APOLOGIA AUCTORIS

In agreeing to collaborate with Mr. Cabell, in preparing this volume of his selections from my inedited verses, I have been influenced by a number of considerations. I am attempting in this place to indicate a few of these.

To begin with, it is generally known—according to the literary reviewers,—that nowadays we are producing an indigenous “new” poetry, of hitherto unknown directness and simplicity; and that, in consequence, America is rendering her poets the unprecedented tribute of purchasing their volumes. That, of course, is one consideration.

Conceivably, too, I think, it may be not unsalutary, at this especial moment, to contrast the output of what has been, in another place, not inappropriately described as “the new naïveté” with the productions of poets who were in reality naïve. Conceivably, at least, one way of learning what is actually “natural” is to observe the ways of unsophisticated persons. This much preamble comes as warning that hereinafter you may look to encounter, in default of the debatable simplicities of “new” poetry, those genuinely simple melodies which were born of ages less complex.

§

I admit that, poetry having become in some sort a salable commodity, a book of verse no longer absolutely demands, as in the old days, a preface to explain and palliate its existence. None the less, these verses based upon pre-Renaissance formulæ must keep to the fashion of their time, and come with a prose pursuivant.

For the way needs clearing, since the road is clogged with the makings of an ugly syllogism. No matter with what joy we may admire “the new naïveté,” the poverty of thought evinced in mediæval poetry remains notorious; and it is, after all, only the mental gist of a poem which is translatable.

Yet, in truth, the feature which repels, and troubles us, is not so much that the thoughts of these men were feeble as that their beliefs were firm. The springtide awakens loveliness and human joy therewith, true love ennobles the lover, and death is a terrific adventuring into the dark; such was their simple credo: and their belief in its tenets was unquestioning. Now, it is perhaps more subtle to consider spring as a meteorological phenomenon, love as an ingenious device for perpetuating the species, and death as a logical progression toward higher spheres of activity; yet each may be a miracle, for all that; and not any longer to see its wonder may quite conceivably be loss rather than gain. Ophthalmia is at the best an infirm basis whereon to assume airs of superiority.

Just so, these mediæval rhymesters wrote by choice of what to us seems prosaic because to them it was throughout heart-shakingly strange. Their more alert perceptions were aware of a continuous wonderfulness, on every side, which we have learned to overlook. It really is astounding, when you come sanely to think of it, to find a frost-nipped world converted overnight into a place of warmth and beauty; and they said so, in the best language they could muster. We heirs of more sophisticated ages cannot but assent; yet even those few of us who are still guilty, say, once in a blue moon, of reading a little time-honored verse, avert with more congenial interest toward the straggling eccentricities of vers libre and of polyphonic prose, with such eye-arresting gambits as “We maidens are many of us older than sheep,” and “Hey, old world, shove your staid bonnet over your ear!”

It were flippant to suggest this is the interest that we accord, with livelier concern, to any other approach of the mentally unbalanced. Yet wonder, not bewilderment, is the gateway to the palace of art. The grand power of poetry, in particular, is its interpretative faculty of so dealing with familiar things as to awaken a full and new sense of their strangeness. And life affords nothing more remarkable than its truisms. There is a waggish saying somewhere as to how eagerly we would all scramble for the best seats if God heralded the coming of the crocus by mailing circulars or announced a sunrise via the public journals. The conceit is sound; for Omnipotence would, so to speak, be versifying the commonplace by stressing its importance, much as a noble rhyme and meter emphasize so insistently the thought they clothe that the whole matter dwindles into bathos if (after all) the thought prove mediocre. Yet the real wonderfulness of the terrestrial pageant, even then, would consist, not in its felicities of color, but in its commonplaceness. For the most beautiful and terrible thing about a sunrise is that it happens every day. Just so the sun arose when Pliocene monstrosities held the earth as their heritage, just so it arose to waken the laborers of Nineveh, just so it arose as the cock crew and Peter for the third time denied his Master: and just so, too, it will arise—every day,—when Earth is a frozen clod, trundling voiceless and naked through infinity. A sunrise has nothing to do with man’s existence, for all that it serves to time his clocks and rouse his factory-whistles; and therein lies the fundamental beauty of a sunrise, which is above and beyond and indifferent to the utmost reach of human achievement, and is therefore worthy to furnish recreation for human thought.

§

Here, too, we touch one fallacy of our modernists who insist that poetry should deal with workaday life, and develop the poetic side of shopwindows and streetcars and pessimism. But in shopwindows and streetcars and consistent pessimism is to be contemplated nothing save what man, whether for good or ill, has heaped together in defiance of nature. He made these things, however curious; he knows the elements whereof they are compounded; and he comprehends—there wakens disenchantment—that at a pinch he can patch up something else of pretty much the same sort. Not hereabouts is to be found aught fore-ordained and uncontrollable, or the beauty of fatality—of Ἀνάγκη—and human inefficiency thereunder, such as the old Greeks knew was necessary to art’s highest strivings.

And what is this Hellenic Ἀνάγκη, after all, but the commonplace deified, with humanity as pawns? It is assuredly sheer commonplace to point out that more or less unpleasantness inevitably follows an elopement with another man’s wife, or that miscegenation tends to shorten life; yet works of very real merit have been based upon these truisms, and nobody worth hearing questions the poetry of the Iliad or of Othello. Nor is in either case the commonplace an inessential; attempting to imagine Helen as the fiancée of Menelaus, or Othello as a Caucasian, you flounder into the inconceivable.

An element of triteness, in fine, must be conceded as necessary to first class art. That which becomes a classic is, both by etymology and human nature, something which belongs to a class. It is not in any way unique; it is innocent of any “disturbing novelty.” Now, neither Ovid’s Lynceus or Poe’s Dupin, nor even the indestructible Mr. Holmes (of Baker Street, W. C.), could plausibly detect any disturbing novelty in the poets of Raynouard’s Choix des poësies originales des Troubadours and Rochegude’s Parnasse Occitanien: and when we find these tinkling verses, played always on the two strings of love and death, astonishingly naïve, the thing is partly owing, no doubt, to our superior perception of the proper ends of poetry, but partly too to a more obtuse perception of life’s actual wonderfulness. So that in criticism it behooves us, like Agag of old, to tread softly. By the rarest luck, there is no such pressing obligation laid on many of us touching poets—whether immortal or minor,—as compels us either to criticize or to read.

§

And, truly, it is this consideration, above all others, which emboldens me to make a volume out of those verses that, for the most part, I “adapted” during my college life, from bardic byways of even more ancient eras.... For the rest, a formal bibliography of the sources of this little book was begun, and laid aside as entailing too much labor squandered to no utilitarian end. Petronius and Villon, at worst, require scant introduction to a generation which, the day before yesterday at any rate, was familiar with Quo Vadis and If I Were King. With Alessandro de Medici, as he misconducts himself in de Musset’s Lorenzaccio, many of us preserve a bowing acquaintance, however few extend the intimacy to include his Latin or Italian verses; which, if not positively unknown, would appear to have been overshadowed, even for the specialist, by the similar diversions of Alessandro’s more gifted great-grandfather, Lorenzo the Magnificent. Then, too, Raimbaut de Vaqueiras and his beloved Belhs Cavaliers figure at respectable length in all books treating of Provençal poetry. And Nicolas de Caen has, at any event, afforded the late Mr. Howard Pyle the subject-matter for some striking paintings.

To the other side, apart from any poetical repute, oblivion has swallowed even Antoine Riczi’s queer part in the matrimonial affairs of King Henry the Fourth of England. Such unfamiliar names as Charles Garnier and Théodore Passerat and Alphonse Moreau are not likely ever to cut a dash in popular romance; and, for very obvious reasons, just as in the cases of Petronius and Villon, their verses have never been adjudged particularly suitable for undergraduates to worry through in colleges. These, therefore, are indisputably forgotten, if indeed in any general sense they were ever known. Yet here as elsewhere—one would like to think at least, with the discoverer’s thrill—the “iniquity of oblivion” has scattered her poppy with rather injudicious cæcity.

If Petronius be not precisely mediæval, he is past doubt more antiquated than his present company in nothing save an accident of birth. And the inclusion of those scattered pieces hereinafter given severally under the name of Paul Verville has seemed on various grounds desirable, in spite of their (comparative) modernity of tone. Into the making of such decisions must always enter, of course, an element of purely personal taste, wherewith proverbially there can be no disputing to the arraigner’s profit. To those who do not honor maxims, it can but be answered, with profound irrationality, that all the verses in this book possess at least the common feature of owing their existence in English to the fact that, once upon a time, to put them into English seemed to their transcriber a natural and desirable action. No other bond has ever united the contents of any book of English verse. And although this particular excuse for making rhymes may very often prove inadequate, experience tends to show that any other reason proves so invariably.

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This book’s sub-title appears to me a bit affected. But Mr. Cabell believes that it will please reviewers, by enabling them to start off with a smart witticism about its applicability to other books: and so I yield.... Moreover, I find that, in printing a collection of “adapted” verses, there seems to be no Median or Persic makeshift whereby plodding translation may, with the desirable precision, be distinguished from those less faithful paraphrases in which the plagiarist has more temerariously pulled about his larcenies. Upon consideration, this has appeared as satisfactory a rule of thumb as any:—to indicate the latter class by mention of an author’s name; and with the former class, to include also the first words of the original. The curious may seek out at will the victims of some few unacknowledged borrowings.

Robert Etheridge Townsend.

Lichfield April, 1924.