Chapter IV: Part 4

Then is asked the question, “But why _do_ poets write? Why do they go on polishing the rough ideas which, once on paper, even in a crude and messy form, should give the mental conflict complete relief? Why, if the conflict is purely a personal one, do they definitely attempt to press the poem on their neighbour’s imagination with all the zeal of a hot-gospeller?”

There is arrogance in that, the arrogance of a child who takes for granted that all the world is interested in its doings and clever sayings. The emotional crises that make Poetry, imply suffering, and suffering usually humiliation, so that the poet makes his secret or open confidence in his poetic powers a set-off against a sense of alienation from society due to some physical deformity, stigma of birth or other early spite of nature, or against his later misfortunes in love.

The expectation and desire of a spurious immortality “fluttering alive on the mouths of men” is admitted by most poets of my acquaintance, both the good and the bad. This may be only a more definitely expressed form of the same instinct for self-perpetuation that makes the schoolboy cut his name on the leaden gutter of the church porch, or the rich man give a college scholarship to preserve his name _in perpetuo_. But with the poet there is always the tinge of arrogance in the thought that his own poetry has a lasting quality which most of his contemporaries cannot claim.

The danger of this very necessary arrogance is that it is likely so to intrude the poet’s personal eccentricities into what he writes that the reader recognizes them and does not read the “I” as being the voice of universality.... It was the first night of a sentimental play in an Early English setting; the crisis long deferred was just coming, the heroine and hero were on the point of reconciliation and the long embrace, the audience had lumps in their throats. At that actual instant of suspense, a man in evening-dress leaped down on the stage from a box, kicked the ruffed and doubleted hero into the orchestra, and began to embrace the lady. A moment’s silence; then terrible confusion and rage. The stage manager burst into tears, attendants rushed forward to arrest the desperado.

“But, ladies and gentlemen, I am the author!! I have an artist’s right to do what I like with my own play.”

“Duck him! scratch his face! tar and feather him!”

* * * * *

Arrogance? Yes, but a self-contradictory arrogance that takes the form of believing that there is nobody beside themselves who could point out just where in a given poem they have written well, and where badly. They know that it contains all sorts of hidden lesser implications (besides the more important ones) which, they think, a few sensitive minds may feel, but none could analyze; they think that they have disguised this or that bit of putty (of which no poem is innocent) so that no living critic could detect it. They are arrogant because they claim to understand better than any rivals how impossible an art poetry is, and because they still have the courage to face it. They have most arrogance before writing their poem of the moment, most humility when they know that they have once more failed.

LXI

IN PROCESSION

This piece was written a few weeks after the remainder of the book: I had no cold-blooded intention of summarizing the paradox of poetic arrogance contained in the last section, but so it happened, and I print it here.

Donne (for example’s sake)
Keats, Marlowe, Spenser, Blake,
Shelley and Milton,
Shakespeare and Chaucer, Skelton--
I love them as I know them,
But who could dare outgo them
At their several arts
At their particular parts
Of wisdom, power and knowledge?
In the Poet’s College
Are no degrees nor stations,
Comparisons, rivals,
Stern examinations,
Class declarations,
Senior survivals;
No creeds, religions, nations
Combatant together
With mutual damnations.
Or tell me whether
Shelley’s hand could take
The laurel wreath from Blake?
Could Shakespeare make the less
Chaucer’s goodliness?

The poets of old
Each with his pen of gold
Gloriously writing
Found no need for fighting,
In common being so rich;
None need take the ditch,
Unless this Chaucer beats
That Chaucer, or this Keats
With other Keats is flyting:
See Donne deny Donne’s feats,
Shelley take Shelley down,
Blake snatch at his own crown.
Without comparison aiming high,
Watching with no jealous eye,
A neighbour’s renown,
Each in his time contended
But with a mood late ended,
Some manner now put by,
Or force expended,
Sinking a new well when the old ran dry.
So, like my masters, I
Voice my ambition loud,
In prospect proud,
Treading the poet’s road,
In retrospect most humble
For I stumble and tumble,
I spill my load.

But often half-way to sleep,
On a mountain shagged and steep,
The sudden moment on me comes
With terrible roll of dream drums,
Reverberations, cymbals, horns replying,
When with standards flying,
A cloud of horsemen behind,
The coloured pomps unwind
The Carnival wagons
With their saints and their dragons
On the screen of my teeming mind,
The _Creation_ and _Flood_
With our Saviour’s Blood
And fat Silenus’ flagons,
With every rare beast
From the South and East,
Both greatest and least,
On and on,
In endless variable procession.
I stand on the top rungs
Of a ladder reared in the air
And I speak with strange tongues
So the crowds murmur and stare,
Then volleys again the blare
Of horns, and Summer flowers
Fly scattering in showers,
And the Sun rolls in the sky,
While the drums thumping by
Proclaim me....
Oh then, when I wake
Could I recovering take
And propose on this page
The words of my rage
And my blandishing speech
Steadfast and sage,
Could I stretch and reach
The flowers and the ripe fruit
Laid out at the ladder’s foot,
Could I rip a silken shred
From the banner tossed ahead,
Could I call a double flam
From the drums, could the Goat
Horned with gold, could the Ram
With a flank like a barn-door
The dwarf and blackamoor,
Could _Jonah and the Whale_
And the _Holy Grail_
With the “_Sacking of Rome_”
And “_Lot at his home_”
The Ape with his platter,
Going clitter-clatter,
The Nymphs and the Satyr,
And every other such matter
Come before me here
Standing and speaking clear
With a “how do ye do?”
And “who are ye, who?”
Could I show them to you
That you saw them with me,
Oh then, then I could be
The Prince of all Poetry
With never a peer,
Seeing my way so clear
To unveil mystery.

Telling you of land and sea
Of Heaven blithe and free,
How I know there to be
Such and such Castles built in Spain,
Telling also of Cockaigne
Of that glorious kingdom, Cand
Of the Delectable Land,
The Land of Crooked Stiles,
The Fortunate Isles,
Of the more than three score miles
That to Babylon lead,
A pretty city indeed
Built on a foursquare plan,
Of the land of the Gold Man
Whose eager horses whinney
In their cribs of gold,
Of the lands of Whipperginny
Of the land where none grow old.

Especially I could tell
Of the Town of Hell,
A huddle of dirty woes
And houses in endless rows
Straggling across all space;
Hell has no market place,
Nor point where four ways meet,
Nor principal street,
Nor barracks, nor Town Hall,
Nor shops at all,
Nor rest for weary feet,
Nor theatre, square or park,
Nor lights after dark,
Nor churches nor inns,
Nor convenience for sins,
Hell nowhere begins,
Hell nowhere ends,
But over the world extends
Rambling, dreamy, limitless, hated well:
The suburbs of itself, I say, is Hell.

But back to the sweets
Of Spenser and Keats
And the calm joy that greets
The chosen of Apollo!
Here let me mope, quirk, holloa
With a gesture that meets
The needs that I follow
In my own fierce way,
Let me be grave-gay
Or merry-sad,
Who rhyming here have had
Marvellous hope of achievement
And deeds of ample scope,
Then deceiving and bereavement
Of this same hope.

APPENDIX:--THE DANGERS OF DEFINITION

The following letter I reprint from Tract No. 6 issued by the Society for Pure English, but put it as an appendix because it explains my attitude to the careful use of language by prose writers as well as by poets. It is intended to be read in conjunction with my section on _Diction_.

_To the Editor of the S. P. E. tracts._

SIR,

As one rather more interested in the choice, use, and blending of
words than in the niceties of historical grammar, and having no
greater knowledge of etymology than will occasionally allow me to
question vulgar derivations of place-names, I would like to sound a
warning against the attempt to purify the language too much--“one
word, one meaning” is as impossible to impose on English as “one
letter, one sound.” By all means weed out homophones, and wherever
a word is overloaded and driven to death let another bear part of
the burden; suppress the bastard and ugly words of journalese or
commerce; keep a watchful eye on the scientists; take necessary
French and Italian words out of their italics to give them an
English spelling and accentuation; call a bird or a flower by its
proper name, revive useful dialect or obsolescent words, and so on;
that is the right sort of purification, but let it be tactfully
done, let the Dictionary be a hive of living things and not a
museum of minutely ticketed fossils. A common-sense precision in
writing is clearly necessary; one has only to read a page or two of
Nashe, Lyly, or (especially) the lesser Euphuists to come to this
conclusion; their sentences often can have meant no more to
themselves than a mere grimace or the latest sweep of the hat
learned in Italy. A common-sense precision, yes, but when the
pedantic scientist accuses the man in the street of verbal
inexactitude the latter will do well to point out to the scientist
that of all classes of writers, his is the least accurate of any in
the use of ordinary words. Witness a typical sentence, none the
better for being taken from a book which has made an extremely
important contribution to modern psychological research, and is
written by a scientist so enlightened that, dispensing almost
entirely with the usual scientific jargon, he has improvised his
own technical terms as they are needed for the argument. Very good
words they are, such as would doubtless be as highly approved by
the Society for Pure English, in session, as they have been by the
British Association. This Doctor X is explaining the unaccountable
foreknowledge in certain insects of the needs they will meet after
their metamorphosis from grub to moth. He writes:

... This grub, after a life completely spent within the channels in
a tree-trunk which it itself manufactures....

“Yes,” said Doctor X to me, “somehow the two it’s coming together
look a bit awkward, but I have had a lot of trouble with that
sentence and I came to the conclusion that I’d rather have it
clumsy than obscure.” I pointed out have the “tree-trunk which” was
surely not what he meant, but that the faults of the sentence lay
deeper than that. He was using words not as winged angels always
ready to do his command, but as lifeless counters, weights,
measures, or automatic engines wrongly adjusted. A _grub_ cannot
_manufacture_ a _channel_. Even a human being who can manufacture a
boot or a box can only _scoop_ or _dig_ a channel. And you can only
have a _channel_ on the outer surface of a tree; inside a tree you
have _tunnels_. A tunnel you _drive_ or _bore_. A grub cannot be
_within_ either a channel or a tunnel (surely) in the same way as a
fly is found _within_ a piece of amber. Doctor X excused himself by
saying that “scientists are usually functionally incapable of
visualization,” and that “normal mental visualization is dangerous,
and abnormal visualization fatal to scientific theorizations, as
offering tempting vistas of imaginative synthetical concepts
unconfirmed by actual investigation of phenomena”--or words to that
effect. Unaware of the beam in his own eye, our Doctor complains
more than once in his book of the motes in the public eye, of the
extended popular application of scientific terms to phenomena for
which they were never intended, until they become like so many
blunted chisels. On the other hand, he would be the first to
acknowledge that over-nice definition is, for scientific purposes,
just as dangerous as blurring of sense; Herr Einstein was saying
only the other day that men become so much the slaves of words that
the propositions of Euclid, for instance, which are abstract
processes of reason only holding good in reference to one another,
have been taken to apply absolutely in concrete cases, where they
do not. Over-definition, I am trying to show, discourages any
progressive understanding of the idea for which it acts as
hieroglyph. It even seems that the more precisely circumscribed a
word, the less accurate it is in its relation to other
closely-defined words.

There is a story of a governess who asked her charges what was the
shape of the earth? “It may conveniently be described as an oblate
spheroid” was the glib and almost mutinous answer. “Who told you
girls that?” asked the suspicious Miss Smithson. A scientific elder
brother was quoted as authority, but Miss Smithson with commendable
common sense gave her ruling, “Indeed that may be so, and it may be
not, but it certainly is _nicer_ for little girls to say that the
earth is more or less the shape of an orange.”

From which fruit, as conveniently as from anywhere else, can be
drawn our homely moral of common sense in the use of words. As
every schoolboy I hope doesn’t know, the orange is the globose
fruit of that rutaceous tree the _citrus aurantium_, but as every
schoolboy certainly is aware, there are several kinds of orange on
the market, to wit the ordinary everyday sweet orange from Jaffa
or Jamaica, the bitter marmalade orange that either comes or does
not come from Seville, the navel orange, and the excellent “blood,”
with several other varieties. Moreover the orange has as many
_points_ as a horse, and parts or processes connected with its
dissection and use as a motor-bicycle. “I would I were an Orange
Tree, that busie Plante,” sighed George Herbert once. I wonder how
Herbert would have anatomized his Orange, then a rarer fruit than
today when popular affection and necessary daily intercourse have
wrapped the orange with a whole glossary of words as well as with
tissue-paper. Old gentlemen usually _pare_ their oranges, but the
homophonic barrage of puns when Jones _père_ prepares to pare a
pair of--even oranges (let alone another English-grown fruit), has
taught the younger generations either to peel a norange or skin
their roranges. _Peel_ (subst.) is ousting _rind_; a pity because
there is also _peal_ as a homophone; but I am glad to say that what
used to be called _divisions_ are now almost universally known as
_fingers_ or _pigs_ (is the derivation from the tithe-or parson’s
pig known by its extreme smallness?); the seeds are “pips,” and
quite rightly too, because in this country they are seldom used for
planting, and “pip” obviously means that when you squeeze them
between forefinger and thumb they are a useful form of minor
artillery; then there is the white pithy part under the outer rind;
I have heard this called _blanket_, and that is pretty good, but I
have also heard it called _kill-baby_, and that is better; for me
it will always remain _kill-baby_. On consulting _Webster’s
International Dictionary_ I find that there is no authority or
precedent for calling the withered calix on the orange the _kim_,
but I have done so ever since I can remember, and have heard the
word in many respectable nurseries (it has a fascination for
children), and I can’t imagine it having any other name. Poetical
wit might call it “the beauty-patch on that fairy orange cheek”;
heraldry might blazon it, on _tenne_, as a _mullet, vert, for
difference_; and contemporary slang would probably explain it as
that “rotten little star-shaped gadget at the place where you shove
in your lump of sugar”; but _kim_ is obviously the word that is
wanted, it needs no confirmation by a Dictionary Revisal Committee
or National Academy. There it is, you can hardly get away from it.
Misguided supporters of the Society for Pure English, resisting the
impulse to say casually “the yellow stuff round my yorange” and
“the bits inside, what you eat,” and knowing better than to give us
_exocarp_, _carpel_, and _ovule_, will, however, perhaps
misunderstand the aims of the Society by only using literary and
semi-scientific language, by insisting on _paring_ the _integument_
and afterwards removing the _divisions_ of their fruit for
_mastication_. But pure English does not mean putting back the
clock; or doing mental gymnastics. Let them rather (when they don’t
honestly push in that lump of sugar and suck) _skin_ off the
_rind_, ignoring the _kim_ and scraping away the _kill-baby_, then
pull out the _pigs_, _chew_ them decently, and put the _pips_ to
their proper use.

Good English surely is clear, easy, unambiguous, rich,
well-sounding, but not self-conscious; for too much pruning
kills....

THE END

* * * * *

Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:

He fell in victory’s pierce pursuit=> He fell in victory’s fierce
pursuit {pg 55}