And love alone can lend you loyalty
--I know and knew it. But, unto the store
Of human deeds divine in all but name,
Was it not worth a little hour or more
To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came
To soothe a time-torn man; even though it be
You love not me?'
On such a seeming fragment of personal experience lies the visible
endorsement of the universe. The hopes not of a lover but of humanity
are crushed beneath its rhythm. The ruthlessness of the event is
intensified in the motion of the poem till one can hear the even pad of
destiny, and a moment comes when to a sense made eager by the strain of
intense attention it seems to have been written by the destiny it
records.
What is the secret of poetic power like this? We do not look for it in
technique, though the technique of this poem is masterly. But the
technique of 'as the hope-hour stroked its sum' is of such a kind that
we know as we read that it proceeds from a sheer compulsive force. For a
moment it startles; a moment more and the echo of those very words is
reverberant with accumulated purpose. They are pitiless as the poem; the
sign of an ultimate obedience is upon them. Whence came the power that
compelled it? Can the source be defined or indicated? We believe it can
be indicated, though not defined. We can show where to look for the
mystery, that in spite of our regard remains a mystery still. We are
persuaded that almost on the instant that it was felt the original
emotion of the poem was endorsed Perhaps it came to the poet as the pain
of a particular and personal experience; but in a little or a long
while--creative time is not measured by days or years--it became, for
him, a part of the texture of the general life. It became a
manifestation of life, almost, nay wholly, in the sacramental sense, a
veritable epiphany. The manifold and inexhaustible quality of life was
focused into a single revelation. A critic's words do not lend
themselves to the necessary precision. We should need to write with
exactly the same power as Mr Hardy when he wrote 'the hope-hour stroked
its sum,' to make our meaning likewise inevitable. The word 'revelation'
is fertile in false suggestion; the creative act of power which we seek
to elucidate is an act of plenary apprehension, by which one
manifestation, one form of life, one experience is seen in its rigorous
relation to all other and to all possible manifestations, forms, and
experiences. It is, we believe, the act which Mr Hardy himself has tried
to formulate in the phrase which is the title of one of his books of
poems--_Moments of Vision_.
Only those who do not read Mr Hardy could make the mistake of supposing
that on his lips such a phrase had a mystical implication. Between
belief and logic lies a third kingdom, which the mystics and the
philosophers alike are too eager to forget--the kingdom of art, no less
the residence of truth than the two other realms, and to some, perhaps,
more authentic even than they. Therefore when we expand the word
'vision' in the phrase to 'æsthetic vision' we mean, not the perception
of beauty, at least in the ordinary sense of that ill-used word, but the
apprehension of truth, the recognition of a complete system of valid
relations incapable of logical statement. Such are the acts of unique
apprehension which Mr Hardy, we believe, implied by his title. In a
'moment of vision' the poet recognises in a single separate incident of
life, life's essential quality. The uniqueness of the whole, the
infinite multiplicity and variety of its elements, are manifested and
apprehended in a part. Since we are here at work on the confines of
intelligible statement, it is better, even at the cost of brutalising a
poem, to choose an example from the book that bears the mysterious name.
The verses that follow come from 'Near Lanivet, 1872.' We choose them as
an example of Mr Hardy's method at less than its best, at a point at
which the scaffolding of his process is just visible.
'There was a stunted hand-post just on the crest.
Only a few feet high:
She was tired, and we stopped in the twilight-time for her rest,
At the crossways close thereby.
'She leant back, being so weary, against its stem,
And laid her arms on its own,
Each open palm stretched out to each end of them,
Her sad face sideways thrown.
'Her white-clothed form at this dim-lit cease of day
Made her look as one crucified
In my gaze at her from the midst of the dusty way,
And hurriedly "Don't," I cried.
'I do not think she heard. Loosing thence she said,
As she stepped forth ready to go,
"I am rested now.--Something strange came into my head;
I wish I had not leant so!'...
'And we dragged on and on, while we seemed to see
In the running of Time's far glass
Her crucified, as she had wondered if she might be
Some day.--Alas, alas!'
Superstition and symbolism, some may say; but they mistakenly invert the
order of the creative process. The poet's act of apprehension is wholly
different from the lover's fear; and of this apprehension the
chance-shaped crucifix is the symbol and not the cause. The
concentration of life's vicissitude upon that white-clothed form was
first recognised by a sovereign act of æsthetic understanding or
intuition; the seeming crucifix supplied a scaffolding for its
expression; it afforded a clue to the method of transposition into words
which might convey the truth thus apprehended; it suggested an
equivalence. The distinction may appear to be hair-drawn, but we believe
that it is vital to the theory of poetry as a whole, and to an
understanding of Mr Hardy's poetry in particular. Indeed, in it must be
sought the meaning of another of his titles, 'Satires of Circumstance,'
where the particular circumstance is neither typical nor fortuitous, but
a symbol necessary to communicate to others the sense of a quality in
life more largely and variously apprehended by the poet. At the risk of
appearing fantastic we will endeavour still further to elucidate our
meaning. The poetic process is, we believe, twofold. The one part, the
discovery of the symbol, the establishment of an equivalence, is what we
may call poetic method. It is concerned with the transposition and
communication of emotion, no matter what the emotion may be, for to
poetic method the emotional material is, strictly, indifferent. The
other part is an esthetic apprehension of significance, the recognition
of the all in the one. This is a specifically poetic act, or rather the
supreme poetic act. Yet it may be absent from poetry. For there is no
necessary connection between poetic apprehension and poetic method.
Poetic method frequently exists without poetic apprehension; and there
is no reason to suppose that the reverse is not also true, for the
recognition of greatness in poetry is probably not the peculiar
privilege of great poets. We have here, at least a principle of division
between major and minor poetry.
Mr Hardy is a major poet; and we are impelled to seek further and ask
what it is that enables such a poet to perform this sovereign act of
apprehension and to recognise the quality of the all in the quality of
the one. We believe that the answer is simple. The great poet knows what
he is looking for. Once more we speak too precisely, and so falsely,
being compelled to use the language of the kingdom of logic to describe
what is being done in the kingdom of art. The poet, we say, knows the
quality for which he seeks; but this knowledge is rather a condition
than a possession of soul. It is a state of responsiveness rather than a
knowledge of that to which he will respond. But it is knowledge inasmuch
as the choice of that to which he will respond is determined by the
condition of his soul. On the purity of that condition depends his
greatness as a poet, and that purity in its turn depends upon his
denying no element of his profound experience. If he denies or forgets,
the synthesis--again the word is a metaphor--which must establish itself
within him is fragmentary and false. The new event can wake but partial
echoes in his soul or none at all; it can neither be received into, nor
can it create a complete relation, and so it passes incommensurable from
limbo into forgetfulness.
Mr Hardy stands high above all other modern poets by the deliberate
purity of his responsiveness. The contagion of the world's slow stain
has not touched him; from the first he held aloof from the general
conspiracy to forget in which not only those who are professional
optimists take a part. Therefore his simplest words have a vehemence and
strangeness of their own:--
'It will have been:
Nor God nor Demon can undo the done,
Unsight the seen
Make muted music be as unbegun
Though things terrene
Groan in their bondage till oblivion supervene.'
What neither God nor Demon can do, men are incessantly at work to
accomplish. Life itself rewards them for their assiduity, for she
scatters her roses chiefly on the paths of those who forget her thorns.
But the great poet remembers both rose and thorn; and it is beyond his
power to remember them otherwise than together.
It was fitting, then, and to some senses inevitable, that Mr Hardy
should have crowned his work as a poet in his old age by a series of
love poems that are unique for power and passion in even the English
language. This late and wonderful flowering has no tinge of miracle; it
has sprung straight from the main stem of Mr Hardy's poetic growth. Into
'Veteris Vestigia Flammas' is distilled the quintessence of the power
that created the Wessex Novels and 'The Dynasts'; all that Mr Hardy has
to tell us of life, the whole of the truth that he has apprehended, is
in these poems, and no poet since poetry began has apprehended or told
us more. _Sunt lacrimæ rerum_.
[NOVEMBER, 1919.
* * * * *
POSTSCRIPT
Three months after this essay was written the first volume of the long
awaited definitive edition of Mr Hardy's works (the Mellstock Edition)
appeared. It was with no common thrill that we read in the precious
pages of introduction the following words confirming the theory upon
which the first part of the essay is largely based.
'Turning now to my verse--to myself the more individual part of my
literary fruitage--I would say that, unlike some of the fiction,
nothing interfered with the writer's freedom in respect of its form
or content. Several of the poems--indeed many--were produced before
novel-writing had been thought of as a pursuit; but few saw the
light till all the novels had been published....
'The few volumes filled by the verse cover a producing period of
some eighteen years first and last, while the seventeen or more
volumes of novels represent correspondingly about four-and-twenty
years. One is reminded by this disproportion in time and result how
much more concise and quintessential expression becomes when given
in rhythmic form than when shaped in the language of prose.'
_Present Condition of English Poetry_
Shall we, or shall we not, be serious? To be serious nowadays is to be
ill-mannered, and what, murmurs the cynic, does it matter? We have our
opinion; we know that there is a good deal of good poetry in the
Georgian book, a little in _Wheels_.[13] We know that there is much bad
poetry in the Georgian book, and less in _Wheels_. We know that there is
one poem in _Wheels_ beside the intense and sombre imagination of which
even the good poetry of the Georgian book pales for a moment. We think
we know more than this. What does it matter? Pick out the good things,
and let the rest go.
[Footnote 13: _Georgian Poetry_, 1918-1919. Edited by E.M. (The
Poetry Bookshop.)
_Wheels_. Fourth Cycle. (Oxford: B.H. Blackwell.)]
And yet, somehow, this question of modern English poetry has become
important for us, as important as the war, important in the same way as
the war. We can even analogise. _Georgian Poetry_ is like the Coalition
Government; _Wheels_ is like the Radical opposition. Out of the one
there issues an indefinable odour of complacent sanctity, an unctuous
redolence of _union sacrée_; out of the other, some acidulation of
perversity. In the coalition poets we find the larger number of good
men, and the larger number of bad ones; in the opposition poets we find
no bad ones with the coalition badness, no good ones with the coalition
goodness, but in a single case a touch of the apocalyptic, intransigent,
passionate honesty that is the mark of the martyr of art or life.
On both sides we have the corporate and the individual flavour; on both
sides we have those individuals-by-courtesy whose flavour is almost
wholly corporate; on both sides the corporate flavour is one that we
find intensely disagreeable. In the coalition we find it noxious, in the
opposition no worse than irritating. No doubt this is because we
recognise a tendency to take the coalition seriously, while the
opposition is held to be ridiculous. But both the coalition and the
opposition--we use both terms in their corporate sense--are unmistakably
the product of the present age. In that sense they are truly
representative and complementary each to the other; they are a fair
sample of the goodness and badness of the literary epoch in which we
live; they are still more remarkable as an index of the complete
confusion of æsthetic values that prevails to-day.
The corporate flavour of the coalition is a false simplicity. Of the
nineteen poets who compose it there are certain individuals whom we
except absolutely from this condemnation, Mr de la Mare, Mr Davies, and
Mr Lawrence; there are others who are more or less exempt from it, Mr
Abercrombie, Mr Sassoon, Mrs Shove, and Mr Nichols; and among the rest
there are varying degrees of saturation. This false simplicity can be
quite subtle. It is compounded of worship of trees and birds and
contemporary poets in about equal proportions; it is sicklied over at
times with a quite perceptible varnish of modernity, and at other times
with what looks to be technical skill, but generally proves to be a
fairly clumsy reminiscence of somebody else's technical skill. The
negative qualities of this _simplesse_ are, however, the most obvious;
the poems imbued with it are devoid of any emotional significance
whatever. If they have an idea it leaves you with the queer feeling that
it is not an idea at all, that it has been defaced, worn smooth by the
rippling of innumerable minds. Then, spread in a luminous haze over
these compounded elements, is a fundamental right-mindedness; you feel,
somehow, that they might have been very wicked, and yet they are very
good. There is nothing disturbing about them; _ils peuvent être mis dans
toutes les mains_; they are kind, generous, even noble. They sympathise
with animate and inanimate nature. They have shining foreheads with big
bumps of benevolence, like Flora Casby's father, and one inclines to
believe that their eyes must be frequently filmed with an honest tear,
if only because their vision is blurred. They are fond of lists of names
which never suggest things; they are sparing of similes. If they use
them they are careful to see they are not too definite, for a definite
simile makes havoc of their constructions, by applying to them a certain
test of reality.
But it is impossible to be serious about them. The more stupid of them
supply the matter for a good laugh; the more clever the stuff of a more
recondite amazement. What _is_ one to do when Mr Monro apostrophises the
force of Gravity in such words as these?--
'By leave of you man places stone on stone;
He scatters seed: you are at once the prop
Among the long roots of his fragile crop
You manufacture for him, and insure
House, harvest, implement, and furniture,
And hold them all secure.'
We are not surprised to learn further that
'I rest my body on your grass,
And let my brain repose in you.'
All that remains to be said is that Mr Monro is fond of dogs ('Can you
smell the rose?' he says to Dog: 'ah, no!') and inclined to fish--both
of which are Georgian inclinations.
Then there is Mr Drinkwater with the enthusiasm of the just man for
moonlit apples--'moon-washed apples of wonder'--and the righteous man's
sense of robust rhythm in this chorus from 'Lincoln':--
'You who know the tenderness
Of old men at eve-tide,
Coming from the hedgerows,
Coming from the plough,
And the wandering caress
Of winds upon the woodside,
When the crying yaffle goes
Underneath the bough.'
Mr Drinkwater, though he cannot write good doggerel, is a very good man.
In this poem he refers to the Sermon on the Mount as 'the words of light
From the mountain-way.'
Mr Squire, who is an infinitely more able writer, would make an
excellent subject for a critical investigation into false simplicity. He
would repay a very close analysis, for he may deceive the elect in the
same way as, we suppose, he deceives himself. His poem 'Rivers' seems to
us a very curious example of the _faux bon_. Not only is the idea
derivative, but the rhythmical treatment also. Here is Mr de la Mare:--
'Sweet is the music of Arabia
In my heart, when out of dreams
I still in the thin clear murk of dawn
Descry her gliding streams;
Hear her strange lutes on the green banks
Ring loud with the grief and delight
Of the dim-silked, dark-haired musicians
In the brooding silence of night.
They haunt me--her lutes and her forests;
No beauty on earth I see
But shadowed with that dream recalls
Her loveliness to me:
Still eyes look coldly upon me,
Cold voices whisper and say--
"He is crazed with the spell of far Arabia,
They have stolen his wits away."'
And here is a verse from Mr Squire:--
'For whatever stream I stand by,
And whatever river I dream of,
There is something still in the back of my mind
From very far away;
There is something I saw and see not,
A country full of rivers
That stirs in my heart and speaks to me
More sure, more dear than they.
'And always I ask and wonder
(Though often I do not know it)
Why does this water not smell like water?...'
To leave the question of reminiscence aside, how the delicate vision of
Mr de la Mare has been coarsened, how commonplace his exquisite
technique has become in the hands of even a first-rate ability! It
remains to be added that Mr Squire is an amateur of nature,--
'And skimming, fork-tailed in the evening air,
When man first was were not the martens there?'--
and a lover of dogs.
Mr Shanks, Mr W.J. Turner, and Mr Freeman belong to the same order. They
have considerable technical accomplishment of the straightforward
kind--and no emotional content. One can find examples of the disastrous
simile in them all. They are all in their degree pseudo-naïves. Mr
Turner wonders in this way:--
'It is strange that a little mud
Should echo with sounds, syllables, and letters,
Should rise up and call a mountain Popocatapetl,
And a green-leafed wood Oleander.'
Of course Mr Turner does not really wonder; those four lines are proof
positive of that. But what matters is not so much the intrinsic value of
the gift as the kindly thought which prompted the giver. Mr Shanks's
speciality is beauty. He also is an amateur of nature. He bids us: 'Hear
the loud night-jar spin his pleasant note.' Of course, Mr Shanks cannot
have heard a real night-jar. His description is proof of that. But
again, it was a kindly thought. Mr Freeman is, like Mr Squire, a more
interesting case, deserving detailed analysis. For the moment we can
only recommend a comparison of his first and second poems in this book
with 'Sabrina Fair' and 'Love in a Valley' respectively.
It is only when we are confronted with the strange blend of technical
skill and an emotional void that we begin to hunt for reminiscences.
Reminiscences are no danger to the real poet. He is the splendid
borrower who lends a new significance to that which he takes. He
incorporates his borrowing in the new thing which he creates; it has its
being there and there alone. One can see the process in the one fine
poem in _Wheels_, Mr Wilfred Owen's 'Strange Meeting':--
'It seemed that out of the battle I escaped
Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped
Through granites which Titanic wars had groined.
Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,
Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.
Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared
With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,
Lifting distressful hands as if to bless.
And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall.
With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained;
Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground,
And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan.
"Strange, friend," I said, "Here is no cause to mourn."
"None," said the other, "save the undone years,
The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours,
Was my life also..."'
The poem which begins with these lines is, we believe, the finest in
these two books, both in intention and achievement. Yet no one can
mistake its source. It comes, almost bodily, from the revised Induction
to 'Hyperion.' The sombre imagination, the sombre rhythm is that of the
dying Keats; the creative impulse is that of Keats.
'None can usurp this height, return'd that shade,
But those to whom the miseries of the world
Are misery, and will not let them rest.'
That is true, word by word, and line by line, of Wilfred Owen's 'Strange
Meeting.' It touches great poetry by more than the fringe; even in its
technique there is the hand of the master to be. Those monosyllabic
assonances are the discovery of genius. We are persuaded that this poem
by a boy like his great forerunner, who had the certainty of death in
his heart, is the most magnificent expression of the emotional
significance of the war that has yet been achieved by English poetry. By
including it in his book, the editor of _Wheels_ has done a great
service to English letters.
Extravagant words, it may be thought. We appeal to the documents. Read
_Georgian Poetry_ and read 'Strange Meeting.' Compare Wilfred Owen's
poem with the very finest things in the Georgian book--Mr Davies's
'Lovely Dames,' or Mr de la Mare's 'The Tryst,' or 'Fare Well,' or the
twenty opening lines of Mr Abercrombie's disappointing poem. You will
not find those beautiful poems less beautiful than they are; but you
will find in 'Strange Meeting' an awe, an immensity, an adequacy to that
which has been most profound in the experience of a generation. You
will, finally, have the standard that has been lost, and the losing of
which makes the confusion of a book like _Georgian Poetry_ possible,
restored to you. You will remember three forgotten things--that poetry
is rooted in emotion, and that it grows by the mastery of emotion, and
that its significance finally depends upon the quality and
comprehensiveness of the emotion. You will recognise that the tricks of
the trade have never been and never will be discovered by which ability
can conjure emptiness into meaning.
It seems hardly worth while to return to _Wheels_. Once the argument has
been pitched on the plane of 'Strange Meeting,' the rest of the
contents of the book become irrelevant. But for the sake of symmetry we
will characterise the corporate flavour of the opposition as false
sophistication. There are the same contemporary reminiscences. Compare
Mr Osbert Sitwell's _English Gothic_ with Mr T.S. Eliot's _Sweeney_; and
you will detect a simple mind persuading itself that it has to deal with
the emotions of a complex one. The spectacle is almost as amusing as
that of the similar process in the Georgian book. Nevertheless, in
general, the affected sophistication here is, as we have said, merely
irritating; while the affected simplicity of the coalition is positively
noxious. Miss Edith Sitwell's deliberate painted toys are a great deal
better than painted canvas trees and fields, masquerading as real ones.
In the poems of Miss Iris Tree a perplexed emotion manages to make its
way through a chaotic technique. She represents the solid impulse which
lies behind the opposition in general. This impulse she describes,
though she is very, very far from making poetry of it, in these not
uninteresting verses:--
'But since we are mere children of this age,
And must in curious ways discover salvation
I will not quit my muddled generation,
But ever plead for Beauty in this rage.