John Clare
The Poems of John Chre's Madness. Edited by Geoffrey Grigson. (Routledge and Kegan Paul. 21s.)
QUITE apart from its theme, there is a touch of split personality about .this book ; for nearly a quarter of it—namely its long, interesting introduction—is in strange contrast to the rest where Clare's lyric ,gift demonstrates itself triumphantly in 176 poems, more than a hundred of them printed now for the first time, making us realise 'that his Muse had, even more successfully than himself, kept its ,spirit with the free. The introduction is an attempt to relate Clare it the madman to Clare the poet ; but the poems themselves are so fresh, so spontaneous and often so shrewd as almost to make the two seem irreconcilable. I would nave preferred the lyrics in one -.,--.book and the case-history in another. Mr. Grigson performs his task conscientiously, and gives us much relevant information ; but the truth is he is handling something far larger than a literary
problem ; he is handling a physiological, psychological and philo- sophic one, which carries us all the time further than the poetry and towards the vaster implications of the mystery of human personality. Clare's case, if it were really examined, might be able to tell us something about human consciousness as well as the processes of composition, in the same way as A. E., in " Song and its Fountains," tells us something about individual inspiration. On the other hand, Clare does not lend himself very well to a psychopathic interpreta- tion. Mr. Grigson quotes the psychiatrist, Ernst Kretschmer, on the subject of Holderlin's madness. According to Kretschmer the artistic schizoid has a tendency to love " the beauty of nature where it is untouched by man." Holderlin was " drawn to every tree, flower and cloud, because they, like schizophrenic persons, are quiet, dreamy and lonely, and, unlike the world of men, do not know how to hurt and wound." Mr. Grigson cries approvingly, " How accurately is that applicable to Clare, to his mental history recorded in his poems, and especially in the poems of High Beech, the last months at North- borough, and the first six years in the Asylum! " But Clare had always loved Nature, for whatever good reason makes poets and mystics love her ; and you must either invalidate all such love, or else give Clare's sanity the benefit of the doubt when it comes to making Nature a theme in his later poems. It is a crime to tie the poems to the apron-strings of a psychiatrist's theory.
In the same way, when Professor Tibble speaks of Clare's " half- delusion, half-pretence that he was Byron," I find this really more satisfactory, -though it burkes the whole question, than when Mr. Grigson says outright that " reading Byron once more coalesced with his delusion that he was Byron." For I suspect that Professor Tibble may be right, and that when Clare wrote his own "Child Harold " and his own " Don Juan," he was largely conscious that these were his variations on another, man's theme. Indeed, in one stanza in Don Juan he says outright, " I think myself as great a bard as Byron."
The whole matter was probably mixed up in his mind with some elaborate riddle such as the paranoiac—sane enough in other respects —delights to stage for himself and his fellow-men. De Wilde re- proached Clare with claiming quotations from " Childe Harold " and Shakespeare as his own. " ' Yours,' I exclaimed, ' who are you? Those are Byron'tAnd Shakespeare's verses, not yours! "It's all the same,' he answered, changing a quid from one cheek to the other, ' I'm John Clare now. I was Byron and Shakespeare formerly. At different times, you know, I'm different persons—that is the same person with different names.' "
If Blake had said this we should view it more reverently ; we should suspect some profound meaning, an affirmation of the universal man, or a hint at reincarnation. On Clare's lips it is sick utterance, and yet it may be the muddled aftermath of some similar lofty intuition. In a long letter to his son Charles, " spotted with a little madness," as Mr. Grigson puts it, Clare can say, " In my boyhood Solitude was the most talkative vision I met with. Birds, bees, trees, flowers all talk to me louder than the busy hum of men." This ii
no madman's talk. At his maddest it is the frantic Lear, or the heart- broken Lear, lisping profundities, that comes to mind, rather than that object for mere pity of whom a contributor to the EnCyclopaedia Brirannica forty years ago could write, " His vogue was no doubt largely due to the interest aroused by his humble position in lite." Clare emerges from this new volume with his reputation more firmly established than ever. Those who read the poems will bless once more Knight, the house steward at Northampton Asylum, who first transcribed them, Inskip, at whose instigation he persisted in that task, and Mr. Grigson, who now gives them to the world.
MONK GIBBON.
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