THE PALL MALL GAZETTE, MARCH 33, 1889
THE student of modern literature, turning to the spectacle of our modern life, notes there a variety and complexity which seem to defy the limitations of verse structure, as if more and more any large record of humanity must necessarily be in prose. Yet there is certainly abundant proof that the beauty and sorrow of the world can still kindle satisfying verse, in a volume recently published under the significant title of “Nights and Days,” being, in effect, concentrations, powerfully dramatic, of what we call the light and shadow of life; although, with Art, as Mr. Symons conceives —
Since, of man with trouble born to death She sings, her song is less of Days than Nights.
Readers of contemporary verse who may regret in much of it, amid an admirable achievement of poetic form, a certain lack of poetic matter, will find substance here — abundant poetic substance, developing, as by its own organic force, the poetic forms proper to it, with natural vigour.
Mr. Symons’s themes, then, are almost exclusively those of the present day, studied, as must needs happen with a very young writer, rather through literature than life; through the literature, however, which is most in touch with the actual life around us. “J’aime passionnément la passion,” he might say with Stendhal: and in two main forms. The reader of Dante will remember those words of La Pia in the “Purgatorio,” so dramatic in their brevity that they have seemed to interpret many a problematic scene of pictorial art. Shape their exacter meaning as we may, they record an instance of human passion, under the influence of some intellectual subtlety in the air, going to its end by paths round-about. Love’s casuistries, impassioned satiety, love’s inversion into cruelty, are experiences even more characteristic of our late day than of Dante’s somewhat sophisticated middle age; and it is just this complexion of sentiment — a grand passion, entangled in scruples, refinements, after-thoughts, reserved, repressed, but none the less masterful for that, conserving all its energies for expression in some unexpected way — that Mr. Symons presents, with unmistakable insight, in one group of his poems, at the head of which we should place “An Act of Mercy” — odd and remote, mercy’s self turned malignant — or “A Revenge,” or, perhaps, in long-drawn sonnet-series, “A Lover’s Progress” — progress, one half at least, in merely intellectual fineness, as if love had heard “All the Yea and Nay of life,” and taken his degree, in some school of metaphysical philosophy. Like the hero in his own “Interlude of Helena and Faustus,” the modern lover, as Mr. Symons conceives him, claims to have seen in their fulness The workings of the world Plato but dreamt of. He welcomes, as an added source of interest in the study of it, the curious subtlety to which the human soul has come even in its passions.
“Thy speech hath not the largeness of my sires,” says Helena to Faustus; but this “largeness” Mr. Symons attains in just the converse of this remotely conceived, exotic, casuistical passion, in that rural tragedy, the tragedy of the poor generally (the tyranny of love, here too, sometimes turning to cruelty), in a group of poignant stories, told with unflinching dramatic sincerity, which is not afraid of the smallest incident that has the suggestion of true feeling in it. The elementary passions of men and women in their exclusive strength, the fierce, vengeful sense of outraged honour in the humble, wild hunger, in mortal conflict with the ideal of homely dignity, as Crabbe or Wordsworth understood it, and, beyond these miserable, ragged ends of existence, the white dawn possible for humanity, for “Esther Bray,” for “Red Bredbury,” for “Margery of the Fens,” whose wronged honour and affection has made her a witch —
Go, and leave me alone. I’m past your help, I shall lie,
As she lay, through the night, and at morn, as she went in the rain, I shall die.
Go, and leave me alone. Let me die as I lived. But oh,
If the wind wouldn’t cry and wail with the baby’s cry as I got And this too, the tragedy of the poor as it must always be with us, finds its still more harshly satiric inverse in certain poems, like “A Café Singer,” and other Parisian grotesques, for the delineation of the deepest tragedy of all, underlying that world of sickly gaslight and artificial flowers which apes the tuberose conventionalities of the ultra-refined; often with a touch of lunacy about it, or the partial lunacy of narcotism—” the soul at pawn” — or that violent religious reaction which is like a narcotic. These very modern notes also are made to contribute their gloom to the dramatic effect of life in these poems.
Set over against this impressively painted series of nights and days, often forbidding, a faith in the eternal value of art is throughout maintained;
Art alone
Changeless among the changing made; as amply compensating for all other defects in the poet’s finding of things; though on what grounds we hardly see, except his own deep, unaffected sense of it Its witness to eternal beauty comes in directly, as nature itself, with tranquillising influence, contrives to do in this volume, in interludes of wholesome air, as through open doors, upon those hot, impassioned scenes. Yet close as art comes in these very poems, for example, to the lives of men, to interpret the beauty and sorrow there, Mr. Symons is anxious to disavow any practical pretension to alter or affect the nature of things thereby: —
“She probes an ancient wound yet brings no balm.”
And yet pity ( who that reads can doubt it? ) is a large constituent of this writer’s temper, — natural pity, contending with the somewhat artificial modern preference for telling and leaving a story in all its harsh, unrelieved effect The appeal of a pale, smitten face has perhaps never been rendered more touchingly than in “A Village Mariana.”
The complex, perhaps too matterful, soul of our century has found in Mr. Browning, and some other excellent modern English poets, the capacity for dealing masterfully with it, excepting only that it has been too much for their perfect lucidity of mind, or at least of style, so that they take a good deal of time to read. In an age of excellent poets, people sometimes speculate wherein any new and original force in poetry may be thought likely to reveal itself; and some may have thought that just as, for a poet after Dryden, nothing was left but correctness, and thereupon the genius of Pope became correct, with a correctness which made him profoundly original; so the cachet of a new-born poetry for ourselves may lie precisely in that gift of lucidity, given a genuine grapple with difficult matter. The finer pieces in this volume, certainly, any poet of our day might be glad to own, for their substance, their dramatic hold on life, their fine scholarship; and they have this eminent merit, among many fine qualities of style, — readers need fear no difficulty in them. In this new poet the rich poetic vintage of our time has run clear at last