first importance of the poet is his “message”; this idea probably
originated with the decline of polite sermon-writing, when the poet was
expected to take on the double duty; but it is quite untenable. The poet
is only concerned with reconciling certain impressions of life as they
occur to him, and presenting them in the most effective way possible,
without reference to their educational value. The cumulative effect of
his work is to suggest a great number of personal obsessions the sum of
which compose if you like his “message,” but the more definitely
propagandist the poet, the less of a poet is the propagandist.
With this is bound up a heresy of about the same standing that poetry
should only be concerned with presenting what is beautiful, beautiful in
the limited sense of the picture-postcard. This romantic obsession
(using the word “romantic” in the sense of optimistic loose thinking) is
as absurd as that of the blood-and-guts realists. Poetry is no more a
narcotic than a stimulant; it is a universal bitter-sweet mixture for
all possible household emergencies, and its action varies according as
it is taken in a wineglass or tablespoon, inhaled, gargled, or rubbed on
the chest (like the literary Epic) by hard fingers covered with rings.
LV
THE ART OF EXPRESSION
It is as foolish to sneer at the Very Wild Men as it is to assume that
the Very Tame Men are all right because they are “in the tradition.” The
Very Wild Men are at any rate likely to have done work which has
explored the desert boundaries of the art they profess, and the Very
Tame Men have never done anything worth doing at all. The only excusable
quarrel is with the pretended Wild Men who persist in identically
repeating the experiments in which their masters have already failed,
and with those whose Very Wilderness is traceable to this--that they
are satisfied with the original spontaneity of their work and do not
trouble to test it in the light of what it will convey to others, whom
they then blame for want of appreciation. What seems to be the matter
with Blake’s Prophetic Books is just this, he connected his images by a
system of free association the clue to which was lost by his death: for
instance his enemy, Schofield, a soldier who informed against him,
suddenly enters “Jerusalem” and its strange company of abstractions, in
the guise of a universal devil “Skofeld.”
Suppose that one Hodge, a labourer, attempted in a fit of homicidal
mania to split my skull with a spade, but that my faithful bloodhound
sprang to the rescue and Hodge barely escaped with his life. In my
imagination, Hodge’s spade might well come to symbolize murder and
madness, while the bloodhound became an emblem of loyal assistance in
the hour of discomfiture. With this experience in my mind I might be
inclined to eulogize a national hero as
“Bloodhound leaping at the throat of Hodge
Who stands with lifted spade,”
and convey a meaning directly contrary to the one intended and having an
apparent reference to agrarian unrest. But conscious reflection would
put my image into line with a more widely favoured conception of Man the
Attacker, and Dog the Rescuer; I would rewrite the eulogy as
“_Watchdog_ leaping at the _burglar’s_ throat
Who stands with _pistol aimed_.”
One of the chief problems of the art of poetry is to decide what are the
essentials of the image that has formed in your mind; the accidental has
to be eliminated and replaced by the essential. There is the double
danger of mistaking a significant feature of the image for an accident
and of giving an accident more prominence than it deserves.
Too much modern country-side poetry is mere verbal photography,
admirably accurate and full of observation but not excited by memories
of human relationships, the emotional bias which could make Bunyan see
the bee as an emblem of sin, and Blake the lion’s loving-kindness.
Now, if Wordsworth had followed the poetical fashion of the day and told
the world that when wandering lonely as a cloud he had seen a number of
vernal flowers, the poem would have fallen pretty flat--if however,
anticipating the present century he had quoted the order, the species
and the subspecies and remarked on having found among the rest no fewer
than five double blooms, we would almost have wished the vernal flowers
back again.
Mr. Edmund Blunden lately called my attention to a message from Keats to
John Clare sent through their common publisher, Taylor. Keats thought
that Clare’s “Images from Nature” were “too much introduced without
being called for by a particular sentiment.” Clare, in reply, is
troubled that Keats shows the usual inaccuracies of the townsman when
treating of nature, and that when in doubt he borrows from the Classics
and is too inclined to see “behind every bush a thrumming Apollo.”
LVI
GHOSTS IN THE SHELDONIAN
The most popular theory advanced to account for the haunting of houses
is that emanations of fear, hate or grief somehow impregnate a locality,
and these emotions are released when in contact with a suitable medium.
So with a poem or novel, passion impregnates the words and can make them
active even divorced from the locality of creation.
An extreme instance of this process was claimed when Mr. Thomas Hardy
came to Oxford to receive his honorary degree as Doctor of Literature,
in the Sheldonian Theatre.
There were two very aged dons sitting together on a front bench, whom
nobody in the assembly had ever seen before. They frowned and refrained
from clapping Mr. Hardy or the Public Orator who had just described him
as “Omnium poetarum Britannicorum necnon fabulatorum etiam facile
princeps,” and people said they were certainly ghosts and identified
them with those masters of colleges who failed to answer Jude the
Obscure when he enquired by letter how he might become a student of the
University. It seems one ought to be very careful when writing
realistically.
LVII
THE LAYING ON OF HANDS
While still in my perambulator about the year 1899,[2] I once received
with great alarm the blessing of Algernon Charles Swinburne who was
making his daily journey from “The Pines” in Putney to the _Rose and
Crown_ public house on the edge of Wimbledon Common. It was many years
before I identified our nursery bogey man, “mad Mr. Swinburne,” with the
poet. It interests me to read that Swinburne as a young man once asked
and received the blessing of Walter Savage Landor who was a very old man
indeed at the time, and that Landor as a child had been himself taken to
get a blessing at the hand of Dr. Samuel Johnson, and that the great
lexicographer in his childhood had been unsuccessfully “touched” by
Queen Anne for the King’s Evil. And what the moral may be, I cannot say,
but I have traced the story back to Queen Anne because I want to make my
grimace at the sacerdotalists; for I must confess, I have been many
times disillusioned over such “poetry in the great tradition” as
Authority has put beyond criticism.
[2] See Mr. Max Beerbohm’s AND EVEN NOW, page 69.
In caution, and out of deference to my reader’s sensibilities I will
only quote a single example. Before reading a line of Swinburne I had
been frequently told that he was “absolutely wonderful,” I would be
quite carried away by him. They all said that the opening chorus, for
instance, of _Atalanta in Calydon_ was the most melodious verse in the
English language. I read:
When the hounds of Spring are on Winter’s traces,
The Mother of months in meadow and plain, ...
and I was not carried away as far as I expected. For a time I persuaded
myself that it was my own fault, that I was a Philistine and had no
ear--but one day pride reasserted itself and I began asking myself
whether in the lines quoted above, the two “in’s” of _Spring_ and
_Winter_ and the two “mo’s” of _Mother_ and _Months_ did not come too
close together for euphony, and who exactly was the heroine of the
second line, and whether the heavy alliteration in _m_ was not too
obvious a device, and whether _months_ was not rather a stumbling-block
in galloping verse of this kind, and would it not have been better....
Thereupon faith in the “great tradition” and in “Authority” waned.
Still, I would be hard-hearted and stiff-necked indeed if I did not
wish to have had on my own head the blessing that Swinburne received.
LVIII
WAYS AND MEANS
It is true that Genius can’t lie hid in a garret nowadays; there are too
many people eager to get credit for discovering and showing it to the
world. But as most of the acknowledged best living poets find it
impossible to make anything like a living wage from their poetry, and
patronage has long gone out of fashion (a great pity I think) the poet
after a little fuss and flattery is obliged to return disconsolately to
his garret. The problem of an alternative profession is one for which I
have never heard a really satisfactory solution. Even Coleridge (whose
Biographia Literaria should be the poet’s Bible) could make no more
hopeful suggestion than that the poet should become a country parson.
Surely a most unhappy choice! The alternative profession should be as
far as possible removed from, and subsidiary to, poetry. True priesthood
will never allow itself to become subordinate to any other calling, and
the dangerous consanguinity of poetry and religion has already been
emphasized. It is the old difficulty of serving two masters; with the
more orthodox poets Herbert and Vaughan, for example, poetry was all
but always tamed into meek subjection to religious propaganda; with
Skelton and Donne it was very different, and one feels that they were
the better poets for their independence, their rebelliousness towards
priestly conventions.
Schoolmastering is another unfortunate subsidiary profession, it is apt
to give poetry a didactic flavour; journalism is too exacting on the
invention, which the poet must keep fresh; manual labour wearies the
body and tends to make the mind sluggish; office-routine limits the
experience. Perhaps Chaucer as dockyard inspector and diplomat,
Shakespeare as actor manager, and Blake as engraver, solved the problem
at best.
These practical reflections may be supplemented by a paragraph lifted
from the New York _Nation_ _apropos_ of a trans-Atlantic poet whose
works have already sold a million copies; a new volume of his poems has
evidently broken the hearty muscular open-prairie tradition of the
’fifties and ’sixties and advanced forty years at a stride to the
Parisian ecstasies of the naughty ’nineties;--
“That verse is in itself a hopelessly unpopular
form of literature is an error of the sophisticated
but imperfectly informed. Every period has its
widely read poets. Only, these poets rarely rise
into the field of criticism since they always echo
the music of the day before yesterday and express
as an astonishing message the delusions of the
huge rear-guard of civilization.”
LIX
POETRY AS LABOUR
A book of verses must be either priceless or valueless and as the
general reading public is never told which by the council of critics
until fifty years at least after the first publication, poets can only
expect payment at a nominal rate. If they complain that the labourer is
worthy of his hire, the analogy is not admitted. The public denies
poetry to be labour; it is supposed to be a gentle recreation like
cutting out “Home Sweet Home” from three-ply wood with a fretsaw, or
collecting pressed flowers.
LX
THE NECESSITY OF ARROGANCE
To say of any poet that there is complete individuality in his poems
combined with excellent craftsmanship amounts to a charge of arrogance.
Craftsmanship in its present-day sense seems necessarily to imply
acquaintance with other poetry; polish is only learned from the
shortcomings and triumphs of others, it is not natural to the
back-woodsman. A poet who after reading the work of those whom he
recognizes as masters of the craft, does not allow himself to be
influenced into imitation of peculiar technical tricks (as we often find
ourselves unwittingly influenced to imitate the peculiar gestures of
people we admire or love), that poet must have the arrogance to put his
own _potential_ achievements on a level with the work he most admires.
Then is asked the question, “But why _do_ poets write? Why do they go on
polishing the rough ideas which, once on paper, even in a crude and
messy form, should give the mental conflict complete relief? Why, if the
conflict is purely a personal one, do they definitely attempt to press
the poem on their neighbour’s imagination with all the zeal of a
hot-gospeller?”
There is arrogance in that, the arrogance of a child who takes for
granted that all the world is interested in its doings and clever
sayings. The emotional crises that make Poetry, imply suffering, and
suffering usually humiliation, so that the poet makes his secret or open
confidence in his poetic powers a set-off against a sense of alienation
from society due to some physical deformity, stigma of birth or other
early spite of nature, or against his later misfortunes in love.
The expectation and desire of a spurious immortality “fluttering alive
on the mouths of men” is admitted by most poets of my acquaintance, both
the good and the bad. This may be only a more definitely expressed form
of the same instinct for self-perpetuation that makes the schoolboy cut
his name on the leaden gutter of the church porch, or the rich man give
a college scholarship to preserve his name _in perpetuo_. But with the
poet there is always the tinge of arrogance in the thought that his own
poetry has a lasting quality which most of his contemporaries cannot
claim.
The danger of this very necessary arrogance is that it is likely so to
intrude the poet’s personal eccentricities into what he writes that the
reader recognizes them and does not read the “I” as being the voice of
universality.... It was the first night of a sentimental play in an
Early English setting; the crisis long deferred was just coming, the
heroine and hero were on the point of reconciliation and the long
embrace, the audience had lumps in their throats. At that actual instant
of suspense, a man in evening-dress leaped down on the stage from a box,
kicked the ruffed and doubleted hero into the orchestra, and began to
embrace the lady. A moment’s silence; then terrible confusion and rage.
The stage manager burst into tears, attendants rushed forward to arrest
the desperado.
“But, ladies and gentlemen, I am the author!! I have an artist’s right
to do what I like with my own play.”
“Duck him! scratch his face! tar and feather him!”
* * * * *
Arrogance? Yes, but a self-contradictory arrogance that takes the form
of believing that there is nobody beside themselves who could point out
just where in a given poem they have written well, and where badly.
They know that it contains all sorts of hidden lesser implications
(besides the more important ones) which, they think, a few sensitive
minds may feel, but none could analyze; they think that they have
disguised this or that bit of putty (of which no poem is innocent) so
that no living critic could detect it. They are arrogant because they
claim to understand better than any rivals how impossible an art poetry
is, and because they still have the courage to face it. They have most
arrogance before writing their poem of the moment, most humility when
they know that they have once more failed.
LXI
IN PROCESSION
This piece was written a few weeks after the remainder of the book: I
had no cold-blooded intention of summarizing the paradox of poetic
arrogance contained in the last section, but so it happened, and I print
it here.
Donne (for example’s sake)
Keats, Marlowe, Spenser, Blake,
Shelley and Milton,
Shakespeare and Chaucer, Skelton--
I love them as I know them,
But who could dare outgo them
At their several arts
At their particular parts
Of wisdom, power and knowledge?
In the Poet’s College
Are no degrees nor stations,
Comparisons, rivals,
Stern examinations,
Class declarations,
Senior survivals;
No creeds, religions, nations
Combatant together
With mutual damnations.
Or tell me whether
Shelley’s hand could take
The laurel wreath from Blake?
Could Shakespeare make the less
Chaucer’s goodliness?
The poets of old
Each with his pen of gold
Gloriously writing
Found no need for fighting,
In common being so rich;
None need take the ditch,
Unless this Chaucer beats
That Chaucer, or this Keats
With other Keats is flyting:
See Donne deny Donne’s feats,
Shelley take Shelley down,
Blake snatch at his own crown.
Without comparison aiming high,
Watching with no jealous eye,
A neighbour’s renown,
Each in his time contended
But with a mood late ended,
Some manner now put by,
Or force expended,
Sinking a new well when the old ran dry.
So, like my masters, I
Voice my ambition loud,
In prospect proud,
Treading the poet’s road,
In retrospect most humble
For I stumble and tumble,
I spill my load.
But often half-way to sleep,
On a mountain shagged and steep,
The sudden moment on me comes
With terrible roll of dream drums,
Reverberations, cymbals, horns replying,
When with standards flying,
A cloud of horsemen behind,
The coloured pomps unwind
The Carnival wagons
With their saints and their dragons
On the screen of my teeming mind,
The _Creation_ and _Flood_
With our Saviour’s Blood
And fat Silenus’ flagons,
With every rare beast
From the South and East,
Both greatest and least,
On and on,
In endless variable procession.
I stand on the top rungs
Of a ladder reared in the air
And I speak with strange tongues
So the crowds murmur and stare,
Then volleys again the blare
Of horns, and Summer flowers
Fly scattering in showers,
And the Sun rolls in the sky,
While the drums thumping by
Proclaim me....
Oh then, when I wake
Could I recovering take
And propose on this page
The words of my rage
And my blandishing speech
Steadfast and sage,
Could I stretch and reach
The flowers and the ripe fruit
Laid out at the ladder’s foot,
Could I rip a silken shred
From the banner tossed ahead,
Could I call a double flam
From the drums, could the Goat
Horned with gold, could the Ram
With a flank like a barn-door
The dwarf and blackamoor,
Could _Jonah and the Whale_
And the _Holy Grail_
With the “_Sacking of Rome_”
And “_Lot at his home_”
The Ape with his platter,
Going clitter-clatter,
The Nymphs and the Satyr,
And every other such matter
Come before me here
Standing and speaking clear
With a “how do ye do?”
And “who are ye, who?”
Could I show them to you
That you saw them with me,
Oh then, then I could be
The Prince of all Poetry
With never a peer,
Seeing my way so clear
To unveil mystery.
Telling you of land and sea
Of Heaven blithe and free,
How I know there to be
Such and such Castles built in Spain,
Telling also of Cockaigne
Of that glorious kingdom, Cand
Of the Delectable Land,
The Land of Crooked Stiles,
The Fortunate Isles,
Of the more than three score miles
That to Babylon lead,
A pretty city indeed
Built on a foursquare plan,
Of the land of the Gold Man
Whose eager horses whinney
In their cribs of gold,
Of the lands of Whipperginny
Of the land where none grow old.
Especially I could tell
Of the Town of Hell,
A huddle of dirty woes
And houses in endless rows
Straggling across all space;
Hell has no market place,
Nor point where four ways meet,
Nor principal street,
Nor barracks, nor Town Hall,
Nor shops at all,
Nor rest for weary feet,
Nor theatre, square or park,
Nor lights after dark,
Nor churches nor inns,
Nor convenience for sins,
Hell nowhere begins,
Hell nowhere ends,
But over the world extends
Rambling, dreamy, limitless, hated well:
The suburbs of itself, I say, is Hell.
But back to the sweets
Of Spenser and Keats
And the calm joy that greets
The chosen of Apollo!
Here let me mope, quirk, holloa
With a gesture that meets
The needs that I follow
In my own fierce way,
Let me be grave-gay
Or merry-sad,
Who rhyming here have had
Marvellous hope of achievement
And deeds of ample scope,
Then deceiving and bereavement
Of this same hope.
APPENDIX:--THE DANGERS OF DEFINITION
The following letter I reprint from Tract No. 6 issued by the Society
for Pure English, but put it as an appendix because it explains my
attitude to the careful use of language by prose writers as well as by
poets. It is intended to be read in conjunction with my section on
_Diction_.
_To the Editor of the S. P. E. tracts._
SIR,
As one rather more interested in the choice, use, and blending of
words than in the niceties of historical grammar, and having no
greater knowledge of etymology than will occasionally allow me to
question vulgar derivations of place-names, I would like to sound a
warning against the attempt to purify the language too much--“one
word, one meaning” is as impossible to impose on English as “one
letter, one sound.” By all means weed out homophones, and wherever
a word is overloaded and driven to death let another bear part of
the burden; suppress the bastard and ugly words of journalese or
commerce; keep a watchful eye on the scientists; take necessary
French and Italian words out of their italics to give them an
English spelling and accentuation; call a bird or a flower by its
proper name, revive useful dialect or obsolescent words, and so on;
that is the right sort of purification, but let it be tactfully
done, let the Dictionary be a hive of living things and not a
museum of minutely ticketed fossils. A common-sense precision in
writing is clearly necessary; one has only to read a page or two of
Nashe, Lyly, or (especially) the lesser Euphuists to come to this
conclusion; their sentences often can have meant no more to
themselves than a mere grimace or the latest sweep of the hat
learned in Italy. A common-sense precision, yes, but when the
pedantic scientist accuses the man in the street of verbal
inexactitude the latter will do well to point out to the scientist
that of all classes of writers, his is the least accurate of any in
the use of ordinary words. Witness a typical sentence, none the
better for being taken from a book which has made an extremely
important contribution to modern psychological research, and is
written by a scientist so enlightened that, dispensing almost
entirely with the usual scientific jargon, he has improvised his
own technical terms as they are needed for the argument. Very good
words they are, such as would doubtless be as highly approved by
the Society for Pure English, in session, as they have been by the
British Association. This Doctor X is explaining the unaccountable
foreknowledge in certain insects of the needs they will meet after
their metamorphosis from grub to moth. He writes:
... This grub, after a life completely spent within the channels in
a tree-trunk which it itself manufactures....