WE SPEAK A. WE CAN.
The Man Who Died Twice. By Edwin Arlington Robinson. (Cecil Palmer. 5s. net.)
bp Hill and Down Dale. By Kenneth Ashley. (John Lane. 5s.) PRESUMP 1LX there is a Choice sometimes. But to most people the way in which they shall express themselves upon flny occasion is foreordained, and is the result of some accident of upbringing or aptitude. To most of us any notion, any understood relation " that we must utter has got to be expressed as a picture, a piece of print, or a building, as the case may be, for the prosaic sufficient reason that we know only this method of setting it forth. We adopt a particular mediumos a rule, not because our ideas are nearly always, say, atehitecturar, or perhaps pictorial, but because no other form of expression presents itself. And so, perhaps, many a poem owes its flatness to the fact that it ought to have been a facade,. many a restless prick-eared villa would have been exquisite as a piece of choreography, and there are galleries of pictures that would have made sensitive and agreeable short stories. But the child who never hears a note of music must express himself as best he can and his fugal idea must fit itself to be an epic or an interpretation, of Hamlet.
What with this and what with what Pope called " lack of genius " the wonder is that we ever get any great works of art at all. However, if the choice of genera—of brick or inkdrop—is not often ours, yet we do have an arbitrament in our power, in the matter of species. Not every conflict that we cannot solve by the mental arithmetic of cogitation "comes " together with its form when we go to set it down, however definite is our classification of ourselves as " poet " or " playwright." Mr. Robert Graves, perhaps, would tell you that his conflicts all came as poems, whether they are doubts of the hideonsnesi of villa architecture or of the righteousness of war. But even he, who is particularly faithful to a single kind of poetic medium, does sometimes express himself in prose, and if he had chosen could have done so more often.
Chekov—if we may judge his method from his notebooks— generally exercised a conscious -choice, apparently deciding with excellent judgment that such or such an idea would do for a play, and the next for a short story. But he was-excep- tional, and too many authors, especially, perhaps, in England, seem to tumble into a form haphazard. They have an idea —or they become aware of a conflict within themselves of two such ideas—and- tumble it out as a narrative, a play, a novel, or a lyric, just because that is the form within which they know how to work. And, obviously, if the channel is inappropriate in size or shape, a part or even the whole of a forcible original momentum may be lost in friction. Con- sider what an intolerable poem Rasselas, or even Gulliver's Travels- would have made. Tiger, Tiger, could have had no other form, while surely Marlowe's Faust took a fashionable rather than an appropriate shape.
Of the three authors with whose new books we are here concerned, two have made a choice of medium which is obviously appropriate, but the third, and perhaps the best of them; Mr. Edwin- Arlington Robinson, has written- a tale which most readers will wish had been ia prose. The use of a verse form produces- certain well-known effects upon the reader ; it enhances the subflavour and implications of the material by iNiling the briskness of the reader's mind while it proportionately blurs the " plot " or overt content. It concentrates the. reader upon the words used, and especially upon certain words (e.g., rhyme words). The difference can be easily observed in the difference between what is left in
a half forgetful reader's mind by a poem and a story. It
is the flavour and tune of a poem. but the events and char- acters of a story that withstand erosion. Now, in The Man Who Died Twice Mr. Robinson has got a good central figure whose story he has seen with a good deal both of emotion and nicety. But the words of the poem are for ever coining between the reader and Fernando Nash, and even between rds: Rubinson and his-meaning.- For instance - " Like a child trying twice the bitter taste Of an unpalatable panacea." ..
Now " medicine " appears to be what Mr. Robinson meant, and his ambling flat-blank verse is no compensation for this sort of blur, True, he is never .histrionic and emotionally false in a story where sueh faults lie in wait. But can any gentlemanliness- reconcile us to this All whiCh was as it was. But it was so No longer when you knew it was not so, And that one day a bush might bloom, with fire - At any trivial hour of inattention " ?
It is not good enough. There must be in the actual narrative of any poem, a certain narrowness. There will be fewer minor characters, for instance, and less of worldly detail. For this the characteristic qualities of verse—epigrammatic and emotional—are to compensate. But in Mr. Robinson's poem we are defrauded. Yet in prose and with all the additions proper to a prose form the story might have been made most acceptable.
"H. D.," who is one of the original Imagists, is, of course, never in danger of this sort of fault. Their whole theory is insistent on the hammering of the medium till the thought or the image runs through it smoothly. With this toil over the medium goes, it seems, a careful selection, and a rejection of
notions which cannot appropriately be expressed with the beautiful and highly-wrought conciseness that distinguishes their work. Heliodora is a collection of poems written, as was her Hymen, in a Hellenist mood, Taken as a whole it has very considerable distinction and elegance, but it shows also a certain lassitude. Conciseness, for instance, has been a little relaxed, and there is nowhere quite the energy of (was it ?) Hera's denunciation of Aphrodite in Hymen.
Mr. Kenneth Ashley's images are all such as are appropriate to the short poem: He seems to be a young writer of a good deal of promise. His easy assimilation, of modern objects is very taking—he can write about such things as trains and tarred roads and trams without self-consciousness. Some of the poems are amusing, and all show a considerable power of
observation. But—and that is his danger—his observation is not confined to natural objects. Even a casual reading of the book evokes a list of five contemporary poets whose work obviously rings in Mr. Ashley's ears. However; if he is, as one supposes, young, this. will certainly wear off, for he has a very distinct personality of his own. Attention to two things would perhaps improve his work : first the use of
rather more interesting form—either verse form or " cadence " —wherever his intention is decorative ; and secondly an avoidance of the commonplace, or perhaps in this case we should say a more wilful setting free of his genuine taste for the fantastic. This book, though we hope it may one day be ranked as. early work by Mr. Ashley, is very well
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