earliest of the poems were read to me in London in 1896, when the writer
was seventeen; the later ones were sent to me from India in 1904, when
she was twenty-five; and they belong, I think, almost wholly to those
two periods. As they seemed to me to have an individual beauty of their
own, I thought they ought to be published. The writer hesitated. 'Your
letter made me very proud and very sad,' she wrote. 'Is it possible that
I have written verses that are "filled with beauty," and is it possible
that you really think them worthy of being given to the world? You know
how high my ideal of Art is; and to me my poor casual little poems seem
to be less than beautiful--I mean with that final enduring beauty that I
desire.' And, in another letter, she writes: 'I am not a poet really. I
have the vision and the desire, but not the voice. If I could write just
one poem full of beauty and the spirit of greatness, I should be
exultantly silent for ever; but I sing just as the birds do, and my
songs are as ephemeral.' It is for this bird-like quality of song, it
seems to me, that they are to be valued. They hint, in a sort of
delicately evasive way, at a rare temperament, the temperament of a
woman of the East, finding expression through a Western language and
under partly Western influences. They do not express the whole of that
temperament; but they express, I think, its essence; and there is an
Eastern magic in them.
Sarojini Chattopâdhyây was born at Hyderabad on February 13, 1879. Her
father, Dr. Aghorenath Chattopâdhyây, is descended from the ancient
family of Chattorajes of Bhramangram, who were noted throughout Eastern
Bengal as patrons of Sanskrit learning, and for their practice of Yoga.
He took his degree of Doctor of Science at the University of Edinburgh
in 1877, and afterwards studied brilliantly at Bonn. On his return to
India he founded the Nizam College at Hyderabad, and has since laboured
incessantly, and at great personal sacrifice, in the cause of education.
Sarojini was the eldest of a large family, all of whom were taught
English at an early age. 'I,' she writes, 'was stubborn and refused to
speak it. So one day, when I was nine years old, my father punished
me--the only time I was ever punished--by shutting me in a room alone
for a whole day. I came out of it a full-blown linguist. I have never
spoken any other language to him, or to my mother, who always speaks to
me in Hindustani. I don't think I had any special hankering to write
poetry as a little child, though I was of a very fanciful and dreamy
nature. My training under my father's eye was of a sternly scientific
character. He was determined that I should be a great mathematician or a
scientist, but the poetic instinct, which I inherited from him and also
from my mother (who wrote some lovely Bengali lyrics in her youth),
proved stronger. One day, when I was eleven, I was sighing over a sum in
algebra; it _wouldn't_ come right; but instead a whole poem came to me
suddenly. I wrote it down.
'From that day my "poetic career" began. At thirteen I wrote a long
poem _à la_ "Lady of the Lake"--1300 lines in six days. At thirteen I
wrote a drama of 2000 lines, a full-fledged passionate thing that I
began on the spur of the moment, without forethought, just to spite my
doctor, who said I was very ill and must not touch a book. My health
broke down permanently about this time, and, my regular studies being
stopped, I read voraciously. I suppose the greater part of my reading
was done between fourteen and sixteen. I wrote a novel, I wrote fat
volumes of journals: I took myself very seriously in those days.'
Before she was fifteen the great struggle of her life began. Dr.
Govindurajulu Naidu, now her husband, is, though of an old and
honourable family, not a Brahmin. The difference of caste roused an
equal opposition, not only on the side of her family, but of his; and in
1895 she was sent to England, against her will, with a special
scholarship from the Nizam. She remained in England, with an interval of
travel in Italy, till 1898, studying first at King's College, London,
then, till her health again broke down, at Girton. She returned to
Hyderabad in September 1898, and in the December of that year, to the
scandal of all India, broke through the bonds of caste, and married Dr.
Naidu. 'Do you know I have some very beautiful poems floating in the
air,' she wrote to me in 1904; 'and if the gods are kind I shall cast my
soul like a net and capture them, this year. If the gods are kind--and
grant me a little measure of health. It is all I need to make my life
perfect, for the very "Spirit of Delight" that Shelley wrote of dwells
in my little home; it is full of the music of birds in the garden and
children in the long-arched verandah.' There are songs about the
children in this book; they are called the Lord of Battles, the Sun of
Victory, the Lotus-born, and the Jewel of Delight.
'My ancestors for thousands of years,' I find written in one of her
letters, 'have been lovers of the forest and mountain caves, great
dreamers, great scholars, great ascetics. My father is a dreamer
himself, a great dreamer, a great man whose life has been a magnificent
failure. I suppose in the whole of India there are few men whose
learning is greater than his, and I don't think there are many men more
beloved. He has a great white beard, and the profile of Homer, and a
laugh that brings the roof down. He has wasted all his money on two
great objects: to help others, and on alchemy. He holds huge courts
every day in his garden of all the learned men of all religions--Rajahs
and beggars and saints, and downright villains, all delightfully mixed
up, and all treated as one. And then his alchemy! Oh dear, night and day
the experiments are going on, and every man who brings a new
prescription is welcome as a brother. But this alchemy is, you know,
only the material counterpart of a poet's craving for Beauty, the
eternal Beauty. "The makers of gold and the makers of verse," they are
the twin creators that sway the world's secret desire for mystery; and
what in my father is the genius of curiosity--the very essence of all
scientific genius--in me is the desire for beauty. Do you remember
Pater's phrase about Leonardo da Vinci, "curiosity and the desire of
beauty"?'
It was the desire of beauty that made her a poet; her 'nerves of
delight' were always quivering at the contact of beauty. To those who
knew her in England, all the life of the tiny figure seemed to
concentrate itself in the eyes; they turned towards beauty as the
sunflower turns towards the sun, opening wider and wider until one saw
nothing but the eyes. She was dressed always in clinging dresses of
Eastern silk, and, as she was so small, and her long black hair hung
straight down her back, you might have taken her for a child. She spoke
little, and in a low voice, like gentle music; and she seemed, wherever
she was, to be alone.
Through that soul I seemed to touch and take hold upon the East. And
first there was the wisdom of the East. I have never known any one who
seemed to exist on such 'large draughts of intellectual day' as this
child of seventeen, to whom one could tell all one's personal troubles
and agitations, as to a wise old woman. In the East maturity comes
early; and this child had already lived through all a woman's life. But
there was something else, something hardly personal, something which
belonged to a consciousness older than the Christian, which I realised,
wondered at, and admired, in her passionate tranquillity of mind, before
which everything mean and trivial and temporary caught fire and burnt
away in smoke. Her body was never without suffering, or her heart
without conflict; but neither the body's weakness nor the heart's
violence could disturb that fixed contemplation, as of Buddha on his
lotus-throne.
And along with this wisdom, as of age or of the age of a race, there was
what I can hardly call less than an agony of sensation. Pain or pleasure
transported her, and the whole of pain or pleasure might be held in a
flower's cup or the imagined frown of a friend. It was never found in
those things which to others seemed things of importance. At the age of
twelve she passed the Matriculation of the Madras University, and awoke
to find herself famous throughout India. 'Honestly,' she said to me, 'I
was not pleased; such things did not appeal to me.' But here, in a
letter from Hyderabad, bidding one 'share a March morning' with her,
there is, at the mere contact of the sun, this outburst: 'Come and share
my exquisite March morning with me: this sumptuous blaze of gold and
sapphire sky; these scarlet lilies that adorn the sunshine; the
voluptuous scents of neem and champak and serisha that beat upon the
languid air with their implacable sweetness; the thousand little gold
and blue and silver breasted birds bursting with the shrill ecstasy of
life in nesting time. All is hot and fierce and passionate, ardent and
unashamed in its exulting and importunate desire for life and love. And,
do you know that the scarlet lilies are woven petal by petal from my
heart's blood, these little quivering birds are my soul made incarnate
music, these heavy perfumes are my emotions dissolved into aerial
essence, this flaming blue and gold sky is the "very me," that part of
me that incessantly and insolently, yes, and a little deliberately,
triumphs over that other part--a thing of nerves and tissues that
suffers and cries out, and that must die to-morrow perhaps, or twenty
years hence.'
Then there was her humour, which was part of her strange wisdom, and was
always awake and on the watch. In all her letters, written in exquisite
English prose, but with an ardent imagery and a vehement sincerity of
emotion which make them, like the poems, indeed almost more directly,
un-English, Oriental, there was always this intellectual, critical sense
of humour, which could laugh at one's own enthusiasm as frankly as that
enthusiasm had been set down. And partly the humour, like the delicate
reserve of her manner, was a mask or a shelter. 'I have taught myself,'
she writes to me from India, 'to be commonplace and like everybody else
superficially. Every one thinks I am so nice and cheerful, so "brave,"
all the banal things that are so comfortable to be. My mother knows me
only as "such a tranquil child, but so strong-willed." A tranquil
child!' And she writes again, with deeper significance: 'I too have
learnt the subtle philosophy of living from moment to moment. Yes, it is
a subtle philosophy though it appears merely an epicurean doctrine:
"Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die." I have gone through so
many yesterdays when I strove with Death that I have realised to its
full the wisdom of that sentence; and it is to me not merely a figure of
speech, but a literal fact. Any to-morrow I might die. It is scarcely
two months since I came back from the grave: is it worth while to be
anything but radiantly glad? Of all things that life or perhaps my
temperament has given me I prize the gift of laughter as beyond price.'
Her desire, always, was to be 'a wild free thing of the air like the
birds, with a song in my heart.' A spirit of too much fire in too frail
a body, it was rarely that her desire was fully granted. But in Italy
she found what she could not find in England, and from Italy her letters
are radiant. 'This Italy is made of gold,' she writes from Florence,
'the gold of dawn and daylight, the gold of the stars, and, now dancing
in weird enchanting rhythms through this magic month of May, the gold of
fireflies in the perfumed darkness--"aerial gold." I long to catch the
subtle music of their fairy dances and make a poem with a rhythm like
the quick irregular wild flash of their sudden movements. Would it not
be wonderful? One black night I stood in a garden with fireflies in my
hair like darting restless stars caught in a mesh of darkness. It gave
me a strange sensation, as if I were not human at all, but an elfin
spirit. I wonder why these little things move me so deeply? It is
because I have a most "unbalanced intellect," I suppose.' Then, looking
out on Florence, she cries, 'God! how beautiful it is, and how glad I am
that I am alive to-day!' And she tells me that she is drinking in the
beauty like wine, 'wine, golden and scented, and shining, fit for the
gods; and the gods have drunk it, the dead gods of Etruria, two thousand
years ago. Did I say dead? No, for the gods are immortal, and one might
still find them loitering in some solitary dell on the grey hillsides of
Fiesole. Have I seen them? Yes, looking with dreaming eyes, I have found
them sitting under the olives, in their grave, strong, antique
beauty--Etruscan gods!'
In Italy she watches the faces of the monks, and at one moment longs to
attain to their peace by renunciation, longs for Nirvana; 'then, when
one comes out again into the hot sunshine that warms one's blood, and
sees the eager hurrying faces of men and women in the street, dramatic
faces over which the disturbing experiences of life have passed and
left their symbols, one's heart thrills up into one's throat. No, no,
no, a thousand times no! how can one deliberately renounce this
coloured, unquiet, fiery human life of the earth?' And, all the time,
her subtle criticism is alert, and this woman of the East marvels at the
women of the West, 'the beautiful worldly women of the West,' whom she
sees walking in the Cascine, 'taking the air so consciously attractive
in their brilliant toilettes, in the brilliant coquetry of their
manner!' She finds them 'a little incomprehensible,' 'profound artists
in all the subtle intricacies of fascination,' and asks if these
'incalculable frivolities and vanities and coquetries and caprices' are,
to us, an essential part of their charm? And she watches them with
amusement as they flutter about her, petting her as if she were a nice
child, a child or a toy, not dreaming that she is saying to herself
sorrowfully: 'How utterly empty their lives must be of all spiritual
beauty _if_ they are nothing more than they appear to be.'
She sat in our midst, and judged us, and few knew what was passing
behind that face 'like an awakening soul,' to use one of her own
epithets. Her eyes were like deep pools, and you seemed to fall through
them into depths below depths.
1905.
WELSH POETRY
There is certainly a reason for at least suggesting to those who concern
themselves, for good or evil, with Celtic literature, what Celtic
literature really is when it is finest; what a 'reaction against the
despotism of fact' really means; what 'natural magic' really means, and
why the phrase 'Celtic glamour' is perhaps the most unfortunate that
could well have been chosen to express the character of a literature
which is above all things precise, concrete, definite.
Lamartine, in the preface to the _Méditations_, describes the
characteristics of Ossian, very justly, as _le vague, la rêverie,
l'anéantissement dans la contemplation, le regard fixé sur des
apparitions confuses dans le lointain_; and it is those very qualities,
still looked upon by so many as the typically Celtic qualities, which
prove the spuriousness of Ossian. That gaze fixed on formless and
distant shadows, that losing of oneself in contemplation, that vague
dreaminess, which Lamartine admired in Ossian, will be found nowhere in
the _Black Book of Carmarthen_, in the _Book of Taliesin_, in the _Red
Book of Hergest_, however much a doubtful text, uncertain readings, and
confusing commentators may leave us in uncertainty as to the real
meaning of many passages. Just as the true mystic is the man who sees
obscure things clearly, so the Welsh poets (whom I take for the moment
as representing the 'Celtic note,' the quality which we find in the work
of primitive races) saw everything in the universe, the wind itself,
under the images of mortality, hands and feet and the ways and motions
of men. They filled human life with the greatness of their imagination,
they ennobled it with the pride of their expectancy of noble things,
they were boundless in praising and in cursing; but poetical excitement,
in them, only taught them the amplitude and splendour of real things. A
chief is an eagle, a serpent, the bull of battle, an oak; he is the
strength of the ninth wave, an uplifted pillar of wrath, impetuous as
the fire through a chimney; the ruddy reapers of war are his desire.
The heart of Cyndyllan was like the ice of winter, like the fire of
spring; the horses of Geraint are ruddy ones, with the assault of
spotted eagles, of black eagles, of red eagles, of white eagles; an
onset in battle is like the roaring of the wind against the ashen
spears. These poets are the poets of 'tumults, shouting, swords, and men
in battle-array.' The sound of battle is heard in them; they are 'where
the ravens screamed over blood'; they are among 'crimsoned hair and
clamorous sorrow'; they praise 'war with the shining wing,' and they
know all the piteousness of the death of heroes, the sense of the
'delicate white body,' 'the lovely, slender, blood-stained body,' that
will be covered with earth, and sand, and stones, and nettles, and the
roots of the oak. They know too the piteousness of the hearth left
desolate, the hearth that will be covered with nettles, and slender
brambles, and thorns, and dock-leaves, and scratched up by fowls, and
turned up by swine. And they praise the gentleness of strength and
courage: 'he was gentle, with a hand eager for battle.' Women are known
chiefly as the widows and the 'sleepless' mothers of heroes; rarely so
much esteemed as to be a snare, rarely a desire, rarely a reward; 'a
soft herd.' They praise drunkenness for its ecstasy, its uncalculating
generosity, and equal with the flowing of blood in battle, and the
flowing of mead in the hall, is the flowing of song. They have the
haughtiness of those who, if they take rewards, 'ale for the drinking,
and a fair homestead, and beautiful clothing,' give rewards: 'I am
Taliesin, who will repay thee thy banquet.'
And they have their philosophy, always a close, vehemently definite
thing, crying out for precise images, by which alone it can apprehend
the unseen. Taliesin knows that 'man is oldest when he is born, and is
younger and younger continually.' He wonders where man is when he is
sleeping, and where the night waits until the passing of day. He is
astonished that books have not found out the soul, and where it resides,
and the air it breathes, and its form and shape. He thinks, too, of the
dregs of the soul, and debates what is the best intoxication for its
petulance and wonder and mockery. And, in a poem certainly late, or
interpolated with fragments of a Latin hymn, he uses the eternal
numeration of the mystics, and speaks of 'the nine degrees of the
companies of heaven, and the tenth, saints a preparation of sevens';
numbers that are 'clean and holy.' And even in poems plainly Christian
there is a fine simplicity of imagination; as when, at the day of
judgment, an arm reaches out, and hides the sea and the stars; or when
Christ, hanging on the cross, laments that the bones of his feet are
stretched with extreme pain.
It is this sharp physical apprehension of things that really gives its
note to Welsh poetry; a sense of things felt and seen, so intense, that
the crutch on which an old man leans becomes the symbol of all the
bodily sorrow of the world. In the poem attributed to Llywarch Hen there
is a fierce, loud complaint, in which mere physical sickness and the
intolerance of age translate themselves into a limitless hunger, and
into that wisdom which is the sorrowful desire of beauty. The cuckoos at
Aber Cuawg, singing 'clamorously' to the sick man: 'there are that hear
them that will not hear them again!' the sound of the large wave
grating sullenly on the pebbles,--
The birds are clamorous; the strand is wet:
Clear is the sky; large the wave:
The heart is palsied with longing:
all these bright, wild outcries, in which wind and wave and leaves and
the song of the cuckoo speak the same word, as if all came from the same
heart of things; and, through it all, the remembrance: 'God will not
undo what he is doing'; have indeed, and supremely, the 'Celtic note.'
'I love the strand, but I hate the sea,' says the _Black Book of
Carmarthen_, and in all these poems we find a more than mediæval hatred
of winter and cold (so pathetic, yet after all so temperate, in the
Latin students' songs), with a far more unbounded hatred of old age and
sickness and the disasters which are not bred in the world, but are a
blind part of the universe itself; older than the world, as old as
chaos, out of which the world was made.
Yet, wild and sorrowful as so much of this poetry is, with its praise of
slaughter and its lament over death, there is much also of a gentle
beauty, a childlike saying over of wind and wave and the brightness in
the tops of green things, as a child counts over its toys. In the 'Song
of Pleasant Things' there is no distinction between the pleasantness of
sea-gulls playing, of summer and slow long days, of the heath when it is
green, of a horse with a thick mane in a tangle, and of 'the word that
utters the Trinity.' 'The beautiful I sang of, I will sing,' says
Taliesin; and with him the seven senses become in symbol 'fire and
earth, and water and air, and mist and flowers, and southerly wind.' And
touches of natural beauty come irrelevantly into the most tragical
places, like the 'sweet apple-tree of delightful branches' in that song
of battles and of the coming of madness, where Myrddin says: 'I have
been wandering so long in darkness and among spirits that it is needless
now for darkness and spirits to lead me astray.' The same sense of the
beauty of earth and of the elements comes into those mysterious
riddle-rhymes, not so far removed from the riddle-rhymes which children
say to one another in Welsh cottages to this day: 'I have been a tear in
the air, I have been the dullest of stars; I was made of the flower of
nettles, and of the water of the ninth wave; I played in the twilight, I
slept in purple; my fingers are long and white, it is long since I was a
herdsman.'
And now, after looking at these characteristics of Welsh poetry, look at
Ossian, and that 'gaze fixed on formless and distant shadows,' which
seemed so impressive and so Celtic to Lamartine. 'In the morning of
Saturday,' or 'On Sunday, at the time of dawn, there was a great
battle'; that is how the Welsh poet tells you what he had to sing about.
And he tells you, in his definite way, more than that; he tells you: 'I
have been where the warriors were slain, from the East to the North, and
from the East to the South: I am alive, they are in their graves!' It is
human emotion reduced to its elements; that instinct of life and death,
of the mystery of all that is tangible in the world, of its personal
meaning, to one man after another, age after age, which in every age
becomes more difficult to feel simply, more difficult to say simply. 'I
am alive, they are in their graves!' and nothing remains to be said in
the face of that immense problem. Well, the Welsh poet leaves you with
his thought, and that simple emphasis of his seems to us now so large
and remote and impressive, just because it was once so passionately
felt, and set down as it was felt. And so with his sense for nature,
with that which seems like style in him; it is a wonderful way of
trusting instinct, of trusting the approaches of natural things. He
says, quite simply: 'I was told by a sea-gull that had come a great
way,' as a child would tell you now. And when he tells you that 'Cynon
rushed forward with the green dawn,' it is not what we call a figure of
speech: it is his sensitive, literal way of seeing things. More
definite, more concrete, closer to the earth and to instinctive emotion
than most other poets, the Welsh poet might have said of himself, in
another sense than that in which he said it of Alexander: 'What he
desired in his mind he had from the world.'
1898.
* * * * *
Printed in Great Britain by
T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty at the University Press,
Edinburgh
End of Project Gutenberg's Figures of Several Centuries, by Arthur Symons