FROM . . . Bookstall and Study.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 17698, 19 November 1925, Page 12

FROM . . . Bookstall and Study.

A GEORGIAN POET.

EDWARD SHANKS ON HIMSELF. Edward Shanks one of tbo most brilliant of the Georgian poets, has written in “T.P.’s and Cassell’s Weekly” »n interesting account of his career ns poet. Shanks is a poet who tinds his spiritual kindred in the work of Keats, and it was J. G. Squire who first commended him to public attention. This is how Shanks writes in prose of himself: If he has never done so before, at least when a- man is inVited to write his reminiscences be must ask himself the. frightening question : “Who am I? ’ T have done it before, and I do it now again, and the answer is always tbo same. My memory is mv real self. Take that awijy from me and I shall cease to exist. The continuity of the self is continuity of the memory. Person a.l immortality must mean immortality of the memory ; and T will not give you a thank you for any scheme of reincarnation keeping alive some spark of which I know nothing and throwing into eternal darkness what I felt when first. I saw the sky and the sea, the flowers and tho fireflies of Italy. As it happens, T have just made, for a purpose which does not matter here, a complete list in chronological order of all the poems T have ever written. Whether they are good pcems or not matters just as little. I may bo permitted to hold the opinion that they aro not so bad ; but whether I do or not. whether they are or not, is immaterial. I speak of them here only as remaining signs of tilings that have happened to me. And more and more, in fact, do I cease to care about them considered from the standpoint of literature- They are for me, and J think that all lyric poetry, at any rate, originally is in the nature of a diarv. !*! W M This makes a diary in which, to he sure, there is not a great number of entries. Not so many even as to average one a. month for tho last fifteen years—hut each one an entry preserving a definite memory for me and often lighting up a whole tract of time round about it. To-day I allowed my eye to drift down the list, and T was astonished to find how much had been caught up in that tenuous well. I let my mind drift with the eve. and into it there floated various pictures. Now the title of a poem would recall the place about which it was written, now tho place where it Mas written. Some verses on the death of a friend took me in a flash to the dining-room of the hoardinghouse where one morning T road in ‘‘The Times” with urief and astonishment that he was dead.v One poem irresistibly suggested to me the top of a tram, another the top of a ’bus. I tried to dismiss these apparently irrelevant suggestions; hut they would not he driven a way, and as T meditated on them the pictures grew more vivid and justified themselves. On the top of a ’bus, on a warm evening of late spring, with childish impatience (for one might have awaited a better opportunity) I showed one of these poems to the"'person for whom it was written, and waited eagerlv to hear how she liked it. The other picture defined itself into the top of a. tram, an electric tram, which paused in the Essex Hoad on a dark, wet evening of October, 1914. There was a post office below me on mv left hand (but whv should I remember that?), and all the lights shone greasily on the wet pavement. And, amid a medley of thoughts that in all likelihood T was goinrr to he killed, verv soon and what a pity it was. T reflected just at that moment that the poem I had finished an hour or so before was a. verv cord poem and might survive me. This is what T am now reminded of when I see the title of that pcem. At another point on the list there is a sonnet, of which my first thought is that the sestet is decidedly inferior ! to the octave. And my second j thought is that when it was written thirteen years ago I had a good reason j for the falling off. What was it? The picture grows clearer and tells me. I am sitting in my rooms at Gam bridge. I am sitting at my dining-table, which is so much covered with books and papers that I can never eat at it, but must take my meals as best I can from the. writing-table. And I have just scribbled off the first eight lines of this sonnet, in the little circle of light thrown by the table-lamp, when two or three “ people of importance ar- ; rive. It was, I remember, thrust out of sight while they stayed, and lamely . finished when they had gone. Some pieces, as I go farther down | the list, recall to me both where they were written and why. One. jotted i down in pencil on the page of a notebook in an inn bedroom in Gloucester- J shire, is about one of the hills near I Washington, in Sussex; and both pictures come so rapidly into my mind that I could not say which of them comes first. And some remind me of lonely walks when their first lines sprang into my mind, and some even of the circumstances in which I first saw them in print. And some have moments associated inseparably with them for which I cannot account at all. But each one of them has associated to it some stretch of the past, some phase of experience, and preserves it for me for ever. These are the days of my youth, and for me, happily, they continue to exist in these relics. For when one begins to reflect on them thus, youth has gone. There is another sign—when one begins every night, reluctantly but prudently, to shepherd oneself to bed, for fear of what one will be like in the morning. Yes; I am afraid there is no doubt about it. j But, if one relishes enough one’s mo- j ments of life, even an uneventful youth is a pleasant possession to have thus embalmed. And there are many more moments, too, which are preserved by the recollection of poems which have never succeeded in getting themselves written. One in particular- is always with me. for it first provoked me to write in the attempt, never yet successful, to lay the ghost of its torturing sweetness. ’I was convalescent from a long, dangerous and exhausting illness, and I was . carried for the first time out of doors into a garden which stood on the site of an old orchard. There I lay wrapped, with the warm spring air playing on my hands and face, filled with the pleasant fatigue of the long, doubtful struggle not to die; and all round me. on my lap and my mouth and my eves, fell showers of the white petals from the fruit trees, piling on

the lawn in little drifts as they were blown by a gentle wind. Ever since that day of emotion I have been mad about poetry, and a little mad about flow'ering trees; but that poem, I suppose, I shall never write, or, if 1 did, it might be the last poem of all. For in some way that moment stands for the impulse to write poetry, which is the impulse at once to rid oneself of the emotion of the moment and to keep it for ever.

BOOSTING A POET.

SWINBURNE AND WHITMAN. Send us a song oversea for us, Heart of their hearts who are free, Heart of tlu*ir singing to be'for us Mere than our singing can be. So Swinburne acclaimed Walt. 'Whitman after rending “ Leaves of Grass ” (writes “John o’ London’s Weekly”)He was acclaimed in prose at the same time by William Michael Rossetti. Robert Buc-hanan, and Edward Dowden ; and now a strange story on the subject comes to us from Dr A. 11. Millar, who, in a letter to the “ Scotsman.’’ declares that “in the early ‘ seventies ’ ” ..Rossetti “ approached three of bis literary friends and suggested that it would be a good joke‘to foist an inferior literary man upon the public, and test the gullibility of that public by belauding his productions.” Whitman, he adds, was the corpus vile selected for the experiment. and his great reputation in these islands is merely the outcome of that hoax. There are, beyond question, passages in the works of “ the good erev poet ” which give colour to the story: passages of which one might justly sav that anyone who discovered poetry in them would he capable of discovering it. in the catalogues of the departmental stores; such lines as these for instance : The implements for daguerrot.ypln?— the tools of the rigger, grappler, sail-maker, block-maker, Goods of gutta-percha, papier-mache, colours, brushes, brush-making, glaThc veneer nffgli/e- pot. the confectionglasses, the shears and flat-iron. But there are other lines in Whitman of a very different quality : some of the lines in “ Pioneers. O Pioneers,” and the lines on the death of Lincoln, which silenced all tho scoffers when W. E Henley read them aloud: My captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still: My father does not feel my arm, lie has no pulse nor will. But the ship, the ship is anchored safe, its voyage closed and done: From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won! Exult, (j sh r s! and ring, O bells! But T. wi silent tread. Walk the spot my Captain lies, Fallen cold and dead. Surely it is equally hard to believe that any combination of critics could have made tho author of tho first of these excerpts famous and that the author of the second depended for his renown on their approval. Nor does Dr Millar give us any adequate evidence of. the existence of the plot which lie claims to have exposed. He tells us, indeed, that the Into Peter Bayne, writing in tho “Contemporary,” “ distinctly charged Dowden, Swinburne. Rossetti. ami Buchanan with a plot to deceive British rea.ders ” ; but Bayne’s article does not really contain any “charge” whatsoever. His statement is merely that such critics could not possibly have praised such rubbish except for the purpose of fooling their readers. It is an inference, not an allegation. There is no proof of collusion and im hint that proof could bo produced if required. Has Dr Millar found any proofs? If so, why does he not publish them? His story, as it stands, contains both improbabilities and inaccuracies. His dates are wrong. It was not in the “ seventies ” hut in the “ sixties” that Rossetti began to blow Walt Whitman’s trumpet. His first article on Whitman appeared in the “Chronicle ” in 1867 : his selection (with a prefatory notice) of Whitman’s poems, in 1868- Buchanan, it' is true, soon echoed his paean ; hut Bowden’s panegyric did not appear until 187 L—a delay which suggests anything rather than a concerted attempt to fool tho public. Nor was Rossetti’s even the first critic to praise Whitman in English periodicals. He himself cites several predecessors in his “Prefatory Notice.” They included W. J. Fox. reviewers in the “ Leader.” the “ Pall .Mall Gazette.” and the “London Review,” and Moncure Conway, whose long and laudatory arfide on Whitman appeared in the “ Fortnightly ” in October. 1886. His copv of “ Leaves of Grass ” was odven to him bv William Bell Scott in I 860: and lie writes, in a. dedicatory letter to Scott: Some years afterwards, getting to know our friend Swinburne, L' found much satisfaction that he also was an ardent (not of course a blind) admirer of Whitman. Satisfaction, and a degree almost of surprise; for his intense sense of poetic refinement of form in his own works and his exactness and acuteness ns a. critic might have seemed likely to carry him away ftom Whitman in sympathy at least, if not in actual latitude of perception. That hardly suggests a plot to perpetrate a hoax ; and one may safely say that Swinburne was the only one of the three alleged conspirators temperamentally capable of planning such a conspiracy, or occupying such a position in the world of letters as would have given the false “ boom ” a fair prospect of success. To Swinburne the idea might perhaps have come. lie afterwards, as is known, “went hack” cm what he had said about Whitman, in an article which suggests that someone had appealed from the earlier Swinburne, “ charioted by Bacchus and his pards.” to the later Swinburne who besought Theodore Watts-Dun ton to choose his path for him. It is known, too. that, in the days of his youth, he was addicted to literarv. hoaxes. But one cannot build a theory of a. conspiracy on those facts; for it is no more possible for a. man to conspire all alone than for a bird to flock in a corner by itself.