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CHAPTER XI The Course of English Poetry – 3
THE Elizabethan drama is an expression of the stir of the life-spirit; at its best it is great or strong, buoyant or rich or beautiful, passionately excessive or gloomily tenebrous force of vital poetry. The ret of the utterance of the time is full of the lyric joy, sweetness or emotion or moved and coloured self-description of the same spirit. There is much in it of curious and delighted thinking, but little of a high and firm intellectual value. Culture is still in its imaginative childhood and the thinking mind rather works for the curiosity and beauty of thought and even more for the curiosity and beauty of the mere expression of thought than for its light and its vision. The poetry which comes out of this mood is likely to have great charm and imaginative, emotional or descriptive appeal, but may very well miss that depth of profounder substance and that self-possessing plenitude of form which are the other characteristics of a rounded artistic creation. Beauty of poetical expression abounds in an unstinted measure, but for the music of a deeper spirit or higher significance we have to wait; the attempt at it we get, but not often all the success of its presence. Spenser, the poet of second magnitude of the time, gives us in his work this beauty in its fullest abundance but also the limited measure of this deeper but not quite successful endeavour. The Faerie Queene is indeed a poem of unfailing imaginative charm and its two opening cantos are exquisite in execution; a stream of liquid harmony, of curiously opulent, yet finely tempered description, of fluid poetical phrase and minutely seen image, -for these are Spenser’s constant gifts, the native form of his genius which displays more of descriptive vision than of the larger creative power or narrative force, -they work out an inspired idea, a little too much lost in detail and in the diffusion of a wealthy prolixity but still holding well together its rather Page – 75 difficult and entangling burden of symbols and forms and achieving in the end some accomplished totality of fine poetic effect. But if we look at the poem as a whole, the effect intended fails, not because it happened to be left unfinished, nor even because the power in it is not equally sustained and is too evidently running thinner and thinner as it proceeds, but because it could not have come to a successful completion. Kalidasa’s Birth of the War-God we left unfinished, or finished by a very inferior hand, yet even in the fragment there is already masterly totality of effect; there is the sense of a great and admirable design. Virgil’ Aeneid, though in a way finished, did not receive those last touches which sometimes make all the difference between perfection and the approach to it, and we feel too, not a failure of art, -for that is a defect which could never be alleged against Virgil, -but a relative thinning of the supporting power and inspiration. Still the consummate artistic intelligence of the poet has been so steadily at work, so complete from the very inception, it has so thought out and harmonized its idea from the beginning that a fine and firm total effect is still given. But here there is a defect of the artistic intellect, a vice or insufficiency in its original power of harmonizing construction, characteristic of the Elizabethan, almost of the English mind. Spenser’s intention seems to have been to combine in his own way the success of Ariosto with the success of Dante. His work was to have been a rich and beautiful romance and at the same time a great interpretation by image and symbol, not here of the spiritual but of the ethical meaning of human life. A faery-tale and an ethical symbol in one is his conception of his artistic task. That is a kind of combination difficult enough to execute, but capable of a great and beautiful effect in a master hand; it had been achieved with supreme success by Homer and Valmiki. But the Elizabethan intellectual direction runs always towards conceit and curious complication and it is unable to follow an idea for the sake of what is essential in it, but tangles it up in all sorts of turns and accessories; seizing on all manner of disparates it tends to throw them together without any real fusion. Spenser in his idea and its execution fell a victim to all these defects of the intelligence. He had taken his intellectual Page – 76 scheme from his Hellenism, the virtues to be figured in typical human beings, but dressed it up with the obvious mediaeval ingenuity of the allegory. Nor is he satisfied with a simple combination; the turn of the allegory must be at once ethical, ecclesiastical and political in one fell complexity, his witch of Faery-land represents Falsehood, the Roman Catholic Church and Mary Queen of Scots in an irritating jumble. The subject of a poem of this kind has to be the struggle of the powers of good and evil, but the human figures through whom it works out to its issues, cannot be merely the good or the evil, this or that virtue or vice, but must stand for them as their expressive opportunity of life, not as their allegorical body. That is how Homer and Valmiki work out their idea. Spenser, a great poet, is not blind to this elementary condition, but his tangled skein of allegory continually hampers the sounder conception and the interpretative narration works itself through the maze of its distractions which we are obliged to accept, not for their own interest or living force and appeal, but for the beauty of the poetic expression and description to which they give occasion. Besides this fault of the initial conception, there are defects in the execution. After a time at least the virtues and vices altogether lose their way in faery-land or they become mistily vague and negligible which is, but considering the idea of the poem ought not to be, a great relief to the reader. We are content to read the poem or, still better, each canto apart as a romance and leave the meaning to take care of itself, -what was intended as a great ethical interpretative poem of the human soul, as a series of romantic descriptions and incidents. We see where the defect is when we make a comparison with the two other greater poems which had a similar intention. The Odyssey is a battle of human will and character sup [ported by divine power against evil men and wrathful gods and adverse circumstance and the deaf opposition of the elements, whose scenes move with an easy inevitability between the lands of romance and the romance of actual human life, losing nowhere in the wealth of incident and description either the harmonizing aesthetic colour or the simple central idea. The Ramayana too is made up of first materials which belong to the world of faery romance, but, transformed into an Page – 77 epic greatness, they support easily a grandiose picture of the struggle of incarnate God and Titan, of a human culture expressing the highest order and range of ethical values with a reign of embattled anarchic force, egoistic violence and domination and lawless self-assertion. The whole is of a piece and even in its enormous length and protracted detail there is a victorious simplicity, largeness and unity. The English poet loses himself in the outward, in romantic incident and description pursued by his imagination for their own sake. His idea is often too much and too visibly expressed, yet in the end finds no successful expression. Instead of relying upon the force of his deeper poetic idea to sustain him, he depends on intellectual device and parades his machinery. The thread of connection is wandering and confused. He achieves a diffuse and richly confused perplexity, not a unity. There are the natural limitation of the Elizabethan age, and we have to note them with what may semi at first a disproportionate emphasis, because they are the key to the immediately following reaction of English poetry with its turn in Milton towards a severe and serious intellectual effort and discipline and its fall in Dryden and Pope to a manner which got away from the most prominent defects of the Elizabethan mind at the price of a loss of all its great powers. English poetry before Milton had not passed through any training of the poetic and artistic intelligence; it had abounding energy and power, but no self-discipline of th4e idea. Except in Shakespeare it fails to construct; it at once loses and finds itself in a luxurious indulgence of its power, follows with a loose sweetness or a vehement buoyancy all its impulses good, bad or indifferent. Still what it does achieve, is unique and often superlative in its kind. It achieves an unsurpassed splendour or imaginative vitality, vision of the life spirit, and also an unsurpassed intensity of poetical expression, life venting itself in speech, pouring its lyric emotion, its intimate and intuitive description of itself in passionate detail, thinking aloud in a native utterance of poetry packed with expressive image or felicitous in directness. There is no other poetry which has in at all the same degree this achievement. This poetry is then great in achievement within the limits of its method and substance; but that substance and method Page – 78 belong to the second step of the psychological gradations by which poetry becomes a more and more profound and subtle instrument of the self-expression of the spirit in man. English poetry, I have remarked, followers the grades of this ascension with a singular fidelity of sequence. At first it was satisfied with only a primary superficial response to the most external appearances of life, its visible figures, incidents, primary feelings and characteristics; to mirror these things clearly, justly, with a certain harmony of selection and a just sufficient transmutation in the personality and aesthetic temperament is enough for this earlier type of poetry, all the more easily satisfied because everything is fresh, interesting, stimulating, and the liveliness of the poetic impression replaces the necessity of subtlety or depth. Great poetry can be written in early times with this as its substantial method, but not afterwards when the race mind has begun to make an intenser and more inward response to life. It then becomes the resort of a secondary inspiration which is unable to rise to the full heights of poetic possibility; or else, this external method still persists as part of the outward manner of more subjective creation, but with a demand for more heightened effects and a more penetrating expression. This is what has happened in the Elizabethan age. The external tendency still persists, but it is no longer sufficient. Where it is most preserved, it still demands a more vehement response, strong colours, violent passions, exaggerated figures, out-of-the-way or crowding events. Life is still the Muse of its poetry, but it is a Life which demands to feel itself more and is knocking at the gates of the deeper subjective being. And in all the best work of the time it has already got there, not very deep, but still enough to be initially subjective. Whatever Shakespeare may suggest, -a poet’s critical theories are not always a just clue to his inspiration, -it is not the holding up of a mirror to life and Nature, but a moved and excited reception and evocation. Life throws its impressions, but what seizes upon them is a greater and deeper life-power inn the poet which is not satisfied with mirroring or just beautifully responding, but begins to throw up at once around them its own rich matter of being and so creates something new, more personal, intimate, fuller of an inner vision, Page – 79 emotion, passion itself-expression. This is the source of the new intensity; it is this impulse towards an utterance of the creative life-power within which drives towards the dramatic form and acts with such unexampled power in Shakespeare; at another extremity of the Elizabethan mind, in Spenser, it gets farther away from the actuality of life and takes its impressions as hints only for a purely imaginative creation which has an aim at things symbolic, otherwise revelatory, deeper down in the soul itself, and shadows them out through the magic of romance if it cannot yet intimately seize and express them. Still even there the method of the utterance, if not altogether its aim, is the voice of Life lifting itself out into waves of word and colour and image and sheer beauty of sound. Imagination, thought, vision work with the emotional life-mind as their instrument or rather in it as a medium, accepted as the form and force of their being. Great poetry is the result, but there are other powers of the human mind which have not yet been mastered, and to get at these is the next immediate step of English poetry. The way it follows is to bring forward the intellect as its chief instrument, the thought-mind no longer carried along in the wave of life, but detaching itself from it to observe and reflect upon it. We have at first an intermediate manner, that of Milton’s early work and of the Carolean poets, in which the Elizabethan impulse prolongs itself but is fading away under the stress of an increasing intellectuality. This rises on one side into the ripened classical perfection of Milton, falls away on the other through Waller into the reaction in Dryden and Pope. Page – 80 |