Chapter II: Part 2

Perhaps the most damaging criticism (if true) of the _vers libre_ school of today is that the standard which most of its professors set themselves is not a very high one; with rhythmic freedom so dearly bought, one expects a more intricate system of interlacing implications than in closer bound poetry. Natural rhythms need no hunting; there is some sort of rhythm in every phrase you write, if you break it up small enough and make sufficient allowances for metric resolutions. There is often a queer, wayward broken-kneed rhythm running through whole sentences of standard prose. The following news item has not had a word changed since I found it in _The Daily Mirror_.

Jóhn Fráin
Of Bállyghaderéen
Was indícted at Roscómmon for the múrder of his fáther;
He báttered his fáther, an óld man, to deáth with a poúnder;
The júry foúnd him unáble to pléad
And hé was commítted
Tó an as´ylum.

One doesn’t “listen” when reading prose, but in poetry or anything offered under that heading a submerged metre is definitely expected. Very few readers of Mr. Kipling’s “Old Man Kangaroo” which is printed as prose, realize that it is written in strict verse all through and that he is, as it were, pulling a long nose at us. The canny _vers librist_ gets help from his printer to call your attention to what he calls “cadence” and “rhythmic relations” (not easy to follow) which might have escaped you if printed as prose; _this_ sentence, you’ll find, has its thumb to its nose.

XVI

MOVING MOUNTAINS

Perhaps some people who buy this book will be disappointed at not being told the correct way of writing triolets and rondeaux. Theirs is the same practical type of mind that longs to join a Correspondence School of Art and learn the formulas for drawing a washer-woman or trousers or the stock caricature of Mr. Winston Churchill.

But poetry is not a science, it is an act of faith; mountains are often moved by it in the most unexpected directions against all the rules laid down by professors of dynamics--only for short distances, I admit; still, definitely moved. The only possible test for the legitimacy of this or that method of poetry is the practical one, the question, “Did the mountain stir?”

XVII

LA BELLE DAME SANS MERCI

The psalmist explains an outburst of sorrowful poetry as due to a long suppression of the causes of his grief. He says, “I kept silent, yea, even from good words. My heart was hot within me and while I was thus musing, the fire kindled, and at the last I spake with my tongue.” So it was I believe with Keats in the composition of this compellingly sorrowful ballad. Sir S. Colvin’s “Life of Keats” gives the setting well enough. We do not know exactly what kindled the fire but I am inclined to think with Sir S. Colvin, that Keats had been reading a translation ascribed to Chaucer from Alan Chartier’s French poem of the same title. The poet says:--

“I came unto a lustie greene vallay
Full of floures ...
... riding an easy paas
I fell in thought of joy full desperate
With great disease and paine, so that I was
Of all lovers the most unfortunate ...”

Death has separated him from the mistress he loved.... We know that Keats’ heart had been hot within for a long while, and the suppressed emotional conflict that made him keep silent and muse is all too plain. He has a growing passion for the “beautiful and elegant, graceful, silly, fashionable and strange ... MINX” Fanny Brawne; she it was who had doubtless been looking on him “as she did love” and “sighing full sore,” and this passion comes into conflict with the apprehension, not yet a certainty, of his own destined death from consumption, so that the Merciless Lady, to put it baldly, represents both the woman he loved and the death he feared, the woman whom he wanted to glorify by his poetry and the death that would cut his poetry short. Of shutting “her wild, wild eyes with kisses four” which makes the almost intolerable climax to the ballad, he writes in a journal-letter to his brother George in America, with a triviality and a light-heartedness that can carry no possible conviction. He is concealing the serious conditions of body and of heart which have combined to bring a “loitering indolence” on his writing, now his livelihood; he does not want George to read between the lines; at the same time it is a relief even to copy out the poem. George knows little of Fanny beyond the purposely unprepossessing portraits of her that John himself has given, but the memory of their beloved brother Tom’s death from consumption is fresh in the minds of both. George had sailed to America not realizing how ill Tom had been, John had come back tired out from Scotland, to find him dying; he had seen the lily on Tom’s brow, the hectic rose on his cheek, his starved lips in horrid warning gaping, and, as the final horrible duty, had shut his brother’s wild staring eyes with coins, not kisses. Now Fanny’s mocking smile and sidelong glance play hide and seek in his mind with Tom’s dreadful death-mask. It was about this time that Keats met Coleridge walking by Highgate Ponds and it is recorded that Keats, wishing with a sudden sense of the mortality of poets, to “carry away the memory” of meeting Coleridge, asked to press his hand. When Keats had gone, Coleridge, turned to his friend Green and said, “There is death in that hand.” He described it afterwards as “a heat and a dampness”--but “fever-dew” is Keats’ own word.

There are many other lesser reminiscences and influences in the poem, on which we might speculate--Spenser’s “Faery Queen,” the ballad of Thomas the Rhymer, Malory’s “Lady of the Lake,” Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” with its singing maiden and the poet’s honey-dew, traceable in Keats’ “honey wild and manna dew,” an echo from Browne “Let no bird sing,” and from Wordsworth “her eyes are wild”; but these are relatively unimportant.

History and Psychology are interdependent sciences and yet the field of historical literary research is almost overcrowded with surveyors, while the actual psychology of creative art is country still pictured in our text-books as Terra Incognita, the rumoured abode of Phoenix and Manticor. The spirit of adventure made me feel myself a regular Sir John Mandeville when I began even comparing Keats’ two descriptions of Fanny as he first knew her with the lady of the poem, noting the “tolerable” foot, the agreeable hair, the elfin grace and elvish manners, in transformation: wondering, did the Knight-at-arms set her on his steed and walk beside so as to see her commended profile at best advantage? When she turned towards him to sing, did the natural thinness and paleness which Keats noted in Fanny’s full-face, form the association-link between his thoughts of love and death? What was the real reason of the “kisses four”? was it not perhaps four because of the painful doubleness of the tragic vision--was it extravagant to suppose that two of the kisses were more properly pennies laid on the eyes of death?

The peculiar value of the ballad for speculation on the birth of poetry is that the version that we know best, the one incorporated in the journal-letter to America, bears every sign of being a very early draft. When Keats altered it later, it is noteworthy that he changed the “kisses four” stanza to the infinitely less poignant:--

... there she gazed and sighèd deep,
And here I shut her wild sad eyes--
So kissed asleep.

Sir S. Colvin suggests that the kisses four were “too quaint”: Keats may have told himself that this was the reason for omitting them, but it is more likely that without realizing it he is trying to limit the painful doubleness: the change of “wild wild eyes” which I understand as meaning “wild” in two senses, elf-wild and horror-wild, to “wild sad eyes” would have the same effect.

In writing all this I am sorry if I have offended those who, so to speak, prefer in their blindness to bow down to wood and stone, who shrink from having the particular variety of their religious experience analyzed for them. This section is addressed to those braver minds who can read “The Golden Bough” from cover to cover and still faithfully, with no dawning contempt, do reverence to the gods of their youth.

XVIII

THE GENERAL ELLIOTT

It is impossible to be sure of one’s ground when theorizing solely from the work of others, and for commenting on the half-comedy of my own, “The General Elliott,” I have the excuse of a letter printed below. It was sent me by an American colonel whose address I do not know, and if he comes across these paragraphs I hope he will understand that I intended no rudeness in not answering his enquiries.

This is the poem:--

THE GENERAL ELLIOTT

He fell in victory’s fierce pursuit,
Holed through and through with shot,
A sabre sweep had hacked him deep
Twixt neck and shoulderknot ...

The potman cannot well recall,
The ostler never knew,
Whether his day was Malplaquet,
The Boyne or Waterloo.

But there he hangs for tavern sign,
With foolish bold regard
For cock and hen and loitering men
And wagons down the yard.

Raised high above the hayseed world
He smokes his painted pipe,
And now surveys the orchard ways,
The damsons clustering ripe.

He sees the churchyard slabs beyond,
Where country neighbours lie,
Their brief renown set lowly down;
_His_ name assaults the sky.

He grips the tankard of brown ale
That spills a generous foam:
Oft-times he drinks, they say, and winks
At drunk men lurching home.

No upstart hero may usurp
That honoured swinging seat;
His seasons pass with pipe and glass
Until the tale’s complete.

And paint shall keep his buttons bright
Though all the world’s forgot
Whether he died for England’s pride
By battle, or by pot.

And this is the letter:

“April, 1921.

“_My dear Mr. Graves_,--

“Friday, I had the pleasure of reading your lines to “The General
Elliott” in _The Spectator_. Yesterday afternoon, about sunset, on
returning across fields to Oxford from a visit to Boar’s Hill, to
my delight and surprise I found myself suddenly confronted with the
General Elliott himself, or rather the duplicate presentment of
him--nailed to a tree. But could it be the same, I asked. He did
not grip the tankard of brown ale that spills a generous foam--nor
did his seasons seem to pass with pipe and glass--and alas, nor did
paint keep his tarnished buttons bright. In spite of your
assertion, is the general’s tale not already complete? Was he not
(like me) but a “temporory officer”? Or have I perhaps seen a
spurious General Elliott? He _should_ not die; the post from which
he views the world is all too lonely for his eyes to be permitted
to close upon that scene, albeit the churchyard slabs do not come
within the range.... May _I_ help to restore him?

“Sincerely,

“J---- B----

“Lt. Col. U. S. A.”

To which letter I would reply, if I had his address:--

_My dear Colonel B_----

... The poet very seldom writes about what he is observing at the
moment. Usually a poem that has been for a long while maturing
unsuspected in the unconscious mind, is brought to birth by an
outside shock, often quite a trivial one, but one which--as
midwives would say--leaves a distinct and peculiar birthmark on the
child.

The inn which you saw at Hinksey is the only “General Elliott” I
know, but I do not remember ever noticing a picture of him. I
remember only a board

+---------------------------+
| THE GENERAL ELLIOTT. |
| MORRELL’S ALES AND STOUT. |
+---------------------------+

and have never even had a drink there; but once I asked a man
working in the garden who this General Elliott was, and he answered
that really he didn’t know; he reckoned he was a fine soldier and
killed somewhere long ago in a big battle. As a matter of fact, I
find now that Elliott was the great defender of Gibraltar from 1779
to 1783, who survived to become Lord Heathfield; but that doesn’t
affect the poem. Some months after this conversation I passed the
sign board again and suddenly a whole lot of floating material
crystallized in my mind and the following verse came into my
head--more or less as I quote it:--

“Was it Schellenberg, General Elliott,
Or Minden or Waterloo
Where the bullet struck your shoulderknot,
And the sabre shore your arm,
And the bayonet ran you through?”

On which lines a poem resulted which seemed unsatisfactory, even
after five drafts. I rewrote in a different style a few days later
and after several more drafts the poem stood as it now stands.
There appear to be more than one set of conflicting emotions
reconciled in this poem. In the false start referred to, the 1. A.
idea was not properly balanced by 1. B. and 1. C., which
necessitated reconstruction of the whole scheme; tinkering wouldn’t
answer. I analyze the final version as follows:--

1.

A. Admiration for a real old-fashioned General beloved by his whole
division, killed in France (1915) while trying to make a broken
regiment return to the attack. He was directing operations from the
front line, an unusual place for a divisional commander in modern
warfare.

B. Disgust for the incompetence and folly of several other generals
under whom I served; their ambition and jealousy, their
recklessness of the lives of others.

C. Affection, poised between scorn and admiration, for an
extraordinary thick-headed, kind-hearted militia Colonel, who was
fond enough of the bottle, and in private life a big farmer. He was
very ignorant of military matters but somehow got through his job
surprisingly well.

2.

A. My hope of settling down to a real country life in the sort of
surroundings that the two Hinkseys afford, sick of nearly five
years soldiering. It occurred to me that the inn must have been
founded by an old soldier who felt much as I did then. Possibly
General Elliott himself, when he was dying, had longed to be back
in these very parts with his pipe and glass and a view of the
orchard. It would have been a kind thought to paint a signboard of
him so, like one I saw once (was it in Somerset or Dorset?)--“The
Jolly Drinker” and not like the usual grim, military scowl of
“General Wellington’s” and “General Wolfe’s.”

B. I ought to have known who Elliott was because, I used once to
pride myself as an authority on military history. The names of
Schellenberg, Minden, Malplaquet, The Boyne (though only the two
middle battles appear on the colours as battle honours) are
imperishable glories for the Royal Welch Fusilier. And the finest
Colonel this regiment ever had, Ellis, was killed at Waterloo; he
had apparently on his own initiative moved his battalion from the
reserves into a gap in the first line.

3.

A. My own faith in the excellent qualities of our national
beverage.

B. A warning inscription on a tomb at Winchester over a private
soldier who died of drink. But his comrades had added a
couplet--“An honest soldier ne’er shall be forgot, Whether he died
by musket or by pot.”

There are all sorts of other sentiments mixed up, which still elude me, but this seems enough for an answer....

Yours sincerely,

R. G.--(late Captain R. W. F.)

Poe’s account of the series of cold-blooded deliberations that evolved “The Raven” is sometimes explained as an attempt in the spirit of “Ask me no questions, and I’ll tell you no lies,” to hoodwink a too curious Public. A juster suggestion would be that Poe was quite honest in his record, but that the painful nature of the emotions which combined to produce the poem prompted him afterwards to unintentional dishonesty in telling the story. In my account of “The General Elliott” there may be similar examples of false rationalization long after the event, but that is for others to discover: and even so, I am not disqualified from suggesting that the bird of ill omen, perching at night on the head of Wisdom among the books of a library, is symbolism too particularly applicable to Poe’s own disconsolate morbid condition to satisfy us as having been deducted by impersonal logic.

It is likely enough that Poe worked very hard at later drafts of the poem and afterwards remembered his deliberate conscious universalizing of an essentially personal symbolism: but that is a very different matter from pretending that he approached “The Raven” from the first with the same cold reasoning care that constructed, for instance, his Gold-Bug cipher.

XIX

THE GOD CALLED POETRY

A piece with this title which appeared in my “Country Sentiment” was the first impulse to more than one of the main contentions in this book, and at the same time supplies perhaps the clearest example I can give of the thought-machinery that with greater luck and cunning may produce something like Poetry. I wrote it without being able to explain exactly what it was all about, but I had a vision in my mind of the God of Poetry having two heads like Janus, one savage, scowling and horrible, the face of Blackbeard the Pirate, the other mild and gracious, that of John the Evangelist. Without realizing the full implication of the symbolism, I wrote:-

Then speaking from his double head
The glorious fearful monster said,
“I am _Yes_ and I am _No_
Black as pitch and white as snow;
Love me, hate me, reconcile
Hate with love, perfect with vile,
So equal justice shall be done
And life shared between moon and sun.
Nature for you shall curse or smile;
A poet you shall be, my son.”

The poem so far as I can remember was set going by the sight of ... a guard of honour drilling on the barrack-square of a camp near Liverpool! I was standing at the door of the Courts-Martial room where I was shortly to attend at the trial of a deserter (under the Military Service Act) who had unsuccessfully pleaded conscientious objection before a tribunal and had been in hiding for some weeks before being arrested. Now, I had been long pondering about certain paradoxical aspects of Poetry and, particularly, contrasting the roaring genius of Christopher Marlowe with that of his gentle contemporary Shakespeare; so, standing there watching the ceremonial drill, I fancifully made the officer in command of the guard, a young terror from Sandhurst, into a Marlowe strutting, ranting, shouting and cursing--but making the men _move_; then I imagined Shakespeare in his place. Shakespeare would never have done to command a guard of honour, and they would have hated him at Camberley or Chelsea. He would have been like a brother-officer who was with me a few weeks before in this extremely “regimental” camp; he hated all the “sergeant-major business” and used sometimes on this barrack square to be laughing so much at the absurd pomposity of the drill as hardly to be able to control his word of command. I had more than once seen him going out, beltless, but with a pipe and a dog, for a pleasant walk in the country when he should really have been on parade. In France, however, this officer was astonishing: the men would do anything for him and his fighting feats had already earned him the name of _Mad Jack_ in a shock-division where military fame was as fugitive as life. This brother-officer, it is to be noted, was a poet, and had a violent feeling against the Military Service Act. I wondered how he would behave if he were in my place, sitting on the Court-Martial; or how would Shakespeare? Marlowe, of course, would thunder “two years” at the accused with enormous relish, investing the cause of militarism with a magnificent poetry. But Shakespeare, or “Mad Jack”?

That night in the quarters which I had once shared with “Mad Jack,” I began writing:--

_“I begin to know at last,_
_These nights when I sit down to rhyme,_
_The form and measure of that vast_
_God we call Poetry...._

_ ... I see he has two heads_
_Like Janus, calm, benignant this,_
_That grim and scowling. His beard spreads_
_From chin to chin; this God has power_
_Immeasurable at every hour...._

_The black beard scowls and says to me_
_“Human frailty though you be_
_Yet shout and crack your whip, be harsh;_
_They’ll obey you in the end,_
_Hill and field, river and marsh_
_Shall obey you, hop and skip_
_At the terrour of your whip,_
_To your gales of anger bend._

_The pale beard smiles and says in turn_
_“True, a prize goes to the stern_
_But sing and laugh and easily run_
_Through the wide airs of my plain;_
_Bathe in my waters, drink my sun,_
_And draw my creatures with soft song;_
_They shall follow you along_
_Graciously, with no doubt or pain._”

_Then speaking from his double head, etc._

The rather scriptural setting of what the pale beard said was probably suggested by the picture I had formed in my mind of the conscientious objector, whom I somehow sympathetically expected to be an earnest Christian, mild and honest; as a matter of fact, he turned out to be the other kind, violent and shifty alternately. He was accordingly sentenced by Major Tamburlaine and Captains Guise and Bajazeth, to the customary term of imprisonment.

And by the way, talking of Marlowe and Shakespeare;--

Here ranted Isaac’s elder son,
The proud shag-breasted godless one
From whom observant Smooth-cheek stole
Birth-right, blessing, hunter’s soul.

XX

LOGICALIZATION

John King is dead, that good old man
You ne’er shall see him more.
He used to wear a long brown coat
All buttoned down before.

Apparently a simple statement, this rustic epitaph has for any sensitive reader a curiously wistful quality and the easiest way I can show the mixed feelings it stirs, is by supposing a typical eighteenth-century writer to have logicalized them into a polite epigram. The poem would appear mutilated as follows:--

Hereunder lies old John Brown’s honoured dust:
His worthy soul has flown to Heav’n we trust.
Yet still we mourn his vanished russet smock
While frowning fates our trifling mem’ries mock.

Many of the subtler implications are necessarily lost in the formal translation for in poetry the more standardized the machinery of logical expression, the less emotional power is accumulated. But the force of the words “he used to wear” is shown in more obvious opposition to the words “dead” and “good.” The importance of “good” will appear at once if we substitute some word like “ancient” for “good old” and see the collapse of the poetic fabric, still more if we change “good” to “bad” and watch the effect it has in our imaginations on the “you ne’er shall see him more,” the cut of his coat, and the reasons John King had for buttoning it. _Good_ John King wore a long brown coat because he was old and felt the cold and because, being a neat old man, he wished to conceal his ragged jacket and patched small-clothes. _Bad_ John King kept pheasants, hares, salmon and silver spoons buttoned for concealment under his. How did good John King die? A Christian death in bed surrounded by weeping neighbours, each begging a coat-button for keepsake. Bad John King? Waylaid and murdered one dark night by an avenger, and buried where he fell, still buttoned in his long brown coat.

The emotional conflict enters curiously into such one-strand songs as Blake’s “Infant Joy” from the _Songs of Innocence_, a poem over which for the grown reader the sharp sword of Experience dangles from a single horsehair. The formal version (which I beg nobody to attempt even in fun) logicalized in creaking sonnet-form would have the octave filled with an address to the Melancholy of Sophistication, the sestet reserved for:--

But thou, Blest Infant, smiling radiantly
Hast taught me etc, etc.

An immoral but far more entertaining parlour game than logicalization--perhaps even a profitable trade--would be to extract the essentials from some long-winded but sincere Augustan poem, disguise the self-conscious antitheses, modernize the diction, liven up the rhythm, fake a personal twist, and publish. Would there be no pundit found to give it credit as a poem of passion and originality? I hope this suggestion for a New-Lamps-for-Old Industry will not meet the eye of those advanced but ill-advised English Masters who are now beginning to supervise with their red-and-blue pencils the writing of English Poetry in our schools.

Now, the trouble about the use of logic in poetry seems not to be that logic isn’t a very useful and (rightly viewed) a very beautiful invention, but that it finds little place in our dreams: dreams are illogical as a child’s mind is illogical, and spontaneous undoctored poetry, like the dream, represents the complications of adult experience translated into thought-processes analogous to, or identical with, those of childhood.

This I regard as a very important view, and it explains, to my satisfaction at any rate, a number of puzzling aspects of poetry, such as the greater emotional power on the average reader’s mind of simple metres and short homely words with an occasional long strange one for wonder; also, the difficulty of introducing a foreign or unusual prosody into poems of intense passion: also the very much wider use in poetry than in daily speech of animal, bird, cloud and flower imagery, of Biblical types characters and emblems, of fairies and devils, of legendary heroes and heroines, which are the stock-in-trade of imaginative childhood; also, the constant appeal poetry makes to the childish habits of amazed wondering, sudden terrors, laughter to signify mere joy, frequent tears and similar manifestations of uncontrolled emotion which in a grown man and especially an Englishman are considered ridiculous; following this last, the reason appears for the strict Classicist’s dislike of the ungoverned Romantic, the dislike being apparently founded on a feeling that to wake this child-spirit in the mind of a grown person is stupid and even disgusting, an objection that has similarly been raised to the indiscriminate practice of psycho-analysis, which involves the same process.

XXI

LIMITATIONS

One of the most embarrassing limitations of poetry is that the language you use is not your own to do entirely what you like with. Times actually come when in the conscious stage of composition you have to consult a dictionary or another writer as to what word you are going to use. It is no longer practical to coin words, resurrect obsolete ones and generally to tease the language as the Elizabethans did. A great living English poet, Mr. Charles Doughty, is apparently a disquieting instance to the contrary. But he has lost his way in the centuries; he belongs really to the sixteenth. English has never recovered its happy-go-lucky civilian slouch since the more than Prussian stiffening it was given by the eighteenth century drill-sergeants.

It is intolerable to feel so bound compared with the freedom of a musician or a sculptor; in spite of the exactions of that side of the art, the poet cannot escape into mere rhythmic sound; there is always the dead load of sense to drag about with him. I have often felt I would like to be a painter at work on a still life, puzzling out ingenious relationships between a group of objects varying in form, texture and colour. Then when people came up and asked me: “Tell me, sir, is that a Spode jar?” or “Isn’t that a very unusual variety of lily?” I would be able to wave them away placidly; the questions would be irrelevant. But I can’t do that in poetry, everything _is_ relevant; it is an omnibus of an art--a public omnibus.

There are consolations, of course; poetry, to be appreciated, is not, like music, dependent on a middleman, the interpretative artist; nor, once in print, is it so liable to damage from accident, deterioration or the reproducer as the plastic arts.

XXII

THE NAUGHTY BOY

Bound up with the business of controlling the association-ghosts which haunt in their millions every word of the English language, there is the great mesmeric art of giving mere fancy an illusion of solid substance. The chief way this is done, and nobody has ever done it better than Keats, is constantly to make appeals to each of the different bodily senses, especially those more elementary ones of taste, touch, smell, until they have unconsciously built up a scene which is as real as anything can be. As an example of the way Keats rung the changes on the senses, take his “Song about Myself”:--

There was a naughty Boy
And a naughty boy was he
He ran away to Scotland
The people for to see
Then he found
That the ground
Was as hard,
That a yard
Was as long,
That a song
Was as merry,
That a cherry
Was as red--
That lead
Was as weighty,
That fourscore
Was as eighty,
That a door
Was as wooden
As in England--

So he stood in his shoes
And he wonder’d,
He wonder’d,
He stood in his shoes
And he wonder’d.

Here we have a succession of staccato notes, but in the “Eve of St. Agnes” or “Ode to Autumn” almost every phrase is a chord, the individual notes of which each strike a separate sense.

XXIII

THE CLASSIC AND ROMANTIC IDEAS

When Aristotle lays down that poets describe the thing that might be, but that the historian (like the natural historians above mentioned) merely describes that which has been, and that poetry is something of “more philosophic, graver import than history because its statements are of a universal nature” so far his idea of poetry tallies with our own. But when he explains his “might be” as meaning the “probable and necessary” according to our every-day experience of life, then we feel the difference between the Classical and Romantic conceptions of the art--Aristotle was trying to weed poetry of all the symbolic extravagances and impossibilities of the dream state in which it seems to have originated, and to confine it within rational and educative limits. Poetry was with him only an intuitive imitation of how typical men think and react upon each other when variously stimulated. It was what we might call the straight goods of thought conveyed in the traditional magic hampers; but there proved to be difficulties in the packing; the Classical ideal was, in practice, modified by the use of heroic diction and action, conventional indications to the audience that “imitation” was not realism, and that there must be no criticisms on that score; every one must “go under” to the hypnotic suggestion of the buskin and the archaic unnatural speech, and for once think ideally. For the same reason the Classical doctrine lays stress on the importance of the set verse-forms and the traditional construction of drama. For the benefit of my scientific readers, if my literary friends promise not to listen to what I am saying, I will attempt a definition of Classical and Romantic notions of Poetry:--

Classical is characteristic and Romantic is Metamorphic, that is, though they are both expressions of a mental conflict, in Classical poetry this conflict is expressed within the confines of waking probability and logic, in terms of the typical interaction of typical minds; in Romantic poetry the conflict is expressed in the illogical but vivid method of dream-changings.

The dream origin of Romantic Poetry gives it the advantage of putting the audience in a state of mind ready to accept it; in a word, it has a naturally hypnotic effect. Characteristic poetry, which is social rather than personal, and proudly divorced from the hit-and-miss methods of the dream, yet feels the need of this easy suggestion to the audience for ideal thinking; and finds it necessary to avoid realism by borrowing shreds of accredited metamorphic diction and legend and building with them an illusion of real metamorphism. So the Hermit Crab, and once it has taken up a cast-off shell to cover its nakedness, it becomes a very terror among the whelks. The borrowed Metamorphism is hardened to a convention and a traditional form, and can be trusted almost inevitably to induce the receptive state in an average audience wherever used. Such a convention as I mean is the May-day dream of the Mediaeval rhymed moralities or the talking beasts of the fabulists.

Sometimes, however, owing to a sudden adventurous spirit appearing in the land, a nation’s Classical tradition is broken by popular ridicule and the reappearance of young Metamorphic Poets. But after a little paper-bloodshed and wranglings in the coffee-houses, the Classical tradition reappears, dressed up in the cast-off finery of the pioneer Metamorphics (who have by this time been succeeded by licentious and worthless pyrotechnists), and rules securely again. It is only fair to observe that the Romantic Revivalist often borrows largely from some Classical writer so obscured by Time and corrupt texts as to seem a comparative Romantic. This complicated dog-eat-dog process is cheerfully called “The Tradition of English Poetry.”

There is an interesting line of investigation which I have no space to pursue far, in a comparison between the Classicism of Wit and the Romanticism of Humour.

Wit depends on a study of the characteristic reactions of typical men to typically incongruous circumstances, and changed little from Theophrastus to Joe Miller. It depends for its effect very largely on the set form and careful diction, e. g:--

A certain inn-keeper of Euboea, with gout in his fingers, returned to his city after sacrificing an Ox to Delphic Apollo.... The celebrated wit, Sidney Smith, one day encountered Foote the comedian, in the Mall.... An Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotchman agreed on a wager of one hundred guineas....

That is Classicism.

Romantic humour is marked by the extravagant improbability of dream-vision and by the same stereoscopic expression as in Romantic poetry.

Would Theophrastus have deigned to laugh at the _fabliau_ of “The Great Panjandrum himself with the little round button at top?” I think not. Our leading living Classical poet was recently set a Romantic riddle as a test of his humour, “What did the tooth-paste say to the tooth brush?” Answer: “Squeeze me and I’ll meet you outside the Tube.” The bard was angry. “Who on earth squeezes his tube of tooth-paste with his tooth brush? Your riddle does not hold water.” He could understand the fable convention of inanimate objects talking, but this other was not “the probable and necessary.”

XXIV

COLOUR

The naming of colours in poetry may be used as a typical instance of the circumspection with which a poet is forced to move. The inexperienced one drenches his poems in gold, silver, purple, scarlet, with the idea of giving them, in fact, “colour.” The old hand almost never names a colour unless definitely presenting the well-known childish delight for bright colours, with the aid of some other indication of childhood, or unless definitely to imply a notable change from the normal nature of the coloured object, or at least some particular quality such as the ripeness of the cherry in Keats’ song just quoted. But even then he usually prefers to find a way round, for the appeal to the sense of colour alone is a most insecure way of creating an illusion; colours vary in mood by so very slight a change in shade or tone that pure colour named without qualification in a poem will seldom call up any precise image or mood.

To extemporize a couple of self-conscious blackboard examples:--

I. “Then Mary came dressed in a robe that was green
And her white hands and neck were a sight to be seen.”

II. “Mary’s robe was rich pasture, her neck and her hands
Were glimpses of river that dazzled those lands.”

The first couplet has not nearly so much colour in it as the second, although in the first the mantle is definitely called green and the lady’s hands and neck, white, while in the second no colour is mentioned at all. The first robe is as it were coloured in a cheap painting-book; the green paint has only come off the cake in a thin yellowish solution and the painting-book instructions for colouring the hands and neck were “leave blank.” The second robe derives its far richer colour from the texture that the pasture simile suggests; the flesh parts get their whiteness from the suggestion of sun shining on water.

XXV

PUTTY

The conscious part of composition is like the finishing of roughly shaped briars in a pipe factory. Where there are flaws in the wood, putty has to be used in order to make the pipe presentable. Only an expert eye can tell the putty when it has been coloured over, but there it is, time will reveal it and nobody is more aware of its presence now than the man who put it there. The public is often gulled into paying two guineas for a well-coloured straight-grain, when a tiny patch of putty under the bowl pulls down its sentimental value to ten shillings or so.

It is only fair to give an example of putty in a poem of my own; in writing songs, where the pattern is more fixed than in any other form, putty is almost inevitable. This song started sincerely and cheerfully enough:--

Once there came a mighty furious wind
(So old worthies tell).
It blew the oaks like ninepins down,
And all the chimney stacks in town
Down together fell.
That was a wind--to write a record on,
to hang a story on,
to sing a ballad on,
To ring the loud church bell!
But for one huge storm that cracks the sky
Came a thousand lesser winds rustling by,
And the only wind that will make me sing
Is breeze of summer or gust of spring
But no more hurtful thing.

This was leading up to a final verse:--

Once my sweetheart spoke an unkind word
As I myself must tell,
For none but I have seen or heard
My sweetheart to such cruelty stirred
For one who loved her well.
That was a word--to write no record on,
to hang no story on,
to sing no ballad on,
To ring no loud church bell!
Yet for one fierce word that has made me smart
Ten thousand gentle ones ease my heart,
So all the song that springs in me
Is “Never a sweetheart born could be
So kind as only she.”

Half-way through this verse I was interrupted, and had to finish the poem consciously as best I could. On picking it up again, apparently I needed another middle verse of exactly the same sort of pattern as the first, to prepare the reader for the third. Searching among natural phenomena, I had already hit on drought as being a sufficiently destructive plague to be long remembered by old worthies. This would make the second verse.

So without more ado I started:--

Once there came a mighty thirsty drought
(So old worthies tell).
The quags were drained, the brooks were dried,
Cattle and sheep and pigs all died,
The parson preached on Hell.
That was a drought--to write a record on etc.

So far I had concealed the poverty of my inspiration well enough, I flattered myself, but here we were stuck, my self-conscious muse and I. What was a pleasing diminutive of _drought_?--Pleasant sunshine? Not quite; the thirstiness of nature doesn’t show in pleasant sunshine at all. So, knowing all the time that I was doing wrong, I took my putty knife and slapped the stuff on thick, then trimmed and smoothed over carefully:--

But for one long drought of world-wide note
Come a thousand lesser ones on man’s throat,
And the only drought for my singing mood
Is a thirst for the very best ale that’s brewed,
Soon quenched, but soon renewed.

In manuscript, the putty didn’t show, somehow, but I am ashamed to say I published the song. And in print, it seemed to show disgracefully. “It was the best butter,” said the _March Hare_. “It was the best putty,” I echoed, to excuse myself. But there is too much of it; the last half of the last verse even, is not all sound wood. This poem has been on my conscience for some time.

If spontaneous poetry is like the Genie from Aladdin’s Lamp, this conscious part of the art is like the assemblage of sheet, turnip-head, lighted candle and rake to make the village ghost.

As I were a trapesin’
To Fox and Grapes Inn
To get I a bottle of ginger wine
I saw summat
In they old tummut
And Lordie how his eyes did shine!

_Suffolk rhyme._
(_Cetera desunt_)

The Genie is the most powerful magic of the two, and surest of its effect, but the Turnip Ghost is usually enough to startle rustics who wander at night, into prayer, sobriety, rapid movement or some other unusual state.

XXVI

READING ALOUD

Though it is a sound principle that the poet should write as if his work were first of all intended to be repeated from mouth to mouth, recitation or reading aloud actually distracts attention from the subtler properties of a poem, which though addressed nominally to the ear, the eye has to see in black and white before they can be appreciated. A beautiful voice can make magic of utter nonsense; I have been taken in by this sort of thing too often. The eye is the most sophisticated organ of sense and is therefore the one to which the poet must make a final appeal in critical matters, but as limited an appeal as possible when he is engaged in the art of illusion. The universal use of printing has put too much work on the eye: which has learned to skip and cut in self-defence. Ask any one who has read CRIME AND PUNISHMENT the name of the hero. It is probable that he will remember the initial letter, possible that he will be able to repeat the whole name more or less recognizably, unlikely that he will be able to spell it correctly, almost certain that he will not have troubled to find out the correct pronunciation in Russian.

XXVII

L’ARTE DELLA PITTURA

A scientific treatise _could_, I suppose, be written on how to manipulate vowels and consonants so as to hurry or slow down rhythm, and suggest every different emotion by mere sound sequence but this is for every poet to find out for himself and practise automatically as a painter mixes his paints.

There was once an old Italian portrait painter, who coming to the end of his life, gathered his friends and pupils together and revealed to them a great discovery he had made, as follows:--

“The art of portrait painting consists in putting the High Lights in exactly the right place in the eyes.”

When I come to my death-bed I have a similarly important message to deliver:--

“The art of poetry consists in knowing exactly how to manipulate the letter S.”

XXVIII

ON WRITING MUSICALLY

In true poetry the mental bracing and relaxing on receipt of sensuous impressions, which we may call the rhythm of emotions, conditions the musical rhythm. This rhythm of emotions also determines the sound-texture of vowels and consonants, so that Metre, as schoolboys understand it when they are made to scan:--Friĕnds, Rōm|ans, count|rymēn, lĕnd mē|your eārs!, has in spontaneous poetry only a submerged existence. For the moment I will content myself by saying that if all words in daily speech were spoken at the same rate, if all stressed syllables and all unstressed syllables, similarly, were dwelt on for exactly the same length of time, as many prosodists assume, poetry would be a much easier art to practise; but it is the haste with which we treat some parts of speech, the deliberation we give to others, and the wide difference in the weight of syllables composed of thin or broad vowels and liquid or rasping consonants, that make it impossible for the Anglo-French theory of only two standardized sound values, long or short, to be reasonably maintained. A far more subtle notation must be adopted, and if it must be shown on a black-board, poetry will appear marked out not in “feet” but in convenient musical bars, with the syllables resolved into quaver, dotted crotchet, semibreve and all the rest of them. Metre in the classical sense of an orderly succession of iambuses, trochees or whatnot, is forced to accept the part of policeman in the Harlequinade, a mere sparring partner for Rhythm the Clown who with his string of sausages is continually tripping him up and beating him over the head, and Texture the Harlequin who steals his truncheon and helmet. This preparatory explanation is necessary because if I were to proclaim in public that “the poet must write musically” it would be understood as an injunction to write like Thomas Moore, or his disciples of today.

XXIX

THE USE OF POETRY

At this stage the question of the use of poetry to its readers may be considered briefly and without rhapsody. Poetry as the Greeks knew when they adopted the Drama as a cleansing rite of religion, is a form of psycho-therapy. Being the transformation into dream symbolism of some disturbing emotional crisis in the poet’s mind (whether dominated by delight or pain) poetry has the power of homoeopathically healing other men’s minds similarly troubled, by presenting them under the spell of hypnosis with an allegorical solution of the trouble. Once the allegory is recognized by the reader’s unconscious mind as applicable the affective power of his own emotional crisis is diminished. Apparently on a recognition of this aspect of poetry the Greeks founded their splendid emblem of its power--the polished shield of Perseus that mirrored the Gorgon’s head with no hurtful effect and allowed the hero to behead her at his ease. A well chosen anthology is a complete dispensary of medicine for the more common mental disorders, and may be used as much for prevention as cure if we are to believe Mr. Housman’s argument in “Terence, this is stupid stuff” no. LXII of his _Shropshire Lad_.

The musical side of poetry is, properly understood, not merely a hypnotic inducement to the reader to accept suggestions, but a form of psycho-therapy in itself, which, working in conjunction with the pictorial allegory, immensely strengthens its chance of success.

XXX

HISTORIES OF POETRY

The History of English Poetry is a subject I hope I shall never have to undertake, especially as I have grave doubts if there really is such a thing. Poets appear spasmodically, write their best poetry at uncertain intervals and owe nothing worth mentioning to any school or convention. Most histories of English Poetry are full of talk about “schools” or they concentrate on what they are pleased to call “the political tendencies” of poetry, and painfully trace the introduction and development in English of various set forms like the Sonnet, Blank Verse, and the Spenserian Stanza. This talk about politics I read as an excuse of the symmetrical-minded for spreading out the Eighteenth Century poets famous in their day to a greater length than the quality of their work can justify. As for the history of metric forms it is, in a sense, of little more vital importance to poetry than the study of numismatics would appear to an expert in finance.

* * * * *

An undergraduate studying English Literature at one of our oldest universities was recently confronted by a senior tutor, Professor X, with a review of his terminal studies and the charge of temperamentalism.

“I understand from Prof. Y,” he explained, “that your literary judgments are a trifle summary, that in fact you prefer some poets to others.”

He acknowledged the charge with all humility.

XXXI

THE BOWL MARKED DOG

“I am sorry, nephew, that I cannot understand your Modern Poetry. Indeed I strongly dislike it; it seems to me mostly mere impudence.”

“But, uncle, you are not expected to like it! The old house-dog goes at dinner time to the broken biscuits in his bowl marked DOG and eats heartily. Tomorrow give him an unaccustomed dainty in an unaccustomed bowl and he will sniff and turn away in disgust. Though tempted to kick him for his unrecognizing stupidity, his ingratitude, his ridiculous preference for the formal biscuit, yet refrain!

“The sight and smell associations of the DOG BOWL out of which he has eaten so long have actually, scientists say, become necessary for bringing the proper digestive juices into his mouth. What you offer him awakes no hunger, his mouth does not water; he is puzzled and insulted.

“But give it to the puppies instead; they’ll gobble it up and sniff contemptuously afterwards at the old dog and his bowl of biscuit.”

XXXII

THE ANALYTIC SPIRIT

In England, since--shall we name the convenient date 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition?--the educated reading public has developed analytic powers which have not been generally matched by a corresponding development of the co-ordinating arts of the poet. Old charms will no longer hold, old baits will no longer be taken; the reader has become too wary. The triumph of the analytic spirit is nowhere better shown than in these histories of Poetry just mentioned, where the interest in fake poetry is just as strong or even stronger than the interest in poetry itself.

As Religions inevitably die with their founders, the disciples having either to reject or formularize their master’s opinions, so with Poetry, it dies on the formation of a poetic school. The analytic spirit has been, I believe, responsible both for the present coma of religion among our educated classes and for the disrespect into which poetry and the fine arts have fallen. As for these histories of poetry, the very fact that people are interested in failures of the various “Schools” to universalize the individual system of a master, is a great discouragement to a poet trying by every means in his power to lay the spirit of sophistication.

But the age of poetry is not yet over if poets will only remember what the word means and not confuse it with acrostic-making and similar ingenious Alexandrianisms. Earlier civilizations than ours have forgotten the necessarily spontaneous nature of the art, and have tried (for lack of any compelling utterance) to beat the sophisticated critics of their day by piling an immense number of technical devices on their verses, killing what little passion there was, by the tyranny of self-imposed rules. The antithetical couplet of Pope or the Ovidian hexameter-and-pentameter are bad enough, but the ancient Irish and Welsh bards were even more restricted by their chain-rhymes and systems of consonantal sequence, the final monstrosity being the Welsh _englyn_ of four lines, governed by ninety-odd separate rules. The way out for Poetry does not lie by this road, we may be sure. But neither on the other hand do we yet need to call in the Da-da-ists.

XXXIII

RHYMES AND ALLITERATION

Rhymes properly used are the good servants whose presence gives the dinner table a sense of opulent security; they are never awkward, they hand the dishes silently and professionally. You can trust them not to interrupt the conversation of the table or allow their personal disagreements to come to the notice of the guests; but some of them are getting very old for their work.

The principle governing the use of alliteration and rhyme appear to be much the same. In unsophisticated days an audience could be moved by the profuse straight-ahead alliteration of _Piers Plowman_, but this is too obvious a device for our times. The best effects seem to have been attained in more recent poetry by precisely (if unconsciously) gauging the memory length of a reader’s mental ear and planting the second alliterative word at a point where the memory of the first is just beginning to blurr; but has not quite faded. By cross-alliteration on these lines a rich atmosphere has resulted and the reader’s eye has been cheated. So with internal and ordinary rhyme; but the memory length for the internal rhyme appears somewhat longer than memory for alliteration, and for ordinary rhyme, longer still.

XXXIV

AN AWKWARD FELLOW CALLED ARIPHRADES

Aristotle defended poetical “properties” that would correspond nowadays with “thine” and “whensoe’er” and “flowerets gay,” by saying “it is a great thing indeed to make proper use of these poetic forms as also of compounds and strange words. The mere fact of their not being in ordinary speech, gives the diction a non-prosaic character.” One Ariphrades had been ridiculing the Tragedians on this score; and Aristotle saw, I suppose, that a strange diction has for the simple-minded reader a power of surprise which enables the poet to work on his feelings unhindered, but he did not see that as soon as a single Ariphrades had ridiculed what was becoming a conventional surprise, a Jack-in-the-Box that every one expected, then was the time for the convention to be scrapped; ridicule is awkwardly catching.