THE MAN WHO DARES
“BALLADS AND SONGS,” BY JOHN DAVIDSON
GRANT ALLEN has written of “The Woman Who Did”—and the title suggests that John Davidson may fitly be called “The Man Who Dares;” for certainly some of his themes and some of his lines, in this his latest book, are among the most daring in modern literature.
Richard Le Gallienne, in comparing William Watson and John Davidson, suggests that Davidson is a great man, and Watson a great manner. This is a statement I am not ready to indorse. I think Watson has much more than a great manner. He has noble and stately thought, a large outlook, and, in his own direction, subtle and keen perception. He knows the moods of the spirit, the reach of the soul; but the human heart does not cry out to him. He waits in the stately Court of the Intellect, and surveys the far heavens through its luminous windows.
Davidson, on the contrary, hearkens to the heart’s cry. The passionate senses clamor in his lines. Ceaseless unrest assails him. Doubt and faith war in him for mastery. Above all he is human; and, secondly, he is modern. “Perfervid,” “A Practical Novelist,” and two or three other tales, at once merry and fantastic, prove his gifts as a story-teller. He has written several delightful plays, among which “Scaramouch In Naxos” is, perhaps, the most remarkable. Its originality, its charm, its wayward grace give it a place to itself in modern literature; and I doubt if we have any other man who could have given us quite the same thing. But when the right to careful attention of his other work has been fully admitted, I am inclined to think that nowhere does he more thoroughly prove his high claim to distinction than in his “Fleet-Street Eclogues,” and his new volume of “Ballads and Songs.”
Of all these Ballads the three that have most moved me are “A Ballad of a Nun,” “A Ballad of Heaven,” and “A Ballad of Hell.” There is much crude strength in “A Ballad in Blank Verse of the Making of a Poet;” but the blank verse, impassioned though it be, has neither the stately splendor of Milton nor the artistic and finished grace of Tennyson. It is full of stress and strain,—this story of a youth who was brought up by a father and mother who really believed that the soul’s probation ends with this brief span of earthly life, and that
“In life it is your privilege to choose,
But after death you have no choice at all.”
He tortured his mother by his unbelief, until he slowly broke her heart, and “she died, in anguish for his sins.” His father upbraided him, and he cried—very naturally, if not very poetically—
“Oh, let me be!”