our sympathies; it enriches the world to our eyes and minds, by
revealing to us the marvels, delights, tendernesses and suggestions
which are all around us in man and nature; it keeps alive our better
part in places and circumstances when that better part might perish with
disease and atrophy; it continually irrigates with benign influences the
mind which might grow arid and barren, and so it enables all the little
seeds and buds of our intellectual and moral nature to germinate and
produce some fruit.
And, therefore, this Society meets to study literature, and, as I said
at the beginning, it meets to study in a spirit which is open-minded,
grateful, and docile.
The Future of Poetry
A thoughtful friend of mine--but one who withal affects a philistinism
which I know to be only skin-deep--is fond of assuring me that "poetry"
can no longer justify its existence, that the world of the future will
regard it as a trifling and artificial thing, and that therefore serious
men will cease to devote themselves either to producing it or to reading
it. In our discussions upon the subject, I have asked him whether he
merely means that men will cease to compose verses, or whether he
believes that "the poetry" is actually going out of life and literature,
and that the imaginative and emotional way of looking at things, which
belongs to "poetry," will give place to the rigidly philosophical and
practical. He answers, of course, that men will continue to have
ardours, aspirations, joys, sorrows, and sympathies, which they will and
must express as vividly as they can, to their own relief and to the
solace or encouragement of their fellow-men; but he asserts that all
this can be done in prose, and will be done in prose, seeing that rhymes
and regular numbers of syllables are a sort of primitive barbarian
device, mechanical, cramping, and, in a certain way, productive of
untruth. When we press this latter point, it is admitted that prose
itself is capable of inexhaustible rhythms and magnificent melodies, and
that these qualities show signs of being more and more developed, more
and more adapted to the mood and sentiment of that which is to be
expressed. When we get thus far, it appears that we have been very much
in agreement all along. To me--and by this time, I hope, to him--poetry
is nothing else but this same impassioned expression of ardour and
emotion, sensibility and imagination, no matter whether the form it
takes be obviously regulated verse or subtly rhythmic "prose."
But, when we have reached our agreement, there are others who confront
us with that too well-known sentence from Macaulay: "In an enlightened
age there will be much intelligence, much science, much philosophy,
abundance of just classification and subtle analysis, abundance of wit
and eloquence, abundance of verses and even of good ones; but little
poetry. Men will judge and compare, but they will not create." It is a
fashion nowadays to make little of Macaulay as a thinker, to damn him
with faint praise as a brilliant rhetorician. It is not to join
unreservedly in that censure, if we remark that Macaulay pronounced his
dictum on poetry when he was very young. But, young or not, he utterly
misses a sound view of the nature and scope of poetry. He asserts that
"men will judge and compare, but they will not create"; and
particularly, he meant, create epics and romances. If Macaulay is to be
taken literally, poetry is to him mainly the creation of stories; it is
summed up in _Iliads_, _AEneids_, _Orlandos_, _Faerie Queenes_. Let us
for the moment suppose--what, however, there is no ground in fact or
reason for supposing--that creations such as these, at least in verse,
will engage enlightened men no more. Is there no room for lyrics and for
the poetical expression of great truths? "But little poetry!" What else
should this imply, except that there will be but little feeling or
emotion, but little ecstasy, hope, grief, loveliness, awe, or mystery in
all the "wide gray lampless deep unpeopled world" of the future? It is
these things which are the most copious and most stimulating
subject-matter of poetry, and Macaulay surely never meant to say, and
never did say, that these would some day fail.
The poets of the last generation are dead--Tennyson, Browning, Arnold,
Morris, Swinburne. The great "makers" have passed away, and there remain
to us but certain highly dexterous word-artificers and melodists, a
varied chorus of dainty, musical, scholarly, but mostly uninspired,
writers of verse. We have passed the crest of the poetical wave, and are
sunk into its trough. It is not unnatural, therefore, that we should, at
this particular juncture, feel some misgivings. Finding no immediate
successor worthy to fill the place of those great departed, we cry out
in our haste that "science" is killing poetry, or that "democracy" is
crushing out poetry, or that we are "living too fast" for poetry. Poetry
was dead in England for a century and three-quarters between Chaucer and
Spenser; in a large sense it was dead for four generations between
Milton and Burns. In Italy there was almost no real poetry for the
thirteen hundred years between Virgil and Dante. In France nearly two
centuries before Victor Hugo may be treated as a blank. Yet the revival
came, and came with strength. We forget, or do not know, that the
complaint of the decay of poetry is a hackneyed tale, familiar to
Addison as to Macaulay. We do not, in fact, look the question frankly in
the face. When one assures us of the decline of poetry as a fact and as
inevitable, we have a right to ask him two questions. One is: "What
signs of weakening and degeneracy in poetic genius, or of failing
interest in its creations, do you actually discover in the course of
history?" the other: "From what arguments are we to conclude that the
future must of necessity prove barren of poetry?" Is there evidence in
fact? Is there in theory?
We can imagine some champion of the Muses pointing to the mass and
excellence of the poetry which has been created during the last hundred
years; to the work of Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Wordsworth, Shelley,
Byron, Keats, Coleridge, Scott, Beranger, Victor Hugo, De Musset,
Leopardi, Longfellow, Browning, Arnold, Tennyson, Morris; to the immense
and varied fertility, to the creative and emotional power, of makers
like these, displayed during the most "enlightened"--that is to say, we
presume, the most rationalistic and scientific--century the world has
yet passed through. We can imagine him asking whether, in all the past
history of the human race, so great a zeal for poetry, romantic,
lyrical-descriptive, speculative, has ever been manifested at once in
such force and width in England, Germany, France, America. And we can
fancy him completely satisfied with that single phenomenon. We can also
imagine him setting opinion against opinion, outweighing Macaulay with
the greater name of Wordsworth and Macaulay's disciples with the name of
Matthew Arnold. We can hear him answering the assertion that in "the
advance of civilization" poetry must necessarily decline, with the
declaration of the most single-hearted poet of our century, that "poetry
is the first and last of all knowledge--it is immortal as the heart of
man. If the labours of men of science should ever create any material
revolution, direct or indirect, in our condition, and in the impressions
which we habitually receive, the poet will sleep then no more than at
present; he will be ready to follow the steps of the man of science ...
carrying the sensation into the midst of the objects of the science
itself." And we can suppose our champion willing to abide in that faith,
because "the master hath said it."
But it is our present concern to go somewhat more closely to the heart
of the question, to consider without bias how much truth there really is
in this prediction that poetry must of necessity decline with the
advance of science and the "progress" of society.
Of the preliminary question what _is_ poetry, we may spare the
discussion. If there are those who are misled by words and who will
insist that poetry is simply identical with good expression in verse, it
will be impossible to say anything helpful to the sect. Nor, indeed,
will anything be needed, for they will entertain no apprehensions about
the future. Does not even Macaulay tell them that there will be
"abundance of verses, even of good ones"? With those, again, who accept
Macaulay's unspeakably miserable definition of poetry as "the art of
employing words in such a manner as to produce an illusion on the
imagination" we shall find no common footing. Nor need we dispute with
those who follow the thin dry criticism of Addison or Johnson, and who
imagine the poetical elements in poetry to consist of figures of speech,
images, and technical devices. It may well be, as Macaulay predicts,
that the enlightened world will indeed resent and cease to practise
"illusions" on the imagination, or on any other faculty. It may be the
case also that the stock poetical diction and mechanism of Addison's
time, with the "Delias" and "Phyllises," "nymphs," "swains," "lyres,"
and other tinsel elegancies in which it delights, will be--nay, are
already--the abomination of a discerning world. But if by "poetry" is
meant what should be meant--the vivid, impassioned and rhythmical
expression of rare emotions and exquisite thoughts, the revelation by
genius of the ideal and spiritual side of things, the crystallizing of
the floating and fugitive sentiments and aspirations of the contemporary
mind into clear aim and purpose by words of luminous beauty; if there is
meant a power which seizes and utters subtle truths "of man, of nature,
and of human life"; if there is meant the urgent desire and the power to
body forth by the imagination in exquisite language the shapes of things
unknown, things of beauty, glamour, pathos, or refreshment; if, as
Wordsworth once more puts it, "the objects of the poet's thoughts are
everywhere"; then, with those who maintain that poetry in this sense
must inevitably wither before the blighting touch of science and
democracy, we may join issue with a light heart. Assuredly the men of
science would be the first to rise in remonstrance at the charge that
the beauty, wonder and moral effluence of nature must all be from the
earth "with sighing sent" because contempt for them has been bred by the
familiarity of scientific knowledge.
And, first, is there any basis whatever in _history_ for the notion that
poetry flourishes best where enlightenment is least; that it is some
sort of noxious weed which cannot bear the intellectual sunshine? Do we
find the most consummate poets in a semi-barbarian world? Do we find our
Anglo-Saxon fore-fathers in this respect superior to Chaucer, Chaucer
superior to Shakespeare? Is Goethe the inferior of Hans Sachs in any
poetic quality, or still more the inferior of the nameless author of the
_Nibelungen Lied_? Is the verse of Caedmon of imagination more compact
than _Paradise Lost_? Or is the _Roman de la Rose_ more poetical, in any
sense ever attributed to the term, than _La Legende des Siecles_? No
one, however bold, will say "yes" to questions put with this undisguised
directness.
The poetical pessimists will not dispassionately examine plain facts.
They take English literature and point to the now remote date of
Shakespeare; they take Italian literature and remind us that Dante has
been dead nearly six centuries; they take the literature of Greece and
triumphantly observe that its greatest poet, Homer, was its earliest.
They ignore the essential fact that transcendent genius is the
phenomenon of a thousand years; that we must not demand a recurrence
even of second-rate genius in every generation or even in every century.
Without the altogether extraordinary genius of Shakespeare, English
poetry culminates, not in the age of Elizabeth, but in the nineteenth
century. Without the unique marvel of the mind of Dante, the poetry of
Italy is at its highest in the sixteenth century of Tasso and Ariosto,
not in the fourteenth century of the subtle amorist Petrarch. Remove the
one name of Homer, and you bring the crowning glory of Grecian poetry at
least three or four centuries later, to the era of Pindar, AEschylus, and
Sophocles. We cannot judge the laws of general progress by unique
instances of individual genius. These are the comets and meteors of the
literary heavens. To judge of a generation's capacity for poetry, we
must compare, not a Shakespeare with a Shelley or a Wordsworth, but the
_average_ spirit, the average power of insight and expression, of
Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Marlowe and Jonson, with those of
Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron and Keats. And who will maintain,
that in force of imagination, in truth of vision, in grasp of the ideal
side of things, in beautiful expression of elusive thoughts, in lyric
rapture, the Elizabethans are equal to the Georgian and Victorian poets?
Our own day is, we boast, the age of light and reason. The days of
Chaucer were times of childlike ignorance, credulity, _naivete_. Yet who
will tell us that Tennyson looks out on nature or on man with a colder,
less imaginative, eye than Chaucer? That the advances of science have
made him gaze less lovingly, less wonderingly, upon any created thing?
That the progress of philosophy has hardened Browning's heart to
accesses of passion, or cramped his creative imagination? And yet it
should be so, if enlightenment means decay of poetry.
Science, we are told, and philosophy are but an inclement atmosphere for
poetry to thrive in. Their spiteful frost nips the young buds and tender
shoots of imagination, of fancy, of "sentiment." Well, at what date was
modern science born? At what date philosophy? Does philosophy date from
Kant, or from Bacon, or from Plato? Does modern science begin with
Darwin, with Newton, with Copernicus, or with Aristotle? Let us, for
argument's sake, accept the common account that the age _par excellence_
of science and philosophy began in England, in France, in Germany,
somewhere about the end of the seventeenth century. Since that time we
have doubtless discovered and elaborated many a detail. None the less
the air of all the eighteenth century was full of scientific inquiry and
mechanical invention, full of philosophical discussion, full of
religious and moral scepticism. If ever there was an age when it looked
to the pessimist as if science and philosophy would change the aspect of
nature and the heart of man, it was that eighteenth century. Now note
that, if some holder of Macaulay's view had risen up in the year 1770
or thereabouts, he might have addressed his contemporaries to great
effect in words like these: "The age of philosophy and science is upon
us all, and poetry is dead. See how in Germany not a single worthy note
of a poet's singing is heard amid the din of critics, philosophers,
jurists, scientists. See how in France we find historians,
letter-writers, philosophers, moralists, but not a verse worth hearing
since the dry-light prose-versicles of Voltaire. Observe how in England
our so-called poetry is but prose sawed into lines of five feet each,
and contains not one drop of the sap of nature, unless it be some
suggestion in Thomson and a half-ashamed trace in Collins or in Gray. As
for the last really great figure, Pope, and all his rhyming brood, they
are but arguers, critics, moralists, describers, satirists in verse.
They show no inspiration, and could show none, because science and
reasoning forbade it to them. The wings of their imaginations are
cropped close by the hard facts and knowledge of our time. Let us cry
_Ichabod_ over poetry, for its glory is departed, and departed for
ever."
It would scarcely have been an unnatural thing for an observant lover of
poetry at that date to make such a speech, and, without the light of
later experience, it would have been impossible to confute him. Yet had
that same man lived the length of another human life, seen still more
scientists make their steps forward in discovery, seen another crop of
even subtler philosophers at their analytic work, witnessed the "Triumph
of Reason and Democracy" in the shape of the French Revolution:--had he
lived to see all this, he would have beheld meanwhile something which
shows how fallible is prophecy. He would have seen, to wit, a most
marvellous, rich and widespread outburst of the strenuous natural poetry
he thought dead. From amid the critical rationalism of Germany would
come the fullest, most fervid voices of poetry with which that land had
ever echoed--voices full of vigour and passion, full of imagination and
music, singing of romance and story, of nature and man and human
life--the voices of Lessing, Schiller, Goethe, Heine, Wieland. From
France would be heard Beranger's stirring songs and the deepening
romantic notes of Lamartine and Victor Hugo. From Scotland would sound
the passionate song of Burns and later the romantic lays of Scott; and
soon would arise in England the graver tones of Wordsworth, Nature's
high-priest, the deep, half-romantic, half-religious music of the mystic
Coleridge, the fiery ecstasies of Shelley, the rebellious melancholies
of Byron, the sensuous raptures of Keats,--these and other tones of less
compass or less power.
And as our mistaken pessimist listens, what then becomes of his theory
that science and philosophy have killed the poet in mankind? Might not
some reasoner of the more cheerful school urge in triumph just the
contrary? Might he not say that it was precisely the new light shed by
the dawning Renaissance which elicited the poetry of Dante's day? That
it was precisely the flood of illumination on English thought in the
sixteenth century which called forth the Elizabethan outburst? That it
was precisely the eminent scientific and critical toiling of the
eighteenth century which led up to that pronounced and unanimous
romantic movement of recent times in England, Germany and France? We
need not at present strongly urge that argument. It is enough to have
shown the unsoundness of its contrary.
It may, however, be answered that science hitherto is only a preface to
what is to come, that even the last generation of discovery is nothing
in comparison with the expansion of our knowledge and the enslavement of
natural forces which must be looked for in the years on which we enter.
Well, we are not sure of that. It has been a foible of many an era to
think itself remarkable as a time when "the world's great age begins
anew." But let us grant, if you choose, that we are moving into an
incomparable age of scientific light and clearness, and at the same time
of unprecedented social change. Is it necessary that this clear light of
science should be dry and cold? And is it inevitable that the destined
social existence shall be arid and hard, cramping, drab, and dreary?
Will analysis destroy all wonder, or classification annihilate all
beauty? And will human nature be so transformed by some system of social
contract that a man will no longer feel love or grief, or any other of
those emotions which have been his, and increasingly his, since the days
of Adam?
There is, we have seen, no basis in history for assuming that poetry
will cease. Is there any ground in speculation? The assertion goes that
imagination will be shrivelled by the chill of scientific practicality,
that minds trained and informed by physical and mental science will
possess too overpowering a sense of logic, too habitual a consciousness
of the matter-of-fact, to indulge in the visions and imaginings which
are supposed to be the life of poetry. It is urged that, when every inch
of the world has rendered its hard statistics to the blue-books, and
when the variety of the nations has disappeared before common appliances
and familiar intercourse, there will be nothing to stimulate the
romantic fancy, nay, romance in any sort will but come into conflict
with man's ever-present realization of actual conditions.
Is this the just account? Is it just to the meaning of "poetry" or just
to the nature of mankind?
One might perhaps fall back on what a man of science declared to Mr.
Stedman: "The conquest of mystery leads to greater mystery: the more we
know, the greater the material for the imagination." Or one might assert
by right of intuition that, in face of the new world of science, we
shall feel as Shakespeare's Miranda felt in the presence of new
realities:--
O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That hath such people in't!
We too may expect to call it a "brave new world," to exclaim "how
beauteous"--and not only how beauteous, but how awesome--"Nature is!"
"how many goodly creatures are there here!" And in this goodliness,
beauty, and awesomeness poetry will find unfailing material, while it
seeks to express the emotions they evoke and to relate them with power
to man's inner life. The objects of poetry are everywhere; and
Wordsworth, who should know, if any one can know, will have it that "the
remotest discoveries of the chemist, the botanist or mineralogist will
be as proper objects of the poet's art as any upon which it can be
employed."
One might, then, simply fall back on statements such as these. But we
need a closer treatment. We require to see in what manner poetry and
science will work side by side as partners and not, as enemies, struggle
with each other until poetry is exterminated.
Whatever the future may be like, there are, and will be, two sides to
human life. There is the material, commonplace, and in a sense, vulgar
existence; there is also life's ideal side. Give a man, who is a man
and not a mere biped animal, all the comforts and enjoyments of physical
life, good food, good habitation, safety and health, even a clear
intellect, and give him nothing else. Would he not scorn and weary of
such a life as that, which merely adds empty day to empty day, so many
ciphers of existence, which, after all, amount to nothing? There is in
man, just in proportion as he rises above the beasts, a demand for
something which he holds more vital, for the things of the mind and
spirit. We live, not by bread alone, but "we live by admiration, hope
and love." Man must have ideals and aspirations and mental ecstasies.
And this, in other words, means that he must live the poetical as well
as the material half of life.
What is our own state of mind--yours and mine--when we contemplate the
threatened unpoetical future? Is it not one of alarm and disgust? Do we
not almost rejoice to think that we ourselves shall not live to shiver
in its bleakness? When we contemplate such a time, we say with
Wordsworth--
Great God, I'd rather be
A pagan, suckled in a creed outworn,
So might I, standing on the pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn