Studies of Contemporary Poets.

by Mary C. Sturgeon.

Lascelles Abercrombie

In the sweet chorus of modern poetry one may hear a strange new harmony.

It is the life of our time, evoking its own music: constraining the poetic spirit to utter its own message. The peculiar beauty of contemporary poetry, with all its fresh and varied charm, grows from that; and in that, too, its vitality is a.s.sured. Its art has the deep sanction of loyalty: its loyalty draws inspiration from the living source.

There is a fair company of these new singers; and it would seem that there should be large hope for a generation, whether in its life or letters, which can find such expression. Listening carefully, however, some notes ring clearer, stronger, or more significant than others; and of these the voice of Mr Abercrombie appears to carry the fullest utterance. It is therefore a happy chance that the name which stands first here, under a quite arbitrary arrangement, has also a natural right to be put at the head of such a group of moderns.

But that is not an implicit denial to those others of fidelity to their time. It is a question of degree and of range. Every poet in this band will be found to represent some aspect of our complex life--its awakened social conscience or its frank joy in the world of sense: its mysticism or its repudiation of dogma, in art as in religion: its mistrust of materialism or keen perception of reality: its worship of the future, or a.s.similation of the heritage of the past to its own ideals: its lyrical delight in life or dramatic re-creation of it: its insistence upon the essential poetry of common things, or its discovery of rare new values in experience and expression.

This poetry frequently catches one or another of those elements, and crystallizes it out of a mere welter into definite form and recognizable beauty. But the claim for Mr Abercrombie is that he has drawn upon them more largely: that he has made a wider synthesis: that his work has a unity more comprehensive and complete. It is in virtue of this that he may be said to represent his age so fully; but that is neither to accuse him of shouting with the crowd, nor to lay on the man in the street the burden of the poet's idealism. He is, indeed, in a deeper sense than politics could make him, a democrat: perhaps that inheres in the poetic temperament. But intellectuality like his, vision so brilliant, a spirit so keen and a sensuous equipment so delicate and bountiful are not to be leashed to the common pace. That is a truism, of course: so often it seems to be the destiny of the poet to be at once with the people and above them. But it needs repet.i.tion here, because it applies with unusual force. This is a poet whose instinct binds him inescapably to his kind, while all the time his genius is soaring where the average mind may sometimes find it hard to follow.

One is right, perhaps, in believing that this particular affinity with his time is instinctive, for it reveals itself in many ways, subtler or more obvious, through all his work. As forthright avowal it naturally occurs most in his earlier poems. There is, for example, the humanitarianism of the fine "Indignation" ode in his first volume, called _Interludes and Poems_. This is an invocation of righteous anger against the deplorable conditions of the workers' lives. A fierce impulse drives through the ode, in music that is sometimes troubled by its own vehemence.

Wilt thou not come again, thou G.o.dly sword, Into the Spirit's hands?

Against our ugly wickedness, Against our wanton dealing of distress, The forced defilement of humanity,

And shall there be no end to life's expense In mills and yards and factories, With no more recompense Than sleep in warrens and low styes, And undelighted food?

Shall still our ravenous and unhandsome mood Make men poor and keep them poor?--

In the same volume there is a pa.s.sage which may be said to present the obverse of this idea. It occurs in an interlude called "An Escape," and is only incidental to the main theme, which is much more abstract than that of the ode. A young poet, Idwal, has withdrawn from the society of his friends, to meditate about life among the hills. All the winter long he has kept in solitude, his spirit seeking for mastery over material things. As the spring dawns he is on the verge of triumph, and the soul is about to put off for ever its veil of sense, when news reaches him from the outer world. His little house, from which he has been absent so long, has been broken into, and robbed, by a tramp. The friend who comes to tell about it ends his tale by a word of sympathy--"I'm sorry for you"--and Idwal replies:

It's sorry I am for that perverted tramp, As having gone from being the earth's friend, Whom she would have at all her private treats.

Now with the foolery called possession he Has dirtied his own freedom, cozen'd all His hearing with the lies of ownership.

The earth may call to him in vain henceforth, He's got a step-dame now, his Goods....

Evidence less direct but equally strong is visible in the later work. It lies at the very root of the tragedy of _Deborah_, a heroine drawn from fisher-folk, who in the extremity of fear for her lover's life cries:

O but my heart is dying in me, waiting:

For us, with lives so hazardous, to love Is like a poor girl's game of being a queen.

And it is found again, gathering materials for the play called _The End of the World_ out of the lives of poor and simple people. Here the impulse is clear enough, but sometimes it takes a subtler form, and then it occasionally betrays the poet into a solecism. For his sense of the unity of the race is so strong that natural distinctions sometimes go the way of artificial ones. He has so completely identified himself with humanity, and for preference with the lowly in mind and estate, that he has not seldom endowed a humble personality with his own large gifts.

Thus you find Deborah using this magnificent plea for her sweetheart's life:

... there's something sacred about lovers.

For there is wondrous more than the joy of life In lovers; there's in them G.o.d Himself Taking great joy to love the life He made: We are G.o.d's desires more than our own, we lovers, You dare not injure G.o.d!

Thus, too, a working wainwright suddenly startled into consciousness of the purpose of the life-force muses:

Why was I like a man sworn to a thing Working to have my wains in every curve, Ay, every tenon, right and as they should be?

Not for myself, not even for those wains: But to keep in me living at its best The skill that must go forward and shape the world, Helping it on to make some masterpiece.

And with the same largesse a fiddling vagabond, old and blind, thief, liar, and seducer, is made to utter a lyric ecstasy on the words which are the poet's instrument:

Words: they are messengers from out G.o.d's heart, Intimate with him; through his deed they go, This pa.s.sion of him called the world, approving All of fierce gladness in it, bidding leap To a yet higher rapture ere it sink.

... There be Who hold words made of thought. But as stars slide Through air, so words, bright aliens, slide through thought, Leaving a kindled way.

Now, since Synge has shown us that the poetry in the peasant heart does utter itself spontaneously, in fitting language, we must be careful how we deny, even to these peasants who are not Celts, a natural power of poetic expression. But there is a difference. That spontaneous poetry of simple folk which is caught for us in _The Playboy of the Western World or The Well of the Saints_, is generally a lyric utterance springing directly out of emotion. It is not, as here, the result of a mental process, operating amongst ideas and based on knowledge which the peasant is unlikely to possess. One may be justified, therefore, in a show of protest at the incongruity; we feel that such people do not talk like that. The poet has transferred to them too much of his own intellectuality. Yet it will probably be a feeble protest, proportionate to the degree that we are disturbed by it, which is practically not at all. For as these people speak, we are convinced of their reality: they live and move before us. And when we consider their complete and robust individuality, it would appear that the poet's method is vindicated by the dramatic force of the presentment. It needs no other vindication, and is no doubt a reasoned process. For Mr Abercrombie makes no line of separation between thought and emotion; and having entered by imagination into the hearts of his people, he might claim to be merely interpreting them--making conscious and vocal that which was already in existence there, however obscurely. There is a hint of this at a point in _The End of the World_ where one of the men says that he had _felt_ a certain thought go through his mind--"though 'twas a thing of such a flight I could not read its colour." And in this way Deborah, being a human soul of full stature, sound of mind and body and all her being flooded with emotion, would be capable of feeling the complex thought attributed to her, even if no single strand of its texture had ever been clear in her mind. While as to the fiddling lyrist, rogue and poet, one sees no reason why the whole argument should not be closed by a gesture in the direction of Heine or Villon.

We turn now to the content of thought in Mr Abercrombie's poetry--an aspect of his genius to be approached with diffidence by a writer conscious of limitations. For though we believed we saw that his affinity with the democratic spirit of his age is instinctive, deeply rooted and persistent, his genius is by no means ruled by instinct. It is intellectual to an extreme degree, moving easily in abstract thought and apparently trained in philosophic speculation. Indeed, his speculative tendency had gone as far as appeared to be legitimate in poetry, when he wisely chose another medium for it in the volume of prose _Dialogues_ published in 1913.

It must not be gathered from this, however, that the philosophic pieces are dull or difficult reading. On the contrary, they are frequently cast into the form of a story with a dramatic basis; and although the torrent of thought sometimes keeps the mind astretch to follow it, it would be hard to discover a single obscure line. An astonishing combination of qualities has gone to produce this result: subtlety with vigour, delicacy with strength, and loftiness with simplicity. Things elusive and immaterial are caught and fixed in vivid imagery; and often charged with poignant human interest. No other modern poet expresses thought so abstract with such force, or describes the adventures of the voyaging soul with such clarity. It suggests high harmony in the development of sense and spirit: it explains the apparent incompatibility between his rapture of delight in the physical world and his spiritual exaltation: while it hints a reason for his preoccupation with the duality in human life, and his vision of an ultimate union of the rival powers.

We may note in pa.s.sing how this reacts upon the form of his work. It has created a unique vocabulary (enriched from many sources but derived from no single one), which is nervous, flexible, vigorous, impa.s.sioned: a.s.similating to its grave beauty words homely, colloquial or quaint, until the range of it seems all but infinite.

Again, rather curiously, the thought has tended toward the dramatic form. At first glance that form would seem to be unsuitable for the expression of reflectiveness so deep as this. Yet here is a poet whose dominant theme might be defined, tritely, as the development of the soul; and he hardly ever writes in any other way.

The fact sends us back to the contrast with the Victorians. The representative poet then, musing about life and death and the evolution of the soul, felt himself impelled to the elegiac form, or the idyll.

But the nature of the thought itself has changed. The representative poet now does not stand and lament, however exquisitely, because reality has shattered dogma: neither does he try to create an epic out of the incredible theme of a perfect soul. He accepts reality; and then he perceives that the perfect soul _is_ incredible, besides being poor material for his art. But on the other hand, while he takes care to seize and hold fast truth: while it does not occur to him to mourn that she is implacable: he resolutely denies to phenomena, the appearance of things, the whole of truth. That is to say, he has transcended at once the despair of the Victorians and their materialism. He has banished their lyric grief for a dead past, along with their scientific and religious dogmas. That was a bit of iconoclasm imperatively demanded of him by his own soul; but from the fact that he is a poet, it is denied to him to find final satisfaction in the region of sense and consciousness.

Thus there arises a duality, and a sense of conflict, which would account for the manner of his expression, without the need to refer it to the general tendency of modern poetry towards the dramatic form.

Doubtless, however, that also has been an influence, for the virility of his genius and the positive strain in his philosophy would lead that way.

One can hardly say that there are perceptible stages in Mr Abercrombie's thought. He is one of the few poets with no crudities to repent, either artistic or philosophic. Yet there is a poem in his first volume, a morality called "The New G.o.d"; and there is another piece called "The Sale of St Thomas," first published in 1911, which are relatively simple. Here he is content to take material that is traditional, both to poetry and religion, and infuse into it so much of modern significance as it will carry. The first re-tells the mediaeval legend of a girl changed by G.o.d into his own likeness in order to save her from violence.

There is, apt to our present study, but too long to give in full, at least one pa.s.sage that is magnificent in conception and imagery alike.

It is the voice of G.o.d, answering the girl's prayer that she may be saved by the destruction of her beauty. The voice declares that the pet.i.tion is sweet and shall be granted, that he will quit the business of the universe, that he will "put off the nature of the world," and become

G.o.d, when all the mult.i.tudinous flow Of Being sets backward to Him; G.o.d, when He Is only glory....

The "Sale of St Thomas" also treats a legend, with originality and power. This remarkable poem is already well known: but one may at least call attention to the fitness and dignity with which the poet has placed the modern gospel upon the lips of the Christ. Thomas has been intercepted by his master, as he is about to run away for the second time from his mission to India.

Now, Thomas, know thy sin. It was not fear; Easily may a man crouch down for fear, And yet rise up on firmer knees, and face The hailing storm of the world with graver courage.

But prudence, prudence is the deadly sin, And one that groweth deep into a life, With hardening roots that clutch about the breast.

For this refuses faith in the unknown powers Within man's nature; shrewdly bringeth all Their inspiration of strange eagerness To a judgment bought by safe experience; Narrows desire into the scope of thought.

But it is written in the heart of man, Thou shalt no larger be than thy desire.

Thou must not therefore stoop thy spirit's sight To pore only within the candle-gleam Of conscious wit and reasonable brain;

But send desire often forth to scan The immense night which is thy greater soul; Knowing the possible, see thou try beyond it Into impossible things, unlikely ends; And thou shalt find thy knowledgeable desire Grow large as all the regions of thy soul, Whose firmament doth cover the whole of Being, And of created purpose reach the ends.

Perhaps the thought here is not so simple as the pellucid expression makes it to appear: yet the conventional material on which the poet is working restrains it to at least relative simplicity. When, however, his inspiration is moving quite freely, unhampered by tradition either of technique or of theme, the result is more complex and more characteristic.

The tragedy called "Blind", in his first volume, is an example. The plot of this dramatic piece is probably unique. If one gave the bald outline of it, it might seem to be merely a story of crude revenge. It is concerned with rude and outlawed people: it springs out of elemental pa.s.sions--fierce love turned to long implacable hatred, and then reverting to tenderness and pity and overwhelming remorse. And yet there are probably no subtler studies in poetry than the three persons of this little drama--the woman who has reared her idiot son to be the weapon to avenge her wrongs upon the father he has never known: the blind son himself; and his father, the same fiddling tramp whom we have already noted. There are points in the delineation of all three which are very brilliantly imagined: the change in the woman when she meets at last the human wreck who had once been her handsome lover: the idiot youth hungering to express the beauty which is revealed to him, through touch, in a child's golden hair, the warmth of fire, the mysterious presence of the dark: