Chapter VI: Part 6

So far we have seen, by illustrations purposely taken from passages in the _Inferno_ and the _Purgatorio_ familiar to all serious readers of the _Divine Comedy_, how Dante, by realistic touches, makes us believe in the ideal, and how, by never for long quitting the region of the Ideal, he reconciles us to the most accurate and merciless realism. But there is a third Realm to which he is admitted, and whither he transports us, the _Paradiso_. Some prosaically precise person would, perhaps, say that the thirtieth canto of the _Purgatorio_ is not a portion of the _Paradiso_. But you know better, for in it Beatrice appears to her poet-lover:

Sotto verde manto,
Vestita di color di fiamma viva,

In mantle green, and girt with living light,

while angelic messengers and ministers from Heaven round her scatter lilies that never fade; and when Dante, overcome by the celestial vision, turns to Virgil with the same instinctive feeling of trust

Col quale il fantolin corre alla mamma,
Quando ha paura

--trust such as is shown by a little child hurrying to its mother when afraid, and exclaims, translating a line of Virgil's own:

Conosco i segni dell' antica fiamma,

O how I know, and feel, and recognise
The indications of my youthful love;--

he finds that Virgil, _dolcissimo padre_, his gentle parent and guide, has left him, and he stands alone in the presence of Beatrice, and hears her voice saying:

Non pianger anco, non pianger ancora;
Che pianger ti convien per altra spada.

Weep not as yet, Dante, weep not as yet,
Though weep you shortly shall, and for good cause.

Tearless, and with downcast eyes, he listens to her just reproaches, trying not even to see the reflection of himself in the water of the translucent fountain at his side:--

Tanta vergogna mi gravo la fronte.

So strong the shame that weighed my forehead down.

And so he turns aside his glance to the untransparent sward, till comes the line, awful in its reproving simplicity:

Guardami ben: ben son, ben son Beatrice!

Look at me well! Yes, I am Beatrice!

Then full and fast flow the tears, like melting snows of Apennine under Slavonian blast.

But there is yet worse to come, yet harder to bear, when, not even addressing him, but turning from him to her heavenly escort, she speaks of him as "_Questi_," "this man," and tells them, in his hearing, how much his love for her might have done for him, had he still lived the _vita nuova_, the pure fresh life with which love had inspired him while she was yet on earth. But when she was withdrawn from him to Heaven, when she was of flesh disrobed and became pure spirit, and so was more deserving of love than before.

Questi si tolse a me, e diessi altrui.

This man from me withdrew himself, and gave
Himself to others.

What think you of that as a realistic treatment of the Ideal? If there be any among my audience, members of the sex commonly supposed to be the wiser, who but partly feel and imperfectly apprehend it, then let them ask any woman they will what she thinks of it, and she will answer, "It is supreme, it is unapproachable."

After such an illustration of the power of Dante over one of the main secrets of fascination in great poetry, it is unnecessary to go in search of more. With illustrating my theme of this evening I have done, and it only remains to add a few words of repetition and enforcement of what has been already indicated, lest perchance, if they were omitted, my meaning and purpose should be misapprehended or overlooked. Did you happen to observe that, a little while back, I used the phrase, "the ideal realism, or realistic idealism, call it which you will"? But now, before concluding, let me say, what has been in my mind all along, and has been there for many years, that great poetry consists of the combination of ideal Realism, realistic Idealism, and Idealism pure and simple. Upon that point much might be said, and perhaps some day I may venture to say it. In all ages the disposition of the more prosaic minds--by which term I do not mean minds belonging to persons devoid of feeling, or even of sentiment, but persons destitute of the poetic sense, or of what Poetry essentially is--has been to incline, in works of fiction whether in prose or verse, to Realism pure and simple; and the present Age, thanks to the invention of photography and the dissemination of novels that seek to describe persons and things such as they are or are supposed to be, has a peculiar and exceptional leaning in that direction. The direction is a dangerous one, for the last stage of Realism pure and simple in prose fiction is the exhibition of demoralised man and degraded woman. In poetry, thank Heaven, that operation is impossible. No doubt, it is possible in verse just as it is possible in prose, and perhaps even more so; and there are persons who will tell you that it is Poetry. But it is not, and never can be made such. Poetry is either the idealised Real, the realistic Ideal, or the Ideal pure and simple. In other words, as I long since endeavoured to show, Poetry is Transfiguration. Attempts are made in these days, as we all well know, to get you to accept Realism pure and simple as the newest and most inspired utterance of the Heavenly Maid. But they will not be successful. In that great hall of the Vatican, whither throng pilgrims from every quarter of the world, and to whose walls Raphael has bequeathed the ripest and richest fruits of his lucid, elevated, and elevating genius, is a presentation of the Muse. She is seated on a throne of majestic marble. Her feet are planted on the clouds, but her laurelled head and outstretched wings are high in the Empyrean, and round her maiden throat is a circlet enamelled with the unageing stars. With one hand she cherishes the lyre, with the other she grasps the Book of Wisdom; and her attendants are, not the sycophants of passing popularity, but the eternal angels of God, upholding a scroll wherein are inscribed the words _Numine afflatur_. She sings only when inspired. That is the Muse for me. Surely it is the Muse for you. At any rate, it was the Muse of Dante; the Muse that inspired the _Divina Commedia_ through his love for Beatrice. As an old English song has it, "'Tis love that makes the world go round," a homely truth that Dante idealised and transfigured in the last line of his immortal poem:

L'Amor che muove il Sole e l'altre stelle.

Love,
That lights the sun and makes the planets sing;

love of Love, love of Beauty, love of Virtue, love of Country, love of Mankind; or, as one might put it in this age of physical discovery:

Electric love illuminates the world.

DANTE'S POETIC CONCEPTION OF WOMAN

The imaginative estimate or ideal conception of Woman by the Poets has always been deemed exceptionally interesting, especially by women themselves, for, as a rule, it is agreeable; and, even if the presentation be sometimes a little overcharged with glowing colour, all of us, men and women alike, are not otherwise than pleased with descriptions that portray us, not exactly as we are, but as we should like to be. Withal, a portrait, to obtain recognition, must have in it some resemblance to the original; and, speaking in the most prosaic manner, one need not hesitate to affirm that any representation of women, at least of womanly women, that was not attractive would be a travesty of the fact.

Alike in the _Vita Nuova_ and the _Divina Commedia_, Beatrice Portinari figures so largely, and Dante's love for her from childhood in her tenth till her death in her twenty-sixth year is so striking that most persons think of the great Florentine Poet in association with no other women, their characters, their occupations, temptations, weaknesses, virtues, and everyday duties. Yet no man could be a Poet such as Dante who confined his ken to so limited a field of observation and feeling, and to whom the whole range of feminine emotion and action was not familiar; and, in the exposition of that theme, I would invite attention to that wider range and scope of interest, though from it Beatrice will not be forgotten. Let us turn, first of all, to the fifteenth canto of the _Paradiso_, where Cacciaguida, the Poet's ancestor, describes, while Beatrice looks on with assenting smile, the simplicity of Florentine manners in former times, alike in men and women, but in women especially--times dear to Dante, since they immediately preceded those in which he himself lived.

Fiorenza,

says Cacciaguida, calling the city by its original name,

Fiorenza, dentro della cerchia antica,
Si stava in pace, sobria e pudica.
Non avea catenella, non corona,
Non donne contigiate, non cintura,
Che fosse a veder piu che la persona.

Florence, within her ancient boundaries
Was chaste, and sober, and in peace abode.
No golden bracelets and no head-tires then,
Transparent garments, rich embroideries,
That caught the eye more than the wearer's self.

He goes on to say that the Florentine ladies of that day left their mirror without any artificial colouring on their cheeks. Mothers themselves tended the cradle, and maidens and matrons drew off the thread from the distaff, while listening to old tales of Troy, Fiesole, and Rome. It is Dante's own description of the manners and customs of the days when he was a child.

Some, perhaps, will ask, "Surely there is nothing very poetic in the foregoing description of woman?" If so, one must reply, indeed there is, and only the acceptance of the idea of Poetry prevailing amongst us of late years, which is essentially false, because so narrow and so exclusive of the simplest poetry at one end of the scale, and of the highest poetry at the other, could make any one doubt that a really poetic and imaginative conception of woman must include the dedication, though not the entire dedication, of herself to domestic duty and tenderness.

Is there nothing poetic in Wordsworth's picture of a girl turning her wheel beside an English fire?

Is there nothing poetic in Byron's description?--

A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose hopes are innocent.

Or in Coventry Patmore's?--

So wise in all she ought to know,
So ignorant in all beside.

Is there, I venture to ask, nothing poetic, nothing romantic in the description of a young girl who blends with cultivated sensibility to Literature and Art homely tasks thus described?--

... She brims the pail,
Straining the udders with her dainty palms,
Sweet as the milk they drain. She skims the cream,
And, with her sleeves rolled up and round white arms,
Makes the churn sing like boulder-baffled stream.
A wimple on her head, and kirtled short,
She hangs the snow-white linen in the wind,
A heavenly earthliness.

In the whole range of poetic literature there is no more celebrated passage than the essentially domestic picture, in the Sixth Book of the _Iliad_, of Hector, Andromache, and their baby boy, where the Trojan hero, before sallying forth to battle afresh, stretches out his arms to clasp the little Astyanax. It might be pedantic to recite the passage in the original. But here is an excellent translation of it by Mr. Walter Leaf:

So spake glorious Hector, and stretched out his arms to his boy. But
the child shrank back to the bosom of his fair-girdled nurse,
dismayed at his dear father's aspect, and in dread at the horse-hair
crest that he beheld nodding fiercely from the helmet's top. Then his
dear father laughed aloud, and his lady-mother; and forthwith
glorious Hector took the helmet from his head and laid it, all
gleaming, upon the ground; then kissed he his dear son, and dandled
him in his arms.

Surely everybody feels the poetic, the romantic character of the incident, founded on the loves of the household and the hearth. Turn to Chaucer, to Milton, to Shakespeare, to any great Poet, and you will find that, like Dante, they included simple duties in their poetic conception of woman. Only in an age sicklied o'er with lackadaisical or sensuous sentimentality could it be otherwise.

But a poet's ideals of what women should be, and often are, is shown not only by what he extols, but by what he condemns, and, in this respect, Dante, poet-like, is sparing and reserved. Most--indeed, nearly all--of the persons whom he indicates by name as being eternally punished in the Circles of the Inferno are men; partly, perhaps, because Dante, who, it must be owned, would have been loved by Doctor Johnson as a good hater, had political and other scores of the kind to settle with those he describes as having a perpetual lease in the lower regions, but in part, also, because he could not bring himself to write harshly of any woman he had known. But to a few notorious female rebels against what he deemed womanly character and conduct, and who had lived many hundred years before his day, he is pitilessly severe. It would be difficult to quote lines from any Poet more so than those in which he describes Semiramis as among those whom

Nulla speranza gli conforta mai.

She has not even hope to fall back on as a mitigation of her endless torments. Of her offences against his ideal of woman he says:

A vizio di lussuria fu si rotta,
Che libito fe lecito in sua legge,
Per torre il biasmo in che era condotta.

She was so steeped in wickedness that she promulgated laws permitting others to act as she herself did, in order to annul the stigma that would otherwise have been attached to her. He is a little hard and unjust to Dido, whom Virgil treats with such exquisite tenderness, in naming her along with "lustful Cleopatra" in the same passage. To Helen he is more indulgent, in words at least, content with saying that she was the guilty cause of dire events, "_per cui tanto reo tempo si volse_"; but she does not escape endless expiation. Some of my readers will remember how much more damning of her conduct is Virgil in the Sixth Book of the _AEneid_, where Priam represents her as giving the signal to the Greeks to enter Troy, and having concealed his sword, that he may fall a helpless victim to the vengeance of Paris, whom the fair wanton wished to propitiate in the hour of her lord's triumph.

But what is Dante's attitude towards Francesca da Rimini, in the most beautiful passage, it seems to me, in the whole range of narrative Poetry? Many, I am sure, know it by heart, and have thereby fortified themselves against the modern less-refined treatment of it even by men aspiring to be regarded as poets. Often as one has repeated it to oneself, one has never felt that Dante had for Francesca any harsher feeling than sympathetic compassion. He casts around her the halo of the purest sentiment; he brings music of matchless verbal sweetness to the description of the hour, the place, the circumstances of her disinterested and unselfish surrender. The very lines in which he leads up to her pathetic story, lines in which his feeling concerning frail and hapless love seems to be purposely expressed in general and wide-embracing language, are in themselves significant to those who observe their meaning. He says that when he heard Virgil name the numerous knights and fair dames who were suffering from having subordinated prudence to impulse, he only felt troubled for them and bewildered.

Pieta mi vinse, e fu quasi smarrito.

The first thing he notices in Francesca and her lover is their buoyancy in the air, as though they were the finest and most tenuous of spirits; and when he says to Virgil that he would fain have speech with them, the reply is that he has only to appeal to them by the love that still moves them, and they will draw nigh to him. Then follows that lovely simile of doves floating to call, and Francesca's recognition of Dante with the words:

O animal grazioso e benigno!

who is sure to have pity on her hapless doom. When Francesca pauses in her narrative, and Dante bows his head for sorrow, Virgil shows what is his own feeling by the brief question addressed to Dante, "What think you?" Dante replies in a voice broken by emotion:

... O lasso,
Quanti dolci pensier, quanto disio
Meno costoro al doloroso passo!

and, turning to Francesca, he says that her fate fills his eyes with tears and his heart with anguish. Encouraged by the poet's sympathy, she tells him what happened, "_al tempo de' dolci sospiri_," in the season of sweet sighs, in itself a preliminary and melodious appeal for indulgence, and that he must be patient with her if she tells her tale, sobbing as she speaks. Torn between sweet remembrance and regret, she cannot refrain from recalling

... il disiato riso
Esser baciato da cotanto amante,

or intimating with supreme delicacy what ensued in the final line of her narrative:

Quel giorno piu non vi leggemmo avante.

The story she had been reading with Paolo Malatesta of Lancelot and Guinevere fell from their hands, and that day they read no further on. And Dante? All he says is that he felt like to die for grief, and fell to the ground even as a dead body falls. From the first line to the last he utters no word of blame or reproach. He would not have been a poet had he done so.

Let us now turn from the fifth book of the _Inferno_ to the third of the _Paradiso_, that we may add to our knowledge of Dante's poetic conception of Woman. He there beholds Piccarda Donati, whom he had known in her lifetime on earth, but at first does not recognise, because, as she herself says with heavenly humility, she is now much fairer to look on than she was then. Withal, she adds, she occupies only an inferior place in Heaven, because she was forced, and sorely against her own will, to violate her vow of virginity. She begins her story by saying simply:

Io fui nel mondo vergine sorella,

that she was a nun dedicated to God, and goes on to tell how she was violently torn from her cloister by her brother, Forese Donati, and his accomplices, to further family ambition, and compelled to submit to the marriage rite. Dante, feeling, as it seems to me, that this did not detract from her merit, asks her if she is contented with the relatively inferior position in Paradise she says she is assigned among celestial denizens. I trust many readers know her reply, for it is one of the noblest and most beautiful passages in the whole of the _Divina Commedia_. Like all fine passages in Poetry, adequate rendering of it in another tongue is not attainable. But the best translation of it with which I am acquainted is that of C. B. Cayley--no Cary, mark you--in _terza rima_, and of which I remember I availed myself when, many years ago, I was beginning to learn Italian, and read Dante for the first time among the then leafy-covered ruins of the Baths of Caracalla. Here is Piccarda's reply:

Our will, O brother mine, is kept at rest
By power of heavenly love, which makes us will,
For nought else thirsting, only things possessed.
If we should crave to be exalted still
More highly, then our will would not agree
With His, who gives to us the place we fill.
For 'tis of our own will the very ground,
That in the will of God we govern ours.

Then comes that supremely beautiful line, not to be surpassed by any line even in Dante:

In la sua voluntade e nostra pace.

Our peace is in submission to His will.

Is it fanciful to think that in that line also Dante has betrayed and bequeathed to us, perhaps unconsciously, his main conception of Woman, as a gentle and adoring creature, who finds her greatest happiness in subordinating her will to those who are deserving of the trust she reposes in them?

But Piccarda does not end the dialogue with her own story. She tells Dante that the great Costanza, as she calls her, who married the German Henry the Fifth, was also torn from a convent where she had taken the veil, and forced into Royal nuptials. But when she was thus compelled to violate her vows,

Contra suo grado e contra buona usanza,
Non fu dal vel del cuor giammai disciolta.

She wore the vestal's veil within her heart.

And, as if to indicate that the conduct of each was condoned by the Virgin of Virgins, Dante concludes by saying:

... _Ave
Maria_, cantando; e cantando vanio,

She faded from our sight, singing _Ave Maria_,

and once again he concentrated his gaze on Beatrice, Beatrice whom he regarded as his highest poetic conception of Woman. Fully to grasp what that was, we must descend from Heaven to earth and recall the origin and growth of his adoration of her, as described in the _Vita Nuova_.

To some commentators on Dante, the narrative to be read there has suggested difficulties when, in reality, there are none, leading them to urge that a child of nine years of age could not feel what is therein described, and that, therefore, it is purely symbolic, and was written not about any human creature, but indicated Philosophy, or the desire for spiritual enlightenment and the search for heavenly wisdom, which was Dante's overpowering impulse almost from the cradle. The answer to such an interpretation of the passage is that it betrays an utter ignorance of the emotional precocity of the poetic temperament, and of the vague but intense hold Love can acquire over Poets from their earliest years.

Of the reality underlying the idealism of the _Vita Nuova_, we therefore need have no doubt whatever. Dante's Beatrice was Beatrice Portinari, a Florentine maid first, a Florentine bride later, whose people lived in the Corso, near the Canto de' Pazzi.

All that follows in the narrative of the _Vita Nuova_ may be relied on just as implicitly; how, when she was eighteen years of age, he met her again walking in the streets of Florence between two noble ladies older than herself, and graciously, as Dante says, returned his salute; how, with the naif shyness of a youth consumed with love, he tried to dissemble it by pretending to be enamoured of another damsel, which only made Beatrice look away when she met him; and how he contrived to convey to her indirectly, through a poem he wrote, that she had misjudged him; how, thereon, she looked on him graciously once more; and how, alas! in her twenty-fifth year, she was summoned from this world to the world above. Then the _Vita Nuova_ draws mournfully to a close, ending with these significant words:--

After I had written this sonnet, there appeared to me a wonderful
vision, in which I saw things that made me determine to write no more
of this dear Saint until I should be able to write of her more
worthily; and, of a surety, she knows that I study to attain unto
this end with all my powers. So, if it shall please Him by Whom all
things live, to spare my life for some more years, I hope to say that
of her which never yet hath been said of any lady; and then may it
please Him, who is the Father of all good, to suffer my soul to see
the glory of its mistress, the sainted Beatrice, who now, abiding in
glory, looketh upon the face of Him who is blessed for ever and ever.

For the fulfilment of that determination we must return to the _Divina Commedia_, written in the fullness of the Poet's powers. But there are three lines in the _Vita Nuova_ about the death of Beatrice that have haunted me ever since I first read them, and whose beauty, I am sure, all will feel:

Non la ci tolse qualita di gelo,
Ne di color, siccome l'altro fece,
Ma sola fu sua gran benignitade:

lines very difficult to translate, but the meaning of which is that she died neither from chill nor from fever, which carries off other mortals, but only of her great benignness, or excess of goodness, which rendered earth an unfitting dwelling-place for her, and Paradise her only true home.

It is not necessary to comment here on the First Canto of the _Divina Commedia_. That, one has done already before the Dante Society, and it is not requisite for one's present theme. But in Canto the Second we meet with the Beatrice of the _Vita Nuova_. She it is that sends Virgil, who dwells in the neutral territory of Limbo, to the Poet, saying:

Io son Beatrice, che ti faccio andare:
Amor mi mosse, che mi fa parlare.

And not only does she say that she is animated by love, which has caused her, now in Heaven, to feel so compassionately towards him, but also because he loved her so while she was on earth, and continued to do so after she had quitted it, with a fidelity that has lifted him above the crowd of ordinary mortals, and made of him a Poet. Here, let it be said in passing, we get another indication of Dante's poetic conception of Woman, which is, among other qualities, to co-operate in the making and fostering of Poets, a mission in which they have never been wanting. Where, indeed, is the Poet who could not say of some woman, and, if he be fortunate, of more than one, what, in the Twenty-second Canto of the _Purgatorio_, Dante makes Statius say to Virgil, "_Per te poeta fui_," "It was through you that I became a Poet."

Throughout the remaining Cantos of the _Inferno_, Beatrice naturally is never mentioned, nor yet in the _Purgatorio_, till we reach Canto the Thirtieth, wherein occurs perhaps the most painful scene in the awe-inspiring poem. In it she descends from Heaven, an apparition of celestial light, compared by the Poet to the dazzling dawn of a glorious day. Smitten with fear, he turns for help to Virgil, but Virgil has left him. "Weep not," says Beatrice to him, "that Virgil is no longer by your side; you will need all your tears when you hear me." Then begins her terrible arraignment:

Guardaci ben: ben sem, ben sem Beatrice.

Look on me well! Yes, I am Beatrice.

Confused, Dante gazes upon the ground, and then glances at a fountain hard by; but, seeing his own image trembling in the water, he lowers his eyes to the green sward encircling it, and fixes them there, while she upbraids him for his deviation from absolute fidelity to her memory, and his disregard of her heavenly endeavours still to help and purify him. Boccaccio says that Dante was a man of strong passions, and possibly, indeed probably, he was. But Beatrice seems to reproach him with only one transgression, and, if one is to say what one thinks, she has always appeared to me a little hard on him. Nor does she rest content till she has compelled him to confess his fault. He does so, and then she tells him to lay aside his grief, and think no more of it, for he is forgiven. Perhaps, in mitigation of the feeling that her severity was in excess of the cause, one ought to remember, since it is peculiarly pertinent to my theme, that we are in the above harrowing scene presented with the crowning characteristic of Dante's poetic conception of Woman, that, be the offence against her what it may, she forgets and forgives.

It might be interesting on some other occasion to inquire how far Dante's poetic conception of Woman is shared by Poets generally, and by the greater Poets of our own land in particular. Meanwhile one may affirm that the inquiry would serve to show that it is in substance the same, though no other Poet, in whatsoever tongue, has extolled and glorified a woman as Dante did Beatrice. But Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Shakespeare, Scott, Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Tennyson, could all be shown, by apposite illustration, to leave on the mind a conception of woman as a being tender, devoted, faithful, helpful, "sweet, and serviceable," as Tennyson says of Elaine, quick to respond to affection, sensitive to beauty in Nature and Arts, sympathising companion alike of the hearth and of man's struggle with life--in a word, a creature of whom it is true to say, as, indeed, Byron _has_ said, that "Love is her whole existence," meaning by Love not what is too frequently in these days falsely presented to us in novels as such, but Love through all the harmonious scale of loving, maternal, filial, conjugal, romantic, religious, and universal.

Read then the Poets. They have a nobler conception of woman and of life than the novelists. Their unobtrusive but conspicuous teaching harmonises with the conduct of the best women, and has its deep foundation in a belief in the beneficent potency of Love, from the most elementary up to an apprehension of the meaning of the last line of the _Divina Commedia_:

L'amor che muove il Sole e l'altre stelle.

Love that keeps the sun in its course, and journeys with the planets in
their orbit.

POETRY AND PESSIMISM

The term Pessimism has in these later days been so intimately associated with the philosophical theories of a well-known German writer, that I can well excuse those who ask, What may be the connection between Pessimism and Poetry? There are few matters of human interest that may not become suitable themes for poetic treatment; but I scarcely think Metaphysics is among them. It is not, therefore, to Schopenhauer's theory of the World conceived as Will and Idea, that I invite your attention. The Pessimism with which we are concerned is much older than Metaphysics, is as old as the human heart, and is never likely to become obsolete. It is the Pessimism of which the simplest, the least cultured, and the most unsophisticated of us may become the victims, and which expresses the feeling that, on the whole, life is rather a bad business, that it is not worth having, and that it is a thing which, in the language used by the Duke in _Measure for Measure_, in order to console Claudio, none but fools would keep.

Now, as all forms of feeling, and most forms of thought, are reflected in the magic mirror of Poetry, it is only natural that gloomy views of existence, of the individual life, and of the world's destiny should from time to time find expression in the poet's verse. There is quite enough pain in the experience of the individual, quite enough vicissitude in the history of nations, quite enough doubt and perplexity in the functions and mission of mankind, for even the most cheerful and masculine Song to change sometimes into the pathetic minor. What I would ask you to consider with me is if there be not a danger lest poetry should remain for long in this minor key, and if the Poet does not find ample justification and warrant--nay, should he be a true and comprehensive interpreter of life, of

All moods, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,

if he does not find himself compelled, in reply to the question, "What of the night?" to answer, "The stars are still shining."

No survey of the attitude of Poetry towards Pessimism would be satisfactory that confined itself to one particular age; and I shall ask you, therefore, to attend to the utterances of poets in other generations than our own. But, since our own age necessarily interests us the most, let us at least _begin_ with IT.

I should be surprised to find any one doubting that during the last few years a wave of disillusion, of doubt, misgiving, and despondency has passed over the world. We are no longer so confident as we were in the abstract wisdom and practical working of our Institutions; we no longer express ourselves with such certainty concerning the social and moral advantages of our material discoveries; we entertain growing anxiety as to the future of our Commerce; many persons have questioned the very foundations of religious belief, and numbers have taken refuge from conflicting creeds in avowed Agnosticism, or the confession that we know and can know absolutely nothing concerning what it had long been assumed it most behoves us to know. One by one, all the fondly cherished theories of life, society and Empire; our belief in Free Trade as the evangelist of peace, the solution of economic difficulties and struggles, and the sure foundation of national greatness; all the sources of our satisfaction with ourselves, our confidence in our capacity to reconcile the rivalry of capital and labour, to repress drunkenness, to abolish pauperism, to form a fraternal confederation with our Colonies, and to be the example to the whole world of wealth, wisdom, and virtue, are one by one deserting us. We no longer believe that Great Exhibitions will disarm the inherent ferocity of mankind, that a judicious administration of the Poor Law will gradually empty our workhouses, or that an elastic law of Divorce will correct the aberrations of human passion and solve all the problems of the hearth. The boastfulness, the sanguine expectations, the confident prophecies of olden times are exchanged for hesitating speculations and despondent whispers. We no longer seem to know whither we are marching, and many appear to think that we are marching to perdition. We have curtailed the authority of kings; we have narrowed the political competence of aristocracies; we have widened the suffrage, till we can hardly widen it any further; we have introduced the ballot, abolished bribery and corruption, and called into play a more active municipal life; we have multiplied our railways, and the pace of our travel has been greatly accelerated. Telegraph and telephone traverse the land. Surgical operations of the most difficult and dangerous character are performed successfully by the aid of anaesthetics, without pain to the patient. We have forced from heaven more light than ever Prometheus did; with the result that we transcend him likewise in our pain. No one would assert that we are happier, more cheerful, more full of hope, than our predecessors, or that we confront the Future with greater confidence. All our Progress, so far, has ended in Pessimism more or less pronounced; by some expressed more absolutely, by some with more moderation; but felt by all, permeating every utterance, and infiltrating into every stratum of thought.

Now let us see to what extent these gloomy views have found expression in poetry, and, first of all, in the writings of not only the most widely read but the most sensitive and receptive poet of our time, Alfred Tennyson. Tennyson came of age in 1830, or just on the eve of the first Reform Bill, when a great Party in the State, which was to enjoy almost a monopoly of power for the next thirty years, firmly believed, and was followed by a majority of the nation in believing, that we had only to legislate in a generous and what was called a liberal sense, to bring about the Millennium within a reasonable period. They had every possible opportunity of putting their belief into practice, and they did so with generous ardour. Now in that year 1830 there appeared what was practically Tennyson's first volume; and save in the instance of the short poem beginning

You ask me, why, tho' ill at ease,
Within this region I subsist,

and the somewhat longer but still comparatively brief one, opening with

Love thou thy land, with love far-brought
From out the storied Past,

there is no reference in it to the political or social condition of the English people. The bulk of the poems had evidently been composed, so to speak, in the lofty vacuum created by the poet and the artist for himself, save where, in the lines,

Vex not thou the Poet's mind
With thy shallow wit:
Vex not thou the poet's mind,
For thou canst not fathom it,

he seemed to be giving the great body of his countrymen notice that they had nothing in common with him, or he with them. And, in the two exceptions I have named, what is his attitude? You all remember the lines:

But pamper not a hasty time,
Nor feed with vague imaginings
The herd, wild hearts and feeble wings
That every sophister can lime.

And so he goes on, through stanzas with which, I am sure, you are thoroughly familiar, ending with the often-quoted couplet:

Earn well the thrifty months, nor wed
Raw Haste, half-sister to Delay.

It would be difficult to find, in verse, a more terse or accurate embodiment of what, in no Party sense, we may call the Conservative mind, the Conservative way of looking at things, or a more striking instance of contemporaneous verse reflecting what had recently been the average public temper of the moment. The England of the years that immediately preceded 1830 was an England wearied with the strain and stress of the great war and the mighty agitations of the early part of the century, and now, craving for repose, was in politics more or less stationary. Therefore in this earliest volume, of one of the most sensitive and receptive of writers, we encounter only quiet panegyrics of

A land of settled government,
A land of just and old renown,
Where Freedom slowly broadens down
From precedent to precedent.

Where Faction seldom gathers head,
But, by degrees to fulness wrought,
The strength of some diffusive thought
Hath time and space to work and spread.

Here we have none of the rebellious political protests of Byron, none of the iconoclastic fervour of Shelley, none even of the philosophic yearning of Wordsworth. It was a Conservative, a self-satisfied England, and the youthful Tennyson accordingly was perfectly well satisfied with it, evidently having as yet no cognizance of the fact that Radicalism was already more than muling and pewking in the arms of its Whig nurse, and that Reforms were about to be carried neither "slowly," nor by "still degrees," nor in accordance with any known "precedent."

Tennyson's next volume was not published till 1842. During the twelve years that had elapsed since the appearance of its predecessor, a mighty change had come not only over the dream, but over the practice, of the English People. It was an England in which the stationary or conservative tone of thought of which I spoke was, if not extinct, discredited and suppressed, and the fortunes of the Realm were moulded by the generous and hopeful theories of Liberalism. Tennyson meanwhile had been subjected to the influences of what he called the wondrous Mother Age; and harken how now--it scarcely sounds like the same voice--the eulogist of the "storied Past," the deprecator of "crude imaginings" and of a "hasty time," confronts the dominant spirit and rising impulses of the new generation:

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be;

Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of magic sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;

Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging thro' the thunder-storm;

Till the war-drum throbb'd no longer, and the battle-flags were furl'd
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.

There the common sense of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.

Did Optimism ever find a clearer, more enthusiastic, or more confident voice than that? I have sometimes thought that when the Historian comes to write, in distant times, of the rise, progress, and decline of Liberalism in England, he will cite that passage as the melodious compendium of its creed. You all know where the passage comes; for you have, I am sure, the first _Locksley Hall_ by heart.

But there is another _Locksley Hall_, the _Locksley Hall_ which the Author himself calls _Locksley Hall Sixty Years After_, published as recently as 1886. You are acquainted with it, no doubt; but I should be surprised to find any one quite so familiar with it as with its predecessor. It is not so attractive, so fascinating, so saturated with beauty. But for my purpose it is eminently instructive, and I will ask you to listen to some of its rolling couplets.

Chaos, Cosmos! Cosmos, Chaos! who can tell how all will end?
Read the wide world's annals, you, and take their wisdom for your friend.

Hope the best, but hold the Present fatal daughter of the Past,
Shape your heart to front the hour, but dream not that the hour will last.

Ay, if dynamite and revolver leave you courage to be wise:
When was age so cramm'd with menace? madness? written, spoken lies?

Envy wears the mask of Love, and, laughing sober fact to scorn,
Cries to Weakest as to Strongest, "Ye are equals, equal-born."

Equal-born? O yes, if yonder hill be level with the flat.
Charm us, Orator, till the Lion look no larger than the Cat.

Till the Cat thro' that mirage of overheated language loom
Larger than the Lion,--Demos end in working its own doom.

Chaos, Cosmos! Cosmos, Chaos! once again the sickening game;
Freedom, free to slay herself, and dying while they shout her name.

Step by step we gain'd a freedom known to Europe, known to all;
Step by step we rose to greatness,--thro' the tonguesters we may fall.

Was there ever such a contrast as between these two _Locksley Halls_? The same poet, the same theme, the same metre, but how different the voice, the tone, the tendency, the conclusion! All the Liberalism, all the enthusiasm, the hope, the confidence, of former years have vanished, and in their place we have reactionary despondency. It is as though the same hand that wrote the Christening Ode to Liberalism, had composed a dirge to be chanted over its grave.

The genius of Tennyson needs no fresh panegyric. It is but yesterday he died, in the fullness of his Fame; and that his works will be read so long as the English language remains a living tongue, I cannot doubt. But if, while his claim to the very highest place as an artist must ever remain uncontested, doubts should be expressed concerning his equality with the very greatest poets, those who express that doubt will, I imagine, base their challenge on the excessive receptivity, and consequent lack of serenity of his mind. In the first _Locksley Hall_ the poet is an Optimist. In the second _Locksley Hall_ he is a Pessimist. And why? Because, when the first was written, the prevailing tone of the age was optimistic; and, when the second was composed, the prevailing tone of the time had become pessimistic.

It will scarcely be doubted, therefore, that there does exist a real and a very grave danger lest Poetry should, in these perplexing and despondent days, not only be closely associated with Pessimism, but should become for the most part its voice and echo. I am precluded from presenting to you illustrations of this danger from the works of living writers of verse. But in truth, the malady of which I am speaking--for malady, in my opinion, it is--began to manifest itself long before the present generation, long before Tennyson wrote, and when indeed he was yet a child in the cradle. The main original source of Modern Pessimism is the French movement known as the Revolution, which, by exciting extravagant hopes as to the happy results to be secured from the emancipation of the individual, at first generated a fretful impatience at the apparently slow fulfilment of the dream, and finally aroused a sceptical and reactionary despondency at the only too plain and patent demonstration that the dream was not going to be fulfilled at all. It is this blending of wild hopes and extravagant impatience that inspired and informed the poetry of Shelley, that produced _Queen Mab_, _The Revolt of Islam_, and _Prometheus Unbound_. In Byron it was impatience blent with disillusion that dictated _Childe Harold_, _Manfred_, and _Cain_, and finally culminated in the mockery of _Don Juan_. Keats, while ostensibly holding aloof from the political and social issues of his time, succumbed and ministered to the disease, even if unconsciously and unintentionally, more even than either Byron or Shelley; for _they_ went on fighting against, while _he_ passively submitted, to it. Keats found nothing in his own time worth sympathising with or singing about, and so took refuge in mythological and classical themes, or in the expression of states of feeling in which he grows half in love with easeful death, in which more than ever it seems sweet to die and to cease upon the midnight with no pain, and to the high requiem of the nightingale to become a sod that does not hear.

Now it is an instructive circumstance that, in recent years, a distinct and decided preference has been manifested both by the majority of critics and by the reading public for the poetry of Keats even over the poetry of the other two writers I have named in connection with him. In Byron, notwithstanding his rebellious tendency, notwithstanding the gloom that often overshadows his verse, notwithstanding his being one of the exponents of those exaggerated hopes and that exaggerated despondency of which I have spoken, there was a considerable fund of common sense and a good deal of manliness. He was a man of the world and could not help being so, in spite of his attitude of hostility to it. Moreover, in many of his poems, action plays a conspicuous part, and the general passions, interests, and politics of mankind are dealt with by him in a more or less practical spirit, and as though they concerned him likewise. Shelley, too, not unoften condescended to deal with the political, social, and religious polemics of his time, though he always did so in a passionate and utterly impracticable temper, and would necessarily leave on the mind of the reader, the conviction that everything in the world is amiss, and that the only possible remedy is the abolition of everything that had hitherto been regarded as an indispensable part of the foundation of human society. But Keats does not trouble himself about any of these things. He gives them the go-by, he ignores them, and only asks to be allowed to leave the world unseen, and with the nightingale, to fade away into the forest dim.

Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.

This is the voice, I say, which, during the last few years, has been preferred even to Shelley's, and very much preferred to Byron's. And why? You will perhaps say that Keats's workmanship is fascinatingly beautiful. In the passage I have cited, and in the entire poem from which it is taken, that unquestionably is so. But I trust I shall not give offence if I say that the number of my countrymen and countrywomen who lay stress on the artistic manner, whether in verse or prose, in which an opinion is expressed, compared with the number of those who value poetry or prose chiefly because it expresses the opinions they value and the sentiments they cherish, is very small. No, Keats is preferred because Keats turns aside from the world at large, and thinks and writes only of individual feeling. Hence he has been more welcomed by recent critics, and by recent readers of poetry. Indeed, certain critics have laboured to erect it into a dogma, indeed into an absolute literary and critical canon, that a poet who wishes to attain true distinction must turn his back on politics, on people, on society, on his country, on patriotism, on everything in fact save books--his own thoughts, his own feelings, and his own art. Because Byron did not do so they have dubbed him a Philistine; and because Pope did precisely the reverse, and the reverse, no doubt, overmuch, they assert that he was not a poet at all.

It is not necessary to dwell on the fatuousness of such criticism, more especially as one discerns welcome signs of a disposition on the part of the reading public to turn away from these guides, and a disposition even on the part of the guides themselves in some degree to reconsider and revise their unfortunate utterances. But I have alluded to the doctrine in question, in order to show you to what lengths Pessimism, which is only a compendious expression of dissatisfaction with things in general, in other words with life, with society, and with mankind, can go, and how it has culminated in such disdain of them by poets, that they brush them aside as subjects unworthy of the Muse. Surely Pessimism in Poetry can no farther go, than to assume, without question, that man, life, society, patriotism are not worth a song?

I should not wonder if some will have been saying to themselves, "But what about Wordsworth; Wordsworth, who was the contemporary, and at least the equal, alike in genius and in influence, of the three poets just named?" I have not forgotten Wordsworth. Wordsworth was of too pious a temperament, using the word pious in its very largest signification, to be a Pessimist; for true piety and Pessimism are irreconcilable. Nevertheless Wordsworth, as a poet, likewise experienced, and experienced acutely, the influence of the French Revolution. Upon this point there can be no difference of opinion; for he himself left it on record in a well-known passage. Everybody knows with what different eyes Wordsworth finally looked on the French Revolution; how utterly he broke with its tenets, its promises, its offspring; taking refuge from his disappointment.

But something akin to despondency, if too permeated with sacred resignation wholly to deserve that description, may be discovered in the attitude henceforward assumed by Wordsworth, as a poet, towards the world, society, and mankind. Not only did he write a long poem, _The Recluse_, but he himself was a recluse, and the whole of _The Excursion_ is the composition of a recluse. Matthew Arnold, always a high authority on Wordsworth, has said:

But Wordsworth's eyes avert their ken
From half of human fate.

Indeed they did; turning instead to the silence that is in the sky, to the sleep that is in the hills, to the mountains, the flowers, and the poet's own solitary _meditations_. He declared that he would rather be a Pagan suckled in a creed outworn than one of those Christian worldlings, of which society seemed to him mainly to consist. This is not necessarily Pessimism. But it goes perilously near to it; and the boundary line would have been crossed, but that Wordsworth's prayer was answered, in which he petitioned that his days might be linked each to each by natural piety.

Of Matthew Arnold himself, as a poet, I am able to speak; for though he was not long ago one's contemporary, he is no longer one of ourselves. In Matthew Arnold it has always seemed to me, the poet and the man, his reason and his imagination, were not quite one. They were harnessed together rather than incorporated one with the other; and, many years before he died, if I may press the comparison a little farther, the poet, the imaginative part of him became lame and halt, and he conveyed his mind in the humbler one-horse vehicle of prose. The poetic impulse in him was not strong enough to carry him along permanently against the prosaic opposition of life. Nevertheless, he was a poet who wrote some very beautiful poetry; and he exercised a powerful influence, both as a poet and as a prose-writer, on the thoughts and sentiments of his time. Now, what do we find him saying? Listen!

Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born,
With nowhere yet to rest my head,
Like these, on earth I wait forlorn.
Their faith, My tears, the world deride,
I come to shed them at your side.

There yet perhaps may dawn an age,
More fortunate alas! than we,
Which without hardness will be sage,
And gay without frivolity.
Sons of the world, oh haste those years!
But, till they rise, allow our tears.

Hark to the words he puts into the mouth of Empedocles:

And yet what days were those, Parmenides!
Then we could still enjoy, then neither thought
Nor outward things were closed and dead to us;
But we received the shock of mighty thoughts
On simple minds with a pure natural joy.

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