THE LONG PROBATION

Press, Volume LXIX, Issue 21010, 11 November 1933, Page 15

THE LONG PROBATION

] poETRY and reality

I r| r*W-- v r "" THI: rnEss.) ; B y y. 11. IIOLCROFT.]

In the best moments of art there i_ : a quality of perception that goes jjevond the scope of conscious effort, 'jj allows us to enjoy the excitement recognition. A warm can supply its own V' a pjjigs, and needs but the sound;ng of a keynote for the quiet K»ming-toS ethcr of a P° et ' s design, gut whence comes the keynote? We v-ve learned to think of the poet a solitary being, isolated among j..jg hills 'and engaged in a tireless teeking for the values of silence and ttarlight. It is easy to confuse ourUves with unreal ideas, and I have thought that when we idealise our poets and set them apart from us cn impossible mountain-lops we are (pending on them our own recurrent I v-eariness. The poet has need of 1 isolation: but according to the lives ( f.pure singers he also has need of ' ,j, e world. No man could be fonder rhan Browning of a good dinner and good talking. He loved to show himself in polite drawing rooms; Ind although his best work was r cone at Florence, he was never really far f ! ' orn friends and i rotable talkers. Even Shelley was giad to carry his establishment of friends and admiring ladies on all his travels. None more apart than he, perhaps, when the music was in him, and words had to be found for "'he imagery and thought in possession of his mind: but when the fiery jet of composition was at an end. rhat could please him better than ; voices in the dusk and the nearness (it gentle companions? It would teem, then, that a poet's isolation ir.ust be in his ways of thought, in his intrepid surrender to intuition; ind for this there is need of a spiritual privacy, a withdrawal from men and affairs at those times when he feels the possibility of invention. But the way back must remain open. It is wise to remember that, however far a poet may range, his mood ri deepest insight is fed from below, even from those roots of his being that are at home within the good esrth of this world. The Rebel. If we are to think of those who heve known the lower and darker isolation, in which the self must iufler without adeauate compensations of the spirit, let us name the unmistakable great figure, standing tpart from his people in pride and bitterness. Byron was the true victim of solitude, not because lie vent voluntarily into exile and cicimed to be resigned there, but because isolation was the inevitable condition of his genius. He was force incarnate. His thought was not deep: lie was without those sulder attributes that engage the jive of succeeding generations; in his view of hi"* age and of mankind ::.e was usually both narrow and iittor. But he had power over vords and tremendous vitality. Wo sometimes pause wi'h a shock of fu*,' rje at the end of his dramatic I>oemsr For so long we are carried, unresistinn. on the tide of words. The moaning breaks through like a storm-light in cloudy skies of night. We are up among the crags < f mountains, and as Manfred looks down into misfy depths the scene is around us as if evoked directly from some storehouse of nature. Thoughts and sentiments are neither roble nor altogether sincere: but •hey are lost in the sound of waters that fume in the iron gorges, and in the wild brightness of the hillsides as they come with vet rocks into the morning. When all is over v.-e may ask ourselves what has been said that can be remembered. No

thought survives. V'e accept Byron in the way that '•"<? accept the uncontrollable forces o[ nature; and this may indicate the' fundamental cause of his solitude. It u splendid to hear these royal outbursts from a distance; but a storm-centre is no place for the habitations of men. A life productive of so much energy must of necessity be a burden and a torment, promoting small hatreds and enmities 'hat can be justified only when time has completed its slow purification. Something of the same energy was at work in Shelley; but in his case its way was smoother. Though Shelley was a rebel, his revolt was little more than a sense of direction. He rose out of the world and lay like a gull upon the currents of air. With Byron, there was always a turmoil of waters below and a fury of winds above. Cross currents were in the surface that bore him, so that he was denied Shelley's "intenser day"; and if he looked upwards there was sure to be a change in the wind. The Problem of Suffering'. There are some who turn from the tormented life of Byron to the Apparent quietness of Browning's, and cry aloud upon his optimism, taying that it was the lading of a Weltered voyage, a sort of complacent gratitude : as with Phoenician mariners who creep from coast to coast or over an inland sea and •'-ame their protective Cabeiri the , l "preme deities of the universe, if they venture beyond the Pillars of Hercules into the long f urj;e and driven force of the great W-tan and suffer shipwreck under ti:t wet cliffs of some barren coast, '"ey are confounded in their faith, and are silent. Consider his life !a y these critics) and note its Peaceful way ; its freedom from poverty, its abundance of love, its <>uiet growth towards recognition fame. No wonder he could give nopa that outcry of contentment .'"ith her springtime world! Yet this ** manifestly unfair to one who Write the Pone's soliloquy in Ring and the Book" and ! r «rays but a surface-view. To j 'tallenge it <s to come near the j W"tib!em of suffering. We are like j •iidren in that we are easily j with sound and nioveSuffering that is beyond our- ;' v&s can be apprehended only in in direct evidence of in catastrophes and inexplic"si# visitations. Byron is pictur**SUe in his long wrestling with in®nal and external foes. Resistance as a necessity to him, so that lie J® 3 never able to learn the secret JjSgth of submission and the JCtory that lies shadowed beyond » e apparent finalitv of defeat, downing was quieter. But Ihcre u™..n° la-'.; ~f force, although its 1 ""erai expression was never ;

anything more than exuberance. And when I think of this power, always in slow crescendo, and consider the calmness , and noble symmetry of his life, I liegin to feel that this was the true' greatness of achievement: the union of turbulent creativeness with a sound stability of character. Could it be said, therefore, that Browning was a man who suffered lightly ? If escape be possible at all, it can be found only in apraLhy or in the unhealthy self-preoccupa-tion that comes upon those who endure long pain. The man of sensitive fibre, capable of thought and poetry, must face the issues of life at every turn of his way. In the most uneventful career there is an urgency of problems, the long attempt to reach a healthy spiritual climate, the loneliness of one who thinks of death and love, who discovers how far he must go without support, and considers the journey of those he loves and would follow with unselfish strength, were the way made possible. There are compensations, however, to be discovered by the artist in the development of his talent. In a curious way the visitations of fate cease to be destructive influences that are hurled into his life like thunderbolts from an unsearchable darkness. He finds that suffering is a contribution of raw material that may issue from his mind in new and lovely forms. To be able to accept suffering and turn it to account brings a savour of triumph that cannot be equalled on the giddiest height of fame. With so many men the blows and buffetings of fortune are interruptions from which they make but a slow recovery. In the indistinct and curtailed view of things that is allowed to human vision we can see only a segment of our lives at a given time; but our desires range wildly forward and complete all patterns in advance, so that when change brings disappointment we are ready to rail upon the universe, as if our personal well-being should have been the sole preoccupation of its guiding powers. The artist is as impatient as his fellows, and equally with them has his own ideas of what his future should be. But he is more quickly responsive to those forces that use him as if he were a plastic material in need of shaping. And nothing can rob him of the supreme joy that comes out of the purpose and function of his life. A true poet will go indomitably forward into a shadow as profound as night : he will create with the very materials of death. Consider Heine on his " mattress-grave," shut out from the flow and glitter that had been so long his necessary stimulus. Yet he writes out of pain, and in a mist that he knows to be the foreshadowing of death.

| Can it be that I still actually exist 7 !My body is so shrunk that there is I hardly anything of me left but my voice, and my bed makes me think of the melodious grave of the enI chanter Merlin, which is in the forest j of Broceliand in Brittany, under high ! oaks whose tops shine like green : flames to heaven. Ah, I envy thee | those trees, brother Merlin, and their fresh waving ! For over my mattressi grave here in Paris no green leaves j rustle; and early and late I hear i nothing but the rattle of carriages. | hammering, scolding, and the jingle j of the piano . . . | The passage ends on a note of sadI ness, like a renewed throbbing of ■ the pain that has been thrust aside ! by his imperious creative faculty ; ! but it is enough that he has been I able to rise so far and so quickly. ; Is not this the voice of one ol' God's I own creatures, obeying the inscrutable impulse of music ? ] Morning. ! | There is so much to do, and the i time is so short. The wistfulness , I of Heine is tinged with a terrible I finality ; but even in the days of | health he must have known the :(ear lof sterilitv. Few writers escape I anxiety lest their productive time is done ancl will not come again. ' We fret against the dimness of sense | and long for a sudden splendour of i vision, the sense of power which announces the incoming tide. There I is happiness in the production of ! good work that can be equalled I from no other source. We wake in I the mornings with a gladness that ' gives a faint aftertaste of the old I passionate love of mankind for the ] eturning dav. It lias been hymned in all the religions. The Vedas are I full of it. so that as we read their j songs we understand how slowly the peoples of antiquity lost their I wonder at the daily miracles how I fervently thev welcomed the sun 1 ; above the hills, how eagerly they ! rose up to take their share of the ' ; prodigal light. I believe that in his , creative time the artist lives again that early joyfulness of earth. It ! can seem remote enough when we look back from our station in a mechanised age; but although the streets are perilous with traffic and speed has become an affliction of nerves, there are islands to be found in the noisy seas. Silence lives on among the trees and above the grassy places that grow damp with dew in the night; and on tussockslopes in clear sunshine it is possible to discover the strange youthfulness of earth. In moments of sudden awe we feel our lives slipping from us as if we were small insects that display gauzy wings in the sunlight of a day and then are not known any more. We consider the rocks and the trees that survive their generations of leaves ; and if it weie possible we would shed this fevered consciousness, allowing it to hasten on in the implacable rhythm of time while a more essential self received the long slow pulse of earth. Joy of morning and youthfulness ! In the vigorous time of preparation we can give no thought to what must come after: the strange, wild weariness of reaction that the Greeks discovered and symbolised in the darker phase of Dionysus. Yet even in the beginning the way is not always easy. The approach of new work is not unlike the coming of music, which sometimes stirs 1 up a kind of opposition, as if the elements of self had got sullenly together and were making their stand against the tidal inflow. Who can j hear the ocean-music of Beethoven s later symphonies without bracing himself'against the long surge of its rhvthm and the tumultuous rising up" of its great chords ? But surrender is complete when it comes. Life, is a long dawning and the rising sun has its pristine energy. Of a uutn, i the golden age of the poets has not ! been lost down the dim ways of hisI tory. It lives now. as it has always lived, in the creative rhythm of I ar^s * s -

ANIMALS ON THE AIR

1 Bushland Broadcast. By Enid Prior. i Robertson and Mullens, Ltd., Mc.- | bourne. (5/- net.) I i Uncle Teddy, an important-look-ing native bear, and Aunt Polly, a sprightly cockatoo, are the announcers for this Bushland Broadcast, which is made from the 'lieait oC the Australian Bush." The book: is planned on the Jincs of a day s broadcasting, with two sessions of songs and stories by bushland performers. A certain amount of natural history is neatly dispensed in the jolly tales and verses. The numerous black and white illustrations by Florence Camm are more suitable than the four-colour plates. This book is suitable for children of about nine.