On reading this little book, {61} and considering all the exaggerated
praise and exaggerated blame which have been lavished on it, we could
not help falling into many thoughts about the history of English
poetry for the last forty years, and about its future destiny. Great
poets, even true poets, are becoming more and more rare among us.
There are those even who say that we have none; an assertion which,
as long as Mr. Tennyson lives, we shall take the liberty of denying.
But were he, which Heaven forbid, taken from us, whom have we to
succeed him? And he, too, is rather a poet of the sunset than of the
dawn--of the autumn than of the spring. His gorgeousness is that of
the solemn and fading year; not of its youth, full of hope,
freshness, gay and unconscious life. Like some stately hollyhock or
dahlia of this month's gardens, he endures while all other flowers
are dying; but all around is winter--a mild one, perhaps, wherein a
few annuals or pretty field weeds still linger on; but, like all mild
winters, especially prolific in fungi, which, too, are not without
their gaudiness, even their beauty, although bred only from the decay
of higher organisms, the plagiarists of the vegetable world. Such is
poetry in England; while in America the case is not much better.
What more enormous scope for new poetic thought than that which the
New World gives? Yet the American poets, even the best of them, look
lingeringly and longingly back to Europe and her legends; to her
models, and not to the best of them--to her criticism, and not to the
best of that--and bestow but a very small portion of such genius as
they have on America and her new forms of life. If they be nearer to
the spring than we, they are still deep enough in the winter. A few
early flowers may be budding among them, but the autumn crop is still
in somewhat shabby and rain-bedrabbled bloom. And for us, where are
our spring flowers? What sign of a new poetic school? Still more,
what sign of the healthy resuscitation of any old one?
"What matter, after all?" one says to oneself in despair, re-echoing
Mr. Carlyle. "Man was not sent into the world to write poetry. What
we want is truth. Of the former we have enough in all conscience
just now. Let the latter need be provided for by honest and
righteous history, and as for poets, let the dead bury their dead."
And yet, after all, man will write poetry, in spite of Mr. Carlyle:
nay, beings who are not men, but mere forked radishes, will write it.
Man is a poetry-writing animal. Perhaps he was meant to be one. At
all events, he can no more be kept from it than from eating. It is
better, with Mr. Carlyle's leave, to believe that the existence of
poetry indicates some universal human hunger, whether after "the
beautiful," or after "fame," or after the means of paying butchers'
bills; and accepting it as a necessary evil which must be committed,
to see that it be committed as well, or at least as little ill, as
possible. In excuse of which we may quote Mr. Carlyle against
himself, reminding him of a saying of Goethe once bepraised by him in
print: "We must take care of the beautiful, for the useful will take
care of itself."
And never, certainly, since Pope wrote his Dunciad, did the beautiful
require more taking care of, or evince less capacity for taking care
of itself; and never, we must add, was less capacity for taking care
of it evinced by its accredited guardians of the press than at this
present time, if the reception given to Mr. Smith's poems is to be
taken as a fair expression of "the public taste."
Now, let it be fairly understood, Mr. Alexander Smith is not the
object of our reproaches: but Mr. Alexander Smith's models and
flatterers. Against him we have nothing whatsoever to say; for him,
very much indeed.
Very young, as is said, self-educated, drudging for his daily bread
in some dreary Glasgow prison-house of brick and mortar, he has seen
the sky, the sun and moon--and, moreover, the sea, report says, for
one day in his whole life; and this is nearly the whole of his
experience in natural objects. And he has felt, too painfully for
his peace of mind, the contrast between his environment and that of
others--his means of culture and that of others--and, still more
painfully, the contrast between his environment and culture, and that
sense of beauty and power of melody which he does not deny that he
has found in himself, and which no one can deny who reads his poems
fairly; who reads even merely the opening page and key-note of the
whole:
For as a torrid sunset burns with gold
Up to the zenith, fierce within my soul
A passion burns from basement unto cope.
Poesy, poesy, I'd give to thee
As passionately my rich laden years,
My bubble pleasures, and my awful joys,
_As Hero gave her trembling sighs to find
Delicious death on wet Leander's lip_.
Bare, bald, and tawdry, as a fingered moth
Is my poor life; but with one smile thou canst
Clothe me with kingdoms. Wilt thou smile on me?
Wilt bid me die for thee? Oh fair and cold!
As well may some wild maiden waste her love
Upon the calm front of a marble Jove.
Now this scrap is by no menus a fair average specimen of Mr. Smith's
verse. But is not the self-educated man who could teach himself,
amid Glasgow smoke and noise, to write such a distich as that
exquisite one which we have given in italics, to be judged lovingly
and hopefully?
What if he has often copied? What if, in this very scrap, chosen
almost at random, there should be a touch from Tennyson's "Two
Voices?" And what if imitations, nay, caricatures, be found in
almost every page? Is not the explanation simple enough, and rather
creditable than discreditable to Mr. Smith? He takes as his models
Shelley, Keats, and their followers. Who is to blame for that? The
Glasgow youth, or the public taste, which has been exalting these
authors more and more for the last twenty years as the great poets of
the nineteenth century? If they are the proper ideals of the day,
who will blame him for following them as closely as possible--for
saturating his memory so thoroughly with their words and thoughts
that he reproduces them unconsciously to himself? Who will blame him
for even consciously copying their images, if they have said better
than he the thing which he wants to say, in the only poetical dialect
which he knows? He does no more than all schools have done, copy
their own masters; as the Greek epicists and Virgil copied Homer; as
all succeeding Latin epicists copied Virgil; as Italians copied
Ariosto and Tasso; as every one who can copies Shakespeare; as the
French school copied, or thought they copied, "The Classics," and as
a matter of duty used to justify any bold image in their notes, not
by its originality, but by its being already in Claudian, or Lucan,
or Virgil, or Ovid; as every poetaster, and a great many who were
more than poetasters, twenty years ago, used to copy Scott and Byron,
and as all poetasters now are copying the very same models as Mr.
Smith, and failing while he succeeds.
We by no means agree in the modern outcry for "originality." Is it
absolutely demanded that no poet shall say anything whatsoever that
any other poet has said? If so, Mr. Smith may well submit to a blame
which he will bear in common with Shakespeare, Chaucer, Pope, and
many another great name; and especially with Raphael himself, who
made no scruple of adopting not merely points of style, but single
motives and incidents, from contemporaries and predecessors. Who can
look at any of his earlier pictures, the Crucifixion for instance, at
present in Lord Ward's gallery at the Egyptian Hall, without seeing
that he has not merely felt the influence of Perugino, but copied
him; tried deliberately to be as like his master as he could? Was
this plagiarism? If so, all education, it would seem, must be a mere
training in plagiarism. For how is the student to learn, except by
copying his master's models? Is the young painter or sculptor a
plagiarist because he spends the first, often the best, years of his
life in copying Greek statues; or the schoolboy, for toiling at the
reproduction of Latin metres and images, in what are honestly and
fittingly called "copies" of verses. And what if the young artist
shall choose, as Mr. Smith has done, to put a few drawings into the
exhibition, or to carve and sell a few statuettes? What if the
schoolboy, grown into a gownsman, shall contribute his share to a set
of "Arundines Cami" or "Prolusiones Etonienses?" Will any one who
really knows what art or education means complain of them for having
imitated their models, however servilely? Will he not rather hail
such an imitation as a fair proof, first of the student's reverence
for authority--a more important element of "genius" than most young
folks fancy--and next, of his possessing any artistic power
whatsoever? For, surely, if the greater contains the less, the power
of creating must contain that of imitating. A young author's power
of accurate imitation is, after all, the primary and indispensable
test of his having even the capability of becoming a poet. He who
cannot write in a style which he does know, will certainly not be
able to invent a new style for himself. The first and simplest form
in which any metrical ear, or fancy, or imagination, can show itself,
must needs be in imitating existing models. Innate good taste--that
is, true poetic genius--will of course choose the best models in the
long run. But not necessarily at first. What shall be the student's
earliest ideal must needs be determined for him by circumstance, by
the books to which he has access, by the public opinion which he
hears expressed. Enough if he chooses, as Raphael did, the best
models which he knows, and tries to exhaust them, and learn all he
can from them, ready to quit them hereafter when he comes across
better ones, yet without throwing away what he has learnt. "Be
faithful in a few things, and thou shalt become ruler over many
things," is one of those eternal moral laws which, like many others,
holds as true of art as it does of virtue.
And on the whole, judging Mr. Alexander Smith by this rule, he has
been faithful over a few things, and therefore we have fair hope of
him for the future. For Mr. Smith does succeed, not in copying one
poet, but in copying all, and very often in improving on his models.
Of the many conceits which he has borrowed from Mr. Bailey, there is
hardly one which he has not made more true, more pointed and more
sweet; nay, in one or two places, he has dared to mend John Keats
himself. But his whole merit is by no means confined to the faculty
of imitation. Though the "Life Drama" itself is the merest cento of
reflections and images, without coherence or organisation, dramatic
or logical, yet single scenes, like that with the peasant and that
with the fallen outcast, have firm self-consistency and clearness of
conception; and these, as a natural consequence, are comparatively
free from those tawdry spangles which deface the greater part of the
poem. And, moreover, in the episode of "The Indian and the Lady,"
there is throughout a "keeping in the tone," as painters say, sultry
and languid, yet rich and full of life, like a gorgeous Venetian
picture, which augurs even better for Mr. Smith's future success than
the two scenes just mentioned; for consistency of thought may come
with time and training; but clearness of inward vision, the faculty
of imagination, can be no more learnt than it can be dispensed with.
In this, and this only it is true that poeta nascitur non fit; just
as no musical learning or practice can make a composer, unless he
first possess an innate ear for harmony and melody. And it must be
said that it is just in the passages where Mr. Smith is not copying,
where he forgets for awhile Shelley, Keats, and the rest, and is
content to be simply himself, that he is best; terse, vivid, sound,
manly, simple. May he turn round some day, and deliberately pulling
out all borrowed feathers, look at himself honestly and boldly in the
glass, and we will warrant him, on the strength of the least gaudy,
and as yet unpraised passages in his poems, that he will find himself
after all more eagle than daw, and quite well plumed enough by nature
to fly at a higher, because for him a more natural, pitch than he has
yet done.
True, he has written a great deal of nonsense; nonsense in matter as
well as in manner. But therein, too, he has only followed the
reigning school. As for manner, he does sometimes, in imitating his
models, out-Herod Herod. But why not? If Herod be a worthy king,
let him be by all means out-Heroded, if any man can do it. One
cannot have too much of a good thing. If it be right to bedizen
verses with metaphors and similes which have no reference, either in
tone or in subject, to the matter in hand, let there be as many of
them as possible. If a saddle is a proper place for jewels, then let
the seat be paved with diamonds and emeralds, and Runjeet Singh's
harness-maker be considered as a lofty artist, for whose barbaric
splendour Mr. Peat and his Melton customers are to forswear pigskin
and severe simplicity--not to say utility and comfort. If poetic
diction be different in species from plain English, then let us have
it as poetical as possible, and as unlike English; as ungrammatical,
abrupt, involved, transposed, as the clumsiness, carelessness, or
caprice of man can make it. If it be correct to express human
thought by writing whole pages of vague and bald abstract metaphysic,
and then trying to explain them by concrete concetti, which bear an
entirely accidental and mystical likeness to the notion which they
are to illustrate, then let the metaphysic be as abstract as
possible, the concetti as fanciful and far-fetched as possible. If
Marino and Cowley be greater poets than Ariosto and Milton, let young
poets imitate the former with might and main, and avoid spoiling
their style by any perusal of the too-intelligible common sense of
the latter. If Byron's moral (which used to be thought execrable) be
really his great excellence, and his style (which used to be thought
almost perfect) unworthy of this age of progress, then let us have
his moral without his style, his matter without his form; or--that we
may be sure of never falling for a moment into his besetting sins of
terseness, grace, and completeness--without any form at all. If
poetry, in order to be worthy of the nineteenth century, ought to be
as unlike as possible to Homer or Sophocles, Virgil or Horace,
Shakespeare or Spenser, Dante or Tasso, let those too-idolised names
be erased henceforth from the calendar; let the "Ars Poetica" be
consigned to flames, and Martinus Scriblerus's "Art of Sinking"
placed forthwith on the list of the Committee of Council for
Education, that not a working man in England may he ignorant that,
whatsoever superstitions about art may have haunted the benighted
heathens who built the Parthenon, nous avons change tout cela. In
one word, if it be best and most fitting to write poetry in the style
in which almost every one has been trying to write it since Pope and
plain sense went out, and Shelley and the seventh heaven came in, let
it be so written; and let him who most perfectly so "sets the age to
music," he presented by the assembled guild of critics, not with the
obsolete and too classic laurel, but with an electro-plated brass
medal, bearing the due inscription, "Ars est nescire artem." And
when, in twelve months' time, he finds himself forgotten, perhaps
decried, for the sake of the next aspirant, let him reconsider
himself, try whether, after all, the common sense of the many will
not prove a juster and a firmer standing-ground than the
sentimentality and bad taste of the few, and read Alexander Pope.
In Pope's writings, whatsoever he may not find, he will find the very
excellences after which our young poets strive in vain, produced by
their seeming opposites, which are now despised and discarded;
naturalness produced by studious art; sublimity by strict self-
restraint; depth by clear simplicity; pathos by easy grace; and a
morality infinitely more merciful, as well as more righteous, than
the one now in vogue among the poetasters, by honest faith in God.
If he be shocked by certain peculiarities of diction, and by the
fondness for perpetual antitheses, let him remember, that what seems
strange to our day was natural and habitual in Pope's; and that, in
the eyes of our grandchildren, Keats's and Shelley's peculiarities
will seem as monstrous as Pope's or Johnson's do in ours. But if,
misled by the popular contempt for Pope, be should he inclined to
answer this advice with a shrug and a smile, we entreat him and all
young poets, to consider, line by line, word by word, sound by sound,
only those once well-known lines, which many a brave and wise man of
fifty years ago would have been unable to read without honourable
tears:
In the worst inn's worst room, with mat half-hung,
The floor of plaster, and the walls of dung,
On once a flock-bed, but repaired with straw,
With tape-tied curtains never meant to draw,
The George and Garter, dangling from that bed,
Where tawdry yellow strove with dirty red,
Great Villiers lies. Alas! how changed from him,
That life of pleasure, and that soul of whim!
Gallant and gay, in Cliveden's proud alcove,
The bower of wanton Shrewsbury and love;
Or just as gay, at Council, in a ring
Of mimic statesmen, and their merry king,
No wit to flatter, left of all his store!
No fool to laugh at, which he valued more.
There, victor of his health, of fortune, friends,
And fame, this lord of useless thousands ends.
Yes; Pope knew, as well as Wordsworth and our "Naturalisti," that no
physical fact was so mean or coarse as to be below the dignity of
poetry--when in its right place. He could draw a pathos and
sublimity out of the dirty inn chamber, such as Wordsworth never
elicited from tubs and daffodils--because he could use them according
to the rules of art, which are the rules of sound reason and of true
taste.
The answer to all this is ready nowadays. We are told that Pope
could easily be great in what he attempted, because he never
attempted any but small matters; easily self-restraining, because his
paces were naturally so slow; above all, easily clear, because he is
always shallow; easily full of faith in what he did believe, because
he believed so very little. On the two former counts we may have
something to say hereafter. On the two latter, we will say at once,
that if it be argued, as it often is, that the reason of our modern
poetical obscurity and vagueness lies in the greater depth of the
questions which are now agitating thoughtful minds, we do utterly
deny it. Human nature, human temptations, human problems, are
radically the same in every age, by whatsoever outward difference of
words they may seem distinguished. Where is deeper philosophic
thought, true or false, expressed in verse, than in Dante, or in
Spenser's two cantos of "Mutabilities"? Yet if they are difficult to
understand, their darkness is that of the deep blue sea. Vague they
never are, obscure they never are, because they see clearly what they
want to say, and how to say it. There is always a sound and coherent
meaning in them, to be found if it be searched for.
The real cause of this modern vagueness is rather to be found in
shallow and unsound culture, and in that inability, or carelessness
about seeing any object clearly, which besets our poets just now; as
the cause of antique clearness lies in the nobler and healthier
manhood, in the severer and more methodic habits of thought, the
sounder philosophic and critical training, which enabled Spenser and
Milton to draw up a state paper, or to discourse deep metaphysics,
with the same manful possession of their subject which gives grace
and completeness to the "Penseroso" or the "Epithalamion." And if
our poets have their doubts, they should remember, that those to whom
doubt and inquiry are real and stern, are not inclined to sing about
them till they can sing poems of triumph over them. There has no
temptation taken our modern poets save that which is common to man--
the temptation of wishing to make the laws of the universe and of art
fit them, as they do not feel inclined to make themselves fit the
laws, or care to find them out.
What! Do you wish, asks some one, a little contemptuously, to
measure the great growing nineteenth century by the thumb-rule of
Alexander Pope? No. But to measure the men who write in the
nineteenth century by a man who wrote in the eighteenth; to compare
their advantages with his, their circumstances with his: and then,
if possible, to make them ashamed of their unmanliness. Have you
young poets of this day, your struggles, your chagrins? Do you think
the hump-backed dwarf, every moment conscious at once of his
deformity and his genius--conscious, probably, of far worse physical
shame than any deformity can bring, "sewed up in buckram every
morning, and requiring a nurse like a child"--caricatured, lampooned,
slandered, utterly without fault of his own--insulted and rejected by
the fine lady whom he had dared to court in reality, after being
allowed and allured to flirt with her in rhyme--do you suppose that
this man had nothing to madden him--to convert him into a sneering
snarling misanthrope? Yet was there one noble soul who met him who
did not love him, or whom he did not love? Have you your doubts? Do
you find it difficult to make your own speculations, even your own
honest convictions, square with the popular superstitions? What were
your doubts, your inward contradictions, to those of a man who, bred
a Papist, and yet burning with the most intense scorn and hatred of
lies and shams, bigotries and priestcrafts, could write that "Essay
on Man"? Read that, young gentlemen of the Job's-wife school, who
fancy it a fine thing to tell your readers to curse God and die, or,
at least, to show the world in print how you could curse God by
divine right of genius, if you chose, and be ashamed of your cowardly
wailings.
Alexander Pope went through doubt, contradiction, confusion, to which
yours are simple and light; and conquered. He was a man of like
passions with yourselves; infected with the peculiar vices of his
day; narrow, for his age was narrow; shallow, for his age was
shallow; a bon-vivant, for his age was a gluttonous and drunken one;
bitter, furious, and personal, for men round him were such; foul-
mouthed often, and indecent, as the rest were. Nay, his very power,
when he abuses it for his own ends of selfish spite and injured
vanity, makes him, as all great men can be (in words at least, for in
life he was far better than the men around him), worse than his age.
He can out-rival Dennis in ferocity, and Congreve in filth. So much
the worse for him in that account which he has long ago rendered up.
But in all times and places, as far as we can judge, the man was
heart-whole, more and not less righteous than his fellows. With his
whole soul he hates what is evil, as far as he can recognise it.
With his whole soul he loves what is good, as far as he can recognise
that. With his soul believes that there is a righteous and good God,
whose order no human folly or crime can destroy; and he will say so;
and does say it, clearly, simply, valiantly, reverently, in his
"Essay on Man." His theodicy is narrow; shallow, as was the
philosophy of his age. But as far as it goes, it is sound--faithful
to God, and to what he sees and knows. Man is made in God's image.
Man's justice is God's justice; man's mercy is God's mercy; man's
science, man's critic taste, are insights into the laws of God
himself. He does not pretend to solve the great problem. But he
believes that it is solved from all eternity; that God knows, God
loves, and God rules; that the righteous and faithful man may know
enough of the solution to know his duty, to see his way, to justify
God; and as much as he knows he tells. There were in that diseased
sensitive cripple no vain repinings, no moon-struck howls, no impious
cries against God: "Why hast thou made me thus?" To him God is a
righteous God, a God of order. Science, philosophy, politics,
criticism, poetry, are parts of His order--they are parts of the
appointed onward path for mankind; there are eternal laws for them.
There is a beautiful and fit order, in poetry, which is part of God's
order, which men have learnt ages ago, for they, too, had their
teaching from above; to offend against which is absolutely wrong, an
offence to be put down mildly in those who offend ignorantly; but
those who offend from dulness, from the incapacity to see the
beautiful, or from carelessness about it, when praise or gain tempts
them the other way, have some moral defect in them; they are what
Solomon calls fools: they are the enemies of man; and he will "hate
them right sore, even as though they were his own enemies"--which
indeed they were. He knows by painful experience that they deserve
no quarter; that there is no use giving them any; to spare them is to
make them insolent; to fondle the reptile is to be bitten by it.
True poetry, as the messenger of heavenly beauty, is decaying; true
refinement, true loftiness of thought, even true morality, are at
stake. And so he writes his "Dunciad." And would that he were here,
to write it over again, and write it better!
For write it again he surely would. And write it better he would
also. With the greater cleanliness of our time, with all the
additional experience of history, with the greater classical,
aesthetic, and theological knowledge of our day, the sins of our
poets are as much less excusable than those of Eusden, Blackmore,
Cibber, and the rest, as Pope's "Dunciad" on them would be more
righteously severe. What, for instance, would the author of the
"Essay on Man" say to anyone who now wrote p. 137 (for it really is
not to be quoted) of the "Life Drama" as the thoughts of his hero,
without any after atonement for the wanton insult it conveys toward
him whom he dares in the same breath to call "Father," simply because
he wants to be something very fine and famous and self-glorifying,
and Providence keeps him waiting awhile? Has Pope not said it
already?
Persist, by all divine in man unawed,
But learn, ye dunces, not to scorn your God!
And yet no; the gentle goddess would now lay no such restriction on
her children, for in Pope's day no man had discovered the new poetic
plan for making the divine in man an excuse for scorning God, and
finding in the dignity of "heaven-born genius" free licence to
upbraid, on the very slightest grounds, the Being from whom the said
genius pretends to derive his dignity. In one of his immortal saws
he has cautioned us against "making God in man's image." But it
never entered into his simple head that man would complain of God for
being made in a lower image than even his own. Atheism he could
conceive of; the deeper absurdity of Authotheism was left for our
more enlightened times and more spiritual muses.
It will be answered that all this blasphemy is not to be attributed
to the author, but to the man whose spiritual development he intends
to sketch. To which we reply that no man has a right to bring his
hero through such a state without showing how he came out of the
slough as carefully as how he came into it, especially when the said
hero is set forth as a marvellously clever person; and the last
scene, though full of beautiful womanly touches, and of a higher
morality than the rest of the book, contains no amende honorable, not
even an explanation of the abominable stuff which the hero has been
talking a few pages back. He leaps from the abyss to the seventh
heaven; but, unfortunately for the spectators, he leaps behind the
scenes, and they are none the wiser. And next; people have no more
right even for dramatic purposes, to put such language into print for
any purpose whatsoever, than they have to print the grossest
indecencies, or the most disgusting details of torture and cruelty.
No one can accuse this magazine of any fondness for sanctimonious
cant or lip-reverence; but if there be a "Father in Heaven," as Mr.
Smith confesses that there is, or even merely a personal Deity at
all, some sort of common decency in speaking of Him should surely be
preserved. No one would print pages of silly calumny and vulgar
insult against his earthly father, or even against a person for whom
he had no special dislike, and then excuse it by, "Of course, I don't
think so: but if anyone did think so, this would be a very smart way
of saying what he thought." Old Aristotle would call such an act
"banauson"--in plain English, blackguard; and we do not see how it
can be called anything else, unless in the case of some utter brute
in human form, to whom "there is no coenum, and therefore no
obscoenum; no fanum, and therefore no profanum." The common sense of
mankind in all ages has condemned this sort of shamelessness, even
more than it has insults to parental and social ties, and to all
which raises man above the brute. Let Mr. Smith take note of this,
and let him, if he loves himself, mend speedily; for of all styles
wherein to become stereotyped the one which he has chosen is the
worst, because in it the greatest amount of insincerity is possible.
There is a Tartarus in front of him as well as an Olympus; a hideous
possibility very near him of insincere impiety merely for the purpose
of startling; of lawless fancy merely for the purpose of glittering;
and a still more hideous possibility of a revulsion to insincere
cant, combined with the same lawless fancy, for the purpose of
keeping well with the public, in which to all appearances one of our
most popular novelists, not to mention the poet whose writings are
most analogous to Mr. Smith's, now lies wallowing.
Whether he shall hereafter obey his evil angel, and follow him, or
his good angel, and become a great poet, depends upon himself; and
above all upon his having courage to be himself, and to forget
himself, two virtues which, paradoxical as it may seem, are
correlatives. For the "subjective" poet--in plain words, the
egotist--is always comparing himself with every man he meets, and
therefore momentarily tempted to steal bits of their finery wherewith
to patch his own rents; while the man who is content to be simply
what God has made him, goes on from strength to strength developing
almost unconsciously under a divine education, by which his real
personality and the salient points by which he is distinguished from
his fellows, become apparent with more and more distinctness of form,
and brilliance of light and shadow, as those well know who have
watched human character attain its clearest and grandest as well as
its loveliest outlines, not among hankerers after fame and power, but
on lonely sickbeds, and during long unknown martyrdoms of humble
self-sacrifice and loving drudgery.
But whether or not Mr. Smith shall purify himself--and he can do so,
if he will, right nobly--the world must be purified of his style of
poetry, if men are ever, as he hopes, to "set his age to music;" much
more if they are once more to stir the hearts of the many by Tyrtaean
strains, such as may be needed before our hairs are gray. The
"poetry of doubt," however pretty, would stand us in little stead if
we were threatened with a second Armada. It will conduce little to
the valour, "virtus," manhood of any Englishman to be informed by any
poet, even in the most melodious verse, illustrated by the most
startling and pan cosmic metaphors. "See what a highly-organised and
peculiar stomach-ache I have had! Does it not prove indisputably
that I am not as other men are?" What gospel there can be in such a
message to any honest man who has either to till the earth, plan a
railroad, colonise Australia, or fight his country's enemies, is hard
to discover. Hard indeed to discover how this most practical, and
therefore most poetical, of ages, is to be "set to music," when all
those who talk about so doing persist obstinately in poring, with
introverted eyes, over the state of their own digestion--or creed.
What man wants, what art wants, perhaps what the Maker of them both
wants, is a poet who shall begin by confessing that he is as other
men are, and sing about things which concern all men, in language
which all men can understand. This is the only road to that gift of
prophecy which most young poets are nowadays in such a hurry to
arrogate to themselves. We can only tell what man will be by fair
induction, by knowing what he is, what he has been.
And it is most noteworthy that in this age, in which there is more
knowledge than there ever was of what man has been, and more
knowledge, through innumerable novelists, and those most subtle and
finished ones, of what man is, that poetry should so carefully avoid
drawing from this fresh stock of information in her so-confident
horoscopes of what man will be.
There is just now as wide a divorce between poetry and the common-
sense of all time, as there is between poetry and modern knowledge.
Our poets are not merely vague and confused, they are altogether
fragmentary--disjecta membra poetarum; they need some uniting idea.
And what idea?
Our answer will probably be greeted with a laugh. Nevertheless we
answer simply, What our poets want is faith.
There is little or no faith nowadays. And without faith there can be
no real art, for art is the outward expression of firm coherent
belief. And a poetry of doubt, even a sceptical poetry, in its true
sense, can never possess clear and sound form, even organic form at
all. How can you put into form that thought which is by its very
nature formless? How can you group words round a central idea when
you do not possess a central idea? Shakespeare in his one sceptic
tragedy has to desert the pure tragic form, and Hamlet remains the
beau-ideal of "the poetry of doubt." But what would a tragedy be in
which the actors were all Hamlets, or rather scraps of Hamlets? A
drama of Hamlet is only possible because the one sceptic is
surrounded by characters who have some positive faith, who do their
work for good or evil undoubtingly while he is speculating about his.
And both Ophelia, and Laertes, Fortinbras, the king, yea the very
grave-digger, know well enough what they want, whether Hamlet does or
not. The whole play is, in fact, Shakespeare's subtle reductio ad
absurdum of that very diseased type of mind which has been for the
last forty years identified with "genius"--with one difference,
namely, that Shakespeare, with his usual clearness of conception,
exhibits the said intellectual type pure and simple, while modern
poets degrade and confuse it, and all the questions dependent on it,
by mixing it up unnecessarily with all manner of moral weaknesses,
and very often moral crimes.
But the poet is to have a faith nowadays of course--a "faith in
nature." This article of Wordsworth's poetical creed is to be
assumed as the only necessary one, and we are to ignore altogether
the somewhat important fact that he had faith in a great deal besides
nature, and to make that faith in nature his sole differentia and
source of inspiration. Now we beg leave to express not merely our
want of faith in this same "faith in nature," but even our ignorance
of what it means. Nature is certain phenomena, appearances. Faith
in them is simply to believe that a red thing is red, and a square
thing square; a sine qua non doubtless in poetry, as in carpentry,
but which will produce no poetry, but only Dutch painting and
gardeners' catalogues--in a word, that lowest form of art, the merely
descriptive; and into this very style the modern naturalist poets,
from the times of Southey and Wordsworth, have been continually
falling, and falling therefore into baldness and vulgarity. For mere
description cannot represent even the outlines of a whole scene at
once, as the daguerreotype does; they must describe it piecemeal.
Much less can it represent that whole scene at once in all its
glories of colour, glow, fragrance, life, motion. In short, it
cannot give life and spirit. All merely descriptive poetry can do is
to give a dead catalogue--to kill the butterfly, and then write a
monograph on it. And, therefore, there comes a natural revulsion
from the baldness and puerility into which Wordsworth too often fell
by indulging his false theories on these matters.
But a revulsion to what? To the laws of course which underlie the
phenomena. But again--to which laws? Not merely to the physical
ones, else Turner's "Chemistry" and Watson's "Practice of Medicine"
are great poems.
True, we have heard Professor Forbes's book on Glaciers called an
epic poem, and not without reason: but what gives that noble book
its epic character is neither the glaciers nor the laws of them, but
the discovery of those laws: the methodic, truthful, valiant,
patient battle between man and nature, his final victory, his
wresting from her the secret which had been locked for ages in the
ice-caves of the Alps, guarded by cold and fatigue, danger and
superstitious dread. For Nature will be permanently interesting to
the poet, and appear to him in a truly poetic aspect, only in as far
as she is connected by him with spiritual and personal beings, and
becomes in his eyes either a person herself, or the dwelling and
organ of persons. The shortest scrap of word-painting, as Thomson's
"Seasons" will sufficiently prove, is wearisome and dead, unless
there be a living figure in the landscape, or unless, failing a
living figure, the scene is deliberately described with reference to
the poet or the reader, not as something in itself, but as something
seen by him, and grouped and subordinated exactly as it would strike
his eye and mind. But even this is insufficient. The heart of man
demands more, and so arises a craving after the old nature-mythology
of Greece, the old fairy legends of the Middle Age. The great poets
of the Renaissance both in England and in Italy had a similar
craving. But the aspect under which these ancient dreams are
regarded by them is most significantly different. With Spenser and
Ariosto, fairies and elves, gods and demons, are regarded in their
fancied connection with man. Even in the age of Pope, when the gods
and the Rosicrucian Sylphs have become alike "poetical machinery,"
this is their work. But among the moderns it is as connected with
Nature, and giving a soul and a personality to her, that they are
most valued. The most pure utterance of this feeling is perhaps
Schiller's "Gods of Greece," where the loss of the Olympians is
distinctly deplored, because it has unpeopled, not heaven, but earth.
But the same tone runs through Goethe's classical "Walpurgis Night,"
where the old human "twelve gods," the antitypes and the friends of
men, in whom our forefathers delighted, have vanished utterly, and
given place to semi-physical Nereides, Tritons, Telchines, Psylli,
and Seismos himself.
Keats, in his wonderful "Endymion," contrived to unite the two
aspects of Greek mythology as they never had been united before,
except by Spenser in his "Garden of Adonis." But the pantheistic
notion, as he himself says in "Lamia," was the one which lay nearest
his heart; and in his "Hyperion" he begins to deal wholly with the
Nature gods, and after magnificent success, leaves the poem
unfinished, most probably because he had become, as his readers must,
weary of its utter want of human interest. For that, after all, is
what is wanted in a poetical view of Nature; and that is what the
poet, in proportion to his want of dramatic faculty, must draw from
himself. He must--he does in these days--colour Nature with the
records of his own mind, and bestow a factitious life and interest on
her by making her reflect his own joy or sorrow. If he be out of
humour, she must frown; if he sigh, she must roar; if he be--what he
very seldom is--tolerably comfortable, the birds have liberty to
sing, and the sun to shine. But by the time that he has arrived at
this stage of his development, or degradation, the poet is hardly to
be called a strong man, he who is so munch the slave of his own moods
that he must needs see no object save through them, is not very
likely to be able to resist the awe which nature's grandeur and
inscrutability brings with it, and to say firmly, and yet reverently:
Si fractus illibatur orbis,
Impavidum ferient ruinae.
He feels, in spite of his conceit, that nature is not going his way,
or looking his looks, but going what he calls her own way, what we
call God's way. At all events, he feels that he is lying, when he
represents the great universe as turned to his small set of Pan's
pipes and all the more because he feels that, conceal it as he will,
those same Pan's pipes are out of tune with each other. And so
arises the habit of impersonating nature, not after the manner of
Spenser (whose purity of metaphor and philosophic method, when he
deals with nature, is generally even more marvellous than the
richness of his fancy), as an organic whole, but in her single and
accidental phenomena; and of ascribing not merely animal passions or
animal enjoyment, but human discursive intellect and moral sense, to
inanimate objects, and talking as if a stick or a stone were more of
a man than the poet is--as indeed they very often may be.
These, like everything else, are perfectly right in their own place--
where they express passion, either pleasurable or painful, passion,
that is, not so intense as to sink into exhaustion, or to be
compelled to self-control by the fear of madness. In these two
cases, as great dramatists know well enough, the very violence of the
emotion produces perfect simplicity, as the hurricane blows the sea
smooth. But where fanciful language is employed to express the
extreme of passion, it is felt to be absurd, and is accordingly
called rant and bombast: and where it is not used to express passion
at all, but merely the quiet and normal state of the poet's mind, or
of his characters, with regard to external nature; when it is
considered, as it is by most of our modern poets, the staple of
poetry, indeed poetic diction itself, so that the more numerous and
the stranger conceits an author can cram into his verses, the finer
poet he is; then, also, it is called rant and bombast, but of the
most artificial, insincere, and (in every sense of the word)
monstrous kind; the offspring of an effeminate nature-worship,
without self-respect, without true manhood, because it exhibits the
poet as the puppet of his own momentary sensations, and not as a man
superior to nature, claiming his likeness to the Author of nature, by
confessing and expressing the permanent laws of Nature, undisturbed
by fleeting appearances without, or fleeting tempers within. Hence
it is that, as in all insincere and effete times, the poetry of the
day deals more and more with conceits, and less and less with true
metaphors. In fact, hinc illae lachrymae. This is, after all, the
primary symptom of disease in the public taste, which has set us on
writing this review--that critics all round are crying: "An ill-
constructed whole, no doubt; but full of beautiful passages"--the
word "passages" turning out to mean, in plain English, conceits. The
simplest distinction, perhaps, between an image and a conceit is
this--that while both are analogies, the image is founded on an
analogy between the essential properties of two things--the conceit
on an analogy between its accidents. Images, therefore, whether
metaphors or similes, deal with laws; conceits with private
judgments. Images belong to the imagination, the power which sees
things according to their real essence and inward life, and conceits
to the fancy or phantasy, which only see things as they appear.