Swinburne disappears, the daffodil of Shakespeare remains. The swallow
of Shakespeare remains in the verse in _Macbeth_; the bird of Wordsworth
Breaking the silence of the seas
remains; the swallow of “Itylus” disappears. Compare, again, a chorus of
_Atalanta_ with a chorus from Athenian tragedy. The chorus of Swinburne
is almost a parody of the Athenian: it is sententious, but it has not
even the significance of commonplace.
At least we witness of thee ere we die
That these things are not otherwise, but thus....
Before the beginning of years
There came to the making of man
Time with a gift of tears;
Grief with a glass that ran....
This is not merely “music”; it is effective because it appears to be a
tremendous statement, like statements made in our dreams; when we wake
up we find that the “glass that ran” would do better for time than for
grief, and that the gift of tears would be as appropriately bestowed by
grief as by time.
It might seem to be intimated, by what has been said, that the work of
Swinburne can be shown to be a sham, just as bad verse is a sham. It
would only be so if you could produce or suggest something that it
pretends to be and is not. The world of Swinburne does not depend upon
some other world which it simulates; it has the necessary completeness
and self-sufficiency for justification and permanence. It is impersonal,
and no one else could have made it. The deductions are true to the
postulates. It is indestructible. None of the obvious complaints that
were or might have been brought to bear upon the first _Poems and
Ballads_ holds good. The poetry is not morbid, it is not erotic, it is
not destructive. These are adjectives which can be applied to the
material, the human feelings, which in Swinburne’s case do not exist.
The morbidity is not of human feeling but of language. Language in a
healthy state presents the object, is so close to the object that the
two are identified.
They are identified in the verse of Swinburne solely because the object
has ceased to exist, because the meaning is merely the hallucination of
meaning, because language, uprooted, has adapted itself to an
independent life of atmospheric nourishment. In Swinburne, for example,
we see the word “weary” flourishing in this way independent of the
particular and actual weariness of flesh or spirit. The bad poet dwells
partly in a world of objects and partly in a world of words, and he
never can get them to fit. Only a man of genius could dwell so
exclusively and consistently among words as Swinburne. His language is
not, like the language of bad poetry, dead. It is very much alive, with
this singular life of its own. But the language which is more important
to us is that which is struggling to digest and express new objects, new
groups of objects, new feelings, new aspects, as, for instance, the
prose of Mr. James Joyce or the earlier Conrad.
Blake
I
If one follows Blake’s mind through the several stages of his poetic
development it is impossible to regard him as a naïf, a wild man, a wild
pet for the supercultivated. The strangeness is evaporated, the
peculiarity is seen to be the peculiarity of all great poetry: something
which is found (not everywhere) in Homer and Æschylus and Dante and
Villon, and profound and concealed in the work of Shakespeare—and also
in another form in Montaigne and in Spinoza. It is merely a peculiar
honesty, which, in a world too frightened to be honest, is peculiarly
terrifying. It is an honesty against which the whole world conspires,
because it is unpleasant. Blake’s poetry has the unpleasantness of great
poetry. Nothing that can be called morbid or abnormal or perverse, none
of the things which exemplify the sickness of an epoch or a fashion,
have this quality; only those things which, by some extraordinary labour
of simplification, exhibit the essential sickness or strength of the
human soul. And this honesty never exists without great technical
accomplishment. The question about Blake the man is the question of the
circumstances that concurred to permit this honesty in his work, and
what circumstances define its limitations. The favouring conditions
probably include these two: that, being early apprenticed to a manual
occupation, he was not compelled to acquire any other education in
literature than he wanted, or to acquire it for any other reason than
that he wanted it; and that, being a humble engraver, he had no
journalistic-social career open to him.
There was, that is to say, nothing to distract him from his interests or
to corrupt these interests: neither the ambitions of parents or wife,
nor the standards of society, nor the temptations of success; nor was he
exposed to imitation of himself or of anyone else. These
circumstances—not his supposed inspired and untaught spontaneity—are
what make him innocent. His early poems show what the poems of a boy of
genius ought to show, immense power of assimilation. Such early poems
are not, as usually supposed, crude attempts to do something beyond the
boy’s capacity; they are, in the case of a boy of real promise, more
likely to be quite mature and successful attempts to do something small.
So with Blake, his early poems are technically admirable, and their
originality is in an occasional rhythm. The verse of _Edward III_
deserves study. But his affection for certain Elizabethans is not so
surprising as his affinity with the very best work of his own century.
He is very like Collins, he is very eighteenth century. The poem
_Whether on Ida’s shady brow_ is eighteenth-century work; the movement,
the weight of it, the syntax, the choice of words—
The _languid_ strings do scarcely move!
The sound is _forc’d_, the notes are few!
this is contemporary with Gray and Collins, it is the poetry of a
language which has undergone the discipline of prose. Blake up to twenty
is decidedly a traditional.
Blake’s beginnings as a poet, then, are as normal as the beginnings of
Shakespeare. His method of composition, in his mature work, is exactly
like that of other poets. He has an idea (a feeling, an image), he
develops it by accretion or expansion, alters his verse often, and
hesitates often over the final choice.[9] The idea, of course, simply
comes, but upon arrival it is subjected to prolonged manipulation. In
the first phase Blake is concerned with verbal beauty; in the second he
becomes the apparent naïf, really the mature intelligence. It is only
when the ideas become more automatic, come more freely and are less
manipulated, that we begin to suspect their origin, to suspect that they
spring from a shallower source.
Footnote 9:
I do not know why M. Berger should say, without qualification, in his
_William Blake: mysticisme et poésie_, that “son respect pour l’esprit
qui soufflait en lui et qui dictait ses paroles l’empêchait de les
corriger jamais.” Dr. Sampson, in his Oxford edition of Blake, gives
us to understand that Blake believed much of his writing to be
automatic, but observes that Blake’s “meticulous care in composition
is everywhere apparent in the poems preserved in rough draft ...
alteration on alteration, rearrangement after rearrangement,
deletions, additions, and inversions....”
The Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and the poems from the
Rossetti manuscript, are the poems of a man with a profound interest in
human emotions, and a profound knowledge of them. The emotions are
presented in an extremely simplified, abstract form. This form is one
illustration of the eternal struggle of art against education, of the
literary artist against the continuous deterioration of language.
It is important that the artist should be highly educated in his own
art; but his education is one that is hindered rather than helped by the
ordinary processes of society which constitute education for the
ordinary man. For these processes consist largely in the acquisition of
impersonal ideas which obscure what we really are and feel, what we
really want, and what really excites our interest. It is of course not
the actual information acquired, but the conformity which the
accumulation of knowledge is apt to impose, that is harmful. Tennyson is
a very fair example of a poet almost wholly encrusted with parasitic
opinion, almost wholly merged into his environment. Blake, on the other
hand, knew what interested him, and he therefore presents only the
essential, only, in fact, what can be presented, and need not be
explained. And because he was not distracted, or frightened, or occupied
in anything but exact statement, he understood. He was naked, and saw
man naked, and from the centre of his own crystal. To him there was no
more reason why Swedenborg should be absurd than Locke. He accepted
Swedenborg, and eventually rejected him, for reasons of his own. He
approached everything with a mind unclouded by current opinions. There
was nothing of the superior person about him. This makes him terrifying.
II
But if there was nothing to distract him from sincerity there were, on
the other hand, the dangers to which the naked man is exposed. His
philosophy, like his visions, like his insight, like his technique, was
his own. And accordingly he was inclined to attach more importance to it
than an artist should; this is what makes him eccentric, and makes him
inclined to formlessness.
But most through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot’s curse
Blasts the new-born infant’s tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage hearse,
is the naked vision;
Love seeketh only self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another’s loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite,
is the naked observation; and _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ is naked
philosophy, presented. But Blake’s occasional marriages of poetry and
philosophy are not so felicitous.
He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars.
General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer;
For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized
particulars....
One feels that the form is not well chosen. The borrowed philosophy of
Dante and Lucretius is perhaps not so interesting, but it injures their
form less. Blake did not have that more Mediterranean gift of form which
knows how to borrow as Dante borrowed his theory of the soul; he must
needs create a philosophy as well as a poetry. A similar formlessness
attacks his draughtsmanship. The fault is most evident, of course, in
the longer poems—or rather, the poems in which structure is important.
You cannot create a very large poem without introducing a more
impersonal point of view, or splitting it up into various personalities.
But the weakness of the long poems is certainly not that they are too
visionary, too remote from the world. It is that Blake did not see
enough, became too much occupied with ideas.
We have the same respect for Blake’s philosophy (and perhaps for that of
Samuel Butler) that we have for an ingenious piece of home-made
furniture: we admire the man who has put it together out of the odds and
ends about the house. England has produced a fair number of these
resourceful Robinson Crusoes; but we are not really so remote from the
Continent, or from our own past, as to be deprived of the advantages of
culture if we wish them.
We may speculate, for amusement, whether it would not have been
beneficial to the north of Europe generally, and to Britain in
particular, to have had a more continuous religious history. The local
divinities of Italy were not wholly exterminated by Christianity, and
they were not reduced to the dwarfish fate which fell upon our trolls
and pixies. The latter, with the major Saxon deities, were perhaps no
great loss in themselves, but they left an empty place; and perhaps our
mythology was further impoverished by the divorce from Rome. Milton’s
celestial and infernal regions are large but insufficiently furnished
apartments filled by heavy conversation; and one remarks about the
Puritan mythology an historical thinness. And about Blake’s supernatural
territories, as about the supposed ideas that dwell there, we cannot
help commenting on a certain meanness of culture. They illustrate the
crankiness, the eccentricity, which frequently affects writers outside
of the Latin traditions, and which such a critic as Arnold should
certainly have rebuked. And they are not essential to Blake’s
inspiration.
Blake was endowed with a capacity for considerable understanding of
human nature, with a remarkable and original sense of language and the
music of language, and a gift of hallucinated vision. Had these been
controlled by a respect for impersonal reason, for common sense, for the
objectivity of science, it would have been better for him. What his
genius required, and what it sadly lacked, was a framework of accepted
and traditional ideas which would have prevented him from indulging in a
philosophy of his own, and concentrated his attention upon the problems
of the poet. Confusion of thought, emotion, and vision is what we find
in such a work as _Also Sprach Zarathustra_; it is eminently not a Latin
virtue. The concentration resulting from a framework of mythology and
theology and philosophy is one of the reasons why Dante is a classic,
and Blake only a poet of genius. The fault is perhaps not with Blake
himself, but with the environment which failed to provide what such a
poet needed; perhaps the circumstances compelled him to fabricate,
perhaps the poet required the philosopher and mythologist; although the
conscious Blake may have been quite unconscious of the motives.
Dante
M. Paul Valéry, a writer for whom I have considerable respect, has
placed in his most recent statement upon poetry a paragraph which seems
to me of very doubtful validity. I have not seen the complete essay, and
know the quotation only as it appears in a critical notice in the
_Athenæum_, July 23, 1920:
La philosophie, et même la morale tendirent à fuir les œuvres pour
se placer dans les réflexions qui les précèdent.... Parler
aujourd’hui de poésie philosophique (fût-ce en invoquant Alfred de
Vigny, Leconte de Lisle, et quelques autres), c’est naivement
confondre des conditions et des applications de l’esprit
incompatibles entre elles. N’est-ce pas oublier que le but de celui
qui spécule est de fixer ou de créer une notion—c’est-à-dire un
_pouvoir_ et un _instrument de pouvoir_, cependant que le poète
moderne essaie de produire en nous un _état_ et de porter cet état
exceptionnel au point d’une jouissance parfaite....
It may be that I do M. Valéry an injustice which I must endeavour to
repair when I have the pleasure of reading his article entire. But the
paragraph gives the impression of more than one error of analysis. In
the first place, it suggests that conditions have changed, that
“philosophical” poetry may once have been permissible, but that (perhaps
owing to the greater specialization of the modern world) it is now
intolerable. We are forced to assume that what we do not like in our
time was never good art, and that what appears to us good was always so.
If any ancient “philosophical” poetry retains its value, a value which
we fail to find in modern poetry of the same type, we investigate on the
assumption that we shall find some difference to which the mere
difference of date is irrelevant. But if it be maintained that the older
poetry has a “philosophic” element and a “poetic” element which can be
isolated, we have two tasks to perform. We must show first in a
particular case—our case is Dante—that the philosophy is essential to
the structure and that the structure is essential to the poetic beauty
of the parts; and we must show that the philosophy is employed in a
different form from that which it takes in admittedly unsuccessful
philosophical poems. And if M. Valéry is in error in his complete
exorcism of “philosophy,” perhaps the basis of the error is his
apparently commendatory interpretation of the effort of the modern poet,
namely, that the latter endeavours “to produce in us a _state_.”
The early philosophical poets, Parmenides and Empedocles, were
apparently persons of an impure philosophical inspiration. Neither their
predecessors nor their successors expressed themselves in verse;
Parmenides and Empedocles were persons who mingled with genuine
philosophical ability a good deal of the emotion of the founder of a
second-rate religious system. They were not interested exclusively in
philosophy, or religion, or poetry, but in something which was a mixture
of all three; hence their reputation as poets is low and as philosophers
should be considerably below Heraclitus, Zeno, Anaxagoras, or
Democritus. The poem of Lucretius is quite a different matter. For
Lucretius was undoubtedly a poet. He endeavours to expound a
philosophical system, but with a different motive from Parmenides or
Empedocles, for this system is already in existence; he is really
endeavouring to find the concrete poetic equivalent for this system—to
find its complete equivalent in vision. Only, as he is an innovator in
this art, he wavers between philosophical poetry and philosophy. So we
find passages such as:
But the velocity of thunderbolts is great and their stroke powerful,
and they run through their course with a rapid descent, because the
force when aroused first in all cases collects itself in the clouds
and.... Let us now sing what causes the motion of the stars.... Of
all these different smells then which strike the nostrils one may
reach to a much greater distance than another....[10]
Footnote 10:
Munro’s translation, _passim_.
But Lucretius’ true tendency is to express an ordered vision of the life
of man, with great vigour of real poetic image and often acute
observation.
quod petiere, premunt arte faciuntque dolorem
corporis et dentes inlidunt saepe labellis
osculaque adfligunt, quia non est pura voluptas
et stimuli subsunt qui instigant laedere id ipsum
quodcumque est, rabies unde illaec germina surgunt....
medio de fonte leporum
surgit amari aliquid quod in ipsis floribus angat....
nec procumbere humi prostratum et pandere palmas
ante deum delubra nec aras sanguine multo
spargere quadrupedum nec votis nectere vota,
sed mage pacata posse omnia mente tueri.
The philosophy which Lucretius tackled was not rich enough in variety of
feeling, applied itself to life too uniformly, to supply the material
for a wholly successful poem. It was incapable of complete expansion
into pure vision. But I must ask M. Valéry whether the “aim” of
Lucretius’ poem was “to fix or create a notion” or to fashion “an
instrument of power.”
Without doubt, the effort of the philosopher proper, the man who is
trying to deal with ideas in themselves, and the effort of the poet, who
may be trying to _realize_ ideas, cannot be carried on at the same time.
But this is not to deny that poetry can be in some sense philosophic.
The poet can deal with philosophic ideas, not as matter for argument,
but as matter for inspection. The original form of a philosophy cannot
be poetic. But poetry can be penetrated by a philosophic idea, it can
deal with this idea when it has reached the point of immediate
acceptance, when it has become almost a physical modification. If we
divorced poetry and philosophy altogether, we should bring a serious
impeachment, not only against Dante, but against most of Dante’s
contemporaries.
Dante had the benefit of a mythology and a theology which had undergone
a more complete absorption into life than those of Lucretius. It is
curious that not only Dante’s detractors, like the Petrarch of Landor’s
_Pentameron_ (if we may apply so strong a word to so amiable a
character), but some of his admirers, insist on the separation of
Dante’s “poetry” and Dante’s “teaching.” Sometimes the philosophy is
confused with the allegory. The philosophy is an ingredient, it is a
part of Dante’s world just as it is a part of life; the allegory is the
scaffold on which the poem is built. An American writer of a little
primer of Dante, Mr. Henry Dwight Sidgwick, who desires to improve our
understanding of Dante as a “spiritual leader,” says:
To Dante this literal Hell was a secondary matter; so it is to us.
He and we are concerned with the allegory. That allegory is simple.
Hell is the absence of God.... If the reader begins with the
consciousness that he is reading about sin, spiritually understood,
he never loses the thread, he is never at a loss, never slips back
into the literal signification.
Without stopping to question Mr. Sidgwick on the difference between
literal and spiritual sin, we may affirm that his remarks are
misleading. Undoubtedly the allegory is to be taken seriously, and
certainly the _Comedy_ is in some way a “moral education.” The question
is to find a formula for the correspondence between the former and the
latter, to decide whether the moral value corresponds directly to the
allegory. We can easily ascertain what importance Dante assigned to
allegorical method. In the _Convivio_ we are seriously informed that
the principal design [of the odes] is to lead men to knowledge and
virtue, as will be seen in the progress of the truth of them;
and we are also given the familiar four interpretations of an ode:
literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical. And so distinguished a
scholar as M. Hauvette repeats again and again the phrase “didactique
d’intention.” We accept the allegory. Accepted, there are two usual ways
of dealing with it. One may, with Mr. Sidgwick, dwell upon its
significance for the seeker of “spiritual light,” or one may, with
Landor, deplore the spiritual mechanics and find the poet only in
passages where he frees himself from his divine purposes. With neither
of these points of view can we concur. Mr. Sidgwick magnifies the
“preacher and prophet,” and presents Dante as a superior Isaiah or
Carlyle; Landor reserves the poet, reprehends the scheme, and denounces
the politics. Some of Landor’s errors are more palpable than Mr.
Sidgwick’s. He errs, in the first place, in judging Dante by the
standards of classical epic. Whatever the _Comedy_ is, an epic it is
not. M. Hauvette well says:
Rechercher dans quelle mesure le poème se rapproche du genre
classique de l’épopée, et dans quelle mesure il s’en écarte, est un
exércice de rhétorique entièrement inutile, puisque Dante, à n’en
pas douter, n’a jamais eu l’intention de composer une action épique
dans les règles.
But we must define the framework of Dante’s poem from the result as well
as from the intention. The poem has not only a framework, but a form;
and even if the framework be allegorical, the form may be something
else. The examination of any episode in the _Comedy_ ought to show that
not merely the allegorical interpretation or the didactic intention, but
the emotional significance itself, cannot be isolated from the rest of
the poem. Landor appears, for instance, to have misunderstood such a
passage as the Paolo and Francesca, by failing to perceive its
relations:
In the midst of her punishment, Francesca, when she comes to the
tenderest part of her story, tells it with complacency and delight.
This is surely a false simplification. To have lost all recollected
delight would have been, for Francesca, either loss of humanity or
relief from damnation. The ecstasy, with the present thrill at the
remembrance of it, is a part of the torture. Francesca is neither
stupefied nor reformed; she is merely damned; and it is a part of
damnation to experience desires that we can no longer gratify. For in
Dante’s Hell souls are not deadened, as they mostly are in life; they
are actually in the greatest torment of which each is capable.
E il modo ancor m’offende.
It is curious that Mr. Sidgwick, whose approbation is at the opposite
pole from Landor’s, should have fallen into a similar error. He says:
In meeting [Ulysses], as in meeting Pier della Vigna and Brunetto
Latini, the preacher and the prophet are lost in the poet.
Here, again, is a false simplification. These passages have no
digressive beauty. The case of Brunetto is parallel to that of
Francesca. The emotion of the passage resides in Brunetto’s excellence
in damnation—so admirable a soul, and so perverse.