Visions and Revisions: A Book of Literary Devotions

by John Cowper Powys

One wonders if the reader, too, knows and loves, that strange fragmentary unrhymed poem, called "the Strayed Reveller," with its vision of Circe and the sleeping boy-faun, and the wave-tossed Wanderer, and its background of "fitful earth-murmurs" and "dreaming woods"—Strangely down, upon the weary child, smiles the great enchantress, seeing the wine stains on his white skin, and the berries in his hair. The thing is slight enough; but in its coolness, and calmness, and sad delicate beauty, it makes one pause and grow silent, as in the long hushed galleries of the Vatican one pauses and grows silent before some little known, scarcely-catalogued Greek Vase. The spirit of life and youth is there—immortal and tender—yet there too is the shadow of that pitiful "in vain," with which the brevity of such beauty, arrested only in chilly marble, mocks us as we pass!

It is life—but life at a distance—Life refined, winnowed, sifted, purged. "Yet, O Prince, what labour! O Prince, what pain!" The world is perhaps tired of hearing from the mouths of its great lonely exiles the warning to youth "to sink unto its own soul," and let the mad throngs clamour by, with their beckoning idols, and treacherous pleading. But never has this unregarded hand been laid so gently upon us as in the poem called "Self-Dependence."

Heaven forgive us—we cannot follow its high teaching—and yet we too, we all, have felt that sort of thing, when standing at the prow of a great ship we have watched the reflection of the stars in the fast-divided water.

"Unaffrightened by the silence round them
Undistracted by the sights they see
These demand not that the world about them
Yield them love, amusement, sympathy.
But with joy the stars perform their shining
And the sea its long, moon-silvered roll;
For self-poised they live; nor pine with noting
All the fever of some differing soul."

The "one philosophy" is, as Matthew Arnold himself puts it, "utrumque paratus," prepared for either event. Yet it leans, and how should it not lean, in a world like this, to the sadder and the more final. That vision of a godless universe, "rocking its obscure body to and fro," in ghastly space, is a vision that refuses to pass away. "To the children of chance," as my Catholic philosopher says, "chance would seem intelligible."

But even if it be—if the whole confluent ocean of its experiences be—unintelligible and without meaning; it remains that mortal men must endure it, and comfort themselves with their "little pleasures." The immoral cruelty of Fate has been well expressed by Matthew Arnold in that poem called "Mycerinus," where the virtuous king does not receive his reward. He, for his part will revel and care not. There may be nobler, there may be happier, ways of awaiting the end—but whether "revelling" or "refraining," we are all waiting the end. Waiting and listening, half-bitterly, half-eagerly, seems the lot of man upon earth! And meanwhile that

—"Power, too great and strong
Even for the gods to conquer or beguile,
Sweeps earth and heaven and men and gods along
Like the broad volume of the insurgent Nile
And the great powers we serve, themselves must be
Slaves of a tyrannous Necessity—"

Matthew Arnold had—and it is a rare gift—in spite of his peaceful domestic life and in spite of that "interlude" of the "Marguerite" poems—a noble and a chaste soul. "Give me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me!" prayed the Psalmist. Well! this friend of Thyrsis had "a clean heart" and "a right spirit"; and these things, in this turbulent age, have their appeal! It was the purging of this "hyssop" that made it possible for him even in the "Marguerite" poems, to write as only those can write whose passion is more than the craving of the flesh.

"Come to me in my dreams and then
In sleep I shall be well again—
For then the night will more than pay
The hopeless longing of the day!"

It was the same chastity of the senses that made it possible for him to write those verses upon a young girl's death, which are so much more beautiful—though those are lovely too—than the ones Oscar Wilde wrote on the same subject.