vision and above it, _rage_. Of the union of these two Tragedy was born.
And Nietzsche's glorification of this elemental creative force also
responded to a wider movement in philosophy, here chiefly German. His
Dionysiac rage is directly derived from that will in which Schopenhauer
saw the master faculty of man and the hidden secret of the universe; and
the beginning of Schopenhauer's fame, about 1850, coincides with a
general rehabilitation of will as the dominant faculty in the soul and
in the world, at the cost of the methodic orderly processes of
understanding; a movement exhibited in the psychological innovations of
Wundt and Münsterberg, in the growth of the doctrine that what a thing
is is determined by what it _can_; that value is in fact the measure,
and even the meaning, of existence; that will can arm impotence, create
faith, and master disease; and in the call of the colossal will-power
which created the German empire and launched her on the career of
industrial greatness. Nietzsche's Superman is, above all, a being of
colossal and masterful will, and Zarathustra, the prophet of
superhumanity, is only an incarnation of the will that for Schopenhauer
moved the world. The moment at which the prestige of will began
definitely to overcome that of reasoning is marked, as Aliotta has
pointed out, by the appearance of James's _Will to Believe_, just when
agnosticism seemed triumphant.
Nietzsche and Bergson thus, with all their obvious and immense
divergences, concurred in this respect, important from our present point
of view, that their influence tended to transfer authority from the
philosophic reason to those 'irrational' elements of mind which reach
their highest intensity in the vision and 'rage' of the poet. James's
vindication of drunken exaltation as a source of religious insight was
not the least symptomatic passage of his great book. And both concurred,
however remote their methods or their speech, in conceiving reality as
creation, creation in which we take part--a conception which again, in
the hands of the constructive religious thinker, led directly to the
type of faith announced in that last--the Jamesian--'Variety' of
religious experience, which represents us as indispensable
fellow-workers and allies of a growing and striving God.
2. _The New Freedom_
No reader of the poetry of our time can mistake the kinship of its
prevailing temper with that which lies at the root of these
philosophies. Without trying to fit its infinite variety to any finite
formula, we may yet venture to find in it, as Mr. McDowall has found in
our Georgian poetry in particular, a characteristic union of grip and
detachment; of intense and eager grasp upon actuality as it breaks upon
us in the successive moments of the stream of time, and yet an inner
independence of it, a refusal to be obsessed by its sanctions and
authorities, a tacit assumption that everything, by whatever length of
tradition consecrated, must come before the bar of the new century to be
judged by its new mind. 'Youth is knocking at the door,' as it is said
of Hilda in the symbolical _Master Builder_, and doubtless in every
generation the philistines or Victorians in possession have had occasion
to make that remark. The difference in our time is rather that youth
comes in without knocking, and that instead of having to work slowly up
to final dominance against the inertia of an established literary
household, it has spontaneously, like Hilda Wrangel, taken possession of
the home, rinding criticism boundlessly eulogistic, the public
inexhaustibly responsive, and philosophy interpreting the universe, as
we have seen, precisely in sympathy with its own naïve intuitions. No
wonder that youth at twenty is writing its autobiography or having its
biography written, and that at twenty-five it makes a show of laying
down the pen, like Max Beerbaum, with the gesture of one rising sated
from the feast of life: 'I shall write no more.'
The fact that youth finds itself thus at home in the world explains the
difference in temper between the new poets of freedom and the old. The
wild or wistful cry of Shelley for an ideal state emancipated from pain
and death is as remote from their poetry as his spiritual anarchy from
their politics; they can dream and see visions, in Scott's phrase, 'like
any one going', but their feet are on the solid ground of actuality and
citizenship, and the actuality comes into and colours their poetry no
less than their vision. When Mr. Drinkwater looks out of his 'town
window' he dreams of the crocus flaming gold in far-off Warwick woods;
but he does not repudiate the drab inglorious street nor the tramway
ringing and moaning over the cobbles, and they come into his verse. And
I find it significant of the whole temper of the new poetry to ordinary
life no less than that of ordinary men and women to the new poetry,
that he has won a singularly intimate relationship with a great
industrial community. He has not fared like his carver in stone. But
then the eagles of his carving, though capable of rising, like
Shelley's, to the sun, are the Cromwells and Lincolns who themselves
brought the eagle's valour and undimmed eye into the stress and turmoil
of affairs.
No doubt a fiercer note of revolt may be heard at times in the poetry of
contemporary France, and that precisely where devotion to some parts of
the heritage of the past is most impassioned. The iconoclastic scorn of
youth's idealism for the effeteness of the 'old hunkers', as Whitman
called them, has rarely rung out more sharply than in the closing
stanzas of Claudel's great Palm Sunday ode. All the pomp and splendour
of bishops and cardinals is idle while victory yet is in suspense: that
must be won by youth in arms.
'To-morrow the candles and the dais and the bishop with his clergy
coped and gold embossed,
But to-day the shout like thunder of an equal, unofficered host
Who, led and kindled by the flag alone,
With one sole spirit swollen, and on one sole thought intent,
Are become one cry like the crash of walls shattered and gates rent:
'Hosanna unto David's son!'
Needless the haughty steeds marble-sculptured, or triumphal arches, or
chariots and four,
Needless the flags and the caparisons, the moving pyramids and towers,
and cars that thunder and roar,--
'Tis but an ass whereon sits Christ;
For to make an end of the nightmare built by the pedants and the
pharisees,
To get home to reality across the gulf of mendacities,
The first she-ass he saw sufficed!
Eternal youth is master, the hideous gang of old men is done with, we
Stand here like children, fanned by the breath of the things to be,
But victory we will have to-day!
Afterwards the corn that like gold gives return, afterwards the gold
that like corn is faithful and will bear,
The fruit we have henceforth only to gather, the land we have
henceforth only to share,
But victory we will have to-day!'
In the same spirit Charles Péguy--like Claudel, be it noted, a student
of Bergson at the École Normale--found his ideal in the great story of
the young girl of Domremy who saved France when all the pomp and wisdom
of generals had broken down. And in our own poetry has not Mr. Bottomley
rewritten the Lear story, with the focus of power and interest
transferred from the old king--left with not an inch of king in him--to
a glorious young Artemis-Goneril?
But among our English Georgians this tense iconoclastic note is rare.
Their detachment from what they repudiate is not fanatical or ascetic;
it is conveyed less in invective than in paradox and irony; their temper
is not that which flies to the wilderness and dresses in camel hair, but
of mariners putting out to the unknown and bidding a not unfriendly
good-bye at the shore. The temper of adventure is deeply ingrained in
the new romance as in the old; the very word adventure is saturated with
a sentiment very congenial to us both for better and worse; it quickens
the hero in us and flatters the devil-may-care.
In its simplest form the temper of adventure has given us the profusion
of pleasant verses which we know as the poetry of 'vagabondage' and 'the
open road'. The point is too familiar to be dwelt on, and has been
admirably illustrated and discussed by Mr. McDowall. George Borrow,
prince of vagabonds, Stevenson, the 'Ariel', with his 'Vagabond-song'--
'All I seek the heaven above,
And the road below me',
and a few less vocal swallows, anticipated the more sustained flights
and melodies of to-day, while Borrow's wonderful company of vagabond
heroes and heroines is similarly premonitory of the alluring gipsies and
circus-clowns of our Georgian poetry. Sometimes a traditional motive is
creatively transformed; as when Father Time, the solemn shadow with
admonitory hour-glass, appears in Mr. Hodgson's poem as an old gipsy
pitching his caravan 'only a moment and off once again'.
Elsewhere a deeper note is sounded. It is not for nothing that Jeanne
d'Arc is the saint of French Catholic democracy, or that Péguy, her
poet, calls the Incarnation the 'sublime adventure of God's Son'. That
last adventure of the Dantesque Ulysses beyond the sunset thrills us
to-day more than the Odyssean tale of his triumphant home-return, and
D'Annunzio, greatly daring, takes it as the symbol of his own
adventurous life. Francis Thompson's most famous poem, too, represents
the divine effort to save the erring soul under the image of the hound's
eager chase of a quarry which may escape; while Yeats hears God 'blowing
his lonely horn' along the moonlit faery glades of Erin. And Meredith,
who so often profoundly voiced the spirit of the time in which only his
ripe old age was passed, struck this note in his sublime verses on
revolutionary France--
'soaring France
That divinely shook the dead
From living man; that stretched ahead
Her resolute forefinger straight
And marched toward the gloomy gate
Of Earth's Untried.'
It is needless to dwell upon the affinity between this temper of
adventure in poetry and the teaching of Bergson. That the link is not
wholly fortuitous is shown by the interesting _Art Poétique_ (1903) of
his quondam pupil, Claudel, a little treatise pervaded by the idea of
Creative-evolution.
It was natural in such a time to assume that any living art of poetry
must itself be new, and in fact the years immediately before and after
the turn of the century are crowded with announcements of 'new'
movements in art of every kind. Beside Claudel's _Art Poétique_ we have
in England the _New Aestheticism_ of Grant Allen; in Germany the 'new
principle' in verse of Arno Holz. And here again the English innovators
are distinguished by a good-humoured gaiety, if also by a slighter build
of thought, from the French or Nietzschean 'revaluers'. Rupert Brooke
delightfully parodies the exquisite hesitances and faltering half-tones
of Pater's cloistral prose; and Mr. Chesterton pleasantly mocks at the
set melancholy of the aggressive Decadence in which he himself grew up:
'Science announced nonentity, and art adored decay,
The world was old and ended, but you and I were gay.'
Like their predecessors in the earlier Romantic school, the new
adventurers have notoriously experimented with poetic _form_. France,
the home of the most rigid and meticulous metrical tradition, had
already led the way in substituting for the strictly measured verse the
more loosely organized harmonies of rhythmical prose, bound together,
and indeed made recognizable as verse, in any sense, solely by the
rhyme. With the Symbolists 'free verse' was an attempt to capture finer
modulations of music than the rigid frame of metre allowed. With their
successors it had rather the value of a plastic medium in which every
variety of matter and of mood could be faithfully expressed. But whether
called verse or not, the vast rushing modulations of rhythmic music in
the great pieces of Claudel and others have a magnificence not to be
denied. And the less explicitly poetic form permits matter which would
jar on the poetic instinct if conveyed through a metrical form to be
taken up as it were in this larger and looser stride.
In Germany, on the other hand, the rhythmic emancipation of Whitman was
carried out, in the school of Arno Holz, with a revolutionary audacity
beyond the example even of Claudel. Holz states with great clearness and
trenchancy what he calls his 'new principle of lyric'; one which
'abandons all verbal music as an aim, and is borne solely by a rhythm
made vital by the thought struggling through it to expression'. Rhyme
and strophe are given up, only rhythm remains.
Of our Georgian poetry, it must suffice to note that here, too, the
temper of adventure in form is rife. But it shows itself,
characteristically, less in revolutionary innovation than in attempts to
elicit new and strange effects from traditional measures by deploying to
the utmost, and in bold and extreme combinations, their traditional
resources and variations, as in the blank verse of Mr. Abercrombie and
Mr. Bottomley. This, and much beside in Georgian verse, has moods and
moments of rare beauty. But, on the whole, verse-form is the region of
poetic art in which Georgian poetry as a whole is least secure.
3. _The New Realism_
We see then how deeply rooted this new freedom is in the passion for
actuality; not the dream but the waking and alert experience throbs and
pulses in it. We have now to look more closely into this other aspect of
it. Realism is a hard-worked term, but it may be taken to imply that the
overflowing vitality of which poetry is one expression fastens with
peculiar eagerness upon the visible and tangible world about us and
seeks to convey that zest in words. Our poets not only do not scorn the
earth to lose themselves in the sky; they are positive friends of the
matter-of-fact, and that not in spite of poetry, but for poetry's sake;
and Pegasus flies more freely because 'things' are 'in the saddle' along
with the poet.
That this matter-of-factness is loved by poets, for poetry's sake, marks
it off once for all from the photographic or 'plain' realism of Crabbe.
But it is also clearly distinct from the no less poetic realism of
Wordsworth. Wordsworth's mind is conservative and traditional; his
inspiration is static; he glorifies the primrose on the river brink by
seeing its transience in the light of something far more deeply
interfused which does not change nor pass away. Romance, in a high
sense, lies about his greatest poetry. But it is a romance rooted in
memory, not in hope--the 'glory of the grass and splendour of the
flower' which he had seen in childhood and imaginatively re-created in
maturity; a romance which change, and especially the intrusions of
industrial man, dispelled and destroyed. Whereas the romance of our new
realism rests, in good part, precisely in the sense that the _thing_ so
vividly gripped is not or need not be permanent, may turn into something
else, has only a tenancy, not a freehold, in its conditions of space and
time, a 'toss-up' hold upon existence, as it were, full of the zest of
adventurous insecurity. A pessimistic philosophy would dissipate this
romance, or strip it of all but the mournful poetry of doom. Mr.
Chesterton glorifies the dust which may become a flower or a face,
against the Reverend Peter Bell for whom dust is dust and no more, and
Hamlet who only remembers that it once was Caesar. If our realism is
buoyant, if it had at once the absorbed and the open mind, this is, in
large part, in virtue of the temper which finds reality a perpetual
creation. Every moment is precious and significant, for it comes with
the burden and meaning of something that has never completely been
before; and goes by only to give place to another moment equally curious
and new. This is the deeper ground of our present fashion of paradox;
what Mr. Chesterton, its apostle, means when he says that 'the great
romance is reality'; for paradox, the unexpected, is, in a reality so
framed, the bare and sober truth. Hence the frequency, in our new
poetry, of pieces founded deliberately upon, as Mr. McDowall points out,
paradox: the breaking in of some utter surprise upon a humdrum society,
as in Mr. de la Mare's _Three Jolly Farmers_, or Mr. Abercrombie's _End
of the World_, or Mr. Munro's _Strange Meetings_.
Moreover, in this incessantly created reality we are ourselves
incessantly creative. That may seem to follow as a matter of course; but
it corresponds with the most radical of the distinctions between our
realism and that of Wordsworth. When Mr. Wells tells us that his most
comprehensive belief about the universe is that every part of it is
ultimately important, he is not expressing a mystic pantheism which
feels every part to be divine, but a generous pragmatism which holds
that every part _works_. The idea of shaping and adapting will, of
energy in industry, of mere routine practicality in office or household,
is no longer tabooed, or shyly evaded; not because of any theoretic
exaltation of labour or consecration of the commonplace, but because
merely to use things, to make them fulfil our purposes, to bring them
into touch with our activities, itself throws a kind of halo over even
very humble and homely members of the 'divine democracy of things'.
Rupert Brooke draws up a famous catalogue of the things of which he was
a 'great lover'. He loved them, he says, simply _as being_. And no
doubt, the simple sensations of colour, touch, or smell counted for
much. But compare them with the things that Keats, a yet greater lover
of sensations, loved. You feel in Brooke's list that he liked doing
things as well as feasting his passive senses; these 'plates', 'holes in
the ground,' 'washen stones,' the cold graveness of iron, and so forth.
One detects in the list the Brooke who, as a boy, went about with a book
of poems in one hand and a cricket-ball in the other, and whose left
hand well knew what his right hand did.[16] That takes us far from the
dream of eternal beauty, which a Greek urn or a nightingale's song
brought to Keats, and the fatal word 'forlorn', bringing back the light
of common day, dispelled. The old ethical and aesthetic canons are
submerged in a passion for life which finds a good beyond good and evil,
and a beauty born of ugliness more vital than beauty's self. 'The worth
of a drama is measured', said D'Annunzio, 'by its fullness of life', and
the formula explains, if it does not justify, those tropical gardens,
rank with the gross blooms of 'superhuman' eroticism and ferocity, to
which he latterly gave that name. And we know how Maeterlinck has
emerged from the mystic dreams and silences of his recluse chamber to
unfold the dramatic pugnacities of Birds and Bees.
Even the downright foulness and ugliness which some people find so
puzzling in poets with an acute delight in beauty, like Mr. Masefield,
come into it not from any aesthetic obtuseness, but because these
uglinesses are full of the zest of drama, of things being done or made,
of life being lived. When Masefield sounded his challenge to the old
aesthetics:
'Others may sing of the wine and the wealth and the mirth,
Mine be the dirt and the dross, the dust and scum of the earth',
he knew well, as _The Everlasting Mercy_ and _The Widow of Bye Street_
showed, that dirt and dross, if wrought into tragedy, can win a higher
beauty than the harmonies of idyll. Even the hideous elder women in Mr.
Bottomley's _Lear's Wife_, or his Regan--an ill-conditioned girl,
sidling among the 'sweaty, half-clad cook-maids' after pig-killing,
'smeary and hot as they', participate in this beauty and energy of
doing.
Poetry, in these cases, wins perhaps at most a Pyrrhic victory over
reluctant matter. It is otherwise with the second of the great Belgian
poets.
In the work of Verhaeren, the modern industrial city, with its spreading
tentacles of devouring grime and squalor, its clanging factories, its
teeming bazaars and warehouses, and all its thronging human population,
is taken up triumphantly into poetry. Verhaeren is the poet of
'tumultuous forces', whether they appear in the roar and clash of 'that
furnace we call existence', or in the heroic struggles of the Flemish
nation for freedom. And he exhibits these surging forces in a style
itself full of tumultuous power, Germanic rather than French in its
violent and stormy splendour, and using the chartered licence of the
French 'free verse' itself with more emphasis than subtlety.
4. _The Cult of Force_
In Verhaeren, indeed, we are conscious of passing into the presence of
power more elemental and unrestrained than the civil refinement of our
Georgians, at their wildest, allows us to suspect. The tragic and heroic
history of his people, and their robust art, the art of Rembrandt, and
of Teniers, vibrates in the Flemish poet. He has much of the temperament
of Nietzsche, and if not evidently swayed by his ideas, or even aware of
them, and with a generous faith in humanity which Nietzsche never knew,
he thinks and imagines with a kindred joy in violence:
'I love man and the world, and I adore the force
Which my force gives and takes from man and the universe.'
And it is no considerable step from him to the poets who in this third
phase of our period have unequivocally exulted in power and burnt
incense or offered sacrifice before the altar of the strong man. The joy
in creation which, we saw, gives its romance to so much of the realism
of our time, now appears accentuated in the fiercer romance of conflict
and overthrow. Thanks largely to Nietzsche, this romance acquired the
status of an authoritative philosophy--even, in his own country, that of
an ethical orthodoxy.
The German people was doubtless less deeply and universally imbued with
this faith than our war-prejudice assumes. But phenomena such as the
enormous success of a cheap exposition of it, _Rembrandt als Erzieher_
(1890) by a fervent Bismarckian, and of the comic journal
_Simplicissimus_ (founded 1895) devoted to systematic ridicule of the
old-fashioned German virtues of tenderness and sympathy, indicated a
current of formidable power and compass, which was soon to master all
the other affluents of the national stream.
But older, and in part foreign, influences concurred to colour and
qualify, while they sustained, the Nietzschean influence,--the daemonic
power of Carlyle, the iron intensity and masterful reticence of Ibsen.
This was the case especially, as is well known, in the drama. Gerhardt
Hauptmann, who painted the tragedy of the self-emancipated superman,--as
Mr. Shaw about the same time showed us his self-achieved
apotheosis,--was no doubt the most commanding (as Mr. Shaw was the most
original) figure in the European drama of the early century.
In poetry, the contributory forces were still more subtly mingled, and
the Nietzschean spirit, which blows where it listeth, often touched men
wholly alien from Nietzsche in cast of genius and sometimes stoutly
hostile to him. Several of the most illustrious were not Germans at all.
Among the younger men who resist, while they betray, his spell, is the
most considerable lyric poet of the present generation in Germany.
Richard Dehmel's vehement inspiration from the outset provoked
comparison with Nietzsche, which he warmly resented.