Chapter II (5)

Aubrey Beardsley's mental and moral sickness at first showed itself only in a contempt for the conventions of art and in especial for the conventions of proportion and prospective. It has sometimes been said that it is as absurd to rebel against the moral law as against the law of gravitation. The first revolt of a consumptive young architectural draughtsman with an extraordinary talent for line was against natural law--against the law of proportion. The first drawings which brought him any notoriety were extraordinary for two things--their admirable draughtsmanship and their deliberate eccentricities of proportion. He drew nothing but monsters--men eight feet tall with microscopic heads, women with arms as long as their entire bodies. The revolt against the moral law came later--the selection of hideously obscene subjects, the painful obsession with sex. Then came the sick boy's discoveries that after all beauty was no more in the weird ugliness he had celebrated than it was in the smug conventions of sentimental Victorian painting. A few weeks before his death Aubrey Beardsley found the immortal abiding place of beauty. Received into the Church, Aubrey Beardsley repented bitterly his misuse of his talents, and plead with his friends to destroy all his immoral drawings, of which he was now thoroughly ashamed. "Burn all my bawdy pictures," he wrote--a dying prayer which his pagan friends utterly disregarded. He had striven to find beauty in sin, and he knew that this seeking was in vain. For now he had found beauty, now he had learned to see in the lamp which is beauty the light which is God.

I have said that Aubrey Beardsley was the only true decadent of all the literary and artistic rebels of the eighteen-nineties. Certainly no intelligent person can call Ernest Dowson a decadent. It is true that there have been critics, such as Mr. Blakie Murdoch, who have tried to throw a halo of wickedness over this unfortunate young poet, to make him seem to be a sort of English Paul Verlaine. But Victor Plarr, who knew him intimately for many years, has told us that except for the tendency to drink too much, which was one of the causes of his death, Ernest Dowson was a simple, wholesome young man, who smoked large black cigars and was fond of playing practical jokes on his friends.

Ernest Dowson's religious poems have never seemed to me to be particularly convincing. I will read you one of the best of them and then tell you why it does not seem to me to ring true. It is called "Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration."

NUNS OF THE PERPETUAL ADORATION

BY ERNEST DOWSON

Calm, sad, secure; behind high convent walls,
These watch the sacred lamp, these watch and pray:
And it is one with them when evening falls,
And one with them the cold return of day.

These heed not time; their nights and days they make
Into a long, returning rosary,
Whereon their lives are threaded for Christ's sake:
Meekness and vigilance and chastity.

A vowed patrol, in silent companies,
Life-long they keep before the living Christ.
In the dim church, their prayers and penances
Are fragrant incense to the Sacrificed.

Outside, the world is wild and passionate;
Man's weary laughter and his sick despair
Entreat at their impenetrable gate:
They heed no voices in their dream of prayer.

They saw the glory of the world displayed;
They saw the bitter of it, and the sweet;
They knew the roses of the world would fade,
And be trod under by the hurrying feet.

Therefore they rather put away desire,
And crossed their hands and came to sanctuary;
And veiled their heads and put on coarse attire:
Because their comeliness was vanity.

And there they rest; they have serene insight
Of the illuminating dawn to be:
Mary's sweet Star dispels for them the night,
The proper darkness of humanity.

Calm, sad, secure; with faces worn and mild:
Surely their choice of vigil is the best?
Yea! for our roses fade, the world is wild;
But there, beside the altar, there, is rest.

Now, this is a very beautiful poem. But there is nothing in it which might not have been written by a Protestant. And there is one note in it which seems to me to be absolutely contrary to the Catholic idea of the religious life--and that is the note of melancholy. Ernest Dowson insists that the nuns are sad as well as calm and secure, he insists upon the fact that their faces are "worn and mild." Also he apparently thinks of the convent as a place of inaction, instead of as a place of ordered and energetic activity. Therefore, this poem, beautiful as it is, seems to me to be in no way Catholic in spirit or in expression.

But while I do not feel that the authenticity of Ernest Dowson's Catholicity can be proved by his deliberately religious poems, I do think that in nearly every poem which this so-called decadent wrote it is possible to find indications if not of piety, at least of normality, sanity, wholesomeness and virtue.

There are, and there have always been since sin first came into the world, genuine decadents. That is, there have been writers who have devoted all their energies and talents to the cause of evil, who have consistently and sincerely opposed Christian morality, and zealously endeavored to make the worst appear the better cause. But every poet who lays a lyric wreath at a heathen shrine, who sings the delights of immorality, or hashish, or suicide, or mayhem, is not a decadent: often he is merely weak-minded. The true decadent, to paraphrase a famous saying, wears his vices lightly, like a flower. He really succeeds in making vice seem picturesque and amusing and even attractive.

Now, this is exactly what Ernest Dowson never could do. He was a member, it will be remembered, of that little band of aesthetic poets which was called The Rhymers Club. With them he spent certain evenings at the Cheshire Cheese, and there he drank absinthe. This is a significant and symbolic fact. Not in some ominous Parisian cellar, but beneath the beamed ceiling of a most British inn, still stained with smoke from the pipe of Dr. Samuel Johnson, among thick mutton chops and tankards of musty ale, in a cloud of sweet-scented steam that rose from the parted crust of the magnificent pigeon pie, Ernest Dowson drank absinthe.

There is splendid symbolism in Ernest Dowson's act of drinking absinthe in the Cheshire Cheese. The wickedness in his poems and his prose sketches is always as affected and incongruous as is that pallid medicine in any honest tavern.

He tried hard to be pagan. In the manner of Mr. Swinburne, he exclaims: "Goddess the laughter-loving, Aphrodite, Aphrodite, befriend! Let me have peace of thee, truce of thee, golden one, send!" And not even Mr. Swinburne ever wrote lines so absolutely unconvincing. He said "I go where the wind blows, Chloe, and am not sorry at all." And from this lyric no one can fail to get the impression that the poet was very sorry indeed.

Ernest Dowson was an accomplished artist in words, a delicate sensitive and graceful genius, but he was no more fitted to be a pagan than to be a policeman. And so, in his best known poems, he uses all the pagan properties, all the splendors of sin's pageantry, but his theme, his overmastering thoughts, is a soul-shaking lament for his stained faithfulness, for his treason to the Catholic ideal of chastity.

Ernest Dowson could not write poems that really were pagan. He was not a true decadent. And for this undoubtedly he now is thanking God. He had his foolish hours: he sometimes misused his gift of song. But--and this is the important thing about it--he did not know how to misuse it successfully. The real Ernest Dowson was not the picturesque vagabond about whom Mr. Blackie Murdoch has written, but the man who with all his heart praised "meekness and vigilance and chastity," who "was faithful" in his pathetic ineffective fashion, who knew at last the fidelity of his eternal Mother, who, in Katherine Bregy's beautiful words, "laid his broken body in consecrated ground and followed his bruised soul, with her pitiful asperging prayers."

In considering the eccentricities of "The Savoy" and "The Yellow Book," in considering all the literary and artistic artificialities of the eighteen-nineties, it seems to me that one real value of the cult of peacocks and green carnations, of artificial paganism and sophisticated loveliness, is that it furnishes a splendidly contrasting background for the white genius of Lionel Johnson.

This aristocratic and wealthy young Oxford graduate might so easily have become an aesthete and nothing more! His environment, many of his friendships, even his discipleship, as it may be called, to Walter Pater might naturally be expected to cause him to develop into a mere dilettante, interested only in delicate and superficial beauty, having, by way of moral code, an earnest desire to live up to his blue chine.

Instead, what was Lionel Johnson? He was a sound and accomplished scholar, writing Latin hymns that for their grace and authentic ecclesiastical style might stand beside those of Adam of St. Victor or of St. Bernard himself. Nor was he less deft in his manipulation of the style of the classical authors, as many graceful lines show. And this, remember, was at a time when Latin was most absolutely a dead language to most young English poets, whose attention was given entirely to the picturesque attractions of the Parisian _argot_ beloved of the decadents.

The aesthetic movement of the eighteen-nineties was merely a search for beauty--merely a revolt against Victorian agnosticism and materialism. Johnson found the adventure which all the young poets and artists were seeking; he knew that the only answer to their question was the Catholic Faith.

The atmosphere of the literary world in which he lived seems to have had no effect upon Lionel Johnson's mind and soul. He was "of the centre" not "of the movement." He gladly accepted the gracious traditions of English poetry. He followed the time-hallowed conventions of his craft as faithfully as did Tennyson. He had no desire to toss Milton's wreath either to Whitman or to Baudelaire.

But these virtues are perhaps chiefly negative. Almost the same thing might be said of many poets, of the late Stephen Phillips, for example, who certainly was an honest traditionalist, uninfluenced by decadence or aestheticism. But Lionel Johnson had also (what Stephen Phillips lacked) a great and beautiful philosophy. And his philosophy was true. He was so fortunate as to hold the Catholic Faith. This Faith inspired his best poems, shines through them and makes them, as the word is used, immortal.

While Lionel Johnson was not exclusively a devotional and religious poet, the theme which he sang with the most splendid passion and the most consummate art was the Catholic Church. This was the great influence in his life; it is to this that his poetry owes most of its enduring beauty. But there were other influences, there were other things which claimed, to a less degree, his devotion. One of these is Ireland.

Lionel Johnson's chivalrous loyalty to Ireland was not without its quaint humor. He was descended from the severe and brutal general who savagely put down the insurrection of 1798. But he by no means shared his ancestor's views in Irish matters; he was an enthusiastic advocate of Irish freedom and a devoted lover of everything Irish.

Although he hailed with delight the revival of ancient Celtic customs and the ancient Celtic language, Lionel Johnson was far from being what we have come to call a neo-Celt. He did not spend his time in writing elaborately annotated chants in praise of Cuchulain and Deidre and Oengus, and other creatures of legend; the attempt to reestablish Ireland's ancient paganism seemed to him singularly unintelligent. He saw that the greatest glory of Ireland is her fidelity to the Catholic Faith, a fidelity which countless cruel persecutions have only strengthened. And so when he wrote of Ireland's dead, he did not see them entering into some Ossianic land of dead warriors. Instead he wrote:

For their loyal love, nought less,
Than the stress of death sufficed:
Now with Christ, in blessedness,
Triumph they, imparadised.

Similarly, in what is generally considered to be his greatest poem, the majestic and passionate "Ireland," his most joyous vision is that of the "Bright souls of Saints, glad choirs of intercession from the Gael," and he concludes with this splendid prayer:

O Rose! O Lily! O Lady full of grace!
O Mary Mother! O Mary Maid! hear thou.
Glory of Angels! Pity, and turn they face,
Praying thy Son, even as we pray thee now,
For thy dear sake to set thine Ireland free:
Pray thou thy Little Child!
Ah! who can help her, but in mercy He?
Pray then, pray thou for Ireland, Mother mild!
O heart of Mary! Pray the Sacred Heart:
His, at Whose word depart
Sorrows and hates, home to Hell's waste and wild.

Lionel Johnson was, as Miss Louise Imogen Guiney has written, "a tower of wholesomeness in the decadence which his short life spanned." His purely secular poems are best when his Catholic Faith, seemingly without his willing it, unexpectedly shines out in a splendor of radiant phrases. And of all his poems, those which constitute his most important contributions to literature, are those which are directly the fruit of his religious experiences or of his love for Ireland. He was not so great a poet as Francis Thompson. He never wrote a poem that will stand comparison with "The Hound of Heaven" or the "Orient Ode." But the sum of the beauty in all his work is great, and his poetry is, on the whole, more companionable than that of Francis Thompson; it is more human, more personal, more intimate.

And to at least two of Lionel Johnson's poems, the adjective "great" may, by every sound critical standard, safely be applied. One of these is the "Dark Angel," a masterly study of the psychology of temptation, written in stanzas that glow with feeling, that are the direct and passionate utterance of the poet's soul, and yet are as polished and accurate as if their author's only purpose had been to make a thing of beauty. The other is "Te Martyrum Candidatus," a poem which may without question be given its place in any anthology which contains "Burning Babe," "The Kings," and Crashaw's "Hymn to St. Teresa." It has seemed to me that these brave and beautiful lines, which have for their inspiration the love of God, and echo with their chiming syllables the hoof-beats of horses bearing knights to God's battles, might serve as a fitting epitaph for the accomplished scholar, the true poet, the noble and kindly Catholic gentleman who wrote them.

SWINBURNE AND FRANCIS THOMPSON

I feel a certain diffidence in approaching the subject of Francis Thompson before such an audience as this. For I know that there are many among you who could teach me much about that great poet, the modern laureate of the Catholic Church. I suppose that many of you have studied the profound philosophy of "From the Night of Forebeing," "The Mistress of Vision" and "The Hound of Heaven," have curiously examined the beautiful verbal intricacies of "Sister Songs" and "The Orient Ode," and are familiar with the triumphs and the tragedies of Francis Thompson's brief life.

But there may be some among you to whom Francis Thompson is little more than a name. To such let me say that Francis Thompson was born of Catholic parents in Lancashire, England, in 1859, that he died, fortified by the last rites of the Church he loved, at the age of forty-eight, that most of his life was spent in poverty and ill-health, that he was subject to terrible and persistent temptations, but remained faithful to the Church, and made in the Church's honor some of the greatest poems in the English language. I compare him to a contemporary poet, Algernon Charles Swinburne, chiefly because Swinburne was the poet of Paganism as Francis Thompson was the poet of Catholicity, because their careers present interesting resemblances as well as interesting contrasts, and because both are what is called "Victorian" poets.

Now, in this connection let me ask you if you ever seriously considered the advantages of living in a Republic, of living, for example, in the United States of America instead of in England? There is, for example, the recurrent excitement of changing the president once every four years, of having every so often a new chief executive on whom to vent your enthusiastic affection or your enthusiastic loathing. A president is a wonderful safety-valve for the pent-up feelings of a nation. The suffrage, the right to vote, must be a golden privilege indeed, otherwise so many members of the wiser sex would not pursue it with such zeal and devotion.

But the advantage of living in a Republic to which I desire particularly to call your attention this afternoon is the advantage of escaping from the custom of calling periods of artistic and literary endeavor after the sovereigns who happened to rule during them. You never hear James Whitcomb Riley or Edwin Markham spoken of as Wilsonian poets. But you do hear Ben Jonson called an Elizabethan poet, which is just as absurd. You never hear Bryant and Whittier called poets of the Lincoln period. But you do hear such utterly dissimilar poets as Algernon Charles Swinburne and Francis Thompson spoken of as Victorian poets.

Why is this? Why is the Elizabethan era? Why should the age that glowed with the deathless flames of Shakespeare's genius, that echoed with Ben Jonson's lyric laughter, that was pierced by the poignant music of Robert Southwell, the martyred Jesuit poet, be named after Elizabeth, the persecutor of the saints, the vain and selfish and cruel woman who then occupied England's throne, to England's lasting shame?

And why are we to-day considering, in Swinburne and Francis Thompson, two Victorian poets? Why Victorian? Of course, Queen Victoria was a good wife and mother, a noble gentlewoman. I think that we all like everything that we know about Queen Victoria except perhaps her politics.

But why should the name of this estimable woman be used to designate the intellectual and spiritual life of the time during which she ruled, a life from which she was as remote as was the Queen of Sheba? Why should we give the placid name Victorian to that time of violent sin and violent virtue, of passionate infidelity and passionate faith, that time which produced the Darwinian theory, and the Oxford Movement, which produced the cruel reign of dogmatic science and the Catholic renascence, which produced the poetry of Algernon Charles Swinburne and the poetry of Francis Thompson?

The combination of these two names may strike you as unusual. You know that Swinburne was what is called a Pagan, that he hated all forms of Christianity and especially the Catholic Church. You know also that Francis Thompson was the Church's poet-laureate, the greatest Catholic poet of modern times. And you wonder why Swinburne and Francis Thompson should be mentioned in the same breath.

Well, great as are the differences between these poets, the resemblances are striking. It is true that when Swinburne was at the height of his fame, Francis Thompson was running errands and holding horses in the London streets, his genius practically unknown. Yet he was famous before Swinburne's death, and there are other points of contact beside that of time between this militant pagan and this militant Christian.

In the first place, both were poets. Both had genuine talent, and both had a strong desire to do the work of the poet, that is, to find beauty and to bind beauty with a chain of linked rhyme.

Now the poet's search for beauty often is difficult, and it was especially difficult in London in the latter days of the nineteenth century. All the poets were seeking for beauty, but the scientists had been industriously trying to drive beauty out of the world. Of course, they had not succeeded, any more than the French Atheist succeeded a few years ago in carrying out his blasphemous threat of putting out that light in the heavens. But they had thrown a veil over the face of beauty, and made beauty hard to see except for those who looked with the strong eyes of faith.

How the poets worried! Where had beauty flown? Browning thought that beauty was in humanity. So he searched for beauty in humanity, and in his search made many interesting and noble poems. Tennyson, that magnificent artist in words, thought that beauty was somewhere in evolution. And he at last descended to the most supine of intellectual attitudes, his philosophy being merely that somehow good would be the final goal of all, that everything would come out all right in the end. And he uttered the most absurd statement ever made by any poet in the history of the world when he said "There lies more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds."

All the poets were seeking after beauty. When Swinburne, full of Greek and Latin and talent and conceit, left Oxford University to begin a military career, he was seeking for beauty. And when Francis Thompson was selling matches and shoestrings in the London gutters, he was seeking for beauty.

Swinburne knew that the life around him was dull and materialistic. The scientists had said that the old ethical and spiritual values were dead. There could be no beauty in religion, for the scientists had killed religion, putting up in its place their own artificial dogma. Beauty and light had gone out of life.

So Swinburne decided, logically enough, that since beauty was not in his own land and age, he must seek it in the ages that had gone before. So he wrote not of modern scientific, dull, Victorian London, but of ancient Venice, of ancient Rome, of ancient Greece. He lamented the departure of Venus and Apollo and Dionysus and all the old gods and goddesses, and the loss of the glories of the spacious classic days.

But Swinburne failed. Musical as are his rhymes and rhythms, lofty as was his imagination, he failed. He failed to write convincingly of medieval Rome and ancient Venice because he could not understand what made these cities beautiful and great--their faith. He failed to write convincingly of ancient Greece because he could never be that rare and in its way splendid thing, an honest pagan.

No one can be a real pagan nowadays. Swinburne is not to be blamed because he failed to be a real pagan, but because he tried to be a pagan. The ancient Greeks who lived before the time of Christ were brave and simple men, their chief virtues were courage, patriotism, obedience to the law, democracy and zeal for art. These virtues were in time taken over and multiplied by the Catholic Church, which has preserved all of pagan culture that deserved preservation. Swinburne rejected these virtues, probably thinking them to be Christian innovations, and the pagans of whom he wrote were sensual, decadent things, like the degenerate Greeks who lived in the days of Roman supremacy. And Swinburne finally reached his true level in the poem in which he speaks by the mouth of Julian the Apostate, the poor maniac who rejected Christianity and struggled vainly to restore the worship of the legendary gods of his heathen ancestors.

Francis Thompson, like Swinburne, sought for beauty. And Francis Thompson found beauty. Francis Thompson found beauty because he knew where to look. He found beauty in prosaic scientific modern London, he found beauty in the city streets. He found beauty right around the corner, in a certain little Church around the corner which is also the big Church around the world. He found beauty where she is and always will be, in the Catholic faith.

Swinburne felt his lack of faith. He bitterly resented the veil that his infidelity had put between himself and beauty. And therefore he attacked faith, and railed with all the venom of a disappointed man against Christ, his Saints and His Church.

Swinburne longed for the days of pagan license and revelry, when Pan and Apollo dwelt with man. Francis Thompson knew that God was with man, that no street was so humble, no house so poor as not to know the tread of His feet. Instead of longing for a return of the old imaginary gods, he saw the beauty of God evident in such harsh thoroughfares as Charing Cross, and brooding even over the muddy waters of the Thames. He wrote:

THE KINGDOM OF GOD

The angels keep their ancient places,
Turn but a stone and start a wing,
'Tis ye, 'tis your estranged faces
That miss the many splendoured thing.

But when so sad thou canst not sadder
Cry:--and upon thy so sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder
Pitched between Heaven and Charing Cross.

Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter,
Cry,--clinging Heaven by the hems;
And lo, Christ walking on the water
Not of Gennesareth but Thames!

A dangerous test of a poet's genius is to be found in his attitude towards the simplest and smallest things. It is for this reason that any poet of talent may safely write about a mountain or a waterfall or a sunset, but only a very great poet should ever write about children. The poets know this, and in spite of his paganism and sophistication Swinburne often tried to prove his genius by making excursions into the enchanted land of childhood. He wrote one poem which he considered a very important achievement, reprinting it in many editions of his poetry. And in that poem Swinburne did accomplish something well worthy of accomplishment, he expressed an interesting and beautiful idea. Now it would be absurd to take this poem of Swinburne's and compare it with one of Francis Thompson's masterpieces, such as "The Hound of Heaven." But it surely is fair to compare it to a poem by Francis Thompson on the same theme.

You must consider how it is that a poet writes a poem. There are said to be poets who are struck on the head by a great inspiration, and let that inspiration trickle down through the shoulder and arm and out the end of a pen upon a piece of paper. There are said to be such poets, although in my rather extensive observation of poets I have never met one. The usual method is for a poet to meditate on a subject, to set down on paper all the most beautiful ideas which his subject suggests to him.

Well, let us imagine Swinburne confronted by the miracle of childhood. Knowing that his reputation must stand or fall by this attempt, he endeavors to record all the splendid emotions and noble comparisons which childhood suggests to him. And what is the result? What is the climax of thought in his poem? The climax is this: Swinburne says that the baby about whom he is writing, who happens to be wearing a plush cap, looks like a moss rose bud in its soft sheath.

This is a pleasant idea. Undoubtedly it pleased the baby's mother and the baby herself when she grew up. But these are scarcely the words that shall tremble on the lips of time.

Francis Thompson was great enough to do the obvious thing. When he was drawing inspiration from the miracle of childhood, he did not think about plush caps and moss roses. Instead, he did the most natural and the most beautiful thing. He thought about the Infant Jesus. Childhood to him suggested Him Who made childhood Divine. And in "Ex Ore Infantium" he gave that thought immortal expression.

But in comparing the plush cap of the baby to a moss rose, Swinburne did not think he had said the last word on the subject. As the result of prolonged meditation on childhood, he produced another poem in which he really did accomplish something remarkable. He found a rhyme for "babe."

Now, I doubt if any of you know the rhyme for "babe," unless you happen to be familiar with this poem of Swinburne's or with those of Chaucer, who also used this word. There is such a word and Swinburne ingeniously introduces it towards the end of his poem. He writes:

Babe, if rhyme be none
For that small sweet word,
Babe, the sweetest one
Ever heard,
Right it is and sweet
Rhyme should not keep true
Time with such a sweet
Thing as you ...
... None can tell in metre
Fit for ears on earth
What sweet star grew sweeter
At your birth.
Wisdom doubts what may be;
Hope with smile sublime
Trusts, but neither, baby
Knows the rhyme.
Wisdom lies down lonely;
Hope keeps watch from far;
None but one seer only
Sees the star.
Love alone, with yearning
Heart for astrolabe
Takes the star's height, burning
O'er the babe.

Compare this, not with Francis Thompson's "Hound of Heaven," but with another poem on childhood, and from that poem decide which of the two poets had the real inspiration. Compare it with Francis Thompson's poem to his god-child. In this he imagines himself as having died, and he imagines that the little boy has died too. So he gives the little boy a kind of working plan of Heaven--he tells him where he may find him after he goes to Heaven. He writes:

And when, immortal mortal, droops your head,
And you, the child of deathless song, are dead;
Then, as you search with unaccustomed glance
The ranks of Paradise for my countenance,
Turn not your tread along the Uranian sod,
Among the bearded counsellors of God;
For if in Eden as on earth are we
I sure shall keep a younger company:
Pass where beneath their ranged ganfalons
The starry cohorts shake their shielded suns,
The dreadful mass of their enridged spears;
Pass where majestical the Eternal peers
The stately choice of the great saintdom meet,--
A silvern congregation, globed complete
In sandalled shadow of the Triune feet:
Pass by where wait, your poet wayfarer,
Your cousin clusters, emulous to share
With you the roseal lightnings burning mid their hair;
Pass the crystalline sea, the Lampads Seven:--
Look for me in the nurseries of Heaven.

I have said that Francis Thompson was great and simple enough to do the obvious thing. Take the mere matter of how to act and what to say in regard to a crucifix, for example. When that admirable poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti was before a crucifix, or had it in mind as the theme of a poem, he would admire the carving, and write a colorful romantic ballad about the man who made it, the man who sold it, the people through whose hands it had passed. The result would be a beautiful poem, but it would be elaborate, artificial, the result of ingenious effort. When Swinburne was before a crucifix, he was reminded of the false delights for which he longed, and which he thought Christianity had driven from the world. So he would rave and blaspheme against the crucifix and all that it represented--producing verse that is technically excellent, but artificial and unnatural. But when Francis Thompson had a crucifix before him or in mind, he would do the simplest and most natural thing in the world. He would say his prayers. And because he was a genius he said them in words that are, as we use the term of literature, immortal.

A NOTE ON THOMAS HARDY

Of Elizabeth-Jane who is the heroine of "The Mayor of Casterbridge," if heroine this tale may be said to have, we learn that "she did not cease to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when the one to whom such unbroken tranquillity had been accorded in the adult stage was she whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain." This is a rather Jacobean sentence, in form not typical of Hardy, but in thought it is greatly significant. It is likely that Hardy himself wondered at the happiness in which he left Elizabeth-Jane, reassuring himself perhaps by the conviction that her "unbroken tranquillity" was the exception which proved the rule her youth had taught her.

For it cannot be denied that according to the Hardy philosophy, implicit in his tales and explicit in his poems, sorrow is the rule and joy the exception. In no other writing is he more clearly a fatalist than in "The Mayor of Casterbridge"; in no other book does he urge more unmistakably his belief that men and women are but helpless puppets in the hands of mischievous fate, that good-will and courage and honesty are brittle weapons for humanity's defense.

The evident fact that Thomas Hardy is a fatalist is responsible for the common and absurd idea that he is a pagan. Now, there is no philosophy--with the exception of the robust and joyous philosophy of the Middle Ages--with which Hardy's philosophy contrasts more strongly than it does with paganism, that is, with the pagan philosophy of the spacious classic day. When we speak of a pagan of ancient Greece or a pagan of ancient Rome we have in mind a brave patriotic man, with a vivid sense of the responsibilities and privileges of citizenship, and the habit of making the most of life, of enjoying to the full the years allowed him on earth. This last characteristic rose from the pagan fatalism, the belief that man should make sure of such visible and tangible delights as were available, because there was no counting on the possibility of happiness or even of existence after death. This was the state of mind which succeeded the earlier romantic polytheism, and was the natural successor of a religious system which attributed to the gods power over mankind but neither love nor justice. So the typical fatalism was materialistic; it was based, of course, upon despair, but its manifestations were not desperate. Rather there was a general conspiracy of joy, not dissimilar to that of a popular religious cult which arose in the United States during the last half century. Disease and sorrow and death were to be generally ignored; mankind was expected to eat, drink and be merry, and good manners required silence as to the explanatory "for to-morrow we die."

However hollow may have been mirth of the pagan fatalists, it was at any rate loud and general. And there can be no doubt that by a kind of self-hypnosis these fatalists were able to give their joy a convincingness and a continuity--they "were always drunken," in Baudelaire's sense. Artificial and in essence tragic as was their state of mind, he would be a false historian who pictured these pagan fatalists as people obsessed with the idea of death and the unkindness of the gods; as holding with anything like unanimity the belief that "happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain."

But this is Hardy's dominant idea; it is a belief on which he insists with a propagandist enthusiasm which sometimes mars the artistic value of his work. No Scotch or English members of some stricter offshoot of a strict Calvinistic sect ever was more firmly convinced that this earth is a vale of tears, or more eager to spread this belief. Every writer, I think, deals with the characters who are his creations as he imagines God to deal with mankind. This is why literary criticism is closer to theology than to any other science; this is why we cannot claim to understand any writer unless we know what he thinks about God. And the God of Hardy's belief, as indicated in his long succession of stories and poems, is no more the remote, indifferent, sensuous, self-sufficient Deity of the pagan fatalist than he is the loving and omnipotent Father of true Christian belief. Instead he is the stern, avenging Deity of the Hebrews, without pity, accessible to no intercessors, the Deity whom we find to-day fearfully worshiped by adherents of the bleakest forms of Puritanism. It would be a misnomer to call Hardy's philosophy a Christian fatalism, but it is a fatalism which is the basis of the religious systems of many who since 1517 have professed and called themselves Christians.

I am frequently impressed, as I read Hardy, with what I may call the evangelical cast of his mind. He is so intent on announcing his discovery that mankind is fallible, unhappy, helpless, undesirable. The people of Hardy's stories are so virtueless, for the most part, that the reader can readily believe that Hardy is determined to show that they deserve no pity from the extraordinary Deity who is also a creature of Hardy's imagination, and that in his own way the novelist (like his greatest Puritan predecessor in literature) is trying to "justify the ways of God toward man." And "The Mayor of Casterbridge," with its lovely pictures of Wessex hills and valleys and its most unlovely pictures of Wessex men and women, irresistibly recalls lines from a certain popular evangelical hymn--the lines which tell of a place "where every prospect pleases and only man is vile."

Hardy is a true realist in that he reports faithfully the habits and manners of people with whom he is familiar, and in that--unlike Mr. Dreiser and other claimants to the title realist--he has humor and admits it to his chronicles. Also he admits good impulses to the lives he creates, although his philosophy seldom lets him cause these impulses to be translated into successful action. He is poet enough to have a sense of beauty and humor inherent in phrases. "But I know that 'a's a banded teetotaler," says Solomon Longways, "and that if any of his men be ever so little overtook by a drop he's down upon 'em as stern as the Lord upon the jovial Jews." And what living poet could write a simpler and more moving study of the immemorial subject, death, than Mother Cuxsom's brief elegy on Mrs. Henchard? "Well, poor soul, she's helpless to hinder that or anything now. And all her shining keys will be took from her, and her cupboards opened; and little things a' didn't wish seen, anybody will see; and her wishes and ways will all be as nothing."

A student of literary motives can easily trace the working of Hardy's philosophy in this book--can see it guiding the novelist's pen, changing his purposes, forcing him to deal harshly, sometimes, with characters whom a writer must come to love as a father his children. Was not Matthew Henchard's rehabilitation to be complete, and the tale to end with a prosperous reunited family? Probably, but Thomas Hardy (unlike Victor Hugo when he handled a similar plot in "Les Miserables") had his monster theory to reckon with. So Elizabeth-Jane must be Newson's child, Lucette must maleficently tangle lives, and Henchard must die in a road-side hut. And even the goldfinch must starve in its paper-covered cage.

And how Hardy enjoys the moments when he escapes his obsession! He had as much fun when Henchard and Farfrae wrestled on the top floor of the granary as Blackmore did in the Homeric fisticuffs of "Lorna Doone." When Hardy dressed up Lucetta and sent her out to plead with Henchard he had the same sporting excitement that Thackeray had when he prepared Becky Sharp for her conquests. At such times Hardy seems momentarily to accept the existence of free will, with its tremendous dramatic possibilities. These are his moments of greatest creative power, of highest poetry, of clearest discernment. They occur more frequently and they last longer in his latest writings. The War has seen to that.

Copyright, 1917, by Boni & Liveright. Reprinted from their Modern
Library Edition by special arrangement.

MADISON JULIUS CAWEIN

(1865-1914)

America has had two great poets of nature--two men called to the task of reflecting in a mirror of words the beauty of meadow and forest. One of these was William Cullen Bryant. The other was Madison Julius Cawein.

As Bryant drew his inspiration from the wooded hills and fertile valleys of his native New England, so Madison Cawein drew his from the meadows of the South, especially those of Kentucky. The term "nature poet" has been used in derision of some writers who lavish sentimental adulation upon every bird and flower, who pretend an admiration for things of which they have no real understanding. But Madison Cawein knew what he was writing about; he had an amazing, we might say a perilous, intimacy with nature. And he had no vague love for all nature--he knew too much for that. True, he knew nature in her delicate and in her splendid aspect--he saw the barberry redden in the lanes, he feasted his eyes on "the orange and amber of the marigold, the terra-cottas of the zinnia flowers," he learned lovely secrets from whippoorwill, swallow, and cricket, and he could see drowsy Summer rocking the world to sleep in her kindly arms. But also he knew (with a knowledge which only Algernon Blackwood among contemporary writers has equaled) that nature has her cruel and terrible aspects. He knew that the daily life of bird and beast--yes, and the daily life of flower and tree--is as much a tragedy as a comedy. So (in the sonnet-sequence he wrote by the Massachusetts shore in 1911) he saw a certain grove as "a sad room, devoted to the dead"; he felt the relentlessness of the ocean mists invading the shore; he saw an autumn branch staining a pool like a blur of blood; he made us share his genuine terror of deserted mill-streams where "the cardinal-flower, in the sun's broad beam, with sudden scarlet takes you by surprise," and of dark and menacing swamps, ominous with trembling moss, purple-veined pitcher-plants and wild grass trailing over the bank like the hair of a drowned girl. His studies of nature were accurate enough to satisfy any botanist--Miss Jessie B. Rittenhouse has said that one might explore the Kentucky woods and fields with a volume of Cawein's poems as a handbook and identify many a lowly and exquisite bower first recognized in song. But his poems were not mere catalogues of natural beauties, any more than they were sentimental idealizations of them. They were, to repeat a phrase, reflections of nature, reflections painted rather than photographed, but interpreted rather than romanticized.

Madison Cawein had not long to wait for the recognition which he enjoyed throughout his life. Born on March 23rd, 1865, in Louisville, Kentucky, and educated in the high school of his native city, he published his first book, "Blooms of the Berry," in 1887. "The Triumph of Music" followed in 1888, and soon after its publication Mr. William Dean Howells wrote of the young Southern poet words that brought him to the attention of a large audience, words that applied as truly to his posthumous book, "The Cup of Comus," as to the rhymes of his boyhood. In the _North American Review_, Mr. Howells wrote:

"He has the gift, in a measure that I do not think surpassed in any poet, of touching some smallest or commonest thing in nature and making it live from the manifold associations in which we have our being, and glow thereafter with an inextinguishable beauty."

From 1887 to the time of his death, scarcely a year passed that did not see the publication of a new book of poems by Madison Cawein. Of course, this caused him to be accused of writing too much, of giving the world poems written hastily and carelessly. There was some justice in this accusation; undoubtedly he would have written better poems if he had written fewer. Mr. H. Houston Peckham, of Purdue University, in an article which appeared in the _South Atlantic Quarterly_ soon after Cawein's death, told a story which is significant. The poet was about to destroy one of his lyrics. A friend rescued it and sent it to a magazine. When it appeared in print, it was shown to Cawein, who failed to recognize it as his own work. He had utterly forgotten it in the course of a few months.

Now, for a poet to forget the children of his own fancy is a sign that he is writing too much. And yet Madison Cawein was not so prolific as a list of his more than a score of volumes would indicate. For many of his books contained poems that had already appeared between covers--this is true of the Macmillan volume called "Poems" and of many others. He seemed to desire to produce a book annually--but fortunately for his art he did not believe it necessary that every volume should contain only new poems.

In one of the most famous of his essays, Ruskin wrote:

"It is, I hope, now made clear to the reader in all respects that the pathetic fallacy is powerful only so far as it is pathetic, feeble so far as it is fallacious, and, therefore, that the dominion of Truth is entire, over this as over every other natural and just state of the human mind."

Madison Cawein was a loyal subject of Truth, the accuracy of his descriptions of nature has seldom been called into question. As to the pathetic fallacy and his relation to it--that might be the subject of an interesting study. At any rate it may be said that he seldom indulged in that common and thoroughly normal fallacy by which the poet sees nature weep because of his own sorrow or smile because of his own joy. Instead, he was filled with the gloom native to the swamp which he beheld, or with mirth that he caught from the lyric ecstasy of the dawn.

He was a sympathetic student of humanity, as every true poet must be, and he resented the statement that mankind had no place in his poetic vision. But he was at his best when he wrote not of reasonable humanity but of the world of animal and vegetable things that have no reason but have, to the poet, qualities stranger and more interesting than reason. He wrote well of a ploughman, but better of the field in which the ploughman worked. He wrote well of a house full of men and women and children, but better of an empty house with its myrtle run wild, its paths hidden by flowering grass, and swallows flying through its broken windows. He subordinated himself to wild nature, letting her speak to the world through him, instead of merely going to her for metaphors appropriate to his own emotional experiences. And this, while it resulted in beautiful poetry, was a dangerous thing to do. "Nature, poor stepdame, cannot slake my drouth," said another poet, "never did any milk of hers once bless my thirsting mouth." Madison Cawein got, it seems, little gratitude from Nature, although to do her honor he had curiously distorted the true vision of man's place in the universe. When his frail body was put in the frozen earth a few years ago, it seemed to many of his friends and critics that he had died at the beginning of a new phase of his genius, that his latest poems, vague and tentative as some of them were, showed that he was looking at the world with a new sense of proportion, and that hereafter his whole scheme of things would be differently arranged--man being the center of the visible universe, and not, as in Blackwood's novels, a wondering visitor to a world of plants and beasts.

But death intervened, and what he might have written can only be guessed from such poems as "The Song of Songs" and "Laus Deo" and "The Iron Age" in "The Cup of Comus." What he accomplished was worth doing, and he did it well. He put the meadows and forests of the South into poems as hauntingly beautiful as themselves.

FRANCIS THOMPSON

(1859-1907)

Poetic sensations are rare in our time. For a quarter of a century we have enjoyed a regular succession of excellent books of verse--verse graceful, fanciful, musical, interesting, and sometimes noble. Perhaps the general average of verse is higher to-day than it has previously been in the history of English letters. But there have been few books of verse which have caused the heart of the public to beat faster, few books of verse which critics have carried in their pockets for weeks at a time to show to their friends.

There has been one such book, however. In 1893 was published "Poems," by Francis Thompson. And this volume (as even Thompson's enemies cannot deny) excited, favorably or unfavorably, all its reviewers. Some hailed it as a work of surpassing genius, some found it irritatingly bad. But all felt about it passionately; no one damned it with faint praise and no one praised it with faint damns.

Francis Thompson was a Roman Catholic and his faith gave him the themes, the imagery, often the phraseology, and the inspiration of all his best poetry. Yet his first most admiring critics were men by no means in sympathy with his religion. H. D. Traill, a North of Ireland Protestant, welcomed him as "a new poet of the first rank." Richard Le Gallienne called him "Crashaw born again, but born greater." John Davidson said "Thompson's poetry at its highest attains a sublimity unsurpassed by any other Victorian poet." And Arnold Bennett wrote of Thompson's second book "Sister Songs," "My belief is that Francis Thompson has a richer natural genius, a finer poetical equipment, than any poet save Shakespeare."

Of course there were hostile critics. Some of them were annoyed by the poet's phraseology, especially his use of words of Latin derivation and of forms which he coined for his own use. But most of them were annoyed by his themes; they resented the intrusion of a flaming Catholicity among the delicate artificial philosophies of the poets of the nineties, and their resentment found voice in attacks that recalled the brave old days of "This will never do" and "Back to your gallipots!" That this resentment continued, in some minds, even after the poet had died and his work had been received as an inalienable part of the world's treasury of English song is shown by the savagery of Austin Harrison's "review" of Everard Meynell's "Life of Francis Thompson" in the _English Review_ in 1913.

Francis Thompson was born on the 16th of December, 1859, at Preston, Lancashire, England. In his boyhood he was taught at the school of the Nuns of the Cross and Passion, and in 1870 he entered Ushaw College. After seven years at Ushaw--years marked by one great tragedy, the decision by those in authority that his "nervous timidity" unfitted him for the priesthood--he went to Owens College as a student of medicine. His years in Manchester taught him little medicine, but they taught him other things destined to affect his life. Francis Thompson read books, but they were not surgical treatises. They were books of poetry, of essay, of theology, of scholastic philosophy. His love for music increased, and he attended more concerts than lectures. Also in Manchester he acquired his besetting sin--the opium habit. He took the drug first in the form of laudanum, during a painful illness. He continued to take it throughout many years of his life. It staved off the assaults of tuberculosis, it prevented his success in medicine or any other methodical and exact career, and thus removed what might have been rivals to the art of poetry. But, as his biographer says, opium "dealt with him remorselessly as it dealt with Coleridge and all its consumers. It put him in such constant strife with his own conscience that he had ever to hide himself from himself, and for concealment he fled to that which made him ashamed, until it was as if a fig-leaf were of necessity plucked from the Tree of the Fall. It killed in him the capacity for acknowledging those duties to his family and friends, which, had his heart not been in shackles, he would have owned with no ordinary ardor."

Francis Thompson's years immediately after his failure in his medical examinations were spent in London, in poverty and ill health. But no man of genius can long remain hidden. In a strange and romantic manner, some of his magnificent poetry and prose came to the attention of Wilfred and Alice Meynell. They gave to the world the blessing of acquaintance with Francis Thompson's work, and to the poet they gave, in addition to more material benefits, the wise and affectionate friendship his lonely spirit most needed. He resisted the opium habit, increased in physical and mental health, gained congenial employment as a reviewer for the best of the London weeklies. The publication of his books established him, in the opinion of those whose opinion was most worth-while, as a figure of great literary importance. He died "a very good death" at the age of forty-eight. Had his mind been (as fortunately it was not) concerned with literature in his last hours he would have known that he had attained a fame of the kind that does not tarnish with the years, that he had realized the poet's ambition of adding substantially to the world's heritage of beauty.