purity of style is commoner in ancient literature than in modern
literature, and also that Shakespeare is not a great or an unmixed
example of it. No one can say that he is. His works are full of
undergrowth, are full of complexity, are not models of style; except by a
miracle, nothing in the Elizabethan age could be a model of style; the
restraining taste of that age was feebler and more mistaken than that of
any other equally great age. Shakespeare’s mind so teemed with creation
that he required the most just, most forcible, most constant restraint
from without. He most needed to be guided among poets, and he was the
least and worst guided. As a whole no one can call his works finished
models of the pure style, or of any style. But he has many passages
of the most pure style, passages which could be easily cited if space
served. And we must remember that the task which Shakespeare undertook
was the most difficult which any poet has ever attempted, and that it
is a task in which after a million efforts every other poet has failed.
The Elizabethan drama—as Shakespeare has immortalised it—undertakes to
delineate in five acts, under stage restrictions, and in mere dialogue, a
whole list of _dramatis personæ_ a set of characters enough for a modern
novel, and with the distinctness of a modern novel. Shakespeare is not
content to give two or three great characters in solitude and in dignity,
like the classical dramatists; he wishes to give a whole party of
characters in the play of life, and according to the nature of each. He
would ‘hold the mirror up to nature,’ not to catch a monarch in a tragic
posture, but a whole group of characters engaged in many actions, intent
on many purposes, thinking many thoughts. There is life enough, there
is action enough, in single plays of Shakespeare to set up an ancient
dramatist for a long career. And Shakespeare succeeded. His characters,
taken _en masse_, and as a whole, are as well known as any novelist’s
characters; cultivated men know all about them, as young ladies know all
about Mr. Trollope’s novels. But no other dramatist has succeeded in such
an aim. No one else’s characters are staple people in English literature,
hereditary people whom everyone knows all about in every generation. The
contemporary dramatists, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Marlowe,
&c., had many merits, some of them were great men. But a critic must say
of them the worst thing he has to say: ‘they were men who failed in
their characteristic aim;’ they attempted to describe numerous sets of
complicated characters, and they failed. No one of such characters, or
hardly one, lives in common memory; the _Faustus_ of Marlowe, a really
great idea, is not remembered. They undertook to write what they could
not write—five acts full of real characters, and in consequence, the fine
individual things they conceived are forgotten by the mixed multitude,
and known only to a few of the few. Of the Spanish theatre we cannot
speak; but there are no such characters in any French tragedy: the whole
aim of that tragedy forbad it. Goethe has added to literature a few great
characters; he may be said almost to have added to literature the idea
of ‘intellectual creation,’—the idea of describing the great characters
through the intellect; but he has not added to the common stock what
Shakespeare added, a new multitude of men and women; and these not in
simple attitudes, but amid the most complex parts of life, with all
their various natures roused, mixed, and strained. The severest art must
have allowed many details, much overflowing circumstance to a poet who
undertook to describe what almost defies description. Pure art would have
commanded him to use details lavishly, for only by a multiplicity of such
could the required effect have been at all produced. Shakespeare could
accomplish it, for his mind was a spring, an inexhaustible fountain of
human nature, and it is no wonder that being compelled by the task of
his time to let the fulness of his nature overflow, he sometimes let it
overflow too much, and covered with erroneous conceits and superfluous
images characters and conceptions which would have been far more justly,
far more effectually, delineated with conciseness and simplicity. But
there is an infinity of pure art in Shakespeare, although there is a
great deal else also.
It will be said, if ornate art be as you say, an inferior species of art,
why should it ever be used? If pure art be the best sort of art, why
should it not always be used?
The reason is this: literary art, as we just now explained, is concerned
with literatesque characters in literatesque situations; and the
_best_ art is concerned with the _most_ literatesque characters in the
_most_ literatesque situations. Such are the subjects of pure art; it
embodies with the fewest touches, and under the most select and choice
circumstances, the highest conceptions; but it does not follow that only
the best subjects are to be treated by art, and then only in the very
best way. Human nature could not endure such a critical commandment
as that, and it would be an erroneous criticism which gave it. _Any_
literatesque character may be described in literature under _any_
circumstances which exhibit its literatesqueness.
The essence of pure art consists in its describing what is as it is,
and this is very well for what can bear it, but there are many inferior
things which will not bear it, and which nevertheless ought to be
described in books. A certain kind of literature deals with illusions,
and this kind of literature has given a colouring to the name romantic.
A man of rare genius, and even of poetical genius, has gone so far as to
make these illusions the true subject of poetry—almost the sole subject.
‘Without,’ says Father Newman, of one of his characters, ‘being
himself a poet, he was in the season of poetry, in the sweet
spring-time, when the year is most beautiful because it is new.
Novelty was beauty to a heart so open and cheerful as his;
not only because it was novelty, and had its proper charm as
such, but because when we first see things, we see them in a
gay confusion, which is a principal element of the poetical.
As time goes on, and we number and sort and measure things,—as
we gain views, we advance towards philosophy and truth, but we
recede from poetry.
‘When we ourselves were young, we once on a time walked on a
hot summer day from Oxford to Newington—a dull road, as anyone
who has gone it knows; yet it was new to us; and we protest
to you, reader, believe it or not, laugh or not, as you will,
to us it seemed on that occasion quite touchingly beautiful;
and a soft melancholy came over us, of which the shadows fall
even now, when we look back upon that dusty, weary journey. And
why? because every object which met us was unknown and full
of mystery. A tree or two in the distance seemed the beginning
of a great wood, or park, stretching endlessly; a hill implied
a vale beyond, with that vale’s history; the bye-lanes, with
their green hedges, wound on and vanished, yet were not lost
to the imagination. Such was our first journey; but when we
had gone it several times, the mind refused to act, the scene
ceased to enchant, stern reality alone remained; and we thought
it one of the most tiresome, odious roads we ever had occasion
to traverse.’
That is to say, that the function of the poet is to introduce a ‘gay
confusion,’ a rich medley which does not exist in the actual world—which
perhaps could not exist in any world—but which would seem pretty if it
did exist. Everyone who reads _Enoch Arden_ will perceive that this
notion of all poetry is exactly applicable to this one poem. Whatever
be made of Enoch’s ‘Ocean-spoil in ocean-smelling osier,’ of the
‘portal-warding lion-whelp, and the peacock yew-tree,’ everyone knows
that in himself Enoch could not have been charming. People who sell
fish about the country (and that is what he did, though Mr. Tennyson
won’t speak out, and wraps it up) never are beautiful. As Enoch was and
must be coarse, in itself the poem must depend for a charm on a ‘gay
confusion’—on a splendid accumulation of impossible accessories.
Mr. Tennyson knows this better than many of us—he knows the country
world; he has proved that no one living knows it better; he has painted
with pure art—with art which describes what is a race perhaps more
refined, more delicate, more conscientious, than the sailor—the _Northern
Farmer_, and we all know what a splendid, what a living thing, he has
made of it. He could, if he only would, have given us the ideal sailor in
like manner—the ideal of the natural sailor we mean—the characteristic
present man as he lives and is. But this he has not chosen. He has
endeavoured to describe an exceptional sailor, at an exceptionally
refined port, performing a graceful act, an act of relinquishment. And
with this task before him, his profound taste taught him that ornate
art was a necessary medium—was the sole effectual instrument—for his
purpose. It was necessary for him if possible to abstract the mind from
reality, to induce us _not_ to conceive or think of sailors as they
are while we are reading of his sailors, but to think of what a person
who did not know, might fancy sailors to be. A casual traveller on the
seashore, with the sensitive mood and the romantic imagination Dr.
Newman has described, might fancy, would fancy, a seafaring village to
be like that. Accordingly, Mr. Tennyson has made it his aim to call off
the stress of fancy from real life, to occupy it otherwise, to bury it
with pretty accessories; to engage it on the ‘peacock yew-tree,’ and the
‘portal-warding lion-whelp.’ Nothing, too, can be more splendid than the
description of the tropics as Mr. Tennyson delineates them, but a sailor
would not have felt the tropics in that manner. The beauties of nature
would not have so much occupied him. He would have known little of the
scarlet shafts of sunrise and nothing of the long convolvuluses. As in
Robinson Crusoe, his own petty contrivances and his small ailments would
have been the principal subject to him. ‘For three years,’ he might have
said, ‘my back was bad; and then I put two pegs into a piece of drift
wood and so made a chair; and after that it pleased God to send me a
chill.’ In real life his piety would scarcely have gone beyond that.
It will indeed be said, that though the sailor had no words for, and
even no explicit consciousness of, the splendid details of the torrid
zone, yet that he had, notwithstanding, a dim latent inexpressible
conception of them: though he could not speak of them or describe them,
yet they were much to him. And doubtless such is the case. Rude people
are impressed by what is beautiful—deeply impressed—though they could
not describe what they see, or what they feel. But what is absurd in
Mr. Tennyson’s description—absurd when we abstract it from the gorgeous
additions and ornaments with which Mr. Tennyson distracts us—is, that his
hero feels nothing else but these great splendours. We hear nothing of
the physical ailments, the rough devices, the low superstitions, which
really would have been the _first_ things, the favourite and principal
occupations of his mind. Just so when he gets home he _may_ have had
such fine sentiments, though it is odd, and he _may_ have spoken of
them to his landlady, though that is odder still,—but it is incredible
that his whole mind should be made up of fine sentiments. Beside those
sweet feelings, if he had them, there must have been many more obvious,
more prosaic, and some perhaps more healthy. Mr. Tennyson has shown
a profound judgment in distracting us as he does. He has given us a
classic delineation of the _Northern Farmer_ with no ornament at all—as
bare a thing as can be—because he then wanted to describe a true type
of real men: he has given us a sailor crowded all over with ornament
and illustration, because he then wanted to describe an unreal type of
fancied men,—not sailors as they are, but sailors as they might be wished.
Another prominent element in _Enoch Arden_ is yet more suitable to, yet
more requires the aid of, ornate art. Mr. Tennyson undertook to deal with
_half belief_. The presentiments which Annie feels are exactly of that
sort which everybody has felt, and which everyone has half believed—which
hardly anyone has more than half believed. Almost everyone, it has been
said, would be angry if anyone else reported that he believed in ghosts;
yet hardly anyone, when thinking by himself, wholly disbelieves them.
Just so such presentiments as Mr. Tennyson depicts, impress the inner
mind so much that the outer mind—the rational understanding—hardly likes
to consider them nicely or to discuss them sceptically. For these dubious
themes an ornate or complex style is needful. Classical art speaks out
what it has to say plainly and simply. Pure style cannot hesitate; it
describes in concisest outline what is, as it is. If a poet really
believes in presentiments he can speak out in pure style. One who could
have been a poet—one of the few in any age of whom one can say certainly
that they could have been and have not been—has spoken thus:—
‘When Heaven sends sorrow,
Warnings go first,
Lest it should burst
With stunning might
On souls too bright
To fear the morrow.
‘Can science bear us
To the hid springs
Of human things?
Why may not dream,
Or thought’s day-gleam,
Startle, yet cheer us?
‘Are such thoughts fetters,
While faith disowns
Dread of earth’s tones,
Recks but Heaven’s call,
And on the wall,
Reads but Heaven’s letters?’
But if a poet is not sure whether presentiments are true or not true; if
he wishes to leave his readers in doubt; if he wishes an atmosphere of
indistinct illusion and of moving shadow, he must use the romantic style,
the style of miscellaneous adjunct, the style ‘which shirks, not meets’
your intellect, the style which, as you are scrutinising, disappears.
Nor is this all, or even the principal lesson, which _Enoch Arden_ may
suggest to us, of the use of ornate art. That art is the appropriate art
for an _unpleasing type_. Many of the characters of real life, if brought
distinctly, prominently, and plainly before the mind, as they really are,
if shown in their inner nature, their actual essence, are doubtless very
unpleasant. They would be horrid to meet and horrid to think of. We fear
it must be owned that Enoch Arden is this kind of person. A dirty sailor
who did _not_ go home to his wife is not an agreeable being: a varnish
must be put on him to make him shine. It is true that he acts rightly;
that he is very good. But such is human nature that it finds a little
tameness in mere morality. Mere virtue belongs to a charity schoolgirl,
and has a taint of the catechism. All of us feel this, though most of us
are too timid, too scrupulous, too anxious about the virtue of others to
speak out. We are ashamed of our nature in this respect, but it is not
the less our nature. And if we look deeper into the matter there are many
reasons why we should not be ashamed of it. The soul of man, and as we
necessarily believe of beings greater than man, has many parts beside
its moral part. It has an intellectual part, an artistic part, even a
religious part, in which mere morals have no share. In Shakespeare or
Goethe, even in Newton or Archimedes, there is much which will not be
cut down to the shape of the commandments. They have thoughts, feelings,
hopes—immortal thoughts and hopes—which have influenced the life of men,
and the souls of men, ever since their age, but which the ‘whole duty
of man,’ the ethical compendium, does not recognise. Nothing is more
unpleasant than a virtuous person with a mean mind. A highly developed
moral nature joined to an undeveloped intellectual nature, an undeveloped
artistic nature, and a very limited religious nature, is of necessity
repulsive. It represents a bit of human nature—a good bit, of course—but
a bit only, in disproportionate, unnatural, and revolting prominence;
and therefore, unless an artist use delicate care, we are offended. The
dismal act of a squalid man needed many condiments to make it pleasant,
and therefore Mr. Tennyson was right to mix them subtly and to use them
freely.
A mere act of self-denial can indeed scarcely be pleasant upon paper.
An heroic struggle with an external adversary, even though it end in a
defeat, may easily be made attractive. Human nature likes to see itself
look grand, and it looks grand when it is making a brave struggle with
foreign foes. But it does not look grand when it is divided against
itself. An excellent person striving with temptation is a very admirable
being in reality, but he is not a pleasant being in description. We
hope he will win and overcome his temptation; but we feel that he would
be a more interesting being, a higher being, if he had not felt that
temptation so much. The poet must make the struggle great in order to
make the self-denial virtuous, and if the struggle be too great, we are
apt to feel some mixture of contempt. The internal metaphysics of a
divided nature are but an inferior subject for art, and if they are to be
made attractive, much else must be combined with them. If the excellence
of Hamlet had depended on the ethical qualities of Hamlet, it would
not have been the masterpiece of our literature. He acts virtuously of
course, and kills the people he ought to kill, but Shakespeare knew that
such goodness would not much interest the pit. He made him a handsome
prince, and a puzzling meditative character; these secular qualities
relieve his moral excellence, and so he becomes ‘nice.’ In proportion
as an artist has to deal with types essentially imperfect, he must
disguise their imperfections; he must accumulate around them as many
first-rate accessories as may make his readers forget that they are
themselves second-rate. The sudden _millionaires_ of the present day
hope to disguise their social defects by buying old places, and hiding
among aristocratic furniture; just so a great artist who has to deal with
characters artistically imperfect, will use an ornate style, will fit
them into a scene where there is much else to look at.
For these reasons ornate art is, within the limits, as legitimate as pure
art. It does what pure art could not do. The very excellence of pure
art confines its employment. Precisely because it gives the best things
by themselves and exactly as they are, it fails when it is necessary to
describe inferior things among other things, with a list of enhancements
and a crowd of accompaniments that in reality do not belong to it.
Illusion, half belief, unpleasant types, imperfect types, are as much
the proper sphere of ornate art, as an inferior landscape is the proper
sphere for the true efficacy of moonlight. A really great landscape
needs sunlight and bears sunlight; but moonlight is an equaliser of
beauties; it gives a romantic unreality to what will not stand the bare
truth. And just so does romantic art.
There is, however, a third kind of art which differs from these on the
point in which they most resemble one another. Ornate art and pure art
have this in common, that they paint the types of literature in a form
as perfect as they can. Ornate art, indeed, uses undue disguises and
unreal enhancements; it does not confine itself to the best types; on
the contrary, it is its office to make the best of imperfect types and
lame approximations; but ornate art, as much as pure art, catches its
subject in the best light it can, takes the most developed aspect of
it which it can find, and throws upon it the most congruous colours it
can use. But grotesque art does just the contrary. It takes the type,
so to say, _in difficulties_. It gives a representation of it in its
minimum development, amid the circumstances least favourable to it, just
while it is struggling with obstacles, just where it is encumbered with
incongruities. It deals, to use the language of science, not with normal
types but with abnormal specimens; to use the language of old philosophy,
not with what nature is striving to be, but with what by some lapse she
has happened to become.
This art works by contrast. It enables you to see, it makes you see,
the perfect type by painting the opposite deviation. It shows you what
ought to be by what ought not to be; when complete it reminds you of
the perfect image, by showing you the distorted and imperfect image. Of
this art we possess in the present generation one prolific master. Mr.
Browning is an artist working by incongruity. Possibly hardly one of his
most considerable efforts can be found which is not great because of its
odd mixture. He puts together things which no one else would have put
together, and produces on our minds a result which no one else would
have produced, or tried to produce. His admirers may not like all we
may have to say of him. But in our way we too are among his admirers.
No one ever read him without seeing not only his great ability but his
great _mind_. He not only possesses superficial useable talents, but
the strong something, the inner secret something, which uses them and
controls them; he is great not in mere accomplishments, but in himself.
He has applied a hard strong intellect to real life; he has applied the
same intellect to the problems of his age. He has striven to know what
is: he has endeavoured not to be cheated by counterfeits, not to be
infatuated with illusions. His heart is in what he says. He has battered
his brain against his creed till he believes it. He has accomplishments
too, the more effective because they are mixed. He is at once a student
of mysticism and a citizen of the world. He brings to the club-sofa
distinct visions of old creeds, intense images of strange thoughts: he
takes to the bookish student tidings of wild Bohemia, and little traces
of the _demi-monde_. He puts down what is good for the naughty, and what
is naughty for the good. Over women his easier writings exercise that
imperious power which belongs to the writings of a great man of the world
upon such matters. He knows women, and therefore they wish to know him.
If we blame many of Browning’s efforts, it is in the interest of art, and
not from a wish to hurt or degrade him.
If we wanted to illustrate the nature of grotesque art by an exaggerated
instance, we should have selected a poem which the chance of late
publication brings us in this new volume. Mr. Browning has undertaken
to describe what may be called _mind in difficulties_—mind set to make
out the universe under the worst and hardest circumstances. He takes
‘Caliban,’ not perhaps exactly Shakespeare’s Caliban, but an analogous
and worse creature; a strong thinking power, but a nasty creature—a gross
animal, uncontrolled and unelevated by any feeling of religion or duty.
The delineation of him will show that Mr. Browning does not wish to take
undue advantage of his readers by a choice of nice subjects.
‘Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best,
Flat on his belly in the pit’s much mire,
With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin;
And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush,
And feels about his spine small eft-things course,
Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh;
And while above his head a pompion plant,
Coating the cave-top as a brow its eye,
Creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard,
And now a flower drops with a bee inside,
And now a fruit to snap at, catch and crunch:’
This pleasant creature proceeds to give his idea of the origin of the
Universe, and it is as follows. Caliban speaks in the third person, and
is of opinion that the maker of the Universe took to making it on account
of his personal discomfort:—
‘Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos!
’Thinketh, He dwelleth i’ the cold o’ the moon.
‘’Thinketh He made it, with the sun to match,
But not the stars: the stars came otherwise;
Only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that:
Also this isle, what lives and grows thereon,
And snaky sea which rounds and ends the same.
‘’Thinketh, it came of being ill at ease:
He hated that He cannot change His cold,
Nor cure its ache. ’Hath spied an icy fish
That longed to ’scape the rock-stream where she lived,
And thaw herself within the lukewarm brine
O’ the lazy sea her stream thrusts far amid,
A crystal spike ’twixt two warm walls of wave;
Only she ever sickened, found repulse
At the other kind of water, not her life,
(Green-dense and dim-delicious, bred o’ the sun)
Flounced back from bliss she was not born to breathe,
And in her old bounds buried her despair,
Hating and loving warmth alike: so He.