XXXIV

MY DEAR X,

SCULPTURESQUE POETRY

I am more than glad that these stray epistles about the modern poets, who, like the realistic novelists, are so ready to strangle the insidious serpents of tradition in their cradles, have given me an opportunity to wander among them. For both groups (like so much of modern literature) represent a break with the past-the realists by fastening like a succubus upon the present, the libertinists (a merely figurative kakophuism, I assure you) by unwinding from their muscular bodies what they conceive to be the swaddling-clothes of tried metrical forms. Grant them a case and I am still unable to understand why it should be considered part of the Tables of the Law that a revolutionary artist must topple the artistic past into the dustbin. What nonsense it is! Was freedom invented only in the twentieth century? Do the records of man's passions, struggles, ideals, experiments, hopes and achievements begin only in 1900? I am confident that humanity will never get anywhere by simply turning its back upon its parentage. Re-examine, reinterpret, and redistribute the aesthetic values of the past-of the whole past-and that is a different matter.

Indeed the utmost I would concede is that the past is the raw material to be used, shaped, and fertilized by the present and future for their ends.

There is, of course, a solid voucher of this in the work of other contemporary poets. De la Mare, W. H. Davies, the exquisite A. E. Housman, Bridges, W. J. Turner, James Stephens, and, in his more limited appeal, Ralph Hodgson, and others, are all children of tradition. All of them in their several artistic preferences have asserted the old forms without either paralysing their freedom or compromising their originality. Are they sterile or superannuated poets?

But a more definite reaction against the inchoate and asymmetric in poetic composition appears in the work of the "statuesque " poets-Sturge Moore and " Michael Field." Sturge Moore, though he has been shamefully neglected by his generation and ours, is familiar enough to you, and all true lovers of poetry, for me to leave his noble rhythms, large utterance, firm perceptions, and profound psychologies (as in "Judith ") safely in your and their hands.

But I may be forgiven a short note on "Michael Field," partly on account of her own quality, partly on account of her remoteness from the verse impressionists and partly because she is (I should rather say, they are) in some measure a disciple of Sturge Moore's. Her work diverges from that of Flecker (a worker in enamels would be a rough definition of him) in this different quality of the sculpturesque. Poetry, being the most compact form

* These words, of course, were written before Edward Thomas died and was born again in poetry. Out of traditional forms, he has developed a new form, which may possibly be of profound significance in the future development of poetry.

of æsthetic realization and, at the same time, the most receptive to influence, has, far more than prose which creates its own content, borrowed from its sister arts. It is like an empire which, swaying other and alien nationalities under its own laws, adopts and absorbs into itself its colonies' essences and characteristics. Thus poetry, still preserving its own form and character intact, will readily approximate to music, painting and sculpture. The predominant effects of Spenser are pictorial, of Herrick and Swinburne musical, and of Landor statuesque. Sculpture has shaped and informed the poetic impulse far less than music and painting. There are very few of the great poets outside Landor, who made his epigrams like Tanagra statuettes, and James Thompson, who hewed his epic out of a solid block of darkness, who have given their expression that air of arrested, petrified mobility, which is the tribute of sculpture to poetry.

But there can be no doubt that "Michael Field " has achieved this distinction, as indeed her reputation shows. It is obvious that the sculpturesque muse has a narrow but individual (not personal) appeal. In the same way "Michael Field's " poetry has never been subject, as that of so many other contemporary poets has been, to eclipses, or excesses, or capriciousness. A small circle of discriminating critics has poured out for her the discreet libations demanded by the value of her utterance. Outside that circle, she has been practically unknown. The recognition fits the desert, for her work has maintained throughout a judicious level of output, both in the separate pieces and in their relation to the whole. This admirable tractability of treatment to material is marked in all her work.

The cast of her thought naturally directs her workmanship towards containing and realizing her artistic purpose. The result is a harmony and balance that hardly admits of flaws in the general handling but only in casual or individual mannerisms or turns of phrase. Her poetry is always free from the grosser vices. There is no fumbling with the poetic interpretation of the idea; no attempt to starve it or to cumber it with irrelevant ornament; no interruption in its evolution to an appropriate expres

sion.

The resemblances indeed between the poetry of "Michael Field" and that of Sturge Moore, the only other modern poet who has wrought his material into a marmoreal pose, are more than superficial. The classical strength of feeling and expression, the orchestration of rhythm, the massive and processional effects, the highly literary flavour, the packed sense, even the occasionally elliptical and obscure perversions of grammar, all these elements they share in common. "Michael Field " does not, it is true, attain Sturge Moore's range and power. Her poetry never captures the supreme felicity; its strong competence, its imaginative solidity, its steady flame, hardly wing her muse into upper regions. Her poetry is not a heaven, but a sane and gracious earth. Or rather her muse is at once elevated and sensuous, most at home in a lower ether, not too remote from earth, yet sublimated from it. I quote " Looking up to the Stars" (from Wild Honey):

"Not so the sun that presently must drop,
And in damp night, no comfort for the eye;
Not as the moon that climbeth by and by,

Too late for my sad eve: as the full crop
Of stars that, clear or trembling, without stop
Amass in myriad feature in the sky,

Is manifest the law that as I die

Fills all my heaven to the arched top.
What feats of gods are these in permanence,
Conflicts and reconciliations there,

As in a chrystal, moving to the sense!

Glad am I through these draughts of quiet air,
To breathe such visitings, and, in pale stream,
The crossing and recrossing of a dream."

From "Dedicated" (an early work published late) :

"They lift themselves, and more, they cannot see,
The spring-tide changing this-they cannot be,
Where all is solemnness of blindfold glades:
They cannot see the spring, but in the hollow,
Unmirroring, vast, their feet are blessed and follow
Some bent of beauty twilight overshades."

But do not let me lead you astray. "Michael Field" may use the chisel, and as often as not upon classical material. But principally her inspiration is not classical but romantic. Indeed she writes plays (even classical plays like "Callirrhoé ") in the romantic, the Elizabethan method. How strongly Elizabethan are these lines from "Fair Rosamund," where Elinor has laid the cup and dagger before Rosamund :

"What a curl o' the lash

A lovely coastline to the hidden realm

Of the eyes.

Have you thought of me these many days?