VERSE-WRITING: KATE GREENAWAY’S FEELING FOR POETRY—PROBLEM, TRAGEDY, AND RESIGNATION—CHARM OF HER VERSES FOR CHILDREN—ON DEATH.

From the early days when Kate Greenaway submitted her crude verses to Mr. W. Marcus Ward and found little encouragement, down to the very end of her life, she spent no inconsiderable portion of her time in fluttering around the base of Parnassus. Competent critics, as we have seen, expressed the opinion that there was poetic fancy and feeling in many of these early attempts. Four thick volumes of neatly written manuscript running to hundreds of pages testify to the industry with which Miss Greenaway followed what she says to her infinite regret proved to be a vain hope. It is not given to every genius to shine in two spheres. These curious volumes as they stand make tantalising reading. A hundred telling themes are gaily launched on a sea of words and all goes well, until we are disturbed by mixed metaphor, faulty rhyme, and defective rhythm, and only here and there do we find a poem which is sustained and carried on successfully to the end.

The fact is, Kate Greenaway—so she told her sister to whom she would read her verses—regarded these efforts only as rough drafts from which she intended some day to select the best and put them into form. She herself considered them defective alike in rhyme, rhythm, and metre, and admitted that they needed rewriting, and she made fair copies into her MS. volumes only in order to preserve her ideas until she could find time to express herself adequately according to the rules of versification. Indeed she did not seem to regard any of them as finished. This should be borne in mind by the reader who would deny these efforts serious consideration, or who would admit them only on the ground that no ‘Life’ of Kate Greenaway would be complete or truly reflective of the artist’s work without some reference to an occupation which filled her mind during many years of her career. How far Miss Greenaway might ultimately have gone it is difficult to say; but we cannot doubt that she possessed some of the qualities of a poet. Hers was a mind full of subtle and beautiful thoughts of a sweet and simple kind, struggling to give them lucid expression.

Let us take for example the following lines in which the anticlimax is really cleverly managed:—

It is so glorious just to say
I loved him all at once—one day—

A winter’s day. Then came the spring
And only deepenÈd the thing.

I think it deepen’d—I’m not sure
If there was room to love you more.

Then summer followed—and my love
Took colour from the skies above.

Then weeks—and months—and years there came,
And I, well, loved on—just the same.

Then, dear, stretch out your hands—and let me lie
Within them as I slowly die,

Then stoop your head to mine and give—
Ah, not a kiss—or I should live.

It must not be forgotten that, like most bright and happy and keenly sensitive natures, Miss Greenaway had many moments of melancholy, almost of morbidness, which she attributed to her being ‘a quarter Welsh.’ On this element of national sadness she laid the responsibility of her passion for writing love-verses, of a character so yearning and despairing, that she almost found herself, with rÔles inverted, playing the Beatrice to some unknown Dante. It pleased and soothed her to work out a poetic problem—to imagine herself appealing to some foolish heartless swain blind to her love and deaf to her appeal—and to feel her way as she developed the character and mind of the lovelorn lady. The case was not her own, and for that reason, no doubt, the experiment was the more alluring. She returned to it again and again, constantly from a different point; and poem after poem is expressive of a passionate desire for a love which never came. Page after page is devoted to apostrophising the imaginary one who is somewhere in the world, sometimes perhaps even seeking her—seeking but not finding.

First, her heroine takes upon herself the blame for losing him—‘You smiled and I turned me away’; and then declares that the fault is his for hanging back, for—‘man is a fool—such a fool’—

Ah, cold, faint-hearted, go—I tell you go!
Dear God, to think I could have loved you so!...
His eyes were blind that he could not see
As he turned away to the world from me ...

And his soul

Sought out—a lower soul.

... It may be

One day God
Will tell you that you missed
The Higher Part.
You grasped the grass
Who might have held the flower.
You took a stone
Who might have won a heart.

... He looks back

Over the years
Of the rift and the wrack—

And the lover’s soul cries to her soul:—

Oh, can you forgive me?

I know to my cost

The Life that I’ve missed,

The Life that I’ve lost.

Soul,

Can you pardon this soul?

God bless you, dear, always and ever,

God bless you and bless you I say.

And I know you will pray for the coward,

The fool who once threw you away.

Soul, when the stars shine

Think sometimes of this soul.

Later on, he is not content with forgiveness, but is praying to be taken back. But it is too late, for

You rejected—threw the gift away,

And now bring tears and sorrowful complaint.

I call you coward, playing at babies’ play.

The woman made no sound, or any plaint,

But took her lot and kept her bitter tears

In silence all alone and unbefriended—

Now take her scorn for all the coming years.

That is her answer, till her life is ended.

Then in the verses entitled ‘The You that was not You’ she makes the discovery that—

The You I loved was my creation—mine,

Without a counterpart within yourself.

I gave you thoughts and soul and heart

Taken from Love’s ideal....

And so the first dream ends and she brings her heroine to a saner mood, with the discovery that all these bitter experiences and disappointments have been sent by God to teach her that she has been pre-ordained to an anchorite’s life of Art, for Art’s sake. Then half regretful, half resigned, she carries on her character a stage:

A lonely soul, I am ever alone.
If love ever comes it is quickly gone—

Nothing abides and nothing stays.

I think I have found it, but only to know
How very soon it is all to go.
The sunshine is followed by falling snow.

There are sometimes moments when I see
A sort of divinity in it for me,

To keep me separate and alone;

To hold away and keep my heart
All for my work, set aside and apart,
As if I were vowed away to Art.

And then there comes a happier moment when something breaks into her life to compensate and console her for her renunciations:—

For the world had found a new and lovely voice

To teach and train me in her secret ways,

And I saw beauty in all things that are

And knew that I was blest for all my days.

Above the world now, above its good and ill,

I ventured on a new and lovely life—

Sesame! had been said and I passed in,

My soul and body no more waged a strife.

Shall I not think you then, oh, best of all?

Shall I not call you Friend, and say—‘tis He

Who shook away the chaff and saved the grain

And gave the whole—God’s Heaven—unto me?

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The verses here quoted are fair examples of her powers and of her limitations, so far as it is fair to speak of limitations when the verses are avowedly but studies for the finished work, the uncut and unpolished stones. The expression of the ideas is consequently crude, but the ideas are clearly there and have at least become articulate. They are not mock heroics, but the half-spoken utterances of real passion, of the baulked, helpless, disillusioned woman of her creation, who is emerging into a philosophic and sufficiently satisfactory state of mind. And they are representative of by far the larger portion of her literary output.

What Kate Greenaway might have accomplished had she devoted as much time to verses for children as in accumulating poetic material of an introspective nature, may be gathered from the pretty and dainty rhymes with which every one who is familiar with her books is well acquainted. It may be seen, too, from the following lines from ‘The Getting Up of the King’s Little Daughter’—in which she has many pretty ideas around which she wanders, grasping them fully from time to time. Here is a dainty couplet describing the little princess’s bath:—

Then she rises and fresh water
Swallows up the King’s small daughter;

and the conclusion—

For her breakfast there is spread
Freshest milk and whitest bread,

Yellow butter, golden honey,
The best there is for love or money.

So, too, in ‘Girls in a Garden,’ a prettily clothed thought here and there stands out deliciously:—

The Roses red white fingers take
And Lilies for their own sweet sake—

is surely a little picture of which no one need to be ashamed. So too—

By Hollyhocks they measure who
Is grown the taller of the two;

and—

The sky is laughing in white and blue—

reveal to us the true Kate Greenaway of Under the Window and Language of Flowers, illustrating the sisterhood of her pencil and her pen. And again there is a touch of infantile delight in the artless little verse—

Oh, what a silken stocking,

And what a satin shoe!

I wish I was a little toe

To live in there, I do.

Is it too much to say that had Kate Greenaway given as much time and energy to such verses as these as she did to her more ambitious efforts, she might be acclaimed the Babies’ laureate as unchallenged on her pinnacle as she is supreme as the Children’s Artist?

From the melancholy of her imaginary heroine, and from the brightness of her joyous self when she appeals to her vast child-constituency, we may turn to the occasional depression which is mirrored in some of her late verses when she considers her own life and achievement. It is not to be supposed for a moment that Kate Greenaway was morbid naturally, but she was easily dejected, particularly when, as we have seen, she fell into despair on realising that the world had forgotten her and passed her by while her imitators were reaping the reward which her own genius and originality had sown. Had she fallen out of fashion merely she would not have complained; it was the denseness of the public who willingly accepted the counterfeit for the genuine that hurt her. More than once she casts these feelings into rhyme:—

Deserted, cast away, my work all done,

Who was a star that shone a little while,

But fallen now and all its brightness gone—

A victim of this world’s brief fickle smile.

Poor fool and vain, grieve not for what is lost,
Nor rend thy heart by counting up the cost.

In spite of the mixed metaphor we must recognise a sincere thought sincerely expressed—no mere idle complaint, but a disappointment honestly and courageously borne. And she proceeds—

We walk, we talk, we sing our song,

Our little song upon this earth;

How soon we tread the road along,

And look for death almost from birth.

In point of fact, hopefulness was the note of her character; and in spite of all disappointments, she was an optimist to the end. This note is struck again in the following lines:—

Take all my things from me—all my gold,
My houses, and my lands, and all I hold—

Even my beauty’s grace;

Smite down my health, take all my joy,
Fret all my life with great annoy,

If thou wilt still look on my Face,

If thou wilt still say—This is she
Who shall be mine, immortally,

In Heaven, on Earth,

In night, in day, in months, in years,
In joy, in sorrow—smiles and tears—

In life—in Death!

Death was a favourite motif, but Death regarded as Watts regarded it—not as a ‘skull and cross-bones idea like that of Holbein,’ but as the gentle messenger, remorseless but not unkind—as the nurse who beckons to the children and puts them to bed. One set of verses, obviously marked out for revision, is entitled—

THE ANGEL FRIEND

God called you—and you left us.

Heaven wanted you for its own.

I guessed you were only waiting

Till an Angel fetched you home.

I knew you talked with Angels

In the green and leafy wood.

Some thought you strangely quiet,

But I—I understood.

For I saw your eyes looked into

The things we could never see,

And the sound of your voice had the wonder

Of the distant sound of the sea.

And all the dumb creatures knew it,

And the flowers faded not in your hand.

You walked this earth as a Spirit

Who sojourned in alien land.

Another, equally simple, is illustrated with the sketch for a water-colour drawing ‘Dead,’ here reproduced. For each of these poems, about fifteen in number, Kate Greenaway had made a drawing more or less complete, with the intention of issuing them in a volume. The verses for which ‘Dead’ was designed run as follows:—

LITTLE DEAD GIRL

Hands that no more colour hold
Than the jasmine stars they fold

In their clasping, still and tender—

Can we doubt, who knew her living,
She was worthy of the giving,

This gift of Death that God did send her?

Alas, that we are left to sorrow
Deeply for you on the morrow.

We stand and envy you the peace

As you lie so, still and blessed,
With your grievings all redressed

And your soul obtained release.

A final example of her happier mood and we have done:—

THE HAPPY LADY

My Lady, as she goes her ways
By street or garden, gives God praise

For all His lovely sounds and sights,
The sunny days, the quiet nights—

The glories of a moonlit sky
With stars all shining silently—

The rose and red of setting sun,
And children as they laugh and run,

The flowering fields, the flowering trees,
The strong winds or soft-blowing breeze.

No evil thing comes ever nigh
To hurt her sweet tranquillity.

In conclusion, we would draw the reader’s attention once more to the verses ‘When I am Dead,’[78] which were written on the approach of death, perhaps when, in spite of the confidence based on friendly assurances, her instinct whispered to her that the end was not far off. In these circumstances the lines assume a more pathetic and a tenderer significance, and breathe the pilgrim spirit of Hope and Faith at the very threshold of the Valley of Death.

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