VERSE-WRITING: KATE GREENAWAY’S FEELING FOR POETRY—PROBLEM, TRAGEDY,
AND RESIGNATION—CHARM OF HER VERSES FOR CHILDREN—ON DEATH.
From the early days when Kate Greenaway submitted her crude verses to
Mr. W. Marcus Ward and found little encouragement, down to the very
end of her life, she spent no inconsiderable portion of her time in
fluttering around the base of Parnassus. Competent critics, as we have
seen, expressed the opinion that there was poetic fancy and feeling
in many of these early attempts. Four thick volumes of neatly written
manuscript running to hundreds of pages testify to the industry with
which Miss Greenaway followed what she says to her infinite regret
proved to be a vain hope. It is not given to every genius to shine
in two spheres. These curious volumes as they stand make tantalising
reading. A hundred telling themes are gaily launched on a sea of words
and all goes well, until we are disturbed by mixed metaphor, faulty
rhyme, and defective rhythm, and only here and there do we find a poem
which is sustained and carried on successfully to the end.
The fact is, Kate Greenaway—so she told her sister to whom she would
read her verses—regarded these efforts only as rough drafts from which
she intended some day to select the best and put them into form. She
herself considered them defective alike in rhyme, rhythm, and metre,
and admitted that they needed rewriting, and she made fair copies
into her MS. volumes only in order to preserve her ideas until she
could find time to express herself adequately according to the rules
of versification. Indeed she did not seem to regard any of them as
finished. This should be borne in mind by the reader who would deny
these efforts serious consideration, or who would admit them only on
the ground that no ‘Life’ of Kate Greenaway would be complete or truly
reflective of the artist’s work without some reference to an occupation
which filled her mind during many years of her career. How far Miss
Greenaway might ultimately have gone it is difficult to say; but we
cannot doubt that she possessed some of the qualities of a poet. Hers
was a mind full of subtle and beautiful thoughts of a sweet and simple
kind, struggling to give them lucid expression.
Let us take for example the following lines in which the anticlimax is
really cleverly managed:—
It is so glorious just to say
I loved him all at once—one day—
A winter’s day. Then came the spring
And only deepenèd the thing.
I think it deepen’d—I’m not sure
If there was room to love you more.
Then summer followed—and my love
Took colour from the skies above.
Then weeks—and months—and years there came,
And I, well, loved on—just the same.
Then, dear, stretch out your hands—and let me lie
Within them as I slowly die,
Then stoop your head to mine and give—
Ah, not a kiss—or I should live.
It must not be forgotten that, like most bright and happy and keenly
sensitive natures, Miss Greenaway had many moments of melancholy,
almost of morbidness, which she attributed to her being ‘a quarter
Welsh.’ On this element of national sadness she laid the responsibility
of her passion for writing love-verses, of a character so yearning
and despairing, that she almost found herself, with rôles inverted,
playing the Beatrice to some unknown Dante. It pleased and soothed her
to work out a poetic problem—to imagine herself appealing to some
foolish heartless swain blind to her love and deaf to her appeal—and
to feel her way as she developed the character and mind of the lovelorn
lady. The case was not her own, and for that reason, no doubt, the
experiment was the more alluring. She returned to it again and again,
constantly from a different point; and poem after poem is expressive
of a passionate desire for a love which never came. Page after page is
devoted to apostrophising the imaginary one who is somewhere in the
world, sometimes perhaps even seeking her—seeking but not finding.
First, her heroine takes upon herself the blame for losing him—‘You
smiled and I turned me away’; and then declares that the fault is his
for hanging back, for—‘man is a fool—such a fool’—
Ah, cold, faint-hearted, go—I tell you go!
Dear God, to think I could have loved you so!...
His eyes were blind that he could not see
As he turned away to the world from me ...
And his soul
Sought out—a lower soul.
... It may be
One day God
Will tell you that you missed
The Higher Part.
You grasped the grass
Who might have held the flower.
You took a stone
Who might have won a heart.
... He looks back
Over the years
Of the rift and the wrack—
And the lover’s soul cries to her soul:—
Oh, can you forgive me?
I know to my cost
The Life that I’ve missed,
The Life that I’ve lost.
Soul,
Can you pardon this soul?
God bless you, dear, always and ever,
God bless you and bless you I say.
And I know you will pray for the coward,
The fool who once threw you away.
Soul, when the stars shine
Think sometimes of this soul.
Later on, he is not content with forgiveness, but is praying to be
taken back. But it is too late, for
You rejected—threw the gift away,
And now bring tears and sorrowful complaint.
I call you coward, playing at babies’ play.
The woman made no sound, or any plaint,
But took her lot and kept her bitter tears
In silence all alone and unbefriended—
Now take her scorn for all the coming years.
That is her answer, till her life is ended.
Then in the verses entitled ‘The You that was not You’ she makes the
discovery that—
The You I loved was my creation—mine,
Without a counterpart within yourself.
I gave you thoughts and soul and heart
Taken from Love’s ideal....
And so the first dream ends and she brings her heroine to a saner
mood, with the discovery that all these bitter experiences and
disappointments have been sent by God to teach her that she has been
pre-ordained to an anchorite’s life of Art, for Art’s sake. Then half
regretful, half resigned, she carries on her character a stage:
A lonely soul, I am ever alone.
If love ever comes it is quickly gone—
Nothing abides and nothing stays.
I think I have found it, but only to know
How very soon it is all to go.
The sunshine is followed by falling snow.
There are sometimes moments when I see
A sort of divinity in it for me,
To keep me separate and alone;
To hold away and keep my heart
All for my work, set aside and apart,
As if I were vowed away to Art.
And then there comes a happier moment when something breaks into her
life to compensate and console her for her renunciations:—
For the world had found a new and lovely voice
To teach and train me in her secret ways,
And I saw beauty in all things that are
And knew that I was blest for all my days.
Above the world now, above its good and ill,
I ventured on a new and lovely life—
Sesame! had been said and I passed in,
My soul and body no more waged a strife.
Shall I not think you then, oh, best of all?
Shall I not call you Friend, and say—‘tis He
Who shook away the chaff and saved the grain
And gave the whole—God’s Heaven—unto me?
[Illustration: SWANSDOWN.
‘Girl in hat with feather, hat trimmed with swansdown and yellow
ribbons.’
_From a water-colour drawing in the possession of Stuart M. Samuel,
Esq., M.P._]
The verses here quoted are fair examples of her powers and of her
limitations, so far as it is fair to speak of limitations when the
verses are avowedly but studies for the finished work, the uncut and
unpolished stones. The expression of the ideas is consequently crude,
but the ideas are clearly there and have at least become articulate.
They are not mock heroics, but the half-spoken utterances of real
passion, of the baulked, helpless, disillusioned woman of her creation,
who is emerging into a philosophic and sufficiently satisfactory state
of mind. And they are representative of by far the larger portion of
her literary output.
What Kate Greenaway might have accomplished had she devoted as much
time to verses for children as in accumulating poetic material of an
introspective nature, may be gathered from the pretty and dainty rhymes
with which every one who is familiar with her books is well acquainted.
It may be seen, too, from the following lines from ‘The Getting Up of
the King’s Little Daughter’—in which she has many pretty ideas around
which she wanders, grasping them fully from time to time. Here is a
dainty couplet describing the little princess’s bath:—
Then she rises and fresh water
Swallows up the King’s small daughter;
and the conclusion—
For her breakfast there is spread
Freshest milk and whitest bread,
Yellow butter, golden honey,
The best there is for love or money.
So, too, in ‘Girls in a Garden,’ a prettily clothed thought here and
there stands out deliciously:—
The Roses red white fingers take
And Lilies for their own sweet sake—
is surely a little picture of which no one need to be ashamed. So too—
By Hollyhocks they measure who
Is grown the taller of the two;
and—
The sky is laughing in white and blue—
reveal to us the true Kate Greenaway of _Under the Window_ and
_Language of Flowers_, illustrating the sisterhood of her pencil and
her pen. And again there is a touch of infantile delight in the artless
little verse—
Oh, what a silken stocking,
And what a satin shoe!
I wish I was a little toe
To live in there, I do.
Is it too much to say that had Kate Greenaway given as much time
and energy to such verses as these as she did to her more ambitious
efforts, she might be acclaimed the Babies’ laureate as unchallenged on
her pinnacle as she is supreme as the Children’s Artist?
From the melancholy of her imaginary heroine, and from the brightness
of her joyous self when she appeals to her vast child-constituency, we
may turn to the occasional depression which is mirrored in some of her
late verses when she considers her own life and achievement. It is not
to be supposed for a moment that Kate Greenaway was morbid naturally,
but she was easily dejected, particularly when, as we have seen, she
fell into despair on realising that the world had forgotten her and
passed her by while her imitators were reaping the reward which her own
genius and originality had sown. Had she fallen out of fashion merely
she would not have complained; it was the denseness of the public who
willingly accepted the counterfeit for the genuine that hurt her. More
than once she casts these feelings into rhyme:—
Deserted, cast away, my work all done,
Who was a star that shone a little while,
But fallen now and all its brightness gone—
A victim of this world’s brief fickle smile.
Poor fool and vain, grieve not for what is lost,
Nor rend thy heart by counting up the cost.
In spite of the mixed metaphor we must recognise a sincere thought
sincerely expressed—no mere idle complaint, but a disappointment
honestly and courageously borne. And she proceeds—
We walk, we talk, we sing our song,
Our little song upon this earth;
How soon we tread the road along,
And look for death almost from birth.
In point of fact, hopefulness was the note of her character; and in
spite of all disappointments, she was an optimist to the end. This note
is struck again in the following lines:—
Take all my things from me—all my gold,
My houses, and my lands, and all I hold—
Even my beauty’s grace;
Smite down my health, take all my joy,
Fret all my life with great annoy,
If thou wilt still look on my Face,
If thou wilt still say—This is she
Who shall be mine, immortally,
In Heaven, on Earth,
In night, in day, in months, in years,
In joy, in sorrow—smiles and tears—
In life—in Death!
Death was a favourite _motif_, but Death regarded as Watts regarded
it—not as a ‘skull and cross-bones idea like that of Holbein,’ but
as the gentle messenger, remorseless but not unkind—as the nurse
who beckons to the children and puts them to bed. One set of verses,
obviously marked out for revision, is entitled—
THE ANGEL FRIEND
God called you—and you left us.
Heaven wanted you for its own.
I guessed you were only waiting
Till an Angel fetched you home.
I knew you talked with Angels
In the green and leafy wood.
Some thought you strangely quiet,
But I—I understood.
For I saw your eyes looked into
The things we could never see,
And the sound of your voice had the wonder
Of the distant sound of the sea.
And all the dumb creatures knew it,
And the flowers faded not in your hand.
You walked this earth as a Spirit
Who sojourned in alien land.
Another, equally simple, is illustrated with the sketch for a
water-colour drawing ‘Dead,’ here reproduced. For each of these poems,
about fifteen in number, Kate Greenaway had made a drawing more or less
complete, with the intention of issuing them in a volume. The verses
for which ‘Dead’ was designed run as follows:—
LITTLE DEAD GIRL
Hands that no more colour hold
Than the jasmine stars they fold
In their clasping, still and tender—
Can we doubt, who knew her living,
She was worthy of the giving,
This gift of Death that God did send her?
Alas, that we are left to sorrow
Deeply for you on the morrow.
We stand and envy you the peace
As you lie so, still and blessed,
With your grievings all redressed
And your soul obtained release.
A final example of her happier mood and we have done:—
THE HAPPY LADY
My Lady, as she goes her ways
By street or garden, gives God praise
For all His lovely sounds and sights,
The sunny days, the quiet nights—
The glories of a moonlit sky
With stars all shining silently—
The rose and red of setting sun,
And children as they laugh and run,
The flowering fields, the flowering trees,
The strong winds or soft-blowing breeze.
No evil thing comes ever nigh
To hurt her sweet tranquillity.
In conclusion, we would draw the reader’s attention once more to the
verses ‘When I am Dead,’[78] which were written on the approach of
death, perhaps when, in spite of the confidence based on friendly
assurances, her instinct whispered to her that the end was not far off.
In these circumstances the lines assume a more pathetic and a tenderer
significance, and breathe the pilgrim spirit of Hope and Faith at the
very threshold of the Valley of Death.
[Illustration: ‘DEAD.’
_Sketch for an illustration to a poem by Kate Greenaway. From a
water-colour drawing in the possession of John Greenaway, Esq._]