Unto simplicity a beautiful content,
Only when battle breaks me and my strength is spent
Will I give back my body to the fields.'
There is the opposition. Against the righteous man, the _mauvais
sujet_. We sympathise with the _mauvais sujet_. If he is persistent and
laborious enough, he may achieve poetry. But he must travel alone. In
order to be loyal to your age you must make up your mind what your age
is. To be muddled yourself is not loyalty, but treachery, even to a
muddled generation.
[DECEMBER, 1919.
_The Nostalgia of Mr Masefield_
Mr Masefiled is gradually finding his way to his self-appointed end,
which is the glorification of England in narrative verse. _Reynard the
Fox_ marks we believe, the end of a stage in his progress to this goal.
He has reached a point at which his mannerisms have been so subdued that
they no longer sensibly impede the movement of his verse, a point at
which we may begin to speak (though not too loud) of mastery. We feel
that he now approaches what he desires to do with some certainty of
doing it, so that we in our turn can approach some other questions with
some hope of answering them.
The questions are various; but they radiate from and enter again into
the old question whether what he is doing, and beginning to do well, is
worth while doing, or rather whether it will have been worth while doing
fifty years hence. For we have no doubt at all in our mind that, in
comparison with the bulk of contemporary poetry, such work as _Reynard
the Fox_ is valuable. We may use the old rough distinction and ask first
whether _Reynard the Fox_ is durable in virtue of its substance, and
second, whether it is durable in virtue of its form.
The glorification of England! There are some who would give their souls
to be able to glorify her as she has been glorified, by Shakespeare, by
Milton, by Wordsworth, and by Hardy. For an Englishman there is no
richer inspiration, no finer theme; to have one's speech and thought
saturated by the fragrance of this lovely and pleasant land was once
the birthright of English poets and novelists. But something has crept
between us and it, dividing. Instead of an instinctive love, there is a
conscious desire of England; instead of slow saturation, a desperate
plunge into its mystery. The fragrance does not come at its own sweet
will; we clutch at it. It does not enfold and pervade our most arduous
speculations; no involuntary sweetness comes flooding in upon our
confrontation of human destinies. Hardy is the last of that great line.
If we long for sweetness--as we do long for it, and with how poignant a
pain!--we must seek it out, like men who rush dusty and irritable from
the babble and fever of the town. The rhythm of the earth never enters
into their gait; they are like spies among the birds and flowers, like
collectors of antique furniture in the haunts of peace. The Georgians
snatch at nature; they are never part of it. And there is some element
of this desperation in Mr Masefield. We feel in him an anxiety to load
every rift with ore of this particular kind, a deliberate intention to
emphasise that which is most English in the English country-side.
How shall we say it? It is not that he makes a parade of arcane
knowledge. The word 'parade' does injustice to his indubitable
integrity. But we seem to detect behind his superfluity of technical,
and at times archaic phrase, an unconscious desire to convince himself
that he is saturated in essential Englishness, and we incline to think
that even his choice of an actual subject was less inevitable than
self-imposed. He would isolate the quality he would capture, have it
more wholly within his grasp; yet, in some subtle way, it finally
eludes him. The intention is in excess, and in the manner of its
execution everything is (though often very subtly) in excess also. The
music of English place-names, for instance is too insistent; no one into
whom they had entered with the English air itself would use them with so
manifest an admiration.
Perhaps a comparison may bring definition nearer. The first part of Mr
Masefield's poem, which describes the meet and the assembled persons one
by one, recalls, not merely by the general cast of the subject, but by
many actual turns of phrase, Chaucer's _Prologue_. Mr Masefield's parson
has more than one point of resemblance to Chaucer's Monk:--
'An out-ryder, that loved venerye;
A manly man to ben an abbot able....'
But it would take too long to quote both pictures. We may choose for our
juxtaposition the Prioress and one of Mr Masefield's young ladies:--
'Behind them rode her daughter Belle,
A strange, shy, lovely girl, whose face
Was sweet with thought and proud with race,
And bright with joy at riding there.
She was as good as blowing air,
But shy and difficult to know.
The kittens in the barley-mow,
The setter's toothless puppies sprawling,
The blackbird in the apple calling,
All knew her spirit more than we.
So delicate these maidens be
In loving lovely helpless things.'
And here is the Prioress:--
'But for to speken of hir conscience,
She was so charitable and so pitous,
She wolde weepe if that she sawe a mous
Caught in a trappe, if it were ded or bledde.
Of smalle houndes had she, that she fed
With rosted flesh, or milk, or wastel bread,
But sore wepte she if oon of hem were ded
Or if men smote it with a yerde smerte:
And all was conscience and tendere herte.'
Ful semely hir wympel pynched was;
His nose tretys; hir eyen greye as glas;
Hir mouth full small, and thereto soft and red,
But sikerly she hadde a fair forhed.'
There is in the Chaucer a naturalness, a lack of emphasis, a confidence
that the object will not fail to make its own impression, beside which
Mr Masefield's demonstration and underlining seem almost _malsain_. How
far outside the true picture now appears that 'blackbird in the apple
calling,' and how tainted by the desperate _bergerie_ of the Georgian
era!
It is, we admit, a portentous experiment to make, to set Mr Masefield's
prologue beside Chaucer's. But not only is it a tribute to Mr Masefield
that he brought us to reading Chaucer over again, but the comparison is
at bottom just. Chaucer is not what we understand by a great poet; he
has none of the imaginative comprehension and little of the music that
belong to one: but he has perdurable qualities. He is at home with his
speech and at home with his world; by his side Mr Masefield seems
nervous and uncertain about both. He belongs, in fact, to a race (or a
generation) of poets who have come to feel a necessity of overloading
every rift with ore. The question is whether such a man can hope to
express the glory and the fragrance of the English country-side.
Can there be an element of permanence in a poem of which the ultimate
impulse is a _nostalgie de la boue_ that betrays itself in line after
line, a nostalgia so conscious of separation that it cannot trust that
any associations will be evoked by an unemphasised appeal? Mr Masefield,
in his fervour to grasp at that which for all his love is still alien to
him, seems almost to shovel English mud into his pages; he cannot (and
rightly cannot) persuade himself that the scent of the mud will be there
otherwise. For the same reason he must make his heroes like himself.
Here, for example, is the first whip, Tom Dansey:--
'His pleasure lay in hounds and horses;
He loved the Seven Springs water-courses,
Those flashing brooks (in good sound grass,
Where scent would hang like breath on glass).
He loved the English country-side;
The wine-leaved bramble in the ride,
The lichen on the apple-trees,
The poultry ranging on the lees,
The farms, the moist earth-smelling cover,
His wife's green grave at Mitcheldover,
Where snowdrops pushed at the first thaw.
Under his hide his heart was raw
With joy and pity of these things...'
That 'raw heart' marks the outsider, the victim of nostalgia. Apart from
the fact that it is a manifest artistic blemish to impute it to the
first whip of a pack of foxhounds, the language is such that it would
be a mistake to impute it to anybody; and with that we come to the
question of Mr Masefield's style in general.
As if to prove how rough indeed was the provisionally accepted
distinction between substance and form, we have for a long while already
been discussing Mr Masefield's style under a specific aspect. But the
particular overstrain we have been examining is part of Mr Masefield's
general condition. Overstrain is permanent with him. If we do not find
it in his actual language (and, as we have said, he is ridding himself
of the worst of his exaggerations) we are sure to find it in the very
vitals of his artistic effort. He is seeking always to be that which he
is not, to lash himself into the illusion of a certainty which he knows
he can never wholly possess.
'From the Gallows Hill to the Kineton Copse
There were ten ploughed fields, like ten full-stops,
All wet red clay, where a horse's foot
Would be swathed, feet thick, like an ash-tree root.
The fox raced on, on the headlands firm,
Where his swift feet scared the coupling worm;
The rooks rose raving to curse him raw,
He snarled a sneer at their swoop and caw.
Then on, then on, down a half-ploughed field
Where a ship-like plough drove glitter-keeled,
With a bay horse near and a white horse leading,
And a man saying "Zook," and the red earth bleeding.'
The rasp of exacerbation is not to be mistaken. It comes, we believe,
from a consciousness of anæmia, a frenetic reaction towards what used,
some years ago, to be called 'blood and guts.'
And here, perhaps, we have the secret of Mr Masefield and of our
sympathy with him. His work, for all its surface robustness and
right-thinking (which has at least the advantage that it will secure for
this 'epic of fox-hunting' a place in the library of every country
house), is as deeply debilitated by reaction as any of our time. Its
colour is hectic; its tempo feverish. He has sought the healing virtue
where he believed it undefiled, in that miraculous English country whose
magic (as Mr Masefield so well knows) is in Shakespeare, and whose
strong rhythm is in Hardy. But the virtue eludes all conscious
inquisition. The man who seeks it feverishly sees riot where there is
peace. And may it not be, in the long run, that Mr Masefield would have
done better not to delude himself into an identification he cannot feel,
but rather to face his own disquiet where alone the artist can master
it, in his consciousness? We will not presume to answer, mindful that Mr
Masefield may not recognise himself in our mirror, but we will content
ourselves with recording our conviction that in spite of the almost
heroic effort that has gone to its composition _Reynard the Fox_ lacks
all the qualities essential to durability.
[JANUARY, 1920.
_The Lost Legions_
One day, we believe, a great book will be written, informed by the
breath which moves the Spirits of Pity in Mr Hardy's _Dynasts_. It will
be a delicate, yet undeviating record of the spiritual awareness of the
generation that perished in the war. It will be a work of genius, for
the essence that must be captured within it is volatile beyond belief,
almost beyond imagination. We know of its existence by signs hardly more
material than a dream-memory of beating wings or an instinctive, yet all
but inexplicable refusal of that which has been offered us in its stead.
The autobiographer-novelists have been legion, yet we turn from them all
with a slow shake of the head. 'No, it was not that. Had we lost only
that we could have forgotten. It was not that.'
No, it was the spirit that troubled, as in dream, the waters of the
pool, some influence which trembled between silence and a sound, a
precarious confidence, an unavowed quest, a wisdom that came not of
years or experience, a dissatisfaction, a doubt, a devotion, some
strange presentiment, it may have been, of the bitter years in store, in
memory an ineffable, irrevocable beauty, a visible seal on the forehead
of a generation.
'When the lamp is shattered.
The light in the dust lies dead--
When the cloud is scattered
The rainbow's glory is shed.
When the lute is broken,
Sweet tones are remembered not...'
Yet out of a thousand fragments this memory must be created anew in a
form that will outlast the years, for it was precious. It was something
that would vindicate an epoch against the sickening adulation of the
hero-makers and against the charge of spiritual sterility; a light in
whose gleam the bewildering non-achievements of the present age, the art
which seems not even to desire to be art, the faith which seems not to
desire to be faith, have substance and meaning. It was shot through and
through by an impulse of paradox, an unconscious straining after the
impossible, gathered into two or three tremulous years which passed too
swiftly to achieve their own expression. Now, what remains of youth is
cynical, is successful, publicly exploits itself. It was not cynical
then.
Elements of the influence that was are remembered only if they lasted
long enough to receive a name. There was Unanimism. The name is
remembered; perhaps the books are read. But it will not be found in the
books. They are childish, just as the English novels which endeavoured
to portray the soul of the generation were coarse and conceited. Behind
all the conscious manifestations of cleverness and complexity lay a
fundamental candour of which only a flickering gleam can now be
recaptured. It glints on a page of M. Romains's _Europe_; the memory of
it haunts Wilfred Owen's poems; it touches Keeling's letters; it hovers
over these letters of Charles Sorley.[14] From a hundred strange
lurking-places it must be gathered by pious and sensitive fingers and
withdrawn from under the very edge of the scythe-blade of time, for if
it wander longer without a habitation it will be lost for ever.
[Footnote 14: _The Letters of Charles Sorley_. (Cambridge University
Press.)]
Charles Sorley was the youngest fringe of the strange unity that
included him and men by ten years his senior. He had not, as they had,
plunged with fantastic hopes and unspoken fears into the world. He had
not learned the slogans of the day. But, seeing that the slogans were
only a disguise for the undefined desires which inspired them he lost
little and gained much thereby. The years at Oxford in which he would
have taken a temporary sameness, a sameness in the long run protective
and strengthening, were spared him. In his letters we have him
unspoiled, as the sentimentalists would say--not yet with the
distraction of protective colouring.
One who knew him better than the mere reader of his letters can pretend
to know him declares that, in spite of his poems, which are among the
most remarkable of those of the boy-poets killed in the war, Sorley
would not have been a man of letters. The evidence of the letters
themselves is heavy against the view; they insist upon being regarded as
the letters of a potential writer. But a passionate interest in
literature is not the inevitable prelude to a life as a writer, and
although it is impossible to consider any thread in Sorley's letters as
of importance comparable to that which joins the enthronement and
dethronement of his literary idols, we shall regard it as the record of
a movement of soul which might as easily find expression (as did
Keeling's) in other than literary activities. It takes more than
literary men to make a generation, after all.
And Sorley was typical above all in this, that, passionate and
penetrating as was his devotion to literature, he never looked upon it
as a thing existing in and for itself. It was, to him and his kind, the
satisfaction of an impulse other and more complex than the æsthetic. Art
was a means and not an end to him, and it is perhaps the apprehension of
this that has led one who endeavoured in vain to reconcile Sorley to
Pater into rash prognostication. Sorley would never have been an artist
in Pater's way; he belonged to his own generation, to which _l'art pour
l'art_ had ceased to have meaning. There had come a pause, a throbbing
silence, from which art might have emerged, may even now after the
appointed time arise, with strange validities undreamed of or forgotten.
Let us not prophesy; let us be content with the recognition that
Sorley's generation was too keenly, perhaps too disastrously aware of
destinies, of
'the beating of the wings of Love
Shut out from his creation,'
to seek the comfort of the ivory tower.
Sorley first appears before us radiant with the white-heat of a
schoolboy enthusiasm for Masefield. Masefield is--how we remember the
feeling!--the poet who has lived; his naked reality tears through 'the
lace of putrid sentimentalism (educing the effeminate in man) which
rotters like Tennyson and Swinburne have taught his (the superficial
man's) soul to love.' It tears through more than Tennyson and Swinburne.
The greatest go down before him.
'So you see what I think of John Masefield. When I say that he has
the rapidity, simplicity, nobility of Homer, with the power of
drawing character, the dramatic truth to life of Shakespeare, along
with a moral and emotional strength and elevation which is all his
own, and therefore I am prepared to put him above the level of these
two great men--I do not expect you to agree with me.'--(From a paper
read at Marlborough, November, 1912.)
That was Sorley at seventeen, and that, it seems to us, is the quality
of enthusiasm which should be felt by a boy of seventeen if he is to
make his mark. It is infinitely more important to have felt that flaming
enthusiasm for an idol who will be cast down than to have felt what we
ought to feel for Shakespeare and Homer. The gates of heaven are opened
by strange keys, but they must be our own.
Within six months Masefield had gone the way of all flesh. In a paper on
_The Shropshire Lad_ (May, 1913), curious both for critical subtlety and
the faint taste of disillusion, Sorley was saying: 'His (Masefield's)
return (to the earth) was purely emotional, and probably less
interesting than the purely intellectual return of Meredith.' At the
beginning of 1914, having gained a Scholarship at University College,
Oxford, he went to Germany. Just before going he wrote:--
'I am just discovering Thomas Hardy. There are two methods of
discovery. One is when Columbus discovers America. The other is when
some one begins to read a famous author who has already run into
seventy editions, and refuses to speak about anything else, and
considers every one else who reads the author's works his own
special converts. Mine is the second method. I am more or less
Hardy-drunk.'
The humorous exactness and detachment of the description are remarkable,
and we feel that there was more than the supersession of a small by a
great idol in this second phase. By April he is at Jena, 'only 15 miles
from Goethe's grave, whose inhabitant has taken the place of Thomas
Hardy (successor to Masefield) as my favourite prophet.'
'I hope (if nothing else) before I leave Germany to get a thorough
hang of _Faust_.... The worst of a piece like _Faust_ is that it
completely dries up any creative instincts or attempts in oneself.
There is nothing that I have ever thought or ever read that is not
somewhere contained in it, and (what is worse) explained in it.'
He had a sublime contempt for any one with whom he was not drunk. He
lumped together 'nasty old Lyttons, Carlyles, and Dickenses.' And the
intoxication itself was swift and fleeting. There was something wrong
with Goethe by July; it is his 'entirely intellectual' life.
'If Goethe really died saying "more light," it was very silly of
him: what _he_ wanted was more warmth.'
And he writes home for Richard Jefferies, the man of his own county--for
through Marlborough he had made himself the adopted son of the Wiltshire
Downs.
'In the midst of my setting up and smashing of deities--Masefield,
Hardy, Goethe--I always fall back on Richard Jefferies wandering
about in the background. I have at least the tie of locality with
him.'
A day or two after we incidentally discover that Meredith is up (though
not on Olympus) from a denunciation of Browning on the queer non- (or
super-) æsthetic grounds of which we have spoken:--
'There is much in B. I like. But my feeling towards him has (ever
since I read his life) been that of his to the "Lost Leader." I
cannot understand him consenting to live a purely literary life in
Italy, or (worse still) consenting to be lionised by fashionable
London society. And then I always feel that if less people read
Browning, more would read Meredith (his poetry, I mean.)'
Then, while he was walking in the Moselle Valley, came the war. He had
loved Germany, and the force of his love kept him strangely free from
illusions; he was not the stuff that "our modern Elizabethans" are made
of. The keen candour of spiritual innocence is in what he wrote while
training at Shorncliffe:--
'For the joke of seeing an obviously just cause defeated, I hope
Germany will win. It would do the world good, and show that real
faith is not that which says "we _must_ win for our cause is just,"
but that which says "our cause is just: therefore we can disregard
defeat."'...
'England--I am sick of the sound of the word. In training to fight
for England, I am training to fight for that deliberate hypocrisy,
that terrible middle-class sloth of outlook and appalling
"imaginative indolence" that has marked us out from generation to
generation.... And yet we have the impudence to write down Germany
(who with all their bigotry are at least seekers) as "Huns," because
they are doing what every brave man ought to do and making
experiments in morality. Not that I approve of the experiment in
this particular case. Indeed I think that after the war all brave
men will renounce their country and confess that they are strangers
and pilgrims on the earth. "For they that say such things declare
plainly that they seek a country." But all these convictions are
useless for me to state since I have not had the courage of them.
What a worm one is under the cart-wheels--big, clumsy, careless,
lumbering cart-wheels--of public opinion. I might have been giving
my mind to fight against Sloth and Stupidity: instead, I am giving
my body (by a refinement of cowardice) to fight against the most
enterprising nation in the world.'
The wise arm-chair patriots will shake their heads; but there is more
wisdom of spirit in these words than in all the newspaper leaders
written throughout the war. Sorley was fighting for more than he said;
he was fighting for his Wiltshire Downs as well. But he fought in
complete and utter detachment. He died too soon (in October, 1915), to
suffer the cumulative torment of those who lasted into the long agony of
1917. There is little bitterness in his letters; they have to the last
always the crystal clarity of the vision of the unbroken.
His intellectual evolution went on to the end. No wonder that he found
Rupert Brooke's sonnets overpraised:--
'He is far too obsessed with his own sacrifice.... It was not that
"they" gave up anything of that list he gives in one sonnet: but
that the essence of these things had been endangered by
circumstances over which he had no control, and he must fight to
recapture them. He has clothed his attitude in fine words: but he
has taken the sentimental attitude.'
Remember that a boy of nineteen is writing, and think how keen is this
criticism of Brooke's war sonnets; the seeker condemns without pity one
who has given up the search. 'There is no such thing as a just war,'
writes this boy. 'What we are doing is casting out Satan by Satan.' From
this position Sorley never flinched. Never for a moment was he renegade
to his generation by taking 'the sentimental attitude.' Neither had he
in him an atom of the narrowness of the straiter sect.
Though space forbids, we will follow out his progress to the last. We do
not receive many such gifts as this book; the authentic voice of those
lost legions is seldom heard. We can afford, surely, to listen to it to
the end. In November, 1914, Sorley turns back to the Hardy of the poems.
After rejecting 'the actual "Satires of Circumstance"' as bad poetry,
and passing an incisive criticism on 'Men who March away,' he
continues:--