CHAPTER XI POETS

It may be set down as an axiom that a nation which is in the proper enjoyment of all its faculties, which is healthy, wealthy, wise, and properly conditioned, must be producing a certain amount of poetry. From the beginning this has been so; it will be so to the end. When England was at her highest, when the best in her was having full play, she produced poets. Right down into the Victorian Era she went on producing them. Then she took to the Stock Exchange and an ostentatious way of life, and the supply of poets fell off. If we except Mr. Swinburne, who does not belong rightfully to this present time, there is not a poet of any parts exercising his function in England to-day.[Pg 104] Furthermore, any bookseller will tell you that the demand for poetry-books by new writers has practically ceased to exist.

These statements will be called sweeping by a certain school of critics, and I shall be asked to cast my eye round the English nest of singing-birds, and to answer and say whether Mr. So-and-so be not a poet, and Mr. So-and-so, and Mr. So-and-so, and Mr. So-and-so. I shall also be asked to say if I am prepared to deny that of Mr. So-and-so's last volume of verse three hundred copies were actually sold to the booksellers. For the propounders of such questions I have one answer—namely, it may be so.

In the meantime let us do our best to find an English poet who is worth the name, and who is prescriptively entitled to be mentioned in the category which begins with Chaucer and ends with Mr. Swinburne. Shall we try Mr. Rudyard Kipling? Tested by sales and the amount of dust he has managed to kick up, Mr. Kipling should be a poet of parts. He is still young, and, hap[Pg 105]pily, among the living; but it cannot be denied that as a poet he has already outlived his reputation. Two years ago he could set the English-speaking nations humming or reciting whatever he chose to put into metre. Some of his little things looked like lasting. Already the majority of them are forgotten. To the next generation, if he be known at all, he will be known as the author of three pieces—Recessional, the L'Envoi appended to Life's Handicap, and Mandalay. What is to become of such verses as the following?

'Ave you 'eard o' the Widow at Windsor,
With a hairy gold crown on 'er 'ead?
She 'as ships on the foam—she 'as millions at 'ome,
An' she pays us poor beggars in red.
('Ow poor beggars in red!)

There's 'er nick on the cavalry 'orses,
There's 'er mark on the medical stores—
An' 'er troopers you'll find with a fair wind be'ind
That takes us to various wars.
(Poor beggars! barbarious wars!)

Then 'ere's to the Widow at Windsor,
An' 'ere's to the stores and the guns,
The men an' the 'orses what makes up the forces
O' Missis Victorier's sons.
(Poor beggars! Victorier's sons!)

[Pg 106]

At the time of their appearance these lines and the like of them were vastly admired; everybody read them, most people praised them. They were supposed to stir the English blood like a blast of martial trumpets. Here at length was the poet England had been waiting for. There could be no mistake about him; he had the authentic voice, the incommunicable fire, the master-touch. He had come to stay. At the present moment the bulk of his metrical work is just about as dead and forgotten as the coster-songs of yesteryear. He has not even made a cult; nobody quotes him, nobody believes in him as a poetical master, nobody wants to hear any more of him. His imitators have all gone back to the imitation of better men. If a copy of verses have a flavour of Kipling about it nowadays, editors drop it as they would drop a hot coal. So much for the poet of empire, the poet of the people, the metrical patron of Thomas Atkins, Esq.

Another poet of empire—Mr. W.E. Henley—has fared very little better. "What[Pg 107] can I do for England?" is, I believe, still in request among the makers of a certain class of anthology; but English poetry in the bulk is just the same as if Mr. Henley had never been. Even the balderdash about "my indomitable soul" has fallen out of the usus loquendi of young men's Christian associations and young men's debating societies. The Song of the Sword is sung no longer; For England's Sake has gone the way of all truculent war-poetry; and out of Hawthorn and Lavender perhaps a couple of lyrics remain. Mr. Henley attacked Burns when Burns had been a century dead. Who will consider it worth while to attack Mr. Henley in, say, the year 2002?

Possibly the real, true English poet who will in due course put on the laurel of Mr. Austin is Mr. Stephen Phillips. Yet Mr. Stephen Phillips is a purveyor of metrical notions for the stage, and in his last great work—Ulysses—I find him writing as follows:

Athene. Father, whose oath in hollow hell is heard,
[Pg 108]Whose act is lightning after thunder-word,
A boon! a boon! that I compassion find
For one, the most unhappy of mankind.

Zeus. How is he named?

Athene.        Ulysses. He who planned
To take the towered city of Troy-land—
A mighty spearsman, and a seaman wise,
A hunter, and at need a lord of lies.
With woven wiles he stole the Trojan town
Which ten years' battle could not batter down:
Oft hath he made sweet sacrifice to thee.

Zeus (nodding benevolently). I mind me of the savoury smell.

Athene.                  Yet he,
When all the other captains had won home,
Was whirled about the wilderness of foam:
For the wind and the wave have driven him evermore,
Mocked by the green of some receding shore.
Yet over wind and wave he had his will,
Blistered and buffeted, unbaffled still.
Ever the snare was set, ever in vain—
The Lotus Island and the Siren strain;
Through Scylla and Charybdis hath he run,
Sleeplessly plunging to the setting sun.
Who hath so suffered, or so far hath sailed,
So much encountered, and so little quailed?

Which is exactly the kind of poetry one requires for the cavern scene of a New Year's pantomime.

Possibly, again, the real, true English poet is Mr. William Watson, with his tiresome mimicry of Wordsworth and his high-[Pg 109]and-dry style of lyrical architecture. Mr. Watson is believed to have done great things, but his r?le now appears to be one of austere silence; he is what the old writers would have termed a costive poet. And if his Collected Poems are to be the end of him, his end will not be long deferred. Or, possibly, the one and only poet our England of to-day would wish to boast is Mr. Arthur Symons. Mr. Symons writes just the kind of poetry one might expect of a versifier who, in early youth, had loved a cigarette-smoking ballet-girl, and could never bring himself to repress his passion. Here is a sample of Mr. Arthur Symons at his choicest:

The feverish room and that white bed,
The tumbled skirts upon a chair,
The novel flung half open where
Hat, hair-pins, puffs, and paints are spread.

And you, half dressed and half awake,
Your slant eyes strangely watching me;
And I, who watch you drowsily,
With eyes that, having slept not, ache:
[Pg 110]
This (need one dread? nay, dare one hope?)
Will rise, a ghost of memory, if
Ever again my handkerchief
Is scented with White Heliotrope.

No doubt, if the English continue to descend the moral Avernus at their present rate of speed, Mr. Symons will become, by sheer process of time, the representative poet of the nation. It is part of a poet's duty to look into the future, and Mr. Symons appears to have taken the next two or three generations of Englishmen by the forelock. May he have the reward which is his due!

For the rest, they all mean well, and they all aim high; but one is afraid that nothing will come of them. There are Francis Thompson, and Laurence Housman, and Henry Newbolt, and Laurence Binyon, and F.B. Money-Coutts, and Arthur Christopher Benson, and Victor Plarr—amiable performers all, but each a standing example of poetical shortcoming. Perhaps one ought not to mention Mr. John Davidson and Mr. W.B. Yeats, because Mr. Davidson is a Scot, and Mr. Yeats, putatively, at any rate, an Irish[Pg 111]man. In some respects these twain may be considered the pick of the basket. I am constrained to admit, however, that neither of them has as yet fulfilled his earlier promise.

So that, on the whole, England is practically without poets of marked or extraordinary attainments. The reason is not far to seek. She is losing the breed of noble bloods; her greed, her luxuriousness, her excesses, her contempt for all but the material, are beginning to find her out. Her youths, who should be fired by the brightest emotions, are bidden not to be fools, and taught that the whole duty of man is to be washed and combed and financially successful. Consequently that section of English adolescence which, in the nature of things, begins with poetry and gladness very speedily throws up the sponge. Consecration to the muse is no longer thought of among Englishmen. They cannot be content to be published and take their chance. The dismal shibboleth, "Poetry does not pay," wears them all down. What is the good of[Pg 112] writing verses which bring you neither reputation nor emolument? One must live, and to live like a gentleman by honest toil, and devote one's leisure instead of one's life to poetry, is the better part. Meanwhile, England jogs along quite comfortably. She can get Keats for a shilling, and Shakespeare for sixpence. Why should she worry herself for a moment with the new men?