The Weekly Machen
The following article is the eleventh in a series by Arthur Machen for The Daily Express.
Democracy of Poets
Soldier Singers Who Have Fallen in the War
by
Arthur Machen
October 30, 1918
In Chaucer’s book of the Canterbury Pilgrims, the Wife of Bath and the Prioress, this Miller and the Knight and Oxford man all sit down together at table and ride together as they go to Canterbury on perfectly easy and friendly and cordial terms. The Prioress—we may conceive her as a sort of pious Miss Pinkerton of her day—did not ask when she saw the Wife of Bath: “Who is that dreadful woman?” Nor did the Oxford man, seeing the Knight, groan gently to himself and murmur: “Oh, dear! These colonels!”
That democracy was possible in mediæval England; it is possible in the England of to-day. I look haphazard through the pages of Mr. St. John Adcock’s “For Remembrance” (Hodder and Stoughton, 7s. 6d. net) and see such a democracy realised.
The book is an account of the soldier-poets who have fallen in the war. On one page are the verses of W. N. Hodgson, the son of the Bishop of St. Edmondsbury. On another the author quotes from the work of Francis Ledwidge, an Irish labourer. On a third he makes a memorial of Leslie Coulson, a London journalist, who wrote:—
When I come home and leave behind
Dark things I would not call to mind,
I’ll taste good ale and home-made bread
And on white sheets and pillows spread;
And there is one who’ll softly creep
To kiss me ere I fall asleep,
And tuck me ‘neath the counterpane
As if I were a boy again—
When I come home.
He came home; but his home was amid the stars, not by the English lanes and meadows.
But here in this book is the true democracy—if we must call it by that name.
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Many thanks for this!
A lot of food for thought, here – whether Chesterton’s discussion of “tradition” as “the democracy of the dead” in chapter 4 of Orthodoxy (1908) or Eliot’s essay to come the following year, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, to mention two things that spring to mind.
Miss Pinkerton is surely Thackeray’s in Vanity Fair (1848, in book form), where she appears in the first paragraph as “good-natured Miss Jemima Pinkerton” to be further described in paragraph 3 as “that majestic lady; the Semiramis of Hammersmith, the friend of Doctor Johnson, the correspondent of Mrs. Chapone herself”.
The Wikipedia article, “Arthur St John Adcock”, links a scan of a copy of his For Remembrance, and that article is well worth a look itself – including for brief note of his acquaintance with A.E. Waite and William Hope Hodgson, and for the extent and variety of his published works.
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