I THINK it was a Young Ireland Society that set my mind running on
‘popular poetry.’ We used to discuss everything that was known to us
about Ireland, and especially Irish literature and Irish history. We
had no Gaelic, but paid great honour to the Irish poets who wrote in
English, and quoted them in our speeches. I could have told you at that
time the dates of the birth and death, and quoted the chief poems, of
men whose names you have not heard, and perhaps of some whose names I
have forgotten. I knew in my heart that the most of them wrote badly,
and yet such romance clung about them, such a desire for Irish poetry
was in all our minds, that I kept on saying, not only to others but
to myself, that most of them wrote well, or all but well. I had read
Shelley and Spenser and had tried to mix their styles together in a
pastoral play which I have not come to dislike much, and yet I do not
think Shelley or Spenser ever moved me as did these poets. I thought
one day—I can remember the very day when I thought it—‘If somebody
could make a style which would not be an English style and yet would
be musical and full of colour, many others would catch fire from him,
and we would have a really great school of ballad poetry in Ireland.
If these poets, who have never ceased to fill the newspapers and the
ballad-books with their verses, had a good tradition they would write
beautifully and move everybody as they move me.’ Then a little later on
I thought, ‘If they had something else to write about besides political
opinions, if more of them would write about the beliefs of the people
like Allingham, or about old legends like Ferguson, they would find
it easier to get a style.’ Then, with a deliberateness that still
surprises me, for in my heart of hearts I have never been quite certain
that one should be more than an artist, that even patriotism is more
than an impure desire in an artist, I set to work to find a style and
things to write about that the ballad writers might be the better.
They are no better, I think, and my desire to make them so was, it may
be, one of the illusions Nature holds before one, because she knows
that the gifts she has to give are not worth troubling about. It is for
her sake that we must stir ourselves, but we would not trouble to get
out of bed in the morning, or to leave our chairs once we are in them,
if she had not her conjuring bag. She wanted a few verses from me, and
because it would not have seemed worth while taking so much trouble
to see my books lie on a few drawing-room tables, she filled my head
with thoughts of making a whole literature, and plucked me out of the
Dublin art schools where I should have stayed drawing from the round,
and sent me into a library to read bad translations from the Irish,
and at last down into Connaught to sit by turf fires. I wanted to
write ‘popular poetry’ like those Irish poets, for I believed that all
good literatures were popular, and even cherished the fancy that the
Adelphi melodrama, which I had never seen, might be good literature,
and I hated what I called the coteries. I thought that one must write
without care, for that was of the coteries, but with a gusty energy
that would put all straight if it came out of the right heart. I had
a conviction, which indeed I have still, that one’s verses should
hold, as in a mirror, the colours of one’s own climate and scenery in
their right proportion; and, when I found my verses too full of the
reds and yellows Shelley gathered in Italy, I thought for two days of
setting things right, not as I should now by making rhythms faint
and nervous and filling my images with a certain coldness, a certain
wintry wildness, but by eating little and sleeping upon a board. I felt
indignant with Matthew Arnold because he complained that somebody,
who had translated Homer into a ballad measure, had tried to write
epic to the tune of Yankee Doodle. It seemed to me that it did not
matter what tune one wrote to, so long as that gusty energy came often
enough and strongly enough. And I delighted in Victor Hugo’s book
upon Shakespeare, because he abused critics and coteries and thought
that Shakespeare wrote without care or premeditation and to please
everybody. I would indeed have had every illusion had I believed in
that straightforward logic, as of newspaper articles, which so tickles
the ears of the shopkeepers; but I always knew that the line of Nature
is crooked, that, though we dig the canal beds as straight as we can,
the rivers run hither and thither in their wildness.
From that day to this I have been busy among the verses and stories
that the people make for themselves, but I had been busy a very little
while before I knew that what we call popular poetry never came from
the people at all. Longfellow, and Campbell, and Mrs. Hemans, and
Macaulay in his _Lays_, and Scott in his longer poems are the poets
of the middle class, of people who have unlearned the unwritten
tradition which binds the unlettered, so long as they are masters of
themselves, to the beginning of time and to the foundation of the
world, and who have not learned the written tradition which has been
established upon the unwritten. I became certain that Burns, whose
greatness has been used to justify the littleness of others, was in
part a poet of the middle class, because though the farmers he sprang
from and lived among had been able to create a little tradition of
their own, less a tradition of ideas than of speech, they had been
divided by religious and political changes from the images and emotions
which had once carried their memories backward thousands of years.
Despite his expressive speech which sets him above all other popular
poets, he has the triviality of emotion, the poverty of ideas, the
imperfect sense of beauty of a poetry whose most typical expression is
in Longfellow. Longfellow has his popularity, in the main, because he
tells his story or his idea so that one needs nothing but his verses
to understand it. No words of his borrow their beauty from those that
used them before, and one can get all that there is in story and
idea without seeing them as if moving before a half-faded curtain
embroidered with kings and queens, their loves and battles and their
days out hunting, or else with holy letters and images of so great
antiquity that nobody can tell the god or goddess they would commend
to an unfading memory. Poetry that is not popular poetry presupposes,
indeed, more than it says, though we, who cannot know what it is to be
disinherited, only understand how much more, when we read it in its
most typical expressions, in the _Epipsychidion_ of Shelley, or in
Spenser’s description of the gardens of Adonis, or when we meet the
misunderstandings of others. Go down into the street and read to your
baker or your candlestick-maker any poem which is not popular poetry.
I have heard a baker, who was clever enough with his oven, deny that
Tennyson could have known what he was writing when he wrote ‘Warming
his five wits, the white owl in the belfry sits,’ and once when I read
out Omar Khayyam to one of the best of candlestick-makers, he said,
‘What is the meaning of “we come like water and like wind we go”?’ Or
go down into the street with some thought whose bare meaning must be
plain to everybody; take with you Ben Jonson’s ‘Beauty like sorrow
dwelleth everywhere,’ and find out how utterly its enchantment depends
on an association of beauty with sorrow which written tradition has
from the unwritten, which had it in its turn from ancient religion; or
take with you these lines in whose bare meaning also there is nothing
to stumble over, and find out what men lose who are not in love with
Helen.
‘Brightness falls from the air,
Queens have died young and fair,
Dust hath closed Helen’s eye.’
I pick my examples at random, for I am writing where I have no books to
turn the pages of, but one need not go east of the sun or west of the
moon in so simple a matter.
On the other hand, when Walt Whitman writes in seeming defiance of
tradition, he needs tradition for his protection, for the butcher and
the baker and the candlestick-maker grow merry over him when they meet
his work by chance. Nature, which cannot endure emptiness, has made
them gather conventions which cannot disguise their low birth though
they copy, as from far off, the dress and manners of the well-bred and
the well-born. The gatherers mock all expression that is wholly unlike
their own, just as little boys in the street mock at strangely-dressed
people and at old men who talk to themselves.
There is only one kind of good poetry, for the poetry of the coteries,
which presupposes the written tradition, does not differ in kind
from the true poetry of the people, which presupposes the unwritten
tradition. Both are alike strange and obscure, and unreal to all who
have not understanding, and both, instead of that manifest logic,
that clear rhetoric of the ‘popular poetry,’ glimmer with thoughts
and images whose ‘ancestors were stout and wise,’ ‘anigh to Paradise’
‘ere yet men knew the gift of corn.’ It may be that we know as little
of their descent as men knew of ‘the man born to be a king’ when they
found him in that cradle marked with the red lion crest, and yet we
know somewhere in the heart that they have been sung in temples, in
ladies’ chambers, and our nerves quiver with a recognition they were
shaped to by a thousand emotions. If men did not remember or half
remember impossible things, and, it may be, if the worship of sun and
moon had not left a faint reverence behind it, what Aran fisher-girl
would sing—
‘It is late last night the dog was speaking of you; the snipe was
speaking of you in her deep marsh. It is you are the lonely bird
throughout the woods; and that you may be without a mate until you find
me.
‘You promised me and you said a lie to me, that you would be before me
where the sheep are flocked. I gave a whistle and three hundred cries
to you; and I found nothing there but a bleating lamb.
‘You promised me a thing that was hard for you, a ship of gold under a
silver mast; twelve towns and a market in all of them, and a fine white
court by the side of the sea.
‘You promised me a thing that is not possible; that you would give me
gloves of the skin of a fish; that you would give me shoes of the skin
of a bird, and a suit of the dearest silk in Ireland.
‘My mother said to me not to be talking with you, to-day or to-morrow
or on Sunday. It was a bad time she took for telling me that, it was
shutting the door after the house was robbed....
‘You have taken the east from me, you have taken the west from me, you
have taken what is before me and what is behind me; you have taken the
moon, you have taken the sun from me, and my fear is great you have
taken God from me.’
The Gael of the Scottish islands could not sing his beautiful song
over a bride, had he not a memory of the belief that Christ was the
only man who measured six feet and not a little more or less, and was
perfectly shaped in all other ways, and if he did not remember old
symbolical observances—
I bathe thy palms
In showers of wine,
In the cleansing fire,
In the juice of raspberries,
In the milk of honey.
* * * * *
Thou art the joy of all joyous things,
Thou art the light of the beam of the sun,
Thou art the door of the chief of hospitality,
Thou art the surpassing pilot star,
Thou art the step of the deer of the hill,
Thou art the step of the horse of the plain,
Thou art the grace of the sun rising,
Thou art the loveliness of all lovely desires.
The lovely likeness of the Lord
Is in thy pure face,
The loveliest likeness that was upon earth.
I soon learned to cast away one other illusion of ‘popular poetry.’ I
learned from the people themselves, before I learned it from any book,
that they cannot separate the idea of an art or a craft from the idea
of a cult with ancient technicalities and mysteries. They can hardly
separate mere learning from witchcraft, and are fond of the words and
verses that keep half their secret to themselves. Indeed, it is certain
that before the counting-house had created a new class and a new art
without breeding and without ancestry, and set this art and this class
between the hut and the castle, and between the hut and the cloister,
the art of the people was as closely mingled with the art of the
coteries as was the speech of the people that delighted in rhythmical
animation, in idiom, in images, in words full of far-off suggestion,
with the unchanging speech of the poets.
Now I see a new generation in Ireland which discusses Irish literature
and history in Young Ireland societies, and societies with newer names,
and there are far more than when I was a boy who would make verses for
the people. They have the help, too, of a vigorous journalism, and this
journalism sometimes urges them to desire the direct logic, the clear
rhetoric, of ‘popular poetry.’ It sees that Ireland has no cultivated
minority, and it does not see, though it would cast out all English
things, that its literary ideal belongs more to England than to other
countries. I have hope that the new writers will not fall into its
illusion, for they write in Irish, and for a people the counting-house
has not made forgetful. Among the seven or eight hundred thousand who
have had Irish from the cradle, there is, perhaps, nobody who has not
enough of the unwritten tradition to know good verses from bad ones, if
he have enough mother-wit. Among all that speak English in Australia,
in America, in Great Britain, are there many more than the ten thousand
the prophet saw, who have enough of the written tradition education has
set in room of the unwritten to know good verses from bad ones, even
though their mother-wit has made them Ministers of the Crown or what
you will? Nor can things be better till that ten thousand have gone
hither and thither to preach their faith that ‘the imagination is the
man himself,’ and that the world as imagination sees it is the durable
world, and have won men as did the disciples of Him who
His seventy disciples sent
Against religion and government.
1901.