Escape, and Other Essays - Arthur Christopher Benson (free novel reading sites .txt) 📗

of course; but I don't think that you can hope to advance, if you begin by being determined to disapprove."

"No, not that," I said. "But one knows of many cases of inferior poets, who were taken up and trumpeted abroad by well-meaning admirers, whom one sees now to have had no significance, but to be so many blind alleys in the street of art; they led nowhere; one had just to retrace one's steps, if one explored them. Indeed," I said, "I had rather miss a great poet than be misled by a little one."

"Ah, no," he said, "I don't feel that. I had rather be thrilled and carried away, even if I discovered afterwards that it was not really great."

"If you will freely admit that this may not be great," I said, "I am on your side. I do not mind your saying, 'This touches me with interest and delight; but it is not to be reckoned among the lords of the garden.' What I object to is your saying, 'This is great and eternal.' I feel that I should be able to respond to the great poet, if he flashed out among us; but he must be great, and especially in a time when there really is a quantity of very beautiful verse. I suspect that perhaps this time is one that will furnish a very beautiful anthology. There are many people alive who have written perhaps half a dozen exquisite lyrics, when the spring and the soaring thought and the vision and the beautiful word all suddenly conspired together. But there is no great, wide, large, tender heart at work. No, I won't even say that; but is there any great spirit who has all that and a supreme word-power as well? I believe that there is more poetry, more love of beauty, more emotion in the world than ever; and a great many men and women are living their poetry who just can't write it or sing it."

"A perverse generation seeking after a sign," he said rather grimly, "and there is no sign forthcoming except the old sign, that has been there for centuries! I don't care," he added, "about the sign of the thing. It is the quality that I want; and these new poets of whom I have been speaking have got the quality. That is all I ask for."

"No," I said, "I want a great deal more than that! Browning gave us the sense of the human heart, bewildered by all the new knowledge, and yet passionately desiring. Tennyson--"

"Poor old Tennyson!" he said.

"That is very ungracious," I said. "You are as perverse as I was about Byron when the old banker quoted him with tears. I was going to say, and I will say it, that Tennyson, with all his faults, was a great lord of music; and he put into words the fine, homely domestic emotion of the race--the poetry of labour, order, and peace. It was new and rich and splendid, and because it seems to you old-fashioned, you call it mere respectability; but it was the marching music of the world, because he showed men that faith was enlarged and not overturned by science. These two were great, because they saw far and wide; they knew by instinct just what the ordinary man was thinking, who yet wished his life to be set to music. These little men of yours don't see that. They have their moments of ecstasy, as we all have, in the blossoming orchard full of the songs of birds. And that will always and for ever give us the lyric, if the skill is there. But I want something more than that; I, you, thousands of people, are feeling something that makes the brain thrill and the heart leap. The mischief is that we don't know what it is, and I want a great poet to come and tell us."

"Ah," he said, "I am afraid you want something ethical, something that satisfies the man in Tennyson who


Walked between his wife and child
And now and then he gravely smiled.


But we have done with all that. What we want is people who can express the fine, rare, unusual thoughts of highly organised creatures, and you want a poet to sing of bread and butter!"

"Why, yes," I said, "I think I agree with Fitz-Gerald that tea and bread and butter are the only foods worth anything--the only things one cannot do without. And it is just the things that one cannot do without that I want the new great poet to sing of. I agree with William Morris that art is the one thing we all want, the expression of man's joy in his work. And the more that art retires into fine nuances and intellectual subtleties, the more that it becomes something esoteric and mysterious, the less I care about it. When Tennyson said to the farmer's wife, 'What's the news?' she replied, 'Mr. Tennyson, there's only one piece of news worth telling, and that is that Christ died for all men.' Tennyson said very grandly and simply, 'Ah, that's old news and good news and NEW news!' And that is exactly what I want the poets to tell us. It is a common inheritance, not a refined monopoly, that I claim."

He laughed at this, and said:

"I think that's rather a mid-Victorian view; I will confute you out of the Tennyson legend. When Tennyson called Swinburne's verse 'poisonous honey, brought from France,' Swinburne retorted by speaking of the laureate's domestic treacle. You can't have both. If you like treacle, you must not clamour for honey."

"Yes, I prefer honey," I said, "but you seem to me to be in search of what I called LITERARY poetry. That is what I am afraid of. I don't want the work of a mind fed on words, and valuing ideas the more that they are uncommon. I hate what is called 'strong' poetry; that seems to me to be generally the coarsest kind of romanticism-- melodrama in fact. I want to have in poetry what we are getting in fiction--the best sort of realism. Realism is now abjuring the heroic theory; it has thrown over the old conventions, the felicitous coincidences, life arranged on ideal lines; and it has gone straight to life itself, strong, full-blooded, eager life, full of mistakes and blunders and failures and sharp disasters and fears. Life goes shambling along like a big dog, but it has got its nose on the scent of something. It is a much more mysterious and prodigious affair than life rearranged upon romantic lines. It means something very vast indeed, though it splashes through mud and scrambles through hedges. You may laugh at what you call ethics, but that is only a name for one of many kinds of collisions. It is the fact that we are always colliding with something, always coming unpleasant croppers, that is the exciting thing. I want the poet to tell me what the obscure winged thing is that we are following; and if he can't explain it to me, I want to be made to feel that it is worth while following. I don't say that all life is poetical material. I don't think that it is; but there is a thing called beauty which seems to me the most maddeningly perfect thing in the world. I see it everywhere, in the dawn, in the far-off landscape, with all its rolling lines of wood and field, in the faces and gestures of people, in their words and deeds. That is a clue, a golden thread, a line of scent, and I shall be more than content if I am encouraged to follow that."

"Ah," he said, "now I partly agree with you. It is precisely that which the new men are after; they take the pure gold of life and just coin it into word and phrase, and it is that which I discern in them."

"Yes," I said, "but I want something a great deal bigger than that. I want to see it everywhere and in everything. I don't want to have to wall in a little space and make it silent and beautiful, and forget what is happening outside. I want a poet to tell me what it is that leaps in the eyes and beckons in the smiles of people whom I meet--people whom often enough I could not live with,--the more's the pity,--but whom I want to be friends with, all the same. I want the common joys and hopes and visions to be put into music. And when I find a man, like Walt Whitman, who does show me the beauty and wonder and the strong affections and joys of simple hearts, so that I feel sure that we are all desiring the same thing, though we cannot tell each other what it is, then I feel I am in the presence of a poet indeed."

My young friend shut up the little book which he had been holding in his hand.

"Yes," he said, "that would be a great thing; but one can't get at things in that way now. We must all specialise; and if you want to follow the new aims and ideals of art, you must put aside a great deal of what is called our common humanity, and you must be content to follow a very narrow path among the stars. I do not mind speaking quite frankly. I do not think you understand what art is. It is essentially a mystery, and the artist is a sort of hermit in the world. It is not a case of 'joys in widest commonalty spread,' as Daddy Wordsworth said. That is quite a different affair; but art has got to withdraw itself, to be content to be misunderstood; and I think that you have just as much parted company with it as your old friend the banker."

"Well," I said, "we shall see. Anyhow, I will give your new poets a careful reading, and I shall be glad if I can really admire them, because, indeed, I don't want to be stranded on a lee shore."

And so my friend departed; and I began to wonder whether the art of which he spoke was not, after all, as real a thing as the beauty of my almond-flower and my mezereons! If so, I should like to be able to include it and understand it, though I do not want to think that it is the end.


IV


WALT WHITMAN

1


There come days and hours in the lives of the busiest, most active, most eager of us, when we suddenly realise with a shock or a shudder, it may be, or perhaps with a sense of solemn mystery, that has something vast, inspiring, hopeful about it, the solidity and the isolation of our own identity. Much of our civilised life is an attempt, not deliberate but instinctive, to escape from this. We organise ourselves into nations and parties, into sects and societies, into families and companies, that we may try to persuade ourselves that we are not alone; and we get nearest to persuading ourselves that we are at one, when we enter into the secrets of love or friendship, and feel that we know as we are known. But even that vision fades, and we become aware, at sad moments, that the comradeship is over; the soul that came so close to us, smiled in our eyes, was clasped to our heart, has left us, has passed into the darkness, or if it still lives and breathes, has drawn away into the crowd. And then one sees that