Studies of Contemporary Poets Part 19

MARY. Oh, Bothwell! Oh, my love! I am bewitched To love you so. You are a deadly poison That's crept through all my veins; you are the North, And I the needle; I must turn to you From every quarter of the hemispheres.

... I am yours Utterly, wholly; when I walk abroad, Jewelled and brocaded, I feel all men's eyes Can see me naked, and, from head to foot, Branded in red-hot letters with your name.

BOTHWELL. This is indeed love!

MARY. You may call it so!

It is not that which most men mean by love-- A moment's idle fancy. No, this love Is like a dragon, laying waste the land Of all my life; it is a deadly sickness, Of which we both shall die; it is a sin, Of which we both are d.a.m.ned, the saints of G.o.d Not finding mercy; there's no pleasure in it, But dust in the mouth and saltness in the eyes.

One would like to indicate further the truth with which the character is studied through the last two acts, providing the material as it does for scenes of great power and range of effect. Particularly one would wish to convey some idea of the scene of the final tragedy, broadly conceived against a background of the angry Edinburgh populace, and throbbing with the defiance of the Queen. Psychological imagination here is no less than brilliant, and one could cull perhaps half a dozen pa.s.sages to ill.u.s.trate it. But a single extract must suffice; and that is chosen for the additional reason that its closing sentences contain the very root of the tragedy. It is from Act IV, and the scene, following upon Mary's marriage to Bothwell, is designed to show her last desperate struggle against him and against herself. Already she is remorseful, disillusioned, and bitter; she knows the marriage to be hateful to her people, and she has found Bothwell cruel and treacherous. Before the n.o.bles, who are a.s.sembled to receive them, she taunts Bothwell that he is not royal; flouts him for Arthur Erskine; declares that she will never wear jewels again; and at last provokes from Bothwell angry abuse and threats of violence. The n.o.bles interpose to protect her, and beg her to let them save her from him. It needs but one word of a.s.sent to be rid of him for ever. She is almost won; she takes a few steps towards them, and actually gives her hand to one of them. Then she hesitates, turns, and looks at her husband:--

MARY. I am yours, Bothwell.

BOTHWELL. Will you go with me?

MARY. Ay, to the world's end, in my petticoat.

BOTHWELL. Let go her hands, my lord.

MORTON. Ay, let them go, And let _her_ go, for naught can save her now.

Not ours the fault.

MARY. Not yours, nor his, nor mine.

'Tis not the fault of floods to drown, nor fire To burn and shrivel--no, nor beasts to bite, Nor frosts to kill the flowers--not the fault, Only the property. There's something here That's stronger than our wishes and our wills.

There is no going back; our course is laid, And we must keep it, though it lead to death.

Good-bye, my lords. My husband, let us go.

_James Stephens_

One does not put a poet like Mr Stephens into a group--it cannot be done. If you try to do it, weakly yielding a wise instinct to mere intelligence, one of two things will happen. You will return to your careful group the moment after you thought you had made it, to find either that Mr Stephens has vanished or that the others have. Either he has broken away from the ridiculous frail links which bound him, and is already disappearing on the horizon with a gleeful shout, or his unfortunate companions have vanished before so much exuberance.

That is why this poet was not included in the Irish chapter where, if the thing were possible at all, one would have hoped to catch him. There are many fine racial strands out of which you would think a net could be woven. They appear to enmesh an Irishman and an Irish poet. We think we recognize that eye, critical and appreciative, for a woman--or a horse.

We believe we know that wit, with a touch of satire and another touch of merry malice. We are surely not mistaken in that adoration of beauty and its converse hatred of ugliness; while we have no doubt whatever about that pa.s.sion for liberty.

But the true poet will transcend his nation, as he does his manhood, at times of purest inspiration; and Mr Stephens has those happy seasons--happy, surely, for those to whom he sings, though, doubtless, each with its own agony to him. In many of the slighter poems, however, all of them good and most of them quite beautiful, the signs of nationality are obvious. They are comically clear, in fact, proceeding as they do directly from the quick, keen perception of the Comic Spirit itself. Only a blessed simpleton whose name was Patsy, could see the angel who walks along the sky sowing the poppyseed. The word 'Sootherer'

sounds like English; and indeed individuals of the species are not unknown in this country. But they, like the word, are native to the land of the born lover. Has anybody heard of a Saxon who could fit names like these to his sweetheart--Little Joy, Sweet Laughter, Shy Little Gay Sprite? or who could woo her with such a ripple of flattery--

... You are more sweetly new Than a May moon: you are my store, My secret and my treasure and the pulse Of my heart's core.

But, on the other hand, no mere English boy could hope to match the glib rage of spite in this disappointed youth--

You'll go--then listen, you are just a pig, A little wrinkled pig out of a sty; Your legs are crooked and your nose is big, You've got no calves, you have a silly eye, I don't know why I stopped to talk to you, I hope you'll die.

Again, no Jack Robinson, though the dull smother that he would call his imagination were fired by plentiful beer, could ever have conceived of "What Tomas an Buile Said in a Pub"; or could have accompanied Mac Dhoul on his impish adventure into heaven, to be twitched off G.o.d's throne by a hand as large as a sky, and sent spinning through the planets--

Sc.r.a.ping old moons and twisting heels and head A chuckle in the void....

These outward marks are unmistakable; and so, too, are certain qualities in the essence and texture of the work. His lyric moods may be as tender and fanciful, though always more spontaneous, than those of Mr Yeats.

And one may find the arrowy truth, the rich earthiness and the profound sense of tragedy of a Synge. But the filmy threads which seem to stretch between Mr Stephens and his compatriots have no strength to bind him.

They are, indeed, only visible when he is ranging at some alt.i.tude that is lower than his highest reach. When he soars to the zenith, as in "The Lonely G.o.d" and "A Prelude and a Song," their tenuity snaps. He has gone beyond what is merely national and simply human; and has become just a Voice for the Spirit of Poetry.

Nevertheless the affinities of this poet with what is best in modern Irish literature would make a fascinating study. Foremost, of course, there is imagination. You will find in him the true Hibernian blend of grotesquerie and grandeur, pure fantasy and shining vision. But each of these things is here raised to a power which makes it notable in itself, while all of them may sometimes be found in astonishing combination in a single poem. In the book called _Insurrections_, which is dated 1909, and appears to represent Mr Stephens' earliest efforts in verse, there is the piece which I have already named, "What Tomas an Buile Said in a Pub." Already we may see this complex quality at work. Tomas is protesting that he saw G.o.d; and that G.o.d was angry with the world.

His beard swung on a wind far out of sight Behind the world's curve, and there was light Most fearful from His forehead ...

He lifted up His hand-- I say He heaved a dreadful hand Over the spinning Earth, then I said "Stay, You must not strike it, G.o.d; I'm in the way; And I will never move from where I stand."

He said "Dear child, I feared that you were dead,"

And stayed His hand.

You will see--a significant fact--that there is no nonsense about a dream or a transcendent waking apparition. In the opening lines Tomas says, with anxious emphasis, that he saw the 'Almighty Man'--and that is symbolical. It has its relation to the mellow tenderness with which the poem closes; but apart from that it is a sign of the way in which the creative energy always works in this poetry. It seizes upon concrete stuff; and that is fused, hammered and moulded into shapes so sharp and clear that we feel we could actually touch them as they spring up in our mental vision. This is not peculiar to Mr Stephens, of course. It would seem to be common to every poet--though to be sure they are not many--in whom sheer imagination, the first and last poetic gift, is preeminent.

Mr Stephens has many other qualities, which give his work depth, variety and significance; but fine as they are, they take a secondary place beside this ardent, plastic power.

We quickly see, even in the early poem from which I have quoted, the mixed elements of this gift. Now the grotesquerie which seems to lie in the fact that Tomas tells about the majesty and familiar kindliness of G.o.d 'in a pub,' may be apparent only. It probably arises from one's own sophistication and painful respectability. We have lost the simplicity which would make it possible to talk about such a subject at all; and as for doing it in a pub...!

Yet there is something truly grotesque in this work. That is to say, there is a juxtaposition of ideas so violently contrasted that they would provoke instant mirth if it were not for the grave intensity of vision. Sometimes, indeed, they are frankly absurd. We are meant to laugh at them, as we do at Mac Dhoul, squirming with merriment on G.o.d's throne with the angels frozen in astonishment round him. But generally these extraordinary images are presented seriously, and often they are winged straight from the heart of the poet's philosophy. Then, the driving power of emotion and a pa.s.sion of sincerity carry us safely over what seems to be their amazing irreverence. There is, for instance, in the piece called "The Fulness of Time," a complete philosophic conception of good and evil, boldly caught into sacred symbolism. The poet tells here how he found Satan, old and haggard, sitting on a rusty throne in a distant star. All his work was done; and G.o.d came to call him to Paradise.

Gabriel without a frown, Uriel without a spear, Raphael came singing down Welcoming their ancient peer, And they seated him beside One who had been crucified.

It is not irreverence, of course, but the audacity of poetic innocence.

Only an imagination pure of convention and ceremonial would dare so greatly. And the remarkable thing is that this naivete is intimately blended with a grandeur which sometimes rises to the sublime. The n.o.blest and most complete expression of that is in "The Lonely G.o.d."

That is probably the reason why this poem is the finest thing that Mr Stephens has done--that, and the magnitude of its central idea. There is, indeed, the closest relation here between the thought and the imagery in which it is made visible. But, keeping our curious, impertinent gaze fixed for the moment on the changing form of the imaginative essence of the work, let us take first the opening lines of the poem:

So Eden was deserted, and at eve Into the quiet place G.o.d came to grieve.

His face was sad, His hands hung slackly down Along his robe ...

... All the birds had gone Out to the world, and singing was not one To cheer the lonely G.o.d out of His grief--

There follow several stanzas of exquisite reverie as the majestic figure paces sadly in Adam's silent garden and pauses before the little hut

Chaste and remote, so tiny and so shy, So new withal, so lost to any eye, So pac't of memories all innocent....

Then, reminiscent of the dear friendliness of those banished human souls, desolation comes upon the solitary Being. He remembers that he is eternal and ringed round with Infinity. He sends thought flying back through endless centuries, but cannot find the beginning of Time. He ranges North and South, but cannot find the bounds of s.p.a.ce. He is most utterly alone--save for his silly singing angels--in the monotonous glory of his heaven.

... Many days I sped Hard to the west, a thousand years I fled Eastwards in fury, but I could not find The fringes of the Infinite....

--till at last Dizzied with distance, thrilling to a pain Unnameable, I turned to Heaven again.

And there My angels were prepared to fling The cloudy incense, there prepared to sing My praise and glory--O, in fury I Then roared them senseless, then threw down the sky And stamped upon it, buffeted a star With My great fist, and flung the sun afar: Shouted My anger till the mighty sound Rung to the width, frighting the furthest bound And scope of hearing: tumult vaster still, Thronging the echo, dinned my ears, until I fled in silence, seeking out a place To hide Me from the very thought of s.p.a.ce.

There was once a reviewer who compared the genius of this poet to that of Homer and aeschylus. Now comparisons like that are apt to tease the mind of the discriminating, to whom there instantly appear all the gulfs of difference. But, indeed, this poet does share in some measure, with aeschylus and our own Milton and the unknown author of the Book of Job, a sublimity of vision. His conceptions have a grandeur of simplicity; and he makes us realize immensities--Eternity and s.p.a.ce and Force--by images which are almost primitive. Like those other poets too, whose philosophical conceptions were as different from his as their ages are remote, he also has made G.o.d in the image of man. But the comparison does not touch what we may call the human side of this newer genius; and it only serves to throw into bolder relief its perception of life's comedy, its waywardness, and its mischievous humour. This aspect, strongly contrasted as it is with the poet's imaginative power, is at least equally interesting. It is apparent, in the earlier work, in the realism of such pieces as "The Dancer" or "The Street." There is a touch of harshness in these poems which would amount to crudity if their realism were an outward thing only. But it is not a mere trick of style: it proceeds from indignation, from an outraged aesthetic sense, and from a mental courage which attains its height, rash but splendid, in "Optimist"--

Let ye be still, ye tortured ones, nor strive Where striving's futile. Ye can ne'er attain To lay your burdens down.

This poet is not a realist at all, of course--far from it. But he loves life and earth and homely words, he is very candid and revealing, and he has a sense of real values. His humanity, too, is deep and strong, and often supplies his verse with the material of actual existence, totally lacking fact.i.tious glamour. Thus we have "To the Four Courts, Please,"

in which the first stanza describes the deplorable state of an ancient cab-horse and his driver. Then--

G.o.d help the horse and the driver too, And the people and beasts who have never a friend, For the driver easily might have been you, And the horse be me by a different end.