impure in its style, if not in its meaning: but it also contains one
great, one nearly perfect, model of the pure style in the literary
expression of typical _sentiment_; and one not perfect, but gigantic and
close approximation to perfection in the pure delineation of objective
character. Wordsworth, perhaps, comes as near to choice purity of style
in sentiment as is possible; Milton, with exceptions and conditions to be
explained, approaches perfection by the strenuous purity with which he
depicts character.
A wit once said, that ‘_pretty_ women had more features than _beautiful_
women,’ and though the expression may be criticised, the meaning is
correct. Pretty women seem to have a great number of attractive points,
each of which attracts your attention, and each one of which you remember
afterwards; yet these points have not grown together, their features have
not linked themselves into a single inseparable whole. But a beautiful
woman is a whole as she is; you no more take her to pieces than a Greek
statue; she is not an aggregate of divisible charms, she is a charm
in herself. Such ever is the dividing test of pure art; if you catch
yourself admiring its details, it is defective; you ought to think of it
as a single whole which you must remember, which you must admire, which
somehow subdues you while you admire it, which is a ‘possession’ to you
‘for ever.’
Of course, no individual poem embodies this ideal perfectly; of course,
every human word and phrase has its imperfections, and if we choose an
instance to illustrate that ideal, the instance has scarcely a fair
chance. By contrasting it with the ideal, we suggest its imperfections;
by protruding it as an example, we turn on its defectiveness the
microscope of criticism. Yet these two sonnets of Wordsworth may be fitly
read in this place, not because they are quite without faults, or because
they are the very best examples of their kind of style; but because they
are luminous examples; the compactness of the sonnet and the gravity
of the sentiment, hedging in the thoughts, restraining the fancy, and
helping to maintain a singleness of expression.
‘THE TROSACHS.
‘There’s not a nook within this solemn Pass,
But were an apt Confessional for one
Taught by his summer spent, his autumn gone,
That Life is but a tale of morning grass
Withered at eve. From scenes of art which chase
That thought away, turn, and with watchful eyes
Feed it ’mid Nature’s old felicities,
Rocks, rivers, and smooth lakes more clear than glass
Untouched, unbreathed upon. Thrice happy guest,
If from a golden perch of aspen spray
(October’s workmanship to rival May)
The pensive warbler of the ruddy breast
That moral sweeten by a heaven-taught lay,
Lulling the year, with all its cares, to rest!’
‘COMPOSED UPON WESTMINSTER BRIDGE, SEPT. 3, 1802.
‘Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This city now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.
Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!
The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! The very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!’
Instances of barer style than this may easily be found instances of
colder style—few better instances of purer style. Not a single expression
(the invocation in the concluding couplet of the second sonnet perhaps
excepted) can be spared, yet not a single expression rivets the
attention. If, indeed, we take out the phrase—
‘The city now doth, like a garment, wear
The beauty of the morning,’
and the description of the brilliant yellow of autumn—
‘October’s workmanship to rival May,’
they have independent value, but they are not noticed in the sonnet when
we read it through; they fall into place there, and being in their place,
are not seen. The great subjects of the two sonnets, the religious aspect
of beautiful but grave nature—the religious aspect of a city about to
awaken and be alive, are the only ideas left in our mind. To Wordsworth
has been vouchsafed the last grace of the self-denying artist; you think
neither of him nor his style, but you cannot help thinking of—you _must_
recall—the exact phrase, the _very_ sentiment he wished.
Milton’s purity is more eager. In the most exciting parts of
Wordsworth—and these sonnets are not very exciting—you always feel, you
never forget, that what you have before you is the excitement of a
recluse. There is nothing of the stir of life; nothing of the brawl of
the world. But Milton, though always a scholar by trade, though solitary
in old age, was through life intent on great affairs, lived close to
great scenes, watched a revolution, and if not an actor in it, was at
least secretary to the actors. He was familiar—by daily experience and
habitual sympathy—with the earnest debate of arduous questions, on which
the life and death of the speakers certainly depended, on which the
weal or woe of the country perhaps depended. He knew how profoundly the
individual character of the speakers—their inner and real nature—modifies
their opinion on such questions; he knew how surely that nature will
appear in the expression of them. This great experience, fashioned
by a fine imagination, gives to the debate of the Satanic Council
in Pandæmonium its reality and its life. It is a debate in the Long
Parliament, and though the theme of _Paradise Lost_ obliged Milton to
side with the monarchical element in the universe, his old habits are
often too much for him; and his real sympathy—the impetus and energy of
his nature—side with the rebellious element. For the purposes of art this
is much better. Of a court, a poet can make but little; of a heaven, he
can make very little; but of a courtly heaven, such as Milton conceived,
he can make nothing at all. The idea of a court and the idea of a heaven
are so radically different, that a distinct combination of them is always
grotesque and often ludicrous. _Paradise Lost_, as a whole, is radically
tainted by a vicious principle. It professes to justify the ways of God
to man, to account for sin and death, and it tells you that the whole
originated in a political event; in a court squabble as to a particular
act of patronage and the due or undue promotion of an eldest son. Satan
may have been wrong, but on Milton’s theory he had an arguable case at
least. There was something arbitrary in the promotion; there were little
symptoms of a job; in _Paradise Lost_ it is always clear that the devils
are the weaker, but it is never clear that the angels are the better.
Milton’s sympathy and his imagination slip back to the Puritan rebels
whom he loved, and desert the courtly angels whom he could not love,
although he praised them. There is no wonder that Milton’s hell is better
than his heaven, for he hated officials and he loved rebels,—he employs
his genius below, and accumulates his pedantry above. On the great debate
in Pandæmonium all his genius is concentrated. The question is very
practical; it is, ‘What are we devils to do, now we have lost heaven?’
Satan, who presides over and manipulates the assembly—Moloch,
‘The fiercest spirit
That fought in Heaven, now fiercer by despair,’
who wants to fight again; Belial, ‘the man of the world,’ who does not
want to fight any more; Mammon, who is for commencing an industrial
career; Beelzebub, the official statesman,
‘Deep on his front engraven,
Deliberation sat and Public care,’
who, at Satan’s instance, proposes the invasion of earth—are as distinct
as so many statues. Even Belial, ‘the man of the world,’ the sort of man
with whom Milton had least sympathy, is perfectly painted. An inferior
artist would have made the actor who ‘counselled ignoble ease and
peaceful sloth,’ a degraded and ugly creature; but Milton knew better.
He knew that low notions require a better garb than high notions. Human
nature is not a high thing, but at least it has a high idea of itself; it
will not accept mean maxims, unless they are gilded and made beautiful.
A prophet in goatskin may cry, ‘Repent, repent,’ but it takes ‘purple
and fine linen’ to be able to say ‘Continue in your sins.’ The world
vanquishes with its speciousness and its show, and the orator who is to
persuade men to worldliness must have a share in them. Milton well knew
this; after the warlike speech of the fierce Moloch, he introduces a
brighter and a more graceful spirit.
‘He ended frowning, and his look denounced
Desp’rate revenge, and battle dangerous
To less than Gods. On th’ other side up rose
Belial, in act more graceful and humane:
A fairer person lost not Heaven; he seem’d
For dignity composed and high exploit:
But all was false and hollow, though his tongue
Dropt manna, and could make the worse appear
The better reason, to perplex and dash
Maturest counsels; for his thoughts were low;
To vice industrious, but to nobler deeds
Tim’rous and slothful: yet he pleased the ear,
And with persuasive accent thus began:’
He does not begin like a man with a strong case, but like a man with a
weak case; he knows that the pride of human nature is irritated by mean
advice, and though he may probably persuade men to take it, he must
carefully apologise for giving it. Here, as elsewhere, though the formal
address is to devils, the real address is to men: to the human nature
which we know, not to the fictitious diabolic nature we do not know.
‘I should be much for open war, O Peers!
As not behind in hate, if what was urged
Main reason to persuade immediate war,
Did not dissuade me most, and seem to cast
Ominous conjecture on the whole success:
When he who most excels in fact of arms,
In what he counsels, and in what excels
Mistrustful, grounds his courage on despair,
And utter dissolution, as the scope
Of all his aim, after some dire revenge.
First, what revenge? The tow’rs of Heav’n are fill’d
With armed watch, that render all access
Impregnable; oft on the bord’ring deep
Encamp their legions, or with obscure wing
Scout far and wide into the realm of night,
Scorning surprise. Or could we break our way
By force, and at our heels all Hell should rise
With blackest insurrection, to confound
Heav’n’s purest light, yet our Great Enemy,
All incorruptible, would on His throne
Sit unpolluted, and th’ ethereal mould
Incapable of stain would soon expel
Her mischief, and purge off the baser fire
Victorious. Thus repulsed, our final hope
Is flat despair. We must exasperate
Th’ Almighty Victor to spend all His rage,
And that must end us: that must be our cure,
To be no more? Sad cure; for who would lose,
Though full of pain, this intellectual being,
Those thoughts that wander through eternity,
To perish rather, swallow’d up and lost
In the wide womb of uncreated night,
Devoid of sense and motion? And who knows,
Let this be good, whether our angry Foe
Can give it, or will ever? How He can
Is doubtful; that He never will is sure.
Will He, so wise, let loose at once His ire
Belike through impotence, or unaware,
To give His enemies their wish, and end
Them in His anger, whom His anger saves
To punish endless? Wherefore cease we then?
Say they who counsel war, we are decreed,
Reserved, and destined, to eternal woe;
Whatever doing, what can we suffer more,
What can we suffer worse? Is this then worst,
Thus sitting, thus consulting, thus in arms?’
...
And so on.
Mr. Pitt knew this speech by heart, and Lord Macaulay has called it
incomparable; and these judges of the oratorical art have well decided.
A mean foreign policy cannot be better defended. Its sensibleness is
effectually explained, and its tameness as much as possible disguised.
But we have not here to do with the excellence of Belial’s policy, but
with the excellence of his speech; and with that speech in a peculiar
manner. This speech, taken with the few lines of description with which
Milton introduces them, embody, in as short a space as possible, with as
much perfection as possible, the delineation of the type of character
common at all times, dangerous in many times; sure to come to the surface
in moments of difficulty, and never more dangerous than then. As Milton
describes it, it is one among several _typical_ characters which will
ever have their place in great councils, which will ever be heard at
important decisions, which are part of the characteristic and inalienable
whole of this statesmanlike world. The debate in Pandæmonium is a debate
among these typical characters at the greatest conceivable crisis, and
with adjuncts of solemnity which no other situation could rival. It is
the greatest classical triumph, the highest achievement of the pure style
in English literature; it is the greatest description of the highest and
most typical characters with the most choice circumstances and in the
fewest words.
It is not unremarkable that we should find in Milton and in _Paradise
Lost_ the best specimen of pure style. Milton was a schoolmaster in a
pedantic age, and there is nothing so unclassical—nothing so impure in
style—as pedantry. The out-of-door conversational life of Athens was as
opposed to bookish scholasticism as a life can be. The most perfect books
have been written not by those who thought much of books, but by those
who thought little, by those who were under the restraint of a sensitive
talking world, to which books had contributed something, and a various,
eager life the rest. Milton is generally unclassical in spirit where he
is learned, and naturally, because the purest poets do not overlay their
conceptions with book knowledge, and the classical poets, having in
comparison no books, were under little temptation to impair the purity
of their style by the accumulation of their research. Over and above
this, there is in Milton, and a little in Wordsworth also, one defect
which is in the highest degree faulty and unclassical, which mars the
effect and impairs the perfection of the pure style. There is a want of
spontaneity, and a sense of effort. It has been happily said that Plato’s
words must have _grown_ into their places. No one would say so of Milton
or even of Wordsworth. About both of them there is a taint of duty; a
vicious sense of the good man’s task. Things seem right where they are,
but they seem to be put where they are. Flexibility is essential to the
consummate perfection of the pure style, because the sensation of the
poet’s efforts carries away our thoughts from his achievements. We are
admiring his labours when we should be enjoying his words. But this is a
defect in those two writers, not a defect in pure art. Of course it _is_
more difficult to write in few words than to write in many; to take the
best adjuncts, and those only, for what you have to say, instead of using
all which comes to hand; it _is_ an additional labour if you write verses
in a morning, to spend the rest of the day in _choosing_, that is, in
making those verses fewer. But a perfect artist in the pure style is as
effortless and as natural as in any style, perhaps is more so. Take the
well-known lines:—
‘There was a little lawny islet
By anemone and violet,
Like mosaic, paven:
And its roof was flowers and leaves
Which the summer’s breath enweaves,
Where nor sun, nor showers, nor breeze,
Pierce the pines and tallest trees,
Each a gem engraven:
Girt by many an azure wave
With which the clouds and mountains pave
A lake’s blue chasm.’
Shelley had many merits and many defects. This is not the place for a
complete or indeed for any estimate of him. But one excellence is most
evident. His words are as flexible as any words; the rhythm of some
modulating air seems to move them into their place without a struggle
by the poet, and almost without his knowledge. This is the perfection
of pure art, to embody typical conceptions in the choicest, the fewest
accidents, to embody them so that each of these accidents may produce its
full effect, and so to embody them without effort.
The extreme opposite to this pure art is what may be called ornate art.
This species of art aims also at giving a delineation of the typical
idea in its perfection and its fulness, but it aims at so doing in a
manner most different. It wishes to surround the type with the greatest
number of circumstances which it will bear. It works not by choice and
selection, but by accumulation and aggregation. The idea is not, as in
the pure style, presented with the least clothing which it will endure,
but with the richest and most involved clothing that it will admit.
We are fortunate in not having to hunt out of past literature an
illustrative specimen of the ornate style. Mr. Tennyson has just given
one admirable in itself, and most characteristic of the defects and the
merits of this style. The story of _Enoch Arden_, as he has enhanced
and presented it, is a rich and splendid composite of imagery and
illustration. Yet how simple that story is in itself. A sailor who sells
fish, breaks his leg, gets dismal, gives up selling fish, goes to sea, is
wrecked on a desert island, stays there some years, on his return finds
his wife married to a miller, speaks to a landlady on the subject, and
dies. Told in the pure and simple, the unadorned and classical style,
this story would not have taken three pages, but Mr. Tennyson has been
able to make it the principal—the largest tale in his new volume. He
has done so only by giving to every event and incident in the volume an
accompanying commentary. He tells a great deal about the torrid zone,
which a rough sailor like Enoch Arden certainly would not have perceived;
and he gives to the fishing village, to which all the characters belong,
a softness and a fascination which such villages scarcely possess in
reality.
The description of the tropical island on which the sailor is thrown, is
an absolute model of adorned art:—
‘The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns
And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven,
The slender coco’s drooping crown of plumes,
The lightning flash of insect and of bird,
The lustre of the long convolvuluses
That coil’d around the stately stems, and ran
Ev’n to the limit of the land, the glows
And glories of the broad belt of the world,
All these he saw; but what he fain had seen
He could not see, the kindly human face,
Nor ever hear a kindly voice, but heard
The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl,
The league-long roller thundering on the reef,
The moving whisper of huge trees that branch’d
And blossom’d in the zenith, or the sweep
Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave,
As down the shore he ranged, or all day long
Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge,
A shipwreck’d sailor, waiting for a sail:
No sail from day to day, but every day
The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts
Among the palms and ferns and precipices;
The blaze upon the waters to the east;
The blaze upon his island overhead;
The blaze upon the waters to the west;
Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven,
The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again
The scarlet shafts of sunrise—but no sail.’
No expressive circumstances can be added to this description, no
enhancing detail suggested. A much less happy instance is the description
of Enoch’s life before he sailed:—
‘While Enoch was abroad on wrathful seas,
Or often journeying landward; for in truth
Enoch’s white horse, and Enoch’s ocean spoil
In ocean-smelling osier, and his face,
Rough-redden’d with a thousand winter gales,
Not only to the market-cross were known,
But in the leafy lanes behind the down,
Far as the portal-warding lion-whelp,
And peacock yew-tree of the lonely Hall,
Whose Friday fare was Enoch’s ministering.’
So much has not often been made of selling fish. The essence of ornate
art is in this manner to accumulate round the typical object, everything
which can be said about it, every associated thought that can be
connected with it without impairing the essence of the delineation.
The first defect which strikes a student of ornate art—the first which
arrests the mere reader of it—is what is called a want of simplicity.
Nothing is described as it is; everything has about it an atmosphere of
something else. The combined and associated thoughts, though they set
off and heighten particular ideas and aspects of the central and typical
conception, yet complicate it: a simple thing—‘a daisy by the river’s
brim’—is never left by itself, something else is put with it; something
not more connected with it than ‘lion-whelp’ and the ‘peacock yew-tree’
are with the ‘fresh fish for sale’ that Enoch carries past them. Even
in the highest cases, ornate art leaves upon a cultured and delicate
taste, the conviction that it is not the highest art, that it is somehow
excessive and over-rich, that it is not chaste in itself or chastening to
the mind that sees it—that it is in an explained manner unsatisfactory,
‘a thing in which we feel there is some hidden want!’
That want is a want of ‘definition.’ We must all know landscapes, river
landscapes especially, which are in the highest sense beautiful, which
when we first see them give us a delicate pleasure; which in some—and
these the best cases—give even a gentle sense of surprise that such
things should be so beautiful, and yet when we come to live in them,
to spend even a few hours in them, we seem stifled and oppressed. On
the other hand there are people to whom the seashore is a companion,
an exhilaration; and not so much for the brawl of the shore as for the
limited vastness, the finite infinite of the ocean as they see it.
Such people often come home braced and nerved, and if they spoke out
the truth, would have only to say, ‘We have seen the horizon line;’ if
they were let alone indeed, they would gaze on it hour after hour, so
great to them is the fascination, so full the sustaining calm, which
they gain from that union of form and greatness. To a very inferior
extent, but still, perhaps, to an extent which most people understand
better, a common arch will have the same effect. A bridge completes a
river landscape; if of the old and many-arched sort, it regulates by a
long series of defined forms the vague outline of wood and river, which
before had nothing to measure it; if of the new scientific sort, it
introduces still more strictly a geometrical element; it stiffens the
scenery which was before too soft, too delicate, too vegetable. Just such
is the effect of pure style in literary art. It calms by conciseness;
while the ornate style leaves on the mind a mist of beauty, an excess of
fascination, a complication of charm, the pure style leaves behind it the
simple, defined, measured idea, as it is, and by itself. That which is
chaste chastens; there is a poised energy—a state half thrill and half
tranquillity—which pure art gives, which no other can give; a pleasure
justified as well as felt; an ennobled satisfaction at what ought to
satisfy us, and must ennoble us.
Ornate art is to pure art what a painted statue is to an unpainted. It is
impossible to deny that a touch of colour does bring out certain parts;
does convey certain expressions; does heighten certain features, but
it leaves on the work as a whole, a want, as we say, ‘of something;’ a
want of that inseparable chasteness which clings to simple sculpture, an
impairing predominance of alluring details which impairs our satisfaction
with our own satisfaction; which makes us doubt whether a higher being
than ourselves will be satisfied even though we are so. In the very same
manner, though the rouge of ornate literature excites our eye, it also
impairs our confidence.