Chapter 18

The mind in creation is as a fading coal, which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; the power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure. Could this influence be durable in its original purity and force, it is impossible to predict the greatness of the results; but when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conceptions of the poet. I appeal to the greatest poets of the present day, whether it is not an error to assert that the finest passages of poetry are produced by labour and study.

He then goes on to interpret literally Milton's reference to _Paradise Lost_ as an "unpremeditated song" "dictated" by the Muse, and to reply scornfully to those "who would allege the fifty-six various readings of the first line of the _Orlando Furioso_." Who is there who would not agree with Shelley quickly if it were a question of having to choose between his inspirational theory of literature and the mechanical theory of the arts advocated by writers like Sir Joshua Reynolds? Literature without inspiration is obviously even a meaner thing than literature without style. But the idea that any man can become an artist by taking pains is merely an exaggerated protest against the idea that a man can become an artist without taking pains. Anthony Trollope, who settled down industriously to his day's task of literature as to bookkeeping, did not grow into an artist in any large sense; and Zola, with the motto "Nulle dies sine linea" ever facing him on his desk, made himself a prodigious author, indeed, but never more than a second-rate writer. On the other hand, Trollope without industry would have been nobody at all, and Zola without pains might as well have been a waiter. Nor is it only the little or the clumsy artists who have found inspiration in labour. It is a pity we have not first drafts of all the great poems in the world: we might then see how much of the magic of literature is the result of toil and how much of the unprophesied wind of inspiration. Sir Sidney Colvin recently published an early draft of Keats's sonnet, "Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art," which showed that in the case of Keats at least the mind in creation was not "as a fading coal," but as a coal blown to increasing flame and splendour by sheer "labour and study." And the poetry of Keats is full of examples of the inspiration not of first but of second and later thoughts. Henry Stephens, a medical student who lived with him for time, declared that an early draft of _Endymion_ opened with the line:

A thing of beauty is a constant joy

--a line which, Stephens observed on hearing it, was "a fine line, but wanting something." Keats thought over it for a little, then cried out, "I have it," and wrote in its place:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.

Nor is this an exceptional example of the studied miracles of Keats. The most famous and, worn and cheapened by quotation though it is, the most beautiful of all his phrases--

magic casements, opening on the foam Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn--

did not reach its perfect shape without hesitation and thinking. He originally wrote "the wide casements" and "keelless seas":

the wide casements, opening on the foam Of keelless seas, in fairy lands forlorn.

That would probably have seemed beautiful if the perfect version had not spoiled it for us. But does not the final version go to prove that Shelley's assertion that "when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline" does not hold good for all poets? On the contrary, it is often the heat of labour which produces the heat of inspiration. Or rather it is often the heat of labour which enables the writer to recall the heat of inspiration. Ben Jonson, who held justly that "the poet must be able by nature and instinct to pour out the treasure of his mind," took care to add the warning that no one must think he "can leap forth suddenly a poet by dreaming he hath been in Parnassus." Poe has uttered a comparable warning against an excessive belief in the theory of the plenary inspiration of poets in his _Marginalia_, where he declares that "this untenable and paradoxical idea of the incompatibility of genius and _art_" must be "kick[ed] out of the world's way." Wordsworth's saying that poetry has its origin in "emotion recollected in tranquillity" also suggests that the inspiration of poetry is an inspiration that may be recaptured by contemplation and labour. How eagerly one would study a Shakespeare manuscript, were it unearthed, in which one could see the shaping imagination of the poet at work upon his lines! Many people have the theory--it is supported by an assertion of Jonson's--that Shakespeare wrote with a current pen, heedless of blots and little changes. He was, it is evident, not one of the correct authors. But it seems unlikely that no pains of rewriting went to the making of the speeches in _A Midsummer Night's Dream_ or Hamlet's address to the skull. Shakespeare, one feels, is richer than any other author in the beauty of first thoughts. But one seems to perceive in much of his work the beauty of second thoughts too. There have been few great writers who have been so incapable of revision as Robert Browning, but Browning with all his genius is not a great stylist to be named with Shakespeare. He did indeed prove himself to be a great stylist in more than one poem, such as _Childe Roland_--which he wrote almost at a sitting. His inspiration, however, seldom raised his work to the same beauty of perfection. He is, as regards mere style, the most imperfect of the great poets. If only Tennyson had had his genius! If only Browning had had Tennyson's desire for golden words!

It would be absurd, however, to suggest that the main labour of an author consists in rewriting. The choice of words may have been made before a single one of them has been written down, as tradition tells us was the case with Menander, who described one of his plays as "finished" before he had written a word of it. It would be foolish, too, to write as though perfection of form in literature were merely a matter of picking and choosing among decorative words. Style is a method, not of decoration, but of expression. It is an attempt to make the beauty and energy of the imagination articulate. It is not any more than is construction the essence of the greatest art: it is, however, a prerequisite of the greatest art. Even those writers whom we regard as the least decorative labour and sorrow after it no less than the æsthetes. We who do not know Russian do not usually think of Tolstoy as a stylist, but he took far more trouble with his writing than did Oscar Wilde (whose chief fault is, indeed, that in spite of his theories his style is not laboured and artistic but inspirational and indolent). Count Ilya Tolstoy, the son of the novelist, published a volume of reminiscences of his father last year, in which he gave some interesting particulars of his father's energetic struggle for perfection in writing:

When _Anna Karénina_ began to come out in the _Russki Vyéstnik_ [he wrote], long galley-proofs were posted to my father, and he looked them through and corrected them. At first, the margins would be marked with the ordinary typographical signs, letters omitted, marks of punctuation, and so on; then individual words would be changed, and then whole sentences; erasures and additions would begin, till in the end the proof-sheet would be reduced to a mass of patches, quite black in places, and it was quite impossible to send it back as it stood because no one but my mother could make head or tail of the tangle of conventional signs, transpositions, and erasures.

My mother would sit up all night copying the whole thing out afresh.

In the morning there lay the pages on her table, neatly piled together, covered all over with her fine, clear handwriting, and everything ready, so that when "Lyóvotchka" came down he could send the proof-sheets out by post.

My father would carry them off to his study to have "just one last look," and by the evening it was worse than before; the whole thing had been rewritten and messed up once more.

"Sonya, my dear, I am very sorry, but I've spoilt all your work again; I promise I won't do it any more," he would say, showing her the passages with a guilty air. "We'll send them off to-morrow without fail." But his to-morrow was put off day by day for weeks or months together.

"There's just one bit I want to look through again," my father would say; but he would get carried away and rewrite the whole thing afresh. There were even occasions when, after posting the Proofs, my father would remember some particular words next day and correct them by telegraph.

There, better than in a thousand generalizations, you see what the artistic conscience is. In a world in which authors, like solicitors, must live, it is, of course, seldom possible to take pains in this measure. Dostoevsky used to groan that his poverty left him no time or chance to write his best as Tolstoy and Turgenev could write theirs. But he at least laboured all that he could. Novel-writing has since his time become as painless as dentistry, and the result may be seen in a host of books that, while affecting to be fine literature, have no price except as merchandise.

XXII.--THE THEORY OF POETRY

Matthew Arnold once advised people who wanted to know what was good poetry not to trouble themselves with definitions of poetry, but to learn by heart passages, or even single lines, from the works of the great poets, and to apply these as touchstones. Certainly a book like Mr. Cowl's _Theory of Poetry in England_, which aims at giving us a representative selection of the theoretical things which were said in England about poetry between the time of Elizabeth and the time of Victoria, makes one wonder at the barrenness of men's thoughts about so fruitful a world as that of the poets. Mr. Cowl's book is not intended to be read as an anthology of fine things. Its value is not that of a book of golden thoughts. It is an ordered selection of documents chosen, not for their beauty, but simply for their use as milestones in the progress of English poetic theory. It is a work, not of literature, but of literary history; and students of literary history are under a deep debt of gratitude to the author for bringing together and arranging the documents of the subject in so convenient and lucid a form. The arrangement is under subjects, and chronological. There are forty-one pages on the theory of poetic creation, beginning with George Gascoigne and ending with Matthew Arnold. These are followed by a few pages of representative passages about poetry as an imitative art, the first of the authors quoted being Roger Ascham and the last F.W.H. Myers. The hook is divided into twelve sections of this kind, some of which have a tendency to overlap. Thus, in addition to the section on poetry as an imitative art, we have a section on imitation of nature, another on external nature, and another on imitation. Imitation, in the last of these, it is true, means for the most part imitation of the ancients, as in the sentence in which Thomas Rymer urged the seventeenth-century dramatists to imitate Attic tragedy even to the point of introducing the chorus.

Mr. Cowl's book is interesting, however, less on account of the sections and subsections into which it is divided than because of the manner in which it enables us to follow the flight of English poetry from the romanticism of the Elizabethans to the neo-classicism of the eighteenth century, and from this on to the romanticism of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and from this to a newer neo-classicism whose prophet was Matthew Arnold. There is not much of poetry captured in these cold-blooded criticisms, but still the shadow of the poetry of his time occasionally falls on the critic's formulae and aphorisms. How excellently Sir Philip Sidney expresses the truth that the poet does not imitate the world, but creates a world, in his observation that Nature's world "is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden!" This, however, is a fine saying rather than an interpretation. It has no importance as a contribution to the theory of poetry to compare with a passage like that so often quoted from Wordsworth's preface to _Lyrical Ballads_:

I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin from emotions recollected in tranquillity; the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.

As a theory of poetic creation this may not apply universally. But what a flood of light it throws on the creative genius of Wordsworth himself! How rich in psychological insight it is, for instance, compared with Dryden's comparable reference to the part played by the memory in poetry:

The composition of all poems is, or ought to be, of wit; and wit in the poet ... is no other than the faculty of imagination in the writer, which, like a nimble spaniel, beats over and ranges through the field of memory, till it springs the quarry it hunted after.

As a matter of fact, few of these generalizations carry one far. Ben Jonson revealed more of the secret of poetry when he said simply: "It utters somewhat above a mortal mouth." So did Edgar Allan Poe, when he said: "It is no mere appreciation of the beauty before us, but a wild effort to reach the beauty above." Coleridge, again, initiates us into the secrets of the poetic imagination when he speaks of it as something which--

combining many circumstances into one moment of consciousness, tends to produce that ultimate end of all human thought and human feeling, unity, and thereby the reduction of the spirit to its principle and fountain, which is alone truly one.

On the other hand, the most dreadful thing that was ever written about poetry was also written by Coleridge, and is repeated in Mr. Cowl's book:

How excellently the German _Einbildungskraft_ expresses this prime and loftiest faculty, the power of coadunation, the faculty that forms the many into one--_Ineins-bildung_! Eisenoplasy, or esenoplastic power, is contradistinguished from fantasy, either catoptric or metoptric--repeating simply, or by transposition--and, again, involuntary [fantasy] as in dreams, or by an act of the will.

The meaning is simple enough: it is much the same as that of the preceding paragraph. But was there ever a passage written suggesting more forcibly how much easier it is to explain poetry by writing it than by writing about it?

Mr. Cowl's book makes it clear that fiercely as the critics may dispute about poetry, they are practically all agreed on at least one point--that it is an imitation. The schools have differed less over the question whether it is an imitation than over the question how, in a discussion on the nature of poetry, the word "imitation" must be qualified. Obviously, the poet must imitate something--either what he sees in nature, or what he sees in memory, or what he sees in other poets, or what he sees in his soul, or it may me, all together. There arise schools every now and then--classicists, Parnassians, realists, and so forth--who believe in imitation, but will not allow it to be a free imitation of things seen in the imaginative world. In the result their work is no true imitation of life. Pope's poetry is not as true an imitation of life as Shakespeare's. Nor is Zola's, for all its fidelity, as close an imitation of life as Victor Hugo's. Poetry, or prose either, without romance, without liberation, can never rise above the second order. The poet must be faithful not only to his subject, but to his soul. Poe defined art as the "reproduction of what the senses perceive in nature through the veil of the soul," and this, though like most definitions of art, incomplete, is true in so far as it reminds us that art at its greatest is the statement of a personal and ideal vision. That is why the reverence of rules in the arts is so dangerous. It puts the standards of poetry not in the hands of the poet, but in the hands of the grammarians. It is a Procrustes' bed which mutilates the poet's vision. Luckily, England has always been a rather lawless country, and we find even Pope insisting that "to judge ... of Shakespeare by Aristotle's rules is like trying a man by the laws of one country who acted under those of another." Dennis might cry: "Poetry is either an art or whimsy and fanaticism.... The great design of the arts is to restore the decays that happened to human nature by the fall, by restoring order." But, on the whole, the English poets and critics have realized the truth that it is not an order imposed from without, but an order imposed from within at which the poet must aim. He aims at bringing order into chaos, but that does not mean that he aims at bringing Aristotle into chaos. He is, in a sense, "beyond good and evil," so far as the orthodoxies of form are concerned. Coleridge put the matter in a nutshell when he remarked that the mistake of the formal critics who condemned Shakespeare as "a sort of African nature, rich in beautiful monsters," lay "in the confounding mechanical regularity with organic form." And he states the whole duty of poets as regards form in another sentence in the same lecture:

As it must not, so genius cannot, be lawless; for it is even this that constitutes its genius--the power of acting creatively under laws of its own origination.

Mr. Cowl enables us to follow, as in no other book we know, the endless quarrel between romance and the rules, between the spirit and the letter, among the English authorities on poetry. It is a quarrel which will obviously never be finally settled in any country. The mechanical theory is a necessary reaction against romance that has decayed into windiness, extravagance, and incoherence. It brings the poets back to literature again. The romantic theory, on the other hand, is necessary as a reminder that the poet must offer to the world, not a formula, but a vision. It brings the poets back to nature again. No one but a Dennis will hesitate an instant in deciding which of the theories is the more importantly and eternally true one.

XXIII.--THE CRITIC AS DESTROYER

It has been said often enough that all good criticism is praise. Pater boldly called one of his volumes of critical essays _Appreciations_. There are, of course, not a few brilliant instances of hostility in criticism. The best-known of these in English is Macaulay's essay on Robert Montgomery. In recent years we have witnessed the much more significant assault by Tolstoy upon almost the whole army of the authors of the civilized world from Æschylus down to Mallarmé. _What is Art?_ was unquestionably the most remarkable piece of sustained hostile criticism that was ever written. At the same time, it was less a denunciation of individual authors than an attack on the general tendencies of the literary art. Tolstoy quarrelled with Shakespeare not so much for being Shakespeare as for failing to write like the authors of the Gospels. Tolstoy would have made every book a Bible. He raged against men of letters because with them literature was a means not to more abundant life but to more abundant luxury. Like so many inexorable moralists, he was intolerant of all literature that did not serve as a sort of example of his own moral and social theories. That is why he was not a great critic, though he was immeasurably greater than a great critic. One would not turn to him for the perfect appreciation even of one of the authors he spared, like Hugo or Dickens. The good critic must in some way begin by accepting literature as it is, just as the good lyric poet must begin by accepting life as it is. He may be as full of revolutionary and reforming theories as he likes, but he must not allow any of these to come like a cloud between him and the sun, moon and stars of literature. The man who disparages the beauty of flowers and birds and love and laughter and courage will never be counted among the lyric poets; and the man who questions the beauty of the inhabited world the imaginative writers have made--a world as unreasonable in its loveliness as the world of nature--is not in the way of becoming a critic of literature.