THE WORLD OF BOOKS.

Press, Volume LIX, Issue 17732, 7 April 1923, Page 13

THE WORLD OF BOOKS.

half hours in a library. BT A. H. Gbinliho. HI—ON LITERARY SUICIDES. The classic instance of a literary suicide is, of course, the case of that "marvellous boy," Thomas Chatterton. who, at the age of ' sixteen, conceived and carried out the most nctable and successful literary forgery of which history lias cognisance. Ths publication of the poems which Chatterton alleged he had copied from the poems of Thomas Rowley, a monk of the fifteenth century, which had been tnk n by C'h;ittcrtcn's father from the old chest at St. Mary Redcliffe's Church at Bristol, raised so great a controversy that the echoes of it still resound. Chatterton committed suicide on the night of August 24th, 1770, by taking a dose of arsenic. He did not consider suicide a crime; he once spoke of it as "a noble insanity of the soul and often the result of a mature and deliberate .approbation of the soul." The following lines, from Cliattorton's pen, reflect a similar sentiment:— SUICIDE. Sirioe wo can die but once, what matters it If rope or garter, poison, pistol, sword, Slow wasting sickness, or the sudden burst Of valve arterial in the noble parts Curtail the miseries of human life? Though varied is the cause, the effect's the same; All to one common dissolution tends. The actual reason which led to Chat-tel-ton's taking his life was extreme destitution, the bane of so many poets and the cause of their ultimate despair. The Chatterton literature is considerable, ranging from the two volumes of his verse in "The Muses' Library" to tho "Biography of the late Professbr Masson," of "Milton" fame. Masson asserts that Chatterton was not only "a true English poet of the. eighteenth century," but compared with the other British poets of tha pait of that century immediately prior to the new era begun by jfcßurns and Wordsworth, he was/ "with all his immaturity, almost solitary in the possession of the highest poetic gift." Chatterton was but 17 years and nine months old when he died ( by his own hand, and his best work was done fyjly a year before he died. It Bays much that Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, and Rossetti ail recognised tue pathos of the life and the poetic genius of the "marvellous boy, the sleepless soul that persisted in its pride.'' Coleridge, in his "Monody on the Death j of Chatterton," asks the questions— I Is this the land of Bong-ennobled lino? Is this the .land where genius ne'er ia vain Poured forth his lofty strain ? Ah »! yet iSpenaer, gentlest bard divine, Beneath chill disappointment's shade, His weary limbs in lonely anguish laid. And o'er her darling dead.' Pity hopeless hung her head, "While 'mid the pelting of th&t merciless storm, Sunk to tho cold earth Otway's famished form I Rossetti's sonnet is, perhaps, not so well known, yet it embodies a e.arcuing analysis of Chatter ton's temperament: With Shakespeare's manhood at a boy's wild heart, Through Hamlet's doubt to Shakespears near allied. And kin to Milton through his Satan's pride,— ! At Death's .solo door ho stooped and craved I a dart; And to the dear new bower of England's art,— were the plays! That was acting 1 And to think that there isn't $ single streak of lightning in any play on the boards this year! And then the kind of climax that a play like this used to have! The scene shifted right at the moment of the excitement, and lo! we are in the tower, the top storey of the lighthouse, interior scene. All is still and quiet within, with the bright light of - the reflectors flooding the little room* and the roar of the storm heard like muffled thunder outside. The lighthouse-keeper trims his lamps. How firm and quiet and rugged he looks.' The snows of sixty winters are on his head, but his eye is clear and hia grip strong. Hear the howls of the wind as he opens the door, and steps forth upon the iron balcony, eighty feet above the water, and peers out upon the storm. "God pity all the poor souls at ee&l" he says. (They all eay that. 'lf yon get used to it, and get to like it, you want to hear it said, no matter how often they say it.) The waves rage beneath him; the foaming crest of a wave splaßhes up angrily at him. (I threw it at him, really, but the effect was wonderful.) Then as he comas in from the storm to the still room, the climax breaks. A man staggers into the room, in oilskins, drencned, wet, breathless! (They all staggered in those plays ; and in the new drama they walk, and the effect is feebleness itself.) He points to the sea. "A boat! A boat upon the reef! With a woman in it!" And the Lighthouse Keeper knows that it is only his daughter—the only one that he has —who is being cast to j death upon the reef. Then oomes the dilemma. They want him for the lifeboat ; no 'one can take it through the surf but him. Yon know that, because the other man says so himself, but if he goes in the boat, then the great light will go out. Untended, it cannot Etp lin the storm. And if it go6s out—ah! if it goes out!—ask of the angey waves and the resounding rocks of what to* night's long toll of death must be without the LightP" I wish you oonld have seen it—yon, who only see the drawing-room plays of to-day—the scene when the Lighthouse man draws himself np, calm and resolute, and says: '*My place is here; God's will be done." And yon know that as he says it, and turns quietly to his lamps again, the boat is drifting, at that very moment, to the recks. "How did they save her?". My dear sir, if yon can ask that question you little understand the drama lis it was. Save herP No, of course they didn't save her. What we wanted in the Olct Drama was reality and force, no matter how wild and tragic it might he. They did not save her. They found her the next day, in tho concluding scene—all that was left of her wb<"*n she wyis dnshed upon the rocks. Her ribs were broken. Her bottom hoards had been smashed in, her gunwale was gone—ill ehart ? sne was &> xrreck. Ill© girlP Oh, yes. certainly they saved the girl. That kind of thing was always taken care of. You see, just as the Lighthouse man said, "G"d's will be done," his eye fell on a long coil of rope hanging there. Providentially, wasn't it? But then we were not ashamed to use Providence in the Old Drama. So be made a noose in it, and threw_ it over the balcony and hauled the girl up on it. I used to hook her on it every night. A rotten play? Oh, lam sura it must have been. But, somehow, those of tis who were brought np on that sorl of thing still sigh for it. (All Rights Reserved.) [Professor Leacock's " next articl' will appear on Saturday next.]

Even to that shrine Time else had deified, The aau tiered heart that soared ag-iinst his side, — Drove the fell poiat and smote liie'a eeals apart. But Keats, as ever, scunded the hi chest poetic note in his haunting lines:— O Chatterton! how very sad thy fate! Dear child of sorrow—son of misery! How soon the film of death obscured that eye, Whence Genius mildly flashed and hijh debate. How soon that voice, majestic and elate, Melted in dying numbers. Oh, how nigh Was night to thy fair morning. Thou didst die A half-blown flow'ret which cold blast 3 amate. But this is *pact; thou art amonsj the stars Of highest heaven; to the rolling- spheres Thou sweetest singest; nought thy hymning mars, the insrate world and human fears. On earth the <rood man bnse detraction b»r3 From thy fair nam© and waters it with tears. It is a debatable point to what extent the suffering and hardship of a poet's life, the ostracism and isolation which his vision calls upon him to endare, is due to his temperament-, and in what degree it may be charged against the unfavourable environment in which so many case; he has lived and had his being. Henley's phrase, applied to Burns, "the misplaced Titan — the man too great for his circumstances," scarcely coincides with Henley's own declaration of faith. "I am the Mester-.vflf my fate, 1 am the Captain of my soul," a verse whi h John Davidson —another literary suicide —scornfully deridet. sw> "Tfie fc>wan Sonu, ot Pistol''; Davidson always referred to Henley as "Pistol Redivivus." The career qf John Davidson, however, affords another piteous example of the way in which the wor'd treats poets; how far such treatment is the fault of the poets themselves must ever remain an open question. "Most wret-ehed men," exclaimed Shelley, "are cradled into poetry by wrong; they learn in suffering what they teach in song." The saying has passed into a proverb, but the* sentiment is not so tamely acceded to to-day as it was in Shellev's time. Middleton, of whom more anon, declares: "Poets who teach in song have derived small benefit from their sufferings." Sir Wifliam Watson, whom 1 iudge to be one of the most disa.po'nting and disappointed poet? of the pt-riod, some, years igo delivered an address in various varts of the United States on "The Poet's P ace in the Scheme of Life," an address included in his volume of verse entitled "The Muse in Exile." In the course of that address he made the statement, "With one exception the e is not a living English poet, the sales of whose poems would not have been thought contemptible by Scott and Byron."' T'ie exception, of co Tse; "s Kip'ing, and Sir "William Watson continues: ''With that one and' brilliant exception, England's living singers eucc-eed in reaching only a pitifully small audience." Fo-lowing a reference to the "gifted novelists" who have appeared in England during the past quarter of a century, Sir William Watson says: "We have a'so had some . very real poets—poets whose names and achievements wo.ulS, in my opinion, add lustre to any age or nation. They occupy amost no place in the public eye; they receive almost no substantial rewards ; and they are everlastingly being told what feeble and degenerate successors they are to the poets, who, being dead, are commonly called the Victorian Giants.''

Since Sir William Watson spoke those words, the poetic situation has greatly improved. The Kipling vogue apart, it is admitted that Alfred Noyes is one of the few living poets who has been able to make a living by his art, and he has confined his efforts aimost entirely to verse. With the almost unparalleled success of '"ine .lirverlasuiug Mercy" as a starting point, Masefield must have made money out of poetry, but he has written plays and prose as well. The fashion for Francis Thompson and the ltupert Brooke vogue are matters of recent memory; both due to the pathetic and tragic manner of either poet's death and only happening too late for the poets to participate in the benefits. AgaJtist such instances, however, must be placed two melancholy literary suicides, attributable in part to indifferent financial support, the cases of John Davidson and Richard Middleton. In the first volume of his "Contemporary Portraits" Frank Harris writes:— "When I think of the fame of Chatterton and the halo that now surrounds his name, and the condemnation which his neglect casts on his age, I am sure that in the time to come every Englishman will condemn this twentieth century England because of the "tragic fates of Davidson and Middleton; for Richard Middleton was a far greater poet and greater man than Chatterton; riper, too. bringing achieve' ment in his hands ih well as promise. . . . Davidson and Middleton, the one about 50, the other at 30, threw away tljelr Irves as not worth living, as impossible to be lived, indeed. Two of the finest' minds in England allowed practically to starve, for that is what it oomes to; such a thing has never happened before even in England. Under <she old hide-bound aristocratic regime of the eighteenth century, young Chatterton killed ' himself, and his death wgs regarded with a certain disquietude as a portent. But Chatterton was very young and stood alone, and the singularity of his fate allowed one to pass it over as almost accidental. But here we have two distinguished men, killing themselves after they have proved*their powers. What does it meian?"

Pursuing his theme somewhat savagely and with evident rancour—for Frank Harris himself has suffered at the hands of constituted authority, and is to-day exiled in New York—he exclaims : "The same Government and the same people that allowed Da/vidson and Middleton to got only a half product from Whiswer, and punished Wilde with savage ferocity, while ennobling mediocrities and millionaires, the dogs and the wolves, and wasting a thousand millions on the South Afr£ can War. Fancy giving a Judge three thousand pounds a year as a life-pen-sion and allotting Davidson a hundred and Middleton nothing!" Making allowing for a tcertain extravagance of statement and -deducting, the obvious bias, there is an important truth underlying the extract quoted. To all who like myself, haive derived profit and enjoyment the writings of Davidson and-Middleton, their untimely and unnatural deaths afford reason for genuine regrets. I am the proud possessor of an almost complete set of the works of John Davidson, and have, besides, read with avidity everytlVnr written about the man and his work" Mr C. Lewis Hind is one of those who believes that John Davidson will yet come into his own, and as token that he is not forgotten he cites the instance that "in one district library of Manchester the selected poems of John .Davidson have been issued forty-nine times since 1911." I have not a great fancy_for parody, but it is vorth noting that Oavidson cfime into early Dopularitv with "A Ballad of a JJun," largely owing to Sir Owen Seaman's parody in "Bunch." called "A Ballad of a Bun," and which is said to have decided Owen Seaman's career as a parodist-. Davidson began writing in 1886 with four Pjavs, first published in Scotbnd. but_ were afterwards issued hv Elkin Mathews and John Lane, with ''lustrations by Aubrey Beardsley. He followed the plays with several prose works, written for a livelihood, the best of which is "Perf<rvid." and t-e most original "The Wonderful Adventures of "Earl Lavender." but his true medium was noetry, and this was early "*>en m his first hook of verse, "In a Music Hall and Other Poems," publish-

Ed in 1891. It was "Ballads and 6on<rs," issued three years later and ,'ontainin<i "A Ballad of a Nun. 'A Ballad of Heaven," Soncr of a Train, and the Kiplingesque, u Th>rty Bob a \Ye<?k," which brought Davidson a wider circle of admirers. Never can I forget the sensation of a.frst reading of "A Ballad of a Nun"; henceforth I was a confirmed Davidson worshipper, and 1 at o;ice set- to work to secure a complete set of his books no easv matter since so many art out of print. Save for a copy of 'ln a .Music Hall," I have been fairly sucand I am not without Lope that a lucky turn of the wheel of fortune may vet bring that book my way. It conta.ns" some verses entitled "Seiene liklen " included in an anthology ot "Scottish Verse" in the Canterbury Poets series from which I Lave transscribed the first and the last three stanzas: ily dearest lovers know mo not; I hide iay life and soul from sight; I conquer ail whose biocd is hot; 3dy mystery is my mail of might. Then, like a long wave rolling homo, The music gatiiers speed and sound; I, dancing, am the music a foam, And wilder, fleeter higher bound. And fling my feet above my head; Aud light grows, none a-side may glance; Crimson and amber, green and red, In blending baths of these I dance. Ar,d soft and sweet, and calm, my face Looks pure as unsunned chastity, E-/en in the whirling triple pace; That is my conquering mystery. There is close relation between both tho method and the spirit of "Selene* 1 Eden" and '"A Ballad of a <Nun,' which tho student of poetry may easily trace. But Davidson certanly touched poetic high-water mark with '"A R unliable Stag," included in "IJcliday and Other Poeiiis," which, with "A. Note on Poetry," was published in ISO 6. This note on poetry js of interest, because it extols the merits of blank versa against rhyme, and incidentally paves tiie way for the vers libre oi the present generation of pcets. The only poem of recent times comparable witli "A Runnable Stag" is Mr Relph Hodgson's "The Bull." Air .Uasefiews "Reynard the Fox," though similar in subject, is not comparable, becuue altogether different in treatment. In an article on "Tho New Poetry," which, originally written for the "Fortnightly Review," was afterwards included in a volume of essays, -Mr Filson Young declared that John Davidson belonged to "that important and vital cl;iS9 of Scottish society which prodrced Burns and Carlyle." Following a reference to religion being still "the Scotsman's grand subject." Mr Young_ continues: ''Davidson is more stable in intellect than Bums was, his mind is far better equipped, and far more powerful; he is mor<? spiritual than Carlyle, «nd therefore he talks of Matter, while Oarlylo talked of Spirit—botli meaning wonderfully nearly tho same thing. Less perfect a poet than Biius, less tremendous an intellectual power than Carlyle, yet of splendid poetio and magnificent intellectual endowment, Mr Davidson completes this triad of Presbyterian Scotland's revolt against the world and Cliristianity." The first hint given to the reading public that all was not well with john Davidson was in a brief preface to '"FLet Street and Other Poems," published in 190?, when he wrote: "The time has come to make an end. There are several motives. 1 find my pension is not enough; I have therefore still to turn aside and attempt things for» which people will pay. My health also i counts. Asthma and otiier annoyances I have tolerated for years; but 1 cannot put up with canoer." Towards the end of 1903, after he had made arrangements to publish this book, Davidson left London and went to reside at Penzance. On March 23rd, 1909, while in a fit of depression, he left his Penzance home and committed suicide by drowning. In the following September hig body, which was discovered by some in Mount's Bay, was, according to his wishes, buried at sea. His, will set forth that no biography of him should be written, none of his unpublished works published, and "no word except of my writing is ever to appear in any book of mine as long as the copyright endures." I have left myself scant space in which to speak of Richard Middleton, an interesting example of tiie literary suicide of recent times. I had intended mentioning also tnose two Australian literary suicides, Adam Lindsay Gordon, who shot himself in the Brighton bush, near Melbourne, in June, 1870; and Barcroft Boake, Gordon's ardent cjisciple, who, at the age of 26, hung himself on the shore of Long Bay, one of the arms of the Middle Harbour of Sydney, on May, 2nd, 1892. This mere mention rf those two gifted Australians must suffice, and the reference to Middleton must perforce be brief. It is said that Middleton killed himself because he could not make a living out of his poetry; the irony of it all is that since his tragic death the five volumes published of his prose and verse have been in considerable demand. Mr Frank Harris, who knew and admired Middleton for hia works salts, says: "I was told later of those four days in Brussels, which he passed in the cold«4ured bedroom, four days in which he forced himself to face the Arch-Fear and conquer it. At the beginning he wrote a post-card telling what he was about to do, taking farewell of his friend before the long journey, in high pagan fashion, and then in that last awful hour, with the bottle of choloroform before him, he wrote across the card: 'A broken and a contrite spirit Thou will not despise.' The awfulness of it; the pity deeper than tears." The interested will find in Mr Henry Savage's biography, "Richard Middleton: the Man and His Work," all that it ig necessary to know of the life and character of this ill-fated genius, who -died under such tragic circumstances in Brussels in November, 1911, a few days after his twenty-ninth birthday.

After an interested perusal of Mr Savage's biography I linger lovingly over th© five blue-covered book 3 which enshrine Middleton's writing in prase and in verse. First in order .comes "The Ghost-ship and Other Stories," the title piece perhaps the finest short story in the English language; "On th© Brighton Rond," th© outcome of an actual excursion; and that n-arrellous. little sketch, which always thrills me when I read it aloud, "The Conjuror." Then "The Dav Before Yesterday," settins; forth Middleton's wonderful insight into and love for the children. The two volumes of "Pi ems and S>ngs" may not be lightly passed over, holding as they do such' prime poetic favourites as "The Bathing Boy," "Drinldns Son" fo:- Lovers," and "Mad Harry's Vision." Last, but by no means least, are Middleton's literary opinions and ideas bound up as "Monologues," among them a paper on "Pensions for Poets, evoked bv the news of th© suicide or John Davidson. "It was." remarks Middleton, "Chattel-ton's stricken vanity and not his hunger that mad© him hurry so, audi X fosl th© Stiuio might almost be said of Davidson. . . - For the rest it may well be that the prophet Davidson grew -weary of waiting for the tardy ravens; but it ia certain thai- the poet, th© man who wrote the 'Ballad of a Nun' and the Tlimnnble Stag,' did not kill himself for lack of an extra hundred' a year. Nor indeed, is he dead." In the same collection of essavs. writing on "Suicide and the State,"'Middleton mentions that in the "Shropshire Lad" Mr A. E. Honsman almost enters a defence or suicide. Pursuing the subject, Middleton savs—and the words carry a euriotss moral Of course it is impossible for any person, breathing air and holding tie flowers of th© world for his reward, to j

(Continued at foot of naxt column.)

defend suicide, but it is another thing to suggest by our silence that suicides do not exist. . . . Everjr honest man knows that nineteen suicides out of twenty are. perfectly sane. The majority lives for what life gives it; the minority dies for what life withholds; and while for once in a way it is possible to agree with the majority, it must be admitted that the point of view of the minority is not irrational. It is pessimism rather than wisdom that keeps us alive; it is optimism and not madness that leads the suicide to seek for better things in the grav«k.