“_des_tructive” and “_der_iding” too close together. “Ingenious” is more
the word I want. It has a long vowel, and suggests that it was a really
witty performance. The two “in’s” are far enough separated. “Accorded”
is better than “accustomed”; more accurate and sounds better. Now
then:--)
In club or messroom let them sit
At skirmish of ingenious wit
Deriding love, yet not with hearts
Accorded etc.
(Consideration:--It may be
rotten, but I’ve done my best.)
The discussion of more radical constructive faults is to be found in
PUTTY and THE ART OF EXPRESSION.
XLV
LINKED SWEETNESS LONG DRAWN OUT
In this last section, besides an attempt at a greater accuracy of
meaning and implication than the first slap-dash arrangement of words
had provided, there may have been noticed three other technical
considerations which are especially exacting in this case, where I am
intending by particularly careful craftsmanship to suggest the
brilliance of the conversation I am reporting.
The first is a care to avoid unintentional echoes, as for example “_In_
club or messroom ... _in_dulging.”
The second is a care which all song writers and singing masters
understand, to keep apart words like “indulge salacious,” where the j
and s sound coming together interfere with easy breathing.
The third is an attempt to vary the vowel sounds so far as is consistent
with getting the right shade of meaning; it pleases the mental ear like
stroking pleases a cat (note the vowel sequence of the phrase that heads
this section. John Milton knew a thing or two about texture, worth
knowing). At the same time I am trying to arrange the position of
consonants and open vowels with much the same care.
But all these three considerations, and even the consideration for
lucidity of expression, can and must be modified where an emotional mood
of obscurity, fear, difficulty or monotony will be better illustrated by
so doing.
Keats was very conscious of the necessity of modification. Leigh Hunt
recounts in his Autobiography:--
“I remember Keats reading to me with great relish and particularity,
conscious of what he had set forth, the lines describing the supper[1]
and ending with the words,
“‘And lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon.’”
[1] St. Agnes’ Eve.
Mr. Wordsworth would have said the vowels were not varied enough; but
Keats knew where his vowels were _not_ to be varied. On the occasion
above alluded to, Wordsworth found fault with the repetition of the
concluding sound of the participles in Shakespeare’s line about bees:--
“‘The _singing_ masons _building_ roofs of gold.’”
This, he said, was a line which Milton would never have written. Keats
thought, on the other hand, that the repetition was in harmony with the
continued note of the singers, and that Shakespeare’s negligence, if
negligence it was, had instinctively felt the thing in the best manner.”
Keats here was surely intending with his succession of short i-sounds, a
gourmet’s fastidious pursing of lips. Poets even of the
Virgil-Milton-Tennyson-Longfellow metrical tradition will on occasion
similarly break their strict metric form with an obviously imitative
“quadrepedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum,” but the manipulation
of vowels and consonants is for them rather a study in abstract grandeur
of music than a relation with the emotional content of the poetry.
XLVI
THE FABLE OF THE IDEAL GADGET
No poem can turn out respectably well unless written in the full
confidence that this time at last the poet is going to attain perfect
expression. So long as this confidence survives he goes on revising the
poem at intervals for days or months until nothing more can be done, and
the inevitable sense of failure is felt, leaving him at liberty to try
again. It is on this inevitable failure that the practice of every art
is made conditional.
* * * * *
A man once went into an ironmonger’s shop and said hesitatingly, “Do you
sell those gadgets for fixing on doors?”
“Well, sir,” replied the assistant, “I am not quite sure if I understand
your requirements, but I take it you are needing a patent automatic
door-closer?”
“Exactly,” said the customer. “One to fix on my pantry door which, by
the way, contains a glass window.”
“You will want a cheap one, sir?”
“Cheap but serviceable.”
“You will prefer an English make, sir?”
“Indeed, that’s a most important consideration.”
“You will perhaps want one with ornamentations, scroll work and roses
for instance?”
“Oh no, nothing of that sort, thank you. I want it as plain and
unobtrusive as possible.”
“You would like it made of some rustless metal, sir?”
“That would be very convenient.”
“And with a strong spring?”
“Well, moderately strong.”
“To be fixed on which side, sir?”
“Let me see; the right-hand side.”
“Now, sir,” said the assistant, “I will go through each point, one by
one. You want an efficient (but not too costly) English made,
unobtrusive, rustless, unornamented, patent automatic door closer, to be
fixed right-handed with a moderately strong spring to a pantry door with
a glass window. Is there any further desideratum, sir?”
“Well, it’s very good of you to help me like this (“Not at all, sir”). I
should like it easily adjusted and easily removed, and above all it must
not squeak or need constant oiling.”
“In fact, sir, you want an apparatus combining a variety of qualities,
in a word, an absolutely silent, efficient, economical, invisible,
corrosive proof, unornamented, not-too-heavily-springed, easily
adjustable, readily removable, British-made, right-handed, patent
automatic door closer, ideally fitted in every possible respect for
attaching to your pantry door which (I understand you to say) contains a
glass window. How is that, sir?”
“Splendid, splendid.”
“Well, sir, I regret that there has never been any article of that
description put on the market, but if you care to visit our wholesale
department across the road, you may perhaps be able to make your choice
from a reasonably large selection of our present imperfect models. Good
day, sir.”
XLVII
SEQUELS ARE BARRED
If you solve a problem to the best of your ability, it never bothers you
again. Enough said: but the following emblem may be taken to heart:--
EPITAPH ON AN UNFORTUNATE ARTIST
He found a formula for drawing comic rabbits:
This formula for drawing comic rabbits paid.
So in the end he could not change the tragic habits
This formula for drawing comic rabbits made.
XLVIII
TOM FOOL
There is a saying that “More people know Tom Fool than Tom Fool knows”;
that may be all right if it means recognizing him in the street, but he
has to be a wonder before he can, without eccentricity, make his work
immediately recognized in print and be even distinguishable from the
best efforts of imitators. This proverb was obviously in the head of the
man or woman who wrote the following sonnet, in the _Spectator_ (I
think) about a year ago; I have lost the cutting and the reference, and
ask to be pardoned if I misquote:--
Cunning indeed Tom Fool must be to-day
For us, who meet his verses in a book,
To cry “Tom Fool wrote that.... I know his way....
... Unsigned, yet eyed all over with Tom’s look....
Why see! It’s pure Tom Fool, I’m not mistook....
Fine simple verses too; now who’s to say
How Tom has charmed these worn old words to obey
His shepherd’s voice and march beneath his crook?
Instead we ponder “I can’t name the man,
But he’s been reading Wilde,” or “That’s the school
Of Côterie.... Voices.... Pound ... the Sitwell clan ...”
“_He_ ‘knows his Kipling’” ... “_he_ accepts the rule
Of Monro ... of Lord Tennyson ... of Queen Anne”
How seldom, “There, for a ducat, writes,
TOM FOOL.
The writer evidently had a keen eye for the failings of others, but is
convicted out of his own mouth, for I have met nobody who can identify
this particular Tom Fool for me.
Hateful as is the art of the parodist when it spoils poems which have
delighted and puzzled us, parody has its uses. A convincing parody is
the best possible danger signal to inform a poet that he is writing
sequels, repeating his conjuring tricks until they can be seen through
and ridiculously imitated. “That awkward fellow Ariphrades,” much as we
dislike him, is one of the most useful members of our republic of
letters.
XLIX
CROSS RHYTHM AND RESOLUTION
I have already attempted to show Poetry as the Recorder’s _précis_ of a
warm debate between the members of the poet’s mental Senate on some
unusually contraversial subject. Let the same idea be expressed less
personally in the terms of coloured circles intersecting, the space cut
off having the combined colour of both circles. In the Drama these
circles represent the warring influences of the plot; the principal
characters lie in the enclosed space and the interest of the play is to
watch their attempts to return to the state of primary colouring which
means mental ease; with tragedy they are eventually forced to the
colourless blackness of Death, with comedy the warring colours disappear
in white. In the lyrical poem, the circles are coinciding
stereoscopically so that it is difficult to discover how each individual
circle is coloured; we only see the combination.
If we consider that each influence represented by these circles has an
equivalent musical rhythm, then in the drama these rhythms interact
orchestrally, tonic theme against dominant; in lyrical poetry where we
get two images almost fused into one, the rhythms interlace
correspondingly closely. Of the warring influences, one is naturally
the original steady-going conservative, the others novel, disquieting,
almost accidental. Then in lyrical poetry the established influence
takes the original metre as its expression, and the new influences
introduce the cross rhythm modifying the metre until it is half
submerged. Shakespeare’s developments of blank verse have much
distressed prosodists, but have these ever considered that they were not
mere wantonness or lack of thought, that what he was doing was to send
emotional cross-rhythms working against the familiar iambic five-stress
line?
I remember “doing Greek iambics” at Charterhouse and being allowed as a
great privilege on reaching the Upper School to resolve the usual
short-long foot into a short-short-short or even in certain spots into a
long-short. These resolutions I never understood as having any reference
to the emotional mood of the verse I was supposed to be translating, but
they came in very conveniently when proper names had too many short
syllables in them to fit otherwise.
A young poet showed me a set of English verses the other day which I
returned him without taking a copy but I remember reading somewhat as
follows:--
T-tum, t-tum, t-tum, t-tum, t-tum
A midnight garden, where as I went past
I saw the cherry’s moonfrozen delicate ivory.
“Good heavens,” I said, “what’s that last line all about?”
“Oh, it’s just an experiment in resolution.”
“Take a pencil, like a good fellow, and scan it for me in the old
fashioned way as we used to do at school together.”
He did so:--
I sāw | thĕ cherr|(y’s) moŏnfrōz|ĕn dĕl|ic(ate) īv|(ory)
“It’s a sort of anapaestic resolution,” he explained.
“Anapaestic resolution of what?”
“Of an iambic decasyllabic line.”
“Excuse me, it’s not. Since we’re talking in that sort of jargon, it’s a
spondaic resolution of a dactylic line.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you’ve put in four extra syllables for your resolution. I’ll put
in a fifth, the word “in.” Now listen!
Swimmery | floatery | bobbery | duckery | divery--
_I_ saw the | cherries moon | frozen in | delicate | ivory
In this case the cross-rhythm, which my friend explained was meant to
suggest the curious ethereal look of cherry blossoms in moonlight, had
so swamped the original metre that it was completely stifled. The poet
has a licence to resolve metre where the emotion demands it, and he is a
poor poet if he daren’t use it; but there is commonsense in restraint.
L
MY NAME IS LEGION, FOR WE ARE MANY
One goes plodding on and hoping for a miracle, but who has ever
recovered the strange quality that makes the early work (which follows a
preliminary period of imitation) in a sense the best work? There is a
fine single-heartedness, an economy of material, an adventurous delight
in expression, a beginner’s luck for which I suppose honest hard work
and mature observation can in time substitute certain other qualities,
but poetry is never the same again.
I will attempt to explain this feeling by an analogy which can be
pressed as closely as any one likes: it is an elaboration of what has
been said of the poet as a “peculiarly gifted witch doctor.” Cases of
multiple personality have recently been investigated in people who
believed themselves to be possessed by spirits. Analysis has proved
pretty conclusively that the mediums have originally mimicked
acquaintances whom they found strange, persons apparently selected for
having completely different outlooks on life, both from the medium and
from each other, different religions, different emotional processes and
usually different dialects. This mimicry has given rise to unconscious
impersonations of these people, impersonations so complete that the
medium is in a state of trance and unconscious of any other existence.
Mere imitation changes to a synthetic representation of how these
characters would act in given circumstances. Finally the characters get
so much a part of the medium’s self that they actually seem to appear
visibly when summoned, and a sight of them can even be communicated to
sympathetic bystanders. So the Witch of Endor called up Samuel for King
Saul. The trances, originally spontaneous, are induced in later stages
to meet the wishes of an inquisitive or devout séance-audience; the
manifestations are more and more presented (this is no charge of
charlatanism) with a view to their effect on the séance. It is the
original unpremeditated trances, or rather the first ones that have the
synthetic quality and are no longer mere mimicry, which correspond to
Early Work.
But it is hardly necessary to quote extreme cases of morbid psychology
or to enter the dangerous arena of spiritualistic argument in order to
explain the presence of subpersonalities in the poet’s mind. They have a
simple origin, it seems, as supplying the need of a primitive mind when
confused. Quite normal children invent their own familiar spirits, their
“shadows,” “dummies” or “slaves,” in order to excuse erratic actions of
their own which seem on reflection incompatible with their usual habits
or code of honour. I have seen a child of two years old accept
literally an aunt’s sarcasm, “Surely it wasn’t my little girl who did
that? It must have been a horrid little stranger dressed just like you
who came in and behaved so badly. My little girl always does what she’s
told.” The child divided into two her own identity of which she had only
recently become conscious. She expected sympathy instead of scolding
when the horrid little stranger reappeared, broke china and flung water
all over the room. I have heard of several developments of the dummy, or
slave idea; how one child used his dummy as a representative to send out
into the world to do the glorious deeds which he himself was not allowed
to attempt; on one occasion this particular dummy got three weeks’
imprisonment after a collision with the police and so complete was his
master’s faith in the independent existence of the creature that he
eagerly counted the days until the dummy’s release and would not call on
his services, however urgently needed, until the sentence had been
completed. Another child, a girl, employed a committee of several
dummies each having very different characteristics, to whom all social
problems were referred for discussion.
Richard Middleton, the poet, in a short essay, “Harold,” traces the
development of a dummy of this sort which assumed a tyranny over his
mind until it became a recurrent nightmare. Middleton says, and it
immensely strengthens my contention if Middleton realized the full
implications of the remark, that but for this dummy, Harold, he would
never have become a poet.
Two or three poets of my acquaintance have admitted (I can confirm it
from my own experience) that they are frequently conscious of their own
divided personalities; that is, that they adopt an entirely different
view of life, a different vocabulary, gesture, intonation, according as
they happen to find themselves, for instance, in clerical society, in
sporting circles, or among labourers in inns. It is no affectation, but
a _mimesis_ or sympathetic imitation hardened into a habit; the
sportsman is a fixed and definite character ready to turn out for every
sporting or quasi-sporting emergency and has no interest outside the
pages of the _Field_, the clerical dummy pops up as soon as a clergyman
passes down the road and can quote scripture by the chapter; the rustic
dummy mops its brow with a red pocket handkerchief and murmurs “keeps
very dry.” These characters have individual tastes in food, drink,
clothes, society, peculiar vices and virtues and even different
handwriting.
The difficulty of remaining _loyal_, which I mention elsewhere, is most
disastrously increased, but the poet finds a certain compensation in the
excitement of doing the quick change. He also finds it amusing to watch
the comments of reviews or private friends on some small batch of poems
which appear under his name. Every poem though signed John Jones is
virtually by a different author. The poem which comes nearest to the
point of view of one critic may be obnoxious to another; and _vice
versa_; but it all turns on which “dummy” or “sub-personality” had
momentarily the most influence on the mental chairman.
In a piece which represents an interlude in a contemplated collection of
poems, the following passage occurs to give the same thought from a
different angle. I am asking a friend to overlook irreconcilabilities in
my book and refer him to two or three poems which are particularly
hostile to each other.
“Yet these are all the same stuff, really,
The obverse and reverse, if you look closely,
Of busy imagination’s new-coined money--
And if you watch the blind
Phototropisms of my fluttering mind,
Whether, growing strong, I wrestle Jacob-wise
With fiendish darkness blinking threatfully
Its bale-fire eyes,
Or whether childishly
I dart to Mother-skirts of love and peace
To play with toys until those horrors leave me,
Yet note, whichever way I find release,
By fight or flight,
By being wild or tame,
The Spirit’s the same, the Pen and Ink’s the same.”
LI
THE PIG BABY
“Multiple personality, perhaps,” says some one. “But does that account
for the stereoscopic process of which you speak, that makes two
sub-personalities speak from a double head, that as it were prints two
pictures on the same photographic plate?” The objector is thereupon
referred to the dream-machinery on which poetry appears to be founded.
He will acknowledge that in dreams the characters are always changing in
a most sudden and baffling manner. He will remember for example that in
“Alice in Wonderland,” which is founded on dream-material, the Duchess’
baby is represented as turning into a pig; in “Alice through the Looking
Glass” the White Queen becomes an old sheep. That is a commonplace of
dreams.
When there is a thought-connection of similarity or contrast between two
concepts, the second is printed over the first on the mental
photographic plate so rapidly that you hardly know at any given moment
whether it is a pig or a baby you are addressing. “You quite make me
giddy,” said Alice to the Cheshire Cat who was performing similar
evolutions. One image starts a sentence, another image succeeds and
finishes it, almost, but the first reappears and has the last word. The
result is poetry--or nonsense. With music much the same happens; I
believe that those wonderful bursts of music heard in sleep are
impossible to reproduce in a waking state largely because they consist
of a number of melodies of different times and keys imposed on one
another.
LII
APOLOGY FOR DEFINITIONS
In my opening definition I have given rather an ideal of English Poetry
than an analysis of the ruling poetics of this, that and the other
century. If those who rally to the later Pope and those who find in the
prophetic Blake the true standard of Poetry, equally deny that my
definition covers their experience of the word, I admit that in an
encyclopediac sense it is quite inadequate, and indeed a fusion of two
contradictory senses; indeed, again, a typically poetic definition.
But how else to make it? Blake’s poetry dictated by angels (a
too-impulsive race) with its abstruse personal symbolism and tangled
rhythms, and Pope’s elegantly didactic generalizations, in rigidly
metrical forms, on the nature of his fellow man, have a common factor so
low as hardly to be worth recovering; my justification is based on the
works of our everywhere acknowledged Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare,
Keats, Shelley and the rest, where the baffling Metamorphism of Romance
and the formal Characterism of Classical Poetry, often reconcile their
traditional quarrel and merge contentedly and inseparably as Jack Spratt
and Mrs. Spratt, dividing the fat and the lean in equable portions.
* * * * *
Here let me then, for the scientific interest, summarize my conception
of the typical poet:--
A poet in the fullest sense is one whom some unusual complications of
early environment or mixed parentage develop as an intermediary between
the small-group consciousnesses of particular sects, clans, castes,
types and professions among whom he moves. To so many of these has he
been formally enrolled as a member, and to so many more has he virtually
added himself as a supernumerary member by showing a disinterested
sympathy and by practising his exceptionally developed powers of
intuition, that in any small-group sense the wide diffusion of his
loyalties makes him everywhere a hypocrite and a traitor.
But the rival sub-personalities formed in him by his relation to these
various groups, constantly struggle to reconciliation in his poetry, and
in proportion as these sub-personalities are more numerous more varied
and more inharmonious, and his controlling personality stronger and
quicker at compromise, so he becomes a more or less capable spokesman of
that larger group-mind of his culture which we somehow consider greater
than the sum of its parts: so that men of smaller scope and more
concentrated loyalties swallow personal prejudices and hear at times in
his utterances what seems to them the direct voice of God.
LIII
TIMES AND SEASONS
Each poet finds that there are special times and seasons most suitable
for his work; for times, I have heard mentioned with favour the hour
before breakfast and the hour after the usual bed-time, for seasons, the
pause between the exuberance of Spring and the heaviness of Summer seems
popular, also the month of October. There are also places more free from
interruption and distraction than others, such as caves, attics barely
furnished, lonely barns, woods, bed, which make the hypnotic state
necessary for poetry easier to induce. The poet has to be very honest
with himself about only writing when he feels like it. To take pen in
hand at the self-conscious hour of (say) nine A.M., for a morning’s
poetry, and with a mental arena free of combatants, is to be
disappointed, and even “put off” poetry for some time to come.
I have often heard it said that a poet in intervals between inspirations
should keep his hand in by writing verse-exercises, but that he should
on such occasions immediately destroy what he has written.
That seems all wrong, it is an insult to the spontaneity of true poetry
to go through a ritual farce of this sort and the poet will only be
blunting his tools. He ought not to feel distressed at the passage of
time as if it represented so many masterpieces unwritten. If he keeps
mentally alive and has patience, the real stuff may arrive any moment;
when it doesn’t, it isn’t his fault, but the harder he tries to force
it, the longer will it be delayed.
LIV
TWO HERESIES