as much fun when Henchard and Farfrae wrestled on the top floor of the
granary as Blackmore did in the Homeric fisticuffs of "Lorna Doone."
When Hardy dressed up Lucetta and sent her out to plead with Henchard he
had the same sporting excitement that Thackeray had when he prepared
Becky Sharp for her conquests. At such times Hardy seems momentarily to
accept the existence of free will, with its tremendous dramatic
possibilities. These are his moments of greatest creative power, of
highest poetry, of clearest discernment. They occur more frequently and
they last longer in his latest writings. The War has seen to that.
Copyright, 1917, by Boni & Liveright. Reprinted from their Modern
Library Edition by special arrangement.
MADISON JULIUS CAWEIN
(1865-1914)
America has had two great poets of nature--two men called to the task of
reflecting in a mirror of words the beauty of meadow and forest. One of
these was William Cullen Bryant. The other was Madison Julius Cawein.
As Bryant drew his inspiration from the wooded hills and fertile valleys
of his native New England, so Madison Cawein drew his from the meadows
of the South, especially those of Kentucky. The term "nature poet" has
been used in derision of some writers who lavish sentimental adulation
upon every bird and flower, who pretend an admiration for things of
which they have no real understanding. But Madison Cawein knew what he
was writing about; he had an amazing, we might say a perilous, intimacy
with nature. And he had no vague love for all nature--he knew too much
for that. True, he knew nature in her delicate and in her splendid
aspect--he saw the barberry redden in the lanes, he feasted his eyes on
"the orange and amber of the marigold, the terra-cottas of the zinnia
flowers," he learned lovely secrets from whippoorwill, swallow, and
cricket, and he could see drowsy Summer rocking the world to sleep in
her kindly arms. But also he knew (with a knowledge which only Algernon
Blackwood among contemporary writers has equaled) that nature has her
cruel and terrible aspects. He knew that the daily life of bird and
beast--yes, and the daily life of flower and tree--is as much a tragedy
as a comedy. So (in the sonnet-sequence he wrote by the Massachusetts
shore in 1911) he saw a certain grove as "a sad room, devoted to the
dead"; he felt the relentlessness of the ocean mists invading the shore;
he saw an autumn branch staining a pool like a blur of blood; he made us
share his genuine terror of deserted mill-streams where "the
cardinal-flower, in the sun's broad beam, with sudden scarlet takes you
by surprise," and of dark and menacing swamps, ominous with trembling
moss, purple-veined pitcher-plants and wild grass trailing over the bank
like the hair of a drowned girl. His studies of nature were accurate
enough to satisfy any botanist--Miss Jessie B. Rittenhouse has said that
one might explore the Kentucky woods and fields with a volume of
Cawein's poems as a handbook and identify many a lowly and exquisite
bower first recognized in song. But his poems were not mere catalogues
of natural beauties, any more than they were sentimental idealizations
of them. They were, to repeat a phrase, reflections of nature,
reflections painted rather than photographed, but interpreted rather
than romanticized.
Madison Cawein had not long to wait for the recognition which he enjoyed
throughout his life. Born on March 23rd, 1865, in Louisville, Kentucky,
and educated in the high school of his native city, he published his
first book, "Blooms of the Berry," in 1887. "The Triumph of Music"
followed in 1888, and soon after its publication Mr. William Dean
Howells wrote of the young Southern poet words that brought him to the
attention of a large audience, words that applied as truly to his
posthumous book, "The Cup of Comus," as to the rhymes of his boyhood. In
the _North American Review_, Mr. Howells wrote:
"He has the gift, in a measure that I do not think surpassed in any
poet, of touching some smallest or commonest thing in nature and making
it live from the manifold associations in which we have our being, and
glow thereafter with an inextinguishable beauty."
From 1887 to the time of his death, scarcely a year passed that did not
see the publication of a new book of poems by Madison Cawein. Of course,
this caused him to be accused of writing too much, of giving the world
poems written hastily and carelessly. There was some justice in this
accusation; undoubtedly he would have written better poems if he had
written fewer. Mr. H. Houston Peckham, of Purdue University, in an
article which appeared in the _South Atlantic Quarterly_ soon after
Cawein's death, told a story which is significant. The poet was about to
destroy one of his lyrics. A friend rescued it and sent it to a
magazine. When it appeared in print, it was shown to Cawein, who failed
to recognize it as his own work. He had utterly forgotten it in the
course of a few months.
Now, for a poet to forget the children of his own fancy is a sign that
he is writing too much. And yet Madison Cawein was not so prolific as a
list of his more than a score of volumes would indicate. For many of his
books contained poems that had already appeared between covers--this is
true of the Macmillan volume called "Poems" and of many others. He
seemed to desire to produce a book annually--but fortunately for his
art he did not believe it necessary that every volume should contain
only new poems.
In one of the most famous of his essays, Ruskin wrote:
"It is, I hope, now made clear to the reader in all respects that the
pathetic fallacy is powerful only so far as it is pathetic, feeble so
far as it is fallacious, and, therefore, that the dominion of Truth is
entire, over this as over every other natural and just state of the
human mind."
Madison Cawein was a loyal subject of Truth, the accuracy of his
descriptions of nature has seldom been called into question. As to the
pathetic fallacy and his relation to it--that might be the subject of an
interesting study. At any rate it may be said that he seldom indulged in
that common and thoroughly normal fallacy by which the poet sees nature
weep because of his own sorrow or smile because of his own joy. Instead,
he was filled with the gloom native to the swamp which he beheld, or
with mirth that he caught from the lyric ecstasy of the dawn.
He was a sympathetic student of humanity, as every true poet must be,
and he resented the statement that mankind had no place in his poetic
vision. But he was at his best when he wrote not of reasonable humanity
but of the world of animal and vegetable things that have no reason but
have, to the poet, qualities stranger and more interesting than reason.
He wrote well of a ploughman, but better of the field in which the
ploughman worked. He wrote well of a house full of men and women and
children, but better of an empty house with its myrtle run wild, its
paths hidden by flowering grass, and swallows flying through its broken
windows. He subordinated himself to wild nature, letting her speak to
the world through him, instead of merely going to her for metaphors
appropriate to his own emotional experiences. And this, while it
resulted in beautiful poetry, was a dangerous thing to do. "Nature, poor
stepdame, cannot slake my drouth," said another poet, "never did any
milk of hers once bless my thirsting mouth." Madison Cawein got, it
seems, little gratitude from Nature, although to do her honor he had
curiously distorted the true vision of man's place in the universe. When
his frail body was put in the frozen earth a few years ago, it seemed to
many of his friends and critics that he had died at the beginning of a
new phase of his genius, that his latest poems, vague and tentative as
some of them were, showed that he was looking at the world with a new
sense of proportion, and that hereafter his whole scheme of things would
be differently arranged--man being the center of the visible universe,
and not, as in Blackwood's novels, a wondering visitor to a world of
plants and beasts.
But death intervened, and what he might have written can only be guessed
from such poems as "The Song of Songs" and "Laus Deo" and "The Iron Age"
in "The Cup of Comus." What he accomplished was worth doing, and he did
it well. He put the meadows and forests of the South into poems as
hauntingly beautiful as themselves.
FRANCIS THOMPSON
(1859-1907)
Poetic sensations are rare in our time. For a quarter of a century we
have enjoyed a regular succession of excellent books of verse--verse
graceful, fanciful, musical, interesting, and sometimes noble. Perhaps
the general average of verse is higher to-day than it has previously
been in the history of English letters. But there have been few books of
verse which have caused the heart of the public to beat faster, few
books of verse which critics have carried in their pockets for weeks at
a time to show to their friends.
There has been one such book, however. In 1893 was published "Poems," by
Francis Thompson. And this volume (as even Thompson's enemies cannot
deny) excited, favorably or unfavorably, all its reviewers. Some hailed
it as a work of surpassing genius, some found it irritatingly bad. But
all felt about it passionately; no one damned it with faint praise and
no one praised it with faint damns.
Francis Thompson was a Roman Catholic and his faith gave him the themes,
the imagery, often the phraseology, and the inspiration of all his best
poetry. Yet his first most admiring critics were men by no means in
sympathy with his religion. H. D. Traill, a North of Ireland Protestant,
welcomed him as "a new poet of the first rank." Richard Le Gallienne
called him "Crashaw born again, but born greater." John Davidson said
"Thompson's poetry at its highest attains a sublimity unsurpassed by any
other Victorian poet." And Arnold Bennett wrote of Thompson's second
book "Sister Songs," "My belief is that Francis Thompson has a richer
natural genius, a finer poetical equipment, than any poet save
Shakespeare."
Of course there were hostile critics. Some of them were annoyed by the
poet's phraseology, especially his use of words of Latin derivation and
of forms which he coined for his own use. But most of them were annoyed
by his themes; they resented the intrusion of a flaming Catholicity
among the delicate artificial philosophies of the poets of the nineties,
and their resentment found voice in attacks that recalled the brave old
days of "This will never do" and "Back to your gallipots!" That this
resentment continued, in some minds, even after the poet had died and
his work had been received as an inalienable part of the world's
treasury of English song is shown by the savagery of Austin Harrison's
"review" of Everard Meynell's "Life of Francis Thompson" in the _English
Review_ in 1913.
Francis Thompson was born on the 16th of December, 1859, at Preston,
Lancashire, England. In his boyhood he was taught at the school of the
Nuns of the Cross and Passion, and in 1870 he entered Ushaw College.
After seven years at Ushaw--years marked by one great tragedy, the
decision by those in authority that his "nervous timidity" unfitted him
for the priesthood--he went to Owens College as a student of medicine.
His years in Manchester taught him little medicine, but they taught him
other things destined to affect his life. Francis Thompson read books,
but they were not surgical treatises. They were books of poetry, of
essay, of theology, of scholastic philosophy. His love for music
increased, and he attended more concerts than lectures. Also in
Manchester he acquired his besetting sin--the opium habit. He took the
drug first in the form of laudanum, during a painful illness. He
continued to take it throughout many years of his life. It staved off
the assaults of tuberculosis, it prevented his success in medicine or
any other methodical and exact career, and thus removed what might have
been rivals to the art of poetry. But, as his biographer says, opium
"dealt with him remorselessly as it dealt with Coleridge and all its
consumers. It put him in such constant strife with his own conscience
that he had ever to hide himself from himself, and for concealment he
fled to that which made him ashamed, until it was as if a fig-leaf were
of necessity plucked from the Tree of the Fall. It killed in him the
capacity for acknowledging those duties to his family and friends,
which, had his heart not been in shackles, he would have owned with no
ordinary ardor."
Francis Thompson's years immediately after his failure in his medical
examinations were spent in London, in poverty and ill health. But no man
of genius can long remain hidden. In a strange and romantic manner, some
of his magnificent poetry and prose came to the attention of Wilfred and
Alice Meynell. They gave to the world the blessing of acquaintance with
Francis Thompson's work, and to the poet they gave, in addition to more
material benefits, the wise and affectionate friendship his lonely
spirit most needed. He resisted the opium habit, increased in physical
and mental health, gained congenial employment as a reviewer for the
best of the London weeklies. The publication of his books established
him, in the opinion of those whose opinion was most worth-while, as a
figure of great literary importance. He died "a very good death" at the
age of forty-eight. Had his mind been (as fortunately it was not)
concerned with literature in his last hours he would have known that he
had attained a fame of the kind that does not tarnish with the years,
that he had realized the poet's ambition of adding substantially to the
world's heritage of beauty.
If Francis Thompson is to be related by critics and historians of
literature to writers of a more recent date than that of Crashaw and
Southwell, it must be to the poets of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
What they promised, Thompson fulfilled. In a materialistic and
sophisticated age, Rossetti and his friends sought to reproduce the
romantic splendors of the Middle Ages. They took delight in the lovely
externalities of the Catholic Church. Rossetti's friend, Coventry
Patmore, went further than the Pre-Raphaelites; he became a Catholic and
thus carried the theories of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood to their
logical and tremendous conclusion. Patmore's greater disciple, Francis
Thompson, brought back to English poetry the knowledge, largely
forgotten since the Reformation, that the proper study of mankind is
God; he refused to limit his mind, as his contemporaries did theirs, by
temporal and astronomical boundaries. A universal poet must sing the
universe. And the center of the universe is God. So Francis Thompson
sang of God, and in "The Hound of Heaven" he made of man's relation to
God and God's relation to man a poem that is unsurpassed in the
literature of spiritual experience. And all great poetry deals with
spiritual experience.
JOHN MASEFIELD
(1874--)
To be versatile and prolific generally is to be unimportant. Especially
in literature, Jack-of-all-trades is, as a rule, master of none. An
exception brilliantly proving this rule is John Masefield.
Homer (scholars tell us) was not one man but a company of poets, writing
through more than one century. Shakespeare (we are encouraged to
believe) was not a theatrical manager who liked occasionally to build a
play to show his dramatists how it should be done, but a syndicate of
philosophers, poets, playwrights, scientists, and politicians. Three
hundred years from now literary detectives will busy themselves with
discovering the names of the sailor, the farmer, the Hellenist, the
Orientalist, the sociologist, the realist, the romanticist, the
dramatist, the ballad maker, the sonneteer, the novelist, the short
story writer, who called their conspiracy John Masefield. They will
attribute some of the "Salt Water Ballads" to Kipling, some to Henry
Newbolt, some to C. Fox Smith. They will attribute "The Sweeps of
Ninety-Eight" to Dr. Douglas Hyde. They will attribute "The Faithful" to
Sturge Moore. They will attribute "The Tragedy of Nan" to D. H.
Lawrence, part of "A Mainsail Haul" to Charles Whibley, part of it to
Algernon Blackwood, and part of it to Robert Louis Stevenson. And some
of his ballads they will attribute to Wilfrid Gibson and some of his
lyrics to William Butler Yeats. This will be a stupid thing for them to
do, but nevertheless, they will do it.
One reason why the conduct of these hypothetical scholars is
particularly irritating is that John Masefield is a writer of strong
individuality. He has a distinct and easily recognizable style; his
theme may be a battle of wits between Tiger Roche and the rebel hunters
of 1798, or the tragedy of Nan Hardwick and the mutton parsties and the
malicious Pargetters, or the great intrigues of royal Spain, or the
ambitions of Pompey, or the soul of man in its relation to the mercy of
God--whatever his theme may be, his style is the same. The writer's eyes
may be fixed upon the mysteries of his own heart, or they may be
searching the boundless heavens; he is, nevertheless, always a realist.
They may be curiously studying the most ordinary details of modern life;
he is, nevertheless, always an idealist. So the intellectual, perhaps it
might be said the spiritual, attitude of John Masefield is unvarying.
And in this is to be found the reason for the intense individuality of
the writer as seen in his works, for the feeling, common to all his
readers, of being in direct communication with him. And the style of the
sequence of sonnets in the Shakespearean manner is much the same as that
of the stories about pirates and the drama of ancient Japan. The nervous
expressive diction, the direct Elizabethan colloquialism, these things
are Masefield; the form may vary, but not in its characteristics, the
language.
A writer's attitude toward life and toward the things beyond life is his
own; it is not to be accounted for by heredity or environment. But a
writer's style must necessarily be influenced, by what he reads and by
the talk of those with whom he spends the formative periods of his life.
Even the careless reader of John Masefield's books will notice
occasionally in them, especially in the lyrics, a strong Celtic flavor.
Masefield's "Sea-Fever" and "Roadways" and "Cardigan Bay" and "Trade
Winds" and "The Harper's Song" surely belong to the same family as Eva
Gore Booth's "The Little Waves of Breffny" and William Butler Yeats's
"The Lake Isle of Innisfree." Furthermore, Masefield has that belief in
the beauty of tragedy, tragedy in itself without regard to its moral
significance, which is characteristic of many of the Irish writers of
our generation. In the preface to "The Tragedy of Nan" he writes:
"Tragedy at its best is a vision of the heart of life. The heart of life
can only be laid bare in the agony and exultation of dreadful acts. The
vision of agony, or spiritual contest, pushed beyond the limits of the
dying personality, is exalting and cleansing. It is only by such visions
that a multitude can be brought to the passionate knowledge of things
exulting and eternal.... Our playwrights have all the powers except that
power of exaltation which comes from a delighted brooding on excessive,
terrible things. That power is seldom granted to men; twice or thrice to
a race perhaps, not oftener. But it seems to me certain that every
effort, however humble, towards the achieving of that power helps the
genius of a race to obtain it, though the obtaining may be fifty years
after the strivers are dead."
Now in our time only one other writer has expressed this idea with equal
force. And that writer is Mr. William Butler Yeats. He has written in an
essay: "Tragic art, passionate art, ... the confounder of understanding,
moves us by setting us to reverie, by alluring us almost to the
intensity of trance." So we find the Irish and the English writer guided
by one impulse and by one conviction. And the result is that considering
this, and considering also the Celtic idiom which seemingly comes so
naturally from the lips of Mr. Masefield, Englishman though he be, in
his lyrics, in his poetic dramas, and in many of the stories in "A
Mainsail Haul," we are tempted to believe that the Irish literary
movement has stretched a shadowy arm across the channel and laid its
potent spell upon a man of Saxon blood. And to this theory Masefield's
close friendship with William Butler Yeats lends color.
But there are flaws in this theory. One of them is that Masefield was
writing in this manner before he met Yeats, before, indeed, the Irish
literary movement had attracted much attention outside of its own home.
Another flaw is, that this idea of the nobility, one might almost say,
of the loveliness of tragedy, while it is in our time more Irish than
English, was held by the English dramatists and poets of centuries
ago--Marlowe, for instance, and Webster and Shakespeare himself. The
very earliest English poets selected tragic themes as a matter of
course. Which of the great old ballads is without at least one bloody
murder? Furthermore, the modern Irish-English idiom is to a great extent
the idiom of England some centuries ago. There are rhymes in Shakespeare
and even in Pope which show that what we consider Irish
mispronunciations of English are simply English pronunciations that have
been carried through the ages unchanged--the "ay" sound for "ea" is an
example of that. "Our gracious Anne, whom the three realms obey, does
sometimes counsel take, and sometimes tea." Chaucerian scholars say that
the Wife of Bath talked what we would call Irish dialect. Now, John
Masefield's literary idols belong not to his own generation or that
immediately preceding it but to the early days of English letters. His
favorite poem, he has told me, is Chaucer's "Ballad of Good Counsel."
This reading has affected his style and it has affected also his
thought, to the strengthening of the first and the deepening of the
second.
There has been much said and written about Masefield's romantic
youth--about his experiences before the mast and behind the bar. There
was a tendency during his tour of the United States in the early spring
of 1916 to regard him as very much of a self-made man, to marvel at the
miracle of genius which turned a bartender-sailor into a great poet. But
the fact of the matter is that Masefield is essentially of the literary
type, a man who might readily have supported himself by school-teaching,
journalism, or some other unromantic trade, but deliberately selected
colorful and exciting occupations. No one can talk to him and retain the
idea that Masefield is a "sailor-poet" or a "bartender-poet." He is an
educated English gentleman, very thoroughly a man of letters, who has
had the good fortune to add to his treasury of experience by travels in
strange places and among strange people.
Masefield's first important romantic experience, however, was undergone
at a time when the poet was so young that it can scarcely have been the
result of his own volition. Born in 1874 at Ledbury, in the west of
England, he was indentured to a captain in the English merchant marine
at the age of fourteen years. A fourteen-year-old boy on shipboard
generally learns to hate passionately and consistently the sea and all
that is associated with it. And it would not be strictly true to say
that Masefield gained from this early adventure a love of the sea.
Rather he then came under the spell of the sea, a spell from which he
has never escaped. He has not that sentimental affection for the sea
which inspires the life-on-the-ocean-waves' verse written by landsmen
who know Neptune only by week-end visits in the summer time. He has been
in the power of the sea more than it is altogether safe for so sensitive
a spirit to be. He seems haunted by the sea; in those of his writings
which in theme are least related to the sea the reader finds that again
and again the figures and comparisons are drawn from the poet's memory
of days when above and beyond him were nothing but water and sky. Not
even Algernon Charles Swinburne was so much influenced by the sea as
Masefield has been.