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Oxford Lectures on Poetry

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Title: Oxford Lectures on Poetry

Author: A. C. Bradley


        
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Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK OXFORD LECTURES ON POETRY ***




Produced by Marius Masi, Suzanne Shell and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net








  _BY A. C. BRADLEY, LL.D., LITT.D._

  SHAKESPEAREAN TRAGEDY

  LECTURES ON
  HAMLET, OTHELLO, KING LEAR, MACBETH

  MACMILLAN & CO LTD.




  OXFORD LECTURES
  ON POETRY

  BY

  A. C. BRADLEY
  LL.D., LITT.D.

  FORMERLY PROFESSOR OF POETRY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
  AND FELLOW OF BALLIOL COLLEGE


  MACMILLAN

  London . Melbourne . Toronto

  ST MARTIN'S PRESS
  New York
  1965


_This book is copyright in all countries which are signatories of the
Berne Convention_

First Edition, May 1909. Second Edition, November 1909 Reprinted 1911,
1914, 1917, 1919, 1920, 1923, 1926, 1934, 1941, 1950, 1955, 1959, 1962,
1963, 1965


  MACMILLAN AND COMPANY LIMITED
  _St Martin's Street London WC2
  also Bombay Calcutta Madras Melbourne_

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  _70 Bond Street Toronto 2_

  ST MARTIN'S PRESS INC
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  PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN




  TO
  MY OXFORD FRIENDS
  1869-1909

_'They have seemed to be together, though absent, shook hands, as over a
vast; and embraced, as it were, from the ends of opposed winds.'_




PREFACE


This volume consists of lectures delivered during my tenure of the Chair
of Poetry at Oxford and not included in _Shakespearean Tragedy_. Most of
them have been enlarged, and all have been revised. As they were given
at intervals, and the majority before the publication of that book, they
contained repetitions which I have not found it possible wholly to
remove. Readers of a lecture published by the University of Manchester
on _English Poetry and German Philosophy in the Age of Wordsworth_ will
pardon also the restatement of some ideas expressed in it.

The several lectures are dated, as I have been unable to take account of
most of the literature on their subjects published since they were
delivered.

They are arranged in the order that seems best to me, but it is of
importance only in the case of the four which deal with the poets of
Wordsworth's time.

I am indebted to the Delegates of the University Press, and to the
proprietors and editors of the _Hibbert Journal_ and the _Albany_,
_Fortnightly_, and _Quarterly Reviews_, respectively, for permission to
republish the first, third, fifth, eighth, and ninth lectures. A like
acknowledgment is due for leave to use some sentences of an article on
Keats contributed to _Chambers's Cyclopaedia of English Literature_
(1903).

In the revision of the proof-sheets I owed much help to a sister who has
shared many of my Oxford friendships.




NOTE TO THE SECOND EDITION


This edition is substantially identical with the first; but it and its
later impressions contain a few improvements in points of detail, and,
thanks to criticisms by my brother, F. H. Bradley, I hope to have made
my meaning clearer in some pages of the second lecture.

There was an oversight in the first edition which I regret. In adding
the note on p. 247 I forgot that I had not referred to Professor Dowden
in the lecture on "Shakespeare the Man." In everything that I have
written on Shakespeare I am indebted to Professor Dowden, and certainly
not least in that lecture.




CONTENTS


                                         PAGE
  POETRY FOR POETRY'S SAKE                  3

  THE SUBLIME                              37

  HEGEL'S THEORY OF TRAGEDY                69

  WORDSWORTH                               99

  SHELLEY'S VIEW OF POETRY                151

  THE LONG POEM IN THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH  177

  THE LETTERS OF KEATS                    209

  THE REJECTION OF FALSTAFF               247

  SHAKESPEARE'S 'ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA'    279

  SHAKESPEARE THE MAN                     311

  SHAKESPEARE'S THEATRE AND AUDIENCE      361




POETRY FOR POETRY'S SAKE


POETRY FOR POETRY'S SAKE[1]

(INAUGURAL LECTURE)


One who, after twenty years, is restored to the University where he was
taught and first tried to teach, and who has received at the hands of
his Alma Mater an honour of which he never dreamed, is tempted to speak
both of himself and of her. But I remember that you have come to listen
to my thoughts about a great subject, and not to my feelings about
myself; and of Oxford who that holds this Professorship could dare to
speak, when he recalls the exquisite verse in which one of his
predecessors described her beauty, and the prose in which he gently
touched on her illusions and protested that they were as nothing when
set against her age-long warfare with the Philistine? How, again,
remembering him and others, should I venture to praise my predecessors?
It would be pleasant to do so, and even pleasanter to me and you if,
instead of lecturing, I quoted to you some of their best passages. But I
could not do this for five years. Sooner or later, my own words would
have to come, and the inevitable contrast. Not to sharpen it now, I
will be silent concerning them also; and will only assure you that I do
not forget them, or the greatness of the honour of succeeding them, or
the responsibility which it entails.

The words 'Poetry for poetry's sake' recall the famous phrase 'Art for
Art.' It is far from my purpose to examine the possible meanings of that
phrase, or all the questions it involves. I propose to state briefly
what I understand by 'Poetry for poetry's sake,' and then, after
guarding against one or two misapprehensions of the formula, to consider
more fully a single problem connected with it. And I must premise,
without attempting to justify them, certain explanations. We are to
consider poetry in its essence, and apart from the flaws which in most
poems accompany their poetry. We are to include in the idea of poetry
the metrical form, and not to regard this as a mere accident or a mere
vehicle. And, finally, poetry being poems, we are to think of a poem as
it actually exists; and, without aiming here at accuracy, we may say
that an actual poem is the succession of experiences--sounds, images,
thoughts, emotions--through which we pass when we are reading as
poetically as we can.[2] Of course this imaginative experience--if I may
use the phrase for brevity--differs with every reader and every time of
reading: a poem exists in innumerable degrees. But that insurmountable
fact lies in the nature of things and does not concern us now.

What then does the formula 'Poetry for poetry's sake' tell us about this
experience? It says, as I understand it, these things. First, this
experience is an end in itself, is worth having on its own account, has
an intrinsic value. Next, its _poetic_ value is this intrinsic worth
alone. Poetry may have also an ulterior value as a means to culture or
religion; because it conveys instruction, or softens the passions, or
furthers a good cause; because it brings the poet fame or money or a
quiet conscience. So much the better: let it be valued for these reasons
too. But its ulterior worth neither is nor can directly determine its
poetic worth as a satisfying imaginative experience; and this is to be
judged entirely from within. And to these two positions the formula
would add, though not of necessity, a third. The consideration of
ulterior ends, whether by the poet in the act of composing or by the
reader in the act of experiencing, tends to lower poetic value. It does
so because it tends to change the nature of poetry by taking it out of
its own atmosphere. For its nature is to be not a part, nor yet a copy,
of the real world (as we commonly understand that phrase), but to be a
world by itself, independent, complete, autonomous; and to possess it
fully you must enter that world, conform to its laws, and ignore for the
time the beliefs, aims, and particular conditions which belong to you in
the other world of reality.

Of the more serious misapprehensions to which these statements may give
rise I will glance only at one or two. The offensive consequences often
drawn from the formula 'Art for Art' will be found to attach not to the
doctrine that Art is an end in itself, but to the doctrine that Art is
the whole or supreme end of human life. And as this latter doctrine,
which seems to me absurd, is in any case quite different from the
former, its consequences fall outside my subject. The formula 'Poetry is
an end in itself' has nothing to say on the various questions of moral
judgment which arise from the fact that poetry has its place in a
many-sided life. For anything it says, the intrinsic value of poetry
might be so small, and its ulterior effects so mischievous, that it had
better not exist. The formula only tells us that we must not place in
antithesis poetry and human good, for poetry is one kind of human good;
and that we must not determine the intrinsic value of this kind of good
by direct reference to another. If we do, we shall find ourselves
maintaining what we did not expect. If poetic value lies in the
stimulation of religious feelings, _Lead, kindly Light_ is no better a
poem than many a tasteless version of a Psalm: if in the excitement of
patriotism, why is _Scots, wha hae_ superior to _We don't want to
fight?_ if in the mitigation of the passions, the Odes of Sappho will
win but little praise: if in instruction, Armstrong's _Art of preserving
Health_ should win much.

Again, our formula may be accused of cutting poetry away from its
connection with life. And this accusation raises so huge a problem that
I must ask leave to be dogmatic as well as brief. There is plenty of
connection between life and poetry, but it is, so to say, a connection
underground. The two may be called different forms of the same thing:
one of them having (in the usual sense) reality, but seldom fully
satisfying imagination; while the other offers something which satisfies
imagination but has not full 'reality.' They are parallel developments
which nowhere meet, or, if I may use loosely a word which will be
serviceable later, they are analogues. Hence we understand one by help
of the other, and even, in a sense, care for one because of the other;
but hence also, poetry neither is life, nor, strictly speaking, a copy
of it. They differ not only because one has more mass and the other a
more perfect shape, but because they have different _kinds_ of
existence. The one touches us as beings occupying a given position in
space and time, and having feelings, desires, and purposes due to that
position: it appeals to imagination, but appeals to much besides. What
meets us in poetry has not a position in the same series of time and
space, or, if it has or had such a position, it is taken apart from much
that belonged to it there;[3] and therefore it makes no direct appeal
to those feelings, desires, and purposes, but speaks only to
contemplative imagination--imagination the reverse of empty or
emotionless, imagination saturated with the results of 'real'
experience, but still contemplative. Thus, no doubt, one main reason why
poetry has poetic value for us is that it presents to us in its own way
something which we meet in another form in nature or life; and yet the
test of its poetic value for us lies simply in the question whether it
satisfies our imagination; the rest of us, our knowledge or conscience,
for example, judging it only so far as they appear transmuted in our
imagination. So also Shakespeare's knowledge or his moral insight,
Milton's greatness of soul, Shelley's 'hate of hate' and 'love of love,'
and that desire to help men or make them happier which may have
influenced a poet in hours of meditation--all these have, as such, no
poetical worth: they have that worth only when, passing through the
unity of the poet's being, they reappear as qualities of imagination,
and then are indeed mighty powers in the world of poetry.

I come to a third misapprehension, and so to my main subject. This
formula, it is said, empties poetry of its meaning: it is really a
doctrine of form for form's sake. 'It is of no consequence what a poet
says, so long as he says the thing well. The _what_ is poetically
indifferent: it is the _how_ that counts. Matter, subject, content,
substance, determines nothing; there is no subject with which poetry may
not deal: the form, the treatment, is everything. Nay, more: not only is
the matter indifferent, but it is the secret of Art to "eradicate the
matter by means of the form,"'--phrases and statements like these meet
us everywhere in current criticism of literature and the other arts.
They are the stock-in-trade of writers who understand of them little
more than the fact that somehow or other they are not 'bourgeois.' But
we find them also seriously used by writers whom we must respect,
whether they are anonymous or not; something like one or another of them
might be quoted, for example, from Professor Saintsbury, the late R. A.
M. Stevenson, Schiller, Goethe himself; and they are the watchwords of a
school in the one country where Aesthetics has flourished. They come, as
a rule, from men who either practise one of the arts, or, from study of
it, are interested in its methods. The general reader--a being so
general that I may say what I will of him--is outraged by them. He feels
that he is being robbed of almost all that he cares for in a work of
art. 'You are asking me,' he says, 'to look at the Dresden Madonna as if
it were a Persian rug. You are telling me that the poetic value of
_Hamlet_ lies solely in its style and versification, and that my
interest in the man and his fate is only an intellectual or moral
interest. You allege that, if I want to enjoy the poetry of _Crossing
the Bar_, I must not mind what Tennyson says there, but must consider
solely his way of saying it. But in that case I can care no more for a
poem than I do for a set of nonsense verses; and I do not believe that
the authors of _Hamlet_ and _Crossing the Bar_ regarded their poems
thus.'

These antitheses of subject, matter, substance on the one side, form,
treatment, handling on the other, are the field through which I
especially want, in this lecture, to indicate a way. It is a field of
battle; and the battle is waged for no trivial cause; but the cries of
the combatants are terribly ambiguous. Those phrases of the so-called
formalist may each mean five or six different things. Taken in one sense
they seem to me chiefly true; taken as the general reader not
unnaturally takes them, they seem to me false and mischievous. It would
be absurd to pretend that I can end in a few minutes a controversy
which concerns the ultimate nature of Art, and leads perhaps to problems
not yet soluble; but we can at least draw some plain distinctions which,
in this controversy, are too often confused.

In the first place, then, let us take 'subject' in one particular sense;
let us understand by it that which we have in view when, looking at the
title of an un-read poem, we say that the poet has chosen this or that
for his subject. The subject, in this sense, so far as I can discover,
is generally something, real or imaginary, as it exists in the minds of
fairly cultivated people. The subject of _Paradise Lost_ would be the
story of the Fall as that story exists in the general imagination of a
Bible-reading people. The subject of Shelley's stanzas _To a Skylark_
would be the ideas which arise in the mind of an educated person when,
without knowing the poem, he hears the word 'skylark'. If the title of a
poem conveys little or nothing to us, the 'subject' appears to be either
what we should gather by investigating the title in a dictionary or
other book of the kind, or else such a brief suggestion as might be
offered by a person who had read the poem, and who said, for example,
that the subject of _The Ancient Mariner_ was a sailor who killed an
albatross and suffered for his deed.

Now the subject, in this sense (and I intend to use the word in no
other), is not, as such, inside the poem, but outside it. The contents
of the stanzas _To a Skylark_ are not the ideas suggested by the work
'skylark' to the average man; they belong to Shelley just as much as the
language does. The subject, therefore, is not the matter _of_ the poem
at all; and its opposite is not the _form_ of the poem, but the whole
poem. The subject is one thing; the poem, matter and form alike, another
thing. This being so, it is surely obvious that the poetic value cannot
lie in the subject, but lies entirely in its opposite, the poem. How
can the subject determine the value when on one and the same subject
poems may be written of all degrees of merit and demerit; or when a
perfect poem may be composed on a subject so slight as a pet sparrow,
and, if Macaulay may be trusted, a nearly worthless poem on a subject so
stupendous as the omnipresence of the Deity? The 'formalist' is here
perfectly right. Nor is he insisting on something unimportant. He is
fighting against our tendency to take the work of art as a mere copy or
reminder of something already in our heads, or at the best as a
suggestion of some idea as little removed as possible from the familiar.
The sightseer who promenades a picture-gallery, remarking that this
portrait is so like his cousin, or that landscape the very image of his
birthplace, or who, after satisfying himself that one picture is about
Elijah, passes on rejoicing to discover the subject, and nothing but the
subject, of the next--what is he but an extreme example of this
tendency? Well, but the very same tendency vitiates much of our
criticism, much criticism of Shakespeare, for example, which, with all
its cleverness and partial truth, still shows that the critic never
passed from his own mind into Shakespeare's; and it may be traced even
in so fine a critic as Coleridge, as when he dwarfs the sublime struggle
of Hamlet into the image of his own unhappy weakness. Hazlitt by no
means escaped its influence. Only the third of that great trio, Lamb,
appears almost always to have rendered the conception of the composer.

Again, it is surely true that we cannot determine beforehand what
subjects are fit for Art, or name any subject on which a good poem might
not possibly be written. To divide subjects into two groups, the
beautiful or elevating, and the ugly or vicious, and to judge poems
according as their subjects belong to one of these groups or the other,
is to fall into the same pit, to confuse with our pre-conceptions the
meaning of the poet. What the thing is in the poem he is to be judged
by, not by the thing as it was before he touched it; and how can we
venture to say beforehand that he cannot make a true poem out of
something which to us was merely alluring or dull or revolting? The
question whether, having done so, he ought to publish his poem; whether
the thing in the poet's work will not be still confused by the
incompetent Puritan or the incompetent sensualist with the thing in
_his_ mind, does not touch this point: it is a further question, one of
ethics, not of art. No doubt the upholders of 'Art for art's sake' will
generally be in favour of the courageous course, of refusing to
sacrifice the better or stronger part of the public to the weaker or
worse; but their maxim in no way binds them to this view. Rossetti
suppressed one of the best of his sonnets, a sonnet chosen for
admiration by Tennyson, himself extremely sensitive about the moral
effect of poetry; suppressed it, I believe, because it was called
fleshly. One may regret Rossetti's judgment and at the same time respect
his scrupulousness; but in any case he judged in his capacity of
citizen, not in his capacity of artist.

So far then the 'formalist' appears to be right. But he goes too far, I
think, if he maintains that the subject is indifferent and that all
subjects are the same to poetry. And he does not prove his point by
observing that a good poem might be written on a pin's head, and a bad
one on the Fall of Man. That truth shows that the subject _settles_
nothing, but not that it counts for nothing. The Fall of Man is really a
more favourable subject than a pin's head. The Fall of Man, that is to
say, offers opportunities of poetic effects wider in range and more
penetrating in appeal. And the fact is that such a subject, as it exists
in the general imagination, has some aesthetic value before the poet
touches it. It is, as you may choose to call it, an inchoate poem or
the debris of a poem. It is not an abstract idea or a bare isolated
fact, but an assemblage of figures, scenes, actions, and events, which
already appeal to emotional imagination; and it is already in some
degree organized and formed. In spite of this a bad poet would make a
bad poem on it; but then we should say he was unworthy of the subject.
And we should not say this if he wrote a bad poem on a pin's head.
Conversely, a good poem on a pin's head would almost certainly transform
its subject far more than a good poem on the Fall of Man. It might
revolutionize its subject so completely that we should say, 'The subject
may be a pin's head, but the substance of the poem has very little to do
with it.'

This brings us to another and a different antithesis. Those figures,
scenes, events, that form part of the subject called the Fall of Man,
are not the substance of _Paradise Lost_; but in _Paradise Lost_ there
are figures, scenes, and events resembling them in some degree. These,
with much more of the same kind, may be described as its substance, and
may then be contrasted with the measured language of the poem, which
will be called its form. Subject is the opposite not of form but of the
whole poem. Substance is within the poem, and its opposite, form, is
also within the poem. I am not criticizing this antithesis at present,
but evidently it is quite different from the other. It is practically
the distinction used in the old-fashioned criticism of epic and drama,
and it flows down, not unsullied, from Aristotle. Addison, for example,
in examining _Paradise Lost_ considers in order the fable, the
characters, and the sentiments; these will be the substance: then he
considers the language, that is, the style and numbers; this will be the
form. In like manner, the substance or meaning of a lyric may be
distinguished from the form.

Now I believe it will be found that a large part of the controversy we
are dealing with arises from a confusion between these two distinctions
of substance and form, and of subject and poem. The extreme formalist
lays his whole weight on the form because he thinks its opposite is the
mere subject. The general reader is angry, but makes the same mistake,
and gives to the subject praises that rightly belong to the
substance[4]. I will read an example of what I mean. I can only explain
the following words of a good critic by supposing that for the moment he
has fallen into this confusion: 'The mere matter of all poetry--to wit,
the appearances of nature and the thoughts and feelings of men--being
unalterable, it follows that the difference between poet and poet will
depend upon the manner of each in applying language, metre, rhyme,
cadence, and what not, to this invariable material.' What has become
here of the substance of _Paradise Lost_--the story, scenery,
characters, sentiments, as they are in the poem? They have vanished
clean away. Nothing is left but the form on one side, and on the other
not even the subject, but a supposed invariable material, the
appearances of nature and the thoughts and feelings of men. Is it
surprising that the whole value should then be found in the form?

So far we have assumed that this antithesis of substance and form is
valid, and that it always has one meaning. In reality it has several,
but we will leave it in its present shape, and pass to the question of
its validity. And this question we are compelled to raise, because we
have to deal with the two contentions that the poetic value lies wholly
or mainly in the substance, and that it lies wholly or mainly in the
form. Now these contentions, whether false or true, may seem at least to
be clear; but we shall find, I think, that they are both of them false,
or both of them nonsense: false if they concern anything outside the
poem, nonsense if they apply to something in it. For what do they
evidently imply? They imply that there are in a poem two parts, factors,
or components, a substance and a form; and that you can conceive them
distinctly and separately, so that when you are speaking of the one you
are not speaking of the other. Otherwise how can you ask the question,
In which of them does the value lie? But really in a poem, apart from
defects, there are no such factors or components; and therefore it is
strictly nonsense to ask in which of them the value lies. And on the
other hand, if the substance and the form referred to are not in the
poem, then both the contentions are false, for its poetic value lies in
itself.

What I mean is neither new nor mysterious; and it will be clear, I
believe, to any one who reads poetry poetically and who closely examines
his experience. When you are reading a poem, I would ask--not analysing
it, and much less criticizing it, but allowing it, as it proceeds, to
make its full impression on you through the exertion of your recreating
imagination--do you then apprehend and enjoy as one thing a certain
meaning or substance, and as another thing certain articulate sounds,
and do you somehow compound these two? Surely you do not, any more than
you apprehend apart, when you see some one smile, those lines in the
face which express a feeling, and the feeling that the lines express.
Just as there the lines and their meaning are to you one thing, not two,
so in poetry the meaning and the sounds are one: there is, if I may put
it so, a resonant meaning, or a meaning resonance. If you read the line,
'The sun is warm, the sky is clear,' you do not experience separately
the image of a warm sun and clear sky, on the one side, and certain
unintelligible rhythmical sounds on the other; nor yet do you experience
them together, side by side; but you experience the one _in_ the other.
And in like manner, when you are really reading _Hamlet_, the action and
the characters are not something which you conceive apart from the
words; you apprehend them from point to point _in_ the words, and the
words as expressions of them. Afterwards, no doubt, when you are out of
the poetic experience but remember it, you may by analysis decompose
this unity, and attend to a substance more or less isolated, and a form
more or less isolated. But these are things in your analytic head, not
in the poem, which is _poetic_ experience. And if you want to have the
poem again, you cannot find it by adding together these two products of
decomposition; you can only find it by passing back into poetic
experience. And then what you recover is no aggregate of factors, it is
a unity in which you can no more separate a substance and a form than
you can separate living blood and the life in the blood. This unity has,
if you like, various 'aspects' or 'sides,' but they are not factors or
parts; if you try to examine one, you find it is also the other. Call
them substance and form if you please, but these are not the
reciprocally exclusive substance and form to which the two contentions
_must_ refer. They do not 'agree,' for they are not apart: they are one
thing from different points of view, and in that sense identical. And
this identity of content and form, you will say, is no accident; it is
of the essence of poetry in so far as it is poetry, and of all art in so
far as it is art. Just as there is in music not sound on one side and a
meaning on the other, but expressive sound, and if you ask what is the
meaning you can only answer by pointing to the sounds; just as in
painting there is not a meaning _plus_ paint, but a meaning _in_ paint,
or significant paint, and no man can really express the meaning in any
other way than in paint and in _this_ paint; so in a poem the true
content and the true form neither exist nor can be imagined apart. When
then you are asked whether the value of a poem lies in a substance got
by decomposing the poem, and present, as such, only in reflective
analysis, or whether the value lies in a form arrived at and existing in
the same way, you will answer, 'It lies neither in one, nor in the
other, nor in any addition of them, but in the poem, where they are
not.'

We have then, first, an antithesis of subject and poem. This is clear
and valid; and the question in which of them does the value lie is
intelligible; and its answer is, In the poem. We have next a distinction
of substance and form. If the substance means ideas, images, and the
like taken alone, and the form means the measured language taken by
itself, this is a possible distinction, but it is a distinction of
things not in the poem, and the value lies in neither of them. If
substance and form mean anything _in_ the poem, then each is involved in
the other, and the question in which of them the value lies has no
sense. No doubt you may say, speaking loosely, that in this poet or poem
the aspect of substance is the more noticeable, and in that the aspect
of form; and you may pursue interesting discussions on this basis,
though no principle or ultimate question of value is touched by them.
And apart from that question, of course, I am not denying the usefulness
and necessity of the distinction. We cannot dispense with it. To
consider separately the action or the characters of a play, and
separately its style or versification, is both legitimate and valuable,
so long as we remember what we are doing. But the true critic in
speaking of these apart does not really think of them apart; the whole,
the poetic experience, of which they are but aspects, is always in his
mind; and he is always aiming at a richer, truer, more intense
repetition of that experience. On the other hand, when the question of
principle, of poetic value, is raised, these aspects _must_ fall apart
into components, separately conceivable; and then there arise two
heresies, equally false, that the value lies in one of two things, both
of which are outside the poem, and therefore where its value cannot lie.

On the heresy of the separable substance a few additional words will
suffice. This heresy is seldom formulated, but perhaps some unconscious
holder of it may object: 'Surely the action and the characters of
_Hamlet_ are in the play; and surely I can retain these, though I have
forgotten all the words. I admit that I do not possess the whole poem,
but I possess a part, and the most important part.' And I would answer:
'If we are not concerned with any question of principle, I accept all
that you say except the last words, which do raise such a question.
Speaking loosely, I agree that the action and characters, as you perhaps
conceive them, together with a great deal more, are in the poem. Even
then, however, you must not claim to possess all of this kind that is in
the poem; for in forgetting the words you must have lost innumerable
details of the action and the characters. And, when the question of
value is raised, I must insist that the action and characters, as you
conceive them, are not in _Hamlet_ at all. If they are, point them out.
You cannot do it. What you find at any moment of that succession of
experiences called _Hamlet_ is words. In these words, to speak loosely
again, the action and characters (more of them than you can conceive
apart) are focussed; but your experience is not a combination of them,
as ideas, on the one side, with certain sounds on the other; it is an
experience of something in which the two are indissolubly fused. If you
deny this, to be sure I can make no answer, or can only answer that I
have reason to believe that you cannot read poetically, or else are
misinterpreting your experience. But if you do not deny this, then you
will admit that the action and characters of the poem, as you separately
imagine them, are no part of it, but a product of it in your reflective
imagination, a faint analogue of one aspect of it taken in detachment
from the whole. Well, I do not dispute, I would even insist, that, in
the case of so long a poem as _Hamlet_, it may be necessary from time to
time to interrupt the poetic experience, in order to enrich it by
forming such a product and dwelling on it. Nor, in a wide sense of
"poetic," do I question the poetic value of this product, as you think
of it apart from the poem. It resembles our recollections of the heroes
of history or legend, who move about in our imaginations, "forms more
real than living man," and are worth much to us though we do not
remember anything they said. Our ideas and images of the "substance" of
a poem have this poetic value, and more, if they are at all adequate.
But they cannot determine the poetic value of the poem, for (not to
speak of the competing claims of the "form") nothing that is outside the
poem can do that, and they, as such, are outside it.'[5]

Let us turn to the so-called form--style and versification. There is no
such thing as mere form in poetry. All form is expression. Style may
have indeed a certain aesthetic worth in partial abstraction from the
particular matter it conveys, as in a well-built sentence you may take
pleasure in the build almost apart from the meaning. Even so, style is
expressive--presents to sense, for example, the order, ease, and
rapidity with which ideas move in the writer's mind--but it is not
expressive of the meaning of that particular sentence. And it is
possible, interrupting poetic experience, to decompose it and abstract
for comparatively separate consideration this nearly formal element of
style. But the aesthetic value of style so taken is not considerable;[6]
you could not read with pleasure for an hour a composition which had no
other merit. And in poetic experience you never apprehend this value by
itself; the style is here expressive also of a particular meaning, or
rather is one aspect of that unity whose other aspect is meaning. So
that what you apprehend may be called indifferently an expressed meaning
or a significant form. Perhaps on this point I may in Oxford appeal to
authority, that of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater, the latter at any
rate an authority whom the formalist will not despise. What is the gist
of Pater's teaching about style, if it is not that in the end the one
virtue of style is truth or adequacy; that the word, phrase, sentence,
should express perfectly the writer's perception, feeling, image, or
thought; so that, as we read a descriptive phrase of Keats's, we
exclaim, 'That is the thing itself'; so that, to quote Arnold, the words
are 'symbols equivalent with the thing symbolized,' or, in our technical
language, a form identical with its content? Hence in true poetry it is,
in strictness, impossible to express the meaning in any but its own
words, or to change the words without changing the meaning. A
translation of such poetry is not really the old meaning in a fresh
dress; it is a new product, something like the poem, though, if one
chooses to say so, more like it in the aspect of meaning than in the
aspect of form.

No one who understands poetry, it seems to me, would dispute this, were
it not that, falling away from his experience, or misled by theory, he
takes the word 'meaning' in a sense almost ludicrously inapplicable to
poetry. People say, for instance, 'steed' and 'horse' have the same
meaning; and in bad poetry they have, but not in poetry that _is_
poetry.

  'Bring forth the horse!' The horse was brought:
  In truth he was a noble steed!

says Byron in _Mazeppa_. If the two words mean the same here, transpose
them:

  'Bring forth the steed!' The steed was brought:
  In truth he was a noble horse!

and ask again if they mean the same. Or let me take a line certainly
very free from 'poetic diction':

  To be or not to be, that is the question.

You may say that this means the same as 'What is just now occupying my
attention is the comparative disadvantages of continuing to live or
putting an end to myself.' And for practical purposes--the purpose, for
example, of a coroner--it does. But as the second version altogether
misrepresents the speaker at that moment of his existence, while the
first does represent him, how can they for any but a practical or
logical purpose be said to have the same sense? Hamlet was well able to
'unpack his heart with words,' but he will not unpack it with our
paraphrases.

These considerations apply equally to versification. If I take the
famous line which describes how the souls of the dead stood waiting by
the river, imploring a passage from Charon:

  Tendebantque manus ripae ulterioris amore;

and if I translate it, 'and were stretching forth their hands in longing
for the further bank,' the charm of the original has fled. Why has it
fled? Partly (but we have dealt with that) because I have substituted
for five words, and those the words of Virgil, twelve words, and those
my own. In some measure because I have turned into rhythmless prose a
line of verse which, as mere sound, has unusual beauty. But much more
because in doing so I have also changed the _meaning_ of Virgil's line.
What that meaning is _I_ cannot say: Virgil has said it. But I can see
this much, that the translation conveys a far less vivid picture of the
outstretched hands and of their remaining outstretched, and a far less
poignant sense of the distance of the shore and the longing of the
souls. And it does so partly because this picture and this sense are
conveyed not only by the obvious meaning of the words, but through the
long-drawn sound of 'tendebantque,' through the time occupied by the
five syllables and therefore by the idea of 'ulterioris,' and through
the identity of the long sound 'or' in the penultimate syllables of
'ulterioris amore'--all this, and much more, apprehended not in this
analytical fashion, nor as _added_ to the beauty of mere sound and to
the obvious meaning, but in unity with them and so as expressive of the
poetic meaning of the whole.

It is always so in fine poetry. The value of versification, when it is
indissolubly fused with meaning, can hardly be exaggerated. The gift for
feeling it, even more perhaps than the gift for feeling the value of
style, is the _specific_ gift for poetry, as distinguished from other
arts. But versification, taken, as far as possible, all by itself, has a
very different worth. Some aesthetic worth it has; how much, you may
experience by reading poetry in a language of which you do not
understand a syllable.[7] The pleasure is quite appreciable, but it is
not great; nor in actual poetic experience do you meet with it, as such,
at all. For, I repeat, it is not _added_ to the pleasure of the meaning
when you read poetry that you do understand: by some mystery the music
is then the music _of_ the meaning, and the two are one. However fond
of versification you might be, you would tire very soon of reading
verses in Chinese; and before long of reading Virgil and Dante if you
were ignorant of their languages. But take the music as it is _in_ the
poem, and there is a marvellous change. Now

  It gives a very echo to the seat
  Where love is throned;

or 'carries far into your heart,' almost like music itself, the sound

  Of old, unhappy, far-off things
      And battles long ago.

What then is to be said of the following sentence of the critic quoted
before: 'But when any one who knows what poetry is reads--

  Our noisy years seem moments in the being
  Of the eternal silence,

he sees that, quite independently of the meaning, ... there is one note
added to the articulate music of the world--a note that never will leave
off resounding till the eternal silence itself gulfs it' must think that
the writer is deceiving himself. For I could quite understand his
enthusiasm, if it were an enthusiasm for the music of the meaning; but
as for the music, 'quite independently of the meaning,' so far as I can
hear it thus (and I doubt if any one who knows English can quite do so),
I find it gives some pleasure, but only a trifling pleasure. And indeed
I venture to doubt whether, considered as mere sound, the words are at
all exceptionally beautiful, as Virgil's line certainly is.

When poetry answers to its idea and is purely or almost purely poetic,
we find the identity of form and content; and the degree of purity
attained may be tested by the degree in which we feel it hopeless to
convey the effect of a poem or passage in any form but its own. Where
the notion of doing so is simply ludicrous, you have quintessential
poetry. But a great part even of good poetry, especially in long works,
is of a mixed nature; and so we find in it no more than a partial
agreement of a form and substance which remain to some extent distinct.
This is so in many passages of Shakespeare (the greatest of poets when
he chose, but not always a conscientious poet); passages where something
was wanted for the sake of the plot, but he did not care about it or was
hurried. The conception of the passage is then distinct from the
execution, and neither is inspired. This is so also, I think, wherever
we can truly speak of merely decorative effect. We seem to perceive that
the poet had a truth or fact--philosophical, agricultural,
social--distinctly before him, and then, as we say, clothed it in
metrical and coloured language. Most argumentative, didactic, or satiric
poems are partly of this kind; and in imaginative poems anything which
is really a mere 'conceit' is mere decoration. We often deceive
ourselves in this matter, for what we call decoration has often a new
and genuinely poetic content of its own; but wherever there is mere
decoration, we judge the poetry to be not wholly poetic. And so when
Wordsworth inveighed against poetic diction, though he hurled his darts
rather wildly, what he was rightly aiming at was a phraseology, not the
living body of a new content, but the mere worn-out body of an old
one.[8]

In pure poetry it is otherwise. Pure poetry is not the decoration of a
preconceived and clearly defined matter: it springs from the creative
impulse of a vague imaginative mass pressing for development and
definition. If the poet already knew exactly what he meant to say, why
should he write the poem? The poem would in fact already be written. For
only its completion can reveal, even to him, exactly what he wanted.
When he began and while he was at work, he did not possess his meaning;
it possessed him. It was not a fully formed soul asking for a body: it
was an inchoate soul in the inchoate body of perhaps two or three vague
ideas and a few scattered phrases. The growing of this body into its
full stature and perfect shape was the same thing as the gradual
self-definition of the meaning.[9] And this is the reason why such poems
strike us as creations, not manufactures, and have the magical effect
which mere decoration cannot produce. This is also the reason why, if we
insist on asking for the meaning of such a poem, we can only be answered
'It means itself.'

And so at last I may explain why I have troubled myself and you with
what may seem an arid controversy about mere words. It is not so. These
heresies which would make poetry a compound of two factors--a matter
common to it with the merest prose, _plus_ a poetic form, as the one
heresy says: a poetical substance _plus_ a negligible form, as the other
says--are not only untrue, they are injurious to the dignity of poetry.
In an age already inclined to shrink from those higher realms where
poetry touches religion and philosophy, the formalist heresy encourages
men to taste poetry as they would a fine wine, which has indeed an
aesthetic value, but a small one. And then the natural man, finding an
empty form, hurls into it the matter of cheap pathos, rancid sentiment,
vulgar humour, bare lust, ravenous vanity--everything which, in
Schiller's phrase,[10] the form should extirpate, but which no mere form
can extirpate. And the other heresy--which is indeed rather a practice
than a creed--encourages us in the habit so dear to us of putting our
own thoughts or fancies into the place of the poet's creation. What he
meant by _Hamlet_, or the _Ode to a Nightingale_, or _Abt Vogler_, we
say, is this or that which we knew already; and so we lose what he had
to tell us. But he meant what he said, and said what he meant.

Poetry in this matter is not, as good critics of painting and music
often affirm, different from the other arts; in all of them the content
is one thing with the form. What Beethoven meant by his symphony, or
Turner by his picture, was not something which you can name, but the
picture and the symphony. Meaning they have, but _what_ meaning can be
said in no language but their own: and we know this, though some strange
delusion makes us think the meaning has less worth because we cannot put
it into words. Well, it is just the same with poetry. But because poetry
is words, we vainly fancy that some other words than its own will
express its meaning. And they will do so no more--or, if you like to
speak loosely, only a trifle more--than words will express the meaning
of the Dresden Madonna.[11] Something a little like it they may indeed
express. And we may find analogues of the meaning of poetry outside it,
which may help us to appropriate it. The other arts, the best ideas of
philosophy or religion, much that nature and life offer us or force upon
us, are akin to it. But they are only akin. Nor is it the expression of
them. Poetry does not present to imagination our highest knowledge or
belief, and much less our dreams and opinions; but it, content and form
in unity, embodies in its own irreplaceable way something which embodies
itself also in other irreplaceable ways, such as philosophy or religion.
And just as each of these gives a satisfaction which the other cannot
possibly give, so we find in poetry, which cannot satisfy the needs they
meet, that which by their natures they cannot afford us. But we shall
not find it fully if we look for something else.

And now, when all is said, the question will still recur, though now in
quite another sense, What does poetry mean?[12] This unique expression,
which cannot be replaced by any other, still seems to be trying to
express something beyond itself. And this, we feel, is also what the
other arts, and religion, and philosophy are trying to express: and that
is what impels us to seek in vain to translate the one into the other.
About the best poetry, and not only the best, there floats an atmosphere
of infinite suggestion. The poet speaks to us of one thing, but in this
one thing there seems to lurk the secret of all. He said what he meant,
but his meaning seems to beckon away beyond itself, or rather to expand
into something boundless which is only focussed in it; something also
which, we feel, would satisfy not only the imagination, but the whole of
us; that something within us, and without, which everywhere

                  makes us seem
  To patch up fragments of a dream,
  Part of which comes true, and part
  Beats and trembles in the heart.

Those who are susceptible to this effect of poetry find it not only,
perhaps not most, in the ideals which she has sometimes described, but
in a child's song by Christina Rossetti about a mere crown of
wind-flowers, and in tragedies like _Lear_, where the sun seems to have
set for ever. They hear this spirit murmuring its undertone through the
_Aeneid_, and catch its voice in the song of Keats's nightingale, and
its light upon the figures on the Urn, and it pierces them no less in
Shelley's hopeless lament, _O world, O life, O time_, than in the
rapturous ecstasy of his _Life of Life_. This all-embracing perfection
cannot be expressed in poetic words or words of any kind, nor yet in
music or in colour, but the suggestion of it is in much poetry, if not
all, and poetry has in this suggestion, this 'meaning,' a great part of
its value. We do it wrong, and we defeat our own purposes, when we try
to bend it to them:

  We do it wrong, being so majestical,
  To offer it the show of violence;
  For it is as the air invulnerable,
  And our vain blows malicious mockery.

It is a spirit. It comes we know not whence. It will not speak at our
bidding, nor answer in our language. It is not our servant; it is our
master.

1901


  NOTE A

The purpose of this sentence was not, as has been supposed, to give a
definition of poetry. To define poetry as something that goes on in us
when we read poetically would be absurd indeed. My object was to suggest
to my hearers in passing that it is futile to ask questions about the
end, or substance, or form of poetry, if we forget that a poem is
neither a mere number of black marks on a white page, nor such
experience as is evoked in us when we read these marks as we read, let
us say, a newspaper article; and I suppose my hearers to know,
sufficiently for the purpose of the lecture, how that sort of reading
differs from poetical reading.

The truths thus suggested are so obvious, when stated, that I thought a
bare reminder of them would be enough. But in fact the mistakes we make
about 'subject,' 'substance,' 'form,' and the like, are due not solely
to misapprehension of our poetic experience, but to our examining what
is not this experience. The whole lecture may be called an expansion of
this statement.

The passage to which the present note refers raises difficult questions
which any attempt at a 'Poetics' ought to discuss. I will mention three.
(1) If the experience called a poem varies 'with every reader and every
time of reading' and 'exists in innumerable degrees,' what is the poem
itself, if there is such a thing? (2) How does a series of successive
experiences form _one_ poem? (3) If the object in the case of poetry and
music ('arts of hearing') is a succession somehow and to some extent
unified, how does it differ in this respect from the object in 'arts of
sight'--a building, a statue, a picture?


  NOTE B

A lyric, for example, may arise from 'real' emotions due to transitory
conditions peculiar to the poet. But these emotions and conditions,
however interesting biographically, are poetically irrelevant. The poem,
what the poet _says_, is universal, and is appropriated by people who
live centuries after him and perhaps know nothing of him and his life;
and if it arose from mere imagination it is none the worse (or the
better) for that. So far as it cannot be appropriated without a
knowledge of the circumstances in which it arose, it is probably, so
far, faulty (probably, because the difficulty _may_ come from our
distance from the whole mental world of the poet's time and country).

What is said in the text applies equally to all the arts. It applies
also to such aesthetic apprehension as does not issue in a work of art.
And it applies to this apprehension whether the object belongs to
'Nature' or to 'Man.' A beautiful landscape is not a 'real' landscape.
Much that belongs to the 'real' landscape is ignored when it is
apprehended aesthetically; and the painter only carries this unconscious
idealisation further when he deliberately alters the 'real' landscape in
further ways.

All this does not in the least imply that the 'real' thing, where there
is one (personal emotion, landscape, historical event, etc.), is of
small importance to the aesthetic apprehension or the work of art. But
it is relevant only as it appears _in_ that apprehension or work.

If an artist alters a reality (_e.g._ a well-known scene or historical
character) so much that his product clashes violently with our familiar
ideas, he may be making a mistake: not because his product is untrue to
the reality (this by itself is perfectly irrelevant), but because the
'untruth' may make it difficult or impossible for others to appropriate
his product, or because this product may be aesthetically inferior to
the reality even as it exists in the general imagination.


  NOTE C

For the purpose of the experiment you must, of course, know the sounds
denoted by the letters, and you must be able to make out the rhythmical
scheme. But the experiment will be vitiated if you get some one who
understands the language to read or recite to you poems written in it,
for he will certainly so read or recite as to convey to you something of
the meaning through the sound (I do not refer of course to the logical
meaning).

Hence it is clear that, if by 'versification taken by itself' one means
the versification of a _poem_, it is impossible under the requisite
conditions to get at this versification by itself. The versification of
a poem is always, to speak loosely, influenced by the sense. The bare
metrical scheme, to go no further, is practically never followed by the
poet. Suppose yourself to know no English, and to perceive merely that
in its general scheme

  It gives a very echo to the seat

is an iambic line of five feet; and then read the line as you would have
to read it; and then ask if _that_ noise is the sound of the line _in
the poem_.

In the text, therefore, more is admitted than in strictness should be
admitted. For I have assumed for the moment that you can hear the sound
of poetry if you read poetry which you do not in the least understand,
whereas in fact that sound cannot be produced at all except by a person
who knows something of the meaning.


  NOTE D

This paragraph has not, to my knowledge, been adversely criticised, but
it now appears to me seriously misleading. It refers to certain kinds of
poetry, and again to certain passages in poems, which we feel to be less
poetical than some other kinds or passages. But this difference of
degree in poeticalness (if I may use the word) is put as a difference
between 'mixed' and 'pure' poetry; and that distinction is, I think,
unreal and mischievous. Further, it is implied that in less poetical
poetry there necessarily is only a partial unity of content and form.
This (unless I am now mistaken) is a mistake, and a mistake due to
failure to hold fast the main idea of the lecture. Naturally it would be
most agreeable to me to re-write the paragraph, but if I reprint it and
expose my errors the reader will perhaps be helped to a firmer grasp of
that idea.

It is true that where poetry is most poetic we feel most decidedly how
impossible it is to separate content and form. But where poetry is less
poetic and does not make us feel this unity so decidedly, it does not
follow that the unity is imperfect. Failure or partial failure in this
unity is always (as in the case of Shakespeare referred to) a failure on
the part of the _poet_ (though it is not always due to the same causes).
It does not lie of necessity in the nature of a particular kind of
poetry (_e.g._ satire) or in the nature of a particular passage. All
poetry cannot be equally poetic, but _all_ poetry ought to maintain the
unity of content and form, and, in that sense, to be 'pure.' Only in
certain kinds, and in certain passages, it is more difficult for the
poet to maintain it than in others.

Let us take first the 'passages' and suppose them to occur in one of the
more poetic kinds of poetry. In certain parts of any epic or tragedy
matter has to be treated which, though necessary to the whole, is not in
itself favourable to poetry, or would not in itself be a good 'subject.'
But it is the business of the poet to do his best to make this matter
poetry, and pure poetry. And, if he succeeds, the passage, though it
will probably be less poetic than the bulk of the poem, will exhibit the
complete unity of content and form. It will not strike us as a mere
bridge between other passages; it will be enjoyable for itself; and it
will not occur to us to think that the poet was dealing with an
un-poetic 'matter' and found his task difficult or irksome. Shakespeare
frequently does not trouble himself to face this problem and leaves an
imperfect unity. The conscientious artists, like Virgil, Milton,
Tennyson, habitually face, it and frequently solve it.[13] And when they
wholly or partially fail, the fault is still _theirs_. It is, in one
sense, due to the 'matter,' which set a hard problem; but they would be
the first to declare that _nothing_ in the poem ought to be only mixedly
poetic.

In the same way, satire is not in its nature a highly poetic kind of
poetry, but it ought, in its own kind, to be poetry throughout, and
therefore ought not to show a merely partial unity of content and form.
If the satirist makes us exclaim 'This is sheer prose wonderfully well
disguised,' that is a fault, and _his_ fault (unless it happens to be
ours). The idea that a tragedy or lyric could really be reproduced in a
form not its own strikes us as ridiculous; the idea that a satire could
so be reproduced seems much less ridiculous; but if it were true the
satire would not be poetry at all.

The reader will now see where, in my judgment, the paragraph is wrong.
Elsewhere it is, I think, right, though it deals with a subject far too
large for a paragraph. This is also true of the next paragraph, which
uses the false distinction of 'pure' and 'mixed,' and which will hold in
various degrees of poetry in various degrees poetical.

It is of course possible to use a distinction of 'pure' and 'mixed' in
another sense. Poetry, whatever its kind, would be pure as far as it
preserved the unity of content and form; mixed, so far as it failed to
do so--in other words, failed to be poetry and was partly prosaic.


  NOTE E

It is possible therefore that the poem, as it existed at certain stages
in its growth, may correspond roughly with the poem as it exists in the
memories of various readers. A reader who is fond of the poem and often
thinks of it, but remembers only half the words and perhaps fills up the
gaps with his own words, may possess something like the poem as it was
when half-made. There are readers again who retain only what they would
call the 'idea' of the poem; and the poem _may_ have begun from such an
idea. Others will forget all the words, and will not profess to remember
even the 'meaning,' but believe that they possess the 'spirit' of the
poem. And what they possess may have, I think, an immense value. The
poem, of course, it is not; but it may answer to the state of
imaginative feeling or emotional imagination which was the germ of the
poem. This is, in one sense, quite definite: it would not be the germ of
a decidedly different poem: but in another sense it is indefinite,
comparatively structureless, more a 'stimmung' than an idea.

Such correspondences, naturally, must be very rough, if only because the
readers have been at one time in contact with the fully grown poem.


  NOTE F

I should be sorry if what is said here and elsewhere were taken to imply
depreciation of all attempts at the interpretation of works of art. As
regards poetry, such attempts, though they cannot possibly express the
whole meaning of a poem, may do much to facilitate the poetic
apprehension of that meaning. And, although the attempt is still more
hazardous in the case of music and painting, I believe it may have a
similar value. That its results _may_ be absurd or disgusting goes
without saying, and whether they are ever of use to musicians or the
musically educated I do not know. But I see no reason why an exceedingly
competent person should not try to indicate the emotional tone of a
composition, movement, or passage, or the changes of feeling within it,
or even, very roughly, the 'idea' he may suppose it to embody (though he
need not imply that the composer had any of this before his mind). And I
believe that such indications, however inadequate they must be, may
greatly help the uneducated lover of music to hear more truly the music
itself.


  NOTE G

This new question has 'quite another sense' than that of the question,
What is the meaning or content expressed by the form of a poem? The new
question asks, What is it that the _poem_, the unity of this content and
form, is trying to express? This 'beyond' is beyond the content as well
as the form.

Of course, I should add, it is not _merely_ beyond them or outside of
them. If it were, they (the poem) could not 'suggest' it. They are a
partial manifestation of it, and point beyond themselves to it, both
because they _are_ a manifestation and because this is partial.

The same thing is true, not only (as is remarked in the text) of the
other arts and of religion and philosophy, but also of what is commonly
called reality. This reality is a manifestation of a different order
from poetry, and in certain important respects a much more imperfect
manifestation. Hence, as was pointed out (pp. 6, 7, note B), poetry is
not a copy of it, but in dealing with it idealises it, and in doing so
produces in certain respects a fuller manifestation. On the other hand,
that imperfect 'reality' has for us a character in which poetry is
deficient,--the character in virtue of which we call it 'reality.' It
is, we feel, thrust upon us, not made by us or by any other man. And in
this respect it seems more akin than poetry to that 'beyond,' or
absolute, or perfection, which we want, which partially expresses itself
in both, and which could not be perfection and could not satisfy us if
it were not real (though it cannot be real in the same sense as that
imperfect 'reality'). This seems the ultimate ground of the requirement
that poetry, though no copy of 'reality,' should not be mere 'fancy,'
but should refer to, and interpret, that 'reality.' For that reality,
however imperfectly it reveals perfection, is at least no mere fancy.
(Not that the merest fancy can fail to reveal something of perfection.)

The lines quoted on p. 26 are from a fragment of Shelley's beginning 'Is
it that in some brighter sphere.'


FOOTNOTES:

  [1] The lecture, as printed in 1901, was preceded by the following
    note: "This Lecture is printed almost as it was delivered. I am aware
    that, especially in the earlier pages, difficult subjects are treated
    in a manner far too summary, but they require an exposition so full
    that it would destroy the original form of the Lecture, while a
    slight expansion would do little to provide against
    misunderstandings." A few verbal changes have now been made, some
    notes have been added, and some of the introductory remarks omitted.

  [2] Note A.

  [3] Note B.

  [4] What is here called 'substance' is what people generally mean
    when they use the word 'subject' and insist on the value of the
    subject. I am not arguing against this usage, or in favour of the
    usage which I have adopted for the sake of clearness. It does not
    matter which we employ, so long as we and others know what we mean.
    (I use 'substance' and 'content' indifferently.)

  [5] These remarks will hold good, _mutatis mutandis_, if by
    'substance' is understood the 'moral' or the 'idea' of a poem,
    although perhaps in one instance out of five thousand this may be
    found in so many words in the poem.

  [6] On the other hand, the absence, or worse than absence, of style,
    in this sense, is a serious matter.

  [7] Note C.

  [8] This paragraph is criticized in Note D.

  [9]: Note E.

  [10] Not that to Schiller 'form' meant mere style and versification.

  [11] Note F.

  [12] Note G.

  [13] In Schiller's phrase, they have extirpated the mere 'matter.' We
    often say that they do this by dint of style. This is roughly true,
    but in strictness it means, as we have seen, not that they decorate
    the mere 'matter' with a mere 'form,' but that they produce a new
    content-form.




THE SUBLIME


THE SUBLIME[1]


Coleridge used to tell a story about his visit to the Falls of Clyde;
but he told it with such variations that the details are uncertain, and
without regard to truth I shall change it to the shape that suits my
purpose best. After gazing at the Falls for some time, he began to
consider what adjective would answer most precisely to the impression he
had received; and he came to the conclusion that the proper word was
'sublime.' Two other tourists arrived, and, standing by him, looked in
silence at the spectacle. Then, to Coleridge's high satisfaction, the
gentleman exclaimed, 'It is sublime.' To which the lady responded, 'Yes,
it is the prettiest thing I ever saw.'

This poor lady's incapacity (for I assume that Coleridge and her husband
were in the right) is ludicrous, but it is also a little painful.
Sublimity and prettiness are qualities separated by so great a distance
that our sudden attempt to unite them has a comically incongruous
effect. At the same time the first of these qualities is so exalted that
the exhibition of entire inability to perceive it is distressing.
Astonishment, rapture, awe, even self-abasement, are among the emotions
evoked by sublimity. Many would be inclined to pronounce it the very
highest of all the forms assumed by beauty, whether in nature or in
works of imagination.

I propose to make some remarks on this quality, and even to attempt some
sort of answer to the question what sublimity is. I say 'some sort of
answer,' because the question is large and difficult, and I can deal
with it only in outline and by drawing artificial limits round it and
refusing to discuss certain presuppositions on which the answer rests.
What I mean by these last words will be evident if I begin by referring
to a term which will often recur in this lecture--the term 'beauty.'

When we call sublimity a form of beauty, as I did just now, the word
'beauty' is obviously being used in the widest sense. It is the sense
which the word bears when we distinguish beauty from goodness and from
truth, or when 'beautiful' is taken to signify anything and everything
that gives aesthetic satisfaction, or when 'Aesthetics' and 'Philosophy
of the Beautiful' are used as equivalent expressions. Of beauty, thus
understood, sublimity is one particular kind among a number of others,
for instance prettiness. But 'beauty' and 'beautiful' have also another
meaning, narrower and more specific, as when we say that a thing is
pretty but not beautiful, or that it is beautiful but not sublime. The
beauty we have in view here is evidently not the same as beauty in the
wider sense; it is only, like sublimity or prettiness, a particular kind
or mode of that beauty. This ambiguity of the words 'beauty' and
'beautiful' is a great inconvenience, and especially so in a lecture,
where it forces us to add some qualification to the words whenever they
occur: but it cannot be helped. (Now that the lecture is printed I am
able to avoid these qualifications by printing the words in inverted
commas where they bear the narrower sense.)[2]

Now, obviously, all the particular kinds or modes of beauty must have,
up to a certain point, the same nature. They must all possess that
character in virtue of which they are called beautiful rather than good
or true. And so a philosopher, investigating one of these kinds, would
first have to determine this common nature or character; and then he
would go on to ascertain what it is that distinguishes the particular
kind from its companions. But here we cannot follow such a method. The
nature of beauty in general is so much disputed and so variously defined
that to discuss it here by way of preface would be absurd; and on the
other hand it would be both presumptuous and useless to assume the truth
of any one account of it. Our only plan, therefore, must be to leave it
entirely alone, and to consider merely the distinctive character of
sublimity. Let beauty in general be what it may, what is it that marks
off _this_ kind of beauty from others, and what is there peculiar in our
state of mind when we are moved to apply to anything the specific
epithet 'sublime'?--such is our question. And this plan is not merely
the only possible one, but it is, I believe, quite justifiable, since,
so far as I can see, the answer to our particular question, unless it is
pushed further than I propose to go, is unaffected by the differences
among theories of repute concerning beauty in general. At the same time,
it is essential to realise and always to bear in mind one consequence of
this plan; which is that our account of what is peculiar to sublimity
will not be an account of sublimity in its full nature. For sublimity is
not those peculiar characteristics alone, it is that _beauty_ which is
distinguished by them, and a large part of its effect is due to that
general nature of beauty which it shares with other kinds, and which we
leave unexamined.

In considering the question thus defined I propose to start from our
common aesthetic experience and to attempt to arrive at an answer by
degrees. It will be understood, therefore, that our first results may
have to be modified as we proceed. And I will venture to ask my hearers,
further, to ignore for the time any doubts they may feel whether I am
right in saying, by way of illustration, that this or that thing is
sublime. Such differences of opinion scarcely affect our question, which
is not whether in a given case the epithet is rightly applied, but what
the epithet signifies. And it has to be borne in mind that, while no two
kinds of beauty can be quite the same, a _thing_ may very well possess
beauty of two different kinds.

Let us begin by placing side by side five terms which represent five of
the many modes of beauty--sublime, grand, 'beautiful,' graceful, pretty.
'Beautiful' is here placed in the middle. Before it come two terms,
sublime and grand; and beyond it lie two others, graceful and pretty.
Now is it not the case that the first two, though not identical, still
seem to be allied in some respect; that the last two also seem to be
allied in some respect; that in this respect, whatever it may be, these
two pairs seem to stand apart from one another, and even to stand in
contrast; that 'beauty,' in this respect, seems to hold a neutral
position, though perhaps inclining rather to grace than to grandeur; and
that the extreme terms, sublime and pretty, seem in this respect to be
the most widely removed; so that this series of five constitutes, in a
sense, a descending series,--descending not necessarily in value, but in
some particular respect not yet assigned? If, for example, in the lady's
answer, 'Yes, it is the prettiest thing I ever saw,' you substitute for
'prettiest' first 'most graceful,' and then 'most beautiful,' and then
'grandest,' you will find that your astonishment at her diminishes at
each step, and that at the last, when she identifies sublimity and
grandeur, she is guilty no longer of an absurdity, but only of a slight
anti-climax. If, I may add, she had said 'majestic,' the anti-climax
would have been slighter still, and, in fact, in one version of the
story Coleridge says that 'majestic' was the word he himself chose.

What then is the 'respect' in question here,--the something or other in
regard to which sublimity and grandeur seemed to be allied with one
another, and to differ decidedly from grace and prettiness? It appears
to be greatness. Thousands of things are 'beautiful,' graceful, or
pretty, and yet make no impression of greatness, nay, this impression in
many cases appears to collide with, and even to destroy, that of grace
or prettiness, so that if a pretty thing produced it you would cease to
call it pretty. But whatever strikes us as sublime produces an
impression of greatness, and more--of exceeding or even overwhelming
greatness. And this greatness, further, is apparently no mere
accompaniment of sublimity, but essential to it: remove the greatness in
imagination, and the sublimity vanishes. Grandeur, too, seems always to
possess greatness, though not in this superlative degree; while 'beauty'
neither invariably possesses it nor tends, like prettiness and grace, to
exclude it. I will try, not to defend these statements by argument, but
to develop their meaning by help of illustrations, dismissing from view
the minor differences between these modes of beauty, and, for the most
part, leaving grandeur out of account.

We need not ask here what is the exact meaning of that 'greatness' of
which I have spoken: but we must observe at once that the greatness in
question is of more than one kind. Let us understand by the term, to
begin with, greatness of extent,--of size, number, or duration; and let
us ask whether sublime things are, in this sense, exceedingly great.
Some certainly are. The vault of heaven, one expanse of blue, or dark
and studded with countless and prodigiously distant stars; the sea that
stretches to the horizon and beyond it, a surface smooth as glass or
breaking into innumerable waves; time, to which we can imagine no
beginning and no end,--these furnish favourite examples of sublimity;
and to call them great seems almost mockery, for they are images of
immeasurable magnitude. When we turn from them to living beings, of
course our standard of greatness changes;[3] but, using the standard
appropriate to the sphere, we find again that the sublime things have,
for the most part, great magnitude. A graceful tree need not be a large
one; a pretty tree is almost always small; but a sublime tree is almost
always large. If you were asked to mention sublime animals, you would
perhaps suggest, among birds, the eagle; among fishes, if any, the
whale; among beasts, the lion or the tiger, the python or the elephant.
But you would find it hard to name a sublime insect; and indeed it is
not easy, perhaps not possible, to feel sublimity in any animal smaller
than oneself, unless one goes beyond the special kind of greatness at
present under review. Consider again such facts as these: that a human
being of average, or even of less than average, stature and build may be
graceful and even 'beautiful,' but can hardly, in respect of stature and
build, be grand or sublime; that we most commonly think of flowers as
little things, and also most commonly think of them as 'beautiful,'
graceful, pretty, but rarely as grand, and still more rarely as
sublime, and that in these latter cases we do not think of them as
small; that a mighty river may well be sublime, but hardly a stream; a
towering or far-stretching mountain, but hardly a low hill; a vast
bridge, but hardly one of moderate span; a great cathedral, but hardly a
village church; that a model of a sublime building is not sublime,
unless in imagination you expand it to the dimensions of its original;
that a plain, though flat, may be sublime if its extent is immense; that
while we constantly say 'a pretty little thing,' or even 'a beautiful
little thing,' nobody ever says 'a sublime little thing.' Examples like
these seem to show clearly--not that bigness is sublimity, for bigness
need have no beauty, while sublimity is a mode of beauty--but that this
particular mode of beauty is frequently connected with, and dependent
on, exceeding greatness of extent.

Let us now take a further step. Can there be sublimity when such
greatness is absent? And, if there can, is greatness of some other sort
always present in such cases, and essential to the sublime effect? The
answer to the first of these questions is beyond doubt. Children have no
great extension, and what Wordsworth calls 'a six-years' darling of a
pigmy size' is (if a darling) generally called pretty but not sublime;
for it _is_ 'of a pigmy size.' Yet it certainly _may_ be sublime, and it
is so to the poet who addresses it thus:

  Thou whose exterior semblance doth belie
    Thy soul's immensity....
  Mighty prophet! Seer blest!
  On whom those truths do rest
  Which we are toiling all our lives to find.

A baby is still smaller, but a baby too may be sublime. The starry sky
is not more sublime than the babe on the arm of the Madonna di San
Sisto. A sparrow is more diminutive still; but that it is possible for a
sparrow to be sublime is not difficult to show. This is a translation
of a prose poem by Tourgenieff:

  I was on my way home from hunting, and was walking up the garden
  avenue. My dog was running on in front of me.

  Suddenly he slackened his pace, and began to steal forward as though
  he scented game ahead.

  I looked along the avenue; and I saw on the ground a young sparrow,
  its beak edged with yellow, and its head covered with soft down. It
  had fallen from the nest (a strong wind was blowing, and shaking the
  birches of the avenue); and there it sat and never stirred, except to
  stretch out its little half-grown wings in a helpless flutter.

  My dog was slowly approaching it, when suddenly, darting from the tree
  overhead, an old black-throated sparrow dropt like a stone right
  before his nose, and, all rumpled and flustered, with a plaintive
  desperate cry flung itself, once, twice, at his open jaws with their
  great teeth.

  It would save its young one; it screened it with its own body; the
  tiny frame quivered with terror; the little cries grew wild and
  hoarse; it sank and died. It had sacrificed itself.

  What a huge monster the dog must have seemed to it! And yet it could
  not stay up there on its safe bough. A power stronger than its own
  will tore it away.

  My dog stood still, and then slunk back disconcerted. Plainly he too
  had to recognise that power. I called him to me; and a feeling of
  reverence came over me as I passed on.

  Yes, do not laugh. It was really reverence I felt before that little
  heroic bird and the passionate outburst of its love.

  Love, I thought, is verily stronger than death and the terror of
  death. By love, only by love, is life sustained and moved.

This sparrow, it will be agreed, is sublime. What, then, makes it so?
Not largeness of size, assuredly, but, we answer, its love and courage.
Yes; but what do we mean by '_its_ love and courage'? We often meet with
love and courage, and always admire and approve them; but we do not
always find them sublime. Why, then, are they sublime in the sparrow?
From their extraordinary greatness. It is not in the quality alone, but
in the quantity of the quality, that the sublimity lies. And this may be
readily seen if we imagine the quantity to be considerably reduced,--if
we imagine the parent bird, after its first brave effort, flinching and
flying away, or if we suppose the bird that sacrifices itself to be no
sparrow but a turkey. In either case love and courage would remain, but
sublimity would recede or vanish, simply because the love and courage
would no longer possess the required immensity.[4]

The sublimity of the sparrow, then, no less than that of the sky or sea,
depends on exceeding or overwhelming greatness--a greatness, however,
not of extension but rather of strength or power, and in this case of
spiritual power. 'Love is _stronger_ than death,' quotes the poet; 'a
power _stronger_ than its own tore it away.' So it is with the dog of
whom Scott and Wordsworth sang, whose master had perished among the
crags of Helvellyn, and who was found three months after by his master's
body,

  How nourished here through such long time
  He knows who gave that love sublime,
  And gave that strength of feeling, great
  Above all human estimate.[5]

And if we look further we shall find that these cases of sublimity are,
in this respect, far from being exceptions: 'thy soul's _immensity_,'
says Wordsworth to the child; '_mighty_ prophet' he calls it. We shall
find, in fact, that in the sublime, when there is not greatness of
extent, there is another greatness, which (without saying that the
phrase is invariably the most appropriate) we may call greatness of
power and which in these cases is essential.

We must develop this statement a little. Naturally the power, and
therefore the sublimity, will differ in its character in different
instances, and therefore will affect us variously. It may be--to
classify very roughly--physical, or vital, or (in the old wide sense of
the word) moral, like that of the sparrow and the dog. And physical
force will appeal to the imagination in one way, and vital in another,
and moral or spiritual in another. But it is still power of some kind
that makes a thing sublime rather than graceful, and immensity of power
that makes it sublime rather than merely grand. For example, the lines
of the water in a thin cascade may be exquisitely graceful, but such a
cascade has not power enough to be sublime. Flickering fire in a grate
is often 'beautiful,' but it is not sublime; the fire of a big bonfire
is on the way to be so; a 'great fire' frequently is so, because it
gives the impression of tremendous power. The ocean, in those stanzas of
_Childe Harold_ which no amount of familiarity or of defect can deprive
of their sublimity, is the untameable monster which engulfs men as
lightly as rain-drops and shatters fleets like toys. The sublimity of
Behemoth and Leviathan in the _Book of Job_ lies in the contrast of
their enormous might with the puny power of man; that of the horse in
the fiery energy of his courage and strength. Think of sublime figures
or ideas in the world of fiction or of history, and you find that,
whether they are radiant or gloomy, violent or peaceful, terrible or
adorable, they all impress the imagination by their immense or even
irresistible might. It is so with Achilles, standing alone beyond the
wall, with the light of the divine flame soaring from his head, while he
sends across the trench that shout at whose far-off sound the hearts of
the Trojans die within them; or with Odysseus, when the moment of his
vengeance has come, and he casts off his rags, and leaps onto the
threshold with his bow, and pours his arrows down at his feet, and looks
down the long hall at the doomed faces of his feasting enemies. Milton's
Satan is sublime when he refuses to accept defeat from an omnipotent
foe; he ceases to be so in tempting Eve, because here he shows not power
but cunning, and we feel not the strength of his cunning but the
weakness of his victim. In the bust of Zeus in the Vatican, in some of
the figures of the Medici Chapel, in 'The horse and his rider,' we feel
again sublimity, because we feel gigantic power, put forth or held in
reserve. Fate or Death, imagined as a lurking assassin, is not sublime,
but may become so when imagined as inevitable, irresistible,
_ineluctabile fatum_. The eternal laws to which Antigone appeals, like
that Duty which preserves the strength and freshness of the most ancient
heavens, are sublime. Prometheus, the saviour of mankind, opposing a
boundless power of enduring pain to a boundless power of inflicting it;
Regulus returning unmoved to his doom; Socrates, serene and even joyous
in the presence of injury and death and the lamentations of his friends,
are sublime. The words 'I have overcome the world' are among the most
sublime on record, and they are also the expression of the absolute
power of the spirit.[6]

It seems clear, then, that sublimity very often arises from an
overwhelming greatness of power. So abundant, indeed, are the instances
that one begins to wonder whether it ever arises from any other kind of
greatness, and whether we were right in supposing that mere magnitude of
extension can produce it. Would such magnitude, however prodigious, seem
to us sublime unless we insensibly construed it as the sign of power? In
the case of living things, at any rate, this doubt seems to be well
founded. A tree is sublime not because it occupies a large extent of
empty space or time, but from the power in it which raises aloft and
spreads abroad a thousand branches and a million leaves, or which has
battled for centuries with buffeting storms and has seen summers and
winters arise and pass like the hours of our day. It is not the mere
bulk of the lion or the eagle that wins them their title as king of
beasts or of birds, but the power exhibited in the gigantic head and arm
or the stretch of wing and the piercing eye. And even when we pass from
the realm of life our doubt remains. Would a mountain, a river, or a
building be sublime to us if we did not read their masses and lines as
symbols of force? Would even the illimitable extent of sea or sky, the
endlessness of time, or the countlessness of stars or sands or waves,
bring us anything but fatigue or depression if we did not apprehend
them, in some way and however vaguely, as expressions of immeasurable
power--power that created them, or lives in them, or _can_ count them;
so that what impresses us is not the mere absence of limits, but the
presence of something that overpowers any imaginable limit? If these
doubts are justified (as in my opinion they are), the conclusion will
follow that the exceeding greatness required for sublimity is _always_
greatness of some kind of power, though in one class of cases the
impression of this greatness can only be conveyed through immensity of
extent.

However this question may be decided, our result so far seems to be that
the peculiarity of the sublime lies in some exceeding and overwhelming
greatness. But before this result can be considered safe, two obstacles
must be removed. In the first place, are there no negative instances? Is
it impossible to find anything sublime which does _not_ show this
greatness? Naturally I can say no more than that I have conscientiously
searched for exceptions to the rule and have searched in vain. I can
find only apparent exceptions which in reality confirm the rule; and I
will mention only those which look the most formidable. They are cases
where at first sight there seems to be not merely an inconsiderable
amount of power or other greatness, but actually the negation of it. For
example, the silence of night, or the sudden pause in a storm or in
stormy music, or again the silence and movelessness of death, may
undoubtedly be sublime; and how, it may be asked, can a mere absence of
sound and motion be an exhibition of immense greatness? It cannot, I
answer; but neither can it be sublime. If you apprehend the silence in
these cases as a mere absence, no feeling of sublimity will arise in
your mind; and if you do apprehend the silence as sublime, it is to you
the sign of immense power, put forth or held in reserve. The 'dead pause
abrupt of mighty winds' is the pause _of_ mighty winds and not of gentle
breezes; and it is not the absence of mighty winds, but their _pause_
before they burst into renewed fury; or if their silence is not their
will, it is a silence imposed on them by something mightier even than
they. In either case there may be sublimity, but then there is the
impression of immense power. In the same way the silence of night, when
it seems sublime, is apprehended not as the absence but as the subdual
of sound,--the stillness wrought by a power so mighty that at its touch
all the restless noises of the day fall dumb,--or the brooding of an
omnipotent peace over the world. And such a peace it is, an unassailable
peace, that may make the face of death sublime, a stillness which is not
moveless but immovable.[7]

At present, then, our result seems to stand firm. But another danger
remains. Granted that in the sublime there is always some exceeding and
overwhelming greatness, is that _all_ there is? Is there not in every
case some further characteristic? This question, premising that the
phrase 'overwhelming greatness' contains important implications which
have yet to be considered, I can only answer like the last. I do not
find any other peculiarity that is _always_ present. Several have been
alleged, and one or two of these will be mentioned later, but none of
them appears to show itself indubitably wherever sublimity is found. It
is easy to give a much fuller account of the sublime if you include in
it everything that impresses you in a sublime baby while you omit to
consider Behemoth, or if you build upon Socrates and ignore Satan, or if
you confine yourself to the sublime thunderstorm and forget the sublime
rainbow or sunrise. But then your account will not answer to the
instances you have ignored; and when you take them in you will have to
pare it down until perhaps you end in a result like ours. At any rate we
had better be content with it for the present, and turn to another
aspect of the matter.[8]

So far, on the whole, we have been regarding the sublime object as if
its sublimity were independent of our state of mind in feeling and
apprehending it. Yet the adjective in the phrase 'overwhelming
greatness' should at once suggest the truth that this state of mind is
essential to sublimity. Let us now therefore look inward, and ask how
this state differs from our state in perceiving or imagining what is
graceful or 'beautiful.' Since Kant dealt with the subject, most writers
who have thought about it have agreed that there is a decided
difference, which I will try to describe broadly, and without pledging
myself to the entire accuracy of the description.

When, on seeing or hearing something, we exclaim, How graceful! or How
lovely! or How 'beautiful'! there is in us an immediate outflow of
pleasure, an unchecked expansion, a delightful sense of harmony between
the thing and ourselves.

                            The air
  Nimbly and sweetly recommends itself
  Unto our gentle senses.... The heaven's breath
  Smells wooingly here.

The thing wins us and draws us towards itself without resistance.
Something in us hastens to meet it in sympathy or love. Our feeling, we
may say, is entirely affirmative. For though it is not always untouched
by pain (for the thing may have sadness in it),[9] this touch of pain or
sadness does not mean any disharmony between the thing and us, or
involve any check in our acceptance of it.

In the case of sublimity, on the other hand, this acceptance does not
seem to be so simple or immediate. There seem, in fact, to be two
'aspects' or stages in it.[10] First--if only for a fraction of a
second--there is a sense of being checked, or baffled, or even
stupefied, or possibly even repelled or menaced, as though something
were affecting us which we could not receive, or grasp, or stand up to.
In certain cases we appear to shrink away from it, as though it thrust
upon us a sense of our own feebleness or insignificance. This we may
call by the convenient but too strong name of the negative stage. It is
essential to sublimity; and nothing seems to correspond to it in our
perception of loveliness or grace except sometimes a sense of surprise
or wonder, which is wholly pleasant, and which does not necessarily
qualify the lovely or graceful thing.

But this first stage or aspect clearly does not by itself suffice for
sublimity. To it there succeeds, it may be instantaneously or more
gradually, another: a powerful reaction, a rush of self-expansion, or an
uplifting, or a sense of being borne out of the self that was checked,
or even of being carried away beyond all checks and limits. These
feelings, even when the sublime thing might be called forbidding,
menacing, or terrible, are always positive,--feelings of union with it;
and, when its nature permits of this, they may amount to rapture or
adoration. But the mark of the negation from which they have issued, the
'smell of the fire,' usually remains on them. The union, we may say
perhaps, has required a self-surrender, and the rapture or adoration is
often strongly tinged with awe.

Now, this peculiar doubleness in our apprehension of sublimity, this
presence of two equally necessary stages or phases, a negative and a
positive, seems to correspond with the peculiarity which we found in the
sublime object when we were provisionally regarding it by itself. It is
its overwhelming greatness which for a moment checks, baffles, subdues,
even repels us or makes us feel our littleness, and which then, forcing
its way into the imagination and emotions, distends or uplifts them to
its own dimensions. We burst our own limits, go out to the sublime thing,
identify ourselves ideally with it, and share its immense greatness. But
if, and in so far as, we remain conscious of our difference from it, we
still feel the insignificance of our actual selves, and our glory is
mingled with awe or even with self-abasement.[11]

In writing thus I was endeavouring simply and without any _arriere
pensee_ to describe a mode of aesthetic experience. But it must have
occurred to some of my hearers that the description recalls other kinds
of experience. And if they find it accurate in the main, they will
appreciate, even if they do not accept, the exalted claim which
philosophers, in various forms, have made for the sublime. It awakes in
us, they say, through the check or shock which it gives to our finitude,
the consciousness of an infinite or absolute; and this is the reason of
the kinship we feel between this particular mode of aesthetic experience
on the one side, and, on the other, morality or religion. For there, by
the denial of our merely finite or individual selves, we rise into union
with the law which imposes on us an unconditional demand, or with the
infinite source and end of our spiritual life.

These are ideas much too large to be considered now, and even later I
can but touch on them. But the mere mention of them may carry us to the
last enquiries with which we can deal. For it suggests this question:
Supposing that high claim to be justified at all, can it really be made
for _all_ sublimity, or must it not be confined to the very highest
forms? A similar question must be raised as to various other statements
regarding the sublime; and I go on to speak of some of these.

(1) Burke asserted that the sublime is always founded on fear; indeed he
considered this to be its distinguishing characteristic. Setting aside,
then, the connection of this statement with Burke's general doctrine (a
doctrine impossible to accept), we may ask, Is it true that the 'check'
administered by the sublime object is always one of fear? We must
answer, first, that if this check is part of an aesthetic experience and
not a mere preliminary to it, it can _never_ be fear in the common
meaning of that word, or what may be called practical or real fear. So
far as we are _practically_ afraid of a storm or a mountain, afraid, for
instance, for ourselves as bodily beings in this particular spatial and
temporal position, the storm or mountain is not sublime to us, it is
simply terrible. _That_ fear must be absent, or must not engage
attention, or must be changed in character, if the object is to be for
us _sublimely_ terrible, something with which we identify ourselves in
imaginative sympathy, and which so causes a great self-expansion. But,
secondly, even if 'fear' is understood rightly as indicating a feature
in an aesthetic and not a practical experience, our question must
obviously be answered in the negative. There is fear in the apprehension
of some sublimity, but by no means in that of all. If there is a
momentary check, for example, in the case of a rainbow, a glorious
sunrise, the starry night, Socrates, or Tourgenieff's sparrow, 'fear,'
unless the meaning of the word is unnaturally extended, is surely not
the name for this check.

Burke's mistake, however, implies a recognition of the 'negative aspect'
in sublimity, and it may remind us of a truth. Instances of the sublime
differ greatly in regard to the prominence and tone of this aspect. It
is less marked, for example, and less obvious, in the case of a sublime
rainbow or sunrise than in that of a sublime and 'terrible'
thunderstorm. And in general we may say that the _distinctive_ nature of
sublimity appears most clearly where this aspect is most prominent,--so
prominent, perhaps, that we have a more or less explicit sense of the
littleness and powerlessness of ourselves, and indeed of the whole
world of our usual experience. It is here that the object is most
decidedly more than 'glorious,' or even 'majestic,' and that sublimity
appears in antithesis to grace. Only we must not give an account of the
sublime which fully applies to these cases _alone_, or suppose that the
negative aspect is absent in other cases. If a rainbow or sunrise is
really sublime, it is overwhelming as well as uplifting. Nor must we
assume that the most distinctively sublime must also be the most
sublime. The sunrise witnessed from an immense snowfield in the high
Alps may be as sublime as an Alpine thunderstorm, though its sublimity
is different.

(2) Grace and 'beauty,' it has been said, though not of course merely
sensuous, are yet friendly to sense. It is their essence, in fact, to be
a harmonious unity of sense and spirit, and so to reconcile powers which
in much of our experience are conflicting and dissonant. But sublimity
is harsh and hostile to sense. It makes us feel in ourselves and in the
world the presence of something irresistibly superior to sense. And this
is the reason why it does not soothe or delight, but uplifts us.

This statement recalls some of the ideas we have been considering, but
it may easily mislead. For one thing, it is impossible for any sublimity
whatever to be _merely_ hostile to 'sense,' since everything aesthetic
must appeal to sense or sensuous imagination, so that the sublime must
at least express its hostility to sense by means of sense. And if we
take the phrase in another meaning, the statement may mislead still, for
it attributes to sublimity in general what is a characteristic only of
certain forms of the sublime. Scores of examples could easily be quoted
which show no hostility to sense: _e.g._ a sublime lion, or bull, or
tree. And if we think of our old examples of the rainbow and the
sunrise, or, better still, of a thunderstorm, or 'The horse and his
rider,' or the 'Sanctus' in Bach's Mass, we find the sublime thing
actually making a powerful appeal to sense and depending for its
sublimity on the vehemence or volume of this appeal. Diminish at all
markedly in these cases the amount of light, colour, or sound, and the
sublimity would vanish. Of course the appeal here is not merely to
sense, but it _is_ to sense.

But undoubtedly there is another kind of sublimity; and it is
particularly interesting. Here, it is true, a sort of despite is done to
the senses and what speaks to them. As we have seen, the greatness of
soul in the sparrow is enhanced by contrast with the smallness and
feebleness of its body, and pours contempt on the visible magnitude of
the hound; and the stillness of night or death is sublime from its
active negation of sound and motion. Again, there is a famous passage
which depends for its effect on this, that, first, sublime things are
introduced which appeal powerfully to sense, and then something else,
which does not so appeal, is made to appear even more sublime and to put
them to shame: first a great and strong wind, an earthquake, a fire; and
after the fire a still small voice. Sometimes, again, as Burke observed,
sublimity depends on, or is increased by, darkness, obscurity,
vagueness,--refusal of satisfaction to the sense of sight. Often in
these cases the sublime object is terrible, and its terror is increased
by inability to see or distinguish it. Examples are the image of 'the
pestilence that walketh in darkness,' or Milton's description of Death,
or the lines in the _Book of Job_:

  In thoughts from the visions of the night
  When deep sleep falleth on men,
  Fear came upon me and trembling,
  Which made all my bones to shake.
  Then a spirit passed before my face;
  The hair of my flesh stood up.
  It stood still, but I could not discern the form thereof.
  An image was before mine eyes.
  There was silence, and I heard a voice.

It has been observed that attempts to illustrate such passages as these
dissipate their sublimity by diminishing the obscurity of the object.
Blake's illustrations of the lines in Milton and in _Job_[12] show this,
while his design of the morning-stars singing together is worthy even of
the words.

We may trace this severity towards sense, again, in examples already
mentioned, the ideas of Fate, of the eternal laws to which Antigone
appeals, of Duty in Wordsworth's ode. We imagine these powers as removed
from sight, and indeed wholly immaterial, and yet as exercising
sovereign dominion over the visible and material world. And their
sublimity would be endangered if we tried to bring them nearer to sense
by picturing the means by which they exercise their control.

I will take a last example. It has probably been mentioned in almost
every account of the sublime since Longinus quoted it in his work on
Elevation of Style. And it is of special interest here because it
illustrates at one and the same time the two kinds of sublimity which we
are engaged in distinguishing. 'God said, Let there be light, and there
was light.' The idea of the first and instantaneous appearance of light,
and that the whole light of the whole world, is already sublime; and its
primary appeal is to sense. The further idea that this transcendently
glorious apparition is due to mere words, to a breath--our symbol of
tenuity, evanescence, impotence to influence material bulk--heightens
enormously the impression of absolutely immeasurable power.

To sum up, then, on this matter. It is not safe to distinguish the
sublime from the 'beautiful' by its hostility to sense. The sublime may
impress its overwhelming greatness in either of two ways, by an appeal
to sense, or by a kind of despite done to it. Nor can we assert, if we
think of the sunrise, the thunderstorm, or of sublime music, that the
second of these ways is more distinctive of the sublime than the first.
But perhaps we may say this. In 'beauty' that which appears in a
sensuous form seems to rest in it, to be perfectly embodied in it, and
to have no tendency to pass beyond it. In the sublime, even where no
such tendency is felt and sublimity is nearest to 'beauty,' we still
feel the presence of a power held in reserve, which could with ease
exceed its present expression. In _some_ forms of sublimity, again, the
sensuous embodiment seems threatening to break in its effort to express
what appears in it. And in others we definitely feel that the power
which for a moment intimates its presence to sense is infinite and
utterly uncontainable by any or all vehicles of its manifestation. Here
we are furthest (in a way) from sense, and furthest also from 'beauty.'

(3) I come finally and, as it will at first seem, needlessly to an idea
which has already been touched on. The words 'boundless,' 'illimitable,'
'infinite,' constantly recur in discussions of sublimity, and it cannot
be denied that our experience constantly provokes them. The sublime has
been said to awake in us the consciousness of our own infinity. It has
been said, again, to represent in all cases the inadequacy of all finite
forms to express the infinite. And so we may be told that, even if we do
not adopt some such formula, but continue to speak of 'greatness,' we
ought at least to go beyond the adjective 'exceeding' or 'overwhelming,'
and to substitute 'immeasurable' or 'incomparable' or 'infinite.'

Now, at the point we have reached, it would seem we might at once answer
that a claim is here being made for the sublime in general which really
holds good only of one kind of sublimity. Sometimes the sublime object
_is_ apprehended as the Infinite, or again as an expression of it. This
is, for example, a point of view frequent in Hebrew poetry. Sometimes,
again, the object (_e.g._ time or the heavens) is apprehended, not
indeed as _the_ Infinite, but still as infinite or immeasurable. But how
are we to say that a sublime lion or mountain, or Satan or Lady Macbeth,
is apprehended as the Infinite, or as infinite, or (usually) as even an
expression of the Infinite? And how are we to say that the greatness of
most sublime objects is apprehended as incomparable or immeasurable? It
is only failure to observe these distinctions that leads to errors like
one recorded in Coleridge's Table-talk (July 25, 1832): 'Could you ever
discover anything sublime, in our sense of the word, in the classic
Greek literature? I never could. Sublimity is Hebrew by birth.'

This reply, however, though sound so far as it goes, does not settle the
question raised. It may still be maintained that sublimity in all cases,
and even when we have no idea of infinity before us, does represent the
inadequacy of all finite forms to express the infinite. And it is
unfortunately impossible for us to deal fully with this contention. It
would carry us into the region of metaphysics; and, while believing that
no theory of the sublime can be complete which stops short of that
region, I am aiming in this lecture at no such theory, but only at a
result which may hold good without regard to further developments. All
that I can do is to add a few words on the question whether, going
beyond the adjective 'exceeding' or 'overwhelming,' we can say that the
sublime is the beautiful which has immeasurable, incomparable, or
infinite greatness. And the answer which I suggest and will go on to
explain may be put thus: the greatness is only sometimes immeasurable,
but it is _always_ unmeasured.

We cannot apprehend an object as sublime while we apprehend it as
comparably, measurably, or finitely great. Let the thing be what it
may--physical, vital, or spiritual--the moment we say to ourselves, 'It
is very great, but I know _how_ great,' or 'It is very great, but
something else is as great or greater,' at that moment it has ceased to
be sublime. Outside the consciousness of its sublimity we may be
perfectly well aware that a thing is limited, measurable, equal or
inferior to something else. But then we are _not_ finding it sublime.
And when we _are_ so finding it, we are absorbed in _its_ greatness, and
have no thought either of the limits of that or of its equality or
inferiority to anything else. The lion of whom we are thinking, 'An
elephant could kill him,' is no sublime lion. The Falls of Schaffhausen
are sublime when you are lost in astonishment at them, but not when you
are saying to yourself 'What must Niagara be!' This seems indubitable,
and hence we may say that, in one sense, all sublimity has unmeasured
greatness, and that no greatness is sublime which we apprehend as
finite.

But the absence of a consciousness of measure or finitude is one thing;
the presence of a consciousness of immeasurableness or infinity is
another. The first belongs to all sublimity, the second only to one kind
of it,--to that where we _attempt_ to measure, or find limits to, the
greatness of the thing. _If_ we make this attempt, as when we try in
imagination to number the stars or to find an end to time, then it is
essential to sublimity that we should fail, and so fail that the idea of
immeasurability or endlessness emerges. In like manner, _if_ we compare
things, nothing will appear sublime whose greatness is surpassed or even
equalled by that of something else; and, if this process of comparison
is pursued, in the end nothing will be found sublime except the absolute
totality (however it may be imagined). And this kind of sublimity,
which arises from attempts to measure or compare, is often exceedingly
striking. But it is only one kind. For it is an entire delusion--though
a very common one in theories of the sublime--to suppose that we _must_
attempt to measure or compare. On the contrary, in the majority of cases
our impression of overwhelming greatness is accompanied neither by any
idea that this greatness has a measure, nor by the idea that it is
immeasurable or infinite.[13]

It will not do, then, to lay it down that the sublime is the beautiful
which has immeasurable, incomparable, or infinite greatness. But I
suggest that, after the explanations given, we may conveniently use the
adjective 'unmeasured,' so long as we remember that this means one thing
where we do not measure at all, and another thing where we try to
measure and fail. And, this being so, it seems that we may say that
_all_ sublimity, and not only that in which the idea of infinite
greatness or of the Infinite emerges, is an image of infinity; for in
all, through a certain check or limitation and the overcoming of it, we
reach the perception or the imaginative idea of something which, on the
one hand, has a positive nature, and, on the other, is either _not_
determined as finite or _is_ determined as infinite. But we must not add
that this makes the sublime superior to the 'beautiful.' For the
'beautiful' too, though in a different way, is an image of infinity. In
'beauty,' as we said, that which appears in a sensuous form seems to
rest in that form, to be wholly embodied in it; it shows no tendency to
pass beyond it, and intimates no reserve of force that might strain or
break it. So that the 'beautiful' thing is a whole complete in itself,
and in moments when beauty fills our souls we know what Wordsworth meant
when he said 'the least of things seemed infinite,' though each thing,
being but one of many, must from another point of view, here suppressed,
be finite. 'Beauty,' then, we may perhaps say, is the image of the total
presence of the Infinite within any limits it may choose to assume;
sublimity the image of its boundlessness, and of its rejection of any
pretension to independence or absoluteness on the part of its finite
forms; the one the image of its immanence, the other of its
transcendence.

Within an hour I could attempt no more than an outline of our subject.
That is inevitable; and so is another defect, which I regret more. In
analysing any kind of aesthetic experience we have to begin by
disentangling the threads that meet in it; and when we can only make a
beginning, no time is left for the further task of showing how they are
interwoven. We distinguish, for example, one kind of sublimity from
another, and we must do so; but in the actual experience, the single
instance, these kinds often melt together. I take one case of this.
Trying to overlook the field in which sublimity appears, we say that
there is a sublimity of inorganic things, and of things vital, and of
things spiritual, and that these kinds differ. And this is true; and
perhaps it is also true that sometimes we experience one of these kinds,
so to say, quite pure and unmixed with others. But it is not always,
perhaps not usually so. More frequently kind mingles with kind, and we
mutilate the experience when we name it after one of them. In life the
imagination, touched at one point, tingles all over and responds at all
points. It is offered an impression of physical or vital greatness, but
at once it brings from the other end of its world reminiscences of
quite another order, and fuses the impression with them. Or an appeal is
made to the sense of spiritual greatness, but there rises before the
imagination a vision with the outlines and hues of material Nature.
Offer it a sunset--a mere collection of coloured lines and spots--and
they become to it regrets and hopes and longings too deep for tears.
Tell it of souls made perfect in bliss, and it sees an immeasurable
rose, or city-walls that flash with the light of all the gems on earth.
The truth that a sparrow and a mountain are different, and that Socrates
is not Satan, interests it but little. What it cares for is the truth
that, when they are sublime, they are all the same; for each becomes
infinite, and it feels in each its own infinity.

1903.


  NOTES[14]

I add here a few remarks on some points which it was not convenient to
discuss in the lecture.

1. We have seen that in the apprehension of sublimity we do not always
employ comparison or attempt to measure. To feel a thing overwhelmingly
great it is not necessary to have before the mind either the idea of
something less great, or any standard of greatness. To argue that this
must be necessary because 'great' means nothing except as opposed to
'small,' is like arguing that I cannot have a perception of pride
without thinking of humility.

This point seems to me quite clear. But a question remains. If we go
below consciousness, what is it that happens in us? The apprehension of
sublimity implies that we have received an exceedingly strong
impression. This as a matter of fact must mean an impression very much
stronger than something else; and this something else must be, so to
say, a standard with which the impression is unconsciously compared.
What then is it?

Stated in the most general terms, it must apparently be the usual or
average strength of impressions.

But this unconscious standard takes particular concrete forms in various
classes of cases. Not seldom it seems to be our sense of our own power
or of average human power. This is especially so where the thing felt to
be sublime is, in the relevant respect, _in eodem genere_ with
ourselves. A sublime lion, for example, is immensely superior to us, or
to the average man, in muscular force and so in dangerousness,
Tourgenieff's sparrow in courage and love, a god in all sorts of ways.
And the use of this unconscious standard is probably the reason of the
fact, noted in the lecture, that it is difficult to feel sublimity, as
regards vital force, in a creature smaller than ourselves.

But this is not the only standard. A sublime lion is not only immensely
stronger than we are, but is generally also exceptional among lions; and
so with a sublime tree or bridge or thunderstorm. So that we seem also
to use as unconscious standard the idea of the average of the kind to
which the thing belongs. An average thunderstorm hardly seems sublime,
and yet it is overwhelmingly superior to us in power.[15]

What, again, is the psychical machinery employed when we attempt to
measure the shoreless sea, or time, and find them immeasurable? Is there
any standard of the 'usual' here? I will leave this question to more
skilled psychologists than myself.

2. Since the impression produced by sublimity is one of very exceptional
strength, we are not able to feel it continuously for long, though we
can repeat it after a pause. In this the sublime differs from the
'beautiful,' on which we like to _dwell_ after our first surprise is
over. A tragedy or symphony that was sublime from beginning to end could
not be so experienced. Living among mountains, we feel their beauty more
or less constantly, their sublimity only by flashes.

3. If our account of the impression produced by sublimity is true, why
should not any sensation whatever produce this impression merely by
gaining extraordinary strength? It seems to me it would, supposing at
its normal strength it conformed to the general requirements of
aesthetic experience, and supposing the requisite accession of strength
did not remove this conformity. But this, in one respect at least, it
would do. It would make the light, sound, smell, physiologically
painful, and we should feel it as painful or even dangerous. We find
this in the case of lightning. If it is to be felt as aesthetic it must
not pass a certain degree of brightness; or, as we sometimes say, it
must not be too 'near.'


FOOTNOTES:

  [1] I have learned something from many discussions of this subject.
    In its outline the view I have taken is perhaps nearer to Hartmann's
    than to any other.

  [2] Popular usage coincides roughly with this sense. Indeed, it can
    hardly be said to recognise the wider one at all. 'Beauty' and
    'beautiful,' in that wider sense, are technical terms of Aesthetics.
    It is a misfortune that the language of Aesthetics should thus differ
    from the ordinary language of speech and literature; but the
    misfortune seems to be unavoidable, for there is no word in the
    ordinary language which means 'whatever gives aesthetic
    satisfaction,' and yet that idea _must_ have a name in Aesthetics.

  [3] I do not mean to imply that in aesthetic apprehension itself we
    always, or generally, make conscious use of a standard or, indeed,
    think of greatness. But here we are _reflecting_ on this
    apprehension.

  [4] Thus, it may be noticed, the sparrow's size, which is the reverse
    of sublime, is yet indirectly essential to the sublimity of the
    sparrow.

  [5] The poet's language here has done our analysis for us.

  [6] A word may be added here on a disputed point as to 'spiritual'
    sublimity. It has been held that intellect cannot be sublime; but
    surely in the teeth of facts. Not to speak of intellect as it appears
    in the sphere of practice, how can it be denied that the intellect of
    Aristotle or Shakespeare or Newton may produce the impression of
    sublimity? All that is true is, first, that the intellect must be
    apprehended imaginatively and not thought abstractly (otherwise it
    can produce _no_ aesthetic impression), and, secondly, that it
    appears sublime in virtue not of its quality alone but of the
    quantity, or force, of that quality.

  [7] The same principle applies to other cases. If, for example, the
    desolation of a landscape is felt to be sublime, it is so not as the
    mere negation of life, verdure, etc., but as their _active_ negation.

  [8] The reader will remember that in one sense of the question, Is
    there no more in the sublime than overwhelming greatness? this
    question must of course be answered in the affirmative. Sublimity is
    a mode of beauty: the sublime is not the overwhelmingly great, it is
    the beautiful which has overwhelming greatness; and it affects us
    through its whole nature, not by mere greatness.

  [9] I am warning the reader against a mistake which may arise from
    the complexity of aesthetic experience. We may make a broad
    distinction between 'glad' and 'sad' modes of beauty; but that does
    not coincide with the distinction of modes with which we are
    concerned in this lecture. What is lovely or 'beautiful' may be glad
    or sad, and so may what is grand or sublime.

  [10] In what follows I have spoken as if the two were always
    successive stages, and as if these always came in the same order. It
    is easier to make the matter quickly clear by taking this view, which
    also seemed to answer to my own experience. But I do not wish to
    commit myself to an opinion on the point, which is of minor
    importance. What is essential is to recognise the presence of the two
    'aspects' or 'stages,' and to see that both are requisite to
    sublimity.

  [11] 'Ich fuehlte mich so klein, so gross,' says Faust, remembering
    the vision of the Erdgeist, whom he addresses as 'Erhabener Geist.'
    He was at once overwhelmed and uplifted.

  [12] At least if the 'Vision' is sublime its sublimity is not that of
    the original. We can 'discern the form thereof' distinctly enough.

  [13] To avoid complication I have passed by the case where we compare
    the sublime thing with another thing and find it much greater without
    finding it immeasurably great. Here the greatness, it appears to me,
    is still unmeasured. That is to say, we do not attempt to determine
    its amount, and if we did we should lose the impression of sublimity.
    We may _say_, perhaps, that it is ten, fifty, or a million times, as
    great; but these words no more represent mathematical calculations
    than Hamlet's 'forty thousand brothers.'

  [14] I am far from being satisfied with the ideas imperfectly
    expressed in the first and third of these Notes, but they require
    more consideration than I can give to them during the printing of the
    Second Edition. The reader is requested to take them as mere
    suggestions.

  [15] Hence a creature much less powerful than ourselves _may_, I
    suppose, be sublime, even from the mere point of view of vital
    energy. But I doubt if this is so in my own case. I have seen
    'magnificent' or 'glorious' cocks and cats, but if I called them
    'sublime' I should say rather more than I feel. I mention cocks,
    because Ruskin somewhere mentions a sublime cock; but I cannot find
    the passage, and this cock may have been sublime (if it really was so
    to Ruskin) from some other than 'vital' greatness.




HEGEL'S THEORY OF TRAGEDY


HEGEL'S THEORY OF TRAGEDY[1]


Since Aristotle dealt with tragedy, and, as usual, drew the main
features of his subject with those sure and simple strokes which no
later hand has rivalled, the only philosopher who has treated it in a
manner both original and searching is Hegel. I propose here to give a
sketch of Hegel's theory, and to add some remarks upon it. But I cannot
possibly do justice in a sketch to a theory which fills many pages of
the _Aesthetik_; which I must tear from its connections with the
author's general view of poetry, and with the rest of his philosophy[2];
and which I must try to exhibit as far as possible in the language of
ordinary literature. To estimate this theory, therefore, from my sketch
would be neither safe nor just--all the more because, in the interest of
immediate clearness, I have not scrupled to insert without warning
various remarks and illustrations for which Hegel is not responsible.

On certain characteristics of tragedy the briefest reminder will
suffice. A large part of the nature of this form of drama is common to
the drama in all its forms; and of this nothing need be said. It will be
agreed, further, that in all tragedy there is some sort of collision or
conflict--conflict of feelings, modes of thought, desires, wills,
purposes; conflict of persons with one another, or with circumstances,
or with themselves; one, several, or all of these kinds of conflict, as
the case may be. Again, it may be taken for granted that a tragedy is a
story of unhappiness or suffering, and excites such feelings as pity and
fear. To this, if we followed the present usage of the term, we should
add that the story of unhappiness must have an unhappy end; by which we
mean in effect that the conflict must close with the death of one or
more of the principal characters. But this usage of the word 'tragedy'
is comparatively recent; it leaves us without a name for many plays, in
many languages, which deal with unhappiness without ending unhappily;
and Hegel takes the word in its older and wider sense.

Passing on from these admitted characteristics of tragedy, we may best
approach Hegel's peculiar view by observing that he lays particular
stress on one of them. That a tragedy is a story of suffering is
probably to many people the most obvious fact about it. Hegel says very
little of this; partly, perhaps, because it is obvious, but more because
the essential point to him is not the suffering but its cause, namely,
the action or conflict. Mere suffering, he would say, is not tragic, but
only the suffering that comes of a special kind of action. Pity for mere
misfortune, like fear of it, is not tragic pity or fear. These are due
to the spectacle of the conflict and its attendant suffering, which do
not appeal simply to our sensibilities or our instinct of
self-preservation, but also to our deeper mind or spirit (_Geist_, a
word which, with its adjective, I shall translate 'spirit,' 'spiritual,'
because our words 'mind' and 'mental' suggest something merely
intellectual).

The reason why the tragic conflict thus appeals to the spirit is that it
is itself a conflict of the spirit. It is a conflict, that is to say,
between powers that rule the world of man's will and action--his
'ethical substance.' The family and the state, the bond of parent and
child, of brother and sister, of husband and wife, of citizen and ruler,
or citizen and citizen, with the obligations and feelings appropriate to
these bonds; and again the powers of personal love and honour, or of
devotion to a great cause or an ideal interest like religion or science
or some kind of social welfare--such are the forces exhibited in tragic
action; not indeed alone, not without others less affirmative and
perhaps even evil, but still in preponderating mass. And as they form
the substance of man, are common to all civilised men, and are
acknowledged as powers rightfully claiming human allegiance, their
exhibition in tragedy has that interest, at once deep and universal,
which is essential to a great work of art.

In many a work of art, in many a statue, picture, tale, or song, such
powers are shown in solitary peace or harmonious co-operation. Tragedy
shows them in collision. Their nature is divine, and in religion they
appear as gods; but, as seen in the world of tragic action, they have
left the repose of Olympus, have entered into human wills, and now meet
as foes. And this spectacle, if sublime, is also terrible. The
essentially tragic fact is the self-division and intestinal warfare of
the ethical substance, not so much the war of good with evil as the war
of good with good. Two of these isolated powers face each other, making
incompatible demands. The family claims what the state refuses, love
requires what honour forbids. The competing forces are both in
themselves rightful, and so far the claim of each is equally justified;
but the right of each is pushed into a wrong, because it ignores the
right of the other, and demands that absolute sway which belongs to
neither alone, but to the whole of which each is but a part.

And one reason why this happens lies in the nature of the characters
through whom these claims are made. It is the nature of the tragic hero,
at once his greatness and his doom, that he knows no shrinking or
half-heartedness, but identifies himself wholly with the power that
moves him, and will admit the justification of no other power. However
varied and rich his inner life and character may be, in the conflict it
is all concentrated in one point. Antigone _is_ the determination to do
her duty to her dead brother; Romeo is not a son or a citizen as well as
a lover, he is lover pure and simple, and his love is the whole of him.

The end of the tragic conflict is the denial of both the exclusive
claims. It is not the work of chance or blank fate; it is the act of the
ethical substance itself, asserting its absoluteness against the
excessive pretensions of its particular powers. In that sense, as
proceeding from an absolute right which cancels claims based on right
but pushed into wrong, it may be called the act of 'eternal justice.'
Sometimes it can end the conflict peacefully, and the tragedy closes
with a solution. Appearing as a divine being, the spiritual unity
reconciles by some adjustment the claims of the contending powers
(_Eumenides_); or at its bidding one of them softens its demand
(_Philoctetes_); or again, as in the more beautiful solution of the
_Oedipus Coloneus_, the hero by his own self-condemnation and inward
purification reconciles himself with the supreme justice, and is
accepted by it. But sometimes the quarrel is pressed to extremes; the
denial of the one-sided claims involves the death of one or more of the
persons concerned; and we have a catastrophe. The ultimate power thus
appears as a destructive force. Yet even here, as Hegel insists, the end
is not without an aspect of reconciliation. For that which is denied is
not the rightful powers with which the combatants have identified
themselves. On the contrary, those powers, and with them the only thing
for which the combatants cared, are affirmed. What is denied is the
exclusive and therefore wrongful assertion of their right.

Such in outline is Hegel's main view. It may be illustrated more fully
by two examples, favourites of his, taken from Aeschylus and Sophocles.
Clytemnestra has murdered Agamemnon, her husband and king. Orestes,
their son, is impelled by filial piety to avenge his father, and is
ordered by Apollo to do so. But to kill a mother is to sin against
filial piety. The spiritual substance is divided against itself. The
sacred bond of father and son demands what the equally sacred bond of
son and mother forbids. When, therefore, Orestes has done the deed, the
Furies of his murdered mother claim him for their prey. He appeals to
Apollo, who resists their claim. A solution is arrived at without a
catastrophe. The cause is referred to Athene, who institutes at Athens a
court of sworn judges. The votes of this court being equally divided,
Athene gives her casting-vote for Orestes; while the Furies are at last
appeased by a promise of everlasting honour at Athens.

In the _Antigone_, on the other hand, to Hegel the 'perfect exemplar of
tragedy,' the solution is negative. The brother of Antigone has brought
against his native city an army of foreigners bent on destroying it. He
has been killed in the battle, and Creon, the ruler of the city, has
issued an edict forbidding anyone on pain of death to bury the corpse.
In so doing he not only dishonours the dead man, but violates the rights
of the gods of the dead. Antigone without hesitation disobeys the
edict, and Creon, despite the remonstrance of his son, who is affianced
to her, persists in exacting the penalty. Warned by the prophet
Teiresias, he gives way, but too late. Antigone, immured in a rocky
chamber to starve, has anticipated her death. Her lover follows her
example, and his mother refuses to survive him. Thus Antigone has lost
her life through her absolute assertion of the family against the state;
Creon has violated the sanctity of the family, and in return sees his
own home laid in ruins. But in this catastrophe neither the right of the
family nor that of the state is denied; what is denied is the
absoluteness of the claim of each.

The danger of illustrations like these is that they divert attention
from the principle illustrated to questions about the interpretation of
particular works. So it will be here. I cannot stay to discuss these
questions, which do not affect Hegel's principle; but it will be well,
before going further, to remove a misunderstanding of it which is
generally to be found in criticisms of his treatment of the _Eumenides_
and the _Antigone_. The main objection may be put thus: 'Hegel talks of
equally justified powers or claims. But Aeschylus never meant that
Orestes and the Furies were equally justified; for Orestes was
acquitted. Nor did Sophocles mean that Antigone and Creon were equally
right. And how can it have been equally the duty of Orestes to kill his
mother and not to kill her?' But, in the first place, it is most
important to observe that Hegel is not discussing at all what we should
generally call the moral quality of the acts and persons concerned, or,
in the ordinary sense, what it was their duty to do. And, in the second
place, when he speaks of 'equally justified' powers, what he means, and,
indeed, sometimes says, is that these powers are _in themselves_ equally
justified. The family and the state, the bond of father and son, the
bond of mother and son, the bond of citizenship, these are each and all,
one as much as another, powers rightfully claiming human allegiance. It
is tragic that observance of one should involve the violation of
another. These are Hegel's propositions, and surely they are true. Their
truth is quite unaffected by the fact (assuming it is one) that in the
circumstances the act combining this observance of one and violation of
another was morally right, or by the fact (if so it is) that one such
act (say Antigone's) was morally right, and another (say Creon's) was
morally wrong. It is sufficient for Hegel's principle that the violation
should take place, and that we should feel its weight. We do feel it. We
may approve the act of Antigone or Orestes, but in approving it we still
feel that it is no light matter to disobey the law or to murder a
mother, that (as we might say) there is much justice in the pleas of the
Furies and of Creon, and that the _tragic_ effect depends upon these
facts. If, again, it is objected that the underlying conflict in the
_Antigone_ is not between the family and the state, but between divine
and human law, that objection, if sound, might touch Hegel's
interpretation,[3] but it would not affect his principle, except for
those who recognise no obligation in human law; and it will scarcely be
contended that Sophocles is to be numbered among them. On the other
hand, it is, I think, a matter for regret that Hegel employed such words
as 'right,' 'justified,' and 'justice.' They do not mislead readers
familiar with his writings, but to others they suggest associations with
criminal law, or our everyday moral judgments, or perhaps the theory of
'poetic justice'; and these are all out of place in a discussion on
tragedy.

Having determined in outline the idea or principle of tragedy, Hegel
proceeds to give an account of some differences between ancient and
modern works. In the limited time at our disposal we shall do best to
confine ourselves to a selection from his remarks on the latter. For in
speaking of ancient tragedy Hegel, who finds something modern in
Euripides, makes accordingly but little use of him for purposes of
contrast, while his main point of view as to Aeschylus and Sophocles has
already appeared in the illustrations we have given of the general
principle. I will only add, by way of preface, that the pages about to
be summarised leave on one, rightly or wrongly, the impression that to
his mind the principle is more adequately realised in the best classical
tragedies than in modern works. But the question whether this really was
his deliberate opinion would detain us too long from weightier
matters.[4]

Hegel considers first the cases where modern tragedy resembles ancient
in dealing with conflicts arising from the pursuit of ends which may be
called substantial or objective and not merely personal. And he points
out that modern tragedy here shows a much greater variety. Subjects are
taken, for example, from the quarrels of dynasties, of rivals for the
throne, of kings and nobles, of state and church. Calderon shows the
conflict of love and honour regarded as powers imposing obligations.
Schiller in his early works makes his characters defend the rights of
nature against convention, or of freedom of thought against
prescription--rights in their essence universal. Wallenstein aims at the
unity and peace of Germany; Karl Moor attacks the whole arrangement of
society; Faust seeks to attain in thought and action union with the
Absolute. In such cases the end is more than personal; it represents a
power claiming the allegiance of the individual; but, on the other
hand, it does not always or generally represent a great _ethical_
institution or bond like the family or the state. We have passed into a
wider world.

But, secondly, he observes, in regard to modern tragedy, that in a
larger number of instances such public or universal interests either do
not appear at all, or, if they appear, are scarcely more than a
background for the real subject. The real subject, the impelling end or
passion, and the ensuing conflict, is personal,--these particular
characters with their struggle and their fate. The importance given to
subjectivity--this is the distinctive mark of modern sentiment, and so
of modern art; and such tragedies bear its impress. A part at least of
Hegel's meaning may be illustrated thus. We are interested in the
personality of Orestes or Antigone, but chiefly as it shows itself in
one aspect, as identifying itself with a certain ethical relation; and
our interest in the personality is inseparable and indistinguishable
from our interest in the power it represents. This is not so with
Hamlet, whose position so closely resembles that of Orestes. What
engrosses our attention is the whole personality of Hamlet in his
conflict, not with an opposing spiritual power, but with circumstances
and, still more, with difficulties in his own nature. No one could think
of describing Othello as the representative of an ethical family
relation. His passion, however much nobility he may show in it, is
personal. So is Romeo's love. It is not pursued, like Posa's freedom of
thought, as something universal, a right of man. Its right, if it could
occur to us to use the term at all, is Romeo's right.

On this main characteristic of modern tragedy others depend. For
instance, that variety of subject to which reference has just been made
depends on it. For when so much weight is attached to personality,
almost any fatal collision in which a sufficiently striking character is
involved may yield material for tragedy. Naturally, again,
characterisation has become fuller and more subtle, except in dramas
which are more or less an imitation of the antique. The characters in
Greek tragedy are far from being types or personified abstractions, as
those of classical French tragedy tend to be: they are genuine
individuals. But still they are comparatively simple and easy to
understand, and have not the intricacy of the characters in Shakespeare.
These, for the most part, represent simply themselves; and the loss of
that interest which attached to the Greek characters from their
identification with an ethical power, is compensated by an extraordinary
subtlety in their portrayal, and also by their possession of some
peculiar charm or some commanding superiority. Finally, the interest in
personality explains the freedom with which characters more or less
definitely evil are introduced in modern tragedy. Mephistopheles is as
essentially modern as Faust. The passion of Richard or Macbeth is not
only personal, like that of Othello; it is egoistic and anarchic, and
leads to crimes done with a full knowledge of their wickedness; but to
the modern mind the greatness of the personality justifies its
appearance in the position of hero. Such beings as Iago and Goneril,
almost portents of evil, are not indeed made the heroes of tragedies;
but, according to Hegel, they would not have been admitted in Greek
tragedy at all. If Clytemnestra had been cited in objection as a
parallel to Lady Macbeth, he would have replied that Lady Macbeth had
not the faintest ground of complaint against Duncan, while in reading
the _Agamemnon_ we are frequently reminded that Clytemnestra's husband
was the sacrificer of their child. He might have added that Clytemnestra
is herself an example of the necessity, where one of the principal
characters inspires hatred or horror, of increasing the subtlety of the
drawing or adding grandeur to the evil will.

It remains to compare ancient and modern tragedy in regard to the issue
of the conflict. We have seen that Hegel attributes this issue in the
former to the ethical substance or eternal justice, and so accounts for
such reconciliation as we feel to be present even where the end is a
catastrophe. Now, in the catastrophe of modern tragedy, he says, a
certain justice is sometimes felt to be present; but even then it
differs from the antique justice. It is in some cases more 'abstract':
the end pursued by the hero, though it is not egoistic, is still
presented rather as his particular end than as something rightful though
partial; and hence the catastrophe appears as the reaction, not of an
undivided ethical totality, but merely of the universal turning against
a too assertive particular.[5] In cases, again, where the hero (Richard
or Macbeth) openly attacks an ethical power and plunges into evil, we
feel that he meets with justice, and only gets what he deserves; but
then this justice is colder and more 'criminalistic' than that of
ancient tragedy. Thus even when the modern work seems to resemble the
ancient in its issue, the sense of reconciliation is imperfect. And
partly for this reason, partly from the concentration of our interest on
individuality as such, we desire to see in the individual himself some
sort of reconciliation with his fate. What shape this will take depends,
of course, on the story and the character of the hero. It may appear in
a religious form, as his feeling that he is exchanging his earthly being
for an indestructible happiness; or again, in his recognition of the
justice of his fall; or at least he may show us that, in face of the
forces that crush him to death, he maintains untouched the freedom and
strength of his own will.

But there remain, says Hegel, many modern tragedies where we have to
attribute the catastrophe not to any kind of justice, but to unhappy
circumstances and outward accidents. And then we can only feel that the
individual whose merely personal ends are thwarted by mere particular
circumstances and chances, pays the penalty that awaits existence in a
scene of contingency and finitude. Such a feeling cannot rise above
sadness, and, if the hero is a noble soul, it may become the impression
of a dreadful external necessity. This impression can be avoided only
when circumstance and accident are so depicted that they are felt to
coincide with something in the hero himself, so that he is not simply
destroyed by an outward force. So it is with Hamlet. 'This bank and
shoal of time' is too narrow for his soul, and the death that seems to
fall on him by chance is also within him. And so in _Romeo and Juliet_
we feel that the rose of a love so beautiful is too tender to bloom in
the storm-swept valley of its birth. But such a feeling of
reconciliation is still one of pain, an unhappy blessedness.[6] And if
the situation displayed in a drama is of such a kind that we feel the
issue to depend _simply_ on the turn the dramatist may choose to give to
the course of events, we are fully justified in our preference for a
happy ending.

In this last remark (or rather in the pages misrepresented by it) Hegel,
of course, is not criticising Shakespeare. He is objecting to the
destiny-dramas of his own time, and to the fashionable indulgence in
sentimental melancholy. Strongly as he asserted the essential function
of negation throughout the universe, the affirmative power of the
spirit, even in its profoundest divisions, was for him the deepest truth
and the most inspiring theme. And one may see this even in his
references to Shakespeare. He appreciated Shakespeare's representation
of extreme forms of evil, but, even if he was fully satisfied of its
justification, his personal preference lay in another direction, and
while I do not doubt that he thought _Hamlet_ a greater work than
_Iphigenie_, I suspect he loved Goethe's play the best.

Most of those who have thought about this subject will agree that the
ideas I have tried to sketch are interesting and valuable; but they
suggest scores of questions. Alike in the account of tragedy in general,
and in that of the differences between ancient and modern tragedy,
everyone will find statements to doubt and omissions to regret; and
scarcely one of Hegel's interpretations of particular plays will escape
objection. It is impossible for me to touch on more than a few points;
and to the main ideas I owe so much that I am more inclined to dwell on
their truth than to criticise what seem to be defects. But perhaps after
all an attempt to supplement and amend may be the best way of throwing
some part of Hegel's meaning more into relief. And I will begin with the
attempt to supplement.

He seems to be right in laying emphasis on the action and conflict in
tragedy rather than on the suffering and misfortune. No mere suffering
or misfortune, no suffering that does not spring in great part from
human agency, and in some degree from the agency of the sufferer, is
tragic, however pitiful or dreadful it may be. But, sufficient
connection with these agencies being present, misfortune, the fall from
prosperity to adversity, with the suffering attending it, at once
becomes tragic; and in many tragedies it forms a large ingredient, as
does the pity for it in the tragic feeling. Hegel, I think, certainly
takes too little notice of it; and by this omission he also withdraws
attention from something the importance of which he would have admitted
at once; I mean the way in which suffering is borne. Physical pain, to
take an extreme instance, is one thing: Philoctetes, bearing it, is
another. And the noble endurance of pain that rends the heart is the
source of much that is best worth having in tragedy.

Again, there is one particular kind of misfortune _not_ obviously due to
human agency, which undoubtedly may affect us in a tragic way. I mean
that kind which suggests the idea of fate. Tragedies which represent man
as the mere plaything of chance or a blank fate or a malicious fate, are
never really deep: it is satisfactory to see that Maeterlinck, a man of
true genius, has now risen above these ideas. But, where those factors
of tragedy are present which Hegel emphasises, the impression of
something fateful in what we call accident, the impression that the hero
not only invites misfortune by his exceptional stature and exceptional
daring, but is also, if I may so put it, strangely and terribly unlucky,
is in many plays a genuine ingredient in tragic effect. It is so, for
example, in the _Oedipus Tyrannus_. It is so even in dramas like
Shakespeare's, which exemplify the saying that character is destiny.
Hegel's own reference to the prominence of accident in the plot of
_Hamlet_ proves it. Othello would not have become Iago's victim if his
own character had been different; but still, as we say, it is an
extraordinary fatality which makes him the companion of the one man in
the world who is at once able enough, brave enough, and vile enough to
ensnare him. In the _Antigone_ itself, and in the very catastrophe of
it, accident plays its part: we can hardly say that it depends solely on
the characters of Creon and Antigone that the one yields just too late
to save the life of the other. Now, it may be said with truth that
Hegel's whole account of the ultimate power in tragedy is a
rationalisation of the idea of fate, but his remarks on this particular
aspect of fate are neither sufficient nor satisfactory.

His insistence on the need for some element of reconciliation in a
tragic catastrophe, and his remarks on the various forms it assumes,
have the greatest value; but one result of the omissions just noticed is
that he sometimes exaggerates it, and at other times rates it too low.
When he is speaking of the kind of tragedy he most approves, his
language almost suggests that our feeling at the close of the conflict
is, or should be, one of complete reconciliation. This it surely neither
is nor can be. Not to mention the suffering and death we have witnessed,
the very existence of the conflict, even if a supreme ethical power is
felt to be asserted in its close, remains a painful fact, and, in large
measure, a fact not understood. For, though we may be said to see, in
one sense, how the opposition of spiritual powers arises, something in
us, and that the best, still cries out against it. And even the
perception or belief that it must needs be that offences come would not
abolish our feeling that the necessity is terrible, or our pain in the
woe of the guilty and the innocent. Nay, one may conjecture, the feeling
and the pain would not vanish if we fully understood that the conflict
and catastrophe were by a rational necessity involved in the divine and
eternally accomplished purpose of the world. But this exaggeration in
Hegel's language, if partly due to his enthusiasm for the affirmative,
may be mainly, like some other defects, an accident of lecturing. In the
_Philosophy of Religion_, I may add, he plainly states that in the
solution even of tragedies like the _Antigone_ something remains
unresolved (ii. 135).

On the other hand, his treatment of the aspect of reconciliation in
modern tragedy is in several respects insufficient. I will mention only
one. He does not notice that in the conclusion of not a few tragedies
pain is mingled not merely with acquiescence, but with something like
exultation. Is there not such a feeling at the close of _Hamlet_,
_Othello_, and _King Lear_; and that although the end in the last two
cases touches the limit of legitimate pathos? This exultation appears to
be connected with our sense that the hero has never shown himself so
great or noble as in the death which seals his failure. A rush of
passionate admiration, and a glory in the greatness of the soul, mingle
with our grief; and the coming of death, so far from destroying these
feelings, appears to leave them untouched, or even to be entirely in
harmony with them. If in such dramas we may be said to feel that the
ultimate power is no mere fate, but a spiritual power, then we also feel
that the hero was never so near to this power as in the moment when it
required his life.

The last omission I would notice in Hegel's theory is that he underrates
the action in tragedy of what may be called by a rough distinction moral
evil rather than defect. Certainly the part played by evil differs
greatly in different cases, but it is never absent, not even from
tragedies of Hegel's favourite type. If it does not appear in the main
conflict, it appears in its occasion. You may say that, while Iago and
Macbeth have evil purposes, neither the act of Orestes nor the vengeance
of the Furies, neither Antigone's breach of the edict nor even Creon's
insistence on her punishment, springs from evil in them; but the
situation with which Orestes or Antigone has to deal, and so in a sense
the whole tragedy, arises from evil, the murder of Agamemnon, and the
attempt of Polyneices to bring ruin on his native city. In fact, if we
confine the title 'tragedy' to plays ending with a catastrophe, it will
be found difficult to name great tragedies, ancient or modern, in which
evil has not directly or indirectly a prominent part. And its presence
has an important bearing on the effect produced by the catastrophe. On
the one hand, it deepens the sense of painful awe. The question why
affirmative spiritual forces should collide is hard enough; but the
question why, together with them, there should be generated violent evil
and extreme depravity is harder and more painful still. But, on the
other hand, the element of reconciliation in the catastrophe is
strengthened by recognition of the part played by evil in bringing it
about; because our sense that the ultimate power cannot endure the
presence of such evil is implicitly the sense that this power is at
least more closely allied with good. If it rejects the exaggerated
claims of its own isolated powers, that which provokes from it a much
more vehement reaction must be still more alien to its nature. This
feeling is forcibly evoked by Shakespeare's tragedies, and in many Greek
dramas it is directly appealed to by repeated reminders that what is at
work in the disasters is the unsleeping Ate which follows an ancestral
sin. If Aristotle did not in some lost part of the _Poetics_ discuss
ideas like this, he failed to give a complete rationale of Greek
tragedy.

I come lastly to the matter I have most at heart. What I take to be the
central idea in Hegel's theory seems to me to touch the essence of
tragedy. And I will not assert that his own statement of it fails to
cover the whole field of instances. For he does not teach, as he is
often said to do, that tragedy portrays only the conflict of such
ethical powers as the family and the state. He adds to these, as we have
seen, others, such as love and honour, together with various universal
ends; and it may even be maintained that he has provided in his general
statement for those numerous cases where, according to himself, no
substantial or universal ends collide, but the interest is centred on
'personalities.' Nevertheless, when these cases come to be considered
more fully--and, in Hegel's view, they are the most characteristically
modern cases--we are not satisfied. They naturally tend to appear as
declensions from the more ideal ancient form; for how can a personality
which represents only itself claim the interest of one which represents
something universal? And further, they are sometimes described in a
manner which strikes the reader, let us say, of Shakespeare, as both
insufficient and misleading. Without raising, then, unprofitable
questions about the comparative merits of ancient and modern tragedy, I
should like to propose a restatement of Hegel's general principle which
would make it more obviously apply to both.

If we omit all reference to ethical or substantial powers and interests,
what have we left? We have the more general idea--to use again a formula
not Hegel's own--that tragedy portrays a self-division and self-waste of
spirit, or a division of spirit involving conflict and waste. It is
implied in this that on _both_ sides in the conflict there is a
spiritual value. The same idea may be expressed (again, I think, not in
Hegel's own words) by saying that the tragic conflict is one not merely
of good with evil, but also, and more essentially, of good with good.
Only, in saying this, we must be careful to observe that 'good' here
means anything that has spiritual value, not moral goodness alone,[7]
and that 'evil' has a similarly wide sense.

Now this idea of a division of spirit involving conflict and waste
covers the tragedies of ethical and other universal powers, and it
covers much besides. According to it the collision of such powers would
be one kind of tragic collision, but only one. _Why_ are we tragically
moved by the conflict of family and state? Because we set a high value
on family and state. Why then should not the conflict of anything else
that has sufficient value affect us tragically? It does. The value must
be sufficient--a moderate value will not serve; and other
characteristics must be present which need not be considered here. But,
granted these conditions, _any_ spiritual conflict involving spiritual
waste is tragic. And it is just one greatness of modern art that it has
shown the tragic fact in situations of so many and such diverse kinds.
These situations have not the peculiar effectiveness of the conflicts
preferred by Hegel, but they may have an equal effectiveness peculiar to
themselves.

Let me attempt to test these ideas by choosing a most unfavourable
instance--unfavourable because the play seems at first to represent a
conflict simply of good and evil, and so, according both to Hegel's
statement and the proposed restatement, to be no tragedy at all: I mean
_Macbeth_. What is the conflict here? It will be agreed that it does not
lie between two ethical powers or universal ends, and that, as Hegel
says, the main interest is in personalities. Let us take it first, then,
to lie between Macbeth and the persons opposing him, and let us ask
whether there is not spiritual value or good on both sides--not an equal
amount of good (that is not necessary), but enough good on each to give
the impression of spiritual waste. Is there not such good in Macbeth? It
is not a question merely of moral goodness, but of good. It is not a
question of the use made of good, but of its presence. And such bravery
and skill in war as win the enthusiasm of everyone about him; such an
imagination as few but poets possess; a conscience so vivid that his
deed is to him beforehand a thing of terror, and, once done, condemns
him to that torture of the mind on which he lies in restless ecstasy; a
determination so tremendous and a courage so appalling that, for all
this torment, he never dreams of turning back, but, even when he has
found that life is a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,
will tell it out to the end though earth and heaven and hell are leagued
against him; are not these things, in themselves, good, and gloriously
good? Do they not make you, for all your horror, admire Macbeth,
sympathise with his agony, pity him, and see in him the waste of forces
on which you place a spiritual value? It is simply on this account that
he is for you, not the abstraction called a criminal who merely 'gets
what he deserves' (art, like religion, knows no such thing), but a
tragic hero, and that his war with other forces of indubitable spiritual
worth is a tragic war.[8]

It is required by the restatement of Hegel's principle to show that in
the external conflict of persons there is good on both sides. It is not
required that this should be true, secondly, of both sides in the
conflict within the hero's soul; for the hero is only a part of the
tragedy. Nevertheless in almost all cases, if not in all, it is true. It
is obviously so where, as in the hero and also the heroine of the _Cid_,
the contending powers in this internal struggle are love and honour.
Even when love is of a quality less pure and has a destructive force, as
in Shakespeare's Antony, it is clearly true. And it remains true even
where, as in Hamlet and Macbeth, the contest seems to lie, and for most
purposes might conveniently be said to lie, between forces simply good
and simply the reverse. This is not really so, and the tragic effect
depends upon the fact. It depends on our feeling that the elements in
the man's nature are so inextricably blended that the good in him, that
which we admire, instead of simply opposing the evil, reinforces it.
Macbeth's imagination deters him from murder, but it also makes the
vision of a crown irresistibly bright. If he had been less determined,
nay, if his conscience had been less maddening in its insistence that he
had thrown the precious jewel of his soul irretrievably away, he might
have paused after his first deed, might even have repented. Yet his
imagination, his determination, and his conscience were things good.
Hamlet's desire to do his duty is a good thing, but what opposes this
desire is by no means simply evil. It is something to which a
substantial contribution is made by the qualities we most admire in him.
Thus the nature of tragedy, as seen in the external conflict, repeats
itself on each side of this conflict, and everywhere there is a
spiritual value in both the contending forces.

In showing that _Macbeth_, a tragedy as far removed as possible from the
_Antigone_ as understood by Hegel, is still of one nature with it, and
equally answers to the account of tragedy proposed, it has been
necessary to ignore the great difference between the two plays. But when
once the common essence of all tragedies has been determined, their
differences become the interesting subject. They could be distinguished
according to the character of the collisions on which they are built, or
of the main forces which move the principal agents. And it may well be
that, other things being equal (as they never are), the tragedy in which
the hero is, as we say, a good man, is more tragic than that in which he
is, as we say, a bad one. The more spiritual value, the more tragedy in
conflict and waste. The death of Hamlet or Othello is, so far, more
tragic than that of Macbeth, that of Macbeth than that of Richard. Below
Richard stands Iago, a figure still tragic, but unfit for the hero's
part; below him persons like Regan or, in the very depth, Oswald,
characters no longer (at least in the dramatic sense) tragic at all.
Moral evil, that is to say, so greatly diminishes the spiritual value we
ascribe to the personality that a very large amount of good of some kind
is required to bring this personality up to the tragic level, the
destruction of evil as such being in no degree tragic. And again, it may
well be that, other things being equal, the more nearly the contending
forces approach each other in goodness, the more tragic is the conflict;
that the collision is, so far, more tragic in the _Antigone_ than in
_Macbeth_, and Hamlet's internal conflict than his struggle with outward
enemies and obstacles. But it is dangerous to describe tragedy in terms
that even appear to exclude _Macbeth_, or to describe _Macbeth_, even
casually or by implication, in terms which imply that it portrays a
conflict of mere evil with mere good.

The restatement of Hegel's main principle as to the conflict would
involve a similar restatement as to the catastrophe (for we need not
consider here those 'tragedies' which end with a solution). As before,
we must avoid any reference to ethical or universal ends, or to the work
of 'justice' in the catastrophe. We might then simply say that, as the
tragic action portrays a self-division or intestinal conflict of spirit,
so the catastrophe displays the violent annulling of this division or
conflict. But this statement, which might be pretty generally accepted,
would represent only half of Hegel's idea, and perhaps nothing of what
is most characteristic and valuable in it. For the catastrophe (if I may
put his idea in my own way) has two aspects, a negative and an
affirmative, and we have ignored the latter. On the one hand it is the
act of a power immeasurably superior to that of the conflicting agents,
a power which is irresistible and unescapable, and which overbears and
negates whatever is incompatible with it. So far, it may be called, in
relation to the conflicting agents,[9] necessity or fate; and unless a
catastrophe affects us in ways corresponding with this aspect it is not
truly tragic. But then if this were all and this necessity were merely
infinite, characterless, external force, the catastrophe would not only
terrify (as it should), it would also horrify, depress, or at best
provoke indignation or rebellion; and these are not tragic feelings. The
catastrophe, then, must have a second and affirmative aspect, which is
the source of our feelings of reconciliation, whatever form they may
assume. And this will be taken into account if we describe the
catastrophe as the violent self-restitution of the divided spiritual
unity. The necessity which acts and negates in it, that is to say, is
yet of one substance with both the agents. _It_ is divided against
itself in them; they are _its_ conflicting forces; and in restoring its
unity through negation it affirms them, so far as they are compatible
with that unity. The qualification is essential, since the hero, for all
his affinity with that power, is, as the living man we see before us,
not so compatible. He must die, and his union with 'eternal justice'
(which is more than 'justice') must itself be 'eternal' or ideal. But
the qualification does not abolish what it qualifies. This is no
occasion to ask how in particular, and in what various ways in various
works, we feel the effect of this affirmative aspect in the catastrophe.
But it corresponds at least with that strange double impression which is
produced by the hero's death. He dies, and our hearts die with him; and
yet his death matters nothing to us, or we even exult. He is dead; and
he has no more to do with death than the power which killed him and with
which he is one.

I leave it to students of Hegel to ask whether he would have accepted
the criticisms and modifications I have suggested. Naturally I think he
would, as I believe they rest on truth, and am sure he had a habit of
arriving at truth. But in any case their importance is trifling,
compared with that of the theory which they attempt to strengthen and to
which they owe their existence.

1901.


  NOTE

Why did Hegel, in his lectures on Aesthetics, so treat of tragedy as to
suggest the idea that the kind of tragedy which he personally preferred
(let us for the sake of brevity call it 'ancient') is also the most
adequate embodiment of the idea of tragedy? This question can be
answered, I think, only conjecturally, but some remarks on it may have
an interest for readers of Hegel (they are too brief to be of use to
others).

One answer might be this. Hegel did not really hold that idea. But he
was lecturing, not writing a book. He thought the principle of tragedy
was more clearly and readily visible in ancient works than in modern;
and so, for purposes of exposition, he emphasised the ancient form. And
this fact, with his personal enthusiasm for certain Greek plays, leads
the reader of the _Aesthetik_ to misconstrue him.

Again, we must remember the facts of Hegel's life. He seems first to
have reflected on tragedy at a time when his enthusiasm for the Greeks
and their 'substantial' ethics was combined, not only with a
contemptuous dislike for much modern 'subjectivity' (this he never
ceased to feel), but with a certain hostility to the individualism and
the un-political character of Christian morality. His first view of
tragedy was thus, in effect, a theory of Aeschylean and Sophoclean
tragedy; and it appears in the early essay on _Naturrecht_ and more
fully in the _Phaenomenologie_. Perhaps, then, when he came to deal with
the subject more generally, he insensibly regarded the ancient form as
the typical form, and tended to treat the modern rather as a
modification of this type than as an alternative embodiment of the
general idea of tragedy. The note in the _Rechtsphilosophie_ (p. 196)
perhaps favours this idea.

But, whether it is correct or no, I believe that the impression produced
by the _Aesthetik_ is a true one, and that Hegel did deliberately
consider the ancient form the more satisfactory. It would not follow, of
course, from that opinion that he thought the advantage was all on one
side, or considered this or that ancient poet greater than this or that
modern, or wished that modern poets had tried to write tragedies of the
Greek type. Tragedy would, in his view, be in somewhat the same position
as Sculpture. Renaissance sculpture, he might say, has qualities in
which it is superior to Greek, and Michael Angelo may have been as great
an artist as Pheidias; but all the same for certain reasons Greek
sculpture is, and probably will remain, sculpture _par excellence_. So,
though not to the same extent, with tragedy.

And such a view would cohere with his general view of Art. For he taught
that, in a sense, Classical Art is Art _par excellence_, and that in
Greece beauty held a position such as it never held before and will not
hold again. To explain in a brief note how this position bears upon his
treatment of modern tragedy would be impossible: but if the student of
Hegel will remember in what sense and on what grounds he held it; that
he describes Beauty as the '_sinnliches_ Scheinen der Idee'; that for
him the new idea that distinguished Christianity and Romantic Art from
Greek religion and Classical Art is that '_unendliche_ Subjektivitaet'
which implies a negative, though not merely negative, relation to sense;
and that in Romantic Art this idea is not only exhibited in the
religious sphere, but appears in the position given to personal honour,
love, and loyalty, and indirectly in what Hegel calls 'die formelle
Selbststaendigkeit der individuellen Besonderheiten,' and in the fuller
admission of common and un-beautiful reality into the realm of
Beauty,--he will see how all this is connected with those
characteristics of modern tragedy which Hegel regards as necessary and
yet as, in part, drawbacks. This connection, which Hegel has no occasion
to work out, will be apparent even from consideration of the
introductory chapter on 'die romantische Kunstform,' _Aesthetik_, ii.
120-135.

There is one marked difference, I may add, between ancient and modern
tragedy, which should be considered with reference to this subject, and
which Hegel, I think, does not explicitly point out. Speaking roughly,
we may say that the former includes, while the latter tends to ignore,
the accepted religious ideas of the time. The ultimate reason of this
difference, on Hegel's view, would be that the Olympian gods are
themselves the '_sinnliches_ Scheinen der Idee,' and so are in the same
element as Art, while this is, on the whole, not so with modern
religious ideas. One result would be that Greek tragedy represents the
total Greek mind more fully than modern tragedy can the total modern
mind.


FOOTNOTES:

  [1] See, primarily, _Aesthetik_, iii. 479-581, and especially
    525-581. There is much in _Aesthetik_, i. 219-306, and a good deal in
    ii. 1-243, that bears on the subject. See also the section on Greek
    religion in _Religionsphilosophie_, ii. 96-156, especially 131-6,
    152-6; and the references to the death of Socrates in _Geschichte der
    Philosophie_, ii. 81 ff., especially 102-5. The works so far cited
    all consist of posthumous redactions of lecture-notes. Among works
    published by Hegel himself, the early essay on 'Naturrecht' (_Werke_,
    i. 386 ff.), and _Phaenomenologie d. Geistes_, 320-348, 527-542, deal
    with or bear on _Greek_ tragedy. See also _Rechtsphilosophie_, 196,
    note. There is a note on _Wallenstein_ in _Werke_, xvii. 411-4. These
    references are to the second edition of the works cited, where there
    are two editions.

  [2] His theory of tragedy is connected with his view of the function
    of negation in the universe. No statement therefore which ignores his
    metaphysics and his philosophy of religion can be more than a
    fragmentary account of that theory.

  [3] I say 'might,' because Hegel himself in the _Phaenomenologie_
    uses those very terms 'divine' and 'human law' in reference to the
    _Antigone_.

  [4] See Note at end of lecture.

  [5] This interpretation of Hegel's 'abstract' is more or less
    conjectural and doubtful.

  [6] Hegel's meaning does not fully appear in the sentences here
    condensed. The 'blessedness' comes from the sense of greatness or
    beauty in the characters.

  [7] Hegel himself expressly guards against this misconception.

  [8] The same point may be put thus, in view of that dangerous word
    'personality.' Our interest in Macbeth may be called interest in a
    personality; but it is not an interest in some bare form of
    self-consciousness, nor yet in a person in the legal sense, but in a
    personality full of matter. This matter is not an ethical or
    universal end, but it must in a sense be universal--human nature in a
    particular form--or it would not excite the horror, sympathy, and
    admiration it does excite. Nor, again, could it excite these feelings
    if it were not composed largely of qualities on which we set a high
    value.

  [9] In relation to _both_ sides in the conflict (though it may not
    need to negate life in both). For the ultimate agent in the
    catastrophe is emphatically not the finite power of one side. It is
    beyond both, and, at any rate in relation to them, boundless.




WORDSWORTH


WORDSWORTH[1]


'Never forget what, I believe, was observed to you by Coleridge, that
every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great or
original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished;
he must teach the art by which he is to be seen.... My ears are
stone-dead to this idle buzz, and my flesh as insensible as iron to
these petty stings.' These sentences, from a letter written by
Wordsworth to Lady Beaumont in 1807, may remind us of the common
attitude of his reviewers in the dozen years when most of his best
poetry was produced. A century has gone by, and there is now no English
poet, either of that period or of any other, who has been the subject of
criticism more just, more appreciative, we may even say more
reverential. Some of this later criticism might have satisfied even that
sense of wonder, awe, and solemn responsibility with which the poet
himself regarded the operation of the spirit of poetry within him; and
if we desire an interpretation of that spirit, we shall find a really
astonishing number of excellent guides. Coleridge, Hazlitt, Arnold,
Swinburne, Brooke, Myers, Pater, Lowell, Legouis,--how easy to add to
this list of them! Only the other day there came another, Mr. Walter
Raleigh. And that the best book on an English poet that has appeared for
some years should be a study of Wordsworth is just what might have been
expected. The whirligig of time has brought him a full revenge.

I have no idea of attempting in these two lectures another study, or
even an estimate, of Wordsworth. My purpose is much more limited. I
think that in a good deal of current criticism, and also in the notions
of his poetry prevalent among general readers, a disproportionate
emphasis is often laid on certain aspects of his mind and writings. And
I should like to offer some words of warning as to this tendency, and
also some advice as to the spirit in which he should be approached. I
will begin with the advice, though I am tempted at the last moment to
omit it, and simply to refer you to Mr. Raleigh, who throughout his book
has practised what I am about to preach.


  1.

There have been greater poets than Wordsworth, but none more original.
He saw new things, or he saw things in a new way. Naturally, this would
have availed us little if his new things had been private fancies, or if
his new perception had been superficial. But that was not so. If it had
been, Wordsworth might have won acceptance more quickly, but he would
not have gained his lasting hold on poetic minds. As it is, those in
whom he creates the taste by which he is relished, those who learn to
love him (and in each generation they are not a few), never let him go.
Their love for him is of the kind that he himself celebrated, a settled
passion, perhaps 'slow to begin,' but 'never ending,' and twined around
the roots of their being. And the reason is that they find his way of
seeing the world, his poetic experience, what Arnold meant by his
'criticism of life,' to be something deep, and therefore something that
will hold. It continues to bring them joy, peace, strength, exaltation.
It does not thin out or break beneath them as they grow older and wiser;
nor does it fail them, much less repel them, in sadness or even in their
sorest need. And yet--to return to our starting-point--it continues to
strike them as original, and something more. It is not like
Shakespeare's myriad-mindedness; it is, for good or evil or both,
peculiar. They can remember, perhaps, the day when first they saw a
cloud somewhat as Wordsworth saw it, or first really understood what
made him write this poem or that; his unique way of seeing and feeling,
though now familiar and beloved, still brings them not only peace,
strength, exaltation, but a 'shock of mild surprise'; and his paradoxes,
long known by heart and found full of truth, still remain paradoxes.

If this is so, the road into Wordsworth's mind must be through his
strangeness and his paradoxes, and not round them. I do not mean that
they are everywhere in his poetry. Much of it, not to speak of
occasional platitudes, is beautiful without being peculiar or difficult;
and some of this may be as valuable as that which is audacious or
strange. But unless we get hold of that, we remain outside Wordsworth's
centre; and, if we have not a most unusual affinity to him, we cannot
get hold of that unless we realise its strangeness, and refuse to blunt
the sharpness of its edge. Consider, for example, two or three of his
statements; the statements of a poet, no doubt, and not of a
philosopher, but still evidently statements expressing, intimating, or
symbolising, what for him was the most vital truth. He said that the
meanest flower that blows could give him thoughts that often lie too
deep for tears. He said, in a poem not less solemn, that Nature was the
soul of all his moral being; and also that she can so influence us that
nothing will be able to disturb our faith that all that we behold is
full of blessings. After making his Wanderer tell the heart-rending tale
of Margaret, he makes him say that the beauty and tranquillity of her
ruined cottage had once so affected him

  That what we feel of sorrow and despair
  From ruin and from change, and all the grief
  The passing shows of Being leave behind,
  Appeared an idle dream, that could not live
  Where meditation was.

He said that this same Wanderer could read in the silent faces of the
clouds unutterable love, and that among the mountains all things for him
breathed immortality. He said to 'Almighty God,'

  But thy most dreaded instrument
  For working out a pure intent
  Is Man arrayed for mutual slaughter;
  Yea, Carnage is thy daughter.

This last, it will be agreed, is a startling statement; but is it a whit
more extraordinary than the others? It is so only if we assume that we
are familiar with thoughts that lie too deep for tears, or if we
translate 'the soul of all my moral being' into 'somehow concordant with
my moral feelings,' or convert 'all that we behold' into 'a good deal
that we behold,' or transform the Wanderer's reading of the silent faces
of the clouds into an argument from 'design.' But this is the road round
Wordsworth's mind, not into it.[2]

Again, with all Wordsworth's best poems, it is essential not to miss the
unique tone of his experience. This doubtless holds good of any true
poet, but not in the same way. With many poems there is little risk of
our failing either to feel what is distinctive of the writer, or to
appropriate what he says. What is characteristic, for example, in
Byron's lines, _On this day I complete my thirty-sixth year_, or in
Shelley's _Stanzas written in dejection near Naples_, cannot escape
discovery, nor is there any difficulty in understanding the mood
expressed. But with Wordsworth, for most readers, this risk is
constantly present in some degree. Take, for instance, one of the most
popular of his lyrics, the poem about the daffodils by the lake. It is
popular partly because it remains a pretty thing even to those who
convert it into something quite undistinctive of Wordsworth. And it is
comparatively easy, too, to perceive and to reproduce in imagination a
good deal that _is_ distinctive; for instance, the feeling of the
sympathy of the waves and the flowers and the breeze in their glee, and
the Wordsworthian 'emotion recollected in tranquillity' expressed in the
lines (written by his wife),

  They flash upon that inward eye
  Which is the bliss of solitude.

But there remains something still more intimately Wordsworthian:

  I wandered lonely as a Cloud
  That floats on high o'er vales and hills.

It is thrust into the reader's face, for these are the opening lines.
But with many readers it passes unheeded, because it is strange and
outside their own experience. And yet it is absolutely essential to the
effect of the poem.

This poem, however, even when thoroughly conventionalised, would remain,
as I said, a pretty thing; and it could scarcely excite derision. Our
point is best illustrated from the pieces by which Wordsworth most
earned ridicule, the ballad poems. They arose almost always from some
incident which, for him, had a novel and arresting character and came on
his mind with a certain shock; and if we do not get back to this through
the poem, we remain outside it. We may, of course, get back to this and
yet consider the poem to be more or less a failure. There is here
therefore room for legitimate differences of opinion. Mr. Swinburne
sees, no doubt, as clearly as Coleridge did, the intention of _The Idiot
Boy_ and _The Thorn_, yet he calls them 'doleful examples of
eccentricity in dullness,' while Coleridge's judgment, though he
criticised both poems, was very different. I believe (if I may venture
into the company of such critics) that I see why Wordsworth wrote _Goody
Blake and Harry Gill_ and the _Anecdote for Fathers_, and yet I doubt if
he has succeeded in either; but a great man, Charles James Fox, selected
the former for special praise, and Matthew Arnold included the latter in
a selection from which he excluded _The Sailor's Mother_.[3] Indeed, of
all the poems at first most ridiculed there is probably not one that has
not been praised by some excellent judge. But they were ridiculed by
men who judged them without attempting first to get inside them. And
this is fatal.

I may bring out the point by referring more fully to one of them. _Alice
Fell_ was beloved by the best critic of the nineteenth century, Charles
Lamb; but the general distaste for it was such that it was excluded 'in
policy' from edition after edition of Wordsworth's Poems; many still who
admire _Lucy Gray_ see nothing to admire in _Alice Fell_; and you may
still hear the question asked, What could be made of a child crying for
the loss of her cloak? And what, I answer, could be made of a man poking
his stick into a pond to find leeches? What sense is there in asking
questions about the subject of a poem, if you first deprive this subject
of all the individuality it possesses in the poem? Let me illustrate
this individuality methodically. A child crying for the loss of her
cloak is one thing, quite another is a child who has an imagination, and
who sees the tattered remnants of her cloak whirling in the wheel-spokes
of a post-chaise fiercely driven by strangers on lonesome roads through
a night of storm in which the moon is drowned. She was alone, and,
having to reach the town she belonged to, she got up behind the chaise,
and her cloak was caught in the wheel. And she is fatherless and
motherless, and her poverty (the poem is called _Alice Fell, or
Poverty_) is so extreme that for the loss of her weather-beaten rag she
does not 'cry'; she weeps loud and bitterly; weeps as if her innocent
heart would break; sits by the stranger who has placed her by his side
and is trying to console her, insensible to all relief; sends forth sob
after sob as if her grief could never, never have an end; checks herself
for a moment to answer a question, and then weeps on as if she had lost
her only friend, and the thought would choke her very heart. It was
_this_ poverty and _this_ grief that Wordsworth described with his
reiterated hammering blows. Is it not pathetic? And to Wordsworth it was
more. To him grief like this is sublime. It is the agony of a soul from
which something is torn away that was made one with its very being. What
does it matter whether the thing is a woman, or a kingdom, or a tattered
cloak? It is the passion that counts. Othello must not agonise for a
cloak, but 'the little orphan Alice Fell' has nothing else to agonise
for. Is all this insignificant? And then--for this poem about a child is
right to the last line--next day the storm and the tragedy have
vanished, and the new cloak is bought, of duffil grey, as warm a cloak
as man can sell; and the child is as pleased as Punch.[4]


  2.

I pass on from this subject to another, allied to it, but wider. In
spite of all the excellent criticism of Wordsworth, there has gradually
been formed, I think, in the mind of the general reader a partial and
misleading idea of the poet and his work. This partiality is due to
several causes: for instance, to the fact that personal recollections of
Wordsworth have inevitably been, for the most part, recollections of his
later years; to forgetfulness of his position in the history of
literature, and of the restricted purpose of his first important poems;
and to the insistence of some of his most influential critics, notably
Arnold, on one particular source of his power--an insistence perfectly
just, but accompanied now and then by a lack of sympathy with other
aspects of his poetry. The result is an idea of him which is mainly true
and really characteristic, but yet incomplete, and so, in a sense,
untrue; a picture, I might say, somewhat like Millais' first portrait of
Gladstone, which renders the inspiration, the beauty, the light, but
not the sternness or imperiousness, and not all of the power and fire.
Let me try to express this idea, which, it is needless to say, I do not
attribute, in the shape here given to it, to anyone in particular.

It was not Wordsworth's function to sing, like most great poets, of war,
or love, or tragic passions, or the actions of supernatural beings. His
peculiar function was 'to open out the soul of little and familiar
things,' alike in nature and in human life. His 'poetry is great because
of the extraordinary power with which he feels the joy offered to us in
nature, the joy offered to us in the simple primary affections and
duties.' His field was therefore narrow; and, besides, he was deficient
in romance, his moral sympathies were somewhat limited, and he tended
also to ignore the darker aspects of the world. But in this very
optimism lay his strength. The gulf which for Byron and Shelley yawned
between the real and the ideal, had no existence for him. For him the
ideal was realised, and Utopia a country which he saw every day, and
which, he thought, every man might see who did not strive, nor cry, nor
rebel, but opened his heart in love and thankfulness to sweet influences
as universal and perpetual as the air. The spirit of his poetry was also
that of his life--a life full of strong but peaceful affections; of a
communion with nature in keen but calm and meditative joy; of perfect
devotion to the mission with which he held himself charged; and of a
natural piety gradually assuming a more distinctively religious tone.
Some verses of his own best describe him, and some verses of Matthew
Arnold his influence on his readers. These are his own words (from _A
Poet's Epitaph_):

  But who is he, with modest looks,
  And clad in homely russet brown?
  He murmurs near the running brooks
  A music sweeter than their own.


  He is retired as noontide dew,
  Or fountain in a noon-day grove;
  And you must love him, ere to you
  He will seem worthy of your love.

  The outward shows of sky and earth,
  Of hill and valley, he has viewed;
  And impulses of deeper birth
  Have come to him in solitude.

  In common things that round us lie
  Some random truths he can impart,
  --The harvest of a quiet eye
  That broods and sleeps on his own heart.

  But he is weak; both man and boy,
  Hath been an idler in the land:
  Contented if he might enjoy
  The things which others understand.

And these are the words from Arnold's _Memorial Verses_:

  He too upon a wintry clime
  Had fallen--on this iron time
  Of doubts, disputes, distractions, fears
  He found us when the age had bound
  Our souls in its benumbing round--
  He spoke, and loosed our heart in tears.
  He laid us as we lay at birth
  On the cool flowery lap of earth;
  Smiles broke from us and we had ease.
  The hills were round us, and the breeze
  Went o'er the sunlit fields again;
  Our foreheads felt the wind and rain.
  Our youth returned: for there was shed
  On spirits that had long been dead,
  Spirits dried up and closely furled,
  The freshness of the early world.

  Ah, since dark days still bring to light
  Man's prudence and man's fiery might,
  Time may restore us in his course
  Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force;
  But where will Europe's latter hour
  Again find Wordsworth's healing power?
  Others will teach us how to dare,
  And against fear our breast to steel;
  Others will strengthen us to bear--
  But who, ah who, will make us feel?
  The cloud of mortal destiny,
  Others will front it fearlessly--
  But who, like him, will put it by?

  Keep fresh the grass upon his grave,
  O Rotha! with thy living wave.
  Sing him thy best! for few or none
  Hears thy voice right, now he is gone.

Those last words are enough to disarm dissent. No, that voice will never
again be heard quite right now Wordsworth is gone. Nor is it, for the
most part, dissent that I wish to express. The picture we have been
looking at, though we may question the accuracy of this line or that,
seems to me, I repeat, substantially true. But is there nothing missing?
Consider this picture, and refuse to go beyond it, and then ask if it
accounts for all that is most characteristic in Wordsworth. How did the
man in the picture ever come to write the Immortality _Ode_, or
_Yew-trees_, or why should he say,

  For I must tread on shadowy ground, must sink
  Deep--and, aloft ascending, breathe in worlds
  To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil?

How, again, could he say that Carnage is God's daughter, or write the
_Sonnets dedicated to National Liberty and Independence_, or the tract
on the Convention of Cintra? Can it be true of him that many of his
best-known poems of human life--perhaps the majority--deal with painful
subjects, and not a few with extreme suffering? Should we expect him to
make an 'idol' of Milton, or to show a 'strong predilection for such
geniuses as Dante and Michael Angelo'? He might easily be 'reserved,'
but is it not surprising to find him described as haughty, prouder than
Lucifer, inhumanly arrogant? Why should his forehead have been marked by
the 'severe worn pressure of thought,' or his eyes have looked so
'supernatural ... like fires, half burning, half smouldering, with a
sort of acrid fixture of regard, and seated at the further end of two
caverns'? In all this there need be nothing inconsistent with the
picture we have been looking at; but that picture fails to suggest it.
In that way the likeness it presents is only partial, and I propose to
emphasise some of the traits which it omits or marks too faintly.[5]

And first as to the restriction of Wordsworth's field. Certainly his
field, as compared with that of some poets, is narrow; but to describe
it as confined to external nature and peasant life, or to little and
familiar things, would be absurdly untrue, as a mere glance at his Table
of Contents suffices to show. And its actual restriction was not due to
any false theory, nor mainly to any narrowness of outlook. It was due,
apart from limitation of endowment, on the one hand to that diminution
of poetic energy which in Wordsworth began comparatively soon, and on
the other, especially in his best days, to deliberate choice; and we
must not assume without question that he was inherently incapable of
doing either what he would not do, or what, in his last five and thirty
years, he could no longer do.

There is no reason to suppose that Wordsworth undervalued or objected to
the subjects of such poets as Homer and Virgil, Chaucer and Spenser,
Shakespeare and Milton. And when, after writing his part of the _Lyrical
Ballads_, he returned from Germany and settled in the Lake Country, the
subjects he himself revolved for a great poem were not concerned with
rural life or humble persons. Some old 'romantic' British theme, left
unsung by Milton; some tale of Chivalry, dire enchantments, war-like
feats; vanquished Mithridates passing north and becoming Odin; the
fortunes of the followers of Sertorius; de Gourgues' journey of
vengeance to Florida; Gustavus; Wallace and his exploits in the war for
his country's independence,--these are the subjects he names first. And,
though his 'last and favourite aspiration' was towards

               Some philosophic song
  Of Truth that cherishes our daily life,

--that song which was never completed--yet, some ten years later, he
still hoped, when it should be finished, to write an epic. Whether at
any time he was fitted for the task or no, he wished to undertake it;
and his addiction, by no means entire even in his earlier days, to
little and familiar things was due, not at all to an opinion that they
are the only right subjects or the best, nor merely to a natural
predilection for them, but to the belief that a particular kind of
poetry was wanted at that time to counteract its special evils. There
prevailed, he thought, a 'degrading thirst after outrageous
stimulation.' The violent excitement of public events, and 'the
increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their
occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the
rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies,' had induced a
torpor of mind which only yielded to gross and sensational effects--such
effects as were produced by 'frantic novels,' of the Radcliffe or Monk
Lewis type, full of mysterious criminals, gloomy castles and terrifying
spectres. He wanted to oppose to this tendency one as far removed from
it as possible; to write a poetry even _more_ alien to it than
Shakespeare's tragedies or Spenser's stories of knights and dragons; to
show men that wonder and beauty can be felt, and the heart be moved,
even when the rate of the pulse is perfectly normal. In the same way, he
grieved Coleridge by refusing to interest himself in the Somersetshire
fairies, and declared that he desired for his scene no planet but the
earth, and no region of the earth stranger than England and the lowliest
ways in England. And, being by no means merely a gentle shepherd, but a
born fighter who was easily provoked and could swing his crook with
uncommon force, he asserted his convictions defiantly and carried them
out to extremes. And so in later days, after he had somewhat narrowed,
when in the Seventh Book of the _Excursion_ he made the Pastor protest
that poetry was not wanted to multiply and aggravate the din of war, or
to propagate the pangs and turbulence of passionate love, he did this
perhaps because the world which would not listen to him[6] was
enraptured by _Marmion_ and the earlier poems of Byron.

How great Wordsworth's success might have been in fields which he
deliberately avoided, it is perhaps idle to conjecture. I do not suppose
it would have been very great, but I see no reason to believe that he
would have failed. With regard, for instance, to love, one cannot read
without a smile his reported statement that, had he been a writer of
love-poetry, it would have been natural to him to write it with a degree
of warmth which could hardly have been approved by his principles, and
which might have been undesirable for the reader. But one may smile at
his naivete without disbelieving his statement. And, in fact, Wordsworth
neither wholly avoided the subject nor failed when he touched it. The
poems about Lucy are not poems of passion, in the usual sense, but they
surely are love-poems. The verses _'Tis said that some have died for
love_, excluded from Arnold's selection but praised by Ruskin, are
poignant enough. And the following lines from _Vaudracour and Julia_
make one wonder how this could be to Arnold the only poem of
Wordsworth's that he could not read with pleasure:

  Arabian fiction never filled the world
  With half the wonders that were wrought for him.
  Earth breathed in one great presence of the spring;
  Life turned the meanest of her implements,
  Before his eyes, to price above all gold;
  The house she dwelt in was a sainted shrine;
  Her chamber-window did surpass in glory
  The portals of the dawn; all paradise
  Could, by the simple opening of a door,
  Let itself in upon him:--pathways, walks,
  Swarmed with enchantment, till his spirit sank,
  Surcharged, within him, overblest to move
  Beneath a sun that wakes a weary world
  To its dull round of ordinary cares;
  A man too happy for mortality!

As a whole, _Vaudracour and Julia_ is a failure, but these lines haunt
my memory, and I cannot think them a poor description of that which they
profess to describe. This is not precisely 'passion,' and, I admit, they
do not prove Wordsworth's capacity to deal with passion. The main reason
for doubting whether, if he had made the attempt, he would have reached
his highest level, is that, so far as we can see, he did not strongly
feel--perhaps hardly felt at all--that the _passion_ of love is a way
into the Infinite; and a thing must be no less than this to Wordsworth
if it is to rouse all his power. Byron, it seemed to him, had

                                     dared to take
  Life's rule from passion craved for passion's sake;[7]

and he utterly repudiated that. 'The immortal mind craves objects that
endure.'

Then there is that 'romance' which Wordsworth abjured. In using the word
I am employing the familiar distinction between two tendencies of the
Romantic Revival, one called naturalistic and one called, in a more
special sense, romantic, and signalised, among other ways, by a love of
the marvellous, the supernatural, the exotic, the worlds of mythology.
It is a just and necessary distinction: the _Ancient Mariner_ and
_Michael_ are very dissimilar. But, like most distinctions of the kind,
it becomes misleading when it is roughly handled or pushed into an
antithesis; and it would be easy to show that these two tendencies
exclude one another only in their inferior examples, and that the better
the example of either, the more it shows its community with the other.
There is not a great deal of truth to nature in _Lalla Rookh_, but there
is plenty in the _Ancient Mariner_: in certain poems of Crabbe there is
little romance, but there is no want of it in _Sir Eustace Grey_ or in
_Peter Grimes_. Taking the distinction, however, as we find it, and
assuming, as I do, that it lay beyond Wordsworth's power to write an
_Ancient Mariner_, or to tell us of

         magic casements opening on the foam
  Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn,

we are not therefore to conclude that he was by nature deficient in
romance and incapable of writing well what he refused to write. The
indications are quite contrary. Not to speak here of his own peculiar
dealings with the supernatural, his vehement defence (in the _Prelude_)
of fairy-tales as food for the young is only one of many passages which
show that in his youth he lived in a world not haunted only by the
supernatural powers of nature. He delighted in 'Arabian fiction.' The
'Arabian sands' (_Solitary Reaper_) had the same glamour for him as for
others. His dream of the Arab and the two books (_Prelude_, v.) has a
very curious romantic effect, though it is not romance _in excelsis_,
like _Kubla Khan_. His love of Spenser; his very description of him,

  Sweet Spenser, moving through his clouded heaven
  With the moon's beauty and the moon's soft pace;

the very lines, so characteristic of his habitual attitude, in which he
praises the Osmunda fern as

       lovelier, in its own retired abode
  On Grasmere's beach, than Naiad by the side
  Of Grecian brook, or Lady of the Mere
  Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance,[8]

--these, and a score of other passages, all point the same way. He would
not carry his readers to the East, like Southey and Moore and Byron,
nor, like Coleridge, towards the South Pole; but when it suited his
purpose, as in _Ruth_, he could write well enough of un-English scenery:

  He told of the magnolia, spread
  High as a cloud, high overhead,
  The cypress and her spire;
  Of flowers that with one scarlet gleam
  Cover a hundred leagues, and seem
  To set the hills on fire.

He would not choose Endymion or Hyperion for a subject, for he was
determined to speak of what Englishmen may see every day; but what he
wrote of Greek religion in the _Excursion_ is full of imagination and
brought inspiration to Keats, and the most famous expression in English
of that longing for the perished glory of Greek myth which appears in
much Romantic poetry came from Wordsworth's pen:

             Great God! I'd rather be
  A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
  So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
  Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
  Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
  Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.

As for war, Wordsworth neither strongly felt, nor at all approved, that
elementary love of fighting which, together with much nobler things, is
gratified by some great poetry. And

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