June 24, 1893. March 4, 1804. In what respect Remarkable.
What seems to me chiefly remarkable in the popular conception of a
Poet is its unlikeness to the truth. Misconception in this case has
been flattered, I fear, by the poets themselves:--
"The poet in a golden Clime was born,
With golden stars above;
Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,
The love of love.
He saw thro' life and death, thro' good and ill;
He saw thro' his own soul.
The marvel of the Everlasting Will,
An open scroll,
Before him lay...."
I should be sorry to vex any poet's mind with my shallow wit; but this
passage always reminds me of the delusions of the respectable
Glendower:--
"At my birth
The frame and huge foundation of the earth
Shak'd like a coward."
--and Hotspur's interpretation (slightly petulant, to be sure), "Why,
so it would have done at the time if your mother's cat had but
kittened, though you yourself had never been born." I protest that I
reverence poetry and the poets: but at the risk of being warned off
the holy ground as a "dark-browed sophist," must declare my plain
opinion that the above account of the poet's birth and native gifts
does not consist with fact.
Yet it consents with the popular notion, which you may find presented
or implied month by month and week by week, in the reviews; and even
day by day--for it has found its way into the newspapers. Critics have
observed that considerable writers fall into two classes--
Two lines of Poetic Development.
(1) Those who start with their heads full of great thoughts, and are
from the first occupied rather with their matter than with the manner
of expressing it.
(2) Those who begin with the love of expression and intent to be
artists in words, _and come through expression to profound thought_.
The Popular Type.
Now, for some reason it is fashionable just now to account Class 1 the
more respectable; a judgment to which, considering that Virgil and
Shakespeare belong to Class 2, I refuse my assent. It is fashionable
to construct an imaginary figure out of the characteristics of Class
1, and set him up as the Typical Poet. The poet at whose nativity
Tennyson assists in the above verses of course belongs to Class 1. A
babe so richly dowered can hardly help his matter overcrowding his
style; at least, to start with.
But this is not all. A poet who starts with this tremendous equipment
can hardly help being something too much for the generation in which
he is born. Consequently, the Typical Poet is misunderstood by his
contemporaries, and probably persecuted. In his own age his is a voice
crying in the wilderness; in the wilderness he speeds the "viewless
arrows of his thought"; which fly far, and take root as they strike
earth, and blossom; and so Truth multiplies, and in the end (most
likely after his death) the Typical Poet comes by his own.
Such is the popular conception of the Typical Poet, and I observe
that it fascinates even educated people. I have in mind the recent
unveiling of Mr. Onslow Ford's Shelley Memorial at University College,
Oxford. Those who assisted at that ceremony were for the most part men
and women of high culture. Excesses such as affable Members of
Parliament commit when distributing school prizes or opening free
public libraries were clearly out of the question. Yet even here, and
almost within the shadow of Bodley's great library, speaker after
speaker assumed as axiomatic this curious fallacy--that a Poet is
necessarily a thinker in advance of his age, and therefore peculiarly
liable to persecution at the hands of his contemporaries.
How supported by History.
But logic, I believe, still flourishes in Oxford; and induction still
has its rules. Now, however many different persons Homer may have
been, I cannot remember that one of him suffered martyrdom, or even
discomfort, on account of his radical doctrine. I seem to remember
that Æchylus enjoyed the esteem of his fellow-citizens, sided with the
old aristocratic party, and lived long enough to find his own
tragedies considered archaic; that Sophocles, towards the end of a
very prosperous life, was charged with senile decay and consequent
inability to administer his estates--two infirmities which even his
accusers did not seek to connect with advanced thinking; and that
Euripides, though a technical innovator, stood hardly an inch ahead of
the fashionable dialectic of his day, and suffered only from the
ridicule of his comic contemporaries and the disdain of his
wife--misfortunes incident to the most respectable. Pindar and Virgil
were court favorites, repaying their patrons in golden song. Dante,
indeed, suffered banishment; but his banishment was just a move in a
political (or rather a family) game. Petrarch and Ariosto were not
uncomfortable in their generations. Chaucer and Shakespeare lived
happy lives and sang in the very key of their own times. Puritanism
waited for its hour of triumph to produce its great poet, who lived
unmolested when the hour of triumph passed and that of reprisals
succeeded. Racine was a royal pensioner; Goethe a chamberlain and the
most admired figure of his time. Of course, if you hold that these
poets one and all pale their ineffectual fires before the radiant
Shelley, our argument must go a few steps farther back. I have
instanced them as acknowledged kings of song.
The Case of Tennyson.
Tennyson was not persecuted. He was not (and more honor to him for his
clearness) even misunderstood. I have never met with the contention
that he stood an inch ahead of the thought of his time. As for seeing
through death and life and his own soul, and having the marvel of the
everlasting will spread before him like an open scroll,--well, to
begin with, I doubt if these things ever happened to any man. Heaven
surely has been, and is, more reticent than the verse implies. But if
they ever happened, Tennyson most certainly was not the man they
happened to. What Tennyson actually sang, till he taught himself to
sing better, was:--
"Airy, fairy Lilian,
Flitting fairy Lilian,
When I ask her if she love me,
Claps her tiny hands above me,
Laughing all she can;
She'll not tell me if she love me,
Cruel little Lilian."
There is not much of the scorn of scorn, or the love of love, or the
open scroll of the everlasting will, about _Cruel Little Lilian_. But
there _is_ a distinct striving after style--a striving that, as
everyone knows, ended in mastery: and through style Tennyson reached
such heights of thought as he was capable of. To the end his thought
remained inferior to his style: and to the end the two in him were
separable, whereas in poets of the very first rank they are
inseparable. But that towards the end his style lifted his thought to
heights of which even _In Memoriam_ gave no promise cannot, I think,
be questioned by any student of his collected works.
Tennyson belongs, if ever poet belonged, to Class 2: and it is the
prettiest irony of fate that, having unreasonably belauded Class 1, he
is now being found fault with for not conforming to the supposed
requirements of that Class. He, who spoke of the poet as of a seër
"through life and death," is now charged with seeing but a short way
beyond his own nose. The Rev. Stopford Brooke finds that he had little
sympathy with the aspirations of the struggling poor; that he bore
himself coldly towards the burning questions of the hour; that, in
short, he stood anywhere but in advance of his age. As if plenty of
people were not interested in these things! Why, I cannot step out
into the street without running against somebody who is in advance of
the times on some point or another.
Of Virgil and Shakespeare.
Virgil and Shakespeare were neither martyrs nor preachers despised in
their generation. I have said that as poets they also belong to Class
2. Will a champion of the Typical Poet (new style) dispute this, and
argue that Virgil and Shakespeare, though they escaped persecution,
yet began with matter that overweighted their style--with deep
stuttered thoughts--in fine, with a Message to their Time? I think
that view can hardly be maintained. We have the _Eclogues_ before the
_Æneid_; and _The Comedy of Errors_ before _As You Like It_.
Expression comes first; and through expression, thought. These are the
greatest names, or of the greatest: and they belong to Class 2.
Of Milton.
Again, no English poetry is more thoroughly informed with thought than
Milton's. Did he find big thoughts hustling within him for utterance?
And did he at an early age stutter in numbers till his oppressed soul
found relief? And was it thus that he attained the glorious manner of
"Seasons return, but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn...."
--and so on. No, to be short, it was not. At the age of twenty-four,
or thereabouts, he deliberately proposed to himself to be a great
poet. To this end he practised and studied, and travelled unweariedly
until his thirty-first year. Then he tried to make up his mind what to
write about. He took some sheets of paper--they are to be seen at this
day in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge--and set down no less
than ninety-nine subjects for his proposed _magnum opus_, before he
could decide upon _Paradise Lost_. To be sure, when the _magnum opus_
was written it fetched £5 only. But even this does not prove that
Milton was before his age. Perhaps he was behind it. _Paradise Lost_
appeared in 1667: in 1657 it might have fetched considerably more than
£5.
If the Typical Poet have few points in common with Shakespeare or
Milton, I fear that the Typical Poet begins to be in a bad way.
Of Coleridge.
Shall we try Coleridge? He had "great thoughts"--thousands of them. On
the other hand, he never had the slightest difficulty in uttering
them, in prose. His great achievements in verse--his _Genevieve_, his
_Christabel_, his _Kubla Khan_, his _Ancient Mariner_--are
achievements of expression. When they appeal from the senses to the
intellect their appeal is usually quite simple.
"He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small."
No, I am afraid Coleridge is not the Typical Poet.
On the whole I suspect the Typical Poet to be a hasty generalization
from Shelley.