Chapter 6

But the poet is to have a faith nowadays of course--a "faith in nature." This article of Wordsworth's poetical creed is to be assumed as the only necessary one, and we are to ignore altogether the somewhat important fact that he had faith in a great deal besides nature, and to make that faith in nature his sole differentia and source of inspiration. Now we beg leave to express not merely our want of faith in this same "faith in nature," but even our ignorance of what it means. Nature is certain phenomena, appearances. Faith in them is simply to believe that a red thing is red, and a square thing square; a sine qua non doubtless in poetry, as in carpentry, but which will produce no poetry, but only Dutch painting and gardeners' catalogues--in a word, that lowest form of art, the merely descriptive; and into this very style the modern naturalist poets, from the times of Southey and Wordsworth, have been continually falling, and falling therefore into baldness and vulgarity. For mere description cannot represent even the outlines of a whole scene at once, as the daguerreotype does; they must describe it piecemeal. Much less can it represent that whole scene at once in all its glories of colour, glow, fragrance, life, motion. In short, it cannot give life and spirit. All merely descriptive poetry can do is to give a dead catalogue--to kill the butterfly, and then write a monograph on it. And, therefore, there comes a natural revulsion from the baldness and puerility into which Wordsworth too often fell by indulging his false theories on these matters.

But a revulsion to what? To the laws of course which underlie the phenomena. But again--to which laws? Not merely to the physical ones, else Turner's "Chemistry" and Watson's "Practice of Medicine" are great poems.

True, we have heard Professor Forbes's book on Glaciers called an epic poem, and not without reason: but what gives that noble book its epic character is neither the glaciers nor the laws of them, but the discovery of those laws: the methodic, truthful, valiant, patient battle between man and nature, his final victory, his wresting from her the secret which had been locked for ages in the ice-caves of the Alps, guarded by cold and fatigue, danger and superstitious dread. For Nature will be permanently interesting to the poet, and appear to him in a truly poetic aspect, only in as far as she is connected by him with spiritual and personal beings, and becomes in his eyes either a person herself, or the dwelling and organ of persons. The shortest scrap of word-painting, as Thomson's "Seasons" will sufficiently prove, is wearisome and dead, unless there be a living figure in the landscape, or unless, failing a living figure, the scene is deliberately described with reference to the poet or the reader, not as something in itself, but as something seen by him, and grouped and subordinated exactly as it would strike his eye and mind. But even this is insufficient. The heart of man demands more, and so arises a craving after the old nature-mythology of Greece, the old fairy legends of the Middle Age. The great poets of the Renaissance both in England and in Italy had a similar craving. But the aspect under which these ancient dreams are regarded by them is most significantly different. With Spenser and Ariosto, fairies and elves, gods and demons, are regarded in their fancied connection with man. Even in the age of Pope, when the gods and the Rosicrucian Sylphs have become alike "poetical machinery," this is their work. But among the moderns it is as connected with Nature, and giving a soul and a personality to her, that they are most valued. The most pure utterance of this feeling is perhaps Schiller's "Gods of Greece," where the loss of the Olympians is distinctly deplored, because it has unpeopled, not heaven, but earth. But the same tone runs through Goethe's classical "Walpurgis Night," where the old human "twelve gods," the antitypes and the friends of men, in whom our forefathers delighted, have vanished utterly, and given place to semi-physical Nereides, Tritons, Telchines, Psylli, and Seismos himself.

Keats, in his wonderful "Endymion," contrived to unite the two aspects of Greek mythology as they never had been united before, except by Spenser in his "Garden of Adonis." But the pantheistic notion, as he himself says in "Lamia," was the one which lay nearest his heart; and in his "Hyperion" he begins to deal wholly with the Nature gods, and after magnificent success, leaves the poem unfinished, most probably because he had become, as his readers must, weary of its utter want of human interest. For that, after all, is what is wanted in a poetical view of Nature; and that is what the poet, in proportion to his want of dramatic faculty, must draw from himself. He must--he does in these days--colour Nature with the records of his own mind, and bestow a factitious life and interest on her by making her reflect his own joy or sorrow. If he be out of humour, she must frown; if he sigh, she must roar; if he be--what he very seldom is--tolerably comfortable, the birds have liberty to sing, and the sun to shine. But by the time that he has arrived at this stage of his development, or degradation, the poet is hardly to be called a strong man, he who is so munch the slave of his own moods that he must needs see no object save through them, is not very likely to be able to resist the awe which nature's grandeur and inscrutability brings with it, and to say firmly, and yet reverently:

Si fractus illibatur orbis, Impavidum ferient ruinae.

He feels, in spite of his conceit, that nature is not going his way, or looking his looks, but going what he calls her own way, what we call God's way. At all events, he feels that he is lying, when he represents the great universe as turned to his small set of Pan's pipes and all the more because he feels that, conceal it as he will, those same Pan's pipes are out of tune with each other. And so arises the habit of impersonating nature, not after the manner of Spenser (whose purity of metaphor and philosophic method, when he deals with nature, is generally even more marvellous than the richness of his fancy), as an organic whole, but in her single and accidental phenomena; and of ascribing not merely animal passions or animal enjoyment, but human discursive intellect and moral sense, to inanimate objects, and talking as if a stick or a stone were more of a man than the poet is--as indeed they very often may be.

These, like everything else, are perfectly right in their own place-- where they express passion, either pleasurable or painful, passion, that is, not so intense as to sink into exhaustion, or to be compelled to self-control by the fear of madness. In these two cases, as great dramatists know well enough, the very violence of the emotion produces perfect simplicity, as the hurricane blows the sea smooth. But where fanciful language is employed to express the extreme of passion, it is felt to be absurd, and is accordingly called rant and bombast: and where it is not used to express passion at all, but merely the quiet and normal state of the poet's mind, or of his characters, with regard to external nature; when it is considered, as it is by most of our modern poets, the staple of poetry, indeed poetic diction itself, so that the more numerous and the stranger conceits an author can cram into his verses, the finer poet he is; then, also, it is called rant and bombast, but of the most artificial, insincere, and (in every sense of the word) monstrous kind; the offspring of an effeminate nature-worship, without self-respect, without true manhood, because it exhibits the poet as the puppet of his own momentary sensations, and not as a man superior to nature, claiming his likeness to the Author of nature, by confessing and expressing the permanent laws of Nature, undisturbed by fleeting appearances without, or fleeting tempers within. Hence it is that, as in all insincere and effete times, the poetry of the day deals more and more with conceits, and less and less with true metaphors. In fact, hinc illae lachrymae. This is, after all, the primary symptom of disease in the public taste, which has set us on writing this review--that critics all round are crying: "An ill- constructed whole, no doubt; but full of beautiful passages"--the word "passages" turning out to mean, in plain English, conceits. The simplest distinction, perhaps, between an image and a conceit is this--that while both are analogies, the image is founded on an analogy between the essential properties of two things--the conceit on an analogy between its accidents. Images, therefore, whether metaphors or similes, deal with laws; conceits with private judgments. Images belong to the imagination, the power which sees things according to their real essence and inward life, and conceits to the fancy or phantasy, which only see things as they appear.

To give an example or two from the "Life Drama:"

His heart holds a deep hope, As holds the wretched West the sunset's corse-- Spit on, insulted by the brutal rains.

The passion-panting sea Watches the unveiled beauty of the stars Like a great hungry soul.

Great spirits, Who left upon the mountain-tops of Death A light that made them lovely.

The moon, Arising from dark waves which plucked at her.

And hundreds, nay, thousands more in this book, whereof it must be said, that beautiful or not, in the eyes of the present generation-- and many of them are put into very beautiful language, and refer to very beautiful natural objects--they are not beautiful really and in themselves, because they are mere conceits; the analogies in them are fortuitous, depending not on the nature of the things themselves, but on the private fancy of the writer, having no more real and logical coherence than a conundrum or a pun; in plain English, untrue, only allowable to Juliets or Othellos; while their self-possession, almost their reason, is in temporary abeyance under the influence of joy or sorrow. Every one must feel the exquisite fitness of Juliet's "Gallop apace, ye fiery-footed steeds," etc., for one of her character, in her circumstances: every one, we trust, and Mr. Smith among the number, will some day feel the exquisite unfitness of using such conceits as we have just quoted, or any other, page after page, for all characters and chances. For the West is not wretched; the rains never were brutal yet, and do not insult the sun's corpse, being some millions of miles nearer us than the sun, but only have happened once to seem to do so in the poet's eyes. The sea does not pant with passion, does not hunger after the beauty of the stars; Death has no mountain-tops, or any property which can be compared thereto; and "the dark waves"--in that most beautiful conceit which follows, and which Mr. Smith has borrowed from Mr. Bailey, improving it marvellously nevertheless--do not "pluck at the moon," but only seem to do so. And what constitutes the beauty of this very conceit- -far the best of those we have chosen--but that it looks so very like an image, so very like a law, from being so very common and customary an ocular deception to one standing on a low shore at night?

Or, again, in a passage which has been already often quoted as exquisite, and in its way is so:

The bridegroom sea Is toying with the shore, his wedded bride; And in the fulness of his marriage joy He decorates her tawny brow with shells, Retires a pace, to see how fair she looks, Then proud, runs up to kiss her.

Exquisite? Yes; but only exquisitely pretty. It is untrue--a false explanation of the rush and recoil of the waves. We learn nothing by these lines; we gain no fresh analogy between the physical and the spiritual world, not even between two different parts of the physical world. If the poetry of this age has a peculiar mission, it is to declare that such an analogy exists throughout the two worlds; then let poetry declare it. Let it set forth a real intercommunion between man and nature, grounded on a communion between man and God, who made nature. Let it accept nature's laws as the laws of God. Truth, scientific truth, is the only real beauty. "Let God be true, and every man a liar."

Now, be it remembered that by far the greater proportion of this book consists of such thoughts as these; and that these are what are called its beauties; these are what young poets try more and more daily to invent--conceits, false analogies. Be it remembered, that the affectation of such conceits has always marked the decay and approaching death of a reigning school of poetry; that when, for instance, the primeval forest of the Elizabethan poets dwindled down into a barren scrub of Vaughans, and Cowleys, and Herberts, and Crashawes, this was the very form in which the deadly blight appeared. In vain did the poetasters, frightened now and then at their own nonsense, try to keep up the decaying dignity of poetry by drawing their conceits, as poetasters do now, from suns and galaxies, earthquakes, eclipses, and the portentous, and huge and gaudy in Nature; the lawlessness and irreverence for Nature, involved in the very worship of conceits, went on degrading the tone of the conceits themselves, till the very sense of true beauty and fitness seemed lost; and a pious and refined gentleman like George Herbert could actually dare to indite solemn conundrums to the Supreme Being, and believe that he was writing devout poetry, and "looking through nature up to nature's God," when he delivered himself thus in one of his least offensive poems (for the most sacred and most offensive of them we dare not quote, lest we incur the same blame which we have bestowed on Mr. Smith, and sing of Church festivals as--)

Marrow of time, eternity in brief, Compendiums epitomised, the chief Contents, the indices, the title-pages Of all past, present, and succeeding ages, Sublimate graces, antedated glories; The cream of holiness. The inventories Of future blessedness, The florilegia of celestial stories, Spirit of Joys, the relishes and closes Of angels' music, pearls dissolved, roses Perfumed, sugar'd honeycombs.

That manner, happily for art, was silenced by the stern truth-loving common sense of the Puritans. Whatsoever else, in their crusade against shams, they were too hasty in sweeping away, they were right, at least, in sweeping away such a sham as that. And now, when a school has betaken itself to use the very same method in the cause of blasphemy, instead of in that of cant, the Pope himself, with his Index Prohibitus, might be a welcome guest, if he would but stop the noise, and compel our doting Muses to sit awhile in silence, and reconsider themselves.

In the meanwhile, poets write about poets, and poetry, and guiding the age, and curbing the world, and waking it, and thrilling it, and making it start, and weep, and tremble, and self-conceit only knows what else; and yet the age is not guided, or the world curbed, or thrilled, or waked, or anything else, by them. Why should it be? Curb and thrill the world? The world is just now a most practical world; and these men are utterly unpractical. The age is given up to physical science; these men disregard and outrage it in every page by their false analogies. If they intend, as they say, to link heaven and earth by preaching the analogy of matter and spirit, let them, in the name of common prudence, observe the laws of matter, about which the world does know something, and show their coincidence with the laws of spirit--if indeed they know anything about the said laws. Loose conceits, fancies of the private judgment, were excusable enough in the Elizabethan poets. In their day, nature was still unconquered by science; medieval superstitions still lingered in the minds of men and the magical notions of nature which they had inherited from the Middle Age received a corroboration from those neoplatonist dreamers, whom they confounded with the true Greek philosophers. But, now that Bacon has spoken, and that Europe has obeyed him, surely, among the most practical, common sense, and scientific nation of the earth, severely scientific imagery, imagery drawn from the inner laws of nature, is necessary to touch the hearts of men. They know that the universe is not such as poets paint it; they know that these pretty thoughts are only pretty thoughts, springing from the caprice, the vanity, very often from the indigestion of the gentlemen who take the trouble to sing to them; and they listen, as they would to a band of street musicians, and give them sixpence for their tune, and go on with their work. The tune outside has nothing to do with the work inside. It will not help them to be wiser, abler, more valiant--certainly not more cheerful and hopeful men, and therefore they care no more for it than they do for an opera or a pantomime, if as much. Whereupon the poets get disgusted with the same hard-hearted prosaic world--which is trying to get its living like an industrious animal as it is--and demand homage--for what? For making a noise, pleasant or otherwise? For not being as other men are? For pleading "the eccentricities of genius" as an excuse for sitting like naughty children in the middle of the schoolroom floor, in everybody's way, shouting and playing on penny trumpets, and when begged to be quiet, that other people may learn their lessons, considering themselves insulted, and pleading "genius"? Genius!--hapless byword, which, like charity, covers nowadays the multitude of sins, all the seven deadly ones included! Is there any form of human folly which one has not heard excused by "He is a genius, you know--one must not judge him by common rules." Poor genius, to have come to this! To be, when confessed, not a reason for being more of a man than others, but an excuse for being less of a man, less amenable than the herd to the common laws of humanity, and therefore less able than they to comprehend its common duties, common temptations, common sins, common virtues, common destinies. Of old the wise singer did by virtue of feeling with all, and obeying with all, learn to see for all, to see eternal laws, eternal analogies, eternal consequences, and so became a seer, vates, prophet; but now he is become a genius, a poetical pharisee, a reviler of common laws and duties, the slave of his own private judgment, who prophesies out of his own heart, and hath seen nothing but only the appearances of things distorted and coloured by "genius." Heaven send the word, with many more, a speedy burial!

And what becomes of artistic form in the hands of such a school? Just what was to be expected. It is impossible to give outward form to that which is in its very nature formless, like doubt and discontent. For on such subjects thought itself is not defined; it has no limit, no self-coherence, not even method or organic law. And in a poem, as in all else, the body must be formed according to the law of the inner life; the utterance must be the expression, the outward and visible antetype of the spirit which animates it. But where the thought is defined by no limits, it cannot express itself in form, for form is that which has limits. Where it has no inward unity it cannot have any outward one. If the spirit be impatient of all moral rule, its utterance will be equally impatient of all artistic rule; and thus, as we are now beginning to discover from experience, the poetry of doubt will find itself unable to use those forms of verse which have been always held to be the highest-- tragedy, epic, the ballad, and lastly, even the subjective lyrical ode. For they, too, to judge by every great lyric which remains to us, require a groundwork of consistent self-coherent belief; and they require also an appreciation of melody even more delicate, and a verbal polish even more complete than any other form of poetic utterance. But where there is no melody within, there will be no melody without. It is in vain to attempt the setting of spiritual discords to physical music. The mere practical patience and self- restraint requisite to work out rhythm when fixed on, will be wanting; nay, the fitting rhythm will never be found, the subject itself being arhythmic; and thus we shall have, or, rather, alas! do have, a wider and wider divorce of sound and sense, a greater and greater carelessness for polish, and for the charm of musical utterance, and watch the clear and spirit-stirring melodies of the older poets swept away by a deluge of half-metrical prose-run-mad, diffuse, unfinished, unmusical, to which any other metre than that in which it happens to have been written would have been equally appropriate, because all are equally inappropriate. Where men have nothing to sing, it is not of the slightest consequence how they sing it.

While poets persist in thinking and writing thus, it is in vain for them to talk loud about the poet's divine mission, as the prophet of mankind, the swayer of the universe, and so forth. Not that we believe the poet simply by virtue of being a singer to have any such power. While young gentlemen are talking about governing heaven and earth by verse, Wellingtons and Peels, Arkwrights and Stephensons, Frys, and Chisholms, are doing it by plain practical prose; and even of those who have moved and led the hearts of men by verse, every one, as far as we know, has produced his magical effects by poetry of the very opposite forum to that which is now in fashion. What poet ever had more influence than Homer? What poet is more utterly antipodal to our modern schools? There are certain Hebrew psalms, too, which will be confessed, even by those who differ most from them, to have exercised some slight influence on human thought and action, and to be likely to exercise the same for some time to come. Are they any more like our modern poetic forms than they are like our modern poetic matter? Ay, even in our own time, what has been the form, what the temper, of all poetry, from Korner and Heine, which has made the German heart leap up, but simplicity, manhood, clearness, finished melody, the very opposite, in a word, of our new school? And to look at home, what is the modern poetry which lives on the lips and in the hearts of Englishmen, Scotchmen, Irishmen? It is not only simple in form and language, but much of it fitted, by a severe exercise of artistic patience, to tunes already existing. Who does not remember how the "Marseillaise" was born, or how Burns's "Scots wha ha' wi' Wallace bled," or the story of Moore's taking the old "Red Fox March," and giving it a new immortality as "Let Erin remember the days of old," while poor Emmett sprang up and cried, "Oh, that I had twenty thousand Irishmen marching to that tune!" So it is, even to this day, and let those who hanker after poetic fame take note of it; not a poem which is now really living but has gained its immortality by virtue of simplicity and positive faith.