Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold Part 12

"Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille, Sich ein Character in dem Strom der Welt."[254]

Nothing can be better in its way than the style in which Goethe there presents his thought, but it is the style of prose as much as of poetry; it is lucid, harmonious, earnest, eloquent, but it has not received that peculiar kneading, heightening, and recasting which is observable in the style of the pa.s.sage from Milton--a style which seems to have for its cause a certain pressure of emotion, and an ever-surging, yet bridled, excitement in the poet, giving a special intensity to his way of delivering himself. In poetical races and epochs this turn for style is peculiarly observable; and perhaps it is only on condition of having this somewhat heightened and difficult manner, so different from the plain manner of prose, that poetry gets the privilege of being loosed, at its best moments, into that perfectly simple, limpid style, which is the supreme style of all, but the simplicity of which is still not the simplicity of prose. The simplicity of Menander's[255] style is the simplicity of prose, and is the same kind of simplicity as that which Goethe's style, in the pa.s.sage I have quoted, exhibits; but Menander does not belong to a great poetical moment, he comes too late for it; it is the simple pa.s.sages in poets like Pindar or Dante which are perfect, being masterpieces of _poetical_ simplicity. One may say the same of the simple pa.s.sages in Shakespeare; they are perfect, their simplicity being a _poetical_ simplicity. They are the golden, easeful, crowning moments of a manner which is always pitched in another key from that of prose, a manner changed and heightened; the Elizabethan style, regnant in most of our dramatic poetry to this day, is mainly the continuation of this manner of Shakespeare's. It was a manner much more turbid and strewn with blemishes than the manner of Pindar, Dante, or Milton; often it was detestable; but it owed its existence to Shakespeare's instinctive impulse towards _style_ in poetry, to his native sense of the necessity for it; and without the basis of style everywhere, faulty though it may in some places be, we should not have had the beauty of expression, unsurpa.s.sable for effectiveness and charm, which is reached in Shakespeare's best pa.s.sages. The turn for style is perceptible all through English poetry, proving, to my mind, the genuine poetical gift of the race; this turn imparts to our poetry a stamp of high distinction, and sometimes it doubles the force of a poet not by nature of the very highest order, such as Gray, and raises him to a rank beyond what his natural richness and power seem to promise. Goethe, with his fine critical perception, saw clearly enough both the power of style in itself, and the lack of style in the literature of his own country; and perhaps if we regard him solely as a German, not as a European, his great work was that he labored all his life to impart style into German literature, and firmly to establish it there. Hence the immense importance to him of the world of cla.s.sical art, and of the productions of Greek or Latin genius, where style so eminently manifests its power.

Had he found in the German genius and literature an element of style existing by nature and ready to his hand, half his work, one may say, would have been saved him, and he might have done much more in poetry.

But as it was, he had to try and create, out of his own powers, a style for German poetry, as well as to provide contents for this style to carry; and thus his labor as a poet was doubled.

It is to be observed that power of style, in the sense in which I am here speaking of style, is something quite different from the power of idiomatic, simple, nervous, racy expression, such as the expression of healthy, robust natures so often is, such as Luther's was in a striking degree. Style, in my sense of the word, is a peculiar recasting and heightening, under a certain condition of spiritual excitement, of what a man has to say, in such a manner as to add dignity and distinction to it; and dignity and distinction are not terms which suit many acts or words of Luther. Deeply touched with the _Gemeinheit_[256] which is the bane of his nation, as he is at the same time a grand example of the honesty which is his nation's excellence, he can seldom even show himself brave, resolute, and truthful, without showing a strong dash of coa.r.s.eness and commonness all the while; the right definition of Luther, as of our own Bunyan, is that he is a Philistine of genius. So Luther's sincere idiomatic German,--such language as this: "Hilf, lieber Gott, wie manchen Jammer habe ich gesehen, da.s.s der gemeine Mann doch so gar nichts weiss von der christlichen Lehre!"--no more proves a power of style in German literature, than Cobbett's[257] sinewy idiomatic English proves it in English literature. Power of style, properly so-called, as manifested in masters of style like Dante or Milton in poetry, Cicero, Bossuet[258] or Bolingbroke[259] in prose, is something quite different, and has, as I have said, for its characteristic effect, this: to add dignity and distinction.

This something is _style_, and the Celts certainly have it in a wonderful measure. Style is the most striking quality of their poetry.

Celtic poetry seems to make up to itself for being unable to master the world and give an adequate interpretation of it, by throwing all its force into style, by bending language at any rate to its will, and expressing the ideas it has with unsurpa.s.sable intensity, elevation, and effect. It has all through it a sort of intoxication of style--a _Pindarism_, to use a word formed from the name of the poet, on whom, above all other poets, the power of style seems to have exercised an inspiring and intoxicating effect; and not in its great poets only, in Taliesin, or Llywarch Hen, or Ossian,[260] does the Celtic genius show this Pindarism, but in all its productions:--

"The grave of March is this, and this the grave of Gwythyr; Here is the grave of Gwgawn Gleddyfreidd; But unknown is the grave of Arthur."[261]

That comes from the _Welsh Memorials of the Graves of the Warriors_, and if we compare it with the familiar memorial inscriptions of an English churchyard (for we English have so much Germanism in us that our productions offer abundant examples of German want of style as well as of its opposite):--

"Afflictions sore long time I bore, Physicians were in vain, Till G.o.d did please Death should me seize And ease me of my pain--"

if, I say, we compare the Welsh memorial lines with the English, which in their _Gemeinheit_ of style are truly Germanic, we shall get a clear sense of what that Celtic talent for style I have been speaking of is.

Its chord of penetrating pa.s.sion and melancholy, again, its _t.i.tanism_ as we see it in Byron,--what other European poetry possesses that like the English, and where do we get it from? The Celts, with their vehement reaction against the despotism of fact, with their sensuous nature, their manifold striving, their adverse destiny, their immense calamities, the Celts are the prime authors of this vein of piercing regret and pa.s.sion,--of this t.i.tanism in poetry. A famous book, Macpherson's _Ossian_,[262] carried in the last century this vein like a flood of lava through Europe. I am not going to criticize Macpherson's _Ossian_ here. Make the part of what is forged, modern, tawdry, spurious, in the book, as large as you please; strip Scotland, if you like, of every feather of borrowed plumes which on the strength of Macpherson's _Ossian_ she may have stolen from that _vetus et major Scotia_, the true home of the Ossianic poetry, Ireland; I make no objection. But there will still be left in the book a residue with the very soul of the Celtic genius in it, and which has the proud distinction of having brought this soul of the Celtic genius into contact with the genius of the nations of modern Europe, and enriched all our poetry by it. Woody Morven, and echoing Sora, and Selma with its silent halls!--we all owe them a debt of grat.i.tude, and when we are unjust enough to forget it, may the Muse forget us! Choose any one of the better pa.s.sages in Macpherson's _Ossian_ and you can see even at this time of day what an apparition of newness and power such a strain must have been to the eighteenth century:--

"I have seen the walls of Balclutha, but they were desolate. The fox looked out from the windows, the rank gra.s.s of the wall waved round her head. Raise the song of mourning, O bards, over the land of strangers.

They have but fallen before us, for one day we must fall. Why dost thou build the hall, son of the winged days? Thou lookest from thy towers today; yet a few years, and the blast of the desert comes; it howls in thy empty court, and whistles round thy half-worn shield. Let the blast of the desert come! we shall be renowned in our day."

All Europe felt the power of that melancholy; but what I wish to point out is, that no nation of Europe so caught in its poetry the pa.s.sionate penetrating accent of the Celtic genius, its strain of t.i.tanism, as the English. Goethe, like Napoleon, felt the spell of Ossian very powerfully, and he quotes a long pa.s.sage from him in his _Werther_.[263]

But what is there Celtic, turbulent, and t.i.tanic about the German Werther, that amiable, cultivated and melancholy young man, having for his sorrow and suicide the perfectly definite motive that Lotte cannot be his? Faust, again, has nothing unaccountable, defiant, and t.i.tanic in him; his knowledge does not bring him the satisfaction he expected from it, and meanwhile he finds himself poor and growing old, and balked of the palpable enjoyment of life; and here is the motive for Faust's discontent. In the most energetic and impetuous of Goethe's creations,-- his _Prometheus_,[264]--it is not Celtic self-will and pa.s.sion, it is rather the Germanic sense of justice and reason, which revolts against the despotism of Zeus. The German _Sehnsucht_ itself is a wistful, soft, tearful longing, rather than a struggling, fierce, pa.s.sionate one. But the Celtic melancholy is struggling, fierce, pa.s.sionate; to catch its note, listen to Llywarch Hen in old age, addressing his crutch:--

"O my crutch! is it not autumn, when the fern is red, the water-flag yellow? Have I not hated that which I love?

O my crutch! is it not winter-time now, when men talk together after that they have drunken? Is not the side of my bed left desolate?

O my crutch! is it not spring, when the cuckoo pa.s.ses through the air, when the foam sparkles on the sea? The young maidens no longer love me.

O my crutch! is it not the first day of May? The furrows, are they not shining; the young corn, is it not springing? Ah! the sight of thy handle makes me wroth.

O my crutch! stand straight, thou wilt support me the better; it is very long since I was Llywarch.

Behold old age, which makes sport of me, from the hair of my head to my teeth, to my eyes, which women loved.

The four things I have all my life most hated fall upon me together,-- coughing and old age, sickness and sorrow.

I am old, I am alone, shapeliness and warmth are gone from me; the couch of honor shall be no more mine; I am miserable, I am bent on my crutch.

How evil was the lot allotted to Llywarch, the night when he was brought forth! sorrows without end, and no deliverance from his burden."[265]

There is the t.i.tanism of the Celt, his pa.s.sionate, turbulent, indomitable reaction against the despotism of fact; and of whom does it remind us so much as of Byron?

"The fire which on my bosom preys Is lone as some volcanic isle; No torch is kindled at its blaze; A funeral pile!"[266]

Or, again:--

"Count o'er the joys thine hours have seen, Count o'er thy days from anguish free, And know, whatever thou hast been, 'Tis something better not to be."[267]

One has only to let one's memory begin to fetch pa.s.sages from Byron striking the same note as that pa.s.sage from Llywarch Hen, and she will not soon stop. And all Byron's heroes, not so much in collision with outward things, as breaking on some rock of revolt and misery in the depths of their own nature; Manfred, self-consumed, fighting blindly and pa.s.sionately with I know not what, having nothing of the consistent development and intelligible motive of Faust,--Manfred, Lara, Cain,[268]

what are they but t.i.tanic? Where in European poetry are we to find this Celtic pa.s.sion of revolt so warm-breathing, puissant, and sincere; except perhaps in the creation of a yet greater poet than Byron, but an English poet, too, like Byron,--in the Satan of Milton?

"... What though the field be lost?

All is not lost; the unconquerable will, And study of revenge, immortal hate, And courage never to submit or yield, And what is else not to be overcome."[269]

There, surely, speaks a genius to whose composition the Celtic fibre was not wholly a stranger!

The Celt's quick feeling for what is n.o.ble and distinguished gave his poetry style; his indomitable personality gave it pride and pa.s.sion; his sensibility and nervous exaltation gave it a better gift still, the gift of rendering with wonderful felicity the magical charm of nature. The forest solitude, the bubbling spring, the wild flowers, are everywhere in romance. They have a mysterious life and grace there; they are Nature's own children, and utter her secret in a way which makes them something quite different from the woods, waters, and plants of Greek and Latin poetry. Now of this delicate magic, Celtic romance is so pre-eminent a mistress, that it seems impossible to believe the power did not come into romance from the Celts.[270] Magic is just the word for it,--the magic of nature; not merely the beauty of nature,--that the Greeks and Latins had; not merely an honest smack of the soil, a faithful realism,--that the Germans had; but the intimate life of Nature, her weird power and her fairy charm. As the Saxon names of places, with the pleasant wholesome smack of the soil in them,-- Weathersfield, Thaxted, Shalford,--are to the Celtic names of places, with their penetrating, lofty beauty,--Velindra, Tyntagel, Caernarvon,-- so is the homely realism of German and Norse nature to the fairy-like loveliness of Celtic nature. Gwydion wants a wife for his pupil: "Well,"

says Math, "we will seek, I and thou, by charms and illusions, to form a wife for him out of flowers. So they took the blossoms of the oak, and the blossoms of the broom, and the blossoms of the meadow-sweet, and produced from them a maiden, the fairest and most graceful that man ever saw. And they baptized her, and gave her the name of Flower-Aspect."[271] Celtic romance is full of exquisite touches like that, showing the delicacy of the Celt's feeling in these matters, and how deeply Nature lets him come into her secrets. The quick dropping of blood is called "faster than the fall of the dewdrop from the blade of reed-gra.s.s upon the earth, when the dew of June is at the heaviest." And thus is Olwen described: "More yellow was her hair than the flower of the broom, and her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood-anemony amidst the spray of the meadow fountains."[272] For loveliness it would be hard to beat that; and for magical clearness and nearness take the following:--

"And in the evening Peredur entered a valley, and at the head of the valley he came to a hermit's cell, and the hermit welcomed him gladly, and there he spent the night. And in the morning he arose, and when he went forth, behold, a shower of snow had fallen the night before, and a hawk had killed a wild-fowl in front of the cell. And the noise of the horse scared the hawk away, and a raven alighted upon the bird. And Peredur stood and compared the blackness of the raven, and the whiteness of the snow, and the redness of the blood, to the hair of the lady whom best he loved, which was blacker than the raven, and to her skin, which was whiter than the snow, and to her two cheeks which were redder than the blood upon the snow appeared to be."[273]

And this, which is perhaps less striking, is not less beautiful:--

"And early in the day Geraint and Enid left the wood, and they came to an open country, with meadows on one hand and mowers mowing the meadows.

And there was a river before them, and the horses bent down and drank the water. And they went up out of the river by a steep bank, and there they met a slender stripling with a satchel about his neck; and he had a small blue pitcher in his hand, and a bowl on the mouth of the pitcher."[274]

And here the landscape, up to this point so Greek in its clear beauty, is suddenly magicalized by the romance touch,--

"And they saw a tall tree by the side of the river, one-half of which was in flames from the root to the top, and the other half was green and in full leaf."

Magic is the word to insist upon,--a magically vivid and near interpretation of nature; since it is this which const.i.tutes the special charm and power of the effect I am calling attention to, and it is for this that the Celt's sensibility gives him a peculiar apt.i.tude. But the matter needs rather fine handling, and it is easy to make mistakes here in our criticism. In the first place, Europe tends constantly to become more and more one community, and we tend to become Europeans instead of merely Englishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Italians; so whatever apt.i.tude or felicity one people imparts into spiritual work, gets imitated by the others, and thus tends to become the common property of all. Therefore anything so beautiful and attractive as the natural magic I am speaking of, is sure, nowadays, if it appears in the productions of the Celts, or of the English, or of the French, to appear in the productions of the Germans also, or in the productions of the Italians; but there will be a stamp of perfectness and inimitableness about it in the literatures where it is native, which it will not have in the literatures where it is not native. Novalis[275] or Ruckert,[276] for instance, have their eye fixed on nature, and have undoubtedly a feeling for natural magic; a rough-and-ready critic easily credits them and the Germans with the Celtic fineness of tact, the Celtic nearness to nature and her secret; but the question is whether the strokes in the German's picture of nature[277] have ever the indefinable delicacy, charm, and perfection of the Celt's touch in the pieces I just now quoted, or of Shakespeare's touch in his daffodil,[278] Wordsworth's in his cuckoo,[279] Keats's in his Autumn, Obermann's in his mountain birch-tree, or his Easter-daisy among the Swiss farms.[280] To decide where the gift for natural magic originally lies, whether it is properly Celtic or Germanic, we must decide this question.

In the second place, there are many ways of handling nature, and we are here only concerned with one of them; but a rough-and-ready critic imagines that it is all the same so long as nature is handled at all, and fails to draw the needful distinction between modes of handling her.

But these modes are many; I will mention four of them now: there is the conventional way of handling nature, there is the faithful way of handling nature, there is the Greek way of handling nature, there is the magical way of handling nature. In all these three last the eye is on the object, but with a difference; in the faithful way of handling nature, the eye is on the object, and that is all you can say; in the Greek, the eye is on the object, but lightness and brightness are added; in the magical, the eye is on the object, but charm and magic are added.

In the conventional way of handling nature, the eye is not on the object; what that means we all know, we have only to think of our eighteenth-century poetry:--

"As when the moon, refulgent lamp of night--"[281]

to call up any number of instances. Latin poetry supplies plenty of instances too; if we put this from Propertius's _Hylas_:--

"... ma.n.u.s heroum ...

Mollia composita litora fronde tegit--"[282]

side by side with the line of Theocritus by which it was suggested:--

[Greek: leimon gar sphin ekeito megas, stibadessin oneiar--][283]