Chapter III (2)

It was in the epigram that Watson first did finished work, and his most typical work is certainly to be found in forms more or less akin to the epigram; in the sonnet, for example. There are so many good sonnets in this volume that choice is difficult; here is one called "Night on Curbar Edge":

No echo of man's life pursues my ears; Nothing disputes this Desolation's reign; Change comes not, this dread temple to profane, Where time by aeons reckons, not by years, Its patient form one crag, sole stranded, rears, Type of whate'er is destined to remain While yon still host encamped on night's waste plain Keeps armed watch, a million quivering spears, Hushed are the wild and wing'd lives of the moor; The sleeping sheep nestle 'neath ruined wall, Or unhewn stones in random concourse hurled; Solitude, sleepless, listens at Fate's door; And there is built and 'stablisht over all Tremendous silence, older than the world.

The breadth of phrasing here is noticeable; and it is by such qualities as this, as well as by the careful accuracy with which every note is produced, that Watson is distinguished alike from older men of the type of Alfred Austin, and from younger men of such varying capacities as John Davidson and Yeats. If he has not the making of a great poet, he is already an accomplished poet; and if he does not possess the highest qualities, he possesses several of the secondary qualities in the highest degree.

Watson's _Ode on the Day of Coronation of King Edward the Seventh_ is a fine piece of verse writing, and can hardly fail to remind the reader of great poetry. It is constructed with care, it flows, it has gravity, an air of amplitude, many striking single lines, and its sentiments are unexceptionable. When we read such lines as these:

All these, O King, from their seclusion dread, And guarded palace of eternity, Mix in thy pageant with phantasmal tread, Hear the long waves of acclamation roll, And with yet mightier silence marshal thee To the awful throne thou hast inherited----

we feel that this is at least workman-like work, written by a man who has studied great masters, and who takes himself and his art seriously. There is not an undignified line in the whole poem, nor a break in the slow, deliberate movement. Watson has style, he is never facile or common. He has frequent felicities of phrase, but he subordinates separate effects to the effect of the whole, and he is almost the only living writer of verse of whom this could be said. His ode is excellently made, from every external point of view. Yet, after reading it over and over, with a full recognition of its technical qualities, we are unable to accept it as genuine poetry, as the equal of the thing which it resembles.

Great poetry is not often written for official occasions, but that it can be so written we need only turn to Marvell's _Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland_ to realize. Watson looks instinctively to public events for his inspiration, and there is something in his temper of mind and of style which seems to set him naturally apart as a commentator upon the destinies of nations. He has never put any vital part of himself into his work; he has told us nothing of what he is when he is not a writer. All his utterances have been themselves official, the guarded statement of just so much of his own thoughts and feelings as he cares to betray to the public. His kind is rather critical than creative, and it was by his epigrams that he first attracted attention. His technique is so accomplished that he seems very often to be thinking only of what he is saying, when it is evident, on a closer examination, that he is thinking much more of how he is saying it. For the poet who concerns himself with public events this might seem to be a useful part of his poetic equipment. Court ceremonies demand court dress. Undoubtedly, but the art of the courtier requires him to forget that he is dressed for an occasion, to forget everything but the occasion. Throughout the whole of his coronation ode Watson never forgets that he is celebrating an important ceremony. His costume is perfectly adjusted, he wears it with grace and dignity; his elocution, as he delivers his lines, is a model of clearness and discreet emphasis. Everything that he says is perfectly appropriate; good taste can go no further. But the occasion itself, the meaning, the emotion, of the occasion? That does not come into the poem; the poem tells us all about it.

Now look at Marvell's ode, and forget for the moment that it is a masterpiece of poetry. What a passion fires the hard, convincing thought! How the mere logic holds the attention! Every word lives, and the cadences (creating a new form for themselves) do but follow the motions of the writer's bright, controlling energy. It is impossible to read the lines aloud without a feeling of exultation. In Watson's ode there is not a breath of life; what is said--admirable and sensible, and at times poetically conceived as it is--comes with no impetus from the mind that has conceived it coldly. And it is to be noted that, though thought and expression are fitted together with great skill and precision, the expression is always rather above the pitch of the thought. Take these lines:

O doom of overlordships! to decay First at the heart, the eye scarce dimmed at all; Or perish of much cumber and array, The burdening robe of empire, and its pall; Or, of voluptuous hours the wanton prey; Die of the poisons that most sweetly slay; Or, from insensate height, With prodigies, with light Of trailing angers on the monstrous night, Magnificently fall.

There we find expression strained to a point to which the thought has not attained. In other words, we find rhetoric. Weight and resonance of verse do but drag down and deafen that which they should uplift and sound abroad, when, instead of being attendants upon greatness, they attempt to replace it.

EMIL VERHAEREN

The poetry of Emile Verhaeren, more than that of any other modern poet, is made directly out of the complaining voices of the nerves. Other writers, certainly, have been indirectly indebted to the effect of nerves on temperament, but Verhaeren seems to express only so much of a temperament as finds its expression through their immediate medium. In his early books _Les Flamandes, Les Moines_ (reprinted, with _Les Bords de la Route_, containing earlier and later work, in the first of his two volumes of collected poems), he began by a solid, heavily colored, exterior manner of painting genre pictures in the Flemish style. Such poems as "Les Paysans," with its fury of description, are like a Teniers in verse; not Breughel has painted a kermesse with hotter colors, a more complete abandonment to the sunlight, wine and gross passions of those Flemish feasts. This first book, _Les Flamandes_, belongs to the Naturalistic movement; but it has already as in the similar commencements of Huysmans so ardent a love of color for its own sake, color becoming lyrical, that one realizes how soon this absorption in the daily life of farms, kitchens, stables, will give place to another kind of interest. And in _Les Moines_, while there is still for the most part the painting of exteriorities, a new sentiment, by no means the religious sentiment, but an artistic interest in what is less material, less assertive in things, finds for itself an entirely new scheme of color. Here, for instance, was "Cuisson de Pain," in the first book:

_Dehors, les grands fournils chauffaient leurs braises rouges, Et deux par deux, du bout d'une planche, les gouges Dans le ventre des fours engouffraient les pains mous. Et les flammes, par les gueules s'ouvrant passage, Comme une meute énorme et chaude de chiens roux, Sautaient en rugissant leur mordre le visage._

But it is not until _Les Soirs_ that we find what was to be the really individual style developing itself. It develops itself at first with a certain heaviness. Here is a poet who writes in images: good; but the images are larger than the ideas. Wishing to say that the hour was struck, he says:

"_Seul un beffroi, Immensément vêtu de nuit, cassait les heures._"

And, indeed, everything must be done _immensément._ The word is repeated on every page, sometimes twice in a stanza. The effect of monotony in rhythm, the significant, chiming recurrence of words, the recoil of a line upon itself, the dwindling away or the heaping up of sound in line after line, the shock of an unexpected cæsura, the delay and the hastened speed of syllables: all these arts of a very conscious technique are elaborated with somewhat too obvious an intention. There is splendor, opulence, and, for the first time, "such stuff as dreams are made of." Description is no longer made for its own sake; it becomes metaphor. And this metaphor is entirely new. It may be called exaggerated, affected even; but it is new, and it is expressive.

"_Les chiens du désespoir, les chiens du vent d'automne, Mordent de leurs abois les échos noirs des soirs, Et l'ombre, immensément, dans le vide, tâtonne Vers la lune, mirée au clair des abreuvoirs._"

In _Les Débâcles_, a year later, this art of writing in colored and audible metaphor, and on increasingly abstract and psychological subjects, the sensations externalized, has become more master of itself, and at the same time more immediately the servant of a more and more feverish nervous organization.

"_Tu seras le fiévreux ployé, sur les fenêtres. D'où l'on peut voir bondir la vie et ses chars d'or._"

And the contemplation of this _fiévreux_ is turned more and more in upon itself, finding in its vision of the outer world only a mirrored image of its own disasters. The sick man, looking down on his thin fingers, can think of them only in this morbid, monastic way:

"_Mes doigts, touchez mon front et cherchez, là, Les vers qui rongeront, un jour, de leur morsure, Mes chairs; touchez mon front, mes maigres doigts, voilà Que mes veines déjà, comme une meurtrissure Bleuâtre, étrangement, en font la tour, mes las Et pauvres doigts--et que vos longs ongles malades Battent, sinistrement, sur mes tempes, un glas, Un pauvre glas, mes lents et mornes doigts!_"

Two years later, with _Les Flambeaux Noirs_, what was nervous has become almost a sort of very conscious madness: the hand on one's own pulse, the eyes watching themselves in the glass with an unswerving fixity, but a breaking and twisting of the links of things, a doubling and division of the mind's sight, which might be met with, less picturesquely, in actual madness. There are two poems, "Le Roc" and "Les Livres," which give, in a really terrifying way, the very movement of idea falling apart from idea, sensation dragging after it sensation down the crumbling staircase of the brain, which are the symptoms of the brain's loss of self-control:

_C'est là que j'ai bâti mon âme, --Dites, serai-je seul avec mon âme?-- Mon âme hélas! maison d'ébène, Où s'est fendu, sans bruit, un soir, Le grand miroir de mon espoir._

_Dites, serai-je seul avec mon âme, En ce nocturne et angoissant domaine? Serai-je seul avec mon orgueil noir, Assis en un fauteuil de haine? Serai-je seul, avec ma pâle hyperdulie, Pour Notre-Dame, la Folie?_

In these poems of self-analysis, which is self-torture, there is something lacerating, and at the same time bewildering, which conveys to one the sense of all that is most solitary, picturesque and poignant in the transformation of an intensely active and keen-sighted reason into a thing of conflicting visionary moods. At times, as in the remarkable study of London called "Les Villes," this fever of the brain looks around it, and becomes a flame of angry and tumultuous epithet, licking up and devouring what is most solid in exterior space. Again, as in "Les Lois" and "Les Nombres," it becomes metaphysical, abstract, and law towers up into a visible palace, number flowers into a forest:

_Je suis l'halluciné de la forêt des Nombres._

That art of presenting a thought like a picture, of which Verhaeren is so accomplished a master, has become more subtle than ever; and

_ces tours de ronde de l'infini, le soir Et ces courbes, et ces spirales,_

of for the most part menacing speculations in the void, take visible form before us, with a kind of hallucination, communicated to us from that (how far deliberate?) hallucination which has created them. Gradually, in "Les Apparus dans mes Chemins," in "Les Campagnes Hallucinées," in "Les Villages Illusoires," in "Les Villes Tentaculaires," the hallucinations become entirely external: it is now the country, the village, the town, that is to say, the whole organized world, that agonizes among cloudy phantoms, and no longer a mere individual, abnormal brain. And so he has at once gained a certain relief from what had been felt to be too intimately a part of himself, and has also surrendered to a more profound, because a more extended, consciousness of human misery. Effacing himself, as he does, behind the great spectacle of the world, as he sees it, with his visionary eyes, in his own violent and lethargic country, he becomes a more hopeless part of that conspiracy of the earth against what man has built out of the earth, of what man has built out of the earth against the earth, which he sees developing silently among the grass and bricks. All these books are a sort of philosophy in symbols, symbols becoming more and more definite: "Le Donneur de Mauvais Conseils," who drives up to the farm gate:

_La vieille carriole en bois vert-pomine Qui l'emmena, on ne sait d'où, Une folle la garda avec son homme Aux carrefours des chemins mous. Le cheval paît l'herbe d'automne, Près d'une mare monotone, Dont l'eau malade réverbère Le soir de pluie et de misère Qui tombe en loques sur la terre_;

"Les Cordiers," the old man spinning his rope against the sky, weaving the past into the future:

_Sur la route muette et régulière, Les yeux fixés vers la lumière Qui frôle en se couchant les clos et les maisons, Le blanc cordier visionnaire, Du fond du soir auréolaire, Attire à lui les horizons_;

and, finally, the many-tentacled towns, drawing to themselves all the strength and sap of the earth: "Les Spectacles, La Bourse, Le Bazar," the monstrous and material soul of towns.

Contrast these poems with those early poems, so brutal, so Flemish, if you would see at a glance all the difference between the naturalistic and the symbolistic treatment. The subject-matter is the same; the same eye sees; there are the same

_vers bâtis comme une estrade Pour la danse des mots et leurs belles parades._

But at first there is merely an eye that sees, and that takes the visible world at its own valuation of itself. Later on, things are seen but to be readjusted, to be set into relation with other, invisible realities, of which they are no more than the wavering and tortured reflection. And with this poet, in his later manner, everything becomes symbol; the shop, the theater, the bank, no less than the old rope-maker weaving the horizons together.

_Sur la Ville, d'où les affres flamboient, Règnent, sans qu'on les voie, Mais évidentes, les idées_:

as he can write, on the last page of _Les Villes Tentaculaires_, which points directly to _Les Aubes_, in which a sort of deliverance through ideas is worked out.

Verhaeren's second play, _Le Cloitre_, is much finer in every way than his first, _Les Aubes_, but it does not convince us that he is a dramatist, in the strict sense of the word. The only French poet of the present day who has really vivid energy, his energy is too feverish, too spasmodic, too little under the control of a shaping intellect, to be of precisely the quality required for the drama. The people of these brief and fiery scenes are like little broken bits of the savage forces of the world, working out their passionate issues under the quiet roofs of the cloister. All their words are cries, coming out of a half-delirious suffering; and these cries echo about the stage in an almost monotonous conflict. It seems to us that the form which suits Verhaeren best is the form which he has temporarily abandoned--a kind of fiery reverie, seen finally in his last book, _Les Visages de la Vie_,

_Mon âme était anxieuse d'être elle-même Elle s'illimitait en une âme suprême Et violente, où l'univers se résumait;--_

as he says in one of the poems of that book; and in all these poems, "La Foule, L'Ivresse, La Joie," and the rest, we see the poet sending his soul into the universe and becoming a vehement voice for all that he finds most passionate in it. It is, in its way, dramatizing of emotion, but, if one may say so, an abstract dramatizing. It is the crowd, not Dom Balthazar; joy itself, not some joyous human being for which he finds words; and his merits and his defects make him a better spokesman for disembodied than for embodied souls. Since the early period of Flemish realism he has been, while making his language more and more pictorial, making his interests more and more internal. He no longer paints landscapes, but the scenery of the soul, and in the same vast and colored images. He magnifies sensation until it becomes a sort of hallucination of which he seems always to be the victim. Now all this is so very personal, so clearly the vision of a not quite healthy temperament, that his neurotic monks in the cloister, with their heated and vehement speech, seem more like repetitions of a single type than individual characters. But he has certainly come nearer to dramatic characterization than in the _Shadowy Dawn_, and he has founded his play on a more emotionally human basis; on a basis, it would seem, partly suggested by the story which Browning tells in _Halbert and Hob._ And, taken as a poem, it is full of vigorous, imaginative writing, in which the religious passion finds eloquent speech. And, after all, is not this one of the most interesting, and not even one of the least successful, attempts at what a more extravagant imitator has lately called _La tragédie intérieure?_ The actual tendency of art is certainly toward an abandonment of the heroic and amusing adventures which constituted so much of the art of the past, and a concentration upon whatever can be surmised of that soul which these adventures must doubtless have left so singularly indifferent. Ibsen has shown us destiny quietly at work in suburban drawing-rooms, among people who have rarely anything interesting to say, but whose least word becomes interesting because it is seen to knit one more mesh in the net of destiny. Maeterlinck has gone further, and shown us soul talking with soul, at first under almost pseudo-romantic disguises, among Leonardo landscapes, then more and more simply, as people who have no longer lost their crowns in a pool, but who, in Aglavaine and Selysette, might be any of our acquaintances, if we can imagine our acquaintances under a startling and revealing flash of light. Verhaeren falls into the movement, trying to give a more lyrical form to this new kind of drama, trying to give it a narrower and fiercer intensity. What he has so far achieved is a melodrama of the spirit, in which there is poetry, but also rhetoric. Will he finally be able to find for himself a form in which the "inner tragedy" can be externally presented without rhetoric? Then, perhaps, the poetry will make its own drama.

A NEGLECTED GENIUS: SIR RICHARD BURTON