The Circus, and Other Essays and Fugitive Pieces Part 16

Well, great as are the differences between these poets, the resemblances are striking. It is true that when Swinburne was at the height of his fame, Francis Thompson was running errands and holding horses in the London streets, his genius practically unknown. Yet he was famous before Swinburne's death, and there are other points of contact beside that of time between this militant pagan and this militant Christian.

In the first place, both were poets. Both had genuine talent, and both had a strong desire to do the work of the poet, that is, to find beauty and to bind beauty with a chain of linked rhyme.

Now the poet's search for beauty often is difficult, and it was especially difficult in London in the latter days of the nineteenth century. All the poets were seeking for beauty, but the scientists had been industriously trying to drive beauty out of the world. Of course, they had not succeeded, any more than the French Atheist succeeded a few years ago in carrying out his blasphemous threat of putting out that light in the heavens. But they had thrown a veil over the face of beauty, and made beauty hard to see except for those who looked with the strong eyes of faith.

How the poets worried! Where had beauty flown? Browning thought that beauty was in humanity. So he searched for beauty in humanity, and in his search made many interesting and n.o.ble poems. Tennyson, that magnificent artist in words, thought that beauty was somewhere in evolution. And he at last descended to the most supine of intellectual att.i.tudes, his philosophy being merely that somehow good would be the final goal of all, that everything would come out all right in the end.

And he uttered the most absurd statement ever made by any poet in the history of the world when he said "There lies more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds."

All the poets were seeking after beauty. When Swinburne, full of Greek and Latin and talent and conceit, left Oxford University to begin a military career, he was seeking for beauty. And when Francis Thompson was selling matches and shoestrings in the London gutters, he was seeking for beauty.

Swinburne knew that the life around him was dull and materialistic. The scientists had said that the old ethical and spiritual values were dead.

There could be no beauty in religion, for the scientists had killed religion, putting up in its place their own artificial dogma. Beauty and light had gone out of life.

So Swinburne decided, logically enough, that since beauty was not in his own land and age, he must seek it in the ages that had gone before. So he wrote not of modern scientific, dull, Victorian London, but of ancient Venice, of ancient Rome, of ancient Greece. He lamented the departure of Venus and Apollo and Dionysus and all the old G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses, and the loss of the glories of the s.p.a.cious cla.s.sic days.

But Swinburne failed. Musical as are his rhymes and rhythms, lofty as was his imagination, he failed. He failed to write convincingly of medieval Rome and ancient Venice because he could not understand what made these cities beautiful and great--their faith. He failed to write convincingly of ancient Greece because he could never be that rare and in its way splendid thing, an honest pagan.

No one can be a real pagan nowadays. Swinburne is not to be blamed because he failed to be a real pagan, but because he tried to be a pagan. The ancient Greeks who lived before the time of Christ were brave and simple men, their chief virtues were courage, patriotism, obedience to the law, democracy and zeal for art. These virtues were in time taken over and multiplied by the Catholic Church, which has preserved all of pagan culture that deserved preservation. Swinburne rejected these virtues, probably thinking them to be Christian innovations, and the pagans of whom he wrote were sensual, decadent things, like the degenerate Greeks who lived in the days of Roman supremacy. And Swinburne finally reached his true level in the poem in which he speaks by the mouth of Julian the Apostate, the poor maniac who rejected Christianity and struggled vainly to restore the wors.h.i.+p of the legendary G.o.ds of his heathen ancestors.

Francis Thompson, like Swinburne, sought for beauty. And Francis Thompson found beauty. Francis Thompson found beauty because he knew where to look. He found beauty in prosaic scientific modern London, he found beauty in the city streets. He found beauty right around the corner, in a certain little Church around the corner which is also the big Church around the world. He found beauty where she is and always will be, in the Catholic faith.

Swinburne felt his lack of faith. He bitterly resented the veil that his infidelity had put between himself and beauty. And therefore he attacked faith, and railed with all the venom of a disappointed man against Christ, his Saints and His Church.

Swinburne longed for the days of pagan license and revelry, when Pan and Apollo dwelt with man. Francis Thompson knew that G.o.d was with man, that no street was so humble, no house so poor as not to know the tread of His feet. Instead of longing for a return of the old imaginary G.o.ds, he saw the beauty of G.o.d evident in such harsh thoroughfares as Charing Cross, and brooding even over the muddy waters of the Thames. He wrote:

THE KINGDOM OF G.o.d

The angels keep their ancient places, Turn but a stone and start a wing, 'Tis ye, 'tis your estranged faces That miss the many splendoured thing.

But when so sad thou canst not sadder Cry:--and upon thy so sore loss Shall s.h.i.+ne the traffic of Jacob's ladder Pitched between Heaven and Charing Cross.

Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter, Cry,--clinging Heaven by the hems; And lo, Christ walking on the water Not of Gennesareth but Thames!

A dangerous test of a poet's genius is to be found in his att.i.tude towards the simplest and smallest things. It is for this reason that any poet of talent may safely write about a mountain or a waterfall or a sunset, but only a very great poet should ever write about children.

The poets know this, and in spite of his paganism and sophistication Swinburne often tried to prove his genius by making excursions into the enchanted land of childhood. He wrote one poem which he considered a very important achievement, reprinting it in many editions of his poetry. And in that poem Swinburne did accomplish something well worthy of accomplishment, he expressed an interesting and beautiful idea. Now it would be absurd to take this poem of Swinburne's and compare it with one of Francis Thompson's masterpieces, such as "The Hound of Heaven."

But it surely is fair to compare it to a poem by Francis Thompson on the same theme.

You must consider how it is that a poet writes a poem. There are said to be poets who are struck on the head by a great inspiration, and let that inspiration trickle down through the shoulder and arm and out the end of a pen upon a piece of paper. There are said to be such poets, although in my rather extensive observation of poets I have never met one. The usual method is for a poet to meditate on a subject, to set down on paper all the most beautiful ideas which his subject suggests to him.

Well, let us imagine Swinburne confronted by the miracle of childhood.

Knowing that his reputation must stand or fall by this attempt, he endeavors to record all the splendid emotions and n.o.ble comparisons which childhood suggests to him. And what is the result? What is the climax of thought in his poem? The climax is this: Swinburne says that the baby about whom he is writing, who happens to be wearing a plush cap, looks like a moss rose bud in its soft sheath.

This is a pleasant idea. Undoubtedly it pleased the baby's mother and the baby herself when she grew up. But these are scarcely the words that shall tremble on the lips of time.

Francis Thompson was great enough to do the obvious thing. When he was drawing inspiration from the miracle of childhood, he did not think about plush caps and moss roses. Instead, he did the most natural and the most beautiful thing. He thought about the Infant Jesus. Childhood to him suggested Him Who made childhood Divine. And in "Ex Ore Infantium" he gave that thought immortal expression.

But in comparing the plush cap of the baby to a moss rose, Swinburne did not think he had said the last word on the subject. As the result of prolonged meditation on childhood, he produced another poem in which he really did accomplish something remarkable. He found a rhyme for "babe."

Now, I doubt if any of you know the rhyme for "babe," unless you happen to be familiar with this poem of Swinburne's or with those of Chaucer, who also used this word. There is such a word and Swinburne ingeniously introduces it towards the end of his poem. He writes:

Babe, if rhyme be none For that small sweet word, Babe, the sweetest one Ever heard, Right it is and sweet Rhyme should not keep true Time with such a sweet Thing as you ...

... None can tell in metre Fit for ears on earth What sweet star grew sweeter At your birth.

Wisdom doubts what may be; Hope with smile sublime Trusts, but neither, baby Knows the rhyme.

Wisdom lies down lonely; Hope keeps watch from far; None but one seer only Sees the star.

Love alone, with yearning Heart for astrolabe Takes the star's height, burning O'er the babe.

Compare this, not with Francis Thompson's "Hound of Heaven," but with another poem on childhood, and from that poem decide which of the two poets had the real inspiration. Compare it with Francis Thompson's poem to his G.o.d-child. In this he imagines himself as having died, and he imagines that the little boy has died too. So he gives the little boy a kind of working plan of Heaven--he tells him where he may find him after he goes to Heaven. He writes:

And when, immortal mortal, droops your head, And you, the child of deathless song, are dead; Then, as you search with unaccustomed glance The ranks of Paradise for my countenance, Turn not your tread along the Uranian sod, Among the bearded counsellors of G.o.d; For if in Eden as on earth are we I sure shall keep a younger company: Pa.s.s where beneath their ranged ganfalons The starry cohorts shake their s.h.i.+elded suns, The dreadful ma.s.s of their enridged spears; Pa.s.s where majestical the Eternal peers The stately choice of the great saintdom meet,-- A silvern congregation, globed complete In sandalled shadow of the Triune feet: Pa.s.s by where wait, your poet wayfarer, Your cousin cl.u.s.ters, emulous to share With you the roseal lightnings burning mid their hair; Pa.s.s the crystalline sea, the Lampads Seven:-- Look for me in the nurseries of Heaven.

I have said that Francis Thompson was great and simple enough to do the obvious thing. Take the mere matter of how to act and what to say in regard to a crucifix, for example. When that admirable poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti was before a crucifix, or had it in mind as the theme of a poem, he would admire the carving, and write a colorful romantic ballad about the man who made it, the man who sold it, the people through whose hands it had pa.s.sed. The result would be a beautiful poem, but it would be elaborate, artificial, the result of ingenious effort.

When Swinburne was before a crucifix, he was reminded of the false delights for which he longed, and which he thought Christianity had driven from the world. So he would rave and blaspheme against the crucifix and all that it represented--producing verse that is technically excellent, but artificial and unnatural. But when Francis Thompson had a crucifix before him or in mind, he would do the simplest and most natural thing in the world. He would say his prayers. And because he was a genius he said them in words that are, as we use the term of literature, immortal.

A NOTE ON THOMAS HARDY

Of Elizabeth-Jane who is the heroine of "The Mayor of Casterbridge," if heroine this tale may be said to have, we learn that "she did not cease to wonder at the persistence of the unforeseen, when the one to whom such unbroken tranquillity had been accorded in the adult stage was she whose youth had seemed to teach that happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain." This is a rather Jacobean sentence, in form not typical of Hardy, but in thought it is greatly significant.

It is likely that Hardy himself wondered at the happiness in which he left Elizabeth-Jane, rea.s.suring himself perhaps by the conviction that her "unbroken tranquillity" was the exception which proved the rule her youth had taught her.

For it cannot be denied that according to the Hardy philosophy, implicit in his tales and explicit in his poems, sorrow is the rule and joy the exception. In no other writing is he more clearly a fatalist than in "The Mayor of Casterbridge"; in no other book does he urge more unmistakably his belief that men and women are but helpless puppets in the hands of mischievous fate, that good-will and courage and honesty are brittle weapons for humanity's defense.

The evident fact that Thomas Hardy is a fatalist is responsible for the common and absurd idea that he is a pagan. Now, there is no philosophy--with the exception of the robust and joyous philosophy of the Middle Ages--with which Hardy's philosophy contrasts more strongly than it does with paganism, that is, with the pagan philosophy of the s.p.a.cious cla.s.sic day. When we speak of a pagan of ancient Greece or a pagan of ancient Rome we have in mind a brave patriotic man, with a vivid sense of the responsibilities and privileges of citizens.h.i.+p, and the habit of making the most of life, of enjoying to the full the years allowed him on earth. This last characteristic rose from the pagan fatalism, the belief that man should make sure of such visible and tangible delights as were available, because there was no counting on the possibility of happiness or even of existence after death. This was the state of mind which succeeded the earlier romantic polytheism, and was the natural successor of a religious system which attributed to the G.o.ds power over mankind but neither love nor justice. So the typical fatalism was materialistic; it was based, of course, upon despair, but its manifestations were not desperate. Rather there was a general conspiracy of joy, not dissimilar to that of a popular religious cult which arose in the United States during the last half century. Disease and sorrow and death were to be generally ignored; mankind was expected to eat, drink and be merry, and good manners required silence as to the explanatory "for to-morrow we die."

However hollow may have been mirth of the pagan fatalists, it was at any rate loud and general. And there can be no doubt that by a kind of self-hypnosis these fatalists were able to give their joy a convincingness and a continuity--they "were always drunken," in Baudelaire's sense. Artificial and in essence tragic as was their state of mind, he would be a false historian who pictured these pagan fatalists as people obsessed with the idea of death and the unkindness of the G.o.ds; as holding with anything like unanimity the belief that "happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain."

But this is Hardy's dominant idea; it is a belief on which he insists with a propagandist enthusiasm which sometimes mars the artistic value of his work. No Scotch or English members of some stricter offshoot of a strict Calvinistic sect ever was more firmly convinced that this earth is a vale of tears, or more eager to spread this belief. Every writer, I think, deals with the characters who are his creations as he imagines G.o.d to deal with mankind. This is why literary criticism is closer to theology than to any other science; this is why we cannot claim to understand any writer unless we know what he thinks about G.o.d. And the G.o.d of Hardy's belief, as indicated in his long succession of stories and poems, is no more the remote, indifferent, sensuous, self-sufficient Deity of the pagan fatalist than he is the loving and omnipotent Father of true Christian belief. Instead he is the stern, avenging Deity of the Hebrews, without pity, accessible to no intercessors, the Deity whom we find to-day fearfully wors.h.i.+ped by adherents of the bleakest forms of Puritanism. It would be a misnomer to call Hardy's philosophy a Christian fatalism, but it is a fatalism which is the basis of the religious systems of many who since 1517 have professed and called themselves Christians.

I am frequently impressed, as I read Hardy, with what I may call the evangelical cast of his mind. He is so intent on announcing his discovery that mankind is fallible, unhappy, helpless, undesirable. The people of Hardy's stories are so virtueless, for the most part, that the reader can readily believe that Hardy is determined to show that they deserve no pity from the extraordinary Deity who is also a creature of Hardy's imagination, and that in his own way the novelist (like his greatest Puritan predecessor in literature) is trying to "justify the ways of G.o.d toward man." And "The Mayor of Casterbridge," with its lovely pictures of Wess.e.x hills and valleys and its most unlovely pictures of Wess.e.x men and women, irresistibly recalls lines from a certain popular evangelical hymn--the lines which tell of a place "where every prospect pleases and only man is vile."

Hardy is a true realist in that he reports faithfully the habits and manners of people with whom he is familiar, and in that--unlike Mr.

Dreiser and other claimants to the t.i.tle realist--he has humor and admits it to his chronicles. Also he admits good impulses to the lives he creates, although his philosophy seldom lets him cause these impulses to be translated into successful action. He is poet enough to have a sense of beauty and humor inherent in phrases. "But I know that 'a's a banded teetotaler," says Solomon Longways, "and that if any of his men be ever so little overtook by a drop he's down upon 'em as stern as the Lord upon the jovial Jews." And what living poet could write a simpler and more moving study of the immemorial subject, death, than Mother Cuxsom's brief elegy on Mrs. Henchard? "Well, poor soul, she's helpless to hinder that or anything now. And all her s.h.i.+ning keys will be took from her, and her cupboards opened; and little things a' didn't wish seen, anybody will see; and her wishes and ways will all be as nothing."

A student of literary motives can easily trace the working of Hardy's philosophy in this book--can see it guiding the novelist's pen, changing his purposes, forcing him to deal harshly, sometimes, with characters whom a writer must come to love as a father his children. Was not Matthew Henchard's rehabilitation to be complete, and the tale to end with a prosperous reunited family? Probably, but Thomas Hardy (unlike Victor Hugo when he handled a similar plot in "Les Miserables") had his monster theory to reckon with. So Elizabeth-Jane must be Newson's child, Lucette must maleficently tangle lives, and Henchard must die in a road-side hut. And even the goldfinch must starve in its paper-covered cage.

And how Hardy enjoys the moments when he escapes his obsession! He had as much fun when Henchard and Farfrae wrestled on the top floor of the granary as Blackmore did in the Homeric fisticuffs of "Lorna Doone."

When Hardy dressed up Lucetta and sent her out to plead with Henchard he had the same sporting excitement that Thackeray had when he prepared Becky Sharp for her conquests. At such times Hardy seems momentarily to accept the existence of free will, with its tremendous dramatic possibilities. These are his moments of greatest creative power, of highest poetry, of clearest discernment. They occur more frequently and they last longer in his latest writings. The War has seen to that.

Copyright, 1917, by Boni & Liveright. Reprinted from their Modern Library Edition by special arrangement.

MADISON JULIUS CAWEIN

(1865-1914)

America has had two great poets of nature--two men called to the task of reflecting in a mirror of words the beauty of meadow and forest. One of these was William Cullen Bryant. The other was Madison Julius Cawein.

As Bryant drew his inspiration from the wooded hills and fertile valleys of his native New England, so Madison Cawein drew his from the meadows of the South, especially those of Kentucky. The term "nature poet" has been used in derision of some writers who lavish sentimental adulation upon every bird and flower, who pretend an admiration for things of which they have no real understanding. But Madison Cawein knew what he was writing about; he had an amazing, we might say a perilous, intimacy with nature. And he had no vague love for all nature--he knew too much for that. True, he knew nature in her delicate and in her splendid aspect--he saw the barberry redden in the lanes, he feasted his eyes on "the orange and amber of the marigold, the terra-cottas of the zinnia flowers," he learned lovely secrets from whippoorwill, swallow, and cricket, and he could see drowsy Summer rocking the world to sleep in her kindly arms. But also he knew (with a knowledge which only Algernon Blackwood among contemporary writers has equaled) that nature has her cruel and terrible aspects. He knew that the daily life of bird and beast--yes, and the daily life of flower and tree--is as much a tragedy as a comedy. So (in the sonnet-sequence he wrote by the Ma.s.sachusetts sh.o.r.e in 1911) he saw a certain grove as "a sad room, devoted to the dead"; he felt the relentlessness of the ocean mists invading the sh.o.r.e; he saw an autumn branch staining a pool like a blur of blood; he made us share his genuine terror of deserted mill-streams where "the cardinal-flower, in the sun's broad beam, with sudden scarlet takes you by surprise," and of dark and menacing swamps, ominous with trembling moss, purple-veined pitcher-plants and wild gra.s.s trailing over the bank like the hair of a drowned girl. His studies of nature were accurate enough to satisfy any botanist--Miss Jessie B. Rittenhouse has said that one might explore the Kentucky woods and fields with a volume of Cawein's poems as a handbook and identify many a lowly and exquisite bower first recognized in song. But his poems were not mere catalogues of natural beauties, any more than they were sentimental idealizations of them. They were, to repeat a phrase, reflections of nature, reflections painted rather than photographed, but interpreted rather than romanticized.