The Seven Seas and the Rubáiyát

SOME months ago, a London editor was rash enough to wager that no paragraph on Kipling or Fitzgerald should appear in his journal during a stated time, — and needless to add, he lost the bet in the very next issue. This endless flux of gossip about two chosen names, with here and there a word of serious criticism smuggled in, is indeed one of the cariosities of our modern literary weeklies ; and the peculiarity of it all is enhanced by the fact that two authors could scarcely be selected from the body of English literature more opposed to each other in style and intention.

Apart from this journalistic notoriety, none of our poets, not even Byron, has enjoyed just the kind of popularity which Kipling has achieved. Other poets have received equal or greater honor from the cultured public, but our new Anglo-Saxon bard appeals with like force to the scholarly and to the illiterate ; his speech has become, as it were, the voice of the people. Mr. William Archer, in his American Jottings, gives an apt illustration of this. On leaving his steamer Mr. Archer “jumped on the platform of a horse car on West Street,”and was accosted by the conductor as follows : "' I s’pose you’ve heard that Kipling has been very ill ? . . . He ’s pulling through now, though. . . . He ought to be the next Poet Laureate. . . . He don’t follow no beaten tracks. He cuts a road for himself every time, right through; an’ a mighty good road, too ! ’”

The fame of the Rubáiyát is of a different sort altogether, yet not less real in its own sphere. One of our ambassadors, himself a devotee of the “Suffolk dreamer,” has related how he heard a stanza of the poem quoted in a far-away mining camp; and I have read of a society of enthusiasts in England, who, with roses garlanding their brows, meet together and dine in honor of their prophet. Very few poems, perhaps no poem of its length, have had so marked an effect on writers of a certain class; and the homage paid to this jewel among translations is strikingly manifested by the number of aspirants — including Mr. Le Gallienne, it may be observed, one of Kipling’s few literary foes — who have tried, and are still trying, to do the work over again more to their own taste, eager apparently to win renown by gilding refined gold.

The interest taken in these two authors is, in fact, so persistent and extraordinary that it might seem as if the corpus vulgatum of our poetry were destined to shrink within these narrow limits ; and it is a timely question to consider what strange fatality has yoked together in notoriety this ill-assorted couple, and what their fame signifies to us in our racial development.

The cause of Kipling’s popularity is not far to seek. For many years the Anglo-Saxon people, in their ever growing self-consciousness, have been waiting for some poet to formulate their experiences and needs, and have not been slow to express open dissatisfaction with otherwise accredited singers. Tennyson dwelt for them in a world of shadowy idealism ; he had no sympathy with the democratic movement; he lapsed in his latter days into a spirit of pantheistic mysticism especially abhorrent to the straightforward Briton. Browning, as R. H. Hutton has observed, was interested chiefly in that subtle line of demarcation between the worlds of sense and faith which finds its problems and symbolism in the Roman Church, —and nothing so disturbs the stolid Philistine as this confusing of the real and the unreal; furthermore, Browning was obscure. Longfellow sang with exquisite grace the virtues and aspirations of the homeloving people, but failed to voice its rude conquering temper out of doors. Matthew Arnold chose for himself a region of sublimated doubt and faith, interesting enough to Oxford, but incomprehensible to the larger public. Each and all of these poets had of necessity strong traits of the Anglo-Saxon character, but they missed its dominant chord, and so remained more or less isolated in the realm of pure art.

For this reason, we can understand the acclaim with which a poet has been received who actually sings in stirring rhythm the instincts of the people. And in truth, both the virtues and the defects of Kipling are such as to render him a popular idol. One cannot easily imagine to himself a car conductor enthusiastic over Milton or Spenser or Shakespeare as a poet to be read : these luminaries dwell in a region beyond his comprehension. Yet if Kipling fails to strike the highest note, the reception given him by such critics as Professor Norton proves that he too, in his own way, is a true artist, and no mountebank of the crossroads.

Probably, what first impresses every one, on reading The Seven Seas, — and the idea comes with peculiar emphasis just now, — is the imperialistic temper of the poet ; his earnest conviction that the English race, “ the Sons of the Blood,”are destined to sweep over the earth and fulfill the law of order and civilization. “After the use of the English, in straightflung words and few,” he has sung his stave of victory so lustily that the hearts of the toilers in the fields and of the “ dreamers, dreaming greatly, in the man-stifled town,” have leaped in response to his call. So great is the influence of hymns like the Recessional and The White Man’s Burden that to his fame as a poet has been added something of the authority of a statesman ; he has made himself, as no other poet before him, accepti pars imperii. His sympathy with the impulse toward expansion and his penetration into the hidden causes of ferment are written large in his Song of the English. He sees in the forward movement no ministerial programme or prudential wisdom, such as guides the rulers of Germany and France to fortify their empire by seizing new lands, but an inevitable instinct of the people, driving them out to subdue and possess.

But there is another and a deeper instinct of the Anglo-Saxon race than the impulse to expand and absorb. With the power of conquest they carry everywhere the law of order and obedience.

sings Tommy Atkins in his vigorous barrack - room idiom; and he is right. It is the sense of life as a vast complicated organization, in which every member must play his part bravely and uncomplainingly in subjection to the whole; it is the hearkening to “Law, Orrder, Duty an’ Restraint, Obedience, Discipline ! ” so eloquently ascribed by Mister McAndrews to his beloved “seven thousand horse-power,” that drives the race irresistibly to its goal. There may be, indeed there are, a few left, even in England, who are not “ damned ijjits,” and who still think something of the old romance at sea is spoiled by steam ; who feel that in some way the fairer and richer flower of life is crushed out by the grinding of mill wheels, and that there is a deeper joy of philosophy than can come to a man driven ruthlessly and restlessly by his own invented machine. But the truth remains that the civilization of the day is a product of iron and steam, and that victory belongs to those who are strong to adapt themselves to the new demands. Our late war with Spain was sufficient proof of this.

Is it strange, therefore, that the people of England and America, in these days of unsettled ideals, should be genuinely thrilled by the clarion notes of a poet who sings of the courage and discipline of the men behind the “ reeking tube ” with the vigor and truth, if not with the grace, of Homer’s glorification of the ancient bronze-clad heroes; who sees in one of the masterful inventions of commerce a mystical Power carrying salutations and warnings “o’er the waste of the ultimate slime,” and whispering its message of union to worlds dissevered by the sea; who has brought together, and in a way spiritualized, all the “ miracles " of a materialistic age for the celebration of his love ; who has discovered in the despised banjo, that can “travel with the cooking-pots and pails,” a true successor of the heroic lyre, and has heard from this “Prophet of the Utterly Absurd ” a divine song crying to the dweller in wild places : —

is it strange that such a singer should appeal to the busy brood of the old “ Seawife ” with something more than the force of a mere lover of beauty and maker of pretty verses ? The eyes even of the dullest are opened, and from the midst of his homely surroundings he seems to see arise in the purity of unsoiled loveliness the vision of the True Romance : —

But there is a still higher reach in Kipling than this glorification of a prosaic civilization and lauding of the militant character. At its best, his sense of order and obedience rises into a pure feeling for righteousness that reminds one of the ancient Hebrew prophets. There is in him something of the stern Calvinistic temper of his own McAndrews brooding over a world in which the active and mechanical virtues fulfill their mission under the law of “interdependence absolute, foreseen, ordained, decreed.” We shall not soon outlive the impression produced on the Anglo-Saxon heart by those unexpected words, “ Lest we forget, lest we forget! ” Amid the empty jubilation of a thoughtless optimism, the mind was suddenly brought to recoil upon itself, and ask what higher destiny was ruling in the affairs of men. The Anglo-Saxon race more than any other has retained the real temper of Hebraism, the worship of a force, dwelling apart, yet human in its limitations, that shapes the activities of the world to its own end. Jehovah, the Lord of righteousness, is still England’s God, and nowhere else is the religion of the land better expressed than in the Hymn before Action : —

When to Kipling’s instinctive utterance of the popular needs are added his wit and dramatic power, his skill in telling a story, his pulsating language and sturdy rhythms, it is easy to understand his immense vogue. The limitations which debar him from ranking with the truly great poets of England and the world are again inherent in the people for whom he writes, — limitations which the master singers were able to transcend, while still retaining the strength of the national character.

It is one of the ironical whims of Fate that the man who stands preëminently for the Anglo-Saxon and Hebraic temperament should have been born in India, the land furthest removed from it of all the world. Righteousness that rules in the hurly-burly of a contentious life, he knows and celebrates; but of that other spirit that turns from the passion and toil of existence as from a wasteful illusion, and whose eyes are set on solitude and a triumph of peace beyond earthly victories, there is in Kipling hardly a breath. I know that a poet is not called to be a mystic, that his office is not that of a Hindu Rishi or mediæval Thomas à Kempis. There must be about him always something of that union of l’illusion et la sagesse which to Joubevt seemed the essence of art. Yet poetry, to accomplish its nobler mission, must both evoke and lay the passions. Through the din of personal struggle and personal emotions must break at times the voice of something deeper within us, calling us to rest. In the clash of worldly ambitions, it happens now and then to a man to pause, while a feeling of unreality comes over him ; and for a moment he knows that his concern in the drama about him is purely fictitious, and that there is in him a witness looking down with disdain on the strutting part he plays. No man ever achieved anything really great in this world without these moments of deeper insight, and without a certain contemptuous indifference to his own fate. No poet ever causes the hearts of his hearers to expand with the larger joy who does not lift the veil occasionally and destroy the illusion he is himself creating.

So at times, in Homer, the ten years of calamity about Ilium seem filled with the warfare of shadows.

he sings, as if the wrath of Achilles and the passion of Hector were no more than the phantasmagoria of a dream. Both Achilles and Hector fight ever with the sure knowledge of death upon them; and in the last book of the Odyssey, which is certainly added as a summing up and conclusion for both poems, the stalwart heroes who led the tumult of war now move before us as shadows, whose futile life is but a mockery of their former strenuous deeds. Virgil makes the plot of his epic revolve about the dim pantheistical scenes of the sixth canto, where all that precedes and all that is to follow arise in vision, like figures beheld through the uncertain light of the moon. Throughout the poem the mind is continually startled by phrases filled with a strange mystical glamour.

“ Dabit deus his quoque finem ! ” cries Æneas, and we feel always that there is a fate akin to the peace of death brooding over the actions and guiding them to their end. Nor is Shakespeare different in this respect from the masters of antiquity. Who can forget the sensation of sudden liberty and enlargement that came to him, as if some new chamber of thought or windows of wider outlook were opened to his mind, when, after the storm of passion and ambition in Macbeth, the fated victim calls out, on hearing of the queen’s death : —

So essential is this higher element of poetry that, at the risk of seeming to countenance a vapid mysticism, I transcribe here a paragraph from one who has recently taken upon himself the profession of Seer. “ It is not,” writes Maeterlinck in Le Trésor des Humbles, “the acts, but the words, that carry the beauty and grandeur of high tragedy ; nor yet is this beauty to be found in the words that accompany and explain the acts. There must be something above and beyond the dialogue demanded by the events. . . . By the side of the indispensable dialogue there runs almost always another dialogue that at first seems superfluous ; yet look more closely, and you will see that to this alone the soul listens attentively, because only here is the soul addressed ; and you will further observe that the quality and extent of this unnecessary dialogue are what really determine the character and inner power of the work. . . . The mysterious and haunting beauty of true tragedy is found in the words that are spoken by the side of the strict and apparent truth, — in the words that conform to a truth profounder and incomparably nearer the invisible soul that breathes through the poem.”

I am far from sustaining any theory which would substitute the pseudomystical dramas of Maeterlinck for the ballads of Kipling. Yet one must confess that he misses in Kipling just this added touch of something deeper than what first meets the ear, and that, missing this, he comes away unsatisfied. We hear Kipling constantly praised for his virility and out-of-doors freedom; and this is well. But Homer and Shakespeare, no poets of the closet certainly, were able to combine this liberty with the insight of a profounder spirituality. Our new bard is landed also for his loyalty to the present; and this too is well. Yet Byron found it possible to speak for his own age, and at the same time absorb all that was memorable in the past. In Childe Harold’s reflections on Italy and other scenes of former grandeur, we enjoy the same largeness of release from the fretful constraints of circumstance which in Virgil comes to us from his pensive brooding over fate. One may indeed question whether any writer so little formed by the traditions of the past as Kipling can, in this day of inherited wisdom, escape the charge of crudeness.

An attentive study of the examples quoted in Matthew Arnold’s Essay on Poetry might lead one to call this defect in Kipling a lack of the “high seriousness ” which that critic adopts as a touchstone of the great style ; but the term at least demands definition. Seriousness, if understood as a quality of the emotions, cannot be denied to the author of The Seven Seas ; it is in fact a marked and distinguishing trait of the AngloSaxon race. Nor is the defect due to any weakness of the intellect. The world was never more ready than at the present hour to expend its intellectual force on social or artistic problems; it revels in labor of the sort. As a matter of fact, the peculiarity of his vocabulary and the continual looseness of his grammar, even apart from the vitality of his thought, render Kipling one of the harder poets to read, yet they in no way detract from his popularity.

The fault lies in another and more essential faculty, — the will; and here again there is need of careful analysis. Any one who looks deeply into his own heart must recognize there two distinct principles governing his life, — the will to act, and, let us not say the will to renounce, for fear of misinterpretation, but rather the will to refrain; and on the right understanding of these two faculties depends largely our insight into much that is best and much that is worst in literature. Now no one can read a page of The Seven Seas without being struck by its splendid virility : the book is in this respect a faithful reflection of the restless energy impelling the race, by fair means or foul, to overrun and subdue the globe. But in that other and higher will, the will to refrain, the Anglo-Saxons are, and have always been, singularly deficient. To this deficiency must be attributed both the lack of any genuine mystical literature in England, and the comparative freedom from decadence, — phenomena which indeed the true Briton finds it difficult even to distinguish one from the other. In fact, much of the confusion of mind in regard to genius and degeneracy, spread abroad over the world by such writers as Lombroso and Max Nordau, is due to the same imperfect analysis. Let the active individual will be weakened by immorality or whatever cause, and there often arises a dissolution of the personality into a flaccid dream state, which the ordinary observer associates with mysticism, but which is in reality the very opposite of that. Out of the deliquescence of character and loosening of the grip on things actual, such as may be seen in Paul Verlaine and Maeterlinck, springs a sham spirituality that wraps itself in the allurements of the senses. Quite different from this is the mysticism of an Emerson or a Juan de la Cruz or a Plato, where in a strong character the higher will to refrain holds the lower will as a slave subservient to its purpose. The one is the defalcation of the will altogether ; the other is the subjection of the lower will to the higher, an exercise of the function which Emerson, quoting I know not what Eastern source, calls the “ inner check.” The one is but a bewildering illusion ; the other is the truest disillusion. I would repeat that the poet is not called to be a mystic, — the sensuous element must always be too predominant in his work for that ; and yet only by comparison with genuine mysticism can the recurring note of disillusion in the greater poets be explained. It was probably the voice of this higher personality heard in Dante that led Matthew Arnold to quote his

as an illustration of " high seriousness ” in verse.

Kipling is indeed serious, with the strength of his Hebraic spirit; but the general absence of this will to refrain in his work, although it may add to his popularity among a people of restless, shallow energy, must effectually seclude him from the band of sacri votes. I remember the shock of surprise that came to me when, on first reading The Seven Seas, I met the lines,

so incongruous did the words appear with the bustling spirit of the book as a whole. For the moment I seemed to be rapt away from the society of Tommy Atkins and Mister McAndrews to the region from which the inspired poets of old spoke to us. Had Kipling written more in this vein, he would have escaped the charge of superficiality.

But something is required of the reader as well as of the poet. We are accustomed to say that great literature can never be really popular, because the masses have not intelligence to appreciate it; and this is partly true. But, besides intelligence, there is needed a distinct effort of the will to put aside the importunate claims of the hour, and to raise ourselves to the realm of ideas ; and never before in the history of the world, perhaps, was this higher will more lacking than at the present day. We surrender ourselves to trivial literature or go into rhapsodies over verse like Kipling’s, because we shrink from calling into exercise this faculty of the will to refrain. After all, may it not be that Kipling has given us the best we are capable of comprehending ? " Do you think that a spirit full of lofty thoughts, and privileged to contemplate all time and all existence, can possibly attach any great importance to this life? ” asks Plato ; and the reverse holds equally well: How can a generation so absorbed in material prosperity be seriously interested in the contemplation of ideal truth ?

But there is another defect in Kipling, which, however, at the last analysis, is closely akin to this lack of true insight : I mean that seeking after beauty as an end in itself, as an instinct of supreme joy such as inspired the opening lines of Keats’ Endymion. In its highest manifestation, this element of beauty is but the expression of an inner harmony of the faculties depending on the same will to refrain ; it is the law of the Delphian Apollo, Nothing too much, working itself out in perfect proportion of thought and form. Even in its lower manifestation, in the love of mere beauty of detail as displayed by the Romantic writers, there must still remain something of the power to withdraw the mind from the immediate uses of things, and read into them a higher significance. Of this love of pure beauty there is singularly little in Kipling in comparison with the force and breadth of his genius. His most ardent admirers would probably be surprised to find how few passages of real loveliness they could recall from his poems ; and it is no doubt this deficiency that inspires Kipling’s enemies— and even he has enemies — to speak so contemptuously of his work.

I have attempted thus far to show how the poetry of The Seven Seas reflects both the dominant strength and the deficiencies of the Anglo-Saxon temper ; there is a curious interest in comparing with it another volume of almost equal popularity, in which all that is unEnglish might seem to have come to flower. Within the body of the people has sprung up, of late years, a small circle of men to whom the restless activity of the race is distinctly repellent : they are quietists and worshipers of pure beauty. The movement began with the pre-raphaelites, who sought in mediæval Italy all that was wanting in the England about them, and has grown to include an ever increasing band of malcontents. For the very reason that they are cut off from the broader sympathies with actual life, there is something inefficient in their work, something very fair and fragile, which we are wont to stigmatize as effeminate or dilettante. Beauty and form are indeed the feminine elements of genius, which, as has been often observed, must embrace both the masculine and feminine principles to accomplish its best results. But alone and unsupported by the virility of thought and action, the love of beauty has always a tendency to become effeminate and inefficient. It is just this flowerlike grace, apart from any sturdier character, that appeals to the group of dilettantes, in Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubáiyát. English poetry contains nothing more exquisitely lovely than such stanzas as this ; —

There is in such writing all the curious felicity of Horace, to whom Fitzgerald is often likened ; but it must be added that there is also a complete absence of the manly tone of Horace, and of his shrewd reflection on life, which have made him the friendly mentor of the centuries.

It might seem at first as if the Rubáiyát would attract this small coterie alone, were it not further true that there is a touch of the dilettante inherent in the whole race. The very fact that a person has little appreciation of harmony and beauty in their higher manifestation leads him to make a sharp distinction in his taste between what appeals to the reason or dominant emotions and what, under the designation of beauty, is a mere titillation of the fancy. This divorce between the reason and the imagination, due to an original defect of temperament in the race, has been so widened by the exigencies of modern life that any real synthesis of the powers has become almost impossible. Unwholesome and irrational as it is, the division has entered even into our scheme of education, and in our universities we now see the classical and modern language faculties separated into semi-hostile groups of pure philologians on the one side, and shallow dabblers in literature on the other; and so impossible is any mediating ground between the two that even when the scholar, who looks down so contemptuously on the æsthetes, himself turns by any chance to notice literature, we see him fall into the same trifling attitude. Our libraries are flooded with works that have no style or form on the one hand, and with books of style that have no substance on the other. And to this same division is due the almost equal popularity of authors so diametrically opposed as Kipling and Fitzgerald.

But our English Omar has another claim on our attention besides this mere verbal grace : his work possesses a genuine psychological interest in so far as it reflects a peculiar mood of the day. The band of dilettantes to whom his felicities of style appeal so strongly represent also a marked reaction against the predominance of Anglo - Saxon ideals. To a few men has come an inner awakening after the despotism of the recent scientific period, and a weariness born of enthusiasm that has failed to carry the mind beyond its own restricted circle. Religious faith in the old formulas of salvation has been weighed and rejected by the scientific spirit, of which Renan in France and Huxley in England made themselves the spokesmen. But in the end the new faith has been found no more enlarging and no less dogmatic than the old ; and to some the whirl and stress of mechanical progress seem to have taken from life all that was truly worth possessing. Even the mass of the AngloSaxon people, whose strenuous, unreflecting minds accepted the doctrine of material advance most eagerly, have begun at last to question blindly their own enthusiasm. The exultant words of a Kipling still draw them with the force of inspiration, but in their hours of relaxation they can listen to another voice that tells of indifference and repose. Out of the ruin of past ideals no new vision of human duty has grown as yet, and no poet has arisen to stir the heart to higher aspirations. Only we listen in our uncertainty to this prophet of disillusion and doubt:—

The Rubáiyát has often been compared with the Epicurean tone of the De Rerum Natura, and there is no doubt a superficial resemblance. “ This too I have seen: how that men recline at table cup in hand, and shadow their brows with garlands, and how they cry out from the depth of their heart, ‘ Brief is this joy for feeble men ; even now it has been, and never again shall we call it to return,’ ” — sang Lucretius to the Romans ; and to-day we read in English verse : —

Yet in spirit the two poems are utterly at variance. The work of Lucretius is but a new faith of philosophy, the dux vitœ Philosophia, calling to men to put away their vain, disturbing superstitions, and to conquer for themselves a better and surer peace in strenuous thought; it is at the last the utterance of the will to refrain speaking with all the stress of the Roman character. Lucretius would have been the first to repudiate the indifferentism of the Persian : —

The stanzas of the Rubáiyát announce the surrender of the will altogether; they speak the creed of defeat, and have little in common with the mysticism — if I may use that ambiguous word —of the great poets of England and antiquity.

We have still to await the coming of the true poet, who shall unite the virility of Kipling and the graceful charm of Omar with yet a deeper note of insight into spiritual truth than has been vouchsafed to either. In the meanwhile, we cannot but admire the strange fatality that has linked together the restless rover of the seven seas and the gentle “ Suffolk dreamer” in their fellowship of fame.

Paul Elmer More.