GIBSON AND HODGSON
Two Northumberland poets--Wilfrid Wilson Gibson--his early
failures--his studies of low life--his collected poems--his
short dramas of pastoral experiences--_Daily Bread_--lack
of melody--uncanny imagination--whimsies--poems of the Great
War--their contrast to conventional sentimental ditties--the
accusation--his contribution to the advance of poetry.--Ralph
Hodgson--his shyness--his slender output--his fastidious
self-criticism--his quiet facing of the known facts in nature
and in humanity--his love of books--his humour--his respect
for wild and tame animals--the high percentage of artistic
excellence in his work.--Lascelles Abercrombie.
Wilfrid Wilson Gibson--a horrible mouthful--was born in Hexham,
Northumberland, in 1878. Like Walt Whitman's, his early poetry was
orthodox, well groomed, and uninteresting. It produced no effect on
the public, but it produced upon its author a mental condition of
acute discontent--the necessary conviction of sin preceding
regeneration. Whether he could ever succeed in bringing his verse down
to earth, he did not then know; but so far as he was concerned, he not
only got down to earth, but got under it. He made subterranean
expeditions with the miners, he followed his nose into slums, he
talked long hours with the unclassed, and listened sympathetically to
the lamentations of sea-made widows. His nature--extraordinarily
delicate and sensitive--received deep wounds, the scars of which
appeared in his subsequent poetry. Now he lives where John Masefield
was born, and like him, speaks for the inarticulate poor.
In 1917 Mr. Gibson collected his poems in one thick volume of some
five hundred and fifty pages. This is convenient for reference, but
desperately hard to read, on account of the soggy weight of the book.
Here we have, however, everything that he has thus far written which
he thinks worth preserving. The first piece, _Akra the Slave_
(1904), is a romantic monologue in free verse. Although rather short,
it is much too long, and few persons will have the courage to read it
through. It is incoherent, spineless, consistent only in dulness.
Possibly it is worth keeping as a curiosity. Then comes
_Stonefolds_ (1906), a series of bitter bucolics. This is
pastoral poetry of a new and refreshing kind--as unlike to the
conventional shepherd-shepherdess mincing, intolerable dialogue as
could well be imagined. For, among all the groups of verse, in which,
for sacred order's sake, we arrange English literature, pastoral
poetry easily takes first place in empty, tinkling artificiality. In
_Stonefolds_, we have six tiny plays, never containing more than
four characters, and usually less, which represent, in a rasping
style, the unending daily struggle of generation after generation with
the relentless forces of nature. It is surprising to see how, in four
or five pages, the author gives a clear view of the monotonous life of
seventy years; in this particular art, Strindberg himself has done no
better. The experience of age is contrasted with the hope of youth.
Perhaps the most impressive of them all is _The Bridal_ where, in
the presence of the newly wedded pair, the man's old, bed-ridden
mother speaks of the chronic misery of her married life, intimates
that the son is just like his dead father, and that therefore the
bride has nothing ahead of her but tragedy. Then comes the conclusion,
which reminds one somewhat of the close of Ibsen's _Lady from the
Sea_. The young husband throws wide the door, and addresses his
wife as follows:
The door is open; you are free to go.
Why do you tarry? Are you not afraid?
Go, ere I hate you. I'll not hinder you.
I would not have you bound to me by fear.
Don't fear to leave me; rather fear to bide
With me who am my father's very son.
Go, lass, while yet I love you!
ESTHER (closing the door). I shall bide.
I have heard all; and yet, I would not go.
Nor would I have a single word unsaid.
I loved you, husband; yet, I did not know you
Until your mother spoke. I know you now;
And I am not afraid.
The first piece in _Stonefolds_ represents the tragic
helplessness of those newly born and those very old, a favourite theme
with Maeterlinck. A lamb and a child are born on the same night, and
both die before dawn. The lamb is a poetic symbol of babyhood.
Nicholas, the aged shepherd, who longs to go out into the night and do
his share of the work that must be done, but who is unable even to
move, thus addresses the dying lamb:
Poor, bleating beast! We two are much alike,
At either end of life, though scarce an hour
You've been in this rough world, and I so long
That death already has me by the heels;
For neither of us can stir to help himself,
But both must bleat for others' aid. This world
Is rough and bitter to the newly born,
But far more bitter to the nearly dead.
In _Daily Bread_ (1908-09), there are eighteen brief plays,
written not in orthodox blank verse, like _Stonefolds_, but in
irregular, brittle, breathless metres. Here is where art takes the
short cut to life, sacrificing every grace to gain reality; the
typical goal and method of twentieth-century poetry. So long as a
vivid impression of character and circumstance is produced, the writer
apparently cares nothing about style. I say "apparently," because the
styleless style is perhaps the one best adapted to produce the
sought-for effect. There is ever one difference between life and
"art"--between drama and theatre--that Mr. Gibson has, I suppose,
tried to cancel in these poems of daily bread. In art, the bigger the
drama, the bigger the stage; one could not mount
_Götterdämmerung_ in a village schoolhouse. But Life does not fit
the splendour of the setting to the grandeur of the struggle. In bleak
farm cottages, in dull dwellings in city blocks, in slum tenements,
the greatest of life's tragedies and comedies are enacted--love, hate,
avarice, jealousy, revenge, birth, death--the most terrific passions
known to human nature are fully presented, without the slightest care
for appropriate scenery from the Master of the show. Thus our poet
leads us by the hand into sea-girt huts, into hovels at the mouths of
mines, into garrets of noisy cities, and makes us silent witnesses of
elemental woe. Here Labour, man's greatest blessing, takes on the
aspect of the primal curse, since so many tragedies spring from the
simple root of poverty. The love of money may be the root of all evil,
but the lack of it is the cause of much pain.
It was a happy inspiration that made Mr. Gibson call these scenes
_Daily Bread_; for it is the struggle, not for comfort, but for
existence, that drives these men from mother, wife, and child into the
thick of the fight. Many novels and plays are written nowadays against
"big business," where, among other real and imagined evils, the
Business itself is represented as the villain in the home, alienating
the husband's affections from wife and children. Whatever may be the
case with the private soldiers, the Captain of Industry does not, and
by the nature of things cannot, confine his labours to an eight-hour
day--when he finally comes home, he brings the business with him,
forming a more well-founded cause of jealousy than the one usually
selected for conventional drama. Mr. Gibson, however, is not
interested in the tragic few, but in the tragic many, and in his poems
the man of the house leaves early and returns late. The industrial war
caused by social conditions takes him from home as surely and as
perilously as though he were drafted into an expeditionary force. The
daily parting is poignant, for every member of the family knows he may
not come back. Perhaps the most dramatic illustration of this
corroding worry is seen in _The Night-Shift_, where four women
with a newly-born baby spend a night of agonized waiting, only to have
their fears confirmed in the dawn.
The wife, weak from childbirth, sits up in bed, and speaks:
Will no one stop that tapping?
I cannot sleep for it.
I think that someone is shut in somewhere,
And trying to get out.
Will no one let them out,
And stop the tapping?
It keeps on tapping, tapping....
Tap ... tap ... tap ... tap....
And I can scarcely breathe,
The darkness is so thick.
It stifles me,
And weighs so heavily upon me,
And drips, and drips....
My hair is wet already;
There's water all about my knees....
As though great rocks were hanging overhead!
And dripping, dripping....
I cannot lift my feet,
The water holds them,
It's creeping ... creeping ... creeping....
My wet hair drags me down.
Ah, God!
Will no one stop that tapping....
I cannot sleep....
And I would sleep
Till he comes home....
Tap ... tap ... tap ... tap....
These poems were, of course, composed before the war. In the greater
tragedy, some of the lesser ones disappear. For example, Mr. Gibson
represents young, able-bodied, healthy and temperate men as unable to
find work of any kind; their wives and children starve because of the
absence of employment. Surely, since August, 1914, this particular
cause of suffering has been removed.
In _Womenkind_ (1909), dedicated to Rabbi and Mrs. Wise, we have
a real play, not only dramatic in character and situation, but fitted
for stage representation without the change of a word. The theme is
just the opposite of Middleton's old drama, _Women Beware Women_.
Here the two young women, one the mistress-mother, and one the bride,
join forces against the man, and walk out of his house on the
wedding-day. They feel that the tie between them is stronger than the
tie which had united them severally to the man, and depart to live
together. The play closes on a note of irony, for Jim, his blind
father, and his weary mother repeat in turn--but with quite different
emphasis--the accusation that women are a faithless lot.
The long series of poems called _Fires_ (1910-11) differ in
matter and manner from the earlier works. The form of drama is
abandoned, and in its place we have vivid rimed narrative, mingled
with glowing pictures of natural scenery, taken at all hours of the
day and night. Each of his poems must be taken as a whole, for each
poem strives for a single effect. This effect is often gained by
taking some object, animate or inanimate, as a symbol. Thus, in _The
Hare_, the hunted animal is the symbol of woman. _The Flute_,
_The Lighthouse_, and _The Money_ mean more than their
definition. Mr. Gibson is somewhat kinder to his readers in this
collection, for the monotony of woe, that hangs over his work like a
cloud, is rifted here and there by a ray of happiness. In _The
Shop_, the little boy actually recovers from pneumonia, and our
share in the father's delight is heightened by surprise, for whenever
any of our poet's characters falls into a sickness, we have learned to
expect the worst. Still, the darker side of life remains the author's
chosen field of exploration. Two pieces are so uncanny that one might
almost think they proceeded from a disordered imagination. The blind
boy, who every day has rowed his father back and forth from the
fishing-grounds, while the man steered, one day rows cheerfully toward
home, unaware that his father is dead. The boy wonders at his father's
silence, and laughingly asserts that he has heard him snoring. Then
his mirth changes to fear, and fear to horror.
Though none has ever known
How he rowed in, alone,
And never touched a reef.
Some say they saw the dead man steer--
The dead man steer the blind man home--
Though, when they found him dead,
His hand was cold as lead.
Another strange poem describes how a cripple sits in his room, with a
mother eternally stitching for bread, and watches out of the window
the giant crane swinging vast weights through the sky. One night,
while he is half-dead with fear, the great crane swoops down upon him,
clutches his bed, and swings him, bed and all, above the sleeping
city, among the blazing stars.
Following Mr. Gibson's development as a poet, year by year, we come to
_Thoroughfares_ (1908-14). These are short poems more
conventional in form than their predecessors, but just as stark and
grim as chronicles of life. Every one remembers the torture inflicted
on women in the good-old-times, when they were strapped to posts on
the flats at low tide, and allowed to watch the cruel slowness of
approaching death. The same theme, with an even more terrible
termination, is selected by Mr. Gibson in _Solway Ford_, where
the carter is pinned by the heavy, overturned wagon on the sands;
while the tide gradually brings the water toward his helpless body. He
dies a thousand deaths in imagination, but is rescued just as the
waves are lapping the wheels. Now he lies in bed, an incurable idiot,
smiling as he sees gold and sapphire fishes swimming in the water over
his head.... That rarest of all English metres--which Browning chose
for _One Word More_--is employed by Mr. Gibson in a compound of
tragedy-irony called _The Vindictive Staircase_. Unfortunately
the rhythm is so closely associated with Browning's love-poem, that
these lines sound like a parody:
Mrs. Murphy, timidest of spectres,
You who were the cheeriest of charers,
With the heart of innocence and only
Torn between a zest for priest and porter,
Mrs. Murphy of the ample bosom,--
Suckler of a score or so of children.
It seems best to leave this measure in the undisturbed possession of
the poet who used it supremely well. Yet some of the verses in
_Thoroughfares_ are an advance on Mr. Gibson's previous work. No
reader will ever forget _Wheels_.
Passing over _Borderlands_ (1912-14) which, with the exception of
_Akra_, is the least successful of Mr. Gibson's works, we come to
his most original contribution to modern poetry, the short poems
included under the heading _Battle_ (1914-15). These verses
afford one more bit of evidence that in order to write unconventional
thoughts, it is not necessary to use unconventional forms. The ideas
expressed here can be found in no other war-poet; they are
idiosyncratic to the highest degree; yet the verse-forms in which they
are written are stanzaic, as traditional as the most conservative
critic could desire. There is, of course, no reason why any poet
should not compose in new and strange rhythms if he prefers to do so;
but I have never believed that originality in thought
_necessarily_ demands metrical measures other than those found in
the history of English literature.
These lyrical poems are dramatic monologues. Each one is the testimony
of some soldier in the thick of the fight as to what he has seen or
heard, or as to what memories are strongest in his mind as he lies in
the filth of the trenches. Conventional emotions of enthusiasm, glory,
sacrifice, courage, are omitted, not because they do not exist, but
simply because they are taken for granted; these boys are aflame with
such feelings at the proper time. But Mr. Gibson is more interested in
the strange, fantastic thoughts, waifs of memory, that wander across
the surface of the mind in the midst of scenes of horror. And we feel
that the more fantastic these thoughts are, the more do they reflect
the deep truths of experience. Home naturally looms large, and some of
the recollections of home take on a grim humour, strangely in contrast
with the present environment of the soldier.
HIS FATHER
I quite forgot to put the spigot in.
It's just come over me.... And it is queer
To think he'll not care if we lose or win.
And yet be jumping-mad about that beer.
I left it running full. He must have said
A thing or two. I'd give my stripes to hear
What he will say if I'm reported dead
Before he gets me told about that beer!
It would appear that the world has grown up, or at all events, grown
much older, during the last forty years. It has grown older at a high
rate of speed. The love of country is the same as ever, because that
is a primal human passion, that will never change, any more than the
love of the sexes; but the expression of battle-poems seems more
mature, more sophisticated, if you like, in this war than in any
preceding conflict. Most of the verses written in England and in
America are as different as may be from "Just before the battle,
mother," which was so popular during our Civil War. Never before has
the psychology of the soldier been so acutely studied by national
poets. And instead of representing the soldier as a man swayed by a
few elemental passions and lush sentiment, he is presented as an
extraordinarily complex individual, with every part of his brain
abnormally alert. Modern poetry, in this respect, has, I think,
followed the lead of the realistic prose novel. Such books as
Tolstoi's _Sevastopol_, and Zola's _La Débâcle_, have had a
powerful effect in making war poetry more analytical; while that
original story, _The Red Badge of Courage_, written by an
inspired young American, Stephen Crane, has left its mark on many a
volume of verse that has been produced since August, 1914. The
unabashed realism of the trenches, together with the psychology of the
soldier, is clearly and significantly reflected in _From the
Front_ (1918), a book of poems written by men in service, edited by
Lieut. C. E. Andrews.
What is going to become of us all if the obsession of
self-consciousness grows ever stronger?
There is not a trace of cheap sentiment in _Battle_. Even the
poems that come nearest to the emotional surface are saved by some
specific touch, like the sense of smell, which, as every one knows, is
a sharper spur to the memory than any other sensation.
Tonight they're sitting by the peat
Talking of me, I know--
Grandfather in the ingle-seat,
Mother and Meg and Joe.
I feel a sudden puff of heat
That sets my ears aglow,
And smell the reek of burning peat
Across the Belgian snow.
Browning wrote of Shelley, who had been dead eleven years,
_The air seems bright with thy past presence yet._
A similar effect of brightness in life and afterglow in death, seems
to have been made on every one who knew him by Rupert Brooke. No young
poet of the twentieth century has left such a flaming glory as he. The
prefatory poem to Mr. Gibson's _Friends_ (1915-16), beautifully
expresses the common feeling:
He's gone.
I do not understand.
I only know
That as he turned to go
And waved his hand
In his young eyes a sudden glory shone:
And I was dazzled by a sunset glow,
And he was gone.
The fine sonnets that follow strengthen the strong colour, and are
among the most authentic claims to poetry that their author has set
forth. The second one, contrasting the pale glimmer of the London
garret with the brilliant apparition of Brooke at the open door, "like
sudden April," is poignant in its beauty. The verses in this volume
are richer in melody than is customary with Mr. Gibson, yet _The
Pessimist_ and _The Ice-Cart_ show that he is as whimsical as
ever. He has no end of fun with his fancy.
_Livelihood_ (1914-16) takes us back to the bitter pessimism of
_Stonefolds_ and _Daily Bread_; only instead of being
dialogues, these stories are given in descriptive form, and for the
most part in regular pentameter rime. The best of them is _In the
Orchestra_, where the poor fiddler in the band at the cheap
music-hall plays mechanically every night for his daily bread, while
his heart is torn by the vulture of memory. This poem shows a firm
grasp of the material; every word adds something to the total
impression.
Mr. Gibson's constantly repeated pictures of the grinding,
soul-crushing labour of the poor seem to say _J'accuse_! Yet he
nowhere says it explicitly. He never interrupts his narrative with "My
Lords and Gentlemen," nor does he comment, like Hood in _The Song of
the Shirt_.
Yet the effect of his work is an indictment. Only, whom does he
accuse? Is it the government; is it society; is it God?
Mr. Gibson's latest book of poems, _Hill-Tracks_ (1918), differs
from his previous works in two respects. It is full of pictures of the
open fields of Northumberland, the county where he was born; and
nearly every piece is an attempt at a singing lyric, something seldom
found in his _Collected Poems_. I say an "attempt" with
deliberation, for song is not the most natural expression of this
realistic writer, and not more than half of the fifty lyrics in this
handsome volume are successfully melodious. Some are trivial, and
hardly deserve such beauty of type and paper; others, however, will be
gladly welcomed by all students of Mr. Gibson's work, because they
exhibit the powers of the author in an unusual and charming manner. I
should think that those familiar with the topography and with the
colloquialisms constantly appearing in this book, would read it with a
veritable delight of reminiscence.
NORTHUMBERLAND
Heatherland and bent-land--
Black land and white,
God bring me to Northumberland,
The land of my delight.
Land of singing waters,
And winds from off the sea,
God bring me to Northumberland,
The land where I would be.
Heatherland and bent-land,
And valleys rich with corn,
God bring me to Northumberland,
The land where I was born.
The shadow of the war darkens nearly every page of this volume, and
the last poem expresses not the local but the universal sentiment of
us who remain in our homes.
We who are left, how shall we look again
Happily on the sun, or feel the rain,
Without remembering how they who went
Ungrudgingly, and spent
Their all for us, loved, too, the sun and rain?
A bird among the rain-wet lilac sings--
But we, how shall we turn to little things
And listen to the birds and winds and streams
Made holy by their dreams,
Nor feel the heart-break in the heart of things?
An interesting feature of the _Collected Poems_ is a striking
unfinished portrait of the author by Mrs. Wise; but I think it was an
error to publish all these verses in one volume. They produce an
impression of grey monotony which is hardly fair to the poet. The
individuals change their names, but they pass through the same typical
woe of childbirth, desertion, loveless old age, incipient insanity,
with eternal joyless toil. One will form a higher opinion if one reads
the separate volumes as they appeared, and not too much at a time.
His contribution to the advance of English poetry is seen mainly in
his grim realism, in his direct, unadorned presentation of what he
believes to be the truth, whether it be the facts of environment, or
the facts of thought. Conventional war-poetry, excellently represented
by Tennyson's _Charge of the Light Brigade_, which itself harks
back to Drayton's stirring _Ballad of Agincourt_, has not the
slightest echo in these volumes; and ordinary songs of labour are
equally remote. Face to face with Life--that is where the poet leads
us, and where he leaves us. He is far indeed from possessing the
splendid lyrical gift of John Masefield; he has nothing of the
literary quality of William Watson. He writes neither of romantic
buccaneers nor of golden old books. But he is close to the grimy
millions. He writes the short and simple annals of the poor. He is a
poet of the people, and seems to have taken a vow that we shall not
forget them.
Ralph Hodgson was born somewhere in Northumberland about forty years
ago, and successfully eluded the notice of the world until the year
1907. He is by nature such a recluse that I feel certain he would
prefer to attract no attention whatever were it not for the fact that
it is as necessary for a poet to print his songs as it is for a bird
to sing them. His favourite companions are Shelley, Wordsworth, and a
bull terrier, and he is said to play billiards with "grim
earnestness." In 1907 he published a tiny volume called _The Last
Blackbird_, and in 1917 another and tinier one called _Poems_.
During this decade he printed in a few paper booklets, which some day
will be valuable curiosities, separate pieces such as _Eve_,
_The Bull_, _The Mystery_. These are now permanently
preserved in the 1917 book. This thin volume, weighing only two or
three ounces, is a real addition to the English poetry of the
twentieth century.
It is impossible to read the verse of Ralph Hodgson without admiration
for the clarity of his art and respect for the vigour of his mind.
Although many of his works are as aloof from his own opinions as a
well-executed statue, the strength of his personality is an immanent
force. He writes much and publishes little; he is an intellectual
aristocrat. He has the fastidiousness which was the main
characteristic of the temperament of Thomas Gray; and he has as well
Gray's hatred of publicity and much of Gray's lambent humour, more
salty than satiric. His work is decidedly caviare to the general, not
because it is obscure, which it is not, but because it presupposes
much background. Lovers of nature and lovers of books will love these
verses, and reread them many times; but they are not for all markets.
No contemporary poet is more truly original than he; but his
originality is seen in his mental attitude rather than in newness of
form or strangeness of language. The standard metres are good enough
for him, and so are the words in common use. His subjects are the
world-old subjects of poetry--birds, flowers, men and women. Religion
is as conspicuously absent as it is in the works of Keats; its place
is taken by sympathy for humanity and an extraordinary sympathy for
animals. He is as far from the religious passion of Francis Thompson
as he is from the sociological inquisitiveness of Mr. Gibson. To him
each bird, each flower appears as a form of worship. Men and women
appeal to him not because they are poor or downtrodden, but simply
because they are men and women. He is neither an optimist nor a
pessimist; the world is full of objects both interesting and
beautiful, which will pay a rich return to those who observe them
accurately. This is as near as he has thus far come to any philosophy
or any theology:
THE MYSTERY
He came and took me by the hand
Up to a red rose tree,
He kept His meaning to Himself
But gave a rose to me.
I did not pray Him to lay bare
The mystery to me,
Enough the rose was Heaven to smell,
And His own face to see.
It is the absolute object that interests this poet, rather than vague
or futile speculation about it. The flower in the crannied wall he
would leave there. He would never pluck it out, root and all,
wondering about the mystery of the life principle. No poet is more
clean-eyed. His eyes are achromatic. He has lost his illusions gladly;
every time he has lost an illusion he has gained a new idea. The world
as it is seems to him more beautiful, more interesting than any
false-coloured picture of it or any longing to remould it nearer to
the heart's desire. He faces life with steady composure. But it is not
the composure either of stoicism or of despair. He finds it so
wonderful just as it is that he is thankful that he has eyes to see
its beauty, ears to hear its melodies--enough for his present mortal
state.
AFTER
"How fared you when you mortal were?
What did you see on my peopled star?"
"Oh, well enough," I answered her,
"It went for me where mortals are!
"I saw blue flowers and the merlin's flight
And the rime on the wintry tree,
Blue doves I saw and summer light
On the wings of the cinnamon bee."
There is in all this a kind of reverent worship
without any trace of mysticism. And still less of
that modern attitude more popular and surely
more fruitless than mysticism--defiance.
There is a quite different side to the poetry of
Mr. Hodgson, which one would hardly suspect
after reading his outdoor verse. The lamplit
silence of the library is as charming to him as
the fragrant silence of the woods. He is as much
of a recluse among books as he is among flowers.
No poet of today seems more self-sufficient. Although
a lover of humanity, he seems to require
no companionship. He is no more lonely than a
cat, and has as many resources as Tabby herself.
Now when he talks about books, his poetry becomes
intimate, and forsakes all objectivity.
His humour, a purely intellectual quality with him,
rises unrestrainedly.
MY BOOKS
When the folks have gone to bed,
And the lamp is burning low,
And the fire burns not so red
As it burned an hour ago,
Then I turn about my chair
So that I can dimly see
Into the dark corners where
Lies my modest library.
Volumes gay and volumes grave,
Many volumes have I got;
Many volumes though I have,
Many volumes have I not.
I have not the rare Lucasta,
London, 1649;
I'm a lean-pursed poetaster,
Or the book had long been mine....
Near the "Wit's Interpreter"
(Like an antique Whitaker,
Full of strange etcetera),
"Areopagitiea,"
And the muse of Lycidas,
Lost in meditation deep,
Give the cut to Hudibras,
Unaware the knave's asleep....
There lies Coleridge, bound in green,
Sleepily still wond'ring what
He meant Kubla Khan to mean,
In that early Wordsworth, Mat.
Arnold knows a faithful prop,--
Still to subject-matter leans,
Murmurs of the loved hill-top,
Fyfield tree and Cumnor scenes.
The poem closes with a high tribute to Shelley, "more than all the
others mine."
The following trifle is excellent fooling:
THE GREAT AUK'S GHOST
The Great Auk's ghost rose on one leg,
Sighed thrice and three times winkt,
And turned and poached a phantom egg,
And muttered, "I'm extinct."
But it is in the love of unextinct animals that Mr. Hodgson's poetic
powers find their most effective display. His masterpiece on the old
unhappy Bull is surprisingly impressive; surprisingly, because we
almost resent being made to feel such ardent sympathy for the poor old
Bull, when there are so many other and more important objects to be
sorry for. Yet the poet draws us away for the moment from all the
other tragedies in God's universe, and absolutely compels our pity for
the Bull. The stanzas in this poem swarm with life.
From a certain point of view, poets are justified in calling attention
to the sufferings of our animal brothers. For it is the sufferings of
animals, even more than the sorrows of man, that check our faith
either in the providence or in the love of God. Human suffering may
possibly be balanced against the spiritual gain it (sometimes) brings;
and at all events, we know that there is no road to greatness of
character except through pain. But what can compensate the dumb
animals for their physical anguish? It is certainly difficult to see
their reward, unless they have immortal souls. That this is no slight
obstacle in the way of those who earnestly desire to believe in an
ethical universe, may be seen from the fact that it was the sight of a
snake swallowing a toad that destroyed once for all the religious
beliefs of Turgenev; and I know a man of science in America who became
an agnostic simply from observation of a particular Texas fly that
bites the cattle. The Founder of Christianity recognized this problem,
as He did every other painful fact in life, when He made the remark
about the sparrow.
Yet even the pessimists ought not to be quite so sure that God is
morally inferior to man. Even their God may be no more amused by human
anguish then men are amused by the grotesque floppings of a dying
fish.
The villains in the world are those who have no respect for the
personality of birds and beasts. And their cruelty to animals is not
deliberate or vindictive--it arises from crass stupidity.
STUPIDITY STREET
I saw with open eyes
Singing birds sweet
Sold in the shops
For the people to eat,
Sold in the shops of
Stupidity Street.
I saw in vision
The worm in the wheat,
And in the shops nothing
For people to eat;
Nothing for sale in
Stupidity Street.
The poet's attitude toward the lion in the jungle, the bull in the
field, the cat in the yard, the bird on the tree is not one of
affectionate petting, for love and sympathy are often
mingled--consciously or unconsciously--with condescension. There is no
trace of condescension in the way Mr. Hodgson writes of animals. He
treats them with respect, and not only hates to see them hurt, he
hates to see their dignity outraged.
THE BELLS OF HEAVEN
'Twould ring the bells of Heaven
The wildest peal for years,
If Parson lost his senses
And people came to theirs,
And he and they together
Knelt down with angry prayers
For tamed and shabby tigers
And dancing dogs and bears,
And wretched, blind pit ponies,
And little hunted hares.
I confess that I have often felt a sense of shame for humanity when I
have observed men and women staring through the bars at the splendid
African cats in cages, and have also observed that their foolish stare
is returned by the lion or tiger with a dull look of infinite boredom.
Nor is it pleasant to see small boys pushing sticks through the safe
bars, in an endeavour to irritate the royal captives. One remembers
Browning's superb lion in _The Glove_, whom the knight was able
to approach in safety, because the regal beast was completely lost in
thought--he was homesick for the desert, oblivious of the little
man-king and his duodecimo court.
Although the total production of Ralph Hodgson is slight in quantity,
the percentage of excellence is remarkably high. The reason for this
is clear. Instead of printing everything he writes, and leaving the
employment of the cream-separator to his readers, he gives to the
public only what has passed his own severe scrutiny. He is a true
poet, with an original mind.
As for the work of Lascelles Abercrombie, which has been much praised
in certain circles, I should prefer to leave the criticism of that to
those who enjoy reading it. If I should attempt to "do justice" to his
poetry, I should seem to his friends to be doing just the
opposite--the opposite of just.