of Milton. But they come straight from the heart, and go straight to the
heart. They are thoroughly human, what we all have felt, or are much to be
pitied if we have not felt. They are instinct with the holiest form of
domestic piety. They are feminine in the best sense, and have all the
feminine power to attract, to chasten, and to subdue.
As far as character and conduct are concerned, there could not well be two
poets more unlike than Cowper and Burns; and their poetry is as unlike as
their temperament. I fear Burns indulged in most of the vices against
which Cowper inveighs; and not unoften he glorified them in verse. Upon
that theme do not ask me to dwell this evening. All it is necessary to
point out here is, that in Burns, as in Cowper, and as in Goldsmith, we
have the compassionate note, the note of pity for suffering, of sympathy
with the lowly; in a word, we again have the feminine note. In _The
Cotter's Saturday Night_ Burns paints a picture, as complete as it is
simple, of humble life. We have the cotter returning home through the
chill November blast with the weary beasts; the collecting of his spades,
his mattocks, and his hoes; the arrival at his cottage; the expectant wee
things running out to meet him; the ingle-nook blinking bonnily; the
cheerful supper of wholesome porridge; the reading of a passage from the
Bible, the evening hymn, and the family prayer before retiring to rest.
There is a line in _The Cotter's Saturday Night_ which might be taken as
the text on which most of Burns's poems are written:
The cottage leaves the palace far behind.
All his sympathies are with cottages and cottagers, whether he be
expressly describing their existence, writing _A Man's a Man for a' that_,
_The Birks of Aberfeldy_, _Auld Lang Syne_, or addressing lines to a mouse
whose nest he has turned up with his plough. All are written in a spirit
of compassion for suffering, of sympathy with the lowly, of admiration for
honest poverty. They are fundamentally tender, and, though expressed in
manly fashion enough, fundamentally feminine, the poetry of a man who
lived habitually under the influence of women.
I think it will be allowed that I have given no grudging admiration to the
feminine note in English poetry, and in so far as it is a note of sympathy
with the more humble and less fortunate ones of the earth. But, in verse,
kindly and compassionate sentiment is not everything. Indeed, it is
nothing at all unless it be expressed in such a manner, the manner
suffused with charm of style, that it is thereby raised to the dignity of
true poetry. There are many excellent persons who accept as poetry any
sentiment, or any opinion expressed in metre with which they happen to
agree. But neither sound opinion nor wholesome sentiment suffices to
produce that exceedingly delicate and subtle thing which alone is rightly
termed poetry, and, in abandoning lofty themes, and descending to humbler
ones, writers of verse unquestionably expose themselves to the danger not
only of not rising above the level of their subject, but even of sinking
below it. The Romans had a proverb that you cannot carve a Mercury out of
every piece of wood, meaning thereby that by reason of Mercury not being a
standing or reposing figure, but a figure flying through the air, and
therefore with limbs and wings extended, the material out of which he is
made has to be both considerable in size and excellent in quality. What is
true of Mercury is truer still of Apollo. You cannot make poetry out of
every subject; and your only chance of making poetry out of any subject is
to do so by treating the subject either nobly, or with charm. Realism,
unadulterated Realism, which is a dangerous experiment in prose, is a
sheer impossibility in poetry; for in poetry what is offered us, and what
delights us, is not realistic but ideal representation. No doubt the very
music of verse is part of the means whereby this ideal representation is
effected; but it will not of itself suffice, as may easily be proved by
reciting mere nonsense verses in which the rhythm or music may be
faultless. I could quote page after page from Cowper, which is verse only,
and not poetry, because it is nothing more than the bare statement of a
fact set forth in lines consisting of so many feet. Here, for instance, is
a specimen. It comes in his poem on _The Sofa_:
Joint-stools were then created, on three legs,
Upborne they stood: three legs upholding firm
A mossy slab, in fashion square or round.
At length a generation more refined
Improved the simple plan, made three legs four,
Gave them a twisted form vermicular
And o'er the seat with plenteous wadding stuffed
Induced a splendid cover, green and blue,
Yellow and red, of tapestry richly wrought,
And woven close, or needlework sublime.
Perhaps you think this is a parody of Cowper. But I can assure you it is
nothing of the kind. It was written by the poet himself; and in his
abounding pages you will find hundreds of verses of this realistic and
pedestrian character. But not Cowper alone, one much greater than Cowper,
one who rose over and over again to the very heaven of poesy, Wordsworth
himself, has likewise left hundreds, aye, thousands of verses, little
better than the passage I have just read from Cowper, through the mistaken
notion that kindly feeling, compassion for the poor and the patient, and
sound moral sentiments, when expressed in verse, must result in poetry.
There is no one here whose admiration of Wordsworth at his best can be
greater than mine, but, in order to show you how the feminine note in
poetry, the note of sympathy with the weak, the obscure, and the
unfortunate, can even in the voice of a great master of poetry, lapse into
verse utterly destitute of the soul and spirit of poetry, I will ask you
to allow me to read you a portion of _Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman_:
And he is lean and he is sick;
His body, dwindled and awry,
Rests upon ankles swoln and thick;
His legs are thin and dry.
One prop he has, and only one,
His Wife, an aged woman,
Lives with him, near the waterfall,
Upon the village Common.
Oft, working by her husband's side,
Ruth does what Simon cannot do;
For she, with scanty cause for pride,
Is stouter of the two.
And though you with your utmost skill
From labour could not wean them,
Alas! 'tis very little--all
Which they can do between them.
O Reader! had you in your mind
Such stores as silent thought can bring,
O gentle Reader! you would find
A tale in everything.
What more I have to say is short,
And you must kindly take it:
It is no tale; but, should you _think_,
Perhaps a tale you'll make it.
Is not that sorry stuff, regarded as poetry? Wordsworth here had the
assistance of the music, not only of verse, but of rhyme; and with what a
result! It is the feminine note of pity in its dotage, whereby we see
that it is not enough to have a warm heart, to have tender feelings, to be
full of sympathy for the suffering, and then to express them in verse. In
the prose of conversation and of everyday life, kindly feeling is all well
enough. But the Heavenly Muse will not place herself at our disposal so
readily and cheaply. She is a very difficult lady, is the Heavenly Muse,
not easily won, and never allowing you, if you want to remain in her good
graces, to approach her, that is to say, in dressing gown and slippers.
She is the noblest and most gracious lady in the world, and the best, the
most refined, the most elevating of companions. Therefore you must come
into her presence and win her favour, not with free-and-easy gait and in
slovenly attire, but arrayed in your very best, and with courtly and
deferential mien. When poets wrote of gods and goddesses, of mighty
sieges, and of the foundation and fall of empires; when their theme was
the madness of princes, and the tragic fate of kings, when their hero was
Lucifer, Son of the Morning, nay, even when they discoursed of free will
and fate, or of the drawing-room intrigues of persons to whom powder,
patches, billets-doux were the chief things in existence, there was no
need to remind them that their style must be as lofty, as dignified, as
refined, or as finished as their subject. No doubt, they sometimes waxed
stilted and fell into excess, whether in rhetoric or in conceits, but they
never forgot themselves so far as to be slovenly or familiar. Stella, you
know, said Swift could write beautifully about a broomstick. Possibly he
could; but note the concession, that if a man writes, at least if he would
write poetry, he must write _beautifully_. Both Cowper and Wordsworth set
the example of writing verse that is not beautiful, though indeed Young
in his _Night Thoughts_, and Thomson in _The Seasons_, had already done
something of the same kind. But they have not the authority of Cowper,
much less the authority of Wordsworth. Let who will be the authority for
it, prosaic utterance in verse, realism in rhyme, no matter what the
subject, is an incongruity that cannot be too severely condemned. A very
large proportion of the verse of Crabbe, once so popular, but now, I
fancy, but little read, is of little value, by reason of the presence of
this defect. Yet while I indicate, and venture to reprove, the feebleness
into which the feminine note in English poetry has too often declined and
deteriorated, never let us forget that it has contributed lovely and
immortal poetry to the language, poetry to be found in Wordsworth, poetry
such as melts us almost to tears in Hood's _Song of the Shirt_, or in Mrs.
Barrett Browning's _The Cry of the Children_. Horace, who was a great
critic as well as a great poet, said long ago that it is extremely
difficult to express oneself concerning ordinary everyday facts and
feelings in a becoming and agreeable manner; and to do this in verse
demands supreme genius. As a set-off to the example of feebleness I just
now cited in Wordsworth, listen how, when the mood of inspiration is on
him, he can see a Highland girl reaping in a field--surely an ordinary
everyday sight--and threw around her the heavenly halo of the divinest
poetry:
Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts, and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.
No Nightingale did ever chaunt
So sweetly to reposing bands
Of Travellers in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands:
A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard
In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.
Will no one tell me what she sings?
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?
Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang
As if her song could have no ending;
I saw her singing at her work,
And o'er the sickle bending;--
I listened till I had my fill,
And when I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.
But there is another manifestation of the feminine note in English poetry,
distinct from, though doubtless akin to, the one we have been considering;
a note which likewise was not heard in it till about a hundred years ago,
but which has been heard very frequently since, and which seems at times
to threaten to become its dominant and all-prevailing note, or at any rate
the only one that is keenly listened to. Instead of the note of interest
in and pity for others, it has become the note of interest in and pity
either for oneself, or for one's other self; a note so strongly personal
and suggestive as to become egotistic and entirely self-regarding. This
is the amatory or erotic note, which I think you will all recognise when I
give it that designation; the note which appears to consider the love of
the sexes as the only important thing in life, and certainly the only
thing worth writing or singing about. More than two thousand years ago, a
Greek poet wrote a lyric beginning, "I would fain sing of the heroes of
the House of Atreus, I would fain chant the glories of the line of Cadmus;
but my lyre refuses to sound any note save that of love." In these days
the poet who expressed that sentiment and acted on it would have a great
many listeners; and no doubt Anacreon, too, had his audience in ancient
Greece. But he was not ranked by them side by side with their great poets
who _did_ take the tragic story of the House of Atreus for their theme. It
can only be when feminine influence is supreme in society and in
literature, and when the feminine note in poetry has become, or threatens
to become, paramount, that the sentiment and practice of Anacreon is
viewed with approbation and favour. Byron has said in a well-known
passage:
For love is of man's life a thing apart;
'Tis woman's whole existence.
If I know anything about women, that is a gross exaggeration, unless in
the term love be included love of parents, love of brothers and sisters,
love of children, in a word, every form and manifestation of affection.
Still it is not necessary to deny--indeed if it be true it is necessary to
admit--that love, in the narrower if more intense signification of the
word, does play a larger part in the lives, or at any rate in the
imagination, of most women than it does in the lives and the imagination
of most men; and it is not to be denied that practically all women, and a
fair sprinkling of men, now take an almost exclusive interest in the
amatory note in poetry. Nor let any one say that this was always so, and
that poetry and poets have from time immemorial occupied themselves mainly
with the passion of love. Indeed they have not done so. It would be to
show an utter ignorance of the genius of Homer, of the great Greek
dramatists, of Virgil, of Dante, of Spenser, of Shakespeare, of Milton,
and of the temper of the times in which they lived, to say that they could
sound only notes of love. They sounded these sometimes, but seldom and
rarely, in comparison with their other and more masculine notes, and
always in due subordination to these. I will not go so far as to say that
they thought, with Napoleon, that love is the occupation of the idle, and
the idleness of the occupied, but they knew that however absorbing for a
season the passion of love as described by many poets and by nearly all
modern novelists may be, it _is_ a thing apart; and, as such, they dealt
with it. They did not ignore its existence, or even its importance, but
they did not exaggerate its existence and its importance, relatively to
other interests, other occupations, other duties in life. It was because
of the high fealty and allegiance which Spenser declared he owed to all
womankind that he did not represent women as perpetually sighing or being
sighed for by men. It was because Shakespeare had such absolute
familiarity, not with this or that part of life, but with the whole of it,
that even in _Romeo and Juliet_, in _Othello_, in _Measure for Measure_,
and again in _As You Like It_, he represented the passion of love at work
and in operation along with other sentiments and other passions; and, in
the greater portion of his dramas either does not introduce it at all, or
assigns to it a quite subordinate place. In _Romeo and Juliet_ the brave
Mercutio, the Tybalt "deaf to peace," the garrulous nurse, the true
apothecary, the comfortable Friar, as Juliet calls him, all these and
more, have their exits and their entrances, and all, in turn, demand our
attention. _Romeo and Juliet_ is a love-drama indeed; but even in _Romeo
and Juliet_, though love occupies the foremost place and plays the leading
part, it stands in relation to other passions and other characters, and
moves onward to its doom surrounded and accompanied by a medley of other
circumstances and occurrences; just as true love, even the most
engrossing, does in real life. The same just apprehension of life, the
same observance of accurate proportion between the action of love and the
action of other passions and other interests, may be observed in
_Othello_. Othello is not represented merely as a man who is consumed and
maddened by jealousy, but as a citizen and a soldier, encompassed by
friends and enemies, and brought into contact, not with Desdemona and Iago
alone, but with the Duke of Venice, with valiant Cassio, with witty
Montano, with Brabantio, with Gratiano, in a word with people and things
in general.
Neither would it be any more to the purpose to object that Herrick, that
Suckling, that Lovelace, and other poets of the seventeenth century wrote
love-lyrics by the score, with many of which I have no doubt you are
acquainted, and some of which are very beautiful. For these, for the most
part, were amatory exercises, not real breathing and burning love-poems;
dainty works of art sometimes, but not sicklied o'er with the pale cast of
amatory passion. They were seventeenth-century reminiscences of the
conventional love-lyrics of the Troubadours of Provence, when there
existed an imaginary court of Love and a host of imaginary lovers.
Indeed, if I were asked what was the truest and most succinct note uttered
by their English imitators, I think I should have to say that I seem to
catch it most distinctly in the lines of Suckling beginning:
Why so pale and wan, fond lover?
Prithee, why so pale?
--and ending with:
If of herself she will not love,
Nothing can make her:
The devil take her!
But we catch a very different amatory note, and that of the most personal
and earnest kind, when the voice of Burns, and then the voice of Byron,
were heard in English poetry. In Byron the note is almost always
passionate. In Burns it is sometimes sentimental, sometimes jovial,
sometimes humorous, sometimes frankly and offensively coarse. Many readers
cannot do full justice to the North-Country dialect in the following
lines, but the most Southern of accents could not quite spoil their simple
beauty:
The westlin wind blaws loud an' shrill;
The night's baith mirk and rainy, O;
But I'll get my plaid, an' out I'll steal,
An' owre the hills to Nannie, O.
Her face is fair, her heart is true,
As spotless as she's bonnie, O:
The op'ning gowan, wat wi' dew,
Nae purer is than Nannie, O.
That is one amatory, one feminine note in Burns. Here is another:
There's nought but care on every han',
In every hour that passes, O;
What signifies the life o' man,
An' 'twere na for the lasses, O.
Auld Nature swears the lovely dears
Her noblest work she classes, O:
Her 'prentice han' she tried on man,
An' then she made the lasses, O.
I have no fault to find with these lines. They express a profound and
enduring truth; and, if they do so with some little exaggeration, they do
it half humorously, and so protect themselves against criticism. But I
really think--I hope you will not deem me unchivalrous in saying so--we
have, during the present century, heard too much, both in poetry and in
prose romance, as we are now hearing too much in newspapers and magazines,
of "the lasses, O." Not that we can hear too much of them in their
relation to each other, to men, and to life. The "too much" I indicate is
the too much of romantic love, that leaves no place for other emotions and
other passions equally worthy, or relegates these to an inferior position
and to a narrower territory. I should say that there is rather too much of
the sentimental note in Byron, in Shelley, in Keats, just as I should say
that there is not too much of it in Wordsworth or in Scott. To say this is
not to decry Byron, Shelley, and Keats--what lover of poetry would dream
of decrying such splendid poets as they?--but only to indicate a certain
tendency against which I cannot help feeling it is well to be on our
guard. The tendency of the times is to encourage writers, whether in prose
or verse, to deal with this particular theme and to deal with it too
frequently and too pertinaciously. Moreover, there is always a danger that
a subject, in itself so delicate, should not be quite delicately
handled, and indeed that it should be treated with indelicacy and
grossness. That, too, unfortunately, has happened in verse; and when
that happens, then I think the Heavenly Muse veils her face and weeps. It
must have been through some dread of poetry thus dishonouring itself that
Plato in his ideal Republic proposed that poets should be crowned with
laurel, and then banished from the city. For my part, I would willingly
see such poets banished from the city, but not crowned with laurel. No
doubt Plato's notion that poets should chant nothing but hymns to the Gods
and praises of virtue is a little narrow and exacting, but if they are to
sing songs worthy of themselves, and of mankind, they must be on the side
of virtue and of the Gods. Hark with what perfect delicacy a masculine
poet like Scott can deal with a feminine theme:
What though no rule of courtly grace
To measured mood had trained her pace,
A foot more light, a step more true
Ne'er from the heath-flower dashed the dew.
Ev'n the light harebell raised its head,
Elastic from her airy tread.
What though upon her speech there hung
The accents of the mountain tongue?
Those solemn sounds, so soft, so clear,
The listener held his breath to hear.
That is how manly poets write and think of women. But they do not dwell
over much on the theme; they do not harp on it; and when you turn the
page, you read in a totally different key:
The fisherman forsook the strand,
The swarthy smith took dirk and brand;
With changed cheer the mower blythe
Left in the half-cut swathe the scythe.
The herds without a keeper strayed,
The plough was in mid-furrow stayed.
The falconer tossed his hawk away,
The hunter left the stag at bay.
Prompt at the signal of alarms,
Each son of Albion rushed to arms.
So swept the tumult and affray
Along the margin of Achray.
Does it not remind you of the passage I quoted from Homer, where Hector
says to Andromache, "Go! to your house, and see to your loom and distaff,
but for war men will provide"? Scott, like Homer, observed the due
proportion between love and life, giving love ample room, but not
allotting it excessive space. If again one wants to hear how delicately,
how worthily, how manfully, poets can write of love and of women, what can
one do better than recall this perfect lyric of Wordsworth's?--
Three years she grew in sun and shower,
Then Nature said, "A lovelier flower
On earth was never sown;
This Child I to myself will take;
She shall be mine, and I will make
A Lady of my own.
"Myself will to my darling be
Both law and impulse: and with me
The Girl, in rock and plain,
In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,
Shall feel an overseeing power
To kindle or restrain.
"She shall be sportive as the Fawn
That wild with glee across the lawn
Or up the mountain springs;
And hers shall be the breathing balm,
And hers the silence and the calm
Of mute insensate things.
"The floating Clouds their state shall lend
To her; for her the willow bend;
Nor shall she fail to see
Even in the motions of the Storm
Grace that shall mould the Maiden's form
By silent sympathy.
"The Stars of midnight shall be dear
To her; and she shall lean her ear
In many a secret place
Where Rivulets dance their wayward round,
And beauty born of murmuring sound
Shall pass into her face.
"And vital feelings of delight
Shall rear her form to stately height,
Her virgin bosom swell;
Such thoughts to Lucy I will give
While she and I together live
Here in this happy Dell."
Thus Nature spake--The work was done--
How soon my Lucy's race was run!
She died, and left to me
This heath, this calm and quiet scene;
The memory of what has been,
And never more will be.
Neither should I like it to be supposed that I think Byron could not write
on this same theme in the noblest manner. He did so frequently; he would
not have been the great poet he is if he had not done so. Listen to this,
for example:
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies,
And all that's best of dark and light
Meet in her aspect and her eyes.
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which Heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o'er her face,
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear, their dwelling place.
And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent.
Women are honoured and exalted when they are sung of in that manner. They
are neither honoured nor exalted, they are dishonoured and degraded, when
they are represented, either in prose or verse, as consuming their days in
morbid longings and sentimental regrets, and men are represented as having
nothing to do save to stimulate or satisfy such feelings. What is written
in prose is not here my theme. I am writing of poets and poetry, and of
the readers of poetry. Novelists and novel-readers are a different and
separate subject. But I may say in passing that poetry and the readers of
poetry have suffered somewhat during the present generation from novels
and novel-readers. A newer and narrower standard of human interest has
been set up; and while the great bulk of readers have turned from poetry
to prose romances, writers of verse have too frequently tried to compete
with novelists, by treating love as the central interest and the main
business of life. Homer did not think it such, neither did Virgil, nor
Dante, nor Chaucer, nor Spenser, nor Shakespeare, nor Milton, and let us
not think so. I urge every one, every now and again at least, to lay down
the novel and open the poem: but let it be a poem that will enlarge one's
conception of life, that will help one to think loftily, and to feel
nobly, will teach us that there is something more important to ourselves
even than _ourselves_, something more important and deserving of attention
than one's own small griefs and own petty woes, the vast and varied
drama of History, the boundless realm of the human imagination, and the
tragic interests and pathetic struggles of mankind. We need not close our
ear to the feminine note, but should not listen to it over much. The
masculine note is necessarily dominant in life; and the note that is
dominant in life should be dominant in literature, and, most of all, in
poetry.