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The Sacred Wood
“Intravit pinacothecam senex canus, exercitati vultus et qui videretur
nescio quid magnum promittere, sed cultu non proinde speciosus, et
facile appareret eum ex hac nota litteratum esse, quos odisse divites
solent ... 'ego’ inquit 'poeta sum et ut spero, non humillimi spiritus,
si modo coronis aliquid credendum est, quas etiam ad immeritos deferre
gratia solet.’”—PETRONIUS.
“I also like to dine on becaficas.”
The Sacred Wood
Essays On Poetry And Criticism
By
T. S. Eliot
Methuen & Co. Ltd.
36 Essex Street W.C.
London
1920
For
H. W. E.
“Tacuit Et Fecit”
Certain of these essays appeared, in the same or a more primitive form,
in _The Times Literary Supplement_, _The Athenæum_, _Art and Letters_,
and _The Egoist_. The author desires to express his obligation to the
editors of these periodicals.
INTRODUCTION
To anyone who is at all capable of experiencing the pleasures of
justice, it is gratifying to be able to make amends to a writer whom one
has vaguely depreciated for some years. The faults and foibles of
Matthew Arnold are no less evident to me now than twelve years ago,
after my first admiration for him; but I hope that now, on re-reading
some of his prose with more care, I can better appreciate his position.
And what makes Arnold seem all the more remarkable is, that if he were
our exact contemporary, he would find all his labour to perform again. A
moderate number of persons have engaged in what is called “critical”
writing, but no conclusion is any more solidly established than it was
in 1865. In the first essay in the first _Essays in Criticism_ we read
that
it has long seemed to me that the burst of creative activity in our
literature, through the first quarter of this century, had about it
in fact something premature; and that from this cause its
productions are doomed, most of them, in spite of the sanguine hopes
which accompanied and do still accompany them, to prove hardly more
lasting than the productions of far less splendid epochs. And this
prematureness comes from its having proceeded without having its
proper data, without sufficient material to work with. In other
words, the English poetry of the first quarter of this century, with
plenty of energy, plenty of creative force, did not know enough.
This makes Byron so empty of matter, Shelley so incoherent,
Wordsworth even, profound as he is, yet so wanting in completeness
and variety.
This judgment of the Romantic Generation has not, so far as I know, ever
been successfully controverted; and it has not, so far as I know, ever
made very much impression on popular opinion. Once a poet is accepted,
his reputation is seldom disturbed, for better or worse. So little
impression has Arnold’s opinion made, that his statement will probably
be as true of the first quarter of the twentieth century as it was of
the nineteenth. A few sentences later, Arnold articulates the nature of
the malady:
In the Greece of Pindar and Sophocles, in the England of
Shakespeare, the poet lived in a current of ideas in the highest
degree animating and nourishing to the creative power; society was,
in the fullest measure, permeated by fresh thought, intelligent and
alive; and this state of things is the true basis for the creative
power’s exercise, in this it finds its data, its materials, truly
ready for its hand; all the books and reading in the world are only
valuable as they are helps to this.
At this point Arnold is indicating the centre of interest and activity
of the critical intelligence; and it is at this perception, we may
almost say, that Arnold’s critical activity stopped. In a society in
which the arts were seriously studied, in which the art of writing was
respected, Arnold might have become a critic. How astonishing it would
be, if a man like Arnold had concerned himself with the art of the
novel, had compared Thackeray with Flaubert, had analysed the work of
Dickens, had shown his contemporaries exactly why the author of _Amos
Barton_ is a more _serious_ writer than Dickens, and why the author of
_La Chartreuse de Parma_ is more serious than either? In _Culture and
Anarchy_, in _Literature and Dogma_, Arnold was not occupied so much in
establishing a criticism as in attacking the uncritical. The difference
is that while in constructive work something can be done, destructive
work must incessantly be repeated; and furthermore Arnold, in his
destruction, went for game outside of the literary preserve altogether,
much of it political game untouched and inviolable by ideas. This
activity of Arnold’s we must regret; it might perhaps have been carried
on as effectively, if not quite so neatly, by some disciple (had there
been one) in an editorial position on a newspaper. Arnold is not to be
blamed: he wasted his strength, as men of superior ability sometimes do,
because he saw something to be done and no one else to do it. The
temptation, to any man who is interested in ideas and primarily in
literature, to put literature into the corner until he has cleaned up
the whole country first, is almost irresistible. Some persons, like Mr.
Wells and Mr. Chesterton, have succeeded so well in this latter
profession of setting the house in order, and have attracted so much
more attention than Arnold, that we must conclude that it is indeed
their proper rôle, and that they have done well for themselves in laying
literature aside.
Not only is the critic tempted outside of criticism. The criticism
proper betrays such poverty of ideas and such atrophy of sensibility
that men who ought to preserve their critical ability for the
improvement of their own creative work are tempted into criticism. I do
not intend from this the usually silly inference that the “Creative”
gift is “higher” than the critical. When one creative mind is better
than another, the reason often is that the better is the more critical.
But the great bulk of the work of criticism could be done by minds of
the second order, and it is just these minds of the second order that
are difficult to find. They are necessary for the rapid circulation of
ideas. The periodical press—the ideal literary periodical—is an
instrument of transport; and the literary periodical press is dependent
upon the existence of a sufficient number of second-order (I do not say
“second-rate,” the word is too derogatory) minds to supply its material.
These minds are necessary for that “current of ideas,” that “society
permeated by fresh thought,” of which Arnold speaks.
It is a perpetual heresy of English culture to believe that only the
first-order mind, the Genius, the Great Man, matters; that he is
solitary, and produced best in the least favourable environment, perhaps
the Public School; and that it is most likely a sign of inferiority that
Paris can show so many minds of the second order. If too much bad verse
is published in London, it does not occur to us to raise our standards,
to do anything to educate the poetasters; the remedy is, Kill them off.
I quote from Mr. Edmund Gosse:[1]
Footnote 1:
_Sunday Times_, May 30, 1920.
Unless something is done to stem this flood of poetastry the art of
verse will become not merely superfluous, but ridiculous. Poetry is
not a formula which a thousand flappers and hobbledehoys ought to be
able to master in a week without any training, and the mere fact
that it seems to be now practised with such universal ease is enough
to prove that something has gone amiss with our standards.... This
is all wrong, and will lead us down into the abyss like so many
Gadarene swine unless we resist it.
We quite agree that poetry is not a formula. But what does Mr. Gosse
propose to do about it? If Mr. Gosse had found himself in the flood of
poetastry in the reign of Elizabeth, what would he have done about it?
would he have stemmed it? What exactly is this abyss? and if something
“has gone amiss with our standards,” is it wholly the fault of the
younger generation that it is aware of no authority that it must
respect? It is part of the business of the critic to preserve
tradition—where a good tradition exists. It is part of his business to
see literature steadily and to see it whole; and this is eminently to
see it _not_ as consecrated by time, but to see it beyond time; to see
the best work of our time and the best work of twenty-five hundred years
ago with the same eyes.[2] It is part of his business to help the
poetaster to understand his own limitations. The poetaster who
understands his own limitations will be one of our useful second-order
minds; a good minor poet (something which is very rare) or another good
critic. As for the first-order minds, when they happen, they will be
none the worse off for a “current of ideas”; the solitude with which
they will always and everywhere be invested is a very different thing
from isolation, or a monarchy of death.
Footnote 2:
Arnold, it must be admitted, gives us often the impression of seeing
the masters, whom he quotes, as canonical literature, rather than as
masters.
NOTE.—I may commend as a model to critics who desire to correct some
of the poetical vagaries of the present age, the following passage
from a writer who cannot be accused of flaccid leniency, and the
justice of whose criticism must be acknowledged even by those who
feel a strong partiality toward the school of poets criticized:—
“Yet great labour, directed by great abilities, is never wholly
lost; if they frequently threw away their wit upon false conceits,
they likewise sometimes struck out unexpected truth: if their
conceits were far-fetched, they were often worth the carriage. To
write on their plan, it was at least necessary to read and think. No
man could be born a metaphysical poet, nor assume the dignity of a
writer, by descriptions copied from descriptions, by imitations
borrowed from imitations, by traditional imagery, and hereditary
similes, by readiness of rhyme, and volubility of syllables.
“In perusing the works of this race of authors, the mind is
exercised either by recollection or inquiry: something already
learned is to be retrieved, or something new is to be examined. If
their greatness seldom elevates, their acuteness often surprises; if
the imagination is not always gratified, at least the powers of
reflection and comparison are employed; and in the mass of materials
which ingenious absurdity has thrown together, genuine wit and
useful knowledge may be sometimes found buried perhaps in grossness
of expression, but useful to those who know their value; and such
as, when they are expanded to perspicuity, and polished to elegance,
may give lustre to works which have more propriety though less
copiousness of sentiment.”—JOHNSON, _Life of Cowley_.
Contents
Introduction ix
The Perfect Critic 1
Imperfect Critics—
Swinburne as Critic 15
A Romantic Aristocrat 22
The Local Flavour 29
A Note on the American Critic 34
The French Intelligence 39
Tradition and the Individual Talent 42
The Possibility of a Poetic Drama 54
Euripides and Professor Murray 64
Rhetoric and Poetic Drama 71
Notes on the Blank Verse of Christopher
Marlowe 78
Hamlet and His Problems 87
Ben Jonson 95
Phillip Massinger 112
Swinburne as Poet 131
Blake 137
Dante 144
The Perfect Critic
I
“Eriger en lois ses impressions personnelles, c’est le grand effort
d’un homme s’il est sincère.”—_Lettres à l’Amazone._
Coleridge was perhaps the greatest of English critics, and in a sense
the last. After Coleridge we have Matthew Arnold; but Arnold—I think it
will be conceded—was rather a propagandist for criticism than a critic,
a popularizer rather than a creator of ideas. So long as this island
remains an island (and we are no nearer the Continent than were Arnold’s
contemporaries) the work of Arnold will be important; it is still a
bridge across the Channel, and it will always have been good sense.
Since Arnold’s attempt to correct his countrymen, English criticism has
followed two directions. When a distinguished critic observed recently,
in a newspaper article, that “poetry is the most highly organized form
of intellectual activity,” we were conscious that we were reading
neither Coleridge nor Arnold. Not only have the words “organized” and
“activity,” occurring together in this phrase, that familiar vague
suggestion of the scientific vocabulary which is characteristic of
modern writing, but one asked questions which Coleridge and Arnold would
not have permitted one to ask. How is it, for instance, that poetry is
more “highly organized” than astronomy, physics, or pure mathematics,
which we imagine to be, in relation to the scientist who practises them,
“intellectual activity” of a pretty highly organized type? “Mere strings
of words,” our critic continues with felicity and truth, “flung like
dabs of paint across a blank canvas, may awaken surprise ... but have no
significance whatever in the history of literature.” The phrases by
which Arnold is best known may be inadequate, they may assemble more
doubts than they dispel, but they usually have some meaning. And if a
phrase like “the most highly organized form of intellectual activity” is
the highest organization of thought of which contemporary criticism, in
a distinguished representative, is capable, then, we conclude, modern
criticism is degenerate.
The verbal disease above noticed may be reserved for diagnosis by and
by. It is not a disease from which Mr. Arthur Symons (for the quotation
was, of course, not from Mr. Symons) notably suffers. Mr. Symons
represents the other tendency; he is a representative of what is always
called “æsthetic criticism” or “impressionistic criticism.” And it is
this form of criticism which I propose to examine at once. Mr. Symons,
the critical successor of Pater, and partly of Swinburne (I fancy that
the phrase “sick or sorry” is the common property of all three), _is_
the “impressionistic critic.” He, if anyone, would be said to expose a
sensitive and cultivated mind—cultivated, that is, by the accumulation
of a considerable variety of impressions from all the arts and several
languages—before an “object”; and his criticism, if anyone’s, would be
said to exhibit to us, like the plate, the faithful record of the
impressions, more numerous or more refined than our own, upon a mind
more sensitive than our own. A record, we observe, which is also an
interpretation, a translation; for it must itself impose impressions
upon us, and these impressions are as much created as transmitted by the
criticism. I do not say at once that this is Mr. Symons; but it is the
“impressionistic” critic, and the impressionistic critic is supposed to
be Mr. Symons.
At hand is a volume which we may test.[3] Ten of these thirteen essays
deal with single plays of Shakespeare, and it is therefore fair to take
one of these ten as a specimen of the book:
Footnote 3:
_Studies in Elizabethan Drama._ By Arthur Symons.
_Antony and Cleopatra_ is the most wonderful, I think, of all
Shakespeare’s plays....
and Mr. Symons reflects that Cleopatra is the most wonderful of all
women:
The queen who ends the dynasty of the Ptolemies has been the star of
poets, a malign star shedding baleful light, from Horace and
Propertius down to Victor Hugo; and it is not to poets only....
What, we ask, is this for? as a page on Cleopatra, and on her possible
origin in the dark lady of the Sonnets, unfolds itself. And we find,
gradually, that this is not an essay on a work of art or a work of
intellect; but that Mr. Symons is living through the play as one might
live it through in the theatre; recounting, commenting:
In her last days Cleopatra touches a certain elevation ... she would
die a thousand times, rather than live to be a mockery and a scorn
in men’s mouths ... she is a woman to the last ... so she dies ...
the play ends with a touch of grave pity ...
Presented in this rather unfair way, torn apart like the leaves of an
artichoke, the impressions of Mr. Symons come to resemble a common type
of popular literary lecture, in which the stories of plays or novels are
retold, the motives of the characters set forth, and the work of art
therefore made easier for the beginner. But this is not Mr. Symons’
reason for writing. The reason why we find a similarity between his
essay and this form of education is that _Antony and Cleopatra_ is a
play with which we are pretty well acquainted, and of which we have,
therefore, our own impressions. We can please ourselves with our own
impressions of the characters and their emotions; and we do not find the
impressions of another person, however sensitive, very significant. But
if we can recall the time when we were ignorant of the French
symbolists, and met with _The Symbolist Movement in Literature_, we
remember that book as an introduction to wholly new feelings, as a
revelation. After we have read Verlaine and Laforgue and Rimbaud and
return to Mr. Symons’ book, we may find that our own impressions dissent
from his. The book has not, perhaps, a permanent value for the one
reader, but it has led to results of permanent importance for him.
The question is not whether Mr. Symons’ impressions are “true” or
“false.” So far as you can isolate the “impression,” the pure feeling,
it is, of course, neither true nor false. The point is that you never
rest at the pure feeling; you react in one of two ways, or, as I believe
Mr. Symons does, in a mixture of the two ways. The moment you try to put
the impressions into words, you either begin to analyse and construct,
to “ériger en lois,” or you begin to create something else. It is
significant that Swinburne, by whose poetry Mr. Symons may at one time
have been influenced, is one man in his poetry and a different man in
his criticism; to this extent and in this respect only, that he is
satisfying a different impulse; he is criticizing, expounding,
arranging. You may say this is not the criticism of a critic, that it is
emotional, not intellectual—though of this there are two opinions, but
it is in the direction of analysis and construction, a beginning to
“ériger en lois,” and not in the direction of creation. So I infer that
Swinburne found an adequate outlet for the creative impulse in his
poetry; and none of it was forced back and out through his critical
prose. The style of the latter is essentially a prose style; and Mr.
Symons’ prose is much more like Swinburne’s poetry than it is like his
prose. I imagine—though here one’s thought is moving in almost complete
darkness—that Mr. Symons is far more disturbed, far more profoundly
affected, by his reading than was Swinburne, who responded rather by a
violent and immediate and comprehensive burst of admiration which may
have left him internally unchanged. The disturbance in Mr. Symons is
almost, but not quite, to the point of creating; the reading sometimes
fecundates his emotions to produce something new which is not criticism,
but is not the expulsion, the ejection, the birth of creativeness.
The type is not uncommon, although Mr. Symons is far superior to most of
the type. Some writers are essentially of the type that reacts in excess
of the stimulus, making something new out of the impressions, but suffer
from a defect of vitality or an obscure obstruction which prevents
nature from taking its course. Their sensibility alters the object, but
never transforms it. Their reaction is that of the ordinary emotional
person developed to an exceptional degree. For this ordinary emotional
person, experiencing a work of art, has a mixed critical and creative
reaction. It is made up of comment and opinion, and also new emotions
which are vaguely applied to his own life. The sentimental person, in
whom a work of art arouses all sorts of emotions which have nothing to
do with that work of art whatever, but are accidents of personal
association, is an incomplete artist. For in an artist these suggestions
made by a work of art, which are purely personal, become fused with a
multitude of other suggestions from multitudinous experience, and result
in the production of a new object which is no longer purely personal,
because it is a work of art itself.
It would be rash to speculate, and is perhaps impossible to determine,
what is unfulfilled in Mr. Symons’ charming verse that overflows into
his critical prose. Certainly we may say that in Swinburne’s verse the
circuit of impression and expression is complete; and Swinburne was
therefore able, in his criticism, to be more a critic than Mr. Symons.
This gives us an intimation why the artist is—each within his own
limitations—oftenest to be depended upon as a critic; his criticism will
be criticism, and not the satisfaction of a suppressed creative
wish—which, in most other persons, is apt to interfere fatally.
Before considering what the proper critical reaction of artistic
sensibility is, how far criticism is “feeling” and how far “thought,”
and what sort of “thought” is permitted, it may be instructive to prod a
little into that other temperament, so different from Mr. Symons’, which
issues in generalities such as that quoted near the beginning of this
article.
II
“L’écrivain de style abstrait est presque toujours un sentimental,
du moins un sensitif. L’écrivain artiste n’est presque jamais un
sentimental, et très rarement un sensitif”—_Le Problème du Style._
The statement already quoted, that “poetry is the most highly organized
form of intellectual activity,” may be taken as a specimen of the
abstract style in criticism. The confused distinction which exists in
most heads between “abstract” and “concrete” is due not so much to a
manifest fact of the existence of two types of mind, an abstract and a
concrete, as to the existence of another type of mind, the verbal, or
philosophic. I, of course, do not imply any general condemnation of
philosophy; I am, for the moment, using the word “philosophic” to cover
the unscientific ingredients of philosophy; to cover, in fact, the
greater part of the philosophic output of the last hundred years. There
are two ways in which a word may be “abstract.” It may have (the word
“activity,” for example) a meaning which cannot be grasped by appeal to
any of the senses; its apprehension may require a deliberate suppression
of analogies of visual or muscular experience, which is none the less an
effort of imagination. “Activity” will mean for the trained scientist,
if he employ the term, either nothing at all or something still more
exact than anything it suggests to us. If we are allowed to accept
certain remarks of Pascal and Mr. Bertrand Russell about mathematics, we
believe that the mathematician deals with objects—if he will permit us
to call them objects—which directly affect his sensibility. And during a
good part of history the philosopher endeavoured to deal with objects
which he believed to be of the same exactness as the mathematician’s.
Finally Hegel arrived, and if not perhaps the first, he was certainly
the most prodigious exponent of emotional systematization, dealing with
his emotions as if they were definite objects which had aroused those
emotions. His followers have as a rule taken for granted that words have
definite meanings, overlooking the tendency of words to become
indefinite emotions. (No one who had not witnessed the event could
imagine the conviction in the tone of Professor Eucken as he pounded the
table and exclaimed _Was ist Geist? Geist ist ..._) If verbalism were
confined to professional philosophers, no harm would be done. But their
corruption has extended very far. Compare a mediæval theologian or
mystic, compare a seventeenth-century preacher, with any “liberal”
sermon since Schleiermacher, and you will observe that words have
changed their meanings. What they have lost is definite, and what they
have gained is indefinite.
The vast accumulations of knowledge—or at least of information—deposited
by the nineteenth century have been responsible for an equally vast
ignorance. When there is so much to be known, when there are so many
fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different
meanings, when every one knows a little about a great many things, it
becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what
he is talking about or not. And when we do not know, or when we do not
know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts. The
sentence so frequently quoted in this essay will serve for an example of
this process as well as any, and may be profitably contrasted with the
opening phrases of the _Posterior Analytics_. Not only all knowledge,
but all feeling, is in perception. The inventor of poetry as the most
highly organized form of intellectual activity was not engaged in
perceiving when he composed this definition; he had nothing to be aware
of except his own emotion about “poetry.” He was, in fact, absorbed in a
very different “activity” not only from that of Mr. Symons, but from
that of Aristotle.
Aristotle is a person who has suffered from the adherence of persons who
must be regarded less as his disciples than as his sectaries. One must
be firmly distrustful of accepting Aristotle in a canonical spirit; this
is to lose the whole living force of him. He was primarily a man of not
only remarkable but universal intelligence; and universal intelligence
means that he could apply his intelligence to anything. The ordinary
intelligence is good only for certain classes of objects; a brilliant
man of science, if he is interested in poetry at all, may conceive
grotesque judgments: like one poet because he reminds him of himself, or
another because he expresses emotions which he admires; he may use art,
in fact, as the outlet for the egotism which is suppressed in his own
speciality. But Aristotle had none of these impure desires to satisfy;
in whatever sphere of interest, he looked solely and steadfastly at the
object; in his short and broken treatise he provides an eternal
example—not of laws, or even of method, for there is no method except to
be very intelligent, but of intelligence itself swiftly operating the
analysis of sensation to the point of principle and definition.
It is far less Aristotle than Horace who has been the model for
criticism up to the nineteenth century. A precept, such as Horace or
Boileau gives us, is merely an unfinished analysis. It appears as a law,
a rule, because it does not appear in its most general form; it is
empirical. When we understand necessity, as Spinoza knew, we are free
because we assent. The dogmatic critic, who lays down a rule, who
affirms a value, has left his labour incomplete. Such statements may
often be justifiable as a saving of time; but in matters of great
importance the critic must not coerce, and he must not make judgments of
worse and better. He must simply elucidate: the reader will form the
correct judgment for himself.
And again, the purely “technical” critic—the critic, that is, who writes
to expound some novelty or impart some lesson to practitioners of an
art—can be called a critic only in a narrow sense. He may be analysing
perceptions and the means for arousing perceptions, but his aim is
limited and is not the disinterested exercise of intelligence. The
narrowness of the aim makes easier the detection of the merit or
feebleness of the work; even of these writers there are very few—so that
their “criticism” is of great importance within its limits. So much
suffices for Campion. Dryden is far more disinterested; he displays much
free intelligence; and yet even Dryden—or any _literary_ critic of the
seventeenth century—is not quite a free mind, compared, for instance,
with such a mind as Rochefoucauld’s. There is always a tendency to
legislate rather than to inquire, to revise accepted laws, even to
overturn, but to reconstruct out of the same material. And the free
intelligence is that which is wholly devoted to inquiry.
Coleridge, again, whose natural abilities, and some of whose
performances, are probably more remarkable than those of any other
modern critic, cannot be estimated as an intelligence completely free.
The nature of the restraint in his case is quite different from that
which limited the seventeenth-century critics, and is much more
personal. Coleridge’s metaphysical interest was quite genuine, and was,
like most metaphysical interest, an affair of his emotions. But a
literary critic should have no emotions except those immediately
provoked by a work of art—and these (as I have already hinted) are, when
valid, perhaps not to be called emotions at all. Coleridge is apt to
take leave of the data of criticism, and arouse the suspicion that he
has been diverted into a metaphysical hare-and-hounds. His end does not
always appear to be the return to the work of art with improved
perception and intensified, because more conscious, enjoyment; his
centre of interest changes, his feelings are impure. In the derogatory
sense he is more “philosophic” than Aristotle. For everything that
Aristotle says illuminates the literature which is the occasion for
saying it; but Coleridge only now and then. It is one more instance of
the pernicious effect of emotion.
Aristotle had what is called the scientific mind—a mind which, as it is
rarely found among scientists except in fragments, might better be
called the intelligent mind. For there is no other intelligence than
this, and so far as artists and men of letters are intelligent (we may
doubt whether the level of intelligence among men of letters is as high
as among men of science) their intelligence is of this kind.
Sainte-Beuve was a physiologist by training; but it is probable that his
mind, like that of the ordinary scientific specialist, was limited in
its interest, and that this was not, primarily, an interest in art. If
he was a critic, there is no doubt that he was a very good one; but we
may conclude that he earned some other name. Of all modern critics,
perhaps Remy de Gourmont had most of the general intelligence of
Aristotle. An amateur, though an excessively able amateur, in
physiology, he combined to a remarkable degree sensitiveness, erudition,
sense of fact and sense of history, and generalizing power.
We assume the gift of a superior sensibility. And for sensibility wide
and profound reading does not mean merely a more extended pasture. There
is not merely an increase of understanding, leaving the original acute
impression unchanged. The new impressions modify the impressions
received from the objects already known. An impression needs to be
constantly refreshed by new impressions in order that it may persist at
all; it needs to take its place in a system of impressions. And this
system tends to become articulate in a generalized statement of literary
beauty.
There are, for instance, many scattered lines and tercets in the _Divine
Comedy_ which are capable of transporting even a quite uninitiated
reader, just sufficiently acquainted with the roots of the language to
decipher the meaning, to an impression of overpowering beauty. This
impression may be so deep that no subsequent study and understanding
will intensify it. But at this point the impression is emotional; the
reader in the ignorance which we postulate is unable to distinguish the
poetry from an emotional state aroused in himself by the poetry, a state
which may be merely an indulgence of his own emotions. The poetry may be
an accidental stimulus. The end of the enjoyment of poetry is a pure
contemplation from which all the accidents of personal emotion are
removed; thus we aim to see the object as it really is and find a
meaning for the words of Arnold. And without a labour which is largely a
labour of the intelligence, we are unable to attain that stage of vision
_amor intellectualis Dei_.
Such considerations, cast in this general form, may appear commonplaces.
But I believe that it is always opportune to call attention to the
torpid superstition that appreciation is one thing, and “intellectual”
criticism something else. Appreciation in popular psychology is one
faculty, and criticism another, an arid cleverness building theoretical
scaffolds upon one’s own perceptions or those of others. On the
contrary, the true generalization is not something superposed upon an
accumulation of perceptions; the perceptions do not, in a really
appreciative mind, accumulate as a mass, but form themselves as a
structure; and criticism is the statement in language of this structure;
it is a development of sensibility. The bad criticism, on the other
hand, is that which is nothing but an expression of emotion. And
emotional people—such as stockbrokers, politicians, men of science—and a
few people who pride themselves on being unemotional—detest or applaud
great writers such as Spinoza or Stendhal because of their “frigidity.”
The writer of the present essay once committed himself to the statement
that “The poetic critic is criticizing poetry in order to create
poetry.” He is now inclined to believe that the “historical” and the
“philosophical” critics had better be called historians and philosophers
quite simply. As for the rest, there are merely various degrees of
intelligence. It is fatuous to say that criticism is for the sake of
“creation” or creation for the sake of criticism. It is also fatuous to
assume that there are ages of criticism and ages of creativeness, as if
by plunging ourselves into intellectual darkness we were in better hope
of finding spiritual light. The two directions of sensibility are
complementary; and as sensibility is rare, unpopular, and desirable, it
is to be expected that the critic and the creative artist should
frequently be the same person.
Imperfect Critics
Swinburne as Critic
Three conclusions at least issue from the perusal of Swinburne’s
critical essays: Swinburne had mastered his material, was more inward
with the Tudor-Stuart dramatists than any man of pure letters before or
since; he is a more reliable guide to them than Hazlitt, Coleridge, or
Lamb; and his perception of relative values is almost always correct.
Against these merits we may oppose two objections: the style is the
prose style of Swinburne, and the content is not, in an exact sense,
criticism. The faults of style are, of course, personal; the tumultuous
outcry of adjectives, the headstrong rush of undisciplined sentences,
are the index to the impatience and perhaps laziness of a disorderly
mind. But the style has one positive merit: it allows us to know that
Swinburne was writing not to establish a critical reputation, not to
instruct a docile public, but as a poet his notes upon poets whom he
admired. And whatever our opinion of Swinburne’s verse, the notes upon
poets by a poet of Swinburne’s dimensions must be read with attention
and respect.
In saying that Swinburne’s essays have the value of notes of an
important poet upon important poets, we must place a check upon our
expectancy. He read everything, and he read with the single interest in
finding literature. The critics of the romantic period were pioneers,
and exhibit the fallibility of discoverers. The selections of Lamb are a
successful effort of good taste, but anyone who has referred to them
after a thorough reading of any of the poets included must have found
that some of the best passages—which must literally have stared Lamb in
the face—are omitted, while sometimes others of less value are included.
Hazlitt, who committed himself to the judgment that the _Maid’s Tragedy_
is one of the poorest of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays, has no connected
message to deliver. Coleridge’s remarks—too few and scattered—have
permanent truth; but on some of the greatest names he passes no remark,
and of some of the best plays was perhaps ignorant or ill-informed. But
compared with Swinburne, Coleridge writes much more as a poet might be
expected to write about poets. Of Massinger’s verse Swinburne says:
It is more serviceable, more businesslike, more eloquently
practical, and more rhetorically effusive—but never effusive beyond
the bounds of effective rhetoric—than the style of any Shakespearean
or of any Jonsonian dramatist.
It is impossible to tell whether Webster would have found the style of
Massinger more “serviceable” than his own for the last act of the _White
Devil_, and indeed difficult to decide what “serviceable” here means;
but it is quite clear what Coleridge means when he says that Massinger’s
style
is much more easily constructed [than Shakespeare’s], and may be
more successfully adopted by writers in the present day.
Coleridge is writing as a professional with his eye on the technique. I
do not know from what writing of Coleridge Swinburne draws the assertion
that “Massinger often deals in exaggerated passion,” but in the essay
from which Swinburne quotes elsewhere Coleridge merely speaks of the
“unnaturally irrational passions,” a phrase much more defensible. Upon
the whole, the two poets are in harmony upon the subject of Massinger;
and although Coleridge has said more in five pages, and said it more
clearly, than Swinburne in thirty-nine, the essay of Swinburne is by no
means otiose: it is more stimulating than Coleridge’s, and the
stimulation is never misleading. With all his superlatives, his
judgment, if carefully scrutinized, appears temperate and just.
With all his justness of judgment, however, Swinburne is an appreciator
and not a critic. In the whole range of literature covered, Swinburne
makes hardly more than two judgments which can be reversed or even
questioned: one, that Lyly is insignificant as a dramatist, and the
other, that Shirley was probably unaffected by Webster. The _Cardinal_
is not a cast of the _Duchess of Malfi_, certainly; but when Shirley
wrote
the mist is risen, and there’s none
To steer my wandering bark. (_Dies._)
he was probably affected by
My soul, like to a ship in a black storm,
Is driven, I know not whither.
Swinburne’s judgment is generally sound, his taste sensitive and
discriminating. And we cannot say that his thinking is faulty or
perverse—up to the point at which it is thinking. But Swinburne stops
thinking just at the moment when we are most zealous to go on. And this
arrest, while it does not vitiate his work, makes it an introduction
rather than a statement.
We are aware, after the _Contemporaries of Shakespeare_ and the _Age of
Shakespeare_ and the books on Shakespeare and Jonson, that there is
something unsatisfactory in the way in which Swinburne was interested in
these people; we suspect that his interest was never articulately
formulated in his mind or consciously directed to any purpose. He makes
his way, or loses it, between two paths of definite direction. He might
as a poet have concentrated his attention upon the technical problems
solved or tackled by these men; he might have traced for us the
development of blank verse from Sackville to the mature Shakespeare, and
its degeneration from Shakespeare to Milton. Or he might have studied
through the literature to the mind of that century; he might, by
dissection and analysis, have helped us to some insight into the feeling
and thought which we seem to have left so far away. In either case, you
would have had at least the excitement of following the movements of an
important mind groping towards important conclusions. As it is, there
are to be no conclusions, except that Elizabethan literature is very
great, and that you can have pleasure and even ecstasy from it, because
a sensitive poetic talent has had the experience. One is in risk of
becoming fatigued by a hubbub that does not march; the drum is beaten,
but the procession does not advance.
If, for example, Swinburne’s interest was in poetry, why devote an essay
to Brome? “The opening scene of the _Sparagus Garden_,” says Swinburne,
“is as happily humorous and as vividly natural as that of any more
famous comedy.” The scene is both humorous and natural. Brome deserves
to be more read than he is, and first of all to be more accessible than
he is. But Swinburne ought to suggest or imply (I do not say impose) a
reason for reading the _Sparagus Garden_ or the _Antipodes_, more
sufficient than any he has provided. No doubt such reason could be
found.
When it is a matter of pronouncing judgment between two poets, Swinburne
is almost unerring. He is certainly right in putting Webster above
Tourneur, Tourneur above Ford, and Ford above Shirley. He weighs
accurately the good and evil in Fletcher: he perceives the essential
theatricality, but his comparison of the _Faithful Shepherdess_ with
_Comus_ is a judgment no word of which can be improved upon:
The difference between this poem [_i.e._ the _Faithful Shepherdess_]
and Milton’s exquisitely imitative _Comus_ is the difference between
a rose with a leaf or two faded or falling, but still fragrant and
radiant, and the faultless but scentless reproduction of a rose in
academic wax for the admiration and imitation of such craftsmen as
must confine their ambition to the laurels of a college or the
plaudits of a school.
In the longest and most important essay in the _Contemporaries of
Shakespeare_, the essay on Chapman, there are many such sentences of
sound judgment forcibly expressed. The essay is the best we have on that
great poet. It communicates the sense of dignity and mass which we
receive from Chapman. But it also illustrates Swinburne’s infirmities.
Swinburne was not tormented by the restless desire to penetrate to the
heart and marrow of a poet, any more than he was tormented by the desire
to render the finest shades of difference and resemblance between
several poets. Chapman is a difficult author, as Swinburne says; he is
far more difficult than Jonson, to whom he bears only a superficial
likeness. He is difficult beyond his obscurity. He is difficult partly
through his possession of a quality comparatively deficient in Jonson,
but which was nevertheless a quality of the age. It is strange that
Swinburne should have hinted at a similarity to Jonson and not mentioned
a far more striking affinity of Chapman’s—that is, Donne. The man who
wrote
Guise, O my lord, how shall I cast from me
The bands and coverts hindering me from thee?
The garment or the cover of the mind
The humane soul is; of the soul, the spirit
The proper robe is; of the spirit, the blood;
And of the blood, the body is the shroud:
and
Nothing is made of nought, of all things made,
Their abstract being a dream but of a shade,
is unquestionably kin to Donne. The quality in question is not peculiar
to Donne and Chapman. In common with the greatest—Marlowe, Webster,
Tourneur, and Shakespeare—they had a quality of sensuous thought, or of
thinking through the senses, or of the senses thinking, of which the
exact formula remains to be defined. If you look for it in Shelley or
Beddoes, both of whom in very different ways recaptured something of the
Elizabethan inspiration, you will not find it, though you may find other
qualities instead. There is a trace of it only in Keats, and, derived
from a different source, in Rossetti. You will not find it in the _Duke
of Gandia_. Swinburne’s essay would have been all the better if he had
applied himself to the solution of problems like this.
He did not apply himself to this sort of problem because this was not
the sort of problem that interested him. The author of Swinburne’s
critical essays is also the author of Swinburne’s verse: if you hold the
opinion that Swinburne was a very great poet, you can hardly deny him
the title of a great critic. There is the same curious mixture of
qualities to produce Swinburne’s own effect, resulting in the same blur,
which only the vigour of the colours fixes. His great merit as a critic
is really one which, like many signal virtues, can be stated so simply
as to appear flat. It is that he was sufficiently interested in his
subject-matter and knew quite enough about it; and this is a rare
combination in English criticism. Our critics are often interested in
extracting something from their subject which is not fairly in it. And
it is because this elementary virtue is so rare that Swinburne must take
a very respectable place as a critic. Critics are often interested—but
not quite in the nominal subject, often in something a little beside the
point; they are often learned—but not quite to the point either.
(Swinburne knew some of the plays almost by heart.) Can this particular
virtue at which we have glanced be attributed to Walter Pater? or to
Professor Bradley? or to Swinburne’s editor?
A Romantic Aristocrat
It is impossible to overlook the merits of scholarship and criticism
exhibited by George Wyndham’s posthumous book, and it is impossible to
deal with the book purely on its merits of scholarship and criticism. To
attempt to do so would in the first place be unfair, as the book is a
posthumous work, and posthumous books demand some personal attention to
their writers. This book is a collection of essays and addresses,
arranged in their present order by Mr. Whibley; they were intended by
their author to be remodelled into a volume on “romantic literature”;
they move from an ingenious search for the date of the beginning of
Romanticism, through the French and English Renaissance, to Sir Walter
Scott. In the second place, these essays represent the literary work of
a man who gained his chief distinction in political life. In the third
place, this man stands for a type, an English type. The type is
interesting and will probably become extinct. It is natural, therefore,
that our primary interest in the essays should be an interest in George
Wyndham.
Mr. Charles Whibley, in an introduction the tone of which is well suited
to the matter, has several sentences which throw light on Wyndham’s
personality. What issues with surprising clearness from Mr. Whibley’s
sketch is the unity of Wyndham’s mind, the identity of his mind as it
engaged in apparently unrelated occupations. Wyndham left Eton for the
army; in barracks he “taught himself Italian, and filled his leisure
with the reading of history and poetry.” After this Coldstream culture
there was a campaign in Egypt; later, service in South Africa
accompanied by a copy of Virgil. There was a career in the Commons, a
conspicuous career as Irish Secretary. Finally, there was a career as a
landowner—2400 acres. And throughout these careers George Wyndham went
on not only accumulating books but reading them, and occasionally
writing about them. He was a man of character, a man of energy. Mr.
Whibley is quite credible when he says:
Literature was for him no parergon, no mere way of escape from
politics. If he was an amateur in feeling, he was a craftsman in
execution;
and, more significantly,
With the same zest that he read and discoursed upon _A Winter’s
Tale_ or _Troilus and Cressida_, he rode to hounds, or threw himself
with a kind of fury into a “point to point,” or made a speech at the
hustings, or sat late in the night talking with a friend.
From these and other sentences we chart the mind of George Wyndham, and
the key to its topography is the fact that his literature and his
politics and his country life are one and the same thing. They are not
in separate compartments, they are one career. Together they made up his
world: literature, politics, riding to hounds. In the real world these
things have nothing to do with each other. But we cannot believe that
George Wyndham lived in the real world. And this is implied in Mr.
Whibley’s remark that:
George Wyndham was by character and training a romantic. He looked
with wonder upon the world as upon a fairyland.
Here is the manifestation of type.