To my best and dearest friend I dedicate the first collected edition of
my poems, and to him I address what I have to say on the occasion.
You will agree with me that it is impossible for any man to undertake
the task of commentary, however brief and succinct, on anything he has
done or tried to do, without incurring the charge of egoism. But there
are two kinds of egoism, the furtive and the frank: and the outspoken
and open-hearted candour of Milton and Wordsworth, Corneille and Hugo,
is not the least or the lightest of their claims to the regard as well
as the respect or the reverence of their readers. Even if I were worthy
to claim kinship with the lowest or with the highest of these deathless
names, I would not seek to shelter myself under the shadow of its
authority. The question would still remain open on all sides. Whether it
is worth while for any man to offer any remarks or for any other man to
read his remarks on his own work, his own ambition, or his own attempts,
he cannot of course determine. If there are great examples of abstinence
from such a doubtful enterprise, there are likewise great examples to
the contrary. As long as the writer can succeed in evading the kindred
charges and the cognate risks of vanity and humility, there can be no
reason why he should not undertake it. And when he has nothing to regret
and nothing to recant, when he finds nothing that he could wish to
cancel, to alter, or to unsay, in any page he has ever laid before his
reader, he need not be seriously troubled by the inevitable
consciousness that the work of his early youth is not and cannot be
unnaturally unlike the work of a very young man. This would be no excuse
for it, if it were in any sense bad work: if it be so, no apology would
avail; and I certainly have none to offer.
It is now thirty-six years since my first volume of miscellaneous verse,
lyrical and dramatic and elegiac and generally heterogeneous, had as
quaint a reception and as singular a fortune as I have ever heard or
read of. I do not think you will differ from my opinion that what is
best in it cannot be divided from what is not so good by any other line
of division than that which marks off mature from immature execution--in
other words, complete from incomplete conception. For its author the
most amusing and satisfying result of the clatter aroused by it was the
deep diversion of collating and comparing the variously inaccurate
verdicts of the scornful or mournful censors who insisted on regarding
all the studies of passion or sensation attempted or achieved in it as
either confessions of positive fact or excursions of absolute fancy.
There are photographs from life in the book; and there are sketches from
imagination. Some which keen-sighted criticism has dismissed with a
smile as ideal or imaginary were as real and actual as they well could
be: others which have been taken for obvious transcripts from memory
were utterly fantastic or dramatic. If the two kinds cannot be
distinguished, it is surely rather a credit than a discredit to an
artist whose medium or material has more in common with a musician's
than with a sculptor's. Friendly and kindly critics, English and
foreign, have detected ignorance of the subject in poems taken straight
from the life, and have protested that they could not believe me were I
to swear that poems entirely or mainly fanciful were not faithful
expressions or transcriptions of the writer's actual experience and
personal emotion. But I need not remind you that all I have to say about
this book was said once for all in the year of its publication: I have
nothing to add to my notes then taken, and I have nothing to retract
from them. To parade or to disclaim experience of passion or of sorrow,
of pleasure or of pain, is the habit and the sign of a school which has
never found a disciple among the better sort of English poets, and which
I know to be no less pitifully contemptible in your opinion than in
mine.
In my next work it should be superfluous to say that there is no touch
of dramatic impersonation or imaginary emotion. The writer of 'Songs
before Sunrise,' from the first line to the last, wrote simply in
submissive obedience to Sir Philip Sidney's precept--'Look in thine
heart, and write.' The dedication of these poems, and the fact that the
dedication was accepted, must be sufficient evidence of this. They do
not pretend and they were never intended to be merely the metrical
echoes, or translations into lyric verse, of another man's doctrine.
Mazzini was no more a Pope or a Dictator than I was a parasite or a
papist. Dictation and inspiration are rather different things. These
poems, and others which followed or preceded them in print, were
inspired by such faith as is born of devotion and reverence: not by such
faith, if faith it may be called, as is synonymous with servility or
compatible with prostration of an abject or wavering spirit and a
submissive or dethroned intelligence. You know that I never pretended to
see eye to eye with my illustrious friends and masters, Victor Hugo and
Giuseppe Mazzini, in regard to the positive and passionate confidence of
their sublime and purified theology. Our betters ought to know better
than we: they would be the last to wish that we should pretend to their
knowledge, or assume a certitude which is theirs and is not ours. But on
one point we surely cannot but be at one with them: that the spirit and
the letter of all other than savage and barbarous religions are
irreconcilably at variance, and that prayer or homage addressed to an
image of our own or of other men's making, be that image avowedly
material or conventionally spiritual, is the affirmation of idolatry
with all its attendant atrocities, and the negation of all belief, all
reverence, and all love, due to the noblest object of human worship that
humanity can realise or conceive. Thus much the exercise of our common
reason might naturally suffice to show us: but when its evidence is
confirmed and fortified by the irrefragable and invariable evidence of
history, there is no room for further dispute or fuller argument on a
subject now visibly beyond reach and eternally beyond need of debate or
demonstration. I know not whether it may or may not be worth while to
add that every passing word I have since thought fit to utter on any
national or political question has been as wholly consistent with the
principles which I then did my best to proclaim and defend as any
apostasy from the faith of all republicans in the fundamental and final
principle of union, voluntary if possible and compulsory if not, would
have been ludicrous in the impudence of its inconsistency with those
simple and irreversible principles. Monarchists and anarchists may be
advocates of national dissolution and reactionary division: republicans
cannot be. The first and last article of their creed is unity: the most
grinding and crushing tyranny of a convention, a directory, or a despot,
is less incompatible with republican faith than the fissiparous
democracy of disunionists or communalists.
If the fortunes of my lyrical work were amusingly eccentric and
accidental, the varieties of opinion which have saluted the appearance
of my plays have been, or have seemed to my humility, even more
diverting and curious. I have been told by reviewers of note and
position that a single one of them is worth all my lyric and otherwise
undramatic achievements or attempts: and I have been told on equal or
similar authority that, whatever I may be in any other field, as a
dramatist I am demonstrably nothing. My first if not my strongest
ambition was to do something worth doing, and not utterly unworthy of a
young countryman of Marlowe the teacher and Webster the pupil of
Shakespeare, in the line of work which those three poets had left as a
possibly unattainable example for ambitious Englishmen. And my first
book, written while yet under academic or tutorial authority, bore
evidence of that ambition in every line. I should be the last to deny
that it also bore evidence of the fact that its writer had no more
notion of dramatic or theatrical construction than the authors of
'Tamburlaine the Great,' 'King Henry VI.,' and 'Sir Thomas Wyatt.' Not
much more, you may possibly say, was discernible in 'Chastelard': a play
also conceived and partly written by a youngster not yet emancipated
from servitude to college rule. I fear that in the former volume there
had been little if any promise of power to grapple with the realities
and subtleties of character and of motive: that whatever may be in it of
promise or of merit must be sought in the language and the style of such
better passages as may perhaps be found in single and separable speeches
of Catherine and of Rosamond. But in 'Chastelard' there are two figures
and a sketch in which I certainly seem to see something of real and
evident life. The sketch of Darnley was afterwards filled out and
finished in the subsequent tragedy of 'Bothwell.' That ambitious,
conscientious, and comprehensive piece of work is of course less
properly definable as a tragedy than by the old Shakespearean term of a
chronicle history. The radical difference between tragic history and
tragedy of either the classic or the romantic order, and consequently
between the laws which govern the one and the principles which guide the
other, you have yourself made clear and familiar to all capable
students. This play of mine was not, I think, inaccurately defined as an
epic drama in the French verses of dedication which were acknowledged by
the greatest of all French poets in a letter from which I dare only
quote one line of Olympian judgment and godlike generosity. 'Occuper ces
deux cimes, cela n'est donne qu'a vous.' Nor will I refrain from the
confession that I cannot think it an epic or a play in which any one
part is sacrificed to any other, any subordinate figure mishandled or
neglected or distorted or effaced for the sake of the predominant and
central person. And, though this has nothing or less than nothing to do
with any question of poetic merit or demerit, of dramatic success or
unsuccess, I will add that I took as much care and pains as though I had
been writing or compiling a history of the period to do loyal justice to
all the historic figures which came within the scope of my dramatic or
poetic design. There is not one which I have designedly altered or
intentionally modified: it is of course for others to decide whether
there is one which is not the living likeness of an actual or imaginable
man.
The third part of this trilogy, as far as I know or remember, found
favour only with the only man in England who could speak on the subject
of historic drama with the authority of an expert and a master. The
generally ungracious reception of 'Mary Stuart' gave me neither surprise
nor disappointment: the cordial approbation or rather the generous
applause of Sir Henry Taylor gave me all and more than all the
satisfaction I could ever have looked for in recompense of as much
painstaking and conscientious though interesting and enjoyable work as
can ever, I should imagine, have been devoted to the completion of any
comparable design. Private and personal appreciation I have always
thought and often found more valuable and delightful than all possible
or imaginable clamour of public praise. This preference will perhaps be
supposed to influence my opinion if I avow that I think I have never
written anything worthier of such reward than the closing tragedy which
may or may not have deserved but which certainly received it.
My first attempt to do something original in English which might in some
degree reproduce for English readers the likeness of a Greek tragedy,
with possibly something more of its true poetic life and charm than
could have been expected from the authors of 'Caractacus' and 'Merope,'
was perhaps too exuberant and effusive in its dialogue, as it certainly
was too irregular in the occasional license of its choral verse, to
accomplish the design or achieve the success which its author should
have aimed at. It may or may not be too long as a poem: it is, I fear,
too long for a poem of the kind to which it belongs or aims at
belonging. Poetical and mathematical truth are so different that I
doubt, however unwilling I may naturally be to doubt, whether it can
truthfully be said of 'Atalanta in Calydon' that the whole is greater
than any part of it. I hope it may be, and I can honestly say no more.
Of 'Erechtheus' I venture to believe with somewhat more confidence that
it can. Either poem, by the natural necessity of its kind and structure,
has its crowning passage or passages which cannot, however much they may
lose by detachment from their context, lose as much as the crowning
scene or scenes of an English or Shakespearean play, as opposed to an
AEschylean or Sophoclean tragedy, must lose and ought to lose by a
similar separation. The two best things in these two Greek plays, the
antiphonal lamentation for the dying Meleager and the choral
presentation of stormy battle between the forces of land and sea, lose
less by such division from the main body of the poem than would those
scenes in 'Bothwell' which deal with the turning-point in the life of
Mary Stuart on the central and conclusive day of Carberry Hill.
It might be thought pedantic or pretentious in a modern poet to divide
his poems after the old Roman fashion into sections and classes; I must
confess that I should like to see this method applied, were it but by
way of experiment in a single edition, to the work of the leading poets
of our own country and century: to see, for instance, their lyrical and
elegiac works ranged and registered apart, each kind in a class of its
own, such as is usually reserved, I know not why, for sonnets only. The
apparent formality of such an arrangement as would give us, for
instance, the odes of Coleridge and Shelley collected into a distinct
reservation or division might possibly be more than compensated to the
more capable among students by the gain in ethical or spiritual symmetry
and aesthetic or intellectual harmony. The ode or hymn--I need remind no
probable reader that the terms are synonymous in the speech of
Pindar--asserts its primacy or pre-eminence over other forms of poetry
in the very name which defines or proclaims it as essentially the song;
as something above all less pure and absolute kinds of song by the very
nature and law of its being. The Greek form, with its regular
arrangement of turn, return, and aftersong, is not to be imitated
because it is Greek, but to be adopted because it is best: the very
best, as a rule, that could be imagined for lyrical expression of the
thing conceived or lyrical aspiration towards the aim imagined. The
rhythmic reason of its rigid but not arbitrary law lies simply and
solely in the charm of its regular variations. This can be given in
English as clearly and fully, if not so sweetly and subtly, as in Greek;
and should, therefore, be expected and required in an English poem of
the same nature and proportion. The Sapphic or Alcaic ode, a simple
sequence of identical stanzas, could be imitated or revived in Latin by
translators or disciples: the scheme of it is exquisitely adequate and
sufficient for comparatively short flights of passion or emotion, ardent
or contemplative and personal or patriotic; but what can be done in
English could not be attempted in Latin. It seems strange to me, our
language being what it is, that our literature should be no richer than
it is in examples of the higher or at least the more capacious and
ambitious kind of ode. Not that the full Pindaric form of threefold or
triune structure need be or should be always adopted: but without an
accurately corresponsive or antiphonal scheme of music even the master
of masters, who is Coleridge, could not produce, even through the superb
and enchanting melodies of such a poem as his 'Dejection,' a fit and
complete companion, a full and perfect rival, to such a poem as his ode
on France.
The title of ode may more properly and fairly be so extended as to cover
all lyrical poems in stanzas or couplets than so strained as to include
a lawless lyric of such irregular and uneven build as Coleridge only and
hardly could make acceptable or admissible among more natural and lawful
forms of poetry. Law, not lawlessness, is the natural condition of
poetic life; but the law must itself be poetic and not pedantic, natural
and not conventional. It would be a trivial precision or restriction
which would refuse the title of ode to the stanzas of Milton or the
heptameters of Aristophanes; that glorious form of lyric verse which a
critic of our own day, as you may not impossibly remember, has likened
with such magnificent felicity of comparison to the gallop of the horses
of the sun. Nor, I presume, should this title be denied to a poem
written in the more modest metre--more modest as being shorter by a
foot--which was chosen for those twin poems of antiphonal correspondence
in subject and in sound, the 'Hymn to Proserpine' and the 'Hymn of Man':
the deathsong of spiritual decadence and the birthsong of spiritual
renascence. Perhaps, too, my first stanzas addressed to Victor Hugo may
be ranked as no less of an ode than that on the insurrection in Candia:
a poem which attracted, whether or not it may have deserved, the notice
and commendation of Mazzini: from whom I received, on the occasion of
its appearance, a letter which was the beginning of my personal
intercourse with the man whom I had always revered above all other men
on earth. But for this happy accident I might not feel disposed to set
much store by my first attempt at a regular ode of orthodox or
legitimate construction; I doubt whether it quite succeeded in evading
the criminal risk and the capital offence of formality; at least until
the change of note in the closing epode gave fuller scope and freer play
of wing to the musical expression. But in my later ode on Athens,
absolutely faithful as it is in form to the strictest type and the most
stringent law of Pindaric hymnology, I venture to believe that there is
no more sign of this infirmity than in the less classically regulated
poem on the Armada; which, though built on a new scheme, is nevertheless
in its way, I think, a legitimate ode, by right of its regularity in
general arrangement of corresponsive divisions. By the test of these two
poems I am content that my claims should be decided and my station
determined as a lyric poet in the higher sense of the term; a craftsman
in the most ambitious line of his art that ever aroused or ever can
arouse the emulous aspiration of his kind.
Even had I ever felt the same impulse to attempt and the same ambition
to achieve the enterprise of epic or narrative that I had always felt
with regard to lyric or dramatic work, I could never have proposed to
myself the lowly and unambitious aim of competition with the work of so
notable a contemporary workman in the humbler branch of that line as
William Morris. No conception could have been further from my mind when
I undertook to rehandle the deathless legend of Tristram than that of so
modest and preposterous a trial of rivalry. My aim was simply to present
that story, not diluted and debased as it had been in our own time by
other hands, but undefaced by improvement and undeformed by
transformation, as it was known to the age of Dante wherever the
chronicles of romance found hearing, from Ercildoune to Florence: and
not in the epic or romantic form of sustained or continuous narrative,
but mainly through a succession of dramatic scenes or pictures with
descriptive settings or backgrounds: the scenes being of the simplest
construction, duologue or monologue, without so much as the classically
permissible intervention of a third or fourth person. It is only in our
native northern form of narrative poetry, on the old and unrivalled
model of the English ballad, that I can claim to have done any work of
the kind worth reference: unless the story of Balen should be considered
as something other than a series or sequence of ballads. A more
plausible objection was brought to bear against 'Tristram of Lyonesse'
than that of failure in an enterprise which I never thought of
undertaking: the objection of an irreconcilable incongruity between the
incidents of the old legend and the meditations on man and nature, life
and death, chance and destiny, assigned to a typical hero of chivalrous
romance. And this objection might be unanswerable if the slightest
attempt had been made to treat the legend as in any possible sense
historical or capable of either rational or ideal association with
history, such as would assimilate the name and fame of Arthur to the
name and fame of any actual and indisputable Alfred or Albert of the
future. But the age when these romances actually lived and flourished
side by side with the reviving legends of Thebes and Troy, not in the
crude and bloodless forms of Celtic and archaic fancy but in the ampler
and manlier developments of Teutonic and mediaeval imagination, was the
age of Dante and of Chaucer: an age in which men were only too prone to
waste their time on the twin sciences of astrology and theology, to
expend their energies in the jungle of pseudosophy or the morass of
metaphysics. There is surely nothing more incongruous or anachronic in
the soliloquy of Tristram after his separation from Iseult than in the
lecture of Theseus after the obsequies of Arcite. Both heroes belong to
the same impossible age of an imaginary world: and each has an equal
right, should it so please his chronicler, to reason in the pauses of
action and philosophise in the intervals of adventure. After all, the
active men of the actual age of chivalry were not all of them mere
muscular machines for martial or pacific exercise of their physical
functions or abilities.
You would agree, if the point were worth discussion, that it might
savour somewhat of pretention, if not of affectation, to be over
particular in arrangement of poems according to subject rather than
form, spirit rather than method, or motive rather than execution: and
yet there might be some excuse for the fancy or the pedantry of such a
classification as should set apart, for example, poems inspired by the
influence of places, whether seen but once or familiar for years or
associated with the earliest memories within cognisance or record of the
mind, and poems inspired by the emotions of regard or regret for the
living or the dead; above all, by the rare and profound passion of
reverence and love and faith which labours and rejoices to find
utterance in some tributary sacrifice of song. Mere descriptive poetry
of the prepense and formal kind is exceptionally if not proverbially
liable to incur and to deserve the charge of dullness: it is unnecessary
to emphasise or obtrude the personal note, the presence or the emotion
of a spectator, but it is necessary to make it felt and keep it
perceptible if the poem is to have life in it or even a right to live:
felt as in Wordsworth's work it is always, perceptible as it is always
in Shelley's. This note is more plain and positive than usual in the
poem which attempts--at once a simple and an ambitious attempt--to
render the contrast and the concord of night and day on Loch Torridon:
it is, I think, duly sensible though implicitly subdued in four poems of
the West Undercliff, born or begotten of sunset in the bay and moonlight
on the cliffs, noon or morning in a living and shining garden, afternoon
or twilight on one left flowerless and forsaken. Not to you or any other
poet, nor indeed to the very humblest and simplest lover of poetry, will
it seem incongruous or strange, suggestive of imperfect sympathy with
life or deficient inspiration from nature, that the very words of Sappho
should be heard and recognised in the notes of the nightingales, the
glory of the presence of dead poets imagined in the presence of the
glory of the sky, the lustre of their advent and their passage felt
visible as in vision on the live and limpid floorwork of the cloudless
and sunset-coloured sea. The half-brained creature to whom books are
other than living things may see with the eyes of a bat and draw with
the fingers of a mole his dullard's distinction between books and life:
those who live the fuller life of a higher animal than he know that
books are to poets as much part of that life as pictures are to painters
or as music is to musicians, dead matter though they may be to the
spiritually still-born children of dirt and dullness who find it
possible and natural to live while dead in heart and brain. Marlowe and
Shakespeare, AEschylus and Sappho, do not for us live only on the dusty
shelves of libraries.
It is hardly probable that especial and familiar love of places should
give any special value to verses written under the influence of their
charm: no intimacy of years and no association with the past gave any
colour of emotion to many other studies of English land and sea which
certainly are no less faithful and possibly have no less spiritual or
poetic life in them than the four to which I have just referred, whose
localities lie all within the boundary of a mile or so. No contrast
could be stronger than that between the majestic and exquisite glory of
cliff and crag, lawn and woodland, garden and lea, to which I have done
homage though assuredly I have not done justice in these four poems--'In
the Bay,' 'On the Cliffs,' 'A Forsaken Garden,' the dedication of 'The
Sisters'--and the dreary beauty, inhuman if not unearthly in its
desolation, of the innumerable creeks and inlets, lined and paven with
sea-flowers, which make of the salt marshes a fit and funereal setting,
a fatal and appropriate foreground, for the supreme desolation of the
relics of Dunwich; the beautiful and awful solitude of a wilderness on
which the sea has forbidden man to build or live, overtopped and bounded
by the tragic and ghastly solitude of a headland on which the sea has
forbidden the works of human charity and piety to survive: between the
dense and sand-encumbered tides which are eating the desecrated wreck
and ruin of them all away, and the matchless magic, the ineffable
fascination of the sea whose beauties and delights, whose translucent
depths of water and divers-coloured banks of submarine foliage and
flowerage, but faintly reflected in the stanzas of the little ode 'Off
Shore,' complete the charm of the scenes as faintly sketched or shadowed
forth in the poems just named, or the sterner and stranger magic of the
seaboard to which tribute was paid in 'An Autumn Vision,' 'A Swimmer's
Dream,' 'On the South Coast,' 'Neap-tide': or, again, between the
sterile stretches and sad limitless outlook of the shore which faces a
hitherto undetermined and interminable sea, and the joyful and fateful
beauty of the seas off Bamborough and the seas about Sark and Guernsey.
But if there is enough of the human or personal note to bring into touch
the various poems which deal with these various impressions, there may
perhaps be no less of it discernible in such as try to render the effect
of inland or woodland solitude--the splendid oppression of nature at
noon which found utterance of old in words of such singular and
everlasting significance as panic and nympholepsy.
The retrospect across many years over the many eulogistic and elegiac
poems which I have inscribed or devoted to the commemoration or the
panegyric of the living or the dead has this in it of pride and
pleasure, that I find little to recant and nothing to repent on
reconsideration of them all. If ever a word of tributary thanksgiving
for the delight and the benefit of loyal admiration evoked in the spirit
of a boy or aroused in the intelligence of a man may seem to exceed the
limit of demonstrable accuracy, I have no apology to offer for any such
aberration from the safe path of tepid praise or conventional applause.
I can truly say with Shelley that I have been fortunate in friendships:
I might add if I cared, as he if he had cared might have added, that I
have been no less fortunate in my enemies than in my friends; and this,
though by comparison a matter of ineffable insignificance, can hardly be
to any rational and right-minded man a matter of positive indifference.
Rather should it be always a subject for thankfulness and
self-congratulation if a man can honestly and reasonably feel assured
that his friends and foes alike have been always and at almost all
points the very men he would have chosen, had choice and foresight been
allowed him, at the very outset of his career in life. I should never,
when a boy, have dared to dream that as a man I might possibly be
admitted to the personal acquaintance of the three living gods, I do not
say of my idolatry, for idolatry is a term inapplicable where the gods
are real and true, but of my whole-souled and single-hearted worship:
and yet, when writing of Landor, of Mazzini, and of Hugo, I write of men
who have honoured me with the assurance and the evidence of their
cordial and affectionate regard. However inadequate and unworthy may be
my tribute to their glory when living and their memory when dead, it is
that of one whose gratitude and devotion found unforgettable favour in
their sight. And I must be allowed to add that the redeeming quality of
entire and absolute sincerity may be claimed on behalf of every line I
have written in honour of friends, acquaintances, or strangers. My
tribute to Richard Burton was not more genuine in its expression than my
tribute to Christina Rossetti. Two noble human creatures more utterly
unlike each other it would be unspeakably impossible to conceive; but it
was as simply natural for one who honoured them both to do honest
homage, before and after they had left us, to the saintly and secluded
poetess as to the adventurous and unsaintly hero. Wherever anything is
worthy of honour and thanksgiving it is or it always should be as
natural if not as delightful to give thanks and do honour to a stranger
as to a friend, to a benefactor long since dead as to a benefactor still
alive. To the kindred spirits of Philip Sidney and Aurelio Saffi it was
almost as equal a pleasure to offer what tribute I could bring as if
Sidney also could have honoured me with his personal friendship. To
Tennyson and Browning it was no less fit that I should give honour than
that I should do homage to the memory of Bruno, the martyred friend of
Sidney. And I can hardly remember any task that I ever took more delight
in discharging than I felt in the inadequate and partial payment of a
lifelong debt to the marvellous and matchless succession of poets who
made the glory of our country incomparable for ever by the work they did
between the joyful date of the rout of the Armada and the woful date of
the outbreak of civil war.
Charles Lamb, as I need not remind you, wrote for antiquity: nor need
you be assured that when I write plays it is with a view to their being
acted at the Globe, the Red Bull, or the Black Friars. And whatever may
be the dramatic or other defects of 'Marino Faliero' or 'Locrine,' they
do certainly bear the same relation to previous plays or attempts at
plays on the same subjects as 'King Henry V.' to 'The Famous
Victories'--if not as 'King Lear,' a poem beyond comparison with all
other works of man except possibly 'Prometheus' and 'Othello,' to the
primitive and infantile scrawl or drivel of 'King Leir and his three
daughters.' The fifth act of 'Marino Faliero,' hopelessly impossible as
it is from the point of view of modern stagecraft, could hardly have
been found too untheatrical, too utterly given over to talk without
action, by the audiences which endured and applauded the magnificent
monotony of Chapman's eloquence--the fervent and inexhaustible
declamation which was offered and accepted as a substitute for study of
character and interest of action when his two finest plays, if plays
they can be called, found favour with an incredibly intelligent and an
inconceivably tolerant audience. The metrical or executive experiment
attempted and carried through in 'Locrine' would have been improper to
any but a purely and wholly romantic play or poem: I do not think that
the life of human character or the lifelikeness of dramatic dialogue has
suffered from the bondage of rhyme or has been sacrificed to the
exigence of metre. The tragedy of 'The Sisters,' however defective it
may be in theatrical interest or progressive action, is the only modern
English play I know in which realism in the reproduction of natural
dialogue and accuracy in the representation of natural intercourse
between men and women of gentle birth and breeding have been found or
made compatible with expression in genuine if simple blank verse. It is
not for me to decide whether anything in the figures which play their
parts on my imaginary though realistic stage may be worthy of sympathy,
attention, or interest: but I think they talk and act as they would have
done in life without ever lapsing into platitude or breaking out of
nature.
In 'Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards,' I took up a subject long since
mishandled by an English dramatist of all but the highest rank, and one
which in later days Alfieri had commemorated in a magnificent passage of
a wholly unhistoric and somewhat unsatisfactory play. The comparatively
slight deviation from historic records in the final catastrophe or
consummation of mine is not, I think, to say the least, injurious to the
tragic effect or the moral interest of the story.
A writer conscious of any natural command over the musical resources of
his language can hardly fail to take such pleasure in the enjoyment of
this gift or instinct as the greatest writer and the greatest versifier
of our age must have felt at its highest possible degree when composing
a musical exercise of such incomparable scope and fullness as 'Les
Djinns.' But if he be a poet after the order of Hugo or Coleridge or
Shelley, the result will be something very much more than a musical
exercise; though indeed, except to such ears as should always be kept
closed against poetry, there is no music in verse which has not in it
sufficient fullness and ripeness of meaning, sufficient adequacy of
emotion or of thought, to abide the analysis of any other than the
purblind scrutiny of prepossession or the squint-eyed inspection of
malignity. There may perhaps be somewhat more depth and variety of
feeling or reflection condensed into the narrow frame of the poems which
compose 'A Century of Roundels' than would be needed to fulfil the epic
vacuity of a Choerilus or a Coluthus. And the form chosen for my only
narrative poem was chosen as a test of the truth of my conviction that
such work could be done better on the straitest and the strictest
principles of verse than on the looser and more slippery lines of
mediaeval or modern improvisation. The impulsive and irregular verse
which had been held sufficient for the stanza selected or accepted by
Thornton and by Tennyson seemed capable of improvement and invigoration
as a vehicle or a medium for poetic narrative. And I think it has not
been found unfit to give something of dignity as well as facility to a
narrative which recasts in modern English verse one of the noblest and
loveliest old English legends. There is no episode in the cycle of
Arthurian romance more genuinely Homeric in its sublime simplicity and
its pathetic sublimity of submission to the masterdom of fate than that
which I have rather reproduced than recast in 'The Tale of Balen': and
impossible as it is to render the text or express the spirit of the
Iliad in English prose or rhyme--above all, in English blank verse--it
is possible, in such a metre as was chosen and refashioned for this
poem, to give some sense of the rage and rapture of battle for which
Homer himself could only find fit and full expression by similitudes
drawn like mine from the revels and the terrors and the glories of the
sea.
It is nothing to me that what I write should find immediate or general
acceptance: it is much to know that on the whole it has won for me the
right to address this dedication and inscribe this edition to you.