POETIC MATERIAL
Difficult as it must be to foresee the evolution of technical methods,
it would be still more hazardous to attempt any prediction as to the
new subject-matter which poets will have to discover, if their art is
to continue as a living growth. The mind of even the most detached
artist is a part of the world into which he was born, and his matter
must to a large extent be a reflection of his environment. But the
material and spiritual world changes far more swiftly than the language
and the rhythmical artifices which constitute the poetic medium.
And so, although I have suggested elsewhere that technique is the
mistress of invention, and that changes in the medium make possible
the discovery of new themes, yet an opposite theory might as easily
be maintained, with perhaps equal truth, that social and intellectual
changes create demands, in satisfying which an intelligent artist will
find his most genial inspiration, and will modify his technique until
it becomes a fit instrument for expressing his new material. But though
for these reasons it would be unwise to indulge in prophecy, we may at
least take a survey of the main possibilities.
To begin with, the innumerable and infinite output of personal lyrics,
good, bad and indifferent, is certain to continue, so long as human
beings are subject to passions and sentimentalities, and can enjoy
the varying moods of nature, and the pleasures of poetic pastiche.
However capriciously the winds of literary fashion may blow, the
countless flock of minor lyricists will always be with us, while the
truly great will be few and far between. One danger indeed we have
little reason to fear. I mean the sterilising tyranny of some dominant
lyrical form, such as the Greek elegiac couplet, or the late-classical
Chinese stanza. Our poetry is already so abundantly rich in types, and
so fertile in breeding new varieties, that neither the spirit of a new
Age, nor genius however individual need be at a loss for appropriate
forms of lyrical self-expression. A twentieth-century Catullus or Heine
would have no cause for complaint if he were to be born an Englishman.
It is with regard to lyrics on a larger, more elaborate scale, that
English poets have hitherto shown least ambition and enterprise. The
Pindarics of Gray are a poor substitute for Pindar; while the _Odes_ of
Keats and Matthew Arnold’s _Thyrsis_ and _Scholar-Gipsy_ are elegiac
rather than lyrical in mood and form. Shelley and Goethe, and at times
Swinburne, have shown themselves to be more truly the successors of
the greater Greek lyric poets; and if they be rightly understood, their
example may yet bear fruit for our delight of altogether unimaginable
quality. But the tendency of the moment seems to be towards poems on
a small scale, of a somewhat anæmic delicacy, or else of an artful
and piquant quaintness, rather than towards the sustained movement,
and elaborate yet highly organised form, which is necessary for the
greatest lyrical poetry.
Another province of literature, which we have seldom as yet attempted
to make our own, is that of comic poetry. We have indeed had many and
various comic writers of first-rate quality; but although, when they
were so minded, Chaucer and Shakespeare and Byron could show themselves
to be masters of comedy in verse, we have as yet had no Aristophanes,
but have been obliged to content ourselves with the charming
trivialities and vulgarities of a Gilbert. If only Ben Jonson, in
addition to stage-craft, Gargantuan comic energy and Titanic eloquence,
had been gifted with a particle of that fiery celestial ether, by
which alone mortal art can become divine, then indeed perhaps....
But of what use are regrets? The future, not the past, is here our
concern. And what a future might there not be for the comic genius
who should be so fortunately inspired as to take the popular Farce,
or even the theatrical Revue, and by giving it the life and the wings
of poetry, so transform it from a poor ephemeral stage-hobby-horse
into an immortal cloud-cruising Pegasus, or at least a serviceable
Hippogryph! Thus sublimely mounted, what regions of the earth and sky
might not such a Bellerophon explore? What monsters and Chimæras might
he not torment and slay with the shafts of his lyrical ridicule? All
that men and women say or think or do, would lie ready as fuel for his
imagination to kindle at will, all our follies and fashions, vices and
virtues, stupidities, cruelties, noble extravagances, religious and
metaphysical dreams. If Socrates could afford to be a good-naturedly
amused spectator of the _Clouds_, so might Freud of some _Comedy of
Dreams_ by our modern Aristophanes: and if he could not, why, so much
the worse for him and his speculations. How wholesome too for our
prominent statesmen and demagogues!--But alas, I am forgetting our
Lord Chamberlain. We are not yet sufficiently enlightened to tolerate
political caricature and Rabelaisian ribaldry upon our stage, and
an English _Knights_ or _Lysistrata_ must remain, I fear, for the
present a poet’s dream. Nevertheless, under a reasonably intelligent
censorship, what Rabelais was for his age, an emancipated imaginative
comedy might well be for our own, except that, whereas the Gallic
genius has always expressed itself most naturally and completely in
prose, ours would expand more congenially into poetry, which, for all
its apparent limitations, should be, at its best, the more universal
interpreter of the spirit of man, whether on the plane of tragedy or of
comedy.
There is good reason for hoping that the problem of an adequate
stage-performance of imaginative comedy would be less difficult to
solve than it seems to be in the case of serious poetic drama. Actors
are always more ready to understand and do justice to plays that are
good fun as well as good literature. Mr. Bernard Shaw and Gilbert and
Sullivan are apt to meet with better treatment at the hands of our
producers and performers than Ibsen or Wagner. All the same even poetic
tragedy should not be too lightly despaired of. If great plays can be
written, someone sooner or later is likely to have the ambition and the
intelligence to produce them worthily. Something of the kind seems to
have happened at Glasgow, in the case of Mr. Gordon Bottomley’s verse
plays. Let us hope, however cautiously, that what Scotland does to-day,
England may at least begin to think of doing to-morrow. Meantime
there is one wholesome lesson that poets may learn from the undoubted
literary success of Mr. Bottomley’s _Gruach_ and _Lear’s Wife_. It is
continually being dinned into their ears by critics who should know
better, that the time is now gone by when poets might borrow their
material from a remote or legendary past; that a twentieth-century
dramatist must deal only in twentieth-century themes if he hopes to
reach the hearts of twentieth-century men and women, or to win the
good graces of Georgian reviewers. And yet it is unquestionably true
that in every period when poetic tragedy has flourished, mythical,
legendary and historical subjects have been the rule, and contemporary
themes the rare exceptions. Oedipus, Agamemnon and Pentheus were not
fifth-century Athenians any more than Hamlet, Lear and Antony were
Elizabethans, or Andromaque and Phèdre _Parisiennes_ of the _grand
siècle_. The artistic success of the _Persae_, _Othello_ and _Bajazet_
merely make this determined preference for archaic subject-matter seem
the more remarkable. And yet none of these writers were mere literary
antiquarians, but true children of their own age, to whose dramas we
now look first, if we wish to understand the mentality and the moral
standards of the populace that applauded them. Even Goethe, in the
work that perhaps more than any other represents the complexity of
modern ideas and aspirations, went back to a myth that was then two
hundred years old. It would seem as though the poetic imagination, when
it sets itself the most arduous of its tasks, that of alembicating
tragic beauty from human misery and passion, welcomes the limitation
of choice, the simplicity of atmosphere, the freedom from distracting
contemporary preoccupations, which a remote theme brings with it. None
the less Ibsen’s _Brandt_ and _Peer Gynt_ show how a modern, though
scarcely a familiar world, may be made the background of true poetic
tragedy; although in _Peer Gynt_ the almost continued presence of the
Comedic Muse, with her incurable modernity, tempers the difficulty of
the problem. Thus, though it would be unreasonable to maintain that the
Tragic Muse must be unable to live and breathe in the smoky atmosphere
of our present-day world, it would be still more absurd to prohibit her
escape into the purer clime of a legendary or historical past.
The case of narrative poetry is somewhat similar, yet with important
differences. It is true that the Homeric heroes and the society in
which they lived had long ceased to exist when the _Iliad_ and the
_Odyssey_ were composed, and that most of the great epic and narrative
writers, Virgil, Ariosto, Milton and Marlowe, preferred mythical or
purely fantastic settings for their stories. Yet such a limitation
would seem to be hardly so natural to narrative as to tragic poetry.
For the quality of narrative being less intense and passionate, and
its unity more loose, it is able to indulge copiously in decoration,
description and digression, and so should be able to deal all the more
effectively with the variegated modern scene. And yet, except for two
sombre short stories in blank verse by Wordsworth, and Byron’s _Don
Juan_, there has scarcely been any narrative, dealing with modern life
and of first-rate poetical quality, since Chaucer’s _Canterbury Tales_.
This is perhaps because poets have not sufficiently realised that the
telling of a story in verse instead of prose can only be justified
when the sensuous and decorative beauty of the medium is continually
maintained at the highest pitch. For whereas in the intense and
tragic moments of drama exquisiteness and richness of texture may be
unnecessary, or at times even a positive nuisance, bald and graceless
verse narrative is always insupportable. Byron indeed atoned for much
artistic unscrupulousness and slovenly workmanship by his unfailing
energy and wit. But poets will have to take to heart the lesson of
Chaucer’s scrupulous attention to beauty of texture, if they are to
hold their own in rivalry with prose fiction. They will have also to
be aware of the dangers of a too exclusive interest in analytical
psychology. Narrative, when it ceases to narrate, very easily becomes
a bore. Such writers as Proust and Henry James may have been able
successfully to dispense with many of the functions of story-telling,
by laboriously evolving a peculiar prose instrument of their own for
the expression of psychological subtleties. But it is doubtful whether
anything of the kind would be possible in verse, or, if possible,
whether it would be readable. Yet for the direct presentation, serious
or humoristic, of character, mood and emotion, verse in the hands of a
master will always remain an instrument of supreme power.
There are certain other kinds of poetry, more or less akin to
narrative, for which an interesting future may be predicted. The
Victorians seem to have had a special predilection for the Dramatic
Monologue, perhaps because they unconsciously felt their inability to
cope with the problems of drama. _Caliban upon Setebos_ and _The Bishop
orders his Tomb in St. Praxed’s Church_ are notable successes; but
several of Browning’s experiments should be a warning of the danger of
lengthiness and over-elaboration in a form that allows of very little
narrative interest or dramatic contrast. Great and sustained beauty of
language can alone justify a long poem of such a kind; and it is just
in this respect that Browning was most deficient.
Another attractive sub-species of narrative poetry is the Dramatic
Dialogue or Interlude, which has lately been successfully revived
by Mr. Sturge Moore and Mr. Abercrombie. The great master of this
form, as also of the Monologue, is Theocritus, whose _Syracusan
Women_, _Kyniska_, _Thyrsis_, and _Simaitha_ will always remain as
a challenging inspiration to succeeding ages. The great range of
his material within the narrow limits of his surviving work, and
his marvellous blend of naturalism and poetry, should be peculiarly
suggestive to a generation like our own, with its eagerness to find new
paths, or rediscover old ones, to poetic freedom.
It would be presumptuous in one who is not himself a philosopher to
speak with assurance about philosophic poetry: yet I shall venture upon
some obvious reflections. Few would dispute that there has been only
one specifically philosophical work which is also a great poem, the
_De Rerum Natura_ of Lucretius. But those of us who love it best will,
if we are candid, admit that it contains vast tracts of scientific
and metaphysical discussion, which even fervid and eloquent genius
has not wholly succeeded in clothing with the vesture of poetry. It
is true that, for those few who have the courage and wisdom to read
them, these sections should have a very high value as parts of a
sublime imaginative vision of the universe; and they also contain
many scattered episodes of divine poetic loveliness. But the claim
of Lucretius to rank among the world’s greatest writers will always
rest upon those sections, such as the endings of his third, fourth
and fifth books, where the material is already in its essence poetic,
and gives scope to his supreme gift for sensuous description, or for
passionate ethical discourse. It is to be feared that if a poet of
equal genius with Lucretius were to take modern psychology, the physics
of Einstein, or the philosophy of Mr. Russell as his subject-matter,
with the intention of seriously expounding and not of merely poetising
them, he would be unable to avoid similar desert tracts of unpoetical
reasoning. But it is a narrow view which can deny that verse should
ever be employed, unless the result be poetry. If an artist in language
is able to set forth philosophic matter that is of great intrinsic
interest more luminously and attractively in verse than could be done
in prose (which is precisely what Lucretius did with the crabbed
sentences of Epicurus), let us not grudge him the praise and gratitude
that are his due. However, it seems unlikely that scientific philosophy
will ever again inspire an expository treatise such as the _De Rerum
Natura_. It might indeed enter as an all-pervading influence into some
comprehensive epic design, just as religion and scholastic philosophy
pervade the _Divina Commedia_. What is certain is that, as there have
always been, so there always will be philosophically minded poets, and
that they will discover for themselves what forms serve their purpose
best.
The treatise, as a poetic form, would seem to be more suitable for
subjects that are neither strictly philosophic, nor scientific. Yet
though we have had our _Seasons_, _Night Thoughts_, and _Sofas_ in
plenty, Virgil’s _Georgics_ remain still unrivalled. Why should not
an ingenious and erudite poet take some such pregnant subject as
Architecture, the Garden, or the Evolution of Religion, or if he have
the knowledge and the boldness, Machinery, Medicine or Economics, and
dispute Virgil’s supremacy in this field, as Virgil once did Hesiod’s?
How fascinating would he not find the problem of wedding didactic
and historical exposition to perfect loveliness of texture? What
opportunities for description and reflection? And with what entrancing
episodes, serious or playful, might he not delight our fancy?
Not the least noble, nor the least exacting of mistresses, is the
Muse of Satire. “_Facit indignatio versum_,” said Juvenal. But alas,
how fumbling a designer, how banal a metrician, how unscrupulous and
inartistic a poetaster has Indignation generally proved herself to be.
Few satires survive the ephemeral social follies that provoked them,
because, being by nature parasites, when that which supported their
growth decays and perishes, they too must perish, unless indeed they
are rooted deeply in the unchanging soil of imagination and poetry.
Truly great satire will always be very rare. It is still possible
to read with delight Byron’s _Vision of Judgment_, and portions of
his _Age of Bronze_; and there are passages in Pope and Dryden that
fully deserve their reputation. But it is perhaps only in parts of the
_Divina Commedia_, and in the last three hundred lines of the fourth
book of Lucretius, and occasionally in Leopardi, that satire may be
found mingled as the dominating element in poetry of the highest order.
Its taste even there is bitter, but with the divine bitterness of
passion and sincerity.
In the enchanted kingdom of fantasy and the mock-heroic, Pope’s _Rape
of the Lock_ and Lear’s poems still reign supreme. It is perhaps
because they are ostensibly written for the delight of children, that
_The Owl and the Pussycat_, _The Dong_, and the _Quangle-Wangle_
have never, so far as I know, found their way into serious adult
anthologies. Yet if we are really sincere in our quest for lyrical
beauty, verbal euphony and metrical invention, we should not have
tolerated without protest the absence of these poems from the _Oxford
Book of Verse_, where they would more than hold their own in the
company of _Annabel Lee_, _The Lady of Shalott_, and _The Blessed
Damozel_.