that the loudly reverberating ballads of Rudyard Kipling had had their
effect upon him; that something of their sheer vehemence and lustiness
had mingled with his own feeling for the tropical seas into which he
had adventured, with the vivid sense of men and things in strange
places which had wrought upon his imagination, as years before they
had wrought upon Mr. Conrad. Needless to say, Mr. Masefield in most
respects stands at the opposite pole of temperament from Mr. Kipling.
He is a lyrical poet whose poetry springs not so much from intense
interest in the lusty vigour of common life as from an intense feeling
for sheer beauty, for that exquisite refinement which may be extracted
from life; and it may be mingled with equally intense pain when the
beauty is removed. He is, perhaps, more nearly akin to the type to
which Keats belonged. But certainly the arrival of the spirit
represented by Kipling, added to the discipline of his own early
adventures, braced him and energised him; and almost his first
literary effort took the form of ballad poems uniting a fineness and
sweetness which were entirely his own with a kind of lusty vigour
which was superimposed. It is easy enough to see the influence of
Kipling in a ballad such as that which begins:
Spanish waters, Spanish waters, you are singing in my ears,
Like a slow sweet piece of music from the grey forgotten years;
Telling tales, and beating tunes, and bringing weary thoughts to me
Of the sandy beach at Muertos, where I would that I could be.
Those early ballads had some of the emotional vigour without the
characteristic defects of Kipling, and in many cases a charm which was
entirely his own. But he very early shook off what there was of that
Kipling influence. It was superficial and transitory. Mr. Kipling, as
I have said, represented a transition period; and another--an
experimental period--has followed. It is probable that Joseph Conrad
became a far more potent influence on the imagination of Mr.
Masefield than any one other author; though he was assuredly not
content to follow any single example, and began steadily to experiment
and to strike out his own line. It was unfortunate that the craze for
experiment and innovation should, for a time--probably a brief
time--have had so strange and uncouth an effect upon so fine and
sensitive a genius. Mr. Masefield was--and is--a lyrical poet, fitted
to express the personal emotions which lyrical poetry can support. But
he became obsessed with the conviction that poetry ought to be made to
do something else than suggest feelings and ideas in a beautiful way;
that it ought to serve a social purpose; that it ought to become a
direct contributory force to the social morality of the time; that it
ought to concern itself with practical modern questions in a practical
way; that it ought to present actual life, realistically. The same
feeling affected a lesser poet, Mr. Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, who, being
a story-teller in verse and a moralist, has been acclaimed as a
powerful poet in both England and America. Mr. Gibson has not yet
shown that he is a considerable poet. But Mr. Masefield undoubtedly
does possess the poetic talent, perhaps even genius, which Mr. Gibson
has not yet revealed. But the most recent poems of the former have
been praised for just the same reasons that Mr. Gibson's have been
praised. The New York _Outlook_ said of Mr. Gibson: "He is bringing a
message which might well rouse his day and generation to an
understanding of and a sympathy with life's disinherited--the
overworked masses." Mr. Masefield's _The Everlasting Mercy_ and his
series of realistic poems of the same order have been lavishly
eulogised in exactly the same way--and for a similar reason. Each of
these poems contains a rousing story; each subserves the purpose of an
excellent moral. They are realistic enough, but only in rare passages
are they beautiful. "Nothing," said Shelley, "can be equally well
expressed in prose that is not tedious and supererogatory in verse." I
have felt that Mr. Masefield's long narrative poems might equally well
have been expressed in prose.
I believe this to be no more than a passing phase in Mr. Masefield. A
poet who could write the charming lyrical poem which, by a curious
accident, was published at the end of _The Everlasting Mercy_ in the
_English Review_ will not long be content to write sensational tracts;
we may even be glad that these tracts have been written if they bring
the public to attend to the more significant work of so finely gifted
an author.
But I am very far from suggesting that the effort made by Mr. Gibson
and Mr. Masefield to bring poetry into touch with modern life is
without significance. It represented reaction against the
querulousness, the vagueness, the mere prettiness which have so often
resulted in nauseous verse. It had its source in the same impulse
which led J.M. Synge to create his finest imaginative effects by means
of a severely realistic method. And still earlier Mr. Doughty, who
holds a solitary position in modern poetry, had expressed himself in
the only way that was natural to him, through an archaic language, the
language in which he thought, which lent itself to the hard, vivid,
and superbly brutal images belonging to his primitive, barbarian, and
as it were primeval theme. Mr. Doughty belongs neither to our own nor
to any other age, but he has not been without influence upon men of
our time. To appreciate _The Dawn in Britain_ or _Adam Cast Forth_ is
to long for the hardness and masculinity which have been rare in
English poetry for a hundred years; to feel that what poetry needs is
more grit and more brain; and to plead for these is to plead for more
poetry, for a stronger imagination.
There is one among the younger poets who has given promise of
satisfying these needs, though it remains to be seen whether he may
not perhaps be over-weighted on the side of intellect. But in _Mary
and the Bramble_ and _The Sale of St. Thomas_ he has shown us how the
poetic imagination ripens into food for adults when virility and
intellect have gone to the making of it. There is no mere prettiness
in Mr. Abercrombie's writing. The wearisome refrain of sex,
disappointed or desirous, neither has part in the argument nor
supplies him with images or asides. Innumerable things and events upon
the earth appeal to him because of that full-bodied experience which
they carry to the wakeful and the zestful, experience which is
manifold, which fills all the chinks of memory, which may recall pain,
which may be charged with pathos, but is never morbid; beautifully he
masses vigorous impressions of sense under a large imaginative idea.
Here there is no pale, languishing phantom of beauty, but that which
men delight in without the verbal distractions of the æsthete.
In _Mary and the Bramble_ he has taken an intellectual idea and
treated it allegorically, and essentially poetically. The Virgin Mary
in his story symbolises the "upward meaning mind," fastened in
"substance," yet pure and "seemly to the Lord;" and the bramble which
clutches her and seeks to smirch her purity is the folly, the
muddiness, the stupid cruelty of the world which mocks at all vision,
at all idealism--it is the mortal trying to drag down the immortal
part of man. Mary is the love of beauty, or of God; the bramble is the
stupidity and grossness of the practical world.
But Mary, "in her rapt girlhood," with her "eyes like the
rain-shadowed sea," is not the less sweet because she stands for an
idea.
Through meadows flowering with happiness
Went Mary, feeling not the air that laid
Honours of gentle dew upon her head;
Nor that the sun now loved with golden stare
The marvellous behaviour of her hair,
Bending with finer swerve from off her brow
Than water which relents before a prow;
Till in the shrinking darkness many a gleam
Of secret bronze-red lustres answered him.
And when the Spirit of Life vaunts itself in her,
Not vain his boast; for seemly to the Lord,
Blue-robed and yellow-kerchieft, Mary went.
There never was to God such worship sent
By any angel in the Heavenly ways,
As this that Life had utter'd for God's praise,
This girlhood--as the service that Life said
In the beauty and the manners of this maid.
Never the harps of Heaven played such song
As her grave walking through the grasses long.
I cannot dwell upon the subject of _The Sale of St. Thomas_. The
dialogue between Thomas and the captain gives opportunity for
description and metaphor almost Elizabethan in their ferocity, though
the reflections of Thomas have a spiritual quality which is entirely
modern. We hear
Of monkeys, those lewd mammets of mankind.
And of flies staring
Out of their little faces of gibbous eyes.
And there are lines such as
Men there have been who could so grimly look
That soldiers' hearts went out like candle flames
Before their eyes, and the blood perisht in them,
which might be placed side by side with Marlowe's:
The frowning looks of fiery _Tamburlaine_
That with his terrour and imperious eies,
Commands the hearts of his associates.
And we may contrast these vehement records of things with the more
philosophic passages:
Thou must not therefore stoop thy spirit's sight
To pore only within the candle-gleam
Of conscious wit and reasonable brain;
But search into the sacred darkness lying
Outside thy knowledge of thyself, the vast
Measureless fate, full of the power of stars,
The outer noiseless heavens of thy soul.
We may well think that the immediate future of poetry depends upon men
of the stamp of Mr. Abercrombie, men for whom poetry is neither a
plaything nor a sweet-sounding expression of desire or anguish or
vague dreams; but a serious attempt to grapple with life through
combined experience, thought, and vision. Long ago Meredith urged that
if fiction was to go on living, it must give us "brain-stuff" and
"food-stuff." But no poet has since arisen to make some similar claim
for poetry; to urge that within its proper sphere and in its own
appropriate way it should attack the larger life of man with
intelligence, with common sense, and with virile passion.
* * * * *
Mr. W.H. Davies stands apart from them all. I should not like to try
to account in any way for Mr. Davies any more than he could account
for a singing-bird by describing the trees among which it lived. His
poetry is unlike any other poetry that is written to-day. It is fresh
and sweet like a voice from a younger and lustier world. It is charged
with no clarion message of prophecy; it is burdened with no exactly
formulated philosophy of life. There is no rhetoric in it, no
rhodomontade. It is the melody of a man's voice singing for the
pleasure of singing, now vehemently, from the sheer delight in things
physical and outward, now sadly, as some evanescent object induces
melancholy, now in a naively reflective way, as past or future brings
memories or expectations. He never reaches quite the exquisite
melodies of Herrick, but when he writes of love he is as simple as
Herrick, and he is more direct, more heart-whole, less of the perfect
singer, perhaps, but more of the lover. If he writes with wide-eyed
wonder at the simpler marvels of life, it is in the manner of Blake
in _Songs of Innocence_, where outwardness of manner and lyrical
simplicity leave an impression of something unearthly in its
strangeness. Occasionally in the slight extravagance of his imagery we
can see that the influence of the seventeenth-century "metaphysical"
poets has not left him unscathed, as when he likens love to the
influence of spring opening up navigation.
But it is a sure instinct which has taken him to the simpler lyrical
poets and led him to mould his style on theirs. His interests lie in
the purely personal affairs of the heart; the simpler emotions may be
best expressed in those lyrical forms in which the older English
literature is pre-eminent, which eschew the fervid rhythms of the
soulful nineteenth century. But he is not merely imitative. Sometimes
in the same poem we see him, now conforming to the manner of the
traditional love-poet, now revivifying it or bursting through it with
images and ideas that are wholly personal to himself.
She had two eyes as blue as Heaven,
Ten times as warm they shone;
And yet her heart was hard and cold
As any shell or stone.
Her mouth was like a soft red rose
When Phœbus drinks its dew;
But oh, that cruel thorn inside
Pierced many a fond heart through.
She had a step that walked unheard,
It made the stones like grass;
Yet that light step has crushed a heart,
As light as that step was.
Those glowing eyes, those smiling lips,
I have lived now to prove
Were not for me, were not for me,
But came of her self-love.
Yet, like a cow for acorns that
Have made it suffer pain,
So, though her charms are poisonous,
I moan for them again.
In any other poet the cow and the acorns would be an intolerable
extravagance; but not so from Mr. Davies, who knows and loves all
beasts of the field; who knows what it is to tramp over stones and to
tread the grass, so that his "stones like grass" rings freshly, while
the dew-drinking Phœbus is stale.
But if he seems to belong to an older tradition, and to have little in
common with the self-conscious modern poet, that is only because his
life has kept him away from the fashions and fashionable ideas which
are the intellectual superficies of our time, which distinguish the
culture of one age from the culture of another. He loves with the
strength of intimate friendship the unchanging things in the natural
world, the sea, things that grow, and animals and birds. And he is
acquainted with the other unchanging things--love, the desire for
food, hatred of death, friendship. He is also too keen in his
sympathies and interests not to be modern in the sense, for instance,
that the romantic appeal has had its effect on him, or that the ugly
facts of modern life have stirred and pained him. There is a great
variety of emotions registered in his poems. There is the grim ballad
called _Treasures_. There is a bold union of magical romanticism and
sensuous passion in the poem beginning:
I met her in the leafy woods,
Early a summer's night;
I saw her white teeth in the dark,
There was no better light.
There is a remarkable confidence and elation in the little poem _The
Elements_, wherein he identifies himself with Nature--it could only be
quoted entire. And he records his impression of a tramcar which sweeps
along Westminster in the twilight carrying its load of sleeping men to
work. He can also write in a vein wholly unlike that of his simple and
more characteristic lyrical verses. Thus he describes his childish
impressions of a mariner "no good in port or out," as his granddad
said:
And all his flesh was pricked with Indian ink,
His body marked as rare and delicate
As dead men struck by lightning under trees,
And pictured with fine twigs and curled ferns;
Chains on his neck and anchors on his arms;
Rings on his fingers, bracelets on his wrist;
And on his breast the Jane of Appledore
Was schooner rigged, and in full sail at sea.
He could not whisper with his strong hoarse voice,
No more than could a horse creep quietly;
He laughed to scorn the men that muffled close
For fear of wind, till all their neck was hid,
Like Indian corn wrapped up in long green leaves;
He knew no flowers but seaweeds brown and green,
He knew no birds but those that followed ships,
Full well he knew the water-world; he heard
A grander music there than we on land.
All of it is the intensely personal and direct poetry of a man of many
moods, many sympathies, but happily removed from the cramping effects
of current fashions of thoughts, and talk about thought. He has lived
in the open air and among simple people, but always companioned by the
poets. And so we have in him a singer fresh and unspoilt, writing from
impulse, probably with little conscious technique, about things which
he knows and the immediate experiences of life.
VI
J.M. SYNGE
Four volumes, none too thick, contain the collected works of the man
who is coming to be regarded as the greatest of Irish dramatists. As
we turn over the pages, and observe that they contain no more than six
plays--three of them very short--a few Poems and Translations, the
volume on the Aran Islands, and a volume of miscellaneous studies of
his experiences among the folk of Wicklow, Kerry, and the Congested
Districts, it is to feel wonder that a man with so profound an
imagination, so wide a knowledge of the folk, and such genius for
creation, should have produced only this for his life-work. And then
we remember the lamentable fact of his early death--he was born in
1871--and the no less important fact that he was one for whom
experience of living counted equally with the experience of art, and
that he wrought as few English authors work, being at the pains to
write and re-write till he had the result to his mind.
And so in these four volumes there is nothing whatever to
regret--nothing that can be passed over as dull or indifferent,
nothing that has not both a hard basis of actuality and also an
intensity of imagination that lifts it into the region of poetry. In
one of his later moments of self-consciousness he uttered a sentence
of criticism worthy to be treasured by the modern poet, and perhaps by
the Irish poet especially. "It may almost be said that before verse
can be human again it must learn to be brutal." What would we not give
to have Synge's "brutality" introduced into the over-idealised and
sonorous poetry of Mr. Yeats? He does not mean the brutality of our
English realists, or ugliness, sheer fact, mis-called truth, without
beauty; what he wants is fidelity to _common_ truth, a realisation of
the root, primitive facts--the most grim primitive facts--that hard
basis of fact which must be accepted before the imagination can bear
fruit.
One of the most singular qualities of Synge is the extraordinary
common sense which sustains the gruesomeness of his tragic imagination
on the one side, and his no less gruesome humour on the other. It
holds together this humour and this grimness which are so truthfully
united in his work. It is the common sense of the old-fashioned poet,
the common sense which is all-pervading in Homer's Odyssey--based upon
a strong, keen sense for the concrete, ordinary things of life. It is
this which makes him find the masterly conclusion to _Riders of the
Sea_, when old Maurya, lamenting the death of her sons, comforts
herself, "No man at all can be living for ever, and we must be
satisfied;" it is this which gives Naisi the ancient love of life,
"It's a hard and bitter thing leaving the earth;" which produces so
admirable a proverb as, "Who would listen to an old woman with one
thing and she saying it over?"; and enables Pegeen, in _The Playboy of
the Western World_, to perceive, if only from pique, the
preposterousness of her infatuation--"There's a great gap," she
says--and this is the gist of the matter--"between a gallous story and
a dirty deed." But never does such common sense stay the flight of the
poetic dream. Pegeen may know the difference "between a gallous story
and a dirty deed," but that does not stop her from breaking out into
wild lamentations: "Oh, my grief, I've lost him surely. I've lost the
only Playboy of the Western World."
It is by never departing far from the high-road of common fact that
Synge suggests to us the fascinations, the dangers, and romance of the
by-paths. I think that when he travels a very long way from that
high-road he does not hold us with so firm a hand. Beautiful as is the
prose-poetry of _Deirdre of the Sorrows_, and fine as is the idealised
portrait of Deirdre, yet, as a whole, this play does not grip so well
as his other, even his slighter, plays. Is it not because he is moving
away from the common life, which he knows so well how to light up into
the uncommon atmosphere of the grim, the fanciful, the romantic, into
the already half-conventionalised art atmosphere of the old heroic
Saga? Most of his success in _Deirdre of the Sorrows_ is due to the
fact that he has treated Deirdre as if she were just one of the
peasant women whom he has known; but the ready-made plot has hampered
him, and he is shut off from the use of those little "brutalities"
which give savour to his modern plays. The actual life is not there to
secure him, and he falls into the characteristic Irish vagueness in
praising the poet-hero--even Pegeen, in _The Playboy_, had spoken of
poets as "fine, fiery fellows with great rages when their temper's
roused" (it is just so that the Irish poets like to be pictured; and
Mr. Jack Yeats, in a drawing usually much admired, has transformed
Synge himself into just such a "fine, fiery fellow" of the tradition).
In _Deirdre of the Sorrows_, Synge could not, of course, free his mind
from the traditional story, or from the poetry of all the poets who
have sung of Deirdre; but should Deirdre herself, at the tragic moment
when her lover lies dead, be thinking of "the way there will be a
story told of a ruined city and a raving king and a woman will be
young for ever?" This is like many Irish poets, but it is not worthy
of Synge.
It was his genius to be able to tell the stories that have not been
traditionalised, and to tell them in a wonderful dialect which may or
may not be true to any actual speech, but which, unlike the jargon
that is affectation in many Irish writers, used by him, has the power
of affecting us as the old Ionic could move those who spoke in Attic
Greek. It helps us to get into the fanciful and grotesque atmosphere
which he conjured up out of the most real life. In all his modern
plays there are character, dramatic intensity, fidelity to the folk
life--and that life, with its brutality and its delicacy, attains the
utmost that life can hold, seen through the poetic vision of Synge,
made poignant and vivid by his imagination.
VII
THE SHRAMANA EKAI KAWAGUCHI
Books are like places of entertainment in that they often afford a
pleasure wholly different in kind from that intended by the author. An
original and cultured gentleman of my acquaintance has a habit of
visiting suburban music-halls, and deriving therefrom a delight
exquisite beyond the dreams of the artists who forgather at the
Wormwood Scrubs Empire. In like manner there are books which have come
to be accepted as classics on the ground of excellences not aimed at
by their authors, not necessarily because the authors were artless,
but because their conscious art had no relation to the quality in them
which pleases. Pepys was a first-rate Admiralty official and a
desirable boon companion, but to his many excellences, known to
himself no less than to his friends, that of being a master in English
literature would never have been added. A still better example is the
_Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi_. We read them now because of
what we are accustomed to call their "human interest," because they
show us the robust, ordinary, fleshly, and ideal side of pious
mediæval Catholics; they appeal to us humorously and pathetically;
they are tragi-comedies of the transcendental life. But they were
written to commemorate the pious acts of the saints, and the authors
would have been shocked to think that they were contributing to the
profane delight of the general and possibly heretical reader. In the
same way the _Journal of John Wesley_ is a delight to many people to
whom Wesley's peculiar excellences make no appeal. He was a great
evangelist, a powerful emotional influence, a considerable thinker, a
scholar, a robust man, and a gentleman of the Church of England. But
when we have named all these qualities we have scarcely begun to
account for the endless delight of his _Journal_. That which he
consciously aimed at is not that which gives all of us pleasure.
To books of this class I should be disposed to add that of the
Shramana Ekai Kawaguchi, a distinguished Japanese priest, scholar, and
traveller, who wrote a book entitled _Three Years in Tibet_. It must
not be supposed that the Shramana is a simple or unsophisticated
writer, or that he has not studied literary effects; but his
intentional effects have the charm of _naïveté_ to an English reader,
and his narrative is wholly unstudied in respect of all that delights
us in it.