Part 4

Poe’s account of the series of cold-blooded deliberations that evolved “The Raven” is sometimes explained as an attempt in the spirit of “Ask me no questions, and I’ll tell you no lies,” to hoodwink a too curious Public. A juster suggestion would be that Poe was quite honest in his record, but that the painful nature of the emotions which combined to produce the poem prompted him afterwards to unintentional dishonesty in telling the story. In my account of “The General Elliott” there may be similar examples of false rationalization long after the event, but that is for others to discover: and even so, I am not disqualified from suggesting that the bird of ill omen, perching at night on the head of Wisdom among the books of a library, is symbolism too particularly applicable to Poe’s own disconsolate morbid condition to satisfy us as having been deducted by impersonal logic.

It is likely enough that Poe worked very hard at later drafts of the poem and afterwards remembered his deliberate conscious universalizing of an essentially personal symbolism: but that is a very different matter from pretending that he approached “The Raven” from the first with the same cold reasoning care that constructed, for instance, his Gold-Bug cipher.

XIX

THE GOD CALLED POETRY

A piece with this title which appeared in my “Country Sentiment” was the first impulse to more than one of the main contentions in this book, and at the same time supplies perhaps the clearest example I can give of the thought-machinery that with greater luck and cunning may produce something like Poetry. I wrote it without being able to explain exactly what it was all about, but I had a vision in my mind of the God of Poetry having two heads like Janus, one savage, scowling and horrible, the face of Blackbeard the Pirate, the other mild and gracious, that of John the Evangelist. Without realizing the full implication of the symbolism, I wrote:-

Then speaking from his double head The glorious fearful monster said, “I am _Yes_ and I am _No_ Black as pitch and white as snow; Love me, hate me, reconcile Hate with love, perfect with vile, So equal justice shall be done And life shared between moon and sun. Nature for you shall curse or smile; A poet you shall be, my son.”

The poem so far as I can remember was set going by the sight of ... a guard of honour drilling on the barrack-square of a camp near Liverpool! I was standing at the door of the Courts-Martial room where I was shortly to attend at the trial of a deserter (under the Military Service Act) who had unsuccessfully pleaded conscientious objection before a tribunal and had been in hiding for some weeks before being arrested. Now, I had been long pondering about certain paradoxical aspects of Poetry and, particularly, contrasting the roaring genius of Christopher Marlowe with that of his gentle contemporary Shakespeare; so, standing there watching the ceremonial drill, I fancifully made the officer in command of the guard, a young terror from Sandhurst, into a Marlowe strutting, ranting, shouting and cursing--but making the men _move_; then I imagined Shakespeare in his place. Shakespeare would never have done to command a guard of honour, and they would have hated him at Camberley or Chelsea. He would have been like a brother-officer who was with me a few weeks before in this extremely “regimental” camp; he hated all the “sergeant-major business” and used sometimes on this barrack square to be laughing so much at the absurd pomposity of the drill as hardly to be able to control his word of command. I had more than once seen him going out, beltless, but with a pipe and a dog, for a pleasant walk in the country when he should really have been on parade. In France, however, this officer was astonishing: the men would do anything for him and his fighting feats had already earned him the name of _Mad Jack_ in a shock-division where military fame was as fugitive as life. This brother-officer, it is to be noted, was a poet, and had a violent feeling against the Military Service Act. I wondered how he would behave if he were in my place, sitting on the Court-Martial; or how would Shakespeare? Marlowe, of course, would thunder “two years” at the accused with enormous relish, investing the cause of militarism with a magnificent poetry. But Shakespeare, or “Mad Jack”?

That night in the quarters which I had once shared with “Mad Jack,” I began writing:--

_“I begin to know at last,_ _These nights when I sit down to rhyme,_ _The form and measure of that vast_ _God we call Poetry...._

_ ... I see he has two heads_ _Like Janus, calm, benignant this,_ _That grim and scowling. His beard spreads_ _From chin to chin; this God has power_ _Immeasurable at every hour...._

_The black beard scowls and says to me_ _“Human frailty though you be_ _Yet shout and crack your whip, be harsh;_ _They’ll obey you in the end,_ _Hill and field, river and marsh_ _Shall obey you, hop and skip_ _At the terrour of your whip,_ _To your gales of anger bend._

_The pale beard smiles and says in turn_ _“True, a prize goes to the stern_ _But sing and laugh and easily run_ _Through the wide airs of my plain;_ _Bathe in my waters, drink my sun,_ _And draw my creatures with soft song;_ _They shall follow you along_ _Graciously, with no doubt or pain._”

_Then speaking from his double head, etc._

The rather scriptural setting of what the pale beard said was probably suggested by the picture I had formed in my mind of the conscientious objector, whom I somehow sympathetically expected to be an earnest Christian, mild and honest; as a matter of fact, he turned out to be the other kind, violent and shifty alternately. He was accordingly sentenced by Major Tamburlaine and Captains Guise and Bajazeth, to the customary term of imprisonment.

And by the way, talking of Marlowe and Shakespeare;--

Here ranted Isaac’s elder son, The proud shag-breasted godless one From whom observant Smooth-cheek stole Birth-right, blessing, hunter’s soul.

XX

LOGICALIZATION

John King is dead, that good old man You ne’er shall see him more. He used to wear a long brown coat All buttoned down before.

Apparently a simple statement, this rustic epitaph has for any sensitive reader a curiously wistful quality and the easiest way I can show the mixed feelings it stirs, is by supposing a typical eighteenth-century writer to have logicalized them into a polite epigram. The poem would appear mutilated as follows:--

Hereunder lies old John Brown’s honoured dust: His worthy soul has flown to Heav’n we trust. Yet still we mourn his vanished russet smock While frowning fates our trifling mem’ries mock.

Many of the subtler implications are necessarily lost in the formal translation for in poetry the more standardized the machinery of logical expression, the less emotional power is accumulated. But the force of the words “he used to wear” is shown in more obvious opposition to the words “dead” and “good.” The importance of “good” will appear at once if we substitute some word like “ancient” for “good old” and see the collapse of the poetic fabric, still more if we change “good” to “bad” and watch the effect it has in our imaginations on the “you ne’er shall see him more,” the cut of his coat, and the reasons John King had for buttoning it. _Good_ John King wore a long brown coat because he was old and felt the cold and because, being a neat old man, he wished to conceal his ragged jacket and patched small-clothes. _Bad_ John King kept pheasants, hares, salmon and silver spoons buttoned for concealment under his. How did good John King die? A Christian death in bed surrounded by weeping neighbours, each begging a coat-button for keepsake. Bad John King? Waylaid and murdered one dark night by an avenger, and buried where he fell, still buttoned in his long brown coat.

The emotional conflict enters curiously into such one-strand songs as Blake’s “Infant Joy” from the _Songs of Innocence_, a poem over which for the grown reader the sharp sword of Experience dangles from a single horsehair. The formal version (which I beg nobody to attempt even in fun) logicalized in creaking sonnet-form would have the octave filled with an address to the Melancholy of Sophistication, the sestet reserved for:--

But thou, Blest Infant, smiling radiantly Hast taught me etc, etc.

An immoral but far more entertaining parlour game than logicalization--perhaps even a profitable trade--would be to extract the essentials from some long-winded but sincere Augustan poem, disguise the self-conscious antitheses, modernize the diction, liven up the rhythm, fake a personal twist, and publish. Would there be no pundit found to give it credit as a poem of passion and originality? I hope this suggestion for a New-Lamps-for-Old Industry will not meet the eye of those advanced but ill-advised English Masters who are now beginning to supervise with their red-and-blue pencils the writing of English Poetry in our schools.

Now, the trouble about the use of logic in poetry seems not to be that logic isn’t a very useful and (rightly viewed) a very beautiful invention, but that it finds little place in our dreams: dreams are illogical as a child’s mind is illogical, and spontaneous undoctored poetry, like the dream, represents the complications of adult experience translated into thought-processes analogous to, or identical with, those of childhood.

This I regard as a very important view, and it explains, to my satisfaction at any rate, a number of puzzling aspects of poetry, such as the greater emotional power on the average reader’s mind of simple metres and short homely words with an occasional long strange one for wonder; also, the difficulty of introducing a foreign or unusual prosody into poems of intense passion: also the very much wider use in poetry than in daily speech of animal, bird, cloud and flower imagery, of Biblical types characters and emblems, of fairies and devils, of legendary heroes and heroines, which are the stock-in-trade of imaginative childhood; also, the constant appeal poetry makes to the childish habits of amazed wondering, sudden terrors, laughter to signify mere joy, frequent tears and similar manifestations of uncontrolled emotion which in a grown man and especially an Englishman are considered ridiculous; following this last, the reason appears for the strict Classicist’s dislike of the ungoverned Romantic, the dislike being apparently founded on a feeling that to wake this child-spirit in the mind of a grown person is stupid and even disgusting, an objection that has similarly been raised to the indiscriminate practice of psycho-analysis, which involves the same process.

XXI

LIMITATIONS

One of the most embarrassing limitations of poetry is that the language you use is not your own to do entirely what you like with. Times actually come when in the conscious stage of composition you have to consult a dictionary or another writer as to what word you are going to use. It is no longer practical to coin words, resurrect obsolete ones and generally to tease the language as the Elizabethans did. A great living English poet, Mr. Charles Doughty, is apparently a disquieting instance to the contrary. But he has lost his way in the centuries; he belongs really to the sixteenth. English has never recovered its happy-go-lucky civilian slouch since the more than Prussian stiffening it was given by the eighteenth century drill-sergeants.

It is intolerable to feel so bound compared with the freedom of a musician or a sculptor; in spite of the exactions of that side of the art, the poet cannot escape into mere rhythmic sound; there is always the dead load of sense to drag about with him. I have often felt I would like to be a painter at work on a still life, puzzling out ingenious relationships between a group of objects varying in form, texture and colour. Then when people came up and asked me: “Tell me, sir, is that a Spode jar?” or “Isn’t that a very unusual variety of lily?” I would be able to wave them away placidly; the questions would be irrelevant. But I can’t do that in poetry, everything _is_ relevant; it is an omnibus of an art--a public omnibus.

There are consolations, of course; poetry, to be appreciated, is not, like music, dependent on a middleman, the interpretative artist; nor, once in print, is it so liable to damage from accident, deterioration or the reproducer as the plastic arts.

XXII

THE NAUGHTY BOY

Bound up with the business of controlling the association-ghosts which haunt in their millions every word of the English language, there is the great mesmeric art of giving mere fancy an illusion of solid substance. The chief way this is done, and nobody has ever done it better than Keats, is constantly to make appeals to each of the different bodily senses, especially those more elementary ones of taste, touch, smell, until they have unconsciously built up a scene which is as real as anything can be. As an example of the way Keats rung the changes on the senses, take his “Song about Myself”:--

There was a naughty Boy And a naughty boy was he He ran away to Scotland The people for to see Then he found That the ground Was as hard, That a yard Was as long, That a song Was as merry, That a cherry Was as red-- That lead Was as weighty, That fourscore Was as eighty, That a door Was as wooden As in England--

So he stood in his shoes And he wonder’d, He wonder’d, He stood in his shoes And he wonder’d.

Here we have a succession of staccato notes, but in the “Eve of St. Agnes” or “Ode to Autumn” almost every phrase is a chord, the individual notes of which each strike a separate sense.

XXIII

THE CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC IDEAS

When Aristotle lays down that poets describe the thing that might be, but that the historian (like the natural historians above mentioned) merely describes that which has been, and that poetry is something of “more philosophic, graver import than history because its statements are of a universal nature” so far his idea of poetry tallies with our own. But when he explains his “might be” as meaning the “probable and necessary” according to our every-day experience of life, then we feel the difference between the Classical and Romantic conceptions of the art--Aristotle was trying to weed poetry of all the symbolic extravagances and impossibilities of the dream state in which it seems to have originated, and to confine it within rational and educative limits. Poetry was with him only an intuitive imitation of how typical men think and react upon each other when variously stimulated. It was what we might call the straight goods of thought conveyed in the traditional magic hampers; but there proved to be difficulties in the packing; the Classical ideal was, in practice, modified by the use of heroic diction and action, conventional indications to the audience that “imitation” was not realism, and that there must be no criticisms on that score; every one must “go under” to the hypnotic suggestion of the buskin and the archaic unnatural speech, and for once think ideally. For the same reason the Classical doctrine lays stress on the importance of the set verse-forms and the traditional construction of drama. For the benefit of my scientific readers, if my literary friends promise not to listen to what I am saying, I will attempt a definition of Classical and Romantic notions of Poetry:--

Classical is characteristic and Romantic is Metamorphic, that is, though they are both expressions of a mental conflict, in Classical poetry this conflict is expressed within the confines of waking probability and logic, in terms of the typical interaction of typical minds; in Romantic poetry the conflict is expressed in the illogical but vivid method of dream-changings.

The dream origin of Romantic Poetry gives it the advantage of putting the audience in a state of mind ready to accept it; in a word, it has a naturally hypnotic effect. Characteristic poetry, which is social rather than personal, and proudly divorced from the hit-and-miss methods of the dream, yet feels the need of this easy suggestion to the audience for ideal thinking; and finds it necessary to avoid realism by borrowing shreds of accredited metamorphic diction and legend and building with them an illusion of real metamorphism. So the Hermit Crab, and once it has taken up a cast-off shell to cover its nakedness, it becomes a very terror among the whelks. The borrowed Metamorphism is hardened to a convention and a traditional form, and can be trusted almost inevitably to induce the receptive state in an average audience wherever used. Such a convention as I mean is the May-day dream of the Mediaeval rhymed moralities or the talking beasts of the fabulists.

Sometimes, however, owing to a sudden adventurous spirit appearing in the land, a nation’s Classical tradition is broken by popular ridicule and the reappearance of young Metamorphic Poets. But after a little paper-bloodshed and wranglings in the coffee-houses, the Classical tradition reappears, dressed up in the cast-off finery of the pioneer Metamorphics (who have by this time been succeeded by licentious and worthless pyrotechnists), and rules securely again. It is only fair to observe that the Romantic Revivalist often borrows largely from some Classical writer so obscured by Time and corrupt texts as to seem a comparative Romantic. This complicated dog-eat-dog process is cheerfully called “The Tradition of English Poetry.”

There is an interesting line of investigation which I have no space to pursue far, in a comparison between the Classicism of Wit and the Romanticism of Humour.

Wit depends on a study of the characteristic reactions of typical men to typically incongruous circumstances, and changed little from Theophrastus to Joe Miller. It depends for its effect very largely on the set form and careful diction, e. g:--

A certain inn-keeper of Euboea, with gout in his fingers, returned to his city after sacrificing an Ox to Delphic Apollo.... The celebrated wit, Sidney Smith, one day encountered Foote the comedian, in the Mall.... An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotchman agreed on a wager of one hundred guineas....

That is Classicism.

Romantic humour is marked by the extravagant improbability of dream-vision and by the same stereoscopic expression as in Romantic poetry.

Would Theophrastus have deigned to laugh at the _fabliau_ of “The Great Panjandrum himself with the little round button at top?” I think not. Our leading living Classical poet was recently set a Romantic riddle as a test of his humour, “What did the tooth-paste say to the tooth brush?” Answer: “Squeeze me and I’ll meet you outside the Tube.” The bard was angry. “Who on earth squeezes his tube of tooth-paste with his tooth brush? Your riddle does not hold water.” He could understand the fable convention of inanimate objects talking, but this other was not “the probable and necessary.”

XXIV

COLOUR

The naming of colours in poetry may be used as a typical instance of the circumspection with which a poet is forced to move. The inexperienced one drenches his poems in gold, silver, purple, scarlet, with the idea of giving them, in fact, “colour.” The old hand almost never names a colour unless definitely presenting the well-known childish delight for bright colours, with the aid of some other indication of childhood, or unless definitely to imply a notable change from the normal nature of the coloured object, or at least some particular quality such as the ripeness of the cherry in Keats’ song just quoted. But even then he usually prefers to find a way round, for the appeal to the sense of colour alone is a most insecure way of creating an illusion; colours vary in mood by so very slight a change in shade or tone that pure colour named without qualification in a poem will seldom call up any precise image or mood.

To extemporize a couple of self-conscious blackboard examples:--

I. “Then Mary came dressed in a robe that was green And her white hands and neck were a sight to be seen.”

II. “Mary’s robe was rich pasture, her neck and her hands Were glimpses of river that dazzled those lands.”

The first couplet has not nearly so much colour in it as the second, although in the first the mantle is definitely called green and the lady’s hands and neck, white, while in the second no colour is mentioned at all. The first robe is as it were coloured in a cheap painting-book; the green paint has only come off the cake in a thin yellowish solution and the painting-book instructions for colouring the hands and neck were “leave blank.” The second robe derives its far richer colour from the texture that the pasture simile suggests; the flesh parts get their whiteness from the suggestion of sun shining on water.

XXV

PUTTY

The conscious part of composition is like the finishing of roughly shaped briars in a pipe factory. Where there are flaws in the wood, putty has to be used in order to make the pipe presentable. Only an expert eye can tell the putty when it has been coloured over, but there it is, time will reveal it and nobody is more aware of its presence now than the man who put it there. The public is often gulled into paying two guineas for a well-coloured straight-grain, when a tiny patch of putty under the bowl pulls down its sentimental value to ten shillings or so.

It is only fair to give an example of putty in a poem of my own; in writing songs, where the pattern is more fixed than in any other form, putty is almost inevitable. This song started sincerely and cheerfully enough:--

Once there came a mighty furious wind (So old worthies tell). It blew the oaks like ninepins down, And all the chimney stacks in town Down together fell. That was a wind--to write a record on, to hang a story on, to sing a ballad on, To ring the loud church bell! But for one huge storm that cracks the sky Came a thousand lesser winds rustling by, And the only wind that will make me sing Is breeze of summer or gust of spring But no more hurtful thing.

This was leading up to a final verse:--

Once my sweetheart spoke an unkind word As I myself must tell, For none but I have seen or heard My sweetheart to such cruelty stirred For one who loved her well. That was a word--to write no record on, to hang no story on, to sing no ballad on, To ring no loud church bell! Yet for one fierce word that has made me smart Ten thousand gentle ones ease my heart, So all the song that springs in me Is “Never a sweetheart born could be So kind as only she.”

Half-way through this verse I was interrupted, and had to finish the poem consciously as best I could. On picking it up again, apparently I needed another middle verse of exactly the same sort of pattern as the first, to prepare the reader for the third. Searching among natural phenomena, I had already hit on drought as being a sufficiently destructive plague to be long remembered by old worthies. This would make the second verse.

So without more ado I started:--

Once there came a mighty thirsty drought (So old worthies tell). The quags were drained, the brooks were dried, Cattle and sheep and pigs all died, The parson preached on Hell. That was a drought--to write a record on etc.