POETRY
REYNARD THE FOX. By John Masefield. Heinemann. 5s. net.
It is an agreeable thing to find a man whose work has been overpraised writing better than he has ever done before. Mr. Masefield's earlier narrative poems were panegyrised for their vices: their unreal plots, their bad psychology, their sentimentality, their jog-trot metres. He; wiser in his generation, appears to have realised that the best parts of them were the "descriptions": details of vivid imagery, pictures of scenes and brief incidents; and that where he was dealing with a person he was at his best when the person was alone and in one self-centred mood. The picture of the widow alone in her cottage was worth all that incredible plot in the Widow in the Bye Street; the public-house scene and the birds following the plough remain in the memory when Saul Kane's spiritual struggles have faded away; Dauber was little more than a means of arriving at that peaceful entry when the ship trod the quiet waters of the harbour like a fawn; and landscapes were the only excuse for The Daffodil Fields. Mr. Masefield (who very likely realises that Biography, a poem that will not die, is the best thing he has done) seems to have discovered his bent. In Reynard the Fox there is only one leading character, the fox, and he is shown in no complicated relationships. It is the description of a chase and of a fight for life, and we could not hope to see it better done. Mr. Masefield's faults of writing are still evident. Lines like
He, too (a year before), had had
A zest for going to the bad
might have come out of one of the numerous parodies which have been perpetrated at his expense; he is unscrupulous in rhyming, he takes pot-shots with words, and he is occasionally grossly sentimental. But none of these faults is bad enough in this poem to get in the way. It is a poem to read again as soon as one has forgotten it, and it will give equal enjoyment every time.
The opening section, which describes the meet, is a little too drawn out; too much time is taken up with describing a multitude of characters, once seen and then forgotten. But no Dutch painter ever gave a better idea of the bustle about an inn than Mr. Masefield does, and the approach of the Hunt is done deliciously. We would spare little of the long description of the hounds who come round the corner in front of the red-coats:
Intent, wise, dipping, trotting, straying,
Smiling at people, shoving, playing,
Nosing to children's faces, waving
Their feathery sterns and all behaving,
and then draw round Tom Dansey on the green in front of the Cock and Pye:
Arrogant, Daffodil, and Queen
Closest, but all in little space.
Some lolled their tongues, some made grimace,
Yawning, or tilting nose in quest,
All stood and looked about with zest,
They were uneasy as they waited.
Byron said the octosyllabic metre is the easiest to write. It is, unvaried, the most monotonous to read. Mr. Masefield, who breaks into anapæstic passages when hounds are in full cry, pulls it off all the way. It was not an easy thing to supply enough bite to descriptions of earth, tree, and sky, to invent enough novel incidents, to enable us to follow without fatigue a ten or fourteen miles chase across country. But it has been done, and Mr. Masefield has also succeeded in intensely interesting us in the fox without (as a rule) making him any less an animal. When he finds one earth and then another stopped the reader's feelings are what they are when a hero of romance walks blind along the plank, and it is with an immense relief that, in the end, we find the fox (at the expense of another) escapes. The final description of the rested fox's nocturnal hunt and the hounds going home is admirable fresh painting. Here is the close:
Then the moon came quiet and flooded full
Light and beauty on clouds like wool,
On a feasted fox at rest from hunting,
In the beech-wood grey where the brocks were grunting.
*****
The beech-wood grey rose dim in the night,
With moonlight fallen in pools of light,
The long dead leaves on the ground were rimed,
A clock struck twelve and the church bells chimed.
It is just the end of such a day.
THE SUPERHUMAN ANTAGONISTS. By Sir William Watson. Hodder & Stoughton. 6s. net.
Nobody could accuse Sir William Watson of over-colloquialism, morbid violence, or carelessness. A slight infusion of those vices might do him good. He is determined to be as lofty and orotund as Milton, as grave as Matthew Arnold, as sage as Wordsworth, if he can manage it; and the result is often a cold and carven monument of respectable but uninspired verse akin to the better of the large tombs in Westminster Abbey. On every page of his title-poem (a debate between Ormuzd and Ahriman) we find lines like
Legible haply in that brow benign.
Rashnu and Vayu and great Mithra, sons
With the huge monster's dragon armature,
Out of the pregnant and parturient dust
Large hereditaments of bliss and woe,
sentences, however mighty their mould, which are to modern poetry what Lord Chaplin's speeches are to modern oratory. This much, however, can be said for Sir William, that his brain is always working in spite of his lordly panoply of words outworn, and he who can penetrate his language will arrive at some sort of argument. The shorter poems are also magniloquent, and, like the longer one, barely escape commonplaceness by a certain activity of mind. But the language would not have been poorer had none of them been written.
MORE TRANSLATIONS FROM THE CHINESE. By Arthur Waley. Allen & Unwin. 3s. and 4s. 6d. net.
Mr. Waley's 170 Chinese Poems (Constable) was one of the most memorable books of recent years; and, what is more, was instantly recognised as such. Even those of us (and we can certainly claim to be a majority) who do not know Chinese could tell at sight that they were accurate beyond the wont of translations. They were obviously beautiful poems in the original tongue, and they became beautiful English poems through Mr. Waley, who has handled unrhymed verse as skilfully as anyone alive or dead, with a variety of rhythm and a flow of sound correspondent to sense, which is amazing in translations. The new collection should not be missed by anyone who has the old one; those who have not should get the old one (which contains a historical sketch, and which, on the whole, covers better poems) before this one. In his second collection Mr. Waley still devotes most of his space to Po Chu'i, really a greater poet than Li Po, of whom we have heard so much. The poems from him are again very diverse in subject and mood; and the more we see of him the more his personality attracts us. We may quote two shorter examples. One is The Cranes, which has the terseness, the melancholy, the directness of the best of Verlaine:
The western wind has blown but a few days;
Yet the first leaf already flies from the bough.
On the drying paths I walk in my thin shoes;
In the first cold I have donned my quilted coat.
Through shallow ditches the floods are clearing away;
Through sparse bamboos trickles a slanting light.
In the early dusk, down an alley of green moss,
The garden boy is leading the cranes home.
Po Chu'i's mild humour is seen in The Lazy Man's Song (A.D. 811):
I have got patronage, but am too lazy to use it;
I have got land, but am too lazy to farm it.
My house leaks; I am too lazy to mend it.
My clothes are torn; I am too lazy to darn them.
I have got wine, but I am too lazy to drink;
So it's just the same as if my cellar were empty.
I have got a harp, but am too lazy to play;
So it's just the same as if it had no strings.
My wife tells me there is no more bread in the house;
I want to bake, but am too lazy to grind.
My friends and relatives write me long letters;
I should like to read them, but they're such a bother to open.
I have always been told that Chi Shu-yeh
Passed his whole life in absolute idleness.
But he played the harp and sometimes transmuted metals.
So even he was not so lazy as I.
The finest thing in the book is perhaps Ch'u Yuan's The Great Summons. That is too long to quote; but we cannot resist Mr. Waley's version of a brief lyric by Li Po, Self-Abandonment:
I sat drinking and did not notice the dusk,
Till falling petals filled the folds of my dress.
Drunken I rose and walked to the moonlit stream;
The birds were gone, and men also few.
These translations may be not without their influence on English poetry; and though the Chinese spirit is not ours, the example of their exactitude and economy will not be thrown away.
COLLECTED POEMS OF LORD ALFRED DOUGLAS. Secker. 7s. 6d. net.
In a note Lord Alfred Douglas observes that all great art is founded on morality; and that "good poetry is made up of two things: style and sincerity." These apophthegms are brief and unelaborate but indisputable. Unfortunately he proceeds to say that poetry has never sunk so low as now, and that "there is not a good poet among the lot," which suggests that he does not know where to look for poetry. He is out of touch with the time, and it is unfortunate for him. Again and again as we read his collection we feel that he is the last of the pre-Raphaelites, clothing genuine feelings in a faded vesture, and images and words gone stale. He has improved. His earliest poems might well have been left out; his latest include several sonnets (notably that beginning "I have been profligate of happiness") which have been, and deserve to be, in the anthologies. But the last exactitude of statement he seldom, as yet, has achieved; and his feelings about persons come out much more strongly and convincingly than his feelings about Nature or the eternal. This edition has a portrait.
FORGOTTEN PLACES. By Ian Mackenzie. Chapman & Hall. 3s. 6d. net.
In the last four years many young men have died who would have helped to make our age—as it will in any case be—glorious in song. Brooke and Flecker and Edward Thomas had at least partly expressed themselves; others, such as Wyndham Tennant and Julian Grenfell, had written one or two perfect poems and justified the muse; but there were some, whose talents only their friends knew, who might have ranked with the first of these, and died before they had outgrown their boyhood. Ian Mackenzie was one of these. He was in the H.L.I.; had a breakdown in England (he had outgrown his strength) and died of pneumonia on Armistice night, after hearing that peace had come. He was just twenty.
The present volume (his second) gathers up what was left over from his first, and is prefaced by a memoir by Arthur Waugh, every word of which will be echoed by those who knew Mackenzie, one of the handsomest, sunniest, most candid boys in the world. He was twenty; and as yet too young to hammer into form the large visions of his precocious imagination, and the queer thoughts that engaged his intellect. The reader who knew him will see in every line the promise of a great maturity; the reader who did not know him will probably fail to see more than a tumble of confused thoughts and images obscurely worded in rhythms that are often ungainly. But even he may be arrested here and there by a phrase beyond the common range of eighteen or nineteen. There are several such in Eyes:
Eyes swim out like strange blue fishes
Recovering beauty from the dark.
And several also in the poem which arises out of the childlike reflection:
What a strange marvel is the telephone.
The whole of the second section of Friends is clear and passionate, and there are lines at the beginning in which he makes the comparison of a thinker with a child looking at pebbles in a pool, which are of the last simplicity and completeness. He oscillated between an extreme analytical habit and a profound love for ordinary things. The first mood may be illustrated by his strange poem on Words:
I watch you talking, catching mouthfuls of air,
Which you twist around till you throw them out
In various shapes, such that each is clear.
Patterns of sound: some soft, some you shout;
Some are round and soft or dimpled and thin,
Some writhe and quiver fantastic about,
Some slip through the lips, and turn whispering in,
Till the waves of silence shut them out.
So, if we could not hear any sound,
But could see air moving like waves in a pond,
And the shape of every word had been found
Till they faded away in the air beyond,
And words came twisted in breaths of air,
You could tell each one by a careful stare.
The other is naïvely expressed in his phrase:
There is as much of beauty in one breath
As there could be upon the largest star!
He was immature; but he need not have troubled to cross-examine himself about
These three last years of fraudulent
Subconscious plagiarism,
For there never was a person so unable to be anything but natural.
A CHALLENGE. By Maitland Hardyman, Lt.-Col., D.S.O., M.C. Allen & Unwin. 2s. 6d. net.
Col. Hardyman was a young civilian soldier who believed in peace, was on the committee of the Union of Democratic Control, and died at twenty-three at the head of his regiment. "I have never seen or heard of a man," says Mr. N. H. Romanes, in his introduction, "to whom not merely a lie, even a harmless one, but any kind of misrepresentation, was so abhorrent." He wrote his own epitaph thus: "He died as he lived, fighting for abstract principles in a cause which he did not believe in." The verse of the man described here cannot but be interesting. But it would be an affectation to call it poetry. Genuine feeling often comes through, but in an amateur way. The nearest thing to good poetry in the book is Via Crucis, which begins:
Lord Jesus of the trenches,
Calm, 'midst the bursting shell,
We met with Thee in Flanders,
We walked with Thee in hell;
O'er Duty's blood-soaked tillage
We strewed our glorious youth;
Yes, we indeed have known Thee,
For us the Cross is Truth.
POEMS OF THE DAWN AND THE NIGHT. By Henry Mond. Chapman & Hall. 3s. 6d. net.
"Youth's a stuff will not endure," and in a year or two Mr. Mond will probably not be talking of storming the battlements of Heaven, and will not care to begin a poem with
An aged filthy hag, with bloated face,
Upon her haunches, wrapped in bloody rags,
There squats Bellona—splashed with entrails—
—words which do not really horrify us, and did not really horrify him. He shows certain gifts. There is observation at the end of The Silver Corpse, and in parts of The Fawn. But he strains after effects and misses them. Honest vision and honest feeling may be later discoveries. He would do well, for a time, to subject himself to a strict discipline formally.
NAPOLEON. By Herbert Trench. Oxford University Press. 2s. 6d. net.
This is a cheap reprint of Mr. Trench's play, previously published at 10s. 6d. net, and recently acted by the Stage Society. With the exception of The Requiem of the Archangels and one or two other poems it is certainly the finest thing he has done. Unfortunately the finest things in it are probably those which are least suitable to the theatre.
ATHENIAN DAYS. By F. Noël Byron. Elkin Mathews. 2s. 6d. and 1s. 6d. net.
Mr. Byron seems to have read the classics, and is obviously fond of Greece. The unfortunate moon has been compared to many things; this time it is a beckoning courtesan. There are few notable blemishes about Mr. Byron's poems; but he never ends them properly, and it is seldom clear why he begins them.
ANY SOLDIER TO HIS SON. By George Willis. Allen & Unwin. 1s. net.
A volume of lively verses, some of them in the military vernacular. The speaker in the title poem, after long service in the trenches, sums up his feats thus:
I never kissed a French girl and I never killed a Hun,
I never missed an issue of tobacco, pay, or rum,
I never made a friend and yet I never lacked a chum;
I never borrowed money, and I never lent—but once.
Not a bad record. The conventional poems at the end are competently written; "Bed" has something of the neatness, and something of the allusiveness, of Prior.
THE STATION PLATFORM AND OTHER POEMS. By Margaret Mackenzie. Sands, 2s. 6d. net.
"These Verses are not all sad—indeed, I hope that in a very real sense none of them are that." They are poems of sorrow and consolation, decently worded and written with a sincerity and simplicity that is sometimes moving. The author has a habit of being too simple. It takes some time to recover from a beginning like "I think maybe the souls of men are bulbs."
ECHOES FROM THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY. By J. G. Legge. Constable. 2s. 6d. net.
Mr. Legge has long been known as one of the most competent and comprehensive of the many who in our time have tried their hands on the Epigrams of the Greek Anthology. This selection is based on that given in Mr. Mackail's excellent little book. Mr. Legge says that many of his versions were made on the top of a municipal tram. He must be a self-possessed man. He never touches the level of inspiration reached in Lang's or in Shelley's few translations from the Anthology, but no translator, so far as we know, has done so many so well. He is always smooth, neat, perspicuous; his principal lack is music. He gives what is perhaps the best extant version of the epitaph on the dead of Thermopylæ.