Graves and Siegfried Sassoon are both Fusiliers, and they publish a
[Greek: stichomythia] "on Nonsense," just as Cowley and Crashaw did "on
Hope" two centuries and a half ago. Lieut. Sassoon's own volume is later
than those which we have hitherto examined, and bears a somewhat
different character. The gallantry of 1915 and the optimism of 1916 have
passed away, and in Lieut. Sassoon's poems their place is taken by a
sense of intolerable weariness and impatience: "How long, O Lord, how
long?" The name-piece of the volume, and perhaps its first in execution,
is a monologue by an ignorant and shrewd old huntsman, who looks back
over his life with philosophy and regret. Like Captain Graves, he is
haunted with the idea that there must be fox-hounds in Heaven. All
Lieut. Sassoon's poems about horses and hunting and country life
generally betray his tastes and habits. This particular poem hardly
touches on the war, but those which follow are absorbed by the ugliness,
lassitude, and horror of fighting. Lieut. Sassoon's verse has not yet
secured the quality of perfection; he is not sufficiently alive to the
importance of always hitting upon the best and only word. He is
essentially a satirist, and sometimes a very bold one, as in "The Hero,"
where the death of a soldier is announced home in "gallant lies," so
that his mother brags to her neighbours of the courage of her dead son.
At the close of all this pious make-believe, the Colonel
"thought how 'Jack,' cold-footed, useless swine,
Had panicked down the trench that night the mine
Went up at Wicked Corner; how he'd tried
To get sent home; and how, at last, he died,
Blown to small bits";
or, again, as in "Blighters," where the sentimentality of London is
contrasted with the reality in Flanders:
"The House is crammed: tier beyond tier they grin
And cackle at the Show, while prancing ranks
Of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din,
'We're sure the Kaiser loves the dear old Tanks!
"I'd like to see a Tank come down the stalls,
Lurching to rag-time tunes, or 'Home, sweet Home!'--
And there'd be no more jokes in Music-halls
To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume."
It is this note of bitter anger, miles away from the serenity of Rupert
Brooke, the lion-heart of Julian Grenfell, the mournful passion of
Robert Nichols, which differentiates Lieut. Sassoon from his fellows.
They accept the war, with gallantry or with resignation; he detests it
with wrathful impatience. He has much to learn as an artist, for his
diction is often hard, and he does not always remember that Horace,
"when he writ on vulgar subjects, yet writ not vulgarly." But he has
force, sincerity, and a line of his own in thought and fancy. A
considerable section of his poetry is occupied with studies of men he
has observed at the Front, a subaltern, a private of the Lancashires,
conscripts, the dross of a battle-field, the one-legged man ("Thank God,
they had to amputate!"), the sniper who goes crazy--savage,
disconcerting silhouettes drawn roughly against a lurid background.
The bitterness of Lieut. Sassoon is not cynical, it is the rage of
disenchantment, the violence of a young man eager to pursue other aims,
who, finding the age out of joint, resents being called upon to help to
mend it. His temper is not altogether to be applauded, for such
sentiments must tend to relax the effort of the struggle, yet they can
hardly be reproved when conducted with so much honesty and courage.
Lieut. Sassoon, who, as we learn, has twice been severely wounded and
has been in the very furnace of the fighting, has reflected, more
perhaps than his fellow-singers, about the causes and conditions of the
war. He may not always have thought correctly, nor have recorded his
impressions with proper circumspection, but his honesty must be
respectfully acknowledged.
I have now called attention to those soldier-writers of verse who, in my
judgment, expressed themselves with most originality during the war.
There is a temptation to continue the inquiry, and to expatiate on
others of only less merit and promise. Much could be said of Charles
Hamilton Sorley, who gave evidence of precocious literary talent, though
less, I think, in verse, since the unmistakable singing faculty is
absent in _Marlborough_ (Cambridge University Press, 1916), than in
prose, a form in which he already excelled. Sorley must have shown
military gifts as well as a fine courage, for when he was killed in
action in October 1915, although he was but twenty years of age, he had
been promoted captain. In the universal sorrow, few figures awaken more
regret, than his. Something, too, had I space, should be said about the
minstrels who have been less concerned with the delicacies of
workmanship than with stirring the pulses of their auditors. In this
kind of lyric "A Leaping Wind from England" will long keep fresh the
name of W.N. Hodgson, who was killed in the battle of the Somme. His
verses were collected in November 1916. The strange rough drum-taps of
Mr. Henry Lawson, published in Sydney at the close of 1915, and those of
Mr. Lawrence Rentoul, testify to Australian enthusiasm. Most of the
soldier-poets were quite youthful; an exception was R.E. Vernede, whose
_War Poems_ (W. Heinemann, 1917) show the vigour of moral experience. He
was killed in the attack on Harrincourt, in April 1917, having nearly
closed his forty-second year. To pursue the list would only be to make
my omissions more invidious.
There can be no healthy criticism where the principle of selection is
neglected, and I regret that patriotism or indulgence has tempted so
many of those who have spoken of the war-poets of the day to plaster
them with indiscriminate praise. I have here mentioned a few, in whose
honour even a little excess of laudation may not be out of place. But
these are the exceptions, in a mass of standardised poetry made to
pattern, loosely versified, respectable in sentiment, uniformly
meditative, and entirely without individual character. The reviewers who
applaud all these ephemeral efforts with a like acclaim, and who say
that there are hundreds of poets now writing who equal if they do not
excel the great masters of the past, talk nonsense; they talk nonsense,
and they know it. They lavish their flatteries in order to widen the
circle of their audience. They are like the prophets of Samaria, who
declared good unto the King of Israel with one mouth; and we need a
Micaiah to clear the scene of all such flatulent Zedekiahs. It is not
true that the poets of the youngest generation are a myriad Shelleys and
Burnses and Berangers rolled into one. But it is true that they carry on
the great tradition of poetry with enthusiasm, and a few of them with
high accomplishment.
1917.
THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH POETRY[8]
"J'ai vu le cheval rose ouvrir ses ailes d'or,
Et, flairant le laurier que je tenais encor,
Verdoyant a jamais, hier comme aujourd'hui,
Se cabrer vers le Jour et ruer vers la Nuit."
HENRI DE REGNIER.
In venturing this afternoon to address an audience accustomed to listen
to those whose positive authority is universally recognised, and in
taking for my theme a subject not, like theirs, distinct in its
definitions or consecrated by tradition and history, I am aware that I
perform what you may, if you choose, call an act of blameworthy
audacity. My subject is chimerical, vague, and founded on conjectures
which you may well believe yourselves at least as well fitted as I am to
propound. Nevertheless, and in no rash or paradoxical spirit, I invite
you to join with me in some reflections on what is the probable course
of English poetry during, let us say, the next hundred years. If I
happen to be right, I hope some of the youngest persons present will
say, when I am long turned to dust, what an illuminating prophet I was.
If I happen to be wrong, why, no one will remember anything at all about
the matter. In any case we may possibly be rewarded this afternoon by
some agreeable hopes and by the contemplation of some pleasant
analogies.
Our title takes for granted that English poetry will continue, with
whatever fluctuations, to be a living and abiding thing. This I must
suppose that you all accede to, and that you do not look upon poetry as
an art which is finished, or the harvest of classic verse as one which
is fully reaped and garnered. That has been believed at one time and
another, in various parts of the globe. I will mention one instance in
the history of our own time: a quarter of a century ago, the practice of
writing verse was deliberately abandoned in the literatures of the three
Scandinavian countries, but particularly in that of Norway, where no
poetry, in our sense, was written from about 1873 to 1885. It almost
died out here in England in the middle of the fifteenth century; it ran
very low in France at the end of the Middle Ages. But all these
instances, whether ancient or modern, of the attempt to prove prose a
sufficing medium for all expression of human thought have hitherto
failed, and it is now almost certain that they will more and more
languidly be revived, and with less and less conviction.
It was at one of the deadliest moments in the life of the art in England
that George Gascoigne remarked, in his _Epistle to the Reverend Divine_
(1574) that "It seemeth unto me that in all ages Poetry hath been not
only permitted, but also it hath been thought a right good thing."
Poetry has occupied the purest and the fieriest minds in all ages, and
you will remember that Plato, who excluded the poets from his
philosophical Utopia, was nevertheless an exquisite writer of lyrical
verse himself. So, to come down to our own day, Ibsen, who drove poetry
out of the living language of his country, had been one of the most
skilful of prosodical proficients. Such instances may allay our alarm.
There cannot be any lasting force in arguments which remind us of the
pious confessions of a redeemed burglar. It needs more than the zeal of
a turncoat to drive Apollo out of Parnassus.
There will, therefore, we may be sure, continue to be English poetry
written and printed. Can we form any idea of the probable character of
it? There exists, in private hands, a picture by that ingenious
water-colour painter of the late eighteenth century, William Gilpin. It
is very fantastic, and means what you like, but it represents Pegasus,
the horse of the Muses, careering in air on the vast white arc of his
wings, against a sky so dark that it must symbolise the obscure
discourse of those who write in prose. You are left quite doubtful
whether he will strike the rocky terrace in the foreground with his
slender, silver hooves, or will swoop down into the valley below, or
will soar to heaven and out of sight. You are left by the painter in a
pleasant uncertainty, but Hippocrene may break out anywhere, and of the
vivacious courser himself all that we can be sure of is that we are
certain to see him alighting before us when we least expect him.
We may put our trust in the persistence of Pegasus through his
apparently aimless gyrations, and in the elasticity of the poetical
spirit, and yet acknowledge that there are difficulties in the way of
believing that verse will continue to be written in the English language
for a quite indefinite period. Perhaps we may as well face one or two of
these difficulties at once. The principal danger, then, to the future of
poetry seems to me to rest in the necessity of freshness of expression.
Every school of verse is a rising and a breaking wave. It rises, because
its leaders have become capable of new forms of attractive expression;
its crest is some writer, or several writers, of genius, who combine
skill and fire and luck at a moment of extreme opportuneness; and then
the wave breaks, because later writers cannot support the ecstasy, and
merely repeat formulas which have lost their attractiveness. Shirley
would have been a portent, if he had flourished in 1595 and had written
then as he did in 1645. Erasmus Darwin would be one of the miracles of
prosody if _The Loves of the Plants_ could be dated 1689 instead of
1789. There must always be this fluctuation, this rise and fall in
value, and what starts each new wave mounting out of the trough of the
last is the instinctive demand for freshness of expression. _Cantate
Domino_ is the cry of youth, sing a _new_ song unto the Lord.
But with the superabundant circulation of language year after year, week
after week, by a myriad careful scribes, the possibilities of freshness
grow rarer and rarer. The obvious, simple, poignant things seem to have
all been said. It is not merely that the actual poems, like Gray's
_Elegy_, and much of _Hamlet_, and some of Burns's songs, have been
manipulated so often, and put to such pedestrian uses, that they are
like rubbed coins, and begin to lose the very features of Apollo and the
script of the Muses, but that the road seems closed to future bards who
wish to speak with simplicity of similar straightforward things. In
several of the literatures of modern Europe--those which began late, or
struggled long against great disadvantages--it is still possible to
produce pleasure by poems which describe primitive emotions in perfectly
limpid language. But with us in England, I confess that it seems to me
certain that whatever we retain, we can never any more have patience to
listen to a new shepherd piping under the hawthorn-tree. Each generation
is likely to be more acutely preoccupied than the last with the desire
for novelty of expression. Accordingly, the sense of originality, which
is so fervently demanded from every new school of writers, will force
the poets of the future to sweep away all recognised impressions. The
consequence must be, I think--I confess so far as language is concerned
that I see no escape from this--that the natural uses of English and the
obvious forms of our speech will be driven from our national poetry, as
they are even now so generally being driven.
No doubt, in this condition, the originality of those who do contrive to
write strongly and clearly will be more vigorously evident than ever.
The poets will have to gird up their loins and take their sword in their
hands. That wise man of the eighteenth century, to whom we never apply
without some illuminating response, recommends that "Qui saura penser de
lui-meme et former de nobles idees, qu'il prenne, s'il pent, la maniere
et le tour eleve des maitres." These are words which should inspire
every new aspirant to the laurel. "S'il peut"; you see that Vauvenargues
puts it so, because he does not wish that we should think that such
victories as these are easy, or that any one else can help us to produce
them. They are not easy, and they will be made more and more hard by the
rubbed-out, conventionalised coinage of our language.
In this matter I think it probable that the little peoples and the
provinces which cultivate a national speech, will long find a great
facility in expressing themselves in verse. I observe that it has
recently been stated that Wales, which has always teemed with vernacular
poets, has never possessed so many as she does at this time. I am
debarred by what Keats called "giant ignorance" from expressing an
opinion on the subject, but I presume that in Welsh the resources of
language are far from being so seriously exhausted as we have seen that
they are in our own complicated sphere, where the cultivation of all the
higher forms of poetic diction through five centuries has made simple
expression extremely difficult. I am therefore ready to believe that in
Welsh, as in Gaelic and in Erse, the poets have still wide fields of
lyric, epic, and dramatic art untilled. We have seen, in the latter half
of the nineteenth century, Provencal poets capable of producing simple
and thrilling numbers which are out of the reach of their sophisticated
brethren who employ the worn locutions of the French language.
In new generations there is likely, we may be sure, to occur less
description of plain material objects, because the aspect of these has
already received every obvious tribute. So also there can hardly fail to
be less precise enumeration of the primitive natural emotions, because
this also has been done already, and repeated to satiety. It will not
any longer satisfy to write
"The rose is red, the violet blue,
And both are sweet, and so are you."
Reflections of this order were once felt to be exquisite, and they were
so still as lately as when Blake and Wordsworth were young. But it is
quite impossible that we should ever go back to them. Future poets will
seek to analyse the redness of the rose, and will scout, as a fallacious
observation, the statement that the violet is blue. All schemes of art
become mechanical and insipid, and even their _naivetes_ lose their
savour. Verse of excellent quality, in this primitive manner, can now be
written to order by any smart little boy in a Grammar-school.
We have agreed, however, to believe that poetry, as an art, in one shape
or another, will escape from the bankruptcy of language, and that
Pegasus, with whatever strange and unexpected gambollings, will continue
to accompany us. But of one thing we may be quite sure, that it will
only be at the cost of much that we at present admire and enjoy that the
continuity of the art of verse will be preserved. If I could suddenly
present to you some characteristic passages of the best English poetry
of 1963, I doubt extremely whether I should be able to persuade you of
their merit. I am not sure that you would understand what the poet
intended to convey, any more than the Earl of Surrey would have
understood the satires of Donne, or Coleridge have enjoyed the odes of
George Meredith. Young minds invariably display their vitality by
attacking the accepted forms of expression, and then they look about
for novelties, which they cultivate with what seems to their elders to
be extravagance. Before we attempt to form an idea, however shadowy, of
what poetry will be in the future, we must disabuse ourselves of the
delusion that it will be a repetition of what is now produced and
accepted. Nor can we hope by any exercise of philosophy to do away with
the embarrassing and painful, but after all perhaps healthful antagonism
between those who look forward and those who live in the past. The
earnestness expended on new work will always render young men incapable
of doing justice to what is a very little older than themselves; and the
piety with which the elderly regard what gave them full satisfaction in
their days of emotional freshness will always make it difficult for them
to be just to what seems built on the ruins of what they loved.
If there is any feature which we can scarcely be wrong in detecting in
our vision of the poetry of the future it is an elaboration which must
follow on the need for novelty of which I have spoken. I expect to find
the modern poet accepting more or less consciously an ever-increasing
symbolic subtlety of expression. If we could read his verses, which are
still unwritten, I feel sure that we should consider them obscure. That
is to say, we should find that in his anxiety not to repeat what had
been said before him, and in his horror of the trite and the
superficial, he will achieve effect and attach interest _obscuris vera
involvens_--wrapping the truth in darkness. The "darkness" will be
relative, as his own contemporaries, being more instructed and
sophisticated than we are, will find those things transparent, or at
least translucent, which remain opaque enough to us. And, of course, as
epithets and adjectives that seem fresh to us will smell of the inkhorn
to him, he will have to exert his ingenuity to find parallel
expressions which would startle us by their oddity if we met with them
now.
A danger, therefore, which the poets of the future will need all their
ingenuity to avoid, will be the cultivation of a patent artificiality, a
forcing of the note until it ceases to rouse an echo in the human heart.
There will be a determination to sweep away all previously recognised
impressions. Affectation, that is to say the obtaining of an effect by
illegitimate means, is an offence against the Muses which they never
fail to avenge by oblivion or by a curtailed and impeded circulation. We
may instructively examine the history of literature with special
attention to this fault, and we find it in all cases to have been fatal.
It was fatal to the poetry of Alexandria, which closed, as you know, in
an obscurity to which the title of Lycophrontic darkness has been given
from the name of its most extravagant exponent. It was fatal to several
highly-gifted writers of the close of the Elizabethan period, who
endeavoured to give freshness to an outworn scheme of poetic ornament; I
need only remind you of the impenetrable cloud or fog, by Cyril
Tourneur, called _The Transform'd Metamorphosis_, and of the cryptic
rhymed dramas of Lord Brooke. It has not been fatal, I hope, but I think
desperately perilous to a beautiful talent of our own age, the amiable
Stephane Mallarme. Nothing, I feel, is more dangerous to the health of
poetry than the praise given by a group of irresponsible disciples to
verse which transfers commonplace thought to an exaggerated, violent,
and involved scheme of diction, and I confess that I should regard the
future of poetry in this country with much more apprehension than I do,
if I believed that the purely learned poet, the prosodical pedant, was
destined to become paramount amongst us. That would, indeed, threaten
the permanence of the art; and it is for this reason that I look with a
certain measure of alarm on the excess of verbiage about versification
which attends not merely criticism--for that matters little--but the
actual production and creation. I am confident, however, that the common
sense of readers will always bring about a reaction in favour of sanity
and lucidity.
One great objection to the introduction of a tortured and affected style
into verse-writing is the sacrifice which has to be made of that dignity
and sweetness, that suave elevation, which marks all successful
masterpieces. Perhaps as difficult a quality to attain as any which the
poetry of the future will be called upon to study is stateliness, what
the French call "la vraie hauteur." This elevation of style, this
dignity, is foreign to democracies, and it is hard to sustain it in the
rude air of modern life. It easily degenerates, as Europe saw it
degenerate for a century and a half, into pomposity relieved by
flatness. It is apt to become a mere sonorous rhetoric, a cultivation of
empty fine phrases. If we examine the serious poetry of the end of the
seventeenth and the greater part of the eighteenth century--especially
in the other countries of Europe, for England was never without some dew
on the threshing-floor--if we examine it in France, for instance,
between Racine and Andre Chenier, we are obliged to recognise that it
was very rarely both genuine and appropriate. The Romantic Revival,
which we are beginning ungratefully to decry, did at least restore to
poetry the sense of a genuine stateliness of expression, which once more
gave it the requisite dignity, and made it a vehicle for the vital and
the noble sentiments of humanity.
Let us now turn, in our conjectural survey, from the form to the
subjects with which the poetry of the future is likely to be engaged.
Here we are confronted with the fact that, if we examine the whole of
history, we see that the domain of verse has been persistently narrowed
by the incursions of a more and more powerful and wide embracing prose.
At the dawn of civilisation poetry had it all its own way. If
instruction was desired upon any sphere of human knowledge or energy,
the bard produced it in a prosodical shape, combining with the dignity
of form the aid which the memory borrowed from a pattern or a song. Thus
you conceive of a Hesiod before you think of a Homer, and the earliest
poetry was probably of a purely didactic kind. As time went on, prose,
with its exact pedestrian method, took over more and more completely the
whole province of information, but it was not until the nineteenth
century that the last strongholds of the poetry of instruction were
stormed. I will, if you please, bring this home to you by an example
which may surprise you.
The subject which I have taken the liberty of discussing with you this
afternoon has not often occupied the serious attention of critics. But
it was attempted, by no less a person than Wordsworth, more than a
hundred years ago. I make no excuse for repeating to you the remarkable
passage in which he expressed his convictions in the famous Preface of
1800:--