Huge and formidable he stood there, leaning on his ice-axe, turning his dark bright eyes slowly and meditatively this way and that. He spoke no word. I did not dare to break the silence. In the end he straightened himself up. He raised his ice-axe and with an emphatic gesture dug the pointed ferrule into the snow. ‘Bloody fine!’ he said slowly in his deep, cavernous voice. He said no more. In silence we retraced our steps towards the Pen-y-pass Hotel.
But my father had not, as I supposed, spoken his last word. When we were about half-way down I was startled and a little alarmed to hear him suddenly begin to speak. ‘For I have learned,’ he began abruptly (and he seemed to be speaking less for my benefit than to himself), ‘to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes the still sad music of humanity, not harsh, nor grating, but of ample power to chasten and subdue. And I have felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns and the round ocean and the living air, and the blue sky, and in the minds of men.’ I listened to him with a kind of terror. The strange words (I had no idea at that time whence they came) reverberated mysteriously in my mind. It seemed an oracle, a divine revelation. My father ceased speaking as abruptly as he had begun. The words hung, as it were, isolated in the midst of his portentous silence. We walked on. My father spoke no more till on the threshold of the inn, sniffing the frozen air, he remarked with a profound satisfaction: ‘Onions!’ And then, after a second sniff: ‘Fried.’
‘A sense of something far more deeply interfused.’ Ever since that day those words, pronounced in my father’s cavernous voice, have rumbled through my mind. It took me a long time to discover that they were as meaningless as so many hiccoughs. Such is the nefarious influence of early training.
My father, however, who never contrived to rid himself of the prejudices instilled into him in childhood, went on believing in his Wordsworthian formulas till the end. Yes, he too, I am afraid, would have preferred the precocious larks to my maturer lucubrations. And yet, how competently I have learned to write! In mere justice to myself I must insist on it. Not, of course, that it matters in the least. The larks might be my masterpiece; it would not matter a pin. Still, I insist. I insist. . . .
CHAPTER V
‘Quite the little poet’—how bitterly poor Keats resented the remark! Perhaps because he secretly knew that it was just. For Keats, after all, was that strange, unhappy chimaera—a little artist and a large man. Between the writer of the Odes and the writer of the letters there is all the gulf that separates a halma player from a hero.
Personally, I do not go in for heroic letters. I only modestly lay claim to being a competent second-class halma player—but a good deal more competent, I insist (though of course it doesn’t matter), than when I wrote about the larks. ‘Quite the little poet’—always and, alas, incorrigibly I am that.
Let me offer you a specimen of my matured competence. I select it at random, as the reviewers say, from my long-projected and never-to-be-concluded series of poems on the first six Caesars. My father, I flatter myself, would have liked the title. That, at any rate, is thoroughly Wordsworthian; it is in the great tradition of that immortal ‘Needle Case in the form of a Harp.’ ‘Caligula crossing the bridge of boats between Baiae and Puteoli. By Peter Paul Rubens (b. 1577: d. 1640).’ The poem itself, however, is not very reminiscent of the Lake District.
Prow after prow the floating ships
Bridge the blue gulph; the road is laid.
And Caesar on a piebald horse
Prances with all his cavalcade.
Drunk with their own quick blood they go.
The waves flash as with seeing eyes;
The tumbling cliffs mimic their speed,
And they have filled the vacant skies
With waltzing Gods and Virtues, set
The Sea Winds singing with their shout,
Made Vesta’s temple on the headland
Spin like a twinkling roundabout.
The twined caduceus in his hand,
And having golden wings for spurs,
Young Caesar dressed as God looks on
And cheers his jolly mariners;
Cheers as they heave from off the bridge
The trippers from the seaside town;
Laughs as they bang the bobbing heads
And shove them bubbling down to drown.
There sweeps a spiral whirl of gesture
From the allegoric sky:
Beauty, like conscious lightning, runs
Through Jove’s ribbed trunk and Juno’s thigh,
Slides down the flank of Mars and takes
From Virtue’s rump a dizzier twist,
Licks round a cloud and whirling stoops
Earthwards to Caesar’s lifted fist.
A burgess tumbles from the bridge
Headlong, and hurrying Beauty slips
From Caesar through the plunging legs
To the blue sea between the ships.
Reading it through, I flatter myself that this is very nearly up to international halma form. A little more, and I shall be playing in critical test-matches against Monsieur Cocteau and Miss Amy Lowell. Enormous honour! I shrink from beneath its impendence.
But ah! those Caesars. They have haunted me for years. I have had such schemes for putting half the universe into two or three dozen poems about those monsters. All the sins, to begin with, and complementarily all the virtues. . . . Art, science, history, religion—they too were to have found their place. And God knows what besides. But they never came to much, these Caesars. The notion, I soon came to see, was too large and pretentious ever to be realized. I began (deep calls to deep) with Nero, the artist. ‘Nero and Sporus walking in the gardens of the Golden House.’
Dark stirrings in the perfumed air
Touch your cheeks, lift your hair.
With softer fingers I caress,
Sporus, all your loveliness.
Round as a fruit, tree-tangled, shines
The moon; and fire-flies in the vines,
Like stars in a delirious sky,
Gleam and go out. Unceasingly
The fountains fall, the nightingales
Sing. But time flows and love avails
Nothing. The Christians smoulder red;
Their brave blue-hearted flames are dead.
And you, sweet Sporus, you and I,
We too must die, we too must die.
But the soliloquy which followed was couched in a more philosophic key. I set forth in it all the reasons for halma’s existence—reasons which, at the time when I composed the piece, I almost believed in still. One lives and learns. Meanwhile, here it is.
The Christians by whose muddy light
Dimly, dimly I divine
Your eyes and see your pallid beauty
Like a pale night-primrose shine
Colourless in the dark, revere
A God who slowly died that they
Might suffer the less; who bore the pain
Of all time in a single day,
The pain of all men in a single
Wounded body and sad heart.
The yellow marble smooth as water
Builds me a Golden House; and there
The marble gods sleep in their strength
And the white Parian girls are fair.
Roses and waxen oleanders,
Green grape bunches and the flushed peach,—
All beautiful things I taste, touch, see,
Knowing, loving, becoming each.
The ship went down, my mother swam:
I wedded and myself was wed;
Old Claudius died of emperor-bane:
Old Seneca too slowly bled.
The wild beast and the victim both,
The ravisher and the wincing bride;
King of the world and a slave’s slave,
Terror-haunted, deified—
An artist, O sweet Sporus, an artist,
All these I am and needs must be.
Is the tune Lydian? I have loved you.
And you have heard my symphony
Of wailing voices and clashed brass,
With long shrill flutings that suspend
Pain o’er a muttering gulf of terrors,
And piercing breathless joys that end
In agony—could I have made
My song of Furies were the bane
Still sap within the hemlock stalk,
The red swords virgin bright again?
Or take a child’s love that is all
Worship, all tenderness and trust,
A dawn-web, dewy and fragile—take
And with the violence of lust
Tear and defile it. You shall hear
The breaking dumbness and the thin
Harsh crying that is the very music
Of shame and the remorse of sin.
Christ died; the artist lives for all;
Loves, and his naked marbles stand
Pure as a column on the sky,
Whose lips, whose breast and thighs demand
Not our humiliation, not
The shuddering of an after shame;
And of his agonies men know
Only the beauty born of them.
Christ died, but living Nero turns
Your mute remorse to song; he gives
To idiot fate eyes like a lover’s,
And while his music plays, God lives.
Romantic and noble sentiments! I protest, they do me credit.
And then there are the fragments about Tiberius; Tiberius, need I add, the representative in my symbolic scheme of love. Here is one. ‘In the gardens at Capri.’ (All my scenes are laid in gardens, I notice, at night, under the moon. Perhaps the fact is significant. Who knows?)
Hour after hour the stars
Move, and the moon towards remoter night
Averts her cheek.
Blind now, these gardens yet remember
That there were crimson petals glossy with light,
And their remembrance is this scent of roses.
Hour after hour the stars march slowly on,
And year by year mysteriously the flowers
Unfold the same bright pattern towards the sky.
Incurious under the streaming stars,
Breathing this new yet immemorial perfume
Unmoved, I lie along the tumbled bed;
And the two women who are my bedfellows,
Whose breath is sour with wine and their soft bodies
Still hot and rank, sleep drunkenly at my side.
Commendable, I should now think, this fixture of the attention upon the relevant, the human reality in the centre of
