GEOFFREY DE MONTALK

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 979, 23 May 1930, Page 16

GEOFFREY DE MONTALK

“THIS SHAKESPEARE BUSINESS” QEOFFREY DE MONTALK, the Auckland poet, whose name recently figured in a cabled message from England has forwarded The Bookman the following letter:--Sir, —It was with some amusement that I read the cablegrams in the New Zealand papers, alleging that I told a literary audience in London that New Zealand has produced poetry greater than Shakespeare ever thought of. I take it you will accord me the justice of being allowed to deny this singular story 1 do indeed think that New Zealand has poets who as a group are greater than any other group in the world of the living, nor would I hesitate to compare them with any dead poet—other than Shakespeare. May I say in passing that the falsity of this report is made clear by the fact that, as those who know me will bear witness, I always speak of the Shakespeare poetry by the name of its real author, the Viscount St. Alban (usually known as Lord Bacon). That great man I worship as a god; and I rather hate to be spoken of as blaspheming against him whom I worship. I hate also to seem to be aping the gestures of that almighty humbug. (jJ. B. Shaw, who calls himself a greater playwright than Shakespeare. The facts are that, when Miss Meynell lectured at Foyle’s, on her mother, Alice Meynell, I took the chair. Miss Meynell said that her mother’s idea of the essential mark of poetry was (hear, hear, say I —New Zealand women versifiers please note), and that her chosen example of supreme poetry was:

in such a night, Stood Dido with a willow- in her hand upon the wild sea banks, and w-aft her love To come again to Carthage. What I said was, that singularly enough, some neighbouring words in the same passage: The moon shines bright—in such a night as this . . . Troll us methinks mounted the Troian walls. And sighed his soul toward the Grecian tents, Where Cressid lay that night.

•were chosen as the high-water mark ct poetry by the young New Zealand poet, A. R. IX Fairburn, whom, I said, I regard as the greatest poet I know I also deny emphatically having said i glad £ am a New Zealander—with no need to remain in that rnedueyal land.” I said I was glad our branch of the princely family of I'otocki had been Englished, and become part of the British Empire, which is a very different thing 1 owe my homage to his Majesty the Ring-Emperor, not to the mere dirt Maui fished up for me to walk on. That mediaeval land. Roland, lias one thing without which for me no country is a country at all, namely, a definite aristocracy—so had Maori New Zealand —and rather than boast ot belonging to a land where Jack boasts himself to be as good as his master and a damn sight better, I would freely give my homage to the sacred Emperor of Japan, the Kaiser, TLM. tho Duke of Guise, or even the High Chiefs New Zealand is busy persecuting in Samoa. A king’s a king for a’ that. My love for the land of my birth depends entirely upon the King: and on the hope that New Zealand will soon give over Christianity (the triumph of the unnatural over the natural) and democracy (the triumph of the ugly over the lovely). A tohunga would certainly be without honour in his own country, were it not for The Sun. Tho first support is always the hardest to get: and 1 shall always be grateful to The Sun for recognising me when I was yet only a youth, in a land whose only tradition was Samuel Butler’s short stay, and Katherine Mansfield. Two of the very greatest modern writers in the world, it is true, but both forgotten by the quaint fools who think the world is based on butter-fat and All Blacks. No pleasure any literary triumph can bring me will ever be quite the same as that of having my first poem published in the place of honour on the leader page of a Saturday’s Sun, with a tranquil drawing in the style of a woodcut.

It is true I am not even afraid of a “London literary audience,” which is, I am sorry to say, not much better than a New Zealand one, but I was neither courageous nor foolish enough to say that we had a poet as great as Shakespeare. The malicious person who sent the cable tried to give the thing that nasty egotistic twist, inferring that I myself was the one greater than Shakespeare. Well, let mo say and have done, I am egotistic and thank the gods for it; moreover, I pray the gods to keep me from ever being so egotistic as the humbugs who try to lord it over the great by ever harping on what they call “humility.” Did not the great Emperor Aurelius say. There is nothing more scandalous than a man who is proud of his humility? But my egotism hardly runs the length of thinking myself as great as the great Viscount who published tinder the name of his nominee. Wm. Shakespeare. What I do think is that the group of young New Zealand poets, the chieftainship of which I am trying to arrogate to myself, is the greatest living group of poets; and I think that individuals in it compare very well with the giants of European poetry. In my own heart I believe myself greater than any European poet, except Shakespeare. I always have believed in w-earing one’s heart on one’s sleeve, and one’s coat-of-arms on one’s tunic. Only the great and brave dare do so! Of course I am doing my best to prepare England for a poetic invasion. GEOFFREY POTOCKI DE MONTALK Earl’s Court, London.