(1) MR. DE LA MARE
Mr. Walter de la Mare gives us no Thames of song. His genius is scarcely
more than a rill. But how the rill shines! How sweet a music it makes!
Into what lands of romance does it flow, and beneath what hedges populous
with birds! It seems at times as though it were a little fugitive stream
attempting to run as far away as possible from the wilderness of reality
and to lose itself in quiet, dreaming places. There never were shyer songs
than these.
Mr. de la Mare is at the opposite pole to poets so robustly at ease with
experience as Browning and Whitman. He has no cheers or welcome for the
labouring universe on its march. He is interested in the daily procession
only because he seeks in it one face, one figure. He is love-sick for
love, for beauty, and longs to save it from the contamination of the
common world. Like the lover in _The Tryst_, he dreams always of a secret
place of love and beauty set solitarily beyond the bounds of the time and
space we know:
Beyond the rumour even of Paradise come,
There, out of all remembrance, make our home:
Seek we some close hid shadow for our lair,
Hollowed by Noah's mouse beneath the chair
Wherein the Omnipotent, in slumber bound,
Nods till the piteous Trump of Judgment sound.
Perchance Leviathan of the deep sea
Would lease a lost mermaiden's grot to me,
There of your beauty we would joyance make--
A music wistful for the sea-nymph's sake:
Haply Elijah, o'er his spokes of fire,
Cresting steep Leo, or the Heavenly Lyre,
Spied, tranced in azure of inanest space,
Some eyrie hostel meet for human grace,
Where two might happy be--just you and I--
Lost in the uttermost of Eternity.
This is, no doubt, a far from rare mood in poetry. Even the waltz-songs of
the music-halls express, or attempt to express, the longing of lovers for
an impossible loneliness. Mr. de la Mare touches our hearts, however, not
because he shares our sentimental day-dreams, but because he so mournfully
turns back from them to the bitterness of reality:
No, no. Nor earth, nor air, nor fire, nor deep
Could lull poor mortal longingness asleep.
Somewhere there Nothing is; and there lost Man
Shall win what changeless vague of peace he can.
These lines (ending in an unsatisfactory and ineffective vagueness of
phrase, which is Mr. de la Mare's peculiar vice as a poet) suggests
something of the sad philosophy which runs through the verse in _Motley_.
The poems are, for the most part, praise of beauty sought and found in the
shadow of death.
Melancholy though it is, however, Mr. de la Mare's book is, as we have
said, a book of praise, not of lamentations. He triumphantly announces
that, if he were to begin to write of earth's wonders:
Flit would the ages
On soundless wings
Ere unto Z
My pen drew nigh;
Leviathan told,
And the honey-fly.
He cannot come upon a twittering linnet, a "thing of light," in a bush
without realizing that--
All the throbbing world
Of dew and sun and air
By this small parcel of life
Is made more fair.
He bids us in _Farewell_:
Look thy last on all things lovely
Every hour. Let no night
Seal thy sense in deathly slumber
Till to delight
Thou have paid thy utmost blessing.
Thus, there is nothing faint-hearted in Mr. de la Mare's melancholy. His
sorrow is idealist's sorrow. He has the heart of a worshipper, a lover.
We find evidence of this not least in his war-verses. At the outbreak of
the war he evidently shared with other lovers and idealists the feeling of
elation in the presence of noble sacrifices made for the world.
Now each man's mind all Europe is,
he cries, in the first line in _Happy England_, and, as he remembers the
peace of England, "her woods and wilds, her loveliness," he exclaims:
O what a deep contented night
The sun from out her Eastern seas
Would bring the dust which in her sight
Had given its all for these!
So beautiful a spirit as Mr. de la Mare's, however, could not remain
content with idealizing from afar the sacrifices and heroism of dying men.
In the long poem called _Motley_ he turns from the heroism to the madness
of war, translating his vision into a fool's song:
Nay, but a dream I had
Of a world all mad,
Not simply happy mad like me,
Who am mad like an empty scene
Of water and willow-tree,
Where the wind hath been;
But that foul Satan-mad,
Who rots in his own head....
The fool's vision of men going into battle is not a vision of knights of
the Holy Ghost nobly falling in the lists with their country looking on,
but of men's bodies--
Dragging cold cannon through a mire
Of rain and blood and spouting fire,
The new moon glinting hard on eyes
Wide with insanities!
In _The Marionettes_ Mr. de la Mare turns to tragic satire for relief from
the bitterness of a war-maddened world:
Let the foul scene proceed:
There's laughter in the wings;
'Tis sawdust that they bleed,
But a box Death brings.
How rare a skill is theirs
These extreme pangs to show,
How real a frenzy wears
Each feigner of woe!
And the poem goes on in perplexity of anger and anguish:
Strange, such a Piece is free,
While we spectators sit,
Aghast at its agony,
Yet absorbed in it!
Dark is the outer air,
Coldly the night draughts blow,
Mutely we stare, and stare,
At the frenzied Show.
Yet Heaven hath its quiet shroud
Of deep, immutable blue--
We cry, "The end!" We are bowed
By the dread, "'Tis true!"
While the Shape who hoofs applause
Behind our deafened ear,
Hoots--angel-wise--"the Cause"!
And affrights even fear.
There is something in these lines that reminds one of Mr. Thomas Hardy's
black-edged indictment of life.
As we read Mr. de la Mare, indeed, we are reminded again and again of the
work of many other poets--of the ballad-writers, the Elizabethan
song-writers, Blake and Wordsworth, Mr. Hardy and Mr. W.B. Yeats. In some
instances it is as though Mr. de la Mare had deliberately set himself to
compose a musical variation on the same theme as one of the older masters.
Thus, _April Moon_, which contains the charming verse--
"The little moon that April brings,
More lovely shade than light,
That, setting, silvers lonely hills
Upon the verge of night"--
is merely Wordsworth's "She dwelt among the untrodden ways" turned into
new music. New music, we should say, is Mr. de la Mare's chief gift to
literature--a music not regular or precise or certain, but none the less a
music in which weak rhymes and even weak phrases are jangled into a
strange beauty, as in _Alexander_, which begins:
It was the Great Alexander,
Capped with a golden helm,
Sate in the ages, in his floating ship,
In a dead calm.
One finds Mr. de la Mare's characteristic, unemphatic music again in the
opening lines of _Mrs. Grundy_:
Step very softly, sweet Quiet-foot,
Stumble not, whisper not, smile not,
where "foot" and "not" are rhymes.
It is the stream of music flowing through his verses rather than any
riches of imagery or phrase that makes one rank the author so high among
living poets. But music in verse can hardly be separated from intensity
and sincerity of vision. This music of Mr. de la Mare's is not a mere
craftsman's tune: it is an echo of the spirit. Had he not seen beautiful
things passionately, Mr. de la Mare could never have written:
Thou with thy cheek on mine,
And dark hair loosed, shalt see
Take the far stars for fruit
The cypress tree,
And in the yew's black
Shall the moon be.
Beautiful as Mr. de la Mare's vision is, however, and beautiful as is his
music, we miss in his work that frequent perfection of phrase which is
part of the genius of (to take another living writer) Mr. Yeats. One has
only to compare Mr. Yeats's _I Heard the Old, Old Men Say_ with Mr. de la
Mare's _The Old Men_ to see how far the latter falls below verbal mastery.
Mr. Yeats has found the perfect embodiment for his imagination. Mr. de la
Mare seems in comparison to be struggling with his medium, and contrives
in his first verse to be no more than just articulate:
Old and alone, sit we,
Caged, riddle-rid men,
Lost to earth's "Listen!" and "See!"
Thought's "Wherefore?" and "When?"
There is vision in some of the later verses in the poem, but, if we read
it alongside of Mr. Yeats's, we get an impression of unsuccess of
execution. Whether one can fairly use the word "unsuccess" in reference to
verse which succeeds so exquisitely as Mr. de la Mare's in being
literature is a nice question. But how else is one to define the peculiar
quality of his style--its hesitations, its vaguenesses, its obscurities?
On the other hand, even when his lines leave the intellect puzzled and the
desire for grammar unsatisfied, a breath of original romance blows through
them and appeals to us like the illogical burden of a ballad. Here at
least are the rhythms and raptures of poetry, if not always the beaten
gold of speech. Sometimes Mr. de la Mare's verse reminds one of
piano-music, sometimes of bird-music: it wavers so curiously between what
is composed and what is unsophisticated. Not that one ever doubts for a
moment that Mr. de la Mare has spent on his work an artist's pains. He has
made a craft out of his innocence. If he produces in his verse the effect
of the wind among the reeds, it is the result not only of his artlessness,
but of his art. He is one of the modern poets who have broken away from
the metrical formalities of Swinburne and the older men, and who, of set
purpose, have imposed upon poetry the beauty of a slightly irregular
pulse.
He is typical of his generation, however, not only in his form, but in the
pain of his unbelief (as shown in _Betrayal_), and in that sense of
half-revelation that fills him always with wonder and sometimes with hope.
His poems tell of the visits of strange presences in dream and vacancy. In
_A Vacant Day_, after describing the beauty of a summer moon, with clear
waters flowing under willows, he closes with the verses:
I listened; and my heart was dumb
With praise no language could express;
Longing in vain for him to come
Who had breathed such blessedness.
On this fair world, wherein we pass
So chequered and so brief a stay,
And yearned in spirit to learn, alas!
What kept him still away.
In these poems we have the genius of the beauty of gentleness expressing
itself as it is doing nowhere else just now in verse. Mr. de la Mare's
poetry is not only lovely, but lovable. He has a personal possession--
The skill of words to sweeten despair,
such as will, we are confident, give him a permanent place in English
literature.
(2) THE GROUP
The latest collection of Georgian verse has had a mixed reception. One or
two distinguished critics have written of it in the mood of a challenge to
mortal combat. Men have begun to quarrel over the question whether we are
living in an age of poetic dearth or of poetic plenty--whether the world
is a nest of singing-birds or a cage in which the last canary has been
dead for several years.
All this, I think, is a good sign. It means that poetry is interesting
people sufficiently to make them wish to argue about it. Better a
breeze--even a somewhat excessive breeze--than stagnant air. It is good
both for poets and for the reading public. It prevents the poets from
resting on their wings, as they might be tempted to do by a consistent
calm of praise. It compels them to examine their work more critically.
Anyhow, "fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil," and a reasonable
amount of sharp censure will do a true poet more good than harm. It will
not necessarily injure even his sales. I understand the latest volume of
_Georgian Poetry_ is already in greater demand than its predecessor.
It is a good anthology of the poetry of the last two years without being
an ideal anthology. Some good poets and some good poems have been omitted.
And they have been omitted, in some instances, in favour of inferior work.
Many of us would prefer an anthology of the best poems rather than an
anthology of authors. At the same time, with all its faults, _Georgian
Poetry_ still remains the best guide we possess to the poetic activities
of the time. I am glad to see that the editor includes the work of a woman
in his new volume. This helps to make it more representative than the
previous selections. But there are several other living women who are
better poets, at the lowest estimate, than at least a quarter of the men
who have gained admission.
Mr. W.H. Davies is by now a veteran among the Georgians, and one cannot
easily imagine a presence more welcome in a book of verse. Among poets he
is a bird singing in a hedge. He communicates the same sense of freshness
while he sings. He has also the quick eye of a bird. He is, for all his
fairy music, on the look-out for things that will gratify his appetite. He
looks to the earth rather than the sky, though he is by no means deaf to
the lark that
Raves in his windy heights above a cloud.
At the same time, at his best, he says nothing about his appetite, and
sings in the free spirit of a child at play. His best poems are songs of
innocence. At least, that is the predominant element in them. He warned
the public in a recent book that he is not so innocent as he sounds. But
his genius certainly is. He has written greater poems than any that are
included in the present selection. _Birds_, however, is a beautiful
example of his gift for joy. We need not fear for contemporary poetry
while the hedges contain a poet such as Mr. Davies.
Mr. de la Mare does not sing from a hedge. He is a child of the arts. He
plays an instrument. His music is the music of a lute of which some of the
strings have been broken. It is so extraordinarily sweet, indeed, that one
has to explain him to oneself as the perfect master of an imperfect
instrument. He is at times like Watts's figure of Hope listening to the
faint music of the single string that remains unbroken. There is always
some element of hope, or of some kindred excuse for joy, even in his
deepest melancholy. But it is the joy of a spirit, not of a "super-tramp."
Prospero might have summoned just such a spirit through the air to make
music for him. And Mr. de la Mare's is a spirit perceptible to the ear
rather than to the eye. One need not count him the equal of Campion in
order to feel that he has something of Campion's beautiful genius for
making airs out of words. He has little enough of the Keatsian genius for
choosing the word that has the most meaning for the seeing imagination.
But there is a secret melody in his words that, when once one has
recognized it, one can never forget.
How different the Georgian poets are from each other may be seen if we
compare three of the best poems in this book, all of them on similar
subjects--Mr. Davies's _Birds_, Mr. de la Mare's _Linnet_, and Mr.
Squire's _Birds_. Mr. Squire would feel as out of place in a hedge as
would Mr. de la Mare. He has an aquiline love of soaring and surveying
immense tracts with keen eyes. He loves to explore both time and the map,
but he does this without losing his eyehold on the details of the Noah's
Ark of life on the earth beneath him. He does not lose himself in vaporous
abstractions; his eye, as well as his mind, is extraordinarily
interesting. This poem of his, _Birds_, is peopled with birds. We see them
in flight and in their nests. At the same time, the philosophic wonder of
Mr. Squire's poem separates him from Mr. Davies and Mr. de la Mare. Mr.
Davies, I fancy, loves most to look at birds; Mr. de la Mare to listen to
birds; Mr. Squire to brood over them with the philosophic imagination. It
would, of course, be absurd to offer this as a final statement of the
poetic attitude of the three writers. It is merely an attempt to
differentiate among them with the help of a prominent characteristic of
each.
The other poets in the collection include Mr. Robert Graves (with his
pleasant bias towards nursery rhymes), Mr. Sassoon (with his sensitive,
passionate satire), and Mr. Edward Shanks (with his trembling
responsiveness to beauty). It is the first time that Mr. Shanks appears
among the Georgians, and his _Night Piece_ and _Glow-worm_ both show how
exquisite is his sensibility. He differs from the other poets by his
quasi-analytic method. He seems to be analyzing the beauty of the evening
in both these poems. Mrs. Shove's _A Man Dreams that He is the Creator_ is
a charming example of fancy toying with a great theme.
(3) THE YOUNG SATIRISTS
Satire, it has been said, is an ignoble art; and it is probable that there
are no satirists in Heaven. Probably there are no doctors either. Satire
and medicine are our responses to a diseased world--to our diseased
selves. They are responses, however, that make for health. Satire holds
the medicine-glass up to human nature. It also holds the mirror up in a
limited way. It does not show a man what he looks like when he is both
well and good. It does show a man what he looks like, however, when he
breaks out into spots or goes yellow, pale, or mottled as a result of
making a beast of himself. It reflects only sick men; but it reflects them
with a purpose. It would be a crime to permit it, if the world were a
hospital for incurables. To write satire is an act of faith, not a
luxurious exercise. The despairing Swift was a fighter, as the despairing
Anatole France is a fighter. They may have uttered the very Z of
melancholy about the animal called man; but at least they were
sufficiently optimistic to write satires and to throw themselves into
defeated causes.
It would be too much to expect of satire that it alone will cure mankind
of the disease of war. It is a good sign, however, that satires on war
have begun to be written. War has affected with horror or disgust a number
of great imaginative writers in the last two or three thousand years. The
tragic indictment of war in _The Trojan Women_ and the satiric indictment
in _The Voyage to the Houyhnhnms_ are evidence that some men at least saw
through the romance of war before the twentieth century. In the war that
has just ended, however--or that would have ended if the Peace Conference
would let it--we have seen an imaginative revolt against war, not on the
part of mere men of letters, but on the part of soldiers. Ballads have
survived from other wars, depicting the plight of the mutilated soldier
left to beg:
You haven't an arm and you haven't a leg,
You're an eyeless, noseless, chickenless egg,
You ought to be put in a bowl to beg--
Och, Johnnie, I hardly knew you!
But the recent war has produced a literature of indictment, basing itself
neither on the woes of women nor on the wrongs of ex-soldiers, but on the
right of common men not to be forced into mutual murder by statesmen who
themselves never killed anything more formidable than a pheasant.
Soldiers--or some of them--see that wars go on only because the people who
cause them do not realize what war is like. I do not mean to suggest that
the kings, statesmen and journalists who bring wars about would not
themselves take part in the fighting rather than that there should be no
fighting at all. The people who cause wars, however, are ultimately the
people who endure kings, statesmen and journalists of the exploiting and
bullying kind. The satire of the soldiers is an appeal not to the
statesmen and journalists, but to the general imagination of mankind. It
is an attempt to drag our imaginations away from the heroics of the
senate-house into the filth of the slaughter-house. It does not deny the
heroism that exists in the slaughter-house any more than it denies the
heroism that exists in the hospital ward. But it protests that, just as
the heroism of a man dying of cancer must not be taken to justify cancer,
so the heroism of a million men dying of war must not be taken to justify
war. There are some who believe that neither war nor cancer is a curable
disease. One thing we can be sure of in this connection: we shall never
get rid either of war or of cancer if we do not learn to look at them
realistically and see how loathsome they are. So long as war was regarded
as inevitable, the poet was justified in romanticizing it, as in that
epigram in the _Greek Anthology:_
Demætia sent eight sons to encounter the phalanx of the foe, and
she buried them all beneath one stone. No tear did she shed in her
mourning, but said this only: "Ho, Sparta, I bore these children
for thee."
As soon as it is realized, however, that wars are not inevitable, men
cease to idealize Demætia, unless they are sure she did her best to keep
the peace. To a realistic poet of war such as Mr. Sassoon, she is an
object of pity rather than praise. His sonnet, _Glory of Women_, suggests
that there is another point of view besides Demætia's:
You love us when we're heroes, home on leave,
Or wounded in a mentionable place.
You worship decorations; you believe
That chivalry redeems the war's disgrace.
You make us shells. You listen with delight,
By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled.
You crown our distant ardours while we fight,
And mourn our laurelled memories when we're killed.
You can't believe that British troops "retire"
When hell's last horror breaks them, and they run,
Trampling the terrible corpses--blind with blood.
_O German mother dreaming by the fire,_
_While you, are knitting socks to send your son_
_His face is trodden deeper in the mud._
To Mr. Sassoon and the other war satirists, indeed, those stay at home and
incite others to go out and kill or get killed seem either pitifully
stupid or pervertedly criminal. Mr. Sassoon has now collected all his war
poems into one volume, and one is struck by the energetic hatred of those
who make war in safety that finds expression in them. Most readers will
remember the bitter joy of the dream that one day he might hear "the
yellow pressmen grunt and squeal," and see the Junkers driven out of
Parliament by the returned soldiers. Mr. Sassoon cannot endure the
enthusiasm of the stay-at-home--especially the enthusiasm that pretends
that soldiers not only behave like music-hall clowns, but are incapable of
the more terrible emotional experiences. He would like, I fancy, to forbid
civilians to make jokes during war-time. His hatred of the jesting
civilian attains passionate expression in the poem called _Blighters_:
The House is crammed: tier beyond tier they grin
And cackle at the Show, while prancing ranks
Of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din;
"We're sure the Kaiser loves the dear old Tanks!"
I'd like to see a Tank come down the stalls,
Lurching to rag-time tunes, or "Home, sweet Home,"--
And there'd be no more jokes in Music-halls
To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume.
Mr. Sassoon himself laughs on occasion, but it is the laughter of a man
being driven insane by an insane world. The spectacle of lives being
thrown away by the hundred thousand by statesmen and generals without the
capacity to run a village flower-show, makes him find relief now and then
in a hysteria of mirth, as in _The General_:
"Good-morning; good-morning!" the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the Line,
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead,
And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
"He's a cheery old card," grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
* * * * *
But he did for them both by his plan of attack.
Mr. Sassoon's verse is also of importance because it paints life in the
trenches with a realism not to be found elsewhere in the English poetry of
the war. He spares us nothing of:
The strangled horror
And butchered, frantic gestures of the dead.
He gives us every detail of the filth, the dullness, and the agony of the
trenches. His book is in its aim destructive. It is a great pamphlet
against war. If posterity wishes to know what war was like during this
period, it will discover the truth, not in _Barrack-room Ballads_, but in
Mr. Sassoon's verse. The best poems in the book are poems of hatred. This
means that Mr. Sassoon has still other worlds to conquer in poetry. His
poems have not the constructive ardour that we find in the revolutionary
poems of Shelley. They are utterances of pain rather than of vision. Many
of them, however, rise to a noble pity--_The Prelude_, for instance, and
_Aftermath_, the latter of which ends:
Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz,--
The night you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench,--
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, "Is it all going to happen again?"
Do you remember that hour of din before the attack--
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads,--those ashen-grey
Masks of the lad who once were keen and kind and gay?
_Have you forgotten yet?..._
_Look up, and swear by the green of the Spring that you'll never forget._
Mr. Sitwell's satires--which occupy the most interesting pages of
_Argonaut and Juggernaut_--seldom take us into the trenches. Mr. Sitwell
gets all the subjects he wants in London clubs and drawing-rooms. These
"free-verse" satires do not lend themselves readily to quotation, but both
the manner and the mood of them can be guessed from the closing verses of
_War-horses_, in which the "septuagenarian butterflies" of Society return
to their platitudes and parties after seeing the war through:
But now
They have come out.
They have preened
And dried themselves
After their blood bath.
Old men seem a little younger,
And tortoise-shell combs
Are longer than ever;
Earrings weigh down aged ears;
And Golconda has given them of its best.
They have seen it through!
Theirs is the triumph,
And, beneath
The carved smile of the Mona Lisa,
False teeth
Rattle
Like machine-guns,
In anticipation
Of food and platitudes.
Les Vieilles Dames Sans Merci!
Mr. Sitwell's hatred of war is seldom touched with pity. It is arrogant
hatred. There is little emotion in it but that of a young man at war with
age. He pictures the dotards of two thousand years ago complaining that
Christ did not die--
Like a hero
With an oath on his lips,
Or the refrain from a comic song--
Or a cheerful comment of some kind.
His own verse, however, seems to me to be hardly more in sympathy with the
spirit of Christ than with the spirit of those who mocked him. He is moved
to write by unbelief in the ideals of other people rather than by the
passionate force of ideals of his own. He is a sceptic, not a sufferer.
His work proceeds less from his heart than from his brain. It is a clever
brain, however, and his satirical poems are harshly entertaining and will
infuriate the right people. They may not kill Goliath, but at least they
will annoy Goliath's friends. David's weapon, it should be remembered, was
a sling, with some pebbles from the brook, not a pea-shooter.
The truth is, so far as I can see, Mr. Sitwell has not begun to take
poetry quite seriously. His non-satirical verse is full of bright colour,
but it has the brightness, not of the fields and the flowers, but of
captive birds in an aviary. It is as though Mr. Sitwell had taken poetry
for his hobby. I suspect his Argonauts of being ballet dancers. He enjoys
amusing little decorations--phrases such as "concertina waves" and--
The ocean at a toy shore
Yaps like a Pekinese.
His moonlight owl is surely a pretty creature from the unreality of a
ballet:
An owl, horned wizard of the night,
Flaps through the air so soft and still;
Moaning, it wings its flight
Far from the forest cool,
To find the star-entangled surface of a pool,
Where it may drink its fill
Of stars.
At the same time, here and there are evidences that Mr. Sitwell has felt
as well as fancied. The opening verse of _Pierrot Old_ gives us a real
impression of shadows:
The harvest moon is at its height,
The evening primrose greets its light
With grace and joy: then opens up
The mimic moon within its cup.
Tall trees, as high as Babel tower,
Throw down their shadows to the flower--
Shadows that shiver--seem to see
An ending to infinity.
But there is too much of Pan, the fauns and all those other ballet-dancers
in his verse. Mr. Sitwell's muse wears some pretty costumes. But one
wonders when she will begin to live for something besides clothes.