Arthur Shearly Cripps: An AssessmentD. E, BorreH*In the nave of his ruined mission church eightmiles from Enkeldoorn lies the body of ArthurShearly Cripps, priest, poet, novelist, pamphleteer,politician of sorts, visionary, or crank as somehave called him. Today, seventeen years after hisdeath, a hundred years after his birth, he is morea figure of controversy than ever. Ordinary Rho-desians are struggling to find their way politicallyand morally in a time of confusion, double-talk,sliding values. On moral, social and political issuesCripps speaks out in his poems and in his life withan uncompromising honesty that makes lessermortals uncomfortable. Although this awkward,stubborn intellectual who was clumsy and pain-fully shy, never resolved his own personalstruggles with inadequacy, homesickness and lone-liness, he had resolved his ethical and religiousproblems by the time he left England for Masho-naland in 1901. For him, those issues were simple:in the steps of St. Francis, prompted by the socialconscience of the Christian Socialists and thevision of "Lux Mundi", one served the humblestand the poorest one could find:, . . see in outward signThe thing worth living for in this harsh world ŠTo feel our fellows' sorrows as our own;Achieve a Passion and attain a Cross,As finding there that rose-crown of our life ŠCrown full as sweet in flow'r as sharp in thorns ŠLove, and of loves, the greatest love of allThat lays a life down gladly for its friends.Those lines occur first in his volume Titania andOther Poems (1900), in a poem significantlywritten on "The Death of St. Francis". Crippsnever changed in his views. When he died at 83,in Enkeldoorn hospital, he had given all his privateincome away and his body was scarred by theenormous privations he inflicted on himself trek-king vast distances to conduct his ministry. Heleft behind a considerable body of verse, somenovels and pamphlets, three churches built by hisown hands, a Dame School, a lazaretto, and alarge number of devoted Africans settled on theirown farms on land he had given them. They gavehim the funeral of a chief, and his grave is stilltended today by the Africans at MarondaMashanu, his own mission. If perhaps they neverquite understood him, they have never forgottenthe priest they called "One-who-helps-you-to-carry-the-Joad".Just as Cripps had decided the course of hislife and the principles he believed in by 1901 andwas still following them at the end of his life withuncompromising devotion, so too his poetry hadfound its form and diction by the time he leftOxford in 1891. He was in the habit of reprintingearlier work alongside new work in his latestvolume. He wrote prolifically on occasional sub-jects and sent verses to everyone at Christmas time,Easter or on birthdays. However, you are just aslikely to find that he sent a poem written in 1903to someone in 1941. His friend, Frank Lloyd alsofrequently uses older ones for Christmas cards;and when you have traced them back to source,you can see absolutely no difference in stylebetween early poems and late. There is some*Zambezia is happy to include this tribute by the wellknown Rhodesian poet D. E. Borrell (Betty Finn), on theoccasion of the centenary of the birth of Arthur ShearlyCripps.falling off in his later years after his blindness, butthat is all.The explanation is that all his life Cripps wascontent to use traditional forms and traditionalEnglish. It was not that Cripps, in his isolationon a mission, had never heard of the work of thepoets in the 1930s. The truth is that Cripps turnedhis back on the developments in poetry in thesame way he refused to recognise the impact ofthe twentieth century on Africa. He began hiscreative life in the doldrums of English poetry,after the death of Tennyson and before theGeorgians. At Oxford people were reading theYellow Book and the minor melancholies ofErnest Dowson and Austin Dobson. For thisgeneration the stilted " 'Tis" and " 'Twere" ofpoetic diction were standard practice and unques-tionable. Cripps used them all his life. They aresometimes incompatible with the subject of Afri-can life but the surprising thing is that they arenot more so. It is as if Cripps' own personalityimposes a oneness on the harsh dissident elements.Tn "To the Veld" for example, after two goodopening lines we get the ludicrous comparison:Stage-carpet, foil for all that's fair!Also alien words like "faery-fine", ''o'er" and"nay" are used, yet the poem ascends in a kindof agony to the last magnificent declaration ofCripps' own cry of courage, and despair, and loveof the harsh veld:Nay most for all they weariness ŠThe homeless void, the endless track,Noon-thirst, the wintry night's distress ŠFor all tense stretchings on the rack ŠThat gave me my lost manhood back.It is this transmutation of unlikely elements, Ithink, which made John Buchan assert in his pre-fatory note to Cripps' last volume Africa: Versesthat "he cunningly adapted it [poetic tradition] tothe needs of a new land". However, Cripps neverattempts to experiment with the rhythms of theAfrican dance, for example, nor does he reallyconvey the violences and extremes of Africa insound or technique, although he deals with droughtand flood, famine and feast. The movements ofthe labourers in the field, the shrilling of thewomen, the shapes and colours of the bush arerather the background of the central action: thedeep spiritual movements of the poet himself.Thus the harshness of the track becomes a symbolof pilgrimage. In "The Way in Africa" it is usedfor the conclusions it forces upon the poet:Great gold vleis, and granite hillsSo far and blue, she'd have me see,But underfoot her deep sand sigh'd,'Better is yet to be'.The hardships of the way are repeatedly identifiedwith those Christ suffered and become the mysticalway to Cripps' spiritual destiny:Now go, a veldsore in each lifted hand,Go with two blistered feet your altar's way,With pity's wound at heart, go, praise and pray!Go, wounds to Wounds! Why you are glad todayHe, whose Five Wounds you wear, will understand.The failure of the mealie crop becomes a symbolof the stoicism Cripps fought to attain; the toilingnatives and the village dance represent to Crippsthe unspoilt Arcadia he tried vainly to defendfrom the encroachments of civilisation.Cripps is not an originator. We do not go to hispoetry for something new in literature, a blendingof two cultures in some miraculous manner. Evenhis political and religious views were derivedfrom the great leaders of the Christian Socialistmovement he knew at Oxford: men like CharlesGore, Francis Paget and Father Benson. Butsurely no one lived out the principles of ChristianSocialism so faithfully and so literally as Cripps?It is true, too, that however closely Cripps livedto the Africans, he remains in his poetry an Eng-lish clergyman whose poetic leanings are toVaughan and Traherne, Keats and Tennyson, tothe Greek poets he imitated as a boy at Charter-house and on whose Arcadia he modelled hisAfrica. The exquisite lines from "Epiphany":Nay, not goldAt his crib I hold:Base metal is my heart, and bare my hand . . .are pure Herbert, just as his early "Pilgrimage ofGrace" is pure Keats. They are not imitations somuch as re-creations of the forms and sound heloved. So too he loved the English of the Bible.He wrote to Buchan and knew several contem-porary poets; Edmund Blunden and LaurenceBinyon were close friends. While at Oxford hehad published an anthology of poetry with Bin-yon, Stephen Phillips and the Indian poetManmohan Ghose. Noel Brettell, the Rhodesianpoet, used to ride over on horseback to see himin his later years and he recalls that they "readeverything from Chaucer to Gilbert Murray'stranslations". It was mostly reading, very littletalk. This was because Cripps did not seem inter-ested in discussing theories of poetry. He hadalready made up his mind, as on so many things!However, in his preface to John Snelling's antho-logy of Rhodesian verse Cripps does give us oneglimpse of his literary views. He first admits thathe owes most to the Bible and to Theocritus, butby this he seems simply to mean that they havehelped him spiritually "to see the sacredness andbeauty around me in African life." In regard topoetry itself, he continued:Also (I write as it were with a deep sigh of relief), Iam glad to say that Verse as represented in thisAnthology means verse in the English Traditional' "* * sense (Victorian? or Edwardian? or Pre-War Georg-ian? or Neo-Caroline?) not Verse in any Post-WarAnti-Traditional (Eliotesque? or Surrealistic) sense.The worst that might truthfully be said, I wouldhazard a guess, of the characteristic poetic diction ofthis Anthology would not be so very bad after all,no worse than what was said of the iingo' of certainnineteenth century verse writers Š 'It was imitativeand sapless, but not preposterous.'1This is a fascinating glimpse of Cripps. He isŁ all there: curious punctuation, prejudices, forth-rightness and all. It shows clearly that Cripps didnot understand the new school of poetry Š orwas not interested in it. Noel Brettell commentsthat in any case, W. H. Auden's brittle drawing-room wit seemed ludicrously inept in Cripps'little rondavel under immense euphorbias. Tenny-son came off much better, as if his "bleachedpageantry" matched the huge canvas of Africa,the gentlemanly sentiments, the morality of Cripps,a natural gentleman, despite his outspoken views.In his poetry as in his life, Cripps struggled forsimplicity, not newness. The traditional forms andvocabulary would do. In a 1941 poem still inmanuscript, he indulges in an analysis of his liter-ary tastes. It is the only occasion he does so inpoetry:'O, what a power has while simplicity'Wrote Keats, and sang so simply and so well ŠKeeping the time, a never-jangled bell ŠPouring his full heart forth as limpidlyAs lark in sky, or nightingale on tree ŠTelling with beauty what Truth bade him tell ŠRinging with rapture of regret a knellEre yet they ended too his youth and glee.Poets of Airly Beacon, Bredon Hill,Poets of Uphill Road or Bridge of Sighs,Poets, whom 'tis a fashion to despise,Your white simplicity endears you still.For charm of sound, for clear-as-crystal senseMy soothed heart's homage take in recompense.A touching and graceful sonnet; however, simpli-city and sweetness did not usually come easily toCripps. As Mr. Brettell remarks: "His verse oftenhas a tongue-tied awkwardness ... It was asthough the vehemence of his motives, his indigna-tion, his bitter self-castigation. his savage charity,twisted and writhed inside the outworn idiom he* had inherited." His satirical verse is particularlyprone to lapses. So often it is mere vituperation.He could not discipline his anger. That is why henever took up the cause of the African in Parlia-ment: "I have too many complexes about theNative." Yet poems like "To My Carriers" and"No Thoroughfare" remain among the best callsto justice in the literature of this part of theworld.No one would claim Cripps was a great poet.He wrote too much, too uncritically for that. Un-like Wordsworth, whom he much resembles, hehas no great poetical revolution to effect. Un-doubtedly, however, there are moments of great-ness. Perhaps this is the lot of the minor poet. Hehas a note of his own, even if the range is limited.The note derives from the spirit of the man ratherthan his style. If, like Milton, Cripps defended theRight of the Common Man in a manner that was,paradoxically enough, downright intolerant, it isthe same passion and agony which transmutessuch poems as "Stigmata Amoris" and "Ascrip-tion" to pure gold. Like Wordsworth too, Crippslacked a sense of humour and the sense of propor-tion that it implies. He perpetrates absurditieslike the image of African angels:Flapping their flight wingsOf russet-brown feathers.Milton however did the same. Angels seem to betheir downfall! Reformers and saints are like that.If they have a strong sense of proportion can theyset themselves their impossible goals? Some callCripps a saint. If he had not lacked our ordinarysense of proportion, the magnitude of his missionwould have overwhelmed him. Mr. Brettell saysthat Cripps could not have then attempted to liveaccording to his strict Franciscan code of self-denial without the protection of the cloisters. Wecan smile at the eccentricity, but the courage ofthe man must win our admiration. Cripps wasperhaps not a very successful missionary; hischurches lie in ruins; the British South AfricaPolice said that his lands were so full of skellumsthat even the dogs were trained to hide! Most ofthe causes he espoused have become things of thepast, but the principles he fought for have takenon a new relevance. Was he a poet worthy of somuch attention? Cripps would have been flatteredbut I fancy he would have reminded us that, forhim, his talents came in the following order:priest, missionary, man, poet.1. SNELLING. J.REFERENCE1938 Rhodesian Verse, 1888-1938. Oxford, Blackwcll.