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Chapter V
THE POET AS PROPHET
When Shelley called the poets the unacknowledged legislators of humanity, he had something more in mind than the association of the moon-led pilgrims (who are commonly regarded as unpractical persons) with the very practical business of passing Acts of Parliament. Their work was something much more fundamental than walking into division lobbies; it was not the passing of Acts, but the making of laws. That is to say, the poets disclosed, in moments of vision, great truths and needs in humanity and the universe which had to go on to their fulfilment. " Thoughts have gone forth whose powers can sleep no more," Shelley sang. The legislative act was but the ratification, in the social life, of some influence set a-going in a song a generation back, just as legislation, when shortly it becomes democratic, and not merely representative, will pass statutes whose first reading was announced by Robert Burns over a century ago, when he sang, " A man's a man for a that."
This Legislative power of the poet is based upon his gift of intuition and extended vision, of divining the direction and strength of the deep currents of human progress. He does not make an ode usually on the royal assent being given to a bill, for his Act is always in the future. He knows the deep truth darkly uttered by one of Ibsen's characters, that an idea dies when it is put into action. The Woman's Suffrage Act in the British Isles is-already out-of-date: it was not, as tired legislators thought, the end of an agitation, but the mere opening of a door to incalculable forces which have already crowded through it.
It is the proportion of this power of foresight, of prophecy, in a poet's work that lifts it towards or above the dividing line between major and minor in poetry. The minor poet comes and goes as a brother, but the major poet instals himself as a father, giving us new life, and through us passing it on to others. " The singers (that is, the minor poets) do not beget, only the poet begets," sings Whitman,. prince of spiritual fathers, and therefore true prophet. The power of prophecy need not be specialty prognostic, and point precisely to times and events. Its highest characteristic is the sure and full apprehension of great groupings of potentialities that are moving in certain directions. The meteorologist will prophesy a cyclonic movement in the atmosphere from certain signs in the sky and in tubes containing mercury, but we do not ask him to tell us the exact hour when the first or fourth shower will fall on our fields. So we must act towards the poet as prophet; and, moreover, because the instrument of the poet is a mush more complex and sensitive one than any of the meteorologist's, and subject to a greater range of the influences at present not clearly understood, we have to make certain reservations when we think of the poet as prophet, one being, that not all poets are prophets another, that not all prophet-poets are always prophetic.
It is necessary to grasp firmly the second reservation, especially if we take up the study of prophecy in poetry in relation to any special event. For instance, if we make the Great War the subject, and come upon the plain anticipations of William Watson in his early days, we -shall get a rude shock if we turn to the spectacle of artistic, intellectual and emotional degradation in his redent book, The Man Who Saw, in which (for the time being only, let us hope) he ceases to be either poet or prophet. Twenty years ago or thereabouts, Watson valued truly the menace of the armed peace of Europe, and lifted up his voice in the cause of disarmament. He saw the state of Europe as
...War in all Save the great death that weaves War's dreadful crown, ...War that sits smiling, with the eyes of Cain.
He saw also the smouldering threat of European history and psychology, and the vast area of its possible ramifications :
Dregs of full many an ancient plague and dire, Old wrongs, old lies of ages blind and cruel.
And, remembering the awful beneficence of the Great Fire of London, that cleansed the city of plague by destroying the insanitary conditions that produced and nourished it, he is moved to the question :
What if alone the world-war's world-wide fire Can purge the ambushed pestilence away ? And into the next line he puts the mystery, the contradiction, the futility of violence :
Yet woe to him who idly lights the fuel.
It is like passing a vote of thanks to him who kindled the fire, hailing him as the predestined banisher of the plague, and then hanging him for incendiarism. We are not, however, concerned with the metaphysics of the fact that Watson here expresses, but with his prophetic power. He pictured Europe as
Powerless from terror of her own vast power Piling the faggots hour by doomful hour,
and across the hollowness of the celebrations of the birthday of the. Prince of Peace, he saw humanity
Waiting till some new world-emotion rise, And with the shattering might of the simoom Sweep clear this dying past that never dies.
Watson foresaw the war, but his power of prophecy was darkened by the emotions of the war when it came. Something of racial vanity and self-assertion brought upon him the punishment of Moses, who forgot the large vision, and the power of the Divine, and was denied the leadership of the Israelites into the Promised Land. Moses, however, was allowed a glimpse across the frontier, but Watson gets not even a glimpse in his later days as far as we can judge from his latest book. In his young manhood he saw Beauty as the goal of the indomitable toiling world, but between those days and the present, the intrusion of an arid rationalism and the renunciation of the broad spirit of human freedom in his desertion of Ireland, have done their full work. For guidance beyond the horizon of War towards the peace that humanity dreams of, we have to turn elsewhere.
Tennyson's foresight of the now much talked of League of Nations comes to mind:
For I lopked into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the vision of the world and all the wonder-that should be, ...Till the War drum throbs no longer, and the battle-flag is furled In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World.
The anticipation of an International Parliament as the way out of warfare is valuable; but Tennyson's intense insularity, his lack of comprehension of France, his hatred of the cause of Irish freedom, provoke a suspicion that his Parliament of Man must be a glorified Westminster, to which other Nations will be permitted to send representatives.
Swinburne chanted the coming of the Republic in " Songs before Sunrise," but he hardly expected the European earthquake of 1918 as an answer to his prayer for Italy's freedom.
If we want a clear and convincing statement in the poets of a modus operandi towards the abolition of warfare we shall find it in a most unexpected quarter,—in the poetry of Thomas Hardy, written since the beginning of the War, and after he had passed the age of seventy. For almost half a century Mr. Hardy has stood as the great "pessimist" of English fiction. Through a powerful but sombre genius he has immortalised a crowd of victims of inexorable and disastrous circumstance, and in his poetry he has railed at fate. Yet, whatever limitations Mr. Hardy's artistic perception and temperament may have put upon him as a story-teller in prose or verse, in his poetry (where he ceases to be novelist and becomes prophet) his humanity overflows the boundaries of Wessex and the twentieth century, and sets all things right through the full development of the divine faculties of " consciousness " and " will."' Pessimist, if he really ever was such,, he is not blinded to human truth by the glare-of war. Love and war have been the dual theme of romance, but in the simple record of truth, love will outlive war.
Yonder a maid and her wight Come whispering by; War's annals will fade into night Ere their story die.
In these quiet lines you look from the eountry life of the south of England, across and beyond Europe, to the dateless and tribeless chronicle of the eternal human simplicities.
It speaks of the vastness of Mr. Hardy's genius that he, the poet and novelist of a humble countryside, should become also the poet of the "Dynasts" in his great epic-drama ; but through the great makers and troublers of the world again he looks, and beyond them;: and in their death-knell, which he rings in the last chorus of his pageant of history, he rings-the birth-bell of a free humanity : But a stirring thrills the air Like to sounds of joyance there,
That the rages Of the ages Shall be cancelled, and deliverance offered from the darts that were, Consciousness the will informing, till it fashion all things fair.
The vital difference between Tennyson and Hardy lies in Hardy's clear recognition and statement, without prejudice and reservation, of the way by which the solidarity of humanity may be achieved. That way is the breaking down of national pride and exclusive-ness. Rabindranath Tagore has recently dealt with the same idea—the nation as the enemy of the people—in his book " Personality," and Hardy sums the matter up in a short poem entitled " Departure (Southampton Docks):" Keen sense of severance everywhere prevails, Which shapes the late long tramp of mounting men
To seeming words that ask and ask again : How long, O ruling Teutons, Slavs and Gaels, Must your wroth reasonings trade on lives like these,
That are as puppets in a playing hand ?— When shall the saner softer polities Whereof we dream have sway in each proud land And patriotism, grown Godlike, scorn to stand
Bondslave to realms, but circle earth and seas ? The substitution of rule in place of mutual service, the subjugation of the masses of humanity by the selfish will of groups of men, the setting of class against class and country against country through the appeal to avarice or vainglory; these are the great heresies against the doctrine of human comradeship. Nay, more, the more one is enthralled by the limitations of the Nation ("bondslave to realms "), the farther is one away from the true patriotism; for patriotism (as Mr. Hardy reminds us in the phrase " patriotism grown Godlike") in its true etymological sense, goes back to the root pater, father; In the strict sense of the term there in no such thing as Mother-land justice and righteousness. "All men in the abstract," says Emerson, "are just and good; what hinders them, in the particular, is the momentary predominance of the finite and individual over the general truth"; Our rule of conduct must he life, not statutes, our standard not written history but living nature, not a zone, but the earth.
Here Whitman thunders in with the snows of wisdom and the gesture of certainty:
I swear there is no greatness or power that does not emulate those of the earth, ...No politics, song, religion, behaviour, or what not, is of account, unless it compare with the amplitude of the earth, Unless it
Reference to Whitman suggests the matter of prophetic failure in the prophet-poets, as a final thought in this essay which is intended to be indicative, not exhaustive. Whitman trumpeted himself as the beginner of new American literature, but so far there has been only one Whitman. Twenty years before his " Leaves of Grass" first appeared, Emerson (in 1838 in " Literary Ethics") complained of America's derivativeness and want of initiative in literature, and the disappointment of those who had hoped that "when all feudal straps and bandages were snapped asunder, Nature, too long the mother of dwarfs, should reimburse itself by a brood of Titans......" But if American literature has not justified Whitman, and if the gleam of the almighty dollar as yet obscures the pure gold of spiritual joy in service, not in America only, it is not improbable that the circumstances and expressionof America to-day in relation to the Great War (a living epic yet to be sung) may be in the straight line of vision of the prophets of a century ago. The vision of the prophet-poets has found shape, imperfect and partial though it be, in the principles laid down in the American President's peace demands. There is something Whitmanic in the despatches of the President to the German Government, though it be disguised in prose. The prophet-poet, who sang of the future as he attended the wounded and the dying in the Civil War of 1862, has vicariously become one of the legislators of the humanity that will survive the World-War of 1914—1918. |
