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The Bridling of Pegasus: Prose Papers on Poetry

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Title: The Bridling of Pegasus: Prose Papers on Poetry

Author: Alfred Austin


        
Release date: February 24, 2011 [eBook #35394]
                Most recently updated: January 7, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BRIDLING OF PEGASUS: PROSE PAPERS ON POETRY ***




Produced by Suzanne Shell and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net









THE BRIDLING OF PEGASUS




  THE BRIDLING OF PEGASUS

  PROSE PAPERS ON POETRY


  BY ALFRED AUSTIN

  POET LAUREATE


  _Essay Index Reprint Series_

  BOOKS FOR LIBRARIES PRESS, INC.
  FREEPORT, NEW YORK
  (_Originally published by Macmillan and Co._)




  First published 1910
  Reprinted 1967

  Reprinted from a copy in the collections of
  The New York Public Library
  Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations




When Bellerophon, mounted on Pegasus, set forth to kill the Chimera,
Minerva, Goddess of Wisdom, gave him a golden bridle with which to curb
and guide his winged steed. Hence the title of this volume, "The Bridling
of Pegasus."




TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE SIR ALFRED C. LYALL, K.C.B.


MY DEAR LYALL,

I should think you must have observed, in the course of your reading, that
even in the most accredited organs of opinion, principles of literary
criticism, either explicitly stated or tacitly assumed, are often utterly
ignored, in the notice of some work or other in the self-same number. The
result can only be to create confusion in the public mind.

In this volume, consisting of papers written at various times during the
last thirty years, no such contradiction will, I think, be found. Whether
they be deemed sound or otherwise, they are at least coherent; the canons
of criticism underlying them being that no verse which is unmusical or
obscure can be regarded as Poetry, whatever other qualities it may
possess; that Imagination in Poetry, as distinguished from mere Fancy, is
the transfiguring of the Real, or actual, into the Ideal, by what Prospero
calls his "so potent art"; and, if these conditions are complied with,
that the greatness of the poem depends on the greatness of the theme.

To no one so much as to you am I indebted for criticism of the frankest
kind. That alone would lead me to ask you to accept the dedication of
these pages. But I find a yet further and stronger impulse to do so, in
the long and uninterrupted friendship that has subsisted between us, and
to which I attach so much value.

  Believe me always,
      Yours most sincerely,
          ALFRED AUSTIN.

  SWINFORD OLD MANOR,
      _January 1910_.




CONTENTS


                                                            PAGE

  THE ESSENTIALS OF GREAT POETRY                               1

  THE FEMININE NOTE IN ENGLISH POETRY                         28

  MILTON AND DANTE: A COMPARISON AND A CONTRAST               60

  BYRON AND WORDSWORTH                                        78

  DANTE'S REALISTIC TREATMENT OF THE IDEAL                   139

  DANTE'S POETIC CONCEPTION OF WOMAN                         156

  POETRY AND PESSIMISM                                       170

  A VINDICATION OF TENNYSON                                  197

  ON THE RELATION OF LITERATURE TO POLITICS                  218

  A CONVERSATION WITH SHAKESPEARE IN THE ELYSIAN FIELDS      241




THE ESSENTIALS OF GREAT POETRY


The decay of authority is one of the most marked features of our time.
Religion, politics, art, manners, speech, even morality, considered in its
widest sense, have all felt the waning of traditional authority, and the
substitution for it of individual opinion and taste, and of the wavering
and contradictory utterances of publications ostensibly occupied with
criticism and supposed to be pronouncing serious judgments. By authority I
do not mean the delivery of dogmatic decisions, analogous to those issued
by a legal tribunal from which there is no appeal, that have to be
accepted and obeyed, but the existence of a body of opinion of long
standing, arrived at after due investigation and experience during many
generations, and reposing on fixed principles or fundamentals of thought.
This it is that is being dethroned in our day, and is being supplanted by
a babel of clashing, irreconcilable utterances, often proceeding from the
same quarters, even the same mouths.

In no department of thought has this been more conspicuous than in that of
literature, especially the higher class of literature; and it is most
patent in the prevailing estimate of that branch of literature to which
lip-homage is still paid as the highest of all, viz. poetry. Chaucer,
Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, have not been openly dethroned; but it would
require some boldness to deny that even their due recognition has been
indirectly questioned by a considerable amount of neglect, as compared
with the interest shown alike by readers and reviewers in poets and poetry
of lesser stature. Are we to conclude from this that there is no standard,
that there exist no permanent canons by which the relative greatness of
poets and poetry can be estimated with reasonable conclusiveness? It is
the purpose of this essay to show that such there are.

The expression of individual opinion upon a subject so wide, no matter who
the individual might be, would obviously be worthless; and I have no wish
to do what has been done too often in our time, to substitute personal
taste or bias for canons of criticism that have stood the test of time,
and whereon the relative position of poets, great, less great, and
comparatively inferior, has reposed. The inductive method was employed
long before it was explicitly proclaimed as distinct from and more
trustworthy than the merely deductive; and it is such method that will, if
indirectly, be employed in this paper. Finally, I shall carefully abstain
from the rhetorical enthusiasm or invective that clouds the judgment of
writers and readers alike, and invariably degenerates into personal
dogmatism, together with intolerance of those who think otherwise. After
indicating, to the best of my ability, the laws of thought and the canons
of criticism on which should repose the estimate of the poetic hierarchy,
I will then ask the reader to observe if the conclusions leave the
recognised Masters of Song--Homer, AEschylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Virgil,
Lucretius, Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron--unassailed
and unshaken in their poetic supremacy.

There must perforce be certain qualities common to all poetry, whether the
greatest, the less great, or the comparatively inferior, and whether
descriptive, lyrical, idyllic, reflective, epic, or dramatic; and, so long
as there existed any authority or body of generally accepted opinion on
the subject, these were at least two such qualities, viz. melodiousness,
whether sweet or sonorous, and lucidity or clearness of expression, to be
apprehended, without laborious investigation, by highly cultured and
simple readers alike. Melodiousness is a quality so essential to, and so
inseparable from, all verse that is poetry, that it often, by its mere
presence, endows with the character of poetry verse of a very rudimentary
kind, verse that just crosses the border between prosaic and poetic verse,
and would otherwise be denied admission to the territory of the Muses.
Some of the enthusiasts to whom allusion has been made have, I am assured,
declared of certain compositions of our time, "This would be poetry, even
if it meant nothing at all"--a dictum calculated, like others enunciated
in our days, to harden the plain man in his disdain of poetry altogether.
It would not be difficult to quote melodious verse published in our time
of which it is no exaggeration to say that the words in it are used rather
as musical notes than as words signifying anything. In all likelihood such
compositions, and the widespread liking for them, arise partly from the
prevailing preference for music over the other arts, and in part from the
mental indolence that usually accompanies emotion in all but the highest
minds. Nevertheless it cannot be too much insisted on that music, or
melodiousness, either sweet or sonorous, is absolutely indispensable to
poetry; and where it is absent, poetry is absent, even though thought and
wide speculation be conspicuous in it. As Horace put it long ago in his
_Art of Poetry_,

  Non satis est pulchra esse poemata: dulcia sunto.

Almost as essential to poetry, and equally as regards poetry of the
loftiest and poetry of the lowliest kind, is lucidity, or clearness of
expression. No poet of much account is ever obscure, unless the text
happens to be corrupt. When essays and even volumes are issued, since
deemed indispensable for the understanding of a writer labelled as a poet,
one may be quite sure that, however deep a thinker, he is not a poet of
the first order, and not a poet at all in the passages that require such
explanation. When one hears a well-authenticated story to the effect that
a great scholar said of an English paraphrase of a well-known Greek poem,
that he thought he had succeeded in gathering its meaning with the help of
the original, one ought to know what to think of the work. Yet, though
much of its author's verse is of that non-lucid character, it is
habitually saluted by many critics as great poetry. With all respect, I
venture to affirm that in such circumstances the designation must be a
misnomer. I remember a poem being read to me, in perfect good faith, by
its author, a man of great mental distinction and no little imagination,
of which, though I listened with the closest attention, not only did I not
understand one word, but I had not the faintest idea, as the colloquial
phrase is, what it was about. When it was published, I asked three ardent
admirers of the author to explain to me its meaning. They failed entirely
to do so. The saying, concerning the orator, _clarescit urendo_, is even
yet more applicable to the poet. He brightens as he burns. Yet, of recent
times, verse fuliginous, clouded, and enshrouded in obscurity, has been
hailed in many quarters, not only as poetry, but poetry of an
exceptionally superior sort.

If it be urged that Dante, and even Shakespeare, do not always yield up
their meaning to the reader at once, the allegation must be traversed
absolutely. The immediate apprehension of the meaning of the _Vita Nuova_
and the _Divina Commedia_ presupposes an intimate acquaintance with the
various dialects of the Italian language existing in Dante's time, and
likewise with the erudition he scatters so profusely, if allusively,
throughout his verse. But to the Italian readers of Dante, even
superficially acquainted with those dialects, and adequate masters of the
theology and the astronomy of Dante's time, those poems present no
difficulty. Of Shakespeare, the greatest of all the poets in our language,
let it be granted that he is not unoften one of the most careless and even
most slovenly; but rarely is he so to the obscuring of his meaning, and
never save casually, and in some brief passage. Yet let it not be inferred
that I am of opinion that the full meaning of the greatest passages in the
greatest poems is to be seized all at once, or by the average reader at
all. That is "deeper than ever plummet sounded," though Tennyson's
"indolent reviewer" apparently imagines that he at once fathoms the more
intellectual poetry of his time. There can be but few readers, and
possibly none but poets themselves, or persons who, to quote Tennyson
again, "have the great poetic heart," who master the full significance of
_Hamlet_ or of the tersely told story of Francesca da Rimini. But the
whole world at once understood the more obvious tenor of both, and is not
puzzled by either. There is a sliding scale of understanding, as there is
a sliding scale of inspiration. "We needs must love the highest when we
see it"; but "when we see it" is an important qualification in the
statement.

I do not know that there are any qualities save melodiousness, sweet or
sonorous, and lucidity, that are absolutely essential to whatever is to be
regarded as poetry. In order to preclude misapprehension, let it be added
that, while both are essential to poetry, they will not, by themselves, go
far towards endowing verse with the poetic character. As an example of
this, let me cite verse which is not unmelodious, though not specially
remarkable for melodiousness, and not obscure, yet is not poetry, and
hardly on the border of it:

  I have a boy of five years old;
    His face is fair and fresh to see;
  His limbs are cast in beauty's mould,
    And dearly he loves me.

  One morn we strolled on our dry walk,
    Our quiet home all full in view,
  And held such intermitted talk
    As we are wont to do.

  My thoughts on former pleasures ran;
    I thought of Kilve's delightful shore,
  Our pleasant home when spring began,
    A long, long year before.

  A day it was when I could bear
    Some fond regrets to entertain;
  With so much happiness to spare,
    I could not feel a pain.

This blameless, correct, harmonious, and thoroughly lucid verse is by a
poet who has written poetry of the noblest quality, no less a poet than
Wordsworth. Yet he sorely tries his readers by page after page no more
poetical than the foregoing; and he offered, on the first appearance of
every volume of his, ample matter for such critics as would rather be
sweepingly censorious than discriminating, to depreciate and even to
ridicule him. His reverent admirers, who comprise all true lovers of
poetry, are acquainted with, and probably possess, a copy of Matthew
Arnold's Selection, entitled _Poems of Wordsworth_--a small volume which
that gifted Wordsworthian, who knew and acknowledged with his usual sense
of humour how many unpoetical "sermons," as he called them, Wordsworth had
written, deliberately considered to contain all the real poetry he has
left us. If I may refer for a moment to my own copy of it, this is scored
with brief observations in pencil, the upshot of which is that the small
fraction of his work, which Matthew Arnold too liberally wished to be
regarded as _digna Phoebi_, would have again to be materially reduced by
a dispassionate criticism.

The most generous critic, if he is to be discriminating and just, cannot,
let me say again, allow that any verse which is profoundly obscure or
utterly unmusical, no matter how intellectual in substance, deserves the
appellation of poetry. But on a very thin thread of meaning poetry, or a
very fair imitation of it, may be hung by the aid of musical sound.
Without going so far as Arnold again, who once wrote to me that Shelley's
"My soul is an enchanted boat" seemed to him "mere musical verbiage," that
poem might serve as an instance of verse which, in spite of tenuity of
meaning, becomes poetry by sheer magic of exquisite music.

      My soul is an enchanted boat,
      Which, like a sleeping swan, doth float
  Upon the silver waves of thy sweet singing;
      And thine doth like an angel sit
      Beside a helm conducting it,
  Whilst all the winds with melody are ringing
      It seems to float ever, for ever,
      Upon that many-winding river,
      Between mountains, woods, abysses.
      A paradise of wildernesses!
      Till, like one in slumber bound,
      Borne to the ocean, I float down, around,
      Into a sea profound of ever-spreading sound.

There is a magic of sound in the verse so enchanting to a reader that he
may be pardoned for failing to observe at once that it is mainly musical
fancy. Many may remember a line of Tennyson:

  Like a tale of little meaning, though the words are strong.

And are we not compelled to feel, on second thoughts, if we have any
capacity for discrimination, that here we have poetry of little meaning,
though the verse is exquisitely melodious? This is, I conclude, what
Arnold meant when he designated it, with a little exaggeration, "musical
verbiage."

I have been obliged to linger somewhat on the threshold of my subject in
order to emphasise the essential importance and inseparable quality of
metrical melodiousness and lucidity in poetry, in order that, in whatever
follows in this paper, these indispensable conditions may not be lost
sight of; and also because of late each of them has been ousted from
consideration by those who have striven, and still strive, to induce
literary opinion to accept not only as poetry, but as great poetry, what
is conspicuously lacking in both. That I shall have the assent, however,
of the weight of authority on this point, and likewise that of the
ordinary unaffected lover of poetry, I can scarcely doubt; the more so, as
the conclusions thus far reached leave undisturbed upon their seats those
mighty ones, of all tongues and all nations, whose universally recognised
greatness has received the seal and sanction of many generations.

What may be called the first principles of poetry having thus been
propounded, without any necessity for reaffirming them in the
investigation of other conclusions yet to be reached, I may move on to
what I imagine will be less familiar and perhaps more original in the
search for "The Essentials of Great Poetry." If we carefully observe the
gradual development of mental power in human beings, irrespectively of any
reference to poetry, but as applied to general objects of human interest,
we shall find that the advance from elementary to supreme expansion of
mental power is in the following order of succession, each preceding
element in mental development being retained on the appearance of its
successor: (1) Perception, vague at first, as in the newly born, gradually
becoming more definite, along with desires of an analogous kind; (2)
Sentiment, also vague at first, but by degrees becoming more definite,
until it attaches itself to one or more objects exclusively; (3) Thought
or Reflection, somewhat hazy in its inception, and often remaining in that
condition to the last; (4) Action, which is attended and assisted by the
three preceding qualities of Perception, Sentiment, and Thought or
Reflection. In other words, human beings perceive before they feel,
perceive and feel before they think, perceive, feel, and think before they
act, or at least before they act reasonably, though it may be but
imperfectly, and though the later or higher stages may in many cases
scarcely be reached at all.

Now let us see if, in poetry, the same order or succession in development
and expansion does not exist. Never forgetting the essential qualities of
melody and lucidity, do we not find that mere descriptive verse, which
depends on perception or observation, is the humblest and most elementary
form of poetry; that descriptive verse, when suffused with sentiment,
gains in value and charm; that if, to the foregoing, thought or reflection
be superadded, there is a conspicuous rise in dignity, majesty, and
relative excellence; and finally, that the employment of these in
narrative action, whether epic or dramatic, carries us on to a stage of
supreme excellence which can rarely be predicated of any poetry in which
action is absent? If this be so, we have to the successive development of
observation, feeling, thought, and action, an exact analogy or counterpart
in (1) Descriptive Poetry; (2) Lyrical Poetry; (3) Reflective Poetry; (4)
Epic or Dramatic Poetry; in each of which, melody and lucidity being
always present, there is an advance in poetic value over the preceding
stage, without the preceding one being eliminated from its progress.

Once again let us have recourse to illustration, which, when fairly
chosen, is probably the most effective method for securing assent.
Wordsworth presents us with an ample supply of illustrations in three out
of the four different kinds of poetry; and therefore to him let us have
recourse. In reading the first stanza of _The Pet Lamb_, and two or three
stanzas that follow, we have descriptive verse which may be regarded as
very elementary poetry, but to which it would seem to many to be
hypercritical to refuse that designation. It is too well known to need
citation. The opening lines of _The Leech-Gatherer_ display the same
elementary descriptive character.

  There was a roaring in the wind all night;
  The rain came heavily and fell in floods;
  But now the sun is rising calm and bright;
  The birds are singing in the distant woods;
  Over his own sweet voice the Stock-dove broods;
  The Jay makes answer as the Magpie chatters;
  And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters.

  All things that love the Sun are out of doors;
  The sky rejoices in the morning's birth;
  The grass is bright with rain-drops; on the moors
  The Hare is running races in her mirth;
  And with her feet she from the plashy earth
  Raises a mist, that, glittering in the sun,
  Runs with her all the way, wherever she doth run.

  I was a traveller then upon the moor;
  I saw the Hare that raced about with joy;
  I heard the woods and distant waters roar;
  Or heard them not, as happy as a boy:
  The pleasant season did my heart employ;
  My old remembrances went from me wholly,
  And all the ways of men, so vain and melancholy.

I perceive that, in my copy of the volume of Selections made by Matthew
Arnold from the poems of Wordsworth, already alluded to, I have written at
the end of _Margaret_, "If this be poetry, surely many people may say they
have written poetry all their lives without knowing it." But as Matthew
Arnold's critical opinions will carry more weight than mine, and he has
included _Margaret_ in his Selection, let me quote a dozen lines or so
from its opening passage:

  'Twas Summer, and the Sun had mounted high:
  Southward the landscape indistinctly glared
  Through a pale steam; but all the northern downs,
  In clearest air ascending, showed far off
  A surface dappled o'er with shadows flung
  From brooding clouds; shadows that lay in spots
  Determined and unmoved, with steady beams
  Of bright and pleasant sunshine interposed;
  Pleasant to him who on the soft cool moss
  Extends his careless limbs along the front
  Of some huge cave, whose rocky ceiling casts
  A twilight of its own, an ample shade,
  Where the Wren warbles.

But there is, it must not be overlooked, merely Descriptive Poetry of a
much higher kind than the foregoing, though Wordsworth may not be the best
source from which to draw it. Perhaps its highest possibilities are to be
found in Byron, and conspicuously in the third and fourth cantos of
_Childe Harold_. Many of the passages of the kind that one remembers there
are, however, either too much suffused with the poet's personal feeling,
or too closely connected with great incidents in history and the fall of
empires, to be quite pertinent examples. A minor but sufficient example
taken from _Childe Harold_ may suffice for illustration:

  It is the hush of night, and all between
  Thy margin and the mountains, dusk, yet clear,
  Mellow'd and mingling, yet distinctly seen,
  Save darken'd Jura, whose capt heights appear
  Precipitously steep; and drawing near,
  There breathes a living fragrance from the shore,
  Of flowers yet fresh with childhood; on the ear
  Drops the light drip of the suspended oar,
  Or chirps the grasshopper one good-night carol more.

Far finer instances of poetry essentially descriptive in the same poem may
be referred to, _e.g._ Canto IV., stanza xcix., beginning "There is a
stern round tower of other days"; stanza cvii., beginning with "Cypress
and ivy, weed and wallflower grown"; stanza clxxiii., descriptive of Lake
Nemi; and even--for it also is strictly descriptive--stanza cxl., opening
with the well-known line "I see before me the gladiator lie."

It could not be allowed that any of these, considered separately,
satisfies the conditions or essentials of great poetry, though, in company
with others, they contribute to that character in a very great poem
indeed. Moreover, they serve to show that even mere Descriptive Poetry,
which I have spoken of as the "lowest" or most elementary kind of poetry,
may rise to striking elevation of merit, and has its counterpart in the
sliding scale of observation in various individuals.

Let us now take a step, and a long one, in the scale of importance
attained by the various kinds of poetry, and consider the classics of
Lyrical Poetry. Here extensive quotation will be less necessary, partly by
reason of the wide ground Lyrical Poetry covers, and partly because of its
relative popularity in our time, and the familiarity of so many readers
with its most enchanting specimens. There is ample room for personal taste
and individual idiosyncrasy within the vast boundaries of this fruitful
field. Many persons are sadly wanting in observation; and to only a
minority can real, serious thought be ascribed. But we all feel, we all
have visitations of sentiment; and therefore to all of us is Lyrical
Poetry more or less welcome.

The causes, personal and social, that have given to Lyrical Poetry in our
time almost exclusive favour in public taste will be dealt with presently.
It will distract less from our main purpose to confine ourselves for the
present to the recognition of the fact, and to seek to show how very
various are the degrees of eminence in Lyrical Poetry. The lyrical note is
so natural to poets and poetry that we may expect to find it in the verse
of all poets, though in a minor degree in didactic verse; while in some
poets it almost monopolises their utterance. Though perhaps not obvious to
many ears to-day, it lurks in no little of Pope's _Epistle of Eloisa to
Abelard_, and is unmistakably present in his _Ode on St. Cecilia's Day_.
If I am asked if the lyrical note is to be found in Chaucer, the reply
must be that, though Chaucer has left nothing which the modern reader
would recognise as lyrical, what is called his iambic or five-foot metre
is far more anapaestic and lyrical than is the case with any subsequent
poet, except Shakespeare. There is a lilt in it equivalent to the lyrical
note, which those who read as Chaucer wrote recognise at once. One has
only to read the opening lines of the Prologue to the _Canterbury Tales_
to perceive this. Not quite to the same extent perhaps as in Chaucer, but
withal very noticeably to the ear, the lyrical note is frequently to be
caught in Spenser, even where he is not obviously offering the reader
Lyrical Poetry; as, for instance, in this stanza in the first canto of the
_Fairy Queen_, beginning:

  A little lowly hermitage it was,
  Down in a dale, hard by a forest's side.

This is not Lyrical Poetry proper, as now understood. But Spenser has left
us in his _Epithalamion_ a lyrical poem with which only one other English
lyric can be placed in competition for the first place. It is too long for
more than one brief excerpt to be cited here:

  Wake now, my love, awake! for it is time;
  The rosy Morne long since left Tithones bed,
  All ready to her silver coche to clyme;
  And Phoebus gins to shew his glorious hed.
  Hark! how the cheerefull birds do chaunt theyr laies
  And carroll of loves praise.
  The merry Larke hir mattins sings aloft;
  The Thrush replyes; the Mavis descant playes;
  The Ouzell shrills; the Ruddock warbles soft;
  So goodly all agree, with sweet consent,
  To this dayes meriment,
  Ah! my deere love, why doe ye sleepe thus long,
  When meeter were that ye should now awake,
  T' awayt the comming of your joyous make,
  And hearken to the birds love-learned song,
  The deawy leaves among?
  For they of joy and pleasance to you sing
  That all the woods them answer, and theyr eccho ring.

One is sorry to think that this long, lovely, and varied lyric is less
known than it ought to be to the modern readers of Lyrical Poetry. I can
only say to them, "Make haste to read it."

In Shakespeare's plays the lyrical note is so often to be heard in the
blank verse that the poet's natural aptitude and inclination for singing
were amply exercised there; and he gives most voice to it in such plays as
_As You Like It_ and _Romeo and Juliet_. But it recurs again and again
throughout his dramas. Such lines as:

  All over-canopied with lush woodbine,

  How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank,

  Under the shade of melancholy boughs,

are illustrations of what I am pointing out.

Without dwelling on the excellent lyrics written in the reigns of Charles
I. and Charles II., and confining ourselves to the _di majores_ of poetry,
we may pass on to Milton, whose _Allegro_ and _Penseroso_ as likewise the
lyrics in _Comus_, are too familiar to every one to be more than mentioned
as evidence of the persistence, in the past as in the present, of the
warbling impulse in all poets. Heard but fitfully during the greater part
of the eighteenth century, yet most arrestingly in Gray, Collins, and
Burns, Lyrical Poetry from the last onward without intermission, to our
own time, in Scott, Byron, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and Tennyson, is
almost the only poetry that has in recent days been much listened to, or
much written and talked about. This circumstance is far from being
conclusive as to whether, during the same period, poems higher and
greater than mere Lyrical Poetry have or have not been produced. But it is
absolutely certain that, if produced, they have been, so far, more or less
ignored; and that, if the same poets have written such and Lyrical Poetry
as well, they will have been considered and estimated by the latter only.

But the domain of feeling and emotion in which Lyrical Poetry has room to
display its power and versatility is so extensive that lyrics are very
various in their themes and in the treatment of them. Love, religion,
patriotism, cosmopolitan benevolence, being, as I have shown in _The Human
Tragedy_, the most elevated and most permanent sources of human sentiment
and emotion, there will necessarily be in Lyrical Poetry, even considered
by itself, and apart from all the other forms of poetry, a scale of
relative elevation and importance.

The love of individuals for each other, whether domestic, romantic, or
sexual, is much more common than any of the other three, being practically
universal; and it has given birth to so many well-known lyrics that it is
unnecessary to cite any of them here. Some of them are very beautiful; but
none of them, by reason of the comparative narrowness of their theme,
satisfies the essentials of great poetry. Not even Tennyson's _Maud_,
which is perhaps the most ambitious and the best known of long poems
dedicated mainly to the subject, though it contains lovely passages,
approaches greatness.

Though what is understood as religious sentiment comes next to the love of
individuals for each other in the extent of its influence, it has produced
much verse, but, it must be allowed, little poetry, the reason probably
being that the religious sentiment of the few who are endowed with the
gift of writing poetry differs from that of the average "religious"
person. Nor can the fact be overlooked that there is a certain character
of reserve in Protestantism which has operated since the Reformation
against the growth of religious Lyrical Poetry. For that we must go either
to pre-Reformation days, or to the poetry of those who, like George
Herbert and the poetic kin of his time, clung to the Roman Catholic creed
after the modification of belief and ritual in the Anglican Church; or to
the poets in our own time trained in the Roman Catholic faith, and to that
extent, and on that ground, debarred from wide popularity among a
Protestant people. The De Veres, Faber, Coventry Patmore, and Newman, the
last notably in his _Dream of Gerontius_, may be named as instances of
what has been done in recent times in the sphere of religious poetry.
Scott's lovely "Ave Maria" in _The Lady of the Lake_, and Byron's stanza
beginning:

  Ave Maria! 'tis the hour of prayer,

are briefer specimens of what may be, and has been contributed in later
times to religious poetry; much smaller in bulk and volume than poetry
dedicated to the love of individuals for each other, but higher in the
rising scale of greatness, because of the greater dignity of its theme.

Patriotic Lyrical Poetry need not detain us long. Most patriotic verse,
however spirited, is verse only, nothing or little more, though exceptions
could be cited, such as Drayton's _Agincourt_, Tennyson's _Relief of
Lucknow_, and _The Ballad of the "Revenge."_ But if in patriotic Lyrical
Poetry we include, as I think we should, poetry in the English tongue, but
not concerning England or the British Empire, I may name Byron's "Isles
of Greece" in _Don Juan_, which I had in my mind when I observed that
there is in our language only one lyrical poem that can compete for the
first place in Lyrical Poetry with Spenser's _Epithalamion_.

3. Reflective Poetry. Over Reflective Poetry, in itself a stage of advance
beyond Descriptive Poetry and Lyrical Poetry in themselves, we need not
linger long, for the reason that, though Reflective Poetry is ample in
quantity, it is, outside the Drama, very limited in quality, most of it
being of so prosaic a character as not only not to be ranked above average
Lyrical Poetry, but far below it. Wordsworth furnishes us, for the purpose
of illustration, with both kinds, the higher and the lower Reflective
Poetry. As regards the latter, I would rather let Matthew Arnold, than
whom there is no warmer admirer of Wordsworth, be the spokesman:

     _The Excursion_ abounds with Philosophy [I prefer to call it Thought
     or Reflection]; and therefore _The Excursion_ is to the Wordsworthian
     what it never can be to the disinterested lover of poetry, a
     satisfactory work. "Duty exists," says Wordsworth in _The Excursion_;
     and then he proceeds thus:

         ... Immutably survive,
         For our support, the measures and the forms
         Which an abstract Intelligence supplies,
         Whose kingdom is where time and space are not.

     And the Wordsworthian is delighted, and thinks that here is a sweet
     union of philosophy and poetry. But the disinterested lover of poetry
     will feel that the lines carry us really not a step farther than the
     proposition which they would interpret; that they are a tissue of
     elevated but abstract verbiage, alien to the very nature of poetry.

Merely observing that I wholly agree with the foregoing estimate, I pass
to the higher Reflective Poetry, of which Wordsworth has given us such
splendid but comparatively brief instances. The _Lines composed a few
miles above Tintern Abbey_, _Elegiac Stanzas suggested by a Picture of
Peele Castle_, his best Sonnets, the _Character of the Happy Warrior_,
the _Ode to Duty_, and, finally, the _Ode on Intimations of Immortality_
seem to me to place Wordsworth above all other English Poets in the domain
of exclusively Reflective Poetry. I do not forget much noble Reflective
Poetry in _Childe Harold_; but it is too much blent with other elements,
and into it the active quality enters too strongly, for its more
reflective features to be separated from them. Moreover, it generally
falls far short of the intellectual note so strongly marked in
Wordsworth's best Reflective Poetry, into which, be it added, both the
descriptive and the lyrical notes, in accordance with the general law I am
seeking to expound in this paper, enter very largely, if, of course,
subordinately. It will be obvious, however, to any dispassionate lover of
poetry, that a merely reflective poem of any great length cannot well be
entitled to the designation of a great poem. Had such been possible,
Wordsworth would have bequeathed it to us. _The Excursion_ is the answer;
which, notwithstanding a certain number of fine passages, is, for the most
part, what Matthew Arnold says of it, "doctrine such as we hear in church,
religious and philosophical doctrine; and the attached Wordsworthian loves
passages of such doctrine, and brings them forward as proofs of his poet's
excellence."

If the reader has followed me so far, with more or less assent, he will be
prepared not only to allow, but of himself to feel, that there must be yet
another kind or order of poetry, in which the greatest poems are to be
found, poems that are neither exclusively nor mainly either descriptive,
lyrical, or reflective, but into which all three elements enter
subordinately, though none of them gives it its distinctive and supreme
character.

4. Epic and Dramatic Poetry. That supreme kind of poetry is Epic and
Dramatic Poetry, though there may be very poor Epics, and Dramas in which
true poetry is scarcely to be observed, just as we have seen that there is
very inferior Descriptive, Lyrical, and Reflective Poetry. All that is
asserted is that great epic and dramatic poems must be greater than the
greatest poetry of the preceding kinds by reason of their wider range and
(as a rule) the higher majesty of their theme, and of their including
every other kind of poetry.

It will perhaps have been noticed that Epic and Dramatic Poetry are here
placed in conjunction, not separately; and their being thus conjoined
needs a word of explanation. Though there is a radical distinction between
the two, this provisional union of them has been adopted in order to
afford an opportunity of pointing out what I think is generally
ignored--that poems which are essentially epical, or merely narrative, may
be written in dialogue or dramatic form, and so mislead incautious readers
into inferring that they are offered as dramas, in the acting sense of the
term. It is because, while remaining substantially epical or narrative in
character they may contain, here and there, dramatic situations, dramatic
rhetoric, and dramatic converse. The _Iliad_ is a conspicuous example of
this; the movement in the earlier portion of it being full of debate and
defiance among its characters, and these dramatic elements recurring, if
less frequently, throughout the entire work. To many persons the episodes
in the narrative of the _Divina Commedia_ that give rise to converse,
whether tender, terrible, or pathetic, are the most delightful portions of
it. What is it that makes the first six books of _Paradise Lost_ so much
more telling than the later ones? Surely it is the magnificence of the
speeches emanating from the mouths of the chief characters. _Childe
Harold_ is ostensibly only descriptive, reflective, and narrative; but the
personality and supposed wrongs of Byron himself, so frequently
introduced, confer on it, beyond these characters, certain features of the
drama and of dramatic action. Moreover, the magnificent ruins bequeathed
to the seven-hilled city by the fall of the Roman Empire enter so largely
into the fourth canto that this includes in it every species of verse,
from the descriptive to the dramatic. To cite a much smaller example, I
once said to Tennyson, "Do you not think that, had one met in a tragedy
with the couplet from Pope (_Ep. to the Sat._ ii. 205)--

  _F._ You're strangely proud ...

  _P._ Yes, I am proud: I must be proud to see
       Men not afraid of God, afraid of _me_

--one would be right in regarding it as very fine, dramatically?" and he
replied, "Yes, certainly." I recall the circumstance because it is an
extreme illustration of the momentary intrusion of one style into another.

By slow but successive stages we have reached conclusions that may be thus
briefly stated. (1) The essentials of great poetry are not to be found in
poetry exclusively descriptive. (2) They are rarely to be met with in
poetry that is lyrical, and then only when reflection of a high order, as
in Wordsworth's _Intimations of Immortality_, or what is equivalent to
action operating on a great theme, as in Byron's _Isles of Greece_,
largely and conspicuously enters into these. (3) That they are to be met
with in Reflective Poetry of the very highest character, but never
throughout an exclusively reflective poem of any length. (4) That they are
chiefly to be sought for and most frequently found in either epic or
dramatic poetry where description, emotion, thought, and action all
co-operate to produce the result; that result being, to adduce supreme
examples, the _Iliad_, _Paradise Lost_, the _Divina Commedia_, the third
and fourth cantos of _Childe Harold_, _Hamlet_, _King Lear_, _Macbeth_.

Many years ago, in a couple of papers published in the _Contemporary
Review_ on "New and Old Canons of Poetic Criticism," I propounded, as the
most satisfactory definition of poetry generally, that it is "the
transfiguration, in musical verse, of the Real into the Ideal"; and I have
more than once advocated the definition. The definition applies to poetry
of all kinds. But, while this is so, the transfiguration must operate on a
great theme greatly treated, either lyrically, reflectively, epically, or
dramatically, in order to produce great poetry.

I fancy I hear some people saying, "Quite so; who ever denied or doubted
it?" The answer must be that, for some time past, it has been tacitly, and
often explicitly, denied by critics and readers alike; reviewers to-day
criticising poetry in utter disregard and contravention of any such
canons, and readers in their conversation and practice following suit,
apparently without any knowledge or suspicion that such canons exist. Had
it been otherwise, an inquiry into the essentials of great poetry would
have been unnecessary.

The permanent passions of mankind--love, religion, patriotism,
humanitarianism, hate, revenge, ambition; the conflict between free will
and fate; the rise and fall of empires--these are all great themes, and,
if greatly treated, and in accordance with the essentials applicable to
all poetry, may produce poetry of the loftiest kind; the underlying reason
being what, as usual, has been better and more convincingly stated by
Shakespeare than by any one else:

  We [actors on the stage] are not all alone unhappy:
  This wide and universal theatre
  Presents more woeful pageants than the scene
  Wherein we play.

For the great treatment of great themes in Epic, and yet more in Dramatic,
Poetry, think of what is required! Not mere fancy, not mere emotion, but a
wide and lofty imagination, a full and flexible style, a copious and ready
vocabulary, an ear for verbal melody and all its cadences, profound
knowledge of men, women, and things in general, a congenital and
cultivated sense of form--the foundation of beauty and majesty alike, in
all art; an experience of all the passions, yet the attainment to a
certain majestic freedom from servitude to these; the descriptive,
lyrical, and reflective capacity; abundance and variety of illustration; a
strong apprehension and grasp of the Real, with the impulse and power to
transfigure it into the Ideal, so that the Ideal shall seem to the reader
to be the Real; in a word, "blood and judgment," as Shakespeare says, "so
commingled." These are the qualifications of the writers that have
stirred, and still stir, in its worthier portion, the admiration,
reverence, and gratitude of mankind.

Even this does not exhaust the requisite endowments of those who aspire to
write great poetry. Their sympathy with all that is demands from them a
fund of practical good sense, too often lacking in merely lyrical
poets--a circumstance that may render their work less attractive to the
average person, and even make it seem to such to be wanting in genius
altogether. Sane they must essentially be; and their native sanity must
have been fortified by some share in practical affairs, while their
robustness of mind must have received aid from the open air. They will be
found to be neither extravagant optimists nor extravagant pessimists, but
wise teachers and indulgent moralists; neither teaching nor preaching
overmuch in their verse, but unintentionally and almost unconsciously
communicating their wisdom to others by radiation. Dante always speaks of
Virgil as "Il Saggio." Tennyson puts it well where he says of the poet,
"He saw through good, through ill; He saw through his own soul."
Architecture, sculpture, music, the kindred of his own art, must be
appreciated by him; and nothing that affects mankind is alien to him.

I should like to say, incidentally, and I hope I may do so without giving
offence, that I have sometimes thought that, in an age much given to
theorising and to considering itself more "scientific" than perhaps it
really is, the diminution of practical wisdom, somewhat conspicuous of
late in politics and legislation, is due in no small measure to the
neglect of the higher poetry, in favour, where concern for poetry survives
at all, of brief snatches of lyrical emotion. Hence legislation by emotion
and haste.

If we ask ourselves, as it is but natural to do, what are the chief causes
that have brought about this change in public taste and sentiment, I
believe they will be found to be mainly as follow. (1) The decay of
authority already mentioned. (2) The perpetual reading of novels of every
kind, many of them of a pernicious nature, but nearly all of them
calculated to indispose readers to care for any poetry save of an
emotional lyrical character. (3) The increase--be it said with all due
chivalry--of feminine influence and activity alike in society and
literature; women, generally speaking, showing but a moderate interest in
great issues in public life, and finding their satisfaction, so far as
reading is concerned, in prose romances, newspapers, and short lyrics. (4)
The febrile quality of contemporaneous existence; the ephemeral
excitements of the passing hour; and the wholesale surrender to the
transient as contrasted with the permanent, great poetry concerning itself
only with this last--a circumstance that makes the _Odyssey_, for
instance, as fresh to-day as though it had been published for the first
time last autumn; whereas the life of most prose romances, like the lady's
scanty attire, _commence a peine, et finit tout de suite_.

I hope no one will imagine--for they would be mistaken in doing so--that
these pages have been prompted by a disposition to depreciate the age in
which we are living, and just as little to manifest disdain of it, though
one need not conceal the opinion, in respect of the lower literary taste
so widely prevalent, that, as Shakespeare says, "it is not and it cannot
be for good." My object has been something very different from this. It
has been to recall canons of poetry and standards of literary excellence
which I believe can never be destroyed though for a time they may be
obscured, and which have of late been too much ignored. That such neglect
will in the very faintest degree prevent those whose instinct it is to
say, with Virgil, "paulo majora canamus," from following their vocation,
without a thought of readers or reviewers, I do not suppose. It is good
for poets, and indeed for others, not to be too quickly appreciated. It is
dangerous for them, and sometimes fatal, to be praised prematurely.

The great stumbling-block of literary criticism, alike for the
professional critic and the unprofessional reader, is the tacit assumption
that the opinions, preferences, and estimates of to-day are not merely
passing opinions, preferences, and estimates, but will be permanent ones;
opinions, preferences, and estimates for all future time. There is no
foundation, save self-complacency, for such a surmise. What solid reason
is there to suppose that the present age is any more infallible in its
literary judgments than preceding ages? On the contrary, its infallibility
is all the less probable because of the precipitation with which its
opinions are arrived at. Yet past ages have been proved over and over
again, in course of time, to be wrong in their estimate of contemporaneous
poetry, in consequence of their mistaking the passing for the permanent.
The consequence in our time of this error has been that one has seen the
passing away of several works loudly declared on their appearance to be
immortal. The only chance a critic has of being right in his judgments is
to measure contemporary literature by standards and canons upon which
rests the fame of the great poets and writers of the past, and, tried by
which, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Byron have been assigned
their enduring rank in the poetic hierarchy. "Blessings be with them,"
says Wordsworth (Sonnet xxv.):

  Blessings be with them, and eternal praise,
  Who gave us nobler lives and nobler cares,
  The Poets who on earth have made us heirs
  Of truth and pure delight by heavenly lays.

It is only the great poets, the poets in whom we can recognise the
essentials of greatness, who can do that for us. They are not rebels, as
are too many lyrical poets, but reconcilers; and they offer to external
things and current ideas both receptivity and resistance, being not merely
of an age, but for all time. It is their thoughts and the verse in which
their thoughts are embodied that are enduringly memorable. For great
poetry, as Wordsworth teaches us in a single line, is not mere emotion,
not mere subtle or sensuous singing, but

  Reason in her most exalted mood.

A still greater authority than Wordsworth, no other than Milton, has
immortalised in verse the principles for which I have ventured to contend
in prose. In _Paradise Regained_ (iv. 255-266) he says:

  There thou shalt hear and learn the secret power
  Of harmony, in tones and numbers hit
  By voice or hand, and various-measured verse,
  AEolian charms and Dorian lyrick odes,
  And his who gave them breath but higher sung,
  Blind Melesigenes, thence Homer called,
  Whose poem Phoebus challenged for his own;
  Thence what the lofty grave tragedians taught
  In Chorus or Iambick, teachers best
  Of moral prudence, with delight receiv'd,
  In brief sententious precepts, while they treat
  Of fate, and chance, and change in human life,
  High actions and high passions best describing.




THE FEMININE NOTE IN ENGLISH POETRY


Women, to whom a barbarous description, willingly accepted by themselves,
has been applied, have recently been much in the public eye, and still
more in the public prints. But I should not class them under the
designation of feminine; and, though they may have invaded prose fiction,
they have not been, and I think they never will be, met with in Poetry.
They are noisy, but numerically weak. Eve listening to the Tempter, then
bewailing her weakness; Ruth amid the alien corn; Magdalen and her box of
spikenard; Helen of Troy following evil-hearted Paris; Beatrice in heaven;
Una and the milk-white lamb; Rosalind and Celia in _As You Like It_; the
Lily Maid of Astolat in the _Idylls of the King_--these are women of whom,
or, at least, of the sentiments and sympathies of whom, as manifested in
English poetry, I wish to speak. The most progressive age one can possibly
conceive will never succeed in leaving human nature behind, and I have not
the smallest doubt that women will continue to be womanly to the end of
time.

What, then, is feminine as contrasted with masculine? what is womanly as
compared with manly, whether in literature or in life? Men and women have
many qualities in common, and resemble more than they differ from each
other. But while, speaking generally, the man's main occupations lie
abroad, the woman's main occupation is at home. He has to deal with public
and collective interests; she has to do with private and individual
interests. We need not go so far as to say, with Kingsley, that man must
work and woman must weep; but at least he has to fight and to struggle,
she has to solace and to heal. Ambition, sometimes high, sometimes low,
but still ambition--ambition and success are the main motives and purpose
of his life. Her noblest ambition is to foster domestic happiness, to
bring comfort to the afflicted, and to move with unostentatious but
salutary step over the vast territory of human affection. While man busies
himself with the world of politics, with the world of commerce, with the
rise and fall of empires, with the fortunes and fate of humanity, woman
tends the hearth, visits the sick, consoles the suffering--in a word, in
all she does, fulfils the sacred offices of love.

Now the highest literature--and Poetry is confessedly the highest
literature--is a transfiguring reflex of life; and in its magic mirror we
perforce see reflected all the thoughts, feelings, interests, passions,
and events of human existence. In English poetry, therefore, we shall
expect to hear both the masculine note and the feminine note; and in what
proportions we hear them will be incidentally indicated in the course of
my remarks. But it is the Feminine Note in which we are at present
specially interested, and if I am asked to define briefly what I mean by
this Feminine Note, I should say that I mean the private or domestic note,
the compassionate note or note of pity, and the sentimental note or note
of romantic love.

Now I am well aware there are numbers of people who look on poetry as
something essentially and necessarily feminine, and who will say, "What do
you mean by speaking of the Feminine Note in English poetry? Surely it has
no other note, poetry being an effeminate business altogether, with which
men, real robust men, need not concern themselves." The people who hold
this opinion can have but a very limited acquaintance with English poetry,
and a yet more limited familiarity with the poetry of other ages and other
nations that has come down to us. As a matter of fact, though the feminine
note has rarely, if ever, been wholly absent from poetry, it is only of
late years comparatively that it has become a very audible note. I should
be carried too far away from my subject if I attempted to demonstrate the
accuracy of this assertion by a survey, however rapid, of all the
best-known poetry in languages, dead and living, of other times and other
peoples. But to cite one or two familiar examples, is the feminine note, I
may ask, the predominant, or even a frequent, note in the _Iliad_? The
poem opens, it is true, with a dispute among the Argive chiefs, and mainly
between Agamemnon and Achilles, concerning two young women. But how
quickly Chryseis and Bryseis fall into the background, and in place of any
further reference to them, we have a tempest of manly voices, the clang of
arms, the recriminations of the Gods up in Olympus, and the cataloguing of
the Grecian ships! Lest perhaps tender interest should be absent overmuch,
just when Paris is being worsted in his duel with Menelaus for the
determination of the siege, Venus carries him off under cover of a cloud,
and brings Helen to his side. Then follows a scene in which the fair cause
of strife and slaughter stands distracted between her passion for Paris,
her shame at his defeat and flight, and her recollection of the brave
Argive Chief she once called her lord. But more fighting promptly
supervenes, and, save in such a passing episode as the lovely leave-taking
of Hector and Andromache, the poem moves on through a magnificent medley
of fighting, plotting, and speech-making. Even in that exceptionally
tender episode what are the farewell words of Hector to his wife, "Go to
your house and see to your own duties, the loom and the distaff, and bid
your handmaidens perform their tasks. But for war shall _man_ provide." It
is over the dead body of Patroclus that Achilles weeps; and whatever tears
are shed in the _Iliad_ are shed by heroes for heroes. Life, as
represented in that poem, is a life in which woman plays a shadowy and
insignificant part, and wherein domestic sentiments are subordinated to
the rivalries of the Gods and the clash of chariot-wheels.

This subordinating of woman to man, of individual aims and private
feelings to great aims and public issues, is equally present in the great
Latin poem, the _AEneid_. "Arms and the Man, I sing," says Virgil at once,
and in the very first line of his poem; and though in one book out of the
twelve of which it consists he sings of the woman likewise, it is but to
leave her to her fate and to liberate AEneas from her seductions. Virgil is
rightly esteemed the most tender and refined writer of antiquity. Yet to
the modern reader, accustomed to the feminine note in poetry, there is
something amazingly callous, almost cruel, in the lines with which, while
the funeral pyre of Dido is still smoking, he tells us how AEneas, without
a moment's hesitation, makes for the open sea, and sails away from
Carthage. But then the main business of AEneas was not to soothe or satisfy
the Carthaginian queen, but to build the city and found the Empire of
Rome. "Spirits," says Shakespeare, "are not finely touched save to fine
issues"; and it never would have occurred to Virgil to allow the hero of
the _AEneid_ to be diverted from his masculine purpose by anything so
secondary as the love, or even the self-immolation, of a woman.

Let us, however, overleap the intervening centuries, and betake ourselves
to the poetry of our own land and our own language. Chaucer, the first
great English poet, was, like all writers of supreme genius, a prolific
and voluminous writer, and we have thousands of verses of his besides the
Prologue to the _Canterbury Tales_. But it is by this latter work that he
is best known; and it is pre-eminently and adequately representative, both
of his own genius and of the temper of the times in which he lived. You
will have to hunt very diligently through his description of the Knight,
the Squire, the Yeoman, the Prioress, the Monk, the Merchant, the Sergeant
of the Law, the Franklin, the Miller, the Manciple, and the rest of his
jovial company, in order to find anything approaching the feminine note.
He says little about what any of them thought, and absolutely nothing
concerning what they felt, but confines himself to descriptions of their
personal appearance, of their conduct and their character, in a word, of
their external presentation of themselves. The Knight who wore a doublet
all stained by his coat of mail, was well mounted, and had ridden far, no
man farther. The Squire, or page, had curly locks, and had borne himself
well in Flanders and Picardy. The Yeoman bore a weighty bow, handled his
arrows and tackle in admirable fashion, and was dressed in a coat of
green. The Monk was fat and in good case, and loved a roast swan more than
any other dish. The Friar, we are told, had made many a marriage at his
own cost, and would get a farthing out of a poor widow, though she had
only one shoe left. The Franklin had a white beard and a high complexion,
kept a capital table, and blew up his cook loudly if the sauces were not
to his liking. The Wife of Bath had married five husbands, not to speak of
other company in her youth; and the Sumpnor loved garlic, onions, and
leeks, had a fiery face, and doated on strong wine. There is nothing very
feminine in all this, is there? The one sole touch of tenderness that I
can remember, and it is very elementary and introduced quite casually, is
that in which we are told that the Prioress is so full of pity that she
would weep if she saw a mouse caught in a trap. One can easily surmise
what sort of tales would proceed from such downright, hearty, unromantic
personages; and, save where any of them recite well-known stories from
ancient poets, their own narratives are as buxom, burly, and as
unsentimental as themselves. If princes and princesses, fine lords and
ladies, be the heroes and heroines of the Tale, a certain amount of
conventional pity is extended to their woes. But if the personages of the
story be, as they for the most part are, common folk, and such as the
story-tellers themselves would be likely to know, their misfortunes and
mishaps are used merely as a theme for mirth and merciless banter. The
humour displayed is excellent, but it is not the humour of _charity_. It
is not compassionate, and it is not feminine. The feminine note is not
absent from Chaucer's Tales, but it is generally a subordinate note, a
rare note, a note scarcely heard in his great concert of masculine
voices.

Passing from the pages of Chaucer to those of Spenser is like passing from
some cheery tavern where the ale is good and the jokes are excellent, but
a trifle coarse, and the company diverting but a little mixed, to the
banqueting-hall of some stately palace, where the wines and meats are of
the choicest, where all the guests are of high degree, the women all fair,
the men all courtly, and where fine manners and dignified speech leave no
place for loud lewd laughter or even for homely familiarity. Surely in one
who is such a poet, and such a gentleman, and in every respect, to quote a
line of his own "a very perfect gentle knight," we shall come across, ever
and anon at least, the feminine note. And indeed we do. The first three
stanzas of the _Fairy Queen_ are dedicated to the description of the
Knight that was pricking on the plain. But listen to the fourth:

  A lovely lady rode him fair beside,
  Upon a lowly ass more white than snow;
  Yet she much whiter; but the same did hide
  Under a veil that wimpled was full low,
  And over all a black stole did she throw;
  As one that inly mourned, so was she sad,
  And heavy sate upon her palfrey slow.
  Seemed at heart some hidden care she had.
  And by her in a line a milk-white lamb she lad.
  So pure and innocent as that same lamb
  She was, in life and every virtuous lore.
  She by descent from royal lineage came.

Her name, as doubtless you well know, was Una, and, when by foul
enchantment she is severed a while from her true knight, harken with what
a truly feminine note Spenser bewails her misfortune:

  Nought is there under heaven's wide hollowness
  Did recover more dear compassion of the mind
  Than beauty brought to unworthy wretchedness
  Through envy's snare, or fortune's freaks unkind.
  I, whether lately through her brightness blind,
  Or through allegiance, and fast fealty
  Which I do owe unto all womankind,
  Feel my heart prest with so great agony,
  When such I see, that all for pity I could die.

Spenser cannot endure the thought of beauty in distress. So at once he
brings upon the scene a ramping lion, which, in the ordinary course of
things would have put a speedy end to her woes. But not so Spenser's lion:

  Instead thereof he kissed her weary feet,
  And licked her lily hands with fawning tongue,
  As he her wronged innocence did weet.
  O how can beauty master the most strong.

And thus he goes on:

  The lion would not leave her desolate,
  But with her went along, as a strong guard
  Of her chaste person, and a faithful mate
  Of her sad troubles and misfortunes hard:
  Still when she slept, he kept both watch and ward,
  And when she waked, he waited diligent
  With humble service to her will prepared.

This allegiance and fast fealty which Spenser declares he owes unto all
womankind is the attitude, not only of all true knights and all true
gentlemen, but likewise, I trust, of all true poets. But do not suppose on
that account that Spenser is a feminine poet. He is very much the reverse.
It would be impossible for a poet to be more masculine than he.

  Upon a great adventure he was bound,

he says at once of his hero, and describes how the knight's heart groaned
to prove his prowess in battle brave. Spenser has the feminine note, but
in subordination to the masculine note; and if I were asked to name some
one quality by which you may know whether a poet be of the very highest
rank, I should be disposed to say, "See if in his poetry you meet with the
feminine note and the masculine note, and if the first be duly
subordinated to the second."

I wish it were possible, within the limit I have here assigned myself, to
apply this test and pursue this enquiry at length in regard to
Shakespeare, in regard to Milton, and likewise in regard to Dryden and
Pope. But of this I am sure that the wider and deeper the survey the more
clear would be the conclusion that in Shakespeare, as we might have
expected, the masculine note and the feminine note are heard in perfect
harmony, but by far the larger volume of sound proceeds from the former.

When, then, was it that the feminine note, the domestic or personal note,
the compassionate note or note of pity, the purely sentimental note, was
first heard in English poetry as a note asserting equality with the
masculine note, and tending to assert itself as the dominant note?

One of the most beautiful and best-known poems in the English language is
Gray's _Elegy written in a Country Churchyard_; and in the following
stanzas which many of you will recognise as belonging to it, do we not
seem to overhear something like the note of which we are in search?--

  Beneath those rugged elms, that yew tree's shade,
  Where heaves the turf in many a mould'ring heap,
  Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
  The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

  The breezy call of incense-breathing Morn,
  The swallow twitt'ring from the straw-built shed,
  The cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing horn,
  No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.

  For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,
  Or busy housewife ply her ev'ning care:
  No children run to lisp their sire's return,
  Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.

Here our sympathy is asked, not for kings and princesses, not for great
lords and fine ladies, not for the rise and fall of empires, but for the
rude forefathers of the hamlet, for the busy housewife, for the
hard-working peasant and his children, for homely joys and the annals of
the poor. But Gray does not maintain this note beyond the five stanzas I
have just quoted. He quickly again lapses into the traditional, the
classic, the purely masculine note:

  The boast of Heraldry, the pomp of Pow'r,
  And all that Beauty, all that Wealth e'er gave,
  Await alike th' inevitable hour,
  The paths of glory lead but to the grave.

  Nor you, ye proud, impute to these the fault,
  If Mem'ry o'er their tombs no trophies raise,
  Where through the long-drawn aisle, and fretted vault,
  The pealing anthem swells the note of praise.

  Can storied urn, or animated bust,
  Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath?
  Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust,
  Or Flatt'ry soothe the dull cold ear of Death?

The stanzas that follow are splendid stanzas, but they are the stately and
sonorous verse of a detached and moralising mind, not the pathetic verse
of a sympathising heart. We have to wait another twenty years before we
come upon a poem of consequence in which the feminine note is not only
present, but paramount. In the year 1770, nearly a century and a half
ago, appeared Goldsmith's poem, _The Deserted Village_, and in it I catch,
for the first time, as the prevailing and predominant note, the note of
feminine compassion, the note of humble happiness and humble grief. In
Goldsmith's verse we hear nothing of great folks except to be told how
small and insignificant are the ills which they can cause or cure.

  Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade;
  A breath can make them, as a breath hath made;
  But a bold peasantry, their country's pride,
  When once destroyed, can never be supplied.

Goldsmith's themes in _The Deserted Village_ are avowedly:

  The sheltered cot, the cultivated farm,
  The never-failing brook, the busy mill,
  The decent church that topped the neighbouring hill,
  The hawthorn bush, with seats beneath the shade,
  For talking age and whispering lovers made.

We seem to have travelled centuries away from the _Troilus and Cressida_,
or the _Palamon and Arcite_ of Chaucer, from the Red Cross Knight and Una,
from the Britomart, the Florimel, the Calidore, the Gloriana of Spenser,
from the kingly ambitions and princely passions of Shakespeare, from the
throes and denunciations of _Paradise Lost_, and equally from the
coffee-house epigrams and savage satire of Pope. We have at last got among
ordinary people, among humble folk, people of our own flesh and blood,
with simple joys and simple sorrows. What could be more unlike the poetry
we have so far been surveying than these lines from _The Deserted
Village_?--

  Sweet was the sound when oft at evening's close
  Up yonder hill the village murmur rose,
  There, as I passed, with careless steps and slow,
  The mingling notes came softened from below.
  The swain responsive as the milkmaid sung,
  The sober herd that lowed to meet their young,
  The noisy geese that gabbled o'er the pool,
  The playful children just let loose from school.

Which of you does not remember the description in the same poem of the
Village Clergyman? the man who was to all his country dear, etc. Some of
you, I daresay, know it by heart. Nothing is too lowly, some would say,
nothing too mean, for Goldsmith's tender Muse. He loves to dwell on the
splendour of the humble parlour, on the whitewashed wall, the sanded
floor, the varnished clock, the chest of drawers, and the chimney-piece
with its row of broken teacups. Truly it is a feminine Muse which can make
poetry, and, in my opinion, very charming poetry, out of broken teacups.

The feminine note once struck, the note of personal tenderness, of
domestic interest, of compassion for the homely, the suffering, or the
secluded was never again to be absent from English poetry; and Cowper
continued, without a break, the still sad music of humanity first clearly
uttered by Goldsmith. What is the name of Cowper's principal and most
ambitious poem? As you know, it is called _The Task_; and what are the
respective titles of the six books into which it is divided? They are:
_The Sofa_, _The Time-Piece_, _The Garden_, _The Winter Evening_, _The
Winter Morning Walk_, _The Winter Walk at Noon_. Other poems of a kindred
character are entitled _Hope_, _Charity_, _Conversation_, _Retirement_.
Open what page you will of Cowper's verse, and you will be pretty sure to
find him either denouncing things which women, good women, at least, find
abhorrent, such as the slave-trade, gin-drinking, gambling, profligacy,
profane language, or dwelling on occupations which are dear to them.

  O for a lodge in some vast wilderness,

he exclaims--

  Some boundless contiguity of shade,
  Where rumour of oppression and deceit
  Of unsuccessful or successful war,
  Might never reach me more! My ear is pained,
  My soul is sick with every day's report
  Of wrong and outrage with which earth is filled.
  There is no flesh in man's obdurate heart,
  It does not feel for man.

These are the opening lines of the _Time-Piece_, and they sound what may
be called the note of feminine indignation; a note which is reverted to by
him again and again.

More placidly but still in the same spirit, he exclaims:

  Now stir the fire and close the shutters fast,
  Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round,
  And while the bubbling and loud hissing urn
  Throws up a steaming column, and the cups
  That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each,
  So let us welcome peaceful evening in.

Farther on, he describes how--

  'Tis pleasant through the loopholes of retreat
  To peep at such a world, to see the stir
  Of the great Babel, and not feel the crowd.
  Thus sitting, and surveying thus at ease
  The globe and its concerns, I seem advanced
  To some secure and more than mortal height,
  That liberates and exempts me from them all.

Again, invoking evening, he says:

  Come then, and thou shalt find thy votary calm
  Or make me so. Composure is thy gift:
  And whether I devote the gentle hours of evening
  To books, to music, or the poet's toil,
  To weaving nets for bird-alluring fruit,
  Or turning silken threads round ivory reels,
  When they command whom man was born to please.

Could there well be a more feminine picture than that? All the politics,
commerce, passions, conflicts of the world are shut out by Mrs. Unwin's
comfortable curtains, and, with her and Lady Austen for sympathising
companions, the poet fills his time, with perfect satisfaction, by holding
their skeins of wool, and meditating such homely lines as these:

  For I, contented with a humble theme,
  Have poured my stream of panegyric down
  The vale of nature where it creeps and winds
  Among her lovely works, with a secure
  And unambitious ease reflecting clear
  If not the virtues, yet the worth of brutes.
  And I am recompensed, and deem the toils
  Of poetry not lost, if verse of mine
  May stand between an animal and woe,
  And teach one tyrant pity for his drudge.

Cowper was never married, nor ever, as far as I know, in love, though Lady
Austen, to her and his misfortune, for a time seemed to fancy he was; and
in his verse therefore we do not meet with the note of amatory sentiment.
But what love is there in this world more beautiful, more touching, more
truly romantic, than the love of a mother for her son, and of a son for
his mother? And where has it been more charmingly expressed than in
Cowper's lines on the receipt of his mother's picture? After that
beautiful outburst--

  O that those lips had language! Life has passed
  With me but roughly since I heard thee last

--he proceeds to recall the home, the scenes, the tender incidents of his
childhood, but, most of all, the fond care bestowed on him by his mother:

  Thy nightly visits to my chamber made
  That thou mightst know me safe and warmly laid,
  Thy fragrant waters on my cheek bestowed
  By thy own hand, till fresh they were and glowed,
  All this, and more endearing still than all,
  Thy constant flow of love that knew no fall,
  Ne'er roughened by those cataracts and breaks
  That humour interposed too often makes;
  All this still legible in memory's page,
  And still to be so to my latest age,
  Adds joy to duty, makes me glad to pay
  Such honour to thee as my numbers may,
  Perhaps a frail memorial, but sincere,
  Not scorned in Heaven, though little noticed here.

The lines are not in what is called the highest vein of poetry. They have
not the bluff masculinity of Chaucer. They lack the magic of Spenser. They
do not purify the passions through terror as is done by _Lear_ or
_Macbeth_, and they are much inferior in majesty to the

  Cherubic trumpets blowing martial sound

of Milton. But they come straight from the heart, and go straight to the
heart. They are thoroughly human, what we all have felt, or are much to be
pitied if we have not felt. They are instinct with the holiest form of
domestic piety. They are feminine in the best sense, and have all the
feminine power to attract, to chasten, and to subdue.

As far as character and conduct are concerned, there could not well be two
poets more unlike than Cowper and Burns; and their poetry is as unlike as
their temperament. I fear Burns indulged in most of the vices against
which Cowper inveighs; and not unoften he glorified them in verse. Upon
that theme do not ask me to dwell this evening. All it is necessary to
point out here is, that in Burns, as in Cowper, and as in Goldsmith, we
have the compassionate note, the note of pity for suffering, of sympathy
with the lowly; in a word, we again have the feminine note. In _The
Cotter's Saturday Night_ Burns paints a picture, as complete as it is
simple, of humble life. We have the cotter returning home through the
chill November blast with the weary beasts; the collecting of his spades,
his mattocks, and his hoes; the arrival at his cottage; the expectant wee
things running out to meet him; the ingle-nook blinking bonnily; the
cheerful supper of wholesome porridge; the reading of a passage from the
Bible, the evening hymn, and the family prayer before retiring to rest.
There is a line in _The Cotter's Saturday Night_ which might be taken as
the text on which most of Burns's poems are written:

  The cottage leaves the palace far behind.

All his sympathies are with cottages and cottagers, whether he be
expressly describing their existence, writing _A Man's a Man for a' that_,
_The Birks of Aberfeldy_, _Auld Lang Syne_, or addressing lines to a mouse
whose nest he has turned up with his plough. All are written in a spirit
of compassion for suffering, of sympathy with the lowly, of admiration for
honest poverty. They are fundamentally tender, and, though expressed in
manly fashion enough, fundamentally feminine, the poetry of a man who
lived habitually under the influence of women.

I think it will be allowed that I have given no grudging admiration to the
feminine note in English poetry, and in so far as it is a note of sympathy
with the more humble and less fortunate ones of the earth. But, in verse,
kindly and compassionate sentiment is not everything. Indeed, it is
nothing at all unless it be expressed in such a manner, the manner
suffused with charm of style, that it is thereby raised to the dignity of
true poetry. There are many excellent persons who accept as poetry any
sentiment, or any opinion expressed in metre with which they happen to
agree. But neither sound opinion nor wholesome sentiment suffices to
produce that exceedingly delicate and subtle thing which alone is rightly
termed poetry, and, in abandoning lofty themes, and descending to humbler
ones, writers of verse unquestionably expose themselves to the danger not
only of not rising above the level of their subject, but even of sinking
below it. The Romans had a proverb that you cannot carve a Mercury out of
every piece of wood, meaning thereby that by reason of Mercury not being a
standing or reposing figure, but a figure flying through the air, and
therefore with limbs and wings extended, the material out of which he is
made has to be both considerable in size and excellent in quality. What is
true of Mercury is truer still of Apollo. You cannot make poetry out of
every subject; and your only chance of making poetry out of any subject is
to do so by treating the subject either nobly, or with charm. Realism,
unadulterated Realism, which is a dangerous experiment in prose, is a
sheer impossibility in poetry; for in poetry what is offered us, and what
delights us, is not realistic but ideal representation. No doubt the very
music of verse is part of the means whereby this ideal representation is
effected; but it will not of itself suffice, as may easily be proved by
reciting mere nonsense verses in which the rhythm or music may be
faultless. I could quote page after page from Cowper, which is verse only,
and not poetry, because it is nothing more than the bare statement of a
fact set forth in lines consisting of so many feet. Here, for instance, is
a specimen. It comes in his poem on _The Sofa_:

  Joint-stools were then created, on three legs,
  Upborne they stood: three legs upholding firm
  A mossy slab, in fashion square or round.
  At length a generation more refined
  Improved the simple plan, made three legs four,
  Gave them a twisted form vermicular
  And o'er the seat with plenteous wadding stuffed
  Induced a splendid cover, green and blue,
  Yellow and red, of tapestry richly wrought,
  And woven close, or needlework sublime.

Perhaps you think this is a parody of Cowper. But I can assure you it is
nothing of the kind. It was written by the poet himself; and in his
abounding pages you will find hundreds of verses of this realistic and
pedestrian character. But not Cowper alone, one much greater than Cowper,
one who rose over and over again to the very heaven of poesy, Wordsworth
himself, has likewise left hundreds, aye, thousands of verses, little
better than the passage I have just read from Cowper, through the mistaken
notion that kindly feeling, compassion for the poor and the patient, and
sound moral sentiments, when expressed in verse, must result in poetry.
There is no one here whose admiration of Wordsworth at his best can be
greater than mine, but, in order to show you how the feminine note in
poetry, the note of sympathy with the weak, the obscure, and the
unfortunate, can even in the voice of a great master of poetry, lapse into
verse utterly destitute of the soul and spirit of poetry, I will ask you
to allow me to read you a portion of _Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman_:

  And he is lean and he is sick;
  His body, dwindled and awry,
  Rests upon ankles swoln and thick;
  His legs are thin and dry.
  One prop he has, and only one,
  His Wife, an aged woman,
  Lives with him, near the waterfall,
  Upon the village Common.

  Oft, working by her husband's side,
  Ruth does what Simon cannot do;
  For she, with scanty cause for pride,
  Is stouter of the two.
  And though you with your utmost skill
  From labour could not wean them,
  Alas! 'tis very little--all
  Which they can do between them.

  O Reader! had you in your mind
  Such stores as silent thought can bring,
  O gentle Reader! you would find
  A tale in everything.
  What more I have to say is short,
  And you must kindly take it:
  It is no tale; but, should you _think_,
  Perhaps a tale you'll make it.

Is not that sorry stuff, regarded as poetry? Wordsworth here had the
assistance of the music, not only of verse, but of rhyme; and with what a
result! It is the feminine note of pity in its dotage, whereby we see
that it is not enough to have a warm heart, to have tender feelings, to be
full of sympathy for the suffering, and then to express them in verse. In
the prose of conversation and of everyday life, kindly feeling is all well
enough. But the Heavenly Muse will not place herself at our disposal so
readily and cheaply. She is a very difficult lady, is the Heavenly Muse,
not easily won, and never allowing you, if you want to remain in her good
graces, to approach her, that is to say, in dressing gown and slippers.
She is the noblest and most gracious lady in the world, and the best, the
most refined, the most elevating of companions. Therefore you must come
into her presence and win her favour, not with free-and-easy gait and in
slovenly attire, but arrayed in your very best, and with courtly and
deferential mien. When poets wrote of gods and goddesses, of mighty
sieges, and of the foundation and fall of empires; when their theme was
the madness of princes, and the tragic fate of kings, when their hero was
Lucifer, Son of the Morning, nay, even when they discoursed of free will
and fate, or of the drawing-room intrigues of persons to whom powder,
patches, billets-doux were the chief things in existence, there was no
need to remind them that their style must be as lofty, as dignified, as
refined, or as finished as their subject. No doubt, they sometimes waxed
stilted and fell into excess, whether in rhetoric or in conceits, but they
never forgot themselves so far as to be slovenly or familiar. Stella, you
know, said Swift could write beautifully about a broomstick. Possibly he
could; but note the concession, that if a man writes, at least if he would
write poetry, he must write _beautifully_. Both Cowper and Wordsworth set
the example of writing verse that is not beautiful, though indeed Young
in his _Night Thoughts_, and Thomson in _The Seasons_, had already done
something of the same kind. But they have not the authority of Cowper,
much less the authority of Wordsworth. Let who will be the authority for
it, prosaic utterance in verse, realism in rhyme, no matter what the
subject, is an incongruity that cannot be too severely condemned. A very
large proportion of the verse of Crabbe, once so popular, but now, I
fancy, but little read, is of little value, by reason of the presence of
this defect. Yet while I indicate, and venture to reprove, the feebleness
into which the feminine note in English poetry has too often declined and
deteriorated, never let us forget that it has contributed lovely and
immortal poetry to the language, poetry to be found in Wordsworth, poetry
such as melts us almost to tears in Hood's _Song of the Shirt_, or in Mrs.
Barrett Browning's _The Cry of the Children_. Horace, who was a great
critic as well as a great poet, said long ago that it is extremely
difficult to express oneself concerning ordinary everyday facts and
feelings in a becoming and agreeable manner; and to do this in verse
demands supreme genius. As a set-off to the example of feebleness I just
now cited in Wordsworth, listen how, when the mood of inspiration is on
him, he can see a Highland girl reaping in a field--surely an ordinary
everyday sight--and threw around her the heavenly halo of the divinest
poetry:

  Behold her, single in the field,
  Yon solitary Highland Lass!
  Reaping and singing by herself;
  Stop here, or gently pass!
  Alone she cuts, and binds the grain,
  And sings a melancholy strain;
  O listen! for the Vale profound
  Is overflowing with the sound.

  No Nightingale did ever chaunt
  So sweetly to reposing bands
  Of Travellers in some shady haunt,
  Among Arabian sands:
  A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard
  In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,
  Breaking the silence of the seas
  Among the farthest Hebrides.

  Will no one tell me what she sings?
  Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
  For old, unhappy, far-off things,
  And battles long ago:
  Or is it some more humble lay,
  Familiar matter of to-day?
  Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
  That has been, and may be again?

  Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang
  As if her song could have no ending;
  I saw her singing at her work,
  And o'er the sickle bending;--
  I listened till I had my fill,
  And when I mounted up the hill,
  The music in my heart I bore,
  Long after it was heard no more.

But there is another manifestation of the feminine note in English poetry,
distinct from, though doubtless akin to, the one we have been considering;
a note which likewise was not heard in it till about a hundred years ago,
but which has been heard very frequently since, and which seems at times
to threaten to become its dominant and all-prevailing note, or at any rate
the only one that is keenly listened to. Instead of the note of interest
in and pity for others, it has become the note of interest in and pity
either for oneself, or for one's other self; a note so strongly personal
and suggestive as to become egotistic and entirely self-regarding. This
is the amatory or erotic note, which I think you will all recognise when I
give it that designation; the note which appears to consider the love of
the sexes as the only important thing in life, and certainly the only
thing worth writing or singing about. More than two thousand years ago, a
Greek poet wrote a lyric beginning, "I would fain sing of the heroes of
the House of Atreus, I would fain chant the glories of the line of Cadmus;
but my lyre refuses to sound any note save that of love." In these days
the poet who expressed that sentiment and acted on it would have a great
many listeners; and no doubt Anacreon, too, had his audience in ancient
Greece. But he was not ranked by them side by side with their great poets
who _did_ take the tragic story of the House of Atreus for their theme. It
can only be when feminine influence is supreme in society and in
literature, and when the feminine note in poetry has become, or threatens
to become, paramount, that the sentiment and practice of Anacreon is
viewed with approbation and favour. Byron has said in a well-known
passage:

  For love is of man's life a thing apart;
    'Tis woman's whole existence.

If I know anything about women, that is a gross exaggeration, unless in
the term love be included love of parents, love of brothers and sisters,
love of children, in a word, every form and manifestation of affection.
Still it is not necessary to deny--indeed if it be true it is necessary to
admit--that love, in the narrower if more intense signification of the
word, does play a larger part in the lives, or at any rate in the
imagination, of most women than it does in the lives and the imagination
of most men; and it is not to be denied that practically all women, and a
fair sprinkling of men, now take an almost exclusive interest in the
amatory note in poetry. Nor let any one say that this was always so, and
that poetry and poets have from time immemorial occupied themselves mainly
with the passion of love. Indeed they have not done so. It would be to
show an utter ignorance of the genius of Homer, of the great Greek
dramatists, of Virgil, of Dante, of Spenser, of Shakespeare, of Milton,
and of the temper of the times in which they lived, to say that they could
sound only notes of love. They sounded these sometimes, but seldom and
rarely, in comparison with their other and more masculine notes, and
always in due subordination to these. I will not go so far as to say that
they thought, with Napoleon, that love is the occupation of the idle, and
the idleness of the occupied, but they knew that however absorbing for a
season the passion of love as described by many poets and by nearly all
modern novelists may be, it _is_ a thing apart; and, as such, they dealt
with it. They did not ignore its existence, or even its importance, but
they did not exaggerate its existence and its importance, relatively to
other interests, other occupations, other duties in life. It was because
of the high fealty and allegiance which Spenser declared he owed to all
womankind that he did not represent women as perpetually sighing or being
sighed for by men. It was because Shakespeare had such absolute
familiarity, not with this or that part of life, but with the whole of it,
that even in _Romeo and Juliet_, in _Othello_, in _Measure for Measure_,
and again in _As You Like It_, he represented the passion of love at work
and in operation along with other sentiments and other passions; and, in
the greater portion of his dramas either does not introduce it at all, or
assigns to it a quite subordinate place. In _Romeo and Juliet_ the brave
Mercutio, the Tybalt "deaf to peace," the garrulous nurse, the true
apothecary, the comfortable Friar, as Juliet calls him, all these and
more, have their exits and their entrances, and all, in turn, demand our
attention. _Romeo and Juliet_ is a love-drama indeed; but even in _Romeo
and Juliet_, though love occupies the foremost place and plays the leading
part, it stands in relation to other passions and other characters, and
moves onward to its doom surrounded and accompanied by a medley of other
circumstances and occurrences; just as true love, even the most
engrossing, does in real life. The same just apprehension of life, the
same observance of accurate proportion between the action of love and the
action of other passions and other interests, may be observed in
_Othello_. Othello is not represented merely as a man who is consumed and
maddened by jealousy, but as a citizen and a soldier, encompassed by
friends and enemies, and brought into contact, not with Desdemona and Iago
alone, but with the Duke of Venice, with valiant Cassio, with witty
Montano, with Brabantio, with Gratiano, in a word with people and things
in general.

Neither would it be any more to the purpose to object that Herrick, that
Suckling, that Lovelace, and other poets of the seventeenth century wrote
love-lyrics by the score, with many of which I have no doubt you are
acquainted, and some of which are very beautiful. For these, for the most
part, were amatory exercises, not real breathing and burning love-poems;
dainty works of art sometimes, but not sicklied o'er with the pale cast of
amatory passion. They were seventeenth-century reminiscences of the
conventional love-lyrics of the Troubadours of Provence, when there
existed an imaginary court of Love and a host of imaginary lovers.
Indeed, if I were asked what was the truest and most succinct note uttered
by their English imitators, I think I should have to say that I seem to
catch it most distinctly in the lines of Suckling beginning:

  Why so pale and wan, fond lover?
      Prithee, why so pale?

--and ending with:

  If of herself she will not love,
      Nothing can make her:
      The devil take her!

But we catch a very different amatory note, and that of the most personal
and earnest kind, when the voice of Burns, and then the voice of Byron,
were heard in English poetry. In Byron the note is almost always
passionate. In Burns it is sometimes sentimental, sometimes jovial,
sometimes humorous, sometimes frankly and offensively coarse. Many readers
cannot do full justice to the North-Country dialect in the following
lines, but the most Southern of accents could not quite spoil their simple
beauty:

  The westlin wind blaws loud an' shrill;
    The night's baith mirk and rainy, O;
  But I'll get my plaid, an' out I'll steal,
    An' owre the hills to Nannie, O.

  Her face is fair, her heart is true,
    As spotless as she's bonnie, O:
  The op'ning gowan, wat wi' dew,
    Nae purer is than Nannie, O.

That is one amatory, one feminine note in Burns. Here is another:

  There's nought but care on every han',
    In every hour that passes, O;
  What signifies the life o' man,
    An' 'twere na for the lasses, O.

  Auld Nature swears the lovely dears
    Her noblest work she classes, O:
  Her 'prentice han' she tried on man,
    An' then she made the lasses, O.

I have no fault to find with these lines. They express a profound and
enduring truth; and, if they do so with some little exaggeration, they do
it half humorously, and so protect themselves against criticism. But I
really think--I hope you will not deem me unchivalrous in saying so--we
have, during the present century, heard too much, both in poetry and in
prose romance, as we are now hearing too much in newspapers and magazines,
of "the lasses, O." Not that we can hear too much of them in their
relation to each other, to men, and to life. The "too much" I indicate is
the too much of romantic love, that leaves no place for other emotions and
other passions equally worthy, or relegates these to an inferior position
and to a narrower territory. I should say that there is rather too much of
the sentimental note in Byron, in Shelley, in Keats, just as I should say
that there is not too much of it in Wordsworth or in Scott. To say this is
not to decry Byron, Shelley, and Keats--what lover of poetry would dream
of decrying such splendid poets as they?--but only to indicate a certain
tendency against which I cannot help feeling it is well to be on our
guard. The tendency of the times is to encourage writers, whether in prose
or verse, to deal with this particular theme and to deal with it too
frequently and too pertinaciously. Moreover, there is always a danger that
a subject, in itself so delicate, should not be quite delicately
handled, and indeed that it should be treated with indelicacy and
grossness. That, too, unfortunately, has happened in verse; and when
that happens, then I think the Heavenly Muse veils her face and weeps. It
must have been through some dread of poetry thus dishonouring itself that
Plato in his ideal Republic proposed that poets should be crowned with
laurel, and then banished from the city. For my part, I would willingly
see such poets banished from the city, but not crowned with laurel. No
doubt Plato's notion that poets should chant nothing but hymns to the Gods
and praises of virtue is a little narrow and exacting, but if they are to
sing songs worthy of themselves, and of mankind, they must be on the side
of virtue and of the Gods. Hark with what perfect delicacy a masculine
poet like Scott can deal with a feminine theme:

  What though no rule of courtly grace
  To measured mood had trained her pace,
  A foot more light, a step more true
  Ne'er from the heath-flower dashed the dew.
  Ev'n the light harebell raised its head,
  Elastic from her airy tread.
  What though upon her speech there hung
  The accents of the mountain tongue?
  Those solemn sounds, so soft, so clear,
  The listener held his breath to hear.

That is how manly poets write and think of women. But they do not dwell
over much on the theme; they do not harp on it; and when you turn the
page, you read in a totally different key:

  The fisherman forsook the strand,
  The swarthy smith took dirk and brand;
  With changed cheer the mower blythe
  Left in the half-cut swathe the scythe.
  The herds without a keeper strayed,
  The plough was in mid-furrow stayed.
  The falconer tossed his hawk away,
  The hunter left the stag at bay.
  Prompt at the signal of alarms,
  Each son of Albion rushed to arms.
  So swept the tumult and affray
  Along the margin of Achray.

Does it not remind you of the passage I quoted from Homer, where Hector
says to Andromache, "Go! to your house, and see to your loom and distaff,
but for war men will provide"? Scott, like Homer, observed the due
proportion between love and life, giving love ample room, but not
allotting it excessive space. If again one wants to hear how delicately,
how worthily, how manfully, poets can write of love and of women, what can
one do better than recall this perfect lyric of Wordsworth's?--

  Three years she grew in sun and shower,
  Then Nature said, "A lovelier flower
  On earth was never sown;
  This Child I to myself will take;
  She shall be mine, and I will make
  A Lady of my own.

  "Myself will to my darling be
  Both law and impulse: and with me
  The Girl, in rock and plain,
  In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,
  Shall feel an overseeing power
  To kindle or restrain.

  "She shall be sportive as the Fawn
  That wild with glee across the lawn
  Or up the mountain springs;
  And hers shall be the breathing balm,
  And hers the silence and the calm
  Of mute insensate things.

  "The floating Clouds their state shall lend
  To her; for her the willow bend;
  Nor shall she fail to see
  Even in the motions of the Storm
  Grace that shall mould the Maiden's form
  By silent sympathy.

  "The Stars of midnight shall be dear
  To her; and she shall lean her ear
  In many a secret place
  Where Rivulets dance their wayward round,
  And beauty born of murmuring sound
  Shall pass into her face.

  "And vital feelings of delight
  Shall rear her form to stately height,
  Her virgin bosom swell;
  Such thoughts to Lucy I will give
  While she and I together live
  Here in this happy Dell."

  Thus Nature spake--The work was done--
  How soon my Lucy's race was run!
  She died, and left to me
  This heath, this calm and quiet scene;
  The memory of what has been,
  And never more will be.

Neither should I like it to be supposed that I think Byron could not write
on this same theme in the noblest manner. He did so frequently; he would
not have been the great poet he is if he had not done so. Listen to this,
for example:

  She walks in beauty, like the night
    Of cloudless climes and starry skies,
  And all that's best of dark and light
    Meet in her aspect and her eyes.
  Thus mellowed to that tender light
    Which Heaven to gaudy day denies.

  One shade the more, one ray the less,
    Had half impaired the nameless grace
  Which waves in every raven tress,
    Or softly lightens o'er her face,
  Where thoughts serenely sweet express
    How pure, how dear, their dwelling place.

  And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
    So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
  The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
    But tell of days in goodness spent,
  A mind at peace with all below,
    A heart whose love is innocent.

Women are honoured and exalted when they are sung of in that manner. They
are neither honoured nor exalted, they are dishonoured and degraded, when
they are represented, either in prose or verse, as consuming their days in
morbid longings and sentimental regrets, and men are represented as having
nothing to do save to stimulate or satisfy such feelings. What is written
in prose is not here my theme. I am writing of poets and poetry, and of
the readers of poetry. Novelists and novel-readers are a different and
separate subject. But I may say in passing that poetry and the readers of
poetry have suffered somewhat during the present generation from novels
and novel-readers. A newer and narrower standard of human interest has
been set up; and while the great bulk of readers have turned from poetry
to prose romances, writers of verse have too frequently tried to compete
with novelists, by treating love as the central interest and the main
business of life. Homer did not think it such, neither did Virgil, nor
Dante, nor Chaucer, nor Spenser, nor Shakespeare, nor Milton, and let us
not think so. I urge every one, every now and again at least, to lay down
the novel and open the poem: but let it be a poem that will enlarge one's
conception of life, that will help one to think loftily, and to feel
nobly, will teach us that there is something more important to ourselves
even than _ourselves_, something more important and deserving of attention
than one's own small griefs and own petty woes, the vast and varied
drama of History, the boundless realm of the human imagination, and the
tragic interests and pathetic struggles of mankind. We need not close our
ear to the feminine note, but should not listen to it over much. The
masculine note is necessarily dominant in life; and the note that is
dominant in life should be dominant in literature, and, most of all, in
poetry.




MILTON AND DANTE: A COMPARISON AND A CONTRAST


No celebrations in our time have been more serious, more scholarly, or
more impressive, than the various gatherings, held during the year lately
come to end, in commemoration of the three hundredth anniversary of the
birth of Milton. The earliest was held, with peculiar appropriateness, at
Christ College, Cambridge, in the month of June. In the hall of the
college was given a dinner, presided over by the Master, who had gathered
round him men holding high positions alike at Cambridge and Oxford, and
poets, scholars, artists, historians, and essayists of true distinction.
On this occasion an admirable eulogium of Milton was pronounced by Mr.
Mackail. The dinner was succeeded by a representation of _Comus_ in the
theatre of the town, by the students of the University, with all the charm
that usually accompanies the efforts of competent amateurs. With the
advent of the exact date of the tercentenary the celebrations were many in
number and interesting in variety, in which the members of the British
Academy took a prominent part. On December 9 a musical celebration was
held in the afternoon in the church of St. Mary-le-Bow, at which the
Bishop of Ripon delivered an eloquent sermon; and at the same hour the
writer of this paper gave a private lecture before the Dante Society, from
the notes of which this article is expanded. In the evening he had the
honour of attending and responding to the toast of Poetry, proposed by the
Italian ambassador, at the banquet given by the Lord Mayor of London at
the Mansion House, to the largest and most impressive gathering of men of
eminence in letters, the arts, the drama, the law, and the Legislature,
that has ever met in that spacious hall of traditionally magnificent
hospitality. A week later a performance of _Samson Agonistes_ was given in
the Burlington Theatre before a large and representative audience. The
more serious section of the daily press, moreover, allotted much space to
reports of the celebrations in honour of Milton, the _Times_ maintaining
in this respect its best traditions.

No one, therefore, can say that the birth, the poetry and prose, the
character and the career and the influence of Milton have not been
solemnly celebrated by his countrymen. But it is necessary to add, in the
interests of truth, that the celebrations were essentially and exclusively
scholarly, and were hardly, if at all, shared in by the nation at large.
The intellectual sympathies of the educated were warmly touched, but the
heart of the British people was not reached.

Now let us turn--for the subject of this paper is not Milton alone, but
Milton and Dante--to the sexcentenary of the birth of Dante in the city of
Florence, the month and year of his birth having been May 1265. I had been
spending the winter in the City of Flowers, and I could not leave it, in
order to journey northward, till after the Dante Commemoration had been
held. I shall never forget it. From dawn to dusk the entire Florentine
people held joyous festival; and, with the coming of night, not only the
entire city, its palaces, its bridges, its Duomo, its Palazzo Vecchio,
that noblest symbol of civic liberty, but indeed all its thoroughfares and
the banks of its river broke into lovely light produced by millions of
little cressets filled with olive oil, and every villa round was similarly
illuminated. The pavement of the famous square of the Uffizi Palace was
boarded over; and overhead was spread a canvas covering dyed with the
three Italian national colours. Thither thronged hundreds of peasant men
and women, who danced and made merry till the early hours of the morning.
At the Pagliano Theatre were given _tableaux vivants_ representing the
most famous episodes in the _Divina Commedia_, Ristori, Salvini, and Rossi
reciting the corresponding passages from that immortal poem.

What a comparison, what a contrast it suggests between the solemn,
serious, but limited honour done by us to Milton, and the exultant,
universal, national honour paid by his countrymen to Dante! I should add
that eight thousand Italian municipalities sent a deputation carrying
their local pennons to the square of Santa Croce, where a statue of Dante
was unveiled, amid thunderous applause, to popular gaze.

Now let us turn to a more personal contrast between the two poets. To many
persons, probably to most in these days, the most interesting feature in
the life of a poet is his relation to the sex that is commonly assumed,
perhaps not quite correctly, to be the more romantic of the two. In
comparing Dante and Milton in that respect one is struck at once by the
fact that, while with Dante are not only associated, but inseparably
interwoven, the name and person of Beatrice, so that the two seem in our
minds but one, knit by a spiritual love stronger even than any bond
sanctioned by domestic law for happiness and social stability, Milton had
no Beatrice. It would be idle to contend that the absence of such love has
not detracted, and will not continue to detract, from the interest felt in
Milton and his poetry, not perhaps by scholars, but by the world at large,
and the average lover of poetry and poets. For just as women can do much,
to use a phrase of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, towards "making a poet out
of a man," so can they do even more, either by spiritual influence or by
consummate self-sacrifice, to widen the field and deepen the intensity of
his fame. No poet ever enjoyed this advantage so conspicuously as Dante.
It will perhaps be said that this was effected more by himself than by
her. Let us not be too sure of that. In Italy, far more than in northern
climes, first avowals of love are made by the eyes rather than by the
tongue, by tell-tale looks more than by explicit words. What says
Shakespeare, who knew men and women equally well?

  A murderous guilt shows not itself more soon
  Than love that would seem hid. Love's night is noon.

Dante's own account of his first meeting with Beatrice confirms this
surmise. This is what he himself says, after Beatrice, as Boccaccio
relates, "very winning, very graceful, in aspect very beautiful," had
turned her gaze on Dante from time to time at their first meeting. "At
that moment the spirit of life which abides in the most secret chamber of
the heart began to tremble, and tremulously it spake these words, 'Behold
a god stronger than I, who cometh to lord it over me.'" These may perhaps
seem strange words in which to record the first meeting of a boy of nine
with a girl of eight. But, over and above the fact that they are the
record, written several years later, of the feeling aroused by that first
meeting, allowance must be made for the proverbial precocity of genius,
and also for that of southern over northern temperaments. Its genuineness
is confirmed by the whole sequel, as testified by the _Vita Nuova_ and the
_Divina Commedia_; the presiding presence of Beatrice in both having long
before been anticipated by the words, "If it shall please Him, by whom all
things live, to spare my life for some years longer, I hope to say that of
her which never yet hath been said of any lady." How completely that hope
was attained is to be seen in the closing canto of the _Purgatorio_ and in
the whole of the _Paradiso_.

The life and poetry of Milton contain nothing (if exception be made of his
beautiful and lofty sonnet, written in the very spirit of the _Divina
Commedia_, on his second wife, "Methought I saw my late espoused Saint")
to compare with Dante's love, at once real and ideal, masculine yet
mystical, for Beatrice. The language used by Eve in addressing Adam, in
_Paradise Lost_--

  My author and disposer, what thou bidst
  Unargued I obey, so God ordains.
  God is thy law, thou mine--

and the very choice of a subject the dominating incident of which is
described by the well-known words, "The woman did give me, and I did eat,"
would almost seem to indicate that Milton's conception of woman, and his
attitude towards her, were such as can be attributed to no other poet. It
is the attitude of unqualified masculine domination. Again, in _Samson
Agonistes_ the very centre and pith of the poem is the incorrigible
frailty and inferiority of women--a thesis that would be extraordinary,
even if true, for a poet. Samson starts with a reproval of himself for
weakly revealing the secret of his strength to the persistent subtlety of
a woman, "that species monster, my accomplished snare," as he calls
Dalila, since "yoked her bond-slave by foul effeminacy"--a servitude he
stigmatises as "ignominious and infamous," whereby he is "shamed,
dishonoured, quelled." When Dalila, profoundly penitent for what she has
done, thereby incurring his displeasure, prostrates herself before him,
and sues for pardon, he spurns her from him with the words,

  Out, out, hyaena! these are thy wonted arts,

and goes on to say they are the arts of every woman, "to deceive, betray,"
and then to "feign remorse." With abject humility she confesses that
curiosity to learn all secrets, and then to publish them, are "common
female faults incident to all our sex." This only causes him to insult and
spurn her yet more fiercely; and he declares that God sent her to "debase
him"--one of those theological peculiarities which apparently made God an
accomplice with "this viper," for which the non-Calvinistic Christian
finds it difficult to account.

Nor can it be said that Milton is here, like Shakespeare, speaking only
dramatically and objectively. The Chorus in _Samson Agonistes_ is of his
opinion, declaring that the man is favoured of heaven who discovers "one
virtuous woman, rarely found"; and that is why

  God's universal law
  Gave to the man despotic power
  Over his female in due awe,
  Nor from that right to part, an hour,
  Smiles she or lour.

After delivering itself of these opinions, the Chorus suddenly exclaims,
"I see a storm," which, in the circumstances, is perhaps scarcely
wonderful.

What a different note is this from that struck by Dante, when he speaks of
"that blessed Beatrice, who now dwells in heaven with the angels, and on
earth in my heart, and with whom my soul is still in love." Far from
thinking that severe command on the part of the one and unquestioning
submission on the part of the other form the proper relation of lover and
maiden, husband and wife, Dante avers that

  Amor e cor gentil son' una cosa,

that love and a gracious gentle heart are one and the same thing; and in
the _Paradiso_, shortly before the close of the poem, he exclaims:

  O Beatrice! dolce guida e cara.

It may perhaps be thought that one might be more lenient towards Milton's
foibles, especially at such a time as the present, in contrasting his
attitude towards woman with that of Dante. But in Milton there was so much
that was noble, so pathetic, and even so attractive, that he can well
afford to have the truth told concerning him; and to omit his view of the
most important of all personal relations in life, as depicted for and
bequeathed to us in his poetry, would be to leave an obvious gap of the
utmost import in comparing and contrasting him with Dante.

But now let us ask, in order to redress the balance, what has Dante to
show, in kind, against _Il Penseroso_, _L'Allegro_, _Lycidas_, and
_Comus_? I put the prose works of both poets aside; and there remains on
the side of Dante only the self-same Dante from first to last, the Dante
of the _Vita Nuova_ and the _Divina Commedia_. Milton, as a poet, had, on
the contrary, a brilliant, an attractive, and a poetically productive
youth. If Dante ever was young in the same sense, he has left no trace of
it in his poetry. Save for Beatrice, there is an austerity even in the
most tender passages of his verse. He seems never to relax in his gravity,
I had almost said in his severity. His very love for Florence is
expressed, for the most part, in harsh upbraiding. An unrelenting awe
dominates his poetry. For Virgil he entertains a humble far-off reverence.
There is no poet of whom it can be so truly said that he remained
unchanged from first to last, and presents to us only one aspect
throughout his works. In reading the English poet one finds oneself in the
presence of two Miltons, not unlike each other in the splendid quality of
the verse, but profoundly differing in tone, temperament, and outlook on
life. In the author of _L'Allegro_, _Il Penseroso_, _Lycidas_, and
_Comus_ there is a youthful buoyancy, an all-pervading cheerful
seriousness worthy of one complacently but justly confident of his powers,
in no degree at war with the world, but on amicable terms with it, and
regarding life on the whole, and on its human side, as a thing to
sympathise with and enjoy. Hear the young Milton's invitation to vernal
exultation and joy:

  But come, thou goddess fair and free,
  In heaven yclept Euphrosyne,
  And, by men, heart-easing Mirth,
  Whom lovely Venus, at a birth,
  With two sister Graces more,
  To ivy-crowned Bacchus bore;
  Or whether (as some sages sing)
  The frolic wind that breathes the spring,
  Zephyr, with Aurora playing,
  As he met her once a-Maying;
  There, on beds of violets blue,
  And fresh-blown roses wash'd in dew,
  Fill'd her with thee, a daughter fair,
  So buxom, blithe, and debonnair.

What is there in Dante to compare with that? There is much by way of
contrast, but no note anywhere in his verse so generous, so exhilarating,
so thoroughly human. And this is how Milton, in the April of his days,
continues:

  Haste thee, nymph, and bring with thee
  Jest, and youthful jollity,
  Quips, and cranks, and wanton wiles,
  Nods, and becks, and wreathed smiles,
  Such as hang on Hebe's cheek,
  And love to live in dimple sleek;
  Sport that wrinkled Care derides,
  And Laughter holding both his sides.
  Come and trip it, as you go,
  On the light fantastic toe;
  And in thy right hand lead with thee
  The mountain nymph, sweet Liberty;
  And, if I give thee honour due,
  Mirth, admit me of thy crew,
  To live with her, and live with thee,
  In unreproved pleasures free.

And what, in the yet happy and in no degree morose Milton, are the
"unreproved pleasures"? They are:

  To hear the lark begin his flight,
  And, singing, startle the dull night,
  From his watch-tower in the skies,
  Till the dappled dawn doth rise;
  Then to come, in spite of sorrow,
  And at my window bid good-morrow,
  Through the sweet-briar, or the vine,
  Or the twisted eglantine;
  While the cock, with lively din,
  Scatters the rear of darkness thin,
  And to the stack, or the barn-door,
  Stoutly struts his dames before:
  Oft listening how the hounds and horn
  Cheerly rouse the slumbering morn,
  From the side of some hoar hill,
  Through the high wood echoing shrill.

Where is the stern Puritan Milton in these cheerful, generous verses?
Where the detester and active enemy of the Cavaliers in the lines that
follow, dwelling proudly on the

  Towers and battlements ...
  Bosom'd high in tufted trees,

the homes of the hereditary gentlemen of England? And think of the lines
"Then to the spicy nut-brown ale," down to "The first cock his matin
rings." They are almost Shakespearean in their sympathy with mirth and
laughter, their enjoyment of harmless practical jokes, their boundless
indulgence to human nature. And what is the conclusion of the poem?

  These delights if thou canst give,
  Mirth, with thee I mean to live.

There exists in no language a more lyrical outburst inspired by the
hey-day of life, and lavishly radiating rustic joy. They are as jocund as
a gipsy rondeau of Haydn, as gracious as the tapestries of Fragonard, as
tender as the Amorini of Albani, and as serenely cheerful as the matchless
melodies of Mozart. You may read every line, whether in verse or prose,
that Dante ever wrote, and you will come across no such spring-like note
as this. Frequently he is tearful, tender, pathetic, and paternally
compassionate, but nowhere does he express the faintest sympathy with
"Laughter holding both its sides."

Gradually, however, there stole over the younger Milton a great, a grave
change. His domestic experiences with his first wife could not have
ministered to his happiness or content; experiences partly caused by the
somewhat worldly ideals and desires of his spouse, but still more,
perhaps, by his theory that what the husband bids it is the duty of the
wife "unargued to obey."

Meanwhile the promptings of his muse slackening for a long interval--an
experience that has happened in the lives of other poets--he turned to
prose, and to the controversial side of prose. Being of a dogmatic
temperament, he quickly became involved in the acerbities of political,
theological, and ethical polemics. For a time he employed his
uncompromising pen on what seemed to be the winning side. But the aims of
the ruling party in the Commonwealth were not then, any more than they are
now, in harmony with the main character and ideals of the English people;
and Milton found himself not only in the camp of the vanquished, but
indicated by his previous actions as an object for Anglican and Royalist
retaliation. The buoyant elasticity of youth had subsided in him; even the
generous vigour of early manhood had vanished; and he found himself, in
advanced middle life, disappointed and disheartened. The natural austerity
of his character and principles deepened with his new situation and
changed outlook. He had fallen, as he thought, on evil days and evil
tongues; and, scandalised by the sensual levity of the King's Court and
favourites, he pondered with almost exultant and vindictive retrospect on
Adam and Eve's first disobedience and its fruits, and devoted his severe
genius and magnificent diction to justifying the ways of God to man.

The Milton of these later years was bowed down by many family vexations,
some of them due, no doubt, to his own exacting character and ideas. He
was baffled and beaten in the political field where he had been so doughty
a combatant, and for a time a triumphant one, and was finally deprived of
all hope of regaining his pristine position; and last, and saddest of all,
there fell on him total blindness, which, after his magnificent apostrophe
to _Holy Light, Offspring of Heaven first-born_, he touchingly laments in
the well-known but never too often to be recited passage in the third book
of _Paradise Lost_:

  I sung of Chaos and eternal Night,
  Taught by the heavenly muse to venture down
  The dark descent, and up to reascend,
  Though hard and rare: thee I revisit safe,
  And feel thy sovereign vital lamp; but thou
  Revisit'st not these eyes, that roll in vain
  To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn;
  So thick a drop serene hath quench'd their orbs,
  Or dim suffusion veil'd. Yet not the more
  Cease I to wander where the Muses haunt
  Clear spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill,
  Smit with the love of sacred song; but chief
  Thee, Sion, and the flowery brooks beneath,
  That wash thy hallow'd feet, and warbling flow,
  Nightly I visit; nor sometimes forget
  Those other two equall'd with me in fate,
  So were I equall'd with them in renown,
  Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides,
  And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old.
  Then feed on thoughts, that voluntary move
  Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful bird
  Sings darkling, and in shadiest covert hid
  Tunes her nocturnal note. Thus with the year
  Seasons return, but not to me returns
  Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
  Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,
  Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
  But cloud instead, and ever-during dark
  Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
  Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair
  Presented with a universal blank
  Of nature's works, to me expunged and rased,
  And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.
  So much the rather, thou celestial light,
  Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
  Irradiate; there plant eyes, all mist from thence
  Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
  Of things invisible to mortal sight.

Could there be poetry of the personal kind more free from reprehensible
egotism, more dignified, more majestic, and at the same time more pathetic
than that? Let us recur to it, and read it, when we are tempted to judge
Milton harshly for any less admirable, less lovable characteristics, from
which no mortal can be wholly free; and the verdict must be, "Everything
is forgiven him, because he suffered much, and expressed those sufferings
in his verse, the truest exponent of his deepest feelings, with
magnanimous and magnificent serenity." Nor let it ever be lost sight of
that, though in the political and theological domain he was anything but
free from fanaticism and bitter partisanship, he uniformly fought for
liberty of speech and printing--liberty, of all our possessions the most
precious, and for the safety and stability of the State the most
indispensable condition. To what extent, in the part Dante played in the
local politics of Florence, which led to his exile, he too was fighting
for liberty, in the sense in which I have just expressed it, it is not
possible for a dispassionate person to hold a confident opinion. In all
probability liberty, as we understand the word, was struggled for and
understood neither by him nor by those who drove him into exile. But, like
Milton, he bore his ostracism with manly dignity, consoling himself and
enriching posterity with a splendid poem, and only craving for safe
shelter and peace, as he said at the monastery gate: _Son' uno che implora
pace_.

In comparing Milton and Dante one might justly be reproached for an
obvious omission if one did not refer, however briefly, to the intense
love of both for music. Very recently Mr. W. H. Hadow, than whom no one
writes with more knowledge or sympathy of music, lectured before the Royal
Society of Literature on Milton's love and knowledge of it. Music, he
truly said, was Milton's most intimate of delights; and he referred to
what Johnson relates of the poet's constantly playing on the organ. In the
second canto of the _Purgatorio_ Dante recognises the musician Casella,
hails him as "Casella mio," and begs him who on earth had soothed Dante's
soul with music to do the same for him now. Casella obeys, and Dante says
it was done so sweetly that he can hear him still; words that recall
Wordsworth's lovely couplet:

  The music in my heart I bore
  Long after it was heard no more.

To my great surprise an eminent man of letters, who is also a poet, said
to me recently that the present writer was one of the few writers of verse
he knew who loved music, and who continually asked for music, more music,
adding that poets, as a rule, did not care for it. I was amazed, and cited
Shakespeare and Milton as a matter of course, and many a lesser poet,
against so untenable a thesis, concluding with the opening lines of
_Twelfth Night_:

  If music be the food of love, play on.
  Give me excess of it.

Surely music is not only the food of love, but of poetry as well; and do
not "music and sweet poetry agree"?

Another point of similarity between Milton and Dante is their total lack
of humour, so strange in two great poets, and one of them an Englishman.
Chaucer is continually on the edge of boisterous laughter. Spenser seems
constantly on the verge of a well-bred smile. Shakespeare, to use his own
language, asks to be allowed with mirth and laughter to play the fool,
though the most gravely thoughtful and awfully tragic of all poets. The
author of _Childe Harold_ is likewise the author of _The Vision of
Judgment_ and _Don Juan_. Scott is one of the greatest of British
humorists. But on the face of neither Dante nor Milton do we find the
trace of a smile either coming or gone.

The Rev. Lonsdale Ragg, in his searching and erudite work, _Dante and his
Italy_, maintains the opposite view at p. 190 _sqq._ But I, at least, find
him on this head unconvincing. None of the passages in Dante to which he
refers would satisfy the definition of humour as employed by Sterne,
Steele, Addison, or Charles Lamb, and cited by Thackeray in his delightful
papers on _The English Humorists_. Dante is scornful, satirical,
merciless; humorous he never is. Nor is Milton. They meet on the common
ground of uncompromising seriousness.

Another parallel I will presume to draw between Dante and Milton is one of
supreme importance; but I can do so only briefly. No man, in my humble
opinion, has the full requisites of a poet of the highest order unless at
some period or another of his life he has been associated by practice and
direct experience with other men in matters of public interest. Milton and
Dante alike had that experience. So had Chaucer, so had Spenser, so had
Shakespeare, so had Byron. They were men of the world, and did not, as
Matthew Arnold said of Wordsworth, "avert their gaze from half of human
fate." I am aware that the opposite view is assumed in much criticism
to-day; and the highest rank is claimed for poetic recluses who write only
of individual joys, sorrows, and emotions, their own mostly, and manifest
a complete want of concern in the wide issues of mankind. That was not a
standard of criticism till our own time; nor will it, I believe, be the
standard of future ages. Dante and Milton both satisfy the older standard,
the older and the more abiding one.

No comparison of Dante with Milton would be complete that omitted
consideration of the respective themes of their chief works, their two
great epic poems, the _Divina Commedia_ and _Paradise Lost_. I am disposed
to think, though others may think differently, that Dante has in this
respect a signal advantage over Milton. If any one is curious to see how a
man of great parts, but in some respects of rather insular views, can fail
to understand the theme of the _Divina Commedia_, and Dante's treatment of
it, he has only to turn, as Mr. Courthope did in his address to the
British Academy, to Macaulay's essay on Milton, where Dante is written of
as though he were nothing but a great Realist. Many years ago I suggested
as a definition of poetry, and have more than once urged the suggestion,
that it is "the harmonious transfiguration of the Real into the Ideal by
the aid of elevating imagination," so that, when the poet has performed
that operation, his readers accept the ideal representation as real, that
surest test of the greatness of a poet, provided his theme itself be
great. The _Divina Commedia_ stands that test triumphantly; and the result
is that Dante makes credible, even to non-believers while they read the
poem, the central conception and beliefs of medieval Christianity, which
are still those of Roman Catholic Christianity. Hence they remain real
facts for the transfiguring idealism of poets to deal with.

Can the same be said of _Paradise Lost_? What is "real" does not depend on
the arbitrary choice of any one, but on the _communis sensus_, the general
assent of those to whom the treatment of the assumed "real" is addressed.
Is that any longer so in the case of _Paradise Lost_? Are the personality
of the devil, the insurrection of Lucifer and the rebel angels, and their
condemnation to eternal punishment, with power to tempt mortals to do that
which will lead to their sharing that punishment, now believed in by any
large number of Christian Englishmen or English-speaking Christians, or is
it ever likely again to be so believed in? I must leave the question to be
answered by every one for himself. But on the answer to it, it is obvious,
the realistic basis of _Paradise Lost_ depends. If the reply be negative,
then what remains is the magnificence of the imagery and the sonority of
the diction. To extol the one over the other in these respects would
indeed be invidious. It is enough to place them side by side to manifest
their equality. If Milton writes:

                  Him the Almighty Power
  Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky
  With hideous ruin and combustion down
  To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
  In adamantine chains and penal fire,
  Who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms;

Dante writes:

  Diverse lingue, orribili favelle,
  Parole di dolore, accenti d'ira,
  Voci alte e fioche, e suon di man con elle,
  Facevan un tumulto, il qual s'aggira
  Sempre in quell' aria senza tempo tinta,
  Come l'arena quando il turbo spira.

Withal, it would show imperfect impartiality if one failed to allow that
there is more variety in the _Divina Commedia_ than in _Paradise Lost_.
Milton never halts in his majestic journey to soothe us with such an
episode as that of Paolo Malatesta and Francesca da Rimini, or closes it
with so celestial a strain as that describing the interview of Dante with
Beatrice in Heaven.

No third poet in any nation or tongue could be named that equals Dante and
Milton in erudition, or in the use they made of it in their poetry. The
present writer is himself too lacking in erudition to presume to expatiate
on that theme. Others have done it admirably, and with due competency. But
on this ground, common to them both, I reluctantly part with them. To each
alike may be assigned the words of Ovid, _Os sublime dedit_, and equally
it may be said of both, that, in the splendid phrase of Lucretius, they
passed beyond the _flammantia moenia mundi_. Finally, each could truly
say of himself, in the words of Dante,

  Minerva spira e conducemi Apollo.

"The Goddess of Wisdom inspires me, and the God of Song is my conductor
and my guide."




BYRON AND WORDSWORTH


The present age can hardly be reproached either with an absence of
admirers or with a lack of self-complacency. Even its most fervid
flatterers, however, ever and anon admit that it exhibits a few trifling
defects; and among these is sometimes named a diminution of popular
interest in poetic literature. Some have attributed this decline to one
cause, some to another; but the fact can hardly be disputed. The Heavenly
Muse is suffering a partial eclipse. The gross and material substance of
the earth has somehow got between her and the Soul, that source and centre
of her gentle light; and some enthusiasts aver that with the progress of
Science and the production at will of its precise and steadfast lights,
fitful luminaries of night may henceforth be dispensed with. But spiritual
eclipses, though not to be predicted with the accuracy with which physical
eclipses are foretold, and though unfortunately they endure for longer
periods, are equally transitory; and the nineteenth century was scarcely
original, nor will its successor prove to be correct, in fancying that the
garish and obedient flame of material philosophy will prove a satisfactory
substitute for the precious, if precarious illumination of the Spirit.

Among the causes that have contributed to divert popular affection and
popular sympathy from poetical literature, there are three that deserve to
be specially indicated. The first of these is the multiplication of prose
romances, which, though so much lower in literary value and in artistic
character than poetry, and so much less elevating in their tendency, are
better fitted to stimulate the vulgar imagination, and minister more
freely to the common craving for excitement. The second cause is the
reaction that has settled upon mankind from the fervid hopes inspired by
the propagation of those theories and the propounding of those promises
which the historian associates with the French Revolution. All saner minds
have long since discovered that happiness is to be procured neither for
the individual nor for the community by mere political changes; and the
discovery has been distinctly hostile to literary enthusiasm. Finally,
many poets, and nearly all the critics of poetry, in our time, seem
determined to alienate ordinary human beings from contact with the Muse.
The world is easily persuaded that it is an ignoramus; and the vast
majority of people, after being told, year after year, that what they do
not understand is poetry, and what they do not care one straw about is the
proper theme and the highest expression of song, end by concluding that
poetry has become a mystery beyond their intelligence, a sort of
freemasonry from whose symbols they are jealously excluded. Unable to
appreciate what the critics tell them are the noblest productions of
genius, they modestly infer that between genius and themselves there is no
method of communication; and incapable of reading with pleasure the poetry
they are assured ought to fill them with rapture, they desist from reading
poetry altogether. They have not the self-confidence to choose their own
poets and select their own poetry; and indeed in these days, the only
chance any writer has of being read is that he should first be greatly
talked about. Thus, what between the poets who are talked about by
so-called experts, and thus made notorious, but whom ordinary folks find
unreadable, and the poets, if there be any such, whom ordinary folks would
read with pleasure if they knew of their existence, but of whom they have
scarcely heard, poetry has become "caviare to the general," who content
themselves with the coarser flavour of the novel, and the more easily
digested pabulum of the newspaper.

But if poetry is now comparatively little read, no one can deny that it is
much written about; and many persons would perhaps see in the second of
these facts a reason for doubting the reality of the first. But the
contradiction is only apparent. Poetry is the subject at present of much
prose criticism, prose exposition, and prose controversy; but the
controversialists are largely the poets themselves, or those who aspire to
the title. The subject is treated by them with much earnestness, indeed
with some little heat; and it is easy to perceive that the main object of
most of the disputants is to establish the superiority of the poet whom
the critic himself most admires, and possibly whom he himself most
resembles. The controversy rages around those poets alone who are claimed
by the nineteenth century, and practically, these are five in number;
Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth. Each of these has his
votaries, his disciples, his passionate advocates. The public look on, a
little bewildered; for who is to decide when doctors disagree? Few, if
any, of the disputants lay down explicit canons respecting poetry, which
may enable a competent bystander to play the part of umpire even to his
own satisfaction; and he is left, like the controversialists themselves,
to abide by his own personal tastes, and to estimate poets and poetry
according to his individual fancy.

It was therefore with no slight satisfaction one heard that one of our
poets, who is likewise a critic, but who brings to his criticisms
moderation of language and measure of statement, was about to appraise the
English poets who have written in this century, but who have for many
years joined the Immortals. To Mr. Matthew Arnold, if to any one amongst
us, may be applied the passage from Wordsworth, to be found in the
"Supplementary Essay" published in 1815:

     Whither then shall we turn for that union of qualifications which
     must necessarily exist before the decisions of a critic can be of
     absolute value? For a mind at once poetical and philosophical; for a
     critic whose affections are as free and kindly as the spirit of
     society, and whose understanding is severe as that of dispassionate
     government? Where are we to look for that initiatory composure of
     mind which no selfishness can disturb; for a natural sensibility that
     has been tutored into correctness, without losing anything of its
     quickness; and for active faculties, capable of answering the demands
     which an author of original imagination shall make upon them,
     associated with a judgment that cannot be duped into admiration by
     aught that is unworthy of it? Among those, and those only, who, never
     having suffered their youthful love of poetry to remit much of its
     force, have applied to the consideration of the laws of this art the
     best power of their understandings.

To Mr. Arnold, if to any, we say, this enumeration of the qualities
indispensable to a trustworthy critic of poetry, may be applied; and if
the conclusions at which he bids us to arrive should not turn out to be
such as we can wholly accept, at least we shall have the satisfaction of
feeling that we dissent from one who has not invited our attention in
vain, and who perhaps, by the avowals he incidentally makes in the course
of his argument, has enabled us to hold with all the more confidence
certain opinions which we will endeavour to establish by independent
reasons of our own.

Here, with sufficient brevity for the present, is the conclusion of Mr.
Arnold on the vexed question of the primacy among English poets, no longer
living, of the last century:

     I place Wordsworth's poetry above Byron's, on the whole, although in
     some points he was greatly Byron's inferior. But these two,
     Wordsworth and Byron, stand, it seems to me, first and pre-eminent in
     actual performance, a glorious pair, among the English poets of this
     century. Keats had probably, indeed, a more consummate poetic gift
     than either of them; but he died having produced too little and being
     as yet too immature to rival them. I for my part can never ever think
     of equalling with them any other of their contemporaries; either
     Coleridge, poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium; or
     Shelley, beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his
     luminous wings in vain. Wordsworth and Byron stand out by themselves.
     When the year 1900 is turned, and our nation comes to recount her
     poetic glories in the century which has just then ended, the first
     names with her will be these.

We do not propose to traverse the entire field of controversy here lightly
indicated; our purpose being to confine ourselves to a consideration of
Mr. Arnold's particular conclusion, that Wordsworth's poetry should be
placed above Byron's. But before passing to that duty, we may say,
parenthetically, that though we agree with Mr. Arnold that Shelley's
poetry often exhibits a lamentable "want of sound subject-matter," the
claims of the "beautiful and ineffectual angel" are here somewhat
summarily dismissed; and that when Mr. Arnold says further that he "doubts
whether Shelley's delightful Essays and Letters, which deserve to be far
more read than they are now, will not resist the wear and tear of time
better, and finally come to stand higher than his poetry," he makes us
lift our eyes in sheer amazement, and somewhat more than doubt whether
this will not prove to be among the utterly falsified prophecies of very
able critics.

Holding the opinion he does concerning Wordsworth and Byron, Mr. Arnold
has published a selection from the works of both, in distinct and separate
volumes, and he believes that he has thereby rendered an equal service to
each. "Alone," he writes, "among our poets of the earlier part of this
century, Byron and Wordsworth not only furnish material enough for a
volume of this kind, but also, it seems to me, they both of them gain
considerably by being thus exhibited." We, on the contrary, submit that if
the comparison is to end here, and is to be confined to the results
produced by Mr. Arnold's method, a more unjust and inadequate method, as
far as Byron is concerned, could not possibly be resorted to. Wordsworth
gains considerably, but Byron loses considerably, to employ Mr. Arnold's
language, by being thus exhibited. No doubt, Mr. Arnold means to be just.
He always means to be just. But in the very description he gives of the
contents of these two volumes on their respective title-pages, does he not
betray a sort of unconscious consciousness that he is dealing with two
very different poets, and with two poets whose works are very different?
If this be not so, how comes it that he calls one volume _"Poems" of
Wordsworth_, and the other _"Poetry" of Byron_? The distinction is a
genuine one. Indeed, it is something more than genuine; it was inevitable,
and Mr. Arnold was obliged to make it, if the title of each volume was to
describe its contents correctly. The best poems of Wordsworth are short,
most of them remarkably short; and therefore, in a volume of selections
from his works, they can without difficulty be presented in their
integrity. The best poems of Byron, like the best poems of AEschylus, of
Virgil, of Dante, of Shakespeare, of Milton, are of considerable length;
and if selections from Byron are to be made, his best poems must be
mutilated for the purpose. Mr. Arnold has mutilated them accordingly.
Thus, while intending to treat Wordsworth and Byron in precisely the same
manner, he has treated them, and by the very conditions of the case could
not help treating them, in an entirely different manner.

That Mr. Arnold has not been altogether insensible to this objection--and,
indeed, with his calm and dispassionate penetration, he was not likely to
be--is apparent not only in the different description he gives of the
contents of the two volumes, on their respective title-pages, but from
certain observations in his prefatory essay upon Byron. When he says that
"there are portions of Byron's poetry which are far higher in worth, and
far more free from fault than others," or that "Byron cannot but be a
gainer by having attention concentrated upon what is vivid, powerful,
effective, in his work, and withdrawn from what is not so," he is, we
would suggest, stating nothing more than a truism, or what is equally true
of every poet. He is only beating the air, and hesitating to close with
the real difficulty with which he feels himself confronted. But when he
proceeds to urge that "Byron has not a great artist's profound and patient
skill in combining an action or in developing a character,--a skill which
we must watch and follow if we are to do justice to it," he shows that he
feels it to be necessary to offer a defence for applying to Byron a
treatment from which Byron may possibly suffer. We confess, with all our
admiration for Mr. Arnold--and it is as deep as it is sincere--we have
never been able to resist the suspicion that he is _tant soit peu_ a
sophist; and surely it is sophistry, in the course of an attempt to show
that Byron and Wordsworth each equally gain by the "selection" method of
treatment, to urge, with that air of tranquil and well-bred triumph of
which Mr. Arnold is so consummate a master, that "to take passages from
work produced as Byron's was, is a very different thing from taking
passages out of the _Oedipus_ or the _Tempest_ and deprives the poetry
far less of its advantage"? For the question is not whether Sophocles,
Shakespeare, and Byron may be treated ostensibly in the same manner by an
editor of selections, without injustice being done to any of them, but
whether Wordsworth and Byron can. That is the question; and it is not
answered, but avoided, by altering the terms of the proposition.

What, therefore, really remains of this plea of Mr. Arnold's, this excuse
for mutilating Byron's poems and presenting them in fragments, is the
allegation that Byron is not, _above and before all things_, a great,
patient, and systematic artist. That much may be granted; and no competent
critic would deny it. But more cannot be granted than is strictly true;
and candour equally demands that it should be admitted that though Byron
was not long-suffering and far-reaching enough in the conception of his
poems, nor careful and self-critical enough in their execution, he
possessed at least enough of the instinct and the scope of the artist to
produce works that cohere with themselves, and that have a unity of design
sufficiently definite to mark it as something distinct from the mere
succession of executed detail. Will Mr. Arnold seriously pretend that a
more "vivid, powerful, and effective" impression is not created upon the
mind by a perusal of the whole of _Manfred_, than by a perusal of portions
of it, or of one or two dissociated Acts? Mr. Arnold turns Byron's own
modest confessions against himself, and lays stress upon the avowal that
the _Giaour_ is "a string of passages." But if any one were, after due
reflection, to maintain, that more justice is done to Byron by reading
some of its passages than by reading the whole of the poem, we confess we
should be obliged to entertain some doubt as to his own instincts as an
artist. For, where men like Byron are concerned, it is peculiarly true
that the divinity of the Muse shapes their ends, rough-hew these how they
may. Of every one of Byron's tales--the _Siege of Corinth_, _The Bride of
Abydos_, _Parisina_--this is equally true. It has more than once been
observed that _Childe Harold_ suffers from the fact that a period of eight
years elapsed between the composition of the first and second cantos, and
the composition of the third and fourth; and as far as style is concerned,
the contrast is very striking, two of the cantos being for the most part
almost as feeble, and two of them as forcible, as anything deserving the
name of poetry well can be. Nevertheless, there would be no difficulty in
showing, and we think no reader of poetry endowed with a fair amount of
artistic sense would require to be shown, that a certain oneness of
purpose and unity of drift presides over and accompanies the entire poem,
in a word that it is substantially homogeneous; and if any one, after
reading through the third and fourth cantos at a stretch, as we recently
did, were to tell us that he thought a few extracts from each give an
adequate conception of the two, and that reading portions is in effect
equivalent to reading the whole, we should have reached that limit of
controversy which is expressed by a silence that is not assent. It is true
that Mr. Arnold has been fairly lavish in his extracts from _Childe
Harold_; yet out of the 300 stanzas which compose the third and fourth
cantos, his selection contains only 114, or little more than a third. But
it is not only by the curtailment of the quantity, but by the treatment
applied to what is selected, that injury is done to _Childe Harold_. The
passages quoted are scattered at intervals through the volume, so that all
consecutiveness and coherence are lost. The majestic march of the poem is
utterly broken. The subtle argument that lurks in the order of every
poem--whether it be the _lucidus ordo_ of a speech, or an order less
obvious and patent--is completely destroyed. The strain neither begins nor
ends, neither rises nor falls, neither pauses nor progresses. The statue
is shivered to pieces, and we are offered a collection of chips, mixed up
with fragments from other marbles that have been treated with equal
ruthlessness. Here there is a hand, here a portion of a foot, here a
section of the features, here a bit of the torso. They still are
magnificent, and full of suggestiveness. But are they equal and equivalent
to the entire statue? Are they as good as the whole of the original work?
With surprising paradox Mr. Arnold assures us they are considerably
better.

This singular conclusion is attained, it seems to us, by the excessive
assertion, or at least by the exaggerated application, of a theory in
which there is, unquestionably, a solid element of truth. We have said
that Byron is not an austere and consistent artist. But that is not to
affirm that he is not an artist at all; whereas, in thus treating his
productions fragmentarily, Mr. Arnold acts as though such an assertion
were true. Byron, says Mr. Arnold, is not "architectural." But is he not?
There is architecture, and architecture; the severe and systematic
architecture of the Greeks, and the more free, irregular, unmethodical
architecture which we know as Gothic. In the conception, and what in
technical parlance is called the composition, of his works, Byron is
assuredly no Greek. The exquisite oneness of design characteristic of
Athenian genius he certainly did not borrow from the land and the race no
one has so splendidly extolled. But if we turn to some of the noblest
productions of Gothic architecture, what do we find? We find Cathedrals of
unquestioned beauty and of universal fame, produced, it would
superficially seem, almost haphazard; without design, without plan, even
without architect. In our own land we may see Minsters that, begun in the
eleventh, were not finished till the fifteenth century. Like _Childe
Harold_, they bear the evident marks of different ages, and of different
styles; and like _Don Juan_, they show that they were commenced without
their parent knowing where or how they were to end. Nay, like it again,
some of them remain unfinished to this day. But will any one affirm that
their integrity, as they stand, is nothing to them, and nothing to us?
Because no great master-conception presided over their origin and their
execution, will no injury be done to them by taking them to pieces, and
saying, "Here is a lovely apse; here you see a beautiful flying buttress;
here contemplate an exquisite rood-screen; here you have an admirable bit
of the choir, and there a glorious specimen of the roof"?

Nor can it be urged that this illustration does violence to the process
Mr. Arnold has adopted. On the contrary, the analogy is not strong enough;
for _Manfred_, _The Corsair_, _Cain_, _Childe Harold_ itself, were
conceived and executed, not less, but far more homogeneously, than the
edifices with which we have compared them, and if it would be unjust and
inadequate to treat Gothic cathedrals after this fashion, it is still more
unjust and inadequate to treat Byron's poems after this fashion. More
glaring still becomes the injustice, and more utter the inadequacy, when
we remember in whose company he is so treated. Mr. Arnold does not break
Wordsworth's poems to pieces and present us with the fragments; for there
is no necessity to do so. The long ones Mr. Arnold cheerfully throws over,
confessing that _The Excursion_ "can never be a satisfactory work to the
disinterested lover of poetry," and even that Jeffrey was not wrong when
he said of it, "This will never do." To adhere to our metaphor, it is a
large comfortless Meeting-house; and so is the _Recluse_. The best of
Wordsworth's poems, as we have said, and as Mr. Arnold says, are his short
ones. There are charming English cottages, or, if it be preferred--for we
have no intention of decrying them, we admire them vastly--exquisite
little wayside chapels; and they fit conveniently into the space, without
being tampered with, which Mr. Arnold has provided for them. But the best
of Byron's poems are the long ones; are vast Gothic edifices that soar
high into the air and cover a vast amount of ground, and therefore cannot
be compressed into the same compass. We have seen how Mr. Arnold gets over
the difficulty. He pulls them down, places bits and sections of them side
by side with the untouched cottages and still complete oratories of
Wordsworth, and asks us to compare the two. We are far from saying that,
even under these conditions, the comparison ends to Byron's disadvantage.
But it surely must be evident to every one that the conditions are not
equal, and therefore, however fair were the intentions of the editor, that
they are not really just. We should be sorry if any one supposed we
consider Mr. Swinburne as sound a critic as Mr. Arnold. But, upon this
particular question, Mr. Swinburne has propounded a conclusion against
which, we submit, Mr. Arnold contends in vain. "The greatest of Byron's
works was his whole work taken together." Nothing could be more terse or
more true; and if Mr. Swinburne would be content always to form his
judgments thus calmly and comprehensively, and to express them with this
brevity and directness, he would soon come to exercise an authority which
is at present refused by many to his literary verdicts.

But though, if the comparison instituted between Byron and Wordsworth by
Mr. Arnold were to be confined within the conditions he has imposed on
both alike, great injustice would be done to Byron, it may well be doubted
if the plan adopted by Mr. Arnold will really tend to Byron's
disadvantage. On the contrary we suspect that, with the best will in the
world to do all he can for Wordsworth, Mr. Arnold has done him rather an
ill turn. For the whole, or anything approaching to the whole, of the best
of Byron, is not to be found in the volume of selections edited by Mr.
Arnold; and everybody will feel that Byron is a far greater poet than he
could possibly be made to appear by any such method. But all the best
poetry of Wordsworth is in the volume Mr. Arnold dedicates to him; and we
entertain little doubt that there is no dispassionate critic who would not
be obliged to allow that a considerable portion, indeed we fear the
greater portion of it, is not poetry at all. The process Mr. Arnold has
applied to Wordsworth, will have to be applied over again, and with
greater rigour. He has rejected as "not satisfactory work to the
disinterested lover of poetry," an immense quantity of what Wordsworth
conceived to be such. Another editor will have to reject a considerable
proportion of what Mr. Arnold has too indulgently included. His selection
will have to be selected from afresh; and thus, with doubtful
friendliness, he has pointed and prepared the way for some entirely
dispassionate critic who will leave of Wordsworth only what, to "the
disinterested lover of poetry," is worth leaving; and this unfortunately,
though of a high and delightful quality, will prove to be comparatively
little. In a word, to do Byron anything like justice, we require several
volumes of the size of that Mr. Arnold devotes to him; we require, in
fact, most of what he wrote. To do Wordsworth justice, we require a volume
less than half the size of what Mr. Arnold gives us; we require, in fact,
to suppress at least three-fourths of what he wrote.

But, again, we can raise no question, and propound no conclusion which Mr.
Arnold, with his penetrating sense and acute susceptibility, has not
himself more or less discerned. After observing, "we must be on our guard
against Wordsworthians," he thus writes, in a vein of delicate humour:

     I have spoken lightly of Wordsworthians: and if we are to get
     Wordsworth recognised by the public and by the world, we must
     recommend him not in the spirit of a clique, but in the spirit of
     disinterested lovers of poetry. But I am a Wordsworthian myself. I
     can read with pleasure and edification _Peter Bell_, and the whole
     series of _Ecclesiastical Sonnets_, and the addresses to Mr.
     Wilkinson's spade, and even the _Thanksgiving Ode_; everything of
     Wordsworth, I think, except _Vaudracour and Julia_. It is not for
     nothing that one has been brought up in the veneration of a man so
     truly worthy of homage; that one has seen and heard him, lived in his
     neighbourhood, and been familiar with his country.

Alas! even the best of us are mortal; and we accept this graceful passage
as Mr. Arnold's confession that he, too, is a Wordsworthian against whom
we must be on our guard. An extremist of a school he could not now be; but
"it is not for nothing," as he says, that he was trained in it. "Once a
priest," says an Italian proverb, "always a priest"; and, we fear, once a
Wordsworthian, always a Wordsworthian. It is no reproach; but "we must be
on our guard." For our part, we are tolerably familiar with Wordsworth's
country, but, beyond that, we are under no such spell as Mr. Arnold
confesses to above. We entertain profound veneration and homage for
Wordsworth, but it is the result, not so much of early teaching--the most
difficult of all lessons to unlearn--as of independent admiration and
sympathy inspired in riper years. We, too, can read _Peter Bell_ and the
_Ecclesiastical Sonnets_, but with more edification than pleasure; and we
have read, afresh, every word of what Mr. Arnold has included in his
_Poems of Wordsworth_, only to reach the conclusion we have already
stated, that from many, only too many of them, the spirit, the essence,
the indefinable something, of poetry is absent.

We should be sorry to be thought guilty of dogmatism, and there is always
peril in generalisations. Let us therefore descend to particulars, as far
as space will permit, and analyse the contents of Mr. Arnold's _Poems of
Wordsworth_. The volume consists of 317 pages; of which 20 are dedicated
to "Poems of Ballad Form," 92 to "Narrative Poems," 56 to "Lyrical Poems,"
34 to "Poems akin to the Antique and Odes," 32 to "Sonnets," and 83 to
"Reflective and Elegiac Poems."

In the first division, _We are Seven_, _Lucy Gray_, and _The Reverie of
Poor Susan_, are the only poems that can be pronounced wholly
satisfactory, and that give real pleasure. _Anecdote for Fathers_ and
_Alice Fell_ would be just as well away, for they would raise the
reputation of no poet, save it be with those against whom "we must be on
our guard." The poems, _The Childless Father_, _Power of Music_, and
_Star-Gazers_, are redeemed only by their moral; and perhaps of _Power of
Music_, even this cannot be said.

  An Orpheus! an Orpheus!--yes, Faith may grow bold,
  And take to herself all the wonders of old;--
  Near the stately Pantheon you'll meet with the same
  In the street that from Oxford hath borrowed its name.

  His station is there;--and he works on the crowd,
  He sways them with harmony merry and loud;
  He fills with his power all their hearts to the brim--
  Was aught ever heard like his Fiddle and him?

  What an eager assembly! what an empire is this!
  The weary have life, and the hungry have bliss;
  The mourner is cheered, and the anxious have rest;
  And the guilt-burthened soul is no longer opprest.

Then follow eight stanzas, in which the baker, the apprentice, the
newsman, the lamplighter, the porter, the lass with her barrow, the
cripple, the mother, and others, are described as stopping to listen, in
language similar to that of the three stanzas we have quoted; the only
slight improvement upon it being such lines as "She sees the Musician,
'tis all that she sees," until we reach the conclusion:

  Now, coaches and chariots! roar on like a stream;
  Here are twenty souls happy as souls in a dream:
  They are deaf to your murmurs, they care not for you,
  Nor what ye are flying, nor what ye pursue.

The more ardent admirers of Wordsworth are in the habit of assuming that
those persons who approach their favourite poet with a more hesitating
homage, fail to appreciate the beauty of simplicity, and fancy that a
composition is not poetical because it lacks what is called elevation of
language and the "grand style." We can assure them, in all sincerity, that
far from that being the basis of our inability to admire all that they
admire, we admire Wordsworth most, and we admire him immensely, when he is
as simple as it is possible to be. We have just cited a poem, which we
scarcely think deserves that name. But, side by side with it, in Mr.
Arnold's volume, is a much shorter composition, on precisely the same
theme, which is, if possible, still more simple in treatment, but which is
true poetry, if true poetry was ever written. It is called _The Reverie of
Poor Susan_:

  At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears,
  Hangs a thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years:
  Poor Susan has passed by the spot, and has heard
  In the silence of morning the song of the Bird.

  'Tis a note of enchantment; what ails her? She sees
  A mountain ascending, a vision of trees;
  Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide,
  And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.

  Green pastures she views in the midst of the dale,
  Down which she so often has tripped with her pail;
  And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove's,
  The one only dwelling on earth that she loves.

  She looks, and her heart is in heaven; but they fade,
  The mist and the river, the hill and the shade:
  The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise,
  And the colours have all passed away from her eyes.

After reading _The Reverie of Poor Susan_, we may pay Wordsworth's Muse
the compliment that was paid by the Latin poet to the woman who was
_simplex munditiis_. Its neat simplicity is in great measure the secret of
its success; but it is not mean in its simplicity. Neither, as in the
other poems we have contrasted with it, have we to wait till the end of
the poem for the moral and the meaning. The moral is interwoven and
interfused with it, and every line breathes the soul and essence of the
entire composition. But nearly all these "Poems of Ballad Form" are
didactic; and does not Mr. Arnold tell us, in his preface, "Some kinds of
poetry are in themselves lower kinds than others; the ballad kind is a
lower kind; the didactic kind, still more, is a lower kind"? Of the twenty
pages of these poems of lower kind, we are strongly disposed to think that
the "disinterested lover of poetry" would discard twelve, and retain only
eight, and that Wordsworth, to use Mr. Arnold's phrase, would "stand
higher" if this were done.

But even this proportion between retention and rejection cannot well be
maintained by the disinterested lover of poetry as he advances through the
volume. The "Narrative Poems" occupy nearly a third of it, and in this
section the amount of real poetry is meagre indeed. We had no conception
how many short poems Wordsworth had written, unredeemed by "the gleam, the
light that never was, on sea or land," till we read this collection
consecutively; and we read it in the open air, in a beautiful country, on
the loveliest day of a lovely May. But nothing could possibly attune the
heart of the disinterested lover of poetry to such verses as these:

  When Ruth was left half desolate,
  Her father took another mate;
  And Ruth, not seven years old,
  A slighted child, at her own will
  Went wandering over dale and hill,
  In thoughtless freedom, bold.

  There came a Youth from Georgia's shore--
  A military casque he wore,
  With splendid feathers drest;
  He brought them from the Cherokees;
  The feathers nodded in the breeze,
  And made a gallant crest.

  "Beloved Ruth!" No more he said.
  The wakeful Ruth at midnight shed
  A solitary tear:
  She thought again--and did agree
  With him to sail across the sea,
  And drive the flying deer.

  "And now, as fitting is and right,
  We in the Church our faith will plight,
  A husband and a wife."
  Even so they did; and I may say
  That to sweet Ruth that happy day
  Was more than human life.

Not only is it impossible, we think, for the disinterested lover of poetry
to read this either with pleasure or with edification, but it is not easy
for him to read it without an ever-broadening smile. As a rule, the verse
to be met with in our less fastidious Magazines is not of a very high
order. But we doubt if the editor of any one of them would consent to
insert the foregoing stanzas, or those that follow, with their, "But as
you have before been told," "Meanwhile, as thus with him it fared, They
for the voyage were prepared," "God help thee, Ruth! Such pains she had,
That she in half a year was mad," and such like specimens of unartistic
and naive childishness. Surely, if there be any one who thinks this
poetry, it must be Mr. Arnold's friend, the British Philistine? If
Murdstone and Quinion could be converted and ever took to reading poetry,
would not this be the sort of verse that would delight them? And would
they not do so by reason of that "stunted sense of beauty," and that
"defective type" of intellect with which Mr. Arnold justly reproaches the
English middle-class?

Did these poems stand alone, in their prosaic puerility, we might be
surprised that Mr. Arnold had reproduced them; but we should have been
content to conclude that, like Homer, both poet and editor had been
nodding. But we turn page after page of these "Narrative Poems" to be
astonished by what we encounter. The next poem to _Ruth_ is _Simon Lee:
The Old Huntsman, with an Incident in which he was Concerned_:

  Few months of life has he in store,
  As he to you will tell,
  For still, the more he works, the more
  Do his weak ankles swell.
  My gentle Reader, I perceive
  How patiently you've waited,
  And now I fear that you'll expect
  Some tale will be related.

  O Reader! had you in your mind
  Such stores as silent thought can bring,
  O gentle Reader! you would find
  A tale in everything.
  What more I have to say is short,
  And you must kindly take it:
  It is no tale; but, should you _think_,
  Perhaps a tale you'll make it.

Simon is grubbing the stump of a tree, but was unequal to the task. The
poet takes the mattock from his hand, and with a blow severs the root, "At
which the poor Old Man so long, And vainly had endeavoured." Thankful
tears come into his eyes, whereupon the poet remarks:

  I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds
  With coldness still returning;
  Alas! the gratitude of men
  Hath oftener left me mourning.

The sentiment is nice and pretty, but is it poetry, or, even if it were,
could it make poetry of the doggerel--for surely there really is no other
name for it--that precedes it? And do Wordsworthians against whom Mr.
Arnold tells us we ought to be on our guard, or Wordsworthians who fancy
that we need not be on our guard against _them_, suppose that moralising
correctly and piously in verse about every "incident" in which somebody
happens to be "concerned," renders the narrative a "tale,"--much more,
makes poetry of it? We are far from saying that Wordsworth might not, in a
happier mood, have written poetry upon this particular incident. But we do
say, with some confidence, that he has unfortunately not done so; that the
incident, narrated in the manner in which he has narrated it, cannot of
itself be accepted as poetry--which, as Mr. Arnold well knows, is the
extreme Wordsworthian theory, as advocated by Wordsworth himself in pages
upon pages of controversial prose; and that we are greatly astonished Mr.
Arnold should indirectly lend it countenance, by reprinting and stamping
with his precious approval, such infelicitous triviality as the above. We
cannot shrink from saying this, through an unworthy dread lest we should
be confounded with "the tenth-rate critics and compilers to whom it is
still permissible to speak of Wordsworth's poetry, not only with
ignorance, but with impertinence." Mr. Arnold has himself shown that he
does not hesitate to speak in pretty strong terms of those portions of
Wordsworth's verse which he does not regard as poetry. He describes them
as "abstract verbiage"; he acknowledges that they are so inferior, it
seems wonderful how Wordsworth should have produced them; and in a passage
delightfully humorous he imagines a long passage of Wordsworth being
declaimed at a Social Science Congress to an admiring audience of men with
bald heads and women in spectacles, "and in the soul of any poor child of
nature who may have wandered in thither, an unutterable sense of
lamentation, mourning, and woe."

All that we ask, therefore, is to be allowed the same amount of liberty
which Mr. Arnold himself has exercised, and to be permitted to do what he
has done. We, too, would fain disengage what is valuable in Wordsworth's
poetry from what is worthless. We, too, would fain "exhibit his best work,
and clear away obstructions from around it." But we contend, and we
willingly leave the decision to disinterested lovers of poetry, that such
poems as _Ruth_ and _Simon Lee_ are not only not Wordsworth's best work,
but not good work at all; on the contrary are part of the obstruction from
which it should be cleared.

The next two poems in the "Narrative" section refer to the fidelity of
dogs, and a single stanza will suffice to show that they are of much the
same calibre as the two that precede them:

  But hear a wonder for whose sake
  This lamentable tale I tell!
  A lasting monument of words
  This wonder merits well.
  The Dog, which still was hovering nigh,
  Repeating the same timid cry,
  This Dog, had been through three months' space
  A dweller in that savage place.

Next in order comes _Hart-Leap Well_, which consists of two parts. In the
first we come across such lines and phrases as "Joy sparkled in the
prancing courser's eyes," "A rout that made the echoes roar," "Soon did
the Knight perform what he had said, And far and wide thereof the fame did
ring," "But there is matter for a second rhyme, And I to this would add
another tale," which are simply a distress to the disinterested reader of
poetry. In the second part, the poet warms up, and ends with a passage
which is very beautiful:

  Grey-headed Shepherd, thou hast spoken well;
  Small difference lies between thy creed and mine:
  This Beast not unobserved by Nature fell;
  His death was mourned by sympathy divine.

  The Being, that is in the clouds and air,
  That is in the green leaves among the groves,
  Maintains a deep and reverential care
  For the unoffending creatures whom he loves.

  The Pleasure-house is dust:--behind, before,
  This is no common waste, no common gloom;
  But Nature, in due course of time, once more
  Shall here put on her beauty and her bloom.

  She leaves these objects to a slow decay,
  That what we are, and have been, may be known;
  But, at the coming of the milder day,
  These monuments shall all be overgrown!

  One lesson, Shepherd, let us two divide,
  Taught both by what she shows, and what conceals;
  Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
  With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.

Of course, this is poetry, and very good poetry; and it is, justly, one of
the favourite passages of ardent admirers of Wordsworth. But we can
scarcely refrain from saying that, good as it is, there exists something
of precisely the same kind, and, as it happens, in precisely the same
metre, which is considerably better. Surely, no one will have any
difficulty in naming it. It is Gray's famous _Elegy_. Yet we remember how
indignant the "Wordsworthians against whom we ought to be on our guard"
were with the _Quarterly Review_, because there appeared in it a paper in
which Wordsworth and Gray were compared. To mention them in the same
breath was sacrilege! We do not wish to affirm that the disinterested
lover of poetry believes Gray ever to have scaled the heights where
Wordsworth's wing sometimes floats almost without effort. But it cannot be
uninteresting to mark that, in what we may call the middle notes,
Wordsworth is distinctly inferior to Gray, though ever and anon his voice
gets entirely beyond Gray's compass.

It would be impossible, with any regard for space, to quote from, or even
to name, every poem reproduced by Mr. Arnold, which in our opinion would
have been better suppressed. But if we seem to have established our
contention so far, we think the reader may rely upon it that he would more
or less concur in what else might be said on this score. _The Force of
Prayer_, _The Affliction of Margaret_, _The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian
Woman_, are little if any less trivial than the poems already condemned;
while in _The Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle_, we read six pages
equally poor and unpoetical, suddenly to come upon such a quatrain as the
following:

  Love had he found in huts where poor men lie;
  His daily teachers had been woods and rills,
  The silence that is in the starry sky,
  The sleep that is among the lonely hills.

The last two lines it would be impossible to praise too highly. Only the
silence of profound reverence can do them justice. They are touches like
these, touches like "the harvest of a quiet eye," that give to Wordsworth
his holy predominance, and whatever predominance, after fair examination,
must be adjudged him. But how few they are! Perhaps it is in the nature of
things that they should be so. But being so few and far between, they
cannot fill up the blank that intervenes. They are indeed "Angels'
visits." But even poetry has to do mainly with human guests, and a poet
must be judged, as Mr. Arnold truly affirms, by "the ample body of
powerful work" he leaves behind. We cannot assume that much of
Wordsworth's poetry is not unutterably bad, because some of it is
unutterably beautiful. The utmost we can do is to grant, concerning him,
what he himself said so finely of a young girl:

  If thou appear'st untouched by solemn thought,
  Thy nature is not therefore less divine:
  Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year,
  And worshipp'st at the Temple's inner shrine,
  God being with thee when we know it not.

It is possible that like the "dear child, dear girl," he lay in Abraham's
bosom "all the year," but he communicates the fact, he impresses us with
the fact, but seldom. As a rule, he seems to be outside the Temple
altogether. Hence these magnificent bursts of poetical depth and
sublimity, which, be it said, are peculiar to Wordsworth, are mere short
passages, and there are not many of them. But if they suffice, after a
complete survey of the works of both poets, to place Wordsworth above
Byron, we shall be obliged to conclude that they suffice to place him
above every poet that ever lived. That such a theory of poetry, such a
canon of criticism is untenable, unless we are to cast every hitherto
accepted theory of poetry and every former canon of criticism to the
winds, we trust, in due course, to be able to establish.

We are aware that _The Brothers_ is a favourite composition with
thoroughgoing Wordsworthians. But as we have been told to be on our guard
against them, we need not hesitate to say that it seems to us to consist
of very ordinary verse, and the piece itself to be devoid of any real
poetical temperament, though it fills sixteen pages in Mr. Arnold's
collection. Sixteen more are occupied by _Margaret_, upon which we are
unable to pronounce a different or a modified verdict. Both abound in such
passages as the following:

  He left his house: two wretched days had past,
  And on the third, as wistfully she raised
  Her head from off her pillow, to look forth,
  Like one in trouble, for returning light,
  Within her chamber-casement she espied
  A folded paper, lying as if placed
  To meet her waking eyes. This tremblingly
  She opened--found no writing, but beheld
  Pieces of money carefully enclosed,
  Silver and gold. "I shuddered at the sight,"
  Said Margaret, "for I knew it was his hand
  Which placed it there: and ere that day was ended,
  That long and anxious day! I learned from one
  Sent hither by my husband to impart
  The heavy news,--that he had joined a Troop
  Of soldiers, going to a distant land.
  He left me thus--he could not gather heart
  To take a farewell of me; for he feared
  That I should follow with my Babes, and sink
  Beneath the misery of that wandering life."

If this be poetry, then poetry is very easily written, and what has
hitherto been supposed to be the highest, the most difficult, and the
rarest, of the arts, presents no more difficulty to the person who knows
how to write at all than the simplest, baldest, and most unartistic prose.
What, for instance, is this?--

     At length the expected letter from the kinsman came, with kind
     assurances that he would do his utmost for the welfare of the boy; to
     which requests were added that forthwith he might be sent to him. Ten
     times or more the letter was read over. Isabel went forth to show it
     to the neighbours round; nor was there at that time on English land a
     prouder heart than Luke's. When Isabel had to her house returned, the
     old man said, "He shall depart to-morrow." To this word the housewife
     answered, talking much of things which, if at such short notice he
     should go, would surely be forgotten. But at length she gave consent,
     and Michael was at ease.

Is this prose or verse? We have printed it as prose. Wordsworth wrote it
as verse, and Mr. Arnold has reproduced it as poetry. Had all Wordsworth's
compositions been of this calibre, and a painfully large number of them
are, well might John Stuart Mill affirm that any man of good abilities
might become as good a poet as Wordsworth by giving his mind to it, and we
will add that a man of good abilities could hardly employ them worse. Yet
this passage, and fourteen pages of verse not one whit better than it, are
to be met with in _Michael_, one of the narrative poems Mr. Arnold, with
special emphasis, begs us to admire. "The right sort of verse," he says,
"to choose from Wordsworth, if we are to seize his true and most
characteristic form of expression, is a line like this from _Michael_:

  And never lifted up a single stone.

There is nothing subtle in it, no heightening, no study of poetic style,
strictly so called; yet it is expressive of the highest and most
expressive kind." Of course, in order to properly appreciate it, we must
know the context, which fortunately is easily compressed. Michael and his
son Luke were to build a sheepfold; but, as told in the passage we have
printed, Luke is sent to a kinsman, who will advance him in life. Before
he goes, Michael takes him to lay the first stone of the sheepfold. The
lad then leaves home, falls into dissolute courses, and at last hides
himself beyond the seas. After that, it is narrated of Michael:

  And to that hollow dell from time to time
  Did he repair, to build the Fold of which
  His flock had need. 'Tis not forgotten yet
  The pity which was then in every heart
  For the Old Man--and 'tis believed by all
  That many and many a day he thither went,
  And never lifted up a single stone.

We have asked several disinterested lovers of poetry, some of them ardent
admirers of Wordsworth, what they think of this; and we are bound to say
that most of them failed to see anything in it whatsoever. That is not our
case. We feel the force of the situation, and the apt simplicity of the
concluding line. Yet repeat it, dwell on it, and surrender ourselves to it
as we will, we fail to persuade ourselves that it merits the lofty eulogy
pronounced on it by Mr. Arnold. It is with hesitation that we presume, on
such a point, and where the issue is so direct, to place our opinion in
seeming competition with his; but we can only leave the decision to the
_communis sensus_ of disinterested lovers of poetry. But nothing--not even
Mr. Arnold's authority--could satisfy us that this line suffices to lend
the wings of poetry to fourteen closely printed pages of such pedestrian
verse as that of which _Michael_ for the most part consists.

The only other poem in the "Narrative" section of the volume is _The
Leech-Gatherer_; and it, besides containing many lines of admirable
poetry, is itself a coherently beautiful poem. But when, resuming our
analysis, we enquire how much poetry there is in the 112 pages, or in more
than the third portion of the volume we have as yet examined, what do we
find? Exactly 20, and only 20, which we honestly believe the disinterested
lover of poetry, the critic to whom Mr. Arnold makes appeal, would
recognise as strictly deserving that description. We can seriously assert
that this is the amount we should save from the wreck, if we were editing
a selection from Wordsworth, were disengaging his good work from his bad,
and were seeking to obtain for him readers who care nothing whatever about
him personally, and who only wish ever and anon to steep themselves in the
atmosphere of native and sterling poetry. We are well aware that, from
another and a more extended point of view, Wordsworth never wrote a line,
in verse or in prose, which is not worth preserving, and worth reading.
But that is not at present the question. We are dealing with the critical
contention of a great and influential critic, that "what strikes me with
admiration, what establishes in my opinion Wordsworth's superiority"--to
Byron, be it understood, and to every English poet since Milton--"is the
great and ample body of powerful work which remains to him, even after all
his inferior work has been cleared away." This it is which renders it
necessary to clear away the inferior work, in order that we may see if the
body of "powerful" work that remains be really "ample" or not.

The "Lyrical Poems" contain the best, the most characteristic, and the
most valuable of the compositions of Wordsworth. For our part, we should
have excluded _To a Sky-Lark_, at page 126--not the beautiful one with the
same title at page 142--_Stray Pleasures_, the two poems _At the Grave of
Burns_, _Yarrow Visited_, _Yarrow Revisited_, in spite of their vogue with
Wordsworthians _quand meme_, _To May_, and _The Primrose of the Rock_.
There would then be left 33 pages containing the best poems _of their
kind_ anywhere to be found, and of inestimable value to the disinterested
lover of poetry. The fervid lover of poetry knows them by heart, and
carries them with him through life. Is it necessary to give their names?
_She was a Phantom of Delight_, _The Solitary Reaper_, _Three Years She
Grew_, _To the Cuckoo_, _I Wandered lonely as a Cloud_--these, and their
companions, to be found about the middle of Mr. Arnold's volume, are among
the most precious, and will remain among the enduring possessions of
mankind. Nor is it only that they fill the mind with elevating thoughts
and swell the heart with sacred sentiments. They make one regard, with a
peculiar affection, the poet who wrote them. But we must not allow this
literary love to warp literary judgment. No such feeling is awakened for
their authors by _Childe Harold_ or _Hamlet_. But to conclude that
Wordsworth is, therefore, a greater poet than Byron or Shakespeare, would
be as illegitimate in the one instance as in the other. It would be to
imitate the filial and uxorious fondness of the late Mr. Carlyle, who
gravely tells us that his father had a larger intellect than Burns, and
that his amiable, long-suffering wife wrote letters of greater value and
insight than the works of George Sand and George Eliot, and "all the pack
of scribbling women from the beginning of time." To love Wordsworth is
pardonable; nay, it is inevitable to those who are intimate with his
tenderest work. But the critic must disengage his judgment from his
affections, if he is not to mislead the persons he aspires to instruct,
and to injure the art of whose dignity he is bound to be jealous.

Briefly, then, and pursuing to the end the "disinterested-lover-of-poetry"
method recommended to us by Mr. Arnold, and of which we think we have
already given illustrations to enable any one to decide for himself
whether we pursue it with equity and candour, we reach the conclusion
that, of the 317 pages composing Mr. Arnold's collection, only 103, on a
liberal estimate, contain what is worth preserving as poetry; or at least,
if there be any dispute as to whether it is poetry, there can be none,
outside the specially Wordsworthian circle, as to its being very inferior
poetry indeed, and in no degree calculated to confer, extend, or uphold
any man's reputation as a poet. That it is admirable in sentiment and
laudable in moral purpose, may at once be granted. But the purest of
sentiments and the loftiest of purposes do not constitute poetry, even
when apparelled in verse. Indeed we may say of them what Mr. Arnold
himself says of those portions of Wordsworth's writings which he discards,
that they are "doctrine such as we hear in church, religious and
philosophical doctrine; and the attached Wordsworthian loves passages of
such doctrine, and brings them forward in proof of his poet's excellence.
But however true the doctrine may be, it has, as here presented, more of
the characters of _poetic_ truth, the kind of truth we require from a
poet."

It may possibly seem an ungracious part to dwell upon the inferior
portions of Wordsworth work, and to play the _role_ of Devil's Advocate in
the case of one who is assured beforehand of the honours of canonisation.
But it should be remembered that this invidious task has been imposed upon
us by Mr. Arnold, who has asserted, and challenged contradiction to the
assertion, that in Wordsworth is to be found "an ampler body of powerful
work," which constitutes his superiority over every English poet since
Milton. It is he who has rendered it necessary, in justice to other poets,
to enquire with accuracy, what _is_ the amount of powerful work to be
found in Wordsworth; and this cannot be done without careful and judicial
scrutiny. Our object is the same as Mr. Arnold's; not to decry Wordsworth,
but to ascertain his proper place in relation to other poets. If we seem
to have spoken of him harshly, then so must Mr. Arnold; the only
difference between us being that he thinks a certain proportion of
Wordsworth's verse poor stuff, while we view a yet larger portion of it in
that light. Nor is it the example of Mr. Arnold alone that can be cited in
exoneration of perfect outspokenness. M. Scherer is a distinguished French
critic, whom Mr. Arnold quotes, and M. Scherer has in turn introduced Mr.
Arnold's _Selections_ from Wordsworth to the French public in the pages of
the _Temps_. He is a warm admirer of Wordsworth, and, as Mr. Arnold tells
us, an excessive depreciator of Byron. From him, therefore, we may, with
all the less scruple, cite the following avowals:

     The simplicity of Wordsworth's subjects and manner too often
     degenerates into triviality, the simplicity of his style into
     poverty. He abuses his love for puerile anecdotes, makes us a present
     of stories about dogs, and of recitals of what a little girl has said
     to her sheep. He not only parades enthusiasm for flowers and birds,
     but predilection for beggars, cripples, and idiots. The lower a
     person is in the scale of being, the more he strives to awaken our
     sympathy in his favour. There are no details so minute, so
     insignificant, that he does not take a special pleasure in remarking
     them. Is he narrating a walk he takes in summer, he will speak of
     "the host of insects gathering round his face, and which are ever
     with him as he paces along."

     The habit of seeking and finding lessons in the smallest incidents of
     his walks becomes a didactic mania. He extracts moralities from every
     object, he preaches sermons at every turn. Often, too, this preaching
     vein is far from being poetical. One sometimes seems to be listening
     to the psalm-singing of a Conventicle. This, for example, resembles a
     hymn of Watts.

     The poetry of Wordsworth, with the tendency it always had towards the
     prosaic, often lapses into it altogether.

This, we submit, is only another way of saying what we have ventured to
say, and what Mr. Arnold himself has said. May we not reasonably conclude
that M. Scherer would reject at least all that we have rejected? But, in
any case, that there is substantial agreement between us and him, so far,
is evident.

What, then, is the "ample body of powerful work" that is left of
Wordsworth after the eliminating process has been applied to it by the
disinterested lover of poetry? Between three and four thousand lines;
rather more than the amount of matter in the third and fourth cantos of
_Childe Harold_, rather less than the amount of matter in _Hamlet_. The
quantity therefore, the "body" of work left, is not very large. Still we
should not contest that it was "ample" enough to establish the superiority
of Wordsworth over Byron, if it happened to be sufficiently "powerful" for
the purpose. Though quantity must count for something, even in the
comparison of poet with poet, since quantity implies copiousness, and
usually implies versatility, quality counts for much more, if the
difference in quality be marked, and suffices to abolish the consideration
of quantity altogether, if the superiority in respect of quality be
sufficiently great. If, for example, the four thousand lines, or
thereabouts, of poetry Wordsworth has written, had been embodied, say, in
a _Hamlet_, then work so powerful would have been ample to establish his
superiority not only over every English poet since Milton, but over every
poet since the one who has left us, so to speak, several _Hamlets_.

For what is it that renders _Hamlet_ so great and so powerful? Is it
single lines of beautiful poetry? Is it detached passages of profound and
elevated thought presented in poetic guise? These go for much, more
especially when we consider them in connection with that of which they are
the drapery. But what would they be, and what should we think of them,
detached from the conception of the drama itself, without the plot,
action, and progress of the piece, without the invention and unfolding of
its characters, without its varied and forcible situations, without its
wit, its irony, its humour? What should we think of _Hamlet_ if divested
of the panorama of moving human passions, of its merciless tragedy, and,
finally, of its utter absence of moral so complete, that moralists have
been for a hundred years wrangling what the moral is? These are the
qualities, and these alone, which make great poetry and great poets.

What has Wordsworth of all these? The answer, if candid and disinterested,
must be, Absolutely nothing. He has written no epic, no drama, no poem of
any kind in which so much as an attempt is made to deal with the clashing
of the various passions that "stir this mortal frame." Of Action he is
utterly devoid. Of Invention, he seems absolutely unconscious. He has no
wit; he has no humour. He has conceived no character, he has portrayed no
character. If he can be said to deal with situations at all, they are of
the simplest and most elementary kind, and he does not in any sense create
them. He finds them at his door. No one blames him for making use of them,
where he makes use of them well; but this is a very different thing from
the invention shown in _Macbeth_ or _The Tempest_, or even in _Cain_, in
_Manfred_, and in _The Siege of Corinth_. Sardanapalus is not a Lear, nor
is Myrra a Cordelia. But, as exhibitions and portraitures of human
character and human passion in poetry they are as much beyond _Lucy Gray_,
or _Michael_, or the little Child in _We are Seven_, as Lear and Cordelia
are beyond them in turn.

Upon this point let us again hear M. Scherer:

     We must expect from Wordsworth neither the knowledge of the human
     heart which worldly experience gives, nor that interior drama of the
     passions which a man can describe well only on condition of having
     been their victim, nor those general views upon history and society
     which are formed partly by study, partly by the practice of public
     affairs. Our poet is as much a stranger to the disquietudes of
     thought as to those of ambition, to the sufferings of love and of
     hate as to that resignation at which one arrives when one has
     discerned how very small are the great affairs of this world. He has
     nothing of that sublime melancholy, of those fervid questionings, of
     those audacious revolts, in which poetry delighted fifty years ago.
     Still less has he that mocking scepticism, that raillery now gay now
     bitter, which succeeded the songs of despair. He will never be of
     those who trouble souls as Byron does, who arm them with irony like
     Heine, or who calm them, like Goethe, by the virtue of true
     understanding. Wordsworth is simply a Solitary who has long gazed
     upon Nature and much analysed his own feelings. Scarcely should we
     dare to call him a philosopher, so wanting in him is the reasoning
     and speculative element. Even the title of thinker only half becomes
     him. He is a contemplative.

It is true that, at the end of his review of Wordsworth, and without any
previous admonition that he is going to do so, M. Scherer says, in one
brief sentence, "Wordsworth seems to me to come after Milton, notably
below him in my opinion, but withal the first after him"; thus endorsing
the judgment of Mr. Arnold. But, unlike Mr. Arnold, he makes no attempt to
establish or justify this view, but throws it out, as an _obiter dictum_,
after writing a long essay, every argument and every phrase of which tend
towards a diametrically opposite conclusion. So thoroughly is this the
case, that we can honestly say we agree with every word in his essay, with
the exception of the one brief sentence we have just cited.

But in the longer and more detailed passage quoted above, is not
everything conceded for which we are contending? According to M. Scherer,
Wordsworth has knowledge neither of the human heart nor of the interior
drama of the passions. He has no broad views of history and society. He is
a stranger to love, hatred, ambition, and the disquietudes they cause, as
well as to the disquietudes caused by deep thought; and not having passed
through these, he has necessarily not "come out upon the other side," and
is equally a stranger to the tranquillity of complete knowledge and
complete experience. He is not a philosopher; he is hardly a thinker. He
is a contemplative solitary, who has consorted much with woods, lakes, and
mountains, and has dwelt much upon the sensations they excite in himself.
Verily, this is a sorry equipment for a great poet. Is it an exaggeration
to say that, if all this be true, Wordsworth is destitute of most of the
qualities which in a great poet have hitherto been deemed indispensable?
If, in spite of these remarkable deficiencies, he really be the greatest
English poet since Milton, we shall be forced to conclude that English
poets since Milton have been far less powerful, of far lower calibre, and
of far less value, than has generally been supposed.

What then is the precise value, the real calibre, the particular kind of
power, of that "ampler body of powerful work" which Wordsworth has given
us? We have seen it is not an epic, nor a drama, nor one great
comprehensive poem of any kind. It consists of lyrics, ballads, sonnets,
and odes; of many of which it would not be just or critical to say more
than that they are very sweet and charming, several of which must be
pronounced exquisite, and a few, very few, of which may be designated
sublime. We own we share the general opinion that the greatest composition
of Wordsworth is the _Ode on Intimations of Immortality_. We are surprised
and disappointed to find Mr. Arnold speaking rather coldly of it; and M.
Scherer likewise refers to it in a depreciatory tone, though he gives
different reasons for his conclusion. M. Scherer thinks it "sounds a
little false," and adds that he "cannot help seeing in it a theme adopted
with reference to the poetic developments of which Wordsworth was
susceptible, rather than a very serious belief of the author." We confess
we think the judgment harsh, and the reasons given for it insufficient,
if not indeed irrelevant. The objection Mr. Arnold entertains for it is
that "it has not the character of poetic truth of the best kind; it has no
real solidity. The instinct of delight in Nature and her beauty had no
doubt extraordinary strength in Wordsworth himself as a child. But to say
that universally this instinct is mighty in childhood, and tends to die
away afterwards, is to say what is extremely doubtful."

Now, with all deference to Mr. Arnold, which is due to him in a special
manner when he is expounding Wordsworth, Wordsworth does not say this. In
the first place, Wordsworth, after describing the comparative and
temporary diminution of this instinct, describes its revival and
transfiguration in another guise. But what is far more important to note
is, Wordsworth does _not_ say the instinct is universal. He is writing as
a poet, not as a psychologist; and though he treats of an objective infant
for a time, and uses the pronoun "_our_ infancy," he in reality is
describing his own experience, and letting it take its chance of being the
experience of a certain number of other people. What, we may well ask, can
a poet do more than this, when he gets into the higher range, the upper
atmosphere of poetry? When Shakespeare talks of "the shade of melancholy
boughs," he does not mean that everybody feels them to be melancholy. That
is the privilege--the melancholy privilege, if any one wills it so--of the
higher natures. That what Wordsworth describes in his splendid _Ode_ not
only was true of himself, but is true likewise of all great poetic
spirits, we entertain no doubt; and it will become true of an
ever-increasing number of persons, if mankind is to make progress in the
intimate and integral union of intellectual and poetic sentiment. In our
opinion, the highest note of Wordsworth is struck in this Ode, and
maintained through a composition of considerable length and of
argumentative unity of purpose. It is struck by him elsewhere--indeed in
the lines on Hartley Coleridge, we have a distinct overture, so to speak,
to the Ode; but nowhere is it sustained for so long, or with such oneness,
definiteness, and largeness of aim. There is, perhaps, no finer poem, of
equal length, in any language. We could well understand any one
maintaining that there exists no other so fine.

But, if this Ode be struck out of the account, what remains to represent
an "ample body of powerful work"? For, after all, in criticism, if we
criticise at all, we must use words with some definite meaning. Perhaps
Mr. Arnold would tell us that it is not the business of true Culture to be
too definite; and we should heartily agree with him. One of the things
that makes prose so inferior to poetry is its inaccurate precision. But it
is Mr. Arnold himself who, on this occasion, compels us to be precise. He
has elected to compare W

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