POETRY AND PROSE POETRY AND PROSE BEING Essays on Modern English Poetry BY ADOLPHUS ALFRED JACK NEW YORK E. P. DUTTON AND CO. 1912 TO L. J. 1 Non enim possumus omnia per nos agere. 257371 PREFACE THIS little book is an attempt to make a little clearer what every one feels about poetry. It is an attempt pursued in a number of essays upon themes so familiar that in writing upon them I have the advantage of touching directly upon the actual poetical experience of almost every reader. There is the further personal advantage that in dealing with a body of poetry so often analysed, the liability to individual caprice is, at least in part, eliminated. But there is one drawback. The familiarity of the subjects increases the difficulty, always present to the modern critical writer, of adequate acknowledgment. Where I am conscious of specific obligations to critical literature I have of course acknowledged them, but there remains a general indebtedness to all I have read. I should add in particular that I should pro- bably not have ventured to write on Meredith's poetry at all but for the aid of Mr. Trevelyan's wonderfully clear Introduction ; that I have also found George Meredith, by M. Sturge Henderson, with the poetical I vii viii POETRY AND PROSE chapters by Mr. Basil de Selincourt, very helpful ; and that though I had thought for many years about Wordsworth's poetry, Professor Raleigh's Study caused me to reconsider my method of approach. The writings that of recent years have done most to control my critical attitude are those which Mr. Bradley has collected in his Oxford Lectures on Poetry. CONTENTS PAGE POETRY : A NOTE, i GRAY (SOCIAL OR PROSE POETRY), ... 23 BURNS (NATURAL OR SPONTANEOUS POETRY), . . 52 WORDSWORTH (BASIC OR ELEMENTAL POETRY), . 86 BYRON (ORATORICAL POETRY), . . . .122 THE POETRY OF THE INTELLECT- EMERSON THE POET AS TEACHER, . . 146 ARNOLD CRITICAL POETRY, . . . .177 MEREDITH INTELLECTUAL POETRY, . . 2OI EMERSON'S DOCTRINE OF THE INFINITE, 244 POETRY: A NOTE To distinguish Poetry from Prose it is not sufficient to say that the one is rhythmical expression, the other expression without rhythm. One knows quite well that it is not. Turn a leader from a daily newspaper into octosyllabics and it is still prose ; we can recognise passages in Homer as poetry even when we have to read them in the beautiful prose of Mr. Lang. Prose and Poetry are the forms man's expression takes according to his state of mind at the moment of utterance, Prose is the normal language of man ; Poetry is his normal language, too ? when he is in an ; \ abnormal state.) Prose and Poetry, equally normally and naturally, give expression to two different sides of man's being. A beast cannot speak in prose ; that is left to mortal man. It is, however, the immortal in him that speaks in poetry. In poetry he voices the soul and is a part of the spirit that breathes in everything. Prose is the language of cool reason, Poetry that of ^ecstasy. It follows that Prose is the language of speech, normal, without rhythm, balanced, like a high- way road, a straight line, a stick, the sentences coming to an end and joining into one another imperceptibly $ and that Poetry is the language of song, at least of rhythm for utterance, when excited, takes to itself a 2 POETRY AND PROSE rhythmic quality. 1 Poetry is what man utters when he loses his balance, his normality the high and low notes of emotion. Prose is an expression of the intellect ; Poetry the language of feeling. Prose addresses itself to an audience ; Poetry utters what she feels ' without thought of a listener.' If Prose is humanity talking, Poetry is humanity * overheard. ' 2 The best prose conveys to us what is already in the 1 As, for example, ' Generation after generation takes to itself the Form of a Body; and forth-issuing from Cimmerian Night, on Heaven's Mission APPEARS. What Force and Fire is in each he expends : one grinding in the mill of Industry ; one hunter-like climbing the giddy Alpine heights of Science ; one madly dashed in pieces on the rocks of Strife, in war with his fellow : and then the Heaven-sent is recalled ; his earthly Vesture falls away, and soon even to Sense becomes a vanished Shadow. Thus, like some wild- flaming, wild-thundering train of Heaven's Artillery, does this mysterious MANKIND thunder and flame, in long-drawn, quick- succeeding grandeur, through the unknown Deep. Thus, like a God-created, fire-breathing Spirit-host, we emerge from the Inane ; haste stormfully across the astonished Earth ; then plunge again into the Inane. Earth's mountains are levelled, and her seas filled up, in our passage : can the Earth, which is but dead and a vision, resist Spirits which have reality and are alive?' Sartor Resartus (1838), p. 276. 2 See Mill's Thoughts o?i Poetry and its Varieties (Dissertations and Discussions, vol. i.). The statement that poetry, is '07/^rheard' is Mill's, and what is here said of Prose he had formerly said of Eloquence. But as he is distinguishing not between Poetry and Prose but between Poetry and Eloquence, to avoid confusion I do not quote him here. His actual words will be found on page 137. The process of Mill's essay is as follows : Denying as of course that the essence of poetry is to be found in metre, he goes on to distinguish shortly between poetry and matter of fact or science (terms he prefers to prose), ' the object of poetry ' being ' confessedly to act upon the emotions.' But this also is the object of the novelist and orator. He therefore goes on to distinguish between the poet and the novelist, and enters at length upon the distinction between eloquence and poetry a distinction most beautifully carried out by POETRY : A NOTE 3 brain of the writer. The best poetry reveals something to the poet himself. 1 Looking at his verses he does not know how that expression came there, or why Othello in his trouble, when the fancied conduct of Desdemona had ruined his world for him, said that it had been better had the Heavens ' Given to captivity me and my utmost hopes.' Every man is a poet in his youth, a politician or an essayist in middle age. Prose lives in an atmosphere of completion ; Poetry dallies with the beginnings and ends of things. She is all for the morning and the twilight, hope and sorrow, desire and defeat, what is to be and what has been. /Prose is Is, the ever-present fact, to-day ;' Poetry, in love with yesterday and to-morrow, flies to the cool night and away from noon to the cool night with its silences and the riddle of the unnumbered stars. ''Prose deals with things as they are school, marriage, wills, dress, law, civilisation, order and degree. Poetry is occupied with the bases of these birth, love and death, human passions, men. reference to music and painting. This constitutes the first part, thirteen pages, from which no one would wish to dissent. The second part of the essay is chiefly occupied with the discussion of the essence of poetic natures, and of the difference 'between the poetry of a poet, and the poetry of a cultivated but not naturally poetic mind.' The distinction is clearly drawn, but for the purposes of a detailed discussion too generally and definitely, nor do I think his instances happy. For his distinction between description and descriptive poetry see page 20. This also occurs in the first part, a series of now generally accepted truths of which Mill has the credit, as far as I know, of being the first systematic enunciator. 1 Cp. Mr. A. C. Bradley, Oxford Lectures on Poetry. ' The specific way of imagination is not to clothe in imagery consciously held ideas ; it is to produce half-consciously a matter from which, when produced, the reader may, if he chooses, extract ideas.' 4 POETRY AND PROSE Is this enough to say about Poetry ? The danger is that it is too much to say of Poetry as a whole, and that not all of it will apply to all the different kinds of Poetry ; but I have set it down as it is, because I believe that most of it does apply. However, it is not possible to speak much more definitely of Poetry unless one has in view some definite variety. All the chief sayings about Poetry have been couched in very general terms. There is, for example, Bacon's pro- found saying : Poetry ' was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shews of things to the desires of the mind ; whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things.' 1 This is perhaps made a little clearer in Hazlitt's para- 1 'The use of this Feigned History hath been to give some shadow of satisfaction to the mind of man in those points wherein the nature of things doth deny it ; the world being in proportion inferior to the soul ; by reason whereof there is agreeable to the spirit of man a more ample greatness, a more exact goodness, and a more absolute variety, than can be found in the nature of things. Therefore, because the acts or events of true history have not that magnitude which satisfieth the mind of man, poesy feigneth acts and events greater and more heroical ; because true history propoundeth the successes and issues of actions not so agreeable to the merits of virtue and vice, therefore poesy feigns them more just in retribu- tion, and more according to revealed providence ; because true history representeth actions and events more ordinary and less interchanged, therefore poesy endueth them with more rareness, and more unexpected and alternative variations. So as it appeareth that poesy serveth and conferreth to magnanimity, morality, and to delectation. And therefore it was ever thought to have some participation of divineness, because it doth raise and erect the mind, by submitting the shews of things to the desires of the mind ; whereas reason doth buckle and bow the mind unto the nature of things.' Bacon, 'Advancement of Learning, the Second Book/ Works of Francis Bacon, Spedding, vol. iii. p. 343. POETRY : A NOTE 5 phrase : ^Poetry, according to Lord Bacon, has something divine in it, because it raises the mind and hurries it into sublimity, by conforming the shows of things to the desires of the soul, instead of subjecting the soul to external things, as reason and history do.' And Emerson with his usual succinctness puts it shortly : * The sensual man conforms thoughts to things ; the poet conforms things to his thoughts ' ; or, to use the language employed in this essay, /Poetry subjects external things to the soul, instead of subject- ing the soul, as Prose does, to external things, /in a word, the use of the poetical imagination communicates an ideal pleasure, a pleasure derived ultimately from the realisation by the soul of its own freedom in regard to the world, This, if the greatest, is also a general doctrine of Poetry the doctrine, if we may call it so, of the trans- cendence of the infinite. Equally general is Whitman's doctrine of a pervading infinity. 'The land and sea, the animals, fishes, and birds, the sky of heaven and the orbs, the forests, mountains, and rivers, are not small themes ; but folks expect of the poet to indicate more than the beauty and dignity which always attach to dumb real objects, they expect him to indicate the path between reality and their souls. Men and women perceive the beauty well enough probably as well as he. . . . Outdoor people can never be assisted by poets to perceive : some may, but they never can. The poetic quality is not marshalled in rhyme or uniformity, or abstract addresses to things, nor in melancholy complaints or good precepts, but is the life of these and much else, and is in the soul.' /what Whitman says here is not that the soul, by virtue of 6 POETRY AND PROSE its own infinity, transcends experience, but that in all experience it recognises an infinity akin to its own ; and this too is one of the most profound things that has been said about poetry. Yet all these definitions are general definitions, and it will be seen that, like all general definitions of poetry, they concern the essence, as also that, like all general definitions, they go some way to justify Poe's famous generalisation about long poems : a long poem, to express his theory in sensible terms, not being a long poem at all, but merely a collection of short poems with something intervening, something that is generally not poetry, but also generally not pure prose ; some- thing of a middle nature which at once preserves and modulates the effect of the more intense passages. 1 Yet restricting ourselves to poetry that is essentially and obviously poetry, poetry that could be recognised as such immediately by every one restricting ourselves, that is, to poetical passages, it is obvious that these may differ very widely in their nature, and that there are in fact several kinds of poetry, ^here is, in the 1 On this head Mr. Bradley says: 'Naturally, in any poem not quite short, there must be many variations and grades of poetic intensity ; but to represent the differences of these numerous grades as a simple antithesis between pure poetry and mere prose is like saying that, because the eyes are the most expressive part of the face, the rest of the face expresses nothing. To hold, again, that this variation of intensity is a defect is like holding that a face would be more beautiful if it were all eyes, a picture better if the illumination were equally intense all over it, a symphony better if it consisted of one movement, and if that were all crisis^ And to speak as if a small poem could do all that a long one does, and do it much more completely, is to speak as though a humming-bird could have the same kind of beauty as an eagle, the rainbow in a fountain produce the same effect as the rainbow in the sky, or a moorland stream thunder like Niagara. A long poem, as we have POETRY : A NOTE 7 first place, the poetry of maturity, and opposed to it, or at least alien from it, there is young man's poetry. Of the poetry of maturity most of what has been said above will be found to be true ; and by the poetry of maturity I mean quintessential poetry, such poetry as is to be found especially in the greatest of Words- worth's short poems, and constantly in Shakespeare's later work. To distinguish such poetry from prose would be easy. One might say that while prose explains things from the outside, this poetry of maturity is concerned immediately with the feeling itself and is occupied solely in expressing the feeling as felt. There is a directness, an immediacy of connection between the felt emotion and the expression of that emotion a connection as close as that between a blow inflicted on the chest and the answering sound of the blow. Some experience comes to the poet and he reverberates with a sympathetic cry. He brings you near to life, not by criticising life but by replying to life. Without ex- planation or apology, allowing no time for reflection, such poetry places the quivering heart of man on the seen, requires imaginative powers superfluous in a short one ; and it would be easy to show that it admits of strictly poetic effects of the highest value which the mere brevity of a short one excludes.' This is to say, that of a long poem such as Wordsworth's Prelude, for example, Bacon's remark quoted above would be true in a wider sense than it could be true of a short poem. Nevertheless there are hosts of passages in the Prelude to which Bacon's remark could not be applied. It is better, therefore, for the purposes of clarity not to include long poems in our survey ; not to include them, and yet not altogether to exclude them ; this note serving sufficiently, for the present, to connect them with the discussion. 8 POETRY AND PROSE table. So that in those sudden bursts of volcanic speech you really get behind language altogether. You have expressed what has never been expressed, what could never have been expressed except by poetry. You seem to see the pulse of the machine. The most concrete instance of the method of this kind of poetry is the short poem Wordsworth wrote on the death of Lucy. These Lucy poems, it is thought, are the record of a real experience, and it is supposed that Wordsworth in youth entertained the idea of ultimately marrying a cottage girl who had been brought up among the influences of Nature, and whose simplicity and gaiety of life had charmed his fancy. In good time she was to be educated so as to fit her for a place in the poet's social world, and in good time she was to be old enough to be his wife. But while the poet was dreaming of the future, the present slipped into the past, and the bright child was no more. The news dumfounded him. He had not connected with this young girl, the type of unfolding life, breathing gently and as by natural law, the sombre idea of death. He should have done so, since death comes to all and often unexpectedly, but he had not done so. She seemed as all young girls seem, and even espe- cially for a young girl, the antithesis of death. But now she is dead, and Wordsworth, in his first realisa- tion of the fact, can realise nothing more. He does not ask, as Shelley asks, of the nature of death. The sole thing he realises, as it is the sole thing we all realise when we first hear of the death of a beloved, is that she is no longer alive. Even of her life past he ceases to think in that stunned moment ; her activity has become inactivity, and in the stupid brain of the POETRY : A NOTE 9 bereaved the one sentence chases itself eternally she is dead : ' A slumber did my spirit seal ; I had no human fears : She seemed a thing that could not feel The touch of earthly years. No motion has she now, no force ; She neither hears nor sees ; Rolled round in earth's diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees.' In those few lines two feelings are expressed perfectly, the feeling of vitality and the feeling of the inanimate, and those two feelings alone are expressed. The mind has not' reflected upon its feeling, indeed, it has not moved. We are brought immediately in contact with the actual sensation. It is as if a man were to say, * I am cold.' This closeness of the expression to the predominant sensation of the heart is well instanced by a hundred surprising bursts in Shakespeare, lightning glimpses of the sources of emotion, laying bare, as by a flash, the workings within. Sometimes it is done by a mere ' repartee ': * So young, my lord, and true,' and sometimes by a sufficing answer, as where in Cymbeline Imogen in tender rebuke says to her hus- band ':- ' Why did you throw your wedded lady from you ? Think that you are upon a rock ; and now Throw me again.' And Posthumus answers : ' Hang there like fruit, my soul, Till the tree die!' 1 1 These two instances are Tennyson's. I have slightly condensed his language. Life> vol ii. p. 290. io POETRY AND PROSE So close indeed is this to the emotion that to read it is like seeing a gesture. It is merely the translation into words of an eternal embrace. In such ways, then, and very commonly, Shake- speare makes his surprising effects, but almost equally commonly he startles us by his feelings aloud, getting the thing expressed while it is still inchoate, the ex- pression also sharing an inchoate character. Thus when Macbeth hears of his wife's death there is his startled comment ' She should have died hereafter,' an expression that has very much troubled literal critics in search for a precise meaning. The truth is, there is no precise meaning. The mind of man in its agony has become articulate. Indeed this is too much to say, for so near is the language to the feeling that it is hardly articulate language. It seems to occupy a middle place between the emotion and these statements or conclusions which we usually employ to express it. A reluctancy to accept the finality of doom, there is nothing more : merely the movements of the human spirit, the deep, shadowy movements, caught and expressed. Sometimes Shakespeare brings us into contact with the actual emotion by expressing, very fully, intangible emotions. There is the famous instance of Othello's reunion, after the perils of the voyage, with Desde- mona at Cyprus : ' If it were now to die, 'Twere now to be most happy ; for, I fear, My soul hath her content so absolute, That not another comfort like to this Succeeds in unknown fate.' POETRY: A NOTE n We are all familiar with those sudden visitations of apprehension in moments of great happiness, but at such moments such apprehensions are never fully voiced. We are not sufficiently near to our own emotions fully to voice them to follow, so to speak, along their track. We are conscious of a vague move- ment of apprehension within, but we cannot feel it distinguishably enough to translate it. All we say is ' I am frightened.' Sometimes so closely does Shakespeare follow a course of thought that he startles you by continuing to express it when, by all the rules of morality, the hero ought to be saying something else. Othello has committed what he considers the judicial murder of Desdemona. Her vices and his virtue, in his estima- tion, alike called for this. Yet so great is her love for him that, with her dying breath, she absolves him and takes her death upon herself. This, with an ordinary playwright, would remove the scales from Othello's eyes. With Shakespeare nothing of the kind happens. Othello is aware that her words, heard by Emilia, have exculpated him, and he refers to them to establish his freedom from the law. Then with magnificent mag- nanimity, once his innocence is legally established, he avows, with a superhuman pride, that the fatal, if necessary, act was his. But the expressions he uses in his avowal have naturally puzzled many. He speaks of Desdemona as if her noble lie were only the crown of a life of deception. The psychology, in short, is so literal, so instinctively profound, that we do not at first realise its truth. But certain it is that it is accurate ; that Shakespeare, when he was writing this passage, was no longer Shakespeare but Othello himself, so 12 POETRY AND PROSE intimately and instinctively does he follow his feeling. 1 A man, once he has convinced himself of the essential badness of another, not only believes that there must be a bad motive for everything he does, but can see nothing in the act but the vice. A man I hate steals a loaf to succour a starving child ; I am the loudest in crying * Thief! ' Of such consequence is the set of the mind. When Othello says * She 's, like a liar, gone to burning hell,' I know I am not reading a play but, on the contrary, the book of life. This is a book, however, which is familiar only to the mature poet, and glimpses of this kind into it are seldom afforded by young poets, and never by poets who are characteristically young. On the contrary, while the characteristic of this kind of mature poetry is its concentration, or rather its essentialness, for it comes straight from the immediate sensation without any aid from reflection, the characteristic of young man's poetry is its diffuseness. The difference between these two kinds of poetry is indeed great. If one is the poetry that is of the sea itself, and its sound like that of a full wave coming up Here is the passage : 1 EMIL. O, who hath done this deed ? DBS. Nobody ; I myself ; Farewell : Commend me to my kind lord ; O, farewell ! [Dies. OTH. Why, how should she be murder'd ? EMIL. Alas! who knows? OTH. You heard her say herself, it was not I. EMIL. She said so ; I must needs report the truth. OTH. She 's, like a liar, gone to burning hell ; 'Twas I that kill'd her.' POETRY : A NOTE 13 with force on a rock, the other is the poetry that deals with the ripples, the many movements made by the body beneath. Both those kinds of poetry, of course, are emotional, but the feeling displays itself differently. In the one case all is in obedience to the deeply felt emotion, in the other the expression is less immediately controlled by it, plays round it, as it were ; nor is the emotion itself in any degree as deep. The young poet feels, but he expatiates on his feeling ; he doesn't express it directly. Young man's poetry is the rhap- sody of appreciation. The young poet is more alive than other young men, though all young men are more alive than mature men, to the beauty and charm of colour, glory of sight, delight of scent which is in the world ; as also he is more alive to the delicious ecstasies of newly awakened feeling. The agility of his own mind is a never-failing joy to the young poet. The exercise of 'all intelligences fair,' the surprising and often intricate beauties of romantic situations these are his delights. He has the power, and he enjoys using the power, of drawing out from situations, even from phrases (La Belle Dame Sans Merci), all their store of beauty and wonder. The young poet loves to linger, where he finds a poetical situation to develop it to its utmost, even to tease it. He has long-drawn-out reveries upon the details of any interesting emotion. A man loses his father. Yes, him in whose likeness he was made, from whom he learnt his first lessons, who first told him that all things were won by applica- tion, who in his day fought many battles, whose cellars contained some flasks of the true Falernian, whose dog used to accompany him in all his walks up the mountain- side, whose failing steps the young poet himself guided, 14 POETRY AND PROSE whose hair never grew entirely white, and who now rests where the long grass waves 'The green, green grass of Traquair Kirkyard.' The young poet ex- patiates ; suggest a theme and he will descant on it continuously. A mature poet tells you an old man dies 'and sleeps forgotten in his quiet grave.' The most evident instances of young man's poetry are to be found in Keats, and in the early dramatic poems of Shakespeare. Such a play as The Two Gentle- men of Verona is full of them. Two old men cannot speak of a boy's going a-voyaging without a poetical excursion on travel : ' ANTONIO. Tell me, Panthino, what sad talk was that, Wherewith my brother held you in the cloister ? PANTHINO. 'Twas of his nephew Proteus, your son. ANTONIO. Why, what of him ? PANTHINO. He wonder'd that your lordship Would suffer him to spend his youth at home ; While other men, of slender reputation, Put forth their sons to seek preferment out : Some, to the wars, to try their fortune there ; Some, to discover islands far away ; Some, to the studious universities.' And no sooner have they determined that Proteus is to journey too, than Proteus delays to sing : ' Thus have I shunn'd the fire, for fear of burning ; And drench'd me in the sea, where I am drown'd : I fear'd to shew my father Julia's letter, Lest he should take exceptions to my love ; And with the vantage of mine own excuse Hath he excepted most against my love. O, how this spring of love resembleth The uncertain glory of an April day ; Which now shews all the beauty of the sun, And by and by a cloud takes all away ! ' POETRY: A NOTE 15 When Lucetta speaks words of moderation to Julia, Julia has this pretty run over : ' LUCETTA. I do not seek to quench your love's hot fire ; But qualify the fire's extreme rage, Lest it should burn above the bounds of reason. JULIA. The more thou dam'st it up, the more it burns ; The current, that with gentle murmur glides, Thou know'st, being stopp'd, impatiently doth rage ; But, when his fair course is not hindered, He makes sweet music with th' enamel'd stones, Giving a gentle kiss to every sedge He overtaketh in his pilgrimage ; And so by many winding nooks he strays, With willing sport to the wild ocean.' Again Proteus, the methodical traitor, gives advice to the foolish Thurio how to win Silvia. He begins methodically enough : ' But you, Sir Thurio, are not sharp enough ; You must lay lime, to tangle her desires By wailful sonnets, whose composed rhymes, Should be full fraught with serviceable vows. . . . Say, that upon the altar of her beauty You sacrifice your tears, your sighs, your heart : Write till your ink be dry ; and with your tears Moist it again ; and frame some feeling line, That may discover such integrity : For Orpheus' lute was strung with poet's sinews ; Whose golden touch could soften steel and stones, Make tigers tame, and huge leviathans Forsake unsounded deeps to dance on sands.' Surely here the poet is writing a very different kind of poetry from that of the mature poet. This is not feeling straight from the heart, but rather feeling played with, felt over, as some delicious morsel is felt over by the tongue. Nor is this enough to say. The vision of the leviathans has carried the imagination altogether away from the original subject of emotion, carried it away to fairy shores. All through this play what 16 POETRY AND PROSE Shakespeare is doing is poetising, expatiating on hints, opportunities, developing the melody. Of the same kind is the poetry of Richard II. : it is all sung to a complaining lute. Sometimes too in his later plays Shakespeare has returns of this youthful habit, as when the Queen in Hamlet, announcing Ophelia's death, sings her song of willow : 1 There is a willow grows aslant a brook, That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.' What could be more of a gratuitous excursion than this, more unnatural, more undramatic ; but also, if we are to use the word with any breadth of meaning at all, more poetical ? Sometimes in his maturity, even when he is most serious, Shakespeare allows his fancy to linger on an idea ; it is solemn play, but it is play, as in the famous ' Never, lago. Like to the Pontic Sea, Whose icy current and compulsive course Ne'er keeps retiring ebb, but keeps due on To the Propontic, and the Hellespont j Even so my bloody thoughts.' Indeed we may say that of all poets Shakespeare, on account of his expansive imagination, is most prone, even in maturity, to illustration. But here the whole passage, though by no means a direct expression of emotion, may be said to be in obedience to the deeply felt emotion behind. 1 Such passages remind us that 1 Similarly the sudden outburst of the expansive Biron at the close of Love's Labour's Lost is an instance of quintessential poetry obtruding amidst young man's work. ' To move wild laughter in the throat of death ? It cannot be ; it is impossible. Mirth cannot move a soul in agony.' POETRY: A NOTE 17 between young man's poetry and the poetry of maturity, broad as the distinction is, there can be no absolute dividing line. Nevertheless the distinction is of service and helps us to clear our ideas. To see things clearly it is neces- sary to distinguish. / What is to be said of meditative poetry ? There are passages in the poets that are strictly meditative, pass- ages sometimes that are merely descriptive, which yet affect us as essentially poetical. Meditation is an in- tellectual process, and description is the product of observation. It is as possible to meditate without any emotion at all, as it is possible to describe. Yes, but the meditation does not affect us as essentially poetical till the meditation has awakened feeling. There is a sonnet of Wordsworth's which is purely meditative, even discriminatively meditative : ' Most sweet it is with unuplifted eyes To pace the ground, if path be there or none, While a fair region round the traveller lies Which he forbears again to look upon ; Pleased rather with some soft ideal scene, The work of Fancy, or some happy tone Of meditation, slipping in between The beauty coming and the beauty gone.' The overwhelming though tender grace of the last line comes from a poet who is overmastered by his emotion. If we turn to descriptive passages we shall find that there the ultimate merit that is, the ultimate poetical truth, is equally dependent on emotion. Mr. George Trevelyan in his Essay on Meredith compares two passages about the nightingale one from i8 POETRY AND PROSE Meredith's Night of Frost in May, with one from Prometheus Unbound. Meredith's passage runs as follows : * In this shrill hush of quietude, The ear conceived a severing cry. Almost it let the sound elude, When chuckles three, a warble sly, From hazels of the garden came, Near by the crimson-windowed farm. They laid the trance on breath and frame, A prelude of the passion-charm. Then soon was heard, not sooner heard Than answered, doubled, trebled, more, Voice of an Eden in the bird Renewing with his pipe of four The sob : a troubled Eden, rich In throb of heart : unnumbered throats Flung upward at a fountain's pitch, The fervour of the four long notes, That on the fountain's pool subside, Exult and ruffle and upspring : Endless the crossing multiplied Of silver and of golden string. There chimed a bubbled underbrew With witch-wild spray of vocal dew.' That is very particular. Shelley is much less so : ' There the voluptuous nightingales Are awake through all the broad noonday. When one with bliss or sadness fails, And through the windless ivy-boughs, Sick with sweet love, droops dying away On its mate's music-panting bosom ; Another, from the swinging blossom Watching to catch the languid close Of the last strain, then lifts on high The wings of the weak melody, Till some new strain of feeling bear The song, and all the woods are mute.' ' 1 do not wish to dispute,' says Mr. Trevelyan, ' which POETRY : A NOTE 19 is the finer passage of the two, but I know which is most like the nightingale.' 1 But this is the Meredith enthusiast. In fact, Shelley's passage is more like ; not sharing the confusing power of Meredith's over-definiteness, it is more nightingaley. Poetry is not description, it is sympathetic emotion. 2 One does not want a line drawing of the nightingale's 1 The choice of passages is Mr. Trevelyan's. Had he been anxious to bring out my point and not his own he would have chosen a passage about the nightingale from the poet of the nightingale : ' Now more than ever seems it rich to die, To cease upon the midnight with no pain, While^hou art pouring forth thy soul abroad In such an ecstasy ! ' 2 Cp. Tolstoy's definition of Art. 'Art is a human activity, con- sisting in this, that one man consciously, by means of certain external signs, hands on to others feelings he has lived through, and that other people are infected by these feelings, and also experience them.' Tolstoy's What is Art? Mr. Aylmer Maude's translation. By ' consciously' Tolstoy means that a scream of agony, however heartrending, is not Art, there must be an Art purpose ; and by ' hands on to others' he means that the mere expression of emotion is not Art, since emotion may be expressed so badly as not to excite a contagious emotion. Thus a wretched bombastic tragedy may excite us to laughter, not tears. Tolstoy is not discussing the standpoint of these Essays, that the highest Art is largely unconscious. He does not deny, he explicitly states that in the deepest poetry or art the poet is chiefly thinking not of affecting others, but of expressing himself. Tolstoy's pur- pose, however, is not to distinguish between spontaneous and oratorical art. He is speaking of all Art, and trying to define the human activity broadly understood. No doubt there must be a contact between the emotion of the artist and that of the audience. This is necessary to Art, and since it is so the artist may be said, however subconsciously, always in some degree to intend it. The mere act of publication proves this. Yet there are very important distinctions in the degree of intention, and these Tolstoy does not discuss. 20 POETRY AND PROSE song ; what one wants, and what the poet alone can give, is the effect produced by it : 'And this is the soul's heaven, to have felt.' 1 ' Description,' says Mill, ' is not poetry because there is descriptive poetry. But an object which admits of being described may also furnish an occasion for the generation of poetry, which we thereupon choose to call descriptive. The poetry is not in the object itself, but in the state of mind in which it may be con- templated.' 2 Of those descriptions of Milton's that come home to us we can say the same : ' Anon they move In perfect phalanx to the Dorian mood Of flutes and soft recorders ; such as rais'd To height of noblest temper heroes old Arming to battle ; and instead of rage Deliberate valour breath'd, firm and unmov'd With dread of death to flight or foul retreat ; Nor wanting power to mitigate and 'suage With solemn touches troubled thoughts, and chase Anguish, and doubt, and fear, and sorrow, and pain, From mortal or immortal minds.' 3 As Milton thinks of the troubles music softens, he thinks of all the troubles of man 'Anguish, and doubt, and fear, and sorrow, and pain,' and, so thinking, his heart is bowed beneath the sense of mortal calamity, bowed and shaken and filled by it as is his noble line. His host moves humanly before us ; 1 Sonnet, Winter Heavens, Meredith. 2 Mill, Thoughts on Poetry and its Varieties, In the original passage there are also references to didactic poetry, but as tending both to confusion and controversy I leave them out. 3 Paradise Lost, i. 549. POETRY: A NOTE 21 it is described to the life because his description has ended on an emotional chord. The effect of a long poem, of which it is so difficult to speak, is also similar. It has as a whole impressed our feeling. 1 Sometimes its effect is single and in- divisible, as is the case with Morris's Sigurd, the dEneid, or Longfellow's Evangeline : * Told she the tale of the fair Lilianu who was wooed by a phantom.' Sometimes the impression left is the impression of a series of emotional effects, as in Tennyson's Idylls, or, in lesser degree, the Odyssey, or still less, because the separate effects are so like, The Faeiy Queen or The Prelude. In those last cases, though one does not quite get a single impression, the separate impressions are so similar as to produce cumulatively almost the effect of unity. Sometimes, though the impression is the impression of a whole, that impression is not poetical, as with The Ring and the Book, and this is because the whole, allowing for surprising spurts of emotion, is the result of an intellectual process. It is not easy to define poetry a dream, a sigh, an exhalation : ' This lady of the luting tongue, The flash in darkness, billow's grace.' Mr. Meredith has indeed attempted it : 'That was the chirp of Ariel You heard, as overhead it flew, The farther going more to dwell, And wing our green to wed our blue ; 1 And such is the effect sometimes even of prose dramas, e.g. Tourgenieffs most beautiful play The Bread of Others. There are few poetical passages in it, but the effect of the whole is the effect of a poem. 22 POETRY AND PROSE But whether note of joy or knell, Not his own Father-singer knew ; Nor yet can any mortal tell, Save only how it shivers through ; The breast of us a sounded shell, The blood of us a lighted dew.' That was poetry, that which we seemed to hear just now ; and the more faint, the more the sound seemed to die off into an illimitable vague and to be lost in the infinite, the more it haunts us and helps to uplift our grosser part into communion with our spirit, which itself is part of the spirit of all. But whether this ecstasy derived from poetry is in a strict sense pleasur- able no one can tell, not even the chief of poetry- makers, Shakespeare, himself. Our eyes are ' wet with most delicious tears.' We cannot say much more than that, except that a real poetical experience makes our being vibrate as nothing else can. We seem, for the moment, ourselves to be participant in the making of this heavenly harmony ; seem to emit, like the dewdrop touched with the sun, a light which is our own. 1 1 For this paraphrase of a difficult little poem, I am greatly indebted to Mr. Trevelyan's detailed explanation, The Poetry and Philosophy of George Meredith, pp. 72-74. GRAY 23 GRAY IF we understood anything perfectly, we should under- stand everything. It is equally true that to understand anything perfectly, we must understand everything. Yet one must make shift to deal with the eighteenth century in England without attempting an analysis of the precedent civilisations of Greece and Rome ; civilisations in which the art of living had been culti- vated to a high degree, but ultimately destroyed, partly by the incursion of barbarians, partly by the growth of Christianity, a religion which made war against the pride of the world. There arose, in what we call the Dark Ages, what we know as the Monastic Ideal, a mode of thought which drew the finer spirits away from life and absorbed them in the contemplation of death and a life to come, leaving meanwhile the earth itself, denuded of ideals, a prey to the strong and violent man. The true Salamanca University was then the cloister, and outside ' the loud-roaring hail- storms ' fell. What remains to us from those ages of quietism and riot is the memory of bloody deeds, often of high tragic value, and of a selected existence solacing itself in seclusion. The first signs of the serious re-emergence of the human spirit synchronise roughly with the Latin Empire of Constantinople, when interest in Roman learning and Roman culture, never wholly forgotten 24 POETRY AND PROSE by the Church, had for some time begun to revive. The greatest achievement of the Roman genius was legal, and one feature of this Latin revival or Pre-renascence was a greatly increased interest in the Pandects. Places for learning were established, and within a space of fifty years there were founded the Universities of Paris, Oxford, Siena, Naples, Padua, Cambridge and Salamanca. If we are to think of this movement as a renascence, we must date the Renascence itself as beginning in the thirteenth and not in the fifteenth century. In truth, the whole process is gradual ; from those Latin beginnings through Aquinas, Roger Bacon, Dante and Petrarch and the new spirit of * Gothicness ' animat- ing Gothic architecture, to the fully quickened interest in Greek literature which distinguishes the Renas- cence proper. Yet, however gradual the process, we can trace in the sixteenth century an immense new impetus coming to England. Erasmus came here in 1497. The last voyage of Columbus ended in 1504. Luther died in 1546. The great work of Copernicus had been published in 1543. That group of dates marks the end of the old world in England and the opening of the new. There is more difference between Chaucer's mental world and Shakespeare's than between Shakespeare's and our own. Our Shakespeare and for this reason he is our Shakespeare stands on the threshold of modern times. It was for him to enter into the realisation of a planet half unknown ; when you came to the end of what you knew there was everywhere an open door, ' antres vast and deserts idle,' in which there might be Eldorado, New Atlantis, Utopia. GRAY 25 The old world what was it? A flat disc, lit pleasantly by a travelling sun and moon with attendant ladies in diamonds, sometimes in bright gold, the patines with which the heavens were thick inlaid ; a flat disc terra firma, round which there was mare magnum, the sea. A new earth and a new heaven faced the Elizabethans, and this both in a material and a spiritual sense. In religion it was coming to be recognised that the last word had not been said. A hundred years after Grocyn had taught Erasmus, the intellectuals every- where had inherited the humane labours of the scholars, and in England, while Shakespeare was still young, Greece, with her old new literature, lived again. There dawned upon the view undreamed-of civilisa- tions, and an endless vista of speculation in religion, morals, politics. In that age you could discover new lands ; there were disclosed, waiting to be explored, new continents of thought. What a field for the imagination to play in ! l The great age of imagination in England was thus the Elizabethan Age, the age of emotional treatment, of generalisation. All sides of man were presented poetically, whether it was his philosophical and reflec- tive side as with Bacon, his inquiring and historiogra- phical side as with Raleigh, or as with Shakespeare his poetical side : in that age even poetry was pre-eminently poetical. Upon the sixteenth century in England there followed the seventeenth century one must call it 1 Cp. Spenser's Faery Queen, Book ii. v. 3 : ' Why then should witlesse man so much misweene, That nothing is, but that which he hath scene ? ' 26 POETRY AND PROSE the seventeenth century, for there is no other single phrase that will define a period that is notable as an ending, a thing in itself, and a beginning. After the blowing of great winds there is a lull. The English imagination had said its say, and the seventeenth century is primarily to be characterised as a period in literature of imaginative exhaustion. The poets, at any rate, had nothing new of consequence to tell. The big things about the beginning had been said. From this point of view, then, the seventeenth century is the end of the sixteenth century. But it exists for itself ; there is no quiescence ; the oscillation continues ; the waves, though not mountains high, still rock. Close upon the heels of the great age of poetry treads the age of artifice. In poetry, trifles, prettiness, a careless shoe-string, dressed-up theology, tricks of phrase, take the place of the imaginative revel. One poet was still writing great poetry, but his was the poetry of lament : with the failure of his political hopes for man, Paradise was lost. In prose too, though there was a much more various effort, there was the same lack of large and definite purpose. People wrote, in any style or no style, on what they pleased. Sir Thomas Browne and Lord Herbert, Urquhart, Harrington or Burton, Izaak Walton, Feltham, Hobbes there is no sequence. In brief, the seventeenth century, which in England doesn't last for nearly a century (1610 to 1670 perhaps), is the kind of century that has little interest, the kind of century one would expect a transition century, being in part the tossing to and fro after the storm, and in part the first faint beginnings of the eighteenth century. One does see emerging from the disturbance GRAY 27 the first faint beginnings of a school of history, of social politics, the first faint beginnings of a school interested in character. Before the seventeenth century had ended, the eighteenth century had begun. Of all modern centuries the eighteenth century is the most indispensable ; it was the necessary preliminary to the building of a completely modern life. The course of nineteenth-century literature might well have been different, and the men of to-day would still have been what they are. What was indispensable was the laying of the foundations. When the eighteenth century 1 began in England (let us say in 1670, when men had settled down after the Revolu- tion and Restoration) it was recognised on every hand that the modern world had begun. The new ideas of the sixteenth century had to some extent been assimilated ; the new discoveries were being under- stood. A truly modern society was coming into existence. To investigate its principles, the necessary conditions of its life, that was the task of the eighteenth century, or in Mr. Courthope's phrases, its task * was to recombine the shattered forms of the old national life into a system suited to modern circumstances,' . . . 'the work of the eighteenth century consisted in providing a safe mode of transition from the manners of mediaeval to those of modern society.' The work of the eighteenth century was a work of investigation, classification, arrangement. No longer have we Shakespeare standing tip-toe in face of a rush 1 The eighteenth century is the process of getting things in order. It therefore begins with the first signs of order. Sir William Temple is in spirit and tone an eighteenth-century writer, and he died in 1699. 28 POETRY AND PROSE of new ideas. Modern man is no longer surprised at his own emergence : on the contrary, he sits down to contemplate himself; his business now is to inquire how he came into being, and what, in fact, he is. It is not by chance that civilisations differ from each other, and the name of Gibbon reminds us of the time when history was discovered to be a science. Men have different opinions, but the movements of the mind, says Hume, are explicable. It was Newton and Herschel who explained that we lived in a Universe and not a Chaos. By 1750 William Hunter was lecturing at the school of surgery in London. Black and Priestley in chemistry attest the activity of the new science of medicine. Before the century was ended Bentham had laid firmly the foundation of a science of legislation. 1 Nor was this interest in investigation and analysis without a general manifestation. A new interest in man and his character prompted even the imagination to fresh efforts. Gulliver's Travels was Swift's reply to a sociological inquiry. If you asked Defoe: How would man comport himself in solitude? the answer was 'Robinson Crusoe.' Some observa- tion of the ways of human beings in the country preceded the papers devoted to Sir Roger de Coverley. Character study was the chief impulse to imaginative composition, and Richardson, Fielding, Sterne spin out their stories with no other end. What then had the eighteenth century to do? It had, standing on the shoulders of the sixteenth century, 1 It was the same abroad. Le Sage, Montesquieu, Bayle, Voltaire all equally indicate the new desire to analyse man, his habits and beliefs, and to found a new beginning starting from that analysis. GRAY 29 to deal with modern man. It could not give free rein to an emotional treatment because, not to speak of the sixteenth century having exhausted emotion, it was just because too free a rein had been given to varying and passing emotions that the seventeenth century had not done more of the work of the eighteenth. Nor could the eighteenth century deal with man on simple and broad lines. Since the sixteenth century, the whole complicated basis of modern life had been laid. It was the office of the eighteenth century to deal with crowds and allow for variety, with cities and to speak with urbanity. This was the time of the cognoscenti, the literati, the day for the clear intellect, the years of marking time, the period in which what was already roughly known was mapped out ; a geological survey of what was habitable human country. Such map-making was essential to subsequent progress. To employ a com- mercial metaphor, in the eighteenth century stock was taken of the business of mankind, and to put a business on a satisfactory footing is a preliminary to profitable results. Yet in itself the business of stocktaking is unemo- tional. It was the business of the eighteenth century, but it was a business extremely ill suited to poetry. The true interests of the eighteenth century were political, social, historical, the interests of prose ; and while the poets of the eighteenth century were right in this that they spoke of the real interests 1 of the 1 Mr. Courthope quotes Pope as taking credit (Epistle to Arbuthnof) ' That not in fancy's maze he wander'd long, But stooped to truth, and moralised his song.' 30 POETRY AND PROSE eighteenth century, for this reason their poetry is weak at least, this is why it is weak as poetry. If it be said they were free to take another course, they were free, in that case, only to write poetry which did not reflect their age, and which, therefore, whatever its aesthetic elegance, would have been worthless. It is true that their success in the course they chose the only course really open to them was but partial. What is remarkable, considering the nature of their task, is that they should have achieved success at all. For the sudden task that confronted them was not merely to extend the domain of poetry, it was to extend it to cover minutiae and detail. Poetry was to conquer, and immediately, a whole new province, the province of social life. If Poetry was to be a true daughter of the eighteenth century, she was to learn, within fifty years of the publication of Paradise Lost, to speak the language of criticism a criticism of religion, morals, politics, the seasons, society and regimen. How was such a task to be accomplished, and who has yet written the poem on mending a wheelbarrow which Dr. Craik instanced as an exercise in the familiar? Part of the danger lay in the consciousness of difficulty. The Elizabethans spoke, without a thought of what they chose, because they did not wish to speak of anything that had not a primary imaginative appeal. But the eighteenth-century poets stood trembling on the verge of a new land. No great emotional impulse was behind them ; what impelled them to their adven- ture was merely the love of method and good sense. GRAY 31 Unemotional people, who are also intelligent, act according to habit, and it is in every case the habit of those who are afraid of speaking too familiarly to cover their shamefacedness with a delicacy of speech. In other words, the difficulty that faced the eighteenth- century poets was that the subjects of which they especially wished to speak were not specially sus- ceptible of poetical treatment ; and so to meet this difficulty they invented a manner that, on the surface, was avowedly poetical a dignified, sometimes pre- tentious style, meant to disguise the prosaic nature of their task. 1 Thus even Cowper, remembering how fond his mother was of him and how on his way to 1 There are many instances of the designedly and falsely dignified in Cowper's 'Lines on receiving his Mother's Picture,' instances which alternate most curiously with instances of the poignantly simple. For example, compare this address to his mother's spirit : ' Thou, as a gallant bark from Albion's coast (The storms all weather'd, and the ocean cross'd), Shoots into port at some well-haven'd isle, Where spices breathe, and brighter seasons smile, There sits quiescent on the floods, that show Her beauteous form reflected clear below, While airs impregnated with incense play Around her, fanning light her streamers gay ; So thou, with sails how swift ! hast reach'd the shore " Where tempests never beat nor billows roar,'" with the immortally affecting lines : ' Where once we dwelt our name is heard no more, Children not thine have trod my nursery floor ; And where the gardener Robin, day by day, Drew me to school along the public way, Delighted with my bauble coach, and wrapp'd In scarlet mantle warm, and velvet cap, 'Tis now become a history little known, That once we call'd the pastoral house our own.' 32 POETRY AND PROSE school she stuffed his pockets with sweets, writes like this when he is afraid : ^ ' Thy morning bounties ere I left my home, The biscuit, or confectionary plum.' Having to speak of many familiar and trivial sub- jects, the poets, by an instinct of self-protection, adopted a high-sounding speech. Another way to meet the difficulty, and it was the way they all attempted later, was to restrict the range of subject, to rule out as too obviously familiar many trifles, and to speak only of the more dignified among familiar things. But a designed selection of this kind, the habit of the mind resting on the notion of dignity, could not but correspondingly affect, however insensibly, the tone of the style. The tendency to select the matter led necessarily to a tendency to select the manner. So that however they approached their task, the very nature of their task, as also the methodical method of their approach, prescribed one ending. If they selected their subjects there was a tendency to select a correspondent tone. If they did not select their sub- jects there was a temptation, for purposes of self-protec- tion, to adopt a disguising manner. In either case the style adopted was similar, the style that we now know as heroic. Nor is this the end of a painful poetical story. The adoption of a selected style tended further to restrict the subject. It may not be easy in poetry to speak of sweets, but it is shortly seen to be impossible to speak of a confectionary plum. High-sounding subjects are the only subjects that can be spoken of in this way. GRAY 33 If you are to use Latin you must write of ^neas and of Dido. By this process poetry, by the end of the century,, was tied up in a corner. The artifice in the manner tended further to restrict the subjects ; the further restriction of subjects tended further to artificialise the style. To find the remedy was to free both together, and to free both together was the work of the Romantic Revival. Looking back on the history of the eighteenth-century process, we can see the curious spectacle of an aim negativing itself. The restrictions to which poetry submitted in the eighteenth century were endured for a purpose. The general design was to extend the sphere of poetry ; with the object of extending her sphere, concessions were made to habit and reason, and in the end these concessions were the cause of a restric- tion thrice restricted. Not all the writers, of course, nor even all the periods of the eighteenth century carried their system to its logical result, but sheer triumphs of social poetry such as Goldsmith's Deserted Village are few. 1 In the main, the eighteenth-century poetry, even at its best, gives itself airs. Pope's points are too consciously pithy ; Thomson in his Seasons carries it, though with elegance, too high ; and Johnson's voice, though dignified in his London^ is loud. At a lower elevation, the poetry of this century is mere stilts. What, however, is chiefly irritating is that it is seldom either bad or good, but more commonly both. In the most characteristic piece left to us, Johnson's tribute to the dead surgeon, we The pompous quatrain at the end is Johnson's. C 34 POETRY AND PROSE have both what the century tried to do occasionally perfectly done, and also the poetical style defensive openly displayed : * Condemn'd to Hope's delusive mine, As on we toil from day to day, By sudden blasts, or slow decline, Our social comforts drop away. 3 The second and fourth lines are unexceptionable, while the first is beyond redemption. ' Well try'd through many a varying year, See Levet to the grave descend, Officious, innocent, sincere, Of ev'ry friendless name the friend. Yet still he fills Affection's eye, Obscurely wise, and coarsely kind ; Nor, letter' d Arrogance, deny Thy praise to merit unrefin'd.' These touching verses, without the seventh and eighth lines, would have no blemish of artificiality, but the particularity of the praise is the particularity of a prose age, an age capable of emotion yet typically critical. * When fainting nature called for aid, And hov'ring death prepar'd the blow, His vig'rous remedy display 'd The pow'r of art without the show. In misery's darkest cavern known, His useful care was ever nigh, Where hopeless anguish poured his groan, And lonely want retired to die. 5 Though the fourth line, a mere contortion, may dim the moderate badness of the rest, it would be impossible in eight lines to epitomise better the deficiencies of the method. GRAY 35 There are more stanzas : * No summons mock'd by chill delay, No petty gain disdain'd by pride, The modest wants of ev'ry day The toil of ev'ry day supply'd. His virtues walk'd their narrow round, Nor made a pause, nor left a void ; And sure th' Eternal Master found The single talent well employ'd.' How did the eighteenth century come to write like this ? By no miracle. So always the eighteenth century could have written, had it never written till it was emotionally moved by its survey. Here the weight of Johnson's feeling carries him through the conven- tion. But if we wish an example of what the eighteenth century could do, we shall have to leave Johnson and turn to Gray. 1 1 No account of the eighteenth century can omit mention of the romantic side-current, the romantic work, which was not its work, done in it, the romantic work done by the way. The passages at the end of Pope's Messiah and Dunciad are not typical eighteenth-century work. Shenstone in his Schoolmistress, though the subject is purely social, speaks often the language of poetry. Thomson, in his Castle of Indolence, is the first to anticipate the antique music of Keats, and Collins's Ode to Evening is not placeable in time. Dryden, in Mr. Courthope's fine phrase, 'the immediate father of the whole line,' is distinguished as much for the airy grace of some of his lyrics as for the merits of his day. ' And still at every close,' he says in The Flower and the Leaf ' And still at every close she would repeat The burden of the song, The daisy is so sweet, The daisy is so sweet.' This was got from the weak thing in the Chaucerian version * For, as me thought, among her notes swete She said Si douse est la Margarete. ' And Arnold has noticed the romantic note in Gray's letters : ' At Keswick, by the lakeside on an autumn evening, he has the accent 36 POETRY AND PROSE Gray is entirely of the eighteenth century, its best product in poetry, a perfect example of the utmost poetical greatness to which an unpoetical age, remain- ing wholly true to itself, can by possibility attain. He does not suffer from its formal vices. An exponent of the heroical style, he uses this style on heroical subjects alone. He writes little to match the dull pomposity of the Alliance of Education and Government ', a poem dear to Gibbon and examiners. His lyrical excellence is as great as was possible for one who had no note of spon- taneous song. As his subjects increase in gravity his tone becomes more measured, more natural. These are great merits ; he has, in fact, every merit attainable by his century, and he lacks those qualities alone that are truly poetical. He lacks spontaneity, swiftness, and the immediate transference of his feeling to paper. He is too slow, too polished, too reflective. But his work is immensely good ; the tone of his mind is serious and human, and had he been characteristically a poet he would have been a poet of a great order. of the Reveries, or of Obermann, or Wordsworth ' : * In the evening walked alone down to the lake by the side of Crow Park after sunset and saw the solemn colouring of light draw on, the last gleam of sun- shine fading away on the hill-tops, the deep serene of the waters, and the long shadows of the mountains thrown across them, till they nearly touched the hithermost shore. At distance heard the murmur of many waterfalls not audible in the daytime. Wished for the moon, but she was " dark to me and silent, hid in her vacant interlunar cave."' Mr. Hudson in his Introduction to the Study of Literature has this statement : ' The publication of some fifty poems, small and large, in the Spenserian form, and often on subjects for which that form was not in the least appropriate, in the half-century between 1725 and 1775, is itself a sign of awakening interest during those years in Spenser and his work,' p. 161. GRAY 37 Indeed, I believe if one were to ask oneself what is poetry, one could not do better than look at his poems side by side with those of Burns. All that Burns writes is not poetry by no means and all that Gray writes is not prose. I do not say so ; but the one, with all his faults, sees the world from the standpoint of the poet ; the other, with all his merits, from the point of view of his century, the sober, intensely English eighteenth century, from the point of view of a writer of prose. I open the little book at its first page, at the lines on the Spring, and I pass by the conventional opening 'the rosy bosom'd Hours, Fair Venus' train,' with its unreal mythology and the muse that sits and thinks what she never does do, she leaps and springs and I also pass by the jerky disconnection of the osten- sibly connected reflection, till I find Gray's mind occupied with the thought, the theme of every poet, as of every prose-writer since the world began the thought of the equality of Death : ' Alike the Busy and the Gay But flutter through life's little day, In Fortune's varying colours dress'd : Brush'd by the hand of rough Mischance, Or chill'd by Age, their airy dance They leave, in dust to rest.' Yes, it is true. But hear Shakespeare on the same subject : ' Golden lads and girls all must, As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.' It is the contrast between a trite reflection, a general comment on the course of human life, as just as it is common, and an old feeling newly felt. 38 POETRY AND PROSE In the one case the poet feels a surprising instance with a surprising newness, leaps to his general truth, and makes us feel it by the ardour with which he seizes on the particular. In the other, the prose nature takes his time and sweeps his eyes around. An old man has weak hams and sleeps lightly. That is true. To the old man, says the Eastern poet, his fancy seizing on their persistent morning chirrup- ing, the grasshopper is a burden. How much more, and how much more incisively true ! This it is to feel as a poet. But Gray does not commonly feel as a poet. I do not mean that he does not feel ; he feels, and with a justice and at times a depth of sentiment so great that he is immortal. The immortal commentator upon the passing show, Gray has passed more pithy and more just reflections upon our leasehold tenure here than any other Englishman. Of such reflections the ' Ode on Eton College ' is full. Everyone knows the finest lines in that poem : * All are men, Condemn'd alike to groan ; The tender for another's pain, The unfeeling for his own.' It is impossible to imagine the saddest of human truths expressed more beautifully or with a more perfect melancholy. It is finer, far finer, than the poetical flashes in the piece : ' They hear a voice in every wind, And snatch a fearful joy,' or ' Alas ! regardless of their doom, The little victims play.' GRAY 39 It is finer because, without the poetical brilliance of these, the lightning flash, it is staider, more in tone with the subject, more said for ever, more excellent. Yes, but it is a prose excellence. That a prose excel- lence was wanted here should not disguise this from us. The * Ode on Eton College ' is a perfect prose triumph popular just for that, since the public has difficulty in understanding poetry, a prose triumph with its careful enumeration of the woes of age, with its perfect enumeration of the unnoticed delights of youth : * The thoughtless day, the easy night.' How does it happen with Gray where he essays a flight more distinctively poetical ? He has written many Odes. They have been [greatly admired, and many have facilely tried to imitate their laboured excellence. The imitators have failed. They did not realise that, however lacking these Odes might be in a strictly poetical excellence, they are the production of a man who had observed life carefully and who never wrote a line that was not pregnant with the meaning of a real experience. For ourselves, if we were to speak openly and not as children of yesterday, we would confess at once that these Odes, with all their admirable merits, leave us cold. We can admire the justice of the senti- ments, without feeling that inner warmth of feeling that communicates its warmth. Some old things may be said in such a way that we seem to feel them for the first time : ' No motion has she now, no force ; She neither hears nor sees ; Rolled round in earth's diurnal course, With rocks, and stones, and trees.' 40 POETRY AND PROSE A woman in an old Scots ballad addresses the ghost of her murdered lover whose wraith she is painfully following : ' Sae painfully she clam the wa', She clam the wa' up after him ; Hosen nor shoon upon her feet, She hadna time to put them on. " Is there ony room at your head, Saunders? Is there ony room at your feet? Or ony room at your side, Saunders, Where fain, fain, I wad sleep ? " ' These old things may be said in some such way, and new things may be said without making new men of us. I do not know that Gray says many new things in his Odes, but the old things do not move. It is impossible to imagine sentiments more just than those with which the * Ode to Adversity ' is crowded. But it is precisely this, their exact justice, that keeps the Ode within the domain of prose. What should I ask from Adversity ? ' Teach me to love, and to forgive, Exact my own defects to scan.' One should do so, but it is too near a perfect propriety. There is here neither the cry of the ' limed soul ' that struggles to be free, nor the ecstasy of virtue : ' To humbler functions, awful Power.' To Wordsworth duty is awful, awful because he is a poet and feels the frailty of man. We may pass a similar criticism upon the more ambitious efforts, * The Progress of Poesy ' and ' The Bard ' ; nor must the studiedly poetical language GRAY 41 conceal from us that those pieces also are the work of one who was pre-eminently a critic, the justest and most discriminating of critics, but at bottom a critic still. Take a passage that looks like poetry : ' O'er Idalia's velvet green The rosy-crowned Loves are seen On Cytherea's day With antic Sport, and blue-eyed Pleasures, Frisking light in frolic measures ; Now pursuing, now retreating, Now in circling troops they meet : To brisk notes in cadence beating, Glance their many-twinkling feet.' No criticism of the dance, no sympathetic exposition of the charm of quick and intertwining motion could be better. What a genius is necessary so to represent ! The dance with its changing measure is seen ; the accompanying music with its change of time is actually heard. But the poetry of motion ! We have only to remember : * When you do dance, I wish you A wave o' the sea, that you might ever do Nothing but that ; move still, still so, And own no other function.' It is interpretation as opposed to presentment, a thing felt as against a thing seen, the rhythmic motion get- ting itself expressed in the undesigned arrangement of four words : * Move still, still so.' Shakespeare does not always write poetry ; but where- ever he is pre-eminently good, he makes his effect by a reliance on the poetical method. He is thus pre- eminently a poet. Gray does not always write prose ; 42 POETRY AND PROSE but wherever he is pre-eminently good we find, with few exceptions, that his method is the method of prose. His genius is thus pre-eminently a prose genius. But how admirable are the efforts of this genius ; how penetrating is the criticism, how ' exact to scan ' ! Shakespeare was what? * Nature's Darling,' 'im- mortal Boy,' an unstudied genius full to the last of the juicy sallies of youth ; and Milton that ' rode sublime,' the exact adjective, ' upon the seraph wings of Ecstacy ' ; and Dryden, and Pindar ' Sailing with supreme dominion Through the azure deep of air.' 1 The Bard' and the 'Ode for Music' are poems not to be admired so greatly. They are too like poetry ;; without being poetry, too like it. The effort, the laboured effort, to simulate the fine frenzy is dis- concerting. We miss our familiar Gray. He is there, of course, just as good a critic as ever, and never a vulgar critic. When the gross vulgar,, for example, think of Henry the Eighth, they think of a fat man with six beheaded wives. Yet some memory of Mr. Froude may intervene, and of what Carlyle said to Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, who, de- murring to Carlyle's statement that Henry knew what he wanted, 'suggested that, among the things he wanted and knew how to get, was as long a roll of wives as the Grand Turk. It would have been a more humane method to have taken them, like that potentate, simultaneously than successively ; he would have been saved the need of killing one to make room for another, and then requiring Parliament to disgrace itself by sanctioning the transaction. ' Carlyle replied that this method of looking at King GRAY 43 Henry's life did not help much to the understanding of it. -He was a true ruler at a time when the will of the Lord's anointed counted for something, and it was likely that he did not regard himself as doing wrong in any of these things over which modern sentimentality grew so impatient.' And so Gray : 'the majestic lord, That broke the bonds of Rome.' And again of the Tower, which we are apt to think of with a curious national pride : 4 Ye towers of Julius, London's lasting shame, With many a foul and midnight murder fed.' But in the main, * The Bard ' is a poem in which the critical side of Gray is not prominently seen. He establishes a reputation as an historical scene-painter, and the whole procession of English history from the Edwards passes in learned, if laboured, review : 'The shrieks of death, through Berkley's roof that ring.' * Low on his funeral couch he lies ! ' ' Her lion-port, Her awe-commanding face.' But somehow I cannot think that the old prophet about to plunge in the roaring tide would have been so particular. ' The Bard ' is an attempt to give to an historical account the hurry and rapture of poetry ; and this attempt succeeds. ' The Bard ' is a hurried, rapturous, and precise performance. It has some of the characteristics of poetry without being poetry. It has the particularity of prose without the leisure to be prose. It is executed as a poet would execute it, but it is not conceived as a poet would conceive it. It is an attempt to make poetry by adding the adjuncts of a poem to a distinctively eighteenth-century task. 44 POETRY AND PROSE Classification, criticism, history, are to be flogged into a canter. The Elegy is a performance of a different kind. The poetry that is in it is not an adjunct to it, but arises out of it, the inner depth of the feeling warming to a slow fire. Far and away the greatest thing Gray did, it is the most difficult of which to speak ; for while it is a product of prose, a creature of the prose imagination, and while there are only a few lines that, detached from the context, are strictly speaking poetry, the effect of the whole is not a prose effect but a poetical effect. When we have read it through we feel as if we had been listening to poetry. The reason is that the conception is poetical, eminently so, and it is only the execution, the carrying out, the imaginative development that belongs to the domain of prose. Death, the term for the Elegy stops with the grave and leaves alone the question of a hereafter Death, the finis to mortal aspiration and delight, forms a subject in contemplating which the prose- writer feels his being stirred to a depth that is poetical. On this subject, finis, the prose-writer and the poet meet, so to speak, on common ground. There is so little to say, and one's feelings, even the feelings of an ordinary man, are so universal that the poetical movement of the mind and the prose movement base on a similarity of feeling that ends in an expression not dissimilar. For this reason Gray's Elegy has an unusually wide appeal. The poetical reader feels with the poet, and the prose nature is able easily to follow the beautiful expatiation. GRAY 45 Let me explain what I mean by saying that the conception of the Elegy is poetical, while its execution is a work of prose. Its execution is a prose execution because the simple subject is exhausted. It is not suddenly or surprisingly felt. The slow considering mind reflects upon a country graveyard till there has arisen in the mind every just reflection, and till there has been embodied in words every just sentiment which the occasion could, by possibility, evoke. It is evening, and the evening is still. Still, did I say? A beetle may be heard, and an owl. Around one lie the country graves. The poor inhabitants below will no more rise to their usual tasks (these tasks then being carefully enumerated). These usual tasks were homely, but this is no reason why we should despise them. Tasks, however grand, and lives, however glorious, come to the same stop. It is true the great are honoured with costlier monuments, but this does not affect the fact of death. Besides, who knows? had there been ampler opportunity, these humble dead might, alive, have done great things (these great things being then carefully enumerated). John Nokes and Richard Stokes might have been Hampden or Milton, a great writer or a great states- man. But even if it is true, as true it is, that they were not great or greatly good, it is also true that they were not greatly bad (the possible developments of great badness being then carefully enumerated). They weren't greatly good or greatly bad. Let that be allowed, and it remains they were men, unnoticed men, whose deaths were regretted as greater deaths have been. It is a sad thing for any one to die, to leave pleasant life and to bid farewell to friends. 46 POETRY AND PROSE Indeed, if one were to inquire of me who write this what could be said of me, my epitaph would not really amount to much more than theirs. Some one, no doubt, would say he saw the harmless poet walking forth at dawn, and lying under the great beech, now happy, now sad one morning missing. There was afterwards, indeed, a rustic funeral and a few lines on a tomb, which said : A man of compassionate and friendly heart lies here. He had his frailties, but now let there be silence, for all that he has is a narrow bed, with hope for a companion did you say? Yes, with trembling hope. I say this execution is a prose execution because it is a prose execution ; it is mapped out and proceeds from point to point like a little school-essay of which the analysis has been written before hand. It is a prose execution because it is not a poetical execution ; there are none of the sudden starts, sallies, surprises of poetry. Heine has been looking at a tomb. This is the fate that overtakes all ; it is common, but then ' Quite suddenly it came into my head The dead man in the marble tomb was I.' It has none of these sallies, and, moreover, it is never beaten by the depth of its own feeling, nor comes to a stop, like Shakespeare's terrifying 'signi- fying nothing/ But while this is so, the conception is poetical. The subject is not suddenly or surprisingly felt, but it is singly felt, felt as a whole. It was a poet's thought to be so deeply moved by what is common, to feel so profoundly just one truth. We are mortal, alike in this, in our mortality ; and to keep saying this in different ways, it is true, but GRAY 47 still saying it and nothing else is a great thing. To trust to the effect of one profoundly felt feeling, this is the true faith of the poet ; to be contented with the emanation of a sigh, 1 not to press eagerly or to attempt to startle, but merely to let one's feeling flow one's feeling, whether it is a surprising or a merely deep feeling, this is the true attitude of the poet. Some- times I think this Elegy is the greatest, the most universal thing in the world ; it so perfectly expresses the feelings of man as man, of an erect, peripatetic biped one day to lie quiet and at full length. It is also, I know, the boast of a purely poetical poetry that it is universal, but in speaking of the greatest poetry we may easily give too wide a meaning to this term. Its claim to universality can be justified only in so far as all great poetry despises everything adventi- tious, and speaks of human nature as human nature. What we really mean when we say that great poetry is universal, is that her interests are not limited in width ; that she speaks ofatt, of what lies at the roots of things ; that she can be understood equally well by a German or a Chinaman, by man or woman : ' By saint, by savage, and by sage, In every clime, adored.' What, however, we do not mean when we claim universality for great poetry is that she speaks for all, or voices the sentiments equally of the imaginative and 1 Why should the emanation of a sigh give comfort ? The Elegy is a poem that does not speak of hope, and yet it brings comfort to every mind. If we ask why it should do so perhaps the best answer is Shelley's ' Thus solemnised and softened, death is mild.' Stanzas in Lechlade Churchyard, 1815. 48 POETRY AND PROSE the unimaginative, the sensitive and the vulgar. We da not mean that her office is simply to give utterance to feel- ings on the tip of every tongue. On the contrary, poetry is an aristocrat, though an aristocrat full of understanding. At her highest, she speaks of depths the common man hasnever sounded, of stillnesses known only to the patient and reflective. Poetry, let us say, speaks of everything, but not as every one thinks about it. The highest and purest poetry is thus not able to boast truly of complete universality ; it is at best an interpretative universality to which she can reach. We shall never be able, let us be sure of this, solely to express an absolutely universal feeling, to give shape to a merely human sigh, unless we keep firm hold of the prose side of our nature. When Shakespeare, for instance, writes ' And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death,' this is, we see after thinking about it, a ray of light shed on the procrastinating habit of the mind ; yet most clearly it is not what every one thinks or is yearn- ing to say. In the splendid indignation of ' fools ' we hear Shakespeare's own voice, the particular bubbling over of Shakespeare's own wrath at an unvarying human habit. Ordinary men do not feel like that, do not think like that, and to speak in that way is not to voice their feeling. In a word, a purely poetical age will never merely voice the sorrows of mankind ; it could never have produced and will never produce so direct an expression of universal grief as this prose eighteenth century, as this tender, melancholy poet Gray, with the critic and the slow prose man so much alive in him. A purely poetical age could not have produced a GRAY 49 poem so much on a level, so perfectly in one note, so exquisitely in tone. And how exquisite is the tact of Gray ! In the poem as it was written, at the end there were two stanzas, one about the poet : ' Him have we seen the greenwood side along, While o'er the heath we hied, our labour done, Oft as the woodlark piped her farewell song, With wistful eyes pursue the setting sun.' It was pretty, but it had a particularity of its own ; it was the kind of thing to be said about a poetical poet, not of the poet standing merely for man poetically moved. Moreover, its particularity detracted from the plain simplicity with which the figure is introduced. Gray's tact condemned it. The other is a more obvious lapse. It was to be inserted just before the epitaph : ' There scatter'd oft, the earliest of the year, By hands unseen are showers of violets found ; The redbreast loves to build and warble there, And little footsteps lightly print the ground.' One must not blame a poet for what he has deleted ; but what are we to think of the poetical standard of an age the chief glory of which, writing the elegy on man, stops to paint this lovely little Christmas card? There is another and more important omission. There was an early stanza now commonly printed by editors without the tact of the poet as the fourth : ' Hark ! how the sacred calm that breathes around, Bids every fierce tumultuous passion cease ; In still small accents whispering from the ground, A grateful earnest of eternal peace.' No ; this had to go for the poem was about Finis. The poem was about Finis, and it is because of this it D 50 POETRY AND PROSE speaks for every man. It voices with perfect propriety, and without the intrusion of a single individual thought, the one deeply felt feeling that every man has in con- templating a graveyard. I do not say that there is any man who has not at times other feelings. Who is there so presumptuous as to say he knows that behind the curtain there is nothing ? Who is there, by his own hypothesis ephemeral, who is prepared to say he knows that to no issue there is lived our perplexing life? Indeed, I think that most men in their common thoughts assume themselves immortal and look beyond the grave. One is alive and one remembers life, those who made it what it was, and those bright eyes, not to shine forever, that cheer it now ; and one's mounting spirit moves. One sees beyond as in a vision, and death, no longer dulling the horizon, slips down beneath one's feet. But in the quiet of a churchyard, coming suddenly on it from the city's hum, in Greyfriars on an August day, or by a playing-ground in Chelsea, somewhere nestling near a lowland hill the contrast between my own present life and those slabs, or rolls of turf it is this that immediately affects me. Life is a going on, a tumult, an upstanding ; and here is something beneath one, lying prone, surrounded by an oppressive quiet, and willy-nilly brought to rest. Gay lovers, and young maidens, and old chilly men who asked for another year. I think so and I am sorry for them : ' For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey, This pleasing anxious being e'er resign'd, Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day, Nor cast one longing lingering look behind ?' You feel it quivering into poetry, the beautiful equable GRAY 51 reflection stirring by its own intensity towards the highest speech of man, that form of speech which affects us like the light ; and you know, as you hear, that there are greater and more illuminating flights of the human spirit than prose can find words for strange trembling outbursts of the panting soul about whose dread passage into silence this Elegy was written and to unnumbered ages will speak. 52 POETRY AND PROSE BURNS THE eighteenth-century movement in Poetry destroyed itself, and had the course of political history continued undisturbed, Pope's verses would still have been replaced by Scott's. The genius of literature never commits suicide, and the knot into which Poetry had tied herself would have been untied by causes purely literary. The instrument the eighteenth century had fashioned an instrument which, like a club in a fable, grew in its hands proved ultimately too unwieldy for use. To write on selected subjects in a selected style was not permanently possible. The road ended in a cul-de-sac : it was necessary to try again, and to hark back to another opening. We can see the tangle untwining itself in some of the poetry of Cowper, in some of the poetry of Burns, in some of the poetry of Scott. Cowper, at his best a poet of a singular simplicity, no doubt often chooses subjects, such as the public-school system, 1 that have rather a social and educational than a poetical interest, but his place in literary history is due to his many efforts to free himself from the bondage of the eighteenth-century subject. His sub- jects often have a merely natural, playful, or pathetic appeal, and this humanising of the subject is the more 1 Tirocinium. BURNS 53 notable as it is by no means always accompanied with an equal freedom from the eighteenth-century manner. 1 Cowper often cuts himself free from the eighteenth- century subject, less often from the eighteenth-century style. Burns also, essentially romantic though his true genius is, betrays traces of the tradition. He is less in bondage to the eighteenth-century style, yet in his younger days is quite as frequently a prey to the eighteenth-century subject. A whole department of his poetry depends for its interest upon political, moral, or social considerations. Burns cut himself largely free from the eighteenth-century style, without freeing himself at all in the same degree from the eighteenth-century subject. If we wish to see the purely literary emancipation complete an emancipation, I mean, to which nothing but literary causes had contributed we must turn to some of the poetry of Scott. The introductions to the several cantos of Marmion present us with a poet, though with no political impetus behind him, dealing with natural subjects without the aid of artifice. Such was the course of poetry. Literary causes working alone produced this result would in fact, had they been left to work alone, have produced just this result over the whole field of activity. Without the Revolutionary ideas, Glover and Erasmus Darwin would have died, and introductions to Marmion and 1 See the famous ' Rose,' where the eighteenth-century style is so marked we almost fail to observe that the subject is both slightly pathetic and exceedingly delicate, e.g. : ' And the tear that is wiped with a little address May be follow'd perhaps by a smile.' 54 POETRY AND PROSE The Lay sprouted abundantly ; but without the Revolu- tionary ideas we should not have had Blake, Words- worth, Shelley, Byron, the love poetry of Burns, or Scott's chivalric protest. 1 To the French Revolution we do not owe everything in modern poetry, but we do owe its impetus, all that is in it of new fire. Without the French Revolution the eighteenth-century move- ment in poetry would have died ; without the French Revolution the nineteenth-century movement would not have lived. The Revolutionary period and the Elizabethan period were alike in this, that they were both times of beginnings ; times in which the world in which man dwells the world of thought and idea was recreated for him. In the Elizabethan period his whole world was made anew. The coming of the Revolutionary ideas involved a complete reversal of his attitude to society. Of Christian Europe's former ideas on this subject the feudal system is the type. That system, which may be represented diagrammatically by a pendent chain, was dominated by the idea of service, of something owed. It was only at the top of the chain that you thought, if you thought at all, of any one as having a right to anything. Each unit owed a duty to the whole of which he formed a component part, a duty variously determined by his particular place therein. Such a society was based equally on the notions of inequality 1 Scott's revival of chivalric interest, due chiefly, no doubt, to his familiarity with the old Border literature, owed much of its enthusiasm to his dislike of the new Liberal ideas. Mr. Hudson quotes Renan appropriately, 'one belongs to one's century even when one reacts against one's century.' BURNS 55 and of duty. No man was seen as an entity, but only as a part of the larger entity the rest. The idea underlying the feudal system was pre-eminently social ; and this idea, long surviving its concrete expression in feudal tenures and feudal status, this conception of men as forming a society, a chain, a pyramid, a homo- geneous ordered mass, this idea of looking at men as an aggregate, continued till 1789. Let us place against this conception of society the watchwords of the Revolution Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. These words have come to mean almost everything, to express in a vague way the multi- tudinous and even contradictory l ideals of modern democracy, yet in the genesis of Revolutionary idea the first word it is that counts. One begins on the top note. That first word, Liberty, was to be understood in an absolute sense. It is not enough to understand that it stood for freedom from control, individualism ; it meant definitely the right of each man to live his life in his own way for himself, with a view to his own development, without a view to anybody else's. His right to do so, do I say ? no, his duty to do so. Each man has a right, even a duty to himself. The ideal is the individual. One is no longer to look on men as an aggregate, but as a mass of units. The second word, Equality, if we are to understand the motive force of the Revolution, was essentially little more than a repetition. The individual was the ideal, and each was to have an equal right to live his own life, 1 If equality is to be understood in a wide general sense, equality of joy or opportunity, it can be preserved only by derogation from the ideal of liberty. Where liberty is absolute, there must be freedom of competition from which inequality will result. 56 POETRY AND PROSE an equal right to freedom. There was to be an equality of liberty. Liberty and Equality means liberty for all. 1 Each man was to be equal before the law, and what was of even more far-reaching effect, to be equally free from the interference of law in matters which concerned him only. The third word carries its own meaning, but it has also a chorus meaning. All men equally free to develop themselves as men, all individuals equally free from other individuals, were to have no longer any motive for disliking each other. Men were to feel themselves members of one vast family, brothers in freedom. The truth of this statement is not affected by the loose, extended meaning Equality and Fraternity came to bear, nor even by the fact that this loose, extended meaning was in degree always inherent in them. Equality soon came to mean not only that men were equal before the law, but that they were actually equal, of equal value ; not only that they had equal rights, but that they had a right to equal opportunities, equal joys. It soon came to mean this ; in the minds of many of the Revolutionists it meant this from the first ; perhaps it has always carried some of that meaning even in its sound. Every Pharaoh knows in his heart that men are equal in more things, and in things more important, than the things by which they differ. The Puritan consciousness draws the same distinction : ' If not equal all, yet free, Equally free ; for orders and degrees Jar not with liberty, but well consist.' Paradise Lost, v. 791. BURNS 57 No human being, and certainly no great human movement, can be ignorant of the equal sense of the word Equality. Yet this was not the basic idea of the Revolution. It was not an old human fact the Revolu- tion spoke about, it was a new song it sang. Man, this was the leading doctrine, was to justify himself not by what he did in the aggregate, and con- sidering himself as an aggregate, but by what he did as a series of differences. Human life was not to be justified by the mechanism, however perfect, of societies, but by the surprising and infinite varieties, however imperfect, of individuals. The expression of these views is the writings of Rousseau ; indeed, the writings of Rousseau are vital, still, for their expression. To Rousseau man appears wonderful, memorable as a unit. His one discovery, his discovery, epoch-making for the whole of Europe, was the recognition of the interest, the meaning, of any single life. A single human soul coming freshly into contact with the world and man, experiencing for itself, and newly, the whole Universe, its temporary home and .surrounding that is the greatest thing in life. And the experiences of this soul, of the soul as human, when thus brought into contact with whatever is not it, with all that is not, are in a literal sense miraculous. How each new peasant born feels the Earth, the starry night, the emotions of his own heart, the wants of his own body ; this perpetual and new interpretation of the same material, the experiences in life of a being ; this is in each case and for itself a miracle as surprising as the .sun and moon. It is a tremendous thing, this full conception of any 58 POETRY AND PROSE one life and what it means. 1 The whole Universe is created anew for each man. There is one Universe, does one say ? Not at all. There are as many Universes as human beings. I contain the Universe ; in a sense I am the Universe. I am my Universe for me. Those views were born with Rousseau, and though throughout his career his constant effort is to justify them by argument, and even to reduce them in some sort to a system, they were the cause, not the result of his reasoning. They were his music, and pervaded his consciousness. For all that, this interior faith of his takes shape, and becomes concrete as an opposition doctrine. It stands up, from having something against which to lean. The Roman Empire provided Christi- anity with its target, and in France, when Rousseau wrote, the evils of the old social system were glaringly apparent. What was at fault ? Not the heart of man no remedial thinker could say that not the heart of man, for to admit so much was to pronounce the problem insoluble. It was not then the material for society, but something in the arrangement of society that was amiss ! But to speak like this is to say nothing ; even to think thus judicially is to think out of the company of the makers of our thoughts. To Rousseau it was not something in the arrange- ment that was at fault, but the fact of arrangement itself. Society, the social order, is to blame. If only man could be quit of it, ring the knell of artifice, leave the town, seek the country, and resume his natural 1 See Wordsworth's Leech-Gatherer, Michael, the Soldier in the Prelude, and a hundred other instances in his poems. BURNS 59 independence. All our vices arise from our being con- stituted in societies. By himself man is innocent, and of nothing more innocent than of original sin. Rousseau is much too reasonable in his exposition to amuse his readers with a dream of a golden age to come, but his belief or half-belief in its once having existed was, if not an argumentative necessity, at least an argumentative advantage. So it was from the begin- ning as soon as a theorist can so convince himself, he feels the solid rock. In the beginning, Rousseau suggests, men were units. In fact we know now that they were not, and that it was ages before the tribal savage rose to the conception of individual entity. Yet Rousseau half-believed in his state of nature, or did not disbelieve in it. The main matter is, he got other people to believe in it, got even the most sensible people, a hundred years before Sir Henry Maine, to believe it might have been. Men started as units, and being units were good and happy that was the golden age for them. It was only for purposes of convenience they began to form social connections. There arose out of the family, and from a general recognition of its utility, the tribe, and after the tribe the state. Social order is convenient, even beneficial, to its constituents ; but it must always be re- membered that it isn't essential, it isn't original, it is no part of the teaching of Nature. What was at first, and therefore most natural, and therefore best, was Liberty. The aim of Rousseau's politics, then in Dr. Edward Caird's interpretative words l l the aim of politics was to 1 Essays on Literature and Philosophy, 1892. Essays on Rousseau and Wordsworth, a masterly synopsis which has guided all my thinking on Rousseau. <5o POETRY AND PROSE maintain the natural independence of man in spite of the social union.' But there are difficulties. In the first place, men deteriorated by herding together are lazy and assentive ; the whole work is done by the front benches. One of the chief anxieties of the general will has become the preservation of the private will. If society had no other reason for existing, it must exist * to force the individual to be free.' Another difficulty is that a great part of the knowledge man acquires in societies is traditional, and this in itself encourages a tendency to conformity. Before the child has had time to think about the moon, he is told what his fathers be- lieve : that it is a satellite of the earth, or, as sometimes happens, that it is made of green cheese. In either case the child is prevented from discovering the moon for himself, from coming freshly in contact with any- thing. And so just as there must be a comparatively elaborate social system to counteract the sequacious tendencies of the parents, so there must be an elaborate educational system to allow their children to develop naturally, to escape the fond parental net, and to secure, each for himself, a single existence. The process of education, like the process of government, ought largely 'to be negative.' In any case tradition is unreliable. The Ulemas of any Church add decision to decision till the affronted understanding is started on the voyage of unbelief. Not that the body of traditional Divinity is easily credible. Besides there are many such bodies, and to believe one is to disbelieve the rest. Orthodoxy cannot at one and the same time be Jewish, Christian, and Mohammedan. 1 1 Emile^ the Savoyard BURNS 61 Is this to say that just as society cannot tell a child what the world is, because the world is a different thing for each individual, so no Church can tell any man what the Supreme Power is, because the Supreme Power is different with each' man? No; this is not Rousseau, the explanation of whose penetrating influence is that he is tied to no system, least of all to a system touched with the scepticism of idealism. He is a revolutionary thinker who never thinks of himself as such. On the subject of religion, if we interrogated him, he would tell us that the heavens must be constant ; that here at least there must be absolute truth if only we could find it. How, then, is it to be found ? We are to find it, says Rousseau, by finding the interior sentiment of each man, what all men naturally and for themselves have in common in belief ; and this basis, really common, a part of the * common reason,' is a belief in a Supreme Being and a Future State. The savants assail him with a fanfaronnade of questions what is meant by these terms ; is it impossible that the definitions may be so variant as to be exclusive ; have a Polynesian and Mr. Jowett really a common meeting-ground ; is this resulting substratum of belief a thing that actually exists as a belief; can it be said that Arnold and a priestess of Vesta see the Universe even for a moment in the same way? Rousseau it gave him his power would have answered Yes to all these questions. We may answer them as we please. The point is, Rousseau did believe that there was an interior belief ; that this interior belief was true, and that you arrived at religious truth, as at everything else, by the testimony of units, by an appeal to the instinct of the individual. Is this too logical an account of Rousseau's thinking? 62 POETRY AND PROSE Is it not possible, in a few pages, too logically to sum- marise the thoughts of an episodic and qualificatory thinker, who expresses himself in a romance, a treatise on education, an autobiography, and a dozen occasional pamphlets? Unquestionably ; but however too general as an account of Rousseau, it is for that reason the better as an account of Rousseauism, that floating body of startling, logical, and attractive opinion which, consolidated by his works, and detaching itself from them, filled the air which was breathed not only by Western Europe, but by Burns, the young Words- worth, the young Coleridge, and in a later day Shelley. Genius moves at the bidding of great impulses ; re- volutions are made by attitudes, not by the careful reading of twenty-seven volumes, and the balancing of their contents. It is often said that Voltaire and Rousseau made the French Revolution, but origins are not quite so precise. It would be more accurate to say it was made by Rousseauism, a movement which, it is true, receives its most equable and beautiful exposi- tion in the works of Rousseau, but which was wider than himself. What made the French Revolution was a conception to which the mind of man was slowly turning the conception of the Individual Life. States were now to be judged by the amount of inde- pendence they allowed to their citizens. So embracing indeed was the new conception of Liberty that it passed outside the confines of the several states. Coleridge wanted to start a state where no state was. No state was to arrogate the power to interfere with its neigh- bours. Just as no individual or collection of individuals had a right to coerce any other individual, so no state or collection of states had the right to coerce any other. BURNS 63 If the worship of Individual Liberty is the most striking note of the new poetry, hardly less prominent is the worship of National Liberty, the spirit of Nation- alism. Every nation, every collection of men owning a common history and conscious of homogeneity, had an indefeasible right, as long as it did not interfere with others, to live its life in its own way. It might not be a very good way. Poland was not a high example of a civilised state ; yet ' Freedom shrieked when Kosciusko fell.' It might not be a good way, yet on the whole, just as societies arrived at the best results by allowing free play to individual development, so the world arrives at the best results by allowing free play to national developments ' See approach proud Edward's power Edward ! chains and slaverie.' All this was in the domain of theory. Publicists still dispute as to the respective spheres of the Protagonists in the modern duel of the Man versus the State. Im- perial Britain and Imperial Germany call up the sun with their respective Growings, while the world amazed looks on. The small nations produce our only litera- ture, or the oppressed of Russia's evil dream. The world has not yet settled these questions of govern- ment, nor ever will. Truth is powerful, but Mammon will prevail. Yet in these times of which I speak, there seemed no limit to the power of Liberty and Love. How happy to have been born when the whole past seemed slain, and to have moved among those people with shining faces who stood on the edge of a new world. Coleridge, indeed, in his youth hears this music leaving Earth and floating heavenward, sung even by the ' blue 64 POETRY AND PROSE rejoicing sky,' the sky in which, in fact, marches ' the army of unalterable law ' ; but to see it was the main thing, to believe that the Universe was voting Liberal and had put on the cap of the young Republic. In the eighteenth century, poets wrote of statesmen, soldiers, courtiers. In the opening of the nineteenth- century movement the poets were interested in human beings human beings variously employed, but interest- ing because they were human beings. The human heart and its primary movements and affections, Man and Nature as the one freshly affects and feels the other, these are the subjects which are dealt with by Burns and Wordsworth. The pure idea of the French Revolution in all its nakedness and ideality is seen most clearly in the poetry of Shelley, but that idea differently interpreted is re- sponsible for the best part of the poetry of Wordsworth and Burns. With Burns our national poetry takes fire again as it took fire in the time of Shakespeare. Great as are Cowper's occasional triumphs on simple subjects and in a simple style, he is properly to be described as the last of the eighteenth-century poets. He is an eighteenth-century poet with gleams of the nineteenth century in him. Exactly the reverse can be said of Burns. He is a nineteenth-century poet who betrays traces of the tradition that was then rapidly expiring. And this is markedly true ; for while the eighteenth-century work in Cowper does not fall markedly in tone and sentiment below his level indeed it is his level, his level which occasionally he shoots above the eighteenth-century work in Burns can be distinguished by the merest novice BURNS 65 in criticism from the real poetry of Burns, so markedly does it lie below the mountain-ranges of his mind. To speak of this eighteenth-century work before speaking of the real poetry of Burns, of the real Burns. In the first place, occurring very often in his poetry, chiefly, no doubt, in the English poems but yet occurring very often, for the English poems are very numerous there are slips into the artificialism of speech which was the worst part of the eighteenth- century habit. Occasionally there is a terrifying lapse as when the poet says, recollecting the fate of Mary Stuart, ' Tho' something like moisture conglobes in my eye ' ; and there are references without number to Phoebus, Venus, the Queen of Love, Bacchus, Boreas and the rest, personages in whom Burns did not believe. Nor are these trifles ; they bear witness to a habit of mind, the same habit that bears larger fruit in the whole series of unreal pastorals. Burns was no pastoral poet ; for the pastoral he had no real feeling ; it was as obviously an exercise as it was obviously an unsuccess- ful exercise for him. Still more plainly do we find traces of this weakness in Burns's persistent habit of dressing up his thoughts, of his failure to trust them. Take this exclamation from * Highland Mary,' ' But oh ! fell Death's untimely frost, That nipt my Flower sae early ! ' or this from 'Thou Gloomy December,' 1 Fond lovers' parting is sweet, painful pleasure, Hope beaming mild on the soft parting hour ; But the dire feeling, O farewell for ever ! Anguish unmingled, and agony pure ! ' 66 POETRY AND PROSE or this from the ' Farewell to Nancy,' ' Deep in heart-wrung tears I '11 pledge thee, Warring sighs and groans I '11 wage thee. Who shall say that Fortune grieves him, While the star of hope she leaves him ?' or this from ' Mary in Heaven,' ' O Mary ! dear departed shade ! Where is thy place of blissful rest ? See'st thou thy lover lowly laid ? Hear'st thou the groans that rend his breast ?' or the whole poem which follows. Miss Isabella M'Leod of Raasay had lost her sister and her sister's husband, and Burns thus painted Isabella's woe : * Raving winds around her blowing, Yellow leaves the woodland strowing, By a river hoarsely roaring, Isabella stray'd deploring : " Farewell, hours that late did measure Sunshine days of joy and pleasure ; Hail, thou gloomy night of sorrow, Cheerless night that knows no morrow ! O'er the past too fondly wandering, On the hopeless future pondering ; Chilly grief my life-blood freezes, Fell despair my fancy seizes. Life, thou soul of every blessing, Load to misery most distressing, Gladly how would I resign thee, And to dark oblivion join thee ! " ' Nor are these instances perversely selected. The last, with its 'load to misery most distressing,' is almost the only poem of Burns about which he was actually conceited. It was once sung in his presence by a lady who knew not the author, and she asked him if he knew BURNS 67 whose were .the words. * Mine, madam they are indeed my very best verses ' ; and he goes on : i She took not the smallest notice of them ! I was going to make a New-Testament quotation about " casting pearls," but that would be too virulent, for the lady is actually a woman of sense and taste.' The most irritating feature of this habit of writing execrably is that it pursues Burns even when he is writing at his best. ' To Mary in Heaven ' has lines of merit : * Time but th' impression stronger makes, As streams their channels deeper wear.' The quotation from the * Farewell to Nancy ' precedes an immortal verse. A poem will open with a snatch of song so penetrating in its depth of passionate feeling, love, anger, grief, that one seems to hear the thud of a blow that has gone home. Here is a picture, a few swift words, of the lover intoxicated with success : ' Yestreen I had a pint o' wine, A place where body saw na ; Yestreen lay on this breast o j mine The gowden locks of Anna.' But after this it goes on : 'The hungry Jew in wilderness, Rejoicing o'er his manna, Was naething to my hiney bliss Upon the lips of Anna.' And here is another where the anxiety of the lover foreboding doom is completely expressed. The verse is heavy with anxious though hopeless fears : ' Long, long the night, Heavy comes the morrow, While my soul's delight Is on her bed of sorrow.' 68 POETRY AND PROSE But after this it goes on : % ' Can I cease to care, Can I cease to languish, While my darling Fair, Is on the couch of anguish ! ' What is to be made of such discrepancy ? But to say this is not to say all. It is to say that Burns on occasion writes execrably, and so he does. It is to say that he does so most commonly when, not content with the simple expression of a real feeling, he attempts in true eighteenth-century manner to dress up his thoughts. But when we have thus sifted Burns's bad work from his good and put it behind us, it is still to be said that his good work is not all of a piece. On the contrary, it is of two distinct pieces. It is all good writing, but it is not all poetically good. There are indeed two sides to the real Burns, the Burns who is in his element, writing with the security of mastery and from his heart. There are two sides to this Burns the prose side and the poetical side. On the one side his triumphs are in their way as undoubted as his triumphs on the other. But the one series of triumphs would never have entitled him to the name of a poet ; the other has established his fame as a poetical writer the poetical writer, may I say? Fortunately here, and the distinction cannot be made with Burns's bad work, the distinction is one of date. Almost all Burns's prose work in verse was finished by the time he was twenty-eight. Almost all his poetry was written in his last ten years. Of his prose work in verse what it is necessary to say can be said shortly. It is indeed most excellent, BURNS 69 but it is prose work and very definitely so. Its sub- jects are politics, theology, morals ; its manner is terse and sober to a degree : nowhere are the sound sense and masculine judgment of the social human being better in evidence. The form the verses take is generally that of the admonitory or friendly epistle, the rhyming epistle written to Davie, Lapraik, Simson, or a Young Friend ; sometimes, however, they take the form of a theological remonstrance addressed to the strait-laced, and some- times even that of the political song. Enclosing the famous lines ' A man 's a man for a' that ' to his correspondent, George Thomson, Burns says with admirable truth, ' The following will be allowed, I think, to be two or three pretty good prose thoughts inverted into rhyme.' It is the criticism of the mature poet, it is true ; when Burns passed this criticism he was not in the habit of writing prose in verse, but it is a perfectly true criticism, and a perfectly true criticism of nearly half of Burns's total output. Take this from the ' Epistle to J. Lapraik,' 'A set o'dull, conceited hashes Confuse their brains in college-classes ! They gang in stirks, and come out asses' ; or this from the ' Epistle to William Simson,' ' The muse, nae poet ever fand her, Till by himsel he learn'd to wander ' ; or this from the l Epistle to a Young Friend,' 'A man mayhae an honest heart, Tho' poortith hourly stare him ; A man may tak a neibor's part, Yet hae nae cash to spare him ' ; 70 POETRY AND PROSE or this, 1 I '11 no say, men are villains a' ; The real, harden'd wicked, Wha hae nae check but human law, Are to a few restricket ; But, och ! mankind are unco weak, An' little to be trusted ; If self the wavering balance shake, It 's rarely right adjusted ! ' or this, as obvious, from the l Epistle to Davie,' ' It 's no in titles nor in rank ; It's no in wealth like Lon'on bank, To purchase peace and rest ; It 's no in makin' muckle, mair ; It's no in books, it 's no in lear, To make us truly blest : If happiness hae not her seat An' centre in the breast, We may be wise, or rich, or great, But never can be blest ; Nae treasures nor pleasures Could make us happy lang ; The heart aye 's the part aye That makes us right or wrang' ; or this, more daring, from the address to ' Scotch Drink,' ' When neibors anger at a plea, An' just as wud as wud can be, How easy can the barley-bree Cement the quarrel ! Its aye the cheapest lawyer's fee To taste the barrel.' Nor must the excellence of the sentiments disguise their character from us. It is an admirable prose admonition, but it is still a prose admonition, when Burns advises the ' Unco Guid ': 'Then gently scan your brother man, Still gentler sister woman ; Tho' they may gang a kennin wrang, To step aside is human : BURNS 71 One point must still be greatly dark, The moving Why they do it ; And just as lamely can ye mark, How far perhaps they rue it.' Here is even a thought tenderly wise, with the tender wisdom of Gray : 'The poor inhabitant below Was quick to learn and wise to know, And keenly felt the friendly glow, And softer flame ; But thoughtless follies laid him low, And stain'd his name ! ' And here is a humane sentiment : 4 Many and sharp the num'rous ills Inwoven with our frame ! More pointed still we make ourselves, Regret, remorse, and shame ! And man, whose heaven-erected face The smiles of love adorn, Man's inhumanity to man Makes countless thousands mourn ! ' Here is a social poetry deeper in observation than Pope's, richer in humanity than Goldsmith's, more weighty than Johnson's. The fact is, such writing has a ripeness, a grip, a huge tense sense, that makes the best work of the eighteenth century look like child's play. It may be asked how a writer with the prose side so fully and masculinely developed in him ever became so astonishing a poet. The answer is that the process was gradual. Among this prose work one finds imbedded work of a totally different order, work of a truly poetical kind. The admirably balanced and sober mind takes fire sporadically ; first of all because of the flame within him always at white heat, the * softer flame ' ; afterwards 72 POETRY AND PROSE because his admirable good sense itself bubbles to a flame in the rush and hurry of his unapproachable satires ; unapproachable because, while wildly fierce at times, they have always, sometimes even to excess for satire, the sap and juice of his abundant and rich humanity. The Hebraic freedoms, the strokes of Dutch painting do not disguise this, rather they emphasise it. There is an abandon, a zest about Burns at his freest as a satirist, in 'The Jolly Beggars,' ' Holy Willie,' 'The Holy Fair,' that is truly poetical. Burns, the greatest of Scotch humourists, and a humorist essentially Scotch with all the sly kindness of the race, has indeed left to the Scotch people to the world too, no doubt, but especially to the Scotch people a wholly unique collection of humorous poems. I do not say they are all poetical there are many of them that are essentially prose produc- tions but they almost all have glints of poetry in them. They are conceived in so full a vein of humour that it runs over constantly into those bold sallies, those outbursts of unpremeditated feeling, the habit of indulging in which belongs to the poetical mind alone. In Burns's humorous verses, not merely in the satires which everyone knows ; in Burns's humorous narratives like ' Tarn o' Shanter ' ; in his mock elegies, 1 Tarn Samson 's dead,' ' Poor Mailie's Elegy ' ; in his tales of bucolic love, ' Last May a braw wooer cam doun the lang glen,' in these poems as well as in the satires there is, if one cares to look for it, a great deal of poetry. Pathos and humour are so blended and come with such unstudied expression that you have BURNS 73 not only a great humorous writer but a great poetical writer too. These are, perhaps, the poems for which Burns is most loved in his native country a country of long-headed prose-writers with a Celtic dash in them. He is loved not so much because he is pre-eminently a poet, though that he is so is the main fact about him, but because in his best-known poems there is displayed the humour and good sense of his country- men, touched with ecstasy ; poetical rapture fleshified, or rather good solid bone and muscle rising to a spiritual exhilaration. For the poor Lowland Scot in his damp cottage or his hive of modern industry, to read these humorous poems is indeed to taste the rapture of rising irresponsibility. For him it is an intellectual intoxication. His chosen poet, the chosen poet of the Scots, lives constantly among those flashes which come from the soberest after a good dinner, and set the table in a roar. Caution, solidity, prudence, they are there, but they do not bar the door on humour * in the dawing.' ' There 's nought but care on ev'ry han', In ev'ry hour that passes, O : What signifies the life o' man, An' 'twere na for the lasses, O ? The war'ly race may riches chase, An' riches still may fly them, O ; An' tho' at last they catch them fast, Their hearts can ne'er enjoy them, O. But gie me a cannie hour at e'en, My arms about my dearie, O ; An' war'ly cares and war'ly men, May a' gae tapsalteerie, O ! 74 POETRY AND PROSE For you sae douce, ye sneer at this, Ye 're nought but senseless asses, O : The wisest man the warF e'er saw, He dearly lov'd the lasses, O. Auld Nature swears, the lovely dears Her noblest work she classes, O : Her prentice han' she try'd on man, An' then she made the lasses, O. Green grow the rashes, O ; Green grow the rashes, O ; The sweetest hours that e'er I spend, Are spent among the lasses, O.' There is something in this that sets one thinking of characters more emphasised than those of the South. There is an appreciation of the grey of life in it, a kind of Glasgow sky for a background, and a brave sense of the delights of human kind. There is this, and added to this a sudden breach of decorum, a rising note, as if prudence were finally to be given the good-bye, that is eminently the sad Northerner touched with emotion. In this class of poems, if in any single class of poems, is to be found the real Burns. But this versa- tile genius was developing, had, in fact, developed another side of him before he died. There pours forth from him in his last eight years a cataract ' of undying song.' Burns, who, had he died at thirty would have died a national poet, dying at thirty-seven died as the folk-poet of the world. The songs of the people ! Nowhere in any literature is there to be found so great a folk-poet as Burns. He is sufficiently near to the soil to feel with the perfect simplicity and directness of the true folk-poet. 1 One 1 And also to be familiar with the oral literature of the soil, the songs of the countryside, of which Burns made as free use as Shake- speare of the plays of the early Elizabethan stage. Like all the greatest original forces Burns was also a product, and many of his songs were more than a hundred years in the making. BURNS 75 can trace this quality, perhaps the rarest of all poetical qualities, as prominent in him quite early. When he is twenty-two he thus celebrates a rustic mistress : ' Yestreen, when to the trembling string The dance gaed thro' the lighted ha', To thee my fancy took its wing, I sat, but neither heard nor saw : Tho' this was fair and that was braw And yon the toast of a' the town, I sigh'd, and said amang them a', " Ye are na Mary Morison."' ' A poor fiddler at a village practising on the sanded floor of some school-room,' and the buxom lassie who is going out to service polkaing up and down the floor. It is tremendous, and reminds one of nothing so much as of the cry of Leontes when at last he understands that the seeming statue is Hermione, and alive : ' Oh, she's warm.' l Or take this, with its picture of the boon companion sitting in the candle-blaze till the night is late : * As I cam by Crochallan, I cannilie keeket ben ; Rattlin', roarin' Willie Was sittin' at yon boord-en' ; Sittin' at yon boord-en', And amang gude companie ; Rattlin', roarin' Willie, You 're welcome hame to me ! ' 1 For this comparison I am indebted to the conversation of the author of ' Tannhauser ' and ' Merlin, 3 the late Mr. Macleod Fullarton, Q.C., who was responsible (Lallan Songs and German Lyrics} for some of our best translations from Heine. 76 POETRY AND PROSE There is an unmatchable freedom in the lollop of the verses, freer than the canter of the sleekest mare : ' My love, she's but a lassie yet, My love, she's but a lassie yet ; We '11 let her stand a year or twa, She'll no be hauf sae saucy yet.' In comin' by the brig o' Dye, At Darlet we a blink did tarry ; As day was dawin in the sky, We drank a health to bonie Mary. Theniel Menzies' bonie Mary, Theniel Menzies' bonie Mary, Charlie Grigor tint his plaidie, Kissin' Theniel's bonie Mary.' Will ye go to the Hielands, Leezie Lindsay, Will ye go to the Hielands wi' me ? Will ye go to the Hielands, Leezie Lindsay, My pride and my darling to be.' ' It's up yon heathery mountain, And down yon scroggy glen, We daurna gang a-milking, For Charlie and his men ! ' * Mally's meek, Mally's sweet, Mally 's modest and discreet ; Mally's rare, Mally's fair, Mally 's ev'ry way complete.' Occasionally in Shelley's songs there is a strain of unearthly music, a faint air coming from aloft, getting itself sung by harps celestial and to melodies not ours. Burns's command of verse, in its own way, is as won- derful : it is like a human being, but it is like a human being in tune, so fresh, so easy ; the natural song of the earth and its toilers ; like running water. However, it is the sentiment of Burns's songs that has caught the ear of the world. There is the same fluent music, only there has entered into it the music of BURNS 77 humanity, its passion, its grief, its strange come-from- nowhere melancholy, the eerie feeling we have some- times while living, because all of us by the same road are compelled to go. Sometimes we have the sentiment in its lightest form where the tone has not begun to deepen and where the humour is still alive ; sometimes we have it with just a suspicion of the sense of loss : * Bonie wee thing, cannie wee thing, Lovely wee thing, wert them mine, I wad wear thee in my bosom, Lest my jewel it should tine.' Or again, with a most delicious open melancholy : ' Out over the Forth, I look to the north ; But what is the north and its Highlands to me ? The south nor the east gie ease to my breast, The far foreign land, or the wide rolling sea. But I look to the west when I gae to rest, That happy my dreams and my slumbers may be ; For far in the west lives he I loe best, The man that is dear to my babie and me.' Or more poignantly : ' My heart is sair I dare na tell, My heart is sair for Somebody ; I could wake a winter night l For the sake o' Somebody.' More poignantly still : ' O wert thou in the cauld blast, On yonder lea, on yonder lea, My plaidie to the angry airt, I 'd shelter thee, I 'd shelter thee.' 1 The last two lines are at least as old as Ramsay's Tea Table Miscellany, but they are not part of a poignant song. 78 POETRY AND PROSE Or where the melancholy is creeping into the tale of love : ' O wat ye wha 's in yon town, Ye see the e'enin' sun upon, The dearest maid 's in yon town, That e'enin' sun is shining on ' ; or touched with the tear of parting : 1 1 '11 aye ca' in by yon town, And by yon garden -green again ; I '11 aye ca' in by yon town, And see my bonie Jean again.' On this theme, indeed, recollection, reminiscence, part- ing, Burns has written for all time, from ' We twa hae paidl'd in the burn,' of the Scotch good-night, to the bold simplicity of ' John Anderson ' and the beautiful lines which he added to the old quatrain : 4 Go, fetch to me a pint o' wine, And fill it in a silver tassie ; That I may drink before I go, A service to my bonie lassie ' ; the four beautiful lines full of the smell of the sea : ' The boat rocks at the pier o' Leith ; Fu' loud the wind blaws frae the Ferry ; The ship rides by the Berwick-law, And 1 maun leave my bonie Mary.' There is a mingling of the sadness which comes with time and a rapturous confession of the joys of the past in this most famous piece : ' How long and dreary is the night, When I am frae my dearie ! I sleepless lye frae e'en to morn, Tho' I were ne'er so weary : BURNS 79 When I think on the happy days I spent wi j you my dearie : And now what lands between us lie, How can I be but eerie ! How slow ye move, ye heavy hours, As ye were wae and weary ! It was na sae ye glinted by, When I was wi' my dearie ! ' The sudden return of the mind upon its distant joy, and the triumph of that ungrammatical ' It was not so ye glinted by,' might perhaps stand as the triumphant instance of the lightning effects of poetry. Yet sudden transitions from one mood to another are not common with Burns. He looses himself on a single note, seizing with poetical insistence on the poetical heart of the matter. When Byron thinks of a battlefield he thinks effectively, thinks of these ' Rider and horse, friend, foe, in one red burial blent.' When Burns thinks of it, he thinks only of natural loss. There was much to say of Culloden or Drumossie moor, but the poet has this only to say : 'The lovely lass o' Inverness, Nae joy nor pleasure can she see ; For, e'en to morn she cries " alas ! " And ay the saut tear blin's her e'e. " Drumossie moor, Drumossie day A waefu' day it was to me ! For there I lost my father dear, My father dear, and brethren three." ' It seizes upon the truth with a deadly insistence : * When wild war's deadly blast was blawn And gentle peace returning, Wi' mony a sweet babe fatherless, And mony a widow mourning.' 8o POETRY AND PROSE Yes, that is about it ; there is perhaps not much more to say about wild war than that. The chivalry of it, its nobility, its lost causes, Burns feels on occasion, but he feels them as a Scotch patriot or Jacobite not normally, that is, but only when the most senti- mental part of Scotch history has displaced his natural sentiment ; and even here he is true to the purely human sorrow when the occasion is sorrowful : ' It was a' for our rightfu' King We left fair Scotland's strand ; It was a' for our rightfu' King We e'er saw Irish land, my dear, We e'er saw Irish land. Now a' is done that men can do, And a' is done in vain ; My Love and Native Land fareweel, For I maun cross the main, my dear, For I maun cross the main. He turn'd him right and round about, 1 Upon the Irish shore ; And gae his bridle reins a shake, With adieu for evermore, my dear. And adieu for evermore. The soger frae the wars returns, The sailor frae the main ; But I hae parted frae my love, Never to meet again, my dear, Never to meet again.' The reality deepens at the close. After all, it is what counts. I am sorry for the Russian people, but I should not think of Russia if my own sorrows struck 1 The third verse is old, and was borrowed both by Burns and Scott ('A weary lot is thine, fair maid 'Rokeby, Canto IV.), but whereas in Scott's lyric it beats the rest, Burns immediately beats it by sheer strength of human sympathy. Scott decorates his original charm- ingly with flowers. Burns uses it as a stone in his building. BURNS 81 home. No grief has the depth of a private grief, and Burns, of all poets, knows these primary facts about human nature best, knows them and lives with them. From this farmer, peasant, yeoman and exciseman, there is little to disguise the realities of life. About grief and love he has the last word, for he feels both simply. For the lady of high degree, it may not be the pure flame of love alone that animates the breast ; the lover may wish to possess what other men desire, to possess from a feeling akin to envy. Admiration, a desire for a stimulating companionship, these may mingle with elemental affection. It is different with Mary, Jean, or Peggy, the soft female thing with whom his whole being is at rest, lulled to a sleep of contentment in a companionship that can get no words for it, just the companionship of mating. And this strange uni- versal human feeling, what the peasant feels for the peasant lass, the unspoken sympathy of the woman as woman, has never before or since been voiced so simply so simply that you begin to understand why the first man yearned for his Eve, untutored, undecorated, unloquacious Eve. It is the male speak- ing ; the bird, beast, or man sharing a rapture common to the earth. The whole creation groaneth ; yes, but it pulsates too : ' My Luve is like a red, red rose, That's newly sprung in June : My Luve is like the melodic, That 's sweetly play'd in tune. As fair art thou, my bonie lass, So deep in luve am I ; And I will luve thee still, my Dear, Till a' the seas gang dry. F 82 POETRY AND PROSE Till a' the seas gang dry, my Dear, And the rocks melt wi' the sun ; And I will luve thee still, my Dear, While the sands o' life shall run. And fare-thee-weel, my only Luve ! And fare-thee-weel, a while ! And I will come again, my Luve, Tho' 'twere ten thousand mile ! ' l Nothing is said ; no, nothing is said, for there is nothing to say. It is a felt companionship a felt companionship which the Browning of ' Two in the Campagna ' and the Shelley of the * Lines written in the Bay of Naples ' will miss and must miss. Perhaps a man of culture or convention must always, in some degree, miss it, and that is why our cultivated poets write so little love poetry that is purely of the heart ; write, instead, love poetry that is ideal, or affected, or romantic ; why Milton and even Shakespeare are rather poor hands at it, and why Arnold evidently thinks this immortal love poetry, perhaps the only true love poetry in the world, for Sappho speaks of passion, of light account. There is seldom anything light or vulgar in it, though equally there is nothing of cultivation. It is true, a stream so unending runs to shallows, chatters sometimes when one does not hear. But always it is grandly common, untroubled, fondness in its elements and without gene. To the cultivated poet domestic love affords little opening for poignant 1 This masterpiece is all made up of snatches from various old songs, and the twelfth line is the only one of which no rude original is known ; but the snatches taken separately have no remarkable effect. How different when a singleness of feeling welds them together ! There is no more striking instance in literature of the 'Ring 'and the ' Book.' BURNS 83 themes, and yet with it absent from his love-story there is, for him, immediately, an impropriety of which, whether as attracting or repelling, there is no thought in the movements of affection. 1 Burns does not think about such things. The old peasant-courtship of the country- side supplied him subjects at once actual and ideal. One sees the field for the display of feeling, and over what experiences a poetry at once so jocular and so tender, so outspoken and so intimate, might freely range. Soiled with self his actual feelings were, but how single they become when realised in their merely human reference by so natural an imagination. He speaks constantly of the lived occasion ; from the passing charms which he fits to some world air, to the grief or ecstasy which, generalised in the poetic consciousness, brings from him the words of life. Indeed, these last emotions are sometimes mingled, and one can see, at one moment, the truant husband- lover and the sick sorrow he has brought to the friendly door ; the sick sorrow and the sick longing, the sick longing and the happy longing, the triumph in the lover's good air. The verses which we may suppose to be spoken by his Jean are irresistibly affecting, not the less that all is subdued by a pre- vailing melancholy as if the poet for once had felt the oppression of the real : 1 It must be admitted that Arnold's own poetry affords an instance of a love poetry that is at once cultivated and genuine. He writes very little of it, but what he does write is beautifully true. Cf. his treatment of the Tristram and Iseult theme with Tennyson's or Swinburne's. It is curious that Swinburne also in his first sketch introductory to this subject (Undergraduate Papers} starts very genuinely. 84 POETRY AND PROSE 1 O how can I be blythe and glad, Or how can I gang brisk and braw. When the bonie lad that I lo'e bes Is o'er the hills and far awa ! My father pat me frae his door, My friends they hae disown'd me a But I hae ane will tak my part, The bonie lad that's far awa. A pair o' glooves he bought to me And silken snoods he gae me twa And I will wear them for his sake, The bonie lad that's far awa. O weary Winter soon will pass, And Spring will cleed the birken shaw And my young babie will be born, And he '11 be hame that J s far awa.' There is no poetry like this. I do not say that there is not greater poetry, but there is no poetry so free from any thought of man's arrangements, so im- mediately concerned with the feeling itself. A human feeling that is what interests Burns, and it is in the expression of these simple, human feelings that he is unmatched. A human feeling, because he was above all things himself human, and spent nobly, generously, foolishly, commonly, in common joys his blood and tears. A stumble in the snow when he had left his cronies in the bar-parlour at Dumfries, a short but heavy sleep, and good-bye, after a year's weary fighting, to the sun, ' Let him shine, my dear ; he will not shine much longer for me,' good-bye to the sun and to humanity. 1 A foolish life and worse, perhaps.' No, the moral is too trite ; just the life of the human body as ex- perienced by the human soul the soul sitting within BURNS 85 its clay castle and recording it so that we who read may profit. To what purpose? I have often asked myself as I have read the lives and heard the cries of poets to no other purpose but that man may know more of man. 86 POETRY AND PROSE WORDSWORTH WORDSWORTH, like Burns, was a child of Revolutionary idea. Like Burns, also, the whole shape of his mind was affected by the influence of writings breathing a romantic or anti-classical or anti-formal spirit. He had, of course, neither the same free access as Burns to the love-song of the country-side, nor Scott's long school- ing at one of the fountain-heads of ballad literature. But Burns had written his own songs before Wordsworth was at his zenith, and, by 1800, Philips and Percy if it was Philips who was responsible for the 1723 Collection of Old Ballads were old names. What is worth remark in the prefaces of both books is the consciousness of the writers that they were innovating. The editor of the Collection of Old Ballads had largely the interest of the mere curio-hunter, but we see 1 in his 1 ' If there be any Beauties in the Book, 'tis certainly his (the reader's) Business to find them out ; and if there ben't why, he can't say I cheated him : I never pretended to give him anything more than an old Song. ... I would not be thought to ridicule any- thing in Sacred Writ, and therefore I will pass over in Silence, what I might say of the Times of Moses, Jephthah and David, and go directly amongst the Pagans. And here the very Prince of Poets, old Homer, if we may trust ancient Records, was nothing more than a blind Ballad-singer. ... It would be endless, to prove that the several Poets whose Bustos I have put in my Frontispiece, were Ballad-writers. For what else can we make of Pindar's Lyrics ? Anacreon would never sit down contented without his Bottle and his Song. Horace could drop the Praises of Augustus and WORDSWORTH 87 apologetic and absurd preface how glad he was of the shield of antiquarianism. Percy apologises too. ' As most of these ballads are of great simplicity, and seem to have been merely written for the people, the Editor was long in doubt, whether, in the present state of improved literature, they could be deemed worthy of the attention of the public.' Johnson had given his sanction to the publication, his incapacity for feeling poetry blinding him to its importance, but his massively acute intellect was quick to take alarm at its success. How good a critic he was, 1 within Maecenas, to sing the Adventures of his Journey to Brundusium and the Baulk he met with from a Servant Wench in a Country Alehouse ; and this Song of his it was, which gave Occasion to a modern Ballad amongst us, called, The Coy Cook-maid. Cowley has left too many Works of this Kind to need quoting ; and Suckling's Wedding will never be forgot.' 1 ' When Dr. Percy first published his collection of ancient English ballads, perhaps he was too lavish in commendation of the beautiful simplicity and poetic merit he supposed himself to discover in them. This circumstance provoked Johnson to observe one evening at Miss Reynolds's tea-table, that he could rhyme as well, and as elegantly, in common narrative and conversation. " For instance," says he, " As with my hat upon my head I walk'd along the Strand, I there did meet another man With his hat in his hand." Or, to render such poetry subservient to my own immediate use, " I therefore pray thee, Renny dear, That thou wilt give to me, With cream and sugar soften'd well, Another dish of tea. Nor fear that I, my gentle maid, Shall long detain the cup, When once unto the bottom I Have drunk the liquor up. 88 POETRY AND PROSE his limits, may be gauged by his uneasy ridicule. He saw the danger to the existing school of poetry, and was the boldest in crying t Fire.' The truth is, the eighteenth-century movement in poetry was mortally wounded by Percy's publication. In his volumes, despite their odd jumble of contents and his own persevering joinering work, men came in contact with a directness of narrative and a simplicity of effect which made the efforts of a cultivated literature look extremely laboured. At times in these ballads everything is accomplished by the mere telling of the fact : ' With that ther cam an arrowe hastely Forthe off a mightie wane, Hit hathe strekene the yerle Duglas In at the brest bane. Thoroue lyvar and longs bathe The sharp arrowe ys gane, That never after in all his lyffe days He spayke mo wordes but ane.' It has the sound of ending in it. Sometimes, equally successfully, the sentiment of an occasion is fully brought out by the realisation of the event ; no comment is necessary : ' So on the morrowe the mayde them byears Off byrch, and hasell so " gray " ; Many wedous with wepying tears, Cam to fach ther makys a-way.' Yet hear, alas ! this mournful truth, Nor hear it with a frown ; Thou canst not make the tea so fast As I can gulp it down." And thus he proceeded through several more stanzas, till the reverend critic cried out for quarter. Such ridicule, however, was unmerited.' George Steevens, the Editor of Shakespeare, wrote this in 1785. WORDSWORTH 89 In the typical romantic ballad * Edom o' Gordon,' a serving-man of the lady, round whose castle burning wood is set, turns traitor to her : ' And ein wae worth ye, Jock my man, I paid ye well your hire ; Quhy pow ye out the ground-wa stane, To me lets in the fire ? Ye paid me weil my hire, lady ; Ye paid me weil my fee : But now I me Edom o' Gordon's man, Maun either doe or die.' There is no better instance even in Wordsworth of the uncovering of the breast. The callous, low nature has been bought, and he runs no danger in saying so to his doomed lady. The sincerity of those nameless writers is as great as their feeling for the picturesque. In the story of Sir Gawaine's marriage we have this expression : * I am glad as grasse wold be of raine,' and a little earlier the picture : * He said as I came over a more I see a lady where shee sate Betweene an oke and a green hollen Shee was clad in red scarlette.' 1 It is difficult to characterise the pathos of some of those pieces, so unobtrusive is it, like that felt through- out ' Young Waters,' or, as often (as at the end of ' O Waly, Waly,' for instance), in the mere statement. There it misses the intensity of Burns, not on account 1 There is the whole of forest greenery in this childish verse. ' The roo full rekeles ther sche rinnes, To make the game and glee : The fawcon and the fesaunt both, Amonge the holtes on hee.' Battle of Otterbourne. 90 POETRY AND PROSE of any defect of truth in the pathos, but just because the pathos is more unobtrusive. The heart that beats there is not a mighty heart transmuting sorrow into passion ; rather that of one content feelingly to observe the sorrows of the world. In Percy's collection there are few of those strokes of driving power which occasionally distinguished the Scotch balladists. There is the familiar passage in ' Edom o' Gordon ' where the vivid colours of young girlhood are contrasted with a violent death ; l there is the simply stated tragedy in ' Edward, Edward,' and in ' The Jew's Daughter ' the voice of the poet clangs through : ' The lead is wondrous heavy, mither, The well is wondrous deip.' But in the main the collection is not rich in instances of native force. What it chiefly made clear to the poetical genius of the country was the value of the stated fact. To see this we have only to contrast these volumes with such a poem as Hamilton's ' Braes ot Yarrow ' with its studied wistful pathos and its lovely dragging length ; an effect produced by the happiest management of the artifice of iteration. The great poetic outburst round about the year 1800 1 ' O bonnie bonnie was hir mouth, And cherry were hir cheiks, And clear clear was hir yellow hair, Whareon the reid bluid dreips.' Longfellow makes use of the same motif ' Blue were her eyes as the fairy-flax, Her cheeks like the dawn of day, And her bosom white as the hawthorn buds That ope in the month of May.' It is the weakness of Longfellow, as it is also his strength, that he is always happiest on the most familiar themes. WORDSWORTH 91 (1785-1815) had then two causes. It was caused, in part, by what we call the Romantic Revival ; that is the literary explanation, and in part by the French Revolution ; that is the political explanation. But Mr. Watts Dunton believes both those causes to be causes only immediate. The real determining cause, he says, 1 was nothing less than a great revived movement of the soul of man after a long period of prosaic acceptance in all things, including literature and art.' To this revival Mr. Watts Dunton gives the name ' Renascence of Wonder.' 'The phrase,' he adds, 'indicates that there are two great impulses governing man,' one at one period of the world's history, the other at another, ' the impulse of acceptance the impulse to take unchallenged and for granted all the phenomena of the outer world as they are and the impulse to confront these phenomena with eyes of inquiry and wonder.' ' Anthropologists have often asked,' he says, ' what was that lever-power lying enfolded in the dark womb of some remote semi-human brain which by first stirring, lifting, and vitalising other potential and latent faculties, gave birth to man ? Would it be rash to assume that this lever-power was a vigorous movement of the faculty of wonder ? ' ' There are of course,' he goes on, 'different kinds of wonder. Primitive poetry is full of wonder the naive and eager wonder of the healthy child. It is the kind of wonder which makes the Iliad and the Odyssey so delightful. The wonder of primitive poetry passes as the primitive conditions of civilisation pass. And then for the most part it can only be succeeded by a very different kind of wonder the wonder aroused by a recognition of the mystery of man's life and the mystery of Nature's 92 POETRY AND PROSE theatre on which the human drama is played the wonder, in short, of ^schylus and Sophocles.' There is a familiar passage in Biographia Literaria which, allowing for the fact that Coleridge is there dealing with definite intentions, is in tone and sentiment very like this. He is speaking of the course of thought which resulted in the publication of The Lyrical Ballads : 'The thought suggested itself . . . that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural ; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being, who from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life ; the characters and incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and its vicinity, where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them, when they present themselves. ' In this idea, originated the plan of the Lyrical Ballads ; in which it was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters super- natural, or at least romantic ; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a resemblance of truth sufficient to procure for those shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth, on the other hand, was to propose WORDSWORTH 93 to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention to the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and wonders of the world before us ; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude, we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.' Wordsworth was to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, but for Wordsworth this was not difficult, for he saw the world newly. He had a native instinct for reality ; his lonely childhood had made his sensations real to him ; his chief companions shepherds, ' statesmen ' of the dales, had, for back- ground to their every emotion, mountain and sky. At times to him, travelling on the hills, the bleat of a sheep and the surrounding universe were the two opposites that made the all. During his residence in France he took from the air that wandering current of Rousseauism which was a reinforcement of his thoughts. That unenervated country life, the ways of peasants providing for their food, the individual values which Rousseau celebrated, of these he was already fond. But besides this, in himself he was familiar with ecstasies. Writing of him in 1792, his sister speaks of * a sort of violence of affection, if I may so term it, which demonstrates itself every moment of the day.' The sensations that came to him were not those that are usually associated with his name ; on the contrary, such as could have been felt even by the Wordsworth who is supposed to have existed. He was a being to 94 POETRY AND PROSE whom occurrence spoke, so constituted as, of course, to suffer, but also to experience ' That pleasurable feeling of blind love, The pleasure which there is in life itself.' This combination of aptitudes produced a poetry which is a unique gift to the English world. There is no other which so well explains the nature of poetry, which, without leaning in the least to the side of poetising, is so essentially poetical. He has written a great deal in verse, more than lesser men, that is not poetry ; he was not careful in his long poems to raise the something which is not poetry to the level of the something which, though not poetry, is not prose ; in his late years he amused himself with a number of exercises in which he was too careful to preserve this level and was too satisfied with it. Sometimes too, in his best period, though rarely, his anxiety to express the fact led him to express a prose fact ; all this is obvious and is the common vision of the blind. But his entire merit is a poetical merit : at his best, and constantly, his poetry is so purely poetry, it has so little an admixture of the particularising intelligence, that to some quick intellects it seems literally to miss fire. The glass seems empty because there is nothing but pure water in the glass. An experience from the outside world comes to Wordsworth, and he puts you in possession of the impression that experience made "when it came. Lan- guage is used, you would have said, but for your experience of these poems, to bring you nearer to the emotion than language can. The purr of a kitten, the laugh of a child, the long indrawn breath of the bereaved, how easy to understand ; and yet, because WORDSWORTH 95 Wordsworth is using the same vehicle with which we commonly, though unintentionally because we cannot do otherwise disguise our thoughts, we do not realise what he is doing. It took seons to form a language ; it took Wordsworth to unform one, to teach language to unroll. The art of speech fades away like a thin vapour and the heart is known. Once, being near Derby, Wordsworth, to give Professor Raleigh's instance, had occasion to travel the same road going and returning, and it happened to him, in the morning, to observe a company of gipsies resting by the roadside on the heath. * The poet, after a day of crowded and changeful experience under the open sky, returns to find the group of gipsies sitting as before round their camp-fire. The winds are blowing and the clouds moving, so that the little knot of human beings seems the only stationary thing in Nature.' They typify 'the dormancy of mere in- dolence' in a Universe where nothing is still. You cannot bathe twice in the same river, nor can the same man bathe twice. He who says so is a different being when he writes the next sentence. Perpetually slough- ing and renewing, the body is a true analogue of Universal law. If the heart stops beating for a minute it enters on a new process of change, and even the thing we call dead speeds along the road of decay. The law of life and activity is the only law, and Nature is, because she is always becoming. This is explication, the intellect having started reasoning along a line of thought suggested by an opposition. But to the poet, the inactivity of these vagrants opens wide a mere apprehending : 'The silent Heavens have goings-on ; The stars have tasks but these have none.' 96 POETRY AND PROSE His sense of this has had hardly time to form itself into speech, so near is ' going on ' to the reality of the apprehension, so much nearer than any words such as movement or process which pre-suppose or connote a conception. The mind is flooded with a feeling of the unconscious life of Nature, and the thing is said as it is felt. 1 This which Wordsworth does for himself here he 1 Professor Raleigh's discussion of this poem (Wordsworth, Edward Arnold, 1903) occurs in a chapter on Poetic Diction, but his words are not sufficiently directed to my immediate purpose to allow me to use all of them instead of my own : * Some of these alterations have happily disappeared from the definitive edition ; others remain. Thus the poem on Gipsies originally ended with these two lines : " The silent Heavens have goings-on ; The stars have tasks but these have none." 'To some mind or other the word "goings-on" suggested flippant associations, and the lines were altered thus : " Life which the very stars reprove As on their silent tasks they move ! " Not only is the most telling word suppressed ; there is a more fundamental change, typical of many changes made by Wordsworth when he had lost touch with his original impressions. The bare contrast of the earlier poem is moralised. The strangeness of the simple impression is lost for the sake of a most impotent didactic application. The poet, after a day of crowded and changeful experience under the open sky, returns to find the group of gypsies sitting as before round their camp-fire. The winds are blowing and the clouds moving, so that the little knot of human beings seems the only stationary thing in nature. The restless jo*y of the poet, his fellow-feeling with the mighty activities of Nature, breaks out in a single remonstrance : " Oh better wrong and strife, Better vain deeds and evil than such life ! " Even this he changed when his sensibilities had been crusted over and his appetite for explicit moral teaching increased by the passage of years ' (pp. 98, 99). WORDSWORTH 97 can do for other people ; or rather, because the people of whom he speaks are merely human, he continues to do this for himself while supposing himself in a variety of situations. For example, imagining the little country girl shut up in the network of poor streets which in 1797 made the City, he writes this : * At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears, Hangs a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years ; Poor Susan has passed by the spot, and has heard In the silence of morning the song of the Bird. 'Tis a note of enchantment ; what ails her ? She sees A mountain ascending, a vision of trees ; Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide, And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside. Green pastures she views in the midst of the dale, Down which she so often has tripped with her pail ; And a single small cottage, a nest like a dove's, The one only dwelling on earth that she loves. She looks, and her heart is in heaven : but they fade, The mist and the river, the hill and the shade : The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise, And the colours have all passed away from her eyes.' The opening of this little poem might be used as an instance of what is meant by visualisation : ' Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide, And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside.' 'Seems, madam! nay, it is; I know not seems.' The dream is superimposed upon the reality. Equally close to the more delicate emotional experience is the description of the fading vision : ' The stream will not flow, and the hill will not rise.' In one's bed in the morning, half roused from a dream and trying with a sleepy persistence to recapture the G 98 POETRY AND PROSE images that, lately distinct, still so cloud the faculties as to make them impervious to waking, who has not felt his whole mind surrendered to the realisation of just this inability? With the next line the bare day is with us. One has been sitting in the concert hall listening to St. Cecilia's harmony. It ceases, and the instruments are still. One is conscious of a visual blank, not of any- thing happening but of something having ceased to happen, of colours that have gone out, and that is the extent of one's consciousness. If it be said that other people besides Wordsworth could have written the last line of the poem, it must be answered they would have written more. Similarly in the poem describing the lover's visit to Lucy's cottage, Wordsworth is content with the bare statement of what occurred. 1 To be near the beloved is an important occasion, and the rider's heart is tense ; and just as Charcot's patient kept his eye fixed on the scintillating ring on the hypnotist's finger, so Words- worth keeps his on the one bright spot in the sky the evening moon. The concentration of the mind upon one thought allows the eye to concentrate itself upon one thing, indeed makes it easily a victim to the hypnotic point. Lucy's cottage is situated on a hill, 1 And so the Edinburgh Reviewer in 1801 : ' Love and the fantasies of lovers have afforded an ample theme to poets of all ages. Mr. Wordsworth, however, has thought fit to compose a piece, illustrat- ing this subject by one single thought. A lover trots away to see his mistress one fine evening, staring all the way at the moon ; when he gets to her door "O mercy ! to myself I cried If Lucy should be dead." And there the poem ends.' An unintentionally good criticism. WORDSWORTH 99 and, as the horse climbs the slope, the moon appears to be dropping behind the small building that, to the rider looking upward, is the highest thing against the horizon. There comes a moment when the cottage comes directly in the line of sight, and the object of the physical eyes falls out of vision. The mind is conscious of a sense of loss, and in this sense of loss is involved the one subject of Wordsworth's thought. How flat all this is, and how the dissection of an emotional state destroys its power of contagion ! Had Wordsworth written so, he would have made himself plain certainly, but would have wakened no responsive echo. In his little miracle which, for want of a better word, we call a poem, the fond and wayward thought slides into us as it came to the lover, and we experience the same unearthly thrill. Wordsworth gives us the whole conscious experience ; what he does not give us is the operation of the mind upon that experience after it has ceased. 1 1 By this it is, of course, not meant that Wordsworth's poetry is spontaneous, or that he expresses the emotion immediately he has felt it. What actually happens is that he ponders over the experi- ence till he is able to get back to it, and to express it just as it came. His own definition of poetry, ' emotion recollected in tran- quillity,' accurately describes his manner of work. He has to have time to realise what he felt. What he does, as the result of much meditation, is to recapture an emotional effect. It is interesting to remember that Tennyson in Maud has imitated the sinking feeling in this * Moon ' poem, but he is much farther from the emotion : * But I look'd, and round, all round the house I beheld The death-white curtain drawn ; Felt a horror over me creep, Prickle my skin and catch my breath, Knew that the death-white curtain meant but sleep, Yet I shudder'd and thought like a fool of the sleep of death.' ioo POETRY AND PROSE Perhaps the simplest instance is in ' The Two April Mornings.' Matthew, the old schoolmaster, is speaking of the first, now/thirty years ago : 4 Six feet in earth my Emma lay ; And yet I loved her more, For so it seemed, than till that day I e'er had loved before. And, turning from her grave, I met, Beside the churchyard yew, A blooming Girl, whose hair was wet With points of morning dew. A basket on her head she bare ; Her brow was smooth and white : To see a child so very fair, It was a pure delight ! No fountain from its rocky cave E'er tripped with foot so free ; She seemed as happy as a wave That dances on the sea. There came from me a sigh of pain Which I could ill confine ; I looked at her, and looked again : And did not wish her mine ! ' While the physical impression is very distinct, the feeling is expressed by a sigh and a negation. We know, of course, Matthew's reason. One's own offspring, in whom courses the blood that warms one's heart, is sui generis : one can be reminded of a dead beloved, but, as it is said in France, one can have but one mother. But a course of reasoning so simple could hardly be fully absent from any mind ? The Tennyson was the most perfect of imitators. Echoes of Virgil, Theocritus, Shakespeare, add no discrepant beauty to the beauty which is his own. Yet when even Tennyson tries to imitate Words- worth, one remembers Professor Murray's quotation, * it does some- how sound like twitterings.' WORDSWORTH 101 truth is that the feeling lies behind even this simple effort. Matthew is conscious only of an absence of desire ; his fancy for the beautiful little maiden, so like Emma, does not reach to a forgetfulness of his loss. In Wordsworth's poems we get near the first move- ments of the heart, and we may truly say that in them we deal with the elements of poetry. This merit alone would have made him the most poetical of poets, but it would not have made him Wordsworth. Alongside of his power of uncovering the breast, his power of passively recording the impression, there is an active faculty the faculty of sudden vision. That is to say, there is not only the thing which comes directly against the sight, but what else the thing seen makes him glance aside to see ; not only what is felt, but the responsive activities of feeling. This faculty is perhaps not as frequently employed. Certainly it is not always to be found in conjunction with the other ; yet it is often so found. In the poem which Wordsworth wrote on the daffodils, he describes himself as wandering alone, purposelessly, the intellec- tual energy held in suspension as a cloud may hold its rain, when his eyes are filled with the sight of a myriad daffodils waving, down there beside the lake, the miracle of a flower. In a moment he is awake, and the whole miraculous life of Nature is comprehended in a flash. His mind jumps from the brilliant weeds at his feet to the unnumbered worlds with which is sown the vault of heaven. Miracle answers to miracle, and the far explains the near : ' Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the milky way, They stretched in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay. 102 POETRY AND PROSE At another time he is thinking of the life past of Lucy, how much apart it was, how modest in its retirement ; and as he thinks, he sees, at his feet and in the zenith, the unnoted solitary beauty of things : ' A violet by a mossy stone Half hidden from the eye ! Fair as a star, when only one Is shining in the sky.' Often as I have read the tiny poem, it is always a fresh astonishment to find that flash between the two other verses, 1 so exclusively human in their sentiment and apparently so sufficing, so much, by themselves, exhaus- tive of their subject. To read them alone and without the middle one is to be conscious of a poet who feels his grief so elementally, his mind has room for no other thought. Here, surely, we would have said, is what we mean when we speak of any one as being contained by his emotion. It is the same faculty of travelling to the world's end that enables him to enliven his village story of Ruth with the lights and colours of the West, to speak of the magnolia spread 4 High as a cloud, high overhead,' or to see, meeting at noontide, beneath his yew-trees, the shapes that make up man's inward dream. 1 ' She dwelt among the untrodden ways Beside the springs of Dove, A Maid whom there were none to praise And very few to love. She lived unknown, and few could know When Lucy ceased to be ; But she is in her grave, and, oh, The difference to me ! ' WORDSWORTH 103 In speaking of his ' Phantom of delight,' his mind dances from the beauty of evening to that of morn and spans the revolving year : - ^ ' Her eyes as stars of Twilight fair ; Like Twilight's, too, her dusky hair, But all things else about her drawn From May-time and the cheerful Dawn.' Arnold has spoken of Wordsworth's ' healing power.' This power to soothe we all find in his poetry, but it is not due to those triumphs of reality or imagination. The opening of the grave which is man's breast, a freedom of imaginative play where ' the flashes come and go ' these have power to arrest the mind, not to soothe it. What soothes in Wordsworth's poetry is his tone. Generally a lyric is consecrated to one note. Burns's lyrics to a remarkable degree are so, and it is true of all the rest. They are joyous or sad, charged with melancholy or with ardour, passionate or reflective ; but in Wordsworth's sedate lyrics the feeling is often mingled, and the shades that go to make up their twilight indistinct. The manner is never entirely sad or entirely joyous. And this song of ' serious faith and inward glee,' of an inner happiness that remembers sorrow, of a trust in the mind of man that will not be cast down, this curiously blended note of delight and regret, is especially Wordsworth's own. We read a happy lyric of his and we are not left entirely happy ; we read a poem steeped in melancholy and we are touched with an inexplicable joy. The story of the mountain child offering milk to the lamb, whose ' tail with pleasure shook,' fades into the heart like evening. io 4 POETRY AND PROSE Among ' the hills where echoes play,' there intrudes 'That plaintive cry ! which up the hill Comes from the depth of Dungeon-Ghyll.' The morning's birth frames the tragedy of the Leech Gatherer in repose. These lyrics, written under the influence of a con- trariety of sensations, of a solemnness which permits of gaiety, and distinguished by a 4 melancholy grace, Brought from a pensive though a happy place,' leave the mind in a state of various or divided feeling, and affect as no other lyrical poetry can. Why Words- worth alone should have this power is perhaps best answered by saying that there was only one Words- worth, but certain it is that these poems have this effect ; their devout happiness, their restrained and perfect grief, touch the mind in a manner different from the noblest work of other poets. Shakespeare can move us to laughter or to tears at his will, but he cannot leave the impression which such a poem as 1 The Solitary Reaper ' does. I suppose that the offices of her Church will produce in the devotee the same kind of subdued exaltation, the same spirit of renewal won from sorrow. Sunshine and shower, the varied colours of the rainbow arching the expectant earth, this is the very breath and being of these poems. And yet, constantly, in Wordsworth's poetry there is, as Mr. Bradley has shown, something even deeper than this, and in its own way as unique. It is his profound sense of the illimitable ; and this itself is based on a basic contact with reality, a deep earnest- ness which is sensible, and which, whatever the subject, WORDSWORTH 105 keeps its grip. Fantasy does not attract him ; he writes nothing formal, and even when he praises virtue he speaks of what he knows. How idle usually are those praises, and how untrue to our own knowledge of humanity. One puts up a formal prayer to a perfection in which one has never troubled seriously to believe, and Love and Fate and Duty are the most frequent terms in the vocabulary of the fool. When one opens an Ode to Duty one expects an idle dithyramb, but Wordsworth's Ode to Duty bristles with observation, and moral experiences are as accurately distinguished as the days of the week. It speaks from the ascertained fact. The comprehensive- ness of the law of Duty as also the lightening of the moral stress which results from obedience to it ' Flowers laugh before thee on their beds And fragrance in thy footing treads,' are no more vividly realised than the frailty of man. The ' weight of chance desires,' the ' confidence of reason,' these are no words of course. The youthful, however, have not our anxiety ; they have not known what it is to be astray, and there is a natural human kindness in the young and untried that prompts to good offices : 4 There are who ask not if thine eye Be on them ; who, in love and truth, Where no misgiving is, rely Upon the genial sense of youth.' This is true, and nearer to the fact of young life than either the doctrine of original sin or Rousseau's absolute opposition to it. Much of our predisposition to serve the self, the young share in common with us. What 106 POETRY AND PROSE they possess, and we do not, is their pleasedness with things, from which there overflows a pleasantness ; but it is useless to attempt otherwise to define what Wordsworth has defined already. 4 The Happy Warrior ' extorts the same admiring wonder, and for the same qualities. 1 Wordsworth, in defining his ideal human being, keeps his finger on the list of human temptations. Good men there have been without number who have failed in life's battle from their inability, in the heat of strife, to * keep the law in calmness made.' Brave men, whom ' no shape of danger can dismay,' have been seduced from the conflict by cherishing the * tender happiness ' of their home. And yet without the love of others to rely on, there is no support in difficulty. The laurel is not plucked by a narrow nature, and at least of a martyr it may be said that he is ' More brave for this, that he hath much to love.' A poet who can write on such subjects without loosening his hold on the facts is very close to the reality of life. And it is on this deep consciousness of life's reality that Wordsworth builds his conscious- ness of a reality beyond it. Man will never be real if he is not real here. If he is real, for him there may be another reality. Man's life, if it is not related to the universal life, is nothing a dream without a dreamer, the mere shadow of a shade. On the other hand, the full consciousness of the reality of the life of man involves its relation to an ultimate reality. On the nature and meaning of any individual life Wordsworth had brooded long ; and so intensely does he realise it 1 Wordsworth himself described it, in conversation with Miss Martineau, as ' a chain of extremely valooable thoughts.' WORDSWORTH 107 that he never realises it alone. The limited glows with so intense a light that it spreads its rays into the illimitable. His Michael, his Leech Gatherer, his dead Brother, his favoured Being gazing from the shore of Esthwaite on a beautiful prospect, his Cumberland Beggar, his Peter Bell, his Dion, his dead stag or guarding dog, the statued Newton, the friendless man in ' Guilt and Sorrow ' who on must pace, * perchance 'till night descend, Where'er the dreary roads their bare white lines extend,' are not more ' each distinct and in his place ' than they carry with them, each and all, a reference to something beyond, and this something is partly the general life of Nature and partly the mystery of life. Those figures owe their supernatural dignity to Wordsworth's con- sciousness that they are not bounded by their own beings, but are, in truth, unlimited and a part of all. A strange thrill comes to us in these poems that are so full of a susceptibility to the mysterious, and that see in a pedlar the shadow of the whole. Nature, too, to a mind of this character, whispers strange secrets. The gross palpable shimmers in a haze, and a thorn, 4 the oak beside the door,' a convicting mountain, the waste places and 'the one blasted tree,' seem about to become animate and to disclose themselves a spirit or a voice. No graver tribute has been paid to Wordsworth in our generation than Mr. Bradley's 1 analysis of this 1 Oxford Lectures on Poetry, 'Wordsworth,' where Mr. Bradley speaks (Hart-leap Well) of 'this feeling of the presence of mysterious inviolable powers behind the momentary powers of hard pleasure and empty pride.' He gives as instances of the side of Wordsworth's genius, adverted to above, the Leech Gatherer, and from the io8 POETRY AND PROSE side of his genius ; for it is not a side, it is the very kernel of his poetry, and supplies the reason why it is sufficing. A lady once said to me that what struck her most about Wordsworth's poems was their reminiscent quality, or, to be explicit, that Wordsworth's poetry has the power, more than that of others, of reviving in us recollections of our youth ; one lays down the volume at a phrase and sees again one's nursery and vanished faces. The explanation of this is not obvious. It is not to be found in the fact, taken by itself, that Wordsworth writes peculiarly often about children, for other poets have done this without producing his effect. The reason is, I think, Wordsworth's singular facility and felicity in bringing us in contact with the emotion as felt ; that is to say, as we ourselves came in contact with it when we were young. People of middle age have lost this capacity of youth. One hears of the decease of a friend, and before one has had time to realise one's impression of personal loss, the intellect is busy relating this one death to the process of things. Prelude, Book II., the convicting mountain (the stealing of the prey of the snares is a parallel passage, and both speak to a common experience of childhood the voice of conscience becoming animate in inanimate things) ; Prelude, Book IV., the old soldier ; Prelude, Book VII., the London beggar ; Prelude, Book xii., the distinctness of recollected impressions on a mind strung to a high pitch by sorrow. ' The single sheep, and the one blasted tree.' The Arab riding into the distance, Book v., is also an instance of Mr. Bradley's. In the same essay Mr. Bradley speaks of the con- nection of this feeling of infinity and the endless passing of limits with Wordsworth's love of wandering, wanderers, and high roads. WORDSWORTH 109 One is praised and, before one has time to feel a delighted glow, one realises the relative unimportance of all possible praise and all possible achievement. One is out on a spring afternoon, lying on the Surrey heather, watching a pigeon sailing above the faint blush of the wood that the hill carries to a sky of mauve. One is conscious of no ecstasy. There float in the mind a dozen pictures of remembered scenes. In later life every experience that comes to us is harmonised by memory or by experience, is generalised before it strikes. But in early youth how different ! A sharp reproof, a box of chocolate, a playmate on the sands, the death of a canary, the expectation when the black-gowned clergyman stopped, after giving out his text, before beginning his sermon, one's drowsy ageing neighbour in the Scottish church ; how real it was, and all we needed to be Wordsworths was his power of expression. As we felt then, Wordsworth speaks, and when he speaks the dusty interval is gone ' For the same sound is in our ears Which in those days we heard.' Children, though, of course, they express their feelings very broadly and crudely, and besides, nobody marks them, have the same faculty of immediacy of feeling that Wordsworth has. Their minds are swept with each separate emotion, joy, pain, fear, grief, perceive it as it is, and have room for nothing else. 1 It is, there- 1 This is the reason too why children do not care for Words- worth's poems, and see nothing in them. To them what Wordsworth talks about is quite familiar, and he merely voices their sensations. Poor Susan is no miracle to a child on the contrary, a bare account of what is constantly happening ; and though the child does not i io POETRY AND PROSE fore, his instinct for an affinity that leads Wordsworth to speak so often of them. Their one-ideaedness, their persistency in an idea when formed, their capacity for concentration, the poignancy of their joy or absorption in their grief, the way in which they are * taken up ' with what they are doing, this made them his fellow- citizens in a land peopled by foreigners who never feel. He has said the wisest and most beautiful things about children, as also the most memorable things about that death in us when our youth is dead. In the great Ode he is indeed hampered by a false philosophy ; but so keen is his eye for the facts of child-life that it is starred with phrases that describe it as it has never been described. As we know, the explicit teaching of the Ode is fanciful j 1 it deals with the belief in pre-existence, a know this, this is the reason why it is not excited by the poem. Tennyson's Idylls are the children's paradise ; they are as strange to them as Poor Susan is to us ; they speak of a magic world. Poor Susan speaks to us of what we have come to know as the only magic in the world, the magical sensations of youth. 1 Arnold in his Essay on Wordsworth has a pregnant hint on this subject, but he dismisses Wordsworth rather airily, and does not seek for the amount of actual truth that is the secret of the Ode's permanent attraction. What pleases the highest minds can never be merely ' a play of fancy.' 'Even the "intimations" of the famous Ode, those corner-stones of the supposed philosophic system of Wordsworth, the idea of the high instincts and affections coming out in childhood, testifying of a divine home recently left, and fading away as our life proceeds, this idea, of undeniable beauty as a play of fancy, has itself not the character of poetic truth of the best kind ; it has no real solidity. The instinct of delight in Nature and her beauty had, no doubt, extraordinary strength in Wordsworth himself as a child. But to say that universally this instinct is mighty in childhood, and tends to die away afterwards, is to say what is extremely doubtful. In many people, perhaps with the majority of educated persons, the WORDSWORTH in belief which, like all other beliefs, is incapable of proof, but which, unlike many beliefs, is no part of the common life of the mind. Wordsworth had observed that the child takes a rapturous delight in the beauty of earth, which is unknown, at least in its rapture, to the grown man. He had also observed that the child is not oppressed by the notion of death, but, on the contrary, assumes that it itself and its surroundings will continue as they are ; has, in fact, the greatest difficulty in accepting the idea of Finis, and will even on occasion persist in suppos- ing its dead companions to be not dead but translated, still somewhere alive and in a sense still with it. Wordsworth, moreover, had observed that always at the period of adolescence there is a fierce struggle on the part of every youth to resist the conclusion, at length irrefutable, that he himself must perish. Other people die, it is true, but I shall not die. I shall be translated in a chariot of fire. The Judgment-day will love of Nature is nearly imperceptible at ten years old, but strong and operative at thirty. In general we may say of these high instincts of early childhood, the base of the alleged systematic philosophy of Wordsworth, what Thucydides says of the early achievements of the Greek race : " It is impossible to speak with certainty of what is so remote ; but from all that we can really investigate, I should say that they were no very great things."' This is, of course, true if we mean by ' love of Nature' what we commonly understand by it. The fact of child-life on which Words- worth is entitled to remark is not in this sense a love of Nature at all, the love of Nature known to the mature mind, but rather, a delight in 'Earth,' a satisfiedness with the mortal condition (because not realised to be mortal) and its natural setting. The child is delighted with life, and is very easily irritated by any cessation of activity. I have seen a child smack a ball because it wouldn't bounce high enough. But as long as it continues to bounce all is well. Life laughs with surrounding life. ii2 POETRY AND PROSE come before my term ; at least somehow, in some manner, in a world that perishes, I shall be persistent. This exception made finally in favour of oneself, for it cannot be denied that others die, sets in opposition one's own will to live and the perishableness of others, an opposition which one attempts to resolve by a crude idealism. These others who die, they are part of my dream. I become conscious of the shadowy nature of a world in which range change and decay. But the material world returns, and when the mind is asleep I come out of my dream, only, however, to slide back into it with recurrent persistence whenever my inner life returns. My real life, the life of my attentive mind, is occupied with 'obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things, Fallings from us, vanishings.' At this period the individual life is paramount, and the material world unreal. As we grow older we lose this sense of superiority, and the world in our habitual mind is greater than ourselves. There is, in Wordsworth's words, a ' subjugation of an opposite character/ 1 To the ordinary gross citizen what he can see, feel, and handle is the touchstone of reality. These are the observed facts. I do not think there can be any doubt about them, but Wordsworth pro- ceeds to invent a theory to account for them. Before, 1 Wordsworth's own words are as follows : ' Nothing was more difficult for me in childhood than to admit the notion of death as a state applicable to my own being. I have said elsewhere, " A simple child, That lightly draws its breath, And feels its life in every limb, What should it know of death ! " WORDSWORTH 113 however, discussing this theory, it is necessary to say that, in paraphrasing, I have relied, and purposely relied, on his long introductory note to the Ode, and not on the Ode itself. In the paraphrase it will be noticed that the experiences of which I speak, and of which Wordsworth speaks in his introductory note, extend over a considerable period of time. They are the account of the process of the mind from childhood to adolescence, and from adolescence to maturity. The rapturous delight in earth is known to a child of six ; the crude idealism to a youth of sixteen, and dates from the moment when the youth is first faced with the cer- tain apprehension of his own decease. Wordsworth himself in his note does not attempt, as I understand him, (he says, 'when going to school,') to date this idealism earlier than his early teens, and of all youths Wordsworth was the soonest mature. In the poem, however, this strictness of chronology, which is essential to the truth of the observations, is by no means But it was not so much from feelings of animal vivacity that my difficulty came as from a sense of the indomitableness of the Spirit within me. I used to brood over the stories of Enoch and Elijah, and almost to persuade myself that, whatever might become of others, I should be translated, in something of the same way, to Heaven. With a feeling congenial to this, I was often unable to think of external things as having external existence, and I com- muned with all that I saw as something not apart from, but inherent in, my own immaterial nature. Many times while going to school have 1 grasped at a wall or tree to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to the reality. At that time I was afraid of such processes. In later periods of life I have deplored, as we all have reason to do, a subjugation of an opposite character, and have rejoiced over the remembrances, as is expressed in the lines " obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things, Fallings from us, vanishings,"' etc. H n 4 POETRY AND PROSE preserved. All these experiences are spoken of loosely, as if they might be those of the actual child, and this adds a difficulty of interpretation. Moreover, this looseness is a vital defect when Wordsworth points to these experiences as a proof of pre- existence. These experiences, he says, belong to the child and not to the man ; they are more spiritual than the man's, and if the human being, at the moment of its emer- gence, is in its most spiritual state, it must have brought its spirituality with it ; those ' clouds of glory ' must trail from a former spiritual life. But this argument immediately dissolves when we reflect that the experiences of which Wordsworth is speaking are in no sense the experiences of a child, and, so far from being experiences of first contact, are experiences gradually and successively evolved through a long series of years by the individual's contact with life ; the most spiritual of them, moreover, (I mean the crude idealism of the youth of sixteen), the one on which Wordsworth chiefly relies, being the last to evolve. The fact is, of course, that these experiences are not spiritual at all, and Wordsworth's fond thesis that the child is more spiritual than the man is the exact contrary of the fact. The child does take a more rapturous delight in earth than its elders, because, for it, earth is not touched with decay. How could it not take a rapturous delight in earth thus seen ? The procession of the seasons, the unchanging faces of our friends, the body that never reminds us of its existence, bones as supple as a twig, sight, sense, taste and sound thronging and exhaustless in their change, the WORDSWORTH 115 mother ever young ; what further Paradise is to be imagined in Heaven when all things are renewed ? In the child's world there is no death ; the flame bubbles without consuming coal, and the same bird sings every Spring. It is true, also, that the youth resists the realisation of death, not knowledge of it (that he acquires almost at once), but realisation of it as a fact for him, and that he would sell the reality of the Universe to preserve his bright life and escape the law of all. The actual child accepts its surroundings with extraordinary com- posure, and as a matter of course. It is only when the child is in process of becoming a man, when it begins to think, as in Wordsworth's case it began far sooner than usual, that questions arise. They arise with all of us, and when they arise, be it early or late, our childhood is past. What was accepted as stable is no longer accepted ; the world becomes unreal, and when the ' victim ' has passed through this trial and acquiesced in his doom, his surroundings are no longer what they were. 1 As men we are in a prison- house, because as youths we have tried to escape from it. ' The glory and the freshness of a dream ' has passed away from earth because we can no longer believe that here we are to remain. All this happens, but it does not happen because the child is more spiritual than the man, but because it is less spiritual ; because in its animal vivacity and its insouciance it relates itself to no other life than earth's. It is Death and Death alone, and the conviction of it, that creates 1 ' The Clouds that gather round the setting sun Do take a sober colouring from an eye That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality.' ii6 POETRY AND PROSE an apprehension of the spiritual, 1 and a being hunger- ing for a reality behind the seen. The child puts its trust in an illusion and is happy. The man, trembling on the edge of an infinity, weeps for what is gone, but because he knows of that infinity he is man. Something less than justice, 2 then, is done to our spiritual nature in the ' Intimations,' and part of the poem, a very small part, is occupied in explicitly preaching a doctrine which is not only fanciful but derogatory to human dignity. These portions the world has, in part, cheerfully forgotten, or remembers only by attaching another meaning and accepting them as a testimonial to childhood. What does remain, and remains imperishably, is the description of the first awaking rapture to the joy of Earth, and the even more beautiful description of its passing, of the sorrow which is stirred in us when we regard the beauty of what was once our imperishable home. A poet may preach a doctrine we must dismiss, and say things we cannot forget. It is because the things he says are true. In Wordsworth's Nature poetry there is initially a similar difficulty ; the doctrine he preaches about Nature is, on the face of it, false. In representing Nature as in basic sympathy with man, as a guide and instructress, in conforming one's life to whom one may 1 Cp. Meredith in ' Youth in Memory' : 'To feel that heaven must we that hell sound through.' 2 Some justice is done towards the close 'rather find Strength in what remains behind,' but it is inadequate. To do full justice, the process of the poem would have had to be an ascent, not a descent. In fact, the idea of a * Fall ' is just as fallacious for the individual as for the race. WORDSWORTH 117 become more humane, he is at radical issue with scientific fact. And this divergence is his own inven- tion. He did not learn it, any more than he learnt his doctrine of pre-existence, from the wandering current of Rousseauism. He added both to Rousseau's compara- tively simple doctrines of original virtue and natural peace. Rousseau has no theories about inanimate Nature ; his love of her is merely his protest against the eighteenth-century preference of urban to rural man. He loves Nature because she is free, quiet, and full of variety ; because, at Les Charmettes or The Hermitage, he can escape from the city. 1 In contra- distinction to the eighteenth century, he loves her just because she is uncultivated, and has not, like a Dutch garden, been taught to behave. He finds her a place in which he can dream his dreams of the untainted individual, and suppose himself to enjoy that state of Nature which existed before politics and houses. Nor is he a devotee of the beauties of Nature for themselves ; the periwinkle is dear to him because it reminds him of a past and dear episode ; he has no special fondness for the ' tall and gloomy rock,' though he likes it in its place. In short, as Lord Morley has pointed out, he is a virtuoso in landscape who likes the confusion, the mixture, a soft smiling foreground with 1 ' I was so tired of fine rooms, fountains, artificial groves and flower-beds, and the still more tiresome people who displayed all these ; I was so worn out with pamphlets, card-playing, music, silly jokes, stupid airs, great suppers, that as I spied a poor hawthorn copse, a hedge, a farmstead, a meadow, as in passing through a hamlet I snuffed the odour of a good chervil omelette, as I heard from a distance the rude refrain of the shepherds' songs, I used to wish at the devil the whole tale of rouge and furbelows.' Confessions : passage translated by Lord Morley. n8 POETRY AND PROSE trees, leading to a background occupied by hills. Not in any Wordsworthian sense a priest of Nature, Rousseau turns to her for relief and calm. This was, according to Arthur Young, to set the fashion in country-houses, or in our more hurried conceptions, to be a week-ender. What is new in Wordsworth is his philosophy of Nature. His exceptional fondness for those scenes which are especially solitary and grand, and in which man feels himself alone with the Universe, was his own. The assumption, underlying all he writes, that Nature's life beats responsive to human life, was not taught him by any one. But this poetry of Wordsworth's brings a new and strange comfort to us, and the joy we take in it, even the best informed among us, is so deep and so per- sistent that it cannot be due to its falsity, but, on the contrary, must be traceable to an inner truth. In what way, then, can we say that a doctrine or philosophy of Nature, which is openly opposed to what we know about the world, is true ? This question for a long time troubled me. There is, of course, one obvious answer, and once it satisfied my mind. This, at least, is certain, that as much as Wordsworth's doctrine is opposed to objective fact, it is in consonance with subjective fact. Though Nature is not in sympathy with man, man believes she is. It is his unconscious habit so to think, and what Wordsworth says of Nature is true of what man feels about Nature. It is true for the imagination ; it is what we call poetic truth. The sun seems to rise and fall, and therefore it is more truthful, and less of a shock, to speak of the setting sun than of the turning earth. Middlesex turned away WORDSWORTH 119 from the sun, the shadows lengthened, it was night. This reads very affectedly, and is not an accurate or truthful record of what any one feels. The weakness of this argument, however, is that we do not, as modern men, feel that Nature sympathises with us in the same constant and unvarying manner that we feel the sun falls. If the instance were perfect it would suffice, but it is not perfect. It is imperfect in two ways : in the way stated about our casual feeling, and in a further and contrary way. We know, when we say the sun falls, that it does not fall, that to say it falls is simply a manner of speech. We do not know when we say Nature sympathises with us that she does not sympathise. We do not know that to say she sympathises is merely a manner of speech. That is not an accurate account of what happens in our minds. What happens in our minds, when Wordsworth tells us that Nature sympathises, is that we are troubled. We do not know that she does, but we are by no means as certain that she does not as we are certain that the sun is comparatively stationary. The amount of subjective truth in the two instances is different ; and the amount of sub- jective truth in Wordsworth's doctrine does not explain, at all adequately, what we feel about its inner truth. Nor will any other mechanical explanation of our half assent quite, satisfy us. It may be said, of course, that while Wordsworth's doctrine of a sympathising Nature is opposed to what we know of scientific fact, we do know that there is a correspondent alteration. Nature is not affected by the moods of man, but man is affected by the moods of Nature. The day is not 120 POETRY AND PROSE dreary because I am sad, but I am miserable without the sun. June is not June because people wed, but they wed because it is June. This is true, but to explain Wordsworth's philosophy of Nature by saying it is a truth stated the wrong way round is a child's trick. The real explanation is much wider, and embraces all these attempted answers. What Wordsworth's Nature poetry emphasises is the intimate connection between Nature's life and our own. When all is said, we are human because we can read Nature, and we interpret everything in her terms. Nature does * enter into mysterious and wonder-working union with the spirit of man.' 1 She does speak to us and we speak her tongue. This Universe is our home. ' Man is placed in the centre of things, and a ray of relation passes from every other being to him.' We make use of everything in Nature, the tree and the * earth bone ' to build houses, the flax to make us clothes. ' Words are signs of natural facts. Right means straight, wrong means twisted.' . . . < It is not words only that are emblematic, it is things which are em- blematic.' ' Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact.' 'Light and darkness are familiar ex- pressions for. knowledge and ignorance.' From Nature also we do gain a reinforcement of moral quality, tranquillity from the sky, firmness from the rock, equanimity from the plain. Our lives, at their highest, find an appropriate setting in natural surroundings. 1 This argument is wiser than the present writer was. I am in- debted to an admirable piece of writing in the Manchester Guardian (Nov. 8, 1904) criticising an essay I published in that year. WORDSWORTH 121 Leonidas dies in 'the steep defile of Thermopylae.' ' The boat of Columbus ' glides in among the Savan- nahs of the West. The body rests in the quiet earth. How is it that a woman reminds us of a flower, and the evening of death? What song does Spring sing in our ear? 1 Wordsworth's poetry, like all the greatest poetry, is based upon the fact, and it is perhaps greatest in this, that it bears witness, more than any other poetry, to the chief fact of life. It is its peculiar office to remind us that we are a part of a whole, a whole which is cousin to us, and which speaks to us in each activity, from the flame in the grate to the incandes- cence of the stars. For the purposes of this relation, it does not matter whether Nature or Man brings most to the other. The Universe is there for us to interpret, but it is not dumb. It is not dumb because in it there breathes the life which is also ours. 1 The quotations are from Emerson's Nature. 122 POETRY AND PROSE BYRON WORDSWORTH represents best the attitude of soul which was the Revolution's, Shelley its inner idea, and Coleridge its romantic afflatus ; but if the historian wishes to see how the ordinary man of the period was affected by that vast and new movement, he will not turn to Wordsworth, Coleridge, or Shelley, he will turn to Byron. He represents best the effect of the Revolution. A sea scourged into commotion tells you better what a storm does than the thunder and lightning ; and Byron's representation is wide enough to represent, not the English effect alone, but the European effect. So variously, episodically, and un- reasoningly does he respond, that you get in his poems just the impetus and upheaval produced over the whole Continent. Chief of all, he is the poet of his time ; he is not a minor writer, the bigness of his spirit enables him to represent the effect of big forces as no minor writer can ; and his huge basis of ordinariness is of this happy service to him that it makes him easily typical of popular results. As Wordsworth felt the Revolution, few could feel it ; as Byron felt it, every one. Allowing for the added intensity, the larger scale of a big nature, his responses were the responses of all. He set the emotions of the crowd to music, their various and often contradictory emotions, pre-Revolutionary, Re- volutionary, and post-Revolutionary ; the whole con- BYRON 123 tents of the disturbed ordinary European mind. This is one of the reasons why he was read so much abroad, and it is one of the reasons for his established place in our literature. What he did was not a little thing to do ; no one else did it. There is always only one who can ever do any given thing perfectly. Byron perfectly represents indeed Byron is, pre-Revolu- tionary man as affected by the Revolution. To fill a role of this kind many qualities are neces- sary, and the nicest arrangement of circumstances. The circumstances of Byron at once set him firmly in the established order, and introduced an atmosphere of disturbance from the start. He came of the class that for the last hundred and fifty years had ruled England, and while still at Harrow became a member of the oligarchic council. He was provided with a stake in the country and a platform when in his teens. At the same time, he was not born in the purple ; his home was poor (the typical cottage opposite the Park gate), he had a club foot which offended him, and a mother with a gusty temper. As full of worldly sensibility as of worldliness, he dissolves in tears when first saluted as Dominus. From Harrow he proceeded to Cambridge, where, studying boxing and keeping a tame bear, he conde- scended upon the modest love for letters, then prevalent in that sober place, by publishing a book of poems with the contemptuous title Hours of Idleness. It is safe to say that no volume less fruitful in promise was ever produced by a poet subsequently eminent. And though, fortified with subsequent knowledge, we may find in these trifles some of the dispositions which Byron maintained or developed later, especially i2 4 POETRY AND PROSE his maddening habit of stressing the metre as if his readers were metrically deaf, had he not been fortu- nately a peer, and had there not fortunately been Whigs in the world, his little book would have shot straight into oblivion's pool. The notice in the Edinburgh Review was roughly equivalent to its subject it was surprising that a lord should write verses, and that, if he wrote them, he should print verses so poor but it stung Byron into fury. There is always this thrust and riposte in his life ; every- thing contributes to his career. It has been the habit of critics to speak slightingly of English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, and certainly, as satire, it is not good. Byron hits out in all direc- tions, and his denunciations have not the necessary basis of truth. Pope wounded Addison because Atticus recognised the portrait ; but to say to Jeffrey that he is in danger of the hangman's cord, to Wordsworth that he is vulgar, to use the words Walter Scott as three syllables of contempt, is to say to Arnold that his poems are amorous, or to speak of some one as being as unamusing as Dickens. One shaft alone went home, that which was aimed at Moore. Yet if English Bards and Scotch Reviewers has, as satire, no vitality, it was sufficient to display the vitality of its author. These random shafts do not wound, but they fly fast and sing : reckless daring takes the fancy, and the effect is that of promiscuous force. The Edinburgh Reviewer provoked into life the most puissant personality England had. In this satire Byron comes into being and hurtles upon the stage of the world. Such an exhibition could not pass unnoticed ; its BYRON 125 clangour, its 'vim,' its random brutality exactly caught the fancy of Byron's public. John Bull with a genius, he lived before John Bull was deceased. Thus famous, Byron devoted himself for the next two years to representing, though unconsciously, the gurgi- tations of his time. On his return from abroad he published in February 1812 the first two Cantos of Childe Harold, and thereafter remained, in the eyes of his contemporaries, the monarch of Parnassus. There flows from him, for three years, romance after romance, full, as was proper in the days of the Regent and Napoleon, of gallantry and war ; Giaours, Conrads, Laras, that unite an occasional, but occasionally brilliant, descriptive power, and a rattling liveliness of narrative, with what have come to be the common- places of the romantic stage. The success was too heady, and these poems are without reality. Byron mirrors the popular aspirations and tendencies, though unconsciously, too exhaustively. In these forceful extravaganzas, where all the energies of youth hurry across a background of world melan- choly, there is too much for effect. This was not Byron ; it was a mirror in which the heavy boobies of the day could see the development of passions which as they fancied, and fancied perhaps rightly, lay un- developed within them. Their daughters were as wise, and many a demure maid must have soaked her pillow thinking how well she understood she whom an unhappy fate had confined at a boarding-school the sorrows of the Bride of Abydos. The roar of Jemappes had died away, but it had left to a world, familiarised with startling developments, such possibilities of sympathy. 126 POETRY AND PROSE Fortunately for the world, for how often it profits by the misfortunes of men of genius, Byron was not much longer to enjoy circumstances so * proudly fine.' On the second of January 1815 he married Miss Milbanke, and within the year the crash came. His tinsel glory fell from him ; the hero became the outlaw, and the darling of society its assailant. Of all the tricks of the genius of literature this is the most pleasing. At a turn of the hand the pose became a fact. There was now a dark secret ; there was now good ground both for melancholy and disappointment ; there was now a breach with law. Everything Byron had imagined of picturesque in personal fate now attached to his own. He was not unaware of the effectiveness of the reality, and in this sense the pose continues, but the pose is now the pose of the fact. He wears his outlaw circumstances as a foreign cloak of distinction, but they are his circumstances. The theatricality continues, but the drama is now no longer Childe Harold, it is Byron. Everything he writes after 1815 is real, not, of course, with the inner reality of unstudied emotion, but real in no trivial sense, as real as its author. This division between the two parts of Byron's poetical career Arnold did not observe. He was not careful to distinguish between a theatricality almost pure and a manner which, though of the theatre, had the matter supplied to it. The early Byron had not sufficient reality to be a poet above the third rank ; the later Byron has sufficient reality for his purpose ; not enough to be Wordsworth, but enough a real sincerity and trueness to himself to be Byron. The highest kind of inner sincerity, that which belongs to the greatest poets, Byron did not BYRON 127 possess ; a lower but genuine kind, that which is necessary to an orator, in the later part of his career and then in a high degree, he did. In his earlier period one can trace in embryo many faculties, but there are only two that are ripely developed, those of copiousness and descriptive power. Both those faculties appear more remarkable when, as in the later period, his mind has a wider content ; and yet what is truly as remarkable, when we consider the levity of the earlier matter, is their pronounced development so soon. Byron's descriptive power always is highly vivid, more vivid than Scott's, and this perhaps was what Scott was thinking of when he said * Byron bet me.' l It is, however, always descriptive power pure and simple. The scene is realised without being real. After having read the description, the picture, of Mazeppa for instance, is printed on your mind forever, without either seeming a part of actual life or making life more real. This is not always due to the isolated character of the incidents, as at the close of Lara (the last of Ezzelin, Arnold calls the passage) ; for the im- pression is similar where Byron describes an assault, Parisina's swoon or cry, the mustering for battle before Waterloo, or Venice. It is due to an excess of vivid- ness, or let me rather say to a vividness in excess of what life wears. It is as if you saw life through an opera-glass. But this is a distinguishing feature of Byron's vision, which is as much a defect as a merit. 1 Scott, of course, meant primarily that Byron had outdistanced him with the public ; but there is a tribute as well as a statement in the phrase. 128 POETRY AND PROSE In life for all of us everything in sight is to some degree harmonised by a neighbouring object ; the unequivocal green of the grass modifies the impression which is made by the young and almost yellow birch in spring. We see sideways as well as direct, and it is seldom anything splashes at us. We have to look at a daffodil through our hands to see how golden it is. Truth to this fact of human life we call in art a sense of relation, and this sense Byron, till he comes to write his satires, does not give. When we say then that Byron's descriptive power compared to the descriptive power of Scott is astonishingly vivid, we are dis- tinguishing, not undilutedly praising. The most vivid incidents in Scott, the fight of Fitzjames and Roderick Dhu, are not the most real. A more fluid character, and therefore a further reality, attaches to the account of the stag-hunt, the process of which in memory is dim. Byron's wonderful descriptive power has some of the characteristics of sensational art. His habit of isolating the object of sight (not of feeling) involves a falsity, and so much is this true that the descriptions that seem most real are those of objects necessarily and of their nature isolated Mazeppa and the Prisoner of Chillon, for example. Here you may quarrel with the selection of too effective subjects, but you cannot quarrel with the concentration of vision. His other faculty of copiousness is a pure merit, or it is a pure merit for him. It was the faculty that enabled him to display a rich nature moving variously, to display it in all its affections, and to give the effect of a whole. Of all poets Byron is he who is least to be represented by any process of selection. Beauties there are, and Arnold has made a happy selection of BYRON 129 them, but the reader of Arnold's little volume has not the faintest idea of the poet. You might as well attempt to represent a kaleidoscope by a few pieces of brightly coloured glass. The whole thing is in the shake, the process of transmutation. Undergoing this process the over-vividness of the parts is not so offen- sive ; you have not time to be properly affronted. Especially was this so as the range of his outlook increased, and thus his faculty of copiousness stood him always in increasing stead. It is the most dangerous of qualities, for while a small man can squeeze and restrain his output till there is something that is at least pruned of what is bad, there must be genuine virtue to be served by a gushing display. And indeed there was. Byron's faults were many, but no bigger or more generous heart ever beat in human bosom. Beside Wordsworth Byron often looks a child, but beside Byron Wordsworth sometimes a little man. 1 In modern times there are only two personali- ties at all comparable, those of Shakespeare and Napoleon. There is not intensity alone, or one might add Shelley ; there is volume, there is gusto. The third and fourth Cantos of Childe Harold are like the impression of a larger world produced in the House of Commons when Mr. Gladstone got on his legs. Man- fred'^ like Mr. Parnell's last manifesto ('the English wolves ') ; to read through the letters is to come in contact with a vitality beside which one's own life, though lived in the actual, pales ; Don Juan in the 1 See the stories in Carlyle's Reminiscences, in the Journal of the Rev. Julian Charles Young (Macmillan, 1871), and in Miss Martineau's Autobiography. I 130 POETRY AND PROSE verity of its abandon is the unguarded display, and how rare a thing, of man in society. I suppose, but for the clamant exception of Shake- speare, we might say that no purely poetical force can display a copiousness equal to this. Great poetry is a selected portion even of a great poet's feeling. We feel, when reading Wordsworth or Milton, that we are allowed intimacy only with the best part of their being. There is a reserve ; the kind of reserve that prevents Heaven including Purgatory and the Inferno. Byron's effusiveness and heedless haste make him the friend of every one. He lives in that ' devil-may-care ' which enchants the 'purblind race of miserable men.' But this conquest of the world is due to personal causes, and is, though a literary, not a poetical triumph. The very qualities which make Byron so effective as a force and as a satirist make against him in the field of pure poetry. Copiousness alone, if it is not a poetical copiousness, is a disservice poetically. To write a social satire Byron was exactly fitted, and in the success of Don Juan everything in his circum- stances had part. Those who condemn society generally condemn it from the hermit's cave, or, at least, without ever having been able to partake of its life, their own solitariness of spirit fencing them among the crowd. But Byron knew society ; he was exempt from hardly one of its brassier vices ; he knew the ordinary man at bottom he was an ordinary man, sharing his loves and admirations ; in himself he was an exaggeration of his virtues, his veins throbbed with his ardours. And this society, this world of elbowing men and attendant women whose vision was his, had shut him out from Paradise. The way of the world BYRON 131 had defeated him, and in return he is Mephistopheles to the way of the world. The whole thing is a mockery the laugh of a fiend who denies that everything that is usual is good. He claims the license of the aristocrat to sneer at home virtues, and the liberty of the outlaw generously to admire. Feeling, observation, irony, a welter of incidents, popular political notions, the cant of the governing class, flat tirades, that attitude to- wards women which peculiarly belongs to the vulgar male, the most obvious and bluntest sarcasm, at times satire the smoothest and most insinuating because freely dashed with sentiment, a frequent voluptuous charm, these jostle each other. Taken together they give a view of a world ; they are related, or at least one thing relates itself to the next. Nowhere is Byron's merit of copiousness of greater service, nowhere is the kaleidoscope turned more quickly. The colours are all high, but they flash past and change one into another. It is not necessary to claim imperishable excellence for Don Juan, but it has a permanent appeal to the society to which it was addressed. Men of the world, and of that world, no doubt, become fewer as civilisation becomes increasingly democratised, and the man whose favourite reading is Don Juan is now often a sorry fellow. Something of the short day of the orator attaches to this consummate effort of Byron's muse, but it has the highest rank as a personal and social document. There is no whispered sound in it too fine to catch the ear of the ordinary citizen, and no work with so little of permanence will continue to be so permanently read. What is the species of poetic merit to which a nature capable, and chiefly capable, of such an achievement 132 POETRY AND PROSE can attain? In considering this we shall have to enter on a series of qualified statements. Metrical facility Byron does possess, an unusual command of almost all the metres in common time. But his metrical ear is not delicate. The metre is metre in black and white : 'Since our Country, our God oh my Sire ! Demand that thy Daughter expire.' Too often it is like this, like a dentist's operation ; and the occasions on which Byron conforms to the inner law of the rhythm, without pronouncing the law at every foot, are rarer than with any other poet of his rank. For this reason his blank verse is very unread- able. Blank verse depends in an especial degree for the fluidity of its effect upon the harmony of regularity with irregularity. There must be a variation sufficient to destroy the monotony without destroying the regularity of the beat. It goes to a time-tune in the poet's head, and since it does is capable, with each new poet, of new variety. What looseness of expres- sion to say that the Two Gentlemen of Verona and Lear are written in the same metre ! The fact is, there is an inner metre, widely different, which how- ever in both cases expresses itself in common form. We may say blank verse is no more than an instrument on which every poet can play his own music. The music is not partly supplied from without, as rhyme and the stanza supply it, nor does it rely in the same way as other poetry upon a series of separate effects. A poem in blank verse, if it is to be a poem, must depend for its poetical effect upon one effect the poetical effect of the whole. And for a sustained BYRON 133 poetical effort of this kind Byron is peculiarly unsuited. Even in the short efforts of lyrical poetry his success is episodic. Shall we find in the matter a more constant attain- ment of a strictly poetical kind? The inquiry is not a hopeful one, for the kind of formal defect that exists in Byron's poetry (not every kind of formal defect) implies a defect in the substance ; it implies a blunt- ness. Arnold, indeed, quotes two very beautiful lines from Byron lines that combine the sympathetic emotion of Wordsworth with a captivating sentiment : ' He heard it, but he heeded not his eyes Were with his heart, and that was far away ' ; and Arnold adds, ' Of verse of this high quality Byron has much,' but to speak so is surely thoughtless. This verse, describing the dying gladiator's state of mind as he hears the shout for the victor, is not pro- perly to be described as verse of high quality ; it is of the highest quality. There is here the quiet absoluteness of the greatest poetry saying all ; and of verse of this quality it would be much truer to say that Byron has nothing more. Interpretative power of this order, with the exception of one or two surprising instances, is simply not his. 1 This is the kind of thing Byron 1 Perhaps a phrase in 'The Dream' : * But the old mansion, and the accustom'd hall, And the remember'd chambers, and the place, The day, the hour, the sunshine, and the shade.' Though this is preceded and even immediately followed by a flatness : ' What business had they there at such a time ? ' 134 POETRY AND PROSE generally writes when he is making a poetical effort, exercising a free imagination : 'The sky is changed ! and such a change ! Oh Night And storm, and darkness, ye are wondrous strong, Yet lovely in your strength, as is the light Of a dark eye in woman ! ' That is dreadful. The stars are forth, the moon above the tops Of the snow-shining mountains, Beautiful ! I linger yet with Nature, for the night Hath been to me a more familiar face Than that of man.' That is strained ; and of such writing, of attempted poetry, there is a great deal in Byron a great deal where a little would be too much. Sometimes what is attempted is achieved, and the result is poetry, the occasional delicacy of the feeling even informing the metre : ' There be none of Beauty's daughters With a magic like thee ; And like music on the waters Is thy sweet voice to me.' But the note is not deep, nor is it sustained. Some- times, too, where the result is very successful, we are still conscious of the effort. There are the verses which Byron, returning from a ball, wrote on Miss Wilmot, who had worn a dark dress with spangles : * She walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies ; And all that 3 s best of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes : Thus mellow'd to that tender light Which heaven to gaudy day denies. BYRON 135 One shade the more, one ray the less, Had half impair'd the nameless grace Which waves in every raven tress, Or softly lightens o'er her face ; Where thoughts serenely sweet express How pure, how dear their dwelling-place. And on that cheek, and o'er that brow, So soft, so calm, yet eloquent, The smiles that win, the tints that glow, But tell of days in goodness spent, A mind at peace with all below, A heart whose love is innocent ! ' One has but to compare this with Wordsworth's * She was a phantom of delight,' to feel the under- strain. Byron's piece has the mellowness which was his ; it is full, exceptionally full, of the ripeness of his exotic charm, and yet we feel it hovering, as if about to settle on contrast and antithesis. The * tender light,' the * gaudy day,' * the one shade more,' the opposition between a gentle innocence and a splendid dark beauty such are contrasted effects. Evident, too, is the appeal, as evident as the definition, nothing of the shadow that there is in Wordsworth's ' Her eyes as stars of twilight fair ; Like twilight's, too, her dusky hair.' Nor is it merely shadow to express which Byron's words are too plain : ' But all things else about her drawn From May-time and the cheerful dawn.' Wordsworth's feeling is so intimate it often cannot be expressed without using unfamiliar terms. A crucial instance of this lack of inner delicacy is to be found in Byron's imitation of Sappho. 136 POETRY AND PROSE This is what he says : ' Oh, Hesperus ! thou bringest all good things Home to the weary, to the hungry cheer, To the young bird the parent's brooding wings, The welcome stall to the o'er-labour'd steer ; Whate'er of peace about our hearthstone clings, Whate'er our household gods protect of dear, Are gather'd round us by thy look of rest ; Thou bring'st the child, too, to the mother's breast.' This is Sappho : ' Oh evening, bringing all that morning scattered, thou bringest the sheep, thou bringest the goat, thou bringest the child back to her mother.' It may be said that no one could have paraphrased those words, in which so much is said by saying so little, without spoiling them ; but it is safe to say Byron was quite innocent that he had here exchanged an immortal verse for a pathetic one. The enumeration, the antithesis, the afterthought, he could not see as merely the alloy of the man of prose. A plainness of this kind was for him beyond even appreciation : he did not feel with sufficient intimacy, with sufficient poetic sincerity, to know how close is Sappho to the truth of feeling. Is Byron not then sincere? He is sincere, singularly outspoken and sincere, but the connection between the impression and the expressed feeling is by no means instantaneous. Indeed we might almost say, though to say it is a contradiction in terms, that there is no instantaneous connection between the impression and the feeling itself. Before he has completely felt the impression he has begun to think what it is, nay, how to express it. He has his eye always on his audience, and is always directly addressing someone. And this is the root difference between the poet strictly so called BYRON 137 and the orator. 1 Poetry is a record of feeling ; oratory is an appeal, based, of course, on emotional experience, but meant to excite feeling. It is an address to the feeling of the audience. Great oratory, and Byron's is superbly great, forces a contact between the emotions of the audience and the emotions of the speaker. Poetry displays its own heart. Oratory tears open the heart of the listener. If we look at Byron's poetry from this point of view, we shall find that, just in so much as it is deficient in the pure inner quality of the most truthful poetry, it is proficient in the more external quality of oratory. Before Sappho's verses can mean anything to any one, there is necessary some retirement to the sessions of thought. But Byron as he runs along, pointing his effects, educes a sympathetic understanding. Great oratory depends just as much as the greatest poetry upon emotion ; nor is it correct to say that the one depends upon the emotion of the hearer, the other on that of the speaker. No orator ever aroused emotion without himself experiencing emotion. What it is correct to say is that the orator is thinking primarily, not of what he feels himself, but of how he can affect others. His feeling is necessary to him, but it is no more necessary 1 ' Poetry and eloquence are both alike the expression or utterance of feeling. But if we may be excused the antithesis, we should say that eloquence is heard, poetry is 0z/