Part 11

Many people doubt whether Christianity has done much, or even anything, for the "progress" of the human race as a race; and there is more to be said in defence of such doubt than most good people suppose. Indeed, the expression of this doubt is very widely considered as shocking and irreligious; and as condemnatory of Christianity altogether. It is considered to be equivalent to an assertion that Christianity has hitherto proved a "failure." But some who do not consider that Christianity has proved a failure, do, nevertheless, hold that it is open to question whether the race, as a race, has been much affected by it, and whether the external and visible evil and good which have come of it do not pretty nearly balance one another.

It is with the same view of things, from the same standpoint, that Mr. Patmore states his ideal of the poetic art, and condemns what he considers the current misconception of the subject. "I may go further," he declares, in his vivacious attack on "Emotional Art,"

and say that no art can appeal "to the emotions only" with the faintest hope of even the base success it aspires to. The pathos of such art (and pathos is its greatest point) is wholly due to a more or less vivid expression of a vague remorse at its divorce from truth and order. The Dame aux Camelias sighs in all Chopin's music over her lost virtue, which, however, she shows no anxiety to recover, and the characteristic expression of the most recent and popular school of poetry and painting is a ray of the same sickly and in the most part hypocritical homage to virtue. Without some such homage even the dying and super-sensitive body of "emotional art" loses its very faintest pretensions to the name of art, and becomes the confessed carion of Offenbach's operas and the music-hall. Atheism in art, as well as in life, has only to be pressed to its last consequences in order to become ridiculous, no less than disastrous; and the "ideal," in the absence of an idea or intellectual reality, becomes the "realism" of the brothel and the shambles.

What, then, is the ideal, the proper substance and manner of poetry? It is thus defined in another essay, which contends that "Bad Morality is Bad Art:"

The poet, as a rule, should avoid religion altogether as a direct subject. Law, the rectitude of humanity, should be his only subject, as, from time immemorial, it has been the subject of true art, though many a true artist has done the Muse's will and knew it not. As all the music of verse arises, not from infraction, but inflection of the law of the set metre, so the greatest poets have been those the modulus of whose verse has been most variously and delicately inflected, in correspondence with feelings and passions which are the inflections of moral law in their theme. Masculine law is always, however obscurely, the theme of the true poet; the feeling and its correspondent rhythm, its feminine inflection, without which the law has no sensitive or poetic life. Art is thus constituted because it is the constitution of life, all the grace and sweetness of which arise from inflection of law, not from infraction of it, as bad men and bad poets fancy.

Again from the same standpoint, again with the same absolute and aristocratic outlook on the world, does Patmore "sing of the nature of woman"--the subject of his constant preoccupation as an artist, the one sufficing subject to which he has devoted all his art. The modern woman, one may suppose, is not likely to appreciate the precise manner in which Patmore exalts her sex. It is far too logical, too reasonable, too scrupulously according to nature; thus, for example, in a passage of characteristically delicate wit:

It is "of faith" that the woman's claim to the honour of man lies in the fact of her being the "weaker vessel." It would be of no use to prove what every Christian man and woman is bound to believe, and what is, indeed, obvious to the senses of any sane man or woman whatever. But a few words of random comment on the text may, by adding to faith knowledge, make man and woman--woman especially--more thankful than before for those conditions which constitute the chief felicity of her life and his, and which it is one of the chief triumphs of progress to render ever more and more manifest. The happiest result of the "higher education" of woman cannot fail to consist in the rendering of her weakness more and more daintily conspicuous. How much sweeter to dry the tears that flow because one cannot accede to some demonstrable fallacy in her theory of variable stars, than to kiss her into conformity to the dinner-hour or the fitness or unfitness of such-or-such a person to be asked to a picnic! How much more dulcet the _dulcis Amaryllidis ira_ when Amaryllis knows Sophocles and Hegel by heart, than when her accomplishments extend only to a moderate proficiency in French and the pianoforte! It is a great consolation to reflect that, among all the bewildering changes to which the world is subject, the character of woman cannot be altered; and that, so long as she abstains from absolute outrages against nature--such as divided skirts, freethinking, tricycles, and Radicalism--neither Greek, nor conic sections, nor political economy, nor cigarettes, nor athletics, can ever really do other than enhance the charm of that sweet unreasonableness which humbles the gods to the dust, and compels them to adore the lace below the last hem of her brocade!

Such, then, and so consistent, is Patmore's attitude in matters of religion, of art, and of the relation of man and woman. We are concerned neither to defend nor to contend against it, admitting only that, granted the premises (which, no doubt, can be taken on certain grave and ancient warrants), the deductions from those premises are strictly logical, and at the present day, as novel as they are logical. Patmore is inclined to be petulant, and he occasionally rides a hobby-horse so recklessly as to commit himself to incredible fallacies. But a book which attains perfection has never yet been produced, and Patmore's is close, very close indeed.

SIR WILLIAM WATSON

Why, I have sometimes asked myself, did not Pater say the right words on a writer greater than Mérimée--George Meredith? I imagine that he never admired his novels enough to try his hand on a subject not quite his own. Certain books, I confess, ought to have been launched at the British Philistine, like David's one convincing pebble, straight to the forehead. I confess also (my own fault it was in regard to Meredith) that to write about Carlyle, Swinburne or Meredith, without unconsciously reproducing some tricks of manner, is a feat of which any man might be proud.

_The Egoist_ is a wonderful book, and in its elemental comedy it challenges Congreve and even Molière; but in the elemental tragedy of certain parts of _Rhoda Fleming_ and _Richard Feverel_, he challenges Webster, or almost Shakespeare. Yet the uncouthness that disfigures certain pages in _Richard Feverel_ is a mere after-taste of Arabian extravagance. It is a new kind of uncouthness that comes into prominence in _The Egotist_--that exaggeration of qualities which one sees in the later works of men who have a pronounced style, even in the case of Browning. No prose writer of our time has written finer or viler English than Meredith. It is a mistake to treat him as if he were stylist first, and novelist afterward, as Flaubert might almost be said to be. Meredith is a conscious artist always--as conscious as Goncourt, with whom he may be compared for his experimental treatment of language, his attempt to express what has never been expressed before by forcing words to say more than they are used to say. Sometimes they give his message, but ungraciously, like beaten slaves; sometimes the message seems to go astray. That is why Englishmen, forgetting triumph after splendid triumph of style, will sometimes tell you that Meredith can not write English, just as Frenchmen gravely assure one another that the novels of the Goncourts are written in any language but French.

That astonishing little volume, _Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside_, published in 1862, has never received anything like justice except at the hands of such a fellow-craftsman as Swinburne. While I for one can not but feel that Meredith works more naturally, with a freer hand, in prose than in verse, that poem of _Modern Love_ seems to me among the masterpieces of contemporary poetry. It is the most distinctly modern poem ever written. There has been nothing like it in English poetry: it brings into our literature something fundamentally new, essentially modern. Side by side with this super-subtle study of passion and sensation, we have the homely realism of "Juggling Jerry"--a poem which can only be compared with Burns' "Jolly Beggars" for triumphant success in perhaps the most difficult kind of literature.

So far I quote from an old article of mine, which was answered by William Watson. Here is part of his answer, printed in _The Academy_:

Now I should like to ask, what has the British Philistine done that he should have a book shied at his head in the way Mr. Symons thinks desirable? As regards Meredith, it seems to me that the British Philistine has been most exemplary in what he would call the discharge of his duty. He has tried his very best to read Meredith, and has failed; or he has read Meredith, but has failed in the attempt to enjoy him. I fancy, however, that when Meredith's devotees speak of the British Philistine, they really mean the vast majority of the public, and it seems to me a little absurd, that because there is an author whose writings the public are comparatively indifferent to, it should be constantly assured that the only person not in the least responsible for such indifference is the author. Other writers have achieved popularity before Meredith. Perhaps the best proof of the futility of trying to convert people into an attitude of admiration by "aiming" a book at them is afforded by Meredith's novels themselves. They are, in Mr. Symons' sense of the word, "aimed" at the British Philistine, if ever novels were. He has been pelted through, I do not know how many, volumes--but have the missiles converted him?

I leave all these questions unanswered, as they deserve no answer, after Time's verdict on Meredith. Now, what was, and is, the place of Sir William Watson in literature? The difference between literature and what is preeminently literary may be clearly illustrated on examination of his poems. No poems written in our time are more literary. They come to us asking to be received on account of their legitimate lineal descent from earlier poets, from Wordsworth and from Matthew Arnold for instance. "If," says the writer, frankly--

If I be indeed Their true descendant, as the veriest hind May yet be sprung of kings, their lineaments Will out, the signature of ancestry Leap unobscured, and somewhat of themselves In me, their lowly scion, live once more.

Many of the poems are about poets, or about books; some are purely critical. And they are indeed, as they profess to be, in the tradition; they strike no unfamiliar note to any ears acquainted with the music of English poetry. Their range is limited, but within it they exhibit an unquestionable mastery of a particular kind of technique. Few lines are bad, all are careful, many are felicitous. Every poem has a certain neatness and order about it. The spirit of the whole work is orderly, reticent and dignified. Nothing has been left to chance, or to the appeal of lawless splendors. An artist has been at work. At work on what? At all events, not on the only really satisfactory material for the poet--himself. Watson tells us that he has chosen the best of himself for giving to the world:

I have not paid the world The evil and the insolent courtesy Of offering it my baseness for a gift.

Well and good; but has he, in choosing among his selves, chosen really the essential one, base or not base, ignoble or not ignoble? He has chosen the self that loves good literature, thinks estimable thoughts, feels decorous emotions, and sets all this into polished and poetical verse. That is enough for the making of literary poetry, but not for poetry which shall be literature.

Watson, in his study of the great writers, seems never to have realized that what matters chiefly, what tells, is not the great phrase, but the personality behind the phrase. He has learned from many writers to make phrases almost as fine as those writers have made; his phrases are never meaningless in themselves, and they can be exquisite in their form. But the phrase, coming with nothing but its own significance behind it, a rootless flower, deriving no life from the soil, fails to convey to us more than an arid, unsatisfying kind of pleasure. There it is, a detached thing; to be taken, you may say, for what it is worth; only, live words will not be so taken. Compare Watson's "Ode to Autumn" with the "Ode to Autumn" of Keats. The poem is one of Watson's best poems; it is full of really poetical phraseology. But the ode of Keats means something in every word, and it means Keats quite as much as autumn. Watson's poem means neither autumn nor Watson; it represents Watson setting himself to describe autumn.

Take his "Hymn to the Sea." It is a long piece of exultant rhetoric, very finely imagined, full of admirable images; the most beautiful similes are gathered and brought together to represent the sea's multitudinous moods; but when the poem is finished, and you have admired it at leisure, you do not feel that this poet loves the sea. The poetry of Byron is assailable on many sides, but when he wrote those too rhetorical lines, now hackneyed almost out of recognition, beginning--

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!

he wrote out of his heart, as nearly as he could, and the lines, faulty as they are, have remained alive ever since. Mr. Watson's verse is very much better verse, but will--

Grant, O regal in bounty, a subtle and delicate largess,

come back to men's lips as often, or for as long a time, as those faulty lines of Byron's?

In his "Apologia," Watson replies to those who have complained that he has brought nothing new into poetry--

I bring nought new Save as each noontide or each Spring is new. Into an old and iterative world.

And he asks--

Is the Muse Fall'n to a thing of Mode, that must each year Supplant her derelict self of yesteryear?

But he declines to see that the new thing which every generation rightly asks of every new poet is by no means "mode," or empty fashion of writing, but the one essential thing, personality, which can never be twice the same. The reason why you will not find any two poets writing in the same way is that every genuine poet has to express himself in his own way, whether it be by offering his own "baseness for a gift," like Villon, or by building a new heaven and a new hell, like Dante. The maker of literature puts this new thing into his work, in the mere act of making it, and it stands out, as plainly as his signature, in every line he writes. Not to find it is to have fallen upon work which is but literary, "books made out of books." Walt Whitman thought that such "pass away."

In that "Apologia" from which we have already quoted, Watson indignantly denounces those who think "all Art is cold" if "an ardor not of Eros' lips" is in it, and he attempts to indicate that state of vision in which man may know--

A deeper transport and a mightier thrill Than comes of commerce with mortality.

Does he then,

In silence, in the visionary mood,

reach this ecstatic state? If so, it has left no impression on his poetry. In his poetry there is no vision, only speculation about vision; no ecstasy, only a reasonable meditation. He speaks of God, "the Whole," the "cosmic descant," and the large words remain empty. In such poems as _The Unknown God_ and _The Father of the Forest_ we seem to have been taught a lesson, read out in a resonant, well controlled voice; nothing has been flashed upon us, we have overheard nothing.

And, indeed, of how little of this poetry can we say, in the words of Mill's great definition, that it has been overheard! Its qualities, almost, though not quite, at the best, are the qualities of good oratory. Watson began by writing epigrams, admirable of their kind, with a more lyric nineteenth century handling of the sharp eighteenth century weapon. The epigram lies at the root of his work--that is to say, something essentially of the quality of prose. He is a Pope who has read Keats. Oratory or the epigram come into his most characteristic passages, as in the well known and much admired lines on the greatness and littleness of man:

Magnificent out of the dust we came And abject from the Spheres.

Now that, striking and effective as it is, is an antithetical ingenuity which a really fine poet would have gone out of his way to avoid. It is oratory, not poetry, and it would make good oratory, for there point has need of all its sharpness; oratory is action.

It is through this oratorical quality of mind that Mr. Watson's style, though so ordered and measurably, often leaves an impression of having been deliberately heightened above the level of ordinary speech. The great things in poetry are song at the core, but externally mere speech. Think of some actual, anonymous Elizabethan song, and then read the piece which Watson has called "Song in Imitation of the Elizabethans." It is not merely that he has not captured the exact note of the period, but rather copied the note of a later period; such lines as

Idly clanged the sullen portal, Idly the sepulchral door,

are not direct speech, and can therefore never become pure song. They are dressed in poetical phraseology, which is a very different thing.

It is curious to find this quality in a writer who is in every sense so critical. Behind a great deal of Watson's work there is the critical intelligence, not the poetical temperament. _Wordsworth's Grave_ is written in discipleship to Matthew Arnold, and it is not Arnold when he is at his best--the Arnold of _Sohrab and Rustum_ and _The Sick King in Bokhara_--that Watson has approached, but that half poet, half prose writer who wrote the Obermann poems. The foundation of those poems is prose, and a great deal of their substance is no more than rhymed prose. But at times the poet flashes out, transfiguring material and form for the moment, before he drops back into prose again. Watson's work is more on a level; he neither falls so low nor rises so high. But, even more than with Arnold, the substance of it is criticism, and the thinking and the style suggest the best kind of prose. Set the poem, with its finely chosen epithets and phrases--"Impassioned quietude, Thou wast home, Thou hadst, for weary feet, the gift of rest, the frugal note of Gray," and the like--beside Pater's essay on Wordsworth, and you will find many points of resemblance, and not only in the echo of "impassioned quietude" from Pater's "impassioned contemplation." Compare it with Matthew Arnold's essay on Wordsworth and you will again find many points of resemblance, not only in detail, which would not matter, but also in the whole way of approaching and handling the subject. Does the rhyme bring in any essential difference between specimens of fine prose and this poem, so well thought out, so poetically expressed? There lies the whole question, for if it does not bring such a difference, can it be accepted as poetry, as an adequate kind of poetry?

Criticism, though it may find place in a poem (as in Shelley's Letter to Maria Gisborne) can never be the basis of poetry. Pope tried to turn the current of English poetry into this narrow channel, but the sea-force soon had its way with the banks and dykes. Watson has tried to revive that heresy; he has disguised its principles under new terms, but it remains the same heresy. Poetry is even less a criticism of thought than it is a "criticism of life," it must be at all points creation, creation of life, creation of thought, if it is to be poetry in the true sense.

It is to Wordsworth, among many masters, that Watson tells us that he is most indebted. Wordsworth is not always a safe master, and it is apparently from him that Mr. Watson has accepted the main principles of his blank verse. Wordsworth's blank verse was more often bad than good; it was bad on principle, and good by the grace of a not infrequent inspiration. At its best, it is not among the great specimens of blank verse, or not for more than a very few lines at a time. It is without vitality, it is without that freedom in beauty which can come from vitality alone. Watson has learned from Wordsworth that it is possible to write grave and impressive lines, sweeping up to fine perorations, in which the pauses are measured, not by the vital pulses of the mood, but by a conscious, cultivated method. Some of Wordsworth's blank verse "The Prelude," though in itself tame and inefficient, takes hold of the reader through a personal warmth which makes him almost forget that he is reading verse at all. But we never feel personal warmth in Mr. Watson; he succeeds or fails as an artificer, and as an artificer only.

It is probably not too much to say that there is not a cadence in his verse which has not been heard before. By what miracle it is that out of the same number and order of syllables no two cadences of Shakespeare and of Browning, of Keats and of Herrick, of Crashaw and of Blake, can be precisely matched no man knows or will ever know--least of all the poet himself. He writes what comes to him, and he may work on his writing until hardly a word of the original stuff remains; and with all his care, or in spite of it, the thing turns doggedly into his own manner of speech, and comes to us with a cadence that we have never heard before. He may have read much or little, and it will make barely an appreciable difference. The music that is not learned in books comes from some unknown source which is as variable as the sea or the wind. Music learned from books, however much beauty may be breathed into it by the singer, keeps the taint of its source about it. It is by such music that the literary artist, not the artist in literature, is known.

William Watson's _Odes and Other Poems_ is remarkable for precisely the qualities which have distinguished his work since the time when, in _Wordsworth's Grave_, he first elaborated a manner of his own. That manner has some of the qualities of eighteenth century verse--its sobriety, its strictness, its intellectual and critical interests; and it also has certain of the richer and more emotional elements of the nineteenth century revival of the Elizabethan passion, and splendor. The reader is reminded of Gray, of Wordsworth, of Matthew Arnold, at moments of Keats and of Rossetti. In spite of occasional and unaccountable blemishes, Watson's work is, in the main, the most careful work of any of the younger poets. Nor is it lacking in a poetic impulse. It does not seem to us that this impulse is a very strong one, or one of special originality, but it is there, undoubtedly; and Watson's verse, unlike that of most of the people now writing, justifies its existence. Take, for instance, these opening lines from the ode _To Arthur Christopher Benson_: