Chapter IX: Part THREE: Literature and Men (4)

The night of my performance of these devotional practices must
have been a matter of wonder and mystery to my companions. They
had been watching me like gaping and astonished children, and
were all intensely curious to know why I had bowed so many
times, and read out such strange Chinese sentences. I was glad
to explain to them the general meaning of my conduct and they
seemed to be deeply struck with its significance. They said they
had never known the Chinese Lamas were men of such Bodhisattvic
mind! The upshot was that they asked me to preach to them that
night, a request to which I was very glad to accede. The
preaching which followed, which I purposely made as simple and
as appealing to the heart as possible, seemed to affect them
profoundly, and to make the best possible impression on them; so
much so that they even shed tears of joy. The preaching over,
they said in all sincerity that they were glad of companionship,
and even offered to regard me as their guest during the two
months which they intended to spend in pilgrimage to and round
the Kang Rinpoche. They thought that their pilgrimage over such
holy ground, while serving such a holy man as I now was to them,
would absolve them completely from their sins.

It was during this pilgrimage that there occurred the tender episode already alluded to, from which the Shramana, though "neither a block of wood, nor a piece of stone," emerged even more creditably than John Wesley when similarly tempted in Georgia.

I can give no account here of his arrival in Lhassa, the reputation he gained as a "Chinese" physician, his kindly reception by the Dalai Lama, or his intimate friendships with the apothecary and the ex-Minister of Finance. He gives a vivid picture of the life of the different classes of priests and monks, and the corrupt state of the Tibetan hierarchy. He describes the rudimentary system of education, the harsh and haphazard administration, the brutality of punishments, the system of espionage, the free position of women and the practice of polyandry, the filthy personal habits of the people, their superstitions, their occupations, their festivals. I do not dwell upon these matters, partly because many of the features described are common to other oriental countries, but mainly because I am here considering the peculiar excellence of the book as a book of travel, a "human document"--as the phrase goes--a record of experience which has taken the stamp of a most interesting personality.

VIII

FRANCIS THOMPSON

In _The Blue Bird_ of Maeterlinck we are told of a child who puts on a magic hat and turns a fairy diamond and sees all that was ugly and sordid transformed into something transcendently beautiful. There was no need for Francis Thompson to find a magic hat; the poetic instinct which was always with him gave him the insight into another poet's nature; he saw through, around, and beyond those unlovely passages in the life of Shelley which made Matthew Arnold, for once so strangely an adherent of Mrs. Grundy, exclaim, "What a set! What a world!" There are few appreciations in the English language comparable to his essay on Shelley. Fixing his eyes on what seems to him essential in the man, Thompson finds that everything else explains itself to the observer who will see with the poet, who can understand his sufferings, and imagine his delights. And so his essay is no ordinary study in criticism. He sets himself, indeed, as Pater would have done, to find what it is that makes the specific worth of the poet. But there is no laborious calculating of values; rather a lavish pouring forth of the just meed of praise, an interpretation, a vindication of Shelley, like Swinburne's vindication of Blake, in language less passionate, perhaps, but more perfect in its melody, and more significant in its imagery, responding to its theme with tremulous beauty.

Mr. Wyndham, I think, did not go far from the truth when he said that this "is the most important contribution to pure letters written in English during the last twenty years." For in a certain sense it seems to reach an even greater height than Thompson's poetry. For whilst he has written exalted poetry, thought-compelling poetry, magnificent in diction and appealing to the deeper emotions, there is in this essay a simplicity which was often lacking in the former, and a passionate pleading which combines the cogent lucidity of a Newman with the other-worldness of a St. Francis. If it has a fault, it is that of being too rich in its imagery, too lavish of its judgments, too overbearing in its vision of beauty, so that some critics will say that it is too poetical for prose. It is, indeed, the prose of a poet, and such as only a poet would or could write; but its harmony, its structural balance, its masterly transitions are, save in a few cases, those which are proper to prose.

There is, perhaps, something a little forced in the opening passage in which he commends the services of poetry to the charity of the Church, paragraphs which were designed to conciliate the editor of the _Dublin Review_. He passes to consider the defect which has "mildewed" all the poetry written since Shelley, "the predominance of art over inspiration, of body over soul." Not, he holds, that inspiration has been lacking--"the warrior is there, but he is hampered by his armour." "We are self-conscious to the finger-tips; and this inherent quality, entailing on our poetry the inevitable loss of spontaneity, ensures that whatever poets, of whatever excellence, may be born to us of the Shelleian stock, its founder's spirit can take among us no reincarnation. An age that is ceasing to produce child-like children cannot produce a Shelley. For both as poet and man he was essentially a child."

"To the last," he exclaims, "he was the enchanted child." And he explains what he means in words that may seem fantastic: "It is to have a spirit yet streaming from the waters of baptism; it is to believe in love, to believe in loveliness, to believe in belief." And he suggests that "Shelley never could have been a man, for he never was a boy. And the reason lay in the persecution which over-clouded his school days." He was a grown-up child when he sailed his paper boats on the Isis, when in his loves he gave way to that "straying, strange and deplorable, of the spirit," when he rebelled petulantly but not ungenerously against the order of the world, and when he soared with the cloud or the skylark like the "child-like peoples among whom mythologies have their rise." In his poetry "he is still at play, save only that his play is such as manhood stops to watch, and his playthings are those which the gods give their children. The universe is his box of toys. He dabbles his fingers in the day-fall. He is gold-dusty with his tumbling amidst the stars. He makes bright mischief with the moon."

And, in the same, full way, Thompson explains in what sense Shelley was a poet of Nature; in what manner images poured naturally from his lips as they ought to have done, but never did, pour from the lips of the metaphysical poets; by what "instinctive perception of the underlying analogies, the secret subterranean passages, between matter and soul," he was able to make such imaginative play with abstractions; and, finally, how in his shorter poems he "forgets for a while all that ever makes his verse turbid; forgets that he is anything but a poet, forgets sometimes that he is anything but a child." And all the time the essayist is dropping phrases which surely are unforgettable, striking us alike by their truth and their pregnance--"this beautiful, wild, feline poetry, wild because left to range the wilds."--"His Muse has become a veritable Echo, whose body has dissolved from about her voice."--"He stood thus at the very junction-lines of the visible and the invisible, and could shift the points as he willed. His thoughts became a mounted infantry, passing with baffling swiftness from horse to foot or foot to horse."

Even to-day, five years after his death, Thompson has not attained the full fame which he merits. It is true his very first book won the highest praise from critics no less distinguished than Coventry Patmore, Mr. Arthur Symons, and Mr. H.D. Traill, and long before his death it was no small circle of admirers who looked eagerly for each new poem from his pen.

Yet his genius is not of that kind which instantly communicates itself to a generation. Living apart in a spiritual atmosphere of his own, his heart divested of the desires which form half the life of most men, his gaze was fixed on the inner mysteries of the spirit and on those outer forms which are the vehicles of beauty. The very language he used was as far remote as possible from "the brutish jargon we inherit." He belonged to the hierarchy of the poets of all ages, and pressed into his service lovely, half-forgotten words which made his poetry seem strange and bizarre to those who were too much immersed in the language and literature of their day. And those subtler minds who instantly perceived its beauty, and saw how his language and his imagery often recalled those of the seventeenth-century metaphysicals, such as Crashaw, too readily perhaps asserted a bond between his thought and theirs. Like them, it is true, he turned his back on the delusive splendours of the world; he accepted and expressed in song the divine ordinance of the universe. But he was afflicted with the pain of modern doubt; fear and speculative curiosity struggled with his faith; sometimes the sheer beauty of the external world, so far from proving the divine beauty, seemed to him as a possible refuge in his vain flight from the "Hound of Heaven."

He cannot be allocated to a single school. In his reading he had ranged through the poets of all ages, and he had assimilated a mighty variety of emotions, and we may see how his form shows the influence now of one poet, now another--Milton, Cowley, Shelley, Hood, Poe, and Rossetti--yet each influence, as it came upon him, was passed through the crucible of his own defined temperament, and the resultant is wholly his own, a creature which speaks of half-suppressed emotion, yet fantastically rich in phrase, rhythm, and image. His study of all the poets seems to have opened to him more avenues of beauty than were open to any poet of the middle seventeenth century. There is in his blood the fantastical romance of the Elizabethans; the love of spiritual contemplation which marked the seventeenth-century mystic; the passionate adoration of Nature and the open air which came with the early nineteenth century; modern introspectiveness; and that habit of symbolism with which Rossetti and his school have made us familiar.

Sometimes his pregnant phrases, his literary imagery, his stately, sweeping rhetoric, and the note of underlying melancholy would lead us to compare him with Virgil rather than with any modern poet.

Under this dreadful brother uterine,
This kinsman feared, Tellus, behold me come,
Thy son stern-nursed; who mortal-mother-like,
To turn thy weanlings' mouth averse, embitter'st,
Thine over-childed breast. Now, mortal-sonlike,
I thou hast suckled, Mother, I at last
Shall sustenant be to thee. Here I untrammel,
Here I pluck loose the body's cerementing,
And break the tomb of life; here I shake off
The bur o' the world, man's congregation shun,
And to the antique order of the dead
I take the tongueless vows.

But those last lines:

And to the antique order of the dead
I take the tongueless vows.

we cannot compare with any model. They stand by themselves, unsurpassable, lines such as are only to be found here and there even in the great poets.

The more one reads this poetry of Thompson's the more one discovers that it is something essentially individual. Harmonies that one may miss on a first reading become more apparent and more insistent as one reads again, and the exquisite, haunting melody of his verse pursues us, and its faultless, rich rhythms seem to create new patterns of form. One may miss not a little of his thought, because the engrossing beauty of the language lays hold of the senses. In almost every poem one finds some lingering phrase:

Whatso looks lovelily
Is but the rainbow on life's weeping rain.

Or:

The little sweetness making grief complete.

Often he shows that exact sense of lyrical fitness which Milton pre-eminently possessed, and, second only to him, Shelley. We see it in the passage which begins:

Suffer me at your leafy feast
To sit apart, a somewhat alien guest,
And watch your mirth,
Unsharing in the liberal laugh of earth.

_The Hound of Heaven_, I think, has rightly been pronounced his greatest poem, for whilst in its wealth of melody, its magnificence of imagery, and its pathos, it is unsurpassed, it reveals also the finest depths of his thought as he takes us "down the labyrinthine ways" of his mind's flight. But next to that I would put _The Making of Viola_, a poem which no other, except Rossetti or his sister Christina, could have written:

I

_The Father of Heaven._
Spin, daughter Mary, spin,
Twirl your wheel with silver din;
Spin, daughter Mary, spin,
Spin a tress for Viola.

_Angels._
Spin, Queen Mary, a
Brown tress for Viola!

II

_The Father of Heaven._
Weave, hands angelical,
Weave a woof of flesh to pall
Weave, hands evangelical--
Flesh to pall our Viola.

_Angels._
Weave, singing brothers, a
Velvet flesh for Viola!

III

_The Father of Heaven._
Scoop, young Jesus, for her eyes,
Wood-browned pools of Paradise--
Young Jesus, for the eyes,
For the eyes of Viola.

_Angels._
Tint, Prince Jesus, a
Dusked eye for Viola!

It may be that he will always be a poet for the few; that his mystical, esoteric spirit, finding its proper expression in baffling imagery and elusive, other-worldly rhythms, will never be wholly congenial to the many. But his place is assured; for he had no traffic with the things of a day or the language of a day. The beauty which haunts his prose and his verse is of that universal order which can hardly fade by the mere passing of time. Only a change in the human spirit can make it dim.

NOTE

Many of the foregoing chapters are based upon articles which
have been published in periodicals. My thanks are due to the
Editors of the following journals, which I name in the order of
my indebtedness:--_The English Review_, _The Nation_, _The Daily
News_, _The North American Review_, _The British Review_, and
_The Athenæum_.

THE COMPLETE DRAMATIC WORKS OF

=Gerhart Hauptmann=

AUTHORIZED EDITION IN SIX VOLUMES

It is generally conceded that Gerhart Hauptmann is the most notable dramatist of the present day. His work combines literary, psychological and dramatic interest in greater measure than that of any other contemporary writer, and the award of the Nobel prize in literature was a public recognition of his genius.

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CONTENTS

Volume I

_Social Dramas_ Before Dawn The Weavers The Beaver Coat The Conflagration

Volume II

_Social Dramas_ Drayman Henschel Rose Bernd The Rats

Volume III

_Domestic Dramas_ The Reconciliation Lonely Lives Colleague Crampton Michael Kramer

Volume IV

_Symbolic and Legendary Dramas_ Hannele The Sunken Bell Henry of Aue

Volume V

_Symbolic and Historical Dramas_ Schluck and Jau And Pippa Dances Charlemagne's Hostage

Volume VI

_Later Dramas in Prose_ The Maidens of the Mount Griselda Gabriel Schilling's Flight

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Throughout this book a particular point of view has been adhered to, from which the drama is looked upon as a separate art from literature, and from which especial attention is paid to the manner of its practice. Thus nearly all the plays of the dramatists passed under review are to be studied in book form, but they are spoken of here, as far as possible, in terms of their actual presentation in the theatre. The dramatists include Pinero, Henry Arthur Jones, Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Bernard Shaw, Barrie, Hubert Henry Davies, Granville Barker, Hankin, Galsworthy and Masefield. It is a book for all playgoers who have done their playgoing in the English theatre of the last twenty-five years.

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NEW FICTION

SINISTER STREET
By COMPTON MACKENZIE
Author of "Carnival."

THE STORY OF LOUIE
By OLIVER ONIONS
Author of "The Debit Account."

HANDS UP!
By FREDERICK NIVEN
Author of "The Porcelain Lady."

TELLING THE TRUTH
By WILLIAM HEWLETT
Author of "Uncle's Advice."

UNDERGROWTH
By F. and E. BRETT YOUNG
A First Novel.

THE BANKRUPT
By HORACE HORSNELL
A First Novel.

THE FOOL'S TRAGEDY
By A. SCOTT CRAVEN
A First Novel.

* * * * *

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