IV NEWMAN AS POET IN 1868 a London publishing house issued a volume bearing the unpretentious title Verses on Various Occasions and containing a preface signed with the initials J. H. N. There was magic in those letters and the modest collection evoked an interest second only to that which might be awakened by a new publication of the Laureate. One of its pieces had already achieved an abiding place among the most notable hymns in the language, while another was destined to surprise its author by evoking undreamed of recognition from public and critics. Of the poems in Verses on Various Occasions something more than half had already appeared in a volume called Lyra Apostolica, published in 1836, and made up of a series of poems contributed to the British Magazine by Newman and five of his intimate friends, Bowden, Hurrell Froude, Keble, Robert Wilberforce, and Isaac Williams, all of whom were in the forefront of the Oxford Movement. True to the intent of the authors these lyrics voice the sentiment and aspirations of the Movement, just as the Tracts for the Times expressed their interest in its theological and historical phases. Of the almost two hundred poems which are comprised in Verses on Various Occasions, the first written when Newman was seventeen and the last nearly half a century later, some eighty-five were the result of the leisure and inspiration of the Mediterranean voyage, and two, one written then and the other thirty-two years later, have won him fame and inspired gratitude among a multitude of men and women who never read a single page of his prose writings. [I] Newman prefaced the Verses on Various Occasions with a dedicatory letter which was not only charming and exceedingly modest but illuminating as well. He would never have published the volume at all, he confesses, had not some critics (entire strangers to him) found merit in several of his poems, quite to his surprise. He admits they may be unequal in merit but says he has no method of discriminating between the good and the bad, especially as all of them have associations of memory and personal feelings and besides were a pleasure to write. It is difficult to be critical in the face of such engaging frankness, singularly rare as it is. But Newman himself has pointed the way and by following him we can arrive at certain (and, I trust, quite warrantable) conclusions. As a matter of fact, those poems do vary greatly in worth and probably only eight or ten have any qualities of lastingness. It is part of the irony of things that Newman's critical sense for poetry, as he himself seems to imply, was defective. It is true that he praised the Greek tragedians and Horace and Shakespeare, as all the world does, but it is significant that he could see in Pope "a rival to Shakespeare, in copiousness and variety if not in genius," and his preference among contemporary poets was for Crabbe and Southey. In selfcriticism he is unfailingly keen where his prose is concerned but as uncertain in poetry as the great Wordsworth himself, who never knew whether he had hit upon fool's gold or that pure ore which Matthew Arnold quarried out of his works and gave us as the unalloyed residuum of his genius. It is also part of the irony of things that Newman should find prose slavishly hard and verse extremely easy to write. He speaks in one of his letters (written, I think, in his sixties) of composing poems while he was shaving, and behind the humor of the remark was more than a grain of truth. He turned to verse as a literary relaxation from the relentless exactions of prose, and the facility with which verse "came" helped to blind him to its actual worth. Did it "write itself," was it the outpouring of authentic inspiration, a perfect thing, fully formed, needing only the privilege of birth? He could not say. First Two things, I suspect, conspired to save Newman from dissatisfaction with verse of inferior worth. of all he probably thought of meter and rhyme as lending to poetry a certain "carrying power" which prose was obliged to seek in other and less obvious ways; and secondly, with his strong ethical prepossessions he found in the high intent of his poems and the purity of the spiritual emotions whose voice they were intrinsic qualities which were sufficient unto themselves, without the need of a more nearly perfect form. It is true that now and then a poem defective in "form" may endure because it expresses an emotion with so pure and deep a passion that it satisfies some craving of the human spirit as nothing else may. But it is a great truth of literature, as we all know, that the world's memory is too heavily laden, her exactions upon Perfection too severe, to recall for long any beauties but the highest of their kind. Even then how much that is good falls into oblivion-and how swiftly! Critics are eternally trying to mortgage the future, to promise that generations yet unborn will read this poem or that novel with delight, and they assure immortality today to works that tomorrow will be forgotten. "Where," inquired the cynical Villon, with a lift of the brow, "where are the snows of yester-year?" [II] Of Newman's sincerity of emotion there is, of course, no doubt. His lyrics breathe it as surely as the Apologia and there is in all of them, especially in those which were written on the Mediterranean voyage, an intensely personal note. We constantly hear the voice of one who feels the weight of his own and the world's sins; who looks on England as a father upon the erring child of his bosom; who is striving to gain enough faith and courage to accomplish a national regeneration even while he feels himself an inadequate and unworthy instrument of Heaven. Again and again he refers to his unworthiness, quite in the tone of Herbert: O Father, list a sinner's call! Fain would I hide from man my fall But I must speak, or faint I cannot wear guilt's silent thrall; Cleanse me, kind Saint! His eyes are always turned toward that perfection which it is man's glory to strive for and, failing to attain it, he feels that his failure is due to unworthiness; thus in his mood of self-accusation he cries: So now defilement dims life's memory-springs; I cannot hear an early-cherish'd strain, But first a joy, and then it brings a pain- Not without hope, this breast May one day lose its load, and youth yet bloom again. Temptation assails him and he prays with a lyric passion not unlike St. Augustine's: O Holy Lord, who with the Children Three Help, in those trial-hours, which, save to Thee, Nor let these quivering eyes and sickening heart There is a touch here that George Herbert would have envied. Scriptural allusion and diction and the significance of scriptural incidents are always in his mind and as they serve the spiritual trend of his thoughts they make him forget the wealth of classical tradition in which the basin of the Mediterranean was so rich. Even at Ithaca it is Exodus and not the Odyssey that he thinks of, and he does not sing of the much-wandering Ulysses and his yearning for the sight of his rocky home, but of Moses whose heart hungered for the land of promise and the joys he was never to know. In passing Lisbon, it is true, Newman had recalled the great pagan figure in the Isles of the Sirens, but even here the "man of many woes" is Newman himself and there is an Hebraic sternness in his self-rebuke for the delight he could not but feel in music: Cease, Stranger, cease those piercing notes, Hush the seductive voice, that floats Upon the languid wires. Music's ethereal fire was given Not to dissolve our clay, But draw Promethean beams from Heaven, And purge the dross away. |