FRANCIS THOMPSON
If ever a meteor fell to earth it was Francis Thompson. If ever a star ascended to that high place in the sky where sit the loftier planets in pleasant company, it was this splendid poet. Stalking through the shadows of the Thames Embankment to find his clear place in the milky way, is hardly the easiest road for so exceptional a celebrity. It is but another instance of the odd tradition perpetuating itself, that some geniuses must creep hand and knee through mire, heart pierced with the bramble of experience, up over the jagged pathways to that still place where skies are clear at last. Thompson is the last among the great ones to have known the dire vicissitude, direst, if legends are true, that can befall a human being. We have the silence of his saviour friends, the Meynells, saying so much more than their few public words, tender but so careful. What they knew, and what the walls of the monastery of Storrington must have heard in that so pained stillness, there, is probably beyond repet.i.tion for pathos. De Quincey had taught him much in the knowledge of hardship. Whether it is just similarity of experience or a kind of imitation in nature, is not easy to say. It was hardly the example to repeat. It is singular enough also, that De Quincey"s "Ann" should have become so vivid a repet.i.tion to Thompson, in just the same terms.
London has no feeling for the peace of poets. They are the little things in the confused maelstrom of human endeavor. Poets are taught with the whip. They must bleed for their divine idea, or so it was then. Sometimes it seems as if a change had come, for so many poets sit in chairs of ease these days. Science produces other kinds of discomfort, and covers the old misery with a new tapestry of contrasts. I doubt if many poets are selling matches these days, living on eleven pence a day. There is still the poet who knows his cheap lodging. There seems enough of them still for high minds to crawl into, and yet there is another face to the misery.
Thompson was seraph from the first. You see the very doom burning out of his boy"s eyes in the youthful portrait, and you see the logical end in that desperate and pitiful mask, the drawing of the last period in the Meynell Book. His was certainly the severed head, and his feet were pathetically far away, down on a stony earth. That he should have forfeited the ordinary ways of ease, is as consistent with his appearance, as it was necessary to his nature. That he should find himself on the long march past the stations of the cross, to the very tree itself, for his poetic purpose, if it is in keeping with tradition, is not precisely the most inspiring aspect of human experiences. Human he was not, as we like to think of human, for he was too early in his career marked for martyr. There is the note of cricket-time in his earlier life, and how long this attached to the physical delights of his being cannot be told here. His eyes were lodged too far in heaven to have kept the delights for long, to have comprehended all that clogged his impatiently mercurial feet.
"The abashless inquisition of each star" was the scrutiny that obsessed his ways, the impertinence that he suffered most; for he had the magnitude of soul that hungered for placement, and the plague of two masters was on him. Huntress and "Hound" he had to choose between, beauty and the insatiable Prince; harsh and determined lovers, both of them, too much craving altogether for an artistic nature. The earth had no room for him and he did not want heaven so soon. He was not saint, even though his name followed him even, for recognition.
"Stood bound and helplessly, for Time to shoot his barbed minutes at me, suffered the trampling hoof of every hour," etc., all this confided to some childish innocent in "The child"s kiss". Whom else should he tell but a child? Where is the man or woman with understanding but has the "child" lodged somewhere for sympathy, for recognition? The clearest listener he could find, and the least commiserative, happily. "The heart of childhood, so divine for me", is but typical of a being so dragged, and emaciate with the tortures of the body, in earth places where no soul like his could ever be at home. What was Preston, or Ashton-under-Lyne to him, more than Kensall Green is to him now? What is such dust in his sky but some blinding and blowing thing? What is there for singer to do but sing until the throat cracks? Even the larks and the thrushes do that. They end their morning and evening with a song. He was brother to these birds in that loftiness. He sang, and sang, and sang, while flesh fainted from hunger and weakness.
Had not Storrington come to him in the dark places of London, we should have had no "Hound of Heaven", and without that masterpiece what would modern poetry do? He sang to cover up his wounds with climbing music. That was his sense of beauty. He filled his hollowing cheek with finer things than moaning. He might have wept, but they were words instead of drops.
It will be difficult to find loftier song as to essences. We shall have room for criticising stylistic extravagances, archaisms of a not interesting order for us, yet there will be nothing said but the highest in praise of his genius. Excess of praise may be heaped upon him without cessation, and it may end in the few cool yet incisive words that fell from the lips of Meredith, with the violets from another"s worshipped hands, "a true poet, one of a small band." Poets of this time will have much to gather from Thompson in point of sincerity. There is terrific mastery of words, which is like Shakespeare in felicity we do not encounter so often it seems to me.
Thompson has scaled the white rainbow of the night, and sits in radiant company among the first planetary strummers of song. His diamond is pure, and the matrix that hid him so long from showing his glinted facets is chipped away of miseries carried down with death.
They will soon be forgotten by the mult.i.tude as death itself made him forget them. We have his chants and his anthems and plainsongs to remind us of the one essential, of how lofty a singer pa.s.sed down our highroad. "Dusty with tumbling about amid the stars!" That is what he is for us now, if he rolled in too much clay of earth. Sh.e.l.ley might have turned his own handsome phrase on him, for they both strode the morning of their bright minds like sun the sky, with much of the same solemn yet speedy gait. There are times when they are certainly of the one radiance, lyrical and poetical. Their consuming intellectual interests were vastly apart, as were their paths of spirit.
I think we shall have no more "dread of height". Poetry has pa.s.sed into scientific discovery. Intellectual pa.s.sions are the vogue, earth is coming into its own, for there is no more heaven in the mind. We are showing our humanities now, and the soul must wait a little, and remain speechless in some dull corner of the universe. Thompson was the last to believe. We are learning to think now, so poetry has come to calculation. Rhapsody and pa.s.sion are romantic, and we are not romantic. The last Rhapsodist was Francis Thompson, and in the sense of lyrical fervour, the last great poet was Francis Thompson.
ERNEST DOWSON
It is late to be telling of Dowson, with the eighteen-nineties nearly out of sight, and yet it is Dowson and Lionel Johnson that I know most of, from the last of this period. Poles apart these two poets are, the one so austere and almost collegiate in adherence to convention, the other too warm to let a coldness obsess his singing. There doesn"t seem to be anything wonderful about Dowson, and yet you want to be saying a line of his every now and then, of him "that lived, and sang, and had a beating heart," ere he grew old, and he grew old so soon.
"Worn out by what was really never life to him," is a prefatorial phrase I recall. There was a genuine music in Dowson, even if it was smothered in lilies and roses and wine of the now old way of saying things. "Come hither child, and rest--Behold the weary west," might have been the thing he was saying to himself, so much is this the essence of his lost cause.
There is a languor and a lack of power to lift a hand toward the light, too much a trusting of the shadow. "I have flung roses, roses riotously with the throng, to put those pale lost lilies out of mind."
Always verging on a poetic feeling not just like ourselves in these days, and yet Dowson was a poet. He caressed words until they sang for him the one plaint that he asked of them. That he was obsessed of the beauties and the intimations of Versailles, is seen in everything he did, or at least he imbibed this from Verlaine. He was himself a pale wanderer down soft green allees, he had a twilight mind struggling toward the sun, which was too bright for him, for the moon was his brightest light. Echoes of Verlaine linger through his verse and a strain of Poe is present, poet whom he with his French taste admired so much, two very typical idols for a young man with a sentimental journey to pursue. Lost Adelaides, to keep him steeped in the sorrow that he cherished, for he petted his miseries considerably; or was it that he was most at home when he was unhappy? He would rather have seen the light of day from a not quite clear window, for instead of a clear hill, he might see a vague castle of his fancy somewhere. He hadn"t the sweep of a great poet, and yet somehow there was the linnet in him, there was the strain of the lute among the leaves, there was the rustle of a soft dress audible, and the pa.s.sing of hands he could not ever hold.
He was the poet of the lost treasure. "Studies in Sentiment" is, I think, the t.i.tle of a small book of prose of his. He might have called his poems "Studies in sentimentality". And yet, for his time, how virile and vigorous he sounds beside "Posies out of Rings", of his friend Theodore Peters, of the renaissance cloak, the cherry coloured velvet cloak embroidered in green leaves and silver veinings, so full of the sky radiance of Dowson himself, this cloak. Cherry sounds red and pa.s.sionate. But it was a cherry of olden time, with the bloom quite gone, the dust of the years permeating its silken warp. It reposes here in America, the property of an artist of that period.
One likes Dowson because of his sincerity, and a clear beauty which, if not exactly startling, was in its way truly genuine. It was merely too late for Dowson, and it was probably too soon. Swinburne had strummed the skies with every kind of song, and Verlaine had whispered every secret of the senses there was, in the land of illusion and vaguery. Dowson was worshipper of them both, for it was sound first and last that he cared most for, the musical mastery of the one and the sentimentality of the other. He was far nearer Verlaine in type.
He had but the one thing to tell of, and that was lost love, and he told it over and over in his book of verse. His Pierrot of the Minute was himself, and his Cynara was the ever vanishing vision of his own insecurity and incapability. He perished for the love of hands. He is so like someone one knows, whom one wants to talk to tenderly, touch in a friendly way, and say as little as possible. He comes to one humanly first, and asks you for your eye to his verse afterward, something of the "Little boy Lost", in his so ineffectual face, weak with sweetness and hidden in shyness, covered with irresponsibility, or lack of power to be responsible.
He was a helpless one, that is certain. He resorted to the old-fashioned methods of the decadents for maintaining the certain requisite melancholy apparently necessary to sing a certain way. In the struggle of that period, he must have seemed like a very clear, though a very sad singer. There were no lilies or orchids in his b.u.t.tonhole, and no strange jewels on his fingers, for you remember, it was the time of "Monsieur Phocas", and the art of Gustave Moreau. He was plain and sincere, and pathetic, old-fashioned too in that he was bohemian, or at least had acquired bohemianism, for I think no Englishman was ever really bohemian. Dieppe and the docks had gotten him, and took away the sense of mastery over things that a real poet of power must somehow have. He was essentially a giver-in. His neurasthenia was probably the reason for that. It was the age of absinthe and little taverns, for there was Verlaine and the inimitable Cafe d"Harcourt, which, as you saw it just before the war, had the very something that kept the Master at his drinks all day.
Murger, Rimbaud, Verlaine had done the thing which has lasted so singularly until now, for there are still echoes of this in the air, even to the present day. Barmaids are memories, and roseleaves dried and set in urns, for that matter, too. How far away it all seems, and they were the substance of poetry then. Sounds were the important things for Dowson, which is essentially the Swinburne echo.
Significant then, that he worshipped "the viol, the violet, and the vine" of Poe. There was little else but singing in his verse however.
His love of Horace did less for him than the masters of sound, excepting that the vision comes in the name "Cynara". But it was all struggle for Dowson, a battle with the pale lily. It was for this he clung to cabmen"s lounging places. He was looking for places to be out of the play in. He couldn"t have survived for long, and yet there is a strain of genuine loveliness, the note of pure beauty in the verse of Dowson. He was poet, and kept to his creed with lover-like tenacity.
He helped close a period that was distinguished all over the world, the period of the sunflower. Apart from its wildest and most spectacular genius, it has produced Lionel Johnson with his religious purity, and Aubrey Beardsley. It was the time of sad and delicate young men. They all died in boyhood really. These were, I think, with Dowson the best it offered. We never read Arthur Symons for his power in verse, he with so much of the rose-tinted afterglow in him, so much of the old feeling for stage doors and roses thrown from the boxes, and the dying scent of lingerie. His essays will be a far finer source of delight for a much longer time, for therein is the best poetry he had to offer.
Dowson was, let us say not mockingly, the boyish whimperer in song. He was ineffectual, too much so, to take up the game of laughter for long. That would have been too strenuous for him, so he had to sit and weep tears of wordy rain. "Il pleut dans mon coeur" was the famous touch of his master, it was the loudest strain in him. That was the lover-strain, and Dowson was the lover dying of love, imaginary love probably, and saw everywhere something to remind him of what he had pathetically lost. If there had been a little savage in him, he would have walked away with what he wanted. He maybe did have a try or two, but they couldn"t have endured, for he wasn"t loving a particular Adelaide. That was the name he gave to love, for it was woman"s lips, and eyes and hands that he cared most for, or at least seemed most to care.
It was in the vision that crossed his ways in the dark and boisterous taverns where love finds strange ways for expression, that the singleness of feeling possessed him. It was among the rougher elements of dock life that his refinements found their level. Dowson sang and sang and sang, until he grew old at thirty-three, "worn out by what was never really life to him". Aged pierrot, gone home to his mother, the Moon, to bask forever in the twilight of his old and vague fancies. There might he strum his heart out in the old way, and the world would never hear, for it has lost the ear for this kind of song.
Perhaps in two hundred years, in other "golden treasuries" there may appear the songs of Dowson as among the best of those early and late singers of the nineteenth century. We cannot say now, for it cloys a little with sweets for us at this time, though it was then the time of honey and jasmine, and the scent of far away flowers. Pierrot of the gla.s.s, with the hours dripping away in fine, gold rain. That was the genius of poets like Dowson, and pierrot was the master of them all.
HENRY JAMES ON RUPERT BROOKE
Henry James on Rupert Brooke! Here is certainly a very wide interval, separated, artist and subject, by the greatest divergence of power, and one may be even amazed at the contrast involved. He is surely, James, in all his elaborateness, trying to square the rose and compute the lily, algebraical advances upon a most simple thesis. Brooke--a nature so obvious, which had no measure at all for what the sum had done to him, and for all that about him, or for those stellar ecstasies which held him bound with fervour as poet, planetary swimmer, and gifted as well with a fine stroke for the sea, and runner of all the beautiful earth places about the great seas" edge.
For me, there is heaviness and over-elaboration paramount in this preface to the Letters from America, excess of byword, a strained relationship with his subject, but that would of course be Jamesian, and very naturally, too. It is hardly, this preface, the tribute of the wise telling of beautiful and "blinding youth", surely more the treatise of the problemist forging his problem, as the sculptor might; something too much of metal or stone, too ponderous, too severe let one say, for its so gracing and brightening theme, something not springing into bloom, as does the person and personality of the young subject himself. Only upon occasion does he really come upon the young man, actual, forgetful of all but him.
There is no question, if the word of those be true who had relation however slight or intimate with Brooke, that he was an engrossing theme, and for more than one greater than himself, as certainly he was for many much less significant than James. It is distinguished from the young poet"s point of view that he was impressed, and that as person to person he really did see him in a convincing manner, as might one artist of great repute find himself uncommonly affected by the young and so living poet with more than a common gift for creation. It seems to me however that James is not over certain as to how poetic all things are in substance, yet all the while treating Brooke coolly and s.p.a.ciously as an artist should.
I did not know Brooke, and I know nothing of him beyond various photos showing him one way, quite manly and robust, and I feel sure he was so, and in another way as neither youth nor man, but something idyllic, separate and seraph-like, untouched mostly with earthly experience. These pictures do show that he was, unquestionably, a bright gust of England, with an almost audible splendour about even these poor replicas, which make it seem that he did perform the ascribed miracle, that England really had brought forth of her brightest and best, only to lay away her golden fruitage in dust upon the borders of a far and cla.s.sical sea, with an acute untimeliness.
But respectfully let me say, I think much in these hours of the incongruity and pathos of excessive celebration. There shall not be for long, singers enough to sing high songs commensurate with the delights of those numberless ones "who lived, and sang, and had a beating heart", those who have sped into the twilight too soon, having but a brief time to discover if years had bright secrets for them or clear perspective. There shall always lack the requisite word for them who have made many a dull morning splendid with faith, they who have been the human indication immeasurably of the sun"s rising, and of the truth that vision is a thing of reason.
Of Brooke and the other dead poets as well, there has, it seems to me, been too much of celebration. But of Brooke and his poetry, which is a far superior product to these really most ordinary "Letters", there is in these poetic pieces too much of what I want to call "University Cleavage", an excess of old school painting, too much usage of the warm image, which, though emotional, is not sensuous enough to express the real poetic sensuousness, to make the line or the word burn pa.s.sionately, too much of the shades of Swinburne still upon the horizon. Rose and violet of the eighteen ninety hues have for long been dispensed with, as has the pierrot and his moon. We have in this time come to like hardier colourings, which are for us more satisfying, and more poetic. We hardly dare use the hot words of "Anactoria" in our day. To be sure rose is English, for it has been for long a very predominant shade on the young face of England, but in Brooke there is an old age to the fervour, and in spite of the brilliant youth of the poet, there is an old age in the substance and really in the treatment as well. We are wanting a fresher intonation to those images, and expect a new approach, and a newer aspect. It is not to adhere by means of criticism to the prevailing graveyard tendency, nor do we want so much of the easy and cheap journalistic element, as comes so often in the so named "free verse". What is really wanted is an individual consistency, and a brightness of imagery which shall be the poet"s own by reason of his own personal attachment, and not simply the variance of the many-in-one poetry of the day.
It is not enough to write pa.s.sably, it is only enough when there are several, or even one, who will give their or his own peculiar contact with those agencies of the day, the hour, and the moment, who will find or invent a style best suited to themselves. Attempts at excessive individualism will never create true individualistic expression, no affected surprise in personal perversity of image or metaphor will make a real poet, or real poetry. There must be first and last of all, a sure ardour, the poet"s very own, which will of itself support obvious, or even slightly detectable, influences. It is not enough to declaim oneself, or propose continually one"s group. The single utterance is what is necessary, a real freshness of vocalization which is, so to speak, the singer"s own throat. If he be original in his freshness, we shall be able to single him away from the sweeping movements of the hour by his very "specialness" in touch, that pressure of the mind and spirit upon the page, which is his.
We shall translate a poet through his indications and intentions as well as through his arrivals, and we must condemn no one to fame beyond his capacity or deserts. We have never the need of extravagant laud. It is not enough to praise a poet for his personal charm, his beauty of body and of mind and soul, for these are but beautiful things at home in a beautiful house. In the case of Brooke, we have ringing up among hosts of others, James"s voice that he was all of this, but I would not wish to think it was the wish of any real poet to be "condemned to sociability", merely because he was an eminently social being, or because he was the exceptionally handsome, among the many less so; or be condemned to overpraise for what is after all but an indication to poetic power. "If I should die", is of course a very lovely sonnet, and it is the true indication of what Brooke might have been, but it is not the reason to be doomed to find all things wonderful in him. For in the state of perfection, if one see always with a lancet eye, we really do accentuate the essence of beauty by a careful and very direct critical sense, which can and should, when honorably exercised, show up delicately, the sense of proportion.
It is as much a part of the artist"s equipment to find fault as it is to praise, for he wants by nature the true value with which he may relate himself to the sense of beauty. It seems, perhaps only to me, that in Brooke"s poems there is but a vigorous indication to poetic expression, whereas doubtless the man himself was being excessively poetic, hour and moment together, and spent much energy of mind and body poetizing sensation. For me, there is a journalistic quality of phrasing and only very rarely the unusual image. As for the "Letters", they are loose and jotty in form, without distinction either in observation or in form, without real felicity or uniqueness. Art is nothing if it is not the object, or the idea, or experience seen in review, with clarity. In Brooke, I feel the superabundance of joy in the attractiveness of the world, but I do not feel the language of him commensurate or distinguished in the qualities of poetic or literary art. There seems to me to be too much of the blown lock and the wistful glance, too much of the att.i.tudinized poet, lacking, I may even say, in true refinement, often.
A too comfortable poet, and poetry of too much verve without incision, too much "gesturing", which is an easy thing for many talented people, and there is also missing for me the real grip of amazement. You will not find anything in the letters that could not have been done by the cub reporter, save possibly in the more charming of the letters with reference to swimming in the South Seas. Here you feel Brooke at home instantly, and the picturing is natural and easy. But other than this, you will find no phrasing to compare with pa.s.sages of James"s preface, such, for instance, as the "sky-clamour of more dollars", surely a vastly more incisive phrase regarding the frenzies of New York, than all that Brooke essays to tell of it. Brooke is distinctly "not there"
too often in these so irregular letters of his. Letters are notably rare in these times anyhow, and so it is with the letters of Brooke.
We look for distinction, and it is not to be found, they have but little of the intimacy with their subjects that one expects.
As to his poetry, it seems to be a poetry rapidly approaching state approval, there is in it the flavour of the budding laureate, it seems to me to be poetry already "in orders". Brooke was certainly in danger of becoming a good poet, like the several other poets who perished in the throes of heroism. Like them, he would, had he lived, have had to save himself from the evils of prosperity, poetically speaking. He would have had to overcome his tendency toward what I want to call the old-fashioned "gold and velvet" of his words, a very definite haze hanging over them of the ill effect of the eighteen-ninety school, which produced a little excellent poetry and a lot of very tame production. Poetry is like all art, difficult even in its freest interval. Brooke must rest his claim to early distinction perhaps upon the "If I should die" sonnet alone, he would certainly have had to come up considerably, to have held the place his too numerous personal admirers were wont to thrust upon him. Unless one be the veritable genius, sudden laurels wither on the stem with too much of morning.
This poet had no chance to prove what poetry of his would have endured the long day, and most of all he needed to be removed from too much love of everything. The best art cannot endure such promiscuity, not an art of specific individual worth. In the book which is called "Letters from America", the attraction lies in its preface, despite the so noticeable irrelevancy of style. It seems to me that James might for once have condescended to an equal footing with his theme, for the sake of the devoutness of his intention, and have come to us for the moment, the man talking of the youth. He might then have told us something really intimate of "Rupert", as he so frequently names him, for this would indicate some intimacy surely, unless perchance he was "Rupert" to the innumerables whom he met, and who were sure of his intimacy on the instant"s introduction, which would indeed be "condemned to sociability".
This book is in two pieces, preface and content, and we are conscious chiefly of the high style and interest of the preface, first of all, and the discrepancy inherent in the rest of the book accentuating the wide divergence between praiser and praised. It is James with reference to Brooke, it is not Henry James informing of the young and handsome Rupert Brooke. Apollo in the flesh must do some mighty singing. Brooke had not done much of this when they laid him by on the borders of that farther sea. He had more to prove the heritage laid so heavily upon him by the unending host of his admirers and lovers. He needed relief from the popular notion, and we must relieve ourselves from his excessive popularity if we are to enjoy him rightly, by being just with him. A little time, and we should have learned his real distinction. It is too soon for us, and too late for him. We must accept him more for his finer indications then, and less for his achievement in the sense of mastery.
THE DEARTH OF CRITICS
There is just cause for wonder at the noticeable absence of critics in the field of painting, of individuals who are capable of some serious approach to the current tendencies in art. We have witnessed a very general failure to rise above the common or high-cla.s.s reportorial level in this particular sphere. Why do so many people who write specifically about painting say so little that really relates to it?
It is because most of them are journalists or men of letters who have made emotional excursions into this field, which is in most instances foreign to them; well-known literary artists, occasionally, intent upon varying their subject matter.
We read Meier-Graefe, for instance, on the development of modern art, and we find his a.n.a.logies more or less stimulating, but taken as a whole his work is unsatisfactory from an artist"s point of view; not much more than a sort of novel with art for its skeleton, or rather a handbook from which the untutored layman can gather superficial information about group and individual influences, a kind of verbal entertainment that is altogether wanting in true critical values. I have listened to lectures on art by people who were supposed to know about it, merely to see how much this type of critical study could satisfy the really artistic mind somewhat conversant with true relations, and I have found these lectures of but the slightest value, _resumes_ compounded of wearisome and inappropriate detail. There is always an extreme lack of true definition, of true information, there is always too much of the amateur spirit pa.s.sing for popular knowledge among these individuals who might otherwise do so much to form public taste and appreciation. Thus we find that even the chatty Meier-Graefe stops without going any further than Cezanne. It is possible that after writing two very heavy volumes upon the development of modern art, he has to remain silent on modern art itself, that he really feels he is not qualified to speak upon Cezanne and his successors; or does he a.s.sume possibly that there is nothing this side of Cezanne?
How many writer people are there who really do understand what has taken place since then?