siècle_ fabric of song. The second decade of the
new century sustains a lively interest in many poets who might well
have been considered local to the last decade of the old. Some of
them, though lacking nothing in individuality, sing with an accent
so much in tune with the “divine average” of culture and experience
that some sort of permanence is assured to their work in special
fanes of poesy, if not in the broader avenues of popular acceptance.
Among such poets may be named Laurence Binyon, H. C. Beeching, F. B.
Money-Coutts, E. Nesbit, Laurence Housman, Herbert Trench, Margaret L.
Woods, “Michael Field,” Sturge Moore, Charles Dalmon, Selwyn Image,
Dollie Radford, Ernest Radford, Norman Gale, George Santayana and
Rosamund Marriott-Watson. And finally there remain those poets who give
expression to moods more attuned to end-of-the-century emotions, but
who will command a select group of admirers in most periods. In this
class are Arthur Symons, Richard Le Gallienne, John Gray, Lord Alfred
Douglas, Theodore Wratislaw and Olive Custance.
In spite, however, of what has been said, the term “minor” applied to
poetry came to be something more than a formal expression of contempt.
The contempt it expressed was associated with the prevailing, though
half-amused, antagonism of the middle classes towards the decadent
movement in art and life. Calling the new poetry “minor” was, from the
point of view of literary criticism, hitting below the belt, for the
term really conveyed a moral meaning beneath a literary demonstration
of force. Opposition to the younger poets may at times have taken the
form of genuine literary criticism, but the voice of disapproval at its
loudest lay in ethics rather than letters. Owen Seaman made exquisite
fun of the younger generation of poets, particularly of
“A precious few, the heirs of utter godlihead,
Who wear the yellow flower of blameless bodlihead!”
in _The Battle of the Bays_, and in a satirical poem, “To a Boy-Poet of
the Decadence,” he indicates precisely the type of poet who came to be
regarded as minor, and the sort of objection he aroused:
“The erotic affairs that you fiddle aloud
Are as vulgar as coin of the mint;
And you merely distinguish yourself from the crowd
By the fact that you put ’em in print.
* * * * *
For your dull little vices we don’t care a fig,
It is _this_ that we deeply deplore:
You were cast for a common or usual pig,
But you play the invincible bore.”
Here there are direct inferences of erotic tendencies in the younger
poets, as though such things were so unusual in youthful verse as to
be startling, instead of being recognised as characteristics of all
adolescent poetry. Be that as it may, “erotic affairs” may or may
not be vulgar or dull. In the hands of a Baudelaire or a Gautier,
a Swinburne or a Rossetti, they may offend--but not necessarily by
vulgarity or dullness. Neither were the best of the minor poets
vulgar or dull. Their eroticism may have been irritating, disturbing,
offensive or disgusting, but it was often unique, and always
sufficiently juvenescent and impudent to be bright. But the younger
poets did not all err on the side of eroticism, and some of those who
had other enthusiasms were ready enough to criticise and repudiate
their fellows in song. Richard Le Gallienne, who, himself, was usually,
and unjustly, classed with the degenerates, showed small sympathy with
that type in “The Decadent to his Soul.” In the course of this poem he
defines very clearly the attitude adopted by at least one poet of the
time towards what was conventionally decadent:
“Then from that day, he used his soul
As bitters to the over dulcet sins,
As olives to the fatness of the feast--
She made those dear heart-breaking ecstasies
Of minor chords amid the Phrygian flutes,
She sauced his sins with splendid memories,
Starry regrets and infinite hopes and fears;
His holy youth and his first love
Made pearly background to strange-coloured vice.”
And Lionel Johnson, who was neither decadent nor minor, contributed
a prose satire on the same subject to the first number of _The
Pageant_. It is called “Incurable,” and deals rather heavily with
that phase of youthful introspection which tends to brood on love and
suicide. But his decadent poet is better represented by examples of
the work attributed to him. Here is a faithful imitation of the minor
mode with satire so well concealed that, in the Nineties, it might
easily have passed for the real thing:
“Sometimes, in very joy of shame,
Our flesh becomes one living flame:
And she and I
Are no more separate, but the same.
Ardour and agony unite;
Desire, delirium, delight:
And I and she
Faint in the fierce and fevered night.
Her body music is: and ah!
The accords of lute and viola,
When she and I
Play on live limbs love’s opera.”
There were poets, I say, who might well have been represented by
the above parody. Arthur Symons (in his earlier phase too often a
Restoration poet _malgré lui_) played the part of minor poet of
the minute with something like desperation:
“Her cheeks are hot, her cheeks are white;
The white girl hardly breathes to-night,
So faint the pulses come and go,
That waken to a smouldering glow
The morbid faintness of her white.
What drowsing heats of sense, desire
Longing and languorous, the fire
Of what white ashes, subtly mesh
The fascinations of her flesh
Into a breathing web of fire?
Only her eyes, only her mouth,
Live, in the agony of drouth,
Athirst for that which may not be:
The desert of virginity
Aches in the hotness of her mouth.”
And among all his earlier poems you can find innumerable manifestations
of the decadent reversion to artificiality, as in the lines:
“Divinely rosy rogued, your face
Smiles, with its painted little mouth,
Half tearfully, a quaint grimace;
The charm and pathos of your youth
Mock the mock roses of your face.”
Such variations upon love were by no means new to poetry even in this
country. Swinburne and Rossetti had been roundly trounced by Robert
Buchanan for venturing as far but no farther, and the minor poets
of the Nineties suffered similar attacks from their own outraged
contemporaries. Generally speaking, this erotic verse lacked the magic
of fine poetry, and to that extent it was minor or, rather, not poetry
at all. It was verse, and often, let it be admitted, very good verse,
but only in the work of Ernest Dowson did it possess the high-wrought
intensity and indefinable glamour of poetry.
The veritable minor note of the poetry of these years was not,
strangely enough, that sought out for denunciation and satire by the
bourgeoisie. The eroticism which became so prevalent in the verse of
the younger poets was minor because it was little more than a pose; not
because it was erotic. It was minor because it was the swan song of the
Fleshly School of the Seventies and Eighties. It did not ring true: for
one reason because it was an affectation, and for another because it
was perhaps a little too much like the life the decadents were trying
to live. Only a respectable person, like Swinburne, could write a
really profound decadent love poem.
Where the minor poets were both minor and poets was in that curious
lisping note which many of them managed to introduce into their poems.
This was a new note in poetry, corresponding with the minor key in
music. It was not polish or style, nor metrical, nor alliterative trick
or experiment. Neither was it entirely that fashionable sensitiveness,
which, in its ultimate search for unknown, unexperienced reality,
often resulted in a sterile perversity. It approximated more to that
ultra-refinement of feeling, that fastidiousness of thought which, in
its over-nice concern for fine shades and precious meanings, becomes
bleak and cheap. There was an unusual femininity about it; not the
femininity of women, nor yet the feminine primness of men; it was more
a mingling of what is effeminate in both sexes. This was the genuine
minor note, and it was abnormal--a form of hermaphroditism. But it
has left no single poem as a monument to itself. It was never so near
corporeality as that. It was a passing mood which gave the poetry of
the hour a hot-house fragrance; a perfume faint yet unmistakable and
strange. And now, as then, it lives only in stray “gillyflowers of
speech,” recording, perchance, “a bruisèd daffodil of last night’s
sin,” to borrow phrases from the early poems of Richard Le Gallienne,
who affected these mincing measures as thoroughly as he has since
followed a more virile muse.
Again, when the minor poet was most minor, he always contrived to
clothe his verse in gracious language which had full power to charm by
its ingenuity and beauty. If the minor mode forbade its devotees to
trespass far beyond the borders of fancy; if it prevented prettiness
becoming beauty, we need not complain. Fancy and Prettiness never
sought to dethrone Imagination and Beauty, but to support and serve
them like good courtiers, and so the minor poets of the Nineties served
Art and Life.
Yet so myopic was the literary vision that ephemeral verses were
classed as minor with the strong and normal lyricism of William
Watson’s:
“Let me go forth, and share
The overflowing Sun
With one wise friend, or one
Better than wise, being fair,
Where the peewit wheels and dips
On heights of bracken and ling,
And Earth, unto her finger tips,
Tingles with the Spring.”
Or with the wistful beauty of W. B. Yeats’
“When you are old and grey and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false and true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead,
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.”
Or Richard Le Gallienne’s beautiful lines:
“She’s somewhere in the sunlight strong,
Her tears are in the falling rain,
She calls me in the wind’s soft song,
And with the flowers she comes again.”
Or with some such happy song as Norman Gale’s
“All the lanes are lyric
All the bushes sing,
You are at your kissing,
Spring!”
Or the more tragic theme of Francis Money-Coutts:
“Oft in the lapses of the night,
When dead things live and live things die,
I touch you with a wild affright
Lest you have ceased in sleep to sigh.”
And later even with Stephen Phillips’ _Christ in Hades_:
“It is the time of tender, opening things.
Above my head the fields murmur and wave,
And breezes are just moving the clear heat.
O the mid-noon is trembling on the corn,
On cattle calm, and trees in perfect sleep,
And hast thou empty come? Hast thou not brought
Even a blossom with the noise of rain
And smell of earth about it, that we all
Might gather round and whisper over it?
At one wet blossom all the dead would feel!”
And the higher and deeper simplicity of A. E. Housman:
“With rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.
By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.”
All these were classed as lesser poems--and so they are, beside the
best of Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Keats and the best work of those
few other high lords of song; but with the rest they may claim kin, and
ever remain in goodly company.
[Illustration: A. E. HOUSMAN
_From a Drawing by William Rothenstein_]