Thomas Sturge Moore

“ For us at least his promise is Sorley, now that he is dead. Death tempts us, nay forces us to overrate his actual production, and Reason in vain points out that the strait limits of his sensuous joys in image and language suggest that his poetical vein might have soon run dry. Yet not before he had enriched us, like another Matthew Arnold, with some equivalent for Empedocles, Sohrab and Rustum and The Scholar Gipsy, we retort. The power which shapes a masterpiece includes that which matures the man of the world, and that which renders the critic accomplished. ”

“ Any thought of the myriad eyes that overpeer a stage should be impossible; the world is forgotten when the spirit dances naked in the light to which joy entrusts it—tender joy for whom the damage of the pale green, ruby-eyed, lace-winged fly is a calamity to avert with tears and supplications. "Everything that lives is holy." If Seeger lives in his poetry, everything else passes like a ghost, like a reference only: his one imperious desire is to cast a personal spell upon us all. ”

“ Novelties in poetry fail if merely new. Mr Yeats has of late years set the fashion of skating across ever thinner ice until it seems almost miraculous that verse is not prose. You watch the skater as the surface warps under his swift passage, and expect that in another minute he will be in it, floundering like any Walt Whitman, but this does not happen. Rhyme is not discarded, but strained; rhythms are not free, but licentious. Thomas shows this tendency in ways of his own, neither very determined nor very risky, yet sometimes annoying. ”

“ Thomas achieved freedom at the cost of disillusionment; yet it was part of his latter-day riches that he had been so deceived long ago. Better so, than to have been without fire, than to have been dull, torpid and mean. Yes, yes; but not better than to have been a creative artist, thrilling and anguishing about work that was more important than the workman. But with freedom came the inspired moods at last, and prose gave way to poetry. ”

“ No name could be more exactly deserved; for a country is always, by collective action, blighting the best hopes and virtues of its sons; and yet they feel for it the affection expressed in a pet name as for some impossible old landlady who has contributed to all the happiness they have known.
R. E. Vernède was a peace lover quite unfamiliar with weapons, over forty and married, yet he enlisted in 1914. He was a man of remarkable intellectual and moral delicacy, and yet his muse returns to this theme of patriotism, as a moth haunts a candle. ”

“ Shakespeare himself could not defend the grandest poems ever conceived against his barbarity.
"'Be true to your taste,' this mocking giant cries, 'your own taste, not any one else's. Be not overborne by tradition or corrupted by fashion. Dare on your own account and let the ideal take care of itself. What! Correct nature, correct yourself! Amazing nonsense! You are what you are; Nature is what it is. That is all we want to know; all we can admire." ”

“ At their feet children play on the grass, and young girls crumble bread to lure doves down from the heroic shoulders; while for the men who glance at them in passing the inspiration of their bearing is all that remains of the Great War. The ardent Grenfell leaps forward; Brooke with smiling grace escapes from the uncomfortable admiration of a bygone age—both bent on grasping by the hand their new and best friend, Death. ”

“ And when the elder poet has listened to the old leech-gatherer standing in the pool, he will turn to welcome wisdom from young rain-brightened lips as Sorley draws to a halt at his side, to wonder over prehistoric men or speak generously of those of to-day and to morrow. His is but a continuation of Wordsworth's theme; for as the dignity of individuals depends on their resolute independence, so that dignity alone renders a social amalgam feasible. ”

“ We need not wonder then to find a young captain-poet writing in a jocular vein about his own wounds and death, and every subject that touches him with at all similar force. The quality of his laughter is all that concerns us; and this, let me hasten to assure the long faces, is irreverent rather than indecent, fantastic rather than boisterous. Now faces are long because they have not laughed enough, not because they have been wise.
The æsthetic expression of a comic sense is perhaps the most difficult problem taste has to face. The success of a jest, as Shakespeare said, "lies in the ear." ”

“ Now melody and rhythm often engross trained apprehension, and the less learned may therefore be more ready to note the grave drift of wonder which flows beneath the playful, indulged and indulgent surface of Brooke's art, than were his æsthetic admirers. Those eyes which gaze out from behind his poems have been fascinated by the contrast between the momentousness of life to us, and our strangely casual relation to its vast movement, which is not at all suited to nourish our hopes of divining the whole truth. ”

“ Peace indeed!
The sanity of a true inspiration is miraculous and avoids errors which we all breathe and utter, and yet does not fall into the opposition of that half illumination which, like a bee on a window-pane, angrily buzzes itself to death because it sees but cannot enter the light. Neither is it passive, disclaiming part and parcel in humanity's tragedy, as though there were any other means of support than man's widespread good will. ”

“ Thus many men and women look back at a full-illusioned youth with something of envy, and yet with a sense of freedom at the thought that those headstrong young people are really dead, which allows them to smile with the world, not in scorn of it, to be tender and kind instead of passionate and self-absorbed. Freedom from that fervid seriousness permits humorous playfulness, permits a vital possession of our own scorned past, and has gentle acceptance for the stream of shortcoming which is daily life. ”

“ Had he lived Ledwidge might very well have shown more constructive power than I seem to allow. He was still quite young when he was killed in Flanders; and those finer things that his genius would have created when it was fully organised were lost for ever. The choice and subtle images which crown his perceptions so frequently are in themselves structures, just as the cells of the body are living organisms. As we have seen, Sorley stands quite alone in power to shape an inevitable whole at so early an age. ”

“ The customs and cares of civil life dishearten and depress, and a run on poetry would be proof of reawakened sensibility. Let us hope that England, where life has seemed both stablest and stalest, is to be refreshed by a wave of finer enthusiasm. The young will feel it first, for they are never stale or established. Of all the young men whom England has sent out to fight, he who has produced the best poem seems to have least hesitated, answering the call to fight with ecstatic joy. ”

“ But observant eyes see more than they look for. And Thomas, who took pains to visit and know the most untouched parts of England and Wales, and who drank to the dregs the considerable literature which can feed such curiosity, though he still loved nature, was undeceived about man and, as a corollary, about himself. It dawned upon him that man's need is nobler impulses rather than choicer circumstances, that the soul seeks a mood and should not be put off with hopes and desires, for we can only possess that which we can truly appreciate. ”

“ Poetry is, he thinks, "a marvel of the brain" fundamentally the same in all men; the poet only excels by more perfect organs of perception and expression—a conception in generous contrast to that of the young man, who is so keen on distinguishing his work as to whittle his gift away in the effort to remove all trace of kinship with other minds. On the other hand, only time will show whether Nichols will say a great deal in a manner not sufficiently distinct to live, or will fulfil the promise everywhere apparent in this book. ”

“ Only if we have followed its growth with all our hopes, a life seems broken through, snapped off and its promise wasted by early death. Then we wonder whether it is civilisation or barbarism that defends itself at such a cost. And the failure to preserve at least those who were creatively gifted from exposure, seems proof that our foresight was at fault, or our scale of values inadequate. [1] Sorley, the youngest, and it may be the most hope-inspiring of our poet soldiers, has set me musing thus. He is so fine, Death seems to have saved him from misshaping Life. ”

“ Yes, the actual world is more hospitable and more inspiring than the scenery, the panorama that English conventions paint and hang round the young, in part to help and prepare them, but in part also to delude them and disguise our own fears and failures. Truth provides a roomier house than the average Englishman has hired for his boys. Yet Sorley knew and felt that he had been unusually lucky in this respect. After leaving school he went to Germany for some months, and loved the life he saw in Mecklenberg Schwerin. ”

“ Our least quarter of an hour of solitary reveries or of serious talk, yours and mine, in our youth, was better employed; but as one gets old one falls back into the power of these nothings; only it is well to know what nothings they are." So the significance of serious thought and discussion about art is apt to hold an inverse ratio to the number and age of those who think and discuss; for the future is always invisible. Robert Nichols, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves, friends by their own avowal, have possibly had this importance in intimate conclave. ”

“ From him as from Grenfell this sentiment comes inevitably; and he was no soldier by profession, but, in so far as he had chosen any, a poet. At first sight they seem twin natures in ardour, in frankness, in courage, in devotion; only gradually can the spirit become reconciled to admitting an immense difference.
The temptation is to apply here the common English prejudice as to where the American fails. But this would be uncritical, for exceptional natures least conform to national foibles. Seeger contrasts with Grenfell as Byron with Shelley rather than as Yankee with Britisher. ”

“ Brooke's amused alertness is like that of a child who watches a door emphatically closed upon a cupboard declared to be empty by grown-up assurance; it creaks, and mysteriously seems to stir; other little boys and girls, his playmates, pay scant attention to its unaccountable behaviour. He himself thinks he has seen that the cupboard was vacant, and yet, in spite of himself, is fascinated by the possibility of a ghostly opener. Smiling over his own fancies, Brooke seems to have sat half abstracted at a pleasure party till the outbreak of war. ”

“ He fears no repetition of that defeat which yet enchanted the world with its misanthropy and cynicism, but strains after a vision fellow to that followed by the pilgrim lord from Harrow to Missolonghi. If in spite of failure this temperament achieved so much, what might it not succeed in? So active, so independent, so daring a nature has as many opportunities of acquiring wisdom as it has of refusing to bow its head under ruin. ”

“ Never record your impressions by enumerating faults, as the newspaper critic so often does. Never accept the absence of apparent flaws as proof of the presence of excellence. Keep to the positive merits and try to define them; merely turn away from what calls for blame. Disparaging warps the mind far worse than over-lauding. Above all, institute comparisons whenever you find two poets treating the same theme or using the same form with felicity to diverse effect, or in any way rivalling one another. Animals see, breathe and feel, man alone discovers, appreciates and admires ”

“ Though the rousing of Vernède's lyrical impulse was at first coincident with loss of discrimination, and might be condemned as an attempt to shout with the crowd, I find its excuse, if not its justification, in that ardent sympathy that at first wraps the confused soul in cloud, but will, like a late September morning by 10 a.m., grow glorious as a summer day. Readers only feel the insult of not being treated as an author's equals, in proportion as they are his peers. ”

“ Is there so much choice between the horrors of war and those of peace when they are truly estimated that the pacifist should prefer them or the imperialist wish to re-establish them? That men should be forced by the self-seeking of others to linger in want or to die in cruel torture is equally abhorrent. The hope of all generous spirits is to have done by means of the war with the peace that they have known and to usher in a better order. ”

“ The felicity here is of the rarest and finest kind, and shapes the main form and rhythm; their inevitability sweeps us away and convinces, in spite of no matter what predisposition to stickle over details.
The downs have another hold on this poet; not only are they good to course at a long swinging run, they have preserved huge stones, earthworks and chiselled flints that tell of prehistoric lives. ”

“ For all this there is no simple and clear defence; even genius is at a loss to create so much as an appearance of straightforwardness or to deduce a practical course which you can pretend is, or has been, followed. This world's sublimest tact is the inept stare that refuses to see difficulties. Youngsters laugh, however seriously minded, for laughter is their one escape from the awe-inspiring immensity of the imposition. ”