And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard,
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips,
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.
They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,
They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea.
And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony and loss,
And called the kings of Christendom for swords about the Cross.
The cold queen of England is looking in the glass;
The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass;
From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun,
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.
Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard,
Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred,
Where, from a doubtful seat and half attainted stall,
The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall,
The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung,
That once went singing southward when all the world was young.
In that enormous silence, tiny and unafraid,
Comes up along a winding road the noise of the Crusade.
Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,
Don John of Austria is going to the war,
Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold
In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold,
Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums,
Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he comes.
Don John laughing in the brave beard curles,
Spurning of his stirrups like the thrones of all the world,
Holding his head up for a flag of all the free.
Love-light of Spain--hurrah!
Death-light of Africa!
Don John of Austria
Is riding to the sea.
Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war).
He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri's knees,
His turban that is woven of the sunsets and the seas.
He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease,
And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees,
And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring
Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing.
Giants and the Genii,
Multiplex of wing and eye,
Whose strong obedience broke the sky
When Solomon was king.
If any living poet deserves to be called the laureate of democracy, that
poet is Gilbert K. Chesterton. I do not base this statement so much on
his serious poems in praise of democracy, as on his light verse. In his
gay ballades, full of rollicking humor, we find every now and then a bit
of shrewd satire, a devastating criticism of the false leaders, of the
hypocrites and tyrants who sit in high places. Better than any other
writer of our day, Chesterton knows how to drive his rapier of rhyme to
the very heart of hypocrisy and injustice. There is sound social and
moral criticism back of the irresistible nonsense of "A Ballade of
Suicide":
A BALLADE OF SUICIDE
The gallows in my garden, people say,
Is new and neat and adequately tall.
I tie the noose on in a knowing way
As one that knots his necktie for a ball;
But just as all the neighbours--on the wall--
Are drawing a long breath to shout "Hurray!"
The strangest whim has seized me.... After all
I think I will not hang myself to-day.
To-morrow is the time I get my pay--
My uncle's sword is hanging in the hall--
I see a little cloud all pink and grey--
Perhaps the rector's mother will _not_ call--
I fancy that I heard from Mr. Gall
That mushrooms could be cooked another way--
I never read the works of Juvenal--
I think I will not hang myself to-day.
The world will have another washing day;
The decadents decay; the pedants pall;
And H. G. Wells has found that children play,
And Bernard Shaw discovered that they squall;
Rationalists are growing rational--
And through thick woods one finds a stream astray,
So secret that the very sky seems small--
I think I will not hang myself to-day.
envoi
Prince, I can hear the trumpet of Germinal,
The tumbrils toiling up the terrible way;
Even to-day your royal head may fall--
I think I will not hang myself to-day.
But the poems which most thoroughly justify their author's claim to the
title of poet are the religious poems, such poems as "The House of
Christmas," "A Hymn for the Church Militant," "The Nativity" and "The
Wise Men." In the last-named poem we find Chesterton's love of democracy
and his hatred of pretentious scientific dogmatism fully expressed, and
we find also the thing which is the basis of these ideas--his deep and
abiding faith. He writes:
THE WISE MEN
Step softly, under snow or rain,
To find the place where men can pray;
The way is all so very plain
That we may lose the way.
Oh, we have learnt to peer and pore
On tortured puzzles from our youth,
We know all labyrinthine lore,
We are the three wise men of yore,
And we know all things but the truth.
We have gone round and round the hill,
And lost the wood among the trees,
And learnt long names for every ill,
And served the mad gods, naming still
The Furies the Eumenides.
The gods of violence took the veil
Of vision and philosophy,
The Serpent that brought all men bale,
He bites his own accursed tail,
And calls himself Eternity.
Go humbly ... it has hailed and snowed ...
With voices low and lanterns lit;
So very simple is the road,
That we may stray from it.
The world grows terrible and white,
And blinding white the breaking day;
We walk bewildered in the light,
For something is too large for sight,
And something much too plain to say.
The Child that was ere worlds begun
(... We need but walk a little way,
We need but see a latch undone ...)
The Child that played with moon and sun
Is playing with a little hay.
The house from which the heavens are fed,
The old strange house that is our own,
Where tricks of words are never said,
And Mercy is as plain as bread,
And Honour is as hard as stone.
Go humbly; humble are the skies,
And low and large and fierce the Star;
So very near the Manger lies
That we may travel far.
Hark! Laughter like a lion wakes
To roar to the resounding plain,
And the whole heaven shouts and shakes,
For God Himself is born again,
And we are little children walking
Through the snow and rain.
This is indeed the beautiful expression of a beautiful impression; it
has in every line the unmistakable glow of noble poetry; it is musical,
imaginative, direct, and it is passionately Christian. It is the sort of
thing which makes it easy to understand why many people, including, it
is said, Mrs. Chesterton, believe that this great humorist, this
formidable debater, this brilliant novelist, this sound critic, this
accomplished essayist, is, before and above all other things, a poet.
LIONEL JOHNSON, ERNEST DOWSON, AUBREY BEARDSLEY
In considering that brief and tumultuous period in English literature
which is sometimes called The AEsthetic Renaissance, it is inevitable
that three figures should stand out with particular vividness. They are
Lionel Johnson, Aubrey Beardsley and Ernest Dowson--a great poet, a
brilliant, but unbalanced illustrator, and another poet, who wrote a
great deal of rubbish and about four poems which are genuine and
important contributions to English literature. What is the bond between
these men? Why should they be grouped together?
They might be grouped together because they all three were creative
artists whose careers, so far as the world knows, ended with the
nineteenth century. They might be grouped together because they were
animated by the same feeling, a violent reaction against the hideous
scientific dogmatism, the deadly materialism of the much vaunted
Victorian era. And they might be grouped together because all three were
artists, seekers after that real but elusive thing called beauty, a
thing which they found at last when they had made their submission to
her who is the mother of all learning, all culture and all the arts, the
Catholic Church.
And yet, although the fact that their conversion establishes a real and
noble connection between these three men of genius, their characters and
talents differ greatly. Only one of them--and that one Lionel
Johnson--was directly inspired through a considerable period of years by
his Catholic Faith. Ernest Dowson, the poet, and Aubrey Beardsley, the
artist, became Catholics towards the end of their artistic careers, too
late for the Faith to give to their work that purity and strength which
are the guarantees of immortality. But Lionel Johnson found his Faith
almost as soon as he found his genius, celebrated it in poems of
enduring beauty, and left the world a precious heritage of song.
In his book "The Eighteen-Nineties," Mr. Holbrook Jackson has pointed
out the significance of the revival of aestheticism which took place in
the closing years of the nineteenth century, and has shown that it was
symptomatic of a sort of idealistic revolt. The poets and artists were
sick of the dogmatic materialism which dominated the mind of England.
Huxley and Darwin seemed to have dragged the angels out of Heaven, even
to have torn down Heaven itself, and to have put in its place nothing
save a dull rational and inhuman scientific theory. Against this
scientific dogmatism in matters intellectual and spiritual, and against
a sort of bleak smugness in matters moral and social, the young
idealists of the eighteen-nineties rebelled. Sometimes the thing which
they advocated was cheap and tawdry enough, sometimes it was base and
vicious. But they were at any rate in revolt--they had found at last
that the religion of science and the morality of merely human convention
could not satisfy their hearts and their souls.
And there was another phase to the renaissance of the nineties--it was a
romantic adventure. These men were all of them young and ardent. If
there had been some brave and noble adventure at hand, they would have
undertaken it with song on their lips and laughter in their hearts. They
longed to be in the daring minority, to battle for lost causes. Now,
this tendency by itself, this ambition lacking a worthy aim is a
dangerous thing. So some of these young men fell by the wayside, but
others saw before them the great and immortal adventure, forsook their
trivial toys and poses and attitudes, and enlisted in the shining army
of a King more shamefully ill-used than Charles I, more powerful than
Charlemagne.
For Aubrey Beardsley I have the greatest sympathy and admiration. That
being the case, let me say that for the honor of his memory I wish that
every drawing that he made, every one of those deftly-made arrangements
in black and white, might be destroyed. It seems to me that he was of
all the men of the eighteen-nineties the one genuine decadent. It is not
only in such openly vicious things as the illustrations to Wilde's
"Salome" that we find deliberate immorality in intention and expression,
there is in all his work, however simple and even noble may be the
theme, as for instance his illustrations to Malory's "Morte D'Arthur," a
definite and unmistakable perversity, a sure sign of physical, mental
and moral sickness.
Aubrey Beardsley's mental and moral sickness at first showed itself only
in a contempt for the conventions of art and in especial for the
conventions of proportion and prospective. It has sometimes been said
that it is as absurd to rebel against the moral law as against the law
of gravitation. The first revolt of a consumptive young architectural
draughtsman with an extraordinary talent for line was against natural
law--against the law of proportion. The first drawings which brought him
any notoriety were extraordinary for two things--their admirable
draughtsmanship and their deliberate eccentricities of proportion. He
drew nothing but monsters--men eight feet tall with microscopic heads,
women with arms as long as their entire bodies. The revolt against the
moral law came later--the selection of hideously obscene subjects, the
painful obsession with sex. Then came the sick boy's discoveries that
after all beauty was no more in the weird ugliness he had celebrated
than it was in the smug conventions of sentimental Victorian painting. A
few weeks before his death Aubrey Beardsley found the immortal abiding
place of beauty. Received into the Church, Aubrey Beardsley repented
bitterly his misuse of his talents, and plead with his friends to
destroy all his immoral drawings, of which he was now thoroughly
ashamed. "Burn all my bawdy pictures," he wrote--a dying prayer which
his pagan friends utterly disregarded. He had striven to find beauty in
sin, and he knew that this seeking was in vain. For now he had found
beauty, now he had learned to see in the lamp which is beauty the light
which is God.
I have said that Aubrey Beardsley was the only true decadent of all the
literary and artistic rebels of the eighteen-nineties. Certainly no
intelligent person can call Ernest Dowson a decadent. It is true that
there have been critics, such as Mr. Blakie Murdoch, who have tried to
throw a halo of wickedness over this unfortunate young poet, to make him
seem to be a sort of English Paul Verlaine. But Victor Plarr, who knew
him intimately for many years, has told us that except for the tendency
to drink too much, which was one of the causes of his death, Ernest
Dowson was a simple, wholesome young man, who smoked large black cigars
and was fond of playing practical jokes on his friends.
Ernest Dowson's religious poems have never seemed to me to be
particularly convincing. I will read you one of the best of them and
then tell you why it does not seem to me to ring true. It is called
"Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration."
NUNS OF THE PERPETUAL ADORATION
BY ERNEST DOWSON
Calm, sad, secure; behind high convent walls,
These watch the sacred lamp, these watch and pray:
And it is one with them when evening falls,
And one with them the cold return of day.
These heed not time; their nights and days they make
Into a long, returning rosary,
Whereon their lives are threaded for Christ's sake:
Meekness and vigilance and chastity.
A vowed patrol, in silent companies,
Life-long they keep before the living Christ.
In the dim church, their prayers and penances
Are fragrant incense to the Sacrificed.
Outside, the world is wild and passionate;
Man's weary laughter and his sick despair
Entreat at their impenetrable gate:
They heed no voices in their dream of prayer.
They saw the glory of the world displayed;
They saw the bitter of it, and the sweet;
They knew the roses of the world would fade,
And be trod under by the hurrying feet.
Therefore they rather put away desire,
And crossed their hands and came to sanctuary;
And veiled their heads and put on coarse attire:
Because their comeliness was vanity.
And there they rest; they have serene insight
Of the illuminating dawn to be:
Mary's sweet Star dispels for them the night,
The proper darkness of humanity.
Calm, sad, secure; with faces worn and mild:
Surely their choice of vigil is the best?
Yea! for our roses fade, the world is wild;
But there, beside the altar, there, is rest.
Now, this is a very beautiful poem. But there is nothing in it which
might not have been written by a Protestant. And there is one note in it
which seems to me to be absolutely contrary to the Catholic idea of the
religious life--and that is the note of melancholy. Ernest Dowson
insists that the nuns are sad as well as calm and secure, he insists
upon the fact that their faces are "worn and mild." Also he apparently
thinks of the convent as a place of inaction, instead of as a place of
ordered and energetic activity. Therefore, this poem, beautiful as it
is, seems to me to be in no way Catholic in spirit or in expression.
But while I do not feel that the authenticity of Ernest Dowson's
Catholicity can be proved by his deliberately religious poems, I do
think that in nearly every poem which this so-called decadent wrote it
is possible to find indications if not of piety, at least of normality,
sanity, wholesomeness and virtue.
There are, and there have always been since sin first came into the
world, genuine decadents. That is, there have been writers who have
devoted all their energies and talents to the cause of evil, who have
consistently and sincerely opposed Christian morality, and zealously
endeavored to make the worst appear the better cause. But every poet who
lays a lyric wreath at a heathen shrine, who sings the delights of
immorality, or hashish, or suicide, or mayhem, is not a decadent: often
he is merely weak-minded. The true decadent, to paraphrase a famous
saying, wears his vices lightly, like a flower. He really succeeds in
making vice seem picturesque and amusing and even attractive.
Now, this is exactly what Ernest Dowson never could do. He was a member,
it will be remembered, of that little band of aesthetic poets which was
called The Rhymers Club. With them he spent certain evenings at the
Cheshire Cheese, and there he drank absinthe. This is a significant and
symbolic fact. Not in some ominous Parisian cellar, but beneath the
beamed ceiling of a most British inn, still stained with smoke from the
pipe of Dr. Samuel Johnson, among thick mutton chops and tankards of
musty ale, in a cloud of sweet-scented steam that rose from the parted
crust of the magnificent pigeon pie, Ernest Dowson drank absinthe.
There is splendid symbolism in Ernest Dowson's act of drinking absinthe
in the Cheshire Cheese. The wickedness in his poems and his prose
sketches is always as affected and incongruous as is that pallid
medicine in any honest tavern.
He tried hard to be pagan. In the manner of Mr. Swinburne, he exclaims:
"Goddess the laughter-loving, Aphrodite, Aphrodite, befriend! Let me
have peace of thee, truce of thee, golden one, send!" And not even Mr.
Swinburne ever wrote lines so absolutely unconvincing. He said "I go
where the wind blows, Chloe, and am not sorry at all." And from this
lyric no one can fail to get the impression that the poet was very sorry
indeed.
Ernest Dowson was an accomplished artist in words, a delicate sensitive
and graceful genius, but he was no more fitted to be a pagan than to be
a policeman. And so, in his best known poems, he uses all the pagan
properties, all the splendors of sin's pageantry, but his theme, his
overmastering thoughts, is a soul-shaking lament for his stained
faithfulness, for his treason to the Catholic ideal of chastity.
Ernest Dowson could not write poems that really were pagan. He was not a
true decadent. And for this undoubtedly he now is thanking God. He had
his foolish hours: he sometimes misused his gift of song. But--and this
is the important thing about it--he did not know how to misuse it
successfully. The real Ernest Dowson was not the picturesque vagabond
about whom Mr. Blackie Murdoch has written, but the man who with all his
heart praised "meekness and vigilance and chastity," who "was faithful"
in his pathetic ineffective fashion, who knew at last the fidelity of
his eternal Mother, who, in Katherine Bregy's beautiful words, "laid his
broken body in consecrated ground and followed his bruised soul, with
her pitiful asperging prayers."
In considering the eccentricities of "The Savoy" and "The Yellow Book,"
in considering all the literary and artistic artificialities of the
eighteen-nineties, it seems to me that one real value of the cult of
peacocks and green carnations, of artificial paganism and sophisticated
loveliness, is that it furnishes a splendidly contrasting background for
the white genius of Lionel Johnson.
This aristocratic and wealthy young Oxford graduate might so easily have
become an aesthete and nothing more! His environment, many of his
friendships, even his discipleship, as it may be called, to Walter Pater
might naturally be expected to cause him to develop into a mere
dilettante, interested only in delicate and superficial beauty, having,
by way of moral code, an earnest desire to live up to his blue chine.
Instead, what was Lionel Johnson? He was a sound and accomplished
scholar, writing Latin hymns that for their grace and authentic
ecclesiastical style might stand beside those of Adam of St. Victor or
of St. Bernard himself. Nor was he less deft in his manipulation of the
style of the classical authors, as many graceful lines show. And this,
remember, was at a time when Latin was most absolutely a dead language
to most young English poets, whose attention was given entirely to the
picturesque attractions of the Parisian _argot_ beloved of the
decadents.
The aesthetic movement of the eighteen-nineties was merely a search for
beauty--merely a revolt against Victorian agnosticism and materialism.
Johnson found the adventure which all the young poets and artists were
seeking; he knew that the only answer to their question was the Catholic
Faith.
The atmosphere of the literary world in which he lived seems to have had
no effect upon Lionel Johnson's mind and soul. He was "of the centre"
not "of the movement." He gladly accepted the gracious traditions of
English poetry. He followed the time-hallowed conventions of his craft
as faithfully as did Tennyson. He had no desire to toss Milton's wreath
either to Whitman or to Baudelaire.
But these virtues are perhaps chiefly negative. Almost the same thing
might be said of many poets, of the late Stephen Phillips, for example,
who certainly was an honest traditionalist, uninfluenced by decadence or
aestheticism. But Lionel Johnson had also (what Stephen Phillips lacked)
a great and beautiful philosophy. And his philosophy was true. He was so
fortunate as to hold the Catholic Faith. This Faith inspired his best
poems, shines through them and makes them, as the word is used,
immortal.
While Lionel Johnson was not exclusively a devotional and religious
poet, the theme which he sang with the most splendid passion and the
most consummate art was the Catholic Church. This was the great
influence in his life; it is to this that his poetry owes most of its
enduring beauty. But there were other influences, there were other
things which claimed, to a less degree, his devotion. One of these is
Ireland.
Lionel Johnson's chivalrous loyalty to Ireland was not without its
quaint humor. He was descended from the severe and brutal general who
savagely put down the insurrection of 1798. But he by no means shared
his ancestor's views in Irish matters; he was an enthusiastic advocate
of Irish freedom and a devoted lover of everything Irish.
Although he hailed with delight the revival of ancient Celtic customs
and the ancient Celtic language, Lionel Johnson was far from being what
we have come to call a neo-Celt. He did not spend his time in writing
elaborately annotated chants in praise of Cuchulain and Deidre and
Oengus, and other creatures of legend; the attempt to reestablish
Ireland's ancient paganism seemed to him singularly unintelligent. He
saw that the greatest glory of Ireland is her fidelity to the Catholic
Faith, a fidelity which countless cruel persecutions have only
strengthened. And so when he wrote of Ireland's dead, he did not see
them entering into some Ossianic land of dead warriors. Instead he
wrote:
For their loyal love, nought less,
Than the stress of death sufficed:
Now with Christ, in blessedness,
Triumph they, imparadised.
Similarly, in what is generally considered to be his greatest poem, the
majestic and passionate "Ireland," his most joyous vision is that of
the "Bright souls of Saints, glad choirs of intercession from the Gael,"
and he concludes with this splendid prayer:
O Rose! O Lily! O Lady full of grace!
O Mary Mother! O Mary Maid! hear thou.
Glory of Angels! Pity, and turn they face,
Praying thy Son, even as we pray thee now,
For thy dear sake to set thine Ireland free:
Pray thou thy Little Child!
Ah! who can help her, but in mercy He?
Pray then, pray thou for Ireland, Mother mild!
O heart of Mary! Pray the Sacred Heart:
His, at Whose word depart
Sorrows and hates, home to Hell's waste and wild.
Lionel Johnson was, as Miss Louise Imogen Guiney has written, "a tower
of wholesomeness in the decadence which his short life spanned." His
purely secular poems are best when his Catholic Faith, seemingly without
his willing it, unexpectedly shines out in a splendor of radiant
phrases. And of all his poems, those which constitute his most important
contributions to literature, are those which are directly the fruit of
his religious experiences or of his love for Ireland. He was not so
great a poet as Francis Thompson. He never wrote a poem that will stand
comparison with "The Hound of Heaven" or the "Orient Ode." But the sum
of the beauty in all his work is great, and his poetry is, on the whole,
more companionable than that of Francis Thompson; it is more human, more
personal, more intimate.