The Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century Part 9

I confess that I have often felt a sense of shame for humanity when I have observed men and women staring through the bars at the splendid African cats in cages, and have also observed that their foolish stare is returned by the lion or tiger with a dull look of infinite boredom.

Nor is it pleasant to see small boys pushing sticks through the safe bars, in an endeavour to irritate the royal captives. One remembers Browning's superb lion in _The Glove_, whom the knight was able to approach in safety, because the regal beast was completely lost in thought--he was homesick for the desert, oblivious of the little man-king and his duodecimo court.

Although the total production of Ralph Hodgson is slight in quant.i.ty, the percentage of excellence is remarkably high. The reason for this is clear. Instead of printing everything he writes, and leaving the employment of the cream-separator to his readers, he gives to the public only what has pa.s.sed his own severe scrutiny. He is a true poet, with an original mind.

As for the work of Lascelles Abercrombie, which has been much praised in certain circles, I should prefer to leave the criticism of that to those who enjoy reading it. If I should attempt to "do justice" to his poetry, I should seem to his friends to be doing just the opposite--the opposite of just.

CHAPTER V

BROOKE, FLECKER, DE LA MARE, AND OTHERS

Rupert Brooke--a personality--the spirit of youth--his horror at old age--Henry James's tribute--his education--a genius--his poems of death--his affected cynicism--his nature poems--war sonnets--his supreme sacrifice--his charming humour--his masterpiece, _Grantchester_.--James Elroy Flecker--the editorial work of Mr. Squire--no posthumous puffery--the case of Crashaw--life of Flecker--his fondness for revision--his friendship with Rupert Brooke--his skill as a translator--his austerity--art for art's sake--his "brightness"--love of Greek mythology--steady mental development--his definition of the aim of poetry.--Walter De La Mare--the poet of shadow--Hawthorne's tales--his persistence--his reflective mood--his descriptive style--his Shakespeare characters--his sketches from life.--D. H.

Lawrence--his lack of discipline--his subjectivity--absence of reserve--a master of colour--his glaring excesses.--John Drinkwater--the west of England--his healthy spirit.--W. H.

Davies--the tramp poet.--Edward Thomas--his death--originality of his work.--Robert Nichols--Willoughby Weaving.--The young Oxford poets.

Rupert Brooke left the world in a chariot of fire. He was something more than either a man or a poet; he was and is a Personality. It was as a Personality that he dazzled his friends. He was overflowing with tremendous, contagious vitality. He was the incarnation of the spirit of youth, wearing the glamour and glory of youth like a shining garment. Despite our loss, it almost seems fitting that he did not live to that old age which he never understood, for which he had such little sympathy, and which he seems to have hated more than death. For he had the splendid insolence of youth. Youth commonly feels high-spirited in an unconscious, instinctive fashion, like a kitten or a puppy; but Rupert Brooke was as self-consciously young as a decrepit pensioner is self-consciously old. He rejoiced in the strength of his youth, and rolled it as a sweet morsel under his tongue. He was so glad to be young, and to know every morning on rising from sleep that he was still young! His pa.s.sionate love of beauty made him see in old age only ugliness; he could not foresee the joys of the mellow years.

All he saw consisted of grey hairs, wrinkles, double chins, paunches.

To him all old people were Struldbrugs. We smile at the insolence of youth, because we know it will pa.s.s with the beauty and strength that support it. Ogniben says, "Youth, with its beauty and grace, would seem bestowed on us for some such reason as to make us partly endurable till we have time for really becoming so of ourselves, without their aid; when they leave us ... little by little, he sees fit to forego claim after claim on the world, puts up with a less and less share of its good as his proper portion; and when the octogenarian asks barely a sup of gruel and a fire of dry sticks, and thanks you as for his full allowance and right in the common good of life,--hoping n.o.body may murder him,--he who began by asking and expecting the whole of us to bow down in worship to him,--why, I say he is advanced."

Henry James--whose affectionate tribute in the preface to Brooke's _Letters_ is impressive testimony--saw in the brilliant youth, besides the accident of genius, a perfect ill.u.s.tration of the highest type of Englishman, bred in the best English way, in the best traditions of English scholarship, and adorned with the good sense, fine temper, and healthy humour of the ideal Anglo-Saxon. He indeed enjoyed every possible advantage; like Milton and Browning, had he been intended for a poet from the cradle, his bringing-up could not have been better adapted to the purpose. He was born at Rugby, on the third of August, 1887, where his father was one of the masters in the famous school. He won a poetry prize there in 1905. The next year he entered King's College, Cambridge; his influence as an undergraduate was notable. He took honours in cla.s.sics, went abroad to study in Munich, and returned to Grantchester, which he was later to celebrate in his best poem. He had travelled somewhat extensively on the Continent, and in 1913 went on a journey through the United States and Canada to the South Seas. I am glad he saw the Hawaiian Islands, for no one should die before beholding that paradise. At the outbreak of war, he enlisted, went to Antwerp, and later embarked on the expedition to the Dardanelles. He was bitten by a fly, and died of bloodpoisoning on a French hospital ship, the day being Shakespeare's, the twenty-third of April, 1915. He was buried on a Greek island.

Rupert Brooke lived to be nearly twenty-eight years old, a short life to show ability in most of the ways of the world, but long enough to test the quality of a poet, not merely in promise, but in performance.

There is no doubt that he had the indefinable but unmistakable touch of genius. Only a portion of his slender production is of high rank, but it is enough to preserve his name. His _Letters_, which have been underestimated, prove that he had mental as well as poetical powers. Had he lived to middle age, it seems certain that his poetry would have been tightly packed with thought. He had an alert and inquisitive mind.

Many have seemed to think that the frequent allusions to death in his poetry are vaguely prophetic. They are, of course--with the exception of the war-poems--nothing of the kind, being merely symptomatic of youth. They form the most conventional side of his work. His cynicism toward the love of the s.e.xes was a youthful affectation, strengthened by his reading. He was deeply read in the seventeenth-century poets, who delighted in imagining themselves pa.s.sing from one woman to another--swearing "by love's sweetest part, variety." At all events, these poems, of which there are comparatively many, exhibit his least attractive side. The poem addressed to _The One Before the Last_, ends

Oh! bitter thoughts I had in plenty, But here's the worst of it-- I shall forget, in Nineteen-twenty, You ever hurt a bit!

He was perhaps, too young to understand two real truths--that real love can exist in the midst of wild pa.s.sion, and that the best part of it can and often does survive the early flames. Such poems as _Menelaus and Helen_, _Jealousy_, and others, profess a profound knowledge of life that is really a profound ignorance.

His pictures of nature, while often beautiful, lack the penetrative quality seen so constantly in Wordsworth and Browning; these greater poets saw nature not only with their eyes, but with their minds. Their representations glow with enduring beauty, but they leave in the spectator something even greater than beauty, something that is food for reflection and imagination, the source of quick-coming fancies.

Compare the picture of the pines in Brooke's poem _Pine-Trees and the Sky: Evening_, with Browning's treatment of an identical theme in _Paracelsus_, remembering that Browning's lines were written when he was twenty-two years old. Brooke writes,

Then from the sad west turning wearily, I saw the pines against the white north sky, Very beautiful, and still, and bending over Their sharp black heads against a quiet sky.

Browning writes,

The herded pines commune, and have deep thoughts, A secret they a.s.semble to discuss, When the sun drops behind their trunks which glare Like grates of h.e.l.l.

Both in painting and in imagination the second pa.s.sage is instantly seen to be superior.

The war sonnets of 1914 receive so much additional poignancy by the death of the author that it is difficult, and perhaps undesirable, to judge them as objective works of art. They are essentially n.o.ble and sincere, speaking from the depths of high-hearted self-sacrifice. He poured out his young life freely and generously, knowing what it meant to say good-bye to his fancy. There is always something eternally sublime--something that we rightly call divine--in the spendthrift giving of one's life-blood for a great cause. And Rupert Brooke was intensely aware of the value of what he unhesitatingly gave.

The two "fish" poems exhibit a playful, charming side to Brooke's imagination; but if I could have only one of his pieces, I should a.s.suredly choose Grantchester. Nostalgia is the mother of much fine poetry; but seldom has the expression of it been mingled more exquisitely with humour and longing. By the rivers of Babylon he sat down and laughed when he remembered Zion. And his laughter at Babylon is so different from his laughter at Grantchester. A few felicitous adjectives sum up the significant difference between Germany and England. Writing in a Berlin cafe, he says:

Here tulips bloom as they are told; Unkempt about those hedges blows An English unofficial rose; And there the unregulated sun Slopes down to rest when day is done, And wakes a vague unpunctual star, A slippered Hesper; and there are Meads toward Haslingfleld and Coton Where _das Betreten'_s not _verboten_....

Oh, is the water sweet and cool, Gentle and brown, above the pool?

And laughs the immortal river still Under the mill, under the mill?

Say, is there Beauty yet to find?

And Certainty? and Quiet kind?

Deep meadows yet, for to forget The lies, and truths, and pain? ... oh! yet Stands the Church clock at ten to three?

And is there honey still for tea?

When Hamlet died, he bequeathed his reputation to Horatio, the official custodian of his good name. He could not have made a better choice. Would that all poets who die young were equally fortunate in their posthumous editors! For there are some friends who conceive it to be their duty to print every sc.r.a.p of written paper the bard left behind him, even if they have to act as scavengers to find the "remains"; and there are others who think affection and admiration for the dead are best shown by adopting the methods and the language of the press-agent. To my mind, the pious memoir of Tennyson is injured by the inclusion of a long list of "testimonials," which a.s.sure us that Alfred Tennyson was a remarkable poet. Mr. J. C. Squire, under whose auspices the works of Flecker appear in one handsome volume, is an admirable editor. His introduction is a model of its kind, giving the necessary biographical information, explaining the chronology, the origin, the background of the poems, and showing how the poet revised his earlier work; the last paragraph ought to serve as an example to those who may be entrusted with a task of similar delicacy in the future. "My only object in writing this necessarily rather disjointed Introduction is to give some information that may interest the reader and be useful to the critic; and if a few personal opinions have slipped in they may conveniently be ignored. A vehement 'puff preliminary' is an insolence in a volume of this kind; it might pardonably be supposed to imply either doubts about the author or distrust of his readers."

As a contrast to the above, it is interesting to recall the preface that an anonymous friend contributed to a volume of Crashaw's verse in the seventeenth century, which, in his own words, "I have impartially writ of this Learned young Gent." Fearing that readers might not appreciate his poetry at its true value, the friend writes, "It were prophane but to mention here in the Preface those under-headed Poets, Retainers to seven shares and a halfe; Madrigall fellowes, whose onely business in verse, is to rime a poore six-penny soule a Suburb sinner into h.e.l.l;--May such arrogant pretenders to Poetry vanish, with their prodigious issue of tumorous heats, and flashes of their adulterate braines, and for ever after, may this our Poet fill up the better roome of man. Oh! when the generall arraignment of Poets shall be, to give an accompt of their higher soules, with what a triumphant brow shall our divine Poet sit above, and looke downe upon poore Homer, Virgil, Horace, Claudian; &c. who had amongst them the ill lucke to talke out a great part of their gallant Genius, upon Bees, Dung, froggs, and Gnats, &c. and not as himself here, upon Scriptures, divine Graces, Martyrs and Angels." Our prefatory friend set a pace that it is hopeless for modern champions to follow, and they might as well abandon the attempt.

James Elroy Flecker, the eldest child of the Rev. Dr. Flecker, who is Head Master of an English school, was born on the fifth of November, 1884, in London. He spent five years at Trinity College, Oxford, and later studied Oriental languages at Caius College, Cambridge. He went to Constantinople in 1910. In that same year signs of tuberculosis appeared, but after some months at an English sanatorium, he seemed to be absolutely well. In 1911 he was in Constantinople, Smyrna, and finally in Athens, where he was married to Miss Skiadaressi, a Greek.

In March the dreaded illness returned, and the rest of his short life was spent in the vain endeavour to recover his health. He died in Switzerland, on the third of January, 1915, at the age of thirty. "I cannot help remembering," says Mr. Squire, "that I first heard the news over the telephone, and that the voice which spoke was Rupert Brooke's."

He had published four books of verse and four books of prose, leaving many poems, essays, short stories, and two plays, in ma.n.u.script. All his best poetry is now included in the _Collected Poems_ (1916).

Flecker had the Tennysonian habit of continually revising; and in this volume we are permitted to see some of the interesting results of the process. I must say, however, that of the two versions of _Tenebris Interlucentem_, although the second is called a "drastic improvement," I prefer the earlier. Any poet might be proud of either.

Flecker liked the work of Mr. Yeats, of Mr. Housman, of Mr. De La Mare; and Rupert Brooke was an intimate friend, for the two young men were together at Cambridge. He wrote a sonnet on Francis Thompson, though he was never affected by Thompson's literary manner. Indeed, he is singularly free from the influence of any of the modern poets. His ideas and his style are his own; he thought deeply on the art of writing, and was given to eager and pa.s.sionate discussion of it with those who had his confidence. His originality is the more remarkable when we remember his fondness for translating verse from a variety of foreign languages, ancient and modern. He was an excellent translator.

His skill in this art can only be inferred where we know nothing at first hand of the originals; but his version of Goethe's immortal lyric is proof of his powers. The only blemish--an unavoidable one--is "far" and "father" in the last two lines.

Knowest thou the land where bloom the lemon trees?

And darkly gleam the golden oranges?

A gentle wind blows down from that blue sky; Calm stands the myrtle and the laurel high.

Knowest thou the land? So far and fair!

Thou, whom I love, and I will wander there.

Knowest thou the house with all its rooms aglow, And shining hall and columned portico?

The marble statues stand and look at me.

Alas, poor child, what have they done to thee?

Knowest thou the land? So far and fair.

My Guardian, thou and I will wander there.

Knowest thou the mountain with its bridge of cloud?

The mule plods warily: the white mists crowd.

Coiled in their caves the brood of dragons sleep; The torrent hurls the rock from steep to steep.

Knowest thou the land? So far and fair.

Father, away! Our road is over there!

Fletcher was more French than English in his dislike of romanticism, sentimentalism, intimate, and confessional poetry; and of course he was strenuously opposed to contemporary standards in so far as they put correct psychology above beauty. Much contemporary verse reads and sounds like undisciplined thinking out loud, where each poet feels it imperative to tell the reader in detail not only all his adventures, and pa.s.sions, but even the most minute whimsies and caprices. When the result of this bosom-cleansing is real poetry, it justifies itself; but the method is the exact opposite of Flecker's. His master was Keats, and in his own words, he wrote "with the single intention of creating beauty." Austerity and objectivity were his ideals.

Strangely enough, he was able to state in a new and more convincing way the doctrine of art for art's sake. "However few poets have written with a clear theory of art for art's sake, it is by that theory alone that their work has been, or can be, judged;--and rightly so if we remember that art embraces all life and all humanity, and sees in the temporary and fleeting doctrines of conservative or revolutionary only the human grandeur or pa.s.sion that inspires them."

Perhaps the best noun that describes Flecker's verse is _brightness_. He had a consumptive's longing for sunshine, and his sojourns on the Mediterranean sh.o.r.es illuminate his pages. The following poem is decidedly characteristic:

IN PHAEACIA

Had I that haze of streaming blue, That sea below, the summer faced, I'd work and weave a dress for you And kneel to clasp it round your waist, And broider with those burning bright Threads of the Sun across the sea, And bind it with the silver light That wavers in the olive tree.

Had I the gold that like a river Pours through our garden, eve by eve, Our garden that goes on for ever Out of the world, as we believe; Had I that glory on the vine, That splendour soft on tower and town, I'd forge a crown of that sunshine, And break before your feet the crown.