Part 6

The format of Mr Hodgson's published work is almost as interesting as the poetry itself--and that is saying a good deal. For all of his poetry that matters (there is an earlier, experimental volume which is not notable) has been issued during the past two or three years in the form of chapbook and broadside.

It was a new publishing venture, quietly launched _At the Sign of Flying Fame_, and piloted now through the rapids of a larger success by the Poetry Bookshop. In a sense, of course, it is not a new thing at all, but a revival of the means by which ballad and romance were conveyed into the hands of the people a couple of centuries ago. Yet it is no imitation of a quaint style for the sake of its picturesqueness, nor the haphazard choice of a vehicle unsuited either to the author or his public, nor a mere bid for popular favour.

The peculiar interest of the revival lies in the fact that it is part of the larger movement, the renascent spirit of poetry which has been visibly stirring the face of the waters in these past few years. The reappearance of the chapbook synchronized with that, and is closely related with it. For it is found to be as well fitted to the form and the content of the newest poetry as it is suited to the need of the newest audience. On the one hand it brings to the freshly awakened public a book which is cheap enough to acquire and small enough readily to become a familiar possession of the mind. On the other hand, it is suited perfectly to the simple themes and metrical effects of the work hitherto published in this form; and is designed only to include small poems of unquestioned excellence. Here may be perceived the more important factors which go to the formation of literary taste; and while one would estimate that the educational value of these little books is therefore high, aptly meeting the need of the novice in poetry, it is clear that the discriminating mind also is likely to find them satisfying.

Mr Hodgson's work, then, will be found in four chapbooks and a thin sheaf of broadsides. The chapbooks are small and slim, and could all be picked up between the thumb and finger of one hand. They are wrapped in cheery yellow and decorated with impressionistic sketches which, nine times out of ten, perhaps, really help the illusion that the poet is creating. The broadsides--there are about a dozen of them--are long loose sheets, each containing a single poem similarly decorated.

The sum of the work is thus quite small. Perhaps there are not more than five-and-twenty pieces altogether, none very long, and amongst them an occasional miniature of a single stanza. Probably the format in which the author has chosen to appear has had an effect in restricting his production. That would be a possible result of the vigorous selection exercised and the limits imposed in space and style. But there are signs that he would not have been in any case a ready writer--the sense these lyrics convey of having waited on inspiration until the veritable moment shone, finding thought and feeling, imagination and technique, ripe to express it. And by those very signs watchers knew and acclaimed this author for a poet, despite the slender bulk of his accomplishment, long before the Royal Society of Literature had awarded to his work the _Polignac_ prize.

The two poems which gained the prize are "The Bull" and "The Song of Honour." Each occupies a whole chapbook to itself, and therefore must be accounted, for this poet, of considerable length. They are, indeed, the most important of his poems. And if one does not immediately add that they are also the most beautiful and the most charming, the reason is something more than an aversion from dogma and the superlative mood. For the artistic level of all this work is high, and it would be difficult, on a critical method, to single out the finest piece. The decision would be susceptible, even more than poetical judgments usually are, to mood and individual bias. One person, inclining to the smaller, gem-like forms of verse, will find pieces by Mr Hodgson to flatter his fancy. This poet has, indeed, a gift of concentrated expression, before which one is compelled to pause. There are tiny lyrics here which comprise immensities. The facile imp that lurks round every corner for the poor trader in words whispers 'epigram' as we read "Stupidity Street" or "The Mystery" or "Reason has Moons." But is the specific quality of these delicate creations really epigrammatic? No, it would appear to be something more gracious and more subtly blent with emotion; having implications that lead beyond the region of stark thought, and an impulse far other than to sharpen a sting. "Stupidity Street" is an example:

I saw with open eyes Singing birds sweet Sold in the shops For the people to eat, Sold in the shops of Stupidity Street. I saw in vision The worm in the wheat, And in the shops nothing For people to eat; Nothing for sale in Stupidity Street.

Analysis of that will discover an anatomy complete enough to those who enjoy that kind of dissection. There are bones of logic and organic heat sufficient of themselves for wonder how the thing can be done in so small a compass. And the strong simple words, which articulate the idea so exactly, confirm the impression of something rounded and complete; as though final expression had been reached and nothing remained behind. But as a fact there is much behind. One sees this perhaps a little more clearly in "The Mystery":

He came and took me by the hand Up to a red rose tree, He kept His meaning to Himself But gave a rose to me.

I did not pray Him to lay bare The mystery to me, Enough the rose was Heaven to smell, And His own face to see.

Again the idea has been crystallized so cleanly out of the poetic matrix that one sees at first only its sharp, bright outline. Perhaps to the analyst it would yield nothing more. But the simpler mind will surely feel, no matter how dimly, the presence of all the imaginings out of which it sprang, a small synthesis of the universe.

Here we touch the main feature of this poet's gift--his power to visualize, to make almost tangible, a poetic conception. So consummate is this power that it dominates other qualities and might almost cheat us into thinking that they did not exist. Thus we might not suspect this transparent verse of reflective depths; and of course, it is not intellectual poetry, specifically so-called. Yet reflection is implied everywhere; and occasionally it is a pure abstraction which gets itself embodied. The poem called "Time" illustrates this. In its opening line--"Time, you old Gipsy-man"--the idea swings into life in a figure which gains energy with every line. One positively sees this restless old man who has driven his caravan from end to end of the world and who cannot be persuaded to stay for bribe or entreaty. And it would be possible quite to forget the underlying thought did not the gravity of it peep between the incisive strokes of the third stanza.

Last week in Babylon, Last night in Rome, Morning, and in the crush Under Paul's dome; Under Paul's dial You tighten your rein-- Only a moment, And off once again; Off to some city Now blind in the womb, Off to another Ere that's in the tomb.

So it is too with this poet's imagination. It deals perpetually with concrete imagery--as for instance when it pictures Eve:

Picking a dish of sweet Berries and plums to eat,

or presents her, when the serpent is softly calling her name, as

Wondering, listening, Listening, wondering, Eve with a berry Half-way to her lips.

Moreover, the poet does not in the least mind winging his fancy in a homely phrase. He is not afraid of an idiomatic touch, nor of pithy, vigorous words. His conception is vivid enough to bear rigorous treatment; and in the same poem, "Eve," the serpent is found plotting the fall of humanity in these terms:

Now to get even and Humble proud heaven and Now was the moment or Never at all.

And when his wiles have been successful, Eve's feathered comrades, Titmouse and Jenny Wren, make an indignant 'clatter':

How the birds rated him, How they all hated him! How they all pitied Poor motherless Eve!

That is the nearest approach to fantasy which will be found in this poetry. There is nothing subtle or whimsical here: no half-lights or neutral tones or hints of meaning. This genius cannot fulfil itself in an 'airy nothing.' The imaginative power is too firmly controlled by a sense of fact to admit the bizarre and incredible; yet there can be no doubt of its creative force when one turns for a moment to either of the prize poems, and particularly to "The Bull." It would be hard to name a finer specimen of verse in which imagination, high and sustained, is seen to be operating through a purely sensuous medium. That is to say, moving in a region of fact, accurately observing and recording the phenomena of a real world, there is yet achieved an imaginative creation of great power--a bit of all-but-perfect art. Quotation will not serve to illustrate this, since the poem is an organic whole and a principal element of its perfection is its unity. One could, however, demonstrate over again from almost any line the poet's instinct for reality: as for example in the truth, quiet but unflinching, of his presentment of the cruelty inherent in his theme. The passages are almost too painful taken out of their context; and there may be some for whom they will rob the poem of complete beauty. But the same instinct may be observed visualizing, in strong light and rich colour and incisive movement, the teeming tropical world in which the old bull stands, sick, unkinged and left to die.

Cranes and gaudy parrots go Up and down the burning sky; Tree-top cats purr drowsily In the dim-day green below; And troops of monkeys, nutting, some, All disputing, go and come;

.....

And a dotted serpent curled Round and round and round a tree, Yellowing its greenery, Keeps a watch on all the world, All the world and this old bull In the forest beautiful.

This poem is indeed very characteristic of its author's method. One perceives the thought behind (apart, of course, from the mental process of actual composition); and one realizes the magnitude of it. But again it is implicit only, and reflection on 'the flesh that dies,' on greatness fallen and worth contemned, hardly wins a couple of lines of direct expression.

In "The Song of Honour" it would seem for the moment as if all that were reversed. This poem is the re-creation of a spiritual experience, a hymn of adoration. It is entirely subjective in conception, and is strangely different therefore from the cool objectivity of "The Bull" or "Eve" or "Time." In them the poet is working so detachedly that there is even room for the play of gentle humour now and then. He is working with delight, indeed, and emotion warm enough, but with a joy that is wholly artistic, caring much more for the thing that he is making than for any single element of it. But in "The Song of Honour" it is evident that he cares immensely for his theme; and hence arise an ardour and intensity which are not present in the other poems. Moreover, the work is the interpretation of a vision, which would seem to imply a mystical quality only latent hitherto; and there is a rapture of utterance which is not found elsewhere.

The apparent contrast has no reality however. It is possible to catch, though in subtle inflexions it is true, an undertone which runs below even the simplest and clearest of these lyrics. No doubt it is as quiet, as subdued, as it well could be--this soft, complex harmony flowing beneath the ringing measure. But one can distinguish a note here and a phrase there which point directly to the dominant theme of "The Song of Honour." There is a hint of it, for example, in "The Mystery," where the soul is imagined as standing, reverent but without fear, within the closed circle of the unknown, and joyfully content to accept as the pledge and symbol of that which it is unable to comprehend, the beauty of the material world. One may see in that a familiar attitude of the modern mind; the perception that there _is_ a mystery, which somehow perpetually eludes the creeds and philosophies, but which seems to be attaining to gradual revelation and fulfilment in actual existence. A vision of the unity of that existence was the inspiration of this greater poem: a realization, momentary but dazzling, of the magnificence of being: of its joy, of its continuity, of the progression of life through countless forms of that which we call matter to an ultimate goal of supreme glory.

I do not say that any thesis, in those or kindred terms, was the origin of this Song. I feel quite sure that it had no basis so abstract. It was born in a mood of exaltation, kindled perhaps by such an instant of flaming super-consciousness as may be observed in the spiritual experience of other contemporary poets. The moment of its inception is recorded in the opening of the poem:

I climbed a hill as light fell short, And rooks came home in scramble sort, And filled the trees and flapped and fought And sang themselves to sleep;

Silence fell upon the landscape as darkness came and the stars shone out.

I heard no more of bird or bell, The mastiff in a slumber fell, I stared into the sky, As wondering men have always done Since beauty and the stars were one, Though none so hard as I.

It seemed, so still the valleys were, As if the whole world knelt at prayer, Save me and me alone;

So true is the poet to his impulse towards clarity and the concrete, so unerringly does he select the strong, familiar word with all its meaning clear on the face of it, that it is possible to regard the Song simply as a religious poem--a hymn of adoration to a Supreme Being:

I heard the universal choir, The Sons of Light exalt their Sire With universal song, Earth's lowliest and loudest notes, Her million times ten million throats Exalt Him loud and long,

Pure religion the poem is, but its implications are broader than any creed. And, define it as we may, it remains suggestive of the most vital current of modern thought. For it takes its stand upon the solid earth, embraces reality and perceives in the material world itself that which is urging joyfully toward some manifestation of spiritual splendour. Thus the poet hears the Song rising from the very stocks and stones:

The everlasting pipe and flute Of wind and sea and bird and brute, And lips deaf men imagine mute In wood and stone and clay,

The pæan is audible to him, too, from lowly creatures in whom life has not yet grown conscious, from the tiniest forms of being, from the most transient of physical phenomena.

The music of a lion strong That shakes a hill a whole night long, A hill as loud as he, The twitter of a mouse among Melodious greenery, The ruby's and the rainbow's song, The nightingale's--all three, The song of life that wells and flows From every leopard, lark and rose And everything that gleams or goes Lack-lustre in the sea.

But it is in humanity that the Song attains its fullest and noblest harmony. Out of the stuff of actual human life the spiritual essence is distilled, making the wraiths of a mystical imagination poor and pale by comparison.

I heard the hymn of being sound From every well of honour found In human sense and soul: The song of poets when they write The testament of Beautysprite Upon a flying scroll, The song of painters when they take A burning brush for Beauty's sake And limn her features whole--

.....

The song of beggars when they throw The crust of pity all men owe To hungry sparrows in the snow, Old beggars hungry too-- The song of kings of kingdoms when They rise above their fortune men, And crown themselves anew,--

_Ford Madox Hueffer_

There is a collected edition of Mr Hueffer's poetry published in that year of dreadful memory nineteen hundred and fourteen. It is a valuable possession. Its verse-content may not--of course it cannot--appeal in the same degree to all lovers of poetry. For reasons that we shall see, it is more liable than most poetic art to certain objections from those whose taste is already formed and who therefore, wittingly or unwittingly, have adopted a pet convention. They may boggle at a word or a phrase in terminology which is avowedly idiomatic. They may wince occasionally at a free rhyme or grow a little restive at the irregularities of a rhyme-scheme, or resent an abrupt change of rhythm in the middle of a stanza just as they believed they had begun to scan it correctly. If they are the least bit sentimental (and it is not many who have cast out, root and branch, the Anglo-Saxon vice) they will be chilled here and there by an ironic touch, repelled by an apparent levity, or irritated at the contiguity of subjects and ideas which seem inept and unrelated. The classicist will grumble that the unities are broken; the idealist will shudder at a bit of actuality; the formalist will eye certain new patterns with disfavour; and even the realist, with so much after his own heart, will be graceless enough to be impatient at recurrent signs of a romantic temperament.

So, in perhaps a dozen different ways, the literary person of as many different types may find that he is just hindered from complete enjoyment of what he nevertheless perceives to be beautiful work. If he be honest, however, and master of his moods, he will be ready to admit that it _is_ beautiful, and that none of these objections invalidate the essential poetry of the book. That has its own winning and haunting qualities, quite strong enough to justify the claim that the volume is a valuable possession. That is to say, there is absolute beauty in it, considered simply as a work of art and judged only from the point of view of the conventional lover of poetry. There are other values however, immediate or potential. There is, for example, to the believer in Mr Hueffer's theory, promise of the power which his method would have upon all the good, kind, jolly, intelligent, but unliterary people, could they be induced to read poetry at all. As a mere corollary from the literary quibbles already named, one would expect such people to find this volume delightful--an expectation by no means daunted by the declared fate of earlier productions. One sees that the evident sincerity of the work, the attitude of that particular individuality to life, the free hand and the right instinct in the selection of incident, and the use of language that is homely and picturesque, ought to be potent attractions to the reader who frequently finds the older poetry stilted and artificial.

Moreover, so successful has the author's method been in many cases that even the _littérateur_ must pause and think. He will observe how well the new artistry suits the new material; he will note the exhilaration of the final effect; and when, returning to his beloved poets of the last generation, he finds that some of their virtue seems to have fled meantime, he will ask himself whether the life of our time may not _demand_ poetic presentation in some such form as this. Which is to say that he will probably be a convert to Mr Hueffer's impressionism.

That point is debatable, of course; but what will hardly be questioned, apart from the joy we frequently experience here in seeing a thing consummately done, is the importance of this work as an experiment. That is obviously another kind of value, with a touch of scientific interest added to the æsthetics. And the importance of the experiment is enhanced, or at any rate we realize it more fully, from the fact that the poet has been generous enough to elaborate his theory in a preface. That is no euphemism, as other prefaces and theories of exasperating memory might seem to suggest. It is real generosity to give away the fundamentals of your art, to show as clearly as is done here the principles upon which you work and the exact means which are taken to give effect to them. It is courageous too, particularly when confessions are made which supply a key to personality. For the hostile critic is thus doubly armed. But the 'gentle reader' is armed too; and Mr Hueffer would seem to have been wise, even from the point of view of mere prudence, to take the risk.

The reader of this book then will find the poems doubly interesting in the light that the preface throws upon them. He may, of course, read and enjoy them without a single reference to it--that is the measure of their poetic value. Or, on the other hand, he may read the preface, brim full of stimulating ideas, without reference to the poetry. But the full significance of either can only be appreciated when they are taken in conjunction. For instance, we light upon this phrase indicating the material of the poet's art: "Modern life, so extraordinary, so hazy; so tenuous, with still such definite and concrete spots in it." It is a charming phrase, and from its own suggestiveness gently constrains one to think. But if we turn at once to the most considerable poem of the collection, "To All the Dead," we shall see our poet in the very act of recording the life that he visualizes in this way; and we shall see how remarkably the texture of the poem fits the description in the passage just quoted: "life hazy and tenuous, with such definite and concrete spots."

To tell the truth, haze is the first thing we see when observing the effect of this poem. It is pervasive too, and for a time nothing more is visible save two or three islets of concrete experience, projecting above it and appearing to float about in it, unstable and unrelated. This first effect is rather like that of a landscape in a light autumn ground-mist, which floats along the valley-meadows leaving tree-tops and hillsides clear. Or it is like trying to recollect what happened to you on a certain memorable day. The mood comes back readily enough, golden or sombre; but the events which induced it, or held it in check, or gave it so sudden a reverse only return reluctantly, one by one, and not even in their proper order; so that we have to puzzle them out and rearrange and fit them together before the right sequence appears.

Such is the main impression of "To All the Dead." Only the artist has been at work here selecting his incidents with a keen eye and sensitive touch, brooding over them with a temperament of complex charm, and for all their apparent disjunction, relating and unifying them, as in life, with the subtlest and frailest of links. As a consequence, at a second glance the haze begins to lift, while at a third the whole landscape is visible, a prospect very rich and fair despite the ugly spots which the artist has not deigned to eliminate, and which, as a fact, he has deliberately retained.

But there is no doubt the first glance is puzzling. If one were not caught by the interest of those concrete spots it might even be tiresome, and one would probably not trouble to take the second glance. But they are so curious in themselves, and so boldly sketched, that we are arrested; and the next moment the general design emerges. First the picture of the ancient Chinese queen--a Mongolian Helen--

With slanting eyes you would say were blind-- In a dead white face.