By now my charms are all o’erthrown,
And what strength I have’s mine own,
Which is most faint: now ’tis true
I must be here confined by you
Or sent to Naples: Let me not
Since I have my Dukedome got,
And pardoned the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours, my sails
Must fill, or else my project fails,
Which was to please: Now I want
Spirits to enforce, Arts to enchant:
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so that it assaults
Mercy itself and frees all faults.[34]
The magician’s renunciation of his power is one of the most profound things in Shakespeare; he puts himself at the mercy of the elements which he has learned so painfully how to control. Perhaps Prospero in these lines shows that he had discovered the paradox in things; he had discovered that he who comes down to earth finds himself nearest to heaven.
It is a lesson which all magicians must learn sooner or later: whether they be saints or poets.
SOURCES
Ortho-Epia Gallica by John Eliot, 1593
Instruction for Forreine Travel by J. Howell, 1642
Travel-Diary of Fynes Moryson, 1617
Coryat’s Crudities by Tom Coryat, 1611
William Webbe, Hys Travels, 1604
Painful Peregrinations, etc., by William Lithgow, 1614
A Synoptic History of Corfu, with an account of a Famous Patron Saint by Dr. Theodore Stephanides, Corfu, 1938
Ideas About Poems
1942
1. Neither poet nor public is really interested in the poem itself but in aspects of it.
2. The poet is interested in the Personal aspect: the poem as an aspect of himself.
3. The public is interested in the Vicarious aspect; that is to say “the universal application,” which is an illusion that grows round a poem once the logical meaning is clear and the syntax ceases to puzzle.
4. This is why good poems get written despite bad poets and why bad publics often choose right.
MEANWHILE.
the poem itself is there all the time. The sum of these aspects, it is quite different to what the poet and the public imagine it to be. Like a child or a climate it is quite outside us and our theories don’t affect it in any way. Just as climate must be endured and children kept amused, the poem as a Fact must be dressed up sometimes and sent to the Zoo—to get rid of it. It is part of the ritual of endurance merely. That is the only explanation for Personal Landscape now.[1] People say that writing Poetry is one of the only non-Gadarene occupations left—but this is only another theory or aspect. Poems are Facts, and if they don’t speak for themselves it’s because they were born without tongues.
Ideas About Poems II
1942
The schizophrene, the cyclothyme,
Pass from the droll to the sublime.
Coming of epileptoid stock
They tell the time without a clock.
NONSENSE IS NEVER JUST NONSENSE; it is more like good sense with all the logic removed. At its highest point poetry makes use of nonsense in order to indicate a level of experience beyond the causality principle. You don’t quicken or laugh at nonsense because it is complete non-sense; but because you detect its resemblance to sense.
Logic, syntax, is a causal instrument, inadequate for the task of describing the whole of reality. Poems don’t describe, but they are sounding-boards which enable the alert consciousness to pick up the reverberations of the extra-causal reality for itself.
Poems are negatives; hold them up to a clean surface of daylight and you get an apprehension of grace. The words carry in them complete submerged poems; as you read your memory goes down like the loud pedal of a piano, and all tribal, personal, associations begin to reverberate. Poems are blueprints. They are not buildings but they enable you to build for yourself. Serious nonsense and funny nonsense are of the same order: both overreach causality and open a dimension independent of logic but quite real. Shakespear and Lear are twins who do not dress alike. Serious nonsense and comical nonsense have a common origin, and an uncommon expression.
Nothing is lost, sweet self
Nothing is ever lost.
The spoken word
Is not exhausted but can be heard.
Music that stains the silence remains,
O! echo is everywhere the unbeckonable bird![1]
The Heraldic Universe
1942
Logic tries to describe the world; but it is never found adequate for the task. Logic is not really an instrument: merely a method.
Describing, logic limits. Its law is causality.
Poetry by an associative approach transcends its own syntax in order not to describe but to be the cause of apprehension in others:
Transcending logic it invades a realm where unreason reigns, and where the relations between ideas are sympathetic and mysterious—affective—rather than causal, objective, substitutional.[1]
I call this The Heraldic Universe,[2] because in Heraldry the object is used in an emotive and affective sense—statically to body forth or utter: not as a victim of description.
The Heraldic Universe is that territory of experience in which the symbol exists—as opposed to the emblem or badge, which are the children of algebra and substitution.
It is not a “state of mind” but a continuous self-subsisting plane of reality towards which the spiritual self of man is trying to reach out through various media: artists like antennae boring into the unknown through music or paint or words, suddenly strike this Universe where for every object in the known world there exists an ideogram.[3]
Since words are inadequate they can only render all this negatively—by an oblique method.
“Art” then is only the smoked glass through which we can look at the dangerous sun.[4]
Hellene and Philhellene
1949
THE INFLUENCE OF HELLAS upon our own literature is a theme of sufficient interest today to tempt the skill of the essayist bold enough to face its implications fully; bold enough moreover to assess that influence in the terms of the new literature which the modern Greek is attempting so obstinately to forge from the popular tongue. “Hellas” is written rather than “Greece” in order first of all to point the difference between the Philhellene of yesterday and the Philhellene of today—for up to almost the present generation the passionate bias of the English writer and scholar has been towards the classical world. In a sense Greece has represented to him, in terms of landscape and climate, the flowering of an education. Those unmanageable verbs, those murderous moods and tenses, the quicksand of Attic syntax—they all seemed to fall into place to justify themselves against the Greek landscape. But the classical bias has had its defects no less than its virtues. It has tended to blindfold the traveller to the reality of contemporary Greece.[1] Wrapped like a mummy in his classical associations, he has been tempted to dismiss the Greeks of today with contempt. This attitude of neglect has remained a constant almost since the time when William Lithgow[2] visited Greece in the course of his painful but often amusing peregrinations. It is difficult perhaps to say exactly why and exactly when it changed.
Trelawny has recorded Shelley’s[3] emotions on being taken aboard a dirty Greek caïque at Leghorn. “As you are writing a poem Hellas, about the modern Greeks,” said Trelawny, not without a certain sly humour,
would it not be as well to take a look at them? I hear their shrill nasal voices and should like to know if you can trace in the language or lineaments of these Greeks of the 19th century A.D. the faintest resemblance to the lofty and sublime spirits who lived in the fourth century B.C. An English merchant who has dealings with them told me he thought these modern Greeks were
if judged by their actions a cross between the Jews and the Gypsies.[4]
It was a difficult question to put to a Philhellene of Shelley’s kind. Yet it was a point well worth trying to clear up. Reluctantly the poet of freedom was dragged aboard the vessel to stand in the midst of her “chattering and irascible crew.…They squatted about the decks in small knots, shrieking, gesticulating, smoking, eating, and gambling like savages.” Trelawny watched Shelley’s face as the poet stood among them. “Does this realize your idea of Hellenism, Shelley?” he asked at last.[5]
“No. But it does of Hell,” replied the poet in hollow tones anxious to escape back into fancy and leave the cold facts to take care of themselves. But Trelawny had not yet finished. They visited the captain in his cabin, where a “flaming gaudy daub of a saint” looked down at them in the light of the spirit-lamp which burned before him. The saint was San Spiridione[6]—which suggests that the vessel was a caïque of Corfu. Shelley made a few desultory attempts to interest the captain in the Greek revolution. The captain was against the whole idea, he discovered to his horror, because it was interfering with trade. “Come away,” gasped Shelley, at last, dragging his burly companion by the arm, “there is not a drop of the old Hellenic blood here. These are not the men to rekindle the ancient Greek fire; their souls are extinguished by traffic and superstition.”[7]
It is a pity that he did not live to qualify his opinions in the light of the events of 1940.[8] Yet in a sense the moral growth and awakening of modern Greece has been due as much to Byron and Shelley as to the help of those powers concerned purely with political considerations of territorial freedom. With their passionate restatement of classical values and their hatred of tyranny they struck a chord in the Greek heart which echoes on even today; a chord which not even political misunderstandings can ever silence. It was Byron, it was Shelley, who morally re-armed the defeated and disunited little nation. And though the part the former played in the War of Independence is not without certain comic opera elements of an unheroic kind (Byron’s procrastinations, his uniforms, his irritation with the Greeks for being un-Homeric), the Greeks owe English poets and poetry a great debt. And they are deeply conscious of the fact. To the Greek peasant of today every Englishman is in some sort a great-grandchild of the famous Byron, and he reaps in terms of friendship and hospitality the love and reverence that the poet himself did not live to enjoy. Yet there is no doubt that Byron shared some of Shelley’s opinions about the modern Greeks. He shared much of the despondency and gloom which his fellow-poet felt when brought face to face with a jabbering Corfiot ship’s crew. It is clear then that both poets had their eyes very firmly bandaged by the classics they had studied. Byron, it is true, knew and loved Greece. He had even troubled to learn Romaic[9] during his Athenian stay. “Byron formed his opinion of the inhabitants of this planet from books,” says Trelawny acidly, and goes on to add: “Personally he knew as little about them as if he belonged to some other.”[10] The charge is a harsh one but it contains the elements of truth. Yet what distinguishes the writings of Trelawny from those of the two poets is precisely a sense of human values. Trelawny judged human beings according to the terms of a large and very comprehensive experience of men and affairs. He does not whitewash the character or behaviour of the Greeks, yet he is the only one who came to be on terms of intimate friendship with them, and whose record and evaluation of their character rings absolutely true. While he was sensible of the poetic and historic values of the day, he did not diminish the war-like virtues of the Greeks he knew by measuring them against the mythical picture-book Hellene. This perhaps accounts for the soundness of his judgements and the simple honesty with which he records them.
The later Victorians interested themselves in the Klephtic ballads of Greece which so strongly resemble our Scots Border ballads; the anthropological works of Sir James Frazer and Tylor[11] stimulated the inquiry into modern Greek folklore so ably conducted by Sir Rennell Rodd and G.F. Abbott[12] about the turn of the century. By laying bare the framework of modern Greek superstition, these two scholars succeeded in tracing with accuracy and force the direct connection existing between the customs of ancient and modern Greek. Their laboratory was the peasant tongue, the peasant calendar, the whole complex of contemporary belief in Greece; and in the light of their findings the classical ancestry of much that is modern in Greece became clear. The bandages of prejudice and misconception were withdrawn. The classical scholar began to find himself no longer at sea in modern Greece, but very much at home. His equipment was no longer an obstruction but an aid to his quickened sensibility. He found points of reference everywhere in terms of myth and history and manners; such a rediscovery of Greece added immediately to his pleasure in wine, food, and landscape. The sentimentalist in him, at any rate, rediscovered a historic sanction which could now be applied to retzina, ikons, and State lotteries no less than to ancient Greek sculpture. The range of literary evocation had widened. He began to understand fully how different his Greece—the Greece of today—was from the Greece of Byron and Shelley.
But if the scholar’s Philhellenism has modified itself within the last two generations, no less of a change can be found among the writers and travellers who have visited Greece, or written books about it. Virginia Woolf, for example, in her essay “On Not Knowing Greek,”[13] wonders whether Greek literature is not for us simply “a summer’s day imagined in the heart of a northern winter.”[14] The question was well worth asking, and to some extent it has been already answered by poets like Mr. Rex Warner[15] and Mr. Louis MacNeice,[16] who have given us ancient Greek dramas retranslated into English. We have begun to see the Greeks as something more than Homeric silhouettes. Even Homer has changed in the light of new translations by T.E. Lawrence and Mr. E.V. Rieu.[17] He has moved closer within the range of common familiarity, closer to the common reader.
It would be a rewarding task to attempt a sketch of modern Greek literature from 1821 in order to try to establish whether there are signs that Greek writing has begun to assume a European, instead of a purely national, validity. No literature, to begin with, has depended upon purely linguistic questions to quite the same extent, and if we mark the emergence of Dionysios Solomos and Calvos[18] during the War of Independence as the first birthday of modern Greek poetry, we should not forget how immense their problems were.
The sterility and darkness which lie over the later Byzantine period are a historical commonplace. Four centuries of Turkish rule all but extinguished the Greek spirit, however, and today it seems clear that had it not been for the monk and the bandit the emergence of a new literature might have been delayed perhaps for centuries. It was this unholy alliance that kept the face of the Greek peasants turned towards their ancestors, kept them alive to the responsibilities of their culture. Such literature as there was flowered in the folk-song, while the flavour and ambience of the mother-tongue were preserved in the Church services that the townsman so often heard gabbled out by the illiterate Greek priests.
A Greek poet of the time of Byron was confronted by much the same sort of problem as an early Elizabethan. He was doubtful about the propriety of writing in so vulgar a medium as demotic.[19] He suffered also from the critic and the literary reactionary, who decried his happiest attempts in the popular idiom and told him he was un-Greek to attempt such works. It was almost as if the pedantries of Gabriel Harvey[20] were being re-stated. The popular tongue had yet to win its spurs. Critical taste and conservatism set up barriers around the poet, and it is possible that he would never have conquered them had he not recognized his creature kinship with the border ballads, the lovely clearly woven poetry of the peasant folk, the spells and riddles, the acrostics and marriage songs of the islands and the hills. It is directly from this oral poetic tradition that the poetry of Dionysios Solomos springs.