i 
 
 ■PR 4525 
 I.D5 Z6 
 Copy 1 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA 
 
 JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 A STUDY OF THE RELATION OF HIS 
 IDEAS TO HIS POETRY 
 
 BY 
 
 HAYIM FINEMAN 
 
 A THESIS 
 
 Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School 
 
 IN Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements 
 
 FOR the Degree of Doctor 
 
 of Philosophy 
 
 PHILADELPHIA, PA. 
 1916 
 
\ 
 
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA 
 
 JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 A STUDY OF THE RELATION OF HIS 
 IDEAS TO HIS POETRY 
 
 BY 
 
 HAYIM FINEMAN 
 
 A THESIS 
 
 Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School 
 
 IN Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements 
 
 for the Degree of Doctor 
 
 of Philosophy 
 
 PHILADELPHIA, PA, 
 1916 
 
< 
 
 Press of 
 
 The New era printing Company 
 
 lancaster. pa, 
 
John David^a is one of a group o£ poets who began to attract 
 
 vailed 11 ^'^^""^ I ^11 raised under the influence of 
 
 ™ta:^^tnitarlnL and Arnold's anti-philistinism and 
 diskd intensely what they conceived to he the mid-Vietonan type. 
 The tidVietorL was to them a wlgar bou.geois-a nar^w^ 
 winded, complacent, practical individual who edified " ''y 
 reading poetry and was shocked by the indecencies of Ibsen Wag 
 ler and Zoa' a person whose philosopher was Spencer because 
 SpenTer was so industriously careful ; whose great -telleetual novd- 
 W was Thackeray because his eharacters reminded one of the com 
 moITace people that one might have met yesterday; whose great 
 poTwas Tennyson because he was abreast of tie times and always 
 comnromised • whose essayist was Macaulay because he was an op i- 
 miTwhTwi ved that a ''praetieal" millennium was at hand; who 
 rreatld a Shakespeare in his own image, "bland, gentle, amiable 
 a hea rical man of bourgeois tastes prudently amassing a fortune 
 and ret ng to the country to live on his income ; who tinkered with 
 cornTaw reforms and model prisons because he was too timid to re- 
 model society ; whose tragedy was of f\^--\''r''ZTimI^^- 
 religion was eompromisingly rational; his phdosophy uti itarian , 
 h pontics liberal ; his manners pr„dish-an old maid, stolid, seri- 
 ;'sentimental, provincial. It was a duty to discuss sex problems 
 fre ly and shock this ™lgar prude with epigrams and poses and 
 wTth the selecting of degenerates for heroes in nove s. Strange sins 
 and subtle moods were accordingly created largely as a reaction 
 against the matter-of-fact moralizings of the mid-Vietorians. ^ 
 
 The social and economical conditions in the eighteen nineties 
 
2 • JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 were especially ripe for this anti- Victorian movement. There were, 
 indeed, no new factors that had been previously inoperative; but 
 conditions hitherto merely generally effective, now became more 
 pronounced. The close of the century thus marked a more com- 
 plete triumph, politically and even socially, of the upper wealthier 
 elements of the middle classes. This brought about within the minds 
 of the younger generation a more thorough down-breaking of class 
 distinctions. The aristocracy in England, whose social position as a 
 class had been steadily undermined throughout the nineteenth cen- 
 tury by intermarriage with wealth, English and American, was 
 now visibly losing in prestige and was looked up to less and less by 
 the younger generation. Youths who belonged to the middle class 
 no longer aspired to become successful bourgeois. They looked with 
 contempt at their own class which had lost its class traditions, and 
 at the aristocracy which was beginning more and more to resemble 
 in all outward circumstances the wealthy bourgeois. The very word 
 bourgeois began to be looked upon as a term of insult. Moreover 
 the diffusion of education of a superficial kind likewise increased 
 the rapidity of this dissolution of class ideals and intensified a gen- 
 eral feeling of discontent. The new youth was thus prepared for 
 all kinds of new movements in any way suggesting rebellion against 
 the past. He found especially irritating the respect for the pro- 
 prieties and the lack of daring in Victorian English life and fre- 
 quently escaped his bourgeois surroundings by cultivating an in- 
 tellectually aristocratic attitude. From an ivory tower the new aris- 
 tocrat could look down with contempt on the stupidities of man- 
 kind, and was enabled in his solitary contemplations to violate 
 mentally in a few epigrams all the moral laws men accept. In such 
 environment a misapprehension of JBstheticism, mysticism, and 
 Baudelairism could flourish and have a crowd of admirers. Politi- 
 cally the completion of the triumph of the money element among 
 the bourgeois was likewise productive of important changes. The 
 exploitation of English capital in India and Africa fired the imagi- 
 nation of many; and made distasteful the ''sober-suited freedom" 
 of a Tennyson. England began to be thought of as mistress of the 
 world with numerous sons encompassing the earth in Canada, India, 
 Africa, Australia ; Englishmen all, who had hived off and acquired 
 new lands by taking up the white man's burden — hewing down for- 
 
JOHN DAVIDSON 3 
 
 ests, building factories, exploiting and civilizing. Imperialist 
 poetry in which England v^as conceived as the savior of mankind 
 and the forlorn hope of the world accordingly began to be written. 
 Economically, with the triumph of the capitalist element among 
 the bourgeois, and with the increase of the unemployed, a class con- 
 scious proletariat developed and with it came socialism and the 
 writers on socialism. The social remedies of Carlyle and Ruskin, 
 and the tinkerings of liberal Victorian statesmen with factory laws 
 became now, in the eyes of a growing element, short-sighted affairs 
 and objects of derision. Moreover the internationalism of the social- 
 ists on the one hand, and the increasing intimacy of political rela- 
 tions with France on the other hand, made impossible the provin- 
 cialism of a Tennyson. Finally, the continuous increase in the use 
 of machinery and electricity, accompanied by an augmented knowl- 
 edge of the nature of social evils, scotched the make-believe roman- 
 ticism of the Idylls of the King, that was largely an outgrowth of a 
 faint-hearted attempt at avoiding life. Realism became a domi- 
 nating mode in fiction and drama; and the romanticism that sur- 
 vived began to have for this new generation a scientific or exact 
 coloring. It either became symbolism, and this appealed to an age 
 of increased intensity of commercial production because of the 
 nerve-irritation that symbolic methods of double interpretation and 
 aroused expectancy involved and implied; or else it became the 
 romance of cruelty and tragic endings with occasional by-products 
 of Wellsian science-romances and Davidsonian cosmological testa- 
 ments. 
 
 As is evident from this rapid survey, a rebellion against Vic- 
 torian taste was inevitable. The rebellion that did take place was, 
 however, far from powerful. No really great creative poet appeared 
 in the nineties. Not much more than a few subtle moods, and sev- 
 eral epigrams and a tendency toward braver habits of thought, were 
 actually produced. The poets were afraid or incapable of sus- 
 tained effort and were, in the main, amateurs. As a result, notwith- 
 standing the healthiness of their revolt, they failed to create any- 
 thing as burly as the works of Carlyle or Dickens. They became 
 merely rebels who played with revolution and half the time did 
 not know what they wanted. Wlien they began to know, they were 
 swamped by influences from the continent, where a similar rebellion 
 
4 JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 wtis going on against the taste of tlie early mid-nineteenth century. 
 Baudelaire, Ibsen, the French realists, mystics and symbolists be- 
 came the great sources of inspiration; whence the derived quality 
 of the poetry and prose of the period. This failure to produce a 
 great literature should not blind us however to the fact that the 
 English poets of the nineties accomplished a useful task: they cer- 
 tainly cleared the atmosphere of the prudishness, the insularity and 
 the lack of courage of the Victorian period, though such a sweeping 
 was necessarily accompanied by a histrionic assertiveness and a 
 somewhat exaggerated sense of self-importance on the part of its 
 authors. 
 
 John Davidson was one of a small number of independent minds 
 of that period who had something to say on a grand scale. He had 
 much in common with his contemporaries. He wrote empire verse 
 and poems of London streets and poverty much in their manner. 
 He participated in, and helped to determine, the direction of the 
 'rebellion against Victorianism. Intoxicated by ideas new to him 
 and engaged in rebellion against the past, his own importance grew 
 on him and his productions contain a swagger somewhat repelling. 
 Similarly liis conception of the Englishman as the Overman is a 
 product of the imperialistic tendencies in the midst of which he 
 lived. These are, however, mere perturbing details which serve to 
 fix the period in which he worked. They do not make his writings 
 any the less originally creative ; for he had a point of view and a 
 depth of emotion altogether his own: he tried to stem the tide of 
 French influence and endeavored to construct a new basis for Eng- 
 lish poetry. Out of his own experience and the scientific thought 
 of his own time he attempted to create "a new dwelling place for 
 the human imagination." This he did with a passion and energy 
 in the presence of which the writings of most of his contemporaries 
 pale. Suspended in majestic agony his poetry rises across the firma- 
 ment of the early twentieth century. It is titanic in conception. 
 It is largely a poetry of liberation inspired by the desire to destroy 
 all illusions that he thought animated the past; for nothing short 
 of infinity would satisfy his imagination. "Whether the poetry so 
 created was really new, or the philosophy on which it is based was 
 true, is open to question. There can be no doubt, however, that such 
 assumptions on the part of Davidson brought out the best in him 
 and gave his work a grandeur and intensity that is impressive. 
 
II 
 
 The elements in Davidson's work that individualize and distin- 
 guish it from other poetry are in evidence even in his earliest pro- 
 ductions, Davidson in Scotland is, as yet, not a materialistic 
 thinker; but the qualities that his early poems display are symp- 
 tomatic of his later development. His nature poems are thus neither 
 decorative nor precieux. They are the kind that would be com- 
 posed by a poet who frankly adored woods firmly rooted in the turf 
 for their own sake because they gave him simple pleasure rather 
 than because they suggested to him a human mood or a pretty 
 image. His rural scenes are hills with budding heather rising like 
 "purple domes"; leas of throbbing color, and stretches of country 
 in which daws are "tossing themselves into the air."^ The ma- 
 terialistic quality in such scenes is the result largely of his not at- 
 tempting to interpret spiritually the things he describes.- Land- 
 scapes are to him patches of gay color, and arouse within him no 
 reflections beyond the expression of the physical pleasure of being 
 out in the open. His love poetry is material in the same manner. 
 Lovers awake in the morning and go out for a pleasant summer 
 day in the woodlands ; they sing and bathe ; they dine in an arbor, 
 gather rosebuds and berries, listen to the larks and wonder at the 
 blueness of the sky ; then night comes and they retire.^ Back of all 
 this there is no wistfulness or even intensity of passion. Love is 
 conceived by Davidson externally and is to him a Cytherean Aphro- 
 dite "all one blush and glance of passion"; fruitful, material, cos- 
 
 i/n a Music Ball: "Kennoul Hill," p. 94; '*0n a Hill Top," p. 88; "A 
 May Morning, ' ' p. 77, etc. 
 
 2 Vide conclusion of " AWood in Autumn" {Hid., p. 65) : 
 
 "Whether they mourned their tarnished ragged dress, 
 Or comrades fallen before the woodman's axe 
 
 I know not; only this, I heard them sing." 
 
 3 "For Lovers" {iUd., pp. 69-76). 
 
6 JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 mic. Anselm and Bianca die in the martyrdom of love ;* the Queen 
 of Thule kills and is slain for love 's sake f but all this happens un- 
 affectedly without any mouthings of passion or the expression of 
 poignant pain. Love is to the poet a process the effects of which 
 are to be studied objectively,^ 
 
 The dramas composed in Scotland are similarly symptomatic of 
 his later growth. In the main they are all frankly plays full of 
 word rivalries and midsummer-night fantasies. They are the prod- 
 uct of a mind overflowing with energy and rejoicing in the con- 
 sciousness of its powers and they have all the freshness and daring 
 of adolescence. Their frolicsomeness and fantasy contain, however, 
 no spirituality. The fairies in An Unhistorical Pastoral as well 
 as Bacchus and Ariadne in Scaramouch in Naxos are of this earth ; 
 they are not woven of finer stuff than some of the mortals they 
 mingle with. The emotions portrayed are genuine enough but there 
 are no magic casements in the plays and the youthful lovers have 
 no fine frenzies. There is, instead, a deftness of wit, a nimbleness 
 of fancy and a certain burliness to be met in his love and nature 
 poems. This absence of spirituality is again accompanied by a cer- 
 tain metaphysical quality. Whole plays are written as if to demon- 
 strate that ''there is no life at all, but love."^ It is this meta- 
 physical attitude that perhaps partly accounts for Davidson's 
 unsuccessful character drawing in his plays and novels ; for David- 
 son is really interested in general principles rather than in indi- 
 viduals. Cinthio and Rupert are accordingly made to vie with each 
 " other in the praise of their respective mistresses; Ringan Dean 
 bursts out with the lyrical "Where have you, been to-day Annie 
 Smith?"; but neither lovers nor mistresses become individualized 
 human beings. Even in Scaramouch in Naxos, Davidson's greatest 
 dramatic achievement, the effectiveness depends on the capricious- 
 ness of fancy, and on the satire on human grossness in the mass 
 rather than on any successful character creation. 
 
 Davidson displays however in these dramas at most only a meta- 
 physical attitude rather than any distinct philosophy of life ; for in 
 
 4 "Anselm and Bianca" (ibid., pp. 36-44). 
 
 5 "The Queen of Thule" (iUd., pp. 115-20). 
 
 6 Vide also "Is Love Worth Learning?" {iUd., p. 53) and "A Sail" 
 (ibid., p. 68). 
 
 7 "Anselm and Bianca" (ibid., p. 47). 
 
JOHN DAVIDSON" 7 
 
 Scotland he has as yet no important thoughts to reveal. Only one 
 of the plays, the semi-autobiographical tragic farce Smith, contains 
 thought that can in any way be described as philosophic. It ex- 
 presses the poet's hatred for "mental boot-blacking," his youthful 
 ambitions for fame, and his feeling that one must be fanatic ''to 
 smite a passage through a close-fisted world. "^ "Smith" thus epit- 
 omizes all that is truly great to Davidson. He is the impatient 
 man of genius fighting the world. He obeys nature and not au- 
 thority, he exclaims against 
 
 ' ' The most inhuman, the most ungodly word, 
 Sinner "9 
 
 and denounces 
 
 The hydra-headed creeds; the sciences, 
 
 That deem the thing is known when it is named; 
 
 And literature, thought's palace prison fair; 
 
 Philosophy, the grand inquisitor 
 
 That racks ideas and is fooled with lies.io 
 
 These sentiments, though significant because they suggest a point 
 of view that subsequently matures in his ballads and testaments, 
 can hardly with fairness be considered the product of keen thought. 
 They read more like the adolescent hysterics of a youth quivering 
 with the desire of revolutionizing belief and deciding at one stroke 
 world-problems. Their significance lies not so much in their thought 
 value as in the fact that they reveal a metaphysical bent of mind 
 that ultimately produces materialistic poetry. 
 
 This philosophic attitude apparent in "Smith" becomes espe- 
 cially evident in Davidson's poetical character sketches that ap- 
 peared in In a Music Hall. Lily Dale, thirty and plump, contriv- 
 ing to bring out "the meaning that tickles ";^^ Airshire Jock made 
 a poet by whiskey and Burns ;^- Stanley Trafford, "the Sentimental 
 Star," who once loved the "star- veiled truth";" are not mere 
 matter-of-fact studies. They are all created because the poet is in- 
 terested in explaining their souls. The "diameter" of things or the 
 meaning of life is indeed the problem that gradually becomes more 
 
 8 "Smith" (Plays, p. 230). n/n a Music Kail, pp. 6-7. 
 
 9 "Smith" {Hid., p. 232). '12 I6i(?., pp. 45-9. 
 
 10 lUd., p. 236. 13 Hid., pp. 7-9. 
 
8 JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 and more significant to Davidson and determines the nature and 
 character of his poetry. 
 
 Davidson's early productions thus reveal three chief qualities: 
 an interest in solid things in his nature poems that is some- 
 what earthy and later develops into materialism; a playfulness 
 of imagination and ingenuity of word play in his dramas that 
 mature in his novels and are transformed in his later work into 
 passionate rhetorical qualities ; and a metaphysical bent that ripens 
 into his later concepts of materialistic monism. He has as yet 
 no significant thoughts to offer; though a few poems in which he 
 pleads for the empire of love suggest something of the propa- 
 gandist that develops in the Testaments and the Plays. He has as 
 yet not found a powerful vehicle for expression and he has only a 
 few simple vivid impressions to transmit into poetry. This absence 
 of any profound thought would not in itself imply an inferiority in 
 poetic powers of any other writer. The productions of a poet need 
 not necessarily contain a philosophic system of thought. Anything 
 in his stream of consciousness that becomes vital to him, the poet 
 may arrest and transfigure into a poem. He may convey an idea 
 or sentiment that he feels intensely ; he may dazzle with a patch of 
 color ; or he may flash the dumb agony of a soul ; and, provided he 
 succeeds in arousing by appropriate words and rhythm a reciprocal 
 vivid response on the part of the reader, he has created a poem. 
 Whether he selects metaphysical themes, or expresses his sheer de- 
 light in color, sound, or movement depends solely on the kind of 
 things that are real to him. Davidson was, however, the type of 
 poet whose greatest source of emotion and whose most vital experi- 
 ences were derived from a consciousness of things that may be called 
 philosophical. This absence of keen thought in Davidson's early 
 work involved therefore a lack of profound consciousness of life 
 and consequently the production of a poetry not altogether convinc- 
 ing. His mastery over utterance was moreover imperfect. Crude 
 phrases like "My heart is burning. It scorches me"" (which David- 
 son later corrected in Godfrida) occur occasionally. He lacked the 
 compactness, the gauntness, and the strength that some of his later 
 poems display. In the presence of the blaze of his later work these 
 poems produced in Scotland become pallid; their playfulness ap- 
 pears frivolity ; and their denunciations sound shrill. He had how- 
 
 ■i-ilbid., p. 53. 
 
X 
 
 JOHN DAVIDSON 9 
 
 ever an abundance of creative power, a nimbleness of fancy, and the 
 freshness and daring of youthfulness. He was moreover in love 
 with sunshine and solid things and was, above all, intensely genuine. 
 
 Ill 
 
 With such tastes and proclivities Davidson arrived in London 
 in 1890, determined to create for himself a literary career. In 
 ''A Would-be-Londoner "IS he later described banteringly the ad- 
 vent of ambitious young Scotchmen who came to conquer the town 
 with their brilliancy; and in the Fleet Street Eclogues he hinted at 
 the hell of writing for bread that such young men frequently ex- 
 perienced. "Nine tenths" of his time in London, as he complained 
 towards the close of his life, "was wasted in the endeavor to earn a 
 livelihood. "i« His time was spent largely in offering contributions 
 to The Glasgow Herald, The Speaker, The Yelloiv Book and The 
 Chap-Book, and in writing romances, short stories, sketches and 
 dramatizations. Though these numerous productions are hardly 
 representative of what he wanted to do or could do, yet they reveal 
 quite clearly what was going on within him. Stimulated by his 
 readings of continental authors and by his instinctive opposition 
 to much of the literature produced in contemporary England, he 
 was clarifying his attitude toward the art of poetry and was 'also 
 gradually forming a consistent philosophy of life that later became 
 uniquely his own. 
 
 Traces of the growth of his ideas are to be found even in the 
 five novels that he published in London. None of these novels really 
 displays Davidson's powers at their highest ; though, as Mr. O'Brien 
 pointed out, they are at least as good as The Napoleon of Notting- 
 ham Hill, and certainly anteceded and must have suggested the 
 creation of such types of fiction. They read like the prosings of an 
 active mmd overflowing with creative energy. They are picturesque 
 tales of heroes who follow out, in the Don Quixote manner, a particu- 
 lar pose or point of view with a mad-like persistency ,- their effective- 
 ness depending not on the insight into life displayed by the charac- 
 ters, which IS but slight, but on an overflow of hurly burly wit and 
 on an inexhaustible supply of word-play, prattle, epigram, paradox 
 
 15 Mtss Armstrong's and Other Circumstances, pp. 32-43. 
 
 16 Triumph of Mammon, p. 151. 
 
10 JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 and absurd situations. But beneath the extended practical jokes and 
 delicious nonsense of the tales there is an unmistaken serious intent. 
 A Practical Novelist is a travesty on novel writing in general. The 
 hero, Maxwell Lee, in the company of Briscoe, an intoxicated Sancho 
 Panza, tries to perform a novel in actual life and deliberately becomes 
 a villain in order to study the effects produced by his arbitrary liter- 
 ary conduct on real people. ' Baptist Lake is composed partly in 
 order to ridicule the taste for paradox and preciosity and indirectly 
 demonstrates among other things the inferiority of successful men. 
 Earl Lavender not merely attacks the principle of Evolution but 
 the numerous young men who come out every day with something 
 they consider new and revolutionary, "fantastical creatures made 
 what they are by the pseudo-philosophy, feeble poetry and foolish 
 fiction ' ' of the day. These tales thus reveal more than a passion for 
 the paradox of the early nineties that finds its most brilliant expres- 
 sion in Wilde. They display a mind that disbelieves in art for art's 
 sake and exhibit, through a veil of fantastic fooling, a materialistic 
 attitude that is essentially almost philosophical. The genuineness 
 and the metaphysical tastes already evident in the poetry he com- 
 posed in Scotland are hardening in London into definite principles. 
 
 The serious elements back of these stories, though pronounced, 
 are, however, rather weak. The author is too much in good humor 
 with himself and the world to take things too thoughtfully. His 
 moral earnestness is not deep. It does not extend beyond admira- 
 tion for the magnanimity and adventuresomeness of adolescence 
 and dislike for pettiness and pretentiousness. The horse play di- 
 gressions are so numerous that the reader often loses sight of the 
 point of the author 's ridicule and of the seriousness of thought that 
 underlies his work. Davidson's ideas are conveyed directly and 
 unequivocally only in the numerous prose essays, sketches and dia- 
 logues that he composes in this period. Many of these prose con- 
 tributions appeared in the files of half forgotten magazines and 
 were published in volume form at a later period. Some of these 
 reflections were exhumed from periodicals in The Man Forbid and 
 Other Essays edited by Mr. O'Brien; others were published in 
 Paragraphs and Sentences; and the most valuable were selected by 
 Davidson himself and published in 1903 with a few slight, easily 
 distinguishable changes in A Rosary. 
 
 There can be but little doubt that when Davidson wrote these 
 
JOHN DAVIDSON 11 
 
 reflections, essays, sketches and imaginary interviews, he was at 
 least externally influenced by Nietzsche and Ibsen, In Para- 
 graphs and Sentences Davidson thus introduces to English readers 
 Nietzsche's views on conscience, compassion, gratitude and woman. 
 Nietzsche's method of expression through aphorisms, iterated sug- 
 gestions and ironical similes seems especially to appeal to him ; and 
 he experiments accordingly in writing maxims of his own in the 
 manner of Nietzsche on the difficulty of detaching one's proper 
 thought from the mass of ideas obtained from others, and on the 
 importance of realizing that dignity is impudence. He proceeds, 
 furthermore, to analyze in the Nietzschean fashion various authors 
 and finds fault with Carlyle 's hypocrisy and with the naked realism 
 of Zola. Even in A Random Itinerary, which is primarily a series 
 of sketches of London parks and suburbs, he frequently breaks up 
 a description of reposeful upland hamlets by introducing an imagi- 
 nary disputant in order to be enabled to praise Ibsen, "that great 
 Scotchman, "^^ and denounce the factitious decadence that exists 
 only ''in the fancies of a few."^^ This influence that Nietzsche and 
 Ibsen exert on Davidson is largely, however, in the manner of a 
 propelling factor that goads him on to form opinions of his own on 
 poetry, based in the main on the opposition to preciosity to be met 
 with in his novels and on an emphasis of his own growing meta- 
 physical tastes. 
 
 Poetry, according to the Davidson of the eighteen nineties, must 
 have two chief characteristics : it must be genuine and must aim to 
 express the heart of things. By the word genuine Davidson implies 
 something that springs directly from experience and observation of 
 life.^^ The poet must keenly feel something conveyed from the 
 world that is actual to him, which experience he transmutes into 
 poetry. There can therefore be no ''art for art's sake"; for tech- 
 nique must express something, and this something must be the ex- 
 perience vital to the poet and not the abstract pleasure of mere 
 expression. Moreover, since poetry is an empiric "stating the world 
 afresh, ' ' it follows that neither Tennyson nor Browning is a genuine 
 poet. Tennyson and Browning, according to Davidson, really did 
 not feel things genuinely: they looked upon life through Shake- 
 
 17^ Random Itinerary, p, 186. is Ihid. 
 
 19 The Man ForMd and Other Essays, p. 67. 
 
12 JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 spearean eyes and saw men "as trees walking. "^^ Tennyson, who 
 was a master artificer rather than artist, described "confections of 
 passions for use in ladies' seminaries" and hid his head like the 
 fabled ostrich "in some sand-bed of Arthurian legend. "^^ Brown- 
 ing, "the boy's poet par excellence,"^- was not without a certain 
 limited intensity,"^ but owing to "a frantic tei-rified optimism" he 
 did not have the courage to think honestly and took shelter in the 
 "paradoxical optimism of The Ring and the Book."-^ Indeed per- 
 haps the only poets since Shakespeare who really wrote poetry that 
 was a genuine outgrowth of their experience were Burns, "whose 
 eyes were open ' ' ; Wordsworth, who had a keen insight into the true 
 character of the world; and Blake, whose eyes were likewise open 
 for a time. The poems of James Thomson and Hood's "Song of 
 the Shirt ' ' are, in their place, the chief poetic creations of the nine- 
 teenth century that will command attention precisely because both 
 poets sang of the actualities of life. They trusted themselves and 
 saw with their own eyes,^^ 
 
 Such a conception of poetry does not imply that poets, in order 
 to be "genuine," must limit themselves to writing on the woman 
 in unwomanly rags or on steam and electricity. Literature has in- 
 deed other functions besides voicing the misery aroused at the sight 
 of suffering millions f^ its theme may be heroic fables or the beauty 
 of the moon. There is thus room and to spare for a poet like Mr. 
 Yeats, who describes people of the Faerie Hills, provided the poet 
 does not treat faery lore in the manner of an antiquarian but be- 
 cause faery lore is to him a living experienee.^^ 
 
 Poetry, according to Davidson, must, moreover, not merely be 
 genuine ; it must also express the heart of things. It is never 
 matter-of-fact reproduction of life. It is fundamentally an offering 
 of ' ' the wine of life in chased goblets, ' ' instead of flinging the mere 
 "bunches plucked from the stem."^^ It is true "romance" that 
 consists not in avoiding modern life but in 'presenting its most sig- 
 nificant elements, the very "diameter" of things.^^ There is there- 
 fore no room in great art for the types of realism of a Zola or a 
 
 20 A Bosary, p. 37. 25 lUd., p. 37. 
 
 21 Ihid., p. 37. 26 Ihid., p. 38. 
 
 22 Ihid., p. 185. 27 The Man Forbid and Other Essays, pp. 94-5. 
 
 23 Ibid., p. 77. 28 Godfrida, p. 3. 
 
 24 Ibid., p. 38. 29 A Eosary, p. 83. 
 
JOHN DAVIDSON 13 
 
 Thackeray, who offers ''impressions of the surface of passing phases 
 of modern life,"^" or for the mood of a Keats, who cries shame on 
 the memory of Newton because "he had destroyed all the poetry of 
 the rainbow by reducing it to the prismatic colours." 
 
 Davidson's views on the technique of poetry proceed from the 
 same standpoint. Since poetry springs directly from living experi- 
 ence, ''liberty of utterance" and "spontaneity" should be the mark 
 of the highest poetry.^^ The greatest form of liberty can be ob- 
 tained, however, only under restraint. Because a poet submits to 
 meters and rhythm he can thus rise above common sense and ordi- 
 nary processes of ratiocination and express himself more imme- 
 diately. Othello's image 
 
 Like to a Pontic sea 
 
 Whose icy current and compulsive course 
 . Never knows the tiring ebb, but keeps due on 
 
 To the Propontic and the Hellespont; 
 
 Even so my bloody thoughts, with violent pace 
 
 Shall ne'er look back, ne'er ebb to humble love 
 
 Till that a capable and wide revenge 
 
 Swallow them up 
 
 reduced to prose could not be read "with a sober face." "It is the 
 meter, the lightning dance of it, that lays common sense under a 
 spell,'' and makes possible a spontaneous expression of poetry.^' 
 Furthermore the narrative and dramatic forms that involve the 
 most numerous restraints are the forms that enable the greatest 
 type of spontaneity.^^ When a poet writes a lyric poem he is partly 
 ashamed for taking the world into his confidence and poses 
 slightly.^* In the drama and narrative, however, all fear and 
 responsibility of feeling and utterance are removed, because the 
 sentiments expressed are attributed to a character conceived under 
 definite limitations, and the utterance of the poet thus becomes 
 freer and fuller. For similar reasons the great discovery of Eliza- 
 bethan dramatists was the madman, for such a character made pos- 
 sible the greatest liberty of expression.^^ 
 
 Entertaining such attitudes towards poetry, which are in the 
 main descriptive of his own tendencies as a poet, Davidson is bound 
 
 30 iMd., p. 161. 33 lUd., p. 127. 
 
 31 The Man ForMd and Other Essays, p. 125. 34 Hid., p. 75. 
 szlbid., pp. 158-60. spIUd., pp. 128-30. 
 
14 JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 to find fault with most of the contemporary criticism of literature. 
 Thus he denies the very possibility of the art of literary criticism.^^ 
 If art can spring only directly from experience and is not genuine 
 when it is a literary echo, then it follows that one can give an ac- 
 count artistically of poetry only by means of painting or music or 
 any other art that involves the use of a medium other than words ; 
 for literary criticism of literature can at most be an echo and of no 
 higher value than imitative verse. Instead of literary criticism one 
 might however write a criticism of literature. The test of such 
 criticism should be experience of life rather than the comparative 
 method which is of value only as a subsidiary aid in dealing with 
 the growing mass of ' ' imitative verse. " " Poetry, ' ' explains David- 
 son, "is the product of originality of a first-hand experience and 
 observation of life, of direct communion with men and women, with 
 the seasons of the year, with day and night. The critic will there- 
 fore be well advised, if he have the good fortune to find something 
 that seems to him poetry, to lay it out in the daylight and the 
 moonlight, to take it into the street and the fields, to set against it 
 his own experience and observation of life and should he be a poet 
 himself, to remember how it was that he wrote his own poetry. "^^ 
 Criticism of this type is still almost in its infancy. * ' It reaches its 
 teens perhaps in Matthew Arnold; and is not yet out of them. "^^ 
 It is however useful; for, whether offered by friend or enemy, it 
 encourages authors who have ' ' small or fluctuating constituencies ' ' 
 in their struggle for existence in the minds of others.^^ 
 
 These conclusions offered by Davidson largely in reviews and 
 in dialogues, that are a literary apotheosis of the modern inter- 
 view, may not impress one at the present moment in the midst of 
 the proclamations of imagists and futurists as striking critical depar- 
 tures. They are not even altogether original. Davidson 's conception 
 of poetry as an empiric ''stating the world afresh" and his advice to 
 the critic that in testing poetry he ''set it against his own experi- 
 ence and observation of life" resemble rather closely Carlyle's 
 dicta that "it is the essence of the poet to be new" and that the 
 true measure of poetry is "human nature and the nature of things 
 at large." Davidson's attitude towards matter-of-fact imitations 
 
 36 A Eosary, p. 185, as A Bosary, p. 94. 
 
 37 The Man Forbid and Other Essays, p. 67. 39 A Bosary, p. 97. 
 
JOHN DAVIDSON 15 
 
 of life, his plea for genuineness of emotion, his belief in the trans- 
 forming powers of meter, and even his insistence on the need of 
 presenting the "diameter" of life through direct communion, can 
 hardly be considered new offerings to critical theory. The con- 
 clusions that he draws by ruthlessly applying such principles to 
 contemporary literature are, however, decidedly striking. In the 
 eighteen-nineties they certainly marked an independent thought 
 contribution : for at that time it required great mental courage for 
 a young man who opposed Victorian taste and ideals to fly in the 
 face of both Wilde's garbling of French sestheticism and Mr. 
 Moore's importation of French naturalism. Both of these impor- 
 tations were in their time healthy reactions against restraining 
 qualities in Victorian literature. Wilde's "nature imitates art 
 far more than art imitates nature" was a battle against Ruskin's 
 conception of the mechanical imitation of nature and against that 
 Victorian evaluation of things that made critics consider Dickens 
 a great writer because his novels were ethically useful. The 
 naturalism of a Mr. Moore was similarly a recoil from the Vic- 
 torian romantic feeling that everything which was contemporary 
 was ugly. They were at bottom assertions in favor of the larger 
 freedom and vitality of poetry. Davidson, though resisting the re- 
 pressing qualities in Victorian literature, realized however that art 
 for art 's sake was untenable and led to a divorce from life ; and that 
 art for truth 's sake led to surface impressions and a starving of the 
 imagination ; and he offered instead (without however actually using 
 Mr. Ransome's formula) art for life 's sake— art that has no ulterior 
 purpose beyond a sincere interpretation or imaginative recreation of 
 the significant things in actual life. He thus became a forerunner of 
 the recent theorists of new poetry. What differentiates him largely 
 from these theorists and from his contemporaries is his conception 
 of what is significant in modern life. For his selection of signifi- 
 cant elenients in the eighteen nineties is not based on objective study 
 but rather on analysis of the elements important to him. His very 
 opposition to aestheticism is due to his interest in material things 
 already displayed in his work in Scotland, and the form of his oppo- 
 sition to naturalism is likewise an outgrowth of his own metaphys- 
 ical tastes. Like a true metaphysician, the search for ultimate 
 causes only, is to him significant; whence his abhorrence of mere 
 matter-of-fact reproductions of details of life. 
 
16 JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 The poetry that Davidson composes in the early nineties is 
 largely an almost literal application of his theories. Even from the 
 standpoint of form, though he does not produce any plays and 
 rarely goes beyond the restraint of the iambic in his metrical ex- 
 periments, yet he tries to express himself spontaneuosly according 
 to the principles laid down in his theories ; and therefore vs^rites but 
 rarely simple lyrics like "In Romney Marsh."*'' Instead he em- 
 ploys forms like the eclogue, ballad and dramatic monologue, 
 through which he can convey lyric emotion through a superficial 
 objectivity and thus obtain what he considers a freedom of utter- 
 ance. The eclogue and ballad thus become his special instruments 
 after being slightly modified to suit his needs. In the eclogue, as 
 adapted by Davidson, he is enabled to indulge in digressions and 
 produce a crescent growth of mood by means of passionate choral 
 outbursts on the part of loosely conceived imaginary characters. 
 The thought moreover can be dropped, resumed, and varied at 
 pleasure ; alternations of lyric and hortatory passages can be intro- 
 duced and the length of the verse be varied to suit the mood. All 
 this can be done without the author speaking in his own name and, 
 therefore, according to Davidson's theory, frankly and unrestrain- 
 edly. Similarly the ballad in his hand lends itself to a thinly veiled 
 subjective relation of a simple story by bounds and leaps. Textual 
 repetitions, colloquial phraseology, and a simple phrasing add to 
 the feeling of spontaneity. The poet moreover expresses his own 
 views on life in the cloak of anonymity. The dramatic monologue 
 that involves an objectivity more profound, he uses, however, more 
 sparingly. An occasional success like " Thirty Bob a Week" not- 
 withstanding, it was not till later in life when he composed his 
 Testaments, that the dramatic monologue became in his hands a 
 really powerful means of expression. 
 
 The themes of the poems are in further harmony with his 
 theories. They are all directly an outgrowth of the effects produced 
 on the poet by contemporary life. The charm of the poems of 
 course depends partly on the novelty of causing Fleet Street re- 
 porters to sing eclogues, and of rendering psychologic tales in ballad 
 form. But what impresses one most is the poet's determination to 
 sing courageously of modern things. This daring of tone is con- 
 veyed not merely in phrases like ''served up hot to God,"*^ and in 
 40 Ballads and Songs, p. 107. 4i Ibid., p. 93. 
 
JOHN DAVIDSON 17 
 
 the use of Christianity as a decorative myth/^ but in the very 
 selection of themes. The dauntlessness of a betrayed soul in hell 
 that knew no fear and walked out ;^^ the courage of the clerk who 
 faced the music and refused to believe that it was all ''luck and 
 toss" J** and the passionate cry of 
 
 We are too young to fall to dust 
 And too unsatisfied to die^s 
 
 is bound to meet with response because one feels that the author is 
 not shrinking from actualities and is dealing passionately with sig- 
 >nificant things. Characteristically enough, the modern things sig- 
 nificant to Davidson are however always philosophical questions. 
 In the eclogues reporters meet in London fog under smoky skies not 
 merely to sing of speckled thrushes and primroses but to argue 
 violently on art, heredity and world problems. In the Ballads and 
 Songs the chief themes are the meaning of heaven, hell and creeds. 
 These are the things most vital to him ; they constitute his concep- 
 tion of ' ' romance " or the " diameter ' ' of things. He indeed pauses 
 to interpret the pathos of a laborer's wife who married on the sly,*^ 
 and he sings of'trains^^ and shrieking steam.^^ But even in such 
 moods it is not the passing vision of ordinary joys and sorrows that 
 haunts his imagination but rather the queries that lie back of it. 
 Human beings are not treated realistically ; they are of interest only 
 in so far as they represent to the poet a certain philosophical atti- 
 tude. They are all searching for the meaning of life. 
 
 It is this quest for the ''meaning of day and night," barren 
 though it be for the time being of any profound conceptions, that 
 gives to his poetry of the eighteen nineties an intensity that was 
 wanting in his earlier work. Nature in the Fleet Street Eclogues 
 is no longer to Davidson a mere joyous catalogue of trees and flowers 
 and hedgerows white with May. It has a new vitality ; trembling 
 day puts on "a saffron wedding dress, "^^ and laburnums open in 
 "thunder showers of greenish gold";^'' for the poet is on the verge 
 of understanding "the passion of the grass that grows. "^^ It is 
 moreover this feeling that nature is about to say something mo- 
 
 *2ihid., "Ballad of Heaven," "Ballad of Hell," etc. 
 
 43 Ibid., p. 84. 46 iMd., p. 98. 49 Fleet Street Eclogues, p. 70. 
 
 44 Ihid., p. 91. 47 lUd., p. 101. 50 Ibid., p. 70. 
 
 45 Ibid., p. 75. 48 Ibid., p. 8. 51 Ibid., p. 60. 
 
18 JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 mentous that makes so effective the continuous inroads of the de- 
 scriptions of landscape into the midst of passionate discussions on 
 art and evolution by the characters in the eclogues. Similarly in 
 Ballads and Songs where the nature passages are lar'^ely used as a 
 background, day coming ''like a flood "^^ and the sun ''taking 
 heaven by storm ' '^^ are not merely decorative ; they are integral 
 parts of the endeavor in the poem to interpret the significant things 
 in life. The nun who probes life's dearest meaning thus becomes 
 "sister to day and night.""* 
 
 It should be emphasized, however, that what impresses one in 
 these poems is Davidson's mental attitudes rather than any actual 
 thought expressed. In the Fleet Street Eclogues the predominating 
 tone is that the world is still alive and there is no cause for despair ; 
 for great is man and great are the simple things of life and great 
 is England.^^ This attitude alternates with a passion for treading 
 on "unpaven ground" that must have been heightened by his 
 absence from Scotland. In the Ballads and Songs similarly the poet 
 exhorts the world to destroy the man-killing creeds and accept 
 gayly its fate by not being afraid of life.^*' Such sentiments full of 
 battle and daring exhilarate when passionately uttered. The 
 thought offered by Davidson in support of these attitudes is how- 
 ever weak. The criticism of creeds in ' ' The Exodus from Hounds- 
 ditch" is narrow, as Davidson himself partly realized in his later 
 poems. The "Ballad of a Nun"" may be significant as a passionate 
 assertion of the joy of life ; but in the form offered by Davidson it 
 is rather an outburst of hysteria. In fact Davidson 's greatest depth 
 of thought is sounded in a passage that contains a Nietzschean 
 mood like 
 
 iSo let us think we are the tortured nerves 
 Of Being in travail with a higher type.^s 
 
 His predominating ideal is seemingly expressed in the "Ballad of 
 the Making of the Poet" : 
 
 I am a man apart 
 A mouth piece for creeds of all the world 
 
 A martyr for all the mundane moods to bear.59 
 52 Ballads and Songs, p. 54. ss JMd., p. 53. 54 Hid., p. 61. 
 
 55 "St. George's Day," in Fleet Street Eclogues. 
 
 56 "Ballad in Blank Verse," "The Exodus from Houndsditch, " etc. 
 in Ballads and Songs. 57 JMd., p. 52. 
 
 58 Fleet Street Eclogues, p. 153. 59 Ballads and Songs, p. 34. 
 
 
JOHN DAVIDSON 19 
 
 Such an attitude is hardly tenable and Davidson later rejected it. 
 It betrays the fact that Davidson in the early nineties is still a poet 
 in the making. He has gained strength in London by grappling 
 courageously with a few ideas. He has discovered a few forms of 
 expression suitable to his powers and has accordingly stormed pas- 
 sionately against a world that he found intolerable. In A Random 
 Itinerary and in his poems he moreover revealed an increased sen- 
 sitiveness and tenderness for landscape as well as a courageous love 
 of life. His senses and feelings have indeed become deeper and 
 richer because he was becoming more definitely a philosophical 
 poet ; but his thoughts were still immature. 
 
 His growth as a thinker becomes evident however in the works' 
 he publishes at the close of the nineteenth century. He is then still 
 not a philosophic thinker, but he becomes more definitely Nietz- 
 schean and more materialistic in his thought; and the moods that 
 he conveys in his poems are at least consistent. In the Neiv Bal- 
 lads and in The Last Ballad and Other Poems the amor fati hitherto 
 intermittent becomes more pronounced and the poet insists definitely 
 that the battle is for the strong and that the hero is he who will 
 fight and is above the laws that overawe the world.®'' Davidson 
 pretends no longer to be "a trembling lyre for every wind to 
 sound ' ' f^ and this growth in definiteness of thought is accompanied 
 in many of the new poems by a greater poetical intensity. In the 
 main he composes more impassioned eclogues; his grasp of signifi- 
 cant details in the ballads becomes firmer; and his nature poetry 
 more fervently meaningful. The morning sings of courage and 
 hope and of the glory of being mighty and alone. The sun rises in 
 his valor and fights the clouds "pressing the mountains to his burn- 
 ing breast. "°^ Not merely does he describe the earth in human 
 terms but interprets human qualities in earthy terms. He sings of 
 the gray earth of the brain and of the red earth burning in the 
 heart.®^ ' ' Feel yourself a part of earth, ' ' Davidson exhorts us ; for 
 there is a meaning underlying all matter : the mirth of summer rain 
 
 60 Vide "Piper Play" in Netv Ballads and "Battle," "The Hero," 
 "The Pioneer," etc., in The Last Ballad and Other Poems, 
 
 61 Ballads and Songs. 
 
 62 "Matinees" in The Last Ballad and Other Poems. 
 
 63 "Earth to Earth," ibid., p. 111. 
 
'^Z 20 JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 i is translated by the earth into terms of growth ; man is part of this 
 
 growth; and all matter is aehmg to become man. 
 
 A similar increase in profundity of ideas is displayed in the 
 
 ' dramas that he writes between 1898 and 1900, These are not, like 
 
 his plays composed in Scotland, full of the mad humors of youth ; 
 but they are based on deeper thought and consequently characters 
 are constructed and scenes are conceived with a keener understand- 
 ing of life. Davidson the dramatist sees in this world two kinds of 
 human beings : those that are brain-sick and those that are healthy. 
 The brain-sick suffer from jealousy, meanness, conviction of sin, 
 and lack of heroic daring. They are malicious, underhand, and full 
 of intrigue. The healthy dare to seize happiness: they are frank, 
 impulsive, brave, look facts in the face, and know how to confront 
 death joyously. Three things in life are especially dear to them : 
 power and love and the glory of the material things of this world ; 
 and as long as they are faithful to their own instincts they triumph. 
 In Godfrida the straightforwardness of Siward and Godf rida, whose 
 love is absolute, reduces into impotence the intrigues of Isembert 
 and Ermengarde. In The Knight of the Maypole hero and heroine 
 likewise know of no mean submission ; they are fiery, impulsive and 
 battle against malice and deceit until they are victorious. In Self's 
 the Man the chief character Urban is similarly of heroic metal. His 
 greatest dream is 
 
 But to be tensely strung and give response 
 
 Full souled to every pang of pleasure and pain; 
 
 To be impassioned always and not to die.s* 
 
 His presence makes the air electric, for no one can tell what he will 
 say or do. He finally proposes, with absolute indifference to the 
 cost of life involved, to make out of Lombardy a sword that will 
 stem barbarous invasions. As he does not consult the old and places 
 young men at the helm, he would have succeeded in his enterprise 
 were it not that he started his career with a compromise. He dared 
 not live openly with Saturnia because he was afraid of the opinion 
 of the world, and had married Osmunda for the sake of policy. He 
 thus depended on others rather than on his instincts and the world 
 triumphed. For tragedy, as conceived by Davidson, is not a prod- 
 ^i' Self's the Man, p. 87. 
 
JOHN DAVIDSON 21 
 
 uct of conscience or environment: it is the result of mistrust of 
 one's instincts and a consequent failure to take advantage of op- 
 portunities that do not recur. 
 
 This semi-Nietzschean conception of ethics on which the plays 
 are based is responsible for many limitations in his dramatic art. 
 One feels that the author frequently limits his sympathetic under- 
 standing of certain minor characters because of a too rigid forcing 
 of life into the mould of his philosophy. It is only in a play like 
 Self's the Man, in which Davidson triumphs sufficiently over his 
 philosophy to make out of Osmunda and Philip not sick-brained 
 characters but bits of frail humanity, that he produces a drama 
 that is intensely human. Moreover the chief appeal that these plays 
 make depends not on their Nietzschean ethics but on motives like 
 the thwarting of the plans of a courageous mind or the triumph of 
 brave lovers over obstacles — elements as old as literature. Yet the 
 progress in dramatic power revealed in his dramas of 1898-1900 
 is due not merely to a riper experience brought about by practice 
 in translating and adapting plays for the London stage. Though 
 the Nietzschean thought embodied in those dramas does occasionally 
 seduce the author into producing artificial type characters, in the 
 main it heightens his critical understanding of life. It gives him a 
 consistent philosophic vantage and an intenser zest of life which 
 enhance his dramatic skill. Davidson's objective attitude towards 
 love and nature which one meets in his earlier work is thus con- 
 verted in its passage through a temperament like Davidson's into a 
 poetry more intense because it is based on a growing philosophic 
 understanding. His theories notwithstanding, Davidson of the 
 eighteen nineties was but a minor poet ; because the significant thing 
 to him was the mere search for the meaning of things. Not until this 
 quest is satisfied by his discovering a philosophic cause that explains 
 to him the origin and significance of all phenomena does he produce 
 really mature verse. This he achieves towards the close of the cen- 
 tury when he can finally look down from a philosophic height and 
 reflect that 
 
 We are fire, 
 Cut off and cooled awhile; and shall return, 
 The earth and all thereon that live and die, 
 To be again candescent in the sun, 
 
22 JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Or in the sun's in tenser, purer source. 
 
 1 
 
 Arise and let us sing; and, singing, build 
 A tabernacle even with these ghastly bones. 
 
 IV 
 
 This philosophic vantage ground attained by Davidson at the 
 close of the century becomes not only his theme but the great source 
 of his inspiration and is the direct cause of his strength and of his 
 weakness as a poet. He approaches the problem of the uprearing 
 of the tabernacle from the constructive critical point of view. As 
 he keeps on writing, poetry gradually begins to mean more to him 
 than a mere search for the meaning of life and a spontaneous ex- 
 pression of vivid impressions : he begins to realize that its intrinsic 
 value is determined by the quality of the emotional understanding of 
 such meaning and by the kind of imaginative power that receives the 
 given impressions. The first essential of a poet is of course to be honest 
 and render what he feels at first hand ; but if the freedom and im- 
 periousness of his imaginative powers are limited by ignorance and 
 shallowness of emotional depth the poet will produce things insig- 
 nificant and imitative. "Poetry is the will to live and the will to 
 power, poetry is the ertipire. Poetry is life and force. '"'^ The 
 great poet is a tyrant who tries to impose upon the world his own ^ 
 imagination and compels others to think and feel in his manner.^^ 
 Thus, according to Davidson, Wordsworth tried to create a Nature 
 Worship; he projected his own soul and character into the world 
 and wanted to substitute for Christendom a William Wordsworth- 
 dom. Therein lay his greatness. Similarly Carlyle proclaimed 
 himself in his heroes and tried to create a cult of great men.; But 
 Carlyle 's conception of the world is too narrow — ''Carlyledom is 
 a strait- jacket for the world and a dusty way to death and to the 
 dull hell of the drill sergeant and the knout"; and Wordsworth- 
 dom is parochial ; it has no room for great passionate romance, for 
 a Napoleon or Wagner. Neither of the two had the kind of imagi- 
 native power that might serve as "an enduring habitation for the 
 spirit of an era. ' '^^ In the entire range of English literature there 
 
 65 Holiday and Other Poems, p. 149. 
 
 66 The Theatocrat, p. 13. ' 67 md.^ p. 15. 
 
JOHN DAVIDSON 23 
 
 are indeed but few great poets who had supreme imaginations. 
 Shakespeare had one of those minds. He lived in Christendom; 
 and accepted Heaven and Hell and the entire religion and morality 
 of his day; his imagination living passionately, "more intensely 
 than that of any other man, ' ' within those limits. The intensity of 
 the freedom of that imagination ''beating against the bars of re- 
 ligion and morality" accordingly still astounds the world.^^ There 
 was Milton whose austere imagination, though frequently atrophied 
 into dogma, yet, tempered by the humanity of a Shakespeare, 
 created the love of Adam and Eve and the rebellion of Satan. Dry- 
 den's imagination merely "beat the air in strong low-pitched 
 flight" through Anglicanism and the "hot-house Catholicism of 
 James"; Pope's imagination could never mount beyond the Rosi- 
 crucian doctrine of spirits.^^ With Burns again a free imagina- 
 tion burst forth, — one that lived in the same moral world as Shakes- 
 speare, and felt keenly sin and hell and the passion of love.'^*' Then 
 came Wordsworth and Carlyle whose imaginations in spite of their 
 imperiousness were too narrow and therefore became doctrinal 
 rather than emotional. Since their time no big imaginations have 
 really appeared. Victorian poets like Tennyson and Browning live 
 indeed in Christendom in the same material-spiritual world in 
 which all English poets have subsisted ; but their emotions and their 
 imaginative power are small. "To have had to write Macbeth 
 would have killed such men as Tennyson and Browning ' ' ;^^ for a 
 great imagination must not merely dabble with a few spurts of 
 passing impressions, but must have the power to disport itself 
 within eternity and infinity.'^? , 
 
 This gift of imperiousness of imagination is, according to David- 
 son, not possessed by modern poets largely because they have not 
 the courage to look things in the face and to think as if nothing 
 had been written in the past.'^ They conceive the world imitatively 
 rather than genuinely and are merely literary echoes. They accept 
 
 6s The Triumph of Mammon, p. 164. 70 Ihid., p. 155. 
 
 69 The Triumph of Mammon, pp. 154-5. 7i Hid., p. 164. 
 
 "^^ Mammon and His Message, p. 160. "Imagination requires nothing 
 less that the infinite." 
 
 73 76t(?., p. 171. "We must know the best that has been thought and 
 imagined in all ages, not for itself, but in order to avoid it, as we would avoid 
 an exhausted atmosphere. Literature is the greatest foe of literature." 
 
24 JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Shakespeare's vision of the Universe without really moving about 
 freely in it. Heaven, Hell and Sin are real nowadays only to the 
 Salvationist to whom Heaven is still an actual place of perpetual 
 joy and Hell a burning lake with real flames in which the damned 
 suffer eternal pain.'^^ Though the modern poet does not believe in 
 a literal Heaven and Hell he writes as if they were. He has no 
 faith but he can offer no substitute for God and is afraid lest the 
 world become a vacuum the moment he discards the machinery and 
 symbols of a divinely created and guided world.'^^ He thus lives 
 in a world of symbolic shams and faint-hearted make-believes. If 
 the modern poet could only dare to step out and cut loose from the 
 past and find a substitute by creating a new habitation for the 
 imagination that should be genuinely real to him and Universe-in- 
 clusive in scope, a new era would begin in poetry. The poet would 
 then no longer be ' ' literary ' ' and reproduce impressions in symbols 
 he does not believe in, and his very experience would gain in poetical 
 significance because of the grandeur of his living imagination. 
 
 Impressed by this situation Davidson proceeds to erect a new 
 dwelling place for the imagination on the basis of things that are 
 real to modern man. According to Davidson modern man knows 
 that there is no other world ; that there is nothing immaterial ; and 
 that man is composed of the same elements that the distant stars 
 are made of. This knovv^ledge on the part of man is the factor that 
 can make possible a new imagination : for if mankind will but con- 
 template the material origin of the universe, its ethical ideals and 
 entire mode of life would change ; and such change is bound to be 
 accompanied by a new art.'^^ 
 
 Religious ethical systems are based, according to Davidson, on 
 certain conceptions of sin and obedience. By sin is usually meant 
 violation of the laws of God for which disobedience punishment is 
 meted out in a hereafter. But from the standpoint of a materialist 
 there is neither Sin, nor God, nor Hereafter. Conviction of sin is 
 merely the effect of physical exhaustion that follows a great dis- 
 charge of force. When a man enjoys a pleasure he does not feel 
 sinful ; only when a state of exhaustion sets in because of lack of 
 
 74 7bt(?., p. 160. Tsr/ie Theatocrat, p. 138. 
 
 76 Ihid., p. 76, and also Dedication to The Testament of John Davidson, 
 p. 31. 
 
JOHN DAVIDSON 25 
 
 energy or over-exertion does he have the * ' conviction of sin. " It is 
 therefore clear that there is nothing really bad in man 's indulging 
 in any kind of pleasure ; though it is true that over-indulgence may 
 lead to a reaction that is physically painful.'^^ The origin of con- 
 ceptions of Heaven and Hell can similarly be explained material- 
 istically as misapprehensions of the "subconscious recollections of 
 the peace of ether, of the glory of nebula, and of the condensation 
 and contraction suffered by the matter of which man consisted dur- 
 ing the millions and millions of years of the evolution of the solar 
 system. ' ''^^ Matter has memory and passion ; and oxygen, nitrogen 
 and other constituent elements that make up man, have thus a dim 
 consciousness of what had occurred before they entered into the 
 makeup of man; and it is this dim consciousness misapprehended by 
 man that led to conceptions of Asgard, Olympus and Heaven. 
 Finally God Himself is merely this self-consciousness misunder- 
 stood. "The generative power of man and the all-pervading ether 
 conscious in him, are the material sources of God."'^ Thus seem- 
 ingly all religious ethics are founded on misapprehension. , 
 
 Ethics should instead be based on the laws of matter. Good 
 should be that which enhances the material power of self-conscious- 
 ness in man who is matter's instrument of consciousness. There 
 should be no cult of virginity because it is contrary to the eosmo- 
 logical processes of nature : The chief function of woman is to breed 
 children.^" Mankind should rid itself of the ascetic incubus ; for 
 material things are here to be enjoyed.^^ Let man not be afraid of 
 his emotions and deeds. Let him do what he really wants and infi- 
 nite greatness and infinite terror will await him.®^ Moreover man 
 must not hesitate, in his endeavor to increase his capacities of con- 
 sciousness and self-consciousness, to be hard on himself and on 
 others. He must not be afraid to cause pain. 
 
 Pain? 
 It may be that matter in itself is pain, 
 Sweetened in sexual love that so mankind, 
 
 77 The Theatocrat, p. 65, 
 
 ■!»IUd., p. 42. 79 76tU, p. 27. 
 
 80 The Testament of John Davidson, p. 140, etc. 
 
 81 Vide accounts of Heaven and Hell in The Testament of an Empire 
 Builder and in The Testament of a Prime Minister. 
 
 82 The Theatocrat. 
 
26 JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 The medium of matter's consciousness 
 May never cease to know — the solid bent 
 Of matter, the infinite vanity 
 Of the universe, being evermore 
 Self-knowledge.83 
 
 The big man should emancipate himself from subservience to the 
 needs of the multitudes ; for the great thing in life is not to lessen 
 pain and increase the happiness of the many but rather to increase 
 knowledge for the sake of knowing. The hero should be hard, mis- 
 understood, and trusting his own instinct do for the world with 
 love what he thinks good for it. Finally, man should know how to 
 face death. The knowledge that there is no end, that there is noth- 
 ing to fall back on but himself, the naked universe stripped of all 
 illusions, should not terrify him. He should face a return to ether 
 with joy, glorying in the fact that he will become in the nebula 
 
 "Essential fire, free from solitude. ' 
 
 This is the freedom of the universe. "84 
 
 I These points of view which, according to Davidson, are an out- 
 growth of the knowledge of the universe, should guide man in deter- 
 mining the various modern social problems that confront him. ^ He 
 should thus oppose representative government because it is based 
 fundamentally on the conception of the greatest good for the many 
 rather than on the welfare of genius. But since the mania for suf- 
 frage does exist, Davidson thinks of stemming the effects of suf- 
 frage by limiting the male vote to married men who are house- 
 holders.^^ _ The educational system should for similar reasons be 
 changed : people should be taught only the things actually known, 
 i. e., the history of matter; for all other learning is based on illu- 
 sions and must be done away with : the literature and books of the 
 past are a curse. ' They may delight but they are in the way of 
 seeing and feeling things afresh. 1 The past must be undone; for 
 
 The rainbow reaches Asgard now no more; 
 Olympus stands untenanted; the dead 
 Have their serene abode in earth itself. 
 Our womb, our nurture, and our sepulchre. 
 
 83 The Testament of a Vivisector, pp. 26-7. 
 
 84 The Theatocrat, p. 146. 
 
 85 The Testament of John Davidson, p. 27. 
 
> 
 
 JOHN DAVIDSON 27 
 
 Expel the sweet imaginings, profound 
 Humanities and golden legends, forms 
 Heroic, beauties, tripping shades, embalmed 
 Through hallowed ages in the fragrant hearts 
 And generous blood of men; the climbing thoughts 
 "Whose roots ethereal grope among the stars, 
 Whose passion-flowers perfume eternity, 
 Weed out and tear, scatter and tread them down; 
 Dismantle and dilapidate high heaven. 86 
 / 
 
 i— -Socialism in so far as it is a leveling force should be crushed by 
 the genius of the world. In so far as it is due to a feeling on the 
 part of workmen of a lack of room in England to make the world 
 to their order let them hive off and acquire new lands and fortunes 
 of their own elsewhere.^^ Woman Suffrage should likewise be sup- 
 pressed : Woman has intellect and man has intelligence ; woman has 
 ruse, chicanery, and nerve brain, and man has passion, instinct, and 
 genius. In a conflict man the creator will triumph. Woman's 
 place in life is that of a companion and child-breeder and not of 
 voter. But since there is already this muddle of representative 
 government, permit temporarily only married women who are 
 mothers of three children the right to vote.^^ Finally, the Irish 
 Question should be solved with a strong hand. The biggest type of 
 man, according to Davidson, is the Englishman.^^ Things should 
 therefore be so arranged that a solid English Empire be created: 
 this can be done by granting autonomy to the Welsh, English, 
 Highland, Lowland, Ulster, Leinster, Connaught, Munster ; but all 
 must remain English. "To live with England and yet to decline 
 the destiny of England is to be unfortunate indeed."^" j 
 
 On the basis of such knowledge and application of principles of 
 life, Davidson concludes that a new and really vital literature 
 might be created. Because of the new ethics, the old tragedies of 
 sin and conseience^ill become almost meaningless. ', The whole 
 world will therefore have to be moulded afresh ; for vriat was done 
 in the past will be as nothing. Since men will dare to do things 
 
 86 The Testament of a Man Forbid, pp. 11-12. 
 
 87 The Testament of John Davidson, p. 17. 
 ssibid., p. 27. 
 
 »9 Ibid., p. 18. "The Englishman is the Overman; and the history of 
 England is the history of his evolution." 
 90 Ibid., pp. 14-16. 
 
28 JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 without restraint of religious ethics, not only will new visions of 
 terror and greatness be opened up,^^ but the very freedom of human 
 conduct will create a life and art that will be full of a " youth and 
 freshness more radiant and more fragrant than they ever wore 
 even in their prime and pristine vigor. "^2. Finally though this 
 novelty of subject matter and life attitude will not affect the form 
 of expression, for English blank verse is already ' ' the prof oundest 
 and most intelligent voice of matter" and the "subtlest, most 
 powerful, and most various organ of utterance articulate faculty 
 has produced" ;^^ yet the poetry produced in the new universe bared 
 of all illusions will be greater than that of Shakespeare because it 
 will not be based on a mere symbol of the universe; it will be a 
 
 statement in emotional terms of the universe itself.^* 
 
 I 
 
 The conclusions that Davidson herewith comes to are not fanci- 
 ful or the outgrowth of a wanton desire to start something new. 
 They are the product of his mature thought and satisfy a genuine 
 inner want. \ The very errors on which his ideas are based are errors 
 only because they are applied to poetry in general. They do not 
 describe erroneously his own processes as a poet. He thus seem- 
 ingly believes that an imperious imagination must, in order to 
 produce the highest poetry, either visualize concepts of Heaven, 
 Hell and God or else understand them materialistically. That a line 
 like 
 
 Absent thee from felicity awhile 
 
 as Davidson claims, is the product of "some eternity of passionate 
 emprise" may be true;^^ but that this eternity is the same as the 
 keen feeling on the part of a poet of a particular philosophy of 
 eternity does not necessarily follow. Great visions of terror and joy 
 ' ' that fill the mind with a sense of everlastingness ' ' may be produced 
 without the poet having had a vision of the Universe in the philo- 
 sophical sense. That Burns must have literally felt (as Davidson 
 implies) that he was living in a world "suspended by a hair from 
 
 91 The Theatocrat, p. 144, ss md., p. 141. 
 
 92 Holiday and Other Poems, p. 136. s* The Theatocrat, p. 52. 
 95 Holiday and Other Poems, p. 148. 
 
JOHN DAVIDSON 29 
 
 the floor of Heaven above a flaming Hell ' ' in order to have produced 
 great poetry in Christendom, is open to question."'' That great 
 poetry based on such a vision of Heaven and Hell might be written 
 is of course true ; but that such a condition is a sine qua non, is an 
 unwarranted assumption. ■- With Davidson, however, who was essen- 
 tially a poet on metaphysical themes, such a vision of the Universe 
 was an essential.^. Once he became definitely an atheist, he was com- 
 pelled to reconstruct the universe so that it would harmonize with 
 his lack of beliefs if he was to be genuine in the writing of his 
 poetry; else his poetry which was becoming more and more an in- 
 terpretation of the significance of life would have degenerated into 
 cowardice of thought and emotional dishonesty. 
 
 It must likewise be realized that the fusion of materialism and 
 Nietzscheism in Davidson's poetry has also a psychological rather 
 than a logical cause. A materialist might deny the immortality of 
 the soul and still accept in the main the ethics of the reduction of 
 pain for the many. He might reason that since man has no other 
 aid to depend on but that of his own kind, conduct that tends to 
 increase the welfare of the majority is ''good." He might even be 
 tempted, owing to his conception of nature as a mechanical process 
 and consequent denial of freedom of will, to look upon the ethical 
 laws existing between man and man as inevitable mechanical regu- 
 lations. But Davidson, notwithstanding his materialism, considers 
 man as master of his fate and the highest good that which increases 
 man's vitality or self -consciousness. He reconciles the irrecon- 
 cilable by conceiving freedom as the accepting of the laws of matter 
 and the working them out bravely. Furthermore, he accepts suf- 
 fering as an inevitable detail in the process of evolution of matter 
 into higher forms of consciousness and makes a cardinal virtue out 
 of amor fati. Such conclusions on the part of Davidson are thus not 
 necessary corollaries of his materialism : they are rather interpreta- 
 tions of his own sympathies offered in materialistic phraseology. 
 
 Moreover the monism of Davidson, woven though it be of ideas 
 of others, is really an original product. Davidson is in his scien- 
 tific ideas primarily a poet and not a scientist or philosopher. He 
 argues indeed in favor of his hypotheses, but more often he enun- 
 ciates things on the basis of his own authority. Things cannot be 
 96 The Triumph of Mammon, p. 155. 
 
30 JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 known scientifically, he announces several times ; they can be appre- 
 hended by poetic powers only.^^ f He thus attains to unity with the 
 subconscious universe by raising himself through poetry above ex- 
 perimentation and ratiocination. He accepts the nebular hypothesis 
 because it is "the most satisfying to the imagination, "°® By a 
 "leap across a chasm" with the "vaulting pole of hypothesis" he 
 arrives at the conclusion that "light and sound are substantive."^^ 
 
 [_He opposes natural selection largely because the thought of descent 
 is repulsive to his imagination. He therefore prefers to believe that 
 just as in the mind of a poet thoughts and imaginings of infinite 
 variety arise, similarly * ' in the matter of the universe life in infinite 
 variety arises and becomes ; not by breaking up of species, but by 
 the appearance of species the staple of evolution proceeds. ' '^"^ Be- 
 cause of a similar motive the creation of a new species of a louse is 
 to him no proof of evolution by natural selection but rather ' ' an in- 
 stance of the material or imaginative style of matter in its mood of 
 depravity — a mood analogous to that which produces Sinon, Tar- 
 tuffe, Parolles, Chivy Slyme. ' '^*^^ To a similar poetic transforma- 
 tion of thought is undoubtedly due his attributing intense passions 
 to the elements ; and his interpreting the universe as Memory rush- 
 ing into Consciousness.^"- 
 
 Not only does Davidson thus transmute the scientific material 
 that he appropriates into poetic fancy, but the points of view em- 
 bodied in his conceptions, their scientific details notwithstanding, 
 are distinctly amplifications of his own understanding of life. The 
 poetry of In a Music Hall communicates already a taste for earthy 
 material things ; and the eclogues and ballads are already passionate 
 searches for the meaning of life with a bias towards materialism. 
 
 ^.Problems of cosmology, heaven, hell and sin loom large in all his 
 poetry of the early nineties ; for his upbringing in the environment 
 of the kirk made these problems the very essence of life to him. 
 When he lost his faith in God his serious Scotch mind could not live 
 in mere negation or assume permanently the attitude of becoming 
 a mere "thoroughfare for all the pageantry of time."^°^ His 
 
 97 The Theatocrat, p. 57 ; Mammon and His Message, p. 173. 
 
 98 Mammon and His Message, p. 164. 
 
 99 The Triumph of Mammon, p. 160. 
 
 100 The Theatocrat, p. 54. ^^^ Hid., p. 40. 
 
 101 md., p. 53. 103 Ballads and Songs, p. 34. 
 
JOHN DAVIDSON 31 
 
 natural avenue of escape was a naive materialism. That this ma- 
 terialism should have consisted largely in expounding modifications 
 of Oswald, Haeckel and others is incidental, and was probably due 
 to his early training as a chemist and to the popularization of ener- 
 gistic monism at the close of the last century. 
 
 t The relationship between Davidson's own mental proclivities 
 and the Nietzschean ethics that he adopts is of the same character. 
 The resemblance between Davidson's ethics and Nietzsche's im- 
 moral ideals are indeed many and striking. Davidson seemingly 
 accepts practically all of Nietzsche 's cardinal ideas, such as the will- 
 to-power, class morality and amor fati. He is merely non-committal 
 about the Eternal Recurrence and opposes definitely only one con- 
 ception of Nietzsche — that of the Overman.""* The acceptance of 
 Nietzsche's cardinal ethical tests is necessarily accompanied by an 
 agreement with Nietzsche's corollaries on Socialism, government, 
 woman, sin, asceticism, and Christianity. Even more close are the 
 similarities between Nietzsche's views on art and Davidson's opin- 
 ions on poetry. _ They both agree that poetry is essentially "the 
 affirmation, the blessing, and deification of existence" and both op- 
 pose naked realism.^°^ ' ' Artists should not see things as they are ; 
 they should see them fuller, simpler, stronger""*' might have been 
 said by either. ' Both furthermore believed that poetic creation is 
 the outcome of a tyrannical will which stamps its image on all 
 things."^ "To represent terrible and questionable things is in itself 
 the sign of an instinct of power ;"^*'^ "all art works as a tonic: it 
 increases strength, it kindles desire {i. e., feeling of strength) ;""^ 
 and ' ' convention is a condition of great art, not an obstacle to it ' '"" 
 are sentiments expressed by both. Yet these numerous likenesses 
 notwithstanding, Davidson can hardly be called a disciple of Nietz- 
 sche. ) In his later work he passes the Nietzschean ideas through a 
 materialisfic crucible so that they practically become amplifica- 
 tions of his own point of view: Human beings should indeed, as 
 Nietzsche says, be hard and not hesitate to cause pain, but this time 
 for a new reason, namely, that matter demands this hardness in 
 order to attain self-consciousness. Similarly man is to be a yea- 
 
 104 The Testament of John Davidson, pp. 17-19. 
 
 105 Will to Power, II, 263. los Jhid., 889. 
 
 106 761^., 243. ^09iMd., 889. 
 ^07 Ibid., 846. 110 76?^., 809. 
 
32 JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 sayer because all is matter and he should be proud of the fact that 
 the entire universe is eager to become man. Finally man is to love 
 the beauty and power of this world because there is no other world 
 and such are the laws of matter. The chief reason why those ideas 
 are adopted by Davidson is evidently because they harmonize with 
 his own proclivities. As early as 1886, before he even heard of the 
 name of Nietzsche, he already expressed a point of view approxi- 
 mating the Nietzschean in his play Smith. For Nietzsche's criti- 
 cism of ethics is not so much a philosophy as a persistent emotional 
 mood. Many of the attitudes, usually described as Nietzschean, 
 were assumed, though with less poignancy and consistency, by many 
 minds who preceded Nietzsche. Davidson felt some of those moods 
 himself; and formal Nietzschean thought merely intensified tend- 
 ^ encies that already possessed him. 
 y It is thus out of his own emotional moods that Davidson con- 
 
 structed his "new" poetry. If monism and certain ethical ideals 
 did become with him a source of poetry it was only because they 
 enriched his consciousness of life and thus served as an emotional 
 cause. But such a condition could not be produced by a mere arbi- 
 trary superimposition of a foreign system of thought on one's feel- 
 ings.) Philosophy in a poet becomes a potent factor only when it 
 augments preexistent emotional states. Such at least was evidently 
 the case with John Davidson. Certain ideas with which he started 
 out kept on returning in his works with a steady recurrence of 
 waves ; each wave encroaching with greater volume of added thought 
 a trifle further in the same direction. Those points of view gradu- 
 ally became conscious processes with him; they gathered to them- 
 selves sinews and flesh from various sources and at last became a 
 systematic living whole ; and as such they influenced intimately and 
 determined the character of his most important work. 
 
 The significance of the realization that the primary origins of 
 Davidson's ideas lie in a personal disposition of mind rather than 
 in systems of thought offered by others becomes evident the moment 
 one examines the relationship between his philosophy and his poetryJ 
 They both have a common origin and are practically inseparable. A 
 healthy mind assimilates indeed a great deal of material; but it 
 selects and rejects new ideas and experiences on a basis of like and 
 dislike. It culls those suggestions that harmonize with its own 
 
JOHN DAVIDSON 33 
 
 ytendeneies and frequently constructs a system of thought that is 
 >^ .really but an amplification of what it unconsciously felt before. 
 Such at least seems to have been the process followed by Davidson 
 in the development of his thought ; whence its intimate relationship 
 with his growth as a poet. There is thus a distinct continuity of 
 ideas prevailing throughout all his work. Philosophic concepts 
 were to him at all times a source of emotional strength and were 
 usually presented as emotional attitudes. Even in his earlier work, 
 as has been noticed above, the chief source of his strength was the 
 search for the meaning of life. ^ Since in his later poetry the 
 greater keenness of thought in evidence was not a new current but 
 an increase in the volume of a stream already flowing in his earlier 
 work, there can be said to be no real change in the direction of 
 thought or general characteristics of his poetry. His consciousness 
 essentially metaphysical, invigorated by a thought that involved a 
 general vision of the universe and a certain philosophic consistency, 
 merely increased the intensity of his poetry. 1 This increase of in- 
 tensity is, however, very significant. .Till Davidson created for him- 
 self his materialistic philosophy he was, his theory of art for life's 
 sake notwithstanding, a minor poet struggling vaguely though pas- 
 sionately with a few modern situations and achieving a boat song 
 in Scaramouch, a song or two in the eclogues, a few ballads sug- 
 gestive of the turmoil of his age, and a few tender lyrics. In the 
 main he was doing with slight variations, though with a sweetness 
 and strength that was his own, what Henley and Kipling had 
 already accomplished. He was a poet of ' ' empire ' ' verse ; of Lon- 
 don poverty ; of the turbiilent elements of modern thought ; — with 
 an intense love of life, and a passionate delicacy. Now, under the 
 inspiration of an intenser thought, his former concepts broaden out 
 and he becomes a nature poet in the Lucretian sense. He does not 
 try to describe semi-literary moods aroused within him by the pres- 
 ence of sea or sky nor does he attempt to construct an ideal nature 
 out of bits of impressions of the real world. Instead he recreates 
 in his Testaments objectively and philosophically the world and its 
 processes. The thick turf becomes to him "Cream of the earth 
 uprisen through fathomed depths of soil and sap. ' '^^^ The throstle 
 in his verse delights ' * to tune his throat with tortured snails ' ' and 
 111 The Testament of a Prime Minister, p. 49. 
 
L 
 
 34 JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 murderous singing birds ''banquet sumptuously as nature bids.""^ 
 The endless processes of nature become his theme : 
 
 The green and sapphire earth embossed with studs 
 Of crystal snow at either lonely pole; 
 With orient dawn, with sunset in the west 
 The sumptuous rubies of its girdle clasped; 
 <1.^ And wearing gallantly, day in day out, 
 
 yV 
 
 Its azure mantle of ethereal dust, 
 j^ That turns at night a sable domino 
 
 ^Xi With stars embroidered. us 
 
 o r 
 
 ( Attempts at putting modern scientific thought into verse were 
 
 made in half-hearted fashion in English poetry before Davidson. 
 Tennyson's "move eastward happy earth" and his exactitude of 
 scientific knowledge in "Break thou deep vase of chilling tears 
 That grief has shaken into frost" had already startled an earlier 
 generation of readers. James Thomson, and even Kobert Browning, 
 likewise contribute their share in the poetic rendering of scientific 
 ideas. But these touch the mere fringe. Davidson becomes ike 
 poet par excellence of natural creation. The creative processes of 
 nature become the chief source of his inspiration. He dwells in a 
 palace in the skies and sings of ether "eternal, stretching taut in 
 bourneless space, "^" "a sheer oblivious ecstacy"; of the wakening 
 of the hungry lightning; of hydrogen's "first condensation of the 
 infinite"; of passionate molecules swelling into "sumptuous neb- 
 ulas"; of earth and neighboring worlds "shedding asteroids like 
 a fiery sweat"; of "Earth delivered of its moon. And chilled with- 
 out and tempered to endure Barbaric sculpture of the glacier. "^^^ 
 Then he proceeds to sing of the sifting of the elements that become 
 warp and woof of life ; of telluric history and of the deluge of fire, 
 
 Compacture fierce and winnowing tides of air 
 That forged and tempered and engraved the earth 
 Enamelled it with sapphire seas and hung 
 An emerald veil about its nakedness. 
 
 He traces in fervent glow the origin of species: "sex from ether 
 strained as lightning," embodied in protoplasm; life organical 
 
 112 The Testament of an Empire Builder, p. 52. 
 
 113 The Testament of a Prime Minister, p. 12. 
 
 114 The Testament of John Bavidson 
 
 115 The Testament of a Prime Minister, p. 96. 
 
JOHN DAVIDSON 35 
 
 speeding through differentiation "into the rose, the oak tree and 
 the wine and unto men and women"; the brain, "the goal Uncon- 
 scious lightning aimed at when it led The onset of eternity to man. ' ' 
 Finally he reveals the very birth of the Gods and narrates their 
 gradual destruction; the death of our earth that shall reel to its 
 doom "orbit-slipped" or 
 
 The weight of ice amassed at either pole 
 Shall change our axis till a deluge wipe 
 The eitied world away.ne 
 
 As a poet of Nature Davidson is far indeed from being alto- 
 gether successful. Though he places the entire world on his can- 
 vas and from a philosophic height judges everything that occurs 
 within his ken, he cannot live long in the rare atmosphere of his 
 heights. He fails to produce a single sustained effort in the manner 
 of Lucretius. He expresses himself only fragmentarily in Testa- 
 ments. Piecemeal he communicates that the world should rid itself 
 of its past ;^^^ that man is made of the same substance as the furthest 
 stars and should therefore lustily enjoy the world and not be afraid 
 of life or pain, "the growing labors of the universe" ;^^® and that 
 the other world is at last to be destroyed.^^^ His visions of the proc- 
 esses of nature are presented in the Testaments and Tragedies only 
 incidentally and spasmodically. He sees clearly only the outer 
 causes of phenomena in their general outlines : but his vision of the 
 details into which infinity disintegrates itself is often blurred. The 
 precision that one does find in his work is frequently purchased at 
 the expense of his becoming rhetorical or even through his produc- 
 ing mere prosaic catalogniing effects^^ His Hell is thus magnifi- 
 cently terrible in its general conception : he understands its suffer- 
 ing and interprets it with a tragic irony by making the "winnow- 
 ing" space between Heaven and Hell mellow 
 
 the shriek of women and the roar 
 Of men into immortal harmony.120 
 
 But when he comes to depict details, he offers an enumeration that 
 lis Ibid., p. 24. 
 
 117 The Testament of a Man Forbid. 
 lis Testaments. 
 
 119 Testament of John Davidson. 
 
 120 Testament of an Empire Builder, p. 75. 
 
36 ' JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 is indeed impressive enough because of its sheer accumulative force, 
 but yet resolves itself into mere rhetoric largely because the poet is 
 perhaps in too great haste to deliver his message rather than sustain 
 his imaginative powers by feeling intensely the details he visualizes. 
 His poetry thus even in its highest moods frequently turns into vio-"^ 
 lent rhapsody. This rhetorical quality is usually however the re- 
 sult of impatience rather than limitation of poetic powers and 
 perturbs but slightly the general impression. In moments of 
 calmer inspiration, Davidson's poetry has a grandeur of vision in 
 the presence of which shrivels even Tennyson^. V ambrosial air" 
 that rolls "from the gorgeous gloom of evening" driving fancy 
 "from belt to belt of crimson seas." ^Davidson's agonies of star 
 dust fill the mind with a keener sense of everlastingness. His 
 ability to view nature as a complete process disintegrating itself 
 into mountains, oceans, flowers and men, works subtle magic into 
 scenes conceived even on a smaller scale. The very declivities ' ' that 
 creep Unhonored to the ocean's shifting verge" communicate a 
 feeling of suppressed energy due to a subconsciousness that the poet 
 is aware that soon the willing earth will * ' leap to the bosom of the 
 sun to be Pure flame once mora in a new time begun. "^^^ Purged 
 by this pure flame, a dignity of mood and restrained melancholy of 
 thought permeates his work. The very deformities of men and 
 women that he describes with startling energy cease to be ugly 
 sickening details : they are sublimated into processes of nature. In 
 the height of his vision there is no room for meaningless details or 
 mawkishness of sentiment. His images become gaunt, exact, in- 
 tense, honest. His largeness of conception is, moreover, uttered in 
 a rhythm of blank verse that rises to the occasion and contains a 
 dignity and sweep that is Miltonic. ; 
 
 The same grandeur of the scale of vision makes possible the con- 
 struction of his later tragedies that are attempts at producing 
 world-dramas in which the significance of materialistic thought is 
 the theme. The limitations of those plays are likewise evident 
 enough. They are largely polemics in dramatic form; for David- 
 son does not start out with definite conceptions of characters or 
 dramatic situations that are to be fitted into a general scheme but 
 deliberately composes characters and situations in order to convey 
 
 121 The Testament of a Man Forbid, p. 29. 
 
 A 
 
JOHN DAVIDSON 37 
 
 through them certain ideas. In The Theatocrat the whole play thus 
 resolves itself into message. Characters who hear the Davidsonian 
 gospel are at once convinced; for the doctrine of materialism is 
 ''not to be apprehended but to be felt." Thus no serious attempt 
 is made by Davidson in the play to reveal the process of character 
 transformation or to trace rigorously the effects that this trans- 
 formation produces on individual conduct. The most effective parts 
 of the tragedy are those that contain an exposition of materialism 
 and that attempt to appreciate the significance of religion as a cul- 
 tural factor in the world's civilization. Davidson realizes clearly 
 that all culture is based on some form of religion. He understands 
 that the opposition to God will be fought by wom^n ''with babes at 
 their breast" to the last drop of blood. All that have suffered — 
 those whose children and lovers are dead — will rise to defend the 
 other world.^-^ It requires therefore great courage "to bid the 
 dream avaunt once and forever. ' ' But though wars and convulsions 
 will follow, the great truth must out ; and the world will be thrilled 
 with the splendor and terror of seeing itself without symbols. For 
 in itself the universe is " a becoming, a passion and a pain, A rapt 
 imagination. ' ' Davidson therefore hurls himself in passionate fury 
 against the world, producing however as a result, not "a drama of 
 church and state" but a rhetorical polemic containing here and 
 there a few impressive rhapsodical visions. 
 
 The same limitations are evident in the uncompleted trilogy of 
 God and Mammon in which he takes his task of producing a world 
 drama even more seriously. His theme becomes definitely the diffi- 
 culty of converting the world to a pure materialism and he tries to 
 deal directly with the various existing forces of the present society. 
 Prince Mammon slays his father, kills his brother, crowns himself 
 king of Thule and marries Gwendolen. After delivering his coro- 
 nation speech he quells a riot with machine guns. He is now ready 
 to spread his message : and the harlots become indignant when they 
 are informed that they have no souls. He informs the paupers that 
 they must die ; for he will have no poor, no incurables, no criminals 
 and no bedlamites. There is moreover no longer to be the cult of 
 age; youth should rule unburdened by a knowledge of the past. 
 The abbot Gottlieb is tortured on the rack, for "to do the things One 
 122 The Theatocrat, p. 195. 
 
38 JOHN DAvrosoN 
 
 fears to do is the first law of nature." The abbey is burned, *'for 
 it enshrines a lie " and all the beauty that came with Christianity — 
 books, buildings, pictures, and the hearts of men must be annihi- 
 lated. Money likewise must be abolished: "Churches and Banks 
 together stand and fall." Such are some of the things achieved 
 by Mammon who through his message ' ' transcends all dishonor and 
 all crimes and the utmost evil he could do. " 
 
 The conversion to the faith is however far from perfect. The 
 soldiers of matter enlisted in Mammon's cause cry "God save the 
 King." Mammon himself suffers from lapses of conscience and 
 "sees" the murdered bodies of his father and brother. None of 
 his followers has the courage fully to accept the significance of 
 his gospel. Oswald "loves and serves in fear and wonder" — ^but 
 the torturing of Gottlieb on the rack, the burning of the abbey, and 
 the betrayal of his affection for Inga finally drive him away to 
 Mammon's enemies. Gwendolen "adores" him; but Mammon 
 realizes that once her passion will cloy she too will desert him. 
 Florimond follows him half in fear : in the presence of death he too 
 becomes afraid of God and judgment. Indeed conditions are fast 
 forming that would have enabled Davidson to show in the third 
 part of the trilogy, that was never written, how Mammon eventu- 
 ally succeeded in ' ' transcending the utmost evil that could be done 
 to him." In spite of this seeming failure Mammon ruthlessly 
 proceeds on his way to change the world. He muzzles the press 
 and even suppresses all display of humor in order to accomplish 
 his purpose. 
 
 The scale of this uncompleted trilogy is indeed titanic: its de- 
 tails are however sketched rather than clearly visualized. All the 
 characters, with the exception of Mammon, are mere symbols of 
 ideals that prevail in modern society — inceptors of Teutonic re- 
 ligion, neo-pagans, socialists, reformers, thieves, beggars, harlots, 
 mobs. These symbols are not treated either lyrically or dramat- 
 ically. They say indeed things consistent with the ideals they are 
 created to represent; but Davidson has no sympathy to waste on 
 them, whence the mechanical effect they produce. He does not 
 create a single foe worthy of Mammon's steel because Davidson is 
 evidently intoxicated with the joy of relating Mammon's message. 
 The character of Mammon is limned however with bold precision. 
 
JOHN DAVIDSON 39 
 
 He is heartless because universal. A true force, he does not calcu- 
 late, and assimilates things as they come along, making them serve 
 his purpose. The boldness of conception back of such character 
 creation is imposing. The limitations in the complete realization 
 of the character are largely a result of the enormous difficulties 
 confronting Davidson in his conception of life, f 
 
 He tried to conceive in his plays human conduct based on a new 
 system of ethics. Poetry is usually informed by the ethics of the 
 age in which it is produced. The penitence, resignation and wist- 
 fulness of Cynewulf, the very defects of his constructive style, are 
 thus related to the scholastic thought of his time. Back of the Caro- 
 line poetry are the monarchic politics of Hobbes, his agnosticism 
 and, above all, his materialistic metaphysics blended with the 
 Epicurianism of Gassendi and the skepticism of Montaigne. Simi- 
 larly the crude empiricism of the prosaic realism of the eighteenth 
 century novelists, the optimism of an Addison, and the deism of a 
 Pope, are related to Locke, Leibnitz, and Berkeley. With the change 
 of moral conceptions a poetry containing new motives might of 
 course be created, without such change precluding the possibility of 
 the production of poetry celebrating the obsequies of ethical ideals 
 of a previous age. But whether the old or new morality is em- 
 ployed, the poet must in either case make the reader sympathize 
 with the given ethics : else the tragedy or comedy so created would 
 
 . become meaningless. One need not become a Platonist in order to 
 
 / appreciate Wordsworth's Ode on Intimations of Immortality; fre- 
 quently a poem exerts its most artful charm when one feels that the 
 thought which lies back of it is part of a faith that is dead ; but even 
 in such cases the poem will not move unless the reader can be made 
 to sympathize with the mood that evoked the particular thought 
 that one fails to accept. The task confronting a poet building on an 
 obsolescent system of ethics or on one prevailing in a given age is 
 comparatively simple. There is no difficulty on the part of the 
 reader to whom the poet appeals in understanding the emotional 
 significance of the moral standards employed. The poet who com- 
 poses on the basis of an ethical system that is strange to most of his 
 contemporaries must however either take it for granted that his 
 readers are of the few who have already attained the new point of 
 view and proceed calmly with his work ; or, if he wants to appeal to 
 
40 JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 a wider circle, he must pause to denounce the past and make of the new 
 standards the center of the emotional crisis of his character. If he 
 follows the latter alternative he becomes either a propagandist and 
 mars his play or else he must sacrifice the natural construction of 
 the drama in order to make out of every significant detail of the 
 new ethics an emotional crisis. Great artists have indeed circum- 
 vented such difficulties. Goethe has fashioned a Mephistopheles 
 who is free of prevailing human tastes and Shakespeare has created 
 an Ariel who is indifferent to human morality. But in the one 
 case, Mephistopheles is a delightful villain for whom no sympathy 
 is expected ; and in the other, Ariel is a disembodied spirit evoking 
 sympathy because he is an airy creature free of mortal cares. The 
 central characters in Faust and in The Tempest, indeed the whole 
 of both plays, is moreover conceived on an ethics that requires no 
 formal exposition to be generally understood. But when in the 
 midst of a world in which conscience, repentance, and pity are con- 
 ceived as virtues a dramatist tries to construct a play fundamentally 
 based on ideas through which these virtues appear vices, his task be- 
 comes artistically almost impossible. He might perhaps in a fashion 
 write a novel based on such new standards ; for the dispersed charac- 
 ter of the novel permits digressions necessary to evoke at least intel- 
 lectual sympathy on the part of the reader for those new ethical 
 aspects. But the very construction of the dramatic form practically 
 precludes these digressions and thus the sympathetic understanding 
 of his new ideas. When Davidson therefore proceeds to create 
 dramas based on a new moral philosophy he either cannot make his 
 characters live consistently in his ethical world without pausing to 
 make lengthy explanations that interfere with the action of his 
 characters, or he fails to make the readers sympathize or even be- 
 lieve in the reality of the character's point of view. Largely for 
 l/.-l these reasons, though Davidson conceives the details in his tragedies 
 
 on a grand scale, his lyric and dramatic powers break down the 
 moment he tries to express himself in dramatic form: He is com- 
 pelled to digress and consequently he produces rhapsodies and 
 rhetorical polemics rather than a Faust or a Peer Gynt. The result 
 achieved is however at worst a brilliant failure that dazzles with 
 the effulgency of its rhetoric, a rhetoric that is impressive because 
 , of its passionate honesty and the daring of the ideas that it conveys. 
 
JOHN DAVIDSON 41 
 
 Similarly impressive are Davidson's attempts at expressing 
 himself at the close of his poetic career in lyric poems, ballads, and 
 dramatic monologues. These briefer poems are artistically more 
 successful than his plays because in them he can make a passionate 
 plea for his ideas without the need of entering into digressions. 
 The entire poem becomes from beginning to end a means of con- 
 veying a single undivided mood. The very novelty of his philo- 
 sophic point of view, moreover, gives an intensity to the moods and 
 emotions that he elects to express. In Holiday and Other Poems 
 and in Fleet Street and Other Poems Davidson is thus enabled to 
 portray life effectively from the standpoint of the poet who en- 
 throned himself above the galaxy and understands the entire uni- 
 verse from a cosmic rather than human morality. The dominating 
 tone in back of the Holiday volume is thus that it is good to be 
 alive, for life is the reason why we are here. He furthermore an- 
 nounces again and again that the biggest conceivable thing is that 
 which tends to increase vitality, the sheer courage for courage's 
 sake. With mind all aglow he accordingly sings the brave hunting 
 song of the runnable stag 
 
 Not to be caught, dead or alive, 
 The stag, the runnable stag.123 
 
 In the new eclogues ether and nebula seem to have lit his blood and 
 he paints in the colors of the dawn. Daisies are to him the ''land 
 wide Milky Way Of myriad eyes of day. "^-* November is "one 
 wet crimson stain ' ' ;^-^ ' ' a crimson flood ' ' intoxicates the east ; and 
 lilies are ''on fire with newly budded love." Life is to him, how- 
 ever, not all blaze. From philosophic heights he can write at pleas- 
 ure calmly of apple trees "heavy with apples And supremely con- 
 tented"; for to them "Life is an effortless passion. "^^^ He can 
 sing from his palace in the Milky Way of "London W.,"^^^ its mur- 
 murs, cries and sunsets. All this he does with passionate intensity 
 but not with violence. An occasional image in which daisies in the 
 grass are likened to a "snowy leprosy "^-^ may occur; but the poet 
 himself condemns it as a slander. His revel in brave colors and 
 fiery images is sobered by his vision of the totality of the universe. 
 
 123 Holiday and Other Poems, p. 19. 126 lUd., p. 30. 
 
 i24 76r(?., p. 70. -^27 Ibid., p. 37. 
 
 ^25 Hid., p. 35. ^28 Hid., p. 71. 
 
42 JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 His poems lack however the freshness that some of his earlier work 
 contained ; and the frequent use of Poe 's repetend in his versifica- 
 tion certainly does not lend them any youthfulness. The repetend 
 has indeed something elemental about it; for like parallelism it 
 carries one back to the very beginning of poetry; but it savors of 
 the simplicity of age rather than of youth. 
 
 In Fleet Street mid Other Poems poetry is written from the same 
 heights but it deals with the work-a-day world. It describes satir- 
 ically the stupid mob in the "Crystal Palace" enjoying its holiday; 
 the insufferable bores one meets on "Koad and Rail"; the com- 
 placent forest folk; and the gutter merchants with their palsied 
 souls and numbed affections. The drabness of the life of the rail- 
 way stations seemingly enters his soul, and the hell of the unfit is 
 lugged out for inspection. Davidson of the Fleet Street volume 
 contemplates rather than feels the life that he sees. Accordingly 
 he reasons, pleads, denounces, and expresses himself in parables 
 that read like protestations of faith. This argumentative tone is 
 seemingly partly the product of an apprehension that there be no 
 one after him to feel intensely the full significance of the "mes- 
 sage ' ' that he wanted to deliver to his contemporaries. He indeed 
 exclaims in his Testament ; 
 
 I dare not die, must not die: I am the sight 
 
 And hearing of the infinite; in me 
 
 Matter fulfills itself; before me none 
 
 Beheld or heard, imagined, thought or felt; 
 
 And though I make the mystery known to men. 
 
 It may be none hereafter shall achieve 
 
 The perfect purpose of eternity; 
 
 It may be that the Universe attains 
 
 Self-knowledge only once; and when I cease 
 
 To see and hear, imagine, think and feel. 
 
 The end may come, and matter, satisfied. 
 
 Devolve once more through wantom change, and tides 
 
 Of slow relapse, suns, systems, gallaxies, 
 
 Back to ethereal oblivion, pure 
 
 Accomplished darkness. Night immaculate 
 
 Augmenting everlastingly into space. . . .129 
 
 He is therefore determined to do almost anything in his power in 
 order to express himself unmistakably and he writes accordingly 
 129 Testament of John Davidson, p. 141. 
 
JOHN DAVIDSON 43 
 
 satires and parables in the Fleet Street volume and explanatory 
 prefaces, dedications and notes in his other works in order to sup- 
 plement and interpret the thoughts expressed in his testaments, 
 plays and briefer poems. 
 
 This stupendous conception of his own value is with Davidson 
 not so much an outgrowth of arrogance as of despair lest he may have 
 lived his hard life in vain ; a sentiment tempered by a dread that soon 
 he will be compelled "to turn aside and attempt things for which peo- 
 ple will pay. ' ' When he is more hopeful the arrogant tone is trans- 
 formed into a courage that slays every dejection and *'seeth the 
 abyss but with the eagle 's eye. ' ' He remembers that even the most 
 repulsive flesh is great because it dares to live. In the poem entitled 
 Fleet Street this thought is brought out with special emphasis. The 
 poet insists that Fleet Street with its noise, rapture and brick-work 
 was once a silence in the ether. Perhaps in foul weather the 
 patience of this brick-work gives out to the length of envying the 
 "dazzling perdition" of Saturn's belts ; if so, let the bricks be coura- 
 geous and be proud of their telluric destinies; for they, too, are 
 part of the cosmic whole. Moods of envy of each other's lots are 
 bound to come but regular bricks "transcend them always." Simi- 
 larly in his later eclogues the poet reflects that "harvests in winter's 
 bosom sleep." This courageous tone is expressed most effectively 
 in a poem like his epilogue to The Testament of John Davidson: 
 
 I felt the world a-spinning on its nave, 
 I felt it sheering blindly round the sun; 
 I felt the time had come to find a grave: 
 I knew it in my heart my days were done. 
 I took my staff in hand; I took the road, 
 And wandered out to seek my last abode. 
 
 Hearts of gold and hearts of lead 
 
 Sing it yet in sun and rain, 
 
 " Heel and toe from dawn to dusk, 
 
 Eound the world and home again. ' ' 
 
 My feet are heavy now, but on I go, 
 My head erect beneath the tragic years. 
 The way is steep, but I would have it so; 
 And dusty, but I lay the dust with tears, 
 Though none can see me weep: alone I climb 
 The rugged path that leads me out of time — 
 
44 JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Out of time and out of all, 
 Singing yet in sun and rain, 
 ' ' Heel and toe from dawn to dusk, 
 Eound the world and home again." 
 
 Farewell the hope that mocked, farewell despair 
 That went before me still and made the pace. 
 The earth is full of graves, and mine was there 
 Before my life began, my resting place; 
 And I shall find it out and with the dead 
 Lie down for ever, all my sayings said — 
 
 Deeds all done and songs all sung. 
 
 While others chant in sun and rain, 
 
 ' ' Heel and toe from dawn to dusk, 
 
 Eound the world and home again." 
 
 In such a swan song he gave expression to the fullest compass of 
 his emotions ; to a manliness, an ecstacy of metaphysical vision and 
 a subdued tragic feeling aroused by his sense of eternity. It lacked 
 but one significant quality that is to be found in many of his other 
 poems : a genuine love of meadows and sky-larks, the tenderness and 
 intimacy of which is heightened, particularly in his later work, by a 
 violent passion for the productive elements of nature. 
 
 Imperfect as these later lyric poems, testaments and tragedies 
 are, they represent not merely his maturest thought but also his 
 most significant work. He personally considered these later produc- 
 tions as his greatest creations, and his opinion on the matter was 
 / unerring. That which he suggested unconsciously as a young man 
 inThis poetry in Scotland, and passionately strove to attain in the 
 poetry of his growing manhood in the eighteen nineties, he defi- 
 nitely achieved in the full consciousness of his powers in his poems 
 of the early twentieth century. In comparison with his more popu- 
 lar poems of the preceding decade his later work thus reveals a 
 greater depth of vision, and intenser emotion and a greater hold on 
 the understanding of the essentials of life. His technical skill dis- 
 plays a corresponding growth. He handles verse with more trium- 
 phant effectiveness. Blank verse is not only to Davidson ''a su- 
 preme relief of nervous tension, the fullest discharge of emotion, 
 the greatest deliverance of energy, ' ' but it communicates at its best 
 to the reader a feeling of everlastingness and supreme contentment 
 that one associates only with the most powerful and most permanent 
 poetry. His later poems, especially the tragedies, contain indeed 
 
JOHN DAVIDSON 45 
 
 many lapses into rhetoric and even bombast; but this bombast is 
 not the result of deterioration of poetic powers. With a poet on 
 metaphysical themes an increase in maturity of thought rather leads 
 to a keener feeling of life and to a corresponding increase of poetic 
 strength. The rhetoric in Davidson's later poems is largely the 
 effusion of a mind overflowing with the bigness of its theme. It 
 contains no clever conceits and no starched images : it communicates 
 a directness of sincere passion. Davidson himself must have been 
 aware of the rodomontade qualities of occasional passages. He must 
 have composed them with the carelessness of a mind overflowing 
 with creative energy. They are probably the result of impatience 
 on the part of the poet to convey an unfamiliar thought, or of a de- 
 termination to pause and explain his new ethics. It should be 
 realized that this very philosophy that was partly responsible for 
 Davidson 's wildest rhapsodies and for prosaic catalogues of the ele- 
 j ments, in moments of the calmer feelings was also the source of his 
 I most triumphant poetical achievements. 
 
 I A contrast between the poems of "London" in Ballads and 
 
 k Songs and "London W. " in Holiday and Other Poems perhaps best 
 illustrates the nature of the growth of Davidson as a thinker and 
 poet. Both poems are unmistakably Davidsonian in their manner- 
 isms. Clouds that "Like smouldering lilies" are unconsumed, and 
 sunsets that * ' well like crimson founts ' ' might have been conceived 
 hJby the poet in almost any period of his work. The London with its 
 ;' heart "beating warm" is, however, suggestive of Wordsworth's 
 sonnet On Westminster Bridge and of the poetry on London com- 
 posed in the eighteen nineties. Moreover a lyrical outcry like 
 
 Oh sweetheart, see! how shadowy, 
 Of some occult magician's rearing, 
 Or swung in space of heaven 's grace 
 Dissolving, dimly reappearing. 
 Afloat upon ethereal tides 
 St. Paul's above the city rides! 
 
 though perfect in its way and delicately suggestive of the poet's 
 mood, yet lacks the compactness and maturity of mind evident in a 
 "London W," In that latter poem there is nothing imitative and 
 the lyric emotion is stronger because it is a product of a mind 
 capable of a loftier vision. In it Davidson brings out with greater 
 
46 JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 directness the murmurs, cries, smoke, and hunger of a great city. 
 Davidson accomplishes in such a poem what impressionistic painters 
 have already realized in paint. For back of a passage like 
 
 Trees of winter 's nakedness aware 
 Gleamed and disappeared like things afraid, 
 Dryads of the terrace and the square, 
 Silvery in the shadow and the shade, 
 
 there is not merely a greater sensitiveness but a more direct feeling 
 of open air. This directness is the product of a more intimate unity 
 between the poet and the spirit of the scene that he describes. In 
 the earlier poem Davidson merely portrays romantic emotions 
 roused at the sight of London. In the later poem there is a firmer 
 grasp of details and consequently a greater directness of emotion 
 that are probably due to the poet's comprehending philosophically 
 the unity of life. The poet's point of view, chastened by a philo- 
 sophic understanding of natural processes, enables him to realize 
 the ultimate significance of the details that he employs and he can 
 thus communicate more intimately the spirit of the landscape that 
 he portrays. Whether Davidson's philosophic attitudes really in- 
 tensify his lyric powers precisely in this manner is of course a 
 matter of speculation. Whatever the causes or processes may be, 
 there can be but little doubt, however, that his later works are not 
 only more philosophical in theme and in point of view but also dis- 
 play a greater compactness of lyrical expression and a profounder 
 emotion. 
 
 Davidson recommends to the critic that he take out into the 
 open that which seems to him poetry and thus discover whether it 
 can bear daylight and experience of life. Davidson's own poems 
 in the presence of mountains and fields do not lose in their genuine- 
 ness. They can stand the test with which he proves others. Their 
 effectiveness depends moreover not only on genuineness of feeling 
 but on breadth of vision. Davidson had a mind that was essen- 
 tially metaphysical ; whence much of his poetry is full of a dignity 
 that is sublime. Because the moods in most of his songs spring 
 ^rom a philosophic vision they not merely allure; they stimulate. 
 V His philosophy may be wrong but the emotion that it arouses is 
 ^ genuine and has a meaning to all who face things. If materialism 
 is wrong, some other process is right; in either case the impending 
 agonies of stars, the viewing of the world from an eternal aspect, 
 
JOHN DAVIDSON 47 
 
 cannot lose meaning. There may be another world ; and the soul, 
 in spite of Davidson, may be immortal; but Davidson's amor fati, 
 his determination to live bravely, are bound to have meaning as 
 
 \ long as courage means anything to the human mind. 
 
 It is a simple matter to enumerate Davidson's limitations; for 
 
 ; he tried to create in his later works the well-nigh impossible: a 
 poetry based on an ethics that was new and almost meaningless to 
 his generation. Staggering under such stupendous attempt, his 
 mind was evidently in a continuous state of tension and was im- 
 pelled by a desire of propaganda that was unfortunately not rele- 
 gated to prefaces and epilogues. Goaded on by a lust for dissemi- 
 nation of doctrine and by a passion for scientific detail he fre- 
 quently became prosaic or rhapsodic. His very satiric powers, in 
 spite of an intense moral passion, thus became impaired. He more- 
 over lacked the power of sustained thought and naturally sought 
 expression in forms that are loose. He did not elaborate his poetic 
 ideas patiently but turbulently burst forth again and again with 
 a passion that overpowered the mind and the imagination but 
 failed to hold them altogether prisoner. He could interpret well 
 perhaps only one human passion — the search for truth. Finally 
 from the standpoint of thought value — the quality that to him was 
 most significant — ^his poetry was largely a record of failure to 
 
 ' solve the great problems that tortured him throughout life. In 
 his "pleasures of youth" he thus insisted that love is the secret 
 of the world — a thought that survived in a modified form to the 
 very end. His attitude towards love was semi-metaphysical from 
 the outset. Even in his early poems love was conceived not as 
 a touch of finger tips nor as a wanton lust but as an ecstasy of 
 creative desire. She later became his mate and joyously journeyed 
 with him ' ' Right into the heart of the sun On the morning or even- 
 ing tide. ' ' But love failed to explain his universe ; for the world 's 
 suffering gripped him — a ghost that he never laid. "With pride he 
 asserted in earlier days that a man is what he makes himself; yet 
 the feeling that man can make himself only at the cost of suffering 
 to others gnawed his conscience. Even after he had accepted in 
 his later philosophy the seemingly inevitable by asserting that suf- 
 fering — the whining of the rotting match girl — was the growing 
 pains of the world that should not daunt, he still partly felt that 
 he was evading an issue. Then the significance of sin, denial, and 
 
48 JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 the glory of the world demanded solution; and he finally evolved 
 through his own thinking and reading a system that served him as 
 an explanation. This system of materialism was based on moods 
 rather than on well-reasoned scientific or philosophic thought. It 
 indeed satisfied, no matter whether right or wrong, his imagina- 
 tion and gave to his poetry consistency of thought, grandeur of 
 vision and intensity of form. It did not however enable him to 
 create a new poetry in the sense that he conceived it. He only 
 talked of a new pathos; but he really did not create it. His 
 poetry was new only in the sense that all original poetry is new. 
 It did not offer a statement of the naked world freed of all 
 symbols and of all traditions, but rather expressed Davidson's 
 particular moods — lofty, passionate and philosophic. But though 
 his poetry was not "a new poetry for the first time in a thou- 
 sand years" yet Davidson's significance is none the less great. His 
 very failures communicate a sense of power. As a thinker he helped 
 to stem artistic pose and unimaginative naturalism and through 
 the invigorating robustness of his poems gave direction to the new 
 movements in English poetry. Though his own work is not free 
 from the tangle of rhetorical verbiage, yet his insistence on the 
 need of genuineness of thought and emotion helped to clear the air 
 of a great deal of imitativeness. His attacks on matter-of-fact real- 
 ism and his endeavors to create poetry on a basis that harmonized 
 with what he thought was the most permanent in the temper of 
 his own time were healthy seminal tendencies of a big mind. Fi- 
 nally he has created some of the most daring ballads and lyrical 
 poems of the late nineteenth century full of a tenderness and 
 earthiness and passionate thought that are peculiarly his own. His 
 semi-dramatic poems contain an exaltation, a rush of power, and a 
 largeness of utterance that thrill with their vastness. His poetry 
 on cosmology, full of fervor and grandeur of vision, undoubtedly 
 occupies a unique position in English literature. He falls indeed 
 short of the greatest. He saw however visions of great things and 
 his failures are due to his not resting satisfied with anything short 
 of eternity. The contributions that he offered to English literature 
 are therefore living poetry and his memory will remain significant 
 to all to whom daring of thought and genuineness of poetic feeling 
 are precious. 
 August, 1914 
 
BIBLIOGRAPHY 
 
 An Unhistorical Pastoral, 1877 (printed Greenock, 89). 
 
 A Eomantic Farce, 1878 (printed Greenock, 89). , . . 
 
 Bruce: A Drama ("A Chronicle Play"), 1884, Glasgow (printed 
 
 1886, Glasgow). ^ . ^ / ■ ^ a 
 
 Smith: A Tragedy C'A Tragic Farce"), 1886, Crieff (printed 
 
 1888, Glasgow) . ^ ^ . . ^ iqqq 
 
 Scaramouch in Naxos: A Pantomime, 1888, Crieff (printed 1889, 
 
 Greenock). 
 In a Music Hall, 1872-89 (printed 1891, London). 
 The North Wall (A Practical Novelist) (printed 1885, Glasgow}. 
 Perfervid (printed 1890, London). 
 
 The Great Men (printed 1891, London). , . ^ ^ .^oon 
 
 Laura Ruthven's Widowhood (with J. C. Wills) (printed 1892). 
 Montesquieu's Lettres Persennes, (tr.) 1892 (printed 1892). 
 Paragraphs and Sentences (printed 1893). 
 Miss Armstrong's and Other Circumstances. 
 Fleet Street Eclogues (printed 1893, London). 
 Baptist Lake (printed 1894, London). 
 
 A Random Itinerary (printed 1894, London). 
 
 Ballads and Songs (printed 1894, London). 
 
 Earl Lavender (printed 1895). 
 
 Second Series of Fleet Street Eclogues (printed 1895) 
 
 PourLaCouronne (Coppee), (tr.) 1896 (printed 1896). 
 
 New Ballads (printed 1896). 
 
 The Last Ballad and Other Poems (printed 1898). 
 ^' Godfrida- A Play in Four Acts (printed 1898). 
 J Self's the Man: A Tragi-Comedy (completed Sept., 1899) (prmted 
 
 The Knight of the Maypole: A Comedy in Four Acts (written 
 1900) (printed 1903). ,, 
 
 . A Queen's Romance-a Version of Victor Hugo's -Ruy Bias 
 written for Lewis Waller (1901) (printed 1904). 
 
 49 
 
50 JOHN DAVIDSON 
 
 Testaments by John Davidson : No. I, The Testament of a Viviseetor 
 
 (printed 1901). 
 Testaments by John Davidson: No. II, The Testament of a Man 
 
 Forbid (printed 1901). 
 Testaments by John Davidson : No. Ill, The Testament of an Em- 
 pire Builder (printed 1902). 
 A Rosary (printed 1903). 
 
 The Testament of a Prime Minister (printed 1904). 
 Selected Poems (printed 1904). 
 "\' The Theatocrat: A Tragic Play for Church and Stage (printed 
 
 1905). 
 Holiday and Other Poems with a Note on Poetry (printed 1906). 
 God and Mammon — A Trilogy: The Triumph of Mammon with a 
 
 personal note by way of epilogue (printed 1907). 
 God and Mammon — A Trilogy: Mammon and His Message, being 
 
 the second part of God and Mammon (printed 1908). 
 The Testament of John Davidson (printed 1908). 
 Fleet Street and Other Poems (composed 1908-9) (printed 1909). 
 The Man Forbid and Other Essays (ed. by Edward J. O'Brien), 
 
 composed 1892( ?)-1902( ?) (printed 1910). 
 
 Biographical Sources 
 
 \ Davidson earnestly requested in his last will the destruction of 
 his letters and forbade the writing of his life. There are conse- 
 quently no biographical notices worth mentioning. The biographical 
 details offered in the Dictionary of National Biography and in the 
 eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica are seemingly re- 
 writings of the scant information to be found in "Who is Who." 
 In Bookman, I, p. 85, a brief interview with Davidson is pub- 
 lished. Accounts of his tragic end are to be found in the English 
 Daily Press of March the 27th, 30th; April 1st, 19th; September 
 20th-22d, 1909. Several of the earlier poems are semi-autobi- 
 ographical. His entire works contain a revelation of the most sig- 
 nificant elements of his personality written large. - 
 
JOHN DAVIDSON 61 
 
 c 
 
 Critical Books and Articles 
 
 Archer, "W. — Poets of the Younger Generation (1902). 
 
 Chapman, E. M. — English Literature in Account with Religion, pp. 
 
 479-85. 
 Bronner, Milton — A Poet of Anarchy (Forum, 44: 305-20). 
 Gates, L. E. — Studies and Appreciations (1900), pp. 177-82. 
 Jackson, Holbrook — The Eighteen Nineties (1913). 
 Kenedy, J. M.— English Literature, 1880-1905 (1912). 
 Murdoch, W. B. — The Renaissance of the Eighteen Nineties. 
 O'Brien, Edward J. — Introduction in The Man Forbid and Other 
 
 Essays (1910). 
 Quiller-Couch, A. T. — Adventures in Criticism (1896). 
 Schelling, Felix E.— The English Lyric (1913), pp. 278-9. 
 Walker, H. — The Literature of the Victorian Era (1910). 
 Young, Filsom— The New Poetry Fortn., 91 : 136-52. 
 
LIBRftRY OF CONGRESS 
 
 014 458 037 >