WALTER DE LA MARE
Walter De La Mare
Except in the personal sense—and the charm of his gracious personality would surely surround him with friends, whether he wanted them or not—Walter de la Mare is, like Hardy, a lonely figure in modern English poetry—no other poet of our time has a place more notably apart from his contemporaries. You might almost read an allegory of this aloofness into his “Myself”:
“There is a garden grey
With mists of autumntide;
Under the giant boughs,
Stretched green on every side,
“Along the lonely paths,
A little child like me,
With face, with hands like mine,
Plays ever silently....
“And I am there alone:
Forlornly, silently,
Plays in the evening garden
Myself with me.”
only that one knows he is happy enough and not forlorn in his aloneness. You may trace, perhaps, here and there in his verse elusive influences of Coleridge, Herrick, Poe, the songs of Shakespeare, or, now and then, in a certain brave and good use of colloquial language, of T. E. Brown, but such influences are so slight and so naturalized into his own distinctive manner that it is impossible to link him up with the past and say he is descended from any predecessor, as Tennyson was from Keats. More than with any earlier poetry, his verse has affinities with the prose of Charles Lamb—of the Lamb who wrote the tender, wistful “Dream-Children” and the elvishly grotesque, serious-humorous “New Year’s Eve”—who was sensitively wise about witches and night-fears, and could tell daintily or playfully of the little people, fairy or mortal. But the association is intangible; he is more unlike Lamb than he is like him. And when you compare him with poets of his day there is none that resembles him; he is alone in his garden. He has had imitators, but they have failed to imitate him, and left him to his solitude.
It is true, as Spencer has it, that
“sheep herd together, eagles fly alone,”
and he has this in common with the lord of the air, that he has never allied himself with any groups or literary cliques; yet his work is so authentic and so modern, so free of the idiosyncracies of any period, that our self-centered, self-conscious school of “new” poets, habitually intolerant of all who move outside their circle, are constrained to keep a door wide open for him and are glad to have him sitting down with them in their anthologies.
But he did not enter into his own promptly, or without fighting for it. He was born in 1873; and had known nearly twenty years of
“that dry drudgery at the desk’s dead wood”
in a city office, before he shook the dust of such business from his feet and began to win a livelihood as a free-lance journalist. One is apt to speak of journalism as if it were an exact calling, like that of the watchmaker; but “journalism” is a portmanteau word which embraces impartially the uninspired records of the junior reporter and the delightful social essays and sketches of Robert Lynd; the witty gossip of a “Beachcomber,” and the dull but very superior oracles of a J. A. Spender. Not any of these, but reviewing was the branch of this trade to which de la Mare devoted himself, and his reviews in the Saturday Westminster, Bookman, Times Literary Supplement, and elsewhere, clothed so fine a critical faculty in the distinction of style which betrays his hand in all he has written that, his reputation growing accordingly, the reviewer for a time overshadowed the poet; for though he did much of it anonymously his work could be identified by the discerning as easily as can the characteristic, unsigned paintings of a master.
Too often, in such a case, the journalist ends by destroying the author; dulls his imagination, dissipates his moods, replaces his careless raptures with a mechanical efficiency; makes him a capable craftsman, and unmakes him as an artist. But de la Mare seems to have learned how to put his heart into journalism without letting journalism get into his heart; I have seen no review of his that has the mark of the hack upon it; his mind was not “like the dyers hand” subdued to what it worked in. Fleet Street might echo his tread, but his spirit was away on other roads in a world that was beyond the jurisdiction of editors. He was not seeking to set up a home in that wilderness, but was all the while quietly paving a way out of it; and in due season he has left it behind him.
A good deal of what he wrote then bore the pseudonym of “Walter Ramal,” a transparent anagram; and throughout those days he went on contributing poems, stories, prose fantasies to Cornhill, the English Review, and other periodicals. In 1902 he had published “Songs of Childhood,” a first revelation of his exquisite genius for writing quaint nursery rhymes, dainty, homely, faery lyrics and ballads that can fascinate the mind of a child, or of any who has not forgotten his childhood—a genius that flowered to perfection eleven years later in “Peacock Pie.”
“Henry Brocken” (1904) showed another side of his gift. It is a story—you cannot call it a novel—that takes you traveling into a land unknown to the map-makers, that is inhabited by people who have never lived and will never die. You go with Brocken over a wild moor and meet with Wordsworth’s Lucy Gray; you go further to hold converse with Poe’s Annabel Lee, with Keat’s Belle Dame, with Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, with Swift’s Gulliver, with Lady Macbeth, Bottom, Titania, with folk from the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and many another. It is all a riot of fancy and poetry in prose, with an undercurrent of shrewd commentary that adds a critical value to its appeal as a story.
This fresh, individual note is as prevailing in all his prose as in his verse. It is in the prose and verse of his blithe, whimsical tale for children, “The Two Mulla-Mulgars,” and in that eerie, bizarre novel, “The Return”—where, falling asleep by the grave of old Sabathier, Arthur Lawford goes home to find his family do not know him, for, as he slept, the dead man’s spirit had subtly taken possession of him and transformed his whole appearance. And the spiritual adventures through which Lawford has to pass before he can break that grim dominance and be restored to himself are unfolded with a delicate art that never over-stresses the beauty or significance of them.
By common consent, however, de la Mare’s prose masterpiece is “The Midget.” One can think of no other present-day author who might have handled successfully so outre a theme; yet the whole conception is as natural to de la Mare’s peculiar genius as it would be alien to that of any of his contemporaries, and he fashions his story of the little lady, mature and sane in mind and perfect in body, but so small that she could stand in the palm of an average hand, into a novel, a fable, a romance—call it what you will—of rare charm and interest. The midget’s dwarfish, deformed lover, and the more normal characters—Waggett, Percy Maudlin, Mrs. Bowater, Pollie—are drawn realistically and with fleeting touches of humor, and while you can read the book for its story alone, the quiet laughter and pathos of it, as you can read Bunyan’s allegory, it is veined with inner meanings and a profound, sympathetic philosophy of life is implicit in the narrative.
It was two years after his 1906 “Poems” appeared I remember, that Edward Thomas first asked me if I knew much of Walter de la Mare, and, in that soft voice and reticent, hesitating manner of his, went on to speak with an unwonted enthusiasm of the work he was doing. Until then, I had read casually only casual things of de la Mare’s in the magazines, but I knew Thomas’s fine, fastidious taste in such matters, and that he was not given to getting enthusiastic over what was merely good in an ordinary degree, and it was not long before I was qualified to understand and respond to the warmth of his admiration. The “Poems” were, with a few exceptions, more remarkable for what they promised than for what they achieved, but they had not a little of the unique magic that is in his “Songs of Childhood”; and “The Listeners and Other Poems” (1912), and “Motley and Other Poems” (1918) more than fulfilled this promise and brought him, at last such general recognition that in 1920, after a lapse of eighteen years, his poems were gathered into a Collected Edition.
He began late, as poets go, for he was nearly thirty when his first book came out, and about forty before he began to be given his due place among the poets of his generation. He was so slow in arriving because he came without noise, intrinsically unconventional but not fussily shattering the superficial conventions of others, making no sensational approach, not attempting to shock or to startle. I don’t think his verse ever had the instant appeal of a topical interest, except such of it as grew out of the War, and nothing could be more unlike the orthodox war poetry than that strange, poignant lyric of his, “The Fool Rings his Bells”—
“Come, Death, I’d have a word with thee;
And thou, poor Innocency;
And love—a lad with a broken wing;
And Pity, too:
The Fool shall sing to you,
As Fools will sing....”
Its quaintness, sincerity, tenderness and grim fancy are spontaneously in keeping with the lovely or whimsical dreamings, the wizardries and hovering music of his happier songs. He may not have lived in seclusion, unfretted by the hard facts of existence but the world has never been too much with him, so he can still hear the horns of elfland blowing over an earth that remains for him
“a magical garden with rivers and bowers,”
haunted by fays and gnomes, dryads and fawns and the witchery and enchantment that have been in dusky woods, in misty fields, in twilight and midnight places since the beginning of time. Howbeit, even the ghostly atmosphere of “The Listeners” is pierced with a cry that is not of the dead, for in his farthest flights of fantasy he is not out of touch with nature and human nature, and it is a glowing love of these at the heart of his darkling visions and gossamer imaginings that gives them life and will keep them alive.