The Art Of Letters Part 6

All the great religious reformations have been rebellions on the part of the immortal souls against the superior persons. Religion, the reformers have proclaimed, is the common possession of mankind. Christ came into the world not to afford a career to theological pedants, but that the ma.s.s of mankind might have life and might have it more abundantly.

Poetry is in constant danger of suffering the same fate as religion. In the great ages of poetry, poetry was what is called a popular subject. The greatest poets, both of Greece and of England, took their genius to that extremely popular inst.i.tution, the theatre. They wrote not for pedants or any exclusive circle, but for mankind. They were, we have reason to believe, under no illusions as to the imperfections of mankind. But it was the best audience they could get, and represented more or less the same kind of world that they found in their own bosoms. It is a difficult thing to prove that the ordinary man can appreciate poetry, just as it is a difficult thing to prove that the ordinary man has an immortal soul. But the great poets, like the great saints, gave him the benefit of the doubt.

If they had not, we should not have had the Greek drama or Shakespeare.

That they were right seems probable in view of the excellence of the poems and songs that survive among a peasantry that has not been de-educated in the schools. If the arts were not a natural inheritance of simple people, neither the Irish love-songs collected by Dr. Douglas Hyde nor the Irish music edited by Moore could have survived. I do not mean to suggest that any art can be kept alive without the aid of such specialists as the poet, the singer, and the musician; but neither can it be kept healthily alive without the popular audience. Tolstoy's use of the unspoiled peasant as the test of art may lead to absurdities, if carried too far. But at least it is an error in the right direction. It is an affirmation of the fact that every man is potentially an artist just as Christianity is an affirmation of the fact that every man is potentially a saint. It is also an affirmation of the fact that art, like religion, makes its appeal to feelings which are shared by the ma.s.s of men rather than the feelings which are the exclusive possession of the few. Where Tolstoy made his chief mistake was in failing to see that the artistic sense, like the religious sense, is something that, so far from being born perfect, even in the unspoiled peasant, pa.s.ses though stage after stage of labour and experience on the way to perfection. Every man is an artist in the seed: he is not an artist in the flower. He may pa.s.s all his life without ever coming to flower. The great artist, however, appeals to a universal potentiality of beauty. Tolstoy's most astounding paradox came _to_ nothing more than this--that art exists, not for the hundreds of people who are artists in name, but for the millions of people who are artists in embryo.

At the same time, there is no use in being too confident that the average man will ever be a poet, even in the sense of being a reader of poetry.

All that one can ask is that the doors of literature shall be thrown open to him, as the doors of religion are in spite of the fact that he is not a perfect saint. The histories of literature and religion, it seems likely, both go back to a time in which men expressed their most rapturous emotions in dances. In time the inarticulate shouts of the dancers--Scottish dancers still utter those shouts, do they not?--gave place to rhythmic words. It may have been the genius of a single dancer that first broke into speech, but his genius consisted not so much in his separateness from the others as in his power to express what all the others felt. He was the prophet of a rapture that was theirs as much as his own.

Men learned to speak rhythmically, however, not merely in order to liberate their deepest emotions, but in order to remember things. Poetry has a double origin in joy and utility. The "Thirty days hath September"

rhyme of the English child suggests the way in which men must have turned to verse in prehistoric times as a preservative of facts, of proverbial wisdom, of legend and narrative. Sir Henry Newbolt, I gather from his _New Study of English Poetry_, would deny the name of poetry to all verse that is not descended from the choric dance. In my opinion it is better to recognize the two lines, as of the father and the mother, in the pedigree of poetry. We find abundant traces of them not only in Hesiod and Virgil, but in Homer and Chaucer. The utility of form and the joy of form have in all these poets become inextricably united. The objection to most of the "free verse" that is being written to-day is that in form it is neither delightful nor memorable. The truth is, the memorableness of the writings of a man of genius becomes a part of their delight. If Pope is a delightful writer it is not merely because he expressed interesting opinions; it is because he threw most of the energies of his being into the task of making them memorable and gave them a heightened vitality by giving them rhymes. His satires and _The Rape of the Lock_ are, no doubt, better poetry than the _Essay on Man_, because he poured into them a still more vivid energy. But I doubt if there is any reasonable definition of poetry which would exclude even Pope the "essayist" from the circle of the poets. He was a puny poet, it may be, but poets were always, as they are to-day, of all shapes and sizes.

Unfortunately, "poetry," like "religion," is a word that we are almost bound to use in several senses. Sometimes we speak of "poetry" in contradistinction to prose: sometimes in contradistinction to bad poetry.

Similarly, "religion" would in one sense include the Abode of Love as opposed to rationalism, and in another sense would exclude the Abode of Love as opposed to the religion of St. James. In a common-sense cla.s.sification, it seems to me, poetry includes every kind of literature written in verse or in rhythms akin to verse. Sir Thomas Browne may have been more poetic than Erasmus Darwin, but in his best work he did not write poetry. Erasmus Darwin may have been more prosaic than Sir Thomas Browne, but in his most famous work he did not write prose. Sir Henry Newbolt will not permit a cla.s.sification of this kind. For him poetry is an expression of intuitions--an emotional transfiguration of life--while prose is the expression of a scientific fact or a judgment. I doubt if this division is defensible. Everything that is literature is, in a sense, poetry as opposed to science; but both prose and poetry contain a great deal of work that is preponderantly the result of observation and judgment, as well as a great deal that is preponderantly imaginative.

Poetry is a house of many mansions. It includes fine poetry and foolish poetry, n.o.ble poetry and base poetry. The chief duty of criticism is the praise--the infectious praise--of the greatest poetry. The critic has the right to demand not only a transfiguration of life, but a n.o.ble transfiguration of life. Swinburne transfigures life in _Anactoria_ no less than Shakespeare transfigures it in _King Lear_. But Swinburne's is an ign.o.ble, Shakespeare's a n.o.ble transfiguration. Poetry may be divine or devilish, just as religion may be. Literary criticism is so timid of being accused of Puritanism that it is chary of admitting that there may be a Heaven and a h.e.l.l of poetic genius as well as of religious genius. The moralists go too far on the other side and are tempted to judge literature by its morality rather than by its genius. It seems more reasonable to conclude that it is possible to have a poet of genius who is nevertheless a false poet, just as it is possible to have a prophet of genius who is nevertheless a false prophet. The lover of literature will be interested in them all, but he will not finally be deceived into blindness to the fact that the greatest poets are spiritually and morally, as well as aesthetically, great. If Shakespeare is infinitely the greatest of the Elizabethans, it is not merely because he is imaginatively the greatest; it is also because he had a soul incomparably n.o.ble and generous. Sir Henry Newbolt deals in an interesting way with this enn.o.blement of life that is the mark of great poetry. He does not demand of poetry an orthodox code of morals, but he does contend that great poetry marches along the path that leads to abundance of life, and not to a feeble and degenerate egotism.

The greatest value of his book, however, lies in the fact that he treats poetry as a natural human activity, and that he sees that poetry must be able to meet the challenge to its right to exist. The extreme moralist would deny that it had a right to exist unless it could be proved to make men more moral. The hedonist is content if it only gives him pleasure. The greatest poets, however, do not accept the point of view either of the extreme moralist or of the hedonist. Poetry exists for the purpose of delivering us neither to good conduct nor to pleasure. It exists for the purpose of releasing the human spirit to sing, like a lark, above this scene of wonder, beauty and terror. It is consonant both with the world of good conduct and the world of pleasure, but its song is a voice and an enrichment of the earth, uttered on wings half-way between earth and heaven. Sir Henry Newbolt suggests that the reason why hymns almost always fail as poetry is that the writers of hymns turn their eyes away so resolutely from the earth we know to the world that is only a formula.

Poetry, in his view, is a transfiguration of life heightened by the home-sickness of the spirit from a perfect world. But it must always use the life we live as the material of its joyous vision. It is born of our double attachment to Earth and to Paradise. There is no formula for absolute beauty, but the poet can praise the echo and reflection of it in the songs of the birds and the colours of the flowers. It is open to question whether

There is a fountain filled with blood

expresses the home-sickness of the spirit as yearningly as

And now my heart with pleasure fills And dances with the daffodils.

There are many details on which one would like to join issue with Sir Henry Newbolt, but his main contentions are so suggestive, his sympathies so catholic and generous, that it seems hardly worth while arguing with him about questions of scansion or of the relation of Blake to contemporary politics, or of the evil of anthologies. His book is the reply of a capable and honest man of letters to the challenge uttered to poets by Keats in _The Fall of Hyperion_, where Moneta demands:

What benfits canst thou, or all thy tribe To the great world?

and declares:

None can usurp this height ...

But those to whom the miseries of the world Are misery, and will not let them rest.

Sir Henry Newbolt, like Sir Sidney Colvin, no doubt, would hold that here Keats dismisses too slightingly his own best work. But how n.o.ble is Keats's dissatisfaction with himself! It is such n.o.ble dissatisfaction as this that distinguishes the great poets from the amateurs. Poetry and religion--the impulse is very much the same. The rest is but a parlour-game.

IX.--EDWARD YOUNG AS CRITIC

So little is Edward Young read in these days that we have almost forgotten how wide was his influence in the eighteenth century. It was not merely that he was popular in England, where his satires, _The Love of Fame, the Universal Pa.s.sion_, are said to have made him 3,000. He was also a power on the Continent. His _Night Thoughts_ was translated not only into all the major languages, but into Portuguese, Swedish and Magyar. It was adopted as one of the heralds of the romantic movement in France. Even his _Conjectures on Original Composition_, written in 1759 in the form of a letter to Samuel Richardson, earned in foreign countries a fame that has lasted till our own day. A new edition of the German translation was published at Bonn so recently as 1910. In England there is no famous author more a.s.siduously neglected. Not so much as a line is quoted from him in _The Oxford Book of English Verse_. I recently turned up a fairly full anthology of eighteenth-century verse only to find that though it has room for Mallet and Ambrose Phillips and Picken, Young has not been allowed to contribute a purple patch even five lines long. I look round my own shelves, and they tell the same story. Small enough poets stand there in s.h.i.+vering neglect. Akenside, Churchill and Parnell have all been thought worth keeping. But not on the coldest, topmost shelf has s.p.a.ce been found for Young. He scarcely survives even in popular quotations. The copy-books have perpetuated one line:

Procrastination is the thief of time.

Apart from that, _Night Thoughts_ have been swallowed up in an eternal night.

And certainly a study of the t.i.tles of his works will not encourage the average reader to go to him in search of treasures of the imagination. At the age of thirty, in 1713, he wrote a _Poem on the Last Day_, which he dedicated to Queen Anne. In the following year he wrote _The Force of Religion, or Vanquish'd Love_, a poem about Lady Jane Grey, which he dedicated to the Countess of Salisbury. And no sooner was Queen Anne dead than he made haste to salute the rising sun in an epistle _On the Late Queen's Death and His Majesty's Accession to the Throne_. Pa.s.sing over a number of years, we find him, in 1730, publis.h.i.+ng a so-called Pindaric ode, _Imperium Pelagi; a Naval Lyric_, in the preface to which he declares with characteristic italics: "_Trade_ is a very _n.o.ble_ subject in itself; more _proper_ than any for an Englishman; and particularly _seasonable_ at this juncture." Add to this that he was the son of a dean, that he married the daughter of an earl, and that, other means of advancement having failed, he became a clergyman at the age of between forty and fifty, and the suggested portrait is that of a prudent hanger-on rather than a fiery man of genius. His prudence was rewarded with a pension of 200 a year, a Royal Chaplaincy, and the position (after George III.'s accession) of Clerk of the Closet to the Princess Dowager. In the opinion of Young himself, who lived till the age of 82, the reward was inadequate. At the age of 79, however, he had conquered his disappointment to a sufficient degree to write a poem on _Resignation_.

Readers who, after a hasty glance at his biography, are inclined to look satirically on Young as a time-server, oily with the mediocrity of self-help, will have a pleasant surprise if they read his _Conjectures on Original Composition_ for the first time. It is a bold and masculine essay on literary criticism, written in a style of quite brilliant, if old-fas.h.i.+oned, rhetoric. Mrs. Thrale said of it: "In the _Conjectures upon Original Composition_ ... we shall perhaps read the wittiest piece of prose our whole language has to boast; yet from its over-twinkling, it seems too little gazed at and too little admired perhaps." This is an exaggerated estimate. Dr. Johnson, who heard Young read the _Conjectures_ at Richardson's house, said that "he was surprised to find Young receive as novelties what he thought very common maxims." If one tempers Mrs.

Thrale's enthusiasms and Dr. Johnson's scorn, one will have a fairly just idea of the quality of Young's book.

It is simply a shot fired with a good aim in the eternal war between authority and liberty in literature. This is a controversy for which, were men wise, there would be no need. We require in literature both the authority of tradition and the liberty of genius to such new conquests.

Unfortunately, we cannot agree as to the proportions in which each of them is required. The French exaggerated the importance of tradition, and so gave us the cla.s.sical drama of Racine and Corneille. Walt Whitman exaggerated the importance of liberty, and so gave us _Leaves of Gra.s.s_.

In nearly all periods of literary energy, we find writers rus.h.i.+ng to one or other of these extremes. Either they declare that the cla.s.sics are perfect and cannot be surpa.s.sed but only imitated; or, like the Futurists, they want to burn the cla.s.sics and release the spirit of man for new adventures. It is all a prolonged duel between reaction and revolution, and the wise man of genius doing his best, like a Liberal, to bring the two opponents to terms.

Much of the interest of Young's book is due to the fact that in an age of reaction he came out on the revolutionary side. There was seldom a time at which the cla.s.sics were more slavishly idolized and imitated. Miss Morley quotes from Pope the saying that "all that is left us is to recommend our productions by the imitation of the ancients." Young threw all his eloquence on the opposite side. He uttered the bold paradox: "The less we copy the renowned ancients, we shall resemble them the more." "Become a n.o.ble collateral," he advised, "not a humble descendant from them. Let us build our compositions in the spirit, and in the taste, of the ancients, but not with their materials. Thus will they resemble the structures of Pericles at Athens, which Plutarch commends for having had an air of antiquity as soon as they were built." He refuses to believe that the moderns are necessarily inferior to the ancients. If they are inferior, it is because they plagiarize from the ancients instead of emulating them.

"If ancients and moderns," he declares, "were no longer considered as masters, and pupils, but as hard-matched rivals for renown, then moderns, by the longevity of their labours, might one day become ancients themselves."

He deplores the fact that Pope should have been so content to indenture his genius to the work of translation and imitation:

Though we stand much obliged to him for giving us an Homer, yet had he doubled our obligation by giving us--a Pope. He had a strong imagination and the true sublime? That granted, we might have had two Homers instead of one, if longer had been his life; for I heard the dying swan talk over an epic plan a few weeks before his decease.

For ourselves, we hold that Pope showed himself to be as original as needs be in his epistles to Martha Blount and Dr. Arbuthnot. None the less, the general philosophy of Young's remarks is sound enough. We should reverence tradition in literature, but not superst.i.tiously. Too much awe of the old masters may easily scare a modern into hiding his talent in a napkin.

True, we are not in much danger of servitude to tradition in literature to-day. We no longer imitate the ancients; we only imitate each other. On the whole, we wish there was rather more sense of the tradition in contemporary writing. The danger of arbitrary egoism is quite as great as the danger of cla.s.sicism. Luckily, Young, in stating the case against the cla.s.sicists, has at the same time stated perfectly the case for familiarity with the cla.s.sics. "It is," he declares, "but a sort of n.o.ble contagion, from a general familiarity with their writings, and not by any particular sordid theft, that we can be the better for those who went before us," However we may deride a servile cla.s.sicism, we should always set out a.s.suming the necessity of the "n.o.ble contagion for every man of letters."

The truth is, the man of letters must in some way reconcile himself to the paradox that he is at once the acolyte and the rival of the ancients.

Young is optimistic enough to believe that it is possible to surpa.s.s them.

In the mechanic arts, he complains, men are always attempting to go beyond their predecessors; in the liberal arts, they merely try to follow them.

The a.n.a.logy between the continuous advance of science and a possible continuous advance in literature is perhaps, a misleading one. Professor Gilbert Murray, in _Religio Grammatici_, bases much of his argument on a denial that such an a.n.a.logy should be drawn. Literary genius cannot be bequeathed and added to as a scientific discovery can. The modern poet does not stand on Shakespeare's shoulders as the modern astronomer stands on Galileo's shoulders. Scientific discovery is progressive. Literary genius, like religious genius, is a miracle less dependent on time. None the less, we may reasonably believe that literature, like science, has ever new worlds to conquer--that, even if aeschylus and Shakespeare cannot be surpa.s.sed, names as great as theirs may one day be added to the roll of literary fame. And this will be possible only if men in each generation are determined, in the words of Goldsmith, "bravely to shake off admiration, and, undazzled by the splendour of another's reputation, to chalk out a path to fame for themselves, and boldly cultivate untried experiment." Goldsmith wrote these words in _The Bee_ in the same year in which Young's _Conjectures_ was published. I feel tolerably certain that he wrote them as a result of reading Young's work. The reaction against traditionalism, however, was gathering general force by this time, and the desire to be original was beginning to oust the desire to copy. Both Young's and Goldsmith's essays are exceedingly interesting as antic.i.p.ations of the romantic movement. Young was a true romantic when he wrote that Nature "brings us into the world all Originals--no two faces, no two minds, are just alike; but all bear evident marks of separation on them. Born Originals, how comes it to pa.s.s that we are Copies?" Genius, he thinks, is commoner than is sometimes supposed, if we would make use of it. His book is a plea for giving genius its head. He wants to see the modern writer, instead of tilling an exhausted soil, staking out a claim in the perfectly virgin field of his own experience. He cannot teach you to be a man of genius; he could not even teach himself to be one. But at least he lays down many of the right rules for the use of genius. His book marks a most interesting stage in the development of English literary criticism.

X.--GRAY AND COLLINS

There seems to be a definite connection between good writing and indolence. The men whom we call stylists have, most of them, been idlers.

From Horace to Robert Louis Stevenson, nearly all have been pigs from the sty of Epicurus. They have not, to use an excellent Anglo-Irish word, "industered" like insects or millionaires. The greatest men, one must admit, have mostly been as punctual at their labours as the sun--as fiery and inexhaustible. But, then, one does not think of the greatest writers as stylists. They are so much more than that. The style of Shakespeare is infinitely more marvellous than the style of Gray. But one hardly thinks of style in presence of the sea or a range of mountains or in reading Shakespeare. His munificent and gorgeous genius was as far above style as the statesmans.h.i.+p of Pericles or the sanct.i.ty of Joan of Arc was above good manners. The world has not endorsed Ben Jonson's retort to those who commended Shakespeare for never having "blotted out" a line: "Would he had blotted out a thousand!" We feel that so vast a genius is beyond the perfection of control we look for in a stylist. There may be badly-written scenes in Shakespeare, and pot-house jokes, and wordy hyperboles, but with all this there are enchanted continents left in him which we may continue to explore though we live to be a hundred.

The fact that the n.o.ble impatience of a Shakespeare is above our fault-finding, however, must not be used to disparage the lazy patience of good writing. An aeschylus or a Shakespeare, a Browning or a d.i.c.kens, conquers us with an abundance like nature's. He feeds us out of a horn, of plenty. This, unfortunately, is possible only to writers of the first order. The others, when they attempt profusion, become fluent rather than abundant, facile of ink rather than generous of golden grain. Who does not agree with Pope that Dryden, though not Shakespeare, would have been a better poet if he had learned:

The last and greatest art--the art to blot?

Who is there who would not rather have written a single ode of Gray's than all the poetical works of Southey? If voluminousness alone made a man a great writer, we should have to canonize Lord Lytton. The truth is, literary genius has no rule either of voluminousness or of the opposite.

The genius of one writer is a world ever moving. The genius of another is a garden often still. The greatest genius is undoubtedly of the former kind. But as there is hardly enough genius of this kind to fill a wall, much less a library, we may well encourage the lesser writers to cultivate their gardens, and, in the absence of the wilder tumult of creation, to delight us with blooms of leisurely phrase and quiet thought.

Gray and Collins were both writers who labored in little gardens. Collins, indeed, had a small flower-bed--perhaps only a pot, indeed--rather than a garden. He produced in it one perfect bloom--the _Ode to Evening_. The rest of his work is carefully written, inoffensive, historically interesting. But his continual personification of abstract ideas makes the greater part of his verse lifeless as allegories or as sculpture in a graveyard. He was a romantic, an inventor of new forms, in his own day. He seems academic to ours. His work is that of a man striking an att.i.tude rather than of one expressing the deeps of a pa.s.sionate nature. He is always careful not to confess. His _Ode to Fear_ does not admit us to any of the secrets of his maniacal and melancholy breast. It is an antic.i.p.ation of the fact.i.tious gloom of Byron, not of the nerve-shattered gloom of Dostoevsky. Collins, we cannot help feeling, says in it what he does not really think. He glorifies fear as though it were the better part of imagination, going so far as to end his ode with the lines:

O thou whose spirit most possessed, The sacred seat of Shakespeare's breast!

By all that from thy prophet broke In thy divine emotions spoke: Hither again thy fury deal, Teach me but once, like him, to feel; His cypress wreath my meed decree, And I, O Fear, will dwell with thee!

We have only to compare these lines with Claudio's terrible speech about death in _Measure for Measure_ to see the difference between pretence and pa.s.sion in literature. Shakespeare had no fear of telling us what he knew about fear. Collins lived in a more reticent century, and attempted to fob off a disease on us as an accomplishment. What perpetually delights us in the _Ode to Evening_ is that here at least Collins can tell the truth without falsification or chilling rhetoric. Here he is writing of the world as he has really seen it and been moved by it. He still makes use of personifications, but they have been trans.m.u.ted by his emotion into imagery. In these exquisite formal unrhymed lines, Collins has summed up his view and dream of life. One knows that he was not lying or bent upon expressing any other man's experiences but his own when he described how the

Air is hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat, With short shrill shriek flits by on leathern wing, Or where the beetle winds His small but sullen horn.

He speaks here, not in the stiffness of rhetoric, but in the liberty of a new mood, never, for all he knew or cared, expressed before. As far as all the rest of his work is concerned, his pa.s.sion for style is more or less wasted. But the _Ode to Evening_ justifies both his pains and his indolence. As for the pains he took with his work, we have it on the authority of Thomas Warton that "all his odes ... had the marks of repeated correction: he was perpetually changing his epithets." As for his indolence, his uncle, Colonel Martin, thought him "too indolent even for the Army," and advised him to enter the Church--a step from which he was dissuaded, we are told, by "a tobacconist in Fleet Street." For the rest, he was the son of a hatter, and went mad. He is said to have haunted the cloisters of Chichester Cathedral during his fits of melancholia, and to have uttered a strange accompaniment of groans and howls during the playing of the organ. The Castle of Indolence was for Collins no keep of the pleasures. One may doubt if it is ever this for any artist. Did not even Horace attempt to escape into Stoicism? Did not Stevenson write _Pulvis et Umbra_?