Part 9

Let us abandon ourselves, however, to the vain pleasure of prophesying. Let us suppose, for the humour of it, that what very young gentlemen call "the might of poesy" is sure to reassert itself, that the votaries of modern verse will always form a respectable minimum, and that some alteration in fashion will reduce the tyranny of antiquarianism to decent proportions. Admit that poetry, in whatever lamentable condition it may be at the present time, is eternal in its essence, and must offer the means of expression to certain admirable talents in each generation. What, then, is the form which we may reasonably expect it to take next? This is, surely, a harmless kind of speculation, and the moral certainty of being fooled by the event need not restrain us from indulging in it. We will prophesy, although fully conscious of the wild predictions on the same subject current in England in 1580, 1650, and 1780, and in France in 1775 and 1825. We may be quite sure of one thing, that when the Marlowe or the André Chénier is coming, not a single critic will be expecting him. But in the meantime why show a front less courageous than that of the history-defying Zadkiel?

It is usually said, in hasty generalisation, that the poetry of the present age is unique in the extreme refinement of its exterior mechanism. Those who say this are not aware that the great poets whose virile simplicity and robust carelessness of detail they applaud--thus building tombs to prophets whom they have never worshipped--have, almost without exception, been scrupulously attentive to form. No modern writer has been so learned in rhythm as Milton, so faultless in rhyme-arrangement as Spenser. But what is true is that a care for form, and a considerable skill in the technical art of verse, have been acquired by writers of a lower order, and that this sort of perfection is no longer the hall-mark of a great master. We may expect it, therefore, to attract less attention in the future; and although, assuredly, the bastard jargon of Walt Whitman, and kindred returns to sheer barbarism, will not be accepted, technical perfection will more and more be taken as a matter of course, as a portion of the poet's training which shall be as indispensable, and as little worthy of notice, as that a musician should read his notes correctly.

Less effort, therefore, is likely to be made, in the immediate future, to give pleasure by the manner of poetry, and more skill will be expended on the subject-matter. By this I do not understand that greater concession will be made than in the past to what may be called the didactic fallacy, the obstinate belief of some critics in the function of poetry as a teacher. The fact is certain that nothing is more obsolete than educational verse, the literary product which deliberately supplies information. We may see another Sappho; it is even conceivable that we might see another Homer; but a new Hesiod, never. Knowledge has grown to be far too complex, exact, and minute to be impressed upon the memory by the artifice of rhyme; and poetry had scarcely passed its infancy before it discovered that to stimulate, to impassion, to amuse, were the proper duties of an art which appeals to the emotions, and to the emotions only. The curious attempts, then, which have been made by poets of no mean talent to dedicate their verse to botany, to the Darwinian hypothesis, to the loves of the fossils, and to astronomical science, are not likely to be repeated, and if they should be repeated, they would scarcely attract much popular attention. Nor is the epic, on a large scale--that noble and cumbersome edifice with all its blank windows and corridors that lead to nothing--a species of poetic architecture which the immediate future can be expected to indulge in.

Leaving the negative for the positive, then, we may fancy that one or two probabilities loom before us. Poetry, if it exist at all, will deal, and probably to a greater degree than ever before, with those more frail and ephemeral shades of emotion which prose scarcely ventures to describe. The existence of a delicately organised human being is diversified by divisions and revulsions of sensation, ill-defined desires, gleams of intuition, and the whole gamut of spiritual notes descending from exultation to despair, none of which have ever been adequately treated except in the hieratic language of poetry. The most realistic novel, the closest psychological analysis in prose, does no more than skim the surface of the soul; verse has the privilege of descending into its depths. In the future, lyrical poetry will probably grow less trivial and less conventional, at the risk of being less popular. It will interpret what prose dares not suggest. It will penetrate further into the complexity of human sensation, and, untroubled by the necessity of formulating a creed, a theory, or a story, will describe with delicate accuracy, and under a veil of artistic beauty, the amazing, the unfamiliar, and even the portentous phenomena which it encounters.

The social revolution or evolution which most sensible people are now convinced is imminent, will surely require a species of poetry to accompany its course and to celebrate its triumphs. If we could foresee what form this species will take, we should know all things. But we must believe that it will be democratic, and that to a degree at present unimaginable. The aristocratic tradition is still paramount in all art. Kings, princesses, and the symbols of chivalry are as essential to poetry, as we now conceive it, as roses, stars, or nightingales. The poet may be a pronounced socialist; he may be Mr. William Morris; but the oligarchic imagery pervades his work as completely as if he were a troubadour of the thirteenth century. It is difficult to understand what will be left if this romantic phraseology is destroyed, but it is still more difficult to believe that it can survive a complete social revolution.

A kind of poetry now scarcely cultivated at all may be expected to occupy the attention of the poets, whether socialism hastens or delays. What the Germans understand by epic verse--that is to say, short and highly finished studies in narrative--is a class of literature which offers unlimited opportunities. What may be done in this direction is indicated in France by the work of M. Coppée. In England and America we have at present nothing at all like it, the idyllic stories of Mr. Coventry Patmore presenting the closest parallel. The great danger which attends the writing of these narratives in English is the tendency to lose distinction of style, to become humorous in dealing with the grotesque and tame in describing the simple. Blank verse will be wholly eschewed by those who in the future sing the annals of the humble; they will feel that the strictest art and the most exquisite ornament of rhyme and metre will be required for the treatment of such narratives. M. Coppée himself, who records the adventures of seamstresses and engine-drivers, of shipwrecked sailors and retail grocers, with such simplicity and moving pathos, has not his rival in all France for purity of phrase and for exquisite propriety of versification.

The modern interest in the drama, and the ever-growing desire to see literature once more wedded to the stage, will, it can hardly be doubted, lead to a revival of dramatic poetry. This will not, of course, have any relation to the feeble lycean plays of the hour--spectacular romances enshrined in ambling blank verse--but will, in its form and substance alike, offer entertainment to other organs than the eye. Probably the puritanic limitations which have so long cramped the English theatre will be removed, and British plays, while remaining civilised and decent, will once more deal with the realities of life and not with its conventions. Neither the funeral baked meats of the romantic English novel, nor the spiced and potted dainties of the French stage, will satisfy our playgoers when once we have strong and sincere playwrights of our own.

In religious verse something, and in philosophical verse much, remains to be done. The wider hope has scarcely found a singer yet, and the deeper speculation has been very imperfectly and empirically celebrated by our poets. Whether love, the very central fountain of poetic inspiration in the past, can yield many fresh variations, remains to be seen. That passion will, however, in all probability be treated in the future less objectively and with a less obtrusive landscape background. The school which is now expiring has carried description, the consciousness of exterior forms and colours, the drapery and upholstery of nature, to its extreme limit. The next development of poetry is likely to be very bare and direct, unembroidered, perhaps even arid, in character. It will be experimental rather than descriptive, human rather than animal. So at least we vaguely conjecture. But whatever the issue may be, we may be confident that the art will retain that poignant charm over undeveloped minds, and that exquisite fascination, which for so many successive generations have made poetry the wisest and the fairest friend of youth.

_1891._

TENNYSON--AND AFTER

Tennyson--and After

As we filed slowly out of the Abbey on the afternoon of Wednesday, the 12th of October, 1892, there must have occurred to others, I think, as to myself, a whimsical and half-terrifying sense of the symbolic contrast between what we had left and what we emerged upon. Inside, the grey and vitreous atmosphere, the reverberations of music moaning somewhere out of sight, the bones and monuments of the noble dead, reverence, antiquity, beauty, rest. Outside, in the raw air, a tribe of hawkers urging upon the edges of a dense and inquisitive crowd a large sheet of pictures of the pursuit of a flea by a "lady," and more insidious salesmen doing a brisk trade in what they falsely pretended to be "Tennyson's last poem."

Next day we read in our newspapers affecting accounts of the emotion displayed by the vast crowds outside the Abbey--horny hands dashing away the tear, seamstresses holding the "the little green volumes" to their faces to hide their agitation. Happy for those who could see these things with their fairy telescopes out of the garrets of Fleet Street. I, alas!--though I sought assiduously--could mark nothing of the kind. Entering the Abbey, conducted by courteous policemen through unparalleled masses of the curious, we distinguished patience, good behaviour, cheerful and untiring inquisitiveness, a certain obvious gratitude for an incomprehensible spectacle provided by the authorities, but nothing else. And leaving the Abbey, as I say, the impression was one almost sinister in its abrupt transition. Poetry, authority, the grace and dignity of life, seemed to have been left behind us for ever in that twilight where Tennyson was sleeping with Chaucer and with Dryden.

In recording this impression I desire nothing so little as to appear censorious. Even the external part of the funeral at Westminster seemed, as was said of the similar scene which was enacted there nearly two hundred years ago, "a well-conducted and uncommon public ceremony, where the philosopher can find nothing to condemn, nor the satirist to ridicule." But the contrast between the outside and the inside of the Abbey, a contrast which may possibly have been merely whimsical in itself, served for a parable of the condition of poetry in England as the burial of Tennyson has left it. If it be only the outworn body of this glorious man which we have relinquished to the safeguard of the Minster, gathered to his peers in the fulness of time, we have no serious ground for apprehension, nor, after the first painful moment, even for sorrow. His harvest is ripe, and we hold it in our granaries. The noble physical presence which has been the revered companion of three generations has, indeed, sunk at length:

_Yet would we not disturb him from his tomb,_ _Thus sleeping in his Abbey's friendly shade,_ _And the rough waves of life for ever laid._

But what if this vast and sounding funeral should prove to have really been the entombment of English poetry? What if it should be the prestige of verse that we left behind us in the Abbey? That is a question which has issues far more serious than the death of any one man, no matter how majestic that man may be.

Poetry is not a democratic art. We are constantly being told by the flexible scribes who live to flatter the multitude that the truest poetry is that which speaks to the million, that moves the great heart of the masses. In his private consciousness no one knows better than the lettered man who writes such sentences that they are not true. Since the pastoral days in which poets made great verses for a little clan, it has never been true that poetry of the noblest kind was really appreciated by the masses. If we take the bulk of what are called educated people, but a very small proportion are genuinely fond of reading. Sift this minority, and but a minute residue of it will be found to be sincerely devoted to beautiful poetry. The genuine lovers of verse are so few that if they could be made the subject of a statistical report, we should probably be astounded at the smallness of their number. From the purely democratic point of view it is certain that they form a negligible quantity. They would produce no general effect at all if they were not surrounded by a very much larger number of persons who, without taste for poetry themselves, are yet traditionally impressed with its value, and treat it with conventional respect, buying it a little, frequently conversing about it, pressing to gaze at its famous professors, and competing for places beside the tombs of its prophets. The respect for poetry felt by these persons, although in itself unmeaning, is extremely valuable in its results. It supports the enthusiasm of the few who know and feel for themselves, and it radiates far and wide into the outer masses, whose darkness would otherwise be unreached by the very glimmer of these things.

There is no question, however, that the existence in prominent public honour of an art in its essence so aristocratic as poetry--that is to say, so dependent on the suffrages of a few thousand persons who happen to possess, in greater or lesser degree, certain peculiar qualities of mind and ear--is, at the present day, anomalous, and therefore perilous. All this beautiful pinnacled structure of the glory of verse, this splendid position of poetry at the summit of the civil ornaments of the Empire, is built of carven ice, and needs nothing but that the hot popular breath should be turned upon it to sink into so much water. It is kept standing there, flashing and sparkling before our eyes, by a succession of happy accidents. To speak rudely, it is kept there by an effort of bluff on the part of a small influential class.

In reflecting on these facts, I have found myself depressed and terrified at an ebullition of popularity which seems to have struck almost everybody else with extreme satisfaction. It has been very natural that the stupendous honour apparently done to Tennyson, not merely by the few who always valued him, but by the many who might be supposed to stand outside his influence, has been welcomed with delight and enthusiasm. But what is so sinister a circumstance is the excessive character of this exhibition. I think of the funeral of Wordsworth at Grasmere, only forty-two years ago, with a score of persons gathering quietly under the low wall that fenced them from the brawling Rotha; and I turn to the spectacle of the 12th, the vast black crowd in the street, the ten thousand persons refused admission to the Abbey, the whole enormous popular manifestation.[1] What does it mean? Is Tennyson, great as he is, a thousand times greater than Wordsworth? Has poetry, in forty years, risen at this ratio in the public estimation? The democracy, I fear, doth protest too much, and there is danger in this hollow reverence.

The danger takes this form. It may at any moment come to be held that the poet, were he the greatest that ever lived, was greater than poetry; the artist more interesting than his art. This was a peril unknown in ancient times. The plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries were scarcely more closely identified with the men who wrote them than Gothic cathedrals were with their architects. Cowley was the first English poet about whom much personal interest was felt outside the poetic class. Dryden is far more evident to us than the Elizabethans were, yet phantasmal by the side of Pope. Since the age of Anne an interest in the poet, as distinguished from his poetry, has steadily increased; the fashion for Byron, the posthumous curiosity in Shelley and Keats, are examples of the rapid growth of this individualisation in the present century. But since the death of Wordsworth it has taken colossal proportions, without, so far as can be observed, any parallel quickening of the taste for poetry itself. The result is that a very interesting or picturesque figure, if identified with poetry, may attract an amount of attention and admiration which is spurious as regards the poetry, and of no real significance. Tennyson had grown to be by far the most mysterious, august, and singular figure in English society. He represented poetry, and the world now expects its poets to be as picturesque, as aged, and as individual as he was, or else it will pay poetry no attention. I fear, to be brief, that the personal, as distinguished from the purely literary, distinction of Tennyson may strike, for the time being, a serious blow at the vitality of poetry in this country.

Circumstances have combined, in a very curious way, to produce this result. If a supernatural power could be conceived as planning a scenic effect, it could hardly have arranged it in a manner more telling, or more calculated to excite the popular imagination, than has been the case in the quick succession of the death of Matthew Arnold, of Robert Browning, and of Tennyson.

_Insatiate archer! could not one suffice?_ _Thy shaft few thrice; and thrice our peace was slain._

A great poet was followed by a greater, and he by the greatest of the century, and all within five years. So died, but not with this crescent effect, Shakespeare, Beaumont, and Raleigh; so Vanbrugh, Congreve, Gay, Steele, and Defoe; so Byron, Shelley, and Keats; so Scott, Coleridge, and Lamb. But in none of these cases was the field left so exposed as it now is in popular estimation. The deaths of Keats, Shelley, and Byron were really momentous to an infinitely greater degree than those of Arnold, Browning, and Tennyson, because the former were still in the prime of life, while the latter had done their work; but the general public was not aware of this, and, as is well known, Shelley and Keats passed away without exciting a ripple of popular curiosity.

The tone of criticism since the death of Tennyson has been very much what might, under the circumstances, have been expected. Their efforts to overwhelm his coffin with lilies and roses have seemed paltry to the critics, unless they could succeed, at the same time, in laying waste all the smaller gardens of his neighbours. There is no doubt that the instinct for suttee lies firmly embedded in human nature, and that the glory of a dead rajah is dimly felt by us all to be imperfect unless some one or other is immolated on his funeral pile. But when we come to think calmly on this matter, it will be seen that this offering up of the live poets as a burnt sacrifice to the memory of their dead master is absurd and grotesque. We have boasted all these years that we possessed the greatest of the world's poets since Victor Hugo. We did well to boast. But he is taken from us at a great age, and we complain at once, with bitter cries--because we have no poet left so venerable or so perfect in ripeness of the long-drawn years of craftsmanship--that poetry is dead amongst us, and that all the other excellent artists in verse are worthless scribblers. This is natural, perhaps, but it is scarcely generous and not a little ridiculous. It is, moreover, exactly what the critics said in 1850, when Arnold, Browning, and Tennyson had already published a great deal of their most admirable work.

The ingratitude of the hour towards the surviving poets of England pays but a poor compliment to the memory of that great man whose fame it professes to honour. I suppose that there has scarcely been a writer of interesting verse who has come into anything like prominence within the lifetime of Tennyson who has not received from him some letter of praise--some message of benevolent indulgence. More than fifty years ago he wrote, in glowing terms, to congratulate Mr. Bailey on his _Festus_; it is only yesterday that we were hearing of his letters to Mr. Rudyard Kipling and Mr. William Watson. Tennyson did not affect to be a critic--no man, indeed, can ever have lived who less _affected_ to be anything--but he loved good verses, and he knew them when he saw them, and welcomed them indulgently. No one can find it more distasteful to him to have it asserted that Tennyson was, and will be, "the last of the English poets" than would Tennyson himself.

It was not my good fortune to see him many times, and only twice, at an interval of about twelve years, did I have the privilege of hearing him talk at length and ease. On each of those occasions, however, it was noticeable with what warmth and confidence he spoke of the future of English poetry, with what interest he evidently followed its progress, and how cordially he appreciated what various younger men were doing. In particular, I hope it is not indiscreet to refer to the tone in which he spoke to me on each of these occasions of Mr. Swinburne, whose critical conscience had, it must not be forgotten, led him to refer with no slight severity to several of the elder poet's writings. In 1877 Mr. Swinburne's strictures were still recent, and might not unreasonably have been painfully recollected. Yet Tennyson spoke of him almost as Dryden did two hundred years ago to Congreve:

_And this I prophesy--thou shalt be seen_ _(Though with some short parenthesis between)_ _High on the throne of wit, and, seated there,_ _Not mine (that's little), but thy laurel wear._

It would never have occurred to this great and wise man that his own death could be supposed to mark the final burning up and turning to ashes of the prophetic bays.