us, though perhaps only our children’s children will be able to speak on
this subject with the assured confidence which belongs to accepted truth,
yet something of some certainty may be stated on the easier elements, and
something that will throw light on these two new books. But it will be
necessary to assign reasons, and the assigning of reasons is a dry task.
Years ago, when criticism only tried to show how poetry could be made a
good amusement, it was not impossible that criticism itself should be
amusing. But now it must at least be serious, for we believe that poetry
is a serious and a deep thing.
There should be a word in the language of literary art to express what
the word ‘picturesque’ expresses for the fine arts. _Picturesque_ means
fit to be put into a picture; we want a word _literatesque_, ‘fit
to be put into a book.’ An artist goes through a hundred different
country scenes, rich with beauties, charms and merits, but he does not
paint any of them. He leaves them alone; he idles on till he finds the
hundred-and-first—a scene which many observers would not think much of,
but which _he_ knows by virtue of his art will look well on canvas,
and this he paints and preserves. Susceptible observers, though not
artists, feel this quality too; they say of a scene, ‘How picturesque!’
meaning by this a quality distinct from that of beauty, or sublimity, or
grandeur—meaning to speak not only of the scene as it is in itself, but
also of its fitness for imitation by art; meaning not only that it is
good, but that its goodness is such as ought to be transferred to paper;
meaning not simply that it fascinates, but also that its fascination is
such as ought to be copied by man. A fine and insensible instinct has put
language to this subtle use; it expresses an idea without which fine art
criticism could not go on, and it is very natural that the language of
pictorial art should be better supplied with words than that of literary
criticism, for the eye was used before the mind, and language embodies
primitive sensuous ideas, long ere it expresses, or need express,
abstract and literary ones.
The reason why a landscape is ‘picturesque’ is often said to be, that
such landscape represents an ‘idea.’ But this explanation, though, in
the minds of some who use it, it is near akin to the truth, fails to
explain that truth to those who did not know it before; the word ‘idea’
is so often used in these subjects when people do not know anything
else to say; it represents so often a kind of intellectual insolvency,
when philosophers are at their wits’ end, that shrewd people will never
readily on any occasion give it credit for meaning anything. A wise
explainer must, therefore, look out for other words to convey what he has
to say. _Landscapes_, like everything else in nature, divide themselves
as we look at them into a sort of rude classification. We go down a
river, for example, and we see a hundred landscapes on both sides of it,
resembling one another in much, yet differing in something; with trees
here, and a farmhouse there, and shadows on one side, and a deep pool
far on, a collection of circumstances most familiar in themselves, but
making a perpetual novelty by the magic of their various combinations.
We travel so for miles and hours, and then we come to a scene which also
has these various circumstances and adjuncts, but which combines them
best, which makes the best whole of them, which shows them in their best
proportion at a single glance before the eye. Then we say, ‘This is the
place to paint the river; this is the picturesque point!’ Or, if not
artists or critics of art, we feel without analysis or examination that
somehow this bend or sweep of the river shall in future be _the river
to us_: that it is the image of it which we will retain in our mind’s
eye, by which we will remember it, which we will call up when we want to
describe or think of it. Some fine countries, some beautiful rivers, have
not this picturesque quality: they give us elements of beauty, but they
do not combine them together; we go on for a time delighted, but _after_
a time somehow we get wearied; we feel that we are taking in nothing and
learning nothing; we get no collected image before our mind; we see the
accidents and circumstances of that sort of scenery, but the summary
scene we do not see; we find _disjecta membra_, but no form; various
and many and faulty approximations are displayed in succession; but the
absolute perfection in that country’s or river’s scenery—its _type_—is
withheld. We go away from such places in part delighted, but in part
baffled; we have been puzzled by pretty things; we have beheld a hundred
different inconsistent specimens of the same sort of beauty; but the
rememberable idea, the full development, the characteristic individuality
of it, we have not seen.
We find the same sort of quality in all parts of painting. We see a
portrait of a person we know, and we say, ‘It is like—yes, like, of
course, but it is not _the man_;’ we feel it could not be anyone else,
but still, somehow it fails to bring home to us the individual as we know
him to be. _He_ is not there. An accumulation of features like his are
painted, but his essence is not painted; an approximation more or less
excellent is given, but the characteristic expression, the _typical_
form, of the man is withheld.
Literature—the painting of words—has the same quality, but wants the
analogous word. The word ‘_literatesque_’ would mean, if we possessed it,
that perfect combination in the _subject-matter_ of literature, which
suits the _art_ of literature. We often meet people, and say of them,
sometimes meaning well and sometimes ill, ‘How well so-and-so would do
in a book!’ Such people are by no means the best people; but they are
the most effective people—the most rememberable people. Frequently,
when we first know them, we like them because they explain to us so much
of our experience; we have known many people ‘like that,’ in one way or
another, but we did not seem to understand them; they were nothing to us,
for their traits were indistinct; we forgot them, for they hitched on
to nothing, and we could not classify them. But when we see the _type_
of the genus, at once we seem to comprehend its character; the inferior
specimens are explained by the perfect embodiment; the approximations are
definable when we know the ideal to which they draw near. There are an
infinite number of classes of human beings, but in each of these classes
there is a distinctive type which, if we could expand it in words, would
define the class. We cannot expand it in formal terms any more than a
landscape, or a species of landscape; but we have an art, an art of
words, which can draw it. Travellers and others often bring home, in
addition to their long journals—which, though so living to them, are so
dead, so inanimate, so undescriptive to all else—a pen-and-ink sketch,
rudely done very likely, but which, perhaps, even the more for the blots
and strokes, gives a distinct notion, an emphatic image, to all who see
it. We say at once, _now_ we know the sort of thing. The sketch has _hit_
the mind. True literature does the same. It describes sorts, varieties,
and permutations, by delineating the type of each sort, the ideal of each
variety, the central, the marking trait of each permutation.
On this account, the greatest artists of the world have ever shown
an enthusiasm for reality. To care for notions and abstractions; to
philosophise; to reason out conclusions; to care for schemes of thought,
are signs in the artistic mind of secondary excellence. A Schiller,
a Euripides, a Ben Jonson, cares for _ideas_—for the parings of the
intellect, and the distillation of the mind; a Shakespeare, a Homer,
a Goethe, finds his mental occupation, the true home of his natural
thoughts, in the real world—‘which is the world of all of us’—where the
face of nature, the moving masses of men and women, are ever changing,
ever multiplying, ever mixing one with the other. The reason is plain—the
business of the poet, of the artist, is with _types_; and those types are
mirrored in reality. As a painter must not only have a hand to execute,
but an eye to distinguish—as he must go here and there through the
real world to catch the picturesque man, the picturesque scene, which
is to live on his canvas—so the poet must find in that reality, the
_literatesque_ man, the _literatesque_ scene which nature intends for
him, and which will live in his page. Even in reality he will not find
this type complete, or the characteristics perfect; but there he will
find, at least, something, some hint, some intimation, some suggestion;
whereas, in the stagnant home of his own thoughts he will find nothing
pure, nothing as it is, nothing which does not bear his own mark, which
is not somehow altered by a mixture with himself.
The first conversation of Goethe and Schiller illustrates this conception
of the poet’s art. Goethe was at that time prejudiced against Schiller,
we must remember, partly from what he considered the outrages of the
_Robbers_, partly because of the philosophy of Kant. Schiller’s ‘Essay on
_Grace and Dignity_,’ he tells us—
‘Was yet less of a kind to reconcile me. The philosophy of
Kant, which exalts the dignity of mind so highly, while
appearing to restrict it, Schiller had joyfully embraced:
it unfolded the extraordinary qualities which Nature had
implanted in him; and in the lively feeling of freedom and
self-direction, he showed himself unthankful to the Great
Mother, who surely had not acted like a step-dame towards him.
Instead of viewing her as self-subsisting, as producing with
a living force, and according to appointed laws, alike the
highest and the lowest of her works, he took her up under the
aspect of some empirical native qualities of the human mind.
Certain harsh passages I could even directly apply to myself:
they exhibited my confession of faith in a false light; and I
felt that if written without particular attention to me, they
were still worse; for, in that case, the vast chasm which lay
between us gaped but so much the more distinctly.’
After a casual meeting at a Society for Natural History, they walked
home, and Goethe proceeds:
‘We reached his house; the talk induced me to go in. I then
expounded to him, with as much vivacity as possible, the
_Metamorphosis of Plants_,[20] drawing out on paper, with
many characteristic strokes, a symbolic plant for him, as I
proceeded. He heard and saw all this, with much interest and
distinct comprehension; but when I had done, he shook his head
and said: “This is no experiment, this is an idea.” I stopped
with some degree of irritation; for the point which separated
us was most luminously marked by this expression. The opinions
in _Dignity and Grace_ again occurred to me; the old grudge was
just awakening; but I smothered it, and merely said: “I was
happy to find that I had got ideas without knowing it, nay,
that I saw them before my eyes.”
‘Schiller had much more prudence and dexterity of management
than I; he was also thinking of his periodical the _Horen_,
about this time, and of course rather wished to attract than
repel me. Accordingly, he answered me like an accomplished
Kantite; and as my stiff-necked Realism gave occasion to many
contradictions, much battling took place between us, and at
last a truce, in which neither party would consent to yield the
victory, but each held himself invincible. Positions like the
following grieved me to the very soul: _How can there ever be
an experiment, that shall correspond with an idea? The specific
quality of an idea is, that no experiment can reach it or agree
with it._ Yet if he held as an idea, the same thing which I
looked upon as an experiment, there must certainly, I thought,
be some community between us—some ground whereon both of us
might meet!’
With Goethe’s natural history, or with Kant’s philosophy, we have here
no concern; but we can combine the expressions of the two great poets
into a nearly complete description of poetry. The ‘symbolic plant’ is the
_type_, of which we speak, the ideal at which inferior specimens aim, the
class characteristic in which they all share, but which none shows forth
fully. Goethe was right in searching for this in reality and nature;
Schiller was right in saying that it was an ‘idea,’ a transcending
notion to which approximations could be found in experience, but only
approximations—which could not be found there itself. Goethe, as a poet,
rightly felt the primary necessity of outward suggestion and experience;
Schiller, as a philosopher, rightly felt its imperfection.
But in these delicate matters, it is easy to misapprehend. There is,
undoubtedly, a sort of poetry which is produced as it were out of the
author’s mind. The description of the poet’s own moods and feelings is
a common sort of poetry—perhaps the commonest sort. But the peculiarity
of such cases is, that the poet does not describe himself _as_ himself:
autobiography is not his object; he takes himself as a specimen of
human nature; he describes, not himself, but a distillation of himself:
he takes such of his moods as are most characteristic, as most typify
certain moods of certain men, or certain moods of all men; he chooses
preponderant feelings of special sorts of men, or occasional feelings
of men of all sorts; but with whatever other difference and diversity,
the essence is that such self-describing poets describe what is _in_
them, but not _peculiar_ to them,—what is generic, not what is special
and individual. Gray’s _Elegy_ describes a mood which Gray felt more
than other men, but which most others, perhaps all others, feel too. It
is more popular, perhaps, than any English poem, because that sort of
feeling is the most diffused of high feelings, and because Gray added to
a singular nicety of fancy an habitual proneness to a _contemplative_—a
discerning but unbiassed—meditation on death and on life. Other poets
cannot hope for such success: a subject so popular, so grave, so wise,
and yet so suitable to the writer’s nature, is hardly to be found. But
the same ideal, the same unautobiographical character is to be found
in the writings of meaner men. Take sonnets of Hartley Coleridge, for
example:—
I.
TO A FRIEND.
‘When we were idlers with the loitering rills,
The need of human love we little noted:
Our love was nature; and the peace that floated
On the white mist, and dwelt upon the hills,
To sweet accord subdued our wayward wills:
One soul was ours, one mind, one heart devoted,
That, wisely doating, ask’d not why it doated,
And ours the unknown joy, which knowing kills.
But now I find, how dear thou wert to me;
That man is more than half of nature’s treasure,
Of that fair Beauty which no eye can see,
Of that sweet music which no ear can measure;
And now the streams may sing for others’ pleasure,
The hills sleep on in their eternity.’
II.
TO THE SAME.
‘In the great city we are met again,
Where many souls there are, that breathe and die,
Scarce knowing more of nature’s potency,
Than what they learn from heat, or cold, or rain,
The sad vicissitude of weary pain;—
For busy man is lord of ear and eye,
And what hath nature, but the vast, void sky,
And the thronged river toiling to the main?
Oh! say not so, for she shall have her part
In every smile, in every tear that falls,
And she shall hide her in the secret heart,
Where love persuades, and sterner duty calls:
But worse it were than death, or sorrow’s smart,
To live without a friend within these walls.’
III.
TO THE SAME.
‘We parted on the mountains, as two streams
From one clear spring pursue their several ways;
And thy fleet course hath been through many a maze
In foreign lands, where silvery Padus gleams
To that delicious sky, whose glowing beams
Brightened the tresses that old Poets praise;
Where Petrarch’s patient love, and artful lays,
And Ariosto’s song of many themes,
Moved the soft air. But I, a lazy brook,
As close pent up within my native dell,
Have crept along from nook to shady nook,
Where flow’rets blow, and whispering Naiads dwell.
Yet now we meet, that parted were so wide,
O’er rough and smooth to travel side by side.’
The contrast of instructive and enviable locomotion with refining but
instructive meditation is not special and peculiar to these two, but
general and universal. It was set down by Hartley Coleridge because he
was the most meditative and refining of men.
What sort of literatesque types are fit to be described in the sort of
literature called poetry, is a matter on which much might be written.
Mr. Arnold, some years since, put forth a theory that the art of poetry
could only delineate _great actions_. But though, rightly interpreted
and understood—using the word action so as to include high and sound
activity in contemplation—this definition may suit the highest poetry,
it certainly cannot be stretched to include many inferior sorts and
even many good sorts. Nobody in their senses would describe Gray’s
_Elegy_ as the delineation of a ‘great action;’ some kinds of mental
contemplation may be energetic enough to deserve this name, but Gray
would have been frightened at the very word. He loved scholarlike calm
and quiet inaction; his very greatness depended on his _not_ acting, on
his ‘wise passiveness,’ on his indulging the grave idleness which so well
appreciates so much of human life. But the best answer—the _reductio ad
absurdum_—of Mr. Arnold’s doctrine, is the mutilation which it has caused
him to make of his own writings. It has forbidden him, he tells us, to
reprint _Empedocles_—a poem undoubtedly containing defects and even
excesses, but containing also these lines:—
‘And yet what days were those Parmenides!
When we were young, when we could number friends
In all the Italian cities like ourselves,
When with elated hearts we join’d your train,
Ye Sun-born virgins! on the road of Truth.
Then we could still enjoy; then neither thought
Nor outward things were clos’d and dead to us,
But we receiv’d the shock of mighty thoughts
On simple minds with a pure natural joy;
And if the sacred load oppress’d our brain,
We had the power to feel the pressure eas’d,
The brow unbound, the thoughts flow free again,
In the delightful commerce of the world.
We had not lost our balance then, nor grown
Thought’s slaves, and dead to every natural joy.
The smallest thing could give us pleasure then—
The sports of the country people;
A flute note from the woods;
Sunset over the sea:
Seed-time and harvest;
The reapers in the corn;
The vinedresser in his vineyard;
The village-girl at her wheel.
Fulness of life and power of feeling, ye
Are for the happy, for the souls at ease,
Who dwell on a firm basis of content.
But he who has outliv’d his prosperous days,
But he, whose youth fell on a different world
From that on which his exil’d age is thrown;
Whose mind was fed on other food, was train’d
By other rules than are in vogue to-day;
Whose habit of thought is fix’d, who will not change,
But in a world he loves not must subsist
In ceaseless opposition, be the guard
Of his own breast, fetter’d to what he guards,
That the world win no mastery over him;
Who has no friend, no fellow left, not one;
Who has no minute’s breathing space allow’d
To nurse his dwindling faculty of joy;—
Joy and the outward world must die to him
As they are dead to me.’
What freak of criticism can induce a man who has written such poetry as
this, to discard it, and say it is not poetry? Mr. Arnold is privileged
to speak of his own poems, but no other critic could speak so and not be
laughed at.
We are disposed to believe that no very sharp definition can be given—at
least in the present state of the critical art—of the boundary line
between poetry and other sorts of imaginative delineation. Between the
undoubted dominions of the two kinds there is a debatable land; everybody
is agreed that the ‘Œdipus at Colonus’ is poetry: everyone is agreed
that the wonderful appearance of Mrs. Veal is _not_ poetry. But the
exact line which separates grave novels in verse like _Aylmer’s Field_
or _Enoch Arden_, from grave novels not in verse like _Silas Marner_ or
_Adam Bede_, we own we cannot draw with any confidence. Nor, perhaps,
is it very important; whether a narrative is thrown into verse or not,
certainly depends in part on the taste of the age, and in part on its
mechanical helps. Verse is the only mechanical help to the memory in
rude times, and there is little writing till a cheap something is found
to write upon, and a cheap something to write with. Poetry—verse, at
least—is the literature of _all work_ in early ages; it is only later
ages which write in what _they_ think a natural and simple prose.
There are other casual influences in the matter too; but they are not
material now. We need only say here that poetry, because it has a more
marked rhythm than prose, must be more intense in meaning and more
concise in style than prose. People expect a ‘marked rhythm’ to imply
something worth marking; if it fails to do so they are disappointed.
They are displeased at the visible waste of a powerful instrument; they
call it ‘doggerel,’ and rightly call it, for the metrical expression
of full thought and eager feeling—the burst of metre—incident to high
imagination, should not be wasted on petty matters which prose does
as well,—which it does better—which it suits by its very limpness and
weakness, whose small changes it follows more easily, and to whose lowest
details it can fully and without effort degrade itself. Verse, too,
should be _more concise_, for long-continued rhythm tends to jade the
mind, just as brief rhythm tends to attract the attention. Poetry should
be memorable and emphatic, intense, and _soon over_.
The great divisions of poetry, and of all other literary art, arise from
the different modes in which these _types_—these characteristic men,
these characteristic feelings—may be variously described. There are
three principal modes which we shall attempt to describe—the _pure_,
which is sometimes, but not very wisely, called the classical; the
_ornate_, which is also unwisely called romantic; and the _grotesque_,
which might be called the mediæval. We will describe the nature of these
a little. Criticism, we know, must be brief—not, like poetry, because
its charm is too intense to be sustained—but, on the contrary, because
its interest is too weak to be prolonged; but elementary criticism, if
an evil, is a necessary evil; a little while spent among the simple
principles of art is the first condition, the absolute pre-requisite,
for surely apprehending and wisely judging the complete embodiments and
miscellaneous forms of actual literature.
The definition of _pure_ literature is, that it describes the type in
its simplicity—we mean, with the exact amount of accessory circumstance
which is necessary to bring it before the mind in finished perfection,
and no more than that amount. The _type_ needs some accessories from its
nature—a picturesque landscape does not consist wholly of picturesque
features. There is a setting of surroundings—as the Americans would say,
of fixings—without which the reality is not itself. By a traditional mode
of speech, as soon as we see a picture in which a complete effect is
produced by detail so rare and so harmonised as to escape us, we say, How
‘classical’! The whole which is to be seen appears at once and through
the detail, but the detail itself is not seen: we do not think of that
which gives us the idea; we are absorbed in the idea itself. Just so in
literature, the pure art is that which works with the fewest strokes; the
fewest, that is, for its purpose, for its aim is to call up and bring
home to men an idea, a form, a character, and if that idea be twisted,
that form be involved, that character perplexed, many strokes of literary
art will be needful. Pure art does not mutilate its object; it represents
it as fully as is possible with the slightest effort which is possible:
it shrinks from no needful circumstances, as little as it inserts any
which are needless. The precise peculiarity is not merely that no
incidental circumstance is inserted which does not tell on the main
design: no art is fit to be called art which permits a stroke to be put
in without an object; but that only the minimum of such circumstance is
inserted at all. The form is sometimes said to be bare, the accessories
are sometimes said to be invisible, because the appendages are so choice
that the shape only is perceived.