I have often thought that in Art, judging by the analogy of previous
development, we ought to be able to prophesy more or less the direction
in which development is likely to take place. I mean that in music, for
instance, the writers of the stricter ancient music might have seen
that the art was likely to develop a greater intricacy of form, an
increased richness of harmony, a larger use of discords, suspensions,
and chromatic intervals, a tendency to conceal superficial form rather
than to emphasise it, and so forth. Yet it is a curious question
whether if Handel, say, could have heard an overture of Wagner's he
would have thought it an advance in beauty or not--whether it would
have seemed to him like the realisation of some incredible dream, a
heavenly music, or whether he would have thought it licentious, and
even shapeless. Of course, one knows that there is going to be
development in art, but the imagination is unable to forecast it,
except in so far as it can forecast a possibility of an increased
perfection of technique. It is the same with painting. It is a
bewildering speculation what Raffaelle or Michelangelo would have
thought of the work of Turner or Millais: whether they would have been
delighted by the subtle evolution of their own aims, or confused by the
increase of impressional suggestiveness--whether, indeed, if Raffaelle
or Michelangelo had seen a large photograph, say, of a winter scene, or
a chromo-lithograph such as appears as a supplement to an illustrated
paper, they might not have flung down their brush in a mixture of
rapture and despair.
There is the same difficulty when we come to literature. What would
Chaucer or Spenser have thought of Browning or Swinburne? Would such
poetry have seemed to them like an inspired product of art, or a
delirious torrent of unintelligible verbiage? Of course, they would not
have understood the language, to begin with; and the thought, the
interfusion of philosophy, the new problems, would have been absolutely
incomprehensible. Probably if one could have questioned Spenser, he
would have felt that the last word had probably been said in poetry,
and would not have been able to conceive of its development in any
direction.
The great genius who is also effective is generally the man who is not
very far ahead of his age, but just a little ahead of it--who foresees
not the remote possibilities of artistic development, but just the
increased amount of colour and quality which the received forms can
bear, and which are consequently likely to be acceptable to people of
artistic perceptions. If a Tennyson had lived in the time of Pope, he
would doubtless have used the heroic couplet faithfully, and put into
it just a small increase of melody, a slightly more graceful play of
thought, a finer observation of natural things--but he probably would
not have strayed beyond the accepted forms of art.
Then there comes in a new and interesting question as to whether it is
possible that any new species of art will be developed, or whether all
the forms of art are more or less in our hands. It is possible to
conceive that music may in the future desert form in favour of colour;
it is possible to conceive that painters might produce pictures of pure
colour, quite apart from any imitation of natural objects, in which
colour might aspire more to the condition of music, and modulate from
tone to tone.
In literary art, the movement in the direction of realistic art, as
opposed to idealistic, is the most marked development of later days.
But I believe that there is still a further possibility of development,
a combination of prose and poetry, which may be confidently expected in
the future.
It is clear, I think, that the old instinct which tended to make a
division between poetry and prose is being gradually obliterated. The
rhythmical structure of poetry, and above all the device of rhyme, is
essentially immature and childish: the use by poets of rhythmical beat
and verbal assonance is simply the endeavour to captivate what is a
primeval and even barbarous instinct. The pleasure which children take
in beating their hands upon a table, in rapping out a tattoo with a
stick, in putting together unmeaning structures of rhyme, is not
necessarily an artistic thing at all; what lies at the root of it is
the pleasure of the conscious perception of similarity and regularity.
This same tendency is to be seen in our buildings, in the love of
geometrical forms, so that the elementary perception is better pleased
by contemplating a building with a door in the middle and the same
number of windows on each side, than in contemplating the structure of
a tree. Uneducated people are far more charmed by the appearance of a
rock which has a resemblance to something else--a human face or an
animal--than by a beautifully proportioned and irregular crag. The
uncultivated human being, again, loves geometrical forms in nature,
such as the crystal and the basalt column, or the magnified snowflake,
better than it loves forms of lavish wildness. We gather about our
dwellings flowers which please by their sharply defined tint, and their
correspondence of petal with petal; and yet there is just as precisely
ordered a structure in natural objects, which appear to be fortuitous
in shape and outline, as there is in things whose outline is more
strictly geometrical. The laws which regulate the shape of a chalk down
or an ivy tendril are just as severe as the laws which regulate the
monkey-puzzle tree or the talc crystal. My own belief is that the
trained artistic sense is probably only in its infancy, and that it
will advance upon the line of the pleased apprehension of the existence
of less obvious structure.
If we apply this to literature, it is my belief that the love of human
beings for the stanza and the rhyme is probably an elementary thing,
like the love of the crystal and the flower-shape, and that it is the
love not so much of the beautiful as of the kind of effect that the
observer could himself produce. The child feels that, given the
materials, he could and would make shapes like crystals and flowers;
but to make things of more elaborate structure would be outside his
power.
To confine ourselves, then, to one single literary effect, it appears
to me that the poetry of the future will probably not develop very much
further in the direction of metre and rhyme. Indeed, it is possible to
see, not to travel far for instances, in the work of such writers as
Mr. Robert Bridges or Mr. Stephen Phillips, a tendency to write lines
which shall conceal as far as possible their rhythmical beat. It is
indeed a very subtle pleasure to perceive the effect of lines which are
unmetrical superficially but which yet confine themselves to a fixed
structure below, by varying the stresses and compensating for them. It
is possible, though I do not think it very likely, that poetry may
develop largely in this direction. I do not think it likely, because
such writing is intricate and difficult, and ends too often in being a
mere _tour de force_; the pleasure arising from the discovery that,
after all, the old simple structure is there, though strangely
disguised, I think it more probable that the superficial structure will
be frankly given up. If we consider what rhyme is, and what detestable
limitations it enforces on the writer for the sake of gratifying what
is, after all, not a dignified pleasure, the only wonder is that such a
tradition should have survived so long.
What I rather anticipate is the growth among our writers of a poetical
prose, with a severe structure and sequence of thought underlying it,
but with an entire irregularity of outline. The pleasure to be derived
from perfectly proportioned lucid prose is a far subtler and more
refined pleasure than that derived from the rhythmical beat of verse.
Take, for instance, such works as _The Ring and the Book_ and _Aurora
Leigh_. Is there anything whatever to be gained by the relentless
drumming, under the surface of these imaginative narratives, of the
stolid blank verse? Would not such compositions have gained by being
written in pure poetical prose? The quality which at present directs
writers to choosing verse-forms for poetical expression, apart from the
traditions, is the need of condensation, and the sense of proportion
which the verse-structure enforces and imparts. But I should look
forward to the writing of prose where the epithets should be as
diligently weighed, the cadence as sedulously studied; where the mood
and the subject would indicate inevitably the form of the sentence, the
alternation of languid, mellifluous streams of scented and honied words
with brisk, emphatic, fiery splashes of language. Indeed, in reading
even great poetry, is one not sometimes sadly aware, as in the case of
Shelley or Swinburne, that the logical sequence of thought is loose and
indeterminate, and that this is concealed from one by the reverberating
beat of metre, which gives a false sense of structure to a mood that is
really invertebrate?
What I am daily hoping to see is the rise of a man of genius, with a
rich poetical vocabulary and a deep instinct for poetical material, who
will throw aside resolutely all the canons of verse, and construct
prose lyrics with a perfect mastery of cadence and melody.
The experiment was made by Walt Whitman, and in a few of his finest
lyrics, such as _Out of the Cradle endlessly rocking_, one gets the
perfection of structure and form. But he spoilt his vehicle by a
careless diffuseness, by a violent categorical tendency, and by other
faults which may be called faults of breeding rather than faults of
art--a ghastly volubility, an indiscretion, a lust for description
rather than suggestion; and thus he has numbered no followers, and only
a few inconsiderable imitators.
I think, too, that Whitman was, in position, just a little ahead, as I
have indicated, of the taste of his time; and he was not a good enough
artist to enforce the beauty and the possibilities of his experiment
upon the world.
There is, moreover, this further difficulty in the way of the literary
experimentalist. Whitman, in virtue of his strength, his vitality, his
perception, his individuality, rather blocks the way; it is difficult
to avoid imitating him, though it is easy to avoid his errors. It is
difficult in such poetry not to apostrophise one's subject as Whitman
did.
It may be asked, in what is this poetical prose to differ from the
prose of great artists who have written melodious, reflective,
essentially poetical prose--the prose of Lamb, of Ruskin, of Pater? The
answer must be that it must differ from Lamb in sustained intention,
from Ruskin in firmness of structure, from Pater in variety of mood.
Such prose as I mean must be serious, liquid, profound. It must
probably eschew all broad effects of humour; it must eschew narrative;
it must be in its essence lyrical, an outburst like the song of the
lark or the voice of the waterfall. It must deal with beauty, not only
the beauty of natural things, but the beauty of human relations, though
not trenching upon drama; and, above all, it must take into itself the
mystery of philosophical and scientific thought. Science and philosophy
are deeply and essentially poetical, in that they are attempts to build
bridges into the abyss of the unknown. The work of the new lyrist must
be to see in things and emotions the quality of beauty, and to discern
and express the magic quickening thrill that creeps like a flame
through the material form, and passes out beyond the invisible horizon,
leaping from star to star, and from the furthest star into the depths
of the ancient environing night.