Old Familiar Faces Part 11

If sick thy soul with fear and doubt, And weary with the rabble din,- If thou wouldst scorn the herd without, First make the discord calm within.

If we are lords in our disdain, And rule our kingdoms of despair, As fools we shall not plough the main For halters made of syren's hair.

We need not traverse foreign earth To seek an alien Sorrow's face.

She sits within thy central hearth, And at thy table has her place.

So with this hour of push and pelf, Where nought unsordid seems to last, Vex not thy miserable self, But search the fallows of the past.

In Time's rich track behind us lies A soil replete with root and seed; There harvest wheat repays the wise, While idiots find but charlock weed.

Between the writer of the above lines and those great poets who in his youth were his contemporaries there is this point of affinity: like them his actual achievements do not strike the reader so forcibly as the potentialities which those achievements reveal. In the same way that Achilles was suggested by his "spear" in the picture in the chamber of Lucrece, the poet who writes not for fame, but writes to please himself, suggests unconsciously his own portrait by every touch:-

For much imaginary work was there; Conceit deceitful, so compact, so kind, That for Achilles' image stood his spear Grip'd in an armed hand; himself behind Was left unseen save to the eye of mind: A hand, a foot, a face, a leg, a head, Stood for the whole to be imagined.

Poets, indeed, have always been divisible into those whose poetry gives the reader an impression that they are greater than their work, and those whose poetry gives the reader a contrary impression. There have always been poets who may say of themselves, like the "Poet" in 'Timon of Athens,'

Our poesy is as a gum, which oozes From whence 'tis nourished: the fire i' the flint Shows not till it be struck.

And there have always been poets whose verse, howsoever good it may be, shows that, although they have been able to mould into poetic forms the riches of the life around them, and also of the literature which has come to them as an inheritance, they are simply working for fame, or rather for notoriety, in the markets of the outer world. The former can give us an impression of personal greatness such as the latter cannot.

With regard to the originality of Lord de Tabley's work, it is obvious that every poet must in some measure be influenced by the leading luminaries of his own period. But at no time would it have been fair to call Lord de Tabley an imitator; and in the new poems in this volume the accent is, perhaps, more individual than was the accent of any of his previous poetry. The general reader's comparatively slight acquaintance with Greek poetry may become unfortunate for modern poets. Often and often it occurs that a poet is charged with imitating another poet of a more prominent position than his own when, as a matter of fact, both poets have been yielding to the magic influence of some poet of Greece.

Such a yielding has been held to be legitimate in every literature of the modern world. Indeed, to be coloured by the great cla.s.sics of Greek and Roman literature is the inevitable destiny and the special glory of all the best poetry of the modern world, as it is the inevitable destiny and the special glory of the far-off waters of the Nile to be enriched and toned by the far-off wealth of Ruwenzori and the great fertilizing lakes from which they have sprung. But in drawing from the eternal fountains of beauty Lord de Tabley's processes were not those of his great contemporaries; they were very specially his own, as far removed from the severe method of Matthew Arnold on the one hand as from Tennyson's method on the other.

His way of work was always to ill.u.s.trate a story of h.e.l.lenic myth by symbols and a.n.a.logies drawn not from the more complex economies of a later world, as was Tennyson's way, but from that wide knowledge of the phenomena of nature which can be attained only by a poet whose knowledge is that of the naturalist. His devotion to certain departments of natural science has been running parallel with his devotion to poetry, and if learning is something wider than scholarship, he is the most learned poet of his time. While Tennyson's knowledge of natural science, though wide, was gathered from books, Lord de Tabley's knowledge, especially in the department of botany, is derived largely from original observation and inquiry. And this knowledge enables him to make his poetry alive with organic detail such as satisfies the naturalist as fully as the other qualities in his works satisfy the lover of poetry.

The leading poem of the present volume, 'Orpheus in Hades,' is full of a knowledge of the ways of nature beyond the reach of most poets, and yet this knowledge is kept well in governance by his artistic sense; it is never obtruded-never more than hinted at, indeed:-

Soon, soon I saw the spectral vanguard come, Coasting along, as swallows, beating low Before a hint of rain. In buoyant air, Circling thy poise, and hardly move the wing, And rather float than fly. Then other spirits, Shrill and more fierce, came wailing down the gale; As plaintive plovers came with swoop and scream To lure our footsteps from their furrowy nest, So these, as lapwing guardians, sailed and swung To save the secrets of their gloomy lair.

I hate to watch the flower set up its face.

I loathe the trembling shimmer of the sea, Its heaving roods of intertangled weed And orange sea-wrack with its necklace fruit; The stale, insipid cadence of the dawn, The ringdove, tedious harper on five tones, The eternal havoc of the sodden leaves, Rotting the floors of Autumn.

'The Death of Phaethon' is another poem in which Lord de Tabley succeeds in mingling a true poetic energy with that subtle dignity of utterance which can never really be divorced from true poetry, whether the poet's subject be lofty or homely.

The line

With sudden ray and music across the sea

and the opening line of the poem,

Before him the immeasurable heaven,

cause us to think that Lord de Tabley has paid but little attention to the question of elision in English poetry. In the second of the lines above quoted elision is impossible, in the first elision is demanded.

The reason why elision is sometimes demanded is that in certain lines, as in the one which opens 'Orpheus in Hades,' the hiatus which occurs when a word ending with a vowel is followed by a vowel beginning the next word may be so great as to become intolerable. The reason why elision is sometimes a merely allowable beauty is that when a word ends with _w_, _r_, or _l_, to elide the liquids is to secure a kind of billowy music of a peculiarly delightful kind. Now elision is very specially demanded in a line like that which opens 'Orpheus in Hades,' where the pause of the line fall upon _the_. To make the main pause of the line fall upon _the_ is extremely and painfully bad, even when the next word begins with a consonant; but when the word following _the_ begins with a vowel, the line is absolutely immetrical; it has, indeed, no more to do with English prosody than with that prosody of j.a.pan upon which Mr. Basil Chamberlain discourses so pleasantly. On the other hand, the elision of the second syllable of the word _music_ in the other line quoted above is equally faulty in another direction. But as we said when reviewing Mr. Bridges's treatise on Milton's prosody, nothing is more striking than the helplessness of most recent poets when confronted with the simple question of elision.

In an 'Ode to a Star' there is great beauty and breadth of thought and expression. Its only structural blemish, that of an opening stanza whose form is not distinctly followed, can be so easily put right that it need only be mentioned here in order to emphasize the canon that it is only in irregular odes that variation of stanza is permissible. Keats, no doubt, in one at least of his unequalled odes, does depart from the scheme of structure indicated by the opening stanza, and without any apparent metrical need for so doing. But the poem does not gain by the departure.

Besides, Keats is now a cla.s.sic, and has a freedom in regard to irregularities of metre which Lord de Tabley would be the last to claim for himself. Another blemish of a minor kind in the 'Ode to a Star' is that of rhyming "meteor" with "wheatear."

If the poetry in Lord de Tabley's volume answers as little to Milton's famous list of the poetic requirements, "simple, sensuous, and pa.s.sionate," as does Milton's own poetry, which answers to only the second of these demands, very high poetry might be cited which is neither sensuous nor pa.s.sionate. The so-called coldness displayed by 'Lycidas'

arises not, it may well be supposed, from any lack on Milton's part of sorrow for his friend, but from his determination that simple he would not be, and yet his method is justified of its own beauty and glory. Of course poetry may be too ornate, but in demanding a simplicity of utterance from the poet it is easy for the critic to forget how wide and how various are poetry's domains. For if in one mood poetry is the simple and unadorned expression of nature, in another it is the woof of art,

Innumerable of stains and splendid dyes As are the tiger-moth's deep-damasked wings.

In the matter of poetic ornament, all that the reader has any right to demand is that the decoration should be poetical and not rhetorical.

Now, as a matter of fact, there is no surer sign of the amount of the poetical endowment of any poet than the insight he shows into the nature of poetry as distinguished from rhetoric when working on ornate poetry.

It is a serious impeachment of latter-day criticism that in very many cases, perhaps in most cases, the plaudits given to the last new "leading poet" of the hour are awarded to "felicitous lines," every felicity of which is rhetorical and not poetical.

VII. WILLIAM MORRIS.

18341896.

I.

The news of the grave turn suddenly taken by William Morris's illness prepared the public for the still worse news that was to follow.

The certificate of the immediate cause of death affirms it to have been phthisis, but one would suppose that almost every vital organ had become exhausted. Each time that I saw him he declared, in answer to my inquiries, that he suffered no pain whatever. And a comforting thought this is to us all-that Morris suffered no pain. To Death himself we may easily be reconciled-nay, we might even look upon him as Nature's final beneficence to all her children, if it were not for the cruel means he so often employs in fulfilling his inevitable mission. The thought that Morris's life had ended in the tragedy of pain-the thought that he to whom work was sport and generosity the highest form of enjoyment, suffered what some men suffer in shuffling off the mortal coil-would have been intolerable almost. For among the thousand and one charms of the man, this, perhaps, was the chief, that Nature had endowed him with an enormous capacity of enjoyment, and that Circ.u.mstance, conspiring with Nature, said to him, "Enjoy."

[Picture: William Morris]

Born in easy circ.u.mstances, though not to the degrading trouble of wealth-cherishing as his sweetest possessions a devoted wife and two daughters, each of them endowed with intelligence so rare as to understand a genius such as his-surrounded by friends, some of whom were among the first men of our time, and most of whom were of the very salt of the earth-it may be said of him that Misfortune, if she touched him at all, never struck home. If it is true, as Merimee affirms, that men are hastened to maturity by misfortune, who wanted Morris to be mature? Who wanted him to be other than the radiant boy of genius that he remained till the years had silvered his hair and carved wrinkles on his brow, but left his blue-grey eyes as bright as when they first opened on the world?

Enough for us to think that the man must, indeed, be specially beloved by the G.o.ds who in his sixty-third year dies young. Old age Morris could not have borne with patience. Pain would not have developed him into a hero. This beloved man, who must have died some day, died when his marvellous powers were at their best-and died without pain. The scheme of life and death does not seem so much awry, after all.

At the last interview but one that ever I had with him-it was in the little carpetless room from which so much of his best work was turned out-he himself surprised me by leading the conversation upon a subject he rarely chose to talk about-the mystery of life and death. The conversation ended with these words of his: "I have enjoyed my life-few men more so-and death in any case is sure."

It is difficult not to think that the cause of causes of his death was excessive exercise of all his forces, especially of the imaginative faculty. When I talked to him, as I often did, of the peril of such a life of tension as his, he pooh-poohed the idea. "Look at Gladstone," he would say; "look at those wise owls your chancellors and your judges.

Don't they live all the longer for work? It is rust that kills men, not work." No doubt he was right in contending that in intellectual efforts such as those he alluded to, where the only faculty drawn upon is the "dry light of intelligence," a prodigious amount of work may be achieved without any sapping of the sources of life. But is this so where that fusion of all the faculties which we call genius is greatly taxed? I doubt it. In all true imaginative production there is, as De Quincey pointed out many years ago, a movement not of "the thinking machine"

only, but of the whole man-the whole "genial" nature of the worker-his imagination, his judgment, moving in an evolution of lightning velocity from the whole of the work to the part, from the part to the whole, together with every emotion of the soul. Hence when, as in the case of Walter Scott, of Charles d.i.c.kens, and presumably of Shakespeare too, the emotional nature of Man is overtaxed, every part of the frame suffers, and cries out in vain for its share of that nervous fluid which is the true _vis vitae_.

We have only to consider the sort of work Morris produced and its amount to realize that no human powers could continue to withstand such a strain. Many are of opinion that 'The Lovers of Gudrun' is his finest poem; he worked at it from four o'clock in the morning till four in the afternoon, and when he rose from the table he had produced 750 lines!

Think of the forces at work in producing a poem like 'Sigurd.' Think of the mingling of the drudgery of the Dryasdust with the movements of an imaginative vision unsurpa.s.sed in our time; think, I say, of the collaborating of the 'Volsunga Saga' with the 'Nibelungenlied,' the choosing of this point from the Saga-man, and of that point from the later poem of the Germans, and then fusing the whole by imaginative heat into the greatest epic of the nineteenth century. Was there not work enough here for a considerable portion of a poet's life? And yet so great is the entire ma.s.s of his work that 'Sigurd' is positively overlooked in many of the notices of his writings which have appeared since his death in the press, while in the others it is alluded to in three words, and this simply because the ma.s.s of other matter to be dealt with fills up all the available s.p.a.ce of a newspaper.

Then, again, take his translation of the Odyssey. Some competent critics are dissatisfied with this; yet in a certain sense it is a triumph. The two specially Homeric qualities-those, indeed, which set Homer apart from all other poets-are eagerness and dignity. Never again can they be fully combined, for never again will poetry be written in the Greek hexameters and by a Homer. That Tennyson could have given us the Homeric dignity his magnificent rendering of a famous fragment of the Iliad shows.

Chapman's translations show that the eagerness also can be caught.

Morris, of course, could not have given the dignity of Homer, but then, while Tennyson has left us only a few lines speaking with the dignity of the Iliad, Morris gave us a translation of the entire Odyssey, which, though it missed the Homeric dignity, secured the eagerness as completely as Chapman's free-and-easy paraphrase, and in a rendering as literal as Buckley's prose crib, which lay frankly by Morris's side as he wrote.

This, with his much less satisfactory translation of Virgil, where he gives us an almost word-for-word translation, and yet throws over the poem a glamour of romance which brings Virgil into the sympathy of the modern reader, would have occupied years with almost any other poet. But these two efforts of his genius are swamped by the purely original poems, such as 'The Defence of Guenevere,' 'Jason,' 'The Earthly Paradise,'

'Love is Enough,' 'Poems by the Way,' &c. And then come his translations from the Icelandic. Mere translation is, of course, easy enough, but not such translation as that in the "Saga Library." Allowing for all the aid he got from Mr. Magnusson, what a work this is! Think of the imaginative exercise required to turn the language of these Saga-men into a diction so picturesque and so concrete as to make each Saga an English poem, for poem each one is, if Aristotle is right in thinking that imaginative substance and not metre is the first requisite of a poem.

And this brings me to those poems without metre which he invented for himself in the latter portion of his career. There is in these delightful stories, leaving out of consideration the exquisite lyrics interspersed, enough poetic wealth adequately to endow a dozen poets.

The last of all of them-the one of which the last two chapters, when he could no longer hold a pen, he dictated to his friend Mr. c.o.c.kerell, in the determination, as he said to me, that he would finish it before he died-will be found to be finer than any hitherto published. It is called 'The Sundering Flood,' and was written after the story 'The Water of the Wondrous Isles.' It ('The Sundering Flood') is as long as 'The Wood beyond the World,' but has lyrics interspersed.

But evidently it is as an inventor in the fine arts that he is chiefly known to the general public. "Had he written no poetry at all, he would have been as famous," we are told, "as he is now." Anyhow, there is no household of any culture among the English-speaking races in which the name of William Morris does not at once call up that great revival in decorative art for which the latter part of the nineteenth century will be famous. In his designs for tapestry and other textures, in his designs for wall-papers and furniture, there is an expenditure of imaginative force which alone might make the fame of an artist. Then his artistic printing, in which he invented his own decorations, his own type, and his own paper-think of the energy he put into all that! The moment that this new interest seized him he made a more thorough study of the various specimens of black-letter printing than had ever been made before save by specialists. But even this could not "fatigue an appet.i.te" for the joy of work "which was insatiable." He started as an apostle of Socialism. He edited _The Commonweal_, and wrote largely in it, sank money in it week by week with the greatest glee, stumped the country as a Socialist orator, and into that cause alone put the energy of three men. Is it any wonder, then, that those who loved him were appalled at this prodigious output? Often and often have I tried to bring this matter before him. It was all of no use. "For me to rest from work," he would say, "means to die."

When not absorbed in some occupation that he loved-and in no other would he move-his restlessness was that of a young animal. In conversation he could rarely sit still for ten consecutive minutes, but must needs spring from his seat and walk round the room, as if every limb were eager to take part in the talk. His boisterous restlessness was the first thing that struck strangers. During the period when the famous partnership of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. was being dissolved I saw him very frequently at Queen's Square, for I took a very active part in the arrangement of that matter, and after our interviews at Queen Square he and I used often to lunch together at the "c.o.c.k" in Fleet Street. He liked a sanded floor and quaint old-fashioned settles. Moreover, the chops were the finest to be had in London.