Chapter VIII: Part THREE: Literature and Men (3)

I wait, till, down the eastern sky,
Muses, like Maenads in a throng,
Sweep my decayed traditions by,
In startling tunes of unknown song.

In the 350 pages of the _Collected Poems_ there is nothing which were better omitted. Even the mere literary experiments, the rondeaus, the sestinas--the literary jokes in which every poet indulges--are neatly turned. Mr. Gosse has attempted, and succeeded with, a great variety of metres. His diction is almost unfailingly good; indeed, it is the very regularity and faultlessness of his verse that sometimes jars. It is the work of a man many-sided in his nature, many-sided in his moods. He can find himself in the atmosphere of a Coleridge, a Wordsworth, a Keats, a Rossetti, a Béranger, and often his form insensibly glides into that of the precursor whose spirit he for the moment assimilates. He is by no means a mere imitator. His feeling is his own; but his genius seems to be rather assimilative than strictly creative. Scores of his poems have the beauty and the value of the literature written by the great poets, when they were not in their greatest moods.

And perhaps it is precisely the many-sidedness of Mr. Gosse's tastes and interests which has left him so few decisive poetic successes. He has ranged through literature with a catholic taste. He has helped to create reputations--the reputations, for instance, of Ibsen and Stevenson. There have been many calls upon his literary instinct, and it is not surprising that the most uniformly successful of his poems are those in praise of the great men of letters whom, with his faculty for friendship, he made his friends. In the poems on these men--Ibsen, Ruskin, Stevenson, Henry Sidgwick, Rossetti, and unnamed friends who have departed--there is dignity, fineness, and the pathos of a regret for that which he shared with them, though he lacked the power, or more probably the opportunity, fully to express it.

But not in vain beneath this lofty shade
I danced awhile, frail plaything of the seas;
Unfit to brave the ampler main with these;
Yet, by the instinct which their souls obeyed,
Less steadfast, o'er the trackless wave I strayed,
And follow still their vanishing trestle-trees.

The beauties of literature, of many kinds and in many languages, the feeling and perception of friendship, nature, and the whole life-process through which men pass to a green memory or to oblivion--these are to be found here, the full-bodied expression of a personality--for poetry is that, or nothing. It is no defect in it that it is of 1872--that there is a certain formality, a kind of austerity, even, in its flippancies. It is meditative poetry. It is poetry which is essentially concerned with the emotions, the fancies, or the reflections, the very personal and secluded reflections, of a mind still concerned about the private ways of the spirit. The emotions, the operations of the mind, and the objective things of life--they are the concern of Mr. Gosse as they were the concern of Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Morris, and many poets before them. For the most part the men of that age adhered to the traditions of poetry, whether they were romantic or classical. At any rate on the formal side most of them--Browning is an exception--remained faithful to the accepted types. On the inner side it was an age which was much concerned about its soul, about nature, and about persons--yes, about persons. Whatever we may think about the Victorian age, from its literature at least we should conclude that it was an age when men valued friendships. And so its best poetry was essentially emotional, personal and subjective.

Now I do not suggest that in the poetry of our younger men there is emerging a single new type with a few distinctive characteristics which can be contrasted with Victorian poetry. On the contrary, if there is anything which we should particularly remark, it is the absence of such typical traits, it is the extraordinary diversity of type; men are experimenting with verse, attempting to revive old forms and invent new, to restore the spirit of antiquity or to ride abreast of the practical spirit of the time. Men like Mr. W.B. Yeats and "A.E." sought to unite the ancient and, as they believed, essential Irish spirit with the spirit which is manifested throughout the stream of English lyrical poetry. In Mr. Yeats there was more romanticism than he would care to admit, though the Elizabethan ideal which he cherished and his own power of concentration did much to subdue and chasten the insubordinate, vaguely aspiring spirit which in lesser Celtic poets turns to froth, with no undercurrent of human truth to give significance to its flaky beauty. Fiona Macleod is the classic instance of this frothy Celtic spirit which is unstayed by human truth or relevance to life; and there is much of this in contemporary Irish poetry. Mr. Yeats is not wholly free from it, but he was conscious of the evil tendency, and subdued it, and the body of fine poetry which stands to his name, taken as a whole, is unequalled for clarity, feeling, beauty and felicity of expression by any large body of poetry standing to the name of any other living poet.

But the Time-Spirit is active, or fickle perhaps, and Mr. Yeats has already almost ceased to be a quite modern poet. He, like Mr. Gosse, formed his technique in the nineteenth century, and the twentieth century is casting about with feverish energy for a new technique and new things to express. Mr. William Watson belongs quite as much to the past as does Mr. Gosse, though it might be said of him that he could belong to any age that knew its Milton and its Wordsworth. In him assuredly there was no attempt at inventiveness; he has always repudiated the idea that the poet should seek to innovate. He stands for austerity and discipline in thought, style, and diction, for a fine exactness which in his case was compatible with the old passion for the idea of "freedom" no less than with that private, self-communing spirit which the Victorians loved to express. Such a poet as Mr. Maurice Hewlett, antiquarian as he often is in the subjects he treats, is much more modern in spirit. In style and technique he is one of those who have gone back, as men for four centuries have constantly gone back, to the manner of the ancient Greeks. Just as that clever experimenter in verse, Mr. Ezra Pound, has created something of an effect by repeating the very metres, melodies, and mannerisms of the Provençal troubadours, so Mr. Hewlett, modelling his style upon the far finer Greek originals, produced an effect which was better than Mr. Pound's in proportion as the Greek tragedians are superior to the troubadours. In his execution he has really recaptured much of the manner of the great Greek tragedians. In _The Death of Hippolytus_ there is something of the aloofness, the blitheness, the thrust of phrases, the grimness, the sedateness which we associate with Greek drama. If he has little of the passion or fluency of Swinburne, he has some of his phrase-making skill, and he is free from that rhythmical lilt which in Swinburne was often excessive. We shall never be carried away as by the music of _Atalanta in Calydon_, but we are often arrested by grim echoes from the actual Greek, apt translations, as they might be, from an existing original.

But though Mr. Hewlett has been clever enough to adapt the technique of Greek poets to his own purpose in poetical drama, nevertheless in his treatment of subject, in thought and feeling, we may see, rather by his defects than by his excellences, how entirely modern he is. In _Minos, King of Crete_, the first play in his trilogy _The Agonists_, we may find ourselves at the outset not a little irritated by his habit of stage-managing with a view to a public that likes sensational and scenic effects. Shakespeare used thunder and lightning at the beginning of _The Tempest_, but only a very modern modern poet could use these devices as an introduction to tragedy. But it is more to the point that his treatment of Pasiphae is not only one that would have been impossible to the Greeks, but would have been impossible to any literary age which had not been so led away by modern theories of realism as to believe that any sort of monstrosity, being conceived as actual, might be made also an object of sympathetic emotion. Pasiphae is a creature of monstrous, unnatural lust, so vile, and so inhuman in its vileness, that it is impossible to conceive that human sympathy should be enlisted in her affair, as if it were a normal and humanly pitiable lapse from virtue. No Greek tragedian ever did attempt, or ever would have attempted, to arouse pity for a creature whose grotesque story expressed the Greek abomination for Phœnician barbarism. Nothing but the Philistine, or in this case Phœnician, realism of the twentieth century, can account for Mr. Hewlett's attempt to elicit fine feeling from an abnormal and nauseous incident.

It has always seemed to me that the transition from the Victorian Age to the experimental age which followed it was marked by the South African War. For a dozen years before that war there had been restless movements in the very heart of the nation; the men who were to be most conspicuous at the close of the century were leavening the nation or being leavened themselves. Joseph Chamberlain appeared as the embodiment of the transitional spirit in the political arena. In journalism the movement took shape in the person of Alfred Harmsworth. In literature the man of the moment was Rudyard Kipling. These three fateful embodiments of the Time-Spirit seemed to dominate England and shake her clean out of her fin-de-siècle complacency. England could never be the same again, after those three men had been at the helm, for however short a period. The course was deflected; the reckoning lost. Austere, dignified Whigs would appear again in politics, but never again would their austerity and dignity represent our political system. Sonorous, sober, highly judicious journalists might still succeed in producing, at great loss, a journal expressing themselves and their views, but no considerable section of the nation would ever again hang upon their words. And even in poetry, which lies so much nearer to the roots of human nature, and might therefore be expected to vary less with the fashions of a time, we cannot but perceive that the private, personal utterances of an Arnold, a Tennyson, a Browning, a Rossetti, would have less chance of being heard in the din of to-day, however sweet the expression, however intimately moving to the spirit. There is a poet belonging to the younger generation who has written lyrics of exquisite grace and charm, who can deal half playfully, half seriously with the lightest of subjects, and make it delicate and entrancing; who can touch the deeper note of the romantic poets and make of it something grim, perplexing, haunting; or can produce in a few stanzas an intimate feeling for persons portrayed in some suggestive aspect. Mr. Walter De la Mare is well known to a small circle of literary persons, but neither his poems nor his prose-writings have been widely read as they should have been.

Mr. Rudyard Kipling would perhaps shudder at the thought, but it is evident--is it not to his credit?--that he was essentially a democrat. He made his appeal to the average man. His ballads were written about ordinary men and ordinary things; the feelings they portrayed were the feelings of everyday life, feelings which everyone without distinction might feel in a vigorous and perhaps boisterous way. Wordsworth never really brought poetry back to the common, everyday life of simple folk. Long ago Coleridge pointed out that this was a popular superstition about Wordsworth shared by the poet himself. But to a far greater extent Mr. Kipling did make his appeal to the common stock of everyday and average emotion--the emotion of the average man. He was not interested, as the great Victorian poets had been, in the lonely way of the spirit; in the more personal emotions; or in nicety of expression. For him it was the corporate spirit that counted--the instinct, not for friendship, but for fellowship. He had sentiment in abundance, but he approached sentiment with that sort of nervous braggadocio with which the schoolboy conceals his softer feelings. A clever American critic, Mr. Bliss Perry, alludes to that "commonness of mind and tone" which Mr. Bryce declared to be inevitable among masses of men associated, as they are in America, under modern democratic government. "This commonness of mind and tone," says Mr. Perry, "is often one of the penalties of fellowship. It may mean a levelling down instead of a levelling up." The loud stridency of Mr. Kipling's voice is perhaps "one of the penalties" which has to be paid for the democratic sentiment of fellowship.

That there should be some "levelling down" is sure to follow when the poet finds himself absorbed in the common emotions of common life, and speaking to the common man. But there need not necessarily be that coarseness of sentiment, that crudity of thought, that bigotry of limited sympathy, mis-called patriotism, which has debased the level of so much of Mr. Kipling's writing. I should say that Mr. G.K. Chesterton owes more than he supposes to the influence, direct or indirect, of Mr. Kipling; that though his opinions, his sympathies, his conclusions are all diametrically opposed to those of the elder writer, still there is something in common between the two which is essentially a democratic quality, the final standard being that of reference to commonness, normal feeling, the common man. Mr. Chesterton wrote a very stirring poem in his Ballad of King Alfred, a ballad which appealed to patriotism, fellowship, and those broad, profound emotions which underlie the common sense of a people. It was far nearer to the spirit of the _Barrack Room Ballads_ than he, I am sure, would be willing to admit.

Mr. Kipling did this great thing, if not for literature, at least for men and men-of-letters. He expressed emotions in language which was as far as possible from the language of æstheticism. This meant, perhaps, that he could not express very subtle or unusual emotions, that his perceptions were broad rather than fine; but he at least taught the world that there were certain profound manly feelings which might be expressed without the preliminary _unmanning_ of æstheticism; and his distinction lies in the fact that he uttered them with vehemence and intensity. In Victorian times the average citizen thought of poetry as a somewhat weak-minded, effeminate pursuit--as very often it was. The poet who might be persuaded of the sublimity of his calling had necessarily to steel himself against the abuse of the matter-of-fact persons who have no traffic in poetry; and in so doing he lost the advantage of that bracing though insufficient criticism by which the sane, practical man influences many of the arts; that is to say, the readers and upholders of poetry everywhere agreed to put the poet beyond the reach of a criticism from which prose can never be wholly exempt. The matter-of-fact view being put out of court in the judgment of poetry, the poet was encouraged to believe that he was not concerned with the same universe as that of common fact. I have heard literary critics speak of romantic or highly imaginative novels, saying: "It is all delicate fancy and imagination; it is not concerned with realities; it is sheer poetry"--as if poetry were not concerned with realities! I have heard people criticise the prose works of Mr. A.C. Benson: "This is all too musical, and sentimental, and self-centred; this sort of thing cannot be done in prose; it should be done in poetry"--as if nonsense becomes less nonsensical by means of metre or rhyme! This easy-going view of the function of the poetic art has borne an ample harvest of nonsense. I could, were it worth while, name many living bards who consider that any sort of fancy or feeling is good enough for poetry so long as it be prettily or gracefully handled, who would thus degrade poetry to the position of the easiest, as it has for long been the least prized, of the fine arts. This havoc has been wrought, in part, by what I may call the doctrine of the sensitive soul. Keats is the classic example of the poet who lived and died through sensitiveness. It was a weakness inherent in the romantic movement which, though it had so much that was enchantingly strange and beautiful to give to the world, bequeathed to it also a consciousness of its nerves and a pride in its very defects. When Coleridge had taught his successors to glorify the poetic perception and vision, to give to the secret feelings a new warrant and value, they came to think it boorish to conceal their fine feelings, and they acquired the habit of expressing feelings which the common man scarcely experiences without a sense of shame. The poet came to be essentially the man who felt acutely, and anything that was a "feeling" came to have a sort of value of its own as denoting poetic sensitiveness. Hence the excessive softness, the indefiniteness, the languishing and the effeminacy which since the beginning of the nineteenth century have been tolerated in poetry because poetry was supposed to be the proper vehicle for such weakness. It is significant that the most admired poem of Keats begins with a sentiment which we should agree to detest in a prose-writing:

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk----

I contend that as this sentiment would be intolerable in prose, so also it is not to be suffered in poetry.

Now, the Kipling epoch did introduce a certain hardness, or masculinity, into the cultured life of the country which gave an opportunity for escape from the querulousness and the vagueness which had become poetic habits among English poets and lovers of poetry. I say the "Kipling epoch," for Mr. Kipling himself never had the self-discipline, perhaps had not the sense of form, to achieve much durable poetry, and his very masculinity turned at last into an unmasculine shriek. He marked no more than the transition period. Mr. Chesterton is a part of it. He, too, is lacking in sense of form and diction, and could never have been a considerable poet, though there is in his writings abundant evidence of poetic feeling. What I am concerned to observe is that his ballad poetry, too, is marked by that essentially masculine note which seemed to have died out of English poetry--unless Browning and Morris be taken as exceptions. Mr. Hilaire Belloc comes at the latter end of the transition period. When a man has only written a few poems it is injudicious to say of him that he is a great poet. But, at any rate, Mr. Belloc has written a few poems which belong to the great order of lyrical verse, and in _The South Country_ he surpasses anything that Kipling or Henley achieved, anything perhaps that any English lyrical poet has written this century. If that is not a great poem, then I for one will abjure great poetry, and be content with the less. There is all Mr. Kipling's sense of fellowship, a thousand times refined, and in alliance with all the most vital emotions of life, the sense for concrete, simple things, the sense for things remembered, of tragedy expected but not feared, the feeling for men, as men; for places, as places; for things, as things; for the emotions, as the ironies of life; for the ludicrous, as the surface aspect of the pathetic--for the whole male side of existence which poetry for a hundred years has been inclined to ignore.

It is quite evident in the very early poetry of Mr. John Masefield that the loudly reverberating ballads of Rudyard Kipling had had their effect upon him; that something of their sheer vehemence and lustiness had mingled with his own feeling for the tropical seas into which he had adventured, with the vivid sense of men and things in strange places which had wrought upon his imagination, as years before they had wrought upon Mr. Conrad. Needless to say, Mr. Masefield in most respects stands at the opposite pole of temperament from Mr. Kipling. He is a lyrical poet whose poetry springs not so much from intense interest in the lusty vigour of common life as from an intense feeling for sheer beauty, for that exquisite refinement which may be extracted from life; and it may be mingled with equally intense pain when the beauty is removed. He is, perhaps, more nearly akin to the type to which Keats belonged. But certainly the arrival of the spirit represented by Kipling, added to the discipline of his own early adventures, braced him and energised him; and almost his first literary effort took the form of ballad poems uniting a fineness and sweetness which were entirely his own with a kind of lusty vigour which was superimposed. It is easy enough to see the influence of Kipling in a ballad such as that which begins:

Spanish waters, Spanish waters, you are singing in my ears,
Like a slow sweet piece of music from the grey forgotten years;
Telling tales, and beating tunes, and bringing weary thoughts to me
Of the sandy beach at Muertos, where I would that I could be.

Those early ballads had some of the emotional vigour without the characteristic defects of Kipling, and in many cases a charm which was entirely his own. But he very early shook off what there was of that Kipling influence. It was superficial and transitory. Mr. Kipling, as I have said, represented a transition period; and another--an experimental period--has followed. It is probable that Joseph Conrad became a far more potent influence on the imagination of Mr. Masefield than any one other author; though he was assuredly not content to follow any single example, and began steadily to experiment and to strike out his own line. It was unfortunate that the craze for experiment and innovation should, for a time--probably a brief time--have had so strange and uncouth an effect upon so fine and sensitive a genius. Mr. Masefield was--and is--a lyrical poet, fitted to express the personal emotions which lyrical poetry can support. But he became obsessed with the conviction that poetry ought to be made to do something else than suggest feelings and ideas in a beautiful way; that it ought to serve a social purpose; that it ought to become a direct contributory force to the social morality of the time; that it ought to concern itself with practical modern questions in a practical way; that it ought to present actual life, realistically. The same feeling affected a lesser poet, Mr. Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, who, being a story-teller in verse and a moralist, has been acclaimed as a powerful poet in both England and America. Mr. Gibson has not yet shown that he is a considerable poet. But Mr. Masefield undoubtedly does possess the poetic talent, perhaps even genius, which Mr. Gibson has not yet revealed. But the most recent poems of the former have been praised for just the same reasons that Mr. Gibson's have been praised. The New York _Outlook_ said of Mr. Gibson: "He is bringing a message which might well rouse his day and generation to an understanding of and a sympathy with life's disinherited--the overworked masses." Mr. Masefield's _The Everlasting Mercy_ and his series of realistic poems of the same order have been lavishly eulogised in exactly the same way--and for a similar reason. Each of these poems contains a rousing story; each subserves the purpose of an excellent moral. They are realistic enough, but only in rare passages are they beautiful. "Nothing," said Shelley, "can be equally well expressed in prose that is not tedious and supererogatory in verse." I have felt that Mr. Masefield's long narrative poems might equally well have been expressed in prose.

I believe this to be no more than a passing phase in Mr. Masefield. A poet who could write the charming lyrical poem which, by a curious accident, was published at the end of _The Everlasting Mercy_ in the _English Review_ will not long be content to write sensational tracts; we may even be glad that these tracts have been written if they bring the public to attend to the more significant work of so finely gifted an author.

But I am very far from suggesting that the effort made by Mr. Gibson and Mr. Masefield to bring poetry into touch with modern life is without significance. It represented reaction against the querulousness, the vagueness, the mere prettiness which have so often resulted in nauseous verse. It had its source in the same impulse which led J.M. Synge to create his finest imaginative effects by means of a severely realistic method. And still earlier Mr. Doughty, who holds a solitary position in modern poetry, had expressed himself in the only way that was natural to him, through an archaic language, the language in which he thought, which lent itself to the hard, vivid, and superbly brutal images belonging to his primitive, barbarian, and as it were primeval theme. Mr. Doughty belongs neither to our own nor to any other age, but he has not been without influence upon men of our time. To appreciate _The Dawn in Britain_ or _Adam Cast Forth_ is to long for the hardness and masculinity which have been rare in English poetry for a hundred years; to feel that what poetry needs is more grit and more brain; and to plead for these is to plead for more poetry, for a stronger imagination.

There is one among the younger poets who has given promise of satisfying these needs, though it remains to be seen whether he may not perhaps be over-weighted on the side of intellect. But in _Mary and the Bramble_ and _The Sale of St. Thomas_ he has shown us how the poetic imagination ripens into food for adults when virility and intellect have gone to the making of it. There is no mere prettiness in Mr. Abercrombie's writing. The wearisome refrain of sex, disappointed or desirous, neither has part in the argument nor supplies him with images or asides. Innumerable things and events upon the earth appeal to him because of that full-bodied experience which they carry to the wakeful and the zestful, experience which is manifold, which fills all the chinks of memory, which may recall pain, which may be charged with pathos, but is never morbid; beautifully he masses vigorous impressions of sense under a large imaginative idea. Here there is no pale, languishing phantom of beauty, but that which men delight in without the verbal distractions of the æsthete.

In _Mary and the Bramble_ he has taken an intellectual idea and treated it allegorically, and essentially poetically. The Virgin Mary in his story symbolises the "upward meaning mind," fastened in "substance," yet pure and "seemly to the Lord;" and the bramble which clutches her and seeks to smirch her purity is the folly, the muddiness, the stupid cruelty of the world which mocks at all vision, at all idealism--it is the mortal trying to drag down the immortal part of man. Mary is the love of beauty, or of God; the bramble is the stupidity and grossness of the practical world.

But Mary, "in her rapt girlhood," with her "eyes like the rain-shadowed sea," is not the less sweet because she stands for an idea.

Through meadows flowering with happiness
Went Mary, feeling not the air that laid
Honours of gentle dew upon her head;
Nor that the sun now loved with golden stare
The marvellous behaviour of her hair,
Bending with finer swerve from off her brow
Than water which relents before a prow;
Till in the shrinking darkness many a gleam
Of secret bronze-red lustres answered him.

And when the Spirit of Life vaunts itself in her,

Not vain his boast; for seemly to the Lord,
Blue-robed and yellow-kerchieft, Mary went.
There never was to God such worship sent
By any angel in the Heavenly ways,
As this that Life had utter'd for God's praise,
This girlhood--as the service that Life said
In the beauty and the manners of this maid.
Never the harps of Heaven played such song
As her grave walking through the grasses long.

I cannot dwell upon the subject of _The Sale of St. Thomas_. The dialogue between Thomas and the captain gives opportunity for description and metaphor almost Elizabethan in their ferocity, though the reflections of Thomas have a spiritual quality which is entirely modern. We hear

Of monkeys, those lewd mammets of mankind.

And of flies staring

Out of their little faces of gibbous eyes.

And there are lines such as

Men there have been who could so grimly look
That soldiers' hearts went out like candle flames
Before their eyes, and the blood perisht in them,

which might be placed side by side with Marlowe's:

The frowning looks of fiery _Tamburlaine_
That with his terrour and imperious eies,
Commands the hearts of his associates.

And we may contrast these vehement records of things with the more philosophic passages:

Thou must not therefore stoop thy spirit's sight
To pore only within the candle-gleam
Of conscious wit and reasonable brain;
But search into the sacred darkness lying
Outside thy knowledge of thyself, the vast
Measureless fate, full of the power of stars,
The outer noiseless heavens of thy soul.

We may well think that the immediate future of poetry depends upon men of the stamp of Mr. Abercrombie, men for whom poetry is neither a plaything nor a sweet-sounding expression of desire or anguish or vague dreams; but a serious attempt to grapple with life through combined experience, thought, and vision. Long ago Meredith urged that if fiction was to go on living, it must give us "brain-stuff" and "food-stuff." But no poet has since arisen to make some similar claim for poetry; to urge that within its proper sphere and in its own appropriate way it should attack the larger life of man with intelligence, with common sense, and with virile passion.

* * * * *

Mr. W.H. Davies stands apart from them all. I should not like to try to account in any way for Mr. Davies any more than he could account for a singing-bird by describing the trees among which it lived. His poetry is unlike any other poetry that is written to-day. It is fresh and sweet like a voice from a younger and lustier world. It is charged with no clarion message of prophecy; it is burdened with no exactly formulated philosophy of life. There is no rhetoric in it, no rhodomontade. It is the melody of a man's voice singing for the pleasure of singing, now vehemently, from the sheer delight in things physical and outward, now sadly, as some evanescent object induces melancholy, now in a naively reflective way, as past or future brings memories or expectations. He never reaches quite the exquisite melodies of Herrick, but when he writes of love he is as simple as Herrick, and he is more direct, more heart-whole, less of the perfect singer, perhaps, but more of the lover. If he writes with wide-eyed wonder at the simpler marvels of life, it is in the manner of Blake in _Songs of Innocence_, where outwardness of manner and lyrical simplicity leave an impression of something unearthly in its strangeness. Occasionally in the slight extravagance of his imagery we can see that the influence of the seventeenth-century "metaphysical" poets has not left him unscathed, as when he likens love to the influence of spring opening up navigation.

But it is a sure instinct which has taken him to the simpler lyrical poets and led him to mould his style on theirs. His interests lie in the purely personal affairs of the heart; the simpler emotions may be best expressed in those lyrical forms in which the older English literature is pre-eminent, which eschew the fervid rhythms of the soulful nineteenth century. But he is not merely imitative. Sometimes in the same poem we see him, now conforming to the manner of the traditional love-poet, now revivifying it or bursting through it with images and ideas that are wholly personal to himself.

She had two eyes as blue as Heaven,
Ten times as warm they shone;
And yet her heart was hard and cold
As any shell or stone.

Her mouth was like a soft red rose
When Phœbus drinks its dew;
But oh, that cruel thorn inside
Pierced many a fond heart through.

She had a step that walked unheard,
It made the stones like grass;
Yet that light step has crushed a heart,
As light as that step was.

Those glowing eyes, those smiling lips,
I have lived now to prove
Were not for me, were not for me,
But came of her self-love.

Yet, like a cow for acorns that
Have made it suffer pain,
So, though her charms are poisonous,
I moan for them again.

In any other poet the cow and the acorns would be an intolerable extravagance; but not so from Mr. Davies, who knows and loves all beasts of the field; who knows what it is to tramp over stones and to tread the grass, so that his "stones like grass" rings freshly, while the dew-drinking Phœbus is stale.

But if he seems to belong to an older tradition, and to have little in common with the self-conscious modern poet, that is only because his life has kept him away from the fashions and fashionable ideas which are the intellectual superficies of our time, which distinguish the culture of one age from the culture of another. He loves with the strength of intimate friendship the unchanging things in the natural world, the sea, things that grow, and animals and birds. And he is acquainted with the other unchanging things--love, the desire for food, hatred of death, friendship. He is also too keen in his sympathies and interests not to be modern in the sense, for instance, that the romantic appeal has had its effect on him, or that the ugly facts of modern life have stirred and pained him. There is a great variety of emotions registered in his poems. There is the grim ballad called _Treasures_. There is a bold union of magical romanticism and sensuous passion in the poem beginning:

I met her in the leafy woods,
Early a summer's night;
I saw her white teeth in the dark,
There was no better light.

There is a remarkable confidence and elation in the little poem _The Elements_, wherein he identifies himself with Nature--it could only be quoted entire. And he records his impression of a tramcar which sweeps along Westminster in the twilight carrying its load of sleeping men to work. He can also write in a vein wholly unlike that of his simple and more characteristic lyrical verses. Thus he describes his childish impressions of a mariner "no good in port or out," as his granddad said:

And all his flesh was pricked with Indian ink,
His body marked as rare and delicate
As dead men struck by lightning under trees,
And pictured with fine twigs and curled ferns;
Chains on his neck and anchors on his arms;
Rings on his fingers, bracelets on his wrist;
And on his breast the Jane of Appledore
Was schooner rigged, and in full sail at sea.
He could not whisper with his strong hoarse voice,
No more than could a horse creep quietly;
He laughed to scorn the men that muffled close
For fear of wind, till all their neck was hid,
Like Indian corn wrapped up in long green leaves;
He knew no flowers but seaweeds brown and green,
He knew no birds but those that followed ships,
Full well he knew the water-world; he heard
A grander music there than we on land.

All of it is the intensely personal and direct poetry of a man of many moods, many sympathies, but happily removed from the cramping effects of current fashions of thoughts, and talk about thought. He has lived in the open air and among simple people, but always companioned by the poets. And so we have in him a singer fresh and unspoilt, writing from impulse, probably with little conscious technique, about things which he knows and the immediate experiences of life.

VI

J.M. SYNGE

Four volumes, none too thick, contain the collected works of the man who is coming to be regarded as the greatest of Irish dramatists. As we turn over the pages, and observe that they contain no more than six plays--three of them very short--a few Poems and Translations, the volume on the Aran Islands, and a volume of miscellaneous studies of his experiences among the folk of Wicklow, Kerry, and the Congested Districts, it is to feel wonder that a man with so profound an imagination, so wide a knowledge of the folk, and such genius for creation, should have produced only this for his life-work. And then we remember the lamentable fact of his early death--he was born in 1871--and the no less important fact that he was one for whom experience of living counted equally with the experience of art, and that he wrought as few English authors work, being at the pains to write and re-write till he had the result to his mind.

And so in these four volumes there is nothing whatever to regret--nothing that can be passed over as dull or indifferent, nothing that has not both a hard basis of actuality and also an intensity of imagination that lifts it into the region of poetry. In one of his later moments of self-consciousness he uttered a sentence of criticism worthy to be treasured by the modern poet, and perhaps by the Irish poet especially. "It may almost be said that before verse can be human again it must learn to be brutal." What would we not give to have Synge's "brutality" introduced into the over-idealised and sonorous poetry of Mr. Yeats? He does not mean the brutality of our English realists, or ugliness, sheer fact, mis-called truth, without beauty; what he wants is fidelity to _common_ truth, a realisation of the root, primitive facts--the most grim primitive facts--that hard basis of fact which must be accepted before the imagination can bear fruit.

One of the most singular qualities of Synge is the extraordinary common sense which sustains the gruesomeness of his tragic imagination on the one side, and his no less gruesome humour on the other. It holds together this humour and this grimness which are so truthfully united in his work. It is the common sense of the old-fashioned poet, the common sense which is all-pervading in Homer's Odyssey--based upon a strong, keen sense for the concrete, ordinary things of life. It is this which makes him find the masterly conclusion to _Riders of the Sea_, when old Maurya, lamenting the death of her sons, comforts herself, "No man at all can be living for ever, and we must be satisfied;" it is this which gives Naisi the ancient love of life, "It's a hard and bitter thing leaving the earth;" which produces so admirable a proverb as, "Who would listen to an old woman with one thing and she saying it over?"; and enables Pegeen, in _The Playboy of the Western World_, to perceive, if only from pique, the preposterousness of her infatuation--"There's a great gap," she says--and this is the gist of the matter--"between a gallous story and a dirty deed." But never does such common sense stay the flight of the poetic dream. Pegeen may know the difference "between a gallous story and a dirty deed," but that does not stop her from breaking out into wild lamentations: "Oh, my grief, I've lost him surely. I've lost the only Playboy of the Western World."

It is by never departing far from the high-road of common fact that Synge suggests to us the fascinations, the dangers, and romance of the by-paths. I think that when he travels a very long way from that high-road he does not hold us with so firm a hand. Beautiful as is the prose-poetry of _Deirdre of the Sorrows_, and fine as is the idealised portrait of Deirdre, yet, as a whole, this play does not grip so well as his other, even his slighter, plays. Is it not because he is moving away from the common life, which he knows so well how to light up into the uncommon atmosphere of the grim, the fanciful, the romantic, into the already half-conventionalised art atmosphere of the old heroic Saga? Most of his success in _Deirdre of the Sorrows_ is due to the fact that he has treated Deirdre as if she were just one of the peasant women whom he has known; but the ready-made plot has hampered him, and he is shut off from the use of those little "brutalities" which give savour to his modern plays. The actual life is not there to secure him, and he falls into the characteristic Irish vagueness in praising the poet-hero--even Pegeen, in _The Playboy_, had spoken of poets as "fine, fiery fellows with great rages when their temper's roused" (it is just so that the Irish poets like to be pictured; and Mr. Jack Yeats, in a drawing usually much admired, has transformed Synge himself into just such a "fine, fiery fellow" of the tradition). In _Deirdre of the Sorrows_, Synge could not, of course, free his mind from the traditional story, or from the poetry of all the poets who have sung of Deirdre; but should Deirdre herself, at the tragic moment when her lover lies dead, be thinking of "the way there will be a story told of a ruined city and a raving king and a woman will be young for ever?" This is like many Irish poets, but it is not worthy of Synge.

It was his genius to be able to tell the stories that have not been traditionalised, and to tell them in a wonderful dialect which may or may not be true to any actual speech, but which, unlike the jargon that is affectation in many Irish writers, used by him, has the power of affecting us as the old Ionic could move those who spoke in Attic Greek. It helps us to get into the fanciful and grotesque atmosphere which he conjured up out of the most real life. In all his modern plays there are character, dramatic intensity, fidelity to the folk life--and that life, with its brutality and its delicacy, attains the utmost that life can hold, seen through the poetic vision of Synge, made poignant and vivid by his imagination.

VII

THE SHRAMANA EKAI KAWAGUCHI

Books are like places of entertainment in that they often afford a pleasure wholly different in kind from that intended by the author. An original and cultured gentleman of my acquaintance has a habit of visiting suburban music-halls, and deriving therefrom a delight exquisite beyond the dreams of the artists who forgather at the Wormwood Scrubs Empire. In like manner there are books which have come to be accepted as classics on the ground of excellences not aimed at by their authors, not necessarily because the authors were artless, but because their conscious art had no relation to the quality in them which pleases. Pepys was a first-rate Admiralty official and a desirable boon companion, but to his many excellences, known to himself no less than to his friends, that of being a master in English literature would never have been added. A still better example is the _Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi_. We read them now because of what we are accustomed to call their "human interest," because they show us the robust, ordinary, fleshly, and ideal side of pious mediæval Catholics; they appeal to us humorously and pathetically; they are tragi-comedies of the transcendental life. But they were written to commemorate the pious acts of the saints, and the authors would have been shocked to think that they were contributing to the profane delight of the general and possibly heretical reader. In the same way the _Journal of John Wesley_ is a delight to many people to whom Wesley's peculiar excellences make no appeal. He was a great evangelist, a powerful emotional influence, a considerable thinker, a scholar, a robust man, and a gentleman of the Church of England. But when we have named all these qualities we have scarcely begun to account for the endless delight of his _Journal_. That which he consciously aimed at is not that which gives all of us pleasure.

To books of this class I should be disposed to add that of the Shramana Ekai Kawaguchi, a distinguished Japanese priest, scholar, and traveller, who wrote a book entitled _Three Years in Tibet_. It must not be supposed that the Shramana is a simple or unsophisticated writer, or that he has not studied literary effects; but his intentional effects have the charm of _naïveté_ to an English reader, and his narrative is wholly unstudied in respect of all that delights us in it.

Such a book as this makes us distrustful of all our standards. It is an example of art as unconscious as that of the song of some vain, but for the moment solitary, child. It declares to us that Nature, when we can bring to it our own appreciation, is the first thing, and that the idealism of art is the second-best with which we content ourselves when Nature, with its direct appeal, is in abeyance.

The Shramana accomplished a journey which has few parallels in the history of travel. He spent three years residing and travelling in the uplands of Tibet, after the exclusion of strangers had become a rigorous policy, and before the British punitive expedition had inspired fear of the long-handed foreigner. He had with him no organised escort of men and mules such as accompanied Sir Sven Hedin in his more recent and better advertised expedition. He went alone and in disguise, as Burton went on his pilgrimage to Mecca; on intimate terms with the natives as Mr. Doughty was with the Arabs; a mendicant as Arminius Vambery has been in Asiatic Turkey and Persia. And he had an advantage which none of these travellers had, one which he did not scruple to use to the utmost--he was a Buddhist, like the Tibetans, and not only a Buddhist, but an exceptionally learned priest, possessed of a knowledge of things holy which he used with a religious fervour tempered with Odysseian guile. He was no missionary, but he carried the true Buddhism about with him in Tibet as discreetly as Borrow carried his Bibles in Spain; and his style has a curious resemblance to that of our English gipsy. With everyone whom he meets he converses on religion, philology, love, or the stars, in the gayest argumentative manner, and these dialogues come as interludes to adventures as thrilling as any that ever fall to the lot of man. In a few paragraphs he will dwell on the almost inconceivable perils he experienced from mountains, floods, storms, and famine, and in the next he is dryly recording the discourse of a holy lama, the wayside gossip of robbers, or the passionate advances of a love-sick maiden, against whose enticements he steeled himself with the fortitude becoming to his profession. He tells us with what joy he preached the simpler truths of Buddhism to the attentive nomads, and in the next page remarks somewhat inconsistently: "I had my own reasons for being painstaking in these preachings. I knew that religious talks always softened the hearts of my companions, and this was very necessary, as I might otherwise have been killed by them.... Fortunately my sermons were well received by my companions." His whole journey was necessarily a long and systematic tissue of deception, but when set on by robbers he disdains to preserve his worldly trash by a concealment of the truth. When his friends in Lhassa discover that he is not, as he has been supposed to be, a Chinaman, but a foreigner from Japan, he begs them to save themselves and send him in fetters to the Dalai Lama; but sacred meditation and a supernatural voice add themselves opportunely to the persuasions of his friends, and with this divine sanction he makes good his escape.

The book, indeed, has a fourfold value; it reveals artlessly and perfectly the character of the Shramana Ekai Kawaguchi, and that is worth knowing in itself. Secondly, it unfolds the emotional and intellectual aspects of Japanese Buddhism, showing this religion both on its theological side and as a practical working influence. Thirdly, it introduces us to a host of Tibetan persons, one after another, presenting not a vague, impressionist account of them, but individuals with whom he lived on intimate equal terms in daily social intercourse. And in the fourth place it gives us what we may take to be an authoritative account of the whole social system of Tibet--the priesthood and religion, administration, finance, trade, and the relations between the sexes and castes.

Having in 1891 given up the rectorship of a monastery in Tokyo, he lived for some years as a hermit and devoted himself to the study of Buddhistic books in the Chinese language. In the course of his studies he learnt that there were Tibetan translations of the sacred text which, though inferior in general meaning to the Chinese, were superior as literal translations. He determined, therefore, to undertake a journey to the forbidden land and travel there alone as a mendicant priest. The many presents his friends offered him before his departure he "declined to accept, save in the form of sincerely given pledges" (and the sum of 430 yen, mentioned subsequently).

From a fisherman he exacted the promise to discontinue the cruel habit of catching fish; from a poultry-man he secured a promise not to kill fowls; and "from immoderate smokers I asked the immediate discontinuance of the habit that would end in nicotine poisoning. About forty persons willingly granted my appeal for this somewhat novel kind of farewell presents." We are reminded of John Wesley's exhortations to his followers to abstain from the pernicious habit of drinking tea--"I proposed it to about forty of those whom I believed to be strong in faith; and the next morning to about sixty more, entreating them all to speak their minds freely. They did so; and in the end saw the good which might ensue." In many moments of dire peril experienced by the Shramana in Tibet, these "effective" gifts, it seems, "contributed largely toward my miraculous escapes."

Before he could begin the most arduous part of his journey it was necessary that he should serve an apprenticeship of no less than three years in Darjeeling and Nepaul, studying the Tibetan language and grammar, and Tibetan Buddhism, befriending beggars with the double object of bestowing charity and gaining information, and ascertaining the possible routes across the Himalayas. Then one day he was conducted to the summit of a lofty and unguarded pass, whence, on July 4, 1900, with his luggage on his back, alone, he stepped on to the soil of Tibet, and entered upon an unknown and apparently interminable wilderness.

In his wanderings over mountains, deserts, and rivers there was no form of hardship and danger which he had not to encounter. Now he spent a night in the open, nearly frozen by snow, the pain of the cold being interrupted only by the abstraction of "meditation" and the joy of composing _utas_ (short poems). Now he was nearly drowned in fording a river, from which he was saved at the moment he was expressing a desire to be born again. Now he was overtaken by a sandstorm, now bereft of his money, now nearly perishing of hunger. But from every danger he emerged triumphant. When he approached the tents of nomads or pilgrims and had pointed his staff at the threatening dogs, he was generally received with hospitality, and on one occasion he fell in with a party of robbers who were undergoing a period of penance at Manasarova, and made him their guest for two months. They approach the sacred peak of Kailasa:

It inspired me with the profoundest feelings of pure reverence,
and I looked up to it as a "natural mandala," the mansion of a
Buddha and Bodhisattvas. Filled with soul-stirring thoughts and
fancies I addressed myself to this sacred pillar of nature,
confessed my sins, and performed to it the obeisance of one
hundred and eight bows. I also took out the manuscript of my
"twenty-two desires," and pledged their accomplishment to the
Buddha. I then considered myself the luckiest of men, to have
thus been enabled to worship such a holy emblem of Buddha's
power and to vow such vows in its sacred presence, and I mused:

Whate'er my sufferings here and dangers dire,
Whate'er befalls me on my onward march,
All, all, I feel, is for the common good
For others treading on Salvation's path