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The Study Of Poetry, Part II.
The Study Of Poetry, Part II.
If we ask ourselves wherein consists the immense superiority of Chaucer`s
poetry over the romance - poetry - why it is that in passing from this to
Chaucer we suddenly feel ourselves to be in another world, we shall find that
his superiority is both in the substance of his poetry and in the style of his
poetry. His superiority in substance is given by his large, free, simple,
clear yet kindly view of human life, - so unlike the total want, in the
romance - poets, of all intelligent command of it. Chaucer has not their
helplessness; he has gained the power to survey the world from a central, a
truly human point of view. We have only to call to mind the Prologue to The
Canterbury Tales. The right comment upon it is Dryden`s: `It is sufficient to
say, according to the proverb, that here is God`s plenty.` And again: `He is a
perpetual fountain of good sense.` It is by a large, free, sound
representation of things, that poetry, this high criticism of life, has truth
of substance; and Chaucer`s poetry has truth of substance.
Of his style and manner, if we think first of the romance - poetry and
then of Chaucer`s divine liquidness of diction, his divine fluidity of
movement, it is difficult to speak temperately. They are irresistible, and
justify all the rapture with which his successors speak of his `gold dew -
drops of speech.` Johnson misses the point entirely when he finds fault with
Dryden for ascribing to Chaucer the first refinement of our numbers, and says
that Gower also can show smooth numbers and easy rhymes. The refinement of our
numbers means something far more than this. A nation may have versifiers with
smooth numbers and easy rhymes, and yet may have no real poetry at all.
Chaucer is the father of our splendid English poetry; he is our `well of
English undefiled,` because by the lovely charm of his diction, the lovely
charm of his movement, he makes an epoch and founds a tradition. In Spenser,
Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, we can follow the tradition of the liquid diction,
the fluid movement of Chaucer; at one time it is his liquid diction of which
in these poets we feel the virtue, and at another time it is his fluid
movement. And the virtue is irresistible.
Bounded as is my space, I must yet find room for an example of Chaucer`s
virtue, as I have given examples to show the virtue of the great classics. I
feel disposed to say that a single line is enough to show the charm of
Chaucer`s verse; that merely one line like this -
`O martyr souded^6 in virginitee!`
[Footnote 6: The French soude; soldered, fixed fast.]
has a virtue of manner and movement such as we shall not find in all the verse
of romance - poetry; - but this is saying nothing. The virtue is such as we
shall not find, perhaps, in all English poetry, outside the poets whom I have
named as the special inheritors of Chaucer`s tradition. A single line,
however, is too little if we have not the strain of Chaucer`s verse well in
our memory; let us take a stanza. It is from The Prioress` Tale, the story of
the Christian child murdered in a Jewry -
`My throte is cut unto my nekke - bone
Saide this child, and as by way of kinde
I should have deyd, yea, longe time agone;
But Jesus Christ, as ye in bookes finde,
Will that his glory last and be in minde,
And for the worship of his mother dere
Yet may I sing O Alma loud and clere.`
Wordsworth has modernised this Tale, and to feel how delicate and evanescent
is the charm of verse, we have only to read Wordsworth`s first three lines of
this stanza after Chaucer`s -
`My throat is cut unto the bone, I trow,
Said this young child, and by the law of kind
I should have died, yea, many hours ago.`
The charm is departed. It is often said that the power of liquidness and
fluidity in Chaucer`s verse was dependent upon a free, a licentious dealing
with language, such as is now impossible; upon a liberty, such as Burns too
enjoyed, of making words like neck, bird, into a disyllable by adding to
them, and words like cause, rhyme, into a disyllable by sounding the e mute.
It is true that Chaucer`s fluidity is conjoined with this liberty, and is
admirably served by it; but we ought not to say that it was dependent upon it.
It was dependent upon his talent. Other poets with a like liberty do not
attain to the fluidity of Chaucer; Burns himself does not attain to it. Poets,
again, who have a talent akin to Chaucer`s, such as Shakespeare or Keats, have
known how to attain his fluidity without the like liberty.
And yet Chaucer is not one of the great classics. His poetry transcends
and effaces, easily and without effort, all the romance - poetry of Catholic
Christendom; it transcends and effaces all the English poetry contemporary
with it, it transcends and effaces all the English poetry subsequent to it
down to the age of Elizabeth. Of such avail is poetic truth of substance, in
its natural and necessary union with poetic truth of style. And yet, I say,
Chaucer is not one of the great classics. He has not their accent. What is
wanting to him is suggested by the mere mention of the name of the first great
classic of Christendom, the immortal poet who died eighty years before
Chaucer, - Dante. The accent of such verse as
`In la sua volontade e nostra pace . . . `
is altogether beyond Chaucer`s reach; we praise him, but we feel that this
accent is out of the question for him. It may be said that it was necessarily
out of the reach of any poet in the England of that stage of growth. Possibly;
but we are to adopt a real, not a historic, estimate of poetry. However we may
account for its absence, something is wanting, then, to the poetry of Chaucer,
which poetry must have before it can be placed in the glorious class of the
best. And there is no doubt what that something is. It is the bnoudalorns, the
high and excellent seriousness, which Aristotle assigns as one of the grand
virtues of poetry. The substance of Chaucer`s poetry, his view of things and
his criticism of life, has largeness, freedom, shrewdness, benignity; but it
has not this high seriousness. Homer`s criticism of life has it, Dante`s has
it, Shakespeare`s has it. It is this chiefly which gives to our spirits what
they can rest upon; and with the increasing demands of our modern ages upon
poetry, this virtue of giving us what we can rest upon will be more and more
highly esteemed. A voice from the slums of Paris, fifty or sixty years after
Chaucer, the voice of poor Villon out of his life of riot and crime, has at
its happy moments (as, for instance, in the last stanza of La Belle
Heaulmiere^7) more of this important poetic virtue of seriousness than all
the productions of Chaucer. But its apparition in Villon, and in men like
Villon, is fitful; the greatness of the great poets, the power of their
criticism of life, is that their virtue is sustained.
[Footnote 7: The name Heaulmiere is said to be derived from a head-dress
(helm) worn as a mark by courtesans. In Villon`s ballad, a poor old creature
of this class laments her days of youth and beauty. The last stanza of the
ballad runs thus -
`Ainsi le bon temps regretons
Entre nous, pauvres vieilles sottes,
Assises bas, a croppetons,
Tout en ung tas comme pelottes;
A petit feu de chenevottes
Tost allumees, tost estainctes.
Et jadis fusmes si mignottes!
Ainsi en prend a maintz et maintes.`
`Thus amongst ourselves we regret the good time, poor silly old things,
low - seated on our heels, all in a heap like so many balls; by a little fire
of hemp - stalks, soon lighted, soon spent. And once we were such darlings! So
fares it with many and many a one.`]
To our praise, therefore, of Chaucer as a poet there must be this
limitation; he lacks the high seriousness of the great classics, and therewith
an important part of their virtue. Still, the main fact for us to bear in mind
about Chaucer is his sterling value according to that real estimate which we
firmly adopt for all poets. He has poetic truth of substance, though he has
not high poetic seriousness, and corresponding to his truth of substance he
has an exquisite virtue of style and manner. With him is born our real poetry.
For my present purpose I need not dwell on our Elizabethan poetry, or on
the continuation and close of this poetry in Milton. We all of us profess to
be agreed in the estimate of this poetry; we all of us recognise it as great
poetry, our greatest, and Shakespeare and Milton as our poetical classics. The
real estimate, here, has universal currency. With the next age of our poetry
divergency and difficulty begin. An historic estimate of that poetry has
established itself; and the question is, whether it will be found to coincide
with the real estimate.
The age of Dryden, together with our whole eighteenth century which
followed it, sincerely believed itself to have produced poetical classics of
its own, and even to have made advance, in poetry, beyond all its
predecessors. Dryden regards as not seriously disputable the opinion `that the
sweetness of English verse was never understood or practised by our fathers.`
Cowley could see nothing at all in Chaucer`s poetry. Dryden heartily admired
it, and, as we have seen, praised its matter admirably; but of its exquisite
manner and movement all he can find to say is that `there is the rude
sweetness of a Scotch tune in it, which is natural and pleasing, though not
perfect.` Addison, wishing to praise Chaucer`s numbers, compares them with
Dryden`s own. And all through the eighteenth century, and down even into our
own times, the stereotyped phrase of approbation for good verse found in our
early poetry has been, that it even approached the verse of Dryden, Addison,
Pope, and Johnson.
Are Dryden and Pope poetical classics? Is the historic estimate, which
represents them as such, and which has been so long established that it cannot
easily give way, the real estimate? Wordsworth and Coleridge, as is well
known, denied it; but the authority of Wordsworth and Coleridge does not weigh
much with the young generation, and there are many signs to show that the
eighteenth century and its judgments are coming into favour again. Are the
favourite poets of the eighteenth century classics?
It is impossible within my present limits to discuss the question fully.
And what man of letters would not shrink from seeming to dispose dictatorially
of the claims of two men who are, at any rate, such masters in letters as
Dryden and Pope; two men of such admirable talent, both of them, and one of
them, Dryden, a man, on all sides, of such energetic and genial power? And
yet, if we are to gain the full benefit from poetry, we must have the real
estimate of it. I cast about for some mode of arriving, in the present case,
at such an estimate without offence. And perhaps the best way is to begin, as
it is easy to begin, with cordial praise.
When we find Chapman, the Elizabethan translator of Homer, expressing
himself in this preface thus: "Though truth in her very nakedness sits in so
deep a pit, that from Gades to Aurora and Ganges few eyes can sound her, I
hope yet those few here will so discover and confirm that, the date being out
of her darkness in this morning of our poet, he shall now gird his temples
with the sun,` - we pronounce that such a prose is intolerable. When we find
Milton writing: `And long it was not after, when I was confirmed in this
opinion, that he, who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well
hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem,` - we pronounce
that such a prose has its own grandeur, but that it is obsolete and
inconvenient. But when we find Dryden telling us: `What Virgil wrote in the
vigour of his age, in plenty and at ease, I have undertaken to translate in my
declining years; struggling with wants, oppressed with sickness, curbed in my
genius, liable to be misconstrued in all I write,` - then we exclaim that here
at last we have the true English prose, a prose such as we would all gladly
use if we only knew how. Yet Dryden was Milton`s contemporary.
But after the Restoration the time had come when our nation felt the
imperious need of a fit prose. So, too, the time had likewise come when our
nation felt the imperious need of freeing itself from the absorbing
preoccupation which religion in the Puritan age had exercised. It was
impossible that this freedom should be brought about without some negative
excess, without some neglect and impairment of the religious life of the soul;
and the spiritual history of the eighteenth century shows us that the freedom
was not achieved without them. Still, the freedom was achieved; the
preoccupation, an undoubtedly baneful and retarding one if it had continued,
was got rid of. And as with religion amongst us at that period, so it was also
with letters. A fit prose was a necessity; but it was impossible that a fit
prose should establish itself amongst us without some touch of frost to the
imaginative life of the soul. The needful qualities for a fit prose are
regularity, uniformity, precision, balance. The men of letters, whose destiny
it may be to bring their nation to the attainment of a fit prose, must of
necessity, whether they work in prose or in verse, give a predominating, an
almost exclusive attention to the qualities of regularity, uniformity,
precision, balance. But an almost exclusive attention to these qualities
involves some repression and silencing of poetry.
We are to regard Dryden as the puissant and glorious founder, Pope as the
splendid high priest, of our age of prose and reason, of our excellent and
indispensable eighteenth century. For the purposes of their mission and
destiny their poetry, like their prose, is admirable. Do you ask me whether
Dryden`s verse, take it almost where you will, is not good?
`A milk - white Hind, immortal and unchanged,
Fed on the lawns and in the forest ranged.`
I answer: Admirable for the purposes of the inaugurator of an age of prose and
reason. Do you ask me whether Pope`s verse, take it almost where you will, is
not good?
`To Hounslow Heath I point, and Banstead Down;
`Thence comes your mutton, and these chicks my own.`
I answer: Admirable for the purposes of the high priest of an age of prose and
reason. But do you ask me whether such verse proceeds from men with an
adequate poetic criticism of life, from men whose criticism of life has a high
seriousness, or even, without that high seriousness, has poetic largeness,
freedom, insight, benignity? Do you ask me whether the application of ideas to
life in the verse of these men, often a powerful application, no doubt, is a
powerful poetic application? Do you ask me whether the poetry of these men has
either the matter or the inseparable manner of such an adequate poetic
criticism; whether it has the accent of
`Absent thee from felicity awhile ...`
or of
`And what is else not to be overcome . . .`
or of
`O martyr souded in virginitee!`
I answer: It has not and cannot have them; it is the poetry of the
builders of an age of prose and reason. Though they may write in verse, though
they may in a certain sense be masters of the art of versification, Dryden and
Pope are not classics of our poetry, they are classics of our prose.
Gray is our poetical classic of that literature and age; the position of
Gray is singular, and demands a word of notice here. He has not the volume or
the power of poets who, coming in times more favourable, have attained to an
independent criticism of life. But he lived with the great poets, he lived,
above all, with the Greeks, through perpetually studying and enjoying them;
and he caught their poetic point of view for regarding life, caught their
poetic manner. The point of view and the manner are not self - sprung in him,
he caught them of others; and he had not the free and abundant use of them.
But, whereas Addison and Pope never had the use of them, Gray had the use of
them at times. He is the scantiest and frailest of classics in our poetry, but
he is a classic.
And now, after Gray, we are met, as we draw towards the end of the
eighteenth century, we are met by the great name of Burns. We enter now on
times where the personal estimate of poets begins to be rife, and where the
real estimate of them is not reached without difficulty. But in spite of the
disturbing pressures of personal partiality, of national partiality, let us
try to reach a real estimate of the poetry of Burns.
By his English poetry Burns in general belongs to the eighteenth century,
and has little importance for us.
`Mark ruffian Violence, distain`d with crimes,
Rousing elate in these degenerate times;
View unsuspecting Innocence a prey,
As guileful Fraud points out the erring way;
While subtle Litigation`s pliant tongue
The life - blood equal sucks of Right and Wrong!`
Evidently this is not the real Burns, or his name and fame would have
disappeared long ago. Nor is Clarinda`s love - poet, Sylvander, the real Burns
either. But he tells us himself: `These English songs gravel me to death. I
have not the command of the language that I have of my native tongue. In fact,
I think that my ideas are more barren in English than in Scotch. I have been
at Duncan Gray to dress it in English, but all I can do is desperately
stupid.` We English turn naturally, in Burns, to the poems in our own
language, because we can read them easily; but in those poems we have not
the real Burns.
The real Burns is of course in this Scotch poems. Let us boldly say that
of much of this poetry, a poetry dealing perpetually with Scotch drink, Scotch
religion, and Scotch manners, A Scotchman`s estimate is apt to be personal. A
Scotchman is used to this world of Scotch drink, Scotch religion, and Scotch
manners; he has a tenderness for it; he meets its poet halfway. In this tender
mood he reads pieces like the Holy Fair or Halloween. But this world of Scotch
drink, Scotch religion, and Scotch manners is against a poet, not for him,
when it is not a partial countryman who reads him; for in itself it is not a
beautiful world, and no one can deny that it is of advantage to a poet to deal
with a beautiful world. Burns` world of Scotch drink, Scotch religion, and
Scotch manners, is often a harsh, a sordid, a repulsive world: even the world
of his Cotter`s Saturday Night is not a beautiful world. No doubt a poet`s
criticism of life may have such truth and power that it triumphs over its
world and delights us. Burns may triumph over his world, often he does triumph
over his world, but let us observe how and where. Burns is the first case we
have had where the bias of the personal estimate tends to mislead; let us look
at him closely, he can bear it.
Many of his admirers will tell us that we have Burns, convivial, genuine,
delightful, here -
`Leeze me on drink! it gies us mair
Than either school or college;
It kindles wit, it waukens lair,
It pangs us fou o`knowledge.
Be`t whisky gill or penny wheep
Or only stronger potion,
It never fails, on drinking deep,
To kittle up our notion
By night or day.`
There is a great deal of that sort of thing in Burns, and it is
unsatisfactory, not because it is bacchanalian poetry, but because it has not
that accent of sincerity which bacchanalian poetry, to do it justice, very
often has. There is something in it of bravado, something which makes us feel
that we have not the man speaking to us with his real voice; something,
therefore, poetically unsound.
With still more confidence will his admirers tell us that we have the
genuine Burns, the great poet, when his strain asserts the independence,
equality, dignity, of men, as in the famous song For a` that, and a` that -
`A prince can mak` a belted knight,
A marquis, duke, and a` that;
But an honest man`s aboon his might,
Guid faith he mauna fa` that!
For a` that, and a` that,
Their dignities, and a` that,
The pith o` sense, a pride o` worth,
Are higher rank than a` that.`
Here they find his grand, genuine touches; and still more, when this
puissant genius, who so often set morality at defiance, falls moralising -
`The sacred lowe o` weel - placed love
Luxuriantly indulge it;
But never tempt th` illicit rove,
Tho` naething should divulge it.
I waive the quantum o` the sin,
The hazard o` concealing,
But och! it hardens a` within,
And petrifies the feeling.`
Or in a higher strain -
`Who made the heart, `tis He alone
Decidedly can try us;
He knows each chord, its various tone;
Each spring, its various bias.
Then at the balance let`s be mute,
We never can adjust it;
What`s done we partly may compute, But know not what`s resisted.`
Or in a better strain yet, a strain, his admirers will say, unsurpassable -
To make a happy fireside clime
To weans and wife,
That`s the true pathos and sublime
Of human life.`
There is criticism of life for you, the admirers of Burns will say to us;
there is the application of ideas to life! There is, undoubtedly. The doctrine
of the last - quoted lines coincides almost exactly with what was the aim and
end, Xenophon tells us, of all the teaching of Socrates. And the application
is a powerful one; made by a man of vigorous understanding, and (need I say?)
a master of language.
But for supreme poetical success more is required than the powerful
application of ideas to life; it must be an application under the conditions
fixed by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty. Those laws fix as an
essential condition, in the poet`s treatment of such matters as are here in
question, high seriousness; - the high seriousness which comes from absolute
sincerity. The accent of high seriousness, born of absolute sincerity, is what
gives to such verse as
`In la sua volontade e nostra pace . . .`
to such criticism of life as Dante`s, its power. Is this accent felt in
the passages which I have been quoting from Burns? Surely not; surely, if our
sense is quick, we must perceive that we have not in those passages a voice
from the very inmost soul of the genuine Burns; he is not speaking to us from
these depths, he is more or less preaching. And the compensation for admiring
such passages less, from missing the perfect poetic accent in them, will be
that we shall admire more the poetry where that accent is found.
No; Burns, like Chaucer, comes short of the high seriousness of the great
classics, and the virtue of matter and manner which goes with that high
seriousness is wanting to his work. At moments he touches it in a profound and
passionate melancholy, as in those four immortal lines taken by Byron as a
motto for The Bride of Abydos, but which have in them a depth of poetic
quality such as resides in no verse of Byron`s own -
`Had we never loved sae kindly,
Had we never loved sae blindly,
Never met, or never parted,
We had ne`er been broken - hearted.`
But a whole poem of that quality Burns cannot make; the rest, in the
Farewell to Nancy, is verbiage.
We arrive best at the real estimate of Burns, I think, by conceiving his
work as having truth of matter and truth of manner, but not the accent or the
poetic virtue of the highest masters. His genuine criticism of life, when the
sheer poet in him speaks, is ironic; it is not -
`Thou Power Supreme, whose mighty scheme
These woes of mine fulfil,
Here firm I rest, they must be best
Because they are Thy will!`
It is far rather: Whistle owre the lave o`t! Yet we may say of him as of
Chaucer, that of life and the world, as they come before him, his view is
large, free, shrewd, benignant, - truly poetic therefore; and his manner of
rendering what he sees is to match. But we must note, at the same time, his
great difference from Chaucer. The freedom of Chaucer is heightened, in Burns,
by a fiery, reckless energy; the benignity of Chaucer deepens, in Burns, into
an overwhelming sense of the pathos of things; - of the pathos of human
nature, the pathos, also, of non - human nature. Instead of the fluidity of
Chaucer`s manner, the manner of Burns has spring, boundless swiftness. Burns
is by far the greater force, though he has perhaps less charm. The world of
Chaucer is fairer, richer, more significant than that of Burns; but when the
largeness and freedom of Burns get full sweep, as in Tam o` Shanter, or still
more in that puissant and splendid production, The Jolly Beggars, his world
may be what it will, his poetic genius triumphs over it. In the world of The
Jolly Beggars there is more than hideousness and squalor, there is bestiality;
yet the piece is a superb poetic success. It has a breadth, truth, and power
which make the famous scene in Auerbach`s Cellar, of Goethe`s Faust, seem
artificial and tame beside it, and which are only matched by Shakespeare and
Aristophanes.
Here, where his largeness and freedom serve him so admirably, and also in
those poems and songs where to shrewdness he adds infinite archness and wit,
and to benignity infinite pathos, where his manner is flawless, and a perfect
poetic whole is the result, - in things like the address to the mouse whose
home he had ruined, in things like Duncan Gray, Tam Glen, Whistle and I`ll
come to you, my Lad, Auld Lang Syne (this list might be made much longer), -
here we have the genuine Burns, of whom the real estimate must be high indeed.
Not a classic, nor with the excellent bnoudalorns of the great classics, nor
with a verse rising to a criticism of life and a virtue like theirs; but a
poet with thorough truth of substance and an answering truth of style, giving
us a poetry sound to the core. We all of us have a leaning towards the
pathetic, and may be inclined perhaps to prize Burns most for his touches of
piercing, sometimes almost intolerable, pathos; for verse like -
`We twa hae paidl`t i` the burn
From mornin` sun till dine;
But seas between us braid hae roar`d
Sin auld lang syne . . .`
where he is as lovely as he is sound. But perhaps it is by the perfection
of soundness of his lighter and archer masterpieces that he is poetically most
wholesome for us. For the votary misled by a personal estimate of Shelley,
as so many of us have been, are, and will be, - of that beautiful spirit
building his many - coloured haze of words and images
`Pinnacled dim in the intense inane` -
no contact can be wholesomer than the contact with Burns at his archest and
soundest. Side by side with the
`On the brink of the night and the morning
My coursers are wont to respire,
But the Earth has just whispered a warning
That their flight must be swifter than fire . . .`
of Prometheus Unbound, how salutary, how very salutary, to place this from
Tam Glen -
`My minnie does constantly deave me
And bids me beware o` young men;
They flatter, she says, to deceive me;
But wha can think sae o` Tam Glen?`
But we enter on burning ground as we approach the poetry of times so near
to us - poetry like that of Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth - of which the
estimates are so often not only personal, but personal with passion. For my
purpose, it is enough to have taken the single case of Burns, the first poet
we come to of whose work the estimate formed is evidently apt to be personal,
and to have suggested how we may proceed, using the poetry of the great
classics as a sort of touchstone, to correct this estimate, as we had
previously corrected by the same means the historic estimate where we met with
it. A collection like the present, with its succession of celebrated names and
celebrated poems, offers a good opportunity to us for resolutely endeavouring
to make our estimates of poetry real. I have sought to point out a method
which will help us in making them so, and to exhibit it in use so far as to
put any one who likes in a way of applying it for himself.
At any rate the end to which the method and the estimate are designed to
lead, and from leading to which, if they do lead to it, they get their whole
value, - the benefit of being able clearly to feel and deeply to enjoy the
best, the truly classic, in poetry, - is an end, let me say it once more at
parting, of supreme importance. We are often told that an era is opening in
which we are to see multitudes of a common sort of readers, and masses of a
common sort of literature; that such readers do not want and could not relish
anything better than such literature, and that to provide it is becoming a
vast and profitable industry. Even if good literature entirely lost currency
with the world, it would still be abundantly worth while to continue to enjoy
it by oneself. But it never will lose currency with the world, in spite of
monetary appearances; it never will lose supremacy. Currency and supremacy are
insured to it, not indeed by the world`s deliberate and conscious choice, but
by something far deeper, - by the instinct of self - preservation in humanity.
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