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Chapter VIII
The Character of English Poetry 2
WHAT KIND or quality of poetry should we naturally expect from a national mind so constituted? The Anglo-Saxon strain is dominant and in that circumstance there lay just a hazardous possibility that there might have been no poetical literature at all. The Teutonic nations have in this field been conspicuous by their silence or the rarity of their speech. After the old rude epics, saga or Nibelungenlied, we have to wait till quite recent times for poetic utterance, nor, when it came, was it rich or abundant. In Germany, so rich in music, in philosophy, in science, the great poetic word has burst out rarely: one brief and strong morning time illumined by the calm, large and steady blaze of Goethe’s genius and the wandering fire of Heine, afterwards a long unlighted stillness. In the North here or there a solitary genius, Ibsen, Strindberg. Holland, another Teutonic country which developed an art of a considerable but almost wholly objective power, is mute in poetry.1 It would almost seem that there is still something too thick and heavy in the strength and depth of the Teutonic composition for the ethereal light and fire of the poetic word to make its way freely through the intellectual and vital envelope. What has saved the English mind from a like taciturnity? It must have been the mixture of other racial strains, sublimating this strong but heavy material temperament with a quicker and more impetuous element; the submerged Celtic genius must have pushed the rest from behind, intervening as a decisive force to liberate and uplift the poetic spirit. And as a necessary aid we have the fortunate accident of the reshaping of a Teutonic tongue
1 I do not include here any consideration of contemporary names; it would be unsafe to go by the great reputations of today which may sink tomorrow to a much lower status. Page – 53 by French and Latinistic influences which gave it clearer and more flowing forms and turned it into a fine though difficult linguistic material sufficiently malleable, sufficiently plastic for Poetry to produce in it both her larger and her subtler effects, but also sufficiently difficult to compel her to put forth her greatest energies. A stuff of speech which, without being harsh and inapt, does not tempt by too great a facility, but offers a certain resistance in the material, increases the strength of the artist by the measure of the difficulty conquered and can be thrown into shapes at once of beauty and of concentrated power. That is eminently the character of the English language. At any rate we have this long continuity of poetic production. And once supposing a predominantly Anglo-Saxon or, more strictly an Anglo-Norman national mind moved to express itself in poetry, we should, ignoring for a moment the Celtic emergence, expect the groundwork to be a strong objective poetry, a powerful presentation of the forms of external life, a ready and energetic portrayal of action and character in action, the pleasant or the melancholy outsides of Nature, the robust play of the will and the passions, a vigorous flow of a strenuous vital and physical verse creation. Even we might look for a good deal of deviation into themes and motives for which prose will always be the more adequate and characteristic instrument; we should not be surprised to meet here a self-styled Augustan age which makes these things the greater part of its realm and indulges with a self-satisfied contentment in a confident and obvious “criticism” of external life, preferring to more truly poetic forms and subjects the poetry of political and ecclesiastical controversy, didactic verse, satire. There would be in this Anglo-Norman poetry a considerable power of narrative and a great energy in the drama of character and incident; but any profounder use of the narrative and dramatic forms we would not look for, — at most we might arrive in the end at some powerful dramatic analysis of character. The romantic element would be of an external Teutonic kind sensational and outward, appealing to the life and the senses; there would be no touch of the delicate and beautiful imaginative, mystic and almost spiritual Celtic Page – 54 romanticism. We should have perhaps much poetical thinking or even poetical philosophy of a rather obvious kind, sedate or vigorous, prompt and direct or robustly powerful, but not the finer and subtler poetic thought which comes easily to the clear Latin intellect. Form too of a kind we might hope for, though we could not be quite sure of it, but at best bright and plain or strongly balanced and not those greater forms in which a high and deep creative thought presides or those more exquisite of which a delicate sense of beauty or a subtle poetic intuition is the magic builder. Both the greater and more profound depths and magnitudes and the subtler intensities of style and rhythm would be absent; but there would be a boldly forcible or a well-beaten energy of speech and much of the more metallic vigours of verse. This side of the national mind would prepare us for English poetry as it was until Chaucer and beyond, for the ground-type of the Elizabethan drama, the work of Dryden and Pope, the whole mass of eighteenth-century verse, Cowper, Scott, Wordsworth in his more outward moments, Byron without his Titanism and unrest, much of the lesser Victorian verse, Tennyson without his surface aestheticism and elaborate finesse, the poetry of Browning. For this much we need not go outside the Anglo-Norman temperament. That also would give, but subject to a potent alchemy of transformation, the basic form and substance of most English poetry. That alchemy we can fairly attribute to the submerged Celtic element which emerges, as time goes on, in bright upstreamings and sometimes in exceptional outbursts of power. It comes up in a blaze of colour, light, emotion and imaginative magic; in a passionate hungering for beauty in its more subtle and delicately sensuous forms, for the ideal which escapes definition and yet has to be seized and cast into interpretative lines; in a lyrical intoxication; in a charm of subtle romance. It casts into the mould a higher urge of thought than the vital common sense of the Saxon can give, not the fine, calm and measured poetical thinking of the Greeks and the Latin races which deals sovereignly with life within the limits of the intellect and the inspired reason, but an excitement of thought seeking for Page –55 something beyond itself and behind life through the intensities of creative sight. It brings in a look upon Nature which pierces beyond her outsides and her external spirit and lays its touch on the mysteries of her inner life and sometimes on that in her which is most intimately spiritual. It awakens rare outbreaks of mysticism, a vein of subtler sentiment, a more poignant pathos; it refines passion from a violence of the vital being into an intensity of the soul, modifies vital sensuousness into a thing of imaginative beauty by a warmer aesthetic perception. It carries with it a seeking for exquisite lyrical form, touches narrative poetry to finer issues, throws its romantic beauty and force and fire and its greater depth of passion across the drama and makes it something more than a tumultuous external action and heavily powerful character-drawing. At one period it strives to rise beyond the English mould, seems about to disengage itself and reveal through poetry the Spirit in things. In language and music it is always a quickening and refining force; where it can do nothing more, it breathes a more intimate energy; where it gets its free characteristic movement, it creates that intensity of style and rhythm, that sheer force of imaginative vision and that peculiar unseizable beauty of turn which are the highest qualities of English poetry. The varied commingling and separating of these two elements mark the whole later course of the literature and present as their effect a side of failure and defect and a side of achievement. There are evidently two opposite powers at work in the same field, often compelled to labour in the same mind at a common production; and when two such opposites can coalesce, seize each other’s motives and, fusing them, become one, the very greatest achievement becomes possible. For each fills in the other’s deficiencies; they light each other up with a new light and bring in a fresh revelation which neither by itself could have accomplished. The greatest things in English poetry have come where this fusion was effected in the creative mind and soul of the poet. But that could not always be done and there results from the failure a frequent uncertainty of motive, a stumbling unsureness of touch, an oscillation, a habit of too often falling Page – 56 short of the mark. It does not prevent great triumphs of poetic power, but it does prevent a high equality and sustained perfection of self-expression and certainty of form. We must expect inequality in all human work, but not necessarily on this scale nor with so frequent and extensive a sinking below what should be the normal level. To the same uncertainty may be attributed the rapid starts and turns of the course of English poetry, its want of conscious continuity, — for there is a secret, underground and inevitable continuity which we have to dig for and disengage. It takes a very different course from the external life of the nation which has always been faithful to its inner motive and spirit and escaped from the shattering and suddenly creative changes that have at once afflicted and quickened the life of other peoples. The revolutions of the spirit of English poetry are extreme and violent, astonishing in their decisiveness and abruptness. We can mark off first the early English poetry which found its solitary greater expression in Chaucer; indeed it marks itself off by an absolute exhaustion and cessation, a dull and black Nirvana. The magnificent Elizabethan outburst has another motive, spirit and manner of expression which seem to have nothing to do with the past; it is a godhead self-born under the impulse of a new age and environment. As this fades away, we see standing high and apart the lonely figure of Milton with his strenuous effort at an intellectual poetry cast in the type of the ancients. The age which succeeds, hardly linked to it by a slender stream of Caroline lyrics, is that of a trivial intellectuality which does not follow the lead of Milton and is the exact contrary of the Elizabethan form and spirit, the thin and arid reign of Pope and Dryden. Another violent and impatient breaking away, a new outburst of wonderful freshness gives us the poetry of Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Blake with another spirit and another language of the spirit. The Victorian period did not deny their influences; it felt them in the first form of its work, and we might have expected it to have gone nobly forward and brought to some high or beautiful issue what had been only a great beginning that did not arrive at its full fruition. But it did nothing of the kind; it deviated Page – 57 into a new way which has nothing to do with the finer spirit of the preceding poets. Descending it fell away into an intellectual, half-artistic, carefully but not finely or sovereignly wrought and mostly superficial and external poetry. And afterwards we have this age which is still trying to find itself, but in its most characteristic tendencies seems to start from a summary rejection of the Victorian forms and motives. These reversals and revolutions of the spirit are not in themselves a defect or a disability; on the contrary, they open the door to large opportunities and unforeseen achievements. English poetical literature has been a series of bold experiments less shackled by the past than in countries which have a stronger sense of cultural tradition. Revolutions are distracting things, but they are often good for the human soul; for they bring a rapid unrolling of new horizons. Here comes in the side of success and greatness in this poetry. There is a force which overrides its defects and compensates richly for its limitations; its lapses and failures are the price it pays for its gains. For nowhere else has individual genius found so free a field; nowhere has it been able to work so directly out of itself and follow so boldly its own line of poetic adventure. Form is a great power, but sureness of form is not everything. A strong tradition of form gives a firm ground upon which genius can work in safety, protected from its own wanderings; but it limits and stands in the way of daring individual adventure. The spirit of adventure, if its path is strewn with accidents, stumblings or fatal casualties, brings, when it does succeed, new revelations which are worth all the price paid for them. English poetry is full of such new revelations. Its richness, its constant freshness, its lavish expenditure of genius exulting in chainless freedom, delivered from all meticulous caution, its fire and penetrating force of imagination, its lambent energy of poetic speech, its constant self-liberation into intensest beauty of self-expression are the rewards of its courage and its liberty. These things are of the greatest value in poetry. They lead besides to possibilities which are of the highest importance to the poetry of the future. We may briefly anticipate and indicate in what manner. We have to accept one constant tendency of the spirit Page – 58 poetry, which loves to dwell with all its weight upon the presentation of life and action, feeling and passion and to give that its full force and make of it the basis and the source and, not only the point of reference, but the utility of all else. A strong hold upon this life, the earth-life, is the characteristic of the English mind, and it is natural that it should take possession of its poetry. The pure Celtic genius leans towards the opposite extreme: it seems to care little for the earth-life for its own sake and has little hold on it or only a light and ethereal hold; it accepts it as a starting-point for the expression of other-life, but is attracted by all that is hidden and secret. The Latin mind insists on the presentation of life, but for the purposes of thought; its eye is on the universal truths and realities of which life is the visible expression, — not the remoter, the spiritual or soul-truths, but those which present themselves to the clarities of the intelligence. But the English mind looks at life and loves it for its own sake, in all its externalities, its play of outer individualities, its immediate subjective idiosyncrasies. Even when it is strongly attracted by other motives, the intellectual, the aesthetic or the spiritual, it seldom follows these with a completely disinterested fidelity, but comes back with them on the external life and tries to subject them to its mould and use them for its purpose. This turn is not universal, — Blake escapes from it; nor is it the single dominant power, — Keats and Shelley and Wordsworth have their hearts elsewhere: but it is a constant power; it attracts even the poets who have not a real genius for it and vitiates their work by the immixture of an alien motive. This objective and external turn might be strong enough in some other arts, — fiction, for instance, or painting or sculpture, — to create a clear national tradition and principle of form, but not easily in poetry. For here the mere representation of life cannot be enough, however vivid or however strongly subjected to the law of poetic beauty it may be. Poetry must strive at least towards a presentation from within and not at simple artistic reproduction; and the principle of presentation must be something more than that of the eye on the visible object. It is by a process from within, a passing of all one meets, thinks or feels Page – 59 through some kind of intimately subjective vision that life is turned into poetry. If this subjective medium is the inspired reason or the intuitive mind, the external presentation of life gives place inevitably to an interpretation, a presentation in which its actual lines are either neglected or subordinated in order that some inner truth of it may emerge. But in English poetry the attempt is to be or at least to appear true to the actual lines of life, to hold up a mirror to Nature. It is the mirror then which has to do the poetising of life; the vital, the imaginative, the emotional temperament of the poet is the reflecting medium and it has to supply unaided the creative and poetical element. We have then a faithfully unfaithful reflection which always amounts to a transformation, because the temperament of the poet lends to life and Nature its own hues, its own lines, its own magnitudes. But the illusion of external reality, of an “imitation” of Nature is created, — the illusion which has been for so long a first canon of Western artistic conceptions, — and the English mind which carries this tendency to an extreme, feels then that it is building upon the safe foundation of the external and the real; it is satisfied of the earth even when it is singing in the heavens. But this sole reliance on the temperament of the poet has certain strong results. It gives an immense importance to individuality, much greater than that which it must always have in poetical creation: the transformation of life and Nature in the individuality becomes almost the whole secret of this poetry. Therefore English poetry is much more powerfully and consciously personal and individual than that of any other language; it aims much less directly at the impersonal and universal. This individual subjective element creates enormous differences between the work of poets of the same age; they cannot escape from the common tendencies, but give to them a quite independent turn and expression and subordinate them to the assertion of the individuality; in other literatures, until recently, the reverse has oftener happened. Besides, the higher value given to the intensity of the imaginative, vital or emotional response favours and is perhaps a first cause of that greater intensity of speech and immediate vision which is the strength of English poetry. Page – 60 For since the heightening cannot come mainly from the power and elevation of the medium through which life is seen, as in Greek and ancient Indian poetry, it has to come almost entirely from the individual response in the poet, his force of personal utterance, his intensity of personal vision. Three general characteristics emerge. The first is a constant reference and return of the higher poetical motives to the forms of external life, as if the enriching of that life were its principal artistic aim. The second is a great force of subjective individuality and personal temperament as a leading power of poetic creation. The third is a great intensity of speech and ordinarily of a certain kind of direct vision. But in the world’s literature generally these are the tendencies that have been on the increase and two of them at least are likely to be persistent. There is everywhere a considerable stressing of the individual subjective element, a drift towards making the most of the poet’s personality, an aim at a more vivid response and the lending of new powers of colour and line from within to the vision of life and Nature, a search for new intensities of word and rhythm which will translate into speech a deeper insight. In following out the possible lines of the future the defect of the English mind is its inability to follow the higher motives disinterestedly to their deepest and largest creative results, but this is being remedied by new influences. The entrance of the pure Celtic temperament into English poetry through the Irish revival is likely to do much; the contribution of the Indian mind in work like Tagore’s may act in the same direction. If this change is effected, the natural powers of the English spirit will be of the highest value to the future poetry. For that poetry is likely to move to the impersonal and universal, not through the toning down of personality and individuality, but by their heightening to a point where they are liberated into the impersonal and universal expression. Subjectivity is likely to be its greater power, the growth to the universal subjective enriched by all the forces of the personal soul-experience. The high intensity of speech which English poetry has brought to bear upon all its material, its power of giving the fullest and richest Page – 61 value to the word and the image, is needed for the expression of the values of the spiritual, which will be one of the aims of a supreme intuitive utterance. If the pursuit of the higher godheads into their own sphere will be one of its endeavours, their return upon the earth-life to transform our vision of it will be its other side. If certain initial movements we can even now see in English poetry outline and emphasise themselves in the future, this long stream of strong creation and utterance may arrive at a point where it will discover a supreme utility for all its past powers. It may go deeper within itself and find and live in the greater spirit which has till now only occasionally broken into its full native utterance. Arriving at a more comprehensive spiritual motive it may successfully interweave into it the conflicting lines of its past forces. It may achieve clear and powerful forms of a new intuitive utterance in which the Anglo-Celtic spirit will find its highest harmonised and perfect self-expression. The Elizabethan poet wrote in the spacious days of its first birth into greatness, Or who can tell for what great work in hand The greatness of our style is now ordained? What powers it shall bring in, what spirits command? It has since brought in many powers, commanded many spirits; but it may be that the richest powers, the highest and greatest spirit yet remain to be found, brought in, commanded, put into the service of the greatest work and achievement of which our evolving humanity is capable. Page – 62 |