though I believe that I do. But at any rate, and on the principle that of
two hypotheses, each in itself adequate, we should choose the simpler, I
suggest in all modesty that we shall do better with our own than with
Coleridge's, which has the further disadvantage of being scarcely
amenable to positive evidence. We can say with historical warrant that
Sappho struck the lyre, and argue therefrom, still within close range of
correction, that her singing responded to the instrument: whereas to
assert that Sappho's mind 'was balanced by a spontaneous effort which
strove to hold in check the workings of passion' is to say something for
which positive evidence will be less handily found, whether to contradict
or to support.
Yet if you choose to prefer Coleridge's explanation, no great harm will
be done: since Coleridge, who may be presumed to have understood it,
promptly goes on to deduce that,
as the elements of metre owe their existence to a state of increased
excitement, so the metre itself should be accompanied by the natural
language of excitement.
which is precisely where we found ourselves, save that where Coleridge
uses the word 'excitement' we used the word 'emotion.'
Shall we employ an illustration before proceeding?--some sentence easily
handled, some commonplace of the moralist, some copybook maxim, I care
not what. 'Contentment breeds Happiness'--That is a proposition with
which you can hardly quarrel; sententious, sedate, obviously true;
provoking delirious advocacy as little as controversial heat; in short a
very fair touchstone. Now hear how the lyric treats it, in these lines of
Dekker--
Art thou poor, yet hast thou golden slumbers?
O sweet content!
Art thou rich, yet is thy mind perplex'd?
O punishment!
Dost thou laugh to see how fools are vex'd
To add to golden numbers golden numbers?
O sweet content! O sweet, O sweet content!
Work apace, apace, apace, apace;
Honest labour wears a lovely face;
Then hey, nonny nonny--hey, nonny nonny!
Canst drink the waters of the crystal spring?
O sweet content!
Swim'st thou in wealth, yet sink'st in thine own tears?
O punishment!
Then he that patiently want's burden bears
No burden bears, but is a king, a king!
O sweet content! O sweet, O sweet content!
Work apace, apace, apace, apace;
Honest labour wears a lovely face;
Then hey, nonny nonny--hey, nonny nonny!
There, in lines obviously written for music, you have our sedate
sentence, 'Contentment breeds Happiness,' converted to mere emotion. Note
(to use Coleridge's word) the 'excitement' of it. There are but two plain
indicative sentences in the two stanzas--(1) 'Honest labour wears a
lovely face' (used as a refrain), and (2) 'Then he that patiently want's
burden bears no burden bears, but is a king, a king!' (heightened
emotionally by inversion and double repetition). Mark throughout how
broken is the utterance; antithetical question answered by exclamations:
both doubled and made more antithetical in the second stanza: with
cunning reduplicated inversions to follow, and each stanza wound up by an
outburst of emotional nonsense--'hey, nonny nonny--hey, nonny nonny!'--as
a man might skip or whistle to himself for want of thought.
Now (still keeping to our same subject of Contentment) let us _prosify_
the lyrical order of language down to the lowest pitch to which genius
has been able to reduce it and still make noble verse. You have all read
Wordsworth's famous Introduction to the "Lyrical Ballads," and you know
that Wordsworth's was a genius working on a theory that the languages of
verse and of prose are identical. You know, too, I dare say, into what
banalities that theory over and over again betrayed him: banalities such
as--
His widowed mother, for a second mate
Espoused the teacher of the village school:
Who on her offspring zealously bestowed
Needful instruction.
--and the rest. Nevertheless Wordsworth was a genius; and genius working
persistently on a narrow theory will now and again 'bring it off' (as
they say). So he, amid the flat waste of his later compositions, did
undoubtedly 'bring it off' in the following sonnet:--
These times strike monied worldlings with dismay:
Ev'n rich men, brave by nature, taint the air
With words of apprehension and despair;
While tens of thousands, thinking on the affray,
Men unto whom sufficient for the day
And minds not stinted or untill'd are given,
Sound healthy children of the God of Heaven,
Are cheerful as the rising sun in May.
What do we gather hence but firmer faith
That every gift of noble origin
Is breath'd upon by Hope's perpetual breath;
That Virtue and the faculties within
Are vital; and that riches are akin
To fear, to change, to cowardice, and death?
Here, I grant, are no repetitions, no inversions. The sentences, though
metrical, run straightforwardly, verb following subject, object verb, as
in strict prose. In short here you have verse reduced to the order and
structure of prose as nearly as a man of genius, working on a set theory,
could reduce it while yet maintaining its proper emotional key. But first
let me say that you will find very few like instances of success even in
Wordsworth; and few indeed to set against innumerable passages wherein
either his verse defies his theory and triumphs, or succumbs to it and,
succumbing, either drops sheer to bathos or spreads itself over dead
flats of commonplace. Let me tell you next that the instances you will
find in other poets are so few and so far between as to be negligible;
and lastly that even such verse as the above has only to be compared with
a passage of prose and its emotional pitch is at once betrayed. Take
this, for example, from Jeremy Taylor:--
Since all the evil in the world consists in the disagreeing between the
object and the appetite, as when a man hath what he desires not, or
desires what he hath not, or desires amiss, he that compares his spirit
to the present accident hath variety of instance for his virtue, but
none to trouble him, because his desires enlarge not beyond his present
fortune: and a wise man is placed in a variety of chances, like the
nave or centre of a wheel in the midst of all the circumvolutions and
changes of posture, without violence or change, save that it turns
gently in compliance with its changed parts, and is indifferent which
part is up, and which is down; for there is some virtue or other to be
exercised whatever happens--either patience or thanksgiving, love or
fear, moderation or humility, charity or contentedness.
Or, take this from Samuel Johnson:--
The fountain of contentment must spring up in the mind; and he who has
so little knowledge of human nature as to seek happiness by changing
anything but his own disposition, will waste his life in fruitless
efforts and multiply the griefs which he purposes to remove.
Now, to be frank, I do not call that first passage very good prose. Like
much of Jeremy Taylor's writing it is prose tricked out with the
trappings and odds-and-ends of verse. It starts off, for example, with a
brace of heroics--'Since all the evil in the world consists'...'between
the object and the appetite.' You may say, further, that the simile of
the wheel, though proper enough to prose, is poetical too: that Homer
might have used it ('As in a wheel the rim turns violently, while the
nave, though it turns also, yet seems to be at rest'--something of that
sort). Nevertheless you will agree with me that, in exchanging
Wordsworth for Taylor and Johnson, we have relaxed something with the
metre, something that the metre kept taut; and this something we
discover to be the emotional pitch.
But let me give you another illustration, supplied (I dare say quite
unconsciously) by one who combined a genuine love of verse--in which,
however, he was no adept--with a sure instinct for beautiful prose.
Contentment was a favourite theme with Isaak Walton: "The Compleat
Angler" is packed with praise of it: and in "The Compleat Angler" occurs
this well-known passage:--
But, master, first let me tell you, that very hour which you were
absent from me, I sat down under a willow tree by the waterside, and
considered what you had told me of the owner of that pleasant meadow in
which you then had left me; that he had a plentiful estate, and not a
heart to think so; that he had at this time many law-suits depending,
and that they both damped his mirth and took up so much of his time and
thoughts that he had no leisure to take the sweet content that I, who
pretended no title to them, took in his fields: for I could there sit
quietly; and looking on the water, see some fishes sport themselves in
the silver streams, others leaping at flies of several shapes and
colours; looking on the hills, I could behold them spotted with woods
and groves; looking down the meadows, could see, here a boy gathering
lilies and lady-smocks, and there a girl cropping culverlocks and
cowslips, all to make garlands suitable to this present month of May.
These and many other field-flowers so perfumed the air that I thought
that very meadow like that field in Sicily of which Diodorus speaks,
where the perfumes arising from the place make all dogs that hunt in it
to fall off and lose their hottest scent. I say, as I thus sat, joying
in my own happy condition, and pitying this poor rich man that owned
this and many other pleasant groves and meadows about me, I did
thankfully remember what my Saviour said, that the meek possess the
earth; or rather they enjoy what the others possess and enjoy not; for
Anglers and meek quiet-spirited men are free from those high, those
restless thoughts which corrode the sweets of life; and they, and they
only can say as the poet has happily exprest it:
'Hail, blest estate of lowliness!
Happy enjoyments of such minds
As, rich in self-contentedness,
Can, like the reeds in roughest winds,
By yielding make that blow but small
At which proud oaks and cedars fall.'
There you have a passage of felicitous prose culminating in a stanza of
trite and fifth-rate verse. Yes, Walton's instinct is sound; for he is
keying up the pitch; and verse, even when mediocre in quality, has its
pitch naturally set above that of prose. So, if you will turn to your
Walton and read the page following this passage, you will see that, still
by a sure instinct, he proceeds from this scrap of reflective verse to a
mere rollicking 'catch':
Man's life is but vain, for 'tis subject to pain
And sorrow, and short as a bubble;
'Tis a hodge-podge of business and money and care,
And care, and money and trouble...
--which is even worse rubbish, and yet a step upwards in emotion because
Venator actually sings it to music. 'Ay marry, sir, this is music
indeed,' approves Brother Peter; 'this cheers the heart.'
In this and the preceding lecture, Gentlemen, I have enforced at some
length the opinion that to understand the many essential differences
between verse and prose we must constantly bear in mind that verse, being
metrical, keeps the character originally imposed on it by musical
accompaniment and must always, however far the remove, be referred back
to its origin and to the emotion which music excites.
Mr George Bernard Shaw having to commit his novel "Cashel Byron's
Profession" to paper in a hurry, chose to cast it in blank verse as being
more easily and readily written so: a performance which brilliantly
illuminates a half-truth. Verse--or at any rate, unrhymed iambic
verse--is easier to write than prose, if you care to leave out the
emotion which makes verse characteristic and worth writing. I have
little doubt that, had he chosen to attempt it, Mr Shaw would have found
his story still more ductile in the metre of "Hiawatha." But the
experiment proves nothing: or no more than that, all fine art costing
labour, it may cost less if burlesqued in a category not its own.
Let me take an example from a work with which you are all familiar--"The
Student's Handbook to the University and Colleges of Cambridge." On
p. 405 we read:--
The Medieval and Modern Languages Tripos is divided into ten sections,
A, A2, B, C, D, E, F, G, H and I. A student may take either one or two
sections at the end of his second year of residence, and either one or
two more sections at the end of his third or fourth year of residence;
or he may take two sections at the end of his third year only. Thus
this Tripos can be treated either as a divided or as an undivided
Tripos at the option of the candidate.
Now I do not hold that up to you for a model of prose. Still, lucidity
rather than emotion being its aim, I doubt not that the composer spent
pains on it; more pains than it would have cost him to convey his
information metrically, thus:--
There is a Tripos that aspires to blend
The Medieval and the Modern tongues
In one red burial (Sing Heavenly Muse!)
Divided into sections A, A2,
B, C, D, E, F, G and H and I.
A student may take either one or two
(With some restrictions mention'd in a footnote)
At th' expiration of his second year:
Or of his third, or of his fourth again
Take one or two; or of his third alone
Take two together. Thus this tripos is
(Like nothing in the Athanasian Creed)
Divisible or indivisible
At the option of the candidate--Gadzooks!
This method has even some advantage over the method of prose in that it
is more easily memorised; but it has, as you will admit, the one fatal
flaw that it imports emotion into a theme which does not properly admit
of emotion, and that so it offends against our first rule of
writing--that it should be appropriate.
Now if you accept the argument so far as we have led it--that verse is by
nature more emotional than prose--certain consequences would seem to
follow: of which the first is that while the capital difficulty of verse
consists in saying ordinary things the capital difficulty of prose
consists in saying extraordinary things; that while with verse, keyed for
high moments, the trouble is to manage the intervals, with prose the
trouble is to manage the high moments.
Let us dwell awhile on this difference, for it is important. You remember
my quoting to you in my last lecture these lines of Milton's:--
Up to a hill anon his steps he reared
From whose high top to ken the prospect round,
If cottage were in view, sheep-cote or herd;
But cottage, herd, or sheep-cote, none he saw.
We agreed that these were good lines, with the accent of poetry: but we
allowed it to be a highly exalted way of telling how So-and-so climbed a
hill for a better view but found none. Now obviously this exaltation does
not arise immediately out of the action described (which is as ordinary
as it well could be), but is _derivative_. It borrows its wings, its
impetus, from a previous high moment, from the emotion proper to that
moment, from the speech proper to that emotion: and these sustain us
across to the next height as with the glide of an aeroplane. Your own
sense will tell you at once that the passage would be merely bombastic if
the poet were starting to set forth how So-and-so climbed a hill for the
view--just that, and nothing else: as your own sense tells you that the
swoop is from one height to another. For if bathos lay ahead, if Milton
had but to relate how the Duke of York, with twenty thousand men,
'marched up a hill and then marched down again,' he certainly would not
use diction such as:--
Up to a hill anon his steps he reared.
Even as it is, I think we must all detect a certain artificiality in the
passage, and confess to some relief when Satan is introduced to us, ten
lines lower down, to revivify the story. For let us note that, in the
nature of things, the more adorned and involved our style (and Milton's
is both ornate and involved) the more difficulty we must find with these
flat pedestrian intervals. Milton may 'bring it off,' largely through
knowing how to dodge the interval and contrive that it shall at any rate
be brief: but, as Bagehot noted, when we come to Tennyson and find
Tennyson in "Enoch Arden" informing us of a fish-jowter, that:--
Enoch's white horse, and Enoch's ocean-spoil
In ocean-smelling osier--
(_i.e._ in a fish-basket)
--and his face
Rough-reddened with a thousand winter gales,
Not only to the market town were known,
But in the leafy lanes beyond the down
Far as the portal-warding lion-whelp
And peacock yewtree of the lonely Hall
Whose Friday fare was Enoch's ministering,
why, then we feel that the vehicle is altogether too pompous for its
load, and those who make speech too pompous for its content commit,
albeit in varying degrees, the error of Defoe's religious lady who,
seeing a bottle of over-ripe beer explode and cork and froth fly up to
the ceiling, cried out, 'O, the wonders of Omnipotent Power!' The poet
who commends fresh fish to us as 'ocean-spoil' can cast no stone at his
brother who writes of them as 'the finny denizens of the deep,' or even
at his cousin the journalist, who exalts the oyster into a 'succulent
bivalve'--
The feathered tribes on pinions cleave the air;
Not so the mackerel, and, still less, the bear!
I believe this difficulty, which verse, by nature and origin emotional,
encounters in dealing with ordinary unemotional narrative, to lie as a
technical reason at the bottom of Horace's advice to the writer of Epic
to plunge _in medias res_, thus avoiding flat preparative and catching at
once a high wind which shall carry him hereafter across dull levels and
intervals. I believe that it lay--though whether consciously or not he
scarcely tells us--at the bottom of Matthew Arnold's mind when, selecting
certain qualities for which to praise Homer, he chose, for the very
first, Homer's _rapidity_. 'First,' he says, 'Homer is eminently rapid;
and,' he adds justly, 'to this rapidity the elaborate movement of
Miltonic blank verse is alien.'
Now until one studies writing as an art, trying to discover what this or
that form of it accomplishes with ease and what with difficulty, and why
verse can do one thing and prose another, Arnold's choice of _rapidity_
to put in the forefront of Homer's merits may seem merely capricious.
'Homer (we say) has other great qualities. Arnold himself indicates
Homer's simplicity, directness, nobility. Surely either one of these
should be mentioned before rapidity, in itself not comparable as a virtue
with either?'
But when we see that the difficulty of verse-narrative lies just _here_;
that the epic poet who is rapid has met, and has overcome, the capital
difficulty of his form, then we begin to do justice not only to Arnold as
a critic but (which is of far higher moment) to Homer as a craftsman.
The genius of Homer in this matter is in fact something daemonic. He
seems to shirk nothing: and the effect of this upon critics is
bewildering. The acutest of them are left wondering how on earth an
ordinary tale--say of how some mariners beached ship, stowed sail, walked
ashore and cooked their dinner--can be made so poetical. They are
inclined to divide the credit between the poet and his fortunate age--'a
time' suggests Pater 'in which one could hardly have spoken at all
without ideal effect, or the sailors pulled down their boat without
making a picture "in the great style" against a sky charged with
marvels.'
Well, the object of these lectures is not to explain genius. Just here it
is rather to state a difficulty; to admit that, once in history, genius
overcame it; yet warn you how rare in the tale of poetical achievement is
such a success. Homer, indeed, stands first, if not unmatched, among
poets in this technical triumph over the capital disability of
annihilating flat passages. I omit Shakespeare and the dramatists;
because they have only to give a stage direction 'Enter Cassius, looking
lean,' and Cassius comes in looking leaner than nature; whereas Homer has
in his narrative to walk Hector or Thersites on to the scene, describe
him, walk him off. I grant the rapidity of Dante. It is amazing; and we
may yield him all the credit for choosing (it was his genius that chose
it) a subject which allowed of the very highest rapidity; since Hell,
Purgatory and Paradise, though they differ in other respects, have this
in common, that they are populous and the inhabitants of each so
compendiously shepherded together that the visitor can turn from one
person to another without loss of time. But Homer does not escort us
around a menagerie in which we can move expeditiously from one cage to
another. He proposes at least, both in the "Iliad" and in the "Odyssey,"
to unfold a story; and he _seems_ to unfold it so artlessly that we
linger on the most pedestrian intervals while he tells us, for example,
what the heroes ate and how they cooked it. A modern writer would serve
us a far better dinner. Homer brings us to his with our appetite all the
keener for having waited and watched the spitting and roasting.
I would point out to you what art this genius conceals; how cunning is
this apparent simplicity: and for this purpose let me take Homer at the
extreme of his difficulty--when he has to describe a long sea-voyage.
Some years ago, in his last Oxford lectures, Mr Froude lamented that no
poet in this country had arisen to write a national epic of the great
Elizabethan seamen, to culminate (I suppose) as his History culminated,
in the defeat of the Armada: and one of our younger poets; Mr Alfred
Noyes, acting on this hint has since given us an epic poem on "Drake," in
twelve books. But Froude probably overlooked, as Mr Noyes has not
overcome, this difficulty of the flat interval which, while ever the
bugbear of Epic, is magnified tenfold when our action takes place on the
sea. For whereas the verse should be rapid and the high moments frequent,
the business of seafaring is undeniably monotonous, as the intervals
between port and port, sea-fight and sea-fight, must be long and lazy.
Matters move more briskly in an occasional gale; but even a gale lasts,
and must be ridden out; and the process of riding to a gale of wind:--
For ever climbing up the climbing wave
--your ship taking one wave much as she takes another--is in its nature
monotonous. Nay, you have only to read Falconer's "Shipwreck" to discover
how much of dulness may lie enwrapped, to discharge itself, even in a
first-class tempest. Courses, reckonings, trimmings of canvas--these
occur in real life and amuse the simple mariner at the time. But to the
reader, if he be a landsman, their repetition in narrative may easily
become intolerable; and when we get down to the 'trades,' even the seaman
sets his sail for a long spell of weather and goes to sleep. In short you
cannot upon the wide Atlantic push action and reaction to and fro as upon
the plains of windy Troy: nor could any but a superhuman genius make
sustained poetry (say) out of Nelson's untiring pursuit of Villeneuve,
which none the less was one of the most heroic feats in history.
This difficulty, inherent in navigation as a subject for the Epic Muse,
has, I think, been very shrewdly detected and hit off in a parody of Mr
Noyes' poem by a young friend of mine, Mr Wilfred Blair:--
Meanwhile the wind had changed, and Francis Drake
Put down the helm and drove against the seas--
Once more the wind changed, and the simple seaman,
Full fraught with weather wisdom, once again
Put down the helm and so drove on--_et cetera_.
Now Homer actually has performed this feat which we declare to be next to
impossible. He actually does convey Odysseus from Troy to Ithaca, by a
ten years' voyage too; he actually has narrated that voyage to us in
plain straightforward words; and, what is more, he actually has made a
superb epic of it. Yes, but when you come to dissect the Odyssey, what
amazing artifice is found under that apparently straightforward
tale!--eight years of the ten sliced out, to start with, and
magnificently presented to Circe
Where that Aeaean isle forgets the main
--and (one may add), so forgetting, avoids the technical difficulties
connected therewith.