Recent Developments in European Thought Part 6

We have now seen something of that power, at once of grip and of detachment with which the dominant poetry of this century faces what it thinks of as the adventure of experience, its plunge into the ever-moving and ever-changing stream of life. How then, it remains to ask, has it dealt with those ideal aspirations and beliefs which one may live intensely and ignore, which in one sense stand 'above the battle', but for which men have lived and died. With a generation which holds so lightly by tradition, which revises and revalues all accepted values, these aspirations and beliefs might well drop out of its poetry. On the other hand, these same aspirations and beliefs might overcome the indifference to tradition by ceasing to be merely traditional, by being immersed and steeped in that moving stream of life, and interwoven with the creative energies of men. The inherited faiths were put to this dilemma, either to become intimately alive and creative in poetry or to be of no concern for it. Some of them failed in the test. England has still devotees of Protestantism, but Protestant religion has hardly inspired n.o.ble poetry since Milton. Nationality, on the other hand, has during the last century inspired finer poetry than at any time since the sixteenth, and that because it has been brought down from the region of political abstractions and ideologies into intimate union with heart and brain, imagination and sense. This is true also of Catholicism and of Socialism, and, if fitfully and uncertainly yet, of the ideal of international fraternity, of humanity. And to all these ideals, to all ideals, came finally the terrific, the overwhelming test of the War,--a searching, annihilating, purifying flame, in which some shrivelled away, some were stripped of the illusive glitter that concealed their ma.s.s of alloy, and some, purged of their baser const.i.tuents, shone out with a l.u.s.tre unapproached before.

What is the distinctive note of this new poetry of nationality? And for the moment I speak of the years before the War. May we not say that in it the ideal of country is saturated with that imaginative grip of reality in all its concrete energy and vivacity which I have called the new realism? The nation is no abstraction, whether it be called Britannia, or _Deutschland uber Alles_. It is seen, and felt; seen in its cities as well as in its mountains, in the workers who have made it, as well as in the heroes who have defended it; in its roaring forges as well as in its idyllic woodlands and its tales of battles long ago; and all these not as separate strands in a woven pattern, but as waters of different origin and hue pouring along together in the same great stream.

emile Verhaeren, six years before the invasion, had seen and felt his country, living body and living soul, with an intensity which made it seem unimaginable that she should be permanently subdued. He well called his book _Toute la Flandre_, for all Flanders is there. Old Flanders,--Artevelde and Charles Temeraire--whose soul was a forest of huge trees and dark thickets,

'A wilderness of crossing ways below, But eagles, over, soaring to the sun,'--

Van Eyck and Rubens--'a thunder of colossal memories'; then the great cities, with their belfries and their foundries, and their warehouses and laboratories, their antique customs and modern ambitions; and the rivers, the homely familiar Lys, where the women wash the whitest of linen, and the mighty Scheldt, the Escaut, the 'hero sombre, violent and magnificent', 'savage and beautiful Escaut', whose companionship had moulded and made the poet, whose rhythms had begotten his music and his best ideas[17].

None of our English poets have rendered England in poetry with the same lyric intensity in its whole compa.s.s of time and s.p.a.ce, calling up into light and music all her teeming centuries and peopled provinces. Yet the present generation has in some respects made a nearer approach to such achievement than its predecessors. A century of growing historic consciousness has not pa.s.sed over us in vain; and if any generic distinction is to be found between our recent, often penetrating and beautiful, poetry of the English countryside and the Nature description of Wordsworth or of Ruskin, it is in the ground-tone of pa.s.sion and memory that pervades it for England herself. Wordsworth wrote magnificently of England threatened with invasion, and magnificently of the Lake Country, Nature's beloved haunt. But the War sonnets and the Lake and mountain poetry come from distinct strains in his genius, which our criticism may bring into relation, but our feeling insists on keeping apart. His Grasmere is a province of Nature--her favoured province--rather than of England; it is in the eye of Nature that the old c.u.mberland beggar lives and dies; England only provides the obnoxious workhouses to which these dest.i.tute vagrants were henceforth to be consigned. Is it not this that divides our modern local poetry from his? Mr. Belloc's Suss.e.x is tenderly loved for itself; yet behind its great hills and its old-world harbours lies the half-mystic presence of historic England. And in Edward Thomas's wonderful old Wiltshireman, Lob, worthy I think to be named with the c.u.mberland Beggar,

'An old man's face, by life and weather cut And coloured,--rough, brown, sweet as any nut,-- A land face, sea-blue eyed,'--

you read the whole lineage of sterling English yeomen and woodlanders from whom Lob springs.

This note is indeed relatively absent from the work of the venerable master who has made 'Wess.e.x' the most vividly realized of all English provinces to-day, and whose prose Egdon Heath may well be put at the head of all the descriptive poetry of our time. But Mr. Hardy, in this respect, belongs to an earlier generation than that into which he happily survives.

Sometimes this feeling is given in a single intense concentrated touch.

When Rupert Brooke tells us of

'Some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,'

do we not feel that the solidarity of England with the English folk and of the English folk with the English soil, is burnt into our imaginations in a new and distinctive way?

But the poetry of shires and provinces reacts too upon the poetry of nationality. It infuses something of the more instinctive and rudimentary attachments from which it springs into a pa.s.sion peculiarly exposed to the contagion of rhetoric and interest. Some of the most strident voices among living nationalist poets have found an unexpected note of tenderness when they sang their home province. Mr. Kipling charms us when he tells, in his close-knit verse, of the 'wooded, dim, Blue goodness of the Weald'. And the more strident notes of D'Annunzio's patriotism are also a.s.suaged by the tenderness and depth of his home feeling. We read with some apprehension his dedication of _La Nave_ to the G.o.d of seas:

'O Lord, who bringest forth and dost efface The ocean-ruling Nations, race by race, It is this living People, by Thy grace Who on the sea Shall magnify Thy name, who on the sea Shall glorify Thy name, who on the sea With myrrh and blood shall sacrifice to Thee At the altar-prow, Of all earth's oceans make our sea, O Thou!

Amen!

But he dedicated a n.o.ble drama, the _Figlia d'Iorio_, in a different tone, 'To the land of the Abruzzi, to my Mother, to my Sisters, to my brother in exile, to my father in his grave, to all my dead and all my race in the mountains and by the sea, I dedicate this song of the ancient blood.'

(2) _Democracy_

The growth of democratic as of national feeling during the later century naturally produced a plentiful harvest of eloquent utterance in verse.

With this, merely as such, I am not here concerned, even though it be as fine as the Socialist songs of William Morris or Edward Carpenter.

But the Catholic Socialism of Charles Peguy,--itself an original and, for most of his contemporaries, a bewildering combination--struck out a no less original poetry,--a poetry of solidarity. Peguy's Socialism, like his Catholicism, was single-souled; he ignored that behind the one was a Party, and behind the other a Church. It was his bitterest regret that a vast part of humanity was removed beyond the pale of fellowship by eternal d.a.m.nation. It was his sublimest thought that the solidarity of man includes the d.a.m.ned. In his first version of the Jeanne d'Arc mystery, already referred to, he tells how Jesus, crucified,

Saw not his Mother in tears at the cross-foot Below him, saw not Magdalen nor John, But wept, dying, only for Judas' death.

The Saviour loved this Judas, and though utterly He gave himself, he knew he could not save him.

It was the dogma of d.a.m.nation which for long kept Peguy out of its fold, that barbarous mixture of life and death, he called it, which no man will accept who has won the spirit of collective humanity. But he revolted not because he was tolerant of evil; on the contrary to d.a.m.n sins was for him a weak and unsocial solution; evil had not to be d.a.m.ned but to be fought down. Whether this vision of Christ weeping because he could not save Judas was un-Christian, or more Christian than Christianity itself, we need not discuss here; but I am sure that the spirit of a Catholic democracy as transfigured in the mind of a great poet could not be more n.o.bly rendered.

(3) _Catholicism_

But Peguy's powerful personality set its own stamp upon whatever he believed, and though a close friend of Jaures, he was a Socialist who rejected almost all the ideas of the Socialist school. As little was his Catholicism to the mind of the Catholic authorities. And his Catholic poetry is sharply marked off from most of the poetry that burgeoned under the stimulus of the remarkable revival of Catholic ideas in twentieth-century France. I say of Catholic ideas, for sceptical poets like Remy de Gourmont played delicately with the symbols of Catholic worship, made 'Litanies' of roses, and offered prayers to Jeanne d'Arc, walking dreamily in the procession of 'Women Saints of Paradise', to 'fill our hearts with anger'.[18] The Catholic adoration of women-saints is one of the springs of modern poetry. At the close of the century of Wordsworth and Sh.e.l.ley, the tender Nature-worship of Francis of a.s.sisi contributed not less to the recovered power of Catholic ideas in poetry, and this chiefly in the person of two poets, in France and in England, both of whom played half-mystically with the symbolism of their names, Francis Thompson and Francis Jammes. The child-like navete of S. Francis is more delicately reflected in Jammes, a Catholic W.H. Davies, who casts the idyllic light of Biblical pastoral over modern farm life, and prays to 'his friends, the a.s.ses' to go with him to Paradise, 'For there is no h.e.l.l in the land of the Bon Dieu.'

But the most powerful creative imagination to-day in the service of Catholic ideas is certainly Paul Claudel. I pa.s.s by here the series of dramas, where a Catholic inspiration as fervent as Calderon's is enforced with Elizabethan technique and Elizabethan violence of terror, cruelty, and pity.[19] From the ferocious beauty of _L'otage_ turn rather to the intense spiritual hush before the altar of some great French church at noon, where the poet, not long after the first decisive check of the invaders on the Marne, finds himself alone, before the shrine of Marie. Here too, his devotion finds a speech not borrowed from the devout or from their poetry:

'It is noon. I see the Church is open. I must enter.

Mother of Jesus Christ, I do not come to pray.

I have nothing to offer and nothing to ask.

I come only, Mother, to gaze at you.

To gaze at you, to weep for happiness, to know That I am your son and that you are there.

Nothing at all but for a moment when all is still, Noon! to be with you, Marie, in this place where you are.

To say nothing, to gaze upon your face, To let the heart sing in its own speech.'

There the nationalist pa.s.sion of Claudel animates his Catholic religion, yet does not break through its confines. But sometimes the strain of suffering and ruin is too intense for Christian submission, and he takes his G.o.d to task truculently for not doing his part in the contract; we are his partner in running the world, and see, he is asleep!

'There is a great alliance, w.i.l.l.y-nilly, between us henceforth, there is this bread that with no trembling hand We have offered you, this wine that we have poured anew, Our tears that you have gathered, our brothers that you share with us, leaving the seed in the earth, There is this living sacrifice of which we satisfy each day's demand, This chalice we have drunk with you!'

Yet the devout pa.s.sion emerges again, with notes of piercing pathos:

'Lord, who hast promised us for one gla.s.s of water a boundless sea, Who knows if Thou art not thirsty too?

And that this blood, which is all we have, will quench that thirst in Thee, We know, for Thou hast told us so.

If indeed there is a spring in us, well, that is what is to be shown, If this wine of ours is red, If our blood has virtue, as Thou sayest, how can it be known Otherwise than by being shed?'

(4) _Effects of the War upon Poetry_

Thus could the great Catholic poet sing under pressure of the supreme national crisis of his country. Poetry at such times may become a great national instrument--a trumpet whence Milton or Wordsworth, Arndt or Whitman, blow soul-animating strains. The war of 1914 was for all the belligerent peoples far more than a stupendous military event. It shattered the patterns of our established mentality, and compelled us to seek new adjustments and support in the chaotically disorganized world.

The psychical upheaval was most violent in the English-speaking peoples, where the military shock was least direct; for here a nation of civilians embraced suddenly the new and amazing experience of battle.

Here too, the imaginatively sensitive minds who interpret life through poetry, and most of all the youngest and freshest among them, themselves shared in the glories and the throes of the fight as hardly one of the signers of our most stirring battle poetry had ever done before. How did this new and amazing experience react upon their poetry? This, our final question, is perhaps the crucial one in considering the tendencies of recent European poetry.

In the first place it enormously stimulated and quickened what was deepest and strongest in the energies and qualities which had been apparent in our latter day poetry before. They had sought to clasp life, to live, not merely to contemplate, experience; and here indeed was life, and death, and both to be embraced. Here was adventure indeed, but one whose grimness made romance cheap, so that in this war-poetry, for the first time in history, the romance and glamour of war, the pomp and circ.u.mstance of military convention, fall entirely away, and the bitterest scorn of these soldier-poets is bestowed not on the enemy, but on those contemplators who disguised its realities with the camouflage of the pulpit and the editorial arm-chair. Turn, I will not say from Campbell or from Tennyson, but from Rudyard Kipling or Sir H. Newbolt, to Siegfried Sa.s.soon, and you feel that you have got away from a literary convention, whether conveyed in the manners of the barrack-room or of the public-school, to something intolerably true, and which holds the poet in so fierce a grip that his song is a cry.

But if the war has brought our poets face to face with intense kinds of real experience, which they have fearlessly grasped and rendered, its grim obsession has not made them cynical, or clogged the wings of their faith and their hope. I will not ask how the war has affected the idealism of others, whether it has left the nationalism of our press or the religion of our pulpits purer or more gross than it found them. But of our poetry at least the latter cannot be said. In Rupert Brooke the inspiration of the call obliterated the last trace of dilettante youth's pretensions, and he encountered darkness like a bride, and greeted the unseen death not with a cheer as a peril to be boldly faced, but as a great consummation, the supreme safety. How his poetry would have reacted to the actual experience of war we can only guess. But in others, his friends and comrades, the fierce immersion in the welter of ruin and pain and filth and horror and death brought only a more superb faith in the power of man's soul to rise above the hideous obsession of his own devilries, to retain the vision of beauty through the riot of foul things, of love through the tumult of hatreds, of life through the infinity of death. True this was not a new power: poetry to be poetry must always in some measure possess it. What was individual to the poets was that this power of mastering actuality went along in them with the fierce and eager immersion in it; the thrill of breathing the

'calm and serene air Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot Which men call earth,'

with the thrill of seeing and painting in all its lurid colouring the volcanic chaos of this 'stir and smoke' itself. Thus the same Siegfried Sa.s.soon who renders with so much close a.n.a.lytic psychology the moods that cross and fluctuate in the dying hospital patient, or the haunted fugitive, as he flounders among snags and stumps, to feel at last the strangling clasp of death, can as little as the visionary Sh.e.l.ley overcome the insurgent sense that these dead are for us yet alive, made one with Nature.

He visits the deserted home of his dead friend--

'Ah, but there was no need to call his name, He was beside me now, as swift as light ...

For now, he said, my spirit has more eyes Than heaven has stars, and they are lit by love.

My body is the magic of the world, And dark and sunset flame with my spilt blood.'

And so the undying dead

'Wander in the dusk with chanting streams, And they are dawn-lit trees, with arms upflung, To hail the burning heaven they left unsung.'

Further, this war poetry, while reflecting military things with a veracity hardly known before, is yet rarely militant. We must not look for explicit pacifist or international ideas; but as little do we find jingo patriotism or hymns of hate. The author of the German hymn of hate was a much better poet than anyone who tried an English hymn in the same key, and the English poets who could have equalled its form were above its spirit. Edith Cavell's dying words 'Patriotism is not enough' cannot perhaps be paralleled in these poets, but they are continually suggested. They do not say, in the phrase of the old cavalier poet, that we should love England less if we loved not something else more, or that something is wanting in our love for our country if we wrong humanity in its name. But the spirit which is embodied in these phrases breathes through them; heroism matters more to them than victory, and they know that death and sorrow and the love of kindred have no fatherland. They 'stand above the battle' as well as share in it, and they share in it without ceasing to stand above it. The German is the enemy, they never falter in that; and even death does not convert him into a friend. But for this enemy there is chivalry, and pity, and a gleam, now and then, of reconciling comradeship.