Uniformity, homogeneity, cohesion, selection scavenging for verisimilitude (the stock-in-trade exactly of the naturalism that Proust abominated), these are the Professor’s tastes, and they are distressed by the passage of intuition and intellection hand in hand, by Mme de Marsantes a saint and a snob in the one breath, by the narrator boy and man without transition, by the inconsequences of Swann, Odette, Saint-Loup, Gilberte, Mme de Villeparisis and even poor Jupien, but most of all by the stupefying antics of those two indeterminates, Charlus and Albertine. And out of their distress they cry for the sweet reasonableness of plane psychology à la Balzac, for the narrational trajectory that is more like a respectable parabola and less like the chart of an ague, and for Time, proclaiming its day of the month and the state of its weather, to elapse in an orderly manner. It is almost as though Proust should be reproached for having written a social Voyage of the Beagle.
Professor Feuillerat rides the antithesis to death. There is no shortage of critical analysis in the original text, nor of impressionism in the interpolations. That which is added is an intensification, not a disclaimer, of the initial conception and method. If there is mésalliance, as for the purists there must be, it was there from the start. And is it not precisely this conflict between intervention and quietism, only rarely to be resolved through the uncontrollable agency of unconscious memory, and its statement without the plausible frills that constitute the essence of Proust’s originality? The book is the search, stated in the full complexity of all its clues and blind alleys, for that resolution, and not the compte rendu after the event, of a round trip. His material, pulverized by time, obliterated by habit, mutilated in the clockwork of memory, he communicates as he can, in dribs and drabs. These, no doubt, when finally by chance the resolution is consummated in the Hotel de Guermantes and the comedy announced as shortly to be withdrawn, may be added up, like those of a life, and cooked to give unity. But such a creditable act of integration would not do for Professor Feuillerat who desires, nay requires, that the right answer, the classical answer, should be ostentatiously implicit in every step of the calculation.
3. Poems. By Rainer Maria Rilke.
Translated from the German by J.B. Leishmann.
Malte Laurids Brigge was a kind of deficient Edmond Teste, deficient in his commerce with Svevo’s Zeno and Gide’s Lafcadio, a Teste who had not ‘tué la marionette’, a Teste obliged to rise, for the purpose of breathing, at frequent intervals to the surface of his Variation’. So one feels it to be with Rilke, always popping up for the gulp of disgust that will rehabilitate the Icbgott, recruit him for the privacies of that divinity — until the next time.
Hence the breathless petulance of so much of his verse (he cannot hold his emotion) and the overstatement of the solitude which he cannot make his element. In the first of the two poems entitled The Solitary’ that appear in Mr Leishmann’s selection, the one taken from the Bucb der Bilder, to which Maeterlinck would seem to have given the la, the other from the Neue Gedicbte, written while under the thumb of Rodin, he indulges his sense of incommensurability in the crassest of antitheses: ‘I move among these human vegetables. … But my horizon’s full of phantasy.’ It is the protest of a child who cannot pause to learn, as Heine learned, the fantasy investing ‘human vegetables’ (which expression, incidentally, does rather less than justice to den ewig Einbeimiscben of the original) and so at least postpone the disillusion of horizons abounding in. the same product, a disillusion duly registered in the Neue Gedicbte version: ‘No, my heart shall turn into a tower…’. The mystic heart, geared to the blatte Blume, petrified! This is the very language of apostasy after the Stundenbucb, where God is the tower and the heart whatever you please to call it:
Ich kreise um Gott, um den uralten Turm,
Und ich kreise jahrtausendelang;
Und ich weiss noch nicht; ich bin ein Falke, ein Sturm,
Oder ein grosser Gesang.
Such a turmoil of self-deception and naif discontent gains nothing in dignity from that prime article of the Rilkean faith, which provides for the interchangeability of Rilke and God:
Mit meinem Reifen
reift
dein Reich.
There is no position here, no possibility of a position, no faculty for one. He changes his ground without ceasing, like Gide, though for different reasons; not in order to save his bacon (oh in the very highest sense), but because he cannot stay still. He has the fidgets, a disorder which may very well give rise, as it did with Rilke on occasion, to poetry of a high order. But why call the fidgets God, Ego, Orpheus and the rest? This is a childishness to which German writers seem specially prone. Klopstock suffered from the fidgets all his life long, and called them Messias.
The translation gets least in the way when it follows its text most closely, for instance in the poem beginning ‘Again and again’. The numerous deviations are unwarrantable, that is to say, ineffective, as when ‘Keine Vision von fremden Lahdern’ blossoms forth as ‘No dream of surf on southern coast-lines glancing’, ‘Lieder’ is promoted to ‘blithe songs’ and the competent hysteria of
‘Männer und Frauen; Manner, Manner, Frauen
Und Kinder.…
made presentable as
Men, women, women, men in black and grays,
And children with their bright diversity.…
4. Humanistic Quietism
Poems. By Thomas McGreevy.
All poetry, as discriminated from the various paradigms of prosody, is prayer. A poem is poetry and not Meistergesang, Vaudeville, Fragrant Minute, or any of the other collects for the day, in so far as the reader feels it to have been the only way out of the tongue-tied profanity. This canon has one great advantage, that it passes as poetry more than it rejects as mere metre, a great advantage indeed, now that Balnibarbism has triumphed. For prayer may be ‘good’ in Dante’s sense on any note between and inclusive of the publican’s whinge and the pharisee’s taratantara. When the changes are made we have the great publican poems (Vita Nuova, Astropbel and Stella, On the death of Laura, etc.) and the great pharisee poems (Goethe’s Prometheus, Cardura’s Satan, and the best of our domestic low church imprecations), to say nothing of their accommodation in a single period such as Milton contrived at the opening of Paradise Lost. But it is with neither of these extremes that we have to do here.
To the mind that has raised itself to the grace of humility ‘founded’ — to quote from Mr McGreevy’s T. S. Eliot — ‘not on misanthropy but on hope’, prayer is no more (no less) than an act of recognition. A nod, even a wink. The flag dipped in Ave, not hauled down in Miserere. This is the adult mode of prayer syntonic to Mr McGreevy, the unfailing salute to his significant from which the fire is struck and the poem kindled, and kindled to a radiance without counterpart in the work of contemporary poets writing in English, who tend to eschew as understatement anything and everything between brilliance and murk. The equable radiance of —
But a moment, now, I suppose,
For a moment I may suppose,
Gleaming blue,
Silver blue,
Gold,
Rose,
And the light of the world.
(Gloria de Carlos V)
and of —
The end of love,
Love’s ultimate good,
Is the end of love … and
Light…
(Seventh Gift of the Holy Ghost).
Even the long Cab Poem, the darkest, as I believe it to be the least characteristic, in this small volume of shining and intensely personal verse, climbs to its Valhalla, in this blaze of prayer creating its object: —
Brightness of brightness,
Towering in the sky
Over Dublin …
obliterating the squalid elements of civil war.
It is from this nucleus of endopsychic clarity, uttering itself in the prayer that is a spasm of awareness, and from no more casual source, that Mr McGreevy evolves his poems. This is the energy and integrity of Gior
gionismo, self-absorption into light; of the rapt Giorgionesque elucidations of Recessional and Nocturne, and of the admirable Nocturne of the Self-Evident Presence: —
I see alps, ice, stars and white starlight
In a dry, high silence.
He has seen it before, he shall see it again. For the intelligent Amiel there is only one landscape.
To know so well what one values is, what one’s value is, as not to neglect those occasions (they are few) on which it may be doubled, is not a common faculty; to retain in the acknowledgment of such enrichment the light, calm and finality that composed it is an extremely rare one. I do not know if the first of these can be acquired; I know that the second cannot.
5. Recent Irish Poetry
I propose, as rough principle of individuation in this essay, the degree in which the younger Irish poets evince awareness of the new thing that has happened, or the old thing that has happened again, namely the breakdown of the object, whether current, historical, mythical or spook. The thermolaters — and they pullulate in Ireland — adoring the stuff of song as incorruptible, uninjurable and unchangeable, never at a loss to know when they are in the Presence, would no doubt like this amended to breakdown of the subject. It comes to the same thing — rupture of the lines of communication.
The artist who is aware of this may state the space that intervenes between him and the world of objects; he may state it as no-man’s-land, Hellespont or vacuum, according as he happens to be feeling resentful, nostalgic or merely depressed. A picture by Mr Jack Yeats, Mr Eliot’s ‘Waste Land’, are notable statements of this kind. Or he may celebrate the cold comforts of apperception. He may even record his findings, if he is a man of great personal courage. Those who are not aware of the rupture, or in whom the velleity of becoming so was suppressed as a nuisance at its inception, will continue to purvey those articles which, in Ireland at least, had ceased to be valid even before the literary advisers to J. M. Synge found themselves prematurely obliged to look elsewhere for a creative hack. These are the antiquarians, delivering with the altitudinous complacency of the Victorian Gael the Ossiank goods.
Thus contemporary Irish poets may be divided into antiquarians and others, the former in the majority, the latter kindly noticed by Mr W. B. Yeats as ‘the fish that lie gasping on the shore’, suggesting that they might at least learn to expire with an air. This position, needless to say, is not peculiar to Ireland or anywhere else. The issue between the conventional and the actual never lapses, not even when the conventional and the actual are most congruent. But it is especially acute in Ireland, thanks to the technique of our leading twilighters.
The device common to the poets of the Revival and after, in the use of which even beyond the jewels of language they are at one, is that of flight from self-awareness, and as such might perhaps be described as a convenience. At the centre there is no theme. Why not? Because the centre is simply not that kind of girl, and no more about it. And without a theme there can be no poem, as witness the exclamation of Mr Yeats’s ‘fánatic heart’: ‘What, be a singer born and lack a theme!’ (‘The Winding Stair’). But the circumference is an iridescence of themes — Oisin, Cuchulain, Maeve, Tir-nanog, the Táin Bo Cuailgne, Yoga, the Crone of Beare — segment after segment of cut-and-dried sanctity and loveliness. There are the specialists, but no monopolies, each poet being left perfect liberty to make his selection. The poem of poems would embrace the sense of confinement, the getaway, the vicissitudes of the road, the wan bliss on the rim. But a large degree of freedom may enter into the montage of these components, and it is very often in virtue of this, when the tics of mere form are in abeyance, that attributions are to be made. Thus typically the first may be scarcely perceptible in Mr Colum and even less so in Mr Stephens, the second predominate in Mr Yeats, the third be acutely dilated by Miss Pamela Travers or the Rev. Monk Gibbon, and the fourth to all intents and purposes discarded by George Russell who, when thoroughly galvanized by the protracted apathies, rigidities and abstractions, enters his heart’s desire with such precipitation as positively to protrude into the void.
What further interest can attach to such assumptions as those on which the convention has for so long taken its ease, namely, that the first condition of any poem is an accredited theme, and that in self-perception there is no theme, but at best sufficient vis a tergo to land the practitioner into the correct scenery, where the self is either most happily obliterated or else so improved and enlarged that it can be mistaken for part of the décori None but the academic. And it is in this connection that our lately founded Academy may be said to meet a need and enjoy a function.
Mr W. B. Yeats, as he wove the best embroideries, so he is more alive than any of his contemporaries or scholars to the superannuation of these, and to the virtues of a verse that shall be nudist. ‘There’s more enterprise in going naked.’ It eliminates swank — unless of course the song has something to swank about. His bequest in The Tower’ of his pride and faith to the ‘young upstanding men’ has something almost second-best bed, as though he knew that they would be embarrassed to find an application for those dispositions. Yet when he speaks, in his preface to Senator Gogarty’s ‘Wild Apples’, of the ‘sense of hardship borne and chosen out of pride’ as the ultimate theme of the Irish writer, it is as though he were to derive in direct descent the very latest prize canary from that fabulous bird, the mesozoic pelican, addicted, though childless, to self-eviscerations.
Mr James Stephens in ‘Theme and Variation’ (1930) and ‘Strict Joy’ (1931), remains in his annexe of the tradition, where the poet appears as beauty expert:
Yea, wonder is that he has done,
For all that is beneath the sun
By magic he transfigures to
A better sound, a finer view.
— (‘Theme and Variations’)
Then follows the psychometricization of Plotinus, rather less of a success than that practised on Descartes by La Fontaine. When the theme, without which there can be no poem, is in itself presentable, then its transmission is a mere question of metrical adjustments; but when it is not, when it is a mournful or a miserable thing, then it must be smartened up:
… Because all things transfer
From what they seem to what they truly are
When they are innocently brooded on —
And so the poet makes grief beautiful.
— (‘Strict Joy’)
‘Reverie on a Rose’ is a good sample of this process — and a gloss on its innocency.
Mr Austin Clarke, having declared himself, in his ‘Cattle-drive in Connaught’ (1925), a follower of ‘that most famous juggler, Mannanaun’, continues in ‘The Pilgrimage’ (1920) to display the ‘trick of tongue or two’ and to remove, by means of ingenious metrical operations, ‘the clapper from the bell of rhyme.’ The fully licensed stock-in-trade from Aisling to Red Branch Bundling, is his to command. Here the need for formal justifications, more acute in Mr Clarke than in Mr Higgins, serves to screen the deeper need that must not be avowed.
Though in his ‘Island Blood’ (1925), The Dark Breed’ (1927) and ‘Arable Holdings’ (1933) Mr Higgins has accumulated a greater number of ‘By Gods’ than all the other antiquarians put together, though he is less of the ‘glimmering fawn’ than Mr Russell and less of the lilter and lisper than Mr Colum or Mr Stephens, yet he is still victim of the centrifugal daemon:
Come away to this holy air …
Come away to this simple lake
And learn at the voice of a bird
To vie with their music and make
New worlds in a word.
— (‘Island Blood’)
It is agreeable, if unreasonable, to connect this impulse, the entire Celtic drill of extraversion, with Mr Higgins’s blackthorn stick, thus addressed:
And here, as in green days you were the perch,
You’re now the prop of song …
— (‘Arable Holdings’)
His verses have what Ledwidge’s had,
what all modern nature poetry excepting Wordsworth’s has, a good smell of dung, most refreshing after all the attar of far off, most secret and inviolate rose. And surely it is a great pity that the discernment enabling Mr Higgins to see his native land as ‘an Easter Island in the Western Sea’ should be so intolerant of its own company. It is symptomatic that both Mr Clarke and Mr Higgins are now taking up prose.
In ‘For Daws to Peck At’ (1929) and ‘Seventeen Sonnets’ (1932), the Rev. Monk Gibbon follows his secret heart from the ‘lack-luck lot’. He is the poet of children (‘Chacun Son Gout’), and as such is bound to consider thought a microbe:
And, though the tune’s of little count
And knowledge more than all to me,
Who knows what music may have died
When that small seed fell silently?
— (‘For Daws To Peck At’)
The sonnets, with so many definite and indefinite articles excised, recall the succinctness of the Cambridge Experimenters.
These, to whom Mr Brian O’Higgins, An Philibin and Miss Large may conveniently be annexed, are the chief of the younger antiquarians.
Mr Thomas MacGreevy is best described as an independent, occupying a position intermediate between the above and the poor fish, in the sense that he neither excludes self-perception from his work nor postulates the object as inaccessible. But he knows how to wait for the thing to happen, how not to beg the fact of this ‘bitch of a world’ — inarticulate earth and inscrutable heaven:
I labour in a barren place,
Alone, self-conscious, frightened, blundering;
Far away, stars wheeling in space,
About my feet, earth voices whispering.
— (‘Poems, 1934’)
And when it does happen and he sees, ‘far as sensitive eyesight could see’, whatever happens to be dispensed, gile na gile or empty hearths, it is the act and not the object of perception that matters. Mr MacGreevy is an existentialist in verse, the Titchener of the modern lyric. It is in virtue of this quality of inevitable unveiling that his poems may be called elucidations, the vision without the dip, and probably the most important contribution to post-War Irish poetry.