“BALLADS AND SONGS,” BY JOHN DAVIDSON
GRANT ALLEN has written of “The Woman Who Did”—and the title suggests
that John Davidson may fitly be called “The Man Who Dares;” for
certainly some of his themes and some of his lines, in this his latest
book, are among the most daring in modern literature.
Richard Le Gallienne, in comparing William Watson and John Davidson,
suggests that Davidson is a great man, and Watson a great manner. This
is a statement I am not ready to indorse. I think Watson has much more
than a great manner. He has noble and stately thought, a large outlook,
and, in his own direction, subtle and keen perception. He knows the
moods of the spirit, the reach of the soul; but the human heart does
not cry out to him. He waits in the stately Court of the Intellect, and
surveys the far heavens through its luminous windows.
Davidson, on the contrary, hearkens to the heart’s cry. The passionate
senses clamor in his lines. Ceaseless unrest assails him. Doubt and
faith war in him for mastery. Above all he is human; and, secondly, he
is modern. “Perfervid,” “A Practical Novelist,” and two or three other
tales, at once merry and fantastic, prove his gifts as a story-teller.
He has written several delightful plays, among which “Scaramouch In
Naxos” is, perhaps, the most remarkable. Its originality, its charm,
its wayward grace give it a place to itself in modern literature; and
I doubt if we have any other man who could have given us quite the
same thing. But when the right to careful attention of his other work
has been fully admitted, I am inclined to think that nowhere does
he more thoroughly prove his high claim to distinction than in his
“Fleet-Street Eclogues,” and his new volume of “Ballads and Songs.”
Of all these Ballads the three that have most moved me are “A Ballad
of a Nun,” “A Ballad of Heaven,” and “A Ballad of Hell.” There is much
crude strength in “A Ballad in Blank Verse of the Making of a Poet;”
but the blank verse, impassioned though it be, has neither the stately
splendor of Milton nor the artistic and finished grace of Tennyson. It
is full of stress and strain,—this story of a youth who was brought up
by a father and mother who really believed that the soul’s probation
ends with this brief span of earthly life, and that
“In life it is your privilege to choose,
But after death you have no choice at all.”
He tortured his mother by his unbelief, until he slowly broke her
heart, and “she died, in anguish for his sins.” His father upbraided
him, and he cried—very naturally, if not very poetically—
“Oh, let me be!”
Then he sought his Aphrodite, and found her, dull, tawdry,
unbeautiful,—an outcast of the streets. He wrote his dreams; and then
he felt that they were lies. He grew desperate, at last, and professed
himself convicted of sin, and became a Christian—resolved to please
his father, if he could not please himself. But this phase could not
last; and he shattered his father’s new-found happiness by a wild
denunciation of all creeds, and an assertion that there is no God
higher than ourselves. Then was the father torn between his desire to
seek his wife in Heaven, and his impulse to go with his son into the
jaws of Hell. At last, in his turn, the father died; and the poet—the
child of storm and stress—was left at liberty to be himself—
“——a thoroughfare
For all the pageantry of Time; to catch
The mutterings of the Spirit of the Hour,
And make them known.”
There are lines, here and there, in this poem of exquisite beauty; but
there are others that seem to me “tolerable and not to be endured.”
I make my “Exodus From Houndsditch,” without as yet being tempted to
linger there, and come to “A Ballad of a Nun.” And here, indeed, you
have something of which only John Davidson has proved himself capable.
The Ballad tells the old Roman Catholic legend of the Nun whom the lust
of the flesh tempted.
There are stanzas here of such splendid power and beauty that they
thrill one like noble and stirring music. You shall listen to some of
them. The Abbess loved this Nun so well that she had trusted her above
all the rest, and made her the Keeper of the Door:—
“High on a hill the Convent hung,
Across a duchy looking down,
Where everlasting mountains flung
Their shadows over tower and town.
“The jewels of their lofty snows
In constellations flashed at night;
Above their crests the moon arose;
The deep earth shuddered with delight.
“Long ere she left her cloudy bed,
Still dreaming in the orient land,
On many a mountain’s happy head
Dawn lightly laid her rosy hand.
“The adventurous sun took heaven by storm;
Clouds scattered largesses of rain;
The sounding cities, rich and warm,
Smouldered and glittered in the plain.
“Sometimes it was a wandering wind,
Sometimes the fragrance of the pine,
Sometimes the thought how others sinned
That turned her sweet blood into wine.
“Sometimes she heard a serenade
Complaining sweetly, far away:
She said, ‘A young man wooes a maid;
And dreamt of love till break of day.”
In vain she plied her knotted scourge. Day after day she “had still
the same red sin to purge.” Winter came, and the snow shut in hill and
plain; and she watched the nearest city glow beneath the frosty sky.
“Her hungry heart devoured the town;” until, at last, she tore her
fillet and veil into strips, and cast aside the ring and bracelet that
she wore as the betrothed of Christ:—
“‘Life’s dearest meaning I shall probe;
Lo! I shall taste of love, at last!
Away!’ She doffed her outer robe,
And sent it sailing down the blast.
“Her body seemed to warm the wind;
With bleeding feet o’er ice she ran;
‘I leave the righteous God behind;
I go to worship sinful man.’”
She reached “the sounding city’s gate.” She drank the wild cup of love
to the dregs. She cried—
“‘I am sister to the mountains, now,
And sister to the sun and moon.’”