The poetry of the age of Wordsworth, we are all agreed, is one of the
glories of our literature. It is surpassed, many would add, by the
poetry of no other period except the Elizabethan. But it has obvious
flaws, of which perhaps we are becoming more and more distinctly
conscious now; and, apart from these definite defects, it also leaves
with us, when we review it, a certain feeling of disappointment. It is
great, we say to ourselves, but why is it not greater still? It shows a
wonderful abundance of genius: why does it not show an equal
accomplishment?
1.
Matthew Arnold, in his essay on _The Function of Criticism at the
Present Time_, gave an answer to this question. 'It has long seemed to
me,' he wrote, 'that the burst of creative activity in our literature,
through the first quarter of this century, had about it, in fact,
something premature.... And this prematureness comes from its having
proceeded without having its proper data, without sufficient materials
to work with. In other words, the English poetry of the first quarter of
this century, with plenty of energy, plenty of creative force, did not
know enough. This makes Byron so empty of matter, Shelley so incoherent,
Wordsworth even, profound as he is, yet so wanting in completeness and
in variety.' The statement that this poetry 'did not know enough' means,
of course, for Arnold, not that it lacked information, reading, ideas of
a kind, but that it lacked 'criticism.' And this means that it did not
live and move freely in an atmosphere of the best available ideas, of
ideas gained by a free, sincere, and continued effort, in theology,
philosophy, history, science, to see things as they are. In such an
atmosphere Goethe lived. There was not indeed in Goethe's Germany, nor
was there in the England of our poets, the 'national glow of life and
thought' that prevailed in the Athens of Pericles or the England of
Elizabeth. That happiest atmosphere for poetry was wanting in both
countries. But there was for Goethe 'a sort of equivalent for it in the
complete culture and unfettered thinking of a large body of Germans,' a
culture produced by a many-sided learning and a long and widely-combined
critical effort. It was this that our poets lacked.
Now, if this want existed, as Arnold affirms, it may not have had all
the importance he ascribes to it, but considerable importance it must
have had. And as to its existence there can hardly be a doubt. One of
the most striking characteristics of Wordsworth's age is the very
unusual superiority of the imaginative literature to the scientific. I
mean by the 'scientific' literature that of philosophy, theology,
history, politics, economics, not only that of the sciences of Nature,
which for our present purpose are perhaps the least important. In this
kind of literature Wordsworth's age has hardly an author to show who
could for a moment be placed on a level with some five of the poets,
with the novelists Scott and Jane Austen, or with the poetic critics
Lamb, Hazlitt, and Coleridge. It has no writers to compare with Bacon,
Newton, Hume, Gibbon, Johnson, or Burke. It is the time of Paley,
Godwin, Stewart, Bentham, Mitford, Lingard, Coleridge the philosopher
and theologian. These are names worthy of all respect, but they
represent a literature quite definitely of the second rank. And this
great disproportion between the two kinds of literature, we must
observe, is a peculiar phenomenon. If we go back as far as the
Elizabethan age we shall find no parallel to it. The one kind was
doubtless superior to the other in Shakespeare's time, possibly even in
Milton's; but Hooker and Bacon and Taylor and Clarendon and Hobbes are
not separated from the best poets of their day by any startling
difference of quality;[2] while in the later periods, right down to the
age of Wordsworth, the scientific literature quite holds its own, to say
no more, with the imaginative. Nor in the Germany of Wordsworth's own
time is there that gap between the two that we find in England. In
respect of genius the philosophers, for example, though none of them was
the equal of Goethe, were as a body not at all inferior to the poets.
The case of England in Wordsworth's age is anomalous.
This peculiarity must be symptomatic, and it must have been influential.
It confirms Arnold's view that the intellectual atmosphere of the time
was not of the best. If we think of the periodical literature--of the
_Quarterly_ and _Edinburgh_ and _Blackwood_--we shall be still more
inclined to assent to that view. And when we turn to the poets
themselves, and especially to their prose writings, letters, and
recorded conversation, and even to the critiques of Hazlitt, of Lamb,
and of Coleridge, we cannot reject it. Assuredly we read with
admiration, and the signs of native genius we meet with in abundance--in
greater abundance, I think, than in the poetry and criticism of Germany,
if Goethe is excepted. But the freedom of spirit, the knowledge, the
superiority to prejudice and caprice and fanaticism, the openness to
ideas, the atmosphere that is all about us when we read Lessing, Goethe,
Schiller, Heine, we do not find. Can we imagine any one of those four
either inspired or imprisoned as Shelley was by the doctrines of Godwin?
Could any of them have seen in the French Revolution no more
significance than Scott appears to have detected? How cramped are the
attitudes, sympathetic or antipathetic, of nearly all our poets towards
the Christian religion! Could anything be more _borne_ than Coleridge's
professed reason for not translating _Faust_?[3] Is it possible that a
German poet with the genius of Byron or Wordsworth could have inhabited
a mental world so small and so tainted with vulgarity as is opened to us
by the brilliant letters of the former, or could have sunk, like the
latter, to suggesting that the cholera was a divine condemnation of
Catholic Emancipation and the Reform Bill?
But if we accept Arnold's statement as to the intellectual atmosphere of
the poetry of Wordsworth's time, a question will remain. Was he right in
regarding this atmosphere as the sole, or even as the chief, cause of
the fact (if it is one) that the poetry does not fully correspond in
greatness with the genius of the poets? And before we come to this
question we must put another. Is the fact really as it has just been
stated? I do not think so. The disappointment that we feel attends, it
seems to me, mainly our reading of the long poems. Reviewing these in
memory, and asking ourselves how many we can unreservedly call 'great,'
we hesitate. Beyond doubt there is great poetry in some of them, fine
poetry in many; but that does not make a great whole. Which of them is
great as a whole? Not the _Prelude_ or the _Excursion_, still less
_Endymion_ or _The Revolt of Islam_ or _Childe Harold_, which hardly
pretends to unity. _Christabel_, the wonderful fragment, is a fragment;
so is _Hyperion_; _Don Juan_, also unfinished, becomes more discursive
the further it proceeds, and in spirit is nowhere great. All the
principal poets wrote dramas, or at least dramatic pieces; and some
readers think that in _Manfred_, and still more certainly in _Cain_, we
have great poems, while others think this of _Prometheus Unbound_ and
_The Cenci_. But if as to one or more of these we assent, is our
judgment quite confident, and can we say that any of them _satisfy_ us,
like some works of earlier times? We are thus satisfied, it seems to me,
only when we come to poems of smaller dimensions, like _The Ancient
Mariner_, or _The Eve of Saint Agnes_, or _Adonais_, or _The Vision of
Judgment_, or when we read the lyrics. To save time I will confine
myself to the latter.
Within this sphere we have no longer that impression of genius which
fails to reach full accomplishment. I would go further. No poet, of
course, of Wordsworth's age is the equal of Shakespeare or of Milton;
and there are certain qualities, too, of lyrical verse in which the
times of Shakespeare and of Milton are superior to that of Wordsworth.
But if we take the better part of the lyrical poetry of these three
periods in the mass, or again in a representative selection, it will not
be the latest period, I think, that need fear the comparison. In the
original edition of the _Golden Treasury_, Book I. (Wyatt to
Shakespeare) occupies forty pages; Book II. (the rest of the seventeenth
century) sixty-five; Book IV., which covers the very much shorter
period from Wordsworth to Hood, close on a hundred and forty. 'Book
I.,' perhaps most of us would say, 'should be longer, and Book IV. a
good deal shorter: some third-rate pieces are included in it, and
Wordsworth is over-represented. And the Elizabethan poems are mostly
quite short, while the Nineteenth Century poets shine equally in the
longer kinds of lyric. And Mr. Palgrave excluded the old ballads, but
admitted poems like Coleridge's _Love_ and Wordsworth's _Ruth_ (seven
whole pages). And in any case we cannot judge by mere quantity.' No; but
still quantity must count for something, and the _Golden Treasury_ is a
volume excellent in selection, arrangement, and taste. It does, I think,
leave the impression that the age of Wordsworth was our greatest period
in lyrical poetry. And if Book I. were swelled to the dimensions of Book
IV., this impression would not be materially altered; it might even be
deepened. For the change would force into notice the comparative
monotony of the themes of the earlier poetry, and the immensely wider
range of the thought and emotion that attain expression in the later. It
might also convince us that, on the whole, this more varied material is
treated with a greater intensity of feeling, though on this point it is
difficult to be sure, since we recognise what may be called the
conventions of an earlier age, and are perhaps a little blind to those
of a time near our own.
Now the eminence of Wordsworth's age in lyrical poetry, even if it is
not also a pre-eminence, is a significant fact. It may mean that the
whole poetic spirit of the time was lyrical in tendency; and this may
indirectly be a cause of that sense of disappointment which mingles with
our admiration of the long poems. I will call attention, therefore, to
two or three allied facts. (1) The longer poems of Campbell are already
dead; he survives only in lyrics. This is also true of Moore. In spite
of fine passages (and the battle in _Marmion_ is in certain qualities
superior to anything else of the time) Scott's longer poems cannot be
classed with the best contemporary poetry; but in some of his ballads
and songs he attains that rank. (2) Again, much of the most famous
narrative poetry is semi-lyrical in form, as a moment's thought of
Scott, Byron, and Coleridge will show. Some of it (for instance, several
of Byron's tales, or Wordsworth's _White Doe of Rylstone_) is strongly
tinged with the lyrical spirit. The centre of interest is inward. It is
an interest in emotion, thought, will, rather than in scenes, events,
actions, which express and re-act on emotions, thoughts, will. It would
hardly be going too far to say that in the most characteristic narrative
poetry the balance of outward and inward is rarely attained.[4] (3) The
same tendencies are visible in much of the dramatic writing. Byron's
regular dramas, for instance, if they ever lived, are almost forgotten;
but _Heaven and Earth_, which is still alive, is largely composed of
lyrics, and the first two acts of _Manfred_ are full of them.
_Prometheus Unbound_ is called 'a lyrical drama.' Though it has some
very fine and some very beautiful blank verse passages (usually
undramatic), its lyrics are its glory; and this is even more the case
with _Hellas_. It would be untrue to say that the comparative failure of
most of the dramas of the time is principally due to the lyrical spirit,
but many of them show it. (4) The strength of this spirit may be
illustrated lastly by a curious fact. The ode is one of the longest and
most ambitious forms of lyric, and some of the most famous poems of
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats are odes. But the greatest of the
lyrists, who wrote the Odes to Liberty and Naples and the West Wind,
found the limits even of the ode too narrow for his 'flight of fire.' If
_Lycidas_ and _L'Allegro_ and Spenser's _Epithalamion_ are lyrical
poems, and if we are not arbitrarily to determine that nothing shall be
called lyrical which exceeds a certain length, _Adonais_ will be a
lyrical elegy in fifty-five Spenserian stanzas, and the _Lines written
among the Euganean Hills_ and _Epipsychidion_ will be lyrics consisting
respectively of 370 and 600 lines.
It will however be agreed that in general a lyrical poem may be called
short as compared with a narrative or drama. It is usual, further, to
say that lyrical poetry is 'subjective,' since, instead of telling or
representing a story of people, actions, and events, it expresses the
thoughts and feelings of the poet himself. This statement is ambiguous
and in other ways defective; but it will be admitted to have a basis in
fact. It may be suggested, then, that the excellence of the lyrical
poetry of Wordsworth's time, and the imperfection of the long narratives
and dramas, may have a common origin. Just as it was most natural to
Homer or to Shakespeare to express the imaginative substance of his mind
in the 'objective' shape of a world of persons and actions ostensibly
severed from his own thoughts and feelings, so, perhaps, for some reason
or reasons, it was most natural to the best poets of this later time to
express that substance in the shape of impassioned reflections,
aspirations, prophecies, laments, outcries of joy, murmurings of peace.
The matter of these might, in another sense of the word, be 'objective'
enough, a matter of general human interest, not personal in any
exclusive way; but it appeared in the form of the poet's thought and
feeling. Just because he most easily expressed it thus, he succeeded
less completely when he attempted the more objective form of utterance;
and for the same reason it was especially important that he should be
surrounded and penetrated by an atmosphere of wide, deep, and liberal
'criticism.' For he not only lived among ideas; he expressed ideas, and
expressed them _as_ ideas.
These suggestions seem to be supported by other phenomena of the poetry.
The 'subjective' spirit extends, we saw, into many of the longer poems.
This is obvious when it can plausibly be said, as in Byron's case, that
the poet's one hero is himself. It appears in another way when the poem,
through its story or stories, displays the poet's favourite ideas and
beliefs. The _Excursion_ does this; most of Shelley's longer poems do
it. And the strength of this tendency may be seen in an apparent
contradiction. One of the marks of the Romantic Revival is a disposition
to substitute the more concrete and vivid forms of narrative and drama
for the eighteenth century form of satiric or so-called didactic
reflection. Yet most of the greater poets, especially in their
characteristic beginnings, show a strong tendency to reflective verse;
Coleridge, for example, in _Religious Musings_, Byron in the first two
cantos of _Childe Harold_, Shelley in _Queen Mab_, and Keats in _Sleep
and Poetry_. These are not, like the _Pleasures of Memory_ and
_Pleasures of Hope_, continuations of the traditional style; they are
thoroughly Romantic; and yet they are reflective. Scott, indeed, goes
straight to the objective forms; but then Scott, for good and evil, was
little affected by the spiritual upheaval of his time. Those who were
deeply affected by it, directly or indirectly, had their minds full of
theoretic ideas. They were groping after, or were already inflamed by,
some explicit view of life, and of life seen in relation to an ideal
which it revealed or contradicted. And this view of life, at least at
first, pressed for utterance in a more or less abstract shape, or
became a sort of soul or second meaning within those appearances of
nature, or actions of men, or figures and fantasies of youthful
imagination, which formed the ostensible subject of the poetry.
Considered in this light, the following facts become very significant.
Wordsworth, now about thirty, and the author of many characteristic
lyrics, on returning from Germany and settling at Grasmere, begins to
meditate a long poem. He tells us in the _Prelude_ of the subjects he
thought of. They are good subjects, legendary and historical, stories of
action, not at all theoretical.[5] But it will not do: his mind 'turns
recreant to her task.' He has another hope, a 'favourite aspiration'
towards 'a philosophic song of Truth.' But even this will not do; it is
premature; even Truth (I venture to suggest) is not inward enough. He
must first tell the story of his own mind: the subject of his long poem
must be Poetry itself. He tells this story, to our great gain, in the
_Prelude_; and it is the story of the steps by which he came to see
reality, Nature and Man, as the partial expression of the ideal, of an
all-embracing and perfect spiritual life or Being. Not till this is done
can he proceed to the _Excursion_, which, together with much reflection
and even argumentation, contains pictures of particular men.
'This for our greatest'; but it is not his history alone. The first
longer poem of Shelley which can be called mature was _Alastor_. And
what is its subject? The subject of the _Prelude_; the story of a Poet's
soul, and of the effect on it of the revelation of its ideal. The first
long poem of Keats was _Endymion_. The tendency to the concrete was
strong in Keats; he has been called, I think, an Elizabethan born out of
due time; and _Endymion_, like _Venus and Adonis_, is a mythological
story. But it is by no means that alone. The infection of his time was
in him. The further subject of _Endymion_ is again the subject of the
_Prelude_, the story of a poet's soul smitten by love of its ideal, the
Principle of Beauty, and striving for union with it, for the 'wedding'
of the mind of man 'with this goodly universe in love and holy passion.'
What, again, is the subject of _Epipsychidion_? The same.
There was a Being whom my spirit oft
Met on its visioned wanderings, far aloft
In the clear golden prime of my youth's dawn.
The poem is all about the search of the poet's soul for this ideal
Being. And the _Sensitive Plant_ is this soul, and the Lady of the
Garden this Being, And _Prince Athanase_ is the same soul, and if the
poem had been continued the Being would soon have appeared. Is it not an
astonishing proof of Shelley's powers that the _Cenci_ was ever written?
Shelley, when he died, had half escaped--Keats, some time before he
died, had quite escaped--from that bewitching inward world of the poet's
soul and its shadowy adventures. Could that well be the world of what we
call emphatically a 'great poem'?
2.
Let us review for a moment the course of our discussion. I have been
suggesting that, if our pleasure and glory in the poetry of Wordsworth's
age is tinged with disappointment, this does not extend to the lyrical
poetry; that the lyrical spirit, or, more generally, an inward or
subjective tendency, shows itself in many of the longer works; and that
their imperfection is partly due to it. Now, let me suggest that the
atmosphere of adequate 'criticism' which Arnold misses in the age and
its poetry, while doubtless it would have influenced favourably even the
lyrics, and much more the larger works, could hardly have diminished the
force of that tendency, and that the main difficulty lay _there_. But,
before developing this idea further, I propose to leave for a time the
English poetry of Wordsworth's age, to look beyond it, and to ask
certain questions.
First, granted that in that age the atmosphere of 'criticism' was more
favourable in Germany than in England, how many long poems were produced
in Germany that we can call without hesitation or qualification 'great'?
Were _any_ produced except by Goethe? And, if we admit (as I gladly do)
that he produced several, was not the _main_ reason simply that he was
born with more poetic genius than any of his contemporaries, just as
Dante and Shakespeare and Milton were? And again, with this native
genius and his long laborious life, did he produce anything like as many
great poems as might have been expected? And, if not, why not? I do not
suggest that his general culture, so superior to that of his English
contemporaries, did not help him; but are we sure that it did not also
hinder him? And is it not also significant that, in spite of his love of
new ideas, he felt an instinctive dread of the influence of philosophy,
in the strict sense, as of something dangerous to the poetic modes of
vision and creation?
Secondly, if we look beyond the first quarter of the century to the
second and third, do we find in Europe a large number of those
emphatically great poems, solid coherent structures of concrete
imagination? It seems more than doubtful. To confine ourselves to
English examples, is it not the case that Tennyson is primarily a
lyrical poet, that the best of his longer poems, _Maud_ and _In
Memoriam_, are lyrical, and that the most ambitious, the narrative
_Idylls of the King_, is, as a whole, not great? Is the _Ring and the
Book_, however fine in parts, a great whole, or comparable as a whole
with _Andrea del Sarto_ or _Rabbi ben Ezra_? And is any one of
Browning's dramas a great play? What these questions suggest is that,
while the difficulty about the long poem affects in an extreme degree
the age of Wordsworth, it affects in some degree the time that follows.
Its beginnings, too, are traceable before the nineteenth century. In
fact it is connected with essential characteristics of modern poetry and
art; and these characteristics are connected with the nature of modern
life, and the position of the artist within that life. I wish to touch
on this huge subject before returning to the age of Wordsworth.
Art, we may say, has become free, and, in a sense, universal. The poet
is no longer the minstrel of king or nobles, nor even of a city or
country. Literature, as Goethe foretold, becomes increasingly European,
and more than European; and the poet, however national, is a citizen of
the Republic of Letters. No class of subject, again, has any prerogative
claim on him. Whatever, in any time or place, is human, whatever has
been conceived as divine, whatever belongs even to external nature, he
may choose, as it suits his bent or offers a promising material. The
world is all before him; and it is a world which the increase of
knowledge has made immensely wide and rich. His art, further, has
asserted its independence. Its public exhibition must conform to the
law; but otherwise it neither asks the approval nor submits to the
control of any outward authority; and it is the handmaid of nothing. It
claims a value for itself, as an expression of mind co-ordinate with
other expressions, theoretic and practical; satisfying a need and
serving a purpose that none of them can fulfil; subject only, as they
too are subject, to the unity of human nature and human good. Finally,
in respect of the methods of his art the poet claims and enjoys the same
freedom. The practice of the past, the 'rules' of the past (if they
existed or exist), are without authority for him. It is improbable
beforehand that a violent breach with them will lead him to a real
advance, just as it is improbable that such a breach with the morals or
the science of his day will do so. But there is no certainty beforehand;
and if he fails, he expects blame not because he innovates, but because
he has failed by innovating.
The freedom of modern art, and the universality of its field, are great
things, and the value of the second is easily seen in the extraordinary
variety of subject-matter in the longer poems of the nineteenth century.
But in candid minds most recitals of our modern advantages are followed
by a melancholy sense of our feebleness in using them. And so in some
degree it is here. The unrivalled opportunities fail to produce
unrivalled works. And we can see that the deepest cause of this is not a
want of native genius or of acquired skill or even of conscientious
labour, but the fact that the opportunities themselves bring danger and
difficulty. The poet who knows everything and may write about anything
has, after all, a hard task. Things must have been easier, it seems to
us, for an artist whose choice, if his aim was high, was restricted to a
cycle of ideas and stories, mythological, legendary, or historical, or
all together, concerning beings divine, daemonic, angelic, or heroic.
His matter, as it existed in the general imagination, was already highly
poetical. If not created by imagination, it was shaped or coloured by
it; a world not of bodiless thoughts and emotions, but of scenes,
figures, actions, and events. For the most part he lived in unity with
it; it appealed to his own religious and moral feelings and beliefs,
sometimes to his patriotic feelings; and he wrote, painted, or carved,
for people who shared with him both his material and his attitude
towards it. It belonged usually to the past, but he did not view it over
a great gulf of time with the eye of a scientific historian. If he
wished to robe it in the vesture of the life around him, he was checked
by no scruples as to truth; and the life around him can seldom, we
think, have appeared to him repulsively prosaic. Broad statements like
these require much qualification; but, when it is supplied, they may
still describe periods in which perhaps most of the greatest
architecture, sculpture, painting, and poetry has come into being.
How different the position of the artist has now become we see at a
glance, and I confine myself to some points which specially concern the
difficulty of the long poem. If a poem is to be anything like great it
must, in one sense, be concerned with the present. Whatever its
'subject' may be, it must express something living in the mind from
which it comes and the minds to which it goes. Wherever its body is, its
soul must be here and now. What subject, then, in the measureless field
of choice, is the poet to select and fashion into a body? The outward
life around him, as he and his critics so often lament, appears uniform,
ugly, and rationally regulated, a world of trousers, machinery and
policemen. Law--the rule, however imperfect, of the general reasonable
will--is a vast achievement and priceless possession; but it is not
favourable to striking events or individual actions on the grand scale.
Beneath the surface, and breaking through it, there is doubtless an
infinity of poetic matter; but this is inward, or it fails to appear in
impressive forms; and therefore it may suit the lyric or idyll, the
monologue or short story, the prose drama or novel, but hardly the long
poem or high tragedy. Even war, for reasons not hard to find, is no
longer the subject that it was.
But when the poet turns to a subject distant in place or time or both,
new troubles await him. If he aims at complete truth to time and place
the soul of the present will hardly come into his work. Yet he lives in
an age of history and science, and these hamper as well as help him. The
difficulty is not that he is bound to historical or scientific truth,
for in principle, I venture to say, he is free. If he _can_ satisfy
imagination by violating them he is justified. It is no function of his
to attain or propagate them; and a critic who objected, say, to the
First Part of _Faust_ on the ground that it puts a modern spirit into
the legend, would rightly be laughed at. It is its triumph to do so and
yet to succeed. But then success is exceedingly difficult. For the poet
lives in a time when the violation of truth is _prima facie_ felt to be
a fault, something that does require justification by the result.
Further, he has himself to start from a clear consciousness of
difference between the present and the past, the spirit and the story,
and has to produce on this basis a harmony of spirit and story. And
again, living in an age of analytical thought, he is likely--all the
more likely, if he has much greatness of mind--to be keenly interested
in ideas; and so he is exposed to the temptation of using as the spirit
of the old story some highly reflective idea--an idea not only
historically alien to his material, but perhaps not very poetical, or
again not very deep, because it belongs to him rather as philosopher
than poet, while his genius is that of a poet.
The influence of some of these difficulties might readily be shown in
the Second Part of _Faust_ or in _Prometheus Unbound_, especially where
we perceive in a figure or action some symbolical meaning, but find this
meaning deficient in interest or poetic truth, or are vexed by the doubt
how far it ought to be pursued.[6] But the matter is more easily
illustrated by the partial failure of the _Idylls of the King_. We have
no right to condemn beforehand an attempt to modernise the Arthurian
legends. Tennyson's treatment of them, even his outrage on the story of
Tristram, might conceivably have been justified by the result. And,
indeed, in the _Holy Grail_ and the _Passing of Arthur_ his treatment,
to my mind, was more than justified. But, in spite of countless
beauties, the total result of the _Idylls_ was disappointing, not merely
from the defects of this or that poem, but because the old unity of
spirit and story was broken up, and the new was neither equal to the old
nor complete in itself. For the main semi-allegorical idea, having
already the disadvantage of not being poetic in its origin, was, as a
reflective idea, by no means profound, and it led to such inconsistency
in the very centre of the story as the imagination refuses to accept.
Tennyson's Lancelot might have wronged the Arthur who is merely a
blameless king and represents Conscience; but Tennyson's Lancelot would
much rather have killed himself than be systematically treacherous to
the friend and lover-husband who appears in _Guinevere_.[7]
These difficulties belong in some measure to the whole modern time--the
whole time that begins with the Renaissance; but they become so much
clearer and so much more serious with the advance of knowledge and
criticism, that in speaking of them I have been referring specially to
the last century. There are other difficulties not so closely connected
with that advance, and I will venture some very tentative remarks on
one of these, which also has increased with time. It has to do with the
kind of life commonly lived by our poets. Is there not some significance
in the fact that the most famous of our narrative poets were all three,
in their various ways and degrees, public men, or in contact with great
affairs; and that poets in earlier times no less must usually have seen
something at first hand of adventure, political struggles, or war;
whereas poets now, for the most part, live wholly private lives, and,
like the majority of their readers, are acquainted only by report with
anything of the kind? If Chaucer had never been at Court, or seen
service in the French war, or gone on embassies abroad; if Spenser had
not known Sidney and Raleigh and been secretary to Lord Grey in Ireland;
if Milton had spent his whole life at Horton; would it have made no
difference to their poetry? Again, if we turn to the drama and ask why
the numerous tragedies of the nineteenth century poets so rarely
satisfy, what is the answer? There are many reasons, and among them the
poet's ignorance of the stage will doubtless count for much; but must we
not also consider that he scarcely ever saw anything resembling the
things he tried to portray? When we study the history of the time in
which the Elizabethan dramas were composed, when we examine the
portraits of the famous men, or read such a book as the autobiography of
Lord Herbert of Cherbury, we realise that the violent actions and
passions which the dramatist depicted were like the things he saw.
Whatever Shakespeare's own disposition was, he lived among these men,
jested with the fellow-actor who had borne arms abroad and killed his
man in a duel at home, conversed with nobles whose heads perhaps were no
great way from the block. But the poet who strolls about the lanes or
plods the London streets with an umbrella for a sword, and who has
probably never seen a violent deed in his life, or for a moment really
longed to kill so much as a critic, how is he to paint the vengeance of
Hamlet or the frenzy of Macbeth, and not merely to thrill you with the
emotions of his actors but to make them _do_ things that take your
imagination by the throat?
3.
Assuming, now, that (even if this last idea is doubtful or unimportant)
there is some truth in the suggestion that the difficulties of the long
poem arise largely from the conditions described, and especially from
the nature of the intellectual atmosphere which the modern poet
breathes, let us return to Wordsworth's age in particular. In that age
these difficulties were aggravated in a quite exceptional way by special
causes, causes responsible also in part for the unusual originality and
intensity of the poetry. In it we find conditions removed to the
extremest distance from those of the poet who wrote, in the midst of a
generally accepted social order, for an audience with which he shared
traditional ideas and beliefs and a more or less traditional imaginative
material. It was, in a word, a revolutionary age, in the electric
atmosphere of which the most potent intellectual influences were those
of Rousseau and (for the English poets) of Godwin. Milton's time was not
in the same sense revolutionary, much less Shakespeare's. The forces of
the great movement of mind in Shakespeare's day _we_ may formulate as
'ideas,' but they were not the abstractly conceived ideas of
Wordsworth's day. Such theoretical ideas were potent in Milton's time,
but they were not ideas that made a total breach with the past,
rejecting as worthless, or worse, the institutions, beliefs, and modes
of life in which human nature had endeavoured to realise itself, and
drawing airy pictures of a different human nature on a new earth. Nor
was the poetic mind of those ages enraptured or dejected by the haunting
many-featured contrast of real and ideal. But the poetic mind in
Wordsworth's age breathed this atmosphere of revolution, though it was
not always sensitive to the influence. Nor is it a question of the
acceptance or rejection of the 'ideas of the Revolution.' That influence
is clearly traceable in all the greater writers except Scott and Jane
Austen. It is equally obvious in Wordsworth, who hungered for realities,
recovered from his theoretic malady, sought for good in life's familiar
face, yet remained a preacher; in Byron, who was too shrewd, sceptical,
and selfish to contract that particular malady, but who suffered from
the sickness from which Goethe freed himself by writing _Werther_,[8]
and who punctuates his story in _Don Juan_ with bursts of laughter and
tears; and in Shelley, whose 'rapid spirit' was quickened, and then
clogged, by the abstractions of revolutionary theory.
But doubtless Shelley is, in a sense, the typical example of this
influence and of its effects. From the world of his imagination the
shapes of the old world had disappeared, and their place was taken by a
stream of radiant vapours, incessantly forming, shifting, and dissolving
in the 'clear golden dawn,' and hymning with the voices of seraphs, to
the music of the stars and the 'singing rain,' the sublime ridiculous
formulas of Godwin. In his heart were emotions that responded to the
vision,--an aspiration or ecstasy, a dejection or despair, like those of
spirits rapt into Paradise or mourning over its ruin. And he wrote, not,
like Shakespeare or Pope, for Londoners sitting in a theatre or a
coffee-house, intelligences vivid enough but definitely embodied in a
definite society; he wrote, or rather he sang, to his own soul, to
other spirit-sparks of the fire of Liberty scattered over the dark
earth, to spirits in the air, to the boundless spirit of Nature or
Freedom or Love, his one place of rest and the one source of his vision,
ecstasy, and sorrow. He sang _to_ this, and he sang _of_ it, and of the
emotions it inspired, and of its world-wide contest with such shapes of
darkness as Faith and Custom. And he made immortal music; now in
melodies as exquisite and varied as the songs of Schubert, and now in
symphonies where the crudest of Philosophies of History melted into
golden harmony. But the songs were more perfect than the symphonies; and
they could hardly fail to be so. For a single thought and mood,
expressive of one aspect of things, suffices, with its melody, for a
lyric, but not for a long poem. That requires a substance which
implicitly contains a whole 'criticism' or interpretation of life. And
although there was something always working in Shelley's mind, and
issuing in those radiant vapours, that was far deeper and truer than his
philosophic creed, its expression and even its development were
constantly checked or distorted by the hard and narrow framework of that
creed. And it was one which in effect condemned nine-tenths of the human
nature that has formed the material of the world's great poems.[9]
The second and third quarters of the century were not in the same degree
as the first a revolutionary time, and we feel this change in the
poetry. The fever-heat is gone, the rapture and the dejection moderate,
the culture is wider, the thought more staid and considerate, the
fascination of abstractions less potent, and the formative or plastic
impulse, if not stronger, less impeded. Late in the period, with Morris,
the born teller of tales re-appears. If, as we saw, the lyrical spirit
continues to prevail, no one would deny to Browning the full and robust
sympathy of the dramatist with all the variety of character and passion.
Yet these changes and others are far from obliterating those features of
the earlier generation on which we have dwelt. To describe the
atmosphere of 'criticism' as that of a common faith or view of the world
would be laughable. If not revolutionary, it was agitated, restless, and
distressed by the conflict of theoretic ideas. To Arnold's mind it was
indeed a most unhappy time for poetry, though the poetic impulse
remained as yet, and even later, powerful. The past was dead, but he
could share neither the soaring hope nor the passionate melancholy of
the opening century. He was
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest his head.
And the two greatest poets, as well as he, still offer not only, as
poets always must, an interpretation, but a definite theory of life,
and, more insistently than ever before, of death. Confidence in the
detail, at least, of such theories has diminished, and with the rapid
advance of the critical sciences the poets may prophesy less than their
predecessors; but they probe, and weigh, and deliberate more. And the
strength of the 'inward' tendency, obvious in Tennyson and Arnold, may
be clearly seen even in Browning, and not alone in such works as
_Christmas Eve and Easter Day_ or _La Saisiaz_.
Objective and dramatic as Browning is called and by comparison is, he is
surely most at home, and succeeds most completely, in lyrics, and in
monologues divested of action and merely suggestive of a story or
suggested by one. He too must begin, in _Pauline_, with the picture of a
youthful poet's soul. Dramatic the drama of _Paracelsus_ neither is nor
tries to be: it consists of scenes in the history of souls. Of the
narrative _Sordello_ its author wrote: 'The historical decoration was
purposely of no more importance than a background requires; and my
stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul: little else is
worth study.' Even if that is so, great narrative poems are not written
thus. And what Browning says here applies more or less fully to most of
his works. In the end, if we set aside the short lyrics, his best poems
are all 'studies' of souls. 'Well,' it may be answered, 'so are
Shakespeare's tragedies and tragi-comedies.' But the difference is
great. Shakespeare, doubtless, is little concerned with the accuracy of
the historical background,--much less concerned than Browning. But his
subject is not a soul, nor even souls: it is the actions of souls, or
souls coming into action. It is more. It is that clash of souls which
exhibits not them alone, but a whole of spiritual forces, appearing in
them, but spreading beyond them into the visible society to which they
essentially belong, and into invisible regions which enclose it. The
thing shown, therefore, is huge, multiform, ponderous, yet quivering
with an inward agitation which explodes into violent bodily expression
and speaks to the _eye_ of imagination. What specially interests
Browning is not this. It is the soul moving in itself, often in its most
secret windings and recesses; before action or after it, where there is
action at all; and this soul not essentially as in its society (that is
'background' or 'decoration'), but alone, or in relation to another
soul, or to God. He exhibits it best, therefore, in monologue, musing,
explaining, debating, pleading, overflowing into the expression of
feeling or passion, but not acting. The 'men and women' that haunt the
reader's imagination are not so much men of action as lovers, artists,
men of religion. And when they act (as for example in _The Ring and the
Book_, or the dramas) what rivets attention, and is first recalled to
memory by their names, is not the action, but its reflection in the soul
of the doer or spectator. Such, at least, is my experience; and in the
end a critic can only offer to others his considered experience. But
with Homer and Shakespeare and Milton it is otherwise. Even with Dante
it is otherwise. I see not souls alone, but souls in visible attitudes,
in outward movement, often in action. I see Paolo and Francesca drifting
on the wind: I see them sitting and reading: I see them kiss: I _see_
Dante's pity:
E caddi come corpo morto cade.
4.
I spoke of Tennyson and Browning in order to point out that, although in
their day the intellectual atmosphere was no longer 'revolutionary,' it
remained an atmosphere of highly reflective ideas representing no common
'faith' or way of envisaging the world, and that the inward tendency
still asserts itself in their poetry. We cannot pursue the history
further, but it does not appear that in the last forty years culture has
advanced much, or at all, towards such a faith or way, or shows the
working of new semi-conscious creative ideas beneath the surface of
warring theories and opinions. Only the younger among us can hope to see
what Arnold descried in the distance,
One mighty wave of thought and joy
Lifting mankind again.
And even when, for them or their descendants, that hope is realised, and
with it the hope of a new great poetry, the atmosphere must assuredly
still be one of 'criticism,' and Arnold's insistence on the necessity of
the best criticism will still be as urgently required. It must indeed be
more and more needed as the power of half-educated journalism grows. How
poetry then will overcome the obstacles which, therefore, must in some
measure still beset it, is a question for it, a question answerable not
by the reflections of critics, but by the creative deeds of poets
themselves. Accordingly, while one may safely prophesy that their long
poems will differ from those of any past age, I have no idea of
predicting the nature of this difference, and will refer in conclusion
only to certain views which seem to me delusive.
It must surely be vain for the poet to seek an escape from modern
difficulties by any attempt to withdraw himself from the atmosphere of
free and scientific culture, to maintain by force simplicity of view and
concreteness of imagination, to live in a past century or a sanctuary of
esoteric art, whether secular or religious. Whatever of value such an
attempt may yield--and that it may yield much I do not deny--it will
never yield poems at once long and great.
Such poems, we may allow ourselves to hope, will sometimes deal with
much of the common and painful and ugly stuff of life, and be in that
sense more 'democratic' or universal than any poetry of the past. But it
is vain to imagine that this can be done by a refusal to 'interpret' and
an endeavour to photograph. Even in the most thorough-going prose
'realism' there is selection; and, to go no further, selection itself is
interpretation. And, as for poetry, the mirror which the least
theoretical of great poets holds up to nature is his soul. And that,
whether he likes it or not, is an activity which divides, and sifts,
and recombines into a unity of its own, and by a method of its own, the
crude material which experience thrusts upon it. This must be so; the
only question is of the choice of matter and the method of treatment.
Nor can the end to be achieved be anything but beauty, though the
meaning of that word may be extended and deepened. And beauty in its
essence is something that gives satisfaction, however much of pain,
repulsion, or horror that satisfaction may contain and overcome.
'But, even so,' it may be said, 'why should the poet trouble himself
about figures, events, and actions? That inward tendency in which you
see danger and difficulty is, on the contrary, simply and solely what on
one side you admit it to be, the sign of our advance. What we really
need is to make our long poems _entirely_ interior. We only want to know
how Dante felt; we do not _wish_ to see his pity felling him to the
ground; and much less do we wish to hear Othello say "and smote him
thus," or even to imagine the blow. We are not children or savages.' We
do not want, I agree, attempts to repeat the Elizabethan drama. But
those who speak thus forget, perhaps, in how many kinds of poem this
inward tendency can display its power without any injury or drawback.
They fail to ask themselves, perhaps, whether a _long_ poem so entirely
'interior' can possibly have the clearness, variety, and solidity of
effect that the best long poems have possessed; whether it can produce
the same impression of a massive, building, organising, 'architectonic'
power of imagination; and whether all this and much else is of little
value. They can hardly have realised, one must suspect, how much of life
they wish to leave unrepresented. They fail to consider, too, that
perhaps the business of art is not to ignore, but at once to satisfy and
to purify, the primitive instincts from which it arises; and that, in
the case of poetic art, the love of a story, and of exceptional figures,
scenes, events, and actions, is one of those instincts, and one that in
the immense majority of men shows no sign of decay. And finally, if they
suppose that the desire to see or imagine action, in particular, is a
symptom of mere sensationalism or a relic of semi-barbarism, I am sure
they are woefully mistaken. There is more virtue than their philosophy
dreams of in deeds, in 'the motion of a muscle this way or that.'
Doubtless it is the soul that matters; but the soul that remains
interior is not the whole soul. If I suppose that mere self-scrutiny can
show me that, I deceive myself; and my deeds, good and evil, will
undeceive me.
A last delusion remains. 'There is,' we may be told, 'a simple, final,
and comfortable answer to all these doubts and fears. The long poem is
not merely difficult, it is impossible. It is dead, and should be
publicly buried, and there is not the least occasion to mourn it. It has
become impossible not because we cannot write it, but because we see
that we ought not. And, in truth, it never was written. The thing called
a long poem was really, as any long poem must be, a number of short
ones, linked together by passages of prose. And these passages _could_
be nothing except prose; for poetry is the language of a state of
crisis, and a crisis is brief. The long poem is an offence to art.' I
believe I have stated this theory fairly. It was, unless I mistake, the
invention of Poe, and it is about as true as I conceive his story of the
composition of _The Raven_ to be. It became a gospel with some
representatives of the Symbolist movement in France; and in fact it
would condemn not only the long poem, but the middle-sized one, and
indeed all sizes but the smallest. To reject this theory is to imply no
want of gratitude for the lyrics of some of its adherents; but the
theory itself seems strangely thoughtless. Naturally, in any poem not
quite short, there must be many variations and grades of poetic
intensity; but to represent the differences of these numerous grades as
a simple antithesis between pure poetry and mere prose is like saying
that, because the eyes are the most expressive part of the face, the
rest of the face expresses nothing. To hold, again, that this variation
of intensity is a defect is like holding that a face would be more
beautiful if it were all eyes, a picture better if the illumination were
equally intense all over it, a symphony better if it consisted of one
movement, and if that were all crisis. And to speak as if a small poem
could do all that a long one does, and do it much more completely, is to
speak as though a humming-bird could have the same kind of beauty as an
eagle, the rainbow in a fountain produce the same effect as the rainbow
in the sky, or a moorland stream thunder like Niagara. A long poem, as
we have seen, requires imaginative powers superfluous in a short one;
and it would be easy to show that it admits of strictly poetic effects
of the highest value which the mere brevity of a short one excludes.
That the long poem is doomed is a possible, however groundless, belief;
but it is futile to deny that, if it dies, something of inestimable
worth will perish.[10]