POETRY
MANSOUL, OR THE RIDDLE OF THE WORLD. By Charles M. Doughty. Selwyn & Blount. 7s. 6d. net.
We imagine that there is no difference of opinion, amongst those who have read it, about Mr. Doughty's prose book, now a generation old, Wanderings in Arabia Deserta. It was one of the great prose works of the nineteenth century, a book which (the geographers assure us) was astonishingly accurate as a record of exploration, and which repeatedly soared into passages of description and meditation unsurpassed for muscularity and grandeur. Even that book, however, was the work of a man odd in temperament and outlook and possessing peculiar ideas as to the use of the English language. In the volumes of poetry which he has been producing so rapidly in his old age his eccentricities have been projected very much farther. We should not be surprised to hear that he had never read (barring perhaps Shakespeare and Milton) any poet later than Spenser; we are certain that he habitually reads no one later than Spenser, and the poet with whom a comparison most frequently leaps to the mind is someone earlier still, namely, Langland. There are those, a very few, who swallow Mr. Doughty whole, who enjoy his archaisms, real and "pseudo," who think The Dawn in Britain the greatest poetical work of our time, and will hear nothing against even the topical passages of his poem about the German war. There are more who find him frankly unreadable in bulk, but are willing to turn over his pages for the sake of the occasionally lovely passages of description that they find on them; whilst the average intelligent reader would probably run from any page of any of his poetical works, so stony is the way that the disciple must tread and so vigorous the discipline to which he must subject himself.
For ourselves, we read Mr. Doughty through as in duty bound, and we perceive even in his knottiest and even in his naïvest passages the workings of a powerful and original mind, the observations of an eye which looks at history and the material world as though they had never been looked at before, the strivings of a heart that has always been acutely aware of the world behind the seen. Nevertheless, not even this compensates us fully for a cumbrousness of style, a malformation of shape, and a guttural obscurity of speech hard to equal in all the annals of literature; and we are, we fear, to be most sympathetic to that second class of readers who look to Mr. Doughty only for occasional flowers and remember, out of all they have read of his, only stray images, as of a shepherd on a hill or swallows circling over the fresh meadows in the dawn of the world. Mansoul is all of a piece with the others; we almost think that in a few months it will, in our own memories, have amalgamated with the others. It opens in the familiar mode, the "grand manner," but just a little awry:
As chanced I sate on terrace of an house,
In summer season, after sickness past;
And fell, surprised my sense, into deep trance;
Wherein meseemed, much musing in my thought,
I cogitations heard, of many hearts;
That came and went, in Mantown's market-place
Whereon I looked. And in my spirit I asked;
What were indeed right paths of a man's feet;
That lacking light, wont stumble in world's murk.
There can be heard the grave voice, there seen the something like majesty of port, there noticed a little of Mr. Doughty's obscurity and some of his, we daresay even unconscious, fads such as the avoidance of particles and the refusal to use the apostrophe 's. Thus it continues for two hundred pages of contortion and clouds with flashes of sunshine coming through them. At one moment we are wondering why on earth Mr. Doughty should call Tigris and Euphrates "Digla" and "Frat" if he has to translate these terms in a footnote; at another we are giving up an unusually dark passage in despair; at another we are wondering whether perhaps his best things do not actually gain something from the mannerisms that normally make our heads ache. The narrative is very hard to follow. The singer, accompanied by Mansoul and one Minimus, peregrinates through the under world, surveys past civilisations, and converses with (amongst others) Nebo, Zoroaster, Socrates, and St. Stephen. The Kaiser (we conceive) is, in anticipation, interviewed:
One crowned, cast lately down unto this place
a Warmonger and a coxcomb whose "werewolfs face" is now blotted by "a loathly leprosy"; and there is a pagan to the soul of all things at the end, the Muse of Britain and Colin (presumed Spenser) being intermittently in mind throughout. Yet at any time Mr. Doughty is liable to break, without the least awareness of writing a purple patch, into a packed passage full of feeling and sweet to the memory. Take one such:
I stayed, where pleasant grassy holms depart;
Those streaming waters, bordered all along;
With daphne and willow herb, sweep sedge, laughing robin;
With woodbind garlanded and sweet eglantine,
And azure-hewed in creeky shallows still
Forget-me-nots lift our frail thoughts to heaven.
Broods o'er those thymy eyots drowsy hum;
Bourdon of glistering bees, in mails of gold.
Labouring from sweet to sweet, in the long hours
Of sunny heat; they sound their shrill small clarions.
And hurl by booming doors, gross bee-fly kin;
(Broadgirded, diverse hewed, in their long pelts;)
That solitary, whiles there light endureth,
In summer skies, each becking clover-tuft haunt.
We do not think that Mr. Doughty should be ignored by anyone who wishes to be familiar with all the good work done in poetry in our time. But, in recommending him, we warn readers that they should approach him almost as they would approach Piers Plowman itself; Chaucer is distinctly more easy and modern.
IMAGES OF WAR. By Richard Aldington. Allen & Unwin. 3s. 6d. net.
WORMS AND EPITAPHS. By H. W. Garrod. Blackwell. 3s. 6d. net.
The first of these small books seems to have been written on active service, the second on return to Oxford after active service. That Mr. Richard Aldington's verse should have a larger content than before is natural; his pre-war verse, to the non-Imagist eye, consisted largely of sweet nothings starred with Greek names. We have here emotional experiences of a less tenuous kind; the poet is coming nearer a comprehension of Keats' remark that poets should express what all men feel. This in Trench Idyll, Time's Changes, Reverie, and other poems he does; and sometimes he conveys the emotion through the medium of a careful picture, as clear in its way as one of Mr. Kennington's drawings. Here is Picket:
Dusk and deep silence ...
Three soldiers huddled on a bench
Over a red-hot brazier,
And a fourth who stands apart
Watching the cold rainy dawn.
Then the familiar sound of birds—
Clear cock-crow, caw of rooks,
Frail pipe of linnet, the "ting! ting!" of chaffinches,
And over all the lark
Outpiercing even the robin....
Wearily the sentry moves
Muttering the one word: "Peace."
Here there is more of a rhythm than usual. But the defect of Mr. Aldington and his Imagist friends is that, although they are quite right, though not original, in emphasising the need for concrete language, they do for the most part lack that rhythm that makes poetry what it is and rememberable. It is not that they write in free verse. Rhyme is no necessary part of verse, and nobody in the world ever contended that all the lines of a poem should be of standard lengths. But a poem in free verse—it is this which chiefly distinguishes Whitman's good from his bad poems—should have a continuous rhythm other than that of prose, and will have it if it is written by a man who is strongly moved and has the gift of musical expression. Mr. Aldington may have that gift, but if so he represses it.
Mr. Garrod's volume bears a picture of a graveyard: therein the tombstones of Messrs. Lloyd George and Balfour, Lords Haldane, Northcliffe and Birkenhead, and Sir Edward Carson. This looks sweeping, but on reference to his epigrammatic epitaphs, one finds that he admires the Old "Gang" and deplores the New. His verses are neat but slight. The best are those on Rupert Brooke, on the new invaders of Oxford who vainly attempt to emulate the dead, and on Reconstruction:
O soon you'll build the world again
With other and with better men;
And I and plenty more will sit,
And sit, and see you doing it.
In a large West-end hotel
Rich non-combatants will dwell;
Well-paid hands will ply the art
Of binding up the broken heart,
A special sub-department deal
With the wounds that never heal,
Deputy-Controllers pour
Government oil on every sore,
And a civilian Soldier's Friend
Furnish us forms world-without-end
God! does a man like me want tape?
I've wounds, man, here, that gape, that gape.
We note that Lord Derby is described as vir teres atque rotundus.
SELECTED POEMS. By Lady Margaret Sackville. Constable. 6s. net.
VERSES. By Viola Meynell. Secker. 2s. 6d. net.
Mr. Wilfrid Blunt, in a lively introduction to the first of these volumes—in the course of which he suggests, provocatively, that blank verse is merely "a dignified kind of prose, pompous in recitation and for common reading dull"—says that "Lady Margaret Sackville is the best, in my opinion, of our English poetesses, at least of the younger generation." It is a good thing that he added the qualification, for, apart from the fact that Mrs. Woods has written poems better than anything that Lady Margaret has yet done, there is Mrs. Meynell, whose too exiguous volume of verse competes for quality with the best work of her generation. If there are scarcely any more exceptions to make we feel that the deduction is that women are at present doing very little in poetry, though there are vast numbers of them who write it. In the Victorian age when Christina Rossetti and Mrs. Browning, both of whom did immortal work, were writing together there was a general impression that these were the first fruits of women's emancipation and that future ages would see women becoming more and more prominent in poetry. But the wind bloweth where it listeth, and the fact that, at a time when an unusually large number of young men are writing sincerely and strongly, not one young poetess should have won prominence has now led to a general opinion that the peculiar qualities of passion and thought that make poets are, and will always be, more normal in men than in women. Lady Margaret Sackville has a reasonable technical equipment: a fair vocabulary, facility with metre. She never says quite stupid things, she sometimes says pretty things, and at times (as in her war poems) she reveals a certain depth of feeling. But usually she is first and foremost derivative; sometimes from Swinburne direct, more often generally derivative. You feel that she is giving a thin version of something else, even when you cannot say exactly what; and her poems, whether dramatic poems about Dionysus and Pan, or dreams, streams, Springs and things, are just saved from being ordinary verse by the fact that she has a brain and a heart which infuse the bare minimum of reality into them. The only things to be said in her favour is that she is young and that her latest verses are her best.
Something of what we lack in Lady Margaret is present, if intermittently, in the small, charmingly-produced book by Miss Viola Meynell. Her work is uneven, and her handling sometimes awkward, but she has, sometimes, force; she sees vividly, thinks strongly, feels strongly, imagines strongly. The point of view of the whale that swallowed strongly was a remarkable thing to try to adopt, but her poem on this subject, despite a weak ending, contains verses with more bite in them than any in Lady Margaret's book; if she has read Donne she has not read him to her hurt. The Maid in the Rice Fields is charming, and Poppy-seeds sent from the East is more than that:
Travelled here in winter sleep
The young wild Eastern poppies keep
Their eyelids closed. They nothing know
Where is this land they lie in now.
The opening is delightful, and the theme is developed with craft and passion.
DUCKS AND OTHER VERSES. By F. W. Harvey. Sidgwick & Jackson. 3s. net.
Mr. Harvey's first book, A Gloucestershire Lad, appeared when he was in France; his second when he was a prisoner in Germany; this is his third. The sequence has been too rapid to show much development; both his merits and his faults are what they were. He is only occasionally a good workman, and he has not yet succeeded in getting himself naturally and forcibly into his work. This is explicable. He loves his country; he wants to celebrate the old traditional simplicities of a healthy country life and (as propagandist) to restore what we have lost of them; he stands, he says, for Romance, Laughter, and the capacity for innocent Wonder. There is no pretence about this, but when a man feels that he must defend the natural there is comprehensibly an air of awkwardness and self-consciousness about him. The drinking-songs (Mr. Harvey also praises ale) of modern singers are examples: the roysterers always have an eye on the neighbouring teetotaller who they know is watching them and whose opposed philosophy they wish to unseat in the affections of their fellows. Mr. Harvey is best when he is forgetting the general principles for which he stands and simply enjoying himself; and the superiority of his more whimsical verses suggests that his bent, like that of Mr. Graves (with whom he has much else in common), lies more in that direction than towards large utterance or solemnity. The title of his book suggests that he realises this: the poem from which it is taken is certainly his most successful. It is really a close study of ducks made with infinite relish of their quaintness:
From troubles of the world
I turn to ducks,
Beautiful comical things,
Sleeping or curled,
Their heads beneath white wings
By water cool.
Or finding curious things
To eat in various mucks
Beneath the pool,
Tail uppermost, or waddling
Sailor-like on the shores
Of ponds, or paddling.
He sketches the main outlines of a duck's varied life by barn, stable, and stack:
They wander at their will,
But if you go too near
They look at you through black
Small topaz-tinted eyes
And wish you ill.
On the whole, he thinks the duck was the best of God's jokes:
And he's probably laughing still at the sound that came out of his bill.
Of the more serious poems some are a trifle stale; the glorification of one's county, with place-names rhymed, might be given a rest. Requiescat is a moving poem, and the tenuity and familiarity of the idea does not prevent Song from lingering in the memory more than anything else in the volume:
Sweetness of birdsong shall fall upon my heart,
Shall fall upon my heart;
Nor will I strive to mimic
The beauty that I find,
But lie in a dream and open wide my heart
And let the song of the birds sink down into my mind.
This song is all of a piece, a musical sigh.