The roving critic

From the inquisitive elder Disraeli, Petit the Poet learned that Lope de Vega was a poet from his cradle, and he learned it bitterly, for he was sixteen, and his poetic April lingered. There was great solace in Keats, who had begun to be a poet at an age which gave Petit still two years to falter in. But what of these cradle rhymes of the Spaniard? What of the numerous lispings of Pope to nurse and bottle? What of the spines of satire Bryant put out at three-and-ten, or the Blossomes Cowley bore midway his second decade? And Chatterton!

Never mind Pascal and his conic sections, precocious Pliny, or the well-stuffed Hermogenes—monsters, not poets! But to see the years slip by while his own virtues lay still under a cloud of youth was a trial which set Petit brooding full of anger, over the hours he had wasted in play before he had grown conscious of an imperative function. No honourable poet could weigh pleasure against the duty to be great. For all her tricky record, Fortune had never behaved so ill, Petit felt, as when she cheated him of his destiny by fifteen years’ stark ignorance of it. There was some comfort in the excuse which he made to himself, that these more forward poets had beaten him in the race toward the Muses merely because they had had an earlier summons. But this comfort faded when he wondered whether they had not beaten him because their summons had been more genuine than his. Nor could he be much heartened by the spectacle of those who had come later into self-knowledge. Wandering in the wilderness palled no less because of the tribes who shared it with him. The dying, Petit felt, might lie down comforted that patriarchs, kings, even the wise and good, were bedfellows; but the hot thrust of those who looked toward birth wanted none of the cool medicine which encourages death. Those who had to be about Father Apollo’s business had little time for beds.

And yet, strenuous as he was for the bright reward, he gave hours to becoming a specialist in the youth of poets. Like a man sick with some lingering disease, he ransacked annals for cases like his own, mad after a sign which would point to an end of his sullen malady of prose. He could tell you at a question when his poets had assumed the toga poetica, from Tennyson, covering his slate with blank verse at six or seven, up through Goldsmith, who scarcely touched pen to verse on the poetical side of thirty, to Cowper, who at fifty, a few cheerful bagatelles aside, had only just begun to be a poet. From this learning of his, more truly a scholar than he knew, Petit took examples, despair, and vindications. When he thought of poets he thought of a thin line marching fierily down through all the ages, endless, quenchless, and himself waiting unsuspected in a prairie village for the tongue of flame which should mark him of their company. When he thought how much he lacked their art and scope, Petit despaired; but whenever despair had a little numbed, he vindicated himself by instancing those who had slept late in the shell.

Thus, year by year, he pushed back the age at which he must come into his powers and fame. By the precedent of Bryant, Petit should have written some new Thanatopsis at seventeen, but he got only heartache from that precedent. With what a thrill, then, he learned that Bryant had made the poem over in riper years. Eighteen was harder for Petit to endure. Poems by Two Brothers, Poe’s Tamerlane, The Blessed Damozel (unanswerable challenge), drove him ashamed and passionate to his rhyming. But once again he found out a defence. If Pope’s Ode on Solitude, written at twelve for lasting honour, was a prank of genius, why not The Blessed Damozel? And who would contend with ghosts? Yet he could not remember this assurance when, that year, he found Chatterton’s bitter, proud will, and thought of the career which had led so straight toward it.

Some years were kinder, or at least Petit’s ignorance saved him, for at nineteen and twenty he kept his courage well enough. But twenty-one threatened him to the very teeth. Drake’s Culprit Fay mocked him; Holmes’s Old Ironsides roared at him; Campbell’s Pleasures of Hope enticed him; Milton’s Nativity ode submerged and cowed him. “No, no,” Petit cried, as he read again these resonant strophes, “I will be a minor poet and never strive with Milton.”

Later, by an odd reversal, Petit consoled himself with proofs that the great poet must come slowly to his heights, and he lived for cheerful months on the surpassing badness of Shelley’s work before Alastor, fruit of twenty-three.

But the years would not cease, nor would they bring Petit’s summons. At twenty-two he thought of Götz von Berlichingen and thrust his boundary back. Twenty-three taunted him with Paracelsus and Endymion and Milton’s wistful On his Being Arrived to the Age of Twenty-three. Petit passed twenty-four sickly conscious of The Defence of Guenevere and Tamburlaine and those cantos of Childe Harold which, already two years out of the pen, made Byron splendid in a night. Keats, by having died glorious at twenty-five, made Petit’s year desolate. To be twenty-six was to remember The Ancient Mariner, Collins’s pure Odes, and the fair, the fragrant, the unforgettable Arcadia. Nor was twenty-seven better: what could Petit’s numbness say to The Strayed Reveller, The Shepheardes’ Calender, and Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect? With twenty-eight, The Lyrical Ballads and Atalanta in Calydon saw his hopes begin a slow decline, which dropped off, the next year, amid contracting ardour, past Johnson’s London, Crabbe’s Village, Clough’s hospitable Bothie, into thirty’s hopeless wilderness. After thirty poets are not made. And Petit was thirty.

Tall Alp after tall Alp behind him, Petit saw before him only a world of foothills. Yet his journey had been passionate. Now the work he had done was dead leaves, his energy all burned grass, his aspirations dust. And dry and bitter in his mouth was the reflection that the summons might have missed his ear while he had watched his fellows. Had zeal overreached him, some hidden jealousy undone him? What grief and rebellion to know himself cause, agent, and penalty of his own ruin! O black decades to come!

Still, Scott found himself at thirty-four.

IN LIEU OF THE LAUREATE

I am so distressed to see that the Poet Laureate has failed to produce an official ode for the British royal wedding that I hardly know whether to rummage through the archives of the Hanoverians for a substitute manufactured for some earlier occasion or to manufacture a new article myself. I think I shall let learning and poetry both serve me with the help of E. K. Broadus’s agreeable new study of “The Laureateship.”

Here, for instance, is a part of what the elegant Henry James Pye, George III’s laureate, wrote when the Princess Charlotta Matilda of England married Prince Frederick William of Stuttgart:

Or if this seems a shade heroic and a little old-fashioned, here are certain lines of Tennyson on the marriage of Princess Beatrice to Prince Henry of Battenberg:

And yet that seems to me to have a touch of insinuation about the fun of getting away from the royal mother which I should be the last to intend—though Tennyson cannot have meant it. Let me turn instead to Thomas Warton and his admirable compliments to a king with the same name as that of the present husband of England’s queen:

and that happier blessing was of course the bride.

I find myself coming back to the bride, as one does when mortals are married. Here suddenly the homely muse of one of our republican poets overtakes me:

“MURDERING BEAUTY”

At the Butirki prison in Moscow, say certain Frenchmen who were formerly there as involuntary guests of the Bolsheviki, there was a beautiful Lettish girl, at about the remorseless age of fifteen, who acted as official executioner, shooting her victims expertly in the back when they had been chosen by lot and led before her. The brawny Jack Ketch of the old tradition had yielded to a mere flapper, “with unerring aim and a lust for blood.”

The French will be French! My mind goes back to some thousands of fine poems and of gallant speeches which have been made by this fine and gallant race upon the theme of “murdering beauty.” What after all is so deadly as a lovely eye? It stabs deep with a glint, slays with a glance, and utterly consumes with a level gaze. There is no armour proof against it. Whenever beauty walks abroad it leaves its path strewn with the wrecks of foolish men who have encountered it. It rises in the morning, like the sun for glory, and kills off a few swains who are outside its casement when first it looks out at the new day. It lisps its dutiful orisons, tastes matutinal nectar, and comes forth to begin its proper business. Walking beside some clear brook it topples one venturer after another into the sympathetic flood. On the smooth enamelled green, where daisies pie the meadow, beauty does its fatal work no less ruthlessly than in secluded arbours or umbrageous grottoes. Then mounted on its favourite courser it takes to the hunt, leaving to others the lighter task of bringing down the boar or catching up with the fox, but itself more deadly among the human quarry who, though hunters, are at last the hunted. Finally twilight, the end of the day, candles, spinet, the dulcimer and the soft recorders, witching sounds and more bewitching silences; but still beauty goes on its conquering course. Not even midnight dims it. When beauty has retired from mortal sight, the lover who had not the luck to come within its range and so be slaughtered, lies disconsolate upon his couch waiting for another day and another chance to dare the killing eyes of beauty.

The French will be French! Even in the dungeon, say the old gallants, they longed for the most murderous gleam of beauty. Better that and annihilation than the long night of safety. Leaning out of his desperate window this or that prisoner, if he beheld some lady walking in the courtyard, would fix his admiration upon her and bend every effort to draw in his direction that killing look. Is there not a story by Kenneth Graham about a headswoman in some courteous region who became so popular that the whole world masculine swarmed to her begging to be slain as a tender personal favour? And did they not swarm so numerously that it embarrassed the land and almost stripped it of its finest heroes because they chose death by the delicate headswoman rather than life at any less exquisite hands whatever?

I do not know whether it was in this fashion that the prisoners of the Bolsheviki behaved, but I suspect that something of the sort might have happened, so true to form does their ancient gallantry seem to have run. It might have happened; it must have happened. For this is not, after all, history we are talking about. It is romance, romance joyfully conscripted in the war against the enemies of the old order and naturally using the old, old tricks.

CHAIRS

Here and there in the rural districts people still talk about professors as holding chairs in this or that subject at some college or university. When they do this they make me remember that the chair was once cousin to the throne. It was an affair of some state. Our remotest ancestors did not sit on chairs; they sat on branches when they had time to sit at all. Our mediate ancestors, having come down to earth, sat on it, or on the floors of the houses they built, or on any odd piece of furniture that came handy. Chairs marked the great who used them, such as kings and senators and bishops. Only our most immediate ancestors, in the last few centuries, ever thought of having enough chairs to go round. Within the memory of plenty of living men quite respectable households, even in the United States, have required children to stand at meals, partly because there were more children than chairs and partly because it did not seem worth while to get more chairs for the relatively unimportant members of the household. Now everybody has chairs—even infants and dolls and dogs and cats; even prisoners in jails; even professors, in fact as well as name. The race has grown sedentary.

What, the moralist inquires, is to be the effect of all this sitting? Not being very moralistic, I answer calmly that the chief effect is to make people fatter than they used to be. The vital and sanitary statistics that are always appearing about the increase of the average age and height of mankind never have a word to say about the increase of average weight. But it is clear that the race is heavier and that chairs have helped to raise the ponderous average. When the race sat on branches the fat men broke the branches, fell, and broke their necks. When the race sat on the floor the fat women grew lean by getting up and down so often. Nor after chairs came in did fatness evolve at once. To have to move one of those primitive settles a few times a day was enough to keep weight down; to sit on their oaken planes and angles was never comfortable enough to make the laziest do it long. Did the Puritan Fathers and Mothers fatten sitting in the straight-backed chairs and pews of their age? No, it remained for the padded and upholstered chair to do the work, for the rocker and the morris chair, for the sprawling chair of the hotel lobby and the trustees’ room.

Consider what happens. The most strenuous man of business, when he sinks into a chair in the hotel thinks dimly—if he is literate enough for that—about “taking mine ease in mine inn” and fattens almost under the very eye. Yet even this is nothing to the process in the trustee’s chair. Something drowsy hangs over it; something soft slumbers in it and infects the sitter. The moment the trustee sits down he feels his spine agreeably melting; he slips deeper in his seat and listens to the committee reports as from a muted distance; he has a sense of power which he realizes it is manners to exercise quietly; he looks with sleepy disapproval upon plans to raise salaries or cut dividends or reinvest funds or elect new trustees; he softens till he is scarcely vertebrate; his bones matter less and less; in time he does not know which is chair and which is he. The fatness of the chair has struck upward to his head. As a certain poet of the primitive has it:

INISHMORE, INISHMAAN, INISHEER

If, as it was reported dimly, the war in Ireland reached the Aran Islands, then there is no spot left untouched in that ancient kingdom and new free state. The story says the forces of the English Crown heard those windy western islets harboured men on the run, and went after them, patrolling the sea with boats and raiding the land. Two civilians are said to have been killed in the mimic battle, three wounded trying to escape, and seven arrested. But only the barest details ever got back to Dublin.

Like enough there were men on the run here and there among the island cottages. There have always been. Didn’t John Synge when he was on the islands hear of a Connaught man who killed his father with a blow of his spade because he was in a passion, and who fled to Inishmaan, where the natives kept him safe from the police for weeks till they could ship him off to America? The impulse to protect the criminal is universal in the Irish west. Chiefly this is because the people, “who are never criminals yet always capable of crime,” feel that a man would not do a wrong unless he were under the influence of an irresponsible passion. But partly, too, it is because “justice” is associated with the English. How much more than in Synge’s day was that the case in the day of this episode when “justice” was trying to level Ireland under its iron feet, and many a fine young man must have had to run to Inishmore or Inishmaan or Inisheer! Even in Synge’s day the most intelligent man on Inishmaan declared that the police had brought crime to Aran. The Congested Districts Board has done something to modernize Killeany, but elsewhere the island population changes very slowly.

A quaint story has come to light about the islands. They were being used, it says, by the Irish Republic as a place of internment for its prisoners, though there is, of course, no jail there. And it seems that when the forces of the Crown crossed Galway Bay from the mainland and offered these prisoners their freedom they rejected it completely, desiring rather to stay where they were than to go free to any other part of the British Isles whatever. I see the seed of legends in this story. Pat Dirane, the old story-teller who made Synge’s day delightful, is dead now; and Michael (really Martin McDonagh) has married and come to America. There will be others, however, to carry on the tradition among a people who still pass from island to island in rude curaghs of a model which has served primitive races since men first went to sea; who still tread the sands and invade the surfs of their islands in pampooties of raw cowskin which are never dry and which are placed in water at night to keep them soft for the next day; who make all the soil they have out of scanty treasures of clay spread out on stones and mixed with sand and seaweed. Old Mourteen on Inishmore told Synge about Diarmid, the strongest man on the earth since Samson, and believed in him. Pat Dirane told tales that were the island versions of Cymbeline and The Merchant of Venice, tales known elsewhere in the words of Boccaccio and of the Gesta Romanorum. Michael’s friend sang “rude and beautiful poetry ... filled with the oldest passions of the world.” How then shall the story die of how men who were put away on Inisheer or Inishmaan or Inishmore found that prison sweeter than freedom and would not go back when the chance was offered them?

SWEETNESS OR LIGHT

Jonathan Swift who invented the phrase “sweetness and light” and Matthew Arnold who made it what it has become are not themselves precisely a congruous pair; but then, neither are the qualities they bracketed. Or at least they occur together in the minds and tempers of none but the utterly elect. Most persons who have either of them have never more than one or at best have only one at a time. Consider, for instance, your perfect optimist: he is a mine, a quarry, a very bee-tree of sweetness, a honey-dripping fellow, a foaming pail of the milk of human kindness. But when now and then the light falls on him from some alien source he shrivels or scurries to a shady nook where the illumination is not so deadly. Or consider your perfect pessimist: he is a vial of light imprisoned, a storage battery charged with the sun, and unless the properest precautions are taken he explodes when sweetness touches him.

But then, however, consider those eclectic citizens who go in for both at once. They usually undertake to be sweet in a light way or to be light in a sweet way. When they are lightly sweet they flit through the sunshine with the prettiest iridescence, stopping at all the prosperous flowers but stopping no longer than a moment and never really exhausting the deepest stores of sugar at the heart of the blossom. When they are sweetly light they sport admirably in the sun in the morning hours while its beams are still young and generous and again toward the evening after mellowness has set in; but they do not often care to venture into the noon at its full splendours. Sweetness, it appears to most of them, is a question of the coat rather than of the constitution; light, it appears to most of them, comes from the air itself rather than from the fire which uses the air merely as its medium. If they had studied the history of sweetness they would realize that it is the fruit of powerful processes working with matter not altogether sweet itself and arriving at the final essence only with patience and strife and victory. If they had observed the methods and effects of light they would understand that though it can heal it can also kill and that though it may throw a radiance around plain things it can quite as truly strip off glamour and halo and luxurious subterfuge.

It is a lamentable arithmetic which has led millions to put sweetness and light together and to make out of the combination something less than either might be by itself. Each has been played off against the other as an excuse. If you follow light too far, says sweetness, you will grow fierce and lose me. If you follow sweetness too far, says light, you will grow soft and forget what I have taught you. Here is the danger. Left to themselves, sweetness and light quarrel a hundred times for once they kiss. Even Socrates and Shakespeare must have had many hours when the war was hot within them. Was Swift, for all his light, ever really sweet? Was Arnold, for all his sweetness, not now and then negligent of the light while he mooned it with his Senancours and Amiels and missed the point of the diamond which Heine actually was?

For my part, while urging no one to refrain from being a Socrates or a Shakespeare if he can, I hint that light was first in the universe and that sweetness, invented since, is its creation. If I cannot have them both I choose light.

Crowning the Bishop