We cannot, dare not, make it cheap!
For holy uses will we keep.
A thing so pure, a thing so great
As Heaven's benignant gift of hate.
Is there no ancient, sceptred Wrong?
No torturing Power, endured too long?
Yea; and for these our hatred shall
Be cloistered and kept virginal.
He found occasion to draw from his cold storage of hate much sooner than he had anticipated. Being a convinced anti-imperialist, and having not a spark of antagonism to Germany, the early days of August, 1914, shocked no one in the world more than him. But after the first maze of bewilderment and horror, he drew his pen against the Kaiser in holy wrath. Most of his war poems have been collected in the little volume The Man Who Saw, published in the summer of 1917. He has now at all events one satisfaction, that of being in absolute harmony with the national sentiment. In his Preface, after commenting on the pain he had suffered in times past at finding himself in opposition to the majority of his countrymen, he manfully says, "During the present war, with all its agonies and horrors, he has had at any rate the one private satisfaction of feeling not even the most momentary doubt or misgiving as to the perfect righteousness of his country's cause. There is nothing on earth of which he is more certain than that this Empire, throughout this supreme ordeal, has shaped her course by the light of purest duty." The volume opens with a fine tribute to Mr. Lloyd George, "the man who saw," and The Kaiser's Dirge is a savage malediction. The poems in this book—of decidedly unequal merit—have the fire of indignation if not always the flame of inspiration. Taken as a whole, they are more interesting psychologically than as a contribution to English verse. I sympathize with the author's feelings, and admire his sincerity; but his reputation as a poet is not heightened overmuch. Perhaps the best poem in the collection is The Yellow Pansy, accompanied with Shakespeare's line, "There's pansies—that's for thoughts."
Winter had swooped, a lean and hungry hawk;
It seemed an age since summer was entombed;
Yet in our garden, on its frozen stalk,
A yellow pansy bloomed.
'Twas Nature saying by trope and metaphor:
"Behold, when empire against empire strives,
Though all else perish, ground 'neath iron war,
The golden thought survives."
Although, with the exception of his marriage and travels in America, Mr. Watson's verse tells us little of the facts of his life, few poets have ever revealed more of the history of their mind. What manner of man he is we know without waiting for the publication of his intimate correspondence. It is fortunate for his temperament that, combined with an almost morbid sensitiveness, he has something of Byron's power of hitting back. His numerous volumes contain many verses scoring off adverse critics, upon whom he exercises a sword of satire not always to be found among a poet's weapons; which exercise seems to give him both relief and delight. Apart from these thrusts edged with personal bitterness, William Watson possesses a rarely used vein of ironical wit that immediately recalls Byron, who might himself have written some of the stanzas in The Eloping Angels. Faust requests Mephisto to procure for them both admission into heaven for half-an-hour:
To whom Mephisto: "Ah, you underrate
The hazards and the dangers, my good Sir.
Peter is stony as his name; the gate,
Excepting to invited guests, won't stir.
'Tis long since he and I were intimate;
We differed;—but to bygones why refer?
Still, there are windows; if a peep through these
Would serve your turn, we'll start whene'er you please…."
So Faust and his companion entered, by
The window, the abodes where seraphs dwell.
"Already morning quickens in the sky,
And soon will sound the heavenly matin bell;
Our time is short," Mephisto said, "for I
Have an appointment about noon in hell.
Dear, dear! why, heaven has hardly changed one bit
Since the old days before the historic split."
The excellent conventional technique displayed in The Prince's Quest has characterized nearly every page of Mr. Watson's works. He is not only content to walk in the ways of traditional poesy, he glories in it. He has a contempt for heretics and experimenters, which he has expressed frequently not only in prose, but in verse. It is natural that he should worship Tennyson; natural (and unfortunate for him) that he can see little in Browning. And if he is blind to Browning, what he thinks of contemporary "new" poets may easily be imagined. With or without inspiration, he believes that hard work is necessary, and that good workmanship ought to be rated more highly. This idea has become an obsession; Mr. Watson writes too much about the sweat of his brow, and vents his spleen on "modern" poets too often. In his latest volume, Retrogression, published in 1917, thirty-two of the fifty-two poems are devoted to the defence of standards of poetic art and of purity of speech. They are all interesting and contain some truth; but if the "new" poetry and the "new" criticism are really balderdash, they should not require so much attention from one of the most eminent of contemporary writers. I think Mr. Watson is rather stiff-necked and obstinate, like an honest, hearty country squire, in his sturdy following of tradition. Smooth technique is a fine thing in art; but I do not care whether a poem is written in conventional metre or in free verse, so long as it is unmistakably poetry. And no garments yet invented or the lack of them can conceal true poetry. Perhaps the Traditionalist might reply that uninspired verse gracefully written is better than uninspired verse abominably written. So it is; but why bother about either? He might once more insist that inspired poetry gracefully written is better than inspired poetry ungracefully written. And I should reply that it depended altogether on the subject. I should not like to see Whitman's Spirit that formed this Scene turned into a Spenserian stanza. I cannot forget that David Mallet tried to smoothen Hamlet's soliloquy by jamming it into the heroic couplet. Mr. Watson thinks that the great John Donne is dead. On the contrary, he is audibly alive; and the only time he really approached dissolution was when Pope "versified" him.
Stephen Phillips, William Watson, Alfred Noyes—each published his first volume of poems at the age of twenty-two, additional evidence of the old truth that poets are born, not made. Alfred Noyes is a Staffordshire man, though his report of the county differs from that of Arnold Bennett as poetry differs from prose. They did not see the same things in Staffordshire, and if they had, they would not have been the same things, anyhow. Mr. Noyes was born on the sixteenth of September, 1880, and made his first departure from the traditions of English poetry in going to Oxford. There he was an excellent illustration of mens sana in corpore sano, writing verses and rowing on his college crew. He is married to an American wife, is a professor at Princeton, and understands the spirit of America better than most visitors who write clever books about us. He has the wholesome, modest, cheerful temperament of the American college undergraduate, and the Princeton students are fortunate, not only in hearing his lectures, but in the opportunity of fellowship with such a man.