from being one of those who reject the accomplished and delicate work
of this highly-trained artist. If I may say so, no chapter of Mr.
Stedman's book seems to me to surpass in skill that in which he deals
with the works of Longfellow, and steers with infinite tact through
the difficulties of the subject. In the face of those impatient
youngsters who dare to speak of Longfellow and of Tupper in a breath,
I assert that the former was, within his limitations, as true a poet
as ever breathed. His skill in narrative was second only to that of
Prior and of Lafontaine. His sonnets, the best of them, are among the
most pleasing objective sonnets in the language. Although his early,
and comparatively poor, work was exaggeratedly praised, his head was
not turned, but, like a conscientious artist, he rose to better and
better things, even at the risk of sacrificing his popularity. It
is a pleasure to say this at the present day, when Longfellow's fame
has unduly declined; but it is needless, of course, to dwell on the
reverse of the medal, and disprove what nobody now advances, that he
was a great or original poet. Originality and greatness were just the
qualities he lacked. I have pointed out elsewhere that Longfellow
was singularly under Swedish influences, and that his real place is
in Swedish literature, chronologically between Tegnér and Runeberg.
Doubtless he seemed at first to his own people more original than he
was, through his habit of reproducing an exotic tone very exactly.
Bryant appears to me to be a poet of a less attractive but somewhat
higher class than Longfellow. His versification is mannered, and
his expressions are directly formed on European models, but his
sense of style was so consistent that his careful work came to be
recognisable. His poetry is a hybrid of two English stocks, closely
related; he belongs partly to the Wordsworth of _Tintern Abbey_,
partly to the Coleridge of _Mont Blanc_. The imaginative formula is
Wordsworth's, the verse is the verse of Coleridge, and having in very
early youth produced this dignified and novel flower, Bryant did
not try to blossom into anything different, but went on cultivating
the Coleridge-Wordsworth hybrid down to the days of Rossetti and of
Villanelles. But Wordsworth and Coleridge had not stayed at the _Mont
Blanc_ and _Tintern Abbey_ point. They went on advancing, developing,
altering, and declining to the end of their days. The consequence is
that the specimens of the Bryant variety do not strike us as remarkably
like the general work of Wordsworth or of Coleridge. As I have said,
although he borrowed definitely and almost boldly, in the first
instance, the very persistence of Bryant's style, the fact that he
was influenced once by a very exquisite and noble kind of poetry, and
then never any more, through a long life, by any other verse, combined
with his splendid command of those restricted harmonies the secret of
which he had conquered, made Bryant a very interesting and valuable
poet. But in discussing his comparative position, it appears to me to
be impossible to avoid seeing that his want of positive novelty--the
derived character of his sentiment, his verse, and his description--is
absolutely fatal to his claim to a place in the foremost rank. He
is exquisitely polished, full of noble suavity and music, but his
irreparable fault is to be secondary, to remind us always of his
masters first, and only on reflection of himself. In this he contrasts
to a disadvantage with one who is somewhat akin to him in temperament,
Walter Savage Landor. We may admit that Byrant is more refined, more
uniformly exquisite than Landor, but the latter has a flavour of his
own, something quite original and Landorian, which makes him continue
to live, while Byrant's reputation slowly fades away, like the stately
crystal gables of an iceberg in summer. The "Water-Fowl" pursues its
steady flight through the anthologies, but Bryant is not with the great
masters of poetry.
We ascend, I think, into a sphere where neither Bryant nor Longfellow,
with all their art, have power to wing their way, when we read such
verses as
_Musketaquit, a goblin strong,_
_Of shard and flint makes jewels gay;_
_They lose their grief who hear his song,_
_And where he winds is the day of day._
_So forth and brighter fares my stream;_
_Who drinks it shall not thirst again;_
_No darkness stains its equal gleam,_
_And ages drop in it like rain._
If Emerson had been frequently sustained at the heights he was
capable of reaching, he would unquestionably have been one of the
sovereign poets of the world. At its very best his phrase is so new
and so magical, includes in its easy felicity such a wealth of fresh
suggestion and flashes with such a multitude of side-lights, that we
cannot suppose that it will ever be superseded or will lose its charm.
He seems to me like a very daring but purblind diver, who flings
himself headlong into the ocean, and comes up bearing, as a rule,
nothing but sand and common shells, yet who every now and then rises
grasping some wonderful and unique treasure. In his prose, of course,
Emerson was far more a master of the medium than in poetry. He never
became an easy versifier; there seems to have been always a difficulty
to him, although an irresistible attraction, in the conduct of a piece
of work confined within rhyme and rhythm. He starts with a burst of
inspiration; the wind drops and his sails flap the mast before he is
out of port; a fresh puff of breeze carries him round the corner; for
another page, the lyrical _afflatus_ wholly gone, he labours with the
oar of logic; when suddenly the wind springs up again, and he dances
into a harbour. We are so pleased to find the voyage successfully
accomplished that we do not trouble to inquire whether or no this
particular port was the goal he had before him at starting. I think
there is hardly one of Emerson's octosyllabic poems of which this will
not be found to be more or less an accurate allegorical description.
This is not quite the manner of Milton or Shelley, although it may
possess its incidental advantages.
It cannot be in candour denied that we obtain a very strange impression
by turning from what has been written about Emerson to his own poetry.
All his biographers and critics unite, and it is very sagacious of
them to do so, in giving us little anthologies of his best lines and
stanzas, just as writers on _Hudibras_ extract miscellanies of the
fragmentary wit of Butler. Judged by a chain of these selected jewels,
Emerson gives us the impression of high imagination and great poetical
splendour. But the volume of his verse, left to produce its own effect,
does not fail to weaken this effect. I have before me at this moment
his first collected _Poems_, published, as he said, at "the solstice
of the stars of his intellectual firmament." It holds the brilliant
fragments that we know so well, but it holds them as a mass of dull
quartz may sparkle with gold dust. It has odes about Contocook and
Agischook and the Over-God, long nebulous addresses to no one knows
whom, about no one knows what; for pages upon pages it wanders away
into mere cacophonous eccentricity. It is Emerson's misfortune as a
poet that his technical shortcomings are for ever being more severely
reproved by his own taste and censorship than we should dare to
reprove them. To the author of _The World-Soul_, in shocking verses,
we silently commend his own postulate in exquisite prose, that "Poetry
requires that splendour of expression which carries with it the proof
of great thoughts." Emerson, as a verse-writer, is so fragmentary and
uncertain that we cannot place him among the great poets; and yet his
best lines and stanzas seem as good as theirs. Perhaps we ought to
consider him, in relation to Wordsworth and Shelley, as an asteroid
among the planets.
It is understood that Edgar Allen Poe is still unforgiven in New
England. "Those singularly valueless verses of Poe," was the now
celebrated _dictum_ of a Boston prophet. It is true that, if "that most
beguiling of all little divinities, Miss Walters of the _Transcript_,"
is to be implicitly believed, Edgar Poe was very rude and naughty at
the Boston Lyceum in the spring of 1845. But surely bygones should be
bygones, and Massachusetts might now pardon the _Al Aaraaf_ incident.
It is not difficult to understand that there were many sides on which
Poe was likely to be long distasteful to Boston, Cambridge, and
Concord. The intellectual weight of the man, though unduly minimised
in New England, was inconsiderable by the side of that of Emerson. But
in poetry, as one has to be always insisting, the battle is not to the
strong; and apart from all faults, weaknesses, and shortcomings of Poe,
we feel more and more clearly, or we ought to feel, the perennial charm
of his verses. The posy of his still fresh and fragrant poems is larger
than that of any other deceased American writer, although Emerson may
have one or two single blossoms to show which are more brilliant than
any of his. If the range of the Baltimore poet had been wider, if Poe
had not harped so persistently on his one theme of remorseful passion
for the irrecoverable dead, if he had employed his extraordinary,
his unparalleled gifts of melodious invention, with equal skill, in
illustrating a variety of human themes, he must have been with the
greatest poets. For in Poe, in pieces like _The Haunted Palace_, _The
Conqueror Worm_, _The City in the Sea_, and _For Annie_, we find two
qualities which are as rare as they are invaluable, a new and haunting
music, which constrains the hearer to follow and imitate, and a command
of evolution in lyrical work so absolute that the poet is able to do
what hardly any other lyrist has dared to attempt, namely, as in _To
One in Paradise_, to take a normal stanzaic form, and play with it as a
great pianist plays with an air.
So far as the first of these attributes is concerned, Poe has proved
himself to be the Piper of Hamelin to all later English poets. From
Tennyson to Austin Dobson there is hardly one whose verse-music does
not show traces of Poe's influence. To impress the stamp of one's
personality on a succeeding generation of artists, to be an almost
(although not wholly) flawless technical artist one's self, to charm
within a narrow circle to a degree that shows no sign, after forty
years, of lessening, is this to prove a claim to rank with the Great
Poets? No, perhaps not quite; but at all events it is surely to have
deserved great honour from the country of one's birthright.
_1889._
WHAT IS A GREAT POET?
What is a Great Poet?
The answer to the question, "Has America produced a Poet?" which
was published in the _Forum_, called forth a surprising amount of
attention from the press in England as well as in America. It was quite
impossible, and I did not expect, that such an expression of personal
opinion would pass without being challenged. In America, particularly,
it could not but disturb some traditions and wound some prejudices. But
in the present instance, as always before, it has been my particular
fortune to find that where criticism--by which I mean, not censure, but
analysis--is candid and sincere, it meets in America with sincere and
candid readers. In parenthesis, I may add, that when literary criticism
of this kind is ill received in America, the fault usually lies with
that unhappy system of newspaper reverberation by which "scraps" or
"items," removed from their context and slightly altered at each fresh
removal, go the round of the press, and are presently commented upon
by journalists who have never seen what the critic originally wrote.
In reading some of the principal articles which my essay called forth,
I find one point dwelt upon, in various ways, in almost all of them. I
find a fresh query started as to the standard which we are to take as a
measurement for imaginative writers; and it seems to me that it may be
interesting to carry our original inquiry a step further back, and to
ask, What is a great poet?
If we are to limit the number of the most illustrious and commanding
names, as I attempted to do, it is plain that we must also confine
the historical range of our inquiry. Some of my reviewers objected to
my selection being made among English poets only, and several of them
attempted lists which included the poets of Europe or of the world.
Yet, without exception, those critics displayed their national bias by
the large proportion of Anglo-Saxon worthies whom they could not bring
themselves to exclude from their dozen. Shakespeare must be there,
and Milton, Chaucer, Wordsworth, and Shelley; already a third of the
majestic company is English. One reviewer, who had been lately studying
the Anthology, could not persuade himself to omit several of those
dying dolphins of Byzantine song that drew the shallop of Agathias up
into the Golden Horn; and this when the whole tale of bards was not to
exceed fifteen at most. One reviewer went to Iceland for a name, and
another to Persia--charming excursions both of them, but calculated to
exhaust our resources prematurely. The least reflection will remind
us that the complexity and excessive fulness of modern interests have
invaded literature also, and the history of literature; to select from
all time a dozen greatest names is a task of doubtful propriety, and
certainly not to be lightly undertaken. It was all very well, in the
morning of time, for the ancient critics to regulate their body-guards
of Apollo by the numbers of the Muses or the Graces. Nothing could be
pleasanter than that tale of the great lyrical poets of the world which
we find so often repeated in slightly varying form:
"The mighty voice of Pindar has thundered out of Thebes. The lyre of
Simonides modulates a song of delicate melody. What brilliancy in
Ibycus and Stesichorus! What sweetness in Alcman! From the mouth of
Bacchylides there breathe delicious accents. Persuasion exhales from
the lips of Anacreon. In the Æolian voice of Alcæus we hear once more
the Lesbian swan; and as for Sappho, that ninth great lyric poet, is
not her place, rather, tenth among the Muses?"
If we are contributing lists of a dozen great poets, here are
three-fourths of the company already summoned; yet splendid as are
these names, and doubtless of irreproachable genius, the roll is, for
modern purposes, awkwardly overweighted. Even if for those whose works
Time has overwhelmed, we substitute the Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides,
Theocritus, whom he has spared, the list is still impracticable and
one-sided. Yet who shall say that these were not great poets in every
possible sense of the word? From each of several modern European
nations, from Italy and from France at least, a magnificent list of
twelve could be selected, not one of whom their compatriots could
afford to lose. Nay, even Sweden or Holland would present us with a
list of twelve which should seem indisputably great to a Dutchman or
a Swede. It is not possible to spread the net so wide as to catch
whales from all the ancient and all the modern languages at once. Let
us restrain our ambition and see what criterion we have for measuring
those of our own tongue and race.
Passing in review, then, the whole five centuries which divide us from
the youth of Chaucer, we would seek to discover what qualities have
raised a limited number of the poetical writers of those successive
ages of English thought to a station permanently and splendidly
exalted. Among the almost innumerable genuine poets of those five
hundred years, are there ten or twelve who are manifestly greater than
the rest, and if so, in what does their greatness consist?
We are not here occupied with the old threadbare question, "What is
a poet"? but we may reply to it so far as to insist that when we are
speaking and thinking in English the term excludes all writers, however
pathetic and fanciful, who do not employ the metrical form. In many
modern languages the word poet, _dichter_, includes novelists and
all other authors of prose fiction. I once learned this to my cost,
for having published a short summary of the writings of the living
"poets" of a certain continental country, one of the leading (if not
the leading) novelist of that country, exclusively a writer in prose,
indignantly upbraided me for the obviously personal slight I had shown
him in leaving him entirely unmentioned. In English we possess and
should carefully maintain the advantage which accrues from having a
word so distinct in its meaning; and we may recollect that there is no
trick in literary criticism more lax and silly than that of talking
about "prose poetry" (a contradiction in terms), or about such men as
Carlyle, Mr. Ruskin, or Jefferies as "poets." The greatness we are
discussing to-day is a quality wholly confined to those who have made
it their chief duty to speak to us in verse.
On these lines, perhaps, the main elements of poetical greatness will
be found to be originality in the treatment of themes, perennial
charm, exquisite finish in execution, and distinction of individual
manner. The great poet, in other words, will be seen, through the
perspectives of history, to have been fresher, stronger, more skilful,
and more personal than his unsuccessful or less successful rival.
When the latter begins to recede into obscurity it will be because
prejudices that blinded criticism are being removed, and because the
candidate for immortality is being found to be lacking in one or all of
these peculiar qualities. And here, of course, comes in the disputed
question of the existence of genius. I confess that that controversy
seems to me to rest on a mere metaphysical quibble. Robert McTavish
is a plough-boy, and ends at the plough's tail. Robert Burns is a
plough-boy, and ends by being set up, like Berenice's hair, as a glory
and a portent in the intellectual zenith of all time. Are they the same
to start with? Is it merely a question of taking pains, of a happy
accident--of luck, in short? A fiddlestick's end for such a theory!
Just as well might we say that a young vine that is to produce, in its
season, a bottle of corton, is the same as a similar stick that will
issue in a wretched draught of _vin bleu_. That which, from its very
cotyledons, has distinguished the corton plant from its base brother,
that is genius.
But even thus the discussion is vain and empty. What we have to deal
with is the work and not the man. So long as we all feel that there
is some quality of charm, vigour, and brightness which exists in Pope
and is absent in Eusden, is discoverable in a tragedy of Shakespeare
and is wanting in a transpontine melodrama, so long, whether we call
this quality by the good old name of genius, or explain it away in the
jargon of some new-fangled sociography, we shall have basis enough for
the conduct of our particular inquiry.
Perhaps I may now be permitted to recapitulate the list of a dozen
English poets whom I ventured to quote as the manifest immortals of
our British Parnassus. They are Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton,
Dryden, Pope, Gray, Burns, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley,
Keats. It will be noticed that there are thirteen names here, and my
reviewers have not failed to remind me that it is notoriously difficult
to count the stars. The fact is that Gray, the real thirteenth, was an
after-thought; and I will admit that, although Gray is the author of
what is perhaps the most imposing single short poem in the language,
and although he has charm, skill, and distinction to a marvellous
degree, his originality, his force of production, were so rigidly
limited that he may scarcely be admitted to the first rank. When he
published his collected poems Gray confessed himself "but a shrimp of
an author," and conjectured that the book would be mistaken for "the
works of a flea or a pismire." No doubt the explosive force which eggs
a very great writer on to constant expression was lacking in the
case of Gray, and I yield him--a tender babe, and the only one of my
interesting family which I will consent to throw to the wolves. The
rest are inviolable, and I will defend them to the last; but I can only
put a lance in rest here for two of them.
The absence of a truly catholic taste, and the survival of an exclusive
devotion to the romantic ideals of the early part of the present
century, must, I suppose, be the cause of a tendency, on the part of
some of those who have replied to me, to question the right of Dryden
and Pope to appear on my list of great poets. It appears that Dryden is
very poorly thought of at Crawfordsville, Indiana, and even at busier
centres of American taste he is reported as being not much of a power.
"Dryden is not read in America," says one of my critics, with jaunty
confidence. They say that we in England are sometimes harsh in our
estimates of America; but I confess I do not know the Englishman bold
enough to have charged America with the shocking want of taste which
these children of her own have so lightly volunteered to attribute to
her. Dryden not read in America! It makes one wonder what is read.
Probably Miss Amélie Rives?
But to be serious, I can conceive nothing more sinister for the future
of English literature than that to any great extent, or among any
influential circle of reading and writing men, the majesty and sinewy
force of the most masculine of all the English poets should be despised
and rejected. Something of a temper less hurried than that of the man
who runs and reads is no doubt required for the appreciation of that
somewhat heavy-footed and sombre giant of tragic and of narrative song,
John Dryden, warring with dunces, marching with sunken head--"a down
look," as Pope described it--through the unappreciative flat places of
our second Charles and James. Prosaic at times he is, slow, fatigued,
unstimulating; but, at his best, how full of the true sublime, how
uplifted by the wind of tragic passion, how stirred to the depths by
the noblest intellectual and moral enthusiasm! For my own part, there
are moments and moods in which nothing satisfies my ear and my brain
as do the great accents of Dryden, while he marches down the page,
with his elephants and his standards and his kettledrums, "in the full
vintage of his flowing honours."
There must be something effeminate and feeble in the nervous system of
a generation which cannot bear this grandiose music, this virile tramp
of Dryden's soldiers and camp-followers; something singularly dull and
timid in a spirit that rejects this robust intellectual companion. And,
with all his russet suit of homespun, Dryden is imbued to the core with
the truest and richest blood of poetry. His vehemence is positively
Homeric; we would not give _Mac Flecknoe_ in exchange even for the lost
_Margites_. He possesses in a high degree all the qualities which we
have marked as needed for the attribution of greatness. He is original
to that extent that mainly by his efforts the entire stream of English
poetry was diverted for a century and a half into an unfamiliar
channel; he has an executive skill eminently his own, and is able to
amaze us to-day after so many subsequent triumphs of verse-power; he
has distinction such as an emperor might envy; and after all the poets
of the eighteenth century have, as Mr. Lowell says, had their hands in
his pockets, his best lines are as fresh and as magical as ever.
Pope I will not defend so warmly, and yet Pope also was a great poet.
Two of my American critics, bent on refuting me, have severally availed
themselves of a somewhat unexpected weapon. Each of them reminds me
that Mr. Lang, in some recent number of a magazine, has said that
Pope is not a poet at all. Research might prove that this heresy is
not entirely unparalleled, yet I am unconvinced. I yield to no one in
respect and affection for Mr. Lang, but in criticising that with which
he feels no personal sympathy, he is merely a "young light-hearted
master of the oar" of temperament. When Mr. Lang blesses, the object is
blest; when he curses, he may bless to-morrow. Some day he will find
himself alone in a country-house with a Horace; old chords will be
touched, the mystery of Pope will reveal itself to him, and we shall
have a panegyric that will make Lady Mary writhe in her grave. Let no
transatlantic, or cisatlantic, infidel of letters be profane at the
expense of a classic by way of pleasing Mr. Lang; his next emotion is
likely to be "_un sentiment obscur d'avoir embrassé la Chimère_."