Part 6

The language of science makes a hieroglyphic, or says “The sign of Aquarius”; the language of prose says “A group of stars likened by popular imagery to a Water Carrier”; the language of Poetry converts the Eastern water carrier with his goatskin bag or pitcher, into an English gardener, then puts him to fill his watering pot from heavenly waters where the Fish are darting. The author of this rhyme has visualized his terrestrial emblems most clearly; he has smelt the rankness of the Goat, and yet in the “Lion shines” and the “glittering tails” one can see that he has been thinking in terms of stars also. The emotional contradiction lies in the stars’ remote aloofness from complications of this climatic and smelly world, from the terror of Lion, Archer, Scorpion, from the implied love-interest of Heavenly Twins and Virgin, and from the daily cares of the Scales, Ram, Bull, Goat, Fish, Crab and Watering Pot.

The ready way to distinguish verse from poetry is this, Verse makes a flat pattern on the paper, Poetry stands out in relief.

XLII

A DIALOGUE ON FAKE-POETRY

Q. When is a fake not a fake?

A. When hard-working and ingenious conjurors are billed by common courtesy as ‘magicians.’

Q. But when is a fake not a fake?

A. When it’s a Classic.

Q. And when else?

A. When it’s “organ-music” and all that.

Q. Elaborate your answer, dear sir!

A. A fake, then, is not a fake when lapse of time has tended to obscure the original source of the borrowing, and when the textural and structural competence that the borrower has used in synthesising the occasional good things of otherwise indifferent authors is so remarkable that even the incorruptible Porter of Parnassus winks and says “Pass Friend!”

Q. Then the Fake Poet is, as you have hinted before, a sort of Hermit Crab?

A. Yes, and here is another parable from Marine Life. Poetry is the protective pearl formed by an oyster around the irritations of a maggot. Now if, as we are told, it is becoming possible to put synthetic pearls on the market, which not even the expert with his X-ray can detect from the natural kind, is not our valuation of the latter perhaps only a sentimentality?

XLIII

ASKING ADVICE

There is a blind spot or many blind spots in the critical eye of every writer; he cannot find for himself certain surface faults which anybody else picks out at once. Especially there is a bias towards running to death a set of words which when he found them, were quite honest and inoffensive. Shelley had a queer obsession about “caves,” “abysses,” and “chasms” which evidently meant for him much more than he can make us see. A poet will always be wise to submit his work, when he can do no more to straighten it, to the judgment of friends whose eyes have their blind spots differently placed; only, he must be careful, I suppose, not to be forced into making any alterations while in their presence.

A poet reveals to a friend in a fit of excitement “I say, listen, I am going to write a great poem on such-and-such! I have the whole thing clear in my mind, waiting to be put down.” But if he goes on to give a detailed account of the scheme, then the act of expression (especially prose expression) kills the creative impulse by presenting it prematurely with too much definiteness. The poem is never written. It remains for a few hopeless days as a title, a couple of phrases and an elaborate scheme of work, and is then banished to the lumber room of the mind; later it probably becomes subsidiary to another apparently irrelevant idea and appears after a month or two in quite a different shape, the elaboration very much condensed, the phrase altered and the title lost.

Now this section is as suitable as any other for the prophecy that the study of Poetry will very soon pass from the hands of Grammarians, Prosodists, historical research men, and such-like, into those of the psychologists. And what a mess they’ll make of it; to be sure!

XLIV

SURFACE FAULTS, AN ILLUSTRATION

The later drafts of some lines I wrote recently called CYNICS AND ROMANTICS, and contrasting the sophisticated and ingenuous ideas of Love, give a fairly good idea of the conscious process of getting a poem in order. I make no claim for achievement, the process is all that is intended to appear, and three or four lines are enough for illustration:

_1st Draft._

In club or messroom let them sit, Let them indulge salacious wit On love’s romance, but not with hearts Accustomed to those healthier parts Of grim self-mockery....

_2nd Draft._ (Consideration:--It is too soon in the poem for the angry jerkiness of “Let them indulge.” Also “Indulge salacious” is hard to say; at present, this is a case for being as smooth as possible.)

In club or messroom let them sit Indulging contraversial wit On love’s romance, but not with hearts Accustomed....

_3rd Draft._ (Consideration:--No, we have the first two lines beginning with “In.” It worries the eye. And “sit, indulging” puts two short “i’s” close together. “Contraversial” is not the word. It sounds as if they were angry, but they are too blasé for that. And “love’s romance” is cheap for the poet’s own ideal.)

In club or messroom let them sit At skirmish of salacious wit Laughing at love, yet not with hearts Accustomed....

_4th Draft._ (Consideration:--Bother the thing! “Skirmish” is good because it suggests their profession, but now we have three S’s,--“sit,” “skirmish,” “salacious.” It makes them sound too much in earnest. The “salacious” idea can come in later in the poem. And at present we have two “at’s” bumping into each other; one of them must go. “Yet” sounds better than “but” somehow.)

In club or messroom let them sit With skirmish of destructive wit Laughing at love, yet not with hearts Accustomed....

_5th Draft._ (Consideration:--And now we have two “with’s” which don’t quite correspond. And we have the two short “i’s” next to each other again. Well, put the first “at” back and change “laughing at” to “deriding.” The long “i” is a pleasant variant; “laughing” and “hearts” have vowel-sounds too much alike.)

In club or messroom let them sit At skirmish of destructive wit Deriding love, yet not with hearts Accustomed....

_6th Draft._ (Consideration:--Yes, that’s a bit better. But now we have “_des_tructive” and “_der_iding” too close together. “Ingenious” is more the word I want. It has a long vowel, and suggests that it was a really witty performance. The two “in’s” are far enough separated. “Accorded” is better than “accustomed”; more accurate and sounds better. Now then:--)

In club or messroom let them sit At skirmish of ingenious wit Deriding love, yet not with hearts Accorded etc.

(Consideration:--It may be rotten, but I’ve done my best.)

The discussion of more radical constructive faults is to be found in PUTTY and THE ART OF EXPRESSION.

XLV

LINKED SWEETNESS LONG DRAWN OUT

In this last section, besides an attempt at a greater accuracy of meaning and implication than the first slap-dash arrangement of words had provided, there may have been noticed three other technical considerations which are especially exacting in this case, where I am intending by particularly careful craftsmanship to suggest the brilliance of the conversation I am reporting.

The first is a care to avoid unintentional echoes, as for example “_In_ club or messroom ... _in_dulging.”

The second is a care which all song writers and singing masters understand, to keep apart words like “indulge salacious,” where the j and s sound coming together interfere with easy breathing.

The third is an attempt to vary the vowel sounds so far as is consistent with getting the right shade of meaning; it pleases the mental ear like stroking pleases a cat (note the vowel sequence of the phrase that heads this section. John Milton knew a thing or two about texture, worth knowing). At the same time I am trying to arrange the position of consonants and open vowels with much the same care.

But all these three considerations, and even the consideration for lucidity of expression, can and must be modified where an emotional mood of obscurity, fear, difficulty or monotony will be better illustrated by so doing.

Keats was very conscious of the necessity of modification. Leigh Hunt recounts in his Autobiography:--

“I remember Keats reading to me with great relish and particularity, conscious of what he had set forth, the lines describing the supper[1] and ending with the words,

“‘And lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon.’”

[1] St. Agnes’ Eve.

Mr. Wordsworth would have said the vowels were not varied enough; but Keats knew where his vowels were _not_ to be varied. On the occasion above alluded to, Wordsworth found fault with the repetition of the concluding sound of the participles in Shakespeare’s line about bees:--

“‘The _singing_ masons _building_ roofs of gold.’”

This, he said, was a line which Milton would never have written. Keats thought, on the other hand, that the repetition was in harmony with the continued note of the singers, and that Shakespeare’s negligence, if negligence it was, had instinctively felt the thing in the best manner.”

Keats here was surely intending with his succession of short i-sounds, a gourmet’s fastidious pursing of lips. Poets even of the Virgil-Milton-Tennyson-Longfellow metrical tradition will on occasion similarly break their strict metric form with an obviously imitative “quadrepedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum,” but the manipulation of vowels and consonants is for them rather a study in abstract grandeur of music than a relation with the emotional content of the poetry.

XLVI

THE FABLE OF THE IDEAL GADGET

No poem can turn out respectably well unless written in the full confidence that this time at last the poet is going to attain perfect expression. So long as this confidence survives he goes on revising the poem at intervals for days or months until nothing more can be done, and the inevitable sense of failure is felt, leaving him at liberty to try again. It is on this inevitable failure that the practice of every art is made conditional.

* * * * *

A man once went into an ironmonger’s shop and said hesitatingly, “Do you sell those gadgets for fixing on doors?”

“Well, sir,” replied the assistant, “I am not quite sure if I understand your requirements, but I take it you are needing a patent automatic door-closer?”

“Exactly,” said the customer. “One to fix on my pantry door which, by the way, contains a glass window.”

“You will want a cheap one, sir?”

“Cheap but serviceable.”

“You will prefer an English make, sir?”

“Indeed, that’s a most important consideration.”

“You will perhaps want one with ornamentations, scroll work and roses for instance?”

“Oh no, nothing of that sort, thank you. I want it as plain and unobtrusive as possible.”

“You would like it made of some rustless metal, sir?”

“That would be very convenient.”

“And with a strong spring?”

“Well, moderately strong.”

“To be fixed on which side, sir?”

“Let me see; the right-hand side.”

“Now, sir,” said the assistant, “I will go through each point, one by one. You want an efficient (but not too costly) English made, unobtrusive, rustless, unornamented, patent automatic door closer, to be fixed right-handed with a moderately strong spring to a pantry door with a glass window. Is there any further desideratum, sir?”

“Well, it’s very good of you to help me like this (“Not at all, sir”). I should like it easily adjusted and easily removed, and above all it must not squeak or need constant oiling.”

“In fact, sir, you want an apparatus combining a variety of qualities, in a word, an absolutely silent, efficient, economical, invisible, corrosive proof, unornamented, not-too-heavily-springed, easily adjustable, readily removable, British-made, right-handed, patent automatic door closer, ideally fitted in every possible respect for attaching to your pantry door which (I understand you to say) contains a glass window. How is that, sir?”

“Splendid, splendid.”

“Well, sir, I regret that there has never been any article of that description put on the market, but if you care to visit our wholesale department across the road, you may perhaps be able to make your choice from a reasonably large selection of our present imperfect models. Good day, sir.”

XLVII

SEQUELS ARE BARRED

If you solve a problem to the best of your ability, it never bothers you again. Enough said: but the following emblem may be taken to heart:--

EPITAPH ON AN UNFORTUNATE ARTIST

He found a formula for drawing comic rabbits: This formula for drawing comic rabbits paid. So in the end he could not change the tragic habits This formula for drawing comic rabbits made.

XLVIII

TOM FOOL

There is a saying that “More people know Tom Fool than Tom Fool knows”; that may be all right if it means recognizing him in the street, but he has to be a wonder before he can, without eccentricity, make his work immediately recognized in print and be even distinguishable from the best efforts of imitators. This proverb was obviously in the head of the man or woman who wrote the following sonnet, in the _Spectator_ (I think) about a year ago; I have lost the cutting and the reference, and ask to be pardoned if I misquote:--

Cunning indeed Tom Fool must be to-day For us, who meet his verses in a book, To cry “Tom Fool wrote that.... I know his way.... ... Unsigned, yet eyed all over with Tom’s look.... Why see! It’s pure Tom Fool, I’m not mistook.... Fine simple verses too; now who’s to say How Tom has charmed these worn old words to obey His shepherd’s voice and march beneath his crook? Instead we ponder “I can’t name the man, But he’s been reading Wilde,” or “That’s the school Of Côterie.... Voices.... Pound ... the Sitwell clan ...” “_He_ ‘knows his Kipling’” ... “_he_ accepts the rule Of Monro ... of Lord Tennyson ... of Queen Anne” How seldom, “There, for a ducat, writes, TOM FOOL.

The writer evidently had a keen eye for the failings of others, but is convicted out of his own mouth, for I have met nobody who can identify this particular Tom Fool for me.

Hateful as is the art of the parodist when it spoils poems which have delighted and puzzled us, parody has its uses. A convincing parody is the best possible danger signal to inform a poet that he is writing sequels, repeating his conjuring tricks until they can be seen through and ridiculously imitated. “That awkward fellow Ariphrades,” much as we dislike him, is one of the most useful members of our republic of letters.

XLIX

CROSS RHYTHM AND RESOLUTION

I have already attempted to show Poetry as the Recorder’s _précis_ of a warm debate between the members of the poet’s mental Senate on some unusually contraversial subject. Let the same idea be expressed less personally in the terms of coloured circles intersecting, the space cut off having the combined colour of both circles. In the Drama these circles represent the warring influences of the plot; the principal characters lie in the enclosed space and the interest of the play is to watch their attempts to return to the state of primary colouring which means mental ease; with tragedy they are eventually forced to the colourless blackness of Death, with comedy the warring colours disappear in white. In the lyrical poem, the circles are coinciding stereoscopically so that it is difficult to discover how each individual circle is coloured; we only see the combination.

If we consider that each influence represented by these circles has an equivalent musical rhythm, then in the drama these rhythms interact orchestrally, tonic theme against dominant; in lyrical poetry where we get two images almost fused into one, the rhythms interlace correspondingly closely. Of the warring influences, one is naturally the original steady-going conservative, the others novel, disquieting, almost accidental. Then in lyrical poetry the established influence takes the original metre as its expression, and the new influences introduce the cross rhythm modifying the metre until it is half submerged. Shakespeare’s developments of blank verse have much distressed prosodists, but have these ever considered that they were not mere wantonness or lack of thought, that what he was doing was to send emotional cross-rhythms working against the familiar iambic five-stress line?

I remember “doing Greek iambics” at Charterhouse and being allowed as a great privilege on reaching the Upper School to resolve the usual short-long foot into a short-short-short or even in certain spots into a long-short. These resolutions I never understood as having any reference to the emotional mood of the verse I was supposed to be translating, but they came in very conveniently when proper names had too many short syllables in them to fit otherwise.

A young poet showed me a set of English verses the other day which I returned him without taking a copy but I remember reading somewhat as follows:--

T-tum, t-tum, t-tum, t-tum, t-tum A midnight garden, where as I went past I saw the cherry’s moonfrozen delicate ivory.

“Good heavens,” I said, “what’s that last line all about?”

“Oh, it’s just an experiment in resolution.”

“Take a pencil, like a good fellow, and scan it for me in the old fashioned way as we used to do at school together.”

He did so:--

I sāw | thĕ cherr|(y’s) moŏnfrōz|ĕn dĕl|ic(ate) īv|(ory)

“It’s a sort of anapaestic resolution,” he explained.

“Anapaestic resolution of what?”

“Of an iambic decasyllabic line.”

“Excuse me, it’s not. Since we’re talking in that sort of jargon, it’s a spondaic resolution of a dactylic line.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you’ve put in four extra syllables for your resolution. I’ll put in a fifth, the word “in.” Now listen!

Swimmery | floatery | bobbery | duckery | divery-- _I_ saw the | cherries moon | frozen in | delicate | ivory

In this case the cross-rhythm, which my friend explained was meant to suggest the curious ethereal look of cherry blossoms in moonlight, had so swamped the original metre that it was completely stifled. The poet has a licence to resolve metre where the emotion demands it, and he is a poor poet if he daren’t use it; but there is commonsense in restraint.

L

MY NAME IS LEGION, FOR WE ARE MANY

One goes plodding on and hoping for a miracle, but who has ever recovered the strange quality that makes the early work (which follows a preliminary period of imitation) in a sense the best work? There is a fine single-heartedness, an economy of material, an adventurous delight in expression, a beginner’s luck for which I suppose honest hard work and mature observation can in time substitute certain other qualities, but poetry is never the same again.

I will attempt to explain this feeling by an analogy which can be pressed as closely as any one likes: it is an elaboration of what has been said of the poet as a “peculiarly gifted witch doctor.” Cases of multiple personality have recently been investigated in people who believed themselves to be possessed by spirits. Analysis has proved pretty conclusively that the mediums have originally mimicked acquaintances whom they found strange, persons apparently selected for having completely different outlooks on life, both from the medium and from each other, different religions, different emotional processes and usually different dialects. This mimicry has given rise to unconscious impersonations of these people, impersonations so complete that the medium is in a state of trance and unconscious of any other existence. Mere imitation changes to a synthetic representation of how these characters would act in given circumstances. Finally the characters get so much a part of the medium’s self that they actually seem to appear visibly when summoned, and a sight of them can even be communicated to sympathetic bystanders. So the Witch of Endor called up Samuel for King Saul. The trances, originally spontaneous, are induced in later stages to meet the wishes of an inquisitive or devout séance-audience; the manifestations are more and more presented (this is no charge of charlatanism) with a view to their effect on the séance. It is the original unpremeditated trances, or rather the first ones that have the synthetic quality and are no longer mere mimicry, which correspond to Early Work.

But it is hardly necessary to quote extreme cases of morbid psychology or to enter the dangerous arena of spiritualistic argument in order to explain the presence of subpersonalities in the poet’s mind. They have a simple origin, it seems, as supplying the need of a primitive mind when confused. Quite normal children invent their own familiar spirits, their “shadows,” “dummies” or “slaves,” in order to excuse erratic actions of their own which seem on reflection incompatible with their usual habits or code of honour. I have seen a child of two years old accept literally an aunt’s sarcasm, “Surely it wasn’t my little girl who did that? It must have been a horrid little stranger dressed just like you who came in and behaved so badly. My little girl always does what she’s told.” The child divided into two her own identity of which she had only recently become conscious. She expected sympathy instead of scolding when the horrid little stranger reappeared, broke china and flung water all over the room. I have heard of several developments of the dummy, or slave idea; how one child used his dummy as a representative to send out into the world to do the glorious deeds which he himself was not allowed to attempt; on one occasion this particular dummy got three weeks’ imprisonment after a collision with the police and so complete was his master’s faith in the independent existence of the creature that he eagerly counted the days until the dummy’s release and would not call on his services, however urgently needed, until the sentence had been completed. Another child, a girl, employed a committee of several dummies each having very different characteristics, to whom all social problems were referred for discussion.

Richard Middleton, the poet, in a short essay, “Harold,” traces the development of a dummy of this sort which assumed a tyranny over his mind until it became a recurrent nightmare. Middleton says, and it immensely strengthens my contention if Middleton realized the full implications of the remark, that but for this dummy, Harold, he would never have become a poet.

Two or three poets of my acquaintance have admitted (I can confirm it from my own experience) that they are frequently conscious of their own divided personalities; that is, that they adopt an entirely different view of life, a different vocabulary, gesture, intonation, according as they happen to find themselves, for instance, in clerical society, in sporting circles, or among labourers in inns. It is no affectation, but a _mimesis_ or sympathetic imitation hardened into a habit; the sportsman is a fixed and definite character ready to turn out for every sporting or quasi-sporting emergency and has no interest outside the pages of the _Field_, the clerical dummy pops up as soon as a clergyman passes down the road and can quote scripture by the chapter; the rustic dummy mops its brow with a red pocket handkerchief and murmurs “keeps very dry.” These characters have individual tastes in food, drink, clothes, society, peculiar vices and virtues and even different handwriting.