page 48

Realism in Poetry.

To what lengths a poet should go in his use of realism, is an open question. To-day there is an increasing desire for a Zola of verse. People are not satisfied to leave the dregs in the kitchen-sink: they want to know what these are and of what they are composed. "There are all sorts of interesting things in a heap of offal,' they say, "so let us have an analysis of it." From the point of view of the scientist this may be praiseworthy, but clearly the function of a poet is not to satisfy such instincts. Poetry should be, first and foremost, song, and its appeal neither revolutionary nor didactic nor pornographic, but aesthetic. Without necessarily being emotional, it should evoke a mood. Where the poet sings of love and introduces sexual odours, he merely evokes discomfort and surprise. The latter is caused, not by his talent, but by his lack of good taste. The Chinese poet, Po Chu-i, lauded the smell of his lady's armpits, but we are not the Chinese. To us, many of their ideas are unclean.

The opposite tendency, with its draperies and its Cranford. is Mid-Victorianism. The recent stimulus against this came from Rupert Brooke. His "Channel Passage" and his "Jealousy" have been quoted so often that they must now be familiar to all readers. He is the real precursor of the movement as Meredith and Hardy were the precursors of the modem novel. Amongst his followers are Oswald Sitwell (of "Wheels" fame) and Aldous Huxley (author of "Leda" and "Limbo"). Take the latter's lines in "Frascati's":

"What steam of blood or kidney pie?
"What blasts of Bantu melody?"

and then

"............we sit in blissful calm
"Quietly sweating palm to palm."

No one doubts that this is clever ragtime verse. It was a somewhat similar quality of cleverness that characterised the nineties, There is also about an equal amount of sincerity. But from so fine an artist as Lascelles Abercrombie one expects an avoidance of subjects and subject-matter which he knows are unsuitable to poetic expression. We can see nothing beautiful, nothing even appealing, in a conversation that takes place in a bar between a slattern and a. number of drunken men:

"'She cannot do it!' one was bawling out;
"A glaring hulk of flesh with a bull's voice.
"He finger'd with his neckerchief, and stretcht
"His throat to ease the anger of dispute,
"Then spat to put a full stop to the matter."

It may be, as the author says, "Witchcraft—New Style;" but let us have the old style and be done with it. There are, however, instances when realism that aims at being excessively sentimental or excessively simple has the virtue of being genuinely amusing. We know what happened to Wordsworth's blind boy, and so when Alfred Noyes asks us to read this, we feel instinctively that tragedy is near at hand:

"For he used to buy the yellow penny dreadfuls,
"And read them where he fished for conger-eels,
"And listened to the lapping of the water,
"The green and oily water round the keels."

page 49

Yet Alfred's little boy has a fellow to share his fate. He appears in Robert Graves's "Country Sentiment," and we cannot leave him without making the observation, however unkindly this may be, that the country churchyard has delayed its sentiment all too long. After enquiring the whereabouts of the page boy of the Hawk and Buckle, the poet says:

"And what of our young Charlie this hot. summer weather?
"He is bobbing for tiddlers in a little trickle-truckle,
"With his line and his hook and his breeches of leather."

Were the writer an elderly and inexperienced sentimentalist who had taken up poetry as a mission or as a hobby, we might forgive him. But to Graves the absurdity of the lines must be apparent. They are puerile. We have a right to cavil at them. Of late we have suffered much of this sort of thing. There is Saul Kane the blaggard and little Jimmy Jaggard. There is also Masefield's blacksmith, who,

".......in his sparky forge
"Beat on the white-hot softness there;
"Ever as he sang an air
"To keep the sparks out of his gorge."

Perhaps he did. Poor chap! he cannot prevent ours from rising. For sheer ugliness, the last line rivals Meredith's "Or is't the widowed's dream of her new mate," which Arthur Symons declares to be the ugliest line in the English language. We have indeed suffered much. Come, let's have an end to it!

—W. E. L.