Sir,—Mr. H. W. Crundell thinks that I should explain the absence of a note to my poem Micah; the presence of the one he suggests would have appeared to me an impertinence. Did Gray and Arnold call attention by notes when they adapted a few lines from Pindar? Did Tennyson thus docket what he owed to Homer and Virgil? To me the explanation seems rather due from Mr. Crundell: why he wrote his letter, and from you, why you printed it. However, obviously you think differently, so this occasion may as well serve me to allay an innocent curiosity that I neither intended to provoke nor to baffle. Besides Mr. Crundell's find there is a longer passage from Salammbo in my Mariamne. I put a line from Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer into my Rout of the Amazons, a phrase from Myers' translation of Pindar into At Bethel, and a phrase from Milton into Love's First Communion. Excepting the usual array from the Bible, I believe these to be all my verbal and literal appropriations.—Yours, etc.,
T. Sturge Moore.
P.S.—I have forgotten an unintentional one, a line from Keats in Mariamne.
[By printing Mr. Crundell's letter we didn't mean to suggest that we agreed with his argument; we were merely interested in the derivation of a beautiful passage in a beautiful poem.—Editor.]
"MANSOUL"
(To the Editor of The London Mercury)
Sir,—Your review of Mr. Doughty's Mansoul reveals an attitude somewhat similar to that of Jeffrey towards Wordsworth. May a humble reader hesitatingly retort the phrase—This will never do? Your reviewer does not think Mr. Doughty should be ignored, but he finds Chaucer easier and more modern, and considers this poetry at best a thing of tough shreds and purple patches.
With this opinion I do not contend, for I do not clearly understand upon what principle of criticism your reviewer is acting; but I should like to suggest that his opinion springs from a misconception which ought not to be nourished by the London Mercury. He seems to think that Mr. Doughty's "guttural obscurity of speech," his style in general, is a vital fault. I submit that he assumes rather than proves such a degree of obscurity, and that he puts an excessive value upon the merely formal and conventional graces of English blank verse. He does not recognise that Mr. Doughty is making not only his own poem, but his own style, and that the poetry is to be judged not exclusively by its conformity with traditional verse—the false standard of the eighteenth century—but by the success with which its style empowers and lucidly presents the author's conception. Casual wrynesses, unaccustomed inversions, idiosyncratic punctuation (forgive, dear Cobbett, the long words) do not affect this central question. Your reviewer admits the greatness of the poet's conception, admits that it has the substantial elements of noble poetry—I mean such elements as we find in Paradise Lost and The Dynasts—but is unwilling to admit that his form is his natural form, the form that expresses not only his explicit intention but his implicit character, and, therefore, a good form. I submit that Mr. Doughty's style in poetry is the inevitable expression of his mind at work upon imaginative themes. I submit that a true poet does not and cannot choose his style, and that the test of his style is not its degree of conformity with Chaucer's simplicity, Milton's lofty sweetness, Tennyson's effusive delicacy, but the fullness with which it expresses his own imaginative vision. Mr. Doughty has written, not a few miscellaneous lyrics, but a vast body of poetry in which a perfectly clear apprehension of past and future is presented. His themes are unfolded with such fullness as enables us to judge whether the expression of them, unusual as it may seem, ruins them or preserves them unspoiled, sustains or dulls their brightness. With extreme diffidence I suggest that your reviewer has not addressed himself to this proposition, and that this proposition remains an elementary principle of criticism. And I would remark that Mr. Doughty's own observations upon his style (note to The Dawn in Britain, Volume 6) might suitably be referred to for a precise statement of his attitude towards the English language.
The principles of criticism do not change, but may be eclipsed or clouded. They are familiar, yet need constant reassertion and illustration. Difficult as it may be to reduce these abstractions to clear and useful formulæ, I think it would be a service to letters if you, Sir, would state and clarify them afresh. Wanting definition and illustration, creation and criticism may become discordant, with unhappy results for each. It is my suspicion of a faint discord that must form the apology for the length of this letter.—Yours, etc.,