Many furrows

by A. G. Gardiner

ON ANTI-CLIMAX

The centenary of the birth of Coventry Patmore has produced many handsome tributes to that once popular, but now little-read poet. When I was a boy The Angel in the House was as familiar as In Memoriam, and Patmore was a more prominent figure in the literary landscape than Browning. He has long lost that eminence, but his haughty genius, like that of Landor, will always command the respectful, if slightly chilly, admiration of certain minds. "I shall dine late," said Landor, "but the rooms will be well-lighted and the company fit, though few."

Patmore, who outlived his earlier reputation, felt the same assurance about himself. And rightly, for though it is probable that the dust will be allowed to gather on the unthumbed Angel in the House, some of his later poems have an energy and nobility that will keep them alive. The Farewell, for example, has the ring of deathlessness in it as assuredly as Drayton's Parting, of which it is reminiscent, or Browning's Last Ride Together. He will not be forgotten, too, for another reason. Fine poet though he was, he could come to grief badly, and the stanza with which he closed his most famous poem will live as an example of anti-climax:

But here their converse had its end;
For, crossing the Cathedral Lawn,
There came an ancient college-friend,
Who, introduced to Mrs. Vaughan,
Lifted his hat and bowed and smiled,
And filled her kind large eyes with joy,
By patting on the cheek her child,
With, "Is he yours, this handsome boy?"

"Who, introduced to Mrs. Vaughan"! Shades of Parnassus! It is easy to see how he came to grief. He had carried his high theme to a close, and wished to end his flight with composed wings and the negligible twitter of the bird at rest. But in the attempt to be simple he stumbled, as much greater poets like Wordsworth have stumbled, on the banal and the commonplace. We suffer from it something of the shock we receive from the historic greeting by Stanley of Livingstone in the depths of the African forest, which is an immortal example of anti-climax. The expedition for the discovery of Livingstone touched the epic note of grand adventure. It held the attention of the world, and the moment of the meeting was charged with the high emotions of a sublime occasion. And when they met (so the record stands), Stanley held out his hand and said, "Dr. Livingstone, I presume." At that artificial word the epic collapses to the dimensions of a suburban reception. It is not easy to imagine what salutation would have fitted the end of so mighty a quest, but if Stanley had said, "Dr. Livingstone, I suppose," or preferably simply the name, the feeling of the occasion would not have been outraged, so slight are the things which separate the sublime from the ridiculous.

A lack of humour as much as of taste is usually the source of the anti-climax, as in the familiar example from the prize poem on the Mayflower:

And so, directed by the hand of God,
They sailed away until they reached Cape Cod.

The impossible transition from the plane of high spiritual ideas to a mere geographical fact was made grotesque by the name which only a very humourless person could have used in such a connection. Similarly, in the hardly less familiar illustration of bathos:

Here comes Dalhousie, the great God of War,
Lieutenant-colonel to the Earl of Mar,

the plunge from the Homeric vein to the Army List could only have been possible to a man who lacked humour even more than the sense of poetry.

That was what was wrong with Alfred Austin, the great master of bathos, who perpetrated more banalities than any poet since Pye. I like best his tribute to the dauntless soldiers:

They did not know what blench meant,
So they stayed in their entrenchment.

Here the grotesqueness of the rhyme emphasises the absurdity of the illustration. It is not staying in an entrenchment, but leaving an entrenchment that requires courage. Like the much greater Patmore, Austin could collapse into the commonplace in trying to achieve the simple and artless, as when he wrote:

The spring time, O, the spring time,
Who does not know it well—
When the little birds begin to sing
And the buds begin to swell.

Contrast these tinkling syllables with the surge of emotion with which another poet could charge the song of the birds and the bloom of the flowers:

Ye flowery banks o' bonnie Doon,
How can ye blume sae fair?
How can ye chant, ye little birds,
And I sae fu' o' care?

I suppose no poet was ever more royally regardless of the smaller niceties of the poet's craft than Burns was, but it would not be easy to find in all his work a case where he comes down with the broken wing of anti-climax.

THE UNKNOWN WARRIOR[[1]]

[[1]] Written on the day of the interment of the Unknown Warrior in Westminster Abbey.

We shall not know his name. It will never be known, and we should not seek to know it. For in that nameless figure that is borne over land and sea to mingle its dust with the most sacred dust of England, we salute the invisible hosts of the fallen. We do not ask his name or whence he comes. His name is legion and he comes from a hundred fields, stricken with a million deaths.

Gaily or sadly, he went out to battle. We see him, as in a vision, streaming in by a thousand roads, down from the Hebrides and the glens of the North, from the mines of Durham and the shipyards of the Clyde and Tyne and the bogs of Ireland, out of the factories of Lancashire and Yorkshire, up from the pastures of East Anglia and the moors of Devon, over the seas from distant lands, whither he had gone to live his life and whence he returns at the call of a duty that transcends life. In his speech we hear the echoes of a hundred countrysides, from the strong burr of Aberdeen to the lilt of Dorset and the broad-vowelled speech of Devon; but whatever the accent it mingles in that song about Tipperary which, by the strangest of ironies, lives in the mind with the sound of the tramp of millions to battle.

He takes a thousand shapes in our minds. We see him leaving the thatched cottage in some remote village, his widowed mother standing at the doorway and shading her eyes to catch the last glimpse of him as he turns into the high-road that shuts him from her sight; we see him throwing aside his books and bounding out of school or college with the light of adventure in his eye; we see him closing his little shop, laying aside his pen, putting down mallet and chisel, hammer and axe. We see him taking a million pitiful farewells, his young wife hanging about his neck in an agony of grief, his little children weeping for they know not what, with that dread foreboding that is the affliction of childhood, the old people standing by with a sorrow that has passed beyond the relief of tears. Here he is the lover and there the son and there the husband and there the brother, but everywhere he is the sacrifice. While others remain behind, perhaps to win ignoble riches and rewards, he goes out to live in mud and filth and die a lonely and horrible death far from his home and all that he loved.

And he is chosen, not because he is the tainted wether of the flock, meetest for sacrifice, but because he is the pride of the flock. In him we see the youth of England, all that is bravest and best and richest in promise, brains that could have won the priceless victories of peace, sinews that could have borne the burden of labour, singers and poets and statesmen in the green leaf, the Rupert Brookes, the Raymond Asquiths, the Gladstones, the Keelings, the finest flower of every household, all offered as a sacrifice on the insane and monstrous altar of war.

And with the mind's eye we follow him as he is swallowed up in the furnace. We see him falling on that desperate day at Suvla Bay, perishing in the deserts of Mesopotamia, struck down in the snowstorm on Vimy Ridge, dying on the hundred battlefields of the Somme, disappearing in the sea of mud churned up at Passchendaele, falling like autumn leaves in the deadly salient of Ypres, stricken in those unforgettable days of March, when the Fifth Army broke before the German onset. His bones lie scattered over a thousand alien fields from the Euphrates to the Scheldt and lie on the floor of every wandering sea. From the Somme to Zeebrugge his cemeteries litter the landscape, and in those graves lie the youth of England and the hearts of those who mourn.

Now one comes back, the symbol of all who have died and who will never return. He comes, unknown and unnamed, to take his place among the illustrious dead. And it is no extravagant fancy to conceive the spirits of that great company, the Chathams and Drydens and Johnsons, poets, statesmen and warriors, receiving him into their midst in the solemn Abbey as something greater and more significant than they. For in him they will see the emblem of the mightiest tribute ever laid on the nation's altar. In him we do reverence to that generation of Britain's young menhood that perished in the world's madness and sleeps for ever in foreign lands.

None of us will look on that moving scene without emotion. But something more will be required of us than a spasm of easy, tearful emotion that exhausts itself in being felt. What have we, the living, to say to the dead who pass by in shadowy hosts? They died for no mean thing. They died that the world might be a better and a cleaner place for those who lived and for those who come after. As that unknown soldier is borne down Whitehall he will issue a silent challenge to the living world to say whether it was worthy of his sacrifice. And if we are honest with ourselves we shall not find the answer easy.