The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century Part 12

As the tallest tree must have the deepest roots, so it would seem that the loftiest edifices of verse must have the deepest foundations.

Certainly one of the many reasons why American poetry is so inferior to British is because our roots do not go down sufficiently deep.

Great poetry does not spring from natures too volatile, too susceptible, too easily swept by gusts of emotion. Landor was one of the most violent men we have on record; he was a prey to uncontrollable outbursts of rage, caused by trivial vexations; but his poetry aimed at cold, cla.s.sical correctness. In comparison with Landor, Tennyson's reserve was almost glacial--yet out of it bloomed many a gorgeous garden of romance. Splendid imaginative masterpieces seem to require more often than not a creative mind marked by sober reason, logical processes, orderly thinking.

John Morley, who found the management of Ireland more than a handful, though he loved Ireland and the Irish with an affection greater than that felt by any other Englishman of his time, has, in his _Recollections_, placed on opposite pages--all the more striking to me because unintentional--illuminating testimony to the difference between the Irish and the British temperament. And this testimony supports the point I am trying to make--that the "typical" logicless, inconsequential Irish mind, so winsome and so exasperating, is not the kind of brain to produce permanent poetry.

A peasant was in the dock for a violent a.s.sault. The clerk read the indictment with all its legal jargon. The prisoner to the warder: "What's all that he says?" _Warder:_ "He says ye hit Pat Curry with yer spade on the side of his head."

_Prisoner:_ "Bedad an' I did." _Warder:_ "Then plade not guilty." This dialogue, loud and in the full hearing of the court.

Read Wordsworth's two poems on Burns; kind, merciful, steady, glowing, manly they are, with some strong phrases, good lines, and human feeling all through, winding up in two stanzas at the close. These are among the pieces that make Wordsworth a poet to live with; he repairs the daily wear and tear, puts back what the fret of the day has rubbed thin or rubbed off, sends us forth in the morning _whole_.

Robert Browning, whose normality in appearance and conversation pleased sensible folk and shocked idolaters, summed up in two stanzas the difference between the popular conception of a poet and the real truth. One might almost take the first stanza as representing the Irish and the second the English temperament.

"Touch him ne'er so lightly, into song he broke: Soil so quick-receptive,--not one feather-seed, Not one flower-dust fell but straight its fall awoke Vitalising virtue: song would song succeed Sudden as spontaneous--prove a poet-soul!"

Indeed?

Rock's the song-soil rather, surface hard and bare: Sun and dew their mildness, storm and frost their rage Vainly both expend,--few flowers awaken there: Quiet in its cleft broods--what the after age Knows and names a pine, a nation's heritage.

People who never grow up may have a certain kind of fascination, but they will not write great poetry. It is exactly the other way with creative artists; they grow up faster than the average. The maturity of Keats is astonishing.... Mr. Yeats's wonderful lamentation, _September 1913_, that sounds like the wailing of the wind, actually gives us a reason why Irishmen are getting the attention of the world in poetry, as well as in fiction and drama.

What need you, being come to sense, But fumble in a greasy till And add the halfpence to the pence And prayer to shivering prayer, until You have dried the marrow from the bone; For men were born to pray and save, Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Yet they were of a different kind.

The names that stilled your childish play They have gone about the world like wind, But little time had they to pray For whom the hangman's rope was spun, And what, G.o.d help us, could they save; Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Was it for this the wild geese spread The grey wing upon every tide; For this that all that blood was shed, For this Edward Fitzgerald died, And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone, All that delirium of the brave; Romantic Ireland's dead and gone, It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Yet could we turn the years again, And call those exiles as they were, In all their loneliness and pain You'd cry "some woman's yellow hair Has maddened every mother's son:"

They weighed so lightly what they gave, But let them be, they're dead and gone, They're with O'Leary in the grave.

William Butler Yeats has done more for English poetry than any other Irishman, for he is the greatest poet in the English language that Ireland has ever produced. He is a notable figure in contemporary literature, having made additions to verse, prose and stage-plays. He has by no means obliterated Clarence Mangan, but he has surpa.s.sed him.

Mr. Yeats was born at Dublin, on the thirteenth of June, 1865. His father was an honour man at Trinity College, taking the highest distinction in Political Economy. After practising law, he became a painter, which profession he still adorns. The future poet studied art for three years, but when twenty-one years old definitely devoted himself to literature. In addition to his original work, one of his foremost services to humanity was his advice to that strange genius, John Synge--for it was partly owing to the influence of his friend that Synge became a creative writer, and he had, alas! little time to lose.

Mr. Yeats published his first poem in 1886. Since that date, despite his preoccupation with the management of the Abbey Theatre, he has produced a long list of works in verse and prose, decidedly unequal in merit, but shining with the light of a luminous mind.

From the first, Mr. Yeats has seemed to realize that he could serve Ireland best by making beautiful and enduring works of art, rather than by any form of political agitation. This is well; for despite the fact that a total inept.i.tude for statesmanship seldom prevents the enthusiast from issuing and spreading dogmatic propaganda, a merely elementary conception of the principle of division of labour should make us all rejoice when the artist confines himself to art. True artists are scarce and precious; and although practical men of business often regard them as superfluous luxuries, the truth is that we cannot live without them. As poet and dramatist, Mr. Yeats has done more for his country than he could have accomplished in any other way.

Never was there more exclusively an artist. He writes pure, not applied poetry. I care little for his theories of symbolism, magic and what not. Poets are judged not by their theories, not by the "schools"

to which they give pa.s.sionate adherence, but simply and solely by the quality of their work. No amount of theory, no correctness of method, no setting up of new or defence of old standards, no elevated ideals can make a poet if he have not the divine gift. Theories have hardly more effect on the actual value of his poetry than the colour of the ink in which he writes. The reason why it is interesting to read what Mr. Yeats says about his love of magic and of symbols is not because there is any truth or falsehood in these will-o'-the-wisps, but because he is such an artist that even when he writes in prose, his style is so beautiful, so harmonious that one is forced to listen.

Literary art has enormous power in propelling a projectile of thought.

I do not doubt that the chief reason for the immense effect of such a philosophy as that of Schopenhauer or that of Nietzsche is because each man was a literary artist--indeed I think both were greater writers than thinkers. A good thing this is for their fame, for art lasts longer than thought. The fashion of a man's thought may pa.s.s away; his knowledge and his ideas may lose their stamp, either because they prove to be false or because they become universally current.

Everybody believes Copernicus, but n.o.body reads him. Yet when a book, no matter how obsolete in thought, is marked by great beauty of style, it lives forever. Consider the case of Sir Thomas Browne. Art is the great preservative.

Mr. Yeats has a genius for names and t.i.tles. His names, like those of Rossetti's, are sweet symphonies. _The Wind Among the Reeds_, _The Shadowy Waters_, _The Secret Rose_, _The Land of Heart's Desire_, _The Island of Statues_ are poems in themselves, and give separate pleasure like an overture without the opera. Perhaps it is not too fanciful to observe that _The Wind Among the Reeds_ suggests better than any other arrangement of words the lovely minor melodies of our poet, while _The Shadowy Waters_ gives exactly the picture that comes into one's mind in thinking of his poems. There is an extraordinary fluidity in his verse, like running water under the shade of overhanging branches. One feels that Mr. Yeats loves these t.i.tles, and chooses them with affectionate solicitude, like a father naming beautiful children.

The love poetry of Mr. Yeats, like the love poetry of Poe, is swept with pa.s.sion, but the pa.s.sion is mingled with unutterable reverence.

It is unlike much modern love poetry in its spiritual exaltation. Just as manners have become more free, and intimacies that once took months to develop, now need only minutes, so much contemporary verse-tribute to women is so detailed, so bold, so c.o.c.k-sure, that the elaborate compliments only half-conceal a sneer. In all such work love is born of desire--its sole foundation--and hence is equally short-lived and fleeting. In the poems of Mr. Yeats, desire seems to follow rather than to precede love. Love thus takes on, as it ought to, something of the beauty of holiness.

Fasten your hair with a golden pin, And bind up every wandering tress; I bade my heart build these poor rhymes: It worked at them, day out, day in, Building a sorrowful loveliness Out of the battles of old times.

You need but lift a pearl-pale hand, And bind up your long hair and sigh; And all men's hearts must burn and beat; And candle-like foam on the dim sand, And stars climbing the dew-dropping sky, Live but to light your pa.s.sing feet.

A still more characteristic love-poem is the one which gleams with the symbols of the cloths of heaven.

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths, Enwrought with golden and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths Of night and light and the halflight, I would spread the cloths under your feet; But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

In mysticism, in symbolism, and in the quality of his imagination, Mr.

Yeats of course reminds us of Maeterlinck. He has the same twilit atmosphere, peopled with elusive dream-footed figures, that make no more noise than the wings of an owl. He is of imagination all compact.

He is neither a teacher nor a prophet; he seems to turn away from the real sorrows of life, yes, even from its real joys, to dwell in a world of his own creation. He invites us thither, if we care to go; and if we go not, we cannot understand either his art or his ideas.

But if we wander with him in the shadowy darkness, like the lonely man in t.i.tanic alleys accompanied only by Psyche, we shall see strange visions. We may be led to the door of a legended tomb; we may be led along the border of dim waters; but we shall live for a time in the realm of Beauty, and be the better for the experience, even though it resemble nothing in the town and country that we know.

Mr. Yeats, like Browning, writes both lyrical poems and dramas; but he is at the opposite remove from Browning in everything except the gift of song. Browning was so devoted to the dramatic aspect of art, that he carried the drama even into its seemingly contradictory form, the lyric. Every lyric is a little one-act play, and he called them dramatic lyrics. Mr. Yeats, on the other hand, is so essentially a lyric poet, that instead of writing dramatic lyrics, he writes lyric dramas. Even his stage-plays are primarily lyrical.

Those who are interested in Mr. Yeats's theory of speaking, reciting, or chanting poetry to the psaltery should read his book, _Ideas of Good and Evil_, which contains some of his most significant articles of faith, written in shining prose. Mr. Yeats cannot write on any subject without illuminating it by the light of his own imagination; and I find his essays in criticism full of original thought--the result of years of brooding reflection. In these short pieces his genius is as clear as it is in his poems.

He is, in fact, a master of English. His latest work, with its musical t.i.tle, _Per Amica Silentia Lunae_(1918), has both in spirit and form something of the ecstasy and quaint beauty of Sir Thomas Browne.

I had supposed that such a style as that displayed in _Urn-Burial_ was a lost art; but Mr. Yeats comes near to possessing its secret. This book is like a deep pool in its limpidity and mystery; no man without genius could have written it. I mean to read it many times, for there are pages that I am not sure that I understand. One looks into its depths of suggestion as one looks into a clear but very deep lake; one can see far down, but not to the bottom of it, which remains mysterious. He invites his own soul, but there is no loafing. Indeed his mind seems preternaturally active, as in a combination of dream and cerebration.

We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry. Unlike the rhetoricians, who get a confident voice from remembering the crowd they have won or may win, we sing amid our uncertainty; and, smitten even in the presence of the most high beauty by the knowledge of our solitude, our rhythm shudders. I think, too, that no fine poet, no matter how disordered his life, has ever, even in his mere life, had pleasure for his end.... The other self, the anti-self or ant.i.thetical self, as one may choose to name it, comes but to those who are no longer deceived, whose pa.s.sion is reality. The sentimentalists are practical men who believe in money, in position, in a marriage bell, and whose understanding of happiness is to be so busy whether at work or at play, that all is forgotten but the momentary aim. They will find their pleasure in a cup that is filled from Lethe's wharf, and for the awakening, for the vision, for the revelation of reality, tradition offers us a different word--ecstasy.... We must not make a false faith by hiding from our thoughts the causes of doubt, for faith is the highest achievement of the human intellect, the only gift man can make to G.o.d, and therefore it must be offered in sincerity. Neither must we create, by hiding ugliness, a false beauty as our offering to the world. He only can create the greatest imaginable beauty who has endured all imaginable pangs, for only when we have seen and foreseen what we dread shall we be rewarded by that dazzling unforeseen wing-footed wanderer.

I admire his devotion to the art of poetry. He will not turn Pegasus into a dray-horse, and make him haul cart-loads of political or moral propaganda. In his fine apologia, _The Cutting of an Agate_, he states and restates his creed: "Literature decays when it no longer makes more beautiful, or more vivid, the language which unites it to all life, and when one finds the criticism of the student, and the purpose of the reformer, and the logic of the man of science, where there should have been the reveries of the common heart, enn.o.bled into some raving Lear or unabashed Don Quixote.... I have been reading through a bundle of German plays, and have found everywhere a desire not to express hopes and alarms common to every man that ever came into the world, but politics or social pa.s.sion, a veiled or open propaganda.... If Homer were alive today, he would only resist, after a deliberate struggle, the temptation to find his subject not in Helen's beauty, that every man has desired, nor in the wisdom and endurance of Odysseus that has been the desire of every woman that has come into the world, but in what somebody would describe, perhaps, as 'the inevitable contest,' arising out of economic causes, between the country-places and small towns on the one hand, and, upon the other, the great city of Troy, representing one knows not what 'tendency to centralization.'"

In other words, if I understand him correctly, Mr. Yeats believes that in writing pure rather than applied poetry, he is not turning his back on great issues to do filigree work, but is merely turning aside from questions of temporary import to that which is fixed and eternal, life itself.

John Millington Synge was born near Dublin on the sixteenth of April, 1871, and died in Dublin on the twenty-fourth of March, 1909. It is a curious thing that the three great Irishmen of the Celtic renaissance--the only men who were truly inspired by genius--originally studied another form of art than literature. Mr.

Yeats studied painting for years; A. E. is a painter of distinction; Synge an accomplished musician before he became a of letters. There is not the slightest doubt the effect of these sister arts upon the literary work of the Great Three is pervasive and powerful. The books of Mr. Yeats and Mr. Russell are full of word-pictures; and the rhythm of Synge's strange prose, which Mr. Ernest Boyd ingeniously compares with Dr. Hyde's translations, is full of harmonies.

Dr. Hyde has not only witnessed a new and wonderful literary revival in his country, but he has the satisfaction of knowing that he is vitally connected with its birth and bloom.

Synge had the greatest mental endowment of all the Irish writers of his time. He had an amazingly powerful mind. At Trinity College he took prizes in Hebrew and in Irish, and at the same time gained a scholarship in harmony and counterpoint at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. As a boy, "he knew the note and plumage of every bird, and when and where they were to be found." As a man, he could easily have mastered the note of every human being, as in addition to his knowledge of ancient languages, he seems to have become proficient in German, French, and Italian with singular speed and ease. He was an excellent performer on the piano, flute, and violin, did conjuring tricks, and delighted the natives of the Aran Islands with his penny whistle. He must have had a positive genius for concentration, obtaining a command over anything to which he cared to devote his attention. Mr. Yeats found him in that ramshackle old Hotel Corneille in the Latin Quarter, busily writing literary criticism in French and English, and told him as an inspired messenger to go to the primitive folk in Ireland and become a creative artist. He went; and in a few years reached the summit of dramatic achievement.

Synge was a terrible person, as terrible in his way as Swift. When Carlyle saw Daniel Webster, he said, "I should hate to be that man's n.i.g.g.e.r." I do not envy any of the men or women who, for whatever reason, incurred the wrath of Synge. He was never noisy or explosive, like a dog whose barks are discounted, to whom one soon ceases to pay any attention; we all know the futile and petty irascibility of the shallow-minded. Synge was like a mastiff who bites without warning.

Irony was the common chord in his composition. He studied life and hated death; hated the gossip of the world, which seemed to him the gabble of fools. Physically he was a sick man, and felt his tether. He thought it frightful that he should have to die, while so many idiots lived long. He never forgave men and women for their folly, and the only reason why he did not forgive G.o.d was because he was not sure of His existence. The lady addressed in the following "poem" must have read it with queasy emotion, and have unwillingly learned it by heart.

A photograph of her face immediately after its perusal would look like futurist art; but who knows the expression on the face of the poet while preparing this poison?

THE CURSE

_To a sister of an enemy of the author's who disapproved of "The Playboy."_

Lord, confound this surly sister, Blight her brow with blotch and blister, Cramp her larynx, lung, and liver, In her guts a galling give her.

Let her live to earn her dinners In Mountjoy with seedy sinners: Lord, this judgment quickly bring, And I'm your servant, John M. Synge.

(Mountjoy is a prison.)

Irish exaggeration is as often seen in plenary curses as in plenary blessings; both have the quality of humour. The curses are partly compounded of robust delight, like the joy of London cabmen in repartee; and the blessings are doubtless commingled with irony. But Synge had a savage heart. He was essentially a wild man, and a friend of mine had a vision of him that seems not without significance. He was walking in a desolate part of Ireland in a bleak storm of rain; when suddenly over the hills came the solitary figure of Synge, dressed in black, with a broad hat pulled over his brows.

As a stranger and sojourner he walked this earth. In the midst of Dublin he never mentioned politics, read no newspapers, and little contemporary literature, not even the books of his few intimate friends. Every one who knew him had such immense respect for the quality of his intellect that it is almost laughable to think how eagerly they must have awaited criticism of the books they gave him--criticism that never came. Yet he never seems to have given the impression of surliness; he was not surly, he was silent. He must have been the despair of diagnosticians; even in his last illness, it was impossible for the doctors and nurses to discover how he felt, for he would not tell. I think his burning mind consumed his bodily frame.