Clough’s in which he seems, for a time, to have got out of his slough
of introspection and doubt and to have breathed the healthy air of
nature and common humanity. In spite of many artistic shortcomings, this
poem is so healthy, human, and original, that it can scarcely fail to
survive when a good deal of far more fashionable verse shall have
disappeared from men’s memories. The one infallible note of a true
poet--the power of expressing himself in rhythmical movements of
subtilty and sweetness which baffle analysis--is also distinctly
manifest in passages of the “Bothie,” passages the music of which was,
we fancy, lingering in the ear of Tennyson when he wrote certain parts
of “Maud.” The originality of this idyl is beyond question. It is not in
the least like any other poem, and an occasionally ostentatious touch of
the manner of “Herman and Dorothea” seems to render this originality all
the more conspicuous in the main. Another note of poetical power,
scarcely less questionable than is that of sweetness and subtilty of
rhythm, is the warm and pure breath of womanhood which is exhaled from
the love-passages of this poem. Clough seems to have felt, in the
presence of a simple and amiable woman, a mystery of life which acted
for a time as the rebuke and speechless solution of all doubts and
intellectual distresses. These passages in the “Bothie,” and, in a less
degree, some others in the “Amours de Voyage,” stand, in the disturbed
course of Clough’s ordinary verse, like the deep, pure, and
sky-reflecting pools which occasionally appear in the course of a
restless mountain river.
XIX
EMERSON
The life and writings of Emerson owe their chief claim on our attention
to the fact that they represent with singular force a line of thought
and belief--if belief it can be called--which an immense number of the
young, intelligent, and sincere of the past and present generation have
been endeavouring to follow, though as yet without any remarkable or
satisfactory results. “Every man is potentially a man of genius,” is the
one dogma of Emerson’s religion--though it is nowhere put thus plainly
by him; and its one commandment is “Be a man of genius.” Absolute
nonconformity with everything, we are taught, is the first condition of
personal and social well-being; and we are enjoined to look upon our
individual insight as our one infallible guide, though it may bid us go
one way to-day and the opposite to-morrow. At the time when Emerson was
debating with himself as to whether he should throw up his office as
Unitarian preacher he seems to have had some searchings of heart as to
the validity of the new doctrine. “How,” he writes, in his Journal,
“shall the droning world get on if all its _beaux esprits_ recalcitrate
upon its approved forms and accepted constitutions and quit them in
order to be single-minded? The double-refiners would produce at the
other end the double-damned.” This is perhaps the wisest thing ever said
by Emerson; but he nevertheless chose his part definitively with the
“double refiners.” “I hate preaching,” he writes in a subsequent page of
his Journal. “Preaching is a pledge, and I wish to say what I feel and
think to-day, with the proviso that to-morrow perhaps I shall contradict
it all.” In the free use of his proviso he accordingly, for the
remainder of his life, followed and taught others to follow what he
called “intuition,” even though it should not wait for “to-morrow” to
contradict itself. For example, in the last page but one of the essay on
“Character” we are instructed to reject the doctrine of the divinity of
Christ because “the mind requires a victory to the senses, a force of
character which will convert judge, jury, soldier, and king and on the
following page we are told that, “when that love which is all-suffering,
all-abstaining, all-aspiring ... comes into our streets and houses,
only the pure and aspiring can know its face.”
Emerson’s life, journals, and letters considerably modify the impression
which his published essays and lectures are calculated to leave--namely,
that he was a mere stringer-together of lively thoughts, images, and
poetical epigrams. He seems to have made the best of his own humanity,
and to have always done the right according to his judgment, though the
doing of it sometimes involved serious pecuniary inconvenience, and, as
in the case of his opposition to the fugitive slave law, violent popular
disapprobation. He was kindly and moral in his family and social
relationships, and was conscientious even to a fault in avoiding those
venial sins of language to which the most of us are perhaps too
indifferent. His American admirers sometimes spoke of him as an “angel.”
At any rate, he was a sort of sylph. He noted of his compatriots
generally that “they have no passions, only appetites.” He seems to have
had neither passion nor appetite; and there was an utter absence of
“nonsense” about him which made it almost impossible to be intimate with
him. Margaret Fuller, his closest friend, and even his wife, whom he
loved in his own serene way, seem to have chafed under the impossibility
of getting within the adamantine sphere of self-consciousness which
surrounded him. He not only could not forget himself, but he could not
forget his grammar; and when he talked he seemed rather to be
“composing” his thoughts than thinking them. His friend and admirer, Mr.
Henry James the elder, complains that for this reason his conversation
was without charm. “For nothing ever came but epigrams, sometimes
clever, sometimes not.” His manners and discourse were, however,
invariably kind and amiable. He never seems to have uttered a personal
sarcasm, and only once in his life to have been seriously angry. This
was on occasion of the famous fugitive slave law, which he indignantly
declared would be disobeyed, if need be, by himself and every honest
man.
Dr. W. H. Furness writes of Emerson: “We were babies and schoolfellows
together. I don’t think he ever engaged in boys’ plays.... I can as
little remember when he was not literary in his pursuits as when I first
made his acquaintance.” Indeed, “orating” was in Emerson’s blood. Nearly
all his known ancestors and relatives seem to have been “ministers” of
some denomination or other. His school-days--though he never became a
scholar in any department of learning--began before he was three years
old. His father complains of the baby of two years and odd
months--“Ralph does not read very well yet”; and during all the rest of
his youth Dr. Furness says that he grew up under “the pressure of I know
not how many literary atmospheres.” Add to this the fact that his father
and mother and his aunt--who was the chief guide of his nonage--were
persons who seemed to think that love could only be manifested by severe
duty, and rarely showed him any signs of the weaknesses of “affection,”
and we have as bad a bringing-up for a moral, philosophical, and
religious teacher as could well have been devised. “The natural first,
and afterwards the spiritual.” Where innocent joy and personal affection
have not been main factors of early experience the whole life wants the
key to Christianity; and a rejection of all faith--except that in
“genius,” “over-soul,” “a somewhat which makes for righteousness,” or
some other such impotent abstraction--is, in our day, almost inevitable
in a mind of constitutional sincerity like Emerson’s, especially when
such sincerity is unaccompanied, as it was in him, by a warm and
passionate nature and its intellectual correlative, a vigorous
conscience. Emerson, though a good man--that is, one who lived up to his
lights--had little or no conscience. He admired good, but did not love
it; he denounced evil, but did not hate it, and did not even maintain
that it was hateful, but only greatly inexpedient.
Though Emerson could not see that a religion of which there is nothing
left but an “over-soul” is much the same thing as a man of whom there is
nothing left but his hat, the religious bodies to which he was for many
years more or less attached were less devoid of humour, and the joke of
a faith without a dogma became, in time, too much for their seriousness.
Consequently they agreed amicably to part, and Emerson pursued his
course; that which had hitherto been called “preaching” becoming
thenceforward lecturing and “orating.”
There can be no greater misfortune for a sincere and truthful mind like
Emerson’s than to have to get a living by “orating.” This was his
predicament, however; and there can be no doubt that his mind and his
writings were the worse for this necessity. His philosophy afforded him
only a very narrow range of subject. In all his essays and lectures he
is but ringing the changes upon three or four ideas--which are really
commonplace, though his sprightly wit and imagination give them
freshness; and it is impossible to read any single essay, much less
several in succession, without feeling that the licence of tautology is
used to its extremest limits. In a few essays--for example, “The Poet,”
“Character,” and “Love”--the writer’s heart is so much in the matter
that these endless variations of one idea have the effect of music
which delights us to the end with the reiteration of an exceedingly
simple theme; but in many other pieces it is impossible not to detect
that weariness of the task of having to coin dollars out of
transcendental sentiments to which Emerson’s letters and journals often
bear witness. But, whether delighted with or weary of his labour, there
is no progress in his thought, which resembles the spinning of a
cockchafer on a pin rather than the flight of a bird on its way from one
continent to another.
Emerson’s was a sweet and uniformly sunny spirit; but the sunshine was
that of the long Polar day, which enlightens but does not fructify. It
never even melted the icy barrier which separated his soul from others;
and men and women were nothing to him, because he never got near enough
to understand them. Hence his journals and letters about his visits to
Europe, and especially to England, are curiously superficial in
observation. He made many acute and witty remarks, such as, “Every
Englishman is a House of Commons, and expects that you will not end your
speech without proposing a measure;” but, on the whole, he quite
misunderstood the better class of our countrymen, of whom, in his second
visit to England, he had the opportunity of seeing a good deal. Although
there was much constitutional reserve, there was no real reticence in
him. His ethereal, unimpassioned ideas had, indeed, nothing in them
that, for him, commanded reticence; and he concluded that the best sort
of Englishmen were without any motives that “transcend” sense, because
he did not feel, as all such Englishmen do, that though that which
transcends sense may be infinitely dearer than all else, and even
because it is so dear, it is better not to talk of things which can
scarcely be spoken of without inadequacy and even an approach to
nonsense. Many an Englishman would turn aside with a jest from any
attempt to lead him into “transcendental” talk, not because he was less,
but because he was more “serious” than his interlocutor; and also
because the very recognition of certain kinds of knowledge involves the
recognition of obligations, to confess directly or indirectly the
fulfilment or neglect of which implies either self-praise or self-blame,
which, in ordinary circumstances, are alike indecent. In fact, Emerson
was totally deficient in the religious sense, which is very strong in
the hearts of a vast number of Englishmen who own to no fixed creed, but
who would be revolted by the profound and unconscious irreverence with
which Emerson was in the habit of speaking and writing of the most
sacred things and names. The name of “Jesus” frequently occurs in such
sentences as this: “Nor Jesus, nor Pericles, nor Cæsar, nor Angelo, nor
Washington,” etc.
If we put aside Emerson’s unconscious malpractices in this sort, the
attitude of his mind with regard to the serious beliefs of the world
were too childish for resentment or exposure. It is as if one should be
angry with a young lady who should simper, “Oh, my religion is the
religion of the Sermon on the Mount!” in answer to an attempt to talk
with her about Bossuet or Hooker.
XX
CRABBE AND SHELLEY
The firmament of fame is full of variable stars, and they are nowhere
thicker than in that great constellation of poets which marks the end of
the last and the commencement of this century. Among the names of Byron,
Moore, Rogers, Southey, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Burns,
Campbell, Crabbe, Cowper, and Scott, there are only two the lustre of
whose names has remained perfectly steady and seems likely to remain so.
Two or three, which blazed forth at once as luminaries of the first
magnitude, have gradually and persistently waned--whether or not ever to
recover any part of their lost splendour is very doubtful. The light of
one or two others has fluctuated violently, and continues to do so, with
a manifest diminution, however, in their total sum of light; one or two
others have suffered a distinct degradation from first into second or
third class lustres, and at present show no sign of further alteration.
Two at least have grown astonishingly in conspicuousness, and now glow
like the Dog-star and Aldebaran--though there are not wanting
sky-critics who declare that they discern conditions of coming change
and retrogression; and one at least has almost disappeared from the
heaven of public recognition, not, however, without prognostications
from some of an assured reassertion of a moderate if not predominating
position.
To quit figures of speech, Coleridge and Burns--though poets of very
different calibre--are the only two of the thirteen above mentioned
whose reputations have been altogether unaffected by the violent changes
of literary fashion which have taken place in the course of the century.
Each of these two poets has written a good deal which the world will
willingly let die; but Coleridge in his great way, and Burns in his
comparatively small way, have done a certain moderate amount of work so
thoroughly and manifestly well that no sane critic has ever called it
into question or ever will. By the leaders of poetic fashion Moore and
Rogers have come to be accounted as almost nowhere as poets. Southey and
Cowper now depend mainly for their fame upon a few small pieces, which
in their own day were not regarded as of much account in comparison with
such works as _The Task_ and _The Curse of Kehama_; Campbell now lives
only, but vigorously, in a few lyrics. Who but Mr. Ruskin is there that
would not laugh now to hear the name of Scott coupled with those of
Keats and Shelley? Byron, who once outblazed all others, is now
considered, by many judges not altogether to be disregarded, less as a
great fixed star than as a meteor formed from earthly fumes condensed
and for a time incandescent in the upper air. Wordsworth’s fame, though
all agree that it is assured, has suffered and is likely still to suffer
some fluctuations; and, when poetry is talked about in circles of modern
experts, no one ever hears of Crabbe, though here and there one comes
upon some literary oddity who maintains that he has as good a claim as
Shelley to a place in the heavens of abiding fame. As this, to most
modern ears astounding, paradox is certainly maintained, in private at
least, by several persons whose opinion the most advanced critic would
not think of despising, it may be worth while to see what can be said
for it.
Things, it is said, are best known by comparison with their opposites;
and, if so, surely Crabbe must be best illustrated by Shelley and
Shelley by Crabbe. Shelley was an atheist and profoundly immoral; but
his irreligion was radiant with pious imagination, and his immorality
delicately and strictly conscientious. Crabbe was a most sincere
Christian in faith and life; but his religion and morality were
intolerant, narrow, and scrupulous, and sadly wanting in all the modern
graces. Shelley had no natural feeling or affection and the greatest
sensitiveness; Crabbe had the tenderest and strongest affections, but
his nerves and æsthetic constitution were of the coarsest. Shelley’s
taste often stood him in the stead of morality. He would have starved
rather than write begging letters to Thurlow, Burke, and other magnates,
as Crabbe did when he wanted to better his condition as an apothecary’s
apprentice. Crabbe’s integrity produced some of the best effects of
taste, and made him at once an equal in manners with the dukes and
statesmen with whom he associated as soon as he had been taken from his
beggary by Burke. Through years and years of poverty and almost hopeless
trial Crabbe was a devoted and faithful lover, and afterwards as devoted
and faithful a husband to his “Myra,” whom he adored in verses that
justified some one’s description of his style as “Pope in worsted
stockings.” Shelley breathes eternal vows in music of the spheres, to
woman after woman, whom he will abandon and speak or write of with
hatred and contempt as soon as their persons have ceased to please him.
Crabbe knew nothing of the “ideal,” but loved all actualities,
especially unpleasant ones, upon which he would turn the electric light
of his peculiar powers of perception till the sludge and dead dogs of a
tidal river shone. Jeffrey described the true position of Crabbe among
poets better than any one else has done when he wrote, “He has
represented his villagers and humble burghers as altogether as
dissipated and more dishonest and discontented than the profligates of
higher life.... He may be considered as the satirist of low life--an
occupation sufficiently arduous, and in a great degree new and original
in our language.” In this his proper vocation Crabbe is so far from
being a “Pope in worsted stockings,” that his lines often resemble the
strokes of Dryden’s sledge-hammer rather than the stings of his
successor’s cane. But, when uninspired by the intensely disagreeable or
vicious, Crabbe’s “diction” is to modern ears, for the most part,
intolerable. In his cooler moments he poured forth thousands of such
couplets as
It seems to us that our Reformers knew
Th’ important work they undertook to do.
And to such vile newspaper prose he not only added the ghastly adornment
of verse, but also frequently enlivened it with the “poetic licences”
and Parnassian “lingo” of the Pope period. What a contrast with Shelley!
He erred quite as much as Crabbe did from the imaginative reality which
is the true ideal; but it was all in the opposite way. If Crabbe’s eye,
in its love for the actual and concrete, dwelt too habitually upon the
hardness and ugliness of the earth on which he trod, Shelley’s thoughts
and perceptions were for the most part
Pinnacled dim in the intense inane
of a fancy which had no foundation in earth or heaven. His poetry has,
however, the immortal reality of music; and his songs _are_ songs,
though they may be often called “songs without words,” the words meaning
so little though they sound so sweet.
This “parallel”--as lines starting and continued in opposite directions
have got to be called--might be carried much further with advantage to
the student of poetry; and the comparison might be still more profitable
if the best poems of Coleridge were examined as illustrations of the
true poetic reality from which Crabbe and Shelley diverge equally, but
in contrary ways. Crabbe mistakes actuality for reality; Shelley’s
imagination is unreal. Coleridge, when he is himself, whether he is in
the region of actuality, as in “Genevieve,” or in that of imagination,
as in “Christabel,” is always both real and ideal in the only true
poetic sense, in which reality and ideality are truly one. In each of
these poems, as in every work of true art, there is a living idea which
expresses itself in every part, while the complete work remains its
briefest possible expression, so that it is as absurd to ask What is its
idea? as it would be to ask what is the idea of a man or of an oak. This
idea cannot be a simple negation; and simple evil--which is so often
Crabbe’s theme--is simple negation. On the other hand, good, in order to
be the ground of the ideal in art, must be intelligible--that is to say,
imaginatively credible, though it may want the conditions of present
actuality. But is there any such ideal as this in Shelley?
XXI
SHALL SMITH HAVE A STATUE?
The modern practice of sending the hat round for money to set up in the
Abbey or elsewhere a statue, or at least a bust, of Smith, during or
immediately after his lifetime, in grateful remembrance of the service
or pleasure he may have done us, can rarely be indulged without danger
of making him and ourselves ridiculous in the eyes of our children; or
even in our own, should we survive for a few years the amiable folly of
having raised an abiding memorial of our possibly transient enthusiasm.
There could have been no doubt of the propriety of setting up a statue
to the Duke of Wellington after Waterloo, however much there may
reasonably have been about the propriety of the statue itself which the
ladies of England dedicated to the hero. But even in the case of such
obvious and measurable merits as those of warriors, it is best not to be
in a hurry. Historical criticism has discovered that the credit of
great battles and even campaigns has not always been rightly due to the
commanders-in-chief. Again, improvements like those of the steam jet, by
which it became at once possible to raise the rate of railway travelling
from under ten to over fifty miles an hour, the penny post, and the
electric telegraph, are certainly matters for permanent memorials,
provided that they are raised to the right men. But improvements and
inventions of this magnitude scarcely ever are, in the first instance,
attributed to the right men, who are generally more or less obscure and
unrewarded geniuses. It is the practical man, who has the quickness to
see the money value of a great invention and the means of removing the
last external hindrance to its popular use, that gets the statue, and
the money too. Few would envy him the latter; but it is cruel to him no
less than to ourselves to be in such haste to decorate him with a laurel
crown, which the touch of time may change into a fool’s cap. Again,
unless statues are due to good intentions ardently prosecuted without
reference to results, we ought to be very careful how we impose
immortality upon great philanthropists and humanitarians. It would not
have been for the abiding happiness and honour of the two eminent
prelates and the able editor who lately constituted themselves high
commissioners of public morality, to have had their images set up in
Hyde Park back to back, like the figure of Hecate Triformis, and so to
have been forbidden eternally to blush unseen, as no doubt they now
desire to do. It would be prudent, also, to wait a while before
conferring diplomas of immortality upon the heroes of legislation. The
fame of repealers of navigation laws and founders of household franchise
should be considered as in a state of pupilage for at least fifty years;
and they should not be allowed to sport bronze thighs and the _toga
virilis_, before the public buildings or in the squares of the
metropolis, ere the paper on which their Bills are printed is well dry.
It should be remembered that, in our haste, we may be placing an awful
and easy vengeance in the hands of posterity; which might choose, not to
pull down such monuments, but--to let them stand.