Art of Letters — Georgians: The Young Satirists
(3) THE YOUNG SATIRISTS
Satire, it has been said, is an ignoble art; and it is probable that there are no satirists in Heaven.
Probably there are no doctors either.
Satire and medicine are our responses to a diseased world--to our diseased selves.
They are responses, however, that make for health.
Satire holds the medicine-glass up to human nature.
It also holds the mirror up in a limited way.
It does not show a man what he looks like when he is both well and good.
It does show a man what he looks like, however, when he breaks out into spots or goes yellow, pale, or mottled as a result of making a beast of himself.
It reflects only sick men; but it reflects them with a purpose.
It would be a crime to permit it, if the world were a hospital for incurables.
To write satire is an act of faith, not a luxurious exercise.
The despairing Swift was a fighter, as the despairing Anatole France is a fighter.
They may have uttered the very Z of melancholy about the animal called man; but at least they were sufficiently optimistic to write satires and to throw themselves into defeated causes.
It would be too much to expect of satire that it alone will cure mankind of the disease of war.
It is a good sign, however, that satires on war have begun to be written.
War has affected with horror or disgust a number of great imaginative writers in the last two or three thousand years.
The tragic indictment of war in _The Trojan Women_ and the satiric indictment in _The Voyage to the Houyhnhnms_ are evidence that some men at least saw through the romance of war before the twentieth century.
In the war that has just ended, however--or that would have ended if the Peace Conference would let it--we have seen an imaginative revolt against war, not on the part of mere men of letters, but on the part of soldiers.
Ballads have survived from other wars, depicting the plight of the mutilated soldier left to beg: You haven't an arm and you haven't a leg, You're an eyeless, noseless, chickenless egg, You ought to be put in a bowl to beg-- Och, Johnnie, I hardly knew you!
But the recent war has produced a literature of indictment, basing itself neither on the woes of women nor on the wrongs of ex-soldiers, but on the right of common men not to be forced into mutual murder by statesmen who themselves never killed anything more formidable than a pheasant.
Soldiers--or some of them--see that wars go on only because the people who cause them do not realize what war is like.
I do not mean to suggest that the kings, statesmen and journalists who bring wars about would not themselves take part in the fighting rather than that there should be no fighting at all.
The people who cause wars, however, are ultimately the people who endure kings, statesmen and journalists of the exploiting and bullying kind.
The satire of the soldiers is an appeal not to the statesmen and journalists, but to the general imagination of mankind.
It is an attempt to drag our imaginations away from the heroics of the senate-house into the filth of the slaughter-house.
It does not deny the heroism that exists in the slaughter-house any more than it denies the heroism that exists in the hospital ward.
But it protests that, just as the heroism of a man dying of cancer must not be taken to justify cancer, so the heroism of a million men dying of war must not be taken to justify war.
There are some who believe that neither war nor cancer is a curable disease.
One thing we can be sure of in this connection: we shall never get rid either of war or of cancer if we do not learn to look at them realistically and see how loathsome they are.
So long as war was regarded as inevitable, the poet was justified in romanticizing it, as in that epigram in the _Greek Anthology:_ Demætia sent eight sons to encounter the phalanx of the foe, and she buried them all beneath one stone.
No tear did she shed in her mourning, but said this only: "Ho, Sparta, I bore these children for thee."
As soon as it is realized, however, that wars are not inevitable, men cease to idealize Demætia, unless they are sure she did her best to keep the peace.
To a realistic poet of war such as Mr. Sassoon, she is an object of pity rather than praise.
His sonnet, _Glory of Women_, suggests that there is another point of view besides Demætia's: You love us when we're heroes, home on leave, Or wounded in a mentionable place.
You worship decorations; you believe That chivalry redeems the war's disgrace.
You make us shells.
You listen with delight, By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled.
You crown our distant ardours while we fight, And mourn our laurelled memories when we're killed.
You can't believe that British troops "retire" When hell's last horror breaks them, and they run, Trampling the terrible corpses--blind with blood.
_O German mother dreaming by the fire,_ _While you, are knitting socks to send your son_ _His face is trodden deeper in the mud.
_ To Mr. Sassoon and the other war satirists, indeed, those stay at home and incite others to go out and kill or get killed seem either pitifully stupid or pervertedly criminal.
Mr. Sassoon has now collected all his war poems into one volume, and one is struck by the energetic hatred of those who make war in safety that finds expression in them.
Most readers will remember the bitter joy of the dream that one day he might hear "the yellow pressmen grunt and squeal," and see the Junkers driven out of Parliament by the returned soldiers.
Mr. Sassoon cannot endure the enthusiasm of the stay-at-home--especially the enthusiasm that pretends that soldiers not only behave like music-hall clowns, but are incapable of the more terrible emotional experiences.
He would like, I fancy, to forbid civilians to make jokes during war-time.
His hatred of the jesting civilian attains passionate expression in the poem called _Blighters_: The House is crammed: tier beyond tier they grin And cackle at the Show, while prancing ranks Of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din;
"We're sure the Kaiser loves the dear old Tanks!"
I'd like to see a Tank come down the stalls, Lurching to rag-time tunes, or "Home, sweet Home,"-- And there'd be no more jokes in Music-halls To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume.
Mr. Sassoon himself laughs on occasion, but it is the laughter of a man being driven insane by an insane world.
The spectacle of lives being thrown away by the hundred thousand by statesmen and generals without the capacity to run a village flower-show, makes him find relief now and then in a hysteria of mirth, as in _The General_: "Good-morning; good-morning!"
the General said When we met him last week on our way to the Line, Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead, And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
"He's a cheery old card," grunted Harry to Jack As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
* * * * * But he did for them both by his plan of attack.
Mr. Sassoon's verse is also of importance because it paints life in the trenches with a realism not to be found elsewhere in the English poetry of the war.
He spares us nothing of: The strangled horror And butchered, frantic gestures of the dead.
He gives us every detail of the filth, the dullness, and the agony of the trenches.
His book is in its aim destructive.
It is a great pamphlet against war.
If posterity wishes to know what war was like during this period, it will discover the truth, not in _Barrack-room Ballads_, but in Mr. Sassoon's verse.
The best poems in the book are poems of hatred.
This means that Mr. Sassoon has still other worlds to conquer in poetry.
His poems have not the constructive ardour that we find in the revolutionary poems of Shelley.
They are utterances of pain rather than of vision.
Many of them, however, rise to a noble pity--_The Prelude_, for instance, and _Aftermath_, the latter of which ends: Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz,-- The night you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench,-- And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, "Is it all going to happen again?"
Do you remember that hour of din before the attack-- And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back With dying eyes and lolling heads,--those ashen-grey Masks of the lad who once were keen and kind and gay?
_Have you forgotten yet?...
_ _Look up, and swear by the green of the Spring that you'll never forget.
_ Mr. Sitwell's satires--which occupy the most interesting pages of _Argonaut and Juggernaut_--seldom take us into the trenches.
Mr. Sitwell gets all the subjects he wants in London clubs and drawing-rooms.
These "free-verse" satires do not lend themselves readily to quotation, but both the manner and the mood of them can be guessed from the closing verses of _War-horses_, in which the "septuagenarian butterflies" of Society return to their platitudes and parties after seeing the war through: But now They have come out.
They have preened And dried themselves After their blood bath.
Old men seem a little younger, And tortoise-shell combs Are longer than ever;
Earrings weigh down aged ears;
And Golconda has given them of its best.
They have seen it through!
Theirs is the triumph, And, beneath The carved smile of the Mona Lisa, False teeth Rattle Like machine-guns, In anticipation Of food and platitudes.
Les Vieilles Dames Sans Merci!
Mr. Sitwell's hatred of war is seldom touched with pity.
It is arrogant hatred.
There is little emotion in it but that of a young man at war with age.
He pictures the dotards of two thousand years ago complaining that Christ did not die-- Like a hero With an oath on his lips, Or the refrain from a comic song-- Or a cheerful comment of some kind.
His own verse, however, seems to me to be hardly more in sympathy with the spirit of Christ than with the spirit of those who mocked him.
He is moved to write by unbelief in the ideals of other people rather than by the passionate force of ideals of his own.
He is a sceptic, not a sufferer.
His work proceeds less from his heart than from his brain.
It is a clever brain, however, and his satirical poems are harshly entertaining and will infuriate the right people.
They may not kill Goliath, but at least they will annoy Goliath's friends.
David's weapon, it should be remembered, was a sling, with some pebbles from the brook, not a pea-shooter.
The truth is, so far as I can see, Mr. Sitwell has not begun to take poetry quite seriously.
His non-satirical verse is full of bright colour, but it has the brightness, not of the fields and the flowers, but of captive birds in an aviary.
It is as though Mr. Sitwell had taken poetry for his hobby.
I suspect his Argonauts of being ballet dancers.
He enjoys amusing little decorations--phrases such as "concertina waves" and-- The ocean at a toy shore Yaps like a Pekinese.
His moonlight owl is surely a pretty creature from the unreality of a ballet: An owl, horned wizard of the night, Flaps through the air so soft and still;
Moaning, it wings its flight Far from the forest cool, To find the star-entangled surface of a pool, Where it may drink its fill Of stars.
At the same time, here and there are evidences that Mr. Sitwell has felt as well as fancied.
The opening verse of _Pierrot Old_ gives us a real impression of shadows: The harvest moon is at its height, The evening primrose greets its light With grace and joy: then opens up The mimic moon within its cup.
Tall trees, as high as Babel tower, Throw down their shadows to the flower-- Shadows that shiver--seem to see An ending to infinity.
But there is too much of Pan, the fauns and all those other ballet-dancers in his verse.
Mr. Sitwell's muse wears some pretty costumes.
But one wonders when she will begin to live for something besides clothes.
