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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, an extraordinary force for achievement limited by a characteristic defect which turns in the actual execution to half-success or a splendid failure. A big streak of rawness somewhere, a wrong turn of the hand or an imperfect balance of the faculties 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 empyrean heights. The mind of this age went for its sustaining influence and its suggestive models to Greece, Rome and France. That was inevitable; for these have been the three typically intellectual nations of Europe. It is these three literatures that have achieved, each following its own different way and peculiar spirit, the best in form and substance that that kind of inspiration can produce. The English mind, not natively possessed of any inborn intellectual depth and subtlety, not trained to a fine classical lucidity and sure aesthetic taste, had to turn to these sources, if the attempt was to be made at all. Steeping itself in these sources, it might hope to blend with the classical clarity and form its own masculine force and strenuousness, its strong imagination, its deeper colour and profounder intuitive suggestiveness and so arrive at something new and great to which the world could turn as another supreme element of its aesthetic culture. But the effect actually obtained did not answer to the possibility offered. To arrive at this perfection, this new turn of poetry ought to have kept, transmuted but not diminished, all that was best in the Elizabethan spirit and to have coloured, enriched and sweetened with its magic touch the classical form and the intellectual motive. There was instead a revolutionary departure, a breaking away, decisive rejection, Page – 90 and entirely new attempt with no roots in the past. In the end not only was the preceding structure of poetry abolished, but all its strong and brilliant Muses were expelled from their seats. A stucco imitation classical temple, very elegant, very cold and very empty, was erected in the vacant place, and the gods of satire and didactic commonplace set up in a shrine which was 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 a glow and beauty which has been left by a fast receding tide of romantic colour, spontaneous warmth of emotion and passion and vital intuition, gifts of a greater depth and force of life. Many softer influences wove themselves together into his high language and rhythm and were fused in his personality into something wonderfully strong, rich and beautiful. Suggestions and secrets were caught from Chaucer, Peele, Spenser, Shakespeare, and their hints gave a strange grace to a style whose austerity of power had been nourished by great classical influences. A touch of Virgilian beauty and majesty, a poise of Lucretian grandeur, a note of Aeschylean sublimity, the finest gifts of the ancients coloured or mellowed by richer romantic elements and subtly toned into each other, entered in and helped to prepare the early Miltonic manner. Magnified and exalted by the stress of an original personality, noble and austere, their result was the blending of a peculiar kind 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; but the form itself is of a faultless beauty. Already, in spite of this slenderness of substance, we can see the coming change; the retreat of the first exuberant life-force and a strong turning of the intelligence upon life to view it sedately from its own intellectual centre of vision are now firmly in evidence. Some of the Elizabethans had tried their hand at this turn, but with no great poetical success; when they wrote their best, even though they tried to think closely and Page – 91 strongly, life took possession of the thought or itself quivered out into thought-expression. Here on the contrary, even in the two poems that are avowedly expressions of vital moods, it is the intellect and its imaginations that are making the mood a material for reflective brooding; there is no longer here the free and spontaneous life mood chanting its own sight and emotion to its own moved delight. In the minor Carolean poets we have some lingering of the colours of the Elizabethan sunset; something of the life-sense and quick emotional value are still there but too thinned and diluted to support any intensity or greatness of speech or manner, and finally they die away into trivialities of the intelligence playing insincerely with the movements of the emotional nature. For the reflective idea already predominates over sight and intimate emotion; the mind is looking at the thing felt and is no longer taken up and carried away in the wave of feeling. Some of this work is mystic in its subject or motive; but that too, except in some luminous lines or passages, suffers from the same desiccating influence. The opening of an age of intellect was not the time when a great mystical poetry could leap into existence. This ebb is rapid and the change is soon complete. The colour has faded, the sweetness has vanished, song has fallen into a dead hush. For a whole long dry metallic century the lyrical faculty disappeared from the English tongue. The grandiose epic chant of Milton breaks what would be otherwise a complete silence of all higher or profounder poetic power; 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 Pagan 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 built out of his beliefs and reviewed in the vision of his soul. One is moved to speculate on what we might have had from him if, instead of writing after the long silence of his poetic genius during which he remained absorbed in barren political controversy until public and private calamities compelled him to go back to himself and his true power, he had written his master work in a Page – 92 ripened continuity and deepened strength of his earlier style and vision. Nothing quite so great perhaps, but surely something more opulent, many-toned and perfect. As things happened, it is by Paradise Lost that he occupies his high rank among the poets. That too imperfect grandiose epic is the one supreme fruit left by the attempt of English poetry to seize the classical manner, achieve beauty of poetic expression disciplined by a high intellectual severity and forge a complete balance and measured perfection of architectonic form and structure. Paradise Lost is one of the few great epic poems in the world’s literature; certain qualities in it reach heights which no other of them had climbed, even though as a whole it has defects and elements of failure which are absent in the other great world epics. Rhythm and speech have never attained to a mightier amplitude of epic expression and movement; seldom has there been an equal sublimity of flight. 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 without depending on any of the formal aids of poetic expression except those which are always essential and indispensable, a speech which succeeds by its own intrinsic force and is in its very grain poetry and in its very grain inspired intellectual thought-utterance. This is always the aim of the classical poet in his style and movement, and Milton has fulfilled it. At the same time he has raised this achievement to a highest possible pitch by that peculiar grandeur in the soul and manner of the utterance and that magnificence of sound-tones and amplitude of gait in the rhythm which belong to him alone of poets. These qualities are easily sustained throughout this long work, because with him they are less an art, great artist though he is, than the natural language of his spirit and the natural sound of its motion. His aim 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; nowhere has there been a more powerful portraiture of the living spirit of egoistic revolt fallen to its natural element of darkness and pain Page – 93 and yet still sustained by the greatness of the divine principle from which it was born, even when it has lost oneness with it and faces it with dissonance and defiance. If the rest of the epic had been equal to its opening books, there would have been no greater poem, few as great in literature. But here too the total performance failed and fell below the promise. Paradise Lost compels our admiration throughout by its greatness of style and rhythm, but as a whole, in spite of its mighty opening, its whole substance as distinct from its more magnificent or striking parts has failed to enter victoriously either into the mind or into the heart of the world; much of it has not lodged itself deeply in its imagination or enriched sovereignly the acquired stock of its more intimate poetical thought and experience. But the poem that does neither of these things, however noble its powers of language and rhythm, has missed its destiny. 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 the intellectual means available to him for fulfilling his purpose. The theology of the Puritan religion was a poor enough aid for so ambitious a purpose; but the Scriptural legend treated was poetically sufficient if only it had received throughout a deeper interpretation. Dante’s theology had the advantage of the richness of import and spiritual experience of mediaeval Catholicism, but intellectually for so deep and vast a purpose it was not any more satisfying or durable. Still through his primitive symbols Dante has seen and has revealed things which make his work throughout poetically and creatively great and sufficient up to a certain high, if narrow level. It is here that Milton failed altogether. Nor is the failure mainly intellectual; it is of a more radical kind. It is true that he had not an original intellect; his mind was scholastic and traditional to a point that discouraged any free thinking power; but he had an original soul and personality and the vision of a poet. It is not the province of poetry to justify intellectually the ways of God to man; what it can do, is to reveal them: but just here is the point 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. But Page – 94 he has not seen God and heaven and man or the soul embodied in humanity, at once divine and fallen, enslaved to suffering and evil, striving for redemption, yearning for a forfeited bliss and perfection. On this side 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 is too predominant, the fatal danger of a failure of vision: he has tried to poetise the stock ideas of his religion and not reached through sight to a living figure of Truth and its great expressive thoughts or revelatory symbols. This failure extends itself to all the elements of his later work; 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 two methods, — there is the schematic form that is thought out and there is the incarnating organic body 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 measures and free lines of inspired perfection. The difference will become evident if we make 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 quickening emotion 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 by 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 thought becomes intellectually externalised, the sight is obvious and on the surface. Milton writing poetry Page – 95 could never fail in greatness and power, nor could he descend, as did Wordsworth and others, in style, turn and rhythm below his well-attained high poetical level; but the supreme vitalising fire has sunk. The method and idea retain sublimity, but the deeper spirit has departed. Much greater, initial and essential was the defect in the poetry that followed this strong beginning. 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 and as if by accident, — 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 poverty and falsity. No doubt this was a necessary phase, and perhaps, the English creative mind being what it then was, rich and strong but confused and lawless and always addicted in its poetry to quite the reverse of a clear intellectual method, it had to go to an opposite extreme. It had to sacrifice for a time many of its native powers in order to learn as best it could how to arrive at a firm and straightforward expression of thought in a just, well-harmonised, precise and lucid speech; an inborn gift in all the Latin tongues, in a half-Teutonic speech attacked by the Celtic richness of imagination this power had to be acquired even at a cost. But the sacrifice made was immense and entailed much effort of recovery in the later development of the language. The writers of this rationalising age got rid of the Elizabethan language with its opulent confusion, its often involved expression, its lapses into trailing and awkward syntax, its 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 and exhilarating, but sometimes merely embarrassing and awkward; they got rid of the crudeness and extravagance but lost all the rich imagination and vision, the Page – 96 sweetness, lyrism, grace and colour, and replaced it with acute point and emphatic glitter. They got rid too of Milton’s Latinisms and poetic inversions, substituting smaller rhetorical artifices of their own device, — dismissed his great and packed turns of speech, filling in the void left by the departure of this grandeur with what claimed to be a noble style, but was no more than a spurious rhetorical pomp. Still the work they had to do they did effectively, with talent, energy, even an undeniable genius. If the substance of this poetry had been of a higher 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 too often on a par with the method and often below it. It took for its models the Augustan poets of Rome, but it substituted a certain perfection of polish and brilliance and often an element of superficiality and triviality for the strength and weight of the Latin manner. It followed more sincerely the contemporary French models; but it missed their best normal qualities, their culture, taste, tact of expression, and missed too the greater gifts of the classical French poetry. For, though that poetry may often fall short of the intensest poetic delight by its excessive cult of reason and taste, though it may run often in too thin a stream, though it may indulge the rhetorical turn too consistently to achieve utterly the highest heights of speech, yet it has ideas and a strong or delicate power, a true nobility of character in Corneille, a fine grace of poetic sentiment and a supreme delicacy and fine passion in Racine. But the verse of these pseudo-Augustan writers does not call in these greater gifts: it is occupied with expressing thought, but its thought has most often little or none of the greater values. This Muse is all brain of facile reasoning, but has no heart, no depth or sweetness of character, no high nobility of will, no fine appeal or charm of the joy and sorrow of life. In this flood of brilliant and forcefully phrased commonplace, even ideas which have depths behind them tend to become shallow and external by the way of their expression. The mind of these writers has no great seeing eye on life. Its satire is the part of their work which is still most alive; for here the Anglo-Saxon spirit gets back to itself, Page – 97 leaves the attempt at a Gallicised refinement, finds its own robust vigour and arrives at a brutal, but still a genuine and sometimes really poetic vigour and truth of expression. Energy and driving force, the English virtues, are, indeed, a general merit of the verse of Pope and Dryden and in this respect they excel their 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. If there is not much gold of poetry here, there is at least much wellgilt copper coin of a good currency, useful for small purchases and petty traffic. But in the end one is tired of a monotonous brilliance of language, wearied out by the always repeated trick of decisiveness and point of rhythm. This verse has to be read by couplets and passages; for each poem is only a long string of them and, except in one or two instances, the true classical gift, the power of structure is absent. There is an almost complete void of the larger genuine thought-power which is necessary for structure. This intellectual age of English poetry did its work, but, as was inevitable with so pronounced a departure from the true or at least the higher line, that work gives the impression, if not of a resonant failure, at least of a fall or a considerable descent to lower levels. This Augustan age not only falls infinitely far below the Roman from which it drew so much of its inspiration, but gives an impression of great inferiority when compared with the work of the Victorians and one is tempted to say that a little of the work of Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley has immeasurably more poetic value than all this silver and tin and copper and the less precious metals of these workers whose superficiality of workmanship was a pride of this age. But although this much has to be said, it would be by itself too one-sided and depreciative a view of the work of what is after all a period of the most brilliant and energetic writing and a verse which in its own way and its own technique is most carefully wrought and might even claim a title to a supreme craftsmanship: nor can we ignore the fact that in certain types such as satire, the mock heroic, the set didactic poem these writers achieved the highest height of a consummate and often Page – 98 impeccable excellence. Moreover some work was done especially by Dryden which even on the higher levels of poetry can challenge comparison with the work of the Elizabethans and the greater poets of later times. Even the satire of Pope and Dryden rises sometimes into a high poetic value beyond the level they normally reached and they have some great outbursts which have the power not only to please or delight by their force and incisiveness or their weight of thought or their powerful presentation of life, but to move to emotion, as great poetry moves us. It is not necessary here to say more in vindication of the excelling work of these writers; their fame abides and no belittling can successfully depreciate their work or discount its excellence. We are concerned here only with their place in the development, and mainly, the psychological development of English poetry. Its place there, its value is mostly in the direction of a sheer intellectuality concerned with the more superficial aspects of thought and life deliberately barren of emotion except the more superficial; lyricism has run dry, beauty has become artificial where at all it survives, passion is replaced by rhetoric, the heart is silent, life has civilised, urbanised, socialised and stylised itself too much to have any more a very living contact with Nature. As the literature of an age of this kind this poetry or this powerful verse has an enormous merit of its own and could hardly be better for its purpose. Much more perhaps than any other age of intellectual writing it has restricted itself to its task; in doing so it has restricted its claims to poetic greatness of the highest kind, but it has admirably done its work. That work is not faultless; it has too much of the baser lead of rhetoric, too frequent a pomposity and artifice, too little of Roman nobility and too little of English sincerity to be of the first value. But it stands out well enough on its own lower summit and surveys well enough from that inferior eminence a reach of country that has, if not any beauty, its own interest, order and value. There we may leave it and turn to the next striking and always revolutionary outburst of this great stream of English poetic literature. Page –99 |