From a Cornish Window Part 6

When Harry played at tennis it was well for this our Isle-- He c.o.c.ked his nose at Interdicts; he 'stablished us the while-- He was l.u.s.tful; he was vengeful; he was hot and hard and proud; But he set his England fairly in the sight of all the crowd.

So Harry played at tennis, and we perfected the game Which astonished swaggering Spaniards when the fat Armada came.

And possession did he give us of our souls in st.u.r.diness; And he gave us peace from priesthood: and he gave us English Bess!

When Harry played at tennis we began to know this thing-- That a mighty people prospers in a mighty-minded king.

We boasted not our righteousness--we took on us our sin, For Bluff Hal was just an Englishman who played the game to win.

You will perceive that in the third stanza the word 'soul' occurs: and I invite you to compare this author's idea of a soul with Mr.

Trench's. This author will have nothing to do with the old advice about doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly before G.o.d.

The old notion that to conquer self is a higher feat than to take a city he dismisses out of hand. "Be l.u.s.tful be vengeful," says he, "but play the game to win, and you have my applause. Get what you want, set England fairly in sight of the crowd, and you are a mighty-minded man." Now the first and last comment upon such a doctrine must be that, if a G.o.d exist, it is false. It sets up a part to override the whole: it flaunts a local success against the austere majesty of Divine law. In brief, it foolishly derides the universal, saying that it chooses to consider the particular as more important. But it is not. Poetry's concern is with the universal: and what makes the Celts (however much you may dislike them) the most considerable force in English poetry at this moment is that they occupy themselves with that universal truth, which, before any technical accomplishment, is the guarantee of good poetry.

Now, when you tell yourself that the days of 'English Bess' were jolly fine empire-making days, and produced great poets (Shakespeare, for example) worthy of them; and when you go on to reflect that these also are jolly fine empire-making days, but that somehow Mr. Austin is your laureate, and that the only poetry which counts is being written by men out of harmony with your present empire-making mood, the easiest plan (if you happen to think the difference worth considering) will be to call the Muse a traitress, and declare that every poem better than Mr. Austin's is a vote given to--whatever nation your Yellow Press happens to be insulting at this moment.

But, if you care to look a little deeper, you may find that some difference in your methods of empire-making is partly accountable for the change. A true poet must cling to universal truth; and by insulting it (as, for example, by importing into present-day politics the spirit which would excuse the iniquities of Henry VIII. on the ground that 'he gave us English Bess'!) you are driving the true poet out of your midst. Read over the verses above quoted, and then repeat to yourself, slowly, these lines:--

"Last, if upon the cold, green-mantling sea Thou cling, alone with Truth, to the last spar, Both castaway, And one must perish--let it not be he Whom thou art sworn to obey."

I ask no more. If a man cannot see the difference at once, I almost despair of making him perceive why poetry refuses just now even more obstinately than trade (if that be possible) to 'follow the flag.'

It will not follow, because you are waving the flag over self-deception. You may be as blithe as Plato in casting out the poets from your commonwealth--though for other reasons than his.

You may be as blithe as Dogberry in determining, of reading and writing, that they may appear when there is no need of such vanity.

But you are certainly driving them forth to say, in place of "O beloved city of Cecrops!" "O beloved city of G.o.d!" There was a time, not many years ago, when an honest poet could have used both cries together and deemed that he meant the same thing by the two.

But the two cries to-day have an utterly different meaning--and by your compulsion or by the compulsion of such politics as you have come to tolerate.

And therefore the young poet whom I have quoted has joined the band of those poets whom we are forcing out of the city, to leave our ideals to the fate which, since the world began, has overtaken all ideals which could not get themselves 'accepted by song.' Even as we drum these poets out we know that they are the only ones worth reckoning with, and that man cannot support himself upon a.s.surances that he is the strongest fellow in the world, and the richest, and owns the biggest house, and pays the biggest rates, and wins whatever game he plays at, and stands so high in his clothes that while the Southern Cross rises over his hat-brim it is already broad day on the seat of his breeches. For that is what it all comes to: and the sentence upon the man who neglects the warning of these poets, while he heaps up great possessions, is still, "Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee." And where is the national soul you would choose, at that hasty summons, to present for inspection, having to stand your trial upon it? Try Park Lane, or run and knock up the Laureate, and then come and report your success!

Weeks ago I was greatly reproached by a correspondent for misusing the word 'Celtic,' and informed that to call Mr. Yeats or Mr. Trench a Celt is a grave abuse of ethnical terms; that a notable percentage of the names connected with the 'Celtic Revival'--Hyde, Sigerson, Atkinson, Stokes--are not Celtic at all but Teutonic; that, in short, I have been following the mult.i.tude to speak loosely. Well, I confess it, and I will confess further that the lax use of the word 'Celt' ill beseems one who has been irritated often enough by the attempts of well-meaning but muddle-headed people who get hold of this or that poet and straightly a.s.sign this or that quality of his verse to a certain set of corpuscles in his mixed blood. Although I believe that my correspondent is too hasty in labelling men's descent from their names--for the mother has usually some share in producing a child; although I believe that Mr. Yeats, for instance, inherits Cornish blood on one side, even if Irish be denied him on the other; yet the rebuke contains some justice.

Still, I must maintain that these well-meaning theorists err only in applying a broad distinction with overmuch nicety. There is, after all, a certain quality in a poem of Blake's, or a prose pa.s.sage of Charlotte Bronte's, which a critic is not only unable to ignore, but which--if he has any 'comparative' sense--he finds himself accounting for by saying, "This man, or this woman, must be a Celt or have some admixture of Celtic blood." I say quite confidently that quality cannot be ignored. You open (let us say) a volume of Blake, and your eye falls on these two lines--

"When the stars threw down their spears And watered heaven with their tears,"

And at once you are aware of an imagination different in kind from the imagination you would recognise as English. Let us, if you please, rule out all debate of superiority; let us take Shakespeare for comparison, and Shakespeare at his best:--

"These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air; And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made of, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep."

Finer poetry than this I can hardly find in English to quote for you.

But fine as it is, will you not observe the matter-of-factness (call it healthy, if you will, and I shall not gainsay you) beneath Shakespeare's n.o.ble language? It says divinely what it has to say; and what it has to say is full of solemn thought. But, for better or worse (or, rather, without question of better or worse), Blake's imagination is moving on a different plane. We may think it an uncomfortably superhuman plane; but let us note the difference, and note further that this plane was habitual with Blake. Now because of his immense powers we are accustomed to think of Shakespeare as almost superhuman: we pay that tribute to his genius, his strength, and the enormous impression they produce on us. But a single couplet of Blake's will carry more of this uncanny superhuman imagination than the whole five acts of _Hamlet_. So great is Shakespeare, that he tempts us to think him capable of any flight of wing; but set down a line or two of Blake's--

"A robin redbreast in a cage Puts all heaven in a rage . . .

A skylark wounded on the wing Doth make a cherub cease to sing."

--And, simple as the thought is, at once you feel it to lie outside the range of Shakespeare's philosophy. Shakespeare's men are fine, brave, companionable fellows, full of pa.s.sionate love, jealousy, ambition; of humour, gravity, strength of mind; of laughter and rage, of the joy and stress of living. But self-sacrifice scarcely enters into their notion of the scheme of things, and they are by no means men to go to death for an idea. We remember what figure Shakespeare made of Sir John Oldcastle, and I wish we could forget what figure he made of Joan of Arc. Within the bounds of his philosophy--the philosophy, gloriously stated, of ordinary brave, full-blooded men-- he is a great encourager of virtue; and so such lines as--

"The expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is l.u.s.t in action . . ."

Are thoroughly Shakespearean, while such lines as--

"A robin redbreast in a cage Puts all heaven in a rage . . ."

Are as little Shakespearean in thought as in phrasing. He can tell us that:

"We are such stuff As dreams are made of, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep."

He can muse on that sleep to come:--

"To die, to sleep; To sleep; perchance to dream; aye, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause."

But that even in this life we may be more truly ourselves when dreaming than when waking--that what we dream may perchance turn out to be more real and more important than what we do--such a thought overpa.s.ses his imaginative range; or, since to dogmatise on his imaginative range is highly dangerous, let us be content with saying that it lies outside his temperament, and that he would have hit on such a thought only to dismiss it with contempt. So when we open a book of poems and come upon a monarch crying out that:

"A wild and foolish labourer is a king, To do and do and do and never dream,"

We know that we are hearkening to a note which is not Shakespearean at all, not practical, not English. And we want a name for that note.

I have followed the mult.i.tude to call it Celtic because in practice when we come upon this note we are pretty safe to discover that the poet who utters it has Celtic blood in him (Blake's poetry, for instance, told me that he must be an Irishman before ever I reflected that his name was Irish, or thought of looking up his descent).

Since, however the blood of most men in these islands is by this time mixed with many strains: since also, though the note be not native with him, nothing forbids even a pure-blooded Anglo-Saxon from learning it and a.s.similating it: lastly, since there is obvious inconvenience in using the same word for an ethnical delimitation and a psychological, when their boundaries do not exactly correspond--and if some Anglo-Saxons have the 'Celtic' note it is certain that many thousands of Celts have not; why then I shall be glad enough to use a better and a handier and a more exact, if only some clever person will provide it.

Meanwhile, let it be understood that in speaking of a 'Celtic' note I accuse no fellow-creature of being an Irishman, Scotsman, Welshman, Manxman, Cornishman, or Breton. The poet will as a rule turn out to be one or other of these, or at least to have a traceable strain of Celtic blood in him. But to the note only is the term applied, Now this note may be recognised by many tokens; but the first and chiefest is its insistence upon man's brotherhood with bird and beast, star and flower, everything, in short, which we loosely call 'nature,' his brotherhood even with spirits and angels, as one of an infinite number of microcosms reflecting a common image of G.o.d.

And poetry which holds by this creed will hardly be subservient to societies and governments and legalised doctrines and conventions; it will hold to them by a long and loose chain, if at all.

It flies high enough, at any rate, to take a bird's-eye view of all manner of things which in the temple, the palace, or the market-place, have come to be taken as axiomatic. It eyes them with an extraordinary 'dissoluteness'--if you will give that word its literal meaning. It sees that some accepted virtues carry no reflection of heaven; it sees that heaven, on the other hand--so infinite is its care--may shake with anger from bound to bound at the sight of a caged bird. It sees that the souls of living things, even of the least conspicuous, reach up by chains and are anch.o.r.ed in heaven, while 'great' events slide by on the surface of this skimming planet with empires and their ordinances.

"And so the Emperor went in the procession under the splendid canopy. And all the people in the streets and at the windows said, 'Bless us! what matchless new clothes our Emperor has!'

But he hasn't anything on!' cried a little child. 'Dear me, just listen to what the little innocent says,' observed his father, and the people whispered to each other what the child had said. 'He hasn't anything on!' they began to shout at last.

This made the Emperor's flesh creep, because he thought that they were right; but he said to himself, 'I must keep it up through the procession, anyhow.' And he walked on still more majestically, and the Chamberlains walked behind and carried the train, though there was none to carry."

This parable of the Emperor without clothes can be matched, for simplicity and searching directness, against any parable outside of the Gospels, and it agrees with the Divine parables in exalting the wisdom of a child. I will not dare to discuss that wisdom here.

I observe that when the poets preach it we tender them our applause.

We applaud Vaughan's lines:--

"Happy those early days, when I Shin'd in my angel-infancy . . .

When yet I had not walk'd above A mile or two from my first love, And looking back--at that short s.p.a.ce-- Could see a glimpse of His bright face; When on some gilded cloud or flow'r My gazing soul would dwell an hour, And in those weaker glories spy Some shadows of eternity. . . ."

We applaud Wordsworth's glorious ode--

"Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting, And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From G.o.d, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! . . ."

We applaud even old John Earle's prose when he tells us of a Child that--

"The elder he grows, he is a stair lower from G.o.d; and, like his first father, much worse in his breeches. He is the Christian's example, and the old man's relapse; the one imitates his pureness, the other falls into his simplicity. . . . His father hath writ him as his own little story, wherein he reads those days of his life that he cannot remember, and sighs to see what innocence he hath outlived. . . . Could he put off his body with his little coat, he had got eternity without a burden, and exchanged but one heaven for another."

But while we applaud this pretty confident attribution of divine wisdom to children, we are much too cautious to translate it into practice. "It is far too shadowy a notion," says Wordsworth prudently, "to be recommended to faith as more than an element in our instincts of immortality;" and he might have added that, while the Child may be Father of the Man, the Man reserves the privilege of spanking. Even so I observe that, while able to agree cordially with Christ on the necessity of becoming as little children as a condition of entering the Kingdom of Heaven, we are not so injudicious as to act upon any such belief; nay, we find ourselves obliged to revise and re-interpret the wisdom of the Gospels when we find it too impracticably childish. When Christ, for instance, forbids oaths of all kinds, we feel sure He cannot be serious, or we should have to upset a settled practice of the courts. And as for resisting no evil and forgiving our enemies, why, good Heavens! what would become of our splendid armaments! The suggestion, put so down rightly, is quite too wild. In short, as a distinguished Bishop put it, society could not exist for forty-eight hours on the lines laid down in the Sermon on the Mount. (I forget the Bishop's exact words, but they amounted to a complete and thoroughly common-sense repudiation of Gospel Christianity.)

No; it is obvious that, in so far as the Divine teaching touches on conduct, we must as practical men correct it, and with a special look-out for its indulgent misunderstanding of children.

Children, as a matter of experience, have no sense of the rights of property. They steal apples.

And yet--there must be something in this downright wisdom of childishness since Christ went (as we must believe) out of His way to lay such stress on it; and since our own hearts respond so readily when Vaughan or Wordsworth claim divinity for it. We cannot of course go the length of believing that the great, wise, and eminent men of our day are engaged one and all in the pursuit of shadows.

'Shadows we are and shadows we pursue' sounded an exquisitely solemn note in an election speech; but after all, we must take the world as we find it, and the world as we find it has its own recognised rewards. No success attended the poet who wrote that--