IS the commercial standard of literary success to be extended to
poetry? This is a question that is raised by the peculiar conditions
which have developed during the last two years, and it is one which
it is important to attempt to solve. If poetry is to be judged by the
extent to which it is sold, and especially in relation to the sales of
prose fiction, then it must be admitted at once to be in a very sad
quandary indeed. If, on the other hand, the status of poetry is to be
discovered by a consideration of the degree to which it is talked about
and written about, then no branch of contemporary literature would
seem to be more flourishing. It is desirable to attempt to define what
literary popularity is, and then to see how far the poets of to-day
enjoy a share of it.
In its original meaning “popularity” signifies a courting of the
popular favor; it is only in its modern and secondary use that the
word takes the sense of a gaining of that good-will. Our old writers
employed the word with a certain flavor of obsequiousness hanging
about it. Among the Elizabethans to be “popular” was to have resigned
something of the dignity of independent judgment. We have lost all
that in these democratic days, and he is held the most honorable man
who has contrived to please the largest number of individual voters,
and that book the most successful which has appealed to the largest
number of readers. Yet, even with us, literary popularity has not
quite come to be synonymous with largeness of sales. We are not so
mechanically statistical, even in the matter of our novels, and there
are writers whose works sell in vast masses, who enjoy a kind of blind,
contemptuous success, and who yet are scarcely to be called “popular.”
There are writers, too, of comic or sentimental verse, who are never
mentioned among the poets, whose sales, nevertheless, by far exceed
those of Mr. Swinburne. I remember how once, in the sacred Lodge of
Trinity, and to the face of its fastidious master, the late Lord
Houghton contended that the most prominent living poet of England was
the writer of a song called “The Old Obadiah and the Young Obadiah.”
At the moment when this whimsical theory was put forth, England
possessed a poet of unsurpassed popularity. The case of Tennyson was
a singular and, for future generations, a disturbing one. As we look
down the history of our country, we may be surprised to see how few of
our greatest bards have enjoyed wide popular favor in their life-time.
Neither Shakespeare nor Milton, neither Wordsworth nor Coleridge,
neither Shelley nor Keats, had any experience of general public
acceptance. Dryden and Ben Jonson were illustrious,—they were scarcely
popular. Among our really ambitious writers in verse, Cowley and Pope,
Burns and Byron, and in his latest years Robert Browning, have alone
enjoyed great popularity at all approaching that of Tennyson; and of
these Burns is the most remarkable in this respect. Tennyson and Burns,
a couple strangely assorted,—these are the two great names in poetry
which have achieved, by purely poetic qualities, a lasting approbation
from the people of Great Britain.
In the case of Burns, as in that of Béranger in France, the charm of
the pure, natural lyric, uttered in the quintessence of its naïveté
may be allowed to account for much of the popular acceptation. The
universality of Tennyson is a more difficult problem, and one on
which criticism has expended much speculation. The main thing at this
moment is to admit and to note that popularity, and to see whether it
is likely to be continued to later writers. In the first place, it is
highly important to recognize that in the history of our poetry, now
extending over at least six centuries, it has by no means been the
rule that what was ultimately to be found incomparable received any
special attention at the time of its production. Some poets have been
mildly admired for a portion of their writings which we now regret that
they should have produced, and have not been admired at all for their
masterpieces. There is evidence to show that the exquisite lyrics of
Herrick were not valued during his lifetime for any of the qualities
which we now universally discern in them. Moore was greatly preferred
to Shelley, not merely until the death of Shelley, but until long after
the death of Moore. Much poetry becomes good, because public taste
develops in the direction in which it was written; still more ceases
to please, because the order of its thoughts and images is no longer
in fashion. Criticism likes to conceive that its dicta are final, and
talks familiarly about “immortality.” But, as a matter of fact, there
are certain even of the old masters who are still on their probation,
and a great social crisis might dethrone half Parnassus.
The death of Tennyson, following so closely on those of Browning
and Matthew Arnold, produced a violent and disturbing crisis in our
poetical history. At the first moment, in the agitation caused by the
disappearance of these extremely dignified figures, and particularly
by the extinction of Tennyson, the critics rashly asserted that poetry
had ceased to develop; that it would henceforward be the pastime of
children; and that it could no longer form a vital branch of our
literature. Almost immediately it was perceived that whatever might
happen, a neglect of verse was not imminent. We had long served under a
gerantocracy, a tyranny by very old men. These venerable figures once
removed, attention became fixed on men of the youngest generation. When
all the ancient trees have fallen in the forest, the sturdiest saplings
have room to expand. Of these some may be oaks and some may be alders,
but all have a chance at last. We have seen no visible increase of
public interest in the poets who already held high second or third rank
(although the extreme respect with which the announcement of Christina
Rossetti’s death was received points to an understratum of appreciation
for these), but we have certainly seen a sudden access of reputation
among writers between thirty-five and twenty-five years of age. The
pendulum of taste is ever swinging, and from the opinion that no one
under eighty was worth reading, we have come to regard no one over
thirty as deserving our attention.
It will be unfortunate, I think, if the poets allow themselves to be
disturbed by the conditions of crisis through which we are now passing.
I deprecate the use of phrases such as hail one or two young versemen
as: “Swans emerging from the ruck of geese.” A swan may once have been
an ugly duckling; he has never been a goose, and exaggerations of this
kind tend to encourage what is by far the most dangerous tendency of
the literature of to-day, its commercial greediness. Coleridge, in his
old age, told a friend of mine, who was then young, that he had never
been one shilling the better off for all the verse he had ever printed.
Mr. Dykes Campbell will tell us that this was an error of memory, but
practically speaking it was true. In our own century, surrounded by
admirers, living long past maturity, here was one of the truest poets
of England confessing that poetry had been not so much a failure to
him as a bankruptcy. Browning, to the very end of his days, through
the period of his splendid late celebrity, could never have lived,
however modestly, on what his poetry put into his pocket. These are the
instances which the poet should bear in mind, nor allow himself to be
dazzled by the almost inexplicable and entirely exceptional success of
the career of Tennyson.
We are told that this is not a poetical age, nor ours a poetical
country. No country and no age is poetical. If England is badly off,
I have yet to learn that France or America, Italy or Germany, is in a
more fortunate condition. In one of these countries, in Italy, as in
England, it is true that attention is concentrated on certain young
men of the latest generation. It is in Italy only, I think, that our
youngest poets meet with rivals of their own value. Gabriele d’Annunzio
and Rudyard Kipling are probably the most gifted persons under the age
of thirty now writing verses in any part of the world. The Italians
loudly praise the author of “Elegie Romane,” but if they buy his
volumes to any appreciable extent, I am greatly misinformed. He is what
Carducci and Panzacchi were before him, distinguished and illustrious,
but not successful as the “female fictionist” understands success. No
Italian poet, I think, in this day of the revival of Italian poetry,
makes what could be called an appreciable income by his verse.
It would be indecorous to push the inquiry so far as to speculate how
the increased interest in verse affects the pockets of our own younger
poets. One hopes that they are fed with the flour of returns as well as
with the honey of renown. But one doubts whether their pretty “limited
editions,” their choruses of praise, their various celebrity, are
symptoms of more than a very moderate popularity. They would think it
unkind if one were to say that one wished them no more pudding than
their great forefathers enjoyed. In point of fact, one wishes for every
true artist the maximum of practical appreciation of his art. But if
they break their hearts because they are not Tennyson, they will be
silly fellows. A poet need feel no sense of failure because his books
do not lie on every parlor-table in Brompton, or because no movement
is made towards his being called up into the House of Lords. Success in
poetry has not been, and we may hope that it never will be, a matter in
which income-tax collectors can take an interest.
More, perhaps, than any other species of literature, poetry ought to
be its own exceeding great reward. The verseman should write his verse
with no other thought in his mind than that of relieving his heart
of metrical pangs too acutely delicious to be borne. The verse being
written, and then printed, the poet has done his work. He ought to
have no further solicitude. He has adventured in a kind of writing in
which less than in any other the element of ephemeral interest exists.
If his stanzas are of true excellence, they will be as much admired in
1945 as in 1895, and perhaps more so. The best poetry does not grow
old-fashioned. The poet should consider that he is not engaged in the
timid coasting-trade of the novelist; he has put out on the vast seas,
and if the risks of sinking are great, there is the chance of reaching
the Golden Isles. He works, we will not say for immortality, since that
is a vague and uncertain phrase, but for the future, and he ought to
be content to miss the more facile successes of the immediate present.
Poetry, after all, is not a democratic art. It appeals to the few, it
“makes great music,” as Keats puts it, “for a little clan,” and it can
by no means be sure, in the wild hurly-burly of our life, immediately
to win the attention of those elect ears. But good verse, once printed,
is never lost; sooner or later it is discovered, and fixed, like a
jewel, into its proper drawer in the cabinet of the ages. To last
forever, as a specimen, by the side of Lovelace or of Wolfe, should
be better worth working for than to earn five thousand pounds as the
author of a deciduous novel about the “New Woman.” At all events, the
poet had better try to think so, for the financial prosperity can by no
possible chance be his.