Studies of Contemporary Poets Part 8

It seemed, so still the valleys were, As if the whole world knelt at prayer, Save me and me alone;

So true is the poet to his impulse towards clarity and the concrete, so unerringly does he select the strong, familiar word with all its meaning clear on the face of it, that it is possible to regard the Song simply as a religious poem--a hymn of adoration to a Supreme Being:

I heard the universal choir, The Sons of Light exalt their Sire With universal song, Earth's lowliest and loudest notes, Her million times ten million throats Exalt Him loud and long,

Pure religion the poem is, but its implications are broader than any creed. And, define it as we may, it remains suggestive of the most vital current of modern thought. For it takes its stand upon the solid earth, embraces reality and perceives in the material world itself that which is urging joyfully toward some manifestation of spiritual splendour.

Thus the poet hears the Song rising from the very stocks and stones:

The everlasting pipe and flute Of wind and sea and bird and brute, And lips deaf men imagine mute In wood and stone and clay,

The paean is audible to him, too, from lowly creatures in whom life has not yet grown conscious, from the tiniest forms of being, from the most transient of physical phenomena.

The music of a lion strong That shakes a hill a whole night long, A hill as loud as he, The twitter of a mouse among Melodious greenery, The ruby's and the rainbow's song, The nightingale's--all three, The song of life that wells and flows From every leopard, lark and rose And everything that gleams or goes Lack-l.u.s.tre in the sea.

But it is in humanity that the Song attains its fullest and n.o.blest harmony. Out of the stuff of actual human life the spiritual essence is distilled, making the wraiths of a mystical imagination poor and pale by comparison.

I heard the hymn of being sound From every well of honour found In human sense and soul: The song of poets when they write The testament of Beautysprite Upon a flying scroll, The song of painters when they take A burning brush for Beauty's sake And limn her features whole--

The song of beggars when they throw The crust of pity all men owe To hungry sparrows in the snow, Old beggars hungry too-- The song of kings of kingdoms when They rise above their fortune men, And crown themselves anew,--

_Ford Madox Hueffer_

There is a collected edition of Mr Hueffer's poetry published in that year of dreadful memory nineteen hundred and fourteen. It is a valuable possession. Its verse-content may not--of course it cannot--appeal in the same degree to all lovers of poetry. For reasons that we shall see, it is more liable than most poetic art to certain objections from those whose taste is already formed and who therefore, wittingly or unwittingly, have adopted a pet convention. They may boggle at a word or a phrase in terminology which is avowedly idiomatic. They may wince occasionally at a free rhyme or grow a little restive at the irregularities of a rhyme-scheme, or resent an abrupt change of rhythm in the middle of a stanza just as they believed they had begun to scan it correctly. If they are the least bit sentimental (and it is not many who have cast out, root and branch, the Anglo-Saxon vice) they will be chilled here and there by an ironic touch, repelled by an apparent levity, or irritated at the contiguity of subjects and ideas which seem inept and unrelated. The cla.s.sicist will grumble that the unities are broken; the idealist will shudder at a bit of actuality; the formalist will eye certain new patterns with disfavour; and even the realist, with so much after his own heart, will be graceless enough to be impatient at recurrent signs of a romantic temperament.

So, in perhaps a dozen different ways, the literary person of as many different types may find that he is just hindered from complete enjoyment of what he nevertheless perceives to be beautiful work. If he be honest, however, and master of his moods, he will be ready to admit that it _is_ beautiful, and that none of these objections invalidate the essential poetry of the book. That has its own winning and haunting qualities, quite strong enough to justify the claim that the volume is a valuable possession. That is to say, there is absolute beauty in it, considered simply as a work of art and judged only from the point of view of the conventional lover of poetry. There are other values however, immediate or potential. There is, for example, to the believer in Mr Hueffer's theory, promise of the power which his method would have upon all the good, kind, jolly, intelligent, but unliterary people, could they be induced to read poetry at all. As a mere corollary from the literary quibbles already named, one would expect such people to find this volume delightful--an expectation by no means daunted by the declared fate of earlier productions. One sees that the evident sincerity of the work, the att.i.tude of that particular individuality to life, the free hand and the right instinct in the selection of incident, and the use of language that is homely and picturesque, ought to be potent attractions to the reader who frequently finds the older poetry stilted and artificial.

Moreover, so successful has the author's method been in many cases that even the _litterateur_ must pause and think. He will observe how well the new artistry suits the new material; he will note the exhilaration of the final effect; and when, returning to his beloved poets of the last generation, he finds that some of their virtue seems to have fled meantime, he will ask himself whether the life of our time may not _demand_ poetic presentation in some such form as this. Which is to say that he will probably be a convert to Mr Hueffer's impressionism.

That point is debatable, of course; but what will hardly be questioned, apart from the joy we frequently experience here in seeing a thing consummately done, is the importance of this work as an experiment. That is obviously another kind of value, with a touch of scientific interest added to the aesthetics. And the importance of the experiment is enhanced, or at any rate we realize it more fully, from the fact that the poet has been generous enough to elaborate his theory in a preface.

That is no euphemism, as other prefaces and theories of exasperating memory might seem to suggest. It is real generosity to give away the fundamentals of your art, to show as clearly as is done here the principles upon which you work and the exact means which are taken to give effect to them. It is courageous too, particularly when confessions are made which supply a key to personality. For the hostile critic is thus doubly armed. But the 'gentle reader' is armed too; and Mr Hueffer would seem to have been wise, even from the point of view of mere prudence, to take the risk.

The reader of this book then will find the poems doubly interesting in the light that the preface throws upon them. He may, of course, read and enjoy them without a single reference to it--that is the measure of their poetic value. Or, on the other hand, he may read the preface, brim full of stimulating ideas, without reference to the poetry. But the full significance of either can only be appreciated when they are taken in conjunction. For instance, we light upon this phrase indicating the material of the poet's art: "Modern life, so extraordinary, so hazy; so tenuous, with still such definite and concrete spots in it." It is a charming phrase, and from its own suggestiveness gently constrains one to think. But if we turn at once to the most considerable poem of the collection, "To All the Dead," we shall see our poet in the very act of recording the life that he visualizes in this way; and we shall see how remarkably the texture of the poem fits the description in the pa.s.sage just quoted: "life hazy and tenuous, with such definite and concrete spots."

To tell the truth, haze is the first thing we see when observing the effect of this poem. It is pervasive too, and for a time nothing more is visible save two or three islets of concrete experience, projecting above it and appearing to float about in it, unstable and unrelated.

This first effect is rather like that of a landscape in a light autumn ground-mist, which floats along the valley-meadows leaving tree-tops and hillsides clear. Or it is like trying to recollect what happened to you on a certain memorable day. The mood comes back readily enough, golden or sombre; but the events which induced it, or held it in check, or gave it so sudden a reverse only return reluctantly, one by one, and not even in their proper order; so that we have to puzzle them out and rearrange and fit them together before the right sequence appears.

Such is the main impression of "To All the Dead." Only the artist has been at work here selecting his incidents with a keen eye and sensitive touch, brooding over them with a temperament of complex charm, and for all their apparent disjunction, relating and unifying them, as in life, with the subtlest and frailest of links. As a consequence, at a second glance the haze begins to lift, while at a third the whole landscape is visible, a prospect very rich and fair despite the ugly spots which the artist has not deigned to eliminate, and which, as a fact, he has deliberately retained.

But there is no doubt the first glance is puzzling. If one were not caught by the interest of those concrete spots it might even be tiresome, and one would probably not trouble to take the second glance.

But they are so curious in themselves, and so boldly sketched, that we are arrested; and the next moment the general design emerges. First the picture of the ancient Chinese queen--a Mongolian Helen--

With slanting eyes you would say were blind-- In a dead white face.

That, with its quaint strange setting and its suggestion of a guilty love story, is a thing to linger over for its own sake, apart from its apparent isolation. Nor do we fully realize till later (although something subtler than intelligence has already perceived it), that in this opening pa.s.sage the theme has been stated, and that the key-note was struck in the line

She should have been dead nine thousand year....

But we pa.s.s abruptly, in the second movement, to our own time and to the very heart of our own civilization. We are paying a call on a garrulous friend in the rue de la Paix. He is an American and therefore a philosopher; but as he descants on the 'nature of things,' doubtless in the beautiful English of the gentle American, we let our attention wander to things that touch us more sharply, to sights and sounds outside the window, each vividly perceived and clearly picked out, but all resolving themselves into a symbol, vaguely impressive, of the complicated whirl of life. And this pa.s.sage again, with its satiric flavour and dexterity of execution, we are content to enjoy in its apparent detachment, until we glimpse the link which unites it to the larger interest of the whole.

The link with that ancient queen is in a flash of contrast--a couple of Chinese chiropodists, grinning from their lofty window at a _mannequin_ on the opposite side of the street. And as the theme is developed, episodes which seem irrelevant at first, are soon found to have their relation with the thought--of death and tragic pa.s.sion--on which the poet is brooding. At a chance word dropped by the American host the confused and perplexing sights and sounds of the outer world vanish; and the philosophical lecture, droning hitherto just on the edge of consciousness, fades even out of hearing--

... I lost them At the word "Sandusky." A landscape crossed them; A scene no more nor less than a vision, All clear and grey in the rue de la Paix.

He is seven years back in time and many hundreds of miles away, pus.h.i.+ng up a North American river in a screaming, smoky steamer, between high banks crowned with forests of fir:

And suddenly we saw a beach--

A grey old beach and some old grey mounds That seemed to silence the steamer's sounds; So still and old and grey and ragged.

For there they lay, the tumuli, barrows, The Indian graves....

So, rather obliquely perhaps as to method, but with certainty of effect, we are prepared for the culmination in the third movement. The poet has fled from civilization and 'Modern Movements' to the upland heather of a high old mound above the town of Treves. And here, on a late autumn evening, he lingers to think. He remembers that it is the eve of All Souls' Day; and remembers too that the mound on which he is seated is an old burying-place of great antiquity. In the cold and dark of his eerie perch, certain impressions of the last few days return to him, just those which have been subtly galling a secret wound and impelling him to flee--the tragedy of the Chinese queen, the vision of the old tumuli at Sandusky Bay, the unheeded plat.i.tudes of his friend--

... "_From good to good, And good to better you say we go._"

(There's an owl overhead.) "_You say that's so?_"

My American friend of the rue de la Paix?

"_Grow better and better from day to day._"

Well, well I had a friend that's not a friend to-day; Well, well, I had a love who's resting in the clay Of a suburban cemetery.

One has felt all through that something weird is impending; but I am sure that no ghost-scene so curiously impressive as that which follows has ever been written before. It could not have been done, waiting as it was for the conjuncture of time and temperament and circ.u.mstance. But here it is, a thing essentially of our day; with its ironic mood, its new lore, its air of detachment, its glint of grim humour now and then, and its intense pa.s.sion, both of love and of despair, which the fugitive show of nonchalance does but serve to accentuate. Pa.s.sion is the dominant note as the myriad wraiths of long-dead lovers crowd past the brooding figure in the darkness.

And so beside the woodland in the sheen And s.h.i.+mmer of the dewlight, crescent moon And dew wet leaves I heard the cry "Your lips!

Your lips! Your lips." It shook me where I sat, It shook me like a trembling, fearful reed, The call of the dead. A mult.i.tudinous And shadowy host glimmered and gleamed, Face to face, eye to eye, heads thrown back, and lips Drinking, drinking from lips, drinking from bosoms The coldness of the dew--and all a gleam Translucent, moonstruck as of moving gla.s.ses, Gleams on dead hair, gleams on the white dead shoulders Upon the backgrounds of black purple woods....

That poem naturally comes first in a little study, because it is the most considerable in the collection, and again because it is the most characteristic. It is very convenient, too, for ill.u.s.trating those theories of the preface, as for example, that the business of the poet is "the right appreciation of such facets of our own day as G.o.d will let us perceive ... the putting of certain realities in certain aspects ...

the juxtaposition of varied and contrasting things ... the genuine love and the faithful rendering of the received impression." But on aesthetic grounds one is not so sure of "To All the Dead" for the first place.

Perhaps it tries to include too many facets of life--or death; perhaps we get a slight impression as regards technique that the poet is _consciously_ experimenting; and there is a shade of morbidity haunting it. In many of the shorter pieces there is a nearer approach to perfection. "The Portrait," for instance, a symbolical picture of life, has only one flaw; a slight excess of a trick of repet.i.tion which is a weakness of our author. It is mere carping, however, to find fault with a piece which is so n.o.ble in idea and gracious in expression; and it seems a crime to spoil the lovely thing by mutilating it. But with a resemblance of theme, the poem is so strongly contrasted in manner with "To All the Dead" that one cannot resist quoting from it at this point.

The idea, although great, is relatively simple: life, symbolized in the figure of a woman, seated upon a tomb in a sequestered graveyard. The mood is one of serene melancholy, not rising to pa.s.sion or dropping to satire; and the gentle unity of thought and feeling leaves the mind free to receive the impression of beauty.

She sits upon a tombstone in the shade;

Being life amid piled up remembrances Of the tranquil dead.

... So she sits and waits.

And she rejoices us who pa.s.s her by, And she rejoices those who here lie still, And she makes glad the little wandering airs, And doth make glad the shaken beams of light That fall upon her forehead: all the world Moves round her, sitting on forgotten tombs And lighting in to-morrow.

That was written earlier than "To All the Dead," but, like the two songs which come immediately after it in this volume, and like the "Suabian Legend," it is amongst Mr Hueffer's best things. One precious quality is the temperament which pervades it--and the princ.i.p.al artistic significance of all this work is to have expressed so strikingly an exuberant and complex personality. Sensibility rules, perhaps; but reflective power is visibly present, with a vein of irony running below it, precipitated out of its own particular share of the bitterness that n.o.body escapes. In one aspect after another this individuality is revealed, and the changing moods are matched by changing forms. It follows that there are many varied measures here; and most of them have some new feature. A few are very irregular, and all are, of course, modelled to suit the author's impressionistic theory. And the fact that these forms are in the main so well adapted to their themes: that they are so successful in conveying the desired impression, is as much as to say that the poet has evolved a technique which perfectly suits his own genius. It may or it may not carry much further than that; and the extent to which the new instrument would respond to other hands may be problematical. One would suppose that some of its qualities at least would be a permanent gain, particularly the larger range which brings within its compa.s.s so many fresh aspects of life on the one hand and on the other a richer idiom. But whether or no these are qualities which will pa.s.s into the substance of future poetry, there can be no question that life seen through this particular temperament is interpreted vividly by this method.

Thus we have the fulmination of "Sussmund's Address to an Unknown G.o.d"; violent, bitter, and unreasoned, the mere rage of weary mind and body against the goads of modern existence. Thus, in the "Canzone _a la_ Sonata" as in "The Portrait" a single serious thought is rendered in grave unrhymed stanzas which have all the dignity of blank verse with something more than its usual vivacity; and thus, too, in "From Inland,"

one of the exquisite pieces of the volume, the whole of a tragedy is suggested by the rapid sketching of two or three brief scenes. Again the verse is perfectly fitted to the theme; the sober rhythm matching the quietness of retrospect; memory tenderly grieving in simple rhymes which vary their occurrence as emotion rises and falls.

"... We two," I said, "Have still the best to come." But you Bowed down your brooding, silent head, Patient and sad and still....