Read Ebook: Aspects of Literature by Murry John Middleton

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Ebook has 303 lines and 41897 words, and 7 pages

'Song that lacks all words, all melody, All sweetness almost, was dearer then to me Than sweetest voice that sings in tune sweet words.'

Not that the unheard melodies were sweeter than the heard to this dead poet. We should be less confident of his quality if he had not been, both in his knowledge and his hesitations, the child of his age. Because he was this, the melodies were heard; but they were not sweet. They made the soul sensible of attachments deeper than the conscious mind's ideals, whether of beauty or goodness. Not to something above but to something beyond are we chained, for all that we forget our fetters, or by some queer trick of self-hallucination turn them into golden crowns. But perhaps the finer task of our humanity is to turn our eyes calmly into 'the dark backward and abysm' not of time, but of the eternal present on whose pinnacle we stand.

'I have mislaid the key. I sniff the spray And think of nothing; I see and hear nothing; Yet seem, too, to be listening, lying in wait For what I should, yet never can, remember. No garden appears, no path, no child beside, Neither father nor mother, nor any playmate; Only an avenue, dark, nameless without end.'

So, it seems, a hundred years have found us out. We come no longer trailing clouds of glory. We are that which we are, less and more than our strong ancestors; less, in that our heritage does not descend from on high, more, in that we know ourselves for less. Yet our chosen spirit is not wholly secure in his courage. He longs not merely to know in what undifferentiated oneness his roots are fixed, but to discover it beautiful. Not even yet is it sufficient to have a premonition of the truth; the truth must wear a familiar colour.

'This heart, some fraction of me, happily Floats through the window even now to a tree Down in the misting, dim-lit, quiet vale, Not like a peewit that returns to wail For something it has lost, but like a dove That slants unswerving to its home and love. There I find my rest, and through the dark air Flies what yet lives in me. Beauty is there.'

Beauty, yes, perhaps; but beautiful by virtue of its coincidence with the truth, as there is beauty in those lines securer and stronger far than the melody of their cadence, because they tell of a loyalty of man's being which, being once made sensible of it, he cannot gainsay. Whence we all come, whither we must all make our journey, there is home indeed. But necessity, not remembered delights, draws us thither. That which we must obey is our father if we will; but let us not delude ourselves into the expectation of kindness and the fatted calf, any more than we dare believe that the love which moves the sun and the other stars has in it any charity. We may be, we are, the children of the universe; but we have 'neither father nor mother nor any playmate.'

And Edward Thomas knew this. The knowledge should be the common property of the poetry of our time, marking it off from what went before and from what will come after. We believe that it will be found to be so; and that the presence of this knowledge, and the quality which this knowledge imparts, makes Edward Thomas more than one among his contemporaries. He is their chief. He challenges other regions in the hinterland of our souls. Yet how shall we describe the narrowness of the line which divides his province from theirs, or the only half-conscious subtlety of the gesture with which he beckons us aside from trodden and familiar paths? The difference, the sense of departure, is perhaps most apparent in this, that he knows his beauty is not beautiful, and his home no home at all.

'This is my grief. That land, My home, I have never seen. No traveller tells of it, However far he has been.

'And could I discover it I fear my happiness there, Or my pain, might be dreams of return To the things that were.'

Great poetry stands in this, that it expresses man's allegiance to his destiny. In every age the great poet triumphs in all that he knows of necessity; thus he is the world made vocal. Other generations of men may know more, but their increased knowledge will not diminish from the magnificence of the music which he has made for the spheres. The known truth alters from age to age; but the thrill of the recognition of the truth stands fast for all our human eternity. Year by year the universe grows vaster, and man, by virtue of the growing brightness of his little lamp, sees himself more and more as a child born in the midst of a dark forest, and finds himself less able to claim the obeisance of the all. Yet if he would be a poet, and not a harper of threadbare tunes, he must at each step in the downward passing from his sovereignty, recognise what is and celebrate it as what must be. Thus he regains, by another path, the supremacy which he has forsaken.

Edward Thomas's poetry has the virtue of this recognition. It may be said that his universe was not vaster but smaller than the universe of the past, for its bounds were largely those of his own self. It is, even in material fact, but half true. None more closely than he regarded the living things of earth in all their quarters. 'After Rain' is, for instance, a very catalogue of the texture of nature's visible garment, freshly put on, down to the little ash-leaves

'... thinly spread In the road, like little black fish, inlaid As if they played.'

But it is true that these objects of vision were but the occasion of the more profound discoveries within the region of his own soul. There he discovered vastness and illimitable vistas; found himself to be an eddy in the universal flux, driven whence and whither he knew not, conscious of perpetual instability, the meeting place of mighty impacts of which only the farthest ripple agitates the steady moonbeam of the waking mind. In a sense he did no more than to state what he found, sometimes in the more familiar language of beauties lost, mourned for lost, and irrecoverable.

'The simple lack Of her is more to me Than other's presence, Whether life splendid be Or utter black.

'I have not seen, I have no news of her; I can tell only She is not here, but there She might have been.

'She is to be kissed Only perhaps by me; She may be seeking Me and no other; she May not exist.'

That search lies nearer to the norm of poetry. We might register its wistfulness, praise the appealing nakedness of its diction and pass on. If that were indeed the culmination of Edward Thomas's poetical quest, he would stand securely enough with others of his time. But he reaches further. In the verses on his 'home,' which we have already quoted, he passes beyond these limits. He has still more to tell of the experience of the soul fronting its own infinity:--

'So memory made Parting to-day a double pain: First because it was parting; next Because the ill it ended vexed And mocked me from the past again. Not as what had been remedied Had I gone on,--not that, ah no! But as itself no longer woe.'

There speaks a deep desire born only of deep knowledge. Only those who have been struck to the heart by a sudden awareness of the incessant not-being which is all we hold of being, know the longing to arrest the movement even at the price of the perpetuation of their pain. So it was that the moments which seemed to come to him free from the infirmity of becoming haunted and held him most.

'Often I had gone this way before, But now it seemed I never could be And never had been anywhere else.'

To cheat the course of time, which is only the name with which we strive to cheat the flux of things, and to anchor the soul to something that was not instantly engulfed--

'In the undefined Abyss of what can never be again.'

Sometimes he looked within himself for the monition which men have felt as the voice of the eternal memory; sometimes, like Keats, but with none of the intoxication of Keats's sense of a sharing in victory, he grasped at the recurrence of natural things, 'the pure thrush word,' repeated every spring, the law of wheeling rooks, or to the wind 'that was old when the gods were young,' as in this profoundly typical sensing of 'A New House.'

'All was foretold me; naught Could I foresee; But I learned how the wind would sound After these things should be.'

But he could not rest even there. There was, indeed, no anchorage in the enduring to be found by one so keenly aware of the flux within the soul itself. The most powerful, the most austerely imagined poem in this book is that entitled 'The Other,' which, apart from its intrinsic appeal, shows that Edward Thomas had something at least of the power to create the myth which is the poet's essential means of triangulating the unknown of his emotion. Had he lived to perfect himself in the use of this instrument, he might have been a great poet indeed. 'The Other' tells of his pursuit of himself, and how he overtook his soul.

No; not a great poet, will be the final sentence, when the palimpsest is read with the calm and undivided attention that is its due, but one who had many of the qualities of a great poet. Edward Thomas was like a musician who noted down themes that summon up forgotten expectations. Whether the genius to work them out to the limits of their scope and implication was in him we do not know. The life of literature was a hard master to him; and perhaps the opportunity he would eagerly have grasped was denied him by circumstance. But, if his compositions do not, his themes will never fail--of so much we are sure--to awaken unsuspected echoes even in unsuspecting minds.

But between myths and phantasmagoria there is a great gulf. The structural possibilities of the myth depend upon its intelligibility. The child knows upon what drama, played in what world, the curtain will rise when he hears the trumpet-note: 'Of man's first disobedience....' And, even when the poet turns from legend and history to create his own myth, he must make one whose validity is visible, if he is not to be condemned to the sterility of a coterie. The lawless and fantastic shapes of his own imagination need, even for their own perfect embodiment, the discipline of the common perception. The phantoms of the individual brain, left to their own waywardness, lose all solidity and become like primary forms of life, instead of the penultimate forms they should be. For the poet himself must move securely among his visions; they must be not less certain and steadfast than men are. To anchor them he needs intelligible myth. Nothing less than a supremely great genius can save him if he ventures into the vast without a landmark visible to other eyes than his own. Blake had a supremely great genius and was saved in part. The masculine vigour of his passion gave stability to the figures of his imagination. They are heroes because they are made to speak like heroes. Even in Blake's most recondite work there is always the moment when the clouds are parted and we recognise the austere and awful countenances of gods. The phantasmagoria of the dreamer have been mastered by the sheer creative will of the poet. Like Jacob, he wrestled until the going down of the sun with his angel and would not let him go.

The effort which such momentary victories demand is almost superhuman; yet to possess the power to exert it is the sole condition upon which a poet may plunge into the world of phantasms. Mr Yeats has too little of the power to vindicate himself from the charge of idle dreaming. He knows the problem; perhaps he has also known the struggle. But the very terms in which he suggests it to us subtly convey a sense of impotence:--

Hands, do what you're bid; Bring the balloon of the mind That bellies and drags in the wind Into its narrow shed.

'I am worn out with dreams, A weather-worn, marble triton Among the streams; And all day long I look Upon this lady's beauty As though I had found in book A pictured beauty, Pleased to have filled the eyes Or the discerning ears, Delighted to be but wise, For men improve with the years; And yet, and yet Is this my dream, or the truth? O would that we had met When I had my burning youth; But I grow old among dreams, A weather-worn, marble triton Among the streams.'

It is pitiful because, even now in spite of all his honesty the poet mistakes the cause of his sorrow. He is worn out not with dreams, but with the vain effort to master them and submit them to his own creative energy. He has not subdued them nor built a new world from them; he has merely followed them like will-o'-the-wisps away from the world he knew. Now, possessing neither world, he sits by the edge of a barren road that vanishes into a no-man's land, where is no future, and whence there is no way back to the past.

'My country is Kiltartan Cross, My countrymen Kiltartan's poor; No likely end could bring them loss Or leave them happier than before.'

It may be that Mr Yeats has succumbed to the malady of a nation. We do not know whether such things are possible; we must consider him only in and for himself. From this angle we can regard him only as a poet whose creative vigour has failed him when he had to make the highest demands upon it. His sojourn in the world of the imagination, far from enriching his vision, has made it infinitely tenuous. Of this impoverishment, as of all else that has overtaken him, he is agonisedly aware.

'I would find by the edge of that water The collar-bone of a hare, Worn thin by the lapping of the water, And pierce it through with a gimlet, and stare At the old bitter world where they marry in churches, And laugh over the untroubled water At all who marry in churches, Through the white thin bone of a hare.'

'A Sphinx with woman breast and lion paw, A Buddha, hand at rest, Hand lifted up that blest; And right between these two a girl at play.'

These are no more than the dry bones in the valley of Ezekiel, and, alas! there is no prophetic fervour to make them live.

Whether Mr Yeats, by some grim fatality, mistook his phantasmagoria for the product of the creative imagination, or whether he made an effort to discipline them to his poetic purpose and failed, we cannot certainly say. Of this, however, we are certain, that somehow, somewhere, there has been disaster. He is empty, now. He has the apparatus of enchantment, but no potency in his soul. He is forced to fall back upon the artistic honesty which has never forsaken him. That it is an insufficient reserve let this passage show:--

'For those that love the world serve it in action, Grow rich, popular, and full of influence, And should they paint or write still it is action: The struggle of the fly in marmalade. The rhetorician would deceive his neighbours, The sentimentalist himself; while art Is but a vision of reality....'

Mr Yeats is neither rhetorician nor sentimentalist. He is by structure and impulse an artist. But structure and impulse are not enough. Passionate apprehension must be added to them. Because this is lacking in Mr Yeats those lines, concerned though they are with things he holds most dear, are prose and not poetry.

is a human being to a degree to which no other figures in the master's comedy of unreason are. And it is evident that Anatole France himself finds him by far the most attractive of them all. He can almost persuade himself, at moments, that he still is the child he was, as in the exquisite story of how, when he had been to a truly royal chocolate shop, he attempted to reproduce its splendours in play. At one point his invention and his memory failed him, and he turned to his mother to ask: 'Est-ce celui qui vend ou celui qui ach?te qui donne de l'argent?'

'Je ne devais jamais conna?tre le prix de l'argent. Tel j'?tais ? trois ans ou trois ans et demi dans le cabinet tapiss? de boutons de roses, tel je restai jusqu'? la vieillesse, qui m'est l?g?re, comme elle l'est ? toutes les ?mes exemptes d'avarice et d'orgueil. Non, maman, je n'ai jamais connu le prix de l'argent. Je ne le connais pas encore, ou plut?t je le connais trop bien.'

'Je suis une autre personne que l'enfant dont je parle. Nous n'avons plus en commun, lui et moi, un atome de substance ni de pens?e. Maintenant qu'il m'est devenu tout ? fait ?tranger, je puis en sa compagnie me distraire de la mienne. Je l'aime, moi qui ne m'aime ni ne me ha?s. Il m'est doux de vivre en pens?e les jours qu'il vivait et je souffre de respirer l'air du temps o? nous sommes.'

Not otherwise is it with us and Anatole France. We may have little in common with his thought--the community we often imagine comes of self-deception--but it is sweet for us to inhabit his mind for a while. His touch is potent to soothe our fitful fevers.

; it is the 'avant toute chose' in his work, which, as we believe, would have condemned him to obscurity to-day, if he had not had Mr Bridges, who was his friend, to stand sponsor and the Oxford University Press to stand the racket. Apparently Mr Bridges himself is something of our opinion, for his introductory sonnet ends on a disdainful note:--

'Go forth: amidst our chaffinch flock display Thy plumage of far wonder and heavenward flight!'

It is from a sonnet written by Hopkins to Mr Bridges that we take the most concise expression of his artistic intention, for the poet's explanatory preface is not merely technical, but is written in a technical language peculiar to himself. Moreover, its scope is small; the sonnet tells us more in two lines than the preface in four pages.

'O then if in my lagging lines you miss The roll, the rise, the carol, the creation....'

There is his 'avant toute chose.' Perhaps it seems very like 'de la musique.' But it tells us more about Hopkins's music than Verlaine's line told us about his. This music is of a particular kind, not the 'sanglots du violon,' but pre-eminently the music of song, the music most proper to lyrical verse. If one were to seek in English the lyrical poem to which Hopkins's definition could be most fittingly applied, one would find Shelley's 'Skylark.' A technical progression onwards from the 'Skylark' is accordingly the main line of Hopkins's poetical evolution. There are other, stranger threads interwoven; but this is the chief. Swinburne, rightly enough if the intention of true song is considered, appears hardly to have existed for Hopkins, though he was his contemporary. There is an element of Keats in his epithets, a half-echo in 'whorled ear' and 'lark-charm?d'; there is an aspiration after Milton's architectonic in the construction of the later sonnets and the most lucid of the fragments,'Epithalamion.' But the central point of departure is the 'Skylark.' The 'May Magnificat' is evidence of Hopkins's achievement in the direct line:--

'Ask of her, the mighty mother: Her reply puts this other Question: What is Spring?-- Growth in everything--

Flesh and fleece, fur and feather, Grass and greenworld all together; Star-eyed strawberry-breasted Throstle above her nested Cluster of bugle-blue eggs thin Forms and warms the life within....

... When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple Bloom lights the orchard-apple, And thicket and thorp are merry With silver-surf?d cherry,

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