Sir William Watson and Mr. Lloyd George
Reading edition
“Representatives of literature and art” usually appear in the Honours Lists, and they are usually queer representatives. The knighted littérateur, as a rule, is either a second-rate man or a man long past his prime. Possibly more men than we know of refuse these knighthoods. For myself I do not see what on earth a really distinguished artist wants with a knighthood, unless he is poor, and thinks that a title would add a guinea or two per thousand to the price of his work. If Sir Samuel Johnson, Sir Charles Dickens, Sir William Blake, Sir Robert Browning, Sir W. Wordsworth, Sir S. Taylor Coleridge, Sir George Meredith stood beside Sir Lewis Morris and Sir W. Robertson Nicoll, Sir Henry Dalziel, and Sir Hedley le Bas (of the Caxton Publishing Company), I do not conceive that those eminent writers would be held in greater honour than they are, or that literature would cut a more important figure in our social life. The one man to whom a knighthood may usefully be given is the deserving person who has worked conscientiously for years without adequate recognition and of whose existence the public might—to his and its advantage—be officially reminded. As the crown of a famous career a knighthood is absurd.
Sir William Watson has presumably got his knighthood for being one of the most industrious of the war-poets—and a war-poet congenial to the Powers-that-now-Be. Twenty years ago he had a greater reputation than he now has, and wrote several good and many respectable poems. He is still skilful, and can echo effectively the accents of Wordsworth and Milton; but he is certainly not a man of whom one thinks when one is estimating the vital forces in contemporary poetry. A new volume, The Man who Saw, has just appeared. The title-poem is about the Prime Minister:
Out of that land where Snowdon night by night Receives the confidence of lonesome stars, And where Carnarvon’s ruthless battlements Magnificently oppress the daunted tide, There comes—no fabled Merlin, son of mist, And brother to the twilight, but a man Who in a time terrifically real Is real as the time; formed for the time; Not much beholden to the munificent Past, In mind or spirit, but frankly of this hour; No faggot of perfections, angel or saint, Created faultless and intolerable; No meeting-place of all the heavenlinesses, But eminently a man to stir and spur Men, to afflict them with benign alarm, Harass their sluggish and uneager blood, Till, like himself, they are hungry for the goal; A man with something of the cragginess Of his own mountains, something of the force That goads to their loud leap the mountain streams.
Sir William proceeds to a peroration on
the man of Celtic blood, Whom Powers Unknown, in a divine caprice, Chose and did make their instrument, wherewith To save the Saxon; the man all eye and hand, The man who saw, and grasped, and gripped, and held. Then shall each morrow with its yesterday Vie, in the honour of nobly honouring him, Who found us lulled and blindfolded by the verge Of fathomless perdition and haled us back. And poets shall dawn in pearl and gold of speech, Crowning his deed with not less homage, here On English ground, than yonder whence he rose.
This must certainly be the most eulogistic poem ever written about a British politician.
There is nothing about Mr. W. M. Hughes, Lord Milner, Lord Curzon, or Lord Devonport in the volume; these, perhaps, will be dealt with in Sir William’s next book, which, I do not doubt, will be ready before long. But Sir Edward Carson gets his meed in a sonnet To the Right Hon. Sir Edward Carson, on leaving Antrim, June 30, 1916, and another sonnet acclaims Lord Northcliffe—to whom, possibly, there is a delicate allusion in the line quoted above, beginning “Whom Powers.” The sonnet is called The Three Alfreds; the three being King Alfred, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and Alfred Lord Northcliffe:
Three Alfreds let us honour. Him who drove His foes before the tempest of his blade At Ethandune—him first, the all-glorious Shade, The care-crowned King whose host with Guthrum strove. Next—though a thousand years asunder clove These twain—a lord of realms serenely swayed; Victoria’s golden warbler, him who made Verse such as Virgil for Augustus wove. Last—neither king nor bard, but just a man Who, in the very whirlwind of our woe, From midnight till the laggard dawn began, Cried ceaseless, “Give us shells—more shells,” and so Saved England; saved her not less truly than Her hero of heroes saved her long ago.
It is a pity that there could not have been added some reference to Lord Northcliffe’s conviction that nobody in his senses ever dreamed of using shrapnel against wire. Had the shells passage been expanded it might have been less cacophonous. As it stands, it gives rise to the suspicious illusion that the sibilant cry was uttered by Mr. (or is it Sir?) Wilkie Bard. But no; it was “neither King nor Bard.”