Delphi Works of Ford Madox Ford (Illustrated) (620 page)

I think pathos and poetry are to be found beneath those lights and in those sounds — in the larking of the anaemic girls, in the shoulders of the women in evening dress, in the idealism of a pickpocket slanting through a shadow and imagining himself a hero whose end will be wealth and permanent apartments in the Savoy Hotel. For such dreamers of dreams there are.

That indeed appears to me — and I am writing as seriously as I can — the real stuff of the poetry of our day. Love in country lanes, the song of birds, moonlight — these the poet, playing for safety, and the critic trying to find something safe to praise, will deem the sure cards of the poetic pack. They seem the safe things to sentimentalize over, and it is taken for granted that sentimentalizing is the business of poetry. It is not, of course. Upon the face of it the comfrey under the hedge may seem a safer card to play, for the purpose of poetry, than the portable zinc dustbin left at dawn for the dustman to take.

But it is not really; for the business of poetry is not sentimentalism so much as the putting of certain realities in certain aspects. The comfrey under the hedge, judged by these standards, is just a plant — but the ash-bucket at dawn is a symbol of poor humanity, of its aspirations, its romance, its ageing and its death. The ashes represent the sociable fires, the god of the hearth, of the slumbering, dawn populations; the orange peels with their bright colours represent all that is left of a little party of the night before, when an alliance between families may have failed to be cemented, or being accomplished may have proved a disillusionment or a temporary paradise. The empty tin of infant’s food stands for birth; the torn up scrap of a doctor’s prescription for death. Yes, even if you wish to sentimentalize, the dustbin is a much safer card to play than the comfrey plant. And, similarly, the anaemic shop-girl at the Exhibition, with her bad teeth and her cheap black frock, is safer than Isolde. She is more down to the ground and much more touching.

Or again, there are the symbols of the great fine things that remain to us. Many of us might confess to being unable to pass Buckingham Palace when the Royal Standard is flying on the flagstaff without a very recognizable emotion that is equivalent to the journalist’s phrase, a catching at the throat. For there are symbols of aspiration everywhere. The preposterous white papier mâché fountain is a symbol, so are the preposterous gilded gates, so are the geraniums and the purplish-grey pencil of Westminster Cathedral tower that overhangs the palace. There are, upon the standard, three leopards passant which are ancient and suggestive things; there is the lion rampant which is pretentious, and a harp which is a silly sort of thing to have upon a flag.

But it is a rich spot; a patch of colour that is left to us. As the ugly marquess said of the handsome footman:

“Mon dieu, comme nous les faisons — et comme ils nous font!”

For papier mâché and passant leopards and all, these symbols are what the crowd desires and what they stand for made the crowd what it is. And the absurd, beloved traditions continue. The excellent father of a family in jack-boots, white breeches, sword, helmet strap, gauntlets, views the preparation of his accoutrements and the flag that he carries before his regiment as something as part of his sacred profession as, to a good butler, is the family plate. That is an odd, mysterious human thing, the stuff for poetry.

We might confess again to having had emotions at the time of the beginning of the South African War — we were, say, in the gallery at Drury Lane and the audience were all on fire; we might confess to having had emotions in the Tivoli Music Hall when, just after a low comedian had “taken off” Henry VIII, it was announced that Edward VII was dying, and the whole audience stood up and sang “God Save the King” — as a genuine hymn that time. We may have had similar emotions at seeing the little Prince of Wales standing unsteadily on a blue foot-stool at the coronation, a young boy in his garter robes — or at a Secret Consistory at the Vatican, when the Holy Father ceremonially whispered to one Cardinal or another.

War-like emotions, tears at the passing of a sovereign, being touched at the sight of a young prince or a sovereignly pontifical prisoner of the Vatican — this is perhaps the merest digging out of fossils from a bed of soft clay that the crowd is. God knows we may “just despise” democracy or the writing of laureate’s odes, but the putting of the one thing in juxtaposition with the other — that seems to me to be much more the business of the poet of to-day than setting down on paper what he thinks about the fate of Brangàne, not because any particular “lesson” may be learned, but because such juxtapositions suggest emotions.

For myself, I have been unable to do it; I am too old, perhaps, or was born too late — anything you like. But there it is — I would rather read a picture in verse of the emotions and environment of a Goodge Street anarchist than recapture what songs the sirens sang. That after all was what François Villon was doing for the life of his day, and I should feel that our day was doing its duty by posterity much more surely if it were doing something of the sort.

Can it then be done? In prose of course it can. But, in poetry? Is there something about the mere framing of verse, the mere sound of it in the ear, that it must at once throw its practitioner or its devotee into an artificial frame of mind? Verse presumably quickens the perceptions of its writer as do T hashish or ether. But must it necessarily quicken them to the perception only of the sentimental, the false, the hackneyed aspects of life? Must it make us, because we live in cities, babble incessantly of green fields; or because we live in the twentieth century must we deem nothing poetically good that did not take place before the year 1603?

This is not saying that one should not soak oneself with the Greek traditions: study every fragment of Sappho; delve ages long in the works of Bertran de Born; translate for years the minnelieder of Walther von der Vogelweide or that we should forget the bardic chants of Patrie of the Seven Kingdoms.

Let us do anything in the world that will widen our perceptions. We are the heirs of all the ages. But, in the end, I feel fairly assured that the purpose of all these pleasant travails is the right appreciation of such facets of our own day as God will let us perceive.

I remember seeing in a house in Hertford an American cartoon representing a dog pursuing a cat out of the door of a particularly hideous tenement house, and beneath this picture was inscribed the words: “This is life — one damn thing after another.” Now I think it would be better to be able to put that sentiment into lyric verse than to remake a ballad of the sorrows of Cuchullain or to paraphrase the Book of Job. I do not mean to say that Job is not picturesque; I do not mean to say that it is not a good thing to have the Book of the Seven Sorrows of whom you will in the background of your mind or even colouring your outlook. But it is better to see life in the terms of one damn thing after another, vulgar as is the phraseology or even the attitude, than to render it in terms of withering gourds and other poetic paraphernalia. It is, in fact, better to be vulgar than affected, at any rate if you practise poetry.

III

One of my friends, a really serious critic, has assured me that my poem called “To All the Dead” was not worth publishing, because it is just Browning. Let me, to further this speculation, just confess that I have never read Browning, and that, roughly speaking, I cannot read poetry at all. I never really have been able to. And then let me analyse this case, because it is the plight of many decent, serious people, friends of mine.

As boys we — I and my friends — read Shakespeare with avidity, Virgil to the extent of getting at least two Books of the Æneid by heart, Horace with pleasure and Ovid’s Persephone Rapta with delight. We liked very much the Bacchae of Euripides — I mean that we used to sit down and take a read in these things sometimes apart from the mere exigencies of the school curriculum. A little later Herrick moved us to ecstasy and some of Donne; we liked passages of Fletcher, of Marlowe, of Webster and of Kyd. At that time we really loved the Minnesingers, and fell flat in admiration before anything of Heine. The Troubadors and even the Northern French Epics we could not read — French poetry did not exist for us at all. If we read a French poem at all, we had always to read it twice, once to master the artificial rhythm, once for the sense.

Between seventeen and eighteen we read Rossetti, Catullus, Theocritus, Bion, Moschus and still Shakespeare, Herrick, Heine, Elizabethan and Jacobean lyrics, Crashaw, Herbert and Donne. Towards eighteen we tried Swinburne, Tennyson, Browning and Pope. We could not read any of them — we simply and physically couldn’t sit down with them in the hand for long enough to master more than a few lines. We never read any Tennyson at all except for the fragment about the Eagle; never read any Swinburne at all except for the poem that contains the words “I thank with faint thanksgiving whatever Gods there be,” and the one beginning “Ask nothing more of me, Sweet”; we also read a German translation of the ballad whose stanzas end: “This is the end of every man’s desire.” Of Browning we read sufficient to “get the hang of”
Fifine at the Fair
, the
Blot on the Scutcheon
for the lyric
There’s a woman like a dewdrop
and
Meeting at Night
and
Parting in the Morning and Oh to be in
England.
I have a faint idea that we may have read
The Bishop Orders his Tomb
and parts of
Asolando.
So that, as things go, we may be said never to have read any Browning at all. (I do not mean to say that what I did read did not influence me, so that even at this late date that influence may be found on such a poem as “To all the Dead,” or “The Starling.” I am not, I mean, trying to dodge the implication that I may derive from Browning. Influences are queer things, and there is no knowing when or where they may take you. But, until the other day, I should have said that Browning was the last of the poets that I should have taken consciously as a model. The other day, however — about a month ago — some one insisted, sorely against my wishes, on reading to me the beginning of the
Flight of the Duchess
, as far as “And the whole is our Duke’s country,” that most triumphant expression of feudal loyalty. And my enthusiasm knew no bounds, so that, if ever the Muse should visit me again, it may well be Browningese that I shall write, for there is no passage in literature that I should more desire to have written.)

But at any rate, the attempt to read Tennyson, Swinburne and Browning and Pope — in our teens — gave me and the friends I have mentioned, a settled dislike for poetry that we have never since quite got over. We seemed to get from them the idea that all poets must of necessity write affectedly, at great length, with many superfluous words — that poetry, of necessity, was something boring and pretentious. And I fancy that it is because the greater part of humanity get that impression from those poets that few modern men or women read verse at all.

To such an extent did that feeling overmaster us that, although we subsequently discovered for ourselves Christina Rossetti — who strikes us still as far and away the greatest master of words and moods that any art has produced — I am conscious that we regarded her as being far more a prose writer than a poet at all. Poetry being something pretentious, “tol-lol” as the phrase then was, portentous, brow-beating, affected — this still, small, private voice gave the impression of not being verse at all. Such a phrase describing lizards amongst heath as: “like darted lightnings here and there perceived yet no-where dwelt upon,” or such a sentence as: “Quoth one to-morrow shall be like to-day but much more sweet” — these things gave an exquisite pleasure, but it was a pleasure comparable rather to that to be had from reading Flaubert. It was comparable rather to that which came from reading the last sentences of Herodias. “Et tous trois ayant pris la tête de Jokanaan s’en allait vers Galillée. Comme elle était très lourde ils la portaient alternativement.” I do not presume to say exactly whence the pleasure comes except in so far as that I believe that such exact, formal and austere phrases can to certain men give a pleasure beyond any other. And it was this emotion that we received from Christina Rossetti.

But still, subconsciously, I am aware that we did not regard her as a poet.

And, from that day onwards I may say that we have read no poetry at all — at any rate we have read none unprofessionally until just the other day. The poets of the nineties — Dowson, Johnson, Davidson and the rest — struck us as just nuisances, writing in derivative language uninteresting matters that might have been interesting had they been expressed in the much more exquisite medium of prose. We got, perhaps, some pleasure from reading the poems — not the novels — of George Meredith, and a great deal from those of Mr Hardy, whom we do regard as a great, queer, gloomy and splendid poet. We read also — by some odd impulse — the whole of Mr Doughty’s
Dawn in Britain,
that atrocious and wonderful epic in twelve volumes which is, I think, the longest and most queerly impressive poem in modern English. We read it with avidity; we could not tear ourselves away from it, and we wrote six reviews of it because no professional reviewers could be found to give the time for reading it. It was a queer adventure.