#1 The English Poets by David Cecil
David Cecil (1902 to 1986) was an English biographer and historian. He was prodigiously prolific - some fifteen biographies and about as many more studies of literature and poetry. I purposely put “biographer” before “historian” because in a quick review of Cecil’s publications, history seems to occupy a back seat behind literature. More accurate, perhaps, to describe him as a scholar.
Cecil was one who rose from the ranks of the aristocracy [did Oscar Wilde say that, or did I make it up?]. Born Edward Christian David Gascoyne-Cecil, Cecil was the younger son of a marquis and, through the quaint rules of the English gentry, accordingly carried the courtesy title of “Lord”. At various times he was a professor of rhetoric in London, and Professor of English Literature at Oxford where he was also a Fellow of New College. This latter position was one clearly designed to provide Cecil with time to think rather than time to work, that is, time to work as a teacher. There is an anecdote involving the writer, Kingsley Amis, when a student at Oxford: “Amis’s allocated supervisor was Lord David Cecil, who seemed disinclined to supervise anything at all; after a term and a half had passed without any contact between them, Amis decided to go in search of him at New College. This caused much amusement at the porters’ lodge, as if he had asked for the Shah of Persia: ‘Oh no, sir. Lord David? Oh, you’d have to get up very early in the morning to get hold of him. Oh dear. Oh, dear. Lord David in college, well I never did.’” A clue, perhaps, to the extent of Cecil’s literary output; and a clue to his being chosen as the expert author of this study of The English Poets; and his ability to deliver. Note that this volume is the first in the Britain in Pictures series.
I did not set out to review Cecil’s observations poet by poet – a few words on each would simply do no justice. Moreover, my lack of first-hand knowledge would be exposed. However, as you will find, it didn’t quite turn out that way, and poet-by-poet proved to be the natural format. And after some close attention this student is obliged to acknowledge that Cecil is one mightily informed gentleman. Despite his scarce presence at New College Cecil was a heavyweight. But first, I thought to hold some of Cecil’s more didactic observations up to the light.
The thing about generalisations is that they are generally true. The other thing about generalisations is that they are generally not true. Thus, when Cecil asserts that: “The Italians are famous for their painting, the Germans for their music, the Russians for their novels. England is distinguished for her poets,” we know what he means, we accept that there’s some truth in it, but feel in our water that it really can’t be true. It’s just a cute way of positing that English poets are better than all others. How Cecil proves his point when he discusses no poets other than the English escaped me.
“Shakespeare, Milton, Byron are acknowledged to be among the supreme poets of the world.” No prisoners taken with this statement; you’d better believe it. Not only have I spoken, but I am speaking for you too. But it seems the big three are only “among” the supreme poets; so the assertion isn’t much of an assertion at all.
“Seven or eight other English poets deserve world-wide fame.” Here we go: there are worthy English poets other than the big three; but Cecil is starting to sound patronising now.
“The greatness of English poetry has been astonishingly continuous……….German music and Italian painting flourished, at most, for two hundred years. England has gone on producing great poets from the fourteenth century to to-day.” Bold stuff.
“That the English should have chosen poetry as the chief channel for their artistic talent is the result partly of their circumstances, partly of their temperament.” Here at last we have Cecil the scholar, not the publicist. Hopefully, he will succeed in proving his point.
“English is a poet’s language. It is ideally suited for description or for the expression of emotion. It is flexible, it is varied, it has an enormous vocabulary; able to convey every subtle diverse shade, to make vivid before the mental eye any picture it wishes to conjure up. Moreover, its very richness helps it to evoke those indefinite moods, those visionary flights of fancy which so much of the material of poetry is composed. There is no better language in the world for touching the heart and setting the imagination aflame.” Apart from the concluding generalisation, this analysis of the English language seems to nail it.
Turning to the specifics, can I find among Cecil’s brief analyses of those poets he chooses to profile an even briefer snippet or bon mot? As what follows will show, many of my words are simply direct quotes from Cecil: it would be presumptuous to try to improve on them! I trust that my admiration for his scholarship shines through.
Geoffrey Chaucer (1340 – 1400): It was the genius of Chaucer that first turned the medieval language of the day into a language suitable for versification. And Chaucer was a consummate storyteller.
Christopher Marlowe (1564 – 1593): Marlowe was a “dramatic poet of genius”, with his plays expressing “line after line of triumphant eloquence”.
William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616): “It was he alone who had the capacity to impose order on the brilliant chaos of Elizabethan drama.” Cecil makes no specific reference to Shakespeare’s sonnets (although Sonnet 29 “When in disgrace with Fortune and men’s eyes” is reproduced), but regards the plays as poetry in a broader sense. I venture that his two page analysis of Shakespeare’s achievement is equal to many a 400-page tome on the same.
John Donne (1573 – 1631): Fuelled by a restless intelligence, occasionally his “passion and intellect fuse together to attain a white heat of sensual or spiritual ecstasy unique in English poetry”. Donne’s “rhythms are complex, his imagery audacious and grotesque”. After pages of “harsh and puzzling riddles….suddenly comes a passage whose every word quivers, shining and transparent as a living flame”. Who’s the poet here?
John Milton (1608 – 1674): “A scholar, a philosopher and a puritan” Milton, considered that the only type of poetry worth writing should be elevated, and should “enshrine in imperishable words the highest truths known to man”. This description shouts “boring”, but Cecil’s praise is unstinting. In contrast to Shakespeare, Milton exudes “refined and disciplined taste. His style is all marble and precious stones.”
Cecil tells us that Milton marked the end of an era - the end of civil and religious wars, and the end of the English Renaissance. The poetry that followed lacked the former “sensual and spiritual splendour”, and lacked also “its confusion and its extravagance”. The society of the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth century displayed “civilised equilibrium, untroubled by fundamental issues”, where manners, good sense and good taste prevailed. This was reflected in the poetry of the times, predominantly social poetry, but not inferior. Not with “the elemental passions of man, nor with his solitary dreams and visions”, but “the poetry of home and town and fashionable life, of friendship, flirtation and worldly wisdom”. Hence –
John Dryden (1631 – 1700) seems stimulated “by his pleasure in practising the craft of letters” and whose “most commonplace thoughts are warmed into poetry by the sheer virile accomplishment of his writing and snap of his superb versification”. [Could Dryden have ever written so brilliant a sentence as that?]
Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744) represents elegance versus Dryden’s strength, with a “delicate sense of style which he polished to the last degree of gleaming finish”. “Pope set the standard of taste for his age”, and – Cecil tells us – none of his early successors equalled him.
William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850): A mystic of nature, the spirit of the Universe communicated to him through still waters and wooded silences [I am paraphrasing Cecil]. “His work is ludicrously unequal…..but now and then inspiration seizes him: and he rises to a height of serene, spiritual sublimity (sic) unparalleled in English poetry.”
John Keats (1795 – 1821) said that he “loved the principle of beauty in all things”, and Cecil asserts that the object of Keats’ poetry “was to express this love”; and “he was equipped to do it”. And although “some of his work is marred by a youthful floridity, he had a gift for the right word, for the exact visualising phrase, that can only be compared to Shakespeare’s”.
Percy Shelley (1792 – 1822): “Take it all in all, he is the most wonderful lyrical poet England has ever produced.”
George Byron (1788 -1824): “A dynamic, theatrical personality, ruthlessly observant of other people and morbidly sensitive to their opinion of himself he both lived and wrote with one eye fixed upon his audience. They returned his gaze. He was a brilliant and eloquent commentator on the active life of man.”
Alfred Tennyson (1809 – 1892): Cecil says that Tennyson had a “natural gift for the lovely evocative phrase” and a similar sensibility to Keats. But he “was a more accomplished craftsman, and his best work is a miracle of finished art. Only, he lacked Keats’s divine fire”. “The Victorian age, strenuous and puritanical, took the view that poetry should teach a moral lesson, and Tennyson yielded to the pressure of his age.” “All the same, Tennyson is a great poet.”
Robert Browning (1812 – 1889): His individualistic style is “conversational, slap-dash, and freaked all over with the grotesque quips of Browning’s fancy” and “often obscure and ugly”. But he is “most exciting reading: bursting with life and passion and possessed of a subtle insight into the processes of men’s minds”.
Matthew Arnold (1822 – 1888): Arnold was a “serious-minded academic person, learned in the literature of the past”. “In words of restrained and poignant eloquence, Arnold voices the profound melancholy which was beginning to permeate the more thoughtful minds of his time.”
Cecil’s survey doesn’t end there, but he has exhausted the big guns, and his remaining poets are – I venture – merely included for completeness. The claims to greatness that might have touched some of them when Cecil was writing in 1942 had not yet been validated by history. Indeed, at the risk of being accused of lazy list-making, query how many of the following are today “household names”, or even recognised as poets at all: Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 – 1882), William Morris (1834 – 1896), Algernon Swinburne (1837 – 1909); Edward Fitzgerald (1809 – 1883); A.E. Housman (1859 – 1936); Thomas Hardy (1840 – 1928); Robert Bridges (1844 – 1930); and more, concluding with T.S. Eliot (1888 – 1965).
At the outset, Cecil set out to evaluate ten or eleven English poets who deserve world-wide fame. In the event, luckily for us, he ranged much wider. I found his dissertation to be beyond insightful.
Let me, in conclusion, lower the bar a little. On my shelf is a small cloth-bound paperback (?) I received as a boy, about 1948 I would guess. I have scrawled my name on the flyleaf – in a fairer hand, I confess, than I have been able to manage later in adult life. Two Hundred Poems for Boys and Girls. One poem is by Austin Dobson (1840 – 1921), a writer known principally as a literary biographer, but a prolific poet too. Dobson’s poem, The Child Musician, is a sentimental piece verging on the mawkish, but it so appealed that I learnt it as a boy; and I remember it still:
He had played for his lordship’s levee,
He had played for her ladyship’s whim,
Till the poor little head was heavy,
And the poor little brain would swim.
And the face grew peaked and eerie,
And the large eyes strange and bright,
And they said – too late – “He is weary!
He shall rest for, at least, tonight!”
But at dawn, when the birds were waking,
As they watched in the silent room,
With a sound of a strained cord breaking,
A something snapped in the room.
‘Twas a string of his violincello,
And they heard him stir in his bed:-
“Make room for a tired little fellow,
Kind God!” – was the last he said.
#66 The English Bible by Sir Herbert Grierson
This volume,The English Bible, was published in 1943 and thus pre-dated the significant Biblical developments of the 20th Century’s second half. Here I hasten to interject a caveat about my use of the word significant. I am using it in the everyday sense of important, rather than tied to a 5% probability as statisticians might. I ascribe to the growth in Biblical scholarship since 1943 a considerably greater than 5% significance. The Revised Standard Version, an updated-language version produced by the American Churches of Christ (New Testament 1946, Old Testament 1953) was the go-to version of my youth. With its scholarly severance from three hundred and fifty years of the King James version, the RSV is a version no longer in the language of old. But even by the 1960s it was still not happily accepted by all sects and congregations. Then came the New English Bible (New Testament 1961, Old Testament 1970) [revised and rebadged as the Revised English Bible in 1989], produced by multiple committees of translators and advisers - the high water mark of its time.
As to what Grierson thought of the English Bible in his day: I have chosen not to attempt a distillation, neither of Grierson’s commentary nor of the Bible itself! For his part the study must have been salutary – Grierson lived for 94 years, from 1866 to 1960. A son of Lerwick on Shetland, he was Professor of English Literature at Aberdeen for 21 years followed by a professorship of English Literature at Edinburgh for 20 years. His special research field was 17th Century English poets. He was not, therefore, a theologian – not a practising one, at least. “No living writer is better equipped…….to expound the fascinating history of the English Bible and its great influence on our language and literature”, so says the flap. Hence this is not to be an exposition of the theology of the Bible, or an apologia, but rather the Bible as literature. Either way, I am ill equipped to offer a critique.
So there I leave it…..except to bemoan the gaping fissures that criss-cross the landscape of organised religion: the silly insistence of some adherents that every word of scripture is “gospel truth”; the inability of some adherents to live comfortably with the different views (interpretations) of their co-religionists, let alone the views of those of other faiths; the sheer nastiness that so often spews from people of faith and so-called good will. In so saying, I mean no ill will to those who wear their faiths lightly.
Footnote: When, in 1955, I went (by steamer) on the Sun Youth Travel tour of the United Kingdom it was suggested that each youthful traveller should take a Bible for private devotion. I reneged at this somewhat ostentatious suggestion, but did agree to take with me Through the Bible by Theodora Wilson Wilson. This book told the Bible story in language accessible to young people, with – notwithstanding its 602 pages – a suitable amount of simplification and bowdlerisation. In travelling around Britain for seven weeks, and on the sea voyages to and fro, lugging this massive book with me, I doubt that I read half a page of it – but I sure as hell wore a lot of guilt for my apostasy.
#119 The British Theatre by Bernard Miles
Bernard Miles (1907 to 1991), the author of The British Theatre, was known to Australian audiences for numerous film appearances, but never as the star. His “character actor” persona was enhanced by his rural/regional accent, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire we’re told. He capitalised on this bucolic flavour in a number of comic phonograph recordings. His climb up the ladder of fame was slow – in 14 of his 19 earliest films, released from 1933 to 1940, he was uncredited. Remember him, later, as gentle Joe Gargery in David Lean’s Great Expectations.
But, this man of the mild screen image, was the second actor only after Laurence Olivier to be awarded a life peerage. A Commander of the British Empire from 1953, he was knighted in 1969, and created Baron Miles in 1979 (all life peers are barons). Not for his film acting, that’s for sure. It was his career in the theatre that did it, and not just his treading on the boards. He had gone on the stage not long after Cambridge. Years of provincial repertory followed, with the attendant jack-of-all-trades theatrical experience. He stage managed, and directed productions, and in time he played Iago in the West End. But the trigger for his elevation to the peerage was his founding of the Mermaid Theatre.
Miles and his actress wife, Josephine Wilson, raised the funds and oversaw the construction of the Mermaid, opened in 1959. It was built in the docks area of London (not the West End), and was the first theatre built in that area since Shakespeare’s time. Furthermore, it was the first London theatre to abandon the traditional stalls and gallery configuration, having instead a single auditorium level with stage on three sides.
Miles was also a student of the theatre, as this volume attests. He had “a unique collection of theatrical books, portraits and autobiographical letters” which doubtless informed this survey of British theatre. There is much of interest in the survey: the early involvement of the Church in primitive drama; the passing of “theatre” into the hands of the mediaeval guilds; plays and pageants in the open air – at markets and on village greens; the evolution of elaborate costuming and special effects. “Thus in the days when work, worship and recreation were inseparable, the theatre grew out of the everyday life of the English people, who were its first playwrights, actors, wardrobe mistresses, property masters and stage directors.” “In fact, the whole thing was home-grown.”
In response to the decline of the trade guilds the actors took to the roads to support themselves, becoming the first “strolling players”. In the sixteenth century companies of such players were formed to perform in the castles and country estates of “wealthy and cultured noblemen”. In 1576 one of these companies was responsible for the building of the first theatre for public entertainment, modestly named The Theatre. (Elizabeth ascended the throne in 1558; Shakespeare was born in 1564, and his first plays likely date from the early 1590s). The Globe theatre was built in London by Shakespeare and five friends in 1599 – using recycled timber from the demolished The Theatre. The Globe was said to have housed a little over two thousand people. One of the early actors to play the stage of the Globe was Richard Burbage (1567 – 1619), son of one of the syndicate of owners. Burbidge created many of Shakespeare’s greatest characters. Miles bravely asserts it likely that Burbage “was vocally superior to any actor before or since”, and quotes from an elegy on Burbage’s death:
“……………..……every thought and mood
Might thoroughly from his face be understood.
And his whole action he could change with ease,
From ancient Leare to youthful Pericles.”.
Miles continues: “We don’t know how much the actors earned, because the companies were run on a commonwealth system, all profits being shared after working expenses had been deducted. They gave only two public performances a week, but were doing shows almost every evening at Court or in private houses - in return for food and drink and a whip around. Thus payment was by results, and a stake in the show was part of each actor’s birthright…….later this birthright was stolen, and the art of the theatre was slowly but surely dragged into the realm of commerce….”.
That dragging was a little delayed by the Puritans, and the closure of the theatres in 1642. The Civil War period (1642 – 1651), and some years beyond, provided no employment for the theatrical community, but with the return of the monarchy in 1660 there was “a period of intense theatrical activity”, the principal feature being the erection of theatres that for the first time featured the picture-frame stage. The “playhouse became a combination of two separate rooms, one containing the audience and the other containing the actors….”. In referencing Duke’s Theatre, which opened in1671 with a 1200-person house, Miles writes rather bitterly: “Armed guards were posted in the vestibule and on the stage itself, to see that no one cheated the box office, and to restore order in the event of a brawl. For the audience were mostly well-to-do and mostly vicious, and as the men usually wore swords and came not to see and hear but to be seen and heard, and to show off their fine clothes and their quick wits and to solicit the women, it is no wonder that there were frequent quarrels or that some of them ended fatally.”
Fair to say that Miles expends most of his effort in portraying the great actors of earlier times. My survey is less comprehensive. My earlier thumbnail sketches of long-gone poets [earlier in this Blog] could each be used as a prompt for seeking out the author’s works, but the work of a long-dead actor is ephemeral – it is anchored in the time of the performance and cannot be revisited today. Nevertheless, it would be churlish not at least to mention briefly some of the stars of Miles’s survey; so now a quick run–through.
David Garrick (1717 - 1779) is introduced by Miles as the one “still accepted as our greatest actor”. Utterly unprovable, but we get the idea. Garrick dominated the London stage, not only as actor but also as manager of the Drury Lane Theatre. His greatest claim to genius, so says Miles, was his filling-in of “looks, action and deportment” between the lines. “He first grasped that the core of acting lies in the pause, during which the actor loosens or tightens the cords of suspense and raises that expectation which is the life and soul of the theatre.” And Garrick abjured the then practice of dropping out of character when not central to the action – as a contemporary writes: “When three or four are on the stage with him, he is attentive to whatever is spoke, and never drops his character when he has finished a speech, by either looking contemptuously on an inferior performer, unnecessary spitting, or suffering his eyes to wander through the whole circle of spectators.”
Sarah Siddons (1755 – 1831) was from the theatrical Kemble family, and was on the stage as soon as she could walk. She played with Garrick in her early twenties, but was overcome with nervousness, retiring to the provinces until her triumphal return in 1782 – when “she knocked London flat”. Thereafter her career “was one long triumph”. “She was gifted with great intelligence, a tall and splendid figure, fine features, wonderful eyes and a magnificent voice.” There is a story that in one performance, where her lover is strangled before her eyes, the reality of her agony and convulsive words as she sank lifeless to the floor caused the audience first to hush, and then to clamour for the curtain to be dropped in the belief that she had died. Even though the manager gave assurance that the actor was alive “the audience would not suffer the performance to be resumed”.
Another member of the Kemble family was John Kemble (1757 – 1823), Sarah Siddons’ younger brother. “Cold, dignified, cultured and correct, he looked ‘like a man about to sneeze’.” He once repeated 1500 lines from Homer by heart, without a mistake.
The ascendancy of Sarah Siddons and John Kemble on the London stage continued until 1814, until eclipsed by Edmund Kean (1787 – 1833), of whom it was said he read Shakespeare as if “reading it by flashes of lightning”. “Of uncertain parentage, born and bred in the gutter, subjected until the very hour of his London triumph to every kind of misery, privation and disappointment, he had all the actor’s gifts except pure inches – the penetrating eye, the stirring and heartbreaking voice, tigerish grace of movement, and a mixture of fiery and melancholy temperament……..He could dance and sing and tumble, and was one of the best swordsmen of his day……..the greatest actor since Garrick.”
A seventeen-year-old actor was offered employment in a London theatre but chose the provinces instead.; and – some 600 roles and 16 years later – emerged in London as Henry Irving (1838 – 1905), and became the leader of the London stage. Irving lacked the physical apparatus that should accompany a great actor, and his vocal deficiencies should have disqualified him from playing Shakespeare’s great tragic heroes, but he had will and imagination, strong personality and acute dramatic sense. Thus he was able “to substitute values of personal magnetism and stagecraft for the gifts which he lacked, and the result was a series of the most thrilling performances since the death of Kean”.
Partnering Irving through much of his career was Ellen Terry (1847 – 1928). Miles describes Terry as “a unique commingling of emotion and intelligence with a glorious face and lovely figure” and is probably not alone in thinking her “one of the most entrancing women ever born”. And with a 64-year stage career she could probably act too! Terry was the leading lady in Irving’s Lyceum Theatre production company from 1878; and it is appropriate, I think, to conclude this survey with some Terry comments on her colleague Irving. On Irving’s ability to portray dying: “He did really almost die – he imagined death with such horrible intensity. His eyes would disappear upwards, his face grow grey, his limbs cold.” On Irving’s ability to subsume himself into a character: “It seems to me some nights as if I were watching Napoleon trying to imitate Henry Irving”.
Miles tells us numerous stories of the theatre and of actors, too many to cover here. As one might expect, natural modesty prevents him from saying anything about his own contributions to the theatre. Indeed the half of the twentieth century before he was writing in 1948 occupies a mere page-and-a-half. In what is virtually a postscript to the main game Miles focuses on the Old Vic theatre under the management of Lilian Baylis [and gives her an additional “s”, which the editors failed to notice]. What was subsequently to become the Old Vic Theatre dated from1818, and had endured numerous changes of name and fortunes, including doubling as a temperance coffee tavern, and a centre for adult education lectures. But in 1914 Baylis instituted a series of Shakespeare productions, and a policy of classical drama at popular prices. By 1921 the whole Shakespeare canon had been produced, along with contributions from other classical playwrights, including European. The Old Vic of that era gave the public Peggy Ashcroft, John Gielgud, Sybil Thorndike, Edith Evans and more. In 1929 Gielgud was one of the founders of the Old Vic production company…….which, in later years, morphed into the National Theatre, with Laurence Olivier as its head.
The Old Vic, and British theatre, survived the Second World War, partly because the Government – through Arts Council funding – decreed that it should; and partly through significant relocation to the provinces. The director, Tyrone Guthrie, kept two or three Old Vic productions on tour throughout the early days of the War, although returning defiantly to the capital in 1942 and re-establishing the company – with Olivier and Ralph Richardson as its leading players.
Miles finishes with an apology for not dealing at greater length with the actors of the earlier twentieth century: “As I look back over these pages I realise how many shades will cut me dead in the Green Rooms of the Elysian Fields where the endless and unresolved debates are continued in an undimmable afterglow”, his consolation being that many of the greats have written about themselves, or “other people have written most delightfully” about them. “The second-hand bookshops are still overflowing with theatrical treasures at knock-down prices.” As to his contemporaries, Miles is less contrite. “Them you can still see and hear. Them you can still laugh and cry with. Them you can still love in the flesh.” Alas, no longer!
Gary Andrews
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