There is the cold of a thousand years shuddering out of this scene, it
is the passing, the last of this delicate and gifted poet, Adelaide
Crapsey. If she has written more than her book prints, these must
surely be of her best. She took the shape of that which she made so
visible, so cold, so beautiful. With her white wings she has skirted
the edge of the dusk with an incredible calm. No whimpering here. Too
much artistry for that; too much of eye to let heart rule. The gifts
of Adelaide Crapsey were high ones, and that she left so little of
song is regrettable, even though she left us a legacy of some of the
best singing of the day. It is enough to call her poet, for she was
among the first of this hour and time. She had no affectations, no
fashionable theories and ambitions. She simply wrote excellent verse.
That is her beautiful gift to us.
FRANCIS THOMPSON
If ever a meteor fell to earth it was Francis Thompson. If ever a star
ascended to that high place in the sky where sit the loftier planets
in pleasant company, it was this splendid poet. Stalking through the
shadows of the Thames Embankment to find his clear place in the milky
way, is hardly the easiest road for so exceptional a celebrity. It is
but another instance of the odd tradition perpetuating itself, that
some geniuses must creep hand and knee through mire, heart pierced
with the bramble of experience, up over the jagged pathways to that
still place where skies are clear at last. Thompson is the last among
the great ones to have known the dire vicissitude, direst, if legends
are true, that can befall a human being. We have the silence of his
saviour friends, the Meynells, saying so much more than their few
public words, tender but so careful. What they knew, and what the
walls of the monastery of Storrington must have heard in that so
pained stillness, there, is probably beyond repetition for pathos. De
Quincey had taught him much in the knowledge of hardship. Whether it
is just similarity of experience or a kind of imitation in nature, is
not easy to say. It was hardly the example to repeat. It is singular
enough also, that De Quincey's "Ann" should have become so vivid a
repetition to Thompson, in just the same terms.
London has no feeling for the peace of poets. They are the little
things in the confused maelstrom of human endeavor. Poets are taught
with the whip. They must bleed for their divine idea, or so it was
then. Sometimes it seems as if a change had come, for so many poets
sit in chairs of ease these days. Science produces other kinds of
discomfort, and covers the old misery with a new tapestry of
contrasts. I doubt if many poets are selling matches these days,
living on eleven pence a day. There is still the poet who knows his
cheap lodging. There seems enough of them still for high minds to
crawl into, and yet there is another face to the misery.
Thompson was seraph from the first. You see the very doom burning out
of his boy's eyes in the youthful portrait, and you see the logical
end in that desperate and pitiful mask, the drawing of the last period
in the Meynell Book. His was certainly the severed head, and his feet
were pathetically far away, down on a stony earth. That he should have
forfeited the ordinary ways of ease, is as consistent with his
appearance, as it was necessary to his nature. That he should find
himself on the long march past the stations of the cross, to the very
tree itself, for his poetic purpose, if it is in keeping with
tradition, is not precisely the most inspiring aspect of human
experiences. Human he was not, as we like to think of human, for he
was too early in his career marked for martyr. There is the note of
cricket-time in his earlier life, and how long this attached to the
physical delights of his being cannot be told here. His eyes were
lodged too far in heaven to have kept the delights for long, to have
comprehended all that clogged his impatiently mercurial feet.
"The abashless inquisition of each star" was the scrutiny that
obsessed his ways, the impertinence that he suffered most; for he had
the magnitude of soul that hungered for placement, and the plague of
two masters was on him. Huntress and "Hound" he had to choose between,
beauty and the insatiable Prince; harsh and determined lovers, both of
them, too much craving altogether for an artistic nature. The earth
had no room for him and he did not want heaven so soon. He was not
saint, even though his name followed him even, for recognition.
"Stood bound and helplessly, for Time to shoot his barbed minutes at
me, suffered the trampling hoof of every hour," etc., all this
confided to some childish innocent in "The child's kiss". Whom else
should he tell but a child? Where is the man or woman with
understanding but has the "child" lodged somewhere for sympathy, for
recognition? The clearest listener he could find, and the least
commiserative, happily. "The heart of childhood, so divine for me", is
but typical of a being so dragged, and emaciate with the tortures of
the body, in earth places where no soul like his could ever be at
home. What was Preston, or Ashton-under-Lyne to him, more than Kensall
Green is to him now? What is such dust in his sky but some blinding
and blowing thing? What is there for singer to do but sing until the
throat cracks? Even the larks and the thrushes do that. They end their
morning and evening with a song. He was brother to these birds in that
loftiness. He sang, and sang, and sang, while flesh fainted from
hunger and weakness.
Had not Storrington come to him in the dark places of London, we
should have had no "Hound of Heaven", and without that masterpiece
what would modern poetry do? He sang to cover up his wounds with
climbing music. That was his sense of beauty. He filled his hollowing
cheek with finer things than moaning. He might have wept, but they
were words instead of drops.
It will be difficult to find loftier song as to essences. We shall
have room for criticising stylistic extravagances, archaisms of a not
interesting order for us, yet there will be nothing said but the
highest in praise of his genius. Excess of praise may be heaped upon
him without cessation, and it may end in the few cool yet incisive
words that fell from the lips of Meredith, with the violets from
another's worshipped hands, "a true poet, one of a small band." Poets
of this time will have much to gather from Thompson in point of
sincerity. There is terrific mastery of words, which is like
Shakespeare in felicity we do not encounter so often it seems to me.
Thompson has scaled the white rainbow of the night, and sits in
radiant company among the first planetary strummers of song. His
diamond is pure, and the matrix that hid him so long from showing his
glinted facets is chipped away of miseries carried down with death.
They will soon be forgotten by the multitude as death itself made him
forget them. We have his chants and his anthems and plainsongs to
remind us of the one essential, of how lofty a singer passed down our
highroad. "Dusty with tumbling about amid the stars!" That is what he
is for us now, if he rolled in too much clay of earth. Shelley might
have turned his own handsome phrase on him, for they both strode the
morning of their bright minds like sun the sky, with much of the same
solemn yet speedy gait. There are times when they are certainly of the
one radiance, lyrical and poetical. Their consuming intellectual
interests were vastly apart, as were their paths of spirit.
I think we shall have no more "dread of height". Poetry has passed
into scientific discovery. Intellectual passions are the vogue, earth
is coming into its own, for there is no more heaven in the mind. We
are showing our humanities now, and the soul must wait a little, and
remain speechless in some dull corner of the universe. Thompson was
the last to believe. We are learning to think now, so poetry has come
to calculation. Rhapsody and passion are romantic, and we are not
romantic. The last Rhapsodist was Francis Thompson, and in the sense
of lyrical fervour, the last great poet was Francis Thompson.
ERNEST DOWSON
It is late to be telling of Dowson, with the eighteen-nineties nearly
out of sight, and yet it is Dowson and Lionel Johnson that I know most
of, from the last of this period. Poles apart these two poets are, the
one so austere and almost collegiate in adherence to convention, the
other too warm to let a coldness obsess his singing. There doesn't
seem to be anything wonderful about Dowson, and yet you want to be
saying a line of his every now and then, of him "that lived, and sang,
and had a beating heart," ere he grew old, and he grew old so soon.
"Worn out by what was really never life to him," is a prefatorial
phrase I recall. There was a genuine music in Dowson, even if it was
smothered in lilies and roses and wine of the now old way of saying
things. "Come hither child, and rest--Behold the weary west," might
have been the thing he was saying to himself, so much is this the
essence of his lost cause.
There is a languor and a lack of power to lift a hand toward the
light, too much a trusting of the shadow. "I have flung roses, roses
riotously with the throng, to put those pale lost lilies out of mind."
Always verging on a poetic feeling not just like ourselves in these
days, and yet Dowson was a poet. He caressed words until they sang for
him the one plaint that he asked of them. That he was obsessed of the
beauties and the intimations of Versailles, is seen in everything he
did, or at least he imbibed this from Verlaine. He was himself a pale
wanderer down soft green allées, he had a twilight mind struggling
toward the sun, which was too bright for him, for the moon was his
brightest light. Echoes of Verlaine linger through his verse and a
strain of Poe is present, poet whom he with his French taste admired
so much, two very typical idols for a young man with a sentimental
journey to pursue. Lost Adelaides, to keep him steeped in the sorrow
that he cherished, for he petted his miseries considerably; or was it
that he was most at home when he was unhappy? He would rather have
seen the light of day from a not quite clear window, for instead of a
clear hill, he might see a vague castle of his fancy somewhere. He
hadn't the sweep of a great poet, and yet somehow there was the linnet
in him, there was the strain of the lute among the leaves, there was
the rustle of a soft dress audible, and the passing of hands he could
not ever hold.
He was the poet of the lost treasure. "Studies in Sentiment" is, I
think, the title of a small book of prose of his. He might have called
his poems "Studies in sentimentality". And yet, for his time, how
virile and vigorous he sounds beside "Posies out of Rings", of his
friend Theodore Peters, of the renaissance cloak, the cherry coloured
velvet cloak embroidered in green leaves and silver veinings, so full
of the sky radiance of Dowson himself, this cloak. Cherry sounds red
and passionate. But it was a cherry of olden time, with the bloom
quite gone, the dust of the years permeating its silken warp. It
reposes here in America, the property of an artist of that period.
One likes Dowson because of his sincerity, and a clear beauty which,
if not exactly startling, was in its way truly genuine. It was merely
too late for Dowson, and it was probably too soon. Swinburne had
strummed the skies with every kind of song, and Verlaine had whispered
every secret of the senses there was, in the land of illusion and
vaguery. Dowson was worshipper of them both, for it was sound first
and last that he cared most for, the musical mastery of the one and
the sentimentality of the other. He was far nearer Verlaine in type.
He had but the one thing to tell of, and that was lost love, and he
told it over and over in his book of verse. His Pierrot of the Minute
was himself, and his Cynara was the ever vanishing vision of his own
insecurity and incapability. He perished for the love of hands. He is
so like someone one knows, whom one wants to talk to tenderly, touch
in a friendly way, and say as little as possible. He comes to one
humanly first, and asks you for your eye to his verse afterward,
something of the "Little boy Lost", in his so ineffectual face, weak
with sweetness and hidden in shyness, covered with irresponsibility,
or lack of power to be responsible.
He was a helpless one, that is certain. He resorted to the
old-fashioned methods of the decadents for maintaining the certain
requisite melancholy apparently necessary to sing a certain way. In
the struggle of that period, he must have seemed like a very clear,
though a very sad singer. There were no lilies or orchids in his
buttonhole, and no strange jewels on his fingers, for you remember, it
was the time of "Monsieur Phocas", and the art of Gustave Moreau. He
was plain and sincere, and pathetic, old-fashioned too in that he was
bohemian, or at least had acquired bohemianism, for I think no
Englishman was ever really bohemian. Dieppe and the docks had gotten
him, and took away the sense of mastery over things that a real poet
of power must somehow have. He was essentially a giver-in. His
neurasthenia was probably the reason for that. It was the age of
absinthe and little taverns, for there was Verlaine and the inimitable
Café d'Harcourt, which, as you saw it just before the war, had the
very something that kept the Master at his drinks all day.
Murger, Rimbaud, Verlaine had done the thing which has lasted so
singularly until now, for there are still echoes of this in the air,
even to the present day. Barmaids are memories, and roseleaves dried
and set in urns, for that matter, too. How far away it all seems, and
they were the substance of poetry then. Sounds were the important
things for Dowson, which is essentially the Swinburne echo.
Significant then, that he worshipped "the viol, the violet, and the
vine" of Poe. There was little else but singing in his verse however.
His love of Horace did less for him than the masters of sound,
excepting that the vision comes in the name "Cynara". But it was all
struggle for Dowson, a battle with the pale lily. It was for this he
clung to cabmen's lounging places. He was looking for places to be out
of the play in. He couldn't have survived for long, and yet there is a
strain of genuine loveliness, the note of pure beauty in the verse of
Dowson. He was poet, and kept to his creed with lover-like tenacity.
He helped close a period that was distinguished all over the world,
the period of the sunflower. Apart from its wildest and most
spectacular genius, it has produced Lionel Johnson with his religious
purity, and Aubrey Beardsley. It was the time of sad and delicate
young men. They all died in boyhood really. These were, I think, with
Dowson the best it offered. We never read Arthur Symons for his power
in verse, he with so much of the rose-tinted afterglow in him, so much
of the old feeling for stage doors and roses thrown from the boxes,
and the dying scent of lingerie. His essays will be a far finer source
of delight for a much longer time, for therein is the best poetry he
had to offer.
Dowson was, let us say not mockingly, the boyish whimperer in song. He
was ineffectual, too much so, to take up the game of laughter for
long. That would have been too strenuous for him, so he had to sit and
weep tears of wordy rain. "Il pleut dans mon coeur" was the famous
touch of his master, it was the loudest strain in him. That was the
lover-strain, and Dowson was the lover dying of love, imaginary love
probably, and saw everywhere something to remind him of what he had
pathetically lost. If there had been a little savage in him, he would
have walked away with what he wanted. He maybe did have a try or two,
but they couldn't have endured, for he wasn't loving a particular
Adelaide. That was the name he gave to love, for it was woman's lips,
and eyes and hands that he cared most for, or at least seemed most to
care.
It was in the vision that crossed his ways in the dark and boisterous
taverns where love finds strange ways for expression, that the
singleness of feeling possessed him. It was among the rougher elements
of dock life that his refinements found their level. Dowson sang and
sang and sang, until he grew old at thirty-three, "worn out by what
was never really life to him". Aged pierrot, gone home to his mother,
the Moon, to bask forever in the twilight of his old and vague
fancies. There might he strum his heart out in the old way, and the
world would never hear, for it has lost the ear for this kind of song.
Perhaps in two hundred years, in other "golden treasuries" there may
appear the songs of Dowson as among the best of those early and late
singers of the nineteenth century. We cannot say now, for it cloys a
little with sweets for us at this time, though it was then the time of
honey and jasmine, and the scent of far away flowers. Pierrot of the
glass, with the hours dripping away in fine, gold rain. That was the
genius of poets like Dowson, and pierrot was the master of them all.
HENRY JAMES ON RUPERT BROOKE
Henry James on Rupert Brooke! Here is certainly a very wide interval,
separated, artist and subject, by the greatest divergence of power,
and one may be even amazed at the contrast involved. He is surely,
James, in all his elaborateness, trying to square the rose and compute
the lily, algebraical advances upon a most simple thesis. Brooke--a
nature so obvious, which had no measure at all for what the sum had
done to him, and for all that about him, or for those stellar
ecstasies which held him bound with fervour as poet, planetary
swimmer, and gifted as well with a fine stroke for the sea, and runner
of all the beautiful earth places about the great seas' edge.
For me, there is heaviness and over-elaboration paramount in this
preface to the Letters from America, excess of byword, a strained
relationship with his subject, but that would of course be Jamesian,
and very naturally, too. It is hardly, this preface, the tribute of
the wise telling of beautiful and "blinding youth", surely more the
treatise of the problemist forging his problem, as the sculptor might;
something too much of metal or stone, too ponderous, too severe let
one say, for its so gracing and brightening theme, something not
springing into bloom, as does the person and personality of the young
subject himself. Only upon occasion does he really come upon the young
man, actual, forgetful of all but him.
There is no question, if the word of those be true who had relation
however slight or intimate with Brooke, that he was an engrossing
theme, and for more than one greater than himself, as certainly he was
for many much less significant than James. It is distinguished from
the young poet's point of view that he was impressed, and that as
person to person he really did see him in a convincing manner, as
might one artist of great repute find himself uncommonly affected by
the young and so living poet with more than a common gift for
creation. It seems to me however that James is not over certain as to
how poetic all things are in substance, yet all the while treating
Brooke coolly and spaciously as an artist should.
I did not know Brooke, and I know nothing of him beyond various photos
showing him one way, quite manly and robust, and I feel sure he was
so, and in another way as neither youth nor man, but something
idyllic, separate and seraph-like, untouched mostly with earthly
experience. These pictures do show that he was, unquestionably, a
bright gust of England, with an almost audible splendour about even
these poor replicas, which make it seem that he did perform the
ascribed miracle, that England really had brought forth of her
brightest and best, only to lay away her golden fruitage in dust upon
the borders of a far and classical sea, with an acute untimeliness.
But respectfully let me say, I think much in these hours of the
incongruity and pathos of excessive celebration. There shall not be
for long, singers enough to sing high songs commensurate with the
delights of those numberless ones "who lived, and sang, and had a
beating heart", those who have sped into the twilight too soon, having
but a brief time to discover if years had bright secrets for them or
clear perspective. There shall always lack the requisite word for them
who have made many a dull morning splendid with faith, they who have
been the human indication immeasurably of the sun's rising, and of the
truth that vision is a thing of reason.
Of Brooke and the other dead poets as well, there has, it seems to me,
been too much of celebration. But of Brooke and his poetry, which is a
far superior product to these really most ordinary "Letters", there is
in these poetic pieces too much of what I want to call "University
Cleavage", an excess of old school painting, too much usage of the
warm image, which, though emotional, is not sensuous enough to express
the real poetic sensuousness, to make the line or the word burn
passionately, too much of the shades of Swinburne still upon the
horizon. Rose and violet of the eighteen ninety hues have for long
been dispensed with, as has the pierrot and his moon. We have in this
time come to like hardier colourings, which are for us more
satisfying, and more poetic. We hardly dare use the hot words of
"Anactoria" in our day. To be sure rose is English, for it has been
for long a very predominant shade on the young face of England, but in
Brooke there is an old age to the fervour, and in spite of the
brilliant youth of the poet, there is an old age in the substance and
really in the treatment as well. We are wanting a fresher intonation
to those images, and expect a new approach, and a newer aspect. It is
not to adhere by means of criticism to the prevailing graveyard
tendency, nor do we want so much of the easy and cheap journalistic
element, as comes so often in the so named "free verse". What is
really wanted is an individual consistency, and a brightness of
imagery which shall be the poet's own by reason of his own personal
attachment, and not simply the variance of the many-in-one poetry of
the day.
It is not enough to write passably, it is only enough when there are
several, or even one, who will give their or his own peculiar contact
with those agencies of the day, the hour, and the moment, who will
find or invent a style best suited to themselves. Attempts at
excessive individualism will never create true individualistic
expression, no affected surprise in personal perversity of image or
metaphor will make a real poet, or real poetry. There must be first
and last of all, a sure ardour, the poet's very own, which will of
itself support obvious, or even slightly detectable, influences. It is
not enough to declaim oneself, or propose continually one's group. The
single utterance is what is necessary, a real freshness of
vocalization which is, so to speak, the singer's own throat. If he be
original in his freshness, we shall be able to single him away from
the sweeping movements of the hour by his very "specialness" in touch,
that pressure of the mind and spirit upon the page, which is his.
We shall translate a poet through his indications and intentions as
well as through his arrivals, and we must condemn no one to fame
beyond his capacity or deserts. We have never the need of extravagant
laud. It is not enough to praise a poet for his personal charm, his
beauty of body and of mind and soul, for these are but beautiful
things at home in a beautiful house. In the case of Brooke, we have
ringing up among hosts of others, James's voice that he was all of
this, but I would not wish to think it was the wish of any real poet
to be "condemned to sociability", merely because he was an eminently
social being, or because he was the exceptionally handsome, among the
many less so; or be condemned to overpraise for what is after all but
an indication to poetic power. "If I should die", is of course a very
lovely sonnet, and it is the true indication of what Brooke might have
been, but it is not the reason to be doomed to find all things
wonderful in him. For in the state of perfection, if one see always
with a lancet eye, we really do accentuate the essence of beauty by a
careful and very direct critical sense, which can and should, when
honorably exercised, show up delicately, the sense of proportion.