April 7, 1894. His Plays.
For some weeks now I have been meaning to write about Mr. John
Davidson's "Plays" (Elkin Mathews and John Lane), and always shirking
the task at the last moment. The book is an exceedingly difficult one
to write about, and I am not at all sure that after a few sentences I
shall not stick my hands in my pockets and walk off to something
easier. The recent fine weather has, however, made me desperate. The
windows of the room in which I sit face S. and S.-E.; consequently a
deal of sunshine comes in upon my writing-table. In ninety-nine cases
out of the hundred this makes for idleness; in this, the hundredth
case, it constrains to energy, because it is rapidly bleaching the
puce-colored boards in which Mr. Davidson's plays are bound--and
(which is worse) bleaching them unevenly. I have tried (let the
miserable truth be confessed) turning the book daily, as one turns a
piece of toast--But this is not criticism of Mr. Davidson's "Plays."
His Style full of Imagination and Wit.
Now it would be easy and pleasant to express my great admiration of
Mr. Davidson's Muse, and justify it by a score of extracts and so make
an end: and nobody (except perhaps Mr. Davidson himself) would know my
dishonesty. For indeed and out of doubt he is in some respects the
most richly-endowed of all our younger poets. Of wit and of
imagination he has almost a plethora: they crowd this book, and all
his books, from end to end. And his frequent felicity of phrase is
hardly less remarkable. You may turn page after page, and with each
page the truth of this will become more obvious. Let me add his quick
eye for natural beauty, his penetrating instinct for the principles
that lie beneath its phenomena, his sympathy with all men's more
generous emotions--and still I have a store of satisfactory
illustrations at hand for the mere trouble of turning the leaves.
Consider, for instance, the imagery in his description of the fight by
Bannockburn--
Now are they hand to hand!
How short a front! How close! _They're sewn together
with steel cross-stitches, halbert over sword,_
_Spear across lance and death the purfled seam!_
I never saw so fierce, so lock'd a fight.
That tireless brand that like a pliant flail
Threshes the lives from sheaves of Englishmen--
Know you who wields it? Douglas, who but he!
A noble meets him now. Clifford it is!
No bitterer foes seek out each other there.
Parried! That told! And that! Clifford, good night!
And Douglas shouts to Randolf; Edward Bruce
Cheers on the Steward; while the King's voice rings
In every Scotch ear: such a narrow strait
Confines this firth of war!
_Young Friar_: "God gives me strength
Again to gaze with eyes unseared. _Jewels!
These must be jewels peering in the grass.
Cloven from helms, or on them: dead men's eyes
Scarce shine so bright. The banners dip and mount
Like masts at sea...._"
Or consider the fanciful melody of the Fairies' song in _An
Unhistorical Pastoral_--
"Weave the dance and sing the song;
_Subterranean depths prolong
The rainy patter of our feet;_
Heights of air are rendered sweet
By our singing. Let us sing,
Breathing softly, fairily,
Swelling sweetly, airily,
Till earth and sky our echo ring.
Rustling leaves chime with our song:
Fairy bells its close prolong
Ding-dong, ding-dong."
--Or the closely-packed wit in such passages as these--
_Brown_: "This world,
This oyster with its valves of toil and play,
Would round his corners for its own good ease,
And make a pearl of him if he'd plunge in.
* * * * *
_Jones_: And in this matter we may all be pearls.
_Smith_: Be worldlings, truly. I would rather be
A shred of glass that sparkles in the sun,
And keeps a lowly rainbow of its own,
Than one of these so trim and patent pearls
With hearts of sand veneered, sewed up and down
The stiff brocade society affects."
I have opened the book at random for these quotations. Its pages are
stuffed with scores as good. Nor will any but the least intelligent
reviewer upbraid Mr. Davidson for deriving so much of his inspiration
directly from Shakespeare. Mr. Davidson is still a young man; but the
first of these plays, _An Unhistorical Pastoral_, was first printed so
long ago as 1877; and the last, _Scaramouch in Naxos; a Pantomime_, in
1888. They are the work therefore of a very young man, who must use
models while feeling his way to a style and method of his own.
Lack of "Architectonic" Quality.
But--there is a "but"; and I am coming at length to my difficulty with
Mr. Davidson's work. Oddly enough, this difficulty may be referred to
the circumstance that Mr. Davidson's poetry touches Shakespeare's
great circle at a second point. Wordsworth, it will be remembered,
once said that Shakespeare _could_ not have written an Epic
(Wordsworth, by the way, was rather fond of pointing out the things
that Shakespeare could not have done). "Shakespeare _could_ not have
written an Epic; he would have died of plethora of thought."
Substitute "wit" for "thought," and you have my difficulty with Mr.
Davidson. It is given to few men to have great wit: it is given to
fewer to carry a great wit lightly. In Mr. Davidson's case it
luxuriates over the page and seems persistently to choke his sense of
form. One image suggests another, one phrase springs under the very
shadow of another until the fabric of his poem is completely hidden
beneath luxuriant flowers of speech. Either they hide it from the
author himself; or, conscious of his lack of architectonic skill, he
deliberately trails these creepers over his ill-constructed walls. I
think the former is the true explanation, but am not sure.
Let me be cautious here, or some remarks I made the other day upon
another poet--Mr. Hosken, author of _Phaon and Sappho_, and _Verses by
the Way_--will be brought up against me. Defending Mr. Hosken against
certain critics who had complained of the lack of dramatic power in
his tragedies, I said, "Be it allowed that he has little dramatic
power, and that (since the poem professed to be a tragedy) dramatic
power was what you reasonably looked for. But an alert critic,
considering the work of a beginner, will have an eye for the
bye-strokes as well as the main ones: and if the author, while missing
the main, prove effective with the bye--if Mr. Hosken, while failing
to construct a satisfactory drama, gave evidence of strength in many
fine meditative passages--then at the worst he stands convicted of a
youthful error in choosing a literary form unsuited to convey his
thought."
Not in the "Plays" only.
These observations I believe to be just, and having entered the
_caveat_ in Mr. Hosken's case, I should observe it in Mr. Davidson's
also, did these five youthful plays stand alone. But Mr. Davidson has
published much since these plays first appeared--works both in prose
and verse--_Fleet Street Eclogues_, _Ninian Jamieson_, _A Practical
Novelist_, _A Random Itinerary_, _Baptist Lake_: and because I have
followed his writings (I think from his first coming to London) with
the greatest interest, I may possibly be excused for speaking a word
of warning. I am quite certain that Mr. Davidson will never bore me:
but I wish I could be half so certain that he will in time produce
something in true perspective; a fabric duly proportioned, each line
of which from the beginning shall guide the reader to an end which the
author has in view; something which
"_Servetur ad imum
Qualis ab incepto processerit, et sibi constet._"
_Sibi constet_, be it remarked. A work of art may stand very far from
Nature, provided its own parts are consistent. Heaven forbid that a
critic should decry an author for being fantastic, so long as he is
true to his fantasy.
But Mr. Davidson's wit is so brilliant within the circles of its
temporary coruscation as to leave the outline of his work in a
constant penumbra. Indeed, when he wishes to unburden his mind of an
idea, he seems to have less capacity than many men of half his
ability to determine the form best suited for conveying it. If
anything can be certain which has not been tried, it is that his story
_A Practical Novelist_ should have been cast in dramatic form. His
vastly clever _Perfervid: _or_ the Career of Ninian Jamieson_ is cast
in two parts which neither unite to make a whole, nor are sufficiently
independent to stand complete in themselves. I find it characteristic
that his _Random Itinerary_--that fresh and agreeable narrative of
suburban travel--should conclude with a crashing poem, magnificent in
itself, but utterly out of key with the rest of the book. Turn to the
_Compleat Angler_, and note the exquisite congruity of the songs
quoted by Walton with the prose in which they are set, and the
difference will be apparent at once. Fate seems to dog Mr. Davidson
even into his illustrations. _A Random Itinerary_ and this book of
_Plays_ (both published by Messrs. Mathews and Lane) have each a
conspicuously clever frontispiece. But the illustrator of _A Random
Itinerary_ has chosen as his subject the very poem which I have
mentioned as out of harmony with the book; and I must protest that the
vilely sensual faces in Mr. Beardsley's frontispiece to these _Plays_
are hopelessly out of keeping with the sunny paganism of _Scaramouch
in Naxos_. There is nothing Greek about Mr. Beardsley's figures: their
only relationship with the Olympians is derived through the goddess
Aselgeia.
With all this I have to repeat that Mr. Davidson is in some respects
the most richly endowed of all the younger poets. The grand manner
comes more easily to him than to any other: and if he can cultivate a
sense of form and use this sense as a curb upon his wit, he has all
the qualities that take a poet far.
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