But he never realized that every step he had taken had been predetermined by the supposed maniac and that once frightened off his balance, he had reacted according to plan. Mr. Poeta did not need to pursue him over the wall or even to go any further than the dining-room door; he counted on the all-or-none principle of reaction to danger finishing the job for him. So out at the window went Mr. Lector and every recourse offered for escape he accepted unquestioningly. Mr. Poeta knew well enough that Mr. Lector would eventually treasure that copy of Chaucer prepared for him, as a souvenir of his terrible experience, that he would have it rebound and adopt the poet as a “discovery” of his own.
The reader in interpreting this parable, must not make too close a comparison of motives; the process is all that is intended to show. The poet, once emotion has suggested a scheme of work, goes over the ground with minute care and makes everything sure, so that when his poem is presented to the reader, the latter is thrown off his balance temporarily by the novelty of the ideas involved. He has no critical weapons at his command, so he must follow the course which the poet has mapped out for him. He is carried away in spite of himself and though the actual words do not in themselves express all the meaning which the poet manages to convey (Mr. Poeta, as has been said, did not pursue) yet the reader on recovering from the first excitement finds the implied conclusion laid for him to discover, and flattering himself that he has reached it independently, finally carries it off as his own. Even where a conclusion is definitely expressed in a poem the reader often deceives himself into saying, “I have often thought that before, but never so clearly,” when as a matter of fact he has just been unconsciously translating the poet’s experience into terms of his own, and finding the formulated conclusion sound, imagines that the thought is originally his.
VIII
THE CARPENTER’S SON
FABLES and analogies serve very well instead of the psychological jargon that would otherwise have to be used in a discussion of the poet’s mental clockwork, but they must be supported wherever possible by definite instances, chapter and verse. An example is therefore owed of how easily and completely the poet can deceive his readers once he has assumed control of their imagination, hypnotizing them into a receptive state by indirect sensuous suggestions and by subtle variations of verse-melody; which hypnotism, by the way, I regard as having a physical rather than a mental effect and being identical with the rhythmic hypnotism to which such animals as snakes, elephants or apes are easily subject.
Turn then to Mr. Housman’s classic sequence “A Shropshire Lad,” to No. XLVII “The Carpenter’s Son,” beginning, “Here the hangman stops his cart.” Ask any Housman enthusiasts (they are happily many) how long it took them to realize what the poet is forcing on them there. In nine cases out of ten where this test is applied, it will be found that the lyric has never been consciously recognized as an Apocryphal account of the Crucifixion; and even those who have consciously recognized the clues offered have failed to formulate consciously the further daring (some would say blasphemous) implications of its position after the last three pieces “Shot, lad? So quick, so clean an ending,” “If it chance your eye offend you” and the momentary relief of “Bring in this timeless grave to throw.”
Among Jubilee bonfires; village sports of running, cricket, football; a rustic murder; the London and North Western Railway; the Shropshire Light Infantry; ploughs; lovers on stiles or in long grass; the ringing of church bells; and then this suicide by shooting, no reader is prepared for the appearance of the historic Son of Sorrow. The poet has only to call the Cross a gallows-tree and make the Crucified call His disciples “Lads” instead of “My Brethren” or “Children,” and we are completely deceived.
In our almost certain failure to recognize Him in this context lies, I believe, the intended irony of the poem which is strewn with the plainest scriptural allusions.
In justification of the above and of my deductions about “La Belle Dame sans Merci” in a later section I plead the rule that “Poetry contains nothing haphazard,” which follows naturally on the theory connecting poetry with dreams. By this rule I mean that if a poem, poem-sequence or drama is an allegory of genuine emotional experience and not a mere cold-blooded exercise, no striking detail and no juxtaposition of apparently irrelevant themes which it contains can be denied at any rate a personal significance—a cypher that can usually be decoded from another context.
IX
THE GADDING VINE
WHEN we say that a poet is born not made, it is saying something much more, that Poetry is essentially spontaneous in origin, and that very little of it can therefore be taught on a blackboard; it means that a man is not a poet unless there is some peculiar event in his family history to account for him. It means to me that with the apparent exceptions given in the next section, the poet, like his poetry, is himself the result of the fusion of incongruous forces. Marriages between people of conflicting philosophies of life, widely separated nationalities or (most important) different emotional processes, are likely either to result in children hopelessly struggling with inhibitions or to develop in them a central authority of great resource and most quick witted at compromise. Early influences, other than parental, stimulate the same process. The mind of a poet is like an international conference composed of delegates of both sexes and every shade of political thought, which is trying to decide on a series of problems of which the chairman has himself little previous knowledge—yet this chairman, this central authority, will somehow contrive to sign a report embodying the specialized knowledge and reconciling the apparently hopeless disagreements of all factions concerned. These factions can be called, for convenience, the poet’s sub-personalities.