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JAMES STEPHENS
THE poets, of whose work I have given a mere indication, are, as we have seen, bound; together very closely in both the substance and method of their poetry, and each in some way is related to one or other of the main characteristics of their masters, AE and Yeats. Indeed, each new writer on his or her first appearance was tested thus, and test became-ultimately somewhat narrow and tyrannical. The circle was broken by a writer whose title-to his first slender volume was a loud knock on the door of the "* school" with a clear indication that if it did not expand itself somewhat, it would hear more about it. " Insurrections " was the title of the book. Its author, James Stephens, has since become one of the best known poets and prose writers of to-day.
The mystical peasant, who monopolised so much of the Irish poetry of James Stephens'" opening days, was no more important to him than the clerk in a Dublin office or a beggar in a city slum ; it is significant that his first book: to attract a public beyond the four seas of Ireland was a study of low city life, " The Charwoman's Daughter." The urban element in Irish life had to be added to the almost obsessing rural life. Something of energy, perhaps of fierceness and vulgarity, had to be included in the interests of the poets. They had reached a refinement that had become weakness, a delicacy that was ill-health. The breath of crude nature must blow upon them. This new singer opened the door. The prefatory lines to his first book, "Insurrections," is typical of his work at that time—acute, fresh, unconventional, grotesque :
What's the use Of my abuse ? The world will run Around the sun As it has done Since time begun, When I have drifted to the deuce, And what's the use Of my abuse ?
These literary 'insurrections ' against a heterodoxy that had narrowed into an orthodoxy took the shape in some cases of asserting the value of the English tradition in regard to form in poetry. Mr. Stephens was not above taking the methods of poets of such distance in age as Edmund Spenser and Robert Browning, and using those methods for the expression of his own vision and environment. The pursuit of such parallels in not possible in a slight sketch like the present, and I must content myself with simply passing on to point out some of the special characteristics of the work of this striking poet.
One such characteristic is a breathless vigour. You hear it in these lines from his second book, " The Hill of Vision :"
If I had wings just like a bird, I would not say a single word, I'd spread my wings and fly away Beyond the reach of yesterday.
If I could swim just like a fish, I'd give my little tail a swish, I'd swim ten days and nights, and then I never would be found again.
Or if I were a comet bright, I'd drop in secret every night Ten million miles, and no one would Know where I kept my solitude. But I am not a bird or fish Or comet, so I need not wish, And need not try to get away Beyond the reach of yesterday.
Damn yesterday I and this and that, And these and those, and all the flat Dull catalogue of weighty things That somehow fastened to my wings." This is a passing song in a long poem in which Joy and her Mother Freedom find varied voice ; and those who are sensitive to the gradations of meaning that gather around and interpenetrate the spoken word in true poetry, will find in the shackles against which the singer chafed a symbol of their own particular " yesterday."
I have referred to the grotesque streak in Mr. Stephens, but his grotesqueness has always a twinkle in its eye like a motley-clothed and garrulous showman at the door of a tent in which a deep spiritual truth is exhibited to all who dare enter. A very respectable clergyman would speak solemnly the line, " The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force," or the phrase, " It needs be that offences come, but woe to him by whom the offence cometh." Mr. Stephens throws the whole import of these deep sayings into a few verses about a " Merry Policeman " who was appointed guardian to a certain tree to see that none plucked its fruit.
There was a robber in the tree, Who climbed as high as ever he Was able. At the top he knew The apple of all apples grew.
The night was dark, the branch was thin. In every wind he heard the din Of angels calling—" Guardian, see That no one climbs upon the tree."
And when he saw me standing there, He shook with terror and despair. But I said to him — Be at rest, The best to him who; wants the best." So I was sacked, but I have got A job in hell to keep me hot.
Like all realists, Mr. Stephens has a strong-power of vivid portraiture ; but his realism is-no more consistent than that of the rest of the-Irish poets. If he cannot see the angel in "Danny Murphy," he can at least turn back the tide of time from age to youth.
He was as old as could be. His little eye could scarcely see. His mouth was sunken in between His nose and chin, and he was lean And twisted up and withered quite, So that he could not walk aright.
His pipe was always going out, And then he'd have to search about In all his pockets, and he'd mow —O deary me, and musha now ! And then he'd light his pipe, and then He'd let it go clean out again.
He could not dance or jump or run, Or ever have a bit of fun... But when he laughed then you could see He was as young as young could be.
Mr. Stephens' third book of poetry, " Songs from the Clay,' shows the same qualities as his earlier books, with a trace of mellowing, and some development of lyrical complexity and pattern-making as in " The Goat-paths."
The crooked paths go every way Upon the hill—they wind about Through the heather in and out Of the quiet sunniness. And there the goats, day after day, Stray in sunny quietness, Cropping here and cropping there, As they pause and turn and pass, Now a hit of heather spray, Now a mouthful of the grass... If To the sunny quietude...... If I were as wise as they I would stay apart and brood, I would beat a hidden way Through the quiet heather spray To a sunny solitude. I would make an angry sound, I would stare and turn and bound To the deeper solitude... I would think until I found Something I can never find, Something lying on the ground, In the bottom of my mind.
There again the " something " haunts the mind of the Celtic poet.
There is a stronger note, more speculative and intellectual, in the work of Stephens than in that of the other poets I have referred to in this essay. The affinity with Browning shows itself in argument of a metaphysical kind, and in commentaries on certain ideas in Christian teaching. At his highest he reaches AE's view of life and evolution, but his expression of it is more laborious, less luminous, because it is the-expression of intellectual conviction or racial intuition rather than of direct knowledge and realisation. For example, AE regards erring humanity as beings who, away back in their spiritual history, voluntarily descended into the limitations of the flesh for the purpose of gathering knowledge :
Some bright one of old time laid his sceptre down,
So his heart might learn of sweet and bitter truth. Stephens sings of ascending and triumphant humanity in such poems as " The Breath of Life," and his intuition is so true as to the conditions of such ascension that he has sung more subtly and truly of the struggle of womanhood towards freedom than any singer of the group or perhaps of his age.
Mr. Stephens is also a voluminous writer in prose, and it remains to be seen whether prose or poetry will gain the ascendancy, or whether literary history will record one more instance of the rare appearance of a writer equally eminent in both modes.
There is one distinction, which I mark by way of conclusion, between the modern Irish poets and the pre-war modern schools on the continent of Europe, particularly in Belgium France and Germany. The continentals revelled in sensuous (not to say sensual)pleasures ; the Irish poets revel in pleasure, but it is free from lowness and coarseness. This comes from the keener imagination and deeper vision of the poets of the Celtic race. Their idealism is incomplete unless everyday life shares in it their realism is unreal unless it lifts itself towards the ideal. Their inspiration has its radiating point deeper than the mind or the emotions: it is of the soul, and gives to their work a touch of conviction and a stability not reached by changing feeling and shifting thought.
These modern Irish singers in the English language " look before and after ;" but whether they are celebrating the past, reflecting the present or visualising the future, they are also looking below to human history and experience, and above to human attainment and aspiration. Hence they achieve nationality in expression, though in an alien tongue ; and they likewise attain universality of interest and sympathy. This is the secret of their world-wide appearand the assurance of their high and abiding place in the literary history of the twentieth century. |
