Chapter III: Part 3

The same argument applies to the use of rhyme to-day; while rhyme can still be used as one of the ingredients of the illusion, a compelling force to make the reader go on till he hears an echo to the syllable at the end of the last pause, it still remains a valuable technical asset. But as soon as rhyme is worn threadbare the ear anticipates the echo and is contemptuous of the clumsy trick.

The reader must be made to surrender himself completely to the poet, as to his guide in a strange country; he must never be allowed to run ahead and say “Hurry up, sir, I know this part of the country as well as you. After that ‘snow-capped mountain’ we inevitably come to a ‘leaping fountain.’ I see it ‘dancing’ and ‘glancing’ in the distance. And by the token of these ‘varied flowers’ on the grass, I know that another few feet will bring us to the ‘leafy bowers’ which, if I am not mistaken, will protect us nicely from the ‘April showers’ for a few ‘blissful hours.’ Come on, sir! am I guiding you, or are you guiding me?”

However, the time has not yet come to get rid of rhyme altogether: it has still plenty of possibilities, as _Dumb Crambo_ at a Christmas party will soon convince the sceptical; and assonances separated even by the whole length of the mouth can work happily together, with or without the co-operation of ordinary rhyme.

These are all merely illustrations of the general principle that as soon as a poem emerges from the hidden thought processes that give it birth, and the poet reviews it with the conscious part of his mind, then his task is one not of rules or precedents so much as of ordinary common-sense.

XXXV

IMPROVISING NEW CONVENTIONS

There is a great dignity in poetry unaffectedly written in stern stiff traditional forms and we feel in spite of ourselves that we owe it the reverence due to ruined abbeys, prints of Fujiyama, or Chelsea pensioners with red coats, medals, and long white beards. But that is no reason for following tradition blindly; it should be possible for a master of words to improvise a new convention, whenever he wishes, that will give his readers just the same notion of centuried authority and smoothness without any feeling of contempt.

XXXVI

WHEN IN DOUBT

A young poet of whose friendship I am very proud was speaking about poetry to one of those University literary clubs which regard English poetry as having found its culmination in the last decade of the nineteenth century and as having no further destiny left for it. He said that he was about to tell them the most important thing he knew about poetry, so having roused themselves from a customary languor, the young fellows were disappointed to hear, not a brilliant critical paradox or a sparkling definition identifying poetry with decay, but a mere rule of thumb for the working poet:

When in Doubt
Cut it Out.

XXXVII

THE EDITOR WITH THE MUCKRAKE

Ordinary readers may deplore the habit of raking up the trivial and bad verse of good poets now long dead, but for living poets there is nothing more instructive in the world than these lapses, and in the absence of honest biography they alone are evidence for what would be naturally assumed, that these great poets in defiance of principle often tried to write in their dull moments just because they longed for the exquisite excitement of composition, and thought that the act of taking up a pen might induce the hypnotic state of which I have spoken. But afterwards they forgot to destroy what they produced, or kept it in the hope that it was some good after all.

XXXVIII

THE MORAL QUESTION

Modern treatises on Poetry usually begin with definitions; ancient treatises with a heavy weight of classical authority and a number of grave reflections on the nature of the Poet, proving conclusively that he should be a man of vast experience of life, apt judgment, versatile talent, and above all unimpeachable moral character. Authority seems to count for nothing in these days, compared with the value set on it by Sir Philip Sidney in his “Apologie for Poetrie,” and the modern treatise would never ask its reader more than to admit a negative conclusion on the moral question, that poets who think they can combine indiscriminate debauch with dyspeptic Bohemian squalor and yet turn out good work merely by applying themselves conscientiously and soberly in working hours, are likely to be disappointed; however, my personal feeling is that poets who modify the general ethical principles first taught them at home and at school, can only afford to purchase the right to do so at a great price of mental suffering and difficult thinking. Wanton, lighthearted apostasies from tradition are always either a sign or a prophecy of ineffectual creative work.

Art is not moral, but civilized man has invented the word to denote a standard of conduct which the mass demands of the individual and so poetry which makes a definitely anti-moral appeal is likely to antagonize two readers out of three straight away, and there is little hope of playing the confidence trick on an enemy. Being therefore addressed to a limited section even of the smallish class who read poetry, such poetry will tend like most high-brow art to have more dexterity than robustness.

For a complete identification of successful art with morality I always remember with appreciation what an Irishman, a complete stranger, once said to my father on hearing that he was author of the song “Father O’Flynn”--“Ye behaved well, sir, when ye wrote that one.”

XXXIX

THE POET AS OUTSIDER

The ethical problem is further complicated for poets by the tussle in their nature between the spontaneous and the critical biases. The principle of loyalty on which the present non-religious system of English manners depends is strained in them to breaking point by the tendency to sudden excitement, delight or disgust with ideas for which mature consideration entirely alters the values, or with people who change by the same process from mere acquaintances to intimate friends and back in a flash. Which should explain many apparently discreditable passages in, for instance, the life and letters of Keats or Wordsworth, and should justify Walt Whitman’s outspoken “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”

The poet is the outsider who sees most of the game, and, by the same token, all or nearly all the great English poets have been men either of ungenteel birth or of good family which has been scandalized by their subsequent adoption of unusual social habits during the best years of their writing. To the polite society of their day--outsiders to a man.

XL

A POLITE ACKNOWLEDGMENT

DEAR SIR,--

Many thanks for the volume of your poems you have sent me. Though I
had never seen any of your compositions before, they are already
old friends--that is, I like them but I see through them.

Yours cordially, Etc.

XLI

FAKE POETRY, BAD POETRY AND MERE VERSE

As in household economics, you cannot take out of a stocking more than has been put in, so in poetry you cannot present suffering or romance beyond your own experience. The attempt to do this is one of the chief symptoms of the fake poet; ignorance forces him to draw on the experience of a real poet who actually has been through the emotional crises which he himself wants to restate. The fake is often made worse by the theft of small turns of speech which though not in any sense irregular or grotesque, the poet has somehow made his own; it is like stealing marked coins, and is a dangerous practice when Posterity is policeman. Most poets visit Tom Tiddler’s ground now and then, but the wise ones melt down the stolen coin and impress it with their own “character.”

There is a great deal of difference between fake poetry and ordinary bad poetry. The bad poet is likely to have suffered and felt joy as deeply as the poet reckoned first class, but he has not somehow been given the power of translating experience into images and emblems, or of melting words in the furnace of his mind and making them flow into the channels prepared to take them. Charles Sorley said, addressing the good poets on behalf of the bad poets (though he was really on the other side):--

We are the homeless even as you,
Who hope but never can begin.
Our hearts are wounded through and through
Like yours, but our hearts bleed within;
We too make music but our tones
Scape not the barrier of our bones.

Mere verse, as an earlier section has attempted to show, is neither bad poetry nor fake poetry necessarily. It finds its own categories, good verse, bad verse and imitation. In its relation to poetry it stands as chimpanzee to man: only the theory that a conflict of emotional ideas is a necessary ingredient of verse to make it poetry, will satisfactorily explain why many kinds of verse, loosely called Poetry, such as Satire and Didactic verse are yet popularly felt not to be the “highest” forms of Poetry. I would say that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred these bear no real relation to Poetry, even though dressed up in poetical language, and that in the hundredth case they are poetry in spite of themselves. Where the writer is dominated by only one aim, in satire, the correction of morals; in didactic verse, instruction; there is no conflict and therefore no poetry. But in rare cases where some Juvenal slips through feelings of compunction to a momentary mood of self-satire and even forgets himself so much as to compliment his adversary; or in didactic verse where a sudden doubt arises and the teacher admits himself a blind groper after truth (so Lucretius time and time again) and breaks his main argument in digressions after loveliness and terror, only then does Poetry appear. It flashes out with the surprise and shock of a broken electric circuit.

Even the _memoria technica_ can slide from verse into poetry. The rhyme to remember the signs of the Zodiac by, ends wonderfully:--

The Ram the Bull, the Heavenly Twins,
And next the Crab, the Lion shines,
The Virgin and the Scales,
The Scorpion, Archer and He Goat,
The Man who carries the Watering Pot,
The Fish with glittering tails.

The language of science makes a hieroglyphic, or says “The sign of Aquarius”; the language of prose says “A group of stars likened by popular imagery to a Water Carrier”; the language of Poetry converts the Eastern water carrier with his goatskin bag or pitcher, into an English gardener, then puts him to fill his watering pot from heavenly waters where the Fish are darting. The author of this rhyme has visualized his terrestrial emblems most clearly; he has smelt the rankness of the Goat, and yet in the “Lion shines” and the “glittering tails” one can see that he has been thinking in terms of stars also. The emotional contradiction lies in the stars’ remote aloofness from complications of this climatic and smelly world, from the terror of Lion, Archer, Scorpion, from the implied love-interest of Heavenly Twins and Virgin, and from the daily cares of the Scales, Ram, Bull, Goat, Fish, Crab and Watering Pot.

The ready way to distinguish verse from poetry is this, Verse makes a flat pattern on the paper, Poetry stands out in relief.

XLII

A DIALOGUE ON FAKE-POETRY

Q. When is a fake not a fake?

A. When hard-working and ingenious conjurors are billed by common
courtesy as ‘magicians.’

Q. But when is a fake not a fake?

A. When it’s a Classic.

Q. And when else?

A. When it’s “organ-music” and all that.

Q. Elaborate your answer, dear sir!

A. A fake, then, is not a fake when lapse of time has tended to
obscure the original source of the borrowing, and when the textural
and structural competence that the borrower has used in
synthesising the occasional good things of otherwise indifferent
authors is so remarkable that even the incorruptible Porter of
Parnassus winks and says “Pass Friend!”

Q. Then the Fake Poet is, as you have hinted before, a sort of
Hermit Crab?

A. Yes, and here is another parable from Marine Life. Poetry is the
protective pearl formed by an oyster around the irritations of a
maggot. Now if, as we are told, it is becoming possible to put
synthetic pearls on the market, which not even the expert with his
X-ray can detect from the natural kind, is not our valuation of the
latter perhaps only a sentimentality?

XLIII

ASKING ADVICE

There is a blind spot or many blind spots in the critical eye of every writer; he cannot find for himself certain surface faults which anybody else picks out at once. Especially there is a bias towards running to death a set of words which when he found them, were quite honest and inoffensive. Shelley had a queer obsession about “caves,” “abysses,” and “chasms” which evidently meant for him much more than he can make us see. A poet will always be wise to submit his work, when he can do no more to straighten it, to the judgment of friends whose eyes have their blind spots differently placed; only, he must be careful, I suppose, not to be forced into making any alterations while in their presence.

A poet reveals to a friend in a fit of excitement “I say, listen, I am going to write a great poem on such-and-such! I have the whole thing clear in my mind, waiting to be put down.” But if he goes on to give a detailed account of the scheme, then the act of expression (especially prose expression) kills the creative impulse by presenting it prematurely with too much definiteness. The poem is never written. It remains for a few hopeless days as a title, a couple of phrases and an elaborate scheme of work, and is then banished to the lumber room of the mind; later it probably becomes subsidiary to another apparently irrelevant idea and appears after a month or two in quite a different shape, the elaboration very much condensed, the phrase altered and the title lost.

Now this section is as suitable as any other for the prophecy that the study of Poetry will very soon pass from the hands of Grammarians, Prosodists, historical research men, and such-like, into those of the psychologists. And what a mess they’ll make of it; to be sure!

XLIV

SURFACE FAULTS, AN ILLUSTRATION

The later drafts of some lines I wrote recently called CYNICS AND ROMANTICS, and contrasting the sophisticated and ingenuous ideas of Love, give a fairly good idea of the conscious process of getting a poem in order. I make no claim for achievement, the process is all that is intended to appear, and three or four lines are enough for illustration:

_1st Draft._

In club or messroom let them sit,
Let them indulge salacious wit
On love’s romance, but not with hearts
Accustomed to those healthier parts
Of grim self-mockery....

_2nd Draft._ (Consideration:--It is too soon in the poem for the angry jerkiness of “Let them indulge.” Also “Indulge salacious” is hard to say; at present, this is a case for being as smooth as possible.)

In club or messroom let them sit
Indulging contraversial wit
On love’s romance, but not with hearts
Accustomed....

_3rd Draft._ (Consideration:--No, we have the first two lines beginning with “In.” It worries the eye. And “sit, indulging” puts two short “i’s” close together. “Contraversial” is not the word. It sounds as if they were angry, but they are too blasé for that. And “love’s romance” is cheap for the poet’s own ideal.)

In club or messroom let them sit
At skirmish of salacious wit
Laughing at love, yet not with hearts
Accustomed....

_4th Draft._ (Consideration:--Bother the thing! “Skirmish” is good because it suggests their profession, but now we have three S’s,--“sit,” “skirmish,” “salacious.” It makes them sound too much in earnest. The “salacious” idea can come in later in the poem. And at present we have two “at’s” bumping into each other; one of them must go. “Yet” sounds better than “but” somehow.)

In club or messroom let them sit
With skirmish of destructive wit
Laughing at love, yet not with hearts
Accustomed....

_5th Draft._ (Consideration:--And now we have two “with’s” which don’t quite correspond. And we have the two short “i’s” next to each other again. Well, put the first “at” back and change “laughing at” to “deriding.” The long “i” is a pleasant variant; “laughing” and “hearts” have vowel-sounds too much alike.)

In club or messroom let them sit
At skirmish of destructive wit
Deriding love, yet not with hearts
Accustomed....

_6th Draft._ (Consideration:--Yes, that’s a bit better. But now we have “_des_tructive” and “_der_iding” too close together. “Ingenious” is more the word I want. It has a long vowel, and suggests that it was a really witty performance. The two “in’s” are far enough separated. “Accorded” is better than “accustomed”; more accurate and sounds better. Now then:--)

In club or messroom let them sit
At skirmish of ingenious wit
Deriding love, yet not with hearts
Accorded etc.

(Consideration:--It may be
rotten, but I’ve done my best.)

The discussion of more radical constructive faults is to be found in PUTTY and THE ART OF EXPRESSION.

XLV

LINKED SWEETNESS LONG DRAWN OUT

In this last section, besides an attempt at a greater accuracy of meaning and implication than the first slap-dash arrangement of words had provided, there may have been noticed three other technical considerations which are especially exacting in this case, where I am intending by particularly careful craftsmanship to suggest the brilliance of the conversation I am reporting.

The first is a care to avoid unintentional echoes, as for example “_In_ club or messroom ... _in_dulging.”

The second is a care which all song writers and singing masters understand, to keep apart words like “indulge salacious,” where the j and s sound coming together interfere with easy breathing.

The third is an attempt to vary the vowel sounds so far as is consistent with getting the right shade of meaning; it pleases the mental ear like stroking pleases a cat (note the vowel sequence of the phrase that heads this section. John Milton knew a thing or two about texture, worth knowing). At the same time I am trying to arrange the position of consonants and open vowels with much the same care.

But all these three considerations, and even the consideration for lucidity of expression, can and must be modified where an emotional mood of obscurity, fear, difficulty or monotony will be better illustrated by so doing.

Keats was very conscious of the necessity of modification. Leigh Hunt recounts in his Autobiography:--

“I remember Keats reading to me with great relish and particularity, conscious of what he had set forth, the lines describing the supper[1] and ending with the words,

“‘And lucent syrups tinct with cinnamon.’”

[1] St. Agnes’ Eve.

Mr. Wordsworth would have said the vowels were not varied enough; but Keats knew where his vowels were _not_ to be varied. On the occasion above alluded to, Wordsworth found fault with the repetition of the concluding sound of the participles in Shakespeare’s line about bees:--

“‘The _singing_ masons _building_ roofs of gold.’”

This, he said, was a line which Milton would never have written. Keats thought, on the other hand, that the repetition was in harmony with the continued note of the singers, and that Shakespeare’s negligence, if negligence it was, had instinctively felt the thing in the best manner.”

Keats here was surely intending with his succession of short i-sounds, a gourmet’s fastidious pursing of lips. Poets even of the Virgil-Milton-Tennyson-Longfellow metrical tradition will on occasion similarly break their strict metric form with an obviously imitative “quadrepedante putrem sonitu quatit ungula campum,” but the manipulation of vowels and consonants is for them rather a study in abstract grandeur of music than a relation with the emotional content of the poetry.

XLVI

THE FABLE OF THE IDEAL GADGET

No poem can turn out respectably well unless written in the full confidence that this time at last the poet is going to attain perfect expression. So long as this confidence survives he goes on revising the poem at intervals for days or months until nothing more can be done, and the inevitable sense of failure is felt, leaving him at liberty to try again. It is on this inevitable failure that the practice of every art is made conditional.

* * * * *

A man once went into an ironmonger’s shop and said hesitatingly, “Do you sell those gadgets for fixing on doors?”

“Well, sir,” replied the assistant, “I am not quite sure if I understand your requirements, but I take it you are needing a patent automatic door-closer?”

“Exactly,” said the customer. “One to fix on my pantry door which, by the way, contains a glass window.”

“You will want a cheap one, sir?”

“Cheap but serviceable.”

“You will prefer an English make, sir?”

“Indeed, that’s a most important consideration.”

“You will perhaps want one with ornamentations, scroll work and roses for instance?”

“Oh no, nothing of that sort, thank you. I want it as plain and unobtrusive as possible.”

“You would like it made of some rustless metal, sir?”

“That would be very convenient.”

“And with a strong spring?”

“Well, moderately strong.”

“To be fixed on which side, sir?”

“Let me see; the right-hand side.”

“Now, sir,” said the assistant, “I will go through each point, one by one. You want an efficient (but not too costly) English made, unobtrusive, rustless, unornamented, patent automatic door closer, to be fixed right-handed with a moderately strong spring to a pantry door with a glass window. Is there any further desideratum, sir?”

“Well, it’s very good of you to help me like this (“Not at all, sir”). I should like it easily adjusted and easily removed, and above all it must not squeak or need constant oiling.”

“In fact, sir, you want an apparatus combining a variety of qualities, in a word, an absolutely silent, efficient, economical, invisible, corrosive proof, unornamented, not-too-heavily-springed, easily adjustable, readily removable, British-made, right-handed, patent automatic door closer, ideally fitted in every possible respect for attaching to your pantry door which (I understand you to say) contains a glass window. How is that, sir?”

“Splendid, splendid.”

“Well, sir, I regret that there has never been any article of that description put on the market, but if you care to visit our wholesale department across the road, you may perhaps be able to make your choice from a reasonably large selection of our present imperfect models. Good day, sir.”

XLVII

SEQUELS ARE BARRED

If you solve a problem to the best of your ability, it never bothers you again. Enough said: but the following emblem may be taken to heart:--

EPITAPH ON AN UNFORTUNATE ARTIST

He found a formula for drawing comic rabbits:
This formula for drawing comic rabbits paid.
So in the end he could not change the tragic habits
This formula for drawing comic rabbits made.

XLVIII

TOM FOOL

There is a saying that “More people know Tom Fool than Tom Fool knows”; that may be all right if it means recognizing him in the street, but he has to be a wonder before he can, without eccentricity, make his work immediately recognized in print and be even distinguishable from the best efforts of imitators. This proverb was obviously in the head of the man or woman who wrote the following sonnet, in the _Spectator_ (I think) about a year ago; I have lost the cutting and the reference, and ask to be pardoned if I misquote:--

Cunning indeed Tom Fool must be to-day
For us, who meet his verses in a book,
To cry “Tom Fool wrote that.... I know his way....
... Unsigned, yet eyed all over with Tom’s look....
Why see! It’s pure Tom Fool, I’m not mistook....
Fine simple verses too; now who’s to say
How Tom has charmed these worn old words to obey
His shepherd’s voice and march beneath his crook?
Instead we ponder “I can’t name the man,
But he’s been reading Wilde,” or “That’s the school
Of Côterie.... Voices.... Pound ... the Sitwell clan ...”
“_He_ ‘knows his Kipling’” ... “_he_ accepts the rule
Of Monro ... of Lord Tennyson ... of Queen Anne”
How seldom, “There, for a ducat, writes,
TOM FOOL.

The writer evidently had a keen eye for the failings of others, but is convicted out of his own mouth, for I have met nobody who can identify this particular Tom Fool for me.

Hateful as is the art of the parodist when it spoils poems which have delighted and puzzled us, parody has its uses. A convincing parody is the best possible danger signal to inform a poet that he is writing sequels, repeating his conjuring tricks until they can be seen through and ridiculously imitated. “That awkward fellow Ariphrades,” much as we dislike him, is one of the most useful members of our republic of letters.

XLIX

CROSS RHYTHM AND RESOLUTION

I have already attempted to show Poetry as the Recorder’s _précis_ of a warm debate between the members of the poet’s mental Senate on some unusually contraversial subject. Let the same idea be expressed less personally in the terms of coloured circles intersecting, the space cut off having the combined colour of both circles. In the Drama these circles represent the warring influences of the plot; the principal characters lie in the enclosed space and the interest of the play is to watch their attempts to return to the state of primary colouring which means mental ease; with tragedy they are eventually forced to the colourless blackness of Death, with comedy the warring colours disappear in white. In the lyrical poem, the circles are coinciding stereoscopically so that it is difficult to discover how each individual circle is coloured; we only see the combination.

If we consider that each influence represented by these circles has an equivalent musical rhythm, then in the drama these rhythms interact orchestrally, tonic theme against dominant; in lyrical poetry where we get two images almost fused into one, the rhythms interlace correspondingly closely. Of the warring influences, one is naturally the original steady-going conservative, the others novel, disquieting, almost accidental. Then in lyrical poetry the established influence takes the original metre as its expression, and the new influences introduce the cross rhythm modifying the metre until it is half submerged. Shakespeare’s developments of blank verse have much distressed prosodists, but have these ever considered that they were not mere wantonness or lack of thought, that what he was doing was to send emotional cross-rhythms working against the familiar iambic five-stress line?

I remember “doing Greek iambics” at Charterhouse and being allowed as a great privilege on reaching the Upper School to resolve the usual short-long foot into a short-short-short or even in certain spots into a long-short. These resolutions I never understood as having any reference to the emotional mood of the verse I was supposed to be translating, but they came in very conveniently when proper names had too many short syllables in them to fit otherwise.

A young poet showed me a set of English verses the other day which I returned him without taking a copy but I remember reading somewhat as follows:--

T-tum, t-tum, t-tum, t-tum, t-tum
A midnight garden, where as I went past
I saw the cherry’s moonfrozen delicate ivory.

“Good heavens,” I said, “what’s that last line all about?”

“Oh, it’s just an experiment in resolution.”

“Take a pencil, like a good fellow, and scan it for me in the old fashioned way as we used to do at school together.”

He did so:--

I sāw | thĕ cherr|(y’s) moŏnfrōz|ĕn dĕl|ic(ate) īv|(ory)

“It’s a sort of anapaestic resolution,” he explained.

“Anapaestic resolution of what?”

“Of an iambic decasyllabic line.”

“Excuse me, it’s not. Since we’re talking in that sort of jargon, it’s a spondaic resolution of a dactylic line.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you’ve put in four extra syllables for your resolution. I’ll put in a fifth, the word “in.” Now listen!

Swimmery | floatery | bobbery | duckery | divery--
_I_ saw the | cherries moon | frozen in | delicate | ivory

In this case the cross-rhythm, which my friend explained was meant to suggest the curious ethereal look of cherry blossoms in moonlight, had so swamped the original metre that it was completely stifled. The poet has a licence to resolve metre where the emotion demands it, and he is a poor poet if he daren’t use it; but there is commonsense in restraint.

L

MY NAME IS LEGION, FOR WE ARE MANY

One goes plodding on and hoping for a miracle, but who has ever recovered the strange quality that makes the early work (which follows a preliminary period of imitation) in a sense the best work? There is a fine single-heartedness, an economy of material, an adventurous delight in expression, a beginner’s luck for which I suppose honest hard work and mature observation can in time substitute certain other qualities, but poetry is never the same again.

I will attempt to explain this feeling by an analogy which can be pressed as closely as any one likes: it is an elaboration of what has been said of the poet as a “peculiarly gifted witch doctor.” Cases of multiple personality have recently been investigated in people who believed themselves to be possessed by spirits. Analysis has proved pretty conclusively that the mediums have originally mimicked acquaintances whom they found strange, persons apparently selected for having completely different outlooks on life, both from the medium and from each other, different religions, different emotional processes and usually different dialects. This mimicry has given rise to unconscious impersonations of these people, impersonations so complete that the medium is in a state of trance and unconscious of any other existence. Mere imitation changes to a synthetic representation of how these characters would act in given circumstances. Finally the characters get so much a part of the medium’s self that they actually seem to appear visibly when summoned, and a sight of them can even be communicated to sympathetic bystanders. So the Witch of Endor called up Samuel for King Saul. The trances, originally spontaneous, are induced in later stages to meet the wishes of an inquisitive or devout séance-audience; the manifestations are more and more presented (this is no charge of charlatanism) with a view to their effect on the séance. It is the original unpremeditated trances, or rather the first ones that have the synthetic quality and are no longer mere mimicry, which correspond to Early Work.

But it is hardly necessary to quote extreme cases of morbid psychology or to enter the dangerous arena of spiritualistic argument in order to explain the presence of subpersonalities in the poet’s mind. They have a simple origin, it seems, as supplying the need of a primitive mind when confused. Quite normal children invent their own familiar spirits, their “shadows,” “dummies” or “slaves,” in order to excuse erratic actions of their own which seem on reflection incompatible with their usual habits or code of honour. I have seen a child of two years old accept literally an aunt’s sarcasm, “Surely it wasn’t my little girl who did that? It must have been a horrid little stranger dressed just like you who came in and behaved so badly. My little girl always does what she’s told.” The child divided into two her own identity of which she had only recently become conscious. She expected sympathy instead of scolding when the horrid little stranger reappeared, broke china and flung water all over the room. I have heard of several developments of the dummy, or slave idea; how one child used his dummy as a representative to send out into the world to do the glorious deeds which he himself was not allowed to attempt; on one occasion this particular dummy got three weeks’ imprisonment after a collision with the police and so complete was his master’s faith in the independent existence of the creature that he eagerly counted the days until the dummy’s release and would not call on his services, however urgently needed, until the sentence had been completed. Another child, a girl, employed a committee of several dummies each having very different characteristics, to whom all social problems were referred for discussion.

Richard Middleton, the poet, in a short essay, “Harold,” traces the development of a dummy of this sort which assumed a tyranny over his mind until it became a recurrent nightmare. Middleton says, and it immensely strengthens my contention if Middleton realized the full implications of the remark, that but for this dummy, Harold, he would never have become a poet.

Two or three poets of my acquaintance have admitted (I can confirm it from my own experience) that they are frequently conscious of their own divided personalities; that is, that they adopt an entirely different view of life, a different vocabulary, gesture, intonation, according as they happen to find themselves, for instance, in clerical society, in sporting circles, or among labourers in inns. It is no affectation, but a _mimesis_ or sympathetic imitation hardened into a habit; the sportsman is a fixed and definite character ready to turn out for every sporting or quasi-sporting emergency and has no interest outside the pages of the _Field_, the clerical dummy pops up as soon as a clergyman passes down the road and can quote scripture by the chapter; the rustic dummy mops its brow with a red pocket handkerchief and murmurs “keeps very dry.” These characters have individual tastes in food, drink, clothes, society, peculiar vices and virtues and even different handwriting.

The difficulty of remaining _loyal_, which I mention elsewhere, is most disastrously increased, but the poet finds a certain compensation in the excitement of doing the quick change. He also finds it amusing to watch the comments of reviews or private friends on some small batch of poems which appear under his name. Every poem though signed John Jones is virtually by a different author. The poem which comes nearest to the point of view of one critic may be obnoxious to another; and _vice versa_; but it all turns on which “dummy” or “sub-personality” had momentarily the most influence on the mental chairman.

In a piece which represents an interlude in a contemplated collection of poems, the following passage occurs to give the same thought from a different angle. I am asking a friend to overlook irreconcilabilities in my book and refer him to two or three poems which are particularly hostile to each other.

“Yet these are all the same stuff, really,
The obverse and reverse, if you look closely,
Of busy imagination’s new-coined money--
And if you watch the blind
Phototropisms of my fluttering mind,
Whether, growing strong, I wrestle Jacob-wise
With fiendish darkness blinking threatfully
Its bale-fire eyes,
Or whether childishly
I dart to Mother-skirts of love and peace
To play with toys until those horrors leave me,
Yet note, whichever way I find release,
By fight or flight,
By being wild or tame,
The Spirit’s the same, the Pen and Ink’s the same.”

LI

THE PIG BABY

“Multiple personality, perhaps,” says some one. “But does that account for the stereoscopic process of which you speak, that makes two sub-personalities speak from a double head, that as it were prints two pictures on the same photographic plate?” The objector is thereupon referred to the dream-machinery on which poetry appears to be founded. He will acknowledge that in dreams the characters are always changing in a most sudden and baffling manner. He will remember for example that in “Alice in Wonderland,” which is founded on dream-material, the Duchess’ baby is represented as turning into a pig; in “Alice through the Looking Glass” the White Queen becomes an old sheep. That is a commonplace of dreams.

When there is a thought-connection of similarity or contrast between two concepts, the second is printed over the first on the mental photographic plate so rapidly that you hardly know at any given moment whether it is a pig or a baby you are addressing. “You quite make me giddy,” said Alice to the Cheshire Cat who was performing similar evolutions. One image starts a sentence, another image succeeds and finishes it, almost, but the first reappears and has the last word. The result is poetry--or nonsense. With music much the same happens; I believe that those wonderful bursts of music heard in sleep are impossible to reproduce in a waking state largely because they consist of a number of melodies of different times and keys imposed on one another.

LII

APOLOGY FOR DEFINITIONS

In my opening definition I have given rather an ideal of English Poetry than an analysis of the ruling poetics of this, that and the other century. If those who rally to the later Pope and those who find in the prophetic Blake the true standard of Poetry, equally deny that my definition covers their experience of the word, I admit that in an encyclopediac sense it is quite inadequate, and indeed a fusion of two contradictory senses; indeed, again, a typically poetic definition.

But how else to make it? Blake’s poetry dictated by angels (a too-impulsive race) with its abstruse personal symbolism and tangled rhythms, and Pope’s elegantly didactic generalizations, in rigidly metrical forms, on the nature of his fellow man, have a common factor so low as hardly to be worth recovering; my justification is based on the works of our everywhere acknowledged Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley and the rest, where the baffling Metamorphism of Romance and the formal Characterism of Classical Poetry, often reconcile their traditional quarrel and merge contentedly and inseparably as Jack Spratt and Mrs. Spratt, dividing the fat and the lean in equable portions.

* * * * *

Here let me then, for the scientific interest, summarize my conception of the typical poet:--

A poet in the fullest sense is one whom some unusual complications of early environment or mixed parentage develop as an intermediary between the small-group consciousnesses of particular sects, clans, castes, types and professions among whom he moves. To so many of these has he been formally enrolled as a member, and to so many more has he virtually added himself as a supernumerary member by showing a disinterested sympathy and by practising his exceptionally developed powers of intuition, that in any small-group sense the wide diffusion of his loyalties makes him everywhere a hypocrite and a traitor.

But the rival sub-personalities formed in him by his relation to these various groups, constantly struggle to reconciliation in his poetry, and in proportion as these sub-personalities are more numerous more varied and more inharmonious, and his controlling personality stronger and quicker at compromise, so he becomes a more or less capable spokesman of that larger group-mind of his culture which we somehow consider greater than the sum of its parts: so that men of smaller scope and more concentrated loyalties swallow personal prejudices and hear at times in his utterances what seems to them the direct voice of God.

LIII

TIMES AND SEASONS

Each poet finds that there are special times and seasons most suitable for his work; for times, I have heard mentioned with favour the hour before breakfast and the hour after the usual bed-time, for seasons, the pause between the exuberance of Spring and the heaviness of Summer seems popular, also the month of October. There are also places more free from interruption and distraction than others, such as caves, attics barely furnished, lonely barns, woods, bed, which make the hypnotic state necessary for poetry easier to induce. The poet has to be very honest with himself about only writing when he feels like it. To take pen in hand at the self-conscious hour of (say) nine A.M., for a morning’s poetry, and with a mental arena free of combatants, is to be disappointed, and even “put off” poetry for some time to come.

I have often heard it said that a poet in intervals between inspirations should keep his hand in by writing verse-exercises, but that he should on such occasions immediately destroy what he has written.

That seems all wrong, it is an insult to the spontaneity of true poetry to go through a ritual farce of this sort and the poet will only be blunting his tools. He ought not to feel distressed at the passage of time as if it represented so many masterpieces unwritten. If he keeps mentally alive and has patience, the real stuff may arrive any moment; when it doesn’t, it isn’t his fault, but the harder he tries to force it, the longer will it be delayed.

LIV

TWO HERESIES

Among the most usual heresies held about poetry is the idea that the first importance of the poet is his “message”; this idea probably originated with the decline of polite sermon-writing, when the poet was expected to take on the double duty; but it is quite untenable. The poet is only concerned with reconciling certain impressions of life as they occur to him, and presenting them in the most effective way possible, without reference to their educational value. The cumulative effect of his work is to suggest a great number of personal obsessions the sum of which compose if you like his “message,” but the more definitely propagandist the poet, the less of a poet is the propagandist.

With this is bound up a heresy of about the same standing that poetry should only be concerned with presenting what is beautiful, beautiful in the limited sense of the picture-postcard. This romantic obsession (using the word “romantic” in the sense of optimistic loose thinking) is as absurd as that of the blood-and-guts realists. Poetry is no more a narcotic than a stimulant; it is a universal bitter-sweet mixture for all possible household emergencies, and its action varies according as it is taken in a wineglass or tablespoon, inhaled, gargled, or rubbed on the chest (like the literary Epic) by hard fingers covered with rings.

LV

THE ART OF EXPRESSION

It is as foolish to sneer at the Very Wild Men as it is to assume that the Very Tame Men are all right because they are “in the tradition.” The Very Wild Men are at any rate likely to have done work which has explored the desert boundaries of the art they profess, and the Very Tame Men have never done anything worth doing at all. The only excusable quarrel is with the pretended Wild Men who persist in identically repeating the experiments in which their masters have already failed, and with those whose Very Wilderness is traceable to this--that they are satisfied with the original spontaneity of their work and do not trouble to test it in the light of what it will convey to others, whom they then blame for want of appreciation. What seems to be the matter with Blake’s Prophetic Books is just this, he connected his images by a system of free association the clue to which was lost by his death: for instance his enemy, Schofield, a soldier who informed against him, suddenly enters “Jerusalem” and its strange company of abstractions, in the guise of a universal devil “Skofeld.”

Suppose that one Hodge, a labourer, attempted in a fit of homicidal mania to split my skull with a spade, but that my faithful bloodhound sprang to the rescue and Hodge barely escaped with his life. In my imagination, Hodge’s spade might well come to symbolize murder and madness, while the bloodhound became an emblem of loyal assistance in the hour of discomfiture. With this experience in my mind I might be inclined to eulogize a national hero as

“Bloodhound leaping at the throat of Hodge
Who stands with lifted spade,”

and convey a meaning directly contrary to the one intended and having an apparent reference to agrarian unrest. But conscious reflection would put my image into line with a more widely favoured conception of Man the Attacker, and Dog the Rescuer; I would rewrite the eulogy as

“_Watchdog_ leaping at the _burglar’s_ throat
Who stands with _pistol aimed_.”

One of the chief problems of the art of poetry is to decide what are the essentials of the image that has formed in your mind; the accidental has to be eliminated and replaced by the essential. There is the double danger of mistaking a significant feature of the image for an accident and of giving an accident more prominence than it deserves.

Too much modern country-side poetry is mere verbal photography, admirably accurate and full of observation but not excited by memories of human relationships, the emotional bias which could make Bunyan see the bee as an emblem of sin, and Blake the lion’s loving-kindness.

Now, if Wordsworth had followed the poetical fashion of the day and told the world that when wandering lonely as a cloud he had seen a number of vernal flowers, the poem would have fallen pretty flat--if however, anticipating the present century he had quoted the order, the species and the subspecies and remarked on having found among the rest no fewer than five double blooms, we would almost have wished the vernal flowers back again.

Mr. Edmund Blunden lately called my attention to a message from Keats to John Clare sent through their common publisher, Taylor. Keats thought that Clare’s “Images from Nature” were “too much introduced without being called for by a particular sentiment.” Clare, in reply, is troubled that Keats shows the usual inaccuracies of the townsman when treating of nature, and that when in doubt he borrows from the Classics and is too inclined to see “behind every bush a thrumming Apollo.”

LVI

GHOSTS IN THE SHELDONIAN

The most popular theory advanced to account for the haunting of houses is that emanations of fear, hate or grief somehow impregnate a locality, and these emotions are released when in contact with a suitable medium. So with a poem or novel, passion impregnates the words and can make them active even divorced from the locality of creation.

An extreme instance of this process was claimed when Mr. Thomas Hardy came to Oxford to receive his honorary degree as Doctor of Literature, in the Sheldonian Theatre.

There were two very aged dons sitting together on a front bench, whom nobody in the assembly had ever seen before. They frowned and refrained from clapping Mr. Hardy or the Public Orator who had just described him as “Omnium poetarum Britannicorum necnon fabulatorum etiam facile princeps,” and people said they were certainly ghosts and identified them with those masters of colleges who failed to answer Jude the Obscure when he enquired by letter how he might become a student of the University. It seems one ought to be very careful when writing realistically.

LVII

THE LAYING ON OF HANDS

While still in my perambulator about the year 1899,[2] I once received with great alarm the blessing of Algernon Charles Swinburne who was making his daily journey from “The Pines” in Putney to the _Rose and Crown_ public house on the edge of Wimbledon Common. It was many years before I identified our nursery bogey man, “mad Mr. Swinburne,” with the poet. It interests me to read that Swinburne as a young man once asked and received the blessing of Walter Savage Landor who was a very old man indeed at the time, and that Landor as a child had been himself taken to get a blessing at the hand of Dr. Samuel Johnson, and that the great lexicographer in his childhood had been unsuccessfully “touched” by Queen Anne for the King’s Evil. And what the moral may be, I cannot say, but I have traced the story back to Queen Anne because I want to make my grimace at the sacerdotalists; for I must confess, I have been many times disillusioned over such “poetry in the great tradition” as Authority has put beyond criticism.

[2] See Mr. Max Beerbohm’s AND EVEN NOW, page 69.

In caution, and out of deference to my reader’s sensibilities I will only quote a single example. Before reading a line of Swinburne I had been frequently told that he was “absolutely wonderful,” I would be quite carried away by him. They all said that the opening chorus, for instance, of _Atalanta in Calydon_ was the most melodious verse in the English language. I read:

When the hounds of Spring are on Winter’s traces,
The Mother of months in meadow and plain, ...

and I was not carried away as far as I expected. For a time I persuaded myself that it was my own fault, that I was a Philistine and had no ear--but one day pride reasserted itself and I began asking myself whether in the lines quoted above, the two “in’s” of _Spring_ and _Winter_ and the two “mo’s” of _Mother_ and _Months_ did not come too close together for euphony, and who exactly was the heroine of the second line, and whether the heavy alliteration in _m_ was not too obvious a device, and whether _months_ was not rather a stumbling-block in galloping verse of this kind, and would it not have been better....

Thereupon faith in the “great tradition” and in “Authority” waned.

Still, I would be hard-hearted and stiff-necked indeed if I did not wish to have had on my own head the blessing that Swinburne received.

LVIII

WAYS AND MEANS

It is true that Genius can’t lie hid in a garret nowadays; there are too many people eager to get credit for discovering and showing it to the world. But as most of the acknowledged best living poets find it impossible to make anything like a living wage from their poetry, and patronage has long gone out of fashion (a great pity I think) the poet after a little fuss and flattery is obliged to return disconsolately to his garret. The problem of an alternative profession is one for which I have never heard a really satisfactory solution. Even Coleridge (whose Biographia Literaria should be the poet’s Bible) could make no more hopeful suggestion than that the poet should become a country parson.

Surely a most unhappy choice! The alternative profession should be as far as possible removed from, and subsidiary to, poetry. True priesthood will never allow itself to become subordinate to any other calling, and the dangerous consanguinity of poetry and religion has already been emphasized. It is the old difficulty of serving two masters; with the more orthodox poets Herbert and Vaughan, for example, poetry was all but always tamed into meek subjection to religious propaganda; with Skelton and Donne it was very different, and one feels that they were the better poets for their independence, their rebelliousness towards priestly conventions.

Schoolmastering is another unfortunate subsidiary profession, it is apt to give poetry a didactic flavour; journalism is too exacting on the invention, which the poet must keep fresh; manual labour wearies the body and tends to make the mind sluggish; office-routine limits the experience. Perhaps Chaucer as dockyard inspector and diplomat, Shakespeare as actor manager, and Blake as engraver, solved the problem at best.

These practical reflections may be supplemented by a paragraph lifted from the New York _Nation_ _apropos_ of a trans-Atlantic poet whose works have already sold a million copies; a new volume of his poems has evidently broken the hearty muscular open-prairie tradition of the ’fifties and ’sixties and advanced forty years at a stride to the Parisian ecstasies of the naughty ’nineties;--

“That verse is in itself a hopelessly unpopular
form of literature is an error of the sophisticated
but imperfectly informed. Every period has its
widely read poets. Only, these poets rarely rise
into the field of criticism since they always echo
the music of the day before yesterday and express
as an astonishing message the delusions of the
huge rear-guard of civilization.”

LIX

POETRY AS LABOUR

A book of verses must be either priceless or valueless and as the general reading public is never told which by the council of critics until fifty years at least after the first publication, poets can only expect payment at a nominal rate. If they complain that the labourer is worthy of his hire, the analogy is not admitted. The public denies poetry to be labour; it is supposed to be a gentle recreation like cutting out “Home Sweet Home” from three-ply wood with a fretsaw, or collecting pressed flowers.

LX

THE NECESSITY OF ARROGANCE

To say of any poet that there is complete individuality in his poems combined with excellent craftsmanship amounts to a charge of arrogance. Craftsmanship in its present-day sense seems necessarily to imply acquaintance with other poetry; polish is only learned from the shortcomings and triumphs of others, it is not natural to the back-woodsman. A poet who after reading the work of those whom he recognizes as masters of the craft, does not allow himself to be influenced into imitation of peculiar technical tricks (as we often find ourselves unwittingly influenced to imitate the peculiar gestures of people we admire or love), that poet must have the arrogance to put his own _potential_ achievements on a level with the work he most admires.