The ideas of Wordsworth and of Coleridge about poetry have often been
discussed and are familiar. Those of Shelley are much less so, and in
his eloquent exposition of them there is a radiance which almost
conceals them from many readers. I wish, at the cost of all the
radiance, to try to see them and show them rather more distinctly. Even
if they had little value for the theory of poetry, they would still have
much as material for it, since they allow us to look into a poet's
experience in conceiving and composing. And, in addition, they throw
light on some of the chief characteristics of Shelley's own poetry.
His poems in their turn form one of the sources from which his ideas on
the subject may be gathered. We have also some remarks in his letters
and in prose pieces dealing with other topics. We have the prefaces to
those of his works which he himself published. And, lastly, there is the
_Defence of Poetry_. This essay was written in reply to an attack made
on contemporary verse by Shelley's friend Peacock,--not a favourable
specimen of Peacock's writing. The _Defence_, we can see, was hurriedly
composed, and it remains a fragment, being only the first of three
projected parts. It contains a good deal of historical matter, highly
interesting, but too extensive to be made use of here. Being polemical,
it no doubt exaggerates such of Shelley's views as collided with those
of his antagonist. But, besides being the only full expression of these
views, it is the most mature, for it was written within eighteen months
of his death. It appears to owe very little either to Wordsworth's
Prefaces or to Coleridge's _Biographia Literaria_; but there are a few
reminiscences of Sidney's _Apology_, which Shelley had read just before
he wrote his own _Defence_; and it shows, like much of his mature
poetry, how deeply he was influenced by the more imaginative dialogues
of Plato.
1.
Any one familiar with the manner in which Shelley in his verse
habitually represents the world could guess at his general view of
poetry. The world to him is a melancholy place, a 'dim vast vale of
tears,' illuminated in flashes by the light of a hidden but glorious
power. Nor is this power, as that favourite metaphor would imply, wholly
outside the world. It works within it as a soul contending with
obstruction and striving to penetrate and transform the whole mass. And
though the fulness of its glory is concealed, its nature is known in
outline. It is the realised perfection of everything good and beautiful
on earth; or, in other words, all such goodness and beauty is its
partial manifestation. 'All,' I say: for the splendour of nature, the
love of lovers, every affection and virtue, any good action or just law,
the wisdom of philosophy, the creations of art, the truths deformed by
superstitious religion,--all are equally operations or appearances of
the hidden power. It is of the first importance for the understanding of
Shelley to realise how strong in him is the sense and conviction of this
unity in life: it is one of his Platonic traits. The intellectual Beauty
of his _Hymn_ is absolutely the same thing as the Liberty of his _Ode_,
the 'Great Spirit' of Love that he invokes to bring freedom to Naples,
the One which in _Adonais_ he contrasts with the Many, the Spirit of
Nature of _Queen Mab_, and the Vision of _Alastor_ and _Epipsychidion_.
The skylark of the famous stanzas is free from our sorrows, not because
it is below them, but because, as an embodiment of that perfection, it
knows the rapture of love without its satiety, and understands death as
we cannot. The voice of the mountain, if a whole nation could hear it
with the poet's ear, would 'repeal large codes of fraud and woe'; it is
the same voice as the reformer's and the martyr's. And in the far-off
day when the 'plastic stress' of this power has mastered the last
resistance and is all in all, outward nature, which now suffers with
man, will be redeemed with him, and man, in becoming politically free,
will become also the perfect lover. Evidently, then, poetry, as the
world now is, must be one of the voices of this power, or one tone of
its voice. To use the language so dear to Shelley, it is the revelation
of those eternal ideas which lie behind the many-coloured, ever-shifting
veil that we call reality or life. Or rather, it is one such revelation
among many.
When we turn to the _Defence of Poetry_ we meet substantially the same
view. There is indeed a certain change; for Shelley is now
philosophising and writing prose, and he wishes not to sing from the
mid-sky, but, for a while at least, to argue with his friend on the
earth. Hence at first we hear nothing of that perfect power at the heart
of things, and poetry is considered as a creation rather than a
revelation. But for Shelley, we soon discover, this would be a false
antithesis. The poet creates, but this creation is no mere fancy of his;
it represents 'those forms which are common to universal nature and
existence,' and 'a poem is the very image of life expressed in its
eternal truth.' We notice, further, that the more voluntary and
conscious work of invention and execution is regarded as quite
subordinate in the creative process. In that process the mind, obedient
to an influence which it does not understand and cannot control, is
driven to produce images of perfection which rather form themselves in
it than are formed by it. The greatest stress is laid on this influence
or inspiration; and in the end we learn that the origin of the whole
process lies in certain exceptional moments when visitations of thought
and feeling, elevating and delightful beyond all expression, but always
arising unforeseen and departing unbidden, reach the soul; that these
are, as it were, the inter-penetration of a diviner nature through our
own; and that the province of the poet is to arrest these apparitions,
to veil them in language, to colour every other form he touches with
their evanescent hues, and so to 'redeem from decay the visitations of
the divinity in man.'
Even more decided is the emphasis laid on the unity of all the forms in
which the 'divinity' or ideal power thus attests its presence. Indeed,
throughout a large part of the essay, that 'Poetry' which Shelley is
defending is something very much wider than poetry in the usual sense.
The enemy he has to meet is the contention that poetry and its influence
steadily decline as civilisation advances, and that they are giving
place, and ought to give place, to reasoning and the pursuit of utility.
His answer is that, on the contrary, imagination has been, is, and
always will be, the prime source of everything that has intrinsic value
in life. Reasoning, he declares, cannot create, it can only operate upon
the products of imagination. Further, he holds that the predominance of
mere reasoning and mere utility has become in great part an evil; for
while it has accumulated masses of material goods and moral truths, we
distribute the goods iniquitously and fail to apply the truths, because,
for want of imagination, we have not sympathy in our hearts and do not
feel what we know. The 'Poetry' which he defends, therefore, is the
whole creative imagination with all its products. And these include not
merely literature in verse, but, first, whatever prose writing is allied
to that literature; and, next, all the other fine arts; and, finally,
all actions, inventions, institutions, and even ideas and moral
dispositions, which imagination brings into being in its effort to
satisfy the longing for perfection. Painters and musicians are poets.
Plato and Bacon, even Herodotus and Livy, were poets, though there is
much in their works which is not poetry. So were the men who invented
the arts of life, constructed laws for tribes or cities, disclosed, as
sages or founders of religion, the excellence of justice and love. And
every one, Shelley would say, who, perceiving the beauty of an imagined
virtue or deed, translates the image into a fact, is so far a poet. For
all these things come from imagination.
Shelley's exposition of this, which is probably the most original part
of his theory, is not very clear; but, if I understand his meaning, that
which he takes to happen in all these cases might be thus described. The
imagination--that is to say, the soul imagining--has before it, or feels
within it, something which, answering perfectly to its nature, fills it
with delight and with a desire to realise what delights it. This
something, for the sake of brevity, we may call an idea, so long as we
remember that it need not be distinctly imagined and that it is always
accompanied by emotion. The reason why such ideas delight the imagining
soul is that they are, in fact, images or forebodings of its own
perfection--of itself become perfect--in one aspect or another. These
aspects are as various as the elements and forms of its own inner life
and outward existence; and so the idea may be that of the perfect
harmony of will and feeling (a virtue), or of the perfect union of soul
with soul (love), or of the perfect order of certain social relations
or forces (a law or institution), or of the perfect adjustment of
intellectual elements (a truth); and so on. The formation and expression
of any such idea is thus the work of Poetry in the widest sense; while
at the same time (as we must add, to complete Shelley's thought) any
such idea is a gleam or apparition of the perfect Intellectual Beauty.
I choose this particular title of the hidden power or divinity in order
to point out (what the reader is left to observe for himself) that the
imaginative idea is always regarded by Shelley as beautiful. It is, for
example, desirable for itself and not merely as a means to a further
result; and it has the formal characters of beauty. For, as will have
been noticed in the instances given, it is always the image of an order,
or harmony, or unity in variety, of the elements concerned. Shelley
sometimes even speaks of their 'rhythm.' For example, he uses this word
in reference to an action; and I quote the passage because, though it
occurs at some distance from the exposition of his main view, it
illustrates it well. He is saying that the true poetry of Rome, unlike
that of Greece, did not fully express itself in poems. 'The true poetry
of Rome lived in its institutions: for whatever of beautiful, true and
majestic they contained, could have sprung only from the faculty which
creates the order in which they consist. The life of Camillus; the death
of Regulus; the expectation of the senators, in their god-like state, of
the victorious Gauls; the refusal of the Republic to make peace with
Hannibal after the battle of Cannae'--these he describes as 'a rhythm and
order in the shows of life,' an order not arranged with a view to
utility or outward result, but due to the imagination, which, 'beholding
the beauty of this order, created it out of itself according to its own
idea.'
2.
If this, then, is the nature of Poetry in the widest sense, how does the
poet, in the special sense, differ from other unusually creative souls?
Not essentially in the inspiration and general substance of his poetry,
but in the kind of expression he gives to them. In so far as he is a
poet, his medium of expression, of course, is not virtue, or action, or
law; poetry is one of the acts. And, again, it differs from the rest,
because its particular vehicle is language. We have now to see,
therefore, what Shelley has to say of the form of poetry, and especially
of poetic language.
First, he claims for language the highest place among the vehicles of
artistic expression, on the ground that it is the most direct and also
the most plastic. It is itself produced by imagination instead of being
simply encountered by it, and it has no relation except to imagination;
whereas any more material medium has a nature of its own, and relations
to other things in the material world, and this nature and these
relations intervene between the artist's conception and his expression
of it in the medium. It is to the superiority of its vehicle that
Shelley attributes the greater fame which poetry has always enjoyed as
compared with other arts. He forgets (if I may interpose a word of
criticism) that the media of the other arts have, on their side, certain
advantages over language, and that these perhaps counterbalance the
inferiority which he notices. He would also have found it difficult to
show that language, on its physical side, is any more a product of
imagination than stone or pigments. And his idea that the medium in the
other arts is an obstacle intervening between conception and expression
is, to say the least, one-sided. A sculptor, painter, or musician, would
probably reply that it is only the qualities of his medium that enable
him to express at all; that what he expresses is inseparable from the
vehicle of expression; and that he has no conceptions which are not from
the beginning sculpturesque, pictorial, or musical. It is true, no
doubt, that his medium is an obstacle as well as a medium; but this is
also true of language.
But to resume. Language, Shelley goes on to say, receives in poetry a
peculiar form. As it represents in its meaning a perfection which is
always an order, harmony, or rhythm, so it itself, as so much sound,
_is_ an order, harmony, or rhythm. It is measured language, which is not
the proper vehicle for the mere recital of facts or for mere reasoning.
For Shelley, however, this measured language is not of necessity
metrical. The order or measure may remain at the stage which it reaches
in beautiful prose, like that of Plato, the melody of whose language,
Shelley declares, is the most intense it is possible to conceive. It may
again advance to metre; and he admits that metrical form is convenient,
popular, and preferable, especially in poetry containing much action.
But he will not have any new great poet tied down to it. It is not
essential, while measure is absolutely so. For it is no mere accident of
poetry that its language is measured, nor does a delight in this measure
mean little. As sensitiveness to the order of the relations of sounds is
always connected with sensitiveness to the order of the relations of
thoughts, so also the harmony of the words is scarcely less
indispensable than their meaning to the communication of the influence
of poetry. 'Hence,' says Shelley, 'the vanity of translation: it were as
wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal
principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one
language into another the creations of a poet.' Strong words to come
from the translator of the _Hymn to Mercury_ and of Agathon's speech in
the _Symposium_![1] And is not all that Shelley says of the difference
between measured and unrhythmical language applicable, at least in some
degree, to the difference between metrical and merely measured language?
Could he really have supposed that metre is no more than a
'convenience,' which contributes nothing of any account to the influence
of poetry? But I will not criticise. Let me rather point out how
surprising, at first sight, and how significant, is Shelley's insistence
on the importance of measure or rhythm. No one could assert more
absolutely than he the identity of the general substance of poetry with
that of moral life and action, of the other arts, and of the higher
kinds of philosophy. And yet it would be difficult to go beyond the
emphasis of his statement that the formal element (as he understood it)
is indispensable to the effect of poetry.
Shelley, however, nowhere considers this element more at length. He has
no discussions, like those of Wordsworth and Coleridge, on diction. He
never says, with Keats, that he looks on fine phrases like a lover. We
hear of his deep-drawn sigh of satisfaction as he finished reading a
passage of Homer, but not of his shouting his delight, as he ramped
through the meadows of Spenser, at some marvellous flower. When in his
letters he refers to any poem he is reading, he scarcely ever mentions
particular lines or expressions; and we have no evidence that, like
Coleridge and Keats, he was a curious student of metrical effects or the
relations of vowel-sounds. I doubt if all this is wholly accidental.
Poetry was to him so essentially an effusion of aspiration, love and
worship, that we can imagine his feeling it almost an impiety to break
up its unity even for purposes of study, and to give a separate
attention to its means of utterance. And what he does say on the
subject confirms this impression. In the first place, as we have seen,
he lays great stress on inspiration; and his statements, if exaggerated
and misleading, must still reflect in some degree his own experience. No
poem, he asserts, however inspired it may be, is more than a feeble
shadow of the original conception; for when composition begins,
inspiration is already on the decline. And so in a letter he speaks of
the detail of execution destroying all wild and beautiful visions.
Still, inspiration, if diminished by composition, is not wholly
dispelled; and he appeals to the greatest poets of his day whether it is
not an error to assert that the finest passages of poetry are produced
by labour and study. Such toil he would restrict to those parts which
connect the inspired passages, and he speaks with contempt of the
fifty-six various readings of the first line of the _Orlando Furioso_.
He seems to exaggerate on this matter because in the _Defence_ his foe
is cold reason and calculation. Elsewhere he writes more truly of the
original conception as being obscure as well as intense;[2] from which
it would seem to follow that the feeble shadow, if darker, is at least
more distinct than the original. He forgets, too, what is certainly the
fact, that the poet in reshaping and correcting is able to revive in
some degree the fire of the first impulse. And we know from himself that
his greatest works cost him a severe labour not confined to the
execution, while his manuscripts show plenty of various readings, if
never so many as fifty-six in one line.
Still, what he says is highly characteristic of his own practice in
composition. He allowed the rush of his ideas to have its way, without
pausing to complete a troublesome line or to find a word that did not
come; and the next day (if ever) he filled up the gaps and smoothed the
ragged edges. And the result answers to his theory. Keats was right in
telling him that he might be more of an artist. His language, indeed,
unlike Wordsworth's or Byron's, is, in his mature work, always that of a
poet; we never hear his mere speaking voice; but he is frequently
diffuse and obscure, and even in fine passages his constructions are
sometimes trailing and amorphous. The glowing metal rushes into the
mould so vehemently that it overleaps the bounds and fails to find its
way into all the little crevices. But no poetry is more manifestly
inspired, and even when it is plainly imperfect it is sometimes so
inspired that it is impossible to wish it changed. It has the rapture of
the mystic, and that is too rare to lose. Tennyson quaintly said of the
hymn _Life of Life_: 'He seems to go up into the air and burst.' It is
true: and, if we are to speak of poems as fireworks, I would not compare
_Life of Life_ with a great set piece of Homer or Shakespeare that
illumines the whole sky; but, all the same, there is no more thrilling
sight than the heavenward rush of a rocket, and it bursts at a height no
other fire can reach.
In addition to his praise of inspiration Shelley has some scattered
remarks on another point which show the same spirit. He could not bear
in poetic language any approach to artifice, or any sign that the writer
had a theory or system of style. He thought Keats's earlier poems faulty
in this respect, and there is perhaps a reference to Wordsworth in the
following sentence from the Preface to the _Revolt of Islam_: 'Nor have
I permitted any system relating to mere words to divert the attention of
the reader, from whatever interest I may have succeeded in creating, to
my own ingenuity in contriving,--to disgust him according to the rules
of criticism. I have simply clothed my thoughts in what appeared to me
the most obvious and appropriate language. A person familiar with
nature, and with the most celebrated productions of the human mind, can
scarcely err in following the instinct, with respect to selection of
language, produced by that familiarity.'[3] His own poetic style
certainly corresponds with his intention. It cannot give the kind of
pleasure afforded by what may be called without disparagement a learned
and artful style, such as Virgil's or Milton's; but, like the best
writing of Shakespeare and Goethe, it is, with all its individuality,
almost entirely free from mannerism and the other vices of
self-consciousness, and appears to flow so directly from the thought
that one is ashamed to admire it for itself. This is equally so whether
the appropriate style is impassioned and highly figurative, or simple
and even plain. It is indeed in the latter case that Shelley wins his
greatest, because most difficult, triumph. In the dialogue part of
_Julian and Maddalo_ he has succeeded remarkably in keeping the style
quite close to that of familiar though serious conversation, while
making it nevertheless unmistakably poetic. And the _Cenci_ is an
example of a success less complete only because the problem was even
harder. The ideal of the style of tragic drama in the nineteenth or
twentieth century should surely be, not to reproduce with modifications
the style of Shakespeare, but to do what Shakespeare did--to idealise,
without deserting, the language of contemporary speech. Shelley in the
_Cenci_ seems to me to have come nearest to this ideal.
3.
So much for general exposition. If now we consider more closely what
Shelley says of the substance of poetry, a question at once arises. He
may seem to think of poetry solely as the direct expression of
perfection in some form, and accordingly to imagine its effect as simply
joy or delighted aspiration. Much of his own poetry, too, is such an
expression; and we understand when we find him saying that Homer
embodied the ideal perfection of his age in human character, and
unveiled in Achilles, Hector, and Ulysses 'the truth and beauty of
friendship, patriotism, and persevering devotion to an object.' But
poetry, it is obvious, is not wholly, perhaps not even mainly, of this
kind. What is to be said, on Shelley's theory, of his own melancholy
lyrics, those 'sweetest songs' that 'tell of saddest thought'? What of
satire, of the epic of conflict and war, or of tragic exhibitions of
violent and destructive passion? Does not his theory reflect the
weakness of his own practice, his tendency to portray a thin and
abstract ideal instead of interpreting the concrete detail of nature and
life; and ought we not to oppose to it a theory which would consider
poetry simply as a representation of fact?
To this last question I should answer No. Shelley's theory, rightly
understood, will take in, I think, everything really poetic. And to a
considerable extent he himself shows the way to meet these doubts. He
did not mean that the _immediate_ subject of poetry must be perfection
in some form. The poet, he says, can colour with the hues of the ideal
everything he touches. If so, he may write of absolutely anything so
long as he _can_ so colour it, and nothing would be excluded from his
province except those things (if any such exist) in which no positive
relation to the ideal, however indirect, can be shown or intimated. Thus
to take the instance of Shelley's melancholy lyrics, clearly the lament
which arises from loss of the ideal, and mourns the evanescence of its
visitations or the desolation of its absence, is indirectly an
expression _of_ the ideal; and so on his theory is the simplest song of
unhappy love or the simplest dirge. Further, he himself observes that,
though the joy of poetry is often unalloyed, yet the pleasure of the
'highest portions of our being is frequently connected with the pain of
the inferior,' that 'the pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the
pleasure of pleasure itself,' and that not sorrow only, but 'terror,
anguish, despair itself, are often the chosen expressions of an
approximation to the highest good.' That, then, which appeals poetically
to such painful emotions will again be an indirect portrayal of the
ideal; and it is clear, I think, that this was how Shelley in the
_Defence_ regarded heroic and tragic poetry, whether narrative or
dramatic, with its manifestly imperfect characters and its exhibition of
conflict and wild passion. He had, it is true, another and an
unsatisfactory way of explaining the presence of these things in poetry;
and I will refer to this in a moment. But he tells us that the Athenian
tragedies represent the highest idealisms (his name for ideals) of
passion and of power (not merely of virtue); and that in them we behold
ourselves, 'under a thin disguise of circumstance, stripped of all but
that ideal perfection and energy which every one feels to be the
internal type of all that he loves, admires, and would become.' He
writes of Milton's Satan in somewhat the same strain. The Shakespearean
tragedy from which he most often quotes is one in which evil holds the
stage, _Macbeth_; and he was inclined to think _King Lear_, which
certainly is no direct portrait of perfection, the greatest drama in the
world. Lastly, in the Preface to his own _Cenci_ he truly says that,
while the story is fearful and monstrous, 'the poetry which exists in
these tempestuous sufferings and crimes,' if duly brought out,
'mitigates the pain of the contemplation of moral deformity': so that he
regards Count Cenci himself as a _poetic_ character, and therefore as in
_some_ sense an expression of the ideal. He does not further explain his
meaning. Perhaps it was that the perfection which poetry is to exhibit
includes, together with those qualities which win our immediate and
entire approval or sympathy, others which are capable of becoming the
instruments of evil. For these, the energy, power and passion of the
soul, though they may be perverted, are in themselves elements of
perfection; and so, even in their perversion or their combination with
moral deformity, they retain their value, they are not simply ugly or
horrible, but appeal through emotions predominantly painful to the same
love of the ideal which is directly satisfied by pictures of goodness
and beauty. Now to these various considerations we shall wish to add
others; but if we bear these in mind, I believe we shall find Shelley's
theory wide enough, and must hold that the substance of poetry is never
mere fact, but is always ideal, though its method of representation is
sometimes more direct, sometimes more indirect.
Nevertheless, he does not seem to have made his view quite clear to
himself, or to hold to it consistently. We are left with the impression,
not merely that he personally preferred the direct method (as he was, of
course, entitled to do), but that his use of it shows a certain
weakness, and also that even in theory he unconsciously tends to regard
it as the primary and proper method, and to admit only by a reluctant
after-thought the representation of imperfection. Let me point out some
signs of this. He considered his own _Cenci_ as a poem inferior in kind
to his other main works, even as a sort of accommodation to the public.
With all his modesty he knew what to think of the neglected
_Prometheus_ and _Adonais_, but there is no sign that he, any more than
the world, was aware that the character of Cenci was a creation without
a parallel in our poetry since the seventeenth century. His enthusiasm
for some second-rate and third-rate Italian paintings, and his failure
to understand Michael Angelo, seem to show the same tendency. He could
not enjoy comedy: it seemed to him simply cruel: he did not perceive
that to show the absurdity of the imperfect is to glorify the perfect.
And, as I mentioned just now, he wavers in his view of the
representation of heroic and tragic imperfection. We find in the Preface
to _Prometheus Unbound_ the strange notion that Prometheus is a more
poetic character than Milton's Satan because he is free from Satan's
imperfections, which are said to interfere with the interest. And in the
_Defence_ a similar error appears. Achilles, Hector, Ulysses, though
they exhibit ideal virtues, are, he admits, imperfect. Why, then, did
Homer make them so? Because, he seems to reply, Homer's contemporaries
regarded their vices (_e.g._ revengefulness and deceitfulness) as
virtues. Homer accordingly had to conceal in the costume of these vices
the unspotted beauty that he himself imagined; and, like Homer, 'few
poets of the highest class have chosen to exhibit the beauty of their
conceptions in its naked truth and splendour.' Now, this idea, to say
nothing of its grotesque improbability in reference to Homer, and its
probable baselessness in reference to most other poets, is quite
inconsistent with that truer view of heroic and tragic character which
was explained just now. It is an example of Shelley's tendency to
abstract idealism or spurious Platonism. He is haunted by the fancy that
if he could only get at the One, the eternal Idea, in complete aloofness
from the Many, from life with all its change, decay, struggle, sorrow
and evil, he would have reached the true object of poetry: as if the
whole finite world were a mere mistake or illusion, the sheer opposite
of the infinite One, and in no way or degree its manifestation. Life, he
says--
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of eternity;
but the other side, the fact that the many colours _are_ the white light
broken, he tends to forget, by no means always, but in one, and that not
the least inspired, of his moods. This is the source of that thinness
and shallowness of which his view of the world and of history is justly
accused, a view in which all imperfect being is apt to figure as
absolutely gratuitous, and everything and everybody as pure white or
pitch black. Hence also his ideals of good, whether as a character or as
a mode of life, resting as they do on abstraction from the mass of real
existence, tend to lack body and individuality; and indeed, if the
existence of the many is a mere calamity, clearly the next best thing to
their disappearance is that they should all be exactly alike and have as
little character as possible. But we must remember that Shelley's
strength and weakness are closely allied, and it may be that the very
abstractness of his ideal was a condition of that quivering intensity of
aspiration towards it in which his poetry is unequalled. We must not go
for this to Homer and Shakespeare and Goethe; and if we go for it to
Dante, we shall find, indeed, a mind far vaster than Shelley's, but also
that dualism of which we complain in him, and the description of a
heaven which, equally with Shelley's regenerated earth, is no place for
mere mortality. In any case, as we have seen, the weakness in his
poetical practice, though it occasionally appears also as a defect in
his poetical theory, forms no necessary part of it.
4.
I pass to his views on a last point. If the business of poetry is
somehow to express ideal perfection, it may seem to follow that the
poet should embody in his poems his beliefs about this perfection and
the way to approach it, and should thus have a moral purpose and aim to
be a teacher. And in regard to Shelley this conclusion seems the more
natural because his own poetry allows us to see clearly some of his
beliefs about morality and moral progress. Yet alike in his Prefaces and
in the _Defence_ he takes up most decidedly the position that the poet
ought neither to affect a moral aim nor to express his own conceptions
of right and wrong. 'Didactic poetry,' he declares, 'is my abhorrence:
nothing can be equally well expressed in prose that is not tedious and
supererogatory in verse.'[4] 'There was little danger,' he tells us in
the _Defence_, 'that Homer or any of the eternal poets' should make a
mistake in this matter; but 'those in whom the poetical faculty, though
great, is less intense, as Euripides, Lucan, Tasso, Spenser, have
frequently affected a moral aim, and the effect of their poetry is
diminished in exact proportion to the degree in which they compel us to
advert to this purpose.' These statements may appeal to us, but are they
consistent with Shelley's main views of poetry? To answer this question
we must observe what exactly it is that he means to condemn.
Shelley was one of the few persons who can literally be said to _love_
their kind. He held most strongly, too, that poetry does benefit men,
and benefits them morally. The moral purpose, then, to which he objects
cannot well be a poet's general purpose of doing moral as well as other
good through his poetry--such a purpose, I mean, as he may cherish when
he contemplates his life and his life's work. And, indeed, it seems
obvious that nobody with any humanity or any sense can object to that,
except through some intellectual confusion. Nor, secondly, does Shelley
mean, I think, to condemn even the writing of a particular poem with a
view to a particular moral or practical effect; certainly, at least, if
this was his meaning he was condemning some of his own poetry. Nor,
thirdly, can he be referring to the portrayal of moral ideals; for that
he regarded as one of the main functions of poetry, and in the very
place where he says that didactic poetry is his abhorrence he also says,
by way of contrast, that he has tried to familiarise the minds of his
readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence. It appears,
therefore, that what he is really attacking is the attempt to give, in
the strict sense, moral _instruction_, to communicate doctrines, to
offer argumentative statements of opinion on right and wrong, and more
especially, I think, on controversial questions of the day. An example
would be Wordsworth's discourse on education at the end of the
_Excursion_, a discourse of which Shelley, we know, had a very low
opinion. In short, his enemy is not the purpose of producing a moral
effect, it is the appeal made for this purpose to the reasoning
intellect. He says to the poet: By all means aim at bettering men; you
are a man, and are bound to do so; but you are also a poet, and
therefore your proper way of doing so is not by reasoning and preaching.
His idea is of a piece with his general championship of imagination, and
it is quite consistent with his main view of poetry.[5]
What, then, are the _grounds_ of this position? They are not clearly set
out, but we can trace several, and they are all solid. Reasoning on
moral subjects, moral philosophy, was by no means 'tedious' to Shelley;
it seldom is to real poets. He loved it, and (outside his _Defence_) he
rated its value very high.[6] But he thought it tedious and out of place
in poetry, because it can be equally well expressed in 'unmeasured'
language--much better expressed, one may venture to add. You invent an
art in order to effect by it a particular purpose which nothing else can
effect as well. How foolish, then, to use this art for a purpose better
served by something else! I know no answer to this argument, and its
application is far wider than that given to it by Shelley. Secondly,
Shelley remarks that a poet's own conceptions on moral subjects are
usually those of his place and time, while the matter of his poem ought
to be eternal, or, as we say, of permanent and universal interest. This,
again, seems true, and has a wide application; and it holds good even
when the poet, like Shelley himself, is in rebellion against orthodox
moral opinion; for his heterodox opinions will equally show the marks of
his place and time, and constitute a perishable element in his work.
Doubtless no poetry can be without a perishable element; but that poetry
has least of it which interprets life least through the medium of
systematic and doctrinal ideas. The veil which time and place have hung
between Homer or Shakespeare and the general reader of to-day is almost
transparent, while even a poetry so intense as that of Dante and Milton
is impeded in its passage to him by systems which may be unfamiliar,
and, if familiar, may be distasteful.
Lastly--and this is Shelley's central argument--as poetry itself is
directly due to imaginative inspiration and not to reasoning, so its
true moral effect is produced through imagination and not through
doctrine. Imagination is, for Shelley, 'the great instrument of moral
good.' The 'secret of morals is love.' It is not 'for want of admirable
doctrines that men hate and despise and censure and deceive and
subjugate one another': it is for want of love. And love is 'a going out
of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful
which exists in thought, action or person not our own.' 'A man,'
therefore, 'to be greatly good must imagine intensely and
comprehensively.' And poetry ministers to moral good, the effect, by
acting on its cause, imagination. It strengthens imagination as exercise
strengthens a limb, and so it indirectly promotes morality. It also
fills the imagination with beautiful impersonations of all that we
should wish to be. But moral reasoning does not act upon the cause, it
only analyses the effect; and the poet has no right to be content to
analyse what he ought indirectly to create. Here, again, in his
eagerness, Shelley cuts his antitheses too clean, but the defect is
easily made good, and the main argument is sound.
Limits of time will compel me to be guilty of the same fault in adding a
consideration which is in the spirit of Shelley's. The chief moral
effect claimed for poetry by Shelley is exerted, primarily, by
imagination on the emotions; but there is another influence, exerted
primarily through imagination on the understanding. Poetry is largely an
interpretation of life; and, considering what life is, that must mean a
moral interpretation. This, to have poetic value, must satisfy
imagination; but we value it also because it gives us knowledge, a wider
comprehension, a new insight into ourselves and the world.[7] Now, it
may be held--and this view answers to a very general feeling among
lovers of poetry now--that the most deep and original moral
interpretation is not likely to be that which most shows a moral purpose
or is most governed by reflective beliefs and opinions, and that as a
rule we learn most from those who do not try to teach us, and whose
opinions may even remain unknown to us: so that there is this weighty
objection to the appearance of such purpose and opinions, that it tends
to defeat its own intention. And the reason that I wish to suggest is
this, that always we get most from the _genius_ in a man of genius and
not from the rest of him. Now, although poets often have unusual powers
of reflective thought, the specific genius of a poet does not lie there,
but in imagination. Therefore his deepest and most original
interpretation is likely to come by the way of imagination. And the
specific way of imagination is not to clothe in imagery consciously held
ideas; it is to produce half-consciously a matter from which, when
produced, the reader may, if he chooses, extract ideas. Poetry (I must
exaggerate to be clear), psychologically considered, is not the
_expression_ of ideas or of a view of life; it is their discovery or
creation, or rather both discovery and creation in one. The
interpretation contained in _Hamlet_ or _King Lear_ was not brought
ready-made to the old stories. What was brought to them was the huge
substance of Shakespeare's imagination, in which all his experience and
thought was latent; and this, dwelling and working on the stories with
nothing but a dramatic purpose, and kindling into heat and motion,
gradually discovered or created in them a meaning and a mass of truth
about life, which was brought to birth by the process of composition,
but never preceded it in the shape of ideas, and probably never, even
after it, took that shape to the poet's mind. And _this_ is the
interpretation which we find inexhaustibly instructive, because
Shakespeare's _genius_ is in it. On the other hand, however much from
curiosity and personal feeling towards him we may wish to know his
opinions and beliefs about morals or religion or his own poems or Queen
Elizabeth, we have not really any reason to suppose that their value
would prove extraordinary. And so, to apply this generally, the
opinions, reasonings and beliefs of poets are seldom of the same quality
as their purely imaginative product. Occasionally, as with Goethe, they
are not far off it; but sometimes they are intense without being
profound, and more eccentric than original; and often they are very sane
and sound, but not very different from those of wise men without genius.
And therefore poetry is not the place for them. For we want in poetry a
moral interpretation, but not the interpretation we have already. As a
rule the genuine artist's quarrel with 'morality' in art is not really
with morality, it is with a stereotyped or narrow morality; and when he
refuses in his art to consider things from what he calls the moral point
of view, his reasons are usually wrong, but his instinct is right.
Poetry itself confirms on the whole this contention, though doubtless in
these last centuries a great poet's work will usually reveal more of
conscious reflection than once it did. Homer and Shakespeare show no
moral aim and no system of opinion. Milton was far from justifying the
ways of God to men by the argumentation he put into divine and angelic
lips; his truer moral insight is in the creations of his genius; for
instance, in the character of Satan or the picture of the glorious
humanity of Adam and Eve. Goethe himself could never have told the world
what he was going to express in the First Part of _Faust_: the poem told
_him_, and it is one of the world's greatest. He knew too well what he
was going to express in the Second Part, and with all its wisdom and
beauty it is scarcely a great poem. Wordsworth's original message was
delivered, not when he was a Godwinian semi-atheist, nor when he had
subsided upon orthodoxy, but when his imagination, with a few hints from
Coleridge, was creating a kind of natural religion; and this religion
itself is more profoundly expressed in his descriptions of his
experience than in his attempts to formulate it. The moral virtue of
Tennyson is in poems like _Ulysses_ and parts of _In Memoriam_, where
sorrow and the consciousness of a deathless affection or an unquenchable
desire for experience forced an utterance; but when in the _Idylls_ he
tried to found a great poem on explicit ideas about the soul and the
ravages wrought in it by lawless passion, he succeeded but partially,
because these ideas, however sound, were no product of his genius. And
so the moral virtue of Shelley's poetry lay, not in his doctrines about
the past and future of man, but in an intuition, which was the substance
of his soul, of the unique value of love. In the end, for him, the
truest name of that perfection called Intellectual Beauty, Liberty,
Spirit of Nature, is Love. Whatever in the world has any worth is an
expression of Love. Love sometimes talks. Love talking musically is
Poetry.
1904.