Title: The Sacred Wood - Essays on Poetry and Criticism
Author: Eliot, T. S. (Thomas Stearns)
Language: English
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                            The Sacred Wood


“Intravit pinacothecam senex canus, exercitati vultus et qui videretur
nescio quid magnum promittere, sed cultu non proinde speciosus, et
facile appareret eum ex hac nota litteratum esse, quos odisse divites
solent ... 'ego’ inquit 'poeta sum et ut spero, non humillimi spiritus,
si modo coronis aliquid credendum est, quas etiam ad immeritos deferre
gratia solet.’”—PETRONIUS.

“I also like to dine on becaficas.”



                            The Sacred Wood

                     Essays On Poetry And Criticism

                                   By

                              T. S. Eliot

                           Methuen & Co. Ltd.
                          36 Essex Street W.C.
                                 London
                                  1920



For

H. W. E.

“Tacuit Et Fecit”



Certain of these essays appeared, in the same or a more primitive form,
in _The Times Literary Supplement_, _The Athenæum_, _Art and Letters_,
and _The Egoist_. The author desires to express his obligation to the
editors of these periodicals.



                              INTRODUCTION


To anyone who is at all capable of experiencing the pleasures of
justice, it is gratifying to be able to make amends to a writer whom one
has vaguely depreciated for some years. The faults and foibles of
Matthew Arnold are no less evident to me now than twelve years ago,
after my first admiration for him; but I hope that now, on re-reading
some of his prose with more care, I can better appreciate his position.
And what makes Arnold seem all the more remarkable is, that if he were
our exact contemporary, he would find all his labour to perform again. A
moderate number of persons have engaged in what is called “critical”
writing, but no conclusion is any more solidly established than it was
in 1865. In the first essay in the first _Essays in Criticism_ we read
that

    it has long seemed to me that the burst of creative activity in our
    literature, through the first quarter of this century, had about it
    in fact something premature; and that from this cause its
    productions are doomed, most of them, in spite of the sanguine hopes
    which accompanied and do still accompany them, to prove hardly more
    lasting than the productions of far less splendid epochs. And this
    prematureness comes from its having proceeded without having its
    proper data, without sufficient material to work with. In other
    words, the English poetry of the first quarter of this century, with
    plenty of energy, plenty of creative force, did not know enough.
    This makes Byron so empty of matter, Shelley so incoherent,
    Wordsworth even, profound as he is, yet so wanting in completeness
    and variety.

This judgment of the Romantic Generation has not, so far as I know, ever
been successfully controverted; and it has not, so far as I know, ever
made very much impression on popular opinion. Once a poet is accepted,
his reputation is seldom disturbed, for better or worse. So little
impression has Arnold’s opinion made, that his statement will probably
be as true of the first quarter of the twentieth century as it was of
the nineteenth. A few sentences later, Arnold articulates the nature of
the malady:

    In the Greece of Pindar and Sophocles, in the England of
    Shakespeare, the poet lived in a current of ideas in the highest
    degree animating and nourishing to the creative power; society was,
    in the fullest measure, permeated by fresh thought, intelligent and
    alive; and this state of things is the true basis for the creative
    power’s exercise, in this it finds its data, its materials, truly
    ready for its hand; all the books and reading in the world are only
    valuable as they are helps to this.

At this point Arnold is indicating the centre of interest and activity
of the critical intelligence; and it is at this perception, we may
almost say, that Arnold’s critical activity stopped. In a society in
which the arts were seriously studied, in which the art of writing was
respected, Arnold might have become a critic. How astonishing it would
be, if a man like Arnold had concerned himself with the art of the
novel, had compared Thackeray with Flaubert, had analysed the work of
Dickens, had shown his contemporaries exactly why the author of _Amos
Barton_ is a more _serious_ writer than Dickens, and why the author of
_La Chartreuse de Parma_ is more serious than either? In _Culture and
Anarchy_, in _Literature and Dogma_, Arnold was not occupied so much in
establishing a criticism as in attacking the uncritical. The difference
is that while in constructive work something can be done, destructive
work must incessantly be repeated; and furthermore Arnold, in his
destruction, went for game outside of the literary preserve altogether,
much of it political game untouched and inviolable by ideas. This
activity of Arnold’s we must regret; it might perhaps have been carried
on as effectively, if not quite so neatly, by some disciple (had there
been one) in an editorial position on a newspaper. Arnold is not to be
blamed: he wasted his strength, as men of superior ability sometimes do,
because he saw something to be done and no one else to do it. The
temptation, to any man who is interested in ideas and primarily in
literature, to put literature into the corner until he has cleaned up
the whole country first, is almost irresistible. Some persons, like Mr.
Wells and Mr. Chesterton, have succeeded so well in this latter
profession of setting the house in order, and have attracted so much
more attention than Arnold, that we must conclude that it is indeed
their proper rôle, and that they have done well for themselves in laying
literature aside.

Not only is the critic tempted outside of criticism. The criticism
proper betrays such poverty of ideas and such atrophy of sensibility
that men who ought to preserve their critical ability for the
improvement of their own creative work are tempted into criticism. I do
not intend from this the usually silly inference that the “Creative”
gift is “higher” than the critical. When one creative mind is better
than another, the reason often is that the better is the more critical.
But the great bulk of the work of criticism could be done by minds of
the second order, and it is just these minds of the second order that
are difficult to find. They are necessary for the rapid circulation of
ideas. The periodical press—the ideal literary periodical—is an
instrument of transport; and the literary periodical press is dependent
upon the existence of a sufficient number of second-order (I do not say
“second-rate,” the word is too derogatory) minds to supply its material.
These minds are necessary for that “current of ideas,” that “society
permeated by fresh thought,” of which Arnold speaks.

It is a perpetual heresy of English culture to believe that only the
first-order mind, the Genius, the Great Man, matters; that he is
solitary, and produced best in the least favourable environment, perhaps
the Public School; and that it is most likely a sign of inferiority that
Paris can show so many minds of the second order. If too much bad verse
is published in London, it does not occur to us to raise our standards,
to do anything to educate the poetasters; the remedy is, Kill them off.
I quote from Mr. Edmund Gosse:[1]

Footnote 1:

  _Sunday Times_, May 30, 1920.

    Unless something is done to stem this flood of poetastry the art of
    verse will become not merely superfluous, but ridiculous. Poetry is
    not a formula which a thousand flappers and hobbledehoys ought to be
    able to master in a week without any training, and the mere fact
    that it seems to be now practised with such universal ease is enough
    to prove that something has gone amiss with our standards.... This
    is all wrong, and will lead us down into the abyss like so many
    Gadarene swine unless we resist it.

We quite agree that poetry is not a formula. But what does Mr. Gosse
propose to do about it? If Mr. Gosse had found himself in the flood of
poetastry in the reign of Elizabeth, what would he have done about it?
would he have stemmed it? What exactly is this abyss? and if something
“has gone amiss with our standards,” is it wholly the fault of the
younger generation that it is aware of no authority that it must
respect? It is part of the business of the critic to preserve
tradition—where a good tradition exists. It is part of his business to
see literature steadily and to see it whole; and this is eminently to
see it _not_ as consecrated by time, but to see it beyond time; to see
the best work of our time and the best work of twenty-five hundred years
ago with the same eyes.[2] It is part of his business to help the
poetaster to understand his own limitations. The poetaster who
understands his own limitations will be one of our useful second-order
minds; a good minor poet (something which is very rare) or another good
critic. As for the first-order minds, when they happen, they will be
none the worse off for a “current of ideas”; the solitude with which
they will always and everywhere be invested is a very different thing
from isolation, or a monarchy of death.

Footnote 2:

  Arnold, it must be admitted, gives us often the impression of seeing
  the masters, whom he quotes, as canonical literature, rather than as
  masters.

    NOTE.—I may commend as a model to critics who desire to correct some
    of the poetical vagaries of the present age, the following passage
    from a writer who cannot be accused of flaccid leniency, and the
    justice of whose criticism must be acknowledged even by those who
    feel a strong partiality toward the school of poets criticized:—

    “Yet great labour, directed by great abilities, is never wholly
    lost; if they frequently threw away their wit upon false conceits,
    they likewise sometimes struck out unexpected truth: if their
    conceits were far-fetched, they were often worth the carriage. To
    write on their plan, it was at least necessary to read and think. No
    man could be born a metaphysical poet, nor assume the dignity of a
    writer, by descriptions copied from descriptions, by imitations
    borrowed from imitations, by traditional imagery, and hereditary
    similes, by readiness of rhyme, and volubility of syllables.

    “In perusing the works of this race of authors, the mind is
    exercised either by recollection or inquiry: something already
    learned is to be retrieved, or something new is to be examined. If
    their greatness seldom elevates, their acuteness often surprises; if
    the imagination is not always gratified, at least the powers of
    reflection and comparison are employed; and in the mass of materials
    which ingenious absurdity has thrown together, genuine wit and
    useful knowledge may be sometimes found buried perhaps in grossness
    of expression, but useful to those who know their value; and such
    as, when they are expanded to perspicuity, and polished to elegance,
    may give lustre to works which have more propriety though less
    copiousness of sentiment.”—JOHNSON, _Life of Cowley_.



                                Contents

          Introduction                                     ix

          The Perfect Critic                                1

          Imperfect Critics—

          Swinburne as Critic                              15

          A Romantic Aristocrat                            22

          The Local Flavour                                29

          A Note on the American Critic                    34

          The French Intelligence                          39

          Tradition and the Individual Talent              42

          The Possibility of a Poetic Drama                54

          Euripides and Professor Murray                   64

          Rhetoric and Poetic Drama                        71

          Notes on the Blank Verse of Christopher
          Marlowe                                          78

          Hamlet and His Problems                          87

          Ben Jonson                                       95

          Phillip Massinger                               112

          Swinburne as Poet                               131

          Blake                                           137

          Dante                                           144



                           The Perfect Critic


                                   I

    “Eriger en lois ses impressions personnelles, c’est le grand effort
    d’un homme s’il est sincère.”—_Lettres à l’Amazone._

Coleridge was perhaps the greatest of English critics, and in a sense
the last. After Coleridge we have Matthew Arnold; but Arnold—I think it
will be conceded—was rather a propagandist for criticism than a critic,
a popularizer rather than a creator of ideas. So long as this island
remains an island (and we are no nearer the Continent than were Arnold’s
contemporaries) the work of Arnold will be important; it is still a
bridge across the Channel, and it will always have been good sense.
Since Arnold’s attempt to correct his countrymen, English criticism has
followed two directions. When a distinguished critic observed recently,
in a newspaper article, that “poetry is the most highly organized form
of intellectual activity,” we were conscious that we were reading
neither Coleridge nor Arnold. Not only have the words “organized” and
“activity,” occurring together in this phrase, that familiar vague
suggestion of the scientific vocabulary which is characteristic of
modern writing, but one asked questions which Coleridge and Arnold would
not have permitted one to ask. How is it, for instance, that poetry is
more “highly organized” than astronomy, physics, or pure mathematics,
which we imagine to be, in relation to the scientist who practises them,
“intellectual activity” of a pretty highly organized type? “Mere strings
of words,” our critic continues with felicity and truth, “flung like
dabs of paint across a blank canvas, may awaken surprise ... but have no
significance whatever in the history of literature.” The phrases by
which Arnold is best known may be inadequate, they may assemble more
doubts than they dispel, but they usually have some meaning. And if a
phrase like “the most highly organized form of intellectual activity” is
the highest organization of thought of which contemporary criticism, in
a distinguished representative, is capable, then, we conclude, modern
criticism is degenerate.

The verbal disease above noticed may be reserved for diagnosis by and
by. It is not a disease from which Mr. Arthur Symons (for the quotation
was, of course, not from Mr. Symons) notably suffers. Mr. Symons
represents the other tendency; he is a representative of what is always
called “æsthetic criticism” or “impressionistic criticism.” And it is
this form of criticism which I propose to examine at once. Mr. Symons,
the critical successor of Pater, and partly of Swinburne (I fancy that
the phrase “sick or sorry” is the common property of all three), _is_
the “impressionistic critic.” He, if anyone, would be said to expose a
sensitive and cultivated mind—cultivated, that is, by the accumulation
of a considerable variety of impressions from all the arts and several
languages—before an “object”; and his criticism, if anyone’s, would be
said to exhibit to us, like the plate, the faithful record of the
impressions, more numerous or more refined than our own, upon a mind
more sensitive than our own. A record, we observe, which is also an
interpretation, a translation; for it must itself impose impressions
upon us, and these impressions are as much created as transmitted by the
criticism. I do not say at once that this is Mr. Symons; but it is the
“impressionistic” critic, and the impressionistic critic is supposed to
be Mr. Symons.

At hand is a volume which we may test.[3] Ten of these thirteen essays
deal with single plays of Shakespeare, and it is therefore fair to take
one of these ten as a specimen of the book:

Footnote 3:

  _Studies in Elizabethan Drama._ By Arthur Symons.

    _Antony and Cleopatra_ is the most wonderful, I think, of all
    Shakespeare’s plays....

and Mr. Symons reflects that Cleopatra is the most wonderful of all
women:

    The queen who ends the dynasty of the Ptolemies has been the star of
    poets, a malign star shedding baleful light, from Horace and
    Propertius down to Victor Hugo; and it is not to poets only....

What, we ask, is this for? as a page on Cleopatra, and on her possible
origin in the dark lady of the Sonnets, unfolds itself. And we find,
gradually, that this is not an essay on a work of art or a work of
intellect; but that Mr. Symons is living through the play as one might
live it through in the theatre; recounting, commenting:

    In her last days Cleopatra touches a certain elevation ... she would
    die a thousand times, rather than live to be a mockery and a scorn
    in men’s mouths ... she is a woman to the last ... so she dies ...
    the play ends with a touch of grave pity ...

Presented in this rather unfair way, torn apart like the leaves of an
artichoke, the impressions of Mr. Symons come to resemble a common type
of popular literary lecture, in which the stories of plays or novels are
retold, the motives of the characters set forth, and the work of art
therefore made easier for the beginner. But this is not Mr. Symons’
reason for writing. The reason why we find a similarity between his
essay and this form of education is that _Antony and Cleopatra_ is a
play with which we are pretty well acquainted, and of which we have,
therefore, our own impressions. We can please ourselves with our own
impressions of the characters and their emotions; and we do not find the
impressions of another person, however sensitive, very significant. But
if we can recall the time when we were ignorant of the French
symbolists, and met with _The Symbolist Movement in Literature_, we
remember that book as an introduction to wholly new feelings, as a
revelation. After we have read Verlaine and Laforgue and Rimbaud and
return to Mr. Symons’ book, we may find that our own impressions dissent
from his. The book has not, perhaps, a permanent value for the one
reader, but it has led to results of permanent importance for him.

The question is not whether Mr. Symons’ impressions are “true” or
“false.” So far as you can isolate the “impression,” the pure feeling,
it is, of course, neither true nor false. The point is that you never
rest at the pure feeling; you react in one of two ways, or, as I believe
Mr. Symons does, in a mixture of the two ways. The moment you try to put
the impressions into words, you either begin to analyse and construct,
to “ériger en lois,” or you begin to create something else. It is
significant that Swinburne, by whose poetry Mr. Symons may at one time
have been influenced, is one man in his poetry and a different man in
his criticism; to this extent and in this respect only, that he is
satisfying a different impulse; he is criticizing, expounding,
arranging. You may say this is not the criticism of a critic, that it is
emotional, not intellectual—though of this there are two opinions, but
it is in the direction of analysis and construction, a beginning to
“ériger en lois,” and not in the direction of creation. So I infer that
Swinburne found an adequate outlet for the creative impulse in his
poetry; and none of it was forced back and out through his critical
prose. The style of the latter is essentially a prose style; and Mr.
Symons’ prose is much more like Swinburne’s poetry than it is like his
prose. I imagine—though here one’s thought is moving in almost complete
darkness—that Mr. Symons is far more disturbed, far more profoundly
affected, by his reading than was Swinburne, who responded rather by a
violent and immediate and comprehensive burst of admiration which may
have left him internally unchanged. The disturbance in Mr. Symons is
almost, but not quite, to the point of creating; the reading sometimes
fecundates his emotions to produce something new which is not criticism,
but is not the expulsion, the ejection, the birth of creativeness.

The type is not uncommon, although Mr. Symons is far superior to most of
the type. Some writers are essentially of the type that reacts in excess
of the stimulus, making something new out of the impressions, but suffer
from a defect of vitality or an obscure obstruction which prevents
nature from taking its course. Their sensibility alters the object, but
never transforms it. Their reaction is that of the ordinary emotional
person developed to an exceptional degree. For this ordinary emotional
person, experiencing a work of art, has a mixed critical and creative
reaction. It is made up of comment and opinion, and also new emotions
which are vaguely applied to his own life. The sentimental person, in
whom a work of art arouses all sorts of emotions which have nothing to
do with that work of art whatever, but are accidents of personal
association, is an incomplete artist. For in an artist these suggestions
made by a work of art, which are purely personal, become fused with a
multitude of other suggestions from multitudinous experience, and result
in the production of a new object which is no longer purely personal,
because it is a work of art itself.

It would be rash to speculate, and is perhaps impossible to determine,
what is unfulfilled in Mr. Symons’ charming verse that overflows into
his critical prose. Certainly we may say that in Swinburne’s verse the
circuit of impression and expression is complete; and Swinburne was
therefore able, in his criticism, to be more a critic than Mr. Symons.
This gives us an intimation why the artist is—each within his own
limitations—oftenest to be depended upon as a critic; his criticism will
be criticism, and not the satisfaction of a suppressed creative
wish—which, in most other persons, is apt to interfere fatally.

Before considering what the proper critical reaction of artistic
sensibility is, how far criticism is “feeling” and how far “thought,”
and what sort of “thought” is permitted, it may be instructive to prod a
little into that other temperament, so different from Mr. Symons’, which
issues in generalities such as that quoted near the beginning of this
article.


                                   II

    “L’écrivain de style abstrait est presque toujours un sentimental,
    du moins un sensitif. L’écrivain artiste n’est presque jamais un
    sentimental, et très rarement un sensitif”—_Le Problème du Style._

The statement already quoted, that “poetry is the most highly organized
form of intellectual activity,” may be taken as a specimen of the
abstract style in criticism. The confused distinction which exists in
most heads between “abstract” and “concrete” is due not so much to a
manifest fact of the existence of two types of mind, an abstract and a
concrete, as to the existence of another type of mind, the verbal, or
philosophic. I, of course, do not imply any general condemnation of
philosophy; I am, for the moment, using the word “philosophic” to cover
the unscientific ingredients of philosophy; to cover, in fact, the
greater part of the philosophic output of the last hundred years. There
are two ways in which a word may be “abstract.” It may have (the word
“activity,” for example) a meaning which cannot be grasped by appeal to
any of the senses; its apprehension may require a deliberate suppression
of analogies of visual or muscular experience, which is none the less an
effort of imagination. “Activity” will mean for the trained scientist,
if he employ the term, either nothing at all or something still more
exact than anything it suggests to us. If we are allowed to accept
certain remarks of Pascal and Mr. Bertrand Russell about mathematics, we
believe that the mathematician deals with objects—if he will permit us
to call them objects—which directly affect his sensibility. And during a
good part of history the philosopher endeavoured to deal with objects
which he believed to be of the same exactness as the mathematician’s.
Finally Hegel arrived, and if not perhaps the first, he was certainly
the most prodigious exponent of emotional systematization, dealing with
his emotions as if they were definite objects which had aroused those
emotions. His followers have as a rule taken for granted that words have
definite meanings, overlooking the tendency of words to become
indefinite emotions. (No one who had not witnessed the event could
imagine the conviction in the tone of Professor Eucken as he pounded the
table and exclaimed _Was ist Geist? Geist ist ..._) If verbalism were
confined to professional philosophers, no harm would be done. But their
corruption has extended very far. Compare a mediæval theologian or
mystic, compare a seventeenth-century preacher, with any “liberal”
sermon since Schleiermacher, and you will observe that words have
changed their meanings. What they have lost is definite, and what they
have gained is indefinite.

The vast accumulations of knowledge—or at least of information—deposited
by the nineteenth century have been responsible for an equally vast
ignorance. When there is so much to be known, when there are so many
fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different
meanings, when every one knows a little about a great many things, it
becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what
he is talking about or not. And when we do not know, or when we do not
know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts. The
sentence so frequently quoted in this essay will serve for an example of
this process as well as any, and may be profitably contrasted with the
opening phrases of the _Posterior Analytics_. Not only all knowledge,
but all feeling, is in perception. The inventor of poetry as the most
highly organized form of intellectual activity was not engaged in
perceiving when he composed this definition; he had nothing to be aware
of except his own emotion about “poetry.” He was, in fact, absorbed in a
very different “activity” not only from that of Mr. Symons, but from
that of Aristotle.

Aristotle is a person who has suffered from the adherence of persons who
must be regarded less as his disciples than as his sectaries. One must
be firmly distrustful of accepting Aristotle in a canonical spirit; this
is to lose the whole living force of him. He was primarily a man of not
only remarkable but universal intelligence; and universal intelligence
means that he could apply his intelligence to anything. The ordinary
intelligence is good only for certain classes of objects; a brilliant
man of science, if he is interested in poetry at all, may conceive
grotesque judgments: like one poet because he reminds him of himself, or
another because he expresses emotions which he admires; he may use art,
in fact, as the outlet for the egotism which is suppressed in his own
speciality. But Aristotle had none of these impure desires to satisfy;
in whatever sphere of interest, he looked solely and steadfastly at the
object; in his short and broken treatise he provides an eternal
example—not of laws, or even of method, for there is no method except to
be very intelligent, but of intelligence itself swiftly operating the
analysis of sensation to the point of principle and definition.

It is far less Aristotle than Horace who has been the model for
criticism up to the nineteenth century. A precept, such as Horace or
Boileau gives us, is merely an unfinished analysis. It appears as a law,
a rule, because it does not appear in its most general form; it is
empirical. When we understand necessity, as Spinoza knew, we are free
because we assent. The dogmatic critic, who lays down a rule, who
affirms a value, has left his labour incomplete. Such statements may
often be justifiable as a saving of time; but in matters of great
importance the critic must not coerce, and he must not make judgments of
worse and better. He must simply elucidate: the reader will form the
correct judgment for himself.

And again, the purely “technical” critic—the critic, that is, who writes
to expound some novelty or impart some lesson to practitioners of an
art—can be called a critic only in a narrow sense. He may be analysing
perceptions and the means for arousing perceptions, but his aim is
limited and is not the disinterested exercise of intelligence. The
narrowness of the aim makes easier the detection of the merit or
feebleness of the work; even of these writers there are very few—so that
their “criticism” is of great importance within its limits. So much
suffices for Campion. Dryden is far more disinterested; he displays much
free intelligence; and yet even Dryden—or any _literary_ critic of the
seventeenth century—is not quite a free mind, compared, for instance,
with such a mind as Rochefoucauld’s. There is always a tendency to
legislate rather than to inquire, to revise accepted laws, even to
overturn, but to reconstruct out of the same material. And the free
intelligence is that which is wholly devoted to inquiry.

Coleridge, again, whose natural abilities, and some of whose
performances, are probably more remarkable than those of any other
modern critic, cannot be estimated as an intelligence completely free.
The nature of the restraint in his case is quite different from that
which limited the seventeenth-century critics, and is much more
personal. Coleridge’s metaphysical interest was quite genuine, and was,
like most metaphysical interest, an affair of his emotions. But a
literary critic should have no emotions except those immediately
provoked by a work of art—and these (as I have already hinted) are, when
valid, perhaps not to be called emotions at all. Coleridge is apt to
take leave of the data of criticism, and arouse the suspicion that he
has been diverted into a metaphysical hare-and-hounds. His end does not
always appear to be the return to the work of art with improved
perception and intensified, because more conscious, enjoyment; his
centre of interest changes, his feelings are impure. In the derogatory
sense he is more “philosophic” than Aristotle. For everything that
Aristotle says illuminates the literature which is the occasion for
saying it; but Coleridge only now and then. It is one more instance of
the pernicious effect of emotion.

Aristotle had what is called the scientific mind—a mind which, as it is
rarely found among scientists except in fragments, might better be
called the intelligent mind. For there is no other intelligence than
this, and so far as artists and men of letters are intelligent (we may
doubt whether the level of intelligence among men of letters is as high
as among men of science) their intelligence is of this kind.
Sainte-Beuve was a physiologist by training; but it is probable that his
mind, like that of the ordinary scientific specialist, was limited in
its interest, and that this was not, primarily, an interest in art. If
he was a critic, there is no doubt that he was a very good one; but we
may conclude that he earned some other name. Of all modern critics,
perhaps Remy de Gourmont had most of the general intelligence of
Aristotle. An amateur, though an excessively able amateur, in
physiology, he combined to a remarkable degree sensitiveness, erudition,
sense of fact and sense of history, and generalizing power.

We assume the gift of a superior sensibility. And for sensibility wide
and profound reading does not mean merely a more extended pasture. There
is not merely an increase of understanding, leaving the original acute
impression unchanged. The new impressions modify the impressions
received from the objects already known. An impression needs to be
constantly refreshed by new impressions in order that it may persist at
all; it needs to take its place in a system of impressions. And this
system tends to become articulate in a generalized statement of literary
beauty.

There are, for instance, many scattered lines and tercets in the _Divine
Comedy_ which are capable of transporting even a quite uninitiated
reader, just sufficiently acquainted with the roots of the language to
decipher the meaning, to an impression of overpowering beauty. This
impression may be so deep that no subsequent study and understanding
will intensify it. But at this point the impression is emotional; the
reader in the ignorance which we postulate is unable to distinguish the
poetry from an emotional state aroused in himself by the poetry, a state
which may be merely an indulgence of his own emotions. The poetry may be
an accidental stimulus. The end of the enjoyment of poetry is a pure
contemplation from which all the accidents of personal emotion are
removed; thus we aim to see the object as it really is and find a
meaning for the words of Arnold. And without a labour which is largely a
labour of the intelligence, we are unable to attain that stage of vision
_amor intellectualis Dei_.

Such considerations, cast in this general form, may appear commonplaces.
But I believe that it is always opportune to call attention to the
torpid superstition that appreciation is one thing, and “intellectual”
criticism something else. Appreciation in popular psychology is one
faculty, and criticism another, an arid cleverness building theoretical
scaffolds upon one’s own perceptions or those of others. On the
contrary, the true generalization is not something superposed upon an
accumulation of perceptions; the perceptions do not, in a really
appreciative mind, accumulate as a mass, but form themselves as a
structure; and criticism is the statement in language of this structure;
it is a development of sensibility. The bad criticism, on the other
hand, is that which is nothing but an expression of emotion. And
emotional people—such as stockbrokers, politicians, men of science—and a
few people who pride themselves on being unemotional—detest or applaud
great writers such as Spinoza or Stendhal because of their “frigidity.”

The writer of the present essay once committed himself to the statement
that “The poetic critic is criticizing poetry in order to create
poetry.” He is now inclined to believe that the “historical” and the
“philosophical” critics had better be called historians and philosophers
quite simply. As for the rest, there are merely various degrees of
intelligence. It is fatuous to say that criticism is for the sake of
“creation” or creation for the sake of criticism. It is also fatuous to
assume that there are ages of criticism and ages of creativeness, as if
by plunging ourselves into intellectual darkness we were in better hope
of finding spiritual light. The two directions of sensibility are
complementary; and as sensibility is rare, unpopular, and desirable, it
is to be expected that the critic and the creative artist should
frequently be the same person.



                           Imperfect Critics


                          Swinburne as Critic


Three conclusions at least issue from the perusal of Swinburne’s
critical essays: Swinburne had mastered his material, was more inward
with the Tudor-Stuart dramatists than any man of pure letters before or
since; he is a more reliable guide to them than Hazlitt, Coleridge, or
Lamb; and his perception of relative values is almost always correct.
Against these merits we may oppose two objections: the style is the
prose style of Swinburne, and the content is not, in an exact sense,
criticism. The faults of style are, of course, personal; the tumultuous
outcry of adjectives, the headstrong rush of undisciplined sentences,
are the index to the impatience and perhaps laziness of a disorderly
mind. But the style has one positive merit: it allows us to know that
Swinburne was writing not to establish a critical reputation, not to
instruct a docile public, but as a poet his notes upon poets whom he
admired. And whatever our opinion of Swinburne’s verse, the notes upon
poets by a poet of Swinburne’s dimensions must be read with attention
and respect.

In saying that Swinburne’s essays have the value of notes of an
important poet upon important poets, we must place a check upon our
expectancy. He read everything, and he read with the single interest in
finding literature. The critics of the romantic period were pioneers,
and exhibit the fallibility of discoverers. The selections of Lamb are a
successful effort of good taste, but anyone who has referred to them
after a thorough reading of any of the poets included must have found
that some of the best passages—which must literally have stared Lamb in
the face—are omitted, while sometimes others of less value are included.
Hazlitt, who committed himself to the judgment that the _Maid’s Tragedy_
is one of the poorest of Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays, has no connected
message to deliver. Coleridge’s remarks—too few and scattered—have
permanent truth; but on some of the greatest names he passes no remark,
and of some of the best plays was perhaps ignorant or ill-informed. But
compared with Swinburne, Coleridge writes much more as a poet might be
expected to write about poets. Of Massinger’s verse Swinburne says:

    It is more serviceable, more businesslike, more eloquently
    practical, and more rhetorically effusive—but never effusive beyond
    the bounds of effective rhetoric—than the style of any Shakespearean
    or of any Jonsonian dramatist.

It is impossible to tell whether Webster would have found the style of
Massinger more “serviceable” than his own for the last act of the _White
Devil_, and indeed difficult to decide what “serviceable” here means;
but it is quite clear what Coleridge means when he says that Massinger’s
style

    is much more easily constructed [than Shakespeare’s], and may be
    more successfully adopted by writers in the present day.

Coleridge is writing as a professional with his eye on the technique. I
do not know from what writing of Coleridge Swinburne draws the assertion
that “Massinger often deals in exaggerated passion,” but in the essay
from which Swinburne quotes elsewhere Coleridge merely speaks of the
“unnaturally irrational passions,” a phrase much more defensible. Upon
the whole, the two poets are in harmony upon the subject of Massinger;
and although Coleridge has said more in five pages, and said it more
clearly, than Swinburne in thirty-nine, the essay of Swinburne is by no
means otiose: it is more stimulating than Coleridge’s, and the
stimulation is never misleading. With all his superlatives, his
judgment, if carefully scrutinized, appears temperate and just.

With all his justness of judgment, however, Swinburne is an appreciator
and not a critic. In the whole range of literature covered, Swinburne
makes hardly more than two judgments which can be reversed or even
questioned: one, that Lyly is insignificant as a dramatist, and the
other, that Shirley was probably unaffected by Webster. The _Cardinal_
is not a cast of the _Duchess of Malfi_, certainly; but when Shirley
wrote

        the mist is risen, and there’s none
    To steer my wandering bark. (_Dies._)

he was probably affected by

    My soul, like to a ship in a black storm,
    Is driven, I know not whither.

Swinburne’s judgment is generally sound, his taste sensitive and
discriminating. And we cannot say that his thinking is faulty or
perverse—up to the point at which it is thinking. But Swinburne stops
thinking just at the moment when we are most zealous to go on. And this
arrest, while it does not vitiate his work, makes it an introduction
rather than a statement.

We are aware, after the _Contemporaries of Shakespeare_ and the _Age of
Shakespeare_ and the books on Shakespeare and Jonson, that there is
something unsatisfactory in the way in which Swinburne was interested in
these people; we suspect that his interest was never articulately
formulated in his mind or consciously directed to any purpose. He makes
his way, or loses it, between two paths of definite direction. He might
as a poet have concentrated his attention upon the technical problems
solved or tackled by these men; he might have traced for us the
development of blank verse from Sackville to the mature Shakespeare, and
its degeneration from Shakespeare to Milton. Or he might have studied
through the literature to the mind of that century; he might, by
dissection and analysis, have helped us to some insight into the feeling
and thought which we seem to have left so far away. In either case, you
would have had at least the excitement of following the movements of an
important mind groping towards important conclusions. As it is, there
are to be no conclusions, except that Elizabethan literature is very
great, and that you can have pleasure and even ecstasy from it, because
a sensitive poetic talent has had the experience. One is in risk of
becoming fatigued by a hubbub that does not march; the drum is beaten,
but the procession does not advance.

If, for example, Swinburne’s interest was in poetry, why devote an essay
to Brome? “The opening scene of the _Sparagus Garden_,” says Swinburne,
“is as happily humorous and as vividly natural as that of any more
famous comedy.” The scene is both humorous and natural. Brome deserves
to be more read than he is, and first of all to be more accessible than
he is. But Swinburne ought to suggest or imply (I do not say impose) a
reason for reading the _Sparagus Garden_ or the _Antipodes_, more
sufficient than any he has provided. No doubt such reason could be
found.

When it is a matter of pronouncing judgment between two poets, Swinburne
is almost unerring. He is certainly right in putting Webster above
Tourneur, Tourneur above Ford, and Ford above Shirley. He weighs
accurately the good and evil in Fletcher: he perceives the essential
theatricality, but his comparison of the _Faithful Shepherdess_ with
_Comus_ is a judgment no word of which can be improved upon:

    The difference between this poem [_i.e._ the _Faithful Shepherdess_]
    and Milton’s exquisitely imitative _Comus_ is the difference between
    a rose with a leaf or two faded or falling, but still fragrant and
    radiant, and the faultless but scentless reproduction of a rose in
    academic wax for the admiration and imitation of such craftsmen as
    must confine their ambition to the laurels of a college or the
    plaudits of a school.

In the longest and most important essay in the _Contemporaries of
Shakespeare_, the essay on Chapman, there are many such sentences of
sound judgment forcibly expressed. The essay is the best we have on that
great poet. It communicates the sense of dignity and mass which we
receive from Chapman. But it also illustrates Swinburne’s infirmities.
Swinburne was not tormented by the restless desire to penetrate to the
heart and marrow of a poet, any more than he was tormented by the desire
to render the finest shades of difference and resemblance between
several poets. Chapman is a difficult author, as Swinburne says; he is
far more difficult than Jonson, to whom he bears only a superficial
likeness. He is difficult beyond his obscurity. He is difficult partly
through his possession of a quality comparatively deficient in Jonson,
but which was nevertheless a quality of the age. It is strange that
Swinburne should have hinted at a similarity to Jonson and not mentioned
a far more striking affinity of Chapman’s—that is, Donne. The man who
wrote

    Guise, O my lord, how shall I cast from me
    The bands and coverts hindering me from thee?
    The garment or the cover of the mind
    The humane soul is; of the soul, the spirit
    The proper robe is; of the spirit, the blood;
    And of the blood, the body is the shroud:

and

    Nothing is made of nought, of all things made,
    Their abstract being a dream but of a shade,

is unquestionably kin to Donne. The quality in question is not peculiar
to Donne and Chapman. In common with the greatest—Marlowe, Webster,
Tourneur, and Shakespeare—they had a quality of sensuous thought, or of
thinking through the senses, or of the senses thinking, of which the
exact formula remains to be defined. If you look for it in Shelley or
Beddoes, both of whom in very different ways recaptured something of the
Elizabethan inspiration, you will not find it, though you may find other
qualities instead. There is a trace of it only in Keats, and, derived
from a different source, in Rossetti. You will not find it in the _Duke
of Gandia_. Swinburne’s essay would have been all the better if he had
applied himself to the solution of problems like this.

He did not apply himself to this sort of problem because this was not
the sort of problem that interested him. The author of Swinburne’s
critical essays is also the author of Swinburne’s verse: if you hold the
opinion that Swinburne was a very great poet, you can hardly deny him
the title of a great critic. There is the same curious mixture of
qualities to produce Swinburne’s own effect, resulting in the same blur,
which only the vigour of the colours fixes. His great merit as a critic
is really one which, like many signal virtues, can be stated so simply
as to appear flat. It is that he was sufficiently interested in his
subject-matter and knew quite enough about it; and this is a rare
combination in English criticism. Our critics are often interested in
extracting something from their subject which is not fairly in it. And
it is because this elementary virtue is so rare that Swinburne must take
a very respectable place as a critic. Critics are often interested—but
not quite in the nominal subject, often in something a little beside the
point; they are often learned—but not quite to the point either.
(Swinburne knew some of the plays almost by heart.) Can this particular
virtue at which we have glanced be attributed to Walter Pater? or to
Professor Bradley? or to Swinburne’s editor?


                         A Romantic Aristocrat


It is impossible to overlook the merits of scholarship and criticism
exhibited by George Wyndham’s posthumous book, and it is impossible to
deal with the book purely on its merits of scholarship and criticism. To
attempt to do so would in the first place be unfair, as the book is a
posthumous work, and posthumous books demand some personal attention to
their writers. This book is a collection of essays and addresses,
arranged in their present order by Mr. Whibley; they were intended by
their author to be remodelled into a volume on “romantic literature”;
they move from an ingenious search for the date of the beginning of
Romanticism, through the French and English Renaissance, to Sir Walter
Scott. In the second place, these essays represent the literary work of
a man who gained his chief distinction in political life. In the third
place, this man stands for a type, an English type. The type is
interesting and will probably become extinct. It is natural, therefore,
that our primary interest in the essays should be an interest in George
Wyndham.

Mr. Charles Whibley, in an introduction the tone of which is well suited
to the matter, has several sentences which throw light on Wyndham’s
personality. What issues with surprising clearness from Mr. Whibley’s
sketch is the unity of Wyndham’s mind, the identity of his mind as it
engaged in apparently unrelated occupations. Wyndham left Eton for the
army; in barracks he “taught himself Italian, and filled his leisure
with the reading of history and poetry.” After this Coldstream culture
there was a campaign in Egypt; later, service in South Africa
accompanied by a copy of Virgil. There was a career in the Commons, a
conspicuous career as Irish Secretary. Finally, there was a career as a
landowner—2400 acres. And throughout these careers George Wyndham went
on not only accumulating books but reading them, and occasionally
writing about them. He was a man of character, a man of energy. Mr.
Whibley is quite credible when he says:

    Literature was for him no parergon, no mere way of escape from
    politics. If he was an amateur in feeling, he was a craftsman in
    execution;

and, more significantly,

    With the same zest that he read and discoursed upon _A Winter’s
    Tale_ or _Troilus and Cressida_, he rode to hounds, or threw himself
    with a kind of fury into a “point to point,” or made a speech at the
    hustings, or sat late in the night talking with a friend.

From these and other sentences we chart the mind of George Wyndham, and
the key to its topography is the fact that his literature and his
politics and his country life are one and the same thing. They are not
in separate compartments, they are one career. Together they made up his
world: literature, politics, riding to hounds. In the real world these
things have nothing to do with each other. But we cannot believe that
George Wyndham lived in the real world. And this is implied in Mr.
Whibley’s remark that:

    George Wyndham was by character and training a romantic. He looked
    with wonder upon the world as upon a fairyland.

Here is the manifestation of type.

There must probably be conceded to history a few “many-sided” men.
Perhaps Leonardo da Vinci was such. George Wyndham was not a man on the
scale of Leonardo, and his writings give a very different effect from
Leonardo’s notebooks. Leonardo turned to art or science, and each was
what it was and not another thing. But Leonardo was Leonardo: he had no
father to speak of, he was hardly a citizen, and he had no stake in the
community. He lived in no fairyland, but his mind went out and became a
part of things. George Wyndham was Gentry. He was chivalrous, the world
was an adventure of himself. It is characteristic that on embarking as a
subaltern for Egypt he wrote enthusiastically:

    I do not suppose that any expedition since the days of Roman
    governors of provinces has started with such magnificence; we might
    have been Antony going to Egypt in a purple-sailed galley.

This is precisely the spirit which animates his appreciation of the
Elizabethans and of Walter Scott; which guides him toward Hakluyt and
North. Wyndham was enthusiastic, he was a Romantic, he was an
Imperialist, and he was quite naturally a literary pupil of W. E.
Henley. Wyndham was a scholar, but his scholarship is incidental; he was
a good critic, within the range allowed him by his enthusiasms; but it
is neither as Scholar nor as Critic that we can criticize him. We can
criticize his writings only as the expression of this peculiar English
type, the aristocrat, the Imperialist, the Romantic, riding to hounds
across his prose, looking with wonder upon the world as upon a
fairyland.

Because he belongs to this type, Wyndham wrote enthusiastically and well
about North’s Plutarch. The romance of the ancient world becomes more
romantic in the idiomatic prose of North; the heroes are not merely
Greek and Roman heroes, but Elizabethan heroes as well; the romantic
fusion allured Wyndham. The charms of North could not be expounded more
delightfully, more seductively, with more gusto, than they are in
Wyndham’s essay. He appreciates the battles, the torchlight, the “dead
sound” of drums, the white, worn face of Cicero in his flight peering
from his litter; he appreciates the sharp brusque phrase of North: “he
roundly trussed them up and hung them by their necks.” And Wyndham is
learned. Here, as in his essays on the Pléiade and Shakespeare, the man
has read everything, with a labour that only whets his enjoyment of the
best. There are two defects: a lack of balance and a lack of critical
profundity. The lack of balance peeps through Wyndham’s condemnation of
an obviously inferior translation of Plutarch: “He dedicated the
superfluity of his leisure to enjoyment, and used his Lamia,” says the
bad translator. North: “he took pleasure of Lamia.” Wyndham makes a set
upon the bad translator. But he forgets that “dedicated the superfluity
of his leisure” is such a phrase as Gibbon would have warmed to life and
wit, and that a history, in the modern sense, could not be written in
the style of North. Wyndham forgets, in short, that it is not, in the
end, periods and traditions but individual men who write great prose.
For Wyndham is himself a period and a tradition.

The lack of balance is to be suspected elsewhere. Wyndham _likes_ the
best, but he likes a good deal. There is no conclusive evidence that he
realized all the difference, the gulf of difference between lines like:

    En l’an trentiesme de mon aage
    Que toutes mes hontes j’ay beues;

and even the very best of Ronsard or Bellay, such as:

    Le temps s’en va, le temps s’en va, madame;
    Las! le temps, non, mais nous nous en allons
    Et tost serons estendus sous la lame.

We should not gather from Wyndham’s essay that the _Phœnix and Turtle_
is a great poem, far finer than _Venus and Adonis_; but what he says
about _Venus and Adonis_ is worth reading, for Wyndham is very sharp in
perceiving the neglected beauties of the second-rate. There is nothing
to show the gulf of difference between Shakespeare’s sonnets and those
of any other Elizabethan. Wyndham overrates Sidney, and in his
references to Elizabethan writings on the theory of poetry omits mention
of the essay by Campion, an abler and more daring though less
common-sense study than Daniel’s. He speaks a few words for Drayton, but
has not noticed that the only good lines (with the exception of one
sonnet which may be an accident) in Drayton’s dreary sequence of “Ideas”
occur when Drayton drops his costume for a moment and talks in terms of
actuality:

    Lastly, mine eyes amazedly have seen
    Essex’ great fall; Tyrone his peace to gain;
    The quiet end of that long-living queen;
    The king’s fair entry, and our peace with Spain.

More important than the lack of balance is the lack of critical
analysis. Wyndham had, as was indicated, a gusto for the Elizabethans.
His essay on the Poems of Shakespeare contains an extraordinary amount
of information. There is some interesting gossip about Mary Fitton and a
good anecdote of Sir William Knollys. But Wyndham misses what is the
cardinal point in criticizing the Elizabethans: we cannot grasp them,
understand them, without some understanding of the pathology of
rhetoric. Rhetoric, a particular form of rhetoric, was endemic, it
pervaded the whole organism; the healthy as well as the morbid tissues
were built up on it. We cannot grapple with even the simplest and most
conversational lines in Tudor and early Stuart drama without having
diagnosed the rhetoric in the sixteenth and seventeenth-century mind.
Even when we come across lines like:

    There’s a plumber laying pipes in my guts, it scalds,

we must not allow ourselves to forget the rhetorical basis any more than
when we read:

    Come, let us march against the powers of heaven
    And set black streamers in the firmament
    To signify the slaughter of the gods.

An understanding of Elizabethan rhetoric is as essential to the
appreciation of Elizabethan literature as an understanding of Victorian
sentiment is essential to the appreciation of Victorian literature and
of George Wyndham.

Wyndham was a Romantic; the only cure for Romanticism is to analyse it.
What is permanent and good in Romanticism is curiosity—

                               ... l’ardore
    Ch’ l’ ebbe a divenir del mondo esperto
    E degli vizii umani e del valore—

a curiosity which recognizes that any life, if accurately and profoundly
penetrated, is interesting and always strange. Romanticism is a short
cut to the strangeness without the reality, and it leads its disciples
only back upon themselves. George Wyndham had curiosity, but he employed
it romantically, not to penetrate the real world, but to complete the
varied features of the world he made for himself. It would be of
interest to divagate from literature to politics and inquire to what
extent Romanticism is incorporate in Imperialism; to inquire to what
extent Romanticism has possessed the imagination of Imperialists, and to
what extent it was made use of by Disraeli. But this is quite another
matter: there may be a good deal to be said for Romanticism in life,
there is no place for it in letters. Not that we need conclude that a
man of George Wyndham’s antecedents and traditions must inevitably be a
Romanticist writer. But this is the case when such a man plants himself
firmly in his awareness of caste, when he says “The gentry must not
abdicate.” In politics this may be an admirable formula. It will not do
in literature. The Arts insist that a man shall dispose of all that he
has, even of his family tree, and follow art alone. For they require
that a man be not a member of a family or of a caste or of a party or of
a coterie, but simply and solely himself. A man like Wyndham brings
several virtues into literature. But there is only one man better and
more uncommon than the patrician, and that is the Individual.


                           The Local Flavour


In a world which is chiefly occupied with the task of keeping up to date
with itself, it is a satisfaction to know that there is at least one man
who has not only read but enjoyed, and not only enjoyed but read, such
authors as Petronius and Herondas. That is Mr. Charles Whibley, and
there are two statements to make about him: that he is not a critic, and
that he is something which is almost as rare, if not quite as precious.
He has apparently read and enjoyed a great deal of English literature,
and the part of it that he has most enjoyed is the literature of the
great ages, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We may opine that
Mr. Whibley has not uttered a single important original judgment upon
any of this literature. On the other hand, how many have done so? Mr.
Whibley is not a critic of men or of books; but he convinces us that if
we read the books that he has read we should find them as delightful as
he has found them; and if we read them we can form our own opinions. And
if he has not the balance of the critic, he has some other equipoise of
his own. It is partly that his tastes are not puritanical, that he can
talk about Restoration dramatists and others without apologizing for
their “indecency”; it is partly his sense for the best local and
temporal flavours; it is partly his healthy appetite.

A combination of non-critical, rather than uncritical, qualities made
Mr. Whibley the most appropriate person in the world for the work by
which he is best known. We should be more grateful for the “Tudor
Translations Series” if we could find copies to be bought, and if we
could afford to buy them when we found them. But that is not Mr.
Whibley’s fault. The introductions which he wrote for some of the
translators are all that such introductions should be. His Urquhart’s
_Rabelais_ contains all the irrelevant information about that writer
which is what is wanted to stimulate a taste for him. After reading the
introduction, to read Urquhart was the only pleasure in life. And
therefore, in a country destitute of living criticism, Mr. Whibley is a
useful person: for the first thing is that English literature should be
read at all. The few people who talk intelligently about Stendhal and
Flaubert and James know this; but the larger number of people who skim
the conversation of the former do not know enough of English literature
to be even insular. There are two ways in which a writer may lead us to
profit by the work of dead writers. One is by isolating the essential,
by pointing out the most intense in various kinds and separating it from
the accidents of environment. This method is helpful only to the more
intelligent people, who are capable of a unique enjoyment of perfect
expression, and it concentrates on the very best in any art. The other
method, that of Mr. Whibley, is to communicate a taste for the
period—and for the best of the period so far as it is of that period.
That is not very easy either. For a pure journalist will not know any
period well enough; a pure dilettante will know it too egotistically, as
a fashion of his own. Mr. Whibley is really interested; and he has
escaped, without any programme of revolt, from the present century into
those of Tudor and Stuart. He escapes, and perhaps leads others, by
virtue of a taste which is not exactly a literary taste.

The “Tudor Translations” form part of a pronounced taste. Some are
better written than others. There is, of course, a world of
difference—of which Mr. Whibley is perhaps unaware—between even Florio
and his original. The French of Montaigne is a mature language, and the
English of Florio’s living translation is not. Montaigne could be
translated into the English of his time, but a similar work could not
have been written in it. But as the English language matured it lost
something that Florio and all his inferior colleagues had, and that they
had in common with the language of Montaigne. It was not only the
language, but the time. The prose of that age had life, a life to which
later ages could not add, from which they could only take away. You find
the same life, the same abundance, in Montaigne and Brantôme, the
alteration in Rochefoucauld as in Hobbes, the desiccation in the classic
prose of both languages, in Voltaire and in Gibbon. Only, the French was
originally richer and more mature—already in Joinville and Commines—and
we have no prose to compare with Montaigne and Rabelais. If Mr. Whibley
had analysed this vitality, and told us why Holland and Underdowne,
Nashe and Martin Marprelate are still worth reading, then he could have
shown us how to recognize this quality when it, or something like it,
appears in our own lifetime. But Mr. Whibley is not an analyst. His
taste, even, becomes less certain as he fixes it on individuals within
his period. On Surrey’s blank verse he is feeble; he does not even give
Surrey the credit of having anticipated some of Tennyson’s best effects.
He has no praise for Golding, quite one of the best of the verse
translators; he apologizes for him by saying that Ovid demands no
strength or energy! There is strength and energy, at least, in Marlowe’s
_Amores_. And he omits mention of Gawain Douglas, who, though he wrote
in Scots, was surely a “Tudor” translator. Characteristically, Mr.
Whibley praises Chapman because

    it gives proof of an abounding life, a quenchless energy. There is a
    grandeur and spirit in Chapman’s rendering, not unworthy the
    original....

This is commonplace, and it is uncritical. And a critic would not use so
careless a phrase as “Tasso’s masterpiece.” The essay on Congreve does
not add much to our understanding:

    And so he set upon the boards a set of men and women of quick brains
    and cynical humours, who talked with the brilliance and rapidity
    wherewith the finished swordsman fences.

We have heard of this conversation like fencing before. And the
suspicion is in our breast that Mr. Whibley might admire George
Meredith. The essay on Ralegh gives still less. The reality of that
pleasing pirate and monopolist has escaped, and only the national hero
is left. And yet Ralegh, and Swift, and Congreve, and the underworld of
sixteenth and seventeenth-century letters, are somehow kept alive by
what Mr. Whibley says of them.

Accordingly, Mr. Whibley does not disappear in the jungle of journalism
and false criticism; he deserves a “place upon the shelves” of those who
care for English literature. He has the first requisite of a critic:
interest in his subject, and ability to communicate an interest in it.
His defects are both of intellect and feeling. He has no dissociative
faculty. There were very definite vices and definite shortcomings and
immaturities in the literature he admires; and as he is not the person
to tell us of the vices and shortcomings, he is not the person to lay
before us the work of absolutely the finest quality. He exercises
neither of the tools of the critic: comparison and analysis. He has not
the austerity of passion which can detect unerringly the transition from
work of eternal intensity to work that is merely beautiful, and from
work that is beautiful to work that is merely charming. For the critic
needs to be able not only to saturate himself in the spirit and the
fashion of a time—the local flavour—but also to separate himself
suddenly from it in appreciation of the highest creative work.

And he needs something else that Mr. Whibley lacks: a creative interest,
a focus upon the immediate future. The important critic is the person
who is absorbed in the present problems of art, and who wishes to bring
the forces of the past to bear upon the solution of these problems. If
the critic consider Congreve, for instance, he will have always at the
back of his mind the question: What has Congreve got that is pertinent
to our dramatic art? Even if he is solely engaged in trying to
understand Congreve, this will make all the difference: inasmuch as to
understand anything is to understand from a point of view. Most critics
have some creative interest—it may be, instead of an interest in any
art, an interest (like Mr. Paul More’s) in morals. These remarks were
introduced only to assist in giving the books of Mr. Whibley a place, a
particular but unticketed place, neither with criticism, nor with
history, nor with plain journalism; and the trouble would not have been
taken if the books were not thought to be worth placing.


                     A Note on the American Critic


This gallery of critics is not intended to be in any sense complete. But
having dealt with three English writers of what may be called critical
prose, one’s mind becomes conscious of the fact that they have something
in common, and, trying to perceive more clearly what this community is,
and suspecting that it is a national quality, one is impelled to
meditate upon the strongest contrast possible. Hence these comments upon
two American critics and one French critic, which would not take exactly
this form without the contrast at which I have hinted.

Mr. Paul More is the author of a number of volumes which he perhaps
hopes will break the record of mass established by the complete works of
Sainte-Beuve. The comparison with Sainte-Beuve is by no means trivial,
for Mr. More, and Professor Irving Babbitt also, are admirers of the
voluminous Frenchman. Not only are they admirers, but their admiration
is perhaps a clue both to much of their merit and to some of their
defects. In the first place, both of these writers have given much more
attention to French criticism, to the study of French standards of
writing and of thought, than any of the notable English critics since
Arnold; they are therefore much nearer to the European current, although
they exhibit faults which are definitely transatlantic and which
definitely keep them out of it. The French influence is traceable in
their devotion to ideas and their interest in problems of art and life
as problems which exist and can be handled apart from their relations to
the critic’s private temperament. With Swinburne, the criticism of
Elizabethan literature has the interest of a passion, it has the
interest for us of any writing by an intellectual man who is genuinely
moved by certain poetry. Swinburne’s intelligence is not defective, it
is impure. There are few ideas in Swinburne’s critical writings which
stand forth luminous with an independent life of their own, so true that
one forgets the author in the statement. Swinburne’s words must always
be referred back to Swinburne himself. And if literature is to Swinburne
merely a passion, we are tempted to say that to George Wyndham it was a
hobby, and to Mr. Whibley almost a charming showman’s show (we are
charmed by the urbanity of the showman). The two latter have gusto, but
gusto is no equivalent for taste; it depends too much upon the appetite
and the digestion of the feeder. And with one or two other writers, whom
I have not had occasion to discuss, literature is not so much a
collection of valuable porcelain as an institution—accepted, that is to
say, with the same gravity as the establishments of Church and State.
That is, in other words, the essentially uncritical attitude. In all of
these attitudes the English critic is the victim of his temperament. He
may acquire great erudition, but erudition easily becomes a hobby; it is
useless unless it enables us to see literature all round, to detach it
from ourselves, to reach a state of pure contemplation.

Now Mr. More and Mr. Babbitt have endeavoured to establish a criticism
which should be independent of temperament. This is in itself a
considerable merit. But at this point Mr. More particularly has been led
astray, oddly enough, by his guide Sainte-Beuve. Neither Mr. More nor
Sainte-Beuve is primarily interested in art. Of the latter M. Benda has
well observed that

    on sait—et c’est certainement un des grands éléments de son
    succès—combien d’études l’illustre critique consacre à des auteurs
    dont l’importance littéraire est quasi nulle (femmes, magistrats,
    courtisans, militaires), mais dont les écrits lui sont une occasion
    de pourtraiturer une âme; combien volontiers, pour les maîtres, il
    s’attache à leurs productions secondaires, notes, brouillons,
    lettres intimes, plutôt qu’à leurs grandes œuvres, souvent beaucoup
    moins expressives, en effet, de leur psychologie.

Mr. More is not, like Sainte-Beuve, primarily interested in psychology
or in human beings; Mr. More is primarily a moralist, which is a worthy
and serious thing to be. The trouble with Mr. More is that you cannot
disperse a theory or point of view of morals over a vast number of
essays on a great variety of important figures in literature, unless you
can give some more particular interest as well. Sainte-Beuve has his
particularized interest in human beings; another critic—say Remy de
Gourmont—may have something to say always about the art of a writer
which will make our enjoyment of that writer more conscious and more
intelligent. But the pure moralist in letters—the moralist is useful to
the creator as well as the reader of poetry—must be more concise, for we
must have the pleasure of inspecting the beauty of his structure. And
here M. Julien Benda has a great advantage over Mr. More; his thought
may be less profound, but it has more formal beauty.

Mr. Irving Babbitt, who shares so many of the ideals and opinions of Mr.
More that their names must be coupled, has expressed his thought more
abstractly and with more form, and is free from a mystical impulse which
occasionally gets out of Mr. More’s hand. He appears, more clearly than
Mr. More, and certainly more clearly than any critic of equal authority
in America or England, to perceive Europe as a whole; he has the
cosmopolitan mind and a tendency to seek the centre. His few books are
important, and would be more important if he preached of discipline in a
more disciplined style. Although he also is an admirer of Sainte-Beuve,
he would probably subscribe to this admirable paragraph of Othenin
d’Haussonville:[4]

Footnote 4:

  _Revue des Deux Mondes_, fevr. 1875, quoted by Benda, _Belphégor_, p.
  140.

    Il y a une beauté littéraire, impersonnelle en quelque sorte,
    parfaitement distincte de l’auteur lui-même et de son organisation,
    beauté qui a sa raison d’être et ses lois, dont la critique est
    tenue de rendre compte. Et si la critique considère cette tâche
    comme au-dessous d’elle, si c’est affaire à la rhétorique et à ce
    que Sainte-Beuve appelle dédaigneusement les Quintilien, alors la
    rhetorique a du bon et les Quintilien ne sont pas à dédaigner.

There may be several critics in England who would applaud this notion;
there are very few who show any evidence of its apprehension in their
writings. But Mr. More and Mr. Babbitt, whatever their actual tastes,
and although they are not primarily occupied with art, are on the side
of the artist. And the side of the artist is not the side which in
England is often associated with critical writing. As Mr. More has
pointed out in an interesting essay, there is a vital weakness in
Arnold’s definition of criticism as “the disinterested endeavour to know
the best that is known and thought in the world, irrespectively of
practice, politics, and everything of the kind.” The “disinterested
endeavour to know” is only a prerequisite of the _critic_, and is not
_criticism_, which may be the result of such an endeavour. Arnold states
the work of the critic merely in terms of the personal ideal, an ideal
for oneself—and an ideal for oneself is not disinterested. Here Arnold
is the Briton rather than the European.

Mr. More indicates his own attitude in praising those whom he elevates
to the position of masters of criticism:

    If they deal much with the criticism of literature, this is because
    in literature more manifestly than anywhere else life displays its
    infinitely varied motives and results; and their practice is always
    to render literature itself more consciously a criticism of life.

“Criticism of life” is a facile phrase, and at most only represents one
aspect of great literature, if it does not assign to the term
“criticism” itself a generality which robs it of precision. Mr. More
has, it seems to me, in this sentence just failed to put his finger on
the right seriousness of great literary art: the seriousness which we
find in Villon’s _Testament_ and which is conspicuously absent from _In
Memoriam_; or the seriousness which controls _Amos Barton_ and not _The
Mill on the Floss_.

It is a pity that Mr. More does not write a little oftener about the
great literary artists, it is a pity that he takes the reputations of
the world too solemnly. This is probably due in part to remoteness in
space from the European centre. But it must be observed that English
solemnity and American solemnity are very different. I do not propose to
analyse the difference (it would be a valuable chapter in social
history); the American solemnity, it is enough to say, is more
primitive, more academic, more like that of the German professor. But it
is not the fault of Mr. More or Mr. Babbitt that the culture of ideas
has only been able to survive in America in the unfavourable atmosphere
of the university.


                        The French Intelligence


As the inspection of types of English irresistibly provoked a glance at
two American critics, so the inspection of the latter leads our
attention to the French. M. Julien Benda has the formal beauty which the
American critics lack, and a close affinity to them in point of view. He
restricts himself, perhaps, to a narrower field of ideas, but within
that field he manipulates the ideas with a very exceptional cogency and
clarity. To notice his last book (_Belphégor: essai sur l’esthétique de
la présente société française_) would be to quote from it. M. Benda is
not like Remy de Gourmont, the critical consciousness of a generation,
he could not supply the conscious formulas of a sensibility in process
of formation; he is rather the ideal scavenger of the rubbish of our
time. Much of his analysis of the decadence of contemporary French
society could be applied to London, although differences are observable
from his diagnosis.

    Quant à la société en elle-même, on peut prévoir que ce soin qu’elle
    met à éprouver de l’émoi par l’art, devenant cause à son tour, y
    rendra la soif de ce plaisir de plus en plus intense, l’application
    a la satisfaire de plus en plus jalouse et plus perfectionnée. On
    entrevoit le jour où la bonne société française repudiera encore le
    peu qu’elle supporte aujourd’hui d’idées et d’organisation dans
    l’art, et ne se passionera plus que pour des gestes de comédiens,
    pour des impressions de femmes ou d’enfants, pour des rugissements
    de lyriques, pour des extases de fanatiques....

Almost the only person who has ever figured in England and attempted a
task at all similar to that of M. Benda is Matthew Arnold. Matthew
Arnold was intelligent, and by so much difference as the presence of one
intelligent man makes, our age is inferior to that of Arnold. But what
an advantage a man like M. Benda has over Arnold. It is not simply that
he has a critical tradition behind him, and that Arnold is using a
language which constantly tempts the user away from dispassionate
exposition into sarcasm and diatribe, a language less fitted for
criticism than the English of the eighteenth century. It is that the
follies and stupidities of the French, no matter how base, express
themselves in the form of ideas—Bergsonism itself is an intellectual
construction, and the mondaines who attended lectures at the College de
France were in a sense using their minds. A man of ideas needs ideas, or
pseudo-ideas, to fight against. And Arnold lacked the active resistance
which is necessary to keep a mind at its sharpest.

A society in which a mind like M. Benda’s can exercise itself, and in
which there are persons like M. Benda, is one which facilitates the task
of the creative artist. M. Benda cannot be attached, like Gourmont, to
any creative group. He does not wholly partake in that “conscious
creation of the field of the present out of the past” which Mr. More
considers to be part of the work of the critic. But in analysing the
maladies of the second-rate or corrupt literature of the time he makes
the labour of the creative artist lighter. The Charles Louis Philippes
of English literature are never done with, because there is no one to
kill their reputations; we still hear that George Meredith is a master
of prose, or even a profound philosopher. The creative artist in England
finds himself compelled, or at least tempted, to spend much of his time
and energy in criticism that he might reserve for the perfecting of his
proper work: simply because there is no one else to do it.



                  Tradition and the Individual Talent


                                   I

In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally
apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to “the
tradition” or to “a tradition”; at most, we employ the adjective in
saying that the poetry of So-and-so is “traditional” or even “too
traditional.” Seldom, perhaps, does the word appear except in a phrase
of censure. If otherwise, it is vaguely approbative, with the
implication, as to the work approved, of some pleasing archæological
reconstruction. You can hardly make the word agreeable to English ears
without this comfortable reference to the reassuring science of
archæology.

Certainly the word is not likely to appear in our appreciations of
living or dead writers. Every nation, every race, has not only its own
creative, but its own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious
of the shortcomings and limitations of its critical habits than of those
of its creative genius. We know, or think we know, from the enormous
mass of critical writing that has appeared in the French language the
critical method or habit of the French; we only conclude (we are such
unconscious people) that the French are “more critical” than we, and
sometimes even plume ourselves a little with the fact, as if the French
were the less spontaneous. Perhaps they are; but we might remind
ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing, and that we
should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our minds when
we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our own
minds in their work of criticism. One of the facts that might come to
light in this process is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet,
upon those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else.
In these aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is
individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with
satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from his predecessors,
especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something
that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a
poet without his prejudice we shall often find that not only the best,
but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead
poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. And I do
not mean the impressionable period of adolescence, but the period of
full maturity.

Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in
following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or
timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be
discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the
sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of
much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you
must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the
historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who
would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the
historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the
past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write
not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that
the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole
of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and
composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense
of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of
the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at
the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in
time, of his contemporaneity.

No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His
significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to
the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set
him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a
principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity
that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what
happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens
simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. The existing
monuments form an ideal order among themselves, which is modified by the
introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them. The
existing order is complete before the new work arrives; for order to
persist after the supervention of novelty, the _whole_ existing order
must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the relations,
proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are readjusted;
and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever has approved
this idea of order, of the form of European, of English literature, will
not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the present
as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is
aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.

In a peculiar sense he will be aware also that he must inevitably be
judged by the standards of the past. I say judged, not amputated, by
them; not judged to be as good as, or worse or better than, the dead;
and certainly not judged by the canons of dead critics. It is a
judgment, a comparison, in which two things are measured by each other.
To conform merely would be for the new work not really to conform at
all; it would not be new, and would therefore not be a work of art. And
we do not quite say that the new is more valuable because it fits in;
but its fitting in is a test of its value—a test, it is true, which can
only be slowly and cautiously applied, for we are none of us infallible
judges of conformity. We say: it appears to conform, and is perhaps
individual, or it appears individual, and may conform; but we are hardly
likely to find that it is one and not the other.

To proceed to a more intelligible exposition of the relation of the poet
to the past: he can neither take the past as a lump, an indiscriminate
bolus, nor can he form himself wholly on one or two private admirations,
nor can he form himself wholly upon one preferred period. The first
course is inadmissible, the second is an important experience of youth,
and the third is a pleasant and highly desirable supplement. The poet
must be very conscious of the main current, which does not at all flow
invariably through the most distinguished reputations. He must be quite
aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material
of art is never quite the same. He must be aware that the mind of
Europe—the mind of his own country—a mind which he learns in time to be
much more important than his own private mind—is a mind which changes,
and that this change is a development which abandons nothing _en route_,
which does not superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock
drawing of the Magdalenian draughtsmen. That this development,
refinement perhaps, complication certainly, is not, from the point of
view of the artist, any improvement. Perhaps not even an improvement
from the point of view of the psychologist or not to the extent which we
imagine; perhaps only in the end based upon a complication in economics
and machinery. But the difference between the present and the past is
that the conscious present is an awareness of the past in a way and to
an extent which the past’s awareness of itself cannot show.

Some one said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we _know_ so
much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know.

I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my programme
for the _métier_ of poetry. The objection is that the doctrine requires
a ridiculous amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim which can be
rejected by appeal to the lives of poets in any pantheon. It will even
be affirmed that much learning deadens or perverts poetic sensibility.
While, however, we persist in believing that a poet ought to know as
much as will not encroach upon his necessary receptivity and necessary
laziness, it is not desirable to confine knowledge to whatever can be
put into a useful shape for examinations, drawing-rooms, or the still
more pretentious modes of publicity. Some can absorb knowledge, the more
tardy must sweat for it. Shakespeare acquired more essential history
from Plutarch than most men could from the whole British Museum. What is
to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the
consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this
consciousness throughout his career.

What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment
to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a
continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its
relation to the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalization that
art may be said to approach the condition of science. I shall,
therefore, invite you to consider, as a suggestive analogy, the action
which takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced
into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide.


                                   II

Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the
poet but upon the poetry. If we attend to the confused cries of the
newspaper critics and the susurrus of popular repetition that follows,
we shall hear the names of poets in great numbers; if we seek not
Blue-book knowledge but the enjoyment of poetry, and ask for a poem, we
shall seldom find it. In the last article I tried to point out the
importance of the relation of the poem to other poems by other authors,
and suggested the conception of poetry as a living whole of all the
poetry that has ever been written. The other aspect of this Impersonal
theory of poetry is the relation of the poem to its author. And I
hinted, by an analogy, that the mind of the mature poet differs from
that of the immature one not precisely in any valuation of
“personality,” not being necessarily more interesting, or having “more
to say,” but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which
special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new
combinations.

The analogy was that of the catalyst. When the two gases previously
mentioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form
sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is
present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of
platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected; has remained
inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of
platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of
the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely
separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates;
the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which
are its material.

The experience, you will notice, the elements which enter the presence
of the transforming catalyst, are of two kinds: emotions and feelings.
The effect of a work of art upon the person who enjoys it is an
experience different in kind from any experience not of art. It may be
formed out of one emotion, or may be a combination of several; and
various feelings, inhering for the writer in particular words or phrases
or images, may be added to compose the final result. Or great poetry may
be made without the direct use of any emotion whatever: composed out of
feelings solely. Canto XV of the _Inferno_ (Brunetto Latini) is a
working up of the emotion evident in the situation; but the effect,
though single as that of any work of art, is obtained by considerable
complexity of detail. The last quatrain gives an image, a feeling
attaching to an image, which “came,” which did not develop simply out of
what precedes, but which was probably in suspension in the poet’s mind
until the proper combination arrived for it to add itself to. The poet’s
mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless
feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles
which can unite to form a new compound are present together.

If you compare several representative passages of the greatest poetry
you see how great is the variety of types of combination, and also how
completely any semi-ethical criterion of “sublimity” misses the mark.
For it is not the “greatness,” the intensity, of the emotions, the
components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so
to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts. The episode
of Paolo and Francesca employs a definite emotion, but the intensity of
the poetry is something quite different from whatever intensity in the
supposed experience it may give the impression of. It is no more
intense, furthermore, than Canto XXVI, the voyage of Ulysses, which has
not the direct dependence upon an emotion. Great variety is possible in
the process of transmution of emotion: the murder of Agamemnon, or the
agony of Othello, gives an artistic effect apparently closer to a
possible original than the scenes from Dante. In the _Agamemnon_, the
artistic emotion approximates to the emotion of an actual spectator; in
_Othello_ to the emotion of the protagonist himself. But the difference
between art and the event is always absolute; the combination which is
the murder of Agamemnon is probably as complex as that which is the
voyage of Ulysses. In either case there has been a fusion of elements.
The ode of Keats contains a number of feelings which have nothing
particular to do with the nightingale, but which the nightingale,
partly, perhaps, because of its attractive name, and partly because of
its reputation, served to bring together.

The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to
the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: for my
meaning is, that the poet has, not a “personality” to express, but a
particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in
which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected
ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may
take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the
poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality.

I will quote a passage which is unfamiliar enough to be regarded with
fresh attention in the light—or darkness—of these observations:

    And now methinks I could e’en chide myself
    For doating on her beauty, though her death
    Shall be revenged after no common action.
    Does the silkworm expend her yellow labours
    For thee? For thee does she undo herself?
    Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships
    For the poor benefit of a bewildering minute?
    Why does yon fellow falsify highways,
    And put his life between the judge’s lips,
    To refine such a thing—keeps horse and men
    To beat their valours for her?...

In this passage (as is evident if it is taken in its context) there is a
combination of positive and negative emotions: an intensely strong
attraction toward beauty and an equally intense fascination by the
ugliness which is contrasted with it and which destroys it. This balance
of contrasted emotion is in the dramatic situation to which the speech
is pertinent, but that situation alone is inadequate to it. This is, so
to speak, the structural emotion, provided by the drama. But the whole
effect, the dominant tone, is due to the fact that a number of floating
feelings, having an affinity to this emotion by no means superficially
evident, have combined with it to give us a new art emotion.

It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular
events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or
interesting. His particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat.
The emotion in his poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the
complexity of the emotions of people who have very complex or unusual
emotions in life. One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to
seek for new human emotions to express: and in this search for novelty
in the wrong place it discovers the perverse. The business of the poet
is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in
working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual
emotions at all. And emotions which he has never experienced will serve
his turn as well as those familiar to him. Consequently, we must believe
that “emotion recollected in tranquillity” is an inexact formula. For it
is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of
meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting
from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to
the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all;
it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of
deliberation. These experiences are not “recollected,” and they finally
unite in an atmosphere which is “tranquil” only in that it is a passive
attending upon the event. Of course this is not quite the whole story.
There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious
and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he
ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.
Both errors tend to make him “personal.” Poetry is not a turning loose
of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of
personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those
who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape
from these things.


                                  III

ὁ δὲ νοῦς ἴσως θειότερόν τι καὶ ἀπαθές ἐστιν

This essay proposes to halt at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism,
and confine itself to such practical conclusions as can be applied by
the responsible person interested in poetry. To divert interest from the
poet to the poetry is a laudable aim: for it would conduce to a juster
estimation of actual poetry, good and bad. There are many people who
appreciate the expression of sincere emotion in verse, and there is a
smaller number of people who can appreciate technical excellence. But
very few know when there is expression of _significant_ emotion, emotion
which has its life in the poem and not in the history of the poet. The
emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this
impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be
done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in
what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past,
unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what is already
living.



                   The Possibility of a Poetic Drama


The questions—why there is no poetic drama to-day, how the stage has
lost all hold on literary art, why so many poetic plays are written
which can only be read, and read, if at all, without pleasure—have
become insipid, almost academic. The usual conclusion is either that
“conditions” are too much for us, or that we really prefer other types
of literature, or simply that we are uninspired. As for the last
alternative, it is not to be entertained; as for the second, what type
do we prefer?; and as for the first, no one has ever shown me
“conditions,” except of the most superficial. The reasons for raising
the question again are first that the majority, perhaps, certainly a
large number, of poets hanker for the stage; and second, that a not
negligible public appears to want verse plays. Surely there is some
legitimate craving, not restricted to a few persons, which only the
verse play can satisfy. And surely the critical attitude is to attempt
to analyse the conditions and the other data. If there comes to light
some conclusive obstacle, the investigation should at least help us to
turn our thoughts to more profitable pursuits; and if there is not, we
may hope to arrive eventually at some statement of conditions which
might be altered. Possibly we shall find that our incapacity has a
deeper source: the arts have at times flourished when there was no
drama; possibly we are incompetent altogether; in that case the stage
will be, not the seat, but at all events a symptom, of the malady.

From the point of view of literature, the drama is only one among
several poetic forms. The epic, the ballad, the chanson de geste, the
forms of Provence and of Tuscany, all found their perfection by serving
particular societies. The forms of Ovid, Catullus, Propertius, served a
society different, and in some respects more civilized, than any of
these; and in the society of Ovid the drama as a form of art was
comparatively insignificant. Nevertheless, the drama is perhaps the most
permanent, is capable of greater variation and of expressing more varied
types of society, than any other. It varied considerably in England
alone; but when one day it was discovered lifeless, subsequent forms
which had enjoyed a transitory life were dead too. I am not prepared to
undertake the historical survey; but I should say that the poetic
drama’s autopsy was performed as much by Charles Lamb as by anyone else.
For a form is not wholly dead until it is known to be; and Lamb, by
exhuming the remains of dramatic life at its fullest, brought a
consciousness of the immense gap between present and past. It was
impossible to believe, after that, in a dramatic “tradition.” The
relation of Byron’s _English Bards_ and the poems of Crabbe to the work
of Pope was a continuous tradition; but the relation of _The Cenci_ to
the great English drama is almost that of a reconstruction to an
original. By losing tradition, we lose our hold on the present; but so
far as there was any dramatic tradition in Shelley’s day there was
nothing worth the keeping. There is all the difference between
preservation and restoration.

The Elizabethan Age in England was able to absorb a great quantity of
new thoughts and new images, almost dispensing with tradition, because
it had this great form of its own which imposed itself on everything
that came to it. Consequently, the blank verse of their plays
accomplished a subtlety and consciousness, even an intellectual power,
that no blank verse since has developed or even repeated; elsewhere this
age is crude, pedantic, or loutish in comparison with its contemporary
France or Italy. The nineteenth century had a good many fresh
impressions; but it had no form in which to confine them. Two men,
Wordsworth and Browning, hammered out forms for themselves—personal
forms, _The Excursion_, _Sordello_, _The Ring and the Book_, _Dramatic
Monologues_; but no man can invent a form, create a taste for it, and
perfect it too. Tennyson, who might unquestionably have been a
consummate master of minor forms, took to turning out large patterns on
a machine. As for Keats and Shelley, they were too young to be judged,
and they were trying one form after another.

These poets were certainly obliged to consume vast energy in this
pursuit of form, which could never lead to a wholly satisfying result.
There has only been one Dante; and, after all, Dante had the benefit of
years of practice in forms employed and altered by numbers of
contemporaries and predecessors; he did not waste the years of youth in
metric invention; and when he came to the _Commedia_ he knew how to
pillage right and left. To have, given into one’s hands, a crude form,
capable of indefinite refinement, and to be the person to see the
possibilities—Shakespeare was very fortunate. And it is perhaps the
craving for some such _donnée_ which draws us on toward the present
mirage of poetic drama.

But it is now very questionable whether there are more than two or three
in the present generation who are _capable_, the least little bit, of
benefiting by such advantages were they given. At most two or three
actually devote themselves to this pursuit of form for which they have
little or no public recognition. To create a form is not merely to
invent a shape, a rhyme or rhythm. It is also the realization of the
whole appropriate content of this rhyme or rhythm. The sonnet of
Shakespeare is not merely such and such a pattern, but a precise way of
thinking and feeling. The _framework_ which was provided for the
Elizabethan dramatist was not merely blank verse and the five-act play
and the Elizabethan playhouse; it was not merely the plot—for the poets
incorporated, remodelled, adapted or invented, as occasion suggested. It
was also the half-formed ὑλή, the “temper of the age” (an unsatisfactory
phrase), a preparedness, a habit on the part of the public, to respond
to particular stimuli. There is a book to be written on the commonplaces
of any great dramatic period, the handling of Fate or Death, the
recurrence of mood, tone, situation. We should see then just how
_little_ each poet had to do; only so much as would make a play his,
only what was really essential to make it different from anyone else’s.
When there is this economy of effort it is possible to have several,
even many, good poets at once. The great ages did not perhaps _produce_
much more talent than ours; but less talent was wasted.

Now in a formless age there is very little hope for the minor poet to do
anything worth doing; and when I say minor I mean very good poets
indeed: such as filled the Greek anthology and the Elizabethan
song-books; even a Herrick; but not merely second-rate poets, for Denham
and Waller have quite another importance, occupying points in the
development of a major form. When everything is set out for the minor
poet to do, he may quite frequently come upon some _trouvaille_, even in
the drama: Peele and Brome are examples. Under the present conditions,
the minor poet has too much to do. And this leads to another reason for
the incompetence of our time in poetic drama.

Permanent literature is always a presentation: either a presentation of
thought, or a presentation of feeling by a statement of events in human
action or objects in the external world. In earlier literature—to avoid
the word “classic”—we find both kinds, and sometimes, as in some of the
dialogues of Plato, exquisite combinations of both. Aristotle presents
thought, stripped to the essential structure, and he is a great
_writer_. The _Agamemnon_ or _Macbeth_ is equally a statement, but of
events. They are as much works of the “intellect” as the writings of
Aristotle. There are more recent works of art which have the same
quality of intellect in common with those of Æschylus and Shakespeare
and Aristotle: _Education Sentimentale_ is one of them. Compare it with
such a book as _Vanity Fair_ and you will see that the labour of the
intellect consisted largely in a purification, in keeping out a great
deal that Thackeray allowed to remain in; in refraining from reflection,
in putting into the statement enough to make reflection unnecessary. The
case of Plato is still more illuminating. Take the _Theœtetus_. In a few
opening words Plato gives a scene, a personality, a feeling, which
colour the subsequent discourse but do not interfere with it: the
particular setting, and the abstruse theory of knowledge afterwards
developed, co-operate without confusion. Could any contemporary author
exhibit such control?

In the nineteenth century another mentality manifested itself It is
evident in a very able and brilliant poem, Goethe’s _Faust_. Marlowe’s
Mephistopheles is a simpler creature than Goethe’s. But at least Marlowe
has, in a few words, concentrated him into a statement. He is there, and
(incidentally) he renders Milton’s Satan superfluous. Goethe’s demon
inevitably sends us back to Goethe. He embodies a philosophy. A creation
of art should not do that: he should _replace_ the philosophy. Goethe
has not, that is to say, sacrificed or consecrated his thought to make
the drama; the drama is still a means. And this type of mixed art has
been repeated by men incomparably smaller than Goethe. We have had one
other remarkable work of this type: _Peer Gynt_. And we have had the
plays of M. Maeterlinck and M. Claudel.[5]

Footnote 5:

  I should except _The Dynasts_. This gigantic panorama is hardly to be
  called a success, but it is essentially an attempt to present a
  vision, and “sacrifices” the philosophy to the vision, as all great
  dramas do. Mr. Hardy has apprehended his matter as a poet and an
  artist.

In the work of Maeterlinck and Claudel on the one hand, and those of M.
Bergson on the other, we have the mixture of the genres in which our age
delights. Every work of imagination must have a philosophy; and every
philosophy must be a work of art—how often have we heard that M. Bergson
is an artist! It is a boast of his disciples. It is what the word “art”
means to them that is the disputable point. Certain works of philosophy
can be called works of art: much of Aristotle and Plato, Spinoza, parts
of Hume, Mr. Bradley’s _Principles of Logic_, Mr. Russell’s essay on
“Denoting”: clear and beautifully formed thought. But this is not what
the admirers of Bergson, Claudel, or Maeterlinck (the philosophy of the
latter is a little out of date) mean. They mean precisely what is not
clear, but what is an emotional stimulus. And as a mixture of thought
and of vision provides more stimulus, by suggesting both, both clear
thinking and clear statement of particular objects must disappear.

The undigested “idea” or philosophy, the idea-emotion, is to be found
also in poetic dramas which are conscientious attempts to adapt a true
structure, Athenian or Elizabethan, to contemporary feeling. It appears
sometimes as the attempt to supply the defect of structure by an
internal structure. “But most important of all is the structure of the
incidents. For Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and
of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action,
not a quality.”[6]

Footnote 6:

  _Poetics_, vi. 9. Butcher’s translation.

We have on the one hand the “poetic” drama, imitation Greek, imitation
Elizabethan, or modern-philosophical, on the other the comedy of
“ideas,” from Shaw to Galsworthy, down to the ordinary social comedy.
The most ramshackle Guitry farce has some paltry idea or comment upon
life put into the mouth of one of the characters at the end. It is said
that the stage can be used for a variety of purposes, that in only one
of them perhaps is it united with literary art. A mute theatre is a
possibility (I do not mean the cinema); the ballet is an actuality
(though under-nourished); opera is an institution; but where you have
“imitations of life” on the stage, with speech, the only standard that
we can allow is the standard of the work of art, aiming at the same
intensity at which poetry and the other forms of art aim. From that
point of view the Shavian drama is a hybrid as the Maeterlinckian drama
is, and we need express no surprise at their belonging to the same
epoch. Both philosophies are popularizations: the moment an idea has
been transferred from its pure state in order that it may become
comprehensible to the inferior intelligence it has lost contact with
art. It can remain pure only by being stated simply in the form of
general truth, or by being transmuted, as the attitude of Flaubert
toward the small bourgeois is transformed in _Education Sentimentale_.
It has there become so identified with the reality that you can no
longer say what the idea is.

The essential is not, of course, that drama should be written in verse,
or that we should be able to extenuate our appreciation of broad farce
by occasionally attending a performance of a play of Euripides where
Professor Murray’s translation is sold at the door. The essential is to
get upon the stage this precise statement of life which is at the same
time a point of view, a world—a world which the author’s mind has
subjected to a complete process of simplification. I do not find that
any drama which “embodies a philosophy” of the author’s (like _Faust_)
or which illustrates any social theory (like Shaw’s) can possibly fulfil
the requirements—though a place might be left for Shaw if not for
Goethe. And the world of Ibsen and the world of Tchehov are not enough
simplified, universal.

Finally, we must take into account the instability of any art—the drama,
music, dancing—which depends upon representation by performers. The
intervention of performers introduces a complication of economic
conditions which is in itself likely to be injurious. A struggle, more
or less unconscious, between the creator and the interpreter is almost
inevitable. The interest of a performer is almost certain to be centred
in himself: a very slight acquaintance with actors and musicians will
testify. The performer is interested not in form but in opportunities
for virtuosity or in the communication of his “personality”; the
formlessness, the lack of intellectual clarity and distinction in modern
music, the great physical stamina and physical training which it often
requires, are perhaps signs of the triumph of the performer. The
consummation of the triumph of the actor over the play is perhaps the
productions of the Guitry.

The conflict is one which certainly cannot be terminated by the utter
rout of the actor profession. For one thing, the stage appeals to too
many demands besides the demand for art for that to be possible; and
also we need, unfortunately, something more than refined automatons.
Occasionally attempts have been made to “get around” the actor, to
envelop him in masks, to set up a few “conventions” for him to stumble
over, or even to develop little breeds of actors for some special Art
drama. This meddling with nature seldom succeeds; nature usually
overcomes these obstacles. Possibly the majority of attempts to confect
a poetic drama have begun at the wrong end; they have aimed at the small
public which wants “poetry.” (“Novices,” says Aristotle, “in the art
attain to finish of diction and precision of portraiture before they can
construct the plot.”) The Elizabethan drama was aimed at a public which
wanted _entertainment_ of a crude sort, but would _stand_ a good deal of
poetry; our problem should be to take a form of entertainment, and
subject it to the process which would leave it a form of art. Perhaps
the music-hall comedian is the best material. I am aware that this is a
dangerous suggestion to make. For every person who is likely to consider
it seriously there are a dozen toymakers who would leap to tickle
æsthetic society into one more quiver and giggle of art debauch. Very
few treat art seriously. There are those who treat it solemnly, and will
continue to write poetic pastiches of Euripides and Shakespeare; and
there are others who treat it as a joke.



                     Euripides and Professor Murray


The recent appearance of Miss Sybil Thorndyke as Medea at the Holborn
Empire is an event which has a bearing upon three subjects of
considerable interest: the drama, the present standing of Greek
literature, and the importance of good contemporary translation. On the
occasion on which I was present the performance was certainly a success;
the audience was large, it was attentive, and its applause was long.
Whether the success was due to Euripides is uncertain; whether it was
due to Professor Murray is not proved; but that it was in considerable
measure due to Miss Thorndyke there is no doubt. To have held the centre
of the stage for two hours in a rôle which requires both extreme
violence and restraint, a rôle which requires simple force and subtle
variation; to have sustained so difficult a rôle almost without support;
this was a legitimate success. The audience, or what could be seen of it
from one of the cheaper seats, was serious and respectful and perhaps
inclined to self-approval at having attended the performance of a Greek
play; but Miss Thorndyke’s acting might have held almost any audience.
It employed all the conventions, the theatricalities, of the modern
stage; yet her personality triumphed over not only Professor Murray’s
verse but her own training.

The question remains whether the production was a “work of art.” The
rest of the cast appeared slightly ill at ease; the nurse was quite a
tolerable nurse of the crone type; Jason was negative; the messenger was
uncomfortable at having to make such a long speech; and the refined
Dalcroze chorus had mellifluous voices which rendered their lyrics
happily inaudible. All this contributed toward the high-brow effect
which is so depressing; and we imagine that the actors of Athens, who
had to speak clearly enough for 20,000 auditors to be able to criticize
the versification, would have been pelted with figs and olives had they
mumbled so unintelligibly as most of this troupe. But the Greek actor
spoke in his own language, and our actors were forced to speak in the
language of Professor Gilbert Murray. So that on the whole we may say
that the performance was an interesting one.

I do not believe, however, that such performances will do very much to
rehabilitate Greek literature or our own, unless they stimulate a desire
for better translations. The serious auditors, many of whom I observed
to be like myself provided with Professor Murray’s eighteenpenny
translation, were probably not aware that Miss Thorndyke, in order to
succeed as well as she did, was really engaged in a struggle against the
translator’s verse. She triumphed over it by attracting our attention to
her expression and tone and making us neglect her words; and this, of
course, was not the dramatic method of Greek acting at its best. The
English and Greek languages remained where they were. But few persons
realize that the Greek language and the Latin language, and,
_therefore_, we say, the English language, are within our lifetime
passing through a critical period. The Classics have, during the latter
part of the nineteenth century and up to the present moment, lost their
place as a pillar of the social and political system—such as the
Established Church still is. If they are to survive, to justify
themselves as literature, as an element in the European mind, as the
foundation for the literature we hope to create, they are very badly in
need of persons capable of expounding them. We need some one—not a
member of the Church of Rome, and perhaps preferably not a member of the
Church of England—to explain how vital a matter it is, if Aristotle may
be said to have been a moral pilot of Europe, whether we shall or shall
not drop that pilot. And we need a number of educated poets who shall at
least have opinions about Greek drama, and whether it is or is not of
any use to us. And it must be said that Professor Gilbert Murray is not
the man for this. Greek poetry will never have the slightest vitalizing
effect upon English poetry if it can only appear masquerading as a
vulgar debasement of the eminently personal idiom of Swinburne. These
are strong words to use against the most popular Hellenist of his time;
but we must witness of Professor Murray ere we die that these things are
not otherwise but thus.

This is really a point of capital importance. That the most conspicuous
Greek propagandist of the day should almost habitually use two words
where the Greek language requires one, and where the English language
will provide him with one; that he should render σκιάν by “_grey_
shadow”; and that he should stretch the Greek brevity to fit the loose
frame of William Morris, and blur the Greek lyric to the fluid haze of
Swinburne; these are not faults of infinitesimal insignificance. The
first great speech of Medea Mr. Murray begins with:

    Women of Corinth, I am come to show
    My face, lest ye despise me....

We find in the Greek, ἑξῆλθον δόμων. “Show my face,” therefore, is Mr.
Murray’s gift.

    This thing undreamed of, sudden from on high,
    Hath sapped my soul: I dazzle where I stand,
    The cup of all life shattered in my hand....

Again, we find that the Greek is:

    ἐμοὶ δ’ ἄελπτον πρᾶγμα προσπεσὸν τόδε
    ψυχὴν διέφθαρκ᾽· οἴχομαι δὲ καὶ βίου
    χάριν μεθεῖσα κατθανεῖν χρηῄζω, φίλαι.

So, here are two striking phrases which we owe to Mr. Murray; it is he
who has sapped our soul and shattered the cup of all life for Euripides.
And these are only random examples.

    οὐκ ἔστιν ἄλλη φρὴν μιαιφονωτέρα

becomes “no bloodier spirit between heaven and hell”! Surely we know
that Professor Murray is acquainted with “Sister Helen”? Professor
Murray has simply interposed between Euripides and ourselves a barrier
more impenetrable than the Greek language. We do not reproach him for
preferring, apparently, Euripides to Æschylus. But if he does, he should
at least appreciate Euripides. And it is inconceivable that anyone with
a genuine feeling for the sound of Greek verse should deliberately elect
the William Morris couplet, the Swinburne lyric, as a just equivalent.

As a poet, Mr. Murray is merely a very insignificant follower of the
pre-Raphaelite movement. As a Hellenist, he is very much of the present
day, and a very important figure in the day. This day began, in a sense,
with Tylor and a few German anthropologists; since then we have acquired
sociology and social psychology, we have watched the clinics of Ribot
and Janet, we have read books from Vienna and heard a discourse of
Bergson; a philosophy arose at Cambridge; social emancipation crawled
abroad; our historical knowledge has of course increased; and we have a
curious Freudian-social-mystical-rationalistic-higher-critical
interpretation of the Classics and what used to be called the
Scriptures. I do not deny the very great value of all work by scientists
in their own departments, the great interest also of this work in detail
and in its consequences. Few books are more fascinating than those of
Miss Harrison, Mr. Cornford, or Mr. Cooke, when they burrow in the
origins of Greek myths and rites; M. Durkheim, with his social
consciousness, and M. Levy-Bruhl, with his Bororo Indians who convince
themselves that they are parroquets, are delightful writers. A number of
sciences have sprung up in an almost tropical exuberance which
undoubtedly excites our admiration, and the garden, not unnaturally, has
come to resemble a jungle. Such men as Tylor, and Robertson Smith, and
Wilhelm Wundt, who early fertilized the soil, would hardly recognize the
resulting vegetation; and indeed poor Wundt’s _Völkerpsychologie_ was a
musty relic before it was translated.

All these events are useful and important in their phase, and they have
sensibly affected our attitude towards the Classics; and it is this
phase of classical study that Professor Murray—the friend and inspirer
of Miss Jane Harrison—represents. The Greek is no longer the
awe-inspiring Belvedere of Winckelmann, Goethe, and Schopenhauer, the
figure of which Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde offered us a slightly
debased re-edition. And we realize better how different—not how much
more Olympian—were the conditions of the Greek civilization from ours;
and at the same time Mr. Zimmern has shown us how the Greek dealt with
analogous problems. Incidentally we do not believe that a good English
prose style can be modelled upon Cicero, or Tacitus, or Thucydides. If
Pindar bores us, we admit it; we are not certain that Sappho was _very_
much greater than Catullus; we hold various opinions about Vergil; and
we think more highly of Petronius than our grandfathers did.

It is to be hoped that we may be grateful to Professor Murray and his
friends for what they have done, while we endeavour to neutralize
Professor Murray’s influence upon Greek literature and English language
in his translations by making better translations. The choruses from
Euripides by H. D. are, allowing for errors and even occasional
omissions of difficult passages, much nearer to both Greek and English
than Mr. Murray’s. But H. D. and the other poets of the “Poets’
Translation Series” have so far done no more than pick up some of the
more romantic crumbs of Greek literature; none of them has yet shown
himself competent to attack the _Agamemnon_. If we are to digest the
heavy food of historical and scientific knowledge that we have eaten we
must be prepared for much greater exertions. We need a digestion which
can assimilate both Homer and Flaubert. We need a careful study of
Renaissance Humanists and Translators, such as Mr. Pound has begun. We
need an eye which can see the past in its place with its definite
differences from the present, and yet so lively that it shall be as
present to us as the present. This is the creative eye; and it is
because Professor Murray has no creative instinct that he leaves
Euripides quite dead.



                      “Rhetoric” and Poetic Drama


The death of Rostand is the disappearance of the poet whom, more than
any other in France, we treated as the exponent of “rhetoric,” thinking
of rhetoric as something recently out of fashion. And as we find
ourselves looking back rather tenderly upon the author of _Cyrano_ we
wonder what this vice or quality is that is associated as plainly with
Rostand’s merits as with his defects. His rhetoric, at least, suited him
at times so well, and so much better than it suited a much greater poet,
Baudelaire, who is at times as rhetorical as Rostand. And we begin to
suspect that the word is merely a vague term of abuse for any style that
is bad, that is so evidently bad or second-rate that we do not recognize
the necessity for greater precision in the phrases we apply to it.

Our own Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry—in so nice a problem it is much
safer to stick to one’s own language—is repeatedly called “rhetorical.”
It had this and that notable quality, but, when we wish to admit that it
had defects, it is rhetorical. It had serious defects, even gross
faults, but we cannot be considered to have erased them from our
language when we are so unclear in our perception of what they are. The
fact is that both Elizabethan prose and Elizabethan poetry are written
in a variety of styles with a variety of vices. Is the style of Lyly, is
Euphuism, rhetorical? In contrast to the elder style of Ascham and Elyot
which it assaults, it is a clear, flowing, orderly and relatively pure
style, with a systematic if monotonous formula of antitheses and
similes. Is the style of Nashe? A tumid, flatulent, vigorous style very
different from Lyly’s. Or it is perhaps the strained and the mixed
figures of speech in which Shakespeare indulged himself. Or it is
perhaps the careful declamation of Jonson. The word simply cannot be
used as synonymous with bad writing. The meanings which it has been
obliged to shoulder have been mostly opprobrious; but if a precise
meaning can be found for it this meaning may occasionally represent a
virtue. It is one of those words which it is the business of criticism
to dissect and reassemble. Let us avoid the assumption that rhetoric is
a vice of manner, and endeavour to find a rhetoric of substance also,
which is right because it issues from what it has to express.

At the present time there is a manifest preference for the
“conversational” in poetry—the style of “direct speech,” opposed to the
“oratorical” and the rhetorical; but if rhetoric is any convention of
writing inappropriately applied, this conversational style can and does
become a rhetoric—or what is supposed to be a conversational style, for
it is often as remote from polite discourse as well could be. Much of
the second and third rate in American _vers libre_ is of this sort; and
much of the second and third rate in English Wordsworthianism. There is
in fact no conversational or other form which can be applied
indiscriminately; if a writer wishes to give the effect of speech he
must positively give the effect of himself talking in his own person or
in one of his rôles; and if we are to express ourselves, our variety of
thoughts and feelings, on a variety of subjects with inevitable
rightness, we must adapt our manner to the moment with infinite
variations. Examination of the development of Elizabethan drama shows
this progress in adaptation, a development from monotony to variety, a
progressive refinement in the perception of the variations of feeling,
and a progressive elaboration of the means of expressing these
variations. This drama is admitted to have grown away from the
rhetorical expression, the bombast speeches, of Kyd and Marlowe to the
subtle and dispersed utterance of Shakespeare and Webster. But this
apparent abandonment or outgrowth of rhetoric is two things: it is
partly an improvement in language and it is partly progressive variation
in feeling. There is, of course, a long distance separating the furibund
fluency of old Hieronimo and the broken words of Lear. There is also a
difference between the famous

    Oh eyes no eyes, but fountains full of tears!
    Oh life no life, but lively form of death!

and the superb “additions to Hieronimo.”[7]

Footnote 7:

  Of the authorship it can only be said that the lines are by some
  admirer of Marlowe. This might well be Jonson.

We think of Shakespeare perhaps as the dramatist who concentrates
everything into a sentence, “Pray you undo this button,” or “Honest
honest Iago”; we forget that there is a rhetoric proper to Shakespeare
at his best period which is quite free from the genuine Shakespearean
vices either of the early period or the late. These passages are
comparable to the best bombast of Kyd or Marlowe, with a greater command
of language and a greater control of the emotion. _The Spanish Tragedy_
is bombastic when it descends to language which was only the trick of
its age; _Tamburlaine_ is bombastic because it is monotonous, inflexible
to the alterations of emotion. The really fine rhetoric of Shakespeare
occurs in situations where a character in the play _sees himself_ in a
dramatic light:

    _Othello._    And say, besides,—that in Aleppo once....

    _Coriolanus._ If you have writ your annals true, ’tis there,
                  That like an eagle in a dovecote, I
                  Fluttered your Volscians in Corioli.
                  Alone I did it. Boy!

    _Timon._      Come not to me again; but say to Athens,
                  Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
                  Upon the beachèd verge of the salt flood....

It occurs also once in _Antony and Cleopatra_, when Enobarbus is
inspired to see Cleopatra in this dramatic light:

    The barge she sat in....

Shakespeare made fun of Marston, and Jonson made fun of Kyd. But in
Marston’s play the words were expressive of nothing; and Jonson was
criticizing the feeble and conceited language, not the emotion, not the
“oratory.” Jonson is as oratorical himself, and the moments when his
oratory succeeds are, I believe, the moments that conform to our
formula. Notably the speech of Sylla’s ghost in the induction to
_Catiline_, and the speech of Envy at the beginning of _The Poetaster_.
These two figures are contemplating their own dramatic importance, and
quite properly. But in the Senate speeches in _Catiline_, how tedious,
how dusty! Here we are spectators not of a play of characters, but of a
play of forensic, exactly as if we had been forced to attend the sitting
itself. A speech in a play should never appear to be intended to move us
as it might conceivably move other characters in the play, for it is
essential that we should preserve our position of spectators, and
observe always from the outside though with complete understanding. The
scene in _Julius Cæsar_ is right because the object of our attention is
not the speech of Antony (_Bedeutung_) but the effect of his speech upon
the mob, and Antony’s intention, his preparation and consciousness of
the effect. And in the rhetorical speeches from Shakespeare which have
been cited, we have this necessary advantage of a new clue to the
character, in noting the angle from which he views himself. But when a
character _in_ a play makes a direct appeal to us, we are either the
victims of our own sentiment, or we are in the presence of a vicious
rhetoric.

These references ought to supply some evidence of the propriety of
Cyrano on Noses. Is not Cyrano exactly in this position of contemplating
himself as a romantic, a dramatic figure? This dramatic sense on the
part of the characters themselves is rare in modern drama. In
sentimental drama it appears in a degraded form, when we are evidently
intended to accept the character’s sentimental interpretation of
himself. In plays of realism we often find parts which are never allowed
to be consciously dramatic, for fear, perhaps, of their appearing less
real. But in actual life, in many of those situations in actual life
which we enjoy consciously and keenly, we are at times aware of
ourselves in this way, and these moments are of very great usefulness to
dramatic verse. A very small part of acting is that which takes place on
the stage! Rostand had—whether he had anything else or not—this dramatic
sense, and it is what gives life to Cyrano. It is a sense which is
almost a sense of humour (for when anyone is conscious of himself as
acting, something like a sense of humour is present). It gives Rostand’s
characters—Cyrano at least—a gusto which is uncommon on the modern
stage. No doubt Rostand’s people play up to this too steadily. We
recognize that in the love scenes of Cyrano in the garden, for in _Romeo
and Juliet_ the profounder dramatist shows his lovers melting into
incoherent unconsciousness of their isolated selves, shows the human
soul in the process of forgetting itself. Rostand could not do that; but
in the particular case of Cyrano on Noses, the character, the situation,
the occasion were perfectly suited and combined. The tirade generated by
this combination is not only genuinely and highly dramatic: it is
possibly poetry also. If a writer is incapable of composing such a scene
as this, so much the worse for his poetic drama.

_Cyrano_ satisfies, as far as scenes like this can satisfy, the
requirements of poetic drama. It must take genuine and substantial human
emotions, such emotions as observation can confirm, typical emotions,
and give them artistic form; the degree of abstraction is a question for
the method of each author. In Shakespeare the form is determined in the
unity of the whole, as well as single scenes; it is something to attain
this unity, as Rostand does, in scenes if not the whole play. Not only
as a dramatist, but as a poet, he is superior to Maeterlinck, whose
drama, in failing to be dramatic, fails also to be poetic. Maeterlinck
has a literary perception of the dramatic and a literary perception of
the poetic, and he joins the two; the two are not, as sometimes they are
in the work of Rostand, fused. His characters take no conscious delight
in their rôle—they are sentimental. With Rostand the centre of gravity
is in the expression of the emotion, not as with Maeterlinck in the
emotion which cannot be expressed. Some writers appear to believe that
emotions gain in intensity through being inarticulate. Perhaps the
emotions are not significant enough to endure full daylight.

In any case, we may take our choice: we may apply the term “rhetoric” to
the type of dramatic speech which I have instanced, and then we must
admit that it covers good as well as bad. Or we may choose to except
this type of speech from rhetoric. In that case we must say that
rhetoric is any adornment or inflation of speech which is _not done for
a particular effect_ but for a general impressiveness. And in this case,
too, we cannot allow the term to cover all bad writing.



          Some Notes on the Blank Verse of Christopher Marlowe


    “Marloe was stabd with a dagger, and dyed swearing”

A more friendly critic, Mr. A. C. Swinburne, observes of this poet that
“the father of English tragedy and the creator of English blank verse
was therefore also the teacher and the guide of Shakespeare.” In this
sentence there are two misleading assumptions and two misleading
conclusions. Kyd has as good a title to the first honour as Marlowe;
Surrey has a better title to the second; and Shakespeare was not taught
or guided by one of his predecessors or contemporaries alone. The less
questionable judgment is, that Marlowe exercised a strong influence over
later drama, though not himself as great a dramatist as Kyd; that he
introduced several new tones into blank verse, and commenced the
dissociative process which drew it farther and farther away from the
rhythms of rhymed verse; and that when Shakespeare borrowed from him,
which was pretty often at the beginning, Shakespeare either made
something inferior or something different.

The comparative study of English versification at various periods is a
large tract of unwritten history. To make a study of blank verse alone,
would be to elicit some curious conclusions. It would show, I believe,
that blank verse within Shakespeare’s lifetime was more highly
developed, that it became the vehicle of more varied and more intense
art-emotions than it has ever conveyed since; and that after the
erection of the Chinese Wall of Milton, blank verse has suffered not
only arrest but retrogression. That the blank verse of Tennyson, for
example, a consummate master of this form in certain applications, is
cruder (_not_ “rougher” or less perfect in technique) than that of half
a dozen contemporaries of Shakespeare; cruder, because less capable of
expressing complicated, subtle, and surprising emotions.

Every writer who has written any blank verse worth saving has produced
particular tones which his verse and no other’s is capable of rendering;
and we should keep this in mind when we talk about “influences” and
“indebtedness.” Shakespeare is “universal” (if you like) because he has
more of these tones than anyone else; but they are all out of the one
man; one man cannot be more than one man; there might have been six
Shakespeares at once without conflicting frontiers; and to say that
Shakespeare expressed nearly all human emotions, implying that he left
very little for anyone else, is a radical misunderstanding of art and
the artist—a misunderstanding which, even when explicitly rejected, may
lead to our neglecting the effort of attention necessary to discover the
specific properties of the verse of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. The
development of blank verse may be likened to the analysis of that
astonishing industrial product coal-tar. Marlowe’s verse is one of the
earlier derivatives, but it possesses properties which are not repeated
in any of the analytic or synthetic blank verses discovered somewhat
later.

The “vices of style” of Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s age is a convenient
name for a number of vices, no one of which, perhaps, was shared by all
of the writers. It is pertinent, at least, to remark that Marlowe’s
“rhetoric” is not, or not characteristically, Shakespeare’s rhetoric;
that Marlowe’s rhetoric consists in a pretty simple huffe-snuffe
bombast, while Shakespeare’s is more exactly a vice of style, a tortured
perverse ingenuity of images which dissipates instead of concentrating
the imagination, and which may be due in part to influences by which
Marlowe was untouched. Next, we find that Marlowe’s vice is one which he
was gradually attenuating, and even, what is more miraculous, turning
into a virtue. And we find that this bard of torrential imagination
recognized many of his best bits (and those of one or two others), saved
them, and reproduced them more than once, almost invariably improving
them in the process.

It is worth while noticing a few of these versions, because they
indicate, somewhat contrary to usual opinion, that Marlowe was a
deliberate and conscious workman. Mr. J. G. Robertson has spotted an
interesting theft of Marlowe’s from Spenser. Here is Spenser (_Faery
Queen_, I. vii. 32):

    Like to an almond tree y-mounted high
      On top of green Selinis all alone,
    With blossoms brave bedeckèd daintily;
      Whose tender locks do tremble every one
    At every little breath that under heaven is blown.

And here Marlowe (_Tamburlaine_, Part II. Act IV. sc. iii.):

    Like to an almond tree y-mounted high
    Upon the lofty and celestial mount
    Of evergreen Selinus, quaintly deck’d
    With blooms more white than Erycina’s brows,
    Whose tender blossoms tremble every one
    At every little breath that thorough heaven is blown.

This is interesting, not only as showing that Marlowe’s talent, like
that of most poets, was partly synthetic, but also because it seems to
give a clue to some particularly “lyric” effects found in _Tamburlaine_,
not in Marlowe’s other plays, and not, I believe, anywhere else. For
example, the praise of Zenocrate in Part II. Act. II. sc. iv.:

    Now walk the angels on the walls of heaven,
    As sentinels to warn th’ immortal souls
    To entertain divine Zenocrate: etc.

This is not Spenser’s movement, but the influence of Spenser must be
present. There had been no great blank verse before Marlowe; but there
was the powerful presence of this great master of melody immediately
precedent; and the combination produced results which could not be
repeated. I do not think that it can be claimed that Peele had any
influence here.

The passage quoted from Spenser has a further interest. It will be noted
that the fourth line:

    With blooms more white than Erycina’s brows

is Marlowe’s contribution. Compare this with these other lines of
Marlowe:

    So looks my love, shadowing in her brows

    (_Tamburlaine_)

    Like to the shadows of Pyramides

    (_Tamburlaine_)

and the final and best version:

    Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows
    Than have the white breasts of the queen of love.

    (_Doctor Faustus_)

and compare the whole set with Spenser again (_F. Q._):

    Upon her eyelids many graces sate
    Under the shadow of her even brows,

a passage which Mr. Robertson says Spenser himself used in three other
places.

This economy is frequent in Marlowe. Within _Tamburlaine_ it occurs in
the form of monotony, especially in the facile use of resonant names
(_e.g._ the recurrence of “Caspia” or “Caspian” with the same tone
effect), a practice in which Marlowe was followed by Milton, but which
Marlowe himself outgrew. Again,

    Zenocrate, lovlier than the love of Jove,
    Brighter than is the silver Rhodope,

is paralleled later by

    Zenocrate, the lovliest maid alive,
    Fairer than rocks of pearl and precious stone.

One line Marlowe remodels with triumphant success:

    And set black streamers in the firmament

    (_Tamburlaine_)

becomes

    See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!

    (_Doctor Faustus_)

The verse accomplishments of _Tamburlaine_ are notably two: Marlowe gets
into blank verse the melody of Spenser, and he gets a new driving power
by reinforcing the sentence period against the line period. The rapid
long sentence, running line into line, as in the famous soliloquies
“Nature compounded of four elements” and “What is beauty, saith my
sufferings, then?” marks the certain escape of blank verse from the
rhymed couplet, and from the elegiac or rather pastoral note of Surrey,
to which Tennyson returned. If you contrast these two soliloquies with
the verse of Marlowe’s greatest contemporary, Kyd—by no means a
despicable versifier—you see the importance of the innovation:

    The one took sanctuary, and, being sent for out,
    Was murdered in Southwark as he passed
    To Greenwich, where the Lord Protector lay.
    Black Will was burned in Flushing on a stage;
    Green was hanged at Osbridge in Kent....

which is not really inferior to:

                      So these four abode
    Within one house together; and as years
    Went forward, Mary took another mate;
    But Dora lived unmarried till her death.

    (Tennyson, _Dora_)

In _Faustus_ Marlowe went farther: he broke up the line, to a gain in
intensity, in the last soliloquy; and he developed a new and important
conversational tone in the dialogues of Faustus with the devil. _Edward
II._ has never lacked consideration: it is more desirable, in brief
space, to remark upon two plays, one of which has been misunderstood and
the other underrated. These are the _Jew of Malta_ and _Dido Queen of
Carthage_. Of the first of these, it has always been said that the end,
even the last two acts, are unworthy of the first three. If one takes
the _Jew of Malta_ not as a tragedy, or as a “tragedy of blood,” but as
a farce, the concluding act becomes intelligible; and if we attend with
a careful ear to the versification, we find that Marlowe develops a tone
to suit this farce, and even perhaps that this tone is his most powerful
and mature tone. I say farce, but with the enfeebled humour of our times
the word is a misnomer; it is the farce of the old English humour, the
terribly serious, even savage comic humour, the humour which spent its
last breath on the decadent genius of Dickens. It has nothing in common
with J. M. Barrie, Captain Bairnsfather, or _Punch_. It is the humour of
that very serious (but very different) play, _Volpone_.

    First, be thou void of these affections,
    Compassion, love, vain hope, and heartless fear;
    Be moved at nothing, see thou pity none ...
    As for myself, I walk abroad o’ nights,
    And kill sick people groaning under walls:
    Sometimes I go about and poison wells ...

and the last words of Barabas complete this prodigious caricature:

    But now begins th’ extremity of heat
    To pinch me with intolerable pangs:
    Die, life! fly, soul! tongue, curse thy fill, and die!

It is something which Shakespeare could not do, and which he could not
have understood.

_Dido_ appears to be a hurried play, perhaps done to order with the
_Æneid_ in front of him. But even here there is progress. The account of
the sack of Troy is in this newer style of Marlowe’s, this style which
secures its emphasis by always hesitating on the edge of caricature at
the right moment:

    The Grecian soldiers, tir’d with ten years war,
    Began to cry, “Let us unto our ships,
    Troy is invincible, why stay we here?”...

    By this, the camp was come unto the walls,
    And through the breach did march into the streets,
    Where, meeting with the rest, “Kill, kill!” they cried....

    And after him, his band of Myrmidons,
    With balls of wild-fire in their murdering paws ...

    At last, the soldiers pull’d her by the heels,
    And swung her howling in the empty air....

    We saw Cassandra sprawling in the streets ...

This is not Vergil, or Shakespeare; it is pure Marlowe. By comparing the
whole speech with Clarence’s dream, in _Richard III._, one acquires a
little insight into the difference between Marlowe and Shakespeare:

                         What scourge for perjury
    Can this dark monarchy afford false Clarence?

There, on the other hand, is what Marlowe’s style could not do; the
phrase has a concision which is almost classical, certainly Dantesque.
Again, as often with the Elizabethan dramatists, there are lines in
Marlowe, besides the many lines that Shakespeare adapted, that might
have been written by either:

                              If thou wilt stay,
    Leap in mine arms; mine arms are open wide;
    If not, turn from me, and I’ll turn from thee;
    For though thou hast the heart to say farewell,
    I have not power to stay thee.

But the direction in which Marlowe’s verse might have moved, had he not
“dyed swearing,” is quite un-Shakespearean, is toward this intense and
serious and indubitably great poetry, which, like some great painting
and sculpture, attains its effects by something not unlike caricature.



                        Hamlet and His Problems


Few critics have even admitted that _Hamlet_ the play is the primary
problem, and Hamlet the character only secondary. And Hamlet the
character has had an especial temptation for that most dangerous type of
critic: the critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order,
but which through some weakness in creative power exercises itself in
criticism instead. These minds often find in Hamlet a vicarious
existence for their own artistic realization. Such a mind had Goethe,
who made of Hamlet a Werther; and such had Coleridge, who made of Hamlet
a Coleridge; and probably neither of these men in writing about Hamlet
remembered that his first business was to study a work of art. The kind
of criticism that Goethe and Coleridge produced, in writing of Hamlet,
is the most misleading kind possible. For they both possessed
unquestionable critical insight, and both make their critical
aberrations the more plausible by the substitution—of their own Hamlet
for Shakespeare’s—which their creative gift effects. We should be
thankful that Walter Pater did not fix his attention on this play.

Two recent writers, Mr. J. M. Robertson and Professor Stoll of the
University of Minnesota, have issued small books which can be praised
for moving in the other direction. Mr. Stoll performs a service in
recalling to our attention the labours of the critics of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries,[8] observing that

Footnote 8:

  I have never, by the way, seen a cogent refutation of Thomas Rymer’s
  objections to _Othello_.

    they knew less about psychology than more recent Hamlet critics, but
    they were nearer in spirit to Shakespeare’s art; and as they
    insisted on the importance of the effect of the whole rather than on
    the importance of the leading character, they were nearer, in their
    old-fashioned way, to the secret of dramatic art in general.

_Qua_ work of art, the work of art cannot be interpreted; there is
nothing to interpret; we can only criticize it according to standards,
in comparison to other works of art; and for “interpretation” the chief
task is the presentation of relevant historical facts which the reader
is not assumed to know. Mr. Robertson points out, very pertinently, how
critics have failed in their “interpretation” of _Hamlet_ by ignoring
what ought to be very obvious: that _Hamlet_ is a stratification, that
it represents the efforts of a series of men, each making what he could
out of the work of his predecessors. The _Hamlet_ of Shakespeare will
appear to us very differently if, instead of treating the whole action
of the play as due to Shakespeare’s design, we perceive his _Hamlet_ to
be superposed upon much cruder material which persists even in the final
form.

We know that there was an older play by Thomas Kyd, that extraordinary
dramatic (if not poetic) genius who was in all probability the author of
two plays so dissimilar as the _Spanish Tragedy_ and _Arden of
Feversham_; and what this play was like we can guess from three clues:
from the _Spanish Tragedy_ itself, from the tale of Belleforest upon
which Kyd’s _Hamlet_ must have been based, and from a version acted in
Germany in Shakespeare’s lifetime which bears strong evidence of having
been adapted from the earlier, not from the later, play. From these
three sources it is clear that in the earlier play the motive was a
revenge-motive simply; that the action or delay is caused, as in the
_Spanish Tragedy_, solely by the difficulty of assassinating a monarch
surrounded by guards; and that the “madness” of Hamlet was feigned in
order to escape suspicion, and successfully. In the final play of
Shakespeare, on the other hand, there is a motive which is more
important than that of revenge, and which explicitly “blunts” the
latter; the delay in revenge is unexplained on grounds of necessity or
expediency; and the effect of the “madness” is not to lull but to arouse
the king’s suspicion. The alteration is not complete enough, however, to
be convincing. Furthermore, there are verbal parallels so close to the
_Spanish Tragedy_ as to leave no doubt that in places Shakespeare was
merely _revising_ the text of Kyd. And finally there are unexplained
scenes—the Polonius-Laertes and the Polonius-Reynaldo scenes—for which
there is little excuse; these scenes are not in the verse style of Kyd,
and not beyond doubt in the style of Shakespeare. These Mr. Robertson
believes to be scenes in the original play of Kyd reworked by a third
hand, perhaps Chapman, before Shakespeare touched the play. And he
concludes, with very strong show of reason, that the original play of
Kyd was, like certain other revenge plays, in two parts of five acts
each. The upshot of Mr. Robertson’s examination is, we believe,
irrefragable: that Shakespeare’s _Hamlet_, so far as it is
Shakespeare’s, is a play dealing with the effect of a mother’s guilt
upon her son, and that Shakespeare was unable to impose this motive
successfully upon the “intractable” material of the old play.

Of the intractability there can be no doubt. So far from being
Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic
failure. In several ways the play is puzzling, and disquieting as is
none of the others. Of all the plays it is the longest and is possibly
the one on which Shakespeare spent most pains; and yet he has left in it
superfluous and inconsistent scenes which even hasty revision should
have noticed. The versification is variable. Lines like

      Look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
    Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastern hill,

are of the Shakespeare of _Romeo and Juliet_. The lines in Act V. sc.
ii.,

    Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
    That would not let me sleep ...
    Up from my cabin,
    My sea-gown scarf’d about me, in the dark
    Grop’d I to find out them: had my desire;
    Finger’d their packet;

are of his quite mature. Both workmanship and thought are in an unstable
condition. We are surely justified in attributing the play, with that
other profoundly interesting play of “intractable” material and
astonishing versification, _Measure for Measure_, to a period of crisis,
after which follow the tragic successes which culminate in _Coriolanus_.
_Coriolanus_ may be not as “interesting” as _Hamlet_, but it is, with
_Antony and Cleopatra_, Shakespeare’s most assured artistic success. And
probably more people have thought _Hamlet_ a work of art because they
found it interesting, than have found it interesting because it is a
work of art. It is the “Mona Lisa” of literature.

The grounds of _Hamlet’s_ failure are not immediately obvious. Mr.
Robertson is undoubtedly correct in concluding that the essential
emotion of the play is the feeling of a son towards a guilty mother:

    [Hamlet’s] tone is that of one who has suffered tortures on the
    score of his mother’s degradation.... The guilt of a mother is an
    almost intolerable motive for drama, but it had to be maintained and
    emphasized to supply a psychological solution, or rather a hint of
    one.

This, however, is by no means the whole story. It is not merely the
“guilt of a mother” that cannot be handled as Shakespeare handled the
suspicion of Othello, the infatuation of Antony, or the pride of
Coriolanus. The subject might conceivably have expanded into a tragedy
like these, intelligible, self-complete, in the sunlight. _Hamlet_, like
the sonnets, is full of some stuff that the writer could not drag to
light, contemplate, or manipulate into art. And when we search for this
feeling, we find it, as in the sonnets, very difficult to localize. You
cannot point to it in the speeches; indeed, if you examine the two
famous soliloquies you see the versification of Shakespeare, but a
content which might be claimed by another, perhaps by the author of the
_Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois_, Act V. sc. i. We find Shakespeare’s
_Hamlet_ not in the action, not in any quotations that we might select,
so much as in an unmistakable tone which is unmistakably not in the
earlier play.

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an
“objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation,
a chain of events which shall be the formula of that _particular_
emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in
sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. If you
examine any of Shakespeare’s more successful tragedies, you will find
this exact equivalence; you will find that the state of mind of Lady
Macbeth walking in her sleep has been communicated to you by a skilful
accumulation of imagined sensory impressions; the words of Macbeth on
hearing of his wife’s death strike us as if, given the sequence of
events, these words were automatically released by the last event in the
series. The artistic “inevitability” lies in this complete adequacy of
the external to the emotion; and this is precisely what is deficient in
_Hamlet_. Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is
inexpressible, because it is in _excess_ of the facts as they appear.
And the supposed identity of Hamlet with his author is genuine to this
point: that Hamlet’s bafflement at the absence of objective equivalent
to his feelings is a prolongation of the bafflement of his creator in
the face of his artistic problem. Hamlet is up against the difficulty
that his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is not
an adequate equivalent for it; his disgust envelops and exceeds her. It
is thus a feeling which he cannot understand; he cannot objectify it,
and it therefore remains to poison life and obstruct action. None of the
possible actions can satisfy it; and nothing that Shakespeare can do
with the plot can express Hamlet for him. And it must be noticed that
the very nature of the _données_ of the problem precludes objective
equivalence. To have heightened the criminality of Gertrude would have
been to provide the formula for a totally different emotion in Hamlet;
it is just _because_ her character is so negative and insignificant that
she arouses in Hamlet the feeling which she is incapable of
representing.

The “madness” of Hamlet lay to Shakespeare’s hand; in the earlier play a
simple ruse, and to the end, we may presume, understood as a ruse by the
audience. For Shakespeare it is less than madness and more than feigned.
The levity of Hamlet, his repetition of phrase, his puns, are not part
of a deliberate plan of dissimulation, but a form of emotional relief.
In the character Hamlet it is the buffoonery of an emotion which can
find no outlet in action; in the dramatist it is the buffoonery of an
emotion which he cannot express in art. The intense feeling, ecstatic or
terrible, without an object or exceeding its object, is something which
every person of sensibility has known; it is doubtless a study to
pathologists. It often occurs in adolescence: the ordinary person puts
these feelings to sleep, or trims down his feeling to fit the business
world; the artist keeps it alive by his ability to intensify the world
to his emotions. The Hamlet of Laforgue is an adolescent; the Hamlet of
Shakespeare is not, he has not that explanation and excuse. We must
simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem which proved too
much for him. Why he attempted it at all is an insoluble puzzle; under
compulsion of what experience he attempted to express the inexpressibly
horrible, we cannot ever know. We need a great many facts in his
biography; and we should like to know whether, and when, and after or at
the same time as what personal experience, he read Montaigne, II. xii.,
_Apologie de Raimond Sebond_. We should have, finally, to know something
which is by hypothesis unknowable, for we assume it to be an experience
which, in the manner indicated, exceeded the facts. We should have to
understand things which Shakespeare did not understand himself.



                               Ben Jonson


The reputation of Jonson has been of the most deadly kind that can be
compelled upon the memory of a great poet. To be universally accepted;
to be damned by the praise that quenches all desire to read the book; to
be afflicted by the imputation of the virtues which excite the least
pleasure; and to be read only by historians and antiquaries—this is the
most perfect conspiracy of approval. For some generations the reputation
of Jonson has been carried rather as a liability than as an asset in the
balance-sheet of English literature. No critic has succeeded in making
him appear pleasurable or even interesting. Swinburne’s book on Jonson
satisfies no curiosity and stimulates no thought. For the critical study
in the “Men of Letters Series” by Mr. Gregory Smith there is a place; it
satisfies curiosity, it supplies many just observations, it provides
valuable matter on the neglected masques; it only fails to remodel the
image of Jonson which is settled in our minds. Probably the fault lies
with several generations of our poets. It is not that the value of
poetry is only its value to living poets for their own work; but
appreciation is akin to creation, and true enjoyment of poetry is
related to the stirring of suggestion, the stimulus that a poet feels in
his enjoyment of other poetry. Jonson has provided no creative stimulus
for a very long time; consequently we must look back as far as
Dryden—precisely, a poetic practitioner who learned from Jonson—before
we find a living criticism of Jonson’s work.

Yet there are possibilities for Jonson even now. We have no difficulty
in seeing what brought him to this pass; how, in contrast, not with
Shakespeare, but with Marlowe, Webster, Donne, Beaumont, and Fletcher,
he has been paid out with reputation instead of enjoyment. He is no less
a poet than these men, but his poetry is of the surface. Poetry of the
surface cannot be understood without study; for to deal with the surface
of life, as Jonson dealt with it, is to deal so deliberately that we too
must be deliberate, in order to understand. Shakespeare, and smaller men
also, are in the end more difficult, but they offer something at the
start to encourage the student or to satisfy those who want nothing
more; they are suggestive, evocative, a phrase, a voice; they offer
poetry in detail as well as in design. So does Dante offer something, a
phrase everywhere (_tu se’ ombra ed ombra vedi_) even to readers who
have no Italian; and Dante and Shakespeare have poetry of design as well
as of detail. But the polished veneer of Jonson reflects only the lazy
reader’s fatuity; unconscious does not respond to unconscious; no swarms
of inarticulate feelings are aroused. The immediate appeal of Jonson is
to the mind; his emotional tone is not in the single verse, but in the
design of the whole. But not many people are capable of discovering for
themselves the beauty which is only found after labour; and Jonson’s
industrious readers have been those whose interest was historical and
curious, and those who have thought that in discovering the historical
and curious interest they had discovered the artistic value as well.
When we say that Jonson requires study, we do not mean study of his
classical scholarship or of seventeenth-century manners. We mean
intelligent saturation in his work as a whole; we mean that in order to
enjoy him at all, we must get to the centre of his work and his
temperament, and that we must see him unbiased by time, as a
contemporary. And to see him as a contemporary does not so much require
the power of putting ourselves into seventeenth-century London as it
requires the power of setting Jonson in our London: a more difficult
triumph of divination.

It is generally conceded that Jonson failed as a tragic dramatist; and
it is usually agreed that he failed because his genius was for satiric
comedy and because of the weight of pedantic learning with which he
burdened his two tragic failures. The second point marks an obvious
error of detail; the first is too crude a statement to be accepted; to
say that he failed because his genius was unsuited to tragedy is to tell
us nothing at all. Jonson did not write a good tragedy, but we can see
no reason why he should not have written one. If two plays so different
as _The Tempest_ and _The Silent Woman_ are both comedies, surely the
category of tragedy could be made wide enough to include something
possible for Jonson to have done. But the classification of tragedy and
comedy, while it may be sufficient to mark the distinction in a dramatic
literature of more rigid form and treatment—it may distinguish
Aristophanes from Euripides—is not adequate to a drama of such
variations as the Elizabethans. Tragedy is a crude classification for
plays so different in their tone as _Macbeth_, _The Jew of Malta_, and
_The Witch of Edmonton_; and it does not help us much to say that _The
Merchant of Venice_ and _The Alchemist_ are comedies. Jonson had his own
scale, his own instrument. The merit which _Catiline_ possesses is the
same merit that is exhibited more triumphantly in _Volpone_; _Catiline_
fails, not because it is too laboured and conscious, but because it is
not conscious enough; because Jonson in this play was not alert to his
own idiom, not clear in his mind as to what his temperament wanted him
to do. In _Catiline_ Jonson conforms, or attempts to conform, to
conventions; not to the conventions of antiquity, which he had
exquisitely under control, but to the conventions of tragico-historical
drama of his time. It is not the Latin erudition that sinks _Catiline_,
but the application of that erudition to a form which was not the proper
vehicle for the mind which had amassed the erudition.

If you look at _Catiline_—that dreary Pyrrhic victory of tragedy—you
find two passages to be successful: Act II. scene i, the dialogue of the
political ladies, and the Prologue of Sylla’s ghost. These two passages
are genial. The soliloquy of the ghost is a characteristic Jonson
success in content and in versification—

    Dost thou not feel me, Rome? not yet! is night
    So heavy on thee, and my weight so light?
    Can Sylla’s ghost arise within thy walls,
    Less threatening than an earthquake, the quick falls
    Of thee and thine? Shake not the frighted heads
    Of thy steep towers, or shrink to their first beds?
    Or as their ruin the large Tyber fills,
    Make that swell up, and drown thy seven proud hills?...

This is the learned, but also the creative, Jonson. Without concerning
himself with the character of Sulla, and in lines of invective, Jonson
makes Sylla’s ghost, while the words are spoken, a living and terrible
force. The words fall with as determined beat as if they were the will
of the morose Dictator himself. You may say: merely invective; but mere
invective, even if as superior to the clumsy fisticuffs of Marston and
Hall as Jonson’s verse is superior to theirs, would not create a living
figure as Jonson has done in this long tirade. And you may say:
rhetoric; but if we are to call it “rhetoric” we must subject that term
to a closer dissection than any to which it is accustomed. What Jonson
has done here is not merely a fine speech. It is the careful, precise
filling in of a strong and simple outline, and at no point does it
overflow the outline; it is far more careful and precise in its
obedience to this outline than are many of the speeches in
_Tamburlaine_. The outline is not Sulla, for Sulla has nothing to do
with it, but “Sylla’s ghost.” The words may not be suitable to an
historical Sulla, or to anybody in history, but they are a perfect
expression for “Sylla’s ghost.” You cannot say they are rhetorical
“because people do not talk like that,” you cannot call them “verbiage”;
they do not exhibit prolixity or redundancy or the other vices in the
rhetoric books; there is a definite artistic emotion which demands
expression at that length. The words themselves are mostly simple words,
the syntax is natural, the language austere rather than adorned. Turning
then to the induction of _The Poetaster_, we find another success of the
same kind—

    Light, I salute thee, but with wounded nerves....

Men may not talk in that way, but the spirit of envy does, and in the
words of Jonson envy is a real and living person. It is not human life
that informs envy and Sylla’s ghost, but it is energy of which human
life is only another variety.

Returning to _Catiline_, we find that the best scene in the body of the
play is one which cannot be squeezed into a tragic frame, and which
appears to belong to satiric comedy. The scene between Fulvia and Galla
and Sempronia is a living scene in a wilderness of oratory. And as it
recalls other scenes—there is a suggestion of the college of ladies in
_The Silent Woman_—it looks like a comedy scene. And it appears to be
satire.

    They shall all give and pay well, that come here,
    If they will have it; and that, jewels, pearl,
    Plate, or round sums to buy these. I’m not taken
    With a cob-swan or a high-mounting bull,
    As foolish Leda and Europa were;
    But the bright gold, with Danaë. For such price
    I would endure a rough, harsh Jupiter,
    Or ten such thundering gamesters, and refrain
    To laugh at ’em, till they are gone, with my much suffering.

This scene is no more comedy than it is tragedy, and the “satire” is
merely a medium for the essential emotion. Jonson’s drama is only
incidentally satire, because it is only incidentally a criticism upon
the actual world. It is not satire in the way in which the work of Swift
or the work of Molière may be called satire: that is, it does not find
its source in any precise emotional attitude or precise intellectual
criticism of the actual world. It is satire perhaps as the work of
Rabelais is satire; certainly not more so. The important thing is that
if fiction can be divided into creative fiction and critical fiction,
Jonson’s is creative. That he was a great critic, our first great
critic, does not affect this assertion. Every creator is also a critic;
Jonson was a conscious critic, but he was also conscious in his
creations. Certainly, one sense in which the term “critical” may be
applied to fiction is a sense in which the term might be used of a
method antithetical to Jonson’s. It is the method of _Education
Sentimentale_. The characters of Jonson, of Shakespeare, perhaps of all
the greatest drama, are drawn in positive and simple outlines. They may
be filled in, and by Shakespeare they are filled in, by much detail or
many shifting aspects; but a clear and sharp and simple form remains
through these—though it would be hard to say in what the clarity and
sharpness and simplicity of Hamlet consists. But Frédéric Moreau is not
made in that way. He is constructed partly by negative definition, built
up by a great number of observations. We cannot isolate him from the
environment in which we find him; it may be an environment which is or
can be much universalized; nevertheless it, and the figure in it,
consist of very many observed particular facts, the actual world.
Without this world the figure dissolves. The ruling faculty is a
critical perception, a commentary upon experienced feeling and
sensation. If this is true of Flaubert, it is true in a higher degree of
Molière than of Jonson. The broad farcical lines of Molière may seem to
be the same drawing as Jonson’s. But Molière—say in Alceste or Monsieur
Jourdain—is criticizing the actual; the reference to the actual world is
more direct. And having a more tenuous reference, the work of Jonson is
much less directly satirical.

This leads us to the question of Humours. Largely on the evidence of the
two Humour plays, it is sometimes assumed that Jonson is occupied with
types; typical exaggerations, or exaggerations of type. The Humour
definition, the expressed intention of Jonson, may be satisfactory for
these two plays. _Every Man in his Humour_ is the first mature work of
Jonson, and the student of Jonson must study it; but it is not the play
in which Jonson found his genius: it is the last of his plays to read
first. If one reads _Volpone_, and after that re-reads the _Jew of
Malta_; then returns to Jonson and reads _Bartholomew Fair_, _The
Alchemist_, _Epicœne_ and _The Devil is an Ass_, and finally _Catiline_,
it is possible to arrive at a fair opinion of the poet and the
dramatist.

The Humour, even at the beginning, is not a type, as in Marston’s
satire, but a simplified and somewhat distorted individual with a
typical mania. In the later work, the Humour definition quite fails to
account for the total effect produced. The characters of Shakespeare are
such as might exist in different circumstances than those in which
Shakespeare sets them. The latter appear to be those which extract from
the characters the most intense and interesting realization; but that
realization has not exhausted their possibilities. Volpone’s life, on
the other hand, is bounded by the scene in which it is played; in fact,
the life is the life of the scene and is derivatively the life of
Volpone; the life of the character is inseparable from the life of the
drama. This is not dependence upon a background, or upon a substratum of
fact. The emotional effect is single and simple. Whereas in Shakespeare
the effect is due to the way in which the characters _act upon_ one
another, in Jonson it is given by the way in which the characters _fit
in_ with each other. The artistic result of _Volpone_ is not due to any
effect that Volpone, Mosca, Corvino, Corbaccio, Voltore have upon each
other, but simply to their combination into a whole. And these figures
are not personifications of passions; separately, they have not even
that reality, they are constituents. It is a similar indication of
Jonson’s method that you can hardly pick out a line of Jonson’s and say
confidently that it is great poetry; but there are many extended
passages to which you cannot deny that honour.

    I will have all my beds blown up, not stuft;
    Down is too hard; and then, mine oval room
    Fill’d with such pictures as Tiberius took
    From Elephantis, and dull Aretine
    But coldly imitated. Then, my glasses
    Cut in more subtle angles, to disperse
    And multiply the figures, as I walk....

Jonson is the legitimate heir of Marlowe. The man who wrote, in
_Volpone_:

                                for thy love,
    In varying figures, I would have contended
    With the blue Proteus, or the hornèd flood....

and

                        See, a carbuncle
    May put out both the eyes of our Saint Mark;
    A diamond would have bought Lollia Paulina,
    When she came in like star-light, hid with jewels....

is related to Marlowe as a poet; and if Marlowe is a poet, Jonson is
also. And, if Jonson’s comedy is a comedy of humours, then Marlowe’s
tragedy, a large part of it, is a tragedy of humours. But Jonson has too
exclusively been considered as the typical representative of a point of
view toward comedy. He has suffered from his great reputation as a
critic and theorist, from the effects of his intelligence. We have been
taught to think of him as the man, the dictator (confusedly in our minds
with his later namesake), as the literary politician impressing his
views upon a generation; we are offended by the constant reminder of his
scholarship. We forget the comedy in the humours, and the serious artist
in the scholar. Jonson has suffered in public opinion, as anyone must
suffer who is forced to talk about his art.

If you examine the first hundred lines or more of _Volpone_ the verse
appears to be in the manner of Marlowe, more deliberate, more mature,
but without Marlowe’s inspiration. It looks like mere “rhetoric,”
certainly not “deeds and language such as men do use”! It appears to us,
in fact, forced and flagitious bombast. That it is not “rhetoric,” or at
least not vicious rhetoric, we do not know until we are able to review
the whole play. For the consistent maintenance of this manner conveys in
the end an effect not of verbosity, but of bold, even shocking and
terrifying directness. We have difficulty in saying exactly what
produces this simple and single effect. It is not in any ordinary way
due to management of intrigue. Jonson employs immense dramatic
constructive skill: it is not so much skill in plot as skill in doing
without a plot. He never manipulates as complicated a plot as that of
_The Merchant of Venice_; he has in his best plays nothing like the
intrigue of Restoration comedy. In _Bartholomew Fair_ it is hardly a
plot at all; the marvel of the play is the bewildering rapid chaotic
action of the fair; it is the fair itself, not anything that happens to
take place in the fair. In _Volpone_, or _The Alchemist_, or _The Silent
Woman_, the plot is enough to keep the players in motion; it is rather
an “action” than a plot. The plot does not hold the play together; what
holds the play together is a unity of inspiration that radiates into
plot and personages alike.

We have attempted to make more precise the sense in which it was said
that Jonson’s work is “of the surface”; carefully avoiding the word
“superficial.” For there is work contemporary with Jonson’s which is
superficial in a pejorative sense in which the word cannot be applied to
Jonson—the work of Beaumont and Fletcher. If we look at the work of
Jonson’s great contemporaries, Shakespeare, and also Donne and Webster
and Tourneur (and sometimes Middleton), have a depth, a third dimension,
as Mr. Gregory Smith rightly calls it, which Jonson’s work has not.
Their words have often a network of tentacular roots reaching down to
the deepest terrors and desires. Jonson’s most certainly have not; but
in Beaumont and Fletcher we may think that at times we find it. Looking
closer, we discover that the blossoms of Beaumont and Fletcher’s
imagination draw no sustenance from the soil, but are cut and slightly
withered flowers stuck into sand.

    Wilt thou, hereafter, when they talk of me,
    As thou shalt hear nothing but infamy,
    Remember some of these things?...
    I pray thee, do; for thou shalt never see me so again.

    Hair woven in many a curious warp,
    Able in endless error to enfold
    The wandering soul;...

Detached from its context, this looks like the verse of the greater
poets; just as lines of Jonson, detached from their context, look like
inflated or empty fustian. But the evocative quality of the verse of
Beaumont and Fletcher depends upon a clever appeal to emotions and
associations which they have not themselves grasped; it is hollow. It is
superficial with a vacuum behind it; the superficies of Jonson is solid.
It is what it is; it does not pretend to be another thing. But it is so
very conscious and deliberate that we must look with eyes alert to the
whole before we apprehend the significance of any part. We cannot call a
man’s work superficial when it is the creation of a world; a man cannot
be accused of dealing superficially with the world which he himself has
created; the superficies _is_ the world. Jonson’s characters conform to
the logic of the emotions of their world. It is a world like
Lobatchevsky’s; the worlds created by artists like Jonson are like
systems of non-Euclidean geometry. They are not fancy, because they have
a logic of their own; and this logic illuminates the actual world,
because it gives us a new point of view from which to inspect it.

A writer of power and intelligence, Jonson endeavoured to promulgate, as
a formula and programme of reform, what he chose to do himself; and he
not unnaturally laid down in abstract theory what is in reality a
personal point of view. And it is in the end of no value to discuss
Jonson’s theory and practice unless we recognize and seize this point of
view, which escapes the formulæ, and which is what makes his plays worth
reading. Jonson behaved as the great creative mind that he was: he
created his own world, a world from which his followers, as well as the
dramatists who were trying to do something wholly different, are
excluded. Remembering this, we turn to Mr. Gregory Smith’s
objection—that Jonson’s characters lack the third dimension, have no
life out of the theatrical existence in which they appear—and demand an
inquest. The objection implies that the characters are purely the work
of intellect, or the result of superficial observation of a world which
is faded or mildewed. It implies that the characters are lifeless. But
if we dig beneath the theory, beneath the observation, beneath the
deliberate drawing and the theatrical and dramatic elaboration, there is
discovered a kind of power, animating Volpone, Busy, Fitzdottrel, the
literary ladies of _Epicœne_, even Bobadil, which comes from below the
intellect, and for which no theory of humours will account. And it is
the same kind of power which vivifies Trimalchio, and Panurge, and some
but not all of the “comic” characters of Dickens. The fictive life of
this kind is not to be circumscribed by a reference to “comedy” or to
“farce”; it is not exactly the kind of life which informs the characters
of Molière or that which informs those of Marivaux—two writers who were,
besides, doing something quite different the one from the other. But it
is something which distinguishes Barabas from Shylock, Epicure Mammon
from Falstaff, Faustus from—if you will—Macbeth; Marlowe and Jonson from
Shakespeare and the Shakespearians, Webster, and Tourneur. It is not
merely Humours: for neither Volpone nor Mosca is a humour. No theory of
humours could account for Jonson’s best plays or the best characters in
them. We want to know at what point the comedy of humours passes into a
work of art, and why Jonson is not Brome.

The creation of a work of art, we will say the creation of a character
in a drama, consists in the process of transfusion of the personality,
or, in a deeper sense, the life, of the author into the character. This
is a very different matter from the orthodox creation in one’s own
image. The ways in which the passions and desires of the creator may be
satisfied in the work of art are complex and devious. In a painter they
may take the form of a predilection for certain colours, tones, or
lightings; in a writer the original impulse may be even more strangely
transmuted. Now, we may say with Mr. Gregory Smith that Falstaff or a
score of Shakespeare’s characters have a “third dimension” that Jonson’s
have not. This will mean, not that Shakespeare’s spring from the
feelings or imagination and Jonson’s from the intellect or invention;
they have equally an emotional source; but that Shakespeare’s represent
a more complex tissue of feelings and desires, as well as a more supple,
a more susceptible temperament. Falstaff is not only the roast
Malmesbury ox with the pudding in his belly; he also “grows old,” and,
finally, his nose is as sharp as a pen. He was perhaps the
_satisfaction_ of more, and of more complicated feelings; and perhaps he
was, as the great tragic characters must have been, the offspring of
deeper, less apprehensible feelings: deeper, but not necessarily
stronger or more intense, than those of Jonson. It is obvious that the
spring of the difference is not the difference between feeling and
thought, or superior insight, superior perception, on the part of
Shakespeare, but his susceptibility to a greater range of emotion, and
emotion deeper and more obscure. But his characters are no more “alive”
than are the characters of Jonson.

The world they live in is a larger one. But small worlds—the worlds
which artists create—do not differ only in magnitude; if they are
complete worlds, drawn to scale in every part, they differ in kind also.
And Jonson’s world has this scale. His type of personality found its
relief in something falling under the category of burlesque or
farce—though when you are dealing with a _unique_ world, like his, these
terms fail to appease the desire for definition. It is not, at all
events, the farce of Molière: the latter is more analytic, more an
intellectual redistribution. It is not defined by the word “satire.”
Jonson poses as a satirist. But satire like Jonson’s is great in the end
not by hitting off its object, but by creating it; the satire is merely
the means which leads to the æsthetic result, the impulse which projects
a new world into a new orbit. In _Every Man in his Humour_ there is a
neat, a very neat, comedy of humours. In discovering and proclaiming in
this play the new genre Jonson was simply recognizing, unconsciously,
the route which opened out in the proper direction for his instincts.
His characters are and remain, like Marlowe’s, simplified characters;
but the simplification does not consist in the dominance of a particular
humour or monomania. That is a very superficial account of it. The
simplification consists largely in reduction of detail, in the seizing
of aspects relevant to the relief of an emotional impulse which remains
the same for that character, in making the character conform to a
particular setting. This stripping is essential to the art, to which is
also essential a flat distortion in the drawing; it is an art of
caricature, of great caricature, like Marlowe’s. It is a great
caricature, which is beautiful; and a great humour, which is serious.
The “world” of Jonson is sufficiently large; it is a world of poetic
imagination; it is sombre. He did not get the third dimension, but he
was not trying to get it.

If we approach Jonson with less frozen awe of his learning, with a
clearer understanding of his “rhetoric” and its applications, if we
grasp the fact that the knowledge required of the reader is not
archæology but knowledge of Jonson, we can derive not only instruction
in non Euclidean humanity—but enjoyment. We can even apply him, be aware
of him as a part of our literary inheritance craving further expression.
Of all the dramatists of his time, Jonson is probably the one whom the
present age would find the most sympathetic, if it knew him. There is a
brutality, a lack of sentiment, a polished surface, a handling of large
bold designs in brilliant colours, which ought to attract about three
thousand people in London and elsewhere. At least, if we had a
contemporary Shakespeare and a contemporary Jonson, it would be the
Jonson who would arouse the enthusiasm of the intelligentsia! Though he
is saturated in literature, he never sacrifices the theatrical
qualities—theatrical in the most favourable sense—to literature or to
the study of character. His work is a titanic show. But Jonson’s
masques, an important part of his work, are neglected; our flaccid
culture lets shows and literature fade, but prefers faded literature to
faded shows. There are hundreds of people who have read _Comus_ to ten
who have read the _Masque of Blackness_. _Comus_ contains fine poetry,
and poetry exemplifying some merits to which Jonson’s masque poetry
cannot pretend. Nevertheless, _Comus_ is the death of the masque; it is
the transition of a form of art—even of a form which existed for but a
short generation—into “literature,” literature cast in a form which has
lost its application. Even though _Comus_ was a masque at Ludlow Castle,
Jonson had, what Milton came perhaps too late to have, a sense for
living art; his art was applied. The masques can still be read, and with
pleasure, by anyone who will take the trouble—a trouble which in this
part of Jonson is, indeed, a study of antiquities—to imagine them in
action, displayed with the music, costume, dances, and the scenery of
Inigo Jones. They are additional evidence that Jonson had a fine sense
of form, of the purpose for which a particular form is intended;
evidence that he was a literary artist even more than he was a man of
letters.



                            Philip Massinger

                                   I

Massinger has been more fortunately and more fairly judged than several
of his greater contemporaries. Three critics have done their best by
him: the notes of Coleridge exemplify Coleridge’s fragmentary and fine
perceptions; the essay of Leslie Stephen is a piece of formidable
destructive analysis; and the essay of Swinburne is Swinburne’s
criticism at its best. None of these, probably, has put Massinger
finally and irrefutably into a place.

English criticism is inclined to argue or persuade rather than to state;
and, instead of forcing the subject to expose himself, these critics
have left in their work an undissolved residuum of their own good taste,
which, however impeccable, is something that requires our faith. The
principles which animate this taste remain unexplained. Mr.
Cruickshank’s book is a work of scholarship; and the advantage of good
scholarship is that it presents us with evidence which is an invitation
to the critical faculty of the reader: it bestows a method, rather than
a judgment.

It is difficult—it is perhaps the supreme difficulty of criticism—to
make the facts generalize themselves; but Mr. Cruickshank at least
presents us with facts which are capable of generalization. This is a
service of value; and it is therefore wholly a compliment to the author
to say that his appendices are as valuable as the essay itself.

The sort of labour to which Mr. Cruickshank has devoted himself is one
that professed critics ought more willingly to undertake. It is an
important part of criticism, more important than any mere expression of
opinion. To understand Elizabethan drama it is necessary to study a
dozen playwrights at once, to dissect with all care the complex growth,
to ponder collaboration to the utmost line. Reading Shakespeare and
several of his contemporaries is pleasure enough, perhaps all the
pleasure possible, for most. But if we wish to consummate and refine
this pleasure by understanding it, to distil the last drop of it, to
press and press the essence of each author, to apply exact measurement
to our own sensations, then we must compare; and we cannot compare
without parcelling the threads of authorship and influence. We must
employ Mr. Cruickshank’s method to examine Mr. Cruickshank’s judgments;
and perhaps the most important judgment to which he has committed
himself is this:—

    Massinger, in his grasp of stagecraft, his flexible metre, his
    desire in the sphere of ethics to exploit both vice and virtue, is
    typical of an age which had much culture, but which, without being
    exactly corrupt, lacked moral fibre.

Here, in fact, is our text: to elucidate this sentence would be to
account for Massinger. We begin vaguely with good taste, by a
recognition that Massinger is inferior: can we trace this inferiority,
dissolve it, and have left any element of merit?

We turn first to the parallel quotations from Massinger and Shakespeare
collocated by Mr. Cruickshank to make manifest Massinger’s indebtedness.
One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature
poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and
good poets make it into something better, or at least something
different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which
is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad
poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will
usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or
diverse in interest. Chapman borrowed from Seneca; Shakespeare and
Webster from Montaigne. The two great followers of Shakespeare, Webster
and Tourneur, in their mature work do not borrow from him; he is too
close to them to be of use to them in this way. Massinger, as Mr.
Cruickshank shows, borrows from Shakespeare a good deal. Let us profit
by some of the quotations with which he has provided us—

    _Massinger_: Can I call back yesterday, with all their aids
                 That bow unto my sceptre? or restore
                 My mind to that tranquillity and peace
                 It then enjoyed?

    _Shakespeare_: Not poppy, nor mandragora,
                   Nor all the drowsy syrops of the world
                   Shall ever medecine thee to that sweet sleep
                   Which thou owedst yesterday.

Massinger’s is a general rhetorical question, the language just and
pure, but colourless. Shakespeare’s has particular significance; and the
adjective “drowsy” and the verb “medecine” infuse a precise vigour. This
is, on Massinger’s part, an echo rather than an imitation or a
plagiarism—the basest, because least conscious form of borrowing.
“Drowsy syrop” is a condensation of meaning frequent in Shakespeare, but
rare in Massinger.

    _Massinger_: Thou didst not borrow of Vice her indirect,
            Crooked, and abject means.

    _Shakespeare_: God knows, my son,
             By what by-paths and indirect crook’d ways
             I met this crown.

Here, again, Massinger gives the general forensic statement, Shakespeare
the particular image. “Indirect crook’d” is forceful in Shakespeare; a
mere pleonasm in Massinger. “Crook’d ways” is a metaphor; Massinger’s
phrase only the ghost of a metaphor.

    _Massinger_: And now, in the evening,
            When thou shoud'st pass with honour to thy rest,
            Wilt thou fall like a meteor?

    _Shakespeare_: I shall fall
              Like a bright exhalation in the evening,
              And no man see me more.

Here the lines of Massinger have their own beauty. Still, a “bright
exhalation” appears to the eye and makes us catch our breath in the
evening; “meteor” is a dim simile; the word is worn.

    _Massinger_: What you deliver to me shall be lock’d up
            In a strong cabinet, of which you yourself
            Shall keep the key.

    _Shakespeare_: ’Tis in my memory locked,
              And you yourself shall keep the key of it.

In the preceding passage Massinger had squeezed his simile to death,
here he drags it round the city at his heels; and how swift
Shakespeare’s figure is! We may add two more passages, not given by our
commentator; here the model is Webster. They occur on the same page, an
artless confession.

                 Here he comes,
    His nose held up; he hath something in the wind,

is hardly comparable to “the Cardinal lifts up his nose like a foul
porpoise before a storm,” and when we come upon

              as tann’d galley-slaves
    Pay such as do redeem them from the oar

it is unnecessary to turn up the great lines in the _Duchess of Malfi_.
Massinger fancied this galley-slave; for he comes with his oar again in
the _Bondman_—

    Never did galley-slave shake off his chains,
    Or looked on his redemption from the oar....

Now these are mature plays; and the _Roman Actor_ (from which we have
drawn the two previous extracts) is said to have been the preferred play
of its author.

We may conclude directly from these quotations that Massinger’s feeling
for language had outstripped his feeling for things; that his eye and
his vocabulary were not in close co-operation. One of the greatest
distinctions of several of his elder contemporaries—we name Middleton,
Webster, Tourneur—is a gift for combining, for fusing into a single
phrase, two or more diverse impressions.

    ... in her strong toil of grace

of Shakespeare is such a fusion; the metaphor identifies itself with
what suggests it; the resultant is one and is unique—

    Does the silk worm _expend_ her _yellow labours_?...
    Why does yon fellow _falsify highways_
    And lays his life between the judge’s lips
    To _refine_ such a one? keeps horse and men
    To _beat their valours_ for her?

    Let the common sewer take it from distinction....
    Lust and forgetfulness have been amongst us....

These lines of Tourneur and of Middleton exhibit that perpetual slight
alteration of language, words perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden
combinations, meanings perpetually _eingeschachtelt_ into meanings,
which evidences a very high development of the senses, a development of
the English language which we have perhaps never equalled. And, indeed,
with the end of Chapman, Middleton, Webster, Tourneur, Donne we end a
period when the intellect was immediately at the tips of the senses.
Sensation became word and the word was sensation. The next period is the
period of Milton (though still with a Marvell in it); and this period is
initiated by Massinger.

It is not that the word becomes less exact. Massinger is, in a wholly
eulogistic sense, choice and correct. And the decay of the senses is not
inconsistent with a greater sophistication of language. But every vital
development in language is a development of feeling as well. The verse
of Shakespeare and the major Shakespearian dramatists is an innovation
of this kind, a true mutation of species. The verse practised by
Massinger is a different verse from that of his predecessors; but it is
not a development based on, or resulting from, a new way of feeling. On
the contrary, it seems to lead us away from feeling altogether.

We mean that Massinger must be placed as much at the beginning of one
period as at the end of another. A certain Boyle, quoted by Mr.
Cruickshank, says that Milton’s blank verse owes much to the study of
Massinger’s.

    In the indefinable touches which make up the music of a verse [says
    Boyle], in the artistic distribution of pauses, and in the unerring
    choice and grouping of just those words which strike the ear as the
    perfection of harmony, there are, if we leave Cyril Tourneur’s
    _Atheist’s Tragedy_ out of the question, only two masters in the
    drama, Shakespeare in his latest period and Massinger.

This Boyle must have had a singular ear to have preferred Tourneur’s
apprentice work to his _Revenger’s Tragedy_, and one must think that he
had never glanced at Ford. But though the appraisal be ludicrous, the
praise is not undeserved. Mr. Cruickshank has given us an excellent
example of Massinger’s syntax—

                      What though my father
    Writ man before he was so, and confirm’d it,
    By numbering that day no part of his life
    In which he did not service to his country;
    Was he to be free therefore from the laws
    And ceremonious form in your decrees?
    Or else because he did as much as man
    In those three memorable overthrows,
    At Granson, Morat, Nancy, where his master,
    The warlike Charalois, with whose misfortunes
    I bear his name, lost treasure, men, and life,
    To be excused from payment of those sums
    Which (his own patrimony spent) his zeal
    To serve his country forced him to take up!

It is impossible to deny the masterly construction of this passage;
perhaps there is not one living poet who could do the like. It is
impossible to deny the originality. The language is pure and correct,
free from muddiness or turbidity. Massinger does not confuse metaphors,
or heap them one upon another. He is lucid, though not easy. But if
Massinger’s age, “without being exactly corrupt, lacks moral fibre,”
Massinger’s verse, without being exactly corrupt, suffers from cerebral
anæmia. To say that an involved style is necessarily a bad style would
be preposterous. But such a style should follow the involutions of a
mode of perceiving, registering, and digesting impressions which is also
involved. It is to be feared that the feeling of Massinger is simple and
overlaid with received ideas. Had Massinger had a nervous system as
refined as that of Middleton, Tourneur, Webster, or Ford, his style
would be a triumph. But such a nature was not at hand, and Massinger
precedes, not another Shakespeare, but Milton.

Massinger is, in fact, at a further remove from Shakespeare than that
other precursor of Milton—John Fletcher. Fletcher was above all an
opportunist, in his verse, in his momentary effects, never quite a
pastiche; in his structure ready to sacrifice everything to the single
scene. To Fletcher, because he was more intelligent, less will be
forgiven. Fletcher had a cunning guess at feelings, and betrayed them;
Massinger was unconscious and innocent. As an artisan of the theatre he
is not inferior to Fletcher, and his best tragedies have an honester
unity than _Bonduca_. But the unity is superficial. In the _Roman Actor_
the development of parts is out of all proportion to the central theme;
in the _Unnatural Combat_, in spite of the deft handling of suspense and
the quick shift from climax to a new suspense, the first part of the
play is the hatred of Malefort for his son and the second part is his
passion for his daughter. It is theatrical skill, not an artistic
conscience arranging emotions, that holds the two parts together. In the
_Duke of Milan_ the appearance of Sforza at the Court of his conqueror
only delays the action, or rather breaks the emotional rhythm. And we
have named three of Massinger’s best.

A dramatist who so skilfully welds together parts which have no reason
for being together, who fabricates plays so well knit and so remote from
unity, we should expect to exhibit the same synthetic cunning in
character. Mr. Cruickshank, Coleridge, and Leslie Stephen are pretty
well agreed that Massinger is no master of characterization. You can, in
fact, put together heterogeneous parts to form a lively play; but a
character, to be living, must be conceived from some emotional unity. A
character is not to be composed of scattered observations of human
nature, but of parts which are felt together. Hence it is that although
Massinger’s failure to draw a moving character is no greater than his
failure to make a whole play, and probably springs from the same
defective sensitiveness, yet the failure in character is more
conspicuous and more disastrous. A “living” character is not necessarily
“true to life.” It is a person whom we can see and hear, whether he be
true or false to human nature as we know it. What the creator of
character needs is not so much knowledge of motives as keen sensibility;
the dramatist need not understand people; but he must be exceptionally
aware of them. This awareness was not given to Massinger. He inherits
the traditions of conduct, female chastity, hymeneal sanctity, the
fashion of honour, without either criticizing or informing them from his
own experience. In the earlier drama these conventions are merely a
framework, or an alloy necessary for working the metal; the metal itself
consisted of unique emotions resulting inevitably from the
circumstances, resulting or inhering as inevitably as the properties of
a chemical compound. Middleton’s heroine, for instance, in the
_Changeling_, exclaims in the well-known words—

    Why, ’tis impossible thou canst be so wicked,
    To shelter such a cunning cruelty
    To make his death the murderer of my honour!

The word “honour” in such a situation is out of date, but the emotion of
Beatrice at that moment, given the conditions, is as permanent and
substantial as anything in human nature. The emotion of Othello in Act
V. is the emotion of a man who discovers that the worst part of his own
soul has been exploited by some one more clever than he; it is this
emotion carried by the writer to a very high degree of intensity. Even
in so late and so decayed a drama as that of Ford, the framework of
emotions and morals of the time is only the vehicle for statements of
feeling which are unique and imperishable: Ford’s and Ford’s only.

What may be considered corrupt or decadent in the morals of Massinger is
not an alteration or diminution in morals; it is simply the
disappearance of all the personal and real emotions which this morality
supported and into which it introduced a kind of order. As soon as the
emotions disappear the morality which ordered it appears hideous.
Puritanism itself became repulsive only when it appeared as the survival
of a restraint after the feelings which it restrained had gone. When
Massinger’s ladies resist temptation they do not appear to undergo any
important emotion; they merely know what is expected of them; they
manifest themselves to us as lubricious prudes. Any age has its
conventions; and any age might appear absurd when its conventions get
into the hands of a man like Massinger—a man, we mean, of so
exceptionally superior a literary talent as Massinger’s, and so paltry
an imagination. The Elizabethan morality was an important convention;
important because it was not consciously of one social class alone,
because it provided a framework for emotions to which all classes could
respond, and it hindered no feeling. It was not hypocritical, and it did
not suppress; its dark corners are haunted by the ghosts of Mary Fitton
and perhaps greater. It is a subject which has not been sufficiently
investigated. Fletcher and Massinger rendered it ridiculous; not by not
believing in it, but because they were men of great talents who could
not vivify it; because they could not fit into it passionate, complete
human characters.

The tragedy of Massinger is interesting chiefly according to the
definition given before; the highest degree of verbal excellence
compatible with the most rudimentary development of the senses.
Massinger succeeds better in something which is not tragedy; in the
romantic comedy. _A Very Woman_ deserves all the praise that Swinburne,
with his almost unerring gift for selection, has bestowed upon it. The
probable collaboration of Fletcher had the happiest result; for
certainly that admirable comic personage, the tipsy Borachia, is handled
with more humour than we expect of Massinger. It is a play which would
be enjoyable on the stage. The form, however, of romantic comedy is
itself inferior and decadent. There is an inflexibility about the poetic
drama which is by no means a matter of classical, or neoclassical, or
pseudo-classical law. The poetic drama might develop forms highly
different from those of Greece or England, India or Japan. Conceded the
utmost freedom, the romantic drama would yet remain inferior. The poetic
drama must have an emotional unity, let the emotion be whatever you
like. It must have a dominant tone; and if this be strong enough, the
most heterogeneous emotions may be made to reinforce it. The romantic
comedy is a skilful concoction of inconsistent emotion, a _revue_ of
emotion. _A Very Woman_ is surpassingly well plotted. The debility of
romantic drama does not depend upon extravagant setting, or preposterous
events, or inconceivable coincidences; all these might be found in a
serious tragedy or comedy. It consists in an internal incoherence of
feelings, a concatenation of emotions which signifies nothing.

From this type of play, so eloquent of emotional disorder, there was no
swing back of the pendulum. Changes never come by a simple reinfusion
into the form which the life has just left. The romantic drama was not a
new form. Massinger dealt not with emotions so much as with the social
abstractions of emotions, more generalized and therefore more quickly
and easily interchangeable within the confines of a single action. He
was not guided by direct communications through the nerves. Romantic
drama tended, accordingly, toward what is sometimes called the
“typical,” but which is not the truly typical; for the _typical_ figure
in a drama is always particularized—an individual. The tendency of the
romantic drama was toward a form which continued it in removing its more
conspicuous vices, was toward a more severe external order. This form
was the Heroic Drama. We look into Dryden’s “Essay on Heroic Plays,” and
we find that “love and valour ought to be the subject of an heroic
poem.” Massinger, in his destruction of the old drama, had prepared the
way for Dryden. The intellect had perhaps exhausted the old conventions.
It was not able to supply the impoverishment of feeling.

Such are the reflections aroused by an examination of some of
Massinger’s plays in the light of Mr. Cruickshank’s statement that
Massinger’s age “had much culture, but, without being exactly corrupt,
lacked moral fibre.” The statement may be supported. In order to fit
into our estimate of Massinger the two admirable comedies—_A New Way to
Pay Old Debts_ and _The City Madam_—a more extensive research would be
required than is possible within our limits.


                                   II

Massinger’s tragedy may be summarized for the unprepared reader as being
very dreary. It is dreary, unless one is prepared by a somewhat
extensive knowledge of his livelier contemporaries to grasp without
fatigue precisely the elements in it which are capable of giving
pleasure; or unless one is incited by a curious interest in
versification. In comedy, however, Massinger was one of the few masters
in the language. He was a master in a comedy which is serious, even
sombre; and in one aspect of it there are only two names to mention with
his: those of Marlowe and Jonson. In comedy, as a matter of fact, a
greater variety of methods were discovered and employed than in tragedy.
The method of Kyd, as developed by Shakespeare, was the standard for
English tragedy down to Otway and to Shelley. But both individual
temperament, and varying epochs, made more play with comedy. The comedy
of Lyly is one thing; that of Shakespeare, followed by Beaumont and
Fletcher, is another; and that of Middleton is a third. And Massinger,
while he has his own comedy, is nearer to Marlowe and Jonson than to any
of these.

Massinger was, in fact, as a comic writer, fortunate in the moment at
which he wrote. His comedy is transitional; but it happens to be one of
those transitions which contain some merit not anticipated by
predecessors or refined upon by later writers. The comedy of Jonson is
nearer to caricature; that of Middleton a more photographic delineation
of low life. Massinger is nearer to Restoration comedy, and more like
his contemporary, Shirley, in assuming a certain social level, certain
distinctions of class, as a postulate of his comedy. This resemblance to
later comedy is also the important point of difference between Massinger
and earlier comedy. But Massinger’s comedy differs just as widely from
the comedy of manners proper; he is closer to that in his romantic
drama—in _A Very Woman_—than in _A New Way to Pay Old Debts_; in his
comedy his interest is not in the follies of love-making or the
absurdities of social pretence, but in the unmasking of villainy. Just
as the Old Comedy of Molière differs in principle from the New Comedy of
Marivaux, so the Old Comedy of Massinger differs from the New Comedy of
his contemporary Shirley. And as in France, so in England, the more
farcical comedy was the more serious. Massinger’s great comic rogues,
Sir Giles Overreach and Luke Frugal, are members of the large English
family which includes Barabas and Sir Epicure Mammon, and from which Sir
Tunbelly Clumsy claims descent.

What distinguishes Massinger from Marlowe and Jonson is in the main an
inferiority. The greatest comic characters of these two dramatists are
slight work in comparison with Shakespeare’s best—Falstaff has a third
dimension and Epicure Mammon has only two. But this slightness is part
of the nature of the art which Jonson practised, a smaller art than
Shakespeare’s. The inferiority of Massinger to Jonson is an inferiority,
not of one type of art to another, but within Jonson’s type. It is a
simple deficiency. Marlowe’s and Jonson’s comedies were a view of life;
they were, as great literature is, the transformation of a personality
into a personal work of art, their lifetime’s work, long or short.
Massinger is not simply a smaller personality: his personality hardly
exists. He did not, out of his own personality, build a world of art, as
Shakespeare and Marlowe and Jonson built.

In the fine pages which Remy de Gourmont devotes to Flaubert in his
_Problème du Style_, the great critic declares:

    La vie est un dépouillement. Le but de l’activité propre de l’homme
    est de nettoyer sa personnalité, de la laver de toutes les
    souillures qu’y déposa l’éducation, de la dégager de toutes les
    empreintes qu’y laissèrent nos admirations adolescentes;

and again:

    Flaubert incorporait toute sa sensibilité à ses œuvres.... Hors de
    ses livres, où il se transvasait goutte à goutte, jusqu’à la lie,
    Flaubert est fort peu intéressant....

Of Shakespeare notably, of Jonson less, of Marlowe (and of Keats to the
term of life allowed him), one can say that they _se transvasaient
goutte à goutte_; and in England, which has produced a prodigious number
of men of genius and comparatively few works of art, there are not many
writers of whom one can say it. Certainly not of Massinger. A brilliant
master of technique, he was not, in this profound sense, an artist. And
so we come to inquire how, if this is so, he could have written two
great comedies. We shall probably be obliged to conclude that a large
part of their excellence is, in some way which should be defined,
fortuitous; and that therefore they are, however remarkable, not works
of perfect art.

This objection raised by Leslie Stephen to Massinger’s method of
revealing a villain has great cogency; but I am inclined to believe that
the cogency is due to a somewhat different reason from that which Leslie
Stephen assigns. His statement is too _apriorist_ to be quite
trustworthy. There is no reason why a comedy or tragedy villain should
not declare himself, and in as long a period as the author likes; but
the sort of villain who may run on in this way is a simple villain
(simple not _simpliste_). Barabas and Volpone can declare their
character, because they have no inside; appearance and reality are
coincident; they are forces in particular directions. Massinger’s two
villains are not simple. Giles Overreach is essentially a great force
directed upon small objects; a great force, a small mind; the terror of
a dozen parishes instead of the conqueror of a world. The force is
misapplied, attenuated, thwarted, by the man’s vulgarity: he is a great
man of the City, without fear, but with the most abject awe of the
aristocracy. He is accordingly not simple, but a product of a certain
civilization, and he is not wholly conscious. His monologues are meant
to be, not what he thinks he is, but what he really is: and yet they are
not the truth about him, and he himself certainly does not know the
truth. To declare himself, therefore, is impossible.

    Nay, when my ears are pierced with widows’ cries,
    And undone orphans wash with tears my threshold,
    I only think what ’tis to have my daughter
    Right honourable; and ’tis a powerful charm
    Makes me insensible of remorse, or pity,
    Or the least sting of conscience.

This is the wrong note. Elsewhere we have the right:

                         Thou art a fool;
    In being out of office, I am out of danger;
    Where, if I were a justice, besides the trouble,
    I might or out of wilfulness, or error,
    Run myself finely into a praemunire,
    And so become a prey to the informer,
    No, I’ll have none of’t; ’tis enough I keep
    Greedy at my devotion: so he serve
    My purposes, let him hang, or damn, I care not....

And how well tuned, well modulated, here, the diction! The man is
audible and visible. But from passages like the first we may be
permitted to infer that Massinger was unconscious of trying to develop a
different kind of character from any that Marlowe or Jonson had
invented.

Luke Frugal, in _The City Madam_, is not so great a character as Sir
Giles Overreach. But Luke Frugal just misses being almost the greatest
of all hypocrites. His humility in the first act of the play is more
than half real. The error in his portraiture is not the extravagant
hocus-pocus of supposed Indian necromancers by which he is so easily
duped, but the premature disclosure of villainy in his temptation of the
two apprentices of his brother. But for this, he would be a perfect
chameleon of circumstance. Here, again, we feel that Massinger was
conscious only of inventing a rascal of the old simpler farce type. But
the play is not a farce, in the sense in which _The Jew of Malta_, _The
Alchemist_, _Bartholomew Fair_ are farces. Massinger had not the
personality to create great farce, and he was too serious to invent
trivial farce. The ability to perform that slight distortion of _all_
the elements in the world of a play or a story, so that this world is
complete in itself, which was given to Marlowe and Jonson (and to
Rabelais) and which is prerequisite to great farce, was denied to
Massinger. On the other hand, his temperament was more closely related
to theirs than to that of Shirley or the Restoration wits. His two
comedies therefore occupy a place by themselves. His ways of thinking
and feeling isolate him from both the Elizabethan and the later Caroline
mind. He might almost have been a great realist; he is killed by
conventions which were suitable for the preceding literary generation,
but not for his. Had Massinger been a greater man, a man of more
intellectual courage, the current of English literature immediately
after him might have taken a different course. The defect is precisely a
defect of personality. He is not, however, the only man of letters who,
at the moment when a new view of life is wanted, has looked at life
through the eyes of his predecessors, and only at manners through his
own.



                           Swinburne as Poet


It is a question of some nicety to decide how much must be read of any
particular poet. And it is not a question merely of the size of the
poet. There are some poets whose every line has unique value. There are
others who can be taken by a few poems universally agreed upon. There
are others who need be read only in selections, but what selections are
read will not very much matter. Of Swinburne, we should like to have the
_Atalanta_ entire, and a volume of selections which should certainly
contain _The Leper_, _Laus Veneris_, and _The Triumph of Time_. It ought
to contain many more, but there is perhaps no other single poem which it
would be an error to omit. A student of Swinburne will want to read one
of the Stuart plays and dip into _Tristram of Lyonesse_. But almost no
one, to-day, will wish to read the whole of Swinburne. It is not because
Swinburne is voluminous; certain poets, equally voluminous, must be read
entire. The necessity and the difficulty of a selection are due to the
peculiar nature of Swinburne’s contribution, which, it is hardly too
much to say, is of a very different kind from that of any other poet of
equal reputation.

We may take it as undisputed that Swinburne did make a contribution;
that he did something that had not been done before, and that what he
did will not turn out to be a fraud. And from that we may proceed to
inquire what Swinburne’s contribution was, and why, whatever critical
solvents we employ to break down the structure of his verse, this
contribution remains. The test is this: agreed that we do not (and I
think that the present generation does not) greatly enjoy Swinburne, and
agreed that (a more serious condemnation) at one period of our lives we
did enjoy him and now no longer enjoy him; nevertheless, the words which
we use to state our grounds of dislike or indifference cannot be applied
to Swinburne as they can to bad poetry. The words of condemnation are
words which express his qualities. You may say “diffuse.” But the
diffuseness is essential; had Swinburne practised greater concentration
his verse would be, not better in the same kind, but a different thing.
His diffuseness is one of his glories. That so little material as
appears to be employed in _The Triumph of Time_ should release such an
amazing number of words, requires what there is no reason to call
anything but genius. You could not condense _The Triumph of Time_. You
could only leave out. And this would destroy the poem; though no one
stanza seems essential. Similarly, a considerable quantity—a volume of
selections—is necessary to give the quality of Swinburne although there
is perhaps no one poem essential in this selection.

If, then, we must be very careful in applying terms of censure, like
“diffuse,” we must be equally careful of praise. “The beauty of
Swinburne’s verse is the sound,” people say, explaining, “he had little
visual imagination.” I am inclined to think that the word “beauty” is
hardly to be used in connection with Swinburne’s verse at all; but in
any case the beauty or effect of sound is neither that of music nor that
of poetry which can be set to music. There is no reason why verse
intended to be sung should not present a sharp visual image or convey an
important intellectual meaning, for it supplements the music by another
means of affecting the feelings. What we get in Swinburne is an
expression by sound, which could not possibly associate itself with
music. For what he gives is not images and ideas and music, it is one
thing with a curious mixture of suggestions of all three.

    Shall I come, if I swim? wide are the waves, you see;
    Shall I come, if I fly, my dear Love, to thee?

This is Campion, and an example of the kind of music that is not to be
found in Swinburne. It is an arrangement and choice of words which has a
sound-value and at the same time a coherent comprehensible meaning, and
the two things—the musical value and meaning—are two things, not one.
But in Swinburne there is no _pure_ beauty—no pure beauty of sound, or
of image, or of idea.

    Music, when soft voices die,
    Vibrates in the memory;
    Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
    Live within the sense they quicken.

    Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
    Are heaped for the beloved’s bed;
    And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
    Love itself shall slumber on.

I quote from Shelley, because Shelley is supposed to be the master of
Swinburne; and because his song, like that of Campion, has what
Swinburne has not—a beauty of music and a beauty of content; and because
it is clearly and simply expressed, with only two adjectives. Now, in
Swinburne the meaning and the sound are one thing. He is concerned with
the meaning of the word in a peculiar way: he employs, or rather
“works,” the word’s meaning. And this is connected with an interesting
fact about his vocabulary: he uses the most general word, because his
emotion is never particular, never in direct line of vision, never
focused; it is emotion reinforced, not by intensification, but by
expansion.

    There lived a singer in France of old
      By the tideless dolorous midland sea.
    In a land of sand and ruin and gold
      There shone one woman, and none but she.

You see that Provence is the merest point of diffusion here. Swinburne
defines the place by the most general word, which has for him its own
value. “Gold,” “ruin,” “dolorous”: it is not merely the sound that he
wants, but the vague associations of idea that the words give him. He
has not his eye on a particular place, as

    Li ruscelletti che dei verdi colli
    Del Casentin discendon giuso in Arno....

It is, in fact, the word that gives him the thrill, not the object. When
you take to pieces any verse of Swinburne, you find always that the
object was not there—only the word. Compare

    Snowdrops that plead for pardon
    And pine for fright

with the daffodils that come before the swallow dares. The snowdrop of
Swinburne disappears, the daffodil of Shakespeare remains. The swallow
of Shakespeare remains in the verse in _Macbeth_; the bird of Wordsworth

    Breaking the silence of the seas

remains; the swallow of “Itylus” disappears. Compare, again, a chorus of
_Atalanta_ with a chorus from Athenian tragedy. The chorus of Swinburne
is almost a parody of the Athenian: it is sententious, but it has not
even the significance of commonplace.

    At least we witness of thee ere we die
    That these things are not otherwise, but thus....

    Before the beginning of years
      There came to the making of man
    Time with a gift of tears;
      Grief with a glass that ran....

This is not merely “music”; it is effective because it appears to be a
tremendous statement, like statements made in our dreams; when we wake
up we find that the “glass that ran” would do better for time than for
grief, and that the gift of tears would be as appropriately bestowed by
grief as by time.

It might seem to be intimated, by what has been said, that the work of
Swinburne can be shown to be a sham, just as bad verse is a sham. It
would only be so if you could produce or suggest something that it
pretends to be and is not. The world of Swinburne does not depend upon
some other world which it simulates; it has the necessary completeness
and self-sufficiency for justification and permanence. It is impersonal,
and no one else could have made it. The deductions are true to the
postulates. It is indestructible. None of the obvious complaints that
were or might have been brought to bear upon the first _Poems and
Ballads_ holds good. The poetry is not morbid, it is not erotic, it is
not destructive. These are adjectives which can be applied to the
material, the human feelings, which in Swinburne’s case do not exist.
The morbidity is not of human feeling but of language. Language in a
healthy state presents the object, is so close to the object that the
two are identified.

They are identified in the verse of Swinburne solely because the object
has ceased to exist, because the meaning is merely the hallucination of
meaning, because language, uprooted, has adapted itself to an
independent life of atmospheric nourishment. In Swinburne, for example,
we see the word “weary” flourishing in this way independent of the
particular and actual weariness of flesh or spirit. The bad poet dwells
partly in a world of objects and partly in a world of words, and he
never can get them to fit. Only a man of genius could dwell so
exclusively and consistently among words as Swinburne. His language is
not, like the language of bad poetry, dead. It is very much alive, with
this singular life of its own. But the language which is more important
to us is that which is struggling to digest and express new objects, new
groups of objects, new feelings, new aspects, as, for instance, the
prose of Mr. James Joyce or the earlier Conrad.



                                 Blake


                                   I

If one follows Blake’s mind through the several stages of his poetic
development it is impossible to regard him as a naïf, a wild man, a wild
pet for the supercultivated. The strangeness is evaporated, the
peculiarity is seen to be the peculiarity of all great poetry: something
which is found (not everywhere) in Homer and Æschylus and Dante and
Villon, and profound and concealed in the work of Shakespeare—and also
in another form in Montaigne and in Spinoza. It is merely a peculiar
honesty, which, in a world too frightened to be honest, is peculiarly
terrifying. It is an honesty against which the whole world conspires,
because it is unpleasant. Blake’s poetry has the unpleasantness of great
poetry. Nothing that can be called morbid or abnormal or perverse, none
of the things which exemplify the sickness of an epoch or a fashion,
have this quality; only those things which, by some extraordinary labour
of simplification, exhibit the essential sickness or strength of the
human soul. And this honesty never exists without great technical
accomplishment. The question about Blake the man is the question of the
circumstances that concurred to permit this honesty in his work, and
what circumstances define its limitations. The favouring conditions
probably include these two: that, being early apprenticed to a manual
occupation, he was not compelled to acquire any other education in
literature than he wanted, or to acquire it for any other reason than
that he wanted it; and that, being a humble engraver, he had no
journalistic-social career open to him.

There was, that is to say, nothing to distract him from his interests or
to corrupt these interests: neither the ambitions of parents or wife,
nor the standards of society, nor the temptations of success; nor was he
exposed to imitation of himself or of anyone else. These
circumstances—not his supposed inspired and untaught spontaneity—are
what make him innocent. His early poems show what the poems of a boy of
genius ought to show, immense power of assimilation. Such early poems
are not, as usually supposed, crude attempts to do something beyond the
boy’s capacity; they are, in the case of a boy of real promise, more
likely to be quite mature and successful attempts to do something small.
So with Blake, his early poems are technically admirable, and their
originality is in an occasional rhythm. The verse of _Edward III_
deserves study. But his affection for certain Elizabethans is not so
surprising as his affinity with the very best work of his own century.
He is very like Collins, he is very eighteenth century. The poem
_Whether on Ida’s shady brow_ is eighteenth-century work; the movement,
the weight of it, the syntax, the choice of words—

    The _languid_ strings do scarcely move!
    The sound is _forc’d_, the notes are few!

this is contemporary with Gray and Collins, it is the poetry of a
language which has undergone the discipline of prose. Blake up to twenty
is decidedly a traditional.

Blake’s beginnings as a poet, then, are as normal as the beginnings of
Shakespeare. His method of composition, in his mature work, is exactly
like that of other poets. He has an idea (a feeling, an image), he
develops it by accretion or expansion, alters his verse often, and
hesitates often over the final choice.[9] The idea, of course, simply
comes, but upon arrival it is subjected to prolonged manipulation. In
the first phase Blake is concerned with verbal beauty; in the second he
becomes the apparent naïf, really the mature intelligence. It is only
when the ideas become more automatic, come more freely and are less
manipulated, that we begin to suspect their origin, to suspect that they
spring from a shallower source.

Footnote 9:

  I do not know why M. Berger should say, without qualification, in his
  _William Blake: mysticisme et poésie_, that “son respect pour l’esprit
  qui soufflait en lui et qui dictait ses paroles l’empêchait de les
  corriger jamais.” Dr. Sampson, in his Oxford edition of Blake, gives
  us to understand that Blake believed much of his writing to be
  automatic, but observes that Blake’s “meticulous care in composition
  is everywhere apparent in the poems preserved in rough draft ...
  alteration on alteration, rearrangement after rearrangement,
  deletions, additions, and inversions....”

The Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and the poems from the
Rossetti manuscript, are the poems of a man with a profound interest in
human emotions, and a profound knowledge of them. The emotions are
presented in an extremely simplified, abstract form. This form is one
illustration of the eternal struggle of art against education, of the
literary artist against the continuous deterioration of language.

It is important that the artist should be highly educated in his own
art; but his education is one that is hindered rather than helped by the
ordinary processes of society which constitute education for the
ordinary man. For these processes consist largely in the acquisition of
impersonal ideas which obscure what we really are and feel, what we
really want, and what really excites our interest. It is of course not
the actual information acquired, but the conformity which the
accumulation of knowledge is apt to impose, that is harmful. Tennyson is
a very fair example of a poet almost wholly encrusted with parasitic
opinion, almost wholly merged into his environment. Blake, on the other
hand, knew what interested him, and he therefore presents only the
essential, only, in fact, what can be presented, and need not be
explained. And because he was not distracted, or frightened, or occupied
in anything but exact statement, he understood. He was naked, and saw
man naked, and from the centre of his own crystal. To him there was no
more reason why Swedenborg should be absurd than Locke. He accepted
Swedenborg, and eventually rejected him, for reasons of his own. He
approached everything with a mind unclouded by current opinions. There
was nothing of the superior person about him. This makes him terrifying.


                                   II

But if there was nothing to distract him from sincerity there were, on
the other hand, the dangers to which the naked man is exposed. His
philosophy, like his visions, like his insight, like his technique, was
his own. And accordingly he was inclined to attach more importance to it
than an artist should; this is what makes him eccentric, and makes him
inclined to formlessness.

    But most through midnight streets I hear
    How the youthful harlot’s curse
    Blasts the new-born infant’s tear,
    And blights with plagues the marriage hearse,

is the naked vision;

    Love seeketh only self to please,
    To bind another to its delight,
    Joys in another’s loss of ease,
    And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite,

is the naked observation; and _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ is naked
philosophy, presented. But Blake’s occasional marriages of poetry and
philosophy are not so felicitous.

    He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars.
    General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer;
    For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized
       particulars....

One feels that the form is not well chosen. The borrowed philosophy of
Dante and Lucretius is perhaps not so interesting, but it injures their
form less. Blake did not have that more Mediterranean gift of form which
knows how to borrow as Dante borrowed his theory of the soul; he must
needs create a philosophy as well as a poetry. A similar formlessness
attacks his draughtsmanship. The fault is most evident, of course, in
the longer poems—or rather, the poems in which structure is important.
You cannot create a very large poem without introducing a more
impersonal point of view, or splitting it up into various personalities.
But the weakness of the long poems is certainly not that they are too
visionary, too remote from the world. It is that Blake did not see
enough, became too much occupied with ideas.

We have the same respect for Blake’s philosophy (and perhaps for that of
Samuel Butler) that we have for an ingenious piece of home-made
furniture: we admire the man who has put it together out of the odds and
ends about the house. England has produced a fair number of these
resourceful Robinson Crusoes; but we are not really so remote from the
Continent, or from our own past, as to be deprived of the advantages of
culture if we wish them.

We may speculate, for amusement, whether it would not have been
beneficial to the north of Europe generally, and to Britain in
particular, to have had a more continuous religious history. The local
divinities of Italy were not wholly exterminated by Christianity, and
they were not reduced to the dwarfish fate which fell upon our trolls
and pixies. The latter, with the major Saxon deities, were perhaps no
great loss in themselves, but they left an empty place; and perhaps our
mythology was further impoverished by the divorce from Rome. Milton’s
celestial and infernal regions are large but insufficiently furnished
apartments filled by heavy conversation; and one remarks about the
Puritan mythology an historical thinness. And about Blake’s supernatural
territories, as about the supposed ideas that dwell there, we cannot
help commenting on a certain meanness of culture. They illustrate the
crankiness, the eccentricity, which frequently affects writers outside
of the Latin traditions, and which such a critic as Arnold should
certainly have rebuked. And they are not essential to Blake’s
inspiration.

Blake was endowed with a capacity for considerable understanding of
human nature, with a remarkable and original sense of language and the
music of language, and a gift of hallucinated vision. Had these been
controlled by a respect for impersonal reason, for common sense, for the
objectivity of science, it would have been better for him. What his
genius required, and what it sadly lacked, was a framework of accepted
and traditional ideas which would have prevented him from indulging in a
philosophy of his own, and concentrated his attention upon the problems
of the poet. Confusion of thought, emotion, and vision is what we find
in such a work as _Also Sprach Zarathustra_; it is eminently not a Latin
virtue. The concentration resulting from a framework of mythology and
theology and philosophy is one of the reasons why Dante is a classic,
and Blake only a poet of genius. The fault is perhaps not with Blake
himself, but with the environment which failed to provide what such a
poet needed; perhaps the circumstances compelled him to fabricate,
perhaps the poet required the philosopher and mythologist; although the
conscious Blake may have been quite unconscious of the motives.



                                 Dante


M. Paul Valéry, a writer for whom I have considerable respect, has
placed in his most recent statement upon poetry a paragraph which seems
to me of very doubtful validity. I have not seen the complete essay, and
know the quotation only as it appears in a critical notice in the
_Athenæum_, July 23, 1920:

    La philosophie, et même la morale tendirent à fuir les œuvres pour
    se placer dans les réflexions qui les précèdent.... Parler
    aujourd’hui de poésie philosophique (fût-ce en invoquant Alfred de
    Vigny, Leconte de Lisle, et quelques autres), c’est naivement
    confondre des conditions et des applications de l’esprit
    incompatibles entre elles. N’est-ce pas oublier que le but de celui
    qui spécule est de fixer ou de créer une notion—c’est-à-dire un
    _pouvoir_ et un _instrument de pouvoir_, cependant que le poète
    moderne essaie de produire en nous un _état_ et de porter cet état
    exceptionnel au point d’une jouissance parfaite....

It may be that I do M. Valéry an injustice which I must endeavour to
repair when I have the pleasure of reading his article entire. But the
paragraph gives the impression of more than one error of analysis. In
the first place, it suggests that conditions have changed, that
“philosophical” poetry may once have been permissible, but that (perhaps
owing to the greater specialization of the modern world) it is now
intolerable. We are forced to assume that what we do not like in our
time was never good art, and that what appears to us good was always so.
If any ancient “philosophical” poetry retains its value, a value which
we fail to find in modern poetry of the same type, we investigate on the
assumption that we shall find some difference to which the mere
difference of date is irrelevant. But if it be maintained that the older
poetry has a “philosophic” element and a “poetic” element which can be
isolated, we have two tasks to perform. We must show first in a
particular case—our case is Dante—that the philosophy is essential to
the structure and that the structure is essential to the poetic beauty
of the parts; and we must show that the philosophy is employed in a
different form from that which it takes in admittedly unsuccessful
philosophical poems. And if M. Valéry is in error in his complete
exorcism of “philosophy,” perhaps the basis of the error is his
apparently commendatory interpretation of the effort of the modern poet,
namely, that the latter endeavours “to produce in us a _state_.”

The early philosophical poets, Parmenides and Empedocles, were
apparently persons of an impure philosophical inspiration. Neither their
predecessors nor their successors expressed themselves in verse;
Parmenides and Empedocles were persons who mingled with genuine
philosophical ability a good deal of the emotion of the founder of a
second-rate religious system. They were not interested exclusively in
philosophy, or religion, or poetry, but in something which was a mixture
of all three; hence their reputation as poets is low and as philosophers
should be considerably below Heraclitus, Zeno, Anaxagoras, or
Democritus. The poem of Lucretius is quite a different matter. For
Lucretius was undoubtedly a poet. He endeavours to expound a
philosophical system, but with a different motive from Parmenides or
Empedocles, for this system is already in existence; he is really
endeavouring to find the concrete poetic equivalent for this system—to
find its complete equivalent in vision. Only, as he is an innovator in
this art, he wavers between philosophical poetry and philosophy. So we
find passages such as:

    But the velocity of thunderbolts is great and their stroke powerful,
    and they run through their course with a rapid descent, because the
    force when aroused first in all cases collects itself in the clouds
    and.... Let us now sing what causes the motion of the stars.... Of
    all these different smells then which strike the nostrils one may
    reach to a much greater distance than another....[10]

Footnote 10:

  Munro’s translation, _passim_.

But Lucretius’ true tendency is to express an ordered vision of the life
of man, with great vigour of real poetic image and often acute
observation.

    quod petiere, premunt arte faciuntque dolorem
    corporis et dentes inlidunt saepe labellis
    osculaque adfligunt, quia non est pura voluptas
    et stimuli subsunt qui instigant laedere id ipsum
    quodcumque est, rabies unde illaec germina surgunt....

                                      medio de fonte leporum
    surgit amari aliquid quod in ipsis floribus angat....

    nec procumbere humi prostratum et pandere palmas
    ante deum delubra nec aras sanguine multo
    spargere quadrupedum nec votis nectere vota,
    sed mage pacata posse omnia mente tueri.

The philosophy which Lucretius tackled was not rich enough in variety of
feeling, applied itself to life too uniformly, to supply the material
for a wholly successful poem. It was incapable of complete expansion
into pure vision. But I must ask M. Valéry whether the “aim” of
Lucretius’ poem was “to fix or create a notion” or to fashion “an
instrument of power.”

Without doubt, the effort of the philosopher proper, the man who is
trying to deal with ideas in themselves, and the effort of the poet, who
may be trying to _realize_ ideas, cannot be carried on at the same time.
But this is not to deny that poetry can be in some sense philosophic.
The poet can deal with philosophic ideas, not as matter for argument,
but as matter for inspection. The original form of a philosophy cannot
be poetic. But poetry can be penetrated by a philosophic idea, it can
deal with this idea when it has reached the point of immediate
acceptance, when it has become almost a physical modification. If we
divorced poetry and philosophy altogether, we should bring a serious
impeachment, not only against Dante, but against most of Dante’s
contemporaries.

Dante had the benefit of a mythology and a theology which had undergone
a more complete absorption into life than those of Lucretius. It is
curious that not only Dante’s detractors, like the Petrarch of Landor’s
_Pentameron_ (if we may apply so strong a word to so amiable a
character), but some of his admirers, insist on the separation of
Dante’s “poetry” and Dante’s “teaching.” Sometimes the philosophy is
confused with the allegory. The philosophy is an ingredient, it is a
part of Dante’s world just as it is a part of life; the allegory is the
scaffold on which the poem is built. An American writer of a little
primer of Dante, Mr. Henry Dwight Sidgwick, who desires to improve our
understanding of Dante as a “spiritual leader,” says:

    To Dante this literal Hell was a secondary matter; so it is to us.
    He and we are concerned with the allegory. That allegory is simple.
    Hell is the absence of God.... If the reader begins with the
    consciousness that he is reading about sin, spiritually understood,
    he never loses the thread, he is never at a loss, never slips back
    into the literal signification.

Without stopping to question Mr. Sidgwick on the difference between
literal and spiritual sin, we may affirm that his remarks are
misleading. Undoubtedly the allegory is to be taken seriously, and
certainly the _Comedy_ is in some way a “moral education.” The question
is to find a formula for the correspondence between the former and the
latter, to decide whether the moral value corresponds directly to the
allegory. We can easily ascertain what importance Dante assigned to
allegorical method. In the _Convivio_ we are seriously informed that

    the principal design [of the odes] is to lead men to knowledge and
    virtue, as will be seen in the progress of the truth of them;

and we are also given the familiar four interpretations of an ode:
literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical. And so distinguished a
scholar as M. Hauvette repeats again and again the phrase “didactique
d’intention.” We accept the allegory. Accepted, there are two usual ways
of dealing with it. One may, with Mr. Sidgwick, dwell upon its
significance for the seeker of “spiritual light,” or one may, with
Landor, deplore the spiritual mechanics and find the poet only in
passages where he frees himself from his divine purposes. With neither
of these points of view can we concur. Mr. Sidgwick magnifies the
“preacher and prophet,” and presents Dante as a superior Isaiah or
Carlyle; Landor reserves the poet, reprehends the scheme, and denounces
the politics. Some of Landor’s errors are more palpable than Mr.
Sidgwick’s. He errs, in the first place, in judging Dante by the
standards of classical epic. Whatever the _Comedy_ is, an epic it is
not. M. Hauvette well says:

    Rechercher dans quelle mesure le poème se rapproche du genre
    classique de l’épopée, et dans quelle mesure il s’en écarte, est un
    exércice de rhétorique entièrement inutile, puisque Dante, à n’en
    pas douter, n’a jamais eu l’intention de composer une action épique
    dans les règles.

But we must define the framework of Dante’s poem from the result as well
as from the intention. The poem has not only a framework, but a form;
and even if the framework be allegorical, the form may be something
else. The examination of any episode in the _Comedy_ ought to show that
not merely the allegorical interpretation or the didactic intention, but
the emotional significance itself, cannot be isolated from the rest of
the poem. Landor appears, for instance, to have misunderstood such a
passage as the Paolo and Francesca, by failing to perceive its
relations:

    In the midst of her punishment, Francesca, when she comes to the
    tenderest part of her story, tells it with complacency and delight.

This is surely a false simplification. To have lost all recollected
delight would have been, for Francesca, either loss of humanity or
relief from damnation. The ecstasy, with the present thrill at the
remembrance of it, is a part of the torture. Francesca is neither
stupefied nor reformed; she is merely damned; and it is a part of
damnation to experience desires that we can no longer gratify. For in
Dante’s Hell souls are not deadened, as they mostly are in life; they
are actually in the greatest torment of which each is capable.

    E il modo ancor m’offende.

It is curious that Mr. Sidgwick, whose approbation is at the opposite
pole from Landor’s, should have fallen into a similar error. He says:

    In meeting [Ulysses], as in meeting Pier della Vigna and Brunetto
    Latini, the preacher and the prophet are lost in the poet.

Here, again, is a false simplification. These passages have no
digressive beauty. The case of Brunetto is parallel to that of
Francesca. The emotion of the passage resides in Brunetto’s excellence
in damnation—so admirable a soul, and so perverse.

                      e parve de costoro
    Quegli che vince e non colui che perde.

And I think that if Mr. Sidgwick had pondered the strange words of
Ulysses,

    com’ altrui piacque,

he would not have said that the preacher and prophet are lost in the
poet. “Preacher” and “prophet” are odious terms; but what Mr. Sidgwick
designates by them is something which is certainly not “lost in the
poet,” but is part of the poet.

A variety of passages might illustrate the assertion that no emotion is
contemplated by Dante purely in and for itself. The emotion of the
person, or the emotion with which our attitude appropriately invests the
person, is never lost or diminished, is always preserved entire, but is
modified by the position assigned to the person in the eternal scheme,
is coloured by the atmosphere of that person’s residence in one of the
three worlds. About none of Dante’s characters is there that ambiguity
which affects Milton’s Lucifer. The damned preserve any degree of beauty
or grandeur that ever rightly pertained to them, and this intensifies
and also justifies their damnation. As Jason

         Guarda quel grande che viene!
    E per dolor non par lagrima spanda,
    Quanto aspetto reale ancor ritiene!

The crime of Bertrand becomes more lurid; the vindictive Adamo acquires
greater ferocity, and the errors of Arnaut are corrected—

    Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina.

If the artistic emotion presented by any episode of the _Comedy_ is
dependent upon the whole, we may proceed to inquire what the whole
scheme is. The usefulness of allegory and astronomy is obvious. A
mechanical framework, in a poem of so vast an ambit, was a necessity. As
the centre of gravity of emotions is more remote from a single human
action, or a system of purely human actions, than in drama or epic, so
the framework has to be more artificial and apparently more mechanical.
It is not essential that the allegory or the almost unintelligible
astronomy should be understood—only that its presence should be
justified. The emotional structure within this scaffold is what must be
understood—the structure made possible by the scaffold. This structure
is an ordered scale of human emotions. Not, necessarily, _all_ human
emotions; and in any case all the emotions are limited, and also
extended in significance by their place in the scheme.

But Dante’s is the most comprehensive, and the most _ordered_
presentation of emotions that has ever been made. Dante’s method of
dealing with any emotion may be contrasted, not so appositely with that
of other “epic” poets as with that of Shakespeare. Shakespeare takes a
character apparently controlled by a simple emotion, and analyses the
character and the emotion itself. The emotion is split up into
constituents—and perhaps destroyed in the process. The mind of
Shakespeare was one of the most _critical_ that has ever existed. Dante,
on the other hand, does not analyse the emotion so much as he exhibits
its relation to other emotions. You cannot, that is, understand the
_Inferno_ without the _Purgatorio_ and the _Paradiso_. “Dante,” says
Landor’s Petrarch, “is the great master of the disgusting.” That is
true, though Sophocles at least once approaches him. But a disgust like
Dante’s is no hypertrophy of a single reaction: it is completed and
explained only by the last canto of the Paradiso.

    La forma universal di questo nodo
      credo ch’io vidi, perchè più di largo
      dicendo questo, mi sento ch’io godo.

The contemplation of the horrid or sordid or disgusting, by an artist,
is the necessary and negative aspect of the impulse toward the pursuit
of beauty. But not all succeed as did Dante in expressing the complete
scale from negative to positive. The negative is the more importunate.

The structure of emotions, for which the allegory is the necessary
scaffold, is complete from the most sensuous to the most intellectual
and the most spiritual. Dante gives a concrete presentation of the most
elusive:

    Pareva a me che nube ne coprisse
      lucida, spessa, solida e polita,
      quasi adamante che lo sol ferisse.

    Per entro sè l’eterna margarita
      ne recepette, com’ acqua recepe
      raggio di luce, permanendo unita.

or

    Nel suo aspetto tal dentro mi fei,
      qual si fe’ Glauco nel gustar dell’ erba,
      che il fe’ consorto in mar degli altri dei.[11]

Footnote 11:

  See E. Pound, _The Spirit of Romance_, p. 145.

Again, in the _Purgatorio_, for instance in Canto XVI and Canto XVIII,
occur passages of pure exposition of philosophy, the philosophy of
Aristotle strained through the schools.

    Lo natural e sempre senza errore,
      ma l’altro puote errar per malo obbietto,
      o per poco o per troppo di vigore....

We are not here studying the philosophy, we _see_ it, as part of the
ordered world. The aim of the poet is to state a vision, and no vision
of life can be complete which does not include the articulate
formulation of life which human minds make.

    Onde convenne legge per fren porre....

It is one of the greatest merits of Dante’s poem that the vision is so
nearly complete; it is evidence of this greatness that the significance
of any single passage, of any of the passages that are selected as
“poetry,” is incomplete unless we ourselves apprehend the whole.

And Dante helps us to provide a criticism of M. Valéry’s “modern poet”
who attempts “to produce in us a _state_.” A state, in itself, is
nothing whatever.

M. Valéry’s account is quite in harmony with pragmatic doctrine, and
with the tendencies of such a work as William James’s _Varieties of
Religious Experience_. The mystical experience is supposed to be
valuable because it is a pleasant state of unique intensity. But the
true mystic is not satisfied merely by feeling, he must pretend at least
that he _sees_, and the absorption into the divine is only the
necessary, if paradoxical, limit of this contemplation. The poet does
not aim to excite—that is not even a test of his success—but to set
something down; the state of the reader is merely that reader’s
particular mode of perceiving what the poet has caught in words. Dante,
more than any other poet, has succeeded in dealing with his philosophy,
not as a theory (in the modern and not the Greek sense of that word) or
as his own comment or reflection, but in terms of something _perceived_.
When most of our modern poets confine themselves to what they had
perceived, they produce for us, usually, only odds and ends of still
life and stage properties; but that does not imply so much that the
method of Dante is obsolete, as that our vision is perhaps comparatively
restricted.

                  *       *       *       *       *

NOTE.—My friend the Abbé Laban has reproached me for attributing to
Landor, in this essay, sentiments which are merely the expression of his
dramatic figure Petrarch, and which imply rather Landor’s reproof of the
limitations of the historical Petrarch’s view of Dante, than the view of
Landor himself. The reader should therefore observe this correction of
my use of Landor’s honoured name.



Transcriber’s Notes:

Missing or obscured punctuation was corrected.

Typographical errors were silently corrected.

Spelling and hyphenation were made consistent when a predominant form
was found in this book; otherwise it was not changed.

Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).





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