On English Poetry / Being an Irregular Approach to the Psychology of This Art, from Evidence Mainly Subjective

XVIII THE GENERAL ELLIOTT

IT is impossible to be sure of one’s ground when theorizing solely from the work of others, and for commenting on the half-comedy of my own, “The General Elliott,” I have the excuse of a letter printed below. It was sent me by an American colonel whose address I do not know, and if he comes across these paragraphs I hope he will understand that I intended no rudeness in not answering his enquiries.

This is the poem:—

THE GENERAL ELLIOTT

He fell in victory’s fierce pursuit,
Holed through and through with shot,
A sabre sweep had hacked him deep
Twixt neck and shoulderknot ...

The potman cannot well recall,
The ostler never knew,
Whether his day was Malplaquet,
The Boyne or Waterloo.

But there he hangs for tavern sign,
With foolish bold regard
For cock and hen and loitering men
And wagons down the yard.

Raised high above the hayseed world
He smokes his painted pipe,
And now surveys the orchard ways,
The damsons clustering ripe.

He sees the churchyard slabs beyond,
Where country neighbours lie,
Their brief renown set lowly down;
His name assaults the sky.

He grips the tankard of brown ale
That spills a generous foam:
Oft-times he drinks, they say, and winks
At drunk men lurching home.

No upstart hero may usurp
That honoured swinging seat;
His seasons pass with pipe and glass
Until the tale’s complete.

And paint shall keep his buttons bright
Though all the world’s forgot
Whether he died for England’s pride
By battle, or by pot.

And this is the letter:

“April, 1921.

“My dear Mr. Graves,—

“Friday, I had the pleasure of reading your lines to “The General Elliott” in The Spectator. Yesterday afternoon, about sunset, on returning across fields to Oxford from a visit to Boar’s Hill, to my delight and surprise I found myself suddenly confronted with the General Elliott himself, or rather the duplicate presentment of him—nailed to a tree. But could it be the same, I asked. He did not grip the tankard of brown ale that spills a generous foam—nor did his seasons seem to pass with pipe and glass—and alas, nor did paint keep his tarnished buttons bright. In spite of your assertion, is the general’s tale not already complete? Was he not (like me) but a “temporory officer”? Or have I perhaps seen a spurious General Elliott? He should not die; the post from which he views the world is all too lonely for his eyes to be permitted to close upon that scene, albeit the churchyard slabs do not come within the range.... May I help to restore him?

“Sincerely,
“J—— B——
“Lt. Col. U. S. A.”

To which letter I would reply, if I had his address:—

My dear Colonel B——

... The poet very seldom writes about what he is observing at the moment. Usually a poem that has been for a long while maturing unsuspected in the unconscious mind, is brought to birth by an outside shock, often quite a trivial one, but one which—as midwives would say—leaves a distinct and peculiar birthmark on the child.

The inn which you saw at Hinksey is the only “General Elliott” I know, but I do not remember ever noticing a picture of him. I remember only a board

THE GENERAL ELLIOTT.
MORRELL’S ALES AND STOUT.

and have never even had a drink there; but once I asked a man working in the garden who this General Elliott was, and he answered that really he didn’t know; he reckoned he was a fine soldier and killed somewhere long ago in a big battle. As a matter of fact, I find now that Elliott was the great defender of Gibraltar from 1779 to 1783, who survived to become Lord Heathfield; but that doesn’t affect the poem. Some months after this conversation I passed the sign board again and suddenly a whole lot of floating material crystallized in my mind and the following verse came into my head—more or less as I quote it:—

“Was it Schellenberg, General Elliott,
Or Minden or Waterloo
Where the bullet struck your shoulderknot,
And the sabre shore your arm,
And the bayonet ran you through?”

On which lines a poem resulted which seemed unsatisfactory, even after five drafts. I rewrote in a different style a few days later and after several more drafts the poem stood as it now stands. There appear to be more than one set of conflicting emotions reconciled in this poem. In the false start referred to, the 1. A. idea was not properly balanced by 1. B. and 1. C., which necessitated reconstruction of the whole scheme; tinkering wouldn’t answer. I analyze the final version as follows:—

1.	A.	Admiration for a real old-fashioned General beloved by his whole division, killed in France (1915) while trying to make a broken regiment return to the attack. He was directing operations from the front line, an unusual place for a divisional commander in modern warfare.
	B.	Disgust for the incompetence and folly of several other generals under whom I served; their ambition and jealousy, their recklessness of the lives of others.
	C.	Affection, poised between scorn and admiration, for an extraordinary thick-headed, kind-hearted militia Colonel, who was fond enough of the bottle, and in private life a big farmer. He was very ignorant of military matters but somehow got through his job surprisingly well.
2.	A.	My hope of settling down to a real country life in the sort of surroundings that the two Hinkseys afford, sick of nearly five years soldiering. It occurred to me that the inn must have been founded by an old soldier who felt much as I did then. Possibly General Elliott himself, when he was dying, had longed to be back in these very parts with his pipe and glass and a view of the orchard. It would have been a kind thought to paint a signboard of him so, like one I saw once (was it in Somerset or Dorset?)—“The Jolly Drinker” and not like the usual grim, military scowl of “General Wellington’s” and “General Wolfe’s.”
2.	B.	I ought to have known who Elliott was because, I used once to pride myself as an authority on military history. The names of Schellenberg, Minden, Malplaquet, The Boyne (though only the two middle battles appear on the colours as battle honours) are imperishable glories for the Royal Welch Fusilier. And the finest Colonel this regiment ever had, Ellis, was killed at Waterloo; he had apparently on his own initiative moved his battalion from the reserves into a gap in the first line.
3.	A.	My own faith in the excellent qualities of our national beverage.
3.	B.	A warning inscription on a tomb at Winchester over a private soldier who died of drink. But his comrades had added a couplet—“An honest soldier ne’er shall be forgot, Whether he died by musket or by pot.”

There are all sorts of other sentiments mixed up, which still elude me, but this seems enough for an answer....

Yours sincerely,

R. G.—(late Captain R. W. F.)

Poe’s account of the series of cold-blooded deliberations that evolved “The Raven” is sometimes explained as an attempt in the spirit of “Ask me no questions, and I’ll tell you no lies,” to hoodwink a too curious Public. A juster suggestion would be that Poe was quite honest in his record, but that the painful nature of the emotions which combined to produce the poem prompted him afterwards to unintentional dishonesty in telling the story. In my account of “The General Elliott” there may be similar examples of false rationalization long after the event, but that is for others to discover: and even so, I am not disqualified from suggesting that the bird of ill omen, perching at night on the head of Wisdom among the books of a library, is symbolism too particularly applicable to Poe’s own disconsolate morbid condition to satisfy us as having been deducted by impersonal logic.

It is likely enough that Poe worked very hard at later drafts of the poem and afterwards remembered his deliberate conscious universalizing of an essentially personal symbolism: but that is a very different matter from pretending that he approached “The Raven” from the first with the same cold reasoning care that constructed, for instance, his Gold-Bug cipher.

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