know. We are tolerably certain that it will not produce wise men. It is
too conscious of defeat and too embittered to be wise. Some may seek
that ecstasy of seeming acquiescence of which we have spoken; others,
who do not endeavour to escape the pain by plunging the barb deeper, may
try to shake the dust of life from off their feet. Neither will be wise.
But precisely because they are not wise, they will seek the company of
wise men. Their own attitude will not wear. The ecstasy will fail, the
will to renunciation falter; the gray reality which permits no one to
escape it altogether will filter like a mist into the vision and the
cell. Then they will turn to the wise men. They will find comfort in the
smile to which they could not frame their own lips, and discover in it
more sympathy than they could hope for.
Among the wise men whom they will surely most frequent will be Anatole
France. His company is constant; his attitude durable. There is no
undertone of anguish in his work like that which gives such poignant and
haunting beauty to Tchehov. He has never suffered himself to be so
involved in life as to be maimed by it. But the price he has paid for
his safety has been a renunciation of experience. Only by being involved
in life, perhaps only by being maimed by it, could he have gained that
bitterness of knowledge which is the enemy of wisdom. Not that Anatole
France made a deliberate renunciation: no man of his humanity would of
his own will turn aside. It was instinct which guided him into a
sequestered path, which ran equably by the side of the road of alternate
exaltation and catastrophe which other men of equal genius must travel.
Therefore he has seen men as it were in profile against the sky, but
never face to face. Their runnings, their stumblings and their
gesticulations are a tumultuous portion of the landscape rather than
symbols of an intimate and personal possibility. They lend a baroque
enchantment to the scene.
So it is that in all the characters of Anatole France's work which are
not closely modelled upon his own idiosyncrasy there is something of the
marionette. They are not the less charming for that; nor do they lack a
certain logic, but it is not the logic of personality. They are embodied
comments upon life, but they do not live. And there is for Anatole
France, while he creates them, and for us, while we read about them, no
reason why they should live. For living, in the accepted sense, is an
activity impossible without indulging many illusions; and fervently to
sympathise with characters engaged in the activity demands that their
author should participate in the illusions. He, too, must be surprised
at the disaster which he himself has proved inevitable. It is not enough
that he should pity them; he must share in their effort, and be
discomfited at their discomfiture.
Such exercises of the soul are impossible to a real acquiescence, which
cannot even permit itself the inspiration of the final illusion that the
wreck of human hopes, being ordained, is beautiful. The man who
acquiesces is condemned to stand apart and contemplate a puppet-show
with which he can never really sympathise.
'De toutes les définitions de l'homme la plus mauvaise me paraît
celle qui en fait un animal raisonnable. Je ne me vante pas
excessivement en me donnant pour doué de plus de raison que la
plupart de ceux de mes semblables que j'ai vus de près ou dont j'ai
connu l'histoire. La raison habite rarement les âmes communes, et
bien plus rarement encore les grands esprits.... J'appelle
raisonnable celui qui accorde sa raison particulière avec la raison
universelle, de manière à n'être jamais trop surpris de ce qui
arrive et à s'y accommoder tant bien que mal; j'appelle raisonnable
celui qui, observant le désordre de la nature et la folie humaine,
ne s'obstine point à y voir de l'ordre et de la sagesse; j'appelle
raisonnable enfin celui qui ne s'efforce pas de l'être.'
The chasm between living and being wise (which is to be _raisonnable_)
is manifest. The condition of living is to be perpetually surprised,
incessantly indignant or exultant, at what happens. To bridge the chasm
there is for the wise man only one way. He must cast back in his memory
to the time when he, too, was surprised and indignant. No man is, after
all, born wise, though he may be born with an instinct for wisdom. Thus
Anatole France touches us most nearly when he describes his childhood.
The innocent, wayward, positive, romantic little Pierre Nozière[4] is a
human being to a degree to which no other figures in the master's comedy
of unreason are. And it is evident that Anatole France himself finds him
by far the most attractive of them all. He can almost persuade himself,
at moments, that he still is the child he was, as in the exquisite story
of how, when he had been to a truly royal chocolate shop, he attempted
to reproduce its splendours in play. At one point his invention and his
memory failed him, and he turned to his mother to ask: 'Est-ce celui qui
vend ou celui qui achète qui donne de l'argent?'
'Je ne devais jamais connaître le prix de l'argent. Tel j'étais à
trois ans ou trois ans et demi dans le cabinet tapissé de boutons de
roses, tel je restai jusqu'à la vieillesse, qui m'est légère, comme
elle l'est à toutes les âmes exemptes d'avarice et d'orgueil. Non,
maman, je n'ai jamais connu le prix de l'argent. Je ne le connais
pas encore, ou plutôt je le connais trop bien.'
[Footnote 4: _Le Petit Pierre_. Par Anatole France. (Paris:
Calmann-Lévy.)]
To know a thing too well is by worlds removed from not to know it at
all, and Anatole France does not elsewhere similarly attempt to indulge
the illusion of unbroken innocence. He who refused to put a mark of
interrogation after 'What is God,' in defiance of his mother, because he
knew, now has to restrain himself from putting one after everything he
writes or thinks. 'Ma pauvre mère, si elle vivait, me dirait peut-être
que maintenant j'en mets trop.' Yes, Anatole France is wise, and far
removed from childish follies. And, perhaps, it is precisely because of
his wisdom that he can so exactly discern the enchantment of his
childhood. So few men grow up. The majority remain hobbledehoys
throughout life; all the disabilities and none of the unique capacities
of childhood remain. There are a few who, in spite of all experience,
retain both; they are the poets and the _grands esprits_. There are
fewer still who learn utterly to renounce childish things; and they are
the wise men.
'Je suis une autre personne que l'enfant dont je parle. Nous n'avons
plus en commun, lui et moi, un atome de substance ni de pensée.
Maintenant qu'il m'est devenu tout à fait étranger, je puis en sa
compagnie me distraire de la mienne. Je l'aime, moi qui ne m'aime ni
ne me haïs. Il m'est doux de vivre en pensée les jours qu'il vivait
et je souffre de respirer l'air du temps où nous sommes.'
Not otherwise is it with us and Anatole France. We may have little in
common with his thought--the community we often imagine comes of
self-deception--but it is sweet for us to inhabit his mind for a while.
His touch is potent to soothe our fitful fevers.
[APRIL, 1919.
_Gerard Manley Hopkins_
Modern poetry, like the modern consciousness of which it is the epitome,
seems to stand irresolute at a crossways with no signpost. It is hardly
conscious of its own indecision, which it manages to conceal from itself
by insisting that it is lyrical, whereas it is merely impressionist. The
value of impressions depends upon the quality of the mind which receives
and renders them, and to be lyrical demands at least as firm a temper of
the mind, as definite and unfaltering a general direction, as to be
epic. Roughly speaking, the present poetical fashion may, with a few
conspicuous exceptions, be described as poetry without tears. The poet
may assume a hundred personalities in as many poems, or manifest a
hundred influences, or he may work a single sham personality threadbare
or render piecemeal an undigested influence. What he may not do, or do
only at the risk of being unfashionable, is to attempt what we may call,
for the lack of a better word, the logical progression of an _oeuvre_.
One has no sense of the rhythm of an achievement. There is an output of
scraps, which are scraps, not because they are small, but because one
scrap stands in no organic relation to another in the poet's work.
Instead of lending each other strength, they betray each other's
weakness.
Yet the organic progression for which we look, generally in vain, is not
peculiar to poetic genius of the highest rank. If it were, we might be
accused of mere querulousness. The rhythm of personality is hard,
indeed, to achieve. The simple mind and the single outlook are now too
rare to be considered as near possibilities, while the task of tempering
a mind to a comprehensive adequacy to modern experience is not an easy
one. The desire to escape and the desire to be lost in life were
probably never so intimately associated as they are now; and it is a
little preposterous to ask a moth fluttering round a candle-flame to see
life steadily and see it whole. We happen to have been born into an age
without perspective; hence our idolatry for the one living poet and
prose writer who has it and comes, or appears to come, from another age.
But another rhythm is possible. No doubt it would be mistaken to
consider this rhythm as in fact wholly divorced from the rhythm of
personality; it probably demands at least a minimum of personal
coherence in its possessor. For critical purposes, however, they are
distinct. This second and subsidiary rhythm is that of technical
progression. The single pursuit of even the most subordinate artistic
intention gives unity, significance, mass to a poet's work. When
Verlaine declares 'de la musique avant toute chose,' we know where we
are. And we know this not in the obvious sense of expecting his verse to
be predominantly musical; but in the more important sense of desiring to
take a man seriously who declares for anything 'avant toute chose.'
It is the 'avant toute chose' that matters, not as a profession of
faith--we do not greatly like professions of faith--but as the guarantee
of the universal in the particular, of the _dianoia_ in the episode. It
is the 'avant toute chose' that we chiefly miss in modern poetry and
modern society and in their quaint concatenations. It is the 'avant
toute chose' that leads us to respect both Mr Hardy and Mr Bridges,
though we give all our affection to one of them. It is the 'avant toute
chose' that compels us to admire the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins[5];
it is the 'avant toute chose' in his work, which, as we believe, would
have condemned him to obscurity to-day, if he had not (after many years)
had Mr Bridges, who was his friend, to stand sponsor and the Oxford
University Press to stand the racket. Apparently Mr Bridges himself is
something of our opinion, for his introductory sonnet ends on a
disdainful note:--
'Go forth: amidst our chaffinch flock display
Thy plumage of far wonder and heavenward flight!'
[Footnote 5: _Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins_. Edited with notes by
Robert Bridges. (Oxford: University Press.)]
It is from a sonnet written by Hopkins to Mr Bridges that we take the
most concise expression of his artistic intention, for the poet's
explanatory preface is not merely technical, but is written in a
technical language peculiar to himself. Moreover, its scope is small;
the sonnet tells us more in two lines than the preface in four pages.
'O then if in my lagging lines you miss
The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation....'
There is his 'avant toute chose.' Perhaps it seems very like 'de la
musique.' But it tells us more about Hopkins's music than Verlaine's
line told us about his. This music is of a particular kind, not the
'sanglots du violon,' but pre-eminently the music of song, the music
most proper to lyrical verse. If one were to seek in English the lyrical
poem to which Hopkins's definition could be most fittingly applied, one
would find Shelley's 'Skylark.' A technical progression onwards from the
'Skylark' is accordingly the main line of Hopkins's poetical evolution.
There are other, stranger threads interwoven; but this is the chief.
Swinburne, rightly enough if the intention of true song is considered,
appears hardly to have existed for Hopkins, though he was his
contemporary. There is an element of Keats in his epithets, a half-echo
in 'whorled ear' and 'lark-charmèd'; there is an aspiration after
Milton's architectonic in the construction of the later sonnets and the
most lucid of the fragments,'Epithalamion.' But the central point of
departure is the 'Skylark.' The 'May Magnificat' is evidence of
Hopkins's achievement in the direct line:--
'Ask of her, the mighty mother:
Her reply puts this other
Question: What is Spring?--
Growth in everything--
Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
Grass and greenworld all together;
Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
Throstle above her nested
Cluster of bugle-blue eggs thin
Forms and warms the life within....
... When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple
Bloom lights the orchard-apple,
And thicket and thorp are merry
With silver-surfèd cherry,
And azuring-over graybell makes
Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes,
And magic cuckoo-call
Caps, clears, and clinches all....'
That is the primary element manifested in one of its simplest, most
recognisable, and some may feel most beautiful forms. But a melody so
simple, though it is perhaps the swiftest of which the English language
is capable without the obscurity which comes of the drowning of sense in
sound, did not satisfy Hopkins. He aimed at complex internal harmonies,
at a counterpoint of rhythm; for this more complex element he coined an
expressive word of his own:--
'But as air, melody, is what strikes me most of all in music and
design in painting, so design, pattern, or what I am in the habit of
calling _inscape_ is what I above all aim at in poetry.'
Here, then, in so many words, is Hopkins's 'avant toute chose' at a
higher level of elaboration. 'Inscape' is still, in spite of the
apparent differentiation, musical; but a quality of formalism seems to
have entered with the specific designation. With formalism comes
rigidity; and in this case the rigidity is bound to overwhelm the sense.
For the relative constant in the composition of poetry is the law of
language which admits only a certain amount of adaptation. Musical
design must be subordinate to it, and the poet should be aware that even
in speaking of musical design he is indulging a metaphor. Hopkins
admitted this, if we may judge by his practice, only towards the end of
his life. There is no escape by sound from the meaning of the posthumous
sonnets, though we may hesitate to pronounce whether this directness was
due to a modification of his poetical principles or to the urgency of
the content of the sonnets, which, concerned with a matter of life and
death, would permit no obscuring of their sense for musical reasons.
'I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.
What hours, O what black hours we have spent
This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!
And more must in yet longer light's delay.
With witness I speak this. But where I say
Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament
Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent
To dearest him that lives, alas! away.'
There is compression, but not beyond immediate comprehension; music, but
a music of overtones; rhythm, but a rhythm which explicates meaning and
makes it more intense.
Between the 'May Magnificat' and these sonnets is the bulk of Hopkins's
poetical work and his peculiar achievement. Perhaps it could be regarded
as a phase in his evolution towards the 'more balanced and Miltonic
style' which he hoped for, and of which the posthumous sonnets are
precursors; but the attempt to see him from this angle would be
perverse. Hopkins was not the man to feel, save on exceptional
occasions, that urgency of content of which we have spoken. The
communication of thought was seldom the dominant impulse of his creative
moment, and it is curious how simple his thought often proves to be when
the obscurity of his language has been penetrated. Musical elaboration
is the chief characteristic of his work, and for this reason what seem
to be the strangest of his experiments are his most essential
achievement So, for instance, 'The Golden Echo':--
'Spare!
There is one, yes, I have one (Hush there!);
Only not within seeing of sun,
Not within the singeing of the strong sun,
Tall sun's tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth's air,
Somewhere else where there is, ah, well, where! one,
One. Yes, I can tell such a key, I do know such a place,
Where, whatever's prized and passes of us, everything that's fresh and
fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and
swiftly away with, done away with, undone,
Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet clearly and dangerously sweet
Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matchèd face,
The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet,
Never fleets more, fastened with the tenderest truth
To its own best being and its loveliness of youth....'
Than this, Hopkins truly wrote, 'I never did anything more musical.' By
his own verdict and his own standards it is therefore the finest thing
that Hopkins did. Yet even here, where the general beauty is undoubted,
is not the music too obvious? Is it not always on the point of
degenerating into a jingle--as much an exhibition of the limitations of
a poetical theory as of its capabilities? The tyranny of the 'avant
toute chose' upon a mind in which the other things were not stubborn and
self-assertive is apparent. Hopkins's mind was irresolute concerning the
quality of his own poetical ideal. A coarse and clumsy assonance seldom
spread its snare in vain. Exquisite openings are involved in disaster:--
'When will you ever, Peace, wild wood dove, shy wings shut,
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I'll not play hypocrite
To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace....'
And the more wonderful opening of 'Windhover' likewise sinks, far less
disastrously, but still perceptibly:--
'I caught this morning morning's minion, kingdom of daylight's dauphin,
dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and the gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,--the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!'
We have no doubt that 'stirred for a bird' was an added excellence to
the poet's ear; to our sense it is a serious blemish on lines which have
'the roll, the rise, the carol, the creation.'
There is no good reason why we should give characteristic specimens of
the poet's obscurity, since our aim is to induce people to read him. The
obscurities will slowly vanish and something of the intention appear;
and they will find in him many of the strange beauties won by men who
push on to the borderlands of their science; they will speculate whether
the failure of his whole achievement was due to the starvation of
experience which his vocation imposed upon him, or to a fundamental vice
in his poetical endeavour. For ourselves we believe that the former was
the true cause. His 'avant toute chose' whirling dizzily in a spiritual
vacuum, met with no salutary resistance to modify, inform, and
strengthen it. Hopkins told the truth of himself--the reason why he
must remain a poets' poet:--
I want the one rapture of an inspiration.
O then if in my lagging lines you miss
The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation,
My winter world, that scarcely yields that bliss
Now, yields you, with some sighs, our explanation.'
[JUNE, 1919.
_The Problem of Keats_
It is a subject for congratulation that a second edition of Sir Sidney
Colvin's life of Keats[6] has been called for by the public: first,
because it is a good, a very good book, and secondly, because all
evidence of a general curiosity concerning a poet so great and so
greatly to be loved must be counted for righteousness. The impassioned
and intimate sympathy which is felt--as we may at least conclude--by a
portion of the present generation for Keats is a motion of the
consciousness which stands in a right and natural order. Keats is with
us; and it argues much for a generous elasticity in Sir Sidney Colvin's
mind, which we have neither the right nor the custom to expect in an
older generation, that he should have had more than a sidelong vision of
at least one aspect of the community between his poet-hero and a younger
race which has had the destiny to produce far more heroes than poets.
Commenting upon the inability of the late Mr Courthope to appreciate
Keats, Sir Sidney writes:--
'He supposed that Keats was indifferent to history or politics. But
of history he was in fact an assiduous reader, and the secret of his
indifference to politics, so far as it existed, was that those of
his own time had to men of his years and way of thinking been a
disillusion,--that the saving of the world from the grip of one
great overshadowing tyranny had but ended in reinstating a number of
ancient and minor tyrannies less interesting but not less
tyrannical. To that which lies behind and above politics and history
to the general destinies, aspirations, and tribulations of the race,
he was, as we have seen, not indifferent but only tragically and
acutely sensitive.'
[Footnote 6: _John Keats: His Life and Poetry, His Friends, Critics,
and After-fame_. By Sidney Colvin. Second edition. (Macmillan.)]
We believe that both the positive and the negative of that vindication
might be exemplified among chosen spirits to-day, living or untimely
dead; but we desire, not to enlist Sir Sidney in a cause, but only to
make apparent the reason why, in spite of minor dissents and inevitable
differences of estimation, our sympathy with him is enduring. It may be
that we have chosen to identify ourselves so closely with Keats that we
feel to Sir Sidney the attachment that is reserved for the staunch
friend of a friend who is dead; but we do not believe that this is so.
We are rather attached by the sense of a loyalty that exists in and for
itself; more intimate repercussions may follow, but they can follow only
when the critical honesty, the determination to let Keats be valid as
Keats, whatever it might cost (and we can see that it sometimes costs
Sir Sidney not a little), has impressed itself upon us.