ABOUT half the verses that follow were written quite lately. The rest
are older, having been held over in MS. when past volumes were published,
on considering that these would contain a sufficient number of pages to
offer readers at one time, more especially during the distractions of the
war. The unusually far back poems to be found here are, however, but
some that were overlooked in gathering previous collections. A freshness
in them, now unattainable, seemed to make up for their inexperience and
to justify their inclusion. A few are dated; the dates of others are not
discoverable.
The launching of a volume of this kind in neo-Georgian days by one who
began writing in mid-Victorian, and has published nothing to speak of for
some years, may seem to call for a few words of excuse or explanation.
Whether or no, readers may feel assured that a new book is submitted to
them with great hesitation at so belated a date. Insistent practical
reasons, however, among which were requests from some illustrious men of
letters who are in sympathy with my productions, the accident that
several of the poems have already seen the light, and that dozens of them
have been lying about for years, compelled the course adopted, in spite
of the natural disinclination of a writer whose works have been so
frequently regarded askance by a pragmatic section here and there, to
draw attention to them once more.
I do not know that it is necessary to say much on the contents of the
book, even in deference to suggestions that will be mentioned presently.
I believe that those readers who care for my poems at all—readers to whom
no passport is required—will care for this new instalment of them,
perhaps the last, as much as for any that have preceded them. Moreover,
in the eyes of a less friendly class the pieces, though a very mixed
collection indeed, contain, so far as I am able to see, little or nothing
in technic or teaching that can be considered a Star-Chamber matter, or
so much as agitating to a ladies’ school; even though, to use
Wordsworth’s observation in his Preface to _Lyrical Ballads_, such
readers may suppose “that by the act of writing in verse an author makes
a formal engagement that he will gratify certain known habits of
association: that he not only thus apprises the reader that certain
classes of ideas and expressions will be found in his book, but that
others will be carefully excluded.”
It is true, nevertheless, that some grave, positive, stark, delineations
are interspersed among those of the passive, lighter, and traditional
sort presumably nearer to stereotyped tastes. For—while I am quite aware
that a thinker is not expected, and, indeed, is scarcely allowed, now
more than heretofore, to state all that crosses his mind concerning
existence in this universe, in his attempts to explain or excuse the
presence of evil and the incongruity of penalizing the irresponsible—it
must be obvious to open intelligences that, without denying the beauty
and faithful service of certain venerable cults, such disallowance of
“obstinate questionings” and “blank misgivings” tends to a paralysed
intellectual stalemate. Heine observed nearly a hundred years ago that
the soul has her eternal rights; that she will not be darkened by
statutes, nor lullabied by the music of bells. And what is to-day, in
allusions to the present author’s pages, alleged to be “pessimism” is, in
truth, only such “questionings” in the exploration of reality, and is the
first step towards the soul’s betterment, and the body’s also.
If I may be forgiven for quoting my own old words, let me repeat what I
printed in this relation more than twenty years ago, and wrote much
earlier, in a poem entitled “In Tenebris”:
If way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst:
that is to say, by the exploration of reality, and its frank recognition
stage by stage along the survey, with an eye to the best consummation
possible: briefly, evolutionary meliorism. But it is called pessimism
nevertheless; under which word, expressed with condemnatory emphasis, it
is regarded by many as some pernicious new thing (though so old as to
underlie the Christian idea, and even to permeate the Greek drama); and
the subject is charitably left to decent silence, as if further comment
were needless.
Happily there are some who feel such Levitical passing-by to be, alas, by
no means a permanent dismissal of the matter; that comment on where the
world stands is very much the reverse of needless in these disordered
years of our prematurely afflicted century: that amendment and not
madness lies that way. And looking down the future these few hold fast
to the same: that whether the human and kindred animal races survive till
the exhaustion or destruction of the globe, or whether these races perish
and are succeeded by others before that conclusion comes, pain to all
upon it, tongued or dumb, shall be kept down to a minimum by
lovingkindness, operating through scientific knowledge, and actuated by
the modicum of free will conjecturally possessed by organic life when the
mighty necessitating forces—unconscious or other—that have “the
balancings of the clouds,” happen to be in equilibrium, which may or may
not be often.
To conclude this question I may add that the argument of the so-called
optimists is neatly summarized in a stern pronouncement against me by my
friend Mr. Frederic Harrison in a late essay of his, in the words: “This
view of life is not mine.” The solemn declaration does not seem to me to
be so annihilating to the said “view” (really a series of fugitive
impressions which I have never tried to co-ordinate) as is complacently
assumed. Surely it embodies a too human fallacy quite familiar in logic.
Next, a knowing reviewer, apparently a Roman Catholic young man, speaks,
with some rather gross instances of the _suggestio falsi_ in his article,
of “Mr. Hardy refusing consolation,” the “dark gravity of his ideas,” and
so on. When a Positivist and a Catholic agree there must be something
wonderful in it, which should make a poet sit up. But . . . O that
’twere possible!
I would not have alluded in this place or anywhere else to such casual
personal criticisms—for casual and unreflecting they must be—but for the
satisfaction of two or three friends in whose opinion a short answer was
deemed desirable, on account of the continual repetition of these
criticisms, or more precisely, quizzings. After all, the serious and
truly literary inquiry in this connection is: Should a shaper of such
stuff as dreams are made on disregard considerations of what is customary
and expected, and apply himself to the real function of poetry, the
application of ideas to life (in Matthew Arnold’s familiar phrase)? This
bears more particularly on what has been called the “philosophy” of these
poems—usually reproved as “queer.” Whoever the author may be that
undertakes such application of ideas in this “philosophic”
direction—where it is specially required—glacial judgments must
inevitably fall upon him amid opinion whose arbiters largely decry
individuality, to whom _ideas_ are oddities to smile at, who are moved by
a yearning the reverse of that of the Athenian inquirers on Mars Hill;
and stiffen their features not only at sound of a new thing, but at a
restatement of old things in new terms. Hence should anything of this
sort in the following adumbrations seem “queer”—should any of them seem
to good Panglossians to embody strange and disrespectful conceptions of
this best of all possible worlds, I apologize; but cannot help it.
Such divergences, which, though piquant for the nonce, it would be
affectation to say are not saddening and discouraging likewise, may, to
be sure, arise sometimes from superficial aspect only, writer and reader
seeing the same thing at different angles. But in palpable cases of
divergence they arise, as already said, whenever a serious effort is made
towards that which the authority I have cited—who would now be called
old-fashioned, possibly even parochial—affirmed to be what no good critic
could deny as the poet’s province, the application of ideas to life. One
might shrewdly guess, by the by, that in such recommendation the famous
writer may have overlooked the cold-shouldering results upon an
enthusiastic disciple that would be pretty certain to follow his putting
the high aim in practice, and have forgotten the disconcerting experience
of Gil Blas with the Archbishop.
To add a few more words to what has already taken up too many, there is a
contingency liable to miscellanies of verse that I have never seen
mentioned, so far as I can remember; I mean the chance little shocks that
may be caused over a book of various character like the present and its
predecessors by the juxtaposition of unrelated, even discordant,
effusions; poems perhaps years apart in the making, yet facing each
other. An odd result of this has been that dramatic anecdotes of a
satirical and humorous intention (such, _e.g._, as “Royal Sponsors”)
following verse in graver voice, have been read as misfires because they
raise the smile that they were intended to raise, the journalist, deaf to
the sudden change of key, being unconscious that he is laughing with the
author and not at him. I admit that I did not foresee such contingencies
as I ought to have done, and that people might not perceive when the tone
altered. But the difficulties of arranging the themes in a graduated
kinship of moods would have been so great that irrelation was almost
unavoidable with efforts so diverse. I must trust for right
note-catching to those finely-touched spirits who can divine without half
a whisper, whose intuitiveness is proof against all the accidents of
inconsequence. In respect of the less alert, however, should any one’s
train of thought be thrown out of gear by a consecutive piping of vocal
reeds in jarring tonics, without a semiquaver’s rest between, and be led
thereby to miss the writer’s aim and meaning in one out of two contiguous
compositions, I shall deeply regret it.
Having at last, I think, finished with the personal points that I was
recommended to notice, I will forsake the immediate object of this
Preface; and, leaving _Late Lyrics_ to whatever fate it deserves, digress
for a few moments to more general considerations. The thoughts of any
man of letters concerned to keep poetry alive cannot but run
uncomfortably on the precarious prospects of English verse at the present
day. Verily the hazards and casualties surrounding the birth and setting
forth of almost every modern creation in numbers are ominously like those
of one of Shelley’s paper-boats on a windy lake. And a forward
conjecture scarcely permits the hope of a better time, unless men’s
tendencies should change. So indeed of all art, literature, and “high
thinking” nowadays. Whether owing to the barbarizing of taste in the
younger minds by the dark madness of the late war, the unabashed
cultivation of selfishness in all classes, the plethoric growth of
knowledge simultaneously with the stunting of wisdom, “a degrading thirst
after outrageous stimulation” (to quote Wordsworth again), or from any
other cause, we seem threatened with a new Dark Age.
I formerly thought, like so many roughly handled writers, that so far as
literature was concerned a partial cause might be impotent or mischievous
criticism; the satirizing of individuality, the lack of whole-seeing in
contemporary estimates of poetry and kindred work, the knowingness
affected by junior reviewers, the overgrowth of meticulousness in their
peerings for an opinion, as if it were a cultivated habit in them to
scrutinize the tool-marks and be blind to the building, to hearken for
the key-creaks and be deaf to the diapason, to judge the landscape by a
nocturnal exploration with a flash-lantern. In other words, to carry on
the old game of sampling the poem or drama by quoting the worst line or
worst passage only, in ignorance or not of Coleridge’s proof that a
versification of any length neither can be nor ought to be all poetry; of
reading meanings into a book that its author never dreamt of writing
there. I might go on interminably.
But I do not now think any such temporary obstructions to be the cause of
the hazard, for these negligences and ignorances, though they may have
stifled a few true poets in the run of generations, disperse like
stricken leaves before the wind of next week, and are no more heard of
again in the region of letters than their writers themselves. No: we may
be convinced that something of the deeper sort mentioned must be the
cause.
In any event poetry, pure literature in general, religion—I include
religion because poetry and religion touch each other, or rather modulate
into each other; are, indeed, often but different names for the same
thing—these, I say, the visible signs of mental and emotional life, must
like all other things keep moving, becoming; even though at present, when
belief in witches of Endor is displacing the Darwinian theory and “the
truth that shall make you free,” men’s minds appear, as above noted, to
be moving backwards rather than on. I speak, of course, somewhat
sweepingly, and should except many isolated minds; also the minds of men
in certain worthy but small bodies of various denominations, and perhaps
in the homely quarter where advance might have been the very least
expected a few years back—the English Church—if one reads it rightly as
showing evidence of “removing those things that are shaken,” in
accordance with the wise Epistolary recommendation to the Hebrews. For
since the historic and once august hierarchy of Rome some generation ago
lost its chance of being the religion of the future by doing otherwise,
and throwing over the little band of neo-Catholics who were making a
struggle for continuity by applying the principle of evolution to their
own faith, joining hands with modern science, and outflanking the
hesitating English instinct towards liturgical reform (a flank march
which I at the time quite expected to witness, with the gathering of many
millions of waiting agnostics into its fold); since then, one may ask,
what other purely English establishment than the Church, of sufficient
dignity and footing, and with such strength of old association, such
architectural spell, is left in this country to keep the shreds of
morality together?
It may be a forlorn hope, a mere dream, that of an alliance between
religion, which must be retained unless the world is to perish, and
complete rationality, which must come, unless also the world is to
perish, by means of the interfusing effect of poetry—“the breath and
finer spirit of all knowledge; the impassioned expression of science,” as
it was defined by an English poet who was quite orthodox in his ideas.
But if it be true, as Comte argued, that advance is never in a straight
line, but in a looped orbit, we may, in the aforesaid ominous moving
backward, be doing it _pour mieux sauter_, drawing back for a spring. I
repeat that I forlornly hope so, notwithstanding the supercilious regard
of hope by Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, and other philosophers down to
Einstein who have my respect. But one dares not prophesy. Physical,
chronological, and other contingencies keep me in these days from
critical studies and literary circles
Where once we held debate, a band
Of youthful friends, on mind and art
(if one may quote Tennyson in this century of free verse). Hence I
cannot know how things are going so well as I used to know them, and the
aforesaid limitations must quite prevent my knowing hence-forward.
I have to thank the editors and owners of _The Times_, _Fortnightly_,
_Mercury_, and other periodicals in which a few of the poems have
appeared for kindly assenting to their being reclaimed for collected
publication.