"Pinguescent speciosa deserti." -- Psalm 64.
POETRY is not only natural but also as universal as nature. While every truly poetic era listens to masters, it welcomes minstrels as well -- wandering minstrels who sing in chorus and are often forgotten before the applause has died away, but who bring something quite like sunshine into the streets through which they pass. Of course, there is really no such being as a minor poet; one might speak as intelligently of minor sunsets or major mornings. Not all, however, are ample and gorgeous, mastering the heavens and the earth, and some are even the children of an hour, dispensing swiftly the beauty which is their secret treasure, and disappearing for evermore into the mute and obscure poverty which rewards their giving. The fact to be noted is that the priceless things in literature are not always signed with resounding names. There are lyrics by humbler poets from Catullus to Donne and Dobell that are as fragrant as any rose in Shakespeare's garden; we should rather have the "Dies Irae" than "Paradise Lost." And among the matchless psalms of David there is none to equal the Magnificat.
It is very much the same, of course, with the other arts. The little town of Thann, in Alsace, has a church which, when everything has been said, is rather simple. But adorning the façade, on the slenderest of columns, stands a statue of the Madonna, the work of some utterly forgotten fourteenth century artist. There is in this representation of the Mother and Son that ultimate originality which endows the dream of the artist with the vision and vitality of the people to whom he belongs. Here is a Virgin whom everybody instinctively recognizes for a Mother, and a Child whose loveliness seems too real, too blissful, for stone. And perhaps it would be better to make a pilgrimage to Thann, of which the world knows little, than to visit the towers of Cologne or even St. Paul's in London, for all its Renaissance majesty.
To return to poetry, let us give thanks that the Catholic Spirit has been enshrined in songs beyond number. There are many poets with whom this narrative cannot deal, although it is true that neither Browning nor Meredith, Tennyson nor Arnold, were uninfluenced by the revival of Christendom; in multitudinous and separate ways they bore testimony to the beauty which is the garment of God. But the glory of these men is to have reflected the spirit of the modern age, to have caught its optimism or its quandary, its aspiration or its despair. The Catholic poet, although alive to the rhythm of the surrounding time, is necessarily a mediaevalist at heart, for the moderns believe in God and also in If, but the Middle Ages were conscious of Him, simply, as a fact. Herein lies all the difference in the world, but chiefly it is the difference between deference to the tables of science and to the tables of the Law. "Every artist," says Ernest Hello, "should live in austere conformity to Order," and certainly this is a golden rule. But the Church has not been a principle, but a mother, and has marshalled men not as soldiers but as future citizens; she has said to man and poet, "Go your own way, but remember the household into which you are born." Nothing is more remarkable in the writers whom we shall consider than the diversity of their temperaments and their likeness in the consciousness of their heritage.
Alice Meynell, the first of these poets, belongs unquestionably among the number of the immortals. She is, moreover, the earliest literary woman to take an active part in the revival of the Catholic Spirit. The feminine mind, from the days of Sappho, has brought to letters qualities of gold -- intimacy, restraint, delicacy of emotion -- and immortal women, Mme. de Sevigne, Jane Austen, St. Teresa, have written with something akin to the virtue of silence. The defense of the shrine of womanhood lies, it is evident, in the poise of reserve, in the attitude which stands half way between repulsion and embrace. Mrs. Meynell, understanding this principle well, has written with a magnificent tranquillity that might have been the mood of Venus de Milo were it not for a subtler shadowing of the flesh, a more resolute devotion to spirit in its pure form. She writes, like Emerson, prose and poetry remarkably similar in character, each distinguished by fine humorous intelligence and the chaste rhythm of secluded feeling. How it is that in this modern age woman should keep best that high Stoicism of character, that classic frigidity of expression, which belonged to Sophocles and Joubert, we shall not attempt to explain.
The first slender volume of poems, "Preludes," has been followed by other collections just as fragile and spare. There is scarcely a line that lacks the ultimate touch, that Mrs. Meynell might conceivably have done better. All the poems are ideas, visions, and prayers; but none of them could conceivably be quoted either in Parliament or in church. And here is at once the secret of Alice Meynell's power and of her limitation; she goes infallibly to the reason of things, but seldom, if ever, to the heart of things. There is no Rachael mourning for her children and no Magdalen drying the Saviour's feet with strands of golden hair. In her verse you meet always the marble figure with the heartbeat in the eyes alone, the poignant cry that is never uttered except in a gaze. "Renunciation" is such a poem, "Maternity" another:
"Ten years ago was born in pain, A child, not now forlorn. But, oh, ten years ago, in vain, A mother, a mother was born."
But it is thus that the ideal woman of the ages, not La Giaconda but Mary of the Stabat Mater, has spoken to the hearts of men. And if Mrs. Meynell's emotions are thus carefully repressed for the show they must make in words, her prayer is no less closely shrouded. Sometimes the comparatively simple vision is put with utter simplicity:
"For no divine Intelligence or art, or fire, or wine Is high-delirious as that rising lark -- The child's soul and its daybreak in the dark."
Again, the insight into remoter things is clouded with its own remoteness, though the naked lines speak everything that can be said. Such a poem as "A General Communion" is pure idea kindled by an almost incommunicable spiritual ecstasy:
"I saw the people as a field of flowers, Each grown at such a price The sum of unimaginable powers Did no more than suffice."
This poetry can be the product only of a mind both remarkably original and remarkably disciplined. By necessity Mrs. Meynell was driven to have her say on life, and while this declaration is very forcefully made in poems like "The Fugitive," it is really the business of her prose. In three surprisingly even series of essays, "The Rhythm of Life," "The Colour of Life," and "Hearts of Controversy," she manages to suggest her own firmly balanced intellectual position while piercing to the rotten core of everything that smacks of decivilization. Her ideal is self control and decidedly not the modern business of self expression. A good deal of subtly restrained opinion is devoted, naturally, to a consideration of art, for Mrs. Meynell is always primarily the artist. She has made of the short prose essay a medium as perfect in form, as responsive to the intimacies of sensibility, as the Epistles of Horace. It is to be expected that such treatment of life will sometimes taste bitter in the mouth, or seem trop raffiné pour ce monde. Neither the prose nor the poetry of Alice Meynell has been written for the multitude; she has courageously elected to say a word to the teachers and to characterize the gaudiness of contemporary romantic philosophy with the withering adjectives it invites. But in her own way she has also been the oracle of consummate womanhood, of mothers whose maternity has only made them graver children of the divine. It is, of course, unsafe to venture an estimate of Mrs. Meynell's ultimate literary position; but there is no other English writer now living whose work seems so safe from time.
No poet could offer a greater contrast to the refined sexlessness -- feminine insight manfully controlled -- of Alice Meynell than the rugged, masculine verse of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. This man of genius, whose career has been so varied and so impetuous, is perhaps the only modern whom Richard of the Lion Heart would have welcomed for a brother. Both have been men of action with a turn for song; they might have ridden out together to the ends of the earth, championing the oppressed almost singlehanded, and come out of the desert shoulder to shoulder, hating the Moslem. Both, in short, have made a knight's homage to the dreams that pulse through the heart of the world. Wilfrid Blunt, at eighteen, was a member of the diplomatic corps; at twenty-nine he married and began with his wife a series of exhilarating though dangerous journeys across Spain -- then the scene of a Carlist revolt -- Algiers, Egypt, and Asia Minor. Some of his adventures gained the attention of Britain and upon returning home Blunt wrote a series of essays on England's policy of outrage in Egypt and India. Not content with this anti-imperialistic mission, he warmly espoused the cause of Ireland and in 1887 was cast into prison for having taken part in a prohibited meeting at Woodford, Galway. "Whoever writes the lining of English history," says Shane Leslie, "must consult the little-known monographs of Wilfrid Blunt criticising England's rule in Ireland, Egypt, and India."
If all this is not of itself very poetic, it will suggest very clearly the kind of verse to which Wilfrid Scawen Blunt affixed his name. Most of his best work is to be found in "Love Sonnets of Proteus" and "Seven Golden Odes of Arabia," a series of translations done with the assistance of his wife. They are songs distinctive of the man of action, impatient of cloying colour, conventions of form, and subtlety, but they are instead direct, genuine, and surprisingly virile. The individuality of the man is further shown by his quixotic choice of the sonnet form, which he employs, however, with more than Shakesperian modifications; but that is after all the man's way, and it is the sentimentalist like Walt Whitman who betrays his weakness by running wildly over the page. Here is a sextet from a love-sonnet, "St. Valentine's Day," to show the vigorous chafing of his muse:
"I knew the spring was come. I knew it even Better than all by this, that through my chase In bush and stone and hill and sea and heaven I seem'd to see and follow still your face. Your face my quarry was. For it I rode, My horse a thing of wings, myself a god."
That Wilfrid Blunt is a genuine Englishman, despite his political opinions, the fine sonnet on "Gibraltar" will suffice to show: but he is the Englishman of an age now almost forgotten -- the age before industry, when man was free as the hills he roamed, and when chivalry was constant in its service of the star. In many ways he has been a Stevenson whose craving has been appeased, whose hunger for the wild paths around the world has sought its fill in more substantial things than sonorous sentences. Blunt's poetry is too much the expression of his independent character to become popular in these days of aesthetic rhythms and carefully groomed ideas. His definite intellectual position is, of course, not due to his breaking of the conventions, nor did he utter paragraphs of nonsense from the philosophy of Rousseau. He has not been a radical but a spectre -- something that in the older days was more plentiful and deserves in these the almost obsolete title of "man."
From the rugged manliness of Wilfrid Blunt one goes, with a sense of fitness, to the delicately feminine charm of Louise Imogen Guiney. Although she was the poet of a few in days when no poetry addressed itself to many, she has been remembered since her death with an affectionate admiration to which only the finest, most genial spirits have a right. Her verses were flowers and she, perhaps, was fairer than any of them -- a woman of the morning, with a taste for the beautiful ages. Born in Massachusetts and educated nearby, Miss Guiney came to feel "the love of man which calleth overseas, and from towers afar off." The later years of her life were spent with modest grace at Oxford, where as "a mere mole of the enchanted Bodleian" she stained her fingers with the lore of Christendom. Memories of the Catholic past grew real under her eyes, and she whom the beauty of life had stirred to song knew also the silent beauty of death. She was of straight American descent, of course; but we have placed her among the English poets because that seems to have been her election.
The bulk of Miss Guiney's work was done in prose of a vibrant, intimate texture that rivals the earlier mastery of Mme. de Sévigné. Perhaps it was her Irish blood, or perhaps it was destiny, that made her write so well in the best manner of the French. Her prose is not so perfect as Mrs. Meynell's, but it is more responsive, less didactic, more tenderly human. There are passages to which the heart answers directly, and the refinement of them is like a subtle natural perfume. "Patrins," a book of crisp personal essays, is probably the most familiar, but it seems that if any work of hers is worthy of immortality it is "Monsieur Henri." This "Foot-note to French History" is the gay and poignant story of Rochejaquelin. His was a character to which Miss Guiney's nature called out in answer: his chivalry, gentleness, and bravoure were her own. One feels that the book, small and exquisite though it may be, is full of regulated virility. The words move with the symmetry of noble speech and sparkle with the gladness of youth. "Stress must be laid," says the author, "upon heroes; they are the universal premise": and her emphasis is unforgettable. Beside the fine grace of this book, Ruskin is ponderous and Howells a mere bludgeoner; it is not given to men to write thus. Yet, though this is her best work, there is art for the most critical in "Goosequill Papers," in the Memoir of Hurrell Froude, in everything she did.
As a poet Louise Imogen Guiney wrote what her heart dictated and no more. It is to be regretted that she could not leave a half-dozen portly volumes rather than one slight book; but that is a sheaf heavy with grain and gold. The cheerful audacity with which she faced life was characteristic to the end, but appears brightest, perhaps, in the ballads:
"Let cowards and laggards fall back! but alert to the saddle, Straight, grim, and abreast, go the weather-worn, galloping legion, With a stirrup-cup each to the lily of women that loves him."
Yet, though the smile was bright, tears stood close by with something of the sweet Celtic melancholy in them,
"The cabin door looks down a furze-lighted hill, And far as Leighlin Cross the fields are green and still. But once I hear the blackbird in Leighlin hedges call, The foolishness is on me, and the wild tears fall!"
Then, best of all there was the loyalty to Faith that warmed her inner life, expressing itself with veiled reticence and yet appealingly. No woman could have been less an Amazon, and still her religious verse throbs with pain met and overborne, with the victorious peace of prayer. Knowing when to bow her head, she met life sternly though in tears, mindful of the beauty which is hidden by the thorny hedge. Perhaps she said all these things best in that perfect poem, "Beati Mortui," written for those
"Who out of wrong Run forth with laughter and a broken thong; Who win from pain their strange and flawless grant Of peace anticipant; Who cerements lately wore of sin, but now, Unbound from foot to brow, Gleam in and out of cities, beautiful As sun-born colours of a forest pool Where autumn sees The splash of walnuts from her thinning trees."
From Miss Guiney's virginal presence one goes gladly and with a sense of fitness to a boy whose short life was busy with stealthy verses made in homage to the loveliness of God. Digby Dolben, dead at nineteen, was already a poet, leaving verse that is remarkably mature. Handsome of body and soul, carefully educated and blessed with a radiant disposition, his soul consecrated itself to religion with a kind of abandon. Unaided he entertained a vision of the Church which alone possesses the Reality, and sought to grope his way. Death overtook him before he had entered the gate, chiefly because family opposition had made delay necessary. Dolben's poetry is a series of tributes to the things of faith, together with examinations of conscience before the Lord whom he dared not confess. There is pure melody in his lyrics and wide knowledge of the invisible world: is it a boy, one asks, who writes the "Shrine" or "Sister Death"? But wonder increases to the point of amazement with the reading of "Dum Agonizatur Anima," a poignant confession of religious irresolution, of weakness, and of hope, done in the manner of Newman's "Gerontius."
"And we who follow in His martyr train Have access only through the courts of pain, Yet on the Via Dolorosa He Precedes us with His sweet Humanity."
Two months after laying aside this impressive but unfinished revelation, Digby Dolben fainted while swimming and all that he might have been ceased to be. But there had come into his story a kindly fulness from the mothering shadow of the Church.
Let us go back for a moment to the memory of Adelaide Proctor, the eldest daughter of "Barry Cornwall." Her verse lacks the artistry, the inner glow, of great poetry, but strikes a simple chord to which the humbler mind instinctively responds. "Legends and Lyrics," the best of Miss Proctor's work, has shared the great popularity of Longfellow; and such poems as "A Lost Chord," "Thankfulness," and "A Legend of Provence" were known to a whole generation of the poor. It is easy to scoff at the fluent rhythm, the commonplace ideas and the general didacticism of such verse, but it is impossible to deny that it sprang sincerely from the sincerest of lives. Adelaide Proctor found her way into the Church without any desperate effort. "She was," said her admirer, Charles Dickens, "a finely sympathetic woman with a great accordant heart and a sterling noble nature." Having given her life wholly to the service of the unfortunate, she died from the strain of devoted overwork. Certainly she understood the songs of the modern poor, for whom
"The Past and the Future are nothing In the face of the stern today,"
better than any mere intellectual can hope to. If th'is be the only reason for keeping her memory green, it is, at least, a reason.
One passes naturally from a life so austerely given to charity to the blasted careers of those poets who came out of the darkness of decadence into the Church for the warding off of final despair. She who for two thousand years has busied herself with the sins of men did not disdain to aid these at the last, although they could give Her no service in return. There is a shred of Catholic tradition in the work of Oscar Wilde, but it is a soiled shred, polluted with that touch of moral leprosy which the brilliant debauchee left an imprint of on everything that came into his life. Even "De Profundis," probably a sincere effort to write sincerely of the soul, has somehow the odour of medicaments. The career of Ernest Dowson, who retarded his conversion until a life of indulgence had sentenced him irretrievably to an early death, did write poetry which is touching as a recognition of the mercy of God. "Extreme Unction" is a Catholic poem, but its inspiration is the grave. Like Aubrey Beardsley and so many of the French decadents, these geniuses, unbalanced by the sickly caste of modern matter-worship, came at last to the foot of the Scarlet Hill. It is something that the Catholic Spirit, which could not save their lives, did heal their souls. The entry into the Church of Lord Alfred Douglas, at one time intimately associated with Wilde, did not altogether calm the spirit of this recklessly impetuous man. A journalist virulent in his defense of conservative government, Douglas is a master of the sonnet. His poems, while not so abstract in inspiration, have the finish and verbal brilliancy of Santayana.
With an ancestry so varied and in general so distinctly regal, the future of the Catholic poetry in England cannot fail to be beautiful. It is natural, however, that this new age should bring changes in attitude and method -- this age so restless in spirit, so raucous in its expression of discontent, and so fiercely wounded, too, in its martyrdom. The cry is for facts in the midst of delirious laughter; for dogma (covertly) in the clutches of despair. It is not true that the Victorians despised truth (shades of Newman and Carlyle!) but that what they knew of it was still considered effective. The modern man clamours for the naked truth and expects to see it shivering and impotent; and so, what he really admires is the half-truth, dark, ugly, and animal. To this no genuine poet can consent, but the singer of to-day, like his predecessor of yesteryear, must make the commonplace extraordinary, and this he cannot do if his tunes have worn out with the times. No one need be surprised, therefore, if the rhythm and imagery of the Victorians are to be somewhat summarily dealt with; if there is to be woven into the fiber of verse a wealth of elemental things, of images taken from the streets, of words gathered from the market place, and of strange, barbaric colour and music -- tom-toms and indigo.
The struggle for the mastery of verse is being fought out to-day between an ideal that is older than the Renaissance and an ultra-modern principle which never has been, and probably never will be, put into successful practice. In reality it is a contest between the poet born of nature and the poet begotten of modern thought; it involves more than vers libre and the sonnet, it is assuredly not narrower than the distance between a pibroch and a klaxon. No one can foretell what is going to happen; but it is comparatively easy to point out the relation that exists between the new Catholic poet and the older masters, who lived closer to nature than men have come during the past century. One is quite warranted in saying that Patmore's protest against the diction of Wordsworth has been accepted: "The best poet is not he whose verses are the most easily scanned, and whose phraseology is the commonest in its materials, and the most direct in its arrangement: but rather he whose language combines the greatest imaginative accuracy with the most elaborate and sensible metrical organization, and who, in his verse, preserves everywhere the living sense of meter." But just as the pre-Raphaelites sought to follow nature instead of convention, the mellifluent word-artistry of Tennyson has been abandoned by the poets for something more homely and homelike. The Chaucer revival, carried so far by John Masefield, the earthiness of "The Shropshire Lad," and particularly the nature poetry of Yeats, Russell, Ledwidge, and other masters of .the Celtic revival, to some extent govern the direction of modern English poetry where it has not grown bizarre in its revolt and followed the amazing intellectual antics of Ezra Pound.
From this movement Catholic poetry cannot fail to gain, for Catholic art in its best, most vital forms antedates the Renaissance. May we not cast out our semi-Methodist English hymns for something more substantially like the songs of Fortunatus? Francis Thompson was fearless enough to borrow rhythms from the breviary; Patmore went to St. John of the Cross, and Hopkins to the old Greek hymnody. Catholic verse to-day is not less resolute in its choice of melody. The poetry of Chesterton and Belloc, tuneful, martial, close to earth, will be considered later. For the moment we shall content ourselves with Mr. Theodore Maynard, a poet of the things which Mr. Chesterton prizes most highly: laughter, religion, freedom, and wine.
"And the little grey imp of laughter Laughs in the soul of me,"
he sings, with just a bit of futility. Somehow one cannot imagine Mr. Maynard's soul thus taken possession of. "Cecidit, Cecidit, Babylonia Magna" expresses a manly contempt for inhumanity; "The World's Miser" is a reverently mystic hymn, and the later poem to "St. George," quiet, sad, not at all imbued with laughter, is almost great verse written out of a mood of defeat. Mr. Maynard is not, however, a great poet; he is a poetic Boswell. Almost every idea to which the masterful G.K.C. has given expression is chronicled somewhere in Mr. Maynard's songs. He is an admirable reflector, too; confident of his inspiration he forges the tune with fervour, and confident in himself he hums his drinking songs in the face of a boresome world. Of course, Mr. Maynard is not personally a boisterous man, but instead an admirable, human, rather reticent one; a man whose humour, delicately keen, makes the stoutly defended dogmas of his religion seem a handsome soldier's code of honour. If he is not very original, he has at least caught originality from one of the few places on earth where there is still danger of contagion.
And in all, it seems that the most significant work being done by any of the contemporary English Catholic poets is that of Helen Parry Eden. This sturdy and altogether admirable convert to the Church is the author, as everyone ought to know, of two distinctive volumes of verse, "Bread and Circuses" and "Coal and Candlelight." These are songs of a woman with a home and children, songs that seem so obvious a part of daily life that their realism is one of the most brightly optimistic facts in modern letters. A number of the poems are written to children or about children, a matter which Patmore and Thompson also considered of some importance. The rest is soul verse, not theosophic banality, but remarkably sane, workable, and yet intensely spiritual poetry. One cannot help thinking that if Saint Jerome had met, during the course of his spiritual labours, with a feminine poet who said,
"Sweet Sorrow, play a grateful part, Break me the marble of my heart And of its fragments pave a street Where, to my bliss, myself may meet One hastening with piercèd feet"
he could not have kept back an expression of intense satisfaction. How admirably close to the real a sacrament may be brought is shown by "A Purpose of Amendment":
"So when the absolution's said Behind the grille, and I may go, And all the flowers of sin are dead, And all the stems of sin laid low, And I am come to Mary's shrine To lay my hopes within her hand -- Ah, in how fair and green a line The seedling resolutions stand."
Whether Mrs. Eden is writing "To Betsy-Jane, on Her Desiring to Go Incontinently to Heaven," or to "Thomas Black, Cat to the Sloane Museum," she never fails to take delight in the epistle and to say something quite as delightful. "Coal and Candlelight" is a better domestic poem than Wordsworth managed to write, and "Trees" succeeds, where others have failed, in really saying a word about trees. If the good humour and the spontaneous piety of these verses are noteworthy, the element of satire has a scarcely less prominent place; the poet has profited by the teaching of Jane Austen. Dean Swift would have chuckled over Mrs. Eden's rebuke to a time-suffering journalist who had complimented a noble lord on his nobleness -- in hard cash:
"Here is a rule to save the like mistakes And sift the patriots from the money-makers, These take an interest in their country's aches And those an interest in their country's acres."
Mrs. Eden has written altogether too little; it is unfortunate that this is not an age for "Canterbury Tales." If one may venture an opinion based on her later poems, the war has borne heavily upon her soul; and that is after all the fount of song.
If Catholic poetry can move forward with the spontaneity, rich candour, and genuine fervour which it has manifested thus far, its position in English letters will be free and great. Asserting as it does the stability of the universe, it can hold its own while the earth rocks. Is it not true that the freedom of the human race is measured by its bondage to song, that its buoyancy will always seek an outlet in make-believe? Let it be repeated: the poet is a child and the Catholic poet is a normal and obedient child. And in more ways than one are the words fulfilled: only the children shall enter into the kingdom.
BOOK NOTE
The best work of Alice Meynell has been issued in three volumes: "Poems," "Essays," "Mary, the Mother of God." Now that W.S. Blunt's "My Diaries" have been republished, information about him may be sought with great profit there. Louise I. Guiney's own selection of her poems is entitled, "Happy Ending." A large part of her prose has not been collected; "Monsieur Henri" is out of print. The only edition of Digby Dolben's verse is that issued, with a memoir, by Robert Bridges. "Louise Imogen Guiney" by Alice Brown, is an inspiring memoir. An interesting sketch of Miss Guiney's personality is that by Jessie B. Rittenhouse, Bookman, vol. 52. Dolben is presented sympathetically in an essay by B.W Cornish, Dublin Review, vol. 151. In connection with Adelaide Proctor, see the introduction by Charles Dickens to the volume of her poems. G.K. Chesterton supplies a sparkling introduction to the first volume of Maynard's collected verse. For information about the decadents, see "Oscar Wilde," by Frank Harris; "Oscar Wilde and Myself" by Alfred Douglas; "The Letters of Aubrey Beardsley"; and "Palms of Papyrus," by M. Monahan. For details of a more general or a biographical character, see "The End of a Chapter," by Shane Leslie; "The Catholic Encyclopedia"; and "The Catholic Who's Who."