ADVENTURES IN CRITICISM
Adventures in Criticism
AMAL KIRAN (K.D. SETHNA)
The Integral Life Foundation
P.O. Box 239
Waterford CT. 06385
USA
First published 1996
(Typeset in 10.5/13 Palatino)
© Amal Kiran (K.D. Sethna)
Published by
The Integral Life Foundation, U.S.A.
Printed at Sri Aurobindo Ashram Press, Pondicherry
PRINTED IN INDIA
J606 (94)/500/96
Prejudices, Principles, Perversities
Whoever wishes to catch the essence of poetry must throw aside all his pet prejudices about both the matter and the manner of art. No doubt, poetry of a particular type holds a special appeal for him, but that should not debar him from distilling the last drop of enjoyment from other types of verse or lead him to label them as artistic failures. For, all art is an attempt to express the various forces of man's being in a beautifully measured way, and so long as the measure of beauty is somehow obtained it would be preposterous as well as pitifully self-privative to denounce from the artistic standpoint a poem for the nature of the force expressed in it.
The Victorians could not relish the beginning of Swinburne's Anactoria, where the poet voices Sappho's yearning in a mood of cruel and morbid exultation for the body of the girl Anactoria whom she loves — perhaps the most sadistic cry in English literature:
I would find grievous ways to have thee slain,
Intense device and superflux of pain;
Vex thee with amorous agonies, and shake
Life at thy lips and leave it there to ache;
Strain out thy soul with pangs too soft to kill,
Intolerable interlude and infinite ill;
Relapse and reluctation of the breath,
Dumb tunes and shuddering semi-tones of death...
Take thy limbs living and new-mould with these
A lyre of many faultless agonies.
Though the passage is perverse, the language gives us no mere pathology bluntly describing a "complex". There is a heat of the imagination captured in verbal appositeness and a masterfully modulated rhythm, the violence is rich enough
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with a deft control for a strong though not throughout a great beauty to shine through the savage motif. And where sense and sound have been mated in precise and moving words with a result of beauty, poetry as such undeniably exists, whatever the theme and style.
Here, of course, it is the theme that proved a rock of offence: the style is not startlingly unexpected — beyond the freshness and vividness indispensable to poetic activity. No sudden gaps are left in the language, the phrases are not pithed to the point of making them stand without any marked transition-link — compact stepping-stones set at difficult distances for a series of leaps from author to reader. Such a style may not prove everybody's delight — at least it did not please Ruskin when Browning indulged in it; yet to reject it just because it is wanting in effect shading off into effect is to take too facilely the intuitive faculty in us on which the poetic moment always impinges with its open or its subtle concords. And where the intuitive faculty is concerned, there can also be no rigid ruling about the texture of language any more than about the movement of it. The intuitive faculty recognises indeed a norm which persists, but the persistence is in the thick of diversities and never clings to a monotonous or single-track method. Many shades and grades of words must be permitted: The vocabulary of Donne need not be cast out by Milton's, the Hopkinsian by that of Bridges. To be able to appreciate the poetic moment — even while noting the absence of one's favourite themes and turns and tones — constitutes, besides an enviably large capacity for enjoyment, the soul of criticism.
Catholicity of outlook, however, must avoid being a weak tolerance: in our zeal to show an impartial mind we must not let our aesthetic acumen be blunted by the interestingness or momentousness of the subject, the sincerity or novelty of the treatment. Though we may value Wordsworth's psychological observations, he can never be forgiven for enfeebling his discoveries by deficient technique or setting marvellous lines to voyage, lonely and depressed, half their freshness lost,
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through a strange waste of watery verse like much of Prelude — in the literal and most damnatory connotation of the term, blank verse. Similarly, just because we do not judge from personal temperament, The Waste Land of T.S. Eliot's labyrinthine cross-lit fitfulness need not be accepted as a poetic paradise. In every department of art, what is required is not only "significant form" nor, as the modern temperament inclines to believe, a mere energy glorying in its own caprice: what is fundamental is a thrill of significant form, spontaneous energy in love with meaning and measure. And great poetry, like any other art attaining greatness, is a rapture, a peace or a pain, according to its creator's mood, in which a significance is shaped out with a glow and a tingle as if some secret from beyond the outer consciousness pushed through, bringing with it splendours and sweetnesses and poignancies far wider and deeper than the common range to which that consciousness is accustomed. Words become wings and in each movement of sound and sense some fiat as of a god strikes us, asserting by means of any part of man's being and through any mode of word-design and pattern of rhythm a unique inevitable loveliness.
No better example, perhaps, of a certain style of great poetry can be produced than the closing lines of the quotation from Swinburne:
...Take thy limbs living and new-mould with these
Their excellence is wrought, on the side of rhythm, by a keen yet sublime movement disposing stresses irregularly in the first line to indicate the change spoken of there, and in the second approximating as closely as possible to the normal iambic base in order to represent the strangely flawless result of the new-moulding: within this general music there is a play of assonances and alliterations, the press forward and suspense of sound echoing the significance, the long lingering last syllable of "agonies" that creates an intensifying
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effect. On the verbal side, the success is due to the surprise of the image-word "lyre" which not only gives the idea a concrete quality but also tunes it up to its extreme pitch of expression through the most rhapsodical figure possible to it, and the epithet "faultless" glorifies in a vein equally original the ravage caused by that violent hunger for physical beauty, a ravage this spell-binding beauty bears like a melody in which pain has found a perfect voice. The meaning is demoniac but chiselled with strokes which bring forth poetic greatness from a crude passion; for this greatness arises when the light of a new imaginative idea clarifies an emotion and a rare emotional heat vivifies an imaginative idea and their interfusion is then reflected, rather embodied, in a just arrangement of words remarkable for their accuracy and their combined vibration ringing apt changes on a fixed base of metre.
Such a description is not likely to go down the modernist gullet, for it seethes not at all with the anarchy in aesthetic values that is behind modernist poetry. Indeed, this poetry is so many different things that it is difficult to catch its essence in a definition — unless one says that it is a poetry of revolt against everything that can be revolted against! Each poet fixes upon a bugbear from the past and performs a dance of destruction on its body. One expresses his contempt for the traditional method of arranging lines, by distributing words and phrases in drunken zigzags across the page; another is less fantastic to the eye but yaps barbarically in the ear by a supreme disdain for metrical rhythm and imaginative nobility; a third believes in presenting raw sensation or incoherent chunks of the subconscious as a legitimate sample of art; a fourth less typically abreast of the times is yet intolerant of the old poetic purple and insists on the simple life to the point of colloquial drabness. All these and many other tendencies have a centre of gravity, so to speak, amidst their irresponsible exaggerations, and some genuine success is perceptible in each departure from the norm; but a large amount of modernist poetry revolts in no other sense than
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that it is revolting to one's finest instincts.
The cult of the capricious, the violent, the crude cannot lead anywhere, whether practised with simple jerks or complicated jumps; not even when a semblance of formal dignity is kept and there is no cutting up of lines and phrases and even words to make a Cummings-holiday. We cannot expect even a Masefield to come off with flying colours where a Browning has failed: Browning with his vehement genius tried the effects of expressive cacophony and proved to his own cost that, though he could sometimes distil a pungent dramatic flavour out of them, sheer poetry was in the majority of experiments bound to suffer a dissolution. In fact, to suggest the harsh or the grotesque it is sufficient to employ a certain image-power coupled with strength of diction without resorting to ugly phraseology, clotting one's consonants and loading the back of one's metre to a breaking point. Sandberg and his free-versifying tribe produce better work than the cacophonists, but Whitman whose elemental enthousiasmos none of the recent free-versifiers have matched revealed the high-water mark possible to the new medium and at the same time the sure though subtle loss it involved when used to voice the "immortal longings" of life. He had the eagle's heart, the eagle's vision, but without the wings of metrical rhythm he was, on the whole, baulked of his right to the utter zenith — for, metre by its marked flux and reflux endows verbal music with a distinctness, a stability, a haunting power, a magic memorableness, whereby the idea and emotion expressed acquire a definite and sustained charm of vitality which evokes more easily than any other rhythm a strong sympathetic correspondence in the reader.
As regards the right of the chaotic, in the subconscious or in sensation, to the poetic domain, one half of the truth was touched by the Symbolist Movement in France which attempted to exploit the value of strange associations and intermingling sense-suggestions free from the intellect's logical and explanatory devices — but not without the aid of beautiful rhythm and metre: in short, a new method for
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giving poetic pleasure. The other half which even those arch-symbolists Mallarmé and Rimbaud often missed was that the flow of associations and symbols, if restricted to form a particular poem, must carry in it by virtue of that restriction a coherence which can be perceived as however subdued a single effect: some undercurrent must convey itself to the reader, providing a means of instinctively feeling if not logically understanding the poem as a whole. What the present unintelligibles forget is both sides of the truth: they crush completely the poetic art by heaping a Pelion of inharmony on an Ossa of incoherence.
Mistaken also in their extremism are those who, while preserving the metrical basis and avoiding verbal savagery as well as imaginative freakishness, yet object to any transcendence of the conversational turn and temper. The latter is no defect in itself; what the poet has to be on guard against is the bathetic or the prosaic. Professor Campbell has observed that Homer could speak of Ulysses' dog Argos as being full of lice without sacrificing all that Arnold claimed for him — rapidity, simplicity, nobility — because the phrase in Greek had a rich rhythm and dignity side by side with its fluent naturalness: "full" there is enipleios and "lice" kynoraisteôn — both polysyllables combining resonance and splendour with a clear delicacy as the same description in English most flatly refuses to do. And if poetry is to be something finer than mere metrical prose — that is to say, not an artificiality — it must seek a mode of utterance unlike conversation when the common idiom proves incapable of answering its noble needs. Phonetic values are indispensable to versecraft and in this respect the arrangement of words must be studied no less than their individual quality, so that at the same time the meaning emerges effectively and the rhythm builds itself to a fresh pattern without losing grip on the metrical beat as it dangerously tends to do in the efforts of Abercrombie and Drinkwater to equate blank verse with oral speech. The poet has often to employ a delicate spell of remoteness from the ordinary language, for his art consists in a certain specialness
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of expressive mood which goes home by a rhythmical lift and intensity in phrase and metre. He may be straightforward and simple and even conversational provided he conjures up that subtle strangeness. Wordsworth did so at his best and Shakespeare almost always when he wanted to say anything worth saying in a swift and clear fashion which was less crowded with images than his usual style. But the important principle in poetry is not plainness, conversational or otherwise, though that has a legitimate place: it is the artistic treatment which matters. To eschew vague ornamentation and rhetoric is no doubt a true instinct, and the modern recoil from the heavy exuberance in some of the early work of Laurence Binyon or the inflated emptiness of William Watson in particular moods makes for a healthy tension and pithiness; yet it is purblind folly and a deafness of ear to run down as too elaborate the lyric exquisiteness of colourful phrase Binyon could display —
And sweet the rose floats on the arching briar's
Green fountain sprayed with delicate frail fires —
or the epic grandeur of a packed sonnet-close like this from Watson —
And over me
The everlasting taciturnity,
The august, inhospitable, inhuman night
Glittering magnificently unperturbed.
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Among great English poets the one who has suffered in these days of jangling nerves and psycho-analytic aberrations the utmost neglect because of his matter, mood and manner is Edmund Spenser. To the modern mind with its personal and introspective bent he seems quite useless, especially as he expended his imagination on themes which do not interest us any more, the age of chivalry and Una being more irrevocably gone than even that of the Canterbury pilgrims. In fact, whatever customs and figures of Chaucer's time may have fallen into obsolescence, the main stuff of his creation still corresponds to life's play around us, and that is why Spenser is as good as forgotten, while Chaucer with his generally less poetic temper persists. But to the true lover of poetry who is not altogether lost in the whirlpools of the life-force the "Faerie Queene" must always remain delightful despite its allegorical remoteness and its structural ambiguity. For there are so many individual scenes and episodes rich in the poetic vein that to skip Spenser completely would be a considerable aesthetic loss, larger at least than that entailed by missing to study how Mr. Aldous Huxley recoils from the Elizabethan romanticist's so-called sugary vagueness to pen doggerel about spermatozoa.
It is true that Spenser does not deal with problems immediately facing us, but after all there must be some "time to stand and stare" — particularly when such staring puts us in contact with beauty. The aim of poetry is not primarily to provide a guide to practical self-adjustment or even intellectual growth: it is to touch us with the magic and power of some absolute beauty whose image it tries to transmit by means of expressive word-music made as faultless as possible. That magic and power has a large variety of heights and depths, and I dare say if I had to choose between Spenser's perfection and Dante's I would not hesitate a minute, because Dante gives a far more intimate touch of the
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absolute beauty which great verse must draw close to us by its patterned inspiration, its unimpeachably expressed and rhythmed mood — gay, grave, subtle or vehement. Yet I do not know how one is to deny the title of great poetry to the stanza full of a grisly glimmer, which continues the description of the Cave of Mammon:
But roof and floor, and walls were all of gold,
Both overgrown with dust and old decay,
And hid in darkness that none could behold
The hue thereof: for view of cheerful day
Did never in that house itself display,
But a faint shadow of uncertain light;
Such as a lamp whose light doth fade away;
Or as the moon clothèd with cloudy night
Does show to him that walks in fear and sad affright.
Or take that other miracle of Spenser's mind, the House of Sleep to which Archimago sends for a dream:
And more to lull him in his slumber soft,
A trickling stream from high rock tumbling down,
And ever-drizzling rain upon the loft,
Mix'd with a murmuring wind, much like the sound
Of swarming bees, did cast him in a swound.
No other noise, nor people's troublous cries,
That still are wont t'annoy the wallèd town,
Might there be heard; but careless quiet lies
Wrapt in eternal silence, far from enemies.
With such passages cropping up in the "Faerie Queene", it is critical perversity to regard it as worthless; when, however, we are asked to weigh its total coinage of fancy there need be no prejudice in its favour to prevent its very unequal intensity from being acknowledged no less than the limitations of its creative range. Words such as Chaucer puts in the mouth of an old beggar —
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And on the ground, which is my modres gate,
I knockè with my staff, erlich and late,
And sa to hire, "Leve, modre, let me in,
Lo, how I vanish, flesh and blood and skin,
Alas! when shall my bonès ben at reste? —
words filled with a keen imaginative pathos are beyond Spenser's genius, fertile though it was; for his was a descriptive imagination which could cast a spell of iridescence or of grim shadows but the sudden metaphorical surprise by which psychological poignancies can be intimately revealed we do not encounter in his work; and for the simple reason that his poetic excellence is for the most part divorced from personal emotion. On the whole, however, he is more often great than Chaucer. Except for the Prologue and the episode of the Christian child slain in the ghetto there is not much in the "Canterbury Tales" about which we can feel that the metrical swing and the chime of rhyme so transfigure the composition that its soul would absolutely evaporate without them — and there is also no great intensity of expression except in scattered lines like that in the Knight's Tale when he relates how a thick wood was cut down by Theseus to make a funeral pyre but says that he will refrain from describing the plight of the nymphs, the fauns, the beasts and the birds,
Ne how the ground agast was of the light.
Volumes of description could not tell us the condition of the suddenly exposed ground with the in-feeling packed into that almost onomatopoeic "agast". Verbal and rhythmic cunning, whether of onomatopoeia or any other means to convey a mood-atmosphere, does not as a rule belong in its true poetic nature to Chaucer: it is the new element Spenser brought into play and it is the element which constitutes the vital differentia of great poetry, transfiguring the substance beyond the reach of prose style. Spenser is not uniformly
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successful, all his charm cannot persuade us that his narrative does not need pruning nor that, even after its being pruned, long stretches of an attenuated sweetness will not remain if the narrative is to have any continuity; but the remarkable point about him is that his music is never absent, thin as the matter it supports may sometimes be. This invariable command over exquisiteness of sound equips a poet for a place in the front rank; for, if he can bewitch by his choice language and cadence in the teeth of a trivial substance, how perfect must the expressive flowering be from a significant soil!
Very few artists come anywhere near the exquisiteness Spenser achieves by an ever-varying technique of recurrent harmonies: he manipulates his artistry in a thousand different ways, ringing infinite changes on a system of correspondence and reiteration, and shifting his pauses with a most effective naturalness. And all this magic is knit together by means of his rhyme-scheme, the elastic coherence of the superb stanza he invented with a ear for echoes diversely disposed, the play of pentameter resolved in an Alexandrian climax so as to introduce repeatedly a break in the monotony and yet not form too sharp a distinction because of its being linked in rhyme with the quatrain which precedes it and which again is linked to the opening four lines. Considering his conscious artistry, his marvellous charm of rhythm, it would be fair to compare him with Virgil.
Virgil is a poet unquestionably superior to Spenser in a total computation: he is more constructive and he is intense with a frequency of which the Elizabethan does not seem capable, but as an artist in sound he is not unrivalled. Spenser rendered the simple buoyant attractiveness he inherited from Chaucer multifariously subtle and richly languid, while Virgil's characteristics sprang from a smooth strength and a majesty flavoured with wistfulness, which have in them something akin to Spenser's tone but are distinct in their psychological note. Virgil is soft because he is haunted by the "tears of things", yet stately because, seeing
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no way out, he is spurred by a high moral purpose to face mortality; Spenser is soft because he has escaped from the ordinary existence and its clashes to the luxury of a dreamland, yet stately because there is nothing in that region to break his spirit, and truth and virtue can ride in triumph through its spacious enchantment. Modern psychology would say that Spenser achieves in his art a sublimation of his discontent with life's contradictions, but that Virgil carries an unresolved complex, the fighter in him bearing always an open wound which is too deep for his natural strength and can be endured only by a willed fortitude. Both, however, turned their moods into music of a rare order, though both had to face languages recalcitrant to rhythm. By means of the device of elision employed with the most appropriate finesse Virgil transmuted into a ripple of inter-blending sounds the rather ponderous strength and precision of Latin, and his ear was helped in its rhythmic inspiration by the latitude which Latin allows in manoeuvring with the position of words to secure euphony and emphasis. A similar plasticity Spenser never had at his disposal; but the English of his day resorted to frequent inversions and of this he took advantage. His greatest instrument, though, of melody no less than picturesqueness was the fact that language was not yet a fixed thing — it was in a condition of semi-fluidity, opening out dazzling prospects of assimilating archaism and innovation with current usage. So, employing a remarkable instinct for the vibration and atmosphere of words necessary to make his world of fancy bewitchingly remote and ideal, Spenser revived obsolete terms for the sake of their music and colour, arrested word-beauties about to fall into desuetude and boldly added to the extant vocabulary by coinages of his own with some pretext of old analogies and even without any if he saw the pure artistic need — all the while claiming an absolutely free hand as regards spelling and pronunciation. But he did not work out a mere tissue of verbal licences: he so deftly wove his innovations with the natural genius of contemporary speech
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that in spite of the novel sheen of his texture there remained an unpedantic simplicity and clearness which made his style the legitimate foundation for all future poetry.
Virgil marked almost a ne plus ultra of poetical Latinity; Spenser had a chord or two missing because no Lucretius and Catullus prepared his way and also on account of a certain dearth in himself of direct passion and that epic fibre which, for all his tendency towards the effeminate, Virgil never lacked — yet his spell of music was so creative that hardly any great poet since but has fallen under it. We moderns, even when free from the paroxysmal influence of our Ezra Pounds and keeping our senses sweet with the old sober ecstasies, may imagine ourselves independent of it since we do not require to worship him, having Shelley and Keats as our first guiding stars; but our independence is unreal — Shelley and Keats are the two poets whose affinity to Spenser is the deepest and in their own manner they have distilled anew his musical attar for us. His stamp on the language is as permanent and unmistakable as Shakespeare's and Milton's, and it is the surest test of critical judgment to find amidst contemporary excitements an impartial hour for appreciating the languid greatness of the "Faerie Queene".
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W.B. Yeats — Poet of Two Phases
Throughout his life W.B. Yeats followed a star above contemporary standards of poetic brilliance. But he was a writer of two phases and in the one which came later his wagon often pulled the star to which it had been hitched into the roadways of day-to-day speech, and showed how a high purpose could illumine tones and methods which in other hands prove an aesthetic failure. In the initial phase, however, he was at his richest from the viewpoint of poetry proper, for there the inspiration seems to be the most continual.
Secret Worlds and Human Heart-tones
This inspiration is a distinct type of Symbolism: it is surcharged with an unusual second sight opening on vistas of Celtic mythology, and it moves on a sound-stream which is exquisite incantation. The atmosphere it creates is due in part to a sensuous monotony, but there are subtle senses as well as the gross, and Yeats's concrete experience is of a world that shimmers behind the physical consciousness, a world of "odorous twilight" where "dream-dimmed eyes" under "cloud-pale eyelids" watch "flame on flame" guarding some "incorruptible Rose". Such and other key-words he interblends with a changing vividness of phrase to embody the master-passion of his life — love.
Yeats has remained at every stage of his career a poet of love, but here it is a mood aglow with occult images. It is a poignancy which the spirits behind the veil portion out to man as his greatest blessing; it is a net of fire cast about mortal limbs making them prisoner to an immortal beauty; through its spells and its tyrannies the clay-born hours partake of an Everlivingness hidden in the deeps of the heart. Though the occult perception thrills through Yeats's poems even apart from the cry of love, their finest moments are often when the hues from secret worlds have mated the
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heart-tones of this. The pure expression of the former is never so haunting as in those eight lines:
O sweet everlasting Voices, be still;
Go to the guards of the heavenly fold
And bid them wander obeying your will,
Flame under flame, till Time be no more;
Have you not heard that our hearts are old,
That you call in birds, in wind on the hill,
In shaken boughs, in tide on the shore?
O sweet everlasting Voices, be still.
From the love-poems it is difficult to choose, presenting as they do unbroken flawlessness everywhere, but in two or three places delicacy and grandeur go hand in hand. Such seems to me the close of that series of couplets in which the memory of a loveliness the poet feels he has known in previous births mingles with his living passion — lights and shadows from a more enchanted past which ultimately carry his mind beyond themselves to yet profounder intuitions:
For that pale breast and lingering hand
Come from a more dream-heavy land,
A more dream-heavy hour than this;
And when you sigh from kiss to kiss
I hear white Beauty sighing, too,
For hours when all must fade like dew,
But flame on flame, and deep on deep,
Throne over throne where in half sleep,
Their swords upon their iron knees,
Brood her high lonely mysteries.
The Art of Indefinite Suggestion
In both these quotations what is common is an indefinite suggestiveness which is the very soul of Yeats's art during his early phase. That phase culminates in Shadowy Waters
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where the story of Forgael and Dectora is told in a language mirroring, as it were, strange symbolic silences, for words are packed with image-colour only to suggest the mysterious and the ineffable. But Yeats's most marked triumph is precisely this pervading vagueness — a triumph since it arises not from the sense being diluted or because he errs in verbal craft. His phrases are none save the right necessary ones, to change them would be to spoil his work, and the general impression he makes through them is of something actually visioned and accurately described. So perfect is the stimulus of his poetry that we get the sight and sound and even the subtle touch of some real world: only, it is a domain of mist, an unknown country which lies in a glimmering haze. The vagueness is not a shortcoming, as there is no mental inanity, no lack of sincere emotion, no mere decadent virtuosity, but an appropriate technique interpreting a very genuinely perceived "inscape" and making vagueness itself a positive quality of vision.
Only one contemporary poet can challenge comparison with Yeats in the art of indefinite suggestion by word and rhythm: Walter de la Mare. Their techniques overlap in several respects, mainly in a use of spondees to produce mournful and remote reverberations; but Yeats is a greater musician and his management of broad vowels and harmonious consonants adds a crystalline richness to the slow chant made by his spondees:
Surely thine hour has come, thy great wind blows,
Far-off, most secret, and inviolate Rose?
Or take his blank verse:
For life moves out of a red flare of dreams
Into a common light of common hours
Until old age bring the red flare again.
A glide-anapaest is frequent in his blank verse as an aid to his
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most artistic effects:
A sweet, miraculous, terrifying sound,
or,
No, not angelical but of the old gods,
Who wander about the world to waken the heart.
Walter de la Mare is not only noted for spondaic rhythms and for assonances, like
Oh, no man knows
Through what wild centuries
Roves back the rose;
but he practises too a queer magic by syncopation, dropping a syllable and lengthening out its companion in a foot:
Speak not — whisper not —
Here bloweth thyme and bergamot...
Beauty vanishes, beauty passes,
However rare — rare it be...
Or again,
See the house, how dark it is,
Beneath its vast-boughed trees.
Here also is a haunted language, but mostly de la Mare is the singer of a romantic strangeness and of the superstitious instinct. It is a domain different from Yeats's: even in the faery element their treatments are unlike, for de la Mare is a poet of the imaginative child, while Yeats goes beyond to a
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supernatural innocence, a childhood wise with unknown voices. The former evokes a ghost-atmosphere in which the colour is subdued and a delicate solemnity reigns over all: the latter spreads out vistas like melting jewels, his shadows too bear each a quivering aureole, and it is not ghosts that hover round him but Elemental Powers and Masters of Destiny, the old gods —
Caoilte tossing his burning hair,
And Niamh calling Away, come away.
Joy and sorrow in Yeats's poetry are alike a keen ecstasy, in fact they are almost one and the same, and whatever delicacy he puts into his art is not solemn but intense: all his flush of triumph is yet passionately wistful and he drinks anguish like a nectar. De la Mare stands on the threshold between the waking life and the subconscious: Yeats belongs to some complete inner realm and a full light from there comes through. Unlike the other who sees a spot of light and concentrates on it, trying to discover how it touches and changes the outer vision, he is a secure seer with an eye that ranges over the entire "inscape" of mystery until his outer consciousness is altogether drenched in that translucence.
Change in Style and Psychology
That a poet should discard so thorough a power to voice occult insight seems a grave tragedy. But life does not follow expected curves of development and the pure critic has no right to complain provided the new curves trace artistic forms as flawless as those that have vanished, different though they be in gesture and expression. Yeats of the second phase is very little of an occultist at the beginning, because the old joy in the fire-mists of an unearthly realm yields to a desire for the clear contours of direct human experience. When he does turn to occult issues, it is mostly with an intellectual semi-Kabbalistic penchant: he deals with
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them in a discursive temper and an abstruse language which to a large measure rob them of poetic vitality. His direct human experience, too, finds as he grows older an accent which, while often powerful or majestic, verges oftener on prose in quality as well as in turn of phrase. In more simple moods he is capable of a lyrical poignancy or a sévère douceur, but not seldom the utmost he displays is a colloquial vivacity and at the worst there is a lapse into the dull and the insipid. These defects do not condemn his second phase; for it has superlative moments, especially at the outset when to a considerable extent it co-exists with the first, though the gradual drift from the latter is characterised beyond mistake by a certain change in style and psychology.
The change was prepared by Yeats's contribution to the Irish theatre. He began "colloquialising" poetry in order to fit blank verse to an idiom and rhythm which would approximate to naturalness in the mouths of men and women. Not that he wanted a language commonplace or abstract: he wished for a spoken vividness, a stir of the wide-awake mind in the tone to mingle increasingly with chanted dream-splendour. It is, however, doubtful whether in his plays he frequently succeeds when he attempts the new style; the best portions are those where the blank verse is filled with mystic intonations, for, at other times, he is prone to keep away magic and wingedness from the lines without quite making them stride with simple strength. Still, there are instances when he does strike out a movement which anticipates the change to come: the early plays on the whole belong to the first phase since the occult imagination is at work in them and by means of Celtic symbols, but lines like
Do you not know
How great a wrong it is to let one's thought
Wander a moment when one is in love?
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And while we bore her hither cloudy gusts
Blackened the world, and shook us on our feet;
Draw the great bolt, for no man has beheld
So black, bitter, blinding and sudden a storm, —
lines like these connect up with the second phase in its finer aspects. The other qualities of that later development grew more from Yeats's dramatic theory than his dramatic practice — a theory which led to a modification in his outlook on the function of all poetry, for he now appeared to believe that a word-music not in consonance with the vehement whimsical gusto and variety of actual outer life could not claim the highest class. Indeed, it must not image the cramped superficial gesticulation of men and women enslaved by fear and habit and routine; it must be a less muddied force, expressing passion, personality, action — a force never forgetting that it has behind it an imperishable spirit in touch with unseen magnitudes and powers, not disdaining to let its imagination be kindled with heroic or romantic colours — but the test is life, more abundant life, and never should the emotions cease responding to flesh as human and the mind fail to move among tangibilities. Yeats could never escape idealism: only, he would not look from beyond the walls of the world, but rather beat against them with a proud courage and use idealism and its light to subserve the actual instead of allowing the actual to dissolve in ideal visions.
The Art of Clear Intensity
The first complete freedom from the old atmosphere is in poems like Adam's Curse. A faint intellectual accent also makes itself heard and, though not the intense emotion of the direct kind which is another feature of the second Yeats, a graceful feeling-tone is not absent:
We sat together at one summer's end,
The beautiful mild woman, your close friend,
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And you and I, and talked of poetry.
I said, 'A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught'....
That beautiful mild woman for whose sake
There's many a one shall find out all heartache
On finding that her voice is sweet and low
Replied, 'To be born woman is to know —
Although they do not talk of it at school —
That we must labour to be beautiful'....
For the full perfection of the new style and psychology, two pieces provide excellent examples: they fuse the growing intellectual tone with a direct throb of passion to achieve a clear intensity as contrasted with the indefinite suggestive power of the old lyricism. The Folly of Being Comforted leaves an unforgettable vibration in the memory because of its original idea-turn which sharpens the impact on our feeling to a sort of delightful stab in the dark:
One that is ever kind said yesterday:
'Your well-beloved's hair has threads of grey,
And little shadows come about her eyes;
Time can but make it easier to be wise
Though now it seem impossible, and so
Patience is all that you have need of.'
No,
I have not a crumb of comfort, not a grain.
Time can but make her beauty over again:
Because of that great nobleness of hers
The fire that stirs within her, when she stirs,
Burns but more clearly. O she had not these ways
When all the wild summer was in her gaze.
O heart! O heart! if she'd but turned her head,
You'd know the folly of being comforted.
I do not see in what way Yeats is here less a poet and an
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artist than during his pure Celtic period. The whole music is dissimilar, and the artistry performs its secret office by a method other than the slow sorcery in a poem like Aedh Wishes for the Clothes of Heaven —
Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet:
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams —
yet it is a method equally authentic and supports an inspiration as inevitable. For, though there is no spell of a perceptible nature in The Folly of Being Comforted, the creative skill by which the effect as of "a moment's thought" is carried to perfection by an alert "stitching and unstitching" is proved by the careful phraseology, the pregnant transitions of syntax, the rhythm modulating itself with most delicate decisive strokes, the repetitive device in the seventh as well as the penultimate line to enforce the emotion. Every detail counts: mark, for instance, that terminal "No", breaking up as it does for the sake of significance the line of which it is metrically a part, giving thereby the argument of that line and its immediate predecessors a kind of check and rebuttal which seems final; nor would it be so definite a stimulus to the reader's zest for the latter half of the poem, if it did not stand thus solitary and suspended.1 The words "wild summer" have also an inspired raison d'être: "summer" is a foot
1. I have followed the original version of the poem. Yeats subsequently revised the line:
All that you need is patience.
Heart cries, 'No,
and he made the heart's speech end with the last word of line 12. The new version is more smooth and poised, but the deliberateness in its dramatic quality makes it somewhat artificial. Yeats's rewriting is not always happy.
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with an inverted stress in the line, and the ordinary justification would be emphasis for the sake of contrast with the peculiar fascination exerted by the well-beloved when the poet is speaking about her; what confers a supreme appo-siteness on the changed accent is the epithet "wild", for immediately we perceive the impulse behind the summer-charm as one which would most naturally tend to run against rules — here the rule of the iambic metre!
The poem entitled No Second Troy differs from The Folly in that its emotional element is more implicit than the latter's and the intellectual rises to the front. The emotion is not lost, it constantly supplies fuel to the intellectual glow in the language, or, to take another metaphor, provides the living edge to the tempered swordlike strength and dignity of each line:
Why should I blame her that she filled my days
With misery, or that she would of late
Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways,
Or hurled the little streets upon the great,
Had they but courage equal to desire?
What could have made her peaceful with a mind
That nobleness made simple as a fire,
With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind
That is not natural in an age like this,
Being high and solitary and most stern?
Why, what could she have done, being what she is?
Was there another Troy for her to burn?
This, too, can stand on aesthetic grounds a safe comparison with anything in the old genre, even the deepest music possible there:
Who dreamed that Beauty passes like a dream?
For these red lips, with all their mournful pride,
Mournful that no new wonder may betide,
Troy passed away in one high funeral gleam,
And Usna's children died.
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We and the labouring world are passing by:
Amid men's souls, that waver and give place
Like the pale waters in their wintry race,
Under the passing stars, foam of the sky,
Lives on this lonely face.
Bow down, archangels, in your dim abode:
Before you were, or any heart to beat,
Weary and kind, one lingered by His seat;
He made the world to be a grassy road
Before her wandering feet.
Both poems show the master-hand, both are as gifts from the gods; but the gods send their gifts through various channels in man's being, and it is only in face of this fact that criticism can permit itself a regret on viewing Yeats's total achievement. For Yeats of the Celtic phase was a rara avis, while the gradual change he underwent produced poems which, though original in detail, were of a type not absolutely novel; much fine work has been done in the latter kind by others, but the rich mysticism and intonation brought by his early verse, the enchanted "mouthful of sweet air" laden with symbolism of "Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days" were such as no one before had breathed on the world's ear.
Was the Early Yeats Decadent?
It is most superficial to see, as Yeats himself did in his old age and some apostles of modernism do, an anaemic decadence in that verse. No doubt the languid aestheticism of the 1890s creeps into it here and there; a weakening and blurring influence is at times caught from writers who divorced art from life and set it within a moated grange or worshipped it in an archaic temple for the mere melodic and bejewelled charm words were capable of. But the art of Yeats in its charmed moments was not barren word-culture, and if there
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was any remoteness about it, the remoteness was of a new reality demanding a special approach through unusual states of consciousness and not a phantom languishing in some vacuum between matter-of-fact and magic. The work of the Decadents was generally in that vacuum — it had not the clear contour of earth nor the subtle shape of the occult, it was just ambiguous and world-weary, drained of healthy Nature without being filled with Supernature's sight and sound and touch. Hanging midway in an uncertain fever, it was an imitation of the true wizardry which withdraws from the light of common life into a strangeness that is as living but with forms and forces washed in an unknown air. All poetry in fact is such a withdrawal — but there is a difference between the imaginative profound and the imaginative occult. Most great poetry is of the profound order, the wakeful mind of thought super-sensitising itself and catching hidden worlds in its mirror; occult poetry keeps only a nominal hold on the wakeful mind and receives its inspiration of the hidden worlds by a faculty which is itself half-hidden. This poetry can be of two sorts: it can either bring forth extraordinary symbols with a dynamic full-figured concreteness or set flowing an iridescent wave with unearthly limbs emerging from it. Yeats practises both sorts, the second much more frequently and with larger success. The decadent aesthetes thought they could reach and reveal Art's secret places by getting as isolated as possible from normal things and wrapping in rich cloths the thin bodies of far-fetched desires. They had considerable skill but not creative clairvoyant power. their inspiration was at its best a decorative inventor. Yeats wrote several poems in early youth which are indistinct and sentimental rather than artistically vague with occult emblems and the emotion of the Unknown. These deserve to be weeded out, but just because a poem lacks what he later called "manful energy" and "athletic joy" moulding "clear outlines", it does not become a painted miasma which settles nowhere and misleads the wakeful will and intellect. Perhaps his stern judgment upon
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his early creation was due to an incomplete liaison between his waking mind and the occult: he could not live like a practising mystic, an all-time seer. That, however, was the shortcoming of the man and did not vitiate the poetry, whose particular species of seerhood was absolutely authentic. Yeats's Celtic verse was both true and new.
The Marvellous Might-have-been
Blake had walked with spirits, Coleridge had known an eerie darkness, Shelley had been touched by "nurselings of immortality", but none had opened the door of which Yeats discovered the key; they had won no access to the heart whose pulse followed the footfall of wizard presences. A hitherto unexplored dimension of conscious activity lay before him; he was granted an instinctive knowledge of all its delicate labyrinths and each dusk-lit reverie through which he glided could be echoed by him in a word-rhythm unique for spell-binding overtones of imagination. If he could have continued his delight in that strange paradise we might have had with the growth of his mind some comprehensive disclosure of it, not magic glimpses as at present but a glimmering cosmology. Even if a result so opulent had been denied us since Yeats has not shown anywhere the architectural sweep of the greatest creators, there would have been a sufficient mass of work in an entirely original field to render his voice and his vision an assured extension of the human consciousness. By one-pointed and organic consistency of aim Wordsworth stamped, on his own time and the generations after, a new perception of Nature, Shelley's amazing productiveness blended inextricably by the same means a new idealistic glow with the emotions to which the human race had been accustomed. Yeats, however, bifurcated his never too prolific inspiration, dropped the wonder that had fallen into his hands and took up moods and methods no less valuable from the aesthetic standpoint yet not surprisingly individual enough in what may be termed
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"revelation" to keep enthralled the eye of aspiring ages. Individual these moods and methods are in the sense of thrusting forward a penetrating original mind of virile aristocracy, an imagination zestful, profoundly moved, admirably eclectic in its range. Their defect, in the revelatory sense, is that they do not draw out in a pure form a plane of reality beyond the mental. They have depth of thought and suggestion, at times a fierce flaming, depth as in Sailing to Byzantium; but how far is this from the swinging wide of secret gates into a land where myth and faery and deific dream have a poignant superlife!
Not that Yeats in old age stopped being occult and mystical. He aimed at an expression of the whole man — realist and romantic, flesh and spirit, intellect and intuition. His splendid aim got splendidly accomplished — but what was lost was the accent of some inner world. Now each esoteric plunge was taken in a grand or energetic manner self-consciously moulded; in his youth his voice had been like a wind blowing from an unearthly kingdom, and whatever energy or grandeur was in it came atmosphered with a consciousness other than the proud intellect. The difference between the sources of the two styles can be felt immediately. Take these lines about the "Holy Tree" in the heart:
The surety of its hidden root
Has planted quiet in the sky.
A similar substance is charged by the later Yeats with a more philosophical and less spiritual passion, though the poetic upshot is no whit inferior:
Whatever flares upon the night
Man's own resinous heart has fed.
The artistry of the aged Yeats made the thinking mind grip and undrape mysteries; that of the young Yeats cunningly
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surrendered to mysteries and made them grip it and undrape themselves with its aid. The larger reality behind the veil used the human self; the smaller came in course of time to lay hands on the larger and fit it to the various sides of the personality. If the early inspiration could have absorbed the whole man instead of a few parts as it was wont to do, there would have resulted an all-roundness not like a compromise as at present under the dominating influence of the athletic will co-ordinating the personality's diverse motions. It would have been a large harmony keyed to a centre of awareness more inward. Yeats did not achieve that rarer wholeness. So what possessed a most surprising individuality of "revelation" came to lack the cumulative power a consistent life-work can bestow, to enlarge beyond doubt the racial soul. As a poet of genius, the finest in the England of the present day, he will last; criticism can enjoy and praise the deviation which occurred in his art, but that deviation is bound to weaken his influence, for it lost him the full blazing torch of a poetic vita nuova which he might have lifted for the future.
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A Great Pioneer of Yogic Poetry:
It was in starlight that I heard of AE's death. I do not know if he died also under the stars, but there could have been no better time to hear of his passing. For often he must have shut his eyes in tranced forgetfulness of earth at this deep and passionless hour: he was one of those to whom meditation and self-communion was the truest life, and he has told us how those little gemlike songs of his early days came to him pure and perfect out of the profound hush into which he had plunged his mind. I remember my own joy on first realising what his poetry disclosed — a cool unpretentious flowering grace, yet laden with a glimmer of mystery rooted beyond our earth's transiences. Tiny they were, his poems, but I felt that their smallness was an illusion produced by the great distance of soul-height from which their inspiration glowed upon us: they were small like the stars — immense worlds that were pin-points because of the farness of their flame.
AE's work is remarkable for the unique spiritual experience by which it is kindled: an experience of many colourful changes resolved by a certain underlying movement of mystical aspiration into a single-shining mood. The colour and change were not valuable to him for their own sake; they derived their intensity, their appeal, from something hidden and invisible, an essence of eternal beauty secretly one behind all its magic myriadness. And the presence of this sacred simplicity AE suggested not only by his words but also by a simple spontaneousness of metre; his rhythms, bare and whisper-like, seem to spring from a chaste unaltering calm. That is at once his merit and his defect. Defect because his technique is prone to be monotonous and his creation to lack vigour and wideness; if he had commanded a more flexible and conscious artistry he could have embodied with a finer verisimilitude many realisations which are now lost by
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his poems in a sort of enchanted emptiness. Still, at his best the sense of a primal peace, a white tranquillity dreaming vaguely behind the veil of multi-hued vision and emotion gives his work a Spirit-touch found nowhere else. Blake may have a deep suggestiveness born of the simplest phrases but he has the clairvoyance of a wise child, not the remote, the ultimate, the transcendental gleam. Though Wordsworth catches a vastness as of the Spirit, the philosopher in him often preponderates over the mystic. Even Shelley's wizard tunes float in an ether different from AE's. The world of AE is not the rarefied mental with its abstractions and idealities come to life under the stress of a lyrical feeling, but an occult atmosphere of mind out of reach for the normal poet and open only to those who follow a discipline of concentration, a yoga of insight such as the Orient has always prescribed. To a sensitive Celt like AE, in whom the old Druid race with its reveries was still alive, the practice of yogic concentration was bound to be fruitful. No doubt, he also lives in iridescence and not in the full Spirit-sun; but the shimmering haze of Shelley differs from his diffuse illumination in that Shelley sees hazily from an aching distance while AE sees diffusely from very near. And it is the satisfied nearness which imparts to his verse the Spirit-appeal peculiar to it. There is a more intimate, more effulgent poetry possible, but this is the first expression in English literature of a close relationship with some sovereign Splendour through a poetic yoga transfiguring both thought and image.
Almost the whole mood of AE's mystical desire is summed up in his Alter Ego:
All the morn a spirit gay
Breathes within my heart a rhyme,
'Tis but hide and seek we play
In and out the courts of time.
Fairy lover, when my feet
Through the tangled woodlands go,
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'Tis thy sunny fingers fleet
Fleck the fire dews to and fro.
In the moonlight grows a smile
Mid its rays of dusty pearl —
'Tis but hide and seek the while
As some frolic boy and girl.
When I fade into the deep
Some mysterious radiance showers
From the jewel-heart of sleep
Through the veil of darkened hours.
Where the ring of twilight gleams
Round the sanctuary wrought,
Whispers haunt me — in my dreams
We are one yet know it not.
Some for beauty follow long
Flying traces; some there be
Seek thee only for a song:
I to lose myself in thee.
Four psychological motifs are to be observed in these lines. AE seeks the Divine with love's happy instinctive heart; then, he wanders in search of this Divine through a various world of occult brilliances, either suffusing earth-vistas or in their native cosmorama opening to the sealed eyes of trance; but the master-passion is not a wanderlust of the mere occult, it is an amor dei athirst for an all-absorbing contact. Not for any gift of vision or inspired voice does AE follow the Great Magician — he yearns for the Magician's being of beauty rather than for his many-coloured miracles. The divine display too is a valued experience; yet it is not the goal of desire. As a poet, AE cherishes the wealth of inspiration scattered from the Unknown, but his soul goes inward with hands that hunger to clasp the Supreme and not to beg
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of Him a boon of music or magnificence. For, the mainspring of the whole psychic process is an intuition that the lover is craving to gain consciously what he already holds somewhere in the buried places of the subliminal. As the penultimate stanza hints, he is at heart one with the Divine; only, he does not remember with an entire certainty this ecstatic fact. An obscure feeling is all that he has; but the feeling is pregnant with fate, and its sleeping seed determines the blossom which shall crown his life.
There is, without question, an earth-self in AE which takes interest in the passing phenomena of time; it is drawn by human faces, but in them also he is ever visionary enough to trace the hidden Beauty. Along the rays shot here in the mutable world he travels home to the centre of light in the inner heaven. Sometimes the inner meanings call so imperiously across the outer symbol and suggestion that he has no sooner loved than lost the mortal and the tangible. In that plunge into the deep, the human starting-point looks well-nigh an illusion:
What is the love of shadowy lips
That know not what they seek or press,
From whom the lure for ever slips
And fails their phantom tenderness?
The mystery and light of eyes
That near to mine grow dim and cold,
They move afar in ancient skies
Mid flame and mystic darkness rolled.
O beauty, as thy heart o'erflows
In tender yielding unto me,
A vast desire awakes and grows
Unto forgetfulness of thee.
At other moments, there is a balance between the known and the unknown: the truth is seen without the appearance
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being destroyed — the phenomenon assumes a secondary place but is not robbed of its warmth and its right of response:
I did not deem it half so sweet
To feel thy gentle hand,
As in a dream thy soul to greet
Across wide leagues of land.
Untouched more near to draw to you
Where, amid radiant skies,
Glimmered thy plume of iris hue,
My Bird of Paradise.
Let me dream only with my heart,
Love first and after see;
Know thy diviner counterpart
Before I kneel to thee.
So in thy motions all expressed
Thy angel I may view:
I shall not on thy beauty rest,
But beauty's self in you.
There is also another phase of AE in answer to earthly contacts. It is an idealistic acceptance of the clay's caress; the human is given a reality, a justification to exist in its own nature just because that nature is regarded as an echo of some divine drama enacted on the higher planes. Beauty's self is here visioned as projecting its own glories below rather than absorbing those of the earth and drawing the poet's consciousness beyond:
We liken love to this and that; our thought
The echo of a deeper being seems;
We kiss because God once for beauty sought
Within a world of dreams.
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We must not, however, commit the mistake that the echoes of a deeper being are the flesh and bone of one brief life; these are the out-most vibration, so to speak, of the "mirrored majesties". The true correspondence is between some heavenly game of archetypes in the Eternal and the play of soul with soul down the ages. A believer in reincarnation, AE makes poetic use of the meeting again and again of souls in sympathy with one another; and the earthly love he praises at times is the flame leaping to flame across clouds that change with each rebirth. Perhaps the most attractive turn taken by this inner romance is in Babylon:
The blue dusk ran between the streets: my love was winged within my mind,
It left today and yesterday and thrice a thousand years behind.
Today was past and dead for me, for from today my feet had run
Through thrice a thousand years to walk the ways of ancient Babylon.
On temple top and palace roof the burnished gold flung back the rays
Of a red sunset that was dead and lost beyond a million days.
The tower of heaven turns darker blue, a starry sparkle now begins;
The mystery and magnificence, the myriad beauty and the sins
Come back to me. I walk beneath the shadowy multitude of towers;
Within the gloom the fountain jets its pallid mist in lily flowers;
The waters lull me and the scent of many gardens, and I hear
Familiar voices and the voice I love is whispering in my ear.
Oh real as in dream all this; and then a hand on mine is laid;
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The wave of phantom time withdraws; and the young Babylonian maid,
One drop of beauty left behind from all the flowing of that tide,
Is looking with the self-same eyes, and here in Ireland by my side.
Oh light our life in Babylon, but Babylon has taken wings,
While we are in the calm and proud procession of eternal things.
In this poem we are struck with a richness and a variety of movement which are not so frequent in AE of the earlier years but which develop as he grows older. His art undergoes a change owing to a more alert mastery, though the seeds of that development were already there in his young days, as proved by pieces like that veritable quintessence of Vaishnava insight, the poem entitled Krishna. Artistically, Krishna and Babylon are the most opulent things he has done, opulent in the sense of not only jewelled phraseology but also rhythm-modulation, the technique of pause, stress and changing tone. The poet and the artist are fused: AE's inspiration had tended to be lyrical cries subdued in their rhythm, theirs was an intensity of feeling but not of art, an intuitive appeal was in them which almost made us forget that it came on word-wings, the language was like a breath of air laden with perfume and we got dreamy with the strange scent of the spirit and did not notice the medium by which it was conveyed. Surely such a transparent inspiration is precious; but it gives by constant recurrence an impression of tenuity no less than monotony, and the greatest poets have, besides the direct touch of intuition, a life and strength of language, a palpable motion of that word-body as well as the soul's sign from afar. This means that not merely the subtle mind or the inner vision but at the same time the energy of the full waking consciousness is employed to catch inspiration. What is thus created acquires a certain impetuous diversity; and in AE the new movement comes when he
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begins to write with a more open-eyed intelligence. Formerly he used to draw upon trance-depths, now he listens with the same inward ear but without dissolving into trance. He does not shut his eyes, as it were, but watches the turn and thrill of his poetry, so that it grows clearer and stronger under his gaze, modulating itself sufficiently in order to satisfy the observing artist-conscience.
We can gauge the new alertness from the fact that he actually turned to blank verse where the grip on the medium must be most steady. Even a poet like Milton who was born with a blank-verse genius had to revise and polish in daytime what Urania had whispered to him in the still hours. With Shakespeare the art was immediate but because he was the most wide-awake, the most out-gazing and conscious of all poets, his nerves ever on the qui vive to respond to sense-stimuli. Yeats's blank verse can float in a half-light and seem a sudden birth from secret worlds — and yet is in fact the most deliberate perhaps of all recent poetry; for Yeats writes with an unsleeping vigilance over words — to such a degree that, occultist though he is, he does not incline to accept AE's description of how his own songs were snatches heard verbatim from the recesses of his meditative mind. Of course, poetry composed with deliberate care is as much really heard from within; only, it is heard after effort of the consciousness to tune in to the soul-ethers and it is received sound by sound instead of in a running strain. Blank verse especially is accompanied by a wakefully inspired intelligence, though its composition may be slow or rapid according to the poet's power to grasp the suggestion out of the subliminal. And AE's resort to this form of self-utterance shows the awakening word-artist in him and from that coming to grips with the language are evolved a force and a versatility absent before. Indeed many of his efforts are not wholly successful and the majority of his work lies among the simple voices with which he began; nevertheless, the innovation is worth weighing because of a few astonishing triumphs.
Being contemporaneous with Lascelles Abercrombie and
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Gordon Bottomley, the two poets who have influenced modern blank verse most, he models his with rather a free and quick hand, pushing nervously the idea-vision into the language when he might achieve better result by teaching the language to respond organically to the creative glow. There is, in consequence, an unassimilated look about many of his lines even if they are metrically normal and not inlaid with truncated feet, trochees, anapaests, tribrachs and cretics. Poems like The Dark Lady are full of a metricised prose, rich and puissant though that may be; but the new will-to-power, when put in tune with older types of blank verse, brings forth fine rhythmic swings and expressive strokes. AE's most ambitious work in this line is The House of the Titans, wherein he sets to potent use a Celtic myth for embodying his conception of the worlds of light and darkness born from the Absolute, the descent of the Soul with its heavenly godheads and powers into earth-consciousness, their slow oblivion of the heights whence they derived but ultimately their recalling that high home and their destiny to transform chaos into a divine image. Despite unfinished versification in several places and even limping lines like
She heard first the voice of the high king,
If thou
Hast from pity come to help us, fly —
and despite drops again and again into a half-kindled style, The House of the Titans is a notable performance. There is a reflection of Keats, naturally enough since the theme is affined to that of Hyperion where also grand music is made from the falling of Titans. Especially the start, after the first five lines, is reminiscent of Keats's picture of Saturn stone-still in the lightless woods with Thea by his side. Keatsian too are the lines:
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Her weeping roused at length the stony king,
Whose face from its own shadow lifted up
Was like the white uprising of the moon.
Quite original, however, are the manner and the movement in the vehement unwillingness of Armid, the fallen king's companion, to let the memory of heaven die in order to cut short the nameless grief in her heart:
"Let it not die," cried Armid flinging up
In fountainous motion her white hands and arms
That wavered, then went downward, casting out
Denial.
And boldly individual like that famous Homeric comparison of the elders on the walls of Troy to thin-legged squeaky grasshoppers is the image:
And as a spider by the finest thread
Hangs from the rafters, so the sky-born hung
By but the frailest thread of memory from
The habitations of eternity.
But the choicest passage in this poem packed with AE's peculiar Celtic clairvoyance is the speech of Dana the Goddess of beauty, the mysterious All-mother:
I am the tender voice calling away,
Whispering between the beatings of the heart,
And inaccessible in dewy eyes
I dwell, and all unkissed on lovely lips,
Lingering between white breasts inviolate,
And fleeting ever from the passionate touch,
I shine afar till men may not divine
Whether it is the stars or the beloved
They follow with rapt spirit. And I weave
My spells at evening, folding with dim caress,
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Aerial arms and twilight-dropping hair
The lonely wanderer by wood or shore,
Till, filled with some vast tenderness, he yields,
Feeling in dreams for the dear mother heart
He knew ere he forsook the starry way,
And clings there pillowed far above the smoke
And the dim murmur from the duns of men.
I can enchant the rocks and trees, and fill
The dumb brown lips of earth with mystery,
Make them reveal or hide the god; myself
Mother of all, but without hands to heal,
Too vast and vague, they know me not, but yet
I am the heartbreak over fallen things,
The sudden gentleness that stays the blow,
And I am in the kiss that foemen give
Pausing in battle, and in the tears that fall
Over the vanquished foe. And in the highest
Among the Danaan gods I am the last
Council of pity in their hearts when they
Mete justice from a thousand starry thrones.
My heart shall be in thine when thine forgives.
AE had nothing to learn in blank verse style when he burst into so exalted a cry; and it is very probable that had he lived he would have reached often this consummate eloquence. As it was, he could not keep the sustained mastery vouchsafed to him in this moment and though telling periods and unforgettable flashes of poetic vision are frequent he could not be said to have mobilised fully the fine energy and prophet-passion that was in him and that had not found deliverance in the intonations of his usual mood.
He will, therefore, take his place in the poetic pantheon as a pioneer of yogic art mainly for his ability to cast brief exquisite Spirit-spells. A fair amount of his work will go to Limbo owing to an ambiguous phantasy, a thinness of imaginative wash with no clear articulate thrill. Nevertheless, what remains is destined to mark the beginning of a
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novel epoch in verse, an effort to clothe sense and sound with strange radiances or shadowy raptures drawn from an inner mystical life lived constantly by the poet unlike the fitful dips made on rare occasions into the unknown by former bards. There will be, ultimately, a tremendous outburst of spiritual fire, poems that bear the full frenzy of that "multitudinous meditation" which is the Soul; but before the unearthly day breaks we shall have a constellation of singers whose voices float in a dim sky, the divine darkness heralding the divine dawn. Of such, AE is the leader, the evening star first plumbing the secret regions beyond the mere mind and the life-force. And among his achievements will rank, side by side with his early poems, the variations he played on that simple tone when the urge for diversity came to him. This urge took two channels — on the one side blank verse and on the other a freer handling than before of rhymed metres, a less repetitive form, a poignancy shaping itself with an innocent caprice and not falling into a rigidly regular pattern. Many failures are noticeable here, the inspiration is frequently lost in a too outward shifting of rhythm and word but essentially as excellent as the old uniform lilt or chant are the subtle changes rung on a simple movement and style as in The Outcast:
Sometimes when alone
At the dark close of day,
Men meet an outlawed majesty
And hurry away.
They come to the lighted house;
They talk to their dear;
They crucify the mystery
With words of good cheer.
When love and life are over,
And flight's at an end,
On the outcast majesty
They lean as a friend.
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The seeds of this modulated simplicity, like those of the variegated richness of other poems of AE's old age, were not absent in his period of youthful sowing, but they were less perceivable because the tendency then was towards transfiguring by sheer subtlety and depth of feeling a steady run of iambics or trochees, the modulations occurring chiefly with an anapaest touch now and again to obtain some particular effect. In The Unknown God, however, mere anapaests do not sway the metre: many deft unexpected modulations of two and three and, if we count the feminine endings, even four syllables combine in a suggestion of lovely star-flicker as well as of ecstatic heart-beat:
Far up the dim twilight fluttered
Moth-wings of vapour and flame:
The lights danced over the mountains,
Star after star they came.
The lights grew thicker unheeded,
For silent and still were we;
Our hearts were drunk with a beauty
Our eyes could never see.
It is not easy to reward such a gem with adequate praise — the intuition is so perfectly kindled and with the most economical elegance. Indeed AE is always a wizard when he faces poetically his favourite hour of dayfall: masterpiece on miniature masterpiece issues from his pen as one by one the planets flower into sight, and I believe that though men can no longer see the intense and far-visaged form that moved among them for a while, their hearts will be drunk to the end of time with the song-creative beauty of his soul.
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Pegasus and "The White Horse"
1
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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It is a very ancient view that occult purposes act from behind the exterior psychology to produce works of poetic excellence. For, all great poets have believed in invoking what they called the Muse: no poet denies that in his perfect moments a rare superhuman force rushes through his ordinary consciousness. However, in various poets the force functions in various ways. Byron did not believe that inspiration could come by sitting and waiting for it, and to disprove that Wordsworthian notion he conducted a series of experiments: evening after evening he sat with a pen in his hand and a sheet of paper in front of him, asking the Muse to come down and make him write. Critics who do not relish "milord" 's poetry may say that inspiration could never have visited Byron because he was not a true poet at all; but this is rather to overshoot the mark, for there are passages even in Byron bearing the authentic stamp. A poet who could write about Lucifer that
...his eye
Glared forth the immortality of hell
might with reason expect the Muse to dictate sometimes to him when he had invited her descent long enough. The failure was due really to his positing wrong conditions — conditions unsuitable to his temperament.
A poet like Wordsworth could draw inspiration by a patient waiting, but Byron's mind acted by an easy natural movement: to make it a blank was rather to obfuscate than clear its receptive mood. He shared with Shelley a spontaneous flow, a rapid inspiration, though one cannot put on an equal footing the rhetorical rush of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and the visionary fire of Prometheus Unbound. Byron began
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his poetic career by dictating oriental tales to his valet while dressing for dinners to which he had been invited: not in the least an irrational method — we can well imagine Shakespeare to have dashed off pages of Hamlet in the green room while some actor was tidying himself up and chatting to him over his shoulder. For inspiration acts according to the peculiarities of a writer. Schiller could not compose his dramas unless he had a boxful of rotting apples under his table, and Milton could not continue fluently his Paradise Lost between the vernal and the autumnal equinoxes: wintry dullness which might freeze the genial current of other poetic souls let loose cataract on cataract of words in his. The point is that an extraordinary power possesses the poet, deploys itself capriciously, fills him with tense music, then lets him drop into loose verbiage, and returns at odd moments to string him up anew.
It is possible to regulate the power somewhat, but beyond a certain degree no poet can be sure of it. And during his contact with its miracles, he is conscious of plumbing some divine depth in himself or is borne on a burning breath of rapture or, with a hand stretched as if in sleep, plucks strange fruit from an invisible tree. The dim profound, the luminous wind, the magic wood are all unknown things — larger than the individual and existing beyond his day-to-day thoughts and desires. They are his symbolic experiences of the Muse within him, the daimon or in-dwelling presence with whom he is identified on rare occasions but whom he recognises as a mighty independent spirit standing on a threshold between the waking intelligence and the dream-state. When the poet is genuinely inspired, a part of him is as though hypnotised by ideas, images, words into an absorbed aloofness from the outer mind; he becomes self-withdrawn, he wears a look of surrender to the incalculable. Even when he tries forcibly to get the right effect it is a frantic cry to the Muse to come and conquer him, a flinging of himself into the Muse's arms rather than a masterful grasping of her to wrench out the mot juste.
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This daimon has in each great poet a certain curve of progress to trace: whether the curve comes full circle or not depends upon a large complex of circumstances. Among English poets, only two got to the end of their journey — Shakespeare and Milton. Spenser fell within eyeshot of his goal: nobody else did even so much. Coleridge did famous things, but his destination remained vague because Wordsworth's soul-composing mind-assuring simplicity was removed from his neighbourhood and he was left drowning in the oceans of his own labyrinthine restlessness. Wordsworth himself lapsed after a brief decade of keen beauty into benevolent dullness because not only did his philosophy have its initial root in Coleridge but even his poetic sensibility had been lit by Coleridge's inflammable temperament and could not long keep a living glow on its own. It was Wordsworth who had sustained Coleridge's already awakened genius, but it was Coleridge who by his contact gave Wordsworth's music a noble accent. Tennyson had a half-morbid half-visionary strain in him which with his curious eye for scenic detail would have brought us colourful and quivering or magically intonated masterpieces on a large scale, if he had not allowed it to superficialise itself into inane sentimentalism and a habit of uttering platitudes with a pensive air. Swinburne fared better, yet lived through most of his manhood and old age in a condition of lop-sided growth: his expansive power kept developing beautiful intricacies of rhythm whereas the faculty to brood and concentrate and delve deep went numb, waking up at rare intervals in an excitement which carried most precious poetic wealth but soon exhausted itself.
There are, however, other circumstances more catastrophic than a long yet unconsummated career; and their classical victims are Keats and Shelley and, before them, Marlowe. They did not have even an opportunity to answer the command which the daimon lays upon the outer life.
Keats has left us his precise plans — namely, to write poems combining the colour of St. Agnes' Eve with a greater
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stress of character-play and psychological motive, as a prelude to some strong and rich dramatic projection in the Shakespearean style. His Hyperion would most probably have remained for a long time a fragment; for Keats was getting disgusted with epic and mythological themes. The resonant language which, while treating them, he beat out for himself he would have wished to use for fashioning, in place of gods and titans, personations of powerful human moods, some disillusioned Othello or frustrated Coriolanus, some Antony blinded to all the world by the dazzling darkness of a Cleopatra's eyes. But would Keats have realised his wish? If he had had the slightest capacity to create live characters — and without that no drama worth the name can exist — it would have displayed itself, at least to some degree, in his extant dramatic efforts. These efforts make no living gesture, and Keats would have, in the last analysis, ill-used his mature years by running after the Shakespearean ideal. He was sure to have discovered his mistake — but perhaps at much cost, just as the ludicrous Cap and Bells frittered away the precious energy he should have spent on continuing Hyperion.
Shelley's development was much more certain; his death too was more lamentable, since Keats died and inspired Adonais and so in a way his passing was compensated for, while the remembrance of Shelley's dust has never bloomed into immortal poetic beauty. If he had lived, his progress would have been towards reflective mysticism. We are too apt to ignore the intellect Shelley possessed: Mary's reminiscences as well as his own prose writings afford us a convincing proof of it. His philosophic spirit, brooding over life's riddle, solved it at first by a lyric vision of a world free in its heart and imagination from superstitious no less than political chains, but he was bound later to arrive at some more clear and controlled thought-process and some more definite spiritual experience side by side with the lyric impulse and the symbolic vision. Shelley could never have stopped growing and in the right direction for his peculiar
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genius: not since Shakespeare had a poet been so completely in rapport with his daimon — his inspired fluency Milton himself had never rivalled. From that point of view a wider gap was left in English verse by the squall in the Bay of Spezzia which drowned his voice for ever than by the coughing lungs that wasted the life-breath of Keats in Rome; besides, even the inspired fluency of Keats can be compared in swiftness with Milton's and not with Shakespeare's.
From another point of view, that squall was more disastrous than the stab which ended Marlowe; for I believe that, despite his premature end, Marlowe's daimon, unlike Shelley's, was not cut off from sovereign fulfilment. Only, it fulfilled itself after Marlowe's own death and under new conditions of consciousness.
Let me explain the paradox. No two poets can write always in exactly the same style and with the same psychological attitude. But if the essence of one poet's drift got mingled in another poet with new qualities and somehow coloured them into its own likeness amid all variations, it might not be impossible to detect the phenomenon. My statement about Marlowe rests on a feeling that such a phenomenon has occurred with regard to him. We must, nevertheless, keep in mind that what he himself would have produced by way of a magnum opus would have been something unique, something no other poet could have written because temperamental differences were bound to interfere. So if the phenomenon I have spoken of has taken place we should best appreciate its meaning and extent by a comparison between the hypothetical magnum opus and the novel form I suppose to have been assumed by the essence of that eruptive energy whose literary flash and detonation we know as Christopher Marlowe.
What was that essence? Marlowe's purple patches and terrible episodes bewilder the mind with their infinite of utterance, so to speak — a stupendous power directed in the main to an expression of wilful personality straining, with magnificent disaster, against the universe and the Divine.
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The first bodying forth of Marlowe's daimon, the occult greatness which seems to have tried his life-force as its vehicle, we find in that unwieldy colossus of his early twenties, Tamburlaine — a work meant to be a drama but destitute of all constructive artistry, a manifold confusion through which the figure of its hero moves in a storm of word-thunder and imaginative lightning. The conception underlying it is the titan-soul's battle with destiny: Tamburlaine, a Scythian shepherd, raises the banner of revolt against Persia and rides victorious over half the world in a gigantic beauty of arrogance and ambition and defiance of man and God, with only one joint in his armour — the love which ravages his heart for his wife Zenocratè. Through this joint he receives his mortal wound, for in the midst of his glory death carries away Zenocratè and soon after lays low the conqueror's own life.
The same theme of personal grandeur towering against the forces of Nature and Providence to a last toppling point runs through all of Marlowe's later production in one form or another of imaginative life-force cast into dramatic movement with no sure success anywhere in that particular mould. There is a certain power of dramatic occasion at his command, but we feel at the same time as though his was a mind which attempted to dramatise with initially a poor constructive gift a natural epic vein, with the result that its sole triumphs were individual scenes such as that most perfect climax to Faustus. For, the daimon who would somehow be out saw in him possibilities both epic and dramatic, and tried to struggle with his rather unbalanced temperament towards some definite and harmonious issue. Before the experiment could come to any satisfying conclusion Marlowe died a violent death at the age of twenty-nine. What would his twofold impulse have ripened into? Would he have penned an epic? Would he have mastered the drama?
In Edward II he was moving towards dramatic structure; but such a framework seems to have run counter to his
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purely poetic urge and wearied and weakened it by too stringent and preoccupying a check to his impetuosity. To me he seems an experiment wherein the occult voices were conceiving an epic drama with the central conception bodied forth a little loosely in semi-dissolving scenes. When some harmonising instinct would have emerged and he would have gained a more uniform control over his blank verse which usually tended, apart even from lack of enjambment, to be a little disproportionate by some musical defect in sentence-formation, then his crowning achievement could have most naturally been a work with Satan as its principal character, the Paradise Lost refigured in a huge phantasmagoria of a play. For, what else is Paradise Lost save an epic nth degree of a grandiose egoism up in arms against the universal Law, a titan ambition warring disastrously with the inscrutable Divine - the basic Marlovian idea consummated?
Of course, important contrasts strike one: Milton was an intellectual and his hero could never be Marlowe's sheer life-force, the mind with its deliberate experiences, its half-spiritual "exultations and agonies", has come on the stage; but the salient feature remains that Milton has thrown himself heart and soul into a theme and figure than which nothing more to Marlowe's taste could be conceived, especially after his almost skirting Milton's domain in the legend of Faustus. It is as though what had moved the old life-force has now appeared behind the new intellectual being and Marlowe's daimon risen to Milton's mental level, making Satan a transfigured Tamburlaine, a sublimation of Barabas, a high unity of Faustus and Mephistophilis. That is why after revolving about a hundred subjects in his mind, many of them scriptural and the rest from British history, Milton fixed on an epic idea and tone so much in Marlowe's line, and as soon as he crossed over to other parts of his epic, parts less Marlovian, his inspiration marked a comparative decline. In addition, have we not his own record that his original design was to embody his poetry in a form of drama and that he had drawn up a whole scheme suited to that treatment — a
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Marlowe-tendency again, relinquished because of his own more mental and less vitally creative nature?
Take his blank verse itself, the strength and the amplitude of it: what he has governed and modulated by a technical pattern of line-overflow, scrupulous shift of pause, and rolling yet compact syntax, is the thunderous "infinite" of Marlowe intellectualised. That this author was not his favourite study adds only an extra interest to the occult way in which the Elizabethan's penchant in substance and in quality of style appears to have been repeated in him under the conditions of the intellect and a new technique. Is this Tamburlaine or Satan described? —
Of stature tall, and straightly fashionèd,
Like his desire, lift upward and divine;
So large of limb, his joints so strongly knit,
Such breadth of shoulders as might mainly bear
Old Atlas's burden.
And whose vaulting ambition speaks thus — the Scythian conqueror's or the Archangel's? —
Give me a look, that when I bend the brows
Pale death may walk in furrows of my face;
A hand that with a grasp may gripe the world;
A royal seat, a sceptre and a crown,
That those that do behold them may become
As men that stand and gaze against the sun.
Is it not possible to catch Miltonic correspondences in lines like:
There angels in their crystal armours fight
A doubtful battle with my tempted thoughts,
or those others:
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Come, let us march against the powers of heaven
And set black streamers in the firmament
To signify the slaughter of the gods;
or in that resounding vaunt:
Give me a map; then let me see how much
Is left for me to conquer all the world.
Here I began to march towards Persia,
Along Armenia and the Caspian Sea,
And thence into Bithynia, where I took
The Turk and his great empress prisoners...
And thence to Nubia near Borno-lake
And so along the Ethiopian Sea,
Cutting the tropic line of Capricorn,
I conquered all as far as Zanzibar...
Look here, my boys; see what a world of ground
Lies westward from the midst of Cancer's line
Unto the rising of this earthly globe,
Whereas the sun declining from our sight
Begins the day with our Antipodes!
And shall I die, and this unconquerèd?
Lo here, my sons, are all the golden mines,
Inestimable drugs and precious stones,
More worth than Asia and the world beside;
And from th'Antarctic Pole eastward behold
As much more land which never was descried,
Wherein are rocks of pearl that shine as bright
As all the lamps that beautify the sky!
And shall I die, and this unconquerèd? —
or, again, in the colloquy between Faustus and Mephistophilis when the former has asked, "How comes it then that thou art out of hell?" And the reply rings forth:
Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it:
Think'st thou that I who saw the face of God
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And tasted the eternal joys of heaven
Am not tormented with ten thousand hells
In being depriv'd of everlasting bliss?
Faustus, who is in seed-form the complement of Mephistophilis for half of Milton's complete Satan to get evolved from, flings a reproach at the fallen spirit's torment:
What, is great Mephistophilis passionate
For being deprivèd of the joys of heaven?
Learn thou of Faustus manly fortitude,
And scorn the joys thou never shalt possess.
The last line is perfect Miltonese, just as the following two where the idea that hell is an inward condition essentially — an idea whose converse is Satan's famous cry that heaven too is an inward condition and the mind can turn hell into heaven — is taken up by Mephistophilis:
Hell hath no limits, nor is circumscrib'd
To one self place; for where we are is hell.
No less Miltonic are the words a little before, when it is questioned how Lucifer, "arch-regent and commander of all spirits", has become the "prince of devils":
O, by aspiring pride and insolence;
For which God threw him from the face of heaven —
and those put in the mouth of Faustus elsewhere:
Now by the kingdoms of infernal rule,
Of Styx, of Acheron, and the fiery lake
Of ever-burning Phlegethon, I swear.
Here even the verse-movement is like Milton's, but in all these excerpts the essential attitude and energy is so anti-
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cipatory of Paradise Lost that to anyone with an occult sense of the poetic afflatus it would seem that the epic possibility lost in Marlowe attained its goal through Milton, though from a different plane.
We might say it attained its goal in a far more consummate manner, too, because of the Puritan poet's maturer, more stable, constructive and intellectual disposition; but in spite of the flaws we might expect to accompany Marlowe's hand, there would have been in his composition not a greater fire but, as distinguished from an organised conflagration, brighter spurts of fire arising from his recrudescent vitality on the one hand and on the other his usual technique of end-stopped lines. The latter, though depriving him of the organ-music possible to enjambment, would have induced his genius for power to put into it in the day of his full poetic growth a preternatural rage of colourful phrase so that the means by which alone the absence, on a large scale, of overflow from one line to another could be supported might perform its function with the utmost effect. I do not think his Satan would have had to such a superb and unrivalled degree the adamantine will of Milton's: a less heroic figure, he would have alternated between defiance and despair, not submitting or yielding but gnawed more miserably by a secret remorse. Whereas, if the poet had gone beyond the loss of heaven to the temptation of Adam and Eve and if the incidents in the Garden of Eden had inspired him, even as much or as little as Milton, the first man and the first woman would have passed to their doom with a more vivid and dynamic disobedience. They would also have had a more dreadful aftermath of repentance: one remembers Faustus's cry —
O, I'll leap up to my God! — Who pulls me down? —
See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament!
One drop would save my soul, half a drop: ah, my Christ! —
Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ!
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Yet will I call on him: O spare me, Lucifer! —
Where is it now? 'tis gone: and see, where God
Stretcheth out his arm, and bends his ireful brows!
Mountains and hills, come, come, and fall on me,
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God!
Another certainty is that Marlowe's God would have spoken more grandly than Milton's and matched the eloquence of Satan instead of being, as in Paradise Lost, mostly a prosaic paragon, omnipotence distilled to never-ending dullness.
What Marlowe could never have supplied was, apart from the masterful and many-mooded artistry of Paradise Lost, the nobility of soul which permeated its power and which derived from its author's unique individuality. A religious intensity of the intellect was one of the wings to Milton's inspiration, while Marlowe had only his élan vital: from a false sense of reverence the former may generally have made his God passionless in speech, but his own fervour for the Divine gave the poem the prophetic overtone that counterbalanced his massive imaginative obsession by Satan's figure — nay, subtly interfused with it and suggested some inner mystic depth at the same time as the outer titanic height. Where this fervour had an unfettered play, the music was most remarkably from a plane inaccessible to Marlowe — graver than his in substance and rhythmic ecstasy and to the intellectual self of man more satisfying: no one except Milton could have written the stately opening of Paradise Lost, the beautiful and poignant invocation to Light with which the third book begins, the tremendous prelude in the seventh to Urania. No one else could have thus worded Belial's fear of extinction at the hands of All-Might as a cure for misery:
Sad cure! for who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish rather, swallowed up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated Night,
Devoid of sense and motion?
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This was, psychologically, beyond Marlowe; in especial the Miltonic summit of the line,
Those thoughts that wander through eternity —
a line in which the words are borne on a rhythm which gives perhaps the grandest vibration, in all European literature, of a feeling of contact with what Dr. Otto calls the "numinous" and Emerson the "Oversoul". But Marlowe could have brought a power as splendid in its own way if more loose, an equal strength of voice if less volume and a less noble intonation. Though he was more sharp in his impact while Milton had more breadth, his own pinnacle —
See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament
— is no whit inferior as imaginative poetry or weaker in essential force. He could also bring mass and volume —
And hide me from the heavy wrath of God!—
yet these again have an element of keenness, of restlessness, which is unlike Milton's more collected grandeur. The difference results to a considerable extent from the fact that in Marlowe the dramatic and the epic tendencies were mixed together. Even when Milton's thunder came nearest the Elizabethan word-fury —
Him the Almighty Power
Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky,
With hideous ruin and combustion, down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms —
even when Milton composed a passage like that, he was
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most unMarlovian by his kind of tone, a mental and deliberate rhythm helped out by his inversions, his linked syntax, his length of poetic phrase. Still, in English poetry there can be found nothing outside Marlowe to measure its power: he alone catches again and again its vast dynamic, though he employs it in successive passionate outbursts where Milton marshals prolonged resonances: Marlowe has not the identical kind of tone, but he has the identical pitch. Moreover, he is ruled by that rebellious mood of the hero of Paradise Lost, from which the poem's terrible beauty is born. There are, throughout Paradise Lost, thousands of lines far removed from Marlowe's style: in fact the whole scheme of this epic is alien to Marlowe's mentality; yet the underlying Satanic megalomania and the boundless poetic Will to Power are close-allied to the "infinite" of Marlowe. It is in this sense that I conjecture the daimon-drive behind the dissimilarities of the two poets to be at heart one and the same.
If, like the inmost Marlowe's reincarnation in the Miltonic Sublime, the Soul within Shelley's soul could have repeated its essential nisus through a fit instrument, we should have had a poetic plenitude such as Shakespeare manifested. Not, however, Shakespeare's substance of drama nor his style's vibrant contact with the life-force. But, as I have hinted before, Shelley's daimon, like Shakespeare's, was in its own way one with its instrument and more than any other poet's was it capable of artistic abundance. Almost all that it touched became glorious, not by a massed incandescence of vital energy but by a rich rippling light of idealistic passion and spiritually suggestive thought. If there had been, later, any poet who could have held a kindred passion and thought in a fluent and ever-maturing freshness, Shelley's genius would not have failed of self-completion. That it tried, more than once, strikes me as plausible.
Swinburne had a supernormal fluency, a rapture of lyric
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rhythm, a plunging iridescence, which were a large and beautiful mould wherein, assimilating new attributes, Shelley's growth might have proceeded. He had even psychological affinities — a fusion of the romantic attitude with Greek culture, the resurgent idealism of a Prometheus, a love of intellectual and political freedom, a revolt against conventional morality and religion, a sense of the universal Spirit's plastic press. With so much in common between him and the older poet, it may seem amazing why the essential Shelley could not be continued and fulfilled in him. Some enrichment was inevitable, and it was in the direction of a more complex and comprehensive, a more orchestral lyricism. Shelley's magic had been simple in prevailing tones yet it had never lacked an implicit complexity, for it had never been simple in the Wordsworthian or the ballad manner. Its structural diversity and artistic manipulation of sound-effects had contained a living seed of the Swinburnian harmony. In Swinburne this seed sprouted in a royal fulfilment. But Shelley was not just fluent and lyrical; he was in addition always inspired with regard to his meaning, while Swinburne diluted too often his own, thus checking the growth that might have happened.
A serious technical difference helped to magnify this obstacle: his iridescence tended to be a haze because over and above his weakness of intellectual effort his words were not seldom subdued to a general harmonic scheme with too little particularisation for themselves: they scarcely assumed a definite and expressive outline, they were hastened with a swirl of vague adjective-colour along the impatient winding polyphony of his verse. Though this trait was not quite absent from Shelley — perhaps Arnold was moved to his protest on account of it — it was in truth on rare occasions that he was vague and void: what was mistaken for indefiniteness was his delicate perception and imaginative subtlety or, as in The Witch of Atlas, his sometimes exclusive play with themes far from the human and the palpable. On the psychological side, the one grave discrepancy which vitiated all resemblan-
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ces, however notable they might be, was that Shelley was not only aware of the universal Spirit nor merely content to feel and enjoy and increase its urge towards Love and Loveliness: he was vehemently athirst for an ideal and entire perfection, he was pursued by an extreme hunger for some luminous super-world, he was a man smitten with desire for Eternity in its own authentic thrill — in short, he was a mystic in disposition. Swinburne could not fulfil this essential nisus towards mysticism.
Shelley had not the definite mystic experience, but the tendency for it was ingrained in him, as proved by various long rhythm-rolls and short song-snatches, ranging from Prometheus Unbound to the fugitive yet unforgettable "I can give not what men call love." Perhaps the most unexpected and implicitly beautiful summary of it is in the Skylark. Oppressed by a sense of mortal finitude which serves as a bar against his spirit, condemned to care and piteous pining for "what is not", all his love and aspiration an exquisite pain, a cry of heart-shattering sweetness, the man in Shelley strains wonderingly up to the Skylark's "keen joyance" and "unpremeditated art", its "flood of rapture so divine". By a symbolic flash he discerns through the skylark's high and happy moments of unfettered gladness a possibility that each moment of life could bring such an experience if we had a vision which would enable us, as he imagines it enabling the bird in that strange soar, to "deem" of death "Things more true and deep/ Than we mortals dream". For, death to us incarnate creatures captive in a multitudinous woe seems a crowning misery whose terrible shadow haunts our whole life; but if we could have that vision, our hearts would sing and soar unhampered by pain and above death's shadow. So Shelley yearns for a mystic self-liberation, an "unbodied joy", a discovery by which one can live and yet be as if bodiless and beyond limitation, knowing life as a divine freedom and death a misfortune and a dreadful darkness to those alone who have not achieved this freedom. Where in Swinburne was to be found such a cry for spiritual insight?
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Swinburne knew the subtle earth-soul, even more the sea-soul; but Shelley had a transcendental vein in him besides the pantheistic, an aching eye towards Plato's Archetype as well as a dissolving gaze into Spinoza's Substance.
It is to Francis Thompson that we must turn for a recurrence of Shelley's transcendental touch — with important discontinuities in form, Thompson being a somewhat fanatical adherent to the Roman Church, yet with so basic a connection with Shelley that whenever he writes about Shelley the tone is as if he were dealing with an essential part of himself. The connection is basic because in Shelley's mind Plato of the Symposium and Dante of the Paradiso interfused: he burned with a spiritual idealism of thought, the lips of his love carried a flame-kiss from the fragmentary human heart to the Absolute Sun of Eternity. What, however, was still imprecise in him Thompson made clear and definite. Shelley's Intellectual Beauty with its awful command to his daimon from behind the veil became to Thompson the Hound of Heaven, a tremendous Lover with a grip as of flesh. What in a more personal mood Shelley had pictured, in the colourful transports running through Epipsychidion, as his all-consummating Archetype come down on earth, Thompson saw at a more authentic pitch of mysticism as the resplendent face of a Divine Virginity whom the child in him called Mother and the man in him Love. Thus Shelley's inmost attitude was matured.
There were also other factors conducive to a necessarily novel yet at bottom organic evolution of Shelley's genius. With Shakespeare as hors concours, Thompson stands with Shelley unparalleled for image-opulence, a never-ceasing dance and glitter of fancies, figures, fantasies — mists of dream, interblended hues of natural sight, sudden vistas of intimate revelation. His language is often steeped in the Shelleyan fire and rainbow and at its best seems borne on an uncontrollable wave. No better proof of remarkable openness of Shelley's daimon can be cited than Thompson's Buona Notte. In her last letter to Shelley, Jane Williams wrote: "Why
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do you always talk of never enjoying moments like the past? Are you going to join your friend Plato, or do you expect I shall do so soon? Buona Notte." Shelley was drowned two days after; and in Thompson's verses the poet's spirit addresses Jane while his body is tossing on the waters of Spezzia:
Ariel to Miranda: — Hear
This good-night the sea-winds bear;
And let thine unaquainted ear
Take grief for their interpreter.
Good-night! I have risen so high
Into slumber's rarity,
Not a dream can beat its feather
Through the unsustaining ether.
Let the sea-winds make avouch
How thunder summoned me to couch,
Tempest curtained me about
And turned the sun with his own hand out.
And though I toss upon my bed
My dream is not disquieted;
Nay, deep I sleep upon the deep,
And my eyes are wet, but I do not weep;
And I fell to sleep so suddenly
That my lips are moist yet — could'st thou see —
With the good-night draught I have drunk to thee.
Thou canst not wipe them; for it was Death
Damped my lips that has dried my breath.
A little while — it is not long —
The salt shall dry on them like the song.
Now know'st thou that voice desolate, —
Mourning ruined joy's estate, —
Reached thee through a closing gate.
'Go'st thou to Plato?' Ah, girl, no!
It is to Pluto that I go.
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This is no imitation, Thompson catches the very essence of Shelley in one aspect, there is a free and living tone which makes it genuine. The man who could write like that had something of Shelley in his own heart.
Elsewhere too, though more charged with his individual attributes, Thompson's poetry has often a Shelleyan undertone which again and again sings out, and it is an organic undertone, so to speak — as naturally Thompson as it is Shelley. A fine instance, in a single line, is
Tangle the tresses of a phantom wind.
Here is another, speaking about the heart's swift brightness
Whose robes are fluent crystal, crocus-hued,
Whose wings are wind a-fire, whose mantles wrought
From spray that falling rainbows shake to air.1
Or read the following — a yet finer coalescence of the two poets:
From cloud-zoned pinnacles of the secret spirit
Song falls precipitant in dizzying streams;
And, like a mountain-hold when war-shouts stir it,
The mind's recessèd fastness casts to light
Its learning multitudes, that from every height
Unfurl the flaming of a thousand dreams.
Even the Thompson who hurls forth the opening rhythms of The Hound of Heaven —
I fled Him down the nights and down the days;
I fled Him down the arches of the years;
1. I take this and the preceding quotation after Mr. Mégroz who also discusses Shelleyan affinities in his admirable study: Francis Thompson: The Poet of Earth in Heaven.
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I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways
Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears
I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
Up vistaed hopes I sped;
And shot, precipitated
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmèd fears,
From those strong Feet that followed, followed after —
even this Thompson is not in fact so far from Shelley as we might imagine; he has no locutions alien to the poet of Prometheus Unbound — the latter may not have used them all but they are in his vein; that "labyrinthine ways of my own mind" which Thompson's admirers have made much of has actually been anticipated in the Shelleyan phrase — "the deep and labyrinthine soul". There is a flash of power in Shelley often overlooked, and some of Thompson's moments offer the sole points of comparison with it. I recall one passage which comes rather close to the tone we find recurring in The Hound. After Thompson's fleeing soul has in vain sought security within its own self, sued
to all swift things for swiftness,
Clung to the whistling mane of every wind,
craved the fellowship of all Nature-moods and human joys and found that nothing would save it from that pursuing voice and is at last forced to yield, the conquering Power reveals to it life's deepest secret — the strange relentless love of God for man. The end of the poem sums up the whole theme beautifully:
Halts by me that footfall:
Is my gloom after all,
Shade of His Hand, outstretched caressingly?
'Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest,
I am He whom thou seekest!
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me.'
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The passage from Shelley which I have in mind depicts at the start quite the opposite process: the soul is now the seeker after an ideal Loveliness which is eluding it:
And as a man with mighty loss dismayed,
I would have followed, though the grave between
Yawned like a gulf whose spectres are unseen:
When a voice said: — 'O thou of hearts the weakest,
The phantom is beside thee whom thou seekest.'
Then I — 'Where?' — the world's echo answered 'where',
And in that silence and in my despair,
I questioned every tongueless wind that flew
Over my tower of mourning if it knew
Whither 'twas fled, this soul out of my soul;
And murmured names and spells which have control
Over the sightless tyrants of our fate;
But neither prayer nor verse could dissipate
The night which closed on her; nor uncreate
That world within this Chaos, mine and me,
Of which she was the veiled Divinity...
Then as a hunted deer that could not flee,
I turned upon my thoughts, and stood at bay,
Wounded and weak and panting.
A certain force and idea-turn here strikes one as similar to Thompson's and the close by a sudden volte-face brings in an image analogous to that of hound-pursuit.
I do not suggest that Thompson's style is all Shelleyan, but that elements exist in the older poet which, brought into greater play, could grow a real strand in what we regard as Thompson's peculiar tensions of tone. His vivid and head-long massiveness, too, is not something of which Shelley was incapable. Lines large in rhythm as well as intrepid are to be met with in the Ode to the West Wind; and the Prometheus has here and there a fiery volume, so to speak, reminiscent of Thompson's hound-movement and his thunder in subsequent odes: a memorable comparison between rushing snow
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and Prometheus's defiance of false godheads is put into Asia's mouth —
The sun-awakened avalanche! whose mass,
Thrice-sifted by the storm, had gathered there
Flake after flake, in heaven-defying minds
As thought by thought is piled, till some great truth
Is loosened, and the nations echo round,
Shaken to their roots, as do the mountains now.
The stanzas with which Demogorgon, the personation of Truth's hidden eternity, is made to close the drama yield also a proof of Shelley's power in the same direction — most in the lines:
Love, from its awful throne of patient power
In the wise heart, from the last giddy hour
Of dread endurance, from the slippery, steep,
And narrow verge of craglike agony, springs
And folds over the world its healing wings.
The special tinge which Thompson often gave to Shelley's power was a certain dithyrambic gorgeousness and to his subtlety a curious imaginative entanglement. In doing so, he brought a verbal daring which revived and invigorated archaisms, unfolded "purple" rarities, tossed about new-minted coin with a masterful hand. He has a way with words which reminds one of the Elizabethans' poetic enterprise and richness. He has not in his language the Elizabethans' quiver of the very stuff of sensation; but he has their burning grandiloquence and their vivid complexity. He is a genius who has put like the great masters his stamp upon poetic diction. Nobody writing after him can ignore the Thomson-effect — a bursting splendour, an ingenious swirl of hue and harmony. On almost any page he provides examples:
The long laburnum drips
Its honey of wild flame, its jocund spilth of fire
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is a Thompson-effect; these lines about the rose —
Lo, in yon gale which waves her green cymar,
With dusky cheeks burnt red
She sways her heavy head,
Drunk with the must of her own odorousness;
While in a moted trouble the vexed gnats
Maze, and vibrate, and tease the noontide hush —
are again a Thompson-effect; so also are the blank verses:
Though I the Orient never more shall feel
Break like a clash of cymbals, and my heart
Clang through my shaken body like a gong,
and the famous flight from the Hound:
Across the margent of the world I fled,
And troubled the gold gateways of the stars,
Smiting for shelter on their clangèd bars,
Fretted to dulcer jars
And silvern chatter the pale ports o' the moon.
More subdued though as typical are lines like
Or if white-handed light
Draw thee yet dripping from the quiet pools,
Still lucencies and cools,
Of sleep, which all night mirror constellate dreams.
Sometimes there is a complex figure:
I pleaded outlaw-wise
By many a hearted casement, curtained red,
Trellised with intertwining charities.
Or the complex and the magnificent combine in a superb
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passage:
Oh! may this treasure-galleon of my verse,
Fraught with its golden passion, oared with cadent rhyme,
Set with a towering press of fantasies,
Drop safely down the time,
Leaving mine islèd self behind it far
Soon to be sunken in the abysm of seas
(As down the years the splendour voyages
From some long ruined and night-submergèd star),
And in thy subject sovereign's havening heart
Anchor the freightage of its virgin ore;
Adding its wasteful more
To his own overflowing treasury.
So through his river mine shall reach the sea...
In all these quotations there are several phrases that have a ring of Shelley, and a few lines even seem to issue from his pen:
Draw thee yet dripping from the quiet pools...
Of sleep, which all night mirror constellate dreams;
Soon to be sunken in the abysm of seas;
As down the years the splendour voyages.
Some others interblend the two poets, the Shelley-note still appreciable:
Lo, in yon gale which waves her green cymar;
Still lucencies and cools;
Trellised with intertwining charities;
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Leaving mine islèd self behind it far;
Anchor the freightage of its virgin ore.
In these mixed moments, the Thompson-note has something of Keats — a strain which is more marked when Shelley's is quite subdued, as in the description of the rose and the "vexed gnats", Thompson reaching there a perfection of what is called natural magic. The line,
Oh, may this treasure-galleon of my verse
belongs also to the Keatsian group, and
Clang through my shaken body like a gong
as well as
From some long ruined and night-submergèd star
have an undertone from Hyperion. Elsewhere too, in Thompson's verse, the Keats-note is repeatedly sounded — one might almost say he has assimilated Keats as much as Shelley; but his basic temperament is more akin to the latter, both in its mystical attitude and its plethora of successive images, so that the Keatsian element works under the stress of a Shelleyan inspiration, while both are taken up into a style which as a living whole is Thompson sheer and unique.
If his style were not individual, Thompson would not be the great poet that he is; but his greatness holds a special interest inasmuch as there was a subtle yet dominating stress in it showing him to be a fruitful starting-point for a further growth of Shelley's daimon.
I do not deny that several affinities other than that with Keats and the Elizabethans are traceable which cannot be called Shelleyan. That Keats and Shelley could intermingle
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without the least catastrophic consequence is evident, since both had a strong dash of Spenser: I could even undertake to show that one influence on the verse of Hyperion came from Prometheus Unbound. In the latter poem the Miltonic turn also is not absent, while the Shakespearean tone which, again, Keats sometimes practised, Shelley had expressed his intention of assimilating more successfully than in his Cenci and there is no reason to doubt that, with a greater maturing of his poetic thought-process, he would have done so. Thompson's style, therefore, was not on that side a development inimical to Shelley's daimon. What about the Crashaw-element so strong in Thompson at times? It was no obstacle either, for if Crashaw most resembled any poet it was, apart from Thompson, Shelley himself and to a lesser extent Blake. Donne and Patmore now remain: they are present — though more in the psychology than in the actual language of the style — in Thompson's later Odes; but with neither of them was he so much "a brother in song" as with Shelley — at least no great poetic outburst under their influence can be found to compare with his excellence at other times. The famous Anthem to Earth rises to authentic splendour of Thompson-effect where it has very little of their characteristic movement. All the same, when we inquire how it was that Thompson failed to take the Shelleyan element further to any sovereign fulfilment, these ancillary resemblances must be given their due place, for the particular promise with which he started got hampered by them.
Another hampering factor was Thompson's bent for rhetoric — rhetoric in an admirable conflagration at his best, but his best then was rather rare. And it was in the rhetorical vein that his mysticism also got far from Shelley's breadth: it seemed cast in a rigid mould, a too narrowly Christian temper, as much static as ecstatic, not flexible and comprehensive enough for Shelley's spirit which had been kindred to the Indian consciousness, whether moved by a pantheistic or a transcendental longing. The Christian temper affected Thompson's powerful sense of Nature also: he had a distinct
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pantheistic emotion, yet whenever the rhapsodical slipped into the rhetorical it was sicklied o'er with a vision of the death's-head everywhere in too unpantheistic a way for the essential Shelley's wistful and even sad but never morbid outlook. Thus even Thompson's mysticism, while making Shelley's more maturely definite, brought in limitations.
In the sphere of style, a certain overloading of words, a too thick surge or too nebulously rich spray of sound, an exaggerated intricacy or explosiveness of image-rush were defects attendant upon the Shelley-coloured qualities that he developed. The development was unquestionable: he intensified by his bold and splendorous dithyrambic movement Shelley's exoticism, creating a texture of word and image most oriental, and in doing so he enriched and widened the expressive range of Shelley's essence. This was a gain as undeniable as bringing Shelley's mysticism to a focus, but, just as a narrowing down in psychology happened there, so here the mistake he committed was to allow his style to become either brightly diffuse and haphazard or turbidly dazzling — two extremes which always are to be feared by the oriental penchant. At least the second extreme could have been avoided if he had thrilled more with a lyric flow; and this insufficiency told against the Shelleyan genius in him: he had an impetuous flow which that genius could take wonderful advantage of, but it was not markedly lyrical. He was a passionate and sonorous artist at times; still, the unfailing lyric grace which could have made his fluency more continual and more in tune with Shelley's daimon was not his forte. What gave the last and heaviest blow to his Shelleyan promise was that he not merely lacked the lyric cry which Shelley had sinuously melodised and Swinburne orchestrated: his fluency itself for all its odic power worked by fire-spurts soon consuming themselves and he had not a sustained gift of building with a large and symmetrical hand. The spacious energy which fashioned Prometheus Unbound and rendered The Cenci — however wanting in personal life — a feat of dramatic construction, could discover no crowning
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outlet through a fine yet sporadic strength.
Thus Thompson failed as Swinburne did, though for different reasons. Nevertheless, a side of Shelley got developed in him too, despite accompanying defects. And I venture to prophesy that if ever some poet carries on the Shelleyan nisus, he would incarnate the poetic gains that nisus has acquired through Thompson no less than Swinburne. In trying to find a new lease of activity, Shelley's genius kept growing and its fresh attributes should be now one with its nature and, if some fluent mould were found, there would be poured in it a manifold harmony together with a plastic melodious stream and, besides the harmonic surge, an oriental audacity of colour, an adventurous and creative and re-shaping word-passion. There would be interwoven with his uniqueness something of the original Shelley, something of Swinburne, something of Francis Thompson. But he must fight free, on the one hand, of an inclination to dilute his meaning and haze off his expressive units and, on the other, of a lapse into unorganised though abundant thought-stuff and objectionably archaic or precious or new-fangled word-surprise. And if in addition to a fully controlled and sculptured grace he proves capable of a vast architectural inspiration, he would accomplish in his own mystic domain what even a Shakespeare, sovereign of the life-force, might envy.
Questions to Sri Aurobindo
1. Is my essay up to the mark?
2. Does the theory I have expounded and illustrated in this article hold water? As part of literature it may be perfectly legitimate, but is there any chance of its being true?
Sri Aurobindo's Answers
1. Yes.
2. What is exactly your theory? There is one thing — influences — everybody undergoes influences, absorbs them
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or rejects, makes them disappear in one's own developed style or else keeps them as constituent strands. There is another thing — Lines of Force. In the universe there are many lines of Force on which various personalities or various achievements and formations spring up — e.g. the line Pericles-Caesar-Napoleon or the line Alexander-Jenghis-Tamerlane-Napoleon — meeting together there — so it may be too in poetry, lines of poetic force prolonging themselves from one poet to another, meeting and diverging. Yours seems to be a third — a Daimon or individual Spirit of Poetry migrating from one individual to another, several perhaps meeting together in one poet who gives them all a full expression. Is that it? If so, it is an interesting idea and arguable.
17.2.1935
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Shakespeare and "Things to Come"
Up to now Shakespeare remains among English poets a "topless tower" — sole and inexplicable. Inexplicable in his inspired prolificity, and not, as the Baconians urge, by having masterpieces ascribed to his "ill-educated" mind. It is argued that what tells against his authorship of the plays is not only their success as literature but also their being packed with versatile learning. One has, however, just to point out Bernard Shaw and ask: What efficient school-education did he have to equip him for his excellence in the field of letters? Shaw is nowhere near Shakespeare as a creative genius, but the fact stands that, without academic education, he could write brilliantly, wittily, learnedly, that he could be play-wright, dramatic critic, judge of the fine arts, authority on Socialism, and could hold forth in most competent a vein on education itself, show keen insight into the medical psychology, assimilate with a fine force biological science into his Weltanschauung. Might not Shakespeare, while exploiting a greater artistic gift after prolonged stage-work, bring in classical allusions with which his fellow-craftsmen must have almost tiresomely familiarised him, write knowingly about legal points which a practical turn of mind such as his biography exhibits could in a most natural way seize during his contact with the motley mass of money-grubbers and their calculating clerks round theatre-land, represent with a vivid understanding military science and court-life and political practice when each man's nostrils were filled with the breath of colonial adventure, all eyes were coloured by eager observation of picturesque heroes and glittering courtiers, every head was buzzing with diplomatic questions raised by unsettled thrones and touch-and-go balances of power?
Besides, it is not likely that Bacon who was most apprehensive about the lasting value of the English language and wished all his works to be written in Latin should have spent
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years creating masterpieces in a tongue he underrated if not despised. Perhaps the most decisive proof against him is the difference of psychological atmosphere between his compositions and Shakespeare's. Shakespeare wrote on occasion like a book-worm, a lawyer, a commander-in-chief, a courtier, a politician; what he could never do was to introduce the genuine philosophical accent. The whole cast and vibration of his style is determined by a vital gusto, impetuousness or ingenuity and not intellectual contemplation; while, if Bacon was anything, he was an intellectual. Shakespeare dragged into his plays all that he was or knew: why is that element not there which most distinguished Bacon's mentality — his half philosophical half scientific thinking, the "Novum Organum" note? If a writer creates even in part out of himself, how is it that Bacon in writing Shakespeare left his essential nature out? Milton, Wordsworth, even Shelley had, unlike Shakespeare, an intellectual substance and their rhythm reflects it; Bacon too would have given his dramas some touch at least of an inspiration uttering in a dynamic or moved or illuminative language the ideas of the pure intelligence. Shakespeare's thought springs from an exuberance of the life-energy; a vivid excitement of feeling and sensation, throws up rich idea-effects, but there is no pressure of the detaching intellect or the seeking for a world-view through the eyes of the inspired reason. Even the moments of what may be called his "message" are steeped in the tones of a mind fixed on potencies of passion and emotion.
For, what he offers us is the colour and complexity of the life-movement converting spontaneously its soul of multi-form desire into word-music. And it is a music all his own — unsurpassed for its continual excellence in three respects. It comes from his characters bearing the unique breath and idiosyncrasy of each as well as the exact substance and stress of every experience they undergo. It comes not merely from them but also through them, as if impelled by some hidden universe of vitality focusing itself in personal moulds and motives, so that each figure vibrates with a sort of genius, a
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superabundant animation. Lastly, it is a speech of inexhaustible picturesqueness, the phrases are gorged with metaphor, word follows word prodigious with assimilated imagery. And by an art little short of the miraculous, this music has a ring of inevitability to suit every occasion possible. It can give us Cleopatra impatient and scornful, uttering her sense of the physical pain of death when she applies an asp to her breast, yet putting into her words all that queenly will of hers by which she takes death unto herself freely in order to satisfy her "immortal longings", her passion for the departed Antony, and not as a common necessity to which she must surrender —
Come, thou mortal wretch,
With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate
Of life at once untie. Poor venomous fool,
Be angry and dispatch.
But Shakespeare's vivid nobility can be perfect also in a tone of exquisite naturalness that holds depths of the sublime as genuine in their subdued self-revelation as the heights when each phrase rings out massive and masterful. Cleopatra's acceptance of death as a means to reach Antony becomes an intimate sense of Antony's own all-satisfying person as soon as Iras falls heart-broken after being kissed farewell by the queen:
If thou and nature can so gently part,
The stroke of death is as a lover's pinch
Which hurts and is desired.
This simile, simple yet profound, is followed by one step more in the disclosure of the sheer woman-soul in Cleopatra. When the asp has clung to her breast, the identification of death with love comes with an overwhelming force to her emotion and on Charmian's poignant praise of her — "O eastern star!" — she gives tongue to a metaphorical reprimand
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which is an unexcelled triumph of art:
Peace, peace!
Dost thou not see my baby at my breast,
That sucks the nurse asleep?
The sudden change, from death as the lover, to death as the lover's child distils from the crisis the entire sweetness of passion: the whole cycle of emotional ecstasy possible to a woman through her chosen mate is compassed and the psychological transfiguration of mortality stands complete. The penetrative magic employed fairly takes one's breath away by its unforced originality and a rhythmic sibilance that echoes the anxious motherly gesture on Cleopatra's part to silence all that may disturb the soothing act of suckling her imagined child.
It is precisely in perfection of expressive rhythm no less than phrase that Shakespeare's claim to be the greatest creator of poetic drama lies. He has, no doubt, a fine constructive instinct. Though the incidents he projects are unified not by conscious dovetailing but by a rambling method in which the main theme progresses as in actual life with a lot of clinging side-swirls, Shakespeare's lack of economy and adroitness is not a fault, because the crowded picture he builds up is most effective by the play of contrasts and foils it provides for etching out all the more vividly the chief characters and events. But this is so on account of the surprising way his people become real to us on a life-breath of word-music. Webster is often almost as good in pure dramatic construction, but his poetry except in a small number of half-scenes and scattered sentences contains no masterful grace of rhythmic expression: he does not play upon his metrical base with skill enough to provide a sustained justification for choosing blank verse instead of prose. Shakespeare's style leads us to feel that the turn and rhythm of prose would entirely rob his language of its living faithfulness, its onomatopoeic response to the meaning he
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has in mind. What writer of his day could have given us King Lear's lament over the dead Cordelia:
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never, never!
Pray you, undo this button —
where the audacity of "sprung rhythm" and dramatic anticlimax has not a streak of crudeness or bathos and is a change the unpatterned movement of prose can never emphasise? Or take the mad Lear on the heath:
Spit, fire! spout, rain!
Nor rain, wind, thunder, fire are my daughters:
I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness;
I never gave you kingdom, called you children,
You owe me no subscription: then, let fall
Your horrible pleasure; here I stand, your slave,
A poor, infirm, weak and despised old man.
Mark how the extra syllable at the close of lines two, three and four produces by its falling rhythm a suggestion as if Lear were breaking down pathetically after each expression of his argument and it is extremely apposite that the point of breaking down in each case is a word reminding him directly of the cause of his misery — "daughters", "unkindness", "children". Mark also the repeated sob in the last line, where the words, even apart from the meaning, seem to represent its psychology by their massed stresses and peculiarly combined tones just as those in the second convey in a like manner their particular substance of overpowering energy.
The result by analogous means in line two of Hamlet's touching plea to Horatio is well known:
Absent thee from felicity a while
And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain
To tell my story.
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It is impossible to read that line without difficulty and strain in the breath, especially as it follows one which is most musically smooth. Macbeth is, perhaps, fullest with this alert or rather instinctive skill in the use of words and their sounds. I can never forget, for instance, the impression of perfect artistry given by Macbeth's famous soliloquy when his wife has left him with an injunction to remove the filthy evidence of his deed:
Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.
The point which rivets the attention is the word "incarna-dine" — a strongly beautiful effect on the ear, but not that alone. Macbeth has invoked a daring comparison, blood-stained hands pitted against "all Neptune's ocean"; and to support it he must somehow bring out the enormity of his crime, all the more when he applies a thirteen-lettered epithet like "multitudinous" to "seas". Only a strikingly big word can prove competent to match that epithet as well as the ocean-idea, and "incarnadine" does this with unerring success. We feel that the evil with which the hand is stained is vast enough to pollute with its indelible heinousness the whole world of waters.... Nor have we appreciated Shakespeare's art enough if we have caught no other point in the quotation. Having accomplished what was psychologically required, he could have dropped the three-foot line which prolongs the sentence by a participial clause: Lady Macbeth who now re-enters does not even finish it with the remaining two feet, and Shakespeare by omitting it would have got an obvious climax; but he was a poet-dramatist beyond the ordinary. He seems to have divined that, since the hand that committed the murder was a small thing though its offence was tremendous, the latter implication by a polysyllable was not enough while treating the ocean-idea: the sea in its turn
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must somehow appear small and become capable of being stained by a human limb. Hence the sonorous is succeeded by the simple, and, even, as "multitudinous" was matched by "incarnadine", "green" is contraposed to "red": it is a device which, besides stressing more explicitly the colour-contrast between water and blood, brings down Macbeth's widening imagination to the reality, to a mood that expresses, without obliterating his great inner sense of guilt, his desire to lay the outer ghost, so to speak, and deal practically with the limited symbol and evidence of his crime — the stained hands.
Macbeth, however, is the Mount Everest of Shakespeare's Himalaya not only because, over and above the usual organic heat and constructive onrush, it has a more uniform poetic inspiration than anywhere else. The poetry and the drama now depict, with a keener vision than ever before, a bursting out of forces from behind the external consciousness. The supernatural takes possession of the field, and incident, atmosphere, expression are all surcharged with uncanny presences. Shakespeare has always a power to put into words the very stuff of what he describes or imagines, but here he makes language throb with a still rarer life, a deeper and more uncommon experience. In this category the most marvellous lines are those in which Macbeth conveys the terror of the voice he heard reverberating around him after Duncan had been stabbed while asleep:
Still it cried, 'Sleep no more!' to all the house:
'Glamis hath murdered sleep, and therefore Cawdor
Shall sleep no more, Macbeth shall sleep no more!'
Shakespeare has found for the original turn to which he has subjected the idea of retribution a verbal scheme with a warp of repetition and a woof of variety, which combines with awe and bewilderment. While the large tone of "sleep no more" stuns us by its recurrence, the different proper names "Glamis", "Cawdor", "Macbeth" perplex us and by yet
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meaning the same person maddeningly multiply the intensity of the curse pronounced on him. If only "Glamis" or either of the other two had been reiterated, the accumulated power would not have been so colossal; now it seems as though the dooms of three separate persons were heaped together upon the head of one at the same time that we understand through our knowing the identity behind the three names that the same individual has been repeatedly condemned. Further, the names are all majestic and answer back the dominant rhythms. The result is assonances and consonances enforcing an intricate and fearful sonority which carries in it the omnipotence of some occult cosmos of avenging life-force risen up against Macbeth.
A similar gust from behind the veil comes in Lady Macbeth's weird invocation:
Come, come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here;
And fill me from the crown to the toe, top-full
Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood,
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between
The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts,
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever in your sightless substances
You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes;
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,
To cry, 'Hold, hold!'
Read out the passage slowly and with contained fury and you will find the blood thickening and the air full of shadows. I have heard formulas to call spirits "from the vasty deep" but none so genuine as this — a most dangerous hail to the powers and principalities that lurk beyond the surface
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consciousness. It is a snatch of black magic establishing a real contact with occult beings: that we do not get possessed is due to the absence of Macbethan circumstances — no man contemplating murder would be able to check himself once he has made his desire touch the mighty madness here immortalised. The poetic art is throughout perfect, but now and again it becomes more markedly effective. The climax comes when the lines —
you murdering ministers,
You wait on nature's mischief! —
draw out the rhythm from between compressed lips, suddenly loosen it forth into spacious and darkened vistas, unknown, unseen, yet felt as alive with strange hisses of hatred. And that phrase "the blanket of the dark", referring back to "night's pall" and "the dunnest smoke of hell", fuses the preternatural with the human, making the latter a battlefield whereon some titanic devilry would repulse the intervening grace of heaven. The vivid homely term "blanket" becomes a haunting realism pregnant with a sense of ghostly vastitudes materialising and concentrating themselves for covert action within the narrow earth-limits.
It is in such passages that Shakespeare is most true to Victor Hugo's similitude of him — a sea of sound: an elemental power not only wide and manifold, giving us humanity's universal nature, but also like the sea profound. Profound, again, in a double connotation: not merely does the word come, as always, from some depth of revealing intuition with a force of actuality — it comes, too, from unfamiliar kingdoms of life below or behind the moods Shakespeare is accustomed to interpret. Like a dream-dragon with a million heads, the word-waves rise and curve and sway and dart towards the terra firma of the wakeful mind. In Lady Macbeth's speech they come with a slaughtering wickedness, while, in the voices that Macbeth heard ringing
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through the house, they emerge in a retributive wrath — a kind of action and reaction from the same occult plane. It is also a breath from there which perturbs the equilibrium of Hamlet's soul, a breath blown upon him as if his father's sepulchre
Hath oped his ponderous and marble jaws.
In Lear the occult invades the surface existence like a tremendous storm rather than a sinister breath, whirling in an uncontrollable catastrophe the human figures: the commotion on the heath is but an outward symbol of a mysterious madness. Iago's "motiveless malignity" is another and less apparent way of hinting the incalculable behind life and its conscious aims; and it evokes against it a corresponding incalculable — the demoniac obsession of Othello:
Like to the Pontic sea,
Whose icy current and compulsive course
Ne'er feels retiring ebb, but keeps due on
To the Propontic and the Hellespont;
Even so my bloody thoughts with violent pace,
Shall ne'er look back, ne'er ebb to humble love,
Till that a capable and wide revenge
Swallow them up.
But in the Moor's tragedy Shakespeare's eye is not cast deliberately inward on the occult. It is even doubtful whether, when he does seem to scrutinise and use the secret suggestions from "the undiscovered country", he sets himself to do it or just happens to have his gaze turned inward without any intention to plumb the unknown. He is as a rule occupied with mirroring the subtle and large region of consciousness immediately behind external life — a near subjective background to human activity from which that activity itself is a narrower projection. Thus he is not bound as most Elizabethan dramatists to the absolutely superficial
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crudenesses, violences, caprices of passion; but he stands no more than a few paces of widening freedom beyond the superficialities — that is, enough to give his representation a universal human touch, a comprehensive interpreting force in the domain of life's psychology, yet not any deliberate grasp on the occult and the ultra-human, the good or evil sources mightier than the subtle human background and governing the latter by their own interplay or their conflicting velleities towards the earth-scene. When his dramatic genius was at its intensest, they somehow broke through and with their cross-currents brought about those giant ship-wrecks of purpose which constitute his greatest plays. It is, however, a pity that he was not inclined to a deliberate study of the unknown, for by his intuitive style he was the one poet most gifted to do so; nobody after him has combined his ample scope, his varicoloured energetic beauty and his plucking the poetic word as if from the heart of his object.
If he had plunged still beyond the occult and felt too some lasting impression of the mystic truth, we would have had a verse vivid and compact with a godlike glow, bringing the mystical into the very senses and the flesh. But if he was little of an intentional occultist he was all the less drawn towards mysticism. It is surprising that in the multifarious world he created of characters that breathe and move and utter themselves with a vitality more royal and authentic than even ours, there is not a single individual fired with religious or spiritual passion. He did try to mirror the intellect: Hamlet is his closest vision of the intellect through the life-force. Yes, through the life-force, because, though among Shakespeare's heroes, Hamlet thinks the most puissantly, the most curiously, we have only to read
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil
side by side with Keats's
To thy high requiem become a sod
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to distinguish the rhythm of the élan vital thinking, from that of the poetic intelligence cast into a beautiful turn of phrase but lacking the Shakespearean life-quiver. Or compare
O that this too too solid flesh would melt,
Thaw and resolve itself into a dew
with Shelley's
From the world's bitter wind
Seek shelter in the shadow of the tomb,
and the result is the same: the one has an impact upon what Sri Aurobindo would call the nerves of mental sensation whereas the other's appeal is from the pure intelligence in a moved imaginative moment. The contrast between
Who would fardels bear
To grunt and sweat under a weary life?
and Wordsworth's
The heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world
is equally striking. In Wordsworth, the grey cells are changing the urgencies of an oppressed existence to philosophic values, presenting deep emotion yet with a detached contemplative air. In Shakespeare, the brain identifies itself with the guts to render coherent the being's instinctive shout of recoil and rebellion: the emotion surges up from the depths with a cutting and devouring power which does not easily allow whatever philosophic values it may have to stand with marked independence. However, Hamlet is as much of the pure intelligence in its reflective state as Shakespeare could seize; but nowhere do we come upon a mystic personation of his creative power.
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Luckily, though, he did have fugitive moods which are interesting as clues to what is possible in the English language when the mystic hue enters the life-mind. There is a sonnet indicating one possibility:
Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
Thrall to these rebel powers that thee array,
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward self so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body's end?
Then, soul, live thou upon thy servant's loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more:
So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And Death once dead, there's no more dying then.
This is an expression of the life-mind moulding with unrest of emotion and sensation a mystic idea. It is a sort of complement to the "metaphysical" Donne-effect which came on the heels of the Shakespeare-phenomenon. Here is a thesis, as it were, suggesting from its own depth that antithesis which is at once opposed and continuous with it, the antithesis which is a mystic idea born of the poetic intelligence and moulding emotion and sensation with unrest of ingenuity and curiosity. The famous lines from Hamlet,
There's a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will,
bear again a mystic substance intuited, with the usual vitality, from the plane of the poetic intelligence. But Shakespeare opens up in other places possibilities still more rich and rare, though it is not always that he gets the mystic
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illumination pure or complete. Cleopatra's
Eternity was in our lips and eyes,
Bliss in our brows' bent; none our parts so poor
But was a race of heaven
fuses the intensity of a spiritual experience with a tremendous thrill of the life-force, but, instead of raising the latter to a significance beyond itself, the infinitude of the Spirit has become a symbol and suggestion of the sheer acme of that thrill. Passion has used, for revealing its own absolute pitch, for achieving its own apotheosis, the mystic light. Prospero's speech at the end of his magic performance before Ferdinand and Miranda is a complex phenomenon denoting in another way a magnificent might-have-been from a plane above that of mystic ideas:
Our revels now are ended; these our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve;
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
The meaning is clearly that each human life is like an illusion, soon to dissolve in the sleep of death, in an everlasting annihilation; and that the whole world too will pass away like a phantom into absolute nothingness. But I take this meaning to be only one side of the inspiration which tried to get through and could not have its full implication expressed because Shakespeare was not a philosophic or a mystic thinker. Prospero had spoken to the spirits after the complete
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fading of their masque; so he knew and believed, before delivering the present speech, that they survived even though the masque had totally faded. Hence his premises were such as would compel a conclusion to the effect that like this masque the whole universe would vanish but like the surviving spirits something would still live behind the world-illusion. He grasped the point of dreamlike fading and pressed his analogy no further, instead of giving us an intuition of some transcendental god-self — a being, rapt and remote, to whom mind and life and matter are an "insubstantial pageant" variously conjured up by its creative imagination, a dream-interlude between a divine peace and peace. We would have been reminded of the Upanishad's supreme Soul projecting the cosmic vision but only to dissolve it again and return to its unfeatured ecstasy of repose, its self-absorbed superconsciousness. What Shakespeare manages to convey to us, in spite of the mystic motive being absent, is an impression as though he stood back in a transcendental poise and uttered his dreamlike experience of the so-called real cosmos without remembering to express the nature of his standpoint: he appears to have quite forgotten the standpoint, for otherwise he would not have so unreservedly described the actors as melting "into thin air" or used the word "baseless" as part of the data on which he drew his analogy, unless he meant that the vanished masque was not built from any stuff of fundamental or basic reality and that its seeming to be built from such substance was a mere illusion, an airy nothing, produced by the actor-spirits. The passage remains one of the most curious in literature — a high mystic inspiration which poured itself in splendid poetry with its original meaning completely negated.
But the spiritual light which should have found a temporary focus in this large and lordly language is not lost for ever. An extremely potent feel of it is conveyed by the phrase,
In the dark backward and abysm of Time,
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a phrase at once keen and profound, far-reaching and mysterious with a deific presence. However, the mantric perfection is here as if one felt the inmost and the highest with one's eyes shut. In a sonnet of Shakespeare's it brims up with as dense yet more intimate a force. A line and a half catch by a superb irrelevance to their context a thrill of some eternal existence and visionary godhead:
The prophetic soul
Of the wide world, dreaming on things to come.
That is mysticism in a ne plus ultra of intuition which, though coloured by the life-mind, plunges into the pure self-knowledge of the Supreme — the rarest and most unplumbable note sounded by the "multitudinous seas" of word-music that are Shakespeare. Outside the writings of Sri Aurobindo and a few of his disciples, there is little in English poetry to match its suggestive vibration except Milton's
Those thoughts that wander through eternity
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone.
I believe that these two lines by the later poets differ from Shakespeare's in part of their rhythmic psychology, they incorporate a colour more intellectual; but, apart from subtle differences, they bear a striking resemblance to it which can best be described as a quality of substance, style and, above all, sound conveying with an immense yet controlled power the value and figure an experience would have in a Consciousness superhuman, illimitable and everlasting. In short, we get through the poetic afflatus a touch and a thrill as of some divine level of Being where archetypes have been bodied forth whose hints and echoes are what we know as the world of mind and life and matter.
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Everywhere in poetry, the aim is to fashion a word-form and a rhythm-movement that have a sense of absolute perfection: the vision must shine in a body of style and sound shaped to a loveliness irreproachable. Even the grotesque and the tragic are thus ensouled and embodied, and become therefore a source of delight which leaves us breathless by its compelling charm. For, always the poetic intuition seems to afford through an aesthetically flawless word-music an impression of divine archetypes. The thought and the feeling held by it are changed, at the very time that they make their particular human appeal, into a mask of something greater, because the words and the rhythm grow, by a beauty complete and unimprovable, a mysterious language suggesting realities transcendental in terms of realities limited by the earth-nature. If we respond in the right way of aesthesis to any line of genuine poetry, we shall find that the creative art which voices the intuition fills the substance with attributes beyond it, as if a supreme and ideal beauty wore a disguise and came vibrating into our consciousness under an alien form and meaning which yet are not opaque enough to dim the lustre draped by them. But though all genuine art has a touch essentially spiritual, it is more allusive than direct, because the substance and the living thrill are too human. Mysticism shows a way out: its art is not superior, but it is more straight in spiritual impact and fraught with wider, more luminous, more satisfying significances inasmuch as the archetypes are less allusively manifested. By several gradations, however, it leads us out, and not till we encounter the lines I have quoted do we feel that the language and the rhythm have altogether thrown off their disguises and spoken directly the transcendental in terms proper to its own authentic nature. Here it is not just the content that is extremely spiritual; the manner and the music attain too a spiritual extreme both of volume and intensity, as can be proved by a comparison with those of the other mystic instances found accidentally in Shakespeare. I have distinguished spiritual light from mystic idea, and now that light is
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tuned up to its last degree of revelation where it passes into the heart-throb of the archetypal and the infinite. Perhaps examples from mystic verse written in the post-Elizabethan, more intellectual periods will help also to illustrate what I mean.
I saw them walking in an air of glory,
Whose light doth trample on our days,
gives us an extraordinary spiritual substance and the language is inevitable; yet the style and the rhythm have only a very high ideative quiver — the words, though pressing beyond the pure intellect's inspiration, have not been possessed by the hues and tones of the infinite. Half-way towards the quality I wish to emphasise is
Solitary thinkings such as dodge
Conception to the very bourne of heaven.
But with
I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm as it was bright.
we are already within the domain of sheer revelation, though not at its centre, whereas in
Voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone
the penetration is entire: the utmost profundities are visioned and voiced in the poetic surge. From the archetypal point of view achievements like this line are the most precious poetry; one might say that they are the goal, the crowning triumph for which the artistic enthousiasmos aspires in secret through all its intuitive audacities.
According to the nature and sensitive openness of its
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human channels the enthousiasmos works; it has no prejudices as to moral and immoral, religious and profane, for in art the side of godhead to be disclosed is beauty. So long as the intuition comes flawless, the divinity in art suffers no wrong; it consents to be worshipped in passionate Dionysiac temples as in fanes of Apollonian calm, to lust on Sappho's lips and deny the gods with Lucretius just as excellently as to weave Tagore's song-garlands for an immortal Beloved and, through Dante, hear even the mouth of hell declare God's mercy. Else it would be curious that the largest poetic splendour the modern ages have witnessed should have burst from the one gigantic genius who cared apparently the least about religion and matters spiritual — Shakespeare. Yet, though Shakespeare will remain unsurpassed, a mare magnum in the poetic creation, he is not the last word spoken by the spirit of beauty. For he is not, save in a couple of brief moments, the Word that was in the Beginning; he did not purpose to identify himself increasingly with the direct poetic counterpart of the archetypal Vision that seeks to find tongue in the cosmic flux. Through self-fulfilment in various terms and disguises of consciousness, this counterpart moves towards the profoundest, closest, most comprehensive revelation of its own beauty, and through all sovereign speech and rhythm till now it has but prepared the "things to come". However, an instrument as constantly and as abundantly intuitive as Shakespeare must be found for that revelation before human poetry can realise the plenitude which has been the dream of the wide world's prophetic Soul.
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If poetry is to glow with true beauty it must rise from living experience. This is not to rule out the Ariels of song: imagination may weave rainbows upon a delicate air, but the rainbows must be a genuine revelation and no coloured falsity. In other words, poetry is not confined to facts of mere earth: it can float in more tenuous regions, but it must create an impression that these regions, however incredible to the normal mind, do exist behind or beyond the familiar and tangible loveliness. The sole criterion, therefore, is: Does poetry come with an authentic power or no? Keats's magic casements may be only the eyes of daydream, they may exist only in his brown-study and in no recognisable room; yet his art is such as to create a feeling of their reality. Our minds are charmed into what Coleridge called a suspension of disbelief. The imagery and the music go home with an inevitable sense of truth. Somewhere, we seem to tell ourselves, these wonderful apertures are to be found; the rhythmic language in which they are described is like a current generated by the poet's touch with their strangeness to produce a television in our own soul. The experience is proved by this convincing spell thrown on us. We must not ask if an emotion or an object poetised is part of common life; we must only inquire whether it lives in its own way with a convincing beauty and appears real, even though its reality be remote from our ordinary perspectives.
Nor is it necessary for a poet to pass completely through the inner experiences recorded by him of subtle realities. A mystic surge may convey to us a thrill of God's presence or a superb spiritual phenomenon like
The lonely waters of eternal ease
with such a strong mood-atmosphere that we pass into that very state of rapture; and yet there would be no reason to
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believe that to the poet the substance of his writing was equally intimate. When a Vedic Vishwamitra rolls some gorgeous hymn to the Truth-Sun wherein the Self of self has its being, we are aware that he is voicing an experience, but that is because we have the independent knowledge that Vishwamitra was a Rishi. If we did not have this knowledge we would not be justified in arguing from the sense of reality implicit in the poem to an experience on the poet's part. All that can be said is that the poet who could bring so assuring a vibration of mystical ecstasy had an extraordinary imagination open to spheres of reality which transcend the reach not only of the average man but also the average poet of the first rank — say, Homer or Shakespeare. For, in poetry the main factor is imagination: we should never forget this central truth if we are to gauge rightly the nature of inspired utterance. Emotion makes poetry throb: it is the animating flame behind all idea and figure, but this emotion is not necessarily what is felt in the accustomed human way. It is a thrill, a warmth, an enthousiasmos of the imagination. And what the imagination, as a rule, does is to take suggestive hints given by actual experience, outer or inner, and then transform them into a power of measured beauty by reflecting or transmitting the response from some centre of consciousness beyond the normal human nature: that is to say, the imagination is a medium.
Some poets are close to their own experience-stuff; still, they too reshape it in order to embody as perfect a glow or gusto of beauty as possible: depths are plumbed, associations explored, velleities stressed rendering the new substance different from the old. In art the demand is for the beautiful, and if changing the stuff of experience brings out a heat and a light which deepen and accentuate beauty, the poet will not and should not hesitate to do so. His purpose, his ideal, is obviously not to photograph the mere outer life; it is not even to be faithful to his own inner life; he is essentially a revealer of shines and shadows from a supernormal plane. All poetry is a marriage of known symbols with unknown modes of
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being. When the Elizabethan poet writes that tall trees, struck by the first gleam of day,
Dandled the morning's childhood in their arms,
a supernormal perception goes quickening the sight of familiar objects; he has unveiled, without relinquishing his hold on these objects, a vision not of the earth-life as we daily contact it. And the supernormal vision increases as the poet becomes a channel of yet rarer subtleties, the culmination being the sheer mystical afflatus. The point, however, is that his sole concern is to be an instrument for perfect aesthetic creation, without stickling after so-called probability or needing to live out inwardly the full substance of the poetic work.
What, then, of sincerity in art? It is necessary to admit and emphasise that a poet who goes against his nature's aesthetic idealistic trend by living quite in disharmony with it is liable to diminish the frequency no less than the strength of his inspiration. The afflatus will hesitate to visit him and instead of producing masterpieces in abundance he will bring forth sovereign speech as a rare rush of light amidst shimmering vacuities. Poetry is a grave occupation, and though we may not convert it into an ostentatious ceremonial it does not bear being trifled with. The crown of utterance, it calls for a high seriousness in the instrument chosen by the gods. The old conception of the Muse is psychologically correct: the poet does appeal to something higher than his quotidian consciousness, he strains and poises himself and rarefies his mood in order to catch the inevitable phrase, the authentic rhythm, the real-sense of inspiration. Sarojini Naidu, after a brief spell of delicate music, grew dumb because she was not jealous enough of the gift bestowed on her: the drum and trumpet of politics deafened her to those flute-voices of her young delight which had given us poem after tremulous poem shot with tones of flame and faëry. A poet has to recognise his vocation, his destiny, and not fritter away the
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precious soul-stuff which takes images from beyond the ephemeral surface life. However, we must not impute insincerity to him even if he wastes his energy, provided the work he occasionally offers us pulses with the secret heart-throb of creative imagination. For then it is a cry from the lips of the gods, and the significant form that makes its beauty is the luminous ever-living body of the Muse. Fundamentally, the Muse and not the man is responsible also for the creative work of a life spent in tune with the aesthete and the idealist in one's nature.
If a mystic poet, for instance, were to claim that his work invariably mirrored his inner experiences, he would be an insincere fraud. But his poems themselves are neither insincere nor fraudulent: if they are inspired, the "I" of each poem is not the human ego but some entity which has an experience on a superhuman plane and sends down its self-expression through a human medium, coloured in a certain measure by the medium's personality yet not vitiated by it. The vitiation takes place only when there is a capricious fanciful play or a dry intellectual interference. So long as there is a moved precision in language, an assured lift of rhythm, a masterful harmony in the whole, a poem is a genuine echo to some subtle reality behind the poet's imagination. It remains a revelation of the real, though its author may have experienced nothing — nothing except the joy of the creative labour, which gives him mostly a mere sympathetic thrill. If people do not understand this paradox and attribute the described experience in its complete form to the man who serves as an instrument, it is after all their own fault. The reaction they undergo on discovering that the man did not have the entire experience is to believe that the poem is a tissue of falsehoods and that poetry is worthless since it does not depict truth. They must understand that both idolatry and iconoclasm are extreme errors.
The test here of sincerity, truth, authenticity, value is, first and last, Inspiration — Inspiration working through any part of man's nature. The outward-going body-conscious
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mind of Homer describes Apollo's descent from Olympus with an intense atmosphere of the god's subtle physicality of power. Shakespeare passes a sudden voice from spiritual heights through the life-force's peculiar thrill and colour and we get
the prophetic soul
Of the wide world dreaming on things to come.
Sri Aurobindo intuits in a self-transfiguring lift of the pure mental consciousness the supreme Spirit's
Force one with unimaginable rest.
In all these expressions the inspiration is absolutely unmarred. Sri Aurobindo has experienced the very state he poetises, while Homer never knew Apollo's deific puissance nor Shakespeare the world-soul's profound reverie; yet their language when filled with a mystic intuition has not suffered the least weakness in imparting a real-sense. For each has conveyed with an aesthetic finality in the terms of his own habitual colour a superhuman magnitude; the perfect inspired beauty which bears evidence of truth behind the veil has been equally present. And this is all that matters.
No doubt, the examples I have mentioned are in a certain category of style which is exceptional — a style in which even poets of the pre-eminent order do not always write. They write in the main with a simple lucidity, a vivid vigour, a shining richness or, at their rarest, a spelled exaltation; no more than a few snatches we have in them of all these styles, distinct or mixed, reaching not only their own perfections but at the same time a special quality for which we have no name. And it is possible to argue that, given an identical measure of poetic capacity, one who has himself gone through high spiritual experiences is more likely to produce a large amount of work irradiating their influence than the man whose imagination only has been inspired, and to get more often their full depth and movement by means of this
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unusual mode of style. Still, it must be remembered that to write in another mode does not cast a shadow of insincerity or untruth over a poem. A poem may not reflect or echo the very stuff of Spirit but it can have a mystical genuineness of its own: the Spirit now is not felt in a language instinct with its essential vibration, it is felt with a true receptivity through a different poetic manner. And, in art, any style can attain the extreme pitch of sincerity, of inevitableness, which marks out the masterpiece. Take these lines from Yeats where he says that he has seen
In all poor foolish things that live a day
Eternal Beauty wandering on her way.
Yeats is a listener to occult footfalls, a singer haunted by unearthly presences, but not, like Sri Aurobindo, a yogi who has climbed the ultimate summits; and his words and rhythm in the couplet above do not voice the Spirit's substance with the direct grandeur of Sri Aurobindo's. Nor can they fill us with the same quantity, so to speak, of spiritual meaning as would an utterance by Sri Aurobindo couched in a similar style-key:
Rose of God, like a blush of rapture on Eternity's face,
Rose of Love, ruby depth of all being, fire-passion of Grace!
Arise from the heart of the yearning that sobs in Nature's abyss:
Make earth the home of the Wonderful and life beatitude's kiss.1
Nevertheless, who will call Yeats's lines inferior poetry? Who can miss in them the inspiration and the beauty that give some kind of authentic touch with a superhuman realit? It is a different kind of touch from what Sri Aurobindo manifests;
1. "Rose of God", Collected Poems (Centenary Edition, Vol. 5), p. 584.
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yet to question its sincerity and truth would be tantamount to saying that to feel a body naked with the hand or through a transparent fabric proves actuality whereas a contact through a silk robe does not. When the inspired perfection is there, it is as much an error to level the charge of falsity at a mystical phrase for being in a particular style with a particular content as for being written by a man like Shakespeare to whom mysticism was quite a terra incognita.
Suppose even the Spirit experience of a high plane gets completely changed in the transmission; then too the result is no falsity but a new interpretative vision, the symbol of one level fused with a significance of another. An illustration is Cleopatra's rhapsodical words to Antony:
Bliss in our brows' bent, none our parts so poor
But was a race of heaven.
Though a tremendous love-thrill between two human beings has usurped here for its own glorification a mystical light, one cannot declare that, because Cleopatra was not a mystic, Shakespeare has made her play a hypocrite's role by using spiritual language for an apotheosis of intense passionate rapture. Mystic or no, the upshot is a ring of utter genuineness, a poetic splendour absolute in its intense yet restrained sincerity of emotion. The real-sense is perfect — since art deals with realities on various planes and is not ostensibly preoccupied with conveying the Spirit by sight, sound or significance. Any mood-thrill imparted through any species of style by any poetic temperament bears the stamp of authenticity if that one sine qua non is found — the unanalysable but ever unmistakable force from subtle worlds we know as Inspiration, the living experience whose sole sign of truth lies in whatever figure reveals itself of a beauty that is intrinsic and not meretricious.
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