ON LOVE IN ENGLISH POETRY
I often imagine that the longer he studies English literature the more the
Japanese student must be astonished at the extraordinary predominance
given to the passion of love both in fiction and in poetry. Indeed, by
this time I have begun to feel a little astonished at it myself. Of
course, before I came to this country it seemed to me quite natural that
love should be the chief subject of literature; because I did not know
anything about any other kind of society except Western society. But
to-day it really seems to me a little strange. If it seems strange to me,
how much more ought it to seem strange to you! Of course, the simple
explanation of the fact is that marriage is the most important act of
man's life in Europe or America, and that everything depends upon it. It
is quite different on this side of the world. But the simple explanation
of the difference is not enough. There are many things to be explained.
Why should not only the novel writers but all the poets make love the
principal subject of their work? I never knew, because I never thought,
how much English literature was saturated with the subject of love until I
attempted to make selections of poetry and prose for class use--naturally
endeavouring to select such pages or poems as related to other subjects
than passion. Instead of finding a good deal of what I was looking for, I
could find scarcely anything. The great prose writers, outside of the
essay or history, are nearly all famous as tellers of love stories. And it
is almost impossible to select half a dozen stanzas of classic verse from
Tennyson or Rossetti or Browning or Shelley or Byron, which do not contain
anything about kissing, embracing, or longing for some imaginary or real
beloved. Wordsworth, indeed, is something of an exception; and Coleridge
is most famous for a poem which contains nothing at all about love. But
exceptions do not affect the general rule that love is the theme of
English poetry, as it is also of French, Italian, Spanish, or German
poetry. It is the dominant motive.
So with the English novelists. There have been here also a few
exceptions--such as the late Robert Louis Stevenson, most of whose novels
contain little about women; they are chiefly novels or romances of
adventure. But the exceptions are very few. At the present time there are
produced almost every year in England about a thousand new novels, and all
of these or nearly all are love stories. To write a novel without a woman
in it would be a dangerous undertaking; in ninety-nine cases out of a
hundred the book would not sell.
Of course all this means that the English people throughout the world, as
readers, are chiefly interested in the subject under discussion. When you
find a whole race interested more in one thing than in anything else, you
may be sure that it is so because the subject is of paramount importance
in the life of the average person. You must try to imagine then, a society
in which every man must choose his wife, and every woman must choose her
husband, independent of all outside help, and not only choose but obtain
if possible. The great principle of Western society is that competition
rules here as it rules in everything else. The best man--that is to say,
the strongest and cleverest--is likely to get the best woman, in the sense
of the most beautiful person. The weak, the feeble, the poor, and the ugly
have little chance of being able to marry at all. Tens of thousands of men
and women can not possibly marry. I am speaking of the upper and middle
classes. The working people, the peasants, the labourers, these marry
young; but the competition there is just the same--just as difficult, and
only a little rougher. So it may be said that every man has a struggle of
some kind in order to marry, and that there is a kind of fight or contest
for the possession of every woman worth having. Taking this view of
Western society not only in England but throughout all Europe, you will
easily be able to see why the Western public have reason to be more
interested in literature which treats of love than in any other kind of
literature.
But although the conditions that I have been describing are about the same
in all Western countries, the tone of the literature which deals with love
is not at all the same. There are very great differences. In prose they
are much more serious than in poetry; because in all countries a man is
allowed, by public opinion, more freedom in verse than in prose. Now these
differences in the way of treating the subject in different countries
really indicate national differences of character. Northern love stories
and Northern poetry about love are very serious; and these authors are
kept within fixed limits. Certain subjects are generally forbidden. For
example, the English public wants novels about love, but the love must be
the love of a girl who is to become somebody's wife. The rule in the
English novel is to describe the pains, fears, and struggles of the period
before marriage--the contest in the world for the right of marriage. A man
must not write a novel about any other point of love. Of course there are
plenty of authors who have broken this rule but the rule still exists. A
man may represent a contest between two women, one good and one bad, but
if the bad woman is allowed to conquer in the story, the public will
growl. This English fashion has existed since the eighteenth century.
since the time of Richardson, and is likely to last for generations to
come.
Now this is not the rule at all which governs making of novels in France.
French novels generally treat of the relations of women to the world and
to lovers, after marriage; consequently there is a great deal in French
novels about adultery, about improper relations between the sexes, about
many things which the English public would not allow. This does not mean
that the English are morally a better people than the French or other
Southern races. But it does mean that there are great differences in the
social conditions. One such difference can be very briefly expressed. An
English girl, an American girl, a Norwegian, a Dane, a Swede, is allowed
all possible liberty before marriage. The girl is told, "You must be able
to take care of yourself, and not do wrong." After marriage there is no
more such liberty. After marriage in all Northern countries a woman's
conduct is strictly watched. But in France, and in Southern countries, the
young girl has no liberty before marriage. She is always under the guard
of her brother, her father, her mother, or some experienced relation. She
is accompanied wherever she walks. She is not allowed to see her betrothed
except in the presence of witnesses. But after marriage her liberty
begins. Then she is told for the first time that she must take care of
herself. Well, you will see that the conditions which inspire the novels,
in treating of the subjects of love and marriage, are very different in
Northern and in Southern Europe. For this reason alone the character of
the novel produced in England could not be the same.
You must remember, however, that there are many other reasons for this
difference--reasons of literary sentiment. The Southern or Latin races
have been civilized for a much longer time than the Northern races; they
have inherited the feelings of the ancient world, the old Greek and Roman
world, and they think still about the relation of the sexes in very much
the same way that the ancient poets and romance writers used to think. And
they can do things which English writers can not do, because their
language has power of more delicate expression.
We may say that the Latin writers still speak of love in very much the
same way that it was considered before Christianity. But when I speak of
Christianity I am only referring to an historical date. Before
Christianity the Northern races also thought about love very much in the
same way that their best poets do at this day. The ancient Scandinavian
literature would show this. The Viking, the old sea-pirate, felt very much
as Tennyson or as Meredith would feel upon this subject; he thought of
only one kind of love as real--that which ends in marriage, the affection
between husband and wife. Anything else was to him mere folly and
weakness. Christianity did not change his sentiment on this subject. The
modern Englishman, Swede, Dane, Norwegian, or German regards love in
exactly that deep, serious, noble way that his pagan ancestors did. I
think we can say that different races have differences of feeling on
sexual relations, which differences are very much older than any written
history. They are in the blood and soul of a people, and neither religion
nor civilization can utterly change them.
So far I have been speaking particularly about the differences in English
and French novels; and a novel is especially a reflection of national
life, a kind of dramatic narration of truth, in the form of a story. But
in poetry, which is the highest form of literature, the difference is much
more observable. We find the Latin poets of to-day writing just as freely
on the subject of love as the old Latin poets of the age of Augustus,
while Northern poets observe with few exceptions great restraint when
treating of this theme. Now where is the line to be drawn? Are the Latins
right? Are the English right? How are we to make a sharp distinction
between what is moral and good and what is immoral and bad in treating
love-subjects?
Some definition must be attempted.
What is meant by love? As used by Latin writers the word has a range of
meanings, from that of the sexual relation between insects or animals up
to the highest form of religious emotion, called "The love of God." I need
scarcely say that this definition is too loose for our use. The English
word, by general consent, means both sexual passion and deep friendship.
This again is a meaning too wide for our purpose. By putting the adjective
"true" before love, some definition is attempted in ordinary conversation.
When an Englishman speaks of "true love," he usually means something that
has no passion at all; he means a perfect friendship which grows up
between man and wife and which has nothing to do with the passion which
brought the pair together. But when the English poet speaks of love, he
generally means passion, not friendship. I am only stating very general
rules. You see how confusing the subject is, how difficult to define the
matter. Let us leave the definition alone for a moment, and consider the
matter philosophically.
Some very foolish persons have attempted even within recent years to make
a classification of different kinds of love--love between the sexes. They
talk about romantic love, and other such things. All that is utter
nonsense. In the meaning of sexual affection there is only one kind of
love, the natural attraction of one sex for them other; and the only
difference in the highest for of this attraction and the lowest is this,
that in the nobler nature a vast number of moral, aesthetic, and ethical
sentiments are related to the passion, and that in lower natures those
sentiments are absent. Therefore we may say that even in the highest forms
of the sentiment there is only one dominant feeling, complex though it be,
the desire for possession. What follows the possession we may call love if
we please; but it might better be called perfect friendship and sympathy.
It is altogether a different thing. The love that is the theme of poets in
all countries is really love, not the friendship that grows out of it.
I suppose you know that the etymological meaning of "passion" is "a state
of suffering." In regard to love, the word has particular significance to
the Western mind, for it refers to the time of struggle and doubt and
longing before the object is attained. Now how much of this passion is a
legitimate subject of literary art?
The difficulty may, I think, be met by remembering the extraordinary
character of the mental phenomena which manifest themselves in the time of
passion. There is during that time a strange illusion, an illusion so
wonderful that it has engaged the attention of great philosophers for
thousands of years; Plato, you know, tried to explain it in a very famous
theory. I mean the illusion that seems to charm, or rather, actually does
charm the senses of a man at a certain time. To his eye a certain face has
suddenly become the most beautiful object in the world. To his ears the
accents of one voice become the sweetest of all music. Reason has nothing
to do with this, and reason has no power against the enchantment. Out of
Nature's mystery, somehow or other, this strange magic suddenly
illuminates the senses of a man; then vanishes again, as noiselessly as it
came. It is a very ghostly thing, and can not be explained by any theory
not of a very ghostly kind. Even Herbert Spencer has devoted his reasoning
to a new theory about it. I need not go further in this particular than to
tell you that in a certain way passion is now thought to have something to
do with other lives than the present; in short, it is a kind of organic
memory of relations that existed in thousands and tens of thousands of
former states of being. Right or wrong though the theories may be, this
mysterious moment of love, the period of this illusion, is properly the
subject of high poetry, simply because it is the most beautiful and the
most wonderful experience of a human life. And why?
Because in the brief time of such passion the very highest and finest
emotions of which human nature is capable are brought into play. In that
time more than at any other hour in life do men become unselfish,
unselfish at least toward one human being. Not only unselfishness but
self-sacrifice is a desire peculiar to the period. The young man in love
is not merely willing to give away everything that he possesses to the
person beloved; he wishes to suffer pain, to meet danger, to risk his life
for her sake. Therefore Tennyson, in speaking of that time, beautifully
said:
Love took up the harp of Life, and smote on all the chords with might,
Smote the chord of Self, that, trembling, pass'd in music out of sight.
Unselfishness is, of course, a very noble feeling, independently of the
cause. But this is only one of the emotions of a higher class when
powerfully aroused. There is pity, tenderness--the same kind of tenderness
that one feels toward a child--the love of the helpless, the desire to
protect. And a third sentiment felt at such a time more strongly than at
any other, is the sentiment of duty; responsibilities moral and social are
then comprehended in a totally new way. Surely none can dispute these
facts nor the beauty of them.
Moral sentiments are the highest of all; but next to them the sentiment of
beauty in itself, the artistic feeling, is also a very high form of
intellectual and even of secondary moral experience. Scientifically there
is a relation between the beautiful and the good, between the physically
perfect and the ethically perfect. Of course it is not absolute. There is
nothing absolute in this world. But the relation exists. Whoever can
comprehend the highest form of one kind of beauty must be able to
comprehend something of the other. I know very well that the ideal of the
love-season is an illusion; in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of
the thousand the beauty of the woman is only imagined. But does that make
any possible difference? I do not think that it does. To imagine beauty is
really to see it--not objectively, perhaps, but subjectively beyond all
possibility of doubt. Though you see the beauty only in your mind, in your
mind it is; and in your mind its ethical influence must operate. During
the time that a man worships even imaginary bodily beauty, he receives
some secret glimpse of a higher kind of beauty--beauty of heart and mind.
Was there ever in this world a real lover who did not believe the woman of
his choice to be not only the most beautiful of mortals, but also the best
in a moral sense? I do not think that there ever was.
The moral and the ethical sentiments of a being thus aroused call into
sudden action all the finer energies of the man--the capacities for
effort, for heroism, for high-pressure work of any sort, mental or
physical, for all that requires quickness in thought and exactitude in
act. There is for the time being a sense of new power. Anything that makes
strong appeal to the best exercise of one's faculties is beneficent and,
in most cases, worthy of reverence. Indeed, it is in the short season of
which I am speaking that we always discover the best of everything in the
character of woman or of man. In that period the evil qualities, the
ungenerous side, is usually kept as much out of sight as possible.
Now for all these suggested reasons, as for many others which might be
suggested, the period of illusion in love is really the period which poets
and writers of romance are naturally justified in describing. Can they go
beyond it with safety, with propriety? That depends very much upon whether
they go up or down. By going up I mean keeping within the region of moral
idealism. By going down I mean descending to the level of merely animal
realism. In this realism there is nothing deserving the highest effort of
art of any sort.
What is the object of art? Is it not, or should it not be, to make us
imagine better conditions than that which at present exist in the world,
and by so imagining to prepare the way for the coming of such conditions?
I think that all great art has done this. Do you remember the old story
about Greek mothers keeping in their rooms the statue of a god or a man,
more beautiful than anything real, so that their imagination might be
constantly influenced by the sight of beauty, and that they might perhaps
be able to bring more beautiful children into the world? Among the Arabs,
mothers also do something of this kind, only, as they have no art of
imagery, they go to Nature herself for the living image. Black luminous
eyes are beautiful, and wives keep in their tents a little deer, the
gazelle, which is famous for the brilliancy and beauty of its eyes. By
constantly looking at this charming pet the Arab wife hopes to bring into
the world some day a child with eyes as beautiful as the eyes of the
gazelle. Well, the highest function of art ought to do for us, or at least
for the world, what the statue and the gazelle were expected to do for
Grecian and Arab mothers--to make possible higher conditions than the
existing ones.
So much being said, consider again the place and the meaning of the
passion of love in any human life. It is essentially a period of idealism,
of imagining better things and conditions than are possible in this world.
For everybody who has been in love has imagined something higher than the
possible and the present. Any idealism is a proper subject for art. It is
not at all the same in the case of realism. Grant that all this passion,
imagination, and fine sentiment is based upon a very simple animal
impulse. That does not make the least difference in the value of the
highest results of that passion. We might say the very same thing about
any human emotion; every emotion can be evolutionally traced back to
simple and selfish impulses shared by man with the lower animals. But,
because an apple tree or a pear tree happens to have its roots in the
ground, does that mean that its fruits are not beautiful and wholesome?
Most assuredly we must not judge the fruit of the tree from the unseen
roots; but what about turning up the ground to look at the roots? What
becomes of the beauty of the tree when you do that? The realist--at least
the French realist--likes to do that. He likes to bring back the attention
of his reader to the lowest rather than to the highest, to that which
should be kept hidden, for the very same reason that the roots of a tree
should be kept underground if the tree is to live.
The time of illusion, then, is the beautiful moment of passion; it
represents the artistic zone in which the poet or romance writer ought to
be free to do the very best that he can. He may go beyond that zone; but
then he has only two directions in which he can travel. Above it there is
religion, and an artist may, like Dante, succeed in transforming love into
a sentiment of religious ecstasy. I do not think that any artist could do
that to-day; this is not an age of religious ecstasy. But upwards there is
no other way to go. Downwards the artist may travel until he finds himself
in hell. Between the zone of idealism and the brutality of realism there
are no doubt many gradations. I am only indicating what I think to be an
absolute truth, that in treating of love the literary master should keep
to the period of illusion, and that to go below it is a dangerous
undertaking. And now, having tried to make what are believed to be proper
distinctions between great literature on this subject and all that is not
great, we may begin to study a few examples. I am going to select at
random passages from English poets and others, illustrating my meaning.
Tennyson is perhaps the most familiar to you among poets of our own time;
and he has given a few exquisite examples of the ideal sentiment in
passion. One is a concluding verse in the beautiful song that occurs in
the monodrama of "Maud," where the lover, listening in the garden, hears
the steps of his beloved approaching.
She is coming, my own, my sweet,
Were it ever so airy a tread,
My heart would hear her and beat,
Were it earth in an earthy bed;
My dust would hear her and beat,
Had I lain for a century dead;
Would start and tremble under her feet,
And blossom in purple and red.
This is a very fine instance of the purely idea emotion--extravagant, if
you like, in the force of the imagery used, but absolutely sincere and
true; for the imagination of love is necessarily extravagant. It would be
quite useless to ask whether the sound of a girl's footsteps could really
waken a dead man; we know that love can fancy such things quite naturally,
not in one country only but everywhere. An Arabian poem written long
before the time of Mohammed contains exactly the same thought in simpler
words; and I think that there are some old Japanese songs containing
something similar. All that the statement really means is that the voice,
the look, the touch, even the footstep of the woman beloved have come to
possess for the lover a significance as great as life and death. For the
moment he knows no other divinity; she is his god, in the sense that her
power over him has become infinite and irresistible.
The second example may be furnished from another part of the same
composition--the little song of exaltation after the promise to marry has
been given.
O let the solid ground
Not fail beneath my feet
Before my life has found
What some have found so sweet;
Then let come what come may,
What matter if I go mad,
I shall have had my day.
Let the sweet heavens endure,
Not close and darken above me
Before I am quite, quite sure
That there is one to love me;
Then let come what come may
To a life that has been so sad,
I shall have had my day.
The feeling of the lover is that no matter what happens afterwards, the
winning of the woman is enough to pay for life, death, pain, or anything
else. One of the most remarkable phenomena of the illusion is the supreme
indifference to consequences--at least to any consequences which would not
signify moral shame or loss of honour, Of course the poet is supposed to
consider the emotion only in generous natures. But the subject of this
splendid indifference has been more wonderfully treated by Victor Hugo
than by Tennyson--as we shall see later on, when considering another phase
of the emotion. Before doing that, I want to call your attention to a very
charming treatment of love's romance by an American. It is one of the most
delicate of modern compositions, and it is likely to become a classic, as
it has already been printed in four or five different anthologies. The
title is "Atalanta's Race."
First let me tell you the story of Atalanta, so that you will be better
able to see the fine symbolism of the poem. Atalanta, the daughter of a
Greek king, was not only the most beautiful of maidens, but the swiftest
runner in the world. She passed her time in hunting, and did not wish to
marry. But as many men wanted to marry her, a law was passed that any one
who desired to win her must run a race with her. If he could beat her in
running, then she promised to marry him, but if he lost the race, he was
to be killed. Some say that the man was allowed to run first, and that the
girl followed with a spear in her hand and killed him when she overtook
him. There are different accounts of the contest. Many suitors lost the
race and were killed. But finally young man called Hippomenes obtained
from the Goddess of Love three golden apples, and he was told that if he
dropped these apples while running, the girl would stop to pick them up,
and that in this way he might be able to win the race. So he ran, and when
he found himself about to be beaten, he dropped one apple. She stopped to
pick it up and thus he gained a little. In this way he won the race and
married Atalanta. Greek mythology says that afterwards she and her husband
were turned into lions because they offended the gods; however, that need
not concern us here. There is a very beautiful moral in the old Greek
story, and the merit of the American composition is that its author,
Maurice Thompson, perceived this moral and used it to illustrate a great
philosophical truth.
When Spring grows old, and sleepy winds
Set from the South with odours sweet,
I see my love, in green, cool groves,
Speed down dusk aisles on shining feet.
She throws a kiss and bids me run,
In whispers sweet as roses' breath;
I know I cannot win the race,
And at the end, I know, is death.
But joyfully I bare my limbs,
Anoint me with the tropic breeze,
And feel through every sinew run
The vigour of Hippomenes.
O race of love! we all have run
Thy happy course through groves of Spring,
And cared not, when at last we lost,
For life or death, or anything!
There are a few thoughts here requiring a little comment. You know that
the Greek games and athletic contests were held in the fairest season, and
that the contestants were stripped. They were also anointed with oil,
partly to protect the skin against sun and temperature and partly to make
the body more supple. The poet speaks of the young man as being anointed
by the warm wind of Spring, the tropic season of life. It is a very pretty
fancy. What he is really telling us is this:
"There are no more Greek games, but the race of love is still run to-day
as in times gone by; youth is the season, and the atmosphere of youth is
the anointing of the contestant."
But the moral of the piece is its great charm, the poetical statement of a
beautiful and a wonderful fact. In almost every life there is a time when
we care for only one person, and suffer much for that person's sake; yet
in that period we do not care whether we suffer or die, and in after life,
when we look back at those hours of youth, we wonder at the way in which
we then felt. In European life of to-day the old Greek fable is still
true; almost everybody must run Atalanta's race and abide by the result.
One of the delightful phases of the illusion of love is the sense of old
acquaintance, the feeling as if the person loved had been known and loved
long ago in some time and place forgotten. I think you must have observed,
many of you, that when the senses of sight and hearing happen to be
strongly stirred by some new and most pleasurable experience, the feeling
of novelty is absent, or almost absent. You do not feel as if you were
seeing or hearing something new, but as if you saw or heard something that
you knew all about very long ago. I remember once travelling with a
Japanese boy into a charming little country town in Shikoku--and scarcely
had we entered the main street, than he cried out: "Oh, I have seen this
place before!" Of course he had not seen it before; he was from Osaka and
had never left the great city until then. But the pleasure of his new
experience had given him this feeling of familiarity with the unfamiliar.
I do not pretend to explain this familiarity with the new--it is a great
mystery still, just as it was a great mystery to the Roman Cicero. But
almost everybody that has been in love has probably had the same feeling
during a moment or two--the feeling "I have known that woman before,"
though the where and the when are mysteries. Some of the modern poets have
beautifully treated this feeling. The best example that I can give you is
the exquisite lyric by Rossetti entitled "Sudden Light."
I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell:
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.
You have been mine before,--
How long ago I may not know:
But just when at that swallow's soar
Your neck turn'd so,
Some veil did fall,--I knew it all of yore.
Has this been thus before?
And shall not thus time's eddying flight
Still with our lives our loves restore
In death's despite,
And day and night yield one delight once more?
I think you will acknowledge that this is very pretty; and the same poet
has treated the idea equally well in other poems of a more complicated
kind. But another poet of the period was haunted even more than Rossetti
by this idea--Arthur O'Shaughnessy. Like Rossetti he was a great lover,
and very unfortunate in his love; and he wrote his poems, now famous, out
of the pain and regret that was in his heart, much as singing birds born
in cages are said to sing better when their eyes are put out. Here is one
example:
Along the garden ways just now
I heard the flowers speak;
The white rose told me of your brow,
The red rose of your cheek;
The lily of your bended head,
The bindweed of your hair:
Each looked its loveliest and said
You were more fair.
I went into the woods anon,
And heard the wild birds sing
How sweet you were; they warbled on,
Piped, trill'd the self-same thing.
Thrush, blackbird, linnet, without pause
The burden did repeat,
And still began again because
You were more sweet.
And then I went down to the sea,
And heard it murmuring too,
Part of an ancient mystery,
All made of me and you:
How many a thousand years ago
I loved, and you were sweet--
Longer I could not stay, and so
I fled back to your feet.
The last stanza especially expresses the idea that I have been telling you
about; but in a poem entitled "Greater Memory" the idea is much more fully
expressed. By "greater memory" you must understand the memory beyond this
life into past stages of existence. This piece has become a part of the
nineteenth century poetry that will live; and a few of the best stanzas
deserve to be quoted,
In the heart there lay buried for years
Love's story of passion and tears;
Of the heaven that two had begun
And the horror that tore them apart;
When one was love's slayer, but one
Made a grave for the love in his heart.
The long years pass'd weary and lone
And it lay there and changed there unknown;
Then one day from its innermost place,
In the shamed and ruin'd love's stead,
Love arose with a glorified face,
Like an angel that comes from the dead.
It uplifted the stone that was set
On that tomb which the heart held yet;
But the sorrow had moulder'd within
And there came from the long closed door
A dear image, that was not the sin
Or the grief that lay buried before.
* * * * *
There was never the stain of a tear
On the face that was ever so dear;
'Twas the same in each lovelier way;
'Twas old love's holier part,
And the dream of the earliest day
Brought back to the desolate heart.
It was knowledge of all that had been
In the thought, in the soul unseen;
'Twas the word which the lips could not say
To redeem or recover the past.
It was more than was taken away
Which the heart got back at the last.
The passion that lost its spell,
The rose that died where it fell,
The look that was look'd in vain,
The prayer that seemed lost evermore,
They were found in the heart again,
With all that the heart would restore.
Put into less mystical language the legend is this: A young man and a
young woman loved each other for a time; then they were separated by some
great wrong--we may suppose the woman was untrue. The man always loved her
memory, in spite of this wrong which she had done. The two died and were
buried; hundreds and hundreds of years they remained buried, and the dust
of them mixed with the dust of the earth. But in the perpetual order of
things, a pure love never can die, though bodies may die and pass away. So
after many generations the pure love which this man had for a bad woman
was born again in the heart of another man--the same, yet not the same.
And the spirit of the woman that long ago had done the wrong, also found
incarnation again; and the two meeting, are drawn to each other by what
people call love, but what is really Greater Memory, the recollection of
past lives. But now all is happiness for them, because the weaker and
worse part of each has really died and has been left hundreds of years
behind, and only the higher nature has been born again. All that ought not
to have been is not; but all that ought to be now is. This is really an
evolutionary teaching, but it is also poetical license, for the immoral
side of mankind does not by any means die so quickly as the poet supposes.
It is perhaps a question of many tens of thousands of years to get rid of
a few of our simpler faults. Anyway, the fancy charms us and tempts us
really to hope that these things might be so.
While the poets of our time so extend the history of a love backwards
beyond this life, we might expect them to do the very same thing in the
other direction. I do not refer to reunion in heaven, or anything of that
sort, but simply to affection continued after death. There are some very
pretty fancies of the kind. But they can not prove to you quite so
interesting as the poems which treat the recollection of past life. When
we consider the past imaginatively, we have some ground to stand on. The
past has been--there is no doubt about that. The fact that we are at this
moment alive makes it seem sufficiently true that we were alive thousands
or millions of years ago. But when we turn to the future for poetical
inspiration, the case is very different. There we must imagine without
having anything to stand upon in the way of experience. Of course if born
again into a body we could imagine many things; but there is the ghostly
interval between death and birth which nobody is able to tell us about.
Here the poet depends upon dream experiences, and it is of such an
experience that Christina Rossetti speaks in her beautiful poem entitled
"A Pause."
They made the chamber sweet with flowers and leaves,
And the bed sweet with flowers on which I lay,
While my soul, love-bound, loitered on its way.
I did not hear the birds about the eaves,
Nor hear the reapers talk among the sheaves:
Only my soul kept watch from day to day,
My thirsty soul kept watch for one away:--
Perhaps he loves, I thought, remembers, grieves.
At length there came the step upon the stair,
Upon the lock the old familiar hand:
Then first my spirit seemed to scent the air
Of Paradise; then first the tardy sand
Of time ran golden; and I felt my hair
Put on a glory, and my soul expand.
The woman is dead. In the room where her body died, flowers have been
placed, offerings to the dead. Also there are flowers upon the bed. The
ghost of the woman observes all this, but she does not feel either glad or
sad because of it; she is thinking only of the living lover, who was not
there when she died, but far away. She wants to know whether he really
loved her, whether he will really be sorry to hear that she is dead.
Outside the room of death the birds are singing; in the fields beyond the
windows peasants are working, and talking as they work. But the ghost does
not listen to these sounds. The ghost remains in the room only for love's
sake; she can not go away until the lover comes. At last she hears him
coming. She knows the sound of the step; she knows the touch of the hand
upon the lock of the door. And instantly, before she sees him at all, she
first feels delight. Already it seems to her that she can smell the
perfume of the flowers of heaven; it then seems to her that about her
head, as about the head of an angel, a circle of glory is shaping itself,
and the real heaven, the Heaven of Love, is at hand.
How very beautiful this is. There is still one line which requires a
separate explanation--I mean the sentence about the sands of time running
golden. Perhaps you may remember the same simile in Tennyson's "Locksley
Hall":
Love took up the glass of Time, and turn'd it in His glowing hands;
Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands.
Here time is identified with the sand of the hour glass, and the verb "to
run" is used because this verb commonly expresses the trickling of the
sand from the upper part of the glass into the lower. In other words, fine
sand "runs" just like water. To say that the sands of time run golden, or
become changed into gold, is only a poetical way of stating that the time
becomes more than happy--almost heavenly or divine. And now you will see
how very beautiful the comparison becomes in this little poem about the
ghost of the woman waiting for the coming step of her lover.
Several other aspects of the emotion may now be considered separately. One
of these, an especially beautiful one, is memory. Of course, there are
many aspects of love's memories, some all happiness, others intensely
sorrowful--the memory of a walk, a meeting, a moment of good-bye. Such
memories occupy a very large place in the treasure house of English love
poems. I am going to give three examples only, but each of a different
kind. The first poet that I am going to mention is Coventry Patmore. He
wrote two curious books of poetry, respectively called "The Angel in the
House" and "The Unknown Eros." In the first of these books he wrote the
whole history of his courtship and marriage--a very dangerous thing for a
poet to do, but he did it successfully. The second volume is
miscellaneous, and contains some very beautiful things. I am going to
quote only a few lines from the piece called "Amelia." This piece is the
story of an evening spent with a sweetheart, and the lines which I am
quoting refer to the moment of taking the girl home. They are now rather
famous:
... To the dim street
I led her sacred feet;
And so the Daughter gave,
Soft, moth-like, sweet,
Showy as damask-rose and shy as musk,
Back to her Mother, anxious in the dusk.
And now "Good Night!"
Why should the poet speak of the girl in this way? Why does he call her
feet sacred? She has just promised to marry him; and now she seems to him
quite divine. But he discovers very plain words with which to communicate
his finer feelings to the reader. The street is "dim" because it is night;
and in the night the beautifully dressed maiden seems like a splendid
moth--the name given to night butterflies in England. In England the moths
are much more beautiful than the true butterflies; they have wings of
scarlet and purple and brown and gold. So the comparison, though
peculiarly English, is very fine. Also there is a suggestion of the
soundlessness of the moth's flight. Now "showy as damask rose" is a
striking simile only because the damask-rose is a wonderfully splendid
flower--richest in colour of all roses in English gardens. "Shy as musk"
is rather a daring simile. "Musk" is a perfume used by English as well as
Japanese ladies, but there is no perfume which must be used with more
discretion, carefulness. If you use ever so little too much, the effect is
not pleasant. But if you use exactly the proper quantity, and no more,
there is no perfume which is more lovely. "Shy as musk" thus refers to
that kind of girlish modesty which never commits a fault even by the
measure of a grain--beautiful shyness incapable of being anything but
beautiful. Nevertheless the comparison must be confessed one which should
be felt rather than explained.
The second of the three promised quotations shall be from Robert Browning.
There is one feeling, not often touched upon by poets, yet peculiar to
lovers, that is here treated--the desire when you are very happy or when
you are looking at anything attractive to share the pleasure of the moment
with the beloved. But it seldom happens that the wish and the conditions
really meet. Referring to this longing Browning made a short lyric that is
now a classic; it is among the most dainty things of the century.
Never the time and the place
And the loved one all together!
This path--how soft to pace!
This May--what magic weather!
Where is the loved one's face?
In a dream that loved one's face meets mine,
But the house is narrow, the place is bleak
Where, outside, rain and wind combine
With a furtive ear, if I try to speak,
With a hostile eye at my flushing cheek,
With a malice that marks each word, each sign!
Never can we have things the way we wish in this world--a beautiful day, a
beautiful place, and the presence of the beloved all at the same time.
Something is always missing; if the place be beautiful, the weather
perhaps is bad. Or if the weather and the place both happen to be perfect,
the woman is absent. So the poet finding himself in some very beautiful
place, and remembering this, remembers also the last time that he met the
woman beloved. It was a small dark house and chilly; outside there was
rain and storm; and the sounds of the wind and of the rain were as the
sounds of people secretly listening, or sounds of people trying to look in
secretly through the windows. Evidently it was necessary that the meeting
should be secret, and it was not altogether as happy as could have been
wished.
The third example is a very beautiful poem; we must content ourselves with
an extract from it. It is the memory of a betrothal day, and the poet is
Frederick Tennyson. I suppose you know that there were three Tennysons,
and although Alfred happened to be the greatest, all of them were good
poets.
It is a golden morning of the spring,
My cheek is pale, and hers is warm with bloom,
And we are left in that old carven room,
And she begins to sing;
The open casement quivers in the breeze,
And one large musk-rose leans its dewy grace
Into the chamber, like a happy face,
And round it swim the bees;
* * * * *
I know not what I said--what she replied
Lives, like eternal sunshine, in my heart;
And then I murmured, Oh! we never part,
My love, my life, my bride!
* * * * *
And silence o'er us, after that great bliss,
Fell like a welcome shadow--and I heard
The far woods sighing, and a summer bird
Singing amid the trees;
The sweet bird's happy song, that streamed around,
The murmur of the woods, the azure skies,
Were graven on my heart, though ears and eyes
Marked neither sight nor sound.
She sleeps in peace beneath the chancel stone,
But ah! so clearly is the vision seen,
The dead seem raised, or Death has never been,
Were I not here alone.
This is great art in its power of picturing a memory of the heart. Let us
notice some of the beauties. The lover is pale because he is afraid,
anxious; he is going to ask a question and he does not know how she may
answer him. All this was long ago, years and years ago, but the strong
emotions of that morning leave their every detail painted in remembrance,
with strange vividness After all those years the man still recollects the
appearance of the room, the sunshine entering and the crimson rose looking
into the room from the garden, with bees humming round it. Then after the
question had been asked and happily answered, neither could speak for joy;
and because of the silence all the sounds of nature outside became almost
painfully distinct. Now he remembers how he heard in that room the sound
of the wind in far-away trees, the singing of a bird--he also remembers
all the colours and the lights of the day. But it was very, very long ago,
and she is dead. Still, the memory is so clear and bright in his heart
that it is as if time had stood still, or as if she had come back from the
grave. Only one thing assures him that it is but a memory--he is alone.
Returning now to the subject of love's illusion in itself, let me remind
you that the illusion does not always pass away--not at all. It passes
away in every case of happy union, when it has become no longer necessary
to the great purposes of nature. But in case of disappointment, loss,
failure to win the maiden desired, it often happens that the ideal image
never fades away, but persistently haunts the mind through life, and is
capable thus of making even the most successful life unhappy. Sometimes
the result of such disappointment may be to change all a man's ideas about
the world, about life, about religion; and everything remains darkened for
him. Many a young person disappointed in love begins to lose religious
feeling from that moment, for it seems to him, simply because he happens
to be unfortunate, that the universe is all wrong. On the other hand the
successful lover thinks that the universe is all right; he utters his
thanks to the gods, and feels his faith in religion and human nature
greater than before. I do not at this moment remember any striking English
poem illustrating this fact; but there is a pretty little poem in French
by Victor Hugo showing well the relation between successful love and
religious feeling in simple minds. Here is an English translation of it.
The subject is simply a walk at night, the girl-bride leaning upon the arm
of her husband; and his memory of the evening is thus expressed:
The trembling arm I pressed
Fondly; our thoughts confessed
Love's conquest tender;
God filled the vast sweet night,
Love filled our hearts; the light
Of stars made splendour.
Even as we walked and dreamed,
'Twixt heaven and earth, it seemed
Our souls were speaking;
The stars looked on thy face;
Thine eyes through violet space
The stars were seeking.
And from the astral light
Feeling the soft sweet night
Thrill to thy soul,
Thou saidst: "O God of Bliss,
Lord of the Blue Abyss,
Thou madest the whole!"
And the stars whispered low
To the God of Space, "We know,
God of Eternity,
Dear Lord, all Love is Thine,
Even by Love's Light we shine!
Thou madest Beauty!"
Of course here the religious feeling itself is part of the illusion, but
it serves to give great depth and beauty to simple feeling. Besides, the
poem illustrates one truth very forcibly--namely, that when we are
perfectly happy all the universe appears to be divine and divinely
beautiful; in other words, we are in heaven. On the contrary, when we are
very unhappy the universe appears to be a kind of hell, in which there is
no hope, no joy, and no gods to pray to.
But the special reason I wished to call attention to Victor Hugo's lyric
is that it has that particular quality called by philosophical critics
"cosmic emotion." Cosmic emotion means the highest quality of human
emotion. The word "cosmos" signifies the universe--not simply this world,
but all the hundred millions of suns and worlds in the known heaven. And
the adjective "cosmic" means, of course, "related to the whole universe."
Ordinary emotion may be more than individual in its relations. I mean that
your feelings may be moved by the thought or the perception of something
relating not only to your own life but also to the lives of many others.
The largest form of such ordinary emotion is what would be called national
feeling, the feeling of your own relation to the whole nation or the whole
race. But there is higher emotion even than that. When you think of
yourself emotionally not only in relation to your own country, your own
nation, but in relation to all humanity, then you have a cosmic emotion of
the third or second order. I say "third or second," because whether the
emotion be second or third rate depends very much upon your conception of
humanity as One. But if you think of yourself in relation not to this
world only but to the whole universe of hundreds of millions of stars and
planets--in relation to the whole mystery of existence--then you have a
cosmic emotion of the highest order. Of course there are degrees even in
this; the philosopher or the metaphysician will probably have a finer
quality of cosmic emotion than the poet or the artist is able to have. But
lovers very often, according to their degree of intellectual culture,
experience a kind of cosmic emotion; and Victor Hugo's little poem
illustrates this. Night and the stars and the abyss of the sky all seem to
be thrilling with love and beauty to the lover's eyes, because he himself
is in a state of loving happiness; and then he begins to think about his
relation to the universal life, to the supreme mystery beyond all Form and
Name.
A third or fourth class of such emotion may be illustrated by the
beautiful sonnet of Keats, written not long before his death. Only a very
young man could have written this, because only a very young man loves in
this way--but how delightful it is! It has no title.
Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel forever its soft fall and swell,
Awake forever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death.
Tennyson has charmingly represented a lover wishing that he were a
necklace of his beloved, or her girdle, or her earring; but that is not a
cosmic emotion at all. Indeed, the idea of Tennyson's pretty song was
taken from old French and English love songs of the peasants--popular
ballads. But in this beautiful sonnet of Keats, where the lover wishes to
be endowed with the immortality and likeness of a star only to be forever
with the beloved, there is something of the old Greek thought which
inspired the beautiful lines written between two and three thousand years
ago, and translated by J.A. Symonds:
Gazing on stars, my Star? Would that I were the welkin,
Starry with myriad eyes, ever to gave upon thee!
But there is more than the Greek beauty of thought in Keats's sonnet, for
we find the poet speaking of the exterior universe in the largest
relation, thinking of the stars watching forever the rising and the
falling of the sea tides, thinking of the sea tides themselves as
continually purifying the world, even as a priest purifies a temple. The
fancy of the boy expands to the fancy of philosophy; it is a blending of
poetry, philosophy, and sincere emotion.
You will have seen by the examples which we have been reading together
that English love poetry, like Japanese love poetry, may be divided into
many branches and classified according to the range of subject from the
very simplest utterance of feeling up to that highest class expressing
cosmic emotion. Very rich the subject is; the student is only puzzled
where to choose. I should again suggest to you to observe the value of the
theme of illusion, especially as illustrated in our examples. There are
indeed multitudes of Western love poems that would probably appear to you
very strange, perhaps very foolish. But you will certainly acknowledge
that there are some varieties of English love poetry which are neither
strange nor foolish, and which are well worth studying, not only in
themselves but in their relation to the higher forms of emotional
expression in all literature. Out of love poetry belonging to the highest
class, much can be drawn that would serve to enrich and to give a new
colour to your own literature of emotion.