“Darken’d so, yet shone
Above them all the archangel; but his face
Deep scars of thunder had intrench’d, and care
Sat on his faded cheek..”
add two such lines as—
“And courage never to submit or yield
And what is else not to be overcome....”
and finish with the exquisite close to the loss of Proserpine, the loss
“... which cost Ceres all that pain
To seek her through the world.”
These few lines, if we have tact and can use them, are enough even of
themselves to keep clear and sound our judgments about poetry, to save
us from fallacious estimates of it, to conduct us to a real estimate.
-----
Footnote 27:
“Ah, unhappy pair, why gave we you to King Peleus, to a mortal? but ye
are without old age, and immortal. Was it that with men born to misery
ye might have sorrow?”—_Iliad_, xvii. 443-445.
Footnote 28:
“Nay, and thou too, old man, in former days wast, as we hear,
happy.”—_Iliad_, xxiv. 543.
Footnote 29:
“I wailed not, so of stone grew I within;—_they_ wailed.”—_Inferno_,
xxxiii. 39, 40.
Footnote 30:
“Of such sort hath God, thanked be His mercy, made me, that your
misery toucheth me not, neither doth the flame of this fire strike
me.”—_Inferno_, ii. 91-93.
Footnote 31:
“In His will is our peace.”—_Paradiso_, iii. 85.
-----
The specimens I have quoted differ widely from one another, but they
have in common this: the possession of the very highest poetical
quality. If we are thoroughly penetrated by their power, we shall find
that we have acquired a sense enabling us, whatever poetry may be laid
before us, to feel the degree in which a high poetical quality is
present or wanting there. Critics give themselves great labor to draw
out what in the abstract constitutes the characters of a high quality of
poetry. It is much better simply to have recourse to concrete
examples;—to take specimens of poetry of the high, the very highest
quality, and to say: The characters of a high quality of poetry are what
is expressed _there_. They are far better recognized by being felt in
the verse of the master, than by being perused in the prose of the
critic. Nevertheless if we are urgently pressed to give some critical
account of them, we may safely, perhaps, venture on laying down, not
indeed how and why the characters arise, but where and in what they
arise. They are in the matter and substance of the poetry, and they are
in its manner and style. Both of these, the substance and matter on the
one hand, the style and manner on the other, have a mark, an accent, of
high beauty, worth, and power. But if we are asked to define this mark
and accent in the abstract, our answer must be: No, for we should
thereby be darkening the question, not clearing it. The mark and accent
are as given by the substance and matter of that poetry, by the style
and manner of that poetry, and of all other poetry which is akin to it
in quality.
Only one thing we may add as to the substance and matter of poetry,
guiding ourselves by Aristotle’s profound observation that the
superiority of poetry over history consists in its possessing a higher
truth and a higher seriousness (φιλοσοφώτερον χαὶ σπουδαιότερον). Let us
add, therefore, to what we have said, this: that the substance and
matter of the best poetry acquire their special character from
possessing, in an eminent degree, truth and seriousness. We may add yet
further, what is in itself evident, that to the style and manner of the
best poetry their special character, their accent, is given by their
diction, and, even yet more, by their movement. And though we
distinguish between the two characters, the two accents, of superiority,
yet they are nevertheless vitally connected one with the other. The
superior character of truth and seriousness, in the matter and substance
of the best poetry, is inseparable from the superiority of diction and
movement marking its style and manner. The two superiorities are closely
related, and are in steadfast proportion one to the other. So far as
high poetic truth and seriousness are wanting to a poet’s matter and
substance, so far also, we may be sure, will a high poetic stamp of
diction and movement be wanting to his style and manner. In proportion
as this high stamp of diction and movement, again, is absent from a
poet’s style and manner, we shall find, also, that high poetic truth and
seriousness are absent from his substance and matter.
So stated, these are but dry generalities; their whole force lies in
their application. And I could wish every student of poetry to make the
application of them for himself. Made by himself, the application would
impress itself upon his mind far more deeply than made by me. Neither
will my limits allow me to make any full application of the generalities
above propounded; but in the hope of bringing out, at any rate, some
significance in them, and of establishing an important principle more
firmly by their means, I will, in the space which remains to me, follow
rapidly from the commencement the course of our English poetry with them
in my view.
Once more I return to the early poetry of France, with which our own
poetry, in its origins, is indissolubly connected. In the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, that seed-time of all modern language and
literature, the poetry of France had a clear predominance in Europe. Of
the two divisions of that poetry, its productions in the _langue d’oil_
and its productions in the _langue d’oc_, the poetry of the _langue
d’oc_, of southern France, of the troubadours, is of importance because
of its effect on Italian literature;—the first literature of modern
Europe to strike the true and grand note, and to bring forth, as in
Dante and Petrarch it brought forth, classics. But the predominance of
French poetry in Europe, during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, is
due to its poetry of the _langue d’oil_, the poetry of northern France
and of the tongue which is now the French language. In the twelfth
century the bloom of this romance-poetry was earlier and stronger in
England, at the court of our Anglo-Norman kings, than in France itself.
But it was a bloom of French poetry; and as our native poetry formed
itself, it formed itself out of this. The romance-poems which took
possession of the heart and imagination of Europe in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries are French; “they are,” as Southey justly says,
“the pride of French literature, nor have we anything which can be
placed in competition with them.” Themes were supplied from all
quarters; but the romance-setting which was common to them all, and
which gained the ear of Europe, was French. This constituted for the
French poetry, literature, and language, at the height of the Middle
Age, an unchallenged predominance. The Italian Brunetto Latini, the
master of Dante, wrote his _Treasure_ in French because, he says, “la
parleure en est plus délitable et plus commune à toutes gens.” In the
same century, the thirteenth, the French romance-writer, Christian of
Troyes, formulates the claims, in chivalry and letters, of France, his
native country, as follows:—
“Or vous ert par ce livre apris,
Que Gresse ot de chevalerie
Le premier los et de clergie;
Puis vint chevalerie à Rome,
Et de la clergie la some,
Qui ore est en France venue.
Diex doinst qu’ele i soit retenu
Et que li lius li abelisse
Tant que de France n’isse
L’onor qui s’i est arestée!”
“Now by this book you will learn that first Greece had the renown for
chivalry and letters: then chivalry and the primacy in letters passed to
Rome, and now it is come to France. God grant it may be kept there; and
that the place may please it so well, that the honor which has come to
make stay in France may never depart thence!”
Yet it is now all gone, this French romance poetry, of which the weight
of substance and the power of style are not unfairly represented by this
extract from Christian of Troyes. Only by means of the historic estimate
can we persuade ourselves now to think that any of it is of poetical
importance.
But in the fourteenth century there comes an Englishman nourished on
this poetry; taught his trade by this poetry, getting words, rhyme,
meter from this poetry; for even of that stanza which the Italians used,
and which Chaucer derived immediately from the Italians, the basis and
suggestion was probably given in France. Chaucer (I have already named
him) fascinated his contemporaries, but so too did Christian of Troyes
the Wolfram of Eschenbach. Chaucer’s power of fascination, however, is
enduring; his poetical importance does not need the assistance of the
historic estimate; it is real. He is a genuine source of joy and
strength, which is flowing still for us and will flow always. He will be
read, as time goes on, far more generally than he is read now. His
language is a cause of difficulty for us; but so also, and I think in
quite as great a degree, is the language of Burns. In Chaucer’s case, as
in that of Burns, it is a difficulty to be unhesitatingly accepted and
overcome.
If we ask ourselves wherein consists the immense superiority of
Chaucer’s poetry over the romance-poetry—why it is that in passing from
this to Chaucer we suddenly feel ourselves to be in another world, we
shall find that his superiority is both in the substance of his poetry
and in the style of his poetry. His superiority in substance is given by
his large, free, simple, clear yet kindly view of human life,—so unlike
the total want, in the romance-poets, of all intelligent command of it.
Chaucer has not their helplessness; he has gained the power to survey
the world from a central, a truly human point of view. We have only to
call to mind the Prologue to _The Canterbury Tales_. The right comment
upon it is Dryden’s: “It is sufficient to say, according to the proverb,
that _here is God’s plenty_.” And again: “He is a perpetual fountain of
good sense.” It is by a large, free, sound representation of things,
that poetry, this high criticism of life, has truth of substance; and
Chaucer’s poetry has truth of substance.
Of his style and manner, if we think first of the romance-poetry and
then of Chaucer’s divine liquidness of diction, his divine fluidity of
movement, it is difficult to speak temperately. They are irresistible,
and justify all the rapture with which his successors speak of his “gold
dew-drops of speech.” Johnson misses the point entirely when he finds
fault with Dryden for ascribing to Chaucer the first refinement of our
numbers, and says that Gower also can show smooth numbers and easy
rhymes. The refinement of our numbers means something far more than
this. A nation may have versifiers with smooth numbers and easy rhymes,
and yet may have no real poetry at all. Chaucer is the father of our
splendid English poetry; he is our “well of English undefiled,” because
by the lovely charm of his diction, the lovely charm of his movement, he
makes an epoch and founds a tradition. In Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton,
Keats, we can follow the tradition of the liquid diction, the fluid
movement, of Chaucer; at one time it is his liquid diction of which in
these poets we feel the virtue, and at another time it is his fluid
movement. And the virtue is irresistible.
Bounded as in space, I must yet find room for an example of Chaucer’s
virtue, as I have given examples to show the virtue of the great
classics. I feel disposed to say that a single line is enough to show
the charm of Chaucer’s verse; that merely one line like this—
“O martyr souded[32] in virginitee!”
has a virtue of manner and movement such as we shall not find in all the
verse of romance-poetry;—but this is saying nothing. The virtue is such
as we shall not find, perhaps, in all English poetry, outside the poets
whom I have named as the special inheritors of Chaucer’s tradition. A
single line, however, is too little if we have not the strain of
Chaucer’s verse well in our memory; let us take a stanza. It is from
_The Prioress’s Tale_, the story of the Christian child murdered in a
Jewry—
“My throte is cut unto my nekke-bone
Said_è_ this child, and as by way of kinde
I should have dyed, yea, longè time agone
But Jesu Christ, as ye in book_è_s finde,
Will that his glory last and be in minde,
And for the worship of his mother dere
Yet may I sing _O Alma_ loud and clere.”
Wordsworth has modernized this Tale, and to feel how delicate and
evanescent is the charm of verse, we have only to read Wordsworth’s
first three lines of this stanza after Chaucer’s—
“My throat is cut unto the bone, I trow,
Said this young child, and by the law of kind
I should have died, yea, many hours ago.”
The charm is departed. It is often said that the power of liquidness and
fluidity in Chaucer’s verse was dependent upon a free, a licentious
dealing with language, such as is now impossible; upon a liberty, such
as Burns too enjoyed, of making words like _neck_, _bird_, into a
dissyllable by adding to them, and words like _cause_, _rhyme_, into a
dissyllable by sounding the _e_ mute. It is true that Chaucer’s fluidity
is conjoined with this liberty, and is admirably served by it; but we
ought not to say that it was dependent upon it. It was dependent upon
his talent. Other poets with a like liberty do not attain to the
fluidity of Chaucer; Burns himself does not attain to it. Poets, again,
who have a talent akin to Chaucer’s, such as Shakespeare or Keats, have
known how to attain to his fluidity without the like liberty.
-----
Footnote 32:
The French _soudé_; soldered, fixed fast.
-----
And yet Chaucer is not one of the great classics. His poetry transcends
and effaces, easily and without effort, all the romance-poetry of
Catholic Christendom; it transcends and effaces all the English poetry
contemporary with it, it transcends and effaces all the English poetry
subsequent to it down to the age of Elizabeth. Of such avail is poetic
truth of substance, in its natural and necessary union with poetic truth
of style. And yet, I say, Chaucer is not one of the great classics. He
has not their accent. What is wanting to him is suggested by the mere
mention of the name of the first great classic of Christendom, the
immortal poet who died eighty years before Chaucer,—Dante. The accent of
such verse as
“In la sua voluntade è nostra pace....”
is altogether beyond Chaucer’s reach; we praise him, but we feel that
this accent is out of the question for him. It may be said that it was
necessarily out of the reach of any poet in the England of that stage of
growth. Possibly; but we are to adopt a real, not a historic, estimate
of poetry. However we may account for its absence, something is wanting,
then, to the poetry of Chaucer, which poetry must have before it can be
placed in the glorious class of the best. And there is no doubt what
that something is. It is the οπουδαιότης, the high and excellent
seriousness, which Aristotle assigns as one of the grand virtues of
poetry. The substance of Chaucer’s poetry, his view of things and his
criticism of life, has largeness, freedom, shrewdness, benignity; but it
has not this high seriousness. Homer’s criticism of life has it, Dante’s
has it, Shakespeare’s has it. It is this chiefly which gives to our
spirits what they can rest upon; and with the increasing demands of our
modern ages upon poetry, this virtue of giving us what we can rest upon
will be more and more highly esteemed. A voice from the slums of Paris,
fifty or sixty years after Chaucer, the voice of poor Villon out of his
life of riot and crime, has at its happy moments (as, for instance, in
the last stanza of _La Belle Heaulmière_[33]) more of this important
poetic virtue of seriousness than all the productions of Chaucer. But
its apparition in Villon, and in men like Villon, is fitful; the
greatness of the great poets, the power of their criticism of life, is
that their virtue is sustained.
-----
Footnote 33:
The name _Heaulmière_ is said to be derived from a headdress (helm)
worn as a mark by courtesans. In Villon’s ballad, a poor old creature
of this class laments her days of youth and beauty. The last stanza of
the ballad runs thus—
“Ainsi le bon temps regretons
Entre nous, pauvres vieilles sott
Assises bas, à croppetons,
Tout en ung tas comme pelottes;
A petit feu de chenevottes
Tost allumées, tost estainctes,
Et jadis fusmes si mignottes!
Ainsi en prend à maintz et maintes.”
“Thus amongst ourselves we regret the good time, poor silly old
things, low-seated on our heels, all in a heap like so many balls: by
a little fire of hemp-stalks, soon lighted, soon spent. And once we
were such darlings! So fares it with many and many a one.”
-----
To our praise, therefore, of Chaucer as a poet there must be this
limitation; he lacks the high seriousness of the great classics, and
therewith an important part of their virtue. Still, the main fact for us
to bear in mind about Chaucer is his sterling value according to that
real estimate which we firmly adopt for all poets. He has poetic truth
of substance, though he has not high poetic seriousness, and
corresponding to his truth of substance he has an exquisite value of
style and manner. With him is born our real poetry.
For my present purpose I need not dwell on our Elizabethan poetry, or on
the continuation and close of this poetry in Milton. We all of us
profess to be agreed in the estimate of this poetry; we all of us
recognize it as great poetry, our greatest, and Shakespeare and Milton
as our poetical classics. The real estimate, here, has universal
currency. With the next age of our poetry divergency and difficulty
began. An historic estimate of that poetry has established itself; and
the question is, whether it will be found to coincide with the real
estimate.
The age of Dryden, together with our whole eighteenth century which
followed it, sincerely believed itself to have produced poetical
classics of its own, and even to have made advance, in poetry, beyond
all its predecessors. Dryden regards as not seriously disputable the
opinion “that the sweetness of English verse was never understood or
practised by our fathers.” Cowley could see nothing at all in Chaucer’s
poetry. Dryden heartily admired it, and, as we have seen, praised its
matter admirably; but of its exquisite manner and movement all he can
find to say is that “there is the rude sweetness of a Scotch tune in it,
which is natural and pleasing, though not perfect.” Addison, wishing to
praise Chaucer’s numbers, compares them with Dryden’s own. And all
through the eighteenth century, and down even into our own times, the
stereotyped phrase of approbation for good verse found in our early
poetry has been, that it even approached the verse of Dryden, Addison,
Pope, and Johnson.
Are Dryden and Pope poetical classics? Is the historic estimate, which
represents them as such, and which has been so long established that it
cannot easily give way, the real estimate? Wordsworth and Coleridge, as
is well known, denied it; but the authority of Wordsworth and Coleridge
does not weigh much with the young generation, and there are many signs
to show that the eighteenth century and its judgments are coming into
favor again. Are the favorite poets of the eighteenth century classics?
It is impossible within my present limits to discuss the question fully.
And what man of letters would not shrink from seeming to dispose
dictatorially of the claims of two men who are, at any rate, such
masters in letters as Dryden and Pope; two men of such admirable talent,
both of them, and one of them, Dryden, a man, on all sides, of such
energetic and genial power? And yet, if we are to gain the full benefit
from poetry, we must have the real estimate of it. I cast about for some
mode of arriving, in the present case, at such an estimate without
offence. And perhaps the best way is to begin, as it is easy to begin,
with cordial praise.
When we find Chapman, the Elizabethan translator of Homer, expressing
himself in his preface thus: “Though truth in her very nakedness sits in
so deep a pit, that from Gades to Aurora and Ganges few eyes can sound
her, I hope yet those few here will so discover and confirm that, the
date being out of her darkness in this morning of our poet, he shall now
gird his temples with the sun,”—we pronounce that such a prose is
intolerable. When we find Milton writing: “And long it was not after,
when I was confirmed in this opinion, that he, who would not be
frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought
himself to be a true poem,”—we pronounce that such a prose has its own
grandeur, but that it is obsolete and inconvenient. But when we find
Dryden telling us: “What Virgil wrote in the vigor of his age, in plenty
and at ease, I have undertaken to translate in my declining years;
struggling with wants, oppressed with sickness, curbed in my genius,
liable to be misconstrued in all I write,”—then we exclaim that here at
last we have the true English prose, a prose such as we would all gladly
use if we only knew how. Yet Dryden was Milton’s contemporary.
But after the Restoration the time had come when our nation felt the
imperious need of a fit prose. So, too, the time had likewise come when
our nation felt the imperious need of freeing itself from the absorbing
preoccupation which religion in the Puritan age had exercised. It was
impossible that this freedom should be brought about without some
negative excess, without some neglect and impairment of the religious
life of the soul; and the spiritual history of the eighteenth century
shows us that the freedom was not achieved without them. Still, the
freedom was achieved; the preoccupation, an undoubtedly baneful and
retarding one if it had continued, was got rid of. And as with religion
amongst us at that period, so it was also with letters. A fit prose was
a necessity; but it was impossible that a fit prose should establish
itself amongst us without some touch of frost to the imaginative life of
the soul. The needful qualities for a fit prose are regularity,
uniformity, precision, balance. The men of letters, whose destiny it may
be to bring their nation to the attainment of a fit prose, must of
necessity, whether they work in prose or in verse, give a predominating,
an almost exclusive attention to the qualities of regularity,
uniformity, precision, balance. But an almost exclusive attention to
these qualities involves some repression and silencing of poetry.
We are to regard Dryden as the puissant and glorious founder, Pope as
the splendid high priest, of our age of prose and reason, of our
excellent and indispensable eighteenth century. For the purposes of
their mission and destiny their poetry, like their prose, is admirable.
Do you ask me whether Dryden’s verse, take it almost where you will, is
not good?
“A milk-white Hind, immortal and unchanged,
Fed on the lawns and in the forest ranged.”
I answer: Admirable for the purposes of the inaugurator of an age of
prose and reason. Do you ask me whether Pope’s verse, take it almost
where you will, is not good?
“To Hounslow Heath I point, and Banstead Down;
Thence comes your mutton, and these chicks my own.”
I answer: Admirable for the purposes of the high priest of an age of
prose and reason. But do you ask me whether such verse proceeds from men
with an adequate poetic criticism of life, from men whose criticism of
life has a high seriousness, or even, without that high seriousness, has
poetic largeness, freedom, insight, benignity? Do you ask me whether the
application of ideas to life in the verse of these men, often a powerful
application, no doubt, is a powerful _poetic_ application? Do you ask me
whether the poetry of these men has either the matter or the inseparable
manner of such an adequate poetic criticism; whether it has the accent
of
“Absent thee from felicity awhile....”
or of
“And what is else not to be overcome....”
or of
“O martyr souded in virginitee!”
I answer: It has not and cannot have them; it is the poetry of the
builders of an age of prose and reason. Though they may write in verse,
though they may in a certain sense be masters of the art of
versification, Dryden and Pope are not classics of our poetry, they are
classics of our prose.
Gray is our poetical classic of that literature and age; the position of
Gray is singular, and demands a word of notice here. He has not the
volume or the power of poets who, coming in times more favorable, have
attained to an independent criticism of life. But he lived with the
great poets, he lived, above all, with the Greeks, through perpetually
studying and enjoying them; and he caught their poetic point of view for
regarding life, caught their poetic manner. The point of view and the
manner are not self-sprung in him, he caught them of others; and he had
not the free and abundant use of them. But whereas Addison and Pope
never had the use of them, Gray had the use of them at times. He is the
scantiest and frailest of classics in our poetry, but he is a classic.
And now, after Gray, we are met, as we draw towards the end of the
eighteenth century, we are met by the great name of Burns. We enter now
on times where the personal estimate of poets begins to be rife, and
where the real estimate of them is not reached without difficulty. But
in spite of the disturbing pressures of personal partiality, of national
partiality, let us try to reach a real estimate of the poetry of Burns.
By his English poetry Burns in general belongs to the eighteenth
century, and has little importance for us.
“Mark ruffian Violence, distain’d with crimes,
Rousing elate in these degenerate times;
View unsuspecting Innocence a prey,
As guileful Fraud points out the erring way;
While subtle Litigation’s pliant tongue
The life-blood equal sucks of Right and Wrong!”
Evidently this is not the real Burns, or his name and fame would have
disappeared long ago. Nor is Clarinda’s love-poet, Sylvander, the real
Burns either. But he tells us himself: “These English songs gravel me to
death. I have not the command of the language that I have of my native
tongue. In fact, I think that my ideas are more barren in English than
in Scotch. I have been at _Duncan Gray_ to dress it in English, but all
I can do is desperately stupid.” We English turn naturally, in Burns, to
the poems in our own language, because we can read them easily; but in
those poems we have not the real Burns.
The real Burns is of course in his Scotch poems. Let us boldly say that
of much of this poetry, a poetry dealing perpetually with Scotch drink,
Scotch religion, and Scotch manners, a Scotchman’s estimate is apt to be
personal. A Scotchman is used to this world of Scotch drink, Scotch
religion, and Scotch manners; he has a tenderness for it; he meets its
poet half way. In this tender mood he reads pieces like the _Holy Fair_
or _Halloween_. But this world of Scotch drink, Scotch religion, and
Scotch manners is against a poet, not for him, when it is not a partial
countryman who reads him; for in itself it is not a beautiful world, and
no one can deny that it is of advantage to a poet to deal with a
beautiful world. Burns’s world of Scotch drink, Scotch religion, and
Scotch manners, is often a harsh, a sordid, a repulsive world; even the
world of his _Cotter’s Saturday Night_ is not a beautiful world. No
doubt a poet’s criticism of life may have such truth and power that it
triumphs over its world and delights us. Burns may triumph over his
world, often he does triumph over his world, but let us observe how and
where. Burns is the first case we have had where the bias of the
personal estimate tends to mislead; let us look at him closely, he can
bear it.
Many of his admirers will tell us that we have Burns, convivial,
genuine, delightful, here—
Leeze me on drink! it gies us mair
Than either school or college;
It kindles wit, it waukens lair,
It pangs us fou o’ knowledge.
Be’t whisky gill or penny wheep
Or ony stronger portion,
It never fails, on drinking deep,
To kittle up our notion
By night or day.”
There is a great deal of that sort of thing in Burns, and it is
unsatisfactory, not because it is bacchanalian poetry, but because it
has not that accent of sincerity which bacchanalian poetry, to do it
justice, very often has. There is something in it of bravado, something
which makes us feel that we have not the man speaking to us with his
real voice; something, therefore, poetically unsound.
With still more confidence will his admirers tell us that we have the
genuine Burns, the great poet, when his strain asserts the independence,
equality, dignity, of men, as in the famous song _For a’ that and a’
that_
“A prince can mak’ a belted knight,
A marquis, duke, and a’ that;
But an honest man’s aboon his might,
Guid faith he mauna fa’ that!
For a’ that, and a’ that,
Their dignities, and a’ that,
The pith o’ sense, and pride o’ worth,
Are higher rank than a’ that.”
Here they find his grand, genuine touches; and still more, when this
puissant genius, who so often set morality at defiance, falls
moralizing—
“The sacred lowe o’ weel-placed love
Luxuriantly indulge it;
But never tempt th’ illicit rove,
Tho’ naething should divulge it.
I waive the quantum o’ the sin,
The hazard o’ concealing,
But och! it hardens a’ within,
And pertrifies the feeling.”