THE BOOKMAN

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 779, 27 September 1929, Page 16

THE BOOKMAN

L&SiMM / Wj; , Reviews »InKfe ml— t «gr?agLsr

A Lonely Poet Charlotte Mew 1 see myself among the erod'd, 'Where no od« fits the singer to his song. THE IRONIC posthumous reward won by so many of the world’s artists has come to Charlotte Mew, the poet, who died last year by her own hand after a bitter life of obscurity. Tragedy oppressed her later days, and her sensitive nature was never able to protect her from the attritions of life. She was 58 when she died in a London nursing home, and all the critics, with the solitary exception of Humbert Wolfe, let her pass from the literary scene without obituary tribute of any kind. Charlotte Mew. the outstanding woman poet of the Georgian movement, published only one volume of verse during her life. It was “The Farmer’s Bride,” produced through the Poetry Bookshop. Appropriately enough a posthumotis volume, “The Rambling Sailor,” also comes from the same publishers. It v. the most important book of verse that has come out this year, and it will do much to •ocus attention on the work of a adly neglected writer. In an age here publicit3' counts lor much, Charlotte Mew avoided it. She abhorred the public gaze, and was content t<•> pass her days in the isolation of Bloomsbury. The sound of popular applause never came to her ears; but, nevertheless, the enjoyed the admiration odf her distinguished contemporaries, and it was through the mediation «»f John Masefield. Walter de la Mare and Thomas Hardy that she was granted a Civil List pension of £73 a year in 1922.

Chronologically, Charlotte Mew was of the Georgians, but so strong and personal was the quality of her poetry t hat she remained uninfluenced by the prevailing fashions of her time. She her own course early, and never deviated from it. She was no more ' f the Georgians than she was of ’ the “Nineties,” although she wrote in both periods. Some of her prose, written •hen she was little more than a girl, a to be found in the Yellow Book; '■lit even this bore none of the pale • igns of the time. She stood aloof avoiding all those who might seek to label her.

The philosophy of her poems is the philosophy of Charlotte Mew’s life, and it is easy to soe how it was that she had such a slender hold upon it. There was never any hope for her, and all that she could ever see at the end was a unity with natural things: a oneness with the trees and the fields, she hoped for no more than thla, and *he vows**ichat she wanted no more. “Moorland Night” tells just what she felt:

>fy heart is against the grass and the sweet earth;—

It has gone still, at last. It does not want to beat any more, And why should it beat This is the end of the journey; The Thing is found. No poet has been more careful in the selection of work than Charlotte Mew. Indeed, one of the outstanding qualities of her published verse is the astonishing level it has kept. She never put out anything that was not of her best, and in this her lack of popularity probably has some virtue. Had she been in the yiositiou of having to feed a market the quality of her work would have suffered. Another excellence was her fertility in devising new. weeping rhythms. Her verse could sigh or thunder as she willed. She wrote delightful songs, a little melancholy perhaps, but they showed that her writing had the broad range of genius “Fin de Fete” was found among Thomas Hardy's papers after his death: Sweetheart, for such * day One mustn’t grudge the score; ICere then, it’s all to pay. It’s Good-night at the door. (Vood-nlght and good dreams to you, Do you remember the picture-book thieves Who left two children sleeping in a wood the long night through. And how the birds came down and covered them with leaves? So you and I have slept,—But now, «»h, what a lonely head! With just the shadow of a waving bough In the moonlight over your bed. Her attitude toward death is beautifully expressed in “Smile. Death”: Smile. Death, I see a smile as I come to you Straight from the road and moor I leave behind, Nothing on earth to me was like this windblown space. Nothing was like the road, but at the end there was a vision or a face And the eyes were not always kind. Smile, Death, as you fasten the blades to my feet for me, On, on let us skate past the sleeping willows dusted with snow; Fast, fast down the frozen stream, with the moor and the road and the vision behind, (Show me your face, why the eyes are mind! > And we will noa speak of life or believe in it or remember it us we go. In “The Rambling Sailor” volume it fa possible to learn all that may be learned of Charlotte Mew’s genius. Her method never altered, nor did it need to alter, and this book stands as her last challenge to the world which let her go by among the throng. A few knew of her, and if more make her acquaintance through this hook its publication will be justified. She stands with Elizabeth Browning and Ghristina Rosetti as the greatest of England's women poets. I.D. Back To Victoria! F'rom one of Hr Hugh Walpole's London Letters to the New York "Herxld-Tribune” literary supplement. NOTHING here has been more striking for many years than the indifference of the ordinary man during this election to party division. Parties here are ceasing to mean anything at all. and I fancy that in a few years there will be some quite new political background, with new estimates and values and ambitions. The same sort of thing is happening in English letters. Only a year or two ago it was perfectly possible for anyone after a minute’s observa tkm to discern the separate grounds:

the old stagers, Kipling, Moore, Bennett, Galsworthy, Wells, Bridges, etc.; Bloomsbury' and intelligence, Lytton Strachey. 11. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry. Clive Bell, etc.; broadbrows. Drinkwater, Squire, Brett Young, Swinnerton. myself. etc.: young men of promise. Gerhardi, Evelyn Waugh, Patrick Hamilton, etc., and so on, and so on. And now, quite suddenly, it has all collapsed. I was dining the other night in a house that has 01215' two pictures, a Derain and a Dufresne, where the latest French literature 13 stale and the only poet alivo of merit has a quite unpronounceable Czechoslovakian name. The only American authors admitted into those sacred walls is the author of “The Wild Party,” and no English author is ad mitted at all —as "approved,” I mean “Elizabeth and Essex” is condemned a 3 Wardour Street claptrap. “Orlando” is affected nonsense and Aldous Huxley is displayed derisively as an infant in pantalettes. I don’t know what I was doing tliere or at least I did not know until sn.l denly to my staggered amazement I heard my hostess, who was puffing at small cheroot, announce with a flicker of her crimson fingernails that English literature was lost altogether unless it returned to some of the Victorian simplicities. “I have been reading this week ’Dombey and Son’.” this lady declared, as though she were proclaiming a new Ten Commandments from the Mount to a fresh young Moses, “and I find the death of little Paul most moving.” The lady with the blood-red breasts painted by Derain shivered a little, but no one else seemed astonished at all. We had been discussing five min utes before David Garnett’s last novel. “No Love,” and dismissing it contemptuously. I plucked up courage and suggested that it was written in beautiful English. How sharply I was mocked. A young man who looked like a very weary dancing instructor from the Hammersmith Palais de Danse asked me whether I was really so sadly behind the times as to care any more for style, asked me whether I’d read any Walter Scott lately. “We must get back to Ivanhoe.” he remarked, a faint flush flooding his sallow features. "I was saying so to Morgan Forster only last week.”