Read Ebook: Principle in Art Etc. by Patmore Coventry

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Hard was the heart that gave the blow, Soft were the lips that bled.

Every one knows how irresistible are a pretty woman's tears.

Nought is there under heav'n's wide hollowness That moves more dear compassion of mind Than beauty brought to unworthy wretchedness.

Pathos is the luxury of grief, and when it ceases to be other than a keen-edged pleasure it ceases to be pathos. Hence Tennyson's question in "Love and Duty," "Shall sharpest pathos blight us?" involves a misunderstanding of the word; although his understanding of the thing is well proved by such lyrics as "Tears, idle tears," and "O well for the fisherman's boy." Pleasure and beauty--which may be said to be pleasure visible--are without their highest perfection if they are without a touch of pathos. This touch, indeed, accrues naturally to profound pleasure and to great beauty by the mere fact of the incongruity of their earthly surroundings and the sense of isolation, peril, and impermanence caused thereby. It is a doctrine of that inexhaustible and almost unworked mine of poetry, Catholic theology, that the felicity of the angels and glorified saints and of God Himself would not be perfect without the edge of pathos, which it receives from the fall and reconciliation of man. Hence, on Holy Saturday the Church exclaims, "O felix culpa!" and hence "there is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth than over ninety and nine righteous who need no repentance." Sin, says St. Augustine, is the necessary shadow of heaven; and pardon, says some other, is the highest light of its beatitude.

POETICAL INTEGRITY

To a soundly trained mind there is no surer sign of shallowness and of interior corruption than that habitual predominance of form over formative energy, of splendour of language and imagery over human significance, which has so remarkably distinguished a great deal of the most widely praised poetry of the past eighty years. Much of this poetry has about as much relation to actual or imaginative reality as the transformation scene of a pantomime; and much more--called "descriptive"--has so low a degree of significance and betrays so inhuman an absorption in the merest superficies of nature, that when the writer pretends to deal with those facts and phenomena of humanity which, directly or indirectly, are the main region of every true poet's song, he has to overcome our sense that he is an habitual trifler before he can gain credit for sincerity, even when he is giving utterance to what may really be a passing strain of true poetic thought and feeling. A poet who is thus constantly occupied with the superficies of nature may probably attain to an accuracy and splendour of analytical description which has its value in its way, and which may, in certain transitory conditions of popular taste, raise him to the highest pinnacle of favour. But such poetry will be judged, in the end, by its human significance; and the writer of it will have the fatal verdict of "heartless" recorded against him--a verdict which even in the time of his favour is implicitly pronounced by the indifference with which his professions of human principle and feeling are received, even by his admirers.

The slightest touch of genuine humanity is of more actual and poetic value than all that is not human which the sun shines on. The interest of what is called "descriptive" or "representative" in real poetry and all real art is always human, or, in other words, "imaginative." A description by Wordsworth, Coleridge, or Burns, a landscape by Crome, Gainsborough, or Constable, is not merely nature, but nature reflected in and giving expression to a state of mind. The state of mind is the true subject, the natural phenomena the terms in which it is uttered; and there has never been a greater critical fallacy than that contained in Mr. Ruskin's strictures on the "pathetic fallacy." Nature has no beauty or pathos but that with which the mind invests it. Without the imaginative eye it is like a flower in the dark, which is only beautiful as having in it a power of reflecting the colours of the light. The true light of nature is the human eye; and if the light of the human eye is darkness, as it is in those who see nothing but surfaces, how great is that darkness!

The saying of Wordsworth concerning the Poet, that

You must love him ere to you He will seem worthy of your love,

which at first reading sounds very much like nonsense, is absolutely true. He must have won your credit and confidence in his words, by proofs of habitual veracity and sincerity, before you can so receive the words which come from his heart that they will move your own. If, in the utterance of what he offers to you as the cry or the deep longing of passion, you catch him in busily noticing trifles--for which very likely he gets praised for "accurate observation of nature"--you will put him down as one who knows nothing of the passion he is pretending to express. If you detect him in the endeavour to say "fine things" in order to win your admiration for himself, instead of rendering his whole utterance a single true thing, which shall win your sympathy with the thought or feeling by which he declares himself to be dominated, the result will be the same; as also it will be if you discover that the beauty of his words is obtained rather by the labour of polish than the inward labour and true finish of passion. When, on the other hand, some familiarity with the poet's work has assured you that, though his speech may be unequal and sometimes inadequate, it is never false; that he has always something to say, even when he fails in saying it: then you will not only believe in and be moved by what he says well; but when the form is sometimes imperfect you will be carried over such passages, as over thin ice, by the formative power of passion or feeling which quickens the whole; although you would reject such passages with disgust were they found in the writing of a man in whose thoughts you know that the manner stands first and the matter second.

THE POETRY OF NEGATION

Poetry is essentially catholic and affirmative, dealing only with the permanent facts of nature and humanity, and interested in the events and controversies of its own time only so far as they evolve manifestly abiding fruits. But the abiding fruits of such events and controversies are very rarely manifest until the turmoil in which they are produced has long since subsided; and therefore poets, in all times before our own, have either allowed the present to drift unheeded by or have so handled its phenomena as to make them wholly subsidiary to and illustrative of matters of well-ascertained stability. The many occasional poems of past times, of which temporary incidents have been the subjects, in no way contradict this assertion in the main; and the casual example of a poet like Dryden affords only the confirming exception. Dryden was fond of protesting, especially when he was a Catholic; and there is no doubt but that this habit added greatly to his popularity in his lifetime, as it does to the favour in which some of the most distinguished of our modern poets are now held; but all those points which probably constituted the high lights of Dryden's poetry to his contemporaries have suffered in course of time a change like that which has come over the whites of many of Sir Joshua Reynolds' pictures; and it is much to be feared that a similar fate awaits a large proportion of what has been written by several of the best poets of the generation which is now passing away. Most of our recent poets, even while condemning political revolution, have shared in the ideas or feelings which are at the bottom of revolutions, a hope which the facts of nature do not justify, and a disbelief in what those facts do justify--namely, the ineradicable character of moral evil, with its circumstantial consequences. The heart of the modern poet is, as a rule, always vibrating between the extremes of despondent grumbling at the present conditions and hasty and unreasonable aspirations for the improvement of his kind; his tragedies and hymns of rejoicing are alike void of the dignity and repose which arise from a sound confession of the facts of humanity and a cheerful resignation to its imperfections; and he whose true function is to stand aside as the tranquil seer too often now becomes the excited agent in matters which concern him least of all men, because of all men he is the least fitted to meddle with them. It is hard to say which is more wonderful--the clearness of the true poet's vision for things when he is contented with looking at them as they are, or his blindness when he fancies he can mend them. Famous statesmen have marvellously drivelled in verse, but not more marvellously than famous poets have drivelled in what pertains to statesmanship. It is scarcely without a feeling of amazement that a man of ordinary good sense contrasts the power of poetic vision in writers like Victor Hugo and Carlyle with the childishness of their judgments when they propose antidotes for evils which they so clearly see, but for which they do not see that there are no antidotes, but only palliatives. Looking for what they fancy may be, when their vocation is to proclaim with clearness that which is, one poet will shriek to us that all will be well when King Log is down and King Stork reigns in his stead; another that Niagara may yet be dammed if country gentlemen will hire drill-sergeants to put their gardeners and farm-labourers through the goose-step; another says the world will be saved if a few gentlemen and ladies, with nothing better to do, will take to playing at being their own domestics; a fourth, in order to save morals, proposes their abolition; a fifth proclaims that all will have good wages when there remains no one to pay them; a sixth discovers in the science of the future a sedative for human passions instead of a wider platform for their display; and so on. Others, who have no patent medicines on hand, impotently grumble or rage at evils in which, if they looked steadily, they might discern the good of justice, or that of trial, or both ; and, instead of truly singing, they sob hysterical sympathy with such sufferings in others as, if they were their own, they either would bear or know that they ought to bear with equanimity.

The statesman, the social reformer, the political economist, the natural philosopher, the alms-giver, the hospital visitor, the preacher, even the cynical humorist, has each his function, and each is rightly more or less negative; but the function of the poet is clearly distinguished from all of these, and is higher though less obtrusive than any. It is simply affirmative of things which it greatly concerns men to know, but which they have either not discovered or have allowed to lapse into the death of commonplace. He alone has the power of revealing by his insight and magic words the undreamt-of mines of felicity which exist potentially for all in social relationships and affections. The inexhaustible glories of nature are a blank for many who are yet able to behold them reflected in his perceptions. His convincing song can persuade many to believe in, if they do not attain to taste--as he, if indeed he be a poet, must have tasted--the sweet and wholesome kernel which the rough shell of unmerited suffering conceals for those who are patient. And he can so contemplate the one real evil in the world as to give body and life and intelligibility to that last and sharpest cry of faith, "O felix culpa!"

The temptations which our time offers to the poet in order to induce him to forsake his own line are very great, and poets are human. The conceited present craves to have singers of its own, who will praise it, or at least abuse it; and it pays them well for pandering to its self-consciousness, lavishing its best honours upon them as leaders of the "Liberal movement," and scoffing at those, as "behind their time," who stand apart and watch and help those abiding developments of humanity which advance "with the slow process of the suns."

THE LIMITATIONS OF GENIUS

In art, as in higher matters, "strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it;" and the initial cause of failure, in many who seem to have faculties which should ensure success, is not so much the difficulty of the road which leads to it, as want of humility in confessing its narrowness. Each man is by birth a unique individuality, which the circumstances of his life will increase and develop continually, if he be content to do his duty in the station, intellectual and otherwise, to which it has pleased God to call him, without falling below its obligations or assuming others which have not been laid upon him. The low but still priceless degree of genius which consists in individuality in manners, and which renders the possessor of it powerfully though imperceptibly edifying in all companies, is open to all, though few are sufficiently simple and honest and unambitious to attain to it, by turning neither to the right hand nor the left in pursuit of their particular good of life.

"Originality," whether in manners, action, or art, consists simply in a man's being upon his own line; in his advancing with a single mind towards his unique apprehension of good; and in his doing so in harmony with the universal laws which secure to all men the liberty of doing as he is doing, without hindrance from his or any other's individuality. Unless "originality" thus works in submission to and harmony with general law, it loses its nature. In morals it becomes sin or insanity, in manners and in art oddity and eccentricity, which are in reality the extreme opposites and travesties of originality. As in religion it is said that "no man can know whether he is worthy of love," so in art and ordinary life no man can know whether he is original. If through habitual fidelity to his idea of good he has attained to originality, he will be the last person in the world to know it. If he thinks he is original, he is probably not so; and if he is commonly praised for originality, he may hardly hope to attain to any such distinction. Originality never expresses itself in harsh and obtrusive singularities. A society of persons of true originality in manners would be like an oak-tree, the leaves of which all look alike until they are carefully compared, when it is found that they are all different. In art, the sphere of extraordinary originalities, there is the same absence of strongly pronounced distinctions, and therefore the same withdrawal from the recognition of the vulgar, who look for originality in antics, oddities, crudities, and incessant violations of the universal laws, which true originality religiously observes; its very function consisting, as it does, in upholding those laws and illustrating them and making them unprecedentedly attractive by its own peculiar emphases and modulations.

The individuality or "genius" of a man, which results from fidelity in life and art to his "ruling love," is almost necessarily narrow. Shakespeare is the only artist that ever lived whose genius has even approached to universality. His range is so great that ordinary readers, if, like Mr. Frederic Harrison, they had the courage to speak their impressions, would with him condemn the greater part of his work as "rubbish"--that is, as having no counterpart in the "positivism" of their actual or imaginative experience. Every play of Shakespeare is a new vision--not only a new aspect of his vision, as is the case with the different works of nearly all other artists, even the greatest. Narrowness, indeed, so far from being opposed to greatness in art, is often its condition. Dante and Wordsworth are proofs that greatness of genius consists in seeing clearly rather than much; and well it would have been both for poets and for readers had the former always or even generally understood the economy of moving always on their own lines. Nothing has so much injured modern art as the artist's ambition to show off his "breadth"; and many an immortal lyric or idyll has been lost because the lyric or idyllic poet has chosen to forsake his line for the production of exceedingly mortal epics or tragedies. The modern custom of exhibiting all the works of a single painter at a time affords proof which every one will understand of what has been said. Who, with an eye for each painter's true quality, can have gone over the collections in recent years of the pictures of Landseer, Reynolds, Rossetti, Blake, Holman Hunt, and others, without a feeling of surprise, and some perhaps irrational disappointment, at the discovery for the first time of the artist's limitations? Each had painted the same vision over and over again! There was no harm in that. The mistake was in bringing together the replicas which should have adorned "palace chambers far apart." But poets, whose "works" are always collectively exhibited, should beware how they betray the inevitable fact of the narrowness of genius. Not only should they never leave their own line for another which is not their own, but they should be equally careful not to go over it again when they have once got to the end of it.

LOVE AND POETRY

Every man and woman who has not denied or falsified nature knows, or at any rate feels, that love, though the least "serious," is the most significant of all things. The wise do not talk much about this knowledge, for fear of exposing its delicate edge to the stolid resistance of the profligate and unbelieving, and because its light, though, and for the reason that, it exceeds all other, is deficient in definition. But they see that to this momentary transfiguration of life all that is best in them looks forward or looks back, and that it is for this the race exists, and not this for the race--the seed for the flower, not the flower for the seed. All religions have sanctified this love, and have found in it their one word for and image of their fondest and highest hopes; and the Catholic has exalted it into a "great Sacrament," holding that, with Transubstantiation--which it resembles--it is only unreasonable because it is above reason. "The love which is the best ground of marriage," writes also the Protestant and "judicious" Hooker, "is that which is least able to render a reason for itself." Indeed, the extreme unreasonableness of this passion, which gives cause for so much blaspheming to the foolish, is one of its surest sanctions and a main cause of its inexhaustible interest and power; for who but a "scientist" values greatly or is greatly moved by anything he can understand--that which can be comprehended being necessarily less than we are ourselves?

In the hands of the poet mystery does not hide knowledge, but reveals it as by its proper medium. Parables and symbols are the only possible modes of expressing realities which are clear to perception though dark to the understanding. "Without a parable he spake not" who always spake of primary realities. Every spiritual reality fades into something else, and none can tell the point at which it fades. The only perfectly definite things in the universe are the conceptions of a fool, who would deny the sun he lives by if he could not see its disk. Natural sciences are definite, because they deal with laws which are not realities but conditions of realities. The greatest and perhaps the only real use of natural science is to supply similes and parables for poets and theologians.

But if the realities of love were not in themselves dark to the understanding, it would be necessary to darken them--not only lest they should be profaned, but also because, as St. Bernard says, "The more the realities of heaven are clothed with obscurity, the more they delight and attract, and nothing so much heightens longing as such tender refusal." "Night," says the inspirer of St. Bernard, "is the light of my pleasures."

Love is rooted deeper in the earth than any other passion; and for that cause its head, like that of the Tree Igdrasil, soars higher into heaven. The heights demand and justify the depths, as giving them substance and credibility. "That He hath ascended--what is it but because He first also descended into the lower parts of the earth?" Love "reconciles the highest with the lowest, ordering all things strongly and sweetly from end to end." St. Bernard says that "divine love" "has its first root in the most secret of the human affections." This affection is the only key to the inner sanctuaries of that faith which declares, "Thy Maker is thy Husband;" the only clue by which searchers of the "secret of the King," in the otherwise inscrutable writings of prophet and apostle, discover, as Keble writes, "the loving hint that meets the longing guess," which looks to the future for the satisfying and abiding reality, the passage of whose momentary shadow forms the supreme glory of our mortality.

The whole of after-life depends very much upon how life's transient transfiguration in youth by love is subsequently regarded; and the greatest of all the functions of the poet is to aid in his readers the fulfilment of the cry, which is that of nature as well as religion, "Let not my heart forget the things mine eyes have seen." The greatest perversion of the poet's function is to falsify the memory of that transfiguration of the senses, and to make light of its sacramental character. This character is instantly recognised by the unvitiated heart and apprehension of every youth and maiden; but it is very easily forgotten and profaned by most, unless its sanctity is upheld by priests and poets. Poets are naturally its prophets--all the more powerful because, like the prophets of old, they are wholly independent of the priests, and are often the first to discover and rebuke the lifelessness into which that order is always tending to fall. If society is to survive its apparently impending dangers, it must be mainly by guarding and increasing the purity of the sources in which society begins. The world is finding out, as it has often done before, and more or less forgotten, that it cannot do without religion. Love is the first thing to wither under its loss. What love does in transfiguring life, that religion does in transfiguring love: as any one may see who compares one state or time with another. Love is sure to be something less than human if it is not something more; and the so-called extravagances of the youthful heart, which always claims a character for divinity in its emotions, fall necessarily into sordid, if not shameful, reaction, if those claims are not justified to the understanding by the faith which declares man and woman to be priest and priestess to each other of relations inherent in Divinity itself, and proclaimed in the words "Let us make man in our own image" and "male and female created he them." Nothing can reconcile the intimacies of love to the higher feelings, unless the parties to them are conscious--and true lovers always are--that, for the season at least, they justify the words "I have said, Ye are gods." Nuptial love bears the clearest marks of being nothing other than the rehearsal of a communion of a higher nature. Its felicity consists in a perpetual conversion of phase from desire to sacrifice, and from sacrifice to desire, accompanied by unchangeable complaisance in the delight shining in the beauty of the beloved; and it is agitated in all its changes by fear, without which love cannot long exist as emotion. Such a state, in proportion to its fervour, delicacy, and perfection, is ridiculous unless it is regarded as a "great sacrament." It is the inculcation of this significance which has made love between man and woman what it is now--at least to the idea and aspirations of all good minds. It is time that the sweet doctrine should be enforced more clearly. Love being much more respected and religion much less than of old, the danger of profanation is not so great as it was when religion was revered and love despised. The most characteristic virtue of woman, or at least the most alluring of her weaknesses--her not caring for masculine truth and worth unless they woo her with a smile or a touch or some such flattery of her senses--is the prevailing vice of most men, especially in these times. This general effeminacy is the poet's great opportunity. It is his pontifical privilege to feel the truth; and his function is to bridge the gulf between severe verity and its natural enemy, feminine sentiment, by speech which, without any sacrifice of the former, is "simple, sensuous, and passionate." He insinuates in nerve-convincing music the truths which the mass of mankind must feel before they believe. He leads them by their affections to things above their affections, making Urania acceptable to them by her praenomen Venus. He is the apostle of the Gentiles, and conveys to them, without any flavour of cant or exclusiveness, the graces which the chosen people have too often denied or disgraced in their eyes.

KEATS

Mr. Sidney Colvin's book upon Keats is, in the main, a welcome exception to what has become, of late, the rule in this class of work. It is remarkably just, and every good reader will feel it to be the more warmly appreciative because it is scarcely ever extravagantly so. The bulk of Keats's poetry, including "Endymion," is estimated at its true worth, which, as Keats--the severest judge of his own work--knew and confessed, was not much; and the little volume which was published in 1820, and which does not consist of more than about 3000 lines, is declared to contain nearly the whole of the poet's effective writing. And even in this little volume--which includes "Lamia," "Isabella," "The Eve of St. Agnes," the five "Odes," and "Hyperion"--Mr. Colvin acutely detects and boldly points out many serious defects. From the comparatively worthless waste of the rest of Keats's writing, Mr. Colvin picks out with accurate discernment the few pieces and passages of real excellence; and he does criticism good service in directing attention to the especial value of the fragment called "The Eve of St. Mark," and of that which is probably the very finest lyric in the English language, "La Belle Dame sans Merci."

As long as Mr. Colvin limits himself to the positive beauties and defects of Keats's poetry he is nearly always right; it is only in his summing up and in his estimate of the comparative worth of his subject that a less enthusiastic critic must part company with him. "I think it probable that by power, as well as by temperament and aim, he was the most Shakespearian spirit that has lived since Shakespeare." Is not the truth rather that, among real poets, Keats was the most un-Shakespearian poet that ever lived? True poets may be divided into two distinct classes, though there is a border-line at which they occasionally become confused. In the first class, which contains all the greatest poets, with Shakespeare at their head, intellect predominates; governing and thereby strengthening passion, and evolving beauty and sweetness as accidents--though inevitable accidents--of its operation. The vision of such poets may almost be described in the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, in speaking of the Beatific Vision. "The vision," he writes, "is a virtue, the beatitude an accident." Such poets are truly spoken of as masculine. In the other class--in which Keats stands as high as any other, if not higher--the "beatitude," the beauty and sweetness, is the essential, the truth and power of intellect and passion the accident. These poets are, without any figure of speech, justly described as feminine ; and they are separated from the first class by a distance as great as that which separates a truly manly man from a truly womanly woman. The trite saying that the spirit of the great poet has always a feminine element is perfectly true notwithstanding. "The man is not without the woman;" though "the man is not for the woman, but the woman for the man." The difference lies in that which has the lead and mastery. In Keats the man had not the mastery. For him a thing of beauty was not only a joy for ever, but was the supreme and only good he knew or cared to know; and the consequence is that his best poems are things of exquisite and most sensitively felt beauty, and nothing else. But it is a fact of primary significance, both in morals and in art , that the highest beauty and joy are not attainable when they occupy the first place as motives, but only when they are more or less the accidents of the exercise of the manly virtue of the vision of truth. There is at fitting seasons a serene splendour and a sunny sweetness about that which is truly masculine, whether in character or in art, which women and womanly artists never attain--an inner radiance of original loveliness and joy which comes, and can only come, of the purity of motive which regards external beauty and delight as accidental.

In his individual criticisms of Keats's poems Mr. Colvin fully recognises their defect of masculine character. In speaking of "Isabella" he says: "Its personages appeal to us, not so much humanly and in themselves, as by the circumstances, scenery, and atmosphere amidst which we see them move. Herein lies the strength, and also the weakness, of modern romance: its strength, inasmuch as the charm of the mediaeval colour and mystery is unfailing for those who feel it at all; its weakness, inasmuch as under the influence of that charm both writer and reader are too apt to forget the need for human and moral truth; and without these no great literature can exist." Again: "In Keats's conceptions of his youthful heroes there is at all times a touch, not the wholesomest, of effeminacy and physical softness, and the influence of passion he is apt to make fever and unman them quite; as, indeed, a helpless and enslaved submission of all the faculties to love proved, when it came to the trial, to be the weakness of his own nature." And again: "In matters of poetic feeling and fancy Keats and Hunt had not a little in common. Both alike were given to 'luxuriating' somewhat effusively and fondly over the 'deliciousness' of whatever they liked in art, books, and nature." In these and other equally just and unquestionable criticisms of Keats's character and works, surely Mr. Colvin sufficiently refutes his own assertion that this writer was "by temperament" "the most Shakespearian" of poets since Shakespeare. And whether he was also such "by power," let the poet's work declare. In his own lovely line--which he faithfully kept to in "Lamia," "Isabella," "The Eve of St. Agnes," and the "Odes"--he is unsurpassed and perhaps unequalled. When he is true to that line we do not feel the want of anything better, though we may know that there is something better: as, in the presence of a beautiful woman, we do not sigh because she is not a General Gordon or a Sir Thomas More. But let Keats try to assume the man--as he does in his latest work, his attempts at dramatic composition or at satirical humour, in the "Cap and Bells"--and all his life and power seem to shrivel and die, like the beauty of Lamia in the presence of Apollonius. Some of his readers may object the semblance of Miltonic strength in certain passages of the fragment "Hyperion"; but Keats himself knew and admitted that it was only a semblance and an echo, and therefore wisely abandoned the attempt, having satisfied himself with having shown the world that there was no object of merely external nature, from "roses amorous of the moon" to

The solid roar Of thunderous waterfalls and torrents hoarse, Pouring a constant bulk, uncertain where,

which he had not nerves to feel and words so to utter that others should feel as he did.

In making this distinction between poetry of a masculine and that of a feminine order, it must be understood that no sort of disrespect is intended to the latter in saying a good word for that "once important sex" of poetry which the bewitching allurements of Keats and Shelley and their followers have caused, for a season, to be comparatively despised. The femininity of such poets as these is a glorious and immortal gift, such as no mortal lady has ever attained or ever will attain. It has been proved to us how well a mortal lady may become able to read the classics; but, humbled as some of us may feel by her having headed the Tripos, it is still some compensation for those of our sex to remember that we alone can write "classics," even of the feminine order. Nor let it be thought that we have been insisting upon a modern and fanciful distinction in thus dividing great men into two classes, in one of which the masculine and in the other the feminine predominates. It is a fact the observation of which is as old as the mythology which attributed the parentage of heroes in whom the intellectual powers prevailed to the union of gods with women, while those who distinguished themselves by more external and showy faculties were said to have been born of the commerce of goddesses with men.

WHAT SHELLEY WAS

Professor Dowden has had access to a very large quantity of hitherto unpublished correspondence and other matter, some of which throws much new light upon Shelley's singular character; and, but for one most important point--his sudden separation from Harriet Westbrook, for which no substantial reason is given--the Professor's eleven hundred closely printed pages contain all and more than all that any reasonable person can want to know about the subject. Professor Dowden's arrangement of this mass of material is so lucid that interest seldom flags; and the whole work reads like a first-class sensational novel, of which the only faults are that the characters are unnatural and the incidents improbable. A beautiful youth of almost superhuman genius, sensitiveness, and self-abnegation, is the hero. He is given early to blaspheming whatever society has hitherto respected; and to cursing the King and his father--an old gentleman whose chief foible seems to have been attachment to the Church of England. His charity is so angelical that he remains on the best of terms with one man who has tried to seduce his wife, and with another--a beautiful young lord with a club-foot, whom he finds wallowing in a society given to vices which cannot be named, and who is also a supreme poet--notwithstanding the fact that this lord has had a child by one of the ladies of his wife's family and treats her with the most unmerited contempt and cruelty. He adores three really respectable and attractive young ladies--by name Harriet Westbrook, Elizabeth Hitchener, and Emilia Viviani--with a passion which eternity cannot exhaust, and praises them in music like that of the spheres ; and, anon, Harriet is "a frantic idiot," Elizabeth a "brown demon," and Emilia a "centaur." "It was," says his biographer, "one of the infirmities of Shelley's character that, from thinking the best of a friend or acquaintance, he could of a sudden, and with insufficient cause, pass over to the other side and think the worst." It is, perhaps, fortunate that Providence should afflict supreme sanctities and geniuses with such "infirmities"; otherwise we might take them for something more than mere saints and poets. The hero, as became absolute charity, gave every one credit--at least, when it suited his mood and convenience--for being as charitable as himself: witness his soliciting Harriet Westbrook for money after he had run away with his fresh "wife," her rival. He was addicted even from his babyhood to the oddest and most "charming" eccentricities. "When Bysshe," then quite a child, "one day set a fagot-stack on fire, the excuse was a charming one: he did so that he might have 'a little hell of his own.'" At Eton "in a paroxysm of rage he seized the nearest weapon, a fork, and stuck it into the hand of his tormentor." On another occasion, when his tutor found him apparently setting fire to himself and the house, and asked him "What on earth are you doing, Shelley?" he replied, "Please, sir, I'm raising the devil." The pet virtue of the hero was tolerance. "Here I swear," he writes to Mr. Hogg, "and as I break my oaths, may Infinity, Eternity blast me--here I swear that never will I forgive intolerance! It is the only point on which I allow myself to encourage revenge ... not one that leaves the wretch at rest, but lasting, long revenge." His resolutions to be himself tolerant often broke down, and he could not abide "men who pray" and such-like; but what could be expected from such a hero in such a world! He had all the na?vet? as well as the self-reliance of true greatness. He had no sooner become an undergraduate at Oxford than he printed a pamphlet on "The Necessity of Atheism," and sent copies to the Vice-Chancellor, the heads of houses, and all the bishops, with "a pretty letter in his own handwriting" to each. He was summoned before the University authorities, who "pleaded, implored, and threatened; on the other side, the unabashed and beardless boy maintaining his right to think, and declare his thoughts to others." Much evil as he believed of such vermin, he does not seem to have dreamed of the intolerance of which they were capable. Hogg--the dear and life-long friend who tried to seduce his wife--writes: "He rushed in; he was terribly agitated. 'I am expelled,' he said, as soon as he had recovered himself a little; 'I am expelled!'... He sat on the sofa, repeating with convulsive vehemence the words 'Expelled! expelled!'" Professor Dowden thinks "it was natural and perhaps expedient that measures should have been taken to vindicate the authority of the heads of the institution; ... but good feeling" would not have punished so severely what "was more an offence of the intellect than of the heart and will": for what was it "to fling out a boy's defiance against the first article of the Creed," compared with the drinking and disorderly life of some other undergraduates who were yet allowed to remain in the University? The conduct of the authorities was the less excusable that we have Mr. Hogg's authority for the fact that at this time "the purity and sanctity of his life were most conspicuous," and that "in no individual, perhaps, was the moral sense ever more completely developed than in Shelley." Of course, in face of such an authority as Mr. Hogg, the assertion of Thornton Hunt that "he was aware of facts which gave him to understand that Shelley while at college, in tampering with venal passions, had seriously injured his health; and that this was followed by a reaction 'marked by horror,'" is not to be listened to, and is therefore relegated to a footnote. Professor Dowden rightly thinks that Shelley might have been all the better had he left the University at the usual time, and with his mind weighted with more discipline and knowledge. "His voyage," says his biographer, "must needs have been fleet and far, and the craft, with fore and flying sails set, must often have run upon her side and drunk the water; all the more reason, therefore, for laying in some ballast below before she raced into the gale." Every one knows how the craft raced into the gale, with Miss Westbrook on board, as soon as the Oxford hawser was cut. Shelley might have done much worse. She was a good and attractive person. He began by liking her. "There are some hopes," he says, "of this dear little girl; she would be a divine little scion of infidelity if I could get hold of her." She seems to have been sincerely devoted to him and he afterwards to her, until circumstances unknown or undivulged made his home insupportable to her, and she became the "frantic idiot" who, though she would give Shelley money when she had it, was apparently not sufficiently "tolerant" upon other points--such as that of his proposition that she should enjoy the scenery of Switzerland in his company and that of her supplanter; and it certainly showed some narrowness of mind to cast herself, upon his final desertion of her, first into some desperation of living and afterwards into the Serpentine, when she might have shared, or at least witnessed, the "eternal rapture" and "divine aspirations" which her husband was enjoying in the arms of another woman. Poor little "idiot" as she was, she constitutes almost the only point in all this bewildering "romance of reality" upon which the mind can rest with any peace or pleasure.

After Shelley, the chief male figure in this romance--which would be altogether incredible were it not real--is that of the guide, philosopher, and friend of the poet's youth, Godwin. Pecksniff is genteel comedy compared with the grim farce of this repulsive lover of wisdom as embodied in himself. Like the German poet who was entrusted by one friend to be the bearer of a sausage to another, and, bit by bit, ate it all on his way, Godwin "sincerely abhorred all that was sordid and mean; but he liked sausage"; and the way he combined the necessity for nibbling at Shelley's future fortune by making incessant claims, which the latter could only satisfy by repeated and ruinous post-obits, with the other necessity for keeping up the insulted and injured dignity of a man whom Shelley had wronged past pardon, is funny beyond description. His writing to tell Shelley that he had insulted him by giving him a heavy sum of money in the form of a cheque made payable to his own name, thereby making the gift liable to be construed as such by the banker, and threatening solemnly not to receive the gift at all, unless the name was changed to "Hume" or any other the poet might select, is a touch which Shakespeare might have coveted for Ancient Pistol.

BLAKE

Blake's poetry, with the exception of four or five lovely lyrics and here and there in the other pieces a startling gleam of unquestionable genius, is mere drivel. A sensible person can easily distinguish between that which he cannot understand and that in which there is nothing to be understood. Mr. W. Rossetti, who is an enthusiast for "the much-maligned Paris Commune" and for Blake's poetry, says of some of the latter, where it is nearly at its worst, "We feel its potent and arcane influence, but cannot dismember this into articulated meanings." This sentence, if put into less exalted English, expresses tolerably well the aspect of mind with which we regard much of the writing of the Prophets and of the great ancient and modern mystics. Some light of their meaning forces itself through the, in most cases, purposely obscure cloud of their words and imagery; but when, by chance, a glimpse of the disk itself is caught, it is surprisingly strong, bright, and intelligible. Such writers are only spoken of with irreverence by those that would have given their verdict in favour of the famous Irishman who, being confronted with one witness swearing to having seen him take a handkerchief from another gentleman's pocket, brought four who testified with equal solemnity to not having seen him do any such thing. The obvious rule in regard to such writers is, "When you cannot understand a man's ignorance, think yourself ignorant of his understanding." Again, if a man's sayings are wholly unintelligible to us, he may claim the benefit of a small possibility of a doubt that his meanings may be too great and necessarily "arcane" for our powers of reception. But when a writer's works consist of a few passages of great beauty and such simplicity that a child may understand them--like Blake's "Chimney-Sweep," "Tiger," "Piping down the valleys wild," "Why was Cupid a boy?" and "Auguries of Innocence"--and a great deal more that is mere ill-expressed but perfectly intelligible platitude and commonplace mixed with petty spite, and a far larger quantity still which to the ear of the natural understanding is mere gibberish, he has no right to claim, as Blake does, that the latter shall be regarded as plenarily inspired, or, indeed, as being anything better than the delirious rubbish it obviously is.

That "great wits to madness nearly are allied" is not true; but it is not only true but psychologically explicable that small "geniuses" often are so. Most children are geniuses before the dawn of moral and intellectual responsibilities; and there are some who remain, not children, but moral and intellectual manikins, all their lives. It must be confessed that conscience makes, not only cowards, but more or less dullards, of us all. The child, that

Mighty prophet, seer blest, On whom those truths do rest Which we are toiling all our lives to find,

owes his power of vision to his not being able to see the flaming sword of conscience which turns every way, and hinders all men but a very few from getting a glimpse through the closed gates of Paradise. Yet it is better to be a purblind man with a conscience than a seeing manikin with none. It is better still, and best of all, when the man of developed intellect and fully accepted responsibilities retains a cherished memory of and an innocent sympathy with the knowledge that came to him in childhood and early youth, and uses his trained powers of expression in order to make the world partakers of those thoughts and feelings which had no tongue when they first arose in him, and leave no memory in the mass of men until the man of true and sane genius touches chords of recollection that would otherwise have slept in them for ever. One of the few really good things ever said by Hazlitt is that "men of genius spend their lives in teaching the world what they themselves learned before they were twenty."

For the time, however, the manikin type of genius is all the fashion, especially with a class of critics who have it in their power to give notoriety, if they cannot give fame. Craziness alone passes at present for a strong presumption of genius, and where genius is really found in company therewith it is at once pronounced "supreme." This is partly because most people can see that craziness has something abnormal about it, and are ready, therefore, to identify it with genius, of which most persons only know that it also is "abnormal"; and partly because the manikin mind is always red republican, and ardent in its hatred of kings, priests, "conventions," the "monopoly" of property and of women, and all other hindrances put in the way of virtue, liberty, and happiness by the wicked "civilizee."

Blake, as an artist, is a more important figure than Blake the poet; and naturally so, for the smallest good poem involves a consecutiveness and complexity of thought which are only required in paintings of a character which Blake rarely attempted. Yet, even as a painter his reputation has until lately been much exaggerated. The recent exhibition of his collected drawings and paintings was a great blow to the fame which had grown up from a haphazard acquaintance by his admirers with a few sketches or an illustrated poem. Here and there there was a gleam of such pure and simple genius as is often revealed in the speech of a finely natured child amid its ordinary chatter; here and there the expression of a tender or distempered dream, which was not like anything else in the spectator's experience; now and then an outline that had a look of Michael Angelo, with sometimes hints which might have formed the themes of great works, and which justified the saying of Fuseli that "Blake is damned good to steal from"; but the effect of the whole collection was dejecting and unimpressive, and did little towards confirming its creator's opinion that Titian, Reynolds, and Gainsborough were bad artists, and Blake, Barry, and Fuseli good ones.

ROSSETTI AS A POET

The claims of Rossetti as a painter and a poet have obtained a full and generous recognition; and he has acquired a standing in either art which will in all probability abide, though it is far too soon to attempt any estimate of his relative position in the permanent ranks of artists and writers. His thoughtfulness, and the clearness and intensity of his perceptions, do not require to be insisted upon, nor the almost unexampled way in which he has merged--and often, it must be admitted, confounded--the functions of painter and poet. This he has done to the detriment of his perfection in either art; in neither of which can he be truly said to have attained the character of mastery which may be found, more or less, in almost all other workers of equal genius with himself, and sometimes in those whose natural qualifications have been inferior to his. Little of his drawing and none of his painting can be enjoyed without the drawback of some sense of manifest technical failure; and nearly all his poetry--which is more or less difficult by reason of the quick succession of out-of-the-way thoughts and images, needing the closest attention for their appreciation--is rendered unnecessarily so by language which rarely has the fluency of perfection. In the two or three instances in which his verse becomes fluent and more or less masterly--notably in the "Burden of Nineveh" and "Jenny"--it ceases to be characteristic or subtle. The "Burden of Nineveh" might have been written by Southey, or any other writer of forcible words and thoughts in somewhat commonplace rhythm. This fact, that fluency fails him as soon as he gets upon his own proper ground, renders it extremely difficult to discern and to describe exactly what that ground is. Style, which is the true expression of the poet's individuality--the mark by which we discover, not what, but how, he thinks and feels--is almost suffocated, in Rossetti's most characteristic work, by voluntary oddities of manner and by a manifest difficulty in so moving in the bonds of verse as to convert them into graces. If subtle thoughts and vivid imagery were all that went to make a poet, Rossetti would stand very high. But these qualities must have the running commentary and musical accompaniment of free feeling, which only a correspondingly subtle and vivid versification can express, before they can be allowed to constitute a claim to the highest poetical rank. Rossetti as a versifier was as technically defective as Rossetti as a painter; his best poems and his best paintings are the outcome, not only of very high aims--which are as common as blackberries--but of very high aims deeply and characteristically felt; and his superiority to many far more technically perfect artists results from the fact that his characteristic feeling is strong enough to make itself powerfully, however indistinctly, perceived through the mist and obstructions of his mannerism and defective verse.

In endeavouring to do justice to Rossetti it must be remembered that, though born and bred in England, he was an Italian by blood and sympathy. His acquaintance with Englishmen and English books was by no means wide. Love, the constant theme of his art, is in some of his most important poems, not the English love whose stream is steady affection and only its occasional eddies passion, and which, when disappointed, does not cease to be love, though it becomes sorrow: but the Italian ardour, in perennial crisis, which stabs its rival and hates its object, if she refuses its satisfaction, as ardently as it worships her so long as there is hope. The limitations, also, which characterise Rossetti's poetry belong to Italian poetry itself. There is little breadth in it, but much acuteness. Dante is to Shakespeare as the Peak of Teneriffe to the tableland of Tibet; and, as any reader of Rossetti's translations of the minor Italian poets may see, the same proportion prevails between them and the lesser singers of England. It is therefore quite unfair to try an essentially Italian poet, like Rossetti, by comparing his works with the classical poetry of a nation which, for combined breadth and height, far surpasses the poetry of all other languages present and past, with the doubtful exception of the Greek. The English language itself is not made for Italian thought and passion. It has about four times as many vowel sounds as Italian and a corresponding consonantal power; that is to say, it differs from the Italian about as much as an organ differs from a flute. Rossetti uses little beside the flute-notes of our English organ; and, if he had made himself complete master of those notes, it would have been the most that could have been expected of him. In appearance and manners Rossetti was thoroughly Italian. In his youth especially he had the sweet and easy courtesy peculiar to his nation. His brother says, "There was a certain British bluffness streaking the finely poised Italian suppleness and facility." This describes, better than perhaps Mr. William Rossetti intended, a characteristic which occasionally, but fortunately not often, appears in his poetry, which is most pleasing when it is least "streaked" with British bluffness: as it is, for example, in "Jenny."

Rossetti's power is chiefly shown in his long ballads, such as "Sister Helen," "The Bride's Prelude," "Rose Mary," and "The King's Tragedy." Had these been found in Percy's "Relics," they would have constituted the chief ornaments of that collection. As it is, it is impossible not to feel that they are more or less anachronisms, both in spirit and in form. The repetition of a refrain through the fifty stanzas or so of "Sister Helen," the most forcible of all these lyrical narratives, has no sufficient justification for its interruption of the fiercely flowing history. A refrain which extends to more than three or four stanzas requires and originally assumed a musical accompaniment. The constant high-pressure of passion in these ballads is also an anachronism; and to the cultured modern reader this character is calculated to defeat the poet's purpose, giving him an impression of cold instead of warmth, as if the fire had a salamander instead of a heart in its centre. A kindred fault, which Rossetti has in common with some of the most famous poets of the century, is that of conferring upon all his images an acute and independent clearness which is never found in the natural and truly poetical expression of feeling. It is true, and great poets have noted it, that in extreme crises of passion there will sometimes be a moment of calm in which the minutiae of some most trifling object or circumstance will, as it were, photograph themselves upon the mind. But this praeternatural calm is only the "eye of the storm"; and to scatter broadcast, over a long poem, imagery with the sharpest outlines is to prove, not only that it has not been written from true passion, but that the poet has not even observed the phenomena of true passion. Such independent force and clearness of imagery can only be justified in poems of the very lowest type of artistic construction, such as Schiller's "Song of the Bell" and "Childe Harold," which scarcely profess to have more unity than is to be found in a scrap-book. A fine poem may or may not be full of "fine things"; but, if it does abound in them, their independent value should only appear when they are separated from their context. In Rossetti, as in several other modern poets of great reputation, we are constantly being pulled up, in the professedly fiery course of a tale of passion, to observe the moss on a rock or the note of a chaffinch. High finish has nothing to do with this quality of extreme definiteness in detail; indeed, it is more often exercised by the perfect poet in blurring outlines than in giving them acuteness. It must be admitted, however, that Rossetti had an unusual temptation to this kind of excess in his extraordinary faculty for seeing objects in such a fierce light of imagination as very few poets have been able to throw upon external things. He can be forgiven for spoiling a tender lyric by a stanza such as this, which seems scratched with an adamantine pen upon a slab of agate--

But the sea stands spread As one wall with the flat skies, Where the lean black craft, like flies, Seem wellnigh stagnated, Soon to drop off dead.

Though the foregoing strictures apply to a large portion of Rossetti's work, there is a really precious residuum which they do not touch. There are several pieces--such as "Love's Nocturn," "The Portrait," "A Little While," and many sonnets--which are full of natural feeling expressed with simple and subtle art; and in much of his work there is a rich and obscure glow of insight into depths too profound and too sacred for clear speech, even if they could be spoken: a sort of insight not at all uncommon in the great art of past times, but exceedingly rare in the art of our own.

MR. SWINBURNE'S SELECTIONS

It has probably been a misfortune for Mr. Swinburne's growth as a poet that no winter of critical neglect preceded the full recognition of his very remarkable talents. His best friends must allow that he is still somewhat younger in judgment than in his years and experience of authorship. It is not, however, much to be wondered at that he should have been tempted to rest content with having apparently attained at a single step a height of reputation to reach which has been with most poets the work of hard climbing during many years. Mr. Swinburne is still in the prime of life and in full possession of his powers, and some of his later work shows that he has that continued power of growth which is one of the greatest privileges of genius. If he will only listen to his own critical conscience, he may yet do work better and much more enduring than any he has yet done. He cannot, indeed, hope to excel certain single passages of prose and verse in which he has attained a character of breadth and poetic ardour scarcely to be found in any other writer of the time; but he can modify his manner of thinking and writing so that his best--which is very good indeed--may not be discredited by so much of the jejune in thought and composition as is to be found in a great deal of his work heretofore. Hitherto Mr. Swinburne has been too much given to protesting; which is not the poet's work, even when it is done wisely. In his future writing we shall probably hear more of the whisper of affirmative wisdom than the whirlwind of passionate negation; he will recognise more and more fully that the world is not and never will be made up of Swinburnes and Rossettis, and that it is vain to denounce popular beliefs and institutions, when he has only, to set up in their places, others which are, and for ever will be, unintelligible by the great majority of mankind, and inapplicable to their demands. The people will always insist on having kings and priests; and Mr. Swinburne has, no doubt, had his eyes too well opened by very recent history not to discern that it would be of little use to dethrone King Log in favour of Prime Minister Stork, or to unfrock an Archbishop of Canterbury in order to transfer his authority to a General Booth.

Hitherto it has been impossible not to feel that there has been some disproportion between Mr. Swinburne's power of saying things and the things he has to say. This defect of the "body of thought," which Coleridge once complained was wanting in an otherwise good poem, has reacted upon Mr. Swinburne's language itself, producing sometimes a reiteration of words and imagery surpassing even that which is to be found in the works of Shelley, and which in them arose from the same inadequacy of matter. For example, in a passage of thirteen lines in the present volume we have "flowery forefront of the year," "foam-flowered strand," "blossom-fringe," "flower-soft face," and "spray-flowers"; and in Mr. Swinburne's poems generally it must be confessed that flowers, stars, waves, flames and three or four other entities of the natural order, come in so often as to suggest some narrowness of observation and vocabulary. This defect, also, is less manifest than it used to be, though probably the abandonment to the mere joy of words, which is natural and not altogether ungraceful in a writer who can use them so splendidly, will always be a characteristic of Mr. Swinburne's poetry. It reminds us of the rapture of Tristram in the truly magnificent description of the bath he took before breakfast in "Sea and Sunrise," and the reader is often carried with like joy upon the waves of words without troubling himself as to whether he and the poet are not both out of their depth.

Mr. Swinburne's mode of dealing with human passions is somewhat of an anachronism. His heroes and heroines, like those of the old English drama and the Scandinavian poems, often become heroic by the sacrifice of humanity, and, thereby, of the reader's sympathy. The pictures of Mary Queen of Scots and of Iseult in this volume, for instance, though painted with a great brush are not truly great, because they are not greatly true--at all events, to any conditions which the modern world recognises or should desire to recognise. Nor, granting that the characters and situations are poetical, is the execution quite what it ought to be. The effects are obtained by a cumulative rather than a developing process; and, at the end of a long poem or passage full of strong words and images, the idea of strength thence derived is rather that given by a hill than the living hole of a huge tree.

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