Halleck's New English Literature Part 73

My spirit would have beauty to offer at the shrine, And turn dull earth to gold and water into wine, And burn in fiery dreams each thought till thence refined It may have power to mirror the mighty Master's mind."[4]

Fiona Macleod.--All the work of William Sharp that he published under the pseudonym of "Fiona Macleod" belongs to this Celtic Renaissance. Born in 1856 at Paisley, Scotland, he settled in London in 1878, and became widely known as William Sharp, the critic. When he turned to his boyhood's home, the West Highlands of Scotland, for inspiration, he wrote, under the pen-name of Fiona Macleod, poetic prose stories and many poems about these Scotch Celts. He kept the secret of his ident.i.ty so well that not until his death in 1905 was it known that Fiona Macleod, the mystic, was William Sharp, the critic.

_Mountain Lovers_ (1895), a romantic novel of primitive people who live with nature in her loneliness, mystery, and terror, and who possess an instinctive, speechless, and poetic knowledge of her moods, is one of the earliest and most interesting of his long novels. He excels in the short story. Some of his finest work in this field is in _The Sin Eater_ (1895), which contains uncanny tales of quaint, strongly-marked highland characters with their weird traditions.

_From the Hills of Dream_ (1901) and _The Hour of Beauty_ (1907) are two small volumes of short poems full of the witchery of dreams, of death, of youth, and of lonely scenes. These poems come from a land far off from our common world. Delicacy of fancy, a freedom from any touch of impurity, a beauty as of "dew-sweet moon-flowers glimmering white through the mirk of a dust laden with sea-mist," are the qualities of Fiona Macleod's best verse.

John Masefield.--Instead of looking to the land of dreams and the misty past, like the Celtic writers, Masefield and Gibson, two younger English poets, have found in the everyday life of the present time the themes for their verse. Masefield was born in 1875 in Shropshire. He was a seafarer in his youth, and later, a traveler by land and sea.

These varied experiences contributed color and vividness to his narrative verse.

[Ill.u.s.tration: JOHN MASEFIELD.]

He has written several long narrative poems on unromantic subjects.

_Dauber_ (1912) contains some of his best lines and its story is the most poetic. This poem follows the fortunes of a poor youth who, wishing to be a painter of ships, went to sea to study his mode at first hand. Masefield describes, with much power, the young artist's ambition, his rough handling by the uncouth sailors, and his perilous experiences while rounding Cape Horn. _Dauber_ exhibits the poet's power of vividly picturing human figures and landscapes. This poem, like most of Masefield's long narrative poems, is a story of human failure,--a dull prosaic failure, such as prose fiction presents in its pessimistic moods.

A strong and cheerful note is struck in some of Masefield's short lyrics, notably in _Laugh and be Merry_, _Roadways_, _The Seekers_, and _Being Her Friend_. In _Laugh and be Merry_, the song is almost triumphant:--

"Laugh and be proud to belong to the old proud pageant of man.

Laugh and battle, and work, and drink of the wine outpoured In the dear green earth, the sign of the joy of the Lord."[5]

Masefield's fancy does not busy itself with dreams and impossible visions. He paints life in its grayness and sordidness and dull mediocrity. Sometimes his verse is merely plain rimed prose, but again it becomes vigorous, picturesque, and vivid in description, as in the following lines from _Dauber_:--

"...then the snow Whirled all about, dense, mult.i.tudinous cold, Mixed with the wind's one devilish thrust and shriek Which whiffled out men's tears, deafened, took hold, Flattening the flying drift against the cheek."[6]

Wilfred W. Gibson.--Gibson, who was born in Hexham in 1878, sings of the struggling oppressed work-a-day people:--

"Crouched in the dripping dark With steaming shoulders stark The man who hews the coal to feed the fires."[7]

His poem, _The Machine_, awakens sympathy for the printer of Christmas story books and reveals Gibson as the twentieth-century Thomas Hood of _The Song of the Shirt_. One of the most richly human of his poems is _The Crane_, the story of the seamstress mother and her lame boy. His realistic volume of verse bearing the significant t.i.tle, _Daily Bread_ (1910), contains a number of narrative poems, which endeavor to set to music the "one measure" to which all life moves,--the earning of daily bread.

Gibson owes much of his popularity to his spirit of democracy and to the story form of his verse. Like Masefield, he sacrifices beauty to dull realism. Gibson manifests less range, less dramatic feeling, than Masefield, but avoids Masefield's uncouthness and repellent dramatic episodes.

These two poets ill.u.s.trate a tendency to introduce a new realistic poetry. Wordsworth wrote of Michael and the Westmoreland peasantry, but Masefield and Gibson have taken as subjects of verse the toilers of factory, foundry, and forecastle. Closeness to life and simplicity of narration characterize these authors. They approximate the subject matter and technique of realistic fiction.

Alfred Noyes.--Alfred Noyes was born in 1880 in Wolverhampton Staffordshire. He wrote verse while an Oxford undergraduate and he has since become one of the leading poets of the twentieth century. He has traveled in England and in America, reading his poems and lecturing on literary subjects.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ALFRED NOYES.]

_The Flower of Old j.a.pan_ (1903) is a fairy tale of children who dream of the pictures on blue china plates and j.a.panese fans. The poem is symbolic. The children are ourselves; and j.a.pan is but the "kingdom of those dreams which ...are the sole reality worth living and dying for."

The poet says of this kingdom:--

"Deep in every heart it lies With its untranscended skies; For what heaven should bend above Hearts that own the heaven of love?"[8]

_The Forest of Wild Thyme_ (1905) affords another

"Hour to hunt the fairy gleam That flutters through this childish dream."[9]

There is also a deeper meaning to be read into this poem. The mystery of life, small as well as great, is found simply told in these lines:--

"What does it take to make a rose, Mother-mine?

The G.o.d that died to make it knows It takes the world's eternal wars, It takes the moon and all the stars, It takes the might of heaven and h.e.l.l And the everlasting Love as well, Little child."[10]

Noyes has published several volumes of lyrical verse. Some of it possesses the lightness of these elfish tales. _The Barrel Organ_, _The Song of Re-Birth_, and _Forty Singing Seamen_ are among his finest lyrics. They display much rhythmic beauty and variety. He strikes a deeply sorrowful and pa.s.sionate note in _The Haunted Palace_ and _De Profundis_. A line like this in _The Haunted Palace_--

"...I saw the tears Bleed through her eyes with the slow pain of years,"[11]

indicates the strong emotional metaphor that occasionally deepens the pa.s.sion of his verse.

England's sea power, immortalized in song from Beowulf to Swinburne, often inspires Noyes. His finest long poem is _Drake: An English Epic_ (1908), which relates the adventures of this Elizabethan sea-captain and his victory over the Armada. The spirit of a daring romantic age of discovery is shown in these lines that tell how Drake and his men--

"...went out To danger as to a sweetheart far away, Who even now was drawing the western clouds Like a cymar of silk and snow-white furs Close to her, till her body's beauty seemed Clad in a mist of kisses."[12]

Another volume of poems, _Tales of the Mermaid Tavern_ (1913), brings us into the company of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spencer, Jonson, Raleigh, and others of the great Elizabethan group that made the Mermaid Tavern their chosen resort. Greene's farewell to Shakespeare,--

"You took my clay and made it live,"[13]

shows that Noyes has caught something of the spirit that animated Elizabethan England.

Noyes is one of the most spontaneous and fluent writers of modern English poetry. Whether he is mystical, dramatic, playful, or marching along the course of a long narrative poem, he handles his verse with ease and facility. His language, his rhythm, and his thought are most happily blended in his graceful singing lyrics. The work of Noyes is inspired by the desire to show that all things and all souls are--

"One with the dream that triumphs beyond the light of the spheres, We come from the Loom of the Weaver that weaves the Web of Years."[14]

THE MODERN DRAMA

The revival of the drama is a characteristic feature of the latter part of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The plays of the Norwegian, Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), affected England profoundly in the last decade of the nineteenth century and proved an impetus to a new dramatic movement, seen in the work of men like Shaw.

The great literary school of dramatists pa.s.sed away soon after the death of Shakespeare. While it is true that the writing of plays has been practically continuous since the time of the Restoration, yet for more than two hundred years after that event, the history of the drama has had little memorable work to record. There were two brief interesting comic periods: (1) the period of Congreve at the close of the seventeenth century, and (2) of Goldsmith and Sheridan nearly a hundred years later. The literary plays of the Victorians,--Browning, Tennyson, and Swinburne,--were lacking in dramatic essentials.

The modern drama has accomplished certain definite results. Pinero's work is typical of vast improvement in technique. Shaw is noted for his power of "investing modern conversation with vivacity and point."

J.M. Synge has won distinction for presenting the great elemental forces that underlie the actions of primitive human beings. The playwrights are making the drama perform some of the functions that have been filled by the novel. The modern drama is also wrestling with the problem of combining literary form, poetic spirit, and good dramatic action. Some of the modern plays deal with unpleasant subjects, and some of the least worthy are immoral in their tendencies. Such plays will be forgotten, for the Anglo-Saxon race has never yet immortalized an unwholesome drama. Fortunately, however, the influence of a large proportion of the plays is pure and wholesome. In this cla.s.s may be included the dramas of the Irish school and of Barrie, the majority by Galsworthy, and a number by Phillips and Shaw.

Jones and Pinero.--The work of Henry Arthur Jones and Sir Arthur Wing Pinero marks the advance of the English drama from artificiality and narrowness of scope toward a wider, closer relation to life. Henry Arthur Jones, both a playwright and a critic, was born in Grandborough, Buckinghamshire, in 1851. Contemporary English life is the subject of his numerous plays. _The Manoeuvers of Jane_ (1898) and _Mrs. Dane's Defence (1900), are among his best works.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HENRY ARTHUR JONES.]

Sir Arthur Wing Pinero, born in 1855 in London, began his career as an actor.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ARTHUR WING PINERO.]

His real ambition, however, was to write for the stage. More than forty works, including farces, comedies of sentiment, and serious dramas of English life, attest his zeal as a dramatist. Among his most successful farces are _The Magistrate_ (1885), _The School Mistress_ (1886), and _The Amazons_ (1893). Clever invention of absurd situations and success in starting infectious laughter are the prime qualities of these plays.

_The Second Mrs. Tanqueray_ (1893) is by most critics considered Pinero's masterpiece. The failure of a character to regain respectability once forfeited supplies the nucleus for the dramatic situations. Excellent in craftsmanship as it is disagreeable in theme, this play contains no superfluous word to r.e.t.a.r.d the action or mar the technical economy. Adolphus William Ward says: "With _The Second Mrs.

Tanqueray_ the English acted drama ceased to be a merely insular product, and took rank in the literature of Europe. Here was a play which, whatever its faults, was ...an epoch-marking play."

One great service of Pinero and Jones to the twentieth-century drama has been excellent craftsmanship. Their technical skill may be specifically noted in the naturalness of the dialogues, in the movement of the characters about the stage, in the performance of some acts apparently trivial but really significant, and in the subst.i.tution of devices to take the place of the old soliloquies and "asides." Of the two, Pinero is the better craftsman, since Jones, in his endeavor to paint a moral, sometimes weakens his dramatic effect.