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Philanderer's Fugue

Innocent of any conscious attempt at humour, the poet De la Mare—he of the exquisite diction—has given us perhaps the most elegant oath ever written:

"Return once more

To gloomy Hades and the whispering shore."

It is not commonly the way of the moderns to seek this eloquent polish for their phrasing. More frequently the style is plainly and playfully vulgar. James Stephens is using but the mildest term when he says: "What the deuce am I to do?" or, "You insulting little pup!" But I am of the patrician temper: I would rather the polish, Victorian though it be. To me this bluntness of address is but a familiarity that breeds contempt.

But for brilliant quaintness of expression a modern is worth a shell-full of your older writers. To this day I vividly recall the time—now many years gone by—when I first read the lines of W. H. Davies in "Love's Caution," where a falling star is seen, and he says:

"It was a tear of pure delight

Ran down the face of Heaven this happy night."

With startling metaphor and all the subtle arts of apt illusion we are led to the most extraordinary conceptions, with the quaintest and most delightful inconsequence. Sara Teasdale, musing on a star map she has in her hand, reflects:

"I whose life is but a breath
Turn infinity around."

James Stephens gives us the picturesque, impressive lines:

"He saw the whirling sea
Swing round the world in surgent energy,
Tangling the moonlight in its netted foam."

We read of "bandy-legged trees," and "bright-heeled constellations." Drinkwater speaks of "the articulate voices of the stars"; Chesterton of dusk—"When the door of darkness is ajar." And is there not a subtle charm in the quaintness of Richard Hughes:

"With darkling hock the Farmer of the skies
Goes reaping stars: they flicker, one by one,
Nodding a little; tumble—and are gone."

In "Exit," too—a splendid sonnet of David Morton's—he describes the departing day as a tottering old man faltering away into the west:

"The prowling wind will never let him be;
The blinking stars lean out to stare at him;
The old man is too bitter-blind to see:
His wits are wandering and his eyes are dim."

Everywhere we find some intriguing turn, some impossible fantastic twist, that lights up the whole poem with the nebulous and mystic beauty of the glow-worm grotto.

Take the well-known piece, "The Song of the Mad Prince," by De la Mare. Half the virtue of this cryptic little poem seems to me to be in the line:

"Life's troubled bubble broken."

Not that the theme is new; it is the execution. For it is merely another version of the later words of T. S. Eliot:

"This is the way the world ends,
Not with a bang, but a whimper."

It is what Mason wrote of, though more sombrely, in "The Spark's Farewell to its Clay." And Richard Aldington, though with a fiery grandeur, in "The Lover (1917)":

". . . She will bend suddenly and clasp me;
She will clutch me with fierce arms
And stab me with a kiss like a wound
That bleeds slowly."

Continuing our philandering in poesy (me perambulant wandering Walt-like)

we turn to the most graphic of all writing—modernist verse. In brief space it is most compelling, and provocative beyond words. We of little leisure, in this land so far removed from the centres of culture (in so far as that commodity can ever be concentrated), can touch on but the fringe of any modern literary movement. Yet if one can but scamper across the outskirts, though it be no more, then prithee, why not scamper?

Nothing was ever more neatly put, more admirably adapted to the medium of verse, than many of the concepts brought newly to us by these "ultras" of one kind and another. Nor one can find in any other form the same rapidity of thought, or such perfect unrestraint in the wielding of satiric wit.

From T. S. Eliot one could quote on for a bookful: of Grishkin—

"Uncorseted her friendly bust
Gives promise of pneumatic bliss."

of the Hollow Men—
whose voices are meaningless

"As rats' feet over broken glass."

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of "Lovely woman," who, after stooping to folly, is in her room again alone, where—

"She smooths her hair with automatic hand
And puts a record on the gramophone."

To my way of thinking, E. E. Cummings is the most picturesque of these writers, particularly with his amazing versatility in form. The Sit-wells keep him company, and add a stronger stab of satire. There is Osbert, who tells of Mrs. Southern, "That grey typhoon"—

"Watching things, tugging things,
Seeing to things,
And putting things to rights."

Sacheverell, with his Fables, saying:

"The gentle, loving unicorn
Will never eat the grass."

And Edith:

"This corraceous
Round orchidaceous
Laceous porraceous
Fruit is a lie."

But perhaps we should make some attempt to retain coherence.

Then there is James Joyce. But I must be too young, I fear. I never could reconcile the Gothic grandeur of the stanza:

"I hear an army charging upon the land" with the irreverent ravings of Ulysses. Maybe his genius is too extensive for the mere beginner to comprehend. Some day, perhaps . . .

But to return to Cummings. Here we find graphic realism again, though perhaps in not so stark a version as much of modernist writing. It is still

"a little sunlight and less
moonlight ourselves against the worms"

and yet it is free from the more violent Joyceian lapses: "Sour as cat's breath," and the like. At the same time one finds, I think, an Equal dexterity in the technique of the game. Witness his Italian daybreak scene. Is there not entertainment for a week in the festive simplicity of the lines:

"Among
these
red pieces of
day . . .
Satanic and blase
a black goat lookingly wanders."

But we have rambled at last on to a very doubtful subject—humour in modernist verse. Indeed, it cannot but appear to many readers, especially among us of the democratic taste in letters, that the exclusive topicality of this modernist humour is the chief detraction of its verse. Nor is this merely a foible on its part; it is a vital and fundamental weakness destroying the very basis of its value as a communicative medium—which, as I have always understood, it certainly purports to be. To defend it on this score is to defend not the author, but a pose.

"I don't know how I could ever have liked Turgeniev," declares Katherine Mansfield, "such a hypocrite, such a poseur." And that is precisely how one is inclined to feel about the superior indifference of modernist writers and their endless obscurity of jests. One can withstand it for a while, but in the end one is inclined to say (in the words of one of their number)—

"sall right in its way kiddo
but as fer I gimme de good old daze."

Sespin.

We note that Professor B. E. Murphy, M.A., LL.B., M.Com., was pleased to give his views on the present Financial Position to the Special Parliamentary Committee. Are we to congratulate you, Professor?

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"S.C.M. Handbook, page 41:

"This year's programme includes studies on . . .

(3) The Word made Flesh—Grubb (2/6).

We wish to assure the S.C.M. that we have quite enough of those Barmecide feasts in the cafeteria, thanks all the same."

We note from the Wellington Competition Society's 1931 awards:—

Mr. W. J. Mountjoy, Jr., wins the impromptu speech on the subject "Why Men Love Women."

Mr. W. J. Mountjoy, Jr., and Miss Z. Henderson were runners-up in the impromptu debate on the subject, "Has the Age of Chivalry Passed?"

Res Ipsa Loquitur!

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Newspaper Exchange:

The Professorial Board at Auckland University College has forbidden smoking in the Women's Common Room.—Other Professorial Boards please copy.