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Chapter XXIII
Recent English Poetry 4
THE INSPIRING spirit and shaping substance of this new poetry, that which gives it its peculiar turn, raises the power of its style to the intuitive closeness or directness and presses on it to bring in another law of its movement, has been indicated to some extent in the core of its meaning, but it is necessary to dwell on it more perusingly, that we may get a closer glimpse of the things towards which we are moving. The change that is coming or at least striving to come, might be described on the surface as a great and subtle deepening and enlarging of the thought-mind in the race and a new profounder, closer, more intimate way of seeing, feeling, appreciating, interpreting life and Nature and existence. The thought of the middle and even the later nineteenth century was wide in its way, especially in its range and breadth of surface or in comparison with the narrower thought of the preceding ages, but it was acute rather than profound, superficial even in its attempt at penetration. It sought for its food over a great country, but it did not wing high in the breadth of the altitudes or plunge down into the largeness of the depths. Perhaps the distinction is best marked by that significant movement of philosophic thought which now repelled by these limitations rejects the supremacy of the intellect and seeks for the secret of things in the intuition, in the inmost suggestions of life, in the innate will and principle of action and points more or less obscurely through these things to a spirit or self or nameless somewhat superconscient to or at least greater than our intellectual mind and reason. The nineteenth century was intellectual, not intuitive, critical rather than creative, or creative mostly by the constructive force of the critical mind, — critically constructive, we may then say, rather than creative by any direct insight and interpretation, — curiously observative of the phenomenon of life and Nature, concerned with many Page –192 interests, patient, accurate and analytic in its method of scrutiny, occupied by a stress of many problems, moved by strong human and democratic sympathies, attracted by intellectual ideals, but mechanical and outward in stress and rather curious and inventive than deep or fine in its aesthetic feeling. It has looked much at the body and life and active idea, but little at the deeper soul and spirit of things. Poetry has been affected by the turn of the human mind in this age; it has been brilliant, curious, careful, inventive, interested and interesting, moving over a great range of subjects, closely observative and even sometimes analytical, or elaborately aesthetic, or expressive of some intellectual idealism, but without much height of wing or force from the depths or strong or fine spiritual suggestion. Or there has been only some occasional suggestion or isolated foretaste of these things. There has been much stress of thought, but not much deeply moved or spontaneous greatness of creation. The mind and soul of the race is now moving forward on the basis of what it has gained by a century of intellectual stir and activity, towards a profounder mood and a more internal force of thought and life. The intellectual way of looking at things is being gradually transcended or is raising itself to a power beyond itself; it is moving through the observing mind and reflective reason towards an intimate self-experience, from thought to vision, from intellectual experiment to intuitive experience, from life and Nature as observed by the eye of the intellect in their appearance to life and Nature as seen and felt by the soul in their spirit and reality. Mankind is still engaged in thinking and searching with an immense stress of mental power, but it is now once more in search of its soul and of the spirit and deeper truth of things, although in a way very different from that of its past cultural ages and on the whole with a greater power and subtlety of the mind, though not as yet, but that too seems predestined to come, with a greater power of the spirit. It is, to return to a phrase already used, in search of our inmost and attempting already to find, though it has not yet altogether found, our inmost way of its sense, vision, idea, expression. This change, reflected in the poetry of the time is Page – 193 not an abrupt turn or a casting away of the immediate past from which it was born, but a rapid development of new viewpoints, a shedding of restrictions and limitations and husks and externalities, a transformation by the entrance of a new force of the soul into possession of the gains of the intellectual age and a swift completion and filling of them out in a new flood of light and an at once nearer and more extended sense of their meaning. The whole view and sense of existence has deepened into a greater subjectivity. For the subjectivity of the nineteenth century was a matter of the temperament, an activity of the strongly marked psychological individuality turned upon things held under the lens as an object of the intelligence; but now there are coming a universal subjectivity of the whole spirit, an attempt towards closeness and identity, a greater community of the individual with the universal soul and mind. The wider interest in Man has not lessened in breadth, but it is changing its character. More strenuous than before, it is less concentrated on his outer life and creation, and even where it deals with them, it opens more understandingly to his future and to his inner possibilities, to the psychological and the spiritual sense of his past, to the deeper significance of his present, to his self-creation. The profounder ranges of his being are now sounded and there is an initial feeling and even some actual seeing of the greater individual and the communal or universal self of our kind. Nature is seen more in her hidden suggestions and soul meanings and in the finer impressions by which we enter into them and establish with her a spiritual relation or identity. The things that lie behind the material world are almost for the first time being touched and seen with a close and revealing intimacy. The communion of the human soul with the Divine is becoming once more a subject of thought and utterance, not now limited to the old religious and personal form, but enlightened by a sense of the Infinite and Eternal which has arisen from and vivified the larger cosmic sense for which the thinking and discovery of the last century was a training. This change amounts to a revolution of the whole attitude of man towards existence, but it is commencing by an extension of the intellectual stress and a Page –194 consequent breaking down of its bounds. A self-exceeding of the intellect and a growth of man into some first freedom and power of an intuitive mentality supported by the liberated intelligence is in its initial travail of new birth. These things have not all arrived, but they are on the way and the first waves of the surge have already broken over the dry beaches of the age of reason. This considerable change was intellectually anticipated and to some extent prepared in the last century itself by a strain, a little thin in body, but high and continuous, of strenuous intellectuality which strove to rise beyond the level of the ordinary thought of the time to the full height and power of what the intellect of the race could then think out or create in the light of the inheritance of our ages. A small number of writers — in the English language Emerson, Carlyle, Ruskin are the best known among these names, — build for us a bridge of transition from the intellectual transcendentalism of the earlier nineteenth century across a subsequent low-lying scientific, utilitarian, externalised intellectualism, as if from bank to bank across morass or flood, over to the age now beginning to come in towards us. But in the region of poetic thought and creation Whitman was the one prophetic mind which consciously and largely foresaw and prepared the paths and had some sense of that to which they are leading. He belongs to the largest mind of the nineteenth century by the stress and energy of his intellectual seeking, by his emphasis on man and life and Nature, by his idea of the cosmic and universal, his broad spaces and surfaces, by his democratic enthusiasm, by his eye fixed on the future, by his intellectual reconciling vision at once of the greatness of the individual and the community of mankind, by his nationalism and internationalism, by his gospel of comradeship and fraternity in our common average manhood, by almost all in fact of the immense mass of ideas which form the connecting tissue of his work. But he brings into them an element which gives them another potency and meaning and restores something which in most of the literature of the time tended to be overcast and sicklied over by an excessive intellectual tendency more leaned to observe life than strong and swift to live it and which in the Page – 195 practicality of the time was caught up from its healthful soul of nature and converted into a huge grinding mechanism. He has the intimate pulse and power of life vibrating in all he utters, an almost primitive force of vitality, delivered from the enormous mechanical beat of the time by a robust closeness to the very spirit of life, — that closeness he has more than any other poet since Shakespeare, — and ennobled by a lifting up of its earthly vigour into a broad and full intellectual freedom. Thought leads and all is made subject and object and substance of a free and a powerful thinking, but this insistence of thought is made one with the pulse of life and the grave reflective pallor and want of blood of an overburdened intellectualism is healed by that vigorous union. Whitman writes with a conscious sense of his high function as a poet, a clear self-conception and consistent idea of what he has to cast into speech, —
One's-self I sing, a simple separate person Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En Masse . . . Of Life immense in passion, pulse and power, Cheerful, for freest action formed under the laws divine, The Modern Man I sing.
No other writer of the time has had this large and definite consciousness of the work of a modern poet as a representative voice of his age, this inspiring vital sentiment of the nation conceived as a myriad-souled pioneer of human progress, of mankind, of universal Nature, of the vast web of a universal thought and action. His creation, triumphing over all defect and shortcoming, draws from it a unique broadness of view, vitality of force and sky-wide atmosphere of greatness. But beyond this representation of the largest thought and life and broadest turn to the future possible to his age, there is something else which arises from it all and carries us forward towards what is now opening to man around or above, towards a vision of new reaches and a profounder interpretation of existence. Whitman by the intensity of his intellectual and vital dwelling on the things he saw and expressed, arrives at some first profound sense of the greater self of the individual, of the greater self in Page –196 the community of the race and in all its immense past action opening down through the broadening eager present to an immenser future, of the greater self of Nature and of the eternal, the divine Self and Spirit of existence who broods over these things, who awaits them and in whom they come to the sense of their oneness. That which the old Indian seers called the mahān ātmā, the Great Self, the Great Spirit, which is seen through the vast strain of the cosmic thought and the cosmic life, — the French poets, influenced in their form and substance by Whitman, have seized on this element with the clear discernment and intellectual precision and lucidity of the Latin mind and given it the name of unanimism, — is the subject of some of his highest strains. He gets to it repeatedly through his vision of the past opening to the ideal future, the organic universal movement of bygone nations and ages and the labour and creation of the present and some nobler coming turn to a freedom of unified completion, —
The journey done, the journeyman come home, And man and art with Nature fused again . . . The Almighty leader now for once has signalled with his wand.
And some part of his work, as in the Passage to India, opens out even into a fuller and profounder sense of its meaning. He sees it here as a new voyage of the human spirit, — "O farther sail!"
Sail forth, steer for the deep waters only . . . For we are bound where mariner has not yet dared to go, And we will risk the ship, ourselves and all . . . O daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of God?
And with a singularly clear first seeing of the ideal goal and the ideal way of the conversion of the intellectual and vital into the spiritual self, he calls the spirit of man to the adventure.
The circumnavigation of the world begin, Of man, the voyage of his mind's return, To reason's early paradise, Back, back to wisdom's birth, to innocent intuitions, Again with fair creation. Page – 197 He casts forward too the ideal heart of this wider movement of man into the sense of the divine unity which is its completion, brings out the divinity of the soul in man and its kinship to the divinity of the Eternal, —
O Thou transcendent, Nameless, the fibre and the breath, Light of the light, shedding forth universes, thou centre of them, Thou mightier centre of the true, the good, the loving, . . . How should I think, how breathe a single breath, how speak, if out of myself I could not launch to those superior universes? Swiftly I shrivel at the thought of God, At nature and its wonders, Time and Space and Death, But that I, turning, call to thee, O soul, O actual Me, And, lo, thou gently masterest the orbs, Thou matest Time, smilest content at Death, And fillest, swellest full the vastnesses of space, —
and he foresees the coming of that kinship of God and man to conscious fruition in oneness,
Greater than stars or suns, Bounding, O soul, thou journeyest forth; What love than thine and ours could wider amplify? What aspirations, wishes outvie thine and ours, O soul? What dreams of the ideal? what plans of purity, perfection, strength? What cheerful willingness for others' sake to give up all? For others' sake to suffer all? Reckoning ahead, O soul, when thou, the time achieved, . . . Surrounded, copest, frontest God, yieldest, the aim attained, As filled with friendship, love complete, the Elder Brother found, The Younger melts in fondness in his arms.
These passages, — one of the seers of old time reborn in ours might so have expressed himself in a modern and intellectualised language, — send forward an arclight of prophetic expression on what is at the very heart of the new movement of humanity. It is Page –198 in some degree an indication of that which the twentieth century is slowly turning to lay hold of, to develop and to make its own in a closer actuality of insight and experience. The idea in these and cognate passages anticipates the new age, but the language and method are still that of the poetic intellect straining to some fullest power of its intelligence and speech-force, and the thought and writing of those who follow Whitman, like the French "unanimist" poets, bear the same character. At the centre of English poetry, in England itself, we have found another turn of intuitive speech which is more native to that closer actuality of experience for which we seek, a turn and power brought about perhaps by the greater fire of poetic genius and imagination, the special gift of the Anglo-Celtic mind, which leaps at once to the forceful, native, instinctive energy of poetic expression of the thing it has to say. The full idea of that thing, the large and clearly conceived substance of thought and vision which should fill this mould of intuitive utterance, we do not get in any considerable degree or range, — again perhaps because of the inferior turn for large and straight thinking on the great scale, a full-orbed thinking with a sustained and total conception, which is the defect of the English mind, — but we have constant partial intuitions in detail and a treatment of life and thought and nature which presses towards the greater coming significance. That is as yet only one strain of recent poetry, but it is the most powerful and original and turns sometimes almost with a full face towards the future. These are strong touches only, but they give already some impression and mould of the thing that has to be, the ultimate creation. A new intuitive interpretation of the soul and mind of man, of the soul and mind in Nature, a thought which casts its fathom beyond the passion of life and the clarity of the intelligence and starts sounding a suggestion of the hidden and the infinite in all it touches is the shaping power and the mode of this utterance. The citations I have already given to illustrate the new rhythm and language indicate also this power and thought-turn in the substance. A few more citations from the same poets may help to bring it out with more precision. The early and greater Page – 199 poetry of Phillips has much of this stamp, — afterwards he unhappily turned to a more outward dramatic motive which was not the true and original bent of his genius, but even there his best is that which prolongs the high beauty of his first inspiration. He has no great conscious range of poetical thinking, but all the more remarkable is the power with which this new influence comes out in what he can give us. We note a new treatment of life and human emotion. The love of Idas for Marpessa is not satisfied with the old forms of passion and feeling and imaginative idealism, there are here other notes which carry the individual emotion out of itself and strive to cast it into unity with the life of Nature and the whole past life and love of humanity and the eternal continuity of passion and seeking and all the suggestion of the Infinite. The very passion for physical beauty takes on this almost mystic character; it is the passion for a body
packed with sweet Of all this world, that cup of brimming June, That jar of violet wine set in the air, That palest rose sweet in the night of life.
But, says Idas,
Not for this only do I love thee, but Because Infinity upon thee broods, And thou art full of whispers and of shadows. Thou meanest what the sea has striven to say So long, and yearned up to the cliffs to tell; Thou art what all the winds have uttered not, What the still night suggesteth to the heart. Thy voice is like to music heard ere birth, Some spirit lute touched on a spirit sea; Thy face remembered is from other worlds. It has been died for though I know not where, It has been sung of though I know not when. I am aware of other times and lands, Of births far back, of lives in many stars. Page –200 Here we have the reconciliation, already suggested by Whitman, of the full power and meaning of the individual with the full power and meaning of the universal, eternal and infinite, but it is concentrated and brought to bear on a single feeling for its enlargement with a great power of intuitive and revealing suggestion. This enlarging of the particular to meet and become one with the universal and infinite — Tennyson's knowing of what God and man is from a deep and intimate perception of all that is meant by Nature in a single little flower in the crannies — is a very characteristic and indicative feature of this new poetry. The same turn emerges in a more indirect and subtle, but not less significant way of treatment even in lines which apparently seek only to concentrate for the thought the essence of a common human idea and emotion. When the poet speaks of
Beautiful friendship tried by sun and wind, Durable from the daily dust of life,
or of Marpessa's maternal human longing,
And he shall give me passionate children, not Some radiant god that will despise me quite, But clambering limbs and little hearts that err,
the thought in itself is not uncommon, but what makes it uncommon is the turn of the utterance which by an intuitive pressure towards some deeper significance of the personal thought and emotion carries it beyond the personality of the idea and feeling into a suggestion of profound universality, a rhythm and light of some entire vibration from the depths of life caught up and held by a human self-knowledge. The same force of suggestion emerges in the treatment of Nature, whether it takes the form of an intensity of sensation,
the moment deep When we are conscious of the secret dawn Amidst the darkness that we feel is green, Page – 201 or passes through that intensity to the sense of the very soul and emotion of what seems to us in less seeing moods an inconscient and inanimate Nature, as in the
trees Motionless in an ecstasy of rain.
Meredith with his greater force of thinking gives us the clear significance of what is here only a powerful indication, a seeing identity of the soul of man with the hidden soul in earth-nature.
I neighbour the invisible So close that my consent Is only asked for spirits masked To leap from trees and flowers. And this because with them I dwell In thought, while calmly bent To read the lines dear earth designs Shall speak her life on ours.
And the same turn emerges too in direct thought on the large aspects of life, as in such a phrase as
Lonely antagonist of destiny,
or that which describes
The listless ripple of oblivion,
lines which give us by some deep suggestion to the spiritual sight a whole abiding soul aspect of man and the universe in a single revealing expression. The effort of poetry of this kind of inspiration may be defined by adapting another expression of Meredith's,
To spell the letters of the sky and read A reflex upon earth else meaningless. Page –202 And the fullness of that which it points to beyond itself, is a movement to unite the life of the earth, not lessened, not denied, not cast away, but accepted, with its own hidden spiritual reality, the one crucial movement necessary for man before he can reach that perfection which the race shall have on its heights, when
The vile plucked out of them, the unlovely slain, Not forfeiting the beast with which they are crossed, To stature of the Gods they shall attain. They shall uplift their earth to meet her Lord, Themselves the attuning chord.
This is in substance the same strain that arises finally from the more puissant voice of Whitman, but it has if a less forceful, a profounder touch, — a more delicate, intimate and spiritual closeness of seeing, experience and utterance is its charm and distinction. The indications that we get in these and other English poets open to a clearer totality in the two great Irish voices. They have, helped by the strand of a spiritual lucidity of thought in the finer Celtic mind, a sustained and conscious idea of the thing that is most inwardly stirring them to utterance. That shapes into a singular light, delicacy and beauty the whole of Yeats' poetry. Here I must be content to note three of its more distinctive features, the remarkable interweaving into one, whether against a background of Irish tradition and legend or by a directer thought, of the earthly life of man with the unseen psychical life which, if we could only see it, as we can when we go back from the frontage of things into the inner soul-spaces, presses upon the earth-life and supports it, so that at times our world seems only its detached projection; the reading through the signs of life of the brighter letters of an ideal and eternal Beauty; the insistence, even when touching exclusively our external life, on the suggestion of finer soul-values which exceed its material meanings. The poetry of A. E. is still more remarkable. What the others suggest or give us in more or less luminous glimpses, he casts into concentrated expression from a nearer spiritual knowledge, — as when he Page – 203 strikes out in a brief verse the living spiritual perception of the universal and infinite source of love, —
We bade adieu to love the old, We heard another lover then, Whose forms are myriad and untold, Sigh to us from the hearts of men.
He lives on the spiritual plane to which so much of this poetry is an indistinct or a less distinct aspiration, and his whole self-expression is bathed, perhaps rendered sometimes a little remote and unseizable by its immergence, in an unusual light, the light of the spirit breaking through the veils of the intelligence in which it has to find its means of speech. This is not the frank marriage and close unity of the earth and heavens of which Whitman and Meredith speak, but a rare, high and exclusive pinnacle of the soul's greater sight. The rest of this side of recent poetry is a climbing or pointing up from the earth-levels to the heights of Truth; but from one region of those loftiest elevations this sight looks down and opens its eye of light on the life of man and the cycles of the universe. Page – 204 |