Are we really, then, to believe the newspapers for once, and to doff our
critical nightcaps, in which we have comfortably overslept many similar
rumors and false alarms, to welcome the advent of a new poet? New poets,
to our thinking, are not very common, and the soft columns of the press
often make dangerous concessions, for which the marble ones of Horace’s
day were too stony-hearted. Indeed, we have some well-grounded doubts
whether England is precisely the country from which we have a right to
expect that most precious of gifts just now. There is hardly enough
fervor of political life there at present to ripen anything but the
fruits of the literary forcing-house, so fair outwardly and so
flavorless compared with those which grow in the hardier open air of a
vigorous popular sentiment. Mere wealth of natural endowment is not
enough; there must be also the co-operation of the time, of the public
genius roused to a consciousness of itself by the necessity of asserting
or defending the vital principle on which that consciousness rests, in
order that a poet may rise to the highest level of his vocation. The
great names of the last generation--Scott, Wordsworth, Byron--represent
moods of national thought and feeling, and are therefore more or less
truly British poets; just as Goethe, in whose capacious nature, open to
every influence of earth and sky, the spiritual fermentation of the
eighteenth century settled and clarified, is a European one. A sceptic
might say, we think, with some justice, that poetry in England was
passing now, if it have not already passed, into one of those periods of
mere art without any intense convictions to back it, which lead
inevitably, and by no long gradation, to the mannered and artificial.
Browning, by far the richest nature of the time, becomes more difficult,
draws nearer to the all-for-point fashion of the _concettisti_, with
every poem he writes; the dainty trick of Tennyson cloys when caught by
a whole generation of versifiers, as the _style_ of a great poet never
can be; and we have a foreboding that Clough, imperfect as he was in
many respects, and dying before he had subdued his sensitive temperament
to the sterner requirements of his art, will be thought a hundred years
hence to have been the truest expression in verse of the moral and
intellectual tendencies, the doubt and struggle towards settled
convictions, of the period in which he lived. To make beautiful
conceptions immortal by exquisiteness of phrase, is to be a poet, no
doubt; but to be a new poet is to feel and to utter that immanent life
of things without which the utmost perfection of mere form is at best
only wax or marble. He who can do both is the great poet.
Over “Chastelard, a Tragedy,” we need not spend much time. It is at best
but the school exercise of a young poet learning to write, and who
reproduces in his copy-book, more or less travestied, the copy that has
been set for him at the page’s head by the authors he most admires.
Grace and even force of expression are not wanting, but there is the
obscurity which springs from want of definite intention; the characters
are vaguely outlined from memory, not drawn firmly from the living and
the nude in actual experience of life; the working of passion is an _a
priori_ abstraction from a scheme in the author’s mind; and there is no
thought, but only a vehement grasping after thought. The hand is the
hand of Swinburne, but the voice is the voice of Browning. With here
and there a pure strain of sentiment, a genuine touch of nature, the
effect of the whole is unpleasant with the faults of the worst school of
modern poetry,--the physically intense school, as we should be inclined
to call it, of which Mrs. Browning’s “Aurora Leigh” is the worst
example, whose muse is a _fast_ young woman with the lavish ornament and
somewhat overpowering perfume of the _demi-monde_, and which pushes
expression to the last gasp of sensuous exhaustion. They forget that
convulsion is not energy, and that words, to hold fire, must first catch
it from vehement heat of thought, while no artificial fervors of phrase
can make the charm work backward to kindle the mind of writer or reader.
An overmastering passion no longer entangles the spiritual being of its
victim in the burning toils of a retribution foredoomed in its own
nature, purifying us with the terror and pity of a soul in its
extremity, as the great masters were wont to set it before us; no, it
must be fleshly, corporeal, must “bite with small white teeth” and draw
blood, to satisfy the craving of our modern inquisitors, who torture
language instead of wooing it to confess the secret of its witchcraft.
That books written on this theory should be popular, is one of the worst
signs of the times; that they should be praised by the censors of
literature shows how seldom criticism goes back to first principles, or
is even aware of them,--how utterly it has forgotten its most earnest
function of demolishing the high places where the unclean rites of Baal
and Ashtaroth usurp on the worship of the one only True and Pure.
“Atalanta in Calydon” is in every respect better than its forerunner. It
is a true poem, and seldom breaks from the maidenly reserve which should
characterize the higher forms of poetry, even in the keenest energy of
expression. If the blank verse be a little mannered and stiff,
reminding one of Landor in his attempts to reproduce the antique, the
lyrical parts are lyrical in the highest sense, graceful, flowing, and
generally simple in sentiment and phrase. There are some touches of
nature in the mother’s memories of Althea, so sweetly pathetic that they
go as right to the heart as they came from it, and are neither Greek nor
English, but broadly human. And yet, when we had read the book through,
we felt as if we were leaving a world of shadows, inhabited by less
substantial things than that nether realm of Homer where the very
eidolon of Achilles is still real to us in its longings and regrets.
These are not characters, but outlines after the Elgin marbles in the
thinnest manner of Flaxman. There is not so much blood in the whole of
them as would warm the little finger of one of Shakespeare’s living and
breathing conceptions. We could not help thinking of those exquisite
verses addressed by Schiller to Goethe, in which, while he expresses a
half-truth so eloquently as almost to make it seem a whole one, he
touches unconsciously the weak point of their common striving after a
Grecian instead of a purely human ideal.
“Doch leicht gezimmert nur ist Thespis Wagen,
Und er ist gleich dem acheront’schen Kahn;
Nur Schatten und Idole kann er tragen,
Und dräugt das rohe Leben sich heran,
So droht das leichte Fahrzeug umzuschlagen
Das nur die flücht’gen Geister fassen kann;
Der Schein soll nie die Wirklichkeit erreichen
Und siegt Natur, so muss die Kunst entweichen.”
The actors in the drama are unreal and shadowy, the motives which
actuate them alien to our modern modes of thought and conceptions of
character. To a Greek, the element of Fate, with which his imagination
was familiar, while it heightened the terror of the catastrophe, would
have supplied the place of that impulse in mere human nature which our
habit of mind demands for its satisfaction. The fulfilment of an oracle,
the anger of a deity, the arbitrary doom of some blind and purposeless
power superior to man, the avenging of blood to appease an injured
ghost, any one of these might make that seem simply natural to a
contemporary of Sophocles which is intelligible to us only by study and
reflection. It is not a little curious that Shakespeare should have made
the last of the motives we have just mentioned, and which was conclusive
for Orestes, insufficient for Hamlet, who so perfectly typifies the
introversion and complexity of modern thought as compared with ancient,
in dealing with the problems of life and action. It was not perhaps
without intention (for who may venture to assume a want of intention in
the world’s highest poetic genius at its full maturity?) that
Shakespeare brings in his hero fresh from the University of Wittenberg,
where Luther, who entailed upon us the responsibility of private
judgment, had been Professor. The dramatic motive in the “Electra” and
“Hamlet” is essentially the same, but what a difference between the
straightforward bloody-mindedness of Orestes and the metaphysical
punctiliousness of the Dane! Yet each was natural in his several way,
and each would have been unintelligible to the audience for which the
other was intended. That Fate which the Greeks made to operate from
without, we recognize at work within in some vice of character or
hereditary predisposition. Hawthorne, the most profoundly ideal genius
of these latter days, was continually returning, more or less directly,
to this theme; and his “Marble Faun,” whether consciously or not,
illustrates that invasion of the æsthetic by the moral which has
confused art by dividing its allegiance, and dethroned the old dynasty
without as yet firmly establishing the new in an acknowledged
legitimacy.
“Atalanta in Calydon” shows that poverty of thought and profusion of
imagery which are at once the defect and the compensation of all
youthful poetry, even of Shakespeare’s. It seems a paradox to say that
there can be too much poetry in a poem, and yet this is a fault with
which all poets begin, and which some never get over. But “Atalanta” is
hopefully distinguished, in a rather remarkable way, from most early
attempts, by a sense of form and proportion, which, if seconded by a
seasonable ripening of other faculties, as we may fairly expect, gives
promise of rare achievement hereafter. Mr. Swinburne’s power of
assimilating style, which is, perhaps, not so auspicious a symptom,
strikes us as something marvellous. The argument of his poem, in its
quaint archaism, would not need the change of a word or in the order of
a period to have been foisted on Sir Thomas Malory as his own
composition. The choosing a theme which Æschylus had handled in one of
his lost tragedies is justified by a certain Æschylean flavor in the
treatment. The opening, without deserving to be called a mere imitation,
recalls that of the “Agamemnon,” and the chorus has often an imaginative
lift in it, an ethereal charm of phrase, of which it is the highest
praise to say that it reminds us of him who soars over the other Greek
tragedians like an eagle.
But in spite of many merits, we cannot help asking ourselves, as we
close the book, whether “Atalanta” can be called a success, and if so,
whether it be a success in the right direction. The poem reopens a
question which in some sort touches the very life of modern literature.
We do not mean to renew the old quarrel of Fontenelle’s day as to the
comparative merits of ancients and moderns. That is an affair of taste,
which does not admit of any authoritative settlement. Our concern is
about a principle which certainly demands a fuller discussion, and
which is important enough to deserve it. Do we show our appreciation of
the Greeks most wisely in attempting the mechanical reproduction of
their forms, or by endeavoring to comprehend the thoughtful spirit of
full-grown manhood in which they wrought, to kindle ourselves by the
emulation of it, and to bring it to bear with all its plastic force upon
our wholly new conditions of life and thought? It seems to us that the
question is answered by the fact, patent in the history of all the fine
arts, that every attempt at reproducing a bygone excellence by external
imitation of it, or even by applying the rules which analytic criticism
has formulated from the study of it, has resulted in producing the
artificial, and not the artistic. That most subtile of all essences in
physical organization, which eludes chemist, anatomist, and
microscopist, the life, is in æsthetics not less shy of the critic, and
will not come forth in obedience to his most learned spells, for the
very good reason that it cannot, because in all works of art it is the
joint product of the artist and of the time. Faust may believe he is
gazing on “the face that launched a thousand ships,” but Mephistopheles
knows very well that it is only shadows that he has the skill to
conjure. He is not merely the spirit that ever denies, but the spirit
also of discontent with the present, that material in which every man
shall work who will achieve realities and not their hollow semblance.
The true anachronism, in our opinion, is not in Shakespeare’s making
Ulysses talk as Lord Bacon might, but in attempting to make him speak in
a dialect of thought utterly dead to all present comprehension. Ulysses
was the type of long-headedness; and the statecraft of an Ithacan
cateran would have seemed as childish to the age of Elizabeth and
Burleigh as it was naturally sufficing to the first hearers of Homer.
Ulysses, living in Florence during the fifteenth century, might have
been Macchiavelli; in France, during the seventeenth, Cardinal
Richelieu; in America, during the nineteenth, Abraham Lincoln, but not
Ulysses. Truth to nature can be reached ideally, never historically; it
must be a study from the life, and not from the scholiasts. Theocritus
lets us into the secret of his good poetry, when he makes Daphnis tell
us that he preferred his rock with a view of the Siculian Sea to the
kingdom of Pelops.
It is one of the marvels of the human mind, this sorcery which the fiend
of technical imitation weaves about his victims, giving a phantasmal
Helen to their arms, and making an image of the brain seem substance.
Men still pain themselves to write Latin verses, matching their wooden
bits of phrase together as children do dissected maps, and measuring the
value of what they have done, not by any standard of intrinsic merit,
but by the difficulty of doing it. Petrarch expected to be known to
posterity by his Africa. Gray hoped to make a Latin poem his monument.
Goethe, who was classic in the only way it is now possible to be
classic, in his “Hermann and Dorothea,” and at least Propertian in his
“Roman Idyls,” wasted his time and thwarted his creative energy on the
mechanical mock-antique of an unreadable “Achilleis.” Landor prized his
waxen “Gebirus Rex” above all the natural fruits of his mind; and we
have no doubt that, if some philosopher should succeed in accomplishing
Paracelsus’s problem of an artificial _homunculus_, he would dote on
this misbegotten babe of his science, and think him the only genius of
the family. We cannot over-estimate the value of some of the ancient
classics, but a certain amount of superstition about Greek and Latin has
come down to us from the revival of learning, and seems to hold in
mortmain the intellects of whoever has, at some time, got a smattering
of them. Men quote a platitude in either of those tongues with a relish
of conviction as droll to the uninitiated as the knighthood of
free-masonry. Horace Walpole’s nephew, the Earl of Orford, when he was
in his cups, used to have Statius read aloud to him every night for two
hours by a tipsy tradesman, whose hiccupings threw in here and there a
kind of cæsural pause, and found some strange mystery of sweetness in
the disqualified syllables. So powerful is this hallucination that we
can conceive of _festina lente_ as the favorite maxim of a Mississippi
steamboat captain, and ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ cited as conclusive by a
gentleman for whom the bottle before him reversed the wonder of the
stereoscope, and substituted the Gascon _v_ for the _b_ in binocular.
Something of this singular superstition has infected the minds of those
who confound the laws of conventional limitation which governed the
practice of Greek authors in dramatic composition--laws adapted to the
habits and traditions and preconceptions of their audience--with that
sense of ideal form which made the Greeks masters in art to all
succeeding generations. Aristophanes is beyond question the highest type
of pure comedy, etherealizing his humor by the infusion, or intensifying
it by the contrast of poetry, and deodorizing the personality of his
sarcasm by a sprinkle from the clearest springs of fancy. His satire,
aimed as it was at typical characteristics, is as fresh as ever; but we
doubt whether an Aristophanic drama, retaining its exact form, but
adapted to present events and personages, would keep the stage as it is
kept by “The Rivals,” for example, immeasurably inferior as that is in
every element of genius except the prime one of liveliness. Something
similar in purpose to the parabasis was essayed in one, at least, of the
comedies of Beaumont and Fletcher, and in our time by Tieck; but it
took, of necessity, a different form of expression, and does not seem
to have been successful. Indeed, the fact that what is called the
legitimate drama of modern times in England, Spain, and France has been
strictly a growth, and not a manufacture, that in each country it took a
different form, and that, in all, the period of its culminating and
beginning to decline might be measured by a generation, seems to point
us toward some natural and inevitable law of human nature, and to show
that, while the principles of art are immutable, their application must
accommodate itself to the material supplied them by the time and by the
national character and traditions. The Spanish tragedy inclines more
toward the lyrical, the French toward the epical, the English toward the
historical, in the representation of real life; the Spanish and English
agree in the Teutonic peculiarity of admitting the humorous offset of
the clown, though in the one case he parodies the leading motive of the
drama, and represents the self-consciousness of the dramatist, while in
the other he heightens the tragic effect by contrast, (as in the
grave-digging scene of Hamlet,) and suggests that stolid but wholesome
indifference of the general life--of what, for want of a better term, we
call Nature--to the sin and suffering, the weakness and misfortunes of
the individual man. All these nations had the same ancient examples
before them, had the same reverence for antiquity, yet they
involuntarily deviated, more or less happily, into originality, success,
and the freedom of a living creativeness. The higher kinds of
literature, the only kinds that live on because they had life at the
start, are not, then, it should seem, the fabric of scholarship, of
criticism, diligently studying and as diligently copying the best
models, but are much rather born of some genetic principle in the
character of the people and the age which produce them. One drop of
ruddy human blood puts more life into the veins of a poem, than all the
delusive _aurum potabile_ that can be distilled out of the choicest
library.
The opera is the closest approach we have to the ancient drama in the
essentials of structure and presentation; and could we have a _libretto_
founded on a national legend and written by one man of genius to be
filled out and accompanied by the music of another, we might hope for
something of the same effect upon the stage. But themes of universal
familiarity and interest are rare,--Don Giovanni and Faust, perhaps,
most nearly, though not entirely, fulfilling the required
conditions,--and men of genius rarer. The oratorio seeks to evade the
difficulty by choosing Scriptural subjects, and it may certainly be
questioned whether the day of popular mythology, in the sense in which
it subserves the purposes of epic or dramatic poetry, be not gone by
forever. Longfellow is driven to take refuge among the red men, and
Tennyson in the Cambro-Breton cyclus of Arthur; but it is impossible
that such themes should come so intimately home to us as the
semi-fabulous stories of their own ancestors did to the Greeks. The most
successful attempt at reproducing the Greek tragedy, both in theme and
treatment, is the “Samson Agonistes,” as it is also the most masterly
piece of English versification. Goethe admits that it alone, among
modern works, has caught life from the breath of the antique spirit. But
he failed to see, or at least to give, the reason of it; probably failed
to see it, or he would never have attempted the “Iphigenia.” Milton not
only subjected himself to the structural requirements of the Attic
tragedy, but with a true poetic instinct availed himself of the striking
advantage it had in the choice of a subject. No popular tradition lay
near enough to him for his purpose; none united in itself the essential
requisites of human interest and universal belief. He accordingly chose
a Jewish mythus, very near to his own heart as a blind prisoner,
betrayed by his wife, among the Philistines of the Restoration, and
familiar to the earliest associations of his hearers. This subject, and
this alone, met all the demands both of living poetic production and of
antique form,--the action grandly simple, the personages few, the
protagonist at once a victim of divine judgment and an executor of
divine retribution, an intense personal sympathy in the poet himself,
and no strangeness to the habitual prepossessions of those he addressed
to be overcome before he could touch their hearts or be sure of aid from
their imaginations. To compose such a drama on such a theme was to _be_
Greek, and not to counterfeit it; for Samson was to Milton traditionally
just what Herakles was to Sophocles, and personally far more. The
“Agonistes” is still fresh and strong as morning, but where are
“Caractacus” and “Elfrida”? Nay, where is the far better work of a far
abler man,--where is “Merope”? If the frame of mind which performs a
deliberate experiment were the same as that which produces poetry
vitalized through and through by the conspiring ardors of every nobler
passion and power of the soul, then “Merope” might have had some little
space of life. But without color, without harmonious rhythm of movement,
with less passion than survived in an average Grecian ghost, and all
this from the very theory of her creation, she has gone back, a shadow,
to join her shadowy Italian and French namesakes in that limbo of things
that would be and cannot be. Mr. Arnold but retraces, in his Preface to
“Merope,” the arguments of Mason in the letters prefixed to his
classical experiments. What finds defenders, but not readers, may be
correct, classic, right in principle, but it is not poetry of that
absolute kind which may and does help men, but needs no help of theirs;
and such surely we have a right to demand in tragedy, if nowhere else.
We should not speak so unreservedly if we did not set a high value on
Mr. Arnold and his poetic gift. But “Merope” has that one fault against
which the very gods, we are told, strive in vain. It is dull, and the
seed of this dulness lay in the system on which it was written.
Pseudo-classicism takes two forms. Sometimes, as Mr. Landor has done, it
attempts truth of detail to ancient scenery and manners, which may be
attained either by hard reading and good memory, or at a cheaper rate
from such authors as Becker. The “Moretum,” once attributed to Virgil,
and the idyl of Theocritus lately chosen as a text by Mr. Arnold, are
interesting, because they describe real things; but the mock-antique, if
not true, is nothing, and how true such poems are likely to be we can
judge by “Punch’s” success at Yankeeisms, by all England’s accurate
appreciation of the manners and minds of a contemporary people one with
herself in language, laws, religion, and literature. The eye is the only
note-book of the true poet; but a patchwork of second-hand memories is a
laborious futility, hard to write and harder to read, with about as much
nature in it as a dialogue of the Deipnosophists. Alexander’s bushel of
peas was a criticism worthy of Aristotle’s pupil. We should reward such
writing with the gift of a classical dictionary. In this idyllic kind of
poetry also we have a classic, because Goldsmith went to nature for his
“Deserted Village,” and borrowed of tradition nothing but the poetic
diction in which he described it. This is the only method by which a
poet may surely reckon on ever becoming an ancient himself. When we
heard it said once that a certain poem might have been written by
Simonides, we could not help thinking that, if it were so, then it was
precisely what Simonides could never have written, since he looked at
the world through his own eyes, not through those of Linus or Hesiod,
and thought his own thoughts, not theirs, or we should never have had
him to imitate.
Objections of the same nature, but even stronger, lie against a servile
copying of the form and style of the Greek tragic drama, and yet more
against the selection of a Greek theme. As we said before, the life we
lead, and the views we take of it, are more complex than those of men
who lived five centuries before Christ. They may be better or worse,
but, at any rate, they are different, and irremediably so. The idea and
the form in which it naturally embodies itself, mutually sustaining and
invigorating each other, cannot be divided without endangering the lives
of both. For in all real poetry the form is not a garment, but a body.
Our very passion has become metaphysical, and speculates upon itself.
Their simple and downright way of thinking loses all its savor when we
assume it to ourselves by an effort of thought. Human nature, it is
true, remains always the same, but the displays of it change; the habits
which are a second nature modify it inwardly as well as outwardly, and
what moves it to passionate action in one age may leave it indifferent
in the next. Between us and the Greeks lies the grave of their murdered
paganism, making our minds and theirs irreconcilable. Christianity as
steadily intensifies the self-consciousness of man as the religion of
the Greeks must have turned their thoughts away from themselves to the
events of this life and the phenomena of nature. We cannot even conceive
of their conception of Phoibos with any plausible assurance of coming
near the truth. To take lesser matters, since the invention of printing
and the cheapening of books have made the thought of all ages and
nations the common property of educated men, we cannot so dis-saturate
our minds of it as to be keenly thrilled in the modern imitation with
those commonplaces of proverbial lore in which the chorus and secondary
characters are apt to indulge, though in the original they may interest
us as being natural and characteristic. In the German-silver of the
modern we get something of this kind, which does not please us the more
by being cut up into single lines that recall the outward semblance of
some pages in Sophocles. We find it cheaper to make a specimen than to
borrow one.
CHORUS. Foolish who bites off nose, his face to spite.
OUTIS. Who fears his fate, him Fate shall one day spurn.
CHORUS. The gods themselves are pliable to Fate.
OUTIS. The strong self-ruler dreads no other sway.
CHORUS. Sometimes the shortest way goes most about.
OUTIS. Why fetch a compass, having stars within?
CHORUS. A shepherd once, I know that stars may set.
OUTIS. That thou led’st sheep fits not for leading men.
CHORUS. To sleep-sealed eyes the wolf-dog barks in vain.
We protest that we have read something very like this, we will not say
where, and we might call it the battle-door and shuttlecock style of
dialogue, except that the players do not seem to have any manifest
relation to each other, but each is intent on keeping his own bit of
feathered cork continually in the air.
The first sincerely popular yearning toward antiquity, the first germ of
Schiller’s “Götter Griechenland’s” is to be found in the old poem of
Tanhäuser, very nearly coincident with the beginnings of the
Reformation. And if we might allegorize it, we should say that it
typified precisely that longing after Venus, under her other name of
Charis, which represents the relation in which modern should stand to
ancient art. It is the grace of the Greeks, their sense of proportion,
their distaste for the exaggerated, their exquisite propriety of
phrase, which steadies imagination without cramping it,--it is these
that we should endeavor to assimilate without the loss of our own
individuality. We should quicken our sense of form by intelligent
sympathy with theirs, and not stiffen it into formalism by a servile
surrender of what is genuine in us to what _was_ genuine in them. “A
pure form,” says Schiller, “helps and sustains, an impure one hinders
and shatters.” But we should remember that the spirit of the age must
enter as a modifying principle, not only into ideas, but into the best
manner of their expression. The old bottles will not always serve for
the new wine. A principle of life is the first requirement of all art,
and it can only be communicated by the touch of the time and a simple
faith in it; all else is circumstantial and secondary. The Greek tragedy
passed through the three natural stages of poetry,--the imaginative in
Æschylus, the thoughtfully artistic in Sophocles, the sentimental in
Euripides,--and then died. If people could only learn the general
applicability to periods and schools of what young Mozart says of
Gellert, that “he had written no poetry _since_ his death”! No effort to
raise a defunct past has ever led to anything but just enough galvanic
twitching of the limbs to remind us unpleasantly of life. The romantic
movement of the school of German poets which succeeded Goethe and
Schiller ended in extravagant unreality, and Goethe himself with his
enerring common-sense, has given us, in the second part of Faust, the
result of his own and Schiller’s common striving after a Grecian ideal.
Euphorion, the child of Faust and Helen, falls dead at their feet; and
Helen herself soon follows him to the shades, leaving only her mantle in
the hands of her lover. This, he is told, shall lift him above the
earth. We fancy we can interpret the symbol. Whether we can or not, it
is certainly suggestive of thought that the only immortal production of
the greatest of recent poets was conceived and carried out in that
Gothic spirit and form from which he was all his life struggling to
break loose.