THE following essays, mainly concerned with famous and familiar names,
are less heterogeneous, and it is hoped less hackneyed, than some of
the titles may suggest. They are all occupied ultimately with some
aspect of a single problem in what I would call the psychology of
poetic experience, did not the phrase imply a scientific rigour of
method hardly as yet achieved, in this region, by psychological science
itself, and in any case beyond the reach of the present writer. How is
the gift of imaginative creation affected by the presence in the same
mind of one or other of the spiritual energies which have a different,
even an alien, perhaps incompatible, aim or goal; or simply by a bias
of ingrained ethical habitudes or ideals? What terms does poetry
make with philosophy, or religion, or patriotism, or politics, or
love, when one of these is urgent, also, in the mind of a poet? I say
‘terms’ advisedly, for nothing is more certain than that the outcome
is determined by a process of give and take. Every complex experience
involves a certain compromise among its disparate or contending
factors; a compromise in great part, indeed, involuntary, resulting
from the fact that, even in the least integrated personalities, the
field of consciousness is a continuous unity, into which no fresh
element enters without modifying, and being itself modified by, the
rest. In the class of cases with which we are here concerned the
modification may be loss or gain, or both together. We think of Dante
or Lucretius as great philosophical poets, and many people assume,
because there are _longueurs_ in the _Paradiso_, and tough blocks of
versified mechanics in the _De Rerum Natura_, that these great poets
would have produced better poems had they pursued poetry ‘for its
own sake.’ What is certain is that, without the passion for truth,
without the passionate desire to understand the universe, without,
too, the missionary passion to save souls by communicating their own
uplifting and fortifying faith, each would have been less occasionally
tedious, doubtless, but also would have missed some of those heights
in poetry which they in fact achieved. A chorus of critics denounce
the ‘didactic poem,’ and clearly the impulse to instruct is more
likely to act as slag than as fuel upon the flame of poetic creation.
But the prophet is only the schoolmaster writ large, and _vates_ is
one of the oldest names of the poet. Matthew Arnold made fun of the
educational theorizing in _The Excursion_, but no one better understood
the grandeur of Wordsworth the prophet, and he and Goethe are doubtless
chiefly accountable for the Arnoldian definition of poetry as
‘criticism of life.’
Analogous problems are touched in the essays on Keats and on
d’Annunzio. These two very dissimilar poets, both recently invested
with topical interest by the hazards of a centenary and of a political
adventure, have this in common, that into the life of both came, at
a certain moment, an experience of grandeur, which told decisively,
though in utterly different ways, upon the scale and contents of their
imaginative vision. Keats in 1818 for the first time looked upon ‘grand
mountains’ (his own phrase); d’Annunzio, in the early nineties, was
captivated by the Nietzschean revelation of the Superman. Upon Keats,
the effect, complicated as we know, with other influences, was wholly
astringent and bracing; it concurred with the strenuous art of Milton
to wean him from the ‘luxury’ of his earlier song and inspire the
colossal imaginings of _Hyperion_. Upon d’Annunzio the effect was less
entirely happy. The fiery declamations of the Destroyer (as his Italian
disciple called Nietzsche), who aspired to rear an ideally potent
and perfect race upon the ruins of present-day humanity, enlarged
his intellectual horizons and quickened his patriotic ambition, but
also tinged his thinking and his action, whether as a poet or as a
publicist, henceforth, with a megalomania hazardous for him in both
capacities.
Shakespeare may seem to offer little foothold for this kind of study,
or at least to illustrate aspects of it too familiar to be discussed.
No one now imagines him a passionless artist, holding up the mirror
to a world in which he had no further concern. He was in any case a
devoted lover of his country, and patriotism contributed vitally to
the making of one, not the least splendid or memorable, division of
his drama. National pride has occasionally impaired the poetry of the
English Histories, though the vulgar Joan of Arc scenes in 1 _Henry
VI_ be no misdeed of his; it has again and again caught the poet up
to towering heights. But in some other, perhaps less obvious, ways
Shakespeare’s mentality, as we divine it, seems to stand in a like
double relation to his poetry; here tributory and creative, there, if
not impairing its quality, limiting its scope. With all his apparent
spontaneity, and the thousand unblotted lines which astonished
his editors and offended Ben, he was hardly pure poet, hardly ‘of
imagination all compact’; the man of ‘sovran alchemy’ had his share of
the still untransmuted stuff. His poetry, compared with Spenser’s or
Shelley’s, is in intimate touch with fact, far richer and deeper than
theirs, but also nearer to the temper which is the negation of poetry.
His glorious humanity is not without preferences and exclusions; and
these are largely of a kind which he shares with the respectable
citizen rather than with the finer and rarer spirits. He has not
Browning’s taste for eccentric or exceptional types, his interest is
not on the dangerous edge of things; and if each of his great creations
is in some sense unique, they are rich beyond all others in traits
which make them seem our kin. He unmistakably prefers order to turmoil;
‘degree, priority and place’ to the romance and heroics of revolution;
observance of custom, other things being the same, to the breach of it;
the normal to the irregular. His temperament was thus of a type which
has affinities with some great and with some less estimable things:
it is allied on the one side to the noble harmonies and symmetries of
classical art, on the other to unreflecting habit and dull routine.
It is the aim of the opening essay to trace the effects of what I may
then call Shakespeare’s bias for _normality_ in a single sphere of his
art--his treatment of Love and Marriage. His ideal of love is a state
in which passion and sense and intellect are united in happy balance,
and we owe to it a series of creations of incomparable loveliness,
from Rosalind and Portia to Imogen and Perdita. But it is plain
that Shakespeare has sounded only a few notes of the gamut of love
poetry. He gives us a few exquisite simple melodies; he rarely hints
its complex music, the difficult harmonies extorted from dissonance
and conflict. He rather conspicuously avoids, save for special
dramatic purposes, irregular, illicit, or criminal passion. It is not
merely accident or stage fashion that has prevented our having from
Shakespeare more than occasional approximations to a Vittoria Corombona
or a Francesca da Rimini, a Gretchen or a Rebekka West.
The fifth essay, finally, asks a question which may appear futile,
or academic, but at least arises very naturally for the student in
this field. Does the creative activity of poetry, so readily fed and
fanned, or obstructed and impaired, by philosophical or religious
preoccupation, itself react upon the poet’s beliefs, his outlook upon
the world, in any definable way? We may be inclined to reply, with the
young Tennyson, that the poet stands apart from beliefs, ‘holding no
form of creed, but contemplating all’; or to object, on the contrary,
that poets are the most sensitive of men, apt to be rather less than
others exempt from subjection to the idols of their place and time.
Certainly there is no ‘poet’s creed.’ But there may be a common
bent or bias which poetic creation tends to impress upon creeds and
convictions otherwise derived; and a survey of the modifications
actually undergone by philosophies and theologies in the crucible of
poetry suggests that this bent will be towards the faith which, in
one guise or another, exalts the place and function of spirit in the
universe, and in the last resort finds in spiritual energy the heart of
reality.
* * * * *
I desire to express my acknowledgments to the Council of the British
Academy, for permission to reprint the fifth Essay; to the Keats’
Memorial Committee, for permission to reprint the third; to the Council
of the Rylands Library, for permission to reprint the second and
fourth; and to the proprietors of _Edda_ (Christiania) for permission
to reprint the first. Most of them have been extensively revised and in
part re-written for the present volume. I am indebted to my colleagues,
Prof. E. Gardner and Signor A. Valgimigli, for kindly reading the
fourth essay. Neither is in any way responsible for the opinions
expressed. The translations throughout the volume, unless the contrary
is stated, are original.