Pegasus and "The White Horse"
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It is often thought that to call G.K. Chesterton a poet is to mistake for the high and authentic light of inspiration mere rhetorical shades masquerading as poetic significances. But the fact is that in G.K.C. there is a genuine poet buried under the clever journalist. His mass of militant controversies has obscured the silver bow of poetic power which he brought in his multifarious armoury; the too frequent thunder of his excursions on a ponderous-bodied though nimble-footed charger of prose style has led us to forget that on occasion he rides out on a more Pegasus-like hoof-stroke. In short, we fail to recognise that he has fought his way, though with many falls, into the kingdom of poetry with his Ballad of the White Horse.
As a vehicle for narration, the ballad-form can be stirring and ringing, or else sweet, in a popular way; but to sustain in it a story which keeps a tense edge of magical or splendid suggestion is a proof of rare genius. Coleridge's Ancient Mariner is faultless save for its tame moral conclusion inserted on the advice of Wordsworth and regretted by the author ever after. It is a wonder he did not drop the peccant stanzas: they are absolutely detachable and their absence would leave not the slightest scar on the poetic tissue. Chesterton's poem is not so perfect as a whole. It is good for seven-eighths of the way, but the last section is a disappointment, because there nothing striking is said except in a couple of brief moments: picturesque journalese is the utmost we have, a piquancy of phrase without any turn of true poetic surprise. Even the admirable seven-eighths is not as uniformly transfigured as Coleridge's work, yet there is sufficient to show what a fine poet Chesterton might have been if the inspired part of him had found more play in his work and learnt to sustain itself.
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That promise is a surer claim to immortality than being the most indefatigable coiner of pun and paradox in one's generation.
Though Chesterton's paradoxes make his ideas "kick", they are, in general, not really impressive: we get tired of the game and suspicious whether it is not a device to point up intellectual platitudes. When, on the other hand, his ideas begin to glow with an inner originality because some eye of his imagination has opened, some permanent chord in us is touched and we perceive whatever truth there is, partial though it be, in what he thinks, at least the heart of vision in the man is conveyed to us and that heart is always a fine mystery, irrespective of its echo or its indifference to our own. Chesterton's humour, audacious and energetic, which accompanies his paradoxes or rather prepares their witty point, has a more genuine freshness than they, but he possesses also a rarer exuberance — an imaginative fantasy as audacious and energetic, with an additional tinge of revealing splendour. The sterling virtues come in a pure and recurrent boldness of deep-sighted speech in the White Horse, deep-sighted by either a vivid adequacy or a significant exaggeration.
The former is to be found on almost any page. He says of Mark, the man from Italy, one of Alfred's allies against the Danes, that he came from
the glittering towns
Where hot white details show,
catching the exact effect of the Italian atmosphere. Or take the two lines,
The smoke of evening food and ease
Rose like a blue tree in the trees,
as a suggestion of Wessex farms glimpsed at a distance. The note of exaggeration has in poetry a triple face. An object is
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seen to be a magnified version of something minute, something commonplace and unpretentious, as Homer describes the elders on the walls of Troy as sitting and chattering like grasshoppers, in order to convey acutely the fact of their thin screeching voices and their lean legs. Or an object is compared to something physically big and imposing with a view to express an inner magnanimity, importance of status, unusual feat of self-transcendence, as in any of the old epic similes — a hero like a falling poplar, like a tower in a waste land, like a forest on fire. Or else an object is conceived under an aspect ordinarily quite incongruous with it and so a pregnant strain is created which may be defined as the miraculous interpretation of one sense in terms proper to another, an instance being Kalidasa's imagining the snowy mountain Kailasa to be the laughter of the god Shiva. Often the three forms of exaggeration grade off into one another and it is difficult to distinguish them: most of Chesterton's splendid effects are such, but he has individual examples of each kind, too. Thus, the raggedness of the army led by Colan, the man with the Celtic strain in him, another ally of Alfred's, is pictured by a synecdoche:
Grey as cobwebs hung
The banners of the Usk.
The words about Wessex enjoying an isolated condition of order and safety are a similar stroke of inspired homeliness — verging somewhat on the third type of exaggeration as well:
And Wessex lay in a patch of peace
Like a dog in a patch of sun.
A grandiose simile suits Chesterton's genius very well, for he loves to sketch with a sweeping brightness and in huge proportions; his soul lives in a state of elemental wonder in which loud colours and gigantic images are almost a part of everyday experience. But he does not lack in tender touches:
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the loud and the gigantic are really framed in those wide open windows, the eyes of his childlike heart. And the stanzas about Eldred, "the Franklin by the sea", the third companion found by Alfred for his forlorn hope, reflect this twofold psychology of Chesterton, making a skilful play of contrasting magnificence and simplicity:
As the tall white devil of the Plague
Moves out of Asian skies,
With his foot on a waste of cities
And his head in a cloud of flies;
Or purple and peacock skies grow dim
With the moving locust-tower;
Or tawny sand-winds tall and dry,
Like hell's red banners beat and fly,
When death comes out of Araby,
Was Eldred in his hour.
But while he moved like a massacre
He murmured as in sleep,
And his words were all of low hedges
And little fields and sheep.
Even as he strode like a pestilence,
That strides from Rhine to Rome,
He thought how tall his beans might be
If ever he went home.
Exaggeration in the third variety, the gripping an image that is incongruous with an occasion and the plucking from it a sudden aptness, is beautifully illustrated by lines about the voice of the Virgin Mary as heard by Alfred when, grief-stricken with his repeated failures against the Danes, he sees at the beginning of the story a vision of her:
And a voice came human but high up,
Like a cottage climbed among
The clouds.
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Perhaps more truly felicitous a surprise are several examples Chesterton provides of a mixed exaggeration, the three types interblended. Here is one — the closing metaphor about the illumined pages in a medieval copy of the Bible:
It was wrought in the monk's slow manner,
From silver and sanguine shell,
Where the scenes are little and terrible
Keyholes of heaven and hell.
But surely the most impressive lines Chesterton ever wrote are among those describing in this manner the general state of chaotic indecision after the fall of Rome, the portentous change known to history as the Dark Ages, a wild phantasmagoria of invasion from the savage parts of Europe and from the unknown East — both the Roman power and the Roman peace broken by the iron heel and the brazen cry of hordes from the earth's remote corners. He catches in effects at once majestic and weird the suggestion those times carried as of a universal dissolution:
For the end of the world was long ago —
And all we dwell to-day
As children of some second birth,
Like a strange people left on earth
After a judgment day.
For the end of the world was long ago,
When the ends of the world waxed free,
When Rome was sunk in a waste of slaves,
And the sun drowned in the sea.
When Ceasar's sun fell out of the sky
And whoso hearkened right
Could only hear the plunging
Of the nations in the night.
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When the ends of the earth came marching in
To torch and cresset gleam,
And the roads of the world that lead to Rome
Were filled with faces that moved like foam,
Like faces in a dream.
The stanza about "Caesar's sun" is almost worthy, I think, of Aeschylus, for the imaginative tension reached there in a style that just falls short of the true epic.
Here the falling short is in consequence more of the ballad-form than the poet's inspiration. It is necessary to point out this distinction both in justice to Chesterton's genius and for fear lest his admirers should rank him beyond his deserts. For, his idea and diction may be epic and yet his rhythm be found wanting. There is a certain strongly calm self-mastery in the true epic, which the jog-trot ballad-rhythm tends to disintegrate. As Matthew Arnold with his usual fine ear perceived, only a deep lyric impulse — that is, an impulse which introduces a poignant, wistful or delicate flow — can charm away the ballad-jerk, while the ample sweeping stress of the epic mood striving rather to coincide with than to smooth out that jerk is broken up by it even when not narrowed down by a pause in sense at the end of each short line. This, apart from quality of genius, should deter us from committing the mistake of comparing with Homer's battle-pieces any episode in Chesterton's account of the battle of Ethandune fought between King Alfred and the Danes within sight of that mound of rock called the White Horse which gives the poem its name. But if the ballad is incapable of the large yet contained sweep of strength, the mighty and harmonious self-possession, without which no epic style can exist, it can still display compass and power and imaginative passion. Its movement tends to be narrow because the lines are mostly end-stopped, but there is nothing in the measure itself to keep a poet from stretching out his sense beyond the line, so that the expressive unit would be not eight or six syllables but a longer average, the
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variations on that average poetically answering change of mood, shift of scene, the necessity to clear-cut or grade off a picture or an idea. And this is precisely what Chapman often does.
It may surprise some to hear that Chapman wrote ballad-poetry, but, as he never distributes a word between the fourth foot and the fifth, the fourteener couplets as handled by him divide naturally into lines of eight syllables alternating regularly with those of six — the form Wordsworth took for his Lucy Gray; only, in the Elizabethan's work the first lines do not rhyme with the third and so his frequent prolongation of the sense up to the fourteenth syllable is not interrupted by any marked sound-clinch at the eighth. Hence it has compass enough: what Chapman lacks is the epic grand style of narration, because, even when he is without tortured and extravagant conceits, his power is rough rather than harmonious. His muscular vigour, his strong nervous rhythm, have not the serene lift by which Homer's elemental enthusiasm expressed itself, the godlike elegance in which Virgil's dignified pensiveness found voice, the soaring yet mountain-secure intensity to which Dante shaped his compulsive vision, the smiling certainty of vast wing-stroke which upbears Milton through all the revelatory detours of his mind. Chapman at his best rushes, dazzles, distracts: he has compass without full harmonious sweep, brilliance without elevated control, imaginative passion without an assured ease of forceful sight. Take any of his peaks: for instance —
When the unmeasured firmament bursts to disclose her light.
Idea and language could not be finer or more forceful, but have they a harmonious strength of rhythm? Or consider a line like
The splendour of the burning ships might satiate his eyes.
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It is most vivid, impressive, puissant, but the last touch of effortless elevation is not there such as Milton could give even for pages. To quote Chapman at any length is at once to prove the weakness bound up with his vigour:
As in a stormy day
In thick-set woods a ravenous fire wraps in his fierce repair
The shaken trees and by the roots doth toss them into air;
Even so beneath Atrides' sword flew up Troy's flying heels,
Their horse drew empty chariots, and sought their thundering wheels
Some fresh directors through the field, where least the pursuit drives.
Thick fell the Trojans, much more sweet to vultures than their wives.
For the tone and rhythm of the true epic style, free from gesticulating loudness, listen to this:
Millions of spirits for his fault amerced
Of Heaven, and from eternal splendours flung
For his revolt — yet faithful how they stood,
Their glory withered; as, when heaven's fire
Hath scathed the forest oaks or mountain pines,
With singèd top their stately growth, though bare,
Stands on the blasted heath.
Chapman's general inferiority is due on the one hand to his not being a genius of the supreme kind and on the other to his ballad metre which constantly intrudes its jog-trot even when nobility and the grand style are throwing on him the bright shadow of their pinions.1
1. In writing this whole paragraph I am indebted to several illuminating suggestions made by Sri Aurobindo.
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G.K.C.'s manner is akin to Chapman's with regard to audacity, an explosive power, either curious or clear, which can give a high and excellent level of poetry though not its ne plus ultra. In spite of his using many anapaests the essential manner and movement are unmistakable: write out his couplets as single lines or his quatrains as couplets and you have often the Chapman fourteeners:
And Wessex lay in a patch of peace like a dog in a patch of sun...
Where the scenes are little and terrible key-holes of heaven and hell...
As the tall white devil of the Plague moves out of Asian skies,
His foot in a waste of cities and his head in a cloud of flies...
When Ceasar's sun fell out of the sky, and whoso hearkened right
Could only hear the plunging of the nations in the night.
Even when the stanzas are longer and the fourteeners are divided by intervening eight or less feet, there is as skilful a play of rise and fall, ripple and eddy, within the persistent plunge, as the jerkiness of the ballad-measure would allow, and bold imaginative streaks shine out amid fibres of a coarser stuff. The lines already quoted about the moving locust-tower and the tawny sand-winds are a striking example. Elsewhere too Chesterton makes effective music:
Whirling the one sword in his hand,
A great wheel in the sun,
He sent it splendid through the sky,
Flying before the shaft could fly —
It smote Earl Harold over the eye,
And blood began to run.
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Colan stood weaponless, while Earl Harold with a ghastly smile of defiance stumbled dead.
Then Alfred, prince of England,
And all the Christian earls,
Unhooked their swords and held them up
Each offered to Colan like a cup
Of chrysolite and pearls.
And the King said, "Do you take my sword
Who have done this deed of fire,
For this is the manner of Christian men,
Whether of steel or priestly pen,
That they cast their hearts out of their ken
To get their heart's desire."
True poetry has a breadth and depth of voice, besides mere length. Through most of these lines the first two are as good as absent. I submit, however, that, at three places in the above, Chesterton finely executes three fourteener progressions:
Whirling the one sword in his hand, a great wheel in the sun...
Each offered to Colan like a cup of chrysolite and pearls...
That they cast their hearts out of their ken to get their heart's desire...
The whirled sword is described with an admirable breadth of voice, a quality of magnificence and rhythmic volume. The middle quotation is the weakest, seeming at first mere length of voice filled with a decorative sentiment. Indeed the opening trio of feet is poor, but the concluding phrase saves the line by a depth of voice, for depth means a simple, subtle or else powerful suggestion of some beautiful or poignant
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thought and feeling. And here there is an exquisite subtlety: the half-rusty blades offered by Alfred's tatterdemalion troops were meant to express the feeling that Colan's act was great and heroic enough to deserve a royal reward, a precious and plenary recognition, cups of chrysolite and pearls. Alfred's closing words in that little speech to Colan give a powerful depth, but breadth too accompanies it. All the three lines together give a pretty adequate average of the virtues which carry The Ballad of the White Horse, despite many clumsy or flat moments, to a place in poetic literature — forceful figurative sight, beautifully suggested thought or feeling, sense of the inward significance of life's happenings.
2
Most poetry confines itself to forceful figurative sight and beautifully suggested thought, but when these combine with a sense of the inward significance of life's happenings the three together render a very satisfying greatness possible. G.K.C. is not by any means a great poet; still, that wondrous possibility he did have, though in a rather uncertain manner, with a rather fitful and sporadic brilliance. For his sudden flashes, lyric or quasi-epic, have that rare third virtue — a delicate or a strong grasp of meanings behind the surface, an out-look thrown from a depth of idea and emotion to understand and interpret the spectacle of events, an attempt to feel the pulse of the wider instincts, impulses, destinies, powers at work in the universe. In poetry this virtue has no indispensable affinity to the occult exquisiteness of Yeats or the mystic opulence that is Sri Aurobindo's. Occult or mystic it may be, yet its fundamental connotation is not thus limited: it can also be moral or philosophical, provided there is no dull morality or dry philosophy. Just as Arnold could not read Macaulay's
To all the men upon this earth
Death cometh soon or late
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without a cry of pain at its ring of false metal, one cannot refrain from laughter at the goody-goody sentimentalism tagged on to the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge:
He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.
It cannot be arraigned on the score of simplicity or even a childlike naïveté: the mariner has a mentality primitive enough; the point is that the simplicity everywhere else has a delicate strangeness, a touch of ether and fire, while here a commonplace diction narrows down as well as superficialises the large interpretative vision this ballad brings — the keen consciousness of profound impulses and powers of being which deepens the general poetic pleasure, adding a new facet to the rich quality of the word-music. Chesterton also brings a large interpretative vision, marred here and there by a too obvious moral and pro-Christian colour, but often resplendent with a true Christian idealism and a vivid if partial understanding of alien ardours. In addition, his sparks of "high seriousness" bear a cryptic tinge, so that the supernatural is never far away, although its nearness is unlike the atmosphere created in Coleridge's poem. In Coleridge the inspiration is more weirdly cryptic — the ancient mariner is a creature haunted by supernatural life-forms whose touch is almost directly felt by us; Chesterton's verse is haunted by supernatural idea-forms — that is, a peculiar nuance in the language and a certain imaginative glimpse suggest presences beyond the mind, without opening a door almost in the senses to feel them. The very first two stanzas set the cryptic tone:
Before the gods that made the gods
Had seen their sunrise pass,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was cut out of the grass.
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Had drunk at dawn their fill,
Was hoary on the hill.
If the ballad-swing and jaunt had not interfered, the thought and the cast of phrase would have reached a unique perfection. As it is, too, it is worthwhile marking the poetic device whereby the antiquity of the White Horse is increasingly hinted: the passing of the sunrise is mentioned before the actual dawn. Then, the word "hoary" is an absolutely felicitous pun with its double meaning of "white" and "old": Chesterton must have written it with a whoop of delight. But the surest stroke to express the immemorial is the phrase: "the gods that made the gods" — a cryptic turn in which is summarised the Norse feeling that there was vista on inscrutable vista of the supernatural, there were powers behind mysterious powers, there were strange successions of divine dynasties. In another stanza, Elf the blue-eyed minstrel of the Rhine-land first sings how the gods forgot the mistletoe,
And soundless as an arrow of snow
The arrow of anguish fell
killing Balder the beautiful. Then he conjures up an uncanny Fate dogging the world's steps:
The thing on the blind side of the heart,
The wrong side of the door,
The green plant groweth, menacing
Almighty lovers in the spring,
There is always a forgotten thing,
And love is not secure.
Every line here is fine cryptic poetry and high seriousness; and what a verbal gem is that "almighty" with its rare suggestion of the elated joy and flush and godlike power felt
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by young love. An equally fine passage of interpretative vision, with a couple of exceedingly magical moments — the end of the third verse and that of the fourth — is about Colan and the Celtic twilight ever in his thought:
He kept the Roman order,
He made the Christian sign:
But his eyes grew often blind and bright,
And the sea that rose in the rocks at night
Rose to his head like wine.
He made the sign of the Cross of God,
He knew the Roman prayer,
But he had unreason in his heart
Because of the gods that were.
Even they that walked on the high cliffs,
High as the clouds were then,
Gods of unbearable beauty
That broke the hearts of men.
And whether in seat or saddle,
Whether with frown or smile,
Whether at feast or fight was he,
He heard the noise of a nameless sea
On an undiscovered isle.
Christian idealism finds often a memorable expression in the course of Chesterton's narrative: not so often as it should, though, considering that almost the entire poem strains to be such an expression. Alfred goes gathering comrades after his vision of the Virgin, and to each of them he conveys its compulsive inspiration, for he is fired by a reality greater than his personal self:
Out of the mouth of the Mother of God,
Like a little word come I.
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She has not spoken to him about the end of his enterprise, she has left him to "go gaily in the dark", but
Her face was like an open word
Where brave men speak and choose;
The very colours of her coat
Were better than good news.
So he brings with him a convinced prophecy that what seems impossible shall be done — the Dane's tyranny shall be trod down, their heathen creed destroyed, and the English live to see, with the Virgin's help,
A tale where a man looks down on the sky
That has long looked down on him.
Here we have the cryptic at its most audacious, as also when Alfred during his incognito reconnoitre in the Danish camp as a poor harper sings to them the Christian idea of man and the first fall and how, since it was due to the divine freedom with which God had gifted him and not to some ineluctable or blind Fate, even Adam's transgression was a glory — though it brought human nature most dangerously near perdition. That dangerous nearness, that dreadful proclivity, is caught in a figure:
He brake Him and betrayed Him,
And fast and far he fell,
Till you and I may stretch our necks
And burn our beards in hell.
It may be that the figure gains a doubly delectable point for those who boast a hirsute chin. Lovers of poetic elegance may demur that its language is almost like a blow in the face. But the refusal altogether to enjoy it argues a defect in the artistic gusto. For this blow is not crude extravagance: it is shot out at the mind's eye, the imaginative vision, and its
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impact makes one "see stars" somewhat in the sense in which out of two sounds Browning's Abt Vogler makes not a third but a star. It is not the grotesque running riot: the grotesque has been illumined and sublimated, even if the "star" Chesterton gives us is an asteroid and not quite a planet. Aeschylus who called Helen "a lion's whelp" would have relished it; Marlowe who spoke of "Cassandra sprawling in the streets" would have gloried in it.... Chesterton, however, has more than one string to his bow: his style can be Elizabethan in effects other than the Gothic — a quieter force and a gentler vividness. Perhaps the lines that sum up best the Christian courage and the Christian mystic tendency that are his main theme are those already quoted:
To get their heart's desire:
while the most beautiful picture of the mystic truth which is believed to be evoking and guiding that courage through the ages is drawn in that reappearance of the Virgin on the battlefield just as the last rally of the broken English troops is made and the last charge to victory commanded by Alfred:
The King looked up and what he saw
Was a great light like death,
For our Lady stood on the standards rent,
As lonely and as innocent
As when between white walls she went
And the lilies of Nazareth.
I have quoted enough to show Chesterton's merit. His ballad — minus the last section — has eminences which will not let it sink out of memory. In toto it is more a promise than a performance, rhetoric and rant or popular sentimentalism thrust themselves again and again between the sheer poetic cries, and we are compelled to accept the entire piece with a certain reserve; but there is no questioning that the root of
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great poetry was in Chesterton. He remains a might-have-been, yet with moments of inspiration that are noteworthy for a special reason. I hold that distinct lines of poetic consciousness run behind the world's outer life and mind, sending out shoots, so to speak, into the latter; and when these are received in abundance we have an Elizabethan, an Augustan, a Victorian or any other age of poetry with ruling characteristic notes. G.K.C., as I have already hinted, belongs in his defects as well as merits to the Elizabethan, though with a subtle difference from its general temperament since he is one of its stray shoots. He has poetically the mental turn of Chapman and Marlowe, and he has their tendency of life-impetus, too; but in them the latter royally disported itself in its own authentic vigour or, otherwise, seized on the mind to attain a more ingenious effectivity, while in Chesterton it is rather the mind using the recrudescent life-impetus for his most telling strokes. All the same, his affinity with the "spacious days", with an inner poetic world of greater power and possibility than at present manifest in purely English letters makes his finer qualities more interesting than those exercised by several living poets. He has a resilient boldness and even his delicacy is dynamic. And he has behind him a splendid enthusiasm: the White Horse stands like a dominating symbol of valorous Faith ready to rush towards death, death which to its eyes is "a great light" leading unto the beatific vision. No doubt he fails to appreciate the old Norse religion in its full relation to life, unlike Morris who gave a puissant reflection of it in his Sigurd the Volsung. That was to be expected, so steeped is he in the Christian ideology; and I for one find no reason to complain against this bias, since it is blown towards us in gusts of genuine poetic ecstasy. But that there should be no more than gusts when the ecstasy is so peculiarly brave renders Chesterton's journalistic triumphs an inexcusable self-dissipation.
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