Chapter 7

This is not the time to exhaust the Davidsonian philosophy, if there be such. We are treating the writer as a poet, and the examples which I have quoted of his joy in nature and his fellow-feeling with mankind, should, I think, demonstrate that he has the gifts of vivid seeing, of vivid feeling, and of vivid expression. If genuine poetry consists of two essentials, substance and form, we cannot deny the substance in Mr. Davidson. He has the gift of "high seriousness," which Arnold declares to be a requisite of all that is classic. He is not always deep; he is not faultless. The same writer who can condense a thought thus--

On Eden's daisies couched, they felt They carried Eden in their heart,

is also capable of writing, as poetry, these lines:--

For no man ever understood a woman, No woman ever understood a man, And no man ever understood a man: No woman ever understood a woman, And no man ever understood himself; No woman ever understood herself.

We can only surmise that Mr. Davidson had just been reading Whitman, and was under the temporary hallucination that this poor stuff was profound thinking. But all poets, nay, all prose-writers, even the greatest, have their lapses into bathos. Yes, even--and I say it with trembling--even Shakespeare.

Let us look, now, for a few moments, more closely, in order to appreciate the particular elements of his genius, as manifested in the form which is his style.

And first, his language. To be perfect, expression must be luminous yet terse, vigorous, yet in taste and keeping. It must be without mannerisms, without inadequacy, without flatness, without obscurity. "Clear, but with distinction," is the brief definition of Aristotle. Davidson has learned his lesson well from Shelley and Wordsworth and Arnold. He cultivates all the virtues, and not without success. He has not been tempted to leave the true path and court singularity, whether in the shape of Browning's verbal puzzles or of Swinburne's luscious and alliterative turgidness. His diction is of the simplest. Says one of his personae--

I love not brilliance; give me words Of meadow-growth and garden plot, Of larks and black-caps; gaudy birds, Gay flowers and jewels like me not.

It is astonishing how expressive the simple word can become in the hands of a master. Dante's verb and noun are now proverbial. As for Mr. Davidson, Gray's clear-cut lines in the _Elegy_ can supply no more instances of perfect aptness than those which I quoted some time ago of the lark. Notice the exactness of choice in--

The patchwork sunshine _nets_ the lea, The flitting shadows _halt and pass_ Forlorn, the mossy humble-bee _Lounges_ along the flowerless grass,

and in "I heard the _husky_ whisper of the corn." Yet I am disposed to think that, like many another finished artist, he has passed through stages of various practice, and has exercised much self-restraint before attaining to that naturalness which, as Goethe reiterates, is the last crown of art-discipline. From sundry indications I conclude that passages of his _Fleet-street Eclogues_ were written independently at different dates, and have been fitted later into the dialogue form. However that may be, it is possible to detect instances in which he falls below his own maturer ideal of natural language. The diction, that is to say the choice of mere vocables, is eminently natural, except for the odd words "muted," "writhen," "watchet-hued," "dup," "swound," which I have collected with a rather laborious captiousness. But diction is only part of expression, and, as I have just hinted, it would seem as if, before his lesson in pure style was fully learned, he had passed under the fascination of the mannerists, and particularly of Pope. Otherwise it is hard to account for such entirely eighteenth century lines as--

And brimming echoes spill the pleasant din,

or--

The sloping shores that fringe the velvet tides;

and (speaking of steamers)--

Or, fiery-hearted, cleave with iron limbs And brows precipitous the pliant sea.

How different are these mechanical constructions from that expression of the birds

hid in the white warm cloud Mantling the thorn.

Whether I am right or wrong as to the process of his development, the fact remains that he can be, if he chooses, a master in language of poetic simplicity. Even a fire of garden rubbish can be expressed without becoming altogether unpoetical when one speaks of

the spicy smoke Of withered weeds that burn where gardens be.

Perhaps there do exist some things which cannot be made poetical in any diction whatsoever. Tennyson could only express "tea" by "and on the board the fluttering urn," and if Mr. Davidson has to speak of whisky and calls it

amber spirit that enshrines the heart Of an old Lothian summer,

we have to recognise that he has come very well out of a difficulty. If at another time he refers to it as

things which journalists require,

we must remember that the context implies a certain humour.

"Clear, but not flat," is an easy maxim to utter, but, as Wordsworth too often shows, the danger of falling from studied simplicity into bald prose is always present; and for that reason do smaller artists rather choose to trick their thoughts in verbal jewellery. We cannot say that Davidson, who undertakes to run the risk, never makes the fatal step. In the address to the daisy--

Oh, little brave adventurer! We human beings love you _so_,

the last word, and indeed the whole line, verges on the infantile. So it is a shock when, after a passage of some pretensions, we come upon the lines--

My way of life led me to London town, And difficulties, which I overcame;

or--

But yet my waking intuition, That longed to execute its mission.

It is extremely difficult to realise that the same man wrote these sorry lines who, in another place, adopts this for his style--

... Here spring appears Caught in a leafless brake, her garland torn, Breathless with wonder, and the tears half dried Upon her rosy cheek.

For our comfort and his let us remember that it was the same Wordsworth who wrote both the _Ode on the Intimations of Immortality_ and also the lines--

I've measured it from side to side: It's three feet long and two feet wide!

Nevertheless flaws of this kind are few, and it is almost unfair for me to be the means perhaps of conveying even thus much impression of faultiness about verses which sustain so high a general level of excellence of language.

In point of melody and harmony and flow of verse there can be no doubt that our poet is, for instance, an excellent writer of songs, in which a vigorous simplicity is the prime requisite. They lilt along with great vivacity and ease. But elsewhere I could wish that here and there he would amend his rhymes. "Reviewer" and "literature," "pierced" and "athirst," "noise" and "voice," "inquisition" and "division," "trees" and "palaces," "shade is" and "ladies," "giftless" and "swiftness," are far from pleasing; and though I am almost ashamed to play the detective in work which is mostly full of charm, I find myself distressed by such cacophonies as--

Hid in its hoard of haws,

and--

Pierces a rushlight's ray's length into it.

John Davidson, then, is a genuine son of his age; free in his thought, wide in his sympathies, eager for the amelioration of man's estate, divided between the hopes of science and the regret for a lost religion, compelled to fall back on the everlasting consolations of love and nature, an ardent lover of the country and its sights and sounds, constrained to draw word-pictures of the things which thus delight him, and drawing them with the consummate skill of the man who keeps his eye on the essentials of the thing he draws. His charm lies in his frank sincerity, and in the clear healthy sweetness of his utterance. That he is a poet none can doubt; if he is comparatively young, as I surmise he is, and if he pursues his true development, he may, I believe, easily take his place in the first rank, not only as a successor, but as the successor, of Tennyson.

On William Watson I shall dwell less long. To begin with, he is already better known. Moreover, his special virtues as a poet are more easy to apprehend, for they lie somewhat prominently upon the surface. Better still, he apparently apprehends them himself, and is in that unusually happy position for an artist, of knowing exactly where his own strength lies. And undoubtedly in those departments his strength is great. We need not hold the mention of them in reserve. I have already quoted a passage of admirable rhetorical and musical skill and taste from the _Lachrymae Musarum_. That was sufficient to illustrate one of this poet's great gifts--the gift of writing splendid verse, as harmonious as Milton's and as choice in expression as Tennyson's. His other chief endowment is that of literary critic. On Burns, Shelley, and Wordsworth he has said almost the final saying, and assuredly in almost the final language. We may pick faults now and again in his expression, and we may suspect a mannerism here and there, especially when we read large quantities of his verse at one time; nevertheless, each individual piece which fairly represents him is very nearly perfect in its way.

The works of his with which I am acquainted are the volumes entitled _Wordsworth's Grave and Other Poems_, _The Father of the Forest and Other Poems_, _Lachrymae Musarum_, and the series of sonnets upon Armenia, called _The Purple East_. There is in Watson nothing of the dramatist or of the epic writer. He is a lyrist and a sonneteer. He is also a critic, and might very conceivably be a satirist. But, whatever he is in writing, he is mainly and before all things an intellectual rather than an emotional poet; he is an artist rather than a seer. His poems are constructions of taste and intellectual judgment. Let me take, as an example, his poem upon the _Father of the Forest_. A yew tree, which may be fifteen centuries old, is addressed by him; and, musing on the historical scenes it must have lived through, he gives us a series of verses which touch musically upon salient epochs and characteristic figures in the history of England. To this the yew practically replies that the so-called historical events amount to nothing, and that "wars and tears" will repeat themselves, until men are some day civilized into pursuing but one object, which shall be Beauty. The piece itself reveals nothing profound, awakes no particular emotion. Given the first idea of the plot, so to speak--an idea which is not far to seek for any reflective man--the rest of the material follows as a matter of course. But where is the man besides Mr. Watson who will give us such lines as--

The South shall bless, the East shall blight, The red rose of the Dawn shall blow; The million-lilied stream of night, Wide in ethereal meadows flow.

I do not say that the poet is without his measure of feeling; but it is rather the pensive feeling of a Jaques, the dainty interest of a Matthew Arnold, than any surge of emotion. The poet seems to me to encourage his brain to feel--to give it that passing luxury with a certain amount of deliberation.

The _Hymn to the Sea_ is the only real poem written in the English language in hexameters and pentameters. There have been many attempts at these metres, but they have been failures, one and all. And nothing shows Mr. Watson's skill, nay genius, more than the fact that his attempt is a great and conspicuous success. The sea, confined within its shores, never resting, yet never able to pass its bounds, at war with the winds, and serving the moon with its tides, is compared to man, with his unrest, his limitations, his aspirations. As before, when the clue is once given, the thread is easily followed to the end. The result is simply an intellectual operation done into verbal music. Yet who but William Watson, having to speak of the moon as mistress of the sea, could express his fancy in words like these:--

When, as yonder, thy mistress, at height of her mutable glories, Wise from the magical East, comes like a sorceress pale. Ah, she comes, she arises--impassive, emotionless, bloodless, Wasted and ashen of cheek, zoning her ruins with pearl. Once she was warm, she was joyous, desire in her pulses abounding: Surely thou lovedst her well, then, in her conquering youth! Surely not all unimpassioned, at sound of thy rough serenading, She from the balconied night unto her melodist leaned,-- Leaned unto thee, her bondsman, who keepest to-day her commandments, All for the sake of old love, dead at thy heart though it lie.

Surely such verse would have a claim to endurance, even if the thought were less of a thought than it is.

_Autumn_, again, is a short piece upon the suggestions of that season. What would those suggestions naturally be? Obviously, the passing and perishing of all things that are. True; but to express those suggestions, obvious as they are, as Watson expresses them, requires a rhetorical power and a taste in melodious words such as would make their possessor eminent in the judgment of men who care anything for beauty. There may be no particular depth in the work; it may be less passionate, less full of thought, than the _Ode to the West Wind_, but we could ill afford to spare such combinations of sound as--

Elusive notes in wandering wafture borne From undiscoverable lips, that blow An immaterial horn.

In _Liberty Rejected_ we meet once more with the similitude of the moon and the tide. Mr. Watson's range of purely intellectual imagination is, like that of his emotion, limited. But we do not mind meeting the comparison again, when the lover who refuses to be free expresses himself thus--

The ocean would as soon Entreat the moon Unsay the magic verse That seals him hers From silver noon to noon.

When he touches upon nature, we feel again that Watson is not "letting himself go." When he escapes from town it is not to revel and to make us revel in the sheer delight of rural sights and sounds. He feels as before, with the eye and the understanding, not with the buoyant blood of the full heart. No matter, he feels enough to give us this quatrain--

In stainless daylight saw the pure seas roll; Saw mountains pillaring the perfect sky: Then journeyed home to carry in his soul The torment of the difference till he die.

Why should I go on to quote such lines as--

That thousand-memoried unimpulsive sea,

or,

Curls the labyrinthine sea Duteous to the lunar will.

Enough that, thanks to a study of Spenser, Milton, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and therefore a delicate taste in word and phrase, and thanks also to an innate genius for verbal music, restrained from Swinburnian riot by a true artistic instinct, Mr. Watson is a poet most delightful to the physical and the mental ear. That he has taken pains with his study is avowed by himself. Beginning with Shelley and passing through Keats to Wordsworth, he says--

In my young days of fervid poesy He drew me to him with his strange far light,-- He held me in a world all clouds and gleams, And vasty phantoms, where ev'n Man himself Moved like a phantom 'mid the clouds and gleams. Anon the Earth recalled me; and a voice Murmuring of dethroned divinities And dead times, deathless upon sculptured urn-- And Philomela's long-descended pain Flooding the night--and maidens of romance To whom asleep St. Agnes' love-dreams come-- Awhile constrained me to a sweet duresse And thraldom, lapping me in high content, Soft as the bondage of white amorous arms. And then a third voice, long unheeded--held Claustral and cold, and dissonant and tame--Found me at last with ears to hear. It sang Of lowly sorrows and familiar joys, Of simple manhood, artless womanhood, And childhood fragrant as the limpid morn; And from the homely matter nigh at hand, Ascending and dilating, it disclosed Spaces and avenues, calm heights and breadths Of vision, whence I saw each blade of grass With roots that groped about eternity, And in each drop of dew upon each blade The mirror of the inseparable All.

It is also clear from such reminiscences as--

The laurel glorious from that wintry hair,

which is practically Tennyson, or

The maker of this verse, which shall endure By splendour of its theme, that cannot die,

which, if I mistake not, is echoed Spenser, or--

And ghostly as remembered mirth,

which is largely Tennyson again.

I do not call these plagiarisms, I call them reflections of wide and retentive reading.

William Watson has thus formed a style which is almost perfect. I say "almost," not quite. There are some few mannerisms which we might wish away. He speaks of "greatly inert," "greatly lost in thee," "greatly slain," "doomed splendidly to die," "loudly weak," "immutably prevail," and "vainly great," till we are forced to recognize what looks very much like a trick. He has occasional moments of tautology, which may possibly be deliberate, but is none the better for that, as when he says:--

Not mine the rich and showering hand, that strews The facile largess of a stintless muse.

And

The retrospect in Time's reverted eyes.

And worst of all--

"Fair clouds of gulls that _wheel_ and _swerve_ In unanimity divine, With _undulation serpentine_, And wondrous consentaneous _curve_."

He sometimes falls into lines which ring of the mint of Pope--

No guile may capture and no force surprise.

Or--

Defames the sunlight and deflowers the morn.

Or--

Towers to a lily, reddens to a rose.

In one passage only do I find him falling, falling, falling into the flattest style of the _Excursion_:--

"I overheard a kind-eyed girl relate To her companions how a favouring chance By some few shillings weekly had increased The earnings of her household."

But as I read this, I murmur to myself those lines from Wordsworth--

"And I have travelled far as Hull to see What clothes he might have left, or other property,"

and wonder how it is that such aberrations can befal even the very man who seems most determined to avoid them.

Watson's second endowment is still one of taste and intellect. It is the gift of literary criticism. The special charm of the great poets is so subtly apprehended by him, and so exquisitely expressed, that it will be a source of much surprise if many of his concise verdicts do not become the household words of students of literature. Let me quote a passage from his poem on _Wordsworth's Grave_:--

You who have loved, like me, his simple themes, Loved his sincere large accent nobly plain, And loved the land whose mountains and whose streams Are lovelier for his strain.

It may be that his manly chant, beside More dainty numbers, seems a rustic tune; It may be, thought has broadened, since he died, Upon the century's noon; It may be that we can no longer share The faith which from his fathers he received; It may be that our doom is to despair Where he with joy believed;--

Enough that there is none since risen who sings A song so gotten of the immediate soul, So instant from the vital fount of things Which is our source and goal;

And though at touch of later hands there float More artful tones than from his lyre he drew, Ages may pass e'er trills another note So sweet, so great, so true.

Take again--

Not Milton's keen, translunar music thine; Not Shakespeare's cloudless, boundless, human view; Not Shelley's flush of rose on peaks divine; Nor yet the wizard twilight Coleridge knew.

And these:--

Shelley, the hectic flamelight rose of verse, All colour and all odour and all bloom.

And on Burns--

But as, when thunder crashes nigh, All darkness opes one flaming eye, And the world leaps against the sky, So fiery clear Did the old truths that we pass by To him appear.

These, then, are the prominent poetical virtues of William Watson, virtues which none can avoid observing--his magnificent power of expression and his literary acumen. He is an intellectual poet, and therefore not devoid of substance. Yet his substance alone would never make him a _vates_. I can imagine that in prose criticisms and in satire he would make a distinguished figure. Here is his answer to Mr. Alfred Austin when the laureate advised him to be patient with the Armenian question:--

"The poet laureate assured me--first, that whosoever in any circumstances arraigns this country for anything that she may do or leave undone thereby covers himself with shame; secondly, that although the continued torture, rape, and massacre of a Christian people, under the eyes of a Christian continent, may be a lamentable thing, it is best to be patient, seeing that the patience of God Himself can never be exhausted; and, thirdly, that if I were but with him in his pretty country house, were but comfortably seated 'by the yule log's blaze,' and joining with him in seasonable conviviality, the enigmas of Providence and the whole mystery of things would presently become transparent to me, and more especially after 'drinking to England' I should be enabled to understand that 'she bides her hour behind the bastioned brine.'"

It would be hard to better that.

But though I call him intellectual, and more artistic than inspired, I have no wish to underrate the intrinsic poetry in such lines as these, on the _Great Misgiving_:--

Ah, but the apparition--the dumb sign-- The beckoning finger bidding me forego The fellowship, the converse, and the wine, The songs, the festal glow! And, ah, to know not, while with friends I sit, And while the purple joy is passed about, Whether 'tis ampler day divinelier lit Or homeless night without.

Nor the graceful fancy in these, from _Beauty's Metempsychosis_:--

From wave and star and flower, Some effluence rare Was lent thee; a divine but transient dower; Thou yield'st it back from eyes and lips and hair To wave and star and flower. Should'st thou to-morrow die, Thou still shalt be Found in the rose, and met in all the sky; And from the ocean's heart shalt sing to me, Should'st thou to-morrow die.

I have also said that Mr. Watson knows his own strength and his limitations. Let me conclude by quoting a passage from his _Apologia_, the very style of which will be in itself the justification of the man whom it argues to justify:--

... Because I have full oft In singers' selves found me a theme of song, Holding these also to be very part Of Nature's greatness....

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