Two of the Newest Poets

WHEN, a few weeks ago, I picked up a copy of Fires at my bookseller’s, I said something to myself which all the reviewers have not hesitated to say in public. I sighed as I reflected that decadence was once more dead and buried.

Of course, decadence has been publicly buried in the dust of forgotten vagaries every time during the past two or three years that another poem by Mr. Wilfrid Wilson Gibson or Mr. John Masefield has appeared; and we are all properly joyful at the funerals. But, after all, the new poetic dispensation is probably a mixed blessing, and certainly there have been some few estimable people who have decried this fresh outburst of virility and rude strength. Those who have come to love phrases in themselves, those who have lived and dreamed in an atmosphere of winged and scintillant words, who have become craftsmen, or, in the real sense of the term, artists in literature, cannot but feel a half sad regret at this latest development of English poetry. How different it is from some of that delicately tinted enamel-work produced by a few men, and at least one woman, in the nineties.

I read a little poem of Michael Field’s to a friend some time ago: —

And then one by Mr. Arthur Symons:

My friend is very ' modern ’ and he likes his poetry to ‘prove something,’ but he could not help acknowledging the sheer beauty of these exquisitely worked-out pastels, conceived though they were in the days when decadence was in flower and dilettantes were bold. He was forced to admit that in all the qualities of mere workmanship this poetry of the nineties was immeasurably superior to anything and everything in, for example, The Everlasting Mercy; and yet he, a young poet of no inconsiderable talent himself, preferred the latter poem! And I think he was right, at least right to a considerable extent. Still, consider the brutal ugliness of this passage from The Everlasting Mercy, in which Saul Kane tells something of the fight between himself and Billy Myers, the poacher: —

This clumsiness of technique, these uncouth, wretched lines, this rude, colloquial speech, we are hailing with pleasure as the first evidence of really modern English poetry. Mr. Masefield’s chief offense against conventionality lies in the realistic speech he employs. While Mr. Gibson’s language is simple to the point of baldness, it is not colloquial — his chief offenses are metrical, his verse is irregular to the point of anarchy. Into this question of technique we need scarcely go; and besides, the reviewers and academic critics have already said concerning it the few obvious things that reviewers and academic critics are always able to say. No one is holding up this poetry as exactly a model of beauty, and it seems clear that it is to be regarded simply as a series of experiments, the groping footsteps of a fresh and novel movement that is yet but in its infancy. The important thing, and, I am sure, the thing which has made this poetry so amazingly popular, is the spirit which is behind it and in it, and which has caused it to be brought forth. Beyond considering technical faults in verse, the academic critics have not deigned to notice Mr. Masefield or Mr. Gibson, and for this there is sufficient reason. A search for the spirit and meaning of poetry would be quite beyond the province of the professors of literature — that peculiar province of theirs of which no one envies them the possession.

After the passing of the ‘great figures’ of the Victorian era, a number of slighter, if more companionable, beings filled the English stage, such as it was, in the nineties — some of them to the pious horror of the middle classes and the journalists of the lower classes. These younger poets were sooner or later divided into some six or seven then already faintly discernible groups. Several groups emerged from that company of enthusiastic young men who were accustomed to gather together at the Cheshire Cheese and discuss their poetry over mugs of ale and long clay pipes, and who styled themselves the Rhymers’ Club.

In their number was Mr. W. B. Yeats, who was later to become the most conspicuous member of that vital and highly interesting movement which we now call the Irish Renaissance. There, too, was Lionel Johnson, fastidious, learned, and somewhat aloof in his nature, who also allied himself with the Irish movement. Ernest Dowson and Mr. Arthur Symons, writing verse of a peculiarly French character, and with temperaments distinctly more Gallic than Anglo-Saxon, were among the Rhymers, forming already a group that was clearly and precisely marked off, and not the less important for its smallness.

Writing at the same time was Michael Field, obviously following the graceful models of later Hellenic literature. Closely allied to her work is that of Mr. T. Sturge Moore, art critic and Greek idyllist of our own day. Clearly Tennysonian, however, was the verse of Mr. Robert Bridges, and later of Mr. Alfred Noyes; while that of Mr. William Watson, has been rather Wordsworthian in character. Francis Thompson was plainly distinct from these, and in the rich decoration and involution of his poetry seemed to indicate a modified return to the Elizabethan spirit. He has been somewhat unworthily followed by Mr. Darrell Figgis. The note of manliness and virility was sounded most loudly by W. E. Henley, and most clearly by John Davidson, in this supposedly decadent age. Simple poetry about country folk of the lower classes has been written, most exquisitely by Professor A. E. Housman, and with less success by Mr. Thomas Hardy.

It is upon some such immediate background as this hastily sketched one that we must view the work of Mr. Masefield and the later work of Mr. Gibson. The question straightway arises, however, as to whether this is a real background, and the better one knows The Everlasting Mercy and Dauber, Daily Bread and Fires, the more insistent does this question become.

At first I fancied that some resemblances could be pointed out between Mr. Hardy’s Wessex poetry and Mr. Housman’s Shropshire Lad and this new poetry. Resemblances there are, of course, but they proved delusive. They are of the superficial kind that usually suffice for the academic grouping of ‘schools’ and the tracing of‘origins’ and ‘sources,’ but the real meanings underlying the two are essentially different.

I afterwards thought that some connection might be shown between the virility of Davidson’s work and that of the latest poetry, for virility is, at first sight, the most evident characteristic of Mr. Masefield’s verse. But note how contradictory the two conceptions really are. Davidson was all for the established order, and the keynote to his position is to be found in that most excellent monologue of his, ‘Thirty Bob a Week.’ One must be a man in spite of things as they are, and the way of doing it lies just in

One must still ‘be a man,’ the newest poets are assuring us, but the consummation will come in an entirely different way, not through ‘brave and meek’ acquiescence, but only by heroical efforts at changing the established order. Says Saul Kane to the Parson in The Everlasting Mercy, —

Could any cart-tail orator of the Socialist persuasion have spoken more effectively about the existing abuses of landlordism?

But there is more than incidental socialism here; behind it all there is that surging, insistent ‘life-song of humanity’ which our own Walt Whitman sang so well, whether or not he sang it in poetry.

There is the keynote to this poetry of all humanity, more plainly expressed by Mr. Gibson, but none the less implicit in Mr. Masefield.

If we are to find anywhere in contemporary literature a parallel for this poetry I think that we shall have to go to France. How often one has to go to France! I wonder if any one has ever realized the full extent of the French leadership of the modern world. It was there, at any rate, that, in 1908, La Vie Unanime was published by L’Abbaye. The author of the poem, M. Jules Romains, immediately became prominent, and a formal ‘movement’ was inaugurated, l’école unanimiste, which has been considerably influenced by Whitman. The work of M. Charles Vildrac will most repay reading in this connection. He is a lover of life in all its manifestations, and finds inspiration in whatsoever be sees or hears — a poor woman walking along a country road, a sailor left to drown after shipwreck, a bit of ground covered with the waste products of industrialism — all these are grist for his poetic mill. M. Vildrac has called his latest book Livre d’Amour, because he ‘is aware that he has brought love and imagination to bear on human wretchedness, meanness, and pain.’

Certain critics, gifted with the usual amount of discernment, have called the work of Mr. Masefield and Mr. Gibson ‘futurist poetry.’ This may do well enough, but let no one confuse it with M. F.-T. Marinetti and Le Futurisme. Perhaps our English poetry is an indication pointing toward the credo of M. Marinetti, but it is at best no more than that, and bears a much closer resemblance to Unanisme, especially as manifested in M. Vildrac’s poetry.

Up to this moment I have coupled Mr. Masefield and Mr. Gibson as one does Klaw and Erlanger. It has been more convenient to do so, but one must not suppose that they are a syndicate. For all I know they may never have met each other personally in the gay whirl of London life; and, though so similar in spirit, certainly their individualities are very distinct.

Mr. Masefield must be set down as fundamentally pessimistic. There are bright spots in his work, of course, and many of them, but through it all there runs a dark thread, and at times the sinister aspects of life among the poor seem to have overpowered him. This is specially true of The Widow in the Bye Street and Dauber, his latest long narrative poem. This pessimistic outlook is evident not alone in Mr. Masefield’s poetical work, but also in his plays, as any one will know who has read The Tragedy of Nan, which ends with a murder, a ptomaine poisoning, and a suicide.

Indeed, one cannot help but feel that Mr. Masefield, with his vivid sensitiveness to human suffering and misery, has let himself be carried away into, if not real untruthfulness, at least a certain misrepresentation. For we all know that the great mass of common working-folk do live; somehow or other they manage to get along, and even have the time and inclination for a considerable amount of loving, and hating, and marrying, and having children — especially having children, one sometimes thinks. And yet — and yet! — if their life really seemed to them the thing Mr. Masefield makes it out to be, I cannot help suspecting that they would all of them, long ere this, have rushed to the river and drowned themselves, even as did Mr. Max Beerbohm’s odd thousands of Oxford undergraduates. Do not suppose that I am presuming exactly to condemn this pessimism, I wish merely to point the thing out with sufficient clearness. It seems, indeed, to possess certain fine and manly qualities — it has the elements of true impressiveness clinging darkly around it, and it has the supreme merit of being unmistakably sincere. Mr. Masefield’s poetry is the work of a man who has known thoroughly that whereof he writes. We may not like it altogether, but we cannot fail of recognizing the noble truthfulness and deep seriousness of The Everlasting Mercy and of Dauber. That exaltation of the dime-novel genre which he gave us in The Widow in the Bye Street is a thing to forget rather than to censure.

Mr. Masefield’s best work was done in The Everlasting Mercy and in a few short ballads of the sea which were published in London several years ago; these smaller poems have lately been reprinted with some additions in the American edition of Dauber, under the general title, The Story of a RoundHouse. In The Everlasting Mercy, Mr. Masefield gave us a representation of vital, red-blooded life that is palpitating with actual energy from start to finish, in its glories and in its debasement, in its spiritual exaltation as well as in its drunken frenzies. Saul Kane, reeling drunk, stripped naked, and ringing the fire-bell at dead of night as a herald of the coming of the devil to claim his own among the villagers, makes an image never to be forgotten, hardly to be surpassed in all its rude vigor and native strength. It is not quite enough to say that Mr. Masefield is the poet of Life: he is at the same time more, and less, than that — he is the poet of Common Life.

In Mr. Gibson we find a sensitive social conscience, and a sympathy with common people that is undoubtedly real; but it has scarcely resulted in pessimism, or in sentimentalism. His outlook is broader and more philosophic, and the result of a more conscious purpose.

Mr. Gibson’s early poetry was intricate, decorative, exquisite, in a word, conventional. But the time came when he perceived that if his art was ever to be real it must concern itself directly with life. Accordingly he descended into mines, and climbed the tortuous stairs of evilly built tenements, talked to men starving for lack of work, and to wives and mothers with husbands lost in the fishing-boats at sea — he viewed intimately all that misery and wretched slavery which has been begotten by modern commerce upon modern science, that foul monster over which its arrogant parents cannot much longer afford to shrug their shoulders indifferently.

From this searching of the heart of life there came forth the poet of Today, and of To-morrow too, I think. And the first expression of this new force came to us in America in Daily Bread, a series of seventeen diminutive poetic dramas dealing with simple themes from the life of working-folk, in diction purged of all surplusage, plain to the point of austerity. A single one, ‘The Night-Shift’ may be taken as typical. A coal-miner dies, imprisoned in the depths of the earth, while his wife is yet ill from childbirth. The effect of the continual tapping of the rescuers’ picks as it is overheard in the clairvoyant mind of the young mother is scarcely to be paralleled for the intensity of the horror which it evokes — it is ‘appalling and sublime,’ as an English critic has said. Still, impressive as many of these dramas are, it is in their cumulative effect that they are chiefly powerful.

And the same thing may be said of Fires, Mr. Gibson’s latest volume, which contains twenty-one narrative poems. All of these narrative poems deal with ordinary or exceptional moments in the life of the so-called common people, but there is a certain broadening of the field of vision. Attention is no longer concentrated exclusively upon the tragical aspects of life which are produced by modern industrialism; there are also studies of the purely emotional life of working-folk, so that we get a larger and more truthful picture. Mr. Gibson is often interested in mental states which result from intense emotional experiences, as we can see from ‘The Lodestar,’ ‘Devil’s Edge,’ and ‘The Lilac Tree,’ and he is singularly successful in dealing with these difficult themes. In Fires, as in Daily Bread, the fundamental note is human sympathy with the whole of life. With Mr. Gibson this sympathy is a very tender, intimate, and wholly comprehending thing, perhaps the least bit aloof, but none the less real and true.

Though writing with fundamentally similar purposes, and actuated by the same underlying spirit, the work of Mr. Masefield and Mr. Gibson has many obvious differences. Mr. Gibson has undeniably the finer, more delicate, more sensitive, in a word more poetic, mind. Mr. Masefield’s song is rather a shout— the shout of one who has but just come from that of which he speaks, with the rudeness and exhilaration of actuality yet clinging about him. At the same time that there is more of the observer in him, there is in Mr. Gibson more of the power of true poetic transformation. There is much in the quality of Mr. Masefield’s work that in certain minds compels immediate enthusiasm, but I suspect that, in the long run, Mr. Gibson will be sincerely liked where Mr. Masefield will be merely endured.

Of course, both men have cut loose from the trammels of convention, and so have antagonized those pious souls who can see only technical experiments in their work, without being able to penetrate to the living, burning spirit which animates them. But the few men in the world who do their own thinking without being ashamed of the horrid fact will recognize the truth of the assertion that here we have a new thing in English poetry, the first poetic expression of a movement which bids fair to sweep over the whole Western World, and the seriousness and extent of which we scarcely realize, even though we are daily presented with fresh evidence of its strength and growth. I mean, of course, the socialist conception of life and government. We may view this movement with uncomprehending horror, as most of us do, or with clearsighted recognition of its defects and strength, as Robert Louis Stevenson did a number of years ago; but however we look at it we cannot escape the fact of its ceaseless spread and growth; and the appearance of this new poetry is but another indication of its deeprooted vitality.

As I turn over again the pages of Le Control Social, I seem to see that moment in the dim future when the ethics of the ant-hill and the bee-hive will be applied for a time to struggling, suffering Western humanity, and there appears for an instant a sardonic smile upon the face of that kindly, wellmeaning blunderer, Jean Jacques.