Part 7
The difficulty of remaining _loyal_, which I mention elsewhere, is most disastrously increased, but the poet finds a certain compensation in the excitement of doing the quick change. He also finds it amusing to watch the comments of reviews or private friends on some small batch of poems which appear under his name. Every poem though signed John Jones is virtually by a different author. The poem which comes nearest to the point of view of one critic may be obnoxious to another; and _vice versa_; but it all turns on which “dummy” or “sub-personality” had momentarily the most influence on the mental chairman.
In a piece which represents an interlude in a contemplated collection of poems, the following passage occurs to give the same thought from a different angle. I am asking a friend to overlook irreconcilabilities in my book and refer him to two or three poems which are particularly hostile to each other.
“Yet these are all the same stuff, really, The obverse and reverse, if you look closely, Of busy imagination’s new-coined money-- And if you watch the blind Phototropisms of my fluttering mind, Whether, growing strong, I wrestle Jacob-wise With fiendish darkness blinking threatfully Its bale-fire eyes, Or whether childishly I dart to Mother-skirts of love and peace To play with toys until those horrors leave me, Yet note, whichever way I find release, By fight or flight, By being wild or tame, The Spirit’s the same, the Pen and Ink’s the same.”
LI
THE PIG BABY
“Multiple personality, perhaps,” says some one. “But does that account for the stereoscopic process of which you speak, that makes two sub-personalities speak from a double head, that as it were prints two pictures on the same photographic plate?” The objector is thereupon referred to the dream-machinery on which poetry appears to be founded. He will acknowledge that in dreams the characters are always changing in a most sudden and baffling manner. He will remember for example that in “Alice in Wonderland,” which is founded on dream-material, the Duchess’ baby is represented as turning into a pig; in “Alice through the Looking Glass” the White Queen becomes an old sheep. That is a commonplace of dreams.
When there is a thought-connection of similarity or contrast between two concepts, the second is printed over the first on the mental photographic plate so rapidly that you hardly know at any given moment whether it is a pig or a baby you are addressing. “You quite make me giddy,” said Alice to the Cheshire Cat who was performing similar evolutions. One image starts a sentence, another image succeeds and finishes it, almost, but the first reappears and has the last word. The result is poetry--or nonsense. With music much the same happens; I believe that those wonderful bursts of music heard in sleep are impossible to reproduce in a waking state largely because they consist of a number of melodies of different times and keys imposed on one another.
LII
APOLOGY FOR DEFINITIONS
In my opening definition I have given rather an ideal of English Poetry than an analysis of the ruling poetics of this, that and the other century. If those who rally to the later Pope and those who find in the prophetic Blake the true standard of Poetry, equally deny that my definition covers their experience of the word, I admit that in an encyclopediac sense it is quite inadequate, and indeed a fusion of two contradictory senses; indeed, again, a typically poetic definition.
But how else to make it? Blake’s poetry dictated by angels (a too-impulsive race) with its abstruse personal symbolism and tangled rhythms, and Pope’s elegantly didactic generalizations, in rigidly metrical forms, on the nature of his fellow man, have a common factor so low as hardly to be worth recovering; my justification is based on the works of our everywhere acknowledged Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley and the rest, where the baffling Metamorphism of Romance and the formal Characterism of Classical Poetry, often reconcile their traditional quarrel and merge contentedly and inseparably as Jack Spratt and Mrs. Spratt, dividing the fat and the lean in equable portions.
* * * * *
Here let me then, for the scientific interest, summarize my conception of the typical poet:--
A poet in the fullest sense is one whom some unusual complications of early environment or mixed parentage develop as an intermediary between the small-group consciousnesses of particular sects, clans, castes, types and professions among whom he moves. To so many of these has he been formally enrolled as a member, and to so many more has he virtually added himself as a supernumerary member by showing a disinterested sympathy and by practising his exceptionally developed powers of intuition, that in any small-group sense the wide diffusion of his loyalties makes him everywhere a hypocrite and a traitor.
But the rival sub-personalities formed in him by his relation to these various groups, constantly struggle to reconciliation in his poetry, and in proportion as these sub-personalities are more numerous more varied and more inharmonious, and his controlling personality stronger and quicker at compromise, so he becomes a more or less capable spokesman of that larger group-mind of his culture which we somehow consider greater than the sum of its parts: so that men of smaller scope and more concentrated loyalties swallow personal prejudices and hear at times in his utterances what seems to them the direct voice of God.
LIII
TIMES AND SEASONS
Each poet finds that there are special times and seasons most suitable for his work; for times, I have heard mentioned with favour the hour before breakfast and the hour after the usual bed-time, for seasons, the pause between the exuberance of Spring and the heaviness of Summer seems popular, also the month of October. There are also places more free from interruption and distraction than others, such as caves, attics barely furnished, lonely barns, woods, bed, which make the hypnotic state necessary for poetry easier to induce. The poet has to be very honest with himself about only writing when he feels like it. To take pen in hand at the self-conscious hour of (say) nine A.M., for a morning’s poetry, and with a mental arena free of combatants, is to be disappointed, and even “put off” poetry for some time to come.
I have often heard it said that a poet in intervals between inspirations should keep his hand in by writing verse-exercises, but that he should on such occasions immediately destroy what he has written.
That seems all wrong, it is an insult to the spontaneity of true poetry to go through a ritual farce of this sort and the poet will only be blunting his tools. He ought not to feel distressed at the passage of time as if it represented so many masterpieces unwritten. If he keeps mentally alive and has patience, the real stuff may arrive any moment; when it doesn’t, it isn’t his fault, but the harder he tries to force it, the longer will it be delayed.
LIV
TWO HERESIES
Among the most usual heresies held about poetry is the idea that the first importance of the poet is his “message”; this idea probably originated with the decline of polite sermon-writing, when the poet was expected to take on the double duty; but it is quite untenable. The poet is only concerned with reconciling certain impressions of life as they occur to him, and presenting them in the most effective way possible, without reference to their educational value. The cumulative effect of his work is to suggest a great number of personal obsessions the sum of which compose if you like his “message,” but the more definitely propagandist the poet, the less of a poet is the propagandist.
With this is bound up a heresy of about the same standing that poetry should only be concerned with presenting what is beautiful, beautiful in the limited sense of the picture-postcard. This romantic obsession (using the word “romantic” in the sense of optimistic loose thinking) is as absurd as that of the blood-and-guts realists. Poetry is no more a narcotic than a stimulant; it is a universal bitter-sweet mixture for all possible household emergencies, and its action varies according as it is taken in a wineglass or tablespoon, inhaled, gargled, or rubbed on the chest (like the literary Epic) by hard fingers covered with rings.
LV
THE ART OF EXPRESSION
It is as foolish to sneer at the Very Wild Men as it is to assume that the Very Tame Men are all right because they are “in the tradition.” The Very Wild Men are at any rate likely to have done work which has explored the desert boundaries of the art they profess, and the Very Tame Men have never done anything worth doing at all. The only excusable quarrel is with the pretended Wild Men who persist in identically repeating the experiments in which their masters have already failed, and with those whose Very Wilderness is traceable to this--that they are satisfied with the original spontaneity of their work and do not trouble to test it in the light of what it will convey to others, whom they then blame for want of appreciation. What seems to be the matter with Blake’s Prophetic Books is just this, he connected his images by a system of free association the clue to which was lost by his death: for instance his enemy, Schofield, a soldier who informed against him, suddenly enters “Jerusalem” and its strange company of abstractions, in the guise of a universal devil “Skofeld.”
Suppose that one Hodge, a labourer, attempted in a fit of homicidal mania to split my skull with a spade, but that my faithful bloodhound sprang to the rescue and Hodge barely escaped with his life. In my imagination, Hodge’s spade might well come to symbolize murder and madness, while the bloodhound became an emblem of loyal assistance in the hour of discomfiture. With this experience in my mind I might be inclined to eulogize a national hero as
“Bloodhound leaping at the throat of Hodge Who stands with lifted spade,”
and convey a meaning directly contrary to the one intended and having an apparent reference to agrarian unrest. But conscious reflection would put my image into line with a more widely favoured conception of Man the Attacker, and Dog the Rescuer; I would rewrite the eulogy as
“_Watchdog_ leaping at the _burglar’s_ throat Who stands with _pistol aimed_.”
One of the chief problems of the art of poetry is to decide what are the essentials of the image that has formed in your mind; the accidental has to be eliminated and replaced by the essential. There is the double danger of mistaking a significant feature of the image for an accident and of giving an accident more prominence than it deserves.
Too much modern country-side poetry is mere verbal photography, admirably accurate and full of observation but not excited by memories of human relationships, the emotional bias which could make Bunyan see the bee as an emblem of sin, and Blake the lion’s loving-kindness.
Now, if Wordsworth had followed the poetical fashion of the day and told the world that when wandering lonely as a cloud he had seen a number of vernal flowers, the poem would have fallen pretty flat--if however, anticipating the present century he had quoted the order, the species and the subspecies and remarked on having found among the rest no fewer than five double blooms, we would almost have wished the vernal flowers back again.
Mr. Edmund Blunden lately called my attention to a message from Keats to John Clare sent through their common publisher, Taylor. Keats thought that Clare’s “Images from Nature” were “too much introduced without being called for by a particular sentiment.” Clare, in reply, is troubled that Keats shows the usual inaccuracies of the townsman when treating of nature, and that when in doubt he borrows from the Classics and is too inclined to see “behind every bush a thrumming Apollo.”
LVI
GHOSTS IN THE SHELDONIAN
The most popular theory advanced to account for the haunting of houses is that emanations of fear, hate or grief somehow impregnate a locality, and these emotions are released when in contact with a suitable medium. So with a poem or novel, passion impregnates the words and can make them active even divorced from the locality of creation.
An extreme instance of this process was claimed when Mr. Thomas Hardy came to Oxford to receive his honorary degree as Doctor of Literature, in the Sheldonian Theatre.
There were two very aged dons sitting together on a front bench, whom nobody in the assembly had ever seen before. They frowned and refrained from clapping Mr. Hardy or the Public Orator who had just described him as “Omnium poetarum Britannicorum necnon fabulatorum etiam facile princeps,” and people said they were certainly ghosts and identified them with those masters of colleges who failed to answer Jude the Obscure when he enquired by letter how he might become a student of the University. It seems one ought to be very careful when writing realistically.
LVII
THE LAYING ON OF HANDS
While still in my perambulator about the year 1899,[2] I once received with great alarm the blessing of Algernon Charles Swinburne who was making his daily journey from “The Pines” in Putney to the _Rose and Crown_ public house on the edge of Wimbledon Common. It was many years before I identified our nursery bogey man, “mad Mr. Swinburne,” with the poet. It interests me to read that Swinburne as a young man once asked and received the blessing of Walter Savage Landor who was a very old man indeed at the time, and that Landor as a child had been himself taken to get a blessing at the hand of Dr. Samuel Johnson, and that the great lexicographer in his childhood had been unsuccessfully “touched” by Queen Anne for the King’s Evil. And what the moral may be, I cannot say, but I have traced the story back to Queen Anne because I want to make my grimace at the sacerdotalists; for I must confess, I have been many times disillusioned over such “poetry in the great tradition” as Authority has put beyond criticism.
[2] See Mr. Max Beerbohm’s AND EVEN NOW, page 69.
In caution, and out of deference to my reader’s sensibilities I will only quote a single example. Before reading a line of Swinburne I had been frequently told that he was “absolutely wonderful,” I would be quite carried away by him. They all said that the opening chorus, for instance, of _Atalanta in Calydon_ was the most melodious verse in the English language. I read:
When the hounds of Spring are on Winter’s traces, The Mother of months in meadow and plain, ...
and I was not carried away as far as I expected. For a time I persuaded myself that it was my own fault, that I was a Philistine and had no ear--but one day pride reasserted itself and I began asking myself whether in the lines quoted above, the two “in’s” of _Spring_ and _Winter_ and the two “mo’s” of _Mother_ and _Months_ did not come too close together for euphony, and who exactly was the heroine of the second line, and whether the heavy alliteration in _m_ was not too obvious a device, and whether _months_ was not rather a stumbling-block in galloping verse of this kind, and would it not have been better....
Thereupon faith in the “great tradition” and in “Authority” waned.
Still, I would be hard-hearted and stiff-necked indeed if I did not wish to have had on my own head the blessing that Swinburne received.
LVIII
WAYS AND MEANS
It is true that Genius can’t lie hid in a garret nowadays; there are too many people eager to get credit for discovering and showing it to the world. But as most of the acknowledged best living poets find it impossible to make anything like a living wage from their poetry, and patronage has long gone out of fashion (a great pity I think) the poet after a little fuss and flattery is obliged to return disconsolately to his garret. The problem of an alternative profession is one for which I have never heard a really satisfactory solution. Even Coleridge (whose Biographia Literaria should be the poet’s Bible) could make no more hopeful suggestion than that the poet should become a country parson.
Surely a most unhappy choice! The alternative profession should be as far as possible removed from, and subsidiary to, poetry. True priesthood will never allow itself to become subordinate to any other calling, and the dangerous consanguinity of poetry and religion has already been emphasized. It is the old difficulty of serving two masters; with the more orthodox poets Herbert and Vaughan, for example, poetry was all but always tamed into meek subjection to religious propaganda; with Skelton and Donne it was very different, and one feels that they were the better poets for their independence, their rebelliousness towards priestly conventions.
Schoolmastering is another unfortunate subsidiary profession, it is apt to give poetry a didactic flavour; journalism is too exacting on the invention, which the poet must keep fresh; manual labour wearies the body and tends to make the mind sluggish; office-routine limits the experience. Perhaps Chaucer as dockyard inspector and diplomat, Shakespeare as actor manager, and Blake as engraver, solved the problem at best.
These practical reflections may be supplemented by a paragraph lifted from the New York _Nation_ _apropos_ of a trans-Atlantic poet whose works have already sold a million copies; a new volume of his poems has evidently broken the hearty muscular open-prairie tradition of the ’fifties and ’sixties and advanced forty years at a stride to the Parisian ecstasies of the naughty ’nineties;--
“That verse is in itself a hopelessly unpopular form of literature is an error of the sophisticated but imperfectly informed. Every period has its widely read poets. Only, these poets rarely rise into the field of criticism since they always echo the music of the day before yesterday and express as an astonishing message the delusions of the huge rear-guard of civilization.”
LIX
POETRY AS LABOUR
A book of verses must be either priceless or valueless and as the general reading public is never told which by the council of critics until fifty years at least after the first publication, poets can only expect payment at a nominal rate. If they complain that the labourer is worthy of his hire, the analogy is not admitted. The public denies poetry to be labour; it is supposed to be a gentle recreation like cutting out “Home Sweet Home” from three-ply wood with a fretsaw, or collecting pressed flowers.
LX
THE NECESSITY OF ARROGANCE
To say of any poet that there is complete individuality in his poems combined with excellent craftsmanship amounts to a charge of arrogance. Craftsmanship in its present-day sense seems necessarily to imply acquaintance with other poetry; polish is only learned from the shortcomings and triumphs of others, it is not natural to the back-woodsman. A poet who after reading the work of those whom he recognizes as masters of the craft, does not allow himself to be influenced into imitation of peculiar technical tricks (as we often find ourselves unwittingly influenced to imitate the peculiar gestures of people we admire or love), that poet must have the arrogance to put his own _potential_ achievements on a level with the work he most admires.
Then is asked the question, “But why _do_ poets write? Why do they go on polishing the rough ideas which, once on paper, even in a crude and messy form, should give the mental conflict complete relief? Why, if the conflict is purely a personal one, do they definitely attempt to press the poem on their neighbour’s imagination with all the zeal of a hot-gospeller?”
There is arrogance in that, the arrogance of a child who takes for granted that all the world is interested in its doings and clever sayings. The emotional crises that make Poetry, imply suffering, and suffering usually humiliation, so that the poet makes his secret or open confidence in his poetic powers a set-off against a sense of alienation from society due to some physical deformity, stigma of birth or other early spite of nature, or against his later misfortunes in love.
The expectation and desire of a spurious immortality “fluttering alive on the mouths of men” is admitted by most poets of my acquaintance, both the good and the bad. This may be only a more definitely expressed form of the same instinct for self-perpetuation that makes the schoolboy cut his name on the leaden gutter of the church porch, or the rich man give a college scholarship to preserve his name _in perpetuo_. But with the poet there is always the tinge of arrogance in the thought that his own poetry has a lasting quality which most of his contemporaries cannot claim.
The danger of this very necessary arrogance is that it is likely so to intrude the poet’s personal eccentricities into what he writes that the reader recognizes them and does not read the “I” as being the voice of universality.... It was the first night of a sentimental play in an Early English setting; the crisis long deferred was just coming, the heroine and hero were on the point of reconciliation and the long embrace, the audience had lumps in their throats. At that actual instant of suspense, a man in evening-dress leaped down on the stage from a box, kicked the ruffed and doubleted hero into the orchestra, and began to embrace the lady. A moment’s silence; then terrible confusion and rage. The stage manager burst into tears, attendants rushed forward to arrest the desperado.
“But, ladies and gentlemen, I am the author!! I have an artist’s right to do what I like with my own play.”
“Duck him! scratch his face! tar and feather him!”
* * * * *
Arrogance? Yes, but a self-contradictory arrogance that takes the form of believing that there is nobody beside themselves who could point out just where in a given poem they have written well, and where badly. They know that it contains all sorts of hidden lesser implications (besides the more important ones) which, they think, a few sensitive minds may feel, but none could analyze; they think that they have disguised this or that bit of putty (of which no poem is innocent) so that no living critic could detect it. They are arrogant because they claim to understand better than any rivals how impossible an art poetry is, and because they still have the courage to face it. They have most arrogance before writing their poem of the moment, most humility when they know that they have once more failed.
LXI
IN PROCESSION
This piece was written a few weeks after the remainder of the book: I had no cold-blooded intention of summarizing the paradox of poetic arrogance contained in the last section, but so it happened, and I print it here.
Donne (for example’s sake) Keats, Marlowe, Spenser, Blake, Shelley and Milton, Shakespeare and Chaucer, Skelton-- I love them as I know them, But who could dare outgo them At their several arts At their particular parts Of wisdom, power and knowledge? In the Poet’s College Are no degrees nor stations, Comparisons, rivals, Stern examinations, Class declarations, Senior survivals; No creeds, religions, nations Combatant together With mutual damnations. Or tell me whether Shelley’s hand could take The laurel wreath from Blake? Could Shakespeare make the less Chaucer’s goodliness?