It has been my fortune to know not a few poets. It has been my fate
to play listener while they, or most of them, read aloud their
verses. To them, presumably, some sort of satisfaction was to be
derived from the self-imposed task; otherwise I should not have been
thus afflicted. To me the case was one of holding on, directly under
the enemy’s artillery and without returning his fire, the casualties
in my own moral garrison being heavy. I was in fact for the most part
as severely punished as was Stephen Phillips on one occasion of which
he told me.
The wife of a friend of his was chatting in her drawing-room one
afternoon with two or three callers, among whom was Phillips. To them
entered the host her husband, who, drawing the author of _Marpessa_
aside, whispered to him, “Come along, Phillips, let’s enjoy
ourselves!”
“I was rather tiring of the drawing-room talk,” said Phillips, in
relating the incident, “and my host’s alluring words were like Hope.
They told a flattering tale. ‘Rumour has it,’ I said to myself, ‘that
there are in his cellars some bottles of port upon which it is good
to look when the colour is tawny in the glass. Nectar for the gods,
was the way one connoisseur described it. Does this mean that my host
is going to crack a bottle in my honour? Does this mean he is going
to fit me out with one of those choice cigars which he has also the
reputation of possessing?’ ‘Come along, Phillips, and let’s enjoy
ourselves!’ were his words.
“And what do you think happened? He lured me away to a dark and
chilly library, and read Francis Thompson’s poems to me for three
mortal hours. If that is his idea of enjoying himself it isn’t mine!”
Nor mine, I hasten to add, unless the reader were Stephen Phillips
himself, to listen to whom was the most exquisite artistic pleasure
imaginable. I agree with Mr. Bleackley that it was not Phillips’s
voice, nor his diction, nor his art that enthralled the hearers, but
I question whether Mr. Bleackley is right in attributing the effect
produced to the fact that the poet was speaking his own poem. For
that effect was the same whether the poem were by Phillips himself
or by Shakespeare, Milton, Tennyson, or Swinburne. In ordinary
conversation Phillips’s voice was not notably beautiful. It was
clear, musical, resonant, and finely modulated--that was all. Had
one done no more than talk with him, I am not sure that his voice
would thus far have impressed itself upon the memory. But in speaking
poetry, his voice was as different from the voice to which one was
accustomed in conversation as is a lit taper from the same taper
when unkindled. Poetry kindled the taper of his soul to flame, as
only poetry could. His genius was more supremely evident at such
times--that is to say, when he was _living_ poetry, when he was, as
it were, caught up and filled by some Pentecostal spirit of poetry
outside himself--than when he was, in travail and labour, if under
the pure impulse of inspiration, creating poetry. Then from the man
to whom we were listening the fetters of the senses (alas, that those
fetters should sometimes hold so closely and so heavily as to drag us
downwards to earth!) seemed to fall away, and his soul to soar back
to the heaven whence he had fallen.
He would begin to read or to recite with slow unemotional
deliberateness--the enunciation perfect, and the voice exquisitely
modulated--but at first there was just a suspicion of a chant, an
incantation, as if by a spell to call up the Spirit of Poetry before
us. It was beautiful, it was the perfection of elocutionary art, but
for the time being it seemed cold and afar from us and our lives,
like the frozen marble beauty of Greek statuary. Soon his voice would
deepen, and the room become strangely still. It was the listeners
now who reminded one of statuary, for each sat unmoving, scarcely
breathing, every sense, every thought, centred on the reader who, his
great eyes ablaze, yet all unseeing, sat as if in a trance. This was
no longer Stephen Phillips, our friend and intimate with whom we had
walked and talked.
All of us know what it is suddenly and unexpectedly to hear that we
shall see on earth, no more, a friend, who but yesterday was with
us, and of us, alive and well, his familiar and happy self. “No!
No! He is not dead! It cannot be! It must not be!” we cry out when
first told--as if death were something unnatural and abnormal; as if
it were but some oversight, some mistake, against which we have but
to enter our protest, to move High God to set it right. But even as
we thus cry out, even as we stagger back under the shock, and turn
sick and faint--so unendurable is our first sense of pity for the
dead--even then our pity passes, for we know it is we, the living,
not the dead, who are in need of pity. Even then and thus early (so
instantly ancient is death, once we realise that it has come) some
strange new majesty, august and awful, has come between our friend
and us, as if to withdraw him an æon and a world away.
And for the moment, and while the spell was upon him, and upon us,
the soul of Stephen Phillips, when he was thus entranced by poetry,
seemed scarcely less far-removed from us, and from our little world,
than are the newly dead. For though to no mortal has the soul of a
man been visible, to some of us who have listened to Stephen Phillips
in those rare moments, it seemed as if _the soul of a man had at
least become audible_.
Then, in some vague way, one’s thoughts wandered back to the time
when God walked in the Garden in the cool of the evening, and His
Voice was heard by mortals. For then the exigencies of Time and Space
were abrogated. The little room, wherein the poet sat and read, while
we listened, was so strangely transformed for us, that we saw the
vision of Dante and Milton unfold themselves before our eyes. The
poet could so speak a word as to make it seem like the Spirit of God
breathing upon the face of the waters, and calling new worlds into
being. He could so speak that single word as to make it almost a
world in itself.
When in Swinburne’s second chorus in _Atalanta in Calydon_ Phillips
came to the lines
He weaves, and is clothed with derision,
Sows, and he shall not reap,
His life is a watch or a vision
Between a sleep and a sleep,
with the last word “sleep,” as it came from Stephen Phillips’s lips,
the very world itself seemed to close tired eyes, to wander away into
unconsciousness, and finally to fall on sleep.
James Russell Lowell once said that if Shakespeare be read in the
very presence of the sea itself, his voice shall but seem the nobler,
for the sublime criticism of ocean; and the words recall Stephen
Phillips to me as I write, for in his voice, when he was deeply
stirred by poetry, there was something measured, unhasting, majestic,
like the vastness of great waters, moving in flood of full tide under
the moon.
I have tried to give the reader some idea of his rendering of
poetry, and I have failed, for, as I have already said, it cannot be
described. Some godlike spirit, outside himself, seemed, in these
supreme and consecrated hours, suddenly to possess him, and, when the
hour and the consecration were past, as suddenly to leave him. But,
while that hour lasted, there was only one word for Stephen Phillips,
poet, and that word was Genius.