naturally so, for the smallest good poem involves a consecutiveness and
complexity of thought which are only required in paintings of a
character which Blake rarely attempted. Yet, even as a painter his
reputation has until lately been much exaggerated. The recent exhibition
of his collected drawings and paintings was a great blow to the fame
which had grown up from a haphazard acquaintance by his admirers with a
few sketches or an illustrated poem. Here and there there was a gleam of
such pure and simple genius as is often revealed in the speech of a
finely natured child amid its ordinary chatter; here and there the
expression of a tender or distempered dream, which was not like anything
else in the spectator’s experience; now and then an outline that had a
look of Michael Angelo, with sometimes hints which might have formed the
themes of great works, and which justified the saying of Fuseli that
“Blake is damned good to steal from”; but the effect of the whole
collection was dejecting and unimpressive, and did little towards
confirming its creator’s opinion that Titian, Reynolds, and Gainsborough
were bad artists, and Blake, Barry, and Fuseli good ones.
XVI
ROSSETTI AS A POET
The claims of Rossetti as a painter and a poet have obtained a full and
generous recognition; and he has acquired a standing in either art which
will in all probability abide, though it is far too soon to attempt any
estimate of his relative position in the permanent ranks of artists and
writers. His thoughtfulness, and the clearness and intensity of his
perceptions, do not require to be insisted upon, nor the almost
unexampled way in which he has merged--and often, it must be admitted,
confounded--the functions of painter and poet. This he has done to the
detriment of his perfection in either art; in neither of which can he be
truly said to have attained the character of mastery which may be found,
more or less, in almost all other workers of equal genius with himself,
and sometimes in those whose natural qualifications have been inferior
to his. Little of his drawing and none of his painting can be enjoyed
without the drawback of some sense of manifest technical failure; and
nearly all his poetry--which is more or less difficult by reason of the
quick succession of out-of-the-way thoughts and images, needing the
closest attention for their appreciation--is rendered unnecessarily so
by language which rarely has the fluency of perfection. In the two or
three instances in which his verse becomes fluent and more or less
masterly--notably in the “Burden of Nineveh” and “Jenny”--it ceases to
be characteristic or subtle. The “Burden of Nineveh” might have been
written by Southey, or any other writer of forcible words and thoughts
in somewhat commonplace rhythm. This fact, that fluency fails him as
soon as he gets upon his own proper ground, renders it extremely
difficult to discern and to describe exactly what that ground is. Style,
which is the true expression of the poet’s individuality--the mark by
which we discover, not what, but how, he thinks and feels--is almost
suffocated, in Rossetti’s most characteristic work, by voluntary
oddities of manner and by a manifest difficulty in so moving in the
bonds of verse as to convert them into graces. If subtle thoughts and
vivid imagery were all that went to make a poet, Rossetti would stand
very high. But these qualities must have the running commentary and
musical accompaniment of free feeling, which only a correspondingly
subtle and vivid versification can express, before they can be allowed
to constitute a claim to the highest poetical rank. Rossetti as a
versifier was as technically defective as Rossetti as a painter; his
best poems and his best paintings are the outcome, not only of very high
aims--which are as common as blackberries--but of very high aims deeply
and characteristically felt; and his superiority to many far more
technically perfect artists results from the fact that his
characteristic feeling is strong enough to make itself powerfully,
however indistinctly, perceived through the mist and obstructions of his
mannerism and defective verse.
Like all men of strong artistic individuality combined with serious
artistic faults, Rossetti has had a great influence upon the literature
of his day--such an influence as comparatively faultless writers never
exert, at least in their time. Many young versifiers and painters fancy
they are reproducing Rossetti’s intensity when they are only imitating
the most prevailing fault of his art, its tensity. His brother, William
Rossetti, in his modest and judicious introduction to these volumes,
tells how he and Gabriel used to amuse themselves in making
_bouts-rimés_. William says of his brother’s literary toys of this
sort: “Some have a _faux air_ of intensity of meaning, as well as of
expression; but their real core of significance is small.” It cannot be
denied that a careful scrutiny of much of Rossetti’s published work is
open to this criticism. It is tense without being intense. This fault is
his great attraction to his imitators, whose every sensation is
represented as a pang, delicious or otherwise, and whose mental sky is a
canopy of iron destiny compared with which the melancholy of Byron,
which likewise had so many copyists, was no more than a pleasant shade.
In endeavouring to do justice to Rossetti it must be remembered that,
though born and bred in England, he was an Italian by blood and
sympathy. His acquaintance with Englishmen and English books was by no
means wide. Love, the constant theme of his art, is in some of his most
important poems, not the English love whose stream is steady affection
and only its occasional eddies passion, and which, when disappointed,
does not cease to be love, though it becomes sorrow: but the Italian
ardour, in perennial crisis, which stabs its rival and hates its object,
if she refuses its satisfaction, as ardently as it worships her so long
as there is hope. The limitations, also, which characterise Rossetti’s
poetry belong to Italian poetry itself. There is little breadth in it,
but much acuteness. Dante is to Shakespeare as the Peak of Teneriffe to
the tableland of Tibet; and, as any reader of Rossetti’s translations of
the minor Italian poets may see, the same proportion prevails between
them and the lesser singers of England. It is therefore quite unfair to
try an essentially Italian poet, like Rossetti, by comparing his works
with the classical poetry of a nation which, for combined breadth and
height, far surpasses the poetry of all other languages present and
past, with the doubtful exception of the Greek. The English language
itself is not made for Italian thought and passion. It has about four
times as many vowel sounds as Italian and a corresponding consonantal
power; that is to say, it differs from the Italian about as much as an
organ differs from a flute. Rossetti uses little beside the flute-notes
of our English organ; and, if he had made himself complete master of
those notes, it would have been the most that could have been expected
of him. In appearance and manners Rossetti was thoroughly Italian. In
his youth especially he had the sweet and easy courtesy peculiar to his
nation. His brother says, “There was a certain British bluffness
streaking the finely poised Italian suppleness and facility.” This
describes, better than perhaps Mr. William Rossetti intended, a
characteristic which occasionally, but fortunately not often, appears in
his poetry, which is most pleasing when it is least “streaked” with
British bluffness: as it is, for example, in “Jenny.”
Rossetti’s power is chiefly shown in his long ballads, such as “Sister
Helen,” “The Bride’s Prelude,” “Rose Mary,” and “The King’s Tragedy.”
Had these been found in Percy’s “Relics,” they would have constituted
the chief ornaments of that collection. As it is, it is impossible not
to feel that they are more or less anachronisms, both in spirit and in
form. The repetition of a refrain through the fifty stanzas or so of
“Sister Helen,” the most forcible of all these lyrical narratives, has
no sufficient justification for its interruption of the fiercely flowing
history. A refrain which extends to more than three or four stanzas
requires and originally assumed a musical accompaniment. The constant
high-pressure of passion in these ballads is also an anachronism; and to
the cultured modern reader this character is calculated to defeat the
poet’s purpose, giving him an impression of cold instead of warmth, as
if the fire had a salamander instead of a heart in its centre. A kindred
fault, which Rossetti has in common with some of the most famous poets
of the century, is that of conferring upon all his images an acute and
independent clearness which is never found in the natural and truly
poetical expression of feeling. It is true, and great poets (especially
Shakespeare) have noted it, that in extreme crises of passion there will
sometimes be a moment of calm in which the minutiæ of some most trifling
object or circumstance will, as it were, photograph themselves upon the
mind. But this præternatural calm is only the “eye of the storm”; and to
scatter broadcast, over a long poem, imagery with the sharpest outlines
is to prove, not only that it has not been written from true passion,
but that the poet has not even observed the phenomena of true passion.
Such independent force and clearness of imagery can only be justified in
poems of the very lowest type of artistic construction, such as
Schiller’s “Song of the Bell” and “Childe Harold,” which scarcely
profess to have more unity than is to be found in a scrap-book. A fine
poem may or may not be full of “fine things”; but, if it does abound in
them, their independent value should only appear when they are separated
from their context. In Rossetti, as in several other modern poets of
great reputation, we are constantly being pulled up, in the professedly
fiery course of a tale of passion, to observe the moss on a rock or the
note of a chaffinch. High finish has nothing to do with this quality of
extreme definiteness in detail; indeed, it is more often exercised by
the perfect poet in blurring outlines than in giving them acuteness. It
must be admitted, however, that Rossetti had an unusual temptation to
this kind of excess in his extraordinary faculty for seeing objects in
such a fierce light of imagination as very few poets have been able to
throw upon external things. He can be forgiven for spoiling a tender
lyric by a stanza such as this, which seems scratched with an adamantine
pen upon a slab of agate--
But the sea stands spread
As one wall with the flat skies,
Where the lean black craft, like flies,
Seem wellnigh stagnated,
Soon to drop off dead.
Though the foregoing strictures apply to a large portion of Rossetti’s
work, there is a really precious residuum which they do not touch. There
are several pieces--such as “Love’s Nocturn,” “The Portrait,” “A Little
While,” and many sonnets--which are full of natural feeling expressed
with simple and subtle art; and in much of his work there is a rich and
obscure glow of insight into depths too profound and too sacred for
clear speech, even if they could be spoken: a sort of insight not at
all uncommon in the great art of past times, but exceedingly rare in the
art of our own.
XVII
MR. SWINBURNE’S SELECTIONS
It has probably been a misfortune for Mr. Swinburne’s growth as a poet
that no winter of critical neglect preceded the full recognition of his
very remarkable talents. His best friends must allow that he is still
somewhat younger in judgment than in his years and experience of
authorship. It is not, however, much to be wondered at that he should
have been tempted to rest content with having apparently attained at a
single step a height of reputation to reach which has been with most
poets the work of hard climbing during many years. Mr. Swinburne is
still in the prime of life and in full possession of his powers, and
some of his later work shows that he has that continued power of growth
which is one of the greatest privileges of genius. If he will only
listen to his own critical conscience, he may yet do work better and
much more enduring than any he has yet done. He cannot, indeed, hope to
excel certain single passages of prose and verse in which he has
attained a character of breadth and poetic ardour scarcely to be found
in any other writer of the time; but he can (and there have of late been
signs that he intends to) modify his manner of thinking and writing so
that his best--which is very good indeed--may not be discredited by so
much of the jejune in thought and composition as is to be found in a
great deal of his work heretofore. Hitherto Mr. Swinburne has been too
much given to protesting; which is not the poet’s work, even when it is
done wisely. In his future writing we shall probably hear more of the
whisper of affirmative wisdom than the whirlwind of passionate negation;
he will recognise more and more fully that the world is not and never
will be made up of Swinburnes and Rossettis, and that it is vain to
denounce popular beliefs and institutions, when he has only, to set up
in their places, others which are, and for ever will be, unintelligible
by the great majority of mankind, and inapplicable to their demands. The
people will always insist on having kings and priests; and Mr. Swinburne
has, no doubt, had his eyes too well opened by very recent history not
to discern that it would be of little use to dethrone King Log in favour
of Prime Minister Stork, or to unfrock an Archbishop of Canterbury in
order to transfer his authority to a General Booth.
Hitherto it has been impossible not to feel that there has been some
disproportion between Mr. Swinburne’s power of saying things and the
things he has to say. This defect of the “body of thought,” which
Coleridge once complained was wanting in an otherwise good poem, has
reacted upon Mr. Swinburne’s language itself, producing sometimes a
reiteration of words and imagery surpassing even that which is to be
found in the works of Shelley, and which in them arose from the same
inadequacy of matter. For example, in a passage of thirteen lines in the
present volume we have “flowery forefront of the year,” “foam-flowered
strand,” “blossom-fringe,” “flower-soft face,” and “spray-flowers”; and
in Mr. Swinburne’s poems generally it must be confessed that flowers,
stars, waves, flames and three or four other entities of the natural
order, come in so often as to suggest some narrowness of observation and
vocabulary. This defect, also, is less manifest than it used to be,
though probably the abandonment to the mere joy of words, which is
natural and not altogether ungraceful in a writer who can use them so
splendidly, will always be a characteristic of Mr. Swinburne’s poetry.
It reminds us of the rapture of Tristram in the truly magnificent
description of the bath he took before breakfast in “Sea and Sunrise,”
and the reader is often carried with like joy upon the waves of words
without troubling himself as to whether he and the poet are not both out
of their depth.
Mr. Swinburne’s mode of dealing with human passions is somewhat of an
anachronism. His heroes and heroines, like those of the old English
drama and the Scandinavian poems, often become heroic by the sacrifice
of humanity, and, thereby, of the reader’s sympathy. The pictures of
Mary Queen of Scots and of Iseult in this volume, for instance, though
painted with a great brush are not truly great, because they are not
greatly true--at all events, to any conditions which the modern world
recognises or should desire to recognise. Nor, granting that the
characters and situations are poetical, is the execution quite what it
ought to be. The effects are obtained by a cumulative rather than a
developing process; and, at the end of a long poem or passage full of
strong words and images, the idea of strength thence derived is rather
that given by a hill than the living hole of a huge tree.
Mr. Swinburne’s metrical practice should be criticised with respect; for
he has an unquestionably fine ear, and has ransacked the literature of
all times in order to discover and appropriate, or modify to his own
uses, a number of movements which, unlike our familiar English metres,
are whirlwinds and blasts of passion in themselves. Such metres,
however, should be sparingly used. They almost satisfy the ear without
any accompaniment of sound meaning, and evoke, as it were by a trick, a
current of emotion that is independent of any human feeling in the poet
himself. This is a great temptation, and Mr. Swinburne has not always
avoided the traps which he has thus set for himself. Such metres have,
moreover, the disadvantage of fixing in too peremptory a manner the key
in which the poems written in them must be sustained. They allow none of
the endless modulations which are open to the poet who writes in almost
any of our native and less emphatic measures. Mr. Swinburne has the less
reason for resorting so habitually as he does to this too easy means of
obtaining passionate effect, inasmuch as some of his very best and most
effective passages are written in our common metres. Witness the almost
incomparable apostrophe to Athens, in “Erechtheus” (unfortunately not
included in these selections), and “Sea and Sunrise,” and “Herse.”
There is one still easier and far less excusable source of effect which
every friend of the poet must rejoice to see that he has of late
abandoned. There is nothing in the _Selections_ which a schoolgirl
might not be permitted to read and understand, if she could; and there
are a number of pieces about children which are so full of pure and
tender perceptions as to cause a doubt whether, in some of his earlier
writings, the poet was not wantonly flouting the world’s opinion rather
than expressing any very real phase of his own feeling.
XVIII
ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH
Clough worshipped Truth with more than the passion of a lover, and his
writings are, for the most part, the tragic records of a life-long
devotion to a mistress who steadily refused his embraces; but as it is
greatly better to have loved without attaining than to have attained
without loving, so Clough’s ardent and unrewarded stumblings in the dark
towards his adored though unseen divinity are greatly more attractive
and edifying to those who have shared, successfully or not, the same
passion, than is that complacent fruition of her smiles which she often
accords to those who are contented to be no more than her speaking
acquaintances. Regarded from a purely intellectual point of view,
Clough’s utterances on religion, duty, etc., are little better than the
commonplaces which in these days pass through the mind and more or less
affect the feelings of almost every intelligent and educated youth
before he is twenty years of age; but there are commonplaces which cease
to be such, and become indefinitely interesting, in proportion as they
are animated by moral ardour and passion. Speech may work good by
warming as well as by enlightening; and if Clough’s writings teach no
new truth, they may inflame the love of truth, which is perhaps as great
a service. Though he professes that he can nowhere see light where light
is most necessary and longed for, his mind is utterly opposed to the
negative type; and he exactly exemplifies the class of believer whom
Richard Hooker endeavours to comfort, in his great sermon on “the
perpetuity of faith in the elect,” by the reminder that a longing to
believe is implicit faith, and that we cannot sorrow for the lack of
that which we interiorly hold to be nonexistent. A question that must
suggest itself to most readers is, What is the use and justification of
these endless and tautological lamentations over the fact--as Clough
conceived it to be--that, for such as him at least, “Christ is not
risen”? The reply is, that the responsibility of the publication of so
much that is profoundly passionate but far from profoundly intellectual
scepticism was not his. With the exception of some not very significant
critical essays, his prose consists of letters, which were of course
not meant for the public; and the greater part of his poetry remained to
the day of Clough’s death in his desk, and would probably never have
left it, with his consent, unless to be put in the fire.
Those who recognise in the “Bothie” Clough’s almost solitary claim to
literary eminence must somewhat wonder at the considerable figure he
stands for in the estimation of the present generation. The fact is that
Clough, like James Spedding, was personally far more impressive than his
works; and the singularly strong effect produced among his friends by
the extreme simplicity and shy kindliness of his life and manners, and
the at once repellent and alluring severity of his truthfulness, gave
his character a consequence beyond that of his writings with all who
knew him though ever so slightly; and the halo of this sanctity hangs,
through the report of his friends, about all that he has done, and
renders cold criticism of it almost impossible. No one who knew Clough
can so separate his personality from his writings as to be able to
criticise them fairly as literature; no one who has not known him can
understand their value as the outcome of character.
The impressionable and feminine element, which is manifest in all
genius, but which in truly effective genius is always subordinate to
power of intellect, had in Clough’s mind the preponderance. The
masculine power of intellect consists scarcely so much in the ability to
see truth, as in the tenacity of spirit which cleaves to and assimilates
the truth when it is found, and which steadfastly refuses to be blown
about by every wind of doctrine and feeling. The reiterated theme of
Clough’s poetry is that the only way of forgetting certain problems now,
and of securing their solution hereafter, is to do faithfully our
nearest duty. This is no new teaching: it is that of every religion and
all philosophy. But Clough had no power of trusting patiently to the
promise, “Do my commandments, and you shall know of the doctrine.” This
was the ruin of what might otherwise have been a fine poetic faculty. A
“Problem” will not sing even in the process of solution, much less while
it is only a hopeless and irritating “Pons.” Clough was curiously
attracted by Emerson, of whom he spoke as the only great contemporary
American. Now Emerson, at his very best, never approached greatness. He
was at highest only a brilliant metaphysical epigrammatist. But a
religion without a dogma, and with only one commandment, “Thou shalt
neither think nor do anything that is customary,” had great attractions
for Clough; to whom it never seems to have occurred that the vast mass
of mankind, for whose moral and religious welfare he felt so keenly, has
not and never can have a religion of speechless aspirations and
incommunicable feelings, and that to teach men to despise custom is to
cut the immense majority of them adrift from all moral restraint. The
promise that we shall all be priests and kings seems scarcely to be for
this world. At all events we are as far from its fulfilment now as we
were two thousand years ago; and we shall not be brought nearer to it by
any such outpourings of sarcastic discontent as go to the making of such
poems as the tedious Mephistophelian drama called “Dipsychus,” which
Clough had the good sense not to publish, though it is included with
many others of equally doubtful value in posthumous editions of his
works. This class of his poems possesses, indeed, a lively interest for
a great many people of our own time, who are in the painful state of
moral and religious ferment which these verses represent; but it is a
mere accident of the time that there is any considerable audience for
such utterances, and in a generation or two it is probable that most men
will feel surprise that there could ever have been a public who found
poetry in this sort of matter.