On Free Verse

and the pitcher is broken at the fountain and the wheel broken at the cistern." The interweaving of the word "broken" is itself an unbroken pattern. And the same fine effect has sometimes been produced in modern free verse. I know one passage in a poem of Mr. T. S. Eliot, which begins, I think, "Pray for Rinaldo, avid of speed and power," which might really satisfy the most classical critic who was — well, who was avid of speed and power. But I have read other poems of T. S. Eliot in which I cannot perceive any rhythm or direction at all; certainly nothing which he, being a cultivated and versatile man, could not have expressed better in classic verse or classic prose.

I happen to have before me a poem by the late D. H. Lawrence, about whom so many people seem suddenly and simultaneously moved to write books and articles. But I am not going to write an article about D. H. Lawrence, but only about the particular form he chose for this particular poem. It does not raise any of the disturbing questions about Lawrence about which so many of his friends and foes seem to be disturbed. There are certain ethical controversies in which I should believe myself to be on the side of civilization, and in which I think he would, quite honestly, avow himself on the side of barbarism. But those questions do not arise here. Even those who would most indignantly declare that what I call barbarism was a beneficent revolution would not pretend that this poem is at all revolutionary. Its theme is one o£ the very oldest themes, even of the very oldest poets. It is the glory of the Homeric Age, which must have been glorified in pretty nearly every age since the Homeric Age. It is that never-fading freshness that seems to lie upon the glittering Greek Islands and the first myths of our culture. There is nothing revolutionary about it, unless writing free verse is still revolutionary. And I only wish to inquire, in a friendly spirit, whether writing free verse is really an assistance to writing good verse. I am not calling in question the powers of the poet; I am simply asking whether the same poet would have produced the same poem, or a better or a worse poem, if he had chosen to write it in the traditional forms of poetry. In other words, I would take this one piece of free verse merely as a test of how much verse does gain or lose by being what is called free. It is only a sort of parlour game, but it is a problem that happens to amuse me. First of all, let us take the free verse poem as it stands. It is called "The Argonauts":

They are not dead, they are not dead! Now that the sun, like a lion, licks his paws and goes slowly down the hill:

now that the moon, who remembers, and only cares that we should be lovely in the flesh, with bright, crescent feet, pauses near the crest o£ the hill, climbing slowly, like a queen looking down on the lion as he retreats.

Now the sea is the Argonaut's sea;..,

I cannot quote the whole, but it ends with a sharp command not to bring the coffee or pain grille till the ships of Odysseus have sailed past.

Now I hope I shall not be misunderstood if I say that the first impression I have is that, while this mode of utterance has become free verse, it has not become free poetry. I mean that it has not produced any purely poetical effect that is freer or wilder or more elemental, magical, or hitherto uncaptured than Shelley or Swinburne or any good poet has produced in formal poetry. It is more conversational; it is not more primeval or even more barbaric. It is more like talk; but not more like tempests loosened or passions made alive. It seems to me, I confess, that the actual effect of the feeling of liberty is even a certain limpness. "As he retreats" is a weaker ending than so able a writer could have put into a sonnet. The only phrase that claims to be original looks oddly artificial. It is not merely the literal logical point: that the sun is seldom observed to lick its paws. It is that the image does not really suit the lion any more than the sun; certainly not the lion taken as a noble symbol of the sun. It has no imaginative fitness; licking the paws could only remind us that the lion is like the pussycat on the hearth-rug; the last thing we want to think when he represents the archaic energy of the Sun God. It looks to me as if Lawrence, writing in the spirit of an ancient poem, unconsciously felt he must put in something to show he was a modern poet. But does the freer form really give him a chance of stronger effects? I doubt it. Suppose he had chosen to write the same thought in unfree verse; as so clever a man could doubtless have done much better than I can. Suppose he had begun something like this:

They are not dead! The sun like a golden lion Goes down to that red desert where he dies; The moon, that is bare of all but bodily beauty, The moon, that is careless of all but bodily beauty, Looks down on the dying lion where he lies; Like a queen, from the steep skies.

This sea is of the Argo. Great Odysseus, etc.

I only give this, of course, as a very ordinary sample of the old classical or even rhetorical verse, which any educated man could write; I am concerned wholly with the inquiry of whether this old style is not really rather stronger than the new style. Many great men have written in the new style, and believed it would be stronger. "Easily-written, loose-fingered chords," said Walt Whitman, "I feel the thrum of your climax and close." But that is exactly what I do not do; I do not feel that "as he retreats" is the best that Lawrence could do for a climax and close. A stronger sense of the rolling sea of the Argonauts comes over me with the long rolling line of "Atalanta":

From the Acroceraunian Kills to the ford of the Fleece of Gold.

I merely propound this as the practical problem of free verse; of whether the freedom really does tend to liberty or only to laxity. I fancy the poet here fell between two stools; between the classic tripod of Delphi and the prosaic wooden stool that Puck pulled from under the old woman; the type of the more modern spirit of abrupt bathos and the grotesque. I am very fond of the grotesque; and in some ways I much prefer Puck to Apollo. But, strictly as a critical problem, I doubt whether the modern manner does make better creative poetry in a description qf the tall ships of Ulysses going by the Isles of Greece.

XXXIII On Eric Gill

I RECENTLY had the honour of taking part in one o£ those Mock Trials organized at the London School o£ Economics, with the intention of supporting a charity by very uncharitable denunciations of every class of the community in turn. Before I arrived on the scene, actors, authors, and many other respectable guilds had been duly blackened and slandered to the satisfaction of the audience, and it fell to my lot to take away the character of several friends of mine who belong to the profession known as Art. Among the villains of the piece were Sir William Rothenstein and Mr. Eric Gill, and some of the ideas developed by the latter, in the course of his defence, are very luminously set out in a book he has recently published: a collection of essays called Beauty Looks After Herself. It is not for me to recall in detail the horrors of that dreadful day. So far as I could see, the Artists left the Court without a stain on their characters, and the Prosecuting Counsel left it having lost any character that he had left. But his interest in intellectual ideas survives any such deplorable lapse in his social morals, and he was, and is, very much interested m the ideas of Mr. Eric Gill. Roughly speaking, the intellectual situation is this.

My own general thesis was somewhat to this effect: that Artists have worried the world by being wantonly, needlessly, and gratuitously progressive. Politicians have to be progressive; that is, they have to live in the future, because they know that they have done nothing but evil in the past. But Artists, who have been right from the beginning of the world, who were, perhaps, the only people who were right even in the beginning of the world, decorating pottery or designing rude frescoes on the rock when other people were fighting or offering human sacrifice, they have no right to despise their own past. Their fickleness and mutability is wanton; and all legal systems roughly agree that extra blame attaches to a crime that is wanton. The millionaire who carefully removes all the pennies from a blind beggar's hat is blamed — if, indeed, a modern millionaire is ever really blamed. The man who bashes-in the head of a lady, a total stranger to whom he has never been introduced, is rebuked for the callousness of his social behaviour, if he cannot plead, in extenuation, before a modern court, that she is his wife, or his mother, or the sister he has promised to support, or somebody towards whom a man is now supposed to be in a necessary and permanent state of hostility. But to make a scene, as a murderer must always make a scene — to kick up a row, to create a riot, when there are no comprehensible causes o£ exasperation — that is still regarded as a breach of social tact, or what our quaint old ancestors would have called a sin.

Now even in my own lifetime I have seen two or three artistic revolutions, each sweeping the whole artistic world: pre-Rapkaelites and Impressionists and post-Impressionists, and then any number more, and I question whether this perpetual quarrel in one of the arts is necessary. Here, however, I am not interested in my argument, but only in the real answer to it. Mr. Eric Gill really answers, in the only way in which a real revolutionist can answer, that his is the right revolution and every other is the wrong revolution. And this is admirably sensible and sane. There is no tradition in revolutions; every revolution is a revolution against the last revolution. Even in this amusing affair of the accusation of the Artists, all the Artists disagreed with each other much more than they disagreed with me. But Mr. Gill took the matter rather more seriously than the rest, and maintained in his speech, as he maintains in his book, a conception which is none the worse for being almost entirely his own. I am not professing either to prove or disprove it here, but only to notice certain rather curious changes which it indicates in the history of modern thought; and especially in that vast amount o£ very modern thought which perpetually passes in successive waves through the minds of the thoughtless.

One queer thing about the history of thought is that very big things have a way of quietly collapsing in the middle of it, while everybody remains for generations unconscious of the collapse. Nobody knows, for instance, at what point the men of medieval times really realized that they were not, in the old sense, living in the Roman Empire. There was certainly never any definite moment when they definitely said they were not. Monks praising Simon de Montfort — that is, supporting a purely local feudal lord against a purely insular and independent king — use the old Roman word of The Republic, exactly as it would have been used by Licinius or Gracchus. So changes pass over modern thought, or merely over modern taste, and nobody notices the enormous implications that may per- 'haps follow them in the future. If I were asked what was the most extraordinary event in mere modern opinion, I should not think of Einstein or such trifles as Time and Space. I should say that the whole perspective of human history has been at least temporarily altered by the collapse of the prestige of the Renaissance. And that is due almost entirely to the Artists, those restless demons.

The whole nineteenth-century rationalism, and most twentieth-century rationalism, is really founded on the idea that the sixteenth century broke out o£ the dungeon o£ the Dark Ages and saw the light. I am not now arguing about whether this is true. I am only pointing out that the Artists now declare it to be false. It is very difficult for the philosophers to maintain that philosophy first became rational, or for the politicians to maintain that politics first became free, or for the scientists to maintain that science first became possible, at the very moment when the Artists declare that Art first became vulgar and varnished and photographic and cheaply realistic and all the rest. After all, the Art of the Renaissance was much more conspicuously and admittedly triumphant than the philosophy of the Renaissance, or the politics of the Renaissance, or the science of the Renaissance. The public was more ready to accept Raphael as the first of painters than to accept Machiavelli as its party leader, and Bruno as its guide. It was willing, in successive stages, to admit that Botticelli was a good painter, or even that Giotto was a good painter; but almost entirely on the ground that Giotto promised to become as realistic as Botticelli, or Botticelli as realistic as Raphael.

And now that way of being realistic is rejected and reviled, under the horrid title of being photographic. Men of the school of Mr. Eric Gill entirely refuse to regard Giotto as the first good artist; their highest compliment to him would be to say that he was the last good artist. They are entirely in favour of the more antiquated school of design, which ruled in even darker portions of the Dark Ages. They praise the great Byzantine patterns, for all the reasons that would have led the followers of the Renaissance to doubt whether they were even pictures. Although I took for a text the disgraceful day on which I figured as an advocate, my mood at the moment of writing is entirely judicial. I do not mean to argue either for or against the new theory of art, which discredits the rationalism and realism of the Renaissance. I only say that it does in that degree discredit the Renaissance, and that anything that discredits the Renaissance does in that degree distort the whole existing theory of European history. Only men have not realized it yet. They do not as yet see all the indirect implications that may follow upon such a theory of false progress or real reaction. Perhaps even the Artists, wicked as they are, do not know. And the Artists are such dangerous anarchists that I am not sure that I ought to tell them.

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XXXIV On Prussian Paganism

GENERAL LUDENDORFF, the eminent Prussian commander, has been reported as saying these words: "I repudiate Christianity as not appropriate to the German character.5' The remark set me thinking, especially about the general absence of thought, and a growing division in mankind upon that matter. To me it seems very much as i£ I were to say: "I deny the existence of the Solar System, as unsuited to the Chestertonian temperament." In other words, I cannot make any sense of it at all.

I do not here distinguish against the poor General because he is a German General, though Germans really have a way of overdoing these things which is rather peculiar to themselves. I do not maintain that all Prussians are pigs; but I do say that their peculiar disposition to go the whole hog makes them appear, to those opposed to them at the moment, more roundedly and completely hoggish. When Mr. Bernard Shaw declared, in his debates at the beginning of the War, that there was no difference between the Prussian and the English aristocracy, and that an officer in the Prus-