Front matter (continued 4)

First, he claims for language the highest place among the vehicles of artistic expression, on the ground that it is the most direct and also the most plastic. It is itself produced by imagination instead of being simply encountered by it, and it has no relation except to imagination; whereas any more material medium has a nature of its own, and relations to other things in the material world, and this nature and these relations intervene between the artist’s conception and his expression of it in the medium. It is to the superiority of its vehicle that Shelley attributes the greater fame which poetry has always enjoyed as compared with other arts. He forgets (if I may interpose a word of criticism) that the media of the other arts have, on their side, certain advantages over language, and that these perhaps counterbalance the inferiority which he notices. He would also have found it difficult to show that language, on its physical side, is any more a product of imagination than stone or pigments. And his idea that the medium in the other arts is an obstacle intervening between conception and expression is, to say the least, one-sided. A sculptor, painter, or musician, would probably reply that it is only the qualities of his medium that enable him to express at all; that what he expresses is inseparable from the vehicle of expression; and that he has no conceptions which are not from the beginning sculpturesque, pictorial, or musical. It is true, no doubt, that his medium is an obstacle as well as a medium; but this is also true of language.

But to resume. Language, Shelley goes on to say, receives in poetry a peculiar form. As it represents in its meaning a perfection which is always an order, harmony, or rhythm, so it itself, as so much sound, is an order, harmony, or rhythm. It is measured language, which is not the proper vehicle for the mere recital of facts or for mere reasoning. For Shelley, however, this measured language is not of necessity metrical. The order or measure may remain at the stage which it reaches in beautiful prose, like that of Plato, the melody of whose language, Shelley declares, is the most intense it is possible to conceive. It may again advance to metre; and he admits that metrical form is convenient, popular, and preferable, especially in poetry containing much action. But he will not have any new great poet tied down to it. It is not essential, while measure is absolutely so. For it is no mere accident of poetry that its language is measured, nor does a delight in this measure mean little. As sensitiveness to the order of the relations of sounds is always connected with sensitiveness to the order of the relations of thoughts, so also the harmony of the words is scarcely less indispensable than their meaning to the communication of the influence of poetry. ‘Hence,’ says Shelley, ‘the vanity of translation: it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet.’ Strong words to come from the translator of the Hymn to Mercury and of Agathon’s speech in the Symposium!1 And is not all that Shelley says of the difference between measured and unrhythmical language applicable, at least in some degree, to the difference between metrical and merely measured language? Could he really have supposed that metre is no more than a ‘convenience,’ which contributes nothing of any account to the influence of poetry? But I will not criticise. Let me rather point out how surprising, at first sight, and how significant, is Shelley’s insistence on the importance of measure or rhythm. No one could assert more absolutely than he the identity of the general substance of poetry with that of moral life and action, of the other arts, and of the higher kinds of philosophy. And yet it would be difficult to go beyond the emphasis of his statement that the formal element (as he understood it) is indispensable to the effect of poetry.

Shelley, however, nowhere considers this element more at length. He has no discussions, like those of Wordsworth and Coleridge, on diction. He never says, with Keats, that he looks on fine phrases like a lover. We hear of his deep-drawn sigh of satisfaction as he finished reading a passage of Homer, but not of his shouting his delight, as he ramped through the meadows of Spenser, at some marvellous flower. When in his letters he refers to any poem he is reading, he scarcely ever mentions particular lines or expressions; and we have no evidence that, like Coleridge and Keats, he was a curious student of metrical effects or the relations of vowel-sounds. I doubt if all this is wholly accidental. Poetry was to him so essentially an effusion of aspiration, love and worship, that we can imagine his feeling it almost an impiety to break up its unity even for purposes of study, and to give a separate attention to its means of utterance. And what he does say on the subject confirms this impression. In the first place, as we have seen, he lays great stress on inspiration; and his statements, if exaggerated and misleading, must still reflect in some degree his own experience. No poem, he asserts, however inspired it may be, is more than a feeble shadow of the original conception; for when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline. And so in a letter he speaks of the detail of execution destroying all wild and beautiful visions. Still, inspiration, if diminished by composition, is not wholly dispelled; and he appeals to the greatest poets of his day whether it is not an error to assert that the finest passages of poetry are produced by labour and study. Such toil he would restrict to those parts which connect the inspired passages, and he speaks with contempt of the fifty-six various readings of the first line of the Orlando Furioso. He seems to exaggerate on this matter because in the Defence his foe is cold reason and calculation. Elsewhere he writes more truly of the original conception as being obscure as well as intense;2 from which it would seem to follow that the feeble shadow, if darker, is at least more distinct than the original. He forgets, too, what is certainly the fact, that the poet in reshaping and correcting is able to revive in some degree the fire of the first impulse. And we know from himself that his greatest works cost him a severe labour not confined to the execution, while his manuscripts show plenty of various readings, if never so many as fifty-six in one line.

Still, what he says is highly characteristic of his own practice in composition. He allowed the rush of his ideas to have its way, without pausing to complete a troublesome line or to find a word that did not come; and the next day (if ever) he filled up the gaps and smoothed the ragged edges. And the result answers to his theory. Keats was right in telling him that he might be more of an artist. His language, indeed, unlike Wordsworth’s or Byron’s, is, in his mature work, always that of a poet; we never hear his mere speaking voice; but he is frequently diffuse and obscure, and even in fine passages his constructions are sometimes trailing and amorphous. The glowing metal rushes into the mould so vehemently that it overleaps the bounds and fails to find its way into all the little crevices. But no poetry is more manifestly inspired, and even when it is plainly imperfect it is sometimes so inspired that it is impossible to wish it changed. It has the rapture of the mystic, and that is too rare to lose. Tennyson quaintly said of the hymn Life of Life: ‘He seems to go up into the air and burst.’ It is true: and, if we are to speak of poems as fireworks, I would not compare Life of Life with a great set piece of Homer or Shakespeare that illumines the whole sky; but, all the same, there is no more thrilling sight than the heavenward rush of a rocket, and it bursts at a height no other fire can reach.

In addition to his praise of inspiration Shelley has some scattered remarks on another point which show the same spirit. He could not bear in poetic language any approach to artifice, or any sign that the writer had a theory or system of style. He thought Keats’s earlier poems faulty in this respect, and there is perhaps a reference to Wordsworth in the following sentence from the Preface to the Revolt of Islam: ‘Nor have I permitted any system relating to mere words to divert the attention of the reader, from whatever interest I may have succeeded in creating, to my own ingenuity in contriving,—to disgust him according to the rules of criticism. I have simply clothed my thoughts in what appeared to me the most obvious and appropriate language. A person familiar with nature, and with the most celebrated productions of the human mind, can scarcely err in following the instinct, with respect to selection of language, produced by that familiarity.’3 His own poetic style certainly corresponds with his intention. It cannot give the kind of pleasure afforded by what may be called without disparagement a learned and artful style, such as Virgil’s or Milton’s; but, like the best writing of Shakespeare and Goethe, it is, with all its individuality, almost entirely free from mannerism and the other vices of self-consciousness, and appears to flow so directly from the thought that one is ashamed to admire it for itself. This is equally so whether the appropriate style is impassioned and highly figurative, or simple and even plain. It is indeed in the latter case that Shelley wins his greatest, because most difficult, triumph. In the dialogue part of Julian and Maddalo he has succeeded remarkably in keeping the style quite close to that of familiar though serious conversation, while making it nevertheless unmistakably poetic. And the Cenci is an example of a success less complete only because the problem was even harder. The ideal of the style of tragic drama in the nineteenth or twentieth century should surely be, not to reproduce with modifications the style of Shakespeare, but to do what Shakespeare did—to idealise, without deserting, the language of contemporary speech. Shelley in the Cenci seems to me to have come nearest to this ideal.

3.

So much for general exposition. If now we consider more closely what Shelley says of the substance of poetry, a question at once arises. He may seem to think of poetry solely as the direct expression of perfection in some form, and accordingly to imagine its effect as simply joy or delighted aspiration. Much of his own poetry, too, is such an expression; and we understand when we find him saying that Homer embodied the ideal perfection of his age in human character, and unveiled in Achilles, Hector, and Ulysses ‘the truth and beauty of friendship, patriotism, and persevering devotion to an object.’ But poetry, it is obvious, is not wholly, perhaps not even mainly, of this kind. What is to be said, on Shelley’s theory, of his own melancholy lyrics, those ‘sweetest songs’ that ‘tell of saddest thought’? What of satire, of the epic of conflict and war, or of tragic exhibitions of violent and destructive passion? Does not his theory reflect the weakness of his own practice, his tendency to portray a thin and abstract ideal instead of interpreting the concrete detail of nature and life; and ought we not to oppose to it a theory which would consider poetry simply as a representation of fact?

To this last question I should answer No. Shelley’s theory, rightly understood, will take in, I think, everything really poetic. And to a considerable extent he himself shows the way to meet these doubts. He did not mean that the immediate subject of poetry must be perfection in some form. The poet, he says, can colour with the hues of the ideal everything he touches. If so, he may write of absolutely anything so long as he can so colour it, and nothing would be excluded from his province except those things (if any such exist) in which no positive relation to the ideal, however indirect, can be shown or intimated. Thus to take the instance of Shelley’s melancholy lyrics, clearly the lament which arises from loss of the ideal, and mourns the evanescence of its visitations or the desolation of its absence, is indirectly an expression of the ideal; and so on his theory is the simplest song of unhappy love or the simplest dirge. Further, he himself observes that, though the joy of poetry is often unalloyed, yet the pleasure of the ‘highest portions of our being is frequently connected with the pain of the inferior,’ that ‘the pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself,’ and that not sorrow only, but ‘terror, anguish, despair itself, are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good.’ That, then, which appeals poetically to such painful emotions will again be an indirect portrayal of the ideal; and it is clear, I think, that this was how Shelley in the Defence regarded heroic and tragic poetry, whether narrative or dramatic, with its manifestly imperfect characters and its exhibition of conflict and wild passion. He had, it is true, another and an unsatisfactory way of explaining the presence of these things in poetry; and I will refer to this in a moment. But he tells us that the Athenian tragedies represent the highest idealisms (his name for ideals) of passion and of power (not merely of virtue); and that in them we behold ourselves, ‘under a thin disguise of circumstance, stripped of all but that ideal perfection and energy which every one feels to be the internal type of all that he loves, admires, and would become.’ He writes of Milton’s Satan in somewhat the same strain. The Shakespearean tragedy from which he most often quotes is one in which evil holds the stage, Macbeth; and he was inclined to think King Lear, which certainly is no direct portrait of perfection, the greatest drama in the world. Lastly, in the Preface to his own Cenci he truly says that, while the story is fearful and monstrous, ‘the poetry which exists in these tempestuous sufferings and crimes,’ if duly brought out, ‘mitigates the pain of the contemplation of moral deformity’: so that he regards Count Cenci himself as a poetic character, and therefore as in some sense an expression of the ideal. He does not further explain his meaning. Perhaps it was that the perfection which poetry is to exhibit includes, together with those qualities which win our immediate and entire approval or sympathy, others which are capable of becoming the instruments of evil. For these, the energy, power and passion of the soul, though they may be perverted, are in themselves elements of perfection; and so, even in their perversion or their combination with moral deformity, they retain their value, they are not simply ugly or horrible, but appeal through emotions predominantly painful to the same love of the ideal which is directly satisfied by pictures of goodness and beauty. Now to these various considerations we shall wish to add others; but if we bear these in mind, I believe we shall find Shelley’s theory wide enough, and must hold that the substance of poetry is never mere fact, but is always ideal, though its method of representation is sometimes more direct, sometimes more indirect.

Nevertheless, he does not seem to have made his view quite clear to himself, or to hold to it consistently. We are left with the impression, not merely that he personally preferred the direct method (as he was, of course, entitled to do), but that his use of it shows a certain weakness, and also that even in theory he unconsciously tends to regard it as the primary and proper method, and to admit only by a reluctant after-thought the representation of imperfection. Let me point out some signs of this. He considered his own Cenci as a poem inferior in kind to his other main works, even as a sort of accommodation to the public. With all his modesty he knew what to think of the neglected Prometheus and Adonaïs, but there is no sign that he, any more than the world, was aware that the character of Cenci was a creation without a parallel in our poetry since the seventeenth century. His enthusiasm for some second-rate and third-rate Italian paintings, and his failure to understand Michael Angelo, seem to show the same tendency. He could not enjoy comedy: it seemed to him simply cruel: he did not perceive that to show the absurdity of the imperfect is to glorify the perfect. And, as I mentioned just now, he wavers in his view of the representation of heroic and tragic imperfection. We find in the Preface to Prometheus Unbound the strange notion that Prometheus is a more poetic character than Milton’s Satan because he is free from Satan’s imperfections, which are said to interfere with the interest. And in the Defence a similar error appears. Achilles, Hector, Ulysses, though they exhibit ideal virtues, are, he admits, imperfect. Why, then, did Homer make them so? Because, he seems to reply, Homer’s contemporaries regarded their vices (e.g. revengefulness and deceitfulness) as virtues. Homer accordingly had to conceal in the costume of these vices the unspotted beauty that he himself imagined; and, like Homer, ‘few poets of the highest class have chosen to exhibit the beauty of their conceptions in its naked truth and splendour.’ Now, this idea, to say nothing of its grotesque improbability in reference to Homer, and its probable baselessness in reference to most other poets, is quite inconsistent with that truer view of heroic and tragic character which was explained just now. It is an example of Shelley’s tendency to abstract idealism or spurious Platonism. He is haunted by the fancy that if he could only get at the One, the eternal Idea, in complete aloofness from the Many, from life with all its change, decay, struggle, sorrow and evil, he would have reached the true object of poetry: as if the whole finite world were a mere mistake or illusion, the sheer opposite of the infinite One, and in no way or degree its manifestation. Life, he says—

Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass, Stains the white radiance of eternity;

but the other side, the fact that the many colours are the white light broken, he tends to forget, by no means always, but in one, and that not the least inspired, of his moods. This is the source of that thinness and shallowness of which his view of the world and of history is justly accused, a view in which all imperfect being is apt to figure as absolutely gratuitous, and everything and everybody as pure white or pitch black. Hence also his ideals of good, whether as a character or as a mode of life, resting as they do on abstraction from the mass of real existence, tend to lack body and individuality; and indeed, if the existence of the many is a mere calamity, clearly the next best thing to their disappearance is that they should all be exactly alike and have as little character as possible. But we must remember that Shelley’s strength and weakness are closely allied, and it may be that the very abstractness of his ideal was a condition of that quivering intensity of aspiration towards it in which his poetry is unequalled. We must not go for this to Homer and Shakespeare and Goethe; and if we go for it to Dante, we shall find, indeed, a mind far vaster than Shelley’s, but also that dualism of which we complain in him, and the description of a heaven which, equally with Shelley’s regenerated earth, is no place for mere mortality. In any case, as we have seen, the weakness in his poetical practice, though it occasionally appears also as a defect in his poetical theory, forms no necessary part of it.

4.

I pass to his views on a last point. If the business of poetry is somehow to express ideal perfection, it may seem to follow that the poet should embody in his poems his beliefs about this perfection and the way to approach it, and should thus have a moral purpose and aim to be a teacher. And in regard to Shelley this conclusion seems the more natural because his own poetry allows us to see clearly some of his beliefs about morality and moral progress. Yet alike in his Prefaces and in the Defence he takes up most decidedly the position that the poet ought neither to affect a moral aim nor to express his own conceptions of right and wrong. ‘Didactic poetry,’ he declares, ‘is my abhorrence: nothing can be equally well expressed in prose that is not tedious and supererogatory in verse.’4 ‘There was little danger,’ he tells us in the Defence, ‘that Homer or any of the eternal poets’ should make a mistake in this matter; but ‘those in whom the poetical faculty, though great, is less intense, as Euripides, Lucan, Tasso, Spenser, have frequently affected a moral aim, and the effect of their poetry is diminished in exact proportion to the degree in which they compel us to advert to this purpose.’ These statements may appeal to us, but are they consistent with Shelley’s main views of poetry? To answer this question we must observe what exactly it is that he means to condemn.

Shelley was one of the few persons who can literally be said to love their kind. He held most strongly, too, that poetry does benefit men, and benefits them morally. The moral purpose, then, to which he objects cannot well be a poet’s general purpose of doing moral as well as other good through his poetry—such a purpose, I mean, as he may cherish when he contemplates his life and his life’s work. And, indeed, it seems obvious that nobody with any humanity or any sense can object to that, except through some intellectual confusion. Nor, secondly, does Shelley mean, I think, to condemn even the writing of a particular poem with a view to a particular moral or practical effect; certainly, at least, if this was his meaning he was condemning some of his own poetry. Nor, thirdly, can he be referring to the portrayal of moral ideals; for that he regarded as one of the main functions of poetry, and in the very place where he says that didactic poetry is his abhorrence he also says, by way of contrast, that he has tried to familiarise the minds of his readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence. It appears, therefore, that what he is really attacking is the attempt to give, in the strict sense, moral instruction, to communicate doctrines, to offer argumentative statements of opinion on right and wrong, and more especially, I think, on controversial questions of the day. An example would be Wordsworth’s discourse on education at the end of the Excursion, a discourse of which Shelley, we know, had a very low opinion. In short, his enemy is not the purpose of producing a moral effect, it is the appeal made for this purpose to the reasoning intellect. He says to the poet: By all means aim at bettering men; you are a man, and are bound to do so; but you are also a poet, and therefore your proper way of doing so is not by reasoning and preaching. His idea is of a piece with his general championship of imagination, and it is quite consistent with his main view of poetry.5

What, then, are the grounds of this position? They are not clearly set out, but we can trace several, and they are all solid. Reasoning on moral subjects, moral philosophy, was by no means ‘tedious’ to Shelley; it seldom is to real poets. He loved it, and (outside his Defence) he rated its value very high.6 But he thought it tedious and out of place in poetry, because it can be equally well expressed in ‘unmeasured’ language—much better expressed, one may venture to add. You invent an art in order to effect by it a particular purpose which nothing else can effect as well. How foolish, then, to use this art for a purpose better served by something else! I know no answer to this argument, and its application is far wider than that given to it by Shelley. Secondly, Shelley remarks that a poet’s own conceptions on moral subjects are usually those of his place and time, while the matter of his poem ought to be eternal, or, as we say, of permanent and universal interest. This, again, seems true, and has a wide application; and it holds good even when the poet, like Shelley himself, is in rebellion against orthodox moral opinion; for his heterodox opinions will equally show the marks of his place and time, and constitute a perishable element in his work. Doubtless no poetry can be without a perishable element; but that poetry has least of it which interprets life least through the medium of systematic and doctrinal ideas. The veil which time and place have hung between Homer or Shakespeare and the general reader of to-day is almost transparent, while even a poetry so intense as that of Dante and Milton is impeded in its passage to him by systems which may be unfamiliar, and, if familiar, may be distasteful.

Lastly—and this is Shelley’s central argument—as poetry itself is directly due to imaginative inspiration and not to reasoning, so its true moral effect is produced through imagination and not through doctrine. Imagination is, for Shelley, ‘the great instrument of moral good.’ The ‘secret of morals is love.’ It is not ‘for want of admirable doctrines that men hate and despise and censure and deceive and subjugate one another’: it is for want of love. And love is ‘a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action or person not our own.’ ‘A man,’ therefore, ‘to be greatly good must imagine intensely and comprehensively.’ And poetry ministers to moral good, the effect, by acting on its cause, imagination. It strengthens imagination as exercise strengthens a limb, and so it indirectly promotes morality. It also fills the imagination with beautiful impersonations of all that we should wish to be. But moral reasoning does not act upon the cause, it only analyses the effect; and the poet has no right to be content to analyse what he ought indirectly to create. Here, again, in his eagerness, Shelley cuts his antitheses too clean, but the defect is easily made good, and the main argument is sound.

Limits of time will compel me to be guilty of the same fault in adding a consideration which is in the spirit of Shelley’s. The chief moral effect claimed for poetry by Shelley is exerted, primarily, by imagination on the emotions; but there is another influence, exerted primarily through imagination on the understanding. Poetry is largely an interpretation of life; and, considering what life is, that must mean a moral interpretation. This, to have poetic value, must satisfy imagination; but we value it also because it gives us knowledge, a wider comprehension, a new insight into ourselves and the world.7 Now, it may be held—and this view answers to a very general feeling among lovers of poetry now—that the most deep and original moral interpretation is not likely to be that which most shows a moral purpose or is most governed by reflective beliefs and opinions, and that as a rule we learn most from those who do not try to teach us, and whose opinions may even remain unknown to us: so that there is this weighty objection to the appearance of such purpose and opinions, that it tends to defeat its own intention. And the reason that I wish to suggest is this, that always we get most from the genius in a man of genius and not from the rest of him. Now, although poets often have unusual powers of reflective thought, the specific genius of a poet does not lie there, but in imagination. Therefore his deepest and most original interpretation is likely to come by the way of imagination. And the specific way of imagination is not to clothe in imagery consciously held ideas; it is to produce half-consciously a matter from which, when produced, the reader may, if he chooses, extract ideas. Poetry (I must exaggerate to be clear), psychologically considered, is not the expression of ideas or of a view of life; it is their discovery or creation, or rather both discovery and creation in one. The interpretation contained in Hamlet or King Lear was not brought ready-made to the old stories. What was brought to them was the huge substance of Shakespeare’s imagination, in which all his experience and thought was latent; and this, dwelling and working on the stories with nothing but a dramatic purpose, and kindling into heat and motion, gradually discovered or created in them a meaning and a mass of truth about life, which was brought to birth by the process of composition, but never preceded it in the shape of ideas, and probably never, even after it, took that shape to the poet’s mind. And this is the interpretation which we find inexhaustibly instructive, because Shakespeare’s genius is in it. On the other hand, however much from curiosity and personal feeling towards him we may wish to know his opinions and beliefs about morals or religion or his own poems or Queen Elizabeth, we have not really any reason to suppose that their value would prove extraordinary. And so, to apply this generally, the opinions, reasonings and beliefs of poets are seldom of the same quality as their purely imaginative product. Occasionally, as with Goethe, they are not far off it; but sometimes they are intense without being profound, and more eccentric than original; and often they are very sane and sound, but not very different from those of wise men without genius. And therefore poetry is not the place for them. For we want in poetry a moral interpretation, but not the interpretation we have already. As a rule the genuine artist’s quarrel with ‘morality’ in art is not really with morality, it is with a stereotyped or narrow morality; and when he refuses in his art to consider things from what he calls the moral point of view, his reasons are usually wrong, but his instinct is right.

Poetry itself confirms on the whole this contention, though doubtless in these last centuries a great poet’s work will usually reveal more of conscious reflection than once it did. Homer and Shakespeare show no moral aim and no system of opinion. Milton was far from justifying the ways of God to men by the argumentation he put into divine and angelic lips; his truer moral insight is in the creations of his genius; for instance, in the character of Satan or the picture of the glorious humanity of Adam and Eve. Goethe himself could never have told the world what he was going to express in the First Part of Faust: the poem told him, and it is one of the world’s greatest. He knew too well what he was going to express in the Second Part, and with all its wisdom and beauty it is scarcely a great poem. Wordsworth’s original message was delivered, not when he was a Godwinian semi-atheist, nor when he had subsided upon orthodoxy, but when his imagination, with a few hints from Coleridge, was creating a kind of natural religion; and this religion itself is more profoundly expressed in his descriptions of his experience than in his attempts to formulate it. The moral virtue of Tennyson is in poems like Ulysses and parts of In Memoriam, where sorrow and the consciousness of a deathless affection or an unquenchable desire for experience forced an utterance; but when in the Idylls he tried to found a great poem on explicit ideas about the soul and the ravages wrought in it by lawless passion, he succeeded but partially, because these ideas, however sound, were no product of his genius. And so the moral virtue of Shelley’s poetry lay, not in his doctrines about the past and future of man, but in an intuition, which was the substance of his soul, of the unique value of love. In the end, for him, the truest name of that perfection called Intellectual Beauty, Liberty, Spirit of Nature, is Love. Whatever in the world has any worth is an expression of Love. Love sometimes talks. Love talking musically is Poetry.

1904.

1 Statements equally emphatic on this subject may be found in a passage quoted by Mrs. Shelley in a footnote to Shelley’s letter to John Gisborne, Nov. 16, 1819 (Letter XXX. in Mrs. Shelley’s edition). Cf. also Letter XXXIII. to Leigh Hunt, Nov. 1819.

2 I cannot find the passage or passages to which I referred in making this statement, and therefore I do not vouch for its accuracy. Cf. from the fragment Fiordispina,

The ardours of a vision which obscure The very idol of its portraiture.

3 Cf. from the Preface to the Cenci: ‘I entirely agree with those modern critics who assert that, in order to move men to true sympathy, we must use the familiar language of men.... But it must be the real language of men in general, and not that of any particular class to whose society the writer happens to belong.’

4 Preface to Prometheus Unbound.

5 I do not discuss the adequacy of Shelley’s position, or assert that he held it quite clearly or consistently. In support of my interpretation, of it I may refer to the Preface to the Cenci. There he repudiates the idea of making the dramatic exhibition of the story ‘subservient to what is vulgarly called a moral purpose,’ and, as the context shows, he identifies such a treatment of the story with the ‘enforcement’ of a ‘dogma.’

This passage has a further interest. The dogma which Shelley would not enforce in his tragedy was that ‘no person can truly be dishonoured by the act of another, and the fit return to make to the most enormous injuries is kindness and forbearance, and a resolution to convert the injurer from his dark passions by peace and love’; and accordingly he held that ‘if Beatrice had thought in this manner, she would have been wiser and better.’ How inexcusable then is the not uncommon criticism on the Cenci that he represents Beatrice as a perfect character and justifies her murder of ‘the injurer.’

Shelley’s position in the Defence, it may be added, is in total disagreement with his youthful doctrine and practice. In 1811 he wrote to Miss Hitchener, ‘My opinion is that all poetical beauty ought to be subordinate to the inculcated moral,’ and a large part of Queen Mab is frankly didactic. Even there, however, he reserved most of the formal instruction for the Notes, perceiving that ‘a poem very didactic is ... very stupid.’

6 ‘I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science,’ he says in a letter to Peacock, Jan. 1819.

7 And, I may add, the more it does this, so long as it does it imaginatively, the more does it satisfy imagination, and the greater is its poetic value.

THE LONG POEM IN THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH

THE LONG POEM IN THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH1

The poetry of the age of Wordsworth, we are all agreed, is one of the glories of our literature. It is surpassed, many would add, by the poetry of no other period except the Elizabethan. But it has obvious flaws, of which perhaps we are becoming more and more distinctly conscious now; and, apart from these definite defects, it also leaves with us, when we review it, a certain feeling of disappointment. It is great, we say to ourselves, but why is it not greater still? It shows a wonderful abundance of genius: why does it not show an equal accomplishment?

1.

Matthew Arnold, in his essay on The Function of Criticism at the Present Time, gave an answer to this question. ‘It has long seemed to me,’ he wrote, ‘that the burst of creative activity in our literature, through the first quarter of this century, had about it, in fact, something premature.... And this prematureness comes from its having proceeded without having its proper data, without sufficient materials 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 in variety.’ The statement that this poetry ‘did not know enough’ means, of course, for Arnold, not that it lacked information, reading, ideas of a kind, but that it lacked ‘criticism.’ And this means that it did not live and move freely in an atmosphere of the best available ideas, of ideas gained by a free, sincere, and continued effort, in theology, philosophy, history, science, to see things as they are. In such an atmosphere Goethe lived. There was not indeed in Goethe’s Germany, nor was there in the England of our poets, the ‘national glow of life and thought’ that prevailed in the Athens of Pericles or the England of Elizabeth. That happiest atmosphere for poetry was wanting in both countries. But there was for Goethe ‘a sort of equivalent for it in the complete culture and unfettered thinking of a large body of Germans,’ a culture produced by a many-sided learning and a long and widely-combined critical effort. It was this that our poets lacked.

Now, if this want existed, as Arnold affirms, it may not have had all the importance he ascribes to it, but considerable importance it must have had. And as to its existence there can hardly be a doubt. One of the most striking characteristics of Wordsworth’s age is the very unusual superiority of the imaginative literature to the scientific. I mean by the ‘scientific’ literature that of philosophy, theology, history, politics, economics, not only that of the sciences of Nature, which for our present purpose are perhaps the least important. In this kind of literature Wordsworth’s age has hardly an author to show who could for a moment be placed on a level with some five of the poets, with the novelists Scott and Jane Austen, or with the poetic critics Lamb, Hazlitt, and Coleridge. It has no writers to compare with Bacon, Newton, Hume, Gibbon, Johnson, or Burke. It is the time of Paley, Godwin, Stewart, Bentham, Mitford, Lingard, Coleridge the philosopher and theologian. These are names worthy of all respect, but they represent a literature quite definitely of the second rank. And this great disproportion between the two kinds of literature, we must observe, is a peculiar phenomenon. If we go back as far as the Elizabethan age we shall find no parallel to it. The one kind was doubtless superior to the other in Shakespeare’s time, possibly even in Milton’s; but Hooker and Bacon and Taylor and Clarendon and Hobbes are not separated from the best poets of their day by any startling difference of quality;2 while in the later periods, right down to the age of Wordsworth, the scientific literature quite holds its own, to say no more, with the imaginative. Nor in the Germany of Wordsworth’s own time is there that gap between the two that we find in England. In respect of genius the philosophers, for example, though none of them was the equal of Goethe, were as a body not at all inferior to the poets. The case of England in Wordsworth’s age is anomalous.

This peculiarity must be symptomatic, and it must have been influential. It confirms Arnold’s view that the intellectual atmosphere of the time was not of the best. If we think of the periodical literature—of the Quarterly and Edinburgh and Blackwood—we shall be still more inclined to assent to that view. And when we turn to the poets themselves, and especially to their prose writings, letters, and recorded conversation, and even to the critiques of Hazlitt, of Lamb, and of Coleridge, we cannot reject it. Assuredly we read with admiration, and the signs of native genius we meet with in abundance—in greater abundance, I think, than in the poetry and criticism of Germany, if Goethe is excepted. But the freedom of spirit, the knowledge, the superiority to prejudice and caprice and fanaticism, the openness to ideas, the atmosphere that is all about us when we read Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, we do not find. Can we imagine any one of those four either inspired or imprisoned as Shelley was by the doctrines of Godwin? Could any of them have seen in the French Revolution no more significance than Scott appears to have detected? How cramped are the attitudes, sympathetic or antipathetic, of nearly all our poets towards the Christian religion! Could anything be more borné than Coleridge’s professed reason for not translating Faust?3 Is it possible that a German poet with the genius of Byron or Wordsworth could have inhabited a mental world so small and so tainted with vulgarity as is opened to us by the brilliant letters of the former, or could have sunk, like the latter, to suggesting that the cholera was a divine condemnation of Catholic Emancipation and the Reform Bill?

But if we accept Arnold’s statement as to the intellectual atmosphere of the poetry of Wordsworth’s time, a question will remain. Was he right in regarding this atmosphere as the sole, or even as the chief, cause of the fact (if it is one) that the poetry does not fully correspond in greatness with the genius of the poets? And before we come to this question we must put another. Is the fact really as it has just been stated? I do not think so. The disappointment that we feel attends, it seems to me, mainly our reading of the long poems. Reviewing these in memory, and asking ourselves how many we can unreservedly call ‘great,’ we hesitate. Beyond doubt there is great poetry in some of them, fine poetry in many; but that does not make a great whole. Which of them is great as a whole? Not the Prelude or the Excursion, still less Endymion or The Revolt of Islam or Childe Harold, which hardly pretends to unity. Christabel, the wonderful fragment, is a fragment; so is Hyperion; Don Juan, also unfinished, becomes more discursive the further it proceeds, and in spirit is nowhere great. All the principal poets wrote dramas, or at least dramatic pieces; and some readers think that in Manfred, and still more certainly in Cain, we have great poems, while others think this of Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci. But if as to one or more of these we assent, is our judgment quite confident, and can we say that any of them satisfy us, like some works of earlier times? We are thus satisfied, it seems to me, only when we come to poems of smaller dimensions, like The Ancient Mariner, or The Eve of Saint Agnes, or Adonaïs, or The Vision of Judgment, or when we read the lyrics. To save time I will confine myself to the latter.

Within this sphere we have no longer that impression of genius which fails to reach full accomplishment. I would go further. No poet, of course, of Wordsworth’s age is the equal of Shakespeare or of Milton; and there are certain qualities, too, of lyrical verse in which the times of Shakespeare and of Milton are superior to that of Wordsworth. But if we take the better part of the lyrical poetry of these three periods in the mass, or again in a representative selection, it will not be the latest period, I think, that need fear the comparison. In the original edition of the Golden Treasury, Book I. (Wyatt to Shakespeare) occupies forty pages; Book II. (the rest of the seventeenth century) sixty-five; Book IV., which covers the very much shorter period from Wordsworth to Hood, close on a hundred and forty. ‘Book I.,’ perhaps most of us would say, ‘should be longer, and Book IV. a good deal shorter: some third-rate pieces are included in it, and Wordsworth is over-represented. And the Elizabethan poems are mostly quite short, while the Nineteenth Century poets shine equally in the longer kinds of lyric. And Mr. Palgrave excluded the old ballads, but admitted poems like Coleridge’s Love and Wordsworth’s Ruth (seven whole pages). And in any case we cannot judge by mere quantity.’ No; but still quantity must count for something, and the Golden Treasury is a volume excellent in selection, arrangement, and taste. It does, I think, leave the impression that the age of Wordsworth was our greatest period in lyrical poetry. And if Book I. were swelled to the dimensions of Book IV., this impression would not be materially altered; it might even be deepened. For the change would force into notice the comparative monotony of the themes of the earlier poetry, and the immensely wider range of the thought and emotion that attain expression in the later. It might also convince us that, on the whole, this more varied material is treated with a greater intensity of feeling, though on this point it is difficult to be sure, since we recognise what may be called the conventions of an earlier age, and are perhaps a little blind to those of a time near our own.

Now the eminence of Wordsworth’s age in lyrical poetry, even if it is not also a pre-eminence, is a significant fact. It may mean that the whole poetic spirit of the time was lyrical in tendency; and this may indirectly be a cause of that sense of disappointment which mingles with our admiration of the long poems. I will call attention, therefore, to two or three allied facts. (1) The longer poems of Campbell are already dead; he survives only in lyrics. This is also true of Moore. In spite of fine passages (and the battle in Marmion is in certain qualities superior to anything else of the time) Scott’s longer poems cannot be classed with the best contemporary poetry; but in some of his ballads and songs he attains that rank. (2) Again, much of the most famous narrative poetry is semi-lyrical in form, as a moment’s thought of Scott, Byron, and Coleridge will show. Some of it (for instance, several of Byron’s tales, or Wordsworth’s White Doe of Rylstone) is strongly tinged with the lyrical spirit. The centre of interest is inward. It is an interest in emotion, thought, will, rather than in scenes, events, actions, which express and re-act on emotions, thoughts, will. It would hardly be going too far to say that in the most characteristic narrative poetry the balance of outward and inward is rarely attained.4 (3) The same tendencies are visible in much of the dramatic writing. Byron’s regular dramas, for instance, if they ever lived, are almost forgotten; but Heaven and Earth, which is still alive, is largely composed of lyrics, and the first two acts of Manfred are full of them. Prometheus Unbound is called ‘a lyrical drama.’ Though it has some very fine and some very beautiful blank verse passages (usually undramatic), its lyrics are its glory; and this is even more the case with Hellas. It would be untrue to say that the comparative failure of most of the dramas of the time is principally due to the lyrical spirit, but many of them show it. (4) The strength of this spirit may be illustrated lastly by a curious fact. The ode is one of the longest and most ambitious forms of lyric, and some of the most famous poems of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats are odes. But the greatest of the lyrists, who wrote the Odes to Liberty and Naples and the West Wind, found the limits even of the ode too narrow for his ‘flight of fire.’ If Lycidas and L’Allegro and Spenser’s Epithalamion are lyrical poems, and if we are not arbitrarily to determine that nothing shall be called lyrical which exceeds a certain length, Adonaïs will be a lyrical elegy in fifty-five Spenserian stanzas, and the Lines written among the Euganean Hills and Epipsychidion will be lyrics consisting respectively of 370 and 600 lines.

It will however be agreed that in general a lyrical poem may be called short as compared with a narrative or drama. It is usual, further, to say that lyrical poetry is ‘subjective,’ since, instead of telling or representing a story of people, actions, and events, it expresses the thoughts and feelings of the poet himself. This statement is ambiguous and in other ways defective; but it will be admitted to have a basis in fact. It may be suggested, then, that the excellence of the lyrical poetry of Wordsworth’s time, and the imperfection of the long narratives and dramas, may have a common origin. Just as it was most natural to Homer or to Shakespeare to express the imaginative substance of his mind in the ‘objective’ shape of a world of persons and actions ostensibly severed from his own thoughts and feelings, so, perhaps, for some reason or reasons, it was most natural to the best poets of this later time to express that substance in the shape of impassioned reflections, aspirations, prophecies, laments, outcries of joy, murmurings of peace. The matter of these might, in another sense of the word, be ‘objective’ enough, a matter of general human interest, not personal in any exclusive way; but it appeared in the form of the poet’s thought and feeling. Just because he most easily expressed it thus, he succeeded less completely when he attempted the more objective form of utterance; and for the same reason it was especially important that he should be surrounded and penetrated by an atmosphere of wide, deep, and liberal ‘criticism.’ For he not only lived among ideas; he expressed ideas, and expressed them as ideas.

These suggestions seem to be supported by other phenomena of the poetry. The ‘subjective’ spirit extends, we saw, into many of the longer poems. This is obvious when it can plausibly be said, as in Byron’s case, that the poet’s one hero is himself. It appears in another way when the poem, through its story or stories, displays the poet’s favourite ideas and beliefs. The Excursion does this; most of Shelley’s longer poems do it. And the strength of this tendency may be seen in an apparent contradiction. One of the marks of the Romantic Revival is a disposition to substitute the more concrete and vivid forms of narrative and drama for the eighteenth century form of satiric or so-called didactic reflection. Yet most of the greater poets, especially in their characteristic beginnings, show a strong tendency to reflective verse; Coleridge, for example, in Religious Musings, Byron in the first two cantos of Childe Harold, Shelley in Queen Mab, and Keats in Sleep and Poetry. These are not, like the Pleasures of Memory and Pleasures of Hope, continuations of the traditional style; they are thoroughly Romantic; and yet they are reflective. Scott, indeed, goes straight to the objective forms; but then Scott, for good and evil, was little affected by the spiritual upheaval of his time. Those who were deeply affected by it, directly or indirectly, had their minds full of theoretic ideas. They were groping after, or were already inflamed by, some explicit view of life, and of life seen in relation to an ideal which it revealed or contradicted. And this view of life, at least at first, pressed for utterance in a more or less abstract shape, or became a sort of soul or second meaning within those appearances of nature, or actions of men, or figures and fantasies of youthful imagination, which formed the ostensible subject of the poetry.

Considered in this light, the following facts become very significant. Wordsworth, now about thirty, and the author of many characteristic lyrics, on returning from Germany and settling at Grasmere, begins to meditate a long poem. He tells us in the Prelude of the subjects he thought of. They are good subjects, legendary and historical, stories of action, not at all theoretical.5 But it will not do: his mind ‘turns recreant to her task.’ He has another hope, a ‘favourite aspiration’ towards ‘a philosophic song of Truth.’ But even this will not do; it is premature; even Truth (I venture to suggest) is not inward enough. He must first tell the story of his own mind: the subject of his long poem must be Poetry itself. He tells this story, to our great gain, in the Prelude; and it is the story of the steps by which he came to see reality, Nature and Man, as the partial expression of the ideal, of an all-embracing and perfect spiritual life or Being. Not till this is done can he proceed to the Excursion, which, together with much reflection and even argumentation, contains pictures of particular men.

‘This for our greatest’; but it is not his history alone. The first longer poem of Shelley which can be called mature was Alastor. And what is its subject? The subject of the Prelude; the story of a Poet’s soul, and of the effect on it of the revelation of its ideal. The first long poem of Keats was Endymion. The tendency to the concrete was strong in Keats; he has been called, I think, an Elizabethan born out of due time; and Endymion, like Venus and Adonis, is a mythological story. But it is by no means that alone. The infection of his time was in him. The further subject of Endymion is again the subject of the Prelude, the story of a poet’s soul smitten by love of its ideal, the Principle of Beauty, and striving for union with it, for the ‘wedding’ of the mind of man ‘with this goodly universe in love and holy passion.’ What, again, is the subject of Epipsychidion? The same.

There was a Being whom my spirit oft Met on its visioned wanderings, far aloft In the clear golden prime of my youth’s dawn.

The poem is all about the search of the poet’s soul for this ideal Being. And the Sensitive Plant is this soul, and the Lady of the Garden this Being, And Prince Athanase is the same soul, and if the poem had been continued the Being would soon have appeared. Is it not an astonishing proof of Shelley’s powers that the Cenci was ever written? Shelley, when he died, had half escaped—Keats, some time before he died, had quite escaped—from that bewitching inward world of the poet’s soul and its shadowy adventures. Could that well be the world of what we call emphatically a ‘great poem’?

2.

Let us review for a moment the course of our discussion. I have been suggesting that, if our pleasure and glory in the poetry of Wordsworth’s age is tinged with disappointment, this does not extend to the lyrical poetry; that the lyrical spirit, or, more generally, an inward or subjective tendency, shows itself in many of the longer works; and that their imperfection is partly due to it. Now, let me suggest that the atmosphere of adequate ‘criticism’ which Arnold misses in the age and its poetry, while doubtless it would have influenced favourably even the lyrics, and much more the larger works, could hardly have diminished the force of that tendency, and that the main difficulty lay there. But, before developing this idea further, I propose to leave for a time the English poetry of Wordsworth’s age, to look beyond it, and to ask certain questions.

First, granted that in that age the atmosphere of ‘criticism’ was more favourable in Germany than in England, how many long poems were produced in Germany that we can call without hesitation or qualification ‘great’? Were any produced except by Goethe? And, if we admit (as I gladly do) that he produced several, was not the main reason simply that he was born with more poetic genius than any of his contemporaries, just as Dante and Shakespeare and Milton were? And again, with this native genius and his long laborious life, did he produce anything like as many great poems as might have been expected? And, if not, why not? I do not suggest that his general culture, so superior to that of his English contemporaries, did not help him; but are we sure that it did not also hinder him? And is it not also significant that, in spite of his love of new ideas, he felt an instinctive dread of the influence of philosophy, in the strict sense, as of something dangerous to the poetic modes of vision and creation?

Secondly, if we look beyond the first quarter of the century to the second and third, do we find in Europe a large number of those emphatically great poems, solid coherent structures of concrete imagination? It seems more than doubtful. To confine ourselves to English examples, is it not the case that Tennyson is primarily a lyrical poet, that the best of his longer poems, Maud and In Memoriam, are lyrical, and that the most ambitious, the narrative Idylls of the King, is, as a whole, not great? Is the Ring and the Book, however fine in parts, a great whole, or comparable as a whole with Andrea del Sarto or Rabbi ben Ezra? And is any one of Browning’s dramas a great play? What these questions suggest is that, while the difficulty about the long poem affects in an extreme degree the age of Wordsworth, it affects in some degree the time that follows. Its beginnings, too, are traceable before the nineteenth century. In fact it is connected with essential characteristics of modern poetry and art; and these characteristics are connected with the nature of modern life, and the position of the artist within that life. I wish to touch on this huge subject before returning to the age of Wordsworth.

Art, we may say, has become free, and, in a sense, universal. The poet is no longer the minstrel of king or nobles, nor even of a city or country. Literature, as Goethe foretold, becomes increasingly European, and more than European; and the poet, however national, is a citizen of the Republic of Letters. No class of subject, again, has any prerogative claim on him. Whatever, in any time or place, is human, whatever has been conceived as divine, whatever belongs even to external nature, he may choose, as it suits his bent or offers a promising material. The world is all before him; and it is a world which the increase of knowledge has made immensely wide and rich. His art, further, has asserted its independence. Its public exhibition must conform to the law; but otherwise it neither asks the approval nor submits to the control of any outward authority; and it is the handmaid of nothing. It claims a value for itself, as an expression of mind co-ordinate with other expressions, theoretic and practical; satisfying a need and serving a purpose that none of them can fulfil; subject only, as they too are subject, to the unity of human nature and human good. Finally, in respect of the methods of his art the poet claims and enjoys the same freedom. The practice of the past, the ‘rules’ of the past (if they existed or exist), are without authority for him. It is improbable beforehand that a violent breach with them will lead him to a real advance, just as it is improbable that such a breach with the morals or the science of his day will do so. But there is no certainty beforehand; and if he fails, he expects blame not because he innovates, but because he has failed by innovating.

The freedom of modern art, and the universality of its field, are great things, and the value of the second is easily seen in the extraordinary variety of subject-matter in the longer poems of the nineteenth century. But in candid minds most recitals of our modern advantages are followed by a melancholy sense of our feebleness in using them. And so in some degree it is here. The unrivalled opportunities fail to produce unrivalled works. And we can see that the deepest cause of this is not a want of native genius or of acquired skill or even of conscientious labour, but the fact that the opportunities themselves bring danger and difficulty. The poet who knows everything and may write about anything has, after all, a hard task. Things must have been easier, it seems to us, for an artist whose choice, if his aim was high, was restricted to a cycle of ideas and stories, mythological, legendary, or historical, or all together, concerning beings divine, daemonic, angelic, or heroic. His matter, as it existed in the general imagination, was already highly poetical. If not created by imagination, it was shaped or coloured by it; a world not of bodiless thoughts and emotions, but of scenes, figures, actions, and events. For the most part he lived in unity with it; it appealed to his own religious and moral feelings and beliefs, sometimes to his patriotic feelings; and he wrote, painted, or carved, for people who shared with him both his material and his attitude towards it. It belonged usually to the past, but he did not view it over a great gulf of time with the eye of a scientific historian. If he wished to robe it in the vesture of the life around him, he was checked by no scruples as to truth; and the life around him can seldom, we think, have appeared to him repulsively prosaic. Broad statements like these require much qualification; but, when it is supplied, they may still describe periods in which perhaps most of the greatest architecture, sculpture, painting, and poetry has come into being.

How different the position of the artist has now become we see at a glance, and I confine myself to some points which specially concern the difficulty of the long poem. If a poem is to be anything like great it must, in one sense, be concerned with the present. Whatever its ‘subject’ may be, it must express something living in the mind from which it comes and the minds to which it goes. Wherever its body is, its soul must be here and now. What subject, then, in the measureless field of choice, is the poet to select and fashion into a body? The outward life around him, as he and his critics so often lament, appears uniform, ugly, and rationally regulated, a world of trousers, machinery and policemen. Law—the rule, however imperfect, of the general reasonable will—is a vast achievement and priceless possession; but it is not favourable to striking events or individual actions on the grand scale. Beneath the surface, and breaking through it, there is doubtless an infinity of poetic matter; but this is inward, or it fails to appear in impressive forms; and therefore it may suit the lyric or idyll, the monologue or short story, the prose drama or novel, but hardly the long poem or high tragedy. Even war, for reasons not hard to find, is no longer the subject that it was.

But when the poet turns to a subject distant in place or time or both, new troubles await him. If he aims at complete truth to time and place the soul of the present will hardly come into his work. Yet he lives in an age of history and science, and these hamper as well as help him. The difficulty is not that he is bound to historical or scientific truth, for in principle, I venture to say, he is free. If he can satisfy imagination by violating them he is justified. It is no function of his to attain or propagate them; and a critic who objected, say, to the First Part of Faust on the ground that it puts a modern spirit into the legend, would rightly be laughed at. It is its triumph to do so and yet to succeed. But then success is exceedingly difficult. For the poet lives in a time when the violation of truth is prima facie felt to be a fault, something that does require justification by the result. Further, he has himself to start from a clear consciousness of difference between the present and the past, the spirit and the story, and has to produce on this basis a harmony of spirit and story. And again, living in an age of analytical thought, he is likely—all the more likely, if he has much greatness of mind—to be keenly interested in ideas; and so he is exposed to the temptation of using as the spirit of the old story some highly reflective idea—an idea not only historically alien to his material, but perhaps not very poetical, or again not very deep, because it belongs to him rather as philosopher than poet, while his genius is that of a poet.

The influence of some of these difficulties might readily be shown in the Second Part of Faust or in Prometheus Unbound, especially where we perceive in a figure or action some symbolical meaning, but find this meaning deficient in interest or poetic truth, or are vexed by the doubt how far it ought to be pursued.6 But the matter is more easily illustrated by the partial failure of the Idylls of the King. We have no right to condemn beforehand an attempt to modernise the Arthurian legends. Tennyson’s treatment of them, even his outrage on the story of Tristram, might conceivably have been justified by the result. And, indeed, in the Holy Grail and the Passing of Arthur his treatment, to my mind, was more than justified. But, in spite of countless beauties, the total result of the Idylls was disappointing, not merely from the defects of this or that poem, but because the old unity of spirit and story was broken up, and the new was neither equal to the old nor complete in itself. For the main semi-allegorical idea, having already the disadvantage of not being poetic in its origin, was, as a reflective idea, by no means profound, and it led to such inconsistency in the very centre of the story as the imagination refuses to accept. Tennyson’s Lancelot might have wronged the Arthur who is merely a blameless king and represents Conscience; but Tennyson’s Lancelot would much rather have killed himself than be systematically treacherous to the friend and lover-husband who appears in Guinevere.7

These difficulties belong in some measure to the whole modern time—the whole time that begins with the Renaissance; but they become so much clearer and so much more serious with the advance of knowledge and criticism, that in speaking of them I have been referring specially to the last century. There are other difficulties not so closely connected with that advance, and I will venture some very tentative remarks on one of these, which also has increased with time. It has to do with the kind of life commonly lived by our poets. Is there not some significance in the fact that the most famous of our narrative poets were all three, in their various ways and degrees, public men, or in contact with great affairs; and that poets in earlier times no less must usually have seen something at first hand of adventure, political struggles, or war; whereas poets now, for the most part, live wholly private lives, and, like the majority of their readers, are acquainted only by report with anything of the kind? If Chaucer had never been at Court, or seen service in the French war, or gone on embassies abroad; if Spenser had not known Sidney and Raleigh and been secretary to Lord Grey in Ireland; if Milton had spent his whole life at Horton; would it have made no difference to their poetry? Again, if we turn to the drama and ask why the numerous tragedies of the nineteenth century poets so rarely satisfy, what is the answer? There are many reasons, and among them the poet’s ignorance of the stage will doubtless count for much; but must we not also consider that he scarcely ever saw anything resembling the things he tried to portray? When we study the history of the time in which the Elizabethan dramas were composed, when we examine the portraits of the famous men, or read such a book as the autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, we realise that the violent actions and passions which the dramatist depicted were like the things he saw. Whatever Shakespeare’s own disposition was, he lived among these men, jested with the fellow-actor who had borne arms abroad and killed his man in a duel at home, conversed with nobles whose heads perhaps were no great way from the block. But the poet who strolls about the lanes or plods the London streets with an umbrella for a sword, and who has probably never seen a violent deed in his life, or for a moment really longed to kill so much as a critic, how is he to paint the vengeance of Hamlet or the frenzy of Macbeth, and not merely to thrill you with the emotions of his actors but to make them do things that take your imagination by the throat?

3.

Assuming, now, that (even if this last idea is doubtful or unimportant) there is some truth in the suggestion that the difficulties of the long poem arise largely from the conditions described, and especially from the nature of the intellectual atmosphere which the modern poet breathes, let us return to Wordsworth’s age in particular. In that age these difficulties were aggravated in a quite exceptional way by special causes, causes responsible also in part for the unusual originality and intensity of the poetry. In it we find conditions removed to the extremest distance from those of the poet who wrote, in the midst of a generally accepted social order, for an audience with which he shared traditional ideas and beliefs and a more or less traditional imaginative material. It was, in a word, a revolutionary age, in the electric atmosphere of which the most potent intellectual influences were those of Rousseau and (for the English poets) of Godwin. Milton’s time was not in the same sense revolutionary, much less Shakespeare’s. The forces of the great movement of mind in Shakespeare’s day we may formulate as ‘ideas,’ but they were not the abstractly conceived ideas of Wordsworth’s day. Such theoretical ideas were potent in Milton’s time, but they were not ideas that made a total breach with the past, rejecting as worthless, or worse, the institutions, beliefs, and modes of life in which human nature had endeavoured to realise itself, and drawing airy pictures of a different human nature on a new earth. Nor was the poetic mind of those ages enraptured or dejected by the haunting many-featured contrast of real and ideal. But the poetic mind in Wordsworth’s age breathed this atmosphere of revolution, though it was not always sensitive to the influence. Nor is it a question of the acceptance or rejection of the ‘ideas of the Revolution.’ That influence is clearly traceable in all the greater writers except Scott and Jane Austen. It is equally obvious in Wordsworth, who hungered for realities, recovered from his theoretic malady, sought for good in life’s familiar face, yet remained a preacher; in Byron, who was too shrewd, sceptical, and selfish to contract that particular malady, but who suffered from the sickness from which Goethe freed himself by writing Werther,8 and who punctuates his story in Don Juan with bursts of laughter and tears; and in Shelley, whose ‘rapid spirit’ was quickened, and then clogged, by the abstractions of revolutionary theory.

But doubtless Shelley is, in a sense, the typical example of this influence and of its effects. From the world of his imagination the shapes of the old world had disappeared, and their place was taken by a stream of radiant vapours, incessantly forming, shifting, and dissolving in the ‘clear golden dawn,’ and hymning with the voices of seraphs, to the music of the stars and the ‘singing rain,’ the sublime ridiculous formulas of Godwin. In his heart were emotions that responded to the vision,—an aspiration or ecstasy, a dejection or despair, like those of spirits rapt into Paradise or mourning over its ruin. And he wrote, not, like Shakespeare or Pope, for Londoners sitting in a theatre or a coffee-house, intelligences vivid enough but definitely embodied in a definite society; he wrote, or rather he sang, to his own soul, to other spirit-sparks of the fire of Liberty scattered over the dark earth, to spirits in the air, to the boundless spirit of Nature or Freedom or Love, his one place of rest and the one source of his vision, ecstasy, and sorrow. He sang to this, and he sang of it, and of the emotions it inspired, and of its world-wide contest with such shapes of darkness as Faith and Custom. And he made immortal music; now in melodies as exquisite and varied as the songs of Schubert, and now in symphonies where the crudest of Philosophies of History melted into golden harmony. But the songs were more perfect than the symphonies; and they could hardly fail to be so. For a single thought and mood, expressive of one aspect of things, suffices, with its melody, for a lyric, but not for a long poem. That requires a substance which implicitly contains a whole ‘criticism’ or interpretation of life. And although there was something always working in Shelley’s mind, and issuing in those radiant vapours, that was far deeper and truer than his philosophic creed, its expression and even its development were constantly checked or distorted by the hard and narrow framework of that creed. And it was one which in effect condemned nine-tenths of the human nature that has formed the material of the world’s great poems.9

The second and third quarters of the century were not in the same degree as the first a revolutionary time, and we feel this change in the poetry. The fever-heat is gone, the rapture and the dejection moderate, the culture is wider, the thought more staid and considerate, the fascination of abstractions less potent, and the formative or plastic impulse, if not stronger, less impeded. Late in the period, with Morris, the born teller of tales re-appears. If, as we saw, the lyrical spirit continues to prevail, no one would deny to Browning the full and robust sympathy of the dramatist with all the variety of character and passion. Yet these changes and others are far from obliterating those features of the earlier generation on which we have dwelt. To describe the atmosphere of ‘criticism’ as that of a common faith or view of the world would be laughable. If not revolutionary, it was agitated, restless, and distressed by the conflict of theoretic ideas. To Arnold’s mind it was indeed a most unhappy time for poetry, though the poetic impulse remained as yet, and even later, powerful. The past was dead, but he could share neither the soaring hope nor the passionate melancholy of the opening century. He was

Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born, With nowhere yet to rest his head.

And the two greatest poets, as well as he, still offer not only, as poets always must, an interpretation, but a definite theory of life, and, more insistently than ever before, of death. Confidence in the detail, at least, of such theories has diminished, and with the rapid advance of the critical sciences the poets may prophesy less than their predecessors; but they probe, and weigh, and deliberate more. And the strength of the ‘inward’ tendency, obvious in Tennyson and Arnold, may be clearly seen even in Browning, and not alone in such works as Christmas Eve and Easter Day or La Saisiaz.

Objective and dramatic as Browning is called and by comparison is, he is surely most at home, and succeeds most completely, in lyrics, and in monologues divested of action and merely suggestive of a story or suggested by one. He too must begin, in Pauline, with the picture of a youthful poet’s soul. Dramatic the drama of Paracelsus neither is nor tries to be: it consists of scenes in the history of souls. Of the narrative Sordello its author wrote: ‘The historical decoration was purposely of no more importance than a background requires; and my stress lay on the incidents in the development of a soul: little else is worth study.’ Even if that is so, great narrative poems are not written thus. And what Browning says here applies more or less fully to most of his works. In the end, if we set aside the short lyrics, his best poems are all ‘studies’ of souls. ‘Well,’ it may be answered, ‘so are Shakespeare’s tragedies and tragi-comedies.’ But the difference is great. Shakespeare, doubtless, is little concerned with the accuracy of the historical background,—much less concerned than Browning. But his subject is not a soul, nor even souls: it is the actions of souls, or souls coming into action. It is more. It is that clash of souls which exhibits not them alone, but a whole of spiritual forces, appearing in them, but spreading beyond them into the visible society to which they essentially belong, and into invisible regions which enclose it. The thing shown, therefore, is huge, multiform, ponderous, yet quivering with an inward agitation which explodes into violent bodily expression and speaks to the eye of imagination. What specially interests Browning is not this. It is the soul moving in itself, often in its most secret windings and recesses; before action or after it, where there is action at all; and this soul not essentially as in its society (that is ‘background’ or ‘decoration’), but alone, or in relation to another soul, or to God. He exhibits it best, therefore, in monologue, musing, explaining, debating, pleading, overflowing into the expression of feeling or passion, but not acting. The ‘men and women’ that haunt the reader’s imagination are not so much men of action as lovers, artists, men of religion. And when they act (as for example in The Ring and the Book, or the dramas) what rivets attention, and is first recalled to memory by their names, is not the action, but its reflection in the soul of the doer or spectator. Such, at least, is my experience; and in the end a critic can only offer to others his considered experience. But with Homer and Shakespeare and Milton it is otherwise. Even with Dante it is otherwise. I see not souls alone, but souls in visible attitudes, in outward movement, often in action. I see Paolo and Francesca drifting on the wind: I see them sitting and reading: I see them kiss: I see Dante’s pity:

E caddi come corpo morto cade.

4.

I spoke of Tennyson and Browning in order to point out that, although in their day the intellectual atmosphere was no longer ‘revolutionary,’ it remained an atmosphere of highly reflective ideas representing no common ‘faith’ or way of envisaging the world, and that the inward tendency still asserts itself in their poetry. We cannot pursue the history further, but it does not appear that in the last forty years culture has advanced much, or at all, towards such a faith or way, or shows the working of new semi-conscious creative ideas beneath the surface of warring theories and opinions. Only the younger among us can hope to see what Arnold descried in the distance,

One mighty wave of thought and joy Lifting mankind again.

And even when, for them or their descendants, that hope is realised, and with it the hope of a new great poetry, the atmosphere must assuredly still be one of ‘criticism,’ and Arnold’s insistence on the necessity of the best criticism will still be as urgently required. It must indeed be more and more needed as the power of half-educated journalism grows. How poetry then will overcome the obstacles which, therefore, must in some measure still beset it, is a question for it, a question answerable not by the reflections of critics, but by the creative deeds of poets themselves. Accordingly, while one may safely prophesy that their long poems will differ from those of any past age, I have no idea of predicting the nature of this difference, and will refer in conclusion only to certain views which seem to me delusive.

It must surely be vain for the poet to seek an escape from modern difficulties by any attempt to withdraw himself from the atmosphere of free and scientific culture, to maintain by force simplicity of view and concreteness of imagination, to live in a past century or a sanctuary of esoteric art, whether secular or religious. Whatever of value such an attempt may yield—and that it may yield much I do not deny—it will never yield poems at once long and great.

Such poems, we may allow ourselves to hope, will sometimes deal with much of the common and painful and ugly stuff of life, and be in that sense more ‘democratic’ or universal than any poetry of the past. But it is vain to imagine that this can be done by a refusal to ‘interpret’ and an endeavour to photograph. Even in the most thorough-going prose ‘realism’ there is selection; and, to go no further, selection itself is interpretation. And, as for poetry, the mirror which the least theoretical of great poets holds up to nature is his soul. And that, whether he likes it or not, is an activity which divides, and sifts, and recombines into a unity of its own, and by a method of its own, the crude material which experience thrusts upon it. This must be so; the only question is of the choice of matter and the method of treatment. Nor can the end to be achieved be anything but beauty, though the meaning of that word may be extended and deepened. And beauty in its essence is something that gives satisfaction, however much of pain, repulsion, or horror that satisfaction may contain and overcome.

‘But, even so,’ it may be said, ‘why should the poet trouble himself about figures, events, and actions? That inward tendency in which you see danger and difficulty is, on the contrary, simply and solely what on one side you admit it to be, the sign of our advance. What we really need is to make our long poems entirely interior. We only want to know how Dante felt; we do not wish to see his pity felling him to the ground; and much less do we wish to hear Othello say “and smote him thus,” or even to imagine the blow. We are not children or savages.’ We do not want, I agree, attempts to repeat the Elizabethan drama. But those who speak thus forget, perhaps, in how many kinds of poem this inward tendency can display its power without any injury or drawback. They fail to ask themselves, perhaps, whether a long poem so entirely ‘interior’ can possibly have the clearness, variety, and solidity of effect that the best long poems have possessed; whether it can produce the same impression of a massive, building, organising, ‘architectonic’ power of imagination; and whether all this and much else is of little value. They can hardly have realised, one must suspect, how much of life they wish to leave unrepresented. They fail to consider, too, that perhaps the business of art is not to ignore, but at once to satisfy and to purify, the primitive instincts from which it arises; and that, in the case of poetic art, the love of a story, and of exceptional figures, scenes, events, and actions, is one of those instincts, and one that in the immense majority of men shows no sign of decay. And finally, if they suppose that the desire to see or imagine action, in particular, is a symptom of mere sensationalism or a relic of semi-barbarism, I am sure they are woefully mistaken. There is more virtue than their philosophy dreams of in deeds, in ‘the motion of a muscle this way or that.’ Doubtless it is the soul that matters; but the soul that remains interior is not the whole soul. If I suppose that mere self-scrutiny can show me that, I deceive myself; and my deeds, good and evil, will undeceive me.

A last delusion remains. ‘There is,’ we may be told, ‘a simple, final, and comfortable answer to all these doubts and fears. The long poem is not merely difficult, it is impossible. It is dead, and should be publicly buried, and there is not the least occasion to mourn it. It has become impossible not because we cannot write it, but because we see that we ought not. And, in truth, it never was written. The thing called a long poem was really, as any long poem must be, a number of short ones, linked together by passages of prose. And these passages could be nothing except prose; for poetry is the language of a state of crisis, and a crisis is brief. The long poem is an offence to art.’ I believe I have stated this theory fairly. It was, unless I mistake, the invention of Poe, and it is about as true as I conceive his story of the composition of The Raven to be. It became a gospel with some representatives of the Symbolist movement in France; and in fact it would condemn not only the long poem, but the middle-sized one, and indeed all sizes but the smallest. To reject this theory is to imply no want of gratitude for the lyrics of some of its adherents; but the theory itself seems strangely thoughtless. Naturally, in any poem not quite short, there must be many variations and grades of poetic intensity; but to represent the differences of these numerous grades as a simple antithesis between pure poetry and mere prose is like saying that, because the eyes are the most expressive part of the face, the rest of the face expresses nothing. To hold, again, that this variation of intensity is a defect is like holding that a face would be more beautiful if it were all eyes, a picture better if the illumination were equally intense all over it, a symphony better if it consisted of one movement, and if that were all crisis. And to speak as if a small poem could do all that a long one does, and do it much more completely, is to speak as though a humming-bird could have the same kind of beauty as an eagle, the rainbow in a fountain produce the same effect as the rainbow in the sky, or a moorland stream thunder like Niagara. A long poem, as we have seen, requires imaginative powers superfluous in a short one; and it would be easy to show that it admits of strictly poetic effects of the highest value which the mere brevity of a short one excludes. That the long poem is doomed is a possible, however groundless, belief; but it is futile to deny that, if it dies, something of inestimable worth will perish.10

1 The material of these pages belongs in part to the course mentioned on p. 99, and in part to a lecture given in November, 1905. They have in consequence defects which I have not found it possible to remove; and they also open questions too large and difficult for a single lecture. This is one reason why I have not referred to the prevalence of the novel in the nineteenth century, a prevalence which doubtless influenced both the character and the popularity of the long poems. I hope the reader will not gain from the lecture the false impression that the writer’s admiration for those poems is lukewarm, or that he has any tendency to reaction against the Romantic Revival of Wordsworth’s time.

2 This, and not the permanent value of the scientific product, is the point.

3 Table-talk, Feb. 16, 1833.

4 The narrative poems that satisfy most, because in their way they come nearest to perfection, will be found, I believe, to show this balance. Such, for instance, are The Eve of St. Agnes, Lamia, Michael, The Vision of Judgment, some of Crabbe’s tales. It does not follow, of course, that such poems must contain the greatest poetry. Crabbe, for example, was probably the best artist of the day in narrative; but he does not represent the full ideal spirit of the time.

5 See p. 110.

6 Demogorgon is an instance of such a figure.

7 This incongruity is not the only cause of the discomfort with which many lovers of Tennyson read parts of Arthur’s speech in that Idyll; but it is the main cause, and, unlike other defects, it lies in the plan of the story. It may be brought out further thus. So far as Arthur is merely the blameless king and representative of Conscience, the attitude of a judge which he assumes in the speech is appropriate, and, again, Lancelot’s treachery to him is intelligible and, however wrong, forgivable. But then this Arthur or Conscience could never be a satisfactory husband, and ought not to astound or shock us by uttering his recollections of past caresses. If, on the other hand, these utterances are appropriate, and if all along Lancelot and Guinevere have had no reason to regard Arthur as cold and wholly absorbed in his public duties, Lancelot has behaved not merely wrongly but abominably, and as the Lancelot of the Idylls could not have behaved. The truth is that Tennyson’s design requires Arthur to be at once perfectly ideal and completely human. And this is not imaginable.

Having written this criticism, I cannot refrain from adding that I think the depreciation of Tennyson’s genius now somewhat prevalent a mistake. I admire and love his poetry with all my heart, and regard him as considerably our greatest poet since the time of Wordsworth.

8 It is never to be forgotten, in comparing Goethe with the English poets, that he was twenty years older than Wordsworth and Coleridge, and forty years older than Byron and Shelley.

9 The reader will remember that he must take these paragraphs as an exaggerated presentment of a single, though essential, aspect of the poetry of the time, and of Shelley’s poetry in particular, and must supply the corrections and additions for himself. But I may beg him to observe that Godwin’s formulas are called sublime as well as ridiculous. Political Justice would never have fascinated such young men as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, unless a great truth had been falsified in it; and the inspiration of this truth can be felt all through the preposterous logical structure reared on its misapprehension.

10 The theory criticised in this paragraph arises, I think, from a misapplication of the truth that the content of a genuine poem is fully expressible only in the words of that poem. It is seen that this is so in a lyric, and then it is assumed that it is not so in a narrative or drama. But the assumption is false. At first sight we may seem able to give a more adequate account of the long poem than of the short one; but in reality you can no more convey the whole poetic content of the Divine Comedy in a form not its own than you can the content of a song.

The theory is connected in some minds with the view that ‘music is the true type or measure of perfected art.’ That view again rests on the idea that ‘it is the art of music which most completely realises [the] artistic ideal, [the] perfect identification of form and matter,’ and that accordingly ‘the arts may be represented as continually struggling after the law or principle of music, to a condition which music alone completely realises’ (Pater, The Renaissance, pp. 144, 145). I have by implication expressed dissent from this idea (p. 25); but, even if its truth is granted, what follows is that poetry should endeavour in its own way to achieve that perfect identification; but it does not in the least follow that it should endeavour to do so by reducing itself as nearly as possible to mere sound. Nor did Pater affirm this, or (so far as I see) imply it. But others have.

THE LETTERS OF KEATS

THE LETTERS OF KEATS

There is no lack of good criticism on the poetry of Keats. It has been discussed by the leading poets of three generations or semi-generations; by Matthew Arnold, by Mr. Swinburne, and, much more fully, by Mr. Bridges. Lord Houghton’s Life and Letters and Mr. Colvin’s biography both contain excellent criticisms or studies of the poems. And (to go no further) they have lately been edited by Mr. de Sélincourt in a volume invaluable to students of Keats, and reflecting honour not only on its author but on the Oxford School of English, to the strength of which he has contributed so much. My principal object is to consider Keats’s attitude to poetry and his views about it, in connection with the ideas set forth in previous lectures on Shelley’s views and on the age of Wordsworth. But I wish to preface my remarks on this subject, and to prepare for them, by an urgent appeal, addressed to any reader of the poems who may need it, to study the letters of Keats. If I may judge from my experience, such readers are still far too numerous; and I am sure that no one already familiar with the letters will be sorry to listen to quotations from them.1

The best of Keats’s poems, of course, can be fully appreciated without extraneous help; but the letters throw light on all, and they are almost necessary to the understanding of Endymion and of some of the earlier or contemporaneous pieces. They clearly reveal those changes in his mind and temper which appear in his poetry. They dispose for ever of the fictions once current of a puny Keats who was ‘snuffed out by an article,’ a sensual Keats who found his ideal in claret and ‘slippery blisses,’ and a mere artist Keats who cared nothing for his country and his fellow-creatures. Written in his last four years by a man who died at twenty-five, they contain abundant evidence of his immaturity and his faults, but they disclose a nature and character which command on the whole not less respect than affection, and they show not a little of that general intellectual power which rarely fails to accompany poetic genius.