Part 7

That, with its quaint strange setting and its suggestion of a guilty love story, is a thing to linger over for its own sake, apart from its apparent isolation. Nor do we fully realize till later (although something subtler than intelligence has already perceived it), that in this opening passage the theme has been stated, and that the key-note was struck in the line

She should have been dead nine thousand year....

But we pass abruptly, in the second movement, to our own time and to the very heart of our own civilization. We are paying a call on a garrulous friend in the rue de la Paix. He is an American and therefore a philosopher; but as he descants on the 'nature of things,' doubtless in the beautiful English of the gentle American, we let our attention wander to things that touch us more sharply, to sights and sounds outside the window, each vividly perceived and clearly picked out, but all resolving themselves into a symbol, vaguely impressive, of the complicated whirl of life. And this passage again, with its satiric flavour and dexterity of execution, we are content to enjoy in its apparent detachment, until we glimpse the link which unites it to the larger interest of the whole.

The link with that ancient queen is in a flash of contrast--a couple of Chinese chiropodists, grinning from their lofty window at a _mannequin_ on the opposite side of the street. And as the theme is developed, episodes which seem irrelevant at first, are soon found to have their relation with the thought--of death and tragic passion--on which the poet is brooding. At a chance word dropped by the American host the confused and perplexing sights and sounds of the outer world vanish; and the philosophical lecture, droning hitherto just on the edge of consciousness, fades even out of hearing--

... I lost them At the word "Sandusky." A landscape crossed them; A scene no more nor less than a vision, All clear and grey in the rue de la Paix.

He is seven years back in time and many hundreds of miles away, pushing up a North American river in a screaming, smoky steamer, between high banks crowned with forests of fir:

And suddenly we saw a beach--

A grey old beach and some old grey mounds That seemed to silence the steamer's sounds; So still and old and grey and ragged. For there they lay, the tumuli, barrows, The Indian graves....

So, rather obliquely perhaps as to method, but with certainty of effect, we are prepared for the culmination in the third movement. The poet has fled from civilization and 'Modern Movements' to the upland heather of a high old mound above the town of Trêves. And here, on a late autumn evening, he lingers to think. He remembers that it is the eve of All Souls' Day; and remembers too that the mound on which he is seated is an old burying-place of great antiquity. In the cold and dark of his eerie perch, certain impressions of the last few days return to him, just those which have been subtly galling a secret wound and impelling him to flee--the tragedy of the Chinese queen, the vision of the old tumuli at Sandusky Bay, the unheeded platitudes of his friend--

... "_From good to good, And good to better you say we go._" (There's an owl overhead.) "_You say that's so?_" My American friend of the rue de la Paix? "_Grow better and better from day to day._" Well, well I had a friend that's not a friend to-day; Well, well, I had a love who's resting in the clay Of a suburban cemetery.

One has felt all through that something weird is impending; but I am sure that no ghost-scene so curiously impressive as that which follows has ever been written before. It could not have been done, waiting as it was for the conjuncture of time and temperament and circumstance. But here it is, a thing essentially of our day; with its ironic mood, its new lore, its air of detachment, its glint of grim humour now and then, and its intense passion, both of love and of despair, which the fugitive show of nonchalance does but serve to accentuate. Passion is the dominant note as the myriad wraiths of long-dead lovers crowd past the brooding figure in the darkness.

And so beside the woodland in the sheen And shimmer of the dewlight, crescent moon And dew wet leaves I heard the cry "Your lips! Your lips! Your lips." It shook me where I sat, It shook me like a trembling, fearful reed, The call of the dead. A multitudinous And shadowy host glimmered and gleamed, Face to face, eye to eye, heads thrown back, and lips Drinking, drinking from lips, drinking from bosoms The coldness of the dew--and all a gleam Translucent, moonstruck as of moving glasses, Gleams on dead hair, gleams on the white dead shoulders Upon the backgrounds of black purple woods....

That poem naturally comes first in a little study, because it is the most considerable in the collection, and again because it is the most characteristic. It is very convenient, too, for illustrating those theories of the preface, as for example, that the business of the poet is "the right appreciation of such facets of our own day as God will let us perceive ... the putting of certain realities in certain aspects ... the juxtaposition of varied and contrasting things ... the genuine love and the faithful rendering of the received impression." But on æsthetic grounds one is not so sure of "To All the Dead" for the first place. Perhaps it tries to include too many facets of life--or death; perhaps we get a slight impression as regards technique that the poet is _consciously_ experimenting; and there is a shade of morbidity haunting it. In many of the shorter pieces there is a nearer approach to perfection. "The Portrait," for instance, a symbolical picture of life, has only one flaw; a slight excess of a trick of repetition which is a weakness of our author. It is mere carping, however, to find fault with a piece which is so noble in idea and gracious in expression; and it seems a crime to spoil the lovely thing by mutilating it. But with a resemblance of theme, the poem is so strongly contrasted in manner with "To All the Dead" that one cannot resist quoting from it at this point. The idea, although great, is relatively simple: life, symbolized in the figure of a woman, seated upon a tomb in a sequestered graveyard. The mood is one of serene melancholy, not rising to passion or dropping to satire; and the gentle unity of thought and feeling leaves the mind free to receive the impression of beauty.

She sits upon a tombstone in the shade;

.....

Being life amid piled up remembrances Of the tranquil dead. ... So she sits and waits. And she rejoices us who pass her by, And she rejoices those who here lie still, And she makes glad the little wandering airs, And doth make glad the shaken beams of light That fall upon her forehead: all the world Moves round her, sitting on forgotten tombs And lighting in to-morrow.

That was written earlier than "To All the Dead," but, like the two songs which come immediately after it in this volume, and like the "Suabian Legend," it is amongst Mr Hueffer's best things. One precious quality is the temperament which pervades it--and the principal artistic significance of all this work is to have expressed so strikingly an exuberant and complex personality. Sensibility rules, perhaps; but reflective power is visibly present, with a vein of irony running below it, precipitated out of its own particular share of the bitterness that nobody escapes. In one aspect after another this individuality is revealed, and the changing moods are matched by changing forms. It follows that there are many varied measures here; and most of them have some new feature. A few are very irregular, and all are, of course, modelled to suit the author's impressionistic theory. And the fact that these forms are in the main so well adapted to their themes: that they are so successful in conveying the desired impression, is as much as to say that the poet has evolved a technique which perfectly suits his own genius. It may or it may not carry much further than that; and the extent to which the new instrument would respond to other hands may be problematical. One would suppose that some of its qualities at least would be a permanent gain, particularly the larger range which brings within its compass so many fresh aspects of life on the one hand and on the other a richer idiom. But whether or no these are qualities which will pass into the substance of future poetry, there can be no question that life seen through this particular temperament is interpreted vividly by this method.

Thus we have the fulmination of "Süssmund's Address to an Unknown God"; violent, bitter, and unreasoned, the mere rage of weary mind and body against the goads of modern existence. Thus, in the "Canzone _à la_ Sonata" as in "The Portrait" a single serious thought is rendered in grave unrhymed stanzas which have all the dignity of blank verse with something more than its usual vivacity; and thus, too, in "From Inland," one of the exquisite pieces of the volume, the whole of a tragedy is suggested by the rapid sketching of two or three brief scenes. Again the verse is perfectly fitted to the theme; the sober rhythm matching the quietness of retrospect; memory tenderly grieving in simple rhymes which vary their occurrence as emotion rises and falls.

"... We two," I said, "Have still the best to come." But you Bowed down your brooding, silent head, Patient and sad and still....

... Dear! What would I give to climb our down, Where the wind hisses in each stalk And, from the high brown crest to see, Beyond the ancient, sea-grey town, The sky-line of our foam-flecked sea; And, looking out to sea, to hear, Ah! Dear, once more your pleasant talk; And to go home as twilight falls Along the old sea-walls! The best to come! The best! The best! One says the wildest things at times, Merely for comfort. But--_The best!_

Again, in "Grey Matter" and "Thanks Whilst Unharnessing," the colloquial touch is right and sure. In the latter poem, the almost halting time of the opening lines clearly suggests the tired horse as he draws to a standstill in the early darkness of a winter evening: there is a quicker movement as the robin's note rings out; the farmer's song is broken at intervals as he moves about the business of unharnessing, and when he stands at the open stable door, peering through the darkness at the robin on the thorn, the impression of relief from toil, of gratitude for home and rest, of simple kindliness and humanity, is complete--

Small brother, flit in here, since all around The frost hath gripped the ground; And oh! I would not like to have you die. We's help each other, Little Brother Beady-eye.

One might continue to cite examples: the rapid unrhymed dialogue of "Grey Matter," which continues so long as there is a touch of controversy in the talk of husband and wife, and changes to a lyric measure as emotion rises; the real childlikeness of the "Children's Song"; or the mingled pain and sweetness of "To Christina at Nightfall," epitomising life in its philosophy and reflecting it in its art. But it is unnecessary to go further; and this last little poem (I will not do it violence by extracting any part of it) is perhaps the most complete vindication of our poet's theories. Never surely were impressions so vivid conveyed with a touch at once so firm and tender; never were thought and feeling so intense rendered with such gracious homeliness.

_An Irish Group_

The spirit of poetry is native to Ireland. It awakened there in the early dawn, and has hardly slumbered in two thousand years. Probably before the Christian era it had become vocal; and as long as twelve hundred years ago it had woven for the garment of its thought an intricate and subtle prosody. You would think it had grown old in so great a time. You would almost expect to find, in these latter days, a pale and mournful wraith of poetry in the green isle. You would look for the symbol of it in the figure of some poor old woman, like the legendary Kathleen ni Houlihan, who is supposed to incarnate the spirit of the country. But even while you are looking it will happen with you as it happened before the eyes of the lad in the play by Mr Yeats. The bent form will straighten and the old limbs become lithe and free, the eyes will sparkle and the cheeks flush and the head be proudly lifted. And when you are asked, "Did you see an old woman?" you will answer with the boy in the play:

I did not; but I saw a young girl, and she had the walk of a queen.

So it is with the later poetry of Ireland. One would not guess, in the more recent lyrics, that these singers are the heirs of a great antiquity. Their songs are as fresh as a blade of grass: they are as new as a spring morning, as young and sweet as field flowers in May. They partake of youth in their essence; and they would seem to proceed from that strain in the Irish nature which has always adored the young and beautiful, and which dreamed, many centuries ago, a pagan paradise of immortal youth which has never lost its glamour:

Where nobody gets old and godly and grave, Where nobody gets old and crafty and wise, Where nobody gets old and bitter of tongue.

Doubtless we owe this air of newness largely to the rebirth of literature in the Isle. When we say that poetry has never slumbered there, we get as near to the truth as is possible; it seems always to have been quick, eager and spontaneous, and never to have drowsed or faded. But there was a black age when it was smitten so hard by external misfortune that it nearly died. It was early in the nineteenth century when, as Dr Hyde tells, "The old literary life of Ireland may be said to come to a close amidst the horrors of famine, fever and emigration." All that Dr Hyde and Lady Gregory have done to build up the new literary life of their land cannot be fully realized yet. But out of their labours has surely sprung the movement which we call the Irish Literary Renaissance--a movement in which, disregarding cross currents, the detached observer would include the whole revival, whether popular or æsthetic. By fostering the Gaelic they have awakened in the people themselves a sense of the dignity of their own language and literature. By the translation of saga and romance, the patient gathering of folk-tale and fairy-lore, the search for and interpretation of old manuscripts, they have given to native poets a mass of material which is peculiarly suited to their genius. And since approximately the year 1890 they have seen their reward in the work of a band of brilliant writers. Romance is reborn in the novel; the poetry of the old saga blooms again in the lyric; and a healthy new development has given to Ireland what she never before possessed--a native drama.

Now it is true that the larger figures of the movement have receded a little; the one in whom the flame of genius burned most fiercely has passed into silence. And Synge being gone, there is no hand like his, cunning to modulate upon every string of the harp. There is no voice of so full a compass, booming out of tragic depths or shrilling satiric laughter or sweet with heroic romance; breathing essential poetry and yet rich with the comedy of life. It is a fact to make us grieve the more for that untimely end, but it is not a cause for despair. For there are many legatees of the genius of Synge. They are slighter figures--naturally so, at this stage of their career--but they belong, as he did, to the new birth of the nation's genius and they draw their inspiration directly from their own land.

Here we touch a constant feature of Irish poetry. Dr. Hyde tells that from the earliest times the bards were imbued with the spirit of nationality: that their themes were always of native gods and heroes, and that they were, in a sense, the guardians of national existence. The singers of a later day curiously resemble them in this. Sometimes it is a matter of outward likeness only, the new poets having drawn directly upon the stories which have been placed in their hands from the old saga. But much more often it is a rooted affinity--a thing of blood and nerve and mental fibre. Then, although the gods may bear another name and the heroes be of a newer breed and the national ideal may be enlarged, it is still with these things that the poets are preoccupied.

This has become to the scoffer a matter of jest, and to the grumbler a cause of complaint--that the Irish poet is obsessed by race. They say that they can guess beforehand what will be the mood, the manner and the subject of nine Irish poems out of ten. They are very clever people, so they probably could get somewhere near the mark. And they would naturally find themselves cramped in these narrow bounds. Religion and history and national ideals would give them no scope. But when they maintain that this is a radical defect, I am not at all convinced. I remember that many of the world's great books proceeded from an intense national self-consciousness; and I ask myself whether it may not be a law in the literary evolution of a people, as well as in their political development, that they proceed by way of a strong, free and proud spirit of nationality to something wider. The reply may be that that is a relatively early stage through which, in a normal literary progress, Ireland should have passed long since. True, but normal growth and advance have never been possible to her; and recalling the events of her history, it is something of a marvel that the literary genius should have survived at all.

In contrast with modern English poetry, impatient as it is to escape from tradition, these traits which mark a line of descent so clearly are the more striking. One may even smile a little at them--whimsically, as we do when we see a youth or a young girl reproducing the very looks and tones and gestures of an older generation. There is something comical in the unconscious exactitude of it. But the laugh comes out of the deeper sources of comedy. There lies below it, subconsciously perhaps, a profound sense of those things in life which are most precious and most enduring.

One of the gayer features of this family likeness is the persistence of a certain kind of satire. We know from Dr Hyde's _Literary History of Ireland_ that an important function of the ancient bards was to satirize the rivals and enemies of their chieftain. They had, of course, to sing his victories, to inspire and encourage his warriors and to weave into verse the hundreds of romances which had come down to them from times older still. But their equipment was not complete unless it included a good stinging power of ridicule; and the _ollamh_, or chief bard, was commonly required to castigate in this way the king of some other province who happened to have given offence. But it is not to be supposed that the rival _ollamh_ would remain silent under the punishment inflicted on his lord; and one can imagine the battle of wits which would follow. Or, if we need any assurance as to the caustic power of the bard, it may be found in one quaint incident. The hero Cuchulain was ranged against Queen Maeve of Connacht in her famous raid into Ulster about the year 100 B.C. Maeve was astute as well as warlike, and when she had failed several times to induce Cuchulain to engage singly with one of her warriors, she sent to him a threat that her bards "would criticize, satirize and blemish him so that they would raise three blisters on his face" ... and Cuchulain instantly consented to her wish.

I cannot guess how many blisters have been raised by Irish satirists since that date, but I know the art has not died out. There are modern practitioners of it. Synge made the national susceptibility smart; and yet his satire, to the mere onlooker, would seem sympathetic enough. So, too, with Miss Susan Mitchell. She pokes fun at her compatriots with perfect good humour and we cannot believe that they would be annoyed by it. But you never can tell. Perhaps the witty philosophy of "The Second Battle of the Boyne" would not appeal to an Ulster Volunteer; and it is conceivable that even a Nationalist might resent the sly shaft at the national pugnacity. The opening stanza tells about an old man, whose name of portent is Edward Carson MacIntyre. His little grandchild runs in to him from the field carrying a dark round thing that she has found, and she trundles it along the floor to the old man's feet.

Now Edward Carson MacIntyre Was old, his eyes were dim, But when he heard the crackling sound, New life returned to him. "Some tax-collector's skull," he swore, "We used to crack them by the score."

"Why did you crack them, grandpapa?" Said wee Victoria May; "It surely was a wicked thing These hapless men to slay." "The cause I have forgot," said Mac, "All I remember is the crack."

.....

"And some men said the Government Were very much to blame; And I myself," says MacIntyre, "Got my own share of fame. I don't know why we fought," says he, "But 'twas the devil of a spree."

Again it is possible (though hardly probable one would think) that Mr George Moore does not really enjoy the fun so cleverly poked at him in the stanzas, "George Moore Comes to Ireland." Safe in our own detachment, the criticism seems delicious, brightly hitting off the personality which has grown so familiar in Mr Moore's work, and especially in "Hail and Farewell": the delightful garrulity, the disconcerting candour, the intimacy and naïve egoism, and the perfectly transparent what-a-terror-I-was-in-my-youth air. The speaker in the poem is, of course, Mr Moore himself; and it will be seen how cunningly the author has caught his attitude, particularly to the work of Mr W. B. Yeats--

I haven't tried potato cake or Irish stew as yet; I've lived on eggs and bacon, and striven to forget A naughty past of ortolan and frothy omelette.

.....

But W. B. was the boy for me--he of the dim, wan clothes; And--don't let on I said it--not above a bit of pose; And they call his writing literature, as everybody knows.

If you like a stir, or want a stage, or would admirèd be, Prepare with care a naughty past, and then repent like me. My past, alas! was blameless, but this the world won't see.

When Miss Mitchell's satire is engaged on personalities in this way, it has a piquancy which may obscure the subtler flavour of it. But the truth is that it is often literary in a double sense, both in subject and in treatment. So we may find a theme of considerable general interest in the world of literature, treated in the allusive literary manner which has so much charm for the booklover. And to that is added a racy and vigorous satirical touch. Thus, for instance, is the question of Synge's _Playboy_ handled. Ridicule is thrown on the stupid rage with which it was received, and on the folly which generalized so hotly from the play to the nation, deducing wild nonsense against a whole people and its literature because the man who killed his father in the story is befriended by peasants. Here is a snatch of it:

I can't love Plato any more Because a man called Sophocles, Who lived in distant Attica, Wrote a great drama _Oedipus_, About a Greek who killed his da. I know now Plato was a sham, And Socrates I brush aside, For Phidias I don't care a damn, For every Greek's a parricide.

So, too, comes the burlesque touch in the "Ode to the British Empire":