Oxford Lectures on Poetry Part 11

2.

If this, then, is the nature of Poetry in the widest sense, how does the poet, in the special sense, differ from other unusually creative souls?

Not essentially in the inspiration and general substance of his poetry, but in the kind of expression he gives to them. In so far as he is a poet, his medium of expression, of course, is not virtue, or action, or law; poetry is one of the acts. And, again, it differs from the rest, because its particular vehicle is language. We have now to see, therefore, what Sh.e.l.ley has to say of the form of poetry, and especially of poetic language.

First, he claims for language the highest place among the vehicles of artistic expression, on the ground that it is the most direct and also the most plastic. It is itself produced by imagination instead of being simply encountered by it, and it has no relation except to imagination; whereas any more material medium has a nature of its own, and relations to other things in the material world, and this nature and these relations intervene between the artist's conception and his expression of it in the medium. It is to the superiority of its vehicle that Sh.e.l.ley attributes the greater fame which poetry has always enjoyed as compared with other arts. He forgets (if I may interpose a word of criticism) that the media of the other arts have, on their side, certain advantages over language, and that these perhaps counterbalance the inferiority which he notices. He would also have found it difficult to show that language, on its physical side, is any more a product of imagination than stone or pigments. And his idea that the medium in the other arts is an obstacle intervening between conception and expression is, to say the least, one-sided. A sculptor, painter, or musician, would probably reply that it is only the qualities of his medium that enable him to express at all; that what he expresses is inseparable from the vehicle of expression; and that he has no conceptions which are not from the beginning sculpturesque, pictorial, or musical. It is true, no doubt, that his medium is an obstacle as well as a medium; but this is also true of language.

But to resume. Language, Sh.e.l.ley goes on to say, receives in poetry a peculiar form. As it represents in its meaning a perfection which is always an order, harmony, or rhythm, so it itself, as so much sound, _is_ an order, harmony, or rhythm. It is measured language, which is not the proper vehicle for the mere recital of facts or for mere reasoning.

For Sh.e.l.ley, however, this measured language is not of necessity metrical. The order or measure may remain at the stage which it reaches in beautiful prose, like that of Plato, the melody of whose language, Sh.e.l.ley declares, is the most intense it is possible to conceive. It may again advance to metre; and he admits that metrical form is convenient, popular, and preferable, especially in poetry containing much action.

But he will not have any new great poet tied down to it. It is not essential, while measure is absolutely so. For it is no mere accident of poetry that its language is measured, nor does a delight in this measure mean little. As sensitiveness to the order of the relations of sounds is always connected with sensitiveness to the order of the relations of thoughts, so also the harmony of the words is scarcely less indispensable than their meaning to the communication of the influence of poetry. 'Hence,' says Sh.e.l.ley, 'the vanity of translation: it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you might discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse from one language into another the creations of a poet.' Strong words to come from the translator of the _Hymn to Mercury_ and of Agathon's speech in the _Symposium_![1] And is not all that Sh.e.l.ley says of the difference between measured and unrhythmical language applicable, at least in some degree, to the difference between metrical and merely measured language?

Could he really have supposed that metre is no more than a 'convenience,' which contributes nothing of any account to the influence of poetry? But I will not criticise. Let me rather point out how surprising, at first sight, and how significant, is Sh.e.l.ley's insistence on the importance of measure or rhythm. No one could a.s.sert more absolutely than he the ident.i.ty of the general substance of poetry with that of moral life and action, of the other arts, and of the higher kinds of philosophy. And yet it would be difficult to go beyond the emphasis of his statement that the formal element (as he understood it) is indispensable to the effect of poetry.

Sh.e.l.ley, however, nowhere considers this element more at length. He has no discussions, like those of Wordsworth and Coleridge, on diction. He never says, with Keats, that he looks on fine phrases like a lover. We hear of his deep-drawn sigh of satisfaction as he finished reading a pa.s.sage of Homer, but not of his shouting his delight, as he ramped through the meadows of Spenser, at some marvellous flower. When in his letters he refers to any poem he is reading, he scarcely ever mentions particular lines or expressions; and we have no evidence that, like Coleridge and Keats, he was a curious student of metrical effects or the relations of vowel-sounds. I doubt if all this is wholly accidental.

Poetry was to him so essentially an effusion of aspiration, love and worship, that we can imagine his feeling it almost an impiety to break up its unity even for purposes of study, and to give a separate attention to its means of utterance. And what he does say on the subject confirms this impression. In the first place, as we have seen, he lays great stress on inspiration; and his statements, if exaggerated and misleading, must still reflect in some degree his own experience. No poem, he a.s.serts, however inspired it may be, is more than a feeble shadow of the original conception; for when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline. And so in a letter he speaks of the detail of execution destroying all wild and beautiful visions.

Still, inspiration, if diminished by composition, is not wholly dispelled; and he appeals to the greatest poets of his day whether it is not an error to a.s.sert that the finest pa.s.sages of poetry are produced by labour and study. Such toil he would restrict to those parts which connect the inspired pa.s.sages, and he speaks with contempt of the fifty-six various readings of the first line of the _Orlando Furioso_.

He seems to exaggerate on this matter because in the _Defence_ his foe is cold reason and calculation. Elsewhere he writes more truly of the original conception as being obscure as well as intense;[2] from which it would seem to follow that the feeble shadow, if darker, is at least more distinct than the original. He forgets, too, what is certainly the fact, that the poet in reshaping and correcting is able to revive in some degree the fire of the first impulse. And we know from himself that his greatest works cost him a severe labour not confined to the execution, while his ma.n.u.scripts show plenty of various readings, if never so many as fifty-six in one line.

Still, what he says is highly characteristic of his own practice in composition. He allowed the rush of his ideas to have its way, without pausing to complete a troublesome line or to find a word that did not come; and the next day (if ever) he filled up the gaps and smoothed the ragged edges. And the result answers to his theory. Keats was right in telling him that he might be more of an artist. His language, indeed, unlike Wordsworth's or Byron's, is, in his mature work, always that of a poet; we never hear his mere speaking voice; but he is frequently diffuse and obscure, and even in fine pa.s.sages his constructions are sometimes trailing and amorphous. The glowing metal rushes into the mould so vehemently that it overleaps the bounds and fails to find its way into all the little crevices. But no poetry is more manifestly inspired, and even when it is plainly imperfect it is sometimes so inspired that it is impossible to wish it changed. It has the rapture of the mystic, and that is too rare to lose. Tennyson quaintly said of the hymn _Life of Life_: 'He seems to go up into the air and burst.' It is true: and, if we are to speak of poems as fireworks, I would not compare _Life of Life_ with a great set piece of Homer or Shakespeare that illumines the whole sky; but, all the same, there is no more thrilling sight than the heavenward rush of a rocket, and it bursts at a height no other fire can reach.

In addition to his praise of inspiration Sh.e.l.ley has some scattered remarks on another point which show the same spirit. He could not bear in poetic language any approach to artifice, or any sign that the writer had a theory or system of style. He thought Keats's earlier poems faulty in this respect, and there is perhaps a reference to Wordsworth in the following sentence from the Preface to the _Revolt of Islam_: 'Nor have I permitted any system relating to mere words to divert the attention of the reader, from whatever interest I may have succeeded in creating, to my own ingenuity in contriving,--to disgust him according to the rules of criticism. I have simply clothed my thoughts in what appeared to me the most obvious and appropriate language. A person familiar with nature, and with the most celebrated productions of the human mind, can scarcely err in following the instinct, with respect to selection of language, produced by that familiarity.'[3] His own poetic style certainly corresponds with his intention. It cannot give the kind of pleasure afforded by what may be called without disparagement a learned and artful style, such as Virgil's or Milton's; but, like the best writing of Shakespeare and Goethe, it is, with all its individuality, almost entirely free from mannerism and the other vices of self-consciousness, and appears to flow so directly from the thought that one is ashamed to admire it for itself. This is equally so whether the appropriate style is impa.s.sioned and highly figurative, or simple and even plain. It is indeed in the latter case that Sh.e.l.ley wins his greatest, because most difficult, triumph. In the dialogue part of _Julian and Maddalo_ he has succeeded remarkably in keeping the style quite close to that of familiar though serious conversation, while making it nevertheless unmistakably poetic. And the _Cenci_ is an example of a success less complete only because the problem was even harder. The ideal of the style of tragic drama in the nineteenth or twentieth century should surely be, not to reproduce with modifications the style of Shakespeare, but to do what Shakespeare did--to idealise, without deserting, the language of contemporary speech. Sh.e.l.ley in the _Cenci_ seems to me to have come nearest to this ideal.

3.

So much for general exposition. If now we consider more closely what Sh.e.l.ley says of the substance of poetry, a question at once arises. He may seem to think of poetry solely as the direct expression of perfection in some form, and accordingly to imagine its effect as simply joy or delighted aspiration. Much of his own poetry, too, is such an expression; and we understand when we find him saying that Homer embodied the ideal perfection of his age in human character, and unveiled in Achilles, Hector, and Ulysses 'the truth and beauty of friendship, patriotism, and persevering devotion to an object.' But poetry, it is obvious, is not wholly, perhaps not even mainly, of this kind. What is to be said, on Sh.e.l.ley's theory, of his own melancholy lyrics, those 'sweetest songs' that 'tell of saddest thought'? What of satire, of the epic of conflict and war, or of tragic exhibitions of violent and destructive pa.s.sion? Does not his theory reflect the weakness of his own practice, his tendency to portray a thin and abstract ideal instead of interpreting the concrete detail of nature and life; and ought we not to oppose to it a theory which would consider poetry simply as a representation of fact?

To this last question I should answer No. Sh.e.l.ley's theory, rightly understood, will take in, I think, everything really poetic. And to a considerable extent he himself shows the way to meet these doubts. He did not mean that the _immediate_ subject of poetry must be perfection in some form. The poet, he says, can colour with the hues of the ideal everything he touches. If so, he may write of absolutely anything so long as he _can_ so colour it, and nothing would be excluded from his province except those things (if any such exist) in which no positive relation to the ideal, however indirect, can be shown or intimated. Thus to take the instance of Sh.e.l.ley's melancholy lyrics, clearly the lament which arises from loss of the ideal, and mourns the evanescence of its visitations or the desolation of its absence, is indirectly an expression _of_ the ideal; and so on his theory is the simplest song of unhappy love or the simplest dirge. Further, he himself observes that, though the joy of poetry is often unalloyed, yet the pleasure of the 'highest portions of our being is frequently connected with the pain of the inferior,' that 'the pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself,' and that not sorrow only, but 'terror, anguish, despair itself, are often the chosen expressions of an approximation to the highest good.' That, then, which appeals poetically to such painful emotions will again be an indirect portrayal of the ideal; and it is clear, I think, that this was how Sh.e.l.ley in the _Defence_ regarded heroic and tragic poetry, whether narrative or dramatic, with its manifestly imperfect characters and its exhibition of conflict and wild pa.s.sion. He had, it is true, another and an unsatisfactory way of explaining the presence of these things in poetry; and I will refer to this in a moment. But he tells us that the Athenian tragedies represent the highest idealisms (his name for ideals) of pa.s.sion and of power (not merely of virtue); and that in them we behold ourselves, 'under a thin disguise of circ.u.mstance, stripped of all but that ideal perfection and energy which every one feels to be the internal type of all that he loves, admires, and would become.' He writes of Milton's Satan in somewhat the same strain. The Shakespearean tragedy from which he most often quotes is one in which evil holds the stage, _Macbeth_; and he was inclined to think _King Lear_, which certainly is no direct portrait of perfection, the greatest drama in the world. Lastly, in the Preface to his own _Cenci_ he truly says that, while the story is fearful and monstrous, 'the poetry which exists in these tempestuous sufferings and crimes,' if duly brought out, 'mitigates the pain of the contemplation of moral deformity': so that he regards Count Cenci himself as a _poetic_ character, and therefore as in _some_ sense an expression of the ideal. He does not further explain his meaning. Perhaps it was that the perfection which poetry is to exhibit includes, together with those qualities which win our immediate and entire approval or sympathy, others which are capable of becoming the instruments of evil. For these, the energy, power and pa.s.sion of the soul, though they may be perverted, are in themselves elements of perfection; and so, even in their perversion or their combination with moral deformity, they retain their value, they are not simply ugly or horrible, but appeal through emotions predominantly painful to the same love of the ideal which is directly satisfied by pictures of goodness and beauty. Now to these various considerations we shall wish to add others; but if we bear these in mind, I believe we shall find Sh.e.l.ley's theory wide enough, and must hold that the substance of poetry is never mere fact, but is always ideal, though its method of representation is sometimes more direct, sometimes more indirect.

Nevertheless, he does not seem to have made his view quite clear to himself, or to hold to it consistently. We are left with the impression, not merely that he personally preferred the direct method (as he was, of course, ent.i.tled to do), but that his use of it shows a certain weakness, and also that even in theory he unconsciously tends to regard it as the primary and proper method, and to admit only by a reluctant after-thought the representation of imperfection. Let me point out some signs of this. He considered his own _Cenci_ as a poem inferior in kind to his other main works, even as a sort of accommodation to the public.

With all his modesty he knew what to think of the neglected _Prometheus_ and _Adonas_, but there is no sign that he, any more than the world, was aware that the character of Cenci was a creation without a parallel in our poetry since the seventeenth century. His enthusiasm for some second-rate and third-rate Italian paintings, and his failure to understand Michael Angelo, seem to show the same tendency. He could not enjoy comedy: it seemed to him simply cruel: he did not perceive that to show the absurdity of the imperfect is to glorify the perfect.

And, as I mentioned just now, he wavers in his view of the representation of heroic and tragic imperfection. We find in the Preface to _Prometheus Unbound_ the strange notion that Prometheus is a more poetic character than Milton's Satan because he is free from Satan's imperfections, which are said to interfere with the interest. And in the _Defence_ a similar error appears. Achilles, Hector, Ulysses, though they exhibit ideal virtues, are, he admits, imperfect. Why, then, did Homer make them so? Because, he seems to reply, Homer's contemporaries regarded their vices (_e.g._ revengefulness and deceitfulness) as virtues. Homer accordingly had to conceal in the costume of these vices the unspotted beauty that he himself imagined; and, like Homer, 'few poets of the highest cla.s.s have chosen to exhibit the beauty of their conceptions in its naked truth and splendour.' Now, this idea, to say nothing of its grotesque improbability in reference to Homer, and its probable baselessness in reference to most other poets, is quite inconsistent with that truer view of heroic and tragic character which was explained just now. It is an example of Sh.e.l.ley's tendency to abstract idealism or spurious Platonism. He is haunted by the fancy that if he could only get at the One, the eternal Idea, in complete aloofness from the Many, from life with all its change, decay, struggle, sorrow and evil, he would have reached the true object of poetry: as if the whole finite world were a mere mistake or illusion, the sheer opposite of the infinite One, and in no way or degree its manifestation. Life, he says--

Life, like a dome of many-coloured gla.s.s, Stains the white radiance of eternity;

but the other side, the fact that the many colours _are_ the white light broken, he tends to forget, by no means always, but in one, and that not the least inspired, of his moods. This is the source of that thinness and shallowness of which his view of the world and of history is justly accused, a view in which all imperfect being is apt to figure as absolutely gratuitous, and everything and everybody as pure white or pitch black. Hence also his ideals of good, whether as a character or as a mode of life, resting as they do on abstraction from the ma.s.s of real existence, tend to lack body and individuality; and indeed, if the existence of the many is a mere calamity, clearly the next best thing to their disappearance is that they should all be exactly alike and have as little character as possible. But we must remember that Sh.e.l.ley's strength and weakness are closely allied, and it may be that the very abstractness of his ideal was a condition of that quivering intensity of aspiration towards it in which his poetry is unequalled. We must not go for this to Homer and Shakespeare and Goethe; and if we go for it to Dante, we shall find, indeed, a mind far vaster than Sh.e.l.ley's, but also that dualism of which we complain in him, and the description of a heaven which, equally with Sh.e.l.ley's regenerated earth, is no place for mere mortality. In any case, as we have seen, the weakness in his poetical practice, though it occasionally appears also as a defect in his poetical theory, forms no necessary part of it.

4.

I pa.s.s to his views on a last point. If the business of poetry is somehow to express ideal perfection, it may seem to follow that the poet should embody in his poems his beliefs about this perfection and the way to approach it, and should thus have a moral purpose and aim to be a teacher. And in regard to Sh.e.l.ley this conclusion seems the more natural because his own poetry allows us to see clearly some of his beliefs about morality and moral progress. Yet alike in his Prefaces and in the _Defence_ he takes up most decidedly the position that the poet ought neither to affect a moral aim nor to express his own conceptions of right and wrong. 'Didactic poetry,' he declares, 'is my abhorrence: nothing can be equally well expressed in prose that is not tedious and supererogatory in verse.'[4] 'There was little danger,' he tells us in the _Defence_, 'that Homer or any of the eternal poets' should make a mistake in this matter; but 'those in whom the poetical faculty, though great, is less intense, as Euripides, Lucan, Ta.s.so, Spenser, have frequently affected a moral aim, and the effect of their poetry is diminished in exact proportion to the degree in which they compel us to advert to this purpose.' These statements may appeal to us, but are they consistent with Sh.e.l.ley's main views of poetry? To answer this question we must observe what exactly it is that he means to condemn.

Sh.e.l.ley was one of the few persons who can literally be said to _love_ their kind. He held most strongly, too, that poetry does benefit men, and benefits them morally. The moral purpose, then, to which he objects cannot well be a poet's general purpose of doing moral as well as other good through his poetry--such a purpose, I mean, as he may cherish when he contemplates his life and his life's work. And, indeed, it seems obvious that n.o.body with any humanity or any sense can object to that, except through some intellectual confusion. Nor, secondly, does Sh.e.l.ley mean, I think, to condemn even the writing of a particular poem with a view to a particular moral or practical effect; certainly, at least, if this was his meaning he was condemning some of his own poetry. Nor, thirdly, can he be referring to the portrayal of moral ideals; for that he regarded as one of the main functions of poetry, and in the very place where he says that didactic poetry is his abhorrence he also says, by way of contrast, that he has tried to familiarise the minds of his readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence. It appears, therefore, that what he is really attacking is the attempt to give, in the strict sense, moral _instruction_, to communicate doctrines, to offer argumentative statements of opinion on right and wrong, and more especially, I think, on controversial questions of the day. An example would be Wordsworth's discourse on education at the end of the _Excursion_, a discourse of which Sh.e.l.ley, we know, had a very low opinion. In short, his enemy is not the purpose of producing a moral effect, it is the appeal made for this purpose to the reasoning intellect. He says to the poet: By all means aim at bettering men; you are a man, and are bound to do so; but you are also a poet, and therefore your proper way of doing so is not by reasoning and preaching.

His idea is of a piece with his general championship of imagination, and it is quite consistent with his main view of poetry.[5]

What, then, are the _grounds_ of this position? They are not clearly set out, but we can trace several, and they are all solid. Reasoning on moral subjects, moral philosophy, was by no means 'tedious' to Sh.e.l.ley; it seldom is to real poets. He loved it, and (outside his _Defence_) he rated its value very high.[6] But he thought it tedious and out of place in poetry, because it can be equally well expressed in 'unmeasured'

language--much better expressed, one may venture to add. You invent an art in order to effect by it a particular purpose which nothing else can effect as well. How foolish, then, to use this art for a purpose better served by something else! I know no answer to this argument, and its application is far wider than that given to it by Sh.e.l.ley. Secondly, Sh.e.l.ley remarks that a poet's own conceptions on moral subjects are usually those of his place and time, while the matter of his poem ought to be eternal, or, as we say, of permanent and universal interest. This, again, seems true, and has a wide application; and it holds good even when the poet, like Sh.e.l.ley himself, is in rebellion against orthodox moral opinion; for his heterodox opinions will equally show the marks of his place and time, and const.i.tute a perishable element in his work.

Doubtless no poetry can be without a perishable element; but that poetry has least of it which interprets life least through the medium of systematic and doctrinal ideas. The veil which time and place have hung between Homer or Shakespeare and the general reader of to-day is almost transparent, while even a poetry so intense as that of Dante and Milton is impeded in its pa.s.sage to him by systems which may be unfamiliar, and, if familiar, may be distasteful.

Lastly--and this is Sh.e.l.ley's central argument--as poetry itself is directly due to imaginative inspiration and not to reasoning, so its true moral effect is produced through imagination and not through doctrine. Imagination is, for Sh.e.l.ley, 'the great instrument of moral good.' The 'secret of morals is love.' It is not 'for want of admirable doctrines that men hate and despise and censure and deceive and subjugate one another': it is for want of love. And love is 'a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action or person not our own.' 'A man,'

therefore, 'to be greatly good must imagine intensely and comprehensively.' And poetry ministers to moral good, the effect, by acting on its cause, imagination. It strengthens imagination as exercise strengthens a limb, and so it indirectly promotes morality. It also fills the imagination with beautiful impersonations of all that we should wish to be. But moral reasoning does not act upon the cause, it only a.n.a.lyses the effect; and the poet has no right to be content to a.n.a.lyse what he ought indirectly to create. Here, again, in his eagerness, Sh.e.l.ley cuts his ant.i.theses too clean, but the defect is easily made good, and the main argument is sound.

Limits of time will compel me to be guilty of the same fault in adding a consideration which is in the spirit of Sh.e.l.ley's. The chief moral effect claimed for poetry by Sh.e.l.ley is exerted, primarily, by imagination on the emotions; but there is another influence, exerted primarily through imagination on the understanding. Poetry is largely an interpretation of life; and, considering what life is, that must mean a moral interpretation. This, to have poetic value, must satisfy imagination; but we value it also because it gives us knowledge, a wider comprehension, a new insight into ourselves and the world.[7] Now, it may be held--and this view answers to a very general feeling among lovers of poetry now--that the most deep and original moral interpretation is not likely to be that which most shows a moral purpose or is most governed by reflective beliefs and opinions, and that as a rule we learn most from those who do not try to teach us, and whose opinions may even remain unknown to us: so that there is this weighty objection to the appearance of such purpose and opinions, that it tends to defeat its own intention. And the reason that I wish to suggest is this, that always we get most from the _genius_ in a man of genius and not from the rest of him. Now, although poets often have unusual powers of reflective thought, the specific genius of a poet does not lie there, but in imagination. Therefore his deepest and most original interpretation is likely to come by the way of imagination. And the specific way of imagination is not to clothe in imagery consciously held ideas; it is to produce half-consciously a matter from which, when produced, the reader may, if he chooses, extract ideas. Poetry (I must exaggerate to be clear), psychologically considered, is not the _expression_ of ideas or of a view of life; it is their discovery or creation, or rather both discovery and creation in one. The interpretation contained in _Hamlet_ or _King Lear_ was not brought ready-made to the old stories. What was brought to them was the huge substance of Shakespeare's imagination, in which all his experience and thought was latent; and this, dwelling and working on the stories with nothing but a dramatic purpose, and kindling into heat and motion, gradually discovered or created in them a meaning and a ma.s.s of truth about life, which was brought to birth by the process of composition, but never preceded it in the shape of ideas, and probably never, even after it, took that shape to the poet's mind. And _this_ is the interpretation which we find inexhaustibly instructive, because Shakespeare's _genius_ is in it. On the other hand, however much from curiosity and personal feeling towards him we may wish to know his opinions and beliefs about morals or religion or his own poems or Queen Elizabeth, we have not really any reason to suppose that their value would prove extraordinary. And so, to apply this generally, the opinions, reasonings and beliefs of poets are seldom of the same quality as their purely imaginative product. Occasionally, as with Goethe, they are not far off it; but sometimes they are intense without being profound, and more eccentric than original; and often they are very sane and sound, but not very different from those of wise men without genius.

And therefore poetry is not the place for them. For we want in poetry a moral interpretation, but not the interpretation we have already. As a rule the genuine artist's quarrel with 'morality' in art is not really with morality, it is with a stereotyped or narrow morality; and when he refuses in his art to consider things from what he calls the moral point of view, his reasons are usually wrong, but his instinct is right.

Poetry itself confirms on the whole this contention, though doubtless in these last centuries a great poet's work will usually reveal more of conscious reflection than once it did. Homer and Shakespeare show no moral aim and no system of opinion. Milton was far from justifying the ways of G.o.d to men by the argumentation he put into divine and angelic lips; his truer moral insight is in the creations of his genius; for instance, in the character of Satan or the picture of the glorious humanity of Adam and Eve. Goethe himself could never have told the world what he was going to express in the First Part of _Faust_: the poem told _him_, and it is one of the world's greatest. He knew too well what he was going to express in the Second Part, and with all its wisdom and beauty it is scarcely a great poem. Wordsworth's original message was delivered, not when he was a G.o.dwinian semi-atheist, nor when he had subsided upon orthodoxy, but when his imagination, with a few hints from Coleridge, was creating a kind of natural religion; and this religion itself is more profoundly expressed in his descriptions of his experience than in his attempts to formulate it. The moral virtue of Tennyson is in poems like _Ulysses_ and parts of _In Memoriam_, where sorrow and the consciousness of a deathless affection or an unquenchable desire for experience forced an utterance; but when in the _Idylls_ he tried to found a great poem on explicit ideas about the soul and the ravages wrought in it by lawless pa.s.sion, he succeeded but partially, because these ideas, however sound, were no product of his genius. And so the moral virtue of Sh.e.l.ley's poetry lay, not in his doctrines about the past and future of man, but in an intuition, which was the substance of his soul, of the unique value of love. In the end, for him, the truest name of that perfection called Intellectual Beauty, Liberty, Spirit of Nature, is Love. Whatever in the world has any worth is an expression of Love. Love sometimes talks. Love talking musically is Poetry.

1904.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Statements equally emphatic on this subject may be found in a pa.s.sage quoted by Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley in a footnote to Sh.e.l.ley's letter to John Gisborne, Nov. 16, 1819 (Letter x.x.x. in Mrs. Sh.e.l.ley's edition).

Cf. also Letter x.x.xIII. to Leigh Hunt, Nov. 1819.

[2] I cannot find the pa.s.sage or pa.s.sages to which I referred in making this statement, and therefore I do not vouch for its accuracy.

Cf. from the fragment _Fiordispina_,

The ardours of a vision which obscure The very idol of its portraiture.

[3] Cf. from the Preface to the _Cenci_: 'I entirely agree with those modern critics who a.s.sert that, in order to move men to true sympathy, we must use the familiar language of men.... But it must be the real language of men in general, and not that of any particular cla.s.s to whose society the writer happens to belong.'

[4] Preface to _Prometheus Unbound_.

[5] I do not discuss the adequacy of Sh.e.l.ley's position, or a.s.sert that he held it quite clearly or consistently. In support of my interpretation, of it I may refer to the Preface to the _Cenci_.

There he repudiates the idea of making the dramatic exhibition of the story 'subservient to what is vulgarly called a moral purpose,' and, as the context shows, he identifies such a treatment of the story with the 'enforcement' of a 'dogma.'

This pa.s.sage has a further interest. The dogma which Sh.e.l.ley would not enforce in his tragedy was that 'no person can truly be dishonoured by the act of another, and the fit return to make to the most enormous injuries is kindness and forbearance, and a resolution to convert the injurer from his dark pa.s.sions by peace and love'; and accordingly he held that 'if Beatrice had thought in this manner, she would have been wiser and better.' How inexcusable then is the not uncommon criticism on the _Cenci_ that he represents Beatrice as a perfect character and justifies her murder of 'the injurer.'

Sh.e.l.ley's position in the _Defence_, it may be added, is in total disagreement with his youthful doctrine and practice. In 1811 he wrote to Miss. .h.i.tchener, 'My opinion is that all poetical beauty ought to be subordinate to the inculcated moral,' and a large part of _Queen Mab_ is frankly didactic. Even there, however, he reserved most of the formal instruction for the Notes, perceiving that 'a poem very didactic is ... very stupid.'

[6] 'I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science,' he says in a letter to Peac.o.c.k, Jan. 1819.

[7] And, I may add, the more it does this, so long as it does it imaginatively, the more does it satisfy imagination, and the greater is its _poetic_ value.

THE LONG POEM IN THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH

THE LONG POEM IN THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH[1]

The poetry of the age of Wordsworth, we are all agreed, is one of the glories of our literature. It is surpa.s.sed, many would add, by the poetry of no other period except the Elizabethan. But it has obvious flaws, of which perhaps we are becoming more and more distinctly conscious now; and, apart from these definite defects, it also leaves with us, when we review it, a certain feeling of disappointment. It is great, we say to ourselves, but why is it not greater still? It shows a wonderful abundance of genius: why does it not show an equal accomplishment?

1.