REGINALD BATEMAN

TEACHER AND SOLDIER

A MEMORIAL VOLUME OF SELECTIONS FROM HIS LECTURES AND OTHER WRITINGS

PRINTED FOR THE UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN, SASKATOON, CANADA AND PUBLISHED FOR THE UNIVERSITY BY HENRY SOTHERAN AND CO. LONDON 1922

PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN. CHISWICK PRESS : CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND GRIGGS (PRINTERS), LTD. TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.

PREFATORY NOTE

The purpose of this volume is to commemorate the life and death of Reginald John Godfrey Bateman, first Professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan. It was felt by the Governors and Faculty of the University that his friends and old students would value a representative selection from the lectures delivered by him within the University and to the outside public. Included in the selection are a few poems which were found among his papers. The lectures and essays which are published here, being written for popular audiences or literary gatherings inside the University, were never intended by their author for publication as the original and considered critical work of a Professor of English; doubtless, if such had been his purpose, much that is printed here, originally hurriedly prepared during the busy rush of a college session, would have been altered and recast.

While originality was one of Professor Bateman's most marked qualities, the members of the committee entrusted with the preparation of this volume for the press have not, in every case, regarded originality of thought as a necessary qualification for inclusion. In making their selection they have rather been guided by the desire to give to his friends and old students what, whether original in thought or not, appeared to be in treatment and presentation most characteristic of the man and teacher.

War—and herein lies its greatest tragedy—always takes heavy toll of the promise and latent greatness of a nation, its youth and vigorous young manhood. Like many others who risked all and gave all in the Great War, Reginald Bateman was cut off in his prime.

He was born in Ireland some thirty-eight years ago. His schooldays were spent under Dr. Biggs, often called the Irish Arnold, at Portora Royal School, perhaps the greatest of Irish public schools, with a tradition of scholarship which is centuries old. On leaving school he entered Trinity College, Dublin, where he graduated with the Highest Honours in Modern Literature. In college his activities and interests were wide, and he was an outstanding example of the student who combines with distinction in scholarship, prominence in athletics and a broad and human outlook on life. In this as in other respects he was a worthy representative of the spirit of his University. After a few years' experience of teaching in Ireland, he was appointed to the chair of English at the University of Saskatchewan, being one of the original four professors who, with President Murray, launched the University on its educational career in 1909. When a peaceful and unsuspecting world was plunged, in August 1914, into the horrors of the most stupendous war in its history,

Professor Bateman quickly decided that his place was in the fighting line, and he enlisted in the 28th Battalion in September 1914, in company with another professor and many members of our student body. His ability to handle men, quickly became apparent; he soon won his sergeant's stripes, and went to France with that rank. In 1916 he was recalled to Canada to take command of the Saskatchewan Company of the Western Universities' Battalion. He proceeded to England with the rank of major, and in 1917 reverted to the rank of lieutenant in order to get again to France, where he was wounded in action. He was holding the rank of captain in the 46th Battalion when he was killed on the 3rd of September 1918. He had taken part in the fighting toward the end of August when the Canadians made the first breach in the Hindenburg Line. The major of his battalion has written that on the and of September Captain Bateman gallantly led his company into action. Dury was taken that day, and near that place on the night of September 3rd he was killed by a shell at the

Regimental Headquarters, which were being held in a chalk quarry. On the 4th of September the chaplain of the regiment gathered together a party who, "amid the roar of guns and scream of shells paid their last respects to a very gallant comrade and one of the best loved men in the Battalion."

Those who served under him as an officer bear witness that he had won not only the men's implicit confidence by qualities of leadership of the highest order, but also their very great affection by his personal qualities. The affection and respect which were the University's tribute to his character were also the tribute of his comrades in circumstances where a man's soul is stripped of all pretences in the constant presence of death, and where the dread arbitrament of war must reveal the good or evil that may lie hidden beneath the conventionalities of ordinary life. Strong in body and fearless in spirit, Reginald Bateman possessed that courage which is neither the product of discipline and rigorous training, nor the mere animal quality which (to quote an early writer on the war) "is our inheritance from a past in which men fought each one for himself that they might survive," but that finer quality of courage which will face the most appalling horrors because it has a vision of the future and a faith in the destiny of mankind.

If Professor Bateman had survived, his career as a soldier would have been but a glorious interlude in his life's work. During the years spent by him at the University, his character and attainments had made him an outstanding figure, and gave promise of a future even richer in achievement. Intellectually, he was a signal example of the union of great ability and imagination with the modesty of a fine spirit and a sane and penetrating outlook on life. He was possessed of a breadth of outlook that gave him clear insight in literary matters. His judgments were always just, because based on essentials, while his humanity enabled him to couple with the minutiae of scholarship a catholicity of interpretation and a sanity of criticism which is not always found in those who are most deeply versed in their subject. The respect of his colleagues and of his students is definite proof of his great ability as a teacher. It was manifest to all that he gave himself wholeheartedly to his work with that enjoyment and appreciation which are essential characteristics of a true teacher.

The loss that the University in general has sustained by Professor Bateman's death finds its counterpart in the personal sorrow of his friends. Those who were privileged to know him well are left immeasurably poorer by his death but enriched by a memory that will always remain with them. For "his story lives on woven into the stuff of other men's lives." His wide human interests brought him into sympathetic touch with many phases of life and gave him strength and tolerance. His true manliness, sincerity of character, and sociable nature endeared him to all. He was a delightful comrade, and many of his colleagues must remember some flash of true humour which lit up the prosaic tenor of an ordinary conversation or of some inordinately dull Faculty Meeting. The students of the University too shared in his friendship. His never-flagging interest in their activities, whether literary, musical, or athletic, will always be remembered.

The University of Saskatchewan lost in the Great War many of its finest spirits, and its losses reached their culmination in the death of Reginald Bateman.

Upon such sacrifices The gods themselves throw incense.

CONTENTS

PART I

REGINALD BATEMAN—STUDENT AND TEACHER

Francis Thompson Milton To the Memory of Dr. Biggs The Teaching of English My Last Duchess Christmas Shopping Realism in Wordsworth and Browning Synge—a Fragment Dickens and Thackeray Pessimism Brains and Intellect The Eternal Silence

PART II

REGINALD BATEMAN—SOLDIER

The War In the Trenches On the Death of a Comrade

Reginald Bateman

PART I

REGINALD BATEMAN

STUDENT AND TEACHER

FRANCIS THOMPSON

A paper given before the Faculty Club in 1913

The recent publication, April 1913, of the first collected edition of Francis Thompson's works, followed in August by an authentic biography of the poet, has focussed general attention upon the man and his work. Hitherto, if known to the general reader at all, he has been known mainly by one poem, The Hound of Heaven, and the majority of the reading public has not yet discovered that Thompson is the author of a large body of poetry fully worthy to rank with The Hound of Heaven in poetical quality. Even to the few who are familiar with his poetry, the story of his life, one of the most romantic in the annals of our literature, came as a revelation.

To the inner circle of literary people Thompson as a poet has been known for twenty years. With his first volume of poems, published 1893, Thompson, as one admirer expressed it, "reached the peak of Parnassus at a bound." The critics, usually so conservative in their estimate of a new poet, were not only favourable, but in most cases so far forgot themselves as to become enthusiastic. For parallels to the austere passion and purity of Thompson's love-poetry, to the richness and strangeness of his imagery, the splendour and luxuriance of his vocabulary, and the loftiness of his inspiration, they turned without apology to the greatest names of our literature.

From this unusually favourable first opinion there was naturally a reaction. Thompson's second volume of 1895, Sister Songs, and still more his third volume of 1897, New Poems, with its increased symbolism and mysticism, met with vicious abuse as well as generous praise. By 1907, however, the date of Thompson's death, his reputation was well established, and from that time to the present, the tide of criticism seems to have set strongly in his favour. To-day few critics would deny him to be the most remarkable of recent poets.

A fresh wave of interest was aroused last year when the complete and final edition of his works was published. This reawakened interest is likely to have the effect of passing his merit again under review, and we shall have some opportunity of judging whether he is to fade from the sight of men like a brilliant but unlasting meteor, whether he is to be like Keats and Shelley, the chosen poet of a small and select circle of readers, or whether, like Tennyson and Browning, he is to win the suffrages of the man on the street.

Personally, while I believe that Thompson will ultimately take a place among the greatest of our nineteenth century poets, I think it extremely unlikely that he will ever be popular. The atmosphere he lives in is too rare for the ordinary man to breathe with comfort. His emotions are too subtle, his passion too austere, his harmonies too refined to catch the ear of the crowd. A few of his poems, like The Hound of Heaven, which is already widely known, may become popular, but I can recall no other which seems to me likely to make an universal appeal.

Before passing to a sketch of Thompson's romantic career, let me dwell for a short while on the more striking qualities of his genius. My first impressions of Thompson have to do more with style than with subject matter. To the literary critic making the acquaintance of a new poet it matters less, perhaps, what the poet says than how he says it. Harmony, rhythm, language, technique—these things are of vital importance. It is true that we may often desire of our poets "more matter and less art," but on the other hand matter without art has never won the name of great poetry. There is a largeness and finality of utterance, an appearance of inevitability about the best work of the great masters, that is unmistakable. It is as if the Muse of Poetry herself had spoken and not a mere mortal man.

Last came and last did go The Pilot of the Galilean lake.

Such words as these grow not upon mortal soil.

What one looks for, then, first of all in a new poet is the grand style, the authentic note, the phrases stamped with the tool of the eternal graver. In the search for it, one's only guide is instinct, an instinct formed by constant study of what is admittedly the best. And the search for this distinction of style is doomed so often to be disappointed that even a line or a phrase which seems to possess it is gladly welcomed.

But in Thompson's case the inspiration is not confined to occasional flashes. No matter where I opened his book, almost every line seemed to me to bear the hall-mark of great poetry. Take even the six lines of the dedication of New Poems to Coventry Patmore; you find, I think, that they ring true, that they have the great utterance.

Lo, my book thinks to look Time's leaguer down, Under the banner of your spread renown! Or if these levies of impuissant rhyme Fall to the overthrow of assaulting Time, Yet this one page shall find oblivious shame, Armed with your crested and prevailing Name.

In reading Thompson's poems one has neither, as in the case of most moderns, to adjust oneself to a completely new and perhaps freakish style, nor to reconcile oneself to a more or less obvious imitation of our greatest recent poets. Thompson is not at all modern; to one familiar with seventeenth century English literature he comes like an old friend; and yet he is no imitator; he is absolutely individual. If a student of literature were given the poems without being told the author, he would probably get the impression that some forgotten poet of the seventeenth century had been re-discovered. For Thompson's poems do not smack of the nineteenth century; they have few echoes of Tennyson or Browning or Swinburne or any nineteenth century poet except, perhaps, Shelley; they have rather a strong flavour of our elder poetry, and while rich, perhaps over-rich, in imagery, give one an impression of close-knit, sinewy strength very different from the milk-and-watery mildness or the sensuous lusciousness of much modern verse. This effect is enhanced

by their vocabulary, which contains many words strange to the modern ear, and which takes one back to Sir Thomas Browne, Milton, Cowley, and Crashaw.

The Ode to the Setting Sun and the Anthem of Earth illustrate to some extent another very prominent characteristic of Thompson, that he is a daring and successful experimenter in metre and language. He does not follow slavishly in the beaten track of other poets; he frames metrical moulds for himself to suit the quality of his own glowing thought. The poems are full of new and difficult metres, handled with perfect mastery; they are full of experiments with language which most modern poets would not dare to make, but which in Thompson nearly always seem to justify themselves.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Thompson's poetry is the quality of his imagery. A great poet must be rich in imagery, for it is the imagery of poetry that discloses to us its hidden soul. Thompson's imagery at once astonishes by its ingenuity and captivates by its beauty. In the former quality he rivals Cowley and Crashaw, in the latter he is far beyond them. One critic remarked that Thompson must surely be Crashaw born again, but born greater. If Thompson's imagery has a fault, it is that there is too much of it; he himself recognized this fault and endeavoured to correct it. Alice Meynell remarked that many poets could be furnished with imagery, not from the abundance of Thompson's, but from its super-abundance.

Here are a few samples, chosen almost at random, of the quality of Thompson's imagery:

And now my heart is as a broken fount, Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever From the dank thoughts that shiver Upon the sighful branches of my mind.

Under my ruined passions fallen and sere The wild dreams stir, like little radiant girls, Whom in the moulted plumage of the year, Their comrades sweet have buried to the curls.

In a more commonplace style of imagery, but still splendidly handled, is the following from Sister Songs:

Or may this treasure-galleon of my verse, Fraught with its golden passion, oared with cadent rhyme, Set with a towering press of fantasies, Drop safely down the time, Leaving mine isled self behind it far, Soon to be sunken in the abysm of seas, (As down the years the splendour voyages From some long-ruined and night-submerged star).

The foregoing extracts impress one also with another noteworthy and very important quality of Thompson's verse—its remarkable metrical effects. Watts-Dunton rightly says that in addition to intellectual and emotional life, great poetry must have rhythmic life. Unless the rhythm of any metrical passage is so vivid, so natural, and so free that it seems as though it could live, if need were, by its rhythm alone, that passage, according to Watts-Dunton, has no right to exist as poetry. One sign by which one may know that poetry possesses rhythmic life is that passages of it will sing themselves in one's head for days after reading them. Arnold Bennett tells us that after reading Sister Songs he went about for days repeating such passages as:

The innocent moon, that nothing does but shine, Moves all the labouring surges of the world.

After reading Thompson first, I went about for days repeating over and over again passages from his poems, not for their meaning, for the meaning in many cases was not clear, but just for the sound and beat of them, such passages as:

On Ararat there grew a vine...

or

I am Daniel's mystic mountain...

Everyone knows Kipling's picture of sunrise in Mandalay:

An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay.

This is commonplace beside Thompson's version of the same thought in The Mistress of Vision:

East, ah, east of Himalay Dwell the nations underground; Hiding from the shock of Day, For the sun's uprising sound: Dare not issue from the ground At the tumults of the Day, So fearfully the sun doth sound, Clanging up beyond Cathay, For the great earth-quaking sunrise rolling up beyond Cathay.

Lastly, Thompson's poetry impresses one with a sense of sublimity, in the strict, literal meaning of the word, which is upliftedness. Thompson seems always uplifted to a high level of inspiration; his wing seems never to flag nor his voice to tire. The reason for this consistent loftiness of Thompson's poetry is probably that to Thompson the writing of poetry was an act of worship, and that the main spring of his inspiration is religious enthusiasm. He never wrote except when he felt that he must write. He was only, he says, the conduit-pipe through which flowed the divine utterance. Speaking of poets he says:

We speak a lesson taught we know not how, And what it is that from us flows The hearer better than the utterer knows.

In every line of Thompson's verse one finds evidence of "the vision and the faculty divine," and when after his brief period of song that vision faded and that faculty failed, he wrote no more. Thompson wrote because he must write. Like Keats he was haunted perpetually by an image of the ideal Beauty, to which he was ever striving to attain. Poetry sometimes seems to him his curse, and not his blessing.

Deaf is he to the world's tongue; He scorneth for his song The loud Shouts of the crowd.

He measureth world's pleasure World's ease, as Saints might measure; For hire Just love entire.

He asks, not grudging pain; And knows his asking vain, And cries Love, love, and dies,

In guerdon of long duty Unowned by Love or Beauty; And goes— Tell, tell who knows.