Platform Monologues Part 6

hid in the white warm cloud Mantling the thorn.

Whether I am right or wrong as to the process of his development, the fact remains that he can be, if he chooses, a master in language of poetic simplicity. Even a fire of garden rubbish can be expressed without becoming altogether unpoetical when one speaks of

the spicy smoke Of withered weeds that burn where gardens be.

Perhaps there do exist some things which cannot be made poetical in any diction whatsoever. Tennyson could only express "tea" by "and on the board the fluttering urn," and if Mr. Davidson has to speak of whisky and calls it

amber spirit that enshrines the heart Of an old Lothian summer,

we have to recognise that he has come very well out of a difficulty. If at another time he refers to it as

things which journalists require,

we must remember that the context implies a certain humour.

"Clear, but not flat," is an easy maxim to utter, but, as Wordsworth too often shows, the danger of falling from studied simplicity into bald prose is always present; and for that reason do smaller artists rather choose to trick their thoughts in verbal jewellery. We cannot say that Davidson, who undertakes to run the risk, never makes the fatal step. In the address to the daisy--

Oh, little brave adventurer!

We human beings love you _so_,

the last word, and indeed the whole line, verges on the infantile. So it is a shock when, after a pa.s.sage of some pretensions, we come upon the lines--

My way of life led me to London town, And difficulties, which I overcame;

or--

But yet my waking intuition, That longed to execute its mission.

It is extremely difficult to realise that the same man wrote these sorry lines who, in another place, adopts this for his style--

... Here spring appears Caught in a leafless brake, her garland torn, Breathless with wonder, and the tears half dried Upon her rosy cheek.

For our comfort and his let us remember that it was the same Wordsworth who wrote both the _Ode on the Intimations of Immortality_ and also the lines--

I've measured it from side to side: It's three feet long and two feet wide!

Nevertheless flaws of this kind are few, and it is almost unfair for me to be the means perhaps of conveying even thus much impression of faultiness about verses which sustain so high a general level of excellence of language.

In point of melody and harmony and flow of verse there can be no doubt that our poet is, for instance, an excellent writer of songs, in which a vigorous simplicity is the prime requisite. They lilt along with great vivacity and ease. But elsewhere I could wish that here and there he would amend his rhymes. "Reviewer" and "literature," "pierced" and "athirst," "noise" and "voice," "inquisition" and "division," "trees"

and "palaces," "shade is" and "ladies," "giftless" and "swiftness," are far from pleasing; and though I am almost ashamed to play the detective in work which is mostly full of charm, I find myself distressed by such cacophonies as--

Hid in its h.o.a.rd of haws,

and--

Pierces a rushlight's ray's length into it.

John Davidson, then, is a genuine son of his age; free in his thought, wide in his sympathies, eager for the amelioration of man's estate, divided between the hopes of science and the regret for a lost religion, compelled to fall back on the everlasting consolations of love and nature, an ardent lover of the country and its sights and sounds, constrained to draw word-pictures of the things which thus delight him, and drawing them with the consummate skill of the man who keeps his eye on the essentials of the thing he draws. His charm lies in his frank sincerity, and in the clear healthy sweetness of his utterance. That he is a poet none can doubt; if he is comparatively young, as I surmise he is, and if he pursues his true development, he may, I believe, easily take his place in the first rank, not only as a successor, but as the successor, of Tennyson.

On William Watson I shall dwell less long. To begin with, he is already better known. Moreover, his special virtues as a poet are more easy to apprehend, for they lie somewhat prominently upon the surface. Better still, he apparently apprehends them himself, and is in that unusually happy position for an artist, of knowing exactly where his own strength lies. And undoubtedly in those departments his strength is great. We need not hold the mention of them in reserve. I have already quoted a pa.s.sage of admirable rhetorical and musical skill and taste from the _Lachrymae Musarum_. That was sufficient to ill.u.s.trate one of this poet's great gifts--the gift of writing splendid verse, as harmonious as Milton's and as choice in expression as Tennyson's. His other chief endowment is that of literary critic. On Burns, Sh.e.l.ley, and Wordsworth he has said almost the final saying, and a.s.suredly in almost the final language. We may pick faults now and again in his expression, and we may suspect a mannerism here and there, especially when we read large quant.i.ties of his verse at one time; nevertheless, each individual piece which fairly represents him is very nearly perfect in its way.

The works of his with which I am acquainted are the volumes ent.i.tled _Wordsworth's Grave and Other Poems_, _The Father of the Forest and Other Poems_, _Lachrymae Musarum_, and the series of sonnets upon Armenia, called _The Purple East_. There is in Watson nothing of the dramatist or of the epic writer. He is a lyrist and a sonneteer. He is also a critic, and might very conceivably be a satirist. But, whatever he is in writing, he is mainly and before all things an intellectual rather than an emotional poet; he is an artist rather than a seer. His poems are constructions of taste and intellectual judgment. Let me take, as an example, his poem upon the _Father of the Forest_. A yew tree, which may be fifteen centuries old, is addressed by him; and, musing on the historical scenes it must have lived through, he gives us a series of verses which touch musically upon salient epochs and characteristic figures in the history of England. To this the yew practically replies that the so-called historical events amount to nothing, and that "wars and tears" will repeat themselves, until men are some day civilized into pursuing but one object, which shall be Beauty. The piece itself reveals nothing profound, awakes no particular emotion. Given the first idea of the plot, so to speak--an idea which is not far to seek for any reflective man--the rest of the material follows as a matter of course.

But where is the man besides Mr. Watson who will give us such lines as--

The South shall bless, the East shall blight, The red rose of the Dawn shall blow; The million-lilied stream of night, Wide in ethereal meadows flow.

I do not say that the poet is without his measure of feeling; but it is rather the pensive feeling of a Jaques, the dainty interest of a Matthew Arnold, than any surge of emotion. The poet seems to me to encourage his brain to feel--to give it that pa.s.sing luxury with a certain amount of deliberation.

The _Hymn to the Sea_ is the only real poem written in the English language in hexameters and pentameters. There have been many attempts at these metres, but they have been failures, one and all. And nothing shows Mr. Watson's skill, nay genius, more than the fact that his attempt is a great and conspicuous success. The sea, confined within its sh.o.r.es, never resting, yet never able to pa.s.s its bounds, at war with the winds, and serving the moon with its tides, is compared to man, with his unrest, his limitations, his aspirations. As before, when the clue is once given, the thread is easily followed to the end. The result is simply an intellectual operation done into verbal music. Yet who but William Watson, having to speak of the moon as mistress of the sea, could express his fancy in words like these:--

When, as yonder, thy mistress, at height of her mutable glories, Wise from the magical East, comes like a sorceress pale.

Ah, she comes, she arises--impa.s.sive, emotionless, bloodless, Wasted and ashen of cheek, zoning her ruins with pearl.

Once she was warm, she was joyous, desire in her pulses abounding: Surely thou lovedst her well, then, in her conquering youth!

Surely not all unimpa.s.sioned, at sound of thy rough serenading, She from the balconied night unto her melodist leaned,-- Leaned unto thee, her bondsman, who keepest to-day her commandments, All for the sake of old love, dead at thy heart though it lie.

Surely such verse would have a claim to endurance, even if the thought were less of a thought than it is.

_Autumn_, again, is a short piece upon the suggestions of that season.

What would those suggestions naturally be? Obviously, the pa.s.sing and peris.h.i.+ng of all things that are. True; but to express those suggestions, obvious as they are, as Watson expresses them, requires a rhetorical power and a taste in melodious words such as would make their possessor eminent in the judgment of men who care anything for beauty.

There may be no particular depth in the work; it may be less pa.s.sionate, less full of thought, than the _Ode to the West Wind_, but we could ill afford to spare such combinations of sound as--

Elusive notes in wandering wafture borne From undiscoverable lips, that blow An immaterial horn.

In _Liberty Rejected_ we meet once more with the similitude of the moon and the tide. Mr. Watson's range of purely intellectual imagination is, like that of his emotion, limited. But we do not mind meeting the comparison again, when the lover who refuses to be free expresses himself thus--

The ocean would as soon Entreat the moon Unsay the magic verse That seals him hers From silver noon to noon.

When he touches upon nature, we feel again that Watson is not "letting himself go." When he escapes from town it is not to revel and to make us revel in the sheer delight of rural sights and sounds. He feels as before, with the eye and the understanding, not with the buoyant blood of the full heart. No matter, he feels enough to give us this quatrain--

In stainless daylight saw the pure seas roll; Saw mountains pillaring the perfect sky: Then journeyed home to carry in his soul The torment of the difference till he die.

Why should I go on to quote such lines as--

That thousand-memoried unimpulsive sea,

or,

Curls the labyrinthine sea Duteous to the lunar will.

Enough that, thanks to a study of Spenser, Milton, Sh.e.l.ley, Keats, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and therefore a delicate taste in word and phrase, and thanks also to an innate genius for verbal music, restrained from Swinburnian riot by a true artistic instinct, Mr. Watson is a poet most delightful to the physical and the mental ear. That he has taken pains with his study is avowed by himself. Beginning with Sh.e.l.ley and pa.s.sing through Keats to Wordsworth, he says--

In my young days of fervid poesy He drew me to him with his strange far light,-- He held me in a world all clouds and gleams, And vasty phantoms, where ev'n Man himself Moved like a phantom 'mid the clouds and gleams.

Anon the Earth recalled me; and a voice Murmuring of dethroned divinities And dead times, deathless upon sculptured urn-- And Philomela's long-descended pain Flooding the night--and maidens of romance To whom asleep St. Agnes' love-dreams come-- Awhile constrained me to a sweet duresse And thraldom, lapping me in high content, Soft as the bondage of white amorous arms.

And then a third voice, long unheeded--held Claustral and cold, and dissonant and tame--Found me at last with ears to hear. It sang Of lowly sorrows and familiar joys, Of simple manhood, artless womanhood, And childhood fragrant as the limpid morn; And from the homely matter nigh at hand, Ascending and dilating, it disclosed s.p.a.ces and avenues, calm heights and breadths Of vision, whence I saw each blade of gra.s.s With roots that groped about eternity, And in each drop of dew upon each blade The mirror of the inseparable All.

It is also clear from such reminiscences as--

The laurel glorious from that wintry hair,