what it actually sought and achieved in poetry, we find that its
positive ideals, too, without being derived from science, reflect the
temper of a scientific time. Thus the supreme gift of all the greater
poets of this group was a superb vision of beauty, and of beauty--_pace_
Hogarth--there is no science. But their view of beauty was partly
limited, partly fertilized and enriched, by the sources they discovered
and the conditions they imposed, and both the discoveries and the
limitations added something to the traditions and resources of poetry.
Thus:
(1) They exploited the aesthetic values to be had by knowledge. They
pursued erudition and built their poetry upon erudition, not in the
didactic way of the Augustans, but as a mine of poetic material and
suggestion. Far more truly than Wordsworth's this poetry could claim to
be the impassioned expression which is in the face of science; for
Wordsworth's knowledge is a mystic insight wholly estranged from
erudition; his celandine, his White Doe, belong to no fauna or flora.
When Leconte de Lisle, on the other hand, paints the albatross of the
southern sea or the condor of the Andes, the eye of a passionate
explorer and observer has gone to the making of their exotic sublimity.
The strange regions of humanity, too, newly disclosed by comparative
religion and mythology, he explores with cosmopolitan impartiality and
imaginative penetration; carving, as in marble, the tragedy of Hjalmar's
heart and Angentyr's sword, of Cain's doom, and Erinnyes never, like
those of Aeschylus, appeased. The Romantics had loved to play with
exotic suggestions; but the East of Hugo's _Orientales_ or Moore's
_Lalla Rookh_ is merely a veneer; the poet of _Qain_ has heard the wild
asses cry and seen the Syrian sun descend into the golden foam.
In the three commanding poets of our English mid-century, learning
becomes no less evidently poetry's honoured and indispensable ally.
Tennyson studies nature like a naturalist, not like a mystic, and finds
felicities of phrase poised, as it were, upon delicate observation. Man,
too, in Browning, loses the vague aureole of Shelleyan humanity, and
becomes the Italian of the Renascence or the Arab doctor or the German
musician, all alive but in their habits as they lived, and fashioned in
a brain fed, like no other, on the Book of the histories of Souls.
Matthew Arnold more distinctively than either, and both for better and
for worse, was the scholar-poet; among other things he was, with Heredia
and Carducci, a master of the poetry of critical portraiture, which
focusses in a few lines (_Sophocles_, _Rahel_, _Heine_, _Obermann Once
More_) the meaning of a great career or of a complex age.
(2) In the elaboration of their vision of beauty from these enlarged
sources, Leconte de Lisle and his followers demanded an impeccable
artistry. 'A great poet', he said, 'and a flawless artist are
convertible terms.' The Parnassian precision rested on the postulate
that, with sufficient resources of vocabulary and phrase, everything can
be adequately expressed, the analogue of the contemporary scientific
conviction that, with sufficient resources of experiment and
calculation, everything can be exhaustively explained. The pursuit of an
objective calm, the repudiation of missionary ardour, of personal
emotion, of the _cri du coeur_, of individual originality, involved the
surrender of some of the glories of spontaneous song, but opened the
way, for consummate artists such as these, to a profusion of
undiscovered beauty, and to a peculiar grandeur not to be attained by
the egoist. Leconte's temperament leads him to subjects which are
already instinct with tragedy and thus in his hands assume this grandeur
without effort. The power of sheer style to ennoble is better seen in
Sully Prudhomme's _tours de force_ of philosophic poetry--when he
unfolds his ideas upon 'Justice' or 'Happiness', for instance, under the
form of a debate where masterly resources of phrase and image are
compelled to the service of a rigorous logic; or in the brief cameo-like
pieces on 'Memory', 'Habit', 'Forms', and similar unpromising
abstractions, most nearly paralleled in English by the quatrains of Mr.
William Watson. But the cameo comparison is still more aptly applied to
the marvellously-chiselled sonnets of Heredia--monuments of a moment, as
sculpture habitually is, but reaching out, as the finest sculpture does,
to invisible horizons, and to the before and after--the old wooden
guardian-god recalling his former career as a scarlet figure-head
laughing at the laughter or fury of the waves; Antony seeing the flying
ships of Actium mirrored in the traitorous azure of Cleopatra's eyes.
In Italy the ideal of an austere simplicity and reserve, resting as it
did on the immense prestige of Leopardi, asserted itself even in the
naturally exuberant and impetuous genius of Carducci. Without it we
should not have had those reticences of an abounding nature, those
economies of a spendthrift, which make him one of the first poets of the
sonnet in the land of its origin, and one of the greatest writers of
Odes among the 'barbarians'. With reason he declared in 1891, when most
of his poetry had been written, that 'all the apparent contradictions in
my work are resolved by the triple formula: in politics Italy before
all, in aesthetics classical poetry before all, in practice, frankness
and force before all'. His two chief disciples, D'Annunzio and Pascoli,
antithetical in almost all points, may be said to have divided his
inheritance in this; Pascoli's Vergilian economy contrasting with the
exuberance of D'Annunzio somewhat as with us the classicism of the
present poet-laureate with that of Swinburne. In Germany the Parnassian
reserve, concentration, and aristocratic exclusiveness was to reappear
in the lyrical group of Stefan Georg.
(3) Finally, the Parnassian poetry, like most contemporary science, was
in varying degrees detached from and hostile to religion, and found some
of its most vibrating notes in contemplating its empty universe. Leconte
de Lisle offers the Stoic the last mournful joy of 'a heart seven-times
steeped in the divine nothingness',[9] or calls him to 'that city of
silence, the sepulchre of the vanished gods, the human heart, seat of
dreams, where eternally ferments and perishes the illusory
universe'.[10] Here, too, Leopardi had anticipated him.
In the ebullient genius of Carducci and Swinburne this lofty disdain for
theological illusions passes into the fierce derision of the Ode to
Satan and the militant paganism of the Sonnet to Luther, and the _Hymn
to Man_. In Matthew Arnold it became a half-wistful resignation, the
pensive retrospect of the Greek 'thinking of his own gods beside a
fallen runic stone', or listening to the 'melancholy long withdrawing
roar' of the tide of faith 'down the vast edges drear and naked shingles
of the world'; while in James Thomson resignation passed into the
unrelieved pessimism of the _City of Dreadful Night_. In all these
poets, what was of moment for poetry was not, of course, the
anti-theological or anti-clerical sentiment which marks them all, but
the notes of sombre and terrible beauty which the contemplation of the
passing of the gods, and of man's faith in them, elicits from their art.
Yet the supreme figure, not only among those who share in the
anti-Romantic reaction but among all the European poets of his time, was
one who had in the heyday of youth led the Romantic vanguard--Victor
Hugo. Leconte de Lisle never ceased to own him his master, and Hugo's
genius had since his exile, in 1851, entered upon a phase in which a
poetry such as the Parnassian sought--objective, reticent, impersonal,
technically consummate--was at least one of the strings of his
many-chorded lyre. Three magnificent works--the very crown and flower of
Hugo's production--belong to this decade, 1850-60,--the _Châtiments_,
_Contemplations_, and _Légende des Siècles_. I said advisedly, one
string in his lyre. Objective reticence is certainly not the virtue of
the terrible indictment of 'Napoleon the Little'. On the other hand, the
greatest qualities of Parnassian poetry were exemplified in many
splendid pieces of the other two works, together with a large benignity
which their austere Stoicism rarely permits, and I shall take as
illustration of the finest achievement of poetry in this whole first
phase the closing stanzas of his famous _Boaz Endormi_ in the _Légende_,
whose beauty even translation cannot wholly disguise. Our decasyllable
is substituted for the Alexandrine.[11]
'While thus he slumbered, Ruth, a Moabite,
Lay at the feet of Boaz, her breast bare,
Waiting, she knew not when, she knew not where,
The sudden mystery of wakening light.
Boaz knew not that there a woman lay,
Nor Ruth what God desired of her could tell;
Fresh rose the perfume of the asphodel,
And tender breathed the dusk on Galgala.
Nuptial, august, and solemn was the night,
Angels no doubt were passing on the wing,
For now and then there floated glimmering
As it might be an azure plume in flight.
The low breathing of Boaz mingled there
With the soft murmur of the mossy rills.
It was the month when earth is debonnaire;
The lilies were in flower upon the hills.
Night compassed Boaz' slumber and Ruth's dreams,
The sheep-bells vaguely tinkled far and near;
Infinite love breathed from the starry sphere;
'Twas the still hour when lions seek the streams.
Ur and Jerimedeth were all at rest;
The stars enamelled the blue vault of sky;
Amid those flowers of darkness in the west
The crescent shone; and with half open eye
Ruth wondered, moveless, in her veils concealed,
What heavenly reaper, when the day was done
And harvest gathered in, had idly thrown
That golden sickle on the starry field.'
II. DREAM AND SYMBOL
The rise of French symbolism towards the end of the 'seventies was a
symptom of a changed temper of thought and feeling traceable in some
degree throughout civilized Europe. Roughly, it marked the passing of
the confident and rather superficial security of the 'fifties into a
vague unrest, a kind of troubled awe. As if existence altogether was a
bigger, more mysterious, and intractable thing than was assumed, not so
easily to be captured in the formulas of triumphant science, or mirrored
and analysed by the most consummate literary art.
Political and social conditions contributed to the change. France stood
on the morrow of a shattering catastrophe. The complacency of
mid-Victorian England began to be disturbed by menaces from the
workshops of industry. And it was precisely in triumphant Germany
herself that revolutionary Socialism found, in Karl Marx, its first
organizing mind and authoritative exponent. The millennium was not so
near as it had seemed; the problems of society, instead of having been
solved once for all, were only, it appeared, just coming into view.
In the secluded workshops of Thought, subtler changes were silently
going on. The dazzling triumphs of physical science, which had led
poetry itself to emulate the marble impassivity of the scientific
temper, were undiminished; but they were seen in a new perspective,
their authority ceased to be exclusive, the focus of interest was slowly
shifting from the physical to the psychical world. Lange, writing the
history of _Materialism_ in 1874, virtually performed its obsequies; and
Tyndall's brilliant effort, in 1871, to equip primordial Matter with the
'promise and the potency' of mind, unconsciously confessed that its
cause was lost. Psychology, after Fechner, steadily advanced in prestige
and importance from the outlying circumference of the sciences to their
very centre and core.
But it was not merely particular doctrines that lost ground; the scope
and validity of scientific method itself began to be questioned. In the
most varied fields of thought there set in that 'idealistic reaction
against science' which has been described in one of the most penetrating
books of our time. Most significant of all, science itself, in the
person of Mach, and Pearson, has abandoned the claim to do more than
provide descriptive formulas for phenomena the real nature of which is
utterly beyond its power to discover.
Of this changed outlook the growth of Symbolism is the most significant
literary expression. It was not confined to France, or to poetry. We
know how the drama of Ibsen became charged with ulterior meanings as the
fiery iconoclast passed into the poet of insoluble and ineluctable
doubt. But by the French symbolists it was pursued as a creed, as a
religion. If the dominant poetry of the third quarter of the century
reflected the prestige of science, the dominant poetry of the fourth
reflected the idealistic reactions against it, and Villiers de l'Ile
Adam, its founder, came forward proclaiming that 'Science was bankrupt'.
And so it might well seem to him, the visionary mystic inhabiting, as
he did, a world of strange beauty and invisible mystery which science
could not unlock. The symbolists had not all an explicit philosophy; but
they were all aware of potencies in the world or in themselves which
language cannot articulately express, and which are yet more vitally
real than the 'facts' which we can grasp and handle, and the
'respectable' people whom we can measure and reckon with. Sometimes
these potencies are vaguely mysterious, an impalpable spirit speaking
only by hints and tokens; sometimes they are felt as the pulsations of
an intoxicating beauty, breaking forth in every flower, but which can
only be possessed, not described; sometimes they are moods of the soul,
beyond analysis, and yet full of wonder and beauty, visions half
created, half perceived. Experiences like these might have been
described, as far as description would go, by brilliant artificers like
the Parnassians. Verlaine and Mallarmé did not discover, but they
applied with new daring, the fact that an experience may be communicated
by words which, instead of representing it, suggest it by their colour,
their cadences, their rhythm, their verbal echoes and inchoate phrases.
All the traditional artistry of French poetic speech was condemned as
both inadequate and insincere. 'Take eloquence and wring her neck!
Nothing but music and the nuance--all the rest is "Literature", mere
writing--futile verbosity!' that was the famous watchword of Verlaine's
creed.[12]
The strength of symbolism lay in this demand for a complete sincerity of
utterance. Its revolt against science was at the same time a vindication
of truth, an effort to get nearer to reality both by shedding off the
incrustations of habitual phrase and by calling into play the obscure
affinities by which it can be magically evoked. In the subtleties of
suggestion latent in sensations the symbolists were real discoverers.
But the way had already been pointed in famous verses by Baudelaire:
'Earth is a Temple, from whose pillared mazes
Murmurs confused of living utterance rise;
Therein Man thro' a forest of symbols paces,
That contemplate him with familiar eyes.
As prolonged echoes, wandering on and on,
At last in one far tenebrous depth unite,
Impalpable as darkness, and as light,
Scents, sounds, and colours meet in unison.'
There Baudelaire had touched a chord that was to sound loud and long;
for what else than this thought of all the senses meeting in union
inspired the music drama of Wagner?--only one of his points of kinship,
as we shall see, with symbolism.
Thus the symbolists, in quest of reality, touched it only through the
inner life. There they are, in their fashion, realists. 'A landscape',
said Albert Samain, 'is a state of soul.' The landscape may be false,
but the state of soul is veracious. What interests them in life is the
image of life, not lucidly reflected but exquisitely transformed. Yet
the vision of the world caught in that transforming mirror was not
without strange revealing glimpses, invisible, like stars mirrored in a
well, to the plain observer. They could hear the music of the spheres;
or in the language of Samain's sonnet
'Feel flowing through them, like a pouring wave,
The music-tide of universal Soul;
Hear in their heart the beating pulse of heaven.'[13]
In the earlier poetry of Maurice Maeterlinck, the inner life imposes a
more jealous sway. The poet sits not before a transforming mirror, where
the outer world is disguised, but in a closed chamber, where it is only
dreamed of, and it fades into the incoherence and the irrelevance of a
dream. But the chamber is of rare beauty, and in its hushed and perfumed
twilight, dramas of the spirit are being silently and almost
imperceptibly enacted, more tragic than the loud passion and violence of
the stage. He has written an essay on Silence,--silence that, like
humility, holds for him a 'treasure' beyond the reach of eloquence or of
pride; for it is the dwelling of our true self, the spiritual core of
us, 'more profound and more boundless than the self of the passions or
of pure reason.' And so there is less matter for drama in 'a captain who
conquers in battle or a husband who avenges his honour than in an old
man, seated in his arm-chair waiting patiently with his lamp beside him,
giving unconscious ear to all the eternal laws that reign about his
house, interpreting without comprehending, the silence of door and
window, and the quivering voice of the light; submitting with bent head
to the presence of his soul and his destiny.'
It is on this side that symbolism discloses its kinship with the Russian
novel,--with the mystic quietism of Tolstoy and the religion of
self-sacrifice in Dostoievsky; and its sharp antagonism to the
Nietzschean gospel of daemonic will and ruthless self-assertion, just
then being preached in Germany. The two faiths were both alive and both
responded to deep though diverse needs of the time; but the immediate
future, as we shall see, belonged to the second. They had their first
resounding encounter when Nietzsche held up his once venerated master
Wagner to scorn as the chief of 'decadents' because he had turned from
the superhuman heroism of Siegfried and the boundless passion of
Tristram to glorify the mystic Catholicism of the Grail and the
loveliness of the 'pure fool' Parzifal.
Outside France symbolism found eager response among young poets, but
rather as a literary than as an ethical doctrine. In Germany Dehmel, the
most powerful personality among her recent poets, began as a disciple of
Verlaine; in Italy, D'Annunzio wove esoteric symbols into the texture of
the more than Nietzschean supermanliness of his supermen and superwomen.
More significant than these, however, was the symbolism of what we call
the Celtic school of poets in Ireland. For here both their artistic
impressionism and their mystic spirituality found a congenial soil. The
principal mediating force was Mr. Arthur Symons, friend of Verlaine and
of Yeats, and himself the most penetrating interpreter of Symbolism,
both as critic and as poet.[14] And to the French influence was added
that of Blake, a poet too great to be included in any school, but allied
to symbolism by his scorn for 'intellect' and for rhetoric, and by his
audacities of figured speech. But Mr. Yeats and 'A.E.', the leaders of
the 'Celtic' group, are in no sense derivation voices. They had the
great advantage over the French of a living native folklore and faery
lore. Hence their symbolism, no less subtle, and no less steeped in
poetic imagining, has not the same air of literary artifice, of studio
fabrication, of cultured Bohemianism; it breathes of the old Irish
hills, holy with old-world rites, and the haunted woods, and the magical
twilight and dewy dawns. And beneath all the folklore, and animating it,
is the passion for Ireland herself, the mother, deathless and ever
young, whom neither the desolation of the time nor the decay of hope can
touch:
'Out-worn heart in a time out-worn
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight;
Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.
Your mother Eire is always young,
Dew ever shining and twilight grey;
Tho' hope fall from you and love decay
Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.
Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill;
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And river and stream work out their will.'
For that, the French had only the Fauns of a literary neo-classicism.
The passion for France was yet indeed to find a voice in poetry. But
this was reserved for the more trumpet-tongued tones of the contemporary
phase to which I now turn.
III. 'CREATIVE EVOLUTION'
1. _Philosophic Analogies_
Nothing is more symptomatic of the incipient twentieth century than the
drawing together of currents of thought and action before remote or
hostile. The Parnassians were an exclusive sect, the symbolists an
eccentric and often disreputable coterie; Claudel, D'Annunzio, Rudyard
Kipling, speak home to throngs of everyday readers, are even national
idols, and our Georgians contrive to be bought and read without the
least surrender of what is most poetic in their poetry. And the
analogies between philosophic thinking and poetic creation become
peculiarly striking. Merely to name Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson,
and Benedetto Croce is to become vividly aware of these analogies and
of the common bent from which they spring. All three--whether with
brilliant rhetoric, or iron logic, or a blend of both--use their
thinking power to deride the theorizing intelligence in comparison with
the creative intuition which culminates in poetry. To define the scope
and province of this intuition is the purport of Croce's epoch-making
_Aesthetics_, the basis and starting-point of his illumining work, in
_Critica_, as a literary critic. Bergson is the dominant figure in a
line of French thinkers possessed with the conviction that life, a
perpetual streaming forth of creative energy, cannot be caught in the
mechanism of law, adapted to merely physical phenomena, which at best
merely gives us generalizations and lets the all-important
particulars--the individual living thing--slip through the meshes;
whereas intuition--the eye fixed on the object--penetrates to the very
heart of this individual living thing, and only drops out the skeleton
framework of abstract laws. Philosophy, in these thinkers, was deeply
imbued with the analogies of artistic creation. 'Beauty,' said
Ravaisson, 'and especially beauty in the most divine and perfect form,
contains the secret of the world.'[15] And Bergson's _Creative
Evolution_ embodied a conception of life and of the world profoundly
congenial to the artistic and poetic temper of his time. For he
restated, it has been well said, the two great surviving formulas of the
nineteenth century, evolution and the will to live, in terms precisely
suited to the temper of the age just dawning. The will to live became a
formula of hope and progress; evolution became a formula of vital
impulse, of creative purpose, not of mechanical 'struggle for
existence'.
The idea that aesthetic experience gives a profounder clue than logical
thought to the inner meaning of things was as old as Plato. It was one
of the crowning thoughts of Kant; it deeply coloured the metaphysics of
Schelling. And Nietzsche developed it with brilliant audacity when in
his _Birth of Tragedy_ (1872) he contrasted scornfully with the laboured
and ineffectual constructions of the theoretic man, even of Socrates the
founder of philosophy, the radiant vision of the artist, the lucid
clarity of Apollo. 'His book gave the lie to a thousand years of orderly
development', wrote the great Hellenist Wilamowitz, Nietzsche's old
schoolfellow, indignant at his rejection of the labours of scholastic
reason. But it affirmed energetically the passion of his own time for
immediate and first-hand experience.