Читать книгу The Selected Poems of Marjorie Pickthall - Marjorie Lowry Christie Pickthall - Страница 3

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I shall say, Lord, "Is it music, is it morning,

Song that is fresh as sunrise, light that sings?"

When on some hill there breaks the immortal warning

Of half-forgotten springs.

The poem from which these lines are taken, "Resurgam," sums up, in a way, the strength and weakness of Marjorie Pickthall. On the one hand, there are grace and charm, restrained Christian mysticism, and unfailing cadence; on the other, preoccupation with the unearthly, with death and regret, with loneliness and grief, where the tendency is toward emotional interpretations of life, and rapture and intuition are substituted for the discipline of reason. Something of a pagan in the classical sense, as well as part Protestant and part Anglo-Catholic, she took beauty where she found it and believed that it held all of goodness and truth. Her faith could be summed up in a quotation from the Bible which she treasured: "Mine eyes shall see the King in His glory!" Her favourite saint was Francis of Assisi. Her poems very often seem to be private acts of devotion—reticent, wistful, and personal, a kind of oblation jewelled with symbolism, bright with imagery, and always softly cadenced as if joining in the age-old litany of the Mass. Passion, grief, feelings of injustice or outrage, were nearly always muted in her verse. Only in her novels and short stories did she ever try to come to grips with mankind, and even then she tended to submerge her intimate thoughts and feelings in romantic situations from which the tangible and the real too often escaped. In both prose and verse her humour remained more or less constant, a fundamental fact in both her art and life that partook of her blitheness and gaiety, sometimes a commentary upon life and sometimes a kind of anodyne to still the hurts of reality.

I

Marjorie Pickthall was born September 14, 1883, near Chiswick, England, the only child of Arthur C. Pickthall and Helen Mary Mallard. Her father was the son of a Church of England clergyman and her mother's father was an officer in the Royal Navy, part Irish and part Huguenot. After several moves the Pickthalls came to Canada in 1889 and settled in Toronto. Marjorie attended a Church of England School on Beverley Street, and later Bishop Strachan School. A delicate child she was often out of school, but always immersed in her drawing and painting, her diary and violin, and her own stories and verses. All the anniversaries of her year were marked by gifts of books. She sold her first story to the Toronto Globe in 1898, a poem to the Mail and Empire in the same year, and a prize poem, "O Keep the World Forever at the Dawn," to the Mail and Empire in 1900. She was at last launched upon a literary career and never turned back. In the next four or five years her poems appeared in the National Monthly, Acta Victoriana, Century, The Atlantic, Westminster, McClures, Metropolitan, University Magazine, Scribners, Harpers, and others, and in 1906 she launched the first of three juvenile thrillers illustrated by C. W. Jefferys. From her prize poem of 1900 to "Bega," "The Little Sister of the Prophet," and "The Bridegroom of Cana," all published in 1909, the distance was great and illustrates her progress from a beginner to the full maturity of her powers. When Drift of Pinions, her first book, appeared in 1913, she had already written much of her best poetry, and was to continue not only the repetition of her favourite attitudes and metaphors, but even the vocabulary that included such words as gray, little, silver, rose, dreams, mist, dove, and moth.

Marjorie Pickthall foraged far and wide, but she sought those experiences most congenial to her nature, many of them denied to her in the only world of reality she knew. In the beginning she devoured Henty, Kipling and Scott, Lytton, Stevenson and Conrad, and her earliest stories were reminiscent of them. Later she came upon John Maclean's The Indians: Their Manners and Customs, and all her materials were ready for three juvenile books of adventure. Soon, however, she was to discover Fiona Macleod, and enter into the Celtic realm of haunting dreams, preoccupation with loneliness and death, and longing for the unobtainable. Thereafter, every landscape held something of the "dim sweet isles of the West." She also found Ingram's Flora Symbolica, and this invested with hidden meanings the flowers she had always loved to paint. Then she discovered Katherine Tynan, Alice Meynell, Louise Imogen Guiney, W. B. Yeats, and even Masefield, to whom, in his Celtic moods, she felt nearer than anyone. As if this were not enough she entered the Norse world through William Morris, loitered about legendary Brittany and the Holy Land, and explored the frontiers of the New World with its Indians, French missionaries, and coureurs de bois.

Then, in 1910, when she was twenty-seven, her dream house on an isle of dreams collapsed. The death of her mother was for her an overwhelming catastrophe, taking her whole world. She had no defences ready and her grief was tragic.

Life is too little for the way of Love,

A lifted wing, a flower too soon unfurled,

A green grave with one patient star above,

And that is all the world.

It was then that she found in several persons identified with Victoria College, Toronto, the counsel and consolation she so much needed. A position was secured for her in Victoria College Library, and after a considerable interval she returned to poetry again. The first poem written after the crisis, "Rain in the Nest," appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. Miss Helena Coleman and Professor Pelham Edgar guided her reticent genius, and brought her strong friends, among them Sir Andrew Macphail, Editor of The University Magazine, who published her first book of poems, Drift of Pinions, dated at Victoria College.

Marjorie Pickthall sailed for England at Christmas time, 1912, and lived with an uncle at Hammersmith, London, where she received her author's copies of Drift of Pinions. The Oxford Book of English Verse appeared in 1913. Her own copy is heavily marked, and indicates her almost morbid concentration upon death: Praed's "Mater Desiderata"; Browning's "Prospice" (in which she corrects the editor's "Then a joy," restoring the proper "out of pain"); George MacDonald's "Sonnet" on death; Christina Rossetti's "Cold it is, my beloved, since your funeral bell was toll'd"; Swinburne's "Hymn to Proserpine"; Francis Thompson's "An Ode after Easter"; "Weep not Today," by Robert Bridges; and others. She later moved with a friend to Bowerchalk, near Salisbury, and there wrote Little Hearts (1914), her first novel, set in Jacobean days, and less a story than a charming and quaint meditation on Mr. Sampson's philosophy of poverty. The First World War broke in upon her own world, and to help in the general call to service she worked for a time on the land, which proved much too heavy for her. Next she worked in the South Kensington Meteorological Office, and the close confinement threatened her eyesight. In between times she began a novel, Fox Cover, never completed, wrote The Bridge (1921), a novel located at Toronto, and published her second book of poems, Lamp of Poor Souls (1916), which contained most of Drift of Pinions together with many new poems. In 1920 she returned to Canada, and took up residence in Vancouver. In the same year her one-act play, The Wood Carver's Wife, was produced in Montreal, and she began what was to have been her greatest work in prose, The Beaten Man, a novel based upon contemporary life in the new world. She died suddenly, in 1922, and was buried beside her mother in St. James' Cemetery, Toronto, April 26. The Wood Carver's Wife and Other Poems appeared the same year in a memorial edition.*

* See Marjorie Pickthall: a Book of Remembrance, by Lorne Pierce. The Ryerson Press, Toronto, 1925.

II

With Marjorie Pickthall the old poetic tradition in Canada may be said to have come to its foreordained end. It came to its end at Victoria College. With a young student, E. J. Pratt, who borrowed books from the Library where Marjorie Pickthall was assistant, the new tradition began. She who helped move the books from the old stacks to the new building, and was not a little lost amid it all, was shortly to enter the chaos of the First World War, and would scarcely survive it. The new day demanded other gifts than hers. Like Bliss Carman, she found the firmament dissolving beneath her feet. What she had to say, and the lyric way she said it, were fast going out of style. She hoped to find herself in war work, with a body that scarcely sustained the demands of a cloistered life in times of peace. "Even if I fail, it will be a satisfaction to know I've had a thorough good try at something useful." Her multiplying stories were full of perilous quests and hazardous journeys, of undertakings that required incredible resources to withstand fatigue, hunger, and despair. She wrote of men who could take the world in their strong hands and rebuild it alone according to their will, but she was no consort for these. Her vivid romanticism invested the incredible with the aura of reality, but whatever of reality her people and places ever possessed was the product of her soaring imagination.

In her poetry she carried the old tradition as far as it could reasonably be expected to go, and certainly as far as the transplanted Celtic motif was desirable in the new world. There seems to be no place now for the historic sorrows of Deirdre, dim and inconsolable, or for the luxurious grief of a Celtic Sappho regretting absent love. There is not a little of this in the poetry of Marjorie Pickthall, as well as her own variations on the theme of The Song of Songs, a blending of passion and reverence, always rather wistful, and very beautiful at its best. Her poems based upon the Mass reveal her imperfect understanding of both doctrine and symbol, and reflect, instead of a deep religious experience, her prevailing attitudes, sincere enough but emotional, toward death, love, and separation, a passionate longing for fulfilment and peace. Whatever theology she possessed was, like her understanding of people—both as individuals and in their social relationships—almost always intuitive and not derived from reason or profound personal experience.

III

During her lifetime she had sometimes been called "Pickthall the Obscure." She attributed this obscurity, if such it was, to the mystical quality of her work. When she sat down to write her last novel, The Beaten Man, she strove to become more objective, simpler, more direct and practical. She was led toward this resolve by her great good sense, by a passionate if detached interest in people, by an all-pervading humour, and by a sense of the grotesque. In her early work she dealt with humanity, but it was man out of the past, remote, idealized, and legendary. She faced away from own age. In her first novel, Little Hearts, she retreated to the Jacobean period, just as elsewhere she was intrigued by mediaeval Brittany or in love with the Cavaliers. Her difficulty, in both prose and poetry, was in not being able to see mankind as it really was. When she escaped from various war services to Bowerchalk, she was immersed in the world of romance. "Chalke Cottage" was within sight of the old Roman Road. "From Brading" reveals the wonder of it all for her, the marching legions, the pomp and circumstance, the arrogance and swagger of those vanished legions. Salisbury Plain, dominated by the cathedral, held under its barrows a long-forgotten civilization. And there was Stonehenge, the Druids with their rubric of the sun, Merlin and Vortigern, Lancelot and Guinivere. When she wrote, the spell, the imagery, the very rhythms of far-off times and ways, dominated the cadences of her lines. When she returned to Canada she resolved to put all this away and to take real people, place them over against a real background of the contemporary and recognizable world, and bring to life a vital Canadian tradition. She recalled Rupert Brooke's lament, that Canada was unpeopled by legendary figures. Her answer to that was: "The material is there, wherever there is longing, sacrifice, or the sense of fate.... Let no one, poet or no, think that the material from which such figures are builded can ever be wanting while man endures...". Thus she wrote in the tentative introduction to The Beaten Man, the title of which was borrowed from Masefield's "Pompey the Great":

And the beaten man becomes a story for ever.

From such mystical stories as "La Blanchisseuse Dorée," "The Worker in Sandalwood," and "The Bog-Wood Box," and her rousing stories of adventure, "Luck," "Cheap," "The Stove," and "The Men Who Climbed," Marjorie Pickthall moved gradually on to her poetic one-act play, The Wood Carver's Wife. She was ready at last for the great experiment, The Beaten Man. Far behind was the adolescent prayer, "O keep the world forever at the dawn." In verse she attained the maturity of "Palome," "Père Lalement," "Resurgam," "The Little Sister of the Prophet," "A Mother in Egypt," and "The Bridegroom of Cana." While the idiom of The Song of Songs remains, there was a growing wisdom of the heart and unmistakable ripeness.

Will he come from the byre

With his head all misty with dreams, and his eyes on fire,

Shaking us all with the weight of the words of his passion?

I will give him raisins instead of dates,

And wreathe young leaves on the little red plates.

I will put on my new head-tyre,

And braid my hair in a comelier fashion.

Will he note? Will he mind?

Will he touch my cheek as he used to, and laugh and be kind?

She lived for only a short time, and dwelt all her days in the realm of the spirit. In such a world there was no frontier. Within the same poem one might expect to meet Armorel or Mary the Mother, Adonis or the Light of the World. Her poetry is saturated with religious sentiment and often reveals swift spiritual insights. Some have suggested that the apparent confusion of symbol and creed in her work anticipated the religious and intellectual fuzziness of our own time. Certainly she was not orthodox, either Protestant or Catholic, and her faith had no consistent theological or philosophical foundations. But it is also true that religion was the deepest thing in her experience, and she spoke about it as naturally as she did the weather. It was valid and real for her, and transcended the bewildering divisions of creeds in the only way she knew, that is, the way of the true artist, and as such provided a meeting ground for all.

For man is not a Solitary but a Kindly Soul. Kind kin he needs, and so hath been provisioned for in the comfortable Reason of God ... (Love) is the best Thing God gives, and perhaps the one Thing even He may not take away...

The gates of Heaven are made of pearl, and the redeemed go through them. In the considerating justice of God, it is possible that the poor have the right of that way before all others, as a sign or recompense of the many gates that have been shut to them on earth; that even the cohorts of the archangels make room for the sons of Poverty. There are no back doors to Heaven. Come, we will look, if we may not enter in...". (Little Hearts)

I shall say, Lord, "We will laugh again tomorrow,

Now we'll be still a little, friend with friend.

Death was the gate and the long way was sorrow.

Love is the end." ("Resurgam")

LORNE PIERCE