unrestraint of his early erotics the example of the French poet's
_fureur d'aimer_. But Dehmel's more strongly-built nature, and perhaps
the downright vigour of the German language, broke through the tenuities
of _la nuance_. It was not the subtle artistry of the Symbolists, but
the ethical and intellectual force of the German character, which
finally drew into a less anarchic channel the vehement energy of Dehmel.
Nietzsche had imagined an ethic of superhuman will 'beyond good and
evil'. The poet, replied Dehmel, had indeed to know the passion which
transcends good and evil, but he had to know no less the good and evil
themselves of the world in and by which common men live. And if he can
cry with the egoism of lawless passion, in the _Erlösungen_, 'I will
fathom all pleasure to the deepest depths of thirst, ... Resign not
pleasure, it waters power',--he can add, in the true spirit of Goethe
and of the higher mind of Germany, 'Yet since it also makes slack, turn
it into the stuff of duty!'
If Nietzsche provoked into antagonism the sounder elements in Dehmel, he
was largely responsible for destroying such sanity as the amazing genius
of Gabriele D'Annunzio had ever possessed. In D'Annunzio the sensuality
of a Sybarite and the eroticism of a Faun go along with a Roman
tenacity and hardness of nerve. The author of novels which, with all
their luxurious splendour, can only be called hothouses of morbid
sentiment, has become the apostle of Italian imperialism, and more than
any other single man provoked Italy to throw herself into the great
adventure of the War. Unapproached in popularity by any other Italian
man of letters, D'Annunzio discovered Nietzsche, and hailed him--a great
concession--as an equal. When Nietzsche died, in 1900, D'Annunzio
indicted a lofty memorial ode to the Titanic Barbarian who set up once
more the serene gods of Hellas over the vast portals of the Future.
Nietzsche indeed let loose all the Titan, and all consequently that was
least Hellenic, in the fertile genius of the Italian; his wonderful
instinct for beauty, his inexhaustible resources of style are employed
in creating orgies of superhuman valour, lust, and cruelty like some of
his later dramas, and hymns intoxicated with the passion for Power, like
the splendid Ode in which the City of the Seven Hills is prophetically
seen once more the mistress of the world, loosing the knot of all the
problems of humanity. His poetic autobiography, the first _Laude_
(1901)--counterpart of Wordsworth's _Prelude_ and its very
antipodes--culminates in a prayer 900 lines long to Hermes, god of the
energy which precipitates itself on life and makes it pregnant with
invention and discovery, of the iron will 'which chews care as a laurel
leaf'--the god of the Superman. And so he discovers the muse of the
Superman, the Muse of Energy, a tenth Muse whose first poet he modestly
disclaims to be, if he may only be, as he would have us interpret his
name, her Announcer.
If D'Annunzio emulates Nietzsche, the two great militant poets of
Catholic France would have scorned the comparison. Charles Péguy's brief
career was shaped from his first entrance, poor and of peasant birth, at
a Paris Lycée, to his heroic death in the field, September 1914, by a
daemonic force of character. His heroine, glorified in his first book,
was Jeanne d'Arc, who attempted the impossible, and achieved it. In
writing, his principle--shocking to French literary tradition--was to
speak the brutal truth _brutalement_. As a poet he stood in the direct
lineage of Corneille, whose _Polyeucte_ he thought the greatest of the
world's tragedies. As a man, he embodied with naïve intensity the
unsurpassed inborn heroism of the French race.
Claudel, even more remote as a thinker from Nietzsche than Péguy,
exhibits a kindred temper in the ingrained violence of his art. His
stroke is vehement and peremptory; he is an absolutist in style as in
creed. It is the style of one who apprehends the visible world with an
intensity as of passionate embrace, such as the young Browning expresses
in _Pauline_. 'I would fain have seen everything,' he cries, 'possessed
and made it my own, not with eyes and senses only, but with mind and
spirit.' And after he was converted he saw and painted supernatural
things with the same carnal and robust incisiveness. The half-lights of
Symbolist mysticism are remote from his hard glare. As a dramatist he
drew upon and exaggerated that which in Aeschylus and Shakespeare seems
to the countrymen of Racine nearest to the limit of the terrible and the
brutal permissible in art: a princess nailed by the hands like a
sparrow-hawk to a pine by a brutal peasant; the daughter of a noble
house submitting to a loathed marriage with a foul-mouthed plebeian in
order to save the pope.
And if we look, finally, for corresponding phenomena at home, we find
them surely in the masculine, militant, and in the French sense _brutal_
poetry of W.E. Henley and Rudyard Kipling. If any modern poets have
conceived life in terms of will, and penetrated their verse with that
faith, it is the author of 'I am the Captain of my Soul', the 'Book of
the Sword', and 'London Voluntaries', friend and subject of the great
kindred-minded sculptor Rodin, the poet over whose grave in St. Paul's
George Wyndham found the right word when he said--marking him off from
the great contemplative, listening poets of the past--'His music was not
the still sad music of humanity; it was never still, rarely sad, always
intrepid.' And we know how Kipling, after sanctioning the mischievous
superstition that 'East and West can never meet', refuted it by
producing his own 'two strong men'.
5. _The New Idealism_
(1) _Nationality_
We have now seen something of that power, at once of grip and of
detachment with which the dominant poetry of this century faces what it
thinks of as the adventure of experience, its plunge into the
ever-moving and ever-changing stream of life. How then, it remains to
ask, has it dealt with those ideal aspirations and beliefs which one may
live intensely and ignore, which in one sense stand 'above the battle',
but for which men have lived and died. With a generation which holds so
lightly by tradition, which revises and revalues all accepted values,
these aspirations and beliefs might well drop out of its poetry. On the
other hand, these same aspirations and beliefs might overcome the
indifference to tradition by ceasing to be merely traditional, by being
immersed and steeped in that moving stream of life, and interwoven with
the creative energies of men. The inherited faiths were put to this
dilemma, either to become intimately alive and creative in poetry or to
be of no concern for it. Some of them failed in the test. England has
still devotees of Protestantism, but Protestant religion has hardly
inspired noble poetry since Milton. Nationality, on the other hand, has
during the last century inspired finer poetry than at any time since the
sixteenth, and that because it has been brought down from the region of
political abstractions and ideologies into intimate union with heart and
brain, imagination and sense. This is true also of Catholicism and of
Socialism, and, if fitfully and uncertainly yet, of the ideal of
international fraternity, of humanity. And to all these ideals, to all
ideals, came finally the terrific, the overwhelming test of the War,--a
searching, annihilating, purifying flame, in which some shrivelled away,
some were stripped of the illusive glitter that concealed their mass of
alloy, and some, purged of their baser constituents, shone out with a
lustre unapproached before.
What is the distinctive note of this new poetry of nationality? And for
the moment I speak of the years before the War. May we not say that in
it the ideal of country is saturated with that imaginative grip of
reality in all its concrete energy and vivacity which I have called the
new realism? The nation is no abstraction, whether it be called
Britannia, or _Deutschland über Alles_. It is seen, and felt; seen in
its cities as well as in its mountains, in the workers who have made it,
as well as in the heroes who have defended it; in its roaring forges as
well as in its idyllic woodlands and its tales of battles long ago; and
all these not as separate strands in a woven pattern, but as waters of
different origin and hue pouring along together in the same great
stream.
Émile Verhaeren, six years before the invasion, had seen and felt his
country, living body and living soul, with an intensity which made it
seem unimaginable that she should be permanently subdued. He well called
his book _Toute la Flandre_, for all Flanders is there. Old
Flanders,--Artevelde and Charles Téméraire--whose soul was a forest of
huge trees and dark thickets,
'A wilderness of crossing ways below,
But eagles, over, soaring to the sun,'--
Van Eyck and Rubens--'a thunder of colossal memories'; then the great
cities, with their belfries and their foundries, and their warehouses
and laboratories, their antique customs and modern ambitions; and the
rivers, the homely familiar Lys, where the women wash the whitest of
linen, and the mighty Scheldt, the Escaut, the 'hero sombre, violent and
magnificent', 'savage and beautiful Escaut', whose companionship had
moulded and made the poet, whose rhythms had begotten his music and his
best ideas[17].
None of our English poets have rendered England in poetry with the same
lyric intensity in its whole compass of time and space, calling up into
light and music all her teeming centuries and peopled provinces. Yet the
present generation has in some respects made a nearer approach to such
achievement than its predecessors. A century of growing historic
consciousness has not passed over us in vain; and if any generic
distinction is to be found between our recent, often penetrating and
beautiful, poetry of the English countryside and the Nature description
of Wordsworth or of Ruskin, it is in the ground-tone of passion and
memory that pervades it for England herself. Wordsworth wrote
magnificently of England threatened with invasion, and magnificently of
the Lake Country, Nature's beloved haunt. But the War sonnets and the
Lake and mountain poetry come from distinct strains in his genius,
which our criticism may bring into relation, but our feeling insists on
keeping apart. His Grasmere is a province of Nature--her favoured
province--rather than of England; it is in the eye of Nature that the
old Cumberland beggar lives and dies; England only provides the
obnoxious workhouses to which these destitute vagrants were henceforth
to be consigned. Is it not this that divides our modern local poetry
from his? Mr. Belloc's Sussex is tenderly loved for itself; yet behind
its great hills and its old-world harbours lies the half-mystic presence
of historic England. And in Edward Thomas's wonderful old Wiltshireman,
Lob, worthy I think to be named with the Cumberland Beggar,
'An old man's face, by life and weather cut
And coloured,--rough, brown, sweet as any nut,--
A land face, sea-blue eyed,'--
you read the whole lineage of sterling English yeomen and woodlanders
from whom Lob springs.
This note is indeed relatively absent from the work of the venerable
master who has made 'Wessex' the most vividly realized of all English
provinces to-day, and whose prose Egdon Heath may well be put at the
head of all the descriptive poetry of our time. But Mr. Hardy, in this
respect, belongs to an earlier generation than that into which he
happily survives.
Sometimes this feeling is given in a single intense concentrated touch.
When Rupert Brooke tells us of
'Some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,'
do we not feel that the solidarity of England with the English folk and
of the English folk with the English soil, is burnt into our
imaginations in a new and distinctive way?
But the poetry of shires and provinces reacts too upon the poetry of
nationality. It infuses something of the more instinctive and
rudimentary attachments from which it springs into a passion peculiarly
exposed to the contagion of rhetoric and interest. Some of the most
strident voices among living nationalist poets have found an unexpected
note of tenderness when they sang their home province. Mr. Kipling
charms us when he tells, in his close-knit verse, of the 'wooded, dim,
Blue goodness of the Weald'. And the more strident notes of D'Annunzio's
patriotism are also assuaged by the tenderness and depth of his home
feeling. We read with some apprehension his dedication of _La Nave_ to
the god of seas:
'O Lord, who bringest forth and dost efface
The ocean-ruling Nations, race by race,
It is this living People, by Thy grace
Who on the sea
Shall magnify Thy name, who on the sea
Shall glorify Thy name, who on the sea
With myrrh and blood shall sacrifice to Thee
At the altar-prow,
Of all earth's oceans make our sea, O Thou!
Amen!
But he dedicated a noble drama, the _Figlia d'Iorio_, in a different
tone, 'To the land of the Abruzzi, to my Mother, to my Sisters, to my
brother in exile, to my father in his grave, to all my dead and all my
race in the mountains and by the sea, I dedicate this song of the
ancient blood.'
(2) _Democracy_
The growth of democratic as of national feeling during the later century
naturally produced a plentiful harvest of eloquent utterance in verse.
With this, merely as such, I am not here concerned, even though it be
as fine as the Socialist songs of William Morris or Edward Carpenter.
But the Catholic Socialism of Charles Péguy,--itself an original and,
for most of his contemporaries, a bewildering combination--struck out a
no less original poetry,--a poetry of solidarity. Péguy's Socialism,
like his Catholicism, was single-souled; he ignored that behind the one
was a Party, and behind the other a Church. It was his bitterest regret
that a vast part of humanity was removed beyond the pale of fellowship
by eternal damnation. It was his sublimest thought that the solidarity
of man includes the damned. In his first version of the Jeanne d'Arc
mystery, already referred to, he tells how Jesus, crucified,
Saw not his Mother in tears at the cross-foot
Below him, saw not Magdalen nor John,
But wept, dying, only for Judas' death.
The Saviour loved this Judas, and though utterly
He gave himself, he knew he could not save him.
It was the dogma of damnation which for long kept Péguy out of its fold,
that barbarous mixture of life and death, he called it, which no man
will accept who has won the spirit of collective humanity. But he
revolted not because he was tolerant of evil; on the contrary to damn
sins was for him a weak and unsocial solution; evil had not to be damned
but to be fought down. Whether this vision of Christ weeping because he
could not save Judas was un-Christian, or more Christian than
Christianity itself, we need not discuss here; but I am sure that the
spirit of a Catholic democracy as transfigured in the mind of a great
poet could not be more nobly rendered.
(3) _Catholicism_
But Péguy's powerful personality set its own stamp upon whatever he
believed, and though a close friend of Jaurès, he was a Socialist who
rejected almost all the ideas of the Socialist school. As little was
his Catholicism to the mind of the Catholic authorities. And his
Catholic poetry is sharply marked off from most of the poetry that
burgeoned under the stimulus of the remarkable revival of Catholic ideas
in twentieth-century France. I say of Catholic ideas, for sceptical
poets like Rémy de Gourmont played delicately with the symbols of
Catholic worship, made 'Litanies' of roses, and offered prayers to
Jeanne d'Arc, walking dreamily in the procession of 'Women Saints of
Paradise', to 'fill our hearts with anger'.[18] The Catholic adoration
of women-saints is one of the springs of modern poetry. At the close of
the century of Wordsworth and Shelley, the tender Nature-worship of
Francis of Assisi contributed not less to the recovered power of
Catholic ideas in poetry, and this chiefly in the person of two poets,
in France and in England, both of whom played half-mystically with the
symbolism of their names, Francis Thompson and Francis Jammes. The
child-like naïvete of S. Francis is more delicately reflected in Jammes,
a Catholic W.H. Davies, who casts the idyllic light of Biblical pastoral
over modern farm life, and prays to 'his friends, the Asses' to go with
him to Paradise, 'For there is no hell in the land of the Bon Dieu.'
But the most powerful creative imagination to-day in the service of
Catholic ideas is certainly Paul Claudel. I pass by here the series of
dramas, where a Catholic inspiration as fervent as Calderon's is
enforced with Elizabethan technique and Elizabethan violence of terror,
cruelty, and pity.[19] From the ferocious beauty of _L'Ôtage_ turn
rather to the intense spiritual hush before the altar of some great
French church at noon, where the poet, not long after the first
decisive check of the invaders on the Marne, finds himself alone, before
the shrine of Marie. Here too, his devotion finds a speech not borrowed
from the devout or from their poetry:
'It is noon. I see the Church is open. I must enter.
Mother of Jesus Christ, I do not come to pray.
I have nothing to offer and nothing to ask.
I come only, Mother, to gaze at you.
To gaze at you, to weep for happiness, to know
That I am your son and that you are there.
Nothing at all but for a moment when all is still,
Noon! to be with you, Marie, in this place where you are.
To say nothing, to gaze upon your face,
To let the heart sing in its own speech.'
There the nationalist passion of Claudel animates his Catholic religion,
yet does not break through its confines. But sometimes the strain of
suffering and ruin is too intense for Christian submission, and he takes
his God to task truculently for not doing his part in the contract; we
are his partner in running the world, and see, he is asleep!
'There is a great alliance, willy-nilly, between us henceforth, there
is this bread that with no trembling hand
We have offered you, this wine that we have poured anew,
Our tears that you have gathered, our brothers that you share with us,
leaving the seed in the earth,
There is this living sacrifice of which we satisfy each day's demand,
This chalice we have drunk with you!'
Yet the devout passion emerges again, with notes of piercing pathos:
'Lord, who hast promised us for one glass of water a boundless sea,
Who knows if Thou art not thirsty too?
And that this blood, which is all we have, will quench that thirst
in Thee,
We know, for Thou hast told us so.
If indeed there is a spring in us, well, that is what is to be shown,
If this wine of ours is red,
If our blood has virtue, as Thou sayest, how can it be known
Otherwise than by being shed?'
(4) _Effects of the War upon Poetry_
Thus could the great Catholic poet sing under pressure of the supreme
national crisis of his country. Poetry at such times may become a great
national instrument--a trumpet whence Milton or Wordsworth, Arndt or
Whitman, blow soul-animating strains. The war of 1914 was for all the
belligerent peoples far more than a stupendous military event. It
shattered the patterns of our established mentality, and compelled us to
seek new adjustments and support in the chaotically disorganized world.
The psychical upheaval was most violent in the English-speaking peoples,
where the military shock was least direct; for here a nation of
civilians embraced suddenly the new and amazing experience of battle.
Here too, the imaginatively sensitive minds who interpret life through
poetry, and most of all the youngest and freshest among them, themselves
shared in the glories and the throes of the fight as hardly one of the
signers of our most stirring battle poetry had ever done before. How did
this new and amazing experience react upon their poetry? This, our final
question, is perhaps the crucial one in considering the tendencies of
recent European poetry.
In the first place it enormously stimulated and quickened what was
deepest and strongest in the energies and qualities which had been
apparent in our latter day poetry before. They had sought to clasp life,
to live, not merely to contemplate, experience; and here indeed was
life, and death, and both to be embraced. Here was adventure indeed, but
one whose grimness made romance cheap, so that in this war-poetry, for
the first time in history, the romance and glamour of war, the pomp and
circumstance of military convention, fall entirely away, and the
bitterest scorn of these soldier-poets is bestowed not on the enemy, but
on those contemplators who disguised its realities with the camouflage
of the pulpit and the editorial arm-chair. Turn, I will not say from
Campbell or from Tennyson, but from Rudyard Kipling or Sir H. Newbolt,
to Siegfried Sassoon, and you feel that you have got away from a
literary convention, whether conveyed in the manners of the barrack-room
or of the public-school, to something intolerably true, and which holds
the poet in so fierce a grip that his song is a cry.
But if the war has brought our poets face to face with intense kinds of
real experience, which they have fearlessly grasped and rendered, its
grim obsession has not made them cynical, or clogged the wings of their
faith and their hope. I will not ask how the war has affected the
idealism of others, whether it has left the nationalism of our press or
the religion of our pulpits purer or more gross than it found them. But
of our poetry at least the latter cannot be said. In Rupert Brooke the
inspiration of the call obliterated the last trace of dilettante youth's
pretensions, and he encountered darkness like a bride, and greeted the
unseen death not with a cheer as a peril to be boldly faced, but as a
great consummation, the supreme safety. How his poetry would have
reacted to the actual experience of war we can only guess. But in
others, his friends and comrades, the fierce immersion in the welter of
ruin and pain and filth and horror and death brought only a more superb
faith in the power of man's soul to rise above the hideous obsession of
his own devilries, to retain the vision of beauty through the riot of
foul things, of love through the tumult of hatreds, of life through the
infinity of death. True this was not a new power: poetry to be poetry
must always in some measure possess it. What was individual to the poets
was that this power of mastering actuality went along in them with the
fierce and eager immersion in it; the thrill of breathing the
'calm and serene air
Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot
Which men call earth,'
with the thrill of seeing and painting in all its lurid colouring the
volcanic chaos of this 'stir and smoke' itself. Thus the same Siegfried
Sassoon who renders with so much close analytic psychology the moods
that cross and fluctuate in the dying hospital patient, or the haunted
fugitive, as he flounders among snags and stumps, to feel at last the
strangling clasp of death, can as little as the visionary Shelley
overcome the insurgent sense that these dead are for us yet alive, made
one with Nature.
He visits the deserted home of his dead friend--
'Ah, but there was no need to call his name,
He was beside me now, as swift as light ...
For now, he said, my spirit has more eyes
Than heaven has stars, and they are lit by love.
My body is the magic of the world,
And dark and sunset flame with my spilt blood.'
And so the undying dead
'Wander in the dusk with chanting streams,
And they are dawn-lit trees, with arms upflung,
To hail the burning heaven they left unsung.'