THE UNKNOWN EROS.[[117]]
There seems a growing and lamentable tendency among English poets in these days to divide themselves up into schools. We have the Tennysonian, the Swinburnian, the Rossettian, as a little earlier we had the Lake school, the Byronic, and so on. In these schools of poetry, as in schools of painting, there are certain marked features peculiar to each and forming, as it were, the common property of that one. Certain tones and colors belong to this: subdued grays, royal purples, dim and far-away lights on meadow and mere. Another is a lustier flesh-and-blood school: its men and women are decidedly, though musically, improper. The choice expressions and tender care that the other lavishes on the beauties of nature this one devotes to a maiden’s hair, or her cheek, or her nose, the droop of her lashes, or the arch of her brow. A third affects the mystic in matter and form; the more incomprehensible it is, the finer the poetry. It is like the “vague school” in painting. One is sometimes puzzled to know whether the picture be a battle-piece, a landscape, a portrait, or a nightmare on canvas. And so they go on.
This follow-my-leader tendency is unquestionably a mark of feebleness. It would be so in any art; it is obviously so in an art that springs from inspiration, and is thus necessarily original. A poet is comprehensible; a school of poets is absurd. Imagine a school of Homers, of Virgils, of Dantes, of Shaksperes, of Miltons, of Byrons! Why, the world could not hold them.
Weak as our days may be in original poets, they are strong at least in numbers. Probably, unless in the days of good Queen Anne, never before did such a constant and voluminous stream of English verse roll through the press. Most of it falls still-born on the market; yet nothing seems to discourage the poets. From Tupper to Tennyson they publish and publish and publish all the time. Yet there is not a living English poet to-day—unless Aubrey de Vere, whose best work has been his latest—who did not establish whatever fame he has almost a quarter of a century ago, and whose poems since that period have not shown a marked and steady decline.
In the author of The Unknown Eros we find a man who has certainly something new to say; who follows no leader; who has thoughts, and a mode of expressing them, all his own; who cares less for how than for what; whose work compels attention, and who depends in nowise on the jingle of words, the tricks of adjective and rhyme—the ballet-dancing, so to say, of the English language—for his attraction. Indeed, in respect of form he is far behind the other poets of the time. He almost disregards it. Yet, as will be seen, the strange dress that he has chosen for his creation fits it admirably, and moulds itself at will to the strenuous freedom of the combative athlete, the scorn of a man of fine feelings and bright intelligence, the meditative mood of the student, or the softer movements of a lover. His instrument is now a clarion call to battle, now a lover’s lute, now a dirge. It has the strength and simplicity of the Gregorian chant, which in a few notes and changes expresses the heights of inspiration and exultation, the depths of dread, the saddest sorrow of the human heart.
The volume is a collection of odes, written at various and long intervals apparently, and in a style of metre resembling somewhat that of the minor poems of Milton. It has often the regular irregularity of the Greek chorus, with much of the latter’s elasticity, brightness, flexibility, and crystalline texture. In all this it is novel—markedly and successfully so. It is more novel, however, in subject-matter. It is refreshing to come across a man, a poet especially, who can drop out of the commonplace, and do it without affectation. So accustomed have we grown, however, to the commonplace that we follow him at first with difficulty. His “Eros” is indeed an unknown god to the run of readers. He is no Cupid rosy-red, with flowery bow and fire-tipped dart to smite and melt the hearts of sweet young lovers. He does not slumber in summer meads, or rove listlessly by laughing streamlets, or roguishly haunt the bosky dells, or float adown the slanting sunbeam to flame on the unwary and capture their hearts and kindle them into passion while they languish in the soft arms of Mother Nature. His God is not this pagan deity. He is remote, obscure, harsh-seeming. The poet’s song is no pleasing love-tune. It is martial, high, far away, up on crags remote and to be reached only by thorny paths with bleeding feet and straining eyes, and hearts that faint many times on the way. True love is banished from the earth, the poet seems to think; and in place of him, high, pure, serene, with his head lifted up and bathed in the clear light and refulgence of heaven, and his feet only touching the earth, men have set a toy, a plaything, a fair bestiality.
“What rumored heavens are these,” he asks,
“Which not a poet sings,
O, Unknown Eros? What this breeze
Of sudden wings