create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our
condition, and in the impressions which we habitually receive, the
Poet will sleep then no more than at present; he will be ready to
follow the steps of the Man of Science, not only in those general
indirect effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation
into the midst of the objects of the science itself. The remotest
discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be
as proper objects of the Poet's art as any upon which it can be
employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be
familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated
by the followers of these respective sciences, thus familiarised
to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and
blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the
transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced, as a
dear and genuine inmate of the household of man."
It is plain, then, that, writing in the year 1800, Wordsworth believed
that a kind of modified and sublimated didactic poetry would come into
vogue in the course of the nineteenth century. He stood on the threshold
of a new age, and he cast his vatic gaze across it much in the same
spirit as we are trying to do to-day. But if any warning were needed to
assure us of the vanity of prophesying, it would surely be the error of
one so sublimely gifted and so enriched with the spoils of meditation.
The belief of Wordsworth was that the poetry of the future would deal,
in some vaguely inspired fashion, with the discoveries of science. But
when we look back over the field of 113 years, how much do we find our
national poetry enriched with ore from the mines of mineralogy or botany
or chemistry? It is difficult to see that there has been so much as an
effort made to develop poetry in this or in any similar direction.
Perhaps the nearest approach to what Wordsworth conceived as probable
was attempted by Tennyson, particularly in those parts of _In Memoriam_
where he dragged in analogies to geological discoveries and the
biological theories of his time. Well, these are just those parts of
Tennyson which are now most universally repudiated as lifeless and
jejune.
Wordsworth did not confine himself to predicting a revival of didactic
poetry, the poetry of information, such as, in a very crude form, had
prevailed all over Europe in his own childhood, but he conceived a wide
social activity for writers of verse. He foresaw that the Poet would
"bind together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human
society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time." I
suppose that in composing those huge works, so full of scattered
beauties, but in their entirety so dry and solid, _The Excursion_ and
_The Prelude_, he was consciously attempting to inaugurate this scheme
of a wide and all-embracing social poetry. Nor do I suppose that efforts
of this kind will ever cease to be made. We have seen a gifted writer in
whom the memory is perhaps even more surprisingly developed than the
imagination, employ the stores of his experience to enrich a social
poetry the elements of which, prima facie, should be deeply attractive
to us all. But I do not know that the experiments of Mr. Rudyard
Kipling, brilliant as they are, are calculated to encourage the poets of
the future to pursue their lyric celebration of machinery and sociology
and the mysteries of natural religion. Already is it not that portion of
his work which we approach with most languor, in spite of its
originality and its outlook upon "the vast empire of human society"? And
lesser poets than he who seek for popularity by such violent means are
not, I think, rewarded by the distinguished loyalty of the best readers.
We are startled by their novelty, and we admire them for the moment; but
when, a few years later, we return to them, we are apt to observe with
distress how
"their lean and flashy songs
Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw."
If, therefore, I venture upon a prophecy, where all the greater
prophets, my predecessors, have failed, it is to suggest that the energy
of future poets will not be largely exercised on themes of this intrepid
social character, but that as civilisation more and more tightly lays
hold upon literature, and excludes the purest form of it from one
province after another, poetry will, in its own defence, cultivate more
and more what Hazlitt calls "a mere effusion of natural sensibility."
Hazlitt used the phrase in derision, but we may accept it seriously, and
not shrink from adopting it. In most public remarks about current and
coming literature in the abstract, I marvel at the confidence with which
it is taken for granted that the sphere of interest occupied by writers
of the imagination is sure to grow wider and wider. It is expected to
embrace the world, to take part in a universal scheme of pacification,
to immortalise imperial events, to be as public as possible. But surely
it is more and more clearly proved that prose is the suitable medium for
such grandiose themes as these. Within the last year our minds have been
galvanised into collective sympathy by two great sensations of
catastrophe, each case wearing the most thrilling form that tragedy can
take in the revolt of nature against the feverish advances of mankind. I
suppose we may consider the destruction of the Titanic and the loss of
Captain Scott's expedition as two absolutely typical examples of what is
thought by journalists to be fitting material for poetry. Yet by common
consent, these tragic occurrences did not awaken our numerous poets to
any really remarkable effort, lyrical or elegiac. No ode or threnody
could equal in vibrating passion Captain Scott's last testament. These
are matters in which the fullness of a wholly sincere statement in prose
does not require, does not even admit, the introduction of the symbol.
The impact of the sentiments of horror and pity is too sudden and
forcible.
My own view is that, whether to its advantage or not, the poetry of the
future is likely to be very much occupied with subjects, and with those
alone, which cannot be expressed in the prose of the best-edited
newspaper. In fact, if I were to say what it is which I think coming
poets will have more and more to be on their guard against, I should
define it as a too rigid determination never to examine subjects which
are of collective interest to the race at large. I dread lest the
intense cultivation of the Ego, in minutest analysis and microscopical
observation of one's self, should become the sole preoccupation of the
future poet. I will not tell you that I dread lest this should be one of
his principal preoccupations, for that would be to give way to a cheery
piece of mid-Victorian hypocrisy which would be unworthy of you and of
me alike. The time is past when intelligent persons ought to warn
writers of the imagination not to cultivate self-analysis, since it is
the only safeguard against the follies of an unbridled romanticism. But
although the ivory tower offers a most valuable retreat, and although
the poets may be strongly recommended to prolong their _villeggiatura_
there, it should not be the year-long habitation of any healthy
intelligence.
I do not question that the closing up of the poetic field, the depending
more and more completely for artistic effect upon an "effusion of
natural sensibility," will isolate the poet from his fellows. He will be
tempted, in the pursuit of the symbol which illustrates his emotion, to
draw farther and farther away from contact with the world. He will wrap
his singing-robes not over his limbs only, but over his face, and treat
his readers with exemplary disdain. We must be prepared, or our
successors must, to find frequently revealed the kind of poet who not
merely sees nothing superior to himself, but nothing except himself. I
am not concerned to say that this will be unfortunate or blameworthy;
the moralist of the future must attend to that. But I can believe that
this unyielding and inscrutable attitude may produce some fine artistic
effects. I can believe that both intensity and dignity may be gained by
this sacrifice of the plainer human responsibilities, although I am not
prepared to say at what loss of other qualities. It is clear that such a
writer will not allow the public to dictate to him the nature or form of
his lyric message, and he will have to depend for success entirely on
the positive value of his verse.
The isolation of the poets of the future is likely to lead them to band
themselves more closely together for mutual protection against the
reasonable world. The mystery of verse is like other abstruse and
recondite mysteries--it strikes the ordinary fleshly man as absurd. The
claim of the poet on human sympathy, if we regard it merely from the
world's standpoint, is gratuitous, vague, and silly. In an entirely
sensible and well-conducted social system, what place will there be for
the sorrows of Tasso and Byron, for the rage of Dante, for the
misanthropy of Alfred de Vigny, for the perversity of Verlaine, for the
rowdiness of Marlowe?--the higher the note of the lyre, the more
ridiculous is the attitude of the lyrist, and the coarse public applauds
the violence of Diogenes when he tramples on the pride of the poets with
a greater pride than theirs. I cannot help thinking that this attitude
of the sacred bard, maundering from the summit of his ivory tower, and
hollowed out and made haggard by a kind of sublime moral neuralgia, will
have to be abandoned as a relic of the dead romantic past. So far as it
is preserved by the poets of the future it will be peculiar to those
monasteries of song, those "little clans," of which I am now about to
speak as likely more and more to prevail.
In France, where the interest in poetry has, during the last generation,
been far more keen and more abundant than anywhere else in the world, we
already see a tendency to the formation of such experimental houses of
song. There has been hitherto no great success attending any one of
these bodies, which soon break up, but the effort to form them is
perhaps instructive. I took considerable interest in the Abbaye de
Creteil, which was a collectivist experiment of this kind. It was
founded in October 1906, and it was dissolved in consequence of internal
dissensions in January 1908. It was an attempt to create, in defiance
of the public, in contemptuous disregard of established "literary
opinion," a sort of prosodical chapel or school of poetry. It was to be
the active centre of energy for a new generation, and there were five
founders, each of whom was highly ambitious to distinguish himself in
verse. At Creteil there was a printing-press in a great park, so that
the members should be altogether independent of the outside world. The
poets were to cultivate the garden and keep house with the sale of the
produce. When not at work, there were recitations, discussions,
exhibitions of sketches, for they were mixed up with the latest vagaries
of the Cubists and Post-impressionists.
This particular experiment lasted only fifteen months, and I cannot
conscientiously say that I think it was in any way a success. No one
among the abbatical founders of Creteil had, to be quite frank, any
measure of talent in proportion to his daring. They were involved in
vague and nebulous ideas, mixed up with what I am afraid I must call
charlatans, the refuse and the wreckage of other arts. Yet I consider
that it is interesting to note that the lay monks of Creteil were in a
sense correct when they announced that they were performing "a heroic
act," an act symbolical of the way in which poetry would in the future
disdainfully protect itself against the invasion of common sense, the
dreadful impact of the sensual world. I think you will do well, if you
wish to pursue the subject of our conjectural discourse, to keep your
eye on this tendency to a poetical collectivism. We have not noticed
much evidence of it yet in England, but it is beginning to stir a good
deal in France and Italy. After all, the highest poetry is a mysterious
thing, like the practices of the Society of Rosicrucians, of whom it was
said, "Our House of the Holy Ghost, though a hundred thousand men should
have looked upon it, is yet doomed to remain untouched, imperturbable,
out of sight, and unrevealed to the whole godless world for ever." If I
am sure of anything, it is that the Poets of the Future will look upon
massive schemes of universal technical education, and such democratic
reforms as those which are now occupying the enthusiasm and energy of
Lord Haldane, as peculiarly hateful expositions of the godlessness of a
godless world.
To turn to another branch of our subject, it appears to me possible that
sexual love may cease to be the predominant theme in the lyrical poetry
of the future. Erotic sentiment has perhaps unduly occupied the
imaginative art of the past. In particular, the poets of the late
nineteenth century were interested to excess in love. There was a sort
of obsession of sex among them, as though life presented no other
phenomenon worthy of the attention of the artist. All over Europe, with
the various tincture of differing national habit and custom, this was
the mark of the sophistication of the poets, sometimes delicately and
craftily exhibited, but often, as in foreign examples which will easily
occur to your memory, rankly, as with the tiresome persistence of a
slightly stale perfume, an irritating odour of last night's opopanax or
vervain. And this is the one point, almost I think the only point, in
which the rather absurd and certainly very noisy and hoydenish
manifestoes of the so-called Futurists, led by M. Marinetti and his crew
of iconoclasts, are worthy of our serious attention. It is a plank in
their platform to banish eroticism, of the good kind and of the bad,
from the poetic practice of the future. I do not, to say the truth, find
much help for the inquiry we have taken up to-day, in the manifestoes of
these raucous young gentlemen, who, when they have succeeded in flinging
the ruins of the architecture of Venice into its small stinking canals,
will find themselves hard put to it to build anything beautiful in the
place of them. But in their reaction against "the eternal feminine,"
they may, I think, very possibly be followed by the serious poets of the
future.
Those who have watched rather closely the recent developments of poetry
in England have been struck with the fact that it tends more and more in
the direction of the dramatic, not necessarily in the form of what is
known as pure drama, particularly adapted for representation to
listening audiences behind the footlights, but in the increased study of
life in its exhibitions of energy. This may seem to be inconsistent with
the tendency, of which I spoke just now, to withdraw from the world
itself, either into an egotistical isolation or into some cloistered
association of more or less independent figures united only in a
rebellious and contemptuous disdain of public opinion. But the
inconsistency may very well be one solely in appearance. It may well
happen that the avoidance of all companionship with the stereotyped
social surfaces of life, the ignorance--really, the happy and hieratic
ignorance--of what "people" in the fussy sense, are supposed to be
saying and doing, may actually help the poet to come more fruitfully and
penetratingly to what lies under the surface, to what is essential and
permanent and notable in the solid earth of human character. Hence, I
think it not improbable that the poetry of the future may become more
and more dramatic, although perhaps by a series of acts of definite
creation, rather than as the result of observation, which will be left
to the ever-increasing adroitness of the brilliant masters of our prose.
As a result of this obsession in creative drama, I suppose that we may
expect to find in the poetry of the future a more steady hope for
mankind than has up to the present time been exhibited. The result of an
excessive observation of the startling facts of life, a work appropriate
to the violent energy of realistic prose, has been a general
exaggeration of the darker tints, an insistence on that prominence of
what was called the "sub-fusc" colours which art-critics of a century
ago judged essential to sublimity in all art. In Continental literature,
and particularly in the very latest Russian drama, this determination to
see blackness and blackness only, to depict the ordinary scene of
existence as a Valley of the Shadow of Despair, has been painfully
frequent. In England we had a poet of considerable power, whose tragic
figure crossed me in my youth, in whose work there is not a single gleam
of hope or dignity for man;--I mean the unfortunate James Thomson,
author of _The City of Dreadful Night_. I cannot but believe that the
poetry of the future, being more deeply instructed, will insist less
emphatically upon human failure and less savagely upon the revolt of
man. I anticipate in the general tone of it an earnestness, a fullness
of tribute to the noble passion of life, an utterance simple and direct.
I believe that it will take as its theme the magnificence of the
spectacle of Man's successful fight with Nature, not the grotesque and
squalid picturesqueness of his occasional defeat.
It has been admirably said, in a charming essay, that "History may be
abstract, science may be frankly inhuman, even art may be purely formal;
but poetry must be full of human life." This consideration, I think, may
make us feel perfectly secure as to the ultimate maintenance of poetic
expression. For humanity will always be with us, whatever changes may be
introduced into our social system, whatever revolutions may occur in
religion, in legality, in public order, or in the stratification of
composite life. I confess the only atmosphere in which it is impossible
for me to conceive of poetry as able to breathe would be one of complete
and humdrum uniformity of existence, such as was dreamed of at one time,
but I think is no longer so rigidly insisted on, by extreme socialistic
reformers. As long as there is such variety of individual action
possible as will give free scope to the energies and passions, the
hopes and fears, of mankind, so long I think the element of plastic
imagination will be found to insist on expression in the mode of formal
art. It is quite possible that, as a result of extended knowledge and of
the democratic instinct, a certain precipitant hardness of design, such
as was presented in the nineteenth century by Tennyson in the blank
verse lyrics in _The Princess_, by Browning in the more brilliant parts
of _One Word More_, by Swinburne in his fulminating _Sapphics_, may be
as little repeated as the analogous hardness of Dryden in _MacFlecknoe_
or the lapidary splendour of Gray in his _Odes_. I should rather look,
at least in the immediate future, for a revival of the liquid ease of
Chaucer or the soft redundancies of _The Faerie Queene_. The remarkable
experiments of the Symbolists of twenty years ago, and their effect upon
the whole body of French verse, leads me to expect a continuous movement
in that direction.
It is difficult indeed to speak of the probable future of poetry without
introducing the word Symbolism, over which there has raged so much windy
warfare in the immediate past. I cannot help believing that the immense
importance of this idea is one of the principal--perhaps the greatest
discovery with regard to poetry which was made in the last generation.
Symbols, among the ancient Greeks, were, if I mistake not, the signs by
which the initiated worshippers of Ceres or Cybele recognised their
mysterious unison of heart. A symbol is an indication of an object, in
opposition to a direct description of the same; it arouses the idea of
it in the awakened soul; rings a bell, for we may almost put it so,
which at once rouses the spirit and reminds it of some special event or
imminent service. The importance of making this the foremost feature of
poetry is not new, although it may be said that we have only lately, and
only partially, become aware of its value. But, really, if you will
consider it, all that the Symbolists have been saying is involved in
Bacon's phrase that "poetry conforms the shows of things to the desires
of the soul, instead of subjecting the soul to external things." There
could never be presented a subject less calculated to be wound up with a
rhetorical flourish or to close in pompous affirmation than that which I
have so temerariously brought before you this afternoon. I hope that you
will not think that your time has been wasted while we have touched,
lightly and erratically, like birds on boughs, upon some of the probable
or possible features of the poetry of the future. Whatever you, or I, or
the wisest of professors, may predict on this theme of the unborn poets,
we may be certain that there will
"hover in their restless heads
One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least,
Which into words no virtue"
of ours can "digest." I began with the rococo image of a Pegasus, poised
in the air, flashing and curvetting, petulantly refusing to alight on
any expected spot. Let me return to it in closing, that I may suggest
our only sage attitude to be one of always watching for his inevitable
arrival, ready to put grateful lips to the waters of Hippocrene as soon
as ever they bubble from the blow of his hoof.
[Footnote 8: Address delivered before the English Association, May 30,
1913.]
THE AGONY OF THE VICTORIAN AGE
For a considerable time past everybody must have noticed, especially in
private conversation, a growing tendency to disparagement and even
ridicule of all men and things, and aspects of things, which can be
defined as "Victorian." Faded habits of mind are lightly dismissed as
typical of the Victorian Age, and old favourite poets, painters, and
musicians are treated with the same scorn as the glued chairs and glass
bowls of wax flowers of sixty years ago. The new generation are hardly
willing to distinguish what was good from what was bad in the time of
their grandmothers. With increasing audacity they repudiate the
Victorian Age as a _saeclum insipiens et infacetum_, and we meet
everywhere with the exact opposite of Montaigne's "Je les approuve tous
Tun apres l'autre, quoi qu'ils disent." Our younger contemporaries are
slipping into the habit of approving of nothing from the moment that
they are told it is Victorian.
This may almost be described as an intellectual and moral revolution.
Every such revolution means some liberation of the intellect from
bondage, and shows itself first of all in a temper of irreverence; the
formulas of the old faith are no longer treated with respect and
presently they are even ridiculed. It is useless to close our eyes to
the fact that a spirit of this kind is at work amongst us, undermining
the dignity and authority of objects and opinions and men that seemed
half a century ago to be more perennial than bronze. Successive orators
and writers have put the public in possession of arguments, and
especially have sparkled in pleasantries, which have sapped the very
foundations of the faith of 1850. The infection has attacked us all, and
there is probably no one who is not surprised, if he seriously reflects,
to realise that he once implicitly took his ideas of art from Ruskin and
of philosophy from Herbert Spencer. These great men are no longer
regarded by anybody with the old credulity; their theories and their
dogmas are mined, as were those of the early eighteenth century in
France by the Encyclopaedists, by a select class of destructive critics,
in whose wake the whole public irregularly follows. The ordinary
unthinking man accepts the change with exhilaration, since in this
country the majority have always enjoyed seeing noses knocked off
statues. But if we are to rejoice in liberation from the bondage of the
Victorian Age we ought to know what those bonds were.