_To Mr. Arthur Wincott, Topeka, Kansas_.
Dear Wincott,--You write to me, from your "bright home in the setting
sun," with the flattering information that you have read my poor "Letters
to Dead Authors." You are kind enough to say that you wish I would write
some "Letters to Living Authors;" but that, I fear, is out of the
question,--for me.
A thoughtful critic in the _Spectator_ has already remarked that the
great men of the past would not care for my shadowy epistles--if they
could read them. Possibly not; but, like Prior, "I may write till they
can spell"--an exercise of which ghosts are probably as incapable as was
Matt's little Mistress of Quality. But Living Authors are very different
people, and it would be perilous, as well as impertinent, to direct one's
comments on them literally, in the French phrase, "to their address." Yet
there is no reason why a critic should not adopt the epistolary form.
Our old English essays, the papers in the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_, were
originally nothing but letters. The vehicle permits a touch of personal
taste, perhaps of personal prejudice. So I shall write my "Letters on
Literature," of the present and of the past, English, American, ancient,
or modern, to _you_, in your distant Kansas, or to such other
correspondents as are kind enough to read these notes.
Poetry has always the precedence in these discussions. Poor Poetry! She
is an ancient maiden of good family, and is led out first at banquets,
though many would prefer to sit next some livelier and younger Muse, the
lady of fiction, or even the chattering _soubrette_ of journalism.
_Seniores priores_: Poetry, if no longer very popular, is a dame of the
worthiest lineage, and can boast a long train of gallant admirers, dead
and gone. She has been much in courts. The old Greek tyrants loved her;
great Rhamses seated her at his right hand; every prince had his singers.
Now we dwell in an age of democracy, and Poetry wins but a feigned
respect, more out of courtesy, and for old friendship's sake, than for
liking. Though so many write verse, as in Juvenal's time, I doubt if
many read it. "None but minstrels list of sonneting." The purchasing
public, for poetry, must now consist chiefly of poets, and _they_ are
usually poor.
Can anything speak more clearly of the decadence of the art than the
birth of so many poetical "societies"? We have the Browning Society, the
Shelley Society, the Shakespeare Society, the Wordsworth Society--lately
dead. They all demonstrate that people have not the courage to study
verse in solitude, and for their proper pleasure; men and women need
confederates in this adventure. There is safety in numbers, and, by dint
of tea-parties, recitations, discussions, quarrels and the like, Dr.
Furnivall and his friends keep blowing the faint embers on the altar of
Apollo. They cannot raise a flame!
In England we are in the odd position of having several undeniable poets,
and very little new poetry worthy of the name. The chief singers have
outlived, if not their genius, at all events its flowering time. Hard it
is to estimate poetry, so apt we are, by our very nature, to prefer "the
newest songs," as Odysseus says men did even during the war of Troy. Or,
following another ancient example, we say, like the rich niggards who
neglected Theocritus, "Homer is enough for all."
Let us attempt to get rid of every bias, and, thinking as dispassionately
as we can, we still seem to read the name of Tennyson in the golden book
of English poetry. I cannot think that he will ever fall to a lower
place, or be among those whom only curious students pore over, like
Gower, Drayton, Donne, and the rest. Lovers of poetry will always read
him as they will read Wordsworth, Keats, Milton, Coleridge, and Chaucer.
Look his defects in the face, throw them into the balance, and how they
disappear before his merits! He is the last and youngest of the mighty
race, born, as it were, out of due time, late, and into a feebler
generation.
Let it be admitted that the gold is not without alloy, that he has a
touch of voluntary affectation, of obscurity, even an occasional
perversity, a mannerism, a set of favourite epithets ("windy" and
"happy"). There is a momentary echo of Donne, of Crashaw, nay, in his
earliest pieces, even a touch of Leigh Hunt. You detect it in pieces
like "Lilian" and "Eleanore," and the others of that kind and of that
date.
Let it be admitted that "In Memoriam" has certain lapses in all that meed
of melodious tears; that there are trivialities which might deserve (here
is an example) "to line a box," or to curl some maiden's locks, that
there are weaknesses of thought, that the poet now speaks of himself as a
linnet, singing "because it must," now dares to approach questions
insoluble, and again declines their solution. What is all this but the
changeful mood of grief? The singing linnet, like the bird in the old
English heathen apologue, dashes its light wings painfully against the
walls of the chamber into which it has flown out of the blind night that
shall again receive it.
I do not care to dwell on the imperfections in that immortal strain of
sympathy and consolation, that enchanted book of consecrated regrets. It
is an easier if not more grateful task to note a certain peevish egotism
of tone in the heroes of "Locksley Hall," of "Maud," of "Lady Clara Vere
de Vere." "You can't think how poor a figure you make when you tell that
story, sir," said Dr. Johnson to some unlucky gentleman whose "figure"
must certainly have been more respectable than that which is cut by these
whining and peevish lovers of Maud and Cousin Amy.
Let it be admitted, too, that King Arthur, of the "Idylls," is like an
Albert in blank verse, an Albert cursed with a Guinevere for a wife, and
a Lancelot for friend. The "Idylls," with all their beauties, are full
of a Victorian respectability, and love of talking with Vivien about what
is not so respectable. One wishes, at times, that the "Morte d'Arthur"
had remained a lonely and flawless fragment, as noble as Homer, as
polished as Sophocles. But then we must have missed, with many other
admirable things, the "Last Battle in the West."
People who come after us will be more impressed than we are by the
Laureate's versatility. He has touched so many strings, from "Will
Waterproof's Monologue," so far above Praed, to the agony of "Rizpah,"
the invincible energy of "Ulysses," the languor and the fairy music of
the "Lotus Eaters," the grace as of a Greek epigram which inspires the
lines to Catullus and to Virgil. He is with Milton for learning, with
Keats for magic and vision, with Virgil for graceful recasting of ancient
golden lines, and, even in the latest volume of his long life, "we may
tell from the straw," as Homer says, "what the grain has been."
There are many who make it a kind of religion to regard Mr. Browning as
the greatest of living English poets. For him, too, one is thankful as
for a veritable great poet; but can we believe that impartial posterity
will rate him with the Laureate, or that so large a proportion of his
work will endure? The charm of an enigma now attracts students who feel
proud of being able to understand what others find obscure. But this
attraction must inevitably become a stumbling-block.
Why Mr. Browning is obscure is a long question; probably the answer is
that he often could not help himself. His darkest poems may be made out
by a person of average intelligence who will read them as hard as, for
example, he would find it necessary to read the "Logic" of Hegel. There
is a story of two clever girls who set out to peruse "Sordello," and
corresponded with each other about their progress. "Somebody is dead in
'Sordello,'" one of them wrote to her friend. "I don't quite know _who_
it is, but it must make things a little clearer in the long run." Alas!
a copious use of the guillotine would scarcely clear the stage of
"Sordello." It is hardly to be hoped that "Sordello," or "Red Cotton
Night Cap Country," or "Fifine," will continue to be struggled with by
posterity. But the mass of "Men and Women," that unexampled gallery of
portraits of the inmost hearts and secret minds of priests, prigs,
princes, girls, lovers, poets, painters, must survive immortally, while
civilization and literature last, while men care to know what is in men.
No perversity of humour, no voluntary or involuntary harshness of style,
can destroy the merit of these poems, which have nothing like them in the
letters of the past, and must remain without successful imitators in the
future. They will last all the better for a certain manliness of
religious faith--something sturdy and assured--not moved by winds of
doctrine, not paltering with doubts, which is certainly one of Mr.
Browning's attractions in this fickle and shifting generation. He cannot
be forgotten while, as he says--
"A sunset touch,
A chorus ending of Euripides,"
remind men that they are creatures of immortality, and move "a thousand
hopes and fears."
If one were to write out of mere personal preference, and praise most
that which best fits one's private moods, I suppose I should place Mr.
Matthew Arnold at the head of contemporary English poets. Reason and
reflection, discussion and critical judgment, tell one that he is not
quite there.
Mr. Arnold had not the many melodies of the Laureate, nor his versatile
mastery, nor his magic, nor his copiousness. He had not the microscopic
glance of Mr. Browning, nor his rude grasp of facts, which tears the life
out of them as the Aztec priest plucked the very heart from the victim.
We know that, but yet Mr. Arnold's poetry has our love; his lines murmur
in our memory through all the stress and accidents of life. "The Scholar
Gipsy," "Obermann," "Switzerland," the melancholy majesty of the close of
"Sohrab and Rustum," the tenderness of those elegiacs on two kindred
graves beneath the Himalayas and by the Midland Sea; the surge and
thunder of "Dover Beach," with its "melancholy, long-withdrawing roar;"
these can only cease to whisper to us and console us in that latest hour
when life herself ceases to "moan round with many voices."
My friends tell me that Mr. Arnold is too doubting, and too didactic,
that he protests too much, and considers too curiously, that his best
poems are, at most, "a chain of highly valuable thoughts." It may be so;
but he carries us back to "wet, bird-haunted English lawns;" like him "we
know what white and purple fritillaries the grassy harvest of the river
yields," with him we try to practise resignation, and to give ourselves
over to that spirit
"Whose purpose is not missed,
While life endures, while things subsist."
Mr. Arnold's poetry is to me, in brief, what Wordsworth's was to his
generation. He has not that inspired greatness of Wordsworth, when
nature does for him what his "_lutin_" did for Corneille, "takes the pen
from his hand and writes for him." But he has none of the creeping prose
which, to my poor mind, invades even "Tintern Abbey." He is, as Mr.
Swinburne says, "the surest-footed" of our poets. He can give a natural
and lovely life even to the wildest of ancient imaginings, as to "these
bright and ancient snakes, that once were Cadmus and Harmonia."
Bacon speaks of the legends of the earlier and ruder world coming to us
"breathed softly through the flutes of the Grecians." But even the
Grecian flute, as in the lay of the strife of Apollo and Marsyas, comes
more tunably in the echo of Mr. Arnold's song, that beautiful song in
"Empedocles on Etna," which has the perfection of sculpture and the charm
of the purest colour. It is full of the silver light of dawn among the
hills, of the music of the loch's dark, slow waves among the reeds, of
the scent of the heather, and the wet tresses of the birch.
Surely, then, we have had great poets living among us, but the fountains
of their song are silent, or flow but rarely over a clogged and stony
channel. And who is there to succeed the two who are gone, or who shall
be our poet, if the Master be silent? That is a melancholy question,
which I shall try to answer (with doubt and dread enough) in my next
letter. {1}