(Dedicated to the Poets’ Club)
I WILL ask the reader to approach with me in fancy any great city. Let us suppose the open country to be already behind us, a sombre look has come upon the sky, a trodden look on the grass; the air has the look of brooding over some regrettable thing; the hoardings, always ugly, always false, often indecent, which have been with us all day into distant wolds, multiply here, and suddenly the mean streets rush on us. And how terrible is their meanness. The poorest cottager beyond in the country, the remote dweller in tents, even houseless wanderers, may turn at any moment, however hard their lot, to the hills, the wild wind, the heath, to something that is not in itself base, but is part of a scheme in which the stars themselves have part. But in a town! The night is a glare of factories, and the day an asset. And night and day they are reading, reading, reading — children and grown men always reading, whether they will or not. Reading, reading, reading, till they hardly even know that they read any longer. And what do they read? All that is basest. All the mean, cunning words of the advertiser praising his poisonous wares which no Government dare put down because they know that the power of the fraudulent cure is too great to be attacked either with safety or remunerative applause. So the poster stands unchecked, the literature of a people; stands in this den of man, the modern factory city, a record of man’s ambition.
Surely as one looks at all these things one’s mind is on a high, dangerous place, with the gulfs of pessimism all black beneath it. It is then that one turns to the poets. One sees the holy traditions, the cloak of Homer being passed reverently on. I hear them say that there are no poets nowadays, and I listen respectfully to that judgment whenever I hear men utter it, for it is no less awful a thing than judgment upon themselves. It means that they are all alone without an interpreter. For how can one view and understand so old a thing as life or so new and strange a thing as this varying age, so full of machinery and politics, without the help of those rare minds that look, without reeling, upon essential things?
There are only two ways of understanding life: we could do it ourselves no doubt if we had the time, but threescore years and ten are not long enough; nor is the time long enough, though one add to that span twenty or twenty-five of those extra years that the Psalmist says are all labour and sorrow. There are only two ways of understanding life: one is to find some ancient folk, some age-old peasantry, and borrow from the storehouse of their wisdom which they have had leisure to fill while wars and earthquakes troubled the thrones and citadels of kings. I never hear a nursery rhyme nor an old saying but it comes to me in this age, that trade and politics have made so sordid, like a little cool breeze into a stifling town out of some far, quiet hills. And the only other way of which I know to come at the meaning of life and the scheme of man is to turn to the poets. No man in his lifetime indeed can understand it, and I do not think that any poet would claim to or would pretend to know more than any other man; but then at moments unknown, always unexpected, there comes that clear voice in his mind, and with a feeling surely of ignorance and of awe he finds himself speaking of cities he has known and byways he has trod in lands where the desert has long since covered all, coming back again to its own, where the historian can only guess and the traveller durst not go. He speaks of things that were before cities began, and of gods that walked with him in the prime of the stars. The voice passes (like the wind in the gospel of John), and he is only a man again, with a man’s humiliations.
It seems to me that in some way beyond our understanding the poet, in the depth of his experience and the wide range of his knowledge, is to be compared with the many generations of a whole people rather than with individuals; and the final product of the culture of man seems to be little more than a return to a certain simplicity that was long since.
Never, as in this time it seems to me, have we so much needed guidance from the poets; for eighty years machinery has altered and increased, changing and changing again the face of England, changing our habits, our needs, our mode of life, our thoughts, our language, and our very selves. We are very proud of it, we boast of it, we are glad that we have changed quicker than others change; and what is it all for? — where are we going? I have not seen the answers in the Press; there is no clue to it in the Palace of Westminster; they do not know in either House of Parliament.
And the poets go on writing as of old. Sometimes they write of high ethereal things that are as far from us as the gates of the dawn, like that remote, unplaced, undated play, Yeats’ King’s Threshold; and sometimes they write about our daily affairs, as in Masefield’s Widow in Bye Street. And in the one case I hear men and women say, “Yes, I would read poetry if only poets would write about the things that interest us, the things of our own time.” And in the other case they say, “It is too sordid; a poet should not write of such sordid things.” Thus they speak when the poet’s mothwinged fancy flits down to the very fields that they themselves, the people of this age, have slimed and made foul with gold.
And if we do not hear them, if the fashion is to be mending oleographs that the jigsaw hath eaten and not reading poetry, whence, then, shall we get our wisdom? We are removed, so terribly removed and utterly cut off, from all the simple peoples of the earth, that it is not from them that we shall learn our destiny. He would shift his pipe in his mouth if we asked one of them, and look long in front of him before he spoke; for there is no hurry in the rural places where things have gone easily, but for winter and war, since ever the quiet folk came there far back in the story of Time; he would be silent perhaps for a while before he answered, and then would speak with an accent so unfamiliar and words so unlike those hallowed only this morning by the latest editions of the daily Press that we might find something whimsical in such a man, and smile and turn away; so may Adam and Eve, as they left the garden, have found something a little uncouth in the angel’s speech. Yet it seems to me, as I watch the glare of our factories, or hear the roar of our towns and the sound going up from Progress upon her ravenous path, it seems to me that man has sailed out of his course and is steering by bad stars. And the terrible evil of it is this: that the further he goes, the harder it becomes for him to hear any voice that calls him back. I mean that this recent redundancy and elaboration of speech, of which an example is the ridiculous spectacle of modern Cabinet Ministers standing up and saying, “The answer is in the affirmative,” when all they mean is “Yes” — those pompous and meaningless phrases that eke out sixpence for the needy journalist when all he had to say would fill one line at a penny; and, final horror of all, the language of the advertisement begotten of avarice and bred in America: all this so rots the mind that true and simple things come to seem false, and men no longer hear when the poet speaks. That is not the concern of the poet. It is not for him to find hearers, not for him to get wealth or ease or applause of men. It is not for him to ask why the message came to himself while other men may rest, nor even to ask whence it came, nor for what end. It is for him to work on with that flame in the mind which is the bane and blessing of the inspired. Time will bring readers — in ten years one or two, in twenty years ten or a dozen, then in a decade a hundred, then a thousand, ten thousand in ten years more, and some day millions; and still Time goes on, nor stops because we cease to imagine his progress, and the day comes when every child on the earth has perhaps one little fancy in its mind that its forbears got from the dreams of that neglected poet, which have become the world’s inheritance.
“But,” they will say to me, “the poet is dead.” What is that to the poet? It is not for any reward that may be put into live hands that the poet works. Who knows for whom his inspiration was sent? Who knows to what end? Perhaps to guide the kings of some far-future age; and perhaps the poet is picked out from all other men as a punishment for some sin committed in other lands long, long ago, which the stars still remember.
They think that because they do not heed the poets they are right upon the course that they have chosen, right to make money by false patriotism and poisonous bread and adulterated wine, and that the poets are wrong. But the poets are never wrong, never have erred in the history of the world, have only failed (how many times they know) to give the message, but their inspiration comes sheer from the Palace of Truth, and what they say is beautiful is so, so long as they are true to their inspiration, and what they say is damnable is already damned in heaven. They reflect what is as lakes reflect it. Can a lake reflect three trees when there are only two, or can a white bird swimming on it seem black, or a crooked branch seem straight? They cannot be wrong, for they weave their work of sincerity, beauty, and truth; and evil days are in store for those prosperous cities that turn away from these things. Let them work on; it is not for them to find readers. But when the poet comes to an age that will not heed his words, let him shake off that dust that is flesh and pass hence; let him go back whither he has come; and not in the day of judgment only shall it be better for Sodom and Gomorrah than for that age, but in its own time its own people shall eke out their own damnation — for what is it to hate poetry? It is to have no little dreams and fancies, no holy memories of golden days, to be unmoved by serene midsummer evenings or dawn over wild lands, singing or sunshine, little tales told by the fire a long while since, glow-worms and briar-rose; for of all these things and more is poetry made. It is to be cut off for ever from the fellowship of great men that are gone; to see men and women without their haloes and the world without its glory; to miss the meaning lurking behind common things, like elves hiding in flowers; it is to beat one’s hands all day against the gates of Fairyland, and to find that they are shut and the country empty and its kings gone hence.
Perhaps I have drawn something too grim a picture. Certain it is that poetry does not pay, and certain that many judge it for this reason and find poetry wanting. Yet no bad custom endures for very long or survives the laughter of posterity, and I think there are signs already of changes coming. It is not wonderful that for one or two generations (and how short are one or two generations in the long, long story of Man), it is not wonderful that for a little while we have turned Materialists: matter has been so marvellous. No record in the histories of the world shows any age in which matter has done such astounding things as in the last hundred years — that is to say, matter to the glory of matter, and matter exulting in material things. I do not think that a motor or great factory is any more wonderful than the cathedrals of England, or Notre Dame or St. Mark’s, or those tremendous dreams of bygone kings that marble and granite have realised in Egypt; but matter is subservient to the spirit in these. Never before to-day has it been so great for its own sake. What will it be to-morrow? Shall we always go on toiling and blackening our sky to make machines ever more wonderful still, or shall we not turn from matter because it has failed us? It has had its turn, we have worshipped it all these many years; it has given us swiftness; Man can move now by mono-rail at a hundred miles an hour, and it is not fast enough — all the old troubles, old cares, old sicknesses keep pace with us: aye, and the new diseases and new cares too. Is it not time to turn away from it? Our triumph over matter has been matter’s triumph over us, and, like a great antagonist, matter cares not that we think we have won the game that we have lost. Look at us after our triumph; look at the stunted figures of the Midlands; look at the careworn faces; look at the full and terrible asylums every year growing fuller; look at the feeble, frantic politicians trying to soothe blind, angry, inarticulate labour. Man is become so very, very wise, has so closely studied the papers; he is as wise as some old and learned professor caught in a crowd and not knowing which way to turn.
The soul is not soothed by a hundred miles an hour, the mind is not made easy in shops in Bond Street by four hundred and five hundred per cent, profits, nor yet may happiness be found for certain even by all the wickedness of honoured and wealthy vendors of patent drugs and adulterated food. With such men as these last, money will always remain; but more and more every year I hope we may find men turning away towards simplicity and beauty, realising that though money may buy happiness, yet it is only a medium, while the poets have on sale in exchange for nothing those ideals, fancies, and phantasies out of which happiness is made. For not a penny is earned, not a thing done but it was to help to carry out some man’s ambition to make some little fancy a little easier; and men’s ambitions and men’s fancies are the poet’s raw material, and it is only short-sighted, unpractical millionaires that think that the stamped gold coins which they give their days in exchange for are at all an end in themselves, or that fail to see that that very happiness that they hope their money may buy is often thrown away for the sake of making that money. O all ye business men, praise ye money, for I sometimes think it is all you ever get. It may be that before we grow simpler and sincerer we may grow even worse. A substitute is yet to be found for water, as there has been for beer and salt; it is yet to be widely advertised, sold, and drunk like many another wickedness, but people must some day turn from all these things and go one by one to the camp where the good men dwell — not the poets only, but all who do work for its own sake and do it well. There are two great divisions among them, the true and the sham; I judge them by their works. In one class are all the snobs, all the pretenders, the writers of advertisements, the keepers of shops (except such as are honest), the makers of antique furniture and the buyers of it, the manufacturers of all things that are meant to look what they are not, the lovers of ugliness, not all the sinners, but all that sin meanly for the sake of gain, however honoured their stations. And in the other class are the men with spades, men near to the fields and natural like the harvests, soldiers and sailors, patriots, not politicians, common labourers, not labour-leaders, policemen, kings, and all (though happily the list is too long) who do any work well for the sake of the work, and not so as to sell it at an unjust price to the first ignorant customer. In this class are the poets. And this whole class should hold fast together to resist the false that is spreading over the world — false knowledge, false work, false food. The rough seafaring man may be ignorant of the poet, but they have the bond between them of work well done, which sets them utterly apart from the mean makers of cough-cures, and Cabinet Ministers answering in the affirmative.
And of such a class the poets should be the leaders; for of all materials for labour, dreams are the hardest, and the artificer in ideas is the chief of workers, who out of nothing will make a piece of work that may-stop a child from crying or lead nations to higher things. For what is it to be a poet? It is to see at a glance the glory of the world, to see beauty in all its forms and manifestations, to feel ugliness like a pain, to resent the wrongs of others as bitterly as one’s own, to know mankind as others know single men, to know Nature as botanists know a flower, to be thought a fool, to hear at moments the clear voice of God.
Dunsany.