MISCELLANEOUS
The main trouble with all attempts at literary classification is that
they are bound to exclude many intermediate types. Much of the most
memorable English poetry is neither in a strict sense lyrical, nor
philosophic, nor anything else than beautiful and shapely verse. No
other literature is so rich as ours in quasi-lyrical poetry, such as
the sonnets of Shakespeare and Wordsworth, Gray’s _Elegy_ and Keats’
_Odes_. Future writers will doubtless invent other similar forms for
their new purposes; but it would be a disastrous error to suppose
that, because an art-form has once become classical, it therefore can
no longer be used, except for academic pastiche. No form is ever
superannuated if it be the best possible vehicle for expressing a new
artistic idea. A poet need be no more afraid of using the Shakespearian
or Petrarchian sonnet, than a musician need be ashamed of composing
a classical fugue, provided his inspiration be genuine; and its
genuineness will not be obscured or destroyed by being cast into some
old and well-tried mould. Indeed the most truly academic works are
often those in which some ephemerally fashionable formula has been
blindly adopted without being understood. The mental habits of poets
are as various as those of scientists or politicians. Wordsworth, who
far more than most poets drew his material from his own experience,
was nevertheless inspired to invent his most felicitous work by such
traditional forms as the sonnet or the common ballad stanza: his _Ode
to Duty_ is exactly modelled on a metrical invention of Gray, and the
pattern of his _Leech-Gatherer_, but for one slight variation, is the
same as that of Shakespeare’s _Rape of Lucrece_. On the other hand Walt
Whitman spent many years laboriously floundering in search of a poetic
method, and it was only late in life that his unconscious sense of
form led him to write a few poems that are as perfect in design and as
moving as any fragment of Alcman.
In every fertile and creative age of literature, it will generally be
found that there were two main stimulating influences at work: in the
first place naturalism, or an awakened sensitiveness to the suggestive
beauty of the actual world; and secondly the fascination exercised by
the masterpieces of earlier periods and alien cultures. By this I do
not mean the direct inheritance of a poetic medium. Milton no doubt
learnt his metrical technique from Shakespeare and the Elizabethans,
but in everything else he owed far more to his loving study of Homer,
Euripides, Virgil and the Bible. Thus too the spiritual presence of
Homer is felt everywhere in the Greek lyrical and dramatic writers, and
even in Theocritus; and thus emulous idolatry of Greek and Alexandrine
masterpieces quickened into life all that was best in Latin poetry;
while Virgil and Ovid in their turn became the schoolmasters of Dante
and the Renaissance. The tyranny of Latin over English poetry only
began to wane towards the end of the eighteenth century; then suddenly
in Shelley and Keats, and later in Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, Mr.
Bridges, and even Browning, the Hellenic spirit becomes a veritable
Castalian fountain of inspiration. Now that the knowledge of Greek
is likely to become a rare accomplishment, it is possible that its
influence will die away as quickly as it flowered. Yet the imagination
is sometimes kindled by translations even more potently than by
scholarship, as is shown by the case of Keats, who had small Latin
and less Greek. And indeed, apart from our ever-growing interest in
our own earlier literature, the most helpful and fertile impulse seems
likely in the near future to come through translations of Oriental
poetry, such as those by Mr. Waley and Mr. Nicholson. But from whatever
direction the wind may blow, it will be the most imaginative artists
who will first be sensitive to it, and the most skilful and discreet in
the use they put it to. The lesser crowd will, as ever, follow their
lead, until what was once a renovating breath of inspiration has become
a stale and flatulent academicism.
Even if it be true, as I have suggested earlier in this essay, that
poetry has ceased to be a great popular and social art, there will be
no need to regret the change in so far as it may make it more easy
for poets to disregard fashionable success, and so to retain their
artistic integrity. Yet there are certain dangers to which they will
become increasingly liable. An art which presupposes a select initiated
audience, very quickly becomes over-precious, and, for all its
refinement, essentially parochial. The best art will take nothing for
granted in those to whom it is addressed, except artistic intelligence
and that human nature which is common to us all. Poets whose idiom is
not universal, but calculated for a cultured private coterie, write
with the risk of swift oblivion, so soon as the tide of æsthetic
caprice has turned. This is all the more regrettable, as such poetry is
sometimes of great originality and beauty. The most frequent fault is
obscurity, due either to an Alexandrine love of recondite allusions, or
more often to an apparently studied neglect of transitions. A contempt
for clarity has almost come to be regarded as an artistic virtue,
rather than as a vice, or at best an occasionally inevitable evil.
Nothing in truth can be more fundamentally inartistic than needless
obscurity. Poetry that is intellectually and emotionally complex, is
certain in any case to be difficult enough; and the less a reader is
called upon to make avoidable mental effort, the more convincingly
will the essential context of a poem be communicated to his mind. The
medium of poetry consists not merely of words, but of speech, that is
of words, phrases and sentences in syntactic and logical relations to
one another; and although these relations necessarily tend to be more
emotional and less rational in poetry than in prose, because poetry is
the more emotional medium, yet there are limits which it is dangerous
to exceed. Much no doubt depends upon the nature of the subject-matter.
A chorus of Aeschylus, or a soliloquy of Macbeth may be very difficult
to analyse and construe satisfactorily; yet their general drift is
usually clear enough. Cloudy vagueness or intricate subtlety may well
be necessary and legitimate qualities of a poem; but all superfluous
obscurity is æsthetically pure waste. Gerard Hopkins is a deplorable
example of a poet of sincerity and genius, who damaged much of his best
work by not being sufficiently aware of the nature of his instrument,
which was the English language, or of his audience, who could only be
educated English-speaking people. The admirers of such writers will
often quite honestly deny that they find them unduly difficult. They
probably forget how hard they have had to work in order to obtain their
reward. The trouble is that the poet ought to have done the larger part
of their work for them himself.
Whatever may be the destinies of English poetry, I do not think it is
likely to achieve anything very remarkable until we have grown out of
a doctrine or prejudice that is widely prevalent just now, that is to
say our dislike and suspicion of rhetoric. By rhetoric I mean the sum
of all the artifices and habits of syntax, phrasing and diction which
are necessary in order to sustain the movement and the structure of a
poem that is designed on a large scale, or of a short poem of great
emotional intensity. That may be a loose and unsatisfactory definition,
but it is the best I can come by. Criticism nowadays seems to be mainly
interested in lyrical poetry on a small scale; and this may account
for the disfavour into which the very name of rhetoric has fallen: for
it is true that short lyrics of a certain kind can afford to dispense
with rhetoric, in the sense in which I am using the word. Yet if the
European poets of the past, and their public, had been as shy of
rhetoric as we are at present, it is certain that there would have been
no Homer to begin with, still less an Aeschylus, a Milton, a Racine,
or a Shelley. We might have produced poetry of exquisite charm and
refinement, but its imaginative range and vitality would probably have
been as restricted as that of the Japanese, or of the later Chinese
poets. If we compare in Mr. Waley’s translations the classical Tang
poets with those earlier primitive writers, who were not yet afraid of
composing on a fairly large scale, we shall then see what may be the
fate of a literature that has grown ashamed of employing the breadth
and energy of movement without which great poetry is impossible. Of
course there has always been, and always will be, bad rhetoric, as well
as good. The inferior imitators of Milton, for instance, used to impose
upon their own commonplace poetic conceptions the whole stylistic
apparatus which Milton had elaborated for the purpose of sustaining the
enormous movement of his verse, and enriching its texture. Bad rhetoric
is always stale rhetoric. “No bird,” as Blake says, “soars too high, if
he soars with his own wings.”
But it is an ill wind that blows nobody any good; and we may
gratefully welcome this impatience of rhetoric, in so far as it
serves to purify the air of that pestilential blight which is known
as “poetic,” but would be more truthfully named “prosaic diction.” To
quote Mr. Santayana, “when use has worn down a poetic phrase to its
external import, and rendered it an indifferent symbol for a particular
thing, that phrase has become prosaic. It has also become, by the same
process, transparent and purely instrumental.” Poetry, when it is
healthy and vigorous, is continually discarding such worn-out words and
phrases, as being indeed no longer poetical enough for its purposes.
It is the simpler, homelier words and idioms of everyday speech
that carry with them most poetic suggestion. Not but what rare and
far-fetched diction may not on fit occasions be ornamentally useful,
or justify itself by its grandeur and impressiveness. Shakespeare knew
his business when he wrote, “The multitudinous seas incarnadine”;
but how thankful we should have been if succeeding poets had had the
wisdom to refrain from debasing his coinage! Poetry need not be always
simple, sensuous or passionate; but when it wishes to be decorative
or extravagant, it will do well to remember the fable of the jay in
peacock’s feathers, and grow novel and appropriate plumage of its own.
With regard to poetic inversion, there is bound to be great divergence
both in practice and in critical taste. Swinburne considered Ben
Jonson’s line, “But might I of Jove’s nectar sup,” to be an inexcusable
blemish in an otherwise perfect masterpiece. Yet Jacobean readers would
probably have found the order of the words sufficiently natural and
unforced. It is true that since then there has been a considerable
change in our linguistic sense, due in part to the long dominance
of prose during the eighteenth century, and in part to the waning
influence of Latin. Nevertheless even now the best writers in their
most genuinely poetic moments still assert for themselves, though
within narrower limits, the licence of modifying the strict grammatical
order. This surely is as it ought to be; for though a language like
ours, which has shed most of its inflections, is compelled to have
a more rigid word-order than an inflected language like Latin, yet
emotional stress and the need for rhetorical emphasis will always, even
in prose, tempt writers to violate the conventional rules, and still
more in poetry, where the position of words and phrases in relation to
the line is of such, paramount importance.