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Chapter I
NEW WAYS IN ENGLISH LITERATURE
There is a general assumption in literary circles in England that the war marks an era in English poetry. It is not quite clear whether it is intended to be conveyed that a new era is to come after the war. The mark that is referred to seems to be of the nature of a full-stop. Much that passed for poetry before the war is not now to be heard or seen.. The futurist movement in poetry, for example, became a thing of the past long before Italy, the home of Signor Marrinetti, its originator, took sides with the Allies.
But terminations may be epoch-markers and by no means epoch-makers. We need a hatful of beginnings before we can conjure or prophesy; and the unmistakable beginnings are not yet. Between the era in literature that ended in August 1914, and the era that may begin on a date not yet fixed, there is the war, and it has produced no poetry. The best poets have avoided the subject: some of them have definitely stated their determination to have nothing to do with the horrible affair because of its inartistic character. The minor poets have not, through its inspiration, become major. It has brought out no new poets of mark, and the poets who were making themselves heard just before the crash, had already found themselves and their time: that is to say, they had got as far in the development of their individual style and genius as could be expected, and they had fastened on to the new phase of British thought, the social consciousness that has been disturbing the art-for-art's-sake theorists for the past twenty years. True, Rupert Brooke achieved fame by his death in the Aegean backed up by a small volume entitled "1914;,, but any epoch-making prophetic impulse that the volume might stir in us is discounted by the volume of Henry Bryan Binns entitled "April Nineteen-fifteen," which, save for half-a-dozen lines, might have been written in a country land age that had never invented human daughter as a last resort of Christian argument.
Yet it is quite true that the war marks, if it does not create, a passing over from one phase of poetical activity to another. Apart from the universally recognised Irish Literary Revival, that produced—or, some say, was produced by —two poets of the front rank, Yeats and AE, lovers of poetry have been aware for some time past of a new spirit and method animating the poets of England. The popular success of John Masefield, an occasional play by Lascelles Abercrombie the winning of the Royal Literary Society's prize by Ralph Hodgson, have been special points in a general tendency. Those who did not come across small volumes by individual poets, were helped to an understanding of the new movement through the publication of two volumes entitled " Georgian Poetry," one containing representative poems during the years 1911 and 1912 by poets who were beginning to define themselves as a younger school; another for 1913 to 1915. These were brought out by the Poetry Bookshop, London, mainly, I think, through the enterprise of one of the poets, Harold Monro, who founded and edited " The Poetry Review "
as an organ for the new singers, and made it the journal of the Poetry Society "Until a split sent Mr. Monro elsewhere, and the magazine passed under the editorship of the late Stephen Philiphs and subsided into literary orthodoxy. It was quite an adventure to walk around the little bookshop in a quiet by-street off one of London's roaring highways, and note on its-shelves the vitality and extensiveness of the new works, mainly in little books produced in the artistic fashion that makes reading a delight to the hand and the eye as well as the mind.
It was apparent that something in the nature of a school of modern English poetry was in process of development. A definite consciousness of purpose showed itself through the personal divergencies of the writers, and many eyes have watched them hopefully for an indication of the new ways that the rhythmic feet of the Muse would pursue through the "hilly lands and hollow lands" of the imaginations of singers who have inherited all the skill and thought of the masters of the past, yet are under the responsibility of their own genius to express their own time in their own way. It is too early yet to prophesy of the fullness of the new movement with any degree of assurances ; but those to whom anticipation is a pleasure, as well as those who are content to enjoy poetry for its own sake, apart from its implications, will find material to hand in Miss Mary C. Sturgeon's "Studies in Contemporary Poets Harrap—which not only makes a sympathetic survey of the whole field of the poets' work, but provides copious illustrations that make the book an exegetical anthology.
Like other observers, Miss Sturgeon notes that the life of contemporary England is " evoking its own music." Some aspect of the complex life of to-day in England is reflected through the work of each of the new poets:
its awakened social consciousness, or its frank joy in the world of sense; its mystieism, or its repudiation of dogma in art as in religion." In their repudiation of dogma we have the symptom of youthfulness. We are all anti-dogmatic in youth, and are not above expressing our anti-dogmatism in the most dogmatic terras. The fact is, of course, that an art without dogma would be as inartistic as a religion without dogma would be unreligious, or as any other creative influence would be impossible without its characteristic boundaries. What matters most, however, is not the merits or demerits of rival literary dogmas, but the free play of the mind which they express; and in the case of the new poets that play is seen not merely in the reflection of the disturbances of their time in thought and conduct, which fulfils the function of environment, but also in the matter of technique, which shows the effort of artistic adjustment between subject and method. " The technique of modern poetry," says Miss Sturgeon, " would seem to be movement towards a more exact rendering of the music and meaning of our language. That is to say, there is in prosody itself an impulse towards truth of expression, which may be found to correspond to the heightened sense of external fact in contemporary poetic genius, as well as to its closer hold upon reality. Thence comes the realism of much good poetry now being written: triune, as all genuine realism must be, since it proceeds out of a spiritual conviction, a mental process, and actual craftsmanship."
The chief characteristic of the new technique is irregularity of rhythm, and a loose adherence to rhyme. Those who forget Whitman, may regard this as an advance~ others who think back to the days before the Muse of Ireland had taught rhyme to Europe, will be forgiven if they wonder if the modern atavism in technique—the alleged bid for freedom—is not at worst a symptom Of emotional haste and intellectual laziness, or at best a renunciation of art's duty to be artistic. Miss Sturgeon's reply to the " wonder" is-that the new technique is a reflection of its day, which does not move in regular rhymes or rhythms: "It has taken hold upon the world real and entire ;" it " has come so close to life as to claim its very identity." " Moreover," she adds, " the life upon which it seizes in this way is wider, more complex, more-meaningful than ever before." Wider and more-complex certainly; but it is not quite clear that extension and complication of detail are added virtues from the point of view of pure poetry, whose concern should be the seizing of essential and fundamentals if it is to possess the vital interpretative and illuminative power of real poetry, and not the mere surface reproduction of verbal photography : and as to-meaningful ; that surely exists more in the, interpreter than in the branchings and transient leaves of the tree of life that lead away from the root —away from the synthesis that is the business of poetry.
The poets themselves will be mercifully preserved from any bother over these uncertainties in the assumptions of their sponsor. They will write just as they are able to write. But the criticism that follows in the wake of creation has a duty to itself, that is, to take the sanest possible view based on the fullest grasp of facts and principles. I fear that in this respect the critic referred to has let the discovery of a new thing run into rhetoric. The new school strikes a responsive chord in herself, and satisfies some desire. That is good, and to that extent the new poetry justifies itself; but it is hardly wise to forget all the literary past of their country, and speak of these young men as having left the twilight of reality and stepped into clear day," with the suggestion that the fuss and gyration of the present time is reality, contrasted with the inferred unreality and darkness of the singers of the past. Miss Sturgeon's idea of reality seems to be that of the superficialists who scorn the metaphysicians. What is of importance in her exposition of the modern poets, (and I am referring entirely to the English poets), what gives us a clue to the essential character of their work, is not any question of artistic or philosophical theory, but the plain fact stated by Miss Sturgeon that there is in these poets an identification of their method and thought with the peculiar life of their time ; which is the same thing as saying that they are dated, and therefore not for all time but for a passing age ; in short, that they are minor poets.
Minor is, in truth, the impression that one gets from the works of these poets. They have terseness of phrase, vividness of sight; but one misses the undertones and overtones and the invisible rays that play about the works of the masters, that lift utterance beyond mere echo of the sounds of life into clarion prophecy of " Life more abundant," and raise sight from the thing seen, to the level of vision. The minor poet reproduces his on her time ; the major poet reveals through himself and his time the true spiritual nature and destiny of the universe. And that is just what these poets have not yet ventured to do. They have not yet come from under the weight of post-Darwinian scepticism, which though it be forged with the sledgehammer of Mr. Blatchford into a piece of cast-iron " truth," is as incapable of inspiring or nourishing poetry as the back streets of an English industrial town. They are disturbed,, these poets, by the possession of a social consciousness—and in this respect they are not very different from the poets of the past to whom the problem of humanity made appeal; they are in contact with the humanitarian movements of their time ; they fulfil the desirable function of " doubting Thomas " in respect of religious assertion ; but, in respect of the two major " discoveries " of their age and place —the fact of the survival of death by the human consciousness, and the inference of the fundamental unity of all mental life in a super-mental consciousness, as of all physical life in a super-physical substance—they are practically silent; that is to say, they have not been touched by the two most revolutionary inspirational forces that the morning of the twentieth century has brought within the sphere of certainty. This omission makes all talk of their dealing with reality very unconvincing.
In two only of the modern English poets, according to Miss Sturgeon, in Lascelles Abercrombie and Rose Macaulay—and, I would add, in Rupert Brooke—do we find any explicit declaration of " that true world within the world we see." Mr. Abercrombie gives utterance to the idea (as old as Indiam thought) that the self of the individual is God : he does not reduce Divinity to the measure of dust: he finds escape into Divinity. Thus he sings in "The Trance
I was exalted above surety And out of time did fall. As from a slander that did -long distress, A sudden justice vindicated me From the customary wrong of Great and Small I stood outside the burning ruins of place, Outside that corner, consciousness,
Then was I not in the midst of thee, Lord God ? In the works of Miss Macaulay, the world of material things, to adopt Miss Sturgeon's excellent summary, "is vividly apprehended ; but it is seen to be rounded by another realm which is not less real."
In the poetry of Walter de le Mare something of the supernatural appears. Miss-Sturgeon regards the supernatural as a constant component of the romantic temperament, and speaks of the " fearful joy which this type of mind experiences in contact with the strange and weird." The words "strange and weird" indicate quite plainly that the supernatural which is referred to is the conventional business of ghosts and happenings that are strange and weird because they are not at all native to the romantic temperament, but unfamiliar. To those who have any real knowledge of these things, they cease to be strange and weird : they become normal as regards fact ; though their absorption as part of the equipment of memory and experience naturally creates an entirely different attitude to life and death and their interpretation. In the poetry, for example, of W. B. Yeats, there is a simple acceptance of " supernatural" phenomena as an orderly fact in nature which is also a fact of experience to himself. This renders transparent to him the surface of life, which is opaque to those to whom the background of psychic reality is unknown, or merely speculative," or "strange and weird." On this account, Miss Sturgeon, like many others, mistakes Mr. Yeats* poetry for romance, instead of realising it to be the fullest expression of the whole reality of human life , physical, emotional, mental and spiritual, in true perspective, here and behind the veil; in short, the most real realism in modern literature in the English language.
I emphasise this matter of classification with some assurance because, in a very sympathetic reference to a portion of my own poetical work in her chapter on " An Irish Group," Miss Sturgeon applies the term " romantic " to my poem " Etain the Beloved," and seems to relegate that poem to some remote " mythological association " in contrast with a " sharply symptomatic change" which appears in my 1915 volume "Straight and Crooked," " subjects of more social and immediate interest" appearing to engage attention. The truth is, I was not a whit more interested, in a literary way, or more engaged in active participation, in " social and immediate " matters when I was writing certain poems in " Straight and Crooked" than when I was writing " Etain
the Beloved." Quite the reverse. What happened was that my destiny took me from
my own land into a greater superficial, but not more acute, relationship with
certain problems of the day during a mercifully short residence in industrial England, and provided me with a few new figures of speech. That was all. If my next volume should contain a poem on social . reform, it is possible that some critic will refer to a growing interest in topics of theday rather than vague subjects of the past ; and 1 may get annoyed, and use unliterary language in the privacy of my own thought, when I remember that the very core and marrow of social reform, including the great fight for the freedom of womanhood in which I was vigorously engaged when I was writing "Etain the Beloved," are both implicitly and explicitly contained in that poem.
Where criticism goes wrong in classification is in taking surface qualities and expressions for essentials ; and not weighing fully the attitude and level of vision attained by the poet. Not everyone who saith " Lord ! Lord !" is fit for the kingdom of heaven. Not everyone who shouts the word power is powerful. I have seen Mr. Henry Ainley, one of the finest Liondon actors, reduce a freshly starched collar to a pulpy ruffle clinging with perspiration around his neck in reciting Masefield's "Philip the King:" it seemed the necessary condition for manifesting the emotional strength and energy of the play ; yet there are little poems of eight lines by AE that have enough spiritual dynamic in them to blow all the muscle and bulk of Masefield's drama to atoms.
The protean creative energy is forever advancing the borders of " reality." The great poets anticipate the advance. The reflection of the great poets is of fire to fire which flames into prophecy: the reflection of the minor poet is of water to water that does no more than reproduce itself When in some future volume from one or other of the new writers of the West we catch the large accent, the forward vision of the self-realised and ecstatic soul, we shall know that the new ways in English literature are breaking through the obstructions of ignorance, and all that hangs thereon, into the broad highway of literary evolution. |
