Woodland Creatures

“Parnassus in Piccadilly,” is the headline I see in my paper. Follows an account of a “séance” promoted by Miss Elizabeth Asquith in aid of the Star and Garter Home. Ten or twelve poets read works of their own to an audience of four hundred who had paid a guinea apiece. Outside the house a large concourse watched the poets arrive. There were Mr. Yeats, Sir O. Seaman, Mr. Hewlett, Sir Henry Newbolt, Mr. Binyon, Mr. de-la Mare, Mrs. Woods, Mr. Belloc, and Mr. W. H. Davies, who is described as looking like “one of his own woodland creatures.” I read that one of the reciters intoned, that another was bluff, and that a third ought to get somebody else to read for him; also that Mr. Birrell, the chairman, sat with his head buried in his hands until the arrival of the first comic turn, Mr. Belloc’s. But I wish I had been there: for the account does not tell me how it was really done.

Did the poets sit in the audience and march up to the platform one by one as their turns came? Did they stand out of sight, each gliding in singly, and then retiring into the antral seclusion of the wings when ten minutes was up? Or did they rather, as I prefer to think, sit on the platform, the whole dozen of them in a semicircle, listening to, and discreetly applauding, each other’s efforts. I am sorry I missed it. Some of them will have been exalted by a sense of the holiness of their work; their eyes will have looked out across the audience with a prophetic and otherworldly fire. Others will have been uneasy and not knowing (unless a table was thoughtfully provided) what to do with their feet. And one or two, I think, will have been preoccupied with the control of their own faces, which, on such an occasion, must have “strained at the leash of dignified deportment.”

Why is it that so many people feel awkward when they are present at a public recitation by a poet of his own verse; and why should writers shrink from such recitations? Amusement on such occasions is closely allied to sheepishness: both spring from a feeling of inappropriateness, a sense that “the fitness of things” is being violated. We are accustomed, of course, to the other kind of recitation, the reading by an interpreter who is not a creator, and who is not exposing his heart in public: the prize child and the local elocutionist who declaims Tennyson’s Revenge, daintily fluttering his fingers in the air when he comes to the part about the pinnace which is like a bird. But our poets themselves have not recited much. It was not always so. “’Omer smote his bloomin’ lyre” in public; he had nowhere else to smite it, for he (presumably) could not write, and his audiences could not read. Every composer of tribal lays, from Tubal-Cain (unless his songs were Lieder ohne Worte) to the Druidic harpists, sang his compositions to his admiring fellows without embarrassment; troubadours and mediæval laureates had no objection at all to public recitation. Most foreigners, one supposes, do not feel so strongly as we do about it now; but the timidity of Englishmen in the matter is very pronounced. I am sure that nothing short of the needs of a War Fund would have induced some of the Piccadilly performers to face the ordeal.

It is all a part of our national reserve, that very reserve which, perhaps, accounts for the greatness and volume of our poetry. In poetry our feelings find an outlet. We have the habit of concealing our finest sentiments and our profoundest emotions. We don’t mind putting them into books and then running round the corner out of sight. But we dislike unbosoming them viva voce in the actual physical presence of strangers. Our dislike of “scenes” covers equally the public row in a restaurant and the public demonstration of our yearnings after virtue and the stirrings of our hearts when we hear the nightingale or listen to the Atlantic at night. We sit bolt upright at concerts; look at pictures with our mouths set like vices; and observe “Yes, very nice” as, with wistfulness in our breasts, we stand on a hill and look at a wooded panorama under the moon. The grotesque Englishman who stares at a sunset and then laughs and says it looks like a fried egg is really bolting in terror from the admission that it looks like the flaming ramparts of the world. So, if somebody gets up to recite his most intimate feelings, we feel it as almost an indecency. He is usually bashful about it himself, and unable therefore to recite with that abandonment which will do his poem justice. The audience, at least that part of it which is most intelligent and self-conscious, feels as if it were intruding. It is like eavesdropping or opening a stranger’s letters. And everybody is conscious of the national titter in the background. When the authors of Prize Poems at the Universities give the official reading of their verses, their friends invariably assemble to grin in the galleries. Undergraduates have still some naturalness. They titter aloud, but the adult Englishman titters in silence. It is reserve that brings forth the titter and it is still more reserve that suppresses it; just as it is reserve that makes our soldiers sing, not invocations to England, home, or glory, but comic songs about cowardice and death.

The foregoing series of platitudes, slightly varied in accordance with each writer’s tastes and talents, is invariably repeated when the character of English people is under discussion. But it may be that, at any rate in our attitude towards poetry, we are changing. In the last four or five years the habit of public readings has been growing; and some of our poets have grown quite addicted to them. This may be a time of transition: if the enthusiasts for recitation keep at it hard enough, people’s constraint may be overcome, and it may be regarded as quite an ordinary and natural thing for a man to stand on a platform and, with all the passion he can release and all the vocal modulation he can command, chant his lyrics to congregations which will yield themselves to him with all the spontaneity, though less than all the gestures and ejaculations, of a Welsh revivalist’s converts. It is a commonplace that poetry gains by being spoken; and that if verse were always read and never recited, poets would be in danger of getting out of touch with natural speech-rhythms. We could do with a little less amusement and a little more excitement; and we might as well, if cowardice or a sense of humour are the only things that hold us back, hold and attend public readings until we are as unselfconscious about them as we are about church services or political meetings. The worst of it is that poets do not invariably read well, and that few persons with the taste for standing on a platform and declaiming are competent to take an author’s place as reciter of his work. There is such a thing as the inspired reader of other people’s verse; but the understanding, the inclination, and the voice cannot be expected to come often together. When the author himself is reciting you can at least be certain that the speaker—unless he is a very “advanced” poet indeed—understands the work which he is repeating. With other performers one always has to take one’s chance. From the professional reciter God save us all.