"Mr. William Watson's Poems"

Mr. William Watson's Poems
The Speaker, January 14, 1905


The Poems Of William Watson. Edited and arranged, with an introduction, by J. A. Spender. Two volumes. With portrait and many new poems. London: John Lane. Crown 8vo, 9s. net.

Any re-issue of Mr. Watson's work is not only a pleasure in itself but is critically important and desirable, since he is eminently a man who not only deserves re-consideration but in some sense demands it. It may or may not be possible to decide that a literary work will not last, but it is generally possible to decide when it is not even meant to last. And this was true of much of the minor poetry (excellent in itself) which was springing up on all sides at the time when Mr. Watson first wrote. Not only was most of that work fugitive, but we may say that it was one of its merits to be fugitive, just as we may say that it is one of the merits of a bird to be fugitive, or one of the merits of an arrow to be fugitive. Some of the best of the minor poets were something better than poets; they were young men; they were comrades and lovers, so full of life as to be able to be superior to mere immortality. Others were idiots, but idiots so unique as to be valuable at least for a moment, for folly is too sacred a thing for man to enjoy it long. But of all of them it may be said that their poetry would not have been so good if it had been more great. Their work was full of wild and childish experiments, sometimes successful, sometimes a ruinous failure; but in all of them the failure was almost as interesting as the success, and in all of them the success was quite as absurd as the failure. In this sense extravagance is more modest than moderation, for extravagance does not claim to endure. Mr. William Watson does claim to endure. They piled their towers sky high, but they made them openly of earth and sand. He works more quietly than they, yet he is the most arrogant of all of them, for his material is a lump of that marble which was the mother of all the gods.

A certain amount of the literary importance of Mr. Watson can no doubt be traced to the bewildering eccentricity of everybody else. It is possible for originality to be so popular that it becomes vulgar. It is possible that the whole ground of obvious invention may be rapidly covered; that every kind of new thing should be brought sharply to the attention of everybody. The last man of science has declared not only that the moon is made of green cheese, but that he has eaten it. The last poet has declared, on the authority of a vision, that devils have halos and angels horns. It seems that there is nothing further that anyone can say that will make anyone else jump. The extravagance of what has gone before has made all extravagance tame. People are not merely at ease in Zion; they are at ease in limbo. Blood and thunder is so victorious that it cannot succeed; men are too blinded with blood to see blood. Men are too deafened with thunder to hear the thunder. It seems as if the universe had shown to men its most startling, and they are not startled. It seems that nothing will startle them.

But there is something which will startle them. Sanity will startle them, quietness will startle them, classical moderation will startle them. Any man walking easily and coolly in the conventional paths will touch with an explosion the deep conventions of the unconventional. Any contented man will seem to these discontented ones a sort of Anarchist. And this is one of the fundamental fascinations of the position of Mr. William Watson, both as a poet and as a philosopher. In a time when everyone was original, the only truly original thing left to do was not to be original at all. The still small voice of sanity came with a sort of hissing stab to remind us that the Lord was not in the thunder. The world caught its breath for a moment at the one genuine novelty of a man who did not try to be new.

This element in Mr. Watson, of what may be called the arrestingly ordinary, owes much of its impressiveness, of course, to his own perfectly placid courage and consistency in maintaining the attitude. He meets the disdain of the decadents with a disdain equal to their own; he is fully as proud of being conventional as they can be of being unconventional. Some of his finest work has been written in defence of himself and his method, and under the impulse of this passionate and pugnacious decency. Nothing in recent rhetoric has been finer than the whole of the poem called "Apologia," and especially the passage in which in the middle of a grave and formal defence of classicism he turns dramatically upon the decadents:

"For though of faulty and of erring walk,
I have not suffered aught of frail in me
To stain my song; I have not paid the world
The evil and the insolent courtesy
Of offering it my baseness as a gift."

This haughty and warlike note is more important in Mr. Watson's work than has, I think, been commonly allowed. He is a classicist, but, like many other classicists, from Pope to Matthew Arnold, he is a hard hitter when he deals with certain matters. On certain things he is, indeed, a doubter, but his very confession of doubt on these has that quality of clearness and severity which characterises the man who knows when he has a conviction and when he has not. A great many soothing writers give us the impression of never having experienced doubt when the quiet unity of their work really proceeds from their never having experienced belief. Mr. Watson in stating his uncertainties implies his certainties, and these latter are never very absent from his mind. Built into his very bones is that old English last-century thing which the flimsy moderns cannot endure or understand- the didactic spirit, the spirit which tells the great man to tell other men simply and fully the whole of his mind. As in the great English agnostics of the Huxley period, even ignorance itself has a responsibility. Even if he has nothing to say it is his duty to say so.

The main matter of Mr. Watson's doubt or uncertainty is religion. The main matter of his faith or certitude is patriotism. He is absolutely convinced that he is standing, and rightly standing, for the whole great historic tradition of English letters and English landscape. He is defending it against a host of foreign influences, against the influence, against the turgidity and obscurity which we have copied from the literature of Germany, against the cheapness and over emphasis which we have borrowed from the literature of America, against the mistiness and melancholy which we have borrowed from the literature of Norway, against the fastidiousness and cruelty which we have borrowed from the literature of France. In fighting for the wholesome and massive qualities of great English poetry he feels, rightly, that he is fighting for something which is, like all precious things, in perpetual and incurable peril. His objection to Imperialism is, of course, wholly of this kind; he realises what all other serious people will realise very soon, that if the Imperialist movement goes on for another twenty years (which, fortunately, it will not do) it is doubtful whether there will be any English people left at all. Purely literary as Mr. Watson is, he has in his heart a certain still vigilance which is as military as that of a sentinel. His very traditionalism partakes of the nature of warlike obedience. He follows Milton and Wordsworth as he would follow a volunteer colonel or an impromptu captain if a foreign army were pouring through the gate of Dover.