The autumn equinox is close upon us with all its presages of mortality, a shortening day, a colder and longer night. How the days draw in! Fear of ridicule hardly allows one to make the melancholy constatation. It is a conversational gambit that, like fool’s mate, can only be used against the simplest and least experienced of players. And yet how much of the world’s most moving poetry is nothing but a variation on the theme of this in-drawing day! The certainty of death has inspired more poetry than the hope of immortality. The visible transience of frail and lovely matter has impressed itself more profoundly on the mind of man than the notion of spiritual permanence. Et l’on verra bient?t surgir du sein de l’onde
La première clarté de mon dernier soleil.
That is an article of faith from which nobody can withhold assent.
Of late I have found myself almost incapable of enjoying any poetry whose inspiration is not despair or melancholy. Why, I 101hardly know. Perhaps it is due to the chronic horror of the political situation. For heaven knows, that is quite sufficient to account for a taste for melancholy verse. The subject of any European government to-day feels all the sensations of Gulliver in the paws of the Queen of Brobdingnag’s monkey—the sensations of some small and helpless being at the mercy of something monstrous and irresponsible and idiotic. There sits the monkey “on the ridge of a building five hundred yards above the ground, holding us like a baby in one of his fore paws.” Will he let go? Will he squeeze us to death? The best we can hope for is to be “let drop on a ridge tile,” with only enough bruises to keep one in bed for a fortnight. But it seems very unlikely that some “honest lad will climb up and, putting us in his breeches pocket, bring us down safe.” However, I divagate a little from my subject, which is the poetry of melancholy.
Some day I shall compile an Oxford Book of Depressing Verse, which shall contain nothing but the most magnificent expressions of melancholy and despair. All the obvious people will be in it and as many of the obscure apostles of gloom as vague and miscellaneous reading shall have made known to me. A duly adequate amount of space, for 102example, will be allotted to that all but great poet, Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke. For dark magnificence there are not many things that can rival that summing up against life and human destiny at the end of his “Mustapha.”
Oh, wearisome condition of humanity,
Born under one law to another bound,
Vainly begot and yet forbidden vanity,
Created sick, commanded to be sound.
What meaneth nature by these diverse laws,
Passion and reason, self-division’s cause?
Is it the mark or majesty of power
To make offences that it may forgive?
Nature herself doth her own self deflower
To hate those errors she herself doth give....
If nature did not take delight in blood,
She would have made more easy ways to good.
Milton aimed at justifying the ways of God to man; Fulke Greville gloomily denounces them.
Nor shall I omit from my anthology the extraordinary description in the Prologue to “Alaham” of the Hell of Hells and of Privation, the peculiar torment of the place:
Thou monster horrible, under whose ugly doom
Down in eternity’s perpetual night
Man’s temporal sins bear torments infinite,
For change of desolation must I come
103To tempt the earth and to profane the light.
A place there is, upon no............