I take very safe ground when I say that our living poets present a
variety and amplitude of talent, a fulness of tone, an accomplishment
in art, such as few other generations in England, and still fewer
elsewhere, have been in a position to exult in. It would be invidious,
and it might indeed be very difficult and tedious, to go through the
list of those who do signal honour to our living literature in this
respect. Without repeating the list so patiently drawn up and so
humorously commented upon by Mr. Traill, it would be easy to select
from it fifteen names, not one of which would be below the fair
meridian of original merit, and many of which would rise far above it.
Could so much have been said in 1592, or in 1692, or in 1792? Surely,
no. I must not be led to multiply names, the mere mention of which in
so casual a manner can hardly fail to seem impertinent; yet I venture
to assert that a generation which can boast of Mr. Swinburne and Miss
Christina Rossetti, of Mr. William Morris and Mr. Coventry Patmore, of
Mr. Austin Dobson and Mr. Robert Bridges, has no reason to complain of
lack of fire or elevation, grace or versatility.
It was only in Paradise, so we learn from St. Basil, that roses ever
grew without thorns. We cannot have the rose of such an exceptional
life as Tennyson's without suffering for it. We suffer by the void its
cessation produces, the disturbance in our literary hierarchy that
it brings, the sense of uncertainty and insufficiency that follows
upon it. The death of Victor Hugo led to precisely such a rocking and
swaying of the ship of literature in France, and to this day it cannot
be said that the balance there is completely restored. I cannot think
that we gain much by ignoring this disturbance, which is inevitable,
and still less by folding our hands and calling out that it means that
the vessel is sinking. It means nothing of the kind. What it does mean
is that when a man of the very highest rank in the profession lives to
an exceptionally great age, and retains his intellectual gifts to the
end, combining with these unusual advantages the still more fortuitous
ones of being singular and picturesque in his personality and the
object of much ungratified curiosity, he becomes the victim, in the
eyes of his contemporaries, of a sort of vertical mirage. He is seen
up in the sky where no man could be. I trust I shall not be accused of
anything like disrespect to the genius of Tennyson--which I loved and
admired as nearly to the pitch of idolatry as possible--when I say that
his reputation at this moment is largely mirage. His gifts were of the
very highest order; but in the popular esteem, at this moment, he holds
a position which is, to carry on the image, topographically impossible.
No poet, no man, ever reached that altitude above his fellows.
The result of seeing one mountain in vertical mirage, and various
surrounding acclivities (if that were possible) at their proper
heights, would be to falsify the whole system of optical proportion.
Yet this is what is now happening, and for some little time will
continue to happen _in crescendo_, with regard to Tennyson and his
surviving contemporaries. There is no need, however, to cherish "those
gloomy thoughts led on by spleen" which the melancholy events of the
past month have awakened. The recuperative force of the arts has never
yet failed the human race, and will not fail us now. All the _Tit-Bits_
and _Pearson's Weeklies_ in the world will not be able to destroy a
fragment of pure and original literature, although the tastes they
foster may delay its recognition and curtail its rewards.
The duty of all who have any influence on the public is now clear. So
far from resigning the responsibility of praise and blame, so far from
opening the flood-gates to what is bad--on the ground that the best
is gone, and that it does not matter--it behoves those who are our
recognised judges of literary merit to resist more strenuously than
ever the inroads of mere commercial success into the Temple of Fame.
The Scotch ministry preserve that interesting practice of "fencing the
tables" of the Lord by a solemn searching of would-be communicants. Let
the tables of Apollo be fenced, not to the exclusion or the discomfort
of those who have a right to his sacraments, but to the chastening of
those who have no other mark of his service but their passbook. And
poetry, which survived the death of Chaucer, will recover even from the
death of Tennyson.
_1892._
FOOTNOTE:
[1] See Mr. Hall Caine's interesting article in the _Times_ for October
17th, 1892.
SHELLEY in 1892
Shelley in 1892
_Centenary Address delivered at Horsham, August 11, 1892_
We meet to-day to celebrate the fact that, exactly one hundred
years ago, there was born, in an old house in this parish, one of
the greatest of the English poets, one of the most individual and
remarkable of the poets of the world. This beautiful county of Sussex,
with its blowing woodlands and its shining downs, was even then not
unaccustomed to poetic honours. One hundred and thirty years before,
it had given birth to Otway; seventy years before, to Collins. But
charming as these pathetic figures were and are, not Collins and
not Otway can compare for a moment with that writer who is the
main intellectual glory of Sussex, the ever-beloved and ethereally
illustrious Percy Bysshe Shelley. It has appeared to me that you might,
as a Sussex audience, gathered in a Sussex town, like to be reminded,
before we go any further, of the exact connection of our poet with
the county--of the stake, as it is called, which his family held in
Sussex, and of the period of his own residence in it. You will see
that, although his native province lost him early, she had a strong
claim upon his interests and associations.
When Shelley was born, on the 4th of August, 1792, his grandfather,
afterwards a baronet, Sir Bysshe Shelley, was ensconced at Goring
Castle, while his father, the heir to the title, Mr. Timothy Shelley,
inhabited that famous house, Field Place, which lies here at your
doors. Mr. Timothy Shelley had married a lady from your nearest eastern
neighbour, the town of Cuckfield; he was M.P. for another Sussex
borough, Shoreham; in the next Parliament he was to represent, if I am
not mistaken, Horsham itself. The names which meet us in the earliest
pages of the poet's biographies are all Sussex names. It was at Warnham
that he was taught his earliest lessons, and it was in Warnham Pond
that the great tortoise lurked which was the earliest of his visions.
St. Irvine's, in whose woods he loved to wander by moonlight, has
disappeared, but Strode is close to you still, and if St. Leonard's
Forest has shrunken somewhat to the eastward since Shelley walked and
raved in its allies, you still possess it in your neighbourhood.
Until Shelley was expelled from Oxford, Field Place was his constant
residence out of school and college hours. Nor, although his father at
first forbade him to return, was his connection with Sussex broken even
then. The house of his uncle, Captain Pilfold, was always open to him
at Cuckfield, and when the Duke of Norfolk made his kind suggestion
that the young man should enter Parliament, as a species of moral
sedative, it was to a Sussex borough that he proposed to nominate
him. Shelley's first abortive volume of poems was set up by a Horsham
printer, and it was from Hurstpierpoint that Miss Hitchener, afterwards
known as the "Brown Demon," started on her disastrous expedition into
the lives of the Shelleys. It was not until 1814, on the eve of his
departure for the Continent, that Shelley came to Sussex for the last
time, paying that furtive visit to his mother and sisters, on which,
in order to conceal himself from his father, he buttoned the scarlet
jacket of a guardsman round his attenuated form.
If I have endeavoured, by thus grouping together all the Sussex names
which are connected with Shelley, to attract your personal and local
sympathy around the career of the poet, it is with no intention to
claim for him a provincial significance. Shelley does not belong to
any one county, however rich and illustrious that county may be; he
belongs to Europe--to the world. The tendency of his poetry and its
peculiar accent were not so much English as European. He might have
been a Frenchman, or an Italian, a Pole, or a Greek, in a way in which
Wordsworth, for instance, or even Byron, could never have been anything
but an Englishman. He passes, as we watch the brief and sparkling
record of his life, from Sussex to the world. One day he is a child,
sailing paper boats among the reeds in Warnham Pond; next day we look,
and see, scarcely the son of worthy Mr. Timothy Shelley of Field Place,
but a spirit without a country, "a planet-crested shape sweeping by
on lightning-braided pinions" to scatter the liquid joy of life over
humanity.
Into the particulars of this strange life I need not pass. You
know them well. No life so brief as Shelley's has occupied so much
curiosity, and for my part I think that even too minute inquiry has
been made concerning some of its details. The "Harriet problem" leaves
its trail across one petal of this rose; minuter insects, not quite
so slimy, lurk where there should be nothing but colour and odour.
We may well, I think, be content to-day to take the large romance
of Shelley's life, and leave any sordid details to oblivion. He
died before he was quite thirty years of age, and the busy piety of
biographers has peeped into the record of almost every day of the last
ten of those years. What seems to me most wonderful is that a creature
so nervous, so passionate, so ill-disciplined as Shelley was, should
be able to come out of such an unprecedented ordeal with his shining
garments so little specked with mire. Let us, at all events, to-day,
think of the man only as "the peregrine falcon" that his best and
oldest friends describe him.
We may, at all events, while a grateful England is cherishing Shelley's
memory, and congratulating herself on his majestic legacy of song to
her, reflect almost with amusement on the very different attitude of
public opinion seventy and even fifty years ago. That he should have
been pursued by calumny and prejudice through his brief, misrepresented
life, and even beyond the tomb, can surprise no thinking spirit. It was
not the poet who was attacked; it was the revolutionist, the enemy of
kings and priests, the extravagant and paradoxical humanitarian. It is
not needful, in order to defend Shelley's genius aright, to inveigh
against those who, taught in the prim school of eighteenth-century
poetics, and repelled by political and social peculiarities which they
but dimly understood, poured out their reprobation of his verses.
Even his reviewers, perhaps, were not all of them "beaten hounds"
and "carrion kites"; some, perhaps, were very respectable and rather
narrow-minded English gentlemen, devoted to the poetry of Shenstone.
The newer a thing is, in the true sense, the slower people are to
accept it, and the abuse of the _Quarterly Review_, rightly taken, was
but a token of Shelley's opulent originality.
To this unintelligent aversion there succeeded in the course of years
an equally blind, although more amiable, admiration. Among a certain
class of minds the reaction set in with absolute violence, and once
more the centre of attention was not the poet and his poetry, but
the faddist and his fads. Shelley was idealised, etherealised, and
canonised. Expressions were used about his conduct and his opinions
which would have been extravagant if employed to describe those of a
virgin-martyr or of the founder of a religion. Vegetarians clustered
around the eater of buns and raisins, revolutionists around the
enemy of kings, social anarchists around the husband of Godwin's
daughter. Worse than all, those to whom the restraints of religion
were hateful, marshalled themselves under the banner of the youth who
had rashly styled himself an atheist, forgetful of the fact that all
his best writings attest that, whatever name he might give himself,
he, more than any other poet of the age, saw God in everything. This
also was a phase, and passed away. The career of Shelley is no longer
a battlefield for fanatics of one sort or the other; if they still
skirmish a little in its obscurer corners, the main tract of it is
not darkened with the smoke from their artillery. It lies, a fair
open country of pure poetry, a province which comes as near to being
fairyland as any that literature provides for us.
We cannot, however, think of this poet as of a writer of verses in the
void. He is anything but the "idle singer of an empty day." Shelley was
born amid extraordinary circumstances into an extraordinary age. On the
very day, one hundred years ago, when the champagne was being drunk
in the hall of Field Place in honour of the birth of a son and heir
to Mr. Timothy Shelley, the thunder-cloud of revolution was breaking
over Europe. Never before had there been felt within so short a space
of time so general a crash of the political order of things. Here, in
England, we were spectators of the wild and sundering stress, in which
the other kingdoms of Europe were distracted actors. The faces of Burke
and of his friends wore "the expression of men who are going to defend
themselves from murderers," and those murderers are called, during the
infancy of Shelley, by many names, Mamelukes and Suliots, Poles and
Swedes, besides the all-dreaded one of _sansculottes_. In the midst of
this turmoil Shelley was born, and the air of revolution filled his
veins with life.
In Shelley we see a certain type of revolutionist, born out of due
time, and directed to the bloodless field of literature. The same
week that saw the downfall of La Fayette saw the birth of Shelley,
and we might believe the one to be an incarnation of the hopes of the
other. Each was an aristocrat, born with a passionate ambition to play
a great part in the service of humanity; in neither was there found
that admixture of the earthly which is needful for sustained success
in practical life. Had Shelley taken part in active affairs, his will
and his enthusiasm must have broken, like waves, against the coarser
type of revolutionist, against the Dantons and the Robespierres. Like
La Fayette, Shelley was intoxicated with virtue and glory; he was
chivalrous, inflammable, and sentimental. Happily for us, and for
the world, he was not thrown into a position where these beautiful
qualities could be displayed only to be shattered like a dome of
many-coloured glass. He was the not unfamiliar figure of revolutionary
times, the _grand seigneur_ enamoured of democracy. But he was much
more than this; as Mr. Swinburne said long ago, Shelley "was born a
son and soldier of light, an archangel winged and weaponed for angel's
work." Let us attempt to discover what sort of prophecy it was that he
blew through his golden trumpet.
It is in the period of youth that Shelley appeals to us most directly,
and exercises his most unquestioned authority over the imagination. In
early life, at the moment more especially when the individuality begins
to assert itself, a young man or a young woman of feeling discovers in
this poet certain qualities which appear to be not merely good, but
the best, not only genuine, but exclusively interesting. At that age
we ask for light, and do not care how it is distributed; for melody,
and do not ask the purpose of the song; for colour, and find no hues
too brilliant to delight the unwearied eye. Shelley satisfies these
cravings of youth. His whole conception of life is bounded only by
its illusions. The brilliancy of the morning dream, the extremities
of radiance and gloom, the most pellucid truth, the most triumphant
virtue, the most sinister guilt and melodramatic infamy, alone contrive
to rivet the attention. All half-lights, all arrangements in grey or
russet, are cast aside with impatience, as unworthy of the emancipated
spirit. Winged youth, in the bright act of sowing its intellectual wild
oats, demands a poet, and Horsham, just one hundred years ago, produced
Shelley to satisfy that natural craving.
It is not for grey philosophers, or hermits wearing out the evening
of life, to pass a definitive verdict on the poetry of Shelley. It
is easy for critics of this temper to point out weak places in the
radiant panoply, to say that this is incoherent, and that hysterical,
and the other an ethereal fallacy. Sympathy is needful, a recognition
of the point of view, before we can begin to judge Shelley aright. We
must throw ourselves back to what we were at twenty, and recollect
how dazzling, how fresh, how full of colour, and melody, and odour,
this poetry seemed to us--how like a May-day morning in a rich Italian
garden, with a fountain, and with nightingales in the blossoming boughs
of the orange-trees, with the vision of a frosty Apennine beyond the
belt of laurels, and clear auroral sky everywhere above our heads. We
took him for what he seemed, "a pard-like spirit, beautiful and swift,"
and we thought to criticise him as little as we thought to judge the
murmur of the forest or the reflections of the moonlight on the lake.
He was exquisite, emancipated, young like ourselves, and yet as wise
as a divinity. We followed him unquestioning, walking in step with his
panthers, as the Bacchantes followed Dionysus out of India, intoxicated
with enthusiasm.
If our sentiment is no longer so rhapsodical, shall we blame the poet?
Hardly, I think. He has not grown older, it is we who are passing
further and further from that happy eastern morning where the light is
fresh, and the shadows plain and clearly defined. Over all our lives,
over the lives of those of us who may be seeking to be least trammelled
by the commonplace, there creeps ever onward the stealthy tinge of
conventionality, the admixture of the earthly. We cannot honestly
wish it to be otherwise. It is the natural development, which turns
kittens into cats, and blithe-hearted lads into earnest members of
Parliament. If we try to resist this inevitable tendency, we merely
become eccentric, a mockery to others, and a trouble to ourselves.
Let us accept our respectability with becoming airs of gravity; it
is another thing to deny that youth was sweet. When I see an elderly
professor proving that the genius of Shelley has been overrated, I
cannot restrain a melancholy smile. What would he, what would I, give
for that exquisite ardour, by the light of which all other poetry than
Shelley's seemed dim? You recollect our poet's curious phrase, that to
go to him for common sense was like going to a gin-palace for mutton
chops. The speech was a rash one, and has done him harm. But it is
true enough that those who are conscious of the grossness of life, and
are over-materialised, must go to him for the elixir and ether which
emancipate the senses.
If I am right in thinking that you will all be with me in considering
this beautiful passion of youth, this recapturing of the illusions,
as the most notable of the gifts of Shelley's poetry to us, you will
also, I think, agree with me in placing only second to it the witchery
which enables this writer, more than any other, to seize the most
tumultuous and agitating of the emotions, and present them to us
coloured by the analogy of natural beauty. Whether it be the petulance
of a solitary human being, to whom the little downy owl is a friend,
or the sorrows and desires of Prometheus, on whom the primal elements
attend as slaves, Shelley is able to mould his verse to the expression
of feeling, and to harmonise natural phenomena to the magnitude or the
delicacy of his theme. No other poet has so wide a grasp as he in this
respect, no one sweeps so broadly the full diapason of man in nature.
Laying hold of the general life of the universe with a boldness that is
unparalleled, he is equal to the most sensitive of the naturalists in
his exact observation of tender and humble forms.
And to the ardour of fiery youth and the imaginative sympathy of
pantheism, he adds what we might hardly expect from so rapt and
tempestuous a singer, the artist's self-restraint. Shelley is none
of those of whom we are sometimes told in these days, whose mission
is too serious to be transmitted with the arts of language, who are
too much occupied with the substance to care about the form. All that
is best in his exquisite collection of verse cries out against this
wretched heresy. With all his modernity, his revolutionary instinct,
his disdain of the unessential, his poetry is of the highest and most
classic technical perfection. No one, among the moderns, has gone
further than he in the just attention to poetic form, and there is so
severe a precision in his most vibrating choruses that we are taken
by them into the company, not of the Ossians and the Walt Whitmans,
not of those who feel, yet cannot control their feelings, but of those
impeccable masters of style,
_who dwelt by the azure sea_
_Of serene and golden Italy,_
_Or Greece the mother of the free._
And now, most inadequately and tamely, yet, I trust, with some sense of
the greatness of my theme, I have endeavoured to recall to your minds
certain of the cardinal qualities which animated the divine poet whom
we celebrate to-day. I have no taste for those arrangements of our
great writers which assign to them rank like schoolboys in a class, and
I cannot venture to suggest that Shelley stands above or below this
or that brother immortal. But of this I am quite sure, that when the
slender roll is called of those singers, who make the poetry of England
second only to that of Greece (if even of Greece), however few are
named, Shelley must be among them. To-day, under the auspices of the
greatest poet our language has produced since Shelley died, encouraged
by universal public opinion and by dignitaries of all the professions,
yes, even by prelates of our national church, we are gathered here as a
sign that the period of prejudice is over, that England is in sympathy
at last with her beautiful wayward child, understands his great
language, and is reconciled to his harmonious ministry. A century has
gone by, and once more we acknowledge the truth of his own words:
_The splendours of the firmament of time_
_May be eclipsed, but are extinguished not;_
_Like stars to their appointed height they climb._
SYMBOLISM AND M. STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ
Symbolism and M. Stéphane Mallarmé
The name which stands at the head of this essay is that of a writer
who is at the present time more talked about, more ferociously
attacked, more passionately beloved and defended, and at the same
time less understood, than perhaps any other man of his intellectual
rank in Europe. Even in the ferocious world of Parisian letters his
purity of motive and dignity of attitude are respected. Benevolent to
those younger than himself, exquisitely courteous and considerate in
controversy, a master of that suavity and reserve the value of which
literary persons so rarely appreciate, M. Mallarmé, to one who from a
distance gazes with curiosity into the Parisian hurly-burly, appeals
first by the beautiful amenity of his manners--a dreamy Sir Launcelot
riding through a forest of dragons to help the dolorous lady of Poesy
from pain. In the incessant pamphlet-wars of his party, others seem to
strike for themselves, M. Mallarmé always for the cause; and when the
battle is over, and the rest meet to carouse round a camp-fire, he is
always found stealing back to the ivory tower of contemplation. Before
we know the rights of the case, or have read a line of his verses, we
are predisposed towards a figure so pure and so distinguished.