landscape of Yorkshire moors, with its touches of stern and tender
memory, 'The mute bird sitting on the stone,' 'A little and a lone green
lane,' has a quality more thrilling than that of Wordsworth. There is
none of his observation, and none of his sense of a benignant 'presence
far more deeply interfused'; but there is the voice of the heart's
roots, crying out to its home in the earth.
At first this unornamented verse may seem forbidding, may seem even to
be ordinary, as an actual moorland may, to those for whom it has no
special attraction. But in the verse, as on the moors, there is space,
wind, and the smell of the earth; and there is room to be alone, that
liberty which this woman cried for when she cried:
Leave the heart that now I bear,
And give me liberty.
To be alone was for her to be alone with 'a chainless soul,' which asked
of whatever powers might be only 'courage to endure,' constancy not to
forget, and the right to leave the door wide open to those visions that
came to her out of mere fixed contemplation: 'the God of Visions,' as
she called her imagination, 'my slave, my comrade, and my king.' And we
know that her courage was flawless, heroic, beyond praise; that she
forgot nothing, not even that love for her unspeakable brother, for
whom she has expressed in two of her poems a more than masculine
magnanimity of pity and contempt; and that at all times she could turn
inward to that world within, where her imagination waited for her,
Where thou, and I, and Liberty
Have undisputed sovereignty.
Yet even imagination, though 'benignant,' is to her a form of 'phantom
bliss' to which she will not trust herself wholly. 'So hopeless is the
world without': but is the world within ever quite frankly accepted as a
substitute, as a truer reality? She is always on her guard against
imagination as against the outer world, whose 'lies' she is resolved
shall not 'beguile' her. She has accepted reason as the final arbiter,
and desires only to see clearly, to see things as they are. She really
believed that
Earth reserves no blessing
For the unblest of heaven;
and she had an almost Calvinistic sense of her own condemnation to
unhappiness. That being so, she was suspicious of those opportunities of
joy which did come to her, or at least resolute not to believe too
implicitly in the good messages of the stars, which might be mere
dreams, or of the earth, which was only certainly kind in preparing for
her that often-thought-of grave. 'No coward soul is mine' is one of her
true sayings; but it was with difficulty that she trusted even that
message of life which she seemed to discover in death. She has to assure
herself of it, again and again: 'Who once lives, never dies!' And that
sense of personal identity which aches throughout all her poems is a
sense, not of the delight, but of the pain and ineradicable sting of
personal identity.
Her poems are all outcries, as her great novel, _Wuthering Heights_, is
one long outcry. A soul on the rack seems to make itself heard at
moments, when suffering has grown too acute for silence. Every poem is
as if torn from her. Even when she does not write seemingly in her own
person, the subjects are such disguises as 'The Prisoner,' 'Honour's
Martyr,' 'The Outcast Mother,' echoes of all the miseries and useless
rebellions of the earth. She spells over the fading characters in dying
faces, unflinchingly, with an austere curiosity; and looks closely into
the eyes of shame, not dreading what she may find there. She is always
arguing with herself, and the answers are inflexible, the answers of a
clear intellect which rebels but accepts defeat. Her doubt is itself an
affirmation, her defiance would be an entreaty but for the 'quenchless
will' of her pride. She faces every terror, and to her pained
apprehension birth and death and life are alike terrible. Only Webster's
dirge might have been said over her coffin.
What my soul bore my soul alone
Within itself may tell,
she says truthfully; but some of that long endurance of her life, in
which exile, the body's weakness, and a sense of some 'divinest anguish'
which clung about the world and all things living, had their share, she
was able to put into ascetic and passionate verse. It is sad-coloured
and desolate, but when gleams of sunlight or of starlight pierce the
clouds that hang generally above it, a rare and stormy beauty comes into
the bare outlines, quickening them with living splendour.
1906.
EDGAR ALLAN POE
The poems of Edgar Allan Poe are the work of a poet who thought
persistently about poetry as an art, and would have reduced inspiration
to a method. At their best they are perfectly defined by Baudelaire,
when he says of Poe's poetry that it is a thing 'deep and shimmering as
dreams, mysterious and perfect as crystal.' Not all the poems, few as
they are, are flawless. In a few unequal poems we have the only
essential poetry which has yet come from America, Walt Whitman's vast
poetical nature having remained a nature only, not come to be an art.
Because Poe was fantastically inhuman, a conscious artist doing strange
things with strange materials, not every one has realised how fine, how
rare, was that beauty which this artist brought into the world. It is
true that there was in the genius of Poe something meretricious; it is
the flaw in his genius; but then he had genius, and Whittier and Bryant
and Longfellow and Lowell had only varying degrees of talent. Let us
admit, by all means, that a diamond is flawed; but need we compare it
with this and that fine specimen of quartz?
Poetry Poe defined as 'the rhythmical creation of beauty'; and the first
element of poetry he found in 'the thirst for supernal beauty.' 'It is
not,' he repeats, 'the mere appreciation of the beauty before us. It is
a wild effort to reach the beauty above.... Inspired with a prescient
ecstasy of the beauty beyond the grave, it struggles by multiform
novelty of combination among the things and thoughts of time, to
anticipate some portions of that loveliness whose very elements,
perhaps, appertain solely to eternity.' The poet, then, 'should limit
his endeavours to the creation of novel moods of beauty, in form, in
colour, in sound, in sentiment.' Note the emphasis upon novel: to Poe
there was no beauty without strangeness. He makes his favourite
quotation: '"But," says Lord Bacon (how justly!) "there is no exquisite
beauty without some strangeness in the proportions." Take away this
element of strangeness--of unexpectedness--of novelty--of
originality--call it what we will--and all that is ethereal in
loveliness is lost at once.... We lose, in short, all that assimilates
the beauty of earth with what we dream of the beauty of heaven!' And, as
another of the elements of this creation of beauty, there must be
indefiniteness. 'I _know_,' he says, 'that indefiniteness is an element
of the true music--I mean of the true musical expression. Give to it any
undue decision--imbue it with any very determinate tone--and you deprive
it at once of its ethereal, its ideal, its intrinsic and essential
character.' Do we not seem to find here an anticipation of Verlaine's
'Art Poétique': '_Pas la couleur, rien que la nuance_'? And is not the
essential part of the poetical theory of Mallarmé and of the French
Symbolists enunciated in this definition and commendation of 'that class
of composition in which there lies beneath the transparent upper current
of meaning an under or _suggestive_ one'? To this 'mystic or secondary
impression' he attributes 'the vast force of an accompaniment in
music.... With each note of the lyre is heard a ghostly, and not always
a distinct, but an august soul-exalting _echo_.' Has anything that has
been said since on that conception of poetry without which no writer of
verse would, I suppose, venture to write verse, been said more subtly or
more precisely?
And Poe does not end here, with what may seem generalities. 'Beyond the
limits of beauty,' he says of poetry, 'its province does not extend. Its
sole arbiter is Taste. With the Intellect or with the Conscience it has
only collateral relations. It has no dependence, unless incidentally,
upon either Duty or Truth.' And of the poet who said, not meaning
anything very different from what Poe meant, 'Beauty is truth, truth
beauty,' he says: 'He is the sole British poet who has never erred in
his themes.' And, as if still thinking of Keats, he says: 'It is chiefly
amid forms of physical loveliness (we use the word _forms_ in its widest
sense as embracing modifications of sound and colour) that the soul
seeks the realisation of its dreams of Beauty.' And, with more earnest
insistence on those limits which he knew to be so much more necessary to
guard in poetry than its so-called freedom ('the true artist will avail
himself of no "license" whatever'), he states, with categorical
precision: 'A poem, in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by
having, for its _immediate_ object, pleasure, not truth; to romance, by
having, for its object, an _indefinite_ instead of a _definite_
pleasure, being a poem only so far as this object is attained; romance
presenting perceptible images with definite, poetry with _in_definite
sensations, to which end music is an _essential_, since comprehension of
sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Music, when combined with
a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music, without the idea, is simply music;
the idea, without the music, is prose, from its very definiteness.'
And he would set these careful limits, not only to the province of
poetic pleasure, but to the form and length of actual poetry. 'A long
poem,' he says, with more truth than most people are quite willing to
see, 'is a paradox.' 'I hold,' he says elsewhere, 'that a long poem does
not exist. I maintain that the phrase, "a long poem," is simply a flat
contradiction in terms.' And, after defining his ideal, 'a rhymed poem,
not to exceed in length what might be perused in an hour,' he says,
very justly, that 'within this limit alone can the highest order of true
poetry exist.' In another essay he narrows the duration to 'half an
hour, at the very utmost'; and wisely. In yet another essay he suggests
'a length of about one hundred lines' as the length most likely to
convey that unity of impression, with that intensity of true poetical
effect, in which he found the highest merit of poetry. Remember, that of
true poetry we have already had his definition; and concede, that a
loftier conception of poetry as poetry, poetry as lyric essence, cannot
easily be imagined. We are too ready to accept, under the general name
of poetry, whatever is written eloquently in metre; to call even
Wordsworth's _Excursion_ a poem, and to accept _Paradise Lost_ as
throughout a poem. But there are not thirty consecutive lines of
essential poetry in the whole of _The Excursion_, and, while _Paradise
Lost_ is crammed with essential poetry, that poetry is not consecutive;
but the splendid workmanship comes in to fill up the gaps, and to hold
our attention until the poetry returns. Essential poetry is an essence
too strong for the general sense; diluted, it can be endured; and, for
the most part, the poets dilute it. Poe could conceive of it only in the
absolute; and his is the counsel of perfection, if of a perfection
almost beyond mortal powers. He sought for it in the verse of all poets;
he sought, as few have ever sought, to concentrate it in his own verse;
and he has left us at least a few poems, '_ciascun distinto e di fulgore
e d'arte_,' in which he has found, within his own limits, the absolute.
1906.
THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES
With the strange fortune that always accompanied him, in life and in
death, Beddoes has not merely escaped the indiscriminate applause which
he would never have valued, but he has remained a bibliographical rather
than a literary rarity. Few except the people who collect first
editions--not, as a rule, the public for a poet--have had the chance of
possessing _Death's Jest-Book_ (1850) and the _Poems_ (1851). At last
Beddoes has been made accessible, the real story of his death, that
suicide so much in the casual and determined manner of one of his own
characters.
'The power of the man is immense and irresistible.' Browning's emphatic
phrase comes first to the memory, and remains always the most
appropriate word of eulogy. Beddoes has been rashly called a great poet.
I do not think he was a great poet, but he was, in every sense of the
word, an astonishing one. Read these lines, and remember that they were
written just at that stagnant period (1821-1826) which comes between the
period of Keats, Shelley, and Byron, and the period of Browning and
Tennyson. It is a murderer who speaks:
I am unsouled, dishumanised, uncreated;
My passions swell and grow like brutes conceived;
My feet are fixing roots, and every limb
Is billowy and gigantic, till I seem
A wild, old, wicked mountain in the air:
And the abhorred conscience of this murder,
It will grow up a lion, all alone,
A mighty-maned, grave-mouthed prodigy,
And lair him in my caves: and other thoughts,
Some will be snakes, and bears, and savage wolves,
And when I lie tremendous in the desert,
Or abandoned sea, murderers and idiot men
Will come to live upon my rugged sides,
Die, and be buried in me. Now it comes;
I break, and magnify, and lose my form,
And yet I shall be taken for a man,
And never be discovered till I die.
How much this has of the old, splendid audacity of the Elizabethans! How
unlike timid modern verse! Beddoes is always large, impressive; the
greatness of his aim gives him a certain claim on respectful
consideration. That his talent achieved itself, or ever could have
achieved itself, he himself would have been the last to affirm. But he
is a monumental failure, more interesting than many facile triumphs.
The one important work which Beddoes actually completed, _Death's
Jest-Book_, is nominally a drama in five acts. All the rest of his work,
except a few lyrics and occasional poems, is also nominally dramatic.
But there never was anything less dramatic in substance than this mass
of admirable poetry in dialogue. Beddoes' genius was essentially
lyrical: he had imagination, the gift of style, the mastery of rhythm, a
strange choiceness and curiosity of phrase. But of really dramatic power
he had nothing. He could neither conceive a coherent plot, nor develop a
credible situation. He had no grasp on human nature, he had no
conception of what character might be in men and women, he had no
faculty of expressing emotion convincingly. Constantly you find the most
beautiful poetry where it is absolutely inappropriate, but never do you
find one of those brief and memorable phrases, words from the heart,
for which one would give much beautiful poetry. To take one instance: an
Arab slave wishes to say that he has caught sight of a sail nearing the
coast. And this is how he says it:
I looked abroad upon the wide old world,
And in the sky and sea, through the same clouds,
The same stars saw I glistening, and nought else,
And as my soul sighed unto the world's soul,
Far in the north a wind blackened the waters,
And, after that creating breath was still,
A dark speck sat on the sky's edge: as watching
Upon the heaven-girt border of my mind
The first faint thought of a great deed arise,
With force and fascination I drew on
The wished sight, and my hope seemed to stamp
Its shade upon it. Not yet is it clear
What, or from whom, the vessel.
In scenes which aim at being passionate one sees the same inability to
be natural. What we get is always literature; it is never less than
that, nor more than that. It is never frank, uncompromising nature. The
fact is, that Beddoes wrote from the head, collectively, and without
emotion, or without inspiration, save in literature. All Beddoes'
characters speak precisely the same language, express the same desires;
all in the same way startle us by their ghostly remoteness from flesh
and blood. 'Man is tired of being merely human,' Siegfried says, in
_Death's Jest-Book_, and Beddoes may be said to have grown tired of
humanity before he ever came to understand it.
Looked at from the normal standpoint, Beddoes' idea of the drama was
something wildly amateurish. As a practical playwright he would be
beneath contempt; but what he aimed at was something peculiar to
himself, a sort of spectral dramatic fantasia. He would have admitted
his obligations to Webster and Tourneur, to all the _macabre_
Elizabethan work; he would have admitted that his foundations were based
on literature, not on life; but he would have claimed, and claimed
justly, that he had produced, out of many strange elements, something
which has a place apart in English poetry. _Death's Jest-Book_ is
perhaps the most morbid poem in our literature. There is not a page
without its sad, grotesque, gay, or abhorrent imagery of the tomb. A
slave cannot say that a lady is asleep without turning it into a parable
of death:
Sleeping, or feigning sleep,
Well done of her: 'tis trying on a garb
Which she must wear, sooner or later, long:
'Tis but a warmer, lighter death.
Not Baudelaire was more amorous of corruption; not Poe was more
spellbound by the scent of graveyard earth. So Beddoes has written a new
Dance of Death, in poetry; has become the chronicler of the praise and
ridicule of Death. 'Tired of being merely human,' he has peopled a play
with confessed phantoms. It is natural that these eloquent speakers
should pass us by with their words, that they should fail to move us by
their sorrows or their hates: they are not intended to be human, except,
indeed, in the wizard humanity of Death.
I have said already that the genius of Beddoes is not dramatic, but
lyrical. What was really most spontaneous in him (nothing was quite
spontaneous) was the impulse of song-writing. And it seems to me that he
is really most successful in sweet and graceful lyrics like this
_Dirge_, so much more than 'half in love with easeful death.'
If thou wilt ease thine heart
Of love and all its smart,
Then sleep, dear, sleep;
And not a sorrow
Hang any tear on your eyelashes;
Lie still and deep,
Sad soul, until the sea-wave washes
The rim o' the sun to-morrow,
In eastern sky.
But wilt thou cure thine heart
Of love and all its smart,
Then die, dear, die;
'Tis deeper, sweeter,
Than on a rose-bank to lie dreaming
With folded eye;
And then alone, amid the beaming
Of love's stars, thou'lt meet her
In eastern sky.
A beautiful lyrist, a writer of charming, morbid, and magnificent poetry
in dramatic form, Beddoes will survive to students, not to readers, of
English poetry, somewhere in the neighbourhood of Ebenezer Jones and
Charles Wells. Charles Wells was certainly more of a dramatist, a writer
of more sustained and Shakespearean blank verse; Ebenezer Jones had
certainly a more personal passion to express in his rough and
tumultuous way; but Beddoes, not less certainly, had more of actual
poetical genius than either. And in the end only one thing counts:
actual poetical genius.
1891.
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
_Salammbô_ is an attempt, as Flaubert, himself his best critic, has told
us, to 'perpetuate a mirage by applying to antiquity the methods of the
modern novel.' By the modern novel he means the novel as he had
reconstructed it; he means _Madame Bovary_. That perfect book is perfect
because Flaubert had, for once, found exactly the subject suited to his
method, had made his method and his subject one. On his scientific side
Flaubert is a realist, but there is another, perhaps a more intimately
personal side, on which he is lyrical, lyrical in a large, sweeping way.
The lyric poet in him made _La Tentation de Saint-Antoine_, the analyst
made _L'Education Sentimentale_; but in _Madame Bovary_ we find the
analyst and the lyric poet in equilibrium. It is the history of a woman,
as carefully observed as any story that has ever been written, and
observed in surroundings of the most ordinary kind. But Flaubert finds
the romantic material which he loved, the materials of beauty, in
precisely that temperament which he studies so patiently and so cruelly.
Madame Bovary is a little woman, half vulgar and half hysterical,
incapable of a fine passion; but her trivial desires, her futile
aspirations after second-rate pleasures and second-hand ideals, give to
Flaubert all that he wants: the opportunity to create beauty out of
reality. What is common in the imagination of Madame Bovary becomes
exquisite in Flaubert's rendering of it, and by that counterpoise of a
commonness in the subject he is saved from any vague ascents of rhetoric
in his rendering of it.
In writing _Salammbô_ Flaubert set himself to renew the historical
novel, as he had renewed the novel of manners. He would have admitted,
doubtless, that perfect success in the historical novel is impossible,
by the nature of the case. We are at best only half conscious of the
reality of the things about us, only able to translate them
approximately into any form of art. How much is left over, in the
closest transcription of a mere line of houses in a street, of a passing
steamer, of one's next-door neighbour, of the point of view of a
foreigner looking along Piccadilly, of one's own state of mind, moment
by moment, as one walks from Oxford Circus to the Marble Arch? Think,
then, of the attempt to reconstruct no matter what period of the past,
to distinguish the difference in the aspect of a world perhaps bossed
with castles and ridged with ramparts, to two individualities encased
within chain-armour! Flaubert chose his antiquity wisely: a period of
which we know too little to confuse us, a city of which no stone is left
on another, the minds of Barbarians who have left us no psychological
documents. 'Be sure I have made no fantastic Carthage,' he says proudly,
pointing to his documents; Ammianus Marcellinus, who has furnished him
with 'the _exact_ form of a door'; the Bible and Theophrastus, from
which he obtains his perfumes and his precious stones; Gresenius, from
whom he gets his Punic names; the _Mémoires de l'Académie des
Inscriptions_. 'As for the temple of Tanit, I am sure of having
reconstructed it as it was, with the treatise of the Syrian Goddess,
with the medals of the Duc de Luynes, with what is known of the temple
at Jerusalem, with a passage of St. Jerome, quoted by Seldon (_De Diis
Syriis_), with the plan of the temple of Gozzo, which is quite
Carthaginian, and best of all, with the ruins of the temple of Thugga,
which I have seen myself, with my own eyes, and of which no traveller or
antiquarian, so far as I know, has ever spoken.' But that, after all, as
he admits (when, that is, he has proved point by point his minute
accuracy to all that is known of ancient Carthage, his faithfulness to
every indication which can serve for his guidance, his patience in
grouping rather than his daring in the invention of action and details),
that is not the question. 'I care little enough for archæology! If the
colour is not uniform, if the details are out of keeping, if the manners
do not spring from the religion and the actions from the passions, if
the characters are not consistent, if the costumes are not appropriate
to the habits and the architecture to the climate, if, in a word, there
is not harmony, I am in error. If not, no.'
And there, precisely, is the definition of the one merit which can give
a historical novel the right to exist, and at the same time a definition
of the merit which sets _Salammbô_ above all other historical novels.
Everything in the book is strange, some of it might easily be
bewildering, some revolting; but all is in harmony. The harmony is like
that of Eastern music, not immediately conveying its charm, or even the
secret of its measure, to Western ears; but a monotony coiling
perpetually upon itself, after a severe law of its own. Or rather, it is
like a fresco, painted gravely in hard, definite colours, firmly
detached from a background of burning sky; a procession of Barbarians,
each in the costume of his country, passes across the wall; there are
battles, in which elephants fight with men; an army besieges a great
city, or rots to death in a defile between mountains; the ground is
paved with dead men; crosses, each bearing its living burden, stand
against the sky; a few figures of men and women appear again and again,
expressing by their gestures the soul of the story.