If, from vocal music, we now pass to instrumental, we may have a

specimen of musical oratory in any fine military symphony or march:

while the poetry of music seems to have attained its consummation in

Beethoven's Overture to Egmont, so wonderful in its mixed expression

of grandeur and melancholy.

In the arts which speak to the eye, the same distinctions will be

found to hold, not only between poetry and oratory, but between

poetry, oratory, narrative, and simple imitation or description.

Pure description is exemplified in a mere portrait or a mere

landscape--productions of art, it is true, but of the mechanical

rather than of the fine arts, being works of simple imitation, not

creation. We say, a mere portrait, or a mere landscape, because it is

possible for a portrait or a landscape, without ceasing to be such, to

be also a picture; like Turner's landscapes, and the great portraits

by Titian or Vandyke.

Whatever in painting or sculpture expresses human feeling--or

character, which is only a certain state of feeling grown

habitual--may be called, according to circumstances, the poetry, or

the eloquence, of the painter's or the sculptor's art: the poetry, if

the feeling declares itself by such signs as escape from us when we

are unconscious of being seen; the oratory, if the signs are those we

use for the purpose of voluntary communication.

The narrative style answers to what is called historical painting,

which it is the fashion among connoisseurs to treat as the climax of

the pictorial art. That it is the most difficult branch of the art we

do not doubt, because, in its perfection, it includes the perfection

of all the other branches: as in like manner an epic poem, though in

so far as it is epic (i. e. narrative) it is not poetry at all, is yet

esteemed the greatest effort of poetic genius, because there is no

kind whatever of poetry which may not appropriately find a place in

it. But an historical picture as such, that is, as the representation

of an incident, must necessarily, as it seems to us, be poor and

ineffective. The narrative powers of painting are extremely limited.

Scarcely any picture, scarcely even any series of pictures, tells its

own story without the aid of an interpreter. But it is the single

figures which, to us, are the great charm even of an historical

picture. It is in these that the power of the art is really seen. In

the attempt to narrate, visible and permanent signs are too far behind

the fugitive audible ones, which follow so fast one after another,

while the faces and figures in a narrative picture, even though they

be Titian's, stand still. Who would not prefer one Virgin and Child of

Raphael, to all the pictures which Rubens, with his fat, frouzy Dutch

Venuses, ever painted? Though Rubens, besides excelling almost every

one in his mastery over the mechanical parts of his art, often shows

real genius in _grouping_ his figures, the peculiar problem of

historical painting. But then, who, except a mere student of drawing

and colouring, ever cared to look twice at any of the figures

themselves? The power of painting lies in poetry, of which Rubens had

not the slightest tincture--not in narrative, wherein he might have

excelled.

The single figures, however, in an historical picture, are rather the

eloquence of painting than the poetry: they mostly (unless they are

quite out of place in the picture) express the feelings of one person

as modified by the presence of others. Accordingly the minds whose

bent leads them rather to eloquence than to poetry, rush to historical

painting. The French painters, for instance, seldom attempt, because

they could make nothing of, single heads, like those glorious ones of

the Italian masters, with which they might feed themselves day after

day in their own Louvre. They must all be historical; and they are,

almost to a man, attitudinizers. If we wished to give any young

artist the most impressive warning our imagination could devise

against that kind of vice in the pictorial, which corresponds to rant

in the histrionic art, we would advise him to walk once up and once

down the gallery of the Luxembourg. Every figure in French painting or

statuary seems to be showing itself off before spectators; they are

not poetical, but in the worst style of corrupted eloquence.

II

_Nascitur Poeta_ is a maxim of classical antiquity, which has passed

to these latter days with less questioning than most of the doctrines

of that early age. When it originated, the human faculties were

occupied, fortunately for posterity, less in examining how the works

of genius are created, than in creating them: and the adage, probably,

had no higher source than the tendency common among mankind to

consider all power which is not visibly the effect of practice, all

skill which is not capable of being reduced to mechanical rules, as

the result of a peculiar gift. Yet this aphorism, born in the infancy

of psychology, will perhaps be found, now when that science is in its

adolescence, to be as true as an epigram ever is, that is, to contain

some truth: truth, however, which has been so compressed and bent out

of shape, in order to tie it up into so small a knot of only two words

that it requires an almost infinite amount of unrolling and laying

straight, before it will resume its just proportions.

We are not now intending to remark upon the grosser misapplications of

this ancient maxim, which have engendered so many races of

poetasters. The days are gone by when every raw youth whose borrowed

phantasies have set themselves to a borrowed tune, mistaking, as

Coleridge says, an ardent desire of poetic reputation for poetic

genius, while unable to disguise from himself that he had taken no

means whereby he might _become_ a poet, could fancy himself a born

one. Those who would reap without sowing, and gain the victory without

fighting the battle, are ambitious now of another sort of distinction,

and are born novelists, or public speakers, not poets. And the wiser

thinkers understand and acknowledge that poetic excellence is subject

to the same necessary conditions with any other mental endowment; and

that to no one of the spiritual benefactors of mankind is a higher or

a more assiduous intellectual culture needful than to the poet. It is

true, he possesses this advantage over others who use the 'instrument

of words', that, of the truths which he utters, a larger proportion

are derived from personal consciousness, and a smaller from

philosophic investigation. But the power itself of discriminating

between what really is consciousness, and what is only a process of

inference completed in a single instant--and the capacity of

distinguishing whether that of which the mind is conscious be an

eternal truth, or but a dream--are among the last results of the most

matured and perfect intellect. Not to mention, that the poet, no more

than any other person who writes, confines himself altogether to

intuitive truths, nor has any means of communicating even these but by

words, every one of which derives all its power of conveying a

meaning, from a whole host of acquired notions, and facts learnt by

study and experience.

Nevertheless, it seems undeniable in point of fact, and consistent

with the principles of a sound metaphysics, that there are poetic

_natures_. There is a mental and physical constitution or temperament,

peculiarly fitted for poetry. This temperament will not of itself make

a poet, no more than the soil will the fruit; and as good fruit may be

raised by culture from indifferent soils, so may good poetry from

naturally unpoetical minds. But the poetry of one who is a poet by

nature, will be clearly and broadly distinguishable from the poetry of

mere culture. It may not be truer; it may not be more useful; but it

will be different: fewer will appreciate it, even though many should

affect to do so; but in those few it will find a keener sympathy, and

will yield them a deeper enjoyment.

One may write genuine poetry, and not be a poet; for whosoever writes

out truly any human feeling, writes poetry. All persons, even the most

unimaginative, in moments of strong emotion, speak poetry; and hence

the drama is poetry, which else were always prose, except when a poet

is one of the characters. What _is_ poetry, but the thoughts and words

in which emotion spontaneously embodies itself? As there are few who

are not, at least for some moments and in some situations, capable of

some strong feeling, poetry is natural to most persons at some period

of their lives. And any one whose feelings are genuine, though but of

the average strength,--if he be not diverted by uncongenial thoughts

or occupations from the indulgence of them, and if he acquire by

culture, as all persons may, the faculty of delineating them

correctly,--has it in his power to be a poet, so far as a life passed

in writing unquestionable poetry may be considered to confer that

title. But _ought_ it to do so? Yes, perhaps, in a collection of

'British Poets'. But 'poet' is the name also of a variety of man, not

solely of the author of a particular variety of book: now, to have

written whole volumes of real poetry is possible to almost all kinds

of characters, and implies no greater peculiarity of mental

construction, than to be the author of a history, or a novel.

Whom, then, shall we call poets? Those who are so constituted, that

emotions are the links of association by which their ideas, both

sensuous and spiritual, are connected together. This constitution

belongs (within certain limits) to all in whom poetry is a pervading

principle. In all others, poetry is something extraneous and

superinduced: something out of themselves, foreign to the habitual

course of their every-day lives and characters; a world to which they

may make occasional visits, but where they are sojourners, not

dwellers, and which, when out of it, or even when in it, they think

of, peradventure, but as a phantom-world, a place of _ignes fatui_ and

spectral illusions. Those only who have the peculiarity of association

which we have mentioned, and which is a natural though not a universal

consequence of intense sensibility, instead of seeming not themselves

when they are uttering poetry, scarcely seem themselves when uttering

anything to which poetry is foreign. Whatever be the thing which they

are contemplating, if it be capable of connecting itself with their

emotions, the aspect under which it first and most naturally paints

itself to them, is its poetic aspect. The poet of culture sees his

object in prose, and describes it in poetry; the poet of nature

actually sees it in poetry.

This point is perhaps worth some little illustration; the rather, as

metaphysicians (the ultimate arbiters of all philosophical criticism),

while they have busied themselves for two thousand years, more or

less, about the few _universal_ laws of human nature, have strangely

neglected the analysis of its _diversities_. Of these, none lie deeper

or reach further than the varieties which difference of nature and of

education makes in what may be termed the habitual bond of

association. In a mind entirely uncultivated, which is also without

any strong feelings, objects whether of sense or of intellect arrange

themselves in the mere casual order in which they have been seen,

heard, or otherwise perceived. Persons of this sort may be said to

think chronologically. If they remember a fact, it is by reason of a

fortuitous coincidence with some trifling incident or circumstance

which took place at the very time. If they have a story to tell, or

testimony to deliver in a witness-box, their narrative must follow the

exact order in which the events took place: _dodge_ them, and the

thread of association is broken; they cannot go on. Their

associations, to use the language of philosophers, are chiefly of the

successive, not the synchronous kind, and whether successive or

synchronous, are mostly casual.

To the man of science, again, or of business, objects group themselves

according to the artificial classifications which the understanding

has voluntarily made for the convenience of thought or of practice.

But where any of the impressions are vivid and intense, the

associations into which these enter are the ruling ones: it being a

well-known law of association, that the stronger a feeling is, the

more quickly and strongly it associates itself with any other object

or feeling. Where, therefore, nature has given strong feelings, and

education has not created factitious tendencies stronger than the

natural ones, the prevailing associations will be those which connect

objects and ideas with emotions, and with each other through the

intervention of emotions. Thoughts and images will be linked together,

according to the similarity of the feelings which cling to them. A

thought will introduce a thought by first introducing a feeling which

is allied with it. At the centre of each group of thoughts or images

will be found a feeling; and the thoughts or images will be there only

because the feeling was there. The combinations which the mind puts

together, the pictures which it paints, the wholes which Imagination

constructs out of the materials supplied by Fancy, will be indebted to

some dominant _feeling_, not as in other natures to a dominant

_thought_, for their unity and consistency of character, for what

distinguishes them from incoherencies.

The difference, then, between the poetry of a poet, and the poetry of

a cultivated but not naturally poetic mind, is, that in the latter,

with however bright a halo of feeling the thought may be surrounded

and glorified, the thought itself is always the conspicuous object;

while the poetry of a poet is Feeling itself, employing Thought only

as the medium of its expression. In the one, feeling waits upon

thought; in the other, thought upon feeling. The one writer has a

distinct aim, common to him with any other didactic author; he desires

to convey the thought, and he conveys it clothed in the feelings which

it excites in himself, or which he deems most appropriate to it. The

other merely pours forth the overflowing of his feelings; and all the

thoughts which those feelings suggest are floated promiscuously along

the stream.

It may assist in rendering our meaning intelligible, if we illustrate

it by a parallel between the two English authors of our own day who

have produced the greatest quantity of true and enduring poetry,

Wordsworth and Shelley. Apter instances could not be wished for; the

one might be cited as the type, the _exemplar_, of what the poetry of

culture may accomplish: the other as perhaps the most striking example

ever known of the poetic temperament. How different, accordingly, is

the poetry of these two great writers! In Wordsworth, the poetry is

almost always the mere setting of a thought. The thought may be more

valuable than the setting, or it may be less valuable, but there can

be no question as to which was first in his mind: what he is impressed

with, and what he is anxious to impress, is some proposition, more or

less distinctly conceived; some truth, or something which he deems

such. He lets the thought dwell in his mind, till it excites, as is

the nature of thought, other thoughts, and also such feelings as the

measure of his sensibility is adequate to supply. Among these thoughts

and feelings, had he chosen a different walk of authorship (and there

are many in which he might equally have excelled), he would probably

have made a different selection of media for enforcing the parent

thought: his habits, however, being those of poetic composition, he

selects in preference the strongest feelings, and the thoughts with

which most of feeling is naturally or habitually connected. His

poetry, therefore, may be defined to be, his thoughts, coloured by,

and impressing themselves by means of, emotions. Such poetry,

Wordsworth has occupied a long life in producing. And well and wisely

has he so done. Criticisms, no doubt, may be made occasionally both

upon the thoughts themselves, and upon the skill he has demonstrated

in the choice of his media: for an affair of skill and study, in the

most rigorous sense, it evidently was. But he has not laboured in

vain; he has exercised, and continues to exercise, a powerful, and

mostly a highly beneficial influence over the formation and growth of

not a few of the most cultivated and vigorous of the youthful minds of

our time, over whose heads poetry of the opposite description would

have flown, for want of an original organization, physical or mental,

in sympathy with it.

On the other hand, Wordsworth's poetry is never bounding, never

ebullient; has little even of the appearance of spontaneousness: the

well is never so full that it overflows. There is an air of calm

deliberateness about all he writes, which is not characteristic of the

poetic temperament: his poetry seems one thing, himself another; he

seems to be poetical because he wills to be so, not because he cannot

help it: did he will to dismiss poetry, he need never again, it might

almost seem, have a poetical thought. He never seems _possessed_ by

any feeling; no emotion seems ever so strong as to have entire sway,

for the time being, over the current of his thoughts. He never, even

for the space of a few stanzas, appears entirely given up to

exultation, or grief, or pity, or love, or admiration, or devotion, or

even animal spirits. He now and then, though seldom, attempts to write

as if he were: and never, we think, without leaving an impression of

poverty: as the brook which on nearly level ground quite fills its

banks, appears but a thread when running rapidly down a precipitous

declivity. He has feeling enough to form a decent, graceful, even

beautiful decoration to a thought which is in itself interesting and

moving; but not so much as suffices to stir up the soul by mere

sympathy with itself in its simplest manifestation, nor enough to

summon up that array of 'thoughts of power' which in a richly stored

mind always attends the call of really intense feeling. It is for this

reason, doubtless, that the genius of Wordsworth is essentially

unlyrical. Lyric poetry, as it was the earliest kind, is also, if the

view we are now taking of poetry be correct, more eminently and

peculiarly poetry than any other: it is the poetry most natural to a

really poetic temperament, and least capable of being successfully

imitated by one not so endowed by nature.

Shelley is the very reverse of all this. Where Wordsworth is strong,

he is weak; where Wordsworth is weak, he is strong. Culture, that

culture by which Wordsworth has reared from his own inward nature the

richest harvest ever brought forth by a soil of so little depth, is

precisely what was wanting to Shelley: or let us rather say, he had

not, at the period of his deplorably early death, reached sufficiently

far in that intellectual progression of which he was capable, and

which, if it has done so much for greatly inferior natures, might have

made of him the most perfect, as he was already the most gifted of our

poets. For him, voluntary mental discipline had done little: the

vividness of his emotions and of his sensations had done all. He

seldom follows up an idea; it starts into life, summons from the

fairy-land of his inexhaustible fancy some three or four bold images,

then vanishes, and straight he is off on the wings of some casual

association into quite another sphere. He had scarcely yet acquired

the consecutiveness of thought necessary for a long poem; his more

ambitious compositions too often resemble the scattered fragments of a

mirror; colours brilliant as life, single images without end, but no

picture. It is only when under the overruling influence of some one

state of feeling, either actually experienced, or summoned up in the

vividness of reality by a fervid imagination, that he writes as a

great poet; unity of feeling being to him the harmonizing principle

which a central idea is to minds of another class, and supplying the

coherency and consistency which would else have been wanting. Thus it

is in many of his smaller, and especially his lyrical poems. They are

obviously written to exhale, perhaps to relieve, a state of feeling,

or of conception of feeling, almost oppressive from its vividness. The

thoughts and imagery are suggested by the feeling, and are such as it

finds unsought. The state of feeling may be either of soul or of

sense, or oftener (might we not say invariably?) of both: for the

poetic temperament is usually, perhaps always, accompanied by

exquisite senses. The exciting cause may be either an object or an

idea. But whatever of sensation enters into the feeling, must not be

local, or consciously organic; it is a condition of the whole frame,

not of a part only. Like the state of sensation produced by a fine

climate, or indeed like all strongly pleasurable or painful sensations

in an impassioned nature, it pervades the entire nervous system.

States of feeling, whether sensuous or spiritual, which thus possess

the whole being, are the fountains of that which we have called the

poetry of poets; and which is little else than a pouring forth of the

thoughts and images that pass across the mind while some permanent

state of feeling is occupying it.

To the same original fineness of organization, Shelley was doubtless

indebted for another of his rarest gifts, that exuberance of imagery,

which when unrepressed, as in many of his poems it is, amounts to a

fault. The susceptibility of his nervous system, which made his

emotions intense, made also the impressions of his external senses

deep and clear; and agreeably to the law of association by which, as

already remarked, the strongest impressions are those which associate

themselves the most easily and strongly, these vivid sensations were

readily recalled to mind by all objects or thoughts which had

co-existed with them, and by all feelings which in any degree

resembled them. Never did a fancy so teem with sensuous imagery as

Shelley's. Wordsworth economizes an image, and detains it until he has

distilled all the poetry out of it, and it will not yield a drop more:

Shelley lavishes his with a profusion which is unconscious because it

is inexhaustible.

If, then, the maxim _Nascitur poeta_ mean, either that the power of

producing poetical compositions is a peculiar faculty which the poet

brings into the world with him, which grows with his growth like any

of his bodily powers, and is as independent of culture as his height,

and his complexion; or that any natural peculiarity whatever is

implied in producing poetry, real poetry, and in any quantity--such

poetry too, as, to the majority of educated and intelligent readers,

shall appear quite as good as, or even better than, any other; in

either sense the doctrine is false. And nevertheless, there _is_

poetry which could not emanate but from a mental and physical

constitution peculiar, not in the kind, but in the degree of its

susceptibility: a constitution which makes its possessor capable of

greater happiness than mankind in general, and also of greater

unhappiness; and because greater, so also more various. And such

poetry, to all who know enough of nature to own it as being in nature,

is much more poetry, is poetry in a far higher sense, than any other;

since the common element of all poetry, that which constitutes poetry,

human feeling, enters far more largely into this than into the poetry

of culture. Not only because the natures which we have called

poetical, really feel more, and consequently have more feeling to

express; but because, the capacity of feeling being so great, feeling,

when excited and not voluntarily resisted, seizes the helm of their

thoughts, and the succession of ideas and images becomes the mere

utterance of an emotion; not, as in other natures, the emotion a mere

ornamental colouring of the thought.

Ordinary education and the ordinary course of life are constantly at

work counteracting this quality of mind, and substituting habits more

suitable to their own ends: if instead of substituting they were

content to superadd, there would be nothing to complain of. But when

will education consist, not in repressing any mental faculty or power,

from the uncontrolled action of which danger is apprehended, but in

training up to its proper strength the corrective and antagonist

power?

In whomsoever the quality which we have described exists, and is not

stifled, that person is a poet. Doubtless he is a greater poet in

proportion as the fineness of his perceptions, whether of sense or of

internal consciousness, furnishes him with an ampler supply of lovely

images--the vigour and richness of his intellect, with a greater

abundance of moving thoughts. For it is through these thoughts and

images that the feeling speaks, and through their impressiveness that

it impresses itself, and finds response in other hearts; and from

these media of transmitting it (contrary to the laws of physical

nature) increase of intensity is reflected back upon the feeling

itself. But all these it is possible to have, and not be a poet; they

are mere materials, which the poet shares in common with other people.

What constitutes the poet is not the imagery nor the thoughts, nor

even the feelings, but the law according to which they are called up.

He is a poet, not because he has ideas of any particular kind, but

because the succession of big ideas is subordinate to the course of

his emotions.

Many who have never acknowledged this in theory, bear testimony to it

in their particular judgements. In listening to an oration, or reading

a written discourse not professedly poetical, when do we begin to feel

that the speaker or author is putting off the character of the orator

or the prose writer, and is passing into the poet? Not when he begins

to show strong feeling; _then_ we merely say, he is in earnest, he

feels what he says; still less when he expresses himself in imagery;

then, unless illustration be manifestly his sole object, we are apt to

say, this is affectation. It is when the feeling (instead of passing

away, or, if it continue, letting the train of thoughts run on

exactly as they would have done if there were no influence at work but

the mere intellect) becomes itself the originator of another train of

association, which expels or blends with the former; when (for

example) either his words, or the mode of their arrangement, are such

as we spontaneously use only when in a state of excitement, proving

that the mind is at least as much occupied by a passive state of its

own feelings, as by the desire of attaining the premeditated end which

the discourse has in view.[35]

[35] And this, we may remark by the way, seems to point to

the true theory of poetic diction; and to suggest the true

answer to as much as is erroneous of Wordsworth's celebrated

doctrine on that subject. For on the one hand, _all_ language

which is the natural expression of feeling, is really

poetical, and will be felt as such, apart from conventional

associations; but on the other, whenever intellectual culture

has afforded a choice between several modes of expressing the

same emotion, the stronger the feeling is, the more naturally

and certainly will it prefer the language which is most

peculiarly appropriated to itself, and kept sacred from the

contact of more vulgar objects of contemplation.

Our judgements of authors who lay actual claim to the title of poets,

follow the same principle. Whenever, after a writer's meaning is fully

understood, it is still matter of reasoning and discussion whether he

is a poet or not, he will be found to be wanting in the characteristic

peculiarity of association so often adverted to. When, on the

contrary, after reading or hearing one or two passages, we

instinctively and without hesitation cry out, 'This is a poet', the

probability is, that the passages are strongly marked with this

peculiar quality. And we may add that in such case, a critic who, not

having sufficient feeling to respond to the poetry, is also without

sufficient philosophy to understand it though he feel it not, will be

apt to pronounce, not 'this is prose', but 'this is exaggeration',

'this is mysticism', or, 'this is nonsense'.

Although a philosopher cannot, by culture, make himself, in the

peculiar sense in which we now use the term, a poet, unless at least

he have that peculiarity of nature which would probably have made

poetry his earliest pursuit; a poet may always, by culture, make

himself a philosopher. The poetic laws of association are by no means

incompatible with the more ordinary laws; are by no means such as

_must_ have their course, even though a deliberate purpose require

their suspension. If the peculiarities of the poetic temperament were

uncontrollable in any poet, they might be supposed so in Shelley; yet

how powerfully, in the _Cenci_, does he coerce and restrain all the

characteristic qualities of his genius; what severe simplicity, in

place of his usual barbaric splendour; how rigidly does he keep the

feelings and the imagery in subordination to the thought.

The investigation of nature requires no habits or qualities of mind,

but such as may always be acquired by industry and mental activity.

Because at one time the mind may be so given up to a state of feeling,

that the succession of its ideas is determined by the present

enjoyment or suffering which pervades it, this is no reason but that

in the calm retirement of study, when under no peculiar excitement

either of the outward or of the inward sense, it may form any

combinations, or pursue any trains of ideas, which are most conducive

to the purposes of philosophic inquiry; and may, while in that state,

form deliberate convictions, from which no excitement will afterwards

make it swerve. Might we not go even further than this? We shall not

pause to ask whether it be not a misunderstanding of the nature of

passionate feeling to imagine that it is inconsistent with calmness;

whether they who so deem of it, do not mistake passion in the militant

or antagonistic state, for the type of passion universally; do not

confound passion struggling towards an outward object, with passion

brooding over itself. But without entering into this deeper

investigation; that capacity of strong feeling, which is supposed

necessarily to disturb the judgement, is also the material out of

which all _motives_ are made; the motives, consequently, which lead

human beings to the pursuit of truth. The greater the individual's

capability of happiness and of misery, the stronger interest has that

individual in arriving at truth; and when once that interest is felt,

an impassioned nature is sure to pursue this, as to pursue any other

object, with greater ardour; for energy of character is commonly the

offspring of strong feeling. If, therefore, the most impassioned

natures do not ripen into the most powerful intellects, it is always

from defect of culture, or something wrong in the circumstances by

which the being has originally or successively been surrounded.

Undoubtedly strong feelings require a strong intellect to carry them,

as more sail requires more ballast: and when, from neglect, or bad

education, that strength is wanting, no wonder if the grandest and

swiftest vessels make the most utter wreck.

Where, as in some of our older poets, a poetic nature has been united

with logical and scientific culture, the peculiarity of association

arising from the finer nature so perpetually alternates with the

associations attainable by commoner natures trained to high

perfection, that its own particular law is not so conspicuously

characteristic of the result produced, as in a poet like Shelley, to

whom systematic intellectual culture, in a measure proportioned to the

intensity of his own nature, has been wanting. Whether the superiority

will naturally be on the side of the philosopher-poet or of the mere

poet--whether the writings of the one ought, as a whole, to be truer,

and their influence more beneficent, than those of the other--is too

obvious in principle to need statement: it would be absurd to doubt

whether two endowments are better than one; whether truth is more

certainly arrived at by two processes, verifying and correcting each

other, than by one alone. Unfortunately, in practice the matter is not

quite so simple; there the question often is, which is least

prejudicial to the intellect, uncultivation or malcultivation. For, as

long as education consists chiefly of the mere inculcation of

traditional opinions, many of which, from the mere fact that the human

intellect has not yet reached perfection, must necessarily be false;

so long as even those who are best taught, are rather taught to know

the thoughts of others than to think, it is not always clear that the

poet of acquired ideas has the advantage over him whose feeling has

been his sole teacher. For the depth and durability of wrong as well

as of right impressions is proportional to the fineness of the

material; and they who have the greatest capacity of natural feeling

are generally those whose artificial feelings are the strongest.

Hence, doubtless, among other reasons, it is, that in an age of

revolutions in opinion, the co-temporary poets, those at least who

deserve the name, those who have any individuality of character, if

they are not before their age, are almost sure to be behind it. An

observation curiously verified all over Europe in the present century.

Nor let it be thought disparaging. However urgent may be the necessity

for a breaking up of old modes of belief, the most strong-minded and

discerning, next to those who head the movement, are generally those

who bring up the rear of it.

WALTER BAGEHOT

1826-1877

WORDSWORTH, TENNYSON, AND BROWNING

OR

PURE, ORNATE, AND GROTESQUE ART IN ENGLISH POETRY (1864)

_Enoch Arden, &c._ By Alfred Tennyson, D.C.L., Poet Laureate.

_Dramatis Personae._ By Robert Browning.

We couple these two books together, not because of their likeness, for

they are as dissimilar as books can be, nor on account of the eminence

of their authors, for in general two great authors are too much for

one essay, but because they are the best possible illustration of

something we have to say upon poetical art--because they may give to

it life and freshness. The accident of contemporaneous publication has

here brought together two books, very characteristic of modern art,

and we want to show how they are characteristic.

Neither English poetry nor English criticism have ever recovered the

_eruption_ which they both made at the beginning of this century into

the fashionable world. The poems of Lord Byron were received with an

avidity that resembles our present avidity for sensation novels, and

were read by a class which at present reads little but such novels.

Old men who remember those days may be heard to say, 'We hear nothing

of poetry nowadays; it seems quite down.' And 'down' it certainly is,

if for poetry it be a descent to be no longer the favourite excitement

of the more frivolous part of the 'upper' world. That stimulating

poetry is now little read. A stray schoolboy may still be detected in

a wild admiration for the _Giaour_ or the _Corsair_ (and it is

suitable to his age, and he should not be reproached for it), but the

_real_ posterity--the quiet students of a past literature--never read

them or think of them. A line or two linger in the memory; a few

telling strokes of occasional and felicitous energy are quoted, but

this is all. As wholes, these exaggerated stories were worthless; they

taught nothing, and, therefore, they are forgotten. If nowadays a

dismal poet were, like Byron, to lament the fact of his birth, and to

hint that he was too good for the world, the _Saturday Review_ would

say that 'they doubted if he _was_ too good; that a sulky poet was a

questionable addition to a tolerable world; that he need not have been

born, as far as they were concerned.' Doubtless, there is much in

Byron besides his dismal exaggeration, but it was that exaggeration

which made 'the sensation', which gave him a wild moment of dangerous

fame. As so often happens, the cause of his momentary fashion is the

cause also of his lasting oblivion. Moore's former reputation was less

excessive, yet it has not been more permanent. The prettiness of a few

songs preserves the memory of his name, but as a poet to _read_ he is

forgotten. There is nothing to read in him; no exquisite thought, no

sublime feeling, no consummate description of true character. Almost

the sole result of the poetry of that time is the harm which it has

done. It degraded for a time the whole character of the art. It said

by practice, by a most efficient and successful practice, that it was

the aim, the _duty_ of poets, to catch the attention of the passing,

the fashionable, the busy world. If a poem 'fell dead', it was

nothing; it was composed to please the 'London' of the year, and if

that London did not like it, why, it had failed. It fixed upon the

minds of a whole generation, it engraved in popular memory and

tradition, a vague conviction that poetry is but one of the many

_amusements_ for the light classes, for the lighter hours of all

classes. The mere notion, the bare idea, that poetry is a deep thing,

a teaching thing, the most surely and wisely elevating of human

things, is even now to the coarse public mind nearly unknown.

As was the fate of poetry, so inevitably was that of criticism. The

science that expounds which poetry is good and which is bad is

dependent for its popular reputation on the popular estimate of poetry

itself. The critics of that day had _a_ day, which is more than can be

said for some since; they professed to tell the fashionable world in

what books it would find new pleasure, and therefore they were read by

the fashionable world. Byron counted the critic and poet equal. The

_Edinburgh Review_ penetrated among the young, and into places of

female resort where it does not go now. As people ask, 'Have you read

_Henry Dunbar_? and what do you think of it?' so they then asked,

'Have you read the _Giaour_? and what do you think of it?' Lord

Jeffrey, a shrewd judge of the world, employed himself in telling it

what to think; not so much what it ought to think, as what at bottom

it did think, and so by dexterous sympathy with current society he

gained contemporary fame and power. Such fame no critic must hope for

now. His articles will not penetrate where the poems themselves do not

penetrate. When poetry was noisy, criticism was loud; now poetry is a

still small voice, and criticism must be smaller and stiller. As the

function of such criticism was limited so was its subject. For the

great and (as time now proves) the _permanent_ part of the poetry of

his time--for Shelley and for Wordsworth--Lord Jeffrey had but one

word. He said[36] 'It won't do'. And it will not do to amuse a

drawing-room.

[36] The first words in Lord Jeffrey's celebrated review of

the _Excursion_ were, 'This will never do.'

The doctrine that poetry is a light amusement for idle hours, a

metrical species of sensational novel, has not indeed been without

gainsayers wildly popular. Thirty years ago, Mr. Carlyle most rudely

contradicted it. But perhaps this is about all that he has done. He

has denied, but he has not disproved. He has contradicted the floating

paganism, but he has not founded the deep religion. All about and

around us a _faith_ in poetry struggles to be extricated, but it is

not extricated. Some day, at the touch of the true word, the whole

confusion will by magic cease; the broken and shapeless notions cohere

and crystallize into a bright and true theory. But this cannot be yet.

But though no complete theory of the poetic art as yet be possible for

us, though perhaps only our children's children will be able to speak

on this subject with the assured confidence which belongs to accepted

truth, yet something of some certainty may be stated on the easier

elements, and something that will throw light on these two new books.

But it will be necessary to assign reasons, and the assigning of

reasons is a dry task. Years ago, when criticism only tried to show

how poetry could be made a good amusement, it was not impossible that

criticism itself should be amusing. But now it must at least be

serious, for we believe that poetry is a serious and a deep thing.

There should be a word in the language of literary art to express what

the word 'picturesque' expresses for the fine arts. _Picturesque_

means fit to be put into a picture; we want a word _literatesque_,

'fit to be put into a book.' An artist goes through a hundred

different country scenes, rich with beauties, charms, and merits, but

he does not paint any of them. He leaves them alone; he idles on till

he finds the hundred-and-first--a scene which many observers would not

think much of, but which _he_ knows by virtue of his art will look

well on canvas, and this he paints and preserves. Susceptible

observers, though not artists, feel this quality too; they say of a

scene, 'How picturesque!' meaning by this a quality distinct from that

of beauty, or sublimity, or grandeur--meaning to speak not only of the

scene as it is in itself, but also of its fitness for imitation by

art; meaning not only that it is good, but that its goodness is such

as ought to be transferred to paper; meaning not simply that it

fascinates, but also that its fascination is such as ought to be

copied by man. A fine and insensible instinct has put language to this

subtle use; it expresses an idea without which fine art criticism

could not go on, and it is very natural that the language of pictorial

should be better supplied with words than that of literary criticism,

for the eye was used before the mind, and language embodies primitive

sensuous ideas, long ere it expresses, or need express, abstract and

literary ones.

The reason why a landscape is 'picturesque' is often said to be that

such landscape represents an 'idea'. But this explanation, though in

the minds of some who use it it is near akin to the truth, fails to

explain that truth to those who did not know it before; the Word

'idea,' is so often used in these subjects when people do not know

anything else to say; it represents so often a kind of intellectual

insolvency, when philosophers are at their wits' end, that shrewd

people will never readily on any occasion give it credit for meaning

anything. A wise explainer must, therefore, look out for other words

to convey what he has to say. _Landscapes_, like everything else in

nature, divide themselves as we look at them into a sort of rude

classification. We go down a river, for example, and we see a hundred

landscapes on both sides of it, resembling one another in much, yet

differing in something; with trees here, and a farmhouse there, and

shadows on one side, and a deep pool far on; a collection of

circumstances most familiar in themselves, but making a perpetual

novelty by the magic of their various combinations. We travel so for

miles and hours, and then we come to a scene which also has these

various circumstances and adjuncts, but which combines them best,

which makes the best whole of them, which shows them in their best

proportion at a single glance before the eye. Then we say, 'This is

the place to paint the river; this is the picturesque point!' Or, if

not artists or critics of art, we feel without analysis or examination

that somehow this bend or sweep of the river, shall, in future, _be

the river to us_: that it is the image of it which we will retain in

our mind's eye, by which we will remember it, which we will call up

when we want to describe or think of it. Some fine countries, some

beautiful rivers, have not this picturesque quality: they give us

elements of beauty, but they do not combine them together; we go on

for a time delighted, but _after_ a time somehow we get wearied; we

feel that we are taking in nothing and learning nothing; we get no

collected image before our mind; we see the accidents and

circumstances of that sort of scenery, but the summary scene we do not

see; we find _disjecta membra_, but no form; various and many and

faulty approximations are displayed in succession; but the absolute

perfection in that country or river's scenery--its _type_--is

withheld: We go away from such places in part delighted, but in part

baffled; we have been puzzled by pretty things; we have beheld a

hundred different inconsistent specimens of the same sort of beauty;

but the rememberable idea, the full development, the characteristic

individuality of it, we have not seen.

We find the same sort of quality in all parts of painting. We see a

portrait of a person we know, and we say, 'It is like--yes, like, of

course, but it is not _the man_;' we feel it could not be any one

else, but still, somehow it fails to bring home to us the individual

as we know him to be. _He_ is not there. An accumulation of features

like his are painted, but his essence is not painted; an

approximation more or less excellent is given, but the characteristic

expression, the _typical_ form, of the man is withheld.

Literature--the painting of words--has the same quality but wants the

analogous word. The word '_literatesque_,' would mean, if we possessed

it, that perfect combination in the _subject-matter_ of literature,

which suits the _art_ of literature. We often meet people, and say of

them, sometimes meaning well and sometimes ill, 'How well so-and-so

would do in a book!' Such people are by no means the best people; but

they are the most effective people--the most rememberable people.

Frequently when we first know them, we like them because they explain

to us so much of our experience; we have known many people 'like

that,' in one way or another, but we did not seem to understand them;

they were nothing to us, for their traits were indistinct; we forgot

them, for they _hitched_ on to nothing, and we could not classify

them; but when we see the _type_ of the genus, at once we seem to

comprehend its character; the inferior specimens are explained by the

perfect embodiment; the approximations are definable when we know the

ideal to which they draw near. There are an infinite number of classes

of human beings, but in each of these classes there is a distinctive

type which, if we could expand it out in words, would define the

class. We cannot expand it in formal terms any more than a landscape

or a species of landscapes; but we have an art, an art of words, which

can draw it. Travellers and others often bring home, in addition to

their long journals--which though so living to them, are so dead, so

inanimate, so undescriptive to all else--a pen-and-ink sketch, rudely

done very likely, but which, perhaps, even the more for the blots and

strokes, gives a distinct notion, an emphatic image, to all who see

it. They say at once, '_Now_ we know the sort of thing'. The sketch

has _hit_ the mind. True literature does the same. It describes sorts,

varieties, and permutations, by delineating the type of each sort, the

ideal of each variety, the central, the marking trait of each

permutation.

On this account, the greatest artists of the world have ever shown an

enthusiasm for reality. To care for notions and abstractions; to

philosophize; to reason out conclusions; to care for schemes of

thought, are signs in the artistic mind of secondary excellence. A

Schiller, a Euripides, a Ben Jonson, cares for _ideas_--for the

parings of the intellect, and the distillation of the mind; a

Shakespeare, a Homer, a Goethe, finds his mental occupation, the true

home of his natural thoughts, in the real world--'which is the world

of all of us'--where the face of nature, the moving masses of men and

women, are ever changing, ever multiplying, ever mixing one with the

other. The reason is plain--the business of the poet, of the artist,

is with _types_; and those types are mirrored in reality. As a painter

must not only have a hand to execute, but an eye to distinguish--as he

must go here and then there through the real world to catch the

picturesque man, the picturesque scene, which is to live on his

canvas--so the poet must find in that reality, the _literatesque_ man,

the _literatesque_ scene which nature intends for him, and which will

live in his page. Even in reality he will not find this type complete,

or the characteristics perfect; but there, at least, he will find

_something_, some hint, some intimation, some suggestion; whereas, in

the stagnant home of his own thoughts he will find nothing pure,

nothing _as it is_, nothing which does not bear his own mark, which is

not somehow altered by a mixture with himself.

The first conversation of Goethe and Schiller illustrates this

conception of the poet's art. Goethe was at that time prejudiced

against Schiller, we must remember, partly from what he considered the

_outrages_ of the _Robbers_, partly because of the philosophy of Kant.

Schiller's 'Essay on _Grace and Dignity_', he tells us, 'was yet less

of a kind to reconcile me. The philosophy of Kant, which exalts the

dignity of mind so highly, while appearing to restrict it, Schiller

had joyfully embraced: it unfolded the extraordinary qualities which

Nature had implanted in him; and in the lively feeling of freedom and

self-direction, he showed himself unthankful to the Great Mother, who

surely had not acted like a step-dame towards him. Instead of viewing

her as self-subsisting, as producing with a living force, and

according to appointed laws, alike the highest and the lowest of her

works, he took her up under the aspect of some empirical native

qualities of the human mind. Certain harsh passages I could even

directly apply to myself: they exhibited my confession of faith in a

false light; and I felt that if written without particular attention

to me they were still worse; for in that case, the vast chasm which

lay between us, gaped but so much the more distinctly.' After a casual

meeting at a Society for Natural History, they walked home and Goethe

proceeds:

'We reached his house; the talk induced me to go in. I then expounded

to him, with as much vivacity as possible, the _Metamorphosis of

Plants_, drawing out on paper, with many characteristic strokes, a

symbolic Plant for him, as I proceeded. He heard and saw all this,

with much interest and distinct comprehension; but when I had done, he

shook his head and said: 'This is no experiment, this is an idea.' I

stopped with some degree of irritation; for the point which separated

us was most luminously marked by this expression. The opinions in

_Dignity and Grace_, again occurred to me; the old grudge was just

awakening; but I smothered it, and merely said: "I was happy to find

that I had got ideas without knowing it, nay that I saw them before my

eyes."

'Schiller had much more prudence and dexterity of management than I;

he was also thinking of his periodical the _Horen_, about this time,

and of course rather wished to attract than repel me. Accordingly he

answered me like an accomplished Kantite; and as my stiff-necked

Realism gave occasion to many contradictions, much battling took place

between us, and at last a truce, in which neither party would consent

to yield the victory, but each held himself invincible. Positions like

the following grieved me to the very soul: _How can there ever be an

experiment, that shall correspond with an idea? The specific quality

of an idea is, that no experiment can reach it or agree with it._ Yet

if he held as an idea, the same thing which I looked upon as an

experiment; there must certainly, I thought, be some community between

us, some ground whereon both of us might meet!'

With Goethe's natural history, or with Kant's philosophy, we have

here no concern, but we can combine the expressions of the two great

poets into a nearly complete description of poetry. The 'symbolic

plant' is the _type_ of which we speak, the ideal at which inferior

specimens aim, the class-characteristic in which they all share, but

which none shows forth fully: Goethe was right in searching for this

in reality and nature; Schiller was right in saying that it was an

'idea', a transcending notion to which approximations could be found

in experience, but only approximations--which could not be found there

itself. Goethe, as a poet, rightly felt the primary necessity of

outward suggestion and experience; Schiller as a philosopher, rightly

felt its imperfection.

But in these delicate matters, it is easy to misapprehend. There is,

undoubtedly, a sort of poetry which is produced as it were out of the

author's mind. The description of the poet's own moods and feelings is

a common sort of poetry--perhaps the commonest sort. But the

peculiarity of such cases is, that the poet does not describe himself

_as_ himself: autobiography is not his object; he takes himself as a

specimen of human nature; he describes, not himself, but a

distillation of himself: he takes such of his moods as are most

characteristic, as most typify certain moods of certain men, or

certain moods of all men; he chooses preponderant feelings of special

sorts of men, or occasional feelings of men of all sorts; but with

whatever other difference and diversity, the essence is that such

self-describing poets describe what is _in_ them, but not _peculiar_

to them,--what is generic, not what is special and individual. Gray's

_Elegy_ describes a mood which Gray felt more than other men, but

which most others, perhaps all others, feel too. It is more popular,

perhaps, than any English poem, because that sort of feeling is the

most diffused of high feelings, and because Gray added to a singular

nicety of fancy an habitual proneness to a _contemplative_--a

discerning but unbiassed--meditation on death and on life. Other poets

cannot hope for such success: a subject, so popular, so grave, so

wise, and yet so suitable to the writer's nature is hardly to be

found. But the same ideal, the same unautobiographical character is to

be found in the writings of meaner men. Take sonnets of Hartley

Coleridge, for example:

I

TO A FRIEND

When we were idlers with the loitering rills,

The need of human love we little noted:

Our love was nature; and the peace that floated

On the white mist, and dwelt upon the hills,

To sweet accord subdued our wayward wills:

One soul was ours, one mind, one heart devoted,

That, wisely doating, ask'd not why it doated,

And ours the unknown joy, which knowing kills.

But now I find, how dear thou wert to me;

That man is more than half of nature's treasure,

Of that fair Beauty which no eye can see,

Of that sweet music which no ear can measure;

And now the streams may sing for others' pleasure,

The hills sleep on in their eternity.

II

TO THE SAME

In the great city we are met again,

Where many souls there are, that breathe and die,

Scarce knowing more of nature's potency,

Than what they learn from heat, or cold, or rain;

The sad vicissitude of weary pain;--

For busy man is lord of ear and eye,

And what hath nature, but the vast, void sky,

And the thronged river toiling to the main?

Oh! say not so, for she shall have her part

In every smile, in every tear that falls,

And she shall hide her in the secret heart,

Where love persuades, and sterner duty calls:

But worse it were than death, or sorrow's smart,

To live without a friend within these walls.

III

TO THE SAME

We parted on the mountains, as two streams

From one clear spring pursue their several ways;

And thy fleet course hath been through many a maze,

In foreign lands, where silvery Padus gleams

To that delicious sky, whose glowing beams

Brightened the tresses that old Poets praise;

Where Petrarch's patient love, and artful lays,

And Ariosto's song of many themes,

Moved the soft air. But I, a lazy brook,

As close pent up within my native dell,

Have crept along from nook to shady nook,

Where flowrets blow, and whispering Naiads dwell.

Yet now we meet, that parted were so wide,

O'er rough and smooth to travel side by side.

The contrast of instructive and enviable locomotion with refining but

instructive meditation is not special and peculiar to these two, but

general and universal. It was set down by Hartley Coleridge because he

was the most meditative and refining of men.

What sort of literatesque types are fit to be described in the sort of

literature called poetry, is a matter on which much might be written.

Mr. Arnold, some years since, put forth a theory that the art of

poetry could only delineate _great actions_. But though, rightly

interpreted and understood--using the word action so as to include

high and sound activity in contemplation--this definition may suit the

highest poetry, it certainly cannot be stretched to include many

inferior sorts and even many good sorts. Nobody in their senses would

describe Gray's _Elegy_ as the delineation of a 'great action'; some

kinds of mental contemplation may be energetic enough to deserve this

name, but Gray would have been frightened at the very word. He loved

scholar-like calm and quiet inaction; his very greatness depended on

his _not_ acting, on his 'wise passiveness,' on his indulging the

grave idleness which so well appreciates so much of human life. But

the best answer--the _reductio ad absurdum_--of Mr. Arnold's doctrine,

is the mutilation which it has caused him to make of his own writings.

It has forbidden him, he tells us, to reprint _Empedocles_--a poem

undoubtedly containing defects and even excesses, but containing also

these lines:

And yet what days were those, Parmenides!

When we were young, when we could number friends

In all the Italian cities like ourselves,

When with elated hearts we join'd your train,

Ye Sun-born virgins! on the road of Truth.

Then we could still enjoy, then neither thought

Nor outward things were clos'd and dead to us,

But we receiv'd the shock of mighty thoughts

On simple minds with a pure natural joy;

And if the sacred load oppress'd our brain,

We had the power to feel the pressure eas'd.

The brow unbound, the thoughts flow free again,

In the delightful commerce of the world.

We had not lost our balance then, nor grown

Thought's slaves and dead to every natural joy.

The smallest thing could give us pleasure then--

The sports of the country people;

A flute note from the woods;

Sunset over the sea:

Seed-time and harvest;

The reapers in the corn;

The vinedresser in his vineyard;

The village-girl at her wheel.

Fullness of life and power of feeling, ye

Are for the happy, for the souls at ease,

Who dwell on a firm basis of content.

But he who has outliv'd his prosperous days,

But he, whose youth fell on a different world

From that on which his exil'd age is thrown;

Whose mind was fed on other food, was train'd

By other rules than are in vogue to-day;

Whose habit of thought is fix'd, who will not change,

But in a world he loves not must subsist

In ceaseless opposition, be the guard

Of his own breast, fetter'd to what he guards,

That the world win no mastery over him;

Who has no friend, no fellow left, not one;

Who has no minute's breathing space allow'd

To nurse his dwindling faculty of joy:--

Joy and the outward world must die to him

As they are dead to me.

What freak of criticism can induce a man who has written such poetry

as this, to discard it, and say it is not poetry? Mr. Arnold is

privileged to speak of his own poems, but no other critic could speak

so and not be laughed at.

We are disposed to believe that no very sharp definition can be

given--at least in the present state of the critical art--of the

boundary line between poetry and other sorts of imaginative

delineation. Between the undoubted dominions of the two kinds there is

a debateable land; everybody is agreed that the _Oedipus at Colonus_

_is_ poetry: every one is agreed that the wonderful appearance of Mrs.

Veal is _not_ poetry. But the exact line which separates grave novels

in verse like _Aylmer's Field_ or _Enoch Arden_, from grave novels not

in verse like _Silas Marner_ or _Adam Bede_, we own we cannot draw

with any confidence. Nor, perhaps, is it very important; whether a

narrative is thrown into verse or not certainly depends in part on the

taste of the age, and in part on its mechanical helps. Verse is the

only mechanical help to the memory in rude times, and there is little

writing till a cheap something is found to write upon, and a cheap

something to write with. Poetry--verse at least--is the literature of

_all work_ in early ages; it is only later ages which write in what

_they_ think a natural and simple prose. There are other casual

influences in the matter too; but they are not material now. We need

only say here that poetry, because it has a more marked rhythm than

prose, must be more intense in meaning and more concise in style than

prose. People expect a 'marked rhythm' to imply something worth

marking; if it fails to do so they are disappointed. They are

displeased at the visible waste of a powerful instrument; they call it

'doggerel,' and rightly call it, for the metrical expression of full

thought and eager feeling--the burst of metre--incident to high

imagination, should not be wasted on petty matters which prose does as

well,--which it does better--which it suits by its very limpness and

weakness, whose small changes it follows more easily, and to whose

lowest details it can fully and without effort degrade itself. Verse,

too, should be _more concise_, for long-continued rhythm tends to jade

the mind, just as brief rhythm tends to attract the attention. Poetry

should be memorable and emphatic, intense, and _soon over_.

The great divisions of poetry, and of all other literary art, arise

from the different modes in which these _types_--these characteristic

men, these characteristic feelings--may be variously described. There

are three principal modes which we shall attempt to describe--the

_pure_, which is sometimes, but not very wisely, called the classical;

the _ornate_, which is also unwisely called romantic; and the

_grotesque_, which might be called the mediaeval. We will describe the

nature of these a little. Criticism we know must be brief--not, like

poetry, because its charm is too intense to be sustained--but on the

contrary, because its interest is too weak to be prolonged; but

elementary criticism, if an evil, is a necessary evil; a little while

spent among the simple principles of art is the first condition, the

absolute pre-requisite, for surely apprehending and wisely judging the

complete embodiments and miscellaneous forms of actual literature.

The definition of _pure_ literature is that it describes the type in

its simplicity, we mean, with the exact amount of accessory

circumstance which is necessary to bring it before the mind in

finished perfection, and _no more_ than that amount. The _type_ needs

some accessories from its nature--a picturesque landscape does not

consist wholly of picturesque features. There is a setting of

surroundings--as the Americans would say, of _fixings_--without which

the reality is not itself. By a traditional mode of speech, as soon as

we see a picture in which a complete effect is produced by detail so

rare and so harmonized as to escape us, we say 'how classical'. The

whole which is to be seen appears at once and through the detail, but

the detail itself is not seen: we do not think of that which gives us

the idea; we are absorbed in the idea itself. Just so in literature

the pure art is that which works with the fewest strokes; the fewest,

that is, for its purpose, for its aim is to call up and bring home to

men an idea, a form, a character, and if that idea be twisted, that

form be involved, that character perplexed, many strokes of literary

art will be needful. Pure art does not mutilate its object: it

represents it as fully as is possible with the slightest effort which

is possible: it shrinks from no needful circumstances, as little as it

inserts any which are needless. The precise peculiarity is not merely

that no incidental circumstance is inserted which does not tell on the

main design: no art is fit to be called _art_ which permits a stroke

to be put in without an object; but that only the minimum of such

circumstance is inserted at all. The form is sometimes said to be

bare, the accessories are sometimes said to be invisible, because the

appendages are so choice that the shape only is perceived.

The English literature undoubtedly contains much impure literature;

impure in its style if not in its meaning: but it also contains one

great, one nearly perfect, model of the pure style in the literary

expression of typical _sentiment_; and one not perfect, but gigantic

and close approximation to perfection in the pure delineation of

objective character. Wordsworth, perhaps, comes as near to choice

purity of style in sentiment as is possible; Milton, with exceptions

and conditions to be explained, approaches perfection by the

strenuous purity with which he depicts character.

A wit once said, that '_pretty_ women had more features than

_beautiful_ women', and though the expression may be criticized, the

meaning is correct. Pretty women seem to have a great number of

attractive points, each of which attracts your attention, and each one

of which you remember afterwards; yet these points have not _grown

together_, their features have not linked themselves into a single

inseparable whole. But a beautiful woman is a whole as she is; you no

more take her to pieces than a Greek statue; she is not an aggregate

of divisible charms, she is a charm in herself. Such ever is the

dividing test of pure art; if you catch yourself admiring its details,

it is defective; you ought to think of it as a single whole which you

must remember, which you must admire, which somehow subdues you while

you admire it, which is a 'possession' to you 'for ever'.

Of course no individual poem embodies this ideal perfectly; of course

every human word and phrase has its imperfections, and if we choose an

instance to illustrate that ideal, the instance has scarcely a fair

chance. By contrasting it with the ideal we suggest its imperfections;

by protruding it as an example, we turn on its defectiveness the

microscope of criticism. Yet these two sonnets of Wordsworth may be

fitly read in this place, not because they are quite without faults,

or because they are the very best examples of their kind of style; but

because they are _luminous_ examples; the compactness of the sonnet

and the gravity of the sentiment, hedging in the thoughts,

restraining the fancy, and helping to maintain a singleness of

expression:

THE TROSACHS.

There's not a nook within this solemn Pass,

But were an apt Confessional for one

Taught by his summer spent; his autumn gone,

That Life is but a tale of morning grass

Withered at eve. From scenes of art which chase

That thought away, turn, and with watchful eyes

Feed it 'mid Nature's old felicities,

Rocks, rivers, and smooth lakes more clear than glass

Untouched, unbreathed upon. Thrice happy guest,

If from a golden perch of aspen spray

(October's workmanship to rival May)

The pensive warbler of the ruddy breast

That moral teaches by a heaven-taught lay,

Lulling the year, with all its cares, to rest!

COMPOSED UPON WESTMINSTER BRIDGE, SEPT. 3, 1802

Earth has not anything to show more fair:

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

A sight so touching in its majesty:

This city now doth, like a garment, wear

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare.

Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie

Open unto the fields and to the sky;

All bright and open in the smokeless air.

Never did sun more beautifully steep

In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;

Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

The river glideth at his own sweet will:

Dear God! The very houses seem asleep;

And all that mighty heart is lying still!

Instances of barer style than this may easily be found, instances of

colder style--few better instances of purer style. Not a single

expression (the invocation in the concluding couplet of the second

sonnet perhaps excepted) can be spared, yet not a single expression

rivets the attention. If, indeed, we take out the phrase--

The city now doth like a garment wear

The beauty of the morning,

and the description of the brilliant yellow of autumn--

October's workmanship to rival May,

they have independent value, but they are not noticed in the sonnet

when we read it through; they fall into place there, and being in

their place are not seen. The great subjects of the two sonnets, the

religious aspect of beautiful but grave nature--the religious aspect

of a city about to awaken and be alive, are the only ideas left in our

mind. To Wordsworth has been vouchsafed the last grace of the

self-denying artist; you think neither of him nor his style, but you

cannot help thinking of--you _must_ recall--the exact phrase, the

_very_ sentiment he wished.

Milton's purity is more eager. In the most exciting parts of

Wordsworth--and these sonnets are not very exciting--you always feel,

you never forget, that what you have before you is the excitement of a

recluse. There is nothing of the stir of life; nothing of the _brawl_

of the world. But Milton though always a scholar by trade, though

solitary in old age, was through life intent on great affairs, lived

close to great scenes, watched a revolution, and if not an actor in

it, was at least secretary to the actors. He was familiar--by daily

experience and habitual sympathy--with the earnest debate of arduous

questions, on which the life and death of the speakers certainly

depended, on which the weal or woe of the country perhaps depended.

He knew how profoundly the individual character of the speakers--their

inner and real nature--modifies their opinion on such questions; he

knew how surely that nature will appear in the expression of them.

This great experience, fashioned by a fine imagination, gives to the

debate of Satanic Council in Pandaemonium its reality and its life. It

is a debate in the Long Parliament, and though the _theme_ of

_Paradise Lost_ obliged Milton to side with the monarchical element in

the universe, his old habits are often too much for him; and his real

sympathy--the impetus and energy of his nature--side with the

rebellious element. For the purposes of art this is much better--of a

court, a poet can make but little; of a heaven he can make very

little, but of a courtly heaven, such as Milton conceived, he can make

nothing at all. The idea of a court and the idea of a heaven are so

radically different, that a distinct combination of them is always

grotesque and often ludicrous. _Paradise Lost_, as a whole, is

radically tainted by a vicious principle. It professes to justify the

ways of God to man, to account for sin and death, and it tells you

that the whole originated in a political event; in a court squabble as

to a particular act of patronage and the due or undue promotion of an

eldest son. Satan may have been wrong, but on Milton's theory he had

an _arguable_ case at least. There was something arbitrary in the

promotion; there were little symptoms of a job; in _Paradise Lost_ it

is always clear that the devils are the weaker, but it is never clear

that the angels are the better. Milton's sympathy and his imagination

slip back to the Puritan rebels whom he loved, and desert the courtly

angels whom he could not love although he praised. There is no wonder

that Milton's hell is better than his heaven, for he hated officials

and he loved rebels, for he employs his genius below, and accumulates

his pedantry above. On the great debate in Pandaemonium all his genius

is concentrated. The question is very practical; it is, 'What are we

devils to do, now we have lost heaven?' Satan who presides over and

manipulates the assembly; Moloch

the fiercest spirit

That fought in Heaven, now fiercer by despair,

who wants to fight again; Belial, 'the man of the world', who does not

want to fight any more; Mammon, who is for commencing an industrial

career; Beelzebub, the official statesman,

deep on his front engraven

Deliberation sat and Public care,

who, at Satan's instance, proposes the invasion of earth--are as

distinct as so many statues. Even Belial, 'the man of the world', the

sort of man with whom Milton had least sympathy, is perfectly painted.

An inferior artist would have made the actor who 'counselled ignoble

ease and peaceful sloth', a degraded and ugly creature; but Milton

knew better. He knew that low notions require a better garb than high

notions. Human nature is not a high thing, but at least it has a high

idea of itself; it will not accept mean maxims, unless they are gilded

and made beautiful. A prophet in goatskin may cry, 'Repent, repent',

but it takes 'purple and fine linen' to be able to say, 'Continue in

your sins'. The world vanquishes with its speciousness and its show,

and the orator who is to persuade men to worldliness must have a share

in them. Milton well knew this; after the warlike speech of the fierce

Moloch he introduces a brighter and a more graceful spirit:

He ended frowning, and his look denounced

Desp'rate revenge, and battle dangerous

To less than Gods. On th' other side up rose

Belial, in act more graceful and humane:

A fairer person lost not Heaven; he seem'd

For dignity composed and high exploit:

But all was false and hollow, though his tongue

Dropt manna, and could make the worse appear

The better reason, to perplex and dash

Maturest counsels: for his thoughts were low;

To vice industrious, but to nobler deeds

Tim'rous and slothful: yet he pleased the ear,

And with persuasive accent thus began:

He does not begin like a man with a strong case, but like a man with a

weak case; he knows that the pride of human nature is irritated by

mean advice, and though he may probably persuade men to _take_ it, he

must carefully apologise for _giving_ it. Here, as elsewhere, though

the formal address is to devils, the real address is to men: to the

human nature which we know, not to the fictitious demonic nature we do

not know:

I should be much for open war, O Peers!

As not behind in hate, if what was urged

Main reason to persuade immediate war,

Did not dissuade me most, and seem to cast

Ominous conjecture on the whole success:

When he who most excels in fact of arms,

In what he counsels and in what excels

Mistrustful, grounds his courage on despair,

And utter dissolution, as the scope

Of all his aim, after some dire revenge.

First, what revenge? The tow'rs of Heav'n are fill'd

With armed watch, that render all access

Impregnable; oft on the bord'ring deep

Encamp their legions, or with obscure wing

Scout far and wide into the realm of night,

Scorning surprise. Or could we break our way

By force, and at our heels all hell should rise

With blackest insurrection, to confound

Heav'n's purest light, yet our great Enemy,

All incorruptible, would on his throne

Sit unpolluted, and th' ethereal mould

Incapable of stain would soon expel

Her mischief, and purge oft the baser fire

Victorious. Thus repulsed, our final hope

Is flat despair. We must exasperate

Th' Almighty Victor to spend all his rage,

And that must end us: that must be our cure,

To be no more? Sad cure; for who would lose,

Though full of pain, this intellectual being,

Those thoughts that wander through eternity,

To perish rather, swallow'd up and lost

In the wide womb of uncreated night,

Devoid of sense and motion? And who knows,

Let this be good, whether our angry Foe

Can give it, or will ever? How he can

Is doubtful; that he never will is sure.

Will he, so wise, let loose at once his ire

Belike through impotence, or unaware,

To give his enemies their wish, and end

Them in his anger, whom his anger saves

To punish endless? Wherefore cease we then?

Say they who counsel war, we are decreed,

Reserved, and destined, to eternal woe;

Whatever doing, what can we suffer more,

What can we suffer worse? Is this then worst,

Thus sitting, thus consulting, thus in arms?

* * * * *

And so on.

Mr. Pitt knew this speech by heart, and Lord Macaulay has called it

incomparable; and these judges of the oratorical art have well

decided. A mean foreign policy cannot be better defended. Its

sensibleness is effectually explained, and its tameness as much as

possible disguised.

But we have not here to do with the excellence of Belial's policy, but

with the excellence of his speech; and with that speech in a peculiar

manner. This speech, taken with the few lines of description with

which Milton introduces them, embody, in as short a space as possible,

with as much perfection as possible, the delineation of the type of

character common at all times, dangerous in many times, sure to come

to the surface in moments of difficulty, and never more dangerous than

then. As Milton describes, it is one among several _typical_

characters which will ever have their place in great councils, which

will ever be heard at important decisions, which are part of the

characteristic and inalienable whole of this statesmanlike world. The

debate in Pandaemonium is a debate among these typical characters at

the greatest conceivable crisis, and with adjuncts of solemnity which

no other situation could rival. It is the greatest _classical_

triumph, the highest achievement of the pure _style_ in English

literature; it is the greatest description of the highest and most

typical characters with the most choice circumstances and in the

fewest words.

It is not unremarkable that we should find in Milton and in _Paradise

Lost_ the best specimen of pure style. He was schoolmaster in a

pedantic age, and there is nothing so unclassical--nothing so impure

in style--as pedantry. The out-of-door conversational life of Athens

was as opposed to bookish scholasticism as a life can be. The most

perfect books have been written not by those who thought much of

books, but by those who thought little, by those who were under the

restraint of a sensitive talking world, to which books had contributed

something, and a various eager life the rest. Milton is generally

unclassical in spirit where he is learned, and naturally, because the

purest poets do not overlay their conceptions with book knowledge, and

the classical poets, having in comparison no books, were under little

temptation to impair the purity of their style by the accumulation of

their research. Over and above this, there is in Milton, and a little

in Wordsworth also, one defect which is in the highest degree faulty

and unclassical, which mars the effect and impairs the perfection of

the pure style. There is a want of _spontaneity_, and a sense of

effort. It has been happily said that Plato's words must have _grown_

into their places. No one would say so of Milton or even of

Wordsworth. About both of them there is a taint of duty; a vicious

sense of the good man's task. Things seem right where they are, but

they seem to be put where they are. _Flexibility_ is essential to the

consummate perfection of the pure style because the sensation of the

poet's efforts carries away our thoughts from his achievements. We are

admiring his labours when we should be enjoying his words. But this is

a defect in those two writers, not a defect in pure art. Of course it

is more difficult to write in few words than to write in many; to take

the best adjuncts, and those only, for what you have to say, instead

of using all which comes to hand; it _is_ an additional labour if you

write verses in a morning, to spend the rest of the day in _choosing_,

or making those verses fewer. But a perfect artist in the pure style

is as effortless and as natural as in any style, perhaps is more so.

Take the well-known lines:

There was a little lawny islet

By anemone and violet,

Like mosaic, paven:

And its roof was flowers and leaves

Which the summer's breath enweaves,

Where nor sun, nor showers, nor breeze,

Pierce the pines and tallest trees,

Each a gem engraven;--

Girt by many an azure wave

With which the clouds and mountains pave

A lake's blue chasm.

Shelley had many merits and many defects. This is not the place for a

complete or indeed for _any_ estimate of him. But one excellence is

most evident. His words are as flexible as any words; the rhythm of

some modulating air seems to move them into their place without a

struggle by the poet and almost without his knowledge. This is the

perfection of pure art, to embody typical conceptions in the choicest,

the fewest accidents, to embody them so that each of these accidents

may produce its full effect, and so to embody them without effort.

The extreme opposite to this pure art is what may be called ornate

art. This species of art aims also at giving a delineation of the

typical idea in its perfection and its fullness, but it aims at so

doing in a manner most different. It wishes to surround the type with

the greatest number of circumstances which it will _bear_. It works

not by choice and selection, but by accumulation and aggregation. The

idea is not, as in the pure style, presented with the least clothing

which it will endure, but with the richest and most involved clothing

that it will admit.

We are fortunate in not having to hunt out of past literature an

illustrative specimen of the ornate style. Mr. Tennyson has just given

one admirable in itself, and most characteristic of the defects and

the merits of this style. The story of Enoch Arden, as he has enhanced

and presented it, is a rich and splendid composite of imagery and

illustration. Yet how simple that story is in itself. A sailor who

sells fish, breaks his leg, gets dismal, gives up selling fish, goes

to sea, is wrecked on a desert island, stays there some years, on his

return finds his wife married to a miller, speaks to a landlady on the

subject, and dies. Told in the pure and simple, the unadorned and

classical style, this story would not have taken three pages, but Mr.

Tennyson has been able to make it the principal--the largest tale in

his new volume. He has done so only by giving to every event and

incident in the volume an accompanying commentary. He tells a great

deal about the torrid zone which a rough sailor like Enoch Arden

certainly would not have perceived; and he gives to the fishing

village, to which all the characters belong, a softness and a

fascination which such villages scarcely possess in reality.

The description of the tropical island on which the sailor is thrown,

is an absolute model of adorned art:

The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns

And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven,

The slender coco's drooping crown of plumes,

The lightning flash of insect and of bird,

The lustre of the long convolvuluses

That coil'd around the stately stems, and ran

Ev'n to the limit of the land, the glows

And glories of the broad belt of the world,

All these he saw; but what he fain had seen

He could not see, the kindly human face,

Nor ever hear a kindly voice, but heard

The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl,

The league-long roller thundering on the reef,

The moving whisper of huge trees that branch'd

And blossom'd in the zenith, or the sweep

Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave,

As down the shore he ranged, or all day long

Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge,

A shipwreck'd sailor, waiting for a sail:

No sail from day to day, but every day

The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts

Among the palms and ferns and precipices;

The blaze upon the waters to the east;

The blaze upon his island overhead;

The blaze upon the waters to the west;

Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven,

The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again

The scarlet shafts of sunrise--but no sail.

No expressive circumstance can be added to this description, no

enhancing detail suggested. A much less happy instance is the

description of Enoch's life before he sailed:

While Enoch was abroad on wrathful seas,

Or often journeying landward; for in truth

Enoch's white horse, and Enoch's ocean spoil

In ocean-smelling osier, and his face,

Rough-redden'd with a thousand winter gales,

Not only to the market-cross were known,

But in the leafy lanes behind the down,

Far as the portal-warding lion-whelp,

And peacock yew-tree of the lonely Hall,

Whose Friday fare was Enoch's ministering.

So much has not often been made of selling fish.

The essence of ornate art is in this manner to accumulate round the

typical object, everything which can be said about it, every

associated thought that can be connected with it without impairing the

essence of the delineation.

The first defect which strikes a student of ornate art--the first

which arrests the mere reader of it--is what is called a want of

simplicity. Nothing is described as it is, everything has about it an

atmosphere of _something else_. The combined and associated thoughts,

though they set off and heighten particular ideas and aspects of the

central conception, yet complicate it: a simple thing--'a daisy by the

river's brim'--is never left by itself, something else is put with it;

something not more connected with it than 'lion-whelp' and the

'peacock yew-tree' are with the 'fresh fish for sale' that Enoch

carries past them. Even in the highest cases ornate art leaves upon a

cultured and delicate taste, the conviction that it is not the highest

art, that it is somehow excessive and over-rich, that it is not chaste

in itself or chastening to the mind that sees it--that it is in an

unexplained manner unsatisfactory, 'a thing in which we feel there is

some hidden want!'

That want is a want of 'definition'. We must all know landscapes,

river landscapes especially, which are in the highest sense beautiful,

which when we first see them give us a delicate pleasure; which in

some--and these the best cases--give even a gentle sense of surprise

that such things should be so beautiful, and yet when we come to live

in them, to spend even a few hours in them, we seem stifled and

oppressed. On the other hand there are people to whom the sea-shore is

a companion, an exhilaration; and not so much for the brawl of the

shore as for the _limited_ vastness, the finite infinite of the ocean

as they see it. Such people often come home braced and nerved, and if

they spoke out the truth, would have only to say, 'We have seen the

horizon line'; if they were let alone indeed, they would gaze on it

hour after hour, so great to them is the fascination, so full the

sustaining calm, which they gain from that union of form and

greatness. To a very inferior extent, but still, perhaps, to an extent

which most people understand better, a common arch will have the same

effect. A bridge completes a river landscape; if of the old and

many-arched sort it regulates by a long series of defined forms the

vague outline of wood and river which before had nothing to measure

it; if of the new scientific sort it introduces still more strictly a

geometrical element; it stiffens the scenery which was before too

soft, too delicate, too vegetable. Just such is the effect of pure

style in literary art. It calms by conciseness; while the ornate style

leaves on the mind a mist of beauty, an excess of fascination, a

complication of charm, the pure style leaves behind it the simple,

defined, measured idea, as it is, and by itself. That which is chaste

chastens; there is a poised energy--a state half thrill, and half

tranquillity--which pure art gives, which no other can give; a

pleasure justified as well as felt; an ennobled satisfaction at what

ought to satisfy us, and must ennoble us.

Ornate art is to pure art what a painted statue is to an unpainted. It

is impossible to deny that a touch of colour _does_ bring out certain

parts, does convey certain expressions, does heighten certain

features, but it leaves on the work as a whole, a want, as we say,

'of something'; a want of that inseparable chasteness which clings to

simple sculpture, an impairing predominance of alluring details which

impairs our satisfaction with our own satisfaction; which makes us

doubt whether a higher being than ourselves will be satisfied even

though we are so. In the very same manner, though the _rouge_ of

ornate literature excites our eye, it also impairs our confidence.

Mr. Arnold has justly observed that this self-justifying,

self-_proving_ purity of style, is commoner in ancient literature than

in modern literature, and also that Shakespeare is not a great or an

unmixed example of it. No one can say that he is. His works are full

of undergrowth, are full of complexity, are not models of style;

except by a miracle nothing in the Elizabethan age could be a model of

style; the restraining taste of that age was feebler and more mistaken

than that of any other equally great age. Shakespeare's mind so teemed

with creation that he required the most just, most forcible, most

constant restraint from without. He most needed to be guided of poets,

and he was the least and worst guided. As a whole no one can call his

works finished models of the pure style, or of any style. But he has

many passages of the most pure style, passages which could be easily

cited if space served. And we must remember that the task which

Shakespeare undertook was the most difficult which any poet has ever

attempted, and that it is a task in which after a million efforts

every other poet has failed. The Elizabethan drama--as Shakespeare has

immortalized it--undertakes to delineate in five acts, under stage

restrictions, and in mere dialogue, a whole list of dramatis

personae, a set of characters enough for a modern novel, and with the

distinctness of a modern novel. Shakespeare is not content to give two

or three great characters in solitude and in dignity, like the

classical dramatists; he wishes to give a whole _party_ of characters

in the play of life, and according to the nature of each. He would

'hold the mirror up to nature', not to catch a monarch in a tragic

posture, but a whole group of characters engaged in many actions,

intent on many purposes, thinking many thoughts. There is life enough,

there is action enough, in single plays of Shakespeare to set up an

ancient dramatist for a long career. And Shakespeare succeeded. His

characters, taken _en masse_, and as a whole, are as well-known as any

novelist's characters; cultivated men know all about them, as young

ladies know all about Mr. Trollope's novels. But no other dramatist

has succeeded in such an aim. No one else's characters are staple

people in English literature, hereditary people whom every one knows

all about in every generation. The contemporary dramatists, Beaumont

and Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Marlowe, &c., had many merits, some of them

were great men. But a critic must say of them the worst thing he has

to say; 'they were men who failed in their characteristic aim;' they

attempted to describe numerous sets of complicated characters, and

they failed. No one of such characters, or hardly one, lives in common

memory; the Faustus of Marlowe, a really great idea, is not

remembered. They undertook to write what they could not write, five

acts full of real characters, and in consequence, the fine individual

things they conceived are forgotten by the mixed multitude, and known

only to a few of the few. Of the Spanish theatre we cannot speak; but

there are no such characters in any French tragedy: the whole aim of

that tragedy forbade it. Goethe has added to literature a few great

characters; he may be said almost to have added to literature the idea

of 'intellectual creation',--the idea of describing great characters

through the intellect; but he has not added to the common stock what

Shakespeare added, a new _multitude_ of men and women; and these not

in simple attitudes, but amid the most complex parts of life, with all

their various natures roused, mixed, and strained. The severest art

must have allowed many details, much overflowing circumstance to a

poet who undertook to describe what almost defies description. Pure

art would have _commanded_ him to use details lavishly, for only by a

multiplicity of such could the required effect have been at all

produced. Shakespeare could accomplish it, for his mind was a

_spring_, an inexhaustible fountain of human nature, and it is no

wonder that being compelled by the task of his time to let the

fullness of his nature overflow, he sometimes let it overflow too

much, and covered with erroneous conceits and superfluous images

characters and conceptions which would have been far more justly, far

more effectually, delineated with conciseness and simplicity. But

there is an infinity of pure art _in_ Shakespeare, although there is a

great deal else also.

It will be said, if ornate art be as you say, an inferior species or

art, why should it ever be used? If pure art be the best sort of art,

why should it not always be used?

The reason is this: literary art, as we just now explained, is

concerned with literatesque characters in literatesque situations; and

the _best_ art is concerned with the _most_ literatesque characters in

the _most_ literatesque situations. Such are the subjects of pure art;

it embodies with the fewest touches, and under the most select and

choice circumstances, the highest conceptions; but it does not follow

that only the best subjects are to be treated by art, and then only in

the very best way. Human nature could not endure such a critical

commandment as that, and it would be an erroneous criticism which gave

it. _Any_ literatesque character may be described in literature under

_any_ circumstances which exhibit its literatesqueness.

The essence of pure art consists in its describing what is as it is,

and this is very well for what can bear it, but there are many

inferior things which will not bear it, and which nevertheless ought

to be described in books. A certain kind of literature deals with

illusions, and this kind of literature has given a colouring to the

name romantic. A man of rare genius, and even of poetical genius, has

gone so far as to make these illusions the true subject of

poetry--almost the sole subject. 'Without,' says Father Newman, of one

of his characters, 'being himself a poet, he was in the season of

poetry, in the sweet spring-time, when the year is most beautiful

because it is new. Novelty was beauty to a heart so open and cheerful

as his; not only because it was novelty, and had its proper charm as

such, but because when we first see things, we see them in a gay

confusion, which is a principal element of the poetical. As time goes

on, and we number and sort and measure things,--as we gain views,--we

advance towards philosophy and truth, but we recede from poetry.

'When we ourselves were young, we once on a time walked on a hot

summer-day from Oxford to Newington--a dull road, as any one who has

gone it knows; yet it was new to us; and we protest to you, reader,

believe it or not, laugh or not, as you will, to us it seemed on that

occasion quite touchingly beautiful; and a soft melancholy came over

us, of which the shadows fall even now, when we look back upon that

dusty, weary journey. And why? because every object which met us was

unknown and full of mystery. A tree or two in the distance seemed the

beginning of a great wood, or park, stretching endlessly; a hill

implied a vale beyond, with that vale's history; the bye-lanes, with

their green hedges, wound on and vanished, yet were not lost to the

imagination. Such was our first journey; but when we had gone it

several times, the mind refused to act, the scene ceased to enchant,

stern reality alone remained; and we thought it one of the most

tiresome, odious roads we ever had occasion to traverse.'

That is to say, that the function of the poet is to introduce a 'gay

confusion', a rich medley which does not exist in the actual

world--which perhaps could not exist in any world--but which would

seem pretty if it did exist. Everyone who reads _Enoch Arden_ will

perceive that this notion of all poetry is exactly applicable to this

one poem. Whatever be made of Enoch's 'Ocean spoil in ocean-smelling

osier,' of the 'portal-warding lion-whelp, and peacock yew-tree',

every one knows that in himself Enoch could not have been charming.

People who sell fish about the country (and that is what he did,

though Mr. Tennyson won't speak out, and wraps it up) never are

beautiful. As Enoch was and must be coarse, in itself the poem must

depend for its charm on a 'gay confusion'--on a splendid accumulation

of impossible accessories.

Mr. Tennyson knows this better than many of us--he knows the country

world; he has proved it that no one living knows it better; he has

painted with pure art--with art which describes what is a race perhaps

more refined, more delicate, more conscientious, than the sailor--the

'Northern Farmer', and we all know what a splendid, what a living

thing, he has made of it. He could, if he only would, have given us

the ideal sailor in like manner--the ideal of the natural sailor we

mean--the characteristic present man as he lives and is. But this he

has not chosen. He has endeavoured to describe an exceptional sailor,

at an exceptionally refined port, performing a graceful act, an act of

relinquishment. And with this task before him, his profound taste

taught him that ornate art was a necessary medium--was the sole

effectual instrument--for his purpose. It was necessary for him if

possible to abstract the mind from reality, to induce us _not_ to

conceive or think of sailors as they are while we are reading of his

sailors, but to think of what a person who did not know might fancy

sailors to be. A casual traveller on the sea-shore, with the sensitive

mood and the romantic imagination Mr. Newman has described, might

fancy, would fancy, a seafaring village to be like that. Accordingly,

Mr. Tennyson has made it his aim to call off the stress of fancy from

real life, to occupy it otherwise, to bury it with pretty accessories;

to engage it on the 'peacock yew-tree', and the 'portal-warding

lion-whelp'. Nothing, too, can be more splendid than the description

of the tropics as Mr. Tennyson delineates them, but a sailor would not

have felt the tropics in that manner. The beauties of nature would not

have so much occupied him. He would have known little of the scarlet

shafts of sunrise and nothing of the long convolvuluses. As in

_Robinson Crusoe_, his own petty contrivances and his small ailments

would have been the principal subject to him. 'For three years', he

might have said, 'my back was bad, and then I put two pegs into a

piece of drift wood and so made a chair, and after that it pleased God

to send me a chill.' In real life his piety would scarcely have gone

beyond that.

It will indeed be said, that though the sailor had no words for, and

even no explicit consciousness of the splendid details of the torrid

zone, yet that he had, notwithstanding, a dim latent inexpressible

conception of them: though he could not speak of them or describe

them, yet they were much to him. And doubtless such is the case. Rude

people are impressed by what is beautiful--deeply impressed--though

they could not describe what they see, or what they feel. But what is

absurd in Mr. Tennyson's description--absurd when we abstract it from

the gorgeous additions and ornaments with which Mr. Tennyson distracts

us--is, that his hero feels nothing else but these great splendours.

We hear nothing of the physical ailments, the rough devices, the low

superstitions, which really would have been the _first_ things, the

favourite and principal occupations of his mind. Just so when he gets

home he _may_ have had such fine sentiments, though it is odd, and he

_may_ have spoken of them to his landlady, though that is odder

still--but it is incredible that his whole mind should be made up of

fine sentiments. Beside those sweet feelings, if he had them, there

must have been many more obvious, more prosaic, and some perhaps more

healthy. Mr. Tennyson has shown a profound judgement in distracting us

as he does. He has given us a classic delineation of the 'Northern

Farmer' with no ornament at all--as bare a thing as can be--because he

then wanted to describe a true type of real men: he has given us a

sailor crowded all over with ornament and illustration, because he

then wanted to describe an unreal type of fancied men, not sailors as

they are, but sailors as they might be wished.

Another prominent element in _Enoch Arden_ is yet more suitable to,

yet more requires the aid of, ornate art. Mr. Tennyson undertook to

deal with _half belief_. The presentiments which Annie feels are

exactly of that sort which everybody has felt, and which every one has

half believed--which hardly any one has more than half believed.

Almost every one, it has been said, would be angry if any one else

reported that he believed in ghosts; yet hardly any one, when thinking

by himself, wholly disbelieves them. Just so such presentiments as Mr.

Tennyson depicts, impress the inner mind so much that the outer

mind--the rational understanding--hardly likes to consider them nicely

or to discuss them sceptically. For these dubious themes an ornate or

complex style is needful. Classical art speaks out what it has to say

plainly and simply. Pure style cannot hesitate; it describes in

concisest outline what is, as it is. If a poet really believes in

presentiments he can speak out in pure style. One who could have been

a poet--one of the few in any age of whom one can say certainly that

they could have been, and have not been--has spoken thus:

When Heaven sends sorrow,

Warnings go first,

Lest it should burst

With stunning might

On souls too bright

To fear the morrow.

Can science bear us

To the hid springs

Of human things?

Why may not dream,

Or thought's day-gleam,

Startle, yet cheer us?

Are such thoughts fetters,

While faith disowns

Dread of earth's tones,

Recks but Heaven's call,

And on the wall,

Reads but Heaven's letters?

But if a poet is not sure whether presentiments are true or not true;

if he wishes to leave his readers in doubt; if he wishes an atmosphere

of indistinct illusion and of moving shadow, he must use the romantic

style, the style of miscellaneous adjunct, the style 'which shirks,

not meets' your intellect, the style which as you are scrutinizing

disappears.

Nor is this all, or even the principal lesson, which _Enoch Arden_ may

suggest to us, of the use of ornate art. That art is the appropriate

art for an _unpleasing type_. Many of the characters of real life, if

brought distinctly, prominently, and plainly before the mind, as they

really are, if shown in their inner nature, their actual essence, are

doubtless very unpleasant. They would be horrid to meet and horrid to

think of. We fear it must be owned that Enoch Arden is this kind of

person. A dirty sailor who did _not_ go home to his wife is not an

agreeable being: a varnish must be put on him to make him shine. It is

true that he acts rightly; that he is very good. But such is human

nature that it finds a little tameness in mere morality. Mere virtue

belongs to a charity school-girl, and has a taint of the catechism.

All of us feel this, though most of us are too timid, too scrupulous,

too anxious about the virtue of others, to speak out. We are ashamed

of our nature in this respect, but it is not the less our nature. And

if we look deeper into the matter there are many reasons why we should

not be ashamed of it. The soul of man, and as we necessarily believe

of beings greater than man, has many parts beside its moral part. It

has an intellectual part, an artistic part, even a religious part, in

which mere morals have no share. In Shakespeare or Goethe, even in

Newton or Archimedes, there is much which will not be cut down to the

shape of the commandments. They have thoughts, feelings,

hopes--immortal thoughts and hopes--which have influenced the life of

men, and the souls of men, ever since their age, but which the 'whole

duty of man', the ethical compendium, does not recognize. Nothing is

more unpleasant than a virtuous person with a mean mind. A highly

developed moral nature joined to an undeveloped intellectual nature,

an undeveloped artistic nature, and a very limited religious nature,

is of necessity repulsive. It represents a bit of human nature--a good

bit, of course, but a bit only--in disproportionate, unnatural, and

revolting prominence; and, therefore, unless an artist use delicate

care, we are offended. The dismal act of a squalid man needed many

condiments to make it pleasant, and therefore Mr. Tennyson was right

to mix them subtly and to use them freely.

A mere act of self-denial can indeed scarcely be pleasant upon paper.

An heroic struggle with an external adversary, even though it end in a

defeat, may easily be made attractive. Human nature likes to see

itself look grand, and it looks grand when it is making a brave

struggle with foreign foes. But it does not look grand when it is

divided against itself. An excellent person striving with temptation

is a very admirable being in reality, but he is not a pleasant being

in description. We hope he will win and overcome his temptation, but

we feel that he would be a more interesting being, a higher being, if

he had not felt that temptation so much. The poet must make the

struggle great in order to make the self-denial virtuous, and if the

struggle be too great, we are apt to feel some mixture of contempt.

The internal metaphysics of a divided nature are but an inferior

subject for art, and if they are to be made attractive, much else must

be combined with them. If the excellence of _Hamlet_ had depended on

the ethical qualities of Hamlet, it would not have been the

masterpiece of our literature. He acts virtuously of course, and kills

the people he ought to kill, but Shakespeare knew that such goodness

would not much interest the pit. He made him a handsome prince, and a

puzzling meditative character; these secular qualities relieve his

moral excellence, and so he becomes 'nice'. In proportion as an artist

has to deal with types essentially imperfect, he must disguise their

imperfections; he must accumulate around them as many first-rate

accessories as may make his readers forget that they are themselves

second-rate. The sudden _millionaires_ of the present day hope to

disguise their social defects by buying old places, and hiding among

aristocratic furniture; just so a great artist who has to deal with

characters artistically imperfect will use an ornate style, will fit

them into a scene where there is much else to look at.

For these reasons ornate art is within the limits as legitimate as

pure art. It does what pure art could not do. The very excellence of

pure art confines its employment. Precisely because it gives the best

things by themselves and exactly as they are, it fails when it is

necessary to describe inferior things among other things, with a list

of enhancements and a crowd of accompaniments that in reality do not

belong to it. Illusion, half belief, unpleasant types, imperfect

types, are as much the proper sphere of ornate art, as an inferior

landscape is the proper sphere for the true efficacy of moonlight. A

really great landscape needs sunlight and bears sunlight; but

moonlight is an equalizer of beauties; it gives a romantic unreality

to what will not stand the bare truth. And just so does romantic art.

There is, however, a third kind of art which differs from these on the

point in which they most resemble one another. Ornate art and pure art

have this in common, that they paint the types of literature in as

good perfection as they can. Ornate art, indeed, uses undue disguises

and unreal enhancements; it does not confine itself to the best types;

on the contrary it is its office to make the best of imperfect types

and lame approximations; but ornate art, as much as pure art, catches

its subject in the best light it can, takes the most developed aspect

of it which it can find, and throws upon it the most congruous colours

it can use. But grotesque art does just the contrary. It takes the

type, so to say, _in difficulties_. It gives a representation of it in

its minimum development, amid the circumstances least favourable to

it, just while it is struggling with obstacles, just where it is

encumbered with incongruities. It deals, to use the language of

science, not with normal types but with abnormal specimens; to use the

language of old philosophy, not with what nature is striving to be,

but with what by some lapse she has happened to become.

This art works by contrast. It enables you to see, it makes you see,

the perfect type by painting the opposite deviation. It shows you what

ought to be by what ought not to be, when complete it reminds you of

the perfect image, by showing you the distorted and imperfect image.

Of this art we possess in the present generation one prolific master.

Mr. Browning is an artist working by incongruity. Possibly hardly one

of his most considerable efforts can be found which is not great

because of its odd mixture. He puts together things which no one else

would have put together, and produces on our minds a result which no

one else would have produced, or tried to produce. His admirers may

not like all we may have to say of him. But in our way we too are

among his admirers. No one ever read him without seeing not only his

great ability but his great _mind_. He not only possesses superficial

useable talents, but the strong something, the inner secret something

which uses them and controls them; he is great, not in mere

accomplishments, but in himself. He has applied a hard strong

intellect to real life; he has applied the same intellect to the

problems of his age. He has striven to know what _is_: he has

endeavoured not to be cheated by counterfeits, not to be infatuated

with illusions. His heart is in what he says. He has battered his

brain against his creed till he believes it. He has accomplishments

too, the more effective because they are mixed. He is at once a

student of mysticism, and a citizen of the world. He brings to the

club sofa distinct visions of old creeds, intense images of strange

thoughts: he takes to the bookish student tidings of wild Bohemia, and

little traces of the _demi-monde_. He puts down what is good for the

naughty and what is naughty for the good. Over women his easier

writings exercise that imperious power which belongs to the writings

of a great man of the world upon such matters. He knows women, and

therefore they wish to know him. If we blame many of Browning's

efforts, it is in the interest of art, and not from a wish to hurt or

degrade him.

If we wanted to illustrate the nature of grotesque art by an

exaggerated instance we should have selected a poem which the chance

of late publication brings us in this new volume. Mr. Browning has

undertaken to describe what may be called _mind in difficulties_--mind

set to make out the universe under the worst and hardest

circumstances. He takes 'Caliban', not perhaps exactly Shakespeare's

Caliban, but an analogous and worse creature; a strong thinking power,

but a nasty creature--a gross animal, uncontrolled and unelevated by

any feeling of religion or duty. The delineation of him will show that

Mr. Browning does not wish to take undue advantage of his readers by a

choice of nice subjects.