true. He must have won your credit and confidence in his words, by
proofs of habitual veracity and sincerity, before you can so receive the
words which come from his heart that they will move your own. If, in the
utterance of what he offers to you as the cry or the deep longing of
passion, you catch him in busily noticing trifles--for which very likely
he gets praised for “accurate observation of nature”--you will put him
down as one who knows nothing of the passion he is pretending to
express. If you detect him in the endeavour to say “fine things” in
order to win your admiration for himself, instead of rendering his whole
utterance a single true thing, which shall win your sympathy with the
thought or feeling by which he declares himself to be dominated, the
result will be the same; as also it will be if you discover that the
beauty of his words is obtained rather by the labour of polish than the
inward labour and true finish of passion. When, on the other hand, some
familiarity with the poet’s work has assured you that, though his speech
may be unequal and sometimes inadequate, it is never false; that he has
always something to say, even when he fails in saying it: then you will
not only believe in and be moved by what he says well; but when the
form is sometimes imperfect you will be carried over such passages, as
over thin ice, by the formative power of passion or feeling which
quickens the whole; although you would reject such passages with disgust
were they found in the writing of a man in whose thoughts you know that
the manner stands first and the matter second.
X
THE POETRY OF NEGATION
Poetry is essentially catholic and affirmative, dealing only with the
permanent facts of nature and humanity, and interested in the events and
controversies of its own time only so far as they evolve manifestly
abiding fruits. But the abiding fruits of such events and controversies
are very rarely manifest until the turmoil in which they are produced
has long since subsided; and therefore poets, in all times before our
own, have either allowed the present to drift unheeded by or have so
handled its phenomena as to make them wholly subsidiary to and
illustrative of matters of well-ascertained stability. The many
occasional poems of past times, of which temporary incidents have been
the subjects, in no way contradict this assertion in the main; and the
casual example of a poet like Dryden affords only the confirming
exception. Dryden was fond of protesting, especially when he was a
Catholic; and there is no doubt but that this habit added greatly to his
popularity in his lifetime, as it does to the favour in which some of
the most distinguished of our modern poets are now held; but all those
points which probably constituted the high lights of Dryden’s poetry to
his contemporaries have suffered in course of time a change like that
which has come over the whites of many of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ pictures;
and it is much to be feared that a similar fate awaits a large
proportion of what has been written by several of the best poets of the
generation which is now passing away. Most of our recent poets, even
while condemning political revolution, have shared in the ideas or
feelings which are at the bottom of revolutions, a hope which the facts
of nature do not justify, and a disbelief in what those facts do
justify--namely, the ineradicable character of moral evil, with its
circumstantial consequences. The heart of the modern poet is, as a rule,
always vibrating between the extremes of despondent grumbling at the
present conditions and hasty and unreasonable aspirations for the
improvement of his kind; his tragedies and hymns of rejoicing are alike
void of the dignity and repose which arise from a sound confession of
the facts of humanity and a cheerful resignation to its imperfections;
and he whose true function is to stand aside as the tranquil seer too
often now becomes the excited agent in matters which concern him least
of all men, because of all men he is the least fitted to meddle with
them. It is hard to say which is more wonderful--the clearness of the
true poet’s vision for things when he is contented with looking at them
as they are, or his blindness when he fancies he can mend them. Famous
statesmen have marvellously drivelled in verse, but not more
marvellously than famous poets have drivelled in what pertains to
statesmanship. It is scarcely without a feeling of amazement that a man
of ordinary good sense contrasts the power of poetic vision in writers
like Victor Hugo and Carlyle with the childishness of their judgments
when they propose antidotes for evils which they so clearly see, but for
which they do not see that there are no antidotes, but only palliatives.
Looking for what they fancy may be, when their vocation is to proclaim
with clearness that which is, one poet will shriek to us (for untruths
cannot be sung) that all will be well when King Log is down and King
Stork reigns in his stead; another that Niagara may yet be dammed if
country gentlemen will hire drill-sergeants to put their gardeners and
farm-labourers through the goose-step; another says the world will be
saved if a few gentlemen and ladies, with nothing better to do, will
take to playing at being their own domestics; a fourth, in order to save
morals, proposes their abolition; a fifth proclaims that all will have
good wages when there remains no one to pay them; a sixth discovers in
the science of the future a sedative for human passions instead of a
wider platform for their display; and so on. Others, who have no patent
medicines on hand, impotently grumble or rage at evils in which, if they
looked steadily, they might discern the good of justice, or that of
trial, or both (as great poets in past times always have done); and,
instead of truly singing, they sob hysterical sympathy with such
sufferings in others as, if they were their own, they either would bear
or know that they ought to bear with equanimity.
The statesman, the social reformer, the political economist, the natural
philosopher, the alms-giver, the hospital visitor, the preacher, even
the cynical humorist, has each his function, and each is rightly more or
less negative; but the function of the poet is clearly distinguished
from all of these, and is higher though less obtrusive than any. It is
simply affirmative of things which it greatly concerns men to know, but
which they have either not discovered or have allowed to lapse into the
death of commonplace. He alone has the power of revealing by his insight
and magic words the undreamt-of mines of felicity which exist
potentially for all in social relationships and affections. The
inexhaustible glories of nature are a blank for many who are yet able to
behold them reflected in his perceptions. His convincing song can
persuade many to believe in, if they do not attain to taste--as he, if
indeed he be a poet, must have tasted--the sweet and wholesome kernel
which the rough shell of unmerited suffering conceals for those who are
patient. And he can so contemplate the one real evil in the world as to
give body and life and intelligibility to that last and sharpest cry of
faith, “O felix culpa!”
The temptations which our time offers to the poet in order to induce him
to forsake his own line are very great, and poets are human. The
conceited present craves to have singers of its own, who will praise it,
or at least abuse it; and it pays them well for pandering to its
self-consciousness, lavishing its best honours upon them as leaders of
the “Liberal movement,” and scoffing at those, as “behind their time,”
who stand apart and watch and help those abiding developments of
humanity which advance “with the slow process of the suns.”
XI
THE LIMITATIONS OF GENIUS
In art, as in higher matters, “strait is the gate, and narrow is the
way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it;” and the
initial cause of failure, in many who seem to have faculties which
should ensure success, is not so much the difficulty of the road which
leads to it, as want of humility in confessing its narrowness. Each man
is by birth a unique individuality, which the circumstances of his life
will increase and develop continually, if he be content to do his duty
in the station, intellectual and otherwise, to which it has pleased God
to call him, without falling below its obligations or assuming others
which have not been laid upon him. The low but still priceless degree of
genius which consists in individuality in manners, and which renders the
possessor of it powerfully though imperceptibly edifying in all
companies, is open to all, though few are sufficiently simple and honest
and unambitious to attain to it, by turning neither to the right hand
nor the left in pursuit of their particular good of life.
“Originality,” whether in manners, action, or art, consists simply in a
man’s being upon his own line; in his advancing with a single mind
towards his unique apprehension of good; and in his doing so in harmony
with the universal laws which secure to all men the liberty of doing as
he is doing, without hindrance from his or any other’s individuality.
Unless “originality” thus works in submission to and harmony with
general law, it loses its nature. In morals it becomes sin or insanity,
in manners and in art oddity and eccentricity, which are in reality the
extreme opposites and travesties of originality. As in religion it is
said that “no man can know whether he is worthy of love,” so in art and
ordinary life no man can know whether he is original. If through
habitual fidelity to his idea of good he has attained to originality, he
will be the last person in the world to know it. If he thinks he is
original, he is probably not so; and if he is commonly praised for
originality, he may hardly hope to attain to any such distinction.
Originality never expresses itself in harsh and obtrusive singularities.
A society of persons of true originality in manners would be like an
oak-tree, the leaves of which all look alike until they are carefully
compared, when it is found that they are all different. In art, the
sphere of extraordinary originalities, there is the same absence of
strongly pronounced distinctions, and therefore the same withdrawal from
the recognition of the vulgar, who look for originality in antics,
oddities, crudities, and incessant violations of the universal laws,
which true originality religiously observes; its very function
consisting, as it does, in upholding those laws and illustrating them
and making them unprecedentedly attractive by its own peculiar emphases
and modulations.
The individuality or “genius” of a man, which results from fidelity in
life and art to his “ruling love,” is almost necessarily narrow.
Shakespeare is the only artist that ever lived whose genius has even
approached to universality. His range is so great that ordinary readers,
if, like Mr. Frederic Harrison, they had the courage to speak their
impressions, would with him condemn the greater part of his work as
“rubbish”--that is, as having no counterpart in the “positivism” of
their actual or imaginative experience. Every play of Shakespeare is a
new vision--not only a new aspect of his vision, as is the case with the
different works of nearly all other artists, even the greatest.
Narrowness, indeed, so far from being opposed to greatness in art, is
often its condition. Dante and Wordsworth are proofs that greatness of
genius consists in seeing clearly rather than much; and well it would
have been both for poets and for readers had the former always or even
generally understood the economy of moving always on their own lines.
Nothing has so much injured modern art as the artist’s ambition to show
off his “breadth”; and many an immortal lyric or idyll has been lost
because the lyric or idyllic poet has chosen to forsake his line for the
production of exceedingly mortal epics or tragedies. The modern custom
of exhibiting all the works of a single painter at a time affords proof
which every one will understand of what has been said. Who, with an eye
for each painter’s true quality, can have gone over the collections in
recent years of the pictures of Landseer, Reynolds, Rossetti, Blake,
Holman Hunt, and others, without a feeling of surprise, and some perhaps
irrational disappointment, at the discovery for the first time of the
artist’s limitations? Each had painted the same vision over and over
again! There was no harm in that. The mistake was in bringing together
the replicas which should have adorned “palace chambers far apart.” But
poets, whose “works” are always collectively exhibited, should beware
how they betray the inevitable fact of the narrowness of genius. Not
only should they never leave their own line for another which is not
their own, but they should be equally careful not to go over it again
when they have once got to the end of it.
XII
LOVE AND POETRY
Every man and woman who has not denied or falsified nature knows, or at
any rate feels, that love, though the least “serious,” is the most
significant of all things. The wise do not talk much about this
knowledge, for fear of exposing its delicate edge to the stolid
resistance of the profligate and unbelieving, and because its light,
though, and for the reason that, it exceeds all other, is deficient in
definition. But they see that to this momentary transfiguration of life
all that is best in them looks forward or looks back, and that it is for
this the race exists, and not this for the race--the seed for the
flower, not the flower for the seed. All religions have sanctified this
love, and have found in it their one word for and image of their fondest
and highest hopes; and the Catholic has exalted it into a “great
Sacrament,” holding that, with Transubstantiation--which it
resembles--it is only unreasonable because it is above reason. “The love
which is the best ground of marriage,” writes also the Protestant and
“judicious” Hooker, “is that which is least able to render a reason for
itself.” Indeed, the extreme unreasonableness of this passion, which
gives cause for so much blaspheming to the foolish, is one of its surest
sanctions and a main cause of its inexhaustible interest and power; for
who but a “scientist” values greatly or is greatly moved by anything he
can understand--that which can be comprehended being necessarily less
than we are ourselves?
In this matter the true poet must always be a mystic--altogether to the
vulgar, and more or less to all who have not attained to his peculiar
knowledge. For what is a mystery but that which one does not know? The
common handicrafts used to be called mysteries; and their professors
were mystics to outsiders exactly in the sense that poets or
theologians, with sure, but to them uncommunicated and perhaps
incommunicable, knowledge, are mystics to the many. The poet simply
knows more than they do; but it flatters their malignant vanity to call
him names which they mean to be opprobrious, though they are not,
because he is not such a spiritual pauper as themselves. But poets are
mystics, not only by virtue of knowledge which the greater part of
mankind does not possess, but also because they deal with knowledge
against which the accusation of dunces who know the differential
calculus is etymologically true--namely, that it is _absurd_. Love is
eternally absurd, for that which is the root of all things must itself
be without root. Aristotle says that things are unintelligible to man in
proportion as they are simple; and another says, in speaking of the
mysteries of love, that the angels themselves desire in vain to look
into these things.
In the hands of the poet mystery does not hide knowledge, but reveals it
as by its proper medium. Parables and symbols are the only possible
modes of expressing realities which are clear to perception though dark
to the understanding. “Without a parable he spake not” who always spake
of primary realities. Every spiritual reality fades into something else,
and none can tell the point at which it fades. The only perfectly
definite things in the universe are the conceptions of a fool, who would
deny the sun he lives by if he could not see its disk. Natural sciences
are definite, because they deal with laws which are not realities but
conditions of realities. The greatest and perhaps the only real use of
natural science is to supply similes and parables for poets and
theologians.
But if the realities of love were not in themselves dark to the
understanding, it would be necessary to darken them--not only lest they
should be profaned, but also because, as St. Bernard says, “The more the
realities of heaven are clothed with obscurity, the more they delight
and attract, and nothing so much heightens longing as such tender
refusal.” “Night,” says the inspirer of St. Bernard, “is the light of my
pleasures.”
Love is rooted deeper in the earth than any other passion; and for that
cause its head, like that of the Tree Igdrasil, soars higher into
heaven. The heights demand and justify the depths, as giving them
substance and credibility. “That He hath ascended--what is it but
because He first also descended into the lower parts of the earth?” Love
“reconciles the highest with the lowest, ordering all things strongly
and sweetly from end to end.” St. Bernard says that “divine love”
(religion) “has its first root in the most secret of the human
affections.” This affection is the only key to the inner sanctuaries of
that faith which declares, “Thy Maker is thy Husband;” the only clue by
which searchers of the “secret of the King,” in the otherwise
inscrutable writings of prophet and apostle, discover, as Keble writes,
“the loving hint that meets the longing guess,” which looks to the
future for the satisfying and abiding reality, the passage of whose
momentary shadow forms the supreme glory of our mortality.
The whole of after-life depends very much upon how life’s transient
transfiguration in youth by love is subsequently regarded; and the
greatest of all the functions of the poet is to aid in his readers the
fulfilment of the cry, which is that of nature as well as religion, “Let
not my heart forget the things mine eyes have seen.” The greatest
perversion of the poet’s function is to falsify the memory of that
transfiguration of the senses, and to make light of its sacramental
character. This character is instantly recognised by the unvitiated
heart and apprehension of every youth and maiden; but it is very easily
forgotten and profaned by most, unless its sanctity is upheld by priests
and poets. Poets are naturally its prophets--all the more powerful
because, like the prophets of old, they are wholly independent of the
priests, and are often the first to discover and rebuke the lifelessness
into which that order is always tending to fall. If society is to
survive its apparently impending dangers, it must be mainly by guarding
and increasing the purity of the sources in which society begins. The
world is finding out, as it has often done before, and more or less
forgotten, that it cannot do without religion. Love is the first thing
to wither under its loss. What love does in transfiguring life, that
religion does in transfiguring love: as any one may see who compares one
state or time with another. Love is sure to be something less than human
if it is not something more; and the so-called extravagances of the
youthful heart, which always claims a character for divinity in its
emotions, fall necessarily into sordid, if not shameful, reaction, if
those claims are not justified to the understanding by the faith which
declares man and woman to be priest and priestess to each other of
relations inherent in Divinity itself, and proclaimed in the words “Let
us make man in our own image” and “male and female created he them.”
Nothing can reconcile the intimacies of love to the higher feelings,
unless the parties to them are conscious--and true lovers always
are--that, for the season at least, they justify the words “I have said,
Ye are gods.” Nuptial love bears the clearest marks of being nothing
other than the rehearsal of a communion of a higher nature. Its felicity
consists in a perpetual conversion of phase from desire to sacrifice,
and from sacrifice to desire, accompanied by unchangeable complaisance
in the delight shining in the beauty of the beloved; and it is agitated
in all its changes by fear, without which love cannot long exist as
emotion. Such a state, in proportion to its fervour, delicacy, and
perfection, is ridiculous unless it is regarded as a “great sacrament.”
It is the inculcation of this significance which has made love between
man and woman what it is now--at least to the idea and aspirations of
all good minds. It is time that the sweet doctrine should be enforced
more clearly. Love being much more respected and religion much less than
of old, the danger of profanation is not so great as it was when
religion was revered and love despised. The most characteristic virtue
of woman, or at least the most alluring of her weaknesses--her not
caring for masculine truth and worth unless they woo her with a smile or
a touch or some such flattery of her senses--is the prevailing vice of
most men, especially in these times. This general effeminacy is the
poet’s great opportunity. It is his pontifical privilege to feel the
truth; and his function is to bridge the gulf between severe verity and
its natural enemy, feminine sentiment, by speech which, without any
sacrifice of the former, is “simple, sensuous, and passionate.” He
insinuates in nerve-convincing music the truths which the mass of
mankind must feel before they believe. He leads them by their affections
to things above their affections, making Urania acceptable to them by
her prænomen Venus. He is the apostle of the Gentiles, and conveys to
them, without any flavour of cant or exclusiveness, the graces which the
chosen people have too often denied or disgraced in their eyes.
XIII
KEATS
Mr. Sidney Colvin’s book upon Keats is, in the main, a welcome exception
to what has become, of late, the rule in this class of work. It is
remarkably just, and every good reader will feel it to be the more
warmly appreciative because it is scarcely ever extravagantly so. The
bulk of Keats’s poetry, including “Endymion,” is estimated at its true
worth, which, as Keats--the severest judge of his own work--knew and
confessed, was not much; and the little volume (justly styled by Mr.
Colvin “immortal”) which was published in 1820, and which does not
consist of more than about 3000 lines, is declared to contain nearly the
whole of the poet’s effective writing. And even in this little
volume--which includes “Lamia,” “Isabella,” “The Eve of St. Agnes,” the
five “Odes,” and “Hyperion”--Mr. Colvin acutely detects and boldly
points out many serious defects. From the comparatively worthless waste
of the rest of Keats’s writing, Mr. Colvin picks out with accurate
discernment the few pieces and passages of real excellence; and he does
criticism good service in directing attention to the especial value of
the fragment called “The Eve of St. Mark,” and of that which is probably
the very finest lyric in the English language, “La Belle Dame sans
Merci.”