Part 32

There should be a word in the language of literary art to express what the word ‘picturesque’ expresses for the fine arts. _Picturesque_ means fit to be put into a picture; we want a word _literatesque_, ‘fit to be put into a book.’ An artist goes through a hundred different country scenes, rich with beauties, charms and merits, but he does not paint any of them. He leaves them alone; he idles on till he finds the hundred-and-first—a scene which many observers would not think much of, but which _he_ knows by virtue of his art will look well on canvas, and this he paints and preserves. Susceptible observers, though not artists, feel this quality too; they say of a scene, ‘How picturesque!’ meaning by this a quality distinct from that of beauty, or sublimity, or grandeur—meaning to speak not only of the scene as it is in itself, but also of its fitness for imitation by art; meaning not only that it is good, but that its goodness is such as ought to be transferred to paper; meaning not simply that it fascinates, but also that its fascination is such as ought to be copied by man. A fine and insensible instinct has put language to this subtle use; it expresses an idea without which fine art criticism could not go on, and it is very natural that the language of pictorial art should be better supplied with words than that of literary criticism, for the eye was used before the mind, and language embodies primitive sensuous ideas, long ere it expresses, or need express, abstract and literary ones.

The reason why a landscape is ‘picturesque’ is often said to be, that such landscape represents an ‘idea.’ But this explanation, though, in the minds of some who use it, it is near akin to the truth, fails to explain that truth to those who did not know it before; the word ‘idea’ is so often used in these subjects when people do not know anything else to say; it represents so often a kind of intellectual insolvency, when philosophers are at their wits’ end, that shrewd people will never readily on any occasion give it credit for meaning anything. A wise explainer must, therefore, look out for other words to convey what he has to say. _Landscapes_, like everything else in nature, divide themselves as we look at them into a sort of rude classification. We go down a river, for example, and we see a hundred landscapes on both sides of it, resembling one another in much, yet differing in something; with trees here, and a farmhouse there, and shadows on one side, and a deep pool far on, a collection of circumstances most familiar in themselves, but making a perpetual novelty by the magic of their various combinations. We travel so for miles and hours, and then we come to a scene which also has these various circumstances and adjuncts, but which combines them best, which makes the best whole of them, which shows them in their best proportion at a single glance before the eye. Then we say, ‘This is the place to paint the river; this is the picturesque point!’ Or, if not artists or critics of art, we feel without analysis or examination that somehow this bend or sweep of the river shall in future be _the river to us_: that it is the image of it which we will retain in our mind’s eye, by which we will remember it, which we will call up when we want to describe or think of it. Some fine countries, some beautiful rivers, have not this picturesque quality: they give us elements of beauty, but they do not combine them together; we go on for a time delighted, but _after_ a time somehow we get wearied; we feel that we are taking in nothing and learning nothing; we get no collected image before our mind; we see the accidents and circumstances of that sort of scenery, but the summary scene we do not see; we find _disjecta membra_, but no form; various and many and faulty approximations are displayed in succession; but the absolute perfection in that country’s or river’s scenery—its _type_—is withheld. We go away from such places in part delighted, but in part baffled; we have been puzzled by pretty things; we have beheld a hundred different inconsistent specimens of the same sort of beauty; but the rememberable idea, the full development, the characteristic individuality of it, we have not seen.

We find the same sort of quality in all parts of painting. We see a portrait of a person we know, and we say, ‘It is like—yes, like, of course, but it is not _the man_;’ we feel it could not be anyone else, but still, somehow it fails to bring home to us the individual as we know him to be. _He_ is not there. An accumulation of features like his are painted, but his essence is not painted; an approximation more or less excellent is given, but the characteristic expression, the _typical_ form, of the man is withheld.

Literature—the painting of words—has the same quality, but wants the analogous word. The word ‘_literatesque_’ would mean, if we possessed it, that perfect combination in the _subject-matter_ of literature, which suits the _art_ of literature. We often meet people, and say of them, sometimes meaning well and sometimes ill, ‘How well so-and-so would do in a book!’ Such people are by no means the best people; but they are the most effective people—the most rememberable people. Frequently, when we first know them, we like them because they explain to us so much of our experience; we have known many people ‘like that,’ in one way or another, but we did not seem to understand them; they were nothing to us, for their traits were indistinct; we forgot them, for they hitched on to nothing, and we could not classify them. But when we see the _type_ of the genus, at once we seem to comprehend its character; the inferior specimens are explained by the perfect embodiment; the approximations are definable when we know the ideal to which they draw near. There are an infinite number of classes of human beings, but in each of these classes there is a distinctive type which, if we could expand it in words, would define the class. We cannot expand it in formal terms any more than a landscape, or a species of landscape; but we have an art, an art of words, which can draw it. Travellers and others often bring home, in addition to their long journals—which, though so living to them, are so dead, so inanimate, so undescriptive to all else—a pen-and-ink sketch, rudely done very likely, but which, perhaps, even the more for the blots and strokes, gives a distinct notion, an emphatic image, to all who see it. We say at once, _now_ we know the sort of thing. The sketch has _hit_ the mind. True literature does the same. It describes sorts, varieties, and permutations, by delineating the type of each sort, the ideal of each variety, the central, the marking trait of each permutation.

On this account, the greatest artists of the world have ever shown an enthusiasm for reality. To care for notions and abstractions; to philosophise; to reason out conclusions; to care for schemes of thought, are signs in the artistic mind of secondary excellence. A Schiller, a Euripides, a Ben Jonson, cares for _ideas_—for the parings of the intellect, and the distillation of the mind; a Shakespeare, a Homer, a Goethe, finds his mental occupation, the true home of his natural thoughts, in the real world—‘which is the world of all of us’—where the face of nature, the moving masses of men and women, are ever changing, ever multiplying, ever mixing one with the other. The reason is plain—the business of the poet, of the artist, is with _types_; and those types are mirrored in reality. As a painter must not only have a hand to execute, but an eye to distinguish—as he must go here and there through the real world to catch the picturesque man, the picturesque scene, which is to live on his canvas—so the poet must find in that reality, the _literatesque_ man, the _literatesque_ scene which nature intends for him, and which will live in his page. Even in reality he will not find this type complete, or the characteristics perfect; but there he will find, at least, something, some hint, some intimation, some suggestion; whereas, in the stagnant home of his own thoughts he will find nothing pure, nothing as it is, nothing which does not bear his own mark, which is not somehow altered by a mixture with himself.

The first conversation of Goethe and Schiller illustrates this conception of the poet’s art. Goethe was at that time prejudiced against Schiller, we must remember, partly from what he considered the outrages of the _Robbers_, partly because of the philosophy of Kant. Schiller’s ‘Essay on _Grace and Dignity_,’ he tells us—

‘Was yet less of a kind to reconcile me. The philosophy of Kant, which exalts the dignity of mind so highly, while appearing to restrict it, Schiller had joyfully embraced: it unfolded the extraordinary qualities which Nature had implanted in him; and in the lively feeling of freedom and self-direction, he showed himself unthankful to the Great Mother, who surely had not acted like a step-dame towards him. Instead of viewing her as self-subsisting, as producing with a living force, and according to appointed laws, alike the highest and the lowest of her works, he took her up under the aspect of some empirical native qualities of the human mind. Certain harsh passages I could even directly apply to myself: they exhibited my confession of faith in a false light; and I felt that if written without particular attention to me, they were still worse; for, in that case, the vast chasm which lay between us gaped but so much the more distinctly.’

After a casual meeting at a Society for Natural History, they walked home, and Goethe proceeds:

‘We reached his house; the talk induced me to go in. I then expounded to him, with as much vivacity as possible, the _Metamorphosis of Plants_,[20] drawing out on paper, with many characteristic strokes, a symbolic plant for him, as I proceeded. He heard and saw all this, with much interest and distinct comprehension; but when I had done, he shook his head and said: “This is no experiment, this is an idea.” I stopped with some degree of irritation; for the point which separated us was most luminously marked by this expression. The opinions in _Dignity and Grace_ again occurred to me; the old grudge was just awakening; but I smothered it, and merely said: “I was happy to find that I had got ideas without knowing it, nay, that I saw them before my eyes.”

‘Schiller had much more prudence and dexterity of management than I; he was also thinking of his periodical the _Horen_, about this time, and of course rather wished to attract than repel me. Accordingly, he answered me like an accomplished Kantite; and as my stiff-necked Realism gave occasion to many contradictions, much battling took place between us, and at last a truce, in which neither party would consent to yield the victory, but each held himself invincible. Positions like the following grieved me to the very soul: _How can there ever be an experiment, that shall correspond with an idea? The specific quality of an idea is, that no experiment can reach it or agree with it._ Yet if he held as an idea, the same thing which I looked upon as an experiment, there must certainly, I thought, be some community between us—some ground whereon both of us might meet!’

With Goethe’s natural history, or with Kant’s philosophy, we have here no concern; but we can combine the expressions of the two great poets into a nearly complete description of poetry. The ‘symbolic plant’ is the _type_, of which we speak, the ideal at which inferior specimens aim, the class characteristic in which they all share, but which none shows forth fully. Goethe was right in searching for this in reality and nature; Schiller was right in saying that it was an ‘idea,’ a transcending notion to which approximations could be found in experience, but only approximations—which could not be found there itself. Goethe, as a poet, rightly felt the primary necessity of outward suggestion and experience; Schiller, as a philosopher, rightly felt its imperfection.

But in these delicate matters, it is easy to misapprehend. There is, undoubtedly, a sort of poetry which is produced as it were out of the author’s mind. The description of the poet’s own moods and feelings is a common sort of poetry—perhaps the commonest sort. But the peculiarity of such cases is, that the poet does not describe himself _as_ himself: autobiography is not his object; he takes himself as a specimen of human nature; he describes, not himself, but a distillation of himself: he takes such of his moods as are most characteristic, as most typify certain moods of certain men, or certain moods of all men; he chooses preponderant feelings of special sorts of men, or occasional feelings of men of all sorts; but with whatever other difference and diversity, the essence is that such self-describing poets describe what is _in_ them, but not _peculiar_ to them,—what is generic, not what is special and individual. Gray’s _Elegy_ describes a mood which Gray felt more than other men, but which most others, perhaps all others, feel too. It is more popular, perhaps, than any English poem, because that sort of feeling is the most diffused of high feelings, and because Gray added to a singular nicety of fancy an habitual proneness to a _contemplative_—a discerning but unbiassed—meditation on death and on life. Other poets cannot hope for such success: a subject so popular, so grave, so wise, and yet so suitable to the writer’s nature, is hardly to be found. But the same ideal, the same unautobiographical character is to be found in the writings of meaner men. Take sonnets of Hartley Coleridge, for example:—

I.

TO A FRIEND.

‘When we were idlers with the loitering rills, The need of human love we little noted: Our love was nature; and the peace that floated On the white mist, and dwelt upon the hills, To sweet accord subdued our wayward wills: One soul was ours, one mind, one heart devoted, That, wisely doating, ask’d not why it doated, And ours the unknown joy, which knowing kills. But now I find, how dear thou wert to me; That man is more than half of nature’s treasure, Of that fair Beauty which no eye can see, Of that sweet music which no ear can measure; And now the streams may sing for others’ pleasure, The hills sleep on in their eternity.’

II.

TO THE SAME.

‘In the great city we are met again, Where many souls there are, that breathe and die, Scarce knowing more of nature’s potency, Than what they learn from heat, or cold, or rain, The sad vicissitude of weary pain;— For busy man is lord of ear and eye, And what hath nature, but the vast, void sky, And the thronged river toiling to the main? Oh! say not so, for she shall have her part In every smile, in every tear that falls, And she shall hide her in the secret heart, Where love persuades, and sterner duty calls: But worse it were than death, or sorrow’s smart, To live without a friend within these walls.’

III.

TO THE SAME.

‘We parted on the mountains, as two streams From one clear spring pursue their several ways; And thy fleet course hath been through many a maze In foreign lands, where silvery Padus gleams To that delicious sky, whose glowing beams Brightened the tresses that old Poets praise; Where Petrarch’s patient love, and artful lays, And Ariosto’s song of many themes, Moved the soft air. But I, a lazy brook, As close pent up within my native dell, Have crept along from nook to shady nook, Where flow’rets blow, and whispering Naiads dwell. Yet now we meet, that parted were so wide, O’er rough and smooth to travel side by side.’

The contrast of instructive and enviable locomotion with refining but instructive meditation is not special and peculiar to these two, but general and universal. It was set down by Hartley Coleridge because he was the most meditative and refining of men.

What sort of literatesque types are fit to be described in the sort of literature called poetry, is a matter on which much might be written. Mr. Arnold, some years since, put forth a theory that the art of poetry could only delineate _great actions_. But though, rightly interpreted and understood—using the word action so as to include high and sound activity in contemplation—this definition may suit the highest poetry, it certainly cannot be stretched to include many inferior sorts and even many good sorts. Nobody in their senses would describe Gray’s _Elegy_ as the delineation of a ‘great action;’ some kinds of mental contemplation may be energetic enough to deserve this name, but Gray would have been frightened at the very word. He loved scholarlike calm and quiet inaction; his very greatness depended on his _not_ acting, on his ‘wise passiveness,’ on his indulging the grave idleness which so well appreciates so much of human life. But the best answer—the _reductio ad absurdum_—of Mr. Arnold’s doctrine, is the mutilation which it has caused him to make of his own writings. It has forbidden him, he tells us, to reprint _Empedocles_—a poem undoubtedly containing defects and even excesses, but containing also these lines:—

‘And yet what days were those Parmenides! When we were young, when we could number friends In all the Italian cities like ourselves, When with elated hearts we join’d your train, Ye Sun-born virgins! on the road of Truth. Then we could still enjoy; then neither thought Nor outward things were clos’d and dead to us, But we receiv’d the shock of mighty thoughts On simple minds with a pure natural joy; And if the sacred load oppress’d our brain, We had the power to feel the pressure eas’d, The brow unbound, the thoughts flow free again, In the delightful commerce of the world. We had not lost our balance then, nor grown Thought’s slaves, and dead to every natural joy. The smallest thing could give us pleasure then— The sports of the country people; A flute note from the woods; Sunset over the sea: Seed-time and harvest; The reapers in the corn; The vinedresser in his vineyard; The village-girl at her wheel. Fulness of life and power of feeling, ye Are for the happy, for the souls at ease, Who dwell on a firm basis of content. But he who has outliv’d his prosperous days, But he, whose youth fell on a different world From that on which his exil’d age is thrown; Whose mind was fed on other food, was train’d By other rules than are in vogue to-day; Whose habit of thought is fix’d, who will not change, But in a world he loves not must subsist In ceaseless opposition, be the guard Of his own breast, fetter’d to what he guards, That the world win no mastery over him; Who has no friend, no fellow left, not one; Who has no minute’s breathing space allow’d To nurse his dwindling faculty of joy;— Joy and the outward world must die to him As they are dead to me.’

What freak of criticism can induce a man who has written such poetry as this, to discard it, and say it is not poetry? Mr. Arnold is privileged to speak of his own poems, but no other critic could speak so and not be laughed at.

We are disposed to believe that no very sharp definition can be given—at least in the present state of the critical art—of the boundary line between poetry and other sorts of imaginative delineation. Between the undoubted dominions of the two kinds there is a debatable land; everybody is agreed that the ‘Œdipus at Colonus’ is poetry: everyone is agreed that the wonderful appearance of Mrs. Veal is _not_ poetry. But the exact line which separates grave novels in verse like _Aylmer’s Field_ or _Enoch Arden_, from grave novels not in verse like _Silas Marner_ or _Adam Bede_, we own we cannot draw with any confidence. Nor, perhaps, is it very important; whether a narrative is thrown into verse or not, certainly depends in part on the taste of the age, and in part on its mechanical helps. Verse is the only mechanical help to the memory in rude times, and there is little writing till a cheap something is found to write upon, and a cheap something to write with. Poetry—verse, at least—is the literature of _all work_ in early ages; it is only later ages which write in what _they_ think a natural and simple prose. There are other casual influences in the matter too; but they are not material now. We need only say here that poetry, because it has a more marked rhythm than prose, must be more intense in meaning and more concise in style than prose. People expect a ‘marked rhythm’ to imply something worth marking; if it fails to do so they are disappointed. They are displeased at the visible waste of a powerful instrument; they call it ‘doggerel,’ and rightly call it, for the metrical expression of full thought and eager feeling—the burst of metre—incident to high imagination, should not be wasted on petty matters which prose does as well,—which it does better—which it suits by its very limpness and weakness, whose small changes it follows more easily, and to whose lowest details it can fully and without effort degrade itself. Verse, too, should be _more concise_, for long-continued rhythm tends to jade the mind, just as brief rhythm tends to attract the attention. Poetry should be memorable and emphatic, intense, and _soon over_.

The great divisions of poetry, and of all other literary art, arise from the different modes in which these _types_—these characteristic men, these characteristic feelings—may be variously described. There are three principal modes which we shall attempt to describe—the _pure_, which is sometimes, but not very wisely, called the classical; the _ornate_, which is also unwisely called romantic; and the _grotesque_, which might be called the mediæval. We will describe the nature of these a little. Criticism, we know, must be brief—not, like poetry, because its charm is too intense to be sustained—but, on the contrary, because its interest is too weak to be prolonged; but elementary criticism, if an evil, is a necessary evil; a little while spent among the simple principles of art is the first condition, the absolute pre-requisite, for surely apprehending and wisely judging the complete embodiments and miscellaneous forms of actual literature.