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ETHICS AND ESTHETICS 
 
 OF 
 
 MODERN POETRY 
 
ETHICS AND ESTHETICS 
 
 OF 
 
 MODERN POETRY 
 
 BY 
 
 J. B. SELKIRK 
 
 ^r 
 
 LONDON 
 
 SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE 
 
 1878 
 
 \_All rights reseri'ed] 
 

 Ur 
 
 i 
 
 .«_«((• t 
 
 
TO 
 
 THE MEMORY 
 
 OF 
 
 HARRY BUCHAM BROWN 
 
 411658 
 
Digitized by the I nternef Archive 
 
 in 2008 with funding from 
 
 IVIicrosoft Corporation 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/ethicsaestheticsOOselkrich 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 PACK 
 
 I. Scepticism and Modern Poetry . . . . i 
 II. Modern Creeds and Modern Poetry . . .29 
 
 III. Mysticism and Modern Poetry . . . .65 
 
 IV. The Conflict of Art and Morals in Modern 
 
 Poetry 117 
 
 V. The Correlation of the Religious and Poeti- 
 cal Instincts 155 
 
 VI. Culture and Modern Poetry . . . .201 
 
Essays I. IV. and VI. of this volume are reproductions — with 
 some slight alterations and additions — of articles contributed to 
 Blackwood's Magazine and the Cornhill. The remainder of the 
 volume has not been hitherto published. 
 
 J. B. S. 
 
SCEPTICISM AND MODERN POETRY 
 
SCEPTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 There are doubts and doubts. Not so many, perhaps, 
 as is generally supposed, of those * honest ' ones in which 
 there lives— according to Tennyson — ' more faith than 
 half the creeds.' It has, in fact, become the fashion in 
 certain quarters to over-compassionate the doubter, to 
 accredit him with a greater depth, and even with a more 
 thorough conscientiousness, than the man convinced. 
 But with every desire to find the reasonableness of such a 
 view, we have entirely failed to discover why the holding 
 of a creed should imply a smaller share either of 
 intelligence or honesty than the holding of a doubt. 
 Credulity has its negative side as well as its positive one, 
 and there is as much room to sHp on the one side as on 
 the other. Clough — himself the most conscientious of 
 poetical sceptics — admits, that if on the one hand 'hopes 
 are dupes,' on the other, ' fears may be liars ; ' and, in 
 short, there is no good reason, other things being equal, 
 for supposing that the man who rejects evidence may not 
 
4 SCEPTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 be quite as great a fool as the man who accepts it. 
 Creeds, no doubt, are easily adopted. We in a sense 
 fall heirs to them. They lie about us from our very 
 infancy, and as soon as we are able to think, they are 
 recommended to us by those whom we very naturally 
 respect. In this way, it is not to be denied that we are 
 apt to creep into them with only too Httle enquiry. But 
 on the other hand, are the great majority of doubts not 
 only equally weak at the root and held with infinitely 
 more self-complacency, not to say conceit? Search 
 faith for its foundations, and in too many cases we dare 
 say they will be found loose and flimsy enough : but 
 subject doubt to a like scrutiny — strip it of all the 
 mystical generahties it seeks to clothe itself in, and the 
 pensive poetical sadness it so frequently affects — and in 
 all but the rare exceptions, you will find that it is neither 
 more nor less than our old friend Sir Oracle in a new 
 disguise. The philosophy that questions everything 
 with a regretfully necessitous air, and a sorrowful shake of 
 the head, passes with too many for originality, and even 
 profundity, until the trick is found out. That there are 
 honest doubts, however, and honest doubters, we do not 
 mean to question — godly doubters even — doubters of the 
 order of * that white soul,' as a living poet so beautifully 
 says of Socrates — 
 
SCEPTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 5 
 
 Which sat beneath the laurels day by day, 1 
 
 And, fired with burning faith in God and Right, : 
 
 Doubted men's doubts away ' — j 
 
 doubters whose doubts ultimately tend to broaden and 
 deepen the foundations of faith rather than undermine 
 them. Doubt of this description is but faith's handmaid, 
 and to whom faith is perpetually indebted, whether it has 
 the candour to acknowledge the debt or not. In a 
 certain sense it is the test of truth itself, and no faith is 
 worth the name that cannot pass through its fires un- 
 scathed. 
 
 Perhaps there has been nothing more suicidal to the 
 real interests of religion than the shallow theology which 
 without distinction, and without a hearing, bundles all 
 scepticism into that too convenient limbo of certain 
 minds to which are relegated the works of the devil. 
 The easiness of the process might itself cast a doubt on 
 its efficiency. 
 
 For on the supposition even that the classification is 
 correct, and that scepticism without discrimination might 
 be put down in the diabolical category, those who know 
 the devil best — or at least the spiritual difficulty his name 
 is made to represent — know well, that he is not to be 
 balked in this way by a mere wave of the hand. 
 
 In fact there is no question as to whether we shall be 
 
6 SCEPTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 troubled with doubt or not : we must. In a mixed 
 world of good and evil, a state of things is not even con- 
 ceivable that would afford ' no hinge or loop to hang a 
 doubt on.' The world where it is not, must be one 
 either altogether sacred to truth, or wholly abandoned to 
 lies. Doubt and faith live under the same imperfect con- 
 ditions, and the point at which one dies, the other also 
 and consequently dies. And if the necessity of the case 
 could only teach the impossible purist who wishes to ignore 
 the existence of doubt altogether, to look it more steadily 
 and honestly and thoughtfully in the face, where he has 
 found only the devil before, he might possibly discover the 
 presence of God as well, in the periodical recurrence of 
 the doubter in the history of all living faith. The damage 
 that 'honest' doubt can do to the real supports of faith 
 must ever be trivial ; while its use in knocking away the 
 conventional props of it is inestimable. The common and 
 easy acceptance by the many of that rather vulgar per- 
 sonage — the regulation Mephistopheles of poetry and the 
 drama — has probably done a good deal in modern times 
 to instruct that prevailing incapacity to disassociate the 
 questioning spirit from the diabolical. But in order to 
 see that such a conclusion is the shallowest of generalities, 
 the weakest of confusions, it is only necessary to fall 
 back on the history of Christianity itself. The most 
 
SCEPTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 7 
 
 important of truths were doubts once. Those soul cer- 
 tainties which men can plant their feet upon, and feel with 
 Milton that — 
 
 If this fail 
 The pillared firmament is rottenness, 
 And earth's base built on stubble — 
 
 were nearly all dangerous heresies at one period of their 
 history. The strength of the Christian religion in our 
 day is as much indebted to her heretics as to her saints j 
 or rather, should we say the maturer verdict of time in 
 many cases has pronounced these two titles to be one ? 
 
 But, however gladly men may acknowledge the ex- 
 istence of these honest doubts, which, closely looked 
 into, are but the transitional phases of faith, they must 
 also admit that these are few compared to the unnumbered 
 host of doubts which have little or no root in conscience, 
 and which appear rather to proceed from a self-satisfied 
 indifference to any faith at all. This kind of doubt has 
 none of the troubles that afflict the genuine and honest 
 article. Its deepest pains seem to be readily assuaged 
 in a kind of sentimental and ^z^^jz-philosophical regret. 
 
 It is mostly this half-hearted and half-affected variety 
 of doubt that has taken a poetical form in modern times, 
 and the fact to us affords a perfectly sufficient reason why 
 a great deal of the poetry produced under such conditions 
 
8 SCEPTICISM AND MODERN POETRY, 
 
 has never risen above mediocrity. There are perhaps few 
 things in themselves more irrecoverably prosaic than 
 doubt. Few, on the other hand, more evocative of the 
 poetic faculty, or more susceptible of poetical treatment, 
 than faith. 
 
 Doubt disintegrates, disperses, repels. Faith attracts 
 and knits together. It acts as a kind of centre of gravi- 
 tation in the planetary system of things ideal, controlling 
 the most erratic of orbits : standing to the intellect in 
 much the same overmastering relation that Cressida's love 
 stood to all her other feelings, when she declares — 
 
 My love 
 Is as the very centre of the earth 
 Drawing all things to it. 
 
 Faith is the tonic of the poetical scale, the key-note 
 to which the most wildly discursive imagination must 
 return in the end before the ear can rest satisfied. Hence 
 we have absolutely no poetry in which doubt is anything 
 like the central or dominant interest ; while we have, as 
 in the Hebrew poetry, as gorgeous palaces as imagination 
 ever sanctified, whose material is supplied and whose 
 genius is inspired from faith alone. When doubt is made 
 use of at all in poetry, as in that highest quotable ex- 
 ample, the Book of Job, it is introduced more as a foil to 
 faith — the intense shadow of an intenser light— a wrestler 
 
SCEPTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 9 
 
 brought into the arena only to be overthrown by his 
 mightier opponent. Doubt can command no prolonged 
 sympathy, and consequently can find no permanent foot- 
 ing in any of the higher places of poetry. Faith, on the 
 contrary, seems to clothe itself with poetry without effort \ 
 attracts all poetry to it as a seemingly natural conse- 
 quence ; interwinds and interweaves its life with it, until 
 — to use the strong Shaksperian phrase — the two have 
 ' grown together,' and their parting would be ' a tortured 
 body.' They are the dermis and the epidermis of the 
 ideal anatomy, and their severance means mutilation. 
 Poetry can find no more than a partial and passing 
 attraction in anything that is doubtful ; she is at best but 
 a stranger and a pilgrim in the debatable land. Her final 
 election and abiding home is faith. She clings to faith as 
 a child to a mother, and will not be shaken off, as plainly 
 as if she had declared, once for all, thy God shall be my 
 God, and thy people my people. 
 
 The poetical scepticism of the present day has of 
 course retired from the gloomy atheism of the beginning 
 of the century. The old controversies, deistical and 
 theistical, have nearly died out in literature. The world 
 at length seems to have lost patience with the philosophy 
 that does not at least postulate a god of some kind or 
 another to begin with ; at all events, any such philosophy 
 
lo SCEPTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 has been left high and dry by the poetical tide of the 
 present generation. And, to tell the truth, there was no 
 choice. One or other must perish ; they could not live 
 together. The dewless desert of blank and barren denial 
 was no place for the gentle muse. Imagination cannot 
 breathe its atmosphere and live. And yet, though not 
 present themselves, these old controversies have left us 
 an inheritance. The times have changed, and we have 
 changed with them. The gloomy, not to say stagey 
 atheism that had a certain fascination for the youth of 
 thirty or forty years ago, has given place in our day to a 
 refined and vaguely idealistic pantheism, which, without 
 any of the old obtrusion of unbelief (it has even a kind of 
 niggardly recognition of a personal God about it), still 
 exercises a limited influence on poetry — a weaker solution 
 of the strong waters of atheism, not so objectionable as 
 the old form, on account of what it admits of evil, as of 
 what it excludes of good. Without attempting any hard- 
 church definition of its influence — and indeed we question 
 much if many of its poetical exponents themselves could 
 give a perfectly lucid account of what they believe and 
 what they do not believe — we are yet of opinion that it 
 puts a Hmitation on genius, and especially on poetical 
 genius, in nearly the same proportion that it falls short of 
 a definite faith. 
 
SCEPTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. ii 
 
 Leaving all moral considerations out of sight as not 
 within our province, it seems to be necessary, for sesthe- 
 tical reasons alone, that the poet, of all other artists, 
 should possess a belief that shall at least be clear to 
 himself. Above all other men it behoves him, in the 
 words of one of the greatest of his brotherhood, to be — 
 
 One in whom persuasion and belief 
 Has ripened into faith, and faith become 
 A passionate intuition. 
 
 There is a certain degree of heat at which language fuses, 
 and becomes the possible vehicle of poetical feeling, and 
 the point of liquefaction is never registered below convic- 
 tion, but above it. We do not say conviction is all that 
 is necessary. Oxygen itself would quickly consume life, 
 yet a man must consume oxygen to live. Conviction i 
 alone will not produce poetry, but it is an essential 
 component of the atmosphere in which alone poetry can 
 be sustained. At the degree in the mental thermometer 
 which chronicles conviction, the possibility of poetry 
 begins. Anything below that lacks one of the first condi- 
 tions of its existence. 
 
 The poetry that has been produced without due regard 
 to this essential quality, has seldom outlived its own 
 generation ; and, in fact, any attempt to get the materials 
 
12 SCEPTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 of poetry out of half belief, argues a defective poetical 
 perception at the outset. 
 
 It is possible indeed, leaping to the opposite extreme, 
 to get something like poetry out of the gigantic and 
 passionate denial of Satan himself, as Milton has abun- 
 dantly proved ; or even, to a certain degree, out of the 
 pagan abhorrence to the God of Christianity, as illustrated 
 by a living poet. For, waiving altogether any question 
 as to the moral fitness of rehabilitating even under an im- 
 personal or dramatic mask that which, in the hearing of 
 the majority of his audience, can only be regarded as flat 
 blasphemy, there can be no doubt that Mr. Swinburne 
 has reached his highest poetical possibility in what we 
 may classify as his ethnical poems. Without troubling 
 ourselves about whether the inspiration comes from above 
 or below, there is a force about his audacious profanity 
 that we do not so readily find in his other efforts. Good 
 or bad, Mr. Swinburne's capacity for blasphemy is 
 unquestionably une qualite, as the French would say, 
 with their subtle substratum of meaning. 
 
 In the hands of a poet like Milton, the Titanic war 
 against heaven is capable of a certain amount of diaboli- 
 cal picturesqueness ; but the merely human unbelief, the 
 distracting doubt, and the shuffling ingenuity that nibbles 
 at this creed and that without arriving at any definite 
 
SCEPTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 13 
 
 conviction of its own, is the most unpoetical thing in the 
 world. 
 
 No amount of artistic skill can make its effusions 
 pleasing. Seeking sympathy and finding none, they seem 
 to be all conceived in the melancholy minor, without any 
 of the natural plaintiveness of that key, and with a double 
 share of its hopeless dejection. There appears to be a 
 place in the realms of the imagination for either God or 
 devil ; but upon the Laodicean lukewarmness, upon the 
 apathetic neutrality that is neither cold nor hot, poetry 
 turns her back. 
 
 To trace the effects of scepticism, and the stern 
 limitation put upon poetical genius by the want of that 
 faith which ripens into Wordsworth's ' passionate intui- 
 tion,' would open up too wide a field, extending as it does 
 through all the infinite phases and degrees of doubt, from 
 the first shadowy suggestion down to the ultimate utter 
 denial. But that each step downward is hurtful in its 
 degree, whatever disguise it assumes, could be easily 
 proved. Even the affectation of atheism, as in much of 
 Byron's poetry, is an artistic expedient fraught with in- 
 finite danger to the user of it. Although one feels that 
 the atheism of Byron is not real, but in most cases a mere 
 stage property, one gets sick of it before all his scowling 
 heroes are exhibited. The Laras, the Corsairs, the 
 
14 SCEPTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 Giaours, are painted in on the same gloomy and thread- 
 bare background — a varied fugue on the one everlasting 
 theme — a change of costume, but the same old unhallowed 
 anatomy visibly sticking through. Nothing short of the 
 genius of Byron could have achieved even a partial success 
 with such a clogging nightmare on its back. 
 
 It is perhaps not to be so much regretted that atheism 
 should prove such a complete extinguisher to anything 
 like second-rate poetical power, as that it should have 
 sometimes dragged down to the second place, gifts that 
 should have ranked with the highest. It overshadows 
 the resplendent genius of Shelley like a black thunder- 
 cloud above a rainbow, and gives everything he has left 
 behind him a phantasmagoric and evanescent character. 
 Reading his works is like walking through the dreamlike 
 palace of Kubla Khan. On every side, and in such pro- 
 fusion as has never been approached by man, lie the 
 potentialities of poetry, but yet in a great measure, only 
 the potentialities. He has left no palace behind him 
 worthy of his genius or his materials. If ever mortal had 
 the materials, and the power of the enchanter to call 
 them forth, it was he. No one ever possessed in a 
 greater degree the faculty of bringing himself en rapport 
 with the hallucination of the moment. 
 
 Images of the most ethereal tenuity, that would have 
 
SCEPTICISM AND MODERN POETRY, 15 
 
 presented themselves to other men's minds in some 
 vague and nebulous way, stood forth to the order of that 
 imperial imagination with the distinctness and precision 
 of objective realities. And yet with all this power he is 
 still but the enchanter. Wherever you go it is fairy- 
 world still, and affords no solid ground for mortal foot ; 
 .and though you cannot resist its haunting beauty, you are 
 equally haunted by a sense of its almost ghastly unreality. 
 The kindred points of heaven and home are even more 
 nearly akin than they are commonly supposed. Shelley's 
 inability to conceive a heaven with a God in it to whom 
 he could pay reverence, seemed to drain away all human- 
 ness and homeliness out of him, until his poetry became 
 quite as unearthly as his adverse critics judged it 
 unheavenly. Starving one side of his moral nature, the 
 other side was supersaturated, and rendered morbid by an 
 overflow of the imaginative secretions that should have 
 fed both. This insubstantial characteristic of his work 
 was unfortunately one upon which Shelley rather prided 
 himself Writing to a friend, he says he ' does not deal 
 in flesh and blood.' ' You might as well,' says he, ' go to 
 a gin-shop for a leg of mutton, as expect anything earthly 
 from me.' That want of fixity, too, which the absence 
 of central faith invariably induces, that want of a peace- 
 able mental anchorage — the green pastures and the still 
 
i6 SCEPTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 waters of the Hebrew poet, with whom, however, he has 
 so much in common— acts as a continual drag on his 
 powers. There is a provoking absence of that massive 
 and leonine repose which usually consorts with the 
 greatest gifts, and which one naturally looks for as a 
 concomitant of his. But we look for it in vain. He 
 was always in an ecstasy, in the somewhat lost but literal 
 meaning of the word — always out of himself. If his 
 genius had a fault, it was too impressionable. The 
 merest mouthful of the Delphian vapour put him into 
 fits. He was ever on the tripod, and is only a modern 
 incarnation of that priestess of Apollo, mentioned by 
 Plutarch, who raved herself to death in the temple. His 
 Pegasus in this way was good for a short run, but had 
 little waiting power. Consequently, the defect does not 
 interfere with the perfection of his shorter lyrics, which 
 are simply unique and unapproached ; but its limiting 
 influence is painfully apparent in all his works (though 
 less marked in the Cenci) that require any long-sustained 
 effort. The deficiency was one well understood and 
 keenly felt by Shelley himself. In a letter to Godwin, he 
 says, — * I cannot but be conscious, in much of what I 
 write, of an absence of that tranquillity which is the 
 attribute and accompaniment of power.' 
 
 Sad indeed that this defect, this want of reference to 
 
SCEPTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 17 
 
 the fundamental key-note of power, should have marred 
 the music of such an otherwise heavenly instrument. 
 
 That the atheism — or at least the pantheism — of 
 Shelley was a mental unsoundness of a constitutional 
 and hereditary kind, does not, we think, admit of a doubt. 
 In these days of irresponsible faultiness, studded over 
 with dipso- and klepto -maniacs, when so many are anxi- 
 ous to prove that we are 'villains by necessity,' as 
 Shakspeare would have put it, — ' fools by heavenly 
 compulsion ; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical 
 predominance,' — we have often wondered that some 
 charitable doctrinaire with a scientific turn of mind has 
 never started his atheomaniac. If the world could be 
 convinced — and there is no lack of plausible argument 
 to prove it — that the different degrees of unbelief are 
 frequently no more than the varied phases of mental 
 disorder, and that absolute atheism itself, in the vast 
 majority of cases, is only an irresponsible mania, pro- 
 ceeding from sheer intellectual defect, — if we could only 
 have it settled that our sceptics, and more especially our 
 cultured and scientific sceptics, are what they are by ' a 
 divine thrusting on,' they might possibly be taught to hold 
 their views with a little more humbleness of mind than 
 they have hitherto done. In Shelley's case, atheism was 
 a thing that ran in the blood. His father seems to have 
 
i8 SCEPTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 had a fame for eccentricity in the direction of profanity, 
 and was said to have been a disciple of the Chesterfield 
 and Rochefoucauldean school; while Shelley himself 
 declares — in an unpublished letter quoted by Mr. Rosetti 
 — that his grandfather, old Sir Bysshe, *was a complete 
 atheist, ^nd founded all his hopes on annihilation.^ 
 
 To a somewhat similar cause — the want of any deep- 
 rooted conviction in the author's mind — may be 
 attributed, we think, a great deal of that watery and 
 Werthery instability that characterises too many of 
 Goethe's heroes, although in his case in a more modified 
 degree. Goethe's unbelief did not kick at heaven as 
 Shelley's did in the Prometheus. His scepticism was of 
 a milder and more passive type, or perhaps it might be 
 more accurately described as a kind oi x^oxdX juste milieu^ 
 with a singular inaccessibility to attraction on one side or 
 the other. His moral sense was insulated, so to speak 
 — encased by a coating of intellect which was an absolute 
 non-conductor. There is no better representative than 
 he of the spirit described by Tennyson as 
 
 Holding no form of creed, 
 But contemplating all. 
 
 With less of this power to maintain an attitude of moral 
 neutrality, Goethe's own character, as well as that of 
 many of those he created, would have been much more 
 
SCEPTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 19 
 
 humanly and poetically complete. His shortcoming in 
 the direction of personal faith cannot be kept down, and 
 is continually cropping out in his heroes. In many of the 
 leading men he has drawn there is hardly any strong 
 moral aspiration, and in some no discoverable preference 
 or predilection whatever. The only exception to this we 
 can think of is in the character of ' Goetz von Berlichingen,' 
 and that was a production almost of the author's boy- 
 hood, or at least at an age before men have begun to 
 question or doubt. There was evidently a lurking 
 suspicion in Goethe's maturer mind that anything like 
 well-defined religious views in a man argued weakness, 
 and weakness was the one vice Goethe abhorred, 
 even to a weakness. But that he was equally well con- 
 vinced, on the other hand, that no feminine character 
 could possibly be complete without such views, may be 
 as safely inferred. His women are singularly rich by the 
 very excess of those qualities of faith and trust so conspi- 
 cuously awanting in his men. 
 
 This absence of any kind of moral partiality in the 
 author found its counterpart in the moral tenuity and 
 aimless vacillation of Werther, Egmont, Wilhelm Meister, 
 and Faust. Beside the intense purpose of Shakspeare's 
 heroes, such men as these are little better than shadows. 
 Even in the presence of Shakspeare's secondary 
 c 2 
 
20 SCEPTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 characters — of his villains even — we are never altogether 
 out of an atmosphere of faith. Among the very worst 
 there is an implied recognition of God, a power without 
 and beyond them, in an accusing if not approving con - 
 science. 
 
 Without any of that modern moral attitudinising that 
 pirouettes on a pivot of its own self-consciousness (and 
 which the world could so well do without), no man's 
 work carries upon it more clearly and unmistakably the 
 marks of an overruling conviction and a dominant 
 purpose. So evident is this quality in Shakspeare's 
 works that one might almost imagine that — like every 
 fresh effort of Haydn's genius — they were commenced 
 with prayer and carried out under the power of old 
 Herbert's motto — 
 
 Think the king sees thee still, for his King does. 
 
 Perhaps the most striking illustration in more modern 
 times of the manner in which the poetical faculty may 
 be overridden and paralysed by the action of doubt, is 
 to be found in the life and writings of Arthur Hugh 
 Clough. The more his life is studied, the more it ap- 
 pears to rise above the common conventionality of 
 doubt, and to represent the highest possible phase of 
 conscientious scepticism — one, indeed, of those sacrificial 
 
SCEPTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 21 
 
 souls which the Creator seems to throw from Him at inter- | 
 
 valsinto the ocean of reHgious opinion to keep the waters 
 
 in a healthy fermentation, and save them from stagnating j 
 
 i 
 by tradition, or freezing by convention into mere lifeless I 
 
 forms. His case presents many unique and interesting 
 points. Differing from Shelley, inasmuch as the very 
 elements left out in Shelley's half-human composition 
 were amongst Clough's most conspicuous endowments — 
 the social side of genius — its simple homeliness, and the 
 keenness of its human sympathies — was in him beauti- 
 fully complete. Differing, again, from the scepticism of 
 Goethe — for Clough's moral predilections were strong, 
 and anything like indifference was with him impossible — 
 his scepticism seemed rather to rise out of an almost 
 morbid over-keenness and over- sensitiveness to the 
 requirements of conscience. With a strong and per- 
 petual craving for some solid ground of belief, he would 
 yet have no part of his faith at second hand. Following 
 Clough's career from his school-days at Rugby onwards, 
 it is a melancholy and even a humiliating thing to find 
 how much even of the unseen and spiritual force of a 
 great man's mind is overruled by the irresponsible 
 circumstance of its earthly surroundings. With all its 
 unquestionable excellences, there was a fatal flaw in the 
 Rugby training under the Arnold regime. In many cases 
 
22 SCEPTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 — and these cases necessarily the most important — it 
 had a tendency to over-stimulate the moral sense. It 
 sent boys out into the world with a dangerously premature 
 moral equipment ; an education that yielded a good 
 deal of dogmatic brain- force, but at the sacrifice of 
 intellectual accuracy and the finer moral discriminations. 
 An old head upon young shoulders is a doubtful blessing 
 in any case ; but when it takes the special form of an 
 adult faith grafted on a spiritual anatomy whose bones 
 are set not yet, there is no doubt in the matter. With 
 the great majority of strong natures, it is simply the best 
 conceivable arrangement for ultimate moral shipwreck. 
 Not the most carefully administered education, accom- 
 panied by the utmost solicitude of parents, can ever take 
 that highest part of every man's education out of the 
 hands of his Maker. Father or mother or teacher may 
 in some measure mould the outward frame, but God 
 alone can breathe into its nostrils the breath of life, and 
 make such an education a living thing. Clough (who 
 by the inherent tendency of his nature would have been 
 a seeker after God had he had no higher advantages than 
 a heathen) has always seemed to us to have been the 
 victim of a premature moral development. He came 
 from Rugby with the Arnold mint-marks fresh and 
 strong upon him, with his mind fully made up, and an 
 
SCEPTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 23 
 
 amiable determination to do battle, if need be, for all 
 the theories of his worthy master. But man proposes, 
 God disposes. A moral influence was lying in wait for 
 him that he had never taken into account, and which 
 proved to be the turning-point of his life. When he 
 went into residence at Oxford in 1836, the Tractarian 
 movement was at its height. Newman was stretching 
 out, through pulpit and platform, through verse and 
 prose, those subtle prehensile tentacles of his, that 
 touched so softly, and yet have closed so firmly, upon 
 modern thought. It was an atmosphere Clough had 
 never breathed before, and it proved too much for his 
 tender years. Speaking of it afterwards, he says that for 
 a long time he was ' like a straw drawn up the draught 
 of a chimney.' 
 
 The fierce struggle he passed through can never be 
 altogether known, and is only shadowed here and there 
 in his poems, and a few chance exclamations in his corre- 
 spondence ; but of the severity of it there can be no 
 doubt. His mind was not altogether unhorsed — he 
 had too firm a seat for that — but he may have been said 
 to have lost his stirrups, and never again to have 
 recovered them until the harrowing interregnum that dates 
 between doubt and well-assured belief had done its 
 work upon him, and worn him down to the brink of the 
 
24 SCEPTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 grave. Torture like his turns the confident cant of your 
 easy-minded believer into something that almost ap- 
 proaches blasphemy. 
 
 All that he suffered in that pitiless purgatory will 
 never be revealed — that valley of the shadow of death, so 
 thickly strewn with the bones of the spiritually dead, by 
 what inscrutable decree of Providence we know not ; but 
 that all was borne without a murmur, and with a rare 
 humility and integrity, his life is a sufficient guarantee. 
 With all his doubts and difficulties, we should be in- 
 clined to question the catholicity of the Church that 
 refused to extend to him the invitation of Laban, ' Come 
 in, thou blessed of the Lord: why standest thou without V 
 
 But for the fate that brought him so directly under 
 the wheels of the Tractarian movement, he might have 
 been living yet ; and few, who have paid his works any 
 attention, will doubt but that he would have held an 
 important rank amongst living writers. That this unfor- 
 tunate interruption and harassing mental conflict fatally 
 interfered with his aesthetic development as a successful 
 poet, is very abundantly proved by nearly all the poetry 
 he has written. He carried his doubts about him by force 
 of habit, and not least doubted his own powers, and the 
 quality of his own productions. His doubts to him in- 
 deed 
 
SCEPTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 25 
 
 Were traitors, 
 And made him lose the good he might have won, 
 By fearing to attempt. 
 
 He kept his most important poem, the 'Amours de 
 Voyage,' in MS. beside him for nine years, and only 
 published it at last in a kind of modestly furtive way in 
 an American periodical — the 'Atlantic Monthly.' His 
 doubt seemed to find him out and to hunt him to cover 
 whenever and wherever he ventured out. He could not 
 escape it. There was nothing left for him, but, in his 
 own melancholy words, 'to pace the sad confusion 
 through.' Baffled and tempest-tost by conflicting opinions, 
 he exclaims, in one of his poems : — 
 
 O may we for assurance' sake 
 Some arbitrary judgment take, 
 And wilfully pronounce it true. 
 
 We almost wish he could have done so, even at some 
 little intellectual sacrifice. But that was just the thing 
 he could not do. He was too keenly suspicious of his 
 intellectual life. With him there was no deeper form of 
 dishonesty than that which shrinks from its own convic- 
 tion. There never was a character more spotlessly free 
 from anything even approaching compromise in this 
 respect. His intellectual honesty was without a flaw. 
 Everything went down before his convictions — his living 
 at Oxford (it should not be forgot that in his position 
 
26 SCEPTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 pecuniary sacrifice meant poverty), and with it, in many 
 men's eyes, his social status as well. And last, what to 
 him was of far more value than these, the confidence of 
 his dearest friends, and at the head of the list Arnold 
 himself. Happiness, health, all went ; and in their place, 
 to use a phrase of his own, came * spiritual vertigo and 
 megrims unutterable,' and loneliness and misery. Every- 
 thing his conscience required of him was paid, down to 
 the last farthing. All was given away, till only his great 
 unrooted honesty remained to him. Religion would 
 indeed be a rhapsody of words if in such a case a man 
 could not spend his life and yet in the highest sense 
 possess it. Whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it. 
 It is a beautiful belief, and it never was beat out into the 
 metal of actual hard fact with a sublimer self-denial than 
 in the life of Clough. 
 
MODERN CREEDS AND MODERN POETRY 
 
MODERN CREEDS AND MODERN 
 POETRY. 
 
 Some of the more recent modifications of poetical scepti- 
 cism are of so vague a character, that they hardly admit 
 of definite classification. If we find the atheism of the 
 poet difficult to account for, and apt, as we have seen in 
 the case of Shelley and others, to be self contradictory, 
 it is quite as difficult on the other hand to give any satis- 
 factory estimate of that cloud of aesthetic sentiment in 
 which some of our teachers of Science envelope their 
 materialistic conclusions. The poetical exponents of 
 Cosmic emotion, and the worship of Humanity are hard 
 enough to understand sometimes, but their effiisions are 
 certainly not less puzzling or less contradictory than the 
 strange outbursts of something very like religious enthu- 
 siasm we sometimes get from those exponents of Science 
 who accept the doctrine of physical and moral necessity, 
 and the hypothesis of a universe without a mind. 
 
 Between Mr. Swinburne's eloquent apostrophes to 
 
30 MODERN CREEDS AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 Humanity without a God, on the one side, and Professor 
 Tyndall's ' poetic thrill ' on the other, there is not much 
 to choose, although perhaps there is not the same likeli- 
 hood of the pagan ecstasy of the poet becoming natura- 
 lized in modern English soil. It is in fact as completely 
 out of time as many of his Christian readers will conceive 
 it to be out of taste. The anachronistic mixture of the 
 pagan with the Christian element in many of his ethnical" 
 poems — in such a one for example as Dolores — recalls 
 the ludicrous incongruity in the Lusiad of Camoens where 
 Vasco de Gama^ caught in a storm, addresses his prayers 
 to Christ, but it is Venus who comes to his assistance. 
 It is not likely that such poetry will ever be anything but 
 caviare to the majority of English readers. Sentimental 
 materialism however, the scientific creed of a soulless 
 universe, duly anointed and glossed over with what may 
 be called the liberation of pent-up poetry, which some of 
 its exponents so well know how to apply, seems to be 
 much more in keeping with what Shakspeare would have 
 called * the tune of the times,' and is destined to have 
 a much wider appreciation. It is surely a novel if not an 
 ominous fact that in the country which used to be 
 specialized as having a hundred religions and only one 
 sauce, an assembly can be found to approve, if not 
 applaud, the philosopher who enlivens the tedium of a 
 
MODERN CREEDS AND MODERN POETRY. 31 
 
 scientific lecture with the condescending admission, that 
 he has no objections to a belief in the existence of a soul, 
 as 'an exercise of ideality.' No doubt a great deal of 
 such scepticism is unreal and affected, and to tell the 
 truth the affectation is getting to be rather banale. Too 
 many of the smaller adventurers on the impacific sea of 
 science and theology seem to trim their sails to the pre- 
 vailing breeze, and must assume the sceptical attitude if 
 they have it not, in order to maintain their character as 
 pioneers of advanced thought ; men who cultivate that 
 kind of rhetoric which always seems to be so pregnant 
 with the promise of the times, and who, by dint of spell- 
 ing 'progress' with a big P, constitute themselves the 
 apostles and prophets of a Future which with strange 
 persistency refuses to become a Present, men who, as 
 long as they can get an audience to applaud them, will 
 probably continue to hail the erection of the latest calf in 
 Horeb that presents itself. 
 
 Scepticism in fact is fast becoming la maladie desiede, 
 and as there are always so many people who must still be 
 in the fashion, even in their maladies, we have naturally 
 enough something too much of it. It is amusing to notice 
 how the spirit is beginning to filter downward and find a 
 bed in that lower stratum of intelligence, whose voice is 
 so frequently little more than an echo of the stratum 
 
32 MODERN CREEDS AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 lying immediately above it. How many of the popular 
 exhibitions of heresy and scepticism so-called, remind us 
 of Voltaire's barber, who strove to convince his illustrious 
 patron that * although he was only a poor " perruquier," 
 he did not believe in God any more than the gentlemen 
 did.' New, and popular, and shallow as much of this 
 scepticism undoubtedly is, and subscribed to, with perhaps 
 as little exercise of thought or conscience as when the 
 broadest of broad churchmen signs those articles of his 
 confession he makes no secret of disbeHeving, it never- 
 theless makes progress. It has its deeper and more 
 intelligent aspects too, and to some of these the Church 
 is lending a tacit justification.. From the present stub- 
 born attitude of conservative theology more than half of 
 our real scepticism is the natural revolt. If the Church 
 can reasonably charge Science, as she most certainly can, 
 with gross materialism, Science can retort that the Church 
 has taken too little care to keep her creed abreast of her 
 convictions \ has made too tardy acknowledgment of what 
 she owes both to Science and the higher criticism ; has 
 tempted men too far away from the terra firma of known 
 fact towards the region of hypothetical and profitless 
 speculation ; and has perhaps thrust aside with too rude a 
 hand the veil of that inner sanctuary behind which facts 
 are silent and dogmatism intolerable. It is quite possible 
 
MODERN CREEDS AND MODERN POETRY. 33 
 
 to revere men's higher though undemonstrable aspirations, 
 
 and yet at the same time reap some little benefit from 
 
 those who tell us that — 
 
 It seems His newer will 
 "We should not think so much of Him, but turn, 
 And of the world that He has given us, make 
 What best we may. 
 
 Between the extremes on either side there ought to be 
 room both for scientific theology and reverential science. 
 There are a good many people, however, who have got 
 thoroughly sick of what they have come to look upon as 
 the incomprehensible phantoms of Theology, and who yet 
 are eagerly disposed to close, not alone with the facts, 
 but with what is quite as mysterious and incomprehensible 
 in Science. They have always been taught to attach their 
 faith most strongly to those problems which, on anything 
 like a priori grounds, it is as impossible for Theology to 
 affirm as it is for Science to deny, so that in throwing off 
 the one extravagance for the other there is little sacrifice 
 to make. And besides, from the extreme of over-belief 
 to the extreme of under-belief there is no great distance. 
 Like other extremes they are apt to meet. The evil 
 generation that must have a sign — or in other words the 
 mind predisposed to believe in anything, provided it is 
 miraculous and humanly speaking incomprehensible — is 
 not uncommonly just the other side of the same mind, 
 
 D 
 
34 MODERN CREEDS AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 which questions everything of which the rest of the world 
 is very well assured. 
 
 The retention and imposition by orthodox theology 
 of much questionable matter, long after such matter has 
 ceased to be of any value to living wight, and in which 
 ^acquiescence or non-acquiescence can neither help 
 nor hinder him, in this world or the next, has no 
 doubt done much to encourage the spread of scientific 
 scepticism. The rapidly growing objection to admit 
 ecclesiastical dogma as such, makes room for the 
 new guest, who perhaps would never have gained an 
 entrance had Theology wisely relaxed, and made those 
 concessions a little earlier, which after all can only be a 
 matter of time. In the meantime the breach widens, for 
 although Science may fail to formulate and organise a cult 
 of its own, it will never come back to the one it has left. 
 It will probably continue to exercise its ideality in the 
 * illimitable azure ' of some of its professors, and clothe it- 
 self in such liturgy as it can appropriate from our best 
 pantheistic poetry. The poetical side of scientific scepti- 
 cism is indeed a curious study and well worth examina- 
 tion. It proves how utterly futile is the attempt to stamp 
 out the religious and imaginative instinct, not only in 
 human nature generally, but in the very hearts of those who 
 deny its power, and who are never tired in trying to prove 
 the unreasonableness and baselessness of its aspirations. 
 
MODERN CREEDS AND MODERN POETRY. 35 
 
 With the labour of a life, Comte builds up a system in- 
 tended to exclude God at every crevice, and then proceeds 
 to organise a religious cult, palpably inspired from the 
 Church of Rome, with priesthood, sacrament, and calen- 
 dar all complete, and, in the beatification of Clotilde de 
 Vaux, something very like the worship of the Virgin 
 added ; while the philosophy of his most famous friend 
 and correspondent, J. S. Mill, if not altogether overthrown, 
 is shaken to its foundations by the publication of a vol- 
 ume of posthumous essays which shows the author in a 
 character and attitude little short of adoration towards the 
 religious conclusions his philosophy tended to undermine. 
 Again Professor Tyndall, the modern exponent of the 
 doctrine of Necessity, the acceptor of a cosmic order 
 which dominates if it does not dispense at once with the 
 will of God and man, and necessarily limits the life of the 
 soul to the dissolution of its fleshy tenements, can still 
 speak of the human mind turning to the Mystery from 
 which it has emerged ' with the yearnmg of a pilgrim for 
 his distant home,' and in the face of that power whose con- 
 trol and interference his philosophy excludes, can still 
 quote, with approbation and evident sincerity, the words 
 of the great poet who tells us of— 
 
 A spirit that impels 
 All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts, 
 And rolls through all things. 
 
36 MODERN CREEDS AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 Every reader of the autobiography of J. S. Mill and 
 these wonderful posthumous essays on religion, must have 
 felt that there is something deeply pathetic in a heart like 
 his, groping about for anchorage upon ground his philo- 
 sophy tells him is either heartless hard rock or shallow- 
 shifting sand. Except indeed in a mind from which all 
 human interest has been drained away, the lower materi- 
 alistic conclusion and the higher aspiration of humanity 
 cannot lie comfortably together. Explosion seems to be 
 a chemical necessity, and when by that explosion the ark, 
 that may have hitherto carried the believer's faith through 
 all the storms of life, goes to pieces, it is curious as well 
 as pathetic to see how ready the self-wrecked mariner is 
 to avail himself of any floating spar he can snatch from 
 the general ruin, upon which to buoy up those indestruct- 
 ible longings, those hopes which will not part with him 
 as long as there is a breath left in his body. This con- 
 tinual looking about for an emotional substitute for religion 
 in the materialistic mind has a strange significance. It is 
 'a fresh endorsation of the profound truth, which lies at 
 the bottom of Voltaire's rather irreverent witticism, that if 
 God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him. 
 We may or may not be of much account to Him, but He 
 is absolutely indispensable to us. 
 
 Science may effect a great reform in widening the 
 
MODERN CREEDS AND MODERN POETRY. 37 
 
 conception, and in purging the worship of God of much 
 of that ignorant superstition, theological fog, and sacer- 
 dotal trumpery, with which it has been too much mixed 
 up, but when it overturns the temple itself to make room 
 for some force in nature which it immediately proceeds 
 to endow with all the attributes of Almightiness, it is 
 simply repeating the blind iconoclasm of the older and 
 more necessary reform, which when it had demolished 
 the cathedrals proceeded to build barns of its own, in 
 which to worship the very same God, with a form and 
 ceremonial no better fitted for its purpose, while at the 
 same time it had an equal liability to sink into empty 
 and unmeaning ritual. 
 
 But the worship of the poetical materialist is more 
 incongruous and inconsistent from another point of view. 
 Professor Tyndall, and those who think with him, propose 
 to banish the religious sentiment from the sphere of know- 
 ledge and relegate, if not confine it, to the sphere of 
 emotion. In much the same way J. S. Mill admits 
 the idea of a life after death as the indulgence of a hope 
 in the region of imagination merely, and tells us that 
 although it is probably an illusion, it is sufficiently valu- 
 able to retain on moral grounds. But would these 
 teachers have us keep our reason in one drawer, and our 
 emotions in another, with a God for each ? Is there room 
 
38 MODERN CREEDS AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 in the same brain for this double-barrelled divinity ? Is 
 it possible to be rationalistic on one side of the head and 
 devout on the other ? And yet how else can we follow 
 such teaching ? To dismiss God from the cerebrum, and 
 find room for him in the cerebellum, is no great comph- 
 ment to one's Maker, and it is hardly a form of faith 
 which recommends itself to reason whatever it may do to 
 rationalism. It would indeed be a new and grotesque 
 exaggeration of that Protestant form of indulgence, now 
 happily dying out, which allows its believers to be 
 worldly for six days and heavenly-minded on the seventh. 
 Moreover the existence of a soul with a future life is 
 either true, or it is not true. There is no room for 
 mortal foot between the yes, and no, of such a subject; 
 and the philosophy which objects to the doctrine on 
 materialistic grounds, but would still retain it as a poetical 
 phenomenon, is unworthy of a reasonable creature. If 
 matter has to account for everything it must account for 
 poetry too, and the religious sentiment as well. And if 
 it cannot throw any new light on these things ; if it fail 
 to solve the problem of that spiritual nature in man of 
 which these things speak and testify, it only proves that 
 there are more things in heaven and earth than are 
 dreamt of in its philosophy, that the Frankenstein 
 monster so dear to the scientific mind is a creature easily 
 
MODERN CREEDS AND MODERN POETRY. 39 
 
 circumvented, but the living specimen, fearfully and 
 wonderfully made, as originally turned out of the hands 
 of his Creator, is as profound a mystery as ever. Of the 
 teachers of such a philosophy it may be said — 
 
 lis ont eu I'art de bien connaitre 
 L'homme qu'ils ont imagine, 
 Mais il n'ont jamais devine 
 
 Ce qu'il est, ni ce qu'il doit etre. 
 
 With no hope beyond the limits of earthly life St. Paul 
 tells us we are of all men the most miserable. Now it is 
 surely trifling with one's misery to recommend him to 
 reject the doctrine of immortality as a fact, and accept it 
 as a beneficial fiction, and seems indeed to offer to the 
 mind a more humiliating and much less honest alter- 
 native than the most out-and-out atheism. Existence 
 would not be worth accepting on such conditions. The 
 great working and suffering mass of the world would sink 
 under the hopeless cross of such a faith, and to all but 
 the fleeting ephemera, to whom the short and paltry pre- 
 sent is sufficient, life would quickly shrivel up into a 
 ghastly study of euthanasia and the nearest way out. In 
 
 such a case 
 
 'Twere hardly worth our while to choose 
 
 Of things all mortal, or to use 
 A little patience ere we die ; 
 'Twere best at once to sink to peace, 
 
 Like birds the charming serpent draws, 
 
 To drop head-foremost in the jaws 
 Of vacant darkness and to cease. 
 
40 MODERN CREEDS AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 To ask a man to let go that part of his faith without 
 
 which his religion would be a vain and cruel delusion, 
 
 without which his life 
 
 Is darkness at the core, 
 And dust and ashes all that is, 
 
 and then to turn round and propose that he may be 
 allowed to retain it as a highly respectable dream, is 
 fortunately a modem modification of belief not very 
 likely to recommend itself to the bulk of mankind. And 
 that such a conviction did not recommend itself with the 
 strength of conviction to the mind of J. S. Mill seems 
 pretty evident. There will always be many, no doubt, 
 who accept the philosopher's enforcement of that gospel 
 according to Bentham in which he was so exclusively and 
 inexorably trained as the highest outcome of his life, but 
 in the light of the posthumous essays, there must be many 
 more who regard the 77ian's unconquerable scepticism 
 towards his own rationalistic conclusions as the most 
 valuable fact he has left behind him. 
 
 Within its own province, it would be difficult to over- 
 rate the value of the modem revelation of science, and 
 the school of thought, in theology or elsewhere, which 
 ignores it, or even fails to appreciate its importance, is 
 simply shortening its own days, losing its hold on the 
 cultivation of its time, and tuming a deaf ear to one of 
 
MODERN CREEDS AND MODERN POETRY. 41 
 
 the grandest and greatest of the oracles of God. But 
 when the apostles of exact science leave their own sphere 
 of demonstrable fact, traverse the line of the knowable, 
 and begin to make experiments in the field that lies be- 
 yond it, they seem too often to fall, as in the case of 
 Comte, an easy prey to the most incoherent mysticism. 
 Within its own proper lines Science is invaluable and in- 
 vulnerable, and within these lines error is nowhere 
 shorter-lived. And for this reason, that in the purely 
 scientific mind there is no historical dogma to contend 
 with, no moral spectre to appease, no preconceived claim 
 or confession of faith to be satisfied or squared off with ; 
 so that Science may be said to be perpetually undergoing 
 a process of self-purification and self correction. Unlike 
 the fixed laws of systematic theology — in whose very 
 fixedness their main strength is erroneously supposed to 
 reside — the deductions of Science have this advantage that 
 the light of every fresh day and every fresh mind is con- 
 tinually pouring through them. In Science the discovery 
 of an error is hailed as a triumph, in Theology it is sus- 
 pected as an enemy, and too often fought with to the 
 death. But once out of its own legitimate field, Science 
 seems to leave all power, and even common- sense, behind 
 it. Amongst things that are immeasurable and imponder- 
 able it seems to lose its head ; its microscope and scalpel,. 
 
42 MODERN CREEDS AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 its tests and solvents, its chemical and mechanical appli- 
 ances, and perhaps more than all these, the scientific 
 habit of thought, seem to encumber rather than help it. 
 It does not appear to realise the difficulty of treating the 
 religious instinct as it would an exact science. In those 
 subjects whose every element lies fairly within the compass 
 of human comprehension, and whose every conclusion 
 can be proven experimentally, or fairly generalised from 
 ascertained phenomena, its inductive methods may be of 
 advantage, but the moment that exact science in the 
 person of the logician or the philosophical necessitarian 
 enters the domain of imagination, his function is be- 
 numbed. The ' two-and thirty palaces ' bamboozle him 
 thoroughly. There are voices in the earth and the air he 
 can make nothing of Like Stephano in the enchanted 
 island, although he had aspired to be king, he is at last 
 reduced to the pitiful confession, that there ' he is not 
 Stephano but a cramp.' Pure reason so called is all very 
 well in its own field of exact definition, but where it comes 
 in contact and has to do with imponderable forces, its 
 laborious attempts to relegate everything to the limbo of 
 emotion which its philosophy fails to account for, and 
 its methods fail to circumvent, may be a convenient way 
 of evading the difficulty, but it by no means disposes of 
 it. Nor are such attempts altogether acceptable to the 
 
MODERN CREEDS AND MODERN POETRY. 43 
 
 inner consciousness of him who makes them. He swears 
 allegiance to his new belief, but still hangs on half-uncon- 
 sciously to the hope that the relinquished creed may be 
 partly true after all. In the later semi-religious phase of 
 Comte's philosophy, in the poetical predilections of Pro- 
 fessor Tyndall, and in the admitted moral value of J. S. 
 Mill's hypothetical immortality, we have only the natural 
 and irrepressible aspirations of men whose faces may be 
 turned towards Babylon, but who in their inmost thoughts 
 are still dreaming of the Zion they have left behind. 
 
 This perfectly natural feeling of regret towards a de- 
 parting faith is not, however, confined to our philosophers 
 and men of science. It gives tone and colour to much 
 of our later sceptical poetry, as well as to a good deal of 
 poetry which does not earn that epithet except from the 
 extremely orthodox. It lies at the heart of some of the 
 most eloquent passages of the laureate's immortal elegy, 
 and is the principal source of the mournful and pathetic 
 inspiration of Mr. Arnold. 
 
 In order to see how true this is with regard to Mr. 
 Arnold's genius, it is only necessary to recall the motif of 
 some of his finest poems. It is the secret root of the 
 poet's own uneasiness which gives him the power to 
 describe the majestic despair of Empedocles on Etna, 
 and express the godlike discontent and impatience of a 
 
44 MODERN CREEDS AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 soul that has broken with the past, thrown off its phi- 
 losophies as utterly inadequate to explain the riddle of 
 the world, but yet has failed to accept the future, or 
 find any satisfactory substitute for the faith it has re- 
 jected, an attitude of soul well described in one of the 
 author's most characteristic poems, where he represents 
 himself as 
 
 Wandering between two worlds, one dead, 
 The other powerless to be born. 
 
 This rupture between the old and new seems to present 
 itself to him in every situation. He hears it in the winds 
 and the woods, and the sea takes up the cry ; standing 
 by a moonlit shore at full tide, the old plaint breaks forth 
 in a lyrical burst unsurpassed in modem poetry for 
 grandeur and breadth : — 
 
 The sea of faith 
 
 Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore, 
 
 Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd j 
 
 But now I only hear 
 
 Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, 
 
 Retreating to the breath 
 
 Of the night-wind down the vast edges drear 
 
 And naked shingles of the world. 
 
 If Mr. Arnold's poetical theory be true, when speaking 
 of Heine, he tells us that all genius is but the passing 
 mood of the spirit in whom we have our being, he miTSt 
 himself have been selected for the melancholy mood, 
 
MODERN CREEDS AND MODERN POETRY. 45 
 
 and set apart as the special exponent of the still sad music 
 of humanity. Wherever his contemplation wanders ; by 
 ' Dover Beach/ or by ' Heine's Grave,' with the world- 
 weary author of Oberman, or with the Carthusian ascetics 
 of the Grand Chartreuse, the same deep undertone of 
 sorrow is everywhere present. Through the thin dramatic 
 disguise of the singer, in all these poems one can read 
 between the hnes the trouble of the poet's own soul : 
 
 A fever in his pages burns 
 Beneath the calm they feign ; 
 A wounded human spirit turns 
 Here, on his bed of pain. 
 
 All his communings with nature and human nature 
 take the same sad and sober colour. His gladdest notes 
 are not all glad, but seem to be conceived in shadow and 
 set in the same low and plaintive key. His quarrel in 
 one of his poems with the calmness of old age, and with 
 death itself, because it does not fulfil the ardent promises 
 of youth, and takes him out of 'the daylight and the 
 cheerful sun,' though singularly Greek in feeling, is yet 
 made to ring with a sorrowful pathos palpably projected 
 from the later faith. It is the song of a Greek soul sing- 
 ing under the cross and thorns of a half-accepted half- 
 rejected Christianity. 
 
 Since the days of Elizabeth contemporaneous religious 
 
46 MODERN CREEDS AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 difficulties have never received the attention, and have 
 never been more vigorously incorporated and reflected 
 in English poetry, than in the present day, and since that 
 day to this it has perhaps never been more needful that 
 it should be so. In Mr. Tennyson and Mr. Arnold we 
 have the interpreters of the spiritual troubles of an age 
 fraught with issues less salient it may be, but certainly 
 not less operative in time to come than those of the 
 Reformation, and the spiritual interpretation of the times 
 would hardly have been complete without them both. 
 With them both the subject is pretty comprehensively 
 discussed and illustrated. In Mr. Arnold we have all 
 the languor and weariness of soul, all the restlessness and 
 hankering solicitude of an age, whose creed is more or 
 less at war with its convictions ; an age which has 
 wakened, or whose attention has been aroused, to the 
 inadequacy of its older authorities and will no longer 
 accept existing standards in matters of faith, although it 
 may not as yet have got its feet on firmer ground ; an 
 age that turns its back on the formulae of the past, but 
 yet has no sufficiently formulated future it can fairly 
 embrace ; refusing, and even overthrowing the old found- 
 ations, it yet would seek some external basis for that 
 kingdom of heaven within us, that faith which is not of 
 man, neither received of men, nor taught. 
 
MODERN CREEDS AND MODERN POETRY. 47 
 
 An age, in short, which dispenses with the revelation 
 written on the stony tables of authority, and which has 
 outgrown the legal swaddling-bands of its historic and 
 dogmatic parchment, and yet is hardly prepared to accept, 
 without some guarantee outside itself, that ever abiding 
 revelation written not on stone but on the fleshy tables 
 of the human heart and conscience. If in the poetical 
 genius of Mr. Arnold (his prose works are not here taken 
 into consideration) we have the regretful exponent of a 
 tottering theological system, the Jeremiah of a decadent 
 Israel, in Mr. Tennyson as reflected at the height of his 
 power in the pages of ' In Memoriam,' we have the pro- 
 phet of the wider faith to come. For it is hardly too 
 much to say that from the shadow projected from that 
 divine poem, we have a more certain indication of what 
 the theological future will be, in those questions it sets 
 itself to solve, than in all the volumes of theology proper 
 the century has produced. 
 
 In the scepticism of Mr. Tennyson (we use the epithet 
 in this case for the sake of illustration, for in our opinion 
 it is not earned) there is a much more hopeful note than 
 in that of Mr. Arnold, although at times he storms the 
 strongholds of orthodoxy much more directly, and with 
 much more telling effect. In the 'In Memoriam,' 
 sorrowful as the poem is, there is little of the hopeless 
 
48 MODERN CREEDS AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 despondency and dejection of Mr. Arnold's view. What 
 seems to lower the power and the pulse of the one singer, 
 seems to stimulate the other. The doubt of the one 
 looks hopefully and towards heaven, that of the other, 
 despondingly and towards earth. The one seems to be 
 earnestly seeking some surer ground, and possesses to the 
 full 
 
 The faith and vigour, bold to dwell 
 
 On doubts that drive the coward back, 
 And keen through wordy snares to track 
 
 Suggestion to her inmost cell ; 
 
 while the other, with not less courage, seems still to be 
 
 more or less ashamed and afraid of being caught in the 
 
 attitude and the company of those who stand convicted 
 
 of having convictions. Like the hero he describes in his 
 
 great poem, who it appears was also troubled with the 
 
 disease of the age, the laureate faces the spectres of his 
 
 mind and lays them ; and as he bravely fights on, he finds 
 
 in the conflict a surer footing for his faith. In his deepest 
 
 perplexity he never loses hold of the ' living Will that 
 
 shall endure,' and overwhelmed with sorrow can still 
 
 represent himself as 
 
 falling with his weight of cares 
 Upon the world's great altar stairs 
 That slope through darkness up to God, 
 
 with a humility, and at the same time a security of con- 
 viction, which Mr. Arnold fails to attain. 
 
MODERN CREEDS AND MODERN POETRY. 49 
 
 The different treatment of the same subject by poets 
 of the same age, may, generally speaking, be ascribed to 
 different idiosyncrasy and diversity of gift, but in this 
 case it must also be attributed in some degree to diversity 
 in point of view, and the route and method by which the 
 subject is approached by each writer. The solvent of 
 the poet's perplexity in the ' In Memoriam ' is a great 
 sorrow. Death is one of those old masters m philosophy, 
 not likely to be superseded even by the most advanced of 
 thinkers, and who in his shadowy hands will sometimes 
 bring more substantial gifts to men than all the schools put 
 together. Mr. Tennyson's doubts, like those of thousands 
 of his less gifted fellow men since the world began, are 
 buried in the grave of a friend. On the other hand, 
 the test which Mr. Arnold brings to the solution of the 
 sceptical problems of his age is a purely intellectual one. 
 The results of the two processes are before the world. 
 In the first case the doubts are dispersed and vanquished, 
 and the closing song of the great elegy in which the 
 triumph is achieved, rings like the joy in heaven when a 
 new world redeems itself from chaos, and takes its place 
 in the choir of its starry peers. In the other case the old 
 vapours still cling, and the doubts of the singer still 
 encircle him like the shirt of Nessus. He fails to shake 
 himself free, and there are no more pathetic lines in the 
 
 E 
 
50 MODERN CREEDS AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 whole range of his noble poems, than those in which he 
 cries out, like a creature in pain, for the faith of an age 
 still untainted by the disease of modern life, and into 
 which he could have thrown his whole heart — 
 
 Oh had I lived in that great day — 
 How had its glory new, 
 Filled earth and heaven, and caught away 
 My ravished spirit too. 
 
 Lord Byron used to declare, that if Lucretius had not 
 been spcdled by the Epicurean system, we should have 
 had a far superior poem to any now existing. One is 
 almost tempted to say of Mr, Arnold, that but for the 
 influence of a corresponding scepticism in our own age, 
 he might have taken a much higher rank in English 
 poetry. An interesting parallel indeed might be drawn 
 between the Roman sceptic and his English antitype. 
 When the Roman philosopher writes to his friend 
 Memmius, to whom he dedicates his poem, telling him 
 not to turn away from his somewhat dry discourse, and 
 assures him that he too (Lucretius) if he chose, could have 
 invented as many pretty poetical lies about the gods as 
 the other bards did, we are almost sorry, when we think 
 of his force and felicity, that he did not do so, rather than 
 exhaust his genius on so poor and unpoetical a theme. 
 In the English poet one feels the same regret, that he did 
 
MODERN CREEDS AND MODERN POETRY. 51 
 
 not give a wider berth to the theological troubles of his 
 time, that he should not have left the Empedoclean 
 perplexities, both in their ancient and modern manifesta- 
 tions, to take care of themselves, and have given more 
 room for the exercise of the matchless idyllic gift which 
 produced such poems as ' Thyrsis ' and ' The Scholar 
 Gipsy.' 
 
 Many other interesting points between the two poets 
 suggest themselves. In fact Mr. Arnold may be said to 
 occupy in several respects a very similar position, in his 
 attitude towards modern faith, to that occupied by Lucre- 
 tius towards the Pagan pantheon. Neither of them can 
 altogether bring themselves to part with the faith they 
 leave behind them, nor satisfactorily give form and defin- 
 ition to that which has to succeed to it. The vague 
 external power with which the philosophy of Lucretius 
 invests the * nature of things ' may be fairly compared 
 with the not less shadowy and impersonal deity which 
 Mr. Arnold speaks of as that ' Power not ourselves.' 
 Again in the Roman poet's rapturous invocation of the 
 gods, that strange inconsistency in the mouth of an 
 avowed Epicurean his commentators have failed to 
 account for, we have something very like the English 
 poet's irrepressible outbursts of intense sympathy with a 
 faith he can no longer accept. Both poets, too, seriously 
 
52 MODERN CREEDS AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 believe, and deeply lament, and perhaps too obtrusively 
 affect a moral pose^ towards the degeneracy of their own 
 age. The decadence of the particular time in which he 
 lives is, however, a theme so common to the poet it would 
 hardly be worth while drawing attention to it here, except 
 to note a certain similarity of manner and treatment by 
 the two writers in this particular. Lucretius delights to 
 picture himself standing upon the serene ramparts erected 
 by the learning of the philosophers, and from whose 
 passionless and unclouded heights he can look down upon 
 the race of blind and miserable mortals, striving night and 
 day for their empty and ridiculous honours.^ It can 
 hardly be necessary to point out that the patrician ex- 
 clusiveness of Lucretius is not without its counterpart in 
 the modern poet. The taint of the ' superior person ' 
 which weakens so much the effect of everything he says, 
 and that intolerable note of condescension towards the 
 wretched Philistine he addresses, as it were, from the 
 templa serena of his Roman prototype, has perhaps never 
 been more strongly marked in any English writer of real 
 genius. 
 
 The exponent of freethinking in the century imme- 
 diately preceding that of Augustus, had, however, a very 
 different task before him, and in many respects a much 
 * See opening of Book II. 
 
MODERN CREEDS AND MODERN POETRY. 53 
 
 less difficult one, than the poet of the Victorian era. He 
 
 had a very different divinity to dethrone and a very 
 
 different public to deal with. The orthodoxy of our day 
 
 occupies a sort of debatable ground liable to invasion on 
 
 all sides, from theologians of every shade of belief and 
 
 degree of enlightenment, and except on the broadest 
 
 grounds, any attempt at religious unity — that miracle for 
 
 which the w^orld yet waits in vain — seems as hopeless a 
 
 task as to seek for a pair of spectacles which will adjust 
 
 themselves to the eyes of the entire human race. In the 
 
 almost passionately religious age of Dante it was as likely 
 
 that the poet should espouse the affirmative side of 
 
 Christianity, as in the age of Lucretius it was likely he 
 
 should embrace the materialistic and negative view, 
 
 towards the worship of the gods of Greece. But what 
 
 with the fresh revelations of Science and Criticism, and 
 
 the contributions to both sides of the question from the 
 
 reconsidered history of the whole past world, the positive 
 
 and negative threads have got so intimately mixed and 
 
 woven into the web of modern life, the question becomes 
 
 a very difficult one. If we are not to tear the web to 
 
 shreds we must needs be both resolute and tender, and 
 
 firmly close our eyes to the fact that the scrupulously 
 
 conscientious exponent, like the late Professor Maurice for 
 
 example, is almost sure to be misunderstood between 
 
54 MODERN CREEDS AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 those who believe too much and those who believe too 
 little. No wonder that a poet like Mr. Arnold should 
 cry out for the whole-hearted honesty and simplicity of 
 apostolic times, in an age whose religious teachers in 
 their ordination vows are asked to declare their '■ unfeigned 
 belief in quasi-\{\^\.ox\Q,dX statements, which many of them 
 in their heart would no more think of seriously accepting 
 as fact, or attempt to prove to any fairly educated person, 
 than they would think of accepting the truth of the Pto- 
 lemaic cosmogony, unfeignedly believing the geographi- 
 cal accuracy of the different circles in Dante's Hell, or 
 substantiating the personal identity of Thor and Woden. 
 And yet believers and teachers of this kind are found who 
 in the holiest of situations will recite these so-called 
 histories for solemn fact, and with (in their mouths) 
 the altogether profane prologue of ' God spake these 
 words.' 
 
 What good can possibly befall a religion in which this 
 thinly crusted falsehood is not only accounted safe and 
 respectable and pious, but he who dares to question the 
 fact is looked upon as one of the suspected ? The time 
 is surely coming round again when the question Milton 
 asked of the religion of his age, may be justly asked of 
 ours, ' Do you think the Living God a buzzard idol ? ' 
 It would almost seem so, or who would attempt to hood- 
 
MODERN CREEDS AND MODERN POETRY. 55 
 
 wink Him with a worship and subscription Hke this. 
 Yes, in the atmosphere of the thirteenth century, it was 
 easy, if not inevitable, that the poet should be religious, 
 and in the decay of the Greek pantheon it was as easy 
 and almost as inevitable he should be a sceptic. But in 
 an age, much of whose creed is amorphous and impossible 
 to define, and much more of it carefully concealed, but 
 yet secretly hanging in painful and sickening suspense, it 
 becomes exceedingly difficult to find a poetical exponent 
 who can give the theological body of the time its form 
 and pressure. 
 
 Our poesy is as a gum, which oozes 
 From whence 'tis nourished ; 
 
 and in order to be a complete exponent of the religious 
 nourishment of the present day, a poet would need to be 
 Lucretius and Dante in one : to have something like the 
 democratic iconoclasm of I^uther, and the conservative 
 spirituality of A Kempis conjoined. 
 
 It is the possession of this double nature in so large 
 a degree by Mr. Tennyson — the characteristic alone of 
 the highest form of genius — the Socratean faculty of 
 seeing both sides of a question with equal power, which 
 has enabled him to become, in so important a sense 
 the interpreter of the transitional character of the 
 philosophy, religion, and to some extent the politics 
 
5 6 MODERN CREEDS AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 of his time ; riis power to stand on the debatable ground 
 on which these questions are discussed, giving strong 
 poetical form to each of the opposing factions, and yet 
 remain himself untouched and untainted by what he 
 would himself call ' the falsehood of extremes.' 
 
 This double-sided gift finds ample and subtle room for 
 exercise in such a poem as ' The Two Voices,' and with 
 such perfect fairness, one is almost at a loss sometimes to 
 decide whether the pessimistic or the optomistic voice 
 has the best of the philosophical duel. Again it is seen 
 in the ' Palace of Art,' where the field is contested by self- 
 sufficient culture against self-forgetful humility. In such 
 a poem again as ' You ask me why so ill at ease,' the 
 same faculty is employed to hold the balance even 
 between the sober-suited and somewhat lifeless conserva- 
 tism of settled government, and the licentious freedom 
 which ends in anarchy and tyranny. In the ' Princess ' 
 the same twofold attitude is maintained against the ex- 
 travagant theory, on the one hand, that would convert a 
 woman into a kind of forbidding female man, and the 
 equal unsoundness on the other side, that tends to keep 
 her the mindless ornamental supernumerary which 
 modem education so frequently turns her out. In * In 
 Memoriam ' we meet the same double endowment in its 
 richer and profounder aspect, in which the two voices 
 
MODERN CREEDS AND MODERN POETRY. 57 
 
 within the poet discuss under the shadow of death some 
 of the darkest riddles of the world, and in a poem which 
 has unquestionably given a prophetic solution to many of 
 the problems which have vexed the poet's day. 
 
 Whether by accident, or by that rare intuition which 
 belongs to the consummate artist by nature, we cannot tell, 
 but the ground accepted by the poet in * In Memoriam ' 
 on which to test the scepticism of his age could not have 
 been better chosen. The trumpet of death sounds a 
 truce to all petty differences and distinctions, whether 
 mental or material. In the one event which happens to 
 all there is a dreadful communism, a kind of butcherly 
 disregard of the ordinary forms of society, which brings 
 us all to a common level : ' Your fat king and your lean 
 beggar are but two dishes to one table.' The presence 
 of death in the poor man's house casts just as holy a 
 shadow as it does in the rich, and the poet who addresses 
 us from that platform speaks to us on the level of a 
 universal fate, and on ground made sacred by a common 
 sorrow and a common humanity. In such a situation 
 the wisdom of ' the superior person ' would be ludicrous 
 if it were not something much worse. In such a house, 
 at such a time, there is something more helpful to the 
 heart in the unconscious prattle of the smallest child 
 than all that the most perfect system of theology, or the 
 
58 MODERN CREEDS AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 most careful creed-making pedagogue has ever yet dis- 
 covered. Hence it is that in the august presence of 
 
 The Shadow, cloaked from head to foot, 
 Which keeps the keys of all the creeds, 
 
 the author of ' In Memoriam ' has no favourite panacea 
 to offer, and proposes no infallible tests by which the 
 various problems the situation suggests may be finally 
 set at rest. Nay, he goes further, and even takes the 
 precaution of guarding the reader against any such 
 misconception of the object he has in view, and tells him 
 plainly : 
 
 If these brief lays, of sorrow born, 
 Were taken to be such as closed 
 Grave doubts and answers here proposed, 
 
 Then these were such as men might scorn. 
 
 If the poet in grappling with the scepticism of his age 
 has acted wisely in thus declining any assistance from 
 the orthodox weapons of the pulpit or conventicle, and 
 has rather preferred to fall back upon those elementary 
 principles and feelings which for the most part constitute 
 the common basis of all the really operative creeds in 
 existence, he has shown the same or perhaps greater 
 wisdom in refusing the authority of that still more 
 intolerable egotism issuing from the opposite quarter of 
 materialistic science, which in his time has swelled into 
 
MODERN CREEDS AND MODERN POETRY. 59 
 
 almost papal proportions, and seeks to claim a final 
 right of judgment in a field of study where the word 
 * finality ' should be the only heresy, and where if faith 
 be not progressive, it is only a lower modification of 
 priestcraft. To condemn all philosophy as spurious except 
 that which treats of the finite and the phenomenal ; to 
 believe nothing, and to worship nothing, except what lies 
 within the radius of one's own observation, is to descend 
 to the lowest and narrowest form of fetishism, the 
 fetishism of self. The poet steers clear of both extremes ; 
 he does not speak to us as a school divine or a physicist, 
 or as a doctrinaire of any sort, but as a man ; and as the 
 production of a man and not a specialist, the poem has 
 its abiding value. That endless and ingenious fooling 
 over the question as to which particular division of 
 theological opinion Shakspeare favoured, is not wholly 
 fruitless, since the very fruitlessness of the discussion 
 goes to prove how utterly impossible it is for any really 
 great genius to become the exponent of a party, or the 
 mouthpiece of a faction. In * In Memoriam ' one 
 cannot detect even between the lines a leaning to- 
 wards one ism or another. The death that gave back 
 again to the mind of his friend its elemental freedom, 
 seems to have lifted his own above its earthly moorings 
 and earthly tendencies ; he battles on single-handed, and 
 
6o MODERN CREEDS AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 beats his music out to an accompaniment in which 
 neither the sophistries of science nor the casuistries of a 
 half-hearted orthodoxy find any place. For such a task 
 a brave and freedom-loving man was wanted, one that in 
 his own phrase was ready to follow truth in scorn of con- 
 sequence; and such a one the age has found in the 
 author of ' In Memoriam.' The image of ' Freedom on 
 her regal seat ' has ever been one of the great sources 
 of his inspiration, and since the days of Burns we have 
 had no more passionate worshipper of the great goddess, 
 and no such divine Promethean scorn of anything in the 
 shape of the quasi-spiritual fetter. Like the friend he 
 consecrates in his immortal elegy, ' he will not have his 
 judgment blind,' and, speaking of himself, he tells us 
 elsewhere how unendurable life would have been to him 
 except in 
 
 A land where, girt by friend or foe, 
 A man may speak the thing he will. 
 
 That such a poem should have presented difficulties to 
 the orthodox mind is perhaps not to be wondered at, and 
 cannot be helped. Without absolute freedom from the 
 fetters and restrictions of authoritative human codes, 
 poetry of the highest kind is impossible. If much of the 
 best poetry of the book of Job or the book of Psalms 
 had not found a conventional shelter behind the aegis of 
 
MODERN CREEDS AND MODERN POETRY. 6^ 
 
 the authorised Canon, there would have been no more 
 suggestive fields for the heresy-hunter than in the per- 
 plexed philosophy and probationary scepticism of the 
 great poets who produced these "works ; and if the pro- 
 fessional gauger of dogmatic truth has been unable to 
 square off several passages in the * In Memoriam ' with 
 the received standard of the particular sect to which he 
 belongs, there are many, on the other hand, who are of 
 opinion, that if the poem has troubled Israel at all, it has 
 troubled it as the angel troubled the waters at Bethesda, 
 so that those who come to wash therein find strength 
 and refreshing to their souls. In common with the 
 sacred writers above mentioned, who left orthodoxy to 
 take care of itself, the poet, in giving battle to his own 
 doubts, and expression to his own sorrow, has lifted up 
 ' a cloud of nameless trouble ' from many a weary and 
 darkened life, and the poem will not hold any less sure 
 or less grateful a place in the memory of men, because it 
 is not built upon the set lines of any doctrinal system, 
 but rather, clearing itself from all such earthly lendings, 
 stands out to the eyes of the imagination a spiritual 
 Camelot — 
 
 built 
 To music, therefore never built at all, 
 And therefore built for ever. 
 
MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY 
 
MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 If mysticism, like sublimity, be not Hebrew by birth, it 
 is at all events not English. The characteristic more 
 strongly marked than any other in 'the tongue that 
 Shakspeare spake ' — as Wordsworth called that glorious 
 vehicle of ours — is perhaps its forcible and terse directness, 
 and the facility it affords in either speaker or writer for 
 the exercise of that eminently English faculty called 
 * coming to the point.' Of the nation too, as well as the 
 language, one may safely risk the assertion that mysticism 
 is entirely out of character. The French proverb, ' Ce 
 qui n'est pas clair, n'est pas Frangais,' applies if possible 
 even more forcibly to English than to French. How it 
 should have come to pass then, notwithstanding these 
 peculiarities of race and language, and in an age, too, 
 whose matter-of-fact utilitarianism has been both well 
 marked and well abused, that such large proportions of 
 that branch of our literature in which we are supposed to 
 rival the best productions of any other nation, should 
 come to exhibit so much that is supersubtle in manner 
 
 F 
 
66 MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 and enigmatical in thought, is not very easily explained. 
 Whether it is that our poetical best — as Mr. Ruskin has as- 
 serted, and Mr. Carlyle more than hinted — has been already 
 achieved, or whether it is that civilisation has a tendency 
 to blunt, and in a certain sense to vulgarise, the faculty of 
 wonder, or that the poetical faculty itself is defective in 
 our day, may be hard to determine, but the fact indis- \ 
 putably remains, that much of what has been offered to 
 the present generation as poetry differs from what has 
 been hitherto accepted by English-speaking people as 
 highest of its kind, and that difference is largely attribut- 
 able to the introduction of an intricate and perplexed 
 phraseology, and an amount of ingenious excogitation / 
 presenting difficulties to the ordinary reader of poetry he I 
 has not hitherto been asked to overcome, and which the (' 
 majority of readers will not willingly encounter twice. I 
 That such poetry is pretty widely read is not to be denied. 
 Anyone taking ordinary notice of what is going on 
 around him — in books and out of them— must have 
 frequently come across specimens of a growing class of 
 readers who indulge a feeling of exclusive and exceptional 
 superiority, by affecting a sympathy with a range of 
 thought or a set of principles — in literature or art, as the 
 case may be — which they would fondly have you believe, 
 in their well-worn idiom, is * caviare to the general.' 
 
MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 67 
 
 Critics of this sort usually discover themselves by an 
 undignified solicitude lest they should be mixed up in 
 any way with the groundlings, or indeed classed in any 
 lower category than that of the enlightened minority they 
 suppose the poet to have comprehended in the phrase 
 
 * fit audience, though few.' The pleasing illusion of their 
 critical superiority to the rest of the world has been 
 nursed into a kind of monomania ; and if you will only 
 humour them so far as to permit them to believe them- 
 selves the occupants of some fancied judgment-seat a 
 little higher than their fellows, and from which they can 
 look down with infinite complacency on what they 
 delight to call the British Public, the amount of amuse- 
 ment to be got out of them is practically unlimited. It is 
 from this class, we imagine, that the great majority of the 
 readers and admirers of our enigmatical poetry is 
 recruited, and in fact the style of criticism has grown up 
 with, and partly grown out of, the style of poetry. 
 
 We do not of course doubt that ' the fit and few ' are 
 always, more or less, represented in every age. That 
 
 * eternal public,' as Mr. Emerson calls it, which selects 
 and hands down from generation to generation all that is 
 worth preserving in literature, is ever with us. It does 
 not follow, however, that we believe in a monopoly of 
 that august function by any class of critics, who, eager 
 
68 MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 for the office, may choose to declare— sometimes rather 
 loudly, and sometimes in an even more oracular whisper 
 — that ' they are the people.' On the contrary, we 
 suspect that the members of that unseen court are 
 seldom demonstrative, seldomer still obtrusive, and 
 never self-elected. The literature that conforms to the 
 dictation of a clique — be it poetry or prose — is not likely 
 to be of permanent value. At best, it will only catch the 
 applause of the hour, by and by to fall beneath the 
 riper verdict of time. 
 
 Perhaps the best means of arriving at the value of 
 much of the mysterious poetry of modern times would be 
 to compare it with what has already passed this final 
 judgment bar, and by this test— unless the 'eternal 
 public ' has materially changed its mode of summing up — 
 we are inclined to question whether much of it will stand 
 examination. At the outset, however, let us guard 
 against being misunderstood. 
 
 In poetry, and especially in English poetry, which is 
 
 more deeply imbued with a moral and even a religious 
 
 element than that of almost any other country, it is not to 
 
 be denied that much which is mysterious is inevitably so. 
 
 What Wordsworth calls 
 
 The weary weight 
 Of all this unintelligible world 
 
MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 69 
 
 is not to be shufifled off merely because we may not like 
 the burden. We are not asked whether or not we shall 
 accept it. It is already ours. Nor is it advisable that 
 we should vex ourselves in the attempt to throw it off. 
 The Power that sees from end to end of what appears in 
 our eyes but the ravelled skein of life, probably sees good 
 reasons for the arrangement, though these reasons may be 
 to us as inscrutable as the dispensation itself. Let it 
 not, then, be supposed that our objections extend to 
 mystery in this sense, or that we have any sympathy with 
 that easy and empty scepticism that laughs at everything, 
 it does not understand. Speaking of material things,, it 
 is, or ought to be, easy enough to be perfectly clear, but 
 in that class of subjects belonging to the spiritual or moral 
 world, and in which poetry so largely deals, it may not 
 be so easy to define wfth exactness. No ; as long as the 
 proportion of human knowledge is but a drop in the ocean 
 of the unknown and the unknowable, as well try to put a 
 door on the curiosity of a child as to attempt to shut out 
 mystery. It has its own true functions and its own high 
 uses, from which it would be wrong, even if it were pos- 
 sible, to displace it ; and, moreover, in an age where it is 
 thrust down by the formalism of a hard and passionless 
 utility, which freezes up its natural channels, and robs it 
 of its legitimate object and action, it is sure to burst out 
 
70 MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 in some wild unhallowed way, a fact our modern insani- 
 ties, revivals, spiritisms, pilgrimages, and the like, have very- 
 abundantly proved. No ; man does not, will not, can 
 not, live by the bread alone that ministers to his animal 
 necessities, nor even that which satisfies his reason only. 
 The stamp of his Maker is not so lost upon him yet but 
 that out of the ruins of his nature he will turn with a kind 
 of heavenly home-sickness, an irrepressible upward 
 instinct, towards that interest of which his highest nature 
 is capable — call that interest what you will, religion, 
 poetry, art, philosophy. Deprive him of that, and life is 
 a failure. Without that, life is but a vulgar pack-horse, 
 dragging a dead body behind it. Mystery is inevitable. 
 All human knowledge is so poor and partial ; none of us 
 know how poor and how partial until we have gone 
 through with life, and, wakening on the other side with 
 death-anointed eyes, find what children we have been, 
 even in our farthest- sighted wisdom. The truths dis- 
 closed to the most gifted, to genius itself, to the prophets 
 of God, are but as the passing glimpses of the heavens 
 one gets in a windy night between the rifts of closing 
 cloud. 
 
 But it is not God's unknown we quarrel with. On the 
 contrary, life would hardly be endurable without it ; with- 
 out that undying soul's-hunger, that cries after the un- 
 
MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 71 
 
 known, and lives upon the faith and hope of one day 
 seeing it face to face. Not God's luminous cloud that 
 leads us upwards and onwards, but the presumptuous cloud 
 of earth is what we cannot away with ; that wretched 
 ambition which would add a mystery of man's own 
 making to that which is already inseparable from our 
 condition as mortals. 
 
 Although obscurity is no new grievance against the 
 poets, we doubt much if there ever was a time in which 
 the charge could be more justly made than our own, or 
 in which the indictment could be more circumstantially 
 supported in detail by direct reference to examples. 
 This, of course, would entail an amount of personality 
 one naturally shrinks from, and luckily such a course is 
 not necessary in order to prove the general question. 
 The mischief of obscurity has been so dexterously shaded 
 into our modern poetry, and has come hand in hand with 
 so much of what is exquisitely beautiful, that it is hardly 
 possible to trace it back to any definite and particular 
 source. It would perhaps approximate the truth most 
 nearly, however, to say that the modern renaissance of 
 the mystical element had its source in the writings of 
 Coleridge — a mysticism quite as conspicuous in his prose 
 as in his poetry. 
 
 That power of the poet which can tempt us towards 
 
72 MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 the flood of the unknown, and that keeps us. in spite of 
 ourselves, hovering about 
 
 The dreadful summit of the cliff 
 That beetles o'er his base into the sea ; 
 
 those thoughts of his that 
 
 Dodge 
 Conception to the very bourne of heaven, 
 Then leave the naked brain ; 
 
 the power that verges upon the incommunicable, that 
 lifts us out of ourselves and puts us under a weird enchant- 
 ment, will ever be amongst the most attractive of his 
 characteristics. Never was this power more successfully 
 exercised than by the author of the ' Ancient Mariner ' 
 and ' Christabel,' and but for the existence of Coleridge's 
 writings, some of the most prominent characteristics of 
 our living poets would be awanting. While paying all 
 homage to the genius of Coleridge, it may be neverthe- 
 less useful to keep in mind that the over-applauded use 
 of one generation is apt to become the abuse of the next, 
 so that the natural magic that drained these mystical 
 masterpieces of almost everything like human interest, and 
 hung them like bloodless transparencies between heaven 
 and earth, has perhaps had more influence on the poetry 
 of the present generation than is good for it, or good for 
 its readers. No one, of course, suspects Coleridge of 
 
MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 73 
 
 anything like the affectation of obscurity. By the neces- 
 sity of his idiosyncrasy all products of his brain must have 
 more or less been characterised by this unique ethereality. 
 Nothing went through that crucible but seemed to undergo 
 a subtle rarefaction. 
 
 Mr. Rossetti talks about the tenuity of his mental 
 substance; but it is more than tenuity. There is an 
 almost spectral absence of solidity in much of the very 
 best he ever utters. His luminosity derives nothing from 
 the clearness usually accompanying matters of fact, but is 
 rather the unearthly light that makes ghostly things trans- 
 parent. 
 
 Under the spell of his words, one is almost tempted 
 to exclaim with Peona, in the ' Endymion,' 
 
 Brother, 'tis vain to hide 
 That thou dost know of things mysterious, 
 Immortal, starry ! 
 
 After Shelley there is no poet of modern times that has 
 less about him of the earth, earthy, and it is this ethereal 
 sublimation of thought that will keep his words alive, 
 when stronger thought than his shall be forgotten. In 
 such a case, then, it was not to be wondered at that he 
 should have been frequently charged with obscurity, nor 
 did it seem to surprise the poet himself that such an 
 accusation should be made. In answer to the charge, he 
 
74 MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY, 
 
 coolly declares, in the Preface to the third edition (1803) 
 of the * Juvenile Poems,' that ' the deficiency is in the 
 reader,' and that 'the charge is one that every poet 
 whose imagination is warm and rapid must expect from 
 his contemporaries.' 'Milton,' he continues, 'did not 
 escape it, and it was adduced with virulence against Gray 
 and Collins.' And he haughtily concludes, ' If any man 
 expect from my poems the same easiness of style he 
 admires in a drinking song, for him I have not written.' 
 Coleridge, in a letter to his friend Cottle, makes a curious 
 confession on the subject. ' So much for an Ode,' he 
 writes, alluding to the ode to the departing year, ' which 
 some people think superior to the " Bard " of Gray, and 
 which others think a rant of turgid obscurity. It is not 
 obscure. ^ My Religious Musings^ I know are, but not 
 this Ode.' Whether or not Coleridge should have the 
 credit of resuscitating the modern mystical school, there 
 is no doubt that poetry of the mystical and obscure style 
 has, since his day, been to a considerable extent the 
 fashion. To say that poetry worth the name is ever a 
 thing of fashion would sound almost profane, had it not 
 always been more or less the case. Humiliating as the 
 fact may appear, the genius that draws its inspiration, as 
 one would fondly believe, more directly than all others 
 from the heavens, is not uninfluenced by the goddess 
 
MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 75 
 
 that bears rule over a very different kingdom. Spenser's 
 
 * Fairy Queen' became so much the rage in its time, 
 and was so much applauded in high quarters — the style 
 being encouraged by Elizabeth herself — that a satirist 
 of that age tells us that it had become the fashion 
 for poets to fall asleep and dream about fairies, and 
 the worst of it was that, to a man, they all awoke, 
 rubbed their eyes, and insisted on printing their tale. 
 Cowper, again, in the ' Table Talk,' speaking of Pope, 
 complains 
 
 That he (his musical finesse was such, 
 So nice his ear, so delicate his touch) 
 Made poetry a mere mechanic art, 
 And every warbler has his tune by heart. 
 
 With Mr. Tennyson's influence abroad, who will deny it 
 is as much the case in our day? The poet, indeed, 
 rebukes it himself, in that weakish little poem he calls 
 
 * The Flower.' It is not unfrequently the unhappy fate 
 of genius to live to see its philosophy, and even its 
 manner, caricatured. The weakness of an undoubted 
 master becomes a very insufferable vice in his imitator. 
 The most exalted manner of a true leader such as 
 Coleridge, or our own poets Mr. Browning or Mr. 
 Tennyson, or Mr. Carlyle in prose, is often only mere 
 mouthing in the disciple, who, for the most part, even 
 
76 MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 where he does not know it, is but the victim of a literary 
 fashion. 
 
 And yet, insufferable as the vice is in the mere 
 imitator, the original fault lies more justly at the door of 
 those leaders in poetry who have themselves gone 
 further into the region of mystery, and even mystification, 
 than can be easily justified. In the career of every 
 successful artist there seems to be a period reached at 
 which the temptation to indulge in puzzling eccentri- 
 cities is almost irresistible. An artist whose genius is 
 proved beyond question, and who has acquired a perfect 
 mastery over the implements of his art, is apt to be 
 tempted into such a use of these implements as will 
 dazzle and confound rather than simply gratify his 
 former admirers. If the artist be a musician, when the 
 temptation comes on he will probably launch out into 
 such rhapsodical compositions as shall be barely within 
 the possibility of execution, and when, with much labour, 
 executed, are not to be understood — far less appreciated 
 — except by a mere handful of the cognoscenti. If he be 
 a musical executant himself, the craze will take a 
 different form, and he will probably seek to astonish his 
 audience by his performance on one string. If he be a 
 painter, he will strive to produce some of those immortal 
 works which Thackeray once suggested might be hung 
 
MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 77 
 
 upside down, just to see the effect. If a poet, he will 
 writhe upon the tripod, and in the interval of his spas- 
 modic inspirations will give to airy nothing such an 
 embodiment of words as in the ears of nine-tenths of his 
 audience shall be litde better than incomprehensible gib- 
 berish. The delusion is not commonly one that over- 
 takes an artist at the commencement of his career. If it 
 does, it is generally fatal, and, if in such a case the 
 victim of the delusion be not sufficiently loved of the gods 
 to die young, he is forced back into obscurity, to curse 
 the critics for the remainder of his life, and to find — as he 
 probably will — a kind of highflown satisfaction in 
 believing himself misunderstood, and in pitying the 
 idiotic world for its obtuseness. 
 
 But this liability to run off at a tangent, as we have 
 said, is one that more readily besets the artist whose fame 
 is established. It is the disease of advanced and 
 proven genius. It seems to grow out of previous 
 success, and to be aggravated by previous praise. Per- 
 haps this very same praise, or at least that malarious 
 variety of it which Shakspeare says ' doth nourish agues,' 
 may have something to do with it. Certain it is, that 
 some of the most loudly applauded seem to have fallen 
 most readily into the trap. 
 
 Paganini was admittedly the greatest artist that ever 
 
78 MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY, 
 
 played on four strings, before he indulged in those 
 impossible arpeggios on one. Turner was already the 
 greatest painter of his time before he gave the world 
 those prismatic nightmares no one could make anything 
 of Beethoven was not proof against the temptation. 
 He confesses to having loaded some of his compositions 
 with technical tricks and difficulties on purpose to 
 flahrigast some of his envious friends in Vienna. Mr. 
 Browning again — to come more closely to our subject — 
 was already an accepted poet of his age, with a fame well 
 rooted in every judgment worth considering, before he 
 attempted to entertain us with the ill-conditioned and 
 perplexed philosophy of ' Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau,' 
 or the intricate metaphysics of 'Fifine.' In fact, Mr. 
 Browning's later poems afford a very interesting parallel 
 to those later works of Turner — those produced in his 
 maelstrom period — when he indulged in quotations from 
 the * Fallacies,' and painted such exploded whirlpools of 
 colour as ' The Whaler, Erebus ' ; or * The Exile and the 
 Rock Limpet.' The works of both masters present 
 many features in common. The substantial drawing, the 
 binding anatomy, and the natural perspective of such 
 works is lost in a supersubtle efflorescence of colour- 
 words. The objective genius is over-ridden by the sub- 
 jective — the poem and the picture sacrificed to the craze 
 
MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 79 
 
 of the poet and the painter. They groan under the 
 weight of what M. Taine would call ' the hypertrophy of 
 the ego.' Mr. Ruskin declared that Turner painted the 
 souls of pictures. It would hardly be less instructive to 
 say that Mr. Browning has attempted to write the souls 
 of poems ; and it is just this ingenious introspective hunt- 
 ing for the souls of things, regardless of their definite 
 form and body, that is so apt to result in works which 
 seem to please only the petits comiies of Art, and by the 
 very same reason must be cancelled from that broader 
 category of things that are fitted for human nature's 
 daily food. 
 
 It would be useless, because not quite true, to say such 
 poems and pictures want genius, and yet safe enough to 
 predict that ten times more genius than they possess 
 would not make them meritorious productions, or com- 
 pensate for their monstrous unreality. Some of the 
 earlier of Browning's poems are not less perfect and not 
 less Rembrandtesque in their severe simplicity than those 
 earlier pictures of Turner, from which we may select 
 * The Mill ' as a well-knovm and representative example ; 
 and the leap from that picture to the ' Rock Limpet ' is 
 not more easily accounted for than that between two such 
 poems as ' The Lost Leader' and ' Fifine.' 
 
 Unfortunately for the author or artist, these very 
 
8o MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 eccentricities, while they do almost nothing for his sub- 
 sequent fame, seem to take more out of him than the 
 works in which his immortality is rooted. Goethe 
 declared that the second part of * Faust ' — another of the 
 unsolved riddles of genius — cost him more than the first. 
 Perhaps the confession may partly account for its costing 
 the average reader so much more. 
 
 If intricacy and elaboration, and the mastering of any 
 amount of technical difficulty in detail, could satisfactorily 
 prove the possession of genius, the case might stand 
 different ; but this can hardly be admitted, except, indeed, 
 upon the paradox of the French proverb, which assures 
 us that simplicity is charming, but there is nothing so 
 difficult. 
 
 The critic should not, however, conceal from himself 
 that these eccentricities are very often the overgrowths of 
 genius in excess, and that the one unpardonable sin in 
 Art is defect. Nor should we forget — and it may be 
 argued with great plausibility — that this charge of inco- 
 herence and partial incomprehensibility has been laid to 
 some of the greatest works on their first appearance. Any 
 sudden originality coming from a quarter — and in a form 
 perhaps — imlooked for, if it should even be the herald of 
 a much-needed reform in Art, is apt to find the world off 
 its guard a little, and the tardy recognition which has 
 
MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 8i 
 
 been afforded to some of the most important works 
 should help us to moderate our judgments. It may not 
 always be the fault of the artist, be he painter, or poet, or 
 musician ; eyes and ears may be awanting. You may 
 complain of an artist that you do not understand him, but 
 he can turn round upon you with the Johnsonian retort, 
 < Sir, I am not accountable for your understanding.' In 
 the world of Art a man sees and hears no more than what 
 he brings with him the power to see and hear, and it does 
 not at all follow as an invariable sequitur that there is 
 nothing else to see and hear. It is at all times rather a 
 dangerous thing in Art for a man to accept the plane 
 of his own thought and emotion as the plane of all 
 other sensible persons, although the thing is done now 
 and then. A critic once objected to a painter's work 
 because, he declared, he saw no such colours in Nature. 
 * I dare say not/ replied the artist ; * you never see such 
 colours, but what would you give to see them ? ' Depend 
 upon it it is only your self-complacent flaneur^ with a 
 copious vocabulary of the readiest slang of Art, and an 
 overweening belief in his own culture, and -^ho, on the 
 strength of his own vote, has probably returned himself 
 among the fine fleur, to whom nothing further can be 
 taught — it is only he who can afford to forget that, after 
 all, there may be a little more beauty in the world than 
 
 G 
 
82 MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 has yet been dreamt of in his philosophy. Especially 
 does this hold good in poetry. When Thackeray's Mr. 
 Yellowplush informs us, in his characteristic way, that it 
 is ' generally best in poetry to understand puffickly what 
 you mean yourself, and to igspress your meaning clearly 
 afterwards, in the simpler words the better p'r'aps,' it 
 would be a mistake not to admit that there is a good 
 deal of wholesome truth as well as humour in what he 
 says ; but would it not be quite as great a mistake to 
 conclude, on the other hand, that the Pythian prophetess 
 must be an idiot and her oracles mere raving, on no 
 better ground than that they appear to be so in the critical 
 discernment of Mr. Yellowplush? In this instance 
 Thackeray's wit is double-edged, and cuts equally well 
 both ways, as wit is apt to do ; while, on the one hand, 
 he has a lunge at the incomprehensible poets, he, on the 
 other, administers quite as severe a rebuke to that large 
 portion of the critical public who accept the Yellow- 
 plush standard as final. A much greater than Yellow- 
 plush, ^ or Yellowplush's literary sponsor either, has 
 recorded his opinion that ' a poetical production is all the 
 better for being incommensurable to reason.' Certainly 
 had poetry admitted no other subjects within her magic 
 circle but such as lie fairly within the apprehension of 
 unassisted reason, some of her choicest fruits would have 
 ' Goethe. 
 
MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 83; 
 
 been as yet unharvested ; if, as Pascal so grandly says, 
 * the heart has reasons that reason does not know,' surely, 
 then, so has the imagination. In short, to talk of limiting 
 poetry to those subjects we perfectly understand (and 
 these are fewer than are commonly supposed) would 
 simply be to talk nonsense ; those facts or feelings most 
 capable of exact definition are by no means those most 
 susceptible of poetical treatment ; on the contrary, they 
 are hardly necessary to Art. Simple fact and the defini- 
 tion of simple fact, no matter how exquisite the thing 
 defined, if it suggest nothing more, is essentially prose. 
 Strike the fundamental note of a stretched string, say low 
 C, on the piano, and if you listen attentively you will hear 
 its harmonics — its octave, its fifth or dominant, and so on, 
 faintly answering it back. This exactly illustrates the 
 value of a poetical utterance as compared with one of 
 mere prose. Strike the prose note, and it announces 
 nothing but itself ; strike a note of true poetry, and its 
 harmonics rise up to meet you, all round about in endless 
 suggestion. It is just those relations of life unseen of 
 reason, those rivers of thought that are fathomless to man, 
 where poetry has her perfect scope : she lives in an 
 atmosphere where exact definition would be idiotic were 
 it possible, and without that atmosphere she could no 
 more mount than a bird could soar in a vacuum ; and why 
 G 2 
 
84 MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 attempt to ignore these imponderable and incommen- 
 surable relations by which we are surrounded on every 
 side ? We live upon impalpable things, are governed by 
 imponderable forces, whether we will or no. 
 
 Is the idea of God any less an over-ruling one because 
 we find it impossible to prove experimentally the very ex- 
 istence of God ? Does the law of gravitation become 
 less an object of our special wonder, or does it impress 
 the imagination less grandly in its action, because we can 
 neither see, nor hear, nor handle it ? Is the atmosphere 
 we breathe any less the breath of our nostrils because it 
 is inhaled by a perfectly independent and involuntary pro- 
 cess, and one of which our reason takes no account ? Are 
 these bodies of ours any the less fearfully or wonderfully 
 made because the secret of organic life defies analysis ; and 
 that hunt the secret as we will, 
 
 lay life's house bare to its inmost room 
 
 With lens and scalpel, 
 
 as a recent singer puts it — we turn from the study 
 of it only to meet the stony eyes of an imperturbable 
 sphinx upon us yet, with the secret as far off and as inscru- 
 table as ever? No; our incomprehensible surroundings 
 are just those we could do worst without, and our faith in 
 them— the evidence of things not seen, the belief that 
 goes beyond the fact, in things not positively provable-* 
 
MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 85 
 
 is, after all, of most account to us, and by far the most in- 
 dispensable for all purposes of Art. In short, we are the 
 mere fools of our senses till we have found out that there 
 is nothing so real as what we are accustomed to call the 
 unreal. 
 
 For all the higher uses of poetry, the things about us 
 that are palpable and seen and temporal are only valuable 
 in so far as they possess for us the power of suggesting 
 those other things which are unseen and eternal. 
 
 And yet, although poetry must frequently deal with 
 thoughts that lie beyond us, and address us in words ' 
 whose significance is not to be fully appreciated except 
 by other ears than those of flesh and blood, it does not 
 necessarily follow that it should utter any such uncertain 
 sound as shall bring it under a charge of obscurity. On 
 the contrary, sublimity itself is mostly simple, and as a 
 natural complement perpkxity is never sublime. If it be 
 true, as the French say, that ' La nettete est le vernis des 
 maWes^ those who are deficient in the quality may be 
 safely classed among the petit maitres. It is the unin- 
 telligent for the most part that are unintelligible, and one 
 is thankful to remember that it is recorded of Him who 
 knew all mysteries, and who spake as never man spake, 
 that the common people heard Him gladly. Not unfre- 
 quently the very highest poetical gift, ' of imagination all 
 
86 MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 ccmpact/ ' the vision and the faculty divine/ has been 
 the endowment of a nature almost childlike in its simpli- 
 city. Admitting, however, that this most desirable sim- 
 plicity has been carelessly and even wilfully disregarded 
 by many of our modern poets, it might be worth while to 
 enquire how far the reader may be justly held responsible 
 for this state of things, and to what extent he has it in his 
 power to correct the abuse. The reform, we imagine, 
 must rather come through the altered taste of the con- 
 sumer of this unhealthy mental condiment than the sup- 
 plier of it. Beyond doubt a great deal of obscurity is 
 permitted to exist merely because it is unchallenged. 
 A great many shrink from questioning what to them is 
 unintelligible, or only half intelligible, for no better reason 
 than that by so doing they fear to draw upon themselves 
 a doubt of their own intellectual sufficiency ; and writers 
 such as Mr. Browning and Mr. Tennyson have many 
 admirers who appreciate and understand them much less 
 completely than they would have it believed. Their zeal is 
 by no means according to knowledge, and many a hundred 
 who dote upon these writers would be plucked beyond a 
 question on a very slender examination in their works. 
 
 Now this cowardly insincerity, bred partly of a fear 
 of being considered stupid, and partly of a kind of fashion- 
 able terror of what would-be-clever people call common- 
 
MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 87 
 
 place, is neither a credit to admirers nor admired— just, 
 indeed, the kind of fame we should fancy such men as 
 Mr. Browning and Mr. Tennyson praying to be dilivered 
 from. And verily the god who accepts such homage is 
 a god indeed — we mean, of course, the wooden variety 
 with the little g — and his worshippers are worthy of him. 
 Away with such moral cowardice ! Let us rather be ten 
 times stupid, in the eyes of fashion, than once false to 
 our own judgment. There is nothing good that is not 
 entirely honest. Better for a man that all the world should 
 grin at him for ever, than that, failing in honesty, God 
 should laugh him to scorn but only once. 
 
 While perfectly ready, then, to condemn anything like 
 unnecessary difficulty in the writer, it may, at the same 
 time, be only fair in some cases to grant him certain con- 
 cessions, in consideration of the altered conditions of the 
 present-day reader to whom he addresses himself 
 
 Among the changes that have taken place in recent 
 times, and especially since the introduction of cheap 
 daily papers and multitudinous periodicals, nothing per- 
 haps has undergone a more complete revolution than the 
 character of the general reader ; in fact, the modern 
 superabundance of these transitory forms of literature has 
 largely developed a new type of reader altogether. The 
 reader who ' takes in ' — as the phrase goes — the special 
 
88 MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 * organ,' or organs, that reflect his own opinions, that 
 clench his own convictions, and who takes them in and 
 pays for them because they do so, and who on that ac- 
 count can nearly anticipate everything he reads, naturally 
 enough gets to sit rather uneasy towards any kind of read- 
 ing that makes a new and unexpected demand upon his 
 attention. Writing that is not to be judged as money's 
 worth because it reflects either this or that man's opinion, 
 but founds its claim for attention upon a quality he is 
 totally unaccustomed to consider, is apt to appear to him, 
 upon the whole, as rather an impertinence. It is no 
 wonder that a poet like Mr. Browning, or, indeed, poetry 
 of any kind, should puzzle such a reader. 
 
 A certain amount of repose is essential to the appre- 
 ciation of any Art production, and that repose such a 
 reader does not bring. He is preoccupied ; and if the 
 world's high pressure and preoccupation continue to 
 increase for the next thirty years in anything like the 
 ratio it has done for the thirty years behind us, we suspect 
 that, long before the expiry of that time, poetry, as well 
 as the other arts, will probably have succumbed to the 
 one divine and all-absorbing art of ' getting on,' and the 
 more generous instincts of human nature will have retired 
 in favour of the holier claims of number One, and the 
 instinct of self-preservation. We mention Mr. Browning, 
 
MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 89 
 
 not that we mean to deny his obscurity, far less make any 
 attempt to justify it. Mr. Browning has proved beyond 
 dispute that he can express himself with an incisive 
 simplicity rarely equalled in the English language, and for 
 that reason alone., were there no other, we deny that his 
 difficulties of diction are to be justified on any ground ; 
 but Mr. Browning is not to be judged, as he too frequently 
 is, as if he were one of the common run of obscure writers. , 
 The slipshod generalities that are held sufficient to knock 
 over your weakHng mystic do not fit his case at all. 
 There is no mysticism about him ; on the contrary, he 
 has a trick sometimes of being rather coarsely realistic. 
 His difficulties for the greater part admit of a gram- 
 matical, or, at least, a constructional solution ; with him 
 it is no defect of sight or sense, but syntax. Reading 
 some of his later poems, one comes across one of these 
 long heterogeneous sentences, so perfectly congested with 
 parenthesis, and packed with subordinate clauses, that 
 the difficulty assumes the exact character of listening to 
 half-a-dozen people speaking to you at the same time. 
 His subtle and abrupt inversions, his use of adverbs and 
 participles in such a way as leaves you in doubt what he 
 intends them to qualify, and his habit of getting along 
 with certainly not more than half the articles and con- 
 junctions other people deem necessary, are amongst the 
 
90 MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY, 
 
 worst of his faults ; but these are not the defects of a 
 mystic. 
 
 We confess we have always considered the criticism 
 that sets down Mr. Browning as obscure — in the mystical 
 sense — to be superficial, and based upon a hasty 
 misconception of his genius. His peculiar domain is so 
 much his own, and, like all strong self-asserting genius, 
 he gives such a buffet to convention, that many men turn 
 away at the very threshold of his enchanted palace who, 
 would they but exercise a little patience, might live to be 
 ashamed of their hasty first impressions. The loss, 
 however, is theirs, not his. Admitted his language is 
 strange enough sometimes — all strong originality must 
 ever be more or less so — gnarled and rugged as Nature 
 herself, but then it is Nature's rich and rugged abundance, 
 and no sickly defect, that obscures his pages. The 
 unchecked copiousness of his imagination sometimes 
 veils too much the light that glides beneath it, like a 
 southern stream that sings beneath the overshadowing 
 fertility its own waters have fed to such strange over- 
 growth. But there is another difficulty ; his genius does 
 not only draw from the abundance of a rich imagination, 
 but from a field of actual and minute knowledge altogether 
 unprecedented in poetry, and this we suspect is the great 
 barrier. You can hardly open his books without finding 
 
MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 91 
 
 an illustration of what we mean. He gathers both his 
 information and his imagery from an acquaintance with 
 subjects too minute and technical ever to be popular in 
 any wide sense. Not unfreqnently he seems to write 
 intentionally and exclusively for students and artists, and 
 to him who does not care to study, the poet may use 
 Coleridge's words without the slightest disrespect, 'for 
 him I do not write.' 
 
 As a poetical exponent of Art, Mr. Browning simply 
 stands alone. Apart from all questions as to the extent 
 of his gift, he is, in this respect at least, unique. No 
 poet has ever attempted to draw from information at 
 once so complete and detailed on the subject of painting 
 as Browning has done in such poems as 'Andrea del 
 Sarto,' ' Fra Lippo Lippi,' or ' Pictor Ignotus.' The 
 same in sculpture, and again in music : ' Hugues of 
 Saxe-Gotha ' or ' Abt Vogler ' could not possibly have 
 been conceived, except by a musician. Such poems are 
 like the discovery of a new Art medium. In the English 
 language there is almost nothing iii kind wherewith to 
 compare them, and this is no doubt a principal reason 
 why such poems are found to be obscure. 
 
 Those of us who have been to school in the Laureate's 
 gentle reign — those who, so to speak, have sat at the feet 
 of the poet, and are to the manner born in his philosophy 
 
92 MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 — may, from long habit, aye, and long aifection, be 
 partly blinded to his faults. In the full blaze of his fame, 
 they have been swallowed up, to rise again perhaps with 
 the slow sure judgment of time, and we only allude to 
 them here because the history of the early criticism of the 
 poet's works is inseparably connected with our subject. 
 We are well aware that there are many who are ready to 
 condemn as antiquated the criticism that admits he has 
 any fault at all, and will set down the critic at once as 
 belonging to what they designate, with infinite scorn, ' the 
 old school.' But, admitting that much of the early criti- 
 cism of Mr. Tennyson's poetry was false and short-sighted, 
 there might be a seed of truth in it nevertheless, and the 
 poet's own testimony may be cited to support the view 
 that there was. To anyone acquainted with the biblio- 
 graphy of our great poet, we need hardly point out that 
 he affords us one of the brightest examples of a poet 
 benefiting by his critics ; and a minute examination of 
 his corrected readings shows that he has learned, and 
 wisely so, less from those who have praised than from 
 those who have censured him. The self-sufficient bigotry 
 that sees absolutely nothing in the argument of an 
 intelligent opposition does not see far on any side, and 
 finds no sympathy in the many-sided nature of a true 
 poet. 
 
MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 93 
 
 Never has artist laboured with a more scrupulous con- 
 scientiousness to present his work faultless, and purge it of 
 all imperfection, than Mr. Tennyson has done — so much 
 so, indeed, that in some instances he is fastidious to a 
 fault. In some of his corrections on the early readings, 
 the reader finds it impossible to shake himself clear of the 
 old love, even though he approve of the new, and is 
 often forced to reconcile himself as best he may to the 
 questionably moral attitude of the hero in Gay's opera, 
 who whispers love on the one side while he squeezes a 
 hand on the other. Those, then, who affect to believe 
 the Laureate's poetry to be beyond criticism have not the 
 poet's own countenance for that belief There are, we 
 know, many young men of that class characterised by 
 Pope, ' who think their fathers fools, so wise they grow,' 
 who affect to pity anyone finding any difficulty in Mr. 
 Tennyson, and who would make this very difficulty an 
 additional article in their amiable, but not very reasonable 
 creed. Such admirers, however, are not among the true 
 supporters of the poet No poet is famous, nor is his 
 poetry beautiful, by reason of its difficulties, but in spite 
 of them. Objections that come from intelligent quarters 
 — their soundness or unsoundness apart — deserve to be 
 carefully weighed. Men who have a keen and critical 
 sense of the beauty of Shakspeare and Milton, even with 
 
94 MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 the disadvantage of having been our ' fathers ' — a fact, 
 per se, they may not be much incHned to boast of — 
 should be listened to with attention, even where we 
 suppose them to be mistaken. ' Miss not the discourse 
 of the elders,' says the wise son of Sirach. The very 
 prejudices of such men are seldom without some ground 
 in reason, and carry a valuable lesson, not to be found 
 elsewhere, for those whose determined good temper 
 enables them to hear out such objections dispassion- 
 ately and with patience. It would serve truth infinitely 
 better were we to give them, even in such cases, all 
 the filial respect they are entitled to, though we are afraid 
 this view will appear more old-school than ever. But 
 never mind ; the whirligig of time brings about its 
 revenges, and the old school may some day come to be 
 the new one. 
 
 We have often thought we should like to try the 
 following experiment on these clever young men : — We 
 shall take half a dozen of them, each provided with a pen 
 and a sheet of paper. We should then read them a 
 passage from the poet, short enough not to tax the 
 memory— and we could find many passages in the ' In 
 Memoriam ' to suit our purpose — and after the reading, 
 each clever young man for himself, and without a word 
 from the others, shall write down a plain prose version, 
 
MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 95 
 
 giving what he conceives to be the poet's meaning. If 
 the result, or rather the six results, have anything in 
 common further than that they are all written on white 
 paper by clever young men, you may call our experiment 
 a failure. But let the clever young men take care that 
 the result does not prove five out of the six of them to 
 be — well, not so clever as they thought themselves. The 
 experiment is one easily tried, and those who know the 
 amusing game of Russian Scandal will readily perceive 
 what fun may be had out of it. Let us not be misunder- 
 stood, however. We do not accept the probable result 
 of such an experiment as at all conclusive evidence 
 against the poet, however conclusive it might prove to be 
 against a good many of the poet's loudest admirers. The 
 highest poetry cannot always be explained by anything 
 but itself — nay, the poet who confesses, with the exquisite 
 naivete of Hogg, that ' he doesna aye ken himsel' what 
 he means,' may yet mean a great deal. The highest 
 poetry, like the highest art everywhere, possesses an 
 inarticulate power as well as an articulate one, and has 
 the gift of projecting itself into a region where speech 
 dies and leaves behind it a soul of meaning that cannot 
 be uttered. 
 
 It ought to be remembered that anyone finding Mr. 
 Tennyson obscure and mystical does not join issue with 
 
96 MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 his adverse critics more than with his friends, although 
 the young men spoken of seem to have forgotten the fact, 
 or, to be more charitable, have perhaps never taken the 
 trouble to know it. Some of the early notices of his 
 poems, such as Prof. Wilson's article in ' Blackwood ; ' 
 the first notice in the * Quarterly ' (it changed its opinion 
 in subsequent articles) ; Lord Lytton's attack in ' The 
 New Timon ' ; and, perhaps, more than all, Coleridge's 
 strictures on his bad metres ! are amongst the best pro- 
 nounced cases of blind and blundering criticism the 
 century has produced. Since Gifford worried poor Keats 
 to death, by running his indiscriminate tusks into the 
 sweet white flesh of young Endymion, the age has had 
 nothing more coarsely uncritical. These go for nothing 
 — but what say his friends ? John Stuart Mill, one of 
 his earliest favourable critics, warns the poet against ' dis- 
 porting himself among mystics.' 
 
 The 'Edinburgh Review' in 1837, whilst admitting 
 him a true poet, confesses it does not understand some 
 of his verses. Again, his great eulogist, and a true critic, 
 George Brimley, tells us that he often met with persons 
 of * unquestioned talent and good taste ' who declared 
 they found the poet obscure and affected. Even Words- 
 worth himself, according to Emerson, charged him with 
 affectation. The supposed necessity also of such a help 
 
MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 97 
 
 as the ' Analysis of " In Memoriam," ' by Robertson of 
 Brighton, himself a man of wonderful imagination, and 
 even of Dr. Mann's pamphlet, 'Maud Vindicated : an 
 Explanatory Essay,' certainly both point in the same 
 direction, and not the less strongly that they both had 
 the poet's approval, the former being dedicated to him by 
 permission, the latter receiving his written thanks. 
 
 It can hardly be said, then, that this fault of obscurity 
 is the complaint of his adverse critics only. In short, we 
 may safely take the assertion of those who find no diffi- 
 culty at all in such a poem as ' In Memoriam ' in nine 
 cases out of ten to be affectation. We do not admit, 
 however, the necessity of such explanation as Robertson's. 
 The poetry that speaks to a man in his own mother- 
 tongue and still needs an interpreter can never be worthy 
 of the name. Those who cannot appreciate the poet 
 without such help will hardly do so with it. Mysticism 
 of a certain kind is an inseparable and indigenous feature 
 of the intellectual school, of which Mr. Tennyson is the 
 chiefest apostle and the truly representative man ; and it 
 is not with the intention of finding fault with it that the 
 subject is here introduced, for we do not hold that in his 
 case we can have him without it, or that in him it amounts 
 to a real mischief. His genius, moreover, possesses to 
 fulness that inarticulate power we have spoken of as 
 
 H 
 
98 MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 characterising true poetry. What we desire to do is 
 rather to point out the mischief that would inevitably 
 follow upon a further development of his manner — with- 
 out his matter — by those poets who take their cue from 
 him, and who think they have caught the prophet's 
 genius, when they have only caught the mantle. In this 
 direction there is but one step from the sublime to the 
 ridiculous. One step further in the direction Mr. Tennyson 
 sometimes leads us, and we reach the point at which 
 conception stands still. Some of his creations, such as 
 the ' Lady of Shalott ' and the ' Lotos Eaters,' from which 
 all human element has been nearly drained away, possess 
 an ethereal beauty of such gossamer consistency as to be 
 just within the possibility of conception — no more, so that 
 anyone going further in the same direction must weave 
 the wind. What we complain of is, that this step is being 
 continually attempted, and a school of poets has arisen 
 with whom mysticism appears to be an intentional 
 specialty : an affected, imitation mysticism, for, being a 
 fashion in most cases, it goes no deeper than manner — a 
 school which, unfortunately, finds too ready an audience, 
 for it is a characteristic of this much applauded nineteenth 
 century — a characteristic well worth taking note of, and 
 which seems to hold good from paste beads to poetry — 
 that the imitation in everything has sometimes a much 
 
MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 99 
 
 readier sale than the real article ; the counterfeit finding 
 an easy acceptance, when the thing itself looks bleak m 
 the cold wind — a school which seems to encourage the 
 belief in its disciples that mysticism is a necessity of true 
 poetry ; an assumption that can never be too emphatically- 
 repelled. When mysticism falls from being the crasis of 
 the man, and becomes the mere fashion or trick of the 
 school, the chances are that it is no longer the veil over 
 what is in itself beautiful and profound, but rather the 
 mist that magnifies feebleness. 
 
 And yet there are readers who accept such writing 
 with readiness, and seem to get some sort of satisfaction 
 out of it. There are people to whom everything seems 
 to become trivial as soon as it is perfectly comprehended 
 by them. For a truth that is quite clear and evident 
 they at once cease to have any veneration ; they treat it, 
 however sacred, with a kind of vulgar familiarity, and, if 
 enunciated from other lips than their own, they not 
 unfrequently affect to despise it as an exploded truism, 
 no longer of any value. With them the proverb of ' omne 
 ignoium pro magnifico' holds good, for they seem to 
 respect nothing but what they cannot comprehend. 
 
 The poet of this school who dares to call a spade a 
 spade is at once voted one of the vulgar. He writes 
 what anyone can understand ; he will never do !— whilst 
 
loo MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 the man of circuitous speech and doubtful intelligibiUty, 
 the man who will drape his platitudes in a studied 
 ingenuity, in order to tickle the ears of the educated 
 vulgar, is taken upon trust, and becomes the hero of the 
 initiated few, who accept his mysticism for a divine mani- 
 festation, even where they cannot understand him. No 
 cloister-bleached mediaeval dreamer ever carried mysti- 
 cism to a more extravagant pass than some of those 
 poets we speak of. They have fairly overshot the policy 
 of that doctor of divinity who, in order to keep up his 
 character for profundity, made it a point to have at 
 least one sentence in every sermon his congregation could 
 make nothing of. Those who have given any attention 
 to this kind of writing know well that it would be no 
 exaggeration to say that pages of it might be quoted that, 
 for ordinary readers, contain, on an average, a gleam of 
 intelligence in about every tenth line, and in some cases 
 passages so utterly incoherent that to all rational appear- 
 ances they might have been concocted in Bedlam by one 
 of the inmates for the entertainment of his fellow- sufferers 
 in bondage, so literally do they fulfil the hyperbole of the 
 
 poet — 
 
 Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, 
 
 Signifying nothing. 
 
 And yet such writing is frequently the subject of elaborate 
 criticism and laudation. In an able critique on one of our 
 
MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. loi 
 
 living poets — a poet who, amongst other unquestionable 
 qualities, indulges sometimes in the fashionable freak of 
 obscurity — the critic openly confesses that he entirely 
 fails to understand the meaning of one of the poems 
 under examination, although it is one upon which he has 
 lavished extravagant praise.^ The question arises, How 
 far can a man honestly praise what he does not under- 
 stand ? We can hardly help associating it in our minds 
 with the religion which attempts to worship what it does 
 not quite believe, a condition of soul besides which an 
 honest paganism is piety itself, and the religion of a 
 gentleman. But this admission of the critic is quite 
 characteristic of those who support by their approbation 
 the obscure school. They will accept anything from their 
 prophets as long as they will foam and speak riddles. 
 To quote a favourite nursery rhyme, ' They open their 
 mouths, and shut their eyes, and take what the king shall 
 send them.' The fault lies as much with those who 
 approve such stuff as with those who provide it. As long 
 as the demand exists, the supply will be forthcoming. 
 Like all false stimulants, it creates a false appetite, until 
 things have come to this pass with these writers — intelligi- 
 bility would ruin them. Were they for a moment to 
 
 ' See Mr. W. M. Rossetti's remarks on Mr. Swinburne's ' Poems 
 and Ballads,' in ' A Criticism,' page 60. 
 
I02 MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 obey Falstaff's injunction to ancient Pistol, ' If thou hast 
 any tidings, prithee deliver them like a man of this 
 world,' there would be an end of them at once. In order 
 to keep their power, they must continue to utter their 
 dark sayings. Plainness would undo them. It is the 
 evident aim of such writers to be only half intelligible. 
 Their work would not fulfil its intention if it failed to 
 place the reader in Puzzledom. They do not write that 
 he who runs may read, but for him who sits in a mist. 
 
 It is a favourite theory with the admirers of this 
 school, that a poet, in addition to being ' a maker ^ in the 
 poetical sense, must also create the taste for what he 
 makes. Such a theory can only be rarely and excep- 
 tionally true. The taste so formed in most cases is only 
 a simulated one, sympathetic rather than idiopathic, con- 
 ventional rather than real, and, in short, a fashion. If 
 such a theory were true, who then, we ask, creates the 
 taste of the poet, or who creates in us all the taste for the 
 poetry of Nature ; the taste for the light on the hills, or 
 the dreamy horizon line of the sea ; the taste for the 
 moon and stars, and the great tumbling clouds that, like 
 spectral icebergs, break across them ; the taste for the 
 falling snow, the moaning wind, the setting sun; the 
 taste for primroses in spring, the music of running water, 
 the singing of birds, the laughter of children, and all the 
 
MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 103 
 
 unwritten poetry that day unto day uttereth speech for 
 ever ? Who has the presumption to say he forms in us 
 the taste for these ? What true poet but feels that he is 
 only a poor interpreter of Nature, and that, without 
 creating taste, his function is high enough, if he can 
 adequately give her music words, and minister faithfully 
 to that taste which is born with us all, written in all 
 men's hearts, not with ink, but with the Spirit of the 
 living God, and which speaks in us as loud as conscience, 
 where our meaner interests have not overgrown it, and 
 where we have not sold away the heavenly inheritance 
 for this world's mess of potage. 
 
 Certainly the obscure school may be said to have 
 created a taste, in the sense that dram-drinking creates a 
 taste for further dram-drinking, for they have nursed into 
 being an order of mind to which they can address 
 nothing but what is 'meteor-like, of stuff and form 
 perplexed ' — a condition of mind that will accept nothing 
 but what is obscure and enigmatical, and to whom plain 
 speaking would be simply distasteful. It must be ad- 
 mitted that they humour their audience well, for the 
 greater part of the poetry provided for their delectation 
 seems to be carefully framed on the recommendation of 
 
 Cartwright's verse : 
 
 Let's keep them 
 In the desperate hope of understanding us. 
 
I04 MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 One of the most unhealthy features of this unhealthy- 
 school — a feature at the root of most of their other 
 weaknesses — is a desire to be considered above and 
 beyond the reach of influences that rule the many, and 
 which not unfrequently takes the form of an extreme 
 dread of what they call commonplace ; a desire praise- 
 worthy enough when ruled by humility, and where 
 he who has it does not invariably conclude that the 
 many are always wrong and he always right. We 
 confess we begin to suspect the entire sanity of this 
 immoderate terror of commonplace. The most 
 hopeless condition of madness is said to be that in 
 which the patient is convinced that it is the world 
 that is mad and he the sole sane man in it. Carlyle 
 writes an amusing fable of a noisy reformer who stood 
 in the market-place and declared that the world 
 was all turned topsy-turvy, that the passers-by were 
 walking with their feet uppermost, and that unless some-, 
 thing were done at once, the houses and everything else 
 would fall into the sky. Things went on in this way for 
 some time, till at length a friend passed by, who thinking 
 he might do the reformer a good turn, laid hold of him, 
 inverted his position, and set him on his feet, when the 
 orator was obliged to confess, from his new point of view, 
 that, after all, it had not been the world that had been at 
 
MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 105 
 
 fault, but that he himself had been standing on his head 
 without knowing it. What if it turn out to be much the 
 same with the victim of this fashionable hobgoblin, 
 commonplace ? The man that finds all plain truth to be 
 but platitude had better ask himself whether the com- 
 monplace he find everywhere be really in the things he 
 calls commonplace, and not in his own commonplace 
 apprehension of them ; and before he so grandly charac- 
 terises truth as threadbare, let him have a care that in 
 expressing such an opinion he is not exposing in himself 
 the wretched seaminess of a threadbare soul, and pro- 
 claiming his own inability to detect the majesty of truth 
 in its work a-day clothes. For, after all, the disease, like 
 that of the madman, may be in the organ of perception, 
 instead of the thing perceived. But no such healthy 
 doubt of his own sufficiency ever disturbs the equilibrium 
 of the obscure philosopher. As for criticism from the 
 outside world, he would have us believe he is wholly 
 impervious to that. He affects to turn from that with 
 scorn. He has nothing in common with men who do 
 not entirely agree with him on every point. In short, to 
 the everyday world he stands in a relation only to be 
 described by reading Shylock's impassioned appeal to a 
 common humanity backwards. If you prick him, he will 
 not bleed. If you tickle him, he will not laugh. Oh, no. 
 
io6 MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 that would let all the secret out and disgrace him for 
 ever. Now, if this magnificent scorn of the world's 
 opinion be genuine, and not mere dust in the eyes, why 
 does he publish at all ? Why not rather, Pygmalion- 
 like, hug his own creation to his heart's content ? Why 
 unveil it to the profane vulgar, whose judgment he holds 
 not at a pin's fee ? The fact is, this magnificent hauteur 
 and indifference to the world's opinion is not wholly 
 sound. After the approval of a man's own sense of what 
 is nght and fit, there is no greater satisfaction than the 
 sympathetic ratification of one's capable fellow-men. 
 But this he has not the honesty to avow ; it is just such 
 a commonplace weakness as we should expect him pre- 
 tending to despise. 
 
 It is this self-separation from the common sympathies 
 of the world that keeps the influence of the mystical 
 school within such narrow bounds. Always excepting 
 those wonderful creatures who come to the world on some 
 special errand from the Infinite — no uncommon commis- 
 sion now-a-days — we may conclude, in a general way, 
 that a poet out of sympathy with his time is an anomaly 
 and a contradiction. He may pretend to sit as far above 
 the salt of ordinary mortals as he Hkes, and find what 
 comfort he can in his creed of Odi profanum vulgus. With- 
 out one interest in common with things below, he may 
 
MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 107 
 
 wrap himself in himself, and having only self for subject 
 
 and object — 
 
 His cogitative faculties immersed 
 In cogibundity of cogitation, 
 
 as an old English poet would put it — he may, by a sort of 
 agonized introspection, elaborate his oracular verses, only 
 fit for the hearing of the initiated few. It will turn out 
 to be all against himself in the end. If he be indeed a 
 poet, he ought to stand in a very different relation to his 
 time ; a relation as nearly as possible the reverse of all 
 this. Nature always favours those creatures of hers that 
 are most suited to their external surroundings, invariably 
 giving preference to the plant and empire to the animal 
 best adapted to its locality, and the poet is no exception 
 to the law. He ought to be the interpreter of his time, 
 and find his strength, not in any power of morbid self- 
 consciousness, but in the ability to go out of and forget 
 self. The distinguishing quality of all true poetic genius 
 is surely that mysterious power of self-surrender that 
 enables it to become a second self at will. The real en- 
 dowment, we suspect, is somewhat akin to the Hindu gift 
 of avatar, the power that enables him, not to hide himself 
 in his own cocoon, and spin out of that, but to identify 
 and incarnate himself in the personalities of other men. 
 A true poet is in a great measure the issue and product 
 
io8 MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 of his time. However ashamed he may be of the relation, 
 his time begets him, and, more than this, will put hini 
 down in the majority of cases at his proper value. Yes, 
 this addle-pated public he despises will be his judge. 
 The pretended contempt of public criticism is, in almost 
 every case, the affectation of the imitator, and rarely the 
 mistake of really great men. Weber tells us he invested 
 his wife with what he called ' the rights of the gallery,' that 
 she might freely criticise his productions, and make objec- 
 tions wherever she saw fit ; and we all know that Moliere 
 put such value on the criticism of a shrewd old housekeeper, 
 that he scrupul®usly read his manuscript to her before 
 submitting it to the judgment of the initiated. It is 
 recorded of Apelles that he used to hide behind his 
 paintings in order to hear the public criticisms on them. 
 Michael Angelo, again, told a young sculptor not to be 
 too particular about the light on his statue, that the light 
 of the public square would set its merits at rest. Although 
 no one, we dare say, presumes to assert that the art of 
 Apelles or Michael Angelo has been very materially im- 
 proved upon, we have come somehow to put less value 
 on this open-air testimony than they ; and yet this day- 
 light is a wonderful critic. It would seem that a work of 
 Art — be it statue, poem, or picture— possesses, in common 
 with a great many other things, both in Nature and Art, 
 
MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 109 
 
 the faculty of undergoing some chemical change more or 
 less complete, on its exposure to the open air. Some 
 Art products are so palpably bad that they stand the test 
 but for a moment, and blacken in the light at once, as if 
 they had been written or painted with a solution of the 
 nitrate of silver ; but all, good or bad, are tested by it 
 more or less. The light that clothes— as Solomon in all his 
 glory was not clothed — the living plant in bravery of green 
 and gold, is just the same light that deprives the lifeless 
 plant of any colour it possesses ; and the fiercer the light, 
 as in tropical countries, the more gorgeous the hue of the 
 living leaf, and the swifter the bleaching and decay of the 
 dead one. And so it is with the work of Art ; expose it, 
 and if it be true Art — that is to say, living Art — the sun, 
 true to his old character of Apollo, the patron of Art, will 
 smile upon it, and accumulate its beauty. If false Art — 
 that is to say, mere dead artifice — the same sun will 
 wither it up, and seem to take away what little beauty it 
 was ever supposed to possess. In poetry, the light of the 
 public square is final, and there is no criticism more hollow 
 or more mischievous than that which teaches its aspirants 
 to despise its judgments, and seek approval from some 
 fancied circle within whose sacred circumference the crime 
 de la crime in matters of taste is supposed to reside. Let 
 us not be led away by any such affectation of culture in 
 
no MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 matters of poetical criticism. Poetry has suffered much 
 from it already. Better to fall back upon ourselves for our 
 convictions, and cherish the possibility that men may yet be 
 found who can look the epithet ' Philistine ' in the face, 
 and who, without undervaluing true culture, can yet strip 
 themselves of the earthly lendings of a culture like this, and 
 find their inspiration in a more direct and closer contact 
 with Nature — men, perhaps, who, casting criticism behind 
 them, can go out to the bare wilderness, and yet be so im- 
 pressed with the simple grandeur of Nature as shall compel 
 them to exclaim with the patriarchal pantheist of old. This 
 is the house of God, and t/ns is the gate of heaven. True 
 poetry is not written for any literary Israel who shall dwell 
 alone, and shall not be reckoned among the nations. The 
 poetry, like the truth, that is only fitted for a sect is never 
 more than half true. It may equally be said of poetry as 
 of truth, in the parable of the Good Seed, The field is the 
 world, and anyone whose superfine criticism teaches him to 
 narrow that field by a single furrow, by a single soul, has 
 something still to learn. Men are all poets more or less. 
 He who feels poetry possesses the essential quality of 
 him who makes it. The power of receiving poetical im- 
 pressions, and the power of creating them, are but different 
 phases of the same gift. Everyone possesses the elements 
 of those emotions out of which the poet builds, and it is 
 
MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY, in 
 
 curious to see how the afflatus crops up here and there, 
 
 even in people who fancy they despise it, for in this case 
 
 Many a thousand of us 
 Have the disease and feel it not. 
 
 And, after all, what true poet would not as soon live 
 in the hearts of the unsophisticated many, and hear his 
 verses sung to the clank of the loom, or the ring of the 
 anvil, as see them lying bound in morocco on any number 
 of drawing-room tables ? But this is too severe a test for 
 modern poetry. Not much of it will stand the light of 
 the public square. The songs that belong to no clique 
 or class, that reach high and low alike, and are the com- 
 munion links of all classes, are not of this generation. 
 The poets that address themselves to the public that never 
 dies are all but an extinct species. Who can turn from 
 the perusal of Shakspeare or Milton, or even parts of 
 Wordsworth, and take up, with little exception, almost 
 any of our later nineteenth century poets, without feeling 
 the presence of a finikin ingenuity that is no necessary 
 part of a true poet ? Let us not forget, however, that it 
 is impossible for anyone to be profited so much by living 
 writers as by those that have been winnowed out of the 
 past. Nor can their worth be finally judged in their own 
 day. Delille complained that Voltaire's ' Henriade ' was 
 too near the eye and the age \ and although distance will 
 
112 MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 perhaps not lend much enchantment to the ' Henriade,' 
 the criticism was just, and has a wide application. We 
 are too near contemporaneous literature to measure its 
 true dimensions, or estimate its permanent influence. It 
 takes a generation or two properly to garner a crop of 
 truth, and separate the wheat from the chaff, so that in 
 the literature of our own generation we have all the chaff 
 against us. If one could only see things through the eyes 
 of his great-grandson, what a light he could throw on such 
 subjects. What an interesting volume he could make out 
 of a comparison of contemporary opinions with the 
 maturer verdicts of time. What a series of reversed 
 judgments it would represent. But the old man with the 
 scythe and the hour-glass is not to be hurried or forejudged. 
 A style of poetry or philosophy may become very popular. 
 A book may be very widely read, and widely accepted in 
 its own day and generation. You may find it at every turn 
 in the hands of sensible men, by rail and road and river. 
 It may reach its thirtieth edition, and be applauded to the 
 echo in what are called literary circles. It may be 
 solemnly recommended and endorsed by the signature 
 of very learned clerks ; but it has another tribunal to 
 pass. It has yet to go through a sort of Upper House 
 before it becomes law. Time, that old justice, the only 
 critic, after all, that can be depended upon, the sure re- 
 
MYSTICISM AND MODERN POETRY. 113 
 
 viewer of every man's work, has yet to deliver his inter- 
 locutor upon it. Slowly and carefully he gathers the 
 evidence. These is no passion, no hurry, no bluster in 
 his verdict. There is the grandeur and the repose of 
 assured faith in his every step. Be that believeth, says the 
 prophet, shall not make haste. With what a majestic in- 
 difference he draws his pen through every falsehood, 
 letting it fall back into the grave of the forgotten without 
 one word of epitaph or comment. Verily the mill of God 
 grinds late, but it grinds to powder. If the book have 
 not the intrinsic self- preserving salt of life within it, not 
 all the benedictions of all the big-wigs, not all the laying- 
 on of hands of all the holy men, will serve its turn. It 
 may be advertised in red, and reviewed into its tens of 
 thousands, but there is not in the world ink sufficiently 
 indelible, nor vellum sufficiently antiseptic to keep it alive. 
 If the staple of its support were driven to the centre of the 
 earth, it could not support it : The depth saith, It is not 
 in me., and the sea saith, It is not in me. Down it must 
 come. The weight of its own insufficiency hangs about 
 its neck like a millstone. It has a natural law to fulfil. 
 The lowest level of everything false is — the abyss, and it 
 will not rest till it reach it. No earthly power can hold 
 it back, and Heaven has provided none. 
 I 
 
THE CONFLICT OF ART AND MORALS 
 IN MODERN POETRY 
 
 I 2 
 
THE CONFLICT OF ART AND MORALS 
 IN MODERN POETRY. 
 
 In the history of every art there are continually recurring 
 periods at which artistic progress, and sometimes almost 
 artistic life, seems to be threatened by those obstructive 
 theories and conventional rules to which art every now 
 and then is authoritatively asked to submit. Just as 
 religion, in its purest and most spiritual aspects, seems to 
 lose ground in nearly the same proportion as dogmatic 
 theology gains it, true art becomes weakened by the over- 
 growth and imposition of its authoritative and arbitrary 
 methods. 
 
 Poetry, for example, was never more seriously 
 hampered and handicapped than by the superstitious 
 observance of the old dramatic unities of time and place. 
 Although to all but a very small number that doctrine 
 looks ridiculous enough from our modern point of view, 
 and is not likely seriously to trouble us again, it was only 
 one out of many difficulties of a similar nature which 
 periodically arise to vex such questions. Fallacious 
 
ii8 THE CONFLICT OF ART AND 
 
 theories in matters of art, as well as morals, will probably 
 continue to come up for discussion, with average regu- 
 larity, as long as art is cultivated. 
 
 The theory of the dramatic unities itself was only the 
 logical consequence of Aristotle's narrow definition of 
 poetry, as nothing more and nothing higher than imita- 
 tion. It was but an extension and application of the iron 
 law of literal imitation to the particulars of time and 
 place. As the world progresses, or thinks it progresses, 
 each cultus brings along with it its besetting snares, and 
 even old theories, supposed to be long ago historically 
 dead and buried, seem to come back to life with such 
 confident rejuvenescence, and clothed so cunnmgly in 
 the fashionable costume of the hour, that many of them 
 are daily passed off, among the inexperienced, as actual 
 novelties. Just as we have had the atomic theory and 
 fortuitous Cosmos of Democritus and Epicurus — we say 
 nothing of the soundness or unsoundness of the theory — 
 rehabilitated in nineteenth-century English, as the newest 
 thing in science ; just as we have in theology the pan- 
 theism known to India for thousands of years, formulated 
 in the mythology of Greece, and revived by Spinoza in 
 the seventeenth century, again served up in the mystical 
 prose-poetry of its fashionable preachers and teachers ; 
 so, in literature and art, more than half of the disputations 
 
MORALS IN MODERN POETRY. 119 
 
 arising out of such subjects are neither more nor less than 
 revivals of old discussions with new names. 
 
 One of the most fashionable fallacies that have 
 recently cropped up, and engaged the attention of artists 
 and art critics, has been discussed under the attractive 
 and, to some extent, misleading title of ' Art for Art's 
 Sake,' misleading in the first place, because the whole 
 argument turns upon the definition of the word ' art,' and 
 the exact ground, ethical and aesthetical, which that word 
 legitimately covers. The extreme supporters of the art for 
 art's sake theory seek, indeed, to draw an impassable line 
 between the ethical and aesthetical, and declare that, 
 however they may have been mixed up by morally dis- 
 posed but stupid people, art and morals have really 
 nothing to do with each other. The doctrine is based 
 upon one of those half-truths which, viewed exclusively 
 from one side, appears to be exceedingly plausible, but 
 which, upon closer acquaintance and viewed as a whole, 
 is altogether unsound, and as full of danger to art as it 
 is to morals. 
 
 Its reference to morals we do not care to touch, but 
 would rather leave that question to the professional 
 guardianship of those who, so to speak, have taken out 
 a licence to treat that side of the subject, and with 
 whose trade monopoly we have no desire to inter- 
 
I20 THE CONFLICT OF ART AND 
 
 fere. Its reference to art, however, and especially 
 to poetry, is another matter, and one in which a large 
 portion of the world, licensed and unlicensed, may 
 fairly be supposed to take an interest. It is some- 
 what ominous that, in its relation to poetry, the doctrine 
 has been already set up by some of its supporters, in 
 extreme cases, not as an argument in the interests of ajt, 
 so much as a shelter and attempted justification of artistic 
 uncleanness. In so doing, the supporters of such a view 
 may be said, in some sort, to have supplied an answer to 
 their own arguments ; for if it be beyond the province of 
 art, and inconsistent with her legitimate object and aim, 
 that she should ever become the exponent of morality, it 
 must surely be admitted that it is equally foreign to her 
 nature to become the exponent of immorality. These 
 are but the two segments of the same argument, and, 
 knocking out the key, the two must fall together. That 
 morals and art, however, broadly speaking, are each in 
 possession of distinct kingdoms of their own, is a general 
 statement of the case, that no one, we dare^say, will care 
 to dispute ; but that the two powers have given and 
 taken from each other, or, in other words, that art has 
 been largely indebted to morals, and that religion has 
 largely availed itself of the assistance of art, is equally 
 indisputable. The artistic instinct may be one, and the 
 
MORALS IN MODERN POETRY. 121 
 
 moral and religious quite another ; but that third instinct, 
 which, in the whole history of the human race, savage 
 and civilised, has invaribly joined the two in one, suggests 
 a tertium quid which cannot be left out of the argument, 
 and which proves the existence of an instinct as strong as 
 either. That mysterious longing for the manifestation of 
 some higher power than we possess, which underlies the 
 history of art and religion in every phase, and at every 
 stage and step of its development, is always looking about 
 it for some tangible and visible incarnation. Art, indeed, 
 may be very well defined as the result of that instinct 
 which propels a man towards the outward embodiment 
 and expression of the highest thought of which his nature 
 is capable ; and no human being, savage or civilised, has 
 ever been able to shake himself altogether clear of the 
 desire. The barbarian who carved his first idol was 
 impelled by this joint instinct, and it would be clearly 
 useless to attempt to separate the art motive from the 
 religious motive in the force that impelled him. Mean 
 and rudimentary as his work must necessarily have been, 
 he was moved to the performance of it by the same 
 instinct which suggested the statue of Zeus to Pheidias, 
 or an Ecce Homo to Guido or Correggio. Poor and 
 elementary as his conception of the Deity must also have 
 been, he was, unconsciously and according to his lights, 
 
122 THE CONFLICT OF ART AND 
 
 working at the root of that tree of which Christianity itself 
 is the crown and flower. The great work of Pheidias 
 affords an exact illustration of the action of this joint 
 instinct amongst a people ethnologically unique, and in 
 a state of civilisation, as regards art, certainly unsurpassed. 
 Strabo relates that the declared intention of the artist in 
 that great work was to illustrate and give a visible em- 
 bodiment to the mighty lines in the Iliad^ in which 
 Homer represents Olympus trembling at the nod of Zeus. 
 The statue was not only considered the masterpiece of 
 Greek art, but an actual representation of the deity, ' the 
 Father of Gods and men ; ' and the epigram of Philip of 
 Thessalonica, in the Greek anthology, which declares 
 that before the production of so marvellous a work could 
 become possible, God must have either come down to 
 earth on purpose to show Himself to the artist, or 
 Pheidias himself must have been taken up into heaven, 
 seems clearly to indicate the belief that the inspiration 
 sprang from the two combined and indivisible sources — 
 religious and artistic. It would not be difficult to prove 
 the existence and operation of this double instinct in the 
 history of every nation, and in all the departments of 
 work, aspiring to the name of art, whether in poetry, 
 painting, sculpture, or architecture. The winged Assyrian 
 bull, with its soulless and yet half-human face, and its 
 
MORALS IN MODERN POETRY. 123 
 
 cruel iron talons, the fossil remnant of a long-forgotten 
 faith — ' the dead disbowelled mystery,' which has given 
 Mr. Rossetti a theme for one of the most perfect poems 
 of the century ; the sphinxes of Egypt, those passionless 
 creatures that seem to be lifted above the cares of a fleet- 
 ing world, and to live in an atmosphere of everlasting 
 
 repose — 
 
 Staring right on with calm eternal eyes ; 
 
 Greek sculpture ; Italian painting at its highest period ; 
 the architecture of the middle ages ; all these are but the 
 varied answer to the one ever-present instinct. It may 
 be objected that many of these earlier works were the 
 unworthy attempts of half-civilised peoples to realise 
 their own gross conceptions of the Deity, and not to be 
 called religious in the sense in which we use the word. 
 But it is enough for our argument that on their moral 
 side many of them were deifications, and that on their 
 artistic side they were all, more or less, an answer to that 
 unquenched and unquenchable cry in the breast of every 
 intelligent human being, which impels him in the search 
 to find what Mr. Tennyson calls ' that type of perfect in 
 his mind.' And even in a religious point of view, when 
 we consider the periods which produced them, it may be 
 after all fairly open to question, whether some of those 
 primitive and barbarous attempts to embody and express 
 
124 THE CONFLICT OF ART AND 
 
 religious feeling and religious faith were not quite as noble, 
 quite as religious, and quite as intelligent as the stolid 
 fetishism of a later and more pretentious cultus which 
 falls down in a brainless acquiescence before the sacer- 
 dotal dogma it does not even pretend to understand. 
 
 It is this longing to embody his highest aspiration in 
 which the morality of the artist consists ; and the history, 
 poetry, or art-work of a people only becomes of import- 
 ance in proportion as it is informed and penetrated by 
 this instinct. It is its profound moral significance which 
 gives the secret charm to Hebrew history and Hebrew 
 poetry, bestowing upon it that unique flavour which sets 
 it above all others in human interest. It is the strange 
 blind groping after the perfect type, after God and the 
 Godlike in all its art-worship, which gives that deathless 
 and unaccountable fascination to *the glory that was 
 Greece,' and which in its highest period makes the sub- 
 limities of ^Eschylus read like passages from Isaiah. In 
 such cases art is no more independent of morals than 
 morality is of art. 
 
 With those, however, who argue for the impassable 
 line between ethics and aesthetics, ©n the ground that it 
 is not desirable that art should be a mere teacher of 
 morality, we perfectly agree, only that does not preclude 
 the possibility of art becoming an admirable exponent of 
 
MORALS IN MODERN POETRY. 125 
 
 morality without any obvious didactic intention. A man 
 may come under moral influence without any design upon 
 him to that end, and in fact one of the most direct means 
 of getting him, morally speaking, to kick over the traces, 
 is to buttonhole him over a sermon. It is not safe even 
 to commend him for his moral excellence. 'Dub not 
 my likings virtues,' says George Eliot — 
 
 lest they get 
 A drug-like taste, and breed a nausea ; 
 Honey's not sweet commended as cathartic. 
 
 It dashes the native power and natural lustre of a good 
 deed to have the light of the moral lantern turned too 
 fully upon it. It should rather be kept dry, and in the 
 dark, like grain seed, in order to preserve its power of 
 germination in perfect efficiency. An obvious exhibition 
 of morality is apt to defeat its own end. In Richardson's 
 Pamela^ for example (that in many respects admirable 
 work of art), it is difficult to say whether the occasional 
 indecency of the book, or the obtrusive morality with 
 which it is interlarded, is the more mischievous or repre- 
 hensible element of the two. It is doubtful enough 
 whether any modest young woman could write to her 
 friend a glowing description of how she was not seduced 
 by the squire, but in the moral tag to such a story, the 
 step for most of us has been taken between the doubtful 
 
126 THE CONFLICT OF ART AND 
 
 and the disgusting. Again, in Hogarth's pictures of the 
 same era, in such a series, for example, as the ' Harlot's 
 Progress,' no possible parade of moral purpose can ever 
 hide the gross realism and the glut of uncleanness which 
 characterise them as a whole. Preaching of such a kind 
 was much better calculated to gratify a prurient curiosity 
 than send any pitiful Magdalene back to the shelter of 
 God. Saviour-less sin is an ugly thing at best, and there 
 is neither reason nor morality in the exhibition of it. 
 Putting the question of art aside, its moral method is 
 unsound, and, except among the more extreme supporters 
 of the Calvinistic school, happily all but obsolete. Such 
 teaching — if there was any religion in it at all — was too 
 exclusively based upon the purblind devil-worship of those 
 with whom the good old orthodox damnation seemed the 
 only safe road — moralists who mainly regarded religion 
 as a deterrent, and upon whom ' the pity of it, lago,' 
 would have been uselessly thrown away. The simple 
 word of the Master on the same subject, * Neither do I 
 condemn thee, go and sin no more,' reduces morality like 
 this to ashes. 
 
 It has always been a somewhat dangerous expedient to 
 use art for a directly moral purpose, or indeed to use it 
 as an exponent of anything but itself. Even in the two 
 arts which lie most closely akin — music and poetry — it is 
 
MORALS IN MODERN POETRY. 127 
 
 not to be attempted except at some slight sacrifice, and 
 violence done to one or the other. The marriage of 
 music to immortal verse was after all the dream of a 
 poet — the ideal union of that ' orb of song, the divine 
 Milton ' — a marriage made in heaven, rather than any 
 alliance capable of being successfully consummated and 
 ratified on earth. There are words in our poetical 
 anthology which refuse to set themselves to music (except 
 indeed to the native rhythm which belongs to all beautiful 
 speech) by reason of their very loftiness and grandeur — 
 passages so profound and impressive that, like the names 
 of God, are hardly to be uttered in other attitude than 
 that of worship, and not to be felt in their fulness except 
 by ourselves alone. In the latter half of the sixteenth, 
 century — that great spring-tide of English poetry — ■ 
 ' Marlowe's mighty line ' only became possible through 
 the poet's determination to discard what he called — 
 
 The jigging veins of rhyming mother wits, 
 And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay — 
 
 all the beggarly elements, that is to say, of the elder 
 drama, the vulgar accessories, and jingling couplets with 
 which his predecessors had so long tickled the ears of 
 the groundlings. The deliberate adoption also of the 
 new method by Shakspeare (who evidently profited by 
 
128 THE CONFLICT OF ART AND 
 
 Marlowe's example) proved beyond a doubt, that even 
 the modified music of rhyme could be safely dispensed 
 with, and was no longer necessary to the very loftiest 
 poetical expression. Music, on the other hand, has also 
 her sacred groves, and her rapturous moments into which 
 words may not and cannot enter ; those sublime solilo- 
 quies, for example, of Beethoven, that master-magician, 
 upon whose great sound-wave words perish and melt like 
 snow that falls upon the sea. The soul of the hearer, 
 under such a mighty spell as his, mounts into a region 
 where the methods of language are superseded. He 
 confers not with flesh and blood. A messenger has 
 reached him with authentic tidings of invisible things, 
 before whom the world and its wordy doctrine stands 
 dumb. With him who saw the heavens open and the 
 angels ascending and descending, things of sense and 
 time are consumed and swallowed up in the eternal 
 chasm, as through the open gates he hears the far-off echo 
 of a song which sings to him — 
 
 of what the world will be 
 When the years have died away. 
 
 No, the marriage between music and words is not 
 consummated, and, the genius of Wagner notwithstanding, 
 never will be consummated on earth. There is a kind of 
 
MORALS IN MODERN POETRY. 139 
 
 music to which words would only be a drag and an 
 intrusion, while on the other hand there are words so 
 sweet, so profound, and so full of a strange fascination 
 for us, that their best possible accompaniment, and their 
 most powerful exponents, will be found in solitude and 
 silence. Herr Wagner may give us a new creature, the 
 joint issue of music and the drama, but neither his theory 
 nor his practice — wonderful as the latter unquestionably 
 is — will ever advance music to a greater height, or poetry 
 to a greater height, than each of these can achieve by 
 itself alone. 
 
 If there be a danger then in asking the kindred arts of 
 music and poetry to become the exponents of each other, 
 the danger is greatly magnified when we come to ask the 
 divine spirit of Poesy — 
 
 The singing maid with pictures in her eyes — 
 
 to become the exponent of the proprieties, and a sort of 
 moral maid of all work. It would be an unpardonable 
 stupidity to insist that she should attune her heavenly 
 voice to the screech of Minerva's owl, and to bind the 
 aegis about her tender flesh and put her in a pulpit would 
 be to strike her dumb. And yet without agreeing with 
 Dryden and the elder authorities, that ' the chief design 
 of poetry is to instruct,' it is not to be denied that the 
 
 K 
 
I30 
 
 THE CONFLICT OF ART AND 
 
 best art does instruct, and that in the highest sense of the 
 word. It is only when the didactic design is put in the 
 front, and obtruded on us, that it becomes obnoxious, 
 and indeed intolerable. To a certain extent this holds 
 good, as we have said, even in moral teaching itself 
 Men must be taught as if you taught them not, whether 
 the medium of instruction be a picture, a poem, or a 
 sermon. The artist in either case who imagines that, 
 being an artist, he can disregard the opinions of the rest 
 of the world as to the morality or immorality in the 
 choice of his subject, or thinks that he can succeed by 
 addressing men as if they occupied a distinct moral plat- 
 form from that upon which he himself stands, is grievously 
 deceiving himself. Any such assumption, on the part 
 of either artist or moralist, is based upon a professional 
 fallacy ; and indeed, in the case of the preacher, this tacit 
 assumption is the real reason why the average sermon 
 in every educated community becomes daily more 
 ridiculous and intolerable, and more and more provocative 
 of that refractory frame of mind which reaches a climax 
 in Goethe's ejaculation, 'five minutes more of this, and I 
 confess everything.' The question for both moralist and 
 artist is not how to separate themselves from their fellow- 
 men, but how to lose sight of any such distinction, how 
 to combine and transfuse themselves into the great soul 
 
MORALS IN MODERN POETRY. 131 
 
 and common mind of the world. It will not do for the 
 artist to address men as his inferiors, but as equals. 
 Even if they should be his inferiors, and deny his art, and 
 laugh him to scorn, it will not serve him, like Byron in 
 his day, and more recently, Mr. Browning in ours, to lose 
 his temper at a public which refuses to appreciate his 
 work. Far better is it to work on in silence, in the well- 
 grounded assurance that the secret sanhedrim, which 
 always judges righteously in the end, and which is always 
 alive somewhere in the world, will one day do him 
 justice. Rather than be tempted by such hostility to 
 seek a separation from the world, he should descend 
 lower yet to meet them, compelling his soul into the 
 highways and byeways, and walking if need be with the 
 publican and sinner, if by any means he can get his feet 
 upon the common rock, and lay his hand at last on the 
 common heart of humanity. By this means only can the 
 artist draw all men to him, and by the light of his tardily 
 acknowledged fitness compel the world at last to read the 
 central purpose of his life, and to judge his work as a 
 whole. In art as well as morals, the basis of all true 
 power is in humility and self-oblivion, and nothing more 
 completely defeats artistic effect than professional self- 
 assertion. There is a stern independence in all healthy 
 human nature which will not suffer itself to be patted on 
 
132 THE CONFLICT OF ART AND 
 
 the back, instructed as a younger, or humoured as an 
 invahd. Where a sense of equaHty or fellow-feeHng is 
 lost, artistic and moral effect goes along with it. All idea 
 of difference between artist and audience must be 
 cancelled, all thought of superior personality put out of 
 the way, before art can have its perfect elemental freedom. 
 No human breath must stain the glass, through which art 
 at its best can be apprehended. The medium through 
 which we perceive and appreciate what is beautiful in art 
 should be as nearly as possible the medium through 
 which we apprehend the beautiful in nature. It should 
 be atmospheric and invisible. The moment at which the 
 attention is diverted from the thought to the utterer of 
 the thought, from the thought to the vehicle of the 
 thought, a false step has been taken. The presence of 
 an obvious apparatus is fatal to artistic effect. In litera- 
 ture, for example, as soon as the writer reveals the trick 
 of his school, or in any way shows the self-consciousness 
 of the literary craftsman, his style is ruined. At that 
 point a poison enters his pen, which affects injuriously 
 everything he utters. Whatever is attempted, the true 
 secret of the highest method of art expression is the 
 result of professional self-forgetfulness. It is the perfect 
 self-negation, the almost ghostly withdrawal of Shak- 
 speare's personality, which loads his words with that 
 
MORALS IN MODERN POETRY. 133 
 
 oracular significance the word of no other man possesses. 
 It is, again, the exquisite simplicity of Homer, in which 
 the literary performer is altogether lost sight of, set aside, 
 sunk, and superseded in the thing performed, the 
 unconscious ' garrulous God-innocence,' — as Mrs. Brown- 
 ing called it — of the simple story-teller, which gives him 
 his ever fresh fascination. This secret power of self- 
 surrender and self-disappearance is even strangely 
 characteristic of the highest spiritual fact within man's 
 cognizance. Although there has never been awanting an 
 intense and even a morbid curiosity on the subject, what 
 a complete withdrawal of everything like earthly personal 
 basis, what an infinite height and depth of distance, what 
 an impenetrable veil stands between us and the human 
 Personality that laid in the earth the living seeds of that 
 miracle of miracles — Christianity. 
 
 Most readers must have noticed the peculiar charm 
 bestowed on all that Shakspeare has ever written, by the 
 conspicuous absence of any apparent didactic purpose. 
 In his profoundest moments he never buttonholes you. 
 He never attempts to point the moral or improve the 
 occasion, except where the dramatic fitness of the situa- 
 tion, or the character of the speaker, demands it ; in such 
 cases, for example, as Jaques and Polonius, who, of 
 course, would be entirely out of keeping with their 
 
134 THE CONFLICT OF ART AND 
 
 character if they did not preach and moralise. It was the 
 want of this deliberate moral finger-post in Shakspeare's 
 work which made him the stumbling-block he was to the 
 critics of the eighteenth century. Dr. Johnson was 
 disgusted with his reckless indifference to the poetical 
 and moral proprieties, in making ihe innocent Cordelia 
 die on the breast of Lear, and quite approved of Nahum 
 Tate's ' revival with alterations,' in which that wretched 
 creature — who wrote a poem on syphilis, and rhymed the 
 Psalms of David with the help of Dr. Brady — kept 
 Cordelia alive, married her to Edgar, and so settled the 
 point of poetical justice and outraged morality. Poor 
 Nahum, from a cursory perusal of the Psalms he rhymed, 
 had probably convinced himself that it was highly im- 
 proper that the wicked should be allowed to spread him- 
 self like a green bay-tree, while the righteous went to the 
 wall, and thought that he might as well readjust the little 
 matter the gods had somehow overlooked, and so proceeded 
 to do so to the satisfaction of the moralists of his time. 
 A little further insight into the philosophy of the two great 
 poets he, for the time being, was born to mutilate, might 
 have taught him the working of that higher law, under 
 which to represent virtue as a policy, and offer it any 
 other inducement or reward than that which it offers 
 itself, is to turn the truth of God into a lie. 
 
MORALS IN MODERN POETRY. 135 
 
 Shakspeare's morality was of a kind which Johnson 
 and his school could hardly understand, because it 
 belonged to an order, not more honest perhaps, but 
 infinitely higher and wider than their own. If Shak- 
 speare's story and his art-method do not of themselves 
 impress their moral, there are no instructions left. 
 Through death and disaster the sun shines and the birds 
 sing, and his eyes are motionless and silent as the eyes 
 in a mask of marble. With a moral design as clear as 
 air, he never tells you what that design is. Lik^ his own 
 ^neas, in ' Troilus and Cressida ' — 
 
 the secrets of nature 
 Have not more gift of taciturnity. 
 
 He that hath ears to hear let him hear, as for the others, 
 he does not care even to speak to them. Just as we see 
 in nature and life itself, he uses facts sometimes in a way 
 which seems to contradict the accepted morahties. One 
 of his noblest creatures starts back from the very thought 
 of dissolution with an undisguised shudder, while his most 
 godless worldling goes to his death in a pleasant dream, 
 in which he ' babbles o' green fields.' That he looked 
 upon the art of the mere preacher with a wise contempt 
 is capable of abundant proof. In Jacques he makes the 
 preacher's gift the cynical conceit of a played-out roue ; 
 
136 THE CONFLICT OF ART AND 
 
 while in Polonius he gathers up the preacher's wisdom 
 in words that have never been surpassed, in order to fit 
 them to the mouth of a meddUng and contemptible 
 busybody. Notwithstanding this well-marked peculiarity 
 in Shakspeare, there are no wTitings which more deeply 
 impress the reader with a profound moral intention. It 
 would savour of special pleading to attempt to prove 
 such a fact by mere reference to isolated passages, 
 although there are enough of these to found such a 
 school of moral philosophy as one would look for in 
 vain from the work of any other man. The stronger 
 proof lies in the broad moral tendency of hi? work as a 
 whole, and the moral build of his matchless men and 
 women, for whom he asks, not our admiration alone, but 
 our respect. He knew, none better, that life was a 
 mingled yarn, good and ill together, and that 'cakes and 
 ale ' in some shape or other had their roots in human 
 nature.. By reason of his measureless receptivity he took 
 the good and evil up under that massive frontal arch of 
 his, and held them there without disturbance or displace- 
 ment until the hour came for using the material in his 
 art, when, without any conscious theory about either art 
 or morals, he instinctively used the darker tints of 
 humanity in such a way as brought its higher and fairer 
 aspects into full relief. In * King Lear,' for example, 
 
MORALS IN MODERN POETRY, 137 
 
 Goneril and Regan form but the dark bacl< ground upon 
 which the artist limns the white soul of Cordelia. In 
 * Othello,' again, he paints the unsullied fame and the too 
 trusting simplicity of the open-hearted soldier on the still 
 blacker canvas of lago's villany. Everywhere the good 
 and bad are used as contrasts, and in a sense exponents 
 of each other^ — Lady Macbeth over against the blameless 
 Duncan, the thought of whose innocent blood at length 
 unseats her reason ; Henry V., Shakspeare's ideal man 
 of the world, is contrasted with Sir John and his good-for- 
 nothing tatterdemalion crew ; while in his most spiritual 
 sphere we have Prospero and Miranda set against the 
 hardly human group of Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo. 
 In all these we have the good and ill, the noble and 
 ignoble, together, but we are never left one moment in 
 doubt as to which side engages the artist's moral sym- 
 pathies ; while there are single characters in which the 
 moral qualities more distinctly predominate, such as 
 Prospero, Cordelia, Hermione, or the Fool in 'King Lear,' 
 so utterly spotless, and even holy, both in conception 
 and execution, that they might have been drawn, as was 
 said of some of Fra Angelic o's pictures of saints and 
 angels, when the artist was on his knees. There is 
 clearly one law controlling all that is truly beautiful 
 either in the physical, moral, or artistic world. If beauty 
 
138 THE CONFLICT OF ART AND 
 
 do not naturally belong to the artistic work, if it is not 
 interfused and made one with it in the original casting, 
 it cannot afterwards be superadded. If Aphrodite her- 
 self have not the beauty of the living flower, the bloom 
 cannot be laid on. Any such attempt in the case of 
 physical beauty is a hindrance rather than a help, and in 
 the region of cesthetics, whether moral or poetical, an 
 artistic blunder. 
 
 M. Taine, who seems, by the way, to be as blind to 
 Shakspeare's moral method as Dr. Johnson was, (only 
 with infinitely less excuse,) has insisted upon a theory, 
 which, if accepted by the poet, enables him to shift the 
 entire moral responsibility of any perilous stuff he may 
 have written, clean off his own conscience on to that of 
 his age, and the social circumstances by which he is 
 surrounded ; although, curiously enough, the critic for- 
 gets to apply his favourite test to Shakspeare's own case, 
 and exhausts his ingenuity to prove our great dramatist's 
 immorality, ignoring the fact that Shakspeare was not 
 only cleanly above his age, but that in one of his 
 undoubtedly autobiographical sonnets he bitterly com- 
 plains of the ill-fortune that threw him on a public whose 
 manners were far below his moral standard, and in 
 which he pitifully asks forgiveness for any shortcomings, 
 arising out of associations with which his public life 
 
MORALS IN MODERN POETRY. 139 
 
 necessarily brought him into contact. Surely such a 
 confession as this might have helped the critic to dis- 
 criminate between the licence characteristic of an era, 
 and that personal and premeditated uncleanness which so 
 frequently disfigures Dryden and the Restoration group. 
 Moreover, M. Taine's theory of environment affects only 
 one side of the truth, and is therefore valueless as a test. 
 To speak of an age as a separate entity controlling the 
 units who constitute that entity, is to a certain extent a 
 fallacy. It is just such a theory as the criticism of 
 Olivia's Clown in the ' Twelfth Night,' would dispose of 
 as * the cheveril glove to a good wit ; how quickly the 
 wrong side may be turned outward ! ' For, if there be 
 any truth in the theory at ail, the inverse proposition is 
 quite as true — viz. that the leading minds of any age give 
 tone to, and in a sense control, the social aggregate of 
 which they themselves are the most influential units. To 
 insist on either proposition as representing the whole truth 
 would be to dogmatise on a half truth. What we call 
 the spirit of the age is not to be caught in a trap which 
 can be turned so easily inside out, nor can it be so 
 readily formulated or manufactured into a critical tape- 
 line by which every case may be exactly measured, least 
 of all the case of genius. It might indeed be said with 
 far more show of truth, that the law of environment con- 
 
HO THE CONFLICT OF ART AND 
 
 trols all mental phenomena below the standard of genius, 
 but at that point ceases to have any influence, and in the 
 case of great genius even provokes a contrary current. 
 Ordinary mental power is fenced round by that chain of 
 outward circumstance which genius breaks ; there are set 
 bounds for the rule, but none for the exception. The 
 theory altogether is one of those complete Utde pocket 
 oracles, which it has been too much the fashion of late to 
 apply indiscriminately to literary and art questions, 
 and which are held to settle everything out of hand. 
 The doctrine, like a good many short-cuts to hard-and- 
 fast conviction, has not that final importance which in 
 some quarters has been rashly credited it. The dogma 
 in art or religion (and in many other places where its 
 presence is less suspected) which proposes to supersede 
 the necessity for any further hard thinking, naturally 
 recommends itself to the majority. Anything that invites 
 a man to fold his brains up and put them away in a 
 napkin is eagerly closed with in these days of mental 
 strain and pressure. But fortunately, or unfortunately, 
 things are not necessarily true because they save trouble 
 and provide an armchair for intellectual inaction. M. 
 Taine has supplied one of these patent processes eagerly 
 accepted by the crowd, and which has been applied in 
 a manner and with a completeness its original pro- 
 
MORALS IN MODERN POETRY. 141 
 
 pounder did not perhaps think of. In a time like ours, 
 when, for the education of men, all periods, and the 
 literatures of all ages, are equally laid under contribution, 
 the theory of environment ceases to have any tangible 
 meaning, and genius in such circum tances is moulded 
 by its own predilections. Such a theory may have a 
 limited application in a literary clique, but in the great 
 broad world its effect becomes quickly invisible. It falls 
 into the vast ocean of modern life and merely makes 
 
 a circle in the water, 
 Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself 
 Till by broad spreading it disperse to nought. 
 
 If there were any really controlling principle in it, one 
 would expect to find a striking resemblance between the 
 poets of the same period, and this is never observable 
 except in poetry of the poorest and most conventional 
 description. Between the poets of our own nineteenth 
 century, discarding the mere imitators, we find no such 
 family likeness ; on the contrary, we are rather astonished 
 at the extraordinary variety of character and quality of 
 gift we so often see in the same family. There is nothing 
 in common between the scowHng cynicism of Byron and 
 the placid serenity of Wordsworth ; nothing between the 
 matter-of-fact realism of Crabbe and the idealistic tenuity 
 of Coleridge ; nothing between the open-hearted manli- 
 
142 THE CONFLICT OF ART AND 
 
 ness of Scott and the sugar-water imitation sentiment of 
 Tom Moore ; nothing in common between the somewhat 
 solid pudding of Southey's muse and the phantasmal 
 spirituality of Shelley. 
 
 Among our living poets too, Mr. Tennyson in his 
 translucent depth and unapproached harmony stands 
 clear of all but his nameless imitators, while Mr. Brown- 
 ing, with his suggestive involution, and his richly synco- 
 pated music and meaning, would have been unique in 
 any age. Could anyone conceive a greater unlikeness, 
 both as regards matter and manner, than between the 
 genius of Mr. Rossetti and that of Sir Henry Taylor? 
 Again, what is there in common between the intellectual 
 lucidity of Mr. Arnold and the erotic mysticism of Mr. 
 Swinburne? Even amongst our female poets of the 
 century, where one would naturally suppose there is less 
 room for contrast, what is there in common between the 
 masculine dry light of George Elliot's poetical gift and 
 the Saphic spontaneity and sometimes almost raw emotion 
 of Mrs. Browning? 
 
 Such contrary currents as these in the same period 
 are surely enough to stagger the most devout believer in 
 the iron law of environment. This diversity of gift and 
 moral purpose is by no means confined to the poets of the 
 present age. The greatest single figure in authenticated 
 
MORALS IN MODERN POETRY. 143 
 
 English history, as scholar, statesman, and poet, a greater 
 personage than Shakspeare, and beyond question our 
 greatest poet next to him, presents us with the most 
 remarkable example. Milton is almost the lonely figure 
 in an age whose morality is happily unparalleled in the 
 history of his country. What sympathy, moral or artistic, 
 what likeness either in the conception or execution of his 
 work, was there between him and the dissolute rhymesters 
 and dramatists of his time ? Looking back upon his life 
 and its moral environment, we seem to see a colossal 
 statue of Apollo, his eyes lifted up to the empyrean as 
 he watches the arrow-flight of his immortal song ; while 
 round about his feet, all but unconscious of the godlike 
 presence, hand in hand with their painted and patched 
 bacchantes, dance the wine-stained satyrs of that never- 
 to-be forgotten court. 
 
 Turning aside, however, from the moral action and 
 counteraction of an age and its greatest artists, it is some- 
 what extraordinary to find that it has been left to the 
 nineteenth century to compound the dogma that art to be 
 worthy of the name must be cut off from all moral signi- 
 ficance, and that the artist, especially the poet, before he 
 begins his work, must carefully lay aside his moral con- 
 sciousness, as if that were some kind of detached move- 
 ment of his being he could take up or lay down at will. 
 
144 THE CONFLICT OF ART AND 
 
 The doctrine was tolerable as long as it went no further 
 than that youthful enthusiasm of beauty for beauty's sake, 
 which young Hallam, for example, at the age of twenty, 
 insisted upon when reviewing Mr. Tennyson's first volume 
 in 1 83 1. But when it is argued to the exclusion and ex- 
 pulsion of all moral sense, it is a very different thing ; 
 and that Mr. Tennyson gives his countenance to any 
 such doctrine is sufficiently disproved by all his highest 
 and best work. In such poems as the ' Palace of Art,' 
 ' The Two Voices,' ' The Vision of Sin,' and ' In Memo- 
 riam,' in which a profound moral sense bulks most 
 largely, his imagination finds its greatest scope, and in 
 the particular sphere to which these poems belong, the 
 artist reaches a higher point than has ever yet been 
 chronicled in the same direction in the entire history of 
 English poetry. ' The Palace of Art,' indeed, is a poetical 
 and philosophical treatise bearing upon the very subject 
 under discussion ; and in which the question is plainly 
 answered — whether or not it be possible that a human 
 soul can lay aside its ethical instinct, and live happily, 
 exclusively for the gratification of its aesthetic sense, 
 whether or not a man can successfully detach and lay 
 aside his moral nature, and find the aims and objects of 
 existence served and satisfied in the worship of beauty 
 for beauty's sake ? It is no new question, and many a 
 
MORALS IN MODERN POETRY. 145 
 
 soul besides the one in Mr. Tennyson's poem has under- 
 gone a similar test, and returned from the battle with a 
 hard-won experience and in a more or less vanquished 
 condition. Nor is it new as a theme for poetical treat- 
 ment. It is the central idea in Goethe's * Faust/ in which 
 the trampled moral nature of the hero has its revenge 
 upon him, and reasserts itself so completely that the 
 devil at last is duped of his dupe, and has to take his 
 departure without him. The theme, indeed, is common 
 to many great works representing that struggle with self 
 and sin through which in some shape or other every soul 
 must pass. The work, however, in which we find the 
 most striking prototype of Mr. Tennyson's poem is the 
 Book of Ecclesiastes. The ' Preacher ' in that moral 
 monologue, and the ' Soul ' in the laureate's poem — both 
 of them dramatic personations — proceed on the same 
 lines. . *I made me great works,' says the hero of the 
 Hebrew drama ; ' I builded me houses ; I made gardens 
 and orchards ; I gathered me silver and gold, and the 
 peculiar treasure of kings : ' while the ' Soul ' in the 
 ' Palace of Art,' in varied phrase to the same eifect, 
 begins — 
 
 I built my soul a lordly pleasure house, 
 Wherein at ease for aye to dwell. 
 
 The Hebrew philosopher says to his heart, *Go to 
 
 L 
 
146 THE CONFLICT OF ART AND 
 
 now, I will prove thee with mirth, therefore enjoy 
 pleasure ; ' while the modern poet, in what sounds 
 almost like a paraphrase of the same words, says — 
 
 O Soul, make merry and carouse, 
 Dear Soul, for all is well ; 
 
 and so the two set out upon that quest which has ever 
 had but one end— vanity and vexation of spirit. 
 
 It is interesting to note the points of difference, as 
 well as resemblance, in the dramatic treatment of the 
 same idea, by writers so widely asunder in point of time 
 as well as environment. Each story represents its hero 
 at the commencement as one who has already attained 
 great worldly eminence. Both are men of position and 
 power, of unbounded means, and great culture; men 
 who, even exposed to the danger of such an experiment, 
 may be stained, but not retained by evil as a habit, caught 
 but not held by the senses, as the sequel in each case 
 proves. The eye takes in at a glance the structural 
 beauty of the modern poem, its clear definition, and its 
 gorgeous imagery, while the ear is held by the fascination 
 of its deep resounding harmony ; and though the subject 
 is of necessity profound and mysterious, as all spiritual 
 conflicts must be, there is no tinge of that obscurity, and 
 repetition, which has made the work of the Hebrew 
 
MORALS IN MODERN POETRY. 147 
 
 author such a puzzle to the annotators. But the 
 wider difference between the two will be found to lie in 
 the moral standard accepted by the respective authors. 
 The hero of Ecclesiastes seems to undergo a series of 
 indulgences, with moral pauses between, in which the 
 ever-recurring burden of Vanitas vanitatiim is introduced, 
 not as a miserere, as we are accustomed to find it under 
 similar conditions in the Psalms, but rather with a kind 
 of moral flourish of trumpets. The alternation of good 
 and evil, preacher and sinner, by turns, no doubt sug- 
 gested the attempt on the part of some of its early com- 
 mentators to divide the poem into strophe and antistrophe, 
 but it certainly lowers its moral tone. The hero retires 
 from each successive trial a wiser rather than a better 
 man, and comes back to the burden of his song, not so 
 much with contrition as vexation of spirit, discontent 
 rather than sorrow. The discovery of failure and the 
 conviction of sin do not much disturb the placid 
 scepticism of the Hebrew, and instead of repentance, or 
 even regret, we have only dejection, disappointment, and 
 satiety, with now and then a half-pitiful, half-sardonic 
 grin at the utter insignificance of man's life. Even when 
 he reaches the sad conviction that the same event happens 
 alike to fool and wise, and that death is the hopeless and 
 final end of all, in which a man has no pre-eminence over 
 L 2 
 
148 THE CONFLICT OF ART AND 
 
 a brute, he goes on making his admirable proverbs as if 
 nothing had happened. One cannot help suspecting 
 that he knew all through that the experiment he was 
 making was an ungodly one, and that he was attempting 
 to juggle his conscience into the belief that wisdom 
 gained by a knowledge of evil was a permitted path for 
 princes. Such experiences were probably looked upon by 
 him in the light of contributions to what Goethe called 
 the ' pyramid of his existence.' One is hardly surprised 
 to learn that the question of the canonicity of the book 
 has afforded such endless matter for discussion, or that 
 by tradition it was placed amongst those works that were 
 not to be read by anyone under thirty. 
 
 As late as the Christian era, heretics, so-called, have 
 attempted to reject it on account of its dangerous 
 teaching. Its many and peculiar excellences, however, 
 are beyond question. It is one of those books which will 
 continue to stand upon the broader canonicity of its own 
 merits long after the question of canonicity has ceased 
 to be discussed. Its keen insight into the ways and 
 working of the world of man, and the incisive language 
 in which its verdicts are embodied — although its direct 
 relation to Christianity may be difficult to see— will 
 always make it a favourite with men of the world. 
 
 Turning to the modern poem, what difference do we 
 
MORALS IN MODERN POETRY. 149 
 
 find there on the discovery of failure and sin ! The 
 moment the truth flashed in upon the Soul in the ' Palace 
 of Art ' that her life had been an acted lie — 
 
 she fell, , 
 
 Like Herod when the shout was in his ears 
 Struck through with pangs of Hell ! 
 
 No time with her for moral reflection on the vanities or 
 insignificances of life ; the new significance of it has 
 struck her dumb ; and when at last speech comes, there 
 is no breath left for a proverb — she cried aloud — 
 
 I am on fire within : 
 What is it that will take away my sin 
 And save me lest I die ? 
 
 To compare language like this to the proverbial phil- 
 osophy of the moral experimenter of Ecclesiastes, would 
 be to compare the moral method of the jailor of Philippi 
 with that of the Due de la Rochefoucault. 
 
 Mr. Tennyson, then, utters no uncertain sound upon 
 the subject of beauty for beauty's sake, when that theory 
 involves the exclusion from art of all action or corre- 
 spondence with the moral instinct, and sets its worshipper 
 on some fancied intellectual height which cuts him off 
 from the moral sympathy of his fellow-men. His verdict 
 is contained in a short prologue to the poem, which, like 
 many prefaces, was perhaps an epilogue in the order 
 
150 THE CONFLICT OF ART AND 
 
 of the poet's mind, and from which we quote four lines, 
 containing, for us, the essence of the argument, and what 
 the author of Ecclesiastes would call the conclusion of the 
 whole matter. The verdict is this — 
 
 That Beauty, Good, and Knowledge are three sisters, 
 That dote upon each other, friends to man, 
 Living together under the same roof, 
 And never can be sundered without tears. 
 
 Where the non-moral argumentin poetical art is stretched, 
 as it has been, so as to cover the immoral and justify 
 positive uncleanness, we do not follow it. A modern 
 singer of no small power, and possessing a lyrical gift 
 perhaps unsurpassed amongst living poets, has lent his 
 eloquent advocacy to this extreme view, and has solemnly 
 assured us that the ' Lesbian music, which spends itself 
 on the record of fleshly fever and amorous malady, has 
 a value beyond price and beyond thought.' It should be 
 remembered, however, that Mr. Swinburne, besides being 
 himself the chief singer in the Lesbian choir, may be said 
 to hold a watching brief in the interest of those who ac- 
 cept this view of the question, so that large deductions 
 may be made for anything he has to say upon it. More- 
 over, upon this subject, the line may be safely drawn at Mr. 
 Swinburne, just because unchecked license in the direc- 
 tion he argues, more quickly and surely defeats itself than 
 
MORALS IN MODERN POETRY. 151 
 
 anything that can be said to restrain it. Mr. Swinburne 
 himself seems to be drifting towards this conclusion, for 
 although he may still support the Lesbian art creed in 
 theory, he is wisely leaving it behind him in practice. It 
 would indeed have been a pity if the poet's genius had 
 remained permanently under the erotic spell that inspired 
 some of his earlier efforts. The Circean myth itself 
 teaches us, (for art will still be moral,) that there is no 
 surer avenger of sense them sense. The Nemesis that 
 overtakes uncleanness in literature is inexorable. Nothing 
 more quickly reduces the power of the artist, or takes him 
 out of that atmosphere of repose in which alone the highest 
 work is possible. Life gets soured in the repeated and 
 hopeless defence of the indefensible. Thought becomes 
 thin and querulous. The finer balance is lost, and power 
 is frittered away on distracting and profitless animosities, 
 until at last the victim becomes incapable of artistic work 
 that does not carry upon it the plain marks either of do- 
 tage or delirium. 
 
 Man's highest and purest culture reaches him through 
 the gates of his imagination, and it is of consequence that 
 only those things which are lovely and of good report 
 should enter in. The art which does not elevate, ennoble, 
 and refine the thing it touches, but tends rather to degrade 
 it, has no right of entrance there ; and when it forces a 
 
152 THE CONFLICT OF ART, ETC. 
 
 way in the disguise of poetry, it is at best a traitor to the 
 household. There is little chance, however, that the 
 Lesbian school of poetry, which makes it a boast that it 
 does not write for mothers or children, will ever gain a 
 solid footing on English ground. Most men are disin- 
 clined at the outset to accept a poetical theory based upon 
 productions that must be read by stealth. The reverence 
 for mothers and children, too, has still a pretty firm hold 
 of the earth, and does not seem hkely to be uprooted and 
 replaced by anything else just yet. An instinct rooted in 
 human nature, and hallowed by its most sacred associa- 
 tions, and which — if their highest works may be called in 
 as evidence — the greatest artists of the greatest art age 
 delighted to honour, is not likely to be seriously affected 
 by the Lesbian school of poetry or any other ; and in all 
 probability mothers and little children will still continue 
 to form no inconsiderable part of that * poetry of earth 
 which never dies.' There is happily, too, a strong pre- 
 judice abroad, both amongst fathers and mothers, that 
 when all is said and done, the poetical laurel does some- 
 how look 
 
 greener on the brows 
 Of him that utters nothing base. 
 
THE CORRELATION OF THE RELIGIOUS 
 AND POETICAL INSTINCTS 
 
THE CORRELATION OF THE RELIGIOUS 
 AND POETICAL INSTINCTS. 
 
 Napoleon First used to declare, with the sententious 
 profundity he was so fond of affecting, that * the world was 
 governed by imagination,' although the way in which he 
 carried out this article of his faith into practice, leaves us 
 in doubt, whether or not he had ever realised to himself 
 the full significance of the proverb. In some of his more 
 bombastic bulletins, and in those numerous and charac- 
 teristic passages in his life, from which we may select, as 
 a representative example, his behaviour and conversation 
 in the pyramids during the Egyptian expedition, he cer- 
 tainly tested the gullibility of his kind, by pushing the 
 imaginative theory to the borders of the ridiculous, and 
 proved himself a perfect master of that solemn cajolery, 
 happily confined to the baser sort of platform rhetoric. 
 Such passages in his career lead us to suspect that he only 
 saw the surface of the truth contained in his favourite 
 proverb. A certain amount of dogmatic shallowness is 
 absolutely necessary to the successful career of the pic- 
 
156 THE CORRELATION OF THE 
 
 turesque poseur^ and just a little more insight into the 
 imaginative faculty than Napoleon possessed, would have 
 made that career impossible, and would possibly have 
 made him ashamed of the very tricks to which he 
 frequently owed his success. 
 
 Imagination governed the world in a far profounder 
 sense than ever he conceived. It governed the world of 
 things that governed him, and while he vainly thought he 
 was ruling through its magic, the deceiver was himself 
 deceived. 
 
 So completely has the imaginative element influenced 
 all human thought and all human action, that it would 
 be a much easier task to point out where it is, than where 
 it is not. From beginning to end it permeates all Even 
 in the solid region of history, one has only to go far 
 enough back in order to reach a period at which the 
 material is no longer material in the literal sense of the 
 word, but rather 'of imagination all compact' Tracing 
 back history is like tracing back a stream. Follow far 
 enough, and you will find it begins in the clouds. Much 
 of our early history accepts even tlie modus of the im- 
 aginative faculty and exists in the form of verse, contain- 
 ing the merest mouthful of historical bread to limitless 
 poetical sack. 
 
 Ballads are the nursery rhymes of infant history. It 
 
RELIGIOUS AND POETICAL INSTINCTS. 157 
 
 seems to be a fact to which there is hardly any exception, 
 that the earliest history of all countries has taken a 
 poetical form, and that too, in the majority of cases, the 
 most poetical of poetical forms, the lyrical. Written not 
 to be read, but to be chanted, and not only to be sung, 
 but also to be danced to. Language has been happily 
 called ' fossil poetry,' and when we apply the philological 
 hammer to the word 'Ballad,' it turns out — like many 
 others of its kind — to be at least, a very interesting piece 
 of fossil history. Its derivation from the Italian ' Ballare,' 
 taken along with the words ' ball ' and ' ballet ' from the 
 same root, leads us to the inevitable conclusion, that in 
 early times, the original composer must have had in his 
 mind's eye the rhythmical movement of the bodily feet, 
 as well as the feet poetical. In the most rudimentary and 
 primitive conditions of society, the poetical and imagina- 
 tive leaven is everywhere apparent, and the instinct — 
 rough-hew it how we will — is frequently found at the root 
 of the very first promptings of religion. Sir John Lubbock, 
 in his ' Origin of Civilisation,' declares that night-mare 
 induced by over-eating gives to the disordered imagina- 
 tion of the savage nearly all the religion he possesses- 
 Nor in more advanced stages of civilisation, does imagina- 
 tion exercise a less important function. Mr. Max Miiller 
 has shown us in his translations of the Hymns of the 
 
158 THE CORRELATION OF THE 
 
 Vedas, that the sacred songs of the Brahmins were 
 saturated, or rather inflated with imagination. In the 
 Persian Hymns of the Zendavesta the same thing is 
 observable. Whilst in each successive evolution of the 
 dominant religion of modem times, from Hebrew law- 
 giver to Hebrew poet, from poet to prophet, from pro- 
 phecy to gospel, onward to the latest refinements of our 
 modem pantheon, the presence and the pressure of im- 
 agination is everywhere apparent. From the dream- 
 begotten creed of Sir John's gorged savage, onward to 
 that latest poetical * recast' of religion which vaporizes 
 the personality of God into 'a tendency that makes for 
 lighteousness,' imagination leavens the whole lump. 
 
 Rudimentary religion quite as notably as rudimentary 
 history is inseparably associated with poetry. The hymns 
 of the Vedas are in the oldest form of the oldest known 
 language, so old indeed that they might have come to 
 us from another world, for there is no record of the con- 
 dition of the society in which they were produced, and 
 no explanation of them except what can be derived from 
 their own form and matter, and their own internal light, 
 is even possible. The earliest known translation into 
 Anglo-Saxon of any part of the Scriptures is a poetical 
 version, that of Caedmon — in the seventh century, of the 
 story of Creation and the Exodus. The ballad itself was 
 
RELIGIOUS AND POETICAL INSTINCTS. 159 
 
 originally a religious song of praise, and even at a later 
 stage of its history, when it became a little more mixed 
 in character, the clergy continued to use it. Warton tells 
 us that the clerical and lay minstrels exercised the art in 
 common, and were frequently to be found amongst the 
 paid singers at the same entertainment, and in fact 
 language makes another fossil revelation here, for the 
 words ' minister ' and ' minstrel ' are from the same root. 
 
 The clergy, with their usual acuteness in estimating 
 the uses of anything calculated to keep the power in their 
 own hands, made strong efforts to keep the ballad under 
 their control, and from all accounts they must have 
 found the art of the minstrel a useful and influential one. 
 
 In Pierce Plowman's Visions, it is said of a friar, that 
 he was much better acquainted with his ' Rimes of Robin 
 Hood ' and ' Randal of Chester' than with his Paternoster, 
 and a good many of them would probably have endorsed 
 old Fletcher of Saltoun's proverb, with the difference of a 
 word, ' if a man were only permitted to make the ballads, 
 he need not trouble himself about who should make the 
 creed of the nation.' That the monks themselves were 
 the authors of many of these metrical homilies, and 
 legends of the saints, which they recited, and taught the 
 lay minstrel to recite, there can be little doubt. In those 
 days before books were, they must have found the ballad 
 
i6o THE CORRELATION OF THE 
 
 no mean educational instrument. The printing press, 
 as was to be expected, shelved alike the minstrel and the 
 monk. 
 
 In these modern days we turn the old ballad in our 
 hands with that affectionate antiquarian interest one 
 takes in a prehistoric spear-head, richly eloquent of the 
 buried past, but in the hands of the original user it was 
 a subtle intellectual weapon, and though we may look 
 upon it as the rather barbarous implement of a kind of 
 stone period in literature, it no doubt served the purposes 
 of its day, and served them well. In an educational point 
 of view it filled the double office of poet and teacher, and 
 taking into account the cultus of the age, the apparatus 
 was well suited to its end. There must have been a force 
 and directness about such teaching that kept anything 
 like sham at arm's length, and had, at all events, none 
 of that mechanical cram which makes the society of a 
 later civilisation so fertile in mediocrities and artificiali- 
 ties, and so wretchedly barren in all that is picturesque 
 in character. Nor was the early ballad a less efficient 
 instrument in education or less powerfully formative of 
 character, because its lessons awoke the heart as well as 
 the head, and were, so to speak, poured in warm, not 
 only training and furnishing the memory, but appealing 
 to the poetical instincts, and sometimes to those religious 
 
RELIGIOUS AND POETICAL INSTINCTS. i6i 
 
 intuitions, which so large a section of our present day 
 philosophers declare must be carefully rooted out of 
 modern education. 
 
 In our day the relation subsisting between the poetical 
 and rehgious instincts is not less intimate. Only very 
 recently, one of the most acute of modern critics treats 
 the subjects of English Poetry and Religion in the same 
 chapter, and asserts that it is next to impossible to speak 
 of them separately. ' The more I reflect,' says M. Taine, 
 ' on the conformation of the English mind, on the pre- 
 eminence of the moral being, and the necessity for re- 
 garding nature through the eyes of the moral being from 
 first to last, the more clearly do I arrive at an under- 
 standing of the strong and innumerable roots of that 
 serious poem which is here (in England) called religion.' 
 Nor could it well be otherwise with a people whose moral 
 modes of thinking have been so largely grafted upon the 
 Hebrew Scriptures, those ever-flowing rivers of consola- 
 tion that have quenched the thirst of so many millions of 
 earth's pilgrims, and in which the perfect and harmonious 
 fusion of the two instincts, religious and poetical, finds 
 so complete an illustration. With what grander poetry 
 could the religious instinct ally itself than the exultant 
 raptures of Isaiah ? Where can finer fellow-feeling for 
 humanity be found than in the penitential pathos of the 
 
 M 
 
i62 THE CORRELATION OF THE 
 
 sweet singer of Israel, with that ever fresh-hearted faith 
 in the final issue, which so strongly characterises the 
 deepest and darkest of its sorrows ? Our indebtedness to 
 Hebrew poetry withdrawn, it would be impossible to form 
 any adequate conception of what civilisation would have 
 been. There is no corner of modern life it has not pene- 
 trated. Not only has it deeply coloured our own best 
 literature — given endless occasion to our greatest artists — 
 wedded and welded itself to our noblest music — but in 
 every-day life its constantly recurring idioms, its little 
 touches of nature that make the whole world kin, are 
 ever turning up, on the lips of those who do not even 
 know sometimes from whence they draw their riches, so 
 rooted is the habit. 
 
 It seems impossible to make these writings of the 
 younger world in any sense antiquated. It is only the 
 products of modern civilisation that run that risk. The 
 further we get from them the more grandly they stand 
 out. And in this very nineteenth century, there is no 
 sharper rebuke to that maudlin piety without power 
 which oppresses our religious literature, . than one can 
 find on almost every page of the Psalms. What a glorious 
 springtide in the world's life must that have been for 
 which these anthems were written. In trying to realise 
 to the imagination the worshippers of those days, who in 
 
RELIGIOUS AND POETICAL INSTINCTS. 163 
 
 congregated thousands praised the Lord with a shout — 
 with ' the sound of the trumpet/ with * the psaltery and 
 harp,' with ' the timbrel and dance,' ' stringed instruments 
 and organs,' till the rolling volume of joyous sound be- 
 came as the noise of many waters, one calls up a picture 
 whose concrete glad directness contrasts strangely enough 
 with the faded theological abstractions of much of our 
 modern worship. 
 
 The later degeneracies and repugnancies of Chris- 
 tianity, dividing not the nation only but every little 
 community into distracted factions, have made our 
 modern faith as fertile in its mortifications as its satis- 
 factions, and has all but dried up that fountain of joy 
 v/hich found such rapturous expression in earlier times, 
 and which characterised more or less the religious 
 services of all Eastern countries. ' I think,' says a great 
 
 poet — 
 
 This is the authentic sign and seal 
 Of Godship, that it ever waxes glad. 
 
 If this be true, the godlike quality is strangely absent 
 from the adoration of the modern Protestant. Worship, 
 for the greater part, seems to have sunk into a respectable 
 ceremonial, from which if the soul has not altogether fled, 
 any pulse of gladness, at all events, can hardly be 
 detected. 
 
i64 THE CORRELATION OF THE 
 
 Without seeming to question for a moment or under- 
 value the moral compensations of adversity, there is cer- 
 tainly no modern equivalent of that joyousness which was 
 so pre-eminent a feature in Hebrew worship and which 
 the Psalmist so eloquently and repeatedly enjoins. One 
 can hardly accept this haggard result of modern theology 
 as in any sense the out-come of the gospel {God-speU\ 
 and there is room, it is to be hoped, within the wide walls 
 of Christianity to speak plainly on such things, without 
 running the risk of earning the epithet ' heterodox ' except 
 from a few moral hypochondriacs. 
 
 But whether there is or not, we have a strong suspicion 
 that one glad and grateful hour, spent in a trustful and 
 joyous sense of the goodness of the All-giver, is perhaps 
 a more acceptable service in His sight, than whole 
 Sundayfuls of that funereal propriety some of us have 
 been taught to call religion. Whatever the Reformation 
 has accomplished — and no doubt it has accomplished 
 much — it has certainly permitted, if it has not sanctioned, 
 the development in our country of some forms of so 
 called Christianity, the moral results of which, could they 
 honestly be scheduled, would incontestably prove that 
 they have done more to counteract than stimulate the 
 religious instinct. Whatever else it has done, it has 
 grievously wounded one of the most glorious potentiali- 
 
RELIGIOUS AND POETICAL INSTINCTS. i6s 
 
 ties of human nature — the capacity for joy — without 
 which, we need no Psalmist to teach us, the highest wor- 
 ship is impossible. Much as we owe to the Hebrew 
 poets, we might in this direction owe them something 
 more with advantage to ourselves. Side by side with the 
 joyous worshipper of the temple, the drowsy indifference 
 of your solemnly respectable sermon- worn devotee, goes 
 far to convince us — the author of Ecclesiastes notwith- 
 standing — that in some respects at least, 'the former da)s 
 were better than these.' 
 
 A very short excursion into the broad and breezy 
 fields of comparative theology, is sufficient to convince us 
 of the vastness of that kingdom which the religious and 
 poetical instinct may be said to hold in common, and 
 enables anyone to discover for himself — and a pleasing 
 discovery it is — that many of those religions he has been 
 probably taught to look upon with suspicion, if not with 
 horror, contain much that is only very little removed 
 from his own ; much that has grown out of the poetical 
 instincts common to his kind, and that after all, the most 
 advanced religionist — call him by w^hatever name you 
 will — is only one of that huge caravan of humanity for 
 ever travelling from the cradle to the grave, striving ac- 
 cording to his best lights, to escape much the same 
 dangers, to gratify much the same aspirations, and seeking 
 
1 66 THE CORRELATION OF THE 
 
 an interest in that pilgrimage of the hereafter, from the 
 Power which he believes has controlled and sanctioned 
 that of the present. The close similarity in some of those 
 root beliefs, of religions that have grown up widely apart, 
 and perfectly unknown to each other, exhibits the extra- 
 ordinary uniformity both as regards instinct and action, 
 that characterises the development of religious intuitions, 
 when fairly left to themselves, proving, apart from all 
 ecclesiastical interference, the existence of an independent 
 faculty — the faculty of apprehending what cannot be 
 made known to the mere senses, the faculty of reaching 
 a verdict and a conviction upon evidence that is unseen, 
 what Mr. Tennyson calls the power of ' believing what 
 we cannot prove,' and which faculty, when treated with 
 the philosophical respect it deserves, will, it is to be hoped, 
 help to clear a space of common ground upon which men 
 of widely different cultus may yet agree to meet and 
 shake hands, without wasting life and energy in the split- 
 ting of theological hairs, and in fighting out questions that 
 are not worth the candle. That there are men who do 
 not admit the existence of such a faculty, and who would 
 laugh at the idea of anything like an attempt at scientific 
 classification of evidence on such a subject, does not 
 require to be pointed out — men with whom the experience 
 of the senses is final, and who will not admit the existence 
 
RELIGIOUS AND POETICAL INSTINCTS. 167 
 
 of phenomena that do not lie within their own horizon, 
 and are not capable of experimental proof 
 
 Doubtless the scientific test has purged the world of 
 much absurdity that has too long sheltered itself under 
 the name of religion. One can quite understand it 
 when it condemns the unreasonableness which mixes up 
 symbol with fact in the stories of a younger world, and in • 
 sists on reading an account of the creation, written thou- 
 sands of years ago, through the eyes of the 19th century, 
 without making any allowance for the mental parallax. 
 But on the other hand if not only these stories, but 
 all the other book-religion in the world could be made 
 a tabula rasa to-morrow, we would have still left on our 
 hands the gigantic fact of the religious instinct. What 
 has to be done with it ? If science could get rid of God 
 himself, it does not at all follow that human nature could 
 get rid of this enormous potentiality — this wheel within the 
 brain which must grind something or grind itself. The 
 Sphinx must have its answer or it will devour you. So 
 long as man is made on the existing model, he may 
 make up his mind to ignore the subject, to vote it a 
 nuisance, and attempt to dismiss it from his thoughts, 
 but that will not prevent the instinct from finding him 
 out now and then. It may lie within the province of the 
 Creator to sever the connection, the creature cannot do 
 
i68 THE CORRELATION OF THE 
 
 it. No one can so perfectly guard himself on all sides 
 
 against the inroads of this instinct, but that the idea of 
 
 the great unseen power acting above and beyond us, 
 
 must enter and overawe sometimes. Just when he 
 
 fancies he has successfully laid the ghost, and made 
 
 everything secure, the merest hint brings all back 
 
 again : — 
 
 A sunset touch, 
 A fancy from a flower bell, some one's death, 
 A chorus ending from Euripides — 
 And that's enough for twenty hopes and fears, 
 As old and new at once as nature's self, 
 To rap, and knock, and enter in his soul, 
 Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring 
 Round the ancient idol on his base again 
 The grand Perhaps ! 
 
 The world's too plentiful trivialities may crust over and 
 conceal for a time the deeper life, but there are junctures 
 in most lives, where, if nothing else succeed, the great 
 solvents of Love and Death find out the way, and lay all 
 open. The wall that does not crumble into dust before 
 these trumpets of God, is not built with hands. A man 
 may refuse to acknowledge the particular object of wor- 
 ship of an/ set of his fellow-men, but in most cases it is 
 only to substitute another. It is quite consistent with 
 human nature, and especially scientific human nature, to 
 be up to the ears in its own superstition, and yet laugh 
 heartily at that of its next-door neighbour. He may 
 
RELIGIOUS AND POETICAL INSTINCTS. 169 
 
 exercise his free will about what he shall bow down to, 
 but bow down he must. The instinct holds him fast. 
 He may take down the name of God from the altar of 
 his new pantheon, and set up instead of it the name of 
 Nature, Law, Molecular Force, Evolution. According 
 to his school or fancy, he chooses one or other of these 
 fashionable substitutes for Almightiness, but it is only to 
 write it with a large capital and then fall down and wor- 
 ship it. 
 
 This unconscious action of the imaginative and 
 religious faculty, ruling a man, as it were behind his 
 mind's back, is frequently to be met with among men 
 who affect to be totally indifferent to, and void of the 
 poetic instinct. We need hardly say that in most cases 
 it is an assumed indifference, and judging from the 
 emphatic way those who boast of the defect sometimes 
 call attention to it, they have evidently convinced them- 
 selves that it goes in some undefined way to prove their 
 solidity and intellectual completeness. Knowing that 
 there are people born now and then with an organ short, 
 as in the case of colour-bHndness, or that deeper affliction 
 the incapacity to distinguish music from mere noise, it 
 might be uncharitable to say, that in this case it is al- 
 ways and altogether affectation. In some instances it is 
 no doubt the honest declaration of downright sterile 
 
I70 THE CORRELATION OF THE 
 
 defect, although the kindly providence that tempers the 
 wind to the shorn lamb, may mercifully disguise the 
 humiliation of such a confession from the subject of it. 
 And yet the confession too is not without a widely sym- 
 pathetic value of a kind, reaching back as it does, and 
 claiming kinship as it were, with those rudimentary forms 
 of animal life which illustrate that most humble and 
 curious of vital conditions — life without organs. But the 
 confesser of such an infirmity may, possibly enough, re- 
 fuse to see it in this light. 
 
 No doubt there are men who honestly fail to realise 
 the utility of these higher intuitions, and to whose ever- 
 reiterated ciii bono ? you can answer nothing which they 
 can possibly understand. If you turn round on such 
 arguers, and tell them that you too admire the utilities, 
 and poetry for its utility, and that in your humble esti- 
 mation, poetry fulfils some of the highest requirements of 
 men's nature ; or, in the words of Victor Hugo, that * the 
 beautiful is as useful as the useful, perhaps more so,' they 
 will possibly stare at you as if you were a madman. But 
 the sincerely defective in such matters are a mere hand- 
 ful beside the pseudo-scientific mob that at the present 
 time affects such an indifference, from the fancied 
 superiority it gives them, and it is no uncommon thing, 
 in these severely scientific times, to meet men who 
 
RELIGIOUS AND POETICAL INSTINCTS. 171 
 
 imagine they bring nothing to the sohition of life's 
 problems but the clear dry Hght of an unbiassed intellect, 
 while one can very plainly see, that under a vain exterior 
 of reason, they are all the time the unconscious tools of 
 their own emotions. The philosophy which affects to 
 exclude from its calculations the imponderable forces of 
 the imagination, is, as far as its humanity goes, blind 
 on one side, and will never be able to give an un- 
 prejudiced account of anything in which humanity is 
 concerned. 
 
 Many of those religious traditions which no sane 
 man pretends to credit with anything like scientific 
 accuracy, such as the paradisiacal traditions of Eden — 
 an equivalent of which is to be found, in some shape 
 or other, in almost every religion— possess a significance, ■ 
 both moral and ethnological, which science takes far 
 too little account of The influence of such traditions 
 will never die. * The garden,' sings pathetically, a living 
 poet — 
 
 The garden, O the garden, must it go, 
 Source of our hope, and our most dear regret ? 
 The ancient story, must it no more show 
 How man may win it yet ? 
 
 But there is no fear that the garden will go. Had 
 Milton never sung his immortal epic ' Of man's first 
 
172 THE CORRELATION OF THE 
 
 disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree,' the 
 story would have been equally safe. It is easy to pick 
 holes in the science of these old stories, a thing they 
 were never intended to teach — but he that would over- 
 turn the lessons that lie deeper than science — the lessons 
 they were intended to teach — has a very different task 
 before him. These are beyond his reach, and are 
 guarded as of old by a sword of fire. They have a 
 never-ending applicability, and indeed the precautionary 
 moral contained in that wholesome old story of the gar- 
 den, and the tree of knowledge, was perhaps never more 
 urgently wanted than in the present time. Unhappily 
 for us, the Mephistopheles who played the villain with 
 such eclat in that magnificent old drama is still alive and 
 well, offering his apples at the old price, and to all 
 appearances doing a very fair stroke of business. We 
 can picture him standing by, and listening until, in the 
 terrible realism of Burns, * his auld damned elbow yeuks 
 wi' joy,' as he hears those eloquent agents of his, holding 
 up knowledge as an end rather than a means, and push- 
 ing the sale of it as something that would effectually 
 patch up all the hungry crevices of poor old leaky human 
 nature ; for well he knows, in the face of all our boasted 
 enlightenment, with its growing materialism, and its host 
 of scientific sceptics, that the tree of knowledge bears 
 
RELIGIOUS AND POETICAL INSTINCTS. 173 
 
 fruit as rotten as ever, for him who thinks he is the wiser 
 for the eating of it. 
 
 These early myths that have fed the imagination of 
 an infant race, are far more firmly rooted, and are of far 
 greater importance than those weak iconoclasts who have 
 laboured to explode them, have any conception of. That 
 the child is father of the man is as true of the race as of 
 the individual. The religious instinct which holds these 
 early myths as a sacred inheritance, like the ardour with 
 which the literary instinct of a civilised people clings to 
 its rudimentary poetry, is only the expression of a some- 
 what similar feeling in the mass, to that which in the 
 single instance prompts a man to cherish with such 
 fondness the stories and experiences of his youth. No 
 man can explain why the stories he heard when he was 
 young, or the adventures of that time, should retain such 
 a hold on him, and so impress him above all others. Why 
 they should stand out clear and vivid, whilst the story he 
 heard the week before last has gone clean out of his head. 
 All the likes and dislikes, the trials and the triumphs of 
 that time, have a strange value for him ; nay, the very 
 errors — for error itself where it has been the youthful over- 
 flow of a warm and trusting nature, turns to very gold in 
 the hands of a calmer and riper experience. All his over- 
 eager aspirations, all his over-ardent philosophies, which 
 
174 THE CORRELATION OF THE 
 
 he can now look back upon with a smile, have yet a 
 power upon him not to be shaken off, an enchantment 
 ne*'er to be forgotten, and which no possible science can 
 ever help him to explain. The poets are all at one in 
 describing the irresistible fascination of the time : — 
 
 Verse, a breeze mid blossoms straying, 
 Where Hope clung, feeding like a bee, 
 Both were mine, Life went a-maying 
 With Nature, Hope, and Poesy. 
 When I was young ! , 
 
 With all its laughters and its tears, its sorrows and 
 successes, its clouds and sunshine, it is youth after all 
 that contributes the memories that make the man, in a far 
 profounder sense than do any of life's later experiences. 
 He who first declared Mnemosyne to be the mother of 
 the Muses was the medium of a genuine inspiration. 
 Genius itself, to a certain degree, is a thing of memory, 
 and greatly consists of the power to summon back at will 
 the force of the first impression. These early memories 
 are the deepest cut and the most abiding, and are never 
 far from any one of us. At the slightest hint of associa- 
 tion, they come back upon us like a flood. Life is full of 
 their ethereal finger-pointings. The hush of the wind, 
 the smell of clover, the hum of a bee, and the waters are 
 over our head, making the dullest man for the moment 
 
RELIGIOUS AND POETICAL INSTINCTS. 175 
 
 poetical, and the silentest man loquacious, for the subject 
 warms the heart like wine. It is an everflowing fountain 
 of emotion, a charmed landscape lying far away in the 
 bosom of Ihe hills, and with such a light upon it, that no 
 man with blood in his veins has ever been able to look 
 back upon its hallowed outline but with a longing and 
 an infinite regret. 
 
 Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean, 
 Tears from the depth of some divine despair, 
 Rise in the heart and gather in the eyes. 
 When looking on the happy autumn fields, 
 And thinking of the days that are no more. 
 
 This liability to be moved and influenced, and formed 
 by life's earliest impressions, lying in a far distant past, is 
 as strongly characteristic of the life of a people as it is of 
 the life of a man. The instinct of the many is just the 
 multiplied intuition of the one, and no science and no 
 philosophy will ever be able to untwine from the heart of 
 mankind the stories it heard first, or succeed in uprooting 
 or even weakening the hold of those traditionary concep- 
 tions, historically associated with the religious growth of 
 early races. They have a value far beyond, and entirely 
 apart from their merely scientific accuracy, and are much 
 more likely to grow venerable as the years roll on. 
 Civilisation does not bury its prehistoric records, but takes 
 delight in the labour that unearths them; does not 
 
176 THE CORRELATION OF THE 
 
 disperse and weaken, but with loving hands accumulates, 
 strengthens, and completes them. 
 
 The past will always win 
 A glory from its being far, 
 And orb into the perfect star , 
 
 We saw not when we moved therein. 
 
 The philosopher who on the strength of a little rudi- 
 mentary knowledge in science proceeds to shatter all to 
 pieces, and who crows over his exploits in a way that 
 would almost have you believe that the creature has at 
 length found out the Achilles' heel of his Creator, is 
 somehow not so popular as he used to be. No doubt he 
 has had his uses, and has been to a certain extent enter- 
 taining, but he is getting dreadfully prosy and common- 
 place. In the beginning of the century while he was yet 
 young and counted his hostile theories to accepted views 
 by hundreds (geology had upwards of eighty itself), he 
 was considered attractive, more particularly by that 
 never- sufficiently-noticed section of society — recruited 
 for the most part from the lower intellectual strata — which 
 is always ready to give a favourable hearing to anything 
 that proposes to overturn accepted authority, not so much 
 because such authority is wrong, as that it is accepted. 
 But even these have mostly fallen away from him. He 
 has paid the penalty of a fame too quickly achieved, a 
 
RELIGIOUS AND POETICAL INSTINCTS. 177 
 
 character forced into raw and cartilaginous maturity, 
 having no lime of endurance in its bones. The greater 
 part of his demolishing theories have either succumbed to 
 later scientific discoveries or have been voted without dis- 
 cussion, to be read that day six months, and in this way 
 have quietly gone the way of waste paper. The radical 
 defect of these theories and their propagators was that 
 they were too blindly radical. They could see no good 
 whatever in religious things as they existed. They could 
 accept no point of view but that which left all others out 
 of sight, and their own facts were the only ones of any 
 account in the argument. But there are symptoms at 
 length of the religious instinct itself receiving a scientific 
 treatment from a high quarter and with something like 
 the respectful consideration the subject demands. The 
 dawn is breaking. Science itself is beginning to suspect 
 that those higher intuitions of the soul are after all not 
 less substantial and scientific because you cannot catch 
 them, catalogue them, and put them in a box, no, not even 
 with satisfaction to all, in the ecclesiastical box we call a 
 creed. The spiritual fact is not less actual because it is 
 not to be handled, or measured by the scientific test. 
 There are things even in the material world that are not to 
 be examined or explained, nay, like the stars, not even to 
 be seen by any light but what they themselves supply. You 
 
 N 
 
178 THE CORRELATION OF THE 
 
 have only to bring the lamp of daylight to see them by, in 
 order not to see them at all, but no one on that account has 
 any doubt of their substantial existence. It is the same 
 with the higher intuitions. If they cannot prove them- 
 selves in some way, no possible science is of any avail. 
 Bring the light of the modem scientific lamp to bear on 
 them, and like the stars before daylight they retire. 
 They will not submit to the indignity. It is a reversion 
 of the highest order of nature. It is the body testing the 
 soul. The letter judging the spirit. These intuitions, 
 not to be accounted for by the senses, are facts never- 
 theless, stern, scientific facts, possessing an importance 
 immeasurably greater than the so-called scientific facts that 
 can be classified and recorded by the senses, and judged by 
 their results are certainly amongst the most important facts 
 in the history of humanity. Moreover they are the only 
 facts that endure, all else is but shifting sand. Beside these 
 the world of material fact is a very Proteus, never, as we 
 know, for two moments together in the same condition. 
 It is in a state of continual flux. Perpetual change is the 
 only changeless law about it, and what science dignifies 
 and deifies by the name of Law is based on a necessarily 
 incomplete record of transient phenomena. The facts of 
 the senses are only the garments for the time being, of 
 the deeper and more enduring law which will stand still 
 when the heavens pass away. The phenomena of nature 
 
RELIGIOUS AND POETICAL INSTINCTS. 179 
 
 are but the mists that break themselves across those 
 quiet immovable and heaven-reaching hills the phenomena 
 of the soul. 
 
 But if the tendency of science as at present existing 
 be to underrate the importance of the religious instinct, 
 the counteracting influence, if not the remedy for such a 
 tendency, may be hopefully expected from that increasing 
 impetus and cultivation of the poetic and imaginative 
 faculty which so invariably keeps step with the progress 
 of education and civilisation. And there is this advantage 
 on the poetical side of the conflict, that its intuitions com- 
 mand respect in quarters where the very same instincts 
 put forward on religious grounds would be laughed at. 
 The witticism held sufficient to set the table in a roar at 
 the expense perhaps of the oracle of a parish pulpit, some- 
 how loses point when directed against Milton or Shak- 
 speare, although the moral taught and the root intuition 
 from which the teaching springs, are in every other respect 
 identical. You may laugh at the one without danger, nay 
 society will even grant you a kind of cheap diploma for 
 smartness if it is done with any sort of cultivated address. 
 • But have a care of the other. You must not risk your 
 aesthetic reputation by seeming to question even in a joke, 
 what the capable criticism of a country has finally agreed 
 to accept as its true poetry. 
 
 N 2 
 
i8o THE CORRELATION OF THE 
 
 In some quarters the two subjects seem to be ap- 
 proaching each other more nearly. Cardinal Manning in 
 one of his eloquent addresses declares, that ' thirty years 
 ago, anyone who introduced religion into conversation 
 caused a silence, he was a methodist, or a madman, or 
 both.' * Nowadays,' he says, ' there is hardly a private house 
 in which it is not uppermost, or any occasion on which it 
 is not introduced.' 'I will not say/ he continues, ' that art, 
 literature, and poetry are become religious, but I may say, 
 that religious art, religious literature, and religious poetry, 
 still more than all these in their highest Catholic forms, 
 are to be found throughout England.' Cardinal Man- 
 ning was of course speaking of his own church, and it may 
 be consequently suspected that the will may have been, to 
 some extent, the father to such a statement. There is 
 certainly no appearance of any such revival in the art of 
 literature or poetry of large sections of Protestant Christi- 
 anity. On the contrary there seems to be a revival of 
 materialism, and under that modern symbol of power, the 
 scalpel of the man of science, the life-blood and the poetry 
 of religion seem to be oozing away, and threaten to leave 
 behind them such a caput mortuum as piety itself will cast 
 the gorge at, and over which not even a theologian will 
 care to fight. The verdicts of society, however, must be 
 taken for what they are worth, and revivals either one way 
 
RELIGIOUS AND POETICAL INSTINCTS. i8i 
 
 or another are not much to be depended upon. For the 
 most part they seem to be epidemics, whose local causes 
 are hopelessly obscure, and rather indicate a passing 
 spasm in society than any radical or abiding change. Apart 
 from all such influences, the two instincts, poetical and 
 religious, wherever they are allowed perfect freedom from 
 outward restraint, social, scientific, or ecclesiastical, must 
 ever come together, and it will always be impossible to 
 draw a categorical line that shall divide them. Do what 
 you can, they will underlie and overlap each other. What, 
 indeed, is much of our most cherished theology but only 
 our highest poetry formulated ? What again is much of 
 our best poetry but our profoundest convictions in a 
 different form, a creed touched by the alchemy of an 
 imagination that sets free its component gases ? Even 
 when there is no such moral intention the most secular 
 of our poets, if ever he reach that point of inspiration 
 where words become winged, is sure to cross the line 
 and wander away into the congenial atmosphere of 
 religion before he knows it. And even in the case of 
 poets in whose blood the hatred of anything like 
 systematic theology has rankled Hke the bite of the 
 Naples spider, in their higher flights they are continually 
 trespassing on the holier ground, unconsciously ratifying 
 the profoundest spiritual truths, and ministermg to the 
 
1 82 THE CORRELATION OF THE 
 
 very forces they themselves affect to hold light. This is 
 notably observable in Byron, although perhaps more 
 conspicuous in Shelley than in any other modern poet. 
 Under a strangely persistent denial of Christianity, and 
 indeed of God, he nevertheless, in his inspired moments 
 became the unconscious interpreter of the higher nature, 
 and to a certain degree became reverential and devout 
 in spite of himself It is not possible in fact to soar 
 except in one direction. The etymology of the word 
 might teach us that. It is not to be denied, however, that 
 too many of our great poets, fevered by that kind of 
 dithyrambic madness which so easily besets the genus 
 irritabile vatu?n, have frequently made attempts to curse 
 what a higher power than theirs has seen fit to bless. 
 And yet how often, when the spell of his supernatural 
 gift is upon him, has the poet found it impossible — like 
 the prophet in a similar frame of mind long ago — to s^ 
 anything but what the Lord had put in his mouth. 
 Shelley is for ever getting into this strange predicament ; 
 Shelley in the hands of the soul of Shelley, was over- 
 mastered. When the winds of God struck that harp, the 
 earthly possessor of it was little better than one of the 
 audience. It would indeed be difficult even in one's 
 imagination to compound any mortal mixture of earth's 
 mould less materialistic than Shelley. On the contrary 
 
RELIGIOUS AND POETICAL INSTINCTS. 183 
 
 he seems to illustrate more than any man that ever lived 
 the last point of material possibility, the minimum 
 quantity of earth compatible with life : one step further 
 and matter would have exhaled, and resolved itself into 
 ether. His genius so completely 'o'er informed the 
 tenement of clay ' that there is a distinctly appreciable 
 want of earthly basis upon which to steady it. His 
 Pegasus, over bred on the ethereal side, was deficient in 
 bone, and had not body and ballast enough to carry the 
 enormous wing of its imagination. He tells us himself 
 that he had tried to be a materialist once, but very 
 quickly abandoned it for the opposite heights of idealism. 
 His atheism was not thorough-going. It was rather a 
 shriek — and sometimes rather a discordant shriek — against 
 state-craft, and sacerdotaHsm, an echo of the French 
 revolution cry against kings and priests, than against 
 authority or religion in the abstract. The sincerest part 
 of Shelley's unbelief, like that of a great many other 
 people, was prompted by a feeling more or less common 
 to all strong natures — and imitated by a good many 
 ones, who think themselves strong — a feeling of im- 
 patience under, and antipathy to, the offensive dogmatism 
 that insists upon its own cut and dry conceptions of the 
 Deity ; not in many cases that those who so insist have 
 more deeply considered the matter, but often for no 
 
i84 THE CORRELATION OF THE 
 
 better reason than that their opinions happen for the 
 time being to be approved, and sanctioned, and pro- 
 tected, by that cheapest of trade marks, ' orthodox the- 
 ology.' There is no real proof in Shelley's works that 
 he had any sympathy with, or had any title to a place in 
 that category of fools, which another great poet has so 
 aptly classified, once and for ever, as having said in their 
 hearts there is no God. His boasted atheism was a 
 piece of insanity in which his deeper feeling and his 
 better reason had no part, and is capable of endless con- 
 futation from his own best utterances. His was an 
 atheism that was condemned out of its own mouth. The 
 reiterated reference to the supernatural, and to that 
 spirit above and beyond earthly things, was one of the 
 most conspicuous characteristics of his genius. There is 
 very much in Shelley's best poetry to justify Mr. Brown- 
 ing's vaticination, that had he lived he would have gone 
 over not only to the theists but to the Christians, and it 
 gives an air of predicability to that seemingly hazardous 
 prophecy, which one does not see so well at first sight, 
 but which a little closer study brings into better focus. 
 Worship, in some form or other, was for him a spiritual 
 necessity; Voltaire's proverb, ^ Si Dieu fi'existatt pas, il 
 faudrait Vinventer^ had never a better illustration. He 
 ignored the Creator, but still would magnify his wonder- 
 
RELIGIOUS AND POETICAL INSTINCTS. 185 
 
 ful works. He denied the very Deity in whose praise he 
 was for ever unconsciously singing a Gloria in excelsis. 
 The philosophy, however, which denies God on one hand, 
 deifies Nature on the other — what ever ism it may range 
 itself under, is a mere shuffler of words. When it comes to 
 that, it is not so much a question of the existence some- 
 where of an Almighty power, but rather a petty quarrel 
 as to what name it shall go by. What difference does it 
 make to the everlasting fact in a purely theistical point of 
 view, whether a poet should speak of God as * the mighty 
 one who upholdeth all things and inhabiteth eternity,' or 
 whether like Shelley he choose to apostrophise him as the 
 
 great — 
 
 Spirit of Nature ! 
 ' Soul of those mighty spheres, 
 
 Whose changeless paths through Heaven's deep silence lie. 
 
 The reverential feeling of such words, and the worship, 
 consciously or unconsciously contained in them, is one and 
 the same thing. And upon close study, with little excep- 
 tion, there is hardly anything discoverable on the supposed 
 atheistic side of Shelley's poetry of a more objectionable 
 nature, than the existence of some such passages as might 
 have provoked the puerile criticism which found fault 
 with Wordsworth as pantheistic. If the unbelief of Shelley 
 had been real and not a mere masquerade in which a 
 foolish boy tried to frighten old women by signing himself 
 
i86 THE CORRELATION OF THE 
 
 * Percy B Shelley, Atheist ! ' with the evident inten- 
 tion of enjoying the horror of the thing, it would have 
 had a far more real presence in all his highest works, 
 whereas it does little more than enable him to contradict 
 himself. Where he is true to his highest genius, he is 
 false to his creed, and vice versa. And on similar grounds 
 the result must ever be the same. What man, but above 
 all what poet, can have anything to do with the higher 
 aspirations of humanity cut away from the existence of 
 God, and a belief in a hereafter ? What advantageth to 
 him, in such a case, all the immortal longings he prates 
 about ? If his creed be the true one it should rather teach 
 him silence and the contentment of the brute, eat a?id 
 drink, for to-morrow we die. But Shelley could never 
 seriously endorse any such creed, and all the obtrusive 
 reiteration with which he announced himself an atheist, 
 only succeeded in strengthening the suspicion that the 
 announcement was not wholly sound. The spasmodic 
 attempts to keep his poetry square with such a creed 
 were hysterical and intermittent and the result of no deep- 
 seated conviction. It was in keeping with the traditions 
 of his school to affect erratic views both in politics and 
 religion, and unfortunately the more such views ran counter 
 to common sense — shocked men and horrified women — 
 the more gratification he seemed to get out of them. 
 
RELIGIOUS AND POETICAL INSTINCTS. 187 
 
 While by no means sympathizing with the coarse and 
 malignant criticism which condemned him without the 
 power, or at all events without taking the trouble to 
 understand him, it is yet a matter of undeniable regret, 
 that neither he nor Byron could altogether conceal a 
 certain weak satisfaction in their diabolical fame. 
 
 Although, however, the poetic instinct — as we have 
 already said — from its very nature, may, more than any 
 other power, be safely depended upon to counteract the 
 encroachments of scientific realism, it need not be forgot- 
 ten that poetry itself^or at least what is frequently called 
 poetry — is as apt to become as mechanical as science, or 
 as conventional as religion has sometimes become. Al- 
 though the true antithesis, as Coleridge once pointed out, 
 is not between poetry and prose, but between poetry and 
 science, it should yet be borne in mind that poetry itself 
 can sink sometimes — as far as its highest functions are 
 concerned — into mere lifeless technicality. A very great 
 deal of the poetry of the eighteenth century may be quoted 
 in support of this. Poetry perhaps never at any time so 
 nearly succeeded in living without a soul as it did before 
 the modern romantic school breathed into its nostrils the 
 breath of a new life. Beyond doubt the life of the 
 eighteenth century possesses a charm for us moderns, in 
 many ways not to be surpassed. In many senses it stands 
 
THE CORRELATION OF THE 
 
 by itself and can never again be repeated. Nevertheless 
 it seems to us altogether out of the way, and argues an 
 absolute want of poetical insight, to compare the art exer- 
 cised by Johnson and Pope with that of Milton and Shak- 
 speare, or of Wordsworth and Tennyson. It is not at all a 
 question of degree, they are totally different in kind. The 
 eighteenth century stopped creating in order to cogitate 
 and criticise. In perusing much of its literature one feels 
 that the prophet has taken his departure, and in his place 
 we have only the heavy theologian and the plodding man 
 of letters. As far as the emotions are concerned the 
 period represented a kind of semi-torpid transition between 
 the old and the new in English poetry. Their sentiment, 
 what was of it, like their pseudo-pastoral and mock-idyllic 
 verse, was cut to the conventional pattern. Its poetry 
 was in a certain sense unique. It was in the first place — 
 and this more than the poetry of any other period — emin- 
 ently critical : it was finished to a fault, it was intellectual, 
 didactic, philosophical, metaphysical, in fact everything 
 but poetical. Much of what it produced stood towards 
 true poetry nearly in the same relation as the doctrinal 
 hymn does to true religion. The nature of the thing for- 
 bids a poetical treatment in the highest sense. It interests 
 the intellect but forgets the heart : it hardly needs, and 
 certainly does not warm, the imagination. Its most perfect 
 
RELIGIOUS AND POETICAL INSTINCTS. 189 
 
 poetry and its highest reHgion was a kmd of subHmated 
 worship of common sense of which BoHngbroke and 
 Leibnitz were the lawgivers and Pope the prophet. And 
 if the pantheon were somewhat narrow, and shut out 
 the sky more perhaps than was needful, and if across its 
 altars hard words were apt sometimes to jar with the music 
 of the temple, it would nevertheless be difficult to conceive 
 a prophet — all the circumstances considered — more 
 admirably fitted for the office. The highest proof of 
 Pope's genius lies in the fact of his achievements, when 
 the poverty of his available implements and the paltriness 
 of his environment are considered. A presiding deity 
 was not so much wanted as a master of ceremonies, 
 for the literature of the time was as artificial as its 
 society. It bulks largely in our eyes because we are 
 as yet near it, and mediocrity is voluminous. But as it 
 retires in time to its true focal distance, the result and 
 especially the poetical result of the eighteenth century 
 will become more and more inconsiderable. Pope, Gold- 
 smith, and a few others who approach them most nearly, 
 will be the only prominent peaks breaking the uniform 
 level. When criticism looks back upon the century 
 from a sufficient distance, it can hardly be doubted but 
 that the greater part of the poetry of Johnson, Parnell, 
 Swift, Prior, Akenside, Churchill, Chatterton, Bloomfield, 
 
190 THE CORRELATION OF THE 
 
 and many others who find a place in ' Johnson's Lives,' 
 will steadily become more and more unread, and more 
 and more unreadable. In much of the poetry of the time, 
 even in the best of it, one cannot get rid of a feeling of 
 artificiality. You begin to suspect the process, and to ask 
 yourself, if this be the real Pythian ecstasy or only what 
 the doctors would call a sympathetic attack? Have 
 many of these writers really chewed the leaves of the 
 plant sacred to Apollo, or are they only the second-hand 
 ruminators of stuff from which the juices of inspiration 
 have already been well extracted ? Is much of what they 
 offer us, the veritable tap of Castaly, or only some modern 
 concoction in a bottle ? In too many cases you have no 
 doubt at all, for behind their flowmg periods you distinctly 
 hear the action of the pump. They have little of the art 
 that conceals art, in their genius. The screen is too thin 
 to hide the machinery. Their pieces, as the French 
 would say, ' are sewed together with white thread, one 
 can see the stitches.' Effort is visible everywhere. They 
 are always on stilts, and the effort for the most part is 
 made in favour of the hearer, and seldom leads up to any 
 high ideal of their own. The ' person of quality ' seems 
 oppressively present. Most of their morality is artificial 
 and sickly and unsound, like that of Sterne, and is too 
 frequently obtruded for effect. One feels the humility of 
 
RELIGIOUS AND POETICAL INSTINCTS. 191 
 
 instruction in so much of it, and the authoritative super- 
 intendence of the consciously superior person, that you 
 cannot shake yourself free of a certain vague sense that 
 you are being patted on the back, and, without your leave 
 being asked, are somehow being made the victim of a 
 system of applied morality. You get sick of its ponder- 
 ous and pretentious mediocrity, and would like to drive 
 a fist through its paste-board morality, just to see if indeed 
 there be any real manhood at the back of it. This sus- 
 picion of unsoundness, this * dram of base,' contaminates 
 the whole social fabric of the period. Its politics were if 
 possible more rotten than its morals, and it is difficult to 
 read any history of its corrupt factions without irritation 
 and disgust. Artifice infects more or less every variety of 
 its poetry. It falsifies their drawing as well as their colour, 
 and taints their style as deeply as their morals. One 
 detects the unsoundness even where morality does not 
 obtrude itself, as in their descriptive poetry. Most of 
 their descriptions of nature are not the pictures of men 
 who have any keen personal relish of country life, but 
 only the conventional Grub Street production, made after 
 the regulation recipe for the treatment of such subjects. 
 Take even a description of country scenery from Pope's 
 Pastorals, and place it side by side with a similar subject 
 from Shakspeare or from Keats, or Coleridge, or Shelley, 
 
192 THE CORRELATION OF THE 
 
 or Mr. Browning, and you see the difference at once. It 
 is like comparing a chromo-lithograph with a sketch from 
 nature of Constable or David Cox. The one kind of work 
 is done at the bidding of a great gift, and with a fervent 
 love of what it works upon ; the other is done to order, a 
 mechanical effort at second hand : well done, we admit, 
 but entirely different in kind. There was seldom any 
 divine necessity laid upon a poet of the eighteenth cen- 
 tury to utter the things he did. One can hardly detect 
 any of the flavour of that faculty which according to our 
 
 modern theory 
 
 Sings because it must, 
 And pipes but as the linnet sings. 
 
 The linnet of the eighteenth century was in many cases 
 only one of those costly mechanical automatons that jumps 
 out of a box, sings you an t'were a nightingale, and jumps 
 in again, very beautiful, very wonderful, but still wound 
 up with a key ; 
 
 The workman made it ; therefore it is not God, 
 
 as the proptiet Hosea said of the golden calf of Samaria. 
 One of the American humourists, speaking of the 
 Elizabethan period, says that genius in that age was epi- 
 demic, and might have broken out in any man's family 
 like small-pox or measles. There was certainly no 
 fear of any such catastrophe in the eighteenth century. 
 
RELIGIOUS AND POETICAL INSTINCTS. 193 
 
 Poetry then was not so much an endowment, as merely 
 the accomplishment of any man of letters who chose 
 verse as his vehicle : a fashionable person who affected 
 'quality,' was very point-device in his accoutrements, 
 and very commonly in debt. He concocted laborious 
 odes to the virtues all round, and apostrophised the ab- 
 stract divinities generally, in the approved form his age 
 expected of him. And really there was little soul for 
 higher work, and little audience for it if higher had been 
 forthcoming. Taken altogether the whole thing was 
 perhaps good enough for that paradise of petits-maitres, 
 which brought up the rear of that division of our literary 
 history we have dignified with the name of the classic 
 period. We are quite aware that exception may be taken, 
 in particular cases, to any such broad criticism of eighteenth 
 century literature. The exceptions, however, are few, and 
 do not materially affect the rule. Its poetical literature 
 has been hoisted up to too high a place in the general 
 Walhalla : it has occupied, and still occupies, a position 
 from which time, that tries all, will quietly take it down. 
 Although this fact must have been borne in upon the 
 convictions of many a student of the period, they have 
 not sufficiently had the courage of their opinions openly 
 to say so. Literary hypocrisy is as common a variety of 
 the hateful vice, as that form of it which is usually asso- 
 o 
 
194 THE CORRELATION OF THE 
 
 ciated with holier things. It is wonderful how long a 
 man, honest in every other respect, will shrink from the 
 plain dictates of his conscience and convictions on liter- 
 ary matters, out of deference to some supposed authority, 
 or other social restriction, and will even suffer himself to 
 be led about, and seemingly approve, if not applaud, 
 opinions which he knows in his secret judgment he 
 condemns. And yet such hypocrisy has sometimes 
 tainted the literary criticism of a whole nation. The 
 eighteenth century has benefited largely by this moral 
 cowardice, going hand in hand, as it almost invariably 
 does, with that intellectual inaction, amounting to positive 
 dishonesty, which accepts its creed in such matters with- 
 out having ever seriously examined whether it is true or 
 not. But in making any general estimate of the time, we 
 must make at least one conspicuous exception. No man 
 can judge Burns in the ruck of the eighteenth century. 
 Except in name he did not really belong to it. He was 
 in the period not of it, and was about the last man in the 
 world who could possibly have accepted its conventional 
 standards for the true ones, its embroidered hollowness 
 for honest character, its empty gallantry for love, or even 
 any amount of its most elegant dissipation for genuine 
 happiness. His intense personal sincerity cried out for 
 * ground more relative than this ' and lifted him a clean 
 
RELIGIOUS AND POETICAL INSTINCTS. 195 
 
 head and shoulders above all that surrounded him. His 
 genius came down upon the theological veneer of his time, 1 
 and the Della-Cruscan filigree of its poetry like the 
 hammer of Thor, and it was his pen above all others, that 
 first and fairly marked the line of cleavage, between the 
 effete classicism of the past century, and the fresh 
 romanticism of the present. It was no great wonder his 
 age did not appreciate him : they had nothing in 
 common. It has always been much the same. The 
 pioneers of any real renaissance have been usually mis- 
 understood, and unless the purse of some sympathetic 
 Lorenzo were at hand, for the most part starved. Burns 
 was a stumbling-block to the complacent religiosity of his 
 time, and to its machine-made wisdom, foolishness. It 
 had none of his sweet simple direct humanity, none of his 
 single-hearted passion, none of the deep sensitive fervour 
 of his moral sentiment. On the contrary it was the want 
 of any strong personal convictions, and the general thin- 
 ness of its moral substance, that made most of the poetry 
 of the eighteenth century so superficial and poor and 
 bloodless. It had drifted away from nature, the only 
 real sustaining source of inspiration, and taken up its 
 abode in books and beautiful stock phrases, and had 
 recourse to these instead of nature for its support and 
 continuance. It thought more of its audience than its 
 
196 THE CORRELATION OF THE 
 
 subject, and gave itself up, as Wilkes said of Pitt, ' to the 
 studying of words, and the rounding of sentences.' It 
 tried to conceal the poverty of its inspiration by bringing 
 all the pretty things to the front. It was exactly in the 
 condition of the religion, which neglecting all the higher 
 sources of its faith, seeks to renew, refresh, and recruit 
 itself at the broken cisterns of ceremony, and doctrinal 
 orthodoxy. The spirit was shoved out of sight and 
 superseded by the letter. Neither the religious nor the 
 poetic instinct will long survive such treatment. The 
 study of words is not only a very charming, but an 
 indispensable study in its place, and books beyond 
 question are invaluable, but after all they are only the 
 conduit pipes, not the fountains, of inspiration. Neither 
 in the one case nor in the other does any man ever see 
 the real significance of the thing until he gets behind the 
 lighted candles, the ritual and the printed forms, and 
 reaches the thing itself, the actual fountain head from 
 which these instincts are fed and nourished. If a man 
 cannot in a great measure help himself to his religious 
 convictions, neither the church nor the priest can do 
 anything for him. Let him not attempt to cheat his 
 Maker by creeping into the creed of another man's soul, 
 merely because he has failed to find wherewithal to cover 
 his own. And so in poetry let no man, however much he 
 
RELIGIOUS AND POETICAL INSTINCTS. 197 
 
 may enjoy it, accept that second-hand heaven of written 
 song, in lieu of that first and last and everlasting heaven, 
 of which all poetry is but the passing record. And there 
 is this also in common between the two, that the book- 
 poetry, like the book-religion, which satisfies us, and lulls us 
 to sleep on a bed of roses, is far less likely to be the highest 
 of its kind, than that which shakes us up and awakens 
 the soul to new sense of its possibiHties and necessities ; 
 that which in religion knocks the theological scaffold- 
 ing from below your feet, and drives you back upon God 
 and no other, and that which in poetry sends you out 
 to the hills alone, to discover for yourself the sources 
 from which all true poetry flows, and convinces you 
 hat poetry, like the kingdom of heaven, is within you. 
 
CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY 
 
CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 It must have frequently occurred to the readers of 
 modern poetry, that the ancient and time-worn dictum, 
 assuring us that a poet is born, not made, must in our day 
 have lost, if not some of its force, then certainly some of 
 its fitness. To this conclusion we must come if the word 
 poet has not changed its signification. The original genius 
 (' his soul is with the saints we trust ') who first pro- 
 pounded the poeta nascitur dogma, had his eye no doubt 
 upon certain of the stiffnecked and rebellious, who clung 
 to the condemned creed, that, given a fair average quantity 
 and quality of mental fibre, a poet might after all, and 
 with some little trouble, be made. Dr. Johnson held 
 that a given amount of ability may be turned in any 
 direction, ' even as a man,' he argued, ' may walk this way 
 or that.' ' And so he can,' answered in our day Arch- 
 bishop Whately, ' because walking is the action for which 
 his legs are fitted ; but though he may use his eyes for 
 looking at this object or that, he cannot hear with his 
 eyes, or see with his ears. And the eyes and ears are not 
 
202 CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 more different than, for instance, the poetical faculty and 
 the mathematical.' 
 
 Notwithstanding the completeness of this answer, 
 there is room for grave suspicion that the Doctor's theory- 
 has still, not only its beHevers, but its 'school and its 
 disciples. If we are to judge by the living facts around 
 us, and seek a conclusion through the philosophy that 
 teaches by examples, that conclusion must inevitably be 
 — either, that we have still amongst us crowds of heretics 
 who abide by the belief in the manufactured article, or 
 that the poetic faculty is a very much more common pro- 
 duction than it used to be. Nor is the alternative very 
 puzzling. Anyone who takes the trouble of looking into 
 the titles of the several claimants of the laurel as they rise, 
 must get himself more and more convinced that the poet 
 made is rampant, and that the real possessor of what 
 Mrs. Browning called 'the sorrowful great gift' — the 
 poet bom of the old dogma — is as rare as he has ever 
 been, and in fact, there are not a few who do not hesitate 
 to declare he is as dead as the Dodo. 
 
 Many of those in the present day who approach nearest 
 to the old standard of the poet born have, in addition, so 
 much about them of the poet made, that the proverb no 
 longer fits, and, we may add, have so much about them 
 of what is so elaborately made, that one is tempted to 
 
CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. 203 
 
 believe some of them might have been greater men at 
 less pains. 
 
 Macaulay declared that 'as civilisation advances, 
 poetry almost necessarily decHnes.' Without denying 
 that the assertion at first sight has an appearance of plausi- 
 bility, we are inclined, on closer examination, to set it 
 down as one of those half-truths which the brilliant 
 essayist's partiality for a teUing antithesis frequently led 
 him into : just one of those picturesque announcements, 
 which Mr. Spedding — speaking of Macaulay's extravagant 
 strictures on Lord Bacon — characterises as proceeding 
 from ' the love of rhetorical effect in a mind rhetorically 
 disposed.' If indeed we are to suppose civilisation in 
 Macaulay's phrase to be in this case synonymous with 
 education, as it is loosely understood, then the statement 
 does contain a certain amount of truth. But if we mean 
 by education what it should be rather than what it is — a 
 drawing out of a man's emotional nature, as well as his 
 merely mental qualities, then the statement not only 
 contains in it nothing that is true, but something that is 
 pretty nearly pernicious. If even we could be brought to 
 admit the possibility of poetical decline from such a cause, 
 we would not the less strenuously deny the necessity of any 
 such decline. Certainly nothing will contribute more 
 surely to the decline of poetry than the civilisation which 
 
204 CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 forgets to educate those very faculties and parts of a man's 
 nature by the exercise of which alone poetry can either be 
 produced or appreciated. And if, in addition to the 
 neglect of these faculties, we give an exaggerated import- 
 ance to the education of the faculties which naturally 
 counteract them, we at length reach tangible grounds and 
 get something more than a glimpse of the civilisation in 
 which poetry necessarily declines. Under like conditions, 
 would it be a matter of surprise that Logic, Metaphysics, 
 Science, or any of the mathematical or mechanical arts 
 should also decline ? Physiologists have long ago agreed 
 that the inordinate exercise of one set of muscles invari- 
 ably results in the impoverishment of the corresponding 
 set, and it is quite as possible in the mind as in the body, 
 by excessive exercise, to strengthen one set of faculties to 
 the permanent weakness and injury of the otheis. Nor 
 can it be denied that the prevailing partiality for scientific 
 and mechanical pursuits, by keeping imagination out in 
 the cold, has had the effect of making our more recent 
 advances rather a one-legged progress. 
 
 By exclusive attention to the education of the emo- 
 tional side of a man's nature, you will no doubt succeed in 
 creating such a milksop as shall hardly supply fibre enough 
 for the hero of a penny novel ; but, on the other hand, 
 by an equally exclusive cultivation of the rationalistic 
 
CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. 205 
 
 side, you will develop something quite as weak, and as 
 dangerous, and a good deal more intolerable. To look 
 strongly at anything with one eye, it is natural to close 
 the other, and so with reason's eye riveted, one need not 
 be surprised to find the eye of imagination shut. 
 
 In the civilisation whose progress is thoroughly sound, 
 the education of the head and of the heart should go 
 abreast, and the assumed advancement in which poetry 
 declines is more than likely to be the civilisation of an age 
 that sacrifices its emotions to its reason. If this be true, 
 we must be prepared to see a good many other things 
 decline. First after poetry, perhaps religion, and after 
 that the possibility of political cohesion. If we read history 
 carefully enough, we shall find in most cases, that this 
 lopsided civilisation, under some very high-sounding 
 aliases, ' Perfectibility of Human Nature,' 'Age of Reason,' 
 and so forth, has a trick of moving in a circle, and playing 
 itself out. By-and-by the neglected half of human nature 
 has its revenge. The fatal flaw in this emotionless cul- 
 ture is that it contains no sort of human amalgam strong 
 enough to bind society together. The individual forces 
 composing it are what Lord Palmerston would have called 
 ' a fortuitous concourse of atoms,' and possess no element 
 of poHtical adherence. The forgotten thing that under 
 the name of Emotion was allowed to fall asleep as quiet 
 
2o6 CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 as a lamb — the busy worshippers of Reason taking no 
 note of the fact — awakens one day with a changed name 
 and a changed nature. It is now a Hon. Spumed Emo- 
 tion has grown to Rage, an easy transition. Renewed 
 by his sleep, the lion rises up and scowls around him, 
 rushes into society with his tail in the air, inaugurates a 
 Reign of Terror, and reasserts the sovereignty of the brute. 
 When the mad fit has gone, and the long arrears to the 
 heart have been paid for in blood, cash down, society sits 
 down again clothed and in its right mind. The Sisyphus 
 of civilisation finds himself again at the foot of the hill, 
 glad to accept a philosophy that, if less high-sounding 
 and pretentious, is at least a good deal more human. 
 
 That in the progress of the civilisation worth the name, 
 the arts should, and actually do extend their influence and 
 empire, hardly requires to be argued. It is rather a matter 
 of historical demonstration than a matter of opinion, and 
 the immensely wider field and increased appreciation of 
 the particular art of poetry might be amply illustrated by 
 simple reference to fact. We do not mean to assert, how- 
 ever, that the publication of any number of editions of 
 the best poets, with an almost universally reading public, 
 necessarily involves the more frequent recurrence in 
 society of the poet born. The times and seasons of 
 genius are as inscrutable as the thing itself It is one of 
 
CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. 207 
 
 those things (for there are a few of them yet left) that has 
 not as yet been altogether circumvented by the rationalist. 
 The natural law — as he would probably call it — that 
 evolves its higher immortals, that drops down here 
 and there, over three or four centuries, its Raphaels, 
 Shakspeares, and Beethovens, is one of those that has not 
 been quite accounted for by that science of Averages 
 which promises to make everything so easy by-and-by. 
 We can see no good reason, however, for concluding that 
 in such an improved condition of society as this advanced 
 civilisation brings about, the poetical gift amounting to 
 genius should occur less frequently, although it may be 
 easy to conceive that it may be born under the unlucky 
 star of having its lot cast in a mechanical civilisation 
 unfavourable to its development. It must be admitted 
 also that the same artificial education that stimulates 
 mediocrity so wonderfully, seems sometimes, not only to 
 obscure but even to interfere with and impede, the more 
 original gift. And yet these unfavourable influences once 
 overcome, civilisation stands no longer in the way, but 
 rather pays tribute. We need not look for the removal of 
 these obstacles, nor is civiHsation altogether to blame for 
 them. It must legislate in the interests of the majority, 
 not the minority — the rule, not the exception — and even 
 if it were advisable, it would yet remain impossible to make 
 
2o8 CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 educational provision, to fit at all points such exceptional 
 cases as genius presents. The ideal milieu that would do 
 justice to every variety and degree of natural gift, and 
 injustice to none, is as far off as ever, and will probably 
 remain what it ever has been, a world-without-end desider- 
 atum. But what if these very obstacles of genius, the 
 earthly incompatibilities, the uncongeniality of atmosphere, 
 which always have been, and from the nature of things must 
 continue to be, its never-ending complaints — what if these 
 are only the providential and appointed spurs in the side of 
 genius, intended to take the place of the more ordinary edu- 
 cational stimulahts that serve the purpose of mediocrity ? 
 It might be fairly argued from the lives of great men, that 
 there is a given amount of genius at which education be- 
 comes almost impossible, and which, in fact, defies educa- 
 tion in the ordinary sense of the word. There seems to be 
 a degree reached in the brain barometer, at which faculty 
 undergoes a chemical change and slips through the fingers 
 of the educational manipulator in an imponderable ether. 
 Let the earth rejoice that this abnormal gift usually brings 
 with it the gift to educate itself Sir Humphry Davy, in 
 a letter to his mother, making reference to the way in 
 which his schoolmaster neglected him when he was a 
 child, declares he was fortunate in such neglect, and adds, 
 ' I perhaps owe to this circumstance the little talents I 
 
CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. 209 
 
 have, and their peculiar application.' Sir Walter Scott, who 
 cut but a poor figure at school, says that ' the best part 
 of every man's education is that which he gives himself.' 
 William Blake goes a good deal further, and boldly says — 
 
 Thank God, I never was sent to school 
 
 To be flogged into following the style of a fool. 
 
 Leslie, again, declares it was Fuseli's ' wise neglect ' of 
 young Landseer that helped to make him what he after- 
 wards became. Turner's father put him to school to 
 learn drawing, and in a short time his teacher, a most 
 competent man, brought the pupil back, fairly beaten, 
 and told his father it was no use, the case was hopeless. 
 Many such anecdotes from the lives of great artists 
 might be added to these, but perhaps poetry's more 
 nearly related sister art of music supplies us with the 
 most striking illustrations. On that auspicious morning, 
 which must ever be held in grateful remembrance by all 
 lovers of music, when the Duke of Saxe-Weissenfels 
 caught a little boy surreptitiously amusing himself on his 
 chapel-organ, ordered him up before him, and settled his 
 career from that day forward, by then and there finding 
 him guilty of genius, no one was more astonished at the 
 verdict than the said boy's own father, who could throw 
 very little light on how young Handel came by his 
 P 
 
2IO CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 accomplishment, and none at all on how he came by his 
 genius — a thing he had never even been suspected of. 
 Again, Schubert's instructor complained that he was 
 always making the mortifying discovery that he could 
 tell his pupil nothing but what he knew beforehand. 
 When young Nicolo Paganini — a mere boy — was sent to 
 Parma to study under Alessandro Rolla, the great 
 musician, on hearing him play, told him to go home, he 
 could teach him nothing. Moschelles told the parents 
 of young Mendelssohn the same thing, and when that 
 excellent couple had at length prevailed on him to give 
 their son lessons, he knew and openly 'confessed the 
 thing was a mere form. In the recently-published Life 
 of Moschelles we find an entry in his diary dated Novem- 
 ber 22nd, 1824 (Mendelssohn being then fourteen), to 
 the following effect : 'This afternoon I gave Felix 
 Mendelssohn his first lesson without losing sight for a 
 single moment of the fact, that I was sitting next a 
 master, not a pupil.' Mozart, again, was the despair of 
 his instructors. And what indeed could anyone be 
 expected to teach a boy who could write tunes at four 
 years old, and was a master himself, and the astonishment 
 of masters, at an age, in ordinary cases, before education 
 can be said to have properly begun ! Then again, 
 Beethoven, how he laughed at the idea of even Haydn 
 
CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. 211 
 
 having taught him anything. He was a standing puzzle 
 to the professors, and to the end of his life used to enjoy 
 their helpless perplexities, and would chuckle over the 
 difficulties they could not explain by reference to any 
 authoritative thorough-bass book. Cases like these set 
 all ordinary method at defiance. 
 
 The difficulty of bringing musical genius under any 
 systematic educational training is even aggravated in the 
 poet's case. If the gift indeed be small enough educa- 
 tion is everything, and in such a case it will teach the 
 poet to be a more elegant rimeur of the vers de societe 
 stamp, and the musician an endless producer of what are 
 called morceaiix de salon, but one naturally does not look 
 for anything corresf)onding to the ' Samson Agonistes ' or 
 the Sonata ' Pathetique ' from such quarters. The arti- 
 ficial soil that hurries into fruit the smaller faculty may 
 not always be the most suited for the development of the 
 deeper-rooted gift. On the contrary, we suspect that the 
 civilisation that levels up the lower endowment, some- 
 times involves a corresponding liability to level down 
 the higher. Again, in a condition of society so almost 
 universally informed, if not cultivated, the recognition of 
 anything short of towering genius is hardly to be 
 expected. Who could bring himself to beHeve, for 
 example, that if three-fourths of the poets eulogized in 
 
212 CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY, 
 
 Johnson's ' Lives,' or gathered together in Chalmers' 
 Collection, were walking in the flesh amongst us now, it 
 would make any appreciable difference ! Not that any- 
 one begrudges them the niche they have earned, only 
 were it to be earned again, and upon the same work, who 
 can reasonably doubt but that an immense preponderance 
 of them would pass on to their graves unnoticed ? 
 
 Critical discernment, and discrimination between gift 
 and gift, seems to increase in difficulty with the progress 
 of civilisation. In an age when education was the 
 privilege and luxury of the few, the greater gift made its 
 mark readily, but when the advantages of culture become 
 more generally distributed, it is not so readily recognised, 
 and the man of talent — more especially the man of 
 mimetic talent — is by the great majority not to be dis 
 tinguished from the man of genius. In much of the 
 criticism issuing from even authoritative quarters, one not 
 unfrequently sees the work of the merely dexterous 
 performer passing off" for the outcome of inspiration. In 
 the interests of art it would pay well if every critic were 
 gagged who did not know the difference. Not to hint 
 for one moment that a perfect knowledge and use of 
 the instruments of his art can be dispensed with, even by 
 genius itself, we still hold that it is mainly to this edu- 
 cated rattle of the tools without the gift, that we are 
 
CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. 213 
 
 indebted for the abundance of modern poetry so called. 
 Perhaps it is one of the inevitable hostages we must pay- 
 to universal civilisation, but it is surely worth an effort 
 to keep the two products apart. The difference of value 
 is discriminated by all in the more ordinary affairs of life. 
 An illustration may be taken from an art which everyone 
 practises more or less, the art of speech. A man may 
 talk the purest rubbish in the purest English, perfect in 
 style, faultless in grammar. What is called his ' delivery ' 
 may be perfect, while the thing itself delivered is utterly 
 worthless ; dear at the breath it cost to deliver it, dearer 
 still at the effort to listen. Now this of course is mere 
 platitude. Nobody disputes it, because there is almost 
 nobody but what has to endure it now and then. But it 
 does not strike us all so forcibly that there is an analogous 
 case to this in all the other and higher arts. The analogy 
 in music, for instance, is not so commonly perceived. 
 Change the medium of expression from words to sound, 
 and some will even deny that such analogy exists. 
 Amongst so-called musicians themselves, nevertheless, 
 nothing is more common than for a man to convince 
 himself that he is giving the world music, when he is only 
 giving them grammatical noise under cover of musical 
 speech. In his sphere he is neither more nor less than 
 an idealess chatterer of correctly worded nonsense. 
 
214 CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 Many who can clearly discern this in the case of 
 speech, seem to fall short of the perception that in music 
 — which is only after all a subtler form of speech — it is 
 equally necessary to have something to say worth saying, 
 before the thing said can have any value. The analogy 
 holds good with all the arts — for ,all are but different 
 modes of conveying thought and feeUng. It is not alone 
 sufficient that a musician should know thorough-bass and 
 counterpoint, or a painter the laws of perspective and 
 chiaroscuro, — or, in short, that any artist, whatever that art 
 may be, should have a perfect knowledge of his subject, 
 and a perfect mastery of its minutest appliances. Unless 
 there goes along with these the ability to use them in the 
 conveyance of original thought, his execution may be 
 admirable, he may be the most skilful of artificers, if you 
 will, but an artist never. Lord Bacon says of studies, 
 * They teach not their own use : but that is a wisdom 
 without them and above them.' This is the part of every 
 artist's education no man can give him, and is not to be 
 confounded with technical dexterity. This last contribu- 
 tion to his efficiency and the one that lifts him out of 
 mediocrity cannot be attached by any amount of educa- 
 tional fitting and screwing. It is the gift specially con- 
 tributed by his Maker — that impalpable gift beyond the 
 reach of criticism or definition, and in the artist's case his 
 
CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. 215 
 
 greatness will mainly depend on his clear perception of 
 what that gift consists, and the devout loyalty with which 
 he is prepared to live for it. 
 
 The commonness of the extrinsical, and what may be 
 called the ingrafted talent, as compared to that which is 
 intrinsical and indigenous, is sufticient to account for the 
 greater bulk and abundance of its products. In poetry 
 we have a hundred volumes coming from this ingrafted 
 talent, for one that issues from natural gift : work which 
 may be considered the result of a cultivated taste and a 
 fair education, and in many cases accompanied with 
 great technical adroitness. Now it would be ungrateful 
 not to acknowledge that many of these volumes are most 
 interesting, and untrue to say they are perfectly devoid 
 of natural gift. The work they represent may be, and 
 sometimes is, more conscientiously creditable in a certain 
 sense than the work of genius itself, and cultivation is as 
 great a duty in their case as in the other. The command- 
 ment is as binding on the one talent as the ten, and if we 
 had no higher motive than personal satisfaction, better 
 cultivate ever so little a patch than none. Better that a 
 man should grow mignonette on a window-sill than no 
 flowers at all. But yet in the interests of art and art- 
 criticism, it is essential that the two kinds of work — for 
 the difference is one of quality as well as degree — should 
 
2i6 CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 be broadly distinguished and clearly discriminated. The 
 ingrafted faculty for poetry, sustaining itself mainly from 
 memory and the radiation of greater minds, and building 
 out of its funded educational acquirements, however 
 highly cultivated and however artistically it may clothe 
 itself with words, will never take the place or work the 
 miracles of that simpler and deeper endowment that 
 derives its nurture more directly from its own heart, and 
 bases its power upon the exercise of its own intrinsic 
 capabilities. The products of the two are as widely 
 different as their sources, and let no poet deceive himself, 
 the difference is readily recognised, and keenly appre- 
 ciated by the most unsophisticated apprehensions, and 
 pronounced upon with unerring instinct, by thousands 
 who know nothing of the wherefore of the difference, and 
 who could not for the life of them give a reason for their 
 preference. Such preference, however, let it be remem- 
 bered, is not the less deeply rooted because it is arrived 
 at by no conscious process. Nor, on the other hand, are 
 the dislikes in such cases to be pooh-poohed simply 
 because the explanation of it is not always at hand — 
 
 Je ne vous aime pas, Hylas ; 
 Je n'en saurais dire la cause. 
 Je sais seulement une chose ; 
 C'est que je ne vous aime paS — 
 
 and there is no help for it. No amount of agonised 
 
CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. 217 
 
 excogitation, no amount of the most masterly manipula- 
 tion of the implements of the art, will ever succeed in 
 giving us the tiger-like spring of the original conception — 
 the leap in the air as of an unsheathed sword — that 
 characterises the genuine inspiration. Those conceptions 
 of the poet that strike the deepest and live the longest do 
 not come to him by any long-sustained and elaborate 
 process ; but finely sensitive to Nature's ordinary 
 influences, at her slightest touch, 
 
 Across his sea of mind, 
 The thought comes streaming like a blazing ship 
 Upon a mighty wind. 
 
 The true gift does not go out of its accustomed way for 
 its effects ; does not dive to the bottom of its own con- 
 sciousness to bring up with infinite labour its brightest 
 pearls. If the thought be there, the faintest breeze will 
 give it wing. Boasting no mysterious power or process, 
 it rather takes delight in clothing things familiar and 
 palpable with ' golden exhalations of the dawn.' An 
 over- critical fondness for the manner of the poet's speech 
 may interfere with the vigour of it. The gift will not 
 stand a too artificial treatment. A native plant taken 
 from the hillside to the garden, notwithstanding the 
 greatest care — as those who have tried it can tell — is apt 
 to become enfeebled. Culture in this way becomes 
 
2i8 CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 sometimes a very questionable benefit to the poet. To 
 the man of talent, and especially to the critic, it is of the 
 last importance, but it is very possible for the poet to 
 wear his culture in such a way as to impede and enfeeble 
 him til at wears it. The educated and literary poet — 
 except when endowed with the very highest power — can 
 never sufficiently forget and shake himself free of the 
 critical element, and seldom attains that perfect, because 
 unconscious, ars celare artem, which characterises the 
 more robust and less elaborated gift. It may occur to 
 many that the poetry of Mr. Browning may serve as an 
 illustration here. But his case is not so much to the point 
 as many others. His is rather a unique example. In 
 him it is difficult to draw the line between information 
 and inspiration ; one cannot well conceive of them apart 
 Take away his culture, or even reduce it to mediocrity, 
 and you withdraw his essential element, and, in fact, put 
 his genius in a receiver and pump the air away. Without 
 elaborate and excessive culture the lever of Mr. Brown- 
 ing's genius would have found no fulcrum, and we 
 question much if in a less cultured age he would have 
 had temptation enough to have become a poet at all. 
 
 There are many and much more fitting illustrations 
 than his case affords. The very highest genius is not 
 altogether untouched by it. Who would not even gladly 
 
CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. 219 
 
 accept a less completely informed Milton, instead of the 
 one we have, bristling all over with a quickset of mytho- 
 logical briers, which ninety-nine out of a hundred of his 
 admirers prefer leaping over to walking through, and 
 which they do leap over ? Cowley again, ' the poet of 
 the brain,' as M. Taine so justly calls him, affords a less 
 important, but yet a more striking case ; in fact, he is one 
 of the best examples we have of the purely literary poet. 
 If we could take from his poetry those ingenious absurdi- 
 ties, and affected prettinesses, with which a lettered 
 overniceness so plentifully strewed it ; or if we could 
 only have kept his poetry as sweetly simple as his prose, 
 how much more readable it would have been. The 
 genius of Burns itself— and Nature never sent anything 
 out of her heart with a clearer distinctness than that — is 
 not altogether untainted in this respect. If there ever was 
 a poet born on purpose to illustrate the difference between 
 the poetry of genius and the poetry of talent, between 
 the poetry of impulse and the poetry of effort, between 
 the poetry of inspiration and the poetry of gestation ; in 
 short, between the intrinsical and extrinsical gift — surely 
 that poet was Burns. One can hardly open his works at 
 random without finding some proof of what we say. His 
 worship of the true fire, and his almost godlike revelry in 
 the use of it, may be inversely estimated by his correspond- 
 
220 CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 ing contempt of the borrowed light. His perception of 
 the infinite vahie of the one, and the pretentious hollow- 
 ness of the other, were equally clear and strong ; and in 
 making allusion to their respective claims, he was not in 
 the habit of mincing matters. 
 
 What's a' your jargon o' your schools, 
 Your Latin names for horns and stools ; 
 If honest Nature made you fools, 
 "What sairs your grammers ? 
 Ye'd better ta'en up spades and shools 
 Or knappin-hammers. 
 
 A set o' dull conceited hashes 
 Confuse their brains in college classes ! 
 They gang in stirks, and come out asses, 
 
 Plain truth to speak. 
 And syne they think to climb Parnassus 
 
 By dint o' Greek. 
 
 Gie me ae spark o' Nature's fire ! 
 
 That's a' the learning I desire. 
 
 Then though I trudge through dub and mire, 
 
 At pleugh or cart, 
 My muse, though hamely in attire, 
 
 May touch the heart. 
 
 And yet— not to detract one moment from the in- 
 finite credit he had in the little culture he so manfully 
 strove to give himself — who can read his letters without 
 perceiving that even that little made him not a little 
 pedantic sometimes ? And in his poems, too, we have 
 nov\' and then a phrase such as ' the tenebrific scene/ 
 
CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. 221 
 
 and a few others of that description, not many, but yet 
 just enough to make every lover of true poetry inwardly 
 thank God that the poet's culture went no further in that 
 direction, and that he escaped the vice of ' fine writing ' 
 by a happy ignorance of it Again, in Goethe it may be 
 questioned whether the philosopher and man of science 
 did not sometimes super-saturate the poet. Even in 
 Shakspeare himself we are perhaps more indebted to his 
 * little Latin and less Greek ' than we commonly suppose. 
 Better for us it may be, after all, that like his own 
 Holofernes, and Nathaniel in ' Love's Labour's Lost,' he 
 did not manage to steal from the great feast of languages 
 any more than the scraps. Had he been more perfectly 
 equipped, we might have had more of his learning and 
 less of his genius : the one we could have had as well 
 from anyone else, the other from no one else. 
 
 Now if the poet born runs this risk, and even suffers 
 by it, to some degree, notwithstanding the continually 
 counteracting influence of his genius, we need not per- 
 haps be so surprised to find that the smaller talent of the 
 poet made is sometimes overpowered by it, or that in a 
 highly-educated age the artificial modifications of the 
 poetic faculty should be so common. 
 
 By far the most admissible ground lying between the 
 poet born and the poet made is unquestionably occupied 
 
222 CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 by the purely critical and reflective writer of verse. Most 
 admissible because he cultivates that little isthmus which 
 may be said to stretch between the two, but which 
 properly belongs to neither. What he produces is not so 
 much poetry as a kind of sublimated prose ; just such 
 thoughts as may occur to any educated person, carefully 
 chiselled into rhythmical form. The words of such 
 writers are not winged, but are rather arrows skilfully 
 feathered. Their productions have none of the marks of 
 an overmastering inspiration. They possess their genius, 
 but are never possessed by it : poets minus the passion, 
 and consequently have none of the creative fire and lofty 
 utterance that passion alone can give. We suspect that 
 the most successful cultivators of this isthmus know 
 better than to lay any claim to being the real inheritors 
 of Apollo's laurel bough ; and yet this half-way house 
 between Poetry and Prose is often frequented by the 
 highest genius. Coleridge, with a humility that should 
 not be without its lesson — we had almost said its rebuke 
 — for a good many versifiers of the present day, designated 
 some of his poems 'rhymed prose.' But that inter- 
 mediate retreat had far more frequent visitors than he. 
 Wordsworth may be said to have rented permanent apart- 
 ments there, for, keeping out of sight in the meantime his 
 unsurpassed and unsurpassable inspirations, he certainly 
 
CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. 223 
 
 wrote more rhymed prose than any other possessor of the 
 real gift that ever lived. In fact, it is mainly to the influ- 
 ence of Wordsworth's rhymed prose that we owe the 
 existence of this half-way school ; and although it has a 
 numerous and influential following, and numbers among 
 its productions a considerable part of what such writers as 
 Clough and Mr. Matthew Arnold have produced, we are 
 by no means clear that that influence has been an 
 unmixed good. There is reason to suspect that a good 
 deal of a kind of verse the world might have done very 
 well without has been contributed by that modern modifi- 
 cation of the faculty — so wonderfully prolific since 
 Wordsworth's day — which fails to recognise with suffi- 
 cient discrimination the line between rhymed prcse and 
 poetry. In an eloquent passage in the ' Excursion ' the 
 author deplores the loss of those poets who, as he says, 
 ' go to the grave unthought of — 
 
 men endowed with highest gifts, 
 The vision and the faculty divine, 
 Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse. 
 
 Our misfortune is just the opposite of all this. In too 
 many cases we have the ' verse ' without the vision. 
 
 In attempting to trace the historical fluctuations and 
 modifications of poetry one cannot but remark the 
 continual tendency of the art to fall into artificial and 
 
224 CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 conventional forms ; a proneness to drift into positive 
 schools with accepted models, and fixed and final laws, 
 and which an extreme culture is apt to regard with some- 
 thing like superstition. It would seem that in the history 
 of art, as well as in politics or theology, there exists a 
 periodical necessity for revolution. Around it, as around 
 these, gathers a tangle of tradition that now and then 
 must be kicked off in the interests of further progress. 
 Art has been as stubborn a conservator of this sort of 
 impedimenta as theology; and just as the Church, as 
 some suppose, has suffered the letter to overgrow the 
 spirit, and now totters beneath a burden of exanimate 
 dogma, which it ought to have allowed to fall in its 
 proper time, like dead leaves that had already served 
 their purpose — in like manner art has frequently been 
 found in an almost breathless condition from the sheer 
 weight of its traditionary harness. In its history we can 
 trace where this hardening process begins, and follow its 
 gradually increasing pressure until the chain begins to 
 gall, and the soul of art begins to sicken under its ever- 
 accumulating burden. Then enters the reformer — some 
 Cromwell of art — who, by the inherent unfetterability of 
 genius, snaps the chain in two and orders the bauble 
 away. 
 
 Never was there a greater innovator, or one who 
 
CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. 225 
 
 shocked the art proprieties with greater effect than Shak- 
 speare himself ; and, dating from his time, it is interesting 
 to watch this ebb and flow, or rather this alternate heating 
 and cooling process in the history of the poetic faculty, 
 the oscillation between the claims of the natural poet 
 and the literary and partially made one. Poetry in the 
 Elizabethan era was poured out molten and alive, so 
 much so, that some of its creations — built out of airy 
 nothing — are yet to us more real than the realities of that 
 time. It was not to be expected that the poetical ther- 
 mometer could have remained long at that height, so we 
 find that it gradually cooled down and hardened, until 
 Dryden and the Restoration group brought back in some 
 measure its wonted fire and vigour ; yet only to fall back 
 again and freeze more completely than ever into the cold 
 monotony and prim formality of the poets of Queen 
 Anne. Again the blood began to warm in the veins of 
 Gray, and Cowper, and Campbell, till at last it reached 
 its modern climax in the glowing passion — not altogether 
 free from fever — of Lord Byron. The tide turned again, 
 and retreated according to its law, till it reached the 
 cultured serenity of Windermere, the placid and almost 
 oriental quietism of Wordsworth. And through his in- 
 fluence we arrive at our own time, with all its advantages 
 and disadvantages, waiting for the next deliverei', as some 
 Q 
 
226 CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 would almost imply, who do not hide their impatience 
 and restlessness under the artificiaHties of modern culture. 
 Nor, notwithstanding all the unquestionably high poetry 
 our time has yielded, is their impatience altogether with- 
 out reason. Unreasonable it might appear, if applied 
 to particular cases, but anyone paying attention to the 
 general tenor and teaching of much of the poetical criti- 
 cism now obtaining, must have observed how frequently 
 it is hinted — and more than hinted — that if we are to 
 pass for judges at all, we must give our hearty approval 
 in many instances to poetry that has little else to re- 
 commend it than a certain technical finish, and musical 
 completeness, and that even for the sake of these artistic 
 advantages, we must be prepared to overlook other 
 qualities that are clearly and unquestionably objectionable. 
 Such critics may carry a few readers with them ; but it is 
 too far on in our day to expect of the majority of men 
 that they should dance to the piping of an educated satyr, 
 even if his exquisite music should compel them to admit 
 that he has found the reed of Pan himself. We make no 
 reference to the metrical attitudinizing of the school 
 which mistakes a cultured eccentricity for genius, and 
 which seems to think it a duty to train their Pegasus, as if 
 he were a circus hack, to do nothing but tricks. Such 
 extravagances may be safely left to cure themselves. But 
 
CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. iif 
 
 leaving these out of sight, men have a right to express 
 their disappointment, when they believe they have 
 amongst them possessors of the real gift, who have allowed 
 the subject to decline in their hands until it has become 
 little better than a lay figure, upon which they are con- 
 tented to display the mere millinery of poetical thought : 
 inheritors of a real inspiration, misled by the affectation 
 of the hour, allowing themselves to be tempted into the 
 tricks of the literary costumier^ who clothes his muse 
 with * samite ' and puts a ' cithern ' in her hand, and in- 
 structs her in all the mannered mimicry of an obsolete 
 English. There is no doubt a sweet and dainty delight 
 in much of this poetry. In many instances it is a real 
 gift exercised only in a wrong direction. There is a 
 quaint prettiness about it that reminds one of an old 
 enamel, an antique Watteau-like artificial simplicity, that 
 has its peculiar charm. It is clearly a step in advance 
 of the Damons and Delias, the Chloes and Phillises, the 
 imitation shepherds and shepherdesses, and all the book- 
 rural mockeries of nature and human nature, that so 
 daintily disfigured what is commonly called the classical 
 period of English literature. It is the same in kind, 
 however ; the same misdirection of the same faculty, 
 developed under slightly modified conditions. Better 
 bred if you choose, and more elaborately cultured, but 
 
 Q2 
 
228 CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 nearly identical. Time has changed the actors and the 
 mise en sdne, but the thing produced is just a revival of 
 the old farce. Such poetry will always have its admirers 
 of a kind, just as there are still readers living who can 
 convince themselves they find nature and reality in the 
 Pastorals of Pope, or the amatory ditties of Shenstone 
 and others of his time. We do not at all quarrel with 
 the fact ; only let no critic attempt to foist upon us such 
 things, as if they belonged to the order of that poetry 
 which holds the mirror up to nature, when they do not 
 even hold it up to art in any dignified sense so much as 
 to artifice. 
 
 The ' classic period of English literature,' how easy to 
 expand the title — and the fatal sarcasm that time will 
 clothe it in — to a whole chapter on the influence of sup- 
 posed culture on the poetic faculty. Showing, as it might 
 be made to show, the easiness of writing the most polished 
 verse and the difficulty of writing even the roughest of 
 true poetry. How easy to illustrate from much of the 
 verse called classic that inveterate tendency of art to run 
 into mere drapery, to the almost burial and oblivion of 
 the thing draped. And in our time the danger is immi- 
 nent In our anxiety * to paint the outward wall so costly 
 gay,* the soul of the thing itself seems to be escaping us. 
 With all deference to one or two great poetical names 
 
CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. 229" 
 
 amongst us, we cannot help thinking that seldom has a 
 time stood more in need than the present of the advent 
 of a soul great enough to be simple, and bringing with it 
 the sacred fire that burns convention to a cinder. 
 
 It is not to be disguised that many readers of present- 
 day poetry would gladly hail a reversion in favour of 
 
 The few strong instincts, and the few plain rules, 
 
 that Wordsworth spoke of. They complain, and not 
 altogether without reason, that too much of what is 
 offered for their delectation wants the freshness and 
 fragrance of Nature, nor are they content, just yet, to 
 accept, in the place of Nature's growths, the most care- 
 fully cultivated of exotics. Perfect of its kind as much 
 of our later poetry may be, its perfection is too studied 
 and finically correct to give general or abiding satisfac- 
 tion, and carries too plainly upon it the marks of the 
 supersubtle manipulation of the modern litterateur. 
 These trim gardens of thought are pleasant enough in 
 their way, but in every healthy estimation they will never 
 be preferred — nay, nor compared — to those unbroken 
 acres of wilderness and wild flowers where the indigenous 
 forces of Nature are at work, and God only is the 
 gardener. 
 
 One of the commonest sources of this over-mannered 
 
230 CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 feebleness in modern poetry, is directly attributable to an 
 overstrained and artificial culture of what has been called 
 word-music — a literary aifectation which in a great 
 measure sacrifices intelligibility to mere euphony, and 
 which is not only indulged in by many modern poets, 
 but not uncommonly praised by modern critics. One of 
 the most enthusiastic of Mr. Tennyson's commentators, 
 and no mean critic — waxing eloquent over the word- 
 music of one of the laureate's early and minor poems, 
 tells us that the poem under examination * does not mean 
 much' (we think differently) — but, instead of stopping 
 short with this confession, he goes on in his rapture to 
 declare, that in spite of its not meaning much, it is perfect, 
 and * that it would not matter if it meant nothing ' ! * 
 Now, were we for one moment to compare this worshipper 
 of word-music to the old lady who talked of* that blessed 
 word Mesopotamia,' he would probably think we were 
 poking fun at him. But what does such criticism really 
 amount to, if it does not plainly confess, that meaning in 
 poetry may with impunity be sacrificed to music, that 
 intelligibility, force, perspicuity, is of little or no import- 
 ance, so long as by a euphonious arrangement of vowel 
 sounds, or a tinkling tintinabulation of consonants, you 
 
 » * Study of Tennyson,' by Tainish, p. 40. 
 
CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. 231 
 
 can produce something, that at all events keeps its pro- 
 mise to the ear, if it break it to the sense ? 
 
 The almost universal cultivation of music, and the 
 rapidly increasing appreciation of the highest kinds of it, 
 are certainly features upon which the age may be fairly 
 congratulated, and it is not to be supposed that such a 
 wonderful development of the art could possibly fail to 
 make its mark upon contemporary poetry. When the 
 poetry of the Victorian era has receded far enough in 
 time to admit of a final and unbiassed summing-up, we 
 make no question but that one of its most conspicuous 
 excellences will be found to be its musicalness. The 
 exquisite melody alone of Mr. Tennyson is more than 
 sufficient to consecrate a muse far less profound than his. 
 Beyond doubt the most perfect passages in poetry have 
 always been the most musical, but to say that on that 
 account they can dispense with meaning, or even con- 
 sider it a thing of minor importance, would be ridiculous. 
 On the contrary, one has only to take to pieces any of 
 those exquisite passages which, by reason of their perfec- 
 tion, have become permanently embedded and inter- 
 woven with the very texture of our language, 'those 
 jewels five-words long,' as Mr. Tennyson calls them — 
 
 That on the stretched forefinger of all time 
 Sparkle for ever — 
 
232 CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 in order to come to a very different conclusion. Take any 
 such passage and examine it minutely, and you will find 
 that its perfection consists of a subde interfusion of sound 
 and sense, and a perfect equipoise of meaning and melody, 
 that sacrifices not so much as a hair on either side. 
 
 One cannot but regard the culture of sound for poetical 
 purposes — and, as far as that goes, for prose as well — as 
 of the highest consequence. To a certain extent we are 
 all victims, consciously or unconsciously, of the Mesopo- 
 tamian fallacy, whether we care to admit it or not. That 
 mere noise, mere colour, mere form, mere motion, alto- 
 gether apart from any intellectual association or moral 
 significance, do of themselves affect us, is not to be 
 denied, and need not be laughed at. And, that euphonious 
 sound gives wings to thought as nothing else does, whether 
 we can explain it or not, is a simple fact that transcends 
 the region of argument. It has the power even of endow- 
 ing very commonplace thought with a kind of fictitious 
 immortality. In all languages some of the weakest and 
 most childish of proverbs have held their place for ages 
 by reason only of the musical mould in which they have 
 been cast. Many of them owe their continued existence 
 to a mere trick of sound, some catching rhyme, or eupho- 
 nious alliteration, some silvery see-saw of sibilants, or, 
 perhaps most of all, to a dexterously balanced distribu- 
 
CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. 233 
 
 tion and modulation of vowel sounds. In the world of 
 art the end justifies everything, and any limitation as 
 to means is not for a moment to be considered. We do 
 not trouble ourselves to enquire too minutely whether or 
 not Turner produced those wonderful effects of surging 
 sea by a twirl of his thumb-nail. For us it is sufficient 
 that the effect is there. The water is alive, and Genius 
 is justified of her children. No exercise of faculty can be 
 too mean or too minute as long as it is controlled by the 
 inspiration, and is not permitted to sink into the region 
 of mere mechanism. 
 
 The art of good writing, either in prose or poetry, was 
 defined by Shenstone as consisting of 'spontaneous ' 
 thought and laboured expression,' and the definition has 
 a certain scope that gives it a fitness for all the other 
 arts. Elaboration can hardly be overdone as long as the 
 thought which sustains and directs it is the vraifeu, and 
 not the ignis fatuus of a mistaken ambition. The capacity, 
 in fact, for minute refinement in detail, and infinite loving 
 labour, is an instinct of all truly artistic genius. But it 
 should not be forgotten that art in these matters of detail, 
 except in the most competent hands, is apt to degenerate 
 into artifice, until the means and expedients called in for 
 the purpose of enforcing thought, are found only to hamper 
 and enfeeble it. To attempt the finish of Rembrandt one 
 
234 CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 must have his insight as well. In such a case music 
 degenerates into mere ^ Musikmacherei,^ and poetry 
 becomes the mechanical trick of the mere versemaker, 
 the work not of the artist, but rather of the weak artificer, 
 whose pottering demon tempts him on to 
 
 Add and alter many times 
 Till all is ripe and rotten. 
 
 Given the strong poetical thought, and we question 
 much whether or not it is possible to give it an embodi- 
 ment that shall be too musical ; but when critics can show 
 such fondness for the vehicle of poetical thought rather 
 than the thing itself, as shall lead them to avow that if 
 language be only musical enough it does not matter if it 
 mean nothing, it is surely time to enter a protest, if poetry 
 has not to sink into an empty jingle, and become to us 
 the trick of one that hath a pleasant voice, a?zd can play well 
 on an instrument. 
 
 The abuse of the music-worshippers in poetry is 
 capable of illustration from an exactly diverse quarter. 
 Wagner and his school are endeavouring to enforce a 
 theory, which, as it seems to us, is rooted in an error on 
 the exactly opposite side. By an attempt to get out of 
 music an amount of dramatic meaning, which from the 
 very nature of music, and the character of its art imple- 
 
CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. 235 
 
 ments, it cannot be made to render up, they are making 
 the same mistake — on the other side — with those who 
 attempt to load poetry with more. music than the nature 
 of articulate language will artistically admit of. To claim 
 anything like originality for Wagner's theory is almost 
 puerile. It is as old as the phenomenon of sound, or the 
 sense of hearing j a thesis universally received, only 
 pushed to an unreasonable and untenable extreme. No 
 one ever doubted that music and poetry possessed much 
 in common, and must of necessity play into each other's 
 hands. Nevertheless, the products of each art must stand 
 or fall alone. Beethoven's music to * Egmont,' or Men- 
 delssohn's to ' A Midsummer Night's Dream,' or Schu- 
 mann's to * Manfred,' have distinctive merits of their own, 
 altogether independent of the names Goethe, or Shak- 
 speare, or Byron. 
 
 No doubt the association and conjunction of exquisite 
 words with exquisite music is an encounter worthy of the 
 gods themselves, and in every case to be desired. iVnd 
 unfortunately it is not to be denied that only too many 
 of our libretti^ even to this day, go to prove the justice of 
 Beaumarchais' sarcasm in the ' Barber of Seville,' ' Ce qui 
 ne vaut pas la peine d'etre dit, on le chante.' But had 
 these libretti been perfect, would the music have been 
 other than it is ? No ; genius by itself must justify itself. 
 
236 CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. 
 
 or nothing. No possible poverty of sound-accompani- 
 ment could ever successfully veil the grandeur of Shak- 
 speare's genius, just as no conceivable triviality of word- 
 accompaniment could alter by a cubit the stature of 
 Beethoven's soul. Bad music just remains bad music, 
 and the bray of the beast is not to be concealed, clothe 
 it as you will in the bravest lion's skin of words. On the 
 other hand, the exploded divinities of poetry — ^your 
 Beatties, Klopstocks, Blackmores, et hoc, would in all 
 likelihood continue to hug the ground if their words were 
 yoked to the song of the morning stars. 
 
 The two arts are not only to be much better judged 
 apart, but they can be drawn so near as to destroy and 
 neutralise the special perfection that distinctively belongs 
 to each. They must not move on the same line, but 
 rather glide forward on imperceptible parallels, that, by 
 the nature of the case, can never touch. To take an 
 illustration from music itself; it is not the similarity but 
 the difiference between a note and its minor third that 
 makes their harmony so sweetly plaintive and pathetic. 
 You have only to draw them closer together by a very 
 few vibrations in order to set your teeth on edge. And 
 so 
 
 If music and sweet poetry agree 
 
 As they must needs, the sister and the brother, 
 
CULTURE AND MODERN POETRY. lyj 
 
 let the very fact of their family connection forbid the 
 banns of a closer alliance. Except by a violation of 
 their nature they can never become one flesh, or one art, 
 in the Wagnerian sense. Where such an alliance has 
 been attempted, the offspring has been some beautifully 
 brainless poetry on the one side, and on the other, music, 
 of which a great part, at least, is unintelligible even 
 amongst musical people. Whether the nonsense or the 
 noise of to-day will ever become, in either case, the 
 wisdom or the music of the future, is a question we are 
 quite contented to let the future settle for itself. But 
 unless these good people — so seemingly essential to 
 every age — who display such an indecent haste in the 
 matter .of the Millennium, are much nearer their final 
 triumph than we have any sober means of computing, 
 we suspect that our grandchildren will probably find with 
 us, that a good deal more than sufficient unto the day 
 are the impossible theories thereof. 
 
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