JOHN DRINKWATER
John Drinkwater
From his essays and some of his poems you gather an idea that John Drinkwater was cradled into poetry by natural inclination but grew to maturity in it by deliberate and assiduous study of his art. He set out with a pretty definite idea of the poet’s mission, which is, he lays it down in one of his essays, “not to express his age, but to express himself”; and though he has largely lived up to that gospel, he has from time to time gone beyond it and, perhaps unwittingly, expressed his age as well. He subscribes to Coleridge’s rather inadequate definition of poetry as “the best words in the best order,” but improves upon it elsewhere by insisting that they shall be pregnant and living words. He has all along taken himself and his function with a certain high seriousness, believing it was for him and his fellow artists to awaken the soul of the world, and conceiving of himself and them as beset on every side by “prejudice, indifference, positive hostility, misrepresentation, a total failure to understand the purposes and the power of art.”
There may be a touch of exaggeration in all this, but it is the lack of some such intense belief in themselves that makes so many of our modern poets trivial and ineffective, and the possession of it that gives a sincerity and meaning to much of Drinkwater’s verse and atones for the austerity and conscientious labor with which he fashions the lofty rhyme after the manner of a builder rather than of a singer. But there is magic in his building, and if he has not often known the rapture of spontaneous singing he has known the quiet, profounder joy of really having something to say and, as Alexander Smith says, the joy, while he shaped it into words, of
“Sitting the silent term of stars to watch
Your own thought passing into beauty, like
An earnest mother watching the first smile
Dawning upon her sleeping infant’s face,
Until she cannot see it for her tears.”
During the twelve years in which he served as clerk in divers Assurance Companies, he was serving also his apprenticeship to the Muses. His first book of verse, published in 1908, when he was twenty-six, contained little of distinction or of promise, and much the same may be said of his second. If he was a born poet he was not born ready-made, and in those books he was still making himself. His third and fourth showed he was succeeding in doing that, and when the best things in those first four were gathered into one volume, in 1914, it was recognized that not merely a new but an authentic poet had arrived. One might have recognized that if this little collection had contained nothing but the four poems, “January Dusk,” “In Lady Street,” “Reckoning,” and “A Prayer,” in which he has finely expressed so much of himself, his own outlook and aspirations:
“Lord, not for light in darkness do we pray,
Not that the veil be lifted from our eyes,
Nor that the slow ascension of our day
Be otherwise.
Not for a clearer vision of the things
Whereof the fashioning shall make us great,
Nor for remission of the perils and stings
Of time and fate....
Grant us the will to fashion as we feel,
Grant us the strength to labour as we know,
Grant us the purpose, ribbed and edged with steel,
To strike the blow.
Knowledge we ask not—knowledge Thou hast lent,
But, Lord, the will—there lies our bitter need,
Give us to build above the deep intent
The deed, the deed.”
He has little of the delicate fantasy, the eerie atmosphere, the gracious humor of Walter de la Mare, and little of the grim, stark realism of Wilfrid Gibson. He cannot write of the squalors of a Birmingham street, with its trams and fried-fish and rag shops without touching it to loveliness in the dreams of the old greengrocer who, among the colors and scents of his apples, marrows, cabbages, mushrooms and gaudy chrysanthemums, sees the sun shining on lanes he had known in Gloucestershire. And when he takes a slight and elusive theme that can only be made to dance to the airiest pipings it dies on his hands and is cold and stiff and formal, an embodied idea, that should have been a thing all music and light or it is nothing. Drinkwater’s genius is more didactic, descriptive, narrative than lyrical. He is heavy and not happy on the wing; he is more at home when he feels the earth under his feet, and walking in the Cotswolds or in the streets of the city it is the visible life and beauty around him, the human joys and griefs, strivings and visions in which he can share that are his surest sources of inspiration.
There is enough dramatic and rhetorical power in several of his poems—in “Eclipse,” “Uncrowned,” “Reckoning,” “A Prayer”—to make it nothing strange that he should turn to the stage. Moreover, he is more prophet than minstrel, more preacher than singer, and though the dogmas he has formulated about art and “we” who are artists, with the claim that the renewal of the world rests with “us,” may seem confident and self-assertive, he is a very modest egoist and, I think, of a sort that must have felt he could express himself with greater freedom and force through the medium of imaginary characters than in his own person. Anyhow, in his early days, he joined in founding the Pilgrim Players who have since developed into the Birmingham Repertory Theater, and he proceeded to write plays to be produced there under his own direction. These were written in blank verse—“Cophetua,” “Rebellion” (not without hints of his practical idealism, for all its romance), the three one-act pieces he published in one volume with the title of “Pawns,” the best of which is that poignantly dramatic sketch “The Storm”—and they gave him the beginnings of a reputation as dramatist, but none of them was particularly successful from a business point of view; and even later “Mary Stuart” was not that. By some irony of circumstance, after devoting his life whole-heartedly to poetry he scored his first big success with a play that was done in prose, and the success of “Abraham Lincoln” was so big and so immediate that it carried him straightway into a full tide of popularity on both sides of the Atlantic.
I doubt whether anybody who read it can have foreseen for “Abraham Lincoln” such a triumphant reception. You might say it is completely artless, or most subtly artistic in design and workmanship with an equal chance of being right. Its structure is so simple, its dialogue cast in such natural, everyday language that you easily may overlook its bold originality of invention, overlook that it ignores theatrical technique and traditions and in the quietest way makes a drastically new departure. It is a chronicle play, but attempts none of the beauty and harmony of poetry that clothes the chronicle plays of Shakespeare in magnificence, nor is it alive with incident as his, nor even knitted up into a continuing story. It is a chronicle play in the barest meaning of the term; the dialogue is pieced out, where possible, with Lincoln’s recorded sayings; each scene presents an event in his career; there are more committee and cabinet meetings than exciting episodes, far more talk than action throughout. Yet because of the essential nobility of Lincoln’s character, his unique personality, his quaintnesses, his brave honesty of thought and intention, this unadorned presentment of the man and his doings becomes curiously impressive, profoundly moving—the more so since it strove to reincarnate what had happened with an exact and naked realism unheightened by the conventional artifice and tricks of the stage. The whole thing gained something undoubtedly by being produced in 1918 when the shadow of the Great War that was upon us gave a topical significance to Lincoln’s heroic struggle with the South, his passion for freedom, his humanitarian but practical attitude toward war in general. His vision and his ideals were at that time those of the better part of our own people; the play largely voiced the minds of the multitudes that crowded to see it, so that in writing “Abraham Lincoln,” despite his artistic faith, Drinkwater was expressing his age no less than himself.
Already he has had imitators; his method looked too easy not to be imitated; but it must be harder than it looks for none of them has succeeded. Perhaps he cannot do it twice himself, for his “Oliver Cromwell,” fashioned on similar lines, does not, in my thinking, reveal so true and convincing a portrait of the man. Nearly ten years earlier Drinkwater had tried his hand on the great Protector in a blank verse poem sympathetically and dramatically conceived but not altogether rising to the height of its subject. Like “Abraham Lincoln,” the later “Oliver Cromwell” is a chronicle play, but he has allowed himself more latitude in this than in that. He has less warrant for some of his incidents; the pathos he introduces into Cromwell’s home life is occasionally just a trifle stagey, and he has sentimentalized Oliver himself, made him less of the sturdy, bluff, uncompromising Roundhead that we know from his letters and speeches and the researches of Carlyle; but it is a vivid, vital piece of portraiture and so often catches the manner and spirit of the original as to leave a final impression of likeness in which its unlikelier aspects are lost. I am told it does not act so well as it reads, but if it does not rival “Lincoln” on the boards one has to remember that it has not the advantage of timeliness that “Lincoln” had.
I have said nothing of John Drinkwater’s excursions into criticism; his studies of Swinburne and Morris, of “The Lyric,” “The Way of Poetry”; for what he has written about poetry and the drama is of small importance in comparison with the poetry and the dramas he has written. As poet and dramatist he has developed slowly, and it is too soon yet to pass judgment on him. Plenty of men spend their lives in trying vainly to live up to a brilliant first book, but he began without fireworks and has grown steadily from the start, and is still young enough not to have done growing.