Minor and Major Verse

BOOKS NEW AND OLD.

THE casual reader takes up Mr. Archer’s new book ¹ with wonder and some perturbation. Its cumbersome bulk, its price net, its large rude portraits, suggestive of the red-hot poker and the pine plank, remind him that this is the period of expansion, when even the critic may assume the right to imperial methods. A glance at the Introduction makes one doubtful of the snap judgment, for the author’s plan is nothing if not modest. he is offering us, not a treatise on modern poetry, but a series of appreciations of certain modern poets. “The essays, ” he says, “are arranged in alphabetical order, and each writer is treated as if he or she were the only poet of the younger generation in England or America,” The critic’s taste is catholic, and his honest desire is to enjoy and to commend whatever he can in modern verse. The reader is never embarrassed, even on occasion of the most emphatic expressions of opinion, by the feeling that the writer is bending the facts to meet a theory, or trying to score a point for the sake of victory. His occasional generalizations are marked by the quiet common sense which is always an admirable quality of his work.

“It is impossible to set up one single and absolute standard of workmanship in poetry. Tennyson’s workmanship was good for Tennyson, and no one admires it more than I; but I hold it no reproach to Burns that his ideal of workmanship was different. If, by some miracle, the Tennysonian ideal had been implanted in Burns’s mind, and he had constantly struggled up to it, he would have been by so much the less Burns and the less enjoyable.”

“The simple rule, ‘ Let your nouns be nouns, and verbs be verbs, ’ seems to me worthy of all acceptation, even at the hands of poets.”

It is consistent with his method that this critic should begin by disinheriting the spendthrift phrase “minor poet.” “The valid distinction, the only one that really matters, is between true poets and poets falsely so called. , . . I do not for a moment doubt that some of the writers whom I discuss will be reckoned by posterity among the major poets of our time; others, very probably, will take minor rank. I leave the distinction to posterity; it does not at present concern me.” This unconcern Mr. Archer tries to maintain throughout the series of essays which follow. He disclaims, moreover, any set theory of poetry, and waives even the right of comparison, purposing simply to consider, one by one, the poets born since 1850, whose work “happens to chime with his idiosyncrasy, ” “gives him genuine pleasure.” Yet it is natural that he should not quite succeed in giving the desired impression of detached merit. Of the thirty-three verse-writers whom he is considering there is always something conscientious to be said; but in many cases his pleasure is so guarded by reservations as to appear inconsiderable, and in others he is carried upward from his carefully chosen middle ground by an unblanketed enthusiasm. Having paid tribute to his gentlemanly versifiers, and acknowledged the less tutored charms of his Irish poetesses, he turns with obvious relief to the consideration of John Davidson, or Francis Thompson, or Stephen Phillips, or Rudyard Kipling. The human habit of weighing relative values, in short, is too much for him; and it is evident that to his feeling, if not to his judgment, very few of the many poems which he quotes possess the vital power of the major poetry.

Fortunately, some of them do possess it. Not many of us, it is to be hoped, take the desperate view of the poetical situation which has been suggested recently by one of these poets of the younger generation, Mr. Santayana.²

he inquires, on his way to the cheerless discovery that “all the living [poets] are useless. ” Many readers will think as much of Mr. Santayana’s verse as if he did not happen to be living, and will find it neither more nor less imitative than that of most other versifiers, living and dead. The couplets just quoted might, with a mere change of names, hail from the Dunciad; Mr. Archer calls attention to this poet’s Shakespearean rhythms; and one hardly needs to turn the page to come upon reminders of other singers, as, for example, of Tennyson in

In his present volume Mr. Santayana makes various experiments in subject and in form, but there is nothing in it which will be likely to change the English critic’s opinion that his chief merit lies in an undoubted mastery of the sonnet. The long titular poem and its sequel, with all their grace of form, are not impressive; a certain attenuation of feeling and rigidity of phrasing leave us in doubt of their value except as poetical exercises.

If the heroic strain is beyond this careful chamber musician, so is the colloquial music of “convivial and occasional verse. ” The attempts in this kind which conclude the volume just miss the qualities of delicate humor and hearty good feeling, which are slippers and dressing gown to the spirit tired, like Dr. Primrose, of being always wise. “Take me as lightly as you choose,” the writer of this sort of verse seems to say; “only don’t be bored.” Of genuine poets who have frankly and happily chosen to be themselves rather than to be profound, who have steadily refused to enter the battle for the grand style, and contented themselves with civilian laurels, we have had nobody since Dr. Holmes so admirable as Mr. Charles Henry Webb. The publication of Vagrom Verse, thirteen years ago, was followed by a sigh of relief from a public overburdened with minor intensities, and his new volume³ tempts the same greeting. To be sure, he does things that we should have said were unpardonable; his metres, we should have said, have very much the doggerel quality; he quibbles, sentimentalizes, chuckles, takes liberties with our ribs and our sensibilities,— is simply himself to all men. His later verses are less rough without being less spontaneous; indeed, there are several poems among them of an almost Landorian elegance.

In one department of occasional verse Dr. Holmes has left no American successor of eminence. Mr. Santayana’s experiments in college verse lack the indescribable atmosphere of the quadrangle which belongs to the verse of the old-world Grecian, while Mr. Webb’s muse is social rather than academic. The new edition of Calverley ⁴ reminds us of what this kind of verse has meant to Englishmen, while the reprint of Owen Seaman’s Horace at Cambridge⁵ suggests that it still means much. Mr. Seaman’s book is somewhat narrowly academic; indeed, much of it is so purely local in its quality as to make a somewhat limited appeal to other than Cantabrigians. There are, to be sure, not a few irresistible phrases, like that about “Hamlet quoting Shakespeare to the Queen, ” or the one about the parson whose aim in life is “a sinecure of souls; ” and the Cambridge Revisited gives something like a final expression to the experience of the college man who goes back after ten years to find the “men ” only boys, and to be unexpectedly satisfied with his own role of fogy. But this is ’prentice work; to enjoy Mr. Seaman at his best we shall turn to his later volumes, two books of parody which have not their equal in English. Even Calverley’s imitations, admirable as they are, lack the refined subtlety of his successor’s. That famous skit The Cock and the Bull, for example, is too obvious a caricature to endure many readings. One might perhaps cite in the older parodist’s defense that masterly Tennyson ian conclusion of The Wanderers: —

But the rest of the poem is in a broader vein of burlesque. The curious thing about Mr. Seaman’s parodies is that they come so near being what the authors might have actually written. They make sense in themselves; they are real poems written in the characteristic mood of the poet in hand, and given the least possible cant toward burlesque consistent with their character as parody. This seems to me the highest distinction in that form of art; for art it is, and its great masters are few indeed. A passing allusion to “that admirable metrist, Mr. Seaman, ” is all the notice that Mr. Archer has felt it possible to give to such a trifler.

Four volumes of verse⁶ have been published recently which it is natural, if improper, to think of together. We have long since ceased to laugh, except with respectfully reverted throat, at the Great Cham’s comparison of a writing woman and a dancing — quadruped. And we regard Macaulay’s sublime condescension with something like awe. “ We conceive, ” he wrote less than sixty years ago, in disposing of a certain luckless Miss Aikin, “that on such occasions a critic would do well to imitate the courteous knight who found himself compelled by duty to keep the lists against Bradamante. He, we are told, defended successfully the cause of which he was the champion, but before the fight began exchanged Balisarda for a less deadly sword, of which he carefully blunted the point and edge.” Indignantly as we may bridle at this form of masculine effrontery, now happily obsolete, it is only fair to wonder whether our own inverted chivalry, which considers “virility” the supreme attribution to feminine excellence, is altogether to be admired. To one reader, certainly, these four books of verse rate themselves distinctly according to their feminine quality, which may, it would seem, be to the work of a woman what the masculine quality is to the work of a man.

If by feminine quality were meant simply the atmosphere of the feminine temperament, we should be abundantly satisfied with its presence in Miss Dickinson’s poetry. She possesses, moreover, vigor of imagination, intensity of feeling, and the true lyrical sense of language as music; but something is lacking, — a quality more important than all of these in life, and not negligible in art. One does not lay down her new book of verse without disquiet, without a feeling of having taken a haphazard voyage in a craft uncertain of its bearings. We have felt the lack of that effortless poise and control which belongs to the strong spirit at peace with itself; we have wished for less of the emotional, and more of the spiritual. There have even been moments of a self-revealment bordering upon indiscretion, which we have hastened to attribute to the New England habit of introspection with doubt, working upon a nature which might have been happier and healthier under the Puritan régime. In verse born of such conditions we are likely to find, if not sheer morbidness, the flush of life grown a little hectic, emotional and intellectual impulse standing for aspiration, and love made much of as a painful though desirable obsession.

W ill it be permitted to say that the charm of Miss Branch’s verse is the charm of maidenliness ? By means of the simplest metrical forms she achieves a delicately poetic expression of feminine refinement and sympathy. Now and then, as in Lazarus, the note deepens, but it is still — and we are very grateful for it — the woman’s note: —

“ MARTHA.
It was so far to come.
MARY.
Far ? No, not far, I think —
A MAN.
But dost thou know ?
MARY.
Ay ! When I keep my thoughts all clean and large,
Open to sunlight as the roses are,
It lies along the margin of the air
With a soft shining, though I see it not.”

We cannot help feeling the soundness of verse like this, and the feeling is not less assured because the strain runs so often into the minor. This gentle unrest is far enough from being morbid ; it is, perhaps, no more than the normal reposelessness of some spiritual Wanderjahr, out of which is to come a calmer and more fruitful strength.

One may find himself thinking of Miss Dickinson’s poems as rather heavily scented exotics produced under glass, and of Miss Branch’s as halfopened roses leaning inquiringly over the wall of some quiet garden. The strange verses of Miss Fiona Macleod carry us into another world, — a world of gray mists and shadow, of a halfhuman nature and a half-elfin humanity, of solitary blossoms of song washed with the salt spray and blown by the rough winds of the farthest Hebrides. And indeed, with all our schooling in Celtic lore, the sad northern music still falls strange upon the Saxon ear. This passionate mysticism veiled in sombre acquiescence, this fierce abiding melancholy which has nothing to do with the nerves or the digestion, is hard for us to enter into. No folk poetry, surely, has so dogged a note of suffering, in both senses of the word, as that which still survives fragmentarily in the Gaelic of the old hill and coast peasantry. Miss Macleod labors under the disadvantage of giving utterance to the genius of one race in terms of another. She chooses to deal much in irregular metres, and in epithets literally translated from the Gaelic. Much of her work, in short, has the quality and the defect of translation; of the anthropological value of such verse we cannot but be aware, though we may not be sure of its value as English poetry. Yet Miss Macleod is not simply an interpreter ; there is no mistaking here and there the “fee-grief due to some single breast, ” the quick bitterness of a thwarted life which remembers and waits, dwelling meanwhile in a land of dream and shadow.

It is a relief to turn from this eerie, crooning strain, with the surprise of its occasional lilt into the major and the recurring monotony of its dying fall, to the warm, rich melody of verse like Miss Peabody’s. Here the charm is not made up of mere delicacy or intensity or unusualness; the poet’s view of life is the simple, healthy view of calm, perfectly poised womanhood. Marlowe is, like her former experiment in dramatic poetry, frankly after the Elizabethans. The fact that it deals with Elizabethan personages furnishes a ready excuse for the risky attempt; yet its warmest admirers will probably not wish for a repetition of the experiment; they will not like to substitute the enjoyment of imitations, however clever, for their delight in the pure modern beauty of Miss Peabody’s lyrics. If, indeed, she could compass dramatic vigor with the retention of her own born diction — but that is an achievement one hardly dares hope for yet in English. And Marlowe hardly deserves to be spoken of with so conventional a reservation. It is no small triumph to have taken a theme which might have lent itself easily to decadent methods or to open moralizing, and to have made it the basis for a piece of pure, strong, creative work.

A similar experiment was tried some years ago by Dr. Mitchell in his Francis Drake, which is now before us in the book of selections from previously published verse (made by the English Macmillans).⁷ This is also a dramatic study of an Elizabethan theme, treated consistently in the Elizabethan manner. It seems, on the whole, to possess less force and spontaneity than the earlier and less formal dramatic sketches. We do not know where to look, unless in Browning’s My Lost Duchess, for such pitiless irony as that of A Medal. As for François Villon, he could have been created only by the chronicler of that other and more rascally François. Dr. Mitchell has more than once succeeded in making us oddly and somewhat disconcertingly sympathetic with villainy. Is Villon or De Luce the greater rascal, and could we wish either of them a different part in the story? We enter almost equally into the light recklessness of the poet-vagabond, and the chill, saturnine humor of his patron and enemy. And we are not quite sure, perhaps, which of the actors in that grim final scene we pity most: —

To read the lyrics of which the volume is mainly composed, and which we now find together for the first time, is to renew our wonder at a versatility not only of craftsmanship, but of powers. The airy grace of Dreamland, the swing and surge of the lines On a Boy’s First Reading of the Play of King Henry the Fifth, the measured stateliness of the Ode on a Grecian Tomb, — hardly elsewhere in American verse is there greater strength in variety than in these poems. We wish there were not so marked a suggestion of leave-taking in the noble lines which close the book: —

Not only Yale men will be glad to have the recent firm utterance of another veteran poet preserved in exceptionally beautiful form. Mr. Stedman’s bicentennial poem⁸ has the union of grave fitness and breadth of tone which sometimes makes of occasional verse a very noble poetic form. The poet concerns himself less with retrospect than with prophecy ; indeed, the whole poem is a hopeful call to arms.

Poems and Inscriptions ⁹ is another of the slender volumes of carefully considered verse which Mr. Gilder produces from time to time. His poetry possesses a cool purity of temper and phrase which, if it does not at once compel the reader, is likely to lodge in the memory, there to grow by degrees into life and beauty. And indeed, it would be a shallow memory which did not offer foothold to the haunting simplicity of such lines as: —

It is a long step from the quiet Wordsworthian glow of verse like this to the exultant passion of Mr. Henley’s springtime poetry. To him we look for the musical utterance of a pure pagan zest in living. Whenever elemental emotion is to be expressed, the author of Hawthorn and Lavender¹⁰ strikes deep and sure. With the more elaborate forms he is less successful, as in the irregular, unrhymed verse of the Praeludium, which might almost have been written by a Le Gallienne. Of the London Eclogues, with all their cleverness, it is hard to know how much to make as poetry, though Mr. Archer is by way of hailing such things as “the new poetry.” This poet of realism does here for London streets what he has already done for the hospital and the camp. He himself hints that this sort of verse is unlikely to be of permanent value : —

Even to Ninety-Eight much of this material must have been but dimly intelligible out of London. As for the songs, it is the hawthorn verses over which we are likely to linger, since the charm of paganism begins to fade as we draw away from youth and spring: —

This voice of resonant joy is altogether lacking to Mr. Hardy’s muse,¹¹ who is indeed a heathen rather than a pagan; or so we might say if we were sure of her existence. For Mr. Hardy’s verse is, after all, a by-product, clearly a left-hand mode of expression. His use of metre is ingenious rather than flexible or musical; not seldom we come upon stanzas which seem not to be prose because of the accidents of verse division and rhyme: —

Arbitrary metrical irregularities of this sort recall irresistibly the remark of old Bentley to a raw aspirant for Pindaric honors numeris lege solutis. “Pindar was a bold fellow, ” said he, “ but thou art an impudent one! ” Mr. Hardy’s verse certainly attains far greater dignity in its simplest forms. The little poem To Life not only illustrates this fact, but may stand as the most perfect expression in the book of the skeptical melancholy which characterizes the writer’s prose: —

If the last year, which has witnessed the publication of so many interesting books, had given us nothing else, it would be memorable for having produced A Reading of Life.¹² In nothing of Mr. Meredith’s has it been made so evident that his manner is not mere mannerism. There are some very stiff lines in this book: it would not be chosen to loll through in a summer afternoon. But there is beauty in it from beginning to end, and in the main spontaneity; the reader is never in doubt that he is listening to a born poet, to whom thought and word are very nearly the same thing. To turn over the opening pages is to be reminded of Dr. Johnson’s dictum, which the world has been falsifying now for a century and a quarter: “The heathen deities can no longer gain attention : we should have turned away from the contest between Venus and Diana.” It is just this mighty old myth in which the modern poet finds his reading of life.

So opens the brief prologue. It will not do to begin quoting from the three poems which follow. Nothing so strong and pure and deeply harmonious has been done since the greater Victorians stopped singing. The marvelous rush and melody of the seven-syllable verse (no longer a lost art) of With the Huntress, the graceful, varied pace of With the Persuader, and the triumphant if uphill march of The Test of Manhood, — the whole poem, whatever mood may be dominant in its parts, fills us with the wondering sense of completeness and vital power which only very real poetry can afford. It will be felt that in the poems which follow, the idiosyncrasy of the poet does not always yield itself sufficiently to lightness of theme or flexibility of mood. The spider in A Garden Idyl, for example, is poetized with an unsocial heaviness of touch which would be fair game for the mocking craft of a pen like Mr. Seaman’s. The experiments in English hexameter of the Fragments from the Iliad once again fail to prove the fitness of that medium for expression in our sledgehammer tongue. Manifestly, it is the fighting Homer which attracts Mr. Meredith; for he reads life as a battlefield, where neither Artemis nor Aphrodite must win the day.

H. W. Boynton.