The Bridling of Pegasus Part 3

More placidly but still in the same spirit, he exclaims:

Now stir the fire and close the shutters fast, Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round, And while the bubbling and loud hissing urn Throws up a steaming column, and the cups That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each, So let us welcome peaceful evening in.

Farther on, he describes how--

'Tis pleasant through the loopholes of retreat To peep at such a world, to see the stir Of the great Babel, and not feel the crowd.

Thus sitting, and surveying thus at ease The globe and its concerns, I seem advanced To some secure and more than mortal height, That liberates and exempts me from them all.

Again, invoking evening, he says:

Come then, and thou shalt find thy votary calm Or make me so. Composure is thy gift: And whether I devote the gentle hours of evening To books, to music, or the poet's toil, To weaving nets for bird-alluring fruit, Or turning silken threads round ivory reels, When they command whom man was born to please.

Could there well be a more feminine picture than that? All the politics, commerce, pa.s.sions, conflicts of the world are shut out by Mrs. Unwin's comfortable curtains, and, with her and Lady Austen for sympathising companions, the poet fills his time, with perfect satisfaction, by holding their skeins of wool, and meditating such homely lines as these:

For I, contented with a humble theme, Have poured my stream of panegyric down The vale of nature where it creeps and winds Among her lovely works, with a secure And unambitious ease reflecting clear If not the virtues, yet the worth of brutes.

And I am recompensed, and deem the toils Of poetry not lost, if verse of mine May stand between an animal and woe, And teach one tyrant pity for his drudge.

Cowper was never married, nor ever, as far as I know, in love, though Lady Austen, to her and his misfortune, for a time seemed to fancy he was; and in his verse therefore we do not meet with the note of amatory sentiment.

But what love is there in this world more beautiful, more touching, more truly romantic, than the love of a mother for her son, and of a son for his mother? And where has it been more charmingly expressed than in Cowper's lines on the receipt of his mother's picture? After that beautiful outburst--

O that those lips had language! Life has pa.s.sed With me but roughly since I heard thee last

--he proceeds to recall the home, the scenes, the tender incidents of his childhood, but, most of all, the fond care bestowed on him by his mother:

Thy nightly visits to my chamber made That thou mightst know me safe and warmly laid, Thy fragrant waters on my cheek bestowed By thy own hand, till fresh they were and glowed, All this, and more endearing still than all, Thy constant flow of love that knew no fall, Ne'er roughened by those cataracts and breaks That humour interposed too often makes; All this still legible in memory's page, And still to be so to my latest age, Adds joy to duty, makes me glad to pay Such honour to thee as my numbers may, Perhaps a frail memorial, but sincere, Not scorned in Heaven, though little noticed here.

The lines are not in what is called the highest vein of poetry. They have not the bluff masculinity of Chaucer. They lack the magic of Spenser. They do not purify the pa.s.sions through terror as is done by _Lear_ or _Macbeth_, and they are much inferior in majesty to the

Cherubic trumpets blowing martial sound

of Milton. But they come straight from the heart, and go straight to the heart. They are thoroughly human, what we all have felt, or are much to be pitied if we have not felt. They are instinct with the holiest form of domestic piety. They are feminine in the best sense, and have all the feminine power to attract, to chasten, and to subdue.

As far as character and conduct are concerned, there could not well be two poets more unlike than Cowper and Burns; and their poetry is as unlike as their temperament. I fear Burns indulged in most of the vices against which Cowper inveighs; and not unoften he glorified them in verse. Upon that theme do not ask me to dwell this evening. All it is necessary to point out here is, that in Burns, as in Cowper, and as in Goldsmith, we have the compa.s.sionate note, the note of pity for suffering, of sympathy with the lowly; in a word, we again have the feminine note. In _The Cotter's Sat.u.r.day Night_ Burns paints a picture, as complete as it is simple, of humble life. We have the cotter returning home through the chill November blast with the weary beasts; the collecting of his spades, his mattocks, and his hoes; the arrival at his cottage; the expectant wee things running out to meet him; the ingle-nook blinking bonnily; the cheerful supper of wholesome porridge; the reading of a pa.s.sage from the Bible, the evening hymn, and the family prayer before retiring to rest.

There is a line in _The Cotter's Sat.u.r.day Night_ which might be taken as the text on which most of Burns's poems are written:

The cottage leaves the palace far behind.

All his sympathies are with cottages and cottagers, whether he be expressly describing their existence, writing _A Man's a Man for a' that_, _The Birks of Aberfeldy_, _Auld Lang Syne_, or addressing lines to a mouse whose nest he has turned up with his plough. All are written in a spirit of compa.s.sion for suffering, of sympathy with the lowly, of admiration for honest poverty. They are fundamentally tender, and, though expressed in manly fashion enough, fundamentally feminine, the poetry of a man who lived habitually under the influence of women.

I think it will be allowed that I have given no grudging admiration to the feminine note in English poetry, and in so far as it is a note of sympathy with the more humble and less fortunate ones of the earth. But, in verse, kindly and compa.s.sionate sentiment is not everything. Indeed, it is nothing at all unless it be expressed in such a manner, the manner suffused with charm of style, that it is thereby raised to the dignity of true poetry. There are many excellent persons who accept as poetry any sentiment, or any opinion expressed in metre with which they happen to agree. But neither sound opinion nor wholesome sentiment suffices to produce that exceedingly delicate and subtle thing which alone is rightly termed poetry, and, in abandoning lofty themes, and descending to humbler ones, writers of verse unquestionably expose themselves to the danger not only of not rising above the level of their subject, but even of sinking below it. The Romans had a proverb that you cannot carve a Mercury out of every piece of wood, meaning thereby that by reason of Mercury not being a standing or reposing figure, but a figure flying through the air, and therefore with limbs and wings extended, the material out of which he is made has to be both considerable in size and excellent in quality. What is true of Mercury is truer still of Apollo. You cannot make poetry out of every subject; and your only chance of making poetry out of any subject is to do so by treating the subject either n.o.bly, or with charm. Realism, unadulterated Realism, which is a dangerous experiment in prose, is a sheer impossibility in poetry; for in poetry what is offered us, and what delights us, is not realistic but ideal representation. No doubt the very music of verse is part of the means whereby this ideal representation is effected; but it will not of itself suffice, as may easily be proved by reciting mere nonsense verses in which the rhythm or music may be faultless. I could quote page after page from Cowper, which is verse only, and not poetry, because it is nothing more than the bare statement of a fact set forth in lines consisting of so many feet. Here, for instance, is a specimen. It comes in his poem on _The Sofa_:

Joint-stools were then created, on three legs, Upborne they stood: three legs upholding firm A mossy slab, in fashion square or round.

At length a generation more refined Improved the simple plan, made three legs four, Gave them a twisted form vermicular And o'er the seat with plenteous wadding stuffed Induced a splendid cover, green and blue, Yellow and red, of tapestry richly wrought, And woven close, or needlework sublime.

Perhaps you think this is a parody of Cowper. But I can a.s.sure you it is nothing of the kind. It was written by the poet himself; and in his abounding pages you will find hundreds of verses of this realistic and pedestrian character. But not Cowper alone, one much greater than Cowper, one who rose over and over again to the very heaven of poesy, Wordsworth himself, has likewise left hundreds, aye, thousands of verses, little better than the pa.s.sage I have just read from Cowper, through the mistaken notion that kindly feeling, compa.s.sion for the poor and the patient, and sound moral sentiments, when expressed in verse, must result in poetry.

There is no one here whose admiration of Wordsworth at his best can be greater than mine, but, in order to show you how the feminine note in poetry, the note of sympathy with the weak, the obscure, and the unfortunate, can even in the voice of a great master of poetry, lapse into verse utterly dest.i.tute of the soul and spirit of poetry, I will ask you to allow me to read you a portion of _Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman_:

And he is lean and he is sick; His body, dwindled and awry, Rests upon ankles swoln and thick; His legs are thin and dry.

One prop he has, and only one, His Wife, an aged woman, Lives with him, near the waterfall, Upon the village Common.

Oft, working by her husband's side, Ruth does what Simon cannot do; For she, with scanty cause for pride, Is stouter of the two.

And though you with your utmost skill From labour could not wean them, Alas! 'tis very little--all Which they can do between them.

O Reader! had you in your mind Such stores as silent thought can bring, O gentle Reader! you would find A tale in everything.

What more I have to say is short, And you must kindly take it: It is no tale; but, should you _think_, Perhaps a tale you'll make it.

Is not that sorry stuff, regarded as poetry? Wordsworth here had the a.s.sistance of the music, not only of verse, but of rhyme; and with what a result! It is the feminine note of pity in its dotage, whereby we see that it is not enough to have a warm heart, to have tender feelings, to be full of sympathy for the suffering, and then to express them in verse. In the prose of conversation and of everyday life, kindly feeling is all well enough. But the Heavenly Muse will not place herself at our disposal so readily and cheaply. She is a very difficult lady, is the Heavenly Muse, not easily won, and never allowing you, if you want to remain in her good graces, to approach her, that is to say, in dressing gown and slippers.

She is the n.o.blest and most gracious lady in the world, and the best, the most refined, the most elevating of companions. Therefore you must come into her presence and win her favour, not with free-and-easy gait and in slovenly attire, but arrayed in your very best, and with courtly and deferential mien. When poets wrote of G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses, of mighty sieges, and of the foundation and fall of empires; when their theme was the madness of princes, and the tragic fate of kings, when their hero was Lucifer, Son of the Morning, nay, even when they discoursed of free will and fate, or of the drawing-room intrigues of persons to whom powder, patches, billets-doux were the chief things in existence, there was no need to remind them that their style must be as lofty, as dignified, as refined, or as finished as their subject. No doubt, they sometimes waxed stilted and fell into excess, whether in rhetoric or in conceits, but they never forgot themselves so far as to be slovenly or familiar. Stella, you know, said Swift could write beautifully about a broomstick. Possibly he could; but note the concession, that if a man writes, at least if he would write poetry, he must write _beautifully_. Both Cowper and Wordsworth set the example of writing verse that is not beautiful, though indeed Young in his _Night Thoughts_, and Thomson in _The Seasons_, had already done something of the same kind. But they have not the authority of Cowper, much less the authority of Wordsworth. Let who will be the authority for it, prosaic utterance in verse, realism in rhyme, no matter what the subject, is an incongruity that cannot be too severely condemned. A very large proportion of the verse of Crabbe, once so popular, but now, I fancy, but little read, is of little value, by reason of the presence of this defect. Yet while I indicate, and venture to reprove, the feebleness into which the feminine note in English poetry has too often declined and deteriorated, never let us forget that it has contributed lovely and immortal poetry to the language, poetry to be found in Wordsworth, poetry such as melts us almost to tears in Hood's _Song of the Shirt_, or in Mrs.

Barrett Browning's _The Cry of the Children_. Horace, who was a great critic as well as a great poet, said long ago that it is extremely difficult to express oneself concerning ordinary everyday facts and feelings in a becoming and agreeable manner; and to do this in verse demands supreme genius. As a set-off to the example of feebleness I just now cited in Wordsworth, listen how, when the mood of inspiration is on him, he can see a Highland girl reaping in a field--surely an ordinary everyday sight--and threw around her the heavenly halo of the divinest poetry:

Behold her, single in the field, Yon solitary Highland La.s.s!

Reaping and singing by herself; Stop here, or gently pa.s.s!

Alone she cuts, and binds the grain, And sings a melancholy strain; O listen! for the Vale profound Is overflowing with the sound.

No Nightingale did ever chaunt So sweetly to reposing bands Of Travellers in some shady haunt, Among Arabian sands: A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird, Breaking the silence of the seas Among the farthest Hebrides.

Will no one tell me what she sings?

Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow For old, unhappy, far-off things, And battles long ago: Or is it some more humble lay, Familiar matter of to-day?

Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, That has been, and may be again?

Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang As if her song could have no ending; I saw her singing at her work, And o'er the sickle bending;-- I listened till I had my fill, And when I mounted up the hill, The music in my heart I bore, Long after it was heard no more.

But there is another manifestation of the feminine note in English poetry, distinct from, though doubtless akin to, the one we have been considering; a note which likewise was not heard in it till about a hundred years ago, but which has been heard very frequently since, and which seems at times to threaten to become its dominant and all-prevailing note, or at any rate the only one that is keenly listened to. Instead of the note of interest in and pity for others, it has become the note of interest in and pity either for oneself, or for one's other self; a note so strongly personal and suggestive as to become egotistic and entirely self-regarding. This is the amatory or erotic note, which I think you will all recognise when I give it that designation; the note which appears to consider the love of the s.e.xes as the only important thing in life, and certainly the only thing worth writing or singing about. More than two thousand years ago, a Greek poet wrote a lyric beginning, "I would fain sing of the heroes of the House of Atreus, I would fain chant the glories of the line of Cadmus; but my lyre refuses to sound any note save that of love." In these days the poet who expressed that sentiment and acted on it would have a great many listeners; and no doubt Anacreon, too, had his audience in ancient Greece. But he was not ranked by them side by side with their great poets who _did_ take the tragic story of the House of Atreus for their theme. It can only be when feminine influence is supreme in society and in literature, and when the feminine note in poetry has become, or threatens to become, paramount, that the sentiment and practice of Anacreon is viewed with approbation and favour. Byron has said in a well-known pa.s.sage:

For love is of man's life a thing apart; 'Tis woman's whole existence.

If I know anything about women, that is a gross exaggeration, unless in the term love be included love of parents, love of brothers and sisters, love of children, in a word, every form and manifestation of affection.

Still it is not necessary to deny--indeed if it be true it is necessary to admit--that love, in the narrower if more intense signification of the word, does play a larger part in the lives, or at any rate in the imagination, of most women than it does in the lives and the imagination of most men; and it is not to be denied that practically all women, and a fair sprinkling of men, now take an almost exclusive interest in the amatory note in poetry. Nor let any one say that this was always so, and that poetry and poets have from time immemorial occupied themselves mainly with the pa.s.sion of love. Indeed they have not done so. It would be to show an utter ignorance of the genius of Homer, of the great Greek dramatists, of Virgil, of Dante, of Spenser, of Shakespeare, of Milton, and of the temper of the times in which they lived, to say that they could sound only notes of love. They sounded these sometimes, but seldom and rarely, in comparison with their other and more masculine notes, and always in due subordination to these. I will not go so far as to say that they thought, with Napoleon, that love is the occupation of the idle, and the idleness of the occupied, but they knew that however absorbing for a season the pa.s.sion of love as described by many poets and by nearly all modern novelists may be, it _is_ a thing apart; and, as such, they dealt with it. They did not ignore its existence, or even its importance, but they did not exaggerate its existence and its importance, relatively to other interests, other occupations, other duties in life. It was because of the high fealty and allegiance which Spenser declared he owed to all womankind that he did not represent women as perpetually sighing or being sighed for by men. It was because Shakespeare had such absolute familiarity, not with this or that part of life, but with the whole of it, that even in _Romeo and Juliet_, in _Oth.e.l.lo_, in _Measure for Measure_, and again in _As You Like It_, he represented the pa.s.sion of love at work and in operation along with other sentiments and other pa.s.sions; and, in the greater portion of his dramas either does not introduce it at all, or a.s.signs to it a quite subordinate place. In _Romeo and Juliet_ the brave Mercutio, the Tybalt "deaf to peace," the garrulous nurse, the true apothecary, the comfortable Friar, as Juliet calls him, all these and more, have their exits and their entrances, and all, in turn, demand our attention. _Romeo and Juliet_ is a love-drama indeed; but even in _Romeo and Juliet_, though love occupies the foremost place and plays the leading part, it stands in relation to other pa.s.sions and other characters, and moves onward to its doom surrounded and accompanied by a medley of other circ.u.mstances and occurrences; just as true love, even the most engrossing, does in real life. The same just apprehension of life, the same observance of accurate proportion between the action of love and the action of other pa.s.sions and other interests, may be observed in _Oth.e.l.lo_. Oth.e.l.lo is not represented merely as a man who is consumed and maddened by jealousy, but as a citizen and a soldier, encompa.s.sed by friends and enemies, and brought into contact, not with Desdemona and Iago alone, but with the Duke of Venice, with valiant Ca.s.sio, with witty Montano, with Brabantio, with Gratiano, in a word with people and things in general.

Neither would it be any more to the purpose to object that Herrick, that Suckling, that Lovelace, and other poets of the seventeenth century wrote love-lyrics by the score, with many of which I have no doubt you are acquainted, and some of which are very beautiful. For these, for the most part, were amatory exercises, not real breathing and burning love-poems; dainty works of art sometimes, but not sicklied o'er with the pale cast of amatory pa.s.sion. They were seventeenth-century reminiscences of the conventional love-lyrics of the Troubadours of Provence, when there existed an imaginary court of Love and a host of imaginary lovers.

Indeed, if I were asked what was the truest and most succinct note uttered by their English imitators, I think I should have to say that I seem to catch it most distinctly in the lines of Suckling beginning:

Why so pale and wan, fond lover?

Prithee, why so pale?

--and ending with:

If of herself she will not love, Nothing can make her: The devil take her!

But we catch a very different amatory note, and that of the most personal and earnest kind, when the voice of Burns, and then the voice of Byron, were heard in English poetry. In Byron the note is almost always pa.s.sionate. In Burns it is sometimes sentimental, sometimes jovial, sometimes humorous, sometimes frankly and offensively coa.r.s.e. Many readers cannot do full justice to the North-Country dialect in the following lines, but the most Southern of accents could not quite spoil their simple beauty:

The westlin wind blaws loud an' shrill; The night's baith mirk and rainy, O; But I'll get my plaid, an' out I'll steal, An' owre the hills to Nannie, O.

Her face is fair, her heart is true, As spotless as she's bonnie, O: The op'ning gowan, wat wi' dew, Nae purer is than Nannie, O.

That is one amatory, one feminine note in Burns. Here is another:

There's nought but care on every han', In every hour that pa.s.ses, O; What signifies the life o' man, An' 'twere na for the la.s.ses, O.