Chapter 18

Take up the White Man's burden, Send forth the best ye breed, Go, bind your sons to exile, To serve your captives' need; To wait in heavy harness On fluttered folk and wild-- Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.

Little Willie, in the tracts, scarcely dreamed of a thornier path of self-sacrifice. No wonder the sentimentalists were soon all dancing to the new music--music which, perhaps, had more of the harmonium than the harp in it, but was none the less suited on that account to its revivalistic purpose.

At the same time, much as we may have been attracted to Mr. Kipling in his Sabbath moods, it was with what we may call his Saturday night moods that he first won the enthusiasm of the young men. They loved him for his bad language long before he had ever preached a sermon or written a leading article in verse. His literary adaptation of the unmeasured talk of the barrack-room seemed to initiate them into a life at once more real and more adventurous than the quiet three-meals-a-day ritual of their homes. He sang of men who defied the laws of man; still more exciting, he sang of men who defied the laws of God. Every oath he loosed rang heroically in the ear like a challenge to the universe; for his characters talked in a daring, swearing fashion that was new in literature. One remembers the bright-eyed enthusiasm with which very young men used to repeat to each other lines like the one in _The Ballad of "The Bolivar_," which runs--

Boys, the wheel has gone to Hell--rig the winches aft!

Not that anybody knew, or cared, what "rigging the winches aft" meant. It was the familiar and fearless commerce with hell that seemed to give literature a new: horizon. Similarly, it was the eternal flames in the background that made the tattered figure of Gunga Din, the water-carrier, so favourite a theme with virgins and boys. With what delight they would quote the verse:--

So I'll meet 'im later on, At the place where 'e is gone-- Where it's always double drill and no canteen; 'E'll be squattin' on the coals, Givin' drink to poor damned souls. An' I'll get a swig in hell from Gunga Din!

Ever since the days of Aucassin, indeed, who praised hell as the place whither were bound the men of fashion and the good scholars and the courteous fair ladies, youth has taken a strange, heretical delight in hell and damnation. Mr. Kipling offered new meats to the old taste.

Gentlemen-rankers, out on the spree, Damned from here to eternity,

began to wear halos in the undergraduate imagination. Those "seven men from out of Hell" who went

Rolling down the Ratcliff Road, Drunk, and raising Cain,

were men with whom youth would have rejoiced to shake hands. One even wrote bad verses oneself in those days, in which one loved to picture oneself as

Cursed with the curse of Reuben, Seared with the brand of Cain,

though so far one's most desperate adventure into reality had been the consumption of a small claret hot with a slice of lemon in it in a back-street public-house. Thus Mr. Kipling brought a new violence and wonder, a sort of debased Byronism, into the imagination of youth; at least, he put a crown upon the violence and wonder which youth had long previously discovered for itself in penny dreadfuls and in its rebellion against conventions and orthodoxies.

It may be protested, however, that this is an incomplete account of Mr. Kipling's genius as a poet. He does something more in his verse, it may be urged, than drone on the harmonium of Imperialism, and transmute the language of the Ratcliff Road into polite literature. That is quite true. He owes his fame partly also to the brilliance with which he talked adventure and talked "shop" to a generation that was exceptionally greedy for both. He, more than any other writer of his time, set to banjo-music the restlessness of the young man who would not stay at home--the romance of the man who lived and laboured at least a thousand miles away from the home of his fathers. He excited the imagination of youth with deft questions such as--

Do you know the pile-built village, where the sago-dealers trade-- Do you know the reek of fish and wet bamboo?

If you did not know all about the sago-dealers and the fish and the wet bamboo, Mr. Kipling had a way of making you feel unpardonably ignorant; and the moral of your ignorance always was that you must "go--go--go away from here." Hence an immense increase in the number of passages booked to the colonies. Mr. Kipling, in his verse, simply acted as a gorgeous poster-artist of Empire. And even those who resisted his call to adventure were hypnotized by his easy and lavish manner of talking "shop." He could talk the "shop" of the army, the sea, the engine-room, the art-school, the charwoman; he was a perfect young Bacon of omniscience. How we thrilled at the unintelligible jingle of the _Anchor Song_, with its cunning blend of "shop" and adventure:--

Heh! Tally on. Aft and walk away with her! Handsome to the cathead, now! O tally on the fall! Stop, seize, and fish, and easy on the davit-guy. Up, well up, the fluke of her, and inboard haul!

Well, ah, fare you well for the Channel wind's took hold of us, Choking down our voices as we snatch the gaskets free, And its blowing up for night. And she's dropping light on light, And she's snorting and she's snatching for a breath of open sea.

The worst of Mr. Kipling is that, in verse like this, he is not only omniscient; he is knowing. He mistakes knowingness for knowledge. He even mistakes it for wisdom at times, as when he writes, not of ships, but of women. His knowing attitude to women makes some of his verse--not very much, to be quite fair--absolutely detestable. _The Ladies_ seems to me the vulgarest poem written by a man of genius in our time. As one reads it, one feels how right Oscar Wilde was when he said that Mr. Kipling had seen many strange things through keyholes. Mr. Kipling's defenders may reply that, in poems like this, he is merely dramatizing the point of view of the barrack-room. But it is unfair to saddle the barrack-room with responsibility for the view of women which appears here and elsewhere in the author's verse. One is conscious of a kind of malign cynicism in Mr. Kipling's own attitude, as one reads _The Young British Soldier_, with a verse like--

If your wife should go wrong with a comrade, be loth To shoot when you catch 'em--you'll swing, on my oath!-- Make 'im take 'er and keep 'er; that's hell for them both, And you're shut o' the curse of a soldier.

That seems to me fairly to represent the level of Mr. Kipling's poetic wisdom in regard to the relations between the sexes. It is the logical result of the keyhole view of life. And, similarly, his Imperialism is a mean and miserable thing because it is the result of a keyhole view of humanity. Spiritually, Mr. Kipling may be said to have seen thousands of miles and thousands of places through keyholes. In him, wide wanderings have produced the narrow mind, and an Empire has become as petty a thing as the hoard in a miser's garret. Many of his poems are simply miser's shrieks when the hoard seems to be threatened. He cannot even praise the flag of his country without a shrill note of malice:--

Winds of the world, give answer! They are whimpering to and fro-- And what should they know of England who only England know? The poor little street-bred people, that vapour, and fume, and brag, They are lifting their heads in the stillness, to yelp at the English flag!

Mr. Kipling is a good judge of yelping.

The truth is, Mr. Kipling has put the worst of his genius into his poetry. His verses have brazen "go" and lively colour and something of the music of travel; but they are too illiberal, too snappish, too knowing, to afford deep or permanent pleasure to the human spirit.

XXVII

MR. THOMAS HARDY

1. HIS GENIUS AS A POET

Mr. Thomas Hardy, in the opinion of some, is greater as a poet than as a novelist. That is one of the mild heresies in which the amateur of letters loves to indulge. It has about as much truth in it as the statement that Milton was greater as a controversialist than as a poet, or that Lamb's plays are better than his essays. Mr. Hardy has undoubtedly made an original contribution to the poetry of his time. But he has given us no verse that more than hints at the height and depth of the tragic vision which is expressed in _Jude the Obscure_. He is not by temperament a singer. His music is a still small voice unevenly matched against his consciousness of midnight and storm. It is a flutter of wings in the rain over a tomb. His sense of beauty is frail and midge-like compared with his sense of everlasting frustration. The conceptions in his novels are infinitely more poetic than the conceptions in his verse. In _Tess_ and _Jude_ destiny presides with something of the grandeur of the ancient gods. Except in _The Dynasts_ and a few of the lyrics, there is none of this brooding majesty in his verse. And even in _The Dynasts_, majestic as the scheme of it is, there seems to me to be more creative imagination in the prose passages than in the poetry.

Truth to tell, Mr. Hardy is neither sufficiently articulate nor sufficiently fastidious to be a great poet. He does not express life easily in beautiful words or in images. There is scarcely a magical image in the hundred or so poems in the book of his selected verse. Thus he writes in _I Found Her Out There_ of one who:--

would sigh at the tale Of sunk Lyonesse As a wind-tugged tress Flapped her cheek like a flail.

There could not be an uglier and more prosaic exaggeration than is contained in the image in the last line. And prose intrudes in the choice of words as well as in images. Take, for example, the use of the word "domiciled" in the passage in the same poem about--

that western sea, As it swells and sobs, Where she once domiciled.

There are infelicities of the same kind in the first verse of the poem called _At an Inn_:--

When we, as strangers, sought Their catering care, Veiled smiles bespoke their thought Of what we were.

They warmed as they opined Us more than friends-- That we had all resigned For love's dear ends.

"Catering care" is an appalling phrase.

I do not wish to over-emphasize the significance of flaws of this kind. But, at a time when all the world is eager to do honour to Mr. Hardy's poems, it is surely well to refrain from doing equal honour to his faults. We shall not appreciate the splendid interpretation of earth in _The Return of the Native_ more highly for persuading ourselves that:--

Intermissive aim at the thing sufficeth,

is a line of good poetry. Similarly the critic, if he is to enjoy the best of Mr. Hardy, must also be resolute not to shut his eyes to the worst in such a verse as that with which _A Broken Appointment_ begins:--

You did not come, And marching time drew on, and wore me numb,-- Yet less for loss of your dear presence there Than that I thus found lacking in your make That high compassion which can overbear Reluctance for pure loving kindness' sake Grieved I, when, as the hope-hour stroked its sum, You did not come.

There are hints of the grand style of lyric poetry in these lines, but phrases like "in your make" and "as the hope-hour stroked its sum" are discords that bring it tumbling to the levels of Victorian commonplace.

What one does bless Mr. Hardy for, however, both in his verse and in his prose, is his bleak sincerity. He writes out of the reality of his experience. He has a temperament sensitive beyond that of all but a few recent writers to the pain and passion of human beings. Especially is he sensitive to the pain and passion of frustrated lovers. At least half his poems, I fancy, are poems of frustration. And they, hold us under the spell of reality like a tragedy in a neighbour's house, even when they leave us most mournful over the emptiness of the world. One can see how very mournful Mr. Hardy's genius is if one compares it with that of Browning, his master in the art of the dramatic lyric. Browning is also a poet of frustrated lovers. One can remember poem after poem of his with a theme that might easily have served for Mr. Hardy--_Too Late, Cristina, The Lost Mistress, The Last Ride Together, The Statue and the Bust_, to name a few. But what a sense of triumph there is in Browning's tragedies! Even when he writes of the feeble-hearted, as in _The Statue and the Bust_, he leaves us with the feeling that we are in the presence of weakness in a world in which courage prevails. His world is a place of opulence, not of poverty. Compare _The Last Ride Together_ with Mr. Hardy's _The Phantom Horsewoman_, and you will see a vast energy and beauty issuing from loss in the one, while in the other there is little but a sad shadow. To have loved even for an hour is with Browning to live for ever after in the inheritance of a mighty achievement. To have loved for an hour is, in Mr. Hardy's imagination, to have deepened the sadness even more than the beauty of one's memories.

Not that Mr. Hardy's is quite so miserable a genius as is commonly supposed. It is false to picture him as always on his knees before the grave-worm. His faith in beauty and joy may be only a thin flame, but it is never extinguished. His beautiful lyric, _I Look into my Glass_, is the cry of a soul dark but not utterly darkened:--

I look into my glass, And view my wasting skin, And say: "Would God, it came to pass My heart had shrunk as thin!"

For then, I, undistrest, By hearts grown cold to me, Could lonely wait my endless rest With equanimity.

But Time, to make me grieve, Part steals, lets part abide; And shakes this fragile frame at eve With throbbings of noontide.

That is certainly worlds apart from the unquenchable joy of Browning's "All the breath and the bloom of the world in the bag of one bee"; but it is also far removed from the "Lo! you may always end it where you will" of _The City of Dreadful Night_. And despair is by no means triumphant in what is perhaps the most attractive of all Mr. Hardy's poems, _The Oxen_:--

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock, "Now they are all on their knees," An elder said as we sat in a flock By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where They dwelt in their strawy pen, Nor did it occur to one of us there To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave In these years! Yet, I feel, If some one said on Christmas Eve, "Come; see the oxen kneel

"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb Our childhood used to know," I should go with him in the gloom, Hoping it might be so.

The mood of faith, however--or, rather, of delight in the memory of faith--is not Mr. Hardy's prevailing mood. At the same time, his unfaith relates to the duration of love rather than to human destiny. He believes in "the world's amendment." He can enter upon a war without ironical doubts, as we see in the song _Men who March Away_. More than this, he can look forward beyond war to the coming of a new patriotism of the world. "How long," he cries, in a poem written some years ago:--

How long, O ruling Teutons, Slavs, and Gaels, Must your wroth reasonings trade on lives like these, That are as puppets in a playing hand? When shall the saner softer polities Whereof we dream, have sway in each proud land, And Patriotism, grown Godlike, scorn to stand Bondslave to realms, but circle earth and seas?

But, perhaps, his characteristic attitude to war is to be found, not in lines like these, but in that melancholy poem, _The Souls of the Slain_, in which the souls of the dead soldiers return to their country and question a "senior soul-flame" as to how their friends and relatives have kept their doughty deeds in remembrance:--

"And, General, how hold out our sweethearts, Sworn loyal as doves?" "Many mourn; many think It is not unattractive to prink Them in sable for heroes. Some fickle and fleet hearts Have found them new loves."

"And our wives?" quoth another, resignedly, "Dwell they on our deeds?" "Deeds of home; that live yet Fresh as new--deeds of fondness or fret, Ancient words that were kindly expressed or unkindly, These, these have their heeds."

Mr. Hardy has too bitter a sense of reality to believe much in the glory of war. His imagination has always been curiously interested in soldiers, but that is more because they have added a touch of colour to the tragic game of life than because he is on the side of the military show. One has only to read _The Dynasts_ along with _Barrack-room Ballads_ to see that the attitude of Mr. Hardy to war is the attitude of the brooding artist in contrast with that of the music-hall politician. Not that Mr. Kipling did not tell us some truths about the fate of our fellows, but he related them to an atmosphere that savoured of beer and tobacco rather than of eternity. The real world to Mr. Hardy is the world of ancient human things, in which war has come to be a hideous irrelevance. That is what he makes emphatically clear in _In the Time of the Breaking of Nations_:--

Only a man harrowing clods In a slow silent walk With an old horse that stumbles and nods Half asleep as they stalk.

Only thin smoke without flame From the heaps of couch grass: Yet this will go onward the same Though Dynasties pass.

Yonder a maid and her wight Come whispering by; War's annals will fade into night Ere their story die

It may be thought, on the other hand, that Mr. Hardy's poems about war are no more expressive of tragic futility than his poems about love. Futility and frustration are ever-recurring themes in both. His lovers, like his soldiers, rot in the grave defeated of their glory. Lovers are always severed both in life and in death:--

Rain on the windows, creaking doors, With blasts that besom the green, And I am here, and you are there, And a hundred miles between!

In _Beyond the Last Lamp_ we have the same mournful cry over severance. There are few sadder poems than this with its tristful refrain, even in the works of Mr. Hardy. It is too long to quote in full, but one may give the last verses of this lyric of lovers in a lane:--

When I re-trod that watery way Some hours beyond the droop of day, Still I found pacing there the twain Just as slowly, just as sadly, Heedless of the night and rain. One could but wonder who they were And what wild woe detained them there.

Though thirty years of blur and blot Have slid since I beheld that spot, And saw in curious converse there Moving slowly, moving sadly, That mysterious tragic pair, Its olden look may linger on-- All but the couple; they have gone.

Whither? Who knows, indeed.... And yet To me, when nights are weird and wet, Without those comrades there at tryst Creeping slowly, creeping sadly, That love-lane does not exist. There they seem brooding on their pain, And will, while such a lane remain.

And death is no kinder than life to lovers:--

I shall rot here, with those whom in their day You never knew. And alien ones who, ere they chilled to clay, Met not my view, Will in yon distant grave-place ever neighbour you.

No shade of pinnacle or tree or tower, While earth endures, Will fall on my mound and within the hour Steal on to yours; One robin never haunt our two green covertures.

Mr. Hardy, fortunately, has the genius to express the burden and the mystery even of a world grey with rain and commonplace in achievement. There is a beauty of sorrow in these poems in which "life with the sad, seared face" mirrors itself without disguise. They bring us face to face with an experience intenser than our own. There is nothing common in the tragic image of dullness in _A Common-place Day_:--

The day is turning ghost, And scuttles from the kalendar in fits and furtively, To join the anonymous host Of those that throng oblivion; ceding his place, maybe, To one of like degree....

Nothing of tiniest worth Have I wrought, pondered, planned; no one thing asking blame or praise, Since the pale corpse-like birth Of this diurnal unit, bearing blanks in all its rays-- Dullest of dull-hued days!

Wanly upon the panes The rain slides, as have slid since morn my colourless thoughts; and yet Here, while Day's presence wanes, And over him the sepulchre-lid is slowly lowered and set, He wakens my regret.

In the poem which contains these verses the emotion of the poet gives words often undistinguished an almost Elizabethan rhythm. Mr. Hardy, indeed, is a poet who often achieves music of verses, though he seldom achieves music of phrase.

We must, then, be grateful without niggardliness for the gift of his verse. On the larger canvas of his prose we find a vision more abundant, more varied, more touched with humour. But his poems are the genuine confessions of a soul, the meditations of a man of genius, brooding not without bitterness but with pity on the paths that lead to the grave, and the figures that flit along them so solitarily and so ineffectually.

2. A POET IN WINTER

In the last poem in his last book, _Moments of Vision_, Mr. Hardy meditates on his own immortality, as all men of genius probably do at one time or another. _Afterwards_, the poem in which he does so, is interesting, not only for this reason, but because it contains implicitly a definition and a defence of the author's achievement in literature. The poem is too long to quote in full, but the first three verses will be sufficient to illustrate what I have said:

When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay, And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings, Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the people say: "He was a man who used to notice such things"?

If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink, The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, will a gazer think: "To him this must have been a familiar sight"?

If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm, When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn, Will they say: "He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm, But he could do little for them; and now he is gone"?

Even without the two other verses, we have here a remarkable attempt on the part of an artist to paint a portrait, as it were, of his own genius.