Old and New Masters Part 17

The first series of _Poems and Ballads_, it must be admitted, owed its success for many years to other things besides the music. It broke in upon the bourgeois moralities of nineteenth-century England like a defiance. It expressed in gorgeous wordiness the mood of every green-sick youth of imagination who sees that beauty is being banished from the world in the name of goodness. One has only to look at the grey and yellow and purple brick houses built during the reign of Victoria to see that the green-sick youth had a good right to protest. A world that makes goodness the enemy of beauty and freedom is a blasphemous denial of both goodness and beauty, and young men will turn from it in disgust to the praise of Venus or any other G.o.d or G.o.ddess that welcomes beauty at the altar. The first volume of _Poems and Ballads_ was a challenge to the lie of tall-hatted religion. There is much truth in Mr. Gosse's saying that "the poet is not a lotus-eater who has never known the Gospel, but an evangelist turned inside out." He had been brought up Puritanically by his mother, who kept all fiction from him in his childhood, but grounded him with the happiest results in the Bible and Shakespeare. "This acquaintance with the text of the Bible," says Mr.

Gosse, "he retained to the end of his life, and he was accustomed to be emphatic about the advantage he had received from the beauty of its language." His early poems, however, were not a protest against the atmosphere of his home, but against the atmosphere of what can only be described by the worn-out word "respectability." Mrs. Disney Leith declares that she never met a character more "reverent-minded." And, certainly, the irreverence of his most pagan poems is largely an irreverence of gesture. He delighted in shocking his contemporaries, and planned shocking them still further with a volume called _Lesbia Brandon_, which he never published; but at heart he never freed himself from the Hebrew awe in presence of good and evil. His _Aholibah_ is a poem that is as moral in one sense as it is lascivious in another. As Mr. Gosse says, "his imagination was always swinging, like a pendulum, between the North and the South, between Paganism and Puritanism, between resignation to the insticts and an ascetic repudiation of their authority." It is the conflict between the two moods that is the most interesting feature in Swinburne's verse, apart from its purely artistic qualities. Some writers find Swinburne as great a magician as ever in those poems in which he is free from the obsession of the flesh. But I doubt if Swinburne ever rose to the same great heights in his later work as in the two first series of _Poems and Ballads._ Those who praise him as a thinker quote _Hertha_ as a masterpiece of philosophy in music, and it was Swinburne's own favourite among his poems. But I confess I find it a too long sermon. Swinburne's philosophy and religion were as vague as his vision of the world about him. "I might call myself, if I wished," he wrote in 1875, "a kind of Christian (of the Church of Blake and Sh.e.l.ley), but a.s.suredly in no sense a Theist."

Mr. Gosse has written Swinburne's life with distinction and understanding; but it was so eventless a life that the biographer's is not an easy task. The book contains plenty of entertainment, however. It is amusing to read of the author of _Anactoria_ as a child going about with Bowdler's Shakespeare under his arm and, in later years, a.s.sisting Jowett in the preparation of a _Child's Bible._

XXIII

THE WORK OF T.M. KETTLE

To have written books and to have died in battle has been a common enough fate in the last few years. But not many of the young men who have fallen in the war have left us with such a sense of perished genius as Lieutenant T.M. Kettle, who was killed at Ginchy. He was one of those men who have almost too many gifts to succeed. He had the gift of letters and the gift of politics; he was a mathematician, an economist, a barrister, and a philosopher; he was a Bohemian as well as a scholar; as one listened to him, one suspected at times that he must be one of the most brilliant conversationalists of the age. He lived in a blaze of adoration as a student, and, though this adoration was tempered by the abuse of opponents in his later years, he still had a way of going about as a conqueror with his charm. Had he only had a little ordinariness in his composition to harden him, he would almost certainly have ended as the leading Irish statesman of his day. He was undoubtedly ambitious of success in the grand style. But with his ambition went the mood of Ecclesiastes, which reminded him of the vanity of ambition. In his youth he adhered to Herbert Spencer's much-quoted saying: "What I need to realize is how infinitesimal is the importance of anything I can do, and how infinitely important it is that I should do it." But, while with Spencer this was a call to action, with Kettle it was rather a call to meditation, to discussion. He was the Hamlet of modern Ireland. And it is interesting to remember that in one of his early essays he defended Hamlet against the common charge of "inability to act," and protested that he was the victim, not of a vacillating will, but of the fates. He contended that, so great were the issues and so dubious the evidence, Hamlet had every right to hesitate. "The commercial blandness," he wrote, "with which people talk of Hamlet's 'plain duty' makes one wonder if they recognize such a thing as plain morality. The 'removal' of an uncle without due process of law and on the unsupported evidence of an unsubpoenable ghost; the widowing of a mother and her casting-off as unspeakably vile, are treated as enterprises about which a man has no right to hesitate or even to feel unhappy." This is not mere speciousness. There is the commonsense of pessimism in it too.

The normal Irish man of letters begins as something of a Utopian. Kettle was always too much of a pessimist--he himself would have said a realist--to yield easily to romance. As a very young man he edited in Dublin a paper called _The Nationist_, for which he claimed, above all things, that it stood for "realism" in politics. Some men are driven into revolution by despair: it was as though Kettle had been driven into reform by despair. He admired the Utopians, but he could not share their faith. "If one never got tired," he wrote in a sketch of the International Socialist Congress at Stuttgart in 1907, "one would always be with the revolutionaries, the re-makers, with Fourier and Kropotkin.

But the soul's energy is strictly limited; and with weariness there comes the need for compromise, for 'machines,' for reputation, for routine. Fatigue is the beginning of political wisdom." One finds the same strain of melancholy trans.m.u.ting itself into gaiety with an epigram in much of his work. His appreciation of Anatole France is the appreciation of a kindred spirit. In an essay called _The Fatigue of Anatole France_ in _The Day's Burden_ he defended his author's pessimistic att.i.tude as he might have defended his own:

A pessimism, stabbed and gashed with the radiance of epigrams, as a thundercloud is stabbed by lightning, is a type of spiritual life far from contemptible. A reasonable sadness, chastened by the music of consummate prose, is an att.i.tude and an achievement that will help many men to bear with more resignation the burden of our century.

How wonderfully, again, he portrays the Hamlet doubts of Anatole France, when, speaking of his bust, he says: "It is the face of a soldier ready to die for a flag in which he does not entirely believe." And he goes on:

He looks out at you like a veteran of the lost cause of intellect, to whose soul the trumpet of defeat strikes with as mournful and vehement a music as to that of Pascal himself, but who thinks that a wise man may be permitted to hearten himself up in evil days with an anecdote after the manner of his master Rabelais.

Kettle himself practised just such a gloom shot with gaiety. He did not, however, share Anatole France's gaiety of unbelief. In some ways he was more nearly akin to Villiers de l'Isle Adam, with his religion and his love of the fine gesture. Had he been a Frenchman of an earlier generation, he would have been famous for his talk, like Villiers, in the cafes. Most people who knew him contend that he talked even better than he wrote; but one gets a good enough example of his ruling mood and att.i.tude in the fine essay called _On Saying Good-bye._ Meditating on life as "a sustained good-bye," he writes:

Life is a cheap _table d'hote_ in a rather dirty restaurant, with Time changing the plates before you have had enough of anything.

We were bewildered at school to be told that walking was a perpetual falling. But life is, in a far more significant way, a perpetual dying. Death is not an eccentricity, but a settled habit of the universe. The drums of to-day call to us, as they call to young Fortinbras in the fifth act of _Hamlet_, over corpses piled up in such abundance as to be almost ridiculous. We praise the pioneer, but we praise him on wrong grounds. His strength lies not in his leaning out to new things--that may be mere curiosity--but in his power to abandon old things. All his courage is a courage of adieus.

This meditativeness on the pa.s.sing nature of things is one of the old moods of mankind. Kettle, however, was one of the men of our time in whom it has achieved imaginative expression. I remember his once saying, in regard to some hostile criticisms that had been pa.s.sed on his own "power to abandon old things": "The whole world is nothing but the story of a renegade. The bud is renegade to the tree, and the flower to the bud, and the fruit to the flower." Though he rejoiced in change as a politician, however, he bewaited the necessity of change as a philosopher. His praise of death in the essay I have just quoted from is the praise of something that will put an end to changes and goodbyes

There is only one journey, as it seems to me ... in which we attain our ideal of going away and going home at the same time. Death, normally encountered, has all the attractions of suicide without any of its horrors. The old woman--

an old woman previously mentioned who complained that "the only bothersome thing about walking was that the miles began at the wrong end"--

the old woman when she comes to that road will find the miles beginning at the right end. We shall all bid our first real adieu to those brother-jesters of ours, Time; and s.p.a.ce; and though the handkerchiefs flutter, no lack of courage will have power to cheat or defeat us. "However amusing the comedy may have been," wrote Pascal, "there is always blood in the fifth act. They scatter a little dust in your face; and then all is over for ever." Blood there may be, but blood does not necessarily mean tragedy. The wisdom of humility bids us pray that in that fifth act we may have good lines and a timely exit; but, fine or feeble, there is comfort in breaking the parting word into its two significant halves, a Dieu. Since life has been a constant slipping from one good-bye to another, why should we fear that sole good-bye which promises to cancel all its forerunners?

There you have a pa.s.sage which, in the light of events, seems strangely prophetic. Kettle certainly got his "good lines" at Ginchy. He gave his life greatly for his ideal of a free Ireland in a free Europe.

This suggests that underlying his Hamlet there was a man of action as surely as there was a jester. He was a man with a genius for rising to the occasion--for saying the fine word and doing the fine thing. He compromised often, in accordance with his "realistic" view of things; but he never compromised in his belief in the necessity of large and European ideals in Ireland. He stood by all good causes, not as an extremist, but as a helper somewhat disillusioned. But his disillusionment never made him feeble in the middle of the fight. He was the sworn foe of the belittlers of Ireland. One will get an idea of the pa.s.sion with which he fought for the traditional Ireland, as well as for the Ireland of coming days, if one turns to his rhymed reply to a living English poet who had urged the Irish to forget their history and gently cease to be a nation. The last lines of this poem--_Reason in Rhyme_, as he called it--are his testament to England no less than his call to Europeanism is his testament to Ireland:

Bond, from the toil of hate we may not cease: Free, we are free to be your friend.

And when you make your banquet, and we come.

Soldier with equal soldier must we sit, Closing a battle, not forgetting it.

With not a name to hide, This mate and mother of valiant "rebels" dead Must come with all her history on her head.

We keep the past for pride: No deepest peace shall strike our poets dumb: No rawest squad of all Death's volunteers, No rudest men who died To tear your flag down in the bitter years.

But shall have praise, and three times thrice again, When at the table men shall drink with men.

That was Kettle's mood to the last. This was the mood that made him regard with such horror the execution of Pea.r.s.e and Connolly, and the other leaders of the Dublin insurrection. He regarded these men as having all but destroyed his dream of an Ireland enjoying the freedom of Europe. But he did not believe that any English Government possessed the right to be merciless in Ireland. The murder of Sheehy-Skeffington, who was his brother-in-law, cast another shadow over his imagination from which he never recovered. Only a week before he died he wrote to me from France: "The Skeffington case oppresses me with horror." When I saw him in the previous July, he talked like a man whose heart Easter Week and its terrible retributions had broken. But there must have been exaltation in those days just before his death, as one gathers from the last, or all but the last, of his letters home:

We are moving up to-night into the battle of the Somme. The bombardment, destruction, and bloodshed are beyond all imagination, nor did I ever think that the valour of simple men could be quite as beautiful as that of my Dublin Fusiliers. I have had two chances of leaving them--one on sick leave and one to take a staff job. I have chosen to stay with my comrades.

There at the end you have the grand gesture. There you have the "good lines" that Kettle had always desired.

XXIV

MR. J.C. SQUIRE

It would not have been easy a few years ago to foresee the achievement of Mr. Squire as a poet. He laboured under the disadvantage of being also a wit. It used to be said of Ibsen that a Pegasus had once been shot under him, and one was alarmed lest the reverse of this was about to happen to Mr. Squire, and lest a writer who began in the gaiety of the comic spirit should end soberly astride Pegasus. When, in _Tricks of the Trade_, he announced that he was going to write no more parodies, one had a depressed feeling that he was about to give up to poetry what was meant for mankind. Yet, on reading Mr. Squire's collected poems in _Poems: First Series_, it is difficult not to admit that it was to write serious verse even more than parody and political epigram that he was born.

He has arranged the poems in the book in the order of their composition, so that we can follow the development of his powers and see him, as it were, learning to fly. To read him is again and again to be reminded of Donne. Like Donne, he is largely self-occupied, examining the horrors of his own soul, overburdened at times with thought, an intellect at odds with the spirit. Like Donne, he will have none of the merely poetic, either in music or in imagery. He beats out a music of his own and he beats out an imagery of his own. In his early work, this sometimes resulted in his poems being unable to rise far from the ground. They seemed to be labouring on unaccustomed wings towards the ether. What other living poet has ever given a poem such a t.i.tle as _Antinomies on a Railway Station?_ What other has examined himself with the same X-rays sort of realism as Mr. Squire has done in _The Mind of Man?_ The latter, like many of Mr. Squire's poems, is an expression of fastidious disgust with life. The early Mr. Squire was a master of disgust, and we see the same mood dominant even in the _Ode: In a Restaurant_, where the poet suddenly breaks out:--

Soul! This life is very strange, And circ.u.mstances very foul Attend the belly's stormy howl.

The ode, however, is not merely, or even primarily, an expression of disgust. Here, too, we see Mr. Squire's pa.s.sion for romance and energy.

Here, too, we see him as a fisherman of strange imagery, as when he describes the sounds of the restaurant band as they float in upon him from another room and die again:--

Like keen-drawn threads of ink dropped into a gla.s.s Of water, which curl and relax and soften and pa.s.s.

The _Ode: In a Restaurant_ is perhaps the summit of Mr. Squire's writing as a poet at odds with himself, a poet who floats above the obscene and dull realities of every day, "like a draggled seagull over dreary flats of mud." He has already escaped into bluer levels in the poem, _On a friend Recently Dead_, written in the same or the following year. Here he ceases to be a poet floating and b.u.mping against a ceiling. He is now ranging the heaven of the emanc.i.p.ated poets. Even when he writes of the common and prosaic things he now charges them with significance for the emotions. He is no longer a satirist and philosopher, but a lover. How well he conjures up the picture of the room in which his friend used to sit and talk:--

Capricious friend!

Here in this room, not long before the end, Here in this very room six months ago You poised your foot and joked and chuckled so.

Beyond the window shook the ash-tree bough, You saw books, pictures, as I see them now.

The sofa then was blue, the telephone Listened upon the desk and softly shone Even as now the fire-irons in the grate, And the little bra.s.s pendulum swung, a seal of fate Stamping the minutes; and the curtains on window and door Just moved in the air; and on the dark boards of the floor These same discreetly-coloured rugs were lying ...

And then you never had a thought of dying.

How much richer, too, by this time Mr. Squire's imagery has become! His observation is both exact and imaginative when he notes how--

the frail ash-tree hisses With a soft sharpness like a fall of mounded grain.

Elsewhere in the same poem Mr. Squire has given us a fine new image of the brevity of man's life:--

And I, I see myself as one of a heap of stones, Wetted a moment to life as the flying wave goes over.

It was not, however, till _The Lily of Malud_ appeared that readers of poetry in general realized that Mr. Squire was a poet of the imagination even more than of the intellect. This is a flower that has blossomed out of the vast swamps of the anthropologists. It is the song of the ritual of initiation. Mr. Squire's power in the sphere both of the grotesque and of lovely imagery is revealed in the triumphant close of this poem:--

And the surly thick-lipped men, as they sit about their huts Making drums out of guts, grunting gruffly now and then, Carving sticks of ivory, stretching shields of wrinkled skin, Smoothing sinister and thin squatting G.o.ds of ebony, Chip and grunt and do not see.

But each mother, silently, Longer than her wont stays shut in the dimness of her hut, For she feels a brooding cloud of memory in the air, A lingering thing there that makes her sit bowed With hollow shining eyes, as the night-fire dies.

And stare softly at the ember, and try to remember Something sorrowful and far, something sweet and vaguely seen Like an early evening star when the sky is pale green: A quiet silver tower that climbed in an hour, Or a ghost like a flower, or a flower like a queen: Something holy in the past that came and did not last, But she knows not what it was.

It is easy to see in the last lines that Mr. Squire has escaped finally from the idealist's disgust to the idealist's exaltation. He has learned to express the beautiful mystery of life and he is no longer haunted in his nerves by the ugliness of circ.u.mstances. Not that he has shut himself up in an enchanted world: he still remains a poet of this agonizing earth. In _The Stronghold_ he summons up a vision of "easeful death," only to turn aside from it as Christian turned aside from the temptations on his way:--