English Critical Essays Part 25

Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie Open unto the fields and to the sky; All bright and open in the smokeless air.

Never did sun more beautifully steep In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill; Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

The river glideth at his own sweet will: Dear G.o.d! The very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still!

Instances of barer style than this may easily be found, instances of colder style--few better instances of purer style. Not a single expression (the invocation in the concluding couplet of the second sonnet perhaps excepted) can be spared, yet not a single expression rivets the attention. If, indeed, we take out the phrase--

The city now doth like a garment wear The beauty of the morning,

and the description of the brilliant yellow of autumn--

October's workmanship to rival May,

they have independent value, but they are not noticed in the sonnet when we read it through; they fall into place there, and being in their place are not seen. The great subjects of the two sonnets, the religious aspect of beautiful but grave nature--the religious aspect of a city about to awaken and be alive, are the only ideas left in our mind. To Wordsworth has been vouchsafed the last grace of the self-denying artist; you think neither of him nor his style, but you cannot help thinking of--you _must_ recall--the exact phrase, the _very_ sentiment he wished.

Milton's purity is more eager. In the most exciting parts of Wordsworth--and these sonnets are not very exciting--you always feel, you never forget, that what you have before you is the excitement of a recluse. There is nothing of the stir of life; nothing of the _brawl_ of the world. But Milton though always a scholar by trade, though solitary in old age, was through life intent on great affairs, lived close to great scenes, watched a revolution, and if not an actor in it, was at least secretary to the actors. He was familiar--by daily experience and habitual sympathy--with the earnest debate of arduous questions, on which the life and death of the speakers certainly depended, on which the weal or woe of the country perhaps depended.

He knew how profoundly the individual character of the speakers--their inner and real nature--modifies their opinion on such questions; he knew how surely that nature will appear in the expression of them.

This great experience, fashioned by a fine imagination, gives to the debate of Satanic Council in Pandaemonium its reality and its life. It is a debate in the Long Parliament, and though the _theme_ of _Paradise Lost_ obliged Milton to side with the monarchical element in the universe, his old habits are often too much for him; and his real sympathy--the impetus and energy of his nature--side with the rebellious element. For the purposes of art this is much better--of a court, a poet can make but little; of a heaven he can make very little, but of a courtly heaven, such as Milton conceived, he can make nothing at all. The idea of a court and the idea of a heaven are so radically different, that a distinct combination of them is always grotesque and often ludicrous. _Paradise Lost_, as a whole, is radically tainted by a vicious principle. It professes to justify the ways of G.o.d to man, to account for sin and death, and it tells you that the whole originated in a political event; in a court squabble as to a particular act of patronage and the due or undue promotion of an eldest son. Satan may have been wrong, but on Milton's theory he had an _arguable_ case at least. There was something arbitrary in the promotion; there were little symptoms of a job; in _Paradise Lost_ it is always clear that the devils are the weaker, but it is never clear that the angels are the better. Milton's sympathy and his imagination slip back to the Puritan rebels whom he loved, and desert the courtly angels whom he could not love although he praised. There is no wonder that Milton's h.e.l.l is better than his heaven, for he hated officials and he loved rebels, for he employs his genius below, and acc.u.mulates his pedantry above. On the great debate in Pandaemonium all his genius is concentrated. The question is very practical; it is, 'What are we devils to do, now we have lost heaven?' Satan who presides over and manipulates the a.s.sembly; Moloch

the fiercest spirit That fought in Heaven, now fiercer by despair,

who wants to fight again; Belial, 'the man of the world', who does not want to fight any more; Mammon, who is for commencing an industrial career; Beelzebub, the official statesman,

deep on his front engraven Deliberation sat and Public care,

who, at Satan's instance, proposes the invasion of earth--are as distinct as so many statues. Even Belial, 'the man of the world', the sort of man with whom Milton had least sympathy, is perfectly painted.

An inferior artist would have made the actor who 'counselled ign.o.ble ease and peaceful sloth', a degraded and ugly creature; but Milton knew better. He knew that low notions require a better garb than high notions. Human nature is not a high thing, but at least it has a high idea of itself; it will not accept mean maxims, unless they are gilded and made beautiful. A prophet in goatskin may cry, 'Repent, repent', but it takes 'purple and fine linen' to be able to say, 'Continue in your sins'. The world vanquishes with its speciousness and its show, and the orator who is to persuade men to worldliness must have a share in them. Milton well knew this; after the warlike speech of the fierce Moloch he introduces a brighter and a more graceful spirit:

He ended frowning, and his look denounced Desp'rate revenge, and battle dangerous To less than G.o.ds. On th' other side up rose Belial, in act more graceful and humane: A fairer person lost not Heaven; he seem'd For dignity composed and high exploit: But all was false and hollow, though his tongue Dropt manna, and could make the worse appear The better reason, to perplex and dash Maturest counsels: for his thoughts were low; To vice industrious, but to n.o.bler deeds Tim'rous and slothful: yet he pleased the ear, And with persuasive accent thus began:

He does not begin like a man with a strong case, but like a man with a weak case; he knows that the pride of human nature is irritated by mean advice, and though he may probably persuade men to _take_ it, he must carefully apologise for _giving_ it. Here, as elsewhere, though the formal address is to devils, the real address is to men: to the human nature which we know, not to the fict.i.tious demonic nature we do not know:

I should be much for open war, O Peers!

As not behind in hate, if what was urged Main reason to persuade immediate war, Did not dissuade me most, and seem to cast Ominous conjecture on the whole success: When he who most excels in fact of arms, In what he counsels and in what excels Mistrustful, grounds his courage on despair, And utter dissolution, as the scope Of all his aim, after some dire revenge.

First, what revenge? The tow'rs of Heav'n are fill'd With armed watch, that render all access Impregnable; oft on the bord'ring deep Encamp their legions, or with obscure wing Scout far and wide into the realm of night, Scorning surprise. Or could we break our way By force, and at our heels all h.e.l.l should rise With blackest insurrection, to confound Heav'n's purest light, yet our great Enemy, All incorruptible, would on his throne Sit unpolluted, and th' ethereal mould Incapable of stain would soon expel Her mischief, and purge oft the baser fire Victorious. Thus repulsed, our final hope Is flat despair. We must exasperate Th' Almighty Victor to spend all his rage, And that must end us: that must be our cure, To be no more? Sad cure; for who would lose, Though full of pain, this intellectual being, Those thoughts that wander through eternity, To perish rather, swallow'd up and lost In the wide womb of uncreated night, Devoid of sense and motion? And who knows, Let this be good, whether our angry Foe Can give it, or will ever? How he can Is doubtful; that he never will is sure.

Will he, so wise, let loose at once his ire Belike through impotence, or unaware, To give his enemies their wish, and end Them in his anger, whom his anger saves To punish endless? Wherefore cease we then?

Say they who counsel war, we are decreed, Reserved, and destined, to eternal woe; Whatever doing, what can we suffer more, What can we suffer worse? Is this then worst, Thus sitting, thus consulting, thus in arms?

And so on.

Mr. Pitt knew this speech by heart, and Lord Macaulay has called it incomparable; and these judges of the oratorical art have well decided. A mean foreign policy cannot be better defended. Its sensibleness is effectually explained, and its tameness as much as possible disguised.

But we have not here to do with the excellence of Belial's policy, but with the excellence of his speech; and with that speech in a peculiar manner. This speech, taken with the few lines of description with which Milton introduces them, embody, in as short a s.p.a.ce as possible, with as much perfection as possible, the delineation of the type of character common at all times, dangerous in many times, sure to come to the surface in moments of difficulty, and never more dangerous than then. As Milton describes, it is one among several _typical_ characters which will ever have their place in great councils, which will ever be heard at important decisions, which are part of the characteristic and inalienable whole of this statesmanlike world. The debate in Pandaemonium is a debate among these typical characters at the greatest conceivable crisis, and with adjuncts of solemnity which no other situation could rival. It is the greatest _cla.s.sical_ triumph, the highest achievement of the pure _style_ in English literature; it is the greatest description of the highest and most typical characters with the most choice circ.u.mstances and in the fewest words.

It is not unremarkable that we should find in Milton and in _Paradise Lost_ the best specimen of pure style. He was schoolmaster in a pedantic age, and there is nothing so uncla.s.sical--nothing so impure in style--as pedantry. The out-of-door conversational life of Athens was as opposed to bookish scholasticism as a life can be. The most perfect books have been written not by those who thought much of books, but by those who thought little, by those who were under the restraint of a sensitive talking world, to which books had contributed something, and a various eager life the rest. Milton is generally uncla.s.sical in spirit where he is learned, and naturally, because the purest poets do not overlay their conceptions with book knowledge, and the cla.s.sical poets, having in comparison no books, were under little temptation to impair the purity of their style by the acc.u.mulation of their research. Over and above this, there is in Milton, and a little in Wordsworth also, one defect which is in the highest degree faulty and uncla.s.sical, which mars the effect and impairs the perfection of the pure style. There is a want of _spontaneity_, and a sense of effort. It has been happily said that Plato's words must have _grown_ into their places. No one would say so of Milton or even of Wordsworth. About both of them there is a taint of duty; a vicious sense of the good man's task. Things seem right where they are, but they seem to be put where they are. _Flexibility_ is essential to the consummate perfection of the pure style because the sensation of the poet's efforts carries away our thoughts from his achievements. We are admiring his labours when we should be enjoying his words. But this is a defect in those two writers, not a defect in pure art. Of course it is more difficult to write in few words than to write in many; to take the best adjuncts, and those only, for what you have to say, instead of using all which comes to hand; it _is_ an additional labour if you write verses in a morning, to spend the rest of the day in _choosing_, or making those verses fewer. But a perfect artist in the pure style is as effortless and as natural as in any style, perhaps is more so.

Take the well-known lines:

There was a little lawny islet By anemone and violet, Like mosaic, paven: And its roof was flowers and leaves Which the summer's breath enweaves, Where nor sun, nor showers, nor breeze, Pierce the pines and tallest trees, Each a gem engraven;-- Girt by many an azure wave With which the clouds and mountains pave A lake's blue chasm.

Sh.e.l.ley had many merits and many defects. This is not the place for a complete or indeed for _any_ estimate of him. But one excellence is most evident. His words are as flexible as any words; the rhythm of some modulating air seems to move them into their place without a struggle by the poet and almost without his knowledge. This is the perfection of pure art, to embody typical conceptions in the choicest, the fewest accidents, to embody them so that each of these accidents may produce its full effect, and so to embody them without effort.

The extreme opposite to this pure art is what may be called ornate art. This species of art aims also at giving a delineation of the typical idea in its perfection and its fullness, but it aims at so doing in a manner most different. It wishes to surround the type with the greatest number of circ.u.mstances which it will _bear_. It works not by choice and selection, but by acc.u.mulation and aggregation. The idea is not, as in the pure style, presented with the least clothing which it will endure, but with the richest and most involved clothing that it will admit.

We are fortunate in not having to hunt out of past literature an ill.u.s.trative specimen of the ornate style. Mr. Tennyson has just given one admirable in itself, and most characteristic of the defects and the merits of this style. The story of Enoch Arden, as he has enhanced and presented it, is a rich and splendid composite of imagery and ill.u.s.tration. Yet how simple that story is in itself. A sailor who sells fish, breaks his leg, gets dismal, gives up selling fish, goes to sea, is wrecked on a desert island, stays there some years, on his return finds his wife married to a miller, speaks to a landlady on the subject, and dies. Told in the pure and simple, the unadorned and cla.s.sical style, this story would not have taken three pages, but Mr.

Tennyson has been able to make it the princ.i.p.al--the largest tale in his new volume. He has done so only by giving to every event and incident in the volume an accompanying commentary. He tells a great deal about the torrid zone which a rough sailor like Enoch Arden certainly would not have perceived; and he gives to the fishing village, to which all the characters belong, a softness and a fascination which such villages scarcely possess in reality.

The description of the tropical island on which the sailor is thrown, is an absolute model of adorned art:

The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven, The slender coco's drooping crown of plumes, The lightning flash of insect and of bird, The l.u.s.tre of the long convolvuluses That coil'd around the stately stems, and ran Ev'n to the limit of the land, the glows And glories of the broad belt of the world, All these he saw; but what he fain had seen He could not see, the kindly human face, Nor ever hear a kindly voice, but heard The myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl, The league-long roller thundering on the reef, The moving whisper of huge trees that branch'd And blossom'd in the zenith, or the sweep Of some precipitous rivulet to the wave, As down the sh.o.r.e he ranged, or all day long Sat often in the seaward-gazing gorge, A shipwreck'd sailor, waiting for a sail: No sail from day to day, but every day The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts Among the palms and ferns and precipices; The blaze upon the waters to the east; The blaze upon his island overhead; The blaze upon the waters to the west; Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven, The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again The scarlet shafts of sunrise--but no sail.

No expressive circ.u.mstance can be added to this description, no enhancing detail suggested. A much less happy instance is the description of Enoch's life before he sailed:

While Enoch was abroad on wrathful seas, Or often journeying landward; for in truth Enoch's white horse, and Enoch's ocean spoil In ocean-smelling osier, and his face, Rough-redden'd with a thousand winter gales, Not only to the market-cross were known, But in the leafy lanes behind the down, Far as the portal-warding lion-whelp, And peac.o.c.k yew-tree of the lonely Hall, Whose Friday fare was Enoch's ministering.

So much has not often been made of selling fish.

The essence of ornate art is in this manner to acc.u.mulate round the typical object, everything which can be said about it, every a.s.sociated thought that can be connected with it without impairing the essence of the delineation.

The first defect which strikes a student of ornate art--the first which arrests the mere reader of it--is what is called a want of simplicity. Nothing is described as it is, everything has about it an atmosphere of _something else_. The combined and a.s.sociated thoughts, though they set off and heighten particular ideas and aspects of the central conception, yet complicate it: a simple thing--'a daisy by the river's brim'--is never left by itself, something else is put with it; something not more connected with it than 'lion-whelp' and the 'peac.o.c.k yew-tree' are with the 'fresh fish for sale' that Enoch carries past them. Even in the highest cases ornate art leaves upon a cultured and delicate taste, the conviction that it is not the highest art, that it is somehow excessive and over-rich, that it is not chaste in itself or chastening to the mind that sees it--that it is in an unexplained manner unsatisfactory, 'a thing in which we feel there is some hidden want!'

That want is a want of 'definition'. We must all know landscapes, river landscapes especially, which are in the highest sense beautiful, which when we first see them give us a delicate pleasure; which in some--and these the best cases--give even a gentle sense of surprise that such things should be so beautiful, and yet when we come to live in them, to spend even a few hours in them, we seem stifled and oppressed. On the other hand there are people to whom the sea-sh.o.r.e is a companion, an exhilaration; and not so much for the brawl of the sh.o.r.e as for the _limited_ vastness, the finite infinite of the ocean as they see it. Such people often come home braced and nerved, and if they spoke out the truth, would have only to say, 'We have seen the horizon line'; if they were let alone indeed, they would gaze on it hour after hour, so great to them is the fascination, so full the sustaining calm, which they gain from that union of form and greatness. To a very inferior extent, but still, perhaps, to an extent which most people understand better, a common arch will have the same effect. A bridge completes a river landscape; if of the old and many-arched sort it regulates by a long series of defined forms the vague outline of wood and river which before had nothing to measure it; if of the new scientific sort it introduces still more strictly a geometrical element; it stiffens the scenery which was before too soft, too delicate, too vegetable. Just such is the effect of pure style in literary art. It calms by conciseness; while the ornate style leaves on the mind a mist of beauty, an excess of fascination, a complication of charm, the pure style leaves behind it the simple, defined, measured idea, as it is, and by itself. That which is chaste chastens; there is a poised energy--a state half thrill, and half tranquillity--which pure art gives, which no other can give; a pleasure justified as well as felt; an enn.o.bled satisfaction at what ought to satisfy us, and must enn.o.ble us.

Ornate art is to pure art what a painted statue is to an unpainted. It is impossible to deny that a touch of colour _does_ bring out certain parts, does convey certain expressions, does heighten certain features, but it leaves on the work as a whole, a want, as we say, 'of something'; a want of that inseparable chasteness which clings to simple sculpture, an impairing predominance of alluring details which impairs our satisfaction with our own satisfaction; which makes us doubt whether a higher being than ourselves will be satisfied even though we are so. In the very same manner, though the _rouge_ of ornate literature excites our eye, it also impairs our confidence.

Mr. Arnold has justly observed that this self-justifying, self-_proving_ purity of style, is commoner in ancient literature than in modern literature, and also that Shakespeare is not a great or an unmixed example of it. No one can say that he is. His works are full of undergrowth, are full of complexity, are not models of style; except by a miracle nothing in the Elizabethan age could be a model of style; the restraining taste of that age was feebler and more mistaken than that of any other equally great age. Shakespeare's mind so teemed with creation that he required the most just, most forcible, most constant restraint from without. He most needed to be guided of poets, and he was the least and worst guided. As a whole no one can call his works finished models of the pure style, or of any style. But he has many pa.s.sages of the most pure style, pa.s.sages which could be easily cited if s.p.a.ce served. And we must remember that the task which Shakespeare undertook was the most difficult which any poet has ever attempted, and that it is a task in which after a million efforts every other poet has failed. The Elizabethan drama--as Shakespeare has immortalized it--undertakes to delineate in five acts, under stage restrictions, and in mere dialogue, a whole list of dramatis personae, a set of characters enough for a modern novel, and with the distinctness of a modern novel. Shakespeare is not content to give two or three great characters in solitude and in dignity, like the cla.s.sical dramatists; he wishes to give a whole _party_ of characters in the play of life, and according to the nature of each. He would 'hold the mirror up to nature', not to catch a monarch in a tragic posture, but a whole group of characters engaged in many actions, intent on many purposes, thinking many thoughts. There is life enough, there is action enough, in single plays of Shakespeare to set up an ancient dramatist for a long career. And Shakespeare succeeded. His characters, taken _en ma.s.se_, and as a whole, are as well-known as any novelist's characters; cultivated men know all about them, as young ladies know all about Mr. Trollope's novels. But no other dramatist has succeeded in such an aim. No one else's characters are staple people in English literature, hereditary people whom every one knows all about in every generation. The contemporary dramatists, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Marlowe, &c., had many merits, some of them were great men. But a critic must say of them the worst thing he has to say; 'they were men who failed in their characteristic aim;' they attempted to describe numerous sets of complicated characters, and they failed. No one of such characters, or hardly one, lives in common memory; the Faustus of Marlowe, a really great idea, is not remembered. They undertook to write what they could not write, five acts full of real characters, and in consequence, the fine individual things they conceived are forgotten by the mixed mult.i.tude, and known only to a few of the few. Of the Spanish theatre we cannot speak; but there are no such characters in any French tragedy: the whole aim of that tragedy forbade it. Goethe has added to literature a few great characters; he may be said almost to have added to literature the idea of 'intellectual creation',--the idea of describing great characters through the intellect; but he has not added to the common stock what Shakespeare added, a new _mult.i.tude_ of men and women; and these not in simple att.i.tudes, but amid the most complex parts of life, with all their various natures roused, mixed, and strained. The severest art must have allowed many details, much overflowing circ.u.mstance to a poet who undertook to describe what almost defies description. Pure art would have _commanded_ him to use details lavishly, for only by a multiplicity of such could the required effect have been at all produced. Shakespeare could accomplish it, for his mind was a _spring_, an inexhaustible fountain of human nature, and it is no wonder that being compelled by the task of his time to let the fullness of his nature overflow, he sometimes let it overflow too much, and covered with erroneous conceits and superfluous images characters and conceptions which would have been far more justly, far more effectually, delineated with conciseness and simplicity. But there is an infinity of pure art _in_ Shakespeare, although there is a great deal else also.

It will be said, if ornate art be as you say, an inferior species or art, why should it ever be used? If pure art be the best sort of art, why should it not always be used?

The reason is this: literary art, as we just now explained, is concerned with literatesque characters in literatesque situations; and the _best_ art is concerned with the _most_ literatesque characters in the _most_ literatesque situations. Such are the subjects of pure art; it embodies with the fewest touches, and under the most select and choice circ.u.mstances, the highest conceptions; but it does not follow that only the best subjects are to be treated by art, and then only in the very best way. Human nature could not endure such a critical commandment as that, and it would be an erroneous criticism which gave it. _Any_ literatesque character may be described in literature under _any_ circ.u.mstances which exhibit its literatesqueness.

The essence of pure art consists in its describing what is as it is, and this is very well for what can bear it, but there are many inferior things which will not bear it, and which nevertheless ought to be described in books. A certain kind of literature deals with illusions, and this kind of literature has given a colouring to the name romantic. A man of rare genius, and even of poetical genius, has gone so far as to make these illusions the true subject of poetry--almost the sole subject. 'Without,' says Father Newman, of one of his characters, 'being himself a poet, he was in the season of poetry, in the sweet spring-time, when the year is most beautiful because it is new. Novelty was beauty to a heart so open and cheerful as his; not only because it was novelty, and had its proper charm as such, but because when we first see things, we see them in a gay confusion, which is a princ.i.p.al element of the poetical. As time goes on, and we number and sort and measure things,--as we gain views,--we advance towards philosophy and truth, but we recede from poetry.

'When we ourselves were young, we once on a time walked on a hot summer-day from Oxford to Newington--a dull road, as any one who has gone it knows; yet it was new to us; and we protest to you, reader, believe it or not, laugh or not, as you will, to us it seemed on that occasion quite touchingly beautiful; and a soft melancholy came over us, of which the shadows fall even now, when we look back upon that dusty, weary journey. And why? because every object which met us was unknown and full of mystery. A tree or two in the distance seemed the beginning of a great wood, or park, stretching endlessly; a hill implied a vale beyond, with that vale's history; the bye-lanes, with their green hedges, wound on and vanished, yet were not lost to the imagination. Such was our first journey; but when we had gone it several times, the mind refused to act, the scene ceased to enchant, stern reality alone remained; and we thought it one of the most tiresome, odious roads we ever had occasion to traverse.'

That is to say, that the function of the poet is to introduce a 'gay confusion', a rich medley which does not exist in the actual world--which perhaps could not exist in any world--but which would seem pretty if it did exist. Everyone who reads _Enoch Arden_ will perceive that this notion of all poetry is exactly applicable to this one poem. Whatever be made of Enoch's 'Ocean spoil in ocean-smelling osier,' of the 'portal-warding lion-whelp, and peac.o.c.k yew-tree', every one knows that in himself Enoch could not have been charming.

People who sell fish about the country (and that is what he did, though Mr. Tennyson won't speak out, and wraps it up) never are beautiful. As Enoch was and must be coa.r.s.e, in itself the poem must depend for its charm on a 'gay confusion'--on a splendid acc.u.mulation of impossible accessories.

Mr. Tennyson knows this better than many of us--he knows the country world; he has proved it that no one living knows it better; he has painted with pure art--with art which describes what is a race perhaps more refined, more delicate, more conscientious, than the sailor--the 'Northern Farmer', and we all know what a splendid, what a living thing, he has made of it. He could, if he only would, have given us the ideal sailor in like manner--the ideal of the natural sailor we mean--the characteristic present man as he lives and is. But this he has not chosen. He has endeavoured to describe an exceptional sailor, at an exceptionally refined port, performing a graceful act, an act of relinquishment. And with this task before him, his profound taste taught him that ornate art was a necessary medium--was the sole effectual instrument--for his purpose. It was necessary for him if possible to abstract the mind from reality, to induce us _not_ to conceive or think of sailors as they are while we are reading of his sailors, but to think of what a person who did not know might fancy sailors to be. A casual traveller on the sea-sh.o.r.e, with the sensitive mood and the romantic imagination Mr. Newman has described, might fancy, would fancy, a seafaring village to be like that. Accordingly, Mr. Tennyson has made it his aim to call off the stress of fancy from real life, to occupy it otherwise, to bury it with pretty accessories; to engage it on the 'peac.o.c.k yew-tree', and the 'portal-warding lion-whelp'. Nothing, too, can be more splendid than the description of the tropics as Mr. Tennyson delineates them, but a sailor would not have felt the tropics in that manner. The beauties of nature would not have so much occupied him. He would have known little of the scarlet shafts of sunrise and nothing of the long convolvuluses. As in _Robinson Crusoe_, his own petty contrivances and his small ailments would have been the princ.i.p.al subject to him. 'For three years', he might have said, 'my back was bad, and then I put two pegs into a piece of drift wood and so made a chair, and after that it pleased G.o.d to send me a chill.' In real life his piety would scarcely have gone beyond that.

It will indeed be said, that though the sailor had no words for, and even no explicit consciousness of the splendid details of the torrid zone, yet that he had, notwithstanding, a dim latent inexpressible conception of them: though he could not speak of them or describe them, yet they were much to him. And doubtless such is the case. Rude people are impressed by what is beautiful--deeply impressed--though they could not describe what they see, or what they feel. But what is absurd in Mr. Tennyson's description--absurd when we abstract it from the gorgeous additions and ornaments with which Mr. Tennyson distracts us--is, that his hero feels nothing else but these great splendours.

We hear nothing of the physical ailments, the rough devices, the low superst.i.tions, which really would have been the _first_ things, the favourite and princ.i.p.al occupations of his mind. Just so when he gets home he _may_ have had such fine sentiments, though it is odd, and he _may_ have spoken of them to his landlady, though that is odder still--but it is incredible that his whole mind should be made up of fine sentiments. Beside those sweet feelings, if he had them, there must have been many more obvious, more prosaic, and some perhaps more healthy. Mr. Tennyson has shown a profound judgement in distracting us as he does. He has given us a cla.s.sic delineation of the 'Northern Farmer' with no ornament at all--as bare a thing as can be--because he then wanted to describe a true type of real men: he has given us a sailor crowded all over with ornament and ill.u.s.tration, because he then wanted to describe an unreal type of fancied men, not sailors as they are, but sailors as they might be wished.

Another prominent element in _Enoch Arden_ is yet more suitable to, yet more requires the aid of, ornate art. Mr. Tennyson undertook to deal with _half belief_. The presentiments which Annie feels are exactly of that sort which everybody has felt, and which every one has half believed--which hardly any one has more than half believed.

Almost every one, it has been said, would be angry if any one else reported that he believed in ghosts; yet hardly any one, when thinking by himself, wholly disbelieves them. Just so such presentiments as Mr.

Tennyson depicts, impress the inner mind so much that the outer mind--the rational understanding--hardly likes to consider them nicely or to discuss them sceptically. For these dubious themes an ornate or complex style is needful. Cla.s.sical art speaks out what it has to say plainly and simply. Pure style cannot hesitate; it describes in concisest outline what is, as it is. If a poet really believes in presentiments he can speak out in pure style. One who could have been a poet--one of the few in any age of whom one can say certainly that they could have been, and have not been--has spoken thus:

When Heaven sends sorrow, Warnings go first, Lest it should burst With stunning might On souls too bright To fear the morrow.

Can science bear us To the hid springs Of human things?