: Tommy Atkins at War: As Told in His Own Letters by Kilpatrick James Alexander - World War 1914-1918; Great Britain. Army Military life World War I

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I THE MUSES IN HEAVEN 1

II THE MEDIUM OF SPOKEN VERSE 13

V MISCELLANEOUS 67

VI THE CHILDREN OF THAMYRIS 81

THAMYRIS

THE MUSES IN HEAVEN

There is an old Teutonic legend that every year, upon All Souls' Day, the archangel Raphael is sent down to the classical ward of Hell, where the dispossessed deities of heathendom are confined, with a summons for the nine Muses to appear and give a command performance before the throne of Jehovah and the assembled Host of Heaven. So the poor embarrassed ladies, ushered before that critical and unsympathetic audience, reluctantly tune their lyres, and begin some ancient Hellenic chant, some ode, it may be, that they had once sung in the feasting-hall of Olympus, or at the marriage of Cadmus and Harmonia. At first their strange pagan minstrelsy seems harsh and unpleasing to blessed ears, accustomed only to the angelical modes of "saintly shout and solemn jubilee"; but before long, in spite of themselves, the angels are touched and troubled by this disquieting music, burdened with all the passions and sighs of humanity, until at last celestial visages are stained with tears, and the sound of weeping is heard in Heaven.

Now what lesson, if any, may we draw from this apologue? Were the angels right or wrong, or perhaps neither? Has the history of poetry been merely a deplorable tale of decadence, a progressive impoverishment and deterioration, through senility and second-childishness, towards an unlamented death in a bastard and graceless prose? Or on the contrary has the gradual divorce of poetry from music and intoning meant its liberation for subtler and more rational, but no less truly poetic purposes? Before attempting to answer such questions, let us first look at the historical facts.

It is no doubt possible that so summary a diagnosis may be quite misleading. Chaucer, it might be objected, already wrote for readers; and so did Milton. Yet many of us find them, and some of their successors, still quite readable. Surely then great poetry can still be both produced and enjoyed, even when it is completely divorced from music or intonation. All this may be true. Yet it is well to remember that Chaucer was the immediate successor on the one hand of the English and French minstrels, and on the other of Dante and Boccaccio, whose art in its turn grew directly out of that of the troubadours and the Italian minstrels. And who have been the inheritors of Chaucer's art? Spenser, let us say, and in our time William Morris. Is it not possible that both Chaucer and Dante were peculiarly fortunate, in that their art had only quite recently emerged from the discipline of a more primitive musical stage? Their successors may be said to have deteriorated, the more purely literary they became, and the further removed from the Pierian fountain-head of minstrelsy. Then again Milton, though more than any other English poet he was consciously the heir to all the ages, inherited his medium and his metrical technique directly from Shakespeare's verse that was written, not for reading, but for dramatic performance, although no doubt Milton modified it considerably for his own undramatic purposes. As to the inheritors of Milton's art, such as Wordsworth and Keats, Matthew Arnold and Mr. Bridges, considerable as have been their achievements, are there not some signs, even in their own work, and still more in the tendency of recent experiments, of an impulse to break away from Miltonic and Shakespearian usage, as though the medium of blank verse could no longer be profitably explored, not at least in its old traditional form?

Nevertheless it might plausibly be maintained that although the poets of the future are not likely to repeat the particular successes of Chaucer and Milton and their school, there is no reason why they should not exploit the medium of spoken verse in quite new ways, just as successfully as did their predecessors. First however it would be as well to become somewhat clearer as to the nature of this medium of spoken and silently read verse, and how it differs from more primitive poetry.

THE MEDIUM OF SPOKEN VERSE

When we read Homer or Aeschylus to ourselves, we do not as a rule attempt to imagine what their poems must have sounded like, when they were recited or sung. We transpose them, as it were, into a medium more or less resembling that of modern poetry. Let us try to measure what our loss must be, and what, if any, the compensations. To begin with, the elements of music and intonation, and also, in drama, of acting and dancing, have disappeared altogether. The intensity and mass of our emotions cannot possibly be the same as they would have been, could we have heard and beheld the living reality of which the text is but a pale, colourless shadow. It is true that rhythm is still there, and the general proportions of the whole: but rhythm and movement, unembodied and uninterpreted by performers, are far more difficult for us to realise by the less sensuous, more purely mental process of reading; while in the absence of musical and histrionic contrasts and emphasis, even the general proportions are likely to be somewhat obscured. It is as though we were studying a photograph or a monochrome copy of a painted picture; or rather we might be said to experience the same kind of difficulties as when we are contemplating colourless fragments of Greek sculpture against the background of a museum wall, at a distance and in a light that were never intended for them by their creators. How different would be our emotions, could we see the figures of the Olympian or Parthenon pediments placed in their right relation to the architecture and to the landscape, unmutilated, and glowing with colour which harmonised with that of the temples of which they were an organic part! It is a poor compensation that by long loving study we may perhaps become more intimate with the indestructible beauty of certain details, than we could ever have been, had we seen them less closely as elements of a complex work of art.

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