Part 9 (1/2)

which had murmured of--

older seas That beat on vaster sands,

and of--

lands Where blaze the unimaginable flowers.

It was as though disillusion had given an artist a soul. And when the war came it found him, as he lay dying of consumption in Switzerland, a poet not merely of manly but of martial utterance. _The Burial in England_ is perhaps too much of an _ad hoc_ call to be great poetry. But it has many n.o.ble and beautiful lines and is certainly of a different world from his mediocre version of _G.o.d Save the King_.

At the same time, I do not wish to suggest that his poetry of illusion is the less important part of his work. The perfection of his genius is to be sought, as a matter of fact, in his romantic eastern work, such as _The Ballad of Iskander, A Miracle of Bethlehem, Gates of Damascus_, and _Bryan of Brittany_. The false, fair tale of the East had, as it were, released; him from mere flirtation with the senses into the world of the imagination. Of human pa.s.sions he sang little. He wrote oftener of amorousness than of love, as in _The Ballad of the Student of the South._ His pa.s.sion for fairy tales, his amorousness of the East, stirred his imagination from idleness among superficial fancies into a brilliant ardour. It was these things that roused him to a nice extravagance with those favourite words and colours and images upon which Mr. Squire comments:

There are words, just as there are images, which he was especially fond of using. There are colours and metals, blue and red, silver and gold, which are present everywhere in his work; the progresses of the sun (he was always a poet of the sunlight rather than a poet of the moonlight) were a continual fascination to him; the images of Fire, of a s.h.i.+p, and of an old white-bearded man recur frequently in his poems.

Mr. Squire contends justly enough that in spite of this Flecker is anything but a monotonous poet. But the image of a s.h.i.+p was almost an obsession with him. It was his favourite toy. Often it is a silver s.h.i.+p.

In the blind man's vision in the time of Christ even the Empires of the future are seen sailing like s.h.i.+ps. The keeper of the West Gate of Damascus sings of the sea beyond the sea:

when no wind breathes or ripple stirs, And there on Roman s.h.i.+ps, they say, stand rows of metal mariners.

Those lines are worth noting for the way in which they suggest' how much in the nature of toys were the images with which Flecker's imagination was haunted. His world was a world of nursery s.h.i.+ps and nursery caravans.

”Haunted” is, perhaps, an exaggeration. His att.i.tude is too impa.s.sive for that. He works with the deliberateness of a prose-writer. He is occasionally even prosaic in the bad sense, as when he uses: the word ”meticulously,” or makes his lost mariners say:

How striking like that boat were we In the days, sweet days, when we put to sea.

That he was a poet of the fancy rather than of the imagination also tended to keep his poetry near the ground. His love of the ballad-design and ”the good coloured things of Earth” was tempered by a kind of infidel humour in his use of them. His ballads are the ballads of a brilliant dilettante, not of a man who is expressing his whole heart and soul and faith, as the old ballad-writers were. In the result he walked a golden pavement rather than mounted into the golden air. He was an artist in ornament, in decoration. Like the Queen in the _Queen's Song_, he would immortalize the ornament at the cost of slaying the soul.

Of all recent poets of his kind, Flecker is the most successful. The cla.s.sical tradition of poetry has been mocked and mutilated by many of the noisy young in the last few years. Flecker was a poet who preserved the ancient balance in days in which want of balance was looked on as a sign of genius. That he was what is called a minor poet cannot be denied, but he was the most beautiful of recent minor poets. His book, indeed, is a treasury of beauty rare in these days. Of that beauty, _The Old s.h.i.+ps_ is, as I have said, the splendid example. And, as it is foolish to offer anything except a poet's best as a specimen of his work, one has no alternative but to turn again to those gorgeously-coloured verses which begin:

I have seen old s.h.i.+ps sail like swans asleep Beyond the village which men still call Tyre, With leaden age o'ercargoed, dipping deep For Famagusta and the hidden sun That rings black Cyprus with a lake of fire; And all those s.h.i.+ps were certainly so old-- Who knows how oft with squat and noisy gun, Questing brown slaves or Syrian oranges, The pirate Genoese h.e.l.l-raked them till they rolled Blood, water, fruit and corpses up the hold.

But now through friendly seas they softly run, Painted the mid-sea blue or sh.o.r.e-sea green, Still patterned with the vine and grapes in gold.

That is the summary and the summit of Flecker's genius. But the rest of his verse, too, is the work of a true and delightful poet, a faithful priest of literature, an honest craftsman with words.

XII

TURGENEV

Mr. Edward Garnett has recently collected his prefaces to the novels and stories of Turgenev, and refas.h.i.+oned them into a book in praise of the genius of the most charming of Russian authors. I am afraid the word ”charming” has lost so much of its stamp and brightness with use as to have become almost meaningless. But we apply it to Turgenev in its fullest sense. We call him charming as Pater called Athens charming. He is one of those authors whose books we love because they reveal a personality sensitive, affectionate, pitiful. There are some persons who, when they come into a room, immediately make us feel happier.

Turgenev seems to ”come into the room” in his books with just such a welcome presence. That is why I wish Mr. Garnett had made his book a biographical, as well as a critical, study.

He quotes Turgenev as saying: ”All my life is in my books.” Still, there are a great many facts recorded about him in the letters and reminiscences of those who knew him (and he was known in half the countries of Europe), out of which we can construct a portrait. One finds in the _Life of Sir Charles Dilke_, for instance, that Dilke considered Turgenev ”in the front rank” as a conversationalist. This opinion interested one all the more because one had come to think of Turgenev as something of a shy giant. I remember, too, reading in some French book a description of Turgenev as a strange figure in the literary circles of Paris--a large figure with a curious chast.i.ty of mind who seemed bewildered by some of the barbarous jests of civilized men of genius.

There are, indeed, as I have said, plenty of suggestions for a portrait of Turgenev, quite apart from his novels. Mr. Garnett refers to some of them in two excellent biographical chapters. He reminds us, for example, of the immense generosity of Turgenev to his contemporaries and rivals, as when he introduced the work of Tolstoy to a French editor. ”Listen,”

said Turgenev. ”Here is 'copy' for your paper of an absolutely first-rate kind. This means that I am not its author. The master--for he is a _real_ master--is almost unknown in France; but I a.s.sure you, on my soul and conscience, that I do not consider myself worthy to unloose the latchet of his shoes.” The letter he addressed to Tolstoy from his death-bed, urging him to return from propaganda to literature, is famous, but it is a thing to which one always returns fondly as an example of the n.o.ble disinterestedness of a great man of letters. ”I cannot recover,” Turgenev wrote:--

That is out of the question. I am writing to you specially to say how glad I am to be your contemporary, and to express my last and sincere request. My friend, return to literary activity! That gift came to you whence comes all the rest. Ah, how happy I should be if I could think my request would have an effect on you!... I can neither walk, nor eat, nor sleep. It is wearisome even to repeat it all! My friend--great writer of our Russian land, listen to my request!... I can write no more; I am tired.

One sometimes wonders how Tolstoy and Dostoevsky could ever have quarrelled with a friend of so beautiful a character as Turgenev.

Perhaps it was that there was something barbarous and brutal in each of them that was intolerant of his almost feminine refinement. They were both men of action in literature, militant, and by nature propagandist.