No, when the fight begins within himself,
A man's worth something. God stoops o'er his head,
Satan looks up between his feet--both tug--
He's left, himself, i' the middle; the soul wakes
And grows. Prolong that battle through his life!
It is perhaps somewhat less fair, though very tempting (as both poets
are concerned with the perpetuation of love by offspring), to compare
with the stanzas already quoted from Lord Herbert's Ode the following
from Tennyson:--
One walked between his wife and child,
With measured footfall firm and mild,
And now and then he gravely smiled.
The prudent partner of his blood
Leaned on him, faithful, gentle, good,
Wearing the rose of womanhood.
And in their double love secure.
The little maiden walked demure,
Pacing with downward eyelids pure.
These three made unity so sweet,
My frozen heart began to beat,
Remembering its ancient heat.
The difference is not a simple difference of degree between poets. It is
something which had happened to the mind of England between the time of
Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of Tennyson and Browning;
it is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective
poet, Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not
feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to
Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet's mind
is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating
disparate experience; the ordinary man's experience is chaotic,
irregular, fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and
these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the
noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet
these experiences are always forming new wholes.
We may express the difference by the following theory:--The poets of the
seventeenth century, the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth,
possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of
experience. They are simple, artificial, difficult, or fantastic, as
their predecessors were; no less nor more than Dante, Guido Cavalcanti,
Guinizelli, or Cino. In the seventeenth century a dissociation of
sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered; and this
dissociation, as is natural, was due to the influence of the two most
powerful poets of the century, Milton and Dryden. Each of these men
performed certain poetic functions so magnificently well that the
magnitude of the effect concealed the absence of others. The language
went on and in some respects improved; the best verse of Collins, Gray,
Johnson, and even Goldsmith satisfies some of our fastidious demands
better than that of Donne or Marvell or King. But while the language
became more refined, the feeling became more crude. The feeling, the
sensibility, expressed in the "Country Churchyard" (to say nothing of
Tennyson and Browning) is cruder than that in the "Coy Mistress."
The second effect of the influence of Milton and Dryden followed from
the first, and was therefore slow in manifestation. The sentimental age
began early in the eighteenth century, and continued. The poets revolted
against the ratiocinative, the descriptive; they thought and felt by
fits, unbalanced; they reflected. In one or two passages of Shelley's
"Triumph of Life," in the second "Hyperion," there are traces of a
struggle toward unification of sensibility. But Keats and Shelley died,
and Tennyson and Browning ruminated.
After this brief exposition of a theory--too brief, perhaps, to carry
conviction--we may ask, what would have been the fate of the
"metaphysical" had the current of poetry descended in a direct line from
them, as it descended in a direct line to them? They would not,
certainly, be classified as metaphysical. The possible interests of a
poet are unlimited; the more intelligent he is the better; the more
intelligent he is the more likely that he will have interests: our only
condition is that he turn them into poetry, and not merely meditate on
them poetically. A philosophical theory which has entered into poetry is
established, for its truth or falsity in one sense ceases to matter, and
its truth in another sense is proved. The poets in question have, like
other poets, various faults. But they were, at best, engaged in the task
of trying to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling.
And this means both that they are more mature, and that they wear
better, than later poets of certainly not less literary ability.
It is not a permanent necessity that poets should be interested in
philosophy, or in any other subject. We can only say that it appears
likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be
_difficult._ Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity,
and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility,
must produce various and complex results. The poet must become more and
more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to
dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning. (A brilliant and
extreme statement of this view, with which it is not requisite to
associate oneself, is that of M. Jean Epstein, "La Poésie
d'aujourd-hui.") Hence we get something which looks very much like the
conceit--we get, in fact, a method curiously similar to that of the
"metaphysical poets," similar also in its use of obscure words and of
simple phrasing.
O géraniums diaphanes, guerroyeurs sortilèges,
Sacrilèges monomanes!
Emballages, dévergondages, douches! O pressoirs
Des vendanges des grands soirs!
Layettes aux abois,
Thyrses au fond des bois!
Transfusions, représailles,
Relevailles, compresses et l'éternal potion,
Angélus! n'en pouvoir plus
De débâcles nuptiales! de débâcles nuptiales!