William Jordan, Junior

by J. C. Snaith

That which proceeded from the lips of this aged man was couched in terms of wisdom and beauty. It began by setting forth briefly the place of the world-poet in the hierarchy of mankind, which was consonant with mankind’s own place in the hierarchy of nature. It indicated briefly the scope and status of the world-poet; and in a short, powerful, lucid argument it proceeded to add another to the group which time was constantly conspiring to limit.

It indicated that which went to the making of a world-poet; a thousand years of prayer and vigil; of unceasing strife against the things that were. It indicated what the world-poet was in essence and in substance; how he transcended all men in their several stations because he was as they were themselves, yet by his power of vision rendered infinitely more; how this divine manifestation of the truth that all the world was kin, was a doctor, a lawyer, a soldier, a teacher, a statesman, a tiller of the earth, a peruser of books.

It proceeded briefly to rehearse the theme of this the latest of the world-poets in the order of his coming, who was yet destined to take precedence of them all. Differentiating classic art from the romantic, and claiming for the poet of the Reconciliation the foremost place in the nobler school, inasmuch that his poem is like a pool whose depths are so measureless that its surface is tranquil, and yet so clear that it becomes a mirror that faithfully reflects the features of all that gaze therein, it recounted how the poem treats the life of man in all its phases. The mighty theme commences with that unspeakable suffering by which Man was taught to speak, that strange ascension from the higher anthropoids to a partial rationalism, culminating in that stage of “Reason” which offered the ill-starred creature Man, in lieu of an ample garment for his solace, protection, and utility, a kind of ridiculous swaddling-clothes, in which he could neither walk nor yet inhabit himself with decency. It reveals Man, the Wayfarer, ever straining after that which he knows not how to attain, until worn out with the heat and dust and the bloody conflict of the battle, the unhappy Warrior-traveller commits himself, a tired, baffled, war-worn child of destiny, yet grateful in his weariness, to the arms of Earth, his mother, again.

To the poet, Man’s terrestrial life, in the present stage of his development, is a progress through an eternal forest; and it submits itself to three phases—bewilderment, terror, pity. Through these he conducts the Warrior-Soul ever seeking for “truth,” ever engaged in a titanic struggle with his “reason”—that sword with which he wounds himself because he comprehends not how to use it rightly—yet ever seeking to reconcile the primal instinct of his own divinity with “the facts of experience” which in vain he strives to overthrow.

He begins with Man’s childhood. When to the mocking amazement of Earth, his primitive mother, the heroic but ill-starred Warrior has wrested from Destiny the power of speech, of thought, of will to bear his head erectly, he forsakes his half-brothers, the beasts of the field, and in a spirit of wonder and inquiry fares forth until he comes to a great city. In its purlieus he grows bewildered by the numberless things he cannot understand, and by the reception of answers that he cannot adjust to his partial development. Yet the Warrior is ever sustained by the sense of his own prowess, and proud of that which it has already achieved, he believes that when it can address its questions to the Whole of that which lies before it, it will comprehend it all.

The second phase of the poem opens with the Warrior’s tragic discovery that his innate sense of divinity is only comparative; that although he is Man in relation to the Ape, in his relation to the universe he is no more than Man-Ape gibbering upon the branches of the Eternal Forest; and that the sense of his own divinity is founded upon his superiority to the beasts of the field. In this tragic phase, the Warrior, overcome by disillusionment, alternately hacks himself with his sword, and at other times seeks to cast it away from him. Overcome by horror he faints in his weakness by the wayside, yet awakens from his hideous nightmare to find his body weltering in blood, and the sword, all hacked and jagged, still in his hand.

The third phase is that in which the Warrior returns again to Earth, his rude mother, whom an overweening exaltation in his prowess has led him to forsake. Having returned to her as a babe, and lain at suck at the brown breasts of the sweet savage, she caresses him and croons her strange songs in his ears; and to give him pleasure and sustenance—because the Warrior whom she has long mourned as lost has ever been the favourite among all her children—she whispers to him as he lies again in her bosom that he is indeed divine.

Girt by this forgiveness, and clad in the valour of his divinity once again, a new and ampler strength is given to the Warrior’s right hand. He learns for the first time in what manner to use his Sword. Yet no sooner does he learn so to do than he understands how Earth, his mother, has deceived him, in order that she may give pleasure to the favourite among all her children, who has returned to lie at her brown breasts. And the Warrior blesses her for the deception, as otherwise he could never have received the strength in his right hand; and without that strength he could not have learned to use the sword of his reason. The poem closes in the exaltation of an infinite pity and tenderness, for the Warrior, blind and spent and weak, with the Sword all broken and jagged upon his knees, has had his inquiries answered, and ceasing to struggle and to resent, in his concern for all his brothers who have not yet learned to use their swords, he defends their amazing formulas and shibboleths and extraordinary self-deceptions, whereby they seek to acquire the strength so to do. And in a passage of tender irony that has no parallel he entreats his poor brothers to continue to deceive themselves; and the Warrior concludes with an invocation to Earth, his mother, for her loving and wise deception, whereby the proudest of her sons has come to lie at peace.

As the white-haired man continued to read the appreciation of the poem, which he himself had wrought, thereby re-enacting the deception of the Mother of the Warrior-Soul, he revealed to the dying poet how his work in all the wonderful assemblance of its qualities surpassed any other that had been given to the world. He appraised the metre which only the highest inspiration would have dared to employ; he appraised the miraculous blend of gravity, sonority, sweetness, purity; the ever-gathering range and power of those mighty cadences, which swept the whole gamut of the emotions as though they were the strings of a lyre. He showed how the people of unborn ages would be able to derive stimulus and sanction for their labours; how the poet’s divine simplicity was such that he who ran might read; how the official “souls” who infest the groves of Academe would be able to cherish it for its “art”; how the humblest street-persons who walked the streets of the great city would be able to cherish it for its truth. This epic of Man the Warrior ever trampling the brakes of the Eternal Forest, cutting out the path with the Sword in his right hand in the fruitless search for that which will reconcile him to his partial vision, with the nobly pitiful irony of its conclusion that in the present stage of the Warrior’s development the reconciliation must be sought by compromise—this epic had in its austere mingling together of those elements of tragedy which purge man’s nature with the healing and co-ordinating properties which reconcile diverse and conflicting factors of experience with the primal belief of Man Himself, a universal power which had been given to no other poet in the modern or the ancient world. And the old man concluded with the prophecy that when “Civilization” itself had sunk to a mere shibboleth of the remote age of “Reason,” the half-divine, half-barbarous music of the unknown poet of the Reconciliation, would prove the only via media between the epoch of ampler vision and that fantastic shadowography of the long ago when Man seemed other than He was.

Throughout the reading of this appraisement of his labours, the blind-eyed poet seemed to vibrate with every word that came upon his ears. As each phrase uttered by that thin, high, quavering voice addressed the entranced being of the poet, the frail and broken form seemed to sway in unison therewith; and the secret and beautiful smile lurking within the hollows of the cheeks seemed to illuminate even the sightless eyes, so that poor Dodson, who sat listening faintly to the old man’s words, was tortured continually by the illusion that the sight had returned to the eyes of his dying friend.