Chapter XI: The Minor Poet

The term “minor poet” is inexact at best, but during the Eighteen Nineties it was used very widely, and a little unnecessarily, to distinguish the younger generation of poets from the generation still represented by Tennyson, Swinburne, William Morris, George Meredith, and from among whom Robert Browning and Dante Gabriel Rossetti were but lately removed. The distinction, like the term “decadent,” began as a disparagement and, despite well-meaning protests, it lived on with a difference. Richard Le Gallienne lectured on “The Minor Poet,” proving him of importance; and many critics were of the same mind, including William Archer. In the preface to _Poets of the Younger Generation_, a book written in 1899, but not published until 1902, owing to the outbreak of the Boer War, he said: “Criticism has made great play with the supercilious catchword ‘minor poet.’ No one denies, of course, that there are greater and lesser lights in the firmament of song; but I do most strenuously deny that the lesser lights, if they be stars at all and not mere factitious fireworks, deserve to be spoken of with contempt. Now a shade of contempt has certainly attached of late years to the term ‘minor poet,’ which has given it a depressing and sterilising effect.”

Zeal to stigmatise a calumny has here led to over-statement of its effect. The very book in which the above words appear, with its excellent review of the work of thirty-three poets, disproves at least any suggestion of sterilising results; and, though the survey is both comprehensive and catholic, one might add without much fear of cavil the names of another twelve poets or more to William Archer’s hierarchy. The truth of the matter is that the poets so labelled were indifferent to the term; but less discerning members of the reading public may have suffered by allowing it to prejudice them against new poetry which was certainly in the tradition of the great British bards. Indeed, it is not easy to discover another decade in which English literature possessed so numerous and so meritorious a body of young poets. There were splendid outbursts of song in the Elizabethan and Caroline epochs, and another in the early years of the nineteenth century, when such poetic planets as Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge, Keats and Shelley swam into human ken, but I know of no other decade with such a variety and ebullience of song as that under review. How much of it will survive the test of the passing years no critical judgment can say; nor is that our concern. The future will have its own tastes and its own criteria. It is our business to recognise that, according to existing standards and modern predilections, the Nineties were prodigal of poets and distinguished in poems.

Already several of the so-called minor poets of the time have won something like the indisputableness of classics. Every survey of recent poetry takes willing and serious account of Francis Thompson, Ernest Dowson, Lionel Johnson and John Davidson; and for greater reasons than that these poets are no longer living. Unhesitating also is the recognition of William Watson, Alice Meynell, A. E. Housman, Henry Newbolt and W. B. Yeats. There may be some who would still withhold the bays from Rudyard Kipling, as there are others who deal niggardly justice to Stephen Phillips, whose poetic achievement is higher than the valuation of the moment, if lower than that of the time when he gave us _Christ in Hades_, _Marpessa_, and _Paolo and Francesca_: poems surely destined to outlive detraction and neglect.

But the natural acceptance of such poets only touches the fringe of the _fin de siècle_ fabric of song. The second decade of the new century sustains a lively interest in many poets who might well have been considered local to the last decade of the old. Some of them, though lacking nothing in individuality, sing with an accent so much in tune with the “divine average” of culture and experience that some sort of permanence is assured to their work in special fanes of poesy, if not in the broader avenues of popular acceptance. Among such poets may be named Laurence Binyon, H. C. Beeching, F. B. Money-Coutts, E. Nesbit, Laurence Housman, Herbert Trench, Margaret L. Woods, “Michael Field,” Sturge Moore, Charles Dalmon, Selwyn Image, Dollie Radford, Ernest Radford, Norman Gale, George Santayana and Rosamund Marriott-Watson. And finally there remain those poets who give expression to moods more attuned to end-of-the-century emotions, but who will command a select group of admirers in most periods. In this class are Arthur Symons, Richard Le Gallienne, John Gray, Lord Alfred Douglas, Theodore Wratislaw and Olive Custance.

In spite, however, of what has been said, the term “minor” applied to poetry came to be something more than a formal expression of contempt. The contempt it expressed was associated with the prevailing, though half-amused, antagonism of the middle classes towards the decadent movement in art and life. Calling the new poetry “minor” was, from the point of view of literary criticism, hitting below the belt, for the term really conveyed a moral meaning beneath a literary demonstration of force. Opposition to the younger poets may at times have taken the form of genuine literary criticism, but the voice of disapproval at its loudest lay in ethics rather than letters. Owen Seaman made exquisite fun of the younger generation of poets, particularly of

“A precious few, the heirs of utter godlihead,
Who wear the yellow flower of blameless bodlihead!”

in _The Battle of the Bays_, and in a satirical poem, “To a Boy-Poet of the Decadence,” he indicates precisely the type of poet who came to be regarded as minor, and the sort of objection he aroused:

“The erotic affairs that you fiddle aloud
Are as vulgar as coin of the mint;
And you merely distinguish yourself from the crowd
By the fact that you put ’em in print.

* * * * *

For your dull little vices we don’t care a fig,
It is _this_ that we deeply deplore:
You were cast for a common or usual pig,
But you play the invincible bore.”

Here there are direct inferences of erotic tendencies in the younger poets, as though such things were so unusual in youthful verse as to be startling, instead of being recognised as characteristics of all adolescent poetry. Be that as it may, “erotic affairs” may or may not be vulgar or dull. In the hands of a Baudelaire or a Gautier, a Swinburne or a Rossetti, they may offend--but not necessarily by vulgarity or dullness. Neither were the best of the minor poets vulgar or dull. Their eroticism may have been irritating, disturbing, offensive or disgusting, but it was often unique, and always sufficiently juvenescent and impudent to be bright. But the younger poets did not all err on the side of eroticism, and some of those who had other enthusiasms were ready enough to criticise and repudiate their fellows in song. Richard Le Gallienne, who, himself, was usually, and unjustly, classed with the degenerates, showed small sympathy with that type in “The Decadent to his Soul.” In the course of this poem he defines very clearly the attitude adopted by at least one poet of the time towards what was conventionally decadent:

“Then from that day, he used his soul
As bitters to the over dulcet sins,
As olives to the fatness of the feast--
She made those dear heart-breaking ecstasies
Of minor chords amid the Phrygian flutes,
She sauced his sins with splendid memories,
Starry regrets and infinite hopes and fears;
His holy youth and his first love
Made pearly background to strange-coloured vice.”

And Lionel Johnson, who was neither decadent nor minor, contributed a prose satire on the same subject to the first number of _The Pageant_. It is called “Incurable,” and deals rather heavily with that phase of youthful introspection which tends to brood on love and suicide. But his decadent poet is better represented by examples of the work attributed to him. Here is a faithful imitation of the minor mode with satire so well concealed that, in the Nineties, it might easily have passed for the real thing:

“Sometimes, in very joy of shame,
Our flesh becomes one living flame:
And she and I
Are no more separate, but the same.

Ardour and agony unite;
Desire, delirium, delight:
And I and she
Faint in the fierce and fevered night.

Her body music is: and ah!
The accords of lute and viola,
When she and I
Play on live limbs love’s opera.”

There were poets, I say, who might well have been represented by the above parody. Arthur Symons (in his earlier phase too often a Restoration poet _malgré lui_) played the part of minor poet of the minute with something like desperation:

“Her cheeks are hot, her cheeks are white;
The white girl hardly breathes to-night,
So faint the pulses come and go,
That waken to a smouldering glow
The morbid faintness of her white.

What drowsing heats of sense, desire
Longing and languorous, the fire
Of what white ashes, subtly mesh
The fascinations of her flesh
Into a breathing web of fire?

Only her eyes, only her mouth,
Live, in the agony of drouth,
Athirst for that which may not be:
The desert of virginity
Aches in the hotness of her mouth.”

And among all his earlier poems you can find innumerable manifestations of the decadent reversion to artificiality, as in the lines:

“Divinely rosy rogued, your face
Smiles, with its painted little mouth,
Half tearfully, a quaint grimace;
The charm and pathos of your youth
Mock the mock roses of your face.”

Such variations upon love were by no means new to poetry even in this country. Swinburne and Rossetti had been roundly trounced by Robert Buchanan for venturing as far but no farther, and the minor poets of the Nineties suffered similar attacks from their own outraged contemporaries. Generally speaking, this erotic verse lacked the magic of fine poetry, and to that extent it was minor or, rather, not poetry at all. It was verse, and often, let it be admitted, very good verse, but only in the work of Ernest Dowson did it possess the high-wrought intensity and indefinable glamour of poetry.

The veritable minor note of the poetry of these years was not, strangely enough, that sought out for denunciation and satire by the bourgeoisie. The eroticism which became so prevalent in the verse of the younger poets was minor because it was little more than a pose; not because it was erotic. It was minor because it was the swan song of the Fleshly School of the Seventies and Eighties. It did not ring true: for one reason because it was an affectation, and for another because it was perhaps a little too much like the life the decadents were trying to live. Only a respectable person, like Swinburne, could write a really profound decadent love poem.

Where the minor poets were both minor and poets was in that curious lisping note which many of them managed to introduce into their poems. This was a new note in poetry, corresponding with the minor key in music. It was not polish or style, nor metrical, nor alliterative trick or experiment. Neither was it entirely that fashionable sensitiveness, which, in its ultimate search for unknown, unexperienced reality, often resulted in a sterile perversity. It approximated more to that ultra-refinement of feeling, that fastidiousness of thought which, in its over-nice concern for fine shades and precious meanings, becomes bleak and cheap. There was an unusual femininity about it; not the femininity of women, nor yet the feminine primness of men; it was more a mingling of what is effeminate in both sexes. This was the genuine minor note, and it was abnormal--a form of hermaphroditism. But it has left no single poem as a monument to itself. It was never so near corporeality as that. It was a passing mood which gave the poetry of the hour a hot-house fragrance; a perfume faint yet unmistakable and strange. And now, as then, it lives only in stray “gillyflowers of speech,” recording, perchance, “a bruisèd daffodil of last night’s sin,” to borrow phrases from the early poems of Richard Le Gallienne, who affected these mincing measures as thoroughly as he has since followed a more virile muse.

Again, when the minor poet was most minor, he always contrived to clothe his verse in gracious language which had full power to charm by its ingenuity and beauty. If the minor mode forbade its devotees to trespass far beyond the borders of fancy; if it prevented prettiness becoming beauty, we need not complain. Fancy and Prettiness never sought to dethrone Imagination and Beauty, but to support and serve them like good courtiers, and so the minor poets of the Nineties served Art and Life.

Yet so myopic was the literary vision that ephemeral verses were classed as minor with the strong and normal lyricism of William Watson’s:

“Let me go forth, and share
The overflowing Sun
With one wise friend, or one
Better than wise, being fair,
Where the peewit wheels and dips
On heights of bracken and ling,
And Earth, unto her finger tips,
Tingles with the Spring.”

Or with the wistful beauty of W. B. Yeats’

“When you are old and grey and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false and true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead,
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.”

Or Richard Le Gallienne’s beautiful lines:

“She’s somewhere in the sunlight strong,
Her tears are in the falling rain,
She calls me in the wind’s soft song,
And with the flowers she comes again.”

Or with some such happy song as Norman Gale’s

“All the lanes are lyric
All the bushes sing,
You are at your kissing,
Spring!”

Or the more tragic theme of Francis Money-Coutts:

“Oft in the lapses of the night,
When dead things live and live things die,
I touch you with a wild affright
Lest you have ceased in sleep to sigh.”

And later even with Stephen Phillips’ _Christ in Hades_:

“It is the time of tender, opening things.
Above my head the fields murmur and wave,
And breezes are just moving the clear heat.
O the mid-noon is trembling on the corn,
On cattle calm, and trees in perfect sleep,
And hast thou empty come? Hast thou not brought
Even a blossom with the noise of rain
And smell of earth about it, that we all
Might gather round and whisper over it?
At one wet blossom all the dead would feel!”

And the higher and deeper simplicity of A. E. Housman:

“With rue my heart is laden
For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
And many a lightfoot lad.

By brooks too broad for leaping
The lightfoot boys are laid;
The rose-lipt girls are sleeping
In fields where roses fade.”

All these were classed as lesser poems--and so they are, beside the best of Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Keats and the best work of those few other high lords of song; but with the rest they may claim kin, and ever remain in goodly company.

_From a Drawing by William Rothenstein_]