Late Lyrics and Earlier: Apology

Apology

About half the verses that follow were written quite lately. The
rest are older, having been held over in MS. when past volumes were
published, on considering that these would contain a sufficient
number of pages to offer readers at one time, more especially during
the distractions of the war. The unusually far back poems to be
found here are, however, but some that were overlooked in gathering
previous collections. A freshness in them, now unattainable, seemed
to make up for their inexperience and to justify their inclusion. A
few are dated; the dates of others are not discoverable.

The launching of a volume of this kind in neo-Georgian days by one
who began writing in mid-Victorian, and has published nothing to
speak of for some years, may seem to call for a few words of excuse
or explanation. Whether or no, readers may feel assured that a new
book is submitted to them with great hesitation at so belated a date.
Insistent practical reasons, however, among which were requests from
some illustrious men of letters who are in sympathy with my
productions, the accident that several of the poems have already seen
the light, and that dozens of them have been lying about for years,
compelled the course adopted, in spite of the natural disinclination
of a writer whose works have been so frequently regarded askance by a
pragmatic section here and there, to draw attention to them once
more.

I do not know that it is necessary to say much on the contents of the
book, even in deference to suggestions that will be mentioned
presently. I believe that those readers who care for my poems at
all--readers to whom no passport is required--will care for this new
instalment of them, perhaps the last, as much as for any that have
preceded them. Moreover, in the eyes of a less friendly class the
pieces, though a very mixed collection indeed, contain, so far as I
am able to see, little or nothing in technic or teaching that can be
considered a Star-Chamber matter, or so much as agitating to a
ladies' school; even though, to use Wordsworth's observation in his
Preface to Lyrical Ballads, such readers may suppose "that by the act
of writing in verse an author makes a formal engagement that he will
gratify certain known habits of association: that he not only thus
apprises the reader that certain classes of ideas and expressions
will be found in his book, but that others will be carefully
excluded."

It is true, nevertheless, that some grave, positive, stark,
delineations are interspersed among those of the passive, lighter,
and traditional sort presumably nearer to stereotyped tastes. For--
while I am quite aware that a thinker is not expected, and, indeed,
is scarcely allowed, now more than heretofore, to state all that
crosses his mind concerning existence in this universe, in his
attempts to explain or excuse the presence of evil and the
incongruity of penalizing the irresponsible--it must be obvious to
open intelligences that, without denying the beauty and faithful
service of certain venerable cults, such disallowance of "obstinate
questionings" and "blank misgivings" tends to a paralysed
intellectual stalemate. Heine observed nearly a hundred years ago
that the soul has her eternal rights; that she will not be darkened
by statutes, nor lullabied by the music of bells. And what is to-
day, in allusions to the present author's pages, alleged to be
"pessimism" is, in truth, only such "questionings" in the exploration
of reality, and is the first step towards the soul's betterment, and
the body's also.

If I may be forgiven for quoting my own old words, let me repeat what
I printed in this relation more than twenty years ago, and wrote much
earlier, in a poem entitled "In Tenebris":

If way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst:

that is to say, by the exploration of reality, and its frank
recognition stage by stage along the survey, with an eye to the best
consummation possible: briefly, evolutionary meliorism. But it is
called pessimism nevertheless; under which word, expressed with
condemnatory emphasis, it is regarded by many as some pernicious new
thing (though so old as to underlie the Christian idea, and even to
permeate the Greek drama); and the subject is charitably left to
decent silence, as if further comment were needless.

Happily there are some who feel such Levitical passing-by to be,
alas, by no means a permanent dismissal of the matter; that comment
on where the world stands is very much the reverse of needless in
these disordered years of our prematurely afflicted century: that
amendment and not madness lies that way. And looking down the future
these few hold fast to the same: that whether the human and kindred
animal races survive till the exhaustion or destruction of the globe,
or whether these races perish and are succeeded by others before that
conclusion comes, pain to all upon it, tongued or dumb, shall be kept
down to a minimum by lovingkindness, operating through scientific
knowledge, and actuated by the modicum of free will conjecturally
possessed by organic life when the mighty necessitating forces--
unconscious or other--that have "the balancings of the clouds,"
happen to be in equilibrium, which may or may not be often.

To conclude this question I may add that the argument of the so-
called optimists is neatly summarized in a stern pronouncement
against me by my friend Mr. Frederic Harrison in a late essay of his,
in the words: "This view of life is not mine." The solemn
declaration does not seem to me to be so annihilating to the said
"view" (really a series of fugitive impressions which I have never
tried to co-ordinate) as is complacently assumed. Surely it embodies
a too human fallacy quite familiar in logic. Next, a knowing
reviewer, apparently a Roman Catholic young man, speaks, with some
rather gross instances of the suggestio falsi in his article, of "Mr.
Hardy refusing consolation," the "dark gravity of his ideas," and so
on. When a Positivist and a Catholic agree there must be something
wonderful in it, which should make a poet sit up. But . . . O that
'twere possible!

I would not have alluded in this place or anywhere else to such
casual personal criticisms--for casual and unreflecting they must be-
-but for the satisfaction of two or three friends in whose opinion a
short answer was deemed desirable, on account of the continual
repetition of these criticisms, or more precisely, quizzings. After
all, the serious and truly literary inquiry in this connection is:
Should a shaper of such stuff as dreams are made on disregard
considerations of what is customary and expected, and apply himself
to the real function of poetry, the application of ideas to life (in
Matthew Arnold's familiar phrase)? This bears more particularly on
what has been called the "philosophy" of these poems--usually
reproved as "queer." Whoever the author may be that undertakes such
application of ideas in this "philosophic" direction--where it is
specially required--glacial judgments must inevitably fall upon him
amid opinion whose arbiters largely decry individuality, to whom
IDEAS are oddities to smile at, who are moved by a yearning the
reverse of that of the Athenian inquirers on Mars Hill; and stiffen
their features not only at sound of a new thing, but at a restatement
of old things in new terms. Hence should anything of this sort in
the following adumbrations seem "queer "--should any of them seem to
good Panglossians to embody strange and disrespectful conceptions of
this best of all possible worlds, I apologize; but cannot help it.

Such divergences, which, though piquant for the nonce, it would be
affectation to say are not saddening and discouraging likewise, may,
to be sure, arise sometimes from superficial aspect only, writer and
reader seeing the same thing at different angles. But in palpable
cases of divergence they arise, as already said, whenever a serious
effort is made towards that which the authority I have cited--who
would now be called old-fashioned, possibly even parochial--affirmed
to be what no good critic could deny as the poet's province, the
application of ideas to life. One might shrewdly guess, by the by,
that in such recommendation the famous writer may have overlooked the
cold-shouldering results upon an enthusiastic disciple that would be
pretty certain to follow his putting the high aim in practice, and
have forgotten the disconcerting experience of Gil Blas with the
Archbishop.

To add a few more words to what has already taken up too many, there
is a contingency liable to miscellanies of verse that I have never
seen mentioned, so far as I can remember; I mean the chance little
shocks that may be caused over a book of various character like the
present and its predecessors by the juxtaposition of unrelated, even
discordant, effusions; poems perhaps years apart in the making, yet
facing each other. An odd result of this has been that dramatic
anecdotes of a satirical and humorous intention (such, e.g., as
"Royal Sponsors") following verse in graver voice, have been read as
misfires because they raise the smile that they were intended to
raise, the journalist, deaf to the sudden change of key, being
unconscious that he is laughing with the author and not at him. I
admit that I did not foresee such contingencies as I ought to have
done, and that people might not perceive when the tone altered. But
the difficulties of arranging the themes in a graduated kinship of
moods would have been so great that irrelation was almost unavoidable
with efforts so diverse. I must trust for right note-catching to
those finely-touched spirits who can divine without half a whisper,
whose intuitiveness is proof against all the accidents of
inconsequence. In respect of the less alert, however, should any
one's train of thought be thrown out of gear by a consecutive piping
of vocal reeds in jarring tonics, without a semiquaver's rest
between, and be led thereby to miss the writer's aim and meaning in
one out of two contiguous compositions, I shall deeply regret it.

Having at last, I think, finished with the personal points that I was
recommended to notice, I will forsake the immediate object of this
Preface; and, leaving Late Lyrics to whatever fate it deserves,
digress for a few moments to more general considerations. The
thoughts of any man of letters concerned to keep poetry alive cannot
but run uncomfortably on the precarious prospects of English verse at
the present day. Verily the hazards and casualties surrounding the
birth and setting forth of almost every modern creation in numbers
are ominously like those of one of Shelley's paper-boats on a windy
lake. And a forward conjecture scarcely permits the hope of a better
time, unless men's tendencies should change. So indeed of all art,
literature, and "high thinking" nowadays. Whether owing to the
barbarizing of taste in the younger minds by the dark madness of the
late war, the unabashed cultivation of selfishness in all classes,
the plethoric growth of knowledge simultaneously with the stunting of
wisdom, "a degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation" (to quote
Wordsworth again), or from any other cause, we seem threatened with a
new Dark Age.

I formerly thought, like so many roughly handled writers, that so far
as literature was concerned a partial cause might be impotent or
mischievous criticism; the satirizing of individuality, the lack of
whole-seeing in contemporary estimates of poetry and kindred work,
the knowingness affected by junior reviewers, the overgrowth of
meticulousness in their peerings for an opinion, as if it were a
cultivated habit in them to scrutinize the tool-marks and be blind to
the building, to hearken for the key-creaks and be deaf to the
diapason, to judge the landscape by a nocturnal exploration with a
flash-lantern. In other words, to carry on the old game of sampling
the poem or drama by quoting the worst line or worst passage only, in
ignorance or not of Coleridge's proof that a versification of any
length neither can be nor ought to be all poetry; of reading meanings
into a book that its author never dreamt of writing there. I might
go on interminably.

But I do not now think any such temporary obstructions to be the
cause of the hazard, for these negligences and ignorances, though
they may have stifled a few true poets in the run of generations,
disperse like stricken leaves before the wind of next week, and are
no more heard of again in the region of letters than their writers
themselves. No: we may be convinced that something of the deeper
sort mentioned must be the cause.

In any event poetry, pure literature in general, religion--I include
religion because poetry and religion touch each other, or rather
modulate into each other; are, indeed, often but different names for
the same thing--these, I say, the visible signs of mental and
emotional life, must like all other things keep moving, becoming;
even though at present, when belief in witches of Endor is displacing
the Darwinian theory and "the truth that shall make you free, men's
minds appear, as above noted, to be moving backwards rather than on.
I speak, of course, somewhat sweepingly, and should except many
isolated minds; also the minds of men in certain worthy but small
bodies of various denominations, and perhaps in the homely quarter
where advance might have been the very least expected a few years
back--the English Church--if one reads it rightly as showing evidence
of "removing those things that are shaken," in accordance with the
wise Epistolary recommendation to the Hebrews. For since the
historic and once august hierarchy of Rome some generation ago lost
its chance of being the religion of the future by doing otherwise,
and throwing over the little band of neo-Catholics who were making a
struggle for continuity by applying the principle of evolution to
their own faith, joining hands with modern science, and outflanking
the hesitating English instinct towards liturgical reform (a flank
march which I at the time quite expected to witness, with the
gathering of many millions of waiting agnostics into its fold); since
then, one may ask, what other purely English establishment than the
Church, of sufficient dignity and footing, and with such strength of
old association, such architectural spell, is left in this country to
keep the shreds of morality together?

It may be a forlorn hope, a mere dream, that of an alliance between
religion, which must be retained unless the world is to perish, and
complete rationality, which must come, unless also the world is to
perish, by means of the interfusing effect of poetry--"the breath and
finer spirit of all knowledge; the impassioned expression of
science," as it was defined by an English poet who was quite orthodox
in his ideas. But if it be true, as Comte argued, that advance is
never in a straight line, but in a looped orbit, we may, in the
aforesaid ominous moving backward, be doing it pour mieux sauter,
drawing back for a spring. I repeat that I forlornly hope so,
notwithstanding the supercilious regard of hope by Schopenhauer, von
Hartmann, and other philosophers down to Einstein who have my
respect. But one dares not prophesy. Physical, chronological, and
other contingencies keep me in these days from critical studies and
literary circles

Where once we held debate, a band
Of youthful friends, on mind and art

(if one may quote Tennyson in this century of free verse). Hence I
cannot know how things are going so well as I used to know them, and
the aforesaid limitations must quite prevent my knowing hence-
forward.

I have to thank the editors and owners of The Times, Fortnightly,
Mercury, and other periodicals in which a few of the poems have
appeared for kindly assenting to their being reclaimed for collected
publication.

T. H.

February 1922.

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