Noyes has always been reckless in these matters. He never took the precaution to attach himself to any of our little groups of poetasters who ecstatically give each other the glory the common public with-holds from them. Before he made a book of his great epic, “Drake”—and it is great not only by comparison with what has been done by his living contemporaries—instead of treating it as something too rare and delicate for human nature’s daily food, he ran it serially in Blackwood’s Magazine, as if it had been a new novel. No poem had ever appeared in that fashion before. I believe he had not written more than half when the first instalment of it was printed, and the orthodox could not be expected to approve of that sort of thing. They began to say Noyes was too facile; wrote too hurriedly and too much; began to take it for granted that no man who wrote thus copiously and fluently could be an authentic poet, when they might more reasonably have assumed that he did by a certain native gift what was only possible to themselves by the slower, sedulous exercise of an average talent.
Howbeit, from being lauded freely, Noyes is now more misrepresented, by a group of poet-critics, whose judgments are too often sound in the wrong sense, than any other poet of our day. Whether anything less respectable than a restricted poetical outlook can account for this misrepresentation I shall not attempt to guess, but, noticing it, I have sometimes been reminded of lines he puts into the mouth of Marlowe, in his “Tales of the Mermaid Tavern”—
“I tell thee ’tis the dwarfs that find no world
Wide enough for their jostlings, while the giants,
The gods themselves, can in one tavern find
Room wide enough to swallow the wide heaven
With all its crowded solitary stars.”
Unprofessional lovers of poetry read Noyes not because it is the proper, high-brow thing to do, but solely because they enjoy reading him. It is an excellent reason; and for the same reason Tennyson and Browning are famous; so, in these times, are Masefield and Davies; de la Mare and William Watson. Noyes differs from most of his contemporaries in being at once, like Chaucer, a born story-teller and, like Swinburne, an amazing master of meter and rhyme. He is not alone in being able more readily and adequately to express himself in meter and rhyme than in prose, and it is ridiculous to assume that this ability indicates any shallowness of thought; it indicates, rather, that he is really efficient in an art he has taken pains to acquire.
It is equally ridiculous to dub him old-fashioned, as some of our superior persons do, because he accepts the classical tradition in poetry. He has not accepted it unintelligently or slavishly; if you look through his books you will note how cunningly he makes old meters new again, and that he has invented enough new meters or variations in accepted metrical forms to give him a place even with those who claim to be rebels against authority. One such rebel, a prominent American poet, included the other day in his collected works a goodly proportion of vers libre from which one of our advanced critics chose two passages for admiring quotation. The ideas in these passages were a mere repetition of two that are expressed with higher art and deeper feeling in “In Memoriam,” yet that advanced critic is one who dismisses Tennyson as out of date and has hailed the American poet as the last word in modern thinking. Perhaps he and his like have not troubled to read what they consider old-fashioned. I mention the circumstance by way of showing to what a pass some of our critics and poets have come.
If Noyes has any theories of poetry, I gather they are that the poet is essentially one endowed with the gift of song; that all the great poets, from Homer downward, have been great singers; and that when he utters himself in meter and rhyme he is but putting himself in tune with the infinite order of the universe—with the rhythm of the tides, of the seasons, the recurring chime of day and night, the harmonious movement of the stars in their orbits. He once confessed to me that he was so far from fearing the possibilities of metrical invention were exhausted that he was convinced we are still at the beginning of them; they were exhausted, according to the first disciples of Whitman, sixty years ago, but Swinburne arose and invented so many new meters that he was considered more revolutionary in his era than Whitman’s later disciples are in ours.
There is a virility and range of subject and style in Noyes’s work that make a good deal of modern verse seem old-maidish or anæmic by comparison. It is a far cry from the grace and tenderness and dainty fancy of “The Flower of Old Japan”, “The Forest of Wild Thyme”, and some of the lyrics in “The Elfin Artist”, and elsewhere, to the masculine imaginative splendor in thought and diction, the robust energy of his epic, “Drake”, or, though gentler moods of pathos, humor, wistful fantasy are never absent from any of his books, to the series of narratives that make up “The Torch Bearers”—an ambitious succession of poems that reveal, with dramatic power and insight and a quick sensitiveness to the poetry of science, the progress of scientific discovery in the life-stories of the great discoverers. None has pictured War in more terribly realistic terms or with a more passionate hatred of its inhumanity than he has in “The Wine Press”; and you have him in the breeziest, most riotously humorous of his moods in “Forty Singing Seamen.” But if I should single my own favorite from his books it would be the “Tales of the Mermaid Tavern.” Here he finds full scope for his many-sided gift; you can turn from the rollicking yarn of “Black Bill’s Honeymoon” to the dignity and poignance of “The Burial of a Queen,” from the anecdotal picturesqueness of “A Coiner of Angels” to the fervor and glittering pageantry of “Flos Mercatorum,” from the suspense and tragedy of “Raleigh” to the laughter and lighter tears and buoyant tripping measures of “The Companion of a Mile,” telling how Will Kemp, the player, danced from London to Norwich for a wager, and passing through Sudbury met a young butcher who offered to dance a mile with him—
“By Sudbury, by Sudbury, by little red-roofed Sudbury,
He wished to dance a mile with me! I made a courtly bow:
I fitted him with morrice-bells, with treble, bass and tenor bells,
And ‘Tickle your tabor, Tom,’ I cried, ‘we’re going to market now.’
And rollicking down the lanes we dashed, and frolicking up the hills we clashed,
And like a sail behind me flapped his great white frock a-while,
Till with a gasp, he sank and swore that he could dance with me no more;
And over the hedge a milk-maid laughed, Not dance with him a mile?
‘You lout!’ she laughed, ‘I’ll leave my pail, and dance with him for cakes and ale!
‘I’ll dance a mile for love,’ she laughed, ‘and win my wager too.
‘Your feet are shod and mine are bare; but when could leather dance on air?
‘A milk-maid’s feet can fall as fair and light as falling dew.’
I fitted her with morrice-bells, with treble, bass and tenor bells:
The fore-bells, as I linked them to her throat, how soft they sang!
Green linnets in a golden nest, they chirped and trembled on her breast,
And faint as elfin blue-bells at her nut-brown ankles rang.
I fitted her with morrice-bells that sweetened into woodbine bells,
And trembled as I hung them there and crowned her sunny brow:
‘Strike up,’ she laughed, ‘my summer king!’ And all her bells began to ring,
And ‘Tickle your tabor, Tom,’ I cried, ‘we’re going to Sherwood now!’”
This, and the rest of it, is very typical of Noyes in his lighter vein, and if you can’t see the poetry that twinkles through the deft, airy gallop of the verse we won’t talk about it; typical of him too is the pathetic aftermath of the dance, so delicately touched in that the pathos is almost lost in the beauty of it, till the motley epilogue strikes the deeper note of sadness through the loud laughter of the fool.
Noyes was born in Staffordshire in 1880, and I know nothing of his doings at Oxford, except that he rowed in the Exeter College Eight. He is nowadays an Hon. Litt. D. of Yale University, and since 1914 has been Professor of Modern English Literature at Princeton University, in America, and divides his time between that country and this. He is the most unassuming of men, looking much younger than his years, and of a sturdy, robust, serious aspect that (till his genial laugh, when he breaks silence, spoils your calculations) seems more in keeping with the vigor of his epic narratives, or with the noble rhetoric of such as that most impressive of his shorter poems, “The Creation,” than with the fairy fancies, the butterfly blitheness and laughing music of “Come down to Kew at lilac time” and other of his daintier lyrics. Like most true poets who have not died young, he has become popular in his lifetime; and if he were not so versatile less versatile critics, instead of panting after him in vain, would be able to grasp him and get him under their microscopes and recognize him for the poet that he is.