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CHAPTER XII The Course of English Poetry – 4
IN THE work of the intellectual and classical age of English poetry, one is again struck by the same phenomenon that we meet throughout, of a great power of achievement limited by a characteristic defect which turns to failure, wastes the power spent and makes the total result much inferior to what it should have been with so much nerve of energy to speed it or so broad a wing of genius to raise it into the highest heights of the empyrean. The mind of this age went for its sustaining influence and its suggestive models to Greece, Rome and France. That we inevitable; for these have been the three intellectual nations, their literatures have achieved, each following its own different way and spirit, the best in form and substance that that kind of inspiration can produce, and not having the root of the matter in itself, the inborn intellectual depth and subtlety, the fine classical lucidity and aesthetic taste, if the attempt was to be made at all, it was here that the English mind must turn. Steeping itself in these sources, it might have blended with the classical clarity and form its own masculine force and strenuousness, its strong imagination, its deeper colour and profounder intuitive suggestiveness and arrived at something new and great to which the world could have turned as another supreme element of its aesthetic culture. But the effect did not answer to the possibility. To have arrived at it, it was essential to keep, transmuted, all that was best in the Elizabethan spirit and to colour, enrich and sweeten with its touch the classical form and the intellectual motive. There was instead a breaking away, a decisive rejection, an entirely new attempt with no roots in the past. In the end not only was the preceding structure of poetry abolished, but all its Muses were expelled; a stucco imitation classical temple, very elegant, very cold and very empty, was erected and the gods of satire and didactic commonplace set up in a shrine which was Page – 81 built more like a coffee-house than a sanctuary. A sterile brilliance, a set polished rhetoric was the poor final outcome. The age set out with a promise of better things; for a time it seemed almost on the right path. Milton’s early poetry is the fruit of a strong classical intellectuality still touched with the glow and beauty of a receding romantic colour, emotion and vital intuition. Many softer influences have woven themselves together into his high language and rhythm and been fused in his personality into something wonderfully strong and rich and beautiful. Suggestions and secrets have been caught from Chaucer, Peele, Spenser, Shakespeare, and their hints have given a strange grace to a style whose austerity of power has been nourished by great classical influences; Virgilian beauty and majesty, Lucretian grandeur and Aeschylean sublimity coloured or mellowed by the romantic elements and toned into each other under the stress of an original personality make the early Miltonic manner which maintains a peculiar blending of greatness and beauty not elsewhere found in English verse. The substance is often slight, for it is as yet Milton’s imagination rather than his soul or his whole mind that is using the poetic form, though the form itself is of a faultless beauty. But still here we already have the coming change, the turning of the intelligence upon life to view it from its own intellectual centre of vision. Some of the Elizabethans had attempted it, but with no great poetical success; when they wrote their best, then even though they tried to think closely and strongly, life took possession of the thought or rather itself quivered out into thought-expression. Here, on the contrary, even in the two poems that are avowedly expressions of vital moods, it is yet the intellect and its imaginations that are making the mood a material for reflective brooding, not the life-mood itself chanting its own sight and emotion. In the minor Carolean poets too we have some lingering of the colours of the Elizabethan sunset, something of the life-sense and emotional value, but, much thinned and diluted, finally they die away into trivialities of the intelligence playing insincerely with the objects of the emotional being. For here too the idea already predominates, is already rather looking at the thing felt than taken up in the feeling. Some of this work is even mystical, but that too Page – 82 suffers from the same characteristic; the opening of an age of intellect was not the time when a great mystical poetry could be created. In the end we find the change complete; colour has gone, sweetness has vanished, song has fallen into a dead hush: for a whole long century the lyrical faculty disappears from the English tongue, to reawaken again first in the Celtic north. Only the grandiose epic chant of Milton breaks the complete silence of genuine poetry; but it is a Milton who has turned away from the richer beauty and promise of his youth, lost the Virgilian accent, put away from him all delicacies of colour and grace and sweetness to express only in fit greatness of speech and form the conception of Heaven and Hell and man and the universe which his imagination had constructed out his intellectual beliefs and reviewed in the vision of his soul,. One might speculate on what we might have had if, instead of writing after the long silence during which he was absorbed in political controversy until public and private calamities compelled him to go back into himself, he had written his master work in a continuity of ripening from his earlier style and vision. Nothing quite so great perhaps, but surely something more opulent and otherwise perfect. As it is, it is by Paradise Lost that he occupies his high rank among the poets; that is the one supreme fruit of the attempt of English poetry to seize the classical manner, to achieve a poetical expression disciplined by a high intellectual severity and to forge a complete balance and measured perfection of form. Paradise Lost is assuredly a great poem, one of the five great epical poems of European literature, and in certain qualities it reaches heights which no other of them had attained, even though as a whole it comes a long way behind them. Rhythm and speech have never attained to mightier amplitude of epic expression and movement, seldom to an equal sublimity. And to a great extent Milton has done in this respect what he had set out to do; he has given English poetic speech a language of intellectual thought which is of itself highly poetic expression except those which are always essential and indispensable, a speech which is in its very grain poetry and in its very grain intellectual Page – 83 thought-utterance. This is always the aim of the classical poet in his style and movement, and Milton has fulfilled it, adding at the same time that peculiar grandeur in both the soul and manner of the utterance and in both the soul and the gait of the rhythm which belongs to him alone of poets. These qualities are, besides, easily sustained throughout, because with him they are less and art, great artist though he is, than the natural language of his spirit and the natural sound of its motion. His aim too is high, his subject loftier than that of any one of his predecessors except Dante; there is nowhere any more magnificently successful opening than the conception and execution of his Satan and Hell, the living spirit of egoistic revolt fallen to its natural element of darkness and pain, yet preserving still the greatness of the divine principle from which he was born. If the rest had been equal to the opening, there would have been no greater poem, few as great in literature. Here, too, the performance failed the promise. Paradise Lost commands admiration, but as a whole, apart from its opening, it has failed either to go home to the heart of the world and lodge itself in its imagination or to enrich sovereignly what we may describe as the acquired stock of its more intimate poetical thought and experience. But the poem that does neither of these things, however fine its powers of language and rhythm, has missed its best aim. The reason is not to be found in the disparity between Milton’s professed aim, which was to justify the ways of God to man, and his intellectual means for fulfilling it. The theology of the Puritan religion was a poor enough aid for so ambitious a purpose, but the Scriptural legend treated was still quite sufficient poetically if only it had received throughout a deeper interpretation. Dante’s theology, though it has the advantage of the greater richness of import and spiritual experience of mediaeval Catholicism, is still intellectually insufficient, but through his primitive symbols Dante has seen and has revealed things which make his work poetically great and sufficient,. It is here that Milton has failed. Nor is the failure mainly intellectual. It is true that he had not an original intellectuality, his mind was rather scholastic and traditional, but he had an originally soul and personality and the vision of a poet. To justify the ways of God Page – 84 to man intellectually is not the province of poetry; what it can do, is to reveal them. Yet just here is the pointy of failure. Milton has seen Satan and Death and Sin and Hell and Chaos; there is a Scriptural greatness in his account of these things: he has not so seen God and heaven and man or the soul of humanity at once divine and fallen, subject to evil and striving for redemption; here there is no inner greatness in the poetic interpretation of his materials. In other words, he has ended by stumbling over the rock of offence that always awaits poetry in which the intellectual element becomes too predominant, the fatal danger of a failure of vision. This failure extends itself to all the elements of his later poetry; it is definitive and he never, except in passages, recovered from it. His language and rhythm remain unfalteringly great to the end, but they are only a splendid robe and the body they clothe is a nobly carved but lifeless image. His architectural structure is always greatly and classically proportioned; but structure has two elements or, perhaps we should say, two methods, that which is thought out and that which grows from an inward artistic and poetic vision. Milton’s structures are thought out; they have not been seen, much less been lived out into their inevitable measure and free inspired lines of perfection. The difference becomes evident by a simple comparison with Homer and Dante or even with the structural power, much less inspired and vital than theirs, but always finely aesthetic and artistic, of Virgil. Poetry may be intellectual, but only in the sense of having a strong intellectual strain in it and of putting forward as its aim the play of imaginative thought in the service of the poetical intelligence; but that must be supported very strongly by the emotion or sentiment or by the imaginative vision to which the idea opens. Milton’s earlier work is suffused by his power of imaginative vision, the opening books of Paradise Lost are upborne by the greatness of the soul that finds expression in its harmonies of speech and sound and the greatness of its sight. But in the later books and still more in the Samson Agonistes and the Paradise Regained this flame sinks; the sight, the thought become intellectually externalized. Milton writing poetry could never fail in a certain greatness and power, nor could he descend, as Page – 85 did Wordsworth and others, below his well attained poetical level, but the supreme vitalising fire has sunk; the method and idea retain sublimity, the deeper spirit has departed. Much greater, initial and essential was the defect in the poetry that followed. Here all is unredeemed intellectuality and even the very first elements of the genuine poetic inspiration are for the most part, one might almost say, entirely absent. Pope and Dryden and their school, except now and then, -Dryden especially has lines sometimes in which he suddenly rises above his method, -are busy only with one aim, with thinking in verse, thinking with a clear force, energy and point or with a certain rhetorical pomp and effectiveness, in a well-turned and well-polished metrical system. That seems to have been their sole idea of “numbers”, of poetry, and it is an idea of unexampled falsity. No doubt this was a necessary phase, and perhaps, the English mind being what it then was, being always so much addicted in its poetry to quite the reverse method, it had to go to an extreme, to sacrifice even for a time man7y of its native powers in order to learn as best it could how to arrive at the clear and straightforward expression of thought with a just, harmonious and lucid turn; an inborn gift in all the Latin tongues, in a half-Teutonic speech attacked by the Celtic richness of imagination it had to be acquired. But the sacrifice made was great and cost much effort of recovery to the later development of the language. These writers got rid of the Elizabethan confusions, the involved expression, the lapses into trailing and awkward syntax, the perplexed turn in which ideas and images jostle and stumble together, fall into each other’s arms and strain and burden the expression in a way which is sometimes stimulating; they got rid too of the crudeness and extravagance; but also of all the rich imagination and vision, the sweetness, lyrism, grace and colour. They replaced it with mere point and false glitter. They got rid too of Milton’s Latinisms and poetic inversions, -though they replaced them by some merely rhetorical artifices or their own, – dismissed his great and packed turns of speech and replaced his grandeurs by what they thought to be noble style, though it was no more than spurious rhetorical pomp. Page – 86 Still the work they had to do they did effectively, with talent, energy, even a certain kind of genius. Therefore, if the substance of this poetry had been of real worth, it would have been less open to depreciation and need not have excited so vehement a reaction or fallen so low from its exaggerated pride of place. But the substance was on a par with, often below the method. It took for its models the Augustan poets of Rome, but it substituted for the strength and weight of the Latin manner an exceeding superficiality and triviality. It followed more really contemporary French models, but missed their best ordinary qualities, their culture taste, tact of expression, and missed too the greater gifts of the classical French poetry, which though it may suffer by its excessive cult of reason and taste or its rhetorical tendency, m run often in too thin a stream, has yet ideas, power, a strong nobility of character in Corneille, a fine grace of poetic sentiment in Racine. But this poetry cares nothing for such gifts: it is occupied with expressing thought, but its thought is of little or no value; for the most part it is brilliant commonplace, and even ideas which have depths behind them become shallow and external by the way of their expression. The thought of these writers has no real eye on life except when it turns to satire. Therefore that is the part of their work which is still most alive; for here the Anglo-Saxon spirit gets back to itself, leaves the attempt at a Gallicised refinement, finds its own robust vigour and arrives at a brutal, but still genuine and sometime really poetic vigour and truth of expression. Energy, driving force is, however, a general merit of the verse of Pope and Dryden and in this one respect they excel their nearest French exemplars. Their expression is striking in its precision, each couplet rings out with a remarkable force of finality and much coin of their minting has passed into common speech and citation: it is not gold of poetry for all that, but it is well-gilt copper coin of good currency. But all turns to a monotonous brilliance of language, a monotonous decisiveness and point of rhythm. It has to be read by couplets and passages, for each poem is only a long string of these and except in one instance the true classical gift, the power of structure is quite wanting. The larger thought-power which is necessary for structure was absent. Page – 87 This intellectual age of English poetry did its work, but, as must happen when there is in art a departure from what is best in the national mind, ended in a failure and for a time even a death of the true poetic faculty. Page – 88 |