Early Writings
Page 25
I am almost a different person when I come to take up the argument for Eliot’s poems.
THE TRADITION
Penitus enim tibi O Phoebe attributa est cantus.1
The tradition is a beauty which we preserve and not a set of fetters to bind us. This tradition did not begin in A.D. 1870, nor in 1776, nor in 1632, nor in 1564. It did not begin even with Chaucer.
The two great lyric traditions which most concern us are that of the Melic2 poets and that of Provence. From the first arose practically all the poetry of the ‘ancient world’, from the second practically all that of the modern. Doubtless there existed before either of these traditions a Babylonian and a Hittite tradition whereof knowledge is for the most part lost. We know that men worshipped Mithra with an arrangement of pure vowel-sounds. We know that men made verses in Egypt and in China, we assume that they made them in Uruk. There is a Japanese metric which I do not yet understand, there is doubtless an agglutinative metric beyond my comprehension.
As it happens, the conditions of English and forces in the English tradition are traceable, for the most part, to the two traditions mentioned. It is not intelligent to ignore the fact that both in Greece and in Provence the poetry attained its highest rhythmic and metrical brilliance at times when the arts of verse and music were most closely knit together, when each thing done by the poet had some definite musical urge or necessity bound up within it. The Romans writing upon tablets did not match the cadences of those earlier makers who had composed to and for the Cythera and the Barbitos.3
As touching the parallel development of the twin arts in the modern world, it may be noted that the canzon of Provence became the canzone of Italy, and that when Dante and his contemporaries began to compose philosophic treatises in verse the son or accompaniment went maying on its own account, and in music became the sonata; and, from the date of the divorce, poetry declined until such time as Baif and the Pléïade4 began to bring Greek and Latin and Italian renaissance fashions into France, and to experiment in music and ‘quantity’.
The Italians of that century had renewed the art, they had written in Latin, and some little even in Greek, and had used the Hellenic meters. DuBellay translated Navgherius into French, and Spenser translated DuBellay’s adaptations into English, and then as in Chaucer’s time and times since then, the English cribbed their technique from over the channel. The Elizabethans ‘made’ to music, and they copied the experiments of Paris. Thus as always one wave of one of these traditions has caught and overflowed an earlier wave receding. The finest troubador had sung at the court of Coeur de Leon. Chaucer had brought in the ‘making’ of France and ended the Anglo-Saxon alliterative fashions. The canzon of Provence which had become the canzone and sonnet, had become Minnesang; it had become the ballade and it became many an ‘Elizabethan’ form. And at that age the next wave from Paris caught it, a wave part ‘Romance’ (in the linguistic sense) and part Latin. But Provence is itself Latin, in a way, for when the quantities of syllables had been lost through the barbarian invasions, rhyme had come in as courtly ornament. The first fragment of Provençal poetry is Latin with a Provençal refrain.
Dr Ker5 has put an end to much babble about folk song by showing us Summer is ycummen in written beneath the Latin words of a very old canon.
II
A return to origins invigorates because it is a return to nature and reason. The man who returns to origins does so because he wishes to behave in the eternally sensible manner. That is to say, naturally, reasonably, intuitively. He does not wish to do the right thing in the wrong place, to ‘hang an ox with trappings’, as Dante puts it. He wishes not pedagogy but harmony, the fitting thing.
This is not the place for an extensive discussion of technical detail. Of the uses and abuses of rhyme I would say nothing, save that it is neither a necessity nor a taboo.
As to quantity, it is foolish to suppose that we are incapable of distinguishing a long vowel from a short one, or that we are mentally debarred from ascertaining how many consonants intervene between one vowel and the next.
As to the tradition of vers libre: Jannaris6 in his study of the Melic poets comes to the conclusion that they composed to the feel of the thing, to the cadence, as have all good poets since. He is not inclined to believe that they were much influenced by discussions held in Alexandria some centuries after their deaths.
If the earnest upholder of conventional imbecility will turn at random to the works of Euripides, or in particular to such passages as Hippolytus 1268 et Seq., or to Alkestis 266 et seq., or idem 455 et seq., or to Phoenissae 1030 et circa, or to almost any notable Greek chorus, it is vaguely possible that the light of vers libre might spread some faint aurora upon his cerebral tissues.
No one is so foolish as to suppose that a musician using ‘four-four’ time is compelled to use always four quarter notes in each bar, or in ‘seven-eighths’ time to use seven eighth notes uniformly in each bar. He may use one ½, one ¼ and one ⅛ rest, or any such combination as he may happen to choose or find fitting.
To apply this musical truism to verse is to employ vers libre.
To say that such and such combinations of sound and tempo are not proper, is as foolish as to say that a painter should not use red in the upper left hand corners of his pictures. The movement of poetry is limited only by the nature of syllables and of articulate sound, and by the laws of music, or melodic rhythm. Space forbids a complete treatise on melody at this point, and forbids equally a complete treatise on all the sorts of verse, alliterative, syllabic, accentual, and quantitative. And such treatises as the latter are for the most part useless, as no man can learn much of these things save by first-hand untrammeled, unprejudiced examination of the finest examples of all these sorts of verse, of the finest strophes and of the finest rhyme-schemes, and by a profound study of the art and history of music.
Neither is surface imitation of much avail, for imitation is, indeed, of use only in so far as it connotes a closer observation, or an attempt closely to study certain forces through their effects.
MR. HUEFFER AND THE PROSE TRADITION IN VERSE
In a country in love with amateurs, in a country where the incompetent have such beautiful manners, and personalities so fragile and charming, that one cannot bear to injure their feelings by the introduction of competent criticism, it is well that one man should have a vision of perfection and that he should be sick to the death and disconsolate because he cannot attain it.
Mr Yeats wrote years ago that the highest poetry is so precious that one should be willing to search many a dull tome to find and gather the fragments. As touching poetry this was, perhaps, no new feeling. Yet where nearly everyone else is still dominated by an eighteenth-century verbalism, Mr Huefferag has had this instinct for prose. It is he who has insisted, in the face of a still Victorian press, upon the importance of good writing as opposed to the opalescent word, the rhetorical tradition. Stendhal had said, and Flaubert, de Maupassant and Turgenev had proved, that ‘prose was the higher art’—at least their prose.
Of course it is impossible to talk about perfection without getting yourself very much disliked. It is even more difficult in a capital where everybody’s Aunt Lucy or Uncle George has written something or other, and where the victory of any standard save that of mediocrity would at once banish so many nice people from the temple of immortality. So it comes about that Mr Hueffer is the best critic in England, one might say the only critic of any importance. What he says to-day the press, the reviewers, who hate him and who disparage his books, will say in about nine years’ time, or possibly sooner. Shelley, Yeats, Swinburne, with their ‘unacknowledged legislators’, with ‘Nothing affects these people except our conversation’, with ‘The rest live under us’; Rémy de Gourmont, when he says that most men think only husks and shells of the thoughts that have been already lived over by others, have shown their very just appreciation of the system of echoes, of the general vacuity of public opinion. America is like England, America
is very much what England would be with the two hundred most interesting people removed. One’s life is the score of this two hundred with whom one happens to have made friends. I do not see that we need to say the rest live under them, but it is certain that what these people say comes to pass. They live in their mutual credence, and thus they live things over and fashion them before the rest of the world is aware. I dare say it is a Cassandra-like and useless faculty, at least from the world’s point of view. Mr Hueffer has possessed the peculiar faculty of ‘foresight’, or of constructive criticism, in a pre-eminent degree. Real power will run any machine. Mr Hueffer said fifteen years ago that a certain unknown Bonar Law would lead the conservative party. Five years ago he said with equal impartiality that D. H. Lawrence would write notable prose, that Mr de la Mare could write verses, and that Chance would make Conrad popular.
Of course if you think things ten or fifteen or twenty years before anyone else thinks them you will be considered absurd and ridiculous. Mr Allen Upward,1 thinking with great lucidity along very different lines, is still considered absurd. Some professor feels that if certain ideas gain ground he will have to rewrite his lectures, some parson feels that if certain other ideas are accepted he will have to throw up his position. They search for the forecaster’s weak points.
Mr Hueffer is still underestimated for another reason also: namely, that we have not yet learned that prose is as precious and as much to be sought after as verse, even its shreds and patches. So that, if one of the finest chapters in English is hidden in a claptrap novel, we cannot weigh the vision which made it against the weariness or the confusion which dragged down the rest of the work. Yet we would do this readily with a poem. If a novel have a form as distinct as that of a sonnet, and if its workmanship be as fine as that of some Pleiade rondel, we complain of the slightness of the motive. Yet we would not deny praise to the rondel. So it remains for a prose craftsman like Arnold Bennett to speak well of Mr Hueffer’s prose, and for a verse-craftsman like myself to speak well of his verses. And the general public will have little or none of him because he does not put on pontifical robes, because he does not take up the megaphone of some known and accepted pose, and because he makes enemies among the stupid by his rather engaging frankness.
We may as well begin reviewing the Collected Poems with the knowledge that Mr Hueffer is a keen critic and a skilled writer of prose, and we may add that he is not wholly unsuccessful as a composer, and that he has given us, in ‘On Heaven’, the best poem yet written in the ‘twentieth-century fashion’.
I drag in these apparently extraneous matters in order to focus attention on certain phases of significance, which might otherwise escape the hurried reader in a volume where the actual achievement is uneven. Coleridge has spoken of ‘the miracle that might be wrought simply by one man’s feeling a thing more clearly or more poignantly than anyone had felt it before’. The last century showed us a fair example when Swinburne awoke to the fact that poetry was an art, not merely a vehicle for the propagation of doctrine. England and Germany are still showing the effects of his perception. I cannot belittle my belief that Mr Hueffer’s realization that poetry should be written at least as well as prose will have as wide a result. He himself will tell you that it is ‘all Christina Rossetti’, and that ‘it was not Wordsworth’, for Wordsworth was so busied about the ordinary word that he never found time to think about le mot juste.
As for Christina, Mr Hueffer is a better critic than I am, and I would be the last to deny that a certain limpidity and precision are the ultimate qualities of style; yet I cannot accept his opinion. Christina had these qualities, it is true—in places, but they are to be found also in Browning and even in Swinburne at rare moments. Christina very often sets my teeth on edge—and so for that matter does Mr Hueffer. But it is the function of criticism to find what a given work is, rather than what it is not. It is also the faculty of a capital or of high civilization to value a man for some rare ability, to make use of him and not hinder him or itself by asking of him faculties which he does not possess.
Mr Hueffer may have found certain properties of style first, for himself, in Christina, but others have found them elsewhere, notably in Arnaut Daniel and in Guido, and in Dante, where Christina herself would have found them. Still there is no denying that there is less of the ore rotundo2 in Christina’s work than in that of her contemporaries, and that there is also in Hueffer’s writing a clear descent from such passages as:
‘I listened to their honest chat:
said one: ‘To-morrow we shall be
Plod plod along the featureless sands
And coasting miles and miles of sea.’
Said one: ‘Before the turn of tide
We will achieve the eyrie-seat.’
Said one: ‘To-morrow shall be like
To-day, but much more sweet.”
We find the qualities of what some people are calling ‘the modern cadence’ in this strophe, also in ‘A Dirge’, in ‘Up Hill’, in—
‘Somewhere or other there must surely be
The face not seen, the voice not heard.’
and in—
‘Sometimes I said: ‘It is an empty name
I long for; to a name why should I give
The peace of all the days I have to live?’—
Yet gave it all the same.’
Mr Hueffer brings to his work a prose training such as Christina never had, and it is absolutely the devil to try to quote snippets from a man whose poems are gracious impressions, leisurely, low-toned. One would quote ‘The Starling’, but one would have to give the whole three pages of it. And one would like to quote patches out of the curious medley, ‘To All the Dead’—save that the picturesque patches aren’t the whole or the feel of it; or Sussmund’s capricious ‘Address’, a sort of ‘Inferno’ to the ‘Heaven’ which we are printing for the first time in another part of this issue. But that also is too long, so I content myself with the opening of an earlier poem, ‘Finchley Road’.
‘As we come up at Baker Street
Where tubes and trains and ’buses meet
There’s a touch of fog and a touch of sleet;
And we go on up Hampstead way
Toward the closing in of day....
You should be a queen or a duchess rather,
Reigning, instead of a warlike father,
In peaceful times o’er a tiny town,
Where all the roads wind up and down
From your little palace—a small, old place
Where every soul should know your face
And bless your coming.’
I quote again, from a still earlier poem where the quiet of his manner is less marked:
‘Being in Rome I wonder will you go
Up to the hill. But I forget the name ...
Aventine? Pincio? No: I do not know
I was there yesterday and watched. You came.’
(I give the opening only to ‘place’ the second portion of the poem.)
‘Though you’re in Rome you will not go, my You,
Up to that Hill ... but I forget the name.
Aventine? Pincio? No, I never knew ...
I was there yesterday. You never came.
I have that Rome; and you, you have a Me,
You have a Rome, and I, I have my You;
My Rome is not your Rome: my You, not you.
..... For, if man knew woman
I should have plumbed your heart; if woman, man,
Your Me should be true I ... If in your day—
You who have mingled with my soul in dreams,
You who have given my life an aim and purpose,
A heart, an imaged form—if in your dreams
You have imagined unfamiliar cities
And me among them, I shall never stand
Beneath your pillars or your poplar groves, ...
Images, simulacra, towns of dreams
That never march upon each other’s borders,
And brin
g no comfort to each other’s hearts!’
I present this passage, not because it is an example of Mr Hueffer’s no longer reminiscent style, but because, like much that appeared four years ago in ‘Songs from London’, or earlier still in ‘From Inland’, it hangs in my memory. And so little modern work does hang in one’s memory, and these books created so little excitement when they appeared. One took them as a matter of course, and they’re not a matter of course, and still less is the later work a matter of course. Oh well, you all remember the preface to the collected poems with its passage about the Shepherd’s Bush exhibition, for it appeared first as a pair of essays in Poetry, so there is no need for me to speak further of Mr Hueffer’s aims or of his prose, or of his power to render an impression.
There is in his work another phase that depends somewhat upon his knowledge of instrumental music. Dante has defined a poemah as a composition of words set to music, and the intelligent critic will demand that either the composition of words or the music shall possess a certain interest, or that there be some aptitude in their jointure together. It is true that since Dante’s day—and indeed his day and Casella’s3 saw a re-beginning of it—‘music and ‘poetry’ have drifted apart, and we have had a third thing which is called ‘word music’. I mean we have poems which are read or even, in a fashion, intoned, and are ‘musical’ in some sort of complete or inclusive sense that makes it impossible or inadvisable to ‘set them to music’. I mean obviously such poems as the First Chorus of ‘Atalanta’ or many of Mr Yeats’ lyrics. The words have a music of their own, and a second ‘musician’s’ music is an impertinence or an intrusion.