The Poetry of William Watson

WHETHER we are to regard history as an analysis of tendencies or as a biography of individuals is ultimately a question, not of absolute truth and falsehood, but of relative temperament. If the question ever occurs to the mind of the man gifted with imagination, mysticism, and poetry, the answer can hardly remain doubtful: it comes in the defiant dictum of Emerson: ‘All history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons.' This is the triumphant consciousness of individuality which belongs to the man of genius, and even Emerson, with all his pure trust in the general average of human nature, was betrayed for a moment into flinging his challenge in the face of a world which looks, at a superficial glance, like a collection of similar units. But the philosopher, or man of scientific mood, will either reverse the statement of Emerson and sink the individual in the prevailing Zeitgeist, or he will speak with hesitation. Lotze has expressed the compromise when he writes of ’those mighty men who through inventive genius or obstinate constancy of will have had a decided influence upon the course of history’; who are not, we are told in conclusion, ‘merely the offspring and the outcome of their age.’ The word ‘merely’ would never have crossed the field of Emerson’s thought.

The unqualified statement may command our emotions and our actions, but not our reason, which soon detects a flaw in the baking. But the vase is none the less beautiful, except for the connoisseur. If we ask why the poetry and literature of Athens in her greatness have never been surpassed as a perfect whole, the answer is easy, — because the world has never seen again within an equally short period such a pageant of individual intellect. But the philosophical thinker steps in again and bids us remember that the literature of Greece lives, not because it was written for the future and dissociates itself from contemporary life, but because it is inspired and limited by the national ideals of one small citystate. Nobody would care to deny that Sophocles, Æschylus, and Plato are ‘the offspring and the outcome of their age,’though with differing degrees of emphasis we may preface the admission with the words ‘trot merely.' But Emerson restricts his dictum to the ‘few’; and whether they are the writers of the hundred best books, supplemented by a selection from the world’s men of action, or the greater saints of the Positivist calendar, matters very little. The statement is rigidly aristocratic; and when we drop to the ranks of the ’minor,’it has little application. But, even here, an evident differentiation presents itself. Among the writers of a day, who cannot claim a place with the famous men for whom we reserve a special kind of praise, there are degrees of subserviency to contemporary tendency. Poets may follow the tradition of a day or a school and yet be something more than servile copyists; or they may exhibit a markedly self-centred development, tinged, of course, with the inevitable admixture of influences flowing from their time and place. The broad and general characteristics which belong to the poetry of the beginning of the twentieth and the later decades of the last century are not cut in hard lines, but do not altogether elude definition. In the first place, if we take, as a supreme test and comparison, two periods in the annals of English poetry, which display in the highest degree what Milton meant by ‘native woodnotes wild,’that is, natural emotion and music in poetry, the age of Elizabeth and the Romantic Revival, we need not hesitate to call these few decades a period of true if not great poetry. And the comparison carries a suggestion of definition with it.

In the form of poetry the past fifty years have exhibited a love for the pure music of words and for metrical experiment. The science of verse has been abundantly analyzed and expounded (witness Professor Saintsbury’s recently completed History of English Prosody), but the influence of mere technique has not excluded poetical content or elaborated it to vanishing point. Neither in content nor in form has the age been one of formalism or of convention. We have everything, from the perfect art of Tennyson and the metrical ingenuities of Swinburne to the recitative of Walt Whitman; and the subject of poetry has been all things in heaven and earth. But, if the content and form of poetry have been infinitely diversified, the spirit animating it has been distinctly lyrical. The epic can appear only occasionally, but, under the influence of Tennyson and Browning, even the narrative poem has been cast in the form of dramatic monologue, and this is a compromise with the subjectivism of the lyric. A human, romantic, and mystical lyrical quality pervades the greater part of the poetry of the last fifty years, whatever its merely external form and purpose may have been,—epic, narrative, didactic, philosophical.

Perhaps there is only one broad and characteristic difference between the spirit of the eighteenth and that of the nineteenth century which can be made to hold at every point of comparison — we are introspective and subjective to a degree which would have shocked the company which used to meet at the Turk’s Head Tavern. Indefinite and introspective lyrical feeling belongs to almost every poet, either living or not long dead, whom we may classify as minor. A catalogue of names, at this point, in justification of the argument, would occupy too much space. A list, by no means full, covering nearly two pages, may be found in the preface to the Oxford Book of English Verse.

It is usual to dismiss one of the poets whose name appears in that list, Mr. William Watson, as non-lyrical; but this is only partially true, and the judgment calls for qualification. Mr. Watson has, no doubt, a stronglymarked objective method, but nobody would deny that he is, at the same time, introspective. The distinction lies rather in this, that, whereas the emotion of the pure lyric should be unpremeditated and spring from the heart, the emotion which inspires the poetry of Mr. Watson is, broadly speaking, of the intellect and mind. That is why he tends naturally to the elegiac, philosophical, and didactic poem: and, more than any poet of our time, he voices himself in epigram, a form which stamps itself upon the intellectual rather than upon the emotional sympathy of the reader.

A supreme contrast in philosophical poetry may be obtained by placing In Memoriam against Pope’s Essay on Man. Tennyson’s poem is the fruit of long years of thought, mingled with emotion and poignant regret; the Essay on Man is a string of jottings from the philosophy of Bolingbroke skillfully tagged together. In the one poem the emotional beauty of thought and language carries us along, and the doctrine or sentiment may very often count for little enough; in the other we are conscious that Pope was himself unmoved, and we are merely attracted or repelled by the marvelous facility with which he succeeds in expressing exactly what he wants to say in a chain of polished epigrams.

It is no disparagement to say of the elegiac and philosophical poems of Mr. Watson that they often suggest an analogy with the manner of the eighteenth century, rather than with that of Tennyson and the nineteenth century in general. If Pope was wanting in poetic vision, he was something more than an admirably constructed machine for turning out neat iambic couplets; he did not see much of life, but what he saw he saw clearly and in the whole. I have even heard of the lady, now living, who always turns to Pope for courage and inspiration in her moments of depression and gloom. Obviously there must be something more in his verse than most of us give the time or trouble to discover. But this by the way. The vision of a poet like Mr. Watson goes much further, and is more genuinely poetical, than that of the eighteenth century as a whole; but in lucidity, in fondness for antithesis and epigram, he approximates to the age of logic and reason. As an example of antithesis, take his contrast of the two great singers of the Victorian era: —

And in the next stanza of the same poem we have a passage against the incompetent scribblers of the day, that suggests the satire of The Dunciad: —

A comparison such as that which has just been made is naturally a comparison of suggestion, and nothing more. In music, in comprehensiveness, in emotion, in vocabulary, and in philosophy of life, Mr. Watson has nothing to do with the eighteenth century. But the lyric emotion of the last few decades has been vague, an undefined yearning for inexpressible things —

Mr. Watson has felt the Weltschmerz, but there is nothing vague or indefinite in his thought or expression. From the first he has set before himself the high ideal of sculptured lucidity in language, and a logical and perfectly intelligible sequence in thought.

Perhaps the words ‘from the first’ call for a slight qualification. The volume containing The Prince’s Quest appeared thirty years ago. Oddly enough, as it is one of Mr. Watson’s earliest, it is also his longest poem. The motif is that underlying the Hymn of Bardaisan, Shelley’s Alastor, and many another of the world’s poems — the quest of the soul’s ideal. It is Mr. Watson’s only poem which exhibits any vagueness in thought or form, and it is obviously inspired by Shelley, while betraying echoes from Tennyson. The metre employed — five-foot iambic couplets — moves slowly, and we are conscious that the poet is not wholly at his ease in it: he suggests nothing of the fresh possibilities for the metre which Swinburne has shown in Tristram of Lyonesse. The poem is immature, and from it we could hardly have guessed the future development of the author of Wordsworth’s Grave.

Far more characteristic of his future style were the two fine sonnets, Vanishings and To Beethoven, which were first published in the notes to Main’s Treasury of English Sonnets. These two sonnets have been included in the collected edition of Mr. Watson’s poems (1905), but the sestet of the sonnet To Beethoven has been rewritten; and, if the metre has been improved, the imagery has been decidedly weakened.

But Mr. Watson’s genius first found definite expression four years later in his Epigrams of Art, Life and Nature (1884). The terse and chiseled form of the epigram was scarcely the favorite child of the times, and its revival by a young man showed at least a courage to stand aloof and work out his own salvation. There have been two periods of the epigram in English literature: the one represented most prominently by the names of Ben Jonson, Herrick, and Drummond of Hawthornden, and the second the eighteenth century generally, from Pope onward. In that century we had a plethora of the epigram, and the form became little less than a plague and a pestilence. Goldsmith has a neat gibe at the overworked satirical epigram of his day: —

‘There was a time when folio was brought to oppose folio. . . . At present the controversy is decided in a summary way: an epigram or an acrostic finishes the debate, and the combatant, like the incursive Tartar, advances and retires with a single blow.’

The epigram as an instrument of satirical invective became tiresome in time and dropped out of sight. In a fine prose note, appended to his original volume of Epigrams, which is now out of print, Mr. Watson disclaims all intention of conforming to the popularly accepted conception of the epigram, and chooses rather in his volume to emulate ‘the nobler sort of Epigram,’ — that is, the single thought on art, life, or nature, pointedly and concisely expressed. In this sense, of course, all great poetry (and all great prose) will contain epigrams; though the epigram in itself can never be a high form of the poetic art. But the interest of Mr. Watson’s venture, so far as he is concerned, is that it has given to all his subsequent writing a terse and sententious character.

The original volume held a century of epigrams, and of these just over half have been reprinted in the collected edition of the poems. A selection is, under any conditions, difficult, and the compiler of an anthology, if he has given some little care and thought to his task, will probably be more dissatisfied with the result than anybody. Though Mr. Watson does not aim at satire, he has a fine satirical gift, and the exclusion of one or two of the satirical epigrams is a pity. Why should we not have LXXI, on Charles Lamb’s proposal for a club of damned authors?

But it is epigrams of ‘ the nobler sort ’ which make the value of this little volume, epigrams such as

This is true poetry, and it would be difficult to compress more thought into four short lines.

With his Epigrams Air. Watson began to walk unassisted on his own road. Since that time he has consistently maintained a high ideal of language and form; and he has been content to follow the sculptured and epigrammatic manner in elegiac and philosophical poetry, showing little tendency to diverse experiment or subserviency to contemporary influence.

The Prince’s Quest, and the shorter poems of that volume, together with the book of Epigrams, gave evidence of a genuine poetical faculty combined with a fine and reserved command of dignified English, which it was good to see at a time when the tendency ran, as it still does, toward a careless enlargement of the borders of poetical vocabulary. In English, poetry has not only its diction, but its idiom and grammar of thought, which, far from being a convention and artifice, are as natural as the language of everyday intercourse. And to depart widely from poetical language, however true may be the poetical content of the writer’s mind, is to become commonplace, to fail in the essential object of conveying to the mind of the reader the peculiar emotion which belongs to poetry. Gray recognized this, protesting against the commonplace verse of his time: “Our poetry . . . has a language peculiar to itself.” And at a later period Coleridge was compelled to enter the same protest in the face of Wordsworth’s attempt to write poetry in the vernacular. If any man could have done it, it was Wordsworth: and his practice has long been cited as the argument against his precept.

Mr. Watson early realized this truth, and his ideal of poetic form and diction was from the first rigidly exacting. His early volumes displayed a self-control and reserve which were remarkable in a young man. But, as a poet of wider reach and feeling, he first showed the range of his powers with Wordsworth’s Grave, written between 1884 and 1887, an elegiac poem which attracted universal admiration, both in England and America, for its perfect artistic form and simple grandeur. The comparison with Milton which the poem suggested to more than one critic was something more than the mere overflow of contemporary feeling.

In Wordsworth’s Grave we find the same intellectual passion for the commanding word or phrase, and the inevitable epithet, which belonged to Milton; and the lines move slowly like ‘a solemn music.’ The manner, the diction, and the music of the poem are exactly fitted to the subject, and, despite the contrary opinion of the few, in the judgment of the majority of those who read poetry at all it will probably remain as Mr. Watson’s finest poem.

It is noteworthy that the poem is written in quatrains with alternately rhyming iambic lines, and thus follows the exact pattern of a number of the epigrams. Many of the stanzas might easily stand by themselves, embodying, as they do, a single and pregnant thought, complete in itself. By far the larger proportion of the forty-seven stanzas which compose the poem end in a full stop; and a very substantial fraction of the whole number may be fairly said to show little if any overflow of thought into the next stanza. And yet the elegy is a harmonious whole, not a broken series of isolated thoughts tagged together; it impresses us with a sense of unity. The poem is much more than an elegy on Wordsworth the poet, and its emotion is intellectual rather than personal; it deals with abstract ideas rather than with concrete objects. The hills, the lakes, the streams of Wordsworth’s chosen country, where he now sleeps, are only named, and provide a text from which the poet departs to pour out his feelings on the relationship of Wordsworth’s poetry to the poetry of the eighteenth century, the poetry of the Romantic Revival, and the poetry of our own time. But Wordsworth’s Grave is not that most deplorable of all things, criticism thrown into poetic form; it is the statement of a faith and belief which is much more than dogma — the impassioned conviction upon which the soul rests. There is little of the lyric emotion which marks In Memoriam; but we carry away from the poem a consciousness that abstract and intellectual enthusiasms may be as genuine a source of impassioned poetry as human love and regret. The feeling is profound; but the poet is less moved than we, for he is expressing far more than the mood of a moment — the faith which is himself.

The abstracted emotion of Mr. Watson’s poetry has prompted the comment, which often appears in print, and is no less often heard from the average reader, that he has not enough passion for a poet. This is not only false in itself but it displays an extraordinary ineptness. It is true that poetry is in danger when it loses touch with physical life and strays into the region of things purely intellectual; but the lyric of the mind may be as genuinely moving and real as the lyric of human passion, hope, or disillusion. Perhaps the finest lyric in our language, Milton’s ode On Time (why is it omitted from the Golden Treasury ?), has no single concrete idea on which we can seize, — time is only a convention of the mind, — and the sphere in which the thought moves is purely mental; yet few poems are more profoundly moving. Mr. Watson’s own Apologia shows a fine power of selfcriticism. To those who level at him the accusation that his art is cold, he retorts that

In the order of elegiac poetry Mr. Watson followed Wordsworth’s Grave with In Laleham Churchyard and Lacrimœ Musarum, the latter written after the death of Tennyson. It is perhaps his most beautiful, warmlycolored, and melodious poem. The loose metre of the ode is used with that seeming artlessness which is the fruit of perfect art; and imagery combines with thought to sustain the poem on a plane worthy of ‘the splendour of its theme.’ It is not, as the poet humbly claims, the theme alone which gives the poem an enduring place in any anthology of English elegiac poetry. The natural tendency of Mr. Watson to finished terseness and rounded completeness in short phrases disappears, and the falling music of the lines flows across the mind, conveying the direct and subtle communication of emotion. We do not stop, as we are inclined to do in Wordsworth’s Grave, to dwell upon the single thought or isolated image. And this is as it should be. The opening passage of the elegy could not be bettered, not only in the poetic imagery of its thought, but in the fitting stress it lays upon the oneness of Tennyson and his poetry with the racial consciousness of the land to which he belonged.

In In Laleham Churchyard and The Tomb of Burns, Mr. Watson, though he adopts a different metre, returns to the concise and epigrammatic manner. In these poems he employs the metre which Wordsworth used in At theGrave of Burns, though his diction is hardly as simple.

It is in the elegy, the ode, and the quasi-philosophical poem that Mr. Watson’s muse finds her fittest sphere of song; it is in these that he stands markedly differentiated from other poets of his time; and for this reason, too, the common comparison with Wordsworth has its meaning, though Mr. Watson is utterly wanting in the simplicity of Wordsworth and his love for the apparently commonplace. As Lowell amusingly remarks, everything was a phenomenon for Wordsworth, he could write poems on how he one day saw an old woman and the next day did not, but a cow instead. Mr. Watson is not obsessed with this belief in the enormous importance of little things, but inclines to display, on the contrary, a manner which is almost irritatingly superior. General conceptions rather than everyday trifles appear in the mirror which he holds up to life.

But that, after a short discipleship to Shelley, Mr. Watson conceived a deep and lasting reverence for Wordsworth, it is needless to say. The reason is not far to seek. If the emotion of the pure lyric is spontaneous and unsought, the inspiration of elegiac poetry, using the words in their widest connotation, is thought touched with emotion. And it is here that Mr. Watson finds a point of contact with Wordsworth. Beneath the slightest of Wordsworth’s lyrics, however trivial it may appear at a superficial glance, lies genuine thought. Wordsworth was not one for whom poetry was an inrush which came to him wholly unbidden; poetry was for him ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity,’ and that is why he was never able wholly to distinguish between his hours of true inspiration and the days when he wrote poetry as a poet by profession. Mr. Watson knows that his is not ‘facile largess of a stintless muse,’ but

The character of the larger part of Mr. Watson’s poetry is ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity.’ Apart from the elegies, the ode, the philosophical poem, and the sonnet with its exacting rules are the forms most naturally fitted to the character of his genius. On another plane we may add his political poetry, which can hardly have more than an ephemeral interest, and his few short satires, which, for point and venom, can hardly be surpassed.

Among the odes come the splendidly sonorous Hymn to the Sea and England my Mother. The first is undoubtedly one of the finest poems which Mr. Watson has ever written. The lilt and sound of the long lines fall on the ear like the beat of a rolling swell on a broad beach; and the command of phrase can hardly fall short of his own high ideal in these things. A few detached quotations will serve to illustrate the last point. The poet ‘from the commune of air cages the volatile song,’ while ‘through the veins of the Earth riots the ichor of spring’; man,

‘ born too great for his ends, never at peace with his goal,’looks out from prison-windows ‘ample of purview’; Summer sits at a banquet ‘purple and drowsed with repletion’; and the moon is described ‘zoning her ruins with pearl,’ leaning toward the sea from ‘the balconied night.’ It would be hard to surpass phrases like these for their sudden and inevitable picturemaking quality; and one great test of poetry is its power to summon these imaginative glimpses of a world which is something other than the region of everyday prose. The ode is not merely an address to the sea.

Mr. Watson cannot, like Swinburne in By the North Sea or On the South Coast, pour out pages hymning the foam-flecked expanse of the sea and the gray shores without introducing an alien thought. Swinburne saw the sea and nothing more, and he sang of nothing more; but for Mr. Watson the sea suggests analogies and meanings which have to do with the problems of life. His passion for nature is not the instinctive and unthinking communion of the merely poetical or primitive being, but the feeling of the egotistic and cultured mind, for whom earth, sky, and sea are the environment in and through which the mystery of life evolves itself. He would never have been satisfied, like Swinburne, to chant nothing more than ‘the light and sound and darkness of the sea,’or content to offer his song to the winds and the ocean as a lyric tribute of praise: —

Mr. Watson’s last volume, New Poems (1909), cannot be said to have added anything of real importance to his earlier work, but it is there, perhaps, that we must look, among his poems, for an ode which approaches the plan of his achievement in the Hymn to the Sea, The unrhymed lines of Wales: A Greeting have an impressive gravity which is something altogether different from the lilt of the earlier ode, but we meet here again the same descriptive power in sounding words. Those who know Wales will appreciate the marvelous compression and power of description in the few lines —

The character of Mr. Watson’s philosophical poetry might be described in the phrase with which a contemporary periodical attempts to explain its attitude — ‘denominational, not sectarian.’ Mr. Watson belongs to no small sect, but he virtually accepts the doctrines of a church which has grown steadily in numbers since the time of Schopenhauer. The theory of any upward and ameliorative movement operating throughout nature Mr. Watson regards as wanting in confirmation. But, even if we accept this standpoint, it is difficult to understand why hopelessness is logically a more courageous attitude to adopt than hopefulness. Yet this appears as the whole argument of a very finely-expressed poem of fifteen stanzas, The Hope of the World. If we are faced with a world ‘signifying nothing’ so far as we can see, there seems no reason why the ‘heroic course’ is to reject ‘instinctive hope.’

Perhaps Mr. Watson meant, and should have said, that to act fully and consistently without hope is the more difficult course of the two; and there most will agree with him; though Nietzsche maintained that pessimism had a fine tonic effect. But the want of conclusiveness and value in the argument does not detract from the sombre power of the poem.

In a companion poem, The Unknown God, Mr. Watson does not wander into the field of argument, but confesses his inability to find a place in the universe for that personal power whom men name God. In one of the stanzas he skillfully incorporates the saying of Christ discovered a few years ago by Messrs. Greenfell and Hunt among the Oxyrhynchus papyri.

And in the category of reflective and didactic poems ‘the things that are more excellent,’ though slighter in theme and less ambitious in form, ought not to be passed over. There is in the keynote and feeling of the poem less harshness and superiority in mental attitude than we are generally led to associate with the work of Mr. Watson. In a moment of sympathy he can see that even the crude and trivial things of life do not

The poem seems to flow from a happy moment of the poet’s mind, when, for a brief instant, he catches a transient glimpse of the mere zest of life which so many of his fellows know, which is yet strange and foreign to his nature and habitual mood. For he has confessed himself that in the world to which he belongs, he has

One of the most striking defects of Mr. Watson’s verse is an absence of tolerance, comprehensiveness, and sympathy. He walks through life for the greater part of his time wearing blinkers which shut out everything but the road directly before him. He is a rebel, not so much against the order of society, though that too obsesses him in his political verse, but against the order of the universe and the cramping limitations within which the human soul is confined. He is at war with invisible principalities and powers. A contrast with Shelley will explain Mr. Watson’s attitude. Shelley was a born revolutionary, but he lived in a world of beneficence and beauty, which man alone made vile. Shelley believed that men could be happy, but that institutions and religions had vitiated the very fountains of their life. Let these be cast away, and all would be well.

Shelley was an altruistic revolutionary. Mr. Watson is an egotistic rebel. He defies the order of the world, as commonly understood, on his own account. And this is a mistake, for, as Epictetus pointed out long ago, it is better for a man to confine himself to the things which lie in his own power. It is this self-centred attitude which hampers Mr. Watson as a poet. He is not lyrical because he cannot place himself in other situations with a subjective and imaginative sympathy. And this faculty lies at the root of all dramatic and lyrical achievement. But, though his genius does not express itself naturally in the lyric, he has written a few short lyrics of supreme beauty. The following stanzas, which bear no title, form a lyric poem with the integral purity of clear crystal: —

And there are a few other short poems of the genuine lyrical order.

Mr. Watson’s last volume came as something of a disappointment to the many who knew and admired the distinctive qualities of his earlier achievement. Apart from political poetry and a formal ode on the coronation of Edward VII, he had published no volume of new work for eleven years. The last collection contains a few poems which approach the austere strength of his best work, but austerity, in the worst significance of the word, is painfully evident. The lines are parched and dry; rapture there is hardly any; emotion of any kind is often difficult to find. Mr. Watson has driven his own ideal of sculptured and statuesque beauty in form and diction to an extreme point, and anything like vital emotion has been strangled in the birth. In tranquillity Mr. Watson has evidently found it difficult to remember his moments of emotion. Apart from one poem already named, and one or two others, the sonnets of the last volume contain more true poetry than the rest of the book. But sonnets are a separate study in themselves, and have hardly been more than named in this brief sketch of Mr. Watson’s work. The form is one which adapts itself to the character of his genius, and not a few of Mr. Watson’s sonnets are worthy of a place in any rigidly exclusive anthology of English sonnets.

Among living English poets Mr. Watson holds a unique place. He stands by himself, with a collection of poetry which is not closely comparable in character with that of any of his contemporaries. The distinctive position he has won for himself he owes to the consistent faith with which he has pursued a method, style, and ideal he evolved in early youth. That style was hardly in the ascendant when he adopted it; but he followed it with individual conviction. He has written slowly, at intervals, and with elaborate care, refusing to print a line which did not satisfy his own ideals of artistic form and the traditions of great poetry. We do not look in his work for color, warmth, and lyric passion; for the emotion of his poetry is abstract and intellectual, of the mind rather than the heart. The inspiration of his work is, none the less, superlatively poetical, and, perhaps more than any poet now living, he has enriched English poetry with a contribution of the highest order.