been discovered in Rousseau's work fade away. That famous confusion
concerning 'the natural man,' whom he presents to us now as a historic
fact, now as an ideal, took its rise, not in the mind of Jean-Jacques,
but in the minds of his critics. The _Contrat Social_ is a parable of
the soul of man, like the _Republic_ of Plato. The truth of the human
soul is its implicit perfection; to that reality material history is
irrelevant, because the anatomy of the soul is eternal. And as for the
nature of this truth, 'it is true so soon as it is felt.' When the
Savoyard Vicar, after accepting all the destructive criticism of
religious dogma, turned to the Gospel story with the immortal 'Ce n'est
pas ainsi qu'on invente,' he was only anticipating what Jean-Jacques was
to say of himself before his death, that there was a sign in his work
which could not be imitated, and which acted only at the level of its
source. We may call Jean-Jacques religious because we have no other
word; but the word would be more truly applied to the reverence felt
towards such a man than to his own emotion. He was driven to speak of
God by the habit of his childhood and the deficiency of a language
shaped by the intellect and not by the soul. But his deity was one whom
neither the Catholic nor the Reformed Church could accept, for He was
truly a God who does not dwell in temples made with hands. The respect
he owed to God, said the Vicar, was such that he could affirm nothing of
Him. And, again, still more profoundly, he said, 'He is to our souls
what our soul is to our body.' That is the mystical utterance of a man
who was no mystic, but of one who found his full communion in the
beatific _dolce far niente_ of the Lake of Bienne. Jean-Jacques was set
apart from his generation, because, like Malvolio, he thought highly of
the soul and in nowise approved the conclusions of his fellows; and he
was fortunate to the last, in spite of what some are pleased to call his
madness (which was indeed only his flaming and uncomprehending
indignation at the persecution inevitably meted out by those who have
only a half truth to one who has the whole), because he enjoyed the
certainty that his high appraisement of the soul was justified.
[MARCH, 1918.
_The Poetry of Edward Thomas_
We believe that when we are old and we turn back to look among the ruins
with which our memory will be strewn for the evidence of life which
disaster could not kill, we shall find it in the poems of Edward
Thomas.[2] They will appear like the faint, indelible writing of a
palimpsest over which in our hours of exaltation and bitterness more
resonant, yet less enduring, words were inscribed; or they will be like
a phial discovered in the ashes of what was once a mighty city. There
will be the triumphal arch standing proudly; the very tombs of the dead
will seem to share its monumental magnificence. Yet we will turn from
them all, from the victory and sorrow alike, to this faintly gleaming
bubble of glass that will hold captive the phantasm of a fragrance of
the soul. By it some dumb and doubtful knowledge will be evoked to
tremble on the edge of our minds. We shall reach back, under its spell,
beyond the larger impulses of a resolution and a resignation which will
have become a part of history, to something less solid and more
permanent over which they passed and which they could not disturb.
[Footnote 2: _Last Poems_. By Edward Thomas. (Selwyn & Blount.)]
Our consciousness will have its record. The tradition of England in
battle has its testimony; our less traditional despairs will be
compassed about by a crowd of witnesses. But it might so nearly have
been in vain that we should seek an echo of that which smiled at the
conclusions of our consciousness. The subtler faiths might so easily
have fled through our harsh fingers. When the sound of the bugles died,
having crowned reveillé with the equal challenge of the last post, how
easily we might have been persuaded that there was a silence, if there
had not been one whose voice rose only so little above that of the winds
and trees and the life of undertone we share with them as to make us
first doubt the silence and then lend an ear to the incessant pulses of
which it is composed. The infinite and infinitesimal vague happinesses
and immaterial alarms, terrors and beauties scared by the sound of
speech, memories and forgettings that the touch of memory itself
crumbles into dust--this very texture of the life of the soul might have
been a gray background over which tumultuous existence passed unheeding
had not Edward Thomas so painfully sought the angle from which it
appears, to the eye of eternity, as the enduring warp of the more
gorgeous woof.
The emphasis sinks; the stresses droop away. To exacter knowledge less
charted and less conquerable certainties succeed; truths that somehow we
cannot make into truths, and that have therefore some strange mastery
over us; laws of our common substance which we cannot make human but
only humanise; loyalties we do not recognise and dare not disregard;
beauties which deny communion with our beautiful, and yet compel our
souls. So the sedge-warbler's
'Song that lacks all words, all melody,
All sweetness almost, was dearer then to me
Than sweetest voice that sings in tune sweet words.'
Not that the unheard melodies were sweeter than the heard to this dead
poet. We should be less confident of his quality if he had not been,
both in his knowledge and his hesitations, the child of his age. Because
he was this, the melodies were heard; but they were not sweet. They made
the soul sensible of attachments deeper than the conscious mind's
ideals, whether of beauty or goodness. Not to something above but to
something beyond are we chained, for all that we forget our fetters, or
by some queer trick of self-hallucination turn them into golden crowns.
But perhaps the finer task of our humanity is to turn our eyes calmly
into 'the dark backward and abysm' not of time, but of the eternal
present on whose pinnacle we stand.
'I have mislaid the key. I sniff the spray
And think of nothing; I see and hear nothing;
Yet seem, too, to be listening, lying in wait
For what I should, yet never can, remember.
No garden appears, no path, no child beside,
Neither father nor mother, nor any playmate;
Only an avenue, dark, nameless without end.'
So, it seems, a hundred years have found us out. We come no longer
trailing clouds of glory. We are that which we are, less and more than
our strong ancestors; less, in that our heritage does not descend from
on high, more, in that we know ourselves for less. Yet our chosen spirit
is not wholly secure in his courage. He longs not merely to know in what
undifferentiated oneness his roots are fixed, but to discover it
beautiful. Not even yet is it sufficient to have a premonition of the
truth; the truth must wear a familiar colour.
'This heart, some fraction of me, happily
Floats through the window even now to a tree
Down in the misting, dim-lit, quiet vale,
Not like a peewit that returns to wail
For something it has lost, but like a dove
That slants unswerving to its home and love.
There I find my rest, and through the dark air
Flies what yet lives in me. Beauty is there.'
Beauty, yes, perhaps; but beautiful by virtue of its coincidence with
the truth, as there is beauty in those lines securer and stronger far
than the melody of their cadence, because they tell of a loyalty of
man's being which, being once made sensible of it, he cannot gainsay.
Whence we all come, whither we must all make our journey, there is home
indeed. But necessity, not remembered delights, draws us thither. That
which we must obey is our father if we will; but let us not delude
ourselves into the expectation of kindness and the fatted calf, any more
than we dare believe that the love which moves the sun and the other
stars has in it any charity. We may be, we are, the children of the
universe; but we have 'neither father nor mother nor any playmate.'
And Edward Thomas knew this. The knowledge should be the common property
of the poetry of our time, marking it off from what went before and from
what will come after. We believe that it will be found to be so; and
that the presence of this knowledge, and the quality which this
knowledge imparts, makes Edward Thomas more than one among his
contemporaries. He is their chief. He challenges other regions in the
hinterland of our souls. Yet how shall we describe the narrowness of the
line which divides his province from theirs, or the only half-conscious
subtlety of the gesture with which he beckons us aside from trodden and
familiar paths? The difference, the sense of departure, is perhaps most
apparent in this, that he knows his beauty is not beautiful, and his
home no home at all.
'This is my grief. That land,
My home, I have never seen.
No traveller tells of it,
However far he has been.
'And could I discover it
I fear my happiness there,
Or my pain, might be dreams of return
To the things that were.'
Great poetry stands in this, that it expresses man's allegiance to his
destiny. In every age the great poet triumphs in all that he knows of
necessity; thus he is the world made vocal. Other generations of men may
know more, but their increased knowledge will not diminish from the
magnificence of the music which he has made for the spheres. The known
truth alters from age to age; but the thrill of the recognition of the
truth stands fast for all our human eternity. Year by year the universe
grows vaster, and man, by virtue of the growing brightness of his little
lamp, sees himself more and more as a child born in the midst of a dark
forest, and finds himself less able to claim the obeisance of the all.
Yet if he would be a poet, and not a harper of threadbare tunes, he must
at each step in the downward passing from his sovereignty, recognise
what is and celebrate it as what must be. Thus he regains, by another
path, the supremacy which he has forsaken.
Edward Thomas's poetry has the virtue of this recognition. It may be
said that his universe was not vaster but smaller than the universe of
the past, for its bounds were largely those of his own self. It is, even
in material fact, but half true. None more closely than he regarded the
living things of earth in all their quarters. 'After Rain' is, for
instance, a very catalogue of the texture of nature's visible garment,
freshly put on, down to the little ash-leaves
'... thinly spread
In the road, like little black fish, inlaid
As if they played.'
But it is true that these objects of vision were but the occasion of the
more profound discoveries within the region of his own soul. There he
discovered vastness and illimitable vistas; found himself to be an eddy
in the universal flux, driven whence and whither he knew not, conscious
of perpetual instability, the meeting place of mighty impacts of which
only the farthest ripple agitates the steady moonbeam of the waking
mind. In a sense he did no more than to state what he found, sometimes
in the more familiar language of beauties lost, mourned for lost, and
irrecoverable.
'The simple lack
Of her is more to me
Than other's presence,
Whether life splendid be
Or utter black.
'I have not seen,
I have no news of her;
I can tell only
She is not here, but there
She might have been.
'She is to be kissed
Only perhaps by me;
She may be seeking
Me and no other; she
May not exist.'
That search lies nearer to the norm of poetry. We might register its
wistfulness, praise the appealing nakedness of its diction and pass on.
If that were indeed the culmination of Edward Thomas's poetical quest,
he would stand securely enough with others of his time. But he reaches
further. In the verses on his 'home,' which we have already quoted, he
passes beyond these limits. He has still more to tell of the experience
of the soul fronting its own infinity:--
'So memory made
Parting to-day a double pain:
First because it was parting; next
Because the ill it ended vexed
And mocked me from the past again.
Not as what had been remedied
Had I gone on,--not that, ah no!
But as itself no longer woe.'
There speaks a deep desire born only of deep knowledge. Only those who
have been struck to the heart by a sudden awareness of the incessant
not-being which is all we hold of being, know the longing to arrest the
movement even at the price of the perpetuation of their pain. So it was
that the moments which seemed to come to him free from the infirmity of
becoming haunted and held him most.
'Often I had gone this way before,
But now it seemed I never could be
And never had been anywhere else.'
To cheat the course of time, which is only the name with which we strive
to cheat the flux of things, and to anchor the soul to something that
was not instantly engulfed--
'In the undefined
Abyss of what can never be again.'
Sometimes he looked within himself for the monition which men have felt
as the voice of the eternal memory; sometimes, like Keats, but with none
of the intoxication of Keats's sense of a sharing in victory, he grasped
at the recurrence of natural things, 'the pure thrush word,' repeated
every spring, the law of wheeling rooks, or to the wind 'that was old
when the gods were young,' as in this profoundly typical sensing of 'A
New House.'
'All was foretold me; naught
Could I foresee;
But I learned how the wind would sound
After these things should be.'
But he could not rest even there. There was, indeed, no anchorage in the
enduring to be found by one so keenly aware of the flux within the soul
itself. The most powerful, the most austerely imagined poem in this book
is that entitled 'The Other,' which, apart from its intrinsic appeal,
shows that Edward Thomas had something at least of the power to create
the myth which is the poet's essential means of triangulating the
unknown of his emotion. Had he lived to perfect himself in the use of
this instrument, he might have been a great poet indeed. 'The Other'
tells of his pursuit of himself, and how he overtook his soul.
'And now I dare not follow after
Too close. I try to keep in sight,
Dreading his frown and worse his laughter,
I steal out of the wood to light;
I see the swift shoot from the rafter
By the window: ere I alight
I wait and hear the starlings wheeze
And nibble like ducks: I wait his flight.
He goes: I follow: no release
Until he ceases. Then I also shall cease.'
No; not a great poet, will be the final sentence, when the palimpsest is
read with the calm and undivided attention that is its due, but one who
had many (and among them the chief) of the qualities of a great poet.
Edward Thomas was like a musician who noted down themes that summon up
forgotten expectations. Whether the genius to work them out to the
limits of their scope and implication was in him we do not know. The
life of literature was a hard master to him; and perhaps the opportunity
he would eagerly have grasped was denied him by circumstance. But, if
his compositions do not, his themes will never fail--of so much we are
sure--to awaken unsuspected echoes even in unsuspecting minds.
[JANUARY 1919.
_Mr Yeats's Swan Song_
In the preface to _The Wild Swans at Coole_,[3] Mr W.B. Yeats speaks of
'the phantasmagoria through which alone I can express my convictions
about the world.' The challenge could hardly be more direct. At the
threshold we are confronted with a legend upon the door-post which gives
us the essential plan of all that we shall find in the house if we enter
in. There are, it is true, a few things capable of common use, verses
written in the seeming-strong vernacular of literary Dublin, as it were
a hospitable bench placed outside the door. They are indeed inside the
house, but by accident or for temporary shelter. They do not, as the
phrase goes, belong to the scheme, for they are direct transcriptions of
the common reality, whether found in the sensible world or the emotion
of the mind. They are, from Mr Yeats's angle of vision (as indeed from
our own), essentially _vers d'occasion._
[Footnote 3: _The Wild Swans at Coole_. By W.B. Yeats.(Macmillan.)]
The poet's high and passionate argument must be sought elsewhere, and
precisely in his expression of his convictions about the world. And
here, on the poet's word and the evidence of our search, we shall find
phantasmagoria, ghostly symbols of a truth which cannot be otherwise
conveyed, at least by Mr Yeats. To this, in itself, we make no demur.
The poet, if he is a true poet, is driven to approach the highest
reality he can apprehend. He cannot transcribe it simply because he does
not possess the necessary apparatus of knowledge, and because if he did
possess it his passion would flag. It is not often that Spinoza can
disengage himself to write as he does at the beginning of the third book
of the Ethics, nor could Lucretius often kindle so great a fire in his
soul as that which made his material incandescent in _Æneadum genetrix_.
Therefore the poet turns to myth as a foundation upon which he can
explicate his imagination. He may take his myth from legend or familiar
history, or he may create one for himself anew, but the function it
fulfils is always the same. It supplies the elements with which he can
build the structure of his parable, upon which he can make it elaborate
enough to convey the multitudinous reactions of his soul to the world.
But between myths and phantasmagoria there is a great gulf. The
structural possibilities of the myth depend upon its intelligibility.
The child knows upon what drama, played in what world, the curtain will
rise when he hears the trumpet-note: 'Of man's first disobedience....'
And, even when the poet turns from legend and history to create his own
myth, he must make one whose validity is visible, if he is not to be
condemned to the sterility of a coterie. The lawless and fantastic
shapes of his own imagination need, even for their own perfect
embodiment, the discipline of the common perception. The phantoms of the
individual brain, left to their own waywardness, lose all solidity and
become like primary forms of life, instead of the penultimate forms they
should be. For the poet himself must move securely among his visions;
they must be not less certain and steadfast than men are. To anchor
them he needs intelligible myth. Nothing less than a supremely great
genius can save him if he ventures into the vast without a landmark
visible to other eyes than his own. Blake had a supremely great genius
and was saved in part. The masculine vigour of his passion gave
stability to the figures of his imagination. They are heroes because
they are made to speak like heroes. Even in Blake's most recondite work
there is always the moment when the clouds are parted and we recognise
the austere and awful countenances of gods. The phantasmagoria of the
dreamer have been mastered by the sheer creative will of the poet. Like
Jacob, he wrestled until the going down of the sun with his angel and
would not let him go.
The effort which such momentary victories demand is almost superhuman;
yet to possess the power to exert it is the sole condition upon which a
poet may plunge into the world of phantasms. Mr Yeats has too little of
the power to vindicate himself from the charge of idle dreaming. He
knows the problem; perhaps he has also known the struggle. But the very
terms in which he suggests it to us subtly convey a sense of
impotence:--
Hands, do what you're bid;
Bring the balloon of the mind
That bellies and drags in the wind
Into its narrow shed.
The languor and ineffectuality of the image tell us clearly how the poet
has failed in his larger task; its exactness, its precise expression of
an ineffectuality made conscious and condoned, bears equal witness to
the poet's minor probity. He remains an artist by determination, even
though he returns downcast and defeated from the great quest of poetry.
We were inclined at first, seeing those four lines enthroned in majestic
isolation on a page, to find in them evidence of an untoward conceit.
Subsequently they have seemed to reveal a splendid honesty. Although it
has little mysterious and haunting beauty, _The Wild Swans at Coole_ is
indeed a swan song. It is eloquent of final defeat; the following of a
lonely path has ended in the poet's sinking exhausted in a wilderness of
gray. Not even the regret is passionate; it is pitiful.
'I am worn out with dreams,
A weather-worn, marble triton
Among the streams;
And all day long I look
Upon this lady's beauty
As though I had found in book
A pictured beauty,
Pleased to have filled the eyes
Or the discerning ears,
Delighted to be but wise,
For men improve with the years;
And yet, and yet
Is this my dream, or the truth?
O would that we had met
When I had my burning youth;
But I grow old among dreams,
A weather-worn, marble triton
Among the streams.'
It is pitiful because, even now in spite of all his honesty the poet
mistakes the cause of his sorrow. He is worn out not with dreams, but
with the vain effort to master them and submit them to his own creative
energy. He has not subdued them nor built a new world from them; he has
merely followed them like will-o'-the-wisps away from the world he knew.
Now, possessing neither world, he sits by the edge of a barren road that
vanishes into a no-man's land, where is no future, and whence there is
no way back to the past.
'My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor;
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.'
It may be that Mr Yeats has succumbed to the malady of a nation. We do
not know whether such things are possible; we must consider him only in
and for himself. From this angle we can regard him only as a poet whose
creative vigour has failed him when he had to make the highest demands
upon it. His sojourn in the world of the imagination, far from enriching
his vision, has made it infinitely tenuous. Of this impoverishment, as
of all else that has overtaken him, he is agonisedly aware.
'I would find by the edge of that water
The collar-bone of a hare,
Worn thin by the lapping of the water,
And pierce it through with a gimlet, and stare
At the old bitter world where they marry in churches,
And laugh over the untroubled water
At all who marry in churches,
Through the white thin bone of a hare.'
Nothing there remains of the old bitter world which for all its
bitterness is a full world also; but nothing remains of the sweet world
of imagination. Mr Yeats has made the tragic mistake of thinking that to
contemplate it was sufficient. Had he been a great poet he would have
made it his own, by forcing it into the fetters of speech. By
re-creating it, he would have made it permanent; he would have built
landmarks to guide him always back to where the effort of his last
discovery had ended. But now there remains nothing but a handful of the
symbols with which he was content:--
'A Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw,
A Buddha, hand at rest,
Hand lifted up that blest;
And right between these two a girl at play.'
These are no more than the dry bones in the valley of Ezekiel, and,
alas! there is no prophetic fervour to make them live.
Whether Mr Yeats, by some grim fatality, mistook his phantasmagoria for
the product of the creative imagination, or whether (as we prefer to
believe) he made an effort to discipline them to his poetic purpose and
failed, we cannot certainly say. Of this, however, we are certain, that
somehow, somewhere, there has been disaster. He is empty, now. He has
the apparatus of enchantment, but no potency in his soul. He is forced
to fall back upon the artistic honesty which has never forsaken him.
That it is an insufficient reserve let this passage show:--
'For those that love the world serve it in action,
Grow rich, popular, and full of influence,
And should they paint or write still it is action:
The struggle of the fly in marmalade.
The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours,
The sentimentalist himself; while art
Is but a vision of reality....'
Mr Yeats is neither rhetorician nor sentimentalist. He is by structure
and impulse an artist. But structure and impulse are not enough.
Passionate apprehension must be added to them. Because this is lacking
in Mr Yeats those lines, concerned though they are with things he holds
most dear, are prose and not poetry.
[APRIL, 1919.
_The Wisdom of Anatole France_
How few are the wise writers who remain to us? They are so few that it
seems, at moments, that wisdom, like justice of old, is withdrawing from
the world, and that when their fullness of years is accomplished, as,
alas! it soon must be, the wise men who will leave us will have been the
last of their kind. It is true that something akin to wisdom, or rather
a quality whose outward resemblance to wisdom can deceive all but the
elect, will emerge from the ruins of war; but true wisdom is not created
out of the catastrophic shock of disillusionment. An unexpected disaster
is always held to be in some sort undeserved. Yet the impulse to rail at
destiny, be it never so human, is not wise. Wisdom is not bitter; at
worst it is bitter-sweet, and bitter-sweet is the most subtle and
lingering savour of all.
Let us not say in our haste, that without wisdom we are lost. Wisdom is,
after all, but one attitude to life among many. It happens to be the one
which will stand the hardest wear, because it is prepared for all
ill-usage. But hard wear is not the only purpose which an attitude may
serve. We may demand of an attitude that it should enable us to exact
the utmost from ourselves. To refuse to accommodate oneself to the
angularities of life or to make provision beforehand for its
catastrophes is, indeed, folly; but it may be a divine folly. It is, at
all events, a folly to which poets incline. But poets are not wise;
indeed, the poetry of true wisdom is a creation which can, at the best,
be but dimly imagined. Perhaps, of them all, Lucretius had the largest
inkling of what such poetry might be; but he disqualified himself by an
aptitude for ecstasy, which made his poetry superb and his wisdom of no
account. To acquiesce is wise; to be ecstatic in acquiescence is not to
have acquiesced at all. It is to have identified oneself with an
imagined power against whose manifestations, in those moments when no
ecstasy remains, one rebels. It is a megalomania, a sublime
self-deception, a heroic attempt to project the soul on to the side of
destiny, and to believe ourselves the masters of those very powers which
have overwhelmed us.