XLVLINKED SWEETNESS LONG DRAWN OUT

In club or messroom let them sitAt skirmish of salacious witLaughing at love, yet not with heartsAccustomed....

4th Draft.(Consideration:—Bother the thing! “Skirmish” is good because it suggests their profession, but now we have three S’s,—“sit,” “skirmish,” “salacious.” It makes them sound too much in earnest. The “salacious” idea can come in later in the poem. And at present we have two “at’s” bumping into each other; one of them must go. “Yet” sounds better than “but” somehow.)

In club or messroom let them sitWith skirmish of destructive witLaughing at love, yet not with heartsAccustomed....

5th Draft.(Consideration:—And now we have two “with’s” which don’t quite correspond. And we have the two short “i’s” next to each other again. Well, put the first “at” back and change “laughing at” to “deriding.” The long “i” is a pleasant variant; “laughing” and “hearts” have vowel-sounds too much alike.)

In club or messroom let them sitAt skirmish of destructive witDeriding love, yet not with heartsAccustomed....

6th Draft.(Consideration:—Yes, that’s a bit better. But now we have “destructive” and “deriding” too close together. “Ingenious” is more the word I want. It has a long vowel, and suggeststhat it was a really witty performance. The two “in’s” are far enough separated. “Accorded” is better than “accustomed”; more accurate and sounds better. Now then:—)

In club or messroom let them sitAt skirmish of ingenious witDeriding love, yet not with heartsAccorded etc.

(Consideration:—It may berotten, but I’ve done my best.)

The discussion of more radical constructive faults is to be found in PUTTY and THE ART OF EXPRESSION.

IN this last section, besides an attempt at a greater accuracy of meaning and implication than the first slap-dash arrangement of words had provided, there may have been noticed three other technical considerations which are especially exacting in this case, where I am intending by particularly careful craftsmanship to suggest the brilliance of the conversation I am reporting.

The first is a care to avoid unintentional echoes,as for example “Inclub or messroom ...indulging.”

The second is a care which all song writers and singing masters understand, to keep apart words like “indulge salacious,” where the j and s sound coming together interfere with easy breathing.

The third is an attempt to vary the vowel sounds so far as is consistent with getting the right shade of meaning; it pleases the mental ear like stroking pleases a cat (note the vowel sequence of the phrase that heads this section. John Milton knew a thing or two about texture, worth knowing). At the same time I am trying to arrange the position of consonants and open vowels with much the same care.

But all these three considerations, and even the consideration for lucidity of expression, can and must be modified where an emotional mood of obscurity, fear, difficulty or monotony will be better illustrated by so doing.

Keats was very conscious of the necessity of modification. Leigh Hunt recounts in his Autobiography:—

“I remember Keats reading to me with great relish and particularity, conscious of what he had set forth, the lines describing the supper[1]and ending with the words,

“ ‘And lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon.’ ”

[1]St. Agnes’ Eve.

Mr. Wordsworth would have said the vowels were not varied enough; but Keats knew where his vowels werenotto be varied. On the occasion above alludedto, Wordsworth found fault with the repetition of the concluding sound of the participles in Shakespeare’s line about bees:—

“ ‘Thesingingmasonsbuildingroofs of gold.’ ”

This, he said, was a line which Milton would never have written. Keats thought, on the other hand, that the repetition was in harmony with the continued note of the singers, and that Shakespeare’s negligence, if negligence it was, had instinctively felt the thing in the best manner.”

Keats here was surely intending with his succession of short i-sounds, a gourmet’s fastidious pursing of lips. Poets even of the Virgil-Milton-Tennyson-Longfellow metrical tradition will on occasion similarly break their strict metric form with an obviously imitative “quadrepedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum,” but the manipulation of vowels and consonants is for them rather a study in abstract grandeur of music than a relation with the emotional content of the poetry.

NO poem can turn out respectably well unless written in the full confidence that this time at last the poet is going to attain perfect expression. So long as this confidence survives hegoes on revising the poem at intervals for days or months until nothing more can be done, and the inevitable sense of failure is felt, leaving him at liberty to try again. It is on this inevitable failure that the practice of every art is made conditional.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

A man once went into an ironmonger’s shop and said hesitatingly, “Do you sell those gadgets for fixing on doors?”

“Well, sir,” replied the assistant, “I am not quite sure if I understand your requirements, but I take it you are needing a patent automatic door-closer?”

“Exactly,” said the customer. “One to fix on my pantry door which, by the way, contains a glass window.”

“You will want a cheap one, sir?”

“Cheap but serviceable.”

“You will prefer an English make, sir?”

“Indeed, that’s a most important consideration.”

“You will perhaps want one with ornamentations, scroll work and roses for instance?”

“Oh no, nothing of that sort, thank you. I want it as plain and unobtrusive as possible.”

“You would like it made of some rustless metal, sir?”

“That would be very convenient.”

“And with a strong spring?”

“Well, moderately strong.”

“To be fixed on which side, sir?”

“Let me see; the right-hand side.”

“Now, sir,” said the assistant, “I will go through each point, one by one. You want an efficient (but not too costly) English made, unobtrusive, rustless, unornamented, patent automatic door closer, to be fixed right-handed with a moderately strong spring to a pantry door with a glass window. Is there any further desideratum, sir?”

“Well, it’s very good of you to help me like this (“Not at all, sir”). I should like it easily adjusted and easily removed, and above all it must not squeak or need constant oiling.”

“In fact, sir, you want an apparatus combining a variety of qualities, in a word, an absolutely silent, efficient, economical, invisible, corrosive proof, unornamented, not-too-heavily-springed, easily adjustable, readily removable, British-made, right-handed, patent automatic door closer, ideally fitted in every possible respect for attaching to your pantry door which (I understand you to say) contains a glass window. How is that, sir?”

“Splendid, splendid.”

“Well, sir, I regret that there has never been any article of that description put on the market, but if you care to visit our wholesale department across the road, you may perhaps be able to make your choice from a reasonably large selection of our present imperfect models. Good day, sir.”

IF you solve a problem to the best of your ability, it never bothers you again. Enough said: but the following emblem may be taken to heart:—

EPITAPH ON AN UNFORTUNATE ARTIST

He found a formula for drawing comic rabbits:This formula for drawing comic rabbits paid.So in the end he could not change the tragic habitsThis formula for drawing comic rabbits made.

THERE is a saying that “More people know Tom Fool than Tom Fool knows”; that may be all right if it means recognizing him in the street, but he has to be a wonder before he can, without eccentricity, make his work immediately recognized in print and be even distinguishable from the best efforts of imitators. This proverb was obviously in the head of the man or woman who wrote the following sonnet, in theSpectator(I think) abouta year ago; I have lost the cutting and the reference, and ask to be pardoned if I misquote:—

Cunning indeed Tom Fool must be to-dayFor us, who meet his verses in a book,To cry “Tom Fool wrote that.... I know his way....... Unsigned, yet eyed all over with Tom’s look....Why see! It’s pure Tom Fool, I’m not mistook....Fine simple verses too; now who’s to sayHow Tom has charmed these worn old words to obeyHis shepherd’s voice and march beneath his crook?Instead we ponder “I can’t name the man,But he’s been reading Wilde,” or “That’s the schoolOf Côterie.... Voices.... Pound ... the Sitwell clan ...”“He‘knows his Kipling’ ” ... “heaccepts the ruleOf Monro ... of Lord Tennyson ... of Queen Anne”How seldom, “There, for a ducat, writes,Tom Fool.

The writer evidently had a keen eye for the failings of others, but is convicted out of his own mouth, for I have met nobody who can identify this particular Tom Fool for me.

Hateful as is the art of the parodist when it spoils poems which have delighted and puzzled us, parody has its uses. A convincing parody is the best possible danger signal to inform a poet that he is writing sequels, repeating his conjuring tricks until they can be seen through and ridiculously imitated. “That awkward fellow Ariphrades,” much as we dislike him, is one of the most useful members of our republic of letters.

IHAVE already attempted to show Poetry as the Recorder’sprécisof a warm debate between the members of the poet’s mental Senate on some unusually contraversial subject. Let the same idea be expressed less personally in the terms of coloured circles intersecting, the space cut off having the combined colour of both circles. In the Drama these circles represent the warring influences of the plot; the principal characters lie in the enclosed space and the interest of the play is to watch their attempts to return to the state of primary colouring which means mental ease; with tragedy they are eventually forced to the colourless blackness of Death, with comedy the warring colours disappear in white. In the lyrical poem, the circles are coinciding stereoscopically so that it is difficult to discover how each individual circle is coloured; we only see the combination.

If we consider that each influence represented by these circles has an equivalent musical rhythm, then in the drama these rhythms interact orchestrally, tonic theme against dominant; in lyrical poetry where we get two images almost fused into one, the rhythms interlace correspondingly closely. Of the warringinfluences, one is naturally the original steady-going conservative, the others novel, disquieting, almost accidental. Then in lyrical poetry the established influence takes the original metre as its expression, and the new influences introduce the cross rhythm modifying the metre until it is half submerged. Shakespeare’s developments of blank verse have much distressed prosodists, but have these ever considered that they were not mere wantonness or lack of thought, that what he was doing was to send emotional cross-rhythms working against the familiar iambic five-stress line?

I remember “doing Greek iambics” at Charterhouse and being allowed as a great privilege on reaching the Upper School to resolve the usual short-long foot into a short-short-short or even in certain spots into a long-short. These resolutions I never understood as having any reference to the emotional mood of the verse I was supposed to be translating, but they came in very conveniently when proper names had too many short syllables in them to fit otherwise.

A young poet showed me a set of English verses the other day which I returned him without taking a copy but I remember reading somewhat as follows:—

T-tum, t-tum, t-tum, t-tum, t-tumA midnight garden, where as I went pastI saw the cherry’s moonfrozen delicate ivory.

“Good heavens,” I said, “what’s that last line all about?”

“Oh, it’s just an experiment in resolution.”

“Take a pencil, like a good fellow, and scan it for me in the old fashioned way as we used to do at school together.”

He did so:—

“It’s a sort of anapaestic resolution,” he explained.

“Anapaestic resolution of what?”

“Of an iambic decasyllabic line.”

“Excuse me, it’s not. Since we’re talking in that sort of jargon, it’s a spondaic resolution of a dactylic line.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you’ve put in four extra syllables for your resolution. I’ll put in a fifth, the word “in.” Now listen!

In this case the cross-rhythm, which my friend explained was meant to suggest the curious ethereal look of cherry blossoms in moonlight, had so swamped the original metre that it was completely stifled. The poet has a licence to resolve metre where the emotion demands it, and he is a poor poet if he daren’t use it; but there is commonsense in restraint.

ONE goes plodding on and hoping for a miracle, but who has ever recovered the strange quality that makes the early work (which follows a preliminary period of imitation) in a sense the best work? There is a fine single-heartedness, an economy of material, an adventurous delight in expression, a beginner’s luck for which I suppose honest hard work and mature observation can in time substitute certain other qualities, but poetry is never the same again.

I will attempt to explain this feeling by an analogy which can be pressed as closely as any one likes: it is an elaboration of what has been said of the poet as a “peculiarly gifted witch doctor.” Cases of multiple personality have recently been investigated in people who believed themselves to be possessed by spirits. Analysis has proved pretty conclusively that the mediums have originally mimicked acquaintances whom they found strange, persons apparently selected for having completely different outlooks on life, both from the medium and from each other, different religions, different emotional processes and usually different dialects. This mimicryhas given rise to unconscious impersonations of these people, impersonations so complete that the medium is in a state of trance and unconscious of any other existence. Mere imitation changes to a synthetic representation of how these characters would act in given circumstances. Finally the characters get so much a part of the medium’s self that they actually seem to appear visibly when summoned, and a sight of them can even be communicated to sympathetic bystanders. So the Witch of Endor called up Samuel for King Saul. The trances, originally spontaneous, are induced in later stages to meet the wishes of an inquisitive or devout séance-audience; the manifestations are more and more presented (this is no charge of charlatanism) with a view to their effect on the séance. It is the original unpremeditated trances, or rather the first ones that have the synthetic quality and are no longer mere mimicry, which correspond to Early Work.

But it is hardly necessary to quote extreme cases of morbid psychology or to enter the dangerous arena of spiritualistic argument in order to explain the presence of subpersonalities in the poet’s mind. They have a simple origin, it seems, as supplying the need of a primitive mind when confused. Quite normal children invent their own familiar spirits, their “shadows,” “dummies” or “slaves,” in order to excuse erratic actions of their own which seem on reflection incompatible with their usual habits or codeof honour. I have seen a child of two years old accept literally an aunt’s sarcasm, “Surely it wasn’t my little girl who did that? It must have been a horrid little stranger dressed just like you who came in and behaved so badly. My little girl always does what she’s told.” The child divided into two her own identity of which she had only recently become conscious. She expected sympathy instead of scolding when the horrid little stranger reappeared, broke china and flung water all over the room. I have heard of several developments of the dummy, or slave idea; how one child used his dummy as a representative to send out into the world to do the glorious deeds which he himself was not allowed to attempt; on one occasion this particular dummy got three weeks’ imprisonment after a collision with the police and so complete was his master’s faith in the independent existence of the creature that he eagerly counted the days until the dummy’s release and would not call on his services, however urgently needed, until the sentence had been completed. Another child, a girl, employed a committee of several dummies each having very different characteristics, to whom all social problems were referred for discussion.

Richard Middleton, the poet, in a short essay, “Harold,” traces the development of a dummy of this sort which assumed a tyranny over his mind until it became a recurrent nightmare. Middleton says, and it immensely strengthens my contention if Middleton realized the full implications of the remark, that butfor this dummy, Harold, he would never have become a poet.

Two or three poets of my acquaintance have admitted (I can confirm it from my own experience) that they are frequently conscious of their own divided personalities; that is, that they adopt an entirely different view of life, a different vocabulary, gesture, intonation, according as they happen to find themselves, for instance, in clerical society, in sporting circles, or among labourers in inns. It is no affectation, but amimesisor sympathetic imitation hardened into a habit; the sportsman is a fixed and definite character ready to turn out for every sporting or quasi-sporting emergency and has no interest outside the pages of theField, the clerical dummy pops up as soon as a clergyman passes down the road and can quote scripture by the chapter; the rustic dummy mops its brow with a red pocket handkerchief and murmurs “keeps very dry.” These characters have individual tastes in food, drink, clothes, society, peculiar vices and virtues and even different handwriting.

The difficulty of remainingloyal, which I mention elsewhere, is most disastrously increased, but the poet finds a certain compensation in the excitement of doing the quick change. He also finds it amusing to watch the comments of reviews or private friends on some small batch of poems which appear under his name. Every poem though signed John Jones is virtually by a different author. The poem whichcomes nearest to the point of view of one critic may be obnoxious to another; andvice versa; but it all turns on which “dummy” or “sub-personality” had momentarily the most influence on the mental chairman.

In a piece which represents an interlude in a contemplated collection of poems, the following passage occurs to give the same thought from a different angle. I am asking a friend to overlook irreconcilabilities in my book and refer him to two or three poems which are particularly hostile to each other.

“Yet these are all the same stuff, really,The obverse and reverse, if you look closely,Of busy imagination’s new-coined money—And if you watch the blindPhototropisms of my fluttering mind,Whether, growing strong, I wrestle Jacob-wiseWith fiendish darkness blinking threatfullyIts bale-fire eyes,Or whether childishlyI dart to Mother-skirts of love and peaceTo play with toys until those horrors leave me,Yet note, whichever way I find release,By fight or flight,By being wild or tame,The Spirit’s the same, the Pen and Ink’s the same.”

“Multiple personality, perhaps,” says some one. “But does that account for the stereoscopic process of which you speak, that makes two sub-personalities speak from a double head, that as it were prints two pictures on the same photographic plate?” The objector is thereupon referred to the dream-machinery on which poetry appears to be founded. He will acknowledge that in dreams the characters are always changing in a most sudden and baffling manner. He will remember for example that in “Alice in Wonderland,” which is founded on dream-material, the Duchess’ baby is represented as turning into a pig; in “Alice through the Looking Glass” the White Queen becomes an old sheep. That is a commonplace of dreams.

When there is a thought-connection of similarity or contrast between two concepts, the second is printed over the first on the mental photographic plate so rapidly that you hardly know at any given moment whether it is a pig or a baby you are addressing. “You quite make me giddy,” said Alice to the Cheshire Cat who was performing similar evolutions. One image starts a sentence, another image succeeds and finishes it, almost, but the first reappears and has the last word. The result ispoetry—or nonsense. With music much the same happens; I believe that those wonderful bursts of music heard in sleep are impossible to reproduce in a waking state largely because they consist of a number of melodies of different times and keys imposed on one another.

IN my opening definition I have given rather an ideal of English Poetry than an analysis of the ruling poetics of this, that and the other century. If those who rally to the later Pope and those who find in the prophetic Blake the true standard of Poetry, equally deny that my definition covers their experience of the word, I admit that in an encyclopediac sense it is quite inadequate, and indeed a fusion of two contradictory senses; indeed, again, a typically poetic definition.

But how else to make it? Blake’s poetry dictated by angels (a too-impulsive race) with its abstruse personal symbolism and tangled rhythms, and Pope’s elegantly didactic generalizations, in rigidly metrical forms, on the nature of his fellow man, have a common factor so low as hardly to be worth recovering; my justification is based on the works of our everywhere acknowledged Chaucer, Spenser,Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley and the rest, where the baffling Metamorphism of Romance and the formal Characterism of Classical Poetry, often reconcile their traditional quarrel and merge contentedly and inseparably as Jack Spratt and Mrs. Spratt, dividing the fat and the lean in equable portions.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Here let me then, for the scientific interest, summarize my conception of the typical poet:—

A poet in the fullest sense is one whom some unusual complications of early environment or mixed parentage develop as an intermediary between the small-group consciousnesses of particular sects, clans, castes, types and professions among whom he moves. To so many of these has he been formally enrolled as a member, and to so many more has he virtually added himself as a supernumerary member by showing a disinterested sympathy and by practising his exceptionally developed powers of intuition, that in any small-group sense the wide diffusion of his loyalties makes him everywhere a hypocrite and a traitor.

But the rival sub-personalities formed in him by his relation to these various groups, constantly struggle to reconciliation in his poetry, and in proportion as these sub-personalities are more numerous more varied and more inharmonious, and his controlling personality stronger and quicker at compromise, so he becomes a more or less capable spokesman of that larger group-mind of his culture which we somehow consider greater than the sum of itsparts: so that men of smaller scope and more concentrated loyalties swallow personal prejudices and hear at times in his utterances what seems to them the direct voice of God.

EACH poet finds that there are special times and seasons most suitable for his work; for times, I have heard mentioned with favour the hour before breakfast and the hour after the usual bed-time, for seasons, the pause between the exuberance of Spring and the heaviness of Summer seems popular, also the month of October. There are also places more free from interruption and distraction than others, such as caves, attics barely furnished, lonely barns, woods, bed, which make the hypnotic state necessary for poetry easier to induce. The poet has to be very honest with himself about only writing when he feels like it. To take pen in hand at the self-conscious hour of (say) nineA.M., for a morning’s poetry, and with a mental arena free of combatants, is to be disappointed, and even “put off” poetry for some time to come.

I have often heard it said that a poet in intervals between inspirations should keep his hand in by writing verse-exercises, but that he should on suchoccasions immediately destroy what he has written.

That seems all wrong, it is an insult to the spontaneity of true poetry to go through a ritual farce of this sort and the poet will only be blunting his tools. He ought not to feel distressed at the passage of time as if it represented so many masterpieces unwritten. If he keeps mentally alive and has patience, the real stuff may arrive any moment; when it doesn’t, it isn’t his fault, but the harder he tries to force it, the longer will it be delayed.

AMONG the most usual heresies held about poetry is the idea that the first importance of the poet is his “message”; this idea probably originated with the decline of polite sermon-writing, when the poet was expected to take on the double duty; but it is quite untenable. The poet is only concerned with reconciling certain impressions of life as they occur to him, and presenting them in the most effective way possible, without reference to their educational value. The cumulative effect of his work is to suggest a great number of personal obsessions the sum of which compose if you like his “message,” but the more definitely propagandist the poet, the less of a poet is the propagandist.

With this is bound up a heresy of about the same standing that poetry should only be concerned with presenting what is beautiful, beautiful in the limited sense of the picture-postcard. This romantic obsession (using the word “romantic” in the sense of optimistic loose thinking) is as absurd as that of the blood-and-guts realists. Poetry is no more a narcotic than a stimulant; it is a universal bitter-sweet mixture for all possible household emergencies, and its action varies according as it is taken in a wineglass or tablespoon, inhaled, gargled, or rubbed on the chest (like the literary Epic) by hard fingers covered with rings.

IT is as foolish to sneer at the Very Wild Men as it is to assume that the Very Tame Men are all right because they are “in the tradition.” The Very Wild Men are at any rate likely to have done work which has explored the desert boundaries of the art they profess, and the Very Tame Men have never done anything worth doing at all. The only excusable quarrel is with the pretended Wild Men who persist in identically repeating the experiments in which their masters have already failed, and with those whose Very Wilderness is traceable to this—thatthey are satisfied with the original spontaneity of their work and do not trouble to test it in the light of what it will convey to others, whom they then blame for want of appreciation. What seems to be the matter with Blake’s Prophetic Books is just this, he connected his images by a system of free association the clue to which was lost by his death: for instance his enemy, Schofield, a soldier who informed against him, suddenly enters “Jerusalem” and its strange company of abstractions, in the guise of a universal devil “Skofeld.”

Suppose that one Hodge, a labourer, attempted in a fit of homicidal mania to split my skull with a spade, but that my faithful bloodhound sprang to the rescue and Hodge barely escaped with his life. In my imagination, Hodge’s spade might well come to symbolize murder and madness, while the bloodhound became an emblem of loyal assistance in the hour of discomfiture. With this experience in my mind I might be inclined to eulogize a national hero as

“Bloodhound leaping at the throat of HodgeWho stands with lifted spade,”

and convey a meaning directly contrary to the one intended and having an apparent reference to agrarian unrest. But conscious reflection would put my image into line with a more widely favoured conception of Man the Attacker, and Dog the Rescuer; I would rewrite the eulogy as

“Watchdogleaping at theburglar’sthroatWho stands withpistol aimed.”

One of the chief problems of the art of poetry is to decide what are the essentials of the image that has formed in your mind; the accidental has to be eliminated and replaced by the essential. There is the double danger of mistaking a significant feature of the image for an accident and of giving an accident more prominence than it deserves.

Too much modern country-side poetry is mere verbal photography, admirably accurate and full of observation but not excited by memories of human relationships, the emotional bias which could make Bunyan see the bee as an emblem of sin, and Blake the lion’s loving-kindness.

Now, if Wordsworth had followed the poetical fashion of the day and told the world that when wandering lonely as a cloud he had seen a number of vernal flowers, the poem would have fallen pretty flat—if however, anticipating the present century he had quoted the order, the species and the subspecies and remarked on having found among the rest no fewer than five double blooms, we would almost have wished the vernal flowers back again.

Mr. Edmund Blunden lately called my attention to a message from Keats to John Clare sent through their common publisher, Taylor. Keats thought that Clare’s “Images from Nature” were “too much introduced without being called for by a particularsentiment.” Clare, in reply, is troubled that Keats shows the usual inaccuracies of the townsman when treating of nature, and that when in doubt he borrows from the Classics and is too inclined to see “behind every bush a thrumming Apollo.”

THE most popular theory advanced to account for the haunting of houses is that emanations of fear, hate or grief somehow impregnate a locality, and these emotions are released when in contact with a suitable medium. So with a poem or novel, passion impregnates the words and can make them active even divorced from the locality of creation.

An extreme instance of this process was claimed when Mr. Thomas Hardy came to Oxford to receive his honorary degree as Doctor of Literature, in the Sheldonian Theatre.

There were two very aged dons sitting together on a front bench, whom nobody in the assembly had ever seen before. They frowned and refrained from clapping Mr. Hardy or the Public Orator who had just described him as “Omnium poetarum Britannicorum necnon fabulatorum etiam facile princeps,” and people said they were certainly ghosts andidentified them with those masters of colleges who failed to answer Jude the Obscure when he enquired by letter how he might become a student of the University. It seems one ought to be very careful when writing realistically.

WHILE still in my perambulator about the year 1899,[2]I once received with great alarm the blessing of Algernon Charles Swinburne who was making his daily journey from “The Pines” in Putney to theRose and Crownpublic house on the edge of Wimbledon Common. It was many years before I identified our nursery bogey man, “mad Mr. Swinburne,” with the poet. It interests me to read that Swinburne as a young man once asked and received the blessing of Walter Savage Landor who was a very old man indeed at the time, and that Landor as a child had been himself taken to get a blessing at the hand of Dr. Samuel Johnson, and that the great lexicographer in his childhood had been unsuccessfully “touched” by Queen Anne for the King’s Evil. And what the moral may be, I cannot say, but I have traced the story back to Queen Anne because I want to make my grimace at the sacerdotalists;for I must confess, I have been many times disillusioned over such “poetry in the great tradition” as Authority has put beyond criticism.

[2]See Mr. Max Beerbohm’s AND EVEN NOW, page 69.

In caution, and out of deference to my reader’s sensibilities I will only quote a single example. Before reading a line of Swinburne I had been frequently told that he was “absolutely wonderful,” I would be quite carried away by him. They all said that the opening chorus, for instance, ofAtalanta in Calydonwas the most melodious verse in the English language. I read:

When the hounds of Spring are on Winter’s traces,The Mother of months in meadow and plain, ...

and I was not carried away as far as I expected. For a time I persuaded myself that it was my own fault, that I was a Philistine and had no ear—but one day pride reasserted itself and I began asking myself whether in the lines quoted above, the two “in’s” ofSpringandWinterand the two “mo’s” ofMotherandMonthsdid not come too close together for euphony, and who exactly was the heroine of the second line, and whether the heavy alliteration inmwas not too obvious a device, and whethermonthswas not rather a stumbling-block in galloping verse of this kind, and would it not have been better....

Thereupon faith in the “great tradition” and in “Authority” waned.

Still, I would be hard-hearted and stiff-neckedindeed if I did not wish to have had on my own head the blessing that Swinburne received.

IT is true that Genius can’t lie hid in a garret nowadays; there are too many people eager to get credit for discovering and showing it to the world. But as most of the acknowledged best living poets find it impossible to make anything like a living wage from their poetry, and patronage has long gone out of fashion (a great pity I think) the poet after a little fuss and flattery is obliged to return disconsolately to his garret. The problem of an alternative profession is one for which I have never heard a really satisfactory solution. Even Coleridge (whose Biographia Literaria should be the poet’s Bible) could make no more hopeful suggestion than that the poet should become a country parson.

Surely a most unhappy choice! The alternative profession should be as far as possible removed from, and subsidiary to, poetry. True priesthood will never allow itself to become subordinate to any other calling, and the dangerous consanguinity of poetry and religion has already been emphasized. It is the old difficulty of serving two masters; with the more orthodox poets Herbert and Vaughan, for example,poetry was all but always tamed into meek subjection to religious propaganda; with Skelton and Donne it was very different, and one feels that they were the better poets for their independence, their rebelliousness towards priestly conventions.

Schoolmastering is another unfortunate subsidiary profession, it is apt to give poetry a didactic flavour; journalism is too exacting on the invention, which the poet must keep fresh; manual labour wearies the body and tends to make the mind sluggish; office-routine limits the experience. Perhaps Chaucer as dockyard inspector and diplomat, Shakespeare as actor manager, and Blake as engraver, solved the problem at best.

These practical reflections may be supplemented by a paragraph lifted from the New YorkNationaproposof a trans-Atlantic poet whose works have already sold a million copies; a new volume of his poems has evidently broken the hearty muscular open-prairie tradition of the ’fifties and ’sixties and advanced forty years at a stride to the Parisian ecstasies of the naughty ’nineties;—

“That verse is in itself a hopelessly unpopularform of literature is an error of the sophisticatedbut imperfectly informed. Every period has itswidely read poets. Only, these poets rarely riseinto the field of criticism since they always echothe music of the day before yesterday and expressas an astonishing message the delusions of thehuge rear-guard of civilization.”

ABOOK of verses must be either priceless or valueless and as the general reading public is never told which by the council of critics until fifty years at least after the first publication, poets can only expect payment at a nominal rate. If they complain that the labourer is worthy of his hire, the analogy is not admitted. The public denies poetry to be labour; it is supposed to be a gentle recreation like cutting out “Home Sweet Home” from three-ply wood with a fretsaw, or collecting pressed flowers.

TO say of any poet that there is complete individuality in his poems combined with excellent craftsmanship amounts to a charge of arrogance. Craftsmanship in its present-day sense seems necessarily to imply acquaintance with other poetry; polish is only learned from the shortcomings and triumphs of others, it is not natural to the back-woodsman. A poet who after reading the work of those whom he recognizes as masters of the craft, doesnot allow himself to be influenced into imitation of peculiar technical tricks (as we often find ourselves unwittingly influenced to imitate the peculiar gestures of people we admire or love), that poet must have the arrogance to put his ownpotentialachievements on a level with the work he most admires.

Then is asked the question, “But whydopoets write? Why do they go on polishing the rough ideas which, once on paper, even in a crude and messy form, should give the mental conflict complete relief? Why, if the conflict is purely a personal one, do they definitely attempt to press the poem on their neighbour’s imagination with all the zeal of a hot-gospeller?”

There is arrogance in that, the arrogance of a child who takes for granted that all the world is interested in its doings and clever sayings. The emotional crises that make Poetry, imply suffering, and suffering usually humiliation, so that the poet makes his secret or open confidence in his poetic powers a set-off against a sense of alienation from society due to some physical deformity, stigma of birth or other early spite of nature, or against his later misfortunes in love.

The expectation and desire of a spurious immortality “fluttering alive on the mouths of men” is admitted by most poets of my acquaintance, both the good and the bad. This may be only a more definitely expressed form of the same instinct for self-perpetuation that makes the schoolboy cut his nameon the leaden gutter of the church porch, or the rich man give a college scholarship to preserve his namein perpetuo. But with the poet there is always the tinge of arrogance in the thought that his own poetry has a lasting quality which most of his contemporaries cannot claim.

The danger of this very necessary arrogance is that it is likely so to intrude the poet’s personal eccentricities into what he writes that the reader recognizes them and does not read the “I” as being the voice of universality.... It was the first night of a sentimental play in an Early English setting; the crisis long deferred was just coming, the heroine and hero were on the point of reconciliation and the long embrace, the audience had lumps in their throats. At that actual instant of suspense, a man in evening-dress leaped down on the stage from a box, kicked the ruffed and doubleted hero into the orchestra, and began to embrace the lady. A moment’s silence; then terrible confusion and rage. The stage manager burst into tears, attendants rushed forward to arrest the desperado.

“But, ladies and gentlemen, I am the author!! I have an artist’s right to do what I like with my own play.”

“Duck him! scratch his face! tar and feather him!”

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Arrogance? Yes, but a self-contradictory arrogance that takes the form of believing that there is nobody beside themselves who could point out justwhere in a given poem they have written well, and where badly. They know that it contains all sorts of hidden lesser implications (besides the more important ones) which, they think, a few sensitive minds may feel, but none could analyze; they think that they have disguised this or that bit of putty (of which no poem is innocent) so that no living critic could detect it. They are arrogant because they claim to understand better than any rivals how impossible an art poetry is, and because they still have the courage to face it. They have most arrogance before writing their poem of the moment, most humility when they know that they have once more failed.

THIS piece was written a few weeks after the remainder of the book: I had no cold-blooded intention of summarizing the paradox of poetic arrogance contained in the last section, but so it happened, and I print it here.

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