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Chapter VIII
A POET'S PASSING STEPHEN' PHILLIPS
ONLY a couple of months had passed since Mr. John Lane, the well-known London publisher, brought out a new book, Panama, and other Poems, by Mr. Stephen Phillips, when the news came to India by cable that. Stephen Phillips was dead.
Emerson in one of his essays tells us of the thrill of enlargement of life that he felt when at school it was announced that some one had written a poem. The birth of a new work of the spiritual imagination was to him a sign Of the liberation of a great purifying force in the world. There is something not less arresting surely, in the bare fact that a poet has died. While he lived—and especially in the case of Stephen Phillips who was in the very heyday of life as years go—there was always the chance that a new manifestation of creative-beauty would be made to the worid. Now, the 138 last stroke has been given by the Hidden Sculptor to the marble of life's accomplishment, and the work stands in all the solemn hush of the ancient phrase, " It is finished,"—finished, that is to say, so far as the bodily vehicle of the poetry is concerned. To write finis to the life of a poet, or to the book of his writings, in the full sense of the word, is to say that he never lived. The end, with the poet, is in truth, but the beginning. Then the complete entity of his poetry starts out—to use in another sense one of Mr. Phillip's splendid lines—as a
Lonely antagonist of destiny, to stand the trial of passing time, new manners of life, changing habits of speech, fresh passions and ideals ; to show whether beneath the trappings there is something of the Divine life which alone can make poetry, or anything else immortal ; or whether the memory of the poet will be covered by what Mr. Phillips has exquisitely called
The listless ripple of Oblivion. The references to which I have recourse at the moment of writing do not give the birth-date of Stephen Phillips ; but reckoning from certain personal data, and my memory of his playing the Ghost in Hamlet in the touring company of his cousin, F. R. Benson, the famous Shakesperian actor, a little over twenty years ago, Mr. Phillips can hardly have been more than fifty years of age when he died. Such an age is, in the ordinary reckoning of life in the West, comparatively young ; and much might still have come from the same source of inspiration as Marpessa, And yet, in thinking back over the quarter of a century during which I have followed his career, I can recall a growing sense of disappointment and anti-climax in the poetry that followed the first two splendours of Marpessa and Christ in Hades and in his last volume, Panama, we get a feeling of mental fatigue, and are dimly conscious of the poet fumbling in obscurity to find his inner light, and only managing to repeat as mannerisms what were once adornments and discoveries.
It was, I think, the diversion of Phillips into poetical drama that prevented a continuance of what now appears to have been his true work, intense narrative poetry. His experience as an actor had taught him the technique of the English stage ; and an ambition to continue the Shakespeare tradition found, from the point of view of his poetry, an unfortunately ready means to its fulfilment. His dramas, Herod, Ulysses, and others, were theatre successes, but they meant the thinning out and objectivising of the poet's genius, and he did not live long, enough beyond the subsequent gradual failure of his dramatic power, and the falling away of his public, to get back to the exquisite concept and craftsmanship of his masterpieces.
It is on the two poems which I have-mentioned that the fame of Stephen Phillips will ultimately rest. His plays are, of course, far above the average in dignity; and here, and there, as in Herod and Ulysses, there are pieces of as fine writing as Mr. Phillips ever did. Amongst them, however, the nearest approach to the full achievement of good drama which is also pure literature, is probably Paolo and Fraricesca.
The history of a flower in the air, Liable bat to breezes and to time, As rich and purposeless as is the rose : Thy simple doom is to be beautiful.
Apollo shows to her the transiency of life and human love, and her own ageing and death. Against this he contrasts what her life with him would be when he had kissed
Warm immortality into her lips,
and some deep insight tells him that, while the splendour of his life as the Sun-god may not win her, she may be found amenable on the side of her womanhood. Hence he discloses to her
More tender tasks, to steal upon the sea, A long expected bliss to tossing men. ...Thou shalt persuade the harvest, and bring on The deeper green ; or silently attend The fiery funeral of foliage old,...... Or lure into the air a face long sick...... With slow sweet surgery restore the brain.
Then Idas speaks, and it is characteristic of the humanity of the poet that he puts his best into the mouth of the mortal.
I love thee, then, Not only for thy body packed with sweet Of all this world, that cup of brimming Jane, That jar of violet wine set in the air, That palest rose sweet in the night of life...... Not for this only do I love thee, but Because Infinity upon thee broods, And thou art full of whispers and of shadows. Thou meanest what the sea has striven to say So long, and yearned up the cliffs to tell ; Thou art what all the winds have uttered not, What the still night suggesteth to the heart. Thy voice is like to music heard ere birth, Some spirit lute touched on a spirit sea ; Thy face remembered is from other worlds, It has been died for, though I know not when, It has been sung of, though I know not where. I am aware of other times and lands, Of births far back, of lives in many stars.
I have put down, from memory retained from the first appearance of the book, the foregoing passage, perhaps the most frequently quoted in Mr. Phillips' writings, because it is an epitome of the qualities of his work, as valued in the West—the feeling for nature as decoration and as emotion, the suggestion of a spiritual life behind phenomena ; I have put it down also because of the example that it gives of the literary imagination of the West breaking, by stress of emotion, through the limitation of the single life, and finding Tumours and hints of other lives—a matter which will appeal with force to those Indian lovers of literature, who are seeking for the fundamental spiritual unity through which the arts of East and West will find the way into each other's sympathy and understanding.
Marpessa weighs the two diverse lives — offered to her. The splendours of the Suh-god she finds wanting in elements that are essential to her human nature. Then she adds :
But if I live with Idas, then we two On the low earth shall prosper hand in hand In odours of the open field, and live
Beautiful friendship tried by sun and wind, Durable from the daily dust of life. ......Last, we shall descend Into the natural ground—not without fears Still like old friends, glad to have met, and leave Behind a wholesome memory on the earth. ... When she had spoken, Idas with one cry Held her, and there was silence; while the god In anger disappeared. Then slowly they, He looking downward, and she gazing up, Into the evening green wandered away."
It was in 1896 that Christ in Hades was-published. To the humanity of Marpessa it added a deeper note, and a firmer and stronger touch. In it appeared again the special suggestive handling of nature which Mr.Phillips made his own. I can best show this in a couple of examples ; this from Marpessa : 'Twas the moment deep When we are conscious of the secret dawn Amidst the darkness that we feel is green. —or this from Christ in Hades;
A wonderful stillness stopped her ; like to trees Motionless in an ectasy of rain.
The new poem takes up the line in the Christian Creed, "He descended into Hell," and tells of the passing of Christ after his crucifixion through the place of departed spirits. He is first spoken to by the Queen of the Dead, who ask Him :
Hast thou not brought Even a blossom with the noise of rain
And scent of earth about it, that we all Might gather round and whisper over it ?
But he passes through Hades in silence. Around Him the dead gather for some sign of the past life, or some hope for the future.
Upon his hands in uncouth gratitude Great prisoners muttering fawned : behind them stood Dreadful suspended business, and vast life Pausing.
Phrases like "dreadful suspended business," with the world of suggestion in each separate word, mark the highest attainment of poetry in their appeal to the mind and the emotions, and in their music that expresses in full vowels a subtle sound of resonant caverns underground, and yet is beautiful. With splendid art the poet suggests the suspense of the dead as they waited for a word from the passing Christ: but no word came.
At last, Waiting the signal that he could not give, Wanting the one word that he might not speak, Seeing he stirred not once, they wandered off, And gathering into groups, yet spoke of him. Then to despair slowly dispersed, as men Return with morning to the accustomed cask. ...The vault closed back, woe upon woe, the wheel Revolved, the stone rebounded, for that time Hades her interrupted life resumed.
In intellectual and spiritual content the work of Stephen Phillips falls far below that of many of the great English poets ; but a place is sure for him in the august assemblage of the immortals because he gave to English poetry a fresh beauty and music both in his masterpieces and in the lyrics that came from his pen. |
