The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century Part 5

Now, of my threescore years and ten, Twenty will not come again, And take from seventy springs a score, It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow.

The death of the body is not the greatest tragedy in this volume, for suicide, a thought that youth loves to play with, is twice glorified.

The death of love is often treated with an ironical bitterness that makes one think of _Time's Laughingstocks_.

Is my friend hearty, Now I am thin and pine, And has he found to sleep in A better bed than mine?

Yes, lad, I lie easy, I lie as lads would choose; I cheer a dead man's sweetheart, Never ask me whose.

The point of view expressed in _The Carpenter's Son_ is singularly detached not only from conventional religious belief, but from conventional reverence. But the originality in _A Shropshire Lad_, while more strikingly displayed in some poems than in others, leaves its mark on them all. It is the originality of a man who thinks his own thoughts with shy obstinacy, makes up his mind in secret meditation, quite unaffected by current opinion. It is not the poetry of a rebel; it is the poetry of an independent man, too indifferent to the crowd even to fight them. And now and then we find a lyric of flawless beauty, that lingers in the mind like the glow of a sunset.

Into my heart an air that kills From yon far country blows: What are those blue remembered hills, What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain, The happy highways where I went, And cannot come again.

Mr. Housman's poems are nearer to the twentieth century in spirit than the work of the late Victorians, and many of them are curiously prophetic of the dark days of the present war. What strange vision made him write such poems as _The Recruit_, _The Street Sounds to the Soldiers' Tread_, _The Day of Battle_, and _On the Idle Hill of Summer_? Change the colour of the uniforms, and these four poems would fit today's tragedy accurately. They are indeed superior to most of the war poems written by the professional poets since 1914.

Ludlow, for ever a.s.sociated with. Milton's _Comus_, is now and will be for many years to come also significant in the minds of men as the home of a Shropshire lad.

CHAPTER III

JOHN MASEFIELD

John Masefield--new wine in old bottles--back to Chaucer--the self-conscious adventurer--early education and experiences--_Dauber_--Mr. Masefleld's remarks on Wordsworth--Wordsworth's famous Preface and its application to the poetry of Mr. Masefield--_The Everlasting Mercy_--_The Widow in the Bye Street_ and its Chaucerian manner--his masterpiece--_The Daffodil Fields_--similarities to Wordsworth--the part played by the flowers--comparison of _The Daffodil Fields_ with _Enoch Arden_--the war poem, _August 1914_--the lyrics--the sonnets--the novels--his object in writing--his contribution to the advance of poetry.

Poets are the Great Exceptions. Poets are for ever performing the impossible. "No man putteth new wine into old bottles ... new wine must be put into new bottles." But putting new wine into old bottles has been the steady professional occupation of John Masefield. While many of our contemporary vers librists and other experimentalists have been on the hunt for new bottles, sometimes, perhaps, more interested in the bottle than in the wine, John Masefield has been constantly pouring his heady drink into receptacles five hundred years old. In subject-matter and in language he is not in the least "traditional,"

not at all Victorian; he is wholly modern, new, contemporary. Yet while he draws his themes and his heroes from his own experience, his inspiration as a poet comes directly from Chaucer, who died in 1400.

He is, indeed, the Chaucer of today; the most closely akin to Chaucer--not only in temperament, but in literary manner--of all the writers of the twentieth century. The beautiful metrical form that Chaucer invented--rime royal--ideally adapted for narrative poetry, as shown in _Troilus and Criseyde_, is the metre chosen by John Masefield for _The Widow in the Bye Street_ and for _Dauber_; the only divergence in _The Daffodil Fields_ consisting in the lengthening of the seventh line of the stanza, for which he had plenty of precedents. Mr. Masefield owes more to Chaucer than to any other poet.

Various are the roads to poetic achievement. Browning became a great poet at the age of twenty, with practically no experience of life outside of books. He had never travelled, he had never "seen the world," but was brought up in a library; and was so deeply read in the Greek poets and dramatists that a sunrise on the Aegean Sea was more real to him than a London fog. He never saw Greece with his natural eyes. In the last year of his life, being asked by an American if he had been much in Athens, he replied contritely, "Thou stick'st a dagger in me." He belied Goethe's famous dictum.

John Masefield was born at Ledbury, in western England, in 1874. He ran away from home, shipped as cabin boy on a sailing vessel, spent some years before the mast, tramped on foot through various countries, turned up in New York, worked in the old Columbia Hotel in Greenwich Avenue, and had plenty of opportunity to study human nature in the bar-room. Then he entered a carpet factory in the Bronx. But he was the last man in the world to become a carpet knight. He bought a copy of Chaucer's poems, stayed up till dawn reading it, and for the first time was sure of his future occupation.

John Masefield is the real man-of-war-bird imagined by Walt Whitman.

He is the bird self-conscious, the wild bird plus the soul of the poet.

To cope with heaven and earth and sea and hurricane, Thou ship of air that never furl'st thy sails, Days, even weeks untired and onward, through s.p.a.ces, realms gyrating, At dusk that look'st on Senegal, at morn America, That sport'st amid the lightning-flash and thunder-cloud, In them, in thy experiences, had'st thou my soul, What joys! what joys were thine!

They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters, these see the works of the Lord, and His wonders in the deep.

They do indeed; they see them as the bird sees them, with no spiritual vision, with no self-consciousness, with no power to refer or to interpret. It is sad that so many of those who have marvellous experiences have nothing else; while those who are sensitive and imaginative live circ.u.mscribed. What does the middle watch mean to an average seaman? But occasionally the sailor is a Joseph Conrad or a John Masefield. Then the visions of splendour and the glorious voices of nature are seen and heard not only by the eye and the ear, but by the spirit.

Although Chaucer took Mr. Masefield out of the carpet factory even as Spenser released Keats it would be a mistake to suppose (as many do) that the Ledbury boy was an uncouth vagabond, who, without reading, without education, and without training, suddenly became a poet. He had a good school education before going to sea; and from earliest childhood he longed to write. Even as a little boy he felt the impulse to put his dreams on paper; he read everything he could lay his hands on, and during all the years of bodily toil, afloat and ash.o.r.e, he had the mind and the aspiration of a man of letters. Never, I suppose, was there a greater contrast between an individual's outer and inner life.

He mingled with rough, brutal, decivilized creatures; his ears were a.s.saulted by obscene language, spoken as to an equal; he saw the ugliest side of humanity, and the blackest phases of savagery. Yet through it all, sharing these experiences with no trace of condescension, his soul was like a lily.

He descended into h.e.l.l again and again, coming out with his inmost spirit unblurred and shining, even as the rough diver brings from the depths the perfect pearl. For every poem that he has written reveals two things: a knowledge of the harshness of life, with a nature of extraordinary purity, delicacy, and grace. To find a parallel to this, we must recall the figure of Dostoevski in the Siberian prison.

Many men of natural good taste and good breeding have succ.u.mbed to a coa.r.s.e environment. What saved our poet, and made his experiences actually minister to his spiritual flame, rather than burn him up? It was perhaps that final miracle of humanity, acute self-consciousness, stronger in some men than in others, strongest of all in the creative artist. Even at the age of twenty, Browning felt it more than he felt anything else, and his words would apply to John Masefield, and explain in some measure his thirst for sensation and his control of it.

I am made up of an intensest life, Of a most clear idea of consciousness Of self, distinct from all its qualities, From all affections, pa.s.sions, feelings, powers; And thus far it exists, if tracked, in all: But linked, in me, to self-supremacy, Existing as a centre to all things, Most potent to create and rule and call Upon all things to minister to it; And to a principle of restlessness Which would be all, have, see, know, taste, feel, all-- This is myself.

Although the poem _Dauber_ is a true story--for there was such a man, who suffered both horrible fear within and brutal ridicule without, who finally conquered both, and who, in the first sweets of victory, as he was about to enter upon his true career, lost his life by falling from the yardarm--cannot help thinking that Mr. Masefield put a good deal of himself into this strange hero. The adoration of beauty, which is the lodestar of the poet, lifted Dauber into a different world from the life of the ship. He had an ungovernable desire to paint the constantly changing phases of beauty in the action of the vessel and in the wonders of the sea and sky. In this pa.s.sion his shy, sensitive nature was stronger than all the brute strength enjoyed by his shipmates; they could destroy his paintings, they could hurt his body, they could torture his heart. But they could not prevent him from following his ideal. Dauber died, and his pictures are lost. But in the poem describing his aims and his sufferings, Mr.

Masefield has accomplished with his pen what Dauber failed to do with his brush; the beauty of the ship, the beauty of dawn and of midnight, the majesty of the storm are revealed to us in a series of unforgettable pictures. And one of Edison's ambitions is here realized. At the same moment we _see_ the frightful white-capped ocean mountains, and we _hear_ the roar of the gale.

Water and sky were devils' brews which boiled, Boiled, shrieked, and glowered; but the ship was saved.

Snugged safely down, though fourteen sails were split.

Out of the dark a fiercer fury raved.

The grey-backs died and mounted, each crest lit With a white toppling gleam that hissed from it And slid, or leaped, or ran with whirls of cloud, Mad with inhuman life that shrieked aloud.

Mr. Masefield is a better poet than critic. In the New York _Tribune_ for 23 January 1916, he spoke with modesty and candour of his own work and his own aims, and no one can read what he said without an increased admiration for him. But it is difficult to forgive him for talking as he did about Wordsworth, who "wrote six poems and then fell asleep." And among the six are not _Tintern Abbey_ or the _Intimations of Immortality_. Meditative poetry is not Mr. Masefield's strongest claim to fame, and we do not go to poets for illuminating literary criticism. Swinburne was so violent in his "appreciations" that his essays in criticism are adjectival volcanoes. Every man with him was G.o.d or Devil. It is rare that a creative poet has the power of interpretation of literature possessed by William Watson. Mr. Masefield does not denounce Wordsworth, as Swinburne denounced Byron; he is simply blind to the finest qualities of the Lake poet. Yet, although he carries Wordsworth's famous theory of poetry to an extreme that would have shocked the author of it--if Mr. Masefield does not like _Tintern Abbey_, we can only imagine Wordsworth's horror at _The Everlasting Mercy_--the philosophy of poetry underlying both _The Everlasting Mercy_, _The Widow in the Bye Street_, and other works is essentially that of William Wordsworth. Keeping _The Everlasting Mercy_ steadily in mind, it is interesting, instructive, and even amusing to read an extract from Wordsworth's famous Preface of 1800. "The princ.i.p.al object, then, proposed in these poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and, further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature; chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we a.s.sociate ideas in a state of excitement. Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, because, in that condition, the essential pa.s.sions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings coexist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings, and, from the necessary character of rural occupations, are more easily comprehended, and are more durable; and, lastly, because in that condition the pa.s.sions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature."

When Wordsworth wrote these dicta, he followed them up with some explicit reservations, and made many more implicit ones. Mr.

Masefield, in the true manner of the twentieth century, makes none at all. Taking the language of Wordsworth exactly as it stands in the pa.s.sage quoted above, it applies with precision to the method employed by Mr. Masefield in the poems that have given him widest recognition.

And in carrying this theory of poetry to its farthest extreme in _The Everlasting Mercy_, not only did its author break with tradition, the tradition of nineteenth-century poetry, as Wordsworth broke with that of the eighteenth, he succeeded in shocking some of his contemporaries, who refused to grant him a place among English poets. It was in the _English Review_ for October, 1911, that _The Everlasting Mercy_ first appeared. It made a sensation. In 1912 the Academic Committee of the Royal Society of Literature awarded him the Edmond de Polignac prize of five hundred dollars. This aroused the wrath of the orthodox poet Stephen Phillips, who publicly protested, not with any animosity toward the recipient, but with the conviction that true standards of literature were endangered.

It is unfortunate for an artist or critic to belong to any "school"

whatsoever. Belonging to a school circ.u.mscribes a man's sympathies. It shuts him away from outside sources of enjoyment, and makes him incapable of appreciating many new works of art, because he has prejudged them even before they were written. Poetry is greater than any definition of it. There is no doubt that _Marpessa_ is a real poem; and there is no doubt that the same description is true of _The Everlasting Mercy_.

In _The Everlasting Mercy_, the prize-fight, given in detail, by rounds, is followed by an orgy of drunkenness rising to a scale almost Homeric. The man, crazy with alcohol, runs amuck, and things begin to happen. The village is turned upside down. Two powerful contrasts are dramatically introduced, one as an interlude between violent phases of the debauch, the other as a conclusion. The first is the contrast between the insane buffoon and the calm splendour of the night.

I opened window wide and leaned Out of that pigstye of the fiend And felt a cool wind go like grace About the sleeping market-place.

The clock struck three, and sweetly, slowly, The bells chimed Holy, Holy, Holy; And in a second's pause there fell The cold note of the chapel bell, And then a c.o.c.k crew, flapping wings, And summat made me think of things.

How long those ticking clocks had gone From church and chapel, on and on, Ticking the time out, ticking slow To men and girls who'd come and go.

These thoughts suddenly become intolerable. A second fit of madness, wilder than the first, drives the man about the town like a tornado.

Finally and impressively comes the contrast between the drunkard's horrible mirth and the sudden calm in his mind when the tall pale Quakeress hypnotizes him with conviction of sin. She drives out the devils from his breast with quiet authority, and the peace of G.o.d enters into his soul.

From the first word of the poem to the last the man's own att.i.tude toward fighting, drink, and religion is logically sustained. It is perfect drama, with never a false note. The hero is one of the "twice-born men," and the work may fairly be taken as one more footnote to the varieties of religious experience.

I have been told on good authority that of all his writings Mr.

Masefield prefers _Nan_, _The Widow in the Bye Street_, and _The Everlasting Mercy_. I think he is right. In these productions he has no real compet.i.tors. They are his most original, most vivid, most powerful pieces. He is at his best when he has a story to tell, and can tell it freely in his own unhampered way, a combination of drama and narrative. In _The Everlasting Mercy_, written in octosyllabics, the metre of _Christmas Eve_, he is unflinchingly realistic, as Browning was in describing the chapel. The _Athenaeum_ thought Browning ought not to write about the mysteries of the Christian faith in doggerel. But _Christmas Eve_ is not doggerel. It is simply the application of the rules of realism to a discussion of religion. It may lack the dignity of the _Essay on Man_, but it is more interesting because it is more definite, more concrete, more real. In _The Everlasting Mercy_ we have beautiful pa.s.sages of description, sharply exciting narration, while the dramatic element is furnished by conversation--and what conversation! It differs from ordinary poetry as the sermons of an evangelist differ from the sermons of Bishops. Mr. Masefield is a natural-born dramatist. He is never content to describe his characters; he makes them talk, and talk their own language, and you will never go far in his longer poems without seeing the characters rise from the page, spring into life, and immediately you hear their voices raised in angry altercation. It is as though he felt the reality of his men and women so keenly that he cannot keep them down.

They refuse to remain quiet. They insist on taking the poem into their own hands, and running away with it.

When we are reading _The Widow in the Bye Street_ we realize that Mr. Masefield has studied with some profit the art of narrative verse as displayed by Chaucer. The story begins directly, and many necessary facts are revealed in the first stanza, in a manner so simple that for the moment we forget that this apparent simplicity is artistic excellence. The _Nun's Priest's Tale_ is a model of attack.

A poure wydwe, somdel stope in age, Was whilom dwellynge in a narwe cottage, Beside a grove, stondynge in a dale.

This wydwe, of which I telle yow my tale, Syn thilke day that she was last a wyf, In pacience ladde a ful symple lyf, For litel was hir catel and hir rente.

Now if I could have only one of Mr. Masefield's books, I would take _The Widow in the Bye Street._ Its opening lines have the much-in-little so characteristic of Chaucer.

Down Bye Street, in a little Shropshire town, There lived a widow with her only son: She had no wealth nor t.i.tle to renown, Nor any joyous hours, never one.

She rose from ragged mattress before sun And st.i.tched all day until her eyes were red, And had to st.i.tch, because her man was dead.

This is one of the best narrative poems in modern literature. It rises from calm to the fiercest and most tumultuous pa.s.sions that usurp the throne of reason. Love, jealousy, hate, revenge, murder, succeed in c.u.mulative force. Then the calm of unmitigated and hopeless woe returns, and we leave the widow in a solitude peopled only with memories. It is melodrama elevated into poetry. The mastery of the artist is shown in the skill with which he avoids the quagmire of sentimentality. We can easily imagine what form this story would take under the treatment of many popular writers. But although constantly approaching the verge, Mr. Masefield never falls in. He has known so much sentimentality, not merely in books and plays, but in human beings, that he understands how to avoid it. Furthermore, he is steadied by seeing so plainly the weaknesses of his characters, just as a great nervous specialist gains in poise by observing his patients. And perhaps our author feels the sorrows of the widow too deeply to talk about them with any conventional affectation.