Part 8

It seems I have no tears left. They should have fallen— Their ghosts, if tears have ghosts, did fall—that day When twenty hounds streamed by me, not yet combed out But still all equals in their age of gladness Upon the scent, made one, like a great dragon In Blooming Meadow that bends towards the sun And once bore hops: and on that other day When I stepped out from the double-shadowed Tower Into an April morning, stirring and sweet And warm. Strange solitude was there and silence. A mightier charm than any in the Tower Possessed the courtyard. They were changing guard, Soldiers in line, young English countrymen, Fair-haired and ruddy, in white tunics. Drums And fifes were playing “The British Grenadiers.” The men, the music piercing that solitude And silence, told me truths I had not dreamed, And have forgotten since their beauty passed.

The emotion is nameless and indescribable, but the poet has intensely felt it and transmitted it to us who read his poem, so that we, too, feel it with the same intensity. Different aspects of this same nameless emotion of quiet happiness shot with melancholy are the theme of almost all Thomas’s poems. They bring to us precisely that consolation and strength which the country and solitude and leisure bring to the spirits of those long pent in populous cities, but essentialized and distilled in the form of art. They are the light that makes young again the tattered leaves.

Of the purely æsthetic qualities of Thomas’s poetry it is unnecessary to say much. He devised a curiously bare and candid verse to express with all possible simplicity and clarity his clear sensations and emotions.... “This is not,” as Mr. de la Mare says in his foreword to Thomas’s _Collected Poems_, “this is not a poetry that will drug or intoxicate.... It must be read slowly, as naturally as if it were prose, without emphasis.” With this bare verse, devoid of any affectation, whether of cleverness or a too great simplicity, Thomas could do all that he wanted. See, for example, with what extraordinary brightness and precision he could paint a picture:

Lichen, ivy and moss Keep evergreen the trees That stand half flayed and dying, And the dead trees on their knees In dog’s mercury and moss: And the bright twit of the goldfinch drops Down there as he flits on thistle-tops.

The same bare precision served him well for describing the interplay of emotions, as in “After you Speak” or “Like the Touch of Rain.” And with this verse of his he could also chant the praises of his English countryside and the character of its people, as typified in Lob-lie-by-the-fire:

He has been in England as long as dove and daw, Calling the wild cherry tree the merry tree, The rose campion Bridget-in-her-bravery; And in a tender mood he, as I guess, Christened one flower Love-in-idleness....

XXII: A WORDSWORTH ANTHOLOGY[2]

To regard Wordsworth critically, impersonally, is for some of us a rather difficult matter. With the disintegration of the solid orthodoxies Wordsworth became for many intelligent, liberal-minded families the Bible of that sort of pantheism, that dim faith in the existence of a spiritual world, which filled, somewhat inadequately, the place of the older dogmas. Brought up as children in the Wordsworthian tradition, we were taught to believe that a Sunday walk among the hills was somehow equivalent to church-going: the First Lesson was to be read among the clouds, the Second in the primroses; the birds and the running waters sang hymns, and the whole blue landscape preached a sermon “of moral evil and of good.” From this dim religious education we brought away a not very well-informed veneration for the name of Wordsworth, a dutiful conviction about the spirituality of Nature in general, and an extraordinary superstition about mountains in particular—a superstition that it took at least three seasons of Alpine Sports to dissipate entirely. Consequently, on reaching man’s estate, when we actually came to read our Wordsworth, we found it extremely difficult to appraise his greatness, so many veils of preconceived ideas had to be pushed aside, so many inveterate deflections of vision allowed for. However, it became possible at last to look at Wordsworth as a detached phenomenon in the world of ideas and not as part of the family tradition of childhood.

Like many philosophers, and especially philosophers of a mystical tinge of thought, Wordsworth based his philosophy on his emotions. The conversion of emotions into intellectual terms is a process that has been repeated a thousand times in the history of the human mind. We feel a powerful emotion before a work of art, therefore it partakes of the divine, is a reconstruction of the Idea of which the natural object is a poor reflection. Love moves us deeply, therefore human love is a type of divine love. Nature in her various aspects inspires us with fear, joy, contentment, despair, therefore nature is a soul that expresses anger, sympathy, love, and hatred. One could go on indefinitely multiplying examples of the way in which man objectifies the kingdoms of heaven and hell that are within him. The process is often a dangerous one. The mystic who feels within himself the stirrings of inenarrable emotions is not content with these emotions as they are in themselves. He feels it necessary to invent a whole cosmogony that will account for them. To him this philosophy will be true, in so far as it is an expression in intellectual terms of these emotions. But to those who do not know these emotions at first hand, it will be simply misleading. The mystical emotions have what may be termed a conduct value; they enable the man who feels them to live his life with a serenity and confidence unknown to other men. But the philosophical terms in which these emotions are expressed have not necessarily any truth value. This mystical philosophy will be valuable only in so far as it revives, in the minds of its students, those conduct-affecting emotions which originally gave it birth. Accepted at its intellectual face value, such a philosophy may not only have no worth; it may be actually harmful.

Into this beautifully printed volume Mr. Cobden-Sanderson has gathered together most of the passages in Wordsworth’s poetry which possess the power of reviving the emotions that inspired them. It is astonishing to find that they fill the best part of two hundred and fifty pages, and that there are still plenty of poems—“Peter Bell,” for example—that one would like to see included. “The Prelude” and “Excursion” yield a rich tribute of what our ancestors would have called “beauties.” There is that astonishing passage in which the poet describes how, as a boy, he rowed by moonlight across the lake:

And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat Went heaving through the water like a swan; When, from behind that craggy steep till then The horizon’s bound, a huge peak, black and huge, As if with voluntary power instinct, Upreared its head. I struck and struck again, And growing still in stature the grim shape Towered up between me and the stars, and still, For so it seemed, with purpose of its own And measured motion, like a living thing, Strode after me.

There is the history of that other fearful moment when

I heard among the solitary hills Low breathings coming after me, and sounds Of undistinguishable motion, steps Almost as silent as the turf they trod.

And there are other passages telling of nature in less awful and menacing aspects, nature the giver of comfort and strong serenity. Reading these we are able in some measure to live for ourselves the emotions that were Wordsworth’s. If we can feel his “shadowy exaltations,” we have got all that Wordsworth can give us. There is no need to read the theology of his mysticism, the pantheistic explanation of his emotions. To Peter Bell a primrose by a river’s brim was only a yellow primrose. Its beauty stirred in him no feeling. But one can be moved by the sight of the primrose without necessarily thinking, in the words of Mr. Cobden-Sanderson’s preface, of “the infinite tenderness of the infinitely great, of the infinitely great which, from out the infinite and amid its own stupendous tasks, stoops to strew the path of man, the infinitely little, with sunshine and with flowers.” This is the theology of our primrose emotion. But it is the emotion itself which is important, not the theology. The emotion has its own powerful conduct value, whereas the philosophy derived from it, suspiciously anthropocentric, possesses, we should imagine, only the smallest value as truth.

XXIII: VERHAEREN

Verhaeren was one of those men who feel all their life long “l’envie” (to use his own admirably expressive phrase), “l’envie de tailler en drapeaux l’étoffe de la vie.” The stuff of life can be put to worse uses. To cut it into flags is, on the whole, more admirable than to cut it, shall we say, into cerecloths, or money-bags, or Parisian underclothing. A flag is a brave, a cheerful and a noble object. These are qualities for which we are prepared to forgive the flag its over-emphasis, its lack of subtlety, its touch of childishness. One can think of a number of writers who have marched through literary history like an army with banners. There was Victor Hugo, for example—one of Verhaeren’s admired masters. There was Balzac, to whose views of life Verhaeren’s was, in some points, curiously akin. Among the minor makers of oriflammes there is our own Mr. Chesterton, with his heroic air of being for ever on the point of setting out on a crusade, glorious with bunting and mounted on a rocking-horse.

The flag-maker is a man of energy and strong vitality. He likes to imagine that all that surrounds him is as large, as full of sap and as vigorous as he feels himself to be. He pictures the world as a place where the colours are strong and brightly contrasted, where a vigorous chiaroscuro leaves no doubt as to the true nature of light and darkness, and where all life pulsates, quivering and taut, like a banner in the wind. From the first we find in Verhaeren all the characteristics of the tailor of banners. In his earliest book of verse, _Les Flamands_, we see him already delighting in such lines as

Leurs deux poings monstrueux pataugeaient dans la pâte.

Already too we find him making copious use—or was it abuse?—as Victor Hugo had done before him, of words like “vaste,” “énorme,” “infini,” “infiniment,” “infinité,” “univers.” Thus, in “L’Ame de la Ville,” he talks of an “énorme” viaduct, an “immense” train, a “monstrueux” sun, even of the “énorme” atmosphere. For Verhaeren all roads lead to the infinite, wherever and whatever that may be.

Les grand’routes tracent des croix A l’infini, à travers bois; Les grand’routes tracent des croix lointaines A l’infini, à travers plaines.

Infinity is one of those notions which are not to be lightly played with. The makers of flags like it because it can be contrasted so effectively with the microscopic finitude of man. Writers like Hugo and Verhaeren talk so often and so easily about infinity that the idea ceases in their poetry to have any meaning at all.

I have said that, in certain respects, Verhaeren, in his view of life, is not unlike Balzac. This resemblance is most marked in some of the poems of his middle period, especially those in which he deals with aspects of contemporary life. _Les Villes tentaculaires_ contains poems which are wholly Balzacian in conception. Take, for example, Verhaeren’s rhapsody on the Stock Exchange:

Une fureur réenflammée Au mirage du moindre espoir Monte soudain de l’entonnoir De bruit et de fumée, Où l’on se bat, à coups de vols, en bas. Langues sèches, regards aigus, gestes inverses, Et cervelles, qu’en tourbillons les millions traversent, Echangent là leur peur et leur terreur ... Aux fins de mois, quand les débâcles se décident La mort les paraphe de suicides, Mais au jour même aux heures blêmes, Les volontés dans la fièvre revivent, L’acharnement sournois Reprend comme autrefois.

One cannot read these lines without thinking of Balzac’s feverish money-makers, of the Baron de Nucingen, Du Tillet, the Kellers and all the lesser misers and usurers, and all their victims. With their worked-up and rather melodramatic excitement, they breathe the very spirit of Balzac’s prodigious film-scenario version of life.

Verhaeren’s flag-making instinct led him to take special delight in all that is more than ordinarily large and strenuous. He extols and magnifies the gross violence of the Flemish peasantry, their almost infinite capacity for taking food and drink, their industry, their animalism. In true Rooseveltian style, he admired energy for its own sake. All his romping rhythms were dictated to him by the need to express this passion for the strenuous. His curious assonances and alliterations—

Luttent et s’entrebuttent en disputes—

arise from this same desire to recapture the sense of violence and immediate life.

It is interesting to compare the violence and energy of Verhaeren with the violence of an earlier poet—Rimbaud, the marvellous boy, if ever there was one. Rimbaud cut the stuff of life into flags, but into flags that never fluttered on this earth. His violence penetrated, in some sort, beyond the bounds of ordinary life. In some of his poems Rimbaud seems actually to have reached the nameless goal towards which he was striving, to have arrived at that world of unheard-of spiritual vigour and beauty whose nature he can only describe in an exclamatory metaphor:

Millions d’oiseaux d’or, ô future vigueur!

But the vigour of Verhaeren is never anything so fine and spiritual as this “million of golden birds.” It is merely the vigour and violence of ordinary life speeded up to cinema intensity.

It is a noticeable fact that Verhaeren was generally at his best when he took a holiday from the making and waving of flags. His Flemish bucolics and the love poems of _Les Heures_, written for the most part in traditional form, and for the most part shorter and more concentrated than his poems of violence and energy, remain the most moving portion of his work. Very interesting, too, are the poems belonging to that early phase of doubt and depression which saw the publication of _Les Débâcles_ and _Les Flambeaux Noirs_. The energy and life of the later books is there, but in some sort concentrated, preserved and intensified, because turned inwards upon itself. Of many of the later poems one feels that they were written much too easily. These must have been brought very painfully and laboriously to the birth.

XXIV: EDWARD LEAR

There are few writers whose works I care to read more than once, and one of them is certainly Edward Lear. Nonsense, like poetry, to which it is closely allied, like philosophic speculation, like every product of the imagination, is an assertion of man’s spiritual freedom in spite of all the oppression of circumstance. As long as it remains possible for the human mind to invent the Quangle Wangle and the Fimble Fowl, to wander at will over the Great Gromboolian Plain and the hills of the Cnankly Bore, the victory is ours. The existence of nonsense is the nearest approach to a proof of that unprovable article of faith, whose truth we must all assume or perish miserably: that life is worth living. It is when circumstances combine to prove, with syllogistic cogency, that life is not worth living that I turn to Lear and find comfort and refreshment. I read him and I perceive that it is a good thing to be alive; for I am free, with Lear, to be as inconsequent as I like.

Lear is a genuine poet. For what is his nonsense except the poetical imagination a little twisted out of its course? Lear had the true poet’s feeling for words—words in themselves, precious and melodious, like phrases of music; personal as human beings. Marlowe talks of entertaining divine Zenocrate; Milton of the leaves that fall in Vallombrosa; Lear of the Fimble Fowl with a corkscrew leg, of runcible spoons, of things meloobious and genteel. Lewis Carroll wrote nonsense by exaggerating sense—a too logical logic. His coinages of words are intellectual. Lear, more characteristically a poet, wrote nonsense that is an excess of imagination, coined words for the sake of their colour and sound alone. His is the purer nonsense, because more poetical. Change the key ever so little and the “Dong with a Luminous Nose” would be one of the most memorable romantic poems of the nineteenth century. Think, too, of that exquisite “Yonghy Bonghy Bo”! In one of Tennyson’s later volumes there is a charming little lyric about Catullus, which begins:

Row us out from Desenzano, To your Sirmione row! So they row’d, and there we landed— _O venusta Sirmio!_

Can one doubt for a moment that he was thinking, when he wrote these words, of that superb stanza with which the “Yonghy Bonghy” opens:

On the coast of Coromandel, Where the early pumpkins blow, In the middle of the woods, Dwelt the Yonghy Bonghy Bo.

Personally, I prefer Lear’s poem; it is the richer and the fuller of the two.

Lear’s genius is at its best in the Nonsense Rhymes, or Limericks, as a later generation has learned to call them. In these I like to think of him not merely as a poet and a draughtsman—and how unique an artist the recent efforts of Mr. Nash to rival him have only affirmed—but also as a profound social philosopher. No study of Lear would be complete without at least a few remarks on “They” of the Nonsense Rhymes. “They” are the world, the man in the street; “They” are what the leader-writers in the twopenny press would call all Right-Thinking Men and Women; “They” are Public Opinion. The Nonsense Rhymes are, for the most part, nothing more nor less than episodes selected from the history of that eternal struggle between the genius or the eccentric and his fellow-beings. Public Opinion universally abhors eccentricity. There was, for example, that charming Old Man of Melrose who walked on the tips of his toes. But “They” said (with their usual inability to appreciate the artist), “It ain’t pleasant to see you at present, you stupid old man of Melrose.” Occasionally, when the eccentric happens to be a criminal genius, “They” are doubtless right. The Old Man with a Gong who bumped on it all the day long deserved to be smashed. (But “They” also smashed a quite innocuous Old Man of Whitehaven merely for dancing a quadrille with a raven.) And there was that Old Person of Buda, whose conduct grew ruder and ruder; “They” were justified, I dare say, in using a hammer to silence his clamour. But it raises the whole question of punishment and of the relation between society and the individual.

When “They” are not offensive, they content themselves with being foolishly inquisitive. Thus, “They” ask the Old Man of the Wrekin whether his boots are made of leather. “They” pester the Old Man in a Tree with imbecile questions about the Bee which so horribly bored him. In these encounters the geniuses and the eccentrics often get the better of the gross and heavy-witted public. The Old Person of Ware who rode on the back of a bear certainly scored off “Them.” For when “They” asked: “Does it trot?” He replied, “It does not.” (The picture shows it galloping _ventre à terre_.) “It’s a Moppsikon Floppsikon bear.” Sometimes, too, the eccentric actually leads “Them” on to their discomfiture. One thinks of that Old Man in a Garden, who always begged every one’s pardon. When “They” asked him, “What for?” he replied, “You’re a bore, and I trust you’ll go out of my garden.” But “They” probably ended up by smashing him.

Occasionally the men of genius adopt a Mallarméen policy. They flee from the gross besetting crowd.

La chair est triste, hélas, et j’ai lu tous les livres. Fuir, là-bas, fuir....

It was surely with these words on his lips that the Old Person of Bazing (whose presence of mind, for all that he was a Symbolist, was amazing) went out to purchase the steed which he rode at full speed and escaped from the people of Bazing. He chose the better part; for it is almost impossible to please the mob. The Old Person of Ealing was thought by his suburban neighbours to be almost devoid of good feeling, because, if you please, he drove a small gig with three owls and a pig. And there was that pathetic Old Man of Thermopylæ (for whom I have a peculiar sympathy, since he reminds me so poignantly of myself), who never did anything properly. “They,” said, “If you choose to boil eggs in your shoes, you shall never remain in Thermopylæ.” The sort of people “They” like do the stupidest things, have the vulgarest accomplishments. Of the Old Person of Filey his acquaintance was wont to speak highly because he danced perfectly well to the sound of a bell. And the people of Shoreham adored that fellow-citizen of theirs whose habits were marked by decorum and who bought an umbrella and sate in the cellar. Naturally; it was only to be expected.

XXV: SIR CHRISTOPHER WREN

That an Englishman should be a very great plastic artist is always rather surprising. Perhaps it is a matter of mere chance; perhaps it has something to do with our national character—if such a thing really exists. But, whatever may be the cause, the fact remains that England has produced very few artists of first-class importance. The Renaissance, as it spread, like some marvellous infectious disease of the spirit, across the face of Europe, manifested itself in different countries by different symptoms. In Italy, the country of its origin, the Renaissance was, more than anything, an outburst of painting, architecture and sculpture. Scholarship and religious reformation were, in Germany, the typical manifestations of the disease. But when this gorgeous spiritual measles crossed the English Channel, its symptoms were almost exclusively literary. The first premonitory touch of the infection from Italy “brought out” Chaucer. With the next bout of the disease England produced the Elizabethans. But among all these poets there was not a single plastic artist whose name we so much as remember.

And then, suddenly, the seventeenth century gave birth to two English artists of genius. It produced Inigo Jones and, a little later, Wren. Wren died, at the age of more than ninety, in the spring of 1723. We are celebrating to-day his bi-centenary—celebrating it not merely by antiquarian talk and scholarly appreciations of his style but also (the signs are not wanting) in a more concrete and living way: by taking a renewed interest in the art of which he was so great a master and by reverting in our practice to that fine tradition which he, with his predecessor, Inigo, inaugurated.