Chapter VI: Part 6

"That was a home word of Pinkerton's, deserving to be writ in
letters of gold on the portico of every School of Art: 'What I
can't see is why you should want to do nothing else.' The dull
man is made, not by the nature, but by the degree of his
immersion in a single business. And all the more if that be
sedentary, uneventful, and ingloriously safe. More than half of
him will then remain unexercised and undeveloped; the rest will
be distended and deformed by over-nutrition, over-cerebration and
the heat of rooms. And I have often marvelled at the impudence of
gentlemen who describe and pass judgment on the life of man, in
almost perfect ignorance of all its necessary elements and
natural careers. Those who dwell in clubs and studios may paint
excellent pictures or write enchanting novels. There is one thing
that they should not do: they should pass no judgment on man's
destiny, for it is a thing with which they are unacquainted.
Their own life is an excrescence of the moment, doomed, in the
vicissitude of history, to pass and disappear. The eternal life
of man, spent under sun and rain and in rude physical effort,
lies upon one side, scarce changed since the beginning."

A few weeks ago our novelists were discussing the reasons why they were novelists and not playwrights. The discussion was sterile enough, in all conscience: but one contributor--it was "Lucas Malet"--managed to make it clear that English fiction has a character to lose. "If there is one thing," she said, "which as a nation we understand, it is _out-of-doors_ by land and sea." Heaven forbid that, with only one Atlantic between me and Mr. W.D. Howells, I should enlarge upon any merit of the English novel: but I do suggest that this open-air quality is a characteristic worth preserving, and that nothing is so likely to efface it as the talk of workshops. It is worth preserving because it tends to keep us in sight of the elemental facts of human nature. After all, men and women depend for existence on the earth and on the sky that makes earth fertile; and man's last act will be, as it was his first, to till the soil. All empires, cities, tumults, civil and religious wars, are transitory in comparison. The slow toil of the farm-laborer, the endurance of the seaman, outlast them all.

Open Air in Criticism.

That studio-talk tends to deaden this sense of the open-air is just as certain. It runs not upon Nature, but upon the presentation of Nature. I am almost ready to assert that it injures a critic as surely as it spoils a creative writer. Certainly I remember that the finest appreciation of Carlyle--a man whom every critic among English-speaking races had picked to pieces and discussed and reconstructed a score of times--was left to be uttered by an inspired loafer in Camden, New Jersey. I love to read of Whitman dropping the newspaper that told him of Carlyle's illness, and walking out under the stars--

"Every star dilated, more vitreous, larger than usual. Not as in
some clear nights when the larger stars entirely outshine the
rest. Every little star or cluster just as distinctly visible and
just as high. Berenice's hair showing every gem, and new ones. To
the north-east and north the Sickle, the Goat and Kids,
Cassiopeia, Castor and Pollux, and the two Dippers. While through
the whole of this silent indescribable show, inclosing and
bathing my whole receptivity, ran the thought of Carlyle dying."

In such a mood and place--not in a club after a dinner unearned by exercise--a man is likely, if ever, to utter great criticism as well as to conceive great poems. It is from such a mood and place that we may consider the following fine passage fitly to issue:--

"The way to test how much he has left his country were to
consider, or try to consider, for a moment the array of British
thought, the resultant _ensemble_ of the last fifty years, as
existing to-day, _but with Carlyle left out._ It would be like an
army with no artillery. The show were still a gay and rich
one--Byron, Scott, Tennyson, and many more--horsemen and rapid
infantry, and banners flying--but the last heavy roar so dear to
the ear of the trained soldier, and that settles fate and
victory, would be lacking."

For critic and artist, as for their fellow-creatures, I believe an open-air life to be the best possible. And that is why I am glad to read in certain newspaper paragraphs that Mr. Gilbert Parker is at this moment on the wide seas, and bound for Quebec, where he starts to collect material for a new series of short stories. His voyage will loose him, in all likelihood, from the little he retains of club art.

Of course, a certain proportion of our novelists must write of town life: and to do this fitly they must live in town. But they must study in the town itself, not in a club. Before anyone quotes Dickens against me, let him reflect, first on the immensity of Dickens' genius, and next on the conditions under which Dickens studied London. If every book be a part of its writer's autobiography I invite the youthful author who now passes his evenings in swapping views about Art with his fellow cockneys to pause and reflect if he is indeed treading in Dickens' footsteps or stands in any path likely to lead him to results such as Dickens achieved.

EXCURSIONISTS IN POETRY

Nov. 5, 1892. An Itinerary.

Besides the glorious exclusiveness of it, there is a solid advantage just now, in not being an aspirant for the Laureateship. You can go out into the wilderness for a week without troubling to leave an address. A week or so back I found with some difficulty a friend who even in his own judgment has no claim to the vacant office, and we set out together across Dartmoor, Exmoor, the Quantocks, by eccentric paths over the southern ranges of Wales to the Wye, and homewards by canoe between the autumn banks of that river. The motto of the voyage was Verlaine's line--

"Et surtout ne parlons pas littérature"

--especially poetry. I think we felt inclined to congratulate each other after passing the Quantocks in heroic silence; but were content to read respect in each other's eyes.

The Return to Literature.

On our way home we fell across a casual copy of the _Globe_ newspaper, and picked up a scrap of information about the Blorenge, a mountain we had climbed three days before. It is (said the _Globe_) the only thing in the world that rhymes with orange. From this we inferred that the Laureate had not been elected during our wanderings, and that the Anglo-Saxon was still taking an interest in poetry. It was so.

Public Excursions in Verse.

The progress of this amusing epidemic may be traced in the _Times_. It started mildly and decorously with the death of a politician. The writer of Lord Sherbrooke's obituary notice happened to remember and transcribe the rather flat epigram beginning--

"Here lie the bones of Robert Lowe,
Where he's gone to I don't know...."

with Lowe's own Latin translation of the same. At once the _Times_ was flooded with other versions by people who remembered the lines more or less imperfectly, who had clung each to his own version since childhood, who doubted if the epigram were originally written on Lord Sherbrooke, who had seen it on an eighteenth-century tombstone in several parts of England, and so on. London Correspondents took up the game and carried it into the provincial press. Then country clergymen bustled up and tried to recall the exact rendering; while others who had never heard of the epigram waxed emulous and produced translations of their own, with the Latin of which the local compositor made sport after his kind. For weeks there continued quite a pretty rivalry among these decaying scholars.

The gentle thunders of this controversy had scarcely died down when the _Times_ quoted a four-lined epigram about Mr. Leech making a speech, and Mr. Parker making something darker that was dark enough without; and another respectable profession, which hitherto had remained cold, began to take fire and dispute with ardor. The Church, the Legislature, the Bar, were all excited by this time. They strained on the verge of surpassing feats, should the occasion be given. From men in this mood the occasion is rarely withheld. Lord Tennyson died. He had written at Cambridge a prize poem on Timbuctoo. Somebody else, at Cambridge or elsewhere, had also written about Timbuctoo and a Cassowary that ate a missionary with his this and his that and his hymn-book too. Who was this somebody? Did he write it at Cambridge (home of poets)? And what were the "trimmings," as Mr. Job Trotter would say, with which the missionary was eaten?

Poetry was in the air by this time. It would seem that those treasures which the great Laureate had kept close were by his death unlocked and spread over England, even to the most unexpected corners. "All have got the seed," and already a dozen gentlemen were busily growing the flower in the daily papers. It was not to be expected that our senators, barristers, stockbrokers, having proved their strength, would stop short at Timbuctoo and the Cassowary. Very soon a bold egregious wether jumped the fence into the Higher Criticism, and gave us a new and amazing interpretation of the culminating line in _Crossing the Bar_. The whole flock was quick upon his heels. "Allow me to remind the readers of your valuable paper that there are _two_ kinds of pilot" is the sentence that now catches our eyes as we open the _Times_. And according to the _Globe_ if you need a rhyme for orange you must use Blorenge. And the press exists to supply the real wants of the public.[A]

They talk of decadence. But who will deny the future to a race capable of producing, on the one hand, _Crossing the Bar_--and on the other, this comment upon it, signed "T.F.W." and sent to the _Times_ from Cambridge, October 27th, 1892?--

"... a poet so studious of fitness of language as Tennyson would
hardly, I suspect, have thrown off such words on such an occasion
haphazard. If the analogy is to be inexorably criticised, may it
not be urged that, having in his mind not the mere passage 'o'er
life's solemn main,' which we all are taking, with or without
reflection, but the near approach to an unexplored ocean beyond
it, he was mentally assigning to the pilot in whom his confidence
was fast the _status_ of the navigator of old days, the
sailing-master, on whose knowledge and care crews and captains
engaged in expeditions alike relied? Columbus himself married the
daughter of such a man, _un piloto Italiano famoso navigante_.
Camoens makes the people of Mozambique offer Vasco da Gama a
_piloto_ by whom his fleet shall be deftly (_sabiamente_)
conducted across the Indian Ocean. In the following century
(1520-30) Sebastian Cabot, then in the service of Spain,
commanded a squadron which was to pass through the Straits of
Magellan to the Moluccas, having been appointed by Charles V.
Grand Pilot of Castile. The French still call the mates of
merchant vessels--that is, the officers who watch about, take
charge of the deck--_pilotes_, and this designation is not
impossibly reserved to them as representing the _pilote
hauturier_ of former times, the scientific guide of ships _dans
la haute mer_, as distinguished from the _pilote côtier_, who
simply hugged the shore. The last class of pilot, it is almost
superfluous to observe, is still with us and does take our ships,
inwards or outwards, across the bar, if there be one, and does no
more. The _hauturier_ has long been replaced in all countries by
the captain, and it must be within the experience of some of us
that when outward bound the captain as often as not has been the
last man to come on board. We did not meet him until the ship,
which until his arrival was in the hands of the _côtier_, was
well out of harbour. Then our _côtier_ left us."

Prodigious!

FOOTNOTES:

[A] Note, Oct. 21, 1893.--The nuisance revived again when Mr. Nettleship the younger perished on Mont Blanc. And again, the friend of Lowe and Nettleship, the great Master of Balliol, had hardly gone to his grave before a dispute arose, not only concerning his parentage (about which any man might have certified himself at the smallest expense of time and trouble), but over an unusually pointless epigram that was made at Cambridge many years ago, and neither on him, nor on his father, but on an entirely different Jowett, _Semper ego auditor tantum?_--

If a funny "Cantab" write a dozen funny rhymes,
Need a dozen "Cantabs" write about it to the _Times_?
Need they write, at any rate, a generation after,
Stating cause and date of joke and reasons for their laughter?

THE POPULAR CONCEPTION OF A POET

June 24, 1893. March 4, 1804. In what respect Remarkable.

What seems to me chiefly remarkable in the popular conception of a Poet is its unlikeness to the truth. Misconception in this case has been flattered, I fear, by the poets themselves:--

"The poet in a golden Clime was born,
With golden stars above;
Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,
The love of love.
He saw thro' life and death, thro' good and ill;
He saw thro' his own soul.
The marvel of the Everlasting Will,
An open scroll,
Before him lay...."

I should be sorry to vex any poet's mind with my shallow wit; but this passage always reminds me of the delusions of the respectable Glendower:--

"At my birth
The frame and huge foundation of the earth
Shak'd like a coward."

--and Hotspur's interpretation (slightly petulant, to be sure), "Why, so it would have done at the time if your mother's cat had but kittened, though you yourself had never been born." I protest that I reverence poetry and the poets: but at the risk of being warned off the holy ground as a "dark-browed sophist," must declare my plain opinion that the above account of the poet's birth and native gifts does not consist with fact.

Yet it consents with the popular notion, which you may find presented or implied month by month and week by week, in the reviews; and even day by day--for it has found its way into the newspapers. Critics have observed that considerable writers fall into two classes--

Two lines of Poetic Development.

(1) Those who start with their heads full of great thoughts, and are from the first occupied rather with their matter than with the manner of expressing it.

(2) Those who begin with the love of expression and intent to be artists in words, _and come through expression to profound thought_.

The Popular Type.

Now, for some reason it is fashionable just now to account Class 1 the more respectable; a judgment to which, considering that Virgil and Shakespeare belong to Class 2, I refuse my assent. It is fashionable to construct an imaginary figure out of the characteristics of Class 1, and set him up as the Typical Poet. The poet at whose nativity Tennyson assists in the above verses of course belongs to Class 1. A babe so richly dowered can hardly help his matter overcrowding his style; at least, to start with.

But this is not all. A poet who starts with this tremendous equipment can hardly help being something too much for the generation in which he is born. Consequently, the Typical Poet is misunderstood by his contemporaries, and probably persecuted. In his own age his is a voice crying in the wilderness; in the wilderness he speeds the "viewless arrows of his thought"; which fly far, and take root as they strike earth, and blossom; and so Truth multiplies, and in the end (most likely after his death) the Typical Poet comes by his own.

Such is the popular conception of the Typical Poet, and I observe that it fascinates even educated people. I have in mind the recent unveiling of Mr. Onslow Ford's Shelley Memorial at University College, Oxford. Those who assisted at that ceremony were for the most part men and women of high culture. Excesses such as affable Members of Parliament commit when distributing school prizes or opening free public libraries were clearly out of the question. Yet even here, and almost within the shadow of Bodley's great library, speaker after speaker assumed as axiomatic this curious fallacy--that a Poet is necessarily a thinker in advance of his age, and therefore peculiarly liable to persecution at the hands of his contemporaries.

How supported by History.

But logic, I believe, still flourishes in Oxford; and induction still has its rules. Now, however many different persons Homer may have been, I cannot remember that one of him suffered martyrdom, or even discomfort, on account of his radical doctrine. I seem to remember that Æchylus enjoyed the esteem of his fellow-citizens, sided with the old aristocratic party, and lived long enough to find his own tragedies considered archaic; that Sophocles, towards the end of a very prosperous life, was charged with senile decay and consequent inability to administer his estates--two infirmities which even his accusers did not seek to connect with advanced thinking; and that Euripides, though a technical innovator, stood hardly an inch ahead of the fashionable dialectic of his day, and suffered only from the ridicule of his comic contemporaries and the disdain of his wife--misfortunes incident to the most respectable. Pindar and Virgil were court favorites, repaying their patrons in golden song. Dante, indeed, suffered banishment; but his banishment was just a move in a political (or rather a family) game. Petrarch and Ariosto were not uncomfortable in their generations. Chaucer and Shakespeare lived happy lives and sang in the very key of their own times. Puritanism waited for its hour of triumph to produce its great poet, who lived unmolested when the hour of triumph passed and that of reprisals succeeded. Racine was a royal pensioner; Goethe a chamberlain and the most admired figure of his time. Of course, if you hold that these poets one and all pale their ineffectual fires before the radiant Shelley, our argument must go a few steps farther back. I have instanced them as acknowledged kings of song.

The Case of Tennyson.

Tennyson was not persecuted. He was not (and more honor to him for his clearness) even misunderstood. I have never met with the contention that he stood an inch ahead of the thought of his time. As for seeing through death and life and his own soul, and having the marvel of the everlasting will spread before him like an open scroll,--well, to begin with, I doubt if these things ever happened to any man. Heaven surely has been, and is, more reticent than the verse implies. But if they ever happened, Tennyson most certainly was not the man they happened to. What Tennyson actually sang, till he taught himself to sing better, was:--

"Airy, fairy Lilian,
Flitting fairy Lilian,
When I ask her if she love me,
Claps her tiny hands above me,
Laughing all she can;
She'll not tell me if she love me,
Cruel little Lilian."

There is not much of the scorn of scorn, or the love of love, or the open scroll of the everlasting will, about _Cruel Little Lilian_. But there _is_ a distinct striving after style--a striving that, as everyone knows, ended in mastery: and through style Tennyson reached such heights of thought as he was capable of. To the end his thought remained inferior to his style: and to the end the two in him were separable, whereas in poets of the very first rank they are inseparable. But that towards the end his style lifted his thought to heights of which even _In Memoriam_ gave no promise cannot, I think, be questioned by any student of his collected works.

Tennyson belongs, if ever poet belonged, to Class 2: and it is the prettiest irony of fate that, having unreasonably belauded Class 1, he is now being found fault with for not conforming to the supposed requirements of that Class. He, who spoke of the poet as of a seër "through life and death," is now charged with seeing but a short way beyond his own nose. The Rev. Stopford Brooke finds that he had little sympathy with the aspirations of the struggling poor; that he bore himself coldly towards the burning questions of the hour; that, in short, he stood anywhere but in advance of his age. As if plenty of people were not interested in these things! Why, I cannot step out into the street without running against somebody who is in advance of the times on some point or another.

Of Virgil and Shakespeare.

Virgil and Shakespeare were neither martyrs nor preachers despised in their generation. I have said that as poets they also belong to Class 2. Will a champion of the Typical Poet (new style) dispute this, and argue that Virgil and Shakespeare, though they escaped persecution, yet began with matter that overweighted their style--with deep stuttered thoughts--in fine, with a Message to their Time? I think that view can hardly be maintained. We have the _Eclogues_ before the _Æneid_; and _The Comedy of Errors_ before _As You Like It_. Expression comes first; and through expression, thought. These are the greatest names, or of the greatest: and they belong to Class 2.

Of Milton.

Again, no English poetry is more thoroughly informed with thought than Milton's. Did he find big thoughts hustling within him for utterance? And did he at an early age stutter in numbers till his oppressed soul found relief? And was it thus that he attained the glorious manner of

"Seasons return, but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn...."

--and so on. No, to be short, it was not. At the age of twenty-four, or thereabouts, he deliberately proposed to himself to be a great poet. To this end he practised and studied, and travelled unweariedly until his thirty-first year. Then he tried to make up his mind what to write about. He took some sheets of paper--they are to be seen at this day in the Library of Trinity College, Cambridge--and set down no less than ninety-nine subjects for his proposed _magnum opus_, before he could decide upon _Paradise Lost_. To be sure, when the _magnum opus_ was written it fetched £5 only. But even this does not prove that Milton was before his age. Perhaps he was behind it. _Paradise Lost_ appeared in 1667: in 1657 it might have fetched considerably more than £5.

If the Typical Poet have few points in common with Shakespeare or Milton, I fear that the Typical Poet begins to be in a bad way.

Of Coleridge.

Shall we try Coleridge? He had "great thoughts"--thousands of them. On the other hand, he never had the slightest difficulty in uttering them, in prose. His great achievements in verse--his _Genevieve_, his _Christabel_, his _Kubla Khan_, his _Ancient Mariner_--are achievements of expression. When they appeal from the senses to the intellect their appeal is usually quite simple.

"He prayeth best who loveth best
All things both great and small."

No, I am afraid Coleridge is not the Typical Poet.

On the whole I suspect the Typical Poet to be a hasty generalization from Shelley.

POETS ON THEIR OWN ART

May 11, 1895. A Prelude to Poetry.

"To those who love the poets most, who care most for their ideals, this little book ought to be the one indispensable book of devotion, the _credo_ of the poetic faith." "This little book" is the volume with which Mr. Ernest Rhys prefaces the pretty series of Lyrical Poets which he is editing for Messrs. Dent & Co. He calls it _The Prelude to Poetry_, and in it he has brought together the most famous arguments stated from time to time by the English poets in defence and praise of their own art. Sidney's magnificent "Apologie" is here, of course, and two passages from Ben Jonson's "Discoveries," Wordsworth's preface to the second edition of "Lyrical Ballads," the fourteenth chapter of the "Biographia Literaria," and Shelley's "Defence."

Poets as Prose-writers.

What admirable prose these poets write! Southey, to be sure, is not represented in this volume. Had he written at length upon his art--in spite of his confession that, when writing prose, "of what is now called style not a thought enters my head at any time"--we may be sure the reflection would have been even more obvious than it is. But without him this small collection makes out a splendid case against all that has been said in disparagement of the prose style of poets. Let us pass what Hazlitt said of Coleridge's prose; or rather let us quote it once again for its vivacity, and so pass on--

"One of his (Coleridge's) sentences winds its 'forlorn way
obscure' over the page like a patriarchal procession with camels
laden, wreathed turbans, household wealth, the whole riches of
the author's mind poured out upon the barren waste of his
subject. The palm tree spreads its sterile branches overhead, and
the land of promise is seen in the distance."

All this is very neatly malicious, and particularly the last co-ordinate sentence. But in the chapter chosen by Mr. Rhys from the "Biographia Literaria" Coleridge's prose is seen at its best--obedient, pertinent, at once imaginative and restrained--as in the conclusion--

"Finally, good sense is the body of poetic genius, fancy its
drapery, motion its life, and imagination the soul that is
everywhere, and in each; and forms all into one graceful and
intelligent whole."

The prose of Sidney's _Apologie_ is Sidney's best; and when that has been said, nothing remains but to economize in quoting. I will take three specimens only. First then, for beauty:--

"Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapistry, as divers
Poets have done, neither with plesant rivers, fruitful trees,
sweet-smelling flowers: nor whatsoever else may make the too much
loved earth more lovely. Her world is brasen, the Poets only
deliver a golden: but let those things alone and goe to man, for
whom as the other things are, so it seemeth in him her uttermost
cunning is imployed, and know whether shee have brought forth so
true a lover as _Theagines_, so constant a friende as _Pilades_,
so valiant a man as _Orlando_, so right a Prince as _Xenophon's
Cyrus_; so excellent a man every way as _Virgil's Aeneas_...."

Next for wit--roguishness, if you like the term better:--

"And therefore, if _Cato_ misliked _Fulvius_, for carrying
_Ennius_ with him to the field, it may be answered, that if
_Cato_ misliked it, the noble _Fulvius_ liked it, or else he had
not done it."

And lastly for beauty and wit combined:--

"For he (the Poet) doth not only show the way, but giveth so
sweete a prospect into the way, as will intice any man to enter
into it. Nay he doth, as if your journey should lye through a
fayre Vineyard, at the first give you a cluster of Grapes: that
full of that taste, you may long to passe further. He beginneth
not with obscure definitions, which must blur the margent with
interpretations, and load the memory with doubtfulnesse: but he
cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either
accompanied with or prepared for the well inchanting skill of
Musicke: and with a tale forsooth he cometh unto you: with a tale
which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney
corner."

"Is not this a glorious way to talk?" demanded the Rev. T.E. Brown of this last passage, when he talked about Sidney, the other day, in Mr. Henley's _New Review_. "No one can fail," said Mr. Brown, amiably assuming the fineness of his own ear to be common to all mankind--"no one can fail to observe the sweetness and the strength, the outspokenness, the downrightness, and, at the same time, the nervous delicacy of pausation, the rhythm all ripple and suspended fall, the dainty _but_, the daintier _and forsooth_, as though the pouting of a proud reserve curved the fine lip of him, and had to be atoned for by the homeliness of _the chimney-corner_."

Everybody admires Sidney's prose. But how of this?--

"Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is
the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all
science. Emphatically it may be said of the Poet, as Shakespeare
has said of man, 'that he looks before and after.' He is the rock
of defence of human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying
everywhere with him relationship and love. In spite of difference
of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and
customs, _in spite of things silently gone out of mind, and
things violently destroyed_, the Poet binds together by passion
and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread
over the whole earth, and over all time."

It is Wordsworth who speaks--too rhetorically, perhaps. At any rate, the prose will not compare with Sidney's. But it is good prose, nevertheless; and the phrase I have ventured to italicise is superb.

Their high claims for Poesy.

As might be expected, the poets in this volume agree in pride of their calling. We have just listened to Wordsworth. Shelley quotes Tasso's proud sentence--"Non c'è in mondo chi merita nome di creatore, se non Iddio ed il Poeta": and himself says, "The jury which sits in judgment upon a poet, belonging as he does to all time, must be composed of his peers: it must be impanelled by Time from the selectest of the wise of many generations." Sidney exalts the poet above the historian and the philosopher; and Coleridge asserts that "no man was ever yet a great poet without being at the same time a profound philosopher." Ben Jonson puts it characteristically: "Every beggarly corporation affords the State a mayor or two bailiffs yearly; but _Solus rex, aut poeta, non quotannis nascitur_." The longer one lives, the more cause one finds to rejoice that different men have different ways of saying the same thing.

Inspiration not Improvisation.

The agreement of all these poets on some other matters is more remarkable. Most of them claim _inspiration_ for the great practitioners of their art; but wonderful is the unanimity with which they dissociate this from _improvisation_. They are sticklers for the rules of the game. The Poet does not pour his full heart

"In profuse strains of _unpremeditated_ art."

On the contrary, his rapture is the sudden result of long premeditation. The first and most conspicuous lesson of this volume seems to be that Poetry is an _art_, and therefore has rules. Next after this, one is struck with the carefulness with which these practitioners, when it comes to theory, stick to their Aristotle.

Poetry not mere Metrical Composition

For instance, they are practically unanimous in accepting Aristotle's contention that it is not the metrical form that makes the poem. "Verse," says Sidney, "is an ornament and no cause to poetry, since there have been many most excellent poets that never versified, and now swarm many versifiers that need never answer to the name of poets." Wordsworth apologizes for using the word "Poetry" as synonymous with metrical composition. "Much confusion," he says, "has been introduced into criticism by this contradistinction of Poetry and Prose, instead of the more philosophical one of Poetry and Matter of Fact or Science. The only strict antithesis to Prose is Metre: nor is this, in truth, a _strict_ antithesis, because lines and passages of metre so naturally occur in writing prose that it would be scarcely possible to avoid them, even were it desirable." And Shelley--"It is by no means essential that a poet should accommodate his language to this traditional form, so that the harmony, which is its spirit, be observed.... The distinction between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error." Shelley goes on to instance Plato and Bacon as true poets, though they wrote in prose. "The popular division into prose and verse," he repeats, "is inadmissible in accurate philosophy."

Its philosophic function.

Then again, upon what Wordsworth calls "the more philosophical distinction" between Poetry and Matter of Fact--quoting, of course, the famous +"Philosophôteron kai spoudaioteron"+ passage in the _Poetics_--it is wonderful with what hearty consent our poets pounce upon this passage, and paraphrase it, and expand it, as the great justification of their art: which indeed it is. Sidney gives the passage at length. Wordsworth writes, "Aristotle, I have been told, hath said that Poetry is the most philosophic of all writings: it is so." Coleridge quotes Sir John Davies, who wrote of Poesy (surely with an eye on the _Poetics_):

"From their gross matter she abstracts their forms,
And draws a kind of quintessence from things;
Which to her proper nature she transforms
To bear them light on her celestial wings.

"Thus does she, when from individual states
She doth abstract the universal kinds;
Which then reclothed in divers names and fates
Steal access through our senses to our minds."

And Shelley has a remarkable paraphrase, ending, "The story of particular facts is as a mirror which obscures and distorts that which should be beautiful: poetry is a mirror which makes beautiful that which is distorted."

In fine, this book goes far to prove of poetry, as it has been proved over and over again of other arts, that it is the men big enough to break the rules who accept and observe them most cheerfully.

THE ATTITUDE OF THE PUBLIC TOWARDS LETTERS

Sept. 29, 1894. The "Great Heart" of the Public.

I observe that our hoary friend, the Great Heart of the Public, has been taking his annual outing in September. Thanks to the German Emperor and the new head of the House of Orleans, he has had the opportunity of a stroll through the public press arm in arm with his old crony and adversary, the Divine Right of Kings. And the two have gone once more a-roaming by the light of the moon, to drop a tear, perchance, on the graves of the Thin End of the Wedge and the Stake in the Country. You know the unhappy story?--how the Wedge drove its thin end into the Stake, with fatal results: and how it died of remorse and was buried at the cross-roads with the Stake in its inside! It is a pathetic tale, and the Great Heart of the Public can always be trusted to discriminate true pathos from false.

Miss Marie Corelli's Opinion of it.

It was Mr. G.B. Burgin, in the September number of the _Idler_, who let the Great Heart loose this time--unwittingly, I am sure; for Mr. Burgin, when he thinks for himself (as he usually does), writes sound sense and capital English. But in the service of Journalism Mr. Burgin called on Miss Marie Corelli, the authoress of _Barabbas_, and asked what she thought of the value of criticism. Miss Corelli "idealised the subject by the poetic manner in which she mingled tea and criticism together." She said--

"I think authors do not sufficiently bear in mind the important
fact that, in this age of ours, the public _thinks for itself_
much more extensively than we give it credit for. It is a
cultured public, and its great brain is fully capable of deciding
things. It rather objects to be treated like a child and told
'what to read and what to avoid'; and, moreover, we must not fail
to note that it mistrusts criticism generally, and seldom reads
'reviews.' And why? Simply 'logrolling.' It is perfectly aware,
for instance, that Mr. Theodore Watts is logroller-in-chief to
Mr. Swinburne; that Mr. Le Gallienne 'rolls' greatly for Mr.
Norman Gale; and that Mr. Andrew Lang tumbles his logs along over
everything for as many as his humour fits...."

--I don't know the proportion of tea to criticism in all this: but Miss Corelli can hardly be said to "idealise the subject" here:--

"... The public is the supreme critic; and though it does not
write in the _Quarterly_ or the _Nineteenth Century_, it thinks
and talks independently of everything and everybody, and on its
thought and word alone depends the fate of any piece of
literature."

Mr. Hall Caine's View.

Then Mr. Burgin called on Mr. Hall Caine, who "had just finished breakfast." Mr. Hall Caine gave reasons which compelled him to believe that "for good or bad, criticism is a tremendous force." But he, too, confessed that in his opinion the public is the "ultimate critic." "It often happens that the public takes books on trust from the professed guides of literature, but if the books are not _right_, it drops them." And he proceeded to make an observation, with which we may most cordially agree. "I am feeling," he said, "increasingly, day by day, that _rightness_ in imaginative writing is more important than subject, or style, or anything else. If a story is right in its theme, and the evolution of its theme, it will live; if it is not right, it will die, whatever its secondary literary qualities."

In what sense the Public is the "Ultimate Critic."

I say that we may agree with this most cordially: and it need not cost us much to own that the public is the "ultimate critic," if we mean no more than this, that, since the public holds the purse, it rests ultimately with the public to buy, or neglect to buy, an author's books. That, surely, is obvious enough without the aid of fine language. But if Mr. Hall Caine mean that the public, without instruction from its betters, is the best judge of a book; if he consent with Miss Corelli that the general public is a cultured public with a great brain, and by the exercise of that great brain approves itself an infallible judge of the rightness or wrongness of a book, then I would respectfully ask for evidence. The poets and critics of his time united in praising Campion as a writer of lyrics: the Great Brain and Heart of the Public neglected him utterly for three centuries: then a scholar and critic arose and persuaded the public that Campion was a great lyrical writer: and now the public accepts him as such. Shall we say, then, the Great Heart of the Public is the "ultimate judge" of Campion's lyrics? Perhaps: but we might as well praise for his cleanliness a boy who has been held under the pump. When Martin Farquhar Tupper wrote, the Great Heart of the Public expanded towards him at once. The public bought his effusions by tens of thousands. Gradually the small voice of skilled criticism made itself heard, and the public grew ashamed of itself; and, at length, laughed at Tupper. Shall we, then, call the public the ultimate judge of Tupper? Perhaps: but we might as well praise the continence of a man who turns in disgust from drink on the morning after a drunken fit.[A]

What is "The Public"?

The proposition that the Man in the Street is a better judge of literature than the Critic--the man who knows little than the man who knows more--wears (to my mind, at least) a slightly imbecile air on the face of it. It also appears to me that people are either confusing thought or misusing language when they confer the title of "supreme critic" on the last person to be persuaded. And, again, what is "the public?" I gather that Miss Corelli's story of _Barabbas_ has had an immense popular success. But so, I believe, has the _Deadwood Dick_ series of penny dreadfuls. And the gifted author of _Deadwood Dick_ may console himself (as I daresay he does) for the neglect of the critics by the thought that the Great Brain[B] of the Public is the supreme judge of literature. But obviously he and Miss Corelli will not have the same Public in their mind. If for "the Great Brain of the Public" we substitute "the Great Brain of that Part of the Public which subscribes to Mudie's," we may lose something of impressiveness, but we shall at least know what we are talking about.

* * * * *

June 17, 1893. Mr. Gosse's View.

Astounding as the statement must appear to any constant reader of the Monthly Reviews, it is mainly because Mr. Gosse happens to be a man of letters that his opinion upon literary questions is worth listening to. In his new book[C] he discusses a dozen or so: and one of them--the question, "What Influence has Democracy upon Literature?"--not only has a chapter to itself, but seems to lie at the root of all the rest. I may add that Mr. Gosse's answer is a trifle gloomy.

"As we filed slowly out of the Abbey on the afternoon of
Wednesday, the 12th of October, 1892, there must have occurred to
others, I think, as to myself, a whimsical and half-terrifying
sense of the symbolic contrast between what we had left and what
we had emerged upon. Inside, the grey and vitreous atmosphere,
the reverberations of music moaning somewhere out of sight, the
bones and monuments of the noble dead, reverence, antiquity,
beauty, rest. Outside, in the raw air, a tribe of hawkers urging
upon the edges of a dense and inquisitive crowd a large sheet of
pictures of the pursuit of a flea by a 'lady,' and more insidious
salesmen doing a brisk trade in what they falsely pretended to be
'Tennyson's last poem.' Next day we read in our newspapers
affecting accounts of the emotion displayed by the vast crowd
outside the Abbey--horny hands dashing away the tear,
seamstresses holding 'the little green volumes' to their faces to
hide their agitation. Happy for those who could see these with
their fairy telescopes out of the garrets of Fleet Street. I,
alas!--though I sought assiduously--could mark nothing of the
kind."

Nothing of the kind was there. Why should anything of the kind be there? Her poetry has been one of England's divinest treasures: but of her population a very few understand it; and the shrine has always been guarded by the elect who happen to possess, in varying degrees, certain qualities of mind and ear. It is, as Mr. Gosse puts it, by a sustained effort of bluff on the part of these elect that English poetry is kept upon its high pedestal of honor. The worship of it as one of the glories of our birth and state is imposed upon the masses by a small aristocracy of intelligence and taste.

Mr. Gissing's Testimony.

What do the "masses" care for poetry? In an appendix Mr. Gosse prints a letter from Mr. George Gissing, who, as everyone knows, has studied the popular mind assiduously, and with startling results. Here are a few sentences from his letter:--

(1) "After fifteen years' observation of the poorer classes of
English folk, chiefly in London and the south, I am pretty well
assured that, whatever civilising agencies may be at work among
the democracy, poetry is not one of them."

(2) "The custodian of a Free Library in a southern city informs
me that 'hardly once in a month' does a volume of verse pass over
his counter; that the exceptional applicant (seeking Byron or
Longfellow) is generally 'the wife of a tradesman;' and that an
offer of verse to man or woman who comes simply for 'a book' is
invariably rejected; 'they won't even look at it.'"

(3) "It was needless folly to pretend that, because one or two of
Tennyson's poems became largely known through popular recitation,
therefore Tennyson was dear to the heart of the people, a subject
of their pride whilst he lived, of their mourning when he died.
My point is that _no_ poet holds this place in the esteem of the
English lower orders."

(4) "Some days before (the funeral) I was sitting in a public
room, where two men, retired shopkeepers, exchanged an occasional
word as they read the morning's news. 'A great deal here about
Lord Tennyson' said one. The 'Lord' was significant. I listened
anxiously for his companion's reply. 'Ah, yes.' The man moved
uneasily, and added at once: 'What do you think about this
long-distance ride?' In that room (I frequented it on successive
days with this object) not a syllable did I hear regarding
Tennyson save the sentence faithfully recorded."

Poetry not beloved by any one Class.

Mr. Gissing, be it observed, speaks only of the class which he has studied: but in talking of "demos," or, more loosely, of "democracy," we must be careful not to limit these terms to the "lower" and "lower-middle" classes. For Poetry, who draws her priests and warders from all classes of society, is generally beloved of none. The average country magnate, the average church dignitary, the average professional man, the average commercial traveller--to all these she is alike unknown: at least, the insensibility of each is differentiated by shades so fine that we need not trouble ourselves to make distinctions. A public school and university education does as little for the Squire Westerns one meets at country dinner-tables as a three-guinea subscription to a circulating library for the kind of matron one comes upon at a _table d'hôte_. Five minutes after hearing the news of Browning's death I stopped an acquaintance in the street, a professional man of charming manner, and repeated it to him. He stared for a moment, and then murmured that he was sorry to hear it. Clearly he did not wish to hurt my feelings by confessing that he hadn't the vaguest idea who Browning might be. And if anybody think this an extreme case, let him turn to the daily papers and read the names of those who were at Newmarket on that same afternoon when our great poet was laid in the Abbey with every pretence of national grief. The pursuit of one horse by another is doubtless a more elevating spectacle than "the pursuit of a flea by a 'lady,'" but on that afternoon even a tepid lover of letters must have found an equal incongruity in both entertainments.

I do not say that the General Public hates Poetry. But I say that those who care about it are few, and those who know about it are fewer. Nor do these assert their right of interference as often as they might. Just once or twice in the last ten or fifteen years they have pulled up some exceptionally coarse weed on which the General Public had every disposition to graze, and have pitched it over the hedge to Lethe wharf, to root itself and fatten there; and terrible as those of Polydorus have been the shrieks of the avulsed root. But as a rule they have sat and piped upon the stile and considered the good cow grazing, confident that in the end she must "bite off more than she can chew."

The "Outsiders."

Still, the aristocracy of letters exists: and in it, if nowhere else, titles, social advantages, and commercial success alike count for nothing; while Royalty itself sits in the Court of the Gentiles. And I am afraid we must include in the crowd not only those affable politicians who from time to time open a Public Library and oblige us with their views upon literature, little realizing what Hecuba is to them, and still less what they are to Hecuba, but also those affable teachers of religion, philosophy, and science, who condescend occasionally to amble through the garden of the Muses, and rearrange its labels for us while drawing our attention to the rapid deterioration of the flowerbeds. The author of _The Citizen of the World_ once compared the profession of letters in England to a Persian army, "where there are many pioneers, several suttlers, numberless servants, women and children in abundance, and but few soldiers." Were he alive to-day he would be forced to include the Volunteers.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] In a private letter, from which I am allowed to quote, Mr. Hall Caine (October 2nd, 1894) explains and (as I think) amends his position:--"If I had said _time_ instead of _the public_, I should have expressed myself exactly. It is impossible for me to work up any enthusiasm for the service done to literature by criticism as a whole. I have, no doubt, the unenviable advantage over you of having wasted three mortal months in reading all the literary criticism extant of the first quarter of this century. It would be difficult to express my sense of its imbecility, its blundering, and its bad passions. But the good books it assailed are not lost, and the bad ones it glorified do not survive. It is not that the public has been the better judge, but that good work has the seeds of life, while bad work carries with it the seeds of dissolution. This is the key to the story of Wordsworth on the one hand, and to the story of Tupper on the other. Tupper did not topple down because James Hannay smote him. Fifty James Hannays had shouted him up before. And if there had not been a growing sense that the big mountain was a mockery, five hundred James Hannays would not have brought it down. The truth is that it is not the 'critic who knows' or the public which does not know that determines the ultimate fate of a book--the immediate fate they may both influence. The book must do that for itself. If it is right, it lives; if it is wrong, it dies. And the critic who re-establishes a neglected poet is merely articulating the growing sense. There have always been a few good critics, thank God ... but the finest critic is the untutored sentiment of the public, not of to-day or to-morrow or the next day, but of all days together--a sentiment which tells if a thing is right or wrong by holding on to it or letting it drop."

Of course, I agree that a book must ultimately depend for its fate upon its own qualities. But when Mr. Hall Caine talks of "a growing sense," I ask, In whom does this sense first grow? And I answer, In the cultured few who enforce it upon the many--as in this very case of Wordsworth. And I hold the credit of the result (apart from the author's share) belongs rather to those few persistent advocates than to those judges who are only "ultimate" in the sense that they are the last to be convinced.

[B] If the reader object that I am using the Great Heart and Great Brain of the Public as interchangeable terms, I would refer him to Mr. Du Maurier's famous Comic Alphabet, letter Z:--

"Z is a Zoophyte, whose heart's in his head,
And whose head's in his turn--rudimentary Z!"

[C] _Questions at Issue_; by Edmund Gosse. London: William Heinemann.

A CASE OF BOOKSTALL CENSORSHIP

March 16, 1895. The "Woman Who Did," and Mr. Eason who wouldn't.

"In the romantic little town of 'Ighbury,
My father kept a Succulating Libary...."

--and, I regret to say, gave himself airs on the strength of it.

The persons in my instructive little story are--

H.H. Prince Francis of Teck.

Mr. Grant Allen, author of _The Woman Who Did_.

Mr. W.T. Stead, Editor of _The Review of Reviews_.

Messrs. Eason & Son, booksellers and newsvendors, possessing on
the railways of Ireland a monopoly similar to that enjoyed by
Messrs. W.H. Smith & Son on the railways of Great Britain.

Mr. James O'Hara, of 18, Cope Street, Dublin.

A Clerk.

Now, on the appearance of Mr. Grant Allen's _The Woman Who Did_, Mr. Stead conceived the desire of criticising it as the "Book of the Month" in _The Review of Reviews_ for February, 1895. He strongly dissents from the doctrine of _The Woman Who Did_, and he also believes that the book indicts, and goes far to destroy, its own doctrine. This opinion, I may say, is shared by many critics. He says "Wedlock is to Mr. Grant Allen _Nehushtan_. And the odd thing about it is that the net effect of the book which he has written with his heart's blood to destroy this said _Nehushtan_ can hardly fail to strengthen the foundation of reasoned conviction upon which marriage rests." And again--"Those who do not know the author, but who take what I must regard as the saner view of the relations of the sexes, will rejoice at what might have been a potent force for evil has been so strangely overruled as to become a reinforcement of the garrison defending the citadel its author desires so ardently to overthrow. From the point of view of the fervent apostle of Free Love, this is a Boomerang of a Book."