arise from this same desire to recapture the sense of violence and immediate life.
It is interesting to compare the violence and energy of Verhaeren with the violence of an earlier poet—Rimbaud, the marvellous boy, if ever there was one. Rimbaud cut the stuff of life into flags, but into flags that never fluttered on this earth. His violence penetrated, in some sort, beyond the bounds of ordinary life. In some of his poems Rimbaud seems actually to have reached the nameless goal towards which he was striving, to have arrived at that world of unheard-of spiritual vigour and beauty whose nature he can only describe in an exclamatory metaphor:
Millions d’oiseaux d’or, ô future vigueur!
But the vigour of Verhaeren is never anything so fine and spiritual as this “million of golden birds.” It is merely the vigour and violence of ordinary life speeded up to cinema intensity.
It is a noticeable fact that Verhaeren was generally at his best when he took a holiday from the making and waving of flags. His Flemish bucolics and the love poems of Les Heures, written for the most part in traditional form, and for the most part shorter and more concentrated than his poems of violence and energy, remain the most moving portion of his work. Very interesting, too, are the poems belonging to that early phase of doubt and depression which saw the publication of Les Débâcles and Les Flambeaux Noirs. The energy and life of the later books is there, but in some sort concentrated, preserved and intensified, because turned inwards upon itself. Of many of the later poems one feels that they were written much too easily. These must have been brought very painfully and laboriously to the birth.
XXIV: EDWARD LEAR
There are few writers whose works I care to read more than once, and one of them is certainly Edward Lear. Nonsense, like poetry, to which it is closely allied, like philosophic speculation, like every product of the imagination, is an assertion of man’s spiritual freedom in spite of all the oppression of circumstance. As long as it remains possible for the human mind to invent the Quangle Wangle and the Fimble Fowl, to wander at will over the Great Gromboolian Plain and the hills of the Cnankly Bore, the victory is ours. The existence of nonsense is the nearest approach to a proof of that unprovable article of faith, whose truth we must all assume or perish miserably: that life is worth living. It is when circumstances combine to prove, with syllogistic cogency, that life is not worth living that I turn to Lear and find comfort and refreshment. I read him and I perceive that it is a good thing to be alive; for I am free, with Lear, to be as inconsequent as I like.
Lear is a genuine poet. For what is his nonsense except the poetical imagination a little twisted out of its course? Lear had the true poet’s feeling for words—words in themselves, precious and melodious, like phrases of music; personal as human beings. Marlowe talks of entertaining divine Zenocrate; Milton of the leaves that fall in Vallombrosa; Lear of the Fimble Fowl with a corkscrew leg, of runcible spoons, of things meloobious and genteel. Lewis Carroll wrote nonsense by exaggerating sense—a too logical logic. His coinages of words are intellectual. Lear, more characteristically a poet, wrote nonsense that is an excess of imagination, coined words for the sake of their colour and sound alone. His is the purer nonsense, because more poetical. Change the key ever so little and the “Dong with a Luminous Nose” would be one of the most memorable romantic poems of the nineteenth century. Think, too, of that exquisite “Yonghy Bonghy Bo”! In one of Tennyson’s later volumes there is a charming little lyric about Catullus, which begins:
Row us out from Desenzano,
To your Sirmione row!