"O Polly, you might have toy'd and kist.By keeping Men off, you keep them on.PollyBut he so teaz'd me,And he so pleas'd me,What I did, you must have done."
"O Polly, you might have toy'd and kist.By keeping Men off, you keep them on.
Polly
But he so teaz'd me,And he so pleas'd me,What I did, you must have done."
Her father then suggests that Polly has Macheath "peach'd" at the next Sessions, so that she can become a rich widow, and leaves her to digest the unpalatable idea. Macheath comes in and Polly urges him to fly, which he does.
Act II. opens with one of the finest choruses imaginable, sung by a gang of pickpockets in a tavern near Newgate:
"Fill every glass, for wine inspires us,And fires usWith Courage, Love and Joy.Women and wine should Life employ.Is there ought else on Earth desirous?"
"Fill every glass, for wine inspires us,And fires usWith Courage, Love and Joy.Women and wine should Life employ.Is there ought else on Earth desirous?"
Macheath comes in and announces to the gang that he must go into hiding for a week or two and is left alone to ruminate upon life:
"A Man who loves Money, might as well be contented with one Guinea, as I with one Woman ..." and is immediately joined by a gang of lovely ladies, by far the most attractive of whom is Jenny Diver.
"As prim and demure as ever! There is not any Prude, though ever so high bred, hath a more sanctify'd Look, with a more mischievous Heart. Ah! thou art a dear artful Hypocrite...." Jenny, who never drinks "Strong-Waters" but when she has "the Cholic," who never goes "to the Tavern with a Man, but in the View of Business." "I have other Hours, and other sort of Men for my Pleasure." It is Jenny who sings one of the sweetest songs in the play:
"Before the Barn-door crowing,The Cock by Hens attended,His Eyes around him throwing,Stands for a while suspended.Then One he singles from the Crew,And cheers the happy Hen;With how do you do, and how do you do,And how do you do again."
"Before the Barn-door crowing,The Cock by Hens attended,His Eyes around him throwing,Stands for a while suspended.Then One he singles from the Crew,And cheers the happy Hen;With how do you do, and how do you do,And how do you do again."
It is Jenny who then blindfolds him and betrays him to Peachum and the constables.
We accompany, loath as Macheath to part company with Jenny, the Captain to Newgate, where Lucy Lockit appears to add to his discomfiture by wishing to "be made an honest woman of."
The two jailers then come in and fight over a point of honour and depart. Meanwhile Macheath endeavours to make Lucy free him and is on the point of succeeding when Polly appears and the fat is properly in the fire. The situation gives rise to the most famous song in the play:
"How happy I could be with either,Were t'other dear charmer away!But while you thus teaze me together,To neither a word will I say:But tol de rol...."
"How happy I could be with either,Were t'other dear charmer away!But while you thus teaze me together,To neither a word will I say:But tol de rol...."
As a result of which the two girls turn on each other and Peachum enters, giving Macheath a chance to reassure Lucy of his love for her, so she gets the keys and lets him escape.
We then have an exquisite passage between Peachum and Mrs Trapes, beginning in an inimitable vein:
Peachum.One may know by your Kiss, that your Ginn is excellent.
Trapes.I was always very curious in my Liquors.... Fill it up—I take as large Draughts of Liquor, as I did of Love.... I hate a Flincher in either.
Lucy, finding that she has released Macheath, only to let him fly to Polly, resolves to poison her with rat's-bane mixed in her gin, which Polly refuses: "Brandy and men (though women love them ever so well) are always taken by us with some Reluctance—unless 'tis in private."
Macheath is again captured, this time in a gaming-house, and sings a great number of songs (one to the tune ofSally in our Alley) in the "Condemn'd Hold" while he drowns his sorrows in drink. To send the audience away in a good humour he is reprieved at the last moment and rejoins his doxie in a dance.
Such is the substance of a play which few people took the trouble to read before they were unexpectedly given the chance of seeing it acted at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith.
But whether we read it or see it, there are certain points about it which make it perennially worth reading and worth seeing.
It is free from sentimentality, it is full of robust sense, and clears the air once and for all from the taint of prurience that has fallen upon us. The irony of it is mirth-provoking and delicious. It is a racy and true picture of human nature stripped naked. There is no savagery, only rascally good humour, true gaiety and buoyant vitality. As an antidote to depression or bad temper it would be hard to think of any quicker cut back to the joy of life.
And the best of it is that there are dozens of other plays equally enjoyable hidden away in the treasure-house of old English plays, waiting for you to unearth and rediscover them.
Mr Logan Pearsall Smith, for whom most of us have a deep admiration, reads George Santayana because he finds in this philosopher "much writing like that of the older Essayists on large human subjects, which seemed ... more interesting and in many ways more important than anything ... in the works of other contemporary writers ... it has been his aim to reconstruct our modern, miscellaneous, shattered picture of the world, and to build, not of clouds, but of the materials of this common earth, an edifice of thought, a fortress or temple for the modern mind, in which every natural impulse could find, if possible, its opportunity for satisfaction, and every ideal aspiration its shrine and altar."
In a word, then, we should read Mr Santayana because he has a definite philosophy, a rational conception of the world and man's allotted place in it. But what, you will ask, does a modern novelist want with a general philosophy when he has made it his business merely to describe what he observes in the particular lives of individual men and women? To which I would reply that though the philosopher has his eyes steadily turned to the infinite and contemplates eternal values in the round, by the light of reason, the novelist at times likes to turn from transcribing the trivial incidents of everyday life and from probing the characters of men and women to join the philosopher in his serene detachment. What is good for the novelist is good for every man.
Even the business man or the sportsman occasionally thinks of a future life either vividly and with acute misery when he has suffered an irreparable loss or loosely and vaguely when he attends the religious rites of his church. To such men—that is, to all of us who are not philosophers—such a passage as the following acts like a tonic or tests our courage.
"To imagine a second career is a pleasing antidote for ill-fortune: the poor soul wants another chance. But how should a future life be constituted if it is to satisfy this demand, and how long need it last? It would evidently have to go on in an environment closely analogous to earth; I could not, for instance, write in another world the epics which the necessity of earning my living may have stifled here, did that other world contain no time, no heroic struggles, or no metrical language. Nor is it clear that my epics, to be perfect, would need to be quite endless. If what is foiled in me is really poetic genius and not simply a tendency toward perpetual motion, it would not help me if in heaven, in lieu of my dreamt-of epics, I were allowed to beget several robust children. In a word, if hereafter I am to be the same man improved I must find myself in the same world corrected."
In a moment we feel as if the windows were opened for the first time in our minds and the pure air of Reason allowed to circulate in our weak lungs. Such clarity of thought may kill us by its freshness; on the other hand, it may restore us to real health. May not our pathetic clinging to a belief in immortality be only a gross form of selfish terror? The philosopher would raise us to a higher plane of thought.
"What a despicable creature must a man be, and how sunk below the level of the most barbaric virtue, if he cannot bear to live and die for his children, for his art, or for his country...." "Let a man once overcome his selfish terror at his own finitude, and his finitude itself is, in one sense, overcome...." "Nothing can be meaner than the anxiety to live on, to live on any how and in any shape: a spirit with any honour is not willing to live except in its own way, and a spirit with any wisdom is not over-eager to live at all."
"While the primitive and animal side of man may continue to cling to existence at all hazards and to find the thought of extinction intolerable, his reason and finer imagination will build a new ideal on reality better understood, and be content that the future he looks to should be enjoyed by others...."
"The truth is cruel, but it can be loved, and it makes free those who have loved it."
So we are bidden to follow the advice of Horace:
"He lives happy and master over himself who can say daily, I have lived."
It is this fierce determination to face the truth of things and not to take refuge in comfortable superstitions that endears the philosopher to us and makes us sympathise with his scorn for the irrationality of Browning.
"It [Browning's "philosophy"] is in spirit the direct opposite of the philosophic maxim of regarding the end, of taking care to leave a finished life and a perfect character behind us. It is the opposite, also, of the religiousmemento mori, of the warning that time is short before we go to our account. According to Browning, there is no account: we have an infinite credit ... his notion is simply that the game of life, the exhilaration of action, is inexhaustible ... but it is unmeaning to call such an exercise heaven ... it is a mere euphemism to call this perpetual vagrancy a development of the soul."
Closely related to his thoughts on Immortality are Mr Santayana's caustic comments on fame.
"The highest form of vanity is love of fame. It is a passion easy to deride but hard to understand, and in men who live at all by imagination almost impossible to eradicate. The good opinion of posterity can have no possible effect on our fortunes, and the practical value which reputation may temporarily have is quite absent in posthumous fame.... What comfort would it be to Virgil that boys still read him at school, or to Pindar that he is sometimes mentioned in a world from which everything he loved has departed?" ... But yet the ancients "often identified fame with immortality, a subject on which they had far more rational sentiments than have since prevailed.... Fame consists in the immortality of a man's work, his spirit, his efficacy, in the perpetual rejuvenation of his soul in the world."
The whole essence of Mr Santayana's teaching on this point is that we become a portion of that loveliness which once we made more lovely. It is a wholesome, sanative doctrine this ... it leads us to the belief that if we are butterflies, we have a real immortality in that we have added something to the eternal beauty of the world: if we are beetles ... and are squashed, I take it that onemore piece of beastliness is suppressed at our extinction and we ought to be glad at that. Consequently, if we accept his theory of the finitude of life, we are braced up to do our part while we can. We strive to round off each day with the phrase, "I have lived," and we see our immortality in our oneness with the Universe, not in the endless projection of our own feeble personality.
And after the philosophy of life we turn naturally to thoughts on Love.
"Not to believe in love is a great sign of dulness," we read. "It is a true natural religion ... it sanctifies a natural mystery ... it recognises that what it worshipped under a figure was truly the principle of all good. The loftiest edifices need the deepest foundations. Love would never take so high a flight unless it sprung from something profound and elementary.... When the generative energy is awakened all that can ever be is virtually called up and made consciously potential; and love yearns for the universe of values.... As a harp, made to vibrate to the fingers, gives some music to the wind, so the nature of man, necessarily susceptible to woman, becomes simultaneously sensitive to other influences, and capable of tenderness toward every object."
And after love, religion.
He adds an all-important corollary to Bacon's well-known axiom that "a little philosophy inclineth men's minds to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men's minds about to religion."
"When Bacon penned the sage epigram," he continues, "he forgot to add that the God to whom depth in philosophy brings back men's minds is far from being the same from whom a little philosophy estranges them. It would be pitiful indeed if mature reflection bred no better conceptions than those which have drifted down the muddy stream of time, where tradition and passion have jumbled everything together."
I suppose that though most of us have had to listen to an amazing amount of nonsense about immortality and love, on the subject of religion we have rarely been taught anything that was not nonsense. Mr Santayana clears the ground as with a hatchet. We feel after reading him as if we were able to see clearly for the first time.
InProsaic Misunderstandingshe makes us realise precisely what we mean by religion.
"Religious doctrines would do well to withdraw their pretensions to be dealing with matters of fact.... The excellence of religion is due to an idealisation of experience which, while making religion noble if treated as poetry, makes it necessarily false if treated as science.... The mass of mankind is divided into two classes—the Sancho Panzas who have a sense for reality, but no ideals, and the Don Quixotes with a sense for ideals, but mad. The expedient of recognising facts as facts and accepting ideals as ideals, although apparently simple enough, seems to elude the normal human power of discrimination."
"A god is a conceived victory of mind over nature. A visible god is the consciousness of such a victory momentarily attained. The vision soon vanishes, the sense of omnipotence is soon dispelled by recurring conflicts with hostile forces: but the momentary illusion of that realised good has left us with the perennial knowledge of good as an ideal. Therein lies the essence and the function of religion."
Christianity conquered the world because it proclaimed a new poetry, a new ideal and a new God. "The moving power was a fable ... it carried the imagination into a new sphere ... it was a whole world of poetry descended among men."
The Christian drama, he tells us, is a magnificent poetic rendering of the fact that what is false in the science of facts may be true in the science of values: while the existence of things must be understood by referring them to their causes, which are mechanical, their functions can only be explained by what is interesting in their results: in other words, by their relation to human nature and to human happiness ... so the whole of Christian doctrine is thus religious and efficacious only when it becomes poetry.
Christian fictions beguiled the intellect but they enlightened the imagination: they made man understand the pathos and nobility of his life, the necessity of discipline, the possibility of sanctity.
And though Mr Santayana would have us accept his dictum that matters of religion should never be matters ofcontroversy, he does not hesitate to become controversial himself over what he calls Protestantism (which he would doubtless say is not a matter of religion at all). He lashes out in no uncertain tones: "It is sentimental, its ritual is meagre and unctuous, it expects no miracles, it thinks optimism akin to piety and regards profitable enterprise and practical ambition as a sort of moral vocation."
It is not surprising in view of what he has to say about the world of politics and religion to find that he expresses relief at being able to turn from them to almost any art, "where what is good is altogether and finally good and what is bad is at least not treacherous: ... how doubly blessed it becomes to find a sphere where limitation is an excellence, where diversity is a beauty, and where every man's ambition is consistent with every other man's and even favourable to it ... with an artist no sane man quarrels, any more than with the colours of a child's eyes." But he ponders upon the rarity of æsthetic feeling. "Men are habitually insensible to beauty ... moralists are much more able to condemn than to appreciate the effects of the arts ... and beauty (in which he finds a hint of happiness) is something indescribable ... it is the clearest manifestation of perfection, and the best evidence of its possibility. Beauty is a pledge of the possible conformity between the soul and nature, and consequently a ground of faith in the prevalence of the good."
So we find that in his eyes the value of all art lies in making people happy " ... to discriminate happiness is the very soul of art, which expresses experience without distorting it." The queer thing is that though men ought to pursue happiness, they seldom do so ... by happiness Mr Santayana means friendship, wealth, reputation, power, and influence added to family life. "If, then, artists and poets are unhappy, it is, after all, because happiness does not interest them; they cannot seriously pursue it, because its components are not components of beauty, and being in love with beauty, they neglect and despise those unæsthetic social virtues in the operation of which happiness is found." On the other hand, those who pursue happiness conceived in terms of money, success, respectability and so on miss more often than notthat real and fundamental part of happiness which flows from the senses and imagination. "This element is what the love of beauty can add to life: for beauty can also be a cause and a factor of happiness. Yet the happiness of loving beauty is either too sensuous to be stable, or else too ultimate, too sacramental, to be accounted happiness by the worldly mind."
When he descends to particularise upon the arts we are surprised to find that he has nothing to say about painting, and begins with music, music which he calls "essentially useless, as life is: but both lend utility to their conditions ... pure music is pure art. Its extreme abstraction is balanced by its entire spontaneity, and while it has no external significance, it bears no internal curse ... it is the chosen art of a mind to whom the world is still foreign ... it serves to keep alive the conviction that perfection is essentially possible; it reminds us that there are worlds far removed from the actual which are yet living and very near to the heart ..." and so while it is "the purest and most impressive of the arts, it is the least human and instructive of them."
Literature, according to his theory, takes a middle course between music and science and tries to subdue music, which for its purposes would be futile and too abstract, into conformity with general experience, making music thereby significant. Literature "looks at natural things with an incorrigibly dramatic eye, turning them into permanent unities (which they never are) and almost into persons. The literary man is an interpreter and hardly succeeds, as the musician may, without experience and mastery of human affairs. His art is half genius and half fidelity. He needs inspiration ... yet inspiration alone will lead him astray, for his art is relative to something other than its own formal impulse; it comes to clarify the real world, not to encumber it."
He rightly differentiates between the philosopher and the poet when he says that the philosopher in his best moments is a poet, while the poet "has his worst moments when he succeeds in being a philosopher."
"Poetry is an attenuation, a rehandling, an echo of crude experience; it is itself a theoretic vision of things at arm's-length.... The first element which the intellectrejects in forming its ideas of things is the emotion which accompanies the perception; and this emotion is the first thing the poet restores. He stops at the image, because he stops to enjoy.... Poetry takes every present passion and every private dream in turn for the core of the universe." He finds that the prosaic rendering of experience has a greater value, if only the experience covers enough human interests: youth and aspiration indulge in poetry ... for "youth, being as yet little fed by experience, can find volume and depth only in the soul; the half-seen, the supra-mundane, the inexpressible, seem to it alone beautiful and worthy of homage.... Mature interests centre on soluble problems and tasks capable of execution ... to dwell, as irrational poets do, on some private experience, on some emotion without representative or ulterior value, seems a waste of time. Fiction becomes less interesting than affairs, and poetry turns into a sort of incompetent whimper, a childish foreshortening of the outspread world."
On the other hand, Mr Santayana finds in the abstractness of prose its great defect. It must convey intelligence, but intelligence clothed in a language that lends the message an intrinsic value and makes it delightful to apprehend apart from its importance in ultimate theory or practice. It is in that measure a fine art ... a poetry "pervasively representative." In a most stimulating little essay onThe Supreme Poetthe philosopher propounds his ideal for literature. "It might be throughout a work of art. It would become so not by being ornate, but by being appropriate: and the sense of a great precision and justness would come over us as we read or write. It would delight us; it would make us see how beautiful, how satisfying, is the art of being observant, economical, and sincere."
Furthermore, life has a margin of play which might become broader.... "To the art of working well a civilised race would add the art of playing well. To play with nature and make it decorative, to play with the over-tones of life and make them delightful, is a sort of art." The new poet of this double insight would "live in the continual presence of all experience, and respect it: he would at the same time understand nature, the ground ofthat experience; and he would also have a delicate sense for the ideal echoes of his own passions, and for all the colours of his possible happiness." It is sad to think that this supreme poet is in limbo still, but now that the path has been so clearly indicated for him, are we not justified in thinking that Mr Santayana is merely the herald of his great dawn?
Just as he sees no great poet even in embryo, so he laments the death of all great men:
"A great man need not be virtuous nor his opinions right, but he must have a firm mind, a distinctive, luminous character ... greatness is spontaneous ... simplicity, trust in some one clear instinct, are essential to it; but the spontaneous variation must be in the direction of some possible sort of order ... how should there be any great heroes, saints, artists, philosophers or legislators in an age when nobody trusts himself ... in an age when the worddogmaticis a term of reproach? Greatness has character and severity, it is deep and sane, it is distinct and perfect. For this reason there is none of it to-day.... A great imaginative apathy has fallen on the mind. One-half the learned world is amused in tinkering obsolete armour, as Don Quixote did his helmet; deputing it, after a series of catastrophes, to be at last sound and invulnerable. The other half, the naturalists who have studied psychology and evolution, look at life from the outside, and the processes of Nature make them forget her uses."
These are hard words, but who can say that they are undeserved?
Not less scornful is he over our contempt for the intellect. "The degree of intelligence which this age possesses makes it so very uncomfortable that it asks for something less vital, and sighs for what evolution has left behind. In the presence of such cruelly distinct things as astronomy or such cruelly confused things as theology it feelsla nostalgie de la boue." Instead of freeing their intelligence, our enslaved contemporaries elude it. They cannot rise to a detached contemplation of earthly things; they revert to sensibility: having no stomach for the ultimate, they burrow downwards towards the primitive. "To be so preoccupied with vitality is a symptom of anæmia."
Yet Mr Santayana is not the sort of man to indulge in sweeping denunciations. There is a reverse to this picture of the modern world.
"Without great men and without clear convictions this age is nevertheless very active intellectually: it is studious, empirical, inventive, sympathetic. Its wisdom consists in a certain contrite openness of mind; it flounders, but at least in floundering it has gained a sense of possible depths in all directions."
But our poetry is the poetry of barbarism, because this age has no sense for perfection; its ideals are negative and partial, its moral strength is a blind vehemence. So we get no total vision, no grasp of the whole reality, no capacity for a sane and steady idealisation. In his little essays on Materialism and Morals we find this outspoken philosophy on the subject of war:
"There are panegyrists of war who say that without a periodical bleeding a race decays and loses its manhood. Experience is directly opposed to this shameless assertion. It is war that wastes a nation's wealth, chokes its industries, kills its flower, narrows its sympathies, condemns it to be governed by adventurers, and leaves the puny, deformed, and unmanly to breed the next generation. Internecine war, foreign and civil, brought about the greatest set-back which the life of reason has ever suffered; it exterminated the Greek and Italian aristocracies. Instead of being descended from heroes, modern nations are descended from slaves: and it is not their bodies only that show it.... To call war the soil of courage and virtue is like calling debauchery the soil of love."
But we read a philosopher mainly, I take it, to see how he himself reached his serene height of detached interest in the universe. We who have no philosophic bent fondly imagine that it is only after despairing of instinctive happiness that the philosopher turns his back on the struggle of life with his shout of "Sour Grapes." Reading Mr Santayana will correct this delusion.
"We cannot venerate anyone in whom appreciation is not divorced from desire. And this elevation and detachment of the heart need not follow upon any great disappointment; it is finest and sweetest where it is the gradual fruit of many affections now merged and mellowedinto a natural piety. Indeed, we are able to frame our idea of the Deity on no other model.... There is perhaps no more frivolous notion than that a good, once attained, loses all its value.... We turn from a beautiful thing, as from a truth or a friend, only to return incessantly, and with increasing appreciation."
This, then, is the reason why we should read Mr Santayana, that we should clarify our aims, readjust our standards, and increase our capacity for appreciating the beautiful, for this is the royal road to the only happiness which is true, steadfast and eternal.
Read but this one song:
"Why have you stolen my delightIn all the golden shows of springWhen every cherry-tree is whiteAnd in the limes the thrushes sing,O fickler than the April day,O brighter than the golden broom,O blyther than the thrushes' lay,O whiter than the cherry-bloom,O sweeter than all things that blow ...Why have you only left for meThe broom, the cherry's crown of snow,And thrushes in the linden-tree?"
"Why have you stolen my delightIn all the golden shows of springWhen every cherry-tree is whiteAnd in the limes the thrushes sing,
O fickler than the April day,O brighter than the golden broom,O blyther than the thrushes' lay,O whiter than the cherry-bloom,
O sweeter than all things that blow ...Why have you only left for meThe broom, the cherry's crown of snow,And thrushes in the linden-tree?"
Is there any need of further reason?
One concedes to that at once a word not often unlocked from one's vocabulary; loveliness is implicit in it, music, harmony, beauty are all there. Alas! that we should have to search among so many heaps of rubble for one rich gem, but this at any rate is well-nigh flawless: for the rest, Mr Brett-Young has approached excellence, achieved haunting lines and oftentimes failed to arouse any emotional feeling at all. He talks of the lovely words that wander through his brain, but they frequently refuse to leave their refuge. He is at his best when he is most simple, as here:
"High on the tufted baobab-treeTo-night a rain-bird sang to meA simple song, of three notes only,That made the wilderness more lonely;For in my brain it echoed nearly,Old village church bells chiming clearly:The sweet cracked bells, just out of tune,Over the mowing grass in June—Over the mowing grass, and meadowsWhere the low sun casts long shadows,And cuckoos call in the twilightFrom elm to elm, in level flight.Now through the evening meadows moveSlow couples of young folk in love,Who pause at every crooked stileAnd kiss in the hawthorn's shade the while:Like pale moths the summer frocksHover between the beds of phlox,And old men, feeling it is late,Cease their gossip at the gate,Till deeper still the twilight grows,And night blossometh, like a roseFull of love and sweet perfume,Whose heart most tender stars illume.Here the red sun sank like lead,And the sky blackened overhead;Only the locust chirped at meFrom the shadowy baobab-tree."
"High on the tufted baobab-treeTo-night a rain-bird sang to meA simple song, of three notes only,That made the wilderness more lonely;
For in my brain it echoed nearly,Old village church bells chiming clearly:The sweet cracked bells, just out of tune,Over the mowing grass in June—
Over the mowing grass, and meadowsWhere the low sun casts long shadows,And cuckoos call in the twilightFrom elm to elm, in level flight.
Now through the evening meadows moveSlow couples of young folk in love,Who pause at every crooked stileAnd kiss in the hawthorn's shade the while:
Like pale moths the summer frocksHover between the beds of phlox,And old men, feeling it is late,Cease their gossip at the gate,
Till deeper still the twilight grows,And night blossometh, like a roseFull of love and sweet perfume,Whose heart most tender stars illume.
Here the red sun sank like lead,And the sky blackened overhead;Only the locust chirped at meFrom the shadowy baobab-tree."
I don't deny that this trick of contrasting unpleasant existing conditions with pleasant conditions that surrounded one's past some time before was part of the stock-in-trade of every so-called war poet. I am not at all concerned to defend, nor am I interested in, the contrast. I merely chronicle the æsthetic pleasure that I derive from verses four and five, though neither of these even approaches perfection. But I do maintain that both the poems I have quoted are worth reading. I do maintain that Mr Brett-Young has the instinct of all true poets: he realises that "Beauty is an armour against fate,""that a lovely word is not an idle thing": he is a true lover of Beauty: listen to his confession of faith:
"Beauty and love are one,Even when fierce war clashes:Even when our fiery sunHath burnt itself to ashes,And the dead planets raceUnlighted through blind space,Beauty will still shine there:Wherefore, I worship her."
"Beauty and love are one,Even when fierce war clashes:Even when our fiery sunHath burnt itself to ashes,And the dead planets raceUnlighted through blind space,Beauty will still shine there:Wherefore, I worship her."
He is, moreover, most successful when he invokes her:
"Whither, O my sweet mistress, must I follow thee?For when I hear thy distant footfall nearing,And wait on thy appearing,Lo! my lips are silent: no words come to me.Once I waylaid thee in green forest covers,Hoping that spring might free my lips with gentle fingers;Alas! her presence lingersNo longer than on the plain the shadow of brown kestrel hovers.Through windless ways of the night my spirit followed after;—Cold and remote were they, and there, possessedBy a strange unworldly rest,Awaiting thy still voice heard only starry laughter.The pillared halls of sleep echoed my ghostly tread.Yet when their secret chambers I essayedMy spirit sank, dismayed,Waking in fear to find the new-born vision fled.Once indeed—but then my spirit bloomed in leafy rapture—I loved; and once I looked death in the eyes:So, suddenly made wise,Spoke of such beauty as I may never recapture....Whither, O divine mistress, must I then follow thee?Is it only in love ... say, is it only in deathThat the spirit blossometh,And words that may match my vision shall come to me?"
"Whither, O my sweet mistress, must I follow thee?For when I hear thy distant footfall nearing,And wait on thy appearing,Lo! my lips are silent: no words come to me.
Once I waylaid thee in green forest covers,Hoping that spring might free my lips with gentle fingers;Alas! her presence lingersNo longer than on the plain the shadow of brown kestrel hovers.
Through windless ways of the night my spirit followed after;—Cold and remote were they, and there, possessedBy a strange unworldly rest,Awaiting thy still voice heard only starry laughter.
The pillared halls of sleep echoed my ghostly tread.Yet when their secret chambers I essayedMy spirit sank, dismayed,Waking in fear to find the new-born vision fled.
Once indeed—but then my spirit bloomed in leafy rapture—I loved; and once I looked death in the eyes:So, suddenly made wise,Spoke of such beauty as I may never recapture....
Whither, O divine mistress, must I then follow thee?Is it only in love ... say, is it only in deathThat the spirit blossometh,And words that may match my vision shall come to me?"
It is because of these simple short poems that I like Mr Brett-Young's work: in his more ambitious and longer poems likeThamarhe leaves me untouched. He cannot convey in words the mysterious mingled effect that the combined colour, music and movement of the Russian ballet produces on the mind.
Let him remain content with the soft, sweet simplicity of Prothalamion and we shall love him the more:
"When the evening came my love said to me:Let us go into the garden now that the sky is cool,The garden of black hellebore and rosemary,Where wild woodruff spills in a milky pool.Low we passed in the twilight, for the wavering heatOf day had waned, and round that shaded plotOf secret beauty the thickets clustered sweet;Here is heaven, our hearts whispered, but our lips spake not.Between that old garden and seas of lazy foamGloomy and beautiful alleys of trees ariseWith spire of cypress and dreamy beechen dome,So dark that our enchanted sight knew nothing but the skies.Veiled with soft air, drench'd in the roses' muskOr the dusky, dark carnation's breath of clove;No stars burned in their deeps, but through the duskI saw my love's eyes, and they were brimmed with love.No star their secret ravished, no wasting moonMocked the sad transience of those eternal hours:Only the soft, unseeing heaven of June,The ghosts of great trees, and the sleeping flowers.For doves that crooned in the leafy noonday nowWere silent; the night-jar sought his secret covers,Nor even a mild sea-whisper moved a creaking bough—Was ever a silence deeper made for lovers?Was ever a moment meeter made for love?Beautiful are your closed lips beneath my kiss;And all your yielding sweetness beautiful—Oh, never in all the world was such a night as this!"
"When the evening came my love said to me:Let us go into the garden now that the sky is cool,The garden of black hellebore and rosemary,Where wild woodruff spills in a milky pool.
Low we passed in the twilight, for the wavering heatOf day had waned, and round that shaded plotOf secret beauty the thickets clustered sweet;Here is heaven, our hearts whispered, but our lips spake not.
Between that old garden and seas of lazy foamGloomy and beautiful alleys of trees ariseWith spire of cypress and dreamy beechen dome,So dark that our enchanted sight knew nothing but the skies.
Veiled with soft air, drench'd in the roses' muskOr the dusky, dark carnation's breath of clove;No stars burned in their deeps, but through the duskI saw my love's eyes, and they were brimmed with love.
No star their secret ravished, no wasting moonMocked the sad transience of those eternal hours:Only the soft, unseeing heaven of June,The ghosts of great trees, and the sleeping flowers.
For doves that crooned in the leafy noonday nowWere silent; the night-jar sought his secret covers,Nor even a mild sea-whisper moved a creaking bough—Was ever a silence deeper made for lovers?
Was ever a moment meeter made for love?Beautiful are your closed lips beneath my kiss;And all your yielding sweetness beautiful—Oh, never in all the world was such a night as this!"
Iris Tree is worth reading for her vivacity, her hatred of shams, her intellectual fireworks, her simple love of the beautiful, her youthful rebellion, her sense of colour, her harmony, her humour, but most of all for this:
"Many things I'd find to charm you,Books and scarves and silken socks,All the seven rainbow colours,Black and white with 'broidered clocks.Then a stick of polished whaleboneAnd a coat of tawny fur,And a row of gleaming bottlesFilled with rose-water and myrrh.Rarest brandy of the 'fifties,Old liqueurs in leather kegs,Golden Sauterne, copper sherryAnd a nest of plovers' eggs.Toys of tortoise-shell and jasper,Little boxes cut in jade;Handkerchiefs of finest cambric,Damask cloths and dim brocade,Six musicians of the Magyar,Madness making harmony;And a bed austere and narrowWith a quilt from Barbary.You shall have a bath of amber,A Venetian looking-glass,And a crimson-chested parrotOn a lawn of terraced grass.Then a small Tanagra statueFound anew in ruins old,Or an azure plate from Persia,Or my hair in plaits of gold;Or my scalp that like an IndianYou shall carry for a purse,Or my spilt blood in a goblet ...Or a volume of my verse."
"Many things I'd find to charm you,Books and scarves and silken socks,All the seven rainbow colours,Black and white with 'broidered clocks.Then a stick of polished whaleboneAnd a coat of tawny fur,And a row of gleaming bottlesFilled with rose-water and myrrh.Rarest brandy of the 'fifties,Old liqueurs in leather kegs,Golden Sauterne, copper sherryAnd a nest of plovers' eggs.Toys of tortoise-shell and jasper,Little boxes cut in jade;Handkerchiefs of finest cambric,Damask cloths and dim brocade,Six musicians of the Magyar,Madness making harmony;And a bed austere and narrowWith a quilt from Barbary.You shall have a bath of amber,A Venetian looking-glass,And a crimson-chested parrotOn a lawn of terraced grass.Then a small Tanagra statueFound anew in ruins old,Or an azure plate from Persia,Or my hair in plaits of gold;Or my scalp that like an IndianYou shall carry for a purse,Or my spilt blood in a goblet ...Or a volume of my verse."
If this doesn't make you rush out and buy her poems, nothing will. It is the topmost level of her achievement, and it is an achievement that even so musical a poet as Walter de la Mare would not be ashamed of having written. Where, I would know, has the love of little material things been so deliciously, so naïvely confessed by any other poet? Listen to her in rebellious mood:
"You preach to me of laws, you tie my limbsWith rights and wrongs and arguments of good,You choke my song and fill my mouth with hymns,You stop my heart and turn it into wood.I serve not God, but make my idol fairFrom clay of brown earth, painted bright with blood,Dressed in sweet flesh and wonder of wild hairBy Beauty's fingers to her changing mood.The long line of the sea, the straight horizon,The toss of flowers, the prance of milky feet,And moonlight clear as grass my great religion,And sunrise falling on the quiet street.The coloured crowd, the unrestrained, the gay,And lovers in the secret sheets of nightTrembling like instruments of music, till the dayStands marvelling at their sleeping bodies white."
"You preach to me of laws, you tie my limbsWith rights and wrongs and arguments of good,You choke my song and fill my mouth with hymns,You stop my heart and turn it into wood.
I serve not God, but make my idol fairFrom clay of brown earth, painted bright with blood,Dressed in sweet flesh and wonder of wild hairBy Beauty's fingers to her changing mood.
The long line of the sea, the straight horizon,The toss of flowers, the prance of milky feet,And moonlight clear as grass my great religion,And sunrise falling on the quiet street.
The coloured crowd, the unrestrained, the gay,And lovers in the secret sheets of nightTrembling like instruments of music, till the dayStands marvelling at their sleeping bodies white."
Here, surely, is that love of beauty, finely expressed, which is the first thing we look for in any true poet. She invokes the aid of her "three musketeers of faithful following," Love, Humour and Rebellion, and these three stalwarts never desert her, and one finds oneself wishing that some other poets had had the good sense to recruit the services of such helpful henchmen.
Especially pleasant is it to find that she has not yet outgrown her youthful pessimism: once youth haspassed, time cries for self-expression in other ways than these:
"There are songs enough of love, of joy, of grief:Roads to the sunset, alleys to the moon:Poems of the red rose and the golden leaf,Fantastic faery and gay ballad tune.The long road unto nothing I will sing,Sing on one note, monotonous and dry,Of sameness, calmness and the years that bringNo more emotion than the fear to die.Grey house, grey house and after that grey house,Another house as grey and steep and still:An old cat tired of playing with a mouse,A sick child tired of chasing down the hill."
"There are songs enough of love, of joy, of grief:Roads to the sunset, alleys to the moon:Poems of the red rose and the golden leaf,Fantastic faery and gay ballad tune.
The long road unto nothing I will sing,Sing on one note, monotonous and dry,Of sameness, calmness and the years that bringNo more emotion than the fear to die.
Grey house, grey house and after that grey house,Another house as grey and steep and still:An old cat tired of playing with a mouse,A sick child tired of chasing down the hill."
There are nothing like enough songs of love or of joy, and no one knows that better than Iris Tree, but Youth loves to drench itself in hopeless greyness, if only to run through the whole gamut of human emotions, "just for fun." It is like a child's dressing up in a myriad different costumes:
"I see myself in many different dresses ...I see myself the child of many races,Poisoners, martyrs, harlots and princesses;Within my soul a thousand weary tracesOf pain and joy and passionate excesses...."
"I see myself in many different dresses ...I see myself the child of many races,Poisoners, martyrs, harlots and princesses;Within my soul a thousand weary tracesOf pain and joy and passionate excesses...."
Much more significant of maturity is her bizarreSonnet for Would-be Suicides(that is my title for it, not hers):