Chapter 13
"Airy, fairy Lilian, Flitting fairy Lilian, When I ask her if she love me, Claps her tiny hands above me, Laughing all she can; She'll not tell me if she love me, Cruel little Lilian."
There is not much of the scorn of scorn, or the love of love, or the open scroll of the everlasting will, about _Cruel Little Lilian_. But there _is_ a distinct striving after style--a striving that, as everyone knows, ended in mastery: and through style Tennyson reached such heights of thought as he was capable of. To the end his thought remained inferior to his style: and to the end the two in him were separable, whereas in poets of the very first rank they are inseparable. But that towards the end his style lifted his thought to heights of which even _In Memoriam_ gave no promise cannot, I think, be questioned by any student of his collected works.
Tennyson belongs, if ever poet belonged, to Class 2: and it is the prettiest irony of fate that, having unreasonably belauded Class 1, he is now being found fault with for not conforming to the supposed requirements of that Class. He, who spoke of the poet as of a seër "through life and death," is now charged with seeing but a short way beyond his own nose. The Rev. Stopford Brooke finds that he had little sympathy with the aspirations of the struggling poor; that he bore himself coldly towards the burning questions of the hour; that, in short, he stood anywhere but in advance of his age. As if plenty of people were not interested in these things! Why, I cannot step out into the street without running against somebody who is in advance of the times on some point or another.
Of Virgil and Shakespeare.
Virgil and Shakespeare were neither martyrs nor preachers despised in their generation. I have said that as poets they also belong to Class 2. Will a champion of the Typical Poet (new style) dispute this, and argue that Virgil and Shakespeare, though they escaped persecution, yet began with matter that overweighted their style--with deep stuttered thoughts--in fine, with a Message to their Time? I think that view can hardly be maintained. We have the _Eclogues_ before the _Æneid_; and _The Comedy of Errors_ before _As You Like It_. Expression comes first; and through expression, thought. These are the greatest names, or of the greatest: and they belong to Class 2.
Of Milton.
Again, no English poetry is more thoroughly informed with thought than Milton's. Did he find big thoughts hustling within him for utterance? And did he at an early age stutter in numbers till his oppressed soul found relief? And was it thus that he attained the glorious manner of
"Seasons return, but not to me returns Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn...."
--and so on. No, to be short, it was not. At the age of twenty-four, or thereabouts, he deliberately proposed to himself to be a great poet. To this end he practised and studied, and travelled unweariedly until his thirty-first year. Then he tried to make up his mind what to write about. He took some sheets of paper--they are to be seen at this day in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge--and set down no less than ninety-nine subjects for his proposed _magnum opus_, before he could decide upon _Paradise Lost_. To be sure, when the _magnum opus_ was written it fetched £5 only. But even this does not prove that Milton was before his age. Perhaps he was behind it. _Paradise Lost_ appeared in 1667: in 1657 it might have fetched considerably more than £5.
If the Typical Poet have few points in common with Shakespeare or Milton, I fear that the Typical Poet begins to be in a bad way.
Of Coleridge.
Shall we try Coleridge? He had "great thoughts"--thousands of them. On the other hand, he never had the slightest difficulty in uttering them, in prose. His great achievements in verse--his _Genevieve_, his _Christabel_, his _Kubla Khan_, his _Ancient Mariner_--are achievements of expression. When they appeal from the senses to the intellect their appeal is usually quite simple.
"He prayeth best who loveth best All things both great and small."
No, I am afraid Coleridge is not the Typical Poet.
On the whole I suspect the Typical Poet to be a hasty generalization from Shelley.
POETS ON THEIR OWN ART
May 11, 1895. A Prelude to Poetry.
"To those who love the poets most, who care most for their ideals, this little book ought to be the one indispensable book of devotion, the _credo_ of the poetic faith." "This little book" is the volume with which Mr. Ernest Rhys prefaces the pretty series of Lyrical Poets which he is editing for Messrs. Dent & Co. He calls it _The Prelude to Poetry_, and in it he has brought together the most famous arguments stated from time to time by the English poets in defence and praise of their own art. Sidney's magnificent "Apologie" is here, of course, and two passages from Ben Jonson's "Discoveries," Wordsworth's preface to the second edition of "Lyrical Ballads," the fourteenth chapter of the "Biographia Literaria," and Shelley's "Defence."
Poets as Prose-writers.
What admirable prose these poets write! Southey, to be sure, is not represented in this volume. Had he written at length upon his art--in spite of his confession that, when writing prose, "of what is now called style not a thought enters my head at any time"--we may be sure the reflection would have been even more obvious than it is. But without him this small collection makes out a splendid case against all that has been said in disparagement of the prose style of poets. Let us pass what Hazlitt said of Coleridge's prose; or rather let us quote it once again for its vivacity, and so pass on--
"One of his (Coleridge's) sentences winds its 'forlorn way obscure' over the page like a patriarchal procession with camels laden, wreathed turbans, household wealth, the whole riches of the author's mind poured out upon the barren waste of his subject. The palm tree spreads its sterile branches overhead, and the land of promise is seen in the distance."
All this is very neatly malicious, and particularly the last co-ordinate sentence. But in the chapter chosen by Mr. Rhys from the "Biographia Literaria" Coleridge's prose is seen at its best--obedient, pertinent, at once imaginative and restrained--as in the conclusion--
"Finally, good sense is the body of poetic genius, fancy its drapery, motion its life, and imagination the soul that is everywhere, and in each; and forms all into one graceful and intelligent whole."
The prose of Sidney's _Apologie_ is Sidney's best; and when that has been said, nothing remains but to economize in quoting. I will take three specimens only. First then, for beauty:--
"Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapistry, as divers Poets have done, neither with plesant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers: nor whatsoever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely. Her world is brasen, the Poets only deliver a golden: but let those things alone and goe to man, for whom as the other things are, so it seemeth in him her uttermost cunning is imployed, and know whether shee have brought forth so true a lover as _Theagines_, so constant a friende as _Pilades_, so valiant a man as _Orlando_, so right a Prince as _Xenophon's Cyrus_; so excellent a man every way as _Virgil's Aeneas_...."
Next for wit--roguishness, if you like the term better:--
"And therefore, if _Cato_ misliked _Fulvius_, for carrying _Ennius_ with him to the field, it may be answered, that if _Cato_ misliked it, the noble _Fulvius_ liked it, or else he had not done it."
And lastly for beauty and wit combined:--
"For he (the Poet) doth not only show the way, but giveth so sweete a prospect into the way, as will intice any man to enter into it. Nay he doth, as if your journey should lye through a fayre Vineyard, at the first give you a cluster of Grapes: that full of that taste, you may long to passe further. He beginneth not with obscure definitions, which must blur the margent with interpretations, and load the memory with doubtfulnesse: but he cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with or prepared for the well inchanting skill of Musicke: and with a tale forsooth he cometh unto you: with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner."
"Is not this a glorious way to talk?" demanded the Rev. T.E. Brown of this last passage, when he talked about Sidney, the other day, in Mr. Henley's _New Review_. "No one can fail," said Mr. Brown, amiably assuming the fineness of his own ear to be common to all mankind--"no one can fail to observe the sweetness and the strength, the outspokenness, the downrightness, and, at the same time, the nervous delicacy of pausation, the rhythm all ripple and suspended fall, the dainty _but_, the daintier _and forsooth_, as though the pouting of a proud reserve curved the fine lip of him, and had to be atoned for by the homeliness of _the chimney-corner_."
Everybody admires Sidney's prose. But how of this?--
"Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science. Emphatically it may be said of the Poet, as Shakespeare has said of man, 'that he looks before and after.' He is the rock of defence of human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love. In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs, _in spite of things silently gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed_, the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time."
It is Wordsworth who speaks--too rhetorically, perhaps. At any rate, the prose will not compare with Sidney's. But it is good prose, nevertheless; and the phrase I have ventured to italicise is superb.
Their high claims for Poesy.
As might be expected, the poets in this volume agree in pride of their calling. We have just listened to Wordsworth. Shelley quotes Tasso's proud sentence--"Non c'è in mondo chi merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta": and himself says, "The jury which sits in judgment upon a poet, belonging as he does to all time, must be composed of his peers: it must be impanelled by Time from the selectest of the wise of many generations." Sidney exalts the poet above the historian and the philosopher; and Coleridge asserts that "no man was ever yet a great poet without being at the same time a profound philosopher." Ben Jonson puts it characteristically: "Every beggarly corporation affords the State a mayor or two bailiffs yearly; but _Solus rex, aut poeta, non quotannis nascitur_." The longer one lives, the more cause one finds to rejoice that different men have different ways of saying the same thing.
Inspiration not Improvisation.
The agreement of all these poets on some other matters is more remarkable. Most of them claim _inspiration_ for the great practitioners of their art; but wonderful is the unanimity with which they dissociate this from _improvisation_. They are sticklers for the rules of the game. The Poet does not pour his full heart
"In profuse strains of _unpremeditated_ art."
On the contrary, his rapture is the sudden result of long premeditation. The first and most conspicuous lesson of this volume seems to be that Poetry is an _art_, and therefore has rules. Next after this, one is struck with the carefulness with which these practitioners, when it comes to theory, stick to their Aristotle.
Poetry not mere Metrical Composition
For instance, they are practically unanimous in accepting Aristotle's contention that it is not the metrical form that makes the poem. "Verse," says Sidney, "is an ornament and no cause to poetry, since there have been many most excellent poets that never versified, and now swarm many versifiers that need never answer to the name of poets." Wordsworth apologizes for using the word "Poetry" as synonymous with metrical composition. "Much confusion," he says, "has been introduced into criticism by this contradistinction of Poetry and Prose, instead of the more philosophical one of Poetry and Matter of Fact or Science. The only strict antithesis to Prose is Metre: nor is this, in truth, a _strict_ antithesis, because lines and passages of metre so naturally occur in writing prose that it would be scarcely possible to avoid them, even were it desirable." And Shelley--"It is by no means essential that a poet should accommodate his language to this traditional form, so that the harmony, which is its spirit, be observed.... The distinction between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error." Shelley goes on to instance Plato and Bacon as true poets, though they wrote in prose. "The popular division into prose and verse," he repeats, "is inadmissible in accurate philosophy."
Its philosophic function.
Then again, upon what Wordsworth calls "the more philosophical distinction" between Poetry and Matter of Fact--quoting, of course, the famous +"Philosophôteron kai spoudaioteron"+ passage in the _Poetics_--it is wonderful with what hearty consent our poets pounce upon this passage, and paraphrase it, and expand it, as the great justification of their art: which indeed it is. Sidney gives the passage at length. Wordsworth writes, "Aristotle, I have been told, hath said that Poetry is the most philosophic of all writings: it is so." Coleridge quotes Sir John Davies, who wrote of Poesy (surely with an eye on the _Poetics_):
"From their gross matter she abstracts their forms, And draws a kind of quintessence from things; Which to her proper nature she transforms To bear them light on her celestial wings.
"Thus does she, when from individual states She doth abstract the universal kinds; Which then reclothed in divers names and fates Steal access through our senses to our minds."
And Shelley has a remarkable paraphrase, ending, "The story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful: poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted."
In fine, this book goes far to prove of poetry, as it has been proved over and over again of other arts, that it is the men big enough to break the rules who accept and observe them most cheerfully.
THE ATTITUDE OF THE PUBLIC TOWARDS LETTERS
Sept. 29, 1894. The "Great Heart" of the Public.
I observe that our hoary friend, the Great Heart of the Public, has been taking his annual outing in September. Thanks to the German Emperor and the new head of the House of Orleans, he has had the opportunity of a stroll through the public press arm in arm with his old crony and adversary, the Divine Right of Kings. And the two have gone once more a-roaming by the light of the moon, to drop a tear, perchance, on the graves of the Thin End of the Wedge and the Stake in the Country. You know the unhappy story?--how the Wedge drove its thin end into the Stake, with fatal results: and how it died of remorse and was buried at the cross-roads with the Stake in its inside! It is a pathetic tale, and the Great Heart of the Public can always be trusted to discriminate true pathos from false.
Miss Marie Corelli's Opinion of it.
It was Mr. G.B. Burgin, in the September number of the _Idler_, who let the Great Heart loose this time--unwittingly, I am sure; for Mr. Burgin, when he thinks for himself (as he usually does), writes sound sense and capital English. But in the service of Journalism Mr. Burgin called on Miss Marie Corelli, the authoress of _Barabbas_, and asked what she thought of the value of criticism. Miss Corelli "idealised the subject by the poetic manner in which she mingled tea and criticism together." She said--
"I think authors do not sufficiently bear in mind the important fact that, in this age of ours, the public _thinks for itself_ much more extensively than we give it credit for. It is a cultured public, and its great brain is fully capable of deciding things. It rather objects to be treated like a child and told 'what to read and what to avoid'; and, moreover, we must not fail to note that it mistrusts criticism generally, and seldom reads 'reviews.' And why? Simply 'logrolling.' It is perfectly aware, for instance, that Mr. Theodore Watts is logroller-in-chief to Mr. Swinburne; that Mr. Le Gallienne 'rolls' greatly for Mr. Norman Gale; and that Mr. Andrew Lang tumbles his logs along over everything for as many as his humour fits...."
--I don't know the proportion of tea to criticism in all this: but Miss Corelli can hardly be said to "idealise the subject" here:--
"... The public is the supreme critic; and though it does not write in the _Quarterly_ or the _Nineteenth Century_, it thinks and talks independently of everything and everybody, and on its thought and word alone depends the fate of any piece of literature."
Mr. Hall Caine's View.
Then Mr. Burgin called on Mr. Hall Caine, who "had just finished breakfast." Mr. Hall Caine gave reasons which compelled him to believe that "for good or bad, criticism is a tremendous force." But he, too, confessed that in his opinion the public is the "ultimate critic." "It often happens that the public takes books on trust from the professed guides of literature, but if the books are not _right_, it drops them." And he proceeded to make an observation, with which we may most cordially agree. "I am feeling," he said, "increasingly, day by day, that _rightness_ in imaginative writing is more important than subject, or style, or anything else. If a story is right in its theme, and the evolution of its theme, it will live; if it is not right, it will die, whatever its secondary literary qualities."
In what sense the Public is the "Ultimate Critic."
I say that we may agree with this most cordially: and it need not cost us much to own that the public is the "ultimate critic," if we mean no more than this, that, since the public holds the purse, it rests ultimately with the public to buy, or neglect to buy, an author's books. That, surely, is obvious enough without the aid of fine language. But if Mr. Hall Caine mean that the public, without instruction from its betters, is the best judge of a book; if he consent with Miss Corelli that the general public is a cultured public with a great brain, and by the exercise of that great brain approves itself an infallible judge of the rightness or wrongness of a book, then I would respectfully ask for evidence. The poets and critics of his time united in praising Campion as a writer of lyrics: the Great Brain and Heart of the Public neglected him utterly for three centuries: then a scholar and critic arose and persuaded the public that Campion was a great lyrical writer: and now the public accepts him as such. Shall we say, then, the Great Heart of the Public is the "ultimate judge" of Campion's lyrics? Perhaps: but we might as well praise for his cleanliness a boy who has been held under the pump. When Martin Farquhar Tupper wrote, the Great Heart of the Public expanded towards him at once. The public bought his effusions by tens of thousands. Gradually the small voice of skilled criticism made itself heard, and the public grew ashamed of itself; and, at length, laughed at Tupper. Shall we, then, call the public the ultimate judge of Tupper? Perhaps: but we might as well praise the continence of a man who turns in disgust from drink on the morning after a drunken fit.[A]
What is "The Public"?
The proposition that the Man in the Street is a better judge of literature than the Critic--the man who knows little than the man who knows more--wears (to my mind, at least) a slightly imbecile air on the face of it. It also appears to me that people are either confusing thought or misusing language when they confer the title of "supreme critic" on the last person to be persuaded. And, again, what is "the public?" I gather that Miss Corelli's story of _Barabbas_ has had an immense popular success. But so, I believe, has the _Deadwood Dick_ series of penny dreadfuls. And the gifted author of _Deadwood Dick_ may console himself (as I daresay he does) for the neglect of the critics by the thought that the Great Brain[B] of the Public is the supreme judge of literature. But obviously he and Miss Corelli will not have the same Public in their mind. If for "the Great Brain of the Public" we substitute "the Great Brain of that Part of the Public which subscribes to Mudie's," we may lose something of impressiveness, but we shall at least know what we are talking about.
* * * * *
June 17, 1893. Mr. Gosse's View.
Astounding as the statement must appear to any constant reader of the Monthly Reviews, it is mainly because Mr. Gosse happens to be a man of letters that his opinion upon literary questions is worth listening to. In his new book[C] he discusses a dozen or so: and one of them--the question, "What Influence has Democracy upon Literature?"--not only has a chapter to itself, but seems to lie at the root of all the rest. I may add that Mr. Gosse's answer is a trifle gloomy.
"As we filed slowly out of the Abbey on the afternoon of Wednesday, the 12th of October, 1892, there must have occurred to others, I think, as to myself, a whimsical and half-terrifying sense of the symbolic contrast between what we had left and what we had emerged upon. Inside, the grey and vitreous atmosphere, the reverberations of music moaning somewhere out of sight, the bones and monuments of the noble dead, reverence, antiquity, beauty, rest. Outside, in the raw air, a tribe of hawkers urging upon the edges of a dense and inquisitive crowd a large sheet of pictures of the pursuit of a flea by a 'lady,' and more insidious salesmen doing a brisk trade in what they falsely pretended to be 'Tennyson's last poem.' Next day we read in our newspapers affecting accounts of the emotion displayed by the vast crowd outside the Abbey--horny hands dashing away the tear, seamstresses holding 'the little green volumes' to their faces to hide their agitation. Happy for those who could see these with their fairy telescopes out of the garrets of Fleet Street. I, alas!--though I sought assiduously--could mark nothing of the kind."
Nothing of the kind was there. Why should anything of the kind be there? Her poetry has been one of England's divinest treasures: but of her population a very few understand it; and the shrine has always been guarded by the elect who happen to possess, in varying degrees, certain qualities of mind and ear. It is, as Mr. Gosse puts it, by a sustained effort of bluff on the part of these elect that English poetry is kept upon its high pedestal of honor. The worship of it as one of the glories of our birth and state is imposed upon the masses by a small aristocracy of intelligence and taste.
Mr. Gissing's Testimony.
What do the "masses" care for poetry? In an appendix Mr. Gosse prints a letter from Mr. George Gissing, who, as everyone knows, has studied the popular mind assiduously, and with startling results. Here are a few sentences from his letter:--
(1) "After fifteen years' observation of the poorer classes of English folk, chiefly in London and the south, I am pretty well assured that, whatever civilising agencies may be at work among the democracy, poetry is not one of them."