_“Human frailty though you be_
_Yet shout and crack your whip, be harsh;_
_They’ll obey you in the end,_
_Hill and field, river and marsh_
_Shall obey you, hop and skip_
_At the terrour of your whip,_
_To your gales of anger bend._
_The pale beard smiles and says in turn_
_“True, a prize goes to the stern_
_But sing and laugh and easily run_
_Through the wide airs of my plain;_
_Bathe in my waters, drink my sun,_
_And draw my creatures with soft song;_
_They shall follow you along_
_Graciously, with no doubt or pain._”
_Then speaking from his double head, etc._
The rather scriptural setting of what the pale beard said was probably
suggested by the picture I had formed in my mind of the conscientious
objector, whom I somehow sympathetically expected to be an earnest
Christian, mild and honest; as a matter of fact, he turned out to be the
other kind, violent and shifty alternately. He was accordingly sentenced
by Major Tamburlaine and Captains Guise and Bajazeth, to the customary
term of imprisonment.
And by the way, talking of Marlowe and Shakespeare;--
Here ranted Isaac’s elder son,
The proud shag-breasted godless one
From whom observant Smooth-cheek stole
Birth-right, blessing, hunter’s soul.
XX
LOGICALIZATION
John King is dead, that good old man
You ne’er shall see him more.
He used to wear a long brown coat
All buttoned down before.
Apparently a simple statement, this rustic epitaph has for any sensitive
reader a curiously wistful quality and the easiest way I can show the
mixed feelings it stirs, is by supposing a typical eighteenth-century
writer to have logicalized them into a polite epigram. The poem would
appear mutilated as follows:--
Hereunder lies old John Brown’s honoured dust:
His worthy soul has flown to Heav’n we trust.
Yet still we mourn his vanished russet smock
While frowning fates our trifling mem’ries mock.
Many of the subtler implications are necessarily lost in the formal
translation for in poetry the more standardized the machinery of logical
expression, the less emotional power is accumulated. But the force of
the words “he used to wear” is shown in more obvious opposition to the
words “dead” and “good.” The importance of “good” will appear at once if
we substitute some word like “ancient” for “good old” and see the
collapse of the poetic fabric, still more if we change “good” to “bad”
and watch the effect it has in our imaginations on the “you ne’er shall
see him more,” the cut of his coat, and the reasons John King had for
buttoning it. _Good_ John King wore a long brown coat because he was old
and felt the cold and because, being a neat old man, he wished to
conceal his ragged jacket and patched small-clothes. _Bad_ John King
kept pheasants, hares, salmon and silver spoons buttoned for concealment
under his. How did good John King die? A Christian death in bed
surrounded by weeping neighbours, each begging a coat-button for
keepsake. Bad John King? Waylaid and murdered one dark night by an
avenger, and buried where he fell, still buttoned in his long brown
coat.
The emotional conflict enters curiously into such one-strand songs as
Blake’s “Infant Joy” from the _Songs of Innocence_, a poem over which
for the grown reader the sharp sword of Experience dangles from a single
horsehair. The formal version (which I beg nobody to attempt even in
fun) logicalized in creaking sonnet-form would have the octave filled
with an address to the Melancholy of Sophistication, the sestet reserved
for:--
But thou, Blest Infant, smiling radiantly
Hast taught me etc, etc.
An immoral but far more entertaining parlour game than
logicalization--perhaps even a profitable trade--would be to extract the
essentials from some long-winded but sincere Augustan poem, disguise
the self-conscious antitheses, modernize the diction, liven up the
rhythm, fake a personal twist, and publish. Would there be no pundit
found to give it credit as a poem of passion and originality? I hope
this suggestion for a New-Lamps-for-Old Industry will not meet the eye
of those advanced but ill-advised English Masters who are now beginning
to supervise with their red-and-blue pencils the writing of English
Poetry in our schools.
Now, the trouble about the use of logic in poetry seems not to be that
logic isn’t a very useful and (rightly viewed) a very beautiful
invention, but that it finds little place in our dreams: dreams are
illogical as a child’s mind is illogical, and spontaneous undoctored
poetry, like the dream, represents the complications of adult experience
translated into thought-processes analogous to, or identical with, those
of childhood.
This I regard as a very important view, and it explains, to my
satisfaction at any rate, a number of puzzling aspects of poetry, such
as the greater emotional power on the average reader’s mind of simple
metres and short homely words with an occasional long strange one for
wonder; also, the difficulty of introducing a foreign or unusual prosody
into poems of intense passion: also the very much wider use in poetry
than in daily speech of animal, bird, cloud and flower imagery, of
Biblical types characters and emblems, of fairies and devils, of
legendary heroes and heroines, which are the stock-in-trade of
imaginative childhood; also, the constant appeal poetry makes to the
childish habits of amazed wondering, sudden terrors, laughter to signify
mere joy, frequent tears and similar manifestations of uncontrolled
emotion which in a grown man and especially an Englishman are considered
ridiculous; following this last, the reason appears for the strict
Classicist’s dislike of the ungoverned Romantic, the dislike being
apparently founded on a feeling that to wake this child-spirit in the
mind of a grown person is stupid and even disgusting, an objection that
has similarly been raised to the indiscriminate practice of
psycho-analysis, which involves the same process.
XXI
LIMITATIONS
One of the most embarrassing limitations of poetry is that the language
you use is not your own to do entirely what you like with. Times
actually come when in the conscious stage of composition you have to
consult a dictionary or another writer as to what word you are going to
use. It is no longer practical to coin words, resurrect obsolete ones
and generally to tease the language as the Elizabethans did. A great
living English poet, Mr. Charles Doughty, is apparently a disquieting
instance to the contrary. But he has lost his way in the centuries; he
belongs really to the sixteenth. English has never recovered its
happy-go-lucky civilian slouch since the more than Prussian stiffening
it was given by the eighteenth century drill-sergeants.
It is intolerable to feel so bound compared with the freedom of a
musician or a sculptor; in spite of the exactions of that side of the
art, the poet cannot escape into mere rhythmic sound; there is always
the dead load of sense to drag about with him. I have often felt I would
like to be a painter at work on a still life, puzzling out ingenious
relationships between a group of objects varying in form, texture and
colour. Then when people came up and asked me: “Tell me, sir, is that a
Spode jar?” or “Isn’t that a very unusual variety of lily?” I would be
able to wave them away placidly; the questions would be irrelevant. But
I can’t do that in poetry, everything _is_ relevant; it is an omnibus of
an art--a public omnibus.
There are consolations, of course; poetry, to be appreciated, is not,
like music, dependent on a middleman, the interpretative artist; nor,
once in print, is it so liable to damage from accident, deterioration or
the reproducer as the plastic arts.
XXII
THE NAUGHTY BOY
Bound up with the business of controlling the association-ghosts which
haunt in their millions every word of the English language, there is the
great mesmeric art of giving mere fancy an illusion of solid substance.
The chief way this is done, and nobody has ever done it better than
Keats, is constantly to make appeals to each of the different bodily
senses, especially those more elementary ones of taste, touch, smell,
until they have unconsciously built up a scene which is as real as
anything can be. As an example of the way Keats rung the changes on the
senses, take his “Song about Myself”:--
There was a naughty Boy
And a naughty boy was he
He ran away to Scotland
The people for to see
Then he found
That the ground
Was as hard,
That a yard
Was as long,
That a song
Was as merry,
That a cherry
Was as red--
That lead
Was as weighty,
That fourscore
Was as eighty,
That a door
Was as wooden
As in England--
So he stood in his shoes
And he wonder’d,
He wonder’d,
He stood in his shoes
And he wonder’d.
Here we have a succession of staccato notes, but in the “Eve of St.
Agnes” or “Ode to Autumn” almost every phrase is a chord, the individual
notes of which each strike a separate sense.
XXIII
THE CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC IDEAS
When Aristotle lays down that poets describe the thing that might be,
but that the historian (like the natural historians above mentioned)
merely describes that which has been, and that poetry is something of
“more philosophic, graver import than history because its statements are
of a universal nature” so far his idea of poetry tallies with our own.
But when he explains his “might be” as meaning the “probable and
necessary” according to our every-day experience of life, then we feel
the difference between the Classical and Romantic conceptions of the
art--Aristotle was trying to weed poetry of all the symbolic
extravagances and impossibilities of the dream state in which it seems
to have originated, and to confine it within rational and educative
limits. Poetry was with him only an intuitive imitation of how typical
men think and react upon each other when variously stimulated. It was
what we might call the straight goods of thought conveyed in the
traditional magic hampers; but there proved to be difficulties in the
packing; the Classical ideal was, in practice, modified by the use of
heroic diction and action, conventional indications to the audience that
“imitation” was not realism, and that there must be no criticisms on
that score; every one must “go under” to the hypnotic suggestion of the
buskin and the archaic unnatural speech, and for once think ideally. For
the same reason the Classical doctrine lays stress on the importance of
the set verse-forms and the traditional construction of drama. For the
benefit of my scientific readers, if my literary friends promise not to
listen to what I am saying, I will attempt a definition of Classical and
Romantic notions of Poetry:--
Classical is characteristic and Romantic is Metamorphic, that is, though
they are both expressions of a mental conflict, in Classical poetry this
conflict is expressed within the confines of waking probability and
logic, in terms of the typical interaction of typical minds; in
Romantic poetry the conflict is expressed in the illogical but vivid
method of dream-changings.
The dream origin of Romantic Poetry gives it the advantage of putting
the audience in a state of mind ready to accept it; in a word, it has a
naturally hypnotic effect. Characteristic poetry, which is social rather
than personal, and proudly divorced from the hit-and-miss methods of the
dream, yet feels the need of this easy suggestion to the audience for
ideal thinking; and finds it necessary to avoid realism by borrowing
shreds of accredited metamorphic diction and legend and building with
them an illusion of real metamorphism. So the Hermit Crab, and once it
has taken up a cast-off shell to cover its nakedness, it becomes a very
terror among the whelks. The borrowed Metamorphism is hardened to a
convention and a traditional form, and can be trusted almost inevitably
to induce the receptive state in an average audience wherever used. Such
a convention as I mean is the May-day dream of the Mediaeval rhymed
moralities or the talking beasts of the fabulists.
Sometimes, however, owing to a sudden adventurous spirit appearing in
the land, a nation’s Classical tradition is broken by popular ridicule
and the reappearance of young Metamorphic Poets. But after a little
paper-bloodshed and wranglings in the coffee-houses, the Classical
tradition reappears, dressed up in the cast-off finery of the pioneer
Metamorphics (who have by this time been succeeded by licentious and
worthless pyrotechnists), and rules securely again. It is only fair to
observe that the Romantic Revivalist often borrows largely from some
Classical writer so obscured by Time and corrupt texts as to seem a
comparative Romantic. This complicated dog-eat-dog process is cheerfully
called “The Tradition of English Poetry.”
There is an interesting line of investigation which I have no space to
pursue far, in a comparison between the Classicism of Wit and the
Romanticism of Humour.
Wit depends on a study of the characteristic reactions of typical men to
typically incongruous circumstances, and changed little from
Theophrastus to Joe Miller. It depends for its effect very largely on
the set form and careful diction, e. g:--
A certain inn-keeper of Euboea, with gout in his fingers, returned to
his city after sacrificing an Ox to Delphic Apollo.... The celebrated
wit, Sidney Smith, one day encountered Foote the comedian, in the
Mall.... An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotchman agreed on a wager of
one hundred guineas....
That is Classicism.
Romantic humour is marked by the extravagant improbability of
dream-vision and by the same stereoscopic expression as in Romantic
poetry.
Would Theophrastus have deigned to laugh at the _fabliau_ of “The Great
Panjandrum himself with the little round button at top?” I think not.
Our leading living Classical poet was recently set a Romantic riddle as
a test of his humour, “What did the tooth-paste say to the tooth brush?”
Answer: “Squeeze me and I’ll meet you outside the Tube.” The bard was
angry. “Who on earth squeezes his tube of tooth-paste with his tooth
brush? Your riddle does not hold water.” He could understand the fable
convention of inanimate objects talking, but this other was not “the
probable and necessary.”
XXIV
COLOUR
The naming of colours in poetry may be used as a typical instance of the
circumspection with which a poet is forced to move. The inexperienced
one drenches his poems in gold, silver, purple, scarlet, with the idea
of giving them, in fact, “colour.” The old hand almost never names a
colour unless definitely presenting the well-known childish delight for
bright colours, with the aid of some other indication of childhood, or
unless definitely to imply a notable change from the normal nature of
the coloured object, or at least some particular quality such as the
ripeness of the cherry in Keats’ song just quoted. But even then he
usually prefers to find a way round, for the appeal to the sense of
colour alone is a most insecure way of creating an illusion; colours
vary in mood by so very slight a change in shade or tone that pure
colour named without qualification in a poem will seldom call up any
precise image or mood.
To extemporize a couple of self-conscious blackboard examples:--
I. “Then Mary came dressed in a robe that was green
And her white hands and neck were a sight to be seen.”
II. “Mary’s robe was rich pasture, her neck and her hands
Were glimpses of river that dazzled those lands.”
The first couplet has not nearly so much colour in it as the second,
although in the first the mantle is definitely called green and the
lady’s hands and neck, white, while in the second no colour is mentioned
at all. The first robe is as it were coloured in a cheap painting-book;
the green paint has only come off the cake in a thin yellowish solution
and the painting-book instructions for colouring the hands and neck were
“leave blank.” The second robe derives its far richer colour from the
texture that the pasture simile suggests; the flesh parts get their
whiteness from the suggestion of sun shining on water.
XXV
PUTTY
The conscious part of composition is like the finishing of roughly
shaped briars in a pipe factory. Where there are flaws in the wood,
putty has to be used in order to make the pipe presentable. Only an
expert eye can tell the putty when it has been coloured over, but there
it is, time will reveal it and nobody is more aware of its presence now
than the man who put it there. The public is often gulled into paying
two guineas for a well-coloured straight-grain, when a tiny patch of
putty under the bowl pulls down its sentimental value to ten shillings
or so.
It is only fair to give an example of putty in a poem of my own; in
writing songs, where the pattern is more fixed than in any other form,
putty is almost inevitable. This song started sincerely and cheerfully
enough:--
Once there came a mighty furious wind
(So old worthies tell).
It blew the oaks like ninepins down,
And all the chimney stacks in town
Down together fell.
That was a wind--to write a record on,
to hang a story on,
to sing a ballad on,
To ring the loud church bell!
But for one huge storm that cracks the sky
Came a thousand lesser winds rustling by,
And the only wind that will make me sing
Is breeze of summer or gust of spring
But no more hurtful thing.
This was leading up to a final verse:--
Once my sweetheart spoke an unkind word
As I myself must tell,
For none but I have seen or heard
My sweetheart to such cruelty stirred
For one who loved her well.
That was a word--to write no record on,
to hang no story on,
to sing no ballad on,
To ring no loud church bell!
Yet for one fierce word that has made me smart
Ten thousand gentle ones ease my heart,
So all the song that springs in me
Is “Never a sweetheart born could be
So kind as only she.”
Half-way through this verse I was interrupted, and had to finish the
poem consciously as best I could. On picking it up again, apparently I
needed another middle verse of exactly the same sort of pattern as the
first, to prepare the reader for the third. Searching among natural
phenomena, I had already hit on drought as being a sufficiently
destructive plague to be long remembered by old worthies. This would
make the second verse.
So without more ado I started:--
Once there came a mighty thirsty drought
(So old worthies tell).
The quags were drained, the brooks were dried,
Cattle and sheep and pigs all died,
The parson preached on Hell.
That was a drought--to write a record on etc.
So far I had concealed the poverty of my inspiration well enough, I
flattered myself, but here we were stuck, my self-conscious muse and I.
What was a pleasing diminutive of _drought_?--Pleasant sunshine? Not
quite; the thirstiness of nature doesn’t show in pleasant sunshine at
all. So, knowing all the time that I was doing wrong, I took my putty
knife and slapped the stuff on thick, then trimmed and smoothed over
carefully:--
But for one long drought of world-wide note
Come a thousand lesser ones on man’s throat,
And the only drought for my singing mood
Is a thirst for the very best ale that’s brewed,
Soon quenched, but soon renewed.
In manuscript, the putty didn’t show, somehow, but I am ashamed to say I
published the song. And in print, it seemed to show disgracefully. “It
was the best butter,” said the _March Hare_. “It was the best putty,” I
echoed, to excuse myself. But there is too much of it; the last half of
the last verse even, is not all sound wood. This poem has been on my
conscience for some time.
If spontaneous poetry is like the Genie from Aladdin’s Lamp, this
conscious part of the art is like the assemblage of sheet, turnip-head,
lighted candle and rake to make the village ghost.
As I were a trapesin’
To Fox and Grapes Inn
To get I a bottle of ginger wine
I saw summat
In they old tummut
And Lordie how his eyes did shine!
_Suffolk rhyme._
(_Cetera desunt_)
The Genie is the most powerful magic of the two, and surest of its
effect, but the Turnip Ghost is usually enough to startle rustics who
wander at night, into prayer, sobriety, rapid movement or some other
unusual state.
XXVI
READING ALOUD
Though it is a sound principle that the poet should write as if his work
were first of all intended to be repeated from mouth to mouth,
recitation or reading aloud actually distracts attention from the
subtler properties of a poem, which though addressed nominally to the
ear, the eye has to see in black and white before they can be
appreciated. A beautiful voice can make magic of utter nonsense; I have
been taken in by this sort of thing too often. The eye is the most
sophisticated organ of sense and is therefore the one to which the poet
must make a final appeal in critical matters, but as limited an appeal
as possible when he is engaged in the art of illusion. The universal use
of printing has put too much work on the eye: which has learned to skip
and cut in self-defence. Ask any one who has read CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
the name of the hero. It is probable that he will remember the initial
letter, possible that he will be able to repeat the whole name more or
less recognizably, unlikely that he will be able to spell it correctly,
almost certain that he will not have troubled to find out the correct
pronunciation in Russian.
XXVII
L’ARTE DELLA PITTURA
A scientific treatise _could_, I suppose, be written on how to
manipulate vowels and consonants so as to hurry or slow down rhythm, and
suggest every different emotion by mere sound sequence but this is for
every poet to find out for himself and practise automatically as a
painter mixes his paints.
There was once an old Italian portrait painter, who coming to the end of
his life, gathered his friends and pupils together and revealed to them
a great discovery he had made, as follows:--
“The art of portrait painting consists in putting the High Lights in
exactly the right place in the eyes.”
When I come to my death-bed I have a similarly important message to
deliver:--
“The art of poetry consists in knowing exactly how to manipulate the
letter S.”
XXVIII
ON WRITING MUSICALLY
In true poetry the mental bracing and relaxing on receipt of sensuous
impressions, which we may call the rhythm of emotions, conditions the
musical rhythm. This rhythm of emotions also determines the
sound-texture of vowels and consonants, so that Metre, as schoolboys
understand it when they are made to scan:--Friĕnds, Rōm|ans,
count|rymēn, lĕnd mē|your eārs!, has in spontaneous poetry only a
submerged existence. For the moment I will content myself by saying that
if all words in daily speech were spoken at the same rate, if all
stressed syllables and all unstressed syllables, similarly, were dwelt
on for exactly the same length of time, as many prosodists assume,
poetry would be a much easier art to practise; but it is the haste with
which we treat some parts of speech, the deliberation we give to others,
and the wide difference in the weight of syllables composed of thin or
broad vowels and liquid or rasping consonants, that make it impossible
for the Anglo-French theory of only two standardized sound values, long
or short, to be reasonably maintained. A far more subtle notation must
be adopted, and if it must be shown on a black-board, poetry will appear
marked out not in “feet” but in convenient musical bars, with the
syllables resolved into quaver, dotted crotchet, semibreve and all the
rest of them. Metre in the classical sense of an orderly succession of
iambuses, trochees or whatnot, is forced to accept the part of policeman
in the Harlequinade, a mere sparring partner for Rhythm the Clown who
with his string of sausages is continually tripping him up and beating
him over the head, and Texture the Harlequin who steals his truncheon
and helmet. This preparatory explanation is necessary because if I were
to proclaim in public that “the poet must write musically” it would be
understood as an injunction to write like Thomas Moore, or his disciples
of today.
XXIX
THE USE OF POETRY