Escape, and Other Essays Part 2

"A book," said Dr. Johnson, "should show one either how to enjoy life or how to endure it"--was ever the function of literature expressed more pungently or justly? Any man who enjoys or endures has a right to speak, if he can. If he can help others to enjoy or to endure, then he need never be in any doubt as to his part in life; while if he cannot ecstatically enjoy, he can at least good- humouredly endure.

III

THE NEW POETS

There's a dark window in a gable which looks out over my narrow slip of garden, where the almond-trees grow, and to-day the dark window, with its black cas.e.m.e.nt lines, had become suddenly a j.a.panese panel. The almond was in bloom, with its delicious, pink, geometrical flowers, not a flower which wins one's love, somehow; it is not homely or sweet enough for that. But it is unapproachably pure and beautiful, with a touch of fanaticism about it--the fanaticism which comes of stainless strength, as though one woke in the dawn and found an angel in one's room: he would not quite understand one's troubles!

But when I looked lower down, there was a sweeter message still, for the mezereon was awake, with its tiny porcelain crimson flowers and its minute leaves of bright green, budding as I think Aaron's rod must have budded, the very crust of the sprig bursting into little flames of green and red.

I thought at the sight of all this that some good fortune was about to befall me; and so it did. When I came back there came a friend to see me whom I seldom see and much enjoy seeing. He is young, but he plays a fine part in the world, and he carries about with him two very fine qualities; one is a great and generous curiosity about what our writers are doing. He is the first man from whom I hear of new and beautiful work; and he praises it royally, he murmurs phrases, he even declaims it in his high, thin voice, which wavers like a dry flame. And what makes all this so refreshing is that his other great quality is an intensely critical spirit, which stares closely and intently at work, as through a crystalline lens.

After we had talked a little, I said to him: "Come, praise me some new writers, you herald of the dawn! You always do that when you come to see me, and you must do it now." He smiled secretly, and drew out a slim volume from his pocket and read me some verses; I will not be drawn into saying the name of the poet.

"How do you find that?" he said.

"Oh," I said, "it is very good; but is it the finest gold?"

"Yes," he said, "it is that." And he then read me some more.

"Now," I said, "I will be frank with you. That seems to me very musical and accomplished; but it has what is to me the one unpardonable fault in poetry: it is literary. He has heard and read, that poet, so much sweet and solemn verse, that his mind murmurs like a harp hung among the trees that are therein; the winds blow into music. But I don't want that; I want a fount of song, a spring of living water." He looked a little vexed at that, and read me a few more pages. And then he went on to praise the work of two or three other writers, and added that he believed there was going to be a great outburst of poetry after a long frost.

"Well," I said, "I am sure I hope so. And if there is one thing in the world that I desire, it is that I may be able to recognise and love the new voices."

And then I told him a story of which I often think. When I was a young man, very much pre-occupied with Tennyson and Omar Khayyam and Swinburne, I went to stay with an elderly business man, a friend of my family. He was a great stout, rubicund man, very good- natured, and he had a voice like the cry of an expiring mouse, shrill and thin. We were sitting after dinner in his big dining- room, several of us, looking out into a wide, dusty garden, when the talk turned on books, and I suppose I praised Swinburne, for he asked me to say some, and I quoted the poem which says

And even the weariest river Winds somewhere safe to sea.

He heard me attentively enough, and said it was pretty good; but then he said that it was nothing to Byron, and in his squeaky voice he quoted a quant.i.ty of Byron, whose poetry, I am sorry to say, I regarded as I might regard withered flowers or worse. His eyes brimmed with tears, and they fell on to his shirt-front; and then he said decisively that there had been no poetry since Byron--none at all. Tennyson was mere word music, Browning was unintelligible, and so forth. And I remember how, with the insolence of youth, I thought how dreadful it was that the old man should have lost all sympathy and judgment; because poetry then seemed to me a really important matter, full of tones and values. I did not understand then, as I understand now, that it is all a question of signals and symbols, and that poetry is but, as the psalm says, what happens when one day telleth another and one night certifieth another. I know now that there can be no deceit about poetry, and that no poet can make you feel more than he feels himself, though he cannot always make another feel as much; and that the worth of his art exists only just in so far as he can say what he feels; and then I thought of my old friend's mind as I might think of a scarecrow among lonely fields, a thing absurd, ragged, and left alone, while real men went about their business. I did not say it, but I thought it in my folly. So I told my young friend that story; and I said:

"I know that it does not really matter what one loves and is moved by as long as one loves something and is moved by its beauty. But, still, I do not want that to happen to me; I do not want to be like a pebble on the beach, when the water draws past it to the land. I want to feel and understand the new signals. In the nursery," I said, "we used to anger our governess when she read us a piece of poetry, by saying to her, 'Who made it up?' 'You should say, "Who wrote it?"' she would say. But I feel now inclined to ask, 'Who made it up?' and I feel, too, like the sign-painter on his rounds, who saw a new sign hung up at an inn, and said in disgust, 'That looks as if some one had been doing it himself.' Your poet seems to me only a very gifted and accomplished amateur."

"Well," he said rather petulantly, "it may be so, of course; but I don't think that you can hope to advance, if you begin by being determined to disapprove."

"No, not that," I said. "But one knows of many cases of inferior poets, who were taken up and trumpeted abroad by well-meaning admirers, whom one sees now to have had no significance, but to be so many blind alleys in the street of art; they led nowhere; one had just to retrace one's steps, if one explored them. Indeed," I said, "I had rather miss a great poet than be misled by a little one."

"Ah, no," he said, "I don't feel that. I had rather be thrilled and carried away, even if I discovered afterwards that it was not really great."

"If you will freely admit that this may not be great," I said, "I am on your side. I do not mind your saying, 'This touches me with interest and delight; but it is not to be reckoned among the lords of the garden.' What I object to is your saying, 'This is great and eternal.' I feel that I should be able to respond to the great poet, if he flashed out among us; but he must be great, and especially in a time when there really is a quant.i.ty of very beautiful verse. I suspect that perhaps this time is one that will furnish a very beautiful anthology. There are many people alive who have written perhaps half a dozen exquisite lyrics, when the spring and the soaring thought and the vision and the beautiful word all suddenly conspired together. But there is no great, wide, large, tender heart at work. No, I won't even say that; but is there any great spirit who has all that and a supreme word-power as well? I believe that there is more poetry, more love of beauty, more emotion in the world than ever; and a great many men and women are living their poetry who just can't write it or sing it."

"A perverse generation seeking after a sign," he said rather grimly, "and there is no sign forthcoming except the old sign, that has been there for centuries! I don't care," he added, "about the sign of the thing. It is the quality that I want; and these new poets of whom I have been speaking have got the quality. That is all I ask for."

"No," I said, "I want a great deal more than that! Browning gave us the sense of the human heart, bewildered by all the new knowledge, and yet pa.s.sionately desiring. Tennyson--"

"Poor old Tennyson!" he said.

"That is very ungracious," I said. "You are as perverse as I was about Byron when the old banker quoted him with tears. I was going to say, and I will say it, that Tennyson, with all his faults, was a great lord of music; and he put into words the fine, homely domestic emotion of the race--the poetry of labour, order, and peace. It was new and rich and splendid, and because it seems to you old-fashioned, you call it mere respectability; but it was the marching music of the world, because he showed men that faith was enlarged and not overturned by science. These two were great, because they saw far and wide; they knew by instinct just what the ordinary man was thinking, who yet wished his life to be set to music. These little men of yours don't see that. They have their moments of ecstasy, as we all have, in the blossoming orchard full of the songs of birds. And that will always and for ever give us the lyric, if the skill is there. But I want something more than that; I, you, thousands of people, are feeling something that makes the brain thrill and the heart leap. The mischief is that we don't know what it is, and I want a great poet to come and tell us."

"Ah," he said, "I am afraid you want something ethical, something that satisfies the man in Tennyson who

Walked between his wife and child And now and then he gravely smiled.

But we have done with all that. What we want is people who can express the fine, rare, unusual thoughts of highly organised creatures, and you want a poet to sing of bread and b.u.t.ter!"

"Why, yes," I said, "I think I agree with Fitz-Gerald that tea and bread and b.u.t.ter are the only foods worth anything--the only things one cannot do without. And it is just the things that one cannot do without that I want the new great poet to sing of. I agree with William Morris that art is the one thing we all want, the expression of man's joy in his work. And the more that art retires into fine nuances and intellectual subtleties, the more that it becomes something esoteric and mysterious, the less I care about it. When Tennyson said to the farmer's wife, 'What's the news?' she replied, 'Mr. Tennyson, there's only one piece of news worth telling, and that is that Christ died for all men.' Tennyson said very grandly and simply, 'Ah, that's old news and good news and NEW news!' And that is exactly what I want the poets to tell us. It is a common inheritance, not a refined monopoly, that I claim."

He laughed at this, and said:

"I think that's rather a mid-Victorian view; I will confute you out of the Tennyson legend. When Tennyson called Swinburne's verse 'poisonous honey, brought from France,' Swinburne retorted by speaking of the laureate's domestic treacle. You can't have both.

If you like treacle, you must not clamour for honey."

"Yes, I prefer honey," I said, "but you seem to me to be in search of what I called LITERARY poetry. That is what I am afraid of. I don't want the work of a mind fed on words, and valuing ideas the more that they are uncommon. I hate what is called 'strong' poetry; that seems to me to be generally the coa.r.s.est kind of romanticism-- melodrama in fact. I want to have in poetry what we are getting in fiction--the best sort of realism. Realism is now abjuring the heroic theory; it has thrown over the old conventions, the felicitous coincidences, life arranged on ideal lines; and it has gone straight to life itself, strong, full-blooded, eager life, full of mistakes and blunders and failures and sharp disasters and fears. Life goes shambling along like a big dog, but it has got its nose on the scent of something. It is a much more mysterious and prodigious affair than life rearranged upon romantic lines. It means something very vast indeed, though it splashes through mud and scrambles through hedges. You may laugh at what you call ethics, but that is only a name for one of many kinds of collisions. It is the fact that we are always colliding with something, always coming unpleasant croppers, that is the exciting thing. I want the poet to tell me what the obscure winged thing is that we are following; and if he can't explain it to me, I want to be made to feel that it is worth while following. I don't say that all life is poetical material. I don't think that it is; but there is a thing called beauty which seems to me the most maddeningly perfect thing in the world. I see it everywhere, in the dawn, in the far-off landscape, with all its rolling lines of wood and field, in the faces and gestures of people, in their words and deeds. That is a clue, a golden thread, a line of scent, and I shall be more than content if I am encouraged to follow that."

"Ah," he said, "now I partly agree with you. It is precisely that which the new men are after; they take the pure gold of life and just coin it into word and phrase, and it is that which I discern in them."

"Yes," I said, "but I want something a great deal bigger than that.

I want to see it everywhere and in everything. I don't want to have to wall in a little s.p.a.ce and make it silent and beautiful, and forget what is happening outside. I want a poet to tell me what it is that leaps in the eyes and beckons in the smiles of people whom I meet--people whom often enough I could not live with,--the more's the pity,--but whom I want to be friends with, all the same. I want the common joys and hopes and visions to be put into music. And when I find a man, like Walt Whitman, who does show me the beauty and wonder and the strong affections and joys of simple hearts, so that I feel sure that we are all desiring the same thing, though we cannot tell each other what it is, then I feel I am in the presence of a poet indeed."

My young friend shut up the little book which he had been holding in his hand.

"Yes," he said, "that would be a great thing; but one can't get at things in that way now. We must all specialise; and if you want to follow the new aims and ideals of art, you must put aside a great deal of what is called our common humanity, and you must be content to follow a very narrow path among the stars. I do not mind speaking quite frankly. I do not think you understand what art is.

It is essentially a mystery, and the artist is a sort of hermit in the world. It is not a case of 'joys in widest commonalty spread,'

as Daddy Wordsworth said. That is quite a different affair; but art has got to withdraw itself, to be content to be misunderstood; and I think that you have just as much parted company with it as your old friend the banker."

"Well," I said, "we shall see. Anyhow, I will give your new poets a careful reading, and I shall be glad if I can really admire them, because, indeed, I don't want to be stranded on a lee sh.o.r.e."

And so my friend departed; and I began to wonder whether the art of which he spoke was not, after all, as real a thing as the beauty of my almond-flower and my mezereons! If so, I should like to be able to include it and understand it, though I do not want to think that it is the end.

IV

WALT WHITMAN