The Art Of Letters Part 14

It is the stream of music flowing through his verses rather than any riches of imagery or phrase that makes one rank the author so high among living poets. But music in verse can hardly be separated from intensity and sincerity of vision. This music of Mr. de la Mare's is not a mere craftsman's tune: it is an echo of the spirit. Had he not seen beautiful things pa.s.sionately, Mr. de la Mare could never have written:

Thou with thy cheek on mine, And dark hair loosed, shalt see Take the far stars for fruit The cypress tree, And in the yew's black Shall the moon be.

Beautiful as Mr. de la Mare's vision is, however, and beautiful as is his music, we miss in his work that frequent perfection of phrase which is part of the genius of (to take another living writer) Mr. Yeats. One has only to compare Mr. Yeats's _I Heard the Old, Old Men Say_ with Mr. de la Mare's _The Old Men_ to see how far the latter falls below verbal mastery.

Mr. Yeats has found the perfect embodiment for his imagination. Mr. de la Mare seems in comparison to be struggling with his medium, and contrives in his first verse to be no more than just articulate:

Old and alone, sit we, Caged, riddle-rid men, Lost to earth's "Listen!" and "See!"

Thought's "Wherefore?" and "When?"

There is vision in some of the later verses in the poem, but, if we read it alongside of Mr. Yeats's, we get an impression of unsuccess of execution. Whether one can fairly use the word "unsuccess" in reference to verse which succeeds so exquisitely as Mr. de la Mare's in being literature is a nice question. But how else is one to define the peculiar quality of his style--its hesitations, its vaguenesses, its obscurities?

On the other hand, even when his lines leave the intellect puzzled and the desire for grammar unsatisfied, a breath of original romance blows through them and appeals to us like the illogical burden of a ballad. Here at least are the rhythms and raptures of poetry, if not always the beaten gold of speech. Sometimes Mr. de la Mare's verse reminds one of piano-music, sometimes of bird-music: it wavers so curiously between what is composed and what is unsophisticated. Not that one ever doubts for a moment that Mr. de la Mare has spent on his work an artist's pains. He has made a craft out of his innocence. If he produces in his verse the effect of the wind among the reeds, it is the result not only of his artlessness, but of his art. He is one of the modern poets who have broken away from the metrical formalities of Swinburne and the older men, and who, of set purpose, have imposed upon poetry the beauty of a slightly irregular pulse.

He is typical of his generation, however, not only in his form, but in the pain of his unbelief (as shown in _Betrayal_), and in that sense of half-revelation that fills him always with wonder and sometimes with hope.

His poems tell of the visits of strange presences in dream and vacancy. In _A Vacant Day_, after describing the beauty of a summer moon, with clear waters flowing under willows, he closes with the verses:

I listened; and my heart was dumb With praise no language could express; Longing in vain for him to come Who had breathed such blessedness.

On this fair world, wherein we pa.s.s So chequered and so brief a stay, And yearned in spirit to learn, alas!

What kept him still away.

In these poems we have the genius of the beauty of gentleness expressing itself as it is doing nowhere else just now in verse. Mr. de la Mare's poetry is not only lovely, but lovable. He has a personal possession--

The skill of words to sweeten despair,

such as will, we are confident, give him a permanent place in English literature.

(2) THE GROUP

The latest collection of Georgian verse has had a mixed reception. One or two distinguished critics have written of it in the mood of a challenge to mortal combat. Men have begun to quarrel over the question whether we are living in an age of poetic dearth or of poetic plenty--whether the world is a nest of singing-birds or a cage in which the last canary has been dead for several years.

All this, I think, is a good sign. It means that poetry is interesting people sufficiently to make them wish to argue about it. Better a breeze--even a somewhat excessive breeze--than stagnant air. It is good both for poets and for the reading public. It prevents the poets from resting on their wings, as they might be tempted to do by a consistent calm of praise. It compels them to examine their work more critically.

Anyhow, "fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil," and a reasonable amount of sharp censure will do a true poet more good than harm. It will not necessarily injure even his sales. I understand the latest volume of _Georgian Poetry_ is already in greater demand than its predecessor.

It is a good anthology of the poetry of the last two years without being an ideal anthology. Some good poets and some good poems have been omitted.

And they have been omitted, in some instances, in favour of inferior work.

Many of us would prefer an anthology of the best poems rather than an anthology of authors. At the same time, with all its faults, _Georgian Poetry_ still remains the best guide we possess to the poetic activities of the time. I am glad to see that the editor includes the work of a woman in his new volume. This helps to make it more representative than the previous selections. But there are several other living women who are better poets, at the lowest estimate, than at least a quarter of the men who have gained admission.

Mr. W.H. Davies is by now a veteran among the Georgians, and one cannot easily imagine a presence more welcome in a book of verse. Among poets he is a bird singing in a hedge. He communicates the same sense of freshness while he sings. He has also the quick eye of a bird. He is, for all his fairy music, on the look-out for things that will gratify his appet.i.te. He looks to the earth rather than the sky, though he is by no means deaf to the lark that

Raves in his windy heights above a cloud.

At the same time, at his best, he says nothing about his appet.i.te, and sings in the free spirit of a child at play. His best poems are songs of innocence. At least, that is the predominant element in them. He warned the public in a recent book that he is not so innocent as he sounds. But his genius certainly is. He has written greater poems than any that are included in the present selection. _Birds_, however, is a beautiful example of his gift for joy. We need not fear for contemporary poetry while the hedges contain a poet such as Mr. Davies.

Mr. de la Mare does not sing from a hedge. He is a child of the arts. He plays an instrument. His music is the music of a lute of which some of the strings have been broken. It is so extraordinarily sweet, indeed, that one has to explain him to oneself as the perfect master of an imperfect instrument. He is at times like Watts's figure of Hope listening to the faint music of the single string that remains unbroken. There is always some element of hope, or of some kindred excuse for joy, even in his deepest melancholy. But it is the joy of a spirit, not of a "super-tramp."

Prospero might have summoned just such a spirit through the air to make music for him. And Mr. de la Mare's is a spirit perceptible to the ear rather than to the eye. One need not count him the equal of Campion in order to feel that he has something of Campion's beautiful genius for making airs out of words. He has little enough of the Keatsian genius for choosing the word that has the most meaning for the seeing imagination.

But there is a secret melody in his words that, when once one has recognized it, one can never forget.

How different the Georgian poets are from each other may be seen if we compare three of the best poems in this book, all of them on similar subjects--Mr. Davies's _Birds_, Mr. de la Mare's _Linnet_, and Mr.

Squire's _Birds_. Mr. Squire would feel as out of place in a hedge as would Mr. de la Mare. He has an aquiline love of soaring and surveying immense tracts with keen eyes. He loves to explore both time and the map, but he does this without losing his eyehold on the details of the Noah's Ark of life on the earth beneath him. He does not lose himself in vaporous abstractions; his eye, as well as his mind, is extraordinarily interesting. This poem of his, _Birds_, is peopled with birds. We see them in flight and in their nests. At the same time, the philosophic wonder of Mr. Squire's poem separates him from Mr. Davies and Mr. de la Mare. Mr.

Davies, I fancy, loves most to look at birds; Mr. de la Mare to listen to birds; Mr. Squire to brood over them with the philosophic imagination. It would, of course, be absurd to offer this as a final statement of the poetic att.i.tude of the three writers. It is merely an attempt to differentiate among them with the help of a prominent characteristic of each.

The other poets in the collection include Mr. Robert Graves (with his pleasant bias towards nursery rhymes), Mr. Sa.s.soon (with his sensitive, pa.s.sionate satire), and Mr. Edward Shanks (with his trembling responsiveness to beauty). It is the first time that Mr. Shanks appears among the Georgians, and his _Night Piece_ and _Glow-worm_ both show how exquisite is his sensibility. He differs from the other poets by his quasi-a.n.a.lytic method. He seems to be a.n.a.lyzing the beauty of the evening in both these poems. Mrs. Shove's _A Man Dreams that He is the Creator_ is a charming example of fancy toying with a great theme.

(3) THE YOUNG SATIRISTS

Satire, it has been said, is an ign.o.ble art; and it is probable that there are no satirists in Heaven. Probably there are no doctors either. Satire and medicine are our responses to a diseased world--to our diseased selves. They are responses, however, that make for health. Satire holds the medicine-gla.s.s up to human nature. It also holds the mirror up in a limited way. It does not show a man what he looks like when he is both well and good. It does show a man what he looks like, however, when he breaks out into spots or goes yellow, pale, or mottled as a result of making a beast of himself. It reflects only sick men; but it reflects them with a purpose. It would be a crime to permit it, if the world were a hospital for incurables. To write satire is an act of faith, not a luxurious exercise. The despairing Swift was a fighter, as the despairing Anatole France is a fighter. They may have uttered the very Z of melancholy about the animal called man; but at least they were sufficiently optimistic to write satires and to throw themselves into defeated causes.

It would be too much to expect of satire that it alone will cure mankind of the disease of war. It is a good sign, however, that satires on war have begun to be written. War has affected with horror or disgust a number of great imaginative writers in the last two or three thousand years. The tragic indictment of war in _The Trojan Women_ and the satiric indictment in _The Voyage to the Houyhnhnms_ are evidence that some men at least saw through the romance of war before the twentieth century. In the war that has just ended, however--or that would have ended if the Peace Conference would let it--we have seen an imaginative revolt against war, not on the part of mere men of letters, but on the part of soldiers. Ballads have survived from other wars, depicting the plight of the mutilated soldier left to beg:

You haven't an arm and you haven't a leg, You're an eyeless, noseless, chickenless egg, You ought to be put in a bowl to beg-- Och, Johnnie, I hardly knew you!

But the recent war has produced a literature of indictment, basing itself neither on the woes of women nor on the wrongs of ex-soldiers, but on the right of common men not to be forced into mutual murder by statesmen who themselves never killed anything more formidable than a pheasant.

Soldiers--or some of them--see that wars go on only because the people who cause them do not realize what war is like. I do not mean to suggest that the kings, statesmen and journalists who bring wars about would not themselves take part in the fighting rather than that there should be no fighting at all. The people who cause wars, however, are ultimately the people who endure kings, statesmen and journalists of the exploiting and bullying kind. The satire of the soldiers is an appeal not to the statesmen and journalists, but to the general imagination of mankind. It is an attempt to drag our imaginations away from the heroics of the senate-house into the filth of the slaughter-house. It does not deny the heroism that exists in the slaughter-house any more than it denies the heroism that exists in the hospital ward. But it protests that, just as the heroism of a man dying of cancer must not be taken to justify cancer, so the heroism of a million men dying of war must not be taken to justify war. There are some who believe that neither war nor cancer is a curable disease. One thing we can be sure of in this connection: we shall never get rid either of war or of cancer if we do not learn to look at them realistically and see how loathsome they are. So long as war was regarded as inevitable, the poet was justified in romanticizing it, as in that epigram in the _Greek Anthology:_

Demaetia sent eight sons to encounter the phalanx of the foe, and she buried them all beneath one stone. No tear did she shed in her mourning, but said this only: "Ho, Sparta, I bore these children for thee."

As soon as it is realized, however, that wars are not inevitable, men cease to idealize Demaetia, unless they are sure she did her best to keep the peace. To a realistic poet of war such as Mr. Sa.s.soon, she is an object of pity rather than praise. His sonnet, _Glory of Women_, suggests that there is another point of view besides Demaetia's:

You love us when we're heroes, home on leave, Or wounded in a mentionable place.

You worship decorations; you believe That chivalry redeems the war's disgrace.

You make us sh.e.l.ls. You listen with delight, By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled.

You crown our distant ardours while we fight, And mourn our laurelled memories when we're killed.

You can't believe that British troops "retire"

When h.e.l.l's last horror breaks them, and they run, Trampling the terrible corpses--blind with blood.

_O German mother dreaming by the fire,_ _While you, are knitting socks to send your son_ _His face is trodden deeper in the mud._

To Mr. Sa.s.soon and the other war satirists, indeed, those stay at home and incite others to go out and kill or get killed seem either pitifully stupid or pervertedly criminal. Mr. Sa.s.soon has now collected all his war poems into one volume, and one is struck by the energetic hatred of those who make war in safety that finds expression in them. Most readers will remember the bitter joy of the dream that one day he might hear "the yellow pressmen grunt and squeal," and see the Junkers driven out of Parliament by the returned soldiers. Mr. Sa.s.soon cannot endure the enthusiasm of the stay-at-home--especially the enthusiasm that pretends that soldiers not only behave like music-hall clowns, but are incapable of the more terrible emotional experiences. He would like, I fancy, to forbid civilians to make jokes during war-time. His hatred of the jesting civilian attains pa.s.sionate expression in the poem called _Blighters_:

The House is crammed: tier beyond tier they grin And cackle at the Show, while prancing ranks Of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din; "We're sure the Kaiser loves the dear old Tanks!"

I'd like to see a Tank come down the stalls, Lurching to rag-time tunes, or "Home, sweet Home,"-- And there'd be no more jokes in Music-halls To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume.

Mr. Sa.s.soon himself laughs on occasion, but it is the laughter of a man being driven insane by an insane world. The spectacle of lives being thrown away by the hundred thousand by statesmen and generals without the capacity to run a village flower-show, makes him find relief now and then in a hysteria of mirth, as in _The General_:

"Good-morning; good-morning!" the General said When we met him last week on our way to the Line, Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead, And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.

"He's a cheery old card," grunted Harry to Jack As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

Mr. Sa.s.soon's verse is also of importance because it paints life in the trenches with a realism not to be found elsewhere in the English poetry of the war. He spares us nothing of:

The strangled horror And butchered, frantic gestures of the dead.

He gives us every detail of the filth, the dullness, and the agony of the trenches. His book is in its aim destructive. It is a great pamphlet against war. If posterity wishes to know what war was like during this period, it will discover the truth, not in _Barrack-room Ballads_, but in Mr. Sa.s.soon's verse. The best poems in the book are poems of hatred. This means that Mr. Sa.s.soon has still other worlds to conquer in poetry. His poems have not the constructive ardour that we find in the revolutionary poems of Sh.e.l.ley. They are utterances of pain rather than of vision. Many of them, however, rise to a n.o.ble pity--_The Prelude_, for instance, and _Aftermath_, the latter of which ends: