Confessions of a Book-Lover Part 6

It seems to me that the study of Sidney Lanier's "Science of English Verse" would suppress the art of expression, even in a genius. By the time he learned how to write verse he would be too old to write verse at all! There are less intricate books. I learned from the theories and the odes of Coventry Patmore and the "Observations in the Art of English Poesy" of Thomas Campion and his practice that the best _vers libre_ has freedom, unexpectedness, lyrical lightness, and an apparently unstudied charm, because the poet had striven, not to sing as a bird sings, without art, but to sing in a civilized world as a great tenor in the opera sings, because he had acquired his method of almost perfect expression through science and art. And, if one wants an example of the intangible "something," expressed artistically, why not take Benet's "Immoral Ballad"? A little thing, sir; but a poet's own and so, incapable of being a.n.a.lyzed by any rules known to the pundits. But it is not _vers libre_. If it were, its intangible appeal would not exist.

Nearly every versifier who disregards those models of form in verse which include rime, or whose cadences are informal, is set down as an imitator of Walt Whitman. When I was young, Walt Whitman seemed to have been established as a strange, erratic, and G.o.dless person, whose indecencies were his princ.i.p.al stock in trade. Emerson's practical repudiation of him had had its effect, and the very respectable--that is, gentlemen of the cla.s.s of the vestrymen of Grace Church in New York of his time--looked on him with horror. He had, it seems, attacked established religion when he made his onslaught in the Brooklyn _Eagle_ on that eminently important body.

The shock of the arrival of Walt Whitman had been broken by the time that I had begun to read poetry wherever I found it; and I accepted the curious mixture of prose and poetry in Walt Whitman just as I accepted the musical Wagner. At that time we had not yet learned to know that Wagner's music was melodious; we had not yet discovered that "Lohengrin," for instance, was woven of many melodies, for they were not detached and made into arias. What could be expected of young persons brought up on "The Bohemian Girl" and "Maritana"?

And yet we soon found out without any help from the critics that Walt Whitman was essentially a poet, and we suspected that his roughness had been deliberately adopted as the best possible form in which to clothe ideas which were not conventional, and to attract attention. Most of the young at that time thought that he had as much right to do this as Browning had to be wilfully inarticulate. The critics did not concern us much. There was always a little coterie of students at the University of Pennsylvania or at Jefferson College, or young men under the influence of Mr. Edward Roth or Mr. Henry Peterson. Among these was a brilliant Mexican, David Cerna; Charles Arthur Henry, who died young; Daniel Dawson, whose "Seeker in the Marshes" ought still to live. He was a devout Whitmanite. Much younger was Harrison Morris, whose opinions, carrying great weight, occasionally floated to us. As I have said, Whitman neither startled nor shocked us nor did he cause us to imitate him. At this time, I was deep in Heinrich Heine, whose prose was not easy to read, but whose lyrics, with a very slight help from the dictionary, were entrancing! I could never understand, being enraptured with Heine's lyrics at that time, why Whitman should have chosen such a poor medium for lyrical expression or such a rude utterance for some n.o.ble ideas. That he chose at times to put into speech sensual dreams or pa.s.sing shadows of evil thoughts astonished us no more than the existence of the photographic reproductions, then the fas.h.i.+on, of the gargoyles from the Cathedral of Notre Dame, or the strange and very improper representations of the Seven Deadly Sins which were sometimes carved on the backs and the undersides of the stalls in old cathedrals.

We Philadelphians thought that it was not a gentlemanly performance.

There were persons who wallowed in pools of de-civilization, and, though they might whisper of their mental wallowings in intimate circles, there was no point whatever in putting them into print. But the great pa.s.sages--there are very many--and the n.o.ble complete poems--there are a few--of Whitman were chosen and recited and enjoyed.

Besides, Whitman lived just across the Delaware River, and one could meet him almost at any time in a street car or lounging about his haunts in Camden. As he was part of our everyday life he did not for us represent anything essentially new. When Swinburne and Rossetti and the Preraphaelites, however, came into our possession, it was quite another thing! There was no Whitman movement among our young. There was a marked, but not concentrated, reflection of the Preraphaelites.

Swinburne's music took us by storm! It did not mean that a young man had a depraved mind because he spouted "Faustine" or quoted verse after verse of the roses and raptures of Swinburne. It simply meant that a breath of rich, sensuous odours from an exotic island had swept across the conventional lamp-posts and well-trimmed gardens of his life. I wonder if any young man feels to-day, in reading Masefield's poems, or Walter de la Mare's, or Seeger's, or Amy Lowell's, or Robert Frost's, or even Alfred Noyes's, the thrill that stirred us when we heard the choruses in "Atalanta in Calydon" or Rossetti's "Blessed Damozel"? And there was William Morris and "The Earthly Paradise!"

The first appearance of Kipling's poems recalled the old thrills of "new" poets, but of late, though the prospects of poetry are beginning to revive, no very modern poet seems to have become a part of the daily lives of the young, who declare that the world is changed, and that the Old hold no torches for them by which they can discover what they really want! The more things change, the more they remain the same! And the young woman who read Swinburne surrept.i.tiously and smoked a cigarette in private now reads Havelock Ellis on summer porches, and puffs at a cigarette in public whenever she feels like it. She is really no more advanced than the girl of the period of the eighties, and not any more astonis.h.i.+ng. It's the same old girl! And the young men who discovered Swinburne and Rossetti, and who were rather bored by the thinness of their aftermath, the aesthetic poets, really got more colour and amazement and delight out of the flas.h.i.+ng of the meteors than the youth of to-day seem to get. It was the fas.h.i.+on then to be blase and cynical and bored with life; but n.o.body was really bored because there were too many amusing and delightful things in the world--as there are now.

Joaquin Miller, with his gorgeous parrots and burning Southern lights and his intensities and his simulated pa.s.sion, did not last long. In England he was looked on as a typical American poet, more decent than Walt Whitman, less vulgar, but with the charm Whitman had for the English--that no Englishman could ever be like him! In England they wanted the Americans raw and fresh and with a savage flavour about them.

I read the poems of Richard Watson Gilder, of Edith Thomas, of Robert Underwood Johnson--whose "Italian Rhapsody" and "The Winter Hour" can never be forgotten--and certain verses of Edmund Clarence Stedman. But _les jeunes_ prefer the new verse makers. There is even a kind of cult for the Imagists. A spokesman for the Imagists tells us briefly that "free verse" is a term that may be attached to all that increasing amount of writing whose cadence is more marked, more definite, and closer knit than that of prose, but which is not so violently or so obviously accented as the so-called "regular verse." Richard Aldington's "Childhood" is a very typical example of _vers libre_. It is also an Imagist poem. It will be remarked that it is so free that there is no cadence that any musician could find. It is a pretty little joyful trifle!

There was nothing to see, Nothing to do, Nothing to play with, Except that in an empty room upstairs There was a large tin box Containing reproductions of the Magna Charta, Of the Declaration of Independence, And of a letter from Raleigh after the Armada; There were also several packets of stamps, Yellow and blue Guatemala parrots, Blue stags and red baboons and birds from Sarawak, Indians and Men-of-war From the United States, And the green and red portraits Of King Francobollo Of Italy.

I don't believe in G.o.d I do believe in avenging G.o.ds Who plague us for sins we never sinned But who avenge us.

That's why I'll never have a child, Never shut up in a chrysalis in a match-box For the moth to spoil and crush its bright colours, Beating its wings against the dingy prison-wall.

Alfred Kreymborg is also very free, and only sometimes musical, but he hammers in his images with a vengeance. But of all the new Americans, Vachel Lindsay's jolly fantasies, with a slightly heard banjo accompaniment, are the most fascinating and least tiresome of all the New.

When one has wallowed for a time with the Imagists and carefully examined the _vers librists_, with the aid of a catalogue and explanations, one turns to the "Collected Poems" of Walter de la Mare.

Come, now! Listen to this:

When slim Sophia mounts her horse And paces down the avenue, It seems an inward melody She paces to.

Each narrow hoof is lifted high Beneath the dark encl.u.s.tering pines, A silver ray within his bit And bridle s.h.i.+nes.

His eye burns deep, his tail is arched, And streams upon the shadowy air, The daylight sleeks his jetty flanks, His mistress' hair.

Her habit flows in darkness down, Upon the stirrup rests her foot, Her brow is lifted, as if earth She heeded not.

'Tis silent in the avenue, The sombre pines are mute of song, The blue is dark, there moves no breeze The boughs among.

When slim Sophia mounts her horse And paces down the avenue, It seems an inward melody She paces to.

It is difficult for the simple minded to understand why Walter de la Mare, who is a singer with something to sing about, cannot be cla.s.sed as an Imagist. He uses the language of common speech and tries always to say exactly what he means; he suits his mood to his rhythm, and his cadences to his ideas; he believes pa.s.sionately in the artistic value of modern life; but he does not seem to see why he should not write about an old-fas.h.i.+oned aeroplane of the year 1914, if he can make it the centre of something interesting.

The professional Imagist tries to produce poetry that is hard and clear and never blurred or indefinite, and he holds that concentration is the very essence of poetry. The Imagist fights for "free verse" as for the principle of liberty. But why does he fight? If "free verse" is musical, if it expresses a mood or an emotion or a thought in terms that appeal to the mind or the heart or the imagination, why should it be necessary to fight for it? It may suit certain verse makers to make men of straw in order "to fight" for them; but all the world loves a poet, if the poet once touches its heart. "The Toys" of Coventry Patmore is a good example of what "free verse" ought to be. But it is not free because it is lawless; its freedom is the freedom of all true art which does not ignore, which obediently accepts, certain laws that govern the expression of the beautiful. Mr. Richard Aldington's "Daisy" is certainly a less appealing poem than that one in which Swinburne sings of the lady who forgot his kisses, and he forgot her name!

Jose de Heredia, in "Les Trophees," is both an Imagist and a Symbolist.

He has the inspiration and the science of the Sibyl without her contortions. It is unfortunate that the truculent att.i.tude of the professional makers of "free verse" should have arrayed a small and angry group against them; and this group will have none of Robert Frost, who is certainly a poet and a poet of great courage and originality.

There are others, however, who may not be imitators of Robert Frost, but who seem as if they were. Tennyson's "Owl," which is looked on to-day as an example of Victorian idiocy, is really better than Mr. T. S. Eliot's "Cousin Nancy":

Miss Nancy Ellicott Strode across the hills and broke them, Rode across the hills and broke them-- The barren New England hills-- Riding to hounds Over the cow-pasture.

Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked And danced all the modern dances; And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it, But they knew that it was modern.

Upon the glazen shelves kept watch Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith, The army of unalterable law.

The Imagist does not believe in ornament, and this glimpse of character might be uttered in one sentence. Perhaps, however, a tendency to ornamentation might have made the poem at least decorative. After all, when one has emerged from the rarefied atmosphere of the Imagist, the Symbolist, and the _vers librist_, one swims into the splendours of Francis Thompson as one might take refuge from a wooden farmhouse unprotected by trees, in a Gothic spire, a Byzantine altar-piece, or a series of Moorish arabesques. It is a frightful descent from the heaven of Crashaw and the places of the Seraphim in "The Hound of Heaven," by Francis Thompson, to Richard Aldington.

Each lover of poetry has his favourite poem and his favourite poet, and it has always seemed to me that one of the hardest tasks of the critic is to decide on the position of a poet among poets, or of a poet in relation to life. For myself, to speak modestly, I cannot see how I could condemn the taste of the man who thinks that Browning and Swinburne and Tennyson, and, in fact, nearly all the modern English poets, deserve to be cla.s.sed indiscriminately together as "inspiring."

And I cannot even scorn the man who declares that Tennyson is _demode_ because his heroines are in crinoline and conventional, and his mediaeval knights cut out of pasteboard.

By comparison with the original of the "Idylls of the King" this statement seems to be true. Sir Thomas Malory's knights and ladies--by modern standards they would hardly be called "ladies"--do not bear the test of even the most elemental demands of modern taste. They are as different as the characters in Saxo Grammaticus's "Hamblet" are from those in Shakespeare's "Hamlet." But I may enjoy the smoothness of the "Idylls of the King," their bursts of exquisite lyricism, their cadences, and their impossibilities, and at the same time read Sir Thomas Malory with delight. When I hear raptures over Browning and Swinburne, when people grow dithyrambic over John Masefield and Alfred Kreymborg and others new--_chacun a son got_--I feel that by comparison with Francis Thompson, these poets are not rich. They are poor because they seem to leave out G.o.d; that is, the G.o.d of the Christians.

Swinburne could never be a real pagan, because he could not escape the shadow of the Crucifixion. Theocritus was a real pagan because he knew neither the sorrow of the Crucifixion nor the joy of the Resurrection.

Keats was a lover of Greece, was ardent, inexpressibly beautiful, sensuously charming; but Keats could no more be a real Greek than Shakespeare, in "Julius Caesar," could be a real Roman. Nor could Tennyson, nor Browning, nor William Morris, nor the Preraphaelites be really out of their time, for they could not understand the essentially religious qualities of the times into which they tried to project themselves.

If you compare the "Idylls" of Tennyson with those idylls of Theocritus he imitated, you easily see that his pictures are not even bad copies of the originals; they are not even paraphrases--to turn again from painting to literature. They are fine in themselves, and the critics of the future, more reasonable than ours and less reactionary, will give them their true place. As for Browning, it is only necessary to read the Italian writers of the Renascence, to find how very modern he is in his poems that touch on that period. He is always modern. With all his efforts he cannot understand that mixture of paganism and Catholicism which made the Renascence possible. He seems to a.s.sume that the Catholic Church in the time of the Renascence produced men in whom paganism struggled with Christianity. The fact is that paganism had melted into Christianity and Christianity had given it a new light and a new form.

It was not difficult for an artist of the Renascence to look on a statuette of Leda and the Swan or Danae and the Descent of Jupiter as a shower of gold, as prefiguring the Incarnation. There was nothing blasphemous in this pagan symbolism of a pagan prophecy of the birth of a G.o.d from a virgin. It does not follow that Browning is not powerfully beautiful and essentially poetical, even when he reads modern meanings impossibly into the life of older days. Nevertheless, he is unsatisfactory, as almost all modern poets, when they interpret the past, are unsatisfactory. A great poet may look into his heart and write, but with Tennyson, with Browning, with Swinburne, one feels that very often they mistake the beating of their own hearts for the sound of the pulsations of the hearts of others.

Similarly, modern Christians who claim to be orthodox are sometimes shocked when they are told that Saint Peter, for example, did not believe that a man might not be both circ.u.mcised and baptized. According to a common belief, the two could not exist together among the converted Jews. And the modern man of letters seems to think that paganism and Christianity were at odds at all points. A deeper knowledge of the manifestations of religion, before the Reformation, would dissipate an illusion which spoils so much fine modern poetry.

Another point, in applying my canons of criticism to poets whom I love in spite of this defect, is that I find that they have no desire to be united with G.o.d--you may call him Jehovah, Jove, or Lord, to quote Pope.

They are, as a rule, without mysticism and constantly without that ecstasy which makes Southwell, Crashaw, and the greatest of all the mystical poets writing in English, Francis Thompson, so satisfactory.

Wordsworth may have been transcendental, as Emerson certainly was, but in different ways they made their search for the Absolute, and the search, especially in Wordsworth's case, was fervent. Neither had the splendours, the ecstasies of that love that casteth out fear, the almost fierce and violent fervour of desire, reflected from the Apocalypse of Saint John and the poems of Saint Teresa and of Saint John of the Cross, which we find in Francis Thompson. In this respect, all modern poets pale before him. He sees life as a glory as Baudelaire saw it as a corpse. After a reading of "The Hound of Heaven," with its glorious colour, its glow, its flame, all other modern poets seem to me to be a pale mauve by comparison to its flaming gold and crimson.

To many of my friends who love modern poets each in his degree, this seems unreasonable and even incomprehensible; but to me it is very real; and all literature which a.s.sumes to treat our lives as if Christianity did not exist lacks that satisfactory quality which one finds in Dante, in Calderon, in Sir Thomas More, and in Shakespeare. It is possible that the prevalence of doubt in modern poetry is the cause of its lack of gaiety. There is a modern belief that gaiety went out of fas.h.i.+on when Pan died or disappeared into hidden haunts. This is not true. The Greeks were gay at times and joyous at times, but if their philosophers represent them, joyousness and gaiety were not essential points of their lives.

The highest cultivation of its time could not save Athens from despondency and destruction, and when the leaders in the city of Rome came to believe so little in life that only the proletariat had children, it was evident that their very tolerant system of adopting any G.o.d that pleased them did not add to the joy of life. The poet, then, who misunderstands the paganism of the Greeks, who does not desire to be united to an absolute Perfection, who is sad by profession, cannot be, according to my canons, a true poet. I speak, not as a critic, but as a man who loves only the poetry that appeals to him.

CHAPTER III

CERTAIN NOVELISTS

My friends.h.i.+p with Thackeray and d.i.c.kens was an evolution rather than a discovery. Once having read "Vanity Fair" or "Nicholas Nickleby," the book became not so much a book but a state of mind--and, as is sometimes felt about a friend--it is hard to remember a time when we did not know him!

Mark Twain was a discovery. "The Jumping Frog of Calavaras" and that chuckling scene in "Innocents Abroad," where the unhappy Italian guide introduces Christopher Columbus to the American travellers, were joys indeed. These were more delightful and satisfying than the kind of humour that preceded them--they seemed better than the whimsicalities of Artemus Ward, and not to be compared to the laboured humour of Mrs.

Partington. But, leaving out these amusing pa.s.sages, my pleasure in the works of Mark Twain faded more and more as I came to the age of reason, which is somewhat over twenty-five. It was hard to laugh at Mark after a time. Compared to him, the "Pickwick Papers" had an infinite variety.

There were other things in d.i.c.kens which were finer than anything in "Pickwick," but the humour of Pickwick had a softness about it, a human interest, a lack of coa.r.s.eness, which placed it immeasurably above that of Mark Twain.

The greatest failure of d.i.c.kens was "A Tale of Two Cities." And the greatest failure of Mark Twain is his "Joan of Arc." But d.i.c.kens redeemed himself in a hundred ways, while Mark Twain sank deeper and deeper into coa.r.s.eness and pessimism. As Mark Twain is by all odds apparently the national American author, it is heresy to say this; and I know persons who have a.s.sumed an air of coldness as long as they could in my presence, because I declined to look on "Joan of Arc" as a masterpiece.

It shows some faults of Mark Twain's philosophy of life, it suggests his narrow and materialistic point of view, and makes plain his lack of knowledge of the perspectives of history. It is all the worse for an appearance of tenderness. Mark Twain was neither mystical nor spiritual.

That does not mean that he was not a good husband and father, a kind friend and a man very loyal to all his engagements. There are many other authors who had not all these qualities, but who would have more easily understood the character of Joan than did Mark Twain.