individual books, to trace the weaknesses of the realistic school of
our own day. Human sentiment has revenged itself upon them for their
rigid regulations and scientific formulas, by betraying them into
faults the possibility of which they had not anticipated. But above
all other causes of their limited and temporary influence, the most
powerful has been the material character which their rules forced upon
them, and their excess of positivism and precision. In eliminating the
grotesque and the rhetorical they drove out more than they wished to
lose; they pushed away with their scientific pitchfork the fantastic
and intellectual elements. How utterly fatal this was may be seen, not
in the leaders, who have preserved something of the reflected colour
of the old romance, but in those earnest disciples who have pushed the
theory to its extremity. In their sombre, grimy, and dreary studies in
pathology, clinical bulletins of a soul dying of atrophy, we may see
what the limits of realism are, and how impossible it is that human
readers should much longer go on enjoying this sort of literary aliment.
If I have dwelt upon these limitations, however, it has not been to
cast a stone at the naturalistic school. It has been rather with the
object of clearing away some critical misconceptions about the future
development of it. Anglo-Saxon criticism of the perambulating species
might, perhaps, be persuaded to consider the realists with calmer
judgment, if it looked upon them, not as a monstrous canker that was
slowly spreading its mortal influence over the whole of literature,
which it would presently overwhelm and destroy, but as a natural and
timely growth, taking its due place in the succession of products, and
bound, like other growths, to bud and blossom and decline. I venture
to put forth the view that the novel of experiment has had its day;
that it has been made the vehicle of some of the loftiest minds of our
age; that it has produced a huge body of fiction, none of it perfect,
perhaps, much of it bad, but much of it, also, exceedingly intelligent,
vivid, sincere, and durable; and that it is now declining, to leave
behind it a great memory, the prestige of persecution, and a library of
books which every highly educated man in the future will be obliged to
be familiar with.
It would be difficult, I think, for any one but a realistic novelist
to overrate the good that realism in fiction has done. It has cleared
the air of a thousand follies, has pricked a whole fleet of oratorical
bubbles. Whatever comes next, we cannot return, in serious novels, to
the inanities and impossibilities of the old "well-made" plot, to the
children changed at nurse, to the madonna heroine and the god-like
hero, to the impossible virtues and melodramatic vices. In future,
even those who sneer at realism and misrepresent it most wilfully,
will be obliged to put in their effects in ways more in accord with
veritable experience. The public has eaten of the apple of knowledge,
and will not be satisfied with mere marionettes. There will still be
novel-writers who address the gallery, and who will keep up the gaudy
old convention and the clumsy _Family Herald_ evolution, but they will
no longer be distinguished people of genius. They will no longer sign
themselves George Sand and Charles Dickens.
In the meantime, wherever I look I see the novel ripe for another
reaction. The old leaders will not change. It is not to be expected
that they will write otherwise than in the mode which has grown mature
with them. But in France, among the younger men, every one is escaping
from the realistic formula. The two young athletes for whom M. Zola
predicted ten years ago an "experimental" career more profoundly
scientific than his own, are realists no longer. M. Guy de Maupassant
has become a psychologist, and M. Huysmans a mystic. M. Bourget, who
set all the ladies dancing after his ingenious, musky books, never
has been a realist; nor has Pierre Loti, in whom, with a fascinating
freshness, the old exiled romanticism comes back with a laugh and a
song. All points to a reaction in France; and in Russia, too, if what
we hear is true, the next step will be one toward the mystical and
the introspective. In America it would be rash for a foreigner to say
what signs of change are evident. The time has hardly come when we
look to America for the symptoms of literary initiative. But it is my
conviction that the limits of realism have been reached; that no great
writer who has not already adapted the experimental system will do so;
and that we ought now to be on the outlook to welcome (and, of course,
to persecute) a school of novelists with a totally new aim, part of
whose formula must unquestionably be a concession to the human instinct
for mystery and beauty.
_1890._
IS VERSE IN DANGER?
Is Verse in Danger?
We are passing through a period obviously unfavourable to the
development of the art of poetry. A little while ago there was an
outburst of popular appreciation of living verse, but this is now
replaced, for the moment, by an almost ostentatious indifference. These
alternations of curiosity and disdain deceive no one who looks at the
history of literature with an eye which is at all philosophical. It is
easy to say, as is commonly said, that they depend on the merit of the
poetry which is being produced. But this is not always, or even often,
the case. About twenty years ago a ferment of interest and enthusiasm
was called forth, all over the English-speaking world, by the early
writings of Mr. Swinburne and by those of the late Mr. Rossetti. This
was deserved by the merit of those productions; but the disdain which,
twenty years earlier, the verse of Mr. Robert Browning and Mr. Matthew
Arnold had met with, cannot be so accounted for. It is wiser to admit
that sons never look at life with their fathers' eyes, and that taste
is subject to incessant and almost regular fluctuations. At the present
moment, though men should sing with the voice of angels, the barbarian
public would not listen, and a new Milton would probably be less warmly
welcomed in 1890 than a Pomfret was two centuries ago or a Bowles was
in 1790. Literary history shows that a demand for poetry does not
always lead to a supply, and that a supply does not always command a
market. He who doubts this fact may compare the success of Herrick with
that of Erasmus Darwin.
The only reason for preluding a speculation on the future of the art
of poetry with these remarks, is to clear the ground of any arguments
based on the merely momentary condition of things. The eagerness or
coldness of the public, the fertility or exhaustion of the poets,
at this particular juncture, are elements of no real importance. If
poetry is to continue to be one of the living arts of humanity, it
does not matter an iota whether poetry is looked upon with contempt by
the members of a single generation. If poetry is declining, and, as a
matter of fact, is now moribund, the immense vogue of Tennyson at a
slightly earlier period will take its place among the insignificant
phenomena of a momentary reaction. The problem is a more serious
one. It is this: Is poetry, in its very essence, an archaic and
rudimentary form of expression, still galvanised into motion, indeed,
by antiquarianism, but really obsolete and therefore to be cultivated
only at the risk of affectation and insincerity; or is it an art
capable of incessant renovation--a living organism which grows, on the
whole, with the expansion of modern life? In other words, is the art of
verse one which, like music or painting, delights and consoles us with
a species of expression which can never be superseded, because it is
in danger of no direct rivalry from a similar species; or was poetry
merely the undeveloped, though in itself the extremely beautiful,
infancy of a type which is now adult, and which has relinquished its
charming puerilities for a mode of expression infinitely wider and of
more practical utility? Sculptors, singers, painters must always exist;
but need we have poets any longer, since the world has discovered how
to say all it wants to say in prose? Will any one who has anything
of importance to communicate be likely in the future to express it
through the medium of metrical language?
These questions are not to be dismissed with a smile. A large number of
thoughtful persons at the present time are, undoubtedly, disposed to
answer them in the affirmative, although a certain decency forbids them
openly to say so. Plenty of clever people secretly regard the Muse as
a distinguished old lady, of good family, who has been a beauty and a
wit in her day, but who really rules only by sufferance in these years
of her decline. They whisper that she is sinking into second childhood,
that she repeats herself when she converses, and that she has exchanged
her early liberal tastes for a love of what is puerile, ingenious, and
"finikin." A great Parisian critic has just told us that each poet is
read only by the other poets, and he gives as the reason that the art
of verse has become so refined and so elaborate that it passes over
the heads of the multitude. But may it not be that this refinement is
only a decrepitude--the amusement of an old age that has sunk to the
playing of more and more helplessly ingenious games of patience? That
is what those hint who, more insidious by far than the open enemies of
literature, suggest that poetry has had its reign, its fascinating and
imperial tyranny, and that it must now make way for the democracy of
prose.
Probably there would have been no need to face this question, either
in this generation or for many generations to come, if it had not
been for a single circumstance. The great enemies of the poets of
the present are the poets of the past, and the antiquarian spirit of
the nineteenth century has made the cessation of the publication of
fresh verse a possibility. The intellectual condition of our times
differs from that of all preceding ages in no other point so much as
in its attitude toward the writings of the dead. In those periods of
renovation which have refreshed the literatures of the world, the
tendency has always been to study some one class of deceased writers
with affection. In English history, we have seen the romantic poets of
Italy, the dramatists of Spain, the Latin satirists, and the German
ballad-mongers, exercise, at successive moments, a vivid influence on
English writers. But this study was mainly limited to those writers
themselves, and did not extend to the circle of their readers; while
even with the writers it never absorbed at a single moment the whole
range of poetry. We may take one instance. Pope was the disciple of
Horace and of the French Jesuits, of Dryden and of the conceit-creating
school of Donne. But he was able to use Boileau and Crashaw so freely
because he addressed a public that had never met with the first and had
forgotten the second; and when he passed outside this narrow circle
he was practically without a rival. To the class whom he addressed,
Shakespeare and Milton were phantoms, Chaucer and Spenser not so much
as names. The only doubt was whether Alexander Pope was man enough to
arrest attention by the intrinsic merits of his poetry. If his verse
was admitted to be good, his public were not distracted by a preference
for other verse which they had known for a longer time.
This remained true until about a generation ago. The great romantic
poets of the beginning of this century found the didactic and
rhetorical verse-writers of the eighteenth century in possession of the
field, but they found no one else there. Their action was of the nature
of a revolt--a revolution so successful that it became constitutional.
All that Wordsworth and Keats had to do was to prove their immediate
predecessors to be unworthy of public attention, and when once they
had persuaded the reading world that what they had to offer was more
pleasing than what Young and Churchill and Darwin had offered, the
revolution was complete. But, in order to draw attention to the merits
of the proposed change, the romantic poets of the Georgian age pointed
to the work of the writers of the Elizabethan age, whom they claimed as
their natural predecessors--the old stock cast out at the Restoration
and now reinstated. The public had entirely forgotten the works of
these writers, except to some extent those of the dramatists, and it
became necessary to reprint them. A whole galaxy of poetic stars was
revealed when the cloud of prejudice was blown away, and a class of
dangerous rivals to the modern poet was introduced.
The activity of the dead is now paramount, and threatens to paralyse
original writing altogether. The revival of the old poets who were in
direct sympathy with Keats and Wordsworth has extended far beyond the
limits which those who inaugurated it desired to lay down. Every poetic
writer of any age precedent to our own has now a chance of popularity,
often a very much better chance than he possessed during his own
lifetime. Scarcely a poet, from Chaucer downward, remains inedited.
The imitative lyrist who, in a paroxysm of inspiration, wrote one good
sonnet under the sway of James I., but was never recognised as a poet
even by his friends, rejoices now in a portly quarto, and lives for the
first time. The order of nature is reversed, and those who were only
ghosts in the seventeenth century come back to us clothed in literary
vitality.
In this great throng of resuscitated souls, all of whom have forfeited
their copyright, how is the modern poet to exist? He has no longer to
compete--as "his great forefathers did, from Homer down to Ben"--with
the leading spirits of his own generation, but with the picked genius
of the world. He writes an epic; Mr. Besant and the Society of Authors
oblige him to "retain his rights," to "publish at a royalty," and to
keep the rules of the game. But Milton has no rights and demands no
royalty. The new poet composes lyrics and publishes them in a volume.
They are sincere and ingenious; but why should the reader buy that
volume, when he can get the best of Shelley and Coleridge, of Gray and
Marvell, in a cheaper form in _The Golden Treasury_? At every turn the
thronging company of the ghosts impedes and disheartens the modern
writer, and it is no wonder if the new Orpheus throws down his lyre
in despair when the road to his desire is held by such an invincible
army of spectres. In the golden age of the Renaissance an enthusiast
is said to have offered up a manuscript by Martial every year, as a
burnt sacrifice to Catullus, an author whom he distinctly preferred.
The modern poet, if he were not afraid of popular censure, might make
a yearly holocaust of editions of the British classics, in honour of
the Genius of Poetry. There are many enemies of the art abroad, but
among them all the most powerful and insidious are those of its own
household. The poets of to-day might contrive to fish the murex up, and
to eat turtle, if it were not for the intolerable rivalry of "souls of
poets dead and gone."
On the whole, however, it is highly unlikely that the antiquarian
passion of our age will last. Already it gives signs of wearing
out, and it will probably be succeeded by a spirit of unreasonable
intolerance of the past. Intellectual invention will not allow itself
to be pinioned for ever by these soft and universal cords of tradition,
each as slight as gossamer in itself, but overwhelming in the immense
mass. As for the old poets, young verse-writers may note with glee
that these rivals of theirs are being caught in the butterfly net of
education, where they will soon find the attractive feathers rubbed
off their wings. One by one they pass into text-books and are lost.
Chaucer is done for, and so is Milton; Goldsmith is annotated, Scott
is prepared for "local examinations," and even Byron, the loose, the
ungrammatical, is edited as a school book. The noble army of extension
lecturers will scarcely pause in their onward march. We shall see
Wordsworth captured, Shelley boiled down for the use of babes, and
Keats elaborately annotated, with his blunders in classical mythology
exposed. The schoolmaster is the only friend the poet of the future
dares to look to, for he alone has the power to destroy the loveliness
and mystery which are the charm of the old poets. Even a second-rate
verse-writer may hope to live by the side of an Elizabethan poet edited
for the Clarendon Press.
This remedy may, however, be considered fantastic, and it would
scarcely be wise to trust to it. There is, nevertheless, nothing
ironical in the statement that an exaggerated attention paid to
historical work leaves no time and no appetite for what contemporaries
produce. The neglect of poetry is so widespread that if the very small
residuum of love of verse is expended lavishly on the dead, the living
are likely to come off badly indeed. The other arts, which can better
defend themselves, are experiencing the same sense of being starved
by the old masters. The bulk of the public neither buys books nor
invests in pictures, nor orders statuary according to its own taste,
but according to the fashion; and if the craze is antiquarian, we may
produce Raphaels in dozens and Shelleys in shoals; they will have to
subsist as the bears and the pelicans do.
Let us abandon ourselves, however, to the vain pleasure of prophesying.
Let us suppose, for the humour of it, that what very young gentlemen
call "the might of poesy" is sure to reassert itself, that the votaries
of modern verse will always form a respectable minimum, and that some
alteration in fashion will reduce the tyranny of antiquarianism to
decent proportions. Admit that poetry, in whatever lamentable condition
it may be at the present time, is eternal in its essence, and must
offer the means of expression to certain admirable talents in each
generation. What, then, is the form which we may reasonably expect it
to take next? This is, surely, a harmless kind of speculation, and the
moral certainty of being fooled by the event need not restrain us
from indulging in it. We will prophesy, although fully conscious of
the wild predictions on the same subject current in England in 1580,
1650, and 1780, and in France in 1775 and 1825. We may be quite sure of
one thing, that when the Marlowe or the André Chénier is coming, not
a single critic will be expecting him. But in the meantime why show a
front less courageous than that of the history-defying Zadkiel?
It is usually said, in hasty generalisation, that the poetry of the
present age is unique in the extreme refinement of its exterior
mechanism. Those who say this are not aware that the great poets whose
virile simplicity and robust carelessness of detail they applaud--thus
building tombs to prophets whom they have never worshipped--have,
almost without exception, been scrupulously attentive to form. No
modern writer has been so learned in rhythm as Milton, so faultless
in rhyme-arrangement as Spenser. But what is true is that a care for
form, and a considerable skill in the technical art of verse, have
been acquired by writers of a lower order, and that this sort of
perfection is no longer the hall-mark of a great master. We may expect
it, therefore, to attract less attention in the future; and although,
assuredly, the bastard jargon of Walt Whitman, and kindred returns to
sheer barbarism, will not be accepted, technical perfection will more
and more be taken as a matter of course, as a portion of the poet's
training which shall be as indispensable, and as little worthy of
notice, as that a musician should read his notes correctly.
Less effort, therefore, is likely to be made, in the immediate
future, to give pleasure by the manner of poetry, and more skill
will be expended on the subject-matter. By this I do not understand
that greater concession will be made than in the past to what may be
called the didactic fallacy, the obstinate belief of some critics in
the function of poetry as a teacher. The fact is certain that nothing
is more obsolete than educational verse, the literary product which
deliberately supplies information. We may see another Sappho; it is
even conceivable that we might see another Homer; but a new Hesiod,
never. Knowledge has grown to be far too complex, exact, and minute to
be impressed upon the memory by the artifice of rhyme; and poetry had
scarcely passed its infancy before it discovered that to stimulate, to
impassion, to amuse, were the proper duties of an art which appeals to
the emotions, and to the emotions only. The curious attempts, then,
which have been made by poets of no mean talent to dedicate their verse
to botany, to the Darwinian hypothesis, to the loves of the fossils,
and to astronomical science, are not likely to be repeated, and if they
should be repeated, they would scarcely attract much popular attention.
Nor is the epic, on a large scale--that noble and cumbersome edifice
with all its blank windows and corridors that lead to nothing--a
species of poetic architecture which the immediate future can be
expected to indulge in.
Leaving the negative for the positive, then, we may fancy that one
or two probabilities loom before us. Poetry, if it exist at all,
will deal, and probably to a greater degree than ever before, with
those more frail and ephemeral shades of emotion which prose scarcely
ventures to describe. The existence of a delicately organised human
being is diversified by divisions and revulsions of sensation,
ill-defined desires, gleams of intuition, and the whole gamut of
spiritual notes descending from exultation to despair, none of which
have ever been adequately treated except in the hieratic language of
poetry. The most realistic novel, the closest psychological analysis in
prose, does no more than skim the surface of the soul; verse has the
privilege of descending into its depths. In the future, lyrical poetry
will probably grow less trivial and less conventional, at the risk of
being less popular. It will interpret what prose dares not suggest.
It will penetrate further into the complexity of human sensation,
and, untroubled by the necessity of formulating a creed, a theory, or
a story, will describe with delicate accuracy, and under a veil of
artistic beauty, the amazing, the unfamiliar, and even the portentous
phenomena which it encounters.
The social revolution or evolution which most sensible people are
now convinced is imminent, will surely require a species of poetry
to accompany its course and to celebrate its triumphs. If we could
foresee what form this species will take, we should know all things.
But we must believe that it will be democratic, and that to a
degree at present unimaginable. The aristocratic tradition is still
paramount in all art. Kings, princesses, and the symbols of chivalry
are as essential to poetry, as we now conceive it, as roses, stars,
or nightingales. The poet may be a pronounced socialist; he may be
Mr. William Morris; but the oligarchic imagery pervades his work as
completely as if he were a troubadour of the thirteenth century. It is
difficult to understand what will be left if this romantic phraseology
is destroyed, but it is still more difficult to believe that it can
survive a complete social revolution.
A kind of poetry now scarcely cultivated at all may be expected to
occupy the attention of the poets, whether socialism hastens or delays.
What the Germans understand by epic verse--that is to say, short and
highly finished studies in narrative--is a class of literature which
offers unlimited opportunities. What may be done in this direction is
indicated in France by the work of M. Coppée. In England and America
we have at present nothing at all like it, the idyllic stories of Mr.
Coventry Patmore presenting the closest parallel. The great danger
which attends the writing of these narratives in English is the
tendency to lose distinction of style, to become humorous in dealing
with the grotesque and tame in describing the simple. Blank verse will
be wholly eschewed by those who in the future sing the annals of the
humble; they will feel that the strictest art and the most exquisite
ornament of rhyme and metre will be required for the treatment of
such narratives. M. Coppée himself, who records the adventures of
seamstresses and engine-drivers, of shipwrecked sailors and retail
grocers, with such simplicity and moving pathos, has not his rival
in all France for purity of phrase and for exquisite propriety of
versification.