Complete Poetical Works of a E Housman

by A E Housman

  Two walking baths, two weeping motions,

  Portable and compendious oceans,

  was not a poetic pleasure; and poetry, as a label for this particular commodity, is not appropriate.

  Appropriateness is even more carefully to be considered when the thing which we so much admire that we wish to give it the noblest name we can lay our tongue to is a new thing. We should beware of treating the word poetry as chemists have treated the word salt. Salt is a crystalline substance recognised by its taste; its name is as old as the English language and is the possession of the English people, who know what it means: it is not the private possession of a science less than three hundred years old, which, being in want of a term to embody a new conception, ‘an acid having the whole or part of its hydrogen replaced by a metal,’ has lazily helped itself to the old and unsuitable word salt, instead of excogitating a new and therefore to that extent an apt one. The right model for imitation is that chemist who, when he encountered, or thought he had encountered, a hitherto nameless form of matter, did not purloin for it the name of something else, but invented out of his own head a name which should be proper to it, and enriched the vocabulary of modern man with the useful word gas. If we apply the word poetry to an object which does not resemble, either in form or content, anything which has heretofore been so called, not only are we maltreating and corrupting language, but we may be guilty of disrespect and blasphemy. Poetry may be too mean a name for the object in question: the object, being certainly something different, may possibly be something superior. When the Lord rained bread from heaven so that man did eat angels’ food, and the children of Israel saw upon the face of the wilderness a small round thing, as small as the hoar frost on the ground, they did not call it quails: they rose to the occasion and said to one another ‘it is manna.’

  There is also such a thing as sham poetry, a counterfeit deliberately manufactured and offered as a substitute. In English the great historical example is certain verse produced abundantly and applauded by high and low in what for literary purposes is loosely called the eighteenth century: not a hundred years accidentally begun and ended by chronology, but a longer period which is a unity and reality; the period lying between Samson Agonistes in 1671 and the Lyrical Ballads in 1798, and including as an integral part and indeed as its most potent influence the mature work of Dryden.

  Matthew Arnold more than fifty years ago, in speaking of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s low estimate of the poetry of the eighteenth century, issued the warning ‘there are many signs to show that the eighteenth century and its judgments are coming into favour again.’ I remember thinking to myself that surely this could never be; but there you see what it is to be a literary critic. There has now for a good many years been a strong disposition to revise the verdict pronounced by the nineteenth century on the poetry of the eighteenth and to represent that its disparaging judgment was no more than an expression of distaste for a sort of poetry unlike its own. That is a misconception. It set a low value on the poetry of the eighteenth century, not because it differed in kind from its own, but because, even at its best, it differed in quality, as its own best poetry did not differ, from the poetry of all those ages, whether modern or ancient, English or foreign, which are acknowledged as the great ages of poetry. Tried by that standard the poetry of the eighteenth century, even when not vicious, even when sound and good, fell short.

  The literature of the eighteenth century in England is an admirable and most enjoyable thing. It has a greater solidity of excellence than any before or after; and although the special task and characteristic achievement of the age was the invention and establishment of a healthy, workmanlike, athletic prose, to supersede the cumbrous and decorated and self-admiring prose of a Milton or a Jeremy Taylor, and to become a trustworthy implement for accurate thinking and the serious pursuit of truth, yet in verse also it created masterpieces, and perhaps no English poem of greater than lyric length, not even The Nonne’s Priest’s Tale or The Ancient Mariner, is quite so perfect as The Rape of the Lock. But the human faculty which dominated the eighteenth century and informed its literature was the intelligence, and that involved, as Arnold says, ‘some repressing and silencing of poetry’, ‘some touch of frost to the imaginative life of the soul.’ Man had ceased to live from the depths of his nature; he occupied himself for choice with thoughts which do not range beyond the sphere of the understanding; he lighted the candles and drew down the blind to shut out that patroness of poets, the moon. The writing of poetry proceeded, and much of the poetry written was excellent literature; but excellent literature which is also poetry is not therefore excellent poetry, and the poetry of the eighteenth century was most satisfactory when it did not try to be poetical. Eighteenth-century poetry is in fact a name for two different things, which ought to be kept distinct. There was a good sound workaday article, efficiently discharging a worthy and honourable though not an exalted duty. Satire, controversy and burlesque, to which the eighteenth century was drawn by the character of its genius, and in which its achievement was unrivalled, are forms of art in which high poetry is not at home, and to which, unless introduced with great parsimony and tact, it would be actually injurious and disfiguring. The conclusion of The Dunciad may fairly be called sublime; but such a tone was wisely reserved for the conclusion. The modicum of the poetical element which satire can easily accommodate is rather what we find in lines like these:

  Riches, like insects, when conceal’d they lie,

  Wait but for wings, and in their season fly.

  Who sees pale Mammon pine amidst his store

  Sees but a backward steward for the poor:

  This year a reservoir, to keep and spare;

  The next, a fountain, spouting through his heir,

  In lavish streams to quench a country’s thirst,

  And men and dogs shall drink him till they burst.

  And what sterling stuff they are! But such writing, which was their true glory and should have been their proper pride, did not content its writers. They felt that this, after all, did not rank as equal with the poetry of other ages, not fulfil the conception of poetry which was obscurely present in their minds; and they aspired to something which should be less pedestrian. It was as though the ostrich should attempt to fly. The ostrich on her own element is the swiftest of created things; she scorneth the horse and his rider; and although we are also told that God hath deprived her of wisdom, neither hath he imparted to her understanding, he has at any rate given her sense enough to know that she is not a lark or an eagle. To poets of the eighteenth century high and impassioned poetry did not come spontaneously, because the feelings which foster its birth were not then abundant and urgent in the inner man; but they girt up their loins and essayed a lofty strain at the bidding of ambition. The way to write real poetry, they thought, must be to write something as little like prose as possible; they devised for the purpose what was called a ‘correct and splendid diction,’ which consisted in always using the wrong word instead of the right, and plastered it as ornament, with no thought of propriety, on whatever they desired to dignify. It commanded notice and was not easy to mistake; so the public mind soon connected it with the notion of poetry and came in course of time to regard it as alone poetical.2

  2 It is now customary to say that the nineteenth century had a similar lingo of its own. A lingo it had, or came to have, and in the seventies and eighties the minor poets and poetasters were all using the same supposedly poetic diction. It was imitative and sapless, but not preposterous; its leading characteristic was a stale and faded prettiness.

  As one that for a weary space has lain

  Lull’d by the song of Circe and her wine

  In gardens near the pale of Proserpine,

  Where that Æean isle forgets the main,

  And only the low lutes of love complain,

  And only shadows of wan lovers pine —

  As such an one were glad to know the brine

  Salt on his lips, an
d the large air again...

  The atmosphere of the eighteenth century made much better poets write much worse.

  Lo! where the rosy-bosom’d Hours,

  Fair Venus’ train, appear,

  Disclose the long-expecting flowers

  And wake the purple year!

  The Attic warbler pours her throat

  and so forth.

  It was in truth at once pompous and poverty-stricken. It had a very limited, because supposedly choice, vocabulary, and was consequently unequal to the multitude and refinement of its duties. It could not describe natural objects with sensitive fidelity to nature; it could not express human feelings with a variety and delicacy answering to their own. A thick, stiff, unaccommodating medium was interposed between the writer and his work. And this deadening of language had a consequence beyond its own sphere: its effect worked inward, and deadened perception. That which could no longer be described was no longer noticed.

  The features and formation of the style can be studied under a cruel light in Dryden’s translations from Chaucer. The Knight’s Tale of Palamon and Arcite is not one of Chaucer’s most characteristic and successful poems: he is not perfectly at home, as in the Prologue and the Tale of Chauntecleer and Pertelote, and his movement is a trifle languid. Dryden’s translation shows Dryden in the maturity of his power and accomplishment, and much of it can be honestly and soberly admired. Nor was he insensible to all the peculiar excellence of Chaucer: he had the wit to keep unchanged such lines as ‘Up rose the sun and up rose Emily’ or ‘The slayer of himself yet saw I there;’ he understood that neither he nor anyone else could better them. But much too often in a like case he would try to improve, because he thought that he could. He believed, as he says himself, that he was ‘turning some of The Canterbury Tales into our language, as it is now refined:’ ‘the words’ he says again ‘are given up as a post not to be defended in our poet, because he wanted the modern art of fortifying;’ ‘in some places’ he tells us ‘I have added somewhat of my own where I thought my author was deficient, and had not given his thoughts their true lustre, for want of words in the beginning of our language.’

  Let us look at the consequences. Chaucer’s vivid and memorable line

  The smiler with the knife under the cloke

  becomes these three:

  Next stood Hypocrisy, with holy leer,

  Soft smiling and demurely looking down,

  But hid the dagger underneath the gown.

  Again:

  Alas, quod he, that day that I was bore.

  So Chaucer, for want of words in the beginning of our language. Dryden comes to his assistance and gives his thoughts their true lustre thus:

  Cursed be the day when first I did appear;

  Let it be blotted from the calendar,

  Lest it pollute the month and poison all the year.

  Or yet again:

  The queen anon for very womanhead

  Gan for to weep, and so did Emily,

  And all the ladies in the company.

  If Homer or Dante had the same thing to say, would he wish to say it otherwise? But to Dryden Chaucer wanted the modern art of fortifying, which he thus applies:

  He said; dumb sorrow seized the standers-by.

  The queen, above the rest, by nature good

  (The pattern formed of perfect womanhood)

  For tender pity wept: when she began

  Through the bright quire the infectious virtue ran.

  All dropped their tears, even the contended maid.

  Had there not fallen upon England the curse out of Isaiah, ‘make the heart of this people fat, and make their ears heavy, and shut their eyes’? That there should ever have existed an obtuseness which could mistake this impure verbiage for a correct and splendid diction is a dreadful thought. More dreadful is the experience of seeing it poured profusely, continually, and with evident exultation, from the pen of a great and deservedly illustrious author. But most dreadful of all is the reflexion that he was himself its principal origin. The correctness of calling Emily ‘the contended maid’ is his correctness, and the splendour of ‘through the bright quire the infectious virtue ran’ is his own infectious vice. His disciple Pope admired this line so much that he put it twice into his Iliad.

  Through all her train the soft infection ran.

  The infectious softness through the heroes ran.

  This same Dryden, when his self-corrupted taste and the false guidance of ambition would let him, could write in verse even better than he wrote in prose, dipping his bucket in the same well of pure, wholesome, racy English. What a joy it is to whistle correctness and splendour down the wind, and hear him speak out straight in the vernacular.

  Till frowning skies began to change their cheer,

  And time turned up the wrong side of the year.

  Bare benting times and moulting months may come,

  When lagging late they cannot reach their home.

  Your benefices twinkled from afar;

  They found the new Messiah by the star.

  And not only in his domestic sphere of satire and controversy but in this very book of Fables, where he is venturing abroad. To his translation of The Flower and the Leaf he prefixed these nineteen lines of his own.

  Now, turning from the wintry signs, the Sun

  His course exalted through the Ram had run,

  And whirling up the skies his chariot drove

  Through Taurus and the lightsome realms of Love,

  Where Venus from her orb descends in showers

  To glad the ground and paint the fields with flowers:

  When first the tender blades of grass appear,

  And buds that yet the blast of Eurus fear

  Stand at the door of life and doubt to clothe the year,

  Till gentle heat and soft repeated rains

  Make the green blood to dance within their veins.

  Then at their call emboldened out they come

  And swell the gems and burst the narrow room,

  Broader and broader yet their blooms display,

  Salute the welcome sun and entertain the day.

  Then from their breathing souls the sweets repair

  To scent the skies and purge the unwholesome air:

  Joy spreads the heart, and with a general song

  Spring issues out and leads the jolly months along.

  What exuberant beauty and vigour! and what nature! I believe that I admire that passage more heartily and relish it more keenly than Pope or Johnson or Dryden’s own contemporaries could, because I live outside their dungeon, the dungeon in which Dryden himself had shut them up; because my ears are not contentedly attuned to the choir of captives singing hymns in the prison chapel, but can listen to the wild music that burdens every bough in the free world outside the wall.

  Not that even this passage will quite sustain that comparison. When I am drinking Barolo stravecchio in Turin, I am not disturbed, nor even visited, by the reflexion that there is better wine in Dijon. But yet there is: and there was better poetry, not reckoning Milton’s, even in the perverse and crooked generation preceding Dryden. Thinly scattered on that huge dross-heap, the Caroline Parnassus, there were tiny gems of purer ray; and the most genuine of Dryden’s own poetry is to be found, never more than four lines at once, seldom more than two, in his early, unshapely and wearisome poem the Annus Mirabilis.

  His great successor, whose Iliad was a more dazzling and seductive example of the false manner than any work of Dryden’s own, and became, as Coleridge said, ‘the main source of our pseudo-poetic diction’ — Pope, though he threw open to others the wide gate, did not long keep them company on the broad way, which led them to destruction. He came to recognise, and for the last twenty years of his life he steadily followed, the true bent of his genius, in satire or disputation: into these he put no larger quantity and no rarer quality of poetry than they would assimilate, and he made no more ascents in the balloon. Pope had less of the poetic gift than Dryden;
in common with his contemporaries he drew from a poorer vocabulary; and his versification, though more evenly good, did not reach the buoyant exuberance of Dryden’s at its best. What lifts him nearest to true poetry is sincere inward ardour. Pope had a soul in his body, and aery and fiery particle, when Dryden had nothing but a lump of clay, and he can be nobler than Dryden can. But not even in the Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady does the fire burn clear of smoke, and truth of emotion do itself full justice in naturalness and purity of diction.