Adventures in Criticism Part 21

Cloven from helms, or on them: dead men's eyes Scarce s.h.i.+ne so bright. The banners dip and mount Like masts at sea...._"

Or consider the fanciful melody of the Fairies' song in _An Unhistorical Pastoral_--

"Weave the dance and sing the song; _Subterranean depths prolong The rainy patter of our feet;_ Heights of air are rendered sweet By our singing. Let us sing, Breathing softly, fairily, Swelling sweetly, airily, Till earth and sky our echo ring.

Rustling leaves chime with our song: Fairy bells its close prolong Ding-dong, ding-dong."

--Or the closely-packed wit in such pa.s.sages as these--

_Brown_: "This world, This oyster with its valves of toil and play, Would round his corners for its own good ease, And make a pearl of him if he'd plunge in.

_Jones_: And in this matter we may all be pearls.

_Smith_: Be worldlings, truly. I would rather be A shred of gla.s.s that sparkles in the sun, And keeps a lowly rainbow of its own, Than one of these so trim and patent pearls With hearts of sand veneered, sewed up and down The stiff brocade society affects."

I have opened the book at random for these quotations. Its pages are stuffed with scores as good. Nor will any but the least intelligent reviewer upbraid Mr. Davidson for deriving so much of his inspiration directly from Shakespeare. Mr. Davidson is still a young man; but the first of these plays, _An Unhistorical Pastoral_, was first printed so long ago as 1877; and the last, _Scaramouch in Naxos; a Pantomime_, in 1888. They are the work therefore of a very young man, who must use models while feeling his way to a style and method of his own.

Lack of "Architectonic" Quality.

But--there is a "but"; and I am coming at length to my difficulty with Mr. Davidson's work. Oddly enough, this difficulty may be referred to the circ.u.mstance that Mr. Davidson's poetry touches Shakespeare's great circle at a second point. Wordsworth, it will be remembered, once said that Shakespeare _could_ not have written an Epic (Wordsworth, by the way, was rather fond of pointing out the things that Shakespeare could not have done). "Shakespeare _could_ not have written an Epic; he would have died of plethora of thought."

Subst.i.tute "wit" for "thought," and you have my difficulty with Mr.

Davidson. It is given to few men to have great wit: it is given to fewer to carry a great wit lightly. In Mr. Davidson's case it luxuriates over the page and seems persistently to choke his sense of form. One image suggests another, one phrase springs under the very shadow of another until the fabric of his poem is completely hidden beneath luxuriant flowers of speech. Either they hide it from the author himself; or, conscious of his lack of architectonic skill, he deliberately trails these creepers over his ill-constructed walls. I think the former is the true explanation, but am not sure.

Let me be cautious here, or some remarks I made the other day upon another poet--Mr. Hosken, author of _Phaon and Sappho_, and _Verses by the Way_--will be brought up against me. Defending Mr. Hosken against certain critics who had complained of the lack of dramatic power in his tragedies, I said, "Be it allowed that he has little dramatic power, and that (since the poem professed to be a tragedy) dramatic power was what you reasonably looked for. But an alert critic, considering the work of a beginner, will have an eye for the bye-strokes as well as the main ones: and if the author, while missing the main, prove effective with the bye--if Mr. Hosken, while failing to construct a satisfactory drama, gave evidence of strength in many fine meditative pa.s.sages--then at the worst he stands convicted of a youthful error in choosing a literary form unsuited to convey his thought."

Not in the "Plays" only.

These observations I believe to be just, and having entered the _caveat_ in Mr. Hosken's case, I should observe it in Mr. Davidson's also, did these five youthful plays stand alone. But Mr. Davidson has published much since these plays first appeared--works both in prose and verse--_Fleet Street Eclogues_, _Ninian Jamieson_, _A Practical Novelist_, _A Random Itinerary_, _Baptist Lake_: and because I have followed his writings (I think from his first coming to London) with the greatest interest, I may possibly be excused for speaking a word of warning. I am quite certain that Mr. Davidson will never bore me: but I wish I could be half so certain that he will in time produce something in true perspective; a fabric duly proportioned, each line of which from the beginning shall guide the reader to an end which the author has in view; something which

"_Servetur ad imum Qualis ab incepto processerit, et sibi constet._"

_Sibi constet_, be it remarked. A work of art may stand very far from Nature, provided its own parts are consistent. Heaven forbid that a critic should decry an author for being fantastic, so long as he is true to his fantasy.

But Mr. Davidson's wit is so brilliant within the circles of its temporary coruscation as to leave the outline of his work in a constant penumbra. Indeed, when he wishes to unburden his mind of an idea, he seems to have less capacity than many men of half his ability to determine the form best suited for conveying it. If anything can be certain which has not been tried, it is that his story _A Practical Novelist_ should have been cast in dramatic form. His vastly clever _Perfervid: _or_ the Career of Ninian Jamieson_ is cast in two parts which neither unite to make a whole, nor are sufficiently independent to stand complete in themselves. I find it characteristic that his _Random Itinerary_--that fresh and agreeable narrative of suburban travel--should conclude with a cras.h.i.+ng poem, magnificent in itself, but utterly out of key with the rest of the book. Turn to the _Compleat Angler_, and note the exquisite congruity of the songs quoted by Walton with the prose in which they are set, and the difference will be apparent at once. Fate seems to dog Mr. Davidson even into his ill.u.s.trations. _A Random Itinerary_ and this book of _Plays_ (both published by Messrs. Mathews and Lane) have each a conspicuously clever frontispiece. But the ill.u.s.trator of _A Random Itinerary_ has chosen as his subject the very poem which I have mentioned as out of harmony with the book; and I must protest that the vilely sensual faces in Mr. Beardsley's frontispiece to these _Plays_ are hopelessly out of keeping with the sunny paganism of _Scaramouch in Naxos_. There is nothing Greek about Mr. Beardsley's figures: their only relations.h.i.+p with the Olympians is derived through the G.o.ddess Aselgeia.

With all this I have to repeat that Mr. Davidson is in some respects the most richly endowed of all the younger poets. The grand manner comes more easily to him than to any other: and if he can cultivate a sense of form and use this sense as a curb upon his wit, he has all the qualities that take a poet far.

Nov. 24, 1984. "Ballads and Songs."

At last there is no mistake about it: Mr. John Davidson has come by his own. And by "his own" I do not mean popularity--though I hope that in time he will have enough of this and to spare--but mastery of his poetic method. This new volume of "Ballads and Songs" (London: John Lane) justifies our hopes and removes our chief fear. You remember Mr. T.E. Brown's fine verses on "Poets and Poets"?--

He fishes in the night of deep sea pools: For him the nets hang long and low, Cork-buoyed and strong; the silver-gleaming schools Come with the ebb and flow Of universal tides, and all the channels glow.

Or holding with his hand the weighted line He sounds the languor of the neaps, Or feels what current of the springing brine The cord divergent sweeps, The throb of what great heart bestirs the middle deeps.

Thou also weavest meshes, fine and thin, And leaguer'st all the forest ways; But of that sea and the great heart therein Thou knowest nought; whole days Thou toil'st, and hast thy end--good store of pies and jays.

Mr. Davidson has never allowed us to doubt to which of these two cla.s.ses he belongs. "For him the nets hang long and low." But though it may satisfy the Pumblechook within us to recall our pleasant prophesyings, we shall find it more salutary to remember our fears. We watched Mr. Davidson struggling in the thicket of his own fancies, and saw him too often break his s.h.i.+ns over his own wit. We asked: Will he in the end overcome the defect of his qualities? Will he remain unable to see the wood for the trees? Or will he some day be giving us poems of which the whole conception and structure shall be as beautiful as the casual fragment or the single line? For this architectonic quality is just that "invidious distinction" which the fabled undergraduate declined to draw between the major and minor prophets.

The "Ballad of a Nun."

Since its appearance, a few weeks back, all the critics have spoken of "A Ballad of a Nun," and admitted its surprising strength and beauty.

They have left me in the plight of that belated fiddle in "Rejected Addresses," or of the gentleman who had to be content with saying "ditto" to Mr. Burke. For once they seem unanimous, and for once they are right. The poem is beautiful indeed in detail:

"The adventurous sun took Heaven by storm; Clouds scattered largesses of rain; The sounding cities, rich and warm, Smouldered and glittered in the plain."

d.i.c.kens, reading for the first time Tennyson's "Dream of Fair Women,"

laid down the book, saying, "What a treat it is to come across a fellow who can _write_!" The verse that moved him to exclaim it was this--

"Squadrons and squares of men in brazen plates, Scaffolds, still sheets of water, divers woes, Ranges of glimmering vaults with iron grates; And hushed seraglios."

It is not necessary to compare these two stanzas. Tennyson's depicts a confused and moving dream; Mr. Davidson's a wide earthly prospect. The point to notice in each is the superlative skill with which the poet chooses the essential points of the picture and presents them so as to convey their full meaning, appealing at once to the senses and the intelligence. Tennyson, who is handling a mental condition in which the sensations are less sharply and logically separated than in a waking vision, can enforce this second appeal--this appeal to the intelligence--by introducing the indefinite "divers woes" between the definite "sheets of water" and the definite "ranges of glimmering vaults with iron grates": just as Wordsworth, to convey the vague una.n.a.lyzed charm of singing, combines the indefinite "old unhappy far-off things" with the definite "battles long ago." Mr. Davidson, on the other hand, is describing what the eye sees, and conveying what the mind suspects, in their waking hours, and is therefore restricted in his use of the abstract and indefinite. Notice, therefore, how he qualifies that which can be seen--the sun, the clouds, the plain, the cities that "smoulder" and "glitter"--with the epithets "sounding,"

"rich," and "warm," each an inference rather than a direct sensation: for n.o.body imagines that the sound of the cities actually rang in the ear of the Nun who watched them from the mountain-side. The whole picture has the effect of one of those wide conventional landscapes which old painters delighted to spread beyond the court-yard of Nazareth, or behind the pillars of the temple at Jerusalem. My attempt to a.n.a.lyze it is something of a folly; to understand it is impossible:

"but _if_ I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all,"--

I should at length comprehend the divine and inexplicable gift of song.

The "Ballad of the Making of a Poet."

But beautiful as it is in detail, this poem, and at least one other in the little volume, have the great merit which has. .h.i.therto been lacking in the best of Mr. Davidson's work. They are thoroughly considered; seen as solid wholes; seen not only in front but round at the back. In fact, they are natural growths of Mr. Davidson's philosophy of life. In his "Ballad of the Making of a Poet" Mr.

Davidson lets us know his conception of the poet's proper function.

"I am a man apart: A mouthpiece for the creeds of all the world; A soulless life that angels may possess Or demons haunt, wherein the foulest things May loll at ease beside the loveliest; A martyr for all mundane moods to tear; The slave of every pa.s.sion; and the slave Of heat and cold, of darkness and of light; A trembling lyre for every wind to sound.

Within my heart I'll gather all the universe, and sing As sweetly as the spheres; and I shall be The first of men to understand himself...."

Making, of course, full concessions to the demands of poetical treatment, we may a.s.sume pretty confidently that Mr. Davidson intended this "Ballad in Blank Verse of the Making of a Poet" for a soul's autobiography, of a kind. If so, I trust he will forgive me for doubting if he is at all likely to fulfil the poet's office as he conceives it here, or even to approach within measurable distance of his ideal--

"A trembling lyre for every wind to sound."

That it is one way in which a poet may attain, I am not just now denying. But luckily men attain in many ways: and the man who sits himself down of fixed purpose to be an aeolian harp for the winds of the world, is of all men the least likely to be merely aeolian. For the first demand of aeolian sound is that the instrument should have no theories of its own; and explicitly to proclaim yourself aeolian is implicitly to proclaim yourself didactic. As a matter of fact, both the "Ballad of the Making of a Poet" and the "Ballad of a Nun" contain sharply pointed morals very stoutly driven home. In each the poet has made up his mind; he has a theory of life, and presents that theory to us under cover of a parable. The beauty of the "Ballad of a Nun"--or so much of it as stands beyond and above mere beauty of language--consists in this, that it is informed, and consciously informed, by a spirit of tolerance so exceedingly wide that to match it I can find one poem and one only among those of recent years: I mean "Catherine Kinrade." In Mr. Brown's poem the Bishop is welcomed into Heaven by the half-wilted harlot he had once condemned to painful and public punishment. In Mr. Davidson's poem, Mary, the Mother of Heaven, herself takes the form and place of the wandering nun and fills it until the penitent returns. Take either poem: take Mr.

Brown's--

"Awe-stricken, he was 'ware How on the Emerald stair A woman sat divinely clothed in white, And at her knees four cherubs bright.

That laid Their heads within their lap. Then, trembling, he essayed To speak--'Christ's mother, pity me!'

Then answered she-- 'Sir, I am Catherine Kinrade.'"

Or take Mr. Davidson's--in a way, its converse--

"The wandress raised her tenderly; She touched her wet and fast-shut eyes; 'Look, sister; sister, look at me; Look; can you see through my disguise?'

She looked and saw her own sad face, And trembled, wondering, 'Who art thou?'

'G.o.d sent me down to fill your place; I am the Virgin Mary now.'