Chapter III: Part 3

Now let us turn--for the subject of this paper is not Milton alone, but Milton and Dante--to the sexcentenary of the birth of Dante in the city of Florence, the month and year of his birth having been May 1265. I had been spending the winter in the City of Flowers, and I could not leave it, in order to journey northward, till after the Dante Commemoration had been held. I shall never forget it. From dawn to dusk the entire Florentine people held joyous festival; and, with the coming of night, not only the entire city, its palaces, its bridges, its Duomo, its Palazzo Vecchio, that noblest symbol of civic liberty, but indeed all its thoroughfares and the banks of its river broke into lovely light produced by millions of little cressets filled with olive oil, and every villa round was similarly illuminated. The pavement of the famous square of the Uffizi Palace was boarded over; and overhead was spread a canvas covering dyed with the three Italian national colours. Thither thronged hundreds of peasant men and women, who danced and made merry till the early hours of the morning. At the Pagliano Theatre were given _tableaux vivants_ representing the most famous episodes in the _Divina Commedia_, Ristori, Salvini, and Rossi reciting the corresponding passages from that immortal poem.

What a comparison, what a contrast it suggests between the solemn, serious, but limited honour done by us to Milton, and the exultant, universal, national honour paid by his countrymen to Dante! I should add that eight thousand Italian municipalities sent a deputation carrying their local pennons to the square of Santa Croce, where a statue of Dante was unveiled, amid thunderous applause, to popular gaze.

Now let us turn to a more personal contrast between the two poets. To many persons, probably to most in these days, the most interesting feature in the life of a poet is his relation to the sex that is commonly assumed, perhaps not quite correctly, to be the more romantic of the two. In comparing Dante and Milton in that respect one is struck at once by the fact that, while with Dante are not only associated, but inseparably interwoven, the name and person of Beatrice, so that the two seem in our minds but one, knit by a spiritual love stronger even than any bond sanctioned by domestic law for happiness and social stability, Milton had no Beatrice. It would be idle to contend that the absence of such love has not detracted, and will not continue to detract, from the interest felt in Milton and his poetry, not perhaps by scholars, but by the world at large, and the average lover of poetry and poets. For just as women can do much, to use a phrase of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, towards "making a poet out of a man," so can they do even more, either by spiritual influence or by consummate self-sacrifice, to widen the field and deepen the intensity of his fame. No poet ever enjoyed this advantage so conspicuously as Dante. It will perhaps be said that this was effected more by himself than by her. Let us not be too sure of that. In Italy, far more than in northern climes, first avowals of love are made by the eyes rather than by the tongue, by tell-tale looks more than by explicit words. What says Shakespeare, who knew men and women equally well?

A murderous guilt shows not itself more soon
Than love that would seem hid. Love's night is noon.

Dante's own account of his first meeting with Beatrice confirms this surmise. This is what he himself says, after Beatrice, as Boccaccio relates, "very winning, very graceful, in aspect very beautiful," had turned her gaze on Dante from time to time at their first meeting. "At that moment the spirit of life which abides in the most secret chamber of the heart began to tremble, and tremulously it spake these words, 'Behold a god stronger than I, who cometh to lord it over me.'" These may perhaps seem strange words in which to record the first meeting of a boy of nine with a girl of eight. But, over and above the fact that they are the record, written several years later, of the feeling aroused by that first meeting, allowance must be made for the proverbial precocity of genius, and also for that of southern over northern temperaments. Its genuineness is confirmed by the whole sequel, as testified by the _Vita Nuova_ and the _Divina Commedia_; the presiding presence of Beatrice in both having long before been anticipated by the words, "If it shall please Him, by whom all things live, to spare my life for some years longer, I hope to say that of her which never yet hath been said of any lady." How completely that hope was attained is to be seen in the closing canto of the _Purgatorio_ and in the whole of the _Paradiso_.

The life and poetry of Milton contain nothing (if exception be made of his beautiful and lofty sonnet, written in the very spirit of the _Divina Commedia_, on his second wife, "Methought I saw my late espoused Saint") to compare with Dante's love, at once real and ideal, masculine yet mystical, for Beatrice. The language used by Eve in addressing Adam, in _Paradise Lost_--

My author and disposer, what thou bidst
Unargued I obey, so God ordains.
God is thy law, thou mine--

and the very choice of a subject the dominating incident of which is described by the well-known words, "The woman did give me, and I did eat," would almost seem to indicate that Milton's conception of woman, and his attitude towards her, were such as can be attributed to no other poet. It is the attitude of unqualified masculine domination. Again, in _Samson Agonistes_ the very centre and pith of the poem is the incorrigible frailty and inferiority of women--a thesis that would be extraordinary, even if true, for a poet. Samson starts with a reproval of himself for weakly revealing the secret of his strength to the persistent subtlety of a woman, "that species monster, my accomplished snare," as he calls Dalila, since "yoked her bond-slave by foul effeminacy"--a servitude he stigmatises as "ignominious and infamous," whereby he is "shamed, dishonoured, quelled." When Dalila, profoundly penitent for what she has done, thereby incurring his displeasure, prostrates herself before him, and sues for pardon, he spurns her from him with the words,

Out, out, hyaena! these are thy wonted arts,

and goes on to say they are the arts of every woman, "to deceive, betray," and then to "feign remorse." With abject humility she confesses that curiosity to learn all secrets, and then to publish them, are "common female faults incident to all our sex." This only causes him to insult and spurn her yet more fiercely; and he declares that God sent her to "debase him"--one of those theological peculiarities which apparently made God an accomplice with "this viper," for which the non-Calvinistic Christian finds it difficult to account.

Nor can it be said that Milton is here, like Shakespeare, speaking only dramatically and objectively. The Chorus in _Samson Agonistes_ is of his opinion, declaring that the man is favoured of heaven who discovers "one virtuous woman, rarely found"; and that is why

God's universal law
Gave to the man despotic power
Over his female in due awe,
Nor from that right to part, an hour,
Smiles she or lour.

After delivering itself of these opinions, the Chorus suddenly exclaims, "I see a storm," which, in the circumstances, is perhaps scarcely wonderful.

What a different note is this from that struck by Dante, when he speaks of "that blessed Beatrice, who now dwells in heaven with the angels, and on earth in my heart, and with whom my soul is still in love." Far from thinking that severe command on the part of the one and unquestioning submission on the part of the other form the proper relation of lover and maiden, husband and wife, Dante avers that

Amor e cor gentil son' una cosa,

that love and a gracious gentle heart are one and the same thing; and in the _Paradiso_, shortly before the close of the poem, he exclaims:

O Beatrice! dolce guida e cara.

It may perhaps be thought that one might be more lenient towards Milton's foibles, especially at such a time as the present, in contrasting his attitude towards woman with that of Dante. But in Milton there was so much that was noble, so pathetic, and even so attractive, that he can well afford to have the truth told concerning him; and to omit his view of the most important of all personal relations in life, as depicted for and bequeathed to us in his poetry, would be to leave an obvious gap of the utmost import in comparing and contrasting him with Dante.

But now let us ask, in order to redress the balance, what has Dante to show, in kind, against _Il Penseroso_, _L'Allegro_, _Lycidas_, and _Comus_? I put the prose works of both poets aside; and there remains on the side of Dante only the self-same Dante from first to last, the Dante of the _Vita Nuova_ and the _Divina Commedia_. Milton, as a poet, had, on the contrary, a brilliant, an attractive, and a poetically productive youth. If Dante ever was young in the same sense, he has left no trace of it in his poetry. Save for Beatrice, there is an austerity even in the most tender passages of his verse. He seems never to relax in his gravity, I had almost said in his severity. His very love for Florence is expressed, for the most part, in harsh upbraiding. An unrelenting awe dominates his poetry. For Virgil he entertains a humble far-off reverence. There is no poet of whom it can be so truly said that he remained unchanged from first to last, and presents to us only one aspect throughout his works. In reading the English poet one finds oneself in the presence of two Miltons, not unlike each other in the splendid quality of the verse, but profoundly differing in tone, temperament, and outlook on life. In the author of _L'Allegro_, _Il Penseroso_, _Lycidas_, and _Comus_ there is a youthful buoyancy, an all-pervading cheerful seriousness worthy of one complacently but justly confident of his powers, in no degree at war with the world, but on amicable terms with it, and regarding life on the whole, and on its human side, as a thing to sympathise with and enjoy. Hear the young Milton's invitation to vernal exultation and joy:

But come, thou goddess fair and free,
In heaven yclept Euphrosyne,
And, by men, heart-easing Mirth,
Whom lovely Venus, at a birth,
With two sister Graces more,
To ivy-crowned Bacchus bore;
Or whether (as some sages sing)
The frolic wind that breathes the spring,
Zephyr, with Aurora playing,
As he met her once a-Maying;
There, on beds of violets blue,
And fresh-blown roses wash'd in dew,
Fill'd her with thee, a daughter fair,
So buxom, blithe, and debonnair.

What is there in Dante to compare with that? There is much by way of contrast, but no note anywhere in his verse so generous, so exhilarating, so thoroughly human. And this is how Milton, in the April of his days, continues:

Haste thee, nymph, and bring with thee
Jest, and youthful jollity,
Quips, and cranks, and wanton wiles,
Nods, and becks, and wreathed smiles,
Such as hang on Hebe's cheek,
And love to live in dimple sleek;
Sport that wrinkled Care derides,
And Laughter holding both his sides.
Come and trip it, as you go,
On the light fantastic toe;
And in thy right hand lead with thee
The mountain nymph, sweet Liberty;
And, if I give thee honour due,
Mirth, admit me of thy crew,
To live with her, and live with thee,
In unreproved pleasures free.

And what, in the yet happy and in no degree morose Milton, are the "unreproved pleasures"? They are:

To hear the lark begin his flight,
And, singing, startle the dull night,
From his watch-tower in the skies,
Till the dappled dawn doth rise;
Then to come, in spite of sorrow,
And at my window bid good-morrow,
Through the sweet-briar, or the vine,
Or the twisted eglantine;
While the cock, with lively din,
Scatters the rear of darkness thin,
And to the stack, or the barn-door,
Stoutly struts his dames before:
Oft listening how the hounds and horn
Cheerly rouse the slumbering morn,
From the side of some hoar hill,
Through the high wood echoing shrill.

Where is the stern Puritan Milton in these cheerful, generous verses? Where the detester and active enemy of the Cavaliers in the lines that follow, dwelling proudly on the

Towers and battlements ...
Bosom'd high in tufted trees,

the homes of the hereditary gentlemen of England? And think of the lines "Then to the spicy nut-brown ale," down to "The first cock his matin rings." They are almost Shakespearean in their sympathy with mirth and laughter, their enjoyment of harmless practical jokes, their boundless indulgence to human nature. And what is the conclusion of the poem?

These delights if thou canst give,
Mirth, with thee I mean to live.

There exists in no language a more lyrical outburst inspired by the hey-day of life, and lavishly radiating rustic joy. They are as jocund as a gipsy rondeau of Haydn, as gracious as the tapestries of Fragonard, as tender as the Amorini of Albani, and as serenely cheerful as the matchless melodies of Mozart. You may read every line, whether in verse or prose, that Dante ever wrote, and you will come across no such spring-like note as this. Frequently he is tearful, tender, pathetic, and paternally compassionate, but nowhere does he express the faintest sympathy with "Laughter holding both its sides."

Gradually, however, there stole over the younger Milton a great, a grave change. His domestic experiences with his first wife could not have ministered to his happiness or content; experiences partly caused by the somewhat worldly ideals and desires of his spouse, but still more, perhaps, by his theory that what the husband bids it is the duty of the wife "unargued to obey."

Meanwhile the promptings of his muse slackening for a long interval--an experience that has happened in the lives of other poets--he turned to prose, and to the controversial side of prose. Being of a dogmatic temperament, he quickly became involved in the acerbities of political, theological, and ethical polemics. For a time he employed his uncompromising pen on what seemed to be the winning side. But the aims of the ruling party in the Commonwealth were not then, any more than they are now, in harmony with the main character and ideals of the English people; and Milton found himself not only in the camp of the vanquished, but indicated by his previous actions as an object for Anglican and Royalist retaliation. The buoyant elasticity of youth had subsided in him; even the generous vigour of early manhood had vanished; and he found himself, in advanced middle life, disappointed and disheartened. The natural austerity of his character and principles deepened with his new situation and changed outlook. He had fallen, as he thought, on evil days and evil tongues; and, scandalised by the sensual levity of the King's Court and favourites, he pondered with almost exultant and vindictive retrospect on Adam and Eve's first disobedience and its fruits, and devoted his severe genius and magnificent diction to justifying the ways of God to man.

The Milton of these later years was bowed down by many family vexations, some of them due, no doubt, to his own exacting character and ideas. He was baffled and beaten in the political field where he had been so doughty a combatant, and for a time a triumphant one, and was finally deprived of all hope of regaining his pristine position; and last, and saddest of all, there fell on him total blindness, which, after his magnificent apostrophe to _Holy Light, Offspring of Heaven first-born_, he touchingly laments in the well-known but never too often to be recited passage in the third book of _Paradise Lost_:

I sung of Chaos and eternal Night,
Taught by the heavenly muse to venture down
The dark descent, and up to reascend,
Though hard and rare: thee I revisit safe,
And feel thy sovereign vital lamp; but thou
Revisit'st not these eyes, that roll in vain
To find thy piercing ray, and find no dawn;
So thick a drop serene hath quench'd their orbs,
Or dim suffusion veil'd. Yet not the more
Cease I to wander where the Muses haunt
Clear spring, or shady grove, or sunny hill,
Smit with the love of sacred song; but chief
Thee, Sion, and the flowery brooks beneath,
That wash thy hallow'd feet, and warbling flow,
Nightly I visit; nor sometimes forget
Those other two equall'd with me in fate,
So were I equall'd with them in renown,
Blind Thamyris and blind Maeonides,
And Tiresias and Phineus, prophets old.
Then feed on thoughts, that voluntary move
Harmonious numbers; as the wakeful bird
Sings darkling, and in shadiest covert hid
Tunes her nocturnal note. Thus with the year
Seasons return, but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer's rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead, and ever-during dark
Surrounds me, from the cheerful ways of men
Cut off, and for the book of knowledge fair
Presented with a universal blank
Of nature's works, to me expunged and rased,
And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.
So much the rather, thou celestial light,
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate; there plant eyes, all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight.

Could there be poetry of the personal kind more free from reprehensible egotism, more dignified, more majestic, and at the same time more pathetic than that? Let us recur to it, and read it, when we are tempted to judge Milton harshly for any less admirable, less lovable characteristics, from which no mortal can be wholly free; and the verdict must be, "Everything is forgiven him, because he suffered much, and expressed those sufferings in his verse, the truest exponent of his deepest feelings, with magnanimous and magnificent serenity." Nor let it ever be lost sight of that, though in the political and theological domain he was anything but free from fanaticism and bitter partisanship, he uniformly fought for liberty of speech and printing--liberty, of all our possessions the most precious, and for the safety and stability of the State the most indispensable condition. To what extent, in the part Dante played in the local politics of Florence, which led to his exile, he too was fighting for liberty, in the sense in which I have just expressed it, it is not possible for a dispassionate person to hold a confident opinion. In all probability liberty, as we understand the word, was struggled for and understood neither by him nor by those who drove him into exile. But, like Milton, he bore his ostracism with manly dignity, consoling himself and enriching posterity with a splendid poem, and only craving for safe shelter and peace, as he said at the monastery gate: _Son' uno che implora pace_.

In comparing Milton and Dante one might justly be reproached for an obvious omission if one did not refer, however briefly, to the intense love of both for music. Very recently Mr. W. H. Hadow, than whom no one writes with more knowledge or sympathy of music, lectured before the Royal Society of Literature on Milton's love and knowledge of it. Music, he truly said, was Milton's most intimate of delights; and he referred to what Johnson relates of the poet's constantly playing on the organ. In the second canto of the _Purgatorio_ Dante recognises the musician Casella, hails him as "Casella mio," and begs him who on earth had soothed Dante's soul with music to do the same for him now. Casella obeys, and Dante says it was done so sweetly that he can hear him still; words that recall Wordsworth's lovely couplet:

The music in my heart I bore
Long after it was heard no more.

To my great surprise an eminent man of letters, who is also a poet, said to me recently that the present writer was one of the few writers of verse he knew who loved music, and who continually asked for music, more music, adding that poets, as a rule, did not care for it. I was amazed, and cited Shakespeare and Milton as a matter of course, and many a lesser poet, against so untenable a thesis, concluding with the opening lines of _Twelfth Night_:

If music be the food of love, play on.
Give me excess of it.

Surely music is not only the food of love, but of poetry as well; and do not "music and sweet poetry agree"?

Another point of similarity between Milton and Dante is their total lack of humour, so strange in two great poets, and one of them an Englishman. Chaucer is continually on the edge of boisterous laughter. Spenser seems constantly on the verge of a well-bred smile. Shakespeare, to use his own language, asks to be allowed with mirth and laughter to play the fool, though the most gravely thoughtful and awfully tragic of all poets. The author of _Childe Harold_ is likewise the author of _The Vision of Judgment_ and _Don Juan_. Scott is one of the greatest of British humorists. But on the face of neither Dante nor Milton do we find the trace of a smile either coming or gone.

The Rev. Lonsdale Ragg, in his searching and erudite work, _Dante and his Italy_, maintains the opposite view at p. 190 _sqq._ But I, at least, find him on this head unconvincing. None of the passages in Dante to which he refers would satisfy the definition of humour as employed by Sterne, Steele, Addison, or Charles Lamb, and cited by Thackeray in his delightful papers on _The English Humorists_. Dante is scornful, satirical, merciless; humorous he never is. Nor is Milton. They meet on the common ground of uncompromising seriousness.

Another parallel I will presume to draw between Dante and Milton is one of supreme importance; but I can do so only briefly. No man, in my humble opinion, has the full requisites of a poet of the highest order unless at some period or another of his life he has been associated by practice and direct experience with other men in matters of public interest. Milton and Dante alike had that experience. So had Chaucer, so had Spenser, so had Shakespeare, so had Byron. They were men of the world, and did not, as Matthew Arnold said of Wordsworth, "avert their gaze from half of human fate." I am aware that the opposite view is assumed in much criticism to-day; and the highest rank is claimed for poetic recluses who write only of individual joys, sorrows, and emotions, their own mostly, and manifest a complete want of concern in the wide issues of mankind. That was not a standard of criticism till our own time; nor will it, I believe, be the standard of future ages. Dante and Milton both satisfy the older standard, the older and the more abiding one.

No comparison of Dante with Milton would be complete that omitted consideration of the respective themes of their chief works, their two great epic poems, the _Divina Commedia_ and _Paradise Lost_. I am disposed to think, though others may think differently, that Dante has in this respect a signal advantage over Milton. If any one is curious to see how a man of great parts, but in some respects of rather insular views, can fail to understand the theme of the _Divina Commedia_, and Dante's treatment of it, he has only to turn, as Mr. Courthope did in his address to the British Academy, to Macaulay's essay on Milton, where Dante is written of as though he were nothing but a great Realist. Many years ago I suggested as a definition of poetry, and have more than once urged the suggestion, that it is "the harmonious transfiguration of the Real into the Ideal by the aid of elevating imagination," so that, when the poet has performed that operation, his readers accept the ideal representation as real, that surest test of the greatness of a poet, provided his theme itself be great. The _Divina Commedia_ stands that test triumphantly; and the result is that Dante makes credible, even to non-believers while they read the poem, the central conception and beliefs of medieval Christianity, which are still those of Roman Catholic Christianity. Hence they remain real facts for the transfiguring idealism of poets to deal with.

Can the same be said of _Paradise Lost_? What is "real" does not depend on the arbitrary choice of any one, but on the _communis sensus_, the general assent of those to whom the treatment of the assumed "real" is addressed. Is that any longer so in the case of _Paradise Lost_? Are the personality of the devil, the insurrection of Lucifer and the rebel angels, and their condemnation to eternal punishment, with power to tempt mortals to do that which will lead to their sharing that punishment, now believed in by any large number of Christian Englishmen or English-speaking Christians, or is it ever likely again to be so believed in? I must leave the question to be answered by every one for himself. But on the answer to it, it is obvious, the realistic basis of _Paradise Lost_ depends. If the reply be negative, then what remains is the magnificence of the imagery and the sonority of the diction. To extol the one over the other in these respects would indeed be invidious. It is enough to place them side by side to manifest their equality. If Milton writes:

Him the Almighty Power
Hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky
With hideous ruin and combustion down
To bottomless perdition, there to dwell
In adamantine chains and penal fire,
Who durst defy the Omnipotent to arms;

Dante writes:

Diverse lingue, orribili favelle,
Parole di dolore, accenti d'ira,
Voci alte e fioche, e suon di man con elle,
Facevan un tumulto, il qual s'aggira
Sempre in quell' aria senza tempo tinta,
Come l'arena quando il turbo spira.

Withal, it would show imperfect impartiality if one failed to allow that there is more variety in the _Divina Commedia_ than in _Paradise Lost_. Milton never halts in his majestic journey to soothe us with such an episode as that of Paolo Malatesta and Francesca da Rimini, or closes it with so celestial a strain as that describing the interview of Dante with Beatrice in Heaven.

No third poet in any nation or tongue could be named that equals Dante and Milton in erudition, or in the use they made of it in their poetry. The present writer is himself too lacking in erudition to presume to expatiate on that theme. Others have done it admirably, and with due competency. But on this ground, common to them both, I reluctantly part with them. To each alike may be assigned the words of Ovid, _Os sublime dedit_, and equally it may be said of both, that, in the splendid phrase of Lucretius, they passed beyond the _flammantia moenia mundi_. Finally, each could truly say of himself, in the words of Dante,

Minerva spira e conducemi Apollo.

"The Goddess of Wisdom inspires me, and the God of Song is my conductor and my guide."

BYRON AND WORDSWORTH

The present age can hardly be reproached either with an absence of admirers or with a lack of self-complacency. Even its most fervid flatterers, however, ever and anon admit that it exhibits a few trifling defects; and among these is sometimes named a diminution of popular interest in poetic literature. Some have attributed this decline to one cause, some to another; but the fact can hardly be disputed. The Heavenly Muse is suffering a partial eclipse. The gross and material substance of the earth has somehow got between her and the Soul, that source and centre of her gentle light; and some enthusiasts aver that with the progress of Science and the production at will of its precise and steadfast lights, fitful luminaries of night may henceforth be dispensed with. But spiritual eclipses, though not to be predicted with the accuracy with which physical eclipses are foretold, and though unfortunately they endure for longer periods, are equally transitory; and the nineteenth century was scarcely original, nor will its successor prove to be correct, in fancying that the garish and obedient flame of material philosophy will prove a satisfactory substitute for the precious, if precarious illumination of the Spirit.

Among the causes that have contributed to divert popular affection and popular sympathy from poetical literature, there are three that deserve to be specially indicated. The first of these is the multiplication of prose romances, which, though so much lower in literary value and in artistic character than poetry, and so much less elevating in their tendency, are better fitted to stimulate the vulgar imagination, and minister more freely to the common craving for excitement. The second cause is the reaction that has settled upon mankind from the fervid hopes inspired by the propagation of those theories and the propounding of those promises which the historian associates with the French Revolution. All saner minds have long since discovered that happiness is to be procured neither for the individual nor for the community by mere political changes; and the discovery has been distinctly hostile to literary enthusiasm. Finally, many poets, and nearly all the critics of poetry, in our time, seem determined to alienate ordinary human beings from contact with the Muse. The world is easily persuaded that it is an ignoramus; and the vast majority of people, after being told, year after year, that what they do not understand is poetry, and what they do not care one straw about is the proper theme and the highest expression of song, end by concluding that poetry has become a mystery beyond their intelligence, a sort of freemasonry from whose symbols they are jealously excluded. Unable to appreciate what the critics tell them are the noblest productions of genius, they modestly infer that between genius and themselves there is no method of communication; and incapable of reading with pleasure the poetry they are assured ought to fill them with rapture, they desist from reading poetry altogether. They have not the self-confidence to choose their own poets and select their own poetry; and indeed in these days, the only chance any writer has of being read is that he should first be greatly talked about. Thus, what between the poets who are talked about by so-called experts, and thus made notorious, but whom ordinary folks find unreadable, and the poets, if there be any such, whom ordinary folks would read with pleasure if they knew of their existence, but of whom they have scarcely heard, poetry has become "caviare to the general," who content themselves with the coarser flavour of the novel, and the more easily digested pabulum of the newspaper.

But if poetry is now comparatively little read, no one can deny that it is much written about; and many persons would perhaps see in the second of these facts a reason for doubting the reality of the first. But the contradiction is only apparent. Poetry is the subject at present of much prose criticism, prose exposition, and prose controversy; but the controversialists are largely the poets themselves, or those who aspire to the title. The subject is treated by them with much earnestness, indeed with some little heat; and it is easy to perceive that the main object of most of the disputants is to establish the superiority of the poet whom the critic himself most admires, and possibly whom he himself most resembles. The controversy rages around those poets alone who are claimed by the nineteenth century, and practically, these are five in number; Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth. Each of these has his votaries, his disciples, his passionate advocates. The public look on, a little bewildered; for who is to decide when doctors disagree? Few, if any, of the disputants lay down explicit canons respecting poetry, which may enable a competent bystander to play the part of umpire even to his own satisfaction; and he is left, like the controversialists themselves, to abide by his own personal tastes, and to estimate poets and poetry according to his individual fancy.

It was therefore with no slight satisfaction one heard that one of our poets, who is likewise a critic, but who brings to his criticisms moderation of language and measure of statement, was about to appraise the English poets who have written in this century, but who have for many years joined the Immortals. To Mr. Matthew Arnold, if to any one amongst us, may be applied the passage from Wordsworth, to be found in the "Supplementary Essay" published in 1815:

Whither then shall we turn for that union of qualifications which
must necessarily exist before the decisions of a critic can be of
absolute value? For a mind at once poetical and philosophical; for a
critic whose affections are as free and kindly as the spirit of
society, and whose understanding is severe as that of dispassionate
government? Where are we to look for that initiatory composure of
mind which no selfishness can disturb; for a natural sensibility that
has been tutored into correctness, without losing anything of its
quickness; and for active faculties, capable of answering the demands
which an author of original imagination shall make upon them,
associated with a judgment that cannot be duped into admiration by
aught that is unworthy of it? Among those, and those only, who, never
having suffered their youthful love of poetry to remit much of its
force, have applied to the consideration of the laws of this art the
best power of their understandings.

To Mr. Arnold, if to any, we say, this enumeration of the qualities indispensable to a trustworthy critic of poetry, may be applied; and if the conclusions at which he bids us to arrive should not turn out to be such as we can wholly accept, at least we shall have the satisfaction of feeling that we dissent from one who has not invited our attention in vain, and who perhaps, by the avowals he incidentally makes in the course of his argument, has enabled us to hold with all the more confidence certain opinions which we will endeavour to establish by independent reasons of our own.

Here, with sufficient brevity for the present, is the conclusion of Mr. Arnold on the vexed question of the primacy among English poets, no longer living, of the last century:

I place Wordsworth's poetry above Byron's, on the whole, although in
some points he was greatly Byron's inferior. But these two,
Wordsworth and Byron, stand, it seems to me, first and pre-eminent in
actual performance, a glorious pair, among the English poets of this
century. Keats had probably, indeed, a more consummate poetic gift
than either of them; but he died having produced too little and being
as yet too immature to rival them. I for my part can never ever think
of equalling with them any other of their contemporaries; either
Coleridge, poet and philosopher wrecked in a mist of opium; or
Shelley, beautiful and ineffectual angel, beating in the void his
luminous wings in vain. Wordsworth and Byron stand out by themselves.
When the year 1900 is turned, and our nation comes to recount her
poetic glories in the century which has just then ended, the first
names with her will be these.

We do not propose to traverse the entire field of controversy here lightly indicated; our purpose being to confine ourselves to a consideration of Mr. Arnold's particular conclusion, that Wordsworth's poetry should be placed above Byron's. But before passing to that duty, we may say, parenthetically, that though we agree with Mr. Arnold that Shelley's poetry often exhibits a lamentable "want of sound subject-matter," the claims of the "beautiful and ineffectual angel" are here somewhat summarily dismissed; and that when Mr. Arnold says further that he "doubts whether Shelley's delightful Essays and Letters, which deserve to be far more read than they are now, will not resist the wear and tear of time better, and finally come to stand higher than his poetry," he makes us lift our eyes in sheer amazement, and somewhat more than doubt whether this will not prove to be among the utterly falsified prophecies of very able critics.

Holding the opinion he does concerning Wordsworth and Byron, Mr. Arnold has published a selection from the works of both, in distinct and separate volumes, and he believes that he has thereby rendered an equal service to each. "Alone," he writes, "among our poets of the earlier part of this century, Byron and Wordsworth not only furnish material enough for a volume of this kind, but also, it seems to me, they both of them gain considerably by being thus exhibited." We, on the contrary, submit that if the comparison is to end here, and is to be confined to the results produced by Mr. Arnold's method, a more unjust and inadequate method, as far as Byron is concerned, could not possibly be resorted to. Wordsworth gains considerably, but Byron loses considerably, to employ Mr. Arnold's language, by being thus exhibited. No doubt, Mr. Arnold means to be just. He always means to be just. But in the very description he gives of the contents of these two volumes on their respective title-pages, does he not betray a sort of unconscious consciousness that he is dealing with two very different poets, and with two poets whose works are very different? If this be not so, how comes it that he calls one volume _"Poems" of Wordsworth_, and the other _"Poetry" of Byron_? The distinction is a genuine one. Indeed, it is something more than genuine; it was inevitable, and Mr. Arnold was obliged to make it, if the title of each volume was to describe its contents correctly. The best poems of Wordsworth are short, most of them remarkably short; and therefore, in a volume of selections from his works, they can without difficulty be presented in their integrity. The best poems of Byron, like the best poems of AEschylus, of Virgil, of Dante, of Shakespeare, of Milton, are of considerable length; and if selections from Byron are to be made, his best poems must be mutilated for the purpose. Mr. Arnold has mutilated them accordingly. Thus, while intending to treat Wordsworth and Byron in precisely the same manner, he has treated them, and by the very conditions of the case could not help treating them, in an entirely different manner.

That Mr. Arnold has not been altogether insensible to this objection--and, indeed, with his calm and dispassionate penetration, he was not likely to be--is apparent not only in the different description he gives of the contents of the two volumes, on their respective title-pages, but from certain observations in his prefatory essay upon Byron. When he says that "there are portions of Byron's poetry which are far higher in worth, and far more free from fault than others," or that "Byron cannot but be a gainer by having attention concentrated upon what is vivid, powerful, effective, in his work, and withdrawn from what is not so," he is, we would suggest, stating nothing more than a truism, or what is equally true of every poet. He is only beating the air, and hesitating to close with the real difficulty with which he feels himself confronted. But when he proceeds to urge that "Byron has not a great artist's profound and patient skill in combining an action or in developing a character,--a skill which we must watch and follow if we are to do justice to it," he shows that he feels it to be necessary to offer a defence for applying to Byron a treatment from which Byron may possibly suffer. We confess, with all our admiration for Mr. Arnold--and it is as deep as it is sincere--we have never been able to resist the suspicion that he is _tant soit peu_ a sophist; and surely it is sophistry, in the course of an attempt to show that Byron and Wordsworth each equally gain by the "selection" method of treatment, to urge, with that air of tranquil and well-bred triumph of which Mr. Arnold is so consummate a master, that "to take passages from work produced as Byron's was, is a very different thing from taking passages out of the _Oedipus_ or the _Tempest_ and deprives the poetry far less of its advantage"? For the question is not whether Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Byron may be treated ostensibly in the same manner by an editor of selections, without injustice being done to any of them, but whether Wordsworth and Byron can. That is the question; and it is not answered, but avoided, by altering the terms of the proposition.

What, therefore, really remains of this plea of Mr. Arnold's, this excuse for mutilating Byron's poems and presenting them in fragments, is the allegation that Byron is not, _above and before all things_, a great, patient, and systematic artist. That much may be granted; and no competent critic would deny it. But more cannot be granted than is strictly true; and candour equally demands that it should be admitted that though Byron was not long-suffering and far-reaching enough in the conception of his poems, nor careful and self-critical enough in their execution, he possessed at least enough of the instinct and the scope of the artist to produce works that cohere with themselves, and that have a unity of design sufficiently definite to mark it as something distinct from the mere succession of executed detail. Will Mr. Arnold seriously pretend that a more "vivid, powerful, and effective" impression is not created upon the mind by a perusal of the whole of _Manfred_, than by a perusal of portions of it, or of one or two dissociated Acts? Mr. Arnold turns Byron's own modest confessions against himself, and lays stress upon the avowal that the _Giaour_ is "a string of passages." But if any one were, after due reflection, to maintain, that more justice is done to Byron by reading some of its passages than by reading the whole of the poem, we confess we should be obliged to entertain some doubt as to his own instincts as an artist. For, where men like Byron are concerned, it is peculiarly true that the divinity of the Muse shapes their ends, rough-hew these how they may. Of every one of Byron's tales--the _Siege of Corinth_, _The Bride of Abydos_, _Parisina_--this is equally true. It has more than once been observed that _Childe Harold_ suffers from the fact that a period of eight years elapsed between the composition of the first and second cantos, and the composition of the third and fourth; and as far as style is concerned, the contrast is very striking, two of the cantos being for the most part almost as feeble, and two of them as forcible, as anything deserving the name of poetry well can be. Nevertheless, there would be no difficulty in showing, and we think no reader of poetry endowed with a fair amount of artistic sense would require to be shown, that a certain oneness of purpose and unity of drift presides over and accompanies the entire poem, in a word that it is substantially homogeneous; and if any one, after reading through the third and fourth cantos at a stretch, as we recently did, were to tell us that he thought a few extracts from each give an adequate conception of the two, and that reading portions is in effect equivalent to reading the whole, we should have reached that limit of controversy which is expressed by a silence that is not assent. It is true that Mr. Arnold has been fairly lavish in his extracts from _Childe Harold_; yet out of the 300 stanzas which compose the third and fourth cantos, his selection contains only 114, or little more than a third. But it is not only by the curtailment of the quantity, but by the treatment applied to what is selected, that injury is done to _Childe Harold_. The passages quoted are scattered at intervals through the volume, so that all consecutiveness and coherence are lost. The majestic march of the poem is utterly broken. The subtle argument that lurks in the order of every poem--whether it be the _lucidus ordo_ of a speech, or an order less obvious and patent--is completely destroyed. The strain neither begins nor ends, neither rises nor falls, neither pauses nor progresses. The statue is shivered to pieces, and we are offered a collection of chips, mixed up with fragments from other marbles that have been treated with equal ruthlessness. Here there is a hand, here a portion of a foot, here a section of the features, here a bit of the torso. They still are magnificent, and full of suggestiveness. But are they equal and equivalent to the entire statue? Are they as good as the whole of the original work? With surprising paradox Mr. Arnold assures us they are considerably better.

This singular conclusion is attained, it seems to us, by the excessive assertion, or at least by the exaggerated application, of a theory in which there is, unquestionably, a solid element of truth. We have said that Byron is not an austere and consistent artist. But that is not to affirm that he is not an artist at all; whereas, in thus treating his productions fragmentarily, Mr. Arnold acts as though such an assertion were true. Byron, says Mr. Arnold, is not "architectural." But is he not? There is architecture, and architecture; the severe and systematic architecture of the Greeks, and the more free, irregular, unmethodical architecture which we know as Gothic. In the conception, and what in technical parlance is called the composition, of his works, Byron is assuredly no Greek. The exquisite oneness of design characteristic of Athenian genius he certainly did not borrow from the land and the race no one has so splendidly extolled. But if we turn to some of the noblest productions of Gothic architecture, what do we find? We find Cathedrals of unquestioned beauty and of universal fame, produced, it would superficially seem, almost haphazard; without design, without plan, even without architect. In our own land we may see Minsters that, begun in the eleventh, were not finished till the fifteenth century. Like _Childe Harold_, they bear the evident marks of different ages, and of different styles; and like _Don Juan_, they show that they were commenced without their parent knowing where or how they were to end. Nay, like it again, some of them remain unfinished to this day. But will any one affirm that their integrity, as they stand, is nothing to them, and nothing to us? Because no great master-conception presided over their origin and their execution, will no injury be done to them by taking them to pieces, and saying, "Here is a lovely apse; here you see a beautiful flying buttress; here contemplate an exquisite rood-screen; here you have an admirable bit of the choir, and there a glorious specimen of the roof"?

Nor can it be urged that this illustration does violence to the process Mr. Arnold has adopted. On the contrary, the analogy is not strong enough; for _Manfred_, _The Corsair_, _Cain_, _Childe Harold_ itself, were conceived and executed, not less, but far more homogeneously, than the edifices with which we have compared them, and if it would be unjust and inadequate to treat Gothic cathedrals after this fashion, it is still more unjust and inadequate to treat Byron's poems after this fashion. More glaring still becomes the injustice, and more utter the inadequacy, when we remember in whose company he is so treated. Mr. Arnold does not break Wordsworth's poems to pieces and present us with the fragments; for there is no necessity to do so. The long ones Mr. Arnold cheerfully throws over, confessing that _The Excursion_ "can never be a satisfactory work to the disinterested lover of poetry," and even that Jeffrey was not wrong when he said of it, "This will never do." To adhere to our metaphor, it is a large comfortless Meeting-house; and so is the _Recluse_. The best of Wordsworth's poems, as we have said, and as Mr. Arnold says, are his short ones. There are charming English cottages, or, if it be preferred--for we have no intention of decrying them, we admire them vastly--exquisite little wayside chapels; and they fit conveniently into the space, without being tampered with, which Mr. Arnold has provided for them. But the best of Byron's poems are the long ones; are vast Gothic edifices that soar high into the air and cover a vast amount of ground, and therefore cannot be compressed into the same compass. We have seen how Mr. Arnold gets over the difficulty. He pulls them down, places bits and sections of them side by side with the untouched cottages and still complete oratories of Wordsworth, and asks us to compare the two. We are far from saying that, even under these conditions, the comparison ends to Byron's disadvantage. But it surely must be evident to every one that the conditions are not equal, and therefore, however fair were the intentions of the editor, that they are not really just. We should be sorry if any one supposed we consider Mr. Swinburne as sound a critic as Mr. Arnold. But, upon this particular question, Mr. Swinburne has propounded a conclusion against which, we submit, Mr. Arnold contends in vain. "The greatest of Byron's works was his whole work taken together." Nothing could be more terse or more true; and if Mr. Swinburne would be content always to form his judgments thus calmly and comprehensively, and to express them with this brevity and directness, he would soon come to exercise an authority which is at present refused by many to his literary verdicts.

But though, if the comparison instituted between Byron and Wordsworth by Mr. Arnold were to be confined within the conditions he has imposed on both alike, great injustice would be done to Byron, it may well be doubted if the plan adopted by Mr. Arnold will really tend to Byron's disadvantage. On the contrary we suspect that, with the best will in the world to do all he can for Wordsworth, Mr. Arnold has done him rather an ill turn. For the whole, or anything approaching to the whole, of the best of Byron, is not to be found in the volume of selections edited by Mr. Arnold; and everybody will feel that Byron is a far greater poet than he could possibly be made to appear by any such method. But all the best poetry of Wordsworth is in the volume Mr. Arnold dedicates to him; and we entertain little doubt that there is no dispassionate critic who would not be obliged to allow that a considerable portion, indeed we fear the greater portion of it, is not poetry at all. The process Mr. Arnold has applied to Wordsworth, will have to be applied over again, and with greater rigour. He has rejected as "not satisfactory work to the disinterested lover of poetry," an immense quantity of what Wordsworth conceived to be such. Another editor will have to reject a considerable proportion of what Mr. Arnold has too indulgently included. His selection will have to be selected from afresh; and thus, with doubtful friendliness, he has pointed and prepared the way for some entirely dispassionate critic who will leave of Wordsworth only what, to "the disinterested lover of poetry," is worth leaving; and this unfortunately, though of a high and delightful quality, will prove to be comparatively little. In a word, to do Byron anything like justice, we require several volumes of the size of that Mr. Arnold devotes to him; we require, in fact, most of what he wrote. To do Wordsworth justice, we require a volume less than half the size of what Mr. Arnold gives us; we require, in fact, to suppress at least three-fourths of what he wrote.

But, again, we can raise no question, and propound no conclusion which Mr. Arnold, with his penetrating sense and acute susceptibility, has not himself more or less discerned. After observing, "we must be on our guard against Wordsworthians," he thus writes, in a vein of delicate humour: