Swift never wearies, for, as Bossuet said of human passion generally, there is in this greatest master of one of its most terrible forms,quelque chose d’infini, and the refreshment which he offers varies unceasingly from the lightest froth of pure nonsense, through beverages middle and stronger to the most drastic restoratives—the very strychnine and capsicum of irony.
Swift never wearies, for, as Bossuet said of human passion generally, there is in this greatest master of one of its most terrible forms,quelque chose d’infini, and the refreshment which he offers varies unceasingly from the lightest froth of pure nonsense, through beverages middle and stronger to the most drastic restoratives—the very strychnine and capsicum of irony.
But what, above all, attracts Mr. Saintsbury in Swift, Fielding and Johnson is their eminent manliness. He is an enthusiast within limits for the genius of Sterne and the genius of Horace Walpole. But he loves them in a grudging way. He is disgusted with their lack of muscle. He admits of the characters inTristrom Shandythat “they are … much more intrinsically true to life than many, if not almost all, the characters of Dickens,” but he is too greatly shocked by Sterne’s humour to be just to his work as a whole. It is the same with Walpole’s letters. Mr. Saintsbury will heap sentence after sentence of praise upon them, till one would imagine they were his favourite eighteenth-century literature. He even defends Walpole’s character against Macaulay, but in the result he damns him with faint praise quite as effectively as Macaulay did. That he has an enviable appetite for Walpole’s letters is shown by the fact that, in speaking of Mrs. Toynbee’s huge sixteen-volume edition of them, he observes that “even a single reading of it will supply the evening requirements of a man who does not go to bed very late, and has learnt the last lesson of intellectual as of other enjoyment—to enjoyslowly—for nearer a month than a week, and perhaps for longer still.” The man who can get through Horace Walpole in a month of evenings without sitting up late seems to me to be endowed not only with an avarice of reading, but with an avarice of Walpole. But, in spite of this, Mr. Saintsbury does not seem to like his author. His ideal author is one of whom he can say, as he does of Johnson, that he is “one of the greatest of Englishmen, one of the greatest men of letters, and one of the greatest ofmen.” One of his complaints against Gray is that, though he likedJoseph Andrews, he “had apparently not enough manliness to see some of Fielding’s real merits.” As for Fielding, Mr. Saintsbury’s verdict is summed up in Dryden’s praise of Chaucer. “Here is God’s plenty.” InTom Joneshe contends that Fielding “puts the whole plant of the pleasure-giver in motion, as no novel-writer—not even Cervantes—had ever done before.” For myself, I doubt whether the exaltation of Fielding has not become too much a matter of orthodoxy in recent years. Compare him with Swift, and he is long-winded in his sentences. Compare him with Sterne, and his characters are mechanical. Compare him with Dickens, and he reaches none of the depths, either of laughter or of sadness. This is not to question the genius of Fielding’s vivid and critical picture of eighteenth-century manners and morals. It is merely to put a drag on the wheel of Mr Saintsbury’s galloping enthusiasm.
But, however one may quarrel with it,The Peace of the Augustansis a book to read with delight—an eccentric book, an extravagant book, a grumpy book, but a book of rare and amazing enthusiasm for good literature. Mr. Saintsbury’s constant jibes at the present age, as though no one had ever been unmanly enough to make a joke before Mr. Shaw, become amusing in the end like Dr. Johnson’s rudenesses. And Mr. Saintsbury’s one attempt to criticize contemporary fiction—where he speaks ofSinister Streetin the same breath withWaverleyandPride and Prejudice—is both amusing and rather appalling. But, in spite of his attitude to his own times, one could not ask for more genial company on going on a pilgrimage among the Augustans. Mr. Saintsbury has in this book written the most irresistible advertisement of eighteenth-century literature that has been published for many years.
Mr. Gosse and Mr. Saintsbury are the two kings of Sparta among English critics of to-day. They stand preeminent among those of our contemporaries who have served literature in the capacity of law-givers during the past fifty years. I do not suggest that they are better critics than Mr. Birrell or Sir Sidney Colvin or the late Sir E.T. Cook. But none of these three was ever a professional and whole-time critic, as Mr. Gosse and Mr. Saintsbury are. One thinks of the latter primarily as the authors of books about books, though Mr. Gosse is a poet and biographer as well, and Mr. Saintsbury, it is said, once dreamed of writing a history of wine. One might say of Mr. Gosse that even in his critical work he writes largely as a poet and biographer, while Mr. Saintsbury writes of literature as though he were writing a history of wine. Mr. Saintsbury seeks in literature, above all things, exhilarating qualities. He can read almost anything and in any language, provided it is not non-intoxicating. He has a good head, and it cannot be said that he ever allows an author to go to it. But the authors whom he has collected in his wonderful cellar unquestionably make him merry. In his books he always seems to be pressing on us “another glass of Jane Austen,” or “just a thimbleful of Pope,” or “a drop of ‘42 Tennyson.” No other critic of literature writes with the garrulous gusto of a boon-companion as Mr. Saintsbury does. In our youth, when we demand style as well as gusto, we condemn him on account of his atrocious English. As we grow older, we think of his English merely as a rather eccentric sort of coat, and we begin to recognize that geniality such as his is a part of critical genius. True, he is not over-genial to new authors. He regards them as he might 1916 claret. Perhaps he is right. Authors undoubtedly get mellower with age. Even great poetry is, we are told, a little crude to the taste till it has stood for a few seasons.
Mr. Gosse is at once more grave and more deferential in his treatment of great authors. One cannot imagine Mr. Saintsbury speaking in a hushed voice before Shakespeare himself. One can almost hear him saying, “Hullo, Shakespeare!” To Mr. Gosse, however, literature is an almost sacred subject. He glows in its presence. He is more lyrical than Mr. Saintsbury, more imaginative and more eloquent. His short history of English literature is a book that fills a young head with enthusiasm. He writes as a servant of the great tradition. He is a Whig, where Mr. Saintsbury is an heretical old Jacobite. He is, however, saved from a professorial earnestness by his sharp talent for portraiture. Mr. Gosse’s judgments may or may not last: his portraits certainly will. It is to be hoped that he will one day write his reminiscences. Such a book would, we feel sure, be among the great books of portraiture in the history of English literature. He has already set Patmore and Swinburne before us in comic reality, and who can forget the grotesque figure of Hans Andersen, sketched in a few lines though it is, inTwo Visits to Denmark? It may be replied that Mr. Gosse has already given us the best of his reminiscences in half a dozen books of essay and biography. Even so, there were probably many things which it was not expedient to tell ten or twenty years ago, but which might well be related for the sake of truth and entertainment to-day. Mr. Gosse in the past has usually told the truth about authors with the gentleness of a modern dentist extracting a tooth. He keeps up a steady conversation of praise while doing the damage. The truth is out before you know. One becomes suddenly aware that the author has ceased to be as coldly perfect as a tailor’s model, and is a queer-looking creature with a gap in his jaw. It is possible that the author, were he alive, would feel furious, as a child sometimes feels with the dentist. None the less, Mr. Gosse has done him a service. The man who extracts a truth is as much to be commended as the man who extracts a tooth. It is not the function of the biographer any more than it is that of a dentist to prettify his subject. Each is an enemy of decay, a furtherer of life. There is such a thing as painless biography, but it is the work of quacks. Mr. Gosse is one of those honest dentists who reassure you by allowing it to hurt you “just a little.”
This gift for telling the truth is no small achievement in a man of letters. Literature is a broom that sweeps lies out of the mind, and fortunate is the man who wields it. Unhappily, while Mr. Gosse is daring in portraiture, he is the reverse in comment. In comment, as his writings on the war showed, he will fall in with the cant of the times. He can see through the cant of yesterday with a sparkle in his eyes, but he is less critical of the cant of to-day. He is at least fond of throwing out saving clauses, as when, writing of Mr. Sassoon’s verse, he says: “His temper is not altogether to be applauded, for such sentiments must tend to relax the effort of the struggle, yet they can hardly be reproved when conducted with so much honesty and courage.” Mr. Gosse again writes out of the official rather than the imaginative mind when, speaking of the war poets, he observes:
It was only proper that the earliest of all should be the Poet Laureate's address to England, ending with the prophecy:Much suffering shall cleanse thee!But thou through the floodShall win to salvation,To Beauty through blood.
It was only proper that the earliest of all should be the Poet Laureate's address to England, ending with the prophecy:
Much suffering shall cleanse thee!But thou through the floodShall win to salvation,To Beauty through blood.
Much suffering shall cleanse thee!But thou through the floodShall win to salvation,To Beauty through blood.
Much suffering shall cleanse thee!
But thou through the flood
Shall win to salvation,
To Beauty through blood.
Had a writer of the age of Charles II. written a verse like that, Mr. Gosse’s chortles would have disturbed the somnolent peace of the House of Peers. Even if it had been written in the time of Albert the Good, he would have rent it with the destructive dagger of a phrase. As it is, one is not sure that Mr. Gosse regards this appalling scrap from a bad hymnal as funny. One hopes that he quoted it with malicious intention. But did he? Was it not Mr. Gosse who early in the war glorified the blood that was being shed as a cleansing stream of Condy’s Fluid? The truth is, apart from his thoughts about literature, Mr. Gosse thinks much as the leader-writers tell him. He is sensitive to beauty of style and to idiosyncrasy of character, but he lacks philosophy and that tragic sense that gives the deepest sympathy. That, we fancy, is why we would rather read him on Catherine Trotter, the precursor of the bluestockings, than on any subject connected with the war.
Two of the most interesting chapters in Mr. Gosse’sDiversions of a Man of Lettersare the essay on Catherine Trotter and that on “the message of the Wartons.” Here he is on ground on which there is no leader-writer to take him by the hand and guide him into saying “the right thing.” He writes as a disinterested scholar and an entertainer. He forgets the war and is amused. How many readers are there in England who know that Catherine Trotter “published in 1693 a copy of verses addressed to Mr. Bevil Higgons on the occasion of his recovery from the smallpox,” and that “she was then fourteen years of age”? How many know even that she wrote a blank-verse tragedy in five acts, calledAgnes de Cestro, and had it produced at Drury Lane at the age of sixteen? At the age of nineteen she was the friend of Congreve, and was addressed by Farquhar as “one of the fairest of her sex and the best judge.” By the age of twenty-five, however, she had apparently written herself out, so far as the stage was concerned, and after her tragedy,The Revolution in Sweden, the theatre knows her no more. Though described as “the Sappho of Scotland” by the Queen of Prussia, and by the Duke of Marlborough as “the wisest virgin I ever knew,” her fame did not last even as long as her life. She married a clergyman, wrote on philosophy and religion, and lived till seventy. Her later writings, according to Mr. Gosse, “are so dull that merely to think of them brings tears into one’s eyes.” Her husband, who was a bit of a Jacobite, lost his money on account of his opinions, even though—“a perfect gentleman at heart—‘he always prayed for the King and Royal Family by name.’” “Meanwhile,” writes Mr. Gosse, “to uplift his spirits in this dreadful condition, he is discovered engaged upon a treatise on the Mosaic deluge, which he could persuade no publisher to print. He reminds us of Dr. Primrose inThe Vicar of Wakefield, and, like him, Mr. Cockburn probably had strong views on the Whistonian doctrine.” Altogether the essay on Catherine Trotter is an admirable example of Mr. Gosse in a playful mood.
The study of Joseph and Thomas Warton as “two pioneers of romanticism” is more serious in purpose, and is a scholarly attempt to discover the first symptoms of romanticism in eighteenth-century literature. Mr. Gosse finds inThe Enthusiast, written by Joseph Warton at the age of eighteen, “the earliest expression of full revolt against the classical attitude which had been sovereign in all European literature for nearly a century.” He does not pretend that it is a good poem, but “here, for the first time, we find unwaveringly emphasized and repeated what was entirely new in literature, the essence of romantic hysteria.” It is in Joseph Warton, according to Mr. Gosse, that we first meet with “the individualist attitude to nature.” Readers of Horace Walpole’s letters, however, will remember still earlier examples of the romantic attitude to nature. But these were not published for many years afterwards.
The other essays in the book range from the charm of Sterne to the vivacity of Lady Dorothy Nevill, from a eulogy of Poe to a discussion of Disraeli as a novelist. The variety, the scholarship, the portraiture of the book make it a pleasure to read; and, even when Mr. Gosse flatters in his portraits, his sense of truth impels him to draw the features correctly, so that the facts break through the praise. The truth is Mr. Gosse is always doing his best to balance the pleasure of saying the best with the pleasure of saying the worst. His books are all the more vital because they bear the stamp of an appreciative and mildly cruel personality.
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It is rather odd that two of the ablest American critics should also be two of the most unsparing enemies of romanticism in literature. Professor Babbitt and Mr. Paul Elmer More cannot get over the French Revolution. They seem to think that the rights of man have poisoned literature. One suspects that they have their doubts even about the American Revolution; for there, too, the rights of man were asserted against the lust of power. It is only fair to Professor Babbitt to say that he does not defend the lust of power. On the contrary, he damns it, and explains it as the logical and almost inevitable outcome of the rights of man! The steps of the process by which the change is effected are these. First, we have the Rousseaus asserting that the natural man is essentially good, but that he has been depraved by an artificial social system imposed on him from without. Instead of the quarrel between good and evil in his breast, they see only the quarrel between the innate good in man and his evil environment. They hold that all will be well if only he is set free—if his genius or natural impulses are liberated. “Rousseauism is … an emancipation of impulse—especially of the impulse of sex.” It is a gospel of egoism and leaves little room for conscience. Hence it makes men mengalomaniacs, and the lust for dominion is given its head no less than the lust of the flesh. “In the absence of ethical discipline,” writes Professor Babbitt inRousseau and Romanticism, “the lust for knowledge and the lust for feeling count very little, at least practically, compared with the third main lust of human nature—the lust for power. Hence the emergence of that most sinister of all types, the efficient megalomaniac.” In the result it appears that not only Rousseau and Hugo, but Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelley, helped to bring about the European War! Had there been no wars, no tyrants, and no lascivious men before Rousseau, one would have been ready to take Professor Babbitt’s indictment more seriously.
Professor Babbitt, however, has a serious philosophic idea at the back of all he says. He believes that man at his noblest lives the life of obligation rather than of impulse; and that romantic literature discourages him in this. He holds that man should rise from the plane of nature to the plane of humanism or the plane of religion, and that to live according to one’s temperament, as the romanticists preach, is to sink back from human nature, in the best sense, to animal nature. He takes the view that men of science since Bacon, by the great conquests they have made in the material sphere, have prepared man to take the romantic and boastful view of himself. “If men had not been so heartened by scientific progress they would have been less ready, we may be sure, to listen to Rousseau when he affirmed that they were naturally good.” Not that Professor Babbitt looks on us as utterly evil and worthy of damnation. He objects to the gloomy Jonathan-Edwards view, because it helps to precipitate by reaction the opposite extreme—“the boundless sycophancy of human nature from which we are now suffering.” It was, perhaps, in reaction against the priests that Rousseau made the most boastful announcements of his righteousness. “Rousseau feels himself so good that he is ready, as he declares, to appear before the Almighty at the sound of the trump of the Last Judgment, with the book of hisConfessionsin his hand, and there to issue a challenge to the whole human race, ‘Let a single one assert to Thee if he dare: “I am better than that man.”’” Rousseau would have been saved from this fustian virtue, Professor Babbitt thinks, if he had accepted either the classic or the religious view of life: for the classic view imposes on human nature the discipline of decorum, while the religious view imposes the discipline of humility. Human nature, he holds, requires the restrictions of the everlasting “No.” Virtue is a struggle within iron limitations, not an easy gush of feeling. At the same time, Professor Babbitt does not offer us as a cure for our troubles the decorum of the Pharisees and the pseudo-classicists, who bid us obey outward rules instead of imitating a spirit. He wishes our men of letters to rediscover the ethical imagination of the Greeks. “True classicism,” he observes, “does not rest on the observance of rules or the imitation of modes, but on an immediate insight into the universal.” The romanticists, he thinks, cultivate not the awe we find in the great writers, but mere wonder. He takes Poe as a typical romanticist. “It is not easy to discover in either the personality or writings of Poe an atom of awe or reverence. On the other hand, he both experiences wonder and seeks in his art to be a pure wonder-smith.”
One of the results of putting wonder above awe is that the romanticists unduly praise the ignorant—the savage, the peasant, and the child. Wordsworth here comes in for denunciation for having hailed a child of six as “Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!” Christ, Professor Babbitt tells us, praised the child not for its capacity for wonder, but for its freedom from sin. The romanticist, on the other hand, loves the spontaneous gush of wonder. He loves day-dreams, Arcadianism, fairy-tale Utopianism. He begins with an uncontrolled fancy and ends with an uncontrolled character. He tries all sorts of false gods—nature-worship, art-worship, humanitarianism, sentimentalism about animals. As regards the last of these, romanticism, according to the author, has meant the rehabilitation of the ass, and the Rousseauists are guilty of onolatry. “Medical men have given a learned name to the malady of those who neglect the members of their own family and gush over animals (zoöphilpsychosis). But Rousseau already exhibits this ‘psychosis.’ He abandoned his five children one after the other, but had, we are told, an unspeakable affection for his dog.” As for the worship of nature, it leads to a “wise passiveness” instead of the wise energy of knowledge and virtue, and tempts man to idle in pantheistic reveries. “In Rousseau or Walt Whitman it amounts to a sort of ecstatic animality that sets up as a divine illumination.” Professor Babbitt distrusts ecstasy as he distrusts Arcadianism. He perceives the mote of Arcadianism even in “the light that never was on sea or land.” He has no objection to a “return to nature,” if it is for purposes of recreation: he denounces it, however, when it is set up as a cult or “a substitute for philosophy and religion.” He denounces, indeed, every kind of “painless substitute for genuine spiritual effort.” He admires the difficult virtues, and holds that the gift of sympathy or pity or fraternity is in their absence hardly worth having.
On points of this kind, I fancy, he would have had on his side Wordsworth, Coleridge, Browning, and many of the other “Rousseauists” whom he attacks. Professor Babbitt, however, is a merciless critic, and the writers of the nineteenth century, who seemed to most of us veritable monsters of ethics, are to him simply false prophets of romanticism and scientific complacency. “The nineteenth century,” he declares, “may very well prove to have been the most wonderful and the least wise of centuries.” He admits the immense materialistic energy of the century, but this did not make up for the lack of a genuine philosophic insight in life and literature. Man is a morally indolent animal, and he was never more so than when he was working “with something approaching frenzy according to the natural law.” Faced with the spectacle of a romantic spiritual sloth accompanied by a materialistic, physical, and even intellectual energy, the author warns us that “the discipline that helps a man to self-mastery is found to have a more important bearing on his happiness than the discipline that helps him to a mastery of physical nature.” He sees a peril to our civilization in our absorption in the temporal and our failure to discover that “something abiding” on which civilization must rest. He quotes Aristotle’s anti-romantic saying that “most men would rather live in a disorderly than in a sober manner.” He feels that in conduct, politics, and the arts, we have, as the saying is, “plumped for” the disorderly manner to-day.
His book is a very useful challenge to the times, though it is a dangerous book to put in the hands of anyone inclined to Conservatism. After all, romanticism was a great liberating force. It liberated men, not from decorum, but from pseudo-decorum—not from humility, but from subserviency. It may be admitted that, without humility and decorum of the true kind, liberty is only pseudo-liberty, equality only pseudo-equality, and fraternity only pseudo-fraternity. I am afraid, however, that in getting rid of the vices of romanticism Professor Babbitt would pour away the baby with the bath water.
Where Professor Babbitt goes wrong is in not realizing that romanticism with its emphasis on rights is a necessary counterpart to classicism with its emphasis on duties. Each of them tries to do without the other. The most notorious romantic lovers were men who failed to realize the necessity of fidelity, just as the minor romantic artists to-day fail to realize the necessity of tradition. On the other hand, the classicist-in-excess prefers a world in which men preserve the decorum of servants to a world in which they might attain to the decorum of equals. Professor Babbitt refers to the pseudo-classical drama of seventeenth-century France, in which men confused nobility of language with the language of the nobility. He himself unfortunately is not free from similar prejudices. He is antipathetic, so far as one can see, to any movement for a better social system than we already possess. He is definitely in reaction against the whole forward movement of the last two centuries. He has pointed out certain flaws in the moderns, but he has failed to appreciate their virtues. Literature to-day is less noble than the literature of Shakespeare, partly, I think, because men have lost the “sense of sin.” Without the sense of sin we cannot have the greatest tragedy. The Greeks and Shakespeare perceived the contrast between the pure and the impure, the noble and the base, as no writer perceives it to-day. Romanticism undoubtedly led to a confusion of moral values. On the other hand, it was a necessary counterblast to formalism. In the great books of the world, inIsaiahand the Gospels, the best elements of both the classic and the romantic are found working together in harmony. If Christ were living to-day, is Professor Babbitt quite sure that he himself would not have censured the anthophilpsychosis of “Consider the lilies of the field”?
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Mr. Walter de la Mare gives us no Thames of song. His genius is scarcely more than a rill. But how the rill shines! How sweet a music it makes! Into what lands of romance does it flow, and beneath what hedges populous with birds! It seems at times as though it were a little fugitive stream attempting to run as far away as possible from the wilderness of reality and to lose itself in quiet, dreaming places. There never were shyer songs than these.
Mr. de la Mare is at the opposite pole to poets so robustly at ease with experience as Browning and Whitman. He has no cheers or welcome for the labouring universe on its march. He is interested in the daily procession only because he seeks in it one face, one figure. He is love-sick for love, for beauty, and longs to save it from the contamination of the common world. Like the lover inThe Tryst, he dreams always of a secret place of love and beauty set solitarily beyond the bounds of the time and space we know:
Beyond the rumour even of Paradise come,There, out of all remembrance, make our home:Seek we some close hid shadow for our lair,Hollowed by Noah’s mouse beneath the chairWherein the Omnipotent, in slumber bound,Nods till the piteous Trump of Judgment sound.Perchance Leviathan of the deep seaWould lease a lost mermaiden’s grot to me,There of your beauty we would joyance make—A music wistful for the sea-nymph’s sake:Haply Elijah, o’er his spokes of fire,Cresting steep Leo, or the Heavenly Lyre,Spied, tranced in azure of inanest space,Some eyrie hostel meet for human grace,Where two might happy be—just you and I—Lost in the uttermost of Eternity.
Beyond the rumour even of Paradise come,There, out of all remembrance, make our home:Seek we some close hid shadow for our lair,Hollowed by Noah’s mouse beneath the chairWherein the Omnipotent, in slumber bound,Nods till the piteous Trump of Judgment sound.Perchance Leviathan of the deep seaWould lease a lost mermaiden’s grot to me,There of your beauty we would joyance make—A music wistful for the sea-nymph’s sake:Haply Elijah, o’er his spokes of fire,Cresting steep Leo, or the Heavenly Lyre,Spied, tranced in azure of inanest space,Some eyrie hostel meet for human grace,Where two might happy be—just you and I—Lost in the uttermost of Eternity.
Beyond the rumour even of Paradise come,
There, out of all remembrance, make our home:
Seek we some close hid shadow for our lair,
Hollowed by Noah’s mouse beneath the chair
Wherein the Omnipotent, in slumber bound,
Nods till the piteous Trump of Judgment sound.
Perchance Leviathan of the deep sea
Would lease a lost mermaiden’s grot to me,
There of your beauty we would joyance make—
A music wistful for the sea-nymph’s sake:
Haply Elijah, o’er his spokes of fire,
Cresting steep Leo, or the Heavenly Lyre,
Spied, tranced in azure of inanest space,
Some eyrie hostel meet for human grace,
Where two might happy be—just you and I—
Lost in the uttermost of Eternity.
This is, no doubt, a far from rare mood in poetry. Even the waltz-songs of the music-halls express, or attempt to express, the longing of lovers for an impossible loneliness. Mr. de la Mare touches our hearts, however, not because he shares our sentimental day-dreams, but because he so mournfully turns back from them to the bitterness of reality:
No, no. Nor earth, nor air, nor fire, nor deepCould lull poor mortal longingness asleep.Somewhere there Nothing is; and there lost ManShall win what changeless vague of peace he can.
No, no. Nor earth, nor air, nor fire, nor deepCould lull poor mortal longingness asleep.Somewhere there Nothing is; and there lost ManShall win what changeless vague of peace he can.
No, no. Nor earth, nor air, nor fire, nor deep
Could lull poor mortal longingness asleep.
Somewhere there Nothing is; and there lost Man
Shall win what changeless vague of peace he can.
These lines (ending in an unsatisfactory and ineffective vagueness of phrase, which is Mr. de la Mare’s peculiar vice as a poet) suggests something of the sad philosophy which runs through the verse inMotley. The poems are, for the most part, praise of beauty sought and found in the shadow of death.
Melancholy though it is, however, Mr. de la Mare’s book is, as we have said, a book of praise, not of lamentations. He triumphantly announces that, if he were to begin to write of earth’s wonders:
Flit would the agesOn soundless wingsEre unto ZMy pen drew nigh;Leviathan told,And the honey-fly.
Flit would the agesOn soundless wingsEre unto ZMy pen drew nigh;Leviathan told,And the honey-fly.
Flit would the ages
On soundless wings
Ere unto Z
My pen drew nigh;
Leviathan told,
And the honey-fly.
He cannot come upon a twittering linnet, a “thing of light,” in a bush without realizing that—
All the throbbing worldOf dew and sun and airBy this small parcel of lifeIs made more fair.
All the throbbing worldOf dew and sun and airBy this small parcel of lifeIs made more fair.
All the throbbing world
Of dew and sun and air
By this small parcel of life
Is made more fair.
He bids us inFarewell:
Look thy last on all things lovelyEvery hour. Let no nightSeal thy sense in deathly slumberTill to delightThou have paid thy utmost blessing.
Look thy last on all things lovelyEvery hour. Let no nightSeal thy sense in deathly slumberTill to delightThou have paid thy utmost blessing.
Look thy last on all things lovely
Every hour. Let no night
Seal thy sense in deathly slumber
Till to delight
Thou have paid thy utmost blessing.
Thus, there is nothing faint-hearted in Mr. de la Mare’s melancholy. His sorrow is idealist’s sorrow. He has the heart of a worshipper, a lover.
We find evidence of this not least in his war-verses. At the outbreak of the war he evidently shared with other lovers and idealists the feeling of elation in the presence of noble sacrifices made for the world.
Now each man’s mind all Europe is,
Now each man’s mind all Europe is,
Now each man’s mind all Europe is,
he cries, in the first line inHappy England, and, as he remembers the peace of England, “her woods and wilds, her loveliness,” he exclaims:
O what a deep contented nightThe sun from out her Eastern seasWould bring the dust which in her sightHad given its all for these!
O what a deep contented nightThe sun from out her Eastern seasWould bring the dust which in her sightHad given its all for these!
O what a deep contented night
The sun from out her Eastern seas
Would bring the dust which in her sight
Had given its all for these!
So beautiful a spirit as Mr. de la Mare’s, however, could not remain content with idealizing from afar the sacrifices and heroism of dying men. In the long poem calledMotleyhe turns from the heroism to the madness of war, translating his vision into a fool’s song:
Nay, but a dream I hadOf a world all mad,Not simply happy mad like me,Who am mad like an empty sceneOf water and willow-tree,Where the wind hath been;But that foul Satan-mad,Who rots in his own head.…
Nay, but a dream I hadOf a world all mad,Not simply happy mad like me,Who am mad like an empty sceneOf water and willow-tree,Where the wind hath been;But that foul Satan-mad,Who rots in his own head.…
Nay, but a dream I had
Of a world all mad,
Not simply happy mad like me,
Who am mad like an empty scene
Of water and willow-tree,
Where the wind hath been;
But that foul Satan-mad,
Who rots in his own head.…
The fool’s vision of men going into battle is not a vision of knights of the Holy Ghost nobly falling in the lists with their country looking on, but of men’s bodies—
Dragging cold cannon through a mireOf rain and blood and spouting fire,The new moon glinting hard on eyesWide with insanities!
Dragging cold cannon through a mireOf rain and blood and spouting fire,The new moon glinting hard on eyesWide with insanities!
Dragging cold cannon through a mire
Of rain and blood and spouting fire,
The new moon glinting hard on eyes
Wide with insanities!
InThe MarionettesMr. de la Mare turns to tragic satire for relief from the bitterness of a war-maddened world:
Let the foul scene proceed:There's laughter in the wings;’Tis sawdust that they bleed,But a box Death brings.How rare a skill is theirsThese extreme pangs to show,How real a frenzy wearsEach feigner of woe!
Let the foul scene proceed:There's laughter in the wings;’Tis sawdust that they bleed,But a box Death brings.
Let the foul scene proceed:
There's laughter in the wings;
’Tis sawdust that they bleed,
But a box Death brings.
How rare a skill is theirsThese extreme pangs to show,How real a frenzy wearsEach feigner of woe!
How rare a skill is theirs
These extreme pangs to show,
How real a frenzy wears
Each feigner of woe!
And the poem goes on in perplexity of anger and anguish:
Strange, such a Piece is free,While we spectators sit,Aghast at its agony,Yet absorbed in it!Dark is the outer air,Coldly the night draughts blow,Mutely we stare, and stare,At the frenzied Show.Yet Heaven hath its quiet shroudOf deep, immutable blue—We cry, “The end!” We are bowedBy the dread, “’Tis true!”While the Shape who hoofs applauseBehind our deafened ear,Hoots—angel-wise—“the Cause”!And affrights even fear.
Strange, such a Piece is free,While we spectators sit,Aghast at its agony,Yet absorbed in it!
Strange, such a Piece is free,
While we spectators sit,
Aghast at its agony,
Yet absorbed in it!
Dark is the outer air,Coldly the night draughts blow,Mutely we stare, and stare,At the frenzied Show.
Dark is the outer air,
Coldly the night draughts blow,
Mutely we stare, and stare,
At the frenzied Show.
Yet Heaven hath its quiet shroudOf deep, immutable blue—We cry, “The end!” We are bowedBy the dread, “’Tis true!”
Yet Heaven hath its quiet shroud
Of deep, immutable blue—
We cry, “The end!” We are bowed
By the dread, “’Tis true!”
While the Shape who hoofs applauseBehind our deafened ear,Hoots—angel-wise—“the Cause”!And affrights even fear.
While the Shape who hoofs applause
Behind our deafened ear,
Hoots—angel-wise—“the Cause”!
And affrights even fear.
There is something in these lines that reminds one of Mr. Thomas Hardy’s black-edged indictment of life.
As we read Mr. de la Mare, indeed, we are reminded again and again of the work of many other poets—of the ballad-writers, the Elizabethan song-writers, Blake and Wordsworth, Mr. Hardy and Mr. W.B. Yeats. In some instances it is as though Mr. de la Mare had deliberately set himself to compose a musical variation on the same theme as one of the older masters. Thus,April Moon, which contains the charming verse—
“The little moon that April brings,More lovely shade than light,That, setting, silvers lonely hillsUpon the verge of night”—
“The little moon that April brings,More lovely shade than light,That, setting, silvers lonely hillsUpon the verge of night”—
“The little moon that April brings,
More lovely shade than light,
That, setting, silvers lonely hills
Upon the verge of night”—
is merely Wordsworth’s “She dwelt among the untrodden ways” turned into new music. New music, we should say, is Mr. de la Mare’s chief gift to literature—a music not regular or precise or certain, but none the less a music in which weak rhymes and even weak phrases are jangled into a strange beauty, as inAlexander, which begins:
It was the Great Alexander,Capped with a golden helm,Sate in the ages, in his floating ship,In a dead calm.
It was the Great Alexander,Capped with a golden helm,Sate in the ages, in his floating ship,In a dead calm.
It was the Great Alexander,
Capped with a golden helm,
Sate in the ages, in his floating ship,
In a dead calm.
One finds Mr. de la Mare’s characteristic, unemphatic music again in the opening lines ofMrs. Grundy:
Step very softly, sweet Quiet-foot,Stumble not, whisper not, smile not,
Step very softly, sweet Quiet-foot,Stumble not, whisper not, smile not,
Step very softly, sweet Quiet-foot,
Stumble not, whisper not, smile not,
where “foot” and “not” are rhymes.
It is the stream of music flowing through his verses rather than any riches of imagery or phrase that makes one rank the author so high among living poets. But music in verse can hardly be separated from intensity and sincerity of vision. This music of Mr. de la Mare’s is not a mere craftsman’s tune: it is an echo of the spirit. Had he not seen beautiful things passionately, Mr. de la Mare could never have written:
Thou with thy cheek on mine,And dark hair loosed, shalt seeTake the far stars for fruitThe cypress tree,And in the yew’s blackShall the moon be.
Thou with thy cheek on mine,And dark hair loosed, shalt seeTake the far stars for fruitThe cypress tree,And in the yew’s blackShall the moon be.
Thou with thy cheek on mine,
And dark hair loosed, shalt see
Take the far stars for fruit
The cypress tree,
And in the yew’s black
Shall the moon be.
Beautiful as Mr. de la Mare’s vision is, however, and beautiful as is his music, we miss in his work that frequent perfection of phrase which is part of the genius of (to take another living writer) Mr. Yeats. One has only to compare Mr. Yeats’sI Heard the Old, Old Men Saywith Mr. de la Mare’sThe Old Mento see how far the latter falls below verbal mastery. Mr. Yeats has found the perfect embodiment for his imagination. Mr. de la Mare seems in comparison to be struggling with his medium, and contrives in his first verse to be no more than just articulate:
Old and alone, sit we,Caged, riddle-rid men,Lost to earth’s “Listen!” and “See!”Thought’s “Wherefore?” and “When?”
Old and alone, sit we,Caged, riddle-rid men,Lost to earth’s “Listen!” and “See!”Thought’s “Wherefore?” and “When?”
Old and alone, sit we,
Caged, riddle-rid men,
Lost to earth’s “Listen!” and “See!”
Thought’s “Wherefore?” and “When?”
There is vision in some of the later verses in the poem, but, if we read it alongside of Mr. Yeats’s, we get an impression of unsuccess of execution. Whether one can fairly use the word “unsuccess” in reference to verse which succeeds so exquisitely as Mr. de la Mare’s in being literature is a nice question. But how else is one to define the peculiar quality of his style—its hesitations, its vaguenesses, its obscurities? On the other hand, even when his lines leave the intellect puzzled and the desire for grammar unsatisfied, a breath of original romance blows through them and appeals to us like the illogical burden of a ballad. Here at least are the rhythms and raptures of poetry, if not always the beaten gold of speech. Sometimes Mr. de la Mare’s verse reminds one of piano-music, sometimes of bird-music: it wavers so curiously between what is composed and what is unsophisticated. Not that one ever doubts for a moment that Mr. de la Mare has spent on his work an artist’s pains. He has made a craft out of his innocence. If he produces in his verse the effect of the wind among the reeds, it is the result not only of his artlessness, but of his art. He is one of the modern poets who have broken away from the metrical formalities of Swinburne and the older men, and who, of set purpose, have imposed upon poetry the beauty of a slightly irregular pulse.
He is typical of his generation, however, not only in his form, but in the pain of his unbelief (as shown inBetrayal), and in that sense of half-revelation that fills him always with wonder and sometimes with hope. His poems tell of the visits of strange presences in dream and vacancy. InA Vacant Day, after describing the beauty of a summer moon, with clear waters flowing under willows, he closes with the verses:
I listened; and my heart was dumbWith praise no language could express;Longing in vain for him to comeWho had breathed such blessedness.On this fair world, wherein we passSo chequered and so brief a stay,And yearned in spirit to learn, alas!What kept him still away.
I listened; and my heart was dumbWith praise no language could express;Longing in vain for him to comeWho had breathed such blessedness.
I listened; and my heart was dumb
With praise no language could express;
Longing in vain for him to come
Who had breathed such blessedness.
On this fair world, wherein we passSo chequered and so brief a stay,And yearned in spirit to learn, alas!What kept him still away.
On this fair world, wherein we pass
So chequered and so brief a stay,
And yearned in spirit to learn, alas!
What kept him still away.
In these poems we have the genius of the beauty of gentleness expressing itself as it is doing nowhere else just now in verse. Mr. de la Mare’s poetry is not only lovely, but lovable. He has a personal possession—
The skill of words to sweeten despair,
The skill of words to sweeten despair,
The skill of words to sweeten despair,
such as will, we are confident, give him a permanent place in English literature.
The latest collection of Georgian verse has had a mixed reception. One or two distinguished critics have written of it in the mood of a challenge to mortal combat. Men have begun to quarrel over the question whether we are living in an age of poetic dearth or of poetic plenty—whether the world is a nest of singing-birds or a cage in which the last canary has been dead for several years.
All this, I think, is a good sign. It means that poetry is interesting people sufficiently to make them wish to argue about it. Better a breeze—even a somewhat excessive breeze—than stagnant air. It is good both for poets and for the reading public. It prevents the poets from resting on their wings, as they might be tempted to do by a consistent calm of praise. It compels them to examine their work more critically. Anyhow, “fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil,” and a reasonable amount of sharp censure will do a true poet more good than harm. It will not necessarily injure even his sales. I understand the latest volume ofGeorgian Poetryis already in greater demand than its predecessor.
It is a good anthology of the poetry of the last two years without being an ideal anthology. Some good poets and some good poems have been omitted. And they have been omitted, in some instances, in favour of inferior work. Many of us would prefer an anthology of the best poems rather than an anthology of authors. At the same time, with all its faults,Georgian Poetrystill remains the best guide we possess to the poetic activities of the time. I am glad to see that the editor includes the work of a woman in his new volume. This helps to make it more representative than the previous selections. But there are several other living women who are better poets, at the lowest estimate, than at least a quarter of the men who have gained admission.
Mr. W.H. Davies is by now a veteran among the Georgians, and one cannot easily imagine a presence more welcome in a book of verse. Among poets he is a bird singing in a hedge. He communicates the same sense of freshness while he sings. He has also the quick eye of a bird. He is, for all his fairy music, on the look-out for things that will gratify his appetite. He looks to the earth rather than the sky, though he is by no means deaf to the lark that
Raves in his windy heights above a cloud.
Raves in his windy heights above a cloud.
Raves in his windy heights above a cloud.
At the same time, at his best, he says nothing about his appetite, and sings in the free spirit of a child at play. His best poems are songs of innocence. At least, that is the predominant element in them. He warned the public in a recent book that he is not so innocent as he sounds. But his genius certainly is. He has written greater poems than any that are included in the present selection.Birds, however, is a beautiful example of his gift for joy. We need not fear for contemporary poetry while the hedges contain a poet such as Mr. Davies.
Mr. de la Mare does not sing from a hedge. He is a child of the arts. He plays an instrument. His music is the music of a lute of which some of the strings have been broken. It is so extraordinarily sweet, indeed, that one has to explain him to oneself as the perfect master of an imperfect instrument. He is at times like Watts’s figure of Hope listening to the faint music of the single string that remains unbroken. There is always some element of hope, or of some kindred excuse for joy, even in his deepest melancholy. But it is the joy of a spirit, not of a “super-tramp.” Prospero might have summoned just such a spirit through the air to make music for him. And Mr. de la Mare’s is a spirit perceptible to the ear rather than to the eye. One need not count him the equal of Campion in order to feel that he has something of Campion’s beautiful genius for making airs out of words. He has little enough of the Keatsian genius for choosing the word that has the most meaning for the seeing imagination. But there is a secret melody in his words that, when once one has recognized it, one can never forget.
How different the Georgian poets are from each other may be seen if we compare three of the best poems in this book, all of them on similar subjects—Mr. Davies’sBirds, Mr. de la Mare’sLinnet, and Mr. Squire’sBirds. Mr. Squire would feel as out of place in a hedge as would Mr. de la Mare. He has an aquiline love of soaring and surveying immense tracts with keen eyes. He loves to explore both time and the map, but he does this without losing his eyehold on the details of the Noah’s Ark of life on the earth beneath him. He does not lose himself in vaporous abstractions; his eye, as well as his mind, is extraordinarily interesting. This poem of his,Birds, is peopled with birds. We see them in flight and in their nests. At the same time, the philosophic wonder of Mr. Squire’s poem separates him from Mr. Davies and Mr. de la Mare. Mr. Davies, I fancy, loves most to look at birds; Mr. de la Mare to listen to birds; Mr. Squire to brood over them with the philosophic imagination. It would, of course, be absurd to offer this as a final statement of the poetic attitude of the three writers. It is merely an attempt to differentiate among them with the help of a prominent characteristic of each.
The other poets in the collection include Mr. Robert Graves (with his pleasant bias towards nursery rhymes), Mr. Sassoon (with his sensitive, passionate satire), and Mr. Edward Shanks (with his trembling responsiveness to beauty). It is the first time that Mr. Shanks appears among the Georgians, and hisNight PieceandGlow-wormboth show how exquisite is his sensibility. He differs from the other poets by his quasi-analytic method. He seems to be analyzing the beauty of the evening in both these poems. Mrs. Shove’sA Man Dreams that He is the Creatoris a charming example of fancy toying with a great theme.
Satire, it has been said, is an ignoble art; and it is probable that there are no satirists in Heaven. Probably there are no doctors either. Satire and medicine are our responses to a diseased world—to our diseased selves. They are responses, however, that make for health. Satire holds the medicine-glass up to human nature. It also holds the mirror up in a limited way. It does not show a man what he looks like when he is both well and good. It does show a man what he looks like, however, when he breaks out into spots or goes yellow, pale, or mottled as a result of making a beast of himself. It reflects only sick men; but it reflects them with a purpose. It would be a crime to permit it, if the world were a hospital for incurables. To write satire is an act of faith, not a luxurious exercise. The despairing Swift was a fighter, as the despairing Anatole France is a fighter. They may have uttered the very Z of melancholy about the animal called man; but at least they were sufficiently optimistic to write satires and to throw themselves into defeated causes.
It would be too much to expect of satire that it alone will cure mankind of the disease of war. It is a good sign, however, that satires on war have begun to be written. War has affected with horror or disgust a number of great imaginative writers in the last two or three thousand years. The tragic indictment of war inThe Trojan Womenand the satiric indictment inThe Voyage to the Houyhnhnmsare evidence that some men at least saw through the romance of war before the twentieth century. In the war that has just ended, however—or that would have ended if the Peace Conference would let it—we have seen an imaginative revolt against war, not on the part of mere men of letters, but on the part of soldiers. Ballads have survived from other wars, depicting the plight of the mutilated soldier left to beg:
You haven’t an arm and you haven’t a leg,You’re an eyeless, noseless, chickenless egg,You ought to be put in a bowl to beg—Och, Johnnie, I hardly knew you!
You haven’t an arm and you haven’t a leg,You’re an eyeless, noseless, chickenless egg,You ought to be put in a bowl to beg—Och, Johnnie, I hardly knew you!
You haven’t an arm and you haven’t a leg,
You’re an eyeless, noseless, chickenless egg,
You ought to be put in a bowl to beg—
Och, Johnnie, I hardly knew you!
But the recent war has produced a literature of indictment, basing itself neither on the woes of women nor on the wrongs of ex-soldiers, but on the right of common men not to be forced into mutual murder by statesmen who themselves never killed anything more formidable than a pheasant. Soldiers—or some of them—see that wars go on only because the people who cause them do not realize what war is like. I do not mean to suggest that the kings, statesmen and journalists who bring wars about would not themselves take part in the fighting rather than that there should be no fighting at all. The people who cause wars, however, are ultimately the people who endure kings, statesmen and journalists of the exploiting and bullying kind. The satire of the soldiers is an appeal not to the statesmen and journalists, but to the general imagination of mankind. It is an attempt to drag our imaginations away from the heroics of the senate-house into the filth of the slaughter-house. It does not deny the heroism that exists in the slaughter-house any more than it denies the heroism that exists in the hospital ward. But it protests that, just as the heroism of a man dying of cancer must not be taken to justify cancer, so the heroism of a million men dying of war must not be taken to justify war. There are some who believe that neither war nor cancer is a curable disease. One thing we can be sure of in this connection: we shall never get rid either of war or of cancer if we do not learn to look at them realistically and see how loathsome they are. So long as war was regarded as inevitable, the poet was justified in romanticizing it, as in that epigram in theGreek Anthology: