Part 1 (1/2)
Modern British Poetry.
by Various.
INTRODUCTORY
_The New Influences and Tendencies_
Mere statistics are untrustworthy; dates are even less dependable.
But, to avoid hairsplitting, what we call ”modern” English literature may be said to date from about 1885. A few writers who are decidedly ”of the period” are, as a matter of strict chronology, somewhat earlier. But the chief tendencies may be divided into seven periods.
They are (1) The decay of Victorianism and the growth of a purely decorative art, (2) The rise and decline of the aesthetic Philosophy, (3) The muscular influence of Henley, (4) The Celtic revival in Ireland, (5) Rudyard Kipling and the ascendency of mechanism in art, (6) John Masefield and the return of the rhymed narrative, (7) The war and the appearance of ”The Georgians.” It may be interesting to trace these developments in somewhat greater detail.
THE END OF VICTORIANISM
The age commonly called Victorian came to an end about 1885. It was an age distinguished by many true idealists and many false ideals. It was, in spite of its notable artists, on an entirely different level from the epoch which had preceded it. Its poetry was, in the main, not universal but parochial; its romanticism was gilt and tinsel; its realism was as cheap as its showy gla.s.s pendants, red plush, parlor chromos and antimaca.s.sars. The period was full of a pessimistic resignation (the note popularized by Fitzgerald's Omar Khayyam) and a kind of cowardice or at least a negation which, refusing to see any glamour in the actual world, turned to the Middle Ages, King Arthur, the legend of Troy--to the suave surroundings of a dream-world instead of the hard contours of actual experience.
At its worst, it was a period of smugness, of placid and pious sentimentality--epitomized by the rhymed sermons of Martin Farquhar Tupper, whose _Proverbial Philosophy_ was devoured with all its cloying and indigestible sweetmeats by thousands. The same tendency is apparent, though far less objectionably, in the moralizing lays of Lord Thomas Macaulay, in the theatrically emotionalized verses of Robert Buchanan, Edwin Arnold and Sir Lewis Morris--even in the lesser later work of Alfred Tennyson.
And, without Tupper's emptiness or absurdities, the outworn plat.i.tudes again find their constant lover in Alfred Austin, Tennyson's successor as poet laureate. Austin brought the laureates.h.i.+p, which had been held by poets like Ben Jonson, Dryden, Southey and Wordsworth, to an incredibly low level; he took the thinning stream of garrulous poetic conventionality, reduced it to the merest trickle--and diluted it.
The poets of a generation before this time were fired with such ideas as freedom, a deep and burning awe of nature, an insatiable hunger for truth in all its forms and manifestations. The characteristic poets of the Victorian Era, says Max Plowman, ”wrote under the dominance of churchliness, of 'sweetness and light,' and a thousand lesser theories that have not truth but comfort for their end.”
The revolt against this and the tawdriness of the period had already begun; the best of Victorianism can be found not in men who were typically Victorian, but in pioneers like Browning and writers like Swinburne, Rossetti, William Morris, who were completely out of sympathy with their time.
But it was Oscar Wilde who led the men of the now famous 'nineties toward an aesthetic freedom, to champion a beauty whose existence was its ”own excuse for being.” Wilde's was, in the most outspoken manner, the first use of aestheticism as a slogan; the battle-cry of the group was actually the now outworn but then revolutionary ”Art for Art's sake”! And, so sick were people of the shoddy ornaments and drab ugliness of the immediate past, that the slogan won. At least, temporarily.
THE RISE AND DECLINE OF THE aeSTHETIC PHILOSOPHY
_The Yellow Book_, the organ of a group of young writers and artists, appeared (1894-97), representing a reasoned and intellectual reaction, mainly suggested and influenced by the French. The group of contributors was a peculiarly mixed one with only one thing in common.
And that was a conscious effort to repudiate the sugary airs and prim romantics of the Victorian Era.
Almost the first act of the ”new” men was to rouse and outrage their immediate predecessors. This end-of-the-century desire to shock, which was so strong and natural an impulse, still has a place of its own--especially as an antidote, a harsh corrective. Mid-Victorian propriety and self-satisfaction crumbled under the swift and energetic audacities of the sensational younger authors and artists; the old walls fell; the public, once so apathetic to _belles lettres_, was more than attentive to every phase of literary experimentation. The last decade of the nineteenth century was so tolerant of novelty in art and ideas, that it would seem, says Holbrook Jackson in his penetrative summary, _The Eighteen-Nineties_, ”as though the declining century wished to make amends for several decades of artistic monotony. It may indeed be something more than a coincidence that placed this decade at the close of a century, and _fin de siecle_ may have been at once a swan song and a death-bed repentance.”
But later on, the movement (if such it may be called), surfeited with its own excesses, fell into the mere poses of revolt; it degenerated into a half-hearted defense of artificialities.
It scarcely needed W. S. Gilbert (in _Patience_) or Robert Hichens (in _The Green Carnation_) to satirize its distorted att.i.tudinizing. It strained itself to death; it became its own burlesque of the bizarre, an extravaganza of extravagance. ”The period” (I am again quoting Holbrook Jackson) ”was as certainly a period of decadence as it was a period of renaissance. The decadence was to be seen in a perverse and finicking glorification of the fine arts and mere artistic virtuosity on the one hand, and a militant commercial movement on the other....
The eroticism which became so prevalent in the verse of many of the younger poets was minor because it was little more than a pose--not because it was erotic.... It was a pa.s.sing mood which gave the poetry of the hour a hothouse fragrance; a perfume faint yet unmistakable and strange.”
But most of the elegant and disillusioned young men overshot their mark. Mere health rea.s.serted itself; an inherent repressed vitality sought new channels. Arthur Symons deserted his hectic Muse, Richard Le Gallienne abandoned his preciosity, and the group began to disintegrate. The aesthetic philosophy was wearing thin; it had already begun to fray and reveal its essential shabbiness. Wilde himself possessed the three things which he said the English would never forgive--youth, power and enthusiasm. But in trying to make an exclusive cult of beauty, Wilde had also tried to make it evade actuality; he urged that art should not, in any sense, be a part of life but an escape from it. ”The proper school to learn art in is not Life--but Art.” And in the same essay (”The Decay of Lying”) he wrote, ”All bad Art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals.” Elsewhere he said, ”The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible. What the second duty is no one has discovered.”
Such a cynical and decadent philosophy could not go unchallenged. Its aristocratic blue-bloodedness was bound to arouse the red blood of common reality. This negative att.i.tude received its answer in the work of that yea-sayer, W. E. Henley.
WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY
Henley repudiated this languid aestheticism; he scorned a negative art which was out of touch with the world. His was a large and sweeping affirmation. He felt that mere existence was glorious; life was coa.r.s.e, difficult, often dangerous and dirty, but splendid at the heart. Art, he knew, could not be separated from the dreams and hungers of man; it could not flourish only on its own essences or technical accomplishments. To live, poetry would have to share the fears, angers, hopes and struggles of the prosaic world. And so Henley came like a swift salt breeze blowing through a perfumed and heavily-screened studio. He sang loudly (sometimes even too loudly) of the joy of living and the courage of the ”unconquerable soul.” He was a powerful influence not only as a poet but as a critic and editor. In the latter capacity he gathered about him such men as Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, W. B. Yeats, T.
E. Brown, J. M. Barrie. None of these men were his disciples, but none of them came into contact with him without being influenced in some way by his sharp and positive personality. A pioneer and something of a prophet, he was one of the first to champion the paintings of Whistler and to proclaim the genius of the sculptor Rodin.