MAGAZINE VERSE
Anthology of Magazine Verse, 1914; selected and published by William S. Braithwaite.
The proper way to review this collection of verse would be, no doubt, to quote some of the best and some of the worst, make a learned and perfectly empty comment upon so-and-so, and say that the book was better or worse than last year’s compilation. But Mr. Braithwaite has sifted and re-sifted the entire crop of poems until there is in his book nothing but the best, such as it is. And the general trend of the volume is scarcely a matter for enthusiasm. A fair conclusion must be that magazine editors were frequently hard pressed for copy. As a faithful and stupidly patriotic American, one should ponder long over certain attempts to found new “American” verse-forms; but it is to be regretted, possibly, that the most enjoyable poems in the collection are written upon foreign or mediaeval topics. As a true aesthete, one ought to reek with admiration for nameless or badly-labelled sonnets that, for some reason, fail to delight. And, as an exponent of politico-poetic modernity, there should be wild raving over the “radical” art of formless form; but this also is shamefully wanting in one’s reaction to this anthology. A number of intelligent humans have been observed in their expectant approach to this collection; they closed the book with neither smiles nor frowns. It is difficult to forget that good poetry will bear re-reading, or prove its worth by clinging to the memory; and it is still more difficult to remember that art has only to be new, rude, or extreme to be called wonderful. Why is this?
John Cowper Powys on Henry James
(Some more jottings from one of Mr. Powys’s lectures.)
Henry James is a revealer of secrets, but never does he entirely draw the veil. He has the most reluctance, the most reverence of all the great novelists. He is always reluctant to draw the last veil. This great, plump-handed moribund figure, waits—afraid. All of his work is a mirror—never a softening or blurring of outlines, but a medium through which one sees the world as he sees it. In reading his works one never forgets the author. All his people speak in his character. All is attuned to his tone from beginning to end.
He uses slang with a curious kind of condescension,—all kinds of slang,—with a tacit implicit apology to the reader. So fine a spirit—he is not at home with slang.
His work divides itself into three periods—best between 1900 and 1903. In reading him approximate 1900 as the climacteric period.
His character delineation is superb. Ralph in The Portrait of a Lady, is the type of those who have difficulty in asserting themselves and are in a peculiar way hurt by contact with the world. Osborne—in the same book—is one of those peculiarly hard, selfish, artistic, super-refined people who turn into ice whatever they touch. He personifies the cruelty of a certain type of egoism—the immorality of laying a dead hand upon life. Poe has that tendency to lay a dead hand upon what he cares for and stop it from changing. Who of us with artistic sensibilities is not afflicted with this immorality? This is the unpardonable sin—more than lust—more than passion—a “necrophilism,” to lay the dead hand of eternal possession upon a young head.
Nothing exists but civilization for H. J. There has been no such writer since Vergil. And for him (H. J.) there is but one civilization—European. He is the cosmopolitan novelist. He describes Paris as no Frenchman does! Not only Paris, but America, Italy, anywhere the reader falls into a delicious passivity to the synthesis of nations. He knows them all and is at home in all. He is the novelist of society. Society—which is the one grand outrage; it is not pain—it is not pity; it is society which is the outrage upon personality, the permanent insult, the punishment to life. As ordinary people we hate it often—as philosophers and artists we are bitter against it, as hermits we are simply on the rack. But it is through their little conventionalities that H. J. discovers people, human beings, in society. He uses these conventionalities to portray his characters. He hears paeans of liberation, hells of pity and sorrow, and distress as people signal to one another across these little conventionalities. He fills the social atmosphere with rumors and whispers of people toward one another.
In describing city and country he is equally great. He does not paint with words, but simply transports you there. Read The Ambassadors for French scenery! Everything is treated sacramentally. He is the Walter Pater of novelists with an Epicurean sense for little things—for little things that happen every day.
There is another element in his work that is psychic and beyond—magnetic and beyond. His people are held together by its vibrations. Read The Two Magics.
H. J. is the apostle to the rich. Money! that accursed thing! He understands its importance. It lends itself in every direction to the tragedy of being. He understands the art of the kind of life in which one can do what one wants. He understands the rich American gentleman in Europe—touches his natural chastity, his goodness, the single-hearted crystalline depths of his purity. Read The Reverberator.
In the Two Hemispheres we find a unique type of woman—a lady from the top of her shining head to the tips of her little feet—exquisite, and yet an adventuress.
This noble, distinguished, massive intelligence is extraordinarily refined and yet has a mania for reality. He risks the verge of vulgarity and never falls into it. He redeems the commonplace.
To appreciate the mise en scène of his books—his descriptions of homes—read The Great Good Place. He has a profound bitterness for stupid people. He understands amorous, vampirish women who destroy a man’s work. Go to H. J. for artist characters—for the baffled atrophied artists who have souls but will never do anything.
Read The Tragic Muse. Note the character of Gabriel Nash, who is Whistler, Oscar, Pater all together and something added—the arch ghost—the moth of the cult of art.
The countenance of H. J. says that he might have been the cruelest and is the tenderest of human beings. To him no one is so poor, so unwanted a spirit but could fill a place that archangels might strive for. James is a Sennacherib of Assyria, a Solomon, a pasha before whom ivory-browed vassals prostrate themselves. He is the Solomon to whom many Queens of Sheba have come and been rejected, the lover of chastity, of purity in the natural state.
He is difficult to read, this grand, massive, unflinching, shrewd old realist, because of his intellect—a distinguished, tender, subtle spirit like a plant. And in the end I sometimes wonder whether H. J. himself in imagination does not stroll beyond the garden gate up the little hill and over to the churchyard, where, under the dank earth he knows that the changing lineaments mold themselves into the sardonic grin of humanity.