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man is more sincere than the poet; yet no man is more
given to expressing under different circumstances the
most opposite sentiments. Let none quarrel with the
poet for this variableness of mood; in fact it is his
chiefest charm; it is that which brings him into the
most tender and intimate relation with the general soul
of humanity. The listener, as he is touched in turn
by so many rapid and equally passionate alternations
of hope and sorrow, anger or despair, perceives that
he is in contact with one who knows the most secret
impulses of his heart, and whose spirit, through quickness
of sympathy, is in the closest friendliness with his
own. I have a friend—a lyric poet—whose
mind is, as a general rule, more stolid and less violent
in its changes of color than is the case with many of
his kind; yet he has just furnished me with a very pretty
example of this fine fickleness of thought. It had been
an unfortunate day for my friend. Unpleasant sensations
had followed closely one upon another. He had been worried
by some small monetary difficulty, a thing that to another
man would have been a very trifle, but to him was like
the breaking of the Bank of England. He had been in
contact with business men, men who deal in money, and
their cold brutality and callousness of heart had affected
his spirit with a kind of gloomy horror. When night
came he was sad and weary, and enveloped in a cloud
of portentous darkness. Yet it was not long before the
old and ever-active remedy began to insinuate itself
and work among his distracted thoughts. As by some happy
accident, a touch of song kindled his reflections with
a sudden illumination, and after meditating a little
while he composed with little effort a sonnet which
he has called the "Cup of Life," and here
I give it just as he read it to me a few days later:—
One
after one the high emotions fade,
Life's wheeling measure empties and refills
Year after year. We seek no more the hills
That lured our youth divine and unafraid,
But, swarming on some common highway, made
Beaten and smooth, plod onward with blind feet,
And only where the crowded crossways meet
We halt and question, anxious and dismayed.
Yet
we cannot escape it. Some we know
Have angered and grown mad, some scornfully laughed,
Yet surely to each lip—to mine, to thine—
Comes with strange scent and acrid, poisonous glow
That cup of life—that dull Circean draught—
That taints us all, and turns the half to swine!
The
following morning seemed to usher in a complete change
of destiny for the poet. As he passed the threshold,
the sunshine greeted him with an unusual heartiness
of warmth, and the great elm before his door, whose
vast level fleece and pendent draperies seemed afloat
upon the air, invited his eyes coolly and alluringly
into its shadowy recesses. The birds sang in their gayest
and happiest humor. A few paces on a friend met him
with good news. When the long day's toil was over, still
under the influence of the morning's first joyous impressions,
he made his way into the fields, and as he returned
homeward after an hour of easy accord with nature, at
peace with all mankind, the following verses formed
themselves naturally and almost unconsciously in his
mind. I give them exactly as he set them upon paper
at the moment of his return:—
I
love the warm bare earth and all
That
works and dreams thereon;
I love the
seasons yet to fall;
I
love the moments gone.
The
valleys with the sheaved grain,
The
river smiling bright,
The merry
wind, the rustling rain,
The
vastness of the night.
I
love the morning's flame, the steep
Where
down the vapor clings;
I love the
clouds that float and sleep,
And
every bird that sings.
I
love the masted pines that soar
Above
the mountain villas;
I love the
silent wood whose floor
Is
spread with golden lilies.
I
love the heaven's azure span,
The
grass beneath my feet;
I love the
face of every man
Whose
thought is swift and sweet.
I
let the merry world go by,
And
like an idle breath
Its phantoms
and its echoes fly;
I
have no dread of death.
I
hear the jar of right and wrong;
Yet
both are things that seem;
Each hour
is but a fluted song,
And
life a lofty dream!
Assuredly
one may say that these verses are light, and inconsiderable
in texture, and ethically of little value; yet I give
them as the happy and sincere expression of a wonderful
change of mood and of all the relations of the poet's
mind. Under what different aspects indeed did this life
present itself to the poet when he composed these two
diverse poems, yet they are both equally sincere.
L.
A
lyric to be perfectly successful should not need any
special interpretation. It should not be so involved
with personal feeling that it would need a commentary
upon the event or upon the special mood which called
it forth. All the great lyrics which have been preserved
by the common decree of the people have some expression
of general experience which renders them capable of
proof, as it were, by any human soul. Thus it has often
happened that a writer who toiled to win fame by some
creation of great length, filled with imagination, accomplished
his object by some fragment wherein he gave voice to
some common experience of the race. There are too many
of the lyrics in Mr. W.E. Henley's new book of which
it can be said that they require a special interpretation;
that they are not self-evident. Although the mass of
the work leaves an impression of extreme cleverness,
the effect is not one either of pleasure or profit.
Mr. Henley seems to have looked at everything which
he attempts to portray with the eye of a painter, and
a painter of the impassionist school. The poem dedicated
to Mr. Whistler is an attempt to reproduce the effect
of one of the painter's harmonies. But it is far from
being a success. The choice of words and imagery gives
no effect of beauty, which must be the basis for every
work of art, however small in dimension. And this principle
of beauty would be present in the scene which inspired
the picture or the poem, no matter to what thoughts
the associations which accompany the scene might give
rise. Now these associations are specially the material
of poetry; painting cannot reproduce them and it is
fatuous for poetry to attempt to give by the choice
of special words the exact value of tone and color in
painting. The beauty of a scene is ever present, and
although it may influence the mind in many different
ways the effect can never be immoral, no matter how
terrible the associations may be. And in such work as
the third of the "London Voluntaries" the
feeling of beauty is entirely absent, and we have the
sense of actual immorality forced upon the material
picture. The wind "comes sullen and obscene, in
a cloud unclean of excremental humors," and every
natural appearance wears a sort of lewdness, an abject
awfulness of shape and purpose. There is present neither
the element of beauty nor the element of human interest,
but the landscape exists by itself and for itself in
this unreal and grotesque masque as if it had a separate,
conscious and rather immoral personality. An example
of the legitimate treatment of a weird and terrible
landscape is Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark
Tower Came," where we have a human interest informing
the whole poem, accompanied by a sense of strange wild
beauty. In his actual choice of word and phrase Mr.
Henley has been undoubtedly influenced by Rudyard Kipling,
and, although in some instances the result of this insolent
realism of expression is fine, in the majority of cases
the striving after an effect is too apparent. Mr. Henley's
philosophy is not deep. When he leaves life he but leaves
"books and women and talk and drink and art,"
and he goes into the ways of death stoically with a
sense of relief and release.
S.
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