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Letters On Literature
Introductory: Of Modern English Poetry
by Lang, Andrew
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To Mr. Arthur Wincott, Topeka, Kansas.
Dear Wincott,--You write to me, from your "bright home in the
setting sun," with the flattering information that you have read my
poor "Letters to Dead Authors." You are kind enough to say that you
wish I would write some "Letters to Living Authors;" but that, I
fear, is out of the question,--for me.
A thoughtful critic in the Spectator has already remarked that the
great men of the past would not care for my shadowy epistles--if
they could read them. Possibly not; but, like Prior, "I may write
till they can spell"--an exercise of which ghosts are probably as
incapable as was Matt's little Mistress of Quality. But Living
Authors are very different people, and it would be perilous, as well
as impertinent, to direct one's comments on them literally, in the
French phrase, "to their address." Yet there is no reason why a
critic should not adopt the epistolary form.
Our old English essays, the papers in the Tatler and Spectator, were
originally nothing but letters. The vehicle permits a touch of
personal taste, perhaps of personal prejudice. So I shall write my
"Letters on Literature," of the present and of the past, English,
American, ancient, or modern, to you, in your distant Kansas, or to
such other correspondents as are kind enough to read these notes.
Poetry has always the precedence in these discussions. Poor Poetry!
She is an ancient maiden of good family, and is led out first at
banquets, though many would prefer to sit next some livelier and
younger Muse, the lady of fiction, or even the chattering soubrette
of journalism. Seniores priores: Poetry, if no longer very
popular, is a dame of the worthiest lineage, and can boast a long
train of gallant admirers, dead and gone. She has been much in
courts. The old Greek tyrants loved her; great Rhamses seated her
at his right hand; every prince had his singers. Now we dwell in an
age of democracy, and Poetry wins but a feigned respect, more out of
courtesy, and for old friendship's sake, than for liking. Though so
many write verse, as in Juvenal's time, I doubt if many read it.
"None but minstrels list of sonneting." The purchasing public, for
poetry, must now consist chiefly of poets, and they are usually
poor.
Can anything speak more clearly of the decadence of the art than the
birth of so many poetical "societies"? We have the Browning
Society, the Shelley Society, the Shakespeare Society, the
Wordsworth Society--lately dead. They all demonstrate that people
have not the courage to study verse in solitude, and for their
proper pleasure; men and women need confederates in this adventure.
There is safety in numbers, and, by dint of tea-parties,
recitations, discussions, quarrels and the like, Dr. Furnivall and
his friends keep blowing the faint embers on the altar of Apollo.
They cannot raise a flame!
In England we are in the odd position of having several undeniable
poets, and very little new poetry worthy of the name. The chief
singers have outlived, if not their genius, at all events its
flowering time. Hard it is to estimate poetry, so apt we are, by
our very nature, to prefer "the newest songs," as Odysseus says men
did even during the war of Troy. Or, following another ancient
example, we say, like the rich niggards who neglected Theocritus,
"Homer is enough for all."
Let us attempt to get rid of every bias, and, thinking as
dispassionately as we can, we still seem to read the name of
Tennyson in the golden book of English poetry. I cannot think that
he will ever fall to a lower place, or be among those whom only
curious students pore over, like Gower, Drayton, Donne, and the
rest. Lovers of poetry will always read him as they will read
Wordsworth, Keats, Milton, Coleridge, and Chaucer. Look his defects
in the face, throw them into the balance, and how they disappear
before his merits! He is the last and youngest of the mighty race,
born, as it were, out of due time, late, and into a feebler
generation.
Let it be admitted that the gold is not without alloy, that he has a
touch of voluntary affectation, of obscurity, even an occasional
perversity, a mannerism, a set of favourite epithets ("windy" and
"happy"). There is a momentary echo of Donne, of Crashaw, nay, in
his earliest pieces, even a touch of Leigh Hunt. You detect it in
pieces like "Lilian" and "Eleanore," and the others of that kind and
of that date.
Let it be admitted that "In Memoriam" has certain lapses in all that
meed of melodious tears; that there are trivialities which might
deserve (here is an example) "to line a box," or to curl some
maiden's locks, that there are weaknesses of thought, that the poet
now speaks of himself as a linnet, singing "because it must," now
dares to approach questions insoluble, and again declines their
solution. What is all this but the changeful mood of grief? The
singing linnet, like the bird in the old English heathen apologue,
dashes its light wings painfully against the walls of the chamber
into which it has flown out of the blind night that shall again
receive it.
I do not care to dwell on the imperfections in that immortal strain
of sympathy and consolation, that enchanted book of consecrated
regrets. It is an easier if not more grateful task to note a
certain peevish egotism of tone in the heroes of "Locksley Hall," of
"Maud," of "Lady Clara Vere de Vere." "You can't think how poor a
figure you make when you tell that story, sir," said Dr. Johnson to
some unlucky gentleman whose "figure" must certainly have been more
respectable than that which is cut by these whining and peevish
lovers of Maud and Cousin Amy.
Let it be admitted, too, that King Arthur, of the "Idylls," is like
an Albert in blank verse, an Albert cursed with a Guinevere for a
wife, and a Lancelot for friend. The "Idylls," with all their
beauties, are full of a Victorian respectability, and love of
talking with Vivien about what is not so respectable. One wishes,
at times, that the "Morte d'Arthur" had remained a lonely and
flawless fragment, as noble as Homer, as polished as Sophocles. But
then we must have missed, with many other admirable things, the
"Last Battle in the West."
People who come after us will be more impressed than we are by the
Laureate's versatility. He has touched so many strings, from "Will
Waterproof's Monologue," so far above Praed, to the agony of
"Rizpah," the invincible energy of "Ulysses," the languor and the
fairy music of the "Lotus Eaters," the grace as of a Greek epigram
which inspires the lines to Catullus and to Virgil. He is with
Milton for learning, with Keats for magic and vision, with Virgil
for graceful recasting of ancient golden lines, and, even in the
latest volume of his long life, "we may tell from the straw," as
Homer says, "what the grain has been."
There are many who make it a kind of religion to regard Mr. Browning
as the greatest of living English poets. For him, too, one is
thankful as for a veritable great poet; but can we believe that
impartial posterity will rate him with the Laureate, or that so
large a proportion of his work will endure? The charm of an enigma
now attracts students who feel proud of being able to understand
what others find obscure. But this attraction must inevitably
become a stumbling-block.
Why Mr. Browning is obscure is a long question; probably the answer
is that he often could not help himself. His darkest poems may be
made out by a person of average intelligence who will read them as
hard as, for example, he would find it necessary to read the "Logic"
of Hegel. There is a story of two clever girls who set out to
peruse "Sordello," and corresponded with each other about their
progress. "Somebody is dead in 'Sordello,'" one of them wrote to
her friend. "I don't quite know who it is, but it must make things
a little clearer in the long run." Alas! a copious use of the
guillotine would scarcely clear the stage of "Sordello." It is
hardly to be hoped that "Sordello," or "Red Cotton Night Cap
Country," or "Fifine," will continue to be struggled with by
posterity. But the mass of "Men and Women," that unexampled gallery
of portraits of the inmost hearts and secret minds of priests,
prigs, princes, girls, lovers, poets, painters, must survive
immortally, while civilization and literature last, while men care
to know what is in men.
No perversity of humour, no voluntary or involuntary harshness of
style, can destroy the merit of these poems, which have nothing like
them in the letters of the past, and must remain without successful
imitators in the future. They will last all the better for a
certain manliness of religious faith--something sturdy and assured--
not moved by winds of doctrine, not paltering with doubts, which is
certainly one of Mr. Browning's attractions in this fickle and
shifting generation. He cannot be forgotten while, as he says -
"A sunset touch,
A chorus ending of Euripides,"
remind men that they are creatures of immortality, and move "a
thousand hopes and fears."
If one were to write out of mere personal preference, and praise
most that which best fits one's private moods, I suppose I should
place Mr. Matthew Arnold at the head of contemporary English poets.
Reason and reflection, discussion and critical judgment, tell one
that he is not quite there.
Mr. Arnold had not the many melodies of the Laureate, nor his
versatile mastery, nor his magic, nor his copiousness. He had not
the microscopic glance of Mr. Browning, nor his rude grasp of facts,
which tears the life out of them as the Aztec priest plucked the
very heart from the victim. We know that, but yet Mr. Arnold's
poetry has our love; his lines murmur in our memory through all the
stress and accidents of life. "The Scholar Gipsy," "Obermann,"
"Switzerland," the melancholy majesty of the close of "Sohrab and
Rustum," the tenderness of those elegiacs on two kindred graves
beneath the Himalayas and by the Midland Sea; the surge and thunder
of "Dover Beach," with its "melancholy, long-withdrawing roar;"
these can only cease to whisper to us and console us in that latest
hour when life herself ceases to "moan round with many voices."
My friends tell me that Mr. Arnold is too doubting, and too
didactic, that he protests too much, and considers too curiously,
that his best poems are, at most, "a chain of highly valuable
thoughts." It may be so; but he carries us back to "wet, bird-
haunted English lawns;" like him "we know what white and purple
fritillaries the grassy harvest of the river yields," with him we
try to practise resignation, and to give ourselves over to that
spirit
"Whose purpose is not missed,
While life endures, while things subsist."
Mr. Arnold's poetry is to me, in brief, what Wordsworth's was to his
generation. He has not that inspired greatness of Wordsworth, when
nature does for him what his "lutin" did for Corneille, "takes the
pen from his hand and writes for him." But he has none of the
creeping prose which, to my poor mind, invades even "Tintern Abbey."
He is, as Mr. Swinburne says, "the surest-footed" of our poets. He
can give a natural and lovely life even to the wildest of ancient
imaginings, as to "these bright and ancient snakes, that once were
Cadmus and Harmonia."
Bacon speaks of the legends of the earlier and ruder world coming to
us "breathed softly through the flutes of the Grecians." But even
the Grecian flute, as in the lay of the strife of Apollo and
Marsyas, comes more tunably in the echo of Mr. Arnold's song, that
beautiful song in "Empedocles on Etna," which has the perfection of
sculpture and the charm of the purest colour. It is full of the
silver light of dawn among the hills, of the music of the loch's
dark, slow waves among the reeds, of the scent of the heather, and
the wet tresses of the birch.
Surely, then, we have had great poets living among us, but the
fountains of their song are silent, or flow but rarely over a
clogged and stony channel. And who is there to succeed the two who
are gone, or who shall be our poet, if the Master be silent? That
is a melancholy question, which I shall try to answer (with doubt
and dread enough) in my next letter. {1}
{1} This was written during the lifetime of Mr. Arnold and Mr.
Browning.
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