The present age can hardly be reproached either with an absence of
admirers or with a lack of self-complacency. Even its most fervid
flatterers, however, ever and anon admit that it exhibits a few trifling
defects; and among these is sometimes named a diminution of popular
interest in poetic literature. Some have attributed this decline to one
cause, some to another; but the fact can hardly be disputed. The Heavenly
Muse is suffering a partial eclipse. The gross and material substance of
the earth has somehow got between her and the Soul, that source and centre
of her gentle light; and some enthusiasts aver that with the progress of
Science and the production at will of its precise and steadfast lights,
fitful luminaries of night may henceforth be dispensed with. But spiritual
eclipses, though not to be predicted with the accuracy with which physical
eclipses are foretold, and though unfortunately they endure for longer
periods, are equally transitory; and the nineteenth century was scarcely
original, nor will its successor prove to be correct, in fancying that the
garish and obedient flame of material philosophy will prove a satisfactory
substitute for the precious, if precarious illumination of the Spirit.
Among the causes that have contributed to divert popular affection and
popular sympathy from poetical literature, there are three that deserve to
be specially indicated. The first of these is the multiplication of prose
romances, which, though so much lower in literary value and in artistic
character than poetry, and so much less elevating in their tendency, are
better fitted to stimulate the vulgar imagination, and minister more
freely to the common craving for excitement. The second cause is the
reaction that has settled upon mankind from the fervid hopes inspired by
the propagation of those theories and the propounding of those promises
which the historian associates with the French Revolution. All saner minds
have long since discovered that happiness is to be procured neither for
the individual nor for the community by mere political changes; and the
discovery has been distinctly hostile to literary enthusiasm. Finally,
many poets, and nearly all the critics of poetry, in our time, seem
determined to alienate ordinary human beings from contact with the Muse.
The world is easily persuaded that it is an ignoramus; and the vast
majority of people, after being told, year after year, that what they do
not understand is poetry, and what they do not care one straw about is the
proper theme and the highest expression of song, end by concluding that
poetry has become a mystery beyond their intelligence, a sort of
freemasonry from whose symbols they are jealously excluded. Unable to
appreciate what the critics tell them are the noblest productions of
genius, they modestly infer that between genius and themselves there is no
method of communication; and incapable of reading with pleasure the poetry
they are assured ought to fill them with rapture, they desist from reading
poetry altogether. They have not the self-confidence to choose their own
poets and select their own poetry; and indeed in these days, the only
chance any writer has of being read is that he should first be greatly
talked about. Thus, what between the poets who are talked about by
so-called experts, and thus made notorious, but whom ordinary folks find
unreadable, and the poets, if there be any such, whom ordinary folks would
read with pleasure if they knew of their existence, but of whom they have
scarcely heard, poetry has become “caviare to the general,” who content
themselves with the coarser flavour of the novel, and the more easily
digested pabulum of the newspaper.
But if poetry is now comparatively little read, no one can deny that it is
much written about; and many persons would perhaps see in the second of
these facts a reason for doubting the reality of the first. But the
contradiction is only apparent. Poetry is the subject at present of much
prose criticism, prose exposition, and prose controversy; but the
controversialists are largely the poets themselves, or those who aspire to
the title. The subject is treated by them with much earnestness, indeed
with some little heat; and it is easy to perceive that the main object of
most of the disputants is to establish the superiority of the poet whom
the critic himself most admires, and possibly whom he himself most
resembles. The controversy rages around those poets alone who are claimed
by the nineteenth century, and practically, these are five in number;
Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth. Each of these has his
votaries, his disciples, his passionate advocates. The public look on, a
little bewildered; for who is to decide when doctors disagree? Few, if
any, of the disputants lay down explicit canons respecting poetry, which
may enable a competent bystander to play the part of umpire even to his
own satisfaction; and he is left, like the controversialists themselves,
to abide by his own personal tastes, and to estimate poets and poetry
according to his individual fancy.
It was therefore with no slight satisfaction one heard that one of our
poets, who is likewise a critic, but who brings to his criticisms
moderation of language and measure of statement, was about to appraise the
English poets who have written in this century, but who have for many
years joined the Immortals. To Mr. Matthew Arnold, if to any one amongst
us, may be applied the passage from Wordsworth, to be found in the
“Supplementary Essay” published in 1815:
Whither then shall we turn for that union of qualifications which
must necessarily exist before the decisions of a critic can be of
absolute value? For a mind at once poetical and philosophical; for a
critic whose affections are as free and kindly as the spirit of
society, and whose understanding is severe as that of dispassionate
government? Where are we to look for that initiatory composure of
mind which no selfishness can disturb; for a natural sensibility that
has been tutored into correctness, without losing anything of its
quickness; and for active faculties, capable of answering the demands
which an author of original imagination shall make upon them,
associated with a judgment that cannot be duped into admiration by
aught that is unworthy of it? Among those, and those only, who, never
having suffered their youthful love of poetry to remit much of its
force, have applied to the consideration of the laws of this art the
best power of their understandings.
To Mr. Arnold, if to any, we say, this enumeration of the qualities
indispensable to a trustworthy critic of poetry, may be applied; and if
the conclusions at which he bids us to arrive should not turn out to be
such as we can wholly accept, at least we shall have the satisfaction of
feeling that we dissent from one who has not invited our attention in
vain, and who perhaps, by the avowals he incidentally makes in the course
of his argument, has enabled us to hold with all the more confidence
certain opinions which we will endeavour to establish by independent
reasons of our own.
Here, with sufficient brevity for the present, is the conclusion of Mr.
Arnold on the vexed question of the primacy among English poets, no longer
living, of the last century:
I place Wordsworth’s poetry above Byron’s, on the whole, although in
some points he was greatly Byron’s inferior. But these two,
Wordsworth and Byron, stand, it seems to me, first and pre-eminent in
actual performance, a glorious pair, among the English poets of this
century. Keats had probably, indeed, a more consummate poetic gift
than either of them; but he died having produced too little and being
as yet too immature to rival them. I for my part can never ever think
of equalling with them any other of their contemporaries; either
Coleridge, poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium; or
Shelley, beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his
luminous wings in vain. Wordsworth and Byron stand out by themselves.
When the year 1900 is turned, and our nation comes to recount her
poetic glories in the century which has just then ended, the first
names with her will be these.
We do not propose to traverse the entire field of controversy here lightly
indicated; our purpose being to confine ourselves to a consideration of
Mr. Arnold’s particular conclusion, that Wordsworth’s poetry should be
placed above Byron’s. But before passing to that duty, we may say,
parenthetically, that though we agree with Mr. Arnold that Shelley’s
poetry often exhibits a lamentable “want of sound subject-matter,” the
claims of the “beautiful and ineffectual angel” are here somewhat
summarily dismissed; and that when Mr. Arnold says further that he “doubts
whether Shelley’s delightful Essays and Letters, which deserve to be far
more read than they are now, will not resist the wear and tear of time
better, and finally come to stand higher than his poetry,” he makes us
lift our eyes in sheer amazement, and somewhat more than doubt whether
this will not prove to be among the utterly falsified prophecies of very
able critics.
Holding the opinion he does concerning Wordsworth and Byron, Mr. Arnold
has published a selection from the works of both, in distinct and separate
volumes, and he believes that he has thereby rendered an equal service to
each. “Alone,” he writes, “among our poets of the earlier part of this
century, Byron and Wordsworth not only furnish material enough for a
volume of this kind, but also, it seems to me, they both of them gain
considerably by being thus exhibited.” We, on the contrary, submit that if
the comparison is to end here, and is to be confined to the results
produced by Mr. Arnold’s method, a more unjust and inadequate method, as
far as Byron is concerned, could not possibly be resorted to. Wordsworth
gains considerably, but Byron loses considerably, to employ Mr. Arnold’s
language, by being thus exhibited. No doubt, Mr. Arnold means to be just.
He always means to be just. But in the very description he gives of the
contents of these two volumes on their respective title-pages, does he not
betray a sort of unconscious consciousness that he is dealing with two
very different poets, and with two poets whose works are very different?
If this be not so, how comes it that he calls one volume “Poems” of
Wordsworth, and the other “Poetry” of Byron? The distinction is a
genuine one. Indeed, it is something more than genuine; it was inevitable,
and Mr. Arnold was obliged to make it, if the title of each volume was to
describe its contents correctly. The best poems of Wordsworth are short,
most of them remarkably short; and therefore, in a volume of selections
from his works, they can without difficulty be presented in their
integrity. The best poems of Byron, like the best poems of Æschylus, of
Virgil, of Dante, of Shakespeare, of Milton, are of considerable length;
and if selections from Byron are to be made, his best poems must be
mutilated for the purpose. Mr. Arnold has mutilated them accordingly.
Thus, while intending to treat Wordsworth and Byron in precisely the same
manner, he has treated them, and by the very conditions of the case could
not help treating them, in an entirely different manner.
That Mr. Arnold has not been altogether insensible to this objection—and,
indeed, with his calm and dispassionate penetration, he was not likely to
be—is apparent not only in the different description he gives of the
contents of the two volumes, on their respective title-pages, but from
certain observations in his prefatory essay upon Byron. When he says that
“there are portions of Byron’s poetry which are far higher in worth, and
far more free from fault than others,” or that “Byron cannot but be a
gainer by having attention concentrated upon what is vivid, powerful,
effective, in his work, and withdrawn from what is not so,” he is, we
would suggest, stating nothing more than a truism, or what is equally true
of every poet. He is only beating the air, and hesitating to close with
the real difficulty with which he feels himself confronted. But when he
proceeds to urge that “Byron has not a great artist’s profound and patient
skill in combining an action or in developing a character,—a skill which
we must watch and follow if we are to do justice to it,” he shows that he
feels it to be necessary to offer a defence for applying to Byron a
treatment from which Byron may possibly suffer. We confess, with all our
admiration for Mr. Arnold—and it is as deep as it is sincere—we have
never been able to resist the suspicion that he is tant soit peu a
sophist; and surely it is sophistry, in the course of an attempt to show
that Byron and Wordsworth each equally gain by the “selection” method of
treatment, to urge, with that air of tranquil and well-bred triumph of
which Mr. Arnold is so consummate a master, that “to take passages from
work produced as Byron’s was, is a very different thing from taking
passages out of the Œdipus or the Tempest and deprives the poetry
far less of its advantage”? For the question is not whether Sophocles,
Shakespeare, and Byron may be treated ostensibly in the same manner by an
editor of selections, without injustice being done to any of them, but
whether Wordsworth and Byron can. That is the question; and it is not
answered, but avoided, by altering the terms of the proposition.
What, therefore, really remains of this plea of Mr. Arnold’s, this excuse
for mutilating Byron’s poems and presenting them in fragments, is the
allegation that Byron is not, above and before all things, a great,
patient, and systematic artist. That much may be granted; and no competent
critic would deny it. But more cannot be granted than is strictly true;
and candour equally demands that it should be admitted that though Byron
was not long-suffering and far-reaching enough in the conception of his
poems, nor careful and self-critical enough in their execution, he
possessed at least enough of the instinct and the scope of the artist to
produce works that cohere with themselves, and that have a unity of design
sufficiently definite to mark it as something distinct from the mere
succession of executed detail. Will Mr. Arnold seriously pretend that a
more “vivid, powerful, and effective” impression is not created upon the
mind by a perusal of the whole of Manfred, than by a perusal of portions
of it, or of one or two dissociated Acts? Mr. Arnold turns Byron’s own
modest confessions against himself, and lays stress upon the avowal that
the Giaour is “a string of passages.” But if any one were, after due
reflection, to maintain, that more justice is done to Byron by reading
some of its passages than by reading the whole of the poem, we confess we
should be obliged to entertain some doubt as to his own instincts as an
artist. For, where men like Byron are concerned, it is peculiarly true
that the divinity of the Muse shapes their ends, rough-hew these how they
may. Of every one of Byron’s tales—the Siege of Corinth, The Bride of
Abydos, Parisina—this is equally true. It has more than once been
observed that Childe Harold suffers from the fact that a period of eight
years elapsed between the composition of the first and second cantos, and
the composition of the third and fourth; and as far as style is concerned,
the contrast is very striking, two of the cantos being for the most part
almost as feeble, and two of them as forcible, as anything deserving the
name of poetry well can be. Nevertheless, there would be no difficulty in
showing, and we think no reader of poetry endowed with a fair amount of
artistic sense would require to be shown, that a certain oneness of
purpose and unity of drift presides over and accompanies the entire poem,
in a word that it is substantially homogeneous; and if any one, after
reading through the third and fourth cantos at a stretch, as we recently
did, were to tell us that he thought a few extracts from each give an
adequate conception of the two, and that reading portions is in effect
equivalent to reading the whole, we should have reached that limit of
controversy which is expressed by a silence that is not assent. It is true
that Mr. Arnold has been fairly lavish in his extracts from Childe
Harold; yet out of the 300 stanzas which compose the third and fourth
cantos, his selection contains only 114, or little more than a third. But
it is not only by the curtailment of the quantity, but by the treatment
applied to what is selected, that injury is done to Childe Harold. The
passages quoted are scattered at intervals through the volume, so that all
consecutiveness and coherence are lost. The majestic march of the poem is
utterly broken. The subtle argument that lurks in the order of every
poem—whether it be the lucidus ordo of a speech, or an order less
obvious and patent—is completely destroyed. The strain neither begins nor
ends, neither rises nor falls, neither pauses nor progresses. The statue
is shivered to pieces, and we are offered a collection of chips, mixed up
with fragments from other marbles that have been treated with equal
ruthlessness. Here there is a hand, here a portion of a foot, here a
section of the features, here a bit of the torso. They still are
magnificent, and full of suggestiveness. But are they equal and equivalent
to the entire statue? Are they as good as the whole of the original work?
With surprising paradox Mr. Arnold assures us they are considerably
better.
This singular conclusion is attained, it seems to us, by the excessive
assertion, or at least by the exaggerated application, of a theory in
which there is, unquestionably, a solid element of truth. We have said
that Byron is not an austere and consistent artist. But that is not to
affirm that he is not an artist at all; whereas, in thus treating his
productions fragmentarily, Mr. Arnold acts as though such an assertion
were true. Byron, says Mr. Arnold, is not “architectural.” But is he not?
There is architecture, and architecture; the severe and systematic
architecture of the Greeks, and the more free, irregular, unmethodical
architecture which we know as Gothic. In the conception, and what in
technical parlance is called the composition, of his works, Byron is
assuredly no Greek. The exquisite oneness of design characteristic of
Athenian genius he certainly did not borrow from the land and the race no
one has so splendidly extolled. But if we turn to some of the noblest
productions of Gothic architecture, what do we find? We find Cathedrals of
unquestioned beauty and of universal fame, produced, it would
superficially seem, almost haphazard; without design, without plan, even
without architect. In our own land we may see Minsters that, begun in the
eleventh, were not finished till the fifteenth century. Like Childe
Harold, they bear the evident marks of different ages, and of different
styles; and like Don Juan, they show that they were commenced without
their parent knowing where or how they were to end. Nay, like it again,
some of them remain unfinished to this day. But will any one affirm that
their integrity, as they stand, is nothing to them, and nothing to us?
Because no great master-conception presided over their origin and their
execution, will no injury be done to them by taking them to pieces, and
saying, “Here is a lovely apse; here you see a beautiful flying buttress;
here contemplate an exquisite rood-screen; here you have an admirable bit
of the choir, and there a glorious specimen of the roof”?
Nor can it be urged that this illustration does violence to the process
Mr. Arnold has adopted. On the contrary, the analogy is not strong enough;
for Manfred, The Corsair, Cain, Childe Harold itself, were
conceived and executed, not less, but far more homogeneously, than the
edifices with which we have compared them, and if it would be unjust and
inadequate to treat Gothic cathedrals after this fashion, it is still more
unjust and inadequate to treat Byron’s poems after this fashion. More
glaring still becomes the injustice, and more utter the inadequacy, when
we remember in whose company he is so treated. Mr. Arnold does not break
Wordsworth’s poems to pieces and present us with the fragments; for there
is no necessity to do so. The long ones Mr. Arnold cheerfully throws over,
confessing that The Excursion “can never be a satisfactory work to the
disinterested lover of poetry,” and even that Jeffrey was not wrong when
he said of it, “This will never do.” To adhere to our metaphor, it is a
large comfortless Meeting-house; and so is the Recluse. The best of
Wordsworth’s poems, as we have said, and as Mr. Arnold says, are his short
ones. There are charming English cottages, or, if it be preferred—for we
have no intention of decrying them, we admire them vastly—exquisite
little wayside chapels; and they fit conveniently into the space, without
being tampered with, which Mr. Arnold has provided for them. But the best
of Byron’s poems are the long ones; are vast Gothic edifices that soar
high into the air and cover a vast amount of ground, and therefore cannot
be compressed into the same compass. We have seen how Mr. Arnold gets over
the difficulty. He pulls them down, places bits and sections of them side
by side with the untouched cottages and still complete oratories of
Wordsworth, and asks us to compare the two. We are far from saying that,
even under these conditions, the comparison ends to Byron’s disadvantage.
But it surely must be evident to every one that the conditions are not
equal, and therefore, however fair were the intentions of the editor, that
they are not really just. We should be sorry if any one supposed we
consider Mr. Swinburne as sound a critic as Mr. Arnold. But, upon this
particular question, Mr. Swinburne has propounded a conclusion against
which, we submit, Mr. Arnold contends in vain. “The greatest of Byron’s
works was his whole work taken together.” Nothing could be more terse or
more true; and if Mr. Swinburne would be content always to form his
judgments thus calmly and comprehensively, and to express them with this
brevity and directness, he would soon come to exercise an authority which
is at present refused by many to his literary verdicts.
But though, if the comparison instituted between Byron and Wordsworth by
Mr. Arnold were to be confined within the conditions he has imposed on
both alike, great injustice would be done to Byron, it may well be doubted
if the plan adopted by Mr. Arnold will really tend to Byron’s
disadvantage. On the contrary we suspect that, with the best will in the
world to do all he can for Wordsworth, Mr. Arnold has done him rather an
ill turn. For the whole, or anything approaching to the whole, of the best
of Byron, is not to be found in the volume of selections edited by Mr.
Arnold; and everybody will feel that Byron is a far greater poet than he
could possibly be made to appear by any such method. But all the best
poetry of Wordsworth is in the volume Mr. Arnold dedicates to him; and we
entertain little doubt that there is no dispassionate critic who would not
be obliged to allow that a considerable portion, indeed we fear the
greater portion of it, is not poetry at all. The process Mr. Arnold has
applied to Wordsworth, will have to be applied over again, and with
greater rigour. He has rejected as “not satisfactory work to the
disinterested lover of poetry,” an immense quantity of what Wordsworth
conceived to be such. Another editor will have to reject a considerable
proportion of what Mr. Arnold has too indulgently included. His selection
will have to be selected from afresh; and thus, with doubtful
friendliness, he has pointed and prepared the way for some entirely
dispassionate critic who will leave of Wordsworth only what, to “the
disinterested lover of poetry,” is worth leaving; and this unfortunately,
though of a high and delightful quality, will prove to be comparatively
little. In a word, to do Byron anything like justice, we require several
volumes of the size of that Mr. Arnold devotes to him; we require, in
fact, most of what he wrote. To do Wordsworth justice, we require a volume
less than half the size of what Mr. Arnold gives us; we require, in fact,
to suppress at least three-fourths of what he wrote.
But, again, we can raise no question, and propound no conclusion which Mr.
Arnold, with his penetrating sense and acute susceptibility, has not
himself more or less discerned. After observing, “we must be on our guard
against Wordsworthians,” he thus writes, in a vein of delicate humour:
I have spoken lightly of Wordsworthians: and if we are to get
Wordsworth recognised by the public and by the world, we must
recommend him not in the spirit of a clique, but in the spirit of
disinterested lovers of poetry. But I am a Wordsworthian myself. I
can read with pleasure and edification Peter Bell, and the whole
series of Ecclesiastical Sonnets, and the addresses to Mr.
Wilkinson’s spade, and even the Thanksgiving Ode; everything of
Wordsworth, I think, except Vaudracour and Julia. It is not for
nothing that one has been brought up in the veneration of a man so
truly worthy of homage; that one has seen and heard him, lived in his
neighbourhood, and been familiar with his country.
Alas! even the best of us are mortal; and we accept this graceful passage
as Mr. Arnold’s confession that he, too, is a Wordsworthian against whom
we must be on our guard. An extremist of a school he could not now be; but
“it is not for nothing,” as he says, that he was trained in it. “Once a
priest,” says an Italian proverb, “always a priest”; and, we fear, once a
Wordsworthian, always a Wordsworthian. It is no reproach; but “we must be
on our guard.” For our part, we are tolerably familiar with Wordsworth’s
country, but, beyond that, we are under no such spell as Mr. Arnold
confesses to above. We entertain profound veneration and homage for
Wordsworth, but it is the result, not so much of early teaching—the most
difficult of all lessons to unlearn—as of independent admiration and
sympathy inspired in riper years. We, too, can read Peter Bell and the
Ecclesiastical Sonnets, but with more edification than pleasure; and we
have read, afresh, every word of what Mr. Arnold has included in his
Poems of Wordsworth, only to reach the conclusion we have already
stated, that from many, only too many of them, the spirit, the essence,
the indefinable something, of poetry is absent.
We should be sorry to be thought guilty of dogmatism, and there is always
peril in generalisations. Let us therefore descend to particulars, as far
as space will permit, and analyse the contents of Mr. Arnold’s Poems of
Wordsworth. The volume consists of 317 pages; of which 20 are dedicated
to “Poems of Ballad Form,” 92 to “Narrative Poems,” 56 to “Lyrical Poems,”
34 to “Poems akin to the Antique and Odes,” 32 to “Sonnets,” and 83 to
“Reflective and Elegiac Poems.”
In the first division, We are Seven, Lucy Gray, and The Reverie of
Poor Susan, are the only poems that can be pronounced wholly
satisfactory, and that give real pleasure. Anecdote for Fathers and
Alice Fell would be just as well away, for they would raise the
reputation of no poet, save it be with those against whom “we must be on
our guard.” The poems, The Childless Father, Power of Music, and
Star-Gazers, are redeemed only by their moral; and perhaps of Power of
Music, even this cannot be said.
An Orpheus! an Orpheus!—yes, Faith may grow bold,
And take to herself all the wonders of old;—
Near the stately Pantheon you’ll meet with the same
In the street that from Oxford hath borrowed its name.
His station is there;—and he works on the crowd,
He sways them with harmony merry and loud;
He fills with his power all their hearts to the brim—
Was aught ever heard like his Fiddle and him?
What an eager assembly! what an empire is this!
The weary have life, and the hungry have bliss;
The mourner is cheered, and the anxious have rest;
And the guilt-burthened soul is no longer opprest.
Then follow eight stanzas, in which the baker, the apprentice, the
newsman, the lamplighter, the porter, the lass with her barrow, the
cripple, the mother, and others, are described as stopping to listen, in
language similar to that of the three stanzas we have quoted; the only
slight improvement upon it being such lines as “She sees the Musician,
’tis all that she sees,” until we reach the conclusion:
Now, coaches and chariots! roar on like a stream;
Here are twenty souls happy as souls in a dream:
They are deaf to your murmurs, they care not for you,
Nor what ye are flying, nor what ye pursue.
The more ardent admirers of Wordsworth are in the habit of assuming that
those persons who approach their favourite poet with a more hesitating
homage, fail to appreciate the beauty of simplicity, and fancy that a
composition is not poetical because it lacks what is called elevation of
language and the “grand style.” We can assure them, in all sincerity, that
far from that being the basis of our inability to admire all that they
admire, we admire Wordsworth most, and we admire him immensely, when he is
as simple as it is possible to be. We have just cited a poem, which we
scarcely think deserves that name. But, side by side with it, in Mr.
Arnold’s volume, is a much shorter composition, on precisely the same
theme, which is, if possible, still more simple in treatment, but which is
true poetry, if true poetry was ever written. It is called The Reverie of
Poor Susan:
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.
After reading The Reverie of Poor Susan, we may pay Wordsworth’s Muse
the compliment that was paid by the Latin poet to the woman who was
simplex munditiis. Its neat simplicity is in great measure the secret of
its success; but it is not mean in its simplicity. Neither, as in the
other poems we have contrasted with it, have we to wait till the end of
the poem for the moral and the meaning. The moral is interwoven and
interfused with it, and every line breathes the soul and essence of the
entire composition. But nearly all these “Poems of Ballad Form” are
didactic; and does not Mr. Arnold tell us, in his preface, “Some kinds of
poetry are in themselves lower kinds than others; the ballad kind is a
lower kind; the didactic kind, still more, is a lower kind”? Of the twenty
pages of these poems of lower kind, we are strongly disposed to think that
the “disinterested lover of poetry” would discard twelve, and retain only
eight, and that Wordsworth, to use Mr. Arnold’s phrase, would “stand
higher” if this were done.
But even this proportion between retention and rejection cannot well be
maintained by the disinterested lover of poetry as he advances through the
volume. The “Narrative Poems” occupy nearly a third of it, and in this
section the amount of real poetry is meagre indeed. We had no conception
how many short poems Wordsworth had written, unredeemed by “the gleam, the
light that never was, on sea or land,” till we read this collection
consecutively; and we read it in the open air, in a beautiful country, on
the loveliest day of a lovely May. But nothing could possibly attune the
heart of the disinterested lover of poetry to such verses as these:
When Ruth was left half desolate,
Her father took another mate;
And Ruth, not seven years old,
A slighted child, at her own will
Went wandering over dale and hill,
In thoughtless freedom, bold.
There came a Youth from Georgia’s shore—
A military casque he wore,
With splendid feathers drest;
He brought them from the Cherokees;
The feathers nodded in the breeze,
And made a gallant crest.
“Belovèd Ruth!” No more he said.
The wakeful Ruth at midnight shed
A solitary tear:
She thought again—and did agree
With him to sail across the sea,
And drive the flying deer.
“And now, as fitting is and right,
We in the Church our faith will plight,
A husband and a wife.”
Even so they did; and I may say
That to sweet Ruth that happy day
Was more than human life.
Not only is it impossible, we think, for the disinterested lover of poetry
to read this either with pleasure or with edification, but it is not easy
for him to read it without an ever-broadening smile. As a rule, the verse
to be met with in our less fastidious Magazines is not of a very high
order. But we doubt if the editor of any one of them would consent to
insert the foregoing stanzas, or those that follow, with their, “But as
you have before been told,” “Meanwhile, as thus with him it fared, They
for the voyage were prepared,” “God help thee, Ruth! Such pains she had,
That she in half a year was mad,” and such like specimens of unartistic
and naive childishness. Surely, if there be any one who thinks this
poetry, it must be Mr. Arnold’s friend, the British Philistine? If
Murdstone and Quinion could be converted and ever took to reading poetry,
would not this be the sort of verse that would delight them? And would
they not do so by reason of that “stunted sense of beauty,” and that
“defective type” of intellect with which Mr. Arnold justly reproaches the
English middle-class?
Did these poems stand alone, in their prosaic puerility, we might be
surprised that Mr. Arnold had reproduced them; but we should have been
content to conclude that, like Homer, both poet and editor had been
nodding. But we turn page after page of these “Narrative Poems” to be
astonished by what we encounter. The next poem to Ruth is Simon Lee:
The Old Huntsman, with an Incident in which he was Concerned:
Few months of life has he in store,
As he to you will tell,
For still, the more he works, the more
Do his weak ankles swell.
My gentle Reader, I perceive
How patiently you’ve waited,
And now I fear that you’ll expect
Some tale will be related.
O Reader! had you in your mind
Such stores as silent thought can bring,
O gentle Reader! you would find
A tale in everything.
What more I have to say is short,
And you must kindly take it:
It is no tale; but, should you think,
Perhaps a tale you’ll make it.
Simon is grubbing the stump of a tree, but was unequal to the task. The
poet takes the mattock from his hand, and with a blow severs the root, “At
which the poor Old Man so long, And vainly had endeavoured.” Thankful
tears come into his eyes, whereupon the poet remarks:
I’ve heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds
With coldness still returning;
Alas! the gratitude of men
Hath oftener left me mourning.
The sentiment is nice and pretty, but is it poetry, or, even if it were,
could it make poetry of the doggerel—for surely there really is no other
name for it—that precedes it? And do Wordsworthians against whom Mr.
Arnold tells us we ought to be on our guard, or Wordsworthians who fancy
that we need not be on our guard against them, suppose that moralising
correctly and piously in verse about every “incident” in which somebody
happens to be “concerned,” renders the narrative a “tale,”—much more,
makes poetry of it? We are far from saying that Wordsworth might not, in a
happier mood, have written poetry upon this particular incident. But we do
say, with some confidence, that he has unfortunately not done so; that the
incident, narrated in the manner in which he has narrated it, cannot of
itself be accepted as poetry—which, as Mr. Arnold well knows, is the
extreme Wordsworthian theory, as advocated by Wordsworth himself in pages
upon pages of controversial prose; and that we are greatly astonished Mr.
Arnold should indirectly lend it countenance, by reprinting and stamping
with his precious approval, such infelicitous triviality as the above. We
cannot shrink from saying this, through an unworthy dread lest we should
be confounded with “the tenth-rate critics and compilers to whom it is
still permissible to speak of Wordsworth’s poetry, not only with
ignorance, but with impertinence.” Mr. Arnold has himself shown that he
does not hesitate to speak in pretty strong terms of those portions of
Wordsworth’s verse which he does not regard as poetry. He describes them
as “abstract verbiage”; he acknowledges that they are so inferior, it
seems wonderful how Wordsworth should have produced them; and in a passage
delightfully humorous he imagines a long passage of Wordsworth being
declaimed at a Social Science Congress to an admiring audience of men with
bald heads and women in spectacles, “and in the soul of any poor child of
nature who may have wandered in thither, an unutterable sense of
lamentation, mourning, and woe.”
All that we ask, therefore, is to be allowed the same amount of liberty
which Mr. Arnold himself has exercised, and to be permitted to do what he
has done. We, too, would fain disengage what is valuable in Wordsworth’s
poetry from what is worthless. We, too, would fain “exhibit his best work,
and clear away obstructions from around it.” But we contend, and we
willingly leave the decision to disinterested lovers of poetry, that such
poems as Ruth and Simon Lee are not only not Wordsworth’s best work,
but not good work at all; on the contrary are part of the obstruction from
which it should be cleared.
The next two poems in the “Narrative” section refer to the fidelity of
dogs, and a single stanza will suffice to show that they are of much the
same calibre as the two that precede them:
But hear a wonder for whose sake
This lamentable tale I tell!
A lasting monument of words
This wonder merits well.
The Dog, which still was hovering nigh,
Repeating the same timid cry,
This Dog, had been through three months’ space
A dweller in that savage place.
Next in order comes Hart-Leap Well, which consists of two parts. In the
first we come across such lines and phrases as “Joy sparkled in the
prancing courser’s eyes,” “A rout that made the echoes roar,” “Soon did
the Knight perform what he had said, And far and wide thereof the fame did
ring,” “But there is matter for a second rhyme, And I to this would add
another tale,” which are simply a distress to the disinterested reader of
poetry. In the second part, the poet warms up, and ends with a passage
which is very beautiful:
Grey-headed Shepherd, thou hast spoken well;
Small difference lies between thy creed and mine:
This Beast not unobserved by Nature fell;
His death was mourned by sympathy divine.
The Being, that is in the clouds and air,
That is in the green leaves among the groves,
Maintains a deep and reverential care
For the unoffending creatures whom he loves.
The Pleasure-house is dust:—behind, before,
This is no common waste, no common gloom;
But Nature, in due course of time, once more
Shall here put on her beauty and her bloom.
She leaves these objects to a slow decay,
That what we are, and have been, may be known;
But, at the coming of the milder day,
These monuments shall all be overgrown!
One lesson, Shepherd, let us two divide,
Taught both by what she shows, and what conceals;
Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.
Of course, this is poetry, and very good poetry; and it is, justly, one of
the favourite passages of ardent admirers of Wordsworth. But we can
scarcely refrain from saying that, good as it is, there exists something
of precisely the same kind, and, as it happens, in precisely the same
metre, which is considerably better. Surely, no one will have any
difficulty in naming it. It is Gray’s famous Elegy. Yet we remember how
indignant the “Wordsworthians against whom we ought to be on our guard”
were with the Quarterly Review, because there appeared in it a paper in
which Wordsworth and Gray were compared. To mention them in the same
breath was sacrilege! We do not wish to affirm that the disinterested
lover of poetry believes Gray ever to have scaled the heights where
Wordsworth’s wing sometimes floats almost without effort. But it cannot be
uninteresting to mark that, in what we may call the middle notes,
Wordsworth is distinctly inferior to Gray, though ever and anon his voice
gets entirely beyond Gray’s compass.
It would be impossible, with any regard for space, to quote from, or even
to name, every poem reproduced by Mr. Arnold, which in our opinion would
have been better suppressed. But if we seem to have established our
contention so far, we think the reader may rely upon it that he would more
or less concur in what else might be said on this score. The Force of
Prayer, The Affliction of Margaret, The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian
Woman, are little if any less trivial than the poems already condemned;
while in The Song at the Feast of Brougham Castle, we read six pages
equally poor and unpoetical, suddenly to come upon such a quatrain as the
following:
Love had he found in huts where poor men lie;
His daily teachers had been woods and rills,
The silence that is in the starry sky,
The sleep that is among the lonely hills.
The last two lines it would be impossible to praise too highly. Only the
silence of profound reverence can do them justice. They are touches like
these, touches like “the harvest of a quiet eye,” that give to Wordsworth
his holy predominance, and whatever predominance, after fair examination,
must be adjudged him. But how few they are! Perhaps it is in the nature of
things that they should be so. But being so few and far between, they
cannot fill up the blank that intervenes. They are indeed “Angels’
visits.” But even poetry has to do mainly with human guests, and a poet
must be judged, as Mr. Arnold truly affirms, by “the ample body of
powerful work” he leaves behind. We cannot assume that much of
Wordsworth’s poetry is not unutterably bad, because some of it is
unutterably beautiful. The utmost we can do is to grant, concerning him,
what he himself said so finely of a young girl:
If thou appear’st untouched by solemn thought,
Thy nature is not therefore less divine:
Thou liest in Abraham’s bosom all the year,
And worshipp’st at the Temple’s inner shrine,
God being with thee when we know it not.
It is possible that like the “dear child, dear girl,” he lay in Abraham’s
bosom “all the year,” but he communicates the fact, he impresses us with
the fact, but seldom. As a rule, he seems to be outside the Temple
altogether. Hence these magnificent bursts of poetical depth and
sublimity, which, be it said, are peculiar to Wordsworth, are mere short
passages, and there are not many of them. But if they suffice, after a
complete survey of the works of both poets, to place Wordsworth above
Byron, we shall be obliged to conclude that they suffice to place him
above every poet that ever lived. That such a theory of poetry, such a
canon of criticism is untenable, unless we are to cast every hitherto
accepted theory of poetry and every former canon of criticism to the
winds, we trust, in due course, to be able to establish.
We are aware that The Brothers is a favourite composition with
thoroughgoing Wordsworthians. But as we have been told to be on our guard
against them, we need not hesitate to say that it seems to us to consist
of very ordinary verse, and the piece itself to be devoid of any real
poetical temperament, though it fills sixteen pages in Mr. Arnold’s
collection. Sixteen more are occupied by Margaret, upon which we are
unable to pronounce a different or a modified verdict. Both abound in such
passages as the following:
He left his house: two wretched days had past,
And on the third, as wistfully she raised
Her head from off her pillow, to look forth,
Like one in trouble, for returning light,
Within her chamber-casement she espied
A folded paper, lying as if placed
To meet her waking eyes. This tremblingly
She opened—found no writing, but beheld
Pieces of money carefully enclosed,
Silver and gold. “I shuddered at the sight,”
Said Margaret, “for I knew it was his hand
Which placed it there: and ere that day was ended,
That long and anxious day! I learned from one
Sent hither by my husband to impart
The heavy news,—that he had joined a Troop
Of soldiers, going to a distant land.
He left me thus—he could not gather heart
To take a farewell of me; for he feared
That I should follow with my Babes, and sink
Beneath the misery of that wandering life.”
If this be poetry, then poetry is very easily written, and what has
hitherto been supposed to be the highest, the most difficult, and the
rarest, of the arts, presents no more difficulty to the person who knows
how to write at all than the simplest, baldest, and most unartistic prose.
What, for instance, is this?—
At length the expected letter from the kinsman came, with kind
assurances that he would do his utmost for the welfare of the boy; to
which requests were added that forthwith he might be sent to him. Ten
times or more the letter was read over. Isabel went forth to show it
to the neighbours round; nor was there at that time on English land a
prouder heart than Luke’s. When Isabel had to her house returned, the
old man said, “He shall depart to-morrow.” To this word the housewife
answered, talking much of things which, if at such short notice he
should go, would surely be forgotten. But at length she gave consent,
and Michael was at ease.
Is this prose or verse? We have printed it as prose. Wordsworth wrote it
as verse, and Mr. Arnold has reproduced it as poetry. Had all Wordsworth’s
compositions been of this calibre, and a painfully large number of them
are, well might John Stuart Mill affirm that any man of good abilities
might become as good a poet as Wordsworth by giving his mind to it, and we
will add that a man of good abilities could hardly employ them worse. Yet
this passage, and fourteen pages of verse not one whit better than it, are
to be met with in Michael, one of the narrative poems Mr. Arnold, with
special emphasis, begs us to admire. “The right sort of verse,” he says,
“to choose from Wordsworth, if we are to seize his true and most
characteristic form of expression, is a line like this from Michael:
And never lifted up a single stone.
There is nothing subtle in it, no heightening, no study of poetic style,
strictly so called; yet it is expressive of the highest and most
expressive kind.” Of course, in order to properly appreciate it, we must
know the context, which fortunately is easily compressed. Michael and his
son Luke were to build a sheepfold; but, as told in the passage we have
printed, Luke is sent to a kinsman, who will advance him in life. Before
he goes, Michael takes him to lay the first stone of the sheepfold. The
lad then leaves home, falls into dissolute courses, and at last hides
himself beyond the seas. After that, it is narrated of Michael:
And to that hollow dell from time to time
Did he repair, to build the Fold of which
His flock had need. ’Tis not forgotten yet
The pity which was then in every heart
For the Old Man—and ’tis believed by all
That many and many a day he thither went,
And never lifted up a single stone.
We have asked several disinterested lovers of poetry, some of them ardent
admirers of Wordsworth, what they think of this; and we are bound to say
that most of them failed to see anything in it whatsoever. That is not our
case. We feel the force of the situation, and the apt simplicity of the
concluding line. Yet repeat it, dwell on it, and surrender ourselves to it
as we will, we fail to persuade ourselves that it merits the lofty eulogy
pronounced on it by Mr. Arnold. It is with hesitation that we presume, on
such a point, and where the issue is so direct, to place our opinion in
seeming competition with his; but we can only leave the decision to the
communis sensus of disinterested lovers of poetry. But nothing—not even
Mr. Arnold’s authority—could satisfy us that this line suffices to lend
the wings of poetry to fourteen closely printed pages of such pedestrian
verse as that of which Michael for the most part consists.
The only other poem in the “Narrative” section of the volume is The
Leech-Gatherer; and it, besides containing many lines of admirable
poetry, is itself a coherently beautiful poem. But when, resuming our
analysis, we enquire how much poetry there is in the 112 pages, or in more
than the third portion of the volume we have as yet examined, what do we
find? Exactly 20, and only 20, which we honestly believe the disinterested
lover of poetry, the critic to whom Mr. Arnold makes appeal, would
recognise as strictly deserving that description. We can seriously assert
that this is the amount we should save from the wreck, if we were editing
a selection from Wordsworth, were disengaging his good work from his bad,
and were seeking to obtain for him readers who care nothing whatever about
him personally, and who only wish ever and anon to steep themselves in the
atmosphere of native and sterling poetry. We are well aware that, from
another and a more extended point of view, Wordsworth never wrote a line,
in verse or in prose, which is not worth preserving, and worth reading.
But that is not at present the question. We are dealing with the critical
contention of a great and influential critic, that “what strikes me with
admiration, what establishes in my opinion Wordsworth’s superiority”—to
Byron, be it understood, and to every English poet since Milton—“is the
great and ample body of powerful work which remains to him, even after all
his inferior work has been cleared away.” This it is which renders it
necessary to clear away the inferior work, in order that we may see if the
body of “powerful” work that remains be really “ample” or not.
The “Lyrical Poems” contain the best, the most characteristic, and the
most valuable of the compositions of Wordsworth. For our part, we should
have excluded To a Sky-Lark, at page 126—not the beautiful one with the
same title at page 142—Stray Pleasures, the two poems At the Grave of
Burns, Yarrow Visited, Yarrow Revisited, in spite of their vogue with
Wordsworthians quand même, To May, and The Primrose of the Rock.
There would then be left 33 pages containing the best poems of their
kind anywhere to be found, and of inestimable value to the disinterested
lover of poetry. The fervid lover of poetry knows them by heart, and
carries them with him through life. Is it necessary to give their names?
She was a Phantom of Delight, The Solitary Reaper, Three Years She
Grew, To the Cuckoo, I Wandered lonely as a Cloud—these, and their
companions, to be found about the middle of Mr. Arnold’s volume, are among
the most precious, and will remain among the enduring possessions of
mankind. Nor is it only that they fill the mind with elevating thoughts
and swell the heart with sacred sentiments. They make one regard, with a
peculiar affection, the poet who wrote them. But we must not allow this
literary love to warp literary judgment. No such feeling is awakened for
their authors by Childe Harold or Hamlet. But to conclude that
Wordsworth is, therefore, a greater poet than Byron or Shakespeare, would
be as illegitimate in the one instance as in the other. It would be to
imitate the filial and uxorious fondness of the late Mr. Carlyle, who
gravely tells us that his father had a larger intellect than Burns, and
that his amiable, long-suffering wife wrote letters of greater value and
insight than the works of George Sand and George Eliot, and “all the pack
of scribbling women from the beginning of time.” To love Wordsworth is
pardonable; nay, it is inevitable to those who are intimate with his
tenderest work. But the critic must disengage his judgment from his
affections, if he is not to mislead the persons he aspires to instruct,
and to injure the art of whose dignity he is bound to be jealous.
Briefly, then, and pursuing to the end the “disinterested-lover-of-poetry”
method recommended to us by Mr. Arnold, and of which we think we have
already given illustrations to enable any one to decide for himself
whether we pursue it with equity and candour, we reach the conclusion
that, of the 317 pages composing Mr. Arnold’s collection, only 103, on a
liberal estimate, contain what is worth preserving as poetry; or at least,
if there be any dispute as to whether it is poetry, there can be none,
outside the specially Wordsworthian circle, as to its being very inferior
poetry indeed, and in no degree calculated to confer, extend, or uphold
any man’s reputation as a poet. That it is admirable in sentiment and
laudable in moral purpose, may at once be granted. But the purest of
sentiments and the loftiest of purposes do not constitute poetry, even
when apparelled in verse. Indeed we may say of them what Mr. Arnold
himself says of those portions of Wordsworth’s writings which he discards,
that they are “doctrine such as we hear in church, religious and
philosophical doctrine; and the attached Wordsworthian loves passages of
such doctrine, and brings them forward in proof of his poet’s excellence.
But however true the doctrine may be, it has, as here presented, more of
the characters of poetic truth, the kind of truth we require from a
poet.”
It may possibly seem an ungracious part to dwell upon the inferior
portions of Wordsworth work, and to play the rôle of Devil’s Advocate in
the case of one who is assured beforehand of the honours of canonisation.
But it should be remembered that this invidious task has been imposed upon
us by Mr. Arnold, who has asserted, and challenged contradiction to the
assertion, that in Wordsworth is to be found “an ampler body of powerful
work,” which constitutes his superiority over every English poet since
Milton. It is he who has rendered it necessary, in justice to other poets,
to enquire with accuracy, what is the amount of powerful work to be
found in Wordsworth; and this cannot be done without careful and judicial
scrutiny. Our object is the same as Mr. Arnold’s; not to decry Wordsworth,
but to ascertain his proper place in relation to other poets. If we seem
to have spoken of him harshly, then so must Mr. Arnold; the only
difference between us being that he thinks a certain proportion of
Wordsworth’s verse poor stuff, while we view a yet larger portion of it in
that light. Nor is it the example of Mr. Arnold alone that can be cited in
exoneration of perfect outspokenness. M. Scherer is a distinguished French
critic, whom Mr. Arnold quotes, and M. Scherer has in turn introduced Mr.
Arnold’s Selections from Wordsworth to the French public in the pages of
the Temps. He is a warm admirer of Wordsworth, and, as Mr. Arnold tells
us, an excessive depreciator of Byron. From him, therefore, we may, with
all the less scruple, cite the following avowals:
The simplicity of Wordsworth’s subjects and manner too often
degenerates into triviality, the simplicity of his style into
poverty. He abuses his love for puerile anecdotes, makes us a present
of stories about dogs, and of recitals of what a little girl has said
to her sheep. He not only parades enthusiasm for flowers and birds,
but predilection for beggars, cripples, and idiots. The lower a
person is in the scale of being, the more he strives to awaken our
sympathy in his favour. There are no details so minute, so
insignificant, that he does not take a special pleasure in remarking
them. Is he narrating a walk he takes in summer, he will speak of
“the host of insects gathering round his face, and which are ever
with him as he paces along.”
The habit of seeking and finding lessons in the smallest incidents of
his walks becomes a didactic mania. He extracts moralities from every
object, he preaches sermons at every turn. Often, too, this preaching
vein is far from being poetical. One sometimes seems to be listening
to the psalm-singing of a Conventicle. This, for example, resembles a
hymn of Watts.
The poetry of Wordsworth, with the tendency it always had towards the
prosaic, often lapses into it altogether.
This, we submit, is only another way of saying what we have ventured to
say, and what Mr. Arnold himself has said. May we not reasonably conclude
that M. Scherer would reject at least all that we have rejected? But, in
any case, that there is substantial agreement between us and him, so far,
is evident.
What, then, is the “ample body of powerful work” that is left of
Wordsworth after the eliminating process has been applied to it by the
disinterested lover of poetry? Between three and four thousand lines;
rather more than the amount of matter in the third and fourth cantos of
Childe Harold, rather less than the amount of matter in Hamlet. The
quantity therefore, the “body” of work left, is not very large. Still we
should not contest that it was “ample” enough to establish the superiority
of Wordsworth over Byron, if it happened to be sufficiently “powerful” for
the purpose. Though quantity must count for something, even in the
comparison of poet with poet, since quantity implies copiousness, and
usually implies versatility, quality counts for much more, if the
difference in quality be marked, and suffices to abolish the consideration
of quantity altogether, if the superiority in respect of quality be
sufficiently great. If, for example, the four thousand lines, or
thereabouts, of poetry Wordsworth has written, had been embodied, say, in
a Hamlet, then work so powerful would have been ample to establish his
superiority not only over every English poet since Milton, but over every
poet since the one who has left us, so to speak, several Hamlets.
For what is it that renders Hamlet so great and so powerful? Is it
single lines of beautiful poetry? Is it detached passages of profound and
elevated thought presented in poetic guise? These go for much, more
especially when we consider them in connection with that of which they are
the drapery. But what would they be, and what should we think of them,
detached from the conception of the drama itself, without the plot,
action, and progress of the piece, without the invention and unfolding of
its characters, without its varied and forcible situations, without its
wit, its irony, its humour? What should we think of Hamlet if divested
of the panorama of moving human passions, of its merciless tragedy, and,
finally, of its utter absence of moral so complete, that moralists have
been for a hundred years wrangling what the moral is? These are the
qualities, and these alone, which make great poetry and great poets.
What has Wordsworth of all these? The answer, if candid and disinterested,
must be, Absolutely nothing. He has written no epic, no drama, no poem of
any kind in which so much as an attempt is made to deal with the clashing
of the various passions that “stir this mortal frame.” Of Action he is
utterly devoid. Of Invention, he seems absolutely unconscious. He has no
wit; he has no humour. He has conceived no character, he has portrayed no
character. If he can be said to deal with situations at all, they are of
the simplest and most elementary kind, and he does not in any sense create
them. He finds them at his door. No one blames him for making use of them,
where he makes use of them well; but this is a very different thing from
the invention shown in Macbeth or The Tempest, or even in Cain, in
Manfred, and in The Siege of Corinth. Sardanapalus is not a Lear, nor
is Myrra a Cordelia. But, as exhibitions and portraitures of human
character and human passion in poetry they are as much beyond Lucy Gray,
or Michael, or the little Child in We are Seven, as Lear and Cordelia
are beyond them in turn.
Upon this point let us again hear M. Scherer:
We must expect from Wordsworth neither the knowledge of the human
heart which worldly experience gives, nor that interior drama of the
passions which a man can describe well only on condition of having
been their victim, nor those general views upon history and society
which are formed partly by study, partly by the practice of public
affairs. Our poet is as much a stranger to the disquietudes of
thought as to those of ambition, to the sufferings of love and of
hate as to that resignation at which one arrives when one has
discerned how very small are the great affairs of this world. He has
nothing of that sublime melancholy, of those fervid questionings, of
those audacious revolts, in which poetry delighted fifty years ago.
Still less has he that mocking scepticism, that raillery now gay now
bitter, which succeeded the songs of despair. He will never be of
those who trouble souls as Byron does, who arm them with irony like
Heine, or who calm them, like Goethe, by the virtue of true
understanding. Wordsworth is simply a Solitary who has long gazed
upon Nature and much analysed his own feelings. Scarcely should we
dare to call him a philosopher, so wanting in him is the reasoning
and speculative element. Even the title of thinker only half becomes
him. He is a contemplative.
It is true that, at the end of his review of Wordsworth, and without any
previous admonition that he is going to do so, M. Scherer says, in one
brief sentence, “Wordsworth seems to me to come after Milton, notably below
him in my opinion, but withal the first after him”; thus endorsing the
judgment of Mr. Arnold. But, unlike Mr. Arnold, he makes no attempt to
establish or justify this view, but throws it out, as an obiter dictum,
after writing a long essay, every argument and every phrase of which tend
towards a diametrically opposite conclusion. So thoroughly is this the
case, that we can honestly say we agree with every word in his essay, with
the exception of the one brief sentence we have just cited.
But in the longer and more detailed passage quoted above, is not
everything conceded for which we are contending? According to M. Scherer,
Wordsworth has knowledge neither of the human heart nor of the interior
drama of the passions. He has no broad views of history and society. He is
a stranger to love, hatred, ambition, and the disquietudes they cause, as
well as to the disquietudes caused by deep thought; and not having passed
through these, he has necessarily not “come out upon the other side,” and
is equally a stranger to the tranquillity of complete knowledge and
complete experience. He is not a philosopher; he is hardly a thinker. He
is a contemplative solitary, who has consorted much with woods, lakes, and
mountains, and has dwelt much upon the sensations they excite in himself.
Verily, this is a sorry equipment for a great poet. Is it an exaggeration
to say that, if all this be true, Wordsworth is destitute of most of the
qualities which in a great poet have hitherto been deemed indispensable?
If, in spite of these remarkable deficiencies, he really be the greatest
English poet since Milton, we shall be forced to conclude that English
poets since Milton have been far less powerful, of far lower calibre, and
of far less value, than has generally been supposed.
What then is the precise value, the real calibre, the particular kind of
power, of that “ampler body of powerful work” which Wordsworth has given
us? We have seen it is not an epic, nor a drama, nor one great
comprehensive poem of any kind. It consists of lyrics, ballads, sonnets,
and odes; of many of which it would not be just or critical to say more
than that they are very sweet and charming, several of which must be
pronounced exquisite, and a few, very few, of which may be designated
sublime. We own we share the general opinion that the greatest composition
of Wordsworth is the Ode on Intimations of Immortality. We are surprised
and disappointed to find Mr. Arnold speaking rather coldly of it; and M.
Scherer likewise refers to it in a depreciatory tone, though he gives
different reasons for his conclusion. M. Scherer thinks it “sounds a
little false,” and adds that he “cannot help seeing in it a theme adopted
with reference to the poetic developments of which Wordsworth was
susceptible, rather than a very serious belief of the author.” We confess
we think the judgment harsh, and the reasons given for it insufficient,
if not indeed irrelevant. The objection Mr. Arnold entertains for it is
that “it has 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.”
Now, with all deference to Mr. Arnold, which is due to him in a special
manner when he is expounding Wordsworth, Wordsworth does not say this. In
the first place, Wordsworth, after describing the comparative and
temporary diminution of this instinct, describes its revival and
transfiguration in another guise. But what is far more important to note
is, Wordsworth does not say the instinct is universal. He is writing as
a poet, not as a psychologist; and though he treats of an objective infant
for a time, and uses the pronoun “our infancy,” he in reality is
describing his own experience, and letting it take its chance of being the
experience of a certain number of other people. What, we may well ask, can
a poet do more than this, when he gets into the higher range, the upper
atmosphere of poetry? When Shakespeare talks of “the shade of melancholy
boughs,” he does not mean that everybody feels them to be melancholy. That
is the privilege—the melancholy privilege, if any one wills it so—of the
higher natures. That what Wordsworth describes in his splendid Ode not
only was true of himself, but is true likewise of all great poetic
spirits, we entertain no doubt; and it will become true of an
ever-increasing number of persons, if mankind is to make progress in the
intimate and integral union of intellectual and poetic sentiment. In our
opinion, the highest note of Wordsworth is struck in this Ode, and
maintained through a composition of considerable length and of
argumentative unity of purpose. It is struck by him elsewhere—indeed in
the lines on Hartley Coleridge, we have a distinct overture, so to speak,
to the Ode; but nowhere is it sustained for so long, or with such oneness,
definiteness, and largeness of aim. There is, perhaps, no finer poem, of
equal length, in any language. We could well understand any one
maintaining that there exists no other so fine.
But, if this Ode be struck out of the account, what remains to represent
an “ample body of powerful work”? For, after all, in criticism, if we
criticise at all, we must use words with some definite meaning. Perhaps
Mr. Arnold would tell us that it is not the business of true Culture to be
too definite; and we should heartily agree with him. One of the things
that makes prose so inferior to poetry is its inaccurate precision. But it
is Mr. Arnold himself who, on this occasion, compels us to be precise. He
has elected to compare Wordsworth with every poet since Milton, and, in
doing so, he has been obliged to use language which, to be of any use,
must be more or less definite. What is meant by “ample”? Still more, what
is meant by “powerful”? Does he mean that Wordsworth’s “Lyrical Poems,”
which we think to be the best of Wordsworth’s compositions after the Ode,
and which he thinks the best, before the Ode, are “powerful”? Let us quote
perhaps the best of them, already quoted elsewhere, but that can never be
read too often:
Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts, and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.
No Nightingale did ever chaunt
So sweetly to reposing bands
Of Travellers in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands:
A voice so thrilling ne’er was heard
In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.
Will no one tell me what she sings?
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?
Whate’er the theme, the Maiden sang
As if her song could have no ending;
I saw her singing at her work,
And o’er the sickle bending;—
I listened till I had my fill,
And when I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.
This is exquisite; and of the sort of exquisiteness that leads one, in
private, and in uncritical colloquies, to fall, as the phrase runs, into
ecstasies. But can it, with any regard to accuracy of speech, be described
as “powerful” work? We submit that it cannot. Lear is powerful. The
first six books of Paradise Lost are powerful. The first four cantos of
Don Juan are powerful. The Ode on Intimations of Immortality is
powerful. But unless we are to lose ourselves in a labyrinth of critical
confusion, we must no more allege or allow that The Solitary Reaper is
powerful, than we can affirm that Where the Bee Sucks is powerful, that
Milton’s sonnet, To the Nightingale is powerful, or that Byron’s She
Walks in Beauty like the Night is powerful. They are all very beautiful;
but that is another matter, and it will not do to confound totally
different things.
How many lyrics, as perfect as the one we have quoted, has Wordsworth
written? We can count but nine; and the most liberal computation could not
extend them beyond twelve. To these would have to be added perhaps twice
as many, very inferior to these, but still very beautiful, a certain
number, but a very limited number, of first-rate sonnets, the Odes we have
referred to, and detached lines and passages from other poems, notably the
passage in the poem On Revisiting Tintern Abbey. The result would be
about a third of the amount we ourselves should altogether extract from
Wordsworth, and of which alone it could justly be said that some of it was
powerful, and all of it was very beautiful work.
This is what, we venture to assert, remains, after rigid scrutiny, of “the
ampler body of powerful work” which Wordsworth has given us. These are the
compositions which, according to Mr. Arnold, “in real poetical achievement
... in power, in interest, in the qualities which give enduring
freshness,” establish Wordsworth’s superiority.
Now can this claim possibly be allowed, unless, as we have said, all
previous canons of criticism, and all previous estimates of poetry are to
be cast to the winds? If it is to be allowed, then Æschylus, Euripides,
Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, must come down from their
pedestals, and be regarded by us with very different eyes from those with
which we have hitherto scanned them. For what are the marks, what the
qualities, which have distinguished these poets above their fellows, and
by reason of which the world has extolled their genius? It is not merely
for poetic diction, for tenderness of sentiment, for elevation of feeling,
for apt simile, appropriate metaphor, illuminating imagery, and the play
of fancy as exhibited in subordinate detail, that we estimate them as we
do. Neither is it, as we have already pointed out, but as we must repeat,
for detached passages of sublimity, nor yet for short poems of exquisite
beauty, that they have been assigned the rank they occupy. They occupy
that rank by reason of their great conceptions, by reason of their
capacity to project long and comparatively complex poems dedicated to a
lofty theme, and to conduct these through all their intricate windings
from first to last, by employing all the arts, all the expedients, all the
resources of Imagination, chief among which are Action, Invention, and
Situation. To these, of course, must be added copious, elastic, and
dignified language, melody, pathos, and just imagery; for, without these,
a man is not a poet at all. These are the very instruments of his craft,
the very credentials of his profession; and if he has these, no one will
challenge his right to be called a poet. But, unless the higher qualities,
the greater credentials are also his, he must be content with an inferior
place, no matter how many beautiful or sublime things he may have said,
and no matter how excellent the doctrines he may have taught. He has
failed to show his mastery over the great materials, his familiarity with
the great purposes, of his art. Wordsworth projected two long poems, The
Prelude and The Excursion; and, practically, these two are one. They
are of portentous length; and that is their only claim to be considered
great. They have no Action, no Situation, no Invention, no Characters.
They consist of pages upon pages, nay, of books upon books, of
interminable talk, in which in reality Wordsworth himself is the only
talker. Little of the talk is poetry. Much of it is, as Mr. Arnold says,
“abstract verbiage.” But we need not pursue the theme. Mr. Arnold candidly
confesses that when Jeffrey said of The Excursion, “this will never do,”
he was quite right.
Unquestionably, he was right; and he would still have been right, even had
The Excursion contained a far greater number of passages of true poetry
than it does. It will be an evil day for poetry, and for the readers of
poetry, if it ever comes to be allowed that the sole or the main function
of poetry is to talk about things, and that a man can get himself
accepted as a great poet by pursuing this course. Unfortunately, it was
Wordsworth’s theory that he could. It would be fatal if critics became of
the same opinion. It is their bounden duty, on the contrary, to protest
against such a theory. Wordsworth sets it down, in black and white, both
in prose and verse, over and over again:
O Reader! had you in your mind
Such stores as silent thought can bring,
O gentle Reader! you will find
A tale in everything.
What more I have to say is short,
And you must kindly take it:
It is no tale; but, should you think,
Perhaps a tale you’ll make it.
Here is the theory full-blown. The poet is not to tell the tale, the
reader is to make it one, by thinking; and if he only thinks enough, he
will find a tale in everything! Could anything be more grotesque, or more
utterly opposed to any sane canon of the function of an author, and his
relation to his readers? It is the business of the poet to tell the tale,
and thereby to set the reader thinking; an altogether different process
from the one here suggested. “Wordsworthians against whom we must be upon
our guard,” often cite the following stanza with admiration:
The moving accident is not my trade;
To freeze the blood I have no ready arts:
’Tis my delight, alone in summer shade,
To pipe a simple song for thinking hearts!
Have they forgotten the “moving accidents by flood and field,” or do they
not know whose trade it was to unfold a tale that
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood?
Piping a simple song for thinking hearts, is all very well. But it will
not do to say, or to suggest, or to allow it to be inferred, that doing
this makes a man as great a poet as doing what Wordsworth did not and
plainly could not do. In the last book of The Excursion, he says:
Life, death, eternity! momentous themes
Are they—and might demand a seraph’s tongue,
Were they not equal to their own support;
And therefore no incompetence of mine
Could do them wrong....
Ye wished for art and circumstance, that make
The individual known and understood;
And such as my best judgment could select
From what the place afforded, could be given.
But no subject is equal to its own support, where the poet is concerned,
however it may be with the preacher and the moralist. The poet himself
must support it. We do wish for act and circumstance, in poetry; and
when Wordsworth tells us that he has, in The Excursion, given us the
best of these he can, we can only answer that this best is not enough, but
wholly insufficient and inadequate.
That Mr. Arnold would deny all this, if put to him plainly, we do not
believe. It is all the more to be regretted that he should have expressed
himself in such a manner as to encourage others in forming judgments and
holding opinions which imply affirmation to the contrary. When he quotes
from Wordsworth the following lines,
Of truth, of grandeur, beauty, love, and hope,
And melancholy fear subdued by faith,
Of blessëd consolation, in distress,
Of moral strength and intellectual power,
Of joy in widest commonalty spread,
and adds that “here we have a poet intent on the best and master thing,”
and wishes us to infer Wordsworth’s superiority from that fact, does he
not perceive that he is not only misleading his readers, but flagrantly
contradicting what he himself avers in the selfsame essay? Being “intent”
on these subjects is not enough. A further question remains to be
answered; viz. how has the poet dealt with them? Nowhere has Wordsworth
dealt with them so completely, so ambitiously, so exhaustively, as in The
Excursion. Yet what does Mr. Arnold say of it? He says that The
Excursion can never be a satisfactory work to the disinterested lover of
poetry, and that much of it is “a tissue of elevated but abstract
verbiage, alien to the very nature of poetry.” It is plain, therefore,
that being “intent” even on “the best and master thing” does not suffice.
The passage Mr. Arnold quotes, leaving the incautious reader to infer that
it does suffice, is merely the
Life, death, eternity! momentous themes,
and their being “equal to their own support” over again. Wordsworth is
perpetually telling us that his subject is Man, and wishes us to infer
that, the subject being great, what is written on it must be great.
Unfortunately, Man, with him, is like Love with the Scotch girl; it is Man
“in the abstract.” Shakespeare also treats of Man; but he treats of him
in men, and Wordsworth does not. In fact, he communes. As M. Scherer
says, he is a Solitary, a Contemplative. In a word, he is essentially, and
before all things a subjective poet, and reader after reader has
complained, and critic after critic has confessed, that to be subjective,
not objective, to reflect instead of to act, to think rather than to
narrate, is the bane of modern poetry, and the conclusive mark of the
inferiority of so large a proportion of it.
Yet, this notwithstanding, Mr. Arnold tells us that Wordsworth “deals with
that in which life really consists”; and, not content with this, he
actually goes on to declare that “Wordsworth deals with more of life than
they do”;—“they” being every English poet since Milton, and indeed every
poet of every tongue since Milton, with the exception of Goethe! We can
only say that such an assertion is astounding; the most startling paradox,
indeed, we ever encountered in a criticism by a critic of authority. To
argue upon it against Mr. Arnold is, happily, superfluous; for Mr. Arnold
has anticipated and categorically answered his own paradox. Let him open
his own poems; let him turn to Stanzas In Memory Of Obermann, and let
him read on until he comes to the following couplet:
But Wordsworth’s eyes avert their ken,
From half of human fate.
Has he forgotten the passage? or would he now expunge it? Mr. Arnold the
poet, and Mr. Arnold the critic, are evidently at issue. But we think no
one will experience much difficulty in deciding which of two has “hit the
nail on the head,” and whether it be sound criticism to affirm that
Wordsworth deals with that in which life really consists, or sound
criticism to affirm that with one half of life he does not deal at all. At
any rate, these rival criticisms are not to be reconciled, and Mr. Arnold
must elect between the two.
What is the first and broad conclusion to be drawn from all that has been
said? It is this: that Wordsworth, as a poet, has treated great subjects
with marked and striking inadequacy, and smaller subjects with marked and
striking success. Now we submit that no man deserves to be called or
considered a great poet who has not treated some great subject in a great
manner. This is the mark, this is the test, of a great poet; and if we
once surrender this distinction, this standard, we soon lose ourselves in
hopeless critical confusion and entanglement. But no great subject can
be greatly or adequately treated in poetry, save objectively, and with the
help of action, passion, incident, of all the expedients, in fact, we have
enumerated. It never can be treated adequately or greatly by merely
writing about it. This is all that Wordsworth has done with his great
subjects, with “truth, grandeur, beauty, love,” and the rest of them; and
therefore, as far as great subjects are concerned, he has failed, and
failed conspicuously. Where he has succeeded, and succeeded conspicuously,
succeeded admirably, succeeded perfectly, is in smaller subjects, such as
The Solitary Reaper, The Cuckoo, Three Years She Grew, and their
companions. This is to have done much; but it is not to have left behind
“an ample body of powerful work.” Much less is it to have left behind an
“ampler” body of powerful work than every English poet since Milton, Byron
included.
For what is the “ample body of powerful work” that Byron has left? If
Byron had failed as completely as Wordsworth in the treatment of his
larger themes, in a word, of his great subjects, then, in spite of much
fine lyrical work in Byron, the palm would have to be adjudged to
Wordsworth. But what critic of authority, who means to retain it, will
come forward and assert that Byron has failed in the treatment of his
larger themes, of his great subjects? Is Childe Harold a failure? Is
Manfred a failure? Is Cain a failure? Is Don Juan a failure? We,
like Mr. Arnold, can honestly say that though we “felt the expiring wave
of Byron’s mighty influence,” we now “regard him, and have long regarded
him, without illusion”; in fact, with just as little illusion as we regard
Wordsworth, which is perhaps more than Mr. Arnold can yet say. We are
unable to assert, with Scott, that, in Cain, “Byron has matched Milton
on his own ground.” It would have been very wonderful if he had, as
wonderful as if Virgil had matched Homer on Homer’s own ground. “Sero
venientibus ossa”; or, as some one put it during the controversy between
the respective merits of the Ancients and the Moderns, “The Ancients have
stolen all our best ideas.” Besides, though Byron has not matched Milton
on the ground Milton occupied first and pretty nigh exhausted, Byron has
done many other things that Milton has not done. We are equally unable to
say that Byron, “as various in composition as Shakespeare himself, has
embraced every topic in human life”; though we strongly incline to think
that a dispassionate and exhaustive survey would show him to be more
various in composition, and to have embraced a greater number of topics
appertaining to human life, than any poet, English or foreign, ancient or
modern, except Shakespeare.[1] Equally unable are we to accept the dictum
of Goethe, which Mr. Arnold vainly endeavours to explain away, by trying
to prove that Goethe did not mean what he certainly said, viz. that Byron
“is in the main greater than any other English poet.”
Therefore, as we say, we look upon Byron without any illusion, and without
any wish to extol him above his real rank, by calling on his behalf even
such witnesses as Scott and Goethe. We look at his works with the same
detachment and dispassionateness as we look at the Parthenon or on the
Venus of Milo. But, so looking on them, looking on them not through any
pet theories of our own, not with any moral, theological, or sectarian
bias, but simply with the same “dispassionate-lover-of-poetry” eyes with
which we look on Antigone, the Æneid, the Fairy Queen, or Faust,
we find ourselves unable to resist the conclusion, that, like them,
Childe Harold, Manfred, Cain, and Don Juan are great poems, are
great themes, greatly treated. This is not to say that they are perfect,
that they are in every way satisfactory. Is the Fairy Queen perfectly
satisfactory? Is the Æneid perfectly satisfactory? No critic has ever
found them so. Is the Iliad perfectly satisfactory? It would be very odd
if it were, seeing that, as no one but Mr. Gladstone any longer doubts, it
is the work, not of one poet, but of several poets. But when all has been
urged against them that can be urged by the most judicial criticism, they
remain great subjects greatly executed. In the same manner, so do Byron’s
greater poems. Roughly and broadly speaking, they are satisfactory;
whereas in no sense can The Prelude and The Excursion be said to be
satisfactory. On the contrary, they are entirely unsatisfactory. In a
word, of Byron’s larger works, it may be said that they will “do”; of
Wordsworth’s, on the contrary, as Jeffrey said, and as Mr. Arnold himself
allows, they “won’t.” That is the distinction; and it is an immense one.
Byron is not Shakespeare; for he lags considerably behind Shakespeare in
Invention, Action, and Character, by dint of which, and in conjunction
with which, the highest faculties of the poet are displayed. But a poet
may lag considerably behind Shakespeare, and yet exhibit these in a
conspicuous degree. It is in Character, no doubt, that Byron is more
particularly weak, as compared with Shakespeare, though he is by no means
so weak, in himself, and as compared with others, as people have come to
assume, by hearing the point so superficially iterated. It is not that
Byron cannot depict character; but he does not depict a sufficient number
of characters. They are not numerous and various enough. When M. Scherer
says that “Byron has treated hardly any subject but one—himself,” he is
repeating the parrot-cry of very shallow people, and is doing little
justice to his own powers as a critic. Indeed, had Shakespeare never
lived, it is probable that it would never have occurred to any one to urge
against Byron his deficiencies in this respect. It is because he is so
great a poet, because he is so great in other respects, and because some
critics have therefore inadvertently attempted to place him on a level
with Shakespeare, that his inferiority in this particular suggested itself
to those holding a juster view. Once suggested, it was harped upon,
exaggerated, and, we may fairly say, has now been done to death. We
presume, however, that no one would suggest that, even in the poetic
presentation of Character, Byron, however inferior to certain other
writers, is not immeasurably superior to Wordsworth, who never even
attempted to portray Character.
When we turn from the consideration of the power shown by Byron in the
presentation of Character, to his power shown in Action, Invention, and
Situation, the account becomes a very different one. In brisk and rapid
narrative, in striking incident, in prompt and perpetual
movement—qualities in which not only is Wordsworth deficient, but of
which he is absolutely devoid—Byron exhibits his true greatness as a
poet. Even in the Tales, in The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The
Corsair, The Siege of Corinth, The Prisoner of Chillon, which it has
of late been the fashion, we had almost said the affectation, to
depreciate, there is a stir, a “go,” a swift and swirling torrent of
action, a current of animation, a full and foaming stream of narrative, a
tumult and conflict of incident, which will never cease to be regarded as
among the best, the highest, and the most indispensable elements of
poetry, until we are all laid up in lavender, until we all take to moping
and brooding over our own feelings, until we all confine ourselves to
“smooth passions, smooth discourse, and joyous thought”; until we all
become content
To sit without emotion, hope, or aim,
In the loved presence of the cottage-fire.
And listen to the flapping of the flame,
Or kettle whispering its faint undersong.
Even if one confined oneself merely to Byron’s Tales, the assertion that
Wordsworth “deals with more of life” than Byron, would be startling. Love,
hatred, revenge, ambition, the rivalry of creeds, travel, fighting,
fighting by land and fighting by sea, almost every passion, and every form
of adventure, these are the “life” they deal with; and we submit that it
is to deal with a considerable portion of it; with far more of life at any
rate than Wordsworth deals with in the whole of his poems. Listen to his
own confession:
And thus from day to day my little boat
Rocks in its harbour, lodging peaceably.
Now turn to Byron:
O’er the glad waters of the dark blue sea,
Our thoughts as boundless, and our souls as free,
Far as the breeze can bear, the billows foam,
Survey our empire, and behold our home.
These are our realms, no limit to their sway!
That is precisely the difference. The horizon of Byron is so much larger.
Far from it being true that Wordsworth deals with more of life than Byron
does, the precise opposite is the truth, that Byron deals with far more of
life than Wordsworth does, if by life we mean the life of men, of men of
action, of men of the world, and not the life, as M. Scherer says, of
Solitaries, Contemplatives, and Recluses.
If we turn to Byron’s Dramas, to Sardanapalus, to The Two Foscari, to
The Doge of Venice, no doubt we crave for yet more action, more
incident, more situation, than Byron gives us. But we do so because
Shakespeare has accustomed us to crave for more; and the craving has been
intensified by the sensational character of modern novels and modern
stage-plays. Nevertheless these are present, in no small amount, in the
plays we have named; and whether people choose to consider the amount
great or small, surely it is immeasurably greater than the amount of
action, invention, and situation Wordsworth exhibits in any and every
poem, of any and every kind, he ever wrote.
We have more than once mentioned Childe Harold, but we must refer to it
once more and finally, in support and illustration of what we have been
urging. The persons who are of opinion that Byron never treated any
subject but himself, will perhaps likewise be of opinion that, in Childe
Harold, Byron treats only of himself, and that it is a purely
contemplative and subjective poem. A more superficial opinion could not
well be held. In form contemplative, it is in substance a poem full of
action, situation, and incident; in a word, it is a poem essentially and
notably objective. It is the only poem, ostensibly contemplative, of which
this can be said; and it assumes this complexion and character by dint of
Byron’s own character, which was above all things active, and could not be
content without action. In Childe Harold, Byron summons dead men and
dead nations from their sepulchres, and makes them live and act again. He
revivifies Athens, he resuscitates Rome. He makes Cicero breathe and burn;
he makes the fallen columns and shattered pillars of the Forum as eloquent
as Tully. Petrarch once more waters the tree that bears his lady’s name.
The mountains find a tongue. Jura answers from her misty shroud. The
lightning becomes a word. Rousseau tortures himself afresh; Gibbon afresh
saps solemn creeds with solemn sneer; afresh Egeria visits Numa in the
silence of the night, his breast to hers replying. Lake Leman woos, and
kisses away the cries of the Rhone, as they awake. Then she reproves like
a sister’s voice. The boats upon the lake are wings to waft us from
distraction. The stars become the poetry of Heaven. Waterloo is fought
before our very eyes. The defiles fatal to Roman rashness are again
crowded with Numidian horse, and Hannibal and Thrasymene flash before our
eyes. A soul is infused into the dead; a spirit is instilled into the
mountains. The torrents talk; the sepulchres act. Movement never ceases,
and the situation is perpetually shifting. Its incidents are almost the
whole of History. In it we have—what M. Scherer justly says Wordsworth
has not—the knowledge of the human heart which worldly experience gives,
the interior drama of the passions which a man can describe well only on
condition of having been their victim, and those general views upon
History and society which are formed partly by study, partly by the
practice of affairs. All this, too, we have, in the third and fourth
cantos—for the first and second are very inferior—presented, in
language, imagery, and music, of the noblest and most elevated kind; till,
swelling, as an organ swells, before it closes, the poem concludes with
that magnificent address to the Ocean, which rounds it off and completes
it, even as the physical ocean rounds off and completes the physical
earth. In no other poem that was ever written are Nature and man—not Man
in the abstract, but men as they act, strive, feel, and suffer—so
thoroughly interfused and interwoven; and they are interwoven and
interfused as they are interwoven and interfused in actual life, not by
men contemplating and talking, but by men doing and acting, in a word, by
living. And if the reference be to men in general and life in general, and
not to a particular sort of man living a particular sort of life away from
other men, then we make bold to say, though in doing so we contradict Mr.
Arnold roundly, that in Childe Harold alone there is “an ampler body of
powerful work,” and that Childe Harold alone “deals with more of life,”
than all Wordsworth’s poems, not even selected from, but taken in their
integrity, without the diminution of a single passage or the omission of a
single line.
At this point, Mr. Arnold steps in with a notable plea. It may be that
much of what Wordsworth has written is trivial, and that still more of it
is abstract verbiage, or doctrine we hear in church, perfectly true, but
wanting in the sort of truth we require, poetic truth. It may also be that
Wordsworth has written no one great poem, and that the poem he fancied to
be great will not do, and can never be satisfactory to the disinterested
lover of poetry. It may furthermore be the case that in Wordsworth’s poems
we have to lament a deficiency, if not indeed a total absence of Action,
Invention, Situation, and Character, and that he is only a Contemplative,
a Recluse, a Solitary, analysing the sensations produced upon himself by
dwelling upon mountains, woods, and waters. All this may be so. But, says
Mr. Arnold, “Poetry is at bottom a criticism of life,” the greatness of a
poet depends upon his criticism of life, and Wordsworth’s criticism of
life is more complete, more powerful, and more sound, than that of any
English poet since Milton, indeed than that of any poet since Milton, with
the one exception of Goethe.
The great and the justly acquired authority of Mr. Arnold must not deter
us from saying that to no canon of criticism upon poetry with which we are
acquainted do so many objections present themselves. We suspect Mr. Arnold
himself has discerned some of these since he first propounded it; for
while in his Prefatory Essay upon Wordsworth he urges it with absolute
confidence, in his Prefatory Essay on Byron he does so more hesitatingly,
and exhibits more anxiety to explain it. But does he not explain it away,
when he says, “We are not brought much on our way, I admit, towards an
adequate definition of poetry as distinguished from prose by that truth”?
Upon this point M. Scherer, an admirer, like ourselves, of both Wordsworth
and Mr. Arnold, has some just observations:
Wordsworth seems to Mr. Arnold to have the qualities of poetic
greatness, and Mr. Arnold accordingly defines these qualities. The
great poet, in his opinion, is the one that expresses the most noble
and the most profound idea, upon the nature of man, the one who has a
philosophy of life, and who impresses it powerfully on the subjects
which he treats. The definition, it will be perceived, is a little
vague.
Mr. Arnold, we all know, is rather partial to vagueness, being of opinion
that it is of the essence of Culture to be more or less vague, and that
without a certain amount of vagueness there can be no sweetness and no
light. We should be sorry to seem to say anything against those delightful
characteristics, lest we should be supposed to be without them; and we
hereby declare ourselves all in favour of our “consciousness playing
about our stock notions,” even if those stock notions be sweetness and
light themselves, with their accompanying charm of vagueness. But though,
in all seriousness, what Swift calls sweetness and light are invaluable
qualities, despite the partial vagueness they entail, yet when two poets
are compared, and a definition of the main business and main essence of
poetry is offered, in order that by it the relative greatness of the two
may be tested, it is just as well that the definition should not be too
vague, should be at any rate precise enough to afford the test desired.
But what is the use of it if it does not “bring us much on our way”?
Unfortunately, Mr. Arnold’s theory of poetry being a criticism of life not
only does not help us along our road, it tends to take us off our road. We
regret we have not left ourselves space to deal with his theory at length,
and can only hope we may have an opportunity of returning to it. But lest
Mr. Arnold should be tempted to raise it to the dignity of a “stock
notion,” and to bestow upon it the privilege of that faithful iteration
which is bestowed upon “culture,” “sweetness and light,” “Barbarians,
Philistines, and Populace,” which have a good deal more to say for
themselves, we think it well to point out to him that, by averring poetry
to be “a criticism of life,” he is giving a handle to the Philistines of
criticism, and to the enemies of sweetness and light, which they may turn
against him in a notable manner.
For whose “criticism of life”? Does he not perceive that he is enabling
people to maintain, which unfortunately they are already only too disposed
to do, that this poet is a great poet because they consider his criticism
of life to be right and true, and that other poet to be not a great poet,
or a much smaller poet, because they consider his criticism of life to be
wrong and false? Why, this is the very pest and bane of English criticism
upon poetry, and upon art generally; the criticism which in reality
resolves itself into “I agree with this; I like that.” This is the
criticism of sheer and unadulterated Philistinism, against which Mr.
Arnold has been waging such excellent and needed war for several years.
Nor, in spite of much vagueness, will it be possible for Mr. Arnold to
escape from this consequence of his dictum that poetry is a criticism of
life. For at last, after much that seems to us like beating about the
bush, he goes straight to the point, and makes the fatal confession in
plain words.
As compared with Leopardi, Wordsworth, though at many points less
lucid, though far less a master of style, far less of an artist,
gains so much by his criticism of life being, in certain matters of
profound importance, healthful and true, whereas Leopardi’s pessimism
is not, that the value of Wordsworth’s poetry, on the whole, stands
higher for us, I think, than that of Leopardi’s, as it stands higher
for us, I think, than that of any modern poetry except Goethe’s.
Higher, because it is more healthful! That any critic, not an abject
Philistine, should say such a thing, amazes us beyond words. Surely Mr.
Arnold is aware that there are persons whose opinion on that subject
carries much weight, who consider that Goethe’s criticism of life is
neither healthful nor true, but on the contrary false or mischievous, yet
who do not on that account deny to Goethe the title of a great poet. Is
Mr. Arnold really serious when he asserts that, other things being equal,
one poet is less great than another poet because the first is a pessimist,
and the other is an optimist? If he is, let us have two more volumes of
Selections; one containing all the best optimist poetry, and the other
containing all the best pessimist poetry, that was ever written. Which
collection would be the more true, we do not undertake to know, and, as
critics and disinterested lovers of poetry, we do not care. But we
entertain no doubt whatever which Selection would contain the finest
poetry. It would not be the optimist one. Some of the finest poetry ever
written upon life is to be found surely in the Old Testament. What might
be taken as its motto? “Vanity of Vanities. All is Vanity.” As far as this
life, and any criticism of it are concerned, it is a very Gospel of
Pessimism.
Is the conclusion then that a pessimistic criticism of life necessarily
makes a poet greater than another poet who criticises it from an
optimistic point of view? Not in the least. The consideration—we do not
say to the positive philosopher, to the historian, to the moralist,
but—to the disinterested lover of poetry, is simply irrelevant.
But there is an attitude towards life which does give a poet the chance at
least of being greater than either a poet who criticises life as a
pessimist, or than a poet who criticises it as an optimist. That attitude
is one neither of pessimism nor of optimism; indeed, not a criticism of
life at all, or at least not such a criticism of life as to leave it open
to any one to declare that it is healthful and true, or that it is
insalubrious and false. Will Mr. Arnold tell us what is Shakespeare’s
criticism of life? Is it pessimistic or optimistic? We are almost alarmed
at asking the question; for who knows that, in doing so, we may not be
sowing the seeds of a controversy as long and as interminable as the
controversy respecting the moral purpose, the criticism of life in
Hamlet? Once started, the controversy will go on for ever, precisely
because there is no way of ending it. What constitutes, not the
superiority, but the comparative inferiority, of Byron and Wordsworth
alike, is their excessive criticism of life. They criticise life overmuch.
It is the foible of each of them. What constitutes the superiority of
Shakespeare is, that he does not so much criticise life, as present it. He
holds the mirror up to nature, and is content to do so, showing it with
all its beautiful and all its ugly features, and with perfect
dispassionateness. Hence his unequalled greatness.
We regret we have not space to set this forth more at length. But Mr.
Arnold will scarcely misunderstand us; and we would venture to ask him to
ponder these objections, and to let his consciousness play freely about
them. If he does so, we have little doubt that the theory about poetry
being a criticism of life, with its appalling consequences to the critic,
to the disinterested lover of poetry, to the adherent of culture, to the
friend of sweetness and light, and in fact to every one but the Philistine
with his stock ideas, will silently be dropped.
But if Mr. Arnold sees insuperable objections to this course, and the
canon about poetry being a criticism of life is to be added to that list
of delightful formulæ, which, during the last decade, have shed so much
light on our condition, then we can only once more appeal from Mr. Arnold
to Mr. Arnold, and ask how it is that Wordsworth can be considered to have
criticised life, and to “deal with that in which life really consists,” if
it be true, as Mr. Arnold tells us it is true, that
Wordsworth’s eyes avert their ken
From half of human fate.
How, we shall still have to ask, can a poet be said to have criticised
life of whom such an ardent admirer as M. Scherer can observe, “As for
cities, Wordsworth seeks to ignore them. He takes them for a discordant
note which it is only just and right to drown and get rid of in the
general harmony of creation.”
But we must end; and we submit that we have established our case.
Wordsworth can be made to figure as the greatest poet since Milton, only
by canons of criticism that would make him not only a greater poet than
Milton, but a greater poet than any poet that preceded Milton. If this be
so, let us know it. But if not, it is vain work, trying to extol him, as a
poet, above Byron. Mr. Arnold has done Byron injustice by making
selections from his works, and asserting that selections are better than
the whole of the works from which they are selected. You might as well
select from a mountain. What should we think of the process that said,
“Here is an edelweiss, here some heather, here a lump of quartz, here a
bit of ice from a glacier, here some water from a torrent, here some
pine-cones, here some eggs from an eagle’s nest; and now you know all
about Mont Blanc”? Byron is no more to be known in that fashion than the
Matterhorn is. You must make acquaintances with pastoral valleys, with
yawning precipices, with roaring cataracts, with tinkling cattle-bells,
with the rumble of avalanches, with the growl of thunder, with the zigzag
lightning, with storm, and mists, and sudden burst of tenderest sunshine,
with these, with more, in fact with all, if Alp or Byron is to be really
known. But Mr. Arnold has rendered Byron one service at least. When he
says that Byron and Wordsworth stand first and pre-eminent among the
English poets of this century, he relieves Byron of danger of rivalry.