GOBLINS AND PAGODAS
BY
JOHN GOULD FLETCHER
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
The Riverside Press Cambridge
1916
TO
DAISY
Thanks are due to the editor of The Egoist, London, for permission to
reprint The Ghosts of an Old House and the Orange Symphony; to the
editor of Poetry, Chicago, for permission to reprint the Blue Symphony;
and to the editor of The Little Review for permission to reprint the
Green Symphony.
PREFACE
I
The second half of the nineteenth and the first fifteen years of the
twentieth century have been a period of research, of experiment, of
unrest and questioning. In science and philosophy we have witnessed an
attempt to destroy the mechanistic theory of the universe as developed
by Darwin, Huxley, and Spencer. The unknowable has been questioned:
hypotheses have been shaken: vitalism and idealism have been proclaimed.
In the arts, the tendency has been to strip each art of its inessentials
and to disclose the underlying basis of pure form. In life, the
principles of nationality, of racial culture, of individualism, of
social development, of Christian ethics, have been discussed, debated,
and examined from top to bottom, until at last, in the early years of
the twentieth century we find all Europe, from the leaders of thought
down to the lowest peasantry, engaged in a mutually destructive war of
which few can trace the beginnings and none can foresee the end. The
fundamental tenets of thought, art, life itself, have been shaken: and
either civilization is destined to some new birth, or mankind will
revert to the conditions of life, thought, and social intercourse that
prevailed in the Stone Age.
Like all men of my generation, I have not been able to resist this
irresistible upheaval of ideas and of forces: and, to the best of my
ability, I have tried to arrive at a clear understanding of the
fundamentals of æsthetic form as they affect the art to which I have
felt myself instinctively akin, the art of poetry. That I have
completely attained such an understanding, it would be idle for me to
pretend: but I believe, and have induced some others to believe, that I
have made a few steps towards it. Some explanation of my own peculiar
theories and beliefs is necessary, however, to those who have not
specifically concerned themselves with poetry, or who suffer in the
presence of any new work of art from the normal human reaction that all
art principles are so essentially fixed that any departure from accepted
ideas is madness.
II
The fundamental basis of all the arts is the same. In every case art
aims at the evocation of some human emotion in the spectator or
listener. Where science proceeds from effects to causes, and seeks to
analyze the underlying causes of emotion and sensation, art reverses the
process, and constructs something that will awaken emotions, according
to the amount of receptiveness with which other people approach it. Thus
architecture gives us feelings of density, proportion, harmony:
sculpture, of masses in movement; painting, of colour-harmony and the
ordered composition of lines and volumes from which arise sensations of
space: music, of the development of sounds into melodic line, harmonic
progression, tonal opposition, and symphonic structure.
The object of literature is not dissimilar from these. Literature aims
at releasing the emotions that arise from the formed words of a certain
language. But literature is probably a less pure--and hence more
universal--art than any I have yet examined. For it must be apparent to
all minds that not only is a word a definite symbol of some fact, but
also it is a thing capable of being spoken or sounded. The art of
literature, then, in so far as it deals with definite statements, is
akin to painting or photography: in so far as it deals with sounded
words, it is akin to music.
III
Literature, therefore, does not depend on the peculiar twists and quirks
which represent, to those who can read, the words, but rather on the
essential words themselves. In fact, literature existed before writing;
and writing in itself is of no value from the purely literary sense,
except in so far as it preserves and transmits from generation to
generation the literary emotion. Style, whether in prose or poetry, is
an attempt to develop this essentially musical quality of literature, to
evoke the magic that exists in the sound-quality of words, as well as
to combine these sound-qualities in definite statements or sentences.
The difference between prose and poetry is, therefore, not a difference
of means, but of psychological effect and reaction. The means employed,
the formed language, is the same: but the resultant impression is quite
different.
In prose, the emotions expressed are those that are capable of
development in a straight line. In so far as prose is pure, it confines
itself to the direct orderly progression of a thought or conception or
situation from point to point of a flat surface. The sentences, as they
develop this conception from its beginning to conclusion, move on, and
do not return upon themselves. The grouping of these sentences into
paragraphs gives the breadth of the thought. The paragraphs, sections,
and chapters are each a square, in that they represent a division of the
main thought into parallel units, or blocks of subsidiary ideas. The
sensation of depth is finally obtained by arranging these blocks in a
rising climacteric progression, or in parallel lines, or in a sort of
zigzag figure.
The psychological reaction that arises from the intelligent appreciation
of poetry is quite different. In poetry, we have a succession of curves.
The direction of the thought is not in straight lines, but wavy and
spiral. It rises and falls on gusts of strong emotion. Most often it
creates strongly marked loops and circles. The structure of the stanza
or strophe always tends to the spherical. Depth is obtained by making
one sphere contain a number of concentric, or overlapping spheres.
Hence, when we speak of poetry we usually mean regular rhyme and metre,
which have for so long been considered essential to all poetry, not as a
device for heightening musical effect, as so many people suppose, but
merely to make these loops and circles more accentuated, and to make the
line of the poem turn upon itself more recognizably. But it must be
recognized that just as Giotto's circle was none the less a circle,
although not drawn with compasses, so poetic circles can be constructed
out of subtler and more musical curves than that which painstakingly
follows the selfsame progression of beats, and catches itself up on the
same point of rhyme for line after line. The key pattern on the lip of a
Greek vase may be beautiful, but it is less beautiful, less satisfying,
and less conclusive a test of artistic ability than the composition of
satyrs and of mænads struggling about the centre. Therefore I maintain,
and will continue to do so, that the mere craftsman-ability to write in
regular lines and metres no more makes a man a poet than the ability to
stencil wall-papers makes him a painter.
Rather is it more important to observe that almost any prose work of
imaginative literature, if examined closely, will be found to contain a
plentiful sprinkling of excellent verses; while many poems which the
world hails as master-pieces, contain whole pages of prose. The fact is,
that prose and poetry are to literature as composition and colour are
to painting, or as light and shadow to the day, or male and female to
mankind. There are no absolutely perfect poets and no absolutely perfect
prose-writers. Each partakes of some of the characteristics of the
other. The difference between poetry and prose is, therefore, a
difference between a general roundness and a general squareness of
outline. A great French critic, recently dead, who devoted perhaps the
major part of his life to the study of the æsthetics of the French
tongue, declared that Flaubert and Chateaubriand wrote only poetry. If
there are those who cannot see that in the only true and lasting sense
of the word poetry, this remark was perfectly just, then all I have
written above will be in vain.
IV
Along with the prevailing preoccupation with technique which so marks
the early twentieth century, there has gone also a great change in the
subject-matter of art. Having tried to explain the aesthetic form-basis
of poetry, I shall now attempt to explain my personal way of viewing its
content.
It is a significant fact that every change in technical procedure in the
arts is accompanied by, and grows out of, a change in subject-matter. To
take only one out of innumerable examples, the new subject-matter of
Wagner's music-dramas, of an immeasurably higher order than the usual
libretto, created a new form of music, based on motifs, not melodies.
Other examples can easily be discovered. The reason for this is not
difficult to find.
No sincere artist cares to handle subject-matter that has already been
handled and exhausted. It is not a question of a desire to avoid
plagiarism, or of self-conscious searching for novelty, but of a
perfectly spontaneous and normal appeal which any new subject-matter
always makes. Hence, when a new subject appears to any artist, he always
realizes it more vividly than an old one, and if he is a good artist, he
realizes it so vividly that he recreates it in what is practically a
novel form.
This novel form never is altogether novel, nor is the subject altogether
a new subject. For, as I pointed out at the beginning of this preface,
that all arts sprang practically out of the same primary sensations, so
the subject-matter of all art must forever be the same: namely, nature
and human life. Hence, any new type of art will always be found, in
subject-matter as well as in technique, to have its roots in the old.
Art is like a kaleidoscope, capable of many changes, while the material
which builds up those changes remains the same.
Nevertheless, although the subject-matter in this book is not altogether
new, yet I have realized it in a way which has not often been tried, and
out of that fresh and quite personal realization have sprung my
innovations in subject as well as technique. Let me illustrate by a
concrete example.
V
A book lies on my desk. It has a red binding and is badly printed on
cheap paper. I have had this book with me for several years. Now,
suppose I were to write a poem on this book, how would I treat the
subject?
If I were a poet following in the main the Victorian tradition, I should
write my poem altogether about the contents of this book and its author.
My poem would be essentially a criticism of the subject-matter of the
book. I should state at length how that subject-matter had affected me.
In short, what the reader would obtain from this sort of poem would be
my sentimental reaction towards certain ideas and tendencies in the work
of another.
If I were a realist poet, I should write about the book's external
appearance. I should expatiate on the red binding, the bad type, the
ink-stain on page sixteen. I should complain, perhaps, of my poverty at
not being able to buy a better edition, and conclude with a gibe at the
author for not having realized the sufferings of the poor.
Neither of these ways, however, of writing about this book possesses any
novelty, and neither is essentially my own way. My own way of writing
about it would be as follows:--
I should select out of my life the important events connected with my
ownership of this book, and strive to write of them in terms of the
volume itself, both as regards subject-matter and appearance. In other
words, I should link up my personality and the personality of the book,
and make each a part of the other. In this way I should strive to evoke
a soul out of this piece of inanimate matter, a something characteristic
and structural inherent in this in-organic form which is friendly to me
and responds to my mood.
This method is not new, although it has not often been used in
Occidental countries. Professor Fenollosa, in his book on Chinese and
Japanese art, states that it was universally employed by the Chinese
artists and poets of the Sung period in the eleventh century A.D. He
calls this doctrine of the interdependence of man and inanimate nature,
the cardinal doctrine of Zen Buddhism. The Zen Buddhists evolved it from
the still earlier Taoist philosophy, which undoubtedly inspired Li Po
and the other great Chinese poets of the seventh and eighth centuries
A.D.
VI
In the first poems of this volume, the "Ghosts of an Old House," I have
followed the method already described. I have tried to evoke, out of the
furniture and surroundings of a certain old house, definite emotions
which I have had concerning them. I have tried to relate my childish
terror concerning this house--a terror not uncommon among children, as I
can testify--to the aspects that called it forth.
In the "Symphonies," which form the second part of this volume, I have
gone a step further. My aim in writing these was, from the beginning, to
narrate certain important phases of the emotional and intellectual
development--in short, the life--of an artist, not necessarily myself,
but of that sort of artist with which I might find myself most in
sympathy. And here, not being restrained by any definite material
phenomena, as in the Old House, I have tried to state each phase in the
terms of a certain colour, or combination of colours, which is
emotionally akin to that phase. This colour, and the imaginative
phantasmagoria of landscape which it evokes, thereby creates, in a
definite and tangible form, the dominant mood of each poem.
The emotional relations that exist between form, colour, and sound have
been little investigated. It is perfectly true that certain colours
affect certain temperaments differently. But it is also true that there
is a science of colour, and that certain of its laws are already
universally known, if not explained. Naturally enough, it is to the
painters we must first turn if we want to find out what is known about
colour. We discover that painters continually are speaking of hot and
cold colour: red, yellow, orange being generally hot, and green, blue,
and violet cold--mixed colours being classed hot and cold according to
the proportions they contain of the hot and cold colours. We also
discover that certain colours will not fit certain forms, but rebel at
the combination. This is so far true that scarcely any landscape painter
finishes his pictures from nature, but in the studio: and almost any art
student, painting a landscape, will disregard the colour before him and
employ the colour-scheme of his master or of some painter he admires. As
Delacroix noted in his journal: "A conception having become a
composition must move in the milieu of a colour peculiar to it. There
seems to be a particular tone belonging to some part of every picture
which is a key that governs all the other tones."
Therefore, we must admit that there is an intimate relation between
colour and form. It is the same with colour and sounds. Many musicians
have observed the phenomenon, that when certain notes, or combinations
of them, are sounded, certain colours are also suggested to the eye. A
Russian composer, Scriabine, went so far as to construct colour-scales,
and an English scientist, Professor Wallace Rimington, has built an
organ which plays in colours, instead of notes. Unfortunately, the
musicians have given this subject less attention than the painters, and
therefore our knowledge concerning the relations of colour and sound is
more fragmentary and incomplete. Nevertheless, these relations exist,
and it is for the future to develop them more fully.
Literature, and especially poetry, as I have already pointed out,
partakes of the character of both painting and music. The impressionist
method is quite as applicable to writing as it is to landscape. Poems
can be written in major or minor keys, can be as full of dominant motif
as a Wagner music-drama, and even susceptible of fugal treatment.
Literature is the common ground of many arts, and in its highest
development, such as the drama as practised in fifth-century Athens, is
found allied to music, dancing, and colour. Hence, I have called my
works "Symphonies," when they are really dramas of the soul, and hence,
in them I have used colour for verity, for ornament, for drama, for its
inherent beauty, and for intensifying the form of the emotion that each
of these poems is intended to evoke.
VII
Let us take an artist, a young man at the outset of his career. His
years of searching, of fumbling, of other men's influence, are coming to
an end. Sure of himself, he yet sees that he will spend all his life
pursuing a vision of beauty which will elude him at the very last. This
is the first symphony, which I have called the "Blue," because blue
suggests to me depth, mystery, and distance.
He finds himself alone in a great city, surrounded by noise and
clamour. It is as if millions of lives were tugging at him, drawing him
away from his art, tempting him to go out and whelm his personality in
this black whirlpool of struggle and failure, on which float golden
specks--the illusory bliss of life. But he sees that all this is only
another illusion, like his own. Here we have the "Symphony in Black and
Gold."
He emerges from the city, and in the country is re-intoxicated with
desire for life by spring. He vows himself to a self-sufficing pagan
worship of nature. This is the "Green Symphony."
Quickened by spring, he dreams of a marvellous golden city of art, fall
of fellow-workers. This city appears to him at times like some Italian
town of the Renaissance, at others like some strange Oriental
golden-roofed monastery-temple. He sees himself dead in the desert far
away from it. Yet its blossoming is ever about him. Something divine has
been born of him after death.
So he passes to the "White Symphony," the central poem of this series,
in which I have sought to describe the artist's struggle to attain
unutterable and superhuman perfection. This struggle goes on from the
midsummer of his life to midwinter. The end of it is stated in the poem.
There follows a brief interlude, which I have called a "Symphony in
White and Blue." These colours were chosen perhaps more
idiosyncratically in this case than in the others. I have tried to
depict the sort of temptation that besets most artists at this stage of
their career: the temptation to abandon the struggle for the sake of a
purely sensual existence. In this case, however, the appeal of
sensuality is conveyed under the guise of a dream. It is resisted, and
the struggle begins anew.
War breaks out, not alone in the external world, but in the artist's
soul. He finds he must follow his personality wherever it leads him,
despite all obstacles. This is the "Orange Symphony."
Now follow long years of struggle and neglect. He is shipwrecked, and
still afar he sees his city of art, but this time it is red, a phantom
mocking his impotent rage.
Old age follows. All is violet, the colour of regret and remembrance. He
is living only in the past, his life a succession of dreams.
Lastly, all things fade out into absolute grey, and it is now midwinter.
Looking forth on the world again he still sees war, like a monstrous red
flower, dominating mankind. He hears the souls of the dead declaring
that they, too, have died for an adventure, even as he is about to die.
Such, in the briefest possible analysis, is the meaning of the poems
contained in this book.
_January_, 1916.
CONTENTS
SECTION I. THE GHOSTS OF AN OLD HOUSE
PROLOGUE
PART I. THE HOUSE
Bedroom
Library
Indian Skull
Old Nursery
The Back Stairs
The Wall Cabinet
The Cellar
The Front Door
PART II. THE ATTIC
In the Attic
The Calendar in the Attic
The Hoopskirt
The Little Chair
In the Dark Corner
The Toy Cabinet
The Yardstick
PART III. THE LAWN
The Three Oaks
An Oak
Another Oak
The Old Barn
The Well
The Trees
Vision
Epilogue
SECTION II. SYMPHONIES
BLUE SYMPHONY
SOLITUDE IN THE CITY (SYMPHONY IN BLACK AND GOLD)
I. Words at Midnight
II. The Evening Rain
III. Street of Sorrows
IV. Song in the Darkness
GREEN SYMPHONY
GOLDEN SYMPHONY
WHITE SYMPHONY
MIDSUMMER DREAMS (SYMPHONY IN WHITE AND BLUE)
ORANGE SYMPHONY
RED SYMPHONY
VIOLET SYMPHONY
GREY SYMPHONY
POPPIES OF THE RED YEAR (A SYMPHONY IN SCARLET)
SECTION I
THE GHOSTS OF AN OLD HOUSE
PROLOGUE
The house that I write of, faces the north:
No sun ever seeks
Its six white columns,
The nine great windows of its face.
It fronts foursquare the winds.
Under the penthouse of the veranda roof,
The upper northern rooms
Gloom outwards mournfully.
Staring Ionic capitals
Peer in them:
Owl-like faces.
On winter nights
The wind, sidling round the corner,
Shoots upwards
With laughter.
The windows rattle as if some one were in them wishing to get out
And ride upon the wind.
Doors lead to nowhere:
Squirrels burrow between the walls.
Closets in every room hang open,
Windows are stared into by uncivil ancient trees.
In the middle of the upper hallway
There is a great circular hole
Going up to the attic.
A wooden lid covers it.
All over the house there is a sense of futility;
Of minutes dragging slowly
And repeating
Some worn-out story of broken effort and desire.
PART I. THE HOUSE
BEDROOM
The clump of jessamine
Softly beneath the rain
Rocks its golden flowers.
In this room my father died:
His bed is in the corner.
No one has slept in it
Since the morning when he wakened
To meet death's hands at his heart.
I cannot go to this room,
Without feeling something big and angry
Waiting for me
To throw me on the bed,
And press its thumbs in my throat.
The clump of jessamine
Without, beneath the rain,
Rocks its golden flowers.
LIBRARY
Stuffy smell of mouldering leather,
Tattered arm-chairs, creaking doors,
Books that slovenly elbow each other,
Sown with children's scrawls and long
Worn out by contact with generations:
Tattered tramps displaying yourselves--
"We, though you broke our backs, did not complain."
If I had my way,
I would take you out and bury you quickly,
Or give you to the clean fire.
INDIAN SKULL
Some one dug this up and brought it
To our house.
In the dark upper hall, I see it dimly,
Looking at me through the glass.
Where dancers have danced, and weary people
Have crept to their bedrooms in the morning,
Where sick people have tossed all night,
Where children have been born,
Where feet have gone up and down,
Where anger has blazed forth, and strange looks have passed,
It has rested, watching meanwhile
The opening and shutting of doors,
The coming and going of people,
The carrying out of coffins.
Earth still clings to its eye-sockets,
It will wait, till its vengeance is accomplished.
OLD NURSERY
In the tired face of the mirror
There is a blue curtain reflected.
If I could lift the reflection,
Peer a little beyond, I would see
A boy crying
Because his sister is ill in another room
And he has no one to play with:
A boy listlessly scattering building blocks,
And crying,
Because no one will build for him the palace of Fairy Morgana.
I cannot lift the curtain:
It is stiff and frozen.
THE BACK STAIRS
In the afternoon
When no one is in the house,
I suddenly hear dull dragging feet
Go fumbling down those dark back stairs,
That climb up twisting,
As if they wanted no one to see them.
Beating a dirge upon the bare planks
I hear those feet and the creak of a long-locked door.
My mother often went
Up and down those selfsame stairs,
From the room where by the window
She would sit all day and listlessly
Look on the world that had destroyed her,
She would go down in the evening
To the room where she would sleep,
Or rather, not sleep, but all night
Lie staring fiercely at the ceiling.
In the afternoon
When no one is in the house:
I suddenly hear dull dragging feet
Beating out their futile tune,
Up and down those dark back stairs,
But there is no one in the shadows.
THE WALL CABINET
Above the steep back stairs
So high that only a ladder can come to it,
There is a wall cabinet hidden away.
No one ever unlocks it;
The key is lost, the door is barred,
It is shut and still.
Some say, a previous tenant
Filled its shelves with rows of bottles,
Bottles of spirit, filled with spiders.
I do not know.
Above the sleepy still back stairs,
It watches, shut and still.
THE CELLAR
Faintly lit by a high-barred grating,
The low-hung cellar,
Flattens itself under the house.
In one corner
There is a little door,
So low, it can scarcely be seen.
Beyond,
There is a narrow room,
One must feel for the walls in the dark.
One shrinks to go
To the end of it,
Feeling the smooth cold wall.
Why did the builders who made this house,
Stow one room away like this?
THE FRONT DOOR
It was always the place where our farewells were taken,
When we travelled to the north.
I remember there was one who made some journey,
But did not come back.
Many years they waited for him,
At last the one who wished the most to see him,
Was carried out of this selfsame door in death.
Since then all our family partings
Have been at another door.