Part 7

Mr. Swinburne’s metrical practice should be criticised with respect; for he has an unquestionably fine ear, and has ransacked the literature of all times in order to discover and appropriate, or modify to his own uses, a number of movements which, unlike our familiar English metres, are whirlwinds and blasts of passion in themselves. Such metres, however, should be sparingly used. They almost satisfy the ear without any accompaniment of sound meaning, and evoke, as it were by a trick, a current of emotion that is independent of any human feeling in the poet himself. This is a great temptation, and Mr. Swinburne has not always avoided the traps which he has thus set for himself. Such metres have, moreover, the disadvantage of fixing in too peremptory a manner the key in which the poems written in them must be sustained. They allow none of the endless modulations which are open to the poet who writes in almost any of our native and less emphatic measures. Mr. Swinburne has the less reason for resorting so habitually as he does to this too easy means of obtaining passionate effect, inasmuch as some of his very best and most effective passages are written in our common metres. Witness the almost incomparable apostrophe to Athens, in “Erechtheus” (unfortunately not included in these selections), and “Sea and Sunrise,” and “Herse.”

There is one still easier and far less excusable source of effect which every friend of the poet must rejoice to see that he has of late abandoned. There is nothing in the _Selections_ which a schoolgirl might not be permitted to read and understand, if she could; and there are a number of pieces about children which are so full of pure and tender perceptions as to cause a doubt whether, in some of his earlier writings, the poet was not wantonly flouting the world’s opinion rather than expressing any very real phase of his own feeling.

XVIII

ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH

Clough worshipped Truth with more than the passion of a lover, and his writings are, for the most part, the tragic records of a life-long devotion to a mistress who steadily refused his embraces; but as it is greatly better to have loved without attaining than to have attained without loving, so Clough’s ardent and unrewarded stumblings in the dark towards his adored though unseen divinity are greatly more attractive and edifying to those who have shared, successfully or not, the same passion, than is that complacent fruition of her smiles which she often accords to those who are contented to be no more than her speaking acquaintances. Regarded from a purely intellectual point of view, Clough’s utterances on religion, duty, etc., are little better than the commonplaces which in these days pass through the mind and more or less affect the feelings of almost every intelligent and educated youth before he is twenty years of age; but there are commonplaces which cease to be such, and become indefinitely interesting, in proportion as they are animated by moral ardour and passion. Speech may work good by warming as well as by enlightening; and if Clough’s writings teach no new truth, they may inflame the love of truth, which is perhaps as great a service. Though he professes that he can nowhere see light where light is most necessary and longed for, his mind is utterly opposed to the negative type; and he exactly exemplifies the class of believer whom Richard Hooker endeavours to comfort, in his great sermon on “the perpetuity of faith in the elect,” by the reminder that a longing to believe is implicit faith, and that we cannot sorrow for the lack of that which we interiorly hold to be nonexistent. A question that must suggest itself to most readers is, What is the use and justification of these endless and tautological lamentations over the fact--as Clough conceived it to be--that, for such as him at least, “Christ is not risen”? The reply is, that the responsibility of the publication of so much that is profoundly passionate but far from profoundly intellectual scepticism was not his. With the exception of some not very significant critical essays, his prose consists of letters, which were of course not meant for the public; and the greater part of his poetry remained to the day of Clough’s death in his desk, and would probably never have left it, with his consent, unless to be put in the fire.

Those who recognise in the “Bothie” Clough’s almost solitary claim to literary eminence must somewhat wonder at the considerable figure he stands for in the estimation of the present generation. The fact is that Clough, like James Spedding, was personally far more impressive than his works; and the singularly strong effect produced among his friends by the extreme simplicity and shy kindliness of his life and manners, and the at once repellent and alluring severity of his truthfulness, gave his character a consequence beyond that of his writings with all who knew him though ever so slightly; and the halo of this sanctity hangs, through the report of his friends, about all that he has done, and renders cold criticism of it almost impossible. No one who knew Clough can so separate his personality from his writings as to be able to criticise them fairly as literature; no one who has not known him can understand their value as the outcome of character.

The impressionable and feminine element, which is manifest in all genius, but which in truly effective genius is always subordinate to power of intellect, had in Clough’s mind the preponderance. The masculine power of intellect consists scarcely so much in the ability to see truth, as in the tenacity of spirit which cleaves to and assimilates the truth when it is found, and which steadfastly refuses to be blown about by every wind of doctrine and feeling. The reiterated theme of Clough’s poetry is that the only way of forgetting certain problems now, and of securing their solution hereafter, is to do faithfully our nearest duty. This is no new teaching: it is that of every religion and all philosophy. But Clough had no power of trusting patiently to the promise, “Do my commandments, and you shall know of the doctrine.” This was the ruin of what might otherwise have been a fine poetic faculty. A “Problem” will not sing even in the process of solution, much less while it is only a hopeless and irritating “Pons.” Clough was curiously attracted by Emerson, of whom he spoke as the only great contemporary American. Now Emerson, at his very best, never approached greatness. He was at highest only a brilliant metaphysical epigrammatist. But a religion without a dogma, and with only one commandment, “Thou shalt neither think nor do anything that is customary,” had great attractions for Clough; to whom it never seems to have occurred that the vast mass of mankind, for whose moral and religious welfare he felt so keenly, has not and never can have a religion of speechless aspirations and incommunicable feelings, and that to teach men to despise custom is to cut the immense majority of them adrift from all moral restraint. The promise that we shall all be priests and kings seems scarcely to be for this world. At all events we are as far from its fulfilment now as we were two thousand years ago; and we shall not be brought nearer to it by any such outpourings of sarcastic discontent as go to the making of such poems as the tedious Mephistophelian drama called “Dipsychus,” which Clough had the good sense not to publish, though it is included with many others of equally doubtful value in posthumous editions of his works. This class of his poems possesses, indeed, a lively interest for a great many people of our own time, who are in the painful state of moral and religious ferment which these verses represent; but it is a mere accident of the time that there is any considerable audience for such utterances, and in a generation or two it is probable that most men will feel surprise that there could ever have been a public who found poetry in this sort of matter.

The “Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich” is the only considerable poem of Clough’s in which he seems, for a time, to have got out of his slough of introspection and doubt and to have breathed the healthy air of nature and common humanity. In spite of many artistic shortcomings, this poem is so healthy, human, and original, that it can scarcely fail to survive when a good deal of far more fashionable verse shall have disappeared from men’s memories. The one infallible note of a true poet--the power of expressing himself in rhythmical movements of subtilty and sweetness which baffle analysis--is also distinctly manifest in passages of the “Bothie,” passages the music of which was, we fancy, lingering in the ear of Tennyson when he wrote certain parts of “Maud.” The originality of this idyl is beyond question. It is not in the least like any other poem, and an occasionally ostentatious touch of the manner of “Herman and Dorothea” seems to render this originality all the more conspicuous in the main. Another note of poetical power, scarcely less questionable than is that of sweetness and subtilty of rhythm, is the warm and pure breath of womanhood which is exhaled from the love-passages of this poem. Clough seems to have felt, in the presence of a simple and amiable woman, a mystery of life which acted for a time as the rebuke and speechless solution of all doubts and intellectual distresses. These passages in the “Bothie,” and, in a less degree, some others in the “Amours de Voyage,” stand, in the disturbed course of Clough’s ordinary verse, like the deep, pure, and sky-reflecting pools which occasionally appear in the course of a restless mountain river.

XIX

EMERSON

The life and writings of Emerson owe their chief claim on our attention to the fact that they represent with singular force a line of thought and belief--if belief it can be called--which an immense number of the young, intelligent, and sincere of the past and present generation have been endeavouring to follow, though as yet without any remarkable or satisfactory results. “Every man is potentially a man of genius,” is the one dogma of Emerson’s religion--though it is nowhere put thus plainly by him; and its one commandment is “Be a man of genius.” Absolute nonconformity with everything, we are taught, is the first condition of personal and social well-being; and we are enjoined to look upon our individual insight as our one infallible guide, though it may bid us go one way to-day and the opposite to-morrow. At the time when Emerson was debating with himself as to whether he should throw up his office as Unitarian preacher he seems to have had some searchings of heart as to the validity of the new doctrine. “How,” he writes, in his Journal, “shall the droning world get on if all its _beaux esprits_ recalcitrate upon its approved forms and accepted constitutions and quit them in order to be single-minded? The double-refiners would produce at the other end the double-damned.” This is perhaps the wisest thing ever said by Emerson; but he nevertheless chose his part definitively with the “double refiners.” “I hate preaching,” he writes in a subsequent page of his Journal. “Preaching is a pledge, and I wish to say what I feel and think to-day, with the proviso that to-morrow perhaps I shall contradict it all.” In the free use of his proviso he accordingly, for the remainder of his life, followed and taught others to follow what he called “intuition,” even though it should not wait for “to-morrow” to contradict itself. For example, in the last page but one of the essay on “Character” we are instructed to reject the doctrine of the divinity of Christ because “the mind requires a victory to the senses, a force of character which will convert judge, jury, soldier, and king and on the following page we are told that, “when that love which is all-suffering, all-abstaining, all-aspiring ... comes into our streets and houses, only the pure and aspiring can know its face.”

Emerson’s life, journals, and letters considerably modify the impression which his published essays and lectures are calculated to leave--namely, that he was a mere stringer-together of lively thoughts, images, and poetical epigrams. He seems to have made the best of his own humanity, and to have always done the right according to his judgment, though the doing of it sometimes involved serious pecuniary inconvenience, and, as in the case of his opposition to the fugitive slave law, violent popular disapprobation. He was kindly and moral in his family and social relationships, and was conscientious even to a fault in avoiding those venial sins of language to which the most of us are perhaps too indifferent. His American admirers sometimes spoke of him as an “angel.” At any rate, he was a sort of sylph. He noted of his compatriots generally that “they have no passions, only appetites.” He seems to have had neither passion nor appetite; and there was an utter absence of “nonsense” about him which made it almost impossible to be intimate with him. Margaret Fuller, his closest friend, and even his wife, whom he loved in his own serene way, seem to have chafed under the impossibility of getting within the adamantine sphere of self-consciousness which surrounded him. He not only could not forget himself, but he could not forget his grammar; and when he talked he seemed rather to be “composing” his thoughts than thinking them. His friend and admirer, Mr. Henry James the elder, complains that for this reason his conversation was without charm. “For nothing ever came but epigrams, sometimes clever, sometimes not.” His manners and discourse were, however, invariably kind and amiable. He never seems to have uttered a personal sarcasm, and only once in his life to have been seriously angry. This was on occasion of the famous fugitive slave law, which he indignantly declared would be disobeyed, if need be, by himself and every honest man.

Dr. W. H. Furness writes of Emerson: “We were babies and schoolfellows together. I don’t think he ever engaged in boys’ plays.... I can as little remember when he was not literary in his pursuits as when I first made his acquaintance.” Indeed, “orating” was in Emerson’s blood. Nearly all his known ancestors and relatives seem to have been “ministers” of some denomination or other. His school-days--though he never became a scholar in any department of learning--began before he was three years old. His father complains of the baby of two years and odd months--“Ralph does not read very well yet”; and during all the rest of his youth Dr. Furness says that he grew up under “the pressure of I know not how many literary atmospheres.” Add to this the fact that his father and mother and his aunt--who was the chief guide of his nonage--were persons who seemed to think that love could only be manifested by severe duty, and rarely showed him any signs of the weaknesses of “affection,” and we have as bad a bringing-up for a moral, philosophical, and religious teacher as could well have been devised. “The natural first, and afterwards the spiritual.” Where innocent joy and personal affection have not been main factors of early experience the whole life wants the key to Christianity; and a rejection of all faith--except that in “genius,” “over-soul,” “a somewhat which makes for righteousness,” or some other such impotent abstraction--is, in our day, almost inevitable in a mind of constitutional sincerity like Emerson’s, especially when such sincerity is unaccompanied, as it was in him, by a warm and passionate nature and its intellectual correlative, a vigorous conscience. Emerson, though a good man--that is, one who lived up to his lights--had little or no conscience. He admired good, but did not love it; he denounced evil, but did not hate it, and did not even maintain that it was hateful, but only greatly inexpedient.

Though Emerson could not see that a religion of which there is nothing left but an “over-soul” is much the same thing as a man of whom there is nothing left but his hat, the religious bodies to which he was for many years more or less attached were less devoid of humour, and the joke of a faith without a dogma became, in time, too much for their seriousness. Consequently they agreed amicably to part, and Emerson pursued his course; that which had hitherto been called “preaching” becoming thenceforward lecturing and “orating.”

There can be no greater misfortune for a sincere and truthful mind like Emerson’s than to have to get a living by “orating.” This was his predicament, however; and there can be no doubt that his mind and his writings were the worse for this necessity. His philosophy afforded him only a very narrow range of subject. In all his essays and lectures he is but ringing the changes upon three or four ideas--which are really commonplace, though his sprightly wit and imagination give them freshness; and it is impossible to read any single essay, much less several in succession, without feeling that the licence of tautology is used to its extremest limits. In a few essays--for example, “The Poet,” “Character,” and “Love”--the writer’s heart is so much in the matter that these endless variations of one idea have the effect of music which delights us to the end with the reiteration of an exceedingly simple theme; but in many other pieces it is impossible not to detect that weariness of the task of having to coin dollars out of transcendental sentiments to which Emerson’s letters and journals often bear witness. But, whether delighted with or weary of his labour, there is no progress in his thought, which resembles the spinning of a cockchafer on a pin rather than the flight of a bird on its way from one continent to another.

Emerson’s was a sweet and uniformly sunny spirit; but the sunshine was that of the long Polar day, which enlightens but does not fructify. It never even melted the icy barrier which separated his soul from others; and men and women were nothing to him, because he never got near enough to understand them. Hence his journals and letters about his visits to Europe, and especially to England, are curiously superficial in observation. He made many acute and witty remarks, such as, “Every Englishman is a House of Commons, and expects that you will not end your speech without proposing a measure;” but, on the whole, he quite misunderstood the better class of our countrymen, of whom, in his second visit to England, he had the opportunity of seeing a good deal. Although there was much constitutional reserve, there was no real reticence in him. His ethereal, unimpassioned ideas had, indeed, nothing in them that, for him, commanded reticence; and he concluded that the best sort of Englishmen were without any motives that “transcend” sense, because he did not feel, as all such Englishmen do, that though that which transcends sense may be infinitely dearer than all else, and even because it is so dear, it is better not to talk of things which can scarcely be spoken of without inadequacy and even an approach to nonsense. Many an Englishman would turn aside with a jest from any attempt to lead him into “transcendental” talk, not because he was less, but because he was more “serious” than his interlocutor; and also because the very recognition of certain kinds of knowledge involves the recognition of obligations, to confess directly or indirectly the fulfilment or neglect of which implies either self-praise or self-blame, which, in ordinary circumstances, are alike indecent. In fact, Emerson was totally deficient in the religious sense, which is very strong in the hearts of a vast number of Englishmen who own to no fixed creed, but who would be revolted by the profound and unconscious irreverence with which Emerson was in the habit of speaking and writing of the most sacred things and names. The name of “Jesus” frequently occurs in such sentences as this: “Nor Jesus, nor Pericles, nor Cæsar, nor Angelo, nor Washington,” etc.

If we put aside Emerson’s unconscious malpractices in this sort, the attitude of his mind with regard to the serious beliefs of the world were too childish for resentment or exposure. It is as if one should be angry with a young lady who should simper, “Oh, my religion is the religion of the Sermon on the Mount!” in answer to an attempt to talk with her about Bossuet or Hooker.

XX

CRABBE AND SHELLEY

The firmament of fame is full of variable stars, and they are nowhere thicker than in that great constellation of poets which marks the end of the last and the commencement of this century. Among the names of Byron, Moore, Rogers, Southey, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Burns, Campbell, Crabbe, Cowper, and Scott, there are only two the lustre of whose names has remained perfectly steady and seems likely to remain so. Two or three, which blazed forth at once as luminaries of the first magnitude, have gradually and persistently waned--whether or not ever to recover any part of their lost splendour is very doubtful. The light of one or two others has fluctuated violently, and continues to do so, with a manifest diminution, however, in their total sum of light; one or two others have suffered a distinct degradation from first into second or third class lustres, and at present show no sign of further alteration. Two at least have grown astonishingly in conspicuousness, and now glow like the Dog-star and Aldebaran--though there are not wanting sky-critics who declare that they discern conditions of coming change and retrogression; and one at least has almost disappeared from the heaven of public recognition, not, however, without prognostications from some of an assured reassertion of a moderate if not predominating position.

To quit figures of speech, Coleridge and Burns--though poets of very different calibre--are the only two of the thirteen above mentioned whose reputations have been altogether unaffected by the violent changes of literary fashion which have taken place in the course of the century. Each of these two poets has written a good deal which the world will willingly let die; but Coleridge in his great way, and Burns in his comparatively small way, have done a certain moderate amount of work so thoroughly and manifestly well that no sane critic has ever called it into question or ever will. By the leaders of poetic fashion Moore and Rogers have come to be accounted as almost nowhere as poets. Southey and Cowper now depend mainly for their fame upon a few small pieces, which in their own day were not regarded as of much account in comparison with such works as _The Task_ and _The Curse of Kehama_; Campbell now lives only, but vigorously, in a few lyrics. Who but Mr. Ruskin is there that would not laugh now to hear the name of Scott coupled with those of Keats and Shelley? Byron, who once outblazed all others, is now considered, by many judges not altogether to be disregarded, less as a great fixed star than as a meteor formed from earthly fumes condensed and for a time incandescent in the upper air. Wordsworth’s fame, though all agree that it is assured, has suffered and is likely still to suffer some fluctuations; and, when poetry is talked about in circles of modern experts, no one ever hears of Crabbe, though here and there one comes upon some literary oddity who maintains that he has as good a claim as Shelley to a place in the heavens of abiding fame. As this, to most modern ears astounding, paradox is certainly maintained, in private at least, by several persons whose opinion the most advanced critic would not think of despising, it may be worth while to see what can be said for it.