Visions and Revisions Part 8

Or that description of the later season:

"Too quick despairer! Wherefore wilt thou go?

Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on, Soon shall we have gold-dusted Snapdragon, Sweet-William with his homely cottage-smell, And Stocks, in fragrant blow.

Roses that down the alleys shine afar, And open Jasmin-m.u.f.fled lattices, And groups under the dreaming garden-trees, And the pale Moon and the white Evening-Star."

True to the "only philosophy," Matthew Arnold is content to indicate how for each one of us the real drama of life goes on with a certain quite natural, quite homely, quite quiet background of the strip of earth where we first loved and dreamed, and were happy, and were sad, and knew loss and regret, and the limits of man's power to change his fate.

There is a large and n.o.ble calm about the poetry of this writer which has the effect upon one of the falling of cool water into a dark, fern-fringed cave. He strips away lightly, delicately, gently, all the trappings of our feverish worldliness, our vanity and ambition, and lifts open, at one touch, the great moon-bathed windows that look out upon the line of white foam--and the patient sands.

And never is this calm deeper than when he refers to Death. "For there" he says, speaking of that Cemetery at Firenze where his Thyrsis lies;

"For there thine earth-forgetting eyelids keep The morningless and unawakening sleep, Under the flowery Oleanders pale--"

Sometimes, as in his "Tristram and Iseult," he is permitted little touches of a startling and penetrating beauty; such as, returning to one's memory and lips, in very dusty and arid places, bring all the tears of half-forgotten romance back again to us and restore to us the despair that is dearer than hope!

Those lines, for instance, when Tristram, dying in his fire-lit, tapestried room, tended by the pale Iseult of Brittany, knows that his death-longing is fulfilled, and that she, his "other" Iseult, has come to him at last--have they not the very echo in them of what such weariness feels when, only not too late, the impossible happens?

Little he cares for the rain beating on the roof, or the moan of the wind in the chimney, or the shadows on that tapestried wall! He listens--his heart almost stops.

"What voices are those in the still night air?

What lights in the court? What steps on the stair?"

One wonders if the reader, too, knows and loves, that strange fragmentary unrhymed poem, called "the Strayed Reveller," with its vision of Circe and the sleeping boy-faun, and the wave-tossed Wanderer, and its background of "fitful earth-murmurs" and "dreaming woods"--Strangely down, upon the weary child, smiles the great enchantress, seeing the wine stains on his white skin, and the berries in his hair. The thing is slight enough; but in its coolness, and calmness, and sad delicate beauty, it makes one pause and grow silent, as in the long hushed galleries of the Vatican one pauses and grows silent before some little known, scarcely-catalogued Greek Vase. The spirit of life and youth is there--immortal and tender--yet there too is the shadow of that pitiful "in vain," with which the brevity of such beauty, arrested only in chilly marble, mocks us as we pa.s.s!

It is life--but life at a distance--Life refined, winnowed, sifted, purged. "Yet, O Prince, what labour! O Prince, what pain!" The world is perhaps tired of hearing from the mouths of its great lonely exiles the warning to youth "to sink unto its own soul," and let the mad throngs clamour by, with their beckoning idols, and treacherous pleading. But never has this unregarded hand been laid so gently upon us as in the poem called "Self-Dependence."

Heaven forgive us--we cannot follow its high teaching--and yet we too, we all, have felt that sort of thing, when standing at the prow of a great ship we have watched the reflection of the stars in the fast-divided water.

"Unaffrightened by the silence round them Undistracted by the sights they see These demand not that the world about them Yield them love, amus.e.m.e.nt, sympathy.

But with joy the stars perform their shining And the sea its long, moon-silvered roll; For self-poised they live; nor pine with noting All the fever of some differing soul."

The "one philosophy" is, as Matthew Arnold himself puts it, "utrumque paratus," prepared for either event. Yet it leans, and how should it not lean, in a world like this, to the sadder and the more final. That vision of a G.o.dless universe, "rocking its obscure body to and fro," in ghastly s.p.a.ce, is a vision that refuses to pa.s.s away. "To the children of chance," as my Catholic philosopher says, "chance would seem intelligible."

But even if it be--if the whole confluent ocean of its experiences be--unintelligible and without meaning; it remains that mortal men must endure it, and comfort themselves with their "little pleasures."

The immoral cruelty of Fate has been well expressed by Matthew Arnold in that poem called "Mycerinus," where the virtuous king _does not_ receive his reward. He, for his part will revel and care not. There may be n.o.bler, there may be happier, ways of awaiting the end--but whether "revelling" or "refraining," we are all waiting the end. Waiting and listening, half-bitterly, half-eagerly, seems the lot of man upon earth! And meanwhile that

--"Power, too great and strong Even for the G.o.ds to conquer or beguile, Sweeps earth and heaven and men and G.o.ds along Like the broad volume of the insurgent Nile And the great powers we serve, themselves must be Slaves of a tyrannous Necessity--"

Matthew Arnold had--and it is a rare gift--in spite of his peaceful domestic life and in spite of that "interlude" of the "Marguerite"

poems--a n.o.ble and a chaste soul. "Give me a clean heart, O G.o.d, and renew a right spirit within me!" prayed the Psalmist. Well! this friend of Thyrsis had "a clean heart" and "a right spirit"; and these things, in this turbulent age, have their appeal! It was the purging of this "hyssop" that made it possible for him even in the "Marguerite"

poems, to write as only those can write whose pa.s.sion is more than the craving of the flesh.

"Come to me in my dreams and then In sleep I shall be well again-- For then the night will more than pay The hopeless longing of the day!"

It was the same chast.i.ty of the senses that made it possible for him to write those verses upon a young girl's death, which are so much more beautiful--though _those_ are lovely too--than the ones Oscar Wilde wrote on the same subject.

"Strew on her, roses, roses, But never a spray of yew; For in silence she reposes-- Ah! would that I did too!

Her cabined ample spirit It fluttered and failed for breath.

Tonight it doth inherit The vasty halls of death."

Matthew Arnold is one of the poets who have what might be called "the power of Liberation." He liberates us from the hot fevers of our l.u.s.ts. He liberates us from our worldliness, our perversions, our mad preoccupations. He reduces things to their simple elements and gives us back air and water and land and sea. And he does this without demanding from us any unusual strain. We have no need to plunge into Dionysian ecstacies, or cry aloud after "cosmic emotion."

We have no need to relinquish our common sense; or to dress or eat or talk or dream, in any strange manner. It is enough if we remember the fields where we were born. It is enough if we do not altogether forget out of what quarter of the sky Orion rises; and where the lord-star Jupiter has his place. It is enough if we are not quite oblivious of the return of the Spring and the sprouting of the first leaves.

From the poetry of Matthew Arnold it is possible to derive an art of life which carries us back to the beginnings of the world's history.

He, the civilized Oxonian; he, domestic moralist; he, the airily playful scholar, has yet the power of giving that _Epic solemnity_ to our sleep and our waking; to our "going forth to our work arid our labour until the evening"; to the pa.s.sing of the seasons over us; which is the ground and substance of all poetic imagination, and which no change or progress, or discovery, can invade or spoil.

For it is the nature of poetry to heighten and to throw into relief those eternal things in our common destiny which too soon get overlaid--And some things only poetry can reach--Religion may have small comfort for us when in the secret depths of our hearts we endure a craving of which we may not speak, a sickening aching longing for "the lips so sweetly forsworn." But poetry is waiting for us, there also, with her Rosemary and her Rue. Not one human heart but has its hidden shrine before which the professional ministrants are fain to hold their peace. But even there, under the veiled Figure itself, some poor poetic "Jongleur de Notre Dame" is permitted to drop his monk's robe, and dance the dance that makes time and s.p.a.ce nothing!

Sh.e.l.lEY

One of the reasons why we find it hard to read the great poets is that they sadden us with their troubling beauty. Sadden us--and put us to shame! They compel us to remember the days of our youth; and that is more than most of us are able to bear! What memories! Ye G.o.ds, what memories!

And this is true, above all, of Sh.e.l.ley. His verses, when we return to them again, seem to have the very "perfume and suppliance" of the Spring; of the Spring of our frost-bitten age. Their sweetness has a poignancy and a pang; the sweetness of things too dear; of things whose beauty brings aching and a sense of bitter loss. It is the sudden uncovering of dead violets, with the memory of the soil they were plucked from. It is the strain of music over wide waters--and over wider years.

These verses always had something about them that went further than their actual meaning. They were always a little like planetary melodies, to which earthly words had been fitted. And now they carry us, not only beyond words, but beyond thought,--"as doth Eternity." There is, indeed, a sadness such as one cannot bear long "and live" about Sh.e.l.ley's poetry.

It troubles our peace. It pa.s.ses over the sterility of our poor comfort like a lost child's cry. It beats upon the door. It rattles the shut cas.e.m.e.nt. It sobs with the rain upon the roof. This is partly because Sh.e.l.ley, more than any poet, has entered into the loneliness of the elements, and given up his heart to the wind, and his soul to the outer darkness. The other poets can _describe_ these things, but he _becomes_ what they are. Listening to him, we listen to them. And who can bear to listen to them? Who, in cold blood, can receive the sorrows of the "many waters"? Who can endure while the heavens, that are "themselves so old," bend down with the burden of their secret?

Not to "describe," but to share the life, or the death-in-life, of the thing you write of, that is the true poetic way. The "arrowy odours"

of those first white violets he makes us feel, darting forth from among the dead leaves, do they leave us content with the art of their description? They provoke us with their fine essence. They trouble us with a fatality we have to share. The pa.s.sing from its "caverns of rain" of the newborn cloud--we do not only follow it, obedient to the spell of rhetoric; we are whirled forward with it, laughing at its "cenotaph" and our own, into unimagined aerial s.p.a.ces. One feels all this and more under Sh.e.l.ley's influence--but alas! as soon as one has felt it, the old cynical, realistic mood descends again, "heavy as frost," and the vision of ourselves, poor, straggling, forked animals, caught up into such regions, shows but as a pantomimic farce; and we awake, shamed and clothed, and in our "right mind!"

With some poets, with Milton and Matthew Arnold, for example, there is always a kind of implicit sub-reference, accompanying the heroic gesture or the magical touch, to our poor normal humanity.

With others, with Tennyson or Browning, for instance, one is often rather absurdly aware of the worthy Victorian Person, behind the poetic mask, "singing" his ethical ditty--like a great, self-conscious speckled thrush upon a prominent bough.

But with Sh.e.l.ley everything is forgotten. It is the authentic fury, the divine madness; and we pa.s.s out of ourselves, and "suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange." Into something "strange,"

perhaps, rather than something "rich"; for the temperament of Sh.e.l.ley, like that of Corot, leads him to suppress the more glowing threads of Nature's woof; leads him to dissolve everything in filmy white light; in the light of an impossible dawn. Has it been noticed how all material objects dissolve at his touch, and float away, as mists and vapours? He has, it seems, an almost insane predilection for _white_ things. White violets, white pansies, white wind-flowers, white ghosts, white daisies and white moons thrill us, as we read, with an almost unearthly awe. White Death, too; the shadow of white Corruption, has her place there, and the appalling whiteness of lepers and corpses. The liturgy he chants is the liturgy of the White Ma.s.s, and the "white radiance" of Eternity is his Real Presence.

Weird and fantastic though Sh.e.l.ley's dreams may appear, it is more than likely that some of them will be realized before we expect it.

His pa.s.sionate advocacy of what now is called "Feminism," his sublime revolutionary hopes for the proletariat, his denunciation of war, his arraignment of so-called "Law" and "Order," his indictment of conventional Morality, his onslaughts on outworn Inst.i.tutions, his invectives against Hypocrisy and Stupidity, are not by any means the blind Utopian rhetoric that some have called them. That crafty slur upon brave new thought which we know so well--that "how-can-you-take-him-seriously" att.i.tude of the "status-quo"

rascals--must not mislead us with regard to Sh.e.l.ley's philosophy.

He is a genuine philosopher, as well as a dreamer. Or shall we say he is the only kind of philosopher who _must_ be taken seriously--the philosopher who creates the dreams of the young?

Sh.e.l.ley is, indeed, a most rare and invaluable thinker, as well as a most exquisite poet. His thought and his poetry can no more be separated than could the thought and poetry of the Book of Job. His poetry is the embodiment of his thought, its swift and splendid incarnation.

Strange though it may seem, there are not very many poets who have the particular kind of _ice-cold intellect_ necessary if one is to detach one's self completely from the idols of the market-place.

Indeed, the poetic temperament is only too apt, out of the very warmth of its sensitive humanity, to idealize the old traditions and throw a glamour around them. That is why, both in politics and religion, there have been, ever since Aristophanes, so many great reactionary poets. Their warmth of human sympathy, their "nihil alienum" att.i.tude; nay! their very sense of humour, have made this inevitable. There is so often, too, something chilly and "unhomely,"

something pitiless and cruel, about quite rational reform, which alienates the poetic mind. It must be remembered that the very thing that makes so many objects poetical--I mean their _traditional a.s.sociation_ with normal human life--is the thing that _has to be destroyed_ if the new birth is to take place. The ice-cold austerity of mind, indicated in the superb contempt of the Nietzschean phrase, "human, too human," is a mood essential, if the world is to cast off its "weeds outworn." Change and growth, when they are living and organic, imply the element of destruction. It is easy enough to talk smoothly about natural "evolution." What Nature herself does, as we are beginning to realize at last, is to advance by leaps and bounds.

One of these mad leaps having produced the human brain, it is for us to follow her example and slough off another Past. Man is _that which has to be left behind!_ We thus begin to see what I must be allowed to call the essential inhumanity of the true prophet. The false prophet is known by nothing so easily as by his crying "peace"--his crying, "hands off! enough!"

It is tragic to think how little the world has changed since Sh.e.l.ley's time, and how horribly relevant to the present hour are his outcries against militarism, capitalism and privilege. If evidence were wanted of the profound moral value of Sh.e.l.ley's revolutionary thought, one has only to read the proclamations of any international school of socialistic propaganda, and find how they are fighting now what he fought then. His ideas have never been more necessary than they are today. Tolstoi has preached some of them, Bernard Shaw others, and Mr. Wells yet others. But none of our modern rebels have managed to give to their new thought quite the comprehensiveness and daring which we find in him.

And he has achieved this by the intensity of his devotion. Modern literary anarchists are so inclined to fall into jocularity, and irony, and "human, too human" humour. Their Hamlet-like consciousness of the "many mansions" of truth tends to paralyse the impetus of their challenge. They are so often, too, dramatists and novelists rather than prophets, and their work, while it gains in sympathy and subtlety, loses in directness. The immense encouragement given to really drastic, original thought by Nietzsche's writings is an evidence of the importance of what might be called _cruel positivity_ in human thinking. Sh.e.l.ley has, however, an advantage over Nietzsche in his recognition of the transformative power of love. In this respect, iconoclast though he is, he is rather with the Buddha and the Christ than with the modern antinomians.

His _mania_ for "love"--one can call it nothing else--frees his revolutionary thought from that arbitrary isolation, that savage subjectivity, which one notes in many philosophical anarchists. His Platonic insistence, too, on the more spiritual aspects of love separates his anti-Christian "immorality" from the easy-going, pleasant hedonism of such a bold individualist as Remy de Gourmont.