The Bridling of Pegasus Part 13

Here we have none of the rebellious political protests of Byron, none of the iconoclastic fervour of Sh.e.l.ley, none even of the philosophic yearning of Wordsworth. It was a Conservative, a self-satisfied England, and the youthful Tennyson accordingly was perfectly well satisfied with it, evidently having as yet no cognizance of the fact that Radicalism was already more than muling and pewking in the arms of its Whig nurse, and that Reforms were about to be carried neither "slowly," nor by "still degrees," nor in accordance with any known "precedent."

Tennyson's next volume was not published till 1842. During the twelve years that had elapsed since the appearance of its predecessor, a mighty change had come not only over the dream, but over the practice, of the English People. It was an England in which the stationary or conservative tone of thought of which I spoke was, if not extinct, discredited and suppressed, and the fortunes of the Realm were moulded by the generous and hopeful theories of Liberalism. Tennyson meanwhile had been subjected to the influences of what he called the wondrous Mother Age; and harken how now--it scarcely sounds like the same voice--the eulogist of the "storied Past," the deprecator of "crude imaginings" and of a "hasty time,"

confronts the dominant spirit and rising impulses of the new generation:

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails, Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm, With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder-storm;

Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe, And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.

Did Optimism ever find a clearer, more enthusiastic, or more confident voice than that? I have sometimes thought that when the Historian comes to write, in distant times, of the rise, progress, and decline of Liberalism in England, he will cite that pa.s.sage as the melodious compendium of its creed. You all know where the pa.s.sage comes; for you have, I am sure, the first _Locksley Hall_ by heart.

But there is another _Locksley Hall_, the _Locksley Hall_ which the Author himself calls _Locksley Hall Sixty Years After_, published as recently as 1886. You are acquainted with it, no doubt; but I should be surprised to find any one quite so familiar with it as with its predecessor. It is not so attractive, so fascinating, so saturated with beauty. But for my purpose it is eminently instructive, and I will ask you to listen to some of its rolling couplets.

Chaos, Cosmos! Cosmos, Chaos! who can tell how all will end?

Read the wide world's annals, you, and take their wisdom for your friend.

Hope the best, but hold the Present fatal daughter of the Past, Shape your heart to front the hour, but dream not that the hour will last.

Ay, if dynamite and revolver leave you courage to be wise: When was age so cramm'd with menace? madness? written, spoken lies?

Envy wears the mask of Love, and, laughing sober fact to scorn, Cries to Weakest as to Strongest, "Ye are equals, equal-born."

Equal-born? O yes, if yonder hill be level with the flat.

Charm us, Orator, till the Lion look no larger than the Cat.

Till the Cat thro' that mirage of overheated language loom Larger than the Lion,--Demos end in working its own doom.

Chaos, Cosmos! Cosmos, Chaos! once again the sickening game; Freedom, free to slay herself, and dying while they shout her name.

Step by step we gain'd a freedom known to Europe, known to all; Step by step we rose to greatness,--thro' the tonguesters we may fall.

Was there ever such a contrast as between these two _Locksley Halls_? The same poet, the same theme, the same metre, but how different the voice, the tone, the tendency, the conclusion! All the Liberalism, all the enthusiasm, the hope, the confidence, of former years have vanished, and in their place we have reactionary despondency. It is as though the same hand that wrote the Christening Ode to Liberalism, had composed a dirge to be chanted over its grave.

The genius of Tennyson needs no fresh panegyric. It is but yesterday he died, in the fullness of his Fame; and that his works will be read so long as the English language remains a living tongue, I cannot doubt. But if, while his claim to the very highest place as an artist must ever remain uncontested, doubts should be expressed concerning his equality with the very greatest poets, those who express that doubt will, I imagine, base their challenge on the excessive receptivity, and consequent lack of serenity of his mind. In the first _Locksley Hall_ the poet is an Optimist. In the second _Locksley Hall_ he is a Pessimist. And why?

Because, when the first was written, the prevailing tone of the age was optimistic; and, when the second was composed, the prevailing tone of the time had become pessimistic.

It will scarcely be doubted, therefore, that there does exist a real and a very grave danger lest Poetry should, in these perplexing and despondent days, not only be closely a.s.sociated with Pessimism, but should become for the most part its voice and echo. I am precluded from presenting to you ill.u.s.trations of this danger from the works of living writers of verse.

But in truth, the malady of which I am speaking--for malady, in my opinion, it is--began to manifest itself long before the present generation, long before Tennyson wrote, and when indeed he was yet a child in the cradle. The main original source of Modern Pessimism is the French movement known as the Revolution, which, by exciting extravagant hopes as to the happy results to be secured from the emanc.i.p.ation of the individual, at first generated a fretful impatience at the apparently slow fulfilment of the dream, and finally aroused a sceptical and reactionary despondency at the only too plain and patent demonstration that the dream was not going to be fulfilled at all. It is this blending of wild hopes and extravagant impatience that inspired and informed the poetry of Sh.e.l.ley, that produced _Queen Mab_, _The Revolt of Islam_, and _Prometheus Unbound_. In Byron it was impatience blent with disillusion that dictated _Childe Harold_, _Manfred_, and _Cain_, and finally culminated in the mockery of _Don Juan_. Keats, while ostensibly holding aloof from the political and social issues of his time, succ.u.mbed and ministered to the disease, even if unconsciously and unintentionally, more even than either Byron or Sh.e.l.ley; for _they_ went on fighting against, while _he_ pa.s.sively submitted, to it. Keats found nothing in his own time worth sympathising with or singing about, and so took refuge in mythological and cla.s.sical themes, or in the expression of states of feeling in which he grows half in love with easeful death, in which more than ever it seems sweet to die and to cease upon the midnight with no pain, and to the high requiem of the nightingale to become a sod that does not hear.

Now it is an instructive circ.u.mstance that, in recent years, a distinct and decided preference has been manifested both by the majority of critics and by the reading public for the poetry of Keats even over the poetry of the other two writers I have named in connection with him. In Byron, notwithstanding his rebellious tendency, notwithstanding the gloom that often overshadows his verse, notwithstanding his being one of the exponents of those exaggerated hopes and that exaggerated despondency of which I have spoken, there was a considerable fund of common sense and a good deal of manliness. He was a man of the world and could not help being so, in spite of his att.i.tude of hostility to it. Moreover, in many of his poems, action plays a conspicuous part, and the general pa.s.sions, interests, and politics of mankind are dealt with by him in a more or less practical spirit, and as though they concerned him likewise. Sh.e.l.ley, too, not unoften condescended to deal with the political, social, and religious polemics of his time, though he always did so in a pa.s.sionate and utterly impracticable temper, and would necessarily leave on the mind of the reader, the conviction that everything in the world is amiss, and that the only possible remedy is the abolition of everything that had hitherto been regarded as an indispensable part of the foundation of human society.

But Keats does not trouble himself about any of these things. He gives them the go-by, he ignores them, and only asks to be allowed to leave the world unseen, and with the nightingale, to fade away into the forest dim.

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget What thou among the leaves hast never known, The weariness, the fever, and the fret Here, where men sit and hear each other groan; Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs, Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies; Where but to think is to be full of sorrow And leaden-eyed despairs; Where beauty cannot keep her l.u.s.trous eyes, Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

This is the voice, I say, which, during the last few years, has been preferred even to Sh.e.l.ley's, and very much preferred to Byron's. And why?

You will perhaps say that Keats's workmanship is fascinatingly beautiful.

In the pa.s.sage I have cited, and in the entire poem from which it is taken, that unquestionably is so. But I trust I shall not give offence if I say that the number of my countrymen and countrywomen who lay stress on the artistic manner, whether in verse or prose, in which an opinion is expressed, compared with the number of those who value poetry or prose chiefly because it expresses the opinions they value and the sentiments they cherish, is very small. No, Keats is preferred because Keats turns aside from the world at large, and thinks and writes only of individual feeling. Hence he has been more welcomed by recent critics, and by recent readers of poetry. Indeed, certain critics have laboured to erect it into a dogma, indeed into an absolute literary and critical canon, that a poet who wishes to attain true distinction must turn his back on politics, on people, on society, on his country, on patriotism, on everything in fact save books--his own thoughts, his own feelings, and his own art. Because Byron did not do so they have dubbed him a Philistine; and because Pope did precisely the reverse, and the reverse, no doubt, overmuch, they a.s.sert that he was not a poet at all.

It is not necessary to dwell on the fatuousness of such criticism, more especially as one discerns welcome signs of a disposition on the part of the reading public to turn away from these guides, and a disposition even on the part of the guides themselves in some degree to reconsider and revise their unfortunate utterances. But I have alluded to the doctrine in question, in order to show you to what lengths Pessimism, which is only a compendious expression of dissatisfaction with things in general, in other words with life, with society, and with mankind, can go, and how it has culminated in such disdain of them by poets, that they brush them aside as subjects unworthy of the Muse. Surely Pessimism in Poetry can no farther go, than to a.s.sume, without question, that man, life, society, patriotism are not worth a song?

I should not wonder if some will have been saying to themselves, "But what about Wordsworth; Wordsworth, who was the contemporary, and at least the equal, alike in genius and in influence, of the three poets just named?" I have not forgotten Wordsworth. Wordsworth was of too pious a temperament, using the word pious in its very largest signification, to be a Pessimist; for true piety and Pessimism are irreconcilable. Nevertheless Wordsworth, as a poet, likewise experienced, and experienced acutely, the influence of the French Revolution. Upon this point there can be no difference of opinion; for he himself left it on record in a well-known pa.s.sage.

Everybody knows with what different eyes Wordsworth finally looked on the French Revolution; how utterly he broke with its tenets, its promises, its offspring; taking refuge from his disappointment.

But something akin to despondency, if too permeated with sacred resignation wholly to deserve that description, may be discovered in the att.i.tude henceforward a.s.sumed by Wordsworth, as a poet, towards the world, society, and mankind. Not only did he write a long poem, _The Recluse_, but he himself was a recluse, and the whole of _The Excursion_ is the composition of a recluse. Matthew Arnold, always a high authority on Wordsworth, has said:

But Wordsworth's eyes avert their ken From half of human fate.

Indeed they did; turning instead to the silence that is in the sky, to the sleep that is in the hills, to the mountains, the flowers, and the poet's own solitary _meditations_. He declared that he would rather be a Pagan suckled in a creed outworn than one of those Christian worldlings, of which society seemed to him mainly to consist. This is not necessarily Pessimism. But it goes perilously near to it; and the boundary line would have been crossed, but that Wordsworth's prayer was answered, in which he pet.i.tioned that his days might be linked each to each by natural piety.

Of Matthew Arnold himself, as a poet, I am able to speak; for though he was not long ago one's contemporary, he is no longer one of ourselves. In Matthew Arnold it has always seemed to me, the poet and the man, his reason and his imagination, were not quite one. They were harnessed together rather than incorporated one with the other; and, many years before he died, if I may press the comparison a little farther, the poet, the imaginative part of him became lame and halt, and he conveyed his mind in the humbler one-horse vehicle of prose. The poetic impulse in him was not strong enough to carry him along permanently against the prosaic opposition of life. Nevertheless, he was a poet who wrote some very beautiful poetry; and he exercised a powerful influence, both as a poet and as a prose-writer, on the thoughts and sentiments of his time. Now, what do we find him saying? Listen!

Wandering between two worlds, one dead, The other powerless to be born, With nowhere yet to rest my head, Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.

Their faith, My tears, the world deride, I come to shed them at your side.

There yet perhaps may dawn an age, More fortunate alas! than we, Which without hardness will be sage, And gay without frivolity.

Sons of the world, oh haste those years!

But, till they rise, allow our tears.

Hark to the words he puts into the mouth of Empedocles:

And yet what days were those, Parmenides!

Then we could still enjoy, then neither thought Nor outward things were closed and dead to us; But we received the shock of mighty thoughts On simple minds with a pure natural joy.

We had not lost our balance then, nor grown Thought's slaves, and dead to every natural joy.

In another poem he declares:

Achilles ponders in his tent: The Kings of modern thought are dumb; Silent they are, though not content, And wait to see the future come.

Our fathers watered with their tears The sea of time whereon we sail; Their voices were in all men's ears Who pa.s.sed within their puissant hail.

Still the same ocean round us raves, But we stand mute and watch the waves.

Last and worst of all, and in utter despondency and pessimism he cries:

Your creeds are dead, your rites are dead, Your social order, too!

Where tarries He, the Power who said, _See_, I make all things new?

... The past is out of date, The future not yet born; And who can be alone elate, While the world lies forlorn?

Can Pessimism in Poetry go farther than that? Many will perhaps think it cannot; but, unfortunately, it can. It is only from poets who are dead, if dead but recently, that one can draw one's ill.u.s.trations; otherwise I could suggest you should read to yourselves volume upon volume of verse, the one long weary burden of which is the misery of being alive. I daresay you will not be sorry that one is precluded from introducing these melancholy minstrels. But the spirit that imbues and pervades them is compendiously and conveniently expressed in a composition that I _can_ read to you, and which I select because it seems to express, in reasonably small compa.s.s, the indictment which our metrical pessimists labour to bring against existence.