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Page 6
Darkling I listen to these faint echoes from a vanished lecture
room, and ponder. Did J---- keep his copy of the book, I wonder, and
did he annotate it with lively commentary of his own? He left
college at the end of our second year, and I have not seen or heard
from him these thirteen years. The last I knew--six years ago--he
was a contractor in an Ohio city; and (is this not significant?) in
a letter written then to another classmate, recalling some
waggishness of our own sophomore days, he used the phrase "Like Ruth
among the alien corn."
In so far as one may see turning points in a tangle of yarn, or
count dewdrops on a morning cobweb, I may say that a few evenings
with my friend J---- were the decisive vibration that moved one more
minor poet toward the privilege and penalty of Parnassus. One cannot
nicely decipher such fragile causes and effects. It was a year later
before the matter became serious enough to enforce abandoning
library copies of Keats and buying an edition of my own. And this,
too, may have been not unconnected with the gracious influence of
the other sex as exhibited in a neighbouring athen�um; and was
accompanied by a gruesome spate of florid lyrics: some (happily)
secret, and some exposed with needless hardihood in a college
magazine. The world, which has looked leniently upon many poetical
minorities, regards such frenzies with tolerant charity and
forgetfulness. But the wretch concerned may be pardoned for looking
back in a mood of lingering enlargement. As Sir Philip Sidney put
it, "Self-love is better than any gilding to make that seem gorgeous
wherein ourselves be parties."
* * * * *
There is a vast deal of nonsense written and uttered about poetry.
In an age when verses are more noisily and fluently circulated than
ever before, it might seem absurd to plead in the Muse's defence.
Yet poetry and the things poets love are pitifully weak to-day. In
essence, poetry is the love of life--not mere brutish tenacity of
sensation, but a passion for all the honesties that make life free
and generous and clean. For two thousand years poets have mocked and
taunted the cruelties and follies of men, but to what purpose?
Wordsworth said: "In spite of difference of soil and climate, of
language and manners, of laws and customs, in spite of things
silently gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed, the Poet
binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human
society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time."
Sometimes it seems as though "things violently destroyed," and the
people who destroy them, are too strong for the poets. Where, now,
do we see any cohesive binding together of humanity? Are we nearer
these things than when Wordsworth and Coleridge walked and talked on
the Quantock Hills or on that immortal road "between Porlock and
Linton"? Hardy writes "The Dynasts," Joseph Conrad writes his great
preface to "The Nigger of the _Narcissus_," but do the destroyers
hear them? Have you read again, since the War, Gulliver's "Voyage to
the Houyhnhnms," or Herman Melville's "Moby Dick"? These men wrote,
whether in verse or prose, in the true spirit of poets; and Swift's
satire, which the text-book writers all tell you is so gross and
savage as to suggest the author's approaching madness, seems tender
and suave by comparison with what we know to-day.
Poetry is the log of man's fugitive castaway soul upon a doomed and
derelict planet. The minds of all men plod the same rough roads of
sense; and in spite of much knavery, all win at times "an ampler
ether, a diviner air." The great poets, our masters, speak out of
that clean freshness of perception. We hear their voices--
I there before thee, in the country that well thou knowest,
Already arrived am inhaling the odorous air.
So it is not vain, perhaps, to try clumsily to tell how this
delicious uneasiness first captured the spirit of one who, if not a
poet, is at least a lover of poetry. Thus he first looked beyond the
sunset; stood, if not on Parnassus, tiptoe upon a little hill. And
overhead a great wind was blowing.
[Illustration]
THE OLD RELIABLE
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