R.E.Gordon George,
Villa de l'Ascension,
Hyeres,
Var,
France.

Mr. Stead's New Poetry.

*The House on the Wold.* 5/- ) London.

*Festival in Tuscany.* 5/- ) Cobden-Sanderson.

It is extraordinary how literary interest runs in grooves. Talk tumbles into them and continues there, no matter how fine things there may be just outside them. There are plenty of names of poets known in America: E.P.Robinson, Edna St.V. Millay, C.Sandburg, C.Aitken, Benet, Witter Bynner, Pound, Masters, Vachell Lindsey: there are, in a different category, Robert Frost and T.S.Eliot, or again John Hall Wheelock and Sara Teasdale. But who has ever heard of William Force Stead? Who knows the name of a single book that he has published? And yet Mr. Stead is one of the greatest living American poets, and his two last volumes place him higher than any of his other work.

Take a few phrases out of Mr. Stead's earlier volumes:

> Evening aloft in awed expectancy
> Waited the starry advent.

or:

> The blue alluring wild unending West.

or:

> They wrought with might and main
> Chiselling, hammering, burning clear glass, and
> raising
> Their firm fixt image of the vision blazing
> On high.

2.

These phrases are remarkable enough to show a poetic gift of an order extremely fine. And yet the last way to assess Mr. Stead's poetry is by short phrases, or brief words. His is a quiet spirit, observing carefully, recording simply; his charm is his sincerity. He prefers the quiet scene, a soft ideal scene such as Wordsworth loved: here and there are lines which show that Mr. Stead knows passion and the visionary gleam.

But where untroubled peace and concord dwell
There also is the muse not loath to range,
Watching the blue smoke of the elmy grange
Skyward ascending from the twilight dell.
And sage content, and placid melancholy;
She loves to gaze upon a crystal river
Diaphanous because it travels slowly;
Soft is the music that would charm for ever;
The flower of sweetest smell is shy and lowly.

One could not quote lines more apposite to the poetry of Mr. Stead: he gives us the record of a love of quiet scenes, of the green well-being of England in her grey air, so heavy and so still, of religious aspiration, of intense personal love. He has not drawn back from that risk of passion, and anguish, which all must run if they retain the delicacy of their senses, and the fullness of their pulse. The true lover will not come to the fullness of his days unacquainted with grief: and no one who has known moments of vision so brightly gleaming as Mr. Stead can fail to have known the torment of tension which makes poetry what it is. In his last volume there is one lyric which shows what his heart is: it is his *Last Offering*:

Yet do I love her still
And always love her dearly,
Though angry winds blow chill,
Nipping severely:

3.

Dark as a sunset hill,
Halt as a frozen rill,
My constant heart can still
Love her so dearly,
O still,
O still, so dearly.

Sure as the daffodil
Comes up all golden yearly.
Though cloud and hail wind shrill
Are glooming drearily.
So, if she treat me ill,
Yet do my heart and will,
Bring her their offering; still
Loving her dearly,
O still,
O still, so dearly.

These, we think, are the most moving lines which Mr. Stead has written. But they are not typical of the peculiar excellence of his work. That excellence is firstly in the freshness and accuracy with which he paints the English country scene, and secondly in the subtle and yet naif way in which in doing so he suggests that the scene's significance is in its relation to a universal power who by growth and change keeps as it were poised in an eternal now between the successiveness in which both past and future glimpse and fade, so that in a moment of vision, made intenser by a personal relation, the mysteries both of time and of eternity are gathered. A poppy bud in the dawn holds quietly his musing gaze: but between it and him is the tension of a high mystical excitement:

Not for long now the hood of space and time
Could veil that outward thrusting core of light.
And all the vast aureole of heaven closed
Me in a globe of silence, a crystal globe,
Streaked only by the lyric note of a bird,
A ripple passing over the flooding stillness.

4.

The golden light
Of the east increased to shivering brilliance,
thrown
High in the sky: the Future sweeping on,
Surely that core of time could be restrained
Not for long now... And instantly there came
A sparkle among the oaks, a level beam
Skimming the garden, and, like a moment passed,
A thing outworn, the veil collapsed and fell,
Setting the flower free: the sun had risen!
The flower had opened! and all my fathers, men
Of a thousand generations, rushed to my eyes,
Rose from the dead, stood up and worshipped Thee.

That is one of Mr.Stead's moments of vision when all that he feels
and believes is gathered up in a spiritual excitement which demands
the release of adequate expression. "How do we distinguish love?"
Meredith once asked and answered "As we do music. By the full note
won from resolute strings. The tense chord is music and it is
love." What is true of love and music is true of poetry. So in
his hymn to the Archangel Uriel, Mr.Stead sees in silence after
storm a vision of the central peace subsisting at the heart of agi-
tation.

Thou,
When winds have blown their ruinous clarion round
The grinding wood, and shuddering wall, at last
Dost cleave amid the storm a **silence cut**
**Clean as the circle of eternity.**
And out of the central silence, sendest forth
A blackbird haply or a thrush to sing,
I hear, and know that at the heart of all
Peace reigns and sings.

There are three elements then in Mr.Stead's poetic creation.

There is first the precise, minute observation of wild flowers and
sky: there is the tension of the string waiting to be set vibrating
at the touch of experience into the music of mysticism; and there

5.

is a philosophy, very apposite to the present day, in which the
world of nature, as understood by science, is seen to be a play of
forces at the sway of the mysteries of intellectual and spiritual
life. Man, whose thoughts and will can do so much with matter,
and do it merely by existing, is the window through which Mr. Stead
looks on a world which is both nature and miracle. "I believe in
miracles" Mr. Stead once wrote, "The supreme miracle is consciousness, for it turns the universe inside out: the next two are life
and death, but about death I have my suspicions. If materialism
were true, then life and purpose and imagination ought never to
have arisen; they are more than cogs in a tight-fitting mechanism,
they are miracles. I conceive of atoms as alive, yet not as living
beings, because they are not organisms capable of change and development. It is remarkable that atoms never change, but it is
miraculous that we living beings come along, and gather them up by
the million, and make them march to our music." Even apart from
intelligence, the flower, for Mr. Stead, is miracle enough. For it
somehow is an expression of a unifying subtlety of power which keeps
in harmony nature and spirit and the mind of man. He looked up at
the sky:

a star, the silver apple
Of heaven, ripened its core of brightness...
But while I held communion with the star,
I felt Thee working in me, flowing down
And welling up in me till in the thought cup
Of arid thought, the living water brimmed,
And for a crystal, shining space I saw
That not the star, but me, Thou callest up
To be thine eye, me and all human kind
To be thine eyes and spies amid the land.

6.

Such are the themes which Mr.Stead associates with his descrip-
tive charm. There is always sincerity, always freshness, and some-
times there is the power of enthusiasm. One would not go so far
as to say that he gives us haunting pregnant phrases, or that he
strikes one as original in big things. It is rather his charm that
he often echoes older poets, and that one can trace his affinities
with his friends, Mr.Blunden, Mr.Yeats and Mr.Walter de la Mare.
But above all, as we have suggested, he recalls the quieter passages
of Wordsworth, though he modernises Wordsworth's themes into some-
thing more congenial to our age because more exact in its sense of
the life of nature. But on the whole he is like no one in the
whole range of literature so much as Henry Vaughan. We cannot
separate the philosophy of a poet from his expression of it, and
just as Vaughan found a certain quaintness and simplicity to flash
out mystical ideas, and truths of personal piety, so does Mr.Stead.
His poetry is often near a beautiful prose, and his prose itself is
excellent. But Mr.Stead is not only a poet: he is, as we began by
saying, one of the best American poets living. For we can judge
poetry only by its effect, and its effect must be to show us things
as they are, yet transfigured; it must make us see and know some-
thing of a transcendent image of beauty, of a love never seen or
experienced, of an entrancing vision so that the soul longs for the
dream in which it has participated. It will do so only when the
poet has found a word true to his moment of vision, and gives us his
truth in music as rare as the rarity of truth in his words and as

probably from Decour

- 3 -

complaint. You know that my students gave me their unanimous
they
support so energetically that/petitioned the government in my
favour: you know that my colleagues also voted unanimously in
support of their decision to retain me: you know that my Chief
presented the strongest arguments in my praise, and signed
a resume of them which I sent to yourself. You are no doubt
aware also that the decision later in my favour was upset by
a council of officials who have habitually voted silently on
instructions from the Financial Advisor. You will remember
that you told me he himself had received no instructions from
the Residency in this case. The conclusion is clear. Sir
Frank Watson once again deliberately and successfully deceived
Sir Miles Lampson.

I have yet another instance of his duplicity to
cite. You will remember that on April 26th. 1935, Sir Miles
Lampson gave me unexpec'ed and strong instructions to drop the
candidature of Mr.William Force Stead for one of my lecture-
ships. Mr.Stead had not only the support of the Vice Chancellor
of the University of Oxford, and of a number of other leading
men in learning and literature, he had also behind him Lord
Crewe and Lord Tweedsmuir. Now in any ordinary circumstances
one would be justified in expecting that the High Commissioner
in Egypt would respect the judgment of a former ambassador in
Paris, or of the Governor General of Canada, especially if
the Ambassador or the Governor General were speaking on a
matter on which, from every point of view, he had the right
to speak with particular authority. Sir Miles Lampson decided

- 4 -

otherwise without giving me any reasons: I immediately accept-
ed his decision but, on further reflection, I thought it con-
ceivable that he did not really wish to go so far as to place
a personal veto on a man of whom he knew nothing, and wrote to
you again. You replied that he was acting on behalf of the
Minister of Education.

Once again, my dear Roberts, you were misinformed.
I did not write to you at the time, but the Minister had long
since told me, and told me truly, that he had passed that
appointment. It was held up by the Financial Advisor, while
I was left in the dark. Although I was in crying need of more
men, Sir Frank Watson, without consulting me, suppressed the
post.

I think it not irrelevant to add what I have since
learned from members of my staff that Scaife, thinking doubt-
less that the appointment of so distinguished a man in a position
junior to his own would throw into stronger relief his own lack
of academic qualifications, went behind my back to Sir Frank
Watson, who acted accordingly. For it is inconceivable that
had Sir Miles Lampson known the facts he would have supported
the intrigue of a lecturer against a distinguished public
servant. In the interesting circles in which Stead moves
an unpleasant feeling was created. I myself was asked more
than once by important people in England if there were not
something wrong about these appointments in Egypt. I had
since learned much, though not all, of what I tell you now
about my own case: and I finally decided to place the difficulty

- 5 -

before the Secretary of State through the leader of the House of Lords, with whom I have been in touch for many years. You will remember that what occasioned my particular indignation in Cairo last summer was that Sir Frank Watson's moves against me were accompanied by the insinuation that I was secretly known to the Residency to be a man of stained character. This matter was mentioned at the Foreign Office to Sir Miles Lampson who, I am glad to say, refused to give it the slightest countenance. But it remains among the many scandalous procedures which I now record, not the least.

I have already discussed with you possible reasons for Sir Frank Watson's hostility. The average Englishman is no doubt inclined to distrust anyone so cosmopolitan, so literary and so exclusive as myself. It was no doubt unwise to denounce the vulgarity of the American cinema, or Lady Milner's publications of Lord Edward Cecil's jokes about corrupt Egyptians. It was no doubt obtuse not to realise that if one said that "sport, however excellent in itself is, as a substitute for religion, an index of decadence", that this would be taken as disloyalty to Ghezireh: it would have been better perhaps to play our games there and not at Mena House. But these were not the reasons why Sir Frank Watson persisted in such elaborations of unscrupulous and secret attacks on a man who had always been courteous to him. Is not the reason that he saw at once from the case of Harvey, and the official letter I addressed to Sir Percy Lorraine that I intended to place competence and qualifications first, and had no sense of that arbitrary