Poets' Hard Times
THESE are hard times for the honest minor poet: not because, as Mr. George Moore adventurously asserts, Art is dead under the curse of universal locomotion, nor because the singer is denied a just hearing by the public. What has happened bears some resemblance to a tragedy; but like certain other tragedies, its result is bound to be wholesome, like the pure touch of fire.
The honest minor poet wakes up in these days to find himself a child in a world of energetic, serious maturity. Even the daily headlines bring home to him that no one needs his songs of hills and leaves and clouds, of elfin things and gypsy feet, even of love and death, touched as they are in his music with the kind deceiving shimmer of dreams.
He dreams through all the battle-thunder.
His bloodless battles climb the sky,
Cloud-legions, led by wide-eyed wonder.
Limp back to dull sleep or swift dying,
Still is he generalled by ghosts.
With dreamy sunburnt banners flying.
Probably, even if the War had not shaken the world into a sort of passionate, if unwilling, seriousness, the dreamer of quiet dreams would have found himself quite as much an innocent among hard able-bodied and able-minded men. Social and industrial battles surge up to our very doorsteps; and the man or woman who clicks the latch and sits by the fire within is accounted a fool or a criminal by the strugglers in the street.
But with the nations reeling like drunken regiments, with blood and death on land and under sea and up in the clean clouds, and an overpowering uncertainty at the heart of every vision of peace and progress, it is no wonder that the little singer finds himself beaten into humble silence.
If he is honest, he knows that the world needs the burning insight and power of a prophet, or the simplicity of eternal child-like Truth. If he is not great enough in complexity to attain the one, nor great enough in simplicity for the other, he has nothing to say. His stars and brooks will stand the test only if somehow he can weave them into the vast troubled web of human experience. Pale pools, white birds, green fishes, blue gardens, are truly the playthings of an artistic moment; and ‘all the little emptiness of love’ is like a rose blown down the wind, unless he can give it the substance of life more mightily than any sweet-chiming words alone can do. Poetry cannot dabble in strange forms, nor try to spice itself to vitality with new labels for old devices. Now, more than ever, poetry must speak for itself.
It is because of this high necessity that the singer is cast back into silence. He is like a young person in a house of tumult and sorrow. He yearns to help, but he is dumb before the terrible or noble facts about him. If he utters himself, he is aware of inadequacy, and expects to be brushed aside. Even if sometimes he feels sure that his dreamknowledge sees deeper than the darkened eyes of his friends, he dares not insist, till Time has given him the right to be heard. He must grow up before he can speak.
Even so the little poet who is clearsighted enough to take himself less seriously than he takes the passionate and various vividness of life, knows that he must grow up. Or, to put it more plainly, he must be great to be worth hearing. When he can never be great, nothing is left for him but silence, and wonder. He may always keep the wonder.
Herein lies the wholesome beauty of this small tragedy of still-born dreams and songs. After all, silence and wonder are better than empty speech and eyes blind to the purifying fires of Experience. The world will not miss the little poet, nor he the world too much. His courageous silence will leave more sky-room for the great songs sure to come. His wonder will open to him some private port of Paradise, gleaming with the proud light of Truth.