what "is" does not strain the intelligence even of one who sees
things from the point of view of 1914. The only unconvincing part of
Mr. Wells's history is that which narrates how we ceased to be what
we were and became what we are. He wipes the old world out with an
atomic bomb, so destructive that it annihilates all the capitals of
the earth, makes war impossible and compels mankind to federate. Mr.
Wells has a penchant for "fishy" science. He knows a good deal about
chemistry, biology, mechanics, and he knows that novel readers know
less, as a rule, than he knows. So with the finest air of conviction
he shatters the world with a new explosive, which has a kind of
laboratory-veracity not claimed for the comet whose tail brushed us
to revolution in an earlier of his engaging romances. The clever man
secures plausibility by rather cheekily dedicating the book to
"Frederick Soddy's interpretation of radium," to which this story
"owes long passages." Neat, isn't it? It inspires in the ignorant
reader a confidence that those atomic bombs are approved by the most
advanced science--though, of course, Mr. Wells does not say so. The
cataclysmic revolution is splendidly narrated, and is even better
than Mr. Wells's earlier mechanical and astronomical romances. The
trouble with it is that it is not a fitting transition from a state
of society which is seriously conceived to a better state of society
which is described with all the earnestness of a sociologist. The two
things are discordant. If we are to be taken from one civilization to
another we must move along a social highway. The atomic bombs are out
of key with the prelude and the last two chapters.
Mr. Wells is fond of mixing fake chemistry and social reality. He has
succeeded in two kinds of fiction, which he should keep distinct, the
Jules Verne romance and the novel of present-day life. He persists in
putting the two in the same book, and they simply will not blend even
under his skilful stirring-spoon. In "Tono-Bungay" he gave us a good
picture of a quack millionaire, full of the spirit of the living age.
It was set in a realistic scene and was true to life. Then for no
reason at all he sent his hero in search of a mysterious metal called
"quap," which does not exist and so never burnt the bottom out of the
ship. "Quap" destroys the illusion of the book. About the time that
quap begins to do its work, the book ceases to be a novel. "Marriage"
almost ceases to be a novel when the couple go to Labrador. The
introduction of love business into the comet story is an impertinence,
as Mr. Bernard Shaw has complained. Mr. Wells's incurable taste for
romantic adventure on a plane removed from life--usually an aeroplane
that does what no aeroplane has done yet--vitiates his realism; and
his concessions to the "love interest" do not help his experiments in
scientific "futurism." He is best when he keeps separate the two sides
of his genius.
On the other hand, his extraordinary skill in feathering social truth
with romance, and his equally extraordinary skill in making a monster
of romance eat real hay are the virtues of his vices. His tracts read
like novels, and his novels often carry shrewdly concealed tracts. He
is, next to Bernard Shaw, the most irritating and the most widely read
revolutionary economist who writes our language. Like Mr. Shaw, he is
a rather tame revolutionist; he has never got free from the
middle-class, emancipated clerk view of life, and his romantic sense
sometimes corrupts his sense of social fact as it does his sense of
scientific fact. But he always thinks in ambush behind his most
trivial narrative. And when he comes forth avowedly as a thinker and
theorist, he has the vivacity of phrase, the sparkle of manner which
serve him when he is making fiction. Moreover, in spite of his intense
modernity and his contempt for ancient elegancies and traditional
beauties, he can write fine, rhythmic, luminously visual prose; like
all imaginative men who deal in words, he is a bit of a poet. His
account of "the last war" has in it something of the quality of the
epic: "Men rode upon the whirlwind that night and slew and fell like
archangels. The sky rained heroes upon the astonished earth. Surely
the last fights of mankind were the best. What was the heavy pounding
of Homeric swordsmen, what was the creaking charge of chariots, beside
this swift rush, this crash, this giddy triumph, this headlong swoop
to death?"
JOHN MASEFIELD
The first version of Mr. Masefield's "Pompey the Great" was published
before "The Everlasting Mercy" and "The Widow of the Bye Street,"
those virile narratives that made us wake to find him famous. "Pompey"
is vigorous and dramatic, yet it lacks the note that announces a new
poet. The earlier poems, "Salt Water Ballads" are good, but do not
rise above the chorus of minor lyrists. The short stories in "A
Mainsail Haul" do not distinguish Masefield from a score of sturdy
spinners of sea yarns. It was "The Widow in the Bye Street" that told
us that a great new ship was in port. After that splendid arrival came
"The Daffodil Fields" and "Dauber." Meanwhile the man who had found,
if not created, a form of poetry so individual as to invite the final
tribute of parody, showed himself in "The Tragedy of Nan," master of
dramatic realism.
It is likely and logical, even if the dates do not fall into line,
that "Pompey" is the work of a young ambitious literary man who in the
hour of conceiving the work had not yet discovered his course. He had
to a large extent discovered his style and his attitude toward life
and the speech of men. He makes the Romans talk in a sharp bold
staccato, which is good English and excellent Masefield; as for its
Latinity, well, the Romans are dead and we do not know just how they
talked. Pompey says: "We were happy there, that year." Cornelia
answers: "Very happy. And that day the doves came, picking the spilled
grain. And at night there was a moon." Pompey's next speech is: "All
the quiet valley. And the owls were calling. Those little grey owls.
Make eight bells, captain."
It is a question whether a modern dramatist is not misdirecting his
genius when he makes plays of Greek or Roman legends and characters.
To be sure, a man of genius is not to be limited in his subjects or
his style. He is free by virtue of his genius. He may make an Iliad if
it pleases him to try it. Mr. Bernard Shaw put a new wrinkle in the
stiffened parchment of Caesar's biography. Ibsen at the age of 43,
after he had hit upon his "later" manner, that is after he had made
the simple discovery that universal tragedy grins in the small houses
of small people in small Norwegian towns, produced his "Julian the
Apostate." Poets of all nations during the last three hundred years
have retold Greek and Roman stories and made new poetry of them. But
on the whole the Greeks and Romans handled their own subjects, their
own lives and legends fairly well. The task of the modern is to render
our times or to interpret timeless and spaceless subjects from our
point of view. The widow who lived in the bye street and the painter
who was killed at sea are not as important persons as the Hon. Cneius
Pompeius Magnus, but Mr. Masefield's poems about living (or recently
killed) obscure folk are more important than his drama about the
ancient illustrious dead.
"Pompey" is a good play, that is, it is good to read; I do not know
whether it has been acted. It has one characteristic of Mr.
Masefield's other work, a direct incisive speech, poetry of the naked
fact, the brief metaphor which might come out in any man's talk and
which has the "unliterary" flavor of reality--a cunningly literary
mode of writing. Mr. Masefield makes Pompey say: "Five minutes ago I
had Rome's future in my hand. She was wax to my seal. I was going to
free her. Now is the time to free her. You can tear the scales and the
chains from her." Did the Romans talk in this clipped hurried fashion?
Probably they did when they were excited, for it is human to talk in
short sentences; even Germans do it.
The business of the dramatist is to make you believe, with an arrested
compelled attention, in the speech and action of persons in clearly
defined circumstances. It makes no great difference whether the scene
is in a Norwegian house or on the necromantic island of Shakespeare's
"Tempest." Sometimes it seems a more wonderful achievement to make the
Norwegian house interesting because it is so terribly like the one we
live in. Mr. Masefield's Nan seems to me worth ten of Mr. Masefield's
Cornelias, and the peculiar style and habit of thought of Mr.
Masefield seem more fitted to the modern subject. One of his
metrically ingenious stanzas, with all the artifice of meter and
rhyme, is nearer to life than his vivaciously realistic sentences put
into the mouth of a Roman. "Back your port oars. Shove off. Give way
together. Go on there. Man your halliards. Take the turns off. Stretch
it along. Softly now. Stand by." Was such the dialect of Roman sea
captains? Nobody knows. All that I argue is that Mr. Masefield's
punching abruptness is more wonderfully real, more effective on the
lips of modern people whom we do know.
O God, O God, what pretty ways she had.
He's kissing all her skin, so soft and white.
She's kissing back. I think I'm going mad.
Like rutting rattens in the apple loft.
She held that light she carried high aloft
Full in my eyes for him to hit me by,
I had the light all dazzling in my eye.
Every poet is limited to his idiom, and though he may make broad
differentiations, may change his structural form from sonnet to ode,
from ode to dramatic scene, may adapt his style to a character to the
extent of making clown and king unlike in their turn of phrase, yet
when he is earnestly poetic he writes his own kind of poetry. Mr.
Masefield vocalizes Masefield sentences with the breath of Romans. So
Browning's characters all have the Browning abundance of telescoped
metaphor. Shakespeare's English kings and Italian dukes trumpet
Elizabethan blank verse. The identity of flavor and idiom and of
metaphor between Shakespeare's English characters and Roman characters
and Italian characters will never be perceived by the male and female
Mrs. Jamesons, who write essays about Shakespeare's "characters," but
cannot hear verse. To be sure, Shakespeare and all other great
dramatists make the persons of the play adapt their substance to the
situation; naturally Othello in a jealous fit does not talk about
having lost his ducats and his daughter or order a cup of sack. But
within the specific situation and the rather loose limits of character
Shakespeare equips his person with a style of blank verse that is
primarily Elizabethan, secondarily Shakespearean, and only in a
tertiary and wholly subordinate sense Caesarean or Macbethean.
D'Annunzio writes magnificent D'Annunzio, with a recognizable fondness
for certain words and sonorities, no matter who is alleged to be
talking. A poet is at his best when his singular power of phrase and
his substance are most happily fused.
Masefield's instrument plays best upon modern themes, upon the tragedy
of obscure people in English fields or upon the seven seas. It is his
distinction to have taken the lives of the humble and to have involved
those lives in the revolution of the stars and the expanses of sea. He
has lifted coarse words into literature (the Elizabethans did that,
too); he has related the large elements to little elemental lives; he
has elevated obvious simplicities to grand complexities.
The resemblance between the austerely tender pathos of "The Daffodil
Fields" and Wordsworth's "Michael" is a genuine resemblance honorable
to the younger poet; and the pointing to the resemblance is not, I
trust, an example of the critic's weak habit of referring one poet
back to another. Mr. Quiller-Couch has said that "neither in the
telling did, or could, 'Enoch Arden' come near the artistic truth of
'The Daffodil Fields'." Now, if one is to compare poets, for the sake
of praising them or for the better understanding of them, it is well
to make comparisons that refer the new and unknown to the known in
illuminating conjunction. To say that "Enoch Arden" does not approach
the artistic truth of "The Daffodil Fields" is to make an inept
comparison, to associate the weak with the strong, even though the
comparison is negative. "Enoch Arden" is the flimsiest kind of
romantic fraud in Tennyson's worst manner. It is a sob poem that sends
only the tiniest lace handkerchiefs to the laundry. "The Daffodil
Fields," for all its conscious artistry and the adroit manipulation of
the verses, is terrifically sincere. If its substance has any
allegiance to another English poet, we must look for a poet who had a
realistic sense of the furrowed field and a visionary sense of the
stars, that is Wordsworth. And if one's odious liking for comparison
is not satisfied with that, one may ask readers of poetry to compare
the opening stanza of "The Widow in the Bye Street" with Chaucer, and
think of such merits as plainness of phrase, simplicity and ease of
narrative, and soundness of verse structure.
Down Bye street, in a little Shropshire town,
There lived a widow with her only son:
She had no wealth nor title to renown,
Nor any joyous hours, never one.
Is there not here a note that suggests the opening of "The Nonne
Preestes Tale," even though the story which follows is quite unlike
Chaucer's? Or is it only the "widow" that makes me associate the two?
At any rate it is pleasant to think that Mr. Masefield in a strong,
not an imitative or servile, sense, is heir to the oldest master of
English narrative verse.
Then if our habit of judging new poets by old ones still dominates us,
let us take any passage describing the sea in "Dauber" and put it
beside any of the thousand years of English sea poetry.
Denser it grew, until the ship was lost.
The elemental hid her: she was merged
In mufflings of dark death, like a man's ghost,
New to the change of death, yet hither urged.
Then from the hidden waters something surged--
Mournful, despairing, great, greater than speech,
A noise like one slow wave on a still beach.
After that, if only for the pleasure of quoting them, recall
Swinburne's lines:
Where beyond the extreme sea-wall and between the remote
sea-gates,
Waste water washes, and tall ships founder, and deep death
waits.
The wonder of our English tongue is never more resounding than when
English poets echo the tumult of the sea. Mr. Masefield is not so much
an innovator as an initiate into a great poetic tradition, the
tradition of a race of sailors and chantey-makers who began with "The
Seafarer" or long before that, and shall not end with "Dauber." The
sea is in Masefield's blood and in his personal experience. Who but an
English poet would have ended "The Tragedy of Pompey the Great" with a
chantey to the tune of "Hanging Johnny"?
SHAKESPEARE AND THE SCRIBES
In his sensible little book, "Literary Taste: How to Form It," Mr.
Arnold Bennett says: "In attending a university extension lecture on
the sources of Shakespeare's plots, or in studying the researches of
George Saintsbury into the origins of English prosody, or in weighing
the evidence for and against the assertion that Rousseau was a
scoundrel, one is apt to forget what literature really is and is for."
Of the vast library of scholarly research, the most fatuous section,
if one is to judge from the few specimens one happens to have seen, is
that which deals with the most important division of literature--poetry;
and probably the poet who has suffered the most voluminous maltreatment
from two centuries of English, German and American scholarship is
Shakespeare. I have been going in an idle way over the notes in "The
Tragedie of Jvlivs Caesar," edited by Horace Howard Furness, Jr.,
and "The Tragedie of Cymbeline," edited by the elder Dr. Furness. And
I have looked into other volumes of this laborious work, "A New
Varorium Edition of Shakespeare." From an enormous mass of commentary,
criticism, word-worrying, text-marring and learned guesswork, the
editor has chosen what seem to him the best notes. The sanity of his
introductions and the good sense of some of his own notes lead one to
suppose that he has selected with discrimination from the notes of
others. His work is a model of patience, industry and judgment. He
plays well in this game of scholarship. But what is the game worth?
What is the result?
Here is a volume of nearly 500 large pages containing only one play!
The text is a literal reprint of the first folio, or whatever is
supposed to be the earliest printed version. The clear stream of
poetry runs along the tops of the pages. Under that is a deposit of
textual emendations full of clam-shells and lost anchors and tin cans.
Under that is a mud bottom two centuries deep. It consists of (a) what
scholars said Shakespeare said; (b) what scholars said Shakespeare
meant; (c) what scholars said about what other scholars said; (d) what
scholars said about the morality and character of the personages, as
(1) they are in Shakespeare's play, and as (2) they are in other
historical and fictitious writings; (e) what scholars said about how
other people used the words that Shakespeare used; (f) what scholars
said could be done to Shakespeare's text to make him a better poet. I
have not read all these notes and I never shall read them. Life is too
short and too interesting.
All the time that I was trying to read the notes, so that I could know
enough about them to write this article, my mind kept swimming up out
of the mud into that clear river of text. It is an almost perfectly
clear river. Some of the obscurities that scholars say are there are
simply not obscure, except as poetry ought to have a kind of obscurity
in some turbulent passages. Many of the obscurities the scholars put
there in their innocence and stupidity, and those obscurities you can
eliminate by ignoring them.
The really valuable note is the etymological. Etymology reveals the
essential metaphors of words. The modern reader will find that beyond
his intellectual front door stand three or four wire entanglements of
connotation; by the time a word gets to him it is bruised and ragged.
The etymologist clears all those fences for you and delivers a word
fresh into your hands. He shows you how other poets have used it. He
enriches it with other connotations. He shows it to be even wealthier
than it was in the mind of the man who wrote the Shakespearian line.
One of the most exciting and poetic books is the Oxford Dictionary.
The dated illustrative history of a word, past milestone after
milestone of use, is an intellectual epic. The word is root-deep and
branch-high with poetry, with the imaginative habits of the race. The
etymological note not only clarifies Shakespeare, but spreads behind
him (and other poets) a sort of verbal-cosmic background. Etymology
brightens the color of words, deepens their significance. That the
etymologist is often a duffer, who, in the very act of resolving a
word into new chords, writes stiff and stodgy prose, is a perplexing
thing in human nature and a very perplexing problem in that appalling
institution, Scholarship.
It is impossible for even a vivacious, humorous man like Dr. Furness,
an enthusiastic amateur in love with his task, to live in a library of
Shakespearian scholarship and not be infected by its diseases. Dr.
Furness knows, for example, precisely when "Cymbeline" was written.
Shakespeare was forty-six years old. Now, "Cymbeline" is a foolish
play; Dr. Johnson said so. And there must be a reason for
Shakespeare's deterioration, for Shakespeare, unlike other poets, is
not to be allowed to write bad plays and bad lines without a
satisfactory explanation. He did not explain himself, but the scholars
come to his rescue. Dr. Furness fancies that, though forty-six is not
an advanced age, Shakespeare was tired and disillusioned. "There may
have crept into Shakespeare's study of imagination a certain weariness
of soul in contemplating in review the vast throng of his dream
children.... A sufficing harvest of fame is his and honest wealth,
accompanied by honor, love, obedience and troops of friends." "I can
most reverently fancy that he is once more allured by the joy of
creation when by chance there falls in his way the old, old story of a
husband convinced, through villany, of his wife's infidelity."
And there you are. Shakespeare at the age of forty-six is lured by the
restless joy of creation into writing "Cymbeline," which is a poor
play. It is not up to the mark which Shakespeare's previous
masterpieces have set. There is something a little wobbly about this
conjunction of surmises. But the scholar is never at a loss. He can
deliver immortal Will from his own errors, shield him from the
consequences of being at once a god in art and a human man, prone to
literary lapses and slovenly work. The masque in the fifth act "is
regarded by a large majority of editors and critics as an intrusive
insertion by some hand not Shakespeare's." When a large majority of
scholars and critics regard a thing as so, it is so. It gets into the
books that you have to read to pass college examinations. And if you
say that many of the scholars and critics whom you happen to have read
or listened to are chumps, when they deal with Shakespeare or any
other poet, you are a lost soul.
Some of the notes of the various commentators are suggestive. But many
of the notes are sheer impertinences, especially those that attempt to
mend the lines.
I would haue left it on the Boord, so soone
As I had made my Meale; and parted
With Pray'rs for the Prouider.
There is nothing the matter with that. It sounds all right. But the
editors have to fill out the short second line, to make it scan. Dr.
Furness thinks, justly, that the line needs only "a very timid pause
after 'Meale.'" Of course, any reader, any good actor, with an ear on
the side of his head, reads all lines with pauses timid or bold as the
case requires, and does not make a fuss about it. It is only the
scholars that fuss, or poets like Pope, who are entirely out of touch
with Shakespeare's free metrical habits.
It is almost inconceivable that grown men with enough interest in
poetry to spend their whole lives in Shakespeare's company could have
daubed him with such muddy nonsense as one finds in these notes, which
are not the worst of scholarly comment but the best, selected by a
discriminating man. What a colossal sham it all is!--erected not by
charlatans but by men working in good faith and with disinterested
devotion to their task.
It is not merely the ignorant idler and the superficial player among
books who has got tired of the institution of Shakespeare Improved:
Fourteen Thousand Doctors of Philosophy in Session Day and Night,
Searching for a Serum to Prevent Spinal Meningitis in the Lines of
Shakespeare. Millions Needed to Continue This Humanitarian Work: Fifty
Thousand Students Under Instruction in the Art of How Not to Be Poets.
Against this amazing institution some of the more independent surgeons
have protested. One was the late John Churton Collins, a physician who
discovered that the Shakespearean metaphor was not a locally British
infection rising from the Avon river, but was brought by the verbal
mosquito from Rome and Greece. Collins had a vivid and audacious mind
that made him one of the most readable of modern Shakespeareans, and
he had, I assume, considerable learning. He says: "Dozens of
impertinent emendations have been introduced into Shakespeare's text,
because editors have not been aware that the custom of using the same
word in different senses in one line, or even twice in contiguous
lines, was deliberately affected by the Elizabethan poets."
Deliberately affected? Yes, and it came natural to them in a time when
language was a little looser and freer than it is after three
centuries of increased use and hardened definition both in prose and
poetry.