THE SACRED WOOD
" INTRAVIT pinacothecam senex canus, exercitati vultus et
qui videretur nescio quid magnum promittere, sed cultu non
proinde speciosus, et facile appareret eum ex hac nota lit-
teratum esse, quos odisse divites solent . . . ' ego ' inquit
* poeta sum et ut spero, non humillimi spiritus, si modo
coronis aliquid -credendum est, quas etiam ad immeritos
deferre gratia solet.'" PETRONIUS.
" I also like to dine on becaficas."
THE SACRED WOOD
ESSAYS ON POETRY AND CRITICISM
BY
T. S. ELIOT
NEW YORK
ALFRED A. KNOPF
1921
FOR
H. W. E.
"TACUIT ET FECIT"
CERTAIN of these essays appeared, in the
same or a more primitive form, in The
Times Literary Supplement, The Athenaum,
Art and , Letters^ and The Egoist. The
author desires to express his obligation to
the editors of these periodicals.
vii
INTRODUCTION
TO anyone who is at all capable of experiencing
the pleasures of justice, it is gratifying to be
able to make amends to a writer whom one has
vaguely depreciated for some years. The faults and
foibles of Matthew Arnold are no less evident to me
now than twelve years ago, after my first admiration
for him ; but I hope that now, on re-reading some of
his prose with more care, I can better appreciate his
position. And what makes Arnold seem all the more
remarkable is, that if he were our exact contemporary,
he would find all his labour to perform again. A
moderate number of persons have engaged in what is
called "critical" writing, but no conclusion is any
more solidly established than it was in 1865. In the
first essay in the first Essays in Criticism we read
that
it has long seemed to me that the burst of creative
activity in our literature, through the first quarter of
this century, had about it in fact something premature ;
and that from this cause its productions are doomed,
most of them, in spite of the sanguine hopes which
accompanied and do still accompany them, to prove
ix
The Sacred Wood
hardly more lasting than the productions of far less
splendid epochs. And this prematureness comes
from its having proceeded without having its proper
data, without sufficient material to work with. In
other words, the English poetry of the first quarter of
this century, with plenty of energy, plenty of creative
force, did not know enough. This makes Byron so
empty of matter, Shelley so incoherent, Wordsworth
even, profound as he is, yet so wanting in completeness
and variety.
This judgment of the Romantic Generation has not,
so far as I know, ever been successfully controverted ;
and it has not, so far as I know, ever made very
much impression on popular opinion. Once a poet
is accepted, his reputation is seldon disturbed, for
better or worse. So little impression has Arnold's
opinion made, that his statement will probably be as
true of the first quarter of the twentieth century as it
was of the nineteenth. A few sentences later, Arnold
articulates the nature of the malady :
In the Greece of Pindar and Sophocles, in the
England of Shakespeare, the poet lived in a current
of ideas in the highest degree animating and nourish-
ing to the creative power; society was, in the fullest
measure, permeated by fresh thought, intelligent and
alive ; and this state of things is the true basis for the
creative power's exercise, in this it finds its data, its
materials, truly ready for its hand ; all the books and
reading in the world are only valuable as they are
helps to this.
At this point Arnold is indicating the centre of interest
Introduction
and activity of the critical intelligence; and it is at
this perception, we may almost say, that Arnold's
critical activity stopped. In a society in which the
arts were seriously studied, in which the art of writing
was respected, Arnold might have become a critic.
How astonishing it would be, if a man like Arnold
had concerned himself with the art of the novel, had
compared Thackeray with Flaubert, had analysed the
work of Dickens, had shown his contemporaries
exactly why the author of Amos Barton is a more
serious writer than Dickens, and why the author of
La Chartreuse de Parme is more serious than either ?
In Culture and Anarchy \ in Literature and Dogma,
Arnold was not occupied so much in establishing a
criticism as in attacking the uncritical. The difference
is that while in constructive work something can be
done, destructive work must incessantly be repeated ;
and furthermore Arnold, in his destruction, went for
game outside of the literary preserve altogether, much
of it political game untouched and inviolable by ideas.
This activity of Arnold's we must regret; it might
perhaps have been carried on as effectively, if riot
quite so neatly, by some disciple (had there been one)
in an editorial position on a newspaper. Arnold is
not to be blamed : he wasted his strength, as men of
superior ability sometimes do, because he saw some-
thing to be done and no one else to do it. The
temptation, to any man who is interested in ideas and
primarily in literature, to put literature into the corner
xi
The Sacred Wood
until he has cleaned up the whole country first, is
almost irresistible. Some persons, like Mr. Wells
and Mr. Chesterton, have succeeded so well in this
latter profession of setting the house in order, and
have attracted so much more attention than Arnold,
that we must conclude that it is indeed their proper
role, and that they have done well for themselves in
laying literature aside.
Not only is the critic tempted outside of criticism.
The criticism proper betrays such poverty of ideas
and such atrophy of sensibility that men who ought
to preserve their critical ability for the improvement
of their own creative work are tempted into criticism.
I do not intend from this the usually silly inference
that the " Creative " gift is " higher " than the critical.
When one creative mind is better than another, the
reason often is that the better is the more critical.
But the great bulk of the work of criticism could be
done by minds of the second order, and it is just
these minds of the second order that are difficult to
find. They are necessary for the rapid circulation of
ideas. The periodical press the ideal literary
periodical is an instrument of transport; and the
literary periodical press is dependent upon the
existence of a sufficient number of second-order (I do
not say "second-rate," the word is too derogatory)
minds to supply its material. These minds are
necessary for that "current of ideas," that "society
permeated by fresh thought," of which Arnold speaks,
xii
Introduction
It is a perpetual heresy of English culture to believe
that only the first-order mind, the Genius, the Great
Man, matters ; that he is solitary, and produced best
in the least favourable environment, perhaps the
Public School; and that it is most likely a sign of
inferiority that Paris can show so many minds of the
second order. If too much bad verse is published in
London, it does not occur to us to raise our standards,
to do anything to educate the poetasters ; the remedy
is, Kill them off. I quote from Mr. Edmund Gosse : 1
Unless something is done to stem this flood of
poetastry the art of verse will become not merely
superfluous, but ridiculous. Poetry is not a formula
which a thousand flappers and hobbledehoys ought to
be able to master in a week without any training, and
the mere fact that it seems to be now practised with
such universal ease is enough to prove that something
has gone amiss with our standards. . . . This is all
wrong, and will lead us down into the abyss like so
many Gadarene swine unless we resist it.
We quite agree that poetry is not a formula. But
what does Mr. Gosse propose to do about it? If
Mr. Gosse had found himself in the flood of poetastry
in the reign of Elizabeth, what would he have done
about it ? would he have stemmed it ? What exactly
is this abyss ? and if something " has gone amiss with
our standards," is it wholly the fault of the younger
generation that it is aware of no authority that it must
respect ? It is part of the business of the critic to
1 Sunday Times, May 30, 1920.
xiii
The Sacred Wood
preserve tradition where a good tradition exists. It
is part of his business to see literature steadily and to
see it whole; and this is eminently to see it not as
consecrated by time, but to see it beyond time; to
see the best work of our time and the best work of
twenty-five hundred years ago with the same eyes. 1
It is part of his business to help the poetaster to
understand his own limitations. The poetaster who
understands his own limitations will be one of our
useful second-order minds ; a good minor poet (some-
thing which is very rare) or another good critic. As
for the first-order minds, when they happen, they will
be none the worse off for a " current of ideas " ; the
solitude with which they will always and everywhere
be invested is a very different thing from isolation, or
a monarchy of death.
NOTE. I may commend as a model to critics who
desire to correct some of the poetical vagaries of the
present age, the following passage from a writer who
cannot be accused of flaccid leniency, and the justice
of whose criticism must be acknowledged even by
those who feel a strong partiality toward the school of
poets criticized :
"Yet great labour, directed by great abilities, is
never wholly lost ; if they frequently threw away their
wit upon false conceits, they likewise sometimes struck
out unexpected truth: if their conceits were faf-
1 Arnold, it must be admitted, gives us often the impression
of seeing the masters, whom he quotes, as canonical literature,
rather than as masters.
XIV
Introduction
fetched, they were often worth the carriage. To write
on their plan, it was at least necessary to read and
think. No man could be born a metaphysical poet,
nor assume the dignity of a writer, by descriptions
copied from descriptions, by imitations borrowed from
imitations, by traditional imagery, and hereditary
similes, by readiness of rhyme, and volubility of
syllables.
" In perusing the works of this race of authors, the
mind is exercised either by recollection or inquiry :
something already learned is to be retrieved, or some-
thing new is to be examined. If their greatness
seldom elevates, their acuteness often surprises; if
the imagination is not always gratified, at least the
powers of reflection and comparison are employed;
and in the mass of materials which ingenious absurdity
has thrown together, genuine wit and useful knowledge
may be sometimes found buried perhaps in grossness
of expression, but useful to those who know their
value; and such as, when they are expanded to
perspicuity, and polished to elegance, may give lustre
to works which have more propriety though less
copiousness of sentiment." JOHNSON, Life of Cowley.
XV
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION ix
THE PERFECT CRITIC i
IMPERFECT CRITICS
SWINBURNE AS CRITIC 15
A ROMANTIC ARISTOCRAT .... 22
THE LOCAL FLAVOUR 29
A NOTE ON THE AMERICAN CRITIC . . 34
THE FRENCH INTELLIGENCE ... 39
TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALENT . 42
THE POSSIBILITY OF A POETIC DRAMA . . 54
EURIPIDES AND PROFESSOR MURRAY ... 64
RHETORIC AND POETIC DRAMA . . . .71
NOTES ON THE BLANK VERSE OF CHRISTOPHER
MARLOWE 78
HAMLET AND His PROBLEMS .... 87
xvii
The Sacred Wood
PAGE
BEN JONSON . . 95
PHILIP MASSINGER 112
SWINBURNE AS POET 131
BLAKE 137
DANTE 144
XVlll
THE SACRED WOOD
THE SACRED WOOD
The Perfect Critic *> o o
"Eriger en lois ses impressions personnelles, c'est le grand
effort d'un homme s'il est sincere. " Lettres & FAmazonc.
/COLERIDGE was perhaps the greatest of English
V^/ critics, and in a sense the last. After
Coleridge we have Matthew Arnold; but Arnold
I think it will be conceded was rather a propa-
gandist for criticism than a critic, a popularizer rather
than a creator of ideas. So long as this island
remains an island (and we are no nearer the Con-
tinent than were Arnold's contemporaries) the work
of Arnold will be important ; it is still a bridge across
the Channel, and it will always have been good sense.
Since Arnold's attempt to correct his countrymen,
English criticism has followed two directions. When
a distinguished critic observed recently, in a news-
paper article, that " poetry is the most highly organ-
ized form of intellectual activity," we were conscious
that we were reading neither Coleridge nor Arnold.
Not only have the words " organized" and "activity,"
occurring together in this phrase, that familiar vague
suggestion of the scientific vocabulary which is
characteristic of modern writing, but one asked
A I
The Sacred Wood
questions which Coleridge and Arnold would not
have permitted one to ask. How is it, for in-
stance, that poetry is more " highly organized " than
astronomy, physics, or pure mathematics, which we
imagine to be, in relation to the scientist who prac-
tises them, " intellectual activity " of a pretty highly
organized type ? " Mere strings of words," our critic
continues with felicity and truth, " flung like dabs of
paint across a blank canvas, may awaken surprise . . .
but have no significance whatever in the history of
literature." The phrases by which Arnold is best
known may be inadequate, they may assemble more
doubts than they dispel, but they usually have some
meaning. And if a phrase like "the most highly
organized form of intellectual activity " is the highest
organization of thought of which contemporary criti-
cism, in a distinguished representative, is capable,
then, we conclude, modern criticism is degenerate.
The verbal disease above noticed may be reserved
for diagnosis by and by. It is not a disease from
which Mr. Arthur Symons (for the quotation was, of
course, not from Mr. Symons) notably suffers. Mr.
Symons represents the other tendency ; he is a repre-
sentative of what is always called " aesthetic criticism "
or " impressionistic criticism." And it is this form of
criticism which I propose to examine at once. Mr.
Symons, the critical successor of Pater, and partly of
Swinburne (I fancy that the phrase " sick or sorry " is
the common property of all three), is the " impression-
istic critic." He, if anyone, would be said to expose
a sensitive and cultivated mind cultivated, that is,
by the accumulation of a considerable variety of im-
pressions from all the arts and several languages
2
The Perfect Critic
before an " object " ; and his criticism, if anyone's,
would be said to exhibit to us, like the plate, the
faithful record of the impressions, more numerous or
more refined than our own, upon a mind more sensi-
tive than our own. A record, we observe, which is
also an interpretation, a translation ; for it must itself
impose impressions upon us, and these impressions
are as much created as transmitted by the criticism.
I do not say at once that this is Mr. Symons ; but it
is the " impressionistic " critic, and the impressionistic
critic is supposed to be Mr. Symons.
At hand is a volume which we may test. 1 Ten of
these thirteen essays deal with single plays of
Shakespeare, and it is therefore fair to take one
of these ten as a specimen of the book :
Antony and Cleopatra is the most wonderful, I
think, of all Shakespeare's plays . . .
and Mr. Symons reflects that Cleopatra is the most
wonderful of all women :
The queen who ends the dynasty of the Ptolemies
has been the star of poets, a malign star shedding
baleful light, from Horace and Propertius down to
Victor Hugo ; and it is not to poets only . . .
What, we ask, is this for? as a page on Cleopatra,
and on her possible origin in the dark lady of the
Sonnets, unfolds itself. And we rind, gradually, that
this is not an essay on a work of art or a work of
intellect ; but that Mr. Symons is living through the
play as one might live it through in the theatre;
recounting, commenting :
In her last days Cleopatra touches a certain eleva-
1 Studies in Elizabethan Drama. By Arthur Symons.
3
The Sacred Wood
tion . . . she would die a thousand times, rather
than live to be a mockery and a scorn in men's
mouths . . . she is a woman to the last ... so
she dies . . . the play ends with a touch of grave
pity . . .
Presented in this rather unfair way, torn apart like
the leaves of anlartichoke, the impressions of Mr.
Symons come to resemble a common type of popular
literary lecture, in which the stories of plays or novels
are retold, the motives of the characters set forth, and
the work of art therefore made easier for the beginner.
But this is not Mr. Symons' reason for writing. The
reason why we find a similarity between his essay and
this form of education is that Antony and Cleopatra is
a play with which we are pretty well acquainted,
and of which we have, therefore, our own impressions.
We can please ourselves with our own impressions of
the characters and their emotions; and we do not
find the impressions of another person, however
sensitive, very significant. But if we can recall the
time when we were ignorant of the French sym-
bolists, and met with The Symbolist Movement in
Literature, we remember that book as an introduc-
tion to wholly new feelings, as a revelation. After we
have read Verlaine and Laforgue and Rimbaud and
return to Mr. Symons' book, we may find that our
own impressions dissent from his. The book has not,
perhaps, a permanent value for the one reader, but it
has led to results of permanent importance for him.
The question is not whether Mr. Symons' impressions
are " true " or " false." So far as you can isolate the
" impression," the pure feeling, it is, of course, neither
true nor false. The point is that you never rest at
4
The Perfect Critic
the pure feeling ; you react in one of two ways, or,
as I believe Mr. Symons does, in a mixture of the two
ways. The moment you try to put the impressions
into words, you either begin to analyse and construct,
to " e*riger en lois," or you begin to create something
else. It is significant that Swinburne, by whose
poetry Mr. Symons may at one time have been
influenced, is one man in his poetry and a different
man in his criticism ; to this extent and in this
respect only, that he is satisfying a different impulse ;
he is criticizing, expounding, arranging. You may say
this is not the criticism of a critic, that it is emotional,
not intellectual though of this there are two opinions,
but it is in the direction of analysis and construction,
a beginning to " riger en lois," and not in the direc-
tion of creation. So I infer that Swinburne found an
adequate outlet for the creative impulse in his poetry ;
and none of it was forced back and out through his
critical prose. The style of the latter is essentially
a prose style ; and Mr. Symons' prose is much more
like Swinburne's poetry than it is like his prose.
I imagine though here one's thought is moving in
almost complete darkness that Mr. Symons is far
more disturbed, far more profoundly affected, by his
reading than was Swinburne, who responded rather
by a violent and immediate and comprehensive
burst of admiration which may have left him internally
unchanged. The disturbance in Mr. Symons is
almost, but not quite, to the point of creating; the
reading sometimes fecundates his emotions to pro-
duce something new which is not criticism, but is not
the expulsion, the ejection, the birth of creativeness.
The type is not uncommon, although Mr. Symons
5
The Sacred Wood
is far superior to most of the type. Some writers are
essentially of the type that reacts in excess of the
stimulus, making something new out of the impres-
sions, but suffer from a defect of vitality or an
obscure obstruction which prevents nature from
taking its course. Their sensibility alters the object,
but never transforms it. Their reaction is that of the
ordinary emotional person developed to an exceptional
degree. For this ordinary emotional person, ex-
periencing a work of art, has a mixed critical and
creative reaction. It is made up of comment and
opinion, and also new emotions which are vaguely
applied to his own life. The sentimental person, in
whom a work of art arouses all sorts of emotions
which have nothing to do with that work of art
whatever, but are accidents of personal association,
is an incomplete artist. For in an artist these sug-
gestions made by a work of art, which are purely
personal, become fused with a multitude of other
suggestions from multitudinous experience, and
result in the production of a new object which is
no longer purely personal, because it is a work of
art itself.
It would be rash to speculate, and is perhaps
impossible to determine, what is unfulfilled in Mr.
Symons' charming verse that overflows into his
critical prose. Certainly we may say that in
Swinburne's verse the circuit of impression and
expression is complete ; and Swinburne was therefore
able, in his criticism, to be more a critic than Mr.
Symons. This gives us an intimation why the artist
is each within his own limitations oftenest to be
depended upon as a critic; his criticism will be
6
The Perfect Critic
criticism, and not the satisfaction of a suppressed
creative wish which, in most other persons, is apt to
interfere fatally.
Before considering what the proper critical reaction
of artistic sensibility is, how far criticism is " feeling "
and how far " thought," and what sort of " thought "
is permitted, it may be instructive to prod a little
into that other temperament, so different from Mr.
Symons', which issues in generalities such as that
quoted near the beginning of this article.
II
"L'ecrivain de style abstrait est presque toujours un senti-
mental, du moins un sensitif. L'ecriyain artiste n'est presque
jamais un sentimental, et tres rarement un sensitif." Le
Probteme du Style.
The statement already quoted, that " poetry is the
most highly organized form of intellectual activity,"
may be taken as a specimen of the abstract style in
criticism. The confused distinction which exists
in most heads between "abstract" and "concrete"
is due not so much to a manifest fact of the existence
of two types of mind, an abstract and a concrete, as
to the existence of another type of mind, the verbal,
or philosophic. I, of course, do not imply any
general condemnation of philosophy; I am, for the
moment, using the word " philosophic " to cover the
unscientific ingredients of philosophy ; to cover, in
fact, the greater part of the philosophic output of
the last hundred years. There are two ways in which
a word may be " abstract." It may have (the word
"activity," for example) a meaning which cannot
7
The Sacred Wood
be grasped by appeal to any of the senses ; its appre-
hension may require a deliberate suppression of
analogies of visual or muscular experience, which is
none the less an effort of imagination. " Activity "
will mean for the trained scientist, if he employ the
term, either nothing at all or something still more
exact than anything it suggests to us. If we are
allowed to accept certain remarks of Pascal and Mr.
Bertrand Russell about mathematics, we believe that
the mathematician deals with objects if he will
permit us to call them objects which directly affect
his sensibility. And during a good part of history
the philosopher endeavoured to deal with objects
which he believed to be of the same exactness as
the mathematician's. Finally Hegel arrived, and if
not perhaps the first, he was certainly the most
prodigious exponent of emotional systematization,
dealing with his emotions as if they were definite
objects which had aroused those emotions. His
followers have as a rule taken for granted that words
have definite meanings, overlooking the tendency of
words to become indefinite emotions. (No one who
had not witnessed the event could imagine the con-
viction in the tone of Professor Eucken as he pounded
the table and exclaimed Was ist Geist? Geist ist. . .)
If verbalism were confined to professional philo-
sophers, no harm would be done. But their cor-
ruption has extended very far. Compare a mediaeval
theologian or mystic, compare a seventeenth-century
preacher, with any " liberal " sermon since Schleier-
macher, and you will observe that words have
changed their meanings. What they have lost is
definite, and what they have gained is indefinite.
8
The Perfect Critic
The vast accumulations of knowledge -or at least
of information deposited by the nineteenth century
have been responsible for an equally vast ignorance.
When there is so much to be known, when there are
so many fields of knowledge in which the same words
are used with different meanings, when every one
knows a little about a great many things, it becomes
increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he
knows what he is talking about or not. And when
we do not know, or when we do not know enough,
we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts.
The sentence so frequently quoted in this essay will
serve for an example of this process as well as any,
and may be profitably contrasted with the opening
phrases of the Posterior Analytics. Not only all
knowledge, but all feeling, is in perception. The
inventor of poetry as the most highly organized form
of intellectual activity was not engaged in perceiving
when he composed this definition ; he had nothing
to be aware of except his own emotion about
"poetry." He was, in fact, absorbed in a very
different "activity" not only from that of Mr.
Symons, but from that of Aristotle.
Aristotle is a person who has suffered from the
adherence of persons who must be regarded less as
his disciples than as his sectaries. One must be
firmly distrustful of accepting Aristotle in a canonical
spirit ; this is to lose the whole living force of him.
He was primarily a man of not only remarkable but
universal intelligence; and universal intelligence
means that he could apply his intelligence to any-
thing. The ordinary intelligence is good only for
certain classes of objects ; a brilliant man of science,
9
The Sacred Wood
if he is interested in poetry at all, may conceive
grotesque judgments: like one poet because he
reminds him of himself, or another because he
expresses emotions which he admires ; he may use
art, in fact, as the outlet for the egotism which is
suppressed in his own speciality. But Aristotle had
none of these impure desires to satisfy ; in whatever
sphere of interest, he looked solely and steadfastly at
the object ; in his short and broken treatise he pro-
vides an eternal example not of laws, or even of
method, for there is no method except to be very
intelligent, but of intelligence itself swiftly operating
the analysis of sensation to the point of principle and
definition.
It is far less Aristotle than Horace who has been
the model for criticism up to the nineteenth century.
A precept, such as Horace or Boileau gives us, is
merely an unfinished analysis. It appears as a law,
a rule, because it does not appear in its most general
form ; it is empirical. When we understand necessity,
as Spinoza knew, we are free because we assent.
The dogmatic critic, who lays down a rule, who
affirms a value, has left his labour incomplete. Such
statements may often be justifiable as a saving of
time; but in matters of great importance the critic
must not coerce, and he must not make judgments
of worse and better. He must simply elucidate : the
reader will form the correct judgment for himself.
And again, the purely " technical " critic the critic,
that is, who writes to expound some novelty or impart
some lesson to practitioners of an art can be called a
critic only in a narrow sense. He may be analysing
perceptions and the means for arousing perceptions,
IO
The Perfect Critic
but his aim is limited and is not the disinterested
exercise of intelligence. The narrowness of the aim
makes easier the detection of the merit or feebleness
of the work ; even of these writers there are very few
so that their "criticism" is of great importance
within its limits. So much suffices for Campion.
Dryden is far more disinterested ; he displays much free
intelligence; and yet even Dryden or any literary
critic of the seventeenth century is not quite a free
mind, compared, for instance, with such a mind as
Rochefoucauld's. There is always a tendency to
legislate rather than to inquire, to revise accepted
laws, even to overturn, but to reconstruct out of the
same material. And the free intelligence is that which
is wholly devoted to inquiry.
Coleridge, again, whose natural abilities, and some
of whose performances, are probably more remarkable
than those of any other modern critic, cannot be
estimated as an intelligence completely free. The
nature of the restraint in his case is quite different
from that which limited the seventeenth-century
critics, and is much more personal. Coleridge's
metaphysical interest was quite genuine, and was,
like most metaphysical interest, an affair of his
emotions. But a literary critic should have no
emotions except those immediately provoked by a
work of art and these (as I have already hinted) are,
when valid, perhaps not to be called emotions at all.
Coleridge is apt to take leave of the data of criticism,
and arouse the suspicion that he has been diverted
into a metaphysical hare-and-hounds. His end does
not always appear to be the return to the work of art
with improved perception and intensified, because
II
The Sacred Wood
more conscious, enjoyment; his centre of interest
changes, his feelings are impure. In the derogatory
sense he is more " philosophic " than Aristotle. For
everything that Aristotle says illuminates the litera-
ture which is the occasion for saying it ; but Coleridge
only now and then. It is one more instance of the
pernicious effect of emotion.
Aristotle had what is called the scientific mind
a mind which, as it is rarely found among scientists
except in fragments, might better be called the in-
telligent mind. For there is no other intelligence
than this, and so far as artists and men of letters are
intelligent (we may doubt whether the level of intelli-
gence among men of letters is as high as among men
of science) their intelligence is of this kind. Sainte-
Beuve was a physiologist by training ; but it is prob-
able that his mind, like that of the ordinary scientific
specialist, was limited in its interest, and that this was
not, primarily, an interest in art. If he was a critic,
there is no doubt that he was a very good one ; but
we may conclude that he earned some other name.
Of all modern critics, perhaps Remy de Gourmont
had most of the general intelligence of Aristotle.
An amateur, though an excessively able amateur,
in physiology, he combined to a remarkable degree
sensitiveness, erudition, sense of fact and sense of
history, and generalizing power.
We assume the gift of a superior sensibility. And
for sensibility wide and profound reading does not
mean merely a more extended pasture. There is not
merely an increase of understanding, leaving the
original acute impression unchanged. The new im-
pressions modify the impressions received from the
12
The Perfect Critic
objects already known. An impression needs to be
constantly refreshed by new impressions in order that
it may persist at all ; it needs to take its place in a
system of impressions. And this system tends to
become articulate in a generalized statement of
literary beauty.
There are, for instance, many scattered lines and
tercets in the Divine Comedy which are capable of
transporting even a quite uninitiated reader, just suffi-
ciently acquainted with the roots of the language to
decipher the meaning, to an impression of overpower-
ing beauty. This impression may be so deep that no
subsequent study and understanding will intensify it.
But at this point the impression is emotional; the
reader in the ignorance which we postulate is unable
to distinguish the poetry from an emotional state
aroused in himself by the poetry, a state which may
be merely an indulgence of his own emotions. The
poetry may be an accidental stimulus. The end of
the enjoyment of poetry is a pure contemplation from
which all the accidents of personal emotion are re-
moved ; thus we aim to see the object as it really is and
find a meaning for the words of Arnold. And without
a labour which is largely a labour of the intelligence,
we are unable to attain that stage of vision amor
intellectualis Dei.
Such considerations, cast in this general form, may
appear commonplaces. But I believe that it is always
opportune to call attention to the torpid superstition
that appreciation is one thing, and "intellectual"
criticism something else. Appreciation in popular
psychology is one faculty, and criticism another, an
arid cleverness building theoretical scaffolds upon
13
The Sacred Wood
one's own perceptions or those of others. On the
contrary, the true generalization is not something
superposed upon an accumulation of perceptions ; the
perceptions do not, in a really appreciative mind,
accumulate as a mass, but form themselves as a
structure ; and criticism is the statement in language
of this structure; it is a development of sensibility.
The bad criticism, on the other hand, is that which is
nothing but an expression of emotion. And emotional
people such as stockbrokers, politicians, men of
science and a few people who pride themselves on
being unemotional detest or applaud great writers
such as Spinoza or Stendhal because of their " frigidity."
The writer of the present essay once committed
himself to the statement that "The poetic critic is
criticizing poetry in order to create poetry." He is
now inclined to believe that the " historical " and the
" philosophical " critics had better be called historians
and philosophers quite simply. As for the rest, there
are merely various degrees of intelligence. It is fatuous
to say that criticism is for the sake of " creation " or
creation for the sake of criticism. It is also fatuous
to assume that there are ages of criticism and ages of
creativeness, as if by plunging ourselves into intel-
lectual darkness we were in better hope of rinding
spiritual light. The two directions of sensibility are
complementary ; and as sensibility is rare, unpopular,
and desirable, it is to be expected that the critic and
the creative artist should frequently be the same
person.
Imperfect Critics o *> *> o
SWINBURNE AS CRITIC
THREE conclusions at least issue from the
perusal of Swinburne's critical essays : Swinburne
had mastered his material, was more inward with the
Tudor-Stuart dramatists than any man of pure
letters before or since; he is a more reliable guide
to them than Hazlitt, Coleridge, or Lamb; and his
perception of relative values is almost always correct.
Against these merits we may oppose two objections :
the style is the prose style of Swinburne, and the
content is not, in an exact sense, criticism. The
faults of style are, of course, personal ; the tumultuous
outcry of adjectives, the headstrong rush of undis-
ciplined sentences, are the index to the impatience
and perhaps laziness of a disorderly mind. But the
style has one positive merit: it allows us to know
that Swinburne was writing not to establish a critical
reputation, not to instruct a docile public, but as a
poet his notes upon poets whom he admired. And
whatever our opinion of Swinburne's verse, the notes
upon poets by a poet of Swinburne's dimensions
must be read with attention and respect.
In saying that Swinburne's essays have the value of
notes of an important poet upon important poets, we
must place a check upon our expectancy. He read
everything, and he read with the single interest in
15
The Sacred Wood
finding literature. The critics of the romantic period
were pioneers, and exhibit the fallibility of discoverers.
The selections of Lamb are a successful effort of
good taste, but anyone who has referred to them
after a thorough reading of any of the poets included
must have found that some of the best passages
which must literally have stared Lamb in the face
are omitted, while sometimes others of less value
are included. Hazlitt, who committed himself to
the judgment that the Mat<Ts Tragedy is one of
the poorest of Beaumont and Fletcher's plays, has
no connected message to deliver. Coleridge's re-
marks too few and scattered have permanent
truth ; but on some of the greatest names he passes
no remark, and of some of the best plays was perhaps
ignorant or ill-informed. But compared with Swin-
burne, Coleridge writes much more as a poet might
be expected to write about poets. Of Massinger's
verse Swinburne says :
It is more serviceable, more businesslike, more
eloquently practical, and more rhetorically effusive
but never effusive beyond the bounds of effective
rhetoric than the style of any Shakespearean or of
any Jonsonian dramatist.
It is impossible to tell whether Webster would
have found the style of Massinger more " serviceable "
than his own for the last act of the White Devil^
and indeed difficult to decide what "serviceable"
here means; but it is quite clear what Coleridge
means when he says that Massinger's style
is much more easily constructed [than Shakespeare's],
and may be more successfully adopted by writers in
the present day.
16
Imperfect Critics
Coleridge is writing as a professional with his eye on
the technique. I do not know from what writing
of Coleridge Swinburne draws the assertion that
" Massinger often deals in exaggerated passion," but
in the essay from which Swinburne quotes elsewhere
Coleridge merely speaks of the " unnaturally irrational
passions," a phrase much more defensible. Upon the
whole, the two poets are in harmony upon the subject
of Massinger ; and although Coleridge has said more
in five pages, and said it more clearly, than Swinburne
in thirty-nine, the essay of Swinburne is by no means
otiose : it is more stimulating than Coleridge's, and
the stimulation is never misleading. With all his
superlatives, his judgment, if carefully scrutinized,
appears temperate and just.
With all his justness of judgment, however, Swin-
burne is an appreciator and not a critic. In the
whole range of literature covered, Swinburne makes
hardly more than two judgments which can be
reversed or even questioned: one, that Lyly is
insignificant as a dramatist, and the other, that
Shirley was probably unaffected by Webster. The
Cardinal is not a cast of the Duchess of Malfi,
certainly ; but when Shirley wrote
the mist is risen, and there's none
To steer my wandering bark. (Dies.)
he was probably affected by
My soul, like to a ship in a black storm,
Is driven, I know not whither.
Swinburne's judgment is generally sound, his taste
sensitive and discriminating. And we cannot say
that his thinking is faulty or perverse up to the
B 17
The Sacred Wood
point at which it is thinking. But Swinburne stops
thinking just at the moment when we are most
zealous to go on. And this arrest, while it does not
vitiate his work, makes it an introduction rather than
a statement.
We are aware, after the Contemporaries of
Shakespeare and the Age of Shakespeare and the
books on Shakespeare and Jonson, that there is
something unsatisfactory in the way in which Swin-
burne was interested in these people; we suspect
that his interest was never articulately formulated in
his mind or consciously directed to any purpose.
He makes his way, or loses it, between two paths of
definite direction. He might as a poet have con-
centrated his attention upon the technical problems
solved or tackled by these men ; he might have
traced for us the development of blank verse from
Sackville to the mature Shakespeare, and its de-
generation from Shakespeare to Milton. Or he might
have studied through the literature to the mind of
that century ; he might, by dissection and analysis,
have helped us to some insight into the feeling and
thought which we seem to have left so far away. In
either case, you would have had at least the excite-
ment of following the movements of an important
mind groping towards important conclusions. As it
is, there are to be no conclusions, except that
Elizabethan literature is very great, and that you can
have pleasure and even ecstasy from it, because a
sensitive poetic talent has had the experience. One
is in risk of becoming fatigued by a hubbub that does
not march ; the drum is beaten, but the procession
does not advance.
18
Imperfect Critics
I for example, Swinburne's interest was in poetry,
why devote an essay to Brome ? " The opening scene
of the Sparagus Garden, says Swinburne, "is as
happily humorous and as vividly natural as that of
any more famous comedy." The scene is both
humorous and natural. Brome deserves to be more
read than he is, and first of all to be more accessible
than he is. But Swinburne ought to suggest or imply
(I do not say impose) a reason for reading the
Sparagus Garden or the Antipodes, more sufficient
than any he has provided. No doubt such reason
could be found.
When it is a matter of pronouncing judgment be-
tween two poets, Swinburne is almost unerring. He
is certainly right in putting Webster above Tourneur,
Tourneur above Ford, and Ford above Shirley. He
weighs accurately the good and evil in Fletcher : he
perceives the essential theatricality, but his com-
parison of the Faithful Shepherdess with Comus
is a judgment no word of which can be improved
upon :
The difference between this poem [i.e. the Faith-
ful Shepherdess] and Milton's exquisitely imitative
Comus is the difference between a rose with a
leaf or two faded or falling, but still fragrant and
radiant, and the faultless but scentless reproduction
of a rose in academic wax for the admiration and
imitation of such craftsmen as must confine their
ambition to the laurels of a college or the plaudits of
a school.
In the longest and most important essay in
the Contemporaries of Shakespeare, the essay on
Chapman, there are many such sentences of sound
19
The Sacred Wood
judgment forcibly expressed. The essay is the best we
have on that great poet. It communicates the sense
of dignity and mass which we receive from Chapman.
But it also illustrates Swinburne's infirmities. Swin-
burne was not tormented by the restless desire to
penetrate to the heart and marrow of a poet, any
more than he was tormented by the desire to render
the finest shades of difference and resemblance be-
tween several poets. Chapman is a difficult author,
as Swinburne says; he is far more difficult than
Jonson, to whom he bears only a superficial likeness.
He is difficult beyond his obscurity. He is difficult
partly through his possession of a quality comparatively
deficient in Jonson, but which was nevertheless a
quality of the age. It is strange that Swinburne
should have hinted at a similarity to Jonson and not
mentioned a far more striking affinity of Chapman's
that is, Donne. The man who wrote
Guise, O my lord, how shall I cast from me
The bands and coverts hindering me from thee ?
The garment or the cover of the mind
The humane soul is ; of the soul, the spirit
The proper robe is ; of the spirit, the blood ;
And of the blood, the body is the shroud :
and
Nothing is made of nought, of all things made,
Their abstract being a dream but of 'a shade,
is unquestionably kin to Donne. The quality in
question is not peculiar to Donne and Chapman.
In common with the greatest Marlowe, Webster,
Tourneur, and Shakespeare they had a quality of
sensuous thought, or of thinking through the senses,
or of the senses thinking, of which the exact formula
20
Imperfect Critics
remains to be defined. If you look for it in Shelley
or Beddoes, both of whom in very different ways
recaptured something of the Elizabethan inspiration,
you will not find it, though you may find other
qualities instead. There is a trace of it only in
Keats, and, derived from a different source, in
Rossetti. You will not find it in the Duke of
Gandia. Swinburne's essay would have been all
the better if he had applied himself to the solution
of problems like this.
He did not apply himself to this sort of problem
because this was not the sort of problem that interested
him. The author of Swinburne's critical essays is
also the author of Swinburne's verse : if you hold the
opinion that Swinburne was a very great poet, you
can hardly deny him the title of a great critic. There
is the same curious mixture of qualities to produce
Swinburne's own effect, resulting in the same blur,
which only the vigour of the colours fixes. His great
merit as a critic is really one which, like many signal
virtues, can be stated so simply as to appear flat.
It is that he was sufficiently interested in his subject-
matter and knew quite enough about it ; and this is
a rare combination in English criticism. Our critics
are often interested in extracting something from their
subject which is not fairly in it. And it is because
this elementary virtue is so rare that Swinburne must
take a very respectable place as a critic. Critics
are often interested but not quite in the nominal
subject, often in something a little beside the point ;
they are often learned but not quite to the point
either. (Swinburne knew some of the plays almost
by heart) Can this particular virtue at which we
21
The Sacred Wood
have glanced be attributed to Walter Pater? or to
Professor Bradley ? or to Swinburne's editor ?
A ROMANTIC ARISTOCRAT
It is impossible to overlook the merits of scholar-
ship and criticism exhibited by George Wyndham's
posthumous book, and it is impossible to deal with
the book purely on its merits of scholarship and
criticism. To attempt to do so would in the first
place be unfair, as the book is a posthumous work,
and posthumous books demand some personal atten-
tion to their writers. This book is a collection of
essays and addresses, arranged in their present order
by Mr. Whibley ; they were intended by their author
to be remodelled into a volume on "romantic
literature " ; they move from an ingenious search for
the date of the beginning of Romanticism, through
the French and English Renaissance, to Sir Walter
Scott. In the second place, these essays represent
the literary work of a man who gained his chief
distinction in political life. In the third place, this
man stands for a type, an English type. The type is
interesting and will probably become extinct. It is
natural, therefore, that our primary interest in the
essays should be an interest in George Wyndham.
Mr. Charles Whibley, in an introduction the tone
of which is well suited to the matter, has several
sentences which throw light on Wyndham's person-
ality. What issues with surprising clearness from Mr.
Whibley's sketch is the unity of Wyndham's mind,
the identity of his mind as it engaged in apparently
unrelated occupations. Wyndham left Eton for the
22
Imperfect Critics
army; in barracks he "taught himself Italian, and
rilled his leisure with the reading of history and
poetry." After this Coldstream culture there was a
campaign in Egypt; later, service in South Africa
accompanied by a copy of Virgil. There was a career
in the Commons, a conspicuous career as Irish
Secretary. Finally, there was a career as a landowner
2400 acres. And throughout these careers George
Wyndham went on not only accumulating books but
reading them, and occasionally writing about them.
He was a man of character, a man of energy. Mr.
Whibley is quite credible when he says :
Literature was for him no parergon, no mere way
of escape from politics. If he was an amateur in
feeling, he was a craftsman in execution ;
and, more significantly,
With the same zest that he read and discoursed
upon A Winters Tale or Troilus and Cressida^ he
rode to hounds, or threw himself with a kind of fury
into a "point to point," or made a speech at the
hustings, or sat late in the night talking with a friend.
From these and other sentences we chart the mind of
George Wyndham, and the key to its topography is
the fact that his literature and his politics and his
country life are one and the same thing. They are
not in separate compartments, they are one career.
Together they made up his world : literature, politics,
riding to hounds. In the real world these things have
nothing to do with each other. But we cannot
believe that George Wyndham lived in the real world.
And this is implied in Mr. Whibley's remark that :
George Wyndham was by character and training a
23
The Sacred Wood
romantic. He looked with wonder upon the world
as upon a fairyland.
Here is the manifestation of type.
There must probably be conceded to history a few
" many-sided " men. Perhaps Leonardo da Vinci was
such. George Wyndham was not a man on the scale
of Leonardo, and his writings give a very different
effect from Leonardo's notebooks. Leonardo turned
to art or science, and each was what it was and not
another thing. But Leonardo was Leonardo : he had
no father to speak of, he was hardly a citizen, and he
had no stake in the community. He lived in no
fairyland, but his mind went out and became a part
of things. George Wyndham was Gentry. He was
chivalrous, the world was an adventure of himself. It
is characteristic that on embarking as a subaltern for
Egypt he wrote enthusiastically :
I do not suppose that any expedition since the days
of Roman governors of provinces has started with
such magnificence; we might have been Antony
going to Egypt in a purple-sailed galley.
This is precisely the spirit which animates his
appreciation of the Elizabethans and of Walter Scott ;
which guides him toward Hakluyt and North.
Wyndham was enthusiastic, he was a Romantic, he
was an Imperialist, and he was quite naturally a
literary pupil of W. E. Henley. Wyndham was a
scholar, but his scholarship is incidental; he was a
good critic, within the range allowed him by his
enthusiasms; but it is neither as Scholar nor as
Critic that we can criticize him. We can criticize
his writings only as the expression of this peculiar
24
Imperfect Critics
English type, the aristocrat, the Imperialist, the
Romantic, riding to hounds across his prose, looking
with wonder upon the world as upon a fairyland.
Because he belongs to this type, Wyndham wrote
enthusiastically and well about North's Plutarch.
The romance of the ancient world becomes more
romantic in the idiomatic prose of North ; the heroes
are not merely Greek and Roman heroes, but
Elizabethan heroes as well; the romantic fusion
allured Wyndham. The charms of North could not
be expounded more delightfully, more seductively,
with more gusto, than they are in Wyndham's essay.
He appreciates the battles, the torchlight, the " dead
sound" of drums, the white, worn face of Cicero in
his flight peering from his litter ; he appreciates the
sharp brusque phrase of North : " he roundly trussed
them up and hung them by their necks." And
Wyndham is learned. Here, as in his essays on the
Ple*iade and Shakespeare, the man has read every-
thing, with a labour that only whets his enjoyment of
the best. There are two [defects : a lack of balance
and a lack of critical profundity. The lack of balance
peeps through Wyndham's condemnation of an
obviously inferior translation of Plutarch: "He
dedicated the superfluity of his leisure to enjoyment,
and used his Lamia," says the bad translator. North :
"he took pleasure of Lamia." Wyndham makes a
set upon the bad translator. But he forgets that
"dedicated the superfluity of his leisure" is such a
phrase as Gibbon would have warmed to life and wit,
and that a history, in the modern sense, could not be
written in the style of North. Wyndham forgets, in
short, that it is not, in the end, periods and traditions
25
The Sacred Wood
but individual men who write great prose. For
Wyndham is himself a period and a tradition.
The lack of balance is to be suspected elsewhere.
Wyndham likes the best, but he likes a good deal.
There is no conclusive evidence that he realized all the
difference, the gulf of difference between lines like :
En 1'an trentiesme de mon aage
Que toutes mes hontes j'ay beues ;
and even the very best of Ronsard or Bellay, such as :
Le temps s'en va, le temps s'en va, madame ;
Las ! le temps, non, mais nous nous en aliens
Et tost serons estendus sous la lame.
We should not gather from Wyndham's essay that the
Phoenix and Turtle is a great poem, far finer than
Venus and Adonis ; but what he says about
Venus and Adonis is worth reading, for Wyndham
is very sharp in perceiving the neglected beauties of
the second-rate. There is nothing to show the gulf
of difference between Shakespeare's sonnets and
those of any other Elizabethan. Wyndham overrates
Sidney, and in his references to Elizabethan writings
on the theory of poetry omits mention of the essay
by Campion, an abler and more daring though less
common-sense study than Daniel's. He speaks a
few words for Drayton, but has not noticed that the
only good lines (with the exception of one sonnet
which may be an accident) in Drayton's dreary
sequence of " Ideas " occur when Drayton drops his
costume for a moment and talks in terms of actuality :
Lastly, mine eyes amazedly have seen
Essex' great fall ; Tyrone his peace to gain ;
The quiet end of that long-living queen ;
The king's fair entry, and our peace with Spain.
26
Imperfect Critics
More important than the lack of balance is the
lack of critical analysis. Wyndham had, as was
indicated, a gusto for the Elizabethans. His essay
on the Poems of Shakespeare contains an extra-
ordinary amount of information. There is some
interesting gossip about Mary Fitton and a good
anecdote of Sir William Knollys. But Wyndham
misses what is the cardinal point in criticizing the
Elizabethans: we cannot grasp them, understand
them, without some understanding of the pathology
of rhetoric. Rhetoric, a particular form of rhetoric,
was endemic, it pervaded the whole organism ; the
healthy as well as the morbid tissues were built up on
it. We cannot grapple with even the simplest and
most conversational lines in Tudor and early Stuart
drama without having diagnosed the rhetoric in the
sixteenth and seventeenth-century mind. Even
when we come across lines like :
There's a plumber laying pipes in my guts, it scalds,
we must not allow ourselves to forget the rhetorical
basis any more than when we read :
Come, let us march against the powers of heaven
And set black streamers in the firmament
To signify the slaughter of the gods.
An understanding of Elizabethan rhetoric is as
essential to the appreciation of Elizabethan literature
as an understanding of Victorian sentiment is
essential to the appreciation of Victorian literature
and of George Wyndham.
Wyndham was a Romantic ; the only cure for
Romanticism is to analyse it. What is permanent
and good in Romanticism is curiosity
27
The Sacred Wood
... 1' ardore
Ch J i* ebbe a divenir del mondo esperto
E degli vizii umani e del valore
a curiosity which recognizes that any life, if accurately
and profoundly penetrated, is interesting and always
strange. Romanticism is a short cut to the strange-
ness without the reality, and it leads its disciples
only back upon themselves. George Wyndham had
curiosity, but he employed it romantically, not to
penetrate the real world, but to complete the varied
features of the world he made for himself. It would
be of interest to divagate from literature to politics
and inquire to what extent Romanticism is incorporate
in Imperialism ; to inquire to what extent Romanticism
has possessed the imagination of Imperialists, and to
what extent it was made use of by Disraeli. But
this is quite another matter : there may be a good
deal to be said for Romanticism in life, there is no
place for it in letters. Not that we need conclude
that a man of George Wyndham's antecedents and
traditions must inevitably be a Romanticist writer.
But this is the case when such a man plants himself
firmly in his awareness of caste, when he says " The
gentry must not abdicate." In politics this may be
an admirable formula. It will not do in literature.
The Arts insist that a man shall dispose of all that
he has, even of his family tree, and follow art alone.
For they require that a man be not a member of a
family or of a caste or of a party or of a coterie, but
simply and solely himself. A man like Wyndham
brings several virtues into literature. But there is
only one man better and more uncommon than the
patrician, and that is the Individual.
28
Imperfect Critics
THE LOCAL FLAVOUR
In a world which is chiefly occupied with the task
of keeping up to date with itself, it is a satisfaction
to know that there is at least one man who has not
only read but enjoyed, and not only enjoyed but read,
such authors as Petronius and Herondas. That is
Mr. Charles Whibley, and there are two statements
to make about him : that he is not a critic, and that
he is something which is almost as rare, if not quite
as precious. He has apparently read and enjoyed
a great deal of English literature, and the part of it
that he has most enjoyed is the literature of the great
ages, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We
may opine that Mr. Whibley has not uttered a single
important original judgment upon any of this literature.
On the other hand, how many have done so ? Mr.
Whibley is not a critic of men or of books ; but he
convinces us that if we read the books that he has
read we should find them as delightful as he has
found them ; and if we read them we can form our
own opinions. And if he has not the balance of the
critic, he has some other equipoise of his own. It is
partly that his tastes are not puritanical, that he can
talk about Restoration dramatists and others -without
apologizing for their "indecency"; it is partly his
sense for the best local and temporal flavours ; it is
partly his healthy appetite.
A combination of non-critical, rather than uncritical,
qualities made Mr. Whibley the most appropriate
person in the world for the work by which he is best
known. We should be more grateful for the " Tudor
Translations Series " if we could find copies to be
29
The Sacred Wood
bought, and if we could afford to buy them when we
found them. But that is not Mr. Whibley's fault.
The introductions which he wrote for some of the
translators are all that such introductions should be.
His Urquhart's Rabelais contains all the irrelevant
information about that writer which is what is wanted
to stimulate a taste for him. After reading the intro-
duction, to read Urquhart was the only pleasure in
life. And therefore, in a country destitute of living
criticism, Mr. Whibley is a useful person: for the
first thing is that English literature should be read
at all. The few people who talk intelligently about
Stendhal and Flaubert and James know this ; but the
larger number of people who skim the conversation
of the former do not know enough of English literature
to be even insular. There are two ways in which
a writer may lead us to profit by the work of dead
writers. One is by isolating the essential, by point-
ing out the most intense in various kinds and
separating it from the accidents of environment.
This method is helpful only to the more intelligent
people, who are capable of a unique enjoyment of
perfect expression, and it concentrates on the very best
in any art. The other method, that of Mr. Whibley,
is to communicate a taste for the period and for the
best of the oeriod so far as it is of that period. That
is not very easy either. For a pure journalist will not
know any period well enough ; a pure dilettante will
know it too egotistically, as a fashion of his own.
Mr. Whibley is really interested; and he has
escaped, without any programme of revolt, from
the present century into those of Tudor and
Stuart. He escapes, and perhaps leads others,
30
Imperfect Critics
by virtue of a taste which is not exactly a literary
taste.
The "Tudor Translations" form part of a pro-
nounced taste. Some are better written than others.
There is, of course, a world of difference of which
Mr. Whibley is perhaps unaware between even Florio
and his original. The French of Montaigne is a
mature language, and the English of Florio's living
translation is not. Montaigne could be translated
into the English of his time, but a similar work could
not have been written in it. But as the English
language matured it lost something that Florio and
all his inferior colleagues had, and that they had in
common with the language of Montaigne. It was not
only the language, but the time. The prose of that
age had life, a life to which later ages could not add,
from which they could only take away. You find the
same life, the same abundance, in Montaigne and
Brantome, the alteration in Rochefoucauld as in
Hobbes, the desiccation in the classic prose of both
languages, in Voltaire and in Gibbon. Only, the
French was originally richer and more mature already
in Joinville and Commines and we have no prose
to compare with Montaigne and Rabelais. If Mr.
Whibley had analysed this vitality, and told us why
Holland and Underdowne, Nashe and Martin
Marprelate are still worth reading, then he could have
shown us how to recognize this quality when it, or
something like it, appears in our own lifetime. But
Mr. Whibley is not an analyst. His taste, even,
becomes less certain as he fixes it on individuals
within his period. On Surrey's blank verse he is
feeble; he does not even give Surrey the credit of
31
The Sacred Wood
having anticipated some of Tennyson's best effects.
He has no praise for Golding, quite one of the best of
the verse translators ; he apologizes for him by saying
that Ovid demands no strength or energy ! There is
strength and energy, at least, in Marlowe's Amores.
And he omits mention of Gawain Douglas, who,
though he wrote in Scots, was surely a "Tudor"
translator. Characteristically, Mr. Whibley praises
Chapman because
it gives proof of an abounding life, a quenchless
energy. There is a grandeur and spirit in Chapman's
rendering, not unworthy the original . . .
This is commonplace, and it is uncritical. And a
critic would not use so careless a phrase as " Tasso's
masterpiece." The essay on Congreve does not add
much to our understanding :
And so he set upon the boards a set of men and
women of quick brains and cynical humours, who
talked with the brilliance and rapidity wherewith the
finished swordsman fences.
We have heard of this conversation like fencing before.
And the suspicion is in our breast that Mr. Whibley
might admire George Meredith. The essay on
Ralegh gives still less. The reality of that pleasing
pirate and monopolist has escaped, and only the
national hero is left. And yet Ralegh, and Swift, and
Congreve, and the underworld of sixteenth and
seventeenth-century letters, are somehow kept alive
by what Mr. Whibley says of them.
Accordingly, Mr. Whibley does not disappear in the
jungle of journalism and false criticism ; he deserves
a "place upon the shelves" of those who care for
32
Imperfect Critics
English literature. He has the first requisite of a
critic: interest in his subject, and ability to com-
municate an interest in it. His defects are both of
intellect and feeling. He has no dissociative faculty.
There were very definite vices and definite short-
comings and immaturities in the literature he admires ;
and as he is not the person to tell us of the vices and
shortcomings, he is not the person to lay before us
the work of absolutely the finest quality. He exercises
neither of the tools of the critic : comparison and
analysis. He has not the austerity of passion which
can detect unerringly the transition from work of
eternal intensity to work that is merely beautiful, and
from work that is beautiful to work that is merely
charming. For the critic needs to be able not only
to saturate himself in the spirit and the fashion of a
time the local flavour but also to separate himself
suddenly from it in appreciation of the highest creative
work.
And he needs something else that Mr. Whibley
lacks : a creative interest, a focus upon the immediate
future. The important critic is the person who is
absorbed in the present problems of art, and who
wishes to bring the forces of the past to bear upon
the solution of these problems. If the critic consider
Congreve, for instance, he will have always at the
back of his mind the question : What has Congreve
got that is pertinent to our dramatic art ? Even if he
is solely engaged in trying to understand Congreve,
this will make all the difference: inasmuch as to
understand anything is to understand from a point of
view. Most critics have some creative interest it
may be, instead of an interest in any art, an interest
c 33
The Sacred Wood
(like Mr. Paul More's) in morals. These remarks
were introduced only to assist in giving the books of
Mr. Whibley a place, a particular but unticketed place,
neither with criticism, nor with history, nor with plain
journalism; and the trouble would not have been
taken if the books were not thought to be worth
placing.
A NOTE ON THE AMERICAN CRITIC
This gallery of critics is not intended to be in any
sense complete. But having dealt with three English
writers of what may be called critical prose, one's
mind becomes conscious of the fact that they have
something in common, and, trying to perceive more
clearly what this community is, and suspecting that
it is a national quality, one is impelled to meditate
upon the strongest contrast possible. Hence these
comments upon two American critics and one French
critic, which would not take exactly this form without
the contrast at which I have hinted.
Mr. Paul More is the author of a number of volumes
which he perhaps hopes will break the record of mass
established by the complete works of Sainte-Beuve.
The comparison with Sainte-Beuve is by no means
trivial, for Mr. More, and Professor Irving Babbitt
also, are admirers of the voluminous Frenchman.
Not only are they admirers, but their admiration is
perhaps a clue both to much of their merit and to
some of their defects. In the first place, both of these
writers have given much more attention to French
criticism, to the study of French standards of writing
and of thought, than any of the notable English critics
34
Imperfect Critics
since Arnold ; they are therefore much nearer to the
European current, although they exhibit faults which
are definitely transatlantic and which definitely keep
them out of it. The French influence is traceable in
their devotion to ideas and their interest in problems
of art and life as problems which exist and can be
handled apart from their relations to the critic's private
temperament. With Swinburne, the criticism of
Elizabethan literature has the interest of a passion, it
has the interest for us of any writing by an intellectual
man who is genuinely moved by certain poetry.
Swinburne's intelligence is not defective, it is impure.
There are few ideas in Swinburne's critical writings
which stand forth luminous with an independent life
of their own, so true that one forgets the author in
the statement. Swinburne's words must always be
referred back to Swinburne himself. And if literature
is to Swinburne merely a passion, we are tempted to
say that to George Wyndham it was a hobby, and to
Mr. Whibley almost a charming showman's show (we
are charmed by the urbanity of the showman). The
two latter have gusto, but gusto is no equivalent for
taste ; it depends too much upon the appetite and the
digestion of the feeder. And with one or two other
writers, whom I have not had occasion to discuss,
literature is not so much a collection of valuable
porcelain as an institution accepted, that is to say,
with the same gravity as the establishments of Church
and State. That is, in other words, the essentially
uncritical attitude. In all of these attitudes the
English critic is the victim of his temperament. He
may acquire great erudition, but erudition easily
becomes a hobby ; it is useless unless it enables us to
35
The Sacred Wood
see literature all round, to detach it from ourselves, to
reach a state of pure contemplation.
Now Mr. More and Mr. Babbitt have endeavoured
to establish a criticism which should be independent
of temperament. This is in itself a considerable
merit. But at this point Mr. More particularly has
been led astray, oddly enough, by his guide Sainte-
Beuve. Neither Mr. More nor Sainte-Beuve is
primarily interested in art. Of the latter M. Benda
has well observed that
on sait et c'est certainement un des grands elements
de son succes combien deludes 1'illustre critique
consacre a des auteurs dont 1'importance litte'raire est
quasi nulle (femmes, magistrals, courtisans, militaires),
mais dont les Merits lui sont une occasion de pour-
traiturer une ame; combien volontiers, pour les
maitres, il s'attache a leurs productions secondaires,
notes, brouillons, lettres intimes, plutot qu'a leurs
grandes ceuvres, souvent beaucoup moins expressives,
en effet, de leur psychologie.
Mr. More is not, like Sainte-Beuve, primarily interested
in psychology or in human beings; Mr. More is
primarily a moralist, which is a worthy and serious
thing to be. The trouble with Mr. More is that you
cannot disperse a theory or point of view of morals
over a vast number of essays on a great variety of
important figures in literature, unless you can give
some more particular interest as well. Sainte-Beuve
has his particularized interest in human beings;
another critic say Remy de Gourmont may have
something to say always about the art of a writer which
will make our enjoyment of that writer more conscious
and more intelligent. But the pure moralist in
36
Imperfect Critics
letters the moralist is useful to the creator as well as
the reader of poetry must be more concise, for we
must have the pleasure of inspecting the beauty of his
structure. And here M. Julien Benda has a great
advantage over Mr. More ; his thought may be less
profound, but it has more formal beauty.
Mr. Irving Babbitt, who shares so many of the
ideals and opinions of Mr. More that their names
must be coupled, has expressed his thought more
abstractly and with more form, and is free from a
mystical impulse which occasionally gets out of Mr.
More's hand. He appears, more clearly than Mr.
More, and certainly more clearly than any critic of
equal authority in America or England, to perceive
Europe as a whole; he has the cosmopolitan
mind and a tendency to seek the centre. His few
books are important, and would be more important if
he preached of discipline in a more disciplined style.
Although he also is an admirer of Sainte-Beuve, he
would probably subscribe to this admirable paragraph
of Othenin d'Haussonville : l
II y a une beautd litte'raire, impersonnelle en quelque
sorte, parfaitement distincte de 1'auteur lui-meme et
de son organisation, beaut qui a sa raison d'etre et
ses lois, dont la critique est tenue de rendre compte.
Et si la critique considere cette tache comme
au-dessous d'elle, si c'est affaire a la rhe*torique et a
ce que Sainte-Beuve appelle de"daigneusement les
Quintilien, alors la rhetorique a du bon et les
Quintilien ne sont pas a dedaigner.
There may be several critics in England who would
1 Revue des Deux Mondes^ fevr. 1875, quoted by Benda,
Belphc'gor, p. 140.
37
The Sacred Wood
applaud this notion; there are very few who show
any evidence of its apprehension in their writings.
But Mr. More and Mr. Babbitt, whatever their actual
tastes, and although they are not primarily occupied
with art, are on the side of the artist. And the side
of the artist is not the side which in England is often
associated with critical writing. As Mr. More has
pointed out in an interesting essay, there is a vital
weakness in Arnold's definition of criticism as "the
disinterested endeavour to know the best that is
known and thought in the world, irrespectively of
practice, politics, and everything of the kind." The
"disinterested endeavour to know" is only a pre-
requisite of the critic, and is not criticism^ which may
be the result of such an endeavour. Arnold states
the work of the critic merely in terms of the personal
ideal, an ideal for oneself and an ideal for oneself is
not disinterested. Here Arnold is the Briton rather
than the European.
Mr. More indicates his own attitude in praising
those whom he elevates to the position of masters of
criticism :
If they deal much with the criticism of literature,
this is because in literature more manifestly than
anywhere else life displays its infinitely varied motives
and results; and their practice is always to render
literature itself more consciously a criticism of life.
"Criticism of life" is a facile phrase, and at most
only represents one aspect of great literature, if it
does not assign to the term "criticism" itself a
generality which robs it of precision. Mr. More has,
it seems to me, in this sentence just failed to put his
38
Imperfect Critics
finger on the right seriousness of great literary art:
the seriousness which we find in Villon's Testament
and which is conspicuously absent from In
Memoriam'y or the seriousness which controls
Amos Barton and not The Mill on the Floss.
It is a pity that Mr. More does not write a little
oftener about the great literary artists, it is a pity that
he takes the reputations of the world too solemnly.
This is probably due in part to remoteness in space
from the European centre. But it must be observed
that English solemnity and American solemnity are
very different. I do not propose to analyse the
difference (it would be a valuable chapter in social
history); the American solemnity, it is enough to
say, is more primitive, more academic, more like
that of the German professor. But it is not the
fault of Mr. More or Mr. Babbitt that the culture of
ideas has only been able to survive in America in the
unfavourable atmosphere of the university.
THE FRENCH INTELLIGENCE
As the inspection of types of English irresistibly
provoked a glance at two American critics, so the
inspection of the latter leads our attention to the
French. M. Julien Benda has the formal beauty
which the American critics lack, and a close affinity
to them in point of view. He restricts himself,
perhaps, to a narrower field of ideas, but within that
field he manipulates the ideas with a very exceptional
cogency and clarity. To notice his last book (Belphegor :
essai sur Vesthetique de la presente societe franfaise)
would be to quote from it. M. Benda is not like
39
The Sacred Wood
Remy de Gourmont, the critical consciousness of a
generation, he could not supply the conscious formulas
of a sensibility in process of formation ; he is rather
the ideal scavenger of the rubbish of our time.
Much of his analysis of the decadence of contemporary
French society could be applied to London, although
differences are observable from his diagnosis.
Quant a la socie"t en elle-meme, on peut pre*voir
que ce soin qu'elle met a e*prouver de I'e'moi par 1'art,
devenant cause a son tour, y rendra la soif de ce
plaisir de plus en plus intense, 1'application a la
satisfaire de plus en plus jalouseet plus perfectionnee.
On entrevoit le jour ou la bonne socie"t franQaise
repudiera encore le peu qu'elle supporte aujourd'hui
d'ide*es et d'organisation dans 1'art, et ne se passionera
plus que pour des gestes de come'diens, pour des
impressions de femmes ou d'enfants, pour des
rugissements de lyriques, pour des extases de
fanatiques . . .
Almost the only person who has ever figured in
England and attempted a task at all similar to that of
M. Benda is Matthew Arnold. Matthew Arnold was
intelligent, and by so much difference as the presence
of one intelligent man makes, our age is inferior to
that of Arnold. But what an advantage a man like
M. Benda has over Arnold. It is not simply that he
has a critical tradition behind him, and that Arnold
is using a language which constantly tempts the user
away from dispassionate exposition into sarcasm and
diatribe, a language less fitted for criticism than the
English of the eighteenth century. It is that the
follies and stupidities of the French, no matter how
base, express themselves in the form of ideas
Bergsonism itself is an intellectual construction, and
40
Imperfect Critics
the mondaines who attended lectures at the College
de France were in a sense using their minds. A
man of ideas needs ideas, or pseudo-ideas, to fight
against. And Arnold lacked the active resistance
which is necessary to keep a mind at its sharpest.
A society in which a mind like M. Benda's can
exercise itself, and in which there are persdns like M.
Benda, is one which facilitates the task of the creative
artist. M. Benda cannot be attached, like Gourmont,
to any creative group. He does not wholly partake
in that " conscious creation of the field of the present
out of the past" which Mr. More considers to be
part of the work of the critic. But in analysing the
maladies of the second-rate or corrupt literature of the
time he makes the labour of the creative artist lighter.
The Charles Louis Philippes of English literature are
never done with, because there is no one to kill their
reputations ; we still hear that George Meredith is a
master of prose, or even a profound philosopher.
The creative artist in England finds himself compelled,
or at least tempted, to spend much of his time and
energy in criticism that he might reserve for the
perfecting of his proper work : simply because there
is no one else to do it.
Tradition and the Individual Talent ^>
I
IN English writing we seldom speak of tradition,
though we occasionally apply its name in deplor-
ing its absence. We cannot refer to " the tradition "
or to "a tradition"; at most, we employ the ad-
jective in saying that the poetry of So-and-so is
" traditional " or even " too traditional." Seldom,
perhaps, does the word appear except in a phrase of
censure. If otherwise, it is vaguely approbative, with
the implication, as to the work approved, of some
pleasing archaeological reconstruction. You can
hardly make the word agreeable to English ears
without this comfortable reference to the reassuring
science of archaeology.
Certainly the word is not likely to appear in our
appreciations of living or dead writers. Every nation,
every race, has not only its own creative, but its own
critical turn of mind ; and is even more oblivious of
the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits
than of those of its creative genius. We know, or
think we know, from the enormous mass of critical
writing that has appeared in the French language the
critical method or habit of the French ; we only con-
clude (we are such unconscious people) that the
French are " more critical " than we, and sometimes
42
Tradition and the Individual Talent
even plume ourselves a little with the fact, as if the
French were the less spontaneous. Perhaps they are ;
but we might remind ourselves that criticism is as
inevitable as breathing, and that we should be none
the worse for articulating what passes in our minds
when we read a book and feel an emotion about it,
for criticizing our own minds in their work of criticism.
One of the facts that might come to light in this
process is our tendency to insist, when we praise a
poet, upon those aspects of his work in which he
least resembles anyone else. In these aspects or
parts of his work we pretend to find what is indi-
vidual, what is the peculiar essence of the man.
We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet's difference
from his predecessors, especially his immediate pre-
decessors ; we endeavour to find something that can
be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we
approach a poet without his prejudice we shall often
find that not only the best, but the most individual
parts of his work may be those in which the dead
poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most
vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable
period of adolescence, but the period of full maturity.
Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down,
consisted in following the ways of the immediate
generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to
its successes, "tradition" should positively be dis-
couraged. We have seen many such simple currents
soon lost in the sand ; and novelty is better than
repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider
significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want
it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in
the first place, the historical sense, which we may
43
The Sacred Wood
call nearly indispensable to anyone who would con-
tinue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year ; and
the historical sense involves a perception, not only of
the pastness of the past, but of its presence ; the his-
torical sense compels a man to write not merely with
his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling
that the whole of the literature of Europe from
Homer and within it the whole of the literature of
his own country has a simultaneous existence and
composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense,
which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the
temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal
together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it
is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely
conscious of his place in time, of his contempo-
raneity.
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete
meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is
the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and
artists. You cannot value him alone ; you must set
him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.
I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely
historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall con-
form, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided ; what
happens when a new work of art is created is some-
thing that happens simultaneously to all the works
of art which preceded it. The existing monuments
form an ideal order among themselves, which is
modified by the introduction of the new (the really
new) work of art among them. The existing order is
complete before the new work arrives; for order to
persist after the supervention of novelty, the whole
existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered ;
44
Tradition and the Individual Talent
and so the relations, proportions, values of each work
of art toward the whole are readjusted; and this is
conformity between the old and the new. Whoever
has approved this idea of order, of the form of
European, of English literature, will not find it pre-
posterous that the past should be altered by the
present as much as the present is directed by the
past. And the poet who is aware of this will be
aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.
In a peculiar sense he will be aware also that he
must inevitably be judged by the standards of the
past. I say judged, not amputated, by them; not
judged to be as good as, or worse or better than,
the dead; and certainly not judged by the canons
of dead critics. It is a judgment, a comparison, in
which two things are measured by each other. To
conform merely would be for the new work not really
to conform at all ; it would not be new, and would
therefore not be a work of art. And we do not quite
say that the new is more valuable because it fits in ;
but its fitting in is a test of its value a test, it is
true, which can only be slowly and cautiously applied,
for we are none of us infallible judges of conformity.
We say : it appears to conform, and is perhaps indi-
vidual, or it appears individual, and may conform ;
but we are hardly likely to find that it is one and not
the other.
To proceed to a more intelligible exposition of the
relation of the poet to the past : he can neither take
the past as a lump, an indiscriminate bolus, nor
can he form himself wholly on one or two private
admirations, nor can he form himself wholly upon
one preferred period. The first course is inadmissible,
45
The Sacred Wood
the second is an important experience of youth, and
the third is a pleasant and highly desirable supple-
ment. The poet must be very conscious of the main
current, which does not at all flow invariably through
the most distinguished reputations. He must be
quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves,
but that the material of art is never quite the same.
He must be aware that the mind of Europe the
mind of his own country a mind which he learns
in time to be much more important than his own
private mind is a mind which changes, and that
this change is a development which abandons nothing
en route, which does not superannuate either Shake-
speare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the Mag-
dalenian draughtsmen. That this development,
refinement perhaps, complication certainly, is not,
from the point of view of the artist, any improvement.
Perhaps not even an improvement from the point of
view of the psychologist or not to the extent which
we imagine \ perhaps only in the end based upon a
complication in economics and machinery. But the
difference between the present and the past is that the
conscious present is an awareness of the past in a
way and to an extent which the past's awareness of
itself cannot show.
Some one said : " The dead writers are remote from
us because we know so much more than they did."
Precisely, and they are that which we know.
I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly
part of my programme for the metier of poetry. The
objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous
amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim which can be
rejected by appeal to the lives of poets in any pan-
Tradition and the Individual Talent
theon. It will even be affirmed that much learning
deadens or perverts poetic sensibility. While, how-
ever, we persist in believing that a poet ought to
know as much as will not encroach upon his necessary
receptivity and necessary laziness, it is not desirable
to confine knowledge to whatever can be put into a
useful shape for examinations, drawing-rooms, or the
still more pretentious modes of publicity. Some can
absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it.
Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plu-
tarch than most men could from the whole British
Museum. What is to be insisted upon is that the
poet must develop or procure the consciousness of
the past and that he should continue to develop this
consciousness throughout his career.
What happens is a continual surrender of himself
as he is at the moment to something which is more
valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-
sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
There remains to define this process of deperson-
alization and its relation to the sense of tradition. It
is in this depersonalization that art may be said to
approach the condition of science. I shall, therefore,
invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the
action which takes place when a bit of finely filiated
platinum is introduced into a chamber containing
oxygen and sulphur dioxide.
II
Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is
directed not upon the poet but upon the poetry. If
we attend to the confused cries of the newspaper
47
The Sacred Wood
critics and the susurrus of popular repetition that
follows, we shall hear the names of poets in great
numbers; if we seek not Blue-book knowledge but
the enjoyment of poetry, and ask for a poem, we shall
seldom find it. In the last article I tried to point
out the importance of the relation of the poem to
other poems by other authors, and suggested the
conception of poetry as a living whole of all the
poetry that has ever been written. The other aspect of
this Impersonal theory of poetry is the relation of the
poem to its author. And I hinted, by an analogy, that
the mind of the mature poet differs from that of the
immature one not precisely in any valuation of
" personality," not being necessarily more interesting,
or having " more to say," but rather by being a more
finely perfected medium in which special, or very
varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new com-
binations.
The analogy was that of the catalyst. When the
two gases previously mentioned are mixed in the
presence of a filament of platinum, they form sul-
phurous acid. This combination takes place only
if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly
formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the
platinum itself is apparently unaffected ; has remained
inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet
is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively
operate upon the experience of the man himself; but,
the more perfect the artist, the more completely
separate in him will be the man who suffers and the
mind which creates ; the more perfectly will the
mind digest and transmute the passions which are its
material.
48
Tradition and the Individual Talent
The experience, you will notice, the elements
which enter the presence of the transforming catalyst,
are of two kinds : emotions and feelings. The effect
of a work of art upon the person who enjoys it is an
experience different in kind from any experience not
of art. It may be formed out of one emotion, or
may be a combination of several ; and various feel-
ings, inhering for the writer in particular words or
phrases or images, may be added to compose the
final result. Or great poetry may be made without
the direct use of any emotion whatever : composed
out of feelings solely. Canto XV of the Inferno
(Brunette Latini) is a working up of the emotion
evident in the situation ; but the effect, though single
as that of any work of art, is obtained by consider-
able complexity of detail. The last quatrain gives
an image, a feeling attaching to an image, which
" came," which did not develop simply out of what
precedes, but which was probably in suspension in
the poet's mind until the proper combination arrived
for it to add itself to. The poet's mind is in fact a
receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feel-
ings, phrases, images, which remain there until all
the particles which can unite to form a new com-
pound are present together.
If you compare several representative passages of
the greatest poetry you see how great is the variety
of types of combination, and also how completely any
semi-ethical criterion of " sublimity " misses the mark.
For it is not the t( greatness," the intensity, of the
emotions, the components, but the intensity of the
artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under
which the fusion takes place, that counts. The
D 49
The Sacred Wood
episode of Paolo and Francesca employs a definite
emotion, but the intensity of the poetry is something
quite different from whatever intensity in the supposed
experience it may give the impression of. It is no
more intense, furthermore, than Canto XXVI, the
voyage of Ulysses, which has not the direct depend-
ence upon an emotion. Great variety is possible in
the process of transmution of emotion : the murder
of Agamemnon, or the agony of Othello, gives an
artistic effect apparently closer to a possible original
than the scenes from Dante. In the Agamemnon,
the artistic emotion approximates to the emotion of
an actual spectator; in Othello to the emotion of
the protagonist himself. But the difference between
art and the event is always absolute ; the combina-
tion which is the murder of Agamemnon is probably
as complex as that which is the voyage of Ulysses.
In either case there has been a fusion ef elements.
The ode of Keats contains a number of feelings
which have nothing particular to do with the night-
ingale, but which the nightingale, partly, perhaps,
because of its attractive name, and partly because of
its reputation, served to bring together.
The point of view which I am struggling to attack
is perhaps related to the metaphysical theory of the
substantial unity of the soul : for my meaning is, that
the poet has, not a "personality" to express, but a
particular medium, which is only a medium and not
a personality, in which impressions and experiences
combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Im-
pressions and experiences which are important
for the man may take no place in the poetry,
and those which become important in the poetry
50
Tradition and the Individual Talent
may play quite a negligible part in the man, the
personality.
I will quote a passage which is unfamiliar enough
to be regarded with fresh attention in the light or
darkness of these observations :
And now methinks I could e'en chide myself
For doating on her beauty, though her death
Shall be revenged after no common action.
Does the silkworm expend her yellow labours
For thee ? For thee does she undo herself?
Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships
For the poor benefit of a bewildering minute?
Why does yon fellow falsify highways,
And put his life between the judge's lips,
To refine such a thing keeps horse and men
To beat their valours for her? . . .
In this passage (as is evident if it is taken in its con-
text) there is a combination of positive and negative
emotions: an intensely strong attraction toward
beauty and an equally intense fascination by the
ugliness which is contrasted with it and which
destroys it. This balance of contrasted emotion is
in the dramatic situation to which the speech is
pertinent, but that situation alone is inadequate to
it. This is, so to speak, the structural emotion, pro-
vided by the drama. But the whole effect, the
dominant tone, is due to the fact that a number of
floating feelings, having an affinity to this emotion by
no means superficially evident, have combined with it
to give us a new art emotion.
It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions
provoked by particular events in his life, that the
poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His
51
The Sacred Wood
particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat.
The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex
thing, but not with the complexity of the emotions
of people who have very complex or unusual
emotions in life. One error, in fact, of eccentricity in
poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express :
and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it
discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is
not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary
ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express
feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.
And emotions which he has never experienced will
serve his turn as well as those familiar to him. Con-
sequently, we must believe that " emotion recollected
in tranquillity" is an inexact formula. For it is
neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without dis-
tortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentra-
tion, and a new thing resulting from the concentration,
of a very great number of experiences which to the
practical and active person would not seem to be
experiences at all ; it is a concentration which does
not happen consciously or of deliberation. These
experiences are not "recollected," and they finally
unite in an atmosphere which is " tranquil " only in
that it is a passive attending upon the event. Of
course this is not quite the whole story. There is a
great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be
conscious and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is
usually unconscious where he ought to be con-
scious, and conscious where he ought to be uncon-
scious. Both errors tend to make him "personal."
Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an
escape from emotion; it is not the expression of
52
Tradition and the Individual Talent
personality, but an escape from personality. But,
of course, only those who have personality and
emotions know what it means to want to escape from
these things.
Ill
6 5 PoOs fous deibrepfo TI Kal &ira0ts tanv
This essay proposes to halt at the frontier of meta-
physics or mysticism, and confine itself to such
practical conclusions as can be applied by the re-
sponsible person interested in poetry. To divert
interest from the poet to the poetry is a laudable aim :
for it would conduce to a juster estimation of actual
poetry, good and bad. There are many people who
appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in verse,
and there is a smaller number of people who can
appreciate technical excellence. But very few know
when there is expression of significant emotion,
emotion which has its life in the poem and not in
the history of the poet. The emotion of art is
impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this im-
personality without surrendering himself wholly to
the work to be done. And he is not likely to know
what is to be done unless he lives in what is not
merely the present, but the present moment of the
past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but
of what is already living.
53
The Possibility of a Poetic Drama o o
THE questions why there is no poetic drama
to-day, how the stage has lost all hold on
literary art, why so many poetic plays are written
which can only be read, and read, if at all, without
pleasure have become insipid, almost academic.
The usual conclusion is either that " conditions " are
too much for us, or that we really prefer other types
of literature, or simply that we are uninspired. As for
the last alternative, it is not to be entertained ; as for
the second, what type do we prefer ? ; and as for the
first, no one has ever shown me "conditions," except
of the most superficial. The reasons for raising the
question again are first that the majority, perhaps,
certainly a large number, of poets hanker for the
stage ; and second, that a not negligible public appears
to want verse plays. Surely there is some legitimate
craving, not restricted to a few persons, which only
the verse play can satisfy. And surely the critical
attitude is to attempt to analyse the conditions and
the other data. If there comes to light some con-
clusive obstacle, the investigation should at least help
us to turn our thoughts to more profitable pursuits ;
and if there is not, we may hope to arrive eventually
at some statement of conditions which might be
altered. Possibly we shall find that our incapacity
has a deeper source : the arts have at times flourished
54
The Possibility of a Poetic Drama
when there was no drama; possibly we are incom-
petent altogether; in that case the stage will be,
not the seat, but at all events a symptom, of the
malady.
From the point of view of literature, the drama is
only one among several poetic forms. The epic, the
ballad, the chanson de geste, the forms of Provence
and of Tuscany, all found their perfection by serving
particular societies. The forms of Ovid, Catullus,
Propertius, served a society different, and in some
respects more civilized, than any of these ; and in the
society of Ovid the drama as a form of art was com-
paratively insignificant. Nevertheless, the drama is
perhaps the most permanent, is capable of greater
variation and of expressing more varied types of
society, than any other. It varied considerably in
England alone ; but when one day it was discovered
lifeless, subsequent forms which had enjoyed a transi-
tory life were dead too. I am not prepared to under-
take the historical survey ; but I should say that the
poetic drama's autopsy was performed as much by
Charles Lamb as by anyone else. For a form is not
wholly dead until it is known to be ; and Lamb, by
exhuming the remains of dramatic life at its fullest,
brought a consciousness of the immense gap between
present and past. It was impossible to believe, after
that, in a dramatic "tradition." The relation of
Byron's English Bards and the poems of Crabbe to
the work of Pope was a continuous tradition ; but the
relation of The Cenci to the great English drama
is almost that of a reconstruction to an original. By
losing tradition, we lose our hold on the present ; but
so far as there was any dramatic tradition in Shelley's
55
The Sacred Wood
day there was nothing worth the keeping. There
is all the difference between preservation and
restoration.
The Elizabethan Age in England was able to absorb
a great quantity of new thoughts and new images,
almost dispensing with tradition, because it had this
great form of its own which imposed itself on every-
thing that came to it. Consequently, the blank verse
of their plays accomplished a subtlety and conscious-
ness, even an intellectual power, that no blank verse
since has developed or even repeated ; elsewhere this
age is crude, pedantic, or loutish in comparison with
its contemporary France or Italy. The nineteenth
century had a good many fresh impressions; but it
had no form in which to confine them. Two men,
Wordsworth and Browning, hammered out forms
for themselves personal forms, The Excursion^
Sordelh) The Ring and the Book> Dramatic Mono-
logues; but no man can invent a form, create
a taste for it, and perfect it too. Tennyson, who
might unquestionably have been a consummate
master of minor forms, took to turning out large
patterns on a machine. As for Keats and Shelley,
they were too young to be judged, and they were
trying one form after another.
These poets were certainly obliged to consume vast
energy in this pursuit of form, which could never
lead to a wholly satisfying result. There has only been
one Dante ; and, after all, Dante had the benefit of
years of practice in forms employed and altered
by numbers of contemporaries and predecessors ; he
did not waste the years of youth in metric invention ;
and when he came to the Commedia he knew how
56
The Possibility of a Poetic Drama
to pillage right and left. To have, given into one's
hands, a crude form, capable of indefinite refinement,
and to be the person to see the possibilities
Shakespeare was very fortunate. And it is perhaps
the craving for some such donnee which draws us on
toward the present mirage of poetic drama.
But it is now very questionable whether there are
more than two or three in the present generation who
are capable, the least little bit, of benefiting by such
advantages were they given. At most two or three
actually devote themselves to this pursuit of form for
which they have little or no public recognition. To
create a form is not merely to invent a shape, a rhyme
or rhythm. It is also the realization of the whole
appropriate content of this rhyme or rhythm. The
sonnet of Shakespeare is not merely such and such a
pattern, but a precise way of thinking and feeling.
The framework which was provided for the Elizabethan
dramatist was not merely blank verse and the five-act
play and the Elizabethan playhouse ; it was not merely
the plot for the poets incorporated, remodelled,
adapted or invented, as occasion suggested. It was
also the half-formed vA.i}, the " temper of the age " (an
unsatisfactory phrase), a preparedness, a habit on the
part of the public, to respond to particular stimuli.
There is a book to be written on the commonplaces
of any great dramatic period, the handling of Fate or
Death, the recurrence of mood, tone, situation. We
should see then just how little each poet had to do ;
only so much as would make a play his, only what was
really essential to make it different from anyone else's.
When there is this economy of effort it is possible to
have several, even many, good poets at once. The
57
The Sacred Wood
great ages did not perhaps produce much more talent
than ours ; but less talent was wasted.
Now in a formless age there is very little hope for
the minor poet to do anything worth doing ; and when
I say minor I mean very good poets indeed : such as
filled the Greek anthology and the Elizabethan song-
books ; even a Herrick ; but not merely second-rate
poets, for Denham and Waller have quite another im-
portance, occupying points in the development of a
major form. When everything is set out for the minor
poet to do, he may quite frequently come upon some
trouvaille, even in the drama : Peele and Brome are
examples. Under the present conditions, the minor
poet has too much to do. And this leads to another
reason for the incompetence of our time in poetic
drama.
Permanent literature is always a presentation : either
a presentation of thought, or a presentation of feeling
by a statement of events in human action or objects in
the external world. In earlier literature to avoid the
word " classic " we find both kinds, and sometimes,
as in some of the dialogues of Plato, exquisite
combinations of both. Aristotle presents thought,
stripped to the essential structure, and he is a
great writer. The Agamemnon or Macbeth is
equally a statement, but of events. They are as
much works of the "intellect" as the writings of
Aristotle. There are more recent works of art which
have the same quality of intellect in common with
those of ^Eschylus and Shakespeare and Aristotle :
Education Sentimentale is one of them. Compare
it with such a book as Vanity Fair and you will see
that the labour of the intellect consisted largely in a
58
The Possibility of a Poetic Drama
purification, in keeping out a great deal that Thackeray
allowed to remain in ; in refraining from reflection, in
putting into the statement enough to make reflection
unnecessary. The case of Plato is still more illu-
minating. Take the The&tetus. In a few opening
words Plato gives a scene, a personality, a feeling,
which colour the subsequent discourse but do not
interfere with it: the particular setting, and the
abstruse theory of knowledge afterwards developed,
co-operate without confusion. Could any contempo-
rary author exhibit such control ?
In the nineteenth century another mentality mani-
fested itself. It is evident in a very able and brilliant
poem, Goethe's Faust. Marlowe's Mephistopheles
is a simpler creature than Goethe's. But at least
Marlowe has, in a few words, concentrated him into a
statement. He is there, and (incidentally) he renders
Milton's Satan superfluous. Goethe's demon inevi-
tably sends us back to Goethe. He embodies a
philosophy. A creation of art should not do that : he
should replace the philosophy. Goethe has not, that
is to say, sacrificed or consecrated his thought to make
the drama ; the drama is still a means. And this type
of mixed art has been repeated by men incomparably
smaller than Goethe. We have had one other re-
markable work of this type : Peer Gynt. And we have
had the plays of M. Maeterlinck and M. Claudel. 1
In the work of Maeterlinck and Claudel on the one
1 I should except The Dynasts. This gigantic panorama is
hardly to be called a success, but it is essentially an attempt to
present a vision, and "sacrifices" the philosophy to the vision,
as all great dramas do. Mr. Hardy has apprehended his matter
as a poet and an artist.
59
The Sacred Wood
hand, and those of M. Bergson on the other, we have
the mixture of the genres in which our age delights.
Every work of imagination must have a philosophy ;
and every philosophy must be a work of art how
often have we heard that M. Bergson is an artist ! It
is a boast of his disciples. It is what the word " art "
means to them that is the disputable point. Certain
works of philosophy can be called works of art : much
of Aristotle and Plato, Spinoza, parts of Hume, Mr.
Bradley's Principles of Logic, Mr. Russell's essay on
" Denoting " : clear and beautifully formed thought.
But this is not what the admirers of Bergson, Claudel,
or Maeterlinck (the philosophy of the latter is a little
out of date) mean. They mean precisely what is not
clear, but what is an emotional stimulus. And as
a mixture of thought and of vision provides more
stimulus, by suggesting both, both clear thinking and
clear statement of particular objects must disappear.
The undigested "idea" or philosophy, the idea-
emotion, is to be found also in poetic dramas which
are conscientious attempts to adapt a true structure,
Athenian or Elizabethan, to contemporary feeling.
It appears sometimes as the attempt to supply the
defect of structure by an internal structure. "But
most important of all is the structure of the incidents.
For Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an
action and of life, and life consists in action, and its
end is a mode of action, not a quality." 1
We have on the one hand the "poetic" drama,
imitation Greek, imitation Elizabethan, or modern-
philosophical, on the other the comedy of "ideas,"
from Shaw to Galsworthy, down to the ordinary
1 Poetics^ vi. 9. Butcher's translation.
60
The Possibility of a Poetic Drama
social comedy. The most ramshackle Guitry farce
has some paltry idea or comment upon life put into
the mouth of one of the characters at the end. It is
said that the stage can be used for a variety of
purposes, that in only one of them perhaps is it
united with literary art. A mute theatre is a
possibility (I do not mean the cinema) ; the ballet is
an actuality (though under-nourished) ; opera is an
institution ; but where you have " imitations of life "
on the stage, with speech, the only standard that we
can allow is the standard of the work of art, aiming at
the same intensity at which poetry and the other
forms of art aim. From that point of view the
Shavian drama is a hybrid as the Maeterlinckian
drama is, and we need express no surprise at their
belonging to the same epoch. Both philosophies are
popularizations : the moment an idea has been
transferred from its pure state in order that it may
become comprehensible to the inferior intelligence it
has lost contact with art. It can remain pure only
by being stated simply in the form of general truth,
or by being transmuted, as the attitude of Flaubert
toward the small bourgeois is transformed in Edu-
cation Sentimentdle. It has there become so
identified with the reality that you can no longer say
what the idea is.
The essential is not, of course, that drama should
be written in verse, or that we should be able to
extenuate our appreciation of broad farce by
occasionally attending a performance of a play of
Euripides where Professor Murray's translation is sold
at the door. The essential is to get upon the stage
this precise statement of life which is at the same
6l
The Sacred Wood
i
time a point of view, a world a world which the
author's mind has subjected to a complete process of
simplification. I do not find that any drama which
"embodies a philosophy" of the author's (like
Faust) or which illustrates any social theory (like
Shaw's) can possibly fulfil the requirements though
a place might be left for Shaw if not for Goethe.
And the world of Ibsen and the world of Tchehov
are not enough simplified, universal.
Finally, we must take into account the instability
of any art the drama, music, dancing which
depends upon representation by performers. The
intervention of performers introduces a complication
of economic conditions which is in itself likely to be
injurious. A struggle, more or less unconscious,
between the creator and the interpreter is almost
inevitable. The interest of a performer is almost
certain to be centred in himself: a very slight
acquaintance with actors and musicians will testify.
The performer is interested not in form but in
opportunities for virtuosity or in the communication
of his "personality"; the formlessness, the lack of
intellectual clarity and distinction in modern music,
the great physical stamina and physical training
which it often requires, are perhaps signs of the
triumph of the performer. The consummation of
the triumph of the actor over the play is perhaps
the productions of the Guitry.
The conflict is one which certainly cannot be
terminated by the utter rout of the actor profession.
For one thing, the stage appeals to too many demands
besides the demand for art for that to be possible ;
and also we need, unfortunately, something more
62
The Possibility of a Poetic Drama
than refined .automatons. Occasionally attempts
have been made to "get around" the actor, to
envelop him in masks, to set up a few " conventions "
for him to stumble over, or even to develop little
breeds of actors for some special Art drama. This
meddling with nature seldom succeeds ; nature
usually overcomes these obstacles. Possibly the
majority of attempts to confect a poetic drama have
begun at the wrong end; they have aimed at the
small public which wants "poetry." ("Novices,"
says Aristotle, " in the art attain to finish of diction
and precision of portraiture before they can construct
the plot.") The Elizabethan drama was aimed at a
public which wanted entertainment of a crude sort,
but would stand a good deal of poetry ; our problem
should be to take a form of entertainment, and subject
it to the process which would leave it a form of art.
Perhaps the music-hall comedian is the best material.
I am aware that this is a dangerous suggestion to
make. For every person who is likely to consider it
seriously there are a dozen toy makers who would
leap to tickle aesthetic society into one more quiver
and giggle of art debauch. Very few treat art seri-
ously. There are those who treat it solemnly, and
will continue to write poetic pastiches of Euripides
and Shakespeare ; and there are others who treat it as
a joke.
Euripides and Professor Murray o o
THE recent appearance of Miss Sybil Thorndyke
as Medea at the Holborn Empire is an event
which has a bearing upon three subjects of con-
siderable interest: the drama, the present standing
of Greek literature, and the importance of good
contemporary translation. On the occasion on which
I was present the performance was certainly a
success ; the audience was large, it was attentive, and
its applause was long. Whether the success was
due to Euripides is uncertain ; whether it was due to
Professor Murray is not proved; but that it was in
considerable measure due to Miss Thorndyke there
is no doubt. To have held the centre of the stage
for two hours in a role which requires both extreme
violence and restraint, a role which requires simple
force and subtle variation; to have sustained so
difficult a role almost without support; this was a
legitimate success. The audience, or what could be
seen of it from one of the cheaper seats, was serious
and respectful and perhaps inclined to self-approval
at having attended the performance of a Greek play ;
but Miss Thorndyke's acting might have held almost
any audience. It employed all the conventions, the
theatricalities, of the modern stage ; yet her person-
ality triumphed over not only Professor Murray's
verse but her own training.
Euripides and Professor Murray
The question remains whether the production was
a "work of art." The rest of the cast appeared
slightly ill at ease; the nurse was quite a tolerable
nurse of the crone type; Jason was negative; the
messenger was uncomfortable at having to make such
a long speech ; and the refined Dalcroze chorus had
mellifluous voices which rendered their lyrics happily
inaudible. All this contributed toward the high-brow
effect which is so depressing; and we imagine that
the actors of Athens, who had to speak clearly
enough for 20,000 auditors to be able to criticize the
versification, would have been pelted with figs and
olives had they mumbled so unintelligibly as most
of this troupe. But the Greek actor spoke in his
own language, and our actors were forced to speak
in the language of Professor Gilbert Murray. So
that on the whole we may say that the performance
was an interesting one.
I do not believe, however, that such performances
will do very much to rehabilitate Greek literature or
our own, unless they stimulate a desire for better
translations. The serious auditors, many of whom
I observed to be like myself provided with Professor
Murray's eighteenpenny translation, were probably
not aware that Miss Thorndyke, in order to succeed
as well as she did, was really engaged in a struggle
against the translator's verse. She triumphed over
it by attracting our attention to her expression and
tone and making us neglect her words ; and this, of
course, was not the dramatic method of Greek acting
at its best. The English and Greek languages
remained where they were. But few persons realize
that the Greek language and the Latin language, and,
E 6 5
The Sacred Wood
therefore^ we say, the English language, are within our
lifetime passing through a critical period. The
Classics have, during the latter part of the nineteenth
century and up to the present moment, lost their
place as a pillar of the social and political system
such as the Established Church still is. If they are
to survive, to justify themselves as literature, as an
element in the European mind, as the foundation for
the literature we hope to create, they are very badly
in need of persons capable of expounding them. We
need some one not a member of the Church of
Rome, and perhaps preferably not a member of the
Church of England to explain how vital a matter
it is, if Aristotle may be said to have been a moral
pilot of Europe, whether we shall or shall not drop
that pilot. And we need a number of educated
poets who shall at least have opinions about Greek
drama, and whether it is or is not of any use to us.
And it must be said that Professor Gilbert Murray
is not the man for this. Greek poetry will never
have the slightest vitalizing effect upon English
poetry if it can only appear masquerading as a
vulgar debasement of the eminently personal idiom
of Swinburne. These are strong words to use against
the most popular Hellenist of his time ; but we must
witness of Professor Murray ere we die that these
things are not otherwise but thus.
This is really a point of capital importance. That
the most conspicuous Greek propagandist of the day
should almost habitually use two words where the
Greek language requires one, and where the English
language will provide him with one ; that he should
render o-Kiav by "grey shadow"; and that he should
66
Euripides and Professor Murray
stretch the Greek brevity to fit the loose frame of
William Morris, and blur the Greek lyric to the fluid
haze of Swinburne ; these are not faults of infinitesimal
insignificance. The first great speech of Medea Mr.
Murray begins with :
Women of Corinth, I am come to show
My face, lest ye despise me. . . .
We find in the Greek, egijXOov So/xwv. "Show my
face," therefore, is Mr. Murray's gift.
This thing undreamed of, sudden from on high,
Hath sapped my soul : I dazzle where I stand,
The cup of all life shattered in my hand. . . .
Again, we find that the Greek is :
/J.ol 5' &e\irTov irpay/J.a irpoffireabi' rude
Kal /3ioi>
So, here are two striking phrases which we owe to
Mr. Murray; it is he who has sapped our soul and
shattered the cup of all life for Euripides. And these
are only random examples.
OJIK ZffTIV d\\7J (f)pT]V fJUaKfiOVUT^pa
becomes " no bloodier spirit between heaven and
hell " ! Surely we know that Professor Murray is
acquainted with " Sister Helen " ? Professor Murray
has simply interposed between Euripides and our-
selves a barrier more impenetrable than the Greek
language. We do not reproach him for preferring,
apparently, Euripides to ^Eschylus. But if he does,
he should at least appreciate Euripides. And it is
inconceivable that anyone with a genuine feeling for
67
The Sacred Wood
the sound of Greek verse should deliberately elect the
William Morris couplet, the Swinburne lyric, as a just
equivalent.
As a poet, Mr. Murray is merely a very insignificant
follower of the pre-Raphaelite movement. As a
Hellenist, he is very much of the present day, and
a very important figure in the day. This day began,
in a sense, with Tylor and a few German anthro-
pologists ; since then we have acquired sociology and
social psychology, we have watched the clinics of
Ribot and Janet, we have read books from Vienna
and heard a discourse of Bergson ; a philosophy
arose at Cambridge; social emancipation crawled
abroad ; our historical knowledge has of course
increased ; and we have a curious Freudian-social-
mystical-rationalistic-higher-critical interpretation of
the Classics and what used to be called the
Scriptures. I do not deny the very great value of all
work by scientists in their own departments, the
great interest also of this work in detail and in its
consequences. Few books are more fascinating than
those of Miss Harrison, Mr. Cornford, or Mr. Cooke,
when they burrow in the origins of Greek myths and
rites; M. Durkheim, with his social consciousness,
and M. Levy-Bruhl, with his Bororo Indians who
convince themselves that they are parroquets, are
delightful writers. A number of sciences have sprung
up in an almost tropical exuberance which un-
doubtedly excites our admiration, and the garden,
not unnaturally, has come to resemble a jungle.
Such men as Tylor, and Robertson Smith, and
Wilhelm Wundt, who early fertilized the soil, would
hardly recognize the resulting vegetation ; and indeed
68
Euripides and Professor Murray
poor Wundt's Volkerpsychologie was a musty relic
before it was translated.
All these events are useful and important in their
phase, and they have sensibly affected our attitude
towards the Classics ; and it is this phase of classical
study that Professor Murray the friend and inspirer
of Miss Jane Harrison represents. The Greek is no
longer the awe-inspiring Belvedere of Winckelmann,
Goethe, and Schopenhauer, the figure of which
Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde offered us a slightly
debased re-edition. And we realize better how
different not how much more Olympian were the
conditions of the Greek civilization from ours ; and at
the same time Mr. Zimmern has shown us how the
Greek dealt with analogous problems. Incidentally we
do not believe that a good English prose style can
be modelled upon Cicero, or Tacitus, or Thucydides.
If Pindar bores us, we admit it ; we are not certain
that Sappho was very much greater than Catullus ; we
hold various opinions about Vergil; and we think
more highly of Petronius than our grandfathers did.
It is to be hoped that we may be grateful to
Professor Murray and his friends for what they have
done, while we endeavour to neutralize Professor
Murray's influence upon Greek literature and English
language in his translations by making better trans-
lations. The choruses from Euripides by H. D. are,
allowing for errors and even occasional omissions of
difficult passages, much nearer to both Greek and
English than Mr. Murray's. But H. D. and the
other poets of the " Poets' Translation Series " have
so far done no more than pick up some of the more
romantic crumbs of Greek literature; none of them
69
The Sacred Wood
has yet shown himself competent to attack the
Agamemnon. If we are to digest the heavy food
of historical and scientific knowledge that we have
eaten we must be prepared for much greater exertions.
We need a digestion which can assimilate both
Homer and Flaubert. We need a careful study of
Renaissance Humanists and Translators, such as Mr.
Pound has begun. We need an eye which can see
the past in its place with its definite differences from
the present, and yet so lively that it shall be as
present to us as the present. This is the creative
eye; and it is because Professor Murray has no
creative instinct that he leaves Euripides quite
dead.
"Rhetoric" and Poetic Drama *> *>
THE death of Rostand is the disappearance
of the poet whom, more than any other in
France, we treated as the exponent of "rhetoric,"
thinking of rhetoric as something recently out of
fashion. And as we find ourselves looking back
rather tenderly upon the author of Cyrano we wonder
what this vice or quality is that is associated a*s
plainly with Rostand's merits as with his defects.
His rhetoric, at least, suited him at times so well,
and so much better than it suited a much greater
poet, Baudelaire, who is at times as rhetorical as
Rostand. And we begin to suspect that the word is
merely a vague term of abuse for any style that is
bad, that is so evidently bad or second-rate that we
do not recognize the necessity for greater precision in
the phrases we apply to it.
Our own Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry in so
nice a problem it is much safer to stick to one's own
language is repeatedly called " rhetorical." It had
this and that notable quality, but, when we wish to
admit that it had defects, it is rhetorical. It had
serious defects, even gross faults, but we cannot be
considered to have erased them from our language
when we are so unclear in our perception of what
they are. The fact is that both Elizabethan prose
and Elizabethan poetry are written in a variety of
71
The Sacred Wood
styles with a variety of vices. Is the style of Lyly,
is Euphuism, rhetorical? In contrast to the elder
style of Ascham and Elyot which it assaults, it is a
clear, flowing, orderly and relatively pure style, with
a systematic if monotonous formula of antitheses
and similes. Is the style of Nashe? A tumid,
flatulent, vigorous style very different from Lyly's.
Or it is perhaps the strained and the mixed
figures of speech in which Shakespeare indulged him-
self. Or it is perhaps the careful declamation of
Jonson. The word simply cannot be used as
synonymous with bad writing. The meanings which
it has been obliged to shoulder have been mostly
opprobrious ; but if a precise meaning can be found
for it this meaning may occasionally represent a
virtue. It is one of those words which it is the
business of criticism to dissect and reassemble. Let
us avoid the assumption that rhetoric is a vice of
manner, and endeavour to find a rhetoric of substance
also, which is right because it issues from what it has
to express.
At the present time there is a manifest preference
for the "conversational" in poetry the style of
"direct speech," opposed to the "oratorical" and
the rhetorical; but if rhetoric is any convention of
writing inappropriately applied, this conversational
style can and does become a rhetoric or what is
supposed to be a conversational style, for it is often
as remote from polite discourse as well could be.
Much of the second and third rate in American vers
libre is of this sort; and much of the second and
third rate in English Wordsworthianism. There is in
fact no conversational or other form which can be
72
"Rhetoric" and Poetic Drama
applied indiscriminately; if a writer wishes to give
the effect of speech he must positively give the effect
of himself talking in his own person or in one of his
roles ; and if we are to express ourselves, our variety
of thoughts and feelings, on a variety of subjects with
inevitable Tightness, we must adapt our manner to
the moment with infinite variations. Examination of
the development of Elizabethan drama shows this
progress in adaptation, a development from monotony
to variety, a progressive refinement in the perception
of the variations of feeling, and a progressive elabora-
tion of the means of expressing these variations.
This drama is admitted to have grown away from the
rhetorical expression, the bombast speeches, of Kyd
and Marlowe to the subtle and dispersed utterance of
Shakespeare and Webster. But this apparent abandon-
ment or outgrowth of rhetoric is two things : it is
partly an improvement in language and it is partly
progressive variation in feeling. There is, of course, a
long distance separating the furibund fluency of old
Hieronimo and the broken words of Lear. There is
also a difference between the famous
Oh eyes no eyes, but fountains full of tears !
Oh life no life, but lively form of death !
and the superb " additions to Hieronimo." l
We think of Shakespeare perhaps as the dramatist
who concentrates everything into a sentence, "Pray
you undo this button," or "Honest honest lago";
we forget that there is a rhetoric proper to Shake-
speare at his best period which is quite free from the
1 Of the authorship it can only be said that the lines are by
some admirer of Marlowe. This might well be Jonson.
73
The Sacred Wood
genuine Shakespearean vices either of the early period
or the late. These passages are comparable to the
best bombast of Kyd or Marlowe, with a greater
command of language and a greater control of the
emotion. The Spanish Tragedy is bombastic
when it descends to language which was only the
trick of its age ; Tamburlaine is bombastic because
it is monotonous, inflexible to the alterations of
emotion. The really fine rhetoric of Shakespeare
occurs in situations where a character in the play
sees himself \\\ a dramatic light :
Othello. And say, besides, that in Aleppo once . . .
Coriolanus. If you have writ your annals true, 'tis there,
That like an eagle in a dovecote, I
Fluttered your Volscians in Corioli.
Alone I did it. Boy !
Timon. Come not to me again ; but say to Athens,
Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
Upon the beached verge of the salt flood . . .
It occurs also once in Antony and Cleopatra, when
Enobarbus is inspired to see Cleopatra in this
dramatic light :
The barge she sat in . . .
Shakespeare made fun of Marston, and Jonson made
fun of Kyd. But in Marston's play the words were
expressive of nothing ; and Jonson was criticizing the
feeble and conceited language, not the emotion, not
the " oratory." Jonson is as oratorical himself, and
the moments when his oratory succeeds are, I believe,
the moments that conform to our formula. Notably
the speech of Sylla's ghost in the induction to Catiline^
and the speech of Envy at the beginning of The
74
" Rhetoric " and Poetic Drama
Poetaster. These two figures are contemplating their
own dramatic importance, and quite properly. But
in the Senate speeches in Catiline^ how tedious, how
dusty ! Here we are spectators not of a play of
characters, but of a play of forensic, exactly as if we
had been forced to attend the sitting itself. A speech
in a play should never appear to be intended to move
us as it might conceivably move other characters in
the play, for it is essential that we should preserve
our position of spectators, and observe always from
the outside though with complete understanding.
The scene in Julius C&sar is right because the object
of our attention is not the speech of Antony
(^Bedeutung) but the effect of his speech upon the
rrfob, and Antony's intention, his preparation and
consciousness of the effect. And in the rhetorical
speeches from Shakespeare which have been cited,
we have this necessary advantage of a new clue to
the character, in noting the angle from which he
views himself. But when a character in a play makes
a direct appeal to us, we are either the victims of our
own sentiment, or we are in the presence of a vicious
rhetoric.
These references ought to supply some evidence of
the propriety of Cyrano on Noses. Is not Cyrano
exactly in this position of contemplating himself as
a romantic, a dramatic figure ? This dramatic sense
on the part of the characters themselves is rare in
modern drama. In sentimental drama it appears in
a degraded form, when we are evidently intended to
accept the character's sentimental interpretation of
himself. In plays of realism we often find parts which
are never allowed to be consciously dramatic, for fear,
75
The Sacred Wood
perhaps, of their appearing less real. But in actual
life, in many of those situations in actual life which
we enjoy consciously and keenly, we are at times
aware of ourselves in this way, and these moments
are of very great usefulness to dramatic verse. A
very small part of acting is that which takes place on
the stage ! Rostand had whether he had anything
else or not this dramatic sense, and it is what gives
life to Cyrano. It is a sense which is almost a sense
of humour (for when anyone is conscious of himself
as acting, something like a sense of humour is present).
It gives Rostand's characters Cyrano at least a
gusto which is uncommon on the modern stage. No
doubt Rostand's people play up to this too steadily.
We recognize that in the love scenes of Cyrano in
the garden, for in Romeo and Juliet the profounder
dramatist shows his lovers melting into incoherent
unconsciousness of their isolated selves, shows the
human soul in the process of forgetting itself. Rostand
could not ,do that; but in the particular case of
Cyrano on Noses, the character, the situation, the
occasion were perfectly suited and combined. The
tirade generated by this combination is not only
genuinely and highly dramatic: it is possibly poetry
also. If a writer is incapable of composing such a scene
as this, so much the worse for his poetic drama.
Cyrano satisfies, as far as scenes like this can
satisfy, the requirements of poetic drama. It must
take genuine and substantial human emotions, such
emotions as observation can confirm, typical emotions,
and give them artistic form ; the degree of abstraction
is a question for the method of each author. In
Shakespeare the form is determined in the unity of
"Rhetoric" and Poetic Drama
the whole, as well as single scenes ; it is something to
attain this unity, as Rostand does, in scenes if not the
whole play. Not only as a dramatist, but as a poet,
he is superior to Maeterlinck, whose drama, in failing
to be dramatic, fails also to be poetic. Maeterlinck
has a literary perception of the dramatic and a literary
perception of the poetic, and he joins the two; the
two are not, as sometimes they are in the work of
Rostand, fused. His characters take no conscious
delight in their role they are sentimental. With
Rostand the centre of gravity is in the expression of
the emotion, not as with Maeterlinck in the emotion
which cannot be expressed. Some writers appear to
believe that emotions gain in intensity through being
inarticulate. Perhaps the emotions are not significant
enough to endure full daylight.
In any case, we may take our choice : we may
apply the term "rhetoric" to the type of dramatic
speech which I have instanced, and then we must
admit that it covers good as well as bad. Or we may
choose to except this type of speech from rhetoric.
In that case we must say that rhetoric is any adornment
or inflation of speech which'is not done for a particular
effect but for a general impressiveness. And in this
case, too, we cannot allow the term to cover all bad
writing.
77
Some Notes on the Blank Verse of Chris-
topher Marlowe o o o o o
" Marloe was stabd with a dagger, and dyed swearing "
A MORE friendly critic, Mr. A. C. Swinburne,
observes of this poet that "the father of
English tragedy and the creator of English blank
verse was therefore also the teacher and the guide of
Shakespeare." In this sentence there are two mis-
leading assumptions and two misleading conclusions.
Kyd has as good a title to the first honour as Mar-
lowe; Surrey has a better title to the second; and
Shakespeare was not taught or guided by one of his
predecessors or contemporaries alone. The less
questionable judgment is, that Marlowe exercised a
strong influence over later drama, though not himself
as great a dramatist as Kyd ; that he introduced
several new tones into blank verse, and commenced
the dissociative process which drew it farther and
farther away from the rhythms of rhymed verse ;
and that when Shakespeare borrowed from him,
which was pretty often at the beginning, Shake-
speare either made something inferior or something
different.
The comparative study of English versification at
various periods is a large tract of unwritten history.
To make a study of blank verse alone, would be to
78
The Blank Verse of Christopher Marlowe
elicit some curious conclusions. It would show, I
believe, that blank verse within Shakespeare's lifetime
was more highly developed, that it became the vehicle
of more varied and more intense art-emotions than it
has ever conveyed since ; and that after the erection
of the Chinese Wall of Milton, blank verse has suffered
not only arrest but retrogression. That the blank
verse of Tennyson, for example, a consummate master
of this form in certain applications, is cruder (not
" rougher " or less perfect in technique) than that of
half a dozen contemporaries of Shakespeare ; cruder,
because less capable of expressing complicated, subtle,
and surprising emotions.
Every writer who has written any blank verse worth
saving has produced particular tones which his verse
and no other's is capable of rendering ; and we should
keep this in mind when we talk about " influences "
and "indebtedness." Shakespeare is "universal"
(if you like) because he has more of these tones than
anyone else ; but they are all out of the one man ;
one man cannot be more than one man ; there might
have been six Shakespeares at once without conflicting
frontiers; and to say that Shakespeare expressed
nearly all human emotions, implying that he left very
little for anyone else, is a radical misunderstanding of
art and the artist a misunderstanding which, even
when explicitly rejected, may lead to our neglecting
the effort of attention necessary to discover the specific
properties of the verse of Shakespeare's contemporaries.
The development of blank verse may be likened to
the analysis of that astonishing industrial product
coal-tar. Marlowe's verse is one of the earlier
derivatives, but it possesses properties which are not,
79
The Sacred Wood
repeated in any of the analytic or synthetic blank
verses discovered somewhat later.
The "vices of style" of Marlowe's and Shake-
speare's age is a convenient name for a number of
vices, no one of which, perhaps, was shared by all
of the writers. It is pertinent, at least, to remark
that Marlowe's " rhetoric " is not, or not characteristi-
cally, Shakespeare's rhetoric ; that Marlowe's rhetoric
consists in a pretty simple huffe-snuffe bombast, while
Shakespeare's is more exactly a vice of style, a tortured
perverse ingenuity of images which dissipates instead
of concentrating the imagination, and which may be
due in part to influences by which Marlowe was
untouched. Next, we find that Marlowe's vice is
one which he was gradually attenuating, and even,
what is more miraculous, turning into a virtue. And
we find that this bard of torrential imagination recog-
nized many of his best bits (and those of one or two
others), saved them, and reproduced them more than
once, almost invariably improving them in the process.
It is worth while noticing a few of these versions,
because they indicate, somewhat contrary to usual
opinion, that Marlowe was a deliberate and conscious
workman. Mr. J. G. Robertson has spotted an
interesting theft of Marlowe's from Spenser. Here is
Spenser (Faery Queen t i. vii. 32) :
Like to an almond tree y-mounted high
On top of green Selinis all alone,
With blossoms brave bedecked daintily;
Whose tender locks do tremble every one
At every little breath that under heaven is blown.
And herejMarlowe (Tamburlaine^ Part II. Act iv.
sc. Hi.) :
80
The Blank Verse of Christopher Marlowe
Like to an almond tree y-mounted high
Upon the lofty and celestial mount
Of evergreen Selinus, quaintly deck'd
With blooms more white than Erycina's brows,
Whose tender blossoms tremble every one
At every little breath that thorough heaven is blown.
This is interesting, not only as showing that
Marlowe's talent, like that of most poets, was partly
synthetic, but also because it seems to give a clue
to some particularly "lyric" effects found in Tam-
burlaine> not in Marlowe's other plays, and not, I
believe, anywhere else. For example, the praise of
Zenocrate in Part II. Act. n. sc. iv. :
Now walk the angels on the walls of heaven,
As sentinels to warn th* immortal souls
To entertain divine Zenocrate : etc.
This is not Spenser's movement, but the influence
of Spenser must be present. There had been no
great blank verse before Marlowe ; but there was the
powerful presence of this great master of melody
immediately precedent; and the combination pro-
duced results which could not be repeated. I do
not think that it can be claimed that Peele had any
influence here.
The passage quoted from Spenser has a further
interest. It will be noted that the fourth line :
With blooms more white than Erycina's brows
is Marlowe's contribution. Compare this with these
other lines of Marlowe :
So looks my love, shadowing in her brows
(Tamburtaine)
Like to the shadows of Pyramides
(Tambnrlainc)
F 8l
The Sacred Wood
and the final and best version :
Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows
Than have the white breasts of the queen of love.
(Doctor Faustus)
and compare the whole set with Spenser again (f. Q.) :
Upon her eyelids many graces sate
Under the shadow of her even brows,
a passage which Mr. Robertson says Spenser himself
used in three other places.
This economy is frequent in Marlowe. Within
Tamburlaine it occurs in the form of monotony,
especially in the facile use of resonant names (e.g.
the recurrence of "Caspia" or "Caspian" with the
same tone effect), a practice in which Marlowe was
followed by Milton, but which Marlowe himself
outgrew. Again,
Zenocrate, lovlier than the love of Jove,
Brighter than is the silver Rhodope,
is paralleled later by
Zenocrate, the lovliest maid alive,
Fairer than rocks of pearl and precious stone.
One line Marlowe remodels with triumphant
success :
And set black streamers in the firmament
( Tamburlaine)
becomes
See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament !
(Doctor Faustus)
The verse accomplishments of Tamburlaim are
notably two : Marlowe gets into blank verse the
82
The Blank Verse of Christopher Marlowe
melody of Spenser, and he gets a new driving power
by reinforcing the sentence period against the line
period. The rapid long sentence, running line into
line, as in the famous soliloquies " Nature com-
pounded of four elements " and " What is beauty,
saith my sufferings, then ? " marks the certain escape
of blank verse from the rhymed couplet, and from
the elegiac or rather pastoral note of Surrey, to which
Tennyson returned. If you contrast these two solilo-
quies with the verse of Marlowe's greatest contem-
porary, Kyd by no means a despicable versifier
you see the importance of the innovation :
The one took sanctuary, and, being sent for out,
Was murdered in Southwark as he passed
To Greenwich, where the Lord Protector lay.
Black Will was burned in Flushing on a stage ;
Green was hanged at Osbridge in Kent . . .
which is not really inferior to :
So these four abode
Within one house together ; and as years
Went forward, Mary took another mate ;
But Dora lived unmarried till her death.
(Tennyson, Dora)
In Faustus Marlowe went farther : he broke up the
line, to a gain in intensity, in the last soliloquy ; and
he developed a new and important conversational
tone in the dialogues of Faustus with the devil.
Edward II. has never lacked consideration : it is
more desirable, in brief space, to remark upon two
plays, one of which has been misunderstood and the
other underrated. These are the Jew of Malta and
Dido Queen of Carthage. Of the first of these, it has
always been said that the end, even the last two acts,
83
The Sacred Wood
are unworthy of the first three. If one takes the
Jew of Malta not as a tragedy, or as a " tragedy of
blood," but as a farce, the concluding act becomes
intelligible j and if we attend with a careful ear to the
versification, we find that Marlowe develops a tone
to suit this farce, and even perhaps that this tone is
his most powerful and mature tone. I say farce, but
with the enfeebled humour of our times the word is a
misnomer ; it is the farce of the old English humour,
the terribly serious, even savage comic humour, the
humour which spent its last breath on the decadent
genius of Dickens. It has nothing in common with
J. M. Barrie, Captain Bairnsfather, or Punch. It is
the humour of that very serious (but very different)
play, Volpone.
First, be thou void of these affections,
Compassion, love, vain hope, and heartless fear ;
Be moved at nothing, see thou pity none . . .
As for myself, I walk abroad o' nights,
And kill sick people groaning under walls :
Sometimes I go about and poison wells . . .
and the last words of Barabas complete this pro-
digious caricature :
But now begins th' extremity of heat
To pinch me with intolerable pangs :
Die, life ! fly, soul ! tongue, curse thy fill, and die !
It is something which Shakespeare could not do,
and which he could not have understood.
Dido appears to be a hurried play, perhaps done to
order with the sEneid in front of him. But even here
there is progress. The account of the sack of Troy
is in this newer style of Marlowe's, this style which
The Blank Verse of Christopher Marlowe
secures its emphasis by always hesitating on the edge
of caricature at the right moment :
The Grecian soldiers, tir'd with ten years war,
Began to cry, " Let us unto our ships,
Troy is invincible, why stay we here?" . . .
By this, the camp was come unto the walls,
And through the breach did march into the streets,
Where, meeting with the rest, " Kill, kill ! " they cried. . . .
And after him, his band of Myrmidons,
With balls of wild-fire in their murdering paws . . .
At last, the soldiers pull'd her by the heels,
And swung her howling in the empty air. . . .
We saw Cassandra sprawling in the streets . . .
This is not Vergil, or Shakespeare; it is pure
Marlowe. By comparing the whole speech with
Clarence's dream, in Richard ///., one acquires a
little insight into the difference between Marlowe and
Shakespeare :
What scourge for perjury
Can this dark monarchy afford false Clarence?
There, on the other hand, is what Marlowe's style
could not do ; the phrase has a concision which is
almost classical, certainly Dantesque. Again, as often
with the Elizabethan dramatists, there are lines in
Marlowe, besides the many lines that Shakespeare
adapted, that might have been written by either :
If thou wilt stay,
Leap in mine arms ; mine arms are open wide ;
If not, turn from me, and I'll turn from thee ;
For though thou hast the heart to say farewell,
I have not power to stay thee.
85
The Sacred Wood
But the direction in which Marlowe's verse might
have moved, had he not " dyed swearing," is quite un-
Shakespearean, is toward this intense and serious and
indubitably great poetry, which, like some great
painting and sculpture, attains its effects by some-
thing not unlike caricature.
86
Hamlet and His Problems & <* o
FEW critics have even admitted that Hamlet
the play is the primary problem, and Hamlet the
character only secondary. And Hamlet the character
has had an especial temptation for that most danger-
ous type of critic : the critic with a mind which is
naturally of the creative order, but which through
some weakness in creative power exercises itself in
criticism instead. These minds often find in Hamlet
a vicarious existence for their own artistic realization.
Such a mind had Goethe, who made of Hamlet a
Werther; and such had Coleridge, who made of
Hamlet a Coleridge ; and probably neither of these
men in writing about Hamlet remembered that his
first business was to study a work of art. The kind
of criticism that Goethe and Coleridge produced, in
writing of Hamlet, is the most misleading kind
possible. For they both possessed unquestionable
critical insight, and both make their critical aberrations
the more plausible by the substitution of their own
Hamlet for Shakespeare's which their creative gift
effects. We should be thankful that Walter Pater
did not fix his attention on this play.
Two recent writers, Mr. J. M. Robertson and
Professor Stoll of the University of Minnesota, have
issued small books which can be praised for moving
in the other direction. Mr. Stoll performs a service
87
The Sacred Wood
in recalling to our attention the labours of the critics
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 1 observing
that
they knew less about psychology than more recent
Hamlet critics, but they were nearer in spirit to
Shakespeare's art ; and as they insisted on the im-
portance of the effect of the whole rather than on
the importance of the leading character, they were
nearer, in their old-fashioned way, to the secret of
dramatic art in general.
Qua work of art, the work of art cannot be inter-
preted; there is nothing to interpret; we can only
criticize it according to standards, in comparison to
other works of art ; and for " interpretation " the chief
task is the presentation of relevant historical facts
which the reader is not assumed to know. Mr.
Robertson points out, very pertinently, how critics have
failed in their " interpretation " of Hamlet by ignor-
ing what ought to be very obvious: that Hamlet
is a stratification, that it represents the efforts of a
series of men, each making what he could out of the
work of his predecessors. The Hamlet of Shake-
speare will appear to us very differently if, instead of
treating the whole action of the play as due to Shake-
speare's design, we perceive his Hamlet to be super-
posed upon much cruder material which persists even
in the final form.
We know that there was an older play by Thomas
Kyd, that extraordinary dramatic (if not poetic) genius
who was in all probability the author of two plays so
dissimilar as the Spanish Tragedy and Arden of
1 1 have never, by the way, seen a cogent refutation of Thomas
Rymer's objections to Othello*
88
Hamlet and His Problems
Fever sham \ and what this play was like we can
guess from three clues : from the Spanish Tragedy
itself, from the tale of Belleforest upon which Kyd's
Hamlet must have been based, and from a version
acted in Germany in Shakespeare's lifetime which
bears strong evidence of having been adapted from
the earlier, not from the later, play. From these three
sources it is clear that in the earlier play the motive
was a revenge-motive simply ; that the action or delay
is caused, as in the Spanish Tragedy, solely by the
difficulty of assassinating a monarch surrounded by
guards; and that the "madness" of Hamlet was
feigned in order to escape suspicion, and successfully.
In the final play of Shakespeare, on the other hand,
there is a motive which is more important than that
of revenge, and which explicitly " blunts " the latter ;
the delay in revenge is unexplained on grounds of
necessity or expediency ; and the effect of the " mad-
ness " is not to lull but to arouse the king's suspicion.
The alteration is not complete enough, however, to
be convincing. Furthermore, there are verbal parallels
so close to the Spanish Tragedy as to leave no doubt
that in places Shakespeare was merely revising the
text of Kyd. And finally there are unexplained scenes
the Polonius-Laertes and the Polonius-Reynaldo
scenes for which there is little excuse ; these scenes
are not in the verse style of Kyd, and not beyond doubt
in the style of Shakespeare. These Mr. Robertson
believes to be scenes in the original play of Kyd
reworked by a third hand, perhaps Chapman, before
Shakespeare touched the play. And he concludes,
with very strong show of reason, that the origina
play of Kyd was, like certain other revenge plays,
The Sacred Wood
in two parts of five acts each. The upshot of Mr.
Robertson's examination is, we believe, irrefragable :
that Shakespeare's Hamlet, so far as it is Shake-
speare's, is a play dealing with the effect of a mother's
guilt upon her son, and that Shakespeare was unable
to impose this motive successfully upon the "in-
tractable " material of the old play.
Of the intractability there can be no doubt. So
far from being Shakespeare's masterpiece, the play is
most certainly an artistic failure. In several ways the
play is puzzling, and disquieting as is none of the
others. Of all the plays it is the longest and is
possibly the one on which Shakespeare spent most
pains ; and yet he has left in it superfluous and incon-
sistent scenes which even hasty revision should have
noticed. The versification is variable. Lines like
Look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastern hill,
are of the Shakespeare of Romeo and Juliet* The
lines in Act v. sc. ii.,
Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep . . .
Up from my cabin,
My sea-gown scarfd about me, in the dark
Grop'd I to find out them : had my desire ;
Finger'd their packet ;
are of his quite mature. Both workmanship and
thought are in an unstable condition. We are surely
justified in attributing the play, with that other pro-
foundly interesting play of " intractable " material and
astonishing versification, Measure for Measure, to a
period of crisis, after which follow the tragic successes
90
Hamlet and His Problems
which culminate in Coriolanus. Coriolanus may
be not as "interesting" as Hamlet, but it is, with
Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare's most assured
artistic success. And probably more people have
thought Hamlet a work of art because they found
it interesting, than have found it interesting because
it is a work of art. It is the "Mona Lisa" of
literature.
The grounds of Hamlefs failure are not
immediately obvious. Mr. Robertson is undoubtedly
correct in concluding that the essential emotion of
the play is the feeling of a son towards a guilty
mother :
[Hamlet's] tone is that of one who has suffered
tortures on the score of his mother's degradation. . . .
The guilt of a mother is an almost intolerable
motive for drama, but it had to be maintained and
emphasized to supply a psychological solution, or
rather a hint of one.
This, however, is by no means the whole story. It is
not merely the " guilt of a mother " that cannot be
handled as Shakespeare handled the suspicion of
Othello, the infatuation of Antony, or the pride of
Coriolanus. The subject might conceivably have
expanded into a tragedy like these, intelligible,
self-complete, in the sunlight. Hamlet, like the
sonnets, is full of some stuff that the writer could not
drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art.
And when we search for this feeling, we find it, as in
the sonnets, very difficult to localize. You cannot
point to it in the speeches ; indeed, if you examine
the two famous soliloquies you see the versification of
Shakespeare, but a content which might be claimed
91
The Sacred Wood
by another, perhaps by the author of the Revenge of
Bussy d'AmboiS) Act v. sc. i. We find Shakespeare's
Hamlet not in the action, not in any quotations
that we might select, so much as in an unmistakable
tone which is unmistakably not in the earlier play.
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of
art is by finding an " objective correlative " ; in other
words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events
which shall be the formula of that particular emotion ;
such that when the external facts, which must ter-
minate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion
is immediately evoked. If you examine any of
Shakespeare's more successful tragedies, you will find
this exact equivalence ; you will find that the state of
mind of Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep has been
communicated to you by a skilful accumulation of
imagined sensory impressions ; the words of Macbeth
on hearing of his wife's death strike us as if, given the
sequence of events, these words were automatically
released by the last event in the series. The artistic
" inevitability " lies in this complete adequacy of the
external to the emotion ; and this is precisely what is
deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is domin-
ated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it
is in excess of the facts as they appear. And the
supposed identity of Hamlet with his author is
genuine to this point : that Hamlet's bafflement at the
absence of objective equivalent to his feelings is a
prolongation of the bafflement of his creator in the face
of his artistic problem. Hamlet is up against the
difficulty that his disgust is occasioned by his mother,
but that his mother is not an adequate equivalent for
it ; his disgust envelops and exceeds her. It is thus
92
Hamlet and His Problems
a feeling which he cannot understand; he cannot
objectify it, and it therefore remains to poison life and
obstruct action. None of the possible actions can
satisfy it ; and nothing that Shakespeare can do with
the plot can express Hamlet for him. And it must be
noticed that the very nature of the donn'ees of the
problem precludes objective equivalence. To have
heightened the criminality of Gertrude would have
been to provide the formula for a totally different
emotion in Hamlet; it is just because her character
is so negative and insignificant that she arouses in
Hamlet the feeling which she is incapable of repre-
senting.
The "madness" of Hamlet lay to Shakespeare's
hand ; in the earlier play a simple ruse, and to the
end, we may presume, understood as a ruse by the
audience. For Shakespeare it is less than madness
and more than feigned. The levity of Hamlet, his
repetition of phrase, his puns, are not part of a
deliberate plan of dissimulation, but a form of
emotional relief. In the character Hamlet it is the
buffoonery of an emotion which can find no outlet
in action ; in the dramatist it is the buffoonery of an
emotion which he cannot express in art. The intense
feeling, ecstatic or terrible, without an object or
exceeding its object, is something which every person
of sensibility has known; it is doubtless a study to
pathologists. It often occurs in adolescence: the
ordinary person puts these feelings to sleep, or trims
down his feeling to fit the business world ; the artist
keeps it alive by his ability to intensify the world
to his emotions. The Hamlet of Laforgue is an
adolescent ; the Hamlet of Shakespeare is not, he has
93
The Sacred Wood
not that explanation and excuse. We must simply
admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem which
proved too much for him. Why he attempted it at
all is an insoluble puzzle ; under compulsion of what
experience he attempted to express the inexpressibly
horrible, we cannot ever know. We need a great
many facts in his biography ; and we should like to
know whether, and when, and after or at the same
time as what personal experience, he read Montaigne,
n. xii., Apologie de Raimond Sebond. We should
have, finally, to know something which is by
hypothesis unknowable, for we assume it to be an
experience which, in the manner indicated, exceeded
the facts. We should have to understand things
which Shakespeare did not understand himself.
94
Ben Jonson *> *> o o o
THE reputation of Jonson has been of the
most deadly kind that can be compelled upon
the memory of a great poet. To be universally ac-
cepted ; to be damned by the praise that quenches
all desire to read the book; to be afflicted by the
imputation of the virtues which excite the least
pleasure ; and to be read only by historians and anti-
quaries this is the most perfect conspiracy of ap-
proval. For some generations the reputation of
Jonson has been carried rather as a liability than as
an asset in the balance-sheet of English literature.
No critic has succeeded in making him appear
pleasurable or even interesting. Swinburne's book on
Jonson satisfies no curiosity and stimulates no
thought. For the critical study in the "Men of
Letters Series" by Mr. Gregory Smith there is a
place; it satisfies curiosity, it supplies many just
observations, it provides valuable matter on the
neglected masques ; it only fails to remodel the image
of Jonson which is settled in our minds. Probably
the fault lies with several generations of our poets. It
is not that the value of poetry is only its value to
living poets for their own work ; but appreciation is
akin to creation, and true enjoyment of poetry is
related to the stirring of suggestion, the stimulus that
95
The Sacred Wood
a poet feels in his enjoyment of other poetry. Jonson
has provided no creative stimulus for a very long time ;
consequently we must look back as far as Dryden
precisely, a poetic practitioner who learned from Jonson
before we find a living criticism of Jonson's work.
Yet there are possibilities for Jonson even now.
We have no difficulty in seeing what brought him to
this pass; how, in contrast, not with Shakespeare,
but with Marlowe, Webster, Donne, Beaumont, and
Fletcher, he has been paid out with reputation instead
of enjoyment. He is no less a poet than these men,
but his poetry is of the surface. Poetry of the surface
cannot be understood without study; for to deal
with the surface of life, as Jonson dealt with it, is to
deal so deliberately that we too must be deliberate,
in order to understand. Shakespeare, and smaller
men also, are in the end more difficult, but they offer
something at the start to encourage the student or to
satisfy those who want nothing more; they are
suggestive, evocative, a phrase, a voice; they offer
poetry in detail as well as in design. So does Dante
offer something, a phrase everywhere (tu se' ombra ed
ombra vedi) even to readers who have no Italian ; and
Dante and Shakespeare have poetry of design as well
as of detail. But the polished veneer of Jonson
reflects only the lazy reader's fatuity; unconscious
does not respond to unconscious ; no swarms of in-
articulate feelings are aroused. The immediate
appeal of Jonson is to the mind ; his emotional tone
is not in the single verse, but in the design of the
whole. But not many people are capable of discover-
ing for themselves the beauty which is only found
after labour; and Jonson's industrious readers have
96
Ben Jonson
been those whose interest was historical and curious,
and those who have thought that in discovering the
historical and curious interest they had discovered the
artistic value as well. When we say that Jonson
requires study, we do not mean study of his classical
scholarship or of seventeenth-century manners. We
mean intelligent saturation in his work as a whole ;
we mean that in order to enjoy him at all, we must
get to the centre of his work and his temperament,
and that we must see him unbiased by time, as a
contemporary. And to see him as a contemporary
does not so much require the power of putting our-
selves into seventeenth-century London as it requires
the power of setting Jonson in our London : a more
difficult triumph of divination.
It is generally conceded that Jonson failed as a
tragic dramatist; and it is usually agreed that he
failed because his genius was for satiric comedy and
because of the weight of pedantic learning with which
he burdened his two tragic failures. The second
point marks an obvious error of detail ; the first is
too crude a statement to be accepted ; to say that he
failed because his genius was unsuited to tragedy is
to tell us nothing at all. Jonson did not write a
good tragedy, but we can see no reason why he should
not have written one. If two plays so different
as The Tempest and The Silent Woman are both
comedies, surely the category of tragedy could be
made wide enough to include something possible for
Jonson to have done. But the classification of
tragedy and comedy, while it may be sufficient to
mark the distinction in a dramatic literature of more
rigid form and treatment it may distinguish Aristo-
G 97
The Sacred Wood
phanes from Euripides is not adequate to a drama
of such variations as the Elizabethans. Tragedy is a
crude classification for plays so different in their
tone as Macbeth, The Jew of Malta, and The Witch of
Edmonton ; and it does not help us much to say
that The Merchant of Venice and The Alchemist are
comedies. Jonson had his own scale, his own in-
strument. The merit which Catiline possesses is the
same merit that is exhibited more triumphantly in
Volpone \ Catiline fails, not because it is too laboured
and conscious, but because it is not conscious
enough; because Jonson in this play was not alert
to his own idiom, not clear in his mind as to what
his temperament wanted him to do. In Catiline
Jonson conforms, or attemps to conform, to con-
ventions ; not to the conventions of antiquity, which
he had exquisitely under control, but to the con-
ventions of tragico-historical drama of his time. It
is not the Latin erudition that sinks Catiline, but
the application of that erudition to a form which was
not the proper vehicle for the mind which had
amassed the erudition.
If you look at Catiline that dreary Pyrrhic victory
of tragedy you find two passages to be successful :
Act ii. scene i, the dialogue of the political ladies,
and the Prologue of Sylla's ghost. These two
passages are genial. The soliloquy of the ghost
is a characteristic Jonson success in content and in
versification
Dost thou not feel me, Rome ? not yet ! is night
So heavy on thee, and my weight so light?
Can Sylla's ghost arise within thy walls,
Less threatening^than an earthquake, the'quick falls
98
Ben Jonson
Of thee and thine ? Shake not the frighted heads
Of thy steep towers, or shrink to their first beds?
Or as their ruin the large Tyber fills.
Make that swell up, and drown thy seven proud hills? . . .
This is the learned, but also the creative, Jonson.
Without concerning himself with the character of
Sulla, and in lines of invective, Jonson makes Sylla's
ghost, while the words are spoken, a living and
terrible force. The words fall with as determined
beat as if they were the will of the morose Dictator
himself. You may say : merely invective ; but mere
invective, even if as superior to the clumsy fisticuffs
of Marston and Hall as Jonson's verse is superior to
theirs, would not create a living figure as Jonson has
done in this long tirade. And you may say : rhetoric ;
but if we are to call it "rhetoric" we must subject
that term to a closer dissection than any to which it
is accustomed. What Jonson has done here is not
merely a fine speech. It is the careful, precise filling
in of a strong and simple outline, and at no point
does it overflow the outline ; it is far more careful and
precise in its obedience to this outline than are many
of the speeches in Tamburlainc. The outline is not
Sulla, for Sulla has nothing to do with it, but " Sylla's
ghost." The words may not be suitable to an
historical Sulla, or to anybody in history, but they
are a perfect expression for "Sylla's ghost." You
cannot say they are rhetorical "because people do
not talk like that," you cannot call them "verbi-
age " ; they do not exhibit prolixity or redundancy or
the other vices in the rhetoric books; there is a
definite artistic emotion which demands expression at
that length. The words themselves are mostly simple
90
The Sacred Wood
words, the syntax is natural, the language austere
rather than adorned. Turning then to the induction
of The Poetaster^ we find another success of the same
kind-
Light, I salute thee, but with wounded nerves . . .
Men may not talk in that way, but the spirit of envy
does, and in the words of Jonson envy is a real and
living person. It is not human life that informs envy
and Sylla's ghost, but it is energy of which human
life is only another variety.
Returning to Catiline^ we find that the best scene
in the body of the play is one which cannot be
squeezed into a tragic frame, and which appears to
belong to satiric comedy. The scene between Fulvia
and Galla and Sempronia is a living scene in a
wilderness of oratory. And as it recalls other scenes
there is a suggestion of the college of ladies in The
Silent Woman it looks like a comedy scene. And it
appears to be satire.
They shall all give and pay well, that come here,
If they will have it ; and that, jewels, pearl,
Plate, or round sums to buy these. I'm not taken
With a cob-swan or a high-mounting bull,
As foolish Leda and Europa were ;
But the bright gold, with Danae. For such price
I would endure a rough, harsh Jupiter,
Or ten such thundering gamesters, and refrain
To laugh at 'em, till they are gone, with my much suffering.
This scene is no more comedy than it is tragedy, and
the " satire " is merely a medium for the essential
emotion. Jonson's drama is only incidentally satire,
because it is only incidentally a criticism upon the
100
Ben Jonson
actual world. It is not satire in the way in which
the work of Swift or the work of Moliere may be
called satire : that is, it does not find its source in
any precise emotional attitude or precise intellectual
criticism of the actual world. It is satire perhaps as
the work of Rabelais is satire ; certainly not more so.
The important thing is that if fiction can be divided
into creative fiction and critical fiction, Jonson's is
creative. That he was a great critic, our first great
critic, does not affect this assertion. Every creator
is also a critic ; Jonson was a conscious critic, but he
was also conscious in his creations. Certainly, one
sense in which the term " critical " may be applied to
fiction is a sense in which the term might be used
of a method antithetical to Jonson's. It is the
method of Education Sentimentale. The characters of
Jonson, of Shakespeare, perhaps of all the greatest
drama, are drawn in positive and simple outlines.
They may be filled in, and by Shakespeare they are
filled in, by much detail or many shifting aspects;
but a clear and sharp and simple form remains
through these though it would be hard to say in
what the clarity and sharpness and simplicity of
Hamlet consists. But Fre'de'ric Moreau is not made
in that way. He is constructed partly by negative
definition, built up by a great number of observa-
tions. We cannot isolate him from the environment
in which we find him; it may be an environment
which is or can be much universalized ; nevertheless
it, and the figure in it, consist of very many observed
particular facts, the actual world. Without this world
the figure dissolves. The ruling faculty is a critical
perception, a commentary upon experienced feeling
101
The Sacred Wood
and sensation. If this is true of Flaubert, it is true
in a higher degree of Moliere than of Jonson. The
broad farcical lines of Moliere may seem to be the
same drawing as Jonson's. But Moliere say in
Alceste or Monsieur Jourdain is criticizing the
actual; the reference to the actual world is more
direct. And having a more tenuous reference, the
work of Jonson is much less directly satirical.
This leads us to the question of Humours.
Largely on the evidence of the two Humour plays,
it is sometimes assumed that Jonson is occupied with
types ; typical exaggerations, or exaggerations of type.
The Humour definition, the expressed intention of
Jonson, may be satisfactory for these two plays.
Every Man in his Humour is the first mature work
of Jonson, and the student of Jonson must study it ;
but it is not the play in which Jonson found his
genius : it is the last of his plays to read first. If one
reads Volpone, and after that re-reads the Jew of
Malta ; then returns to Jonson and reads Bartholomeiv
Fair, The Alchemist, Epicxne and The Devil is an
Ass, and finally Catiline, it is possible to arrive at a
fair opinion of the poet and the dramatist.
The Humour, even at the beginning, is not a type,
as in Marston's satire, but a simplified and somewhat
distorted individual with a typical mania. In the
later work, the Humour definition quite fails to
account for the total effect produced. The characters
of Shakespeare are such as might exist in different
circumstances than those in which Shakespeare sets
them. The latter appear to be those which extract
from the characters the most intense and interesting
realization; but that realization has not exhausted
I O2
Ben Jonson
their possibilities. Volpone's life, on the other hand,
is bounded by the scene in which it is played; in
fact, the life is the life of the scene and is derivatively
the life of Volpone; the life of the character is
inseparable from the life of the drama. This is not
dependence upon a background, or upon a substratum
of fact. The emotional effect is single and simple.
Whereas in Shakespeare the effect is due to the way
in which the characters act upon one another, in
Jonson it is given by the way in which the characters
fit in with each other. The artistic result of Volpone
is not due to any effect that Volpone, Mosca,
Corvino, Corbaccio, Voltore have upon each other,
but simply to their combination into a whole. And
these figures are not personifications of passions;
separately, they have not even that reality, they are
constituents. It is a similar indication of Jonson's
method that you can hardly pick out a line of
Jonson's and say confidently that it is great poetry ;
but there are many extended passages to which you
cannot deny that honour.
I will have all my beds blown up, not stuft ;
Down is too hard ; and then, mine oval room
Fill'd with such pictures as Tiberius took
From Elephantis, and dull Aretine
But coldly imitated. Then, my glasses
Cut in more subtle angles, to disperse
And multiply the figures, as I walk. . . .
Jonson is the legitimate heir of Marlowe. The
man who wrote, in Volpone :
for thy love,
In varying figures, I would have contended
With the blue Proteus, or the horned flood. . . .
103
The Sacred Wood
and
See, a carbuncle
May put out both the eyes of our Saint Mark ;
A diamond would have bought Lollia Paulina,
When she came in like star-light, hid with jewels. . . .
is related to Marlowe as a poet ; and if Marlowe is
a poet, Jonson is also. And, if Jonson's comedy is
a comedy of humours, then Marlowe's tragedy, a large
part of it, is a tragedy of humours. But Jonson has
too exclusively been considered as the typical repre-
sentative of a point of view toward comedy. He has
suffered from his great reputation as a critic and
theorist, from the effects of his intelligence. We
have been taught to think of him as the man, the
dictator (confusedly in our minds with his later
namesake), as the literary politician impressing his
views upon a generation; we are offended by
the constant reminder of his scholarship. We
forget the comedy in the humours, and the serious
artist in the scholar. Jonson has suffered in public
opinion, as anyone must suffer who is forced to talk
about his art.
If you examine the first hundred lines or more of
Volpone the verse appears to be in the manner of
Marlowe, more deliberate, more mature, but without
Marlowe's inspiration. It looks like mere " rhetoric,"
certainly not "deeds and language such as men do
use " ! It appears to us, in fact, forced and flagitious
bombast. That it is not " rhetoric," or at least not
vicious rhetoric, we do not know until we are able
to review the whole play. For the consistent main-
tenance "of this manner conveys in the end an effect
not of verbosity, but of bold, even shocking and
104
Ben Jonson
terrifying directness. We have difficulty in saying
exactly what produces this simple and single effect.
It is not in any ordinary way due to management of
intrigue. Jonson employs immense dramatic con-
structive skill : it is not so much skill in plot as skill
in doing without a plot. He never manipulates as
complicated a plot as that of The Merchant of Venice ;
he has in his best plays nothing like the intrigue of
Restoration comedy. In Bartholomew Fair it is
hardly a plot at all; the marvel of the play is the
bewildering rapid chaotic action of the fair ; it is the
fair itself, not anything that happens to take place
in the fair. In Volpone, or The Alchemist^ or The
Silent Woman> the plot is enough to keep the players
in motion ; it is rather an " action " than a plot. The
plot does not hold the play together ; what holds the
play together is a unity of inspiration that radiates
into plot and personages alike.
We have attempted to make more precise the sense
in which it was said that Jonson's work is "of the
surface " ; carefully avoiding the word " superficial."
For there is work contemporary with Jonson's which
is superficial in a pejorative sense in which the word
cannot be applied to Jonson the work of Beaumont
and Fletcher. If we look at the work of Jonson's
great contemporaries, Shakespeare, and also Donne
and Webster and Tourneur (and sometimes Middleton),
have a depth, a third dimension, as Mr. Gregory
Smith rightly calls it, which Jonson's work has not.
Their words have often a network of tentacular roots
reaching down to the deepest terrors and desires.
Jonson's most certainly have not ; but in Beaumont
and Fletcher we may think that at times we find it.
105
The Sacred Wood
Looking closer, we discover that the blossoms of
Beaumont and Fletcher's imagination draw no sus-
tenance from the soil, but are cut and slightly
withered flowers stuck into sand.
Wilt thou, hereafter, when they talk of me,
As thou shalt hear nothing but infamy,
Remember some of these things? . . .
I pray thee, do ; for thou shalt never see me so again.
Hair woven in many a curious warp,
Able in endless error to enfold
The wandering soul ; . . .
Detached from its context, this looks like the verse
of the greater poets ; just as lines of Jonson, detached
from their context, look like inflated or empty fustian.
But the evocative quality of the verse of Beaumont
and Fletcher depends upon a clever appeal to
emotions and associations which they have not them-
selves grasped; it is hollow. It is superficial with
a vacuum behind it; the superficies of Jonson is
solid. It is what it is; it does not pretend to be
another thing. But it is so very conscious and
deliberate that we must look with eyes alert to the
whole before we apprehend the significance of any
part. We cannot call a man's work superficial when
it is the creation of a world ; a man cannot be
accused of dealing superficially with the world which
he himself has created ; the superficies is the world.
Jonson's characters conform to the logic of the
emotions of their world. It is a world like Lobat-
chevsky's ; the worlds created by artists like Jonson
are like systems of non-Euclidean geometry. They
are not fancy, because they have a logic of their
own ; and this logic illuminates the actual world,
106
Ben Jonson
because it gives us a new point of view from which
to inspect it.
A writer of power and intelligence, Jonson en-
deavoured to promulgate, as a formula and programme
of reform, what he chose to do himself; and he not
unnaturally laid down in abstract theory what is in
reality a personal point of view. And it is in the end
of no value to discuss Jonson's theory and practice
unless we recognize and seize this point of view,
which escapes the formulae, and which is what makes
his plays worth reading. Jonson behaved as the
great creative mind that he was : he created his own
world, a world from which his followers, as well as
the dramatists who were trying to do something
wholly different, are excluded. Remembering this,
we turn to Mr. Gregory Smith's objection that
Jonson's characters lack the third dimension, have no
life out of the theatrical existence in which they
appear and demand an inquest. The objection
implies that the characters are purely the work of
intellect, or the result of superficial observation of
a world which is faded or mildewed. It implies that
the characters are lifeless. But if we dig beneath the
theory, beneath the observation, beneath the deliberate
drawing and the theatrical and dramatic elaboration,
there is discovered a kind of power, animating
Volpone, Busy, Fitzdottrel, the literary ladies of
Epiccene, even Bobadil, which comes from below
the intellect, and for which no theory of humours
will account. And it is the same kind of power
which vivifies Trimalchio, and Panurge, and some
but not all of the "comic" characters of Dickens.
The fictive life of this kind is not to be circum-
107
The Sacred Wood
scribed by a reference to " comedy " or to " farce " ;
it is not exactly the kind of life which informs the
characters of Moliere or that which informs those of
Marivaux two writers who were, besides, doing
something quite different the one from the other.
But it is something which distinguishes Barabas from
Shylock, Epicure Mammon from Falstaff, Faustus
from if you will Macbeth ; Marlowe and Jonson
from Shakespeare and the Shakespearians, Webster,
and Tourneur. It is not merely Humours: for
neither Volpone nor Mosca is a humour. No theory
of humours could account for Jonson's best plays or
the best characters in them. We want to know at
what point the comedy of humours passes into a work
of art, and why Jonson is not Brome.
The creation of a work of art, we will say the crea-
tion of a character in a drama, consists in the process
of transfusion of the personality, or, in a deeper sense,
the life, of the author into the character. This is a
very different matter from the orthodox creation in
one's own image. The ways in which the passions
and desires of the creator may be satisfied in the work
of art are complex and devious. In a painter they
may take the form of a predilection for certain colours,
tones, or lightings; in a writer the original impulse
may be even more strangely transmuted. Now, we
may say with Mr. Gregory Smith that Falstaff or a
score of Shakespeare's characters have a "third
dimension " that Jonson's have not. This will mean,
not that Shakespeare's spring from the feelings or
imagination and Jonson's from the intellect or inven-
tion ; they have equally an emotional source ; but that
Shakespeare's represent a more complex tissue of
108
Ben Jonson
feelings and desires, as well as a more supple, a more
susceptible temperament. Falstaff is not only the
roast Malmesbury ox with the pudding in his belly ;
he also " grows old," and, finally, his nose is as sharp
as a pen. He was perhaps the satisfaction of more,
and of more complicated feelings ; and perhaps he was,
as the great tragic characters must have been, the off-
spring of deeper, less apprehensible feelings : deeper,
but not necessarily stronger or more intense, than
those of Jonson. It is obvious that the spring of the
difference is not the difference between feeling and
thought, or superior insight, superior perception, on the
part of Shakespeare, but his susceptibility to a greater
range of emotion, and emotion deeper and more
obscure. But his characters are no more " alive "
than are the characters of Jonson.
The world they live in is a larger one. But small
worlds the worlds which artists create do not differ
only in magnitude ; if they are complete worlds, drawn
to scale in every part, they differ in kind also. And
Jonson's world has this scale. His type of personality
found its relief in something falling under the category
of burlesque or farce though when you are dealing
with a unique world, like his, these terms fail to
appease the desire for definition. It is not, at all
events, the farce of Moliere: the latter is more
analytic, more an intellectual redistribution. It is
not defined by the word " satire." Jonson poses as a
satirist. But satire like Jonson's is great in the end
not by hitting off its object, but by creating it ; the
satire is merely the means which leads to the aesthetic
result, the impulse which projects a new world into a
new orbit. In Every Man in his Humour there is
109
The Sacred Wood
a neat, a very neat, comedy of humours. In dis-
covering and proclaiming in this play the new genre
Jonson was simply recognizing, unconsciously, the
route which opened out in the proper direction for
his instincts. His characters are and remain, like
Marlowe's, simplified characters; but the simplification
does not consist in the dominance of a particular
humour or monomania. That is a very superficial
account of it. The simplification consists largely in
reduction of detail, in the seizing of aspects relevant to
the relief of an emotional impulse which remains the
same for that character, in making the character
conform to a particular setting. This stripping is
essential to the art, to which is also essential a flat
distortion in the drawing ; it is an art of caricature, of
great caricature, like Marlowe's. It is a great carica-
ture, which is beautiful ; and a great humour, which is
serious. The " world " of Jonson is sufficiently large ;
it is a world of poetic imagination ; it is sombre. He
did not get the third dimension, but he was not
trying to get it.
If we approach Jonson with less frozen awe of his
learning, with a clearer understanding of his " rhetoric "
and its applications, if we grasp the fact that the
knowledge required of the reader is not archaeology
but knowledge of Jonson, we can derive not only
instruction in non Euclidean humanity but enjoy-
ment. We can even apply him, be aware of him as a
part of our literary inheritance craving further expres-
sion. Of all the dramatists of his time, Jonson is
probably the one whom the present age would find the
most sympathetic, if it knew him. There is a brutality,
a lack of sentiment, a polished surface, a handling of
IIO
Ben Jonson
large bold designs in brilliant colours, which ought to
attract about three thousand people in London and
elsewhere. At least, if we had a contemporary
Shakespeare and a contemporary Jonson, it would be
the Jonson who would arouse the enthusiasm of the
intelligentsia! Though he is saturated in literature,
he never sacrifices the theatrical qualities theatrical
in the most favourable sense to literature or to the
study of character. His work is a titanic show. But
Jonson's masques, an important part of his work, are
neglected ; our flaccid culture lets shows and literature
fade, but prefers faded literature to faded shows.
There are hundreds of people who have read Comus
to ten who have read the Masque of Blackness. Comus
contains fine poetry, and poetry exemplifying some
merits to which Jonson's masque poetry cannot
pretend. Nevertheless, Comus is the death of the
masque ; it is the transition of a form of art even of
a form which existed for but a short generation into
" literature," literature cast in a form which has lost
its application. Even though Comus was a masque at
Ludlow Castle, Jonson had, what Milton came per-
haps too late to have, a sense for living art ; his art
was applied. The masques can still be read, and with
pleasure, by anyone who will take the trouble a
trouble which in this part of Jonson is, indeed, a study
of antiquities to imagine them in action, displayed
with the music, costume, dances, and the scenery of
Inigo Jones. They are additional evidence that
Jonson had a fine sense of form, of the purpose for
which a particular form is intended; evidence that
he was a literary artist even more than he was
of letters.
Ill
Philip Massinger
MASSINGER has been more fortunately and
more fairly judged than several of his greater
contemporaries. Three critics have done their best
by him : the notes of Coleridge exemplify Coleridge's
fragmentary and fine perceptions ; the essay of Leslie
Stephen is a piece of formidable destructive analysis ;
and the essay of Swinburne is Swinburne's criticism
at its best. None of these, probably, has put
Massinger finally and irrefutably into a place.
English criticism is inclined to argue or persuade
rather than to state; and, instead of forcing the
subject to expose himself, these critics have left in
their work an undissolved residuum of their own good
taste, which, however impeccable, is something that
requires our faith. The principles which animate
this taste remain unexplained. Mr. Cruickshank's
book is a work of scholarship ; and the advantage of
good scholarship is that it presents us with evidence
which is an invitation to the critical faculty of the
reader: its bestows a method, rather than a judg-
ment.
It is difficult it is perhaps the supreme difficulty
of criticism to make the facts generalize themselves ;
but Mr. Cruickshank at least presents us with facts
Philip Massinger
which are capable of generalization. This is a service
of value ; and it is therefore wholly a compliment to
the author to say that his appendices are as valuable
as the essay itself.
The sort of labour to which Mr. Cruickshank has
devoted himself is one that professed critics ought
more willingly to undertake. It is an important part
of criticism, more important than any mere expres-
sion of opinion. To understand Elizabethan drama
it is necessary to study a dozen playwrights at once,
to dissect with all care the complex growth, to ponder
collaboration to the utmost line. Reading Shake-
speare and several of his contemporaries is pleasure
enough, perhaps all the pleasure possible, for most.
But if we wish to consummate and refine this pleasure
by understanding it, to distil the last drop of it, to
press and press the essence of each author, to apply
exact measurement to our own sensations, then we
must compare; and we cannot compare without
parcelling the threads of authorship and influence.
We must employ Mr. Cruickshank's method to
examine Mr. Cruickshank's judgments ; and perhaps
the most important judgment to which he has com-
mitted himself is this :
Massinger, in his grasp of stagecraft, his flexible
metre, his desire in the sphere of ethics to exploit
both vice and virtue, is typical of an age which had
much culture, but which, without being exactly
corrupt, lacked moral fibre.
Here, in fact, is our text : to elucidate this sentence
would be to account for Massinger. We begin
vaguely with good taste, by a recognition that
H 113
The Sacred Wood
Massinger is inferior: can we trace this inferiority,
dissolve it, and have left any element of merit ?
We turn first to the parallel quotations from Massinger
and Shakespeare collocated by Mr. Cruickshank
to make manifest Massinger's indebtedness. One of
the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows.
Immature poets imitate ; mature poets steal ; bad
poets deface what they take, and good poets make it
into something better, or at least something different.
The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling
which is unique, utterly different from that from which
it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something
which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually
borrow from, authors remote in time, or alien in
language, or diverse in interest. Chapman borrowed
from Seneca ; Shakespeare and Webster from Mon-
taigne. The two great followers of Shakespeare,
Webster and Tourneur, in their mature work do not
borrow from him ; he is too close to them to be of
use to them in this way. Massinger, as Mr. Cruick-
shank shows, borrows from Shakespeare a good deal.
Let us profit by some of the quotations with which he
has provided us
Massinger : Can I call back yesterday, with all their aids
That bow unto my sceptre? or restore
My mind to that tranquillity and peace
It then enjoyed ?
Shakespeare'. Not poppy, nor mandragora,
Nor all the drowsy syrops of the world
Shall ever medecine thee to that sweet sleep
Which thou owedst yesterday.
Massinger's is a general rhetorical question, the
language just and pure, but colourless. Shakespeare's
114
Philip Massinger
has particular significance; and the adjective
" drowsy " and the verb " medecine " infuse a precise
vigour. This is, on Massinger's part, an echo rather
than an imitation or a plagiarism the basest, because
least conscious form of borrowing. " Drowsy syrop "
is a condensation of meaning frequent in Shakespeare,
but rare in Massinger.
Massinger : Thou didst not borrow of Vice her indirect,
Crooked, and abject means.
Shakespeare: God knows, my son,
By what by-paths and indirect crook'd ways
I met this crown.
Here, again, Massinger gives the general forensic
statement, Shakespeare the particular image. "In-
direct crook'd" is forceful in Shakespeare; a mere
pleonasm in Massinger. " Crook'd ways " is a
metaphor ; Massinger's phrase only the ghost of a
metaphor.
Massinger : And now, in the evening,
When thou shoud'st pass with honour to thy rest,
Wilt thou fall like a meteor?
Shakespeare'. I shall fall
Like a bright exhalation in the evening,
And no man see me more.
Here the lines of Massinger have their own beauty.
Still, a " bright exhalation " appears to the eye and
makes us catch our breath in the evening ; " meteor "
is a dim simile ; the word is worn.
Massinger'. What you deliver to me shall be lock'd up
In a strong cabinet, of which you yourself
Shall keep the key.
"5
The Sacred Wood
Shakespeare : 'Tis in my memory locked,
And you yourself shall keep the key of it.
In the preceding passage Massinger had squeezed
his simile to death, here he drags it round the city
at his heels ; and how swift Shakespeare's figure is !
We may add two more passages, not given by our
commentator; here the model is Webster. They
occur on the same page, an artless confession.
Here he comes,
His nose held up ; he hath something in the wind,
is hardly comparable to "the Cardinal lifts up his
nose like a foul porpoise before a storm," and when
we come upon
as tann'd galley-slaves
Pay such as do redeem them from the oar
it is unnecessary to turn up the great lines in the
Duchess of Malfi. Massinger fancied this galley-
slave ; for he comes with his oar again in the Bond-
man
Never did galley-slave shake off his chains,
Or looked on his redemption from the oar. . . .
Now these are mature plays ; and the Roman Actor
(from which we have drawn the two previous extracts)
is said to have been the preferred play of its author.
We may conclude directly from these quotations
that Massinger's feeling for language had outstripped
his feeling for things ; that his eye and his vocabulary
were not in close co-operation. One of the greatest
distinctions of several of his elder contemporaries
we name Middleton, Webster, Tourneur is a gift
116
Philip Massinger
for combining, for fusing into a single phrase, two
or more diverse impressions.
.... in her strong toil of grace
of Shakespeare is such a fusion; the metaphor
identifies itself with what suggests it ; the resultant
is one and is unique
Does the silk worm expend her yellow labours ? . . .
Why does yon fellow falsify highways
And lays his life between the judge's lips
To refine such a one? keeps horse and men
To beat their valours for her?
Let the common sewer take it from distinction. . . .
Lust and forgetfulness have been amongst us. ...
These lines of Tourneur and of Middleton exhibit
that perpetual slight alteration of language, words
perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden com-
binations, meanings perpetually eingeschachtelt into
meanings, which evidences a very high development
of the senses, a development of the English language
which we have perhaps never equalled. And, indeed,
with the end of Chapman, Middleton, Webster,
Tourneur, Donne we end a period when the intellect
was immediately at the tips of the senses. Sensation
became word and the word was sensation. The next
period is the period of Milton (though still with a
Marvell in it); and this period is initiated by
Massinger.
It is not that the word becomes less exact.
Massinger is, in a wholly eulogistic sense, choice and
correct. And the decay of the senses is not incon-
sistent with a greater sophistication of language.
But every vital development in language is a
117
The Sacred Wood
development of feeling as well. The verse of
Shakespeare and the major Shakespearian dramatists
is an innovation of this kind, a true mutation of
species. The verse practised by Massinger is a
different verse from that of his predecessors ; but it is
not a development based on, or resulting from, a new
way of feeling. On the contrary, it seems to lead us
away from feeling altogether.
We mean that Massinger must be placed as much
at the beginning of one period as at the end of
another. A certain Boyle, quoted by Mr. Cruick-
shank, says that Milton's blank verse owes much to
the study of Massinger's.
In the indefinable touches which make up the
music of a verse [says Boyle], in the artistic distribu-
tion of pauses, and in the unerring choice and
grouping of just those words which strike the ear as
the perfection of harmony, there are, if we leave
Cyril Tourneur's Atheists Tragedy out of the ques-
tion, only two masters in the drama, Shakespeare
in his latest period and Massinger.
This Boyle must have had a singular ear to have
preferred Tourneur's apprentice work to his
Revenger's Tragedy ', and one must think that he had
never glanced at Ford. But though the appraisal be
ludicrous, the praise is not undeserved. Mr.
Cruickshank has given us an excellent example of
Massinger's syntax
What though my father
Writ man before he was so, and confirm'd it,
By numbering that day no part of his life
In which he did not service to his country ;
Was he to be free therefore from the laws
And ceremonious form in your decrees?
118
Philip Massinger
Or else because he did as much as man
In those three memorable overthrows,
At Granson, Morat, Nancy, where his master,
The warlike Charalois, with whose misfortunes
I bear his name, lost treasure, men, and life,
To be excused from payment of those sums
Which (his own patrimony spent) his zeal
To serve his country forced him to take up !
It is impossible to deny the masterly construction of
this passage ; perhaps there is not one living poet who
could do the like. It is impossible to deny the
originality. The language is pure and correct, free
from muddiness or turbidity. Massinger does not
confuse metaphors, or heap them one upon another.
He is lucid, though not easy. But if Massinger's age,
"without being exactly corrupt, lacks moral fibre,"
Massinger's verse, without being exactly corrupt,
suffers from cerebral anaemia. To say that an
involved style is necessarily a bad style would be
preposterous. But such a style should follow the
involutions of a mode of perceiving, registering, and
digesting impressions which is also involved. It is
to be feared that the feeling of Massinger is simple
and overlaid with received ideas. Had Massinger
had a nervous system as refined as that of Middleton,
Tourneur, Webster, or Ford, his style would be a
triumph. But such a nature was not at hand, and
Massinger precedes, not another Shakespeare, but
Milton.
Massinger is, in fact, at a further remove from
Shakespeare than that other precursor of Milton
John Fletcher. Fletcher was above all an opportunist,
in his verse, in his momentary effects, never quite a
pastiche ; in his structure ready to sacrifice everything
119
The Sacred Wood
to the single scene. To Fletcher, because he was
more intelligent, less will be forgiven. Fletcher had
a cunning guess at feelings, and betrayed them;
Massinger was unconscious and innocent. As an
artisan of the theatre he is not inferior to Fletcher,
and his best tragedies have an honester unity than
Bonduca. But the unity is superficial. In the Roman
Actor the development of parts is out of all proportion
to the central theme ; in the Unnatural Combat, in
spite of the deft handling of suspense and the quick
shift from climax to a new suspense, the first part of
the play is the hatred of Malefort for his son and the
second part is his passion for his daughter. It is
theatrical skill, not an artistic conscience arranging
emotions, that holds the two parts together. In the
Duke of Milan the appearance of Sforza at the Court
of his conqueror only delays the action, or rather
breaks the emotional rhythm. And we have named
three of Massinger's best
A dramatist who so skilfully welds together parts
which have no reason for being together, who
fabricates plays so well knit and so remote from unity,
we should expect to exhibit the same synthetic
cunning in character. Mr. Cruickshank, Coleridge,
and Leslie Stephen are pretty well agreed that
Massinger is no master of characterization. You
can, in fact, put together heterogeneous parts to form
a lively play ; but a character, to be living, must be
conceived from some emotional unity. A character
is not to be composed of scattered observations of
human nature, but of parts which are felt together.
Hence it is that although Massinger's failure to draw
a moving character is no greater than his failure to
1 20
Philip Massinger
make a whole play, and probably springs from the
same defective sensitiveness, yet the failure in
character is more conspicuous and more disastrous.
A " living " character is not necessarily " true to life."
It is a person whom we can see and hear, whether he
be true or false to human nature as we know it.
What the creator of character needs is not so much
knowledge of motives as keen sensibility; the
dramatist need not understand people ; but he must
be exceptionally aware of them. This awareness was
not given to Massinger. He inherits the traditions
of conduct, female chastity, hymeneal sanctity, the
fashion of honour, without either criticizing or
informing them from his own experience. In the
earlier drama these conventions are merely a frame-
work, or an alloy necessary for working the metal ;
the metal itself consisted of unique emotions resulting
inevitably from the circumstances, resulting or
inhering as inevitably as the properties of a chemical
compound. Middleton's heroine, for instance, in the
Changeling, exclaims in the well-known words
Why, 'tis impossible thou canst be so wicked,
To shelter such a cunning cruelty
To make his death the murderer of my honour !
The word "honour" in such a situation is out of
date, but the emotion of Beatrice at that moment,
given the conditions, is as permanent and substantial
as anything in human nature. The emotion of
Othello in Act v. is the emotion of a man who
discovers that the worst part of his own soul has been
exploited by some one more clever than he ; it is this
emotion carried by the writer to a very high degree of
121
The Sacred Wood
intensity. Even in so late and so decayed a drama
as that of Ford, the framework of emotions and morals
of the time is only the vehicle for statements of
feeling which are unique and imperishable: Ford's
and Ford's only.
What may be considered corrupt or decadent in
the morals of Massinger is not an alteration or
diminution in morals ; it is simply the disappearance
of all the personal and real emotions which this
morality supported and into which it introduced a
kind of order. As soon as the emotions disappear
the morality which ordered it appears hideous.
Puritanism itself became repulsive only when it
appeared as the survival of a restraint after the feelings
which it restrained had gone. When Massinger's
ladies resist temptation they do not appear to undergo
any important emotion; they merely know what is
expected of them ; they manifest themselves to us as
lubricious prudes. Any age has its conventions;
and any age might appear absurd when its conven-
tions get into the hands of a man like Massinger a
man, we mean, of so exceptionally superior a literary
talent as Massinger's, and so paltry an imagination.
The Elizabethan morality was an important conven-
tion ; important because it was not consciously of one
social class alone, because it provided a framework
for emotions to which all classes could respond, and
it hindered no feeling. It was not hypocritical, and
it did not suppress ; its dark corners are haunted by
the ghosts of Mary Fitton and perhaps greater. It is
a subject which has not been sufficiently investigated.
Fletcher and Massinger rendered it ridiculous; not
by not believing in it, but because they were men of
122
Philip Massinger
great talents who could not vivify it; because they
could not fit into it passionate, complete human
characters.
The tragedy of Massinger is interesting chiefly
according to the definition given before ; the highest
degree of verbal excellence compatible with the most
rudimentary development of the senses. Massinger
succeeds better in something which is not tragedy;
in the romantic comedy. A Very Woman deserves
all the praise that Swinburne, with his almost unerring
gift for selection, has bestowed upon it. The probable
collaboration of Fletcher had the happiest result ; for
certainly that admirable comic personage, the tipsy
Borachia, is handled with more humour than we expect
of Massinger. It is a play which would be enjoyable
on the stage. The form, however, of romantic
comedy is itself inferior and decadent. There is an
inflexibility about the poetic drama which is by no
means a matter of classical, or neoclassical, or pseudo-
classical law. The poetic drama might develop forms
highly different from those of Greece or England,
India or Japan. Conceded the utmost freedom, the
romantic drama would yet remain inferior. The
poetic drama must have an emotional unity, let the
emotion be whatever you like. It must have a
dominant tone; and if this be strong enough, the
most heterogeneous emotions may be made to rein-
force it. The romantic comedy is a skilful concoction
of inconsistent emotion, a revue of emotion. A Very
Woman is surpassingly well plotted. The debility of
romantic drama does not depend upon extravagant
setting, or preposterous events, or inconceivable
coincidences; all these might be found in a serious
123
The Sacred Wood
tragedy or comedy. It consists in an internal incoher-
ence of feelings, a concatenation of emotions which
signifies nothing.
From this type of play, so eloquent of emotional
disorder, there was no swing back of the pendulum.
Changes never come by a simple reinfusion into the
form which the life has just left. The romantic drama
was not a new form. Massinger dealt not with
emotions so much as with the social abstractions of
emotions, more generalized and therefore more quickly
and easily interchangeable within the confines of a
single action. He was not guided by direct com-
munications through the nerves. Romantic drama
tended, accordingly, toward what is sometimes called
the " typical," but which is not the truly typical ; for the
typical figure in a drama is always particularized an
individual. The tendency of the romantic drama was
toward a form which continued it in removing its
more conspicuous vices, was toward a more severe
external order. This form was the Heroic Drama.
We look into Dryden's " Essay on Heroic Plays," and
we find that " love and valour ought to be the subject
of an heroic poem." Massinger, in his destruction of
the old drama, had prepared the way for Dryden.
The intellect had perhaps exhausted the old con-
ventions. It was not able to supply the impoverish-
ment of Reeling.
Such are the reflections aroused by an examination
of some of Massinger's plays in the light of Mr.
Cruickshank's statement that Massinger's age "had
much culture, but, without being exactly corrupt,
lacked moral fibre." The statement may be supported.
In order to fit into our estimate of Massinger the two
124
Philip Massinger
admirable comedies A New Way to Pay Old Debts
and The City Madam a more extensive research
would be required than is possible within our limits.
II
Massinger's tragedy may be summarized for the
unprepared reader as being very dreary. It is dreary,
unless one is prepared by a somewhat extensive
knowledge of his livelier contemporaries to grasp
without fatigue precisely the elements in it which are
capable of giving pleasure; or unless one is incited
by a curious interest in versification. In comedy,
however, Massinger was one of the few masters in the
language. He was a master in a comedy which is
serious, even sombre ; and in one aspect of it there
are only two names to mention with his : those of
Marlowe and Jonson. In comedy, as a matter of
fact, a greater variety of methods were discovered and
employed than in tragedy. The method of Kyd, as
developed by Shakespeare, was the standard for
English tragedy down to Otway and to Shelley. But
both individual temperament, and varying epochs,
made more play with comedy. The comedy of Lyly
is one thing; that of Shakespeare, followed by
Beaumont and Fletcher, is another; and that of
Middleton is a third. And Massinger, while he has
his own comedy, is nearer to Marlowe and Jonson
than to any of these.
Massinger was, in fact, as a comic writer, fortunate
in the moment at which he wrote. His comedy is
transitional; but it happens to be one of those
transitions which contain some merit not anticipated
125
The Sacred Wood
by predecessors or refined upon by later writers. The
comedy of Jonson is nearer to caricature; that of
Middleton a more photographic delineation of low
life. Massinger is nearer to Restoration comedy, and
more like his contemporary, Shirley, in assuming a
certain social level, certain distinctions of class, as
a postulate of his comedy. This resemblance to later
comedy is also the important point of difference
between Massinger and earlier comedy. But
Massinger's comedy differs just as widely from the
comedy of manners proper ; he is closer to that in his
romantic drama in A Very Woman than in A New
Way to Pay Old Debts \ in his comedy his interest
is not in the follies of love-making or the absurdities
of social pretence, but in the unmasking of villainy
Just as the Old Comedy of Moliere differs in principle
from the New Comedy of Marivaux, so the Old
Comedy of Massinger differs from the New Comedy
of his contemporary Shirley. And as in France, so
in England, the more farcical comedy was the more
serious. Massinger's great comic rogues, Sir Giles
Overreach and Luke Frugal, are members of the large
English family which includes Barabas and Sir
Epicure Mammon, and from which Sir Tunbelly
Clumsy claims descent.
What distinguishes Massinger from Marlowe and
Jonson is in the main an inferiority. The greatest
comic characters of these two dramatists are slight
work in comparison with Shakespeare's best Falstaff
has a third dimension and Epicure Mammon has
only two. But this slightness is part of the nature of
the art which Jonson practised, a smaller art than
Shakespeare's. The inferiority of Massinger to Jonson
126
Philip Massinger
is an inferiority, not of one type of art to another, but
within Jonson's type. It is a simple deficiency.
Marlowe's and Jonson's comedies were a view of life ;
they were, as great literature is, the transformation of
a personality into a personal work of art, their life-
time's work, long or short. Massinger is not simply
a smaller personality: his personality hardly exists.
He did not, out of his own personality, build a world
of art, as Shakespeare and Marlowe and Jonson
built.
In the fine pages which Remy de Gourmont devotes
to Flaubert in his Probleme du Style, the great
critic declares :
La vie est un de*pouillement. Le but de 1'activite*
propre de rhomme est de nettoyer sa personnalite', de
la laver de toutes les souillures qu'y ddposa 1'e'duca-
tion, de la ddgager de toutes les empreintes qu'y
laisserent nos admirations adolescentes ;
and again :
Flaubert incorporait toute sa sensibilite* k ses
ceuvres. . . . Hors de ses livres, ou il se transvasait
goutte a goutte, jusqu'a la lie, Flaubert est fort peu
inte'ressant. . . .
Of Shakespeare notably, of Jonson less, of Marlowe
(and of Keats to the term of life allowed him), one
can say that they se transvasaient goutte a goutte ; and
in England, which has produced a prodigious number
of men of genius and comparatively few works of art,
there are not many writers of whom one can say it.
Certainly not of Massinger. A brilliant master of
technique, he was not, in this profound sense, an
artist. And so we come to inquire how, if
127
The Sacred Wood
this is so, he could have written two great comedies.
We shall probably be obliged to conclude that a
large part of their excellence is, in some way
which should be defined, fortuitous ; and that there-
fore they are, however remarkable, not works of
perfect art.
This objection raised by Leslie Stephen to
Massinger's method of revealing a villain has great
cogency; but I am inclined to believe that the
cogency is due to a somewhat different reason from
that which Leslie Stephen assigns. His statement is
too apriorist to be quite trustworthy. There is no
reason why a comedy or tragedy villain should not
declare himself, and in as long a period as the author
likes ; but the sort of villain who may run on in this
way is a simple villain (simple not stmpliste).
Barabas and Volpone can declare their character,
because they have no inside j appearance and reality
are coincident ; they are forces in particular directions.
Massinger's two villains are not simple. Giles Over-
reach is essentially a great force directed upon small
objects ; a great force, a small mind ; the terror of a
dozen parishes instead of the conqueror of a world.
The force is misapplied, attenuated, thwarted, by the
man's vulgarity : he is a great man of the City, with-
out fear, but with the most abject awe of the
aristocracy. He is accordingly not simple, but a
product of a certain civilization, and he is not wholly
conscious. His monologues are meant to be, not
what he thinks he is, but what he really is : and yet
they are not the truth about him, and he himself
certainly does not know the truth. To declare him-
self, therefore, is impossible.
128
Philip Massinger
Nay, when my ears are pierced with widows' cries,
And undone orphans wash with tears my threshold,
I only think what 'tis to have my daughter
Right honourable ; and 'tis a powerful charm
Makes me insensible of remorse, or pity,
Or the least sting of conscience.
This is the wrong note. Elsewhere we have the
right :
Thou art a fool ;
In being out of office, I am out of danger ;
Where, if I were a justice, besides the trouble,
I might or out of wilfulness, or error,
Run myself finely into a praemunire,
And so become a prey to the informer,
No, I'll have none oft ; 'tis enough I keep
Greedy at my devotion : so he serve
My purposes, let him hang, or damn, I care not ...
And how well tuned, well modulated, here, the
diction ! The man is audible and visible. But from
passages like the first we may be permitted to infer
that Massinger was unconscious of trying to develop
a different kind of character from any that Marlowe
or Jonson had invented.
Luke Frugal, in The City Madam, is not so
great a character as Sir Giles Overreach. But Luke
Frugal just misses being almost the greatest of all
hypocrites. His humility in the first act of the play
is more than half real. The error in his portraiture is
not the extravagant hocus-pocus of supposed Indian
necromancers by which he is so easily duped, but the
premature disclosure of villainy in his temptation of
the two apprentices of his brother. But for this, he
would be a perfect chameleon of circumstance. Here,
again, we feel that Massinger was conscious only of
i 129
The Sacred Wood
inventing a rascal of the old simpler farce type. But
the play is not a farce, in the sense in which The Jew
of Malta,) The Alchemist^ Bartholomew Fair are
farces. Massinger had not the personality to create
great farce, and he was too serious to invent trivial
farce. The ability to perform that slight distortion of
all the elements in the world of a play or a story, so
that this world is complete in itself, which was given
to Marlowe and Jonson (and to Rabelais) and which
is prerequisite to great farce, was denied to Massinger.
On the other hand, his temperament was more closely
related to theirs than to that of Shirley or the Restora-
tion wits. His two comedies therefore occupy a
place by themselves. His ways of thinking and feel-
ing isolate him from both the Elizabethan and the
later Caroline mind. He might almost have been a
great realist ; he is killed by conventions which were
suitable for the preceding literary generation, but not
for his. Had Massinger been a greater man, a man
of more intellectual courage, the current of English
literature immediately after him might have taken a
different course. The defect is precisely a defect of
personality. He is not, however, the only man of
letters who, at the moment when a new view of life is
wanted, has looked at life through the eyes of his
predecessors, and only at manners through his own.
130
Swinburne as Poet o o o o
IT is a question of some nicety to decide how
much must be read of any particular poet. And
it is not a question merely of the size of the poet.
There are some poets whose every line has unique
value. There are others who can be taken by a
few poems universally agreed upon. There are
others who need be read only in selections, but what
selections are read will not very much matter. Of
Swinburne, we should like to have the Atalanta
entire, and a volume of selections which should
certainly contain The Leper^ Laus Veneris, and The
Triumph of Time. It ought to contain many more,
but there is perhaps no other single poem which
it would be an error to omit. A student of Swin-
burne will want to read one of the Stuart plays
and dip into Tristram of Lyonesse. But almost no
one, to-day, will wish to read the whole of Swinburne.
It is not because Swinburne is voluminous ; certain
poets, equally voluminous, must be read entire. The
necessity and the difficulty of a selection are due to
the peculiar nature of Swinburne's contribution,
which, it is hardly too much to say, is of a very
different kind from that of any other poet of equal
reputation.
We may take it as undisputed that Swinburne did
make a contribution; that he did something that
The Sacred Wood
had not been done before, and that what he did will
not turn out to be a fraud. And from that we may
proceed to inquire what Swinburne's contribution
was, and why, whatever critical solvents we employ
to break down the structure of his verse, this con-
tribution remains. The test is this : agreed that we
do not (and I think that the present generation does
not) greatly enjoy Swinburne, and agreed that (a
more serious condemnation) at one period of our
lives we did enjoy him and now no longer enjoy
him ; nevertheless, the words which we use to state
our grounds of dislike or indifference cannot be
applied to Swinburne as they can to bad poetry.
The words of condemnation are words which express
his qualities. You may say "diffuse." But the
diffuseness is essential; had Swinburne practised
greater concentration his verse would be, not better
in the same kind, but a different thing. His diffuse-
ness is one of his glories. That so little material as
appears to be employed in The Triumph of Time
should release such an amazing number of words,
requires what there is no reason to call anything but
genius. You could not condense The Triumph of
Time. You could only leave out. And this would
destroy the poem; though no one stanza seems
essential. Similarly, a considerable quantity a
volume of selections is necessary to give the quality
of Swinburne although there is perhaps no one poem
essential in this selection.
If, then, we must be very careful in applying terms
of censure, like " diffuse," we must be equally care-
ful of praise. " The beauty of Swinburne's verse is
the sound," people say, explaining, "he had little
132
Swinburne as Poet
visual imagination." I am inclined to think that the
word " beauty " is hardly to be used in connection
with Swinburne's verse at all; but in any case the
beauty or effect of sound is neither that of music nor
that of poetry which can be set to music. There is
no reason why verse intended to be sung should not
present a sharp visual image or convey an important
intellectual meaning, for it supplements the music
by another means of affecting the feelings. What we
get in Swinburne is an expression by sound, which
could not possibly associate itself with music. For
what he gives is not images and ideas and music, it
is one thing with a curious mixture of suggestions of
all three.
Shall I come, if I swim ? wide are the waves, you see ;
Shall I come, if I fly, my dear Love, to thee ?
This is Campion, and an example of the kind of
music that is not to be found in Swinburne. It is an
arrangement and choice of words which has a sound-
value and at the same time a coherent comprehensible
meaning, and the two things the musical value and
meaning are two things, not one. But in Swinburne
there is no pure beauty no pure beauty of sound,
or of image, or of idea.
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory ;
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved's bed ;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.
133
The Sacred Wood
I quote from Shelley, because Shelley is supposed
to be the master of Swinburne ; and because his
song, like that of Campion, has what Swinburne
has not a beauty of music and a beauty of content ;
and because it is clearly and simply expressed, with
only two adjectives. Now, in Swinburne the meaning
and the sound are one thing. He is concerned with
the meaning of the word in a peculiar way : he
employs, or rather " works," the word's meaning. And
this is connected with an interesting fact about his
vocabulary : he uses the most general word, because
his emotion is never particular, never in direct line
of vision, never focused ; it is emotion reinforced, not
by intensification, but by expansion.
There lived a singer in France of old
By the tideless dolorous midland sea.
In a land of sand and ruin and gold
There shone one woman, and none but she.
You see that Provence is the merest point of diffusion
here. Swinburne defines the place by the most
general word, which has for him its own value.
"Gold," "ruin," "dolorous": it is not merely the
sound that he wants, but the vague associations of
idea that the words give him. He has not his eye
on a particular place, as
Li ruscelletti che dei verdi colli
Del Casentin discendon giuso in Arno . . .
It is, in fact, the word that gives him the thrill, not
the object. When you take to pieces any verse of
Swinburne, you find always that the object was not
there only the word. Compare
Snowdrops that plead for pardon
And pine for fright
134
Swinburne as Poet
with the daffodils that come before the swallow dares.
The snowdrop of Swinburne disappears, the daffodil
of Shakespeare remains. The swallow of Shakespeare
remains in the verse in Macbeth ; the bird of
Wordsworth
Breaking the silence of the seas
remains ; the swallow of " Itylus " disappears. Com-
pare, again, a chorus of Atalanta with a chorus
from Athenian tragedy. The chorus of Swinburne
is almost a parody of the Athenian : it is sententious,
but it has not even the significance of commonplace.
At least we witness of thee ere we die
That these things are not otherwise, but thus. . . .
Before the beginning of years
There came to the making of man
Time with a gift of tears ;
Grief with a glass that ran. . . .
This is not merely " music " ; it is effective because it
appears to be a tremendous statement, like statements
made in our dreams ; when we wake up we find that
the " glass that ran " would do better for time than
for grief, and that the gift of tears would be as
appropriately bestowed by grief as by time.
It might seem to be intimated, by what has been
said, that the work of Swinburne can be shown to
be a sham, just as bad verse is a sham. It would
only be so if you could produce or suggest something
that it pretends to be and is not. The world of
Swinburne does not depend upon some other world
which it simulates ; it has the necessary completeness
and self-sufficiency for justification and permanence.
It is impersonal, and no one else could have made it.
135
The Sacred Wood
The deductions are true to the postulates. It is
indestructible. None of the obvious complaints that
were or might have been brought to bear upon the
first Poems and Ballads holds good. The poetry is
not morbid, it is not erotic, it is not destructive. These
are adjectives which can be applied to the material,
the human feelings, which in Swinburne's case do
not exist. The morbidity is not of human feeling
but of language. Language in a healthy state
presents the object, is so close to the object that
the two are identified.
They are identified in the verse of Swinburne solely
because the object has ceased to exist, because the
meaning is merely the hallucination of meaning,
because language, uprooted, has adapted itself to an
independent life of atmospheric nourishment. In
Swinburne, for example, we see the word " weary "
flourishing in this way independent of the particular
and actual weariness of flesh or spirit. The bad poet
dwells partly in a world of objects and partly in a
world of words, and he never can get them to fit.
Only a man of genius could dwell so exclusively and
consistently among words as Swinburne. His language
is not, like the language of bad poetry, dead. It is
very much alive, with this singular life of its own.
But the language which is more important to us is
that which is struggling to digest and express new
objects, new groups of objects, new feelings, new
aspects, as, for instance, the prose of Mr. James
Joyce or the earlier Conrad.
136
Blake
IF one follow Blake's mind through the several
stages of his poetic development it is impossible to
regard him as a naif, a wild man, a wild pet for the
supercultivated. The strangeness is evaporated, the
peculiarity is seen to be the peculiarity of all great
poetry: something which is found (not everywhere)
in Homer and ^Eschylus and Dante and Villon, and
profound and concealed in the work of Shakespeare
and also in another form in Montaigne and in Spinoza.
It is merely a peculiar honesty, which, in a world too
frightened to be honest, is peculiarly terrifying. It is
an honesty against which the whole world conspires,
because it is unpleasant. Blake's poetry has the un-
pleasantness of great poetry. Nothing that can be
called morbid or abnormal or perverse, none of the
things which exemplify the sickness of an epoch or a
fashion, have this quality ; only those things which,
by some extraordinary labour of simplification, exhibit
the essential sickness or strength of the human soul.
And this honesty never exists without great technical
accomplishment. The question about Blake the man
is the question of the circumstances that concurred
to permit this honesty in his work, and what circum-
137
The Sacred Wood
stances define its limitations. The favouring con-
ditions probably include these two : that, being early
apprenticed to a manual occupation, he was not
compelled to acquire any other education in literature
than he wanted, or to acquire it for any other reason
than that he wanted it; and that, being a humble
engraver, he had no journalistic-social career open to
him.
There was, that is to say, nothing to distract him
from his interests or to corrupt these interests :
neither the ambitions of parents or wife, nor the
standards of society, nor the temptations of success ;
nor was he exposed to imitation of himself or of any-
one else. These circumstances not his supposed
inspired and untaught spontaneity are what make
him innocent. His early poems show what the poems
of a boy of genius ought to show, immense power of
assimilation. Such early poems are not, as usually
supposed, crude attempts to do something beyond
the boy's capacity ; they are, in the case of a boy of
real promise, more likely to be quite mature and
successful attempts to do something small. So with
Blake, his early poems are technically admirable, and
their originality is in an occasional rhythm. The
verse of Edward III deserves study. But his
affection for certain Elizabethans is not so surprising
as his affinity with the very best work of his own
century. He is very like Collins, he is very eighteenth
century. The poem Whether on Idds shady brow
is eighteenth-century work ; the movement, the weight
of it, the syntax, the choice of words
The languid strings do scarcely move !
The sound is forced, the notes are few !
138
Blake
this is contemporary with Gray and Collins, it is the
poetry of a language which has undergone the
discipline of prose. Blake up to twenty is decidedly
a traditional.
Blake's beginnings as a poet, then, are as normal
as the beginnings of Shakespeare. His method of
composition, in his mature work, is exactly like that
of other poets. He has an idea (a feeling, an image),
he develops it by accretion or expansion, alters his
verse often, and hesitates often over the final choice. 1
The idea, of course, simply comes, but upon arrival
it is subjected to prolonged manipulation. In the
first phase Blake is concerned with verbal beauty ; in
the second he becomes the apparent naif, really the
mature intelligence. It is only when the ideas be-
come more automatic, come more freely and are less
manipulated, that we begin to suspect their origin, to
suspect that they spring from a shallower source.
The Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and
the poems from the Rossetti manuscript, are the
poems of a man with a profound interest in human
emotions, and a profound knowledge of them. The
emotions are presented in an extremely simplified,
abstract form. This form is one illustration of the
1 I do not know why M. Berger should say, without qualifica-
tion, in his William Blake: mysticisme et patsie^ that "son
respect pour 1'esprit qui soufflait en lui et qui dictait ses paroles
1'empechait de les corriger jamais." Dr. Sampson, in his
Oxford edition of Blake, gives us to understand that Blake
believed much of his writing to be automatic, but observes
that Blake's "meticulous care in composition is everywhere
apparent in the poems preserved in rough draft . . . altera-
tion on alteration, rearrangement after rearrangement, de-
letions, additions, and inversions. ..."
139
The Sacred Wood
eternal struggle of art against education, of the literary
artist against the continuous deterioration of language.
It is important that the artist should be highly
educated in his own art; but his education is one
that is hindered rather than helped by the ordinary
processes of society which constitute education for
the ordinary man. For these processes consist
largely in the acquisition of impersonal ideas which
obscure what* we really are and feel, what we really
want, and what really excites our interest. It is of
course not the actual information acquired, but the
conformity which the accumulation of knowledge is
apt to impose, that is harmful. Tennyson is a very
fair example of a poet almost wholly encrusted with
parasitic opinion, almost wholly merged into his
environment. Blake, on the other hand, knew what
interested him, and he therefore presents only the
essential, only, in fact, what can be presented, and
need not be explained. And because he was not
distracted, or frightened, or occupied in anything but
exact statement, he understood. He was naked, and
saw man naked, and from the centre of his own crystal.
To him there was no more reason why Swedenborg
should be absurd than Locke. He accepted Sweden-
borg, and eventually rejected him, for reasons of his
own. He approached everything with a mind un-
clouded by current opinions. There was nothing of
the superior person about him. This makes him
terrifying.
II
But if there was nothing to distract him from
sincerity there were, on the other hand, the dangers
140
Blake
to which the naked man is exposed. His philo-
sophy, like his visions, like his insight, like his
technique, was his own. And accordingly he was
inclined to attach more importance to it than an
artist should ; this is what makes him eccentric, and
makes him inclined to formlessness.
But most through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot's curse
Blasts the new-born infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage hearse,
is the naked vision ;
Love seeketh only self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite,
is the naked observation; and The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell is naked philosophy, presented.
But Blake's occasional marriages of poetry and
philosophy are not so felicitous.
He who would do good to another must do it in Minute
Particulars.
General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and
flatterer ;
For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized
particulars. . . .
One feels that the form is not well chosen. The
borrowed philosophy of Dante and Lucretius is
perhaps not so interesting, but it injures their form
less. Blake did not have that more Mediterranean
gift of form which knows how to borrow as Dante
borrowed his theory of the soul; he must needs
create a philosophy as well as a poetry. A similar
formlessness attacks his draughtsmanship. The fault
141
The Sacred Wood
is most evident, of course, in the longer poems or
rather, the poems in which structure is important.
You cannot create a very large poem without intro-
ducing a more impersonal point of view, or splitting
it up into various personalities. But the weakness of
the long poems is certainly not that they are too
visionary, too remote from the world. It is that
Blake did not see enough, became too much occupied
with ideas.
We have the same respect for Blake's philosophy
(and perhaps for that of Samuel Butler) that we have
for an ingenious piece of home-made furniture: we
admire the man who has put it together out of the
odds and ends about the house. England has pro-
duced a fair number of these resourceful Robinson
Crusoes; but we are not really so remote from the
Continent, or from our own past, as to be deprived of
the advantages of culture if we wish them.
We may speculate, for amusement, whether it
would not have been beneficial to the north of
Europe generally, and to Britain in particular, to
have had a more continuous religious history. The
local divinities of Italy were not wholly exterminated
by Christianity, and they were not reduced to the
dwarfish fate which fell upon our trolls and pixies.
The latter, with the major Saxon deities, were
perhaps no great loss in themselves, but they left an
empty place ; and perhaps our mythology was further
impoverished by the divorce from Rome. Milton's
celestial and infernal regions are large but in-
sufficiently furnished apartments filled by heavy
conversation ; and one remarks about the Puritan
mythology an historical thinness. And about Blake's
142
Blake
supernatural territories, as about the supposed ideas
that dwell there, we cannot help commenting on a
certain meanness of culture. They illustrate the
crankiness, the eccentricity, which frequently affects
writers outside of the Latin traditions, and which
such a critic as Arnold should certainly have re-
buked. And they are not essential to Blake's
inspiration.
Blake was endowed with a capacity for considerable
understanding of human nature, with a remarkable
and original sense of language and the music of
language, and a gift of hallucinated vision. Had
these been controlled by a respect for impersonal
reason, for common sense, for the objectivity of
science, it would have been better for him. What
his genius required, and what it sadly lacked, was a
framework of accepted and traditional ideas which
would have prevented him from indulging in a philo-
sophy of his own, and concentrated his attention
upon the problems of the poet. Confusion of
thought, emotion, and vision is what we find in such
a work as Also Sprach Zarathustra ; it is eminently
not a Latin virtue. The concentration resulting
from a framework of mythology and theology and
philosophy is one of the reasons why Dante is a
classic, and Blake only a poet of genius. The fault
is perhaps not with Blake himself, but with the
environment which failed to provide what such a
poet needed ; perhaps the circumstances compelled
him to fabricate, perhaps the poet required the
philosopher and mythologist ; although the conscious
Blake may have been quite unconscious of the
motives.
Dante o o o *<> o o o
MPAUL VALERY, a writer for whom I have
. considerable respect, has placed in his
most recent statement upon poetry a paragraph which
seems to me of very doubtful validity. I have not
seen the complete essay, and know the quotation
only as it appears in a critical notice in the
Athenceum, July 23, 1920:
La philosophic, et meme la morale tendirent a fuir
les ceuvres pour se placer dans les reflexions qui les
precedent. . . . Parler aujourd'hui de poetic philo-
sophique (fut-ce en invoquant Alfred de Vigny,
Leconte de Lisle, et quelques autres), c'est naivement
confondre des conditions et des applications de
1'esprit incompatibles entre elles. N'est-ce pas
oublier que le but de celui qui sp^cule est de fixer
ou de cre*er une notion c'est-a-dire un pouvoir et un
instrument depouvoir, cependant que le poete moderne
essaie de produire en nous un etat et de porter
cet tat exceptionnel au point d'une jouissance
parfaite. . . .
It may be that I do M. Vale'ry an injustice which
I must endeavour to repair when I have the pleasure
of reading his article entire. But the paragraph gives
the impression of more than one error of analysis.
In the first place, it suggests that conditions have
changed, that " philosophical " poetry may once have
been permissible, but that (perhaps owing to the
144
Dante
greater specialization of the modern world) it is now
intolerable. We are forced to assume that what we
do not like in our time was never good art, and that
what appears to us good was always so. If any
ancient "philosophical" poetry retains its value, a
value which we fail to find in modern poetry of the
same type, we investigate on the assumption that we
shall find some difference to which the mere differ-
ence of date is irrelevant. But if it be maintained that
the older poetry has a " philosophic " element and a
" poetic " element which can be isolated, we have
two tasks to perform. We must show first in a par-
ticular case our case is Dante that the philosophy
is essential to the structure and that the structure is
essential to the poetic beauty of the parts ; and we
must show that the philosophy is employed in a
different form from that which it takes in admittedly
unsuccessful philosophical poems. And if M. Vale'ry
is in error in his complete exorcism of " philosophy,"
perhaps the basis of the error is his apparently com-
mendatory interpretation of the effort of the modern
poet, namely, that the latter endeavours " to produce
in us a state"
The early philosophical poets, Parmenides and
Empedocles, were apparently persons of an impure
philosophical inspiration. Neither their predecessors
nor their successors expressed themselves in verse;
Parmenides and Empedocles were persons who
mingled with genuine philosophical ability a good
deal of the emotion of the founder of a second-rate
religious system. They were not interested ex-
clusively in philosophy, or religion, or poetry, but in
something which was a mixture of all three; hence
K 145
The Sacred Wood
their reputation as poets is low and as philosophers
should be considerably below Heraclitus, Zeno,
Anaxagoras, or Democritus. The poem of Lucretius
is quite a different matter. For Lucretius was
undoubtedly a poet. He endeavours to expound a
philosophical system, but with a different motive from
Parmenides or Empedocles, for this system is already
in existence; he is really endeavouring to find the
concrete poetic equivalent for this system to find
its complete equivalent in vision. Only, as he is an
innovator in this art, he wavers between philosophical
poetry and philosophy. So we find passages such as :
But the velocity of thunderbolts is great and their
stroke powerful, and they run through their course
with a rapid descent, because the force when aroused
first in all cases collects itself in the clouds and . . .
Let us now sing what causes the motion of the stars.
... Of all these different smells then which strike
the nostrils one may reach to a much greater distance
than another. . . . l
But Lucretius' true tendency is to express an
ordered vision of the life of man, with great vigour
of real poetic image and often acute observation.
quod petiere, premunt arte faciuntque dolorem
corporis et dentes inlidunt saepe labellis
osculaque adfligunt, quia non est pura voluptas
et stimuli subsunt qui instigant laedere id ipsum
quodcumque est, rabies unde illaec germina surgunt . . .
medio de fonte leporum
surgit amari aliquid quod in ipsis floribus angat . . .
nee procumbere humi prostratum et pandere palmas
1 Munro's translation, passim.
146
Dante
ante deum delubra nee aras sanguine multo
spargere quadrupedum nee votis nectere vota,
sed mage pacata posse omnia mente tueri.
The philosophy which Lucretius tackled was not
rich enough in variety of feeling, applied itself to
life too uniformly, to supply the material for a wholly
successful poem. It was incapable of complete ex-
pansion into pure vision. But I must ask M. Vale"ry
whether the " aim " of Lucretius' poem was "to fix
or create a notion " or to fashion " an instrument of
power."
Without doubt, the effort of the philosopher proper,
the man who is trying to deal with ideas in themselves,
and the effort of the poet, who may be trying to realize
ideas, cannot be carried on at the same time. But
this is not to deny that poetry can be in some sense
philosophic. The poet can deal with philosophic
ideas, not as matter for argument, but as matter for
inspection. The original form of a philosophy cannot
be poetic. But poetry can be penetrated by a philo-
sophic idea, it can deal with this idea when it has
reached the point of immediate acceptance, when it
has become almost a physical modification. If we
divorced poetry and philosophy altogether, we should
bring a serious impeachment, not only against Dante,
but against most of Dante's contemporaries.
Dante had the benefit of a mythology and a theology
which had undergone a more complete absorption
into life than those of Lucretius. It is curious that
not only Dante's detractors, like the Petrarch of
Landor's Pentameron (if we may apply so strong a
word to so amiable a character), but some of his
admirers, insist on the separation of Dante's "poetry"
147
The Sacred Wood
and Dante's " teaching." Sometimes the philosophy
is confused with the allegory. The philosophy is an
ingredient, it is a part of Dante's world just as it is a
part of life ; the allegory is the scaffold on which the
poem is built. An American writer of a little primer
of Dante, Mr. Henry Dwight Sidgwick, who desires
to improve our understanding of Dante as a " spiritual
leader," says :
To Dante this literal Hell was a secondary matter ;
so it is to us. He and we are concerned with the
allegory. That allegory is simple. Hell is the ab-
sence of God. ... If the reader begins with the
consciousness that he is reading about sin, spiritually
understood, he never loses the thread, he is never at
a loss, never slips back into the literal signification.
Without stopping to question Mr. Sidgwick on the
difference between literal and spiritual sin, we may
affirm that his remarks are misleading. Undoubtedly
the allegory is to be taken seriously, and certainly
the Comedy is in some way a "moral education."
The question is to find a formula for the correspond-
ence between the former and the latter, to decide
whether the moral value corresponds directly to the
allegory. We can easily ascertain what importance
Dante assigned to allegorical method. In the Con-
vivio we are seriously informed that
the principal design [of the odes] is to lead men to
knowledge and virtue, as will be seen in the progress
of the truth of them \
and we are also given the familiar four interpretations
of an ode : literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical.
148
Dante
And so distinguished a scholar as M. Hauvette repeats
again and again the phrase " didactique d'intention."
We accept the allegory. Accepted, there are two
usual ways of dealing with it. One may, with Mr.
Sidgwick, dwell upon its significance for the seeker of
"spiritual light," or one may, with Landor, deplore
the spiritual mechanics and find the poet only in
passages where he frees himself from his divine
purposes. With neither of these points of view can
we concur. Mr. Sidgwick magnifies the "preacher
and prophet," and presents Dante as a superior Isaiah
or Carlyle ; Landor reserves the poet, reprehends the
scheme, and denounces the politics. Some of Lander's
errors are more palpable than Mr. Sidgwick's. He
errs, in the first place, in judging Dante by the
standards of classical epic. Whatever the Comedy
is, an epic it is not. M. Hauvette well says :
Rechercher dans quelle mesure le poeme se rap-
proche du genre classique de Pepopee, et dans quelle
mesure il s'en ecarte, est un exdrcice de rhe'torique
entierement inutile, puisque Dante, a n'en pas douter,
n'a jamais eu 1'intention de composer une action
pique dans les regies.
But we must define the framework of Dante's poem
from the result as well as from the intention. The
poem has not only a framework, but a form ; and even
if the framework be allegorical, the form may be
something else. The examination of any episode
in the Comedy ought to show that not merely the
allegorical interpretation or the didactic intention, but
the emotional significance itself, cannot be isolated
from the rest of the poem. Landor appears, for
instance, to have misunderstood such a passage as
149
The Sacred Wood
the Paolo and Francesca, by failing to perceive its
relations :
In the midst of her punishment, Francesca, when
she comes to the tenderest part of her story, tells it
with complacency and delight.
This is surely a false simplification. To have lost all
recollected delight would have been, for Francesca,
either loss of humanity or relief from damnation. The
ecstasy, with the present thrill at the remembrance of
it, is a part of the torture. Francesca is neither
stupefied nor reformed ; she is merely damned ; and
it is a part of damnation to experience desires that we
can no longer gratify. For in Dante's Hell souls are
not deadened, as they mostly are in life; they are
actually in the greatest torment of which each is
capable.
E il modo ancor m'offende.
It is curious that Mr. Sidgwick, whose approbation
is at the opposite pole from Landor's, should have
fallen into a similar error. He says :
In meeting [Ulysses], as in meeting Pier della Vigna
and Brunetto Latini, the preacher and the prophet
are lost in the poet.
Here, again, is a false simplification. These passages
have no digressive beauty. The case of Brunetto is
parallel to that of Francesca. The emotion of the
passage resides in Brunette's excellence in damnation
so admirable a soul, and so perverse.
e parve de costoro
Quegli che vince e non colui che perde.
150
Dante
And I think that if Mr. Sidgwick had pondered the
strange words of Ulysses,
com' altrui piacque,
he would not have said that the preacher and prophet
are lost in the poet. " Preacher " and " prophet " are
odious terms ; but what Mr. Sidgwick designates by
them is something which is certainly not " lost in the
poet," but is part of the poet.
A variety of passages might illustrate the assertion
that no emotion is contemplated by Dante purely in
and for itself. The emotion of the person, or the
emotion with which our attitude appropriately invests
the person, is never lost or diminished, is always pre-
served entire, but is modified by the position assigned
to the person in the eternal scheme, is coloured by
the atmosphere of that person's residence in one of the
three worlds. About none of Dante's characters is
there that ambiguity which affects Milton's Lucifer.
The damned preserve any degree of beauty or
grandeur that ever rightly pertained to them, and
this intensifies and also justifies their damnation.
As Jason
Guarda quel grande che viene !
per dolor non par lagrima spanda,
Quanto aspetto reale ancor ritiene !
The crime of Bertrand becomes more lurid; the
vindictive Adamo acquires greater ferocity, and the
errors of Arnaut are corrected
Poi s'ascose nel foco che gli affina.
If the artistic emotion presented by any episode of
the Comedy is dependent upon the whole, we may
The Sacred Wood
proceed to inquire what the whole scheme is. The
usefulness of allegory and astronomy is obvious. A
mechanical framework, in a poem of so vast an ambit,
was a necessity. As the centre of gravity of emotions
is more remote from a single human action, or a
system of purely human actions, than in drama or
epic, so the framework has to be more artificial and
apparently more mechanical. It is not essential that
the allegory or the almost unintelligible astronomy
should be understood only that its presence should
be justified. The emotional structure within this
scaffold is what must be understood the structure
made possible by the scaffold. This structure is an
ordered scale of human emotions. Not, necessarily,
all human emotions ; and in any case all the emotions
are limited, and also extended in significance by their
place in the scheme.
But Dante's is the most comprehensive, and the
most ordered presentation of emotions that has ever
been made. Dante's method of dealing with any
emotion may be contrasted, not so appositely with
that of other " epic " poets as with that of Shake-
speare. Shakespeare takes a character apparently
controlled by a simple emotion, and analyses the
character and the emotion itself. The emotion is
split up into constituents and perhaps destroyed in
the process. The mind of Shakespeare was one of
the most critical that has ever existed. Dante, on the
other hand, does not analyse the emotion so much
as he exhibits its relation to other emotions. You
cannot, that is, understand the Inferno without the
Purgatorio and the Paradise. " Dante," says Lander's
Petrarch, "is the great master of the disgusting."
152
Dante
That is true, though Sophocles at least once ap-
proaches him. But a disgust like Dante's is no
hypertrophy of a single reaction : it is completed and
explained only by the last canto of the Paradiso.
La forma universal di questo nodo
credo ch'io vidi, perche piu di largo
dicendo questo, mi sento ch'io godo.
The contemplation of the horrid or sordid or dis-
gusting, by an artist, is the necessary and negative
aspect of the impulse toward the pursuit of beauty.
But not all succeed as did Dante in expressing the
complete scale from negative to positive. The
negative is the more importunate.
The structure of emotions, for which the allegory is
the necessary scaffold, is complete from the most
sensuous to the most intellectual and the most spiritual.
Dante gives a concrete presentation of the most
elusive :
Pareva a me che nube ne coprisse
lucida, spessa, solida e polita,
quasi adamante che lo sol ferisse.
Per entro se 1'eterna margarita
ne recepette, com' acqua recepe
raggio di luce, permanendo unita.
or
Nel suo aspetto tal dentro mi fei,
qual si fe' Glauco nel gustar dell' erba,
che il fe' consorto in mar degli altri dei. 1
Again, in the Purgatorio^ for instance in Canto XVI
and Canto XVIII, occur passages of pure exposition
1 See E. Pound, The Spirit of Romance, p. 145.
153
The Sacred Wood
of philosophy, the philosophy of Aristotle strained
through the schools.
Lo natural e sempre senza errore,
ma 1' altro puote errar per malo obbietto,
o per poco o per troppo di vigore . . .
We are not here studying the philosophy, we see
it, as part of the ordered world. The aim of the
poet is to state a vision, and no vision of life can be
complete which does not include the articulate formu-
lation of life which human minds make.
Onde convenne legge per fren porre . . .
It is one of the greatest merits of Dante's poem
that the vision is so nearly complete ; it is evidence
of this greatness that the significance of any single
passage, of any of the passages that are selected as
"poetry," is incomplete unless we ourselves ap-
prehend the whole.
And Dante helps us to provide a criticism of M.
Vale*ry's " modern poet " who attempts " to produce
in us a state" A state, in itself, is nothing whatever.
M. Vale*ry's account is quite in harmony with
pragmatic doctrine, and with the tendencies of such
a work as William James's Varieties of Religious
Experience. The mystical experience is supposed
to be valuable because it is a pleasant state of unique
intensity-. But the true mystic is not satisfied merely
by feeling, he must pretend at least that he sees, and
the absorption into the divine is only the necessary,
if paradoxical, limit of this contemplation. The poet
does not aim to excite that is not even a test of his
success but to set something down ; the state of the
154
Dante
reader is merely that reader's particular mode of
perceiving what the poet has caught in words.
Dante, more than any other poet, has succeeded in
dealing with his philosophy, not as a theory (in the
modern and not the Greek sense of that word) or as
his own comment or reflection, but in terms of some-
thing perceived. When most of our modern poets
confine themselves to what they had perceived, they
produce for us, usually, only odds and ends of still
life and stage properties ; but that does not imply so
much that the method of Dante is obsolete, as that
our vision is perhaps comparatively restricted.
NOTE. My friend the Abb Laban has reproached
me for attributing to Landor, in this essay, senti-
ments which are merely the expression of his dramatic
figure Petrarch, and which imply rather Landor's
reproof of the limitations of the historical Petrarch's
view of Dante, than the view of Landor himself.
The reader should therefore observe this correction
of my use of Landor's honoured name.
155
PRINTED BY
MORRISON AND G1BB LTD.
EDINBURGH
D