23. The Oxford Book of Christian Verse, ed. Lord David Cecil
With the exception of textual criticism there is perhaps no scholarly activity in which the work is so disproportionate to the reward as in the compiling of an anthology. The labour of reading through all, or nearly all, our sacred poets from Rolle to Ruth Pitter; of flogging into activity a critical faculty which must, before the end of the task, become as jaded as that of an examiner; of seeking – what is never attained – perfect accuracy in transcription and proof-reading, is very great; the reward is usually to have one's final choice criticized by reviewers who have not given a hundredth part of the editor's thought to the subject and who, perhaps, take for granted considerations which he has had to abandon after serious reflection. I find myself just such a reviewer. I have a strong inclination to pull Lord David Cecil's book about – to shove a poem in here and remove a poem there. I would have selected differently than he from Chesterton; I would have had Mr Charles Williams represented by one of the great odes from Taliessin. I would have read worlds for words on p. 398. But all this is so little to the purpose that I think it better to leave all detailed criticisms unwritten and discuss instead certain questions arising out of his preface.
Lord David Cecil explains the rarity of good Christian poetry (which here means poetry about Christianity from within) by a tendency to insincerity on the part of the poet who ‘feels it profane to show himself in all his earthly imperfections’ (p. xii), and ‘will allow himself to express only unexceptionable sentiments’ (p. xiii). I am neither convinced of the fact nor satisfied by the explanation. I do not know whether good Christian poetry is rare. Is the percentage of rubbish in the whole corpus of such poetry higher than in the whole corpus of heroic, or erotic, or ‘nature’ poetry? It is a question of statistics, and I do not know where those statistics can be found.
But on the supposed tendency to insincerity or a borrowed attitude, I have something to say. This seems to me precisely the reverse of the truth. Let us see the Christian poets actually at work. ‘But yet, alas, for all this, I Have little mind that I must die’, confesses Southwell. ‘If, what my soul doth feel sometimes, My soul might ever feel!’ sighs Herbert. ‘If ought is felt, ‘tis only pain To find I cannot feel’, says Cowper with almost scientific accuracy. ‘I cannot will’, says Christina Rossetti, ‘I cannot wish’ – ‘can neither choose nor wish to choose’.
The important thing to notice is that the poets are not merely making general confessions of sinfulness; that might be part of a borrowed attitude. They are recording, with the most clearsighted fidelity, the failure of their feelings to respond to the object with which their poetry is concerned. Now we do not find other poets doing this nearly so often. The nature poets do it now and then, doubtless because the romantic love of nature is, in some degree, a religion. But the great mass of poets almost ignore that phenomenon which stands to their subject-matter as ‘dryness’ stands to the Christian life. This is not in the least because it does not occur. There are plenty of days when the lover cannot love (and even, if truth were told, the lecher cannot lust!), the warrior cannot feel martial, the patriot cannot feel patriotic, and the satirist cannot feel indignant. But hardly a word of this comes out in the poetry.
A visitor from another world who judged humanity simply by its poetry would get the impression from profane poetry that we were creatures who lived habitually on a high, level plateau of consistent passion; from our sacred poetry, and from it almost alone, would he get any notion of human experience as it really is, with all its lee-shores and doldrums and rudderless hithering and thithering. If any such contrast as Lord David Cecil draws between sacred and profane verse is to be drawn at all, we must draw it the other way round. It is the profane poetry which assumes attitudes of greater clarity and consistency than inner experience will really support; it is the sacred poetry which gives us life in the raw. For whatever else the religious life may be, it is apparently the fountain of self-knowledge and disillusion, the safest form of psychoanalysis. I had almost said ‘and the least expensive’, but that's as may be. Most Christians, I suspect, would say that while the cost is merely nominal if we regard the value of the goods, it is seldom less than the total wealth of the purchaser.
‘The average hymn’, writes Lord David Cecil, ‘is a by word for forced feeble sentiment, flat conventional expression’ (p. xi). Now it is certainly true that all hymnbooks are full of very bad poems. But before we explain this by the hypothesis that the sentiments are forced (which is an inference from the felt badness of the poems and not, as we too easily suppose, a datum) it would be well to remind ourselves of two facts. In the first place, many very bad English hymns are translations of very good Latin hymns. The uninspiring jingle of
O what their joy and their glory must be,Those endless Sabbaths the blessed ones see!
Derives from the very delicate and sophisticated dance of
The badness of the English certainly does not tell us that Abelard's sentiments were ‘forced’. And what it tells us about the translator (Neale) is that he was misled by an error of judgement. Abelard was dealing with Latin in the light of his own vernacular, which had little or no stress-accent, so that the dum-de-de-dum of bad English verse was not in his ear at all. Neale, using a vernacular in which stress-accent is positively tyrannical, selected a metre whose similarity to Abelard's is wholly superficial, and was too insensitive to notice how he had vulgarized his original. And that, if not the whole story, is surely as much of the story as we shall ever know. Speculations as to whether Neale's own desire for heavenly bliss was or was not ‘forced’ are, in my opinion, wholly futile. Christians will feel sure that it was in some degree ‘forced’ (as all ordinate desires have been ever since the Fall), but they will know this on grounds external to the poem. Purely literary criticism, if it tries to answer such a question, will find nothing but mares’ nests.
And secondly, we must replace the badness of the hymns in its proper context, side-by-side with the badness of most modern attempts at what may be called ‘public’ poetry – the badness of most modern laureate poems, installation odes, epithalamiums, and other such occasional pieces. This is a purely modern phenomenon. Once, if you wanted an ode to celebrate your victory at the games, you went to the poet (Pindar or another) and ordered it, just as you ordered your banquet from the cook; and you had the same assurance of getting a good poem, if you chose a good poet, as of getting a good dinner, if you chose a good cook. If you wanted a diversion in your own house winding up with a compliment to the chief guest, you gave your order to Peele or Shakespeare or Milton; and got an Arraignment of Paris, a Dream, or a Comus. A poet who could not practice his art to order would then have been no less ridiculous than a surgeon who could not operate or a compositor who could not print except when ‘inspired’.
But in the last few centuries we have unquestionably lost the power of fitting art into the processes of life – of producing a great work to fill up a given space of wall in a room or a given space of time in an evening's festivity. The decay of the hymn (for there was no difficulty about it in the Middle Ages) is only one instance of this general phenomenon. I do not doubt that this escape of poetry from the harness is a very great evil, and a very bad omen for the future of the culture in which it has occurred. But to trace it to some peculiarity in the subject-matter of the hymn is unscientific. For all phenomena of a class a single cause should be given. In the meantime, the bad modern hymns have still the use of preserving, however feebly, in the minds of churchgoers the idea (elsewhere almost lost) that poetry has the possible function of being controlled and used by human life as a whole. If ever a revival of ‘used’ or ‘public’ poetry occurs, it may be because even this thin and muddy trickle in our churches has preserved the old watercourse.
A subtler question is raised when Lord David Cecil says of the ‘devout’ poem, ‘as for using any but the most decorous language to express his feelings, the very idea horrifies him’ (p. xiii). The number of devout poets who have overcome this ‘horror’ seems rather remarkable – indeed, a student accustomed to the propriety and reverence of profane literature might well be shocked on first encountering the familiarity, or even the incivility, with which the sacred poets sometimes treat the Almighty. ‘Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend, How wouldn't thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost?’ enquires Hopkins; a shrewd question. Hardy used to scold God a good deal – whether for existing or for not existing, it is sometimes difficult to make out – but he never touched the quick of the nerve as do those terrible words in Herbert,
After this, it is little that he should accuse God of first ‘enticing’ but afterwards ‘betraying’ him. But such direct railing is only one way in which the sacred poets abandon ‘the most decorous language’. Indecorum of one sort or another is broadcast over the whole book. The Absolute and Ubiquitous is offered a pipe, a skirt, a tarbox, and a scrip by a shepherd who ‘swet; he had gon faster than a pace’. Sexless spirit is represented explaining to the mortal beloved that ‘hyr bed is made, hyr bolster is in blysse’. A miracle is performed in order that the Virgin Mary, after some plain speaking from Joseph, may have cherries. The Creator, making man, has ‘a glass of blessings standing by’, or comes near like an innkeeper to ask if the newly arrived guest lacks anything, or is warned that ‘in vain He struggles to get free’. ‘How narrow is He’, exclaims Patmore. ‘Is thy love indeed A weed?’ asks Thompson.
In explanation of all this it is not sufficient (though it is true) to say that a religion which enthrones at its very centre the monstrous indecorum of the Incarnation cannot be expected to be very decorous about anything else. For the poets do not merely accept, they often seem anxious to exaggerate, the paradox of their faith – to wed the very great with the very little and to present the transcendent under symbols almost impudently mundane. And I think I see the reason of this. Lord David is right in thinking that the sacred subject, considered in itself, demands an almost stifling degree of decorum from the poet; if he is to ‘rise’ to his subject, he must rise very high indeed, and will be tempted to borrow stilts. But sacred poets have, in varying degrees, been aware of this difficulty, and the history of the fashions in religious poetry is partly the history of the various ways in which they met it.
The obvious way of meeting it is the frontal attack – simply to be as ‘high’ as you know how. This is the method of Pseudo-Caedmon, of Dante, of the great Latin hymns, of Dunbar's Rorate Coeli, of Smart. It has produced some of the best poetry in the world. The pieces from Young in this collection show what it is like when it fails; and so does Toplady's address to the soul (‘Deathless principle’, ‘celestial tenant’). This is, in one obvious sense, the most naïf or ingenuous solution, though of course, in technical detail, the work it produces may be highly sophisticated. It is employed either by very great poets who have a right to such audacity, or by fools who do not know they are being audacious.
The second method may be called that of transferred classicism. It aims, like the first, at splendour, but at splendour with a difference. It arises from two impulses which were often present in the same mind but which are distinct and complementary. One is the impulse which leads the poet to say, ‘We too ought to have our classics, our great epics, tragedies, and odes in the ancient manner. But if so, they must deal with Christianity, for that is our Great Subject, just as the Fata Jovis and the founding of Rome were Virgil's Great Subject’.
The complementary impulse says, ‘We want a great Christian work. But that means doing for Christianity what the ancients did for Paganism; we must therefore produce epics, tragedies, and odes in the ancient manner’. The urge to classicized Christian, or Christianized classical, work was further reinforced by the conception that ‘machines’ were necessary to epic, but that Pagan and ‘Gothic’ machines were childish, exploded, and profane. (These critical problems are largely discussed in Tasso, Davenant, and Cowley.) The method was almost wholly successful in Milton, and wholly successful in Tasso. What pitch of blasphemy and absurdity it can reach at its worst is known only to those who have read Vida's Christiad. But there is one thing to be noticed about this whole school. Bold and massive as its ornaments are, it is in a sense declining the frontal attack. Its God is, in some degree, disguised as a mere god, its Angels as inferior gods. There is an element of solemn masquerade in it: the poets and reader almost know they are treating one thing in terms of another. I believe that part of the pleasure was the pleasure of idem in alio. Just as in reading Johnson's London you enjoyed the skill with which modern parallels were found for detail after detail in the Juvenal, so in the Davideis, the Christiad, or the Paradise Lost, you enjoyed seeing how well Christianity could produce the councils, catalogues, Mercuries, and battlepieces of ancient epic. And indeed the pleasure of seeing that A is to B as C is to D is entwined with the pleasures of poetry throughout.
The third method is that of humble sobriety. The subject of our poetry is high beyond all height; we shall not try pitifully to scale that height with the carnal beauties of poetic diction. Nor shall we evade it by the classical and Pagan disguise. As cleanliness and convenience are the only beauties, other than those of the spirit, to which our Protestant churches aspire, so strong sense, rigid sincerity, genuine English, and the firmness of the metre shall be the only beauties of our sacred poetry – unless, indeed, a new uncovenanted beauty creeps in from the very contrast between the horrors or ecstasies described and the stern, unshaken lucidity of the form. We may, as in Cowper's Castaway, be standing on the brink of hell: that is no reason why our grammar, our scansion, or the shape of our lyric should be modified. The heart may be broken but the head is clear. It is the method of Watts and the Wesleys at their best, of Cowper nearly always. It is divided by a hair's breadth from flatness; but when it comes off it can no more be ignored than the blow of a hammer. It can, on occasion, lift such dull poets as Tate and Brady to the perfection of
Those three methods are all more or less what Dr Tillyard would call ‘direct’; those that follow are ‘oblique’. They decline the whole problem of the ‘high’ subject, and become at ease in Sion by disguising Sion as their native hamlet. The first and more obvious way of doing this is to fasten on the Incarnation, while leaving the thought of what is incarnate in the background. Hence all those songs, both medieval and modern, in which the infant Christ is given toys and fruit and generally treated like any other baby. It would, of course, be a naivety on our own part to suppose that this kind of poetry is naïf. The whole piquancy comes from the consciousness, never absent from the poet's mind, that this baby is also the Absolute, the Unconditioned, the Ens Entium. ‘By, by, lully, lulley’ derives its whole point from this consciousness, and the age of ‘lully, lulley’ is also the age of Pange lingua. The medieval poets, in their own different way, are practicing the same deliberate litotes which we see in Mr Eliot's ‘it was (you may say) satisfactory’. And this can be done even without reference to the Incarnation. The monosyllable Sir, used by Hopkins to God, does it to perfection; and so does Fredegond Shove's ‘for the greatness of their love neither of them could speak’.
The mention of love brings us naturally to the commonest of all the forms of ‘oblique’ religious verse. Working on a hint from Canticles – not to say another hint furnished by the very nature of things and agreed upon, in very different senses, by Christians and Freudians – the poets present the relations of God and the soul in terms of the relations between two human lovers. The Middle Ages do this, once more, with a deceptive appearance of naivety, borrowing the forms and phrases of popular songs which are very ‘profane’ indeed: at the other end of the scale, Patmore does it in the lofty and abstruse manner, taking the symbol more seriously than the old poets, and always on the verge (some would say, beyond it) of the greatest obscenity that can be imagined. Herbert, writing with the sonneteers and the erotic poetry of Donne behind him, writes much of the Temple as if it were the poetical history of all the ups and downs (meetings, partings, quarrels, and reconciliations) of an earthly love. But he has other symbols as well; and with these we are embarked on the wide sea of symbolic sacred verse – the innkeeper of Herbert's Love, the hound in Francis Thompson, the shepherd in Ruth Pitter's Turn not aside.
The ways of making sacred poems are innumerable. The ‘devout poets’ of Lord David's preface who are stifled by the difficulties he mentioned, are stifled not because they are devout but because they are no poets.
This seems to me in one way an encouraging book; the harvest of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is, in my opinion, more vivid, more varied, and more excellent than that of any preceding age.