It is time to turn to those living poets through study of whose work
these reflections have arisen. Mr. Hardy is for every reason the poet
with whom it is most natural to begin. Not only does his work span the
whole period in which what I have called the neutralisation of nature
was finally effected, but it has throughout definitely reflected that
change. Short essays in verse are fairly frequent among his _Collected
Poems_, essays almost always dealing with this very topic; but these,
however suggestive, are not the ground for singling him out as the
poet who has most fully and courageously accepted the contemporary
background; nor are the poems which are most definitely _about_
the neutrality of nature the ground for the assertion. There is an
opportunity for a misunderstanding at this point. The ground is the
tone, the handling and the rhythm of poems which treat other subjects,
for example _The Self Unseeing_, _The Voice_, _A Broken Appointment_,
and pre-eminently _After a Journey_. A poem does not necessarily accept
the situation because it gives it explicit recognition, but only
through the precise mutation of the attitudes of which it is composed.
Mr. Middleton Murry, against whose recent positions parts of this
essay may be suspected by the reader to be aimed, has best pointed
out, in his _Aspects of Literature_, how peculiarly “adequate to what
we know and have suffered” Mr. Hardy’s poetry is. “His reaction to
an episode has behind it and within it a reaction to the universe.”
This is not as I should put it were I making a statement; but read as
a pseudo-statement, emotively, it is excellent; it makes us remember
how we felt. Actually, it describes just what Hardy, at his best,
does not do. He makes no reaction to the universe, recognizing it as
something to which no reaction is more relevant than another. Mr. Murry
is again well inspired, this time both emotively and scientifically,
when he says: “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.” These extracts (from a writer more
agonizingly aware than others that some strange change has befallen
man in this generation, though his diagnosis is, I believe, mistaken)
indicate very well Mr. Hardy’s place and rank in English poetry. He is
the poet who has most steadily refused to be comforted. The comfort
of forgetfulness, the comfort of beliefs, he has put both these away.
Hence his singular preoccupation with death; because it is in the
contemplation of death that the necessity for human attitudes, in the
face of an indifferent universe, to become self-supporting is felt most
poignantly. Only the greatest tragic poets have achieved an equally
self-reliant and immitigable acceptance.
From Mr. Hardy to Mr. De la Mare may seem a large transition, though
readers of Mr. De la Mare’s later work will agree that there are
interesting resemblances--in _Who’s That_ and in other poems in _The
Veil_ where Mr. De la Mare is notably less himself than when writing at
his best. In his best poetry, in _The Pigs and the Charcoal Burner_,
in _John Mouldy_, no intimation of the contemporary situation sounds.
He is writing of, and from, a world which knows nothing of these
difficulties, a world of pure phantasy for which the distinction
between knowledge and feeling has not yet dawned. When in other poems,
more reflective, in _The Tryst_, for example, Mr. De la Mare does seem
to be directly facing the indifference of the universe towards “poor
mortal longingness” a curious thing happens. His utterance, in spite
of his words, becomes not at all a recognition of this indifference,
but voices instead an impulse to turn away, to forget it, to seek
shelter in the warmth of his own familiar thickets of dream, not to
stay out in the wind. His rhythm, that indescribable personal note
which clings to all his best poetry, is a lulling rhythm, an anodyne,
an opiate, it gives sleep and visions, phantasmagoria; but it does
not give _vision_, it does not awaken. Even when he most appears to be
contemplating the fate of the modern, “whom the words of the wise have
made sad,” the drift of his verse is still “seeking after that sweet
golden clime” where the mental traveller’s journey _begins_.
There is one exception to this charge (for in a sense it is an adverse
criticism, though not one to be pressed except against a great poet),
there is one poem in which there is no such reluctance to bear the
blast--_The Mad Prince’s Song_ in _Peacock Pie_. But here the spirit of
the poem, the impulse which gives it life, comes from a poet who more
than most refused to take shelter; _The Mad Prince’s Song_ derives from
_Hamlet_.
Mr. Yeats and Mr. Lawrence present two further ways of dodging those
difficulties which come from being born into this generation rather
than into some earlier age. Mr. De la Mare takes shelter in the
dream-world of the child, Mr. Yeats retires into black velvet curtains
and the visions of the Hermetist, and Mr. Lawrence makes a magnificent
attempt to reconstruct in himself the mentality of the Bushman. There
are other modes of escape open to the poet. Mr. Blundell, to name one
other poet only, goes into the country, but few people follow him there
in his spirit, whereas Mr. Yeats and Mr. Lawrence, whether they are
widely read or not, do represent tendencies among the defeated which
are only too easily observable.
Mr. Yeats’ work from the beginning was a repudiation of the most active
contemporary interests. But at first the poet of _The Wanderings
of Usheen_, _The Stolen Child_, and _Innisfree_ turned away from
contemporary civilization in favour of a world which he knew perfectly,
the world of folk-lore as it is accepted, neither with belief nor
disbelief, by the peasant. Folk-lore and the Irish landscape, its
winds, woods, waters, islets, and seagulls, and for a while an
unusually simple and direct kind of love poetry in which he became
something more than a minor poet, these were his refuge. Later, after
a drawn battle with the drama, he made a more violent repudiation,
not merely of current civilization but of life itself, in favour of a
supernatural world. But the world of the ‘eternal moods,’ of supernal
essences and immortal beings is not, like the Irish peasant stories
and the Irish landscape, part of his natural and familiar experience.
Now he turns to a world of symbolic phantasmagoria about which he is
desperately uncertain. He is uncertain because he has adopted as a
technique of inspiration the use of trance, of dissociated phases of
consciousness, and the revelations given in these dissociated states
are insufficiently connected with normal experience. This, in part,
explains the weakness of Mr. Yeats’ transcendental poetry. A deliberate
reversal of the natural relations of thought and feeling is the rest
of the explanation. Mr. Yeats takes certain feelings--feelings of
conviction attaching to certain visions--as evidence for the thoughts
which he supposes his visions to symbolize. To Mr. Yeats the value of
_The Phases of the Moon_ lies not in any attitudes which it arouses or
embodies but in the doctrine which for an initiate it promulgates.
The resort to trance, and the effort to discover a new world-picture to
replace that given by science are the two most significant points for
our purpose in Mr. Yeats’ work. A third might be the singularly bitter
contempt for the generality of mankind which occasionally appears.
The doctrinal problem arises again, but in a clearer form with Mr.
Lawrence. But here (Mr. Yeats’ promised treatise on the states of the
soul has not yet appeared) we have the advantage of an elaborate prose
exposition, _Phantasia of the Unconscious_, of the positions which
so many of the poems advocate. It is not unfair to put the matter in
this way, since there is little doubt possible that the bulk of Mr.
Lawrence’s published verse is prose, scientific prose too, jottings, in
fact, from a psychologist’s notebook, with a commentary interspersed.
Due allowance being made for the extreme psychological interest of
these observations, there remains the task of explaining how the poet
who wrote the _Ballad of Another Ophelia_ and _Aware_, and, above
all, _The White Peacock_, should have wandered, through his own zeal
misdirected, so far from the paths which once appeared to be his alone
to open.
Mr. Lawrence’s revolt against civilization seems to have been
originally spontaneous, an emotional revulsion free from _ad hoc_
beliefs. It sprang directly from experience. He came to abhor all
the attitudes men adopt, not through the direct prompting of their
instincts, but because of the supposed nature of the objects to
which they are directed. The conventions, the idealizations, which
come between man and man and between man and woman, which often
queer the pitch for the natural responses, seemed to him the source
of all evil. Part of his revolt was certainly justified. These
idealizations--representative examples are the dogma of the equality
of man and the doctrine that Love is primarily sympathy--are beliefs
illicitly interpolated in order to support and strengthen attitudes
in the manner discussed at length above. And Mr. Lawrence’s original
rejection of a morality not self-supporting but based upon beliefs,
makes his work an admirable illustration of my main thesis. But two
simple and avoidable mistakes deprived his revolt of the greater part
of its value. He overlooked the fact that such beliefs commonly arise
because the attitudes they support are already existent. He assumed
that a bad basis for an attitude meant a bad attitude. In general, it
does mean a forced attitude, but that is another matter. Secondly,
he tried to cure the disease by introducing other beliefs of his own
manufacture in place of the conventional beliefs and in support of very
different attitudes.
The genesis of these beliefs is extremely interesting as an
illustration of primitive mentality. Since the attitudes on which he
fell back are those of a very early stage of human development, it is
not surprising that the means by which he has supported them should
be of the same era, or that the world-picture which he has worked out
should be similar to that described in _The Golden Bough_. The mental
process at work is schematically as follows: First, undergo an intense
emotion, located with unusual definiteness in the body, which can be
described as “a feeling _as though_ the solar plexus were connected by
a current of dark passional energy with another person.” Those whose
emotions tend to be localised will be familiar with such feelings. The
second step is to say “I must trust my feelings.” The third is to call
the feeling an intuition. The last is to say “_I know_ that my solar
plexus is, etc.” By this means we arrive at indubitable knowledge that
the sun’s energy is recruited from the life on the earth and that the
astronomers are wrong in what they say about the moon, and so on.
The illicit steps in the argument are not quite so evident as they
appear to be in this analysis. To distinguish an intuition _of_
an emotion from an intuition _by_ it is not always easy, nor is a
description of an emotion always in practice distinguishable from an
emotion. Certainly we must trust our feelings--in the sense of acting
upon them. We have nothing else to trust. And to confuse this trusting
with believing an emotive description of them is a mistake which all
traditional codes of morality encourage us to commit.
The significance of such similar disasters in the work of poets so
unlike and yet so greatly gifted as Mr. Yeats and Mr. Lawrence is
noteworthy. For each the traditional scaffolding of conventional
beliefs has proved unsatisfying, unworkable as a basis for their
attitudes. Each has sought, in very different directions it is true,
a new set of beliefs as a remedy. For neither has the world-picture
of science seemed a possible substitute. And neither seems to have
envisaged the possibility of a poetry which is independent of all
beliefs, probably because, however much they differ, both are very
serious poets. A great deal of poetry can, of course, be written for
which total independence of all beliefs is an easy matter. But it
is never poetry of the more important kind, because the temptation
to introduce beliefs is a sign and measure of the importance of
the attitudes involved. At present it is not primarily religious
beliefs, in the stricter sense of the word, which are most likely
to be concerned. Emphases alter surprisingly. University societies
founded fifteen years ago, for example, to discuss religion, are
usually found to be discussing sex to-day. And serious love poetry,
which is independent of beliefs of one kind or another, traditional or
eccentric, is extremely rare.
Yet the necessity for independence is increasing. This is not to say
that traditional poetry, into which beliefs readily enter, is becoming
obsolete; it is merely becoming more and more difficult to approach
without confusion; it demands a greater imaginative effort, a greater
purity in the reader.
We must distinguish here, however. There are many feelings and
attitudes which, though in the past supported by beliefs now untenable,
can survive their removal because they have other, more natural,
supports and spring directly from the necessities of existence. To
the extent to which they have been undistorted by the beliefs which
have gathered round them they will remain as before. But there are
other attitudes which are very largely the product of belief and have
no other support. These will lapse if the changes here forecasted
continue. With their disappearance some forms of poetry--much minor
devotional verse, for example--will become obsolete. And with the
unravelling of the intellect _versus_ emotion entanglement, there
will be cases where even literature to which immense value has been
assigned--the speculative portions of the work of Dostoevsky may be
instanced--will lose much of its interest, except for the history of
the mind. It was because he belonged to our age that Dostoevsky had to
wrestle so terribly in these toils. A poet to-day, whose integrity is
equal to that of the greater poets of the past, is inevitably plagued
by the problem of thought and feeling as poets have never been plagued
before.
A pioneer in modern research upon the origins of culture was asked
recently whether his work had any bearing upon religion. He replied
that it had, but that at present he was engaged merely in ‘getting the
guns into position.’ The same answer might be given with regard to
the probable consequences of recent progress in psychology, not only
for religion but for the whole fabric of our traditional beliefs about
ourselves. In many quarters there is a tendency to suppose that the
series of attacks upon received ideas which began, shall we say, with
Galileo and rose to a climax with Darwinism, has over-reached itself
with Einstein and Eddington, and that the battle is now due to die
down. This view seems to be too optimistic. The most dangerous of the
sciences is only now beginning to come into action. I am thinking less
of Psycho-analysis or of Behaviourism than of the whole subject which
includes them. It is very probable that the Hindenburg Line to which
the defence of our traditions retired as a result of the onslaughts
of the last century will be blown up in the near future. If this
should happen a mental chaos such as man has never experienced may be
expected. We shall then be thrown back, as Matthew Arnold foresaw, upon
poetry. It is capable of saving us; it is a perfectly possible means
of overcoming chaos. But whether man is capable of the reorientation
required, whether he can loosen in time the entanglement with belief
which now takes from poetry half its power and would then take all, is
another question, and too large for the scope of this essay.