Personality in Literature Part 9

But Mary, "in her rapt girlhood," with her "eyes like the rain-shadowed sea," is not the less sweet because she stands for an idea.

Through meadows flowering with happiness Went Mary, feeling not the air that laid Honours of gentle dew upon her head; Nor that the sun now loved with golden stare The marvellous behaviour of her hair, Bending with finer swerve from off her brow Than water which relents before a prow; Till in the shrinking darkness many a gleam Of secret bronze-red l.u.s.tres answered him.

And when the Spirit of Life vaunts itself in her,

Not vain his boast; for seemly to the Lord, Blue-robed and yellow-kerchieft, Mary went.

There never was to G.o.d such worship sent By any angel in the Heavenly ways, As this that Life had utter'd for G.o.d's praise, This girlhood--as the service that Life said In the beauty and the manners of this maid.

Never the harps of Heaven played such song As her grave walking through the gra.s.ses long.

I cannot dwell upon the subject of _The Sale of St. Thomas_. The dialogue between Thomas and the captain gives opportunity for description and metaphor almost Elizabethan in their ferocity, though the reflections of Thomas have a spiritual quality which is entirely modern. We hear

Of monkeys, those lewd mammets of mankind.

And of flies staring

Out of their little faces of gibbous eyes.

And there are lines such as

Men there have been who could so grimly look That soldiers' hearts went out like candle flames Before their eyes, and the blood perisht in them,

which might be placed side by side with Marlowe's:

The frowning looks of fiery _Tamburlaine_ That with his terrour and imperious eies, Commands the hearts of his a.s.sociates.

And we may contrast these vehement records of things with the more philosophic pa.s.sages:

Thou must not therefore stoop thy spirit's sight To pore only within the candle-gleam Of conscious wit and reasonable brain; But search into the sacred darkness lying Outside thy knowledge of thyself, the vast Measureless fate, full of the power of stars, The outer noiseless heavens of thy soul.

We may well think that the immediate future of poetry depends upon men of the stamp of Mr. Abercrombie, men for whom poetry is neither a plaything nor a sweet-sounding expression of desire or anguish or vague dreams; but a serious attempt to grapple with life through combined experience, thought, and vision. Long ago Meredith urged that if fiction was to go on living, it must give us "brain-stuff" and "food-stuff." But no poet has since arisen to make some similar claim for poetry; to urge that within its proper sphere and in its own appropriate way it should attack the larger life of man with intelligence, with common sense, and with virile pa.s.sion.

Mr. W.H. Davies stands apart from them all. I should not like to try to account in any way for Mr. Davies any more than he could account for a singing-bird by describing the trees among which it lived. His poetry is unlike any other poetry that is written to-day. It is fresh and sweet like a voice from a younger and l.u.s.tier world. It is charged with no clarion message of prophecy; it is burdened with no exactly formulated philosophy of life. There is no rhetoric in it, no rhodomontade. It is the melody of a man's voice singing for the pleasure of singing, now vehemently, from the sheer delight in things physical and outward, now sadly, as some evanescent object induces melancholy, now in a naively reflective way, as past or future brings memories or expectations. He never reaches quite the exquisite melodies of Herrick, but when he writes of love he is as simple as Herrick, and he is more direct, more heart-whole, less of the perfect singer, perhaps, but more of the lover. If he writes with wide-eyed wonder at the simpler marvels of life, it is in the manner of Blake in _Songs of Innocence_, where outwardness of manner and lyrical simplicity leave an impression of something unearthly in its strangeness. Occasionally in the slight extravagance of his imagery we can see that the influence of the seventeenth-century "metaphysical"

poets has not left him unscathed, as when he likens love to the influence of spring opening up navigation.

But it is a sure instinct which has taken him to the simpler lyrical poets and led him to mould his style on theirs. His interests lie in the purely personal affairs of the heart; the simpler emotions may be best expressed in those lyrical forms in which the older English literature is pre-eminent, which eschew the fervid rhythms of the soulful nineteenth century. But he is not merely imitative. Sometimes in the same poem we see him, now conforming to the manner of the traditional love-poet, now revivifying it or bursting through it with images and ideas that are wholly personal to himself.

She had two eyes as blue as Heaven, Ten times as warm they shone; And yet her heart was hard and cold As any sh.e.l.l or stone.

Her mouth was like a soft red rose When Phbus drinks its dew; But oh, that cruel thorn inside Pierced many a fond heart through.

She had a step that walked unheard, It made the stones like gra.s.s; Yet that light step has crushed a heart, As light as that step was.

Those glowing eyes, those smiling lips, I have lived now to prove Were not for me, were not for me, But came of her self-love.

Yet, like a cow for acorns that Have made it suffer pain, So, though her charms are poisonous, I moan for them again.

In any other poet the cow and the acorns would be an intolerable extravagance; but not so from Mr. Davies, who knows and loves all beasts of the field; who knows what it is to tramp over stones and to tread the gra.s.s, so that his "stones like gra.s.s" rings freshly, while the dew-drinking Phbus is stale.

But if he seems to belong to an older tradition, and to have little in common with the self-conscious modern poet, that is only because his life has kept him away from the fashions and fashionable ideas which are the intellectual superficies of our time, which distinguish the culture of one age from the culture of another. He loves with the strength of intimate friendship the unchanging things in the natural world, the sea, things that grow, and animals and birds. And he is acquainted with the other unchanging things--love, the desire for food, hatred of death, friendship. He is also too keen in his sympathies and interests not to be modern in the sense, for instance, that the romantic appeal has had its effect on him, or that the ugly facts of modern life have stirred and pained him. There is a great variety of emotions registered in his poems. There is the grim ballad called _Treasures_. There is a bold union of magical romanticism and sensuous pa.s.sion in the poem beginning:

I met her in the leafy woods, Early a summer's night; I saw her white teeth in the dark, There was no better light.

There is a remarkable confidence and elation in the little poem _The Elements_, wherein he identifies himself with Nature--it could only be quoted entire. And he records his impression of a tramcar which sweeps along Westminster in the twilight carrying its load of sleeping men to work. He can also write in a vein wholly unlike that of his simple and more characteristic lyrical verses. Thus he describes his childish impressions of a mariner "no good in port or out," as his granddad said:

And all his flesh was p.r.i.c.ked with Indian ink, His body marked as rare and delicate As dead men struck by lightning under trees, And pictured with fine twigs and curled ferns; Chains on his neck and anchors on his arms; Rings on his fingers, bracelets on his wrist; And on his breast the Jane of Appledore Was schooner rigged, and in full sail at sea.

He could not whisper with his strong hoa.r.s.e voice, No more than could a horse creep quietly; He laughed to scorn the men that m.u.f.fled close For fear of wind, till all their neck was hid, Like Indian corn wrapped up in long green leaves; He knew no flowers but seaweeds brown and green, He knew no birds but those that followed ships, Full well he knew the water-world; he heard A grander music there than we on land.

All of it is the intensely personal and direct poetry of a man of many moods, many sympathies, but happily removed from the cramping effects of current fashions of thoughts, and talk about thought. He has lived in the open air and among simple people, but always companioned by the poets. And so we have in him a singer fresh and unspoilt, writing from impulse, probably with little conscious technique, about things which he knows and the immediate experiences of life.

VI

J.M. SYNGE

Four volumes, none too thick, contain the collected works of the man who is coming to be regarded as the greatest of Irish dramatists. As we turn over the pages, and observe that they contain no more than six plays--three of them very short--a few Poems and Translations, the volume on the Aran Islands, and a volume of miscellaneous studies of his experiences among the folk of Wicklow, Kerry, and the Congested Districts, it is to feel wonder that a man with so profound an imagination, so wide a knowledge of the folk, and such genius for creation, should have produced only this for his life-work. And then we remember the lamentable fact of his early death--he was born in 1871--and the no less important fact that he was one for whom experience of living counted equally with the experience of art, and that he wrought as few English authors work, being at the pains to write and re-write till he had the result to his mind.

And so in these four volumes there is nothing whatever to regret--nothing that can be pa.s.sed over as dull or indifferent, nothing that has not both a hard basis of actuality and also an intensity of imagination that lifts it into the region of poetry. In one of his later moments of self-consciousness he uttered a sentence of criticism worthy to be treasured by the modern poet, and perhaps by the Irish poet especially. "It may almost be said that before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal." What would we not give to have Synge's "brutality" introduced into the over-idealised and sonorous poetry of Mr. Yeats? He does not mean the brutality of our English realists, or ugliness, sheer fact, mis-called truth, without beauty; what he wants is fidelity to _common_ truth, a realisation of the root, primitive facts--the most grim primitive facts--that hard basis of fact which must be accepted before the imagination can bear fruit.

One of the most singular qualities of Synge is the extraordinary common sense which sustains the gruesomeness of his tragic imagination on the one side, and his no less gruesome humour on the other. It holds together this humour and this grimness which are so truthfully united in his work. It is the common sense of the old-fashioned poet, the common sense which is all-pervading in Homer's Odyssey--based upon a strong, keen sense for the concrete, ordinary things of life. It is this which makes him find the masterly conclusion to _Riders of the Sea_, when old Maurya, lamenting the death of her sons, comforts herself, "No man at all can be living for ever, and we must be satisfied;" it is this which gives Naisi the ancient love of life, "It's a hard and bitter thing leaving the earth;" which produces so admirable a proverb as, "Who would listen to an old woman with one thing and she saying it over?"; and enables Pegeen, in _The Playboy of the Western World_, to perceive, if only from pique, the preposterousness of her infatuation--"There's a great gap," she says--and this is the gist of the matter--"between a gallous story and a dirty deed." But never does such common sense stay the flight of the poetic dream. Pegeen may know the difference "between a gallous story and a dirty deed," but that does not stop her from breaking out into wild lamentations: "Oh, my grief, I've lost him surely. I've lost the only Playboy of the Western World."

It is by never departing far from the high-road of common fact that Synge suggests to us the fascinations, the dangers, and romance of the by-paths. I think that when he travels a very long way from that high-road he does not hold us with so firm a hand. Beautiful as is the prose-poetry of _Deirdre of the Sorrows_, and fine as is the idealised portrait of Deirdre, yet, as a whole, this play does not grip so well as his other, even his slighter, plays. Is it not because he is moving away from the common life, which he knows so well how to light up into the uncommon atmosphere of the grim, the fanciful, the romantic, into the already half-conventionalised art atmosphere of the old heroic Saga? Most of his success in _Deirdre of the Sorrows_ is due to the fact that he has treated Deirdre as if she were just one of the peasant women whom he has known; but the ready-made plot has hampered him, and he is shut off from the use of those little "brutalities"

which give savour to his modern plays. The actual life is not there to secure him, and he falls into the characteristic Irish vagueness in praising the poet-hero--even Pegeen, in _The Playboy_, had spoken of poets as "fine, fiery fellows with great rages when their temper's roused" (it is just so that the Irish poets like to be pictured; and Mr. Jack Yeats, in a drawing usually much admired, has transformed Synge himself into just such a "fine, fiery fellow" of the tradition).

In _Deirdre of the Sorrows_, Synge could not, of course, free his mind from the traditional story, or from the poetry of all the poets who have sung of Deirdre; but should Deirdre herself, at the tragic moment when her lover lies dead, be thinking of "the way there will be a story told of a ruined city and a raving king and a woman will be young for ever?" This is like many Irish poets, but it is not worthy of Synge.

It was his genius to be able to tell the stories that have not been traditionalised, and to tell them in a wonderful dialect which may or may not be true to any actual speech, but which, unlike the jargon that is affectation in many Irish writers, used by him, has the power of affecting us as the old Ionic could move those who spoke in Attic Greek. It helps us to get into the fanciful and grotesque atmosphere which he conjured up out of the most real life. In all his modern plays there are character, dramatic intensity, fidelity to the folk life--and that life, with its brutality and its delicacy, attains the utmost that life can hold, seen through the poetic vision of Synge, made poignant and vivid by his imagination.

VII

THE SHRAMANA EKAI KAWAGUCHI

Books are like places of entertainment in that they often afford a pleasure wholly different in kind from that intended by the author. An original and cultured gentleman of my acquaintance has a habit of visiting suburban music-halls, and deriving therefrom a delight exquisite beyond the dreams of the artists who forgather at the Wormwood Scrubs Empire. In like manner there are books which have come to be accepted as cla.s.sics on the ground of excellences not aimed at by their authors, not necessarily because the authors were artless, but because their conscious art had no relation to the quality in them which pleases. Pepys was a first-rate Admiralty official and a desirable boon companion, but to his many excellences, known to himself no less than to his friends, that of being a master in English literature would never have been added. A still better example is the _Little Flowers of St. Francis of a.s.sisi_. We read them now because of what we are accustomed to call their "human interest," because they show us the robust, ordinary, fleshly, and ideal side of pious medival Catholics; they appeal to us humorously and pathetically; they are tragi-comedies of the transcendental life. But they were written to commemorate the pious acts of the saints, and the authors would have been shocked to think that they were contributing to the profane delight of the general and possibly heretical reader. In the same way the _Journal of John Wesley_ is a delight to many people to whom Wesley's peculiar excellences make no appeal. He was a great evangelist, a powerful emotional influence, a considerable thinker, a scholar, a robust man, and a gentleman of the Church of England. But when we have named all these qualities we have scarcely begun to account for the endless delight of his _Journal_. That which he consciously aimed at is not that which gives all of us pleasure.

To books of this cla.s.s I should be disposed to add that of the Shramana Ekai Kawaguchi, a distinguished j.a.panese priest, scholar, and traveller, who wrote a book ent.i.tled _Three Years in Tibet_. It must not be supposed that the Shramana is a simple or unsophisticated writer, or that he has not studied literary effects; but his intentional effects have the charm of _navet_ to an English reader, and his narrative is wholly unstudied in respect of all that delights us in it.

Such a book as this makes us distrustful of all our standards. It is an example of art as unconscious as that of the song of some vain, but for the moment solitary, child. It declares to us that Nature, when we can bring to it our own appreciation, is the first thing, and that the idealism of art is the second-best with which we content ourselves when Nature, with its direct appeal, is in abeyance.

The Shramana accomplished a journey which has few parallels in the history of travel. He spent three years residing and travelling in the uplands of Tibet, after the exclusion of strangers had become a rigorous policy, and before the British punitive expedition had inspired fear of the long-handed foreigner. He had with him no organised escort of men and mules such as accompanied Sir Sven Hedin in his more recent and better advertised expedition. He went alone and in disguise, as Burton went on his pilgrimage to Mecca; on intimate terms with the natives as Mr. Doughty was with the Arabs; a mendicant as Arminius Vambery has been in Asiatic Turkey and Persia. And he had an advantage which none of these travellers had, one which he did not scruple to use to the utmost--he was a Buddhist, like the Tibetans, and not only a Buddhist, but an exceptionally learned priest, possessed of a knowledge of things holy which he used with a religious fervour tempered with Odysseian guile. He was no missionary, but he carried the true Buddhism about with him in Tibet as discreetly as Borrow carried his Bibles in Spain; and his style has a curious resemblance to that of our English gipsy. With everyone whom he meets he converses on religion, philology, love, or the stars, in the gayest argumentative manner, and these dialogues come as interludes to adventures as thrilling as any that ever fall to the lot of man. In a few paragraphs he will dwell on the almost inconceivable perils he experienced from mountains, floods, storms, and famine, and in the next he is dryly recording the discourse of a holy lama, the wayside gossip of robbers, or the pa.s.sionate advances of a love-sick maiden, against whose enticements he steeled himself with the fort.i.tude becoming to his profession. He tells us with what joy he preached the simpler truths of Buddhism to the attentive nomads, and in the next page remarks somewhat inconsistently: "I had my own reasons for being painstaking in these preachings. I knew that religious talks always softened the hearts of my companions, and this was very necessary, as I might otherwise have been killed by them.... Fortunately my sermons were well received by my companions." His whole journey was necessarily a long and systematic tissue of deception, but when set on by robbers he disdains to preserve his worldly trash by a concealment of the truth. When his friends in Lha.s.sa discover that he is not, as he has been supposed to be, a Chinaman, but a foreigner from j.a.pan, he begs them to save themselves and send him in fetters to the Dalai Lama; but sacred meditation and a supernatural voice add themselves opportunely to the persuasions of his friends, and with this divine sanction he makes good his escape.

The book, indeed, has a fourfold value; it reveals artlessly and perfectly the character of the Shramana Ekai Kawaguchi, and that is worth knowing in itself. Secondly, it unfolds the emotional and intellectual aspects of j.a.panese Buddhism, showing this religion both on its theological side and as a practical working influence. Thirdly, it introduces us to a host of Tibetan persons, one after another, presenting not a vague, impressionist account of them, but individuals with whom he lived on intimate equal terms in daily social intercourse. And in the fourth place it gives us what we may take to be an authoritative account of the whole social system of Tibet--the priesthood and religion, administration, finance, trade, and the relations between the s.e.xes and castes.