The autumn equinox is close upon us with all its presages of mortality,
a shortening day, a colder and longer night. How the days draw in! Fear
of ridicule hardly allows one to make the melancholy constatation. It is
a conversational gambit that, like fool’s mate, can only be used against
the simplest and least experienced of players. And yet how much of the
world’s most moving poetry is nothing but a variation on the theme of
this in-drawing day! The certainty of death has inspired more poetry
than the hope of immortality. The visible transience of frail and lovely
matter has impressed itself more profoundly on the mind of man than the
notion of spiritual permanence.
Et l’on verra bientôt surgir du sein de l’onde
La première clarté de mon dernier soleil.
That is an article of faith from which nobody can withhold assent.
Of late I have found myself almost incapable of enjoying any poetry
whose inspiration is not despair or melancholy. Why, I hardly know.
Perhaps it is due to the chronic horror of the political situation. For
heaven knows, that is quite sufficient to account for a taste for
melancholy verse. The subject of any European government to-day feels
all the sensations of Gulliver in the paws of the Queen of Brobdingnag’s
monkey—the sensations of some small and helpless being at the mercy of
something monstrous and irresponsible and idiotic. There sits the monkey
“on the ridge of a building five hundred yards above the ground, holding
us like a baby in one of his fore paws.” Will he let go? Will he squeeze
us to death? The best we can hope for is to be “let drop on a ridge
tile,” with only enough bruises to keep one in bed for a fortnight. But
it seems very unlikely that some “honest lad will climb up and, putting
us in his breeches pocket, bring us down safe.” However, I divagate a
little from my subject, which is the poetry of melancholy.
Some day I shall compile an Oxford Book of Depressing Verse, which shall
contain nothing but the most magnificent expressions of melancholy and
despair. All the obvious people will be in it and as many of the obscure
apostles of gloom as vague and miscellaneous reading shall have made
known to me. A duly adequate amount of space, for example, will be
allotted to that all but great poet, Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke. For
dark magnificence there are not many things that can rival that summing
up against life and human destiny at the end of his “Mustapha.”
Oh, wearisome condition of humanity,
Born under one law to another bound,
Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity,
Created sick, commanded to be sound.
What meaneth nature by these diverse laws,
Passion and reason, self-division’s cause?
Is it the mark or majesty of power
To make offences that it may forgive?
Nature herself doth her own self deflower
To hate those errors she herself doth give....
If nature did not take delight in blood,
She would have made more easy ways to good.
Milton aimed at justifying the ways of God to man; Fulke Greville
gloomily denounces them.
Nor shall I omit from my anthology the extraordinary description in the
Prologue to “Alaham” of the Hell of Hells and of Privation, the peculiar
torment of the place:
Thou monster horrible, under whose ugly doom
Down in eternity’s perpetual night
Man’s temporal sins bear torments infinite,
For change of desolation must I come
To tempt the earth and to profane the light.
A place there is, upon no centre placed,
Deep under depths as far as is the sky
Above the earth, dark, infinitely spaced,
Pluto the king, the kingdom misery.
Privation would reign there, by God not made,
But creature of uncreated sin,
Whose being is all beings to invade,
To have no ending though it did begin;
And so of past, things present and to come,
To give depriving, not tormenting doom.
But horror in the understanding mixed....
Like most of his contemporaries in those happy days before the notion of
progress had been invented, Lord Brooke was what Peacock would have
called a “Pejorationist.” His political views (and they were also
Sidney’s) are reflected in his _Life of Sir Philip Sidney_. The best
that a statesman can do, according to these Elizabethan pessimists, is
to patch and prop the decaying fabric of society in the hope of staving
off for a little longer the final inevitable crash. It seems curious to
us, who have learnt to look at the Elizabethan age as the most splendid
in English history, that the men who were the witnesses of these
splendours should have regarded their time as an age of decadence.
The notion of the Fall was fruitful in despairing poetry. One of the
most remarkable products of this doctrine is a certain “Sonnet Chrétien”
by the seventeenth-century writer, Jean Ogier de Gombauld, surnamed “le
Beau Ténébreux.”
Cette source de mort, cette homicide peste,
Ce péché dont l’enfer a le monde infecté,
M’a laissé pour tout être un bruit d’avoir été,
Et je suis de moi-même une image funeste.
L’Auteur de l’univers, le Monarque céleste
S’était rendu visible en ma seule beauté.
Ce vieux titre d’honneur qu’autrefois j’ai porté
Et que je porte encore, est tout ce qui me reste.
Mais c’est fait de ma gloire, et je ne suis plus rien
Qu’un fantôme qui court après l’ombre d’un bien,
Ou qu’un corps animé du seul ver qui le ronge.
Non, je ne suis plus rien quand je veux m’éprouver,
Qu’un esprit ténébreux qui voit tout comme en songe
Et cherche incessament ce qu’il ne peut trouver.
There are astonishing lines in this, lines that might have been written
by a Baudelaire, if he had been born a Huguenot and two hundred years
before his time. That “carcase animated by the sole gnawing worm” is
something that one would expect to find rotting away among the sombre
and beautiful Flowers of Evil.
An amusing speculation. If Steinach’s rejuvenating operations on the old
become the normal and accepted thing, what will be the effect on poetry
of this abolition of the depressing process of decay? It may be that the
poetry of melancholy and despair is destined to lose its place in
literature, and that a spirit of what William James called
“healthy-mindedness” will inherit its kingdom. Many “eternal truths”
have already found their way on to the dust-heap of antiquated ideas. It
may be that this last and seemingly most inexorable of them—that life is
short and subject to a dreadful decay—will join the other great
commonplaces which have already perished out of literature.
The flesh is bruckle, the fiend is slee:
Timor mortis conturbat me:—
Some day, it may be, these sentiments will seem as hopelessly
superannuated as Milton’s cosmology.