“One is essentially of the autumn,” he wrote of himself. But that is not true, for Dowson was not ripe, but (I say it of course with respect) rotten. He remained in the cradle sucking sensations long after he should have been out in the world creating sensations. Life never got beyond his lips.
A Sentimental Excursion.—The writers of the Venture, a literary magazine published from Bristol, and written chiefly by members of the Postal Service, are sincere in that they are manifestly striving to acquire a good English style; and they are modest in that they do not pretend to have attained to it. Even better, and unlike so many current “stylists,” they do not say that the unreachable grapes are sour, while those only which they can pluck are the perfect fruit; in other words, they do not try to pass off their defects as new beauties of style. Their models are good, and their exercises are promising. The introductory note contains, however, a little cant, rather out of key with the prevailing mood of the journal. It demands “stalwart criticism,” not for itself only, but for literature in general. The London Mercury appeared before the world in the same austere attitude, calling in prophetic tones for sterner criticism, more outspoken criticism, criticism that should both say and mean something, criticism, in short, of the kind which has for years ensured the ostracism of precisely that kind of critic. It is the easiest thing in the world to demand such criticism, and very popular on one condition—that it be never actually provided. For the fact is that the criticism in question is really killing; and how many of those who ask for stern criticism would welcome their own extinction?
Special attention is directed to the longish poem by Mr. Francis Andrews. It is entitled “Mother,” and the opening stanza is as follows:—
You can see from the gate which once enclosed my world
The tinted woods o’ the hill and the white road wending,
And among the nearer boughs whereon my stars were hung
The blown and shifting wraith of the blue smoke curled.
Let us stop at that and collect our impressions. It is a very dangerous subject that Mr. Andrews has chosen. The temptation to indulge in “sob-stuff” in reflecting on “Mother,” is well-nigh irresistible, since the sentiment goes back to the childhood not only of the individual, but of the race, and probably earlier. It is almost inextricably mingled with the tears of things. But tears are not a proper accompaniment of poetry or of beauty. The mission of Art is to dry all tears, and the utmost severity and serenity are needed in dealing with a profoundly emotional subject exactly to keep the tears from welling into it. That Mr. Andrews has not succeeded is evident from the opening stanza which I have just quoted. It is almost drenched with sentiment. Listen to the rhythm which is nearly a lullaby in reverie, and let us ask ourselves whether it is not calculated, quite apart from the words, to throw the reader backwards into his mother’s arms. “Which once enclosed my world,” “and the white road wending,” “whereon my stars were hung,” “the blown and shifting wraith of blue smoke curled”—these are sentimental rhythms, and their inevitable effect is to induce a reverie of the past rather than a meditation or contemplation of the future. The mood is backward-looking, and not forward-looking, an indulgence and not an effort of spirit. It is quite in accordance with the diagnosis that a concluding stanza of the poem should repeat the opening stanza, since there is no release in a mood of this kind. In great reveries it will be observed that the movement is forward and upwards. The action starts from a profound sentiment, but it works its way upward to a triumphant assertion of spiritual realisation. Look, for instance, at Lycidas or Adonais, both sentimental in origin, but both exalted in conclusion. There the song springs from a dewy bed, drenched with tears, but it mounts and mounts until it ends in the sky. Mr. Andrews keeps well to the ground, and, as I have said, his concluding stanza is only a slight variation of the prelude. The influence of Kipling is to be discerned at work, especially Kipling’s “Envoi,” beginning, “There’s a whisper down the field.” Kipling is another of the writers whose sentiment is still tied to his mother’s apron-strings; and his “Envoi” and “Mother o’ Mine” are almost as poisonous to poetry as Meredith’s “Love in the Valley.” We need not be averse to sentiment as such, but the most careful discrimination between the nest and the sky is essential to an æsthetic use of it. Let us start in sentiment, by all means, but let us rise from it as quickly as possible.
The Newest Testament.—Various attempts have been made from time to time to “render” the New Testament into colloquial English in order to bring it “up-to-date.” None of these, we may congratulate ourselves, has so far been more than a nine days’ sensation, and even less than that length of life is destined for the latest attempt, Sayings and Stories, a translation into “colloquial English” of the Sermon on the Mount and some Parables. The Yates Professor of New Testament Greek and Exegesis at Mansfield College gives us his assurance that however “startlingly unlike the familiar versions” these translations by Mr. Hoare may be, they are nevertheless “actual translations and not mere paraphrases,” and he commends the “style” to the “candid judgment of the reader.” The prose sections, in particular, he says, are “curiously reminiscent” of the “homely speech in which the sayings of Jesus Christ have been preserved.” It may be so, but then, again, it may not; since, after all, it is not a question of reproducing in colloquial English the colloquial Greek of the original, but a question rather of reproducing in English the meaning of the Gospel writers; and this may very well require, not colloquial English, but the English vernacular in its highest degree of purity, simplicity, and grandeur. I am not sufficiently acquainted with the popular Greek in which much of the New Testament was written to pass a candid judgment on its quality as a Greek style, but if the aim of the original writers was the grand style simple—as it must have been—whether they achieved it or not, it is indubitably achieved in the English of the authorised translation. Assuming the original, in fact, to be “faithfully” represented in the colloquial English of Mr. Hoare, I unhesitatingly say that the English of the authorised translation is nearer the spirit of the original than the present translation, and, in that sense, more fully faithful to the intentions of the original authors.
It would be tedious to cite more than one example, and I will take it in the very first sentence of Mr. Hoare’s translation. “What joy,” he says, “for those with the poor man’s feelings! Heaven’s Empire is for them,” the authorised translation of which is too familiar to need quotation. I do not see what is gained, setting aside the cost, by the substitution of the exclamatory “What joy ...” for the ecstatic affirmation, “Blessed are the poor.” Why again, “the poor man,” and, after that, the “poor man’s feelings”? Why also “Heaven’s Empire” instead of “the Kingdom of Heaven”; and why “is for them” instead of “theirs is”? The gain, even literally, is imperceptible, and in cost a world of meaning has been sacrificed. “Blessed” is an incomparably more spiritual word than “joy”—in English, at any rate, whatever their respective originals may indicate; and there is a plane of difference between an incontinent ejaculation such as “What joy,” which resembles “What fun,” and has in view rather a prospect than a fact—and the serene and confident utterance of an assured truth. Further, and again without regard to the literal original, “a poor man’s feelings” must be miles away, from the intention of the original authors, since it definitely conveys to us associations derived from social surroundings, social reform, and what not. Was this the intention of the Sermon on the Mount, the very location of which symbolised a state of mind above that of the dwellers in the plain of common life? Was it a socialist or communist discourse? If not, the “poor man’s feelings,” in our English colloquial sense, is utterly out of place, and the original must have meant something symbolically different. The substitution, again, of “Heaven’s Empire” for the “Kingdom of Heaven” may be, as Professor Dodd assures us, a more correct literal translation of the original phrase; but only a literary barbarian can contemplate it without grieving over the lost worlds of meaning. What is the prospect of an “Empire,” even Heaven’s Empire, to us to-day? As certainly as the phrase “Kingdom of Heaven” has come to mean, in English, a state of beatitude, the reversion to an “Empire” marks the decline of that state to one of outward pomp and circumstance. The spiritual meaning which must have characterised the intention of the Sermon on the Mount is completely sacrificed in the substitution of Empire for Kingdom. The volume is published by the “Congregational Union of England and Wales,” and it serves to indicate the depths to which Nonconformist taste can sink. We only need now this “colloquial English” version in the “nu speling” to touch bottom.