THE NEO-PARNASSIANS

“… But I would implore them to abstain from wearing their knees out before the shrine of the ugly and grotesque when there is all the beauty of the world for the choosing.”—Sir Johnstone Forbes-Robertson.

Away back in the dark ages, when the kindergarten was still an experiment, a stern elderly person—doubtless a relic of the yet earlier age in which children addressed their mother as “Honoured Madam,” and never sat down in their father’s presence—a person of far-seeing but ruthless mind, would every now and then arise to predict that Froebel and his disciples, by making things too easy for the infant intelligence, would produce a spineless generation, with the mentality of rubber dolls. Changing the figure, with apparently an eye upon the dentist, this pessimist would point out that a pap-fed race could have occasion for, and therefore would develop, no teeth.

It is far from my purpose to venture, with presumptuous foot, into the happy fields of pedagogy: it is only that certain straws, gyrating in the intellectual zephyrs of the moment, have arrested an inquiring eye, and awakened a mental question as to how far the disaffected prophet may have been right. Is the multiplication-table set to music, and gayly sung rather than acquired with labor and sorrow in the dark watches of the study-hour after school, really responsible for a contemporary mental condition which seems to demand that even the simplest short story be expounded by the editor, in type which dwarfs the title, lest the readers’ brains grope vainly for its meaning? Have our early fumblings with strips of many-colored paper rendered us incapable of coping with even the most obvious canvas? Were those well-beloved blocks and cubes the true instigators of Csaky, Brancusi, Delaunay, and the rest—sculptors who last year set us gasping? Did “Birdie in the treetop” blaze the trail for the divers exponents of “interpretative dancing?” Most harrowing of all, have the “finger-plays” of babyhood, designed for the gradual awakening of the child’s consciousness to his five senses and his little ego, led up to the reverberating chaos of words which we are now called upon seriously to regard as poetry?

Let the responsibility rest where it may, we have been relentlessly herded and driven far by those who in this day and generation assume to mold our opinions for us. We have survived the onslaught of Cubism, Futurism, St. Vitism and what not, in art: is there anything in stone or bronze, or on canvas, that can now take us by surprise? We have outlived the shock, and can even derive pleasure from the spectacle, of our elders joyously cavorting between the tables when we ask them out to dine; other times, other manners. We have learned to listen unabashed and with the proper modicum of concern while Sweet-and-twenty, who has been to the “movies” and knows whereof she speaks, discourses between the soup and fish upon themes erstwhile supposed to be undiscussible, unless by physicians and students of sociology. We can even look without remonstrance upon our nearest and dearest attired only less frankly than Josephine when she essayed to convince the world of the superiority of her challenged charms to those of Madame Tallien. We have had hitherto one refuge when all this grew too much for us: we could exclaim, if we still had the hardihood to quote Tennyson, “I will bury myself in my books”—of course omitting the remainder of the line, which is “unsocial.” Now this stronghold also has been battered down. If we seek diversion in a story which is really a story, and not a tract—if we venture still to take pleasure in those who until to-day have been considered poets—we are upheld to the contumely of our fellows as “primitive,” “elementary,” and our beliefs are made a by-word and a hissing in the public prints. Ours not to reason why, ours not to make reply: we are expected to go for artistic and literary pabulum where we are sent—“forty feeding as one,” like Wordsworth’s cattle; and perhaps, to borrow once more from the Light Brigade, ours but to do and die, intellectually, may be the result.

Doubtless most of the “advanced investigators” (inspired circumlocution of M. Andre Salmon) in both art and literature are sincere; yet it seems an almost unavoidable conclusion that this epidemic which is upon us in many forms, all disagreeable and unnecessary, like any other epidemic, arises from a physiological condition akin to the tarantism which once swept southern Europe, giving the tarantella its name, and not to be cured even by the startling method of burying the victim up to the neck in earth. The mythic spider having bitten him, whirl he must, until he drop exhausted. Crueler than the earlier spider of whose bite noble Tom Thumb died, the ferocious arachnid of our day, like the Lycosa tarantula of the Middle Ages, is ravaging at will, and sparing no age, sex, or previous condition of activity. The “bite” may not prove fatal: but while the madness lasts, clarity of vision, calm and coherent utterance, are not to be expected. The dervish-like frenzy of literary and artistic production will of course eventually wear itself out; but until it does, those who by Heaven’s mercy have been spared the infection can only, with what patience the gods vouchsafe, stand out of the way and look on, deafened by the insistent remedial strains.

Even as heat-waves above the summer fields and sands cause fixed objects to shimmer and fluctuate before the eyes, sometimes creating actual mirage, so the extraordinary brain-waves of our day seem to influence human conduct and, necessarily, its reflex, achievement in art and letters. It is not that both subject and handling are so often grotesque or deplorable; it is not—though the spread of any epidemic is regrettable—that more and more worthy craftsmen fall victims, hypnotised by others’ gyral eccentricities, and by what a recent promulgator of the cult terms “the strident and colossal song.” It is that these, clamoring for their own prepossession, deny us ours!

“Dolly,” besought the heroine of Miss Broughton’s first novel, the novel which created a school of fiction, and which her unsuspecting father told her was unfit for her, a young woman, to read: “Dolly, am I so very ugly? Look!” Her sister, thus adjured, surveyed the appealing face. “I do not admire you,” she returned, calmly. “But that is no reason why some one should not!” Cannot the apostles of the tarantist persuasion, in its varying manifestations, show us an equal liberality? They do not admire what one of them has summed up as “the completely solved, tabulated, indexed problems of the past:” but may not others who do be permitted to enjoy them in peace, unobjurgated? Those who are labelled “early-Victorian,” “primitive,” “elementary,” are usually possessed of the ornament, no less out of date, of a meek and quiet spirit; and, if let alone, will continue on their unobtrusive way, neither assailing nor disparaging schools whose inspirations do not attract them. Why may they not be permitted to adhere to their ideals, unwhipt of neo-justice?—since the untrammelled tarantist proclaims with no hesitating voice his right to stand up, naked and unashamed, for his own!

There is one certain result of intellectual or any other sort of bullying; present forcibly enough to any man that he is merely a worm, and he is bound in the nature of things to “turn,” with what vigor he may—and as the late Sir William Gilbert well said, “Devil blame the worms!” Tell a man often enough, and contemptuously enough, that he doesn’t know what he is talking about, and his most cherished beliefs are only so much junk, and you inevitably goad him into nailing his colors to the mast. The holy martyrs need not have died for their convictions if they had not been badgered into, not merely holding, but flaunting them! Again, to fall back upon my Gilbert, “versifier” and master of “smart-aleckry” though it seems he was, as measured by a recent standard—

and I am driven to couch my lance and gallop into the lists chiefly by a modern form of challenge unrecognized of Chivalry: “My ladye is fairest because yours is foul and void of grace!” Your lady is fairest?—no man has a better right than you to think so, or to say so: but it is unknightly to attempt bolstering up her claims by a personal attack upon my ladye, whose charms I justifiably hold to be supreme. The glaive being down, there is nothing for it but the onset—and may the best man win!

In less archaic phrase, no man who knows his Milton and his Wordsworth can sit silent and be told that “when a perfect sonnet” (a perfect sonnet, remember!) “is duly whittled out, it is usually found to be worth about as much as a well-crocheted lambrequin”—whatever that may be. No man who has delighted in his Praed, his Ingoldsby, his Locker, Calverley, Lang, Austin Dobson, Owen Seaman and the rest, can see them all swept into the scrap-heap as “worn out—an exhibition of adroitness … for impressing a circus audience!” No man can hear with patience the undoubted fact that the blank verse of Shakspeare and Milton was “written quite without rhyme,” adduced, with an air of giving light to them that sit in darkness, by way of supporting a hurly-burly of words which has been well compared to “pumpkins rolling over a barn-floor.” That blank verse does not rhyme is too “elementary” to need discussion: and the Eocene minds which still read Shakspeare, Milton, and even Tennyson, are thoroughly aware that the construction of blank verse is governed by no less rigorous rules than the sonnet or the dainty old French forms which Austin Dobson and our own Bunner made exquisite in English. But the foe of rhyme is by no means limited to blank verse in support of his thesis: experiments in unrhymed metre are by no means new. Bulwer tamed the Latin verse-forms to eat out of his hand; Ossian and his collateral descendant, “Fiona Macleod,” made chamber music of the wild harp of the Gael; Aldrich, in his youth, went far toward establishing his fame with the Ballad of Baby Bell: Charles Henry Lüders, untimely dead a generation ago, achieved a gem in his brief dirge, The Four Winds. One may be a poet without ever having written a line in metre. It is doubtful whether Mrs. Meynell’s well-won reputation—a reputation which brought her, in a “popular ballot” for England’s laureateship, nearly six thousand votes, and a place second only to Rudyard Kipling—does not rest quite as much upon the poetic beauty of her essays as upon her verse. “The mighty engine of English prose” is always available for the writer with “a message;” Lincoln did not elect to “sing” his Gettysburg address, which no recent bard whom it has been my privilege to read has surpassed. If the bearer of the “message” have not the sense of music which produces that perfection of rhythm needing no grace of rhyme; if he object to rhyme “because,” according to a recent candid outburst, “it is so confoundedly hard to find!” the lyre and even the oaten pipe are not for him. Nothing is easier to compass, in either prose or metre, than the cryptic, the portentous; the bellow of the trombone, the thud of the big drum, will always cause some one to listen, at least long enough to find out what is causing the disturbance. But neither Vorticist, Polyrhythmicist, nor any other specialist in Parnassian wares, need flatter himself that lines of assorted lengths, huddled like jack-straws, make poetry. If any message be there, it is obscured and marred by its uncouth disguise; if there be no message, the “work” has even less excuse for being. I am far from denying the right of every one to express himself in whatever way he think fit: it is wholly his own affair, and it may be, like Benedick’s hypothetical lady’s hair, “of what color it please God.” But if it be neither verse nor honest prose—if it be cacophony for mere cacophony’s sake—he who takes in vain for it the name of poetry, does it little service.

One of the strange symptoms of the modern tarantism is this unrelenting hostility to beauty: in fashion not less than in art it is the ugly and the queer, in fiction and verse the pathological, the unpleasant, that seem to be assiduously striven for. The arts are sisters, children of one father; their aims are closely allied, and if one step down from her high estate, the others are likely soon to show the unfortunate influence of her example. Bad taste in sculpture affects us more disagreeably than bad taste in painting, because sculpture stands forth with us, in our own atmosphere, while the picture confines within its frame an atmosphere of its own; bad taste in dancing is worse in the drawing room than on the stage, being by so much nearer; and bad taste in literary expression is more distressing than any, because, after all, it is only music which has so intimate an appeal as the written word. Only music and the written word become a part of us, dwelling with us unsought, singing to us unurged, lingering with us in the silent hours when our mental sentinels or taskmasters are off guard, and if a graceless pretender, professing to be what he is not, intrude upon the starry company of the heaven-born, shall not the intrusion be resented?

What is poetry? There are many definitions with which few of us can quarrel; but one of the most direct, and at the same time most comprehensive, is that poetry is the expression, in terms of beauty, of what humanity feels—that beauty of thought, beauty of feeling, beauty of form, which implies truth, sympathy, clarity of vision, imagination, and the unerring sense of fitness which is good taste. And if this God-given beauty, twin-sister to music, be not inextricably woven, like a three-fold thread of gold, through and through the very fabric of the soul, it is never to be acquired—no mastery of prosody, of rules, of libraries full of the “best examples,” will avail. It is distinct from inspiration, which may be a single bolt from the blue: it is rather an attribute, to venture upon the methods of Sir Boyle Roche, of the voice of that inmost higher self which the late F. W. H. Myers called “the subliminal mind” and which Maeterlinck has termed “our unknown guest.” Let the man whose literary endeavor, well-intended though it be, is without this essence, call himself what he please: he is not, nor can he ever be, a poet.

Meanwhile, those who remain unbitten of the dread Lycosa may find peace in M. Andrè Salmon’s dictum that “critics encourage the most absurd, for the most absurd is necessary to art”—which may be stretched to include the art of letters—and anything that is really necessary may, by right effort, be endured. It is sufficiently clear that not on this side of the bridge of Al Sirat shall we and the Neo-Parnassians agree: but we can at least avoid each other like gentlemen.