have indulged every extreme in human life, but the Christianity of the
Bible takes sides more definitely. And as for the Catholic Church,
embracing as it did so many seemingly contradictory elements, it is
nevertheless true that at one time it failed to satisfy human nature
because it was too ascetic, and at another time it caused bloody
revolt because it was worldly and luxurious. I need not pursue this
question, for the "orthodoxy" which Mr. Chesterton defends is not the
teaching of the Christian Churches. At first sight it seems to be
anarchy modified by mysticism and friendship for persons. But it is
more than that. Negatively it is a protest against false culture and
cant, and we cannot fail to see that it is at the same time a protest
against that virtue which is the predecessor of false culture--the
incessant, arduous effort to seek truth with the help of the intellect
and the reason. Positively, it champions the spiritual perceptions on
the one hand, and the physical sensations on the other--the
excellences of the manifold activities of the human body and soul.
Both in his view provide the proper avenues of truth. Every spiritual
emotion and every animal passion are in themselves good and excellent.
For him the struggle of life resolves itself into a romantic game,
with immortality as its conclusion. The one discipline which he
upholds, the only precept he has really taken from Christianity, is
that arising from love for your neighbour. That unnamable quality in
life which in every deeper feeling and every keen perception lights
the spirit and charges it with intuitive knowledge is in his
philosophy the love of God and the source of the love for persons.
V
SOME MODERN POETS
A few years ago it was the fashion to lament the dearth of promising
authors, especially poets. But since then we have assured ourselves
that we are still, after all, a poetical people. The reproach against
the age was taken as a challenge by dozens of young adventurers, who
resolved to prove in their own persons that the twentieth century was
not without poets. Tiny volumes of verse fluttered forth from the
press. Poetry Societies were started, and Poetry Reviews, and men and
women met in the darkened hall of Clifford's Inn to hear Mr. Sturge
Moore declaim sonorous verses. Publishers began to advertise new
genius, and reviewers began to attend to poetry as if it were really a
serious business. The opening pages of _The English Review_ were
devoted to poems which seemed to be appreciated in proportion to their
ever-increasing length. Mr. John Masefield had a success such as had
been attained by no poet since Stephen Phillips in his prime. It is
true that Mr. W.H. Davies might have starved if he had not received a
Government pension; that Mr. Yeats--I believe I am right--never
entertained the idea of supporting himself by poetry; that Mr. Doughty
has not so much as been heard of by one Englishman in a thousand.
Nevertheless, poetry has now become a mentionable subject in decent
society; and it is no longer synonymous with Tennyson or Mr. Kipling.
It has become a modern thing, lending itself to new experiments, a
possible vehicle for new ideas, a means even of becoming notorious on
a grand scale.
But before considering some of these younger authors who represent
newer phases in poetry I should like to dwell a little upon the work
of an elder--one who is not by any means so exquisite a poet as Mr.
Robert Bridges, who cannot compare in creative vigour with the greater
poets who were contemporary with him, nor with his junior, Mr. W.B.
Yeats--but interesting for purposes of comparison because his poetry,
even his quite recent poetry, has in it the ring of a past age, of a
poetic ideal to which we are not likely to return in this century. I
allude to Mr. Edmund Gosse, whom we all think of as a distinguished
student and critic of literature, but it is very seldom that we hear
any allusion to his poetical work. "Anyone who has the patience to
turn over these pages," he says in the Preface to his _Collected
Poems_, "will not need to be told that the voice is not of 1911--it is
of 1872, or of a still earlier date--since my technique was determined
more than forty years ago, and what it was it has remained." When
first I read these words they sounded strangely to me. It was only the
other day that he began to edit a distinguished literary page for a
daily paper. Still more recently I heard him speaking on a public
platform. His activity does not seem to be a thing of yesterday, and
it was he who wrote the most intimate and, perhaps, the most
interesting biographical study of recent years; as editor and critic
he is still amongst active living writers. In reading his later poems
we can see how keen is his desire to retain sensibility to the full,
not to become stereotyped by the past, or blind to the newer beauties.
He is conscious of the passage of the Time-Spirit and the changed ways
of men, and the passionate desire of all vital minds to be fully
percipient to the last.
So, if I pray for length of days,
It is not in the barren pride
That looks behind itself, and says,
"The Past alone is deified!"
Nay, humbly, shrinkingly, in dread
Of fires too splendid to be borne--
In expectation lest my head
Be from its Orphic shoulders torn--
I wait, till, down the eastern sky,
Muses, like Maenads in a throng,
Sweep my decayed traditions by,
In startling tunes of unknown song.
In the 350 pages of the _Collected Poems_ there is nothing which were
better omitted. Even the mere literary experiments, the rondeaus, the
sestinas--the literary jokes in which every poet indulges--are neatly
turned. Mr. Gosse has attempted, and succeeded with, a great variety
of metres. His diction is almost unfailingly good; indeed, it is the
very regularity and faultlessness of his verse that sometimes jars. It
is the work of a man many-sided in his nature, many-sided in his
moods. He can find himself in the atmosphere of a Coleridge, a
Wordsworth, a Keats, a Rossetti, a Béranger, and often his form
insensibly glides into that of the precursor whose spirit he for the
moment assimilates. He is by no means a mere imitator. His feeling is
his own; but his genius seems to be rather assimilative than strictly
creative. Scores of his poems have the beauty and the value of the
literature written by the great poets, when they were not in their
greatest moods.
And perhaps it is precisely the many-sidedness of Mr. Gosse's tastes
and interests which has left him so few decisive poetic successes. He
has ranged through literature with a catholic taste. He has helped to
create reputations--the reputations, for instance, of Ibsen and
Stevenson. There have been many calls upon his literary instinct, and
it is not surprising that the most uniformly successful of his poems
are those in praise of the great men of letters whom, with his faculty
for friendship, he made his friends. In the poems on these men--Ibsen,
Ruskin, Stevenson, Henry Sidgwick, Rossetti, and unnamed friends who
have departed--there is dignity, fineness, and the pathos of a regret
for that which he shared with them, though he lacked the power, or
more probably the opportunity, fully to express it.
But not in vain beneath this lofty shade
I danced awhile, frail plaything of the seas;
Unfit to brave the ampler main with these;
Yet, by the instinct which their souls obeyed,
Less steadfast, o'er the trackless wave I strayed,
And follow still their vanishing trestle-trees.
The beauties of literature, of many kinds and in many languages, the
feeling and perception of friendship, nature, and the whole
life-process through which men pass to a green memory or to
oblivion--these are to be found here, the full-bodied expression of a
personality--for poetry is that, or nothing. It is no defect in it
that it is of 1872--that there is a certain formality, a kind of
austerity, even, in its flippancies. It is meditative poetry. It is
poetry which is essentially concerned with the emotions, the fancies,
or the reflections, the very personal and secluded reflections, of a
mind still concerned about the private ways of the spirit. The
emotions, the operations of the mind, and the objective things of
life--they are the concern of Mr. Gosse as they were the concern of
Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Morris, and many poets before them. For
the most part the men of that age adhered to the traditions of poetry,
whether they were romantic or classical. At any rate on the formal
side most of them--Browning is an exception--remained faithful to the
accepted types. On the inner side it was an age which was much
concerned about its soul, about nature, and about persons--yes, about
persons. Whatever we may think about the Victorian age, from its
literature at least we should conclude that it was an age when men
valued friendships. And so its best poetry was essentially emotional,
personal and subjective.
Now I do not suggest that in the poetry of our younger men there is
emerging a single new type with a few distinctive characteristics
which can be contrasted with Victorian poetry. On the contrary, if
there is anything which we should particularly remark, it is the
absence of such typical traits, it is the extraordinary diversity of
type; men are experimenting with verse, attempting to revive old
forms and invent new, to restore the spirit of antiquity or to ride
abreast of the practical spirit of the time. Men like Mr. W.B. Yeats
and "A.E." sought to unite the ancient and, as they believed,
essential Irish spirit with the spirit which is manifested throughout
the stream of English lyrical poetry. In Mr. Yeats there was more
romanticism than he would care to admit, though the Elizabethan ideal
which he cherished and his own power of concentration did much to
subdue and chasten the insubordinate, vaguely aspiring spirit which in
lesser Celtic poets turns to froth, with no undercurrent of human
truth to give significance to its flaky beauty. Fiona Macleod is the
classic instance of this frothy Celtic spirit which is unstayed by
human truth or relevance to life; and there is much of this in
contemporary Irish poetry. Mr. Yeats is not wholly free from it, but
he was conscious of the evil tendency, and subdued it, and the body of
fine poetry which stands to his name, taken as a whole, is unequalled
for clarity, feeling, beauty and felicity of expression by any large
body of poetry standing to the name of any other living poet.
But the Time-Spirit is active, or fickle perhaps, and Mr. Yeats has
already almost ceased to be a quite modern poet. He, like Mr. Gosse,
formed his technique in the nineteenth century, and the twentieth
century is casting about with feverish energy for a new technique and
new things to express. Mr. William Watson belongs quite as much to the
past as does Mr. Gosse, though it might be said of him that he could
belong to any age that knew its Milton and its Wordsworth. In him
assuredly there was no attempt at inventiveness; he has always
repudiated the idea that the poet should seek to innovate. He stands
for austerity and discipline in thought, style, and diction, for a
fine exactness which in his case was compatible with the old passion
for the idea of "freedom" no less than with that private,
self-communing spirit which the Victorians loved to express. Such a
poet as Mr. Maurice Hewlett, antiquarian as he often is in the
subjects he treats, is much more modern in spirit. In style and
technique he is one of those who have gone back, as men for four
centuries have constantly gone back, to the manner of the ancient
Greeks. Just as that clever experimenter in verse, Mr. Ezra Pound, has
created something of an effect by repeating the very metres, melodies,
and mannerisms of the Provençal troubadours, so Mr. Hewlett, modelling
his style upon the far finer Greek originals, produced an effect which
was better than Mr. Pound's in proportion as the Greek tragedians are
superior to the troubadours. In his execution he has really recaptured
much of the manner of the great Greek tragedians. In _The Death of
Hippolytus_ there is something of the aloofness, the blitheness, the
thrust of phrases, the grimness, the sedateness which we associate
with Greek drama. If he has little of the passion or fluency of
Swinburne, he has some of his phrase-making skill, and he is free from
that rhythmical lilt which in Swinburne was often excessive. We shall
never be carried away as by the music of _Atalanta in Calydon_, but we
are often arrested by grim echoes from the actual Greek, apt
translations, as they might be, from an existing original.
But though Mr. Hewlett has been clever enough to adapt the technique
of Greek poets to his own purpose in poetical drama, nevertheless in
his treatment of subject, in thought and feeling, we may see, rather
by his defects than by his excellences, how entirely modern he is. In
_Minos, King of Crete_, the first play in his trilogy _The Agonists_,
we may find ourselves at the outset not a little irritated by his
habit of stage-managing with a view to a public that likes sensational
and scenic effects. Shakespeare used thunder and lightning at the
beginning of _The Tempest_, but only a very modern modern poet could
use these devices as an introduction to tragedy. But it is more to the
point that his treatment of Pasiphae is not only one that would have
been impossible to the Greeks, but would have been impossible to any
literary age which had not been so led away by modern theories of
realism as to believe that any sort of monstrosity, being conceived as
actual, might be made also an object of sympathetic emotion. Pasiphae
is a creature of monstrous, unnatural lust, so vile, and so inhuman in
its vileness, that it is impossible to conceive that human sympathy
should be enlisted in her affair, as if it were a normal and humanly
pitiable lapse from virtue. No Greek tragedian ever did attempt, or
ever would have attempted, to arouse pity for a creature whose
grotesque story expressed the Greek abomination for Phœnician
barbarism. Nothing but the Philistine, or in this case Phœnician,
realism of the twentieth century, can account for Mr. Hewlett's
attempt to elicit fine feeling from an abnormal and nauseous incident.
It has always seemed to me that the transition from the Victorian Age
to the experimental age which followed it was marked by the South
African War. For a dozen years before that war there had been restless
movements in the very heart of the nation; the men who were to be most
conspicuous at the close of the century were leavening the nation or
being leavened themselves. Joseph Chamberlain appeared as the
embodiment of the transitional spirit in the political arena. In
journalism the movement took shape in the person of Alfred Harmsworth.
In literature the man of the moment was Rudyard Kipling. These three
fateful embodiments of the Time-Spirit seemed to dominate England and
shake her clean out of her fin-de-siècle complacency. England could
never be the same again, after those three men had been at the helm,
for however short a period. The course was deflected; the reckoning
lost. Austere, dignified Whigs would appear again in politics, but
never again would their austerity and dignity represent our political
system. Sonorous, sober, highly judicious journalists might still
succeed in producing, at great loss, a journal expressing themselves
and their views, but no considerable section of the nation would ever
again hang upon their words. And even in poetry, which lies so much
nearer to the roots of human nature, and might therefore be expected
to vary less with the fashions of a time, we cannot but perceive that
the private, personal utterances of an Arnold, a Tennyson, a Browning,
a Rossetti, would have less chance of being heard in the din of
to-day, however sweet the expression, however intimately moving to the
spirit. There is a poet belonging to the younger generation who has
written lyrics of exquisite grace and charm, who can deal half
playfully, half seriously with the lightest of subjects, and make it
delicate and entrancing; who can touch the deeper note of the romantic
poets and make of it something grim, perplexing, haunting; or can
produce in a few stanzas an intimate feeling for persons portrayed in
some suggestive aspect. Mr. Walter De la Mare is well known to a small
circle of literary persons, but neither his poems nor his
prose-writings have been widely read as they should have been.
Mr. Rudyard Kipling would perhaps shudder at the thought, but it is
evident--is it not to his credit?--that he was essentially a democrat.
He made his appeal to the average man. His ballads were written about
ordinary men and ordinary things; the feelings they portrayed were the
feelings of everyday life, feelings which everyone without distinction
might feel in a vigorous and perhaps boisterous way. Wordsworth never
really brought poetry back to the common, everyday life of simple
folk. Long ago Coleridge pointed out that this was a popular
superstition about Wordsworth shared by the poet himself. But to a far
greater extent Mr. Kipling did make his appeal to the common stock of
everyday and average emotion--the emotion of the average man. He was
not interested, as the great Victorian poets had been, in the lonely
way of the spirit; in the more personal emotions; or in nicety of
expression. For him it was the corporate spirit that counted--the
instinct, not for friendship, but for fellowship. He had sentiment in
abundance, but he approached sentiment with that sort of nervous
braggadocio with which the schoolboy conceals his softer feelings. A
clever American critic, Mr. Bliss Perry, alludes to that "commonness
of mind and tone" which Mr. Bryce declared to be inevitable among
masses of men associated, as they are in America, under modern
democratic government. "This commonness of mind and tone," says Mr.
Perry, "is often one of the penalties of fellowship. It may mean a
levelling down instead of a levelling up." The loud stridency of Mr.
Kipling's voice is perhaps "one of the penalties" which has to be paid
for the democratic sentiment of fellowship.
That there should be some "levelling down" is sure to follow when the
poet finds himself absorbed in the common emotions of common life, and
speaking to the common man. But there need not necessarily be that
coarseness of sentiment, that crudity of thought, that bigotry of
limited sympathy, mis-called patriotism, which has debased the level
of so much of Mr. Kipling's writing. I should say that Mr. G.K.
Chesterton owes more than he supposes to the influence, direct or
indirect, of Mr. Kipling; that though his opinions, his sympathies,
his conclusions are all diametrically opposed to those of the elder
writer, still there is something in common between the two which is
essentially a democratic quality, the final standard being that of
reference to commonness, normal feeling, the common man. Mr.
Chesterton wrote a very stirring poem in his Ballad of King Alfred, a
ballad which appealed to patriotism, fellowship, and those broad,
profound emotions which underlie the common sense of a people. It was
far nearer to the spirit of the _Barrack Room Ballads_ than he, I am
sure, would be willing to admit.
Mr. Kipling did this great thing, if not for literature, at least for
men and men-of-letters. He expressed emotions in language which was as
far as possible from the language of æstheticism. This meant, perhaps,
that he could not express very subtle or unusual emotions, that his
perceptions were broad rather than fine; but he at least taught the
world that there were certain profound manly feelings which might be
expressed without the preliminary _unmanning_ of æstheticism; and his
distinction lies in the fact that he uttered them with vehemence and
intensity. In Victorian times the average citizen thought of poetry as
a somewhat weak-minded, effeminate pursuit--as very often it was. The
poet who might be persuaded of the sublimity of his calling had
necessarily to steel himself against the abuse of the matter-of-fact
persons who have no traffic in poetry; and in so doing he lost the
advantage of that bracing though insufficient criticism by which the
sane, practical man influences many of the arts; that is to say, the
readers and upholders of poetry everywhere agreed to put the poet
beyond the reach of a criticism from which prose can never be wholly
exempt. The matter-of-fact view being put out of court in the
judgment of poetry, the poet was encouraged to believe that he was not
concerned with the same universe as that of common fact. I have heard
literary critics speak of romantic or highly imaginative novels,
saying: "It is all delicate fancy and imagination; it is not concerned
with realities; it is sheer poetry"--as if poetry were not concerned
with realities! I have heard people criticise the prose works of Mr.
A.C. Benson: "This is all too musical, and sentimental, and
self-centred; this sort of thing cannot be done in prose; it should be
done in poetry"--as if nonsense becomes less nonsensical by means of
metre or rhyme! This easy-going view of the function of the poetic art
has borne an ample harvest of nonsense. I could, were it worth while,
name many living bards who consider that any sort of fancy or feeling
is good enough for poetry so long as it be prettily or gracefully
handled, who would thus degrade poetry to the position of the easiest,
as it has for long been the least prized, of the fine arts. This havoc
has been wrought, in part, by what I may call the doctrine of the
sensitive soul. Keats is the classic example of the poet who lived and
died through sensitiveness. It was a weakness inherent in the romantic
movement which, though it had so much that was enchantingly strange
and beautiful to give to the world, bequeathed to it also a
consciousness of its nerves and a pride in its very defects. When
Coleridge had taught his successors to glorify the poetic perception
and vision, to give to the secret feelings a new warrant and value,
they came to think it boorish to conceal their fine feelings, and
they acquired the habit of expressing feelings which the common man
scarcely experiences without a sense of shame. The poet came to be
essentially the man who felt acutely, and anything that was a
"feeling" came to have a sort of value of its own as denoting poetic
sensitiveness. Hence the excessive softness, the indefiniteness, the
languishing and the effeminacy which since the beginning of the
nineteenth century have been tolerated in poetry because poetry was
supposed to be the proper vehicle for such weakness. It is significant
that the most admired poem of Keats begins with a sentiment which we
should agree to detest in a prose-writing:
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk----
I contend that as this sentiment would be intolerable in prose, so
also it is not to be suffered in poetry.
Now, the Kipling epoch did introduce a certain hardness, or
masculinity, into the cultured life of the country which gave an
opportunity for escape from the querulousness and the vagueness which
had become poetic habits among English poets and lovers of poetry. I
say the "Kipling epoch," for Mr. Kipling himself never had the
self-discipline, perhaps had not the sense of form, to achieve much
durable poetry, and his very masculinity turned at last into an
unmasculine shriek. He marked no more than the transition period. Mr.
Chesterton is a part of it. He, too, is lacking in sense of form and
diction, and could never have been a considerable poet, though there
is in his writings abundant evidence of poetic feeling. What I am
concerned to observe is that his ballad poetry, too, is marked by
that essentially masculine note which seemed to have died out of
English poetry--unless Browning and Morris be taken as exceptions. Mr.
Hilaire Belloc comes at the latter end of the transition period. When
a man has only written a few poems it is injudicious to say of him
that he is a great poet. But, at any rate, Mr. Belloc has written a
few poems which belong to the great order of lyrical verse, and in
_The South Country_ he surpasses anything that Kipling or Henley
achieved, anything perhaps that any English lyrical poet has written
this century. If that is not a great poem, then I for one will abjure
great poetry, and be content with the less. There is all Mr. Kipling's
sense of fellowship, a thousand times refined, and in alliance with
all the most vital emotions of life, the sense for concrete, simple
things, the sense for things remembered, of tragedy expected but not
feared, the feeling for men, as men; for places, as places; for
things, as things; for the emotions, as the ironies of life; for the
ludicrous, as the surface aspect of the pathetic--for the whole male
side of existence which poetry for a hundred years has been inclined
to ignore.