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/<?Hieard. Eloquence supposes 
 an audience ; the peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the 
 poet's utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing 
 itself to itself, in moments of solitude, and embodying itself in sym- 
 bols which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling in 
 the exact shape in which it exists in the poet's mind. Eloquence is 
 feeling pouring itself out to other minds, courting their sympathy, or 
 endeavouring to influence their belief or move them to passion or to 
 action.' Mill, Poetry and its Varieties. 
 
138 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 than his tongue. The feeling of the orator, to employ 
 a bold figure, is the tongue of his heart ; it is eloquent. 
 How easy it is to draw distinctions, and how difficult 
 to make them. The orator is not occupied in telling 
 people how he feels, but in getting people to feel with 
 him. For this reason his chief enemy is inattention, 
 and since it is, he must deal in contrast and antithesis, 
 he must deal in broad effects : 
 
 ' When Nero perished by the justest doom 
 Which ever the destroyer yet destroyed. 3 
 
 Nero had little to do with Hesperus, but he points, and 
 points rightly, Byron's moral. 
 
 Take, for instance, that moving passage about the 
 Colosseum : 
 
 ' And here the buzz of eager nations ran, 
 
 In murmur'd pity, or loud-roar'd applause, 
 
 As man was slaughter'd by his fellow-man. 
 
 And wherefore slaughter'd ? wherefore, but because 
 
 Such were the bloody Circus' genial laws, 
 
 And the imperial pleasure. Wherefore not ? 
 
 What matters where we fall to fill the maws 
 
 Of worms on battle-plains or listed spot ? 
 
 Both are but theatres where the chief actors rot. 
 
 I see before me the gladiator lie : 
 
 He leans upon his hand his manly brow 
 
 Consents to death, but conquers agony, 
 
 And his droop'd head sinks gradually low 
 
 And through his side the last drops, ebbing slow 
 
 From the red gash, fall heavy, one by one, 
 
 Like the first of a thunder-shower ; and now 
 
 The arena swims around him he is gone, 
 
 Ere ceased the inhuman shout which hail'd the wretch who won. 
 
 He heard it, but he heeded not his eyes 
 Were with his heart, and that was far away : 
 He reck'd not of the life he lost nor prize, 
 But where his rude hut by the Danube lay, 
 There were his young barbarians all at play, 
 There was their Dacian mother he, their sire, 
 Butcher'd to make a Roman holiday.' 
 
BYRON 139 
 
 It is impossible to imagine grander oratory : the dis- 
 turbed atmosphere, as of a concourse, of the noble 
 introduction ; the swift appeal, with outflung arm, to 
 humane sentiment ; the invented question and the 
 broad irony. Nothing is perfect, and at the close of 
 the first stanza there is poor writing, but it is imme- 
 diately followed by the wonderful second stanza so 
 boldly painted, the blood that falls * like the first of a 
 thunder-shower,' a meretricious but colossal figure that 
 out-Burkes Burke, and then the swift exitus, and the 
 masterly return on the humane mood : 
 
 * Ere ceased the inhuman shout which hail'd the wretch who won.' 
 
 There follows a stroke of pure poetry, improved for the 
 purposes of popular appeal by the pathetic explication, 
 the simple home scene, the children, the mother, and 
 then thundering 
 
 'he, their sire, 
 Butcher'd to make a Roman holiday, 3 
 
 the whole pent-up sympathies of the audience gather- 
 ing to a head in that glut of splendid rage : a hush of 
 wonder and then the whole theatre rising to its feet. 
 
 It is magnificent ; but it is not the method of poetry. 
 The tomb of Cecilia Metella is another familiar in- 
 stance : 
 
 ' There is a stern round tower of other days, 
 Firm as a fortress, with its fence of stone, 
 Such as an army's baffled strength delays, 
 Standing with half its battlements alone, 
 And with two thousand years of ivy grown, 
 The garland of eternity, where wave 
 The green leaves over all by time o'erthrown ; 
 What was this tower of strength ? within its cave 
 What treasure lay so lock'd, so hid ? A woman's grave.' 
 
140 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 It is not possible to beat this. What art ! The stern 
 tower, the reference to martial multitudes, and to the 
 withstood attrition of the years, all to lead to the 
 eternal contrast, the source of human birth and the 
 quiet resistless end. 
 
 Just as effective are Waterloo, the address to the 
 Ocean, the falls of Terni, the shipwreck in Don Juan, 
 the cup of Samian wine. Nay, just as effective are 
 all those pieces which cannot be praised throughout for 
 their poetical excellence, 'The Dream,' * She Walks in 
 Beauty ' ; just as effective is the quality of over-vivid- 
 ness at which we cavilled. This quality of over-vivid- 
 ness is indeed found to be essential. 
 
 Such rhetorical merit, the merit of an appeal or an 
 effect, attaches to pieces which have hardly any other, 
 Manfred contra Mundum, for instance. This dramatic 
 poem, Byron's defiant exclamation that he can live 
 alone, is, as a whole, nearly unreadable ; but the figure 
 lives in the memory like a storm. So with Cain, which 
 Arnold amused himself with demonstrating not to be 
 a great philosophical work. Cain was not properly 
 comparable with the De Rerum Natura ; its author did 
 not possess his own view definitely nor see it suffi- 
 ciently as a whole ; had in fact no view ; was troubled 
 with the difficulties of Genesis and * the two principles.' 
 Perhaps in Arnold's day this needed saying, or perhaps 
 it was Arnold's way of saying something else. Yet 
 Cain was a remarkable achievement. Obviously not 
 the work of a thinker, nor written from any single 
 standpoint, it occupied itself very effectively in putting 
 posers to the current theology, and it startled the whole 
 of Byron's England as the crack of a stockdriver's 
 whip startles the cattle of the American plains. It was 
 
BYRON 141 
 
 an actual living polemic of the directest kind, and one 
 might as well object to the Tale of a Tub that it was 
 not written by Meredith. Dr. Kennedy's views did 
 not interest Arnold, but they interested Byron. Dr. 
 Kennedy was sitting on the Government benches. 
 
 A merit that can inform and give life to whole poems 
 is no light merit, and Byron's oratorical power is so great 
 that he leaves all other English orators standing. We 
 have not to say * How different from Wordsworth.' 
 We have to say ' How much better than Patrick Henry.' 
 Here is an orator who is moving with the flow, the 
 rush, and the light of poetry. 
 
 And how strong and firm is Byron : 
 
 ' A solitary shriek, the bubbling cry 
 Of some strong swimmer in his agony.' 
 
 That is as much beyond Macaulay as Shakespeare's 
 plays are beyond Tennyson's. There is here a con- 
 tained power. How the blows, on this side and on 
 that, heavily fall. He puts his fist through : 
 
 ' You have the Pyrrhic dance as yet ; * 
 Where is the Pyrrhic phalanx gone ?' 
 
 Byron does not understand war as Burns understands 
 it or Tolstoy, but no such noble expression of the 
 martial instinct as Byron's one line, 
 
 * Battle's magnificently-stern array,' 
 
 is to be found in their human pages. This is to 
 express what the serried ranks are aspiring to feel 
 
 1 Plato (Laws, vii. 816) tells us there were two main classes of 
 dancing the warlike or Pyrrhic dance, and the dance of peace (TO 
 ). E. A. Sonnenschein's Ideals of Culture. 
 
142 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 about their business. It is to achieve the purpose of 
 the public orator : 
 
 ' Minions of splendour shrinking from distress.' 
 
 How good it all is, and how impossible to be bettered ! l 
 With this power of direct and luminous appeal 
 Byron combines another, the power of sentiment. 
 And this power, though also superseded by a greater 
 power in the highest poetry, is peculiarly of service to 
 an orator. To an orator sentiment is of greater account 
 than feeling, for what is sentiment but feeling dis- 
 played ? It is not possible to have sentiment without 
 feeling ; it is possible to have feeling without sentiment. 
 You can feel, that is to say, without posing or setting 
 the feeling so as to start a responsive tear. Feeling 
 itself is without consciousness of its effect ; it is direct, 
 poignant, even sometimes unmanly. But the great 
 speaker must exercise control ; from his touches of 
 tenderness there must be a recovery. You move an 
 audience by standing erect. Sometimes, coming 
 where it does, a momentary retrospect is enough : 
 
 1 One says so, forgetting Shakespeare, for Shakespeare has some- 
 times an eloquence that contains more imagination than Byron's : 
 
 ' Are all thy conquests, glories, triumphs, spoils, 
 Shrunk to this little measure.' 
 
 The quality that is in this that is not in Byron at his best is a clear 
 magnificence. And just for this reason it would be admired, as Lord 
 Rosebery's eloquence is admired, by any audience ; but it would not 
 move an audience as Byron would. 
 
 Shakespeare too, at other times, has oratorical lines that might be 
 Byron's : 
 
 ' Cowards die many times before their death.' 
 
 But Shakespeare's power of writing constantly like this was crowded 
 out by his power of writing very differently. 
 
BYRON 143 
 
 ' I have a passion for the name of Mary, 
 For once it was a magic name to me.' 
 
 Sometimes there is a deliberate balancing : 
 
 ' Though wit may flash from fluent lips, and mirth distract the 
 
 breast, 
 Through midnight hours that yield no more their former hope of 
 
 rest; 
 
 'Tis but as ivy-leaves around the ruined turret wreath, 
 All green and wildly fresh without, but worn and grey beneath.' 
 
 Or less obviously, but more finely : 
 
 ' There 's not a joy the world can give like that it takes away, 
 When the glow of early thought declines in feeling's dull decay ; 
 J Tis not on youth's smooth cheek the blush alone, which fades so fast, 
 But the tender bloom of heart is gone, ere youth itself be past.' 
 
 Without the precision of the opening lines that last 
 beautiful one would sound sentimental. 
 
 Sometimes too, when the depth of the feeling over- 
 masters, there is compression of the lips : 
 
 * The fire that on my bosom preys 
 Is lone as some volcanic isle ; 
 No torch is kindled at its blaze 
 A funeral pile ! ' 
 
 Byron's command over verse is considerable, such 
 as to afford him free opportunity of developing his 
 sentiment a sentiment which for richness and warmth 
 of generosity stands alone. Usually a sentimental 
 writer has something that, however charming, is 
 essentially feminine in his nature, something Long- 
 fellowish. But Byron is not unmanned ; his display is 
 like the first drops of a thunder shower, and it no 
 more detracts from his dignity than the cloud's 
 bursting detracts from that of heaven. As a poet of 
 
144 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 sentiment he has a range, to which he never otherwise 
 attains : 
 
 "'Tis sweet to hear the watch-dog's honest bark 
 
 Bay deep-mouth'd welcome as we draw near home ; 
 
 'Tis sweet to know there is an eye will mark 
 Our coming, and look brighter when we come ; 
 
 } Tis sweet to be awaken'd by the lark, 
 
 Or lull'd by falling waters ; sweet the hum 
 
 Of bees, the voice of girls, the song of birds, 
 
 The lisp of children and their earliest words. 
 
 Sweet is the vintage, when the showering grapes 
 In Bacchanal profusion reel to earth. . . .' 
 
 One can think of the cradle and yet clink one's 
 glass. 
 
 "Tis sweet to win, no matter how, one's laurels, 
 
 By blood or ink ; 'tis sweet to put an end 
 To strife ; 'tis sometimes sweet to have our quarrels, 
 
 Particularly with a tiresome friend : 
 Sweet is old wine in bottles, ale in barrels ; 
 
 Dear is the helpless creature we defend 
 Against the world ; and dear the schoolboy spot 
 
 We ne'er forget, though there we are forgot.' 
 
 There is nothing of the litterateur here ; it is the man 
 talking to men. In truth, there is both a robustness 
 and an orange glow in these sentimental passages 
 which quiver on the brink of tears. They move like 
 the panorama of sunset, full of that fluent reference to 
 all things that distinguishes great-hearted talk. No 
 writer gives you the same sense of coming in con- 
 tact with a living flesh-and-blood personality. The 
 personality disclosed in Wordsworth's poems is an 
 inner personality. If you met him he would not be 
 like his poems ; but Byron, at his best, has no singing 
 
BYRON 145 
 
 mantle to put on. He has not, like Shakespeare, 
 a secret imaginative world. He is no poetry fellow : 
 
 ' My boat is on the shore, 
 
 And my bark is on the sea ; 
 But, before I go, Tom Moore, 
 Here's a double health to thee ! ' 
 
 That might be trolled out in a mellow voice at the 
 banquet of social joy. You can see him lifting his cup, 
 the whole head, with the shining eyes, sparkling with 
 animation. 
 
 It is the charm of contact. What Byron writes 
 is near the summit of that perfection to which a purely 
 external poetry can attain. 
 
 K 
 
 
146 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 EMERSON 
 
 4 THE emotionalisation of knowledge,' says Mr. Hudson 
 in his Introduction to the Study of Literature, is inevit- 
 ably a slow and gradual process ; but meanwhile, one 
 measure of a poet's greatness as a thinker is his ability 
 to perceive the possibility of it.' 
 
 Principal Shairp heads a chapter of his essay On 
 the Poetic Interpretation of Nature, l Will Science put 
 out Poetry?' and in the copy in my hands Professor 
 Nichol has answered this question with the genial note, 
 <Yes, for a hundred years.' Thirty-four of these 
 years have gone, and Poetry has not yet seriously 
 concentrated upon the task of the twentieth century. 
 The novel nature of the task, and the general con- 
 sciousness of a task being there, has for the most 
 part merely damped the ardour of poets. Our love 
 songs have not of late been good, because we have 
 heard, faintly, a call to sing of the new interests. 
 Sporadically in the last hundred years much has been 
 attempted by great men, by Emerson, by Arnold, and 
 by Meredith. Much too has been achieved, yet 'the 
 emotionalisation of knowledge is inevitably a slow and 
 gradual process,' and what Wordsworth said remains 
 true : ' If the labours of Men of science should ever 
 create any material revolution, direct or indirect, in our 
 condition, and in the impressions which we habitually 
 receive, the Poet will sleep then no more than at 
 
EMERSON 147 
 
 present ; he will be ready to follow the steps of the 
 Man of science, not only in those general indirect 
 effects, but he will be at his side, carrying sensation 
 into the midst of the objects of the science itself.' 
 
 But this time has not yet arrived : the conclusions of 
 philosophy, science, and criticism are not yet any 
 necessary part of the general mind nay, more, the 
 thinker himself seldom apprehends these conclusions 
 emotionally. The first step is that he should do so ; 
 the next step is that all should do so. 
 
 Emerson, the forerunner in everything modern, is 
 the forerunner in this. His poetry is to be judged not 
 solely for its own excellence, but for its worth as a 
 factor in an intellectual development that will be the 
 ripest birth of the coming time. Then Poetry will 
 cease to confine herself to the chronicling of action 
 and the topics of Love and Doubt : she will expend 
 her emotion on her inner Faith. A new Dante and 
 a new Milton will arise to sing the beliefs of the 
 new man. 
 
 4 To point forward and to help in the accomplish- 
 ment' of this is the true work of Emerson's poems. 
 This it is which gives them a character of their own, 
 which makes them difficult and, to those who run away 
 from modern life, even uninteresting. It is so much 
 easier to luxuriate in the imagery of 'The Blessed 
 Damozel.' 
 
 The duty of the literary critic is not, therefore, to 
 praise Emerson for occasionally writing poems on 
 more general patterns. He does so, but this is not his 
 chief merit. It is not his chief merit, but the merit of 
 these occasional poems of Emerson's is at times ex- 
 tremely high. In the poetry of quietism, of gentle and 
 
148 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 resigned feeling, and of feeling observation, he has left 
 occasional work which is not of its kind surpassable ; 
 and in a poetry of a lower order, a poetry whose merit 
 is rhetorical, his occasional successes are so brilliant 
 that he bulks large in the list of quotations familiar to 
 the literate. 
 
 As a rhetorician Emerson has the supreme merit of 
 not being rhetorical ; I mean, that the balance of the 
 saying is with the speaker. In Byron's rhetoric you 
 feel that it is all, or if not all, chiefly in the address. 
 He is thinking much more of the people he is address- 
 ing than of the thing said, with the consequence that 
 Byron's rhetoric is never for long not wild. The target 
 is hit, but there is a shower of arrows, many of which 
 fly wide. In Emerson's rhetoric, though the thing is 
 put in the most telling way possible, you feel there has 
 been a preliminary and conscientious struggle to define 
 the thing. It is legitimate rhetoric, the wit of sense : 
 
 ' Pay ransom to the owner, 
 
 And fill the bag to the brim. 
 Who is the owner ? The slave is owner, 
 And ever was. Pay him.' 
 
 What a wrestle with the opposing argument went 
 before that lightning throw ! 
 
 1 So nigh is grandeur to our dust, 
 
 So near is God to man, 
 When Duty whispers low, Thou must, 
 The youth replies, I can? 
 
 One could not say that but as the result of a 
 laborious moral experience. Sometimes it is a long 
 pondering on history that has preceded : 
 
 ' For He that worketh high and wise, 
 
 Nor pauses in his plan, 
 Will take the sun out of the skies 
 Ere freedom out of man. 
 
EMERSON 149 
 
 At times, too, there is a higher virtue. You are hardly 
 conscious that you are being addressed, so much does 
 the poet seem to be thinking aloud : 
 
 4 Though love repine, and reason chafe, 
 There came a voice without reply, 
 " 'Tis man's perdition to be safe, 
 When for the truth he ought to die."' 
 
 It carries much further than Byron at his best : 
 
 4 1 laugh at the lore and the pride of man, 
 At the sophist schools, and the learned clan ; 
 For what are they all, in their high conceit, 
 When man in the bush with God may meet?' 
 
 It does not merely convince one, it sets one thinking. 
 In the hymn for the Concord Monument, rhetoric 
 reaches its final expression : 
 
 * Here once the embattled farmers stood, 
 And fired the shot heard round the world.' 
 
 That is to glorify the fact without boasting. In its 
 square shoulders it has the unaggressive dignity of 
 defence, and pays at once a pointed and a just tribute 
 to America, to Freedom, and to Man. 1 
 
 Besides this poetry, very easily understood and with 
 a broad moral appeal, Emerson has another poetry 
 more definitely poetic, less intellectual and more 
 emotional. 
 
 1 Cowper's 
 
 * Regions Caesar never knew 
 Thy Posterity shall sway,' 
 
 is fine too, the finest thing in the literature of Imperialism. It is 
 fine because of the prospect in it, by which it is separated from the 
 vainglorious celebration of present achievement. But put it beside 
 Emerson and it is but a prophetic boast, a thing of glitter. 
 
150 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 It must be premised, however, that on typically 
 emotional subjects in a typical love poetry, for ex- 
 ample success does not attend his steps. On emotional 
 subjects he has no power of emotion. These poems 
 often are too thin in sentiment ('Eva') ; often the poet 
 talks round his subject and is content with a succession 
 of statements ; he has no sufficient command of music, 
 no sufficient facility of rejection of unemotional 
 images : 
 
 * O'er ten thousand, thousand acres, 
 
 Goes light the nimble zephyr ; 
 The Flowers tiny sect of Shakers 
 Worship him ever.' 
 
 Even in the best of these emotional pieces there is a 
 sense of intellectual effort : 
 
 ' When the redbird spread his sable wing, 
 
 And showed his side of flame ; 
 When the rosebud ripened to the rose, 
 In both I read thy name.' 
 
 It is pretty, but it is made pretty. Those who find a 
 stately charm in everything Emerson writes will find 
 that charm still in these love pieces, but charm of 
 magic they have none. 
 
 At times, too, when something observed has stirred 
 in him a transient but very real emotion, he disturbs 
 the emotional effect by explaining or trying to explain. 
 Take this beautiful little piece to the American wild 
 flower the Rhodora : 
 
 * In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes, 
 I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods, 
 Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook, 
 To please the desert and the sluggish brook 
 The purple petals, fallen in the pool, 
 Made the black water with their beauty gay ; 
 Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool, 
 And court the flower that cheapens his array. 
 
EMERSON 151 
 
 Rhodora ! Let the sages ask thee why 
 
 This charm is wasted on the earth and sky, 
 
 Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose ! 
 
 I never thought to ask, I never knew ; 
 
 But, in my simple ignorance, suppose 
 
 The self-same Power that brought me there brought you.' 
 
 This is not to be placed beside Wordsworth's 
 daffodils, but it is simple and affecting, and there is a 
 beautiful ascension of emotion from the freshness of 
 the opening line to the religious sincerity of the last. 
 I have placed the real Rhodora in a footnote. 1 The 
 inserted couple of lines explain nothing, and if they 
 did, they furnish a sudden descent to the level road of 
 the intellect. 
 
 For all that, on occasion, and on subjects where the 
 appropriate emotion is a gentle one, Emerson can write 
 with a clear, fresh grace that belongs to him alone. 
 These triumphs are occasional, but they are triumphs, 
 as when he speaks of the mists 
 
 ' Gracing the rich man's wood and lake, 
 His park where amber mornings break' 
 
 (a phrase that you would have said was Tennyson's, 
 except that Tennyson would have said ' the amber 
 morn '), or as when he speaks of the free life of the 
 wood : 
 
 ' I am going to my own hearth-stone, 
 Bosomed in yon green hills alone, 
 
 1 In the text given I have taken a liberty of omission, and the 
 poem really ends as follows : 
 
 ' Rhodora, if the sages ask thee why 
 This charm is wasted on the earth and sky, 
 Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing, 
 Then Beauty is its own excuse for being ; 
 Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose ! ' etc. 
 
152 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 A secret nook in a pleasant land, 
 Whose groves the frolic fairies planned ; 
 Where arches green, the livelong day, 
 Echo the blackbird's roundelay.' 
 
 Here is a passage that might have stepped straight out 
 of the pages of a seventeenth-century quietist : 
 
 ' When the forest shall mislead me, 
 When the night and morning lie, 
 When sea and land refuse to feed me, 
 'Twill be time enough to die ; 
 Then will yet my mother yield 
 A pillow in her greenest field, 
 Nor the June flowers scorn to cover 
 The clay of their departed lover.' 
 
 And here is a vignette with more of panorama and 
 open air in it than was ever confined in a drawing : 
 
 ' Many hamlets sought I then, 
 Many farms of mountain men. 
 Rallying round a parish steeple 
 Nestle warm the highland people, 
 Coarse and boisterous, yet mild, 
 Strong as giant, slow as child, 
 Smoking in a squalid room 
 Where yet the westland breezes come.' 
 
 There are only two emotional poems of Emerson's 
 which may be said to be successful as a whole : the 
 * Threnody,' which in a low quiet tone is very noble, 
 and ' May Day ' ; but in both, and notably in ' May 
 Day,' the second half of which is a falling off, parts are 
 better than the rest. The ' Threnody ' was composed 
 under the influence of Emerson's deepest affliction, the 
 loss of his darling son. The depths of that serene 
 nature, generally superior to life and its accidents, for 
 once were stirred : 
 
EMERSON 153 
 
 * O child of paradise, 
 Boy who made dear his father's home, 
 In whose deep eyes 
 
 Men read the welfare of the times to come, 
 I am too much bereft. 
 The world dishonoured thou hast left. 
 O truth's and nature's costly lie ! 
 O trusted broken prophecy ! 
 
 richest fortune sourly crossed ! 
 Born for the future, to the future lost ! ' 
 
 Or, as he writes in a strain of imaginative clarity, the 
 resigned mind surrendering itself to the dream of 
 things, and therefore to the contemplation of the 
 dream's continuance : 
 
 ' And whither now, my truant wise and sweet, 
 O, whither tend thy feet ? 
 
 1 had the right, few days ago, 
 
 Thy steps to watch, thy place to know ; 
 
 How have I forfeited the right ? 
 
 Hast thou forgot me in a new delight?' 
 
 He paints the dainty picture : 
 
 1 Ah, vainly do these eyes recall 
 The school-march, each day's festival, 
 When every morn my bosom glowed 
 To watch the convoy on the road ; 
 The babe in willow wagon closed, 
 With rolling eyes and face composed ; 
 With children forward and behind, 
 Like Cupids studiously inclined ; 
 And he the chieftain paced beside, 
 The centre of the troop allied, 
 With sunny face of sweet repose, 
 To guard the babe from fancied foes. 
 The little captain innocent 
 Took the eye with him as he went ; 
 Each village senior paused to scan 
 And speak the lovely caravan. 
 
154 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 From the window I look out 
 To mark thy beautiful parade, 
 Stately marching in cap and coat 
 To some tune by fairies played.' 1 
 
 A similar delicacy and a more unrestrained emotion 
 inform the ' Ode on May Day,' the precursor of much 
 that Meredith has written about Nature, the music 
 being struck, however, on a bell of higher note. For 
 the first time in English poetry man is in contact with 
 the outer air, undisturbed by a breath from the medita- 
 tive or religious study : 
 
 'As if time brought a new relay 
 Of shining virgins every May.' 
 
 The invitation fans the cheek : 
 
 ' Up and away ! where haughty woods 
 Front the liberated floods : 
 We will climb the broad-backed hills, 
 Hear the uproar of their joy' ; 
 
 or mark where 
 
 * The million-handed painter pours 
 Opal hues and purple dye ; 
 Azaleas flush the island floors, 
 And the tints of heaven reply.' 
 
 1 Beside this stately grief Cowper's famous passage is from a 
 moral standpoint very poor. It is surcharged with a sense of clam- 
 ant personal loss, and even grudges the unfeeling new generation* 
 the playroom that was his. 
 
 ' 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.' 
 
 But how inexpressibly more affecting ! The truth is, Emerson has- 
 too fine a nature to be supremely great as an emotional poet. 
 
EMERSON 155 
 
 The wonderful opening is the sign and herald of a new 
 poetry : 
 
 ' Daughter of Heaven and Earth, coy Spring, 
 With sudden passion languishing, 
 Maketh all things softly smile, 
 Painteth pictures mile on mile, 
 Holds a cup with cowslip-wreaths, 
 Whence a smokeless incense breathes. 
 Girls are peeling the sweet willow, 
 Poplar white, and Gilead-tree, 
 And troops of boys 
 Shouting with whoop and hilloa, 
 And hip, hip three times three. 1 
 The air is full of whistlings bland ; 
 What was that I heard 
 Out of the hazy land? 
 Harp of the wind or song of bird, 
 Or clapping of shepherd's hands, 
 Or vagrant booming of the air, 
 Voice of a meteor lost in day ? 
 Such tidings of the starry sphere 
 Can this elastic air convey. 
 Or haply 'twas the cannonade 
 Of the pent and darkened lake, 
 Cooled by the pendent mountain's shade, 
 Whose deeps, till beams of noonday break, 
 Afflicted moan, and latest hold 
 Even unto May the iceberg cold. 
 Was it a squirrel's pettish bark, 
 Or clarionet of jay ? or hark, 
 Where yon wedged line the Nestor leads, 
 Steering north with raucous cry 
 Through tracts and provinces of sky, 
 Every night alighting down 
 
 1 * Girls are peeling the sweet willow, 
 Poplar white, and Gilead-tree, 
 And troops of boys 
 Shouting with whoop and hilloa, 
 And hip, hip three times three. ' 
 
 How succulent it is ! 
 
156 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 In new landscapes of romance, 
 Where darkling feed the clamorous clans 
 By lonely lakes to men unknown. 
 Come the tumult whence it will, 
 Voice of sport, or rush of wings, 
 It is a sound, it is a token 
 That the marble sleep is broken, 
 And a change has passed on things.' 
 
 This is emotion stirred by the fact, and entering into 
 the fact and colouring it emotionally. The fact here, 
 it is true, is a fact observed. Greater difficulties are in 
 Emerson's road when he comes to deal with the facts 
 or conclusions of the intellect. To turn them into 
 emotion is indeed hard, and yet this is precisely for 
 what Emerson as a poet stands. He offers to us more 
 intellectual matter emotionally apprehended than any 
 poet who preceded him. He is not always successful ; 
 often he is contented with the mere statement of his 
 conclusion, or finds it impossible to state his conclu- 
 sion in any but the barest intellectual terms. The 
 verse 
 
 * One thing is forever good ; 
 That one thing is Success, 
 Dear to the Eumenides, 
 
 And to all the heavenly brood' ; 
 
 or the question 
 
 * Why Nature loves the number five, 
 And why the star-form she repeats ' ; 
 
 or what he has to say of Letters/ or of Freedom in 
 'Voluntaries,' or of the fortunate Guy in the poem of 
 that name, or of ' Berrying,' or of the revolutions in 
 the generations in ' Woodnotes,' 
 
 * The lord is the peasant that was, 
 The peasant the lord that shall be ' ; 
 
EMERSON 157 
 
 with all these Poetry has had nothing to do. They 
 may be a little more neatly stated than most prose 
 statements, but they are prose statements. Of such 
 statements Emerson's poems are far too full ; they make 
 up a solid half of his nominal poetry, and the wisdom 
 they contain does not justify their numerous intrusion. 
 This is a fault, and one of the gravest ; but it is not 
 one from which the intellectual poet can easily free 
 himself. The poetry of the intellect is almost bound 
 to be diffusive ; the reasoning power is prone to amble, 
 and does its work by not being always at white heat. 
 
 Even when he is dealing with a profound thought 
 for example, a thought running through all his 
 writings 
 
 ' We cannot learn the cipher 
 
 That 's writ upon our cell ; 
 Stars help us by a mystery 
 
 Which we could never spell,' 
 
 he is, as here, often contented with the mere setting 
 out of the thought. This mystery of which Emerson 
 speaks we do not feel its mysteriousness in reading 
 the verse which speaks of it. Here is not an in- 
 tellectual truth emotionally, but an emotional truth 
 intellectually apprehended. The stars help us by a 
 mystery, but Emerson does not. 
 
 It is curious to notice in his poems the interaction 
 of two separate desires, the constant effort of the 
 emotion to make poetry out of intellectual matter, and 
 the cool persistent claim of the intellect to set the 
 thing fully out. 'The Sphinx' contains his central 
 doctrine, his doctrine of the infinite nature of the 
 soul, perhaps never more clearly stated than in this 
 verse : 
 
158 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 1 The heavens that now draw him 
 
 With sweetness untold, 
 Once found, for new heavens 
 He spurneth the old.' 
 
 But this is not poetry. It is a singularly clear state- 
 ment of the doctrine, by means of the metaphor that 
 is at once most easily understood and nearest to hand. 
 It is also a statement of sufficient width. When he 
 wrote it he was thinking how to state it. But a little 
 further on, the idea resting in his mind, the emotion 
 takes fire : 
 
 ' Have I a lover 
 
 Who is noble and free ? 
 I would he were nobler 
 
 Than to love me.' l 
 
 This is not as explicit, and would not inform a general 
 reader as carefully, but it sets alight a contagious 
 emotion. Similarly in ' Merlin ' he makes the scientific 
 statement, generalised from much observation, that 
 
 ' Balance-loving Nature 
 Made all things in pairs.' 
 
 The student of natural history understands that and 
 wishes to hear no more, but eight lines further down 
 Emerson goes on : 
 
 ' Hands to hands, and feet to feet, 
 In one body grooms and brides ; 
 Eldest rite, two married sides 
 In every mortal meet.' 
 
 The thing begins to glow. 
 
 1 And so in the essay on Nature (Essays, 2nd Series) : * The 
 accepted and betrothed lover has lost the wildest charm of his 
 maiden in her acceptance of him.' 
 
EMERSON 159 
 
 Per contra, on occasion he first seizes the thing 
 poetically, and then stumbles back into prose : 
 
 4 1 thought the sparrow's note from heaven, 
 Singing at dawn on the alder bough ; 
 I brought him home, in his nest, at even ; 
 He sings the song, but it pleases not now,' 
 
 but he must attempt an explanation : 
 
 1 For I did not bring home the river and sky ; 
 He sang to my ear, they sang to my eye.' 
 
 And now he has spoilt it. Not solely because he has 
 given the reason ; our disillusionment has another 
 cause : we at once reject the reason as insufficient. 
 That is only partially true. There were many reasons, 
 and even if all the causes of difference were ex- 
 haustively stated, they would not explain the sense 
 of difference. It is strange that Emerson, who so 
 constantly tells us this, should err in this way, but in 
 this way he is constantly erring. 
 
 With these faults admitted, Emerson is often much 
 more successful than here. If he were not, I should 
 not now, and for my present purpose, be discussing 
 his poetry. He does often succeed in emotionalising 
 matter very hard to emotionalise. 
 
 But before discussing his occasional but very numer- 
 ous successes, there is still a further distinction to be 
 drawn. At times he stops short of emotion and is 
 content with crystallisation. To this department of 
 his activity belong the immortal epigrams : 
 
 ' For gods delight in gods, 
 
 And thrust the weak aside ; 
 To him who scorns their charities, 
 
 Their arms fly open wide' ; 
 
160 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 the reply of the squirrel to the mountain, 
 
 * If I cannot carry forests on my back, 
 Neither can you crack a nut ' ; 
 
 the recognition of the reign of material interests, 
 
 * The horseman serves the horse, 
 The neatherd serves the neat, 
 The merchant serves the purse, 
 The eater serves his meat ; 
 'Tis the day of the chattel, 
 
 Web to weave, and corn to grind ; 
 Things are in the saddle, 
 And ride mankind ' ; 
 
 the too optimistic pronouncement, l 
 
 * Heartily know, 
 When half-gods go, 
 The gods arrive ' ; 
 
 the testimonial to social nature, 
 
 ' Man was made of social earth, 
 Child and brother from his birth ' ; 
 
 the enthronement of the humane sentiment, 
 
 * Fear not, then, thou child infirm, 
 There 's no god dare wrong a worm ' ; 
 
 the contemptuous summary of the worth of material 
 things, 
 
 1 Too optimistic ; for nothing is easier than to destroy without 
 building up. What is true is that you cannot build up without 
 destroying. 
 
 * When the gods arrive 
 The half-gods go,' 
 
 but this would not have tickled the ear of the world. 
 
EMERSON 161 
 
 ' Gold and iron are good 
 To buy iron and gold.' 1 
 
 In all these there is no emotion ; the thought is 
 crystallised, but there is no feeling suffusing the 
 thought. It is the same where he is not epigrammatic 
 but merely concentrated, as in the mountain's dis- 
 missal of the cit : 
 
 ' Then, at last, I let him down 
 
 Once more into his dapper town, 
 
 To chatter, frightened, to his clan, 
 
 And forget me if he can ' ; 
 
 or when Emerson describes existence, 
 ' Out of sleeping a waking, 
 Out of waking a sleep ; 
 Life death overtaking ; 
 Deep underneath deep ' ; 
 
 or in the pregnant counsel to the man who would 
 open the woods with the memory of a book, 
 ' Leave all thy pedant lore apart ; 
 God hid the whole world in thy heart ' ; 
 
 1 Once or twice there are epigrams expressly written as epigrams : 
 ' The sinful painter drapes his goddess warm, 
 Because she still is naked, being dressed : 
 The godlike sculptor will not so deform 
 Beauty, which limbs and flesh enough invest.' 
 
 He is appropriately and singularly successful in translating epigrams : 
 
 ' On prince or bride no diamond stone 
 Half so gracious ever shone, 
 As the light of enterprise 
 Beaming from a young man's eyes.' 
 
 Which is so happy it might be Emerson's own. 
 
 ' EPITAPH. 
 
 Bethink, poor heart, what bitter kind of jest 
 Mad Destiny this tender stripling played ; 
 For a warm breast of maiden to his breast, 
 She laid a slab of marble on his head.' 
 
 Which plays with more emotion than most of Emerson's own 
 epigrams. 
 
 L 
 
162 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 or where he speaks of his boy's education, 
 
 4 1 taught thy heart beyond the reach 
 Of ritual, bible, or of speech ' ; 
 
 or refers to those 
 
 * Swains that live in happiness, 
 And do well because they please' ; l 
 
 or sums up the beautiful experiences of a day, 
 
 1 Thus far to-day your favours reach, 
 O fair, appeasing presences ! 
 Ye taught my lips a single speech, 
 And a thousand silences.' 
 
 It is in such passages that the calm, penetrating 
 intellect finds itself finds itself in this often sudden 
 but unhurried concentration of aphoristic thought ; 
 and this calm, penetrating intellect is Emerson. It is 
 not the whole of Emerson, but it is especially himself. 
 Weakness in this very Emersonian habit of crystallisa- 
 tion, of course, there is. One patent defect of it is, 
 that as there is in it no emotion to generalise or to 
 intensify experience, it is apt to run away into over- 
 particularisation. It is apt to state too definitely, even 
 to state indefiniteness definitely : 
 
 ' As sunbeams stream through liberal space, 
 And nothing jostle or displace, 
 So waved the pine-tree through my thought, 
 And fanned the dreams it never brought.' 
 
 1 Cp. Wordsworth's 
 
 * who, in love and truth, 
 Where no misgiving is, rely 
 Upon the genial sense of youth ' : 
 
 where Wordsworth has not merely observed, as Emerson, but has 
 sympathetically felt the fact. The more exact parallel is 
 * Glad hearts, without reproach or blot, 
 Who do thy work and know it not.' 
 
 But this is no better than Emerson's. 
 
EMERSON 163 
 
 The dreams were in the mind of the percipient, and 
 not brought from outside. Nothing could be simpler, 
 but the definiteness of the negation disturbs the atten- 
 tive mind and affects it like a volte-face. 
 
 The other weakness is that which we have been 
 considering the tendency, or rather the practice, to 
 be contented with the statement without feeling. In 
 a little thing called * Eros' Emerson speaks of the 
 sufficiency of Love : 
 
 ' The sense of the world is short, 
 Long and various the report, 
 
 To love and be beloved ; 
 Men and gods have not outlearned it ; 
 And, how oft soe'er they've turned it, 
 
 'Twill not be improved.' 
 
 This is a simple thought concisely stated, so concisely 
 that the last three lines are unnecessary ; whereas in 
 FitzGerald's 
 
 * A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, 
 A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread and Thou 
 
 Beside me singing in the Wilderness 
 Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow ! ' l 
 
 the simple thought is sublimised. Between Emerson's 
 conciseness and FitzGerald's elevation there lies the 
 whole difference between a thought that is merely 
 perceived and a thought that is felt to be true. 
 
 And it is this which constitutes the difference 
 between these Emersonian verses and the Emersonian 
 poetry of which I am about to speak. The contrast 
 
 1 Emerson is not very happy with Omar Chiam, as he calls him 
 ' Each spot where tulips prank their state 
 Has drunk the life-blood of the great ; 
 The violets yon field which stain 
 Are moles of beauties time hath slain ' ; 
 which recalls other verses. 
 
1 64 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 obviously is not so sharp. FitzGerald's quatrain is 
 an outpouring of emotion upon an emotional subject. 
 The intellect is not employed at all. But of the poetry 
 to which I now proceed to advert, the whole point is 
 that it is primarily and, when primarily, exclusively 
 occupied with the subjects of the intellectual perception. 
 I have not now to deal with a purely emotional poetry. 
 Of such of Emerson's poetry as has a primary emo- 
 tional appeal, and it is very limited in quantity, I have 
 already spoken, just as I have concluded speaking of 
 that poetry of Emerson's which makes no emotional 
 appeal and pretends to none. What remains to discuss 
 is Emerson's power of apprehending emotionally matter 
 that is intellectual. His power in this respect is much 
 greater than is commonly supposed, since it is exer- 
 cised not continuously but only here and there. 
 
 It is possible, if one is to confine oneself to whole 
 poems, to represent Emerson as an emotional poet 
 by a reference to two long poems, the ' Threnody ' and 
 ' May Day.' To do so, one has to make allowance for 
 some roughness of representation ; but it is possible. 
 It is easily possible to represent Emerson as a poet 
 who makes no appeal to emotion, by single poems and 
 plenty of them. But, if one is to speak of him as a 
 poet at once intellectual and emotional, one has to 
 confine oneself to passages, often quite short passages, 
 sometimes longer but never of very great length : 
 
 * Set not thy foot on graves : 
 Hear what wine and roses say.' 
 
 That is Emerson at his best. There is probably no 
 one else who could have written it. A whole philo- 
 sophy of life and a cheerful one not a luxurious one, 
 the negative is too grave for that is expressed in two 
 
EMERSON 165 
 
 lines, and it is expressed feelingly, but the poem as a 
 whole does not come off. 
 
 Again a discursive poem, always about to clinch 
 and never clinching, ends or almost ends with this 
 immensity : 
 
 4 Over me soared the eternal sky, 
 Full of light and of deity.' 
 
 In this division of Emerson's poetry are many 
 passages in * Woodnotes,' the lineal ancestor of 
 Meredith's ' Woods of Westermain.' To the true 
 lover of Nature the life of the woodland appeals as 
 possessing a various activity, the varied spirit of which 
 he can feel : 
 
 ' He saw the partridge drum in the woods ; 
 He heard the woodcock's evening hymn ; 
 He found the tawny thrush's broods ; 
 And the shy hawk did wait for him.' 
 
 The creatures are not afraid of him who * foots at 
 peace with mouse or worm,' and if he is not afraid he 
 need not be afraid of them : 
 
 ' Whoso walketh in solitude, 
 And inhabiteth the wood, . . . 
 On him the light of star and moon 
 Shall fall with purer radiance down ; 
 All constellations of the sky 
 Shed their virtue through his eye. 
 Him Nature giveth for defence 
 His formidable innocence ' ; 
 
 or as in another place it is expressed more explicitly : 
 
 ' The timid it concerns to ask their way, 
 And fear what foe in caves and swamps can stray, 
 To make no step until the event is known, 
 And ills to come as evils past bemoan. 
 Not so the wise ; no coward watch he keeps 
 To spy what danger on his pathway creeps ; 
 
166 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 Go where he will, the wise man is at home, 1 
 His hearth the earth, his hall the azure dome ; 
 Where his clear spirit leads him, there's his road, 
 By God's own light illumined and foreshowed.' 
 
 The underlying law of the wood, as the alert intelli- 
 gence observing and adding perceives, is the law of 
 'going on.' The ceaseless process of life continues, 
 and if one lends one's ear attentively one can hear, amid 
 the myriad variety, one tune : 
 
 ' Hearken ! Hearken ! 
 If thou wouldst know the mystic song 
 Chanted when the sphere was young. . . . 
 To the open ear it sings 
 Sweet the genesis of things, 
 Of tendency through endless ages, 
 Of star-dust, and star-pilgrimages, 
 Of rounded worlds, of space and time, 
 Of the old flood's subsiding slime, 
 Of chemic matter, force, and form, 
 Of poles and powers, cold, wet, and warm : 
 The rushing metamorphosis, 
 Dissolving all that fixture is, 
 Melts things that be to things that seem, 
 And solid nature to a dream.' 
 
 And of this ' metamorphosis,' of this ' tendency 
 through endless ages ' working in beauty towards 
 that higher beauty which is good, man feels himself a 
 part. Nature is eloquent to man, and 'a ray of 
 relation ' comes to him from everything that breathes : 
 
 ' The youth reads omens where he goes, 
 And speaks all languages the rose. 
 The wood-fly mocks with tiny noise 
 The far halloo of human voice ; 
 The perfumed berry on the spray 
 Smacks of faint memories far away. 
 
 1 'Go where he will, the wise man is at home.' If one were asked 
 where that line occurred, one would say ' The Happy Warrior.' 
 
EMERSON 167 
 
 A subtle chain of countless rings 
 The next unto the farthest brings, 
 And, striving to be man, the worm 
 Mounts through all the spires of form.' l 
 
 It is because he is part of the evolutionary process, the 
 tendency, a process never completed and inexhaustible. 
 Death itself is a part of this process, and decay a fuel 
 that serves to nourish, or, in Meredith's words, to 
 brighten, the fire of renewal. Emerson's figure is more 
 of the open : 
 
 * No ray is dimmed, no atom worn, 
 My oldest force is good as new, 
 And the fresh rose on yonder thorn 
 
 Gives back the bending heavens in dew.' 
 
 To the modern man mountain scenery has an especial 
 appeal. It formed and strengthened the character of 
 Wordsworth. In comparing the influence of scenery 
 upon the shape of the mind one has but to think of 
 Tennyson's youth spent on the edge of the Lincoln- 
 shire fens, and how he ' used to stand when a boy on 
 the sandbuilt ridge at Mablethorpe and think that it 
 was the spine-bone of the world.' In such scenery the 
 adolescent is alone with the Universe ; there is nothing 
 but himself and stars and sky. But against this 
 beckoning horizon of vague there is set, in a wholly 
 flat country, the distinctness of such objects as there 
 are. In l Mariana in the Moated Grange,' the cries of 
 
 1 ' May Day.' Elsewhere Emerson has another pregnant phrase 
 for the doctrine of Evolution : 
 
 * And the poor grass shall plot and plan 
 What it will do when it is man.' 'Bacchus.' 
 
1 68 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 animals, and the trees, become more definite than the 
 landscape. Tennyson is distinguished as a poet by a 
 peculiar niceness of observation joined to a sense of 
 vastness. He sees the pattern on the dresses of his 
 ladies, but beyond this bright world there is the deep. 
 Compare in ' Mariana' the effect of the waste places and 
 the distinctness of the detail of life against them, with 
 Wordsworth's shepherds, moving like Greenland giants 
 against the splendid definition of the mountain. To 
 Wordsworth's familiarity with mountain scenery is to be 
 ascribed his delight in the peak, the top, the finishing ; 
 there is to be ascribed to it that solidity and restfulness 
 which is in the character of his poems. In Tennyson, 
 who was so much taken up with life, there is a distinct 
 mystic vein. Wordsworth's sense of mystery has 
 nothing elusive about it. It leads from reality to 
 reality. The reason is given in poetry by Emerson 
 when he thus addresses the mountain Monadnoc : 
 
 ' Thou imagest the stable good 
 For which we all our lifetime grope, 
 In shifting form the formless mind, 
 And though the substance us elude, 
 We in thee the shadow find.' 
 
 The mountain gives stability to life, and is necessary 
 to exclude from man's constant sight the vast infinite, 
 and yet this infinite, mirrored in space, is ever and again 
 whispering a home-song in his ear : 
 
 ' Daily the bending skies solicit man, 
 The seasons chariot him from this exile, 
 The rainbow hours bedeck his glowing chair, 
 The storm-winds urge the heavy weeks along, 
 Suns haste to set, that so remoter lights 
 Beckon the wanderer to his vaster home.' 
 
EMERSON 169 
 
 Man's body is 'an engine whose motive power is a 
 soul,' and because it is so both Finite and Infinite 
 speak to him in turn. He is immersed in terrestrial 
 affairs, when suddenly 
 
 ' a sunset-touch 
 
 A fancy from a flower-bell, someone's death, 
 A chorus-ending from Euripides,' l 
 
 and he breathes the air of another sphere. 
 
 ' Sometimes the airy synod bends, 
 And the mighty choir descends, 
 And the brains of men thenceforth, 
 In crowded and in still resorts, 
 Teem with unwonted thoughts : 
 As, when a shower of meteors 
 Cross the orbit of the earth, 
 And, lit by fringent air, 
 Blaze near and far, 
 Mortals deem the planets bright 
 Have slipped their sacred bars, 
 And the lone seaman all the night 
 Sails, astonished, amid stars.' 
 
 These emotions, of which these passages speak, are 
 not, some may say, difficult to poeticalise. The religion 
 of the modern man may not be a definite religion, still it 
 is a religion, and all religion is emotional. 
 
 The answer is supplied by the rarity of the occasions 
 on which it has been done. Not to say too much is 
 the most difficult art, and these passages depend for 
 their verity upon this art. 
 
 But Emerson can poeticalise things harder still ; 
 he can poeticalise politics ; for example, the working 
 creed of Liberalism : 
 
 Bishop Blougram's Apology.' 
 
170 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 'God said, I am tired of kings, 
 
 I suffer them no more ; 
 Up to my ear the morning brings 
 The outrage of the poor.' 1 
 
 Characterisation, too, yields to this power of his. Take 
 this passage, descriptive at once of the attraction of 
 the gipsy life to the gipsies, and of their claim to live 
 the true life of the planet, which is out of doors : 
 
 'The wild air bloweth in our lungs, 
 
 The keen stars twinkle in our eyes, 
 The birds give us our wily tongues, 
 The panther in our dances flies.' 
 
 If this is not poetry, what is poetry ; and what town- 
 dweller after this does not see a gipsy with a kind of 
 forlorn respect? 
 
 'The wild air bloweth in our lungs.' 
 
 Nothing as fine as that, of course, can be said on so 
 thin a subject as 'The Humble-Bee,' ' yellow-breeched 
 philosopher ' ; but the whole life of the bee is sym- 
 pathetically presented : 
 
 ' Burly, dozing humble-bee, 
 Where thou art is clime for me. 
 
 1 Or equally beautifully of the undefeatable Freedom 
 
 ' Who gives to seas and sunset skies 
 Their unspent beauty of surprise.' 
 
 Emerson is telling of a memorable defeat : 
 
 ' The Cossack eats Poland, 
 Like stolen fruit ; 
 Her last noble is ruined, 
 Her last poet mute : 
 Straight into double band 
 The victors divide ; 
 Half for freedom strike and stand ; 
 The astonished Muse finds thousands at her side.' 
 
EMERSON 171 
 
 Let them sail for Porto Rique, 
 Far-off heats through seas to seek ; 
 I will follow thee alone, 
 Thou animated torrid-zone ! 
 Zigzag steerer, desert cheerer, 
 Let me chase thy waving lines : 
 Keep me nearer, me thy hearer, 
 Singing over shrubs and vines.' 
 
 There is presented here something of the intoxication 
 of freedom which belongs to any life preoccupied with 
 its own business and indifferent to all else. Human 
 life, too, affords moments like that, when we ' float at 
 pleasure through all Nature/ moments when we seem 
 to have drunk wine ' which never grew in the belly of 
 the grape.' But this human intoxication reaches higher 
 than the bee's ; the mind subject to it is not merely 
 free to attend to its own business but to that of every 
 one, to remould the world nearer to its desire. It is 
 then, when the imagination soars, everything seems in 
 harmony, all obstacles fall away, the struggles of the 
 spirit in a material environment, death and time. One's 
 step is once more elastic, and one feels as one felt 
 in the first waking rapture of the boy. With what 
 propriety does Emerson call to this Bacchus of the 
 soul to 
 
 * Refresh the faded tints, 
 Recut the aged prints, 
 And write my old adventures with the pen 
 Which on the first day drew, 
 Upon the tablets blue, 
 The dancing Pleiads and eternal men.' 
 
 One's youth is lost, and with it the limitless creative 
 daring of fancy. Yet to the seeing eye life itself dis- 
 closes itself as wonderful. Fancy cannot conceive a 
 
172 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 beauty rarer than that which to Seyd, the true poet, 
 opens everywhere : 
 
 1 Was never form and never face 
 So sweet to Seyd as only grace 
 Which did not slumber like a stone, 
 But hovered gleaming and was gone. 
 Beauty chased he everywhere, 
 In flame, in storm, in clouds of air. 
 He smote the lake to feed his eye 
 With the beryl beam of the broken wave ; 
 He flung in pebbles well to hear 1 
 The moment's music which they gave. 3 
 
 The true poet is aware of this miracle which is life, 
 .and walks abroad like a man in a dream, because he is 
 the one man truly alive : 
 
 * He would, yet would not, counsel keep, 
 But, like a walker in his sleep 
 
 With staring eye that seeth none, 
 Ridiculously up and down 
 Seeks how he may fitly tell 
 The heart-o'erlading miracle.' 
 
 The true poet is possessed with a sense of this beauty 
 which is everywhere, and where it is not, is : 
 
 'And on his mind at dawn of day 
 Soft shadows of the evening lay. 5 
 
 He hears and sees what others do not mark : 
 
 'His music was the south-wind's sigh, 
 His lamp, the maiden's downcast eye.' 
 
 * He should be loved ; he should be hated ' ; 
 
 * A blooming child to children dear, 
 His heart should palpitate with fear,' 
 
 because he alone is conscious (and thus to other men a 
 disturbing influence) that he walks amid mystery. 
 Life that seems so real is in reality built up of illusion. 
 
 How like the style of Meredith ! 
 
EMERSON 173 
 
 We pursue a hope never to catch it, for to come up with 
 it is to recognise it no longer as a hope. When we 
 reach it another airy beckoner leads us on. Indeed, 
 we never realise our ideals ; we can reach those we do 
 attain only when we are reaching past them ; there are 
 forerunners always for the living spirit, and when he 
 ceases to hear their distant music the man is dead. 
 But how much clearer Emerson makes this by leaving 
 it less clear : 
 
 * Long I followed happy guides, 
 I could never reach their sides ; 
 Their step is forth, and, ere the day, 
 Breaks up their leaguer, and away. 
 Keen my sense, my heart was young, 
 Right good-will my sinews strung, 
 But no speed of mine avails 
 To hunt upon their shining trails. 
 On and away, their hasting feet 
 Make the morning proud and sweet ; 
 Flowers they strew, I catch the scent ; 
 Or tone of silver instrument 
 Leaves on the wind melodious trace ; 
 Yet I could never see their face.' 
 
 The explanation of this is that man's nature is 
 infinite, and that he is (in his finite limitation) at once 
 mocked and fed by infinite ideas. He, the one, is a 
 part of the All, and the one part that can recognise the 
 All. Some breath from the Infinite Nature, as man 
 alone discerns, mixes with the life of everything. There 
 is an Identity, to which men give the highest name, 
 behind each variety, or as Emerson has it in the poem 
 called ' Brahma ' : 
 
 4 If the red slayer think he slays, 
 
 Or if the slain think he is slain, 
 They know well the subtle ways 
 I keep, and pass, and turn again 
 
174 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 Far or forgot to me is near ; 
 
 Shadow and sunlight are the same ; 
 The vanquished gods to me appear ; 
 
 And one to me are shame and fame. 
 
 They reckon ill who leave me out ; 
 
 When me they fly, I am the wings ; 
 I am the doubter and the doubt, 
 
 And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.' 
 
 Is it easy to write like this, or to explain the modern 
 mind to itself? For the key to the modern mind is that 
 it is at once intensely religious and intensely anti- 
 dogmatic : 
 
 ' Thou shalt not try 
 To plant thy shrivelled pedantry 
 On the shoulders of the sky,' 
 
 or, in other words, the modern mind has at once a clear 
 apprehension of the Infinite, and a clear recognition 
 of 'the shadow of surrounding cloud.' It has long 
 ceased to put its trust in the fact, ' the supposed fact,' 1 
 and knows now that if it is to be saved it can only be 
 saved by the idea. The way of salvation is indeed 
 hard, for the same mind that thus puts its trust in ideas 
 must have capacity to know that those ideas, in which 
 it lives, are in truth no more than its own ideas, dreams 
 of the subject, and not true objects at all : 
 
 * The lords of life, the lords of life, 
 I saw them pass, 
 In their own guise, 
 Like and unlike, 
 Portly and grim, 
 Use and Surprise, 
 Surface and Dream, 
 Succession swift and spectral Wrong, 
 
 1 Arnold. Introduction to Mr. T. H. Ward's Selections from the 
 English Poets. 
 
EMERSON 175 
 
 Temperament without a tongue, 
 And the inventor of the game 
 Omnipresent without name ; 
 Some to see, some to be guessed, 
 They march from east to west : 
 Little man, least of all, 
 Among the legs of his guardians tall, 
 Walked about with puzzled look. 
 Him by the hand dear Nature took, 
 Dearest Nature, strong and kind, 
 Whispered, " Darling, never mind ! 
 To-morrow they will wear another face, 
 The founder thou ; these are thy race ! "' 
 
 And yet those ideas which proceed from man, the 
 offspring of his brain, are themselves the proof of a 
 nature competent to comprehend the Universal show, 
 and to entertain it as a guest. We dream true when 
 we dream and see behind substance something as fluid 
 as our thoughts, and of nature akin to them. We are 
 the thought of Existence, and all existence is subject 
 to our thought. The whole lives in its parts, and its 
 parts revivify the whole. 
 
 In this philosophy there is no creed, and the best 
 learning is an apprehending. 
 
 * Wilt thou not ope thy heart to know 
 What rainbows teach, and sunsets show ? ' 
 
 What consolation there is for us is to be found in 
 acceptance, in an acquiescence in the course of an 
 activity which certainly we do not understand but to 
 which we also, being at once lawmakers and subject to 
 the law, contribute our part : 
 
 ' I see the inundation sweet, 
 I hear the spending of the stream 
 Through years, through men, through nature fleet, 
 Through passion, thought, through power and dream.' 
 
176 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 1 They lose their grief who hear this song ' ; and it is 
 heard by quite small things, such as the Titmouse, 
 brave in its own life, that sang in the winter wood to 
 the desponding poet : 
 
 ' Here was this atom in full breath, 
 Hurling defiance at vast death.' 
 
 In fact life, wherever you meet it, is brave. It feels 
 the Titmouse, or Jenny Wren, even the London 
 sparrow, that it is in a Universe of Life and conse- 
 quently at home. 
 
 It is only man deceived by the loss of friends, and 
 with his vision that takes in past and future, who 
 recoils from the Law. He sees the end, or fears the end 
 of his own activity, and forgets that activity continues. 
 And certainly it points a contrast dead tinder and 
 living flame that man so infinite in capacity should be 
 enclosed in so little room : 
 
 'A TRAIN of gay and clouded days 
 Dappled with joy and grief and praise, 
 Beauty to fire us, saints to save, 
 Escort us to a little grave.' 
 
ARNOLD 177- 
 
 ARNOLD 
 
 OF all Arnold's dicta on the subject of Literature his 
 statement about Poetry is the best known : ' It is 
 important, therefore, to hold fast to this, that Poetry is 
 at bottom a criticism of life ; that the greatness of a 
 poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of 
 ideas to life to the question how to live.' 1 
 
 The first remark that suggests itself it is so obvious 
 that I cannot avoid making it is that this is a defini- 
 tion of Poetry which does not distinguish poetry from 
 prose. Carlyle's character sketch of Coleridge, in his 
 life of Sterling, is very obviously at bottom a criticism 
 of life, and it has nothing more poetical about it than 
 caustic irony usually has. 
 
 Arnold himself came to acknowledge this, and in a 
 later essay he qualified his dictum accordingly : ' For 
 supreme poetical success more is required than the 
 powerful application of ideas to life ; it must be applica- 
 tion under the conditions fixed by the laws of poetic 
 truth and beauty.' 2 And no doubt, with this qualifica- 
 tion, what Arnold here says of Poetry is true in a 
 general sense. A good many things that can be said 
 about Poetry are true in a general sense. 
 
 Poetry is at bottom a representation of life. Is this 
 true? Yes, it is true in a general sense. 
 
 1 Essay on Wordsworth prefixed to the volume of selections. 
 
 2 Introduction to The English Poets^ selections edited by 
 T. H. Ward. 
 
 M 
 
178 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 In this general wide sense then, in this loose sense, 
 it is true to say Poetry is a criticism of life ; it is one 
 of the true things that can be said about Poetry. Each 
 man's life is his implicit criticism of human life. A 
 monk shows us by his conduct that he thinks of human 
 life as providing leisure for fasting and prayer ; a pretty 
 girl by hers that it gives occasion for balls and dress ; 
 a drunkard thinks human life affords opportunity for 
 the vine. From the conduct of these people we know 
 what they think worth while in life, or what in life is 
 pleasurable to them. We know what would be their 
 judgment or criticism on life if they stopped to 
 pass one. 
 
 In the same way every poet's poetry has, implied in 
 it, a criticism of life. What he celebrates, what he 
 passes by, how and when he feels, these tell us what he 
 really thinks about life. 
 
 Thus when Hamlet is dying he says to Horatio : Do 
 not commit suicide, but live on to tell my story ; and 
 he says it in this way : 
 
 ' Absent thee from felicity awhile.' 
 
 The mists of death which * o'er-crow the spirit,' that 
 against which the physical body rebels, may, when 
 compared to the world so harsh to Hamlet, be described 
 as felicity. 1 Hamlet speaking of death in such terms 
 is Hamlet criticising life. It was good to be gone. 
 
 1 It may be said that Hamlet's 'felicity' is merely a mode of say- 
 ing ' Heaven ' or ' the abode of the blessed,' a picturesque and 
 poetical way, and so it is. But why should Heaven figure to 
 Shakespeare just at this moment and nowhere else in his plays as 
 especially the abode of ' felicity ' ? Modes of phrase are dictated by 
 modes of feeling, and, when Shakespeare wrote it, he was sym- 
 pathetically./^//^ the rest to which Hamlet was going. 
 
ARNOLD 179 
 
 Again Wordsworth, reflecting on the short life of a 
 flower, how soon it withers, and how gay and shining 
 it is when first it begins to blow, cries out : 
 
 ' O man, that from thy fair and shining youth 
 Age might but take the things youth needed not. 3 1 
 
 And Carew, who is not a didactic poet, opens a poem 
 in this way : 
 
 ' He that loves a rosy cheek 
 Or a coral lip admires.' 
 
 From these different sayings we form a fairly accurate 
 idea of the differing ways in which their authors viewed 
 life, and of the kind of criticism which, had they been 
 called upon to do so, and Wordsworth does generally 
 feel himself called upon, they would have passed 
 upon it. 
 
 It is true then, and worth saying, that all poetry is a 
 criticism of life, expresses the poet's view of life, and 
 that by his view of life his poetry ultimately will be in 
 great part judged. If it is a very ignoble view, his 
 poetry, even if it contains great passion and great fire, 
 will not be very great. 
 
 This is to say that Arnold's famous statement is true, 
 in a general sense, of all poetry. 
 
 But it is much more than true in a general sense ; it 
 is precisely true when applied to his own poetry. A 
 very great proportion of Arnold's poetry is occupied 
 with passing actual judgments on life or portions of 
 life youth, age or aspects of life literature, society, 
 religion ; a very great proportion is occupied with 
 passing judgments as direct as that judgment of Words- 
 
 The Small Celandine. 3 
 
i8o POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 worth's evoked by the lesser celandine. And even when 
 Arnold is not thus occupied his attitude generally is 
 critical ; at any rate it is intellectually reflective. He 
 does not merely respond to life, he does not merely 
 interpret life, he reflects upon life. 
 
 Generally speaking, the critical poet, the poet who is 
 always criticising, does not write poetry at all : though 
 he expresses himself in verse, he writes prose. Long 
 before his considering is done, all the fire, gush, and 
 spontaneity of his thought has departed. But what 
 makes the peculiarity of Arnold's poetry is that this is 
 not so. He is a genuine poet, and at his best, and he 
 is very often at his best, he feels pre-eminently as a 
 poet. His reflective habit does not displace his feeling, 
 it is added to it ; nor does it whittle it away in detail. 
 What happens is that his reflective habit cools and 
 expands his feeling ; he is long on one note, but the 
 feeling is there behind his verses and informing them. 
 
 Arnold, at his best, is a reflective poet and a very 
 great reflective poet. With this said, it remains to be 
 said that there is a very great deal of Arnold's poetry 
 which is just criticism in verse ; admirable criticism, 
 and criticism very tersely expressed, expressed with all 
 the epigramatic terseness of verse. 
 
 Here is a criticism of Heine : 
 
 1 The Spirit of the world, 
 Beholding the absurdity of men 
 Their vaunts, their feats let a sardonic smile, 
 For one short moment, wander o'er his lips ; 
 That smile was Heine ! ' 
 
 It is not often, of course, that the criticism is ex- 
 pressed so barely, with so little sentiment in it ; on the 
 contrary what is remarkable is how seldom, even when 
 
ARNOLD 181 
 
 it is explicit criticism, it is really unpoetical, how 
 seldom it occurs without some admixture of feel- 
 ing. But before discussing this further, let us con- 
 sider how much, and how much memorable criticism 
 there is. 
 
 There are a few passages of literary criticism that 
 will suggest themselves to every memory : 
 
 * Time may restore us in his course 
 Goethe's sage mind and Byron's force ; 
 But where will Europe's latter hour 
 Again find Wordsworth's healing power ? ' 
 
 or this on Byron, 
 
 'our soul 
 ' Had felt him like the thunder's roll ' ; 
 
 or again, 
 
 ' What helps it now, that Byron bore, 
 With haughty scorn that mock'd the smart, 
 Through Europe to the ^Etolian shore, 
 The pageant of his bleeding heart?' 
 
 or the following passage from the poem on the odd 
 subject, an odd subject for a poem, of Lessing's 
 Laocoon. What is the poet's sphere? asks Arnold 
 in his ' Epilogue to Lessing's Laocoon ' : 
 
 * " Behold, at last the poet's sphere ! 
 But who," I said, "suffices here? 
 For, ah ! so much he has to do ; 
 Be painter and musician too ! 
 The aspect of the moment show, 
 The feeling of the moment know ! 
 The aspect not, I grant, express 
 Clear as the painter's art can dress ; 
 The feeling not, I grant, explore 
 So deep as the musician's lore 
 But clear as words can make revealing, 
 And deep as words can follow feeling. 
 
1 82 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 But, ah ! then comes his sorest spell 
 
 Of toil he must life's movement tell ! 
 
 The thread which binds it all in one, 
 
 And not its separate parts alone. 
 
 The movement he must tell of life, 
 
 Its pain and pleasure, rest and strife ; 
 
 His eye must travel down, at full, 
 
 The long, unpausing spectacle ; 
 
 With faithful unrelaxing force 
 
 Attend it from its primal source, 
 
 From change to change and year to year 
 
 Attend it of its mid career, 
 
 Attend it to the last repose 
 
 And solemn silence of its close/ 
 
 Or take this flash of religious criticism, attacking the 
 anthropomorphism of the time, and praising the author 
 of Obermann, who 
 
 ' Neither made man too much a God, 
 Nor God too much a man ' ; 
 
 or this piece of vital criticism complaining of what, to 
 the thinker, is the worst insult of old age, 
 
 ' To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost 
 Which blamed the living man ' ; 
 
 or this piece of social criticism explaining Arnold's 
 sense of 
 
 ' This strange disease of modern life, 
 With its sick hurry, its divided aims,' 
 
 where he says 
 
 ' But we, brought forth and rear'd in hours 
 Of change, alarm, surprise 
 What shelter to grow ripe is ours, 
 What leisure to grow wise?' 
 
 What leisure to see like Sophocles, 
 
 * Who saw life steadily, and saw it whole.' 
 
 
ARNOLD 183 
 
 There is in us, as there was in the actress Rachel, a 
 mixture in the soul, a strife of various influences : 
 
 ' In her, like us, there clash'd contending powers, 
 Germany, France, Christ, Moses, Athens, Rome.' 
 
 Arnold, then, in his verse production figures as a 
 critic, as a literary, social, and religious critic, and 
 this he does whether he is or is not writing poetry. 
 Perhaps the best instance of his success as a poetical 
 critic, a critic speaking in poetry, is that sonnet in 
 which he rebuked an excited preacher who called upon 
 his audience to live in harmony with Nature : 
 
 *" In harmony with Nature?" Restless fool, 
 Who with such heat dost preach what were to thee, 
 When true, the last impossibility 
 To be like Nature strong, like Nature cool ! 
 Know, man hath all which Nature hath, but more, 
 And in that more lie all his hopes of good. 
 Nature is cruel, man is sick of blood ; 
 Nature is stubborn, man would fain adore ; 
 Nature is fickle, man hath need of rest ; 
 Nature forgives no debt, and fears no grave ; 
 Man would be mild, and with safe conscience blest. 
 Man must begin, know this, where Nature ends ; 
 Nature and man can never be fast friends. 
 Fool, if thou canst not pass her, rest her slave !' 
 
 It is an admirable instance of Arnold's success as a 
 poetical critic, because, though the criticism is there, 
 it is poetically expressed, poetically felt. There is not 
 only criticism but criticism presented poetically, so 
 poetically that we hardly feel we are listening to criti- 
 cism ; at least we begin to feel we are not. We can see 
 the poet, the man who feels, getting on terms with the 
 critic, the man who thinks. And in what Arnold says 
 about the poet's province, in the verses called ' Resigna- 
 tion,' we see this even more clearly. Indeed, here, 
 
1 84 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 though the attitude is critical and the critical mind is 
 still thoroughly alert, the result expressed is not the 
 expression of criticism, but the expression of feeling. 
 It is the kind of poetry that gets itself written by a man 
 capable of the nicest shades of discernment, but it is 
 not consciously critical. In this way a deeply critical 
 nature, in this way a highly refined nature given to 
 refining, in this way such a nature feels : 
 
 'The poet, to whose mighty heart 
 Heaven does a quicker pulse impart, 
 Subdues that energy to scan 
 Not his own course, but that of man. 
 Though he move mountains, though his day 
 Be pass'd on the proud heights of sway, 
 Though he hath loosed a thousand chains, 
 Though he hath borne immortal pains, 
 Action and suffering though he know 
 He hath not lived, if he lives so. 
 He sees, in some great-historied land, 
 A ruler of the people stand, 
 Sees his strong thought in fiery flood 
 Roll through the heaving multitude, 
 Exults yet for no moment's space 
 Envies the all-regarded place. 
 Beautiful eyes meet his and he 
 Bears to admire uncravingly ; 
 They pass he, mingled with the crowd, 
 Is in their far-off triumphs proud. 
 From some high station he looks down, 
 At sunset, on a populous town ; 
 Surveys each happy group which fleets, 
 Toil ended, through the shining streets, 
 Each with some errand of its own 
 And does not say : I am alone. 
 He sees the gentle stir of birth 
 When morning purifies the earth ; 
 He leans upon a gate, and sees 
 The pastures, and the quiet trees. 
 Low woody hill with gracious bound 
 Folds the still valley almost round ; 
 
ARNOLD 185 
 
 The cuckoo, loud on some high lawn, 
 
 Is answer'd from the depths of dawn ; 
 
 In the hedge straggling to the stream, 
 
 Pale, dew-drench'd, half-shut roses gleam ; 
 
 And, 1 where the farther side slopes down, 
 
 He sees the drowsy new-waked clown 
 
 In his white quaint-embroider'd frock 
 
 Make, whistling, toward his mist-wreathed flock 
 
 Slowly, behind his heavy tread, 
 
 The wet, flower'd grass heaves up its head. 
 
 Lean'd on his gate, he gazes tears 
 
 Are in his eyes, and in his ears 
 
 The murmur of a thousand years. 
 
 Before him he sees life unroll, 
 
 A placid and continuous whole 
 
 That general life, which does not cease, 
 
 Whose secret is not joy, but peace ; 
 
 That life, whose dumb wish is not miss'd 
 
 If birth proceeds, if things subsist ; 
 
 The life of plants, and stones, and rain, 
 
 The life he craves if not in vain 
 
 Fate gave, what chance shall not control, 
 
 His sad lucidity of soul.' 2 
 
 1 Arnold has 'But,' but surely the sense requires 'And.' There is 
 no opposition, there is merely a succession of things seen. 
 
 2 The tone of this is more Emersonian than is usual with Arnold. 
 'Sad lucidity' is an Arnoldian, but 'lucidity of soul' a strictly 
 Emersonian phrase. One is tempted to think Arnold had just 
 laid down the volume of 'Poems,' 1846. In that volume the 
 second poem is ' Each and All,' which begins : 
 
 4 Little thinks, in the field, yon red-cloaked clown, 
 Of thee from the hill-top looking down ; 
 The heifer that lows in the upland farm, 
 Far -heard, lows not thine ear to charm ' ; 
 
 and it ends 
 
 * Again I saw, again I heard, 
 The rolling river, the morning bird ; 
 Beauty through my senses stole ; 
 I yielded myself to the perfect whole. ' 
 
 The poem is not about a poet, but about the relation of each to 
 .all. Yet the resemblances are curious. In each there is the looker- 
 
1 86 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 Arnold is at once a critical poet and a reflective poet ;, 
 and one can see from those two examples how criticism 
 shades off into reflection, and meditation into feeling. 
 In reading this passage from ' Resignation ' we feel 
 that we have been reading poetry. It is the feeling 
 with which it is surcharged that strikes home. No one 
 can read that passage and remain quite the same 
 man as he was before. To agree ,with a critic does 
 not involve a change in the mind? No, but to feel 
 with a poet does. 
 
 Indeed Arnold is quite uniquely successful as a critical 
 poet. He attempts generally things much less hard 
 than Emerson and Meredith ; but constantly when he 
 attempts to make poetry out of critical material, he 
 makes it. The passage just cited, for example, is 
 less general and more detailed in its reference than 
 Emerson's ' Each and All.' This definition of the 
 poet's attitude to things is the hardest thing in poetry 
 that Arnold attempts, but one has only to compare it 
 with Emerson's poem which deals with a comparatively 
 easy subject on which to make poetry, to know which 
 is more basically a poet. Arnold's fund of poetical 
 sensibility is so great that it overrides obstacles. 
 
 I do not mean to claim for Arnold that he is 
 
 on and in each the ' clown.' In each the looker-on looks from a 
 hill. The panorama is below him. In each the looker-on has no 
 part in the panorama, and in each, final consolation is found in the 
 continuance of the process : 
 
 * The rolling river, the morning bird ' 
 in Emerson, and in Arnold 
 
 'That general life which does not cease,' 
 and 
 
 The life of plants, and stones, and rain.' 
 
ARNOLD 187 
 
 always successful many of the verses in the parts 
 of l Resignation ' not here quoted are not poetry at 
 all but he is constantly successful, and when he is 
 successful, he is supremely successful : 
 
 * Lean'd on his gate, he gazes tears 
 Are in his eyes, and in his ears 
 The murmur of a thousand years.' 
 
 That is not only an exact statement of the full content 
 of the poet's attitude to life as a whole ; it has the 
 whole of the poet's emotion in it. Here is a bit of 
 aesthetics made into what is very nearly the highest 
 poetry, poetry so potent that it can change, and has 
 changed for many, the individual's relation to existence. 
 
 If I seem to labour this point needlessly, it is because 
 this side of Arnold's achievement is far and away the 
 most important thing about him as a poet. He is 
 the one modern Englishman, and therefore the one 
 Englishman, who has made critical matter so much 
 poetry that it has become a part of our poetical 
 inheritance. At times he does perfectly what, when 
 placed beside him, Emerson and Meredith seem often 
 only to attempt. In the main they are critics of life 
 who, by virtue of the clarity or enthusiasm of their 
 criticism, and because their whole being is permeated 
 with it, ascend with it into poetry. Arnold is a poet 
 who condescends upon criticism. 
 
 One of the poems most familiar to the lover of Arnold 
 is the beautiful piece of modern apologetics called * East 
 London ' : 
 
 ' 'Twas August, and the fierce sun overhead 
 Smote on the squalid streets of Bethnal Green, 
 And the pale weaver, through his windows seen 
 In Spitalfields, look'd thrice dispirited. 
 
1 88 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 I met a preacher there I knew, and said : 
 
 " 111 and o'erwork'd, how fare you in this scene ? " 
 
 " Bravely ! " said he ; "for I of late have been 
 
 Much cheer'd with thoughts of Christ, the living bread" 
 
 human soul ! as long as thou canst so 
 Set up a mark of everlasting light, 
 Above the howling senses' ebb and flow, 
 
 To cheer thee, and to right thee if thou roam 
 Not with lost toil thou labourest through the night ! 
 Thou mak'st the heaven thou hop'st indeed thy home.' 
 
 Insurgent emotion ! and so clearly so, that I suppose 
 few have stopped to remark that the sonnet is merely 
 an epitome of * Literature and Dogma.' It does in 
 poetry what ' Literature and Dogma ' does in prose, 
 what ' Literature and Dogma ' could only do because 
 of this emotion behind it. Such success as this dis- 
 guises itself. Arnold seems to be writing poetry like 
 other poets, and we forget that he is criticising. The 
 emotion is singularly contagious, and we feel with 
 the poet before we have time to think with the critic. 
 
 This, then, is the most important thing, because it 
 is the most unique thing, about Arnold as a poet. I 
 do not mean it is the greatest thing. Arnold is not 
 chiefly a man who attempts a task ; he is a natural 
 poet and his sentiment is profound : 
 
 * No, thou shalt not speak ! I should be finding 
 Something alter'd in thy courtly tone. 
 Sit sit by me ! I will think, we've lived so 
 In the greenwood, all our lives, alone.' 
 
 His thought breathes itself into music as easily as the 
 wind in a September tree. 
 
 His best poetry is not critical, it is the expression 
 of his sentiment, his personal 1 and religious sentiment. 
 
 1 ' Who, let me say, is this stranger regards me 
 
 With the grey eyes, and the lovely brown hair ? ' 
 
ARNOLD 189 
 
 When viewed from this aspect, the sonnet just quoted 
 is itself a remarkable instance of this. No doubt 
 this poetry reflects upon life, but this is only to say 
 that Arnold was by nature reflective, and that his 
 best poetry expresses his nature. 
 
 In tone this veritable poetry of Arnold's is curiously 
 differentiated from his prose. You would say from 
 reading his prose that he had a sunny nature, and so he 
 had. You would say from reading his poetry that he 
 was deeply melancholy, and so he was : 
 
 ' Radiant, adorn'd outside ; a hidden ground 
 Of thought and of austerity within.' 
 
 It is not an inexplicable difference. In his prose 
 we have Arnold's work-a-day attempt to make bad 
 better, and, on this bright mission, some whistling 
 to keep his courage up. In his poetry we have his 
 real and deeper feeling that we, who lived while he 
 was still with us, are at the end of days. Arnold, 
 with a positive faith not very different from Emerson's, 
 was in the inner depths of his being profoundly stirred 
 by the loss of the old, and not greatly heartened by 
 the coming of the new. 1 
 
 Yet if we are to consider his poetry from the stand- 
 point of lastingness and not from that of personal 
 charm, this constitutes a weakness. He does not owe 
 his great place in the history of religious thought 
 to any such amiability. What he accomplished in 
 religion he accomplished by teaching us to express 
 
 1 ' But now the old is out of date, 
 
 The new is not yet born, 
 And who can be alone elate, 
 
 While the world lies forlorn ? ' 
 
 Verses not otherwise remarkable than as expressing very succinctly 
 his actual attitude. 
 
POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 our negations positively, by teaching us not to say 
 *I do not believe in the history of the Jews,' but to 
 say <I believe in the history of man,' not to say <I 
 do not believe in the prophets,' but to say 'I believe 
 in the world.' This is Emerson's method too, but 
 Emerson has not the same awed reverence ; he is 
 perhaps too much alive to have it. It is true, also, 
 that on the negative side of his creed, Emerson in 
 actual fact says much less than Arnold ; nevertheless 
 his attitude to the positive side of it is not so emotional. 
 Emerson's religion is with some differences, such as 
 his much lighter appreciation of necessity, the same 
 religion as Arnold's, but the tone is different. Emerson 
 is the announcer of a religion, Arnold the follower of 
 one. What is personal about Arnold's religious atti- 
 tude is not, of course, that he shared with many a 
 disbelief in tradition, or with Emerson a belief in 
 spirit, but that this untraditional religion of his affected 
 him in precisely the same way as traditional religion 
 affects the faithful. 1 He feels religiously, and our 
 inestimable debt to him is that he taught us how 
 much religion every man's nature of necessity con- 
 tained. He taught us to remember that, however 
 slightly others account them, these basic religious 
 feelings of fear, mystery, submission, strange feelings 
 of the heart's own confidence ; these basic religious 
 
 1 For example. 'The lives and deaths of "the pure in heart" 
 have, perhaps, the privilege of touching us more deeply than those 
 of others partly, no doubt, because with them the disproportion of 
 suffering to desert seems so unusually great. However, with them 
 one feels even I feel that for their purity's sake, if for that alone, 
 whatever delusions they may have wandered in, and whatever 
 impossibilities they may have dreamed of, they shall undoubtedly, in 
 some sense or other, see God.' 
 
ARNOLD 191 
 
 feelings are religious. He taught us not to be cheated 
 out of our religion because the orthodox call our lack 
 of their religion, irreligion. 
 
 But in his poetry there is too frequent a melancholy, 
 at times a minus note, the cry of the defeated soul 
 outside the gates barred on man's Eden. He has 
 more tears than Nature sheds. A poetry of regret 
 and loss can never be of the same service to mankind 
 as a poetry that accepts the world as it sees it. 
 
 And yet no genuine poetry can ever be other than 
 it is, and if it is the weakness of Arnold's that it is 
 without sufficient confidence, it is equally a necessity 
 of its charm that it should voice his own inner sense 
 of loss. His poetry is a lament, yet the lament is 
 the melody. The meaning and the colour is passing 
 out of life, and there is no meaning and no colour to 
 come. The tone of this poetry is grey, an exquisite 
 grey. It is a poetry of regret that somehow, by the 
 restraint in its grief, by the command of its sorrow, 
 fans the fevered brow : 
 
 'And there arrives a lull in the hot race 
 Wherein he doth for ever chase 
 That flying and elusive shadow, rest. 
 An air of coolness plays upon his face, 
 And an unwonted calm pervades his breast. 
 And then he thinks he knows 
 The hills where his life rose, 
 And the sea where it goes.' 
 
 Nor is this regretful tone, however frequent, really 
 tedious. It is varied by a poetry of joy, not the joy 
 of hope, but joy. All perfectly regretful musings, 
 we shall see if we consider it even for a moment, must 
 mourn for a joy that is past. The mortal condition 
 disappoints us ; ' our boasted life is one long funeral ' ; 
 
192 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 friend follows friend away, but in the morning, with 
 those friends, it was sweet. Sometimes the body, worn 
 out by the trouble and difficulties of the sensitive spirit, 
 gives out even before its allotted span, and one has 
 to mourn for Thyrsis, dead in the first forties at the 
 entrance to man's summer : 
 
 4 So, some tempestuous morn in early June, 
 When the year's primal burst of bloom is o'er, 
 Before the roses and the longest day 
 When garden-walks, and all the grassy floor, 
 With blossoms, red and white, of fallen May, 
 And chestnut-flowers are strewn 
 So have I heard the cuckoo's parting cry, 
 From the wet field, through the vext garden-trees, 
 Come with the volleying rain and tossing breeze : 
 The bloom is gone^ and with the bloom go I f 
 
 Yes, life is unsatisfying in its evanescence, a spark 
 between two unlit spaces, and in itself, in the continuity 
 of its joy or work, delusive : 
 
 4 And if a life, 
 
 With large results so little rife, 
 Though bearable, seem hardly worth 
 This pomp of worlds, this pain of birth ' ; 
 
 yet, when it is done and we look back on it, the air 
 blew fresh : 
 
 ' So rest, for ever rest, O princely Pair ! 
 In your high church, 'mid the still mountain-air, 
 Where horn, and hound, and vassals, never come. 
 Only the blessed Saints are smiling dumb 
 From the rich painted windows of the nave 
 On aisle, and transept, and your marble grave ; 
 Where thou, young Prince, shalt never more arise 
 From the fringed mattress where thy Duchess lies, 
 On autumn-mornings, when the bugle sounds, 
 And ride across the drawbridge with thy hounds 
 To hunt the boar in the crisp woods till eve.' 
 
ARNOLD 193 
 
 This it is that we must part from them that gives 
 their pathos to 
 
 ' Youth and bloom and this delightful world. 3 
 If man remained for ever young and had no end to 
 fear, if he did not feel his bones to creak or his veins 
 to throb, if he remained as unconscious of his body 
 and its burden as a school-boy, if, indeed, it were 
 always May, who would quarrel with our lot? Not 
 Arnold ! He is conscious, surprisingly conscious for 
 a reflective poet, of the joys of youthful life, of the 
 imaginary joys of the unfading youth of the gods. 
 All his serious bids for pathos are made upon this 
 theme. The sad thing is that so many die young 
 with their life's hope unfulfilled, that others who live 
 long have never tasted life. 
 
 Thus the story of the young Sohrab and his death 
 is told with a pathos that is very moving, because it is 
 so full of a consciousness of the joys of youth, when 
 the heart first expands in its affections, and feels the 
 glow, still unchilled by the winds of death, of human 
 love. But young Sohrab has to die, and by an 
 accident, so that even the average human lot, full 
 of pain and parting as it is, promised, fairly, more. 
 And Arnold moves us more than other poets because 
 he bears uncomplainingly ; thinks of Sohrab's death 
 and weeps, but draws his manhood together as he 
 rests in the wide idea of Death, surrounding us like 
 the quiet spaces of the night sky, really to us as the 
 sea is to a river, for all its wandering, a final home : 
 
 * for many a league 
 
 The shorn and parcell'd Oxus strains along 
 
 Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles 
 
 Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had 
 
 In his high mountain-cradle in Pamere, 
 
 N 
 
i 9 4 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 A foil'd circuitous wanderer till at last 
 
 The long'd-for dash of waves is heard, and wide 
 
 His luminous home of waters opens, bright 
 
 And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bathed stars 
 
 Emerge, and shine upon the Aral sea.' 
 
 He thinks so of Sohrab's death, and so also of Balder's 
 accepting the doom assigned. It is remarkable how 
 he treats Tristram and Iseult, the subject of which is 
 life fulfilling itself, also as a theme of reminiscence. 
 On the lovers' ecstasies he looks backward, and in 
 his hands it is a tale of youth that fled. 
 
 There is a passage in this perfect thing which, 
 with the years, does not lose its power to make still ; 
 that passage where Arnold tells of the long quiet life of 
 Iseult of Brittany with her children, after Tristram, 
 with* his passion for another Iseult of a stranger and 
 wilder beauty, is dead. 
 
 ' And is she happy ? Does she see unmoved 
 The days in which she might have lived and loved 
 Slip without bringing bliss slowly away, 
 One after one, to-morrow like to-day ? 
 Joy has not found her yet, nor ever will 
 Is it this thought that makes her mien so still, 
 Her features so fatigued, her eyes, though sweet, 
 So sunk, so rarely lifted save to meet 
 Her children's ? She moves slow ; her voice alone 
 Hath yet an infantine and silver tone, 
 But even that comes languidly ; in truth, 
 She seems one dying in a mask of youth. 
 And now she will go home, and softly lay 
 Her laughing children in their beds, and play 
 Awhile with them before they sleep ; and then 
 She'll light her silver lamp, which fishermen 
 Dragging their nets through the rough waves, afar, 
 Along this iron coast, know like a star, 
 And take her broidery-frame, and there she'll sit 
 Hour after hour, her gold curls sweeping it ; 
 Lifting her soft-bent head only to mind 
 Her children, or to listen to the wind. 
 
ARNOLD 195 
 
 And when the clock peals midnight, she will move 
 Her work away, and let her fingers rove 
 Across the shaggy brows of Tristram's hound 
 Who lies, guarding her feet, along the ground ; 
 Or else she will fall musing, her blue eyes 
 Fix'd, her slight hands clasp'd on her lap ; then rise, 
 And at her prie-dieu kneel, until she have told 
 Her rosary-beads of ebony tipp'd with gold, 
 Then to her soft sleep and to-morrow '11 be 
 To-day's exact repeated effigy.' 
 
 This tone of patience is heard in all Arnold's poetry, 
 and it is heard because his poetry is devout. It has 
 more of the cloister in it than is to be found in any 
 other poetry of our time, so much more that there is 
 even some initial difficulty of appreciation ; a greater 
 depth of Christian feeling and a fuller understanding 
 of the doctrine of self-surrender than we have capacity 
 properly to realise. If we were to compare it with 
 the finest attitude of a Pagan age or temper, we 
 should see that what we have to deal with here is 
 not the beautiful superiority to life which we find in 
 Marcus Aurelius, or even in the last reported sayings 
 of John Brown, 1 but submission to life. And so 
 real is this temper that other poets in their efforts 
 to represent it seem like boys playing with half- 
 apprehended ideas. Put Tennyson's ' St. Agnes' Eve * 
 beside the passage just quoted, and how frail and 
 
 1 'His guards and attendants can talk of nothing but his natural 
 cheerfulness, which seems never to have given way at all. He was 
 a man of few words ; and any long conversations, any preachments, 
 given out as his utterances, must be distrusted. His conduct and 
 manners were just those of a man to whom nothing particular was 
 happening. When an officer, impressed with this, asked him plainly 
 whether he really felt no recoil at all from what awaited him ; he 
 replied, Why, no ; but that fear was not his trial. He was not 
 liable to fear. He had in the course of his life suffered far more 
 from bashfulness than fear.' 
 
 I 
 
196 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 external becomes that exquisite picture of the emotion 
 of another. Compared with Arnold, Tennyson, the 
 Broad Churchman, is a man who has heard of 
 Christianity, and Browning, the optimist, with his 
 Abt Vogler melodies, a brave citizen with a Sunday 
 mood : much vigour and confidence of blood sings 
 with Browning when he sings his masterful hymns. 
 But in the inner sanctuary of Arnold we are admitted 
 to a place removed, as much withdrawn from the 
 activities of living, and as dead to them, as a rayless 
 star, a place accessible only to the rare poet and the 
 rarer saint, the saint who is satisfied with his own 
 quietism and does not seek to do good. There is an 
 abnegation of the private will, and this without any 
 parade. *I yielded myself to the perfect whole,' says 
 Emerson, but in so saying, he seems merely to be 
 politely waiving resistance to the claims of the Universe 
 to absorb the most persistent individuality in literature. 
 It was a voluntary act, and Emerson is the gracious 
 victor in that as in every contest. The tone of Arnold 
 is altogether different. He is not the individual who 
 decides, but the thing which is affected. The Universe, 
 this you feel in his poems, is everywhere greater than 
 man is. His still music comes from him in response 
 to ideas which shake the forest of men like a reed, 
 to which they owe their life, and which make them 
 distinguishably human. To Arnold, the one thought 
 that through the years comes permanently sweet is 
 that of the life of Jesus, and the one idea that consoles, 
 in permanent opposition to the hurry of the world, the 
 idea of the Everlasting. 
 
 It is difficult to represent this, the breath and finer 
 spirit of his feeling, but there is one poem which 
 
ARNOLD 197 
 
 of all his poems, it seems to me, represents it best. 
 It is an early poem, and full of longueurs and imma- 
 turities which have sufficed to hide from critical 
 appreciation the meaning of its tone. Moreover, the 
 mere story of ' The Sick King in Bokhara ' has a 
 peculiarity and particularity that is a little distracting. 
 There is an out-of-the-wayness in the external aspect 
 of the religious experience with which it deals, which 
 prevents many from realising how much it is about 
 themselves. Besides, the demand of the ' poor man ' 
 formally religious, though in spirit quite forlornly 
 selfish, is, when followed by his execution, so strik- 
 ing an episode that attention is concentrated upon it. 
 And yet, of course, the religious experience of which 
 the poem speaks is not the poor man's, but the 
 King's. 
 
 The poem opens with the King present and, in 
 attendance on him, Hussein. To them enters the 
 Vizier, for whom the King has sent to afford him 
 aid in his trouble. The Vizier wishes to know what 
 troubles the King, and Hussein proceeds to tell him, 
 the King standing patiently by, waiting for the Vizier's 
 opinion. 
 
 Two days ago, says Hussein, a man came running, 
 crying for justice, but the King would not heed. 
 Again, yesterday, when the King went forth, the man 
 came importunate and told his tale. The water in the 
 land had dried up and the hot nights were unbearable. 
 This poor man had collected water in a pitcher from 
 a far spot, and put it by in a secret place that he 
 might drink when he woke. But when he woke his 
 pitcher was gone. His brothers had satisfied their 
 thirst at his hoard, and having given the last drops to 
 
i 9 8 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 his mother were now composing themselves to sleep. 
 At that he broke forth and cursed them : 
 
 ' One was my mother Now, do right ! ' 
 
 ' But my lord mused a space, and said : 
 " Send him away, Sirs, and make on ! 
 It is some madman ! " the King said. 
 As the King bade, so was it done.' 
 
 But again this morning right in the King's path behold 
 the man ! If the King would not judge him in this 
 world for his impiety, he must bear the guilt with him 
 into the limitless future : 
 
 * " What, must I howl in the next world, 
 Because thou wilt not listen here ? " 
 
 Then they who stood about the King 
 Drew close together and conferr'd ; 
 Till that the King stood forth and said : 
 " Before the priests thou shalt be heard." 
 
 But when the Ulemas were met, 
 And the thing heard, they doubted not ; 
 But sentenced him, as the law is, 
 To die by stoning on the spot. 
 
 Now the King charged us secretly : 
 " Stoned must he be, the law stands so. 
 Yet, if he seek to fly, give way ; 
 Hinder him not, but let him go." 
 
 So saying, the King took a stone, 
 And cast it softly ; but the man, 
 With a great joy upon his face, 
 Kneel'd down, and cried not, neither ran.' 
 
 Then the stones of the judgment fly fast : 
 
 ' My lord had cover'd up his face ; 
 But when one told him, " He is dead," 
 Turning him quickly to go in, 
 " Bring thou to me his corpse," he said.' 
 
ARNOLD 199 
 
 Even now the bearers can be heard on the stair. The 
 Vizier looks on the haggard face of the young King 
 whose soul is bowed beneath another's burden, and he 
 begins quietly, compassionately, and in the language 
 of good sense, to distinguish. There is in truth no 
 just occasion for sorrow ; the victim was not of blood 
 kin, far from it, and, had he been, this is the kind of 
 thing that must happen. One would not wish it other- 
 wise, that impiety should go unchecked, and that he 
 who curseth father or mother should escape the opera- 
 tion of the law : 
 
 'But being nothing, as he is, 
 Why for no cause make sad thy face ? 
 Lo, I am old ! three Kings, ere thee, 
 Have I seen reigning in this place. 
 
 But who, through all this length of time, 
 Could bear the burden of his years, 
 If he for strangers pain'd his heart 
 Not less than those who merit tears ? 
 
 Fathers we must have, wife and child, 
 And grievous is the grief for these ; 
 This pain alone, which must be borne, 
 Makes the head white, and bows the knees.' 
 
 It is really important that one should not give way to 
 such outpourings of the heart. If one is to think of all 
 the sad things that happen in the world one will always 
 have occasion for sorrow. Suppose all is well in the 
 palace (the little palace of one's own affections !) at 
 least far away you can hear, if you lay your ear to 
 the earth, the cry of the stolen slave child, the short 
 heavy panting of the toilers, the ceaseless sound of 
 quarrelling, and the uneasy tossing of disease. Life 
 can only be supported on the supposition that to each 
 man is not only his own sorrow but his own joy ; 
 
200 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 the poor, are they not always with us and always 
 suffering? 
 
 'All these have sorrow, and keep still, 
 Whilst other men make cheer, and sing. 
 Wilt thou have pity on all these? 
 No, nor on this dead dog, O King ! J 
 
 But the young man turns on his adviser a lack-lustre 
 eye. In his ears is the sound of the earth that travails, 
 in his vision, so that he cannot get it out, the mangled 
 body his pity could not save, and in his bosom that 
 overpowering feeling of sick disgust which proceeds 
 from the soul disturbed : 
 
 ' O Vizier, thou art old, I young ! 
 Clear in these things I cannot see. 
 My head is burning, and a heat 
 Is in my skin which angers me. 
 
 But hear ye this, ye sons of men ! 
 They that bear rule, and are obeyed, 
 Unto a rule more strong than theirs 
 Are in their turn obedient made.' 
 
 I have represented this poem very poorly if it appears 
 to any one that the clear-eyed Emerson could have 
 written it, or that any one could have written it but 
 Arnold. 
 
MEREDITH 201 
 
 MEREDITH 
 
 SPECULATION as to the genesis of Meredith's poetical 
 style ended, for the literary class, with the republication 
 of the poems of 1851. It was clear that he was not a 
 natural poet ; that there was at first no magic, no capa- 
 city for essentially poetical thought, not much beyond 
 competence. Meredith, at first, could do what others 
 can do. In verse, occasionally truly melodious, he 
 could say little, easily enough. The chief character- 
 istic of the small volume is its diffuseness. 1 Even the 
 poem which has most poetical quality in it (' Daphne'), 
 has a spread effect. * The Two Blackbirds ' is spoilt 
 by not knowing how to stop half way. The short 
 
 1 'Chillianwallah' has some 'natural music' : 
 
 ' Chillianwallah, Chillianwallah ! 
 
 'Tis a wild and dreary plain, 
 Strewn with plots of thickest jungle, 
 
 Matted with the gory stain. 
 There the murder-mouthed artillery, 
 
 In the deadly ambuscade, 
 Wrought the thunder of its treachery 
 
 On the skeleton brigade ' ; 
 
 .and there is a verse opening the Pastorals that lingers in my 
 jnemory : 
 
 ' How sweet on sunny afternoons, 
 For those who journey light and well, 
 To loiter up a hilly rise 
 Which hides the prospect far beyond, 
 And fancy all the landscape lying 
 Beautiful and still.' 
 
202 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 4 Love in the Valley ' reads longer than the much 
 lengthened poem of later days. For the rest, there is- 
 expansive stuff and to spare. 
 
 Leaving out of account a few happy phrases and a 
 really individual observation of country sights, the 
 active effect of ' South-West Wind in the Woodland,' 1 
 or the fresh effect of a country girl, there was little 
 accomplished ; scattered shot fired in the air without 
 apparent intention of hitting. One would have said 
 there was no danger of obscurity, nor of anything 
 else. 
 
 But with the next volume, published ten years later,. 
 
 1 As for example : 
 
 * Now, whirring like an eagle's wing 
 Preparing for a wide blue flight ; 
 Now, flapping like a sail that tacks 
 And chides the wet bewildered mast ; 
 Now, screaming like an anguish'd thing 
 Chased close by some down-breathing beak ; 
 Now, wailing like a breaking heart, 
 That will not wholly break, but hopes 
 With hope that knows itself in vain ; 
 Now, threatening like a storm-charged cloud ; 
 Now, cooing like a woodland dove ; 
 Now, up again in roar and wrath 
 High soaring and wide sweeping ; now 
 With sudden fury dashing down 
 Full-force on the awaiting woods ' ; 
 
 but the level is not as high. On the other hand, there are no other 
 verses in the early ' Love in the Valley ' quite as weak as this : 
 
 ' Comes a sudden question should a strange hand pluck her ! 
 
 Oh ! what an anguish smites me at the thought. 
 Should some idle lordling bribe her mind with jewels ! 
 
 Can such beauty ever thus be bought ? 
 Sometimes the huntsmen prancing down the valley 
 
 Eye the village lasses, full of sprightly mirth ; 
 They see as I see, mine is the fairest ! 
 
 Would she were older and could read my worth ! ' 
 
MEREDITH 203 
 
 a new poet presented himself. In those years Mere- 
 dith had found his interests, which were political and 
 moral, and there is now heart in his talk. The material 
 is not essentially poetical material ; on the contrary, 
 essentially material of observation, and singularly far 
 removed from the empty conventional subjects of the 
 preceding volume, but there is often mastery. Some 
 of the verses that appeared in 1862 had no doubt 
 affinity with the earlier productions. In some there 
 was still a tendency to be diffuse. ' Grandfather 
 Bridgeman,' though it is saved by its humour, is not 
 free from Mid-Victorian sentiment, and ' The Beggar's 
 Soliloquy ' attempts the same thing that is successfully 
 done in 'The Old Chartist.' But in the main, even 
 the failures were ' prophetic of the coming joy and 
 strife.' In 'Margaret's Bridal Eve,' which is too 
 wordy, in 'The Head of Bran the Blest,' which ends 
 very poorly, in 'Cassandra,' which, but for its subject 
 being infinitely better, might be good, one hears at 
 times the future clinch. 
 
 In short, as soon as he has something to say, not 
 usually a poetical something, Meredith takes poetical 
 rank. Whether his task, before the end of his poetical 
 career, does not become too hard for him is another 
 question, but he achieved little or nothing till he had a 
 task. No poet has ever been more indebted to having 
 something to lean against. Emerson on conventional 
 subjects was not so weak. Emerson was no love poet, 
 yet when he was writing, or, as a better expression, 
 failing to write, love poetry, he was Emerson. Mere- 
 dith is not himself till he sets his teeth. With mouth 
 open he is not the poet breathing the sunrise; with this 
 attitude, in poetry he is a yokel. As a poet, commonly 
 
204 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 so called, he is an ineffective and unindividual writer. 
 As striving to give his matter poetical expression, he is 
 one of the greatest who has made language subserve 
 his use. It is not his task, hard as it is, that prevents 
 him writing more poetically ; it was his task that made 
 him a poet. 
 
 The nature of this task was twofold. He had to 
 learn to write on usual subjects so as to compel atten- 
 tion ; he had to learn to write on unusual subjects. 
 
 His achievement therefore falls into two divisions, 
 which however in two ways overlap. There is no 
 distinct order of succession, for, though the choice of 
 extremely unusual subjects is in the main a habit of 
 later life, a fondness for subjects that are out of the way 
 is developed almost as early as his habit of effective 
 speech. Both habits grow in intensity side by side. 
 The other overlapping concerns the manner. It is not 
 only on usual subjects that he comes finally to write 
 unusually. His habit of effortful writing becomes a 
 general habit, and independent of the simplicity of the 
 subjects. Some of his wryest and most effective con- 
 tortions are on topics not in themselves easily suscep- 
 tible of poetical treatment ; topics strange to poetry. 
 Again, when one speaks of Meredith writing so as to 
 compel attention on usual subjects, one must be under- 
 stood with the reservation that the most usual subjects 
 treated by him become in some degree unusual ; at 
 least are set in a new light. 
 
 A serviceable distinction, then, among Meredith's 
 successes would amount to not much more than this. 
 He has poems which are chiefly remarkable for their 
 quality of style, other poems that are chiefly remark- 
 able, being poems, for their thought or philosophy. 
 
MEREDITH 205 
 
 The second class of poems forms Meredith's contri- 
 bution to the poetical movement of the age, a move- 
 ment which will be complete when at last we are able 
 to see emotion and matter of thought as no longer 
 separate. 
 
 The first class of poems, that class which contains 
 the poems chiefly remarkable for their quality of style, 
 is Meredith's contribution to poetry : how great and 
 how singular a contribution has been under-emphasised 
 by those, and it is natural the exponents of Meredith 
 should be among them, who have eyes chiefly for the 
 nuptials of philosophy and song. 
 
 But, in its way, it is an achievement as unique as the 
 other. Meredith invented a poetical style. All great 
 poets have a style of their own, a style which is them- 
 selves ; but Meredith invented a style. He invented a 
 new style in poetry for himself, just as Johnson for 
 himself, for neither is imitable, invented a new style in 
 prose. And he brought to this style-making some 
 similar qualities ; a capacity for classicalising English, 
 an instinct for Saxon, and a hard pushing-through 
 sense. These qualities appear in different proportions 
 in the two writers. Besides, Meredith adds qualities of 
 his own ; he has light, and an ear peculiarly sensitive 
 to the subtler effects of metre. He has, moreover, a 
 sense of Comedy ; not humour nor wit, properly so 
 called, but the kind of benign grin his Earth Spirit 
 sometimes wears. With these attributes he has one 
 supreme power : he has few plain depths, but when he 
 feels subtly he feels deeply. Give him a shade of feel- 
 ing, or a half-formed feeling, and he is at the bottom of 
 it in the same way in which Burns is at home with the 
 elemental feelings of the heart. He uses a rapier and 
 
206 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 he amuses you with its flickering, and then, suddenly, 
 it is there. 
 
 The tale of the love felt by the good physician 
 Melampus for the creatures of the wood is told in a 
 sort of chequered sunlight, in verse with the grace of a 
 long billow ; the story-telling intellect flicking over its 
 subject : 
 
 ' Now sleeping once on a day of marvellous fire, 
 A brood of snakes he had cherished in grave regret 
 That death his people had dealt their dam and their sire, 
 Through savage dread of them, crept to his neck, and set 
 Their tongues to lick him : the swift affectionate tongue 
 Of each ran licking the slumberer : then his ears 
 A forked red tongue tickled shrewdly : sudden upsprung, 
 He heard a voice piping : Ay, for he has no fears ! 
 
 A bird said that, in the notes of birds, and the speech 
 Of men, it seemed ' : 
 
 ' The swift affectionate tongue ' ! Equally dependent 
 on its style is 'The Old Chartist,' a simple tale of the 
 reflections of a Radical on inequality and self-respect: 
 
 ' Whate'er I be, old England is my dam ! 
 
 So there's my answer to the judges, clear. 
 I 'm nothing of a fox, nor of a lamb ; 
 I don't know how to bleat nor how to leer : 
 
 I 'm for the nation ! 
 
 That 's why you see me by the wayside here, 
 Returning home from transportation. 
 
 It's Summer in her bath this morn, I think. 
 
 I J m fresh as dew, and chirpy as the birds : 
 And just for joy to see old England wink 
 
 Thro' leaves again, I could harangue the herds : 
 
 Isn't it something 
 To speak out like a man when you Ve got words, 
 
 And prove you're not a stupid dumb thing?' 
 
 He sees a water-rat cleaning himself on the mud-bank, 
 sharing the ' aplomb of animals,' happy in self-suffi- 
 ciency, quadrupedally indifferent to all else : 
 
MEREDITH 207 
 
 ' You teach me a fine lesson, my old boy ! 
 
 I 've looked on my superiors far too long, 
 And small has been my profit as my joy. 
 
 You've done the right while I 've denounced the wrong 
 
 Prosper me later ! 
 
 Like you I will despise the sniggering throng, 
 And please myself and my Creator.' 
 
 The thought pleases him. He remembers, with kind- 
 liness all aglow, that his wife, without sharing his 
 opinions, supported him at his trial : 
 
 4 She suffered for me : women, you'll observe, 
 
 Don't suffer for a Cause, but for a man. 
 When I was in the dock she show'd her nerve : 
 I saw beneath her shawl my old tea-can. 
 
 Trembling . . . she brought it 
 To screw me for my work : she loath'd my plan, 
 And therefore doubly kind I thought it. 
 
 I 've never lost the taste of that same tea : 
 
 That liquor on my logic floats like oil, 
 When I state facts, and fellows disagree. 
 
 For human creatures all are in a coil ; 
 
 All may want pardon. 
 I see a day when every pot will boil 
 
 Harmonious in one great Tea-garden ! ' 
 
 Take him again in ' Martin's Puzzle.' Molly, who is 
 as good as gold and half as pretty, has been run over 
 by the village cart, pushed downstairs ' to make her go 
 crooked,' and generally made the sport 
 
 ' of that power 
 Which erring men call Chance.' 
 
 Martin wishes to embrace the creed of Pangloss 
 and offers to himself several justifications of those 
 troubles : 
 
 ' But the worst of me is, that when I bow my head, 
 I perceive a thought wriggling away in the dust, 
 And I follow its tracks, quite forgetful, instead 
 Of humble acceptance : for, question I must! 
 
208 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 Here 's a creature made carefully carefully made ! 
 
 Put together with craft, and then stamped on, and why ? 
 The answer seems nowhere : it's discord that's played. 
 
 The sky's a blue dish !- an implacable sky !' 
 
 1 Here 's a creature made carefully carefully made ! r 
 The quality here is the quality of style. Sometimes it 
 is possible for the reader thus to particularise ; * the 
 swift affectionate tongue,' and, here, the studied repeti- 
 tion. Occasionally one can place one's finger on the 
 line from which the magic radiates, but more often the 
 quality is a pervading quality, and felt in a series of 
 effects. Few things finer than ' The Orchard and the 
 Heath ' l have ever been written. The sense of childish 
 delight so artfully caught by an intentional sim- 
 plicity : 
 
 ' A small one tumbling sang, " Oh ! head ! " ' 
 
 the impression of spattered life, the consciousness of 
 the vast livingness of Nature surrounding and enfolding 
 all ; these are brought home to us, not by single lines, 
 but by an obtrusive style ; a style that is at once so 
 weighted and so alert with perception that it seems to 
 be obtruded by a power behind itself ; an artificiality so 
 convincing that it seems as if Nature required the 
 artificiality to be seen. 
 
 In their different manners, ' The Day of the Daugh- 
 ter of Hades,' a poem which does not quite succeed, 2 
 but which leaves a permanent imaginative effect, 
 
 1 This poem is admirably analysed by Mr. Basil de Se'lincourt, 
 pp. 251-254, George Meredith^ by M. Sturge Henderson. 
 
 2 It does not succeed partly owing to a purely wanton obscurity, 
 as Mr. Ker would express it, 'outside the poem.' The whole 
 would be clear enough if we were told that the story was about 
 
MEREDITH 209 
 
 ' Earth and a Wedded Woman ' no more than the 
 arrangement of an impression and 'Jump to Glory 
 Jane ' 
 
 'Those flies of boys disturbed them sore 
 On Sundays and when daylight wore : 
 With withies- cut from hedge or copse, 
 They treated them as whipping-tops, 
 And flung big stones with cruel aim ; 
 Yet all the flock jumped on the same' ; 
 
 in their different manners, these poems are wholly- 
 made by their style. 1 
 
 Of course behind this style there is the personality of 
 
 Proserpine, the unwilling bride of Pluto ; about her god-granted 
 boon of periodical visits to the earth, and about her having a 
 daughter born to Pluto, Skiageneia, who accompanies her parent 
 on one of her visits to earth, and is overlooked when Proserpine 
 returns. When Skiageneia is missed, Pluto comes up for her. This 
 is very easily said, and it was merely wanton not to say it. Similarly, 
 Meredith should have told us, in elucidation of 'Jump to Glory Jane,' 
 that there was in actual fact a sect of Jumpers, and in elucidation of 
 'Periander' that Periander, Tyrant of Corinth, on one occasion, in a 
 wild rage, wounded his wife Melissa so that she died ; that afterwards 
 he banished his son Lycophron, who grieved for his mother's death, 
 to Corcyra, and that finally, many years having passed, and the 
 Tyrant wearying of the cares of State, Periander offered to recall 
 Lycophron to govern Corinth, he himself retiring as Governor of 
 Corcyra. The Corcyraeans, not liking the prospect of this exchange, 
 killed Lycophron, and Periander died of grief. 
 
 With this told, the poem is quite clear. Left untold, there is no 
 better instance of obscurity ' outside a poem.' 
 
 1 ' The Appeasement of Demeter' furnishes another instance of the 
 vital service to Meredith of his attention-arresting speech. In itself 
 the poem is, in subject, affectedly actionless. Demeter has left 
 Earth in a pet, and a blight falls on the valley ; there is neither sun 
 nor rain : 
 
 4 Now whether night advancing, whether day, 
 Scarce did the baldness show.' 
 
 But instinct in the valley creatures still, at times, and half-heartedly, 
 
 O 
 
210 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 Meredith, pleasingly cynical and intimately modern. 
 But the style here is by no means merely the man. 
 There is an elaborate, sometimes jocund, sometimes 
 ironical artifice. You can see the conjurer waving his 
 hands. These poems of Meredith's are a brilliant 
 causerie on experience. l Breath of the Briar ' is a 
 morsel touched with the * swift affectionate tongue ' of 
 the intellect : 
 
 ' Green of rind, and redolent 
 Of sweetness as a milking cow ' ; 
 
 fresh as that apple and the vision recalled : 
 
 ' The damsel with her teeth on it ; 
 Her twinkle between frank and shy, 
 My thirst to bite where she had bit.' 
 
 ' Juggling Jerry ' is the prettiest plaything that ever 
 amused man that is mortal, and touched his fount of 
 tears. In these ingenious verses, Meredith's playful 
 excursus * upon Setebos,' the acrobat must be particu- 
 larised as a juggler, so that the metaphor (it is natural 
 to speak in the terms of one's trade) may personify the 
 irony of things : 
 
 makes dumb attempt to play. This moves Demeter to laughter, and 
 her laughter the sun to shine and the rain to fall : 
 
 ' She laughed : since our first harvesting heard none 
 Like thunder of the song of heart : her face, 
 The dreadful darkness, shook to mounted sun, 
 And peal and peal across the hills held chase. 
 She laughed herself to water ; laughed to fire ; 
 Laughed the torrential laugh of dam and sire 
 
 Full of the marrowy race. 
 Her laughter, Gods ! was flesh on skeleton.' 
 
 It is all made so important, so solid. The moods of the weather 
 become concrete. 
 
MEREDITH 211 
 
 'Yonder came smells of the gorse, so nutty, 
 
 Gold-like and warm : it 's the prime of May. 
 Better than mortar, brick and putty, 
 
 Is God's house on a blowing day. 
 Lean me more up the mound ; now I feel it : 
 
 All the old heath-smells ! Ain't it strange ? 
 There 's the world laughing, as if to conceal it, 
 
 But He's by us, juggling the change.' 
 
 It is difficult to say what pleases most in this poem, 
 the brave trip of the dying humour of life slipping into 
 the close, or the free, careless description of natural 
 objects, as if death were a matter of unconcern. Jerry 
 pretends not to know, but you know he does know. It 
 is like a man stroking a cobra. 
 
 In these poems there is an impudence of insistent 
 personality that makes them great literature. They 
 are deliberately contrived, deliberately and successfully 
 contrived, to be unlike anything else, and this difference 
 is pleasing. One's own personality feels contagiously 
 that it rides lightly over life. 
 
 Part of this feeling of irresponsible ascendency is 
 produced by Meredith's amazing command of the lilt. 
 It is this which makes < Phoebus with Admetus,' 
 forgiving its very ordinary chorus, what it is, like 
 spring rain tinkling on the grass ; and it is this which, 
 as much as its other divine qualities, places much of 
 the completed ' Love in the Valley ' (as a whole it is 
 prolix) among the completest triumphs of Art. 
 
 How beautifully made this poem is any one can see 
 who places it beside its ineffective original. To write a 
 simple poem about a simple country girl ! Almost 
 any one could do that ; but to write of simplicity with 
 a gem-like artifice, that was reserved for Meredith. 
 Stevenson said of one verse, in the original, that it 
 
212 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 intoxicated him like new wine. It is the only verse 
 that is retained, and the whole completed poem has this 
 effect. There is in it the anxious delicate amorousness 
 of senses which are healthy, and with this undercurrent 
 of sweet trembling and pensive naturalism there goes 
 the eye of the connoisseur. There are verses that only 
 Meredith could have written : 
 
 ' Cool was the woodside ; cool as her white dairy 
 
 Keeping sweet the cream-pan ; and there the boys from school, 
 Cricketing below, rushed brown and red with sunshine ; 
 
 O the dark translucence of the deep-eyed cool ! 
 Spying from the farm, herself she fetched a pitcher 
 
 Full of milk, and tilted for each in turn the beak. 
 Then a little fellow, mouth up and on tiptoe, 
 
 Said, " I will kiss you " : she laughed and leaned her cheek.' 
 
 And there are verses, so perfect is the art, that it seems 
 only Nature could have written : 
 
 ' All the girls are out with their baskets for the primrose ; 
 
 Up lanes, woods through, they troop in joyful bands. 
 My sweet leads : she knows not why, but now she loiters, 
 
 Eyes the bent anemones, and hangs her hands. 
 Such a look will tell that the violets are peeping, 
 
 Coming the rose : and unaware a cry 
 Springs in her bosom for odours and for colour, 
 
 Covert and the nightingale ; she knows not why.' 
 
 The ecstasy of this music is produced not merely by 
 the lilt, but by its interruption, ' and hangs her hands,' 
 as if a ripple were to hesitate in coming over ; the 
 omitted accent 
 
 ' Eyes the bent anemones ' (stoops) * and hangs her hands ' 
 being replaced by a pause. And this artifice, simple as 
 it is, in the hands of so consummate an artist has the 
 effect of witchery. Its frequent repetition yields the 
 effect of a second or inner music, following and mock- 
 ing the light tripping rhythm of the whole. It has 
 
MEREDITH 213 
 
 been objected by some critics that * Love in the Valley ' 
 is artificial. Other critics have complained that Burns 
 wrote love songs. * The qualities of sugar remain with 
 sugar, and those of salt with salt.' 
 
 As great triumphs, though triumphs in another note, 
 Meredith achieves in his later ballads. For the purpose 
 of these poems of love and war, * Attila,' ' Archduchess 
 Anne,' ' The Song of Theodolinda,' ' A Preaching from 
 a Spanish Ballad,' * King Harald's Trance,' he has in- 
 vented, to use Mr. de Selincourt's word, a form of poetical 
 ' shorthand ' like the jobbing strokes of a chopper : 
 
 * Her he eyed : his judgement was one word, 
 Foulbed ! and she fell : the blow clove two.' 
 
 It is necessary to become familiar with the language ; 
 but, this done, it is easily seen that there are no short 
 poems more vivid, and none so barely dramatic. In 
 narrative dramatic poetry, even when the narrator re- 
 frains from explicit comment, you can generally discover 
 from the underlying emotion where his sympathies are. 
 But these poems are entirely pure of any comment by 
 the artist's emotion, and give the separate actions and 
 ecstasies for what they are worth. It is true their range 
 is not wide, and their brutal strength largely due to 
 their being about brutes about a brute of a husband, or 
 a religious brute like the self-cherishing Theodolinda. 
 They are not the highest poetry, and are worth no more 
 than themselves, but for naked effectiveness they stand 
 alone. Rembrandt painted a carcass. 
 
 Critics who read ' The Empty Purse ' have been so 
 occupied with explaining that Meredith was not a 
 finished artist that they have omitted to notice that he 
 was. For sheer artistry Meredith stands by himself 
 
2i 4 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 among modern poets. Tennyson was sufficiently an 
 artist to display the poet Tennyson. Meredith is artist 
 enough to make a poet : 
 
 ' Prophetic of the coming joy and strife, 
 Like the wild western war-chief sinking 
 Calm to the end he eyes unblinking, 
 Earth's voice is jubilant in ebbing life. 1 
 
 He for his happy hunting-fields, 
 
 Forgets the droning chant, and yields 
 
 His numbered breaths to exultation 
 
 In the proud anticipation : 
 
 Shouting the glories of his nation, 
 
 Shouting the grandeur of his race, 
 
 Shouting his own great deeds of daring : 
 
 And when at last death grasps his face, 
 
 And stiffened on the ground in peace 
 He lies with all his painted terrors glaring ; 
 Hushed are the tribe to hear a threading cry : 
 
 Not from the dead man ; 
 
 Not from the standers-by : 
 
 The spirit of the red man 
 Is welcomed by his fathers up on high.' 
 
 The sharp e's and o's with the shrill i between 
 
 ' Not from the dead man ; 
 Not from the standers-by : 
 The spirit of the red man '- 
 
 are like pistol-shots ; then the music mellows, shoots up, 
 and is gone, the air of the concert-room still thrilling 
 with the recent quickly successive sounds. Qualis 
 artifex ! 
 
 There are two Nature poems of Meredith's dear to 
 lovers of his philosophy, but which even on his first 
 readers must exercise an arresting effect. The opening 
 
 1 ' Earth's voice.' In the text ' Her voice ' ; 'her' referring to Earth, 
 mentioned five or six lines earlier in the ' Ode to the Spirit of Earth 
 in Autumn.' 
 
MEREDITH 215 
 
 passage of ' Hard Weather ' is the nearest thing to a 
 breezy morning on the high Downs that has yet got on 
 paper : 
 
 ^** 
 
 ' Shrill underfoot the grassblade shrews, 
 At gallop, clumped, and down the croft 
 Bestrid by shadows, beaten, tossed ; 
 It seems a scythe, it seems a rod. 
 The howl is up at the howl's accost ; 
 The shivers greet and the shivers nod. 
 
 Is the land ship? we are rolled, we drive 
 
 Tritonly, cleaving hiss and hum ; 
 
 Whirl with the dead, or mount or dive, 
 
 Or down in dregs, or on in scum. 
 
 And drums the distant, pipes the near, 
 
 And vale and hill are grey in grey, 
 
 As when the surge is crumbling sheer, 
 
 And sea-mews wing the haze of spray. 
 
 Clouds are they bony witches ? swarms, 
 
 Darting swift on the robber's flight, 
 
 Hurry an infant sky in arms : 
 
 It peeps, it becks ; 'tis day, 'tis night. 
 
 Black while over the loop of blue 
 
 The swathe is closed, like shroud on corse. 
 
 Lo, as if swift the Furies flew, 
 
 The Fates at heel at a cry to horse ! ' 
 
 * The South- Wester,' published in 1888, maybe com- 
 pared with ' The South- West Wind in the Woodland ' 
 of 1 85 1. 1 There is a difference of thirty-seven years, 
 but also that between a good description and actual 
 sight. The transmutation of the clouds is a visible 
 process : 
 
 ' A murky cloud a fair pursued, 
 Assailed, and felt the limbs elude : 
 He sat him down to pipe his woe, 
 And some strange beast of sky became : 
 A giant's club withheld the blow ; 
 A milky cloud went all to flame.' 
 
 1 See note on page 202. 
 
2i6 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 How is one to give the effect of sky and air? 
 
 ' Day of the cloud in fleets ! O day 
 Of wedded white and blue, that sail 
 Immingled, with a footing ray 
 In shadow-sandals down our vale ! 
 And swift to ravish golden meads, 
 Swift up the run of turf it speeds, 
 Thy bright of head and dark of heel, 
 To where the hilltop flings on sky, 
 As hawk from wrist or dust from wheel, 
 The tiptoe sealers tossed to fly.' 
 
 There is a huddle of compressed language, like the 
 shift of light and blast of wind, the sort of bewildering 
 of awakened senses one gets on such a day. And this is 
 due to the manner. Yes, but a supreme manner brings 
 matter with it, the only possible matter. * In speaking,' 
 writes Emerson, 'of I know not what style, Words- 
 worth said "to be sure, it was the manner, but then 
 you know the matter always comes out of the 
 manner." 
 
 Of Meredith's manner it is necessary to add that so 
 complete an artist does he train himself to be, he some- 
 times writes verse of the highest descriptive quality 
 wholly free from artifice, verse like this from the ' Ode 
 to the Spirit of Earth in Autumn,' 
 
 * The crimson-footed nymph is panting up the glade, 
 
 With the wine-jar at her arm-pit, and the drunken ivy-braid 
 
 Round her forehead, breasts, and thighs : starts a Satyr, and they 
 
 speed : 
 
 Hear the crushing of the leaves : hear the crackling of the bough ! 
 And the whistling of the bramble, the piping of the weed' ; 
 
 or like this from ' Bellerophon,' 
 
 ' The cottagers who dole him fruit and crust, 
 With patient inattention hear him prate : 
 And comes the snow, and comes the dust, 
 Comes the old wanderer, more bent of late.' 
 
MEREDITH 217 
 
 We come to the second class of Meredith's poems, 
 those poems which, being poems, are chiefly remark- 
 able for their philosophy or thought. Meredith is 
 -emphatically a modern writer, and this modernity shows 
 itself, in a hundred ways, all through his poetry. The 
 
 * Poems of the English Roadside,' 'The Old Chartist,' 
 
 * The Patriot Engineer,' good and less good, deal with 
 subjects so little defined, so trivial or so intellectual, as 
 to exclude them from any but a modern anthology. 
 4 Juggling Jerry ' is as modern a way of saying what 
 one wants to say as 'Caliban upon Setebos' or 'Bishop 
 Blougram's Apology.' The ' Ballads and Poems of 
 Tragic Life ' are poems of to-day in their absorbed 
 interest in purely external action, action interesting for 
 action's sake without aid from the poet's sentiment. 
 
 * The South- Wester ' has an equally absorbed interest 
 in pure description ; it deals with Nature in the fashion 
 first taught by Emerson's ' May Day.' ' The Appease- 
 ment of Demeter ' and ' Earth and a Wedded Woman ' 
 are characteristically modern in their indifference to the 
 subject ; an indifference Arnold rebuked in his famous 
 preface to his reprinted poems of 1853, a rebuke to 
 which modern poetry has turned an ear increasingly 
 deaf. ' Love in the Valley ' itself has no action, and 
 .a hundred years ago even Wordsworth would not 
 have attempted the extended theme. The critics of 
 1800 made themselves merry with what happened in 
 Wordsworth's poems about people. This is to say 
 that something generally did happen. 1 
 
 1 To meet the enemy's instance, the 'Idiot Boy' was lost. In 
 'The Brothers' the action is outside the poem, but the greater part 
 is occupied with reminiscences of the one who was killed. I do not 
 say there are not exceptions. There are, of course, many purely 
 descriptive poems of flowers, yew-trees, natural objects. 
 
218 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 In ' Modern Love ' Meredith broke ground which in 
 some sort he claimed to be new. In this poem or 
 poems, sonnet sequence or sequence of poems the 
 Sonnet is proud to claim, we have love-poetry of a 
 new sort, poetry not about love in its fruition but in its 
 decay, the detail of the irritant tedium of its absence 
 and not the passion of its rupture. We have here 
 neither Borneo and Juliet nor Othello, but the minu- 
 tiae of what happens in the odd numbers of any 
 terrace. 
 
 It is not the generous passion of the play-books, 
 simple, and with * the dignity of dumb real objects/ 
 that is here celebrated, the desire past reason for some 
 particular other Francesca, Helen, ' Anna with the 
 gowden locks.' Equally clearly it is not the love 
 celebrated by Tennyson with individual delicacy in 
 ' Maud,' the feeling of the pure man for the pure maid ; 
 a love which looks upon the beloved at once as mother, 
 wife, and daughter, which has something of fatherly 
 protection in it, looks as a son for support, and yet 
 amid both cherishes the idea of equal mating. This 
 feeling, which is quite modern, * I have led her home, 
 my love, my only friend,' is by no means the feeling 
 analysed in Meredith's poem. The senses are by no 
 means absent in ' Modern Love,' though they are 
 played with and controlled by the observing intellect. 
 This it is which gives it its bitter and incisive truth : 
 
 * What are we first ? First, animals : and next 
 Intelligences at a leap.' 
 
 Tennyson speaks of an ideal, which, however, to-day 
 is sometimes realised by the young. Meredith de- 
 scribes a mental state which, in a late civilisation, is- 
 
MEREDITH 219 
 
 not uncommon with middle age. The aesthete 
 and the moralist both complain that the subject is 
 unpleasing. 1 What is worth observation is that the 
 subject is not one that lends itself easily to poetical 
 treatment. Indeed, without Meredith's treatment to 
 assist our judgment, we might think that for poetical 
 purposes it was impossible. But Meredith has used 
 it for a poetical purpose. It is not the noblest poetry in 
 all the world, but it is a noble poem. 
 
 How has he managed to effect this ? 
 
 In two ways. In the first place he surrounds the 
 poem, which is very particular in its emotions, with 
 emotion of a general kind emotion so fluent, and 
 speaking so widely of the sense of passion's loss, 
 that at the beginning and end we are not dealing with 
 the actual subject at all. And this breadth of opening 
 and closing tone affects the whole impression. 
 
 In the second place, not always, but exceedingly 
 often, the slack detail is lifted into the tense world of 
 poetry. The grave intensity of observation saves the 
 poet again and again. 'There is no object,' says 
 Emerson, ' which intense light does not make beautiful.' 
 The high seriousness is the high seriousness of lived 
 
 1 The critic in the Spectator, May 24, 1862 the critic of whom 
 Swinburne fell foul 'falls foul of Mr. Meredith for dealing with 
 "a deep and painful subject on which he has no conviction to 
 express." ' This was to give himself into Swinburne's hands. 
 The play of Hamlet has no conviction to express. But what 
 made the critic express himself thus adversely was that he felt 
 the subject was unpleasing. But to say this, though true, would 
 not have been to offer criticism. Poetry not only is entitled to 
 deal but must deal constantly with unpleasing subjects. The 
 real question is whether, in any given instance, the subject is too 
 unpleasing so to be treated as to yield poetical pleasure. It is 
 always difficult to answer this question a priori \ the treatment 
 answers it. 
 
220 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 emotion. Phases of feeling so felt become crises of 
 the heart : 
 
 ' At dinner, she is hostess, I am host. 
 Went the feast ever cheerfuller ? She keeps 
 The Topic over intellectual deeps 
 In buoyancy afloat. They see no ghost. 
 With sparkling surface-eyes we ply the ball : 
 It is in truth a most contagious game : 
 HIDING THE SKELETON shall be its name. 
 Such play as this, the devils might appal ! 
 But here 's the greater wonder ; in that we 
 Enamoured of an acting nought can tire, 
 Each other, like true hypocrites, admire ; 
 Warm-lighted looks, Love's ephemerioe, 
 Shoot gaily o'er the dishes and the wine. 
 We waken envy of our happy lot. 
 Fast, sweet, and golden, shows the marriage-knot. 
 Dear guests, you now have seen Love's corpse-light shine.' 
 
 To write that sonnet and twenty others like it was 
 to step twenty years forward in the march of modern 
 poetry ; to combine them all with a single seriousness, 
 so that their effect was not separate, was to do what the 
 later century was trying to do. It was to emotionalise 
 mental states. Whatever poetical judgment may ulti- 
 mately be passed on * Modern Love,' its place in the 
 history of the new poetical movement will be that of 
 the first miracle. 1 
 
 1 'Modern Love 5 has two outstanding weaknesses : (a) It is a tale 
 of love ceasing to burn, and then sputtering out. Two wedded 
 people cease to love mutually that is all. Unless there is scandal to 
 force a crisis, the unhappy partnership continues, and the tale is the 
 tale of two lives dragging on. The stately end invented by Meredith 
 is not true to life. It is a concession to the claims of traditional 
 art, and while there is thus a gain in poetical effect, it is at the 
 expense of the truth of Nature. 
 
 (b] * Modern Love ' suffers greatly from an obscurity * outside the 
 poem.' The poem is for Meredith singularly clear in language, but 
 
MEREDITH 221 
 
 Later in life Meredith returned to the discussion of 
 modern sex relations, but the subject of 'The Sage 
 Enamoured and the Honest Lady ' was, for the purposes 
 of poetry, beyond him. Despite some occasional 
 flashes of the highest descriptive imagination, 1 he does 
 not produce a successful poem. More often even than 
 usual, flogging like the rider of a beaten horse, he 
 indulges in 
 
 1 That sly temptation of the illumined brain, 
 Deliveries oracular, self-spun.' 
 
 Indeed this is not enough to say of so prevailing 
 an obscurity. It is almost as if the language were 
 studiedly difficult, as if the writer were not desirous to be 
 plain. What is probably true is that throughout he was 
 uneasily conscious how simply he could spoil all by an 
 over-definiteness, or by neglecting at any time any side 
 
 the story it tells is not clear. You have to read it two or three times 
 to puzzle out a story which is more implied than told : to find out, 
 for example, that ' Madam ' is the hero's wife, and ' My Lady ' a 
 former flame ' relumed,' or that the hero sometimes speaks in the 
 first person, sometimes in the third ; or to puzzle out the particular 
 turn of events preceding the particular sonnet remarking upon 
 them. When such things have been ascertained (and they are ascer- 
 tainable) the poem is plain. In fact, the series of sonnets is a series 
 of comments by Meredith (standing in the hero's shoes) on scenes 
 fully played out before him. When you, too, know the scenes, the 
 comment is as plain to you as to Meredith. But it is a great defect 
 in Art not to make one's story clear at first reading. It is the one 
 thing perhaps that in narrative poetry, at first reading, can be made 
 wholly clear. Here again there is a concession, though an uncon- 
 scious one. To be very explicit about matters so very often merely 
 matters of prose would have made the subject still harder to poeti- 
 calise. These weaknesses emphasise the extreme difficulty of the 
 undertaking. 
 
 1 * Her eyes were the sweet world desired of souls, 
 With something of a wavering line unspelt.' 
 
222 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 of truth. The main thesis is simple. Nature forms 
 a harmonising background to the poem, but in the 
 definite argument she is made use of only to say that 
 we could borrow from her a more equal view. In 
 societies the balance between man and woman is un- 
 equally weighted. The way of lightening suggested 
 is a distribution of the penalty. 
 
 As express contributions to the sociological discus- 
 sion, such pronouncements are now the commonplaces 
 of Ethics, and yet the < lyric has a tone.' 1 Clearly its 
 content is not exhausted by these statements. We 
 must consider what is implied by the atmosphere of 
 difficulty and irresolution. All through, Meredith ap- 
 pears to be conscious of the existence of a deeper ill 
 than any for which he knows the remedy. The poem 
 at once disturbs and uplifts. It indicates a depth which 
 Meredith does not fathom, which he knows is properly 
 unfathomable. On such subjects it is especially true 
 that law and custom, however wise certainly when 
 they are wise can never cover the ground which is 
 occupied by feeling. Nature and society can never be 
 identified. There are antinomies everywhere, and it is 
 because the poem is generously aware of them, and 
 indeed takes in, in its < blind sight,' the whole of the 
 human consciousness, that it achieves at all. 
 
 And in truth, this is a large part of what poetry as 
 opposed to sociology can do here, it can give an 
 atmosphere, it can humanise, it can meliorate ; and 
 as much as this, this effort, for all that it is but 
 broken speech, does, somehow, in its strange way, 
 
 1 he sang not Nature's own 
 Divinest, but his lyric had a tone, 
 As 'twere a forest-echo of her voice.' 
 
MEREDITH 223 
 
 manage to do. One feels, as one struggles through 
 the thorns and brambles of the language, that one has 
 come, for once, upon a competent attitude. 
 
 This poem, written in an offensively packed style, 
 and in some passages merely decipherable in meaning, 
 speaking with a parade of reserve wisdom, discreet, 
 suggestive, inconclusive, is one of the most interesting 
 failures in modern literature. There is no bridge, for 
 we are not taken to the other side of the stream ; the 
 subject is not made into the subject of a poem, but we 
 may say that something a broken rainbow perhaps 
 stretches across. We have suggested to us the way in 
 which such topics can be treated in poetry. Meredith 
 teaches us at least the method of approach. Without 
 making his subject into a poem, he has succeeded in 
 poeticalising his subject. He has lifted it into the 
 category of poetry. 
 
 If one can say so much of a botched splendour like 
 'The Sage Enamoured and the Honest Lady,' it will 
 be easy to say the same of the more perspicuous ' Ballad 
 of Fair Ladies in Revolt.* The tone is much lighter, 
 as befits verses dealing with a claim viewed from its 
 political, not its moral side, but otherwise the same 
 criticism can be repeated in small. On the lesser 
 subject Meredith, without being successful, comes a 
 little nearer success. And yet the fact that he misses 
 success, does not bring the thing off, is the primary 
 fact. One notices this, and then that the whole subject 
 of ' Women's Rights ' is surveyed with a genial 
 understanding. This is how gentlefolk of both sexes, 
 cultivated people in touch with each other, should 
 handle their divergencies. But the poem is too 
 debonair ; there is an artifice of manner, the argument 
 
224 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 crossing and recrossing as in the preconcerted figures 
 of the dance. Judged as a poem ' A Ballad of Fair 
 Ladies in Revolt ' does no more than indicate a 
 temper. 
 
 ' Men rail at such a singer ; women thrill 
 Responsively.' 
 
 The advocates of Sex equality have, here, lent to their 
 doctrine the dignity of grace, and it is perhaps not 
 strange that the less imaginative sex should, in this 
 instance, be the more apt to appreciate the value of 
 suggestion. In this field Meredith was the first ; his 
 poems dealing with the modern relations of the sexes 
 are his special contribution to modern poetry. 
 
 In his greater contribution, his promulgation in verse 
 of the Philosophy of Earth, he had been anticipated by 
 Emerson. In general his doctrines are the same ; a 
 confidence in the worth of the process, and we even find 
 in Emerson that way of speaking of the Great Mother 
 which we familiarly know as Meredithian : 
 
 * Where are these men ? Asleep beneath their grounds 
 And strangers, fond as they, their furrows plough. 
 Earth laughs in flowers, to see her boastful boys 
 Earth-proud, proud of the earth which is not theirs.' 1 
 
 But the differences are more striking than the similarity. 
 Emerson has no weak sentimentality, Meredith is anti- 
 sentiment. He goes out of his way to proclaim his 
 disrespect for senility, the one god men continue to 
 honour, for thus they hope to be deified : 
 
 1 Emerson ' Hamatreya.' If one were asked who wrote the last 
 two lines, one would say Meredith. Even the adjectival Meredithian 
 compound is supplied. 
 
MEREDITH 225 
 
 ' Thy frame is as a dusty mantle hung, 
 O grey one ! pendant on a loosened peg. 
 Thou art for this our life an ancient egg.' 
 
 That is direct. 
 
 1 Her gabbling grey Earth eyes askant, nor treads 
 The ways they walk ; by what they speak oppressed.' 
 
 That is equally so, and Meredith has even a whole 
 poem, one of his most metaphorical, ' The Last 
 Contention,' l in which he reviles the old man 
 
 1 Whose toothless Winter claws at May.' 
 
 For Age is neither life nor the promise of life, and 
 must not, in a last efflorescence, hope to emulate the 
 naturally young. The office of Senex is quite 
 different; 'to admire uncravingly,' and to consider 
 what of life's glory meets his eye merely as a rosy 
 cloud that crosses, to leave, the grey evening of his days. 
 On other subjects, provinces of general pathos, 
 Meredith is as close to the bare fact. We shed a good 
 many tears over the inhumanity of nature ; still, to put 
 it in another way, it is natural to be inhumane. These 
 laws may not please us, but they remain laws 
 
 * All round we find cold Nature slight 
 The feelings of the totter-knee'd.' 
 
 It is this universal struggle that makes life ' tragic life.' 
 Take it away and we are engaged in ' a May game,' or 
 
 1 'The Last Contention' apparently is directed against 'Four 
 Score' mating. But, using that as a second metaphor, it may also 
 be taken to deprecate any intrusion of Age into the province of youth. 
 One should marry before forty, but also one should write one's love 
 lyrics and fight one's Jenas then. 
 
 P 
 
226 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 as Meredith ironically has it in his ' Whimper of 
 
 Sympathy' 
 
 , 
 
 1 Hawk or shrike has done this deed 
 Of downy feathers : rueful sight ! 
 Sweet sentimentalist, invite 
 Your bosom's Power to intercede. 
 
 O it were pleasant, with you 
 
 To fly from this tussle of foes, 
 
 The shambles, the charnel, the wrinkle ! 
 
 To dwell in yon dribble of dew 
 
 On the cheek of your sovereign rose, 
 
 And live the young life of a twinkle.' 
 
 And this struggle goes by rule ; the stronger, the 
 more social, or the better trained wins. A pack of 
 wolves pulls down the deer, just as a hunt company 
 wears down the fox : 
 
 'Wild, my poor friend, has the fate to be chased ; 
 Civil will conquer : were't other 'twere worse.' 
 
 This is sound gospel ; but the irony is rather bitter, 
 as if coming from a man who had once found its pure 
 milk sour in the mouth. A poet does not become an 
 anti-sentimentalist without having had, to start with, 
 some flush of sentiment, and ' The Doe ' explains how, 
 thirty years later, ' Young Reynard ' came to be written. 
 Emerson writes neither. 
 
 Something of this provoked irony creeps out, at 
 times, in Meredith's later verse. There is a trace of 
 iron which we do not find in the poet of ' May Day.' 
 He likes to choose a sentimental subject and to be 
 unsentimental. 
 
 One of the most sentimental subjects is the way of 
 transition, and Longfellow, the poet of sentiment, loves 
 to tell us how in human life there is the lament for loss. 
 
MEREDITH 227 
 
 The grass returns every spring, but our loved ones or 
 our youth are gone with 'the grass of yester-year.' 
 Children form a subject that affords an opening, for 
 they do not remain children. There comes a time 
 when the house that was once bright with their voices 
 is vacant of their laughter : 
 
 'The old house by the lindens 
 
 Stood silent in the shade, 
 And on the gravelled pathway 
 The light and shadow played. 
 
 I saw the nursery windows 
 
 Wide open to the air ; 
 But the faces of the children, 
 
 They were no longer there. 
 
 The large Newfoundland house-dog 
 
 Was standing by the door ; 
 He looked for his little playmates, 
 
 Who would return no more. 
 
 They walked not under the lindens 
 
 They played not in the hall ; 
 But shadow, and silence, and sadness, 
 
 Were hanging over all. 
 
 The birds sang in the branches, 
 
 With sweet, familiar tone ; 
 But the voices of the children 
 
 Will be heard in dreams alone ! 
 
 And the boy that walked beside me, 
 
 He could not understand 
 Why closer in mine, ah ! closer, 
 
 I pressed his warm, soft hand ! ' 
 
 It is amusing to contrast with this Meredith's ' Change 
 in Recurrence.' We are not bound to suppose that 
 the girl he loved has died ; it is sufficient that time 
 passes and that she has become the mate of another, or 
 merely that she has grown up and gone elsewhere. 
 
228 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 There are many reasons why ' le beau temps ne revien- 
 dra,' but I think it is natural to suppose that Meredith 
 implies the gravest reason : 
 
 1 I stood at the gate of the cot 
 
 Where my darling, with side-glance demure, 
 Would spy, on her trim garden-plot, 
 
 The busy wild things chase and lure. 
 For these with their ways were her feast 
 
 They had surety no enemy lurked. 
 Their deftest of tricks to their least, 
 
 She gathered in watch as she worked. 
 
 When berries were red on her ash, 
 
 The blackbird would rifle them rough, 
 Till the ground underneath looked a gash, 
 
 And her rogue grew the round of a chough. 
 The squirrel cocked ear o'er his hoop, 
 
 Up the spruce, quick as eye, trailing brush. 
 She knew any tit of the troop 
 
 All as well as the snail-tapping thrush. 
 
 I gazed : 'twas the scene of the frame, 
 
 With the face, the dear life for me, fled. 
 No window a lute to my name, 
 
 No watcher there plying the thread. 
 But the blackbird hung pecking at will ; 
 
 The squirrel from cone hopped to cone ; 
 The thrush had a snail in his bill, 
 
 And tap-tapped the shell hard on a stone.' 
 
 In Longfellow's poem, so much insistence is laid on 
 the instability of human affairs that we hardly notice 
 the permanence of nature. It is introduced as an 
 aggravation of the pathos : 
 
 * How can ye chant ye little birds, 
 And I sae weary, fu' o' care,' 
 
 but that is all. In Meredith so much stress is laid on 
 the continuance of the process that the human sorrow 
 is forgotten. There seems a little more than human 
 willingness to be contented ' if birth proceeds, if things 
 
MEREDITH 229 
 
 subsist.' It is a very beautiful and surprising poem, 
 this painting of the absence of feeling which lingers on 
 the mind almost like a sentiment, the sentiment of no 
 sentiment, but it is not quite a natural poem : the 
 thrush tap-taps his snail needlessly hard. Meredith is 
 a little too anxious not to be Longfellow. We suspect, 
 therefore, that at the back of him, there to be slain 
 by the future irony, there was a little sentiment. 
 
 This sense of strain, this slight sense of opposition 
 to something else once half entertained, appears even 
 in his exposition of his Philosophy of Earth. It is a 
 little harder for him to be a poet of pure Nature than it 
 was for Emerson. There is less of Emerson's spontan- 
 eous though episodical emotion, and more of a system. 
 Occasionally, no doubt, there is an echo of Emerson's 
 clarity, as when speaking of the lark he says : 
 
 ' And every face to watch him raised, 
 Puts on the light of children praised' : 
 
 perhaps also 
 
 1 The song seraphically free 
 Of taint of personality.' l 
 
 But almost invariably there is a curiosity of expression 
 
 1 In ' The Woods of Westermain' there are four or five Emersonian 
 crystallisations : 
 
 ' You of any well that springs 
 
 May unfold the heaven of things ' ; 
 and 
 
 ' Even as dewlight off the rose 
 In the mind a jewel sows' ; 
 
 and 
 
 ' You must love the light so well 
 That no darkness will seem fell' ; 
 
 and 
 
 ' Change is on the wing to bud 
 Rose in brain from rose in blood. 
 
230 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 or a compression of thought beyond Emerson's : he 
 has an insistence, too, that is different from Emerson's 
 iteration. It is partly on account of this thoroughness 
 that he has caught the ear of the modern world. 
 
 Meredith's philosophy of Earth is, in short, a counsel 
 to man to ascertain and reverence the laws of his cer- 
 tain home. The first demand is trust. Earth is no 
 Mother, but dead matter, and ironical, to those who 
 spend their lives beating on a fast-shut door. Her 
 flowers and her meaning are for confidence : 
 
 * Well knows she the cry of unfaith. 
 If we strain to the farther shore, 
 We are catching at comfort near. 
 Assurances, symbols, saws, 
 Revelations in Legends, light 
 To eyes rolling darkness, these 
 Desired of the flesh in affright, 
 For the which it will swear to adore, 
 She yields not for prayers at her knees ; 
 The woolly beast bleating will shear.' 
 
 Not by clamouring to know of their personal destiny 
 will men help themselves, but by living the life of the 
 spirit for its own satisfying sake. So in the poem : 
 ( Earth whispers : "they scarce have the thirst, 
 
 Except to unriddle a rune ; 
 
 And I spin none ; only show, 
 
 Would humanity soar from its worst, 
 
 Winged above darkness and dole, 
 
 How flesh unto spirit must grow. 
 
 Spirit raves not for a goal." ' l 
 
 1 ( We must pick no locks,' says Emerson, in ' The Over Soul.' 
 'We must check this low curiosity' : low, because it meanly con- 
 cerns ourselves. 
 
 The whole of ' A Faith on Trial ' is reminiscent of Emerson, both 
 of his Essays and Poems. We have even 'The Great Over-Reason' 
 and the reappearance of the Titmouse as a wild cherry tree in blos- 
 som. The better and more modern a thinker is, the more he is 
 indebted to Emerson. 
 
MEREDITH -231 
 
 We must address ourselves to our surrounding of 
 Earth like the rest of her children plants and trees, 
 who accept the necessary conditions without anxiety : 
 
 ' They question not, nor ask 
 The silent to give sound, 
 The hidden to unmask, 
 The distant to draw near/ 
 
 And if we confine our attention to Earth, we shall find 
 we can learn much from her who knows not hope or 
 fear, and who is perpetually selecting the fit and 
 rejecting the foul. Nor is it hard for us to do this, to 
 become pupils of Earth, for, however careless of our 
 existence the Great Mother may be, there is in fact a 
 sympathetic emotion aroused in us by the unplumbed 
 world around. Even the distant stars are expressions 
 of the same energy by which we live : 
 
 * We, specks of dust upon a mound of mould, 
 We, who reflect those rays, though low our place, 
 
 To them are lastingly allied. 
 So may we read, and little find them cold/ 
 
 No doubt, Earth may not intend to teach anything. 
 What we receive may be only what we give, but we 
 receive it back with a new emphasis. At any rate, a 
 great part of our lives is occupied with the recognition 
 of the processes of the universe, of its laws. We can 
 learn from them, and we can listen to what, through 
 them, Earth teaches. But what does she teach ? She 
 teaches a truce to tears, and a short and swift way with 
 sheep. She teaches conflict, she teaches fitness, she 
 teaches beauty and health : 
 
 * The bird of felicity loud, 
 Spun high, and a South wind blew.' 
 
 The first and chief lesson, then, is the lesson of 
 
232 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 acceptance, of conformity to environment. We must 
 accept struggle as well as balm, the law of pureness, 
 Earth's healthful lusts. 
 
 The doctrine of sacrifice is attractive, and rightly 
 attractive, to the world, because of its warfare with the 
 chief worldly diseases, love of self and self-pity. But 
 the gospel Meredith preaches is not a gospel of sacri- 
 fice, for, though 
 
 ' To sacrifice Earth prompts her best,' 
 
 the chief law of life is that we should fulfil the laws 
 of Earth : 
 
 ' Slain 
 Is no force in Westermain.' 
 
 4 Put his fangs to uses,' says Meredith of the self- 
 dragon that haunts the human wood. 
 
 Nor is this gospel as easy as at first it looks. To 
 accept all the laws of Earth is not easy. We are to 
 accept the laws both of human instinct and of Nature, 
 to accept them without repining, even the law of 
 Change without repining. 
 
 * Change and decay in all around I see,' 
 sings the hymn-writer tenderly and repiningly. 
 ' Rosiest rosy wanes to crone,' 
 
 says Meredith with an absurd and happy irony, for the 
 law of change is no tearful but a joyful law to him. 
 His own name for it is the 'fire of renewal.' This 
 burning is what Earth is doing ; it is her life, the 
 activity which justifies her being. There is no such 
 thing as an end or stop in Earth's processes. The 
 
MEREDITH 233 
 
 leaf falls from the tree and makes the soil for the next 
 year ; the buried tree turns to coal, the thrush 
 
 ' He sings me, out of Winter's throat, 
 The young time with the life ahead.' 
 
 And this rushing metamorphosis which Emerson 
 celebrated is evidenced not merely by everything in 
 external nature. Primitive man, the one of us nearest 
 to Earth, and primitive beliefs, are equally emphatic 
 for unendingness. Primitive man never dreams even 
 of his own death as an end. 1 Meredith does not 
 mean by this to assure us that when we die we shall 
 enter the happy hunting grounds. He means merely 
 that in speaking of death as we do we deceive ourselves 
 with words. 2 Literally speaking there is no such thing 
 as death. What we call death is merely part of a 
 process, part of the life-process. Something in the 
 plan of Earth happens when we die, just as something 
 happens in the plan of Earth when a leaf dies. Death 
 is part of a process which has a meaning, and this 
 meaning, though we can only imperfectly decipher it, 
 quite evidently exists : it exists independently of the 
 effect upon ourselves of that part of the process which 
 we call our death. But our death is the change which 
 most affects us ; and it is the one change in the course 
 of Earth's process about which we know no more than 
 .that it is a change. Yes, but it is just this mystery 
 surrounding this change which, taken together with 
 suffering, makes the life of man the full drama it is ; 
 
 1 See quotation on page 214. 
 
 2 * Death is the word of a bovine day ' says Meredith in his quaint 
 
 ^manner, retorting upon the text. 
 
234 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 a tragedy with a meaning in the process of things, but 
 a meaning which from us Earth hides. 1 
 
 Of this process, then, our lives are a portion. And 
 consequently a life lived congruently with Earth will 
 be a life not lived with a view to the end of a part of 
 the process, but in sympathy with a quick whole which 
 never ceases quickening, and which, even in what we 
 call death, lives : 
 
 'Earth knows no desolation. 
 She smells regeneration 
 In the moist breath of decay.' 
 
 The law to which we have to assimilate ourselves is 
 the law of growth. 
 
 1 For, what is human grief? 
 And what do men desire ? 
 Teach me to feel myself the tree, 
 And not the withered leaf. 
 Fixed am I and await the dark to-be.' 
 
 Thus does Meredith, proclaiming, in the fine phrase of 
 Professor Elton, a hard-won i faith in the known life 
 of man,' 2 counsel us to attend to what we know, to find 
 our comfort here, and not to seek for it in desire. 
 
 1 'The knowledge that we traverse the whole scale of being,' 
 says Emerson, in a sentence after Meredith's heart, 'from the 
 centre to the poles of nature, and have some stake in every possi- 
 bility, lends that sublime lustre to death, which philosophy and 
 religion have too outwardly and literally striven to express.' Essays,, 
 2nd series, ' Nature.' 
 
 2 Modern Studies, ' Tennyson : a Lecture.' Professor Elton 
 has been speaking especially of Tennyson's social attitude. His' 
 actual words are : ' The literature of hope, of faith in the known life 
 of man, and of a hard-won optimism, has veteran and trained com- 
 manders beside whom Tennyson is only like an amateur aristocrat. 
 
MEREDITH 235 
 
 A large confidence that, in a different sense from 
 Browning's, ' all 's right with the world,' replaces indi- 
 vidual longing. Earth in those processes of hers, in 
 those parts of her process which we can and do observe, 
 does not disappoint us. Out of the dead day she 
 builds her sun-set, and out of a seed and a few decayed 
 leaves, the infinite convolution of the rose. 1 
 
 What makes the substance of this teaching different 
 from the substance of Emerson's ? There are several 
 points of similarity, but its whole atmosphere is harder ; 
 it relies more exclusively upon the known fact ; it is 
 much less occupied with questions as to the ultimate 
 nature of Reality, and there is a deeper insistence on 
 the meaning of the process, taken separate from man. 
 In the recognition of this there is even an insistent joy. 
 Emerson reads the whole Universe in terms of the 
 Soul ; Meredith reads it in terms of Earth. And though 
 you may say these are merely different names for the 
 
 permitted to accompany outlying portions of a campaign. Scarred 
 and gaunt, sometimes harsh of style, a little overwhelming to the 
 men of intellectual diplomacy and compromise, unscared, strong- 
 headed, they stand, with most of their work ready for judgement, 
 reaping a few long-grudged honours for which they cannot care. It 
 would take long to draw out the lines of connexion between minds 
 so divergent as those which created the poem of Brand, the epic 
 story of La Debacle, and The Ordeal of Richard Feverel? 
 
 1 The metaphor of the rose is a favourite one with Meredith. He 
 uses it, both to express his trust in Earth 
 
 ' Into the breast that gives the rose, 
 Shall I with shuddering fall ? ' 
 
 and to justify suffering 
 
 ' Sure reward 
 
 We have whom knowledge crowns ; 
 Who see in mould the rose unfold, 
 The soul through blood and tears.' 
 
236 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 same thing, there is a great difference in different 
 names. To rename the All is to see it under a new 
 aspect. Meredith subjects man to the laws of things, 
 whereas Emerson subjects the laws of things to the 
 Universal Soul which speaks in man. Meredith's 
 doctrine of conformity to environment is eminently 
 sensible, and his gospel of trust in the Process the most 
 basically helpful that has been promulgated. These 
 doctrines of Nature are very natural, and taken together 
 form a Reading of Earth which is sound. Yet to read 
 Emerson is to feel that Meredith's doctrine is a First 
 Reading of Earth. It is a doctrine to which Emerson's 
 doctrine gives wings. He ought to have written 
 before Emerson instead of after him. 
 
 The difference is that one is a philosophical, the 
 other a religious teacher, and this explains how Emer- 
 son can transmute his teaching, on occasion, into 
 poetry of a wonderful clarity, while Meredith to poeti- 
 calise his matter has to work much harder. When 
 Meredith has a thought we may call religious rather 
 than philosophical, a thought of morality touched with 
 emotion, he also is successful. There is his pro- 
 nouncement on the doctrine of sacrifice given in ' The 
 Garden of Epicurus ' : 
 
 'That Garden of sedate Philosophy 
 Once flourished, fenced from passion and mishap, 
 A shining spot upon a shaggy map ; 
 Where mind and body, in fair junction free, 
 Luted their joyful concord ; like the tree 
 From root to flowering twigs a flowing sap. 
 Clear Wisdom found in tended Nature's lap, 
 Of gentlemen the happy nursery. 
 That Garden would on light supremest verge, 
 Were the long drawing of an equal breath 
 
MEREDITH 237 
 
 Healthful for Wisdom's head, her heart, her aims. 
 Our world which for its Babels wants a scourge, 
 And for its wilds a husbandman, acclaims 
 The crucifix that came of Nazareth.' 
 
 That is hard. How different from Arnold's sonnet 
 1 East London ' which approaches the same topic 
 from a different point of feeling. But if it has the 
 hardness, it has the truth, of steel. 
 
 Why it is especially difficult for Meredith to poeti- 
 calise his matter is that it is in general strictly philo- 
 sophical, exclusively mental, and practically bare of 
 emotion, strictly so-called. 
 
 This, no doubt, is the primary difficulty of the 
 intellectual poet, that he has to emotionalise his 
 material ; that he has to feel intellectual matter 
 emotionally. But in his Philosophy of Earth Meredith 
 experiences this difficulty in an intensified form. The 
 ratiocination is absolutely continuous. It is a long 
 process to which the attention of the mind has to be 
 exclusively given. Often all that Meredith can do 
 is to translate. There are thus two language processes. 
 To give an example of poetry where there is only one 
 language process, every one is familiar with the 
 striking passage which opens Henry 7F., Part n. 
 Northumberland, receiving the news of defeat and full 
 of foreboding for the future, imagines and defies the 
 worst : 
 
 * Now bind my brows with iron ; and approach 
 The ragged'st hour that time and spite dare bring, . 
 To frown upon the enrag'd Northumberland ! 
 Let heaven kiss earth ! Now let not nature's hand 
 Keep the wild flood confin'd ! let order die ! 
 And let this world no longer be a stage, 
 To feed contention in a lingering act ; 
 
238 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 But let one spirit of the first-born Cain 
 Reign in all bosoms, that, each heart being set 
 On bloody courses, the rude scene may end, 
 And darkness be the burier of the dead !' 
 
 When Shakespeare says this he has made clear to 
 himself his sense of gathering gloom ; that is to say, 
 Shakespeare's feelings and thoughts, as a general 
 habit, take definite form as they are voiced. He did 
 not know what he was going to say till he said it. 
 There is one language process. Poetry is Shake- 
 speare's language, and his thought is expressed in it. 
 Till he so expressed it, his thought was inchoate ; it 
 was waiting to take form till it was expressed, expressed 
 in that way. 1 
 
 But Meredith knows exactly, before he has said it 
 in verse, what he wants to say. Indeed the conception 
 is clearer, because more immediate, before it is ex- 
 pressed in verse. It has been thought out in words 
 beforehand, not necessarily in words written down, 
 but a long course of abstract thinking cannot be 
 pursued without their aid. There are two language 
 processes. The thing does not take form in verse ; 
 it takes intellectual form, before it is expressed in 
 verse. What happens is that intellectual matter, on 
 which the operations of the intellect are concluded, 
 is written over in a state of enthusiasm, an enthusiasm 
 that if never simulated, is often stimulated, forced. 
 You can hear the whirr of the machine. As a result 
 we do not get precisely poetry. 
 
 On occasion he brings it off to a miracle. He is 
 
 1 For some of this phraseology I am conscious of a debt to 
 Mr. Bradley 's Poetry for Poetry's Sake. 
 
MEREDITH 239 
 
 speaking of * Youth in Memory,' and how in memory 
 the facts of young life wane dim ; while feelings, 
 impressions, intuitions, shafts of day - dreams we 
 thought nothing of at the time, now, in retrospect, 
 seem to have been the most keenly lived : 
 
 ' Solidity and bulk and martial brass, 
 Once tyrants of the senses, faintly score 
 A mark on pebbled sand or fluid slime, 
 While present in the spirit, vital there, 
 Are things that seemed the phantoms of their time ; 
 Eternal as the recurrent cloud, as air 
 Imperative, refreshful as dawn-dew.' 
 
 The whole * Ode to the Spirit of Earth in Autumn ' is 
 thus successful. But generally this is not how it is 
 brought off. Nor is his success brought off by his 
 power of imperishable phrase, which is chiefly con- 
 fined to his poems touching on sex. I do not mean 
 that his command over phraseology is, in these poems 
 of Earth, not brought into frequent use. Sometimes, 
 very rarely, there is an emotional phrase : 
 
 ' Look now where Colour, the soul's bridegroom, makes 
 The house of heaven splendid for the bride ' ; 
 
 or 
 
 1 1 stood to the touch of a key 
 Turned in a fast-shut door.' 
 
 More often it is a huddled image that strikes and 
 enchains the fancy, of which the prettiest instance 
 is the phrase that describes the children's spatter, 
 when their immediate business, buying pennies, school, 
 dinner, is finished or about to begin. Off, 
 
 ' chatter, hop, skip, they were sent, 
 In a buzz of young company glee. 3 
 
 And the wildest is that which describes the awe that 
 
240 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 damps the spirit as one is staring at the star-strewn 
 
 sky : 
 
 ' Fronting yon shoreless, sown with fiery sails, 
 It is our ravenous that quails.' 1 
 
 Yet allowing for all this, we have not explained the 
 effect of the level of the poems, a level of which there 
 is a great deal, and to which their general poetical 
 effect is plainly due. 
 
 What we may, for want of a better word, call their 
 quality of poeticalness is chiefly due to two habits, 
 both of which are in constant employment. 
 
 The first is the high strenuousness of the argument. 
 The packed thought, the compressed language, the 
 way in which Meredith beats and thumps on our 
 attention, heat the brain. It is intensity that makes 
 ' A Faith on Trial ' affect us like poetry ; it is done 
 on tiptoe and so affects us like flight. The aloof 
 comment of ' Earth and Man ' holds the spiritual 
 imagination with a chain. That series of cold pro- 
 nouncements upon man's destiny, like minute-guns 
 announcing the funeral of his egoism, and varied 
 only by the insistent gibe, is truly a voice of the 
 upper air. This strain upon our attention we can 
 realise perhaps more easily in a descriptive piece such 
 as 'The Lark Ascending/ a feat which stupefies our 
 faculty of astonishment. We wonder when the par- 
 ticularising intellect will cease describing, miss the 
 target, or break the string. To read it to oneself is 
 to lose one's breath. Such intensity alone could save 
 five hundred lines like 'The Woods of Westermain,' 
 
 1 These two instances are quoted together as instances of noun- 
 adjectives and adjective nouns by Mr. Trevelyan. 
 
MEREDITH 241 
 
 a long description and a long allegory combined, 
 neither of which for an instant is forgotten in the 
 other, and where the Ethic is as pungent as the 
 smell of the wood. So one man can play two games 
 of chess at once, and another hold an audience, which 
 is not really soaring with him, and often when he 
 is not really soaring at all, by his arresting eye. No 
 other poet has ever displayed the same power of con- 
 centrated interest : 
 
 'White of heat, awakes to flame. 
 Beat, beat ! white of heat.' 
 
 The other habit, which is of general service to the 
 poetical effect, is his habit of obscurity, his habit of 
 leaving a thought merely suggested, or of pitching 
 so many thoughts into a sentence that the reader is 
 merely conscious that many are there. It is never 
 nonsense. You can decipher the meaning. It is 
 really amazing how, in the hands of a fit expositor, 
 the tangle of thought and image unrolls till you are 
 presented with all the ideas taken separate and to 
 be seen. But to decipher the poems is not to explain 
 their effect ; the effect is made before they are de- 
 ciphered ; in fact the same effect continues to be made 
 after the deciphering. The keys to the ciphers are 
 now known, but who can read slowly enough to apply 
 them? 
 
 There is, of course, always an apparent or general 
 meaning I do not say in every line but there is 
 also always a consciousness that something in the 
 verses is being missed. One has not time nor attentive 
 faculty to absorb their full content. The result is that 
 one seems to float in an atmosphere of surrounding 
 
 Q 
 
242 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 idea. The imagination of the reader is set up, like a 
 cocked ear ; it begins to hear voices, itself it becomes 
 active and begins to flow. It is a kind of writing to 
 which Coleridge's note-book saying that ' poetry gives 
 most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly 
 understood ' is peculiarly applicable. 1 
 
 Moreover, the subjects with which Meredith deals in 
 those philosophical poems suffer better than others a 
 treatment of this kind. Earth's processes we may 
 observe, but we are all conscious that, despite our 
 keenest observation or most dogmatic definition, there 
 is a secret behind. Man perishes as the grass of the 
 field. Let it be so. Nothing could be plainer, and 
 now we understand all about death ; and yet it is 
 mysterious that it should be so. Love, memory, com- 
 prehension, if these are the play of chemic forces, there 
 is an oddness remaining over. Man's soul is infinite 
 .and a part of the Infinite Soul. We are not a whit 
 nearer plain English, and the Sphinx has spoken. 
 Meredith's poems dealing with the problems of Uni- 
 versal destiny offer a similar difficulty of comprehension. 
 The Delphic priestess is oracular ; and so this poet, by 
 his half expression or tangled expression, suggests 
 what cannot be fully expressed, but, on the contrary, 
 can be realised in some ways better when suggested 
 than when over-laid with the statements of precision. 
 He produces a matter which is really like that tangle 
 of Universal conflicting, compensating, and even 
 sympathetic laws of which, at best, as a whole, we have 
 
 1 Emerson has the sense of this. 'An imaginative book renders 
 us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, 
 than afterward, when we arrive at the precise sense of the author.' 
 Essays, 2nd series, ' The Poet.' 
 
MEREDITH 243 
 
 an imperfect cognition. In these poems we live in a 
 world of ideas, which cross and recross, in an oppression 
 of ideas, in the same oppression which we ourselves 
 inhabit when we attempt to realise Earth. 
 
 Meredith's matter in these poems, great as is his 
 poetical faculty, is often quite beyond it. Often he 
 does not resolve this matter into poetry. Often he trips 
 over his thought, gets through sometimes by a series 
 of tumbles, sometimes altogether fails to get out his 
 idea. But this very struggle to express, the side-shafts 
 of parenthesis, the quick-flying labouring brain, this 
 difficulty in resolution, suggest the atmosphere of the 
 ideas he is trying to resolve. It is very certain, despite 
 all that the pedants of perspicuousness may say, that 
 we ourselves are conscious at the back of our minds of 
 a profundity, of a sense that, try as we like, we know 
 more than we can tell. 
 
 ' Was never voice of ours could say 
 Our inmost in the sweetest way.' 
 
 This we may take for granted ; but it is idle to with- 
 hold the title of poetry from work which to a rare degree 
 yields the sense of its subject, and indicates our depth. 
 That it does so, largely owing to its imperfection, is to 
 say, of course, that it is not the greatest poetry, but 
 it is not to say it is not poetry. That is poetry which 
 yields a poetical effect. 
 
244 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 EMERSON'S DOCTRINE OF THE 
 INFINITE 
 
 THE course of Emerson's thought is an orderly process. 
 While still young, and living in the old manse in which 
 Hawthorne in after years wrote his lingering tales, he 
 wrote the Treatise on Nature, fifty pages which explain 
 nearly all that is explicable about the correspondence 
 between man and his environment. 
 
 He opens the little tract by sketching roughly * that 
 wonderful congruity which exists between man and the 
 world. ' 
 
 ' Standing on the bare ground my head bathed by 
 the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all mean 
 egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball ; I 
 am nothing ; I see all ; the currents of the Universal 
 Being circulate through me. ... In the wilderness, 
 I find something more dear and connate than in streets 
 or villages. . . . The greatest delight which the fields 
 and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult re- 
 lation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone 
 and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. 
 The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me 
 and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not un- 
 known. . . . Yet it is certain that the power to produce 
 this delight does not reside in nature, but in man, or 
 in a harmony of both.' 
 
EMERSON'S DOCTRINE OF THE INFINITE 245 
 
 Thereafter he discusses the detail of this harmony 
 under the heads of Commodity, Beauty, Language, 
 Discipline. 
 
 Of Commodity he has necessarily little to say. On 
 
 * the rich conveniences ' Earth affords to man it would 
 be easy for an empty writer to expand. A full one is 
 short on the obvious. Man is able to make use of every- 
 thing in Nature, of beasts, fire, water, stones, and corn. 
 
 It is more difficult to speak of Beauty, but there is 
 the fact that * the simple perception of natural forms is a 
 delight,' and that to us ' every natural action is grace- 
 ful ' ; not only so ; ' every heroic act is also decent, and 
 causes the place and the bystanders to shine.' * In 
 private places, among sordid objects, an act of truth or 
 heroism seems at once to draw to itself the sky as its 
 temple, the sun as its cradle. Nature stretches out her 
 arms to embrace man, only let his thoughts be of equal 
 greatness.' Beauty in Nature speaks to Beauty in him. 
 
 4 No reason can be asked or given why the soul seeks 
 beauty,' but Nature both ministers to man's ardency to 
 realise it and feeds that flame. All Art is founded upon 
 Nature ; ' the beauty of nature re-forms itself in the 
 mind, and not for barren contemplation, but for new 
 creation. ' Art is often spoken of in contrast with Nature, 
 but the difference is one of addition, not of opposition. 
 
 The purpose of the chapter on Language is to show 
 that Nature is also the vehicle of man's thought : for 
 not only are words ' signs of natural facts/ but ' every 
 natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every 
 appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the 
 mind, and that state of the mind can only be described 
 by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.' 
 
 * It is easily seen that there is nothing lucky or capri- 
 
246 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 cious in these analogies, but that they are constant and 
 pervade nature.' * Hence good writing and brilliant 
 discourse are perpetual allegories. This imagery is 
 spontaneous. It is the blending of experience with the 
 present action of the mind. It is proper creation. It 
 is the working of the Original Cause through the 
 instruments he has already made.' 
 
 To speak in the same way of Discipline, ' Nature is a 
 discipline of the understanding in intellectual truths. 
 Our dealing with sensible objects is a constant exercise 
 in the necessary lessons of difference, of likeness, of 
 order, of being and seeming, of progressive arrange- 
 ment ; of ascent from particular to general ; of combina- 
 tion to one end of manifold forces ' ; but not only so ; 
 * Sensible objects conform to the premonitions of Reason 
 and reflect the conscience. All things are moral ; and 
 in their boundless changes have an unceasing reference 
 to spiritual nature.' . . . 'Thus the use of commodity, 
 regarded by itself, is mean and squalid. But it is to the 
 mind an education in the doctrine of Use, namely, that 
 a thing is good only so far as it serves.' 'All things 
 with which we deal, preach to us.' ' What is a farm 
 but a mute gospel ? . . . the chaff and the wheat, weeds 
 and plants, blight, rain, insects, sun.' Every natural 
 fact is a symbol of some moral fact, and can be read by 
 a moral understanding. 
 
 ' In this brave lodging wherein man is harboured, all 
 his faculties find appropriate and endless exercise.' In- 
 deed Nature's song strikes so directly on our ear, is so 
 much our song, that a doubt is suggested whether 
 Nature has any other object than this reference to us, 
 or even whether the whole is not a dream of the per- 
 cipient. Certain it is that Nature as read by us is 
 
EMERSON'S DOCTRINE OF THE INFINITE 247 
 
 dependent upon our reading. The report of the senses 
 depends upon the state of the senses. Change the 
 point of view and the scene is changed. All that is 
 observed undergoes a transmutation in human thought, 
 in the unfixing and refixing processes of poetry, and in 
 the pervading and dissolving thought of the philo- 
 sopher. 1 l Intellectual science has been observed to 
 beget invariably a doubt of the existence of matter/ 
 ' Whilst we behold unveiled the nature of Justice and 
 Truth, we learn the difference between the absolute and 
 the conditional or relative. We apprehend the absolute. 
 As it were, for the first time, we exist. We become im- 
 mortal, for we learn that time and space are relations 
 of matter ; that, with a perception of truth, or a virtuous 
 will, they have no affinity.' . . . * It appears' then 'that 
 motion, poetry, physical and intellectual science, and 
 religion, all tend to affect our convictions of the reality 
 of the external world.' 
 
 There is then nothing outside the individual ? By no 
 means : that is an absolute idealism which is not 
 Emerson's. We may regard nature ' as phenomena not as 
 substance,' and yet ' acquiesce entirely in the permanence 
 of natural laws,' in the existence of other percipient 
 minds, in the reality of an Existence behind phenomena 
 and supporting them. * Behind nature, throughout 
 nature, spirit is present ; one and not compound, it 
 does not act upon us from without, that is, in space and 
 
 1 ' Is not the charm of one of Plato's or Aristotle's definitions, 
 strictly like that of the Antigone of Sophocles? It is, in both cases, 
 that a spiritual life has been imparted to nature ; that the solid seem- 
 ing block of matter has been pervaded and dissolved by a thought ; 
 that this feeble human being has penetrated the vast masses of nature 
 with an informing soul, and recognised itself in their harmony, that 
 is, seized their law.' Treatise on Nature. ' Idealism.' 
 
248 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 time, but spiritually, or through ourselves ; therefore, 
 that spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, does not build 
 up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as 
 the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves 
 through the pores of the old.' 
 
 It will be seen that Emerson, by a process of detail 
 and founding on observation, reaches and answers in 
 the way of Philosophical Idealism the basic question 
 of metaphysics. By what means does the Ego obtain 
 a knowledge of the Non-Ego ? Obviously and easily, 
 replies Idealism, if Ego and Non-Ego are of similar 
 and correspondent nature. Obviously and easily, re- 
 plies Dualism, accepting both spirit and matter, if it is 
 so ordained. But this is to invent a ' Deus ex machina ' 
 to invent a bridge. 1 A valid Theism arrives at the con- 
 ception of Deity, a Mind intelligible to mind, through 
 finding in the Non-Ego a nature similar to the Ego. 
 It does not presuppose the existence, much less the 
 operations of this Mind. There is no question, if the 
 answer is supplied. 
 
 Emerson was in no danger of surrendering his whole 
 philosophy, a considering which makes for results, to 
 conclusions ready made. ' Build your own world,' he 
 says decisively. ' As fast as you conform your life 
 to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great 
 proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will 
 attend the influx of the spirit.' 
 
 This correspondent revolution is seen throughout the 
 
 1 Materialism too is a theory of the Universe that is free from the 
 weakness of Dualism. Its root defect is different, namely that it 
 confounds Appearance and Reality. * Idealism,' says Emerson in 
 his terse way, ' is a hypothesis to account for nature by other principles 
 than those of carpentry and chemistry.' 
 
EMERSON'S DOCTRINE OF THE INFINITE 249 
 
 whole course of Emerson's thought. Man understands 
 the Universe because he is of nature akin to it. But 
 the Universe is infinite. The Universe is understood 
 by man because it is of similar nature to himself. But 
 man is a being capable of thinking beyond the finite. 
 The argument beats in with equal force from both sides. 
 The Universe is infinite because man is not finite. 
 Man is not finite because the Universe is infinite. 
 There at once appear the doctrines of an embracing 
 Infinity and of the infinity of the private man. 
 
 The All is the Universal Soul, the life of which is 
 spread abroad not only as a Unity, but separately and 
 divisibly in its particular parts. The Whole embraces 
 the one, and the one reflects the Whole. 
 
 Every quality of the Universal, therefore, belongs of 
 nature to the particular, and though, of course, on 
 account of the tiny scale, never seen perfect there, 
 capable in a less or lesser degree of Universality. 
 Thus, if we conceive of the Universal as a vast circle, 
 the most perfect unit will be so much of the circumfer- 
 ence as exhibits roundness ; an imperfect part will be 
 one so small that it appears straight ; a mere point 
 without extension will represent Peter Bell. 
 
 Emerson's doctrine contains both a definition and an 
 Ethic. Man is infinite ; that is the fact of his being. 
 He is a portion of the infinite imprisoned in the finite, 
 but it is his duty to spread his wings : he ought to think 
 infinitely. This doctrine gives, not to every man, but 
 to the capacity of man, the infinity of the Infinite Nature. 
 
 Thus, to take Emerson's hardest saying : < The 
 moment the doctrine of immortality is separately 
 taught, man is already fallen.' Our anxiety to know 
 .about our future is an anxiety that is truly finite, a 
 
250 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 curiosity that is Mow.' Each individual soul is a part 
 of the Universal Soul, and its true life is in the attri- 
 butes of the Universal Soul ; truth, justice, love, with 
 which 'the idea of immutableness is essentially 
 associated.' ' In the flowing of love, in the adoration 
 of humility, there is no question of continuance. No 
 inspired man ever asks this question, or condescends to 
 these evidences. For the soul is true to itself, and the 
 man in whom it is shed abroad cannot wander from the 
 present, which is infinite, to a future which would be 
 finite.' By finite Emerson does not mean, here, limited 
 by definition, though he may also be thinking of that ; 
 he means limited by being confined to the particular. 
 The individual ceases living in the life of the Whole 
 and becomes concerned for his own duration. He has 
 made 'a confession of sin.' 
 
 Similarly in all departments of thought, Religion, 
 Ethics, Art, Scholarship, even Manners, we must think 
 Universally ; we must do so because in part we cannot 
 help doing so, and in part because we ought to do so. 
 
 Appropriately Emerson opens his ' Address to the 
 Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge,' with a 
 reference to the Universe. * In this refulgent summer, 
 it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life. The 
 grass grows, the buds burst, the meadow is spotted 
 with fire and gold in the tint of flowers,' and speaking, 
 three years later, of the ' Method of Nature,' he asks, 
 ' Who could ever analyse it? That rushing stream will 
 not stop to be observed. We can never surprise nature 
 in a corner ; never find the end of a thread ; never 
 tell where to set the first stone. The bird hastens to lay 
 her egg; the egg hastens to be a bird.' Of this Protean 
 life we necessarily partake. ' You cannot bathe twice 
 
EMERSON'S DOCTRINE OF THE INFINITE 251 
 
 in the same river, said Heraclitus ; and I add, a man 
 never sees the same object twice with his own enlarge- 
 ment the object acquires new aspects.' The music of 
 the -spheres is the song of revolving. Loud and in- 
 sistent as the gyroscopic hum, it fills the ears of the 
 understanding. Man's soul quickens in sympathy ; 
 he is caught up and whirled forward in the Universal 
 race. He could not stop if he would, and for him 
 finality is 'a discredited word.' Everything is in 
 motion, everything that lives, the Spirit that gives life, 
 and so also our ideas of this Spirit. Man is always 
 writing new Bibles, but * the secret of heaven is kept 
 from Age to Age.' No religion, on account of the 
 nature of man, can be final, for no sooner is it expressed 
 than the soul must begin to circle beyond it, or disprove 
 its own essence by sinking into finitude. 
 
 To man, distressed by his incapacity to 'rest satisfied 
 with explanations,' even explanations of what he most 
 cherishes, this doctrine of Emerson's is a cooling 
 stream. Man's difficulties arise not because he is sunk 
 in material flesh ; they arise because he already pos- 
 sesses that of which dogma chiefly seeks to prove his 
 possession. Were man finite he would be easily 
 satisfied with any chart of infinity. Being infinite he 
 is satisfied with none. 
 
 This belief that we destroy what we define, and that 
 there is always something in the defined that escapes 
 us, and therefore always something limiting in defini- 
 tion, holds equally in the sphere of morals. 
 
 First, in the merely wide and common sense, on 
 account of the necessary width of the moral experience. 
 It is not every one who exercises freely his religious 
 faculties ; he may take refuge in indifferentism, or he 
 
252 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 may leave, in the phrase of the world, the matter with 
 the priest. But every one must be a moral being ; he 
 must form ideas of the permissible if they are only 
 immoral ideas ; he must be offended with some one's 
 conduct to him, or offend some one with his conduct. 
 He must praise and he must blame ; he must be 
 acquainted both with satisfaction and remorse. ' We 
 side with the hero, as we read or paint, against the 
 coward and the robber; but we have been ourselves that 
 coward and robber, and shall be again, not in the low 
 circumstance, but in comparison with the grandeurs 
 possible to the soul.' 1 When, therefore, we shut off 
 the robber from consideration and consign him to the 
 criminal class, as who should say, ' This is a wolf,' we 
 are conscious of a meanness, as if we had left some- 
 thing unsaid. And this width of experience gives a 
 universality of moral outlook, though not of moral 
 judgment, even to the lowest intelligence. If the crime 
 is not against himself, there is no mind so limited as 
 to be without understanding of the freedom taken with 
 the law. ' We permit all things to ourselves, and that 
 which we call sin in others, is experiment for us. It is 
 an instance of our faith in ourselves, that men never 
 speak of crime as lightly as they think ; or, every 
 man thinks a latitude safe for himself, which is nowise 
 to be indulged to another. 2 The act looks very differ- 
 
 1 ' Spiritual Laws,' Essays, ist series. 
 
 2 Was it some perception of this that induced folk-lore to find 
 its fond pleasure in making the bad heroine appoint her own 
 punishment ? What should be done to a stepmother who has sold 
 her stepchild to a witch ? And the stepmother answers with un- 
 failing moral assurance : ' She should be put into a cask studded 
 with nails, and rolled into the sea.' 
 
EMERSON'S DOCTRINE OF THE INFINITE 253 
 
 ently on the inside, and on the outside ; in its quality, 
 and in its consequences. . . . Especially the crimes that 
 spring from love, seem right and fair from the actor's 
 point of view, but, when acted, are found destructive of 
 society. No man at last believes that he can be lost, 
 nor that the crime in him is as black as in the felon. 
 Because the intellect qualifies in our own case the 
 moral judgments.' l 
 
 But there is a higher doctrine, the doctrine, not of 
 the width of moral outlook, but of the infinity of moral 
 idea. Even when we are on the sweetest ground, and 
 speaking of virtue, we must not linger too long. l Truth 
 is our element of life, yet if a man fasten his attention 
 on a single aspect of truth, and apply himself to that 
 alone for a long time, the truth becomes distorted and 
 not itself, but falsehood.' 2 
 
 ' This is the law of moral and of mental gain. The 
 simple rise as by specific levity, not into a particular 
 virtue, but into the region of all the virtues. They are 
 in the spirit which contains them all. The soul requires 
 purity, but purity is not it ; requires justice, but justice 
 is not that ; requires beneficence, but is somewhat 
 better ; so that there is a kind of descent and accom- 
 modation felt when we leave speaking of moral nature, 
 to urge a virtue which it enjoins.' 3 As I read this I 
 seem to hear my own soul speaking, and that is ex- 
 pressed which I have always felt. We see now why 
 books inculcating a virtue have an oppressive effect, 
 why The Heart of Midlothian offends us morally. 
 There is a flowing in the moral sentiment which 
 
 1 { Experience,' Essays, 2nd series. 
 
 2 * Intellect,' Essays, ist series. 
 
 3 ' The Over-Soul,' Essays, ist series. 
 
254 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 embraces all morality, and cannot attend to one thing 
 at a time. ' For other things, I make poetry of them ; 
 but the moral sentiment makes poetry of me.' 1 
 
 Emerson does not, like a school-book, follow his 
 doctrine with instances. He sets himself no tasks. He 
 does not ask how the Doctrine of the Infinite affects 
 specifically Art, the Drama, Poetry, Education. 2 He 
 has no chapters on Turner's pictures viewed from this 
 aspect. No, but his thought has always this colour ; it 
 is the river on which he sails, and a hundred surprising 
 sayings attest the purity and strength of the stream. 
 Of Beauty, he has this to tell us : * Nothing interests 
 us which is stark or bounded, but only what streams 
 with life, what is in act or endeavour to reach some- 
 what beyond. . . . Beauty is the moment of transition, 
 as if the form were just ready to flow into other 
 forms ' ; 3 and of the beloved : ' His friends find in her 
 a likeness to her mother, or her sisters, or to persons 
 not of her blood. The lover sees no resemblance 
 except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to 
 rainbows and the song of birds.' 4 In his essay on 
 ' Manners,' what gives him most pleasure is what Hafiz 
 said of his Persian Lilla : ' She was an elemental force, 
 
 1 Representative Men, * Swedenborg.' 
 
 2 But of course it does apply to Education. ' You send your 
 boy to the schoolmaster, but 'tis the schoolboys who educate him.' 
 Conduct of Life, * Culture.' ' I recall,' says Mr. Moncure Con way, 
 * the vigorous way in which Emerson, warning parents against 
 what he quaintly called " disobedience to children " said in a lecture, 
 " Get off that child ! You are trying to make that man another you. 
 One is enough."' And in Representative Men 'Uses of Great 
 Men' Emerson speaks of a world 'where children seem so much 
 at the mercy of their foolish parents, and where almost all men 
 are too social and interfering.' 
 
 3 Conduct of Life, ' Beauty.' 4 * Love,' Essays, jst series. 
 
EMERSON'S DOCTRINE OF THE INFINITE 255 
 
 and astonished me by her amount of life.' 1 * How 
 often must we learn this lesson ? Men cease to interest 
 us when we find their limitations.' 2 'We honour 
 the rich, because they have externally the freedom, 
 power, and grace which we feel to be proper to man, 
 proper to us.' 3 It is the same when we abase ourselves 
 to exalt ourselves by scraping before a throne. Some- 
 thing of this can be seen in the old servants of families, 
 and it is the poetry of the English which makes them so 
 free with titles of respect. * All goes to show that the 
 soul in man is not an organ, but animates and exer- 
 cises all the organs ; is not a function, like the power 
 of memory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses 
 these as hands and feet ; is not a faculty, but a light ; 
 is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the 
 intellect and the will ; is the background of our being, 
 in which they lie an immensity not possessed and that 
 cannot be possessed. From within or from behind, 
 a light shines through us upon things, and makes us 
 aware that we are nothing, but the light is all.' . . . 
 1 We lie open on one side to the deeps of spiritual 
 nature, to the attributes of God,' and * the sovereignty 
 of this nature whereof we speak is made known by its 
 independency of those limitations which circumscribe 
 us on every hand.' 4 
 
 In a singularly beautiful passage Emerson speaks of 
 the eternal distance : ' There is in woods and waters 
 a certain enticement and flattery, together with a failure 
 to yield a present satisfaction. This disappointment is 
 
 ' Manners,' Essays, 2nd series. 
 
 2 ' Circles,' Essays, ist series. 
 
 3 ' History,' Essays, ist series. 
 
 4 ' The Over- Soul,' Essays, ist series. 
 
256 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 felt in every landscape. I have seen the softness and 
 beauty of the summer-clouds floating feathery over- 
 head, enjoying, as it seemed, their height and privilege 
 of motion, whilst yet they appeared not so much the 
 drapery of this place and hour, as forelooking to some 
 pavilions and gardens of festivity beyond. It is an odd 
 jealousy : but the poet finds himself not near enough to 
 his object. The pine-tree, the river, the bank of flowers 
 before him, does not seem to be nature. Nature is 
 still elsewhere. This or this is but outskirt and far-off 
 reflection and echo of the triumph that has passed by, 
 and is now at its glancing splendour and heyday, 
 perchance in the neighbouring fields, or, if you 
 stand in the field, then in the adjacent woods. The 
 present object shall give you this sense of stillness that 
 follows a pageant which has just gone by. What 
 splendid distance, what recesses of ineffable pomp and 
 loveliness in the sunset ! But who can go where they 
 are, or lay his hand or plant his foot thereon? Off they 
 fall from the round world for ever and ever. It is the 
 same among the men and women, as among the silent 
 trees ; always a referred existence, an absence, never 
 a presence and satisfaction.' 1 
 
 ' A lady, with whom I was riding in the forest, said 
 to me, that the woods seemed to her to wait, as if the 
 genii who inhabit them suspended their deeds until the 
 wayfarer has passed onward : a thought which poetry 
 has celebrated in the dance of the fairies, which breaks 
 off on the approach of human feet.' 2 
 
 With this, attitude it was certain that Emerson, in 
 
 1 * Nature,' Essays, 2nd series. 
 
 2 ' History,' Essays, ist series. 
 
EMERSON'S DOCTRINE OF THE INFINITE 257 
 
 speaking of Poetry, would seize upon Bacon's descrip- 
 tion ; a description that ascribes its charm to the fact 
 that in it we find the infinite side of man's nature tran- 
 scending" his finite circumstances. 1 
 
 * The power or music, the power of poetry to unfix, 
 and, as it were, clap wings to solid nature, interprets 
 the riddle of Orpheus.' 2 
 
 ' A boy hears a military band play on the field at 
 night, and he has kings and queens, and famous 
 chivalry palpably before him. He hears the echoes of 
 a horn in a hill-country . . . which converts the moun- 
 tains into an .^Eolian harp, and this supernatural 
 tiralira restores to him the Dorian mythology, Apollo, 
 Diana, and all divine hunters and huntresses.' 3 
 
 Again, ' All the fictions of the Middle Age explain 
 themselves as a masked or frolic expression of that 
 which in grave earnest the mind of that period toiled 
 to achieve. Magic, and all that is ascribed to it, is a 
 deep presentiment of the powers of science. The shoes 
 of swiftness, the sword of sharpness, the power of sub- 
 duing the elements, of using the secret virtues of 
 minerals, of understanding the voices of birds, are the 
 obscure efforts of the mind in a right direction. The 
 preternatural prowess of the hero, the gift of perpetual 
 youth, and the like, are alike the endeavour of the 
 human spirit "to bend the shows of things to the 
 desires of the mind." 4 
 
 * The poets are thus liberating gods. The ancient 
 British bards had for the title of their order, " Those 
 
 1 See pages 4 and 5 of this volume ; * Poetry : a Note.' 
 
 2 ' History,' Essays, 1st series. 3 * Nature,' Essays, 2nd series. 
 4 ' History,' Essays, ist series. 
 
 R 
 
258 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 who are free throughout the world." They are 
 free, and they make free.' 1 They make free because 
 they transfer things from the empire of fact to the 
 country where thought is emperor. 
 
 * A strange process too, this, by which experience is 
 converted into thought, as a mulberry leaf is converted 
 into satin. The manufacture goes forward at all hours. 
 The actions and events of our childhood and youth are 
 now matters of calmest observation. They lie like fair 
 pictures in the air. Not so with our recent actions, 
 with the business which we now have in hand. On 
 this we are quite unable to speculate. Our affections 
 as yet circulate through it. We no more feel or know 
 it, than we feel the feet, or the hand, or the brain of 
 our body. The new deed is yet a part of life, remains 
 for a time immersed in our unconscious life. In some 
 contemplative hour, it detaches itself from the life like a 
 ripe fruit, to become a thought of the mind. Instantly, 
 it is raised, transfigured ; the corruptible has put on 
 incorruption. Henceforth it is an object of beauty, 
 however base its origin and neighbourhood. Observe, 
 too, the impossibility of ante-dating this act. In its 
 grub state, it cannot fly, it cannot shine, it is a dull 
 grub. But suddenly, without observation, the self- 
 same thing unfurls beautiful wings, and is an angel of 
 wisdom. So is there no fact, no event, in our private 
 history, which shall not, sooner or later, lose its 
 adhesive, inert form, and astonish us by soaring from 
 our body into the empyrean. Cradle and infancy, 
 school and playground, the fear of boys, and dogs, and 
 ferules, the love of little maids and berries, and many 
 
 1 ' The Poet,' Essays^ 2nd series. 
 
EMERSON'S DOCTRINE OF THE INFINITE 259 
 
 another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone 
 already ; friend and relative, profession and party, 
 town and country, nation and world, must also soar 
 and sing.' * ' The making a fact the subject of thought 
 raises it.' 2 
 
 All poetry therefore, in proportion as it refreshes us, 
 is the play of the soul upon and behind circumstance, 
 the recognition by the soul, in thought, of its own 
 infinity. And this is really why no great poet has a 
 system, or, if he has a system, why his greatest poetry 
 lies outside it. It is why didactic poetry teaches us 
 nothing, and why didacticism of any kind always 
 tempts us to contradict. We feel outside it. * It is 
 remarkable,' says Emerson, ' that involuntarily we 
 always read as superior beings,' 3 and, though this is 
 not true of imaginative literature, it is very evidently so 
 of all works that consist of statements. In literature 
 that is truly imaginative, we inhabit an atmosphere, 
 and can no more feel above it than we can feel above 
 the air. But no statement encloses us, and we feel we 
 are larger than the widest pronouncement of wisdom. 
 The Song of Pippa makes us conscious of what lies 
 outside her song, and when a poet says what we wish 
 to believe we immediately become dissatisfied. 
 
 There are many reasons why an express optimism 
 tires us, but the ultimate reason is that we will not be 
 shut up to it. If man is a spirit there are but two 
 entertainable hypotheses of death. To express them in 
 words, meaningless because precise, either the one is 
 merged in the All or continues distinct in apprehend- 
 
 1 ' The American Scholar, 3 Miscellanies. 
 
 2 ' Intellect,' Essays, ist series. 3 ' History,' Essays, ist series. 
 
260 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 ing. But to fix upon either as an alternative, or to 
 define the future, to satisfy a finite curiosity, is to 
 exchange a state of being for a groove. And in this 
 groove we are restless. Doubts perplex us ; weary of 
 the tedium of knowledge we desire the opposite : 
 
 ' There remaineth a rest for the people of God : 
 And I have had troubles enough, for one.' 
 
 We come back to it and are away again. We handsel 
 our destiny until we tire, and return to confidence and 
 a quiet mind only when we have destroyed our defini- 
 tions. Thus even Browning's too frequent and too 
 confident pronouncements, and certainly Longfellow's 
 habit of expressing his hopes merely as statements of 
 fact, are not soothing but irritating. 
 
 'There is no Death ! What seems so is transition ; 
 
 This life of mortal breath 
 Is but a suburb of the life elysian, 
 Whose portal we call death.' 
 
 We know in a moment that that statement does not 
 contain its subject. If this were all that could be said, 
 not only our speculation but our longing could never 
 have had reality, and death could never have possessed 
 a sting. When a man tells us that all is plain sailing, 
 we have no use for him. He offers to sell us sovereigns 
 for a penny, and we won't buy them. We feel that the 
 dignity of life, and the nobility of its aspirations 
 demand a deeper consciousness of its meaning. 
 
 But the charm of Longfellow's poetry is to be found, 
 not in these pronouncements, but in his sentiment I 
 Undoubtedly. 
 
 How different is Emerson ! ' We grant that human 
 life is mean ; but how did we find out that it was 
 
EMERSON'S DOCTRINE OF THE INFINITE 261 
 
 mean ? ' x Here Emerson replaces an affirmation with 
 a question. Instead of a statement, he gives us, in 
 which to disport ourselves, a whole region of thought. 
 It is a saying the width of which justifies his own 
 praise of the delights of the mind. ' Some thoughts 
 always find us young, and keep us so. ... In sick- 
 ness, in languor, give us a strain of poetry, or a 
 profound sentence, and we are refreshed ; . . . instantly 
 we come into a feeling of longevity.* 2 
 
 In fact every attempt to enclose the infinite awakens 
 disquiet. In hymns, for the purposes of definition, 
 infinite notions are shrunk accordingly. The vivid 
 imagery, the realisation, convince us of an inner 
 unreality ; the atmosphere and the attitude are too 
 fixed, and Lucifer is not the only spirit who has good 
 reasons for his dislike of holy water. The last ecstasies 
 of the true believer, and the sceptic's holding of all 
 thought in solution, are alike in contentedly inhabiting 
 a vague ; are similar in their acceptance of an ultimate 
 mystery. The beauty of ' In Memoriam ' is dimmed 
 by Tennyson's anxiety to find an answer. 3 * The tone 
 of seeking is one, and the tone of having is another.' 4 
 
 Browning's peculiar service to his generation, as a 
 religious teacher, is not due to his optimistic dicta, 
 though, unlike most optimistic dicta, his are not to be 
 dismissed with a word. Of them it is not enough to 
 
 'The Over-Soul,' Essays, ist series. 2 Ibid. 
 
 3 Is it fanciful to find Tennyson's deepest personal feeling 
 expressed more singly and with an added calm in the later poems, 
 in 'The Higher Pantheism' or the wonderful 'Vastness,' or even in 
 single lines of a superhuman dignity ? 
 
 'Spirit, nearing yon dark portal at the limit of thy human state.' 
 
 4 'The Over-Soul,' Essay s, ist series. 
 
262 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 say that they formed his moral and practical contribu- 
 tion to the social energy of the now living English, and 
 meant the tonic-bracing of many lives. To say this of 
 them is to say what is true, but it is not enough to say, 
 because sometimes they sing. Expressed in the form 
 of too confident statements, they are sometimes the 
 music of aspiration, a real song of hope. 1 But his 
 entirely peculiar religious service is not due to this 
 song. Nor is it due to his fondness for argumentation, 
 nor even to his episodical but extremely felicitous 
 voicing of the subjective religion of his day, for this 
 was done more fully and with a more unfailing sureness 
 of touch by Tennyson. This is Tennyson's, not 
 Browning's, religious achievement. What is wholly 
 peculiar to Browning is his way of adjusting himself to 
 circumstance, his habit of content in dubiety. It is a 
 habit of mind, not a doctrine to be expressed in precise 
 terms where Browning is precise, it is generally to 
 express himself with optimistic certainty but it is the 
 habit which finally explains his unshakeable confidence. 
 This poet, though in many ways a more persistent 
 speculator than Tennyson, has no quarrel with spiritual 
 laws. Uncertainty in regard to the Ultimate, we can 
 hear him saying, is not only a law of the world but a 
 desirable law. There is his whole series of poems 
 dealing with moods of the religious mind 'Cleon,' 
 expressing the Greek idea of the worth of life now, but 
 breaking through at the end towards Browning's own 
 conclusions: * The Epistle of Karshish,' a poem as 
 distinctively Jewish in attitude as ' A Death in the 
 Desert' is Christian, yet neither wholly dramatic, and 
 
 1 ' Abt Vogler,' ' Rabbi Ben Ezra,' * Pippa's Song.' 
 
EMERSON'S DOCTRINE OF THE INFINITE 263 
 
 both partaking of Browning's sentiment : * Bishop 
 Blougram's Apology,' a plea for the worldly value of 
 religion if religion is to be viewed from that aspect 
 alone, a plea also for the basic religiousness of man : 
 and the strange, vivid 'Caliban upon Setebos,' a heaping 
 together of the thoughts that strike the mind when, 
 contemplating a world of oddities, it amuses itself with 
 supposing that all things rest on a basis of caprice a 
 series of poems written as if with the object of trying 
 and testing the Universe from different points of view. 
 There is also his doctrine, developed in * Christmas 
 Eve and Easter Day,' of the need for the continual 
 reshaping of dogma, the doctrine, we might say, of the 
 tentative dogma : l and there is his happy pronounce- 
 ment in * La Saisiaz ' that if man were as certain of 
 eternal as of present life he would, putting suicide 
 altogether aside, go through his present life slackly 
 and as a spectator. A belief in individual duration is 
 Browning's central belief, as it was the belief about 
 which Tennyson was most anxious, but accept it for a 
 fact of existence and all the sap is out of living. We 
 should be colonists, not home-dwellers in the world, 
 perpetually dreaming of the voyage home. It is well 
 'that a veil shuts down on the facts of to-morrow,' 2 
 just as it is well that in life perfect happiness cannot be 
 preserved. If it could, if one could ride with one's 
 loye for ever along the Surrey pastures in April, or on 
 May-Day by the Creetown shore, we should 'burn 
 
 1 Cp. Emerson, ' The Poet,' Essays, 2nd series. ' The history of 
 hierarchies seems to show, that all religious error consisted in 
 making the symbol too stark and solid.' 
 
 2 'The Over-Soul,' Essays, ist series. 
 
264 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 upward' to no ' point of bliss.' Again there is his 
 questioning as to our wishes ; in ' Speculative,' whether 
 we really do wish a new life or just ' Earth's old life ' 
 restored, and in * Old Pictures in Florence,' whether 
 our actual longing is for Eternal Progression or Eternal 
 Rest. The answer suggested is very simple, that we 
 desire all, and that there is no limit to infinite desire. 
 
 Men are fond of table-rapping, of Longfellow's 
 'Psalm of Life,' and of developing the finite side of 
 their natures, but in fact there is an atmosphere that is 
 fresher than that of the seance-chamber. ' People wish 
 to be settled ; only as far as they are unsettled is there 
 any hope for them.' 1 ' It was no Oxonian, but Hafiz, 
 who said, " Let us be crowned with roses, let us drink 
 wine, and break up the tiresome old roof of heaven into 
 new forms." ' 2 Our pleasure in these poems is that in 
 them the soul gets ' soaring room,' and hovers 'with 
 unconfined wings.' 
 
 Emerson's doctrine explains equally well, in regard 
 to the moral atmosphere of books, the less obvious of 
 our likings and dislikings. An imaginative artist 
 becomes weak when he takes an attitude to his charac- 
 ters, and is no longer content to let them play outside 
 him. There is a detraction from the fluidity of life. 
 In Scott's novels you are, when all praise is exhausted, 
 keeping company with a gentleman ; in the Norse 
 sagas with humanity. Especially is this limitation 
 apparent when there is a moral attitude. An express 
 morality is the negation of freedom, and ' Thou shalt 
 not ' is a discord to the soul. What the soul loves to 
 contemplate is the flowing of a passion, even the 
 
 Circles,' Essays, ist series. 2 'Literature,' English Traits. 
 
EMERSON'S DOCTRINE OF THE INFINITE 265 
 
 passionate austerity of the saint, for all realisation is 
 grand. A love that breaks law and scorns death, 
 tramples upon fame and sets kingdoms at variance, is, 
 as an anti-social disturbance, not recognised by poetry, 
 but only when it is viewed as a thing explaining, even 
 justifying, itself. The imagination looks on the posi- 
 tive side of every action, for on the negative side it is 
 limited. The same story, which, left alone, is the 
 milk of moral nature, turns sour in a finite churn. 
 Morality makes immorality of so much of the morality 
 of art. In the world there is no sweeter legend than 
 that of the affection of Tristan and Iseult as told by 
 Gottfried von Strassburg in Miss Weston's beautiful 
 version ; an affection so powerful that it topples over 
 everything the world holds dear, truth, friendship, 
 honour. So brutally frank is the dilemma that the 
 legend is itself afraid of it, and invents the philtre. 
 The noble Sigurd drank of a potion before his 
 mind turned from Brynhild to thoughts of a more 
 earthly maid. It was magic, says the trembling 
 mortal, just as to-day we say he must have been mad. 
 But this lunacy happens because Love reigns ; 
 and because of that, Mortality endures and each 
 new series in the troubled succession discovers life 
 is good. In our hearts we know the poet is sing- 
 ing not of broken law, but of law fulfilled. Yet 
 Tennyson did not know this, and he has made a story 
 which the world knows as profitable, a tale of license and 
 marital revenge. 1 The actual subject of Tristan and 
 
 1 'The Last Tournament.' Tennyson in his sketch has altered 
 the tone of the story because, while accepting the incidents, he views 
 them differently. It is perhaps worth saying that it was a matter of 
 course that he should view them differently. Tennyson was speak- 
 
266 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 Iseult was as much above Tennyson's capacity as the 
 actual subject of Hiawatha was above Longfellow's. 
 Both subjects, in their different ways, were grander 
 than the two very different poets: 'The wise Dan- 
 damis, on hearing the lives of Socrates, Pythagoras, 
 and Diogenes read, "judged them to be great men 
 every way, excepting that they were too much subjected 
 to the reverence of the laws, which to second and 
 authorise, true virtue must abate very much of its 
 original vigour." ' * 
 
 How sweet is the nut in Shakespeare's shell ! In 
 re-telling the tale of ' the gentle lady married to the 
 Moor,' he does not, like Cinthio, tell us that she ought 
 
 ing from a society with a much deeper consciousness than the 
 Middle Ages of the necessity of social law. To re-tell to-day the 
 whole detailed story of Tristram in the way of the Middle Ages 
 would be merely to trifle with one's own morality. That is why 
 Swinburne's version affects us as essentially trifling, as without 
 moral content. But the real problem is how to preserve the mean- 
 ing of a legend. Morris in his ' Sigurd the Volsung' has evaded the 
 difficulty by confining himself to translation. Morris does not really 
 tell Sigurd's story again. What he has left us is the translation,, 
 nearest of all English translations to the meaning of his original. It 
 was reserved for Arnold to meet the difficulty full face. Arnold in 
 his Tristram does not exactly omit the incidents, but he views them 
 generally, and only in retrospect, and is thus able to preserve the 
 feeling of his original without doing violence to his own feeling. 
 Arnold quite freely and whole-heartedly celebrates at the death-bed 
 of Tristram what Gottfried von Strassburg had celebrated by 
 Tristram's life ; I mean the persistence or undefeatability of affec- 
 tion. Arnold does really re-tell \hz story of Tristram (that is to say, 
 Arnold's Tristram is full throughout not of a translated feeling but of 
 Arnold's own feeling), and if it be urged that his beautiful re-telling 
 forms an inadequate version of the old tale, it must be answered that 
 some stories in their entirety cannot be told again. After all, there re- 
 mains the old story. We cannot make a modern story out of the Iliad,, 
 but that should not prevent us from seeing what the Iliad means. 
 1 New England Reformers : A Lecture, 1 844. 
 
EMERSON'S DOCTRINE OF THE INFINITE 267 
 
 not to have done so, but that she did, and no one read- 
 ing * Romeo and Juliet ' ever dreamt that they were in 
 the wrong. 
 
 King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid are very 
 pleasing to the imagination which delights in seeing 
 the requirements of place and condition violated, and 
 always hopes to believe that there are no obstacles to 
 the power of love. We know indeed that there are 
 none and that love can triumph over everything. We 
 know also, of course, that such marriages are seldom 
 successful, and the result, generally, not a witness to 
 the essential equality of humanity, but two broken 
 lives. Yet when Tennyson tells us this in l The Lord 
 of Burleigh,' we do not thank him. These troubles, 
 which 'the gallant gay domestics* cannot soften, seem 
 to us falsities. It is idle to tell us that the story is 
 much more true to life than King Cophetua, and that 
 Tennyson is here dealing with the fact. A mere social 
 fact which illustrates nothing, which tells us nothing 
 but that we are creatures of circumstances, is no fact 
 for the imagination. 'The child asks, " Mamma, why 
 don't I like the story as well as when you told it me 
 yesterday?" Alas, child, it is even so with the oldest 
 cherubim of knowledge. But will it answer thy ques- 
 tion to say, Because thou wert born to a whole, and this 
 story is a particular?' 1 
 
 The practical nature of their genius is what gives the 
 English this fatal blindness; and their racial incapacity 
 to see the infinite in the life before them explains why 
 to-day we have so much competent fiction that is not 
 of literary value. In speaking of 'The Sublime,' Mr. 
 
 ' Experience.' Essays, 2nd series. 
 
268 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 Bradley turns, for an instance from a modern writer, 
 by natural instinct, to Turgenieff. And yet as much 
 talent goes to the making of Thackeray's novels as to 
 his. The difference is surely racial ; for no modern 
 writer has a deeper sense than Thackeray of an under- 
 lying illusion, a better feeling for Autumn and for 
 Finis. But when he comes to describe, it is gone. 
 His characters do not move in an infinite world. Often 
 he stops speaking of them, to speak to us of the 
 Infinite, but his characters he does not read infinitely. 
 It is his sentiment that is his imperishable part. What 
 things of wood, and law, and class, are these person- 
 ages ; how much bohemianism and gentlemanliness 
 and young-ladyhood disguises from us the soul ! A 
 silly story by Anatole France, not to mention his 
 achievements, brings one nearer the interior of a 
 being. 
 
 Of the grotesques of Dickens it is necessary to speak 
 more carefully. Clearly there are no characters, so 
 little merely copies of individuals, which are so lacking 
 in reference to the infinite, and Dickens when he is 
 most Dickens, has no consciousness of a vast. Pick- 
 wick and Mantalini, Pecksniff and Mrs. Gamp, live in 
 no world of illusion, but, on the contrary, eat substan- 
 tial food. They were not born for death, as Mr. 
 Chesterton says truly. They possess the never-dying- 
 ness of Falstaff, that absence of being terminal or on 
 a visit here, which attaches to all true children of 
 Comedy, as well as to Comedy herself. For all this 
 the range of their reference is wide. They are not part 
 of an infinite Universe, but they throw light upon an 
 infinite number of other characters. They are succu- 
 lent, not wooden, and illustrate by their absurdities 
 
EMERSON'S DOCTRINE OF THE INFINITE 269 
 
 half the follies of mankind. The kindliness of Micaw- 
 ber is shared by the human race, and you learn more 
 about men from these people who never lived than by 
 much painful study of separate lives. Hence, in 
 speaking of Dickens in this connection, one has to pick 
 one's words. His characters are not finite, in the 
 sense in which that term is used of Thackeray's. Each 
 speaks for many, and not one of his great creations is 
 self-contained. The atmosphere of these astonishing 
 novels is very wide. In the main you are dealing with 
 traits, not people, and thus the reference to character is 
 almost infinite. 
 
 And yet when this is frankly said, and one has real- 
 ised the cause of the feeling of width which one gets 
 in reading Dickens, it is obvious that no more than 
 in Thackeray are you reading of the soul. The world 
 is a world of Victorian grotesque ', but it is a desperately 
 Victorian world, and staked round with the parapher- 
 nalia of common things. The heart shown within this 
 palisade is very soft and generous, but is never merely 
 the heart of man. The soul is conscious neither of its 
 immensity nor of its width, and never beats against the 
 limits of to-day. 
 
 In contemporary non-English Art there is some- 
 times 'a subjugation of an opposite character.' In 
 Mr. Synge's ' Riders to the Sea,' a little poem which 
 makes the * dead march ' exquisite and lovely, a thing 
 of rainbow and pearl, the finite is almost wholly for- 
 gotten. Maeterlinck began in harbour, it is true, and 
 in 'The Princess Maleine,' it is at life's door that Death 
 knocks ; but in his later and greater fantasies there is too 
 much open sea. 'The Intruder ' no longer intrudes upon 
 what is his own domain, and existence seems a protest 
 
270 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 increasingly unavailing against a surrounding vague. 
 To look fixedly at the sun is not the best way to see it, 
 and one cannot live for ever in the country of * Les 
 Aveugles.' ' The health of the eye seems to demand a 
 horizon. We are never tired so long as we can see 
 far enough/ 1 It is beautifully said, but Emerson's 
 sanity always implicitly adds that the health of the 
 body requires some place on which to put one's feet. 
 The ship should swing at its moorings. 
 
 Hawthorne, by being an American, escapes at once 
 this tendency to dispense with a basis, and the amateur- 
 ism of English mid-century Art. Life exists, but 
 man's adventures form the stuff out of which the soul 
 is made, not the object nor the true interest of its 
 being. Hawthorne's stories therefore begin where 
 those of Thackeray and Dickens end. The whole 
 business of Westervelt and Zenobia lies in the back- 
 ground ; the interest of the Marble Faun deepens after 
 the murder of Vision ; The House of the Seven 
 Gables is a tale of twilight. His characters, who one 
 and all suggest no social place, are as familiar as faces 
 in a dream, and, in a smaller theatre, display as freely 
 a universal heart as the frantic owner of the horse 
 Malek-Adel 2 or the stumbling Levin with the priest. 3 
 
 When morality has no more to say, the moral 
 instinct is awakened, and the tender Clifford, whose 
 vitality has been whipped to tatters by the iron prison 
 system, speaks to deeps in the ordinary vital man. 
 Few things in literature are more sublime than the 
 
 1 Treatise on Nature. 
 
 2 Tourgenieff : A Sportsmaris Sketches. 
 
 3 Tolstoy : Anna Karenina, Part V. Chapter I. 
 
EMERSON'S DOCTRINE OF THE INFINITE 271 
 
 introduction of the child Pearl in The Scarlet Letter. 
 Hester wears the seal of the outlaw uncomplainingly. 
 Banished from the life of her community, she comes 
 to see things in their essence, and where all is forgotten 
 but human feeling, there only is at home. ' She came, 
 not as a guest, but as a rightful inmate, into the house- 
 hold that was darkened by trouble. . . . There 
 glimmered the embroidered letter, with comfort in its 
 unearthly ray. Elsewhere the token of sin, it was 
 the taper of the sick-chamber. It had even thrown 
 its gleam, in the sufferer's hard extremity, across the 
 verge of time. ... In such emergencies, Hester's 
 nature showed itself warm and rich ; a well-spring 
 of human tenderness, unfailing to every real demand, 
 and inexhaustible by the largest. Her breast, with 
 its badge of shame, was but the softer pillow for the 
 head that needed one.* 
 
 The wound burns and heals, but for ever it burns. 
 The child is there, by an inspiration, at once as the 
 protest of lawlessness and as the lawful protest of 
 Earth. 
 
 ' In the afternoon of a certain summer's day, after 
 Pearl grew big enough to run about, she amused 
 herself with gathering handfuls of wild flowers, and 
 flinging them, one by one, at her mother's bosom ; 
 dancing up and down, like a little elf, whenever she 
 hit the scarlet letter. Hester's first motion had been 
 to cover her bosom with her clasped hands. But, 
 whether from pride or resignation, or a feeling that 
 her penance might best be wrought out by this unutter- 
 able pain, she resisted the impulse, and sat erect, pale 
 as death, looking sadly into little Pearl's wild eyes. 
 Still came the battery of flowers.' 
 
272 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 The Puritans are here on the side of a virtue 
 essential to society ; and yet we feel that in dealing 
 with a breach of it, as the Puritans did here, with a 
 single eye to reprobation, we have come upon some- 
 thing of the conventional, and that in their purely 
 moral atmosphere the spirit of man is cramped. We 
 feel as if a disrespect were being done to life, or to 
 give Emerson's words * The soul requires purity, but 
 purity is not it. ... So that there is a kind of descent 
 and accommodation felt when we leave speaking of 
 moral nature, to urge a virtue which it enjoins.' 1 The 
 introduction of Pearl, in short, entices the soul 
 outside the life of man and links it with the 
 Universal life. Of all things purity is the most 
 lovely, and yet we can approach too singly to its 
 celebration. ' The sea is lovely, but when we bathe in 
 it, the beauty forsakes all the near water.' 2 So great 
 and moral is the imagination that it is in Art man 
 finds his freest moment and ethical delight. 
 
 A balancing criticism will, however, admit that while 
 the moral atmosphere of Hawthorne is thus profound, 
 it is not absolutely healthy. In part from the nature 
 of the case. As his interest does not begin till the 
 customary moral judgment is pronounced, to get his 
 circumstances set to his liking, he has always to deal 
 with broken law ; and since he has no interest in moral 
 problems in the ordinary sense, he is always tempted 
 to emphasise this breach. The questions he asks 
 are subsequent questions, and he is careful, instinc- 
 tively, that no initial question of the right or wrong 
 
 1 'The Over-Soul,' Essay s^ 1st series. 
 
 2 'Beauty,' Conduct of Life. 
 
EMERSON'S DOCTRINE OF THE INFINITE 273 
 
 of the actual action should distract the attention. 
 Besides, he inherits from his forefathers more than 
 something of the Puritan consciousness of sin. The 
 combined result is that he so constantly tells us his 
 characters are sinners, and dwells so much on the 
 enormity of their offences, that he produces an atmo- 
 sphere, a little hectic, a little fevered. It is not exactly 
 an atmosphere of lost souls, but it is an atmosphere 
 in which we are oppressed. His morality here may 
 be said, the morality of as pure and gentle a moralist 
 as ever lived, to be a little defective. We miss 
 Shakespeare's large confidence in his readers, his trust 
 in our moral nature. Why should we be anxious 
 to teach the human conscience what it knows for 
 itself ? Why should one wish to be more moral than 
 the world ? 
 
 It is sometimes of advantage to an imaginative artist 
 to be less so, and there are instances of literature being 
 saved by having no morality at all. When one re- 
 members the more horrible tales of Poe, ' Berenice/ 
 for instance, ' The Case of M. Waldemar,' even the 
 incomparably skilful 'Lygeia,' one asks oneself by 
 what legerdemain are we made to tolerate such stories, 
 how is it they do not totally disgust. 
 
 For this reason their whole appeal is to the curious 
 intellect. 
 
 Indeed, when one comes to think of it, nothing is 
 more surprising in Poe's tales than the rarity of the 
 occasions on which the moral judgment is appealed to ; 
 the rarity of the occasions on which the moral judg- 
 ment is even aroused. To adopt a phrase of his own, 
 ' the nervous intensity of interest with which in his case 
 the powers of observation and meditation,' and these 
 
 s 
 
274 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 powers alone, ' busy and bury themselves in the con- 
 templation ' of the most extraordinary occurrences, is 
 perhaps the greatest of all his miraculous qualities. 
 
 When Poe deals ostensibly with moral effects he is 
 weak. The story of William Wilson is meant to be 
 a story of conscience. In so far as it is so, it is a 
 manufactured thing. The great success it achieves is 
 due to the intellectual pleasure derived from surprise. 
 ' The Man of the Crowd ' has a tremendous effect, but 
 the effect is not the effect of morality but of mystery. 
 This is why Poe's poems are no better than they are. 
 It is impossible to write considerable poetry unless 
 there is a basis of moral idea. But this absence of 
 moral idea, which is a basic defect in a poet, is the 
 crowning merit of an artist in the horrible. We can 
 tolerate from Poe what we can tolerate from no one 
 else. He presents us with a detailed account of can- 
 nibalism at sea, and it does not totally sicken : a 
 hideous murder is with him an event, and when a 
 husband plunges with his wife's corpse overboard, we 
 are excited nothing more. This is what would be 
 thought unfeeling by the Tribunal of the Terror, 
 yet our pleasure in these stories is that in them 
 the prying intellect can satisfy itself undisturbed. 
 
 More often, no doubt, we are not content merely to 
 say goodbye to limitations ; we override them. We 
 side with Ajax against the lightning, and there is no rule 
 made by man or essential to our condition the yoke of 
 which sometimes we do not feel to gall. Nietzsche's 
 violence lets us see the doctrine of sympathy, for once, 
 wholly from outside, and relieves the spirit from a 
 creeping bondage to the best. ' Honour him,' says 
 Emerson in his highest strain, * whose life is perpetual 
 
EMERSON'S DOCTRINE OF THE INFINITE 275 
 
 victory. . . . With eyes open, he makes the choice of 
 virtue, which outrages the virtuous ; of religion, which 
 churches stop their discords to burn and exterminate ; 
 for the highest virtue is always against the law.' 1 And 
 so apparent is the fact at the base of this that sometimes 
 we even sport with it, and imagine a tun-bellied sot 
 and sensualist as the type of the liberated soul. < The 
 bliss of freedom gained in humour,' 2 says Mr. Bradley, 
 ' is the essence of Falstaff,' and, once he has demon- 
 strated the cause of our pleasure in this character, 
 the cause is obvious. In great literature we discover 
 that the mind has sides to it, and loves neither straight 
 lines nor closed doors. 
 
 What is the method of the grand illustrator of the 
 genus Man ? By what means does Shakespeare bring 
 home to us, in a surprisingly new way, old truths 
 about ourselves ? Are those large results achieved by 
 the use of good sense, by telling us probable fictions, 
 or by making his imaginary characters act as they 
 would act in life? It would be more true to say that he 
 manages it by contradictions, impossibilities, surprises, 
 by the negation of the probable. The fine harmonies 
 of The Winter's Tale are directly due to his making 
 men jealous for no reason, affectionate wives punish 
 repentant husbands for sixteen years, and princesses 
 brought up in a cottage betray no traces of their up- 
 bringing. In Hamlet he tells us the story of a middle- 
 aged and accomplished prince, still at school, acting 
 and treated like a boy, to distinguish further the com- 
 plexity of the mind : in Macbeth a hobgoblin tale about 
 
 1 ' Worship,' Conduct of Life. 
 
 2 Oxford Lectures on Poetry, ' The Rejection of Falstaff. 3 
 
276 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 a bloody tyrant, to make clear to us the humanity of man. 
 Shakespeare's Othello is of a free and open nature, and 
 for his revenge he can think of nothing better than to 
 employ his servant in a mean assassination. Every- 
 thing Tolstoy has said about Lear is true. It is a con- 
 glomeration of melodramatic absurdities, and yet there 
 is no religion that speaks more eloquently to the 
 suffering of the world. 
 
 But is this peculiar to Shakespeare ? Is it not true 
 of all the literature we most value that it goes a step 
 beyond extravagance and mixes, in great plenty, 
 smoke with flame? By indirections we find directions 
 out and read folly to be wise. In the Iliad, gods and 
 heroes are always achieving the impossible. We love 
 Hector because he was dragged in the dust, and 
 Achilles for sulking in his tent. The Odyssey is a 
 fairy tale, and often a most foolish one. Don Quixote 
 and Gulliver's Travels are well fitted to be favourites 
 in the nursery. Ariosto's fable is more childish than 
 Tasso's, and therefore can bear to be longer. What 
 nonsense amused the German mind in the Middle 
 Ages Siegfried with his cap of darkness the ring of 
 fire the maidens singing under water about a bag 
 of sovereigns a man wooing his bride for another, 
 and in the form of that other. It is of a piece with 
 Goethe's rigmarole about the Prince of Darkness 
 neglecting his business to go sky - larking on the 
 Brocken, Milton's folly about the celestial war, and 
 apple, and Dante's subterranean fears. 
 
 Who reads these tales, if not every one? The 
 stockbroker in the evening is found grinning over the 
 wild adventures of Pantagruel. The lawyer, on a 
 Sunday is sealed with Merlin in the hollow oak. The 
 
EMERSON'S DOCTRINE OF THE INFINITE 277 
 
 good clergyman, in the week, knows the roll of the 
 prophets no better than the love affairs of Jupiter. 
 
 ' Innocently to amuse the imagination,' said Gold- 
 smith, ' in this dream of life is wisdom ' ; for indeed, 
 it is the patent or visible that is the absolute fiction, 
 and in dreams alone we behold the true. Towns, 
 Cathedrals, the Bank of England, and the Pyramids, 
 nay the very senses which return us our report of these, 
 do we not know they are ephemera the finite on their 
 way to pass ; and that there is nothing real at all but 
 the spirit, which is infinite, and the cloudland of 
 fancy in which it dwells. There we see ourselves 
 as in a glass and not darkly, our real selves that, 
 in life, perhaps, never got a word spoken. The old 
 bachelor climbs rope-ladders with Romeo, the school- 
 mistress is enthusiastic over Desdemona's marriage, 
 and we are all at last happy when the ruffian Posthumus, 
 who laid a bet about his wife's honour, is dismissed 
 to happiness and Imogen. In Shakespeare's world we 
 find jealousy impressive and a murderer a moralist. It 
 is an unfixed world in which we find ourselves at home. 
 But no great literature differs in kind from his. There 
 is ' the Zoroastrian definition of poetry, mystical, yet 
 exact, " apparent pictures of unapparent natures."' 1 
 In all poetry we recognise as great, we can hear this 
 veiled reality whispering to our hidden self, and can 
 .set out to test those contradictions which life supplies 
 but leaves unresolved ; for is not man himself a con- 
 tradiction a spirit bound to make matter serve his 
 turn ? 
 
 He kills animals by his cunning and stores with 
 
 1 English Traits, ' Literature. 5 
 
278 POETRY AND PROSE 
 
 careful providence his annual corn, he builds houses 
 brick by brick ; but he lives in his imagination, he 
 flies only when he essays a daring flight, and feels 
 human when he rests upon his wings. Man himself is 
 the enigma. Hovering in an Eternity, on his voyage 
 from the unknown to the unknown, he is himself, in 
 Carlyle's language, 'the mystery of mysteries,' to be 
 interpreted but by stray glints and gleams, interpret- 
 able, if at all, not by prose and reason but by poetry. 
 
 Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to His Majesty 
 at the Edinburgh University Press 
 
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY 
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