I
I intend, in this and two following lectures, Gentlemen, taking my illustrations in the main from Victorian times, to examine with you how one and the same social question, urgent in our politics, presented itself to several writers of imaginative genius, all of whom found something intolerable in England and sought in their several ways to amend it.
At the beginning of this enquiry let me disclaim any parti pris about the duty of an imaginative writer towards the politics of his age. Aristophanes has a political sense, Virgil a strong one even when imitating Theocritus; Theocritus none: yet both are delightful: Lucretius has no care for politics, Horace has any amount, and both are delightful again: the evils of his time which oppress the author of Piers Plowman, affect Chaucer not at all: Dante is intensely political, Petrarch, far less sublime as a poet, disdains the business; Villon is for life as it flies, Ronsard for verse and art (and the devil take the rest); Spenser, with a sore enough political experience, casts it off almost as absolutely as does Ariosto. Shakespeare has a strong patriotic sense and a manly political sense: but he treats politics—let us take King John and Coriolanus for examples—artistically, for their dramatic value. He knows about
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely
and that they can be unendurable: but he does not use them for propaganda (odious word!) whatever the minute of utterance. Milton put all his religion into verse, his politics into prose; save for a passage or two in Lycidas and Paradise Lost he excluded politics from his high poetry. On the other hand Dryden had a high poetic sense of politics, and it pervades the bulk of his original poetry, while the opening of his famous Essay of Dramatic Poesy strikes an introductory note as sure as Virgil’s, through whom a deep undercurrent of politics runs from the first page of the Eclogues to the last of the Æneid. Our poets of the eighteenth century were social and political in the main: since if you once take Man for your theme, you, or some one following you, must be drawn on irresistibly to compare the position you assign him in the scheme of things with his actual position in the body politic, to consider the “Rights of Man,” “man’s inhumanity to man” and so forth. An Essay on Man (with the philosophy Pope borrowed for it) leads on to The Deserted Village:
Ill fares the land, to hast’ning ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates and men decay
—to Crabbe’s Poor House, Hall of Justice, Prison; to Blake’s lyrical laments over small chimney-sweeps, blackamoors, foundlings and all that are young and desolate and oppressed, and the vow to sweep away “these dark Satanic mills” (of which I shall have more to say by and by) “and build Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.” Turn now to Keats and you are returned upon mere poetry, in the Latin sense of mere. Keats has no politics, no philosophy of statecraft, little social feeling: he is a young apostle of poetry for poetry’s sake.
Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
But of course, to put it solidly, that is a vague observation—to anyone whom life has taught to face facts and define his terms, actually an uneducated conclusion, albeit most pardonable in one so young and ardent. Let us, for a better, go on to the last and grandest word of his last, unfinished, poem:
“High Prophetess,” said I, “purge off
Benign, if so it please thee, my mind’s film.”
“None can usurp this height,” returned the Shade,
“But those to whom the miseries of this world
Are misery, and will not let them rest.”
Such a spirit, preëminently, was Shelley; of whom, when the last word of disparagement has been said, or the undeniable truth, put into a phrase by Mr. Max Beerbohm, “a crystal crank,” the equally undeniable fact remains that Shelley suffered tortures over the woes of his fellow-creatures, while Byron (for a contrast) cares scarcely at all for the general woe surrounding him, everything for his own affliction in a world which had paid him tribute far above the earnings of common men, and yet not only (as Shelley does) casts the blame on tyrants and governments, but the cure for his egoistical troubles on political machinery, revolutions. I go on, taking names and illustrations almost at random. Contrast any Radical utterance of Tennyson’s—his Lady Clara Vere de Vere, for example—with poor Thomas Hood’s Song of the Shirt. Why, it fades away: Hood’s passionate charity simply withers up the other’s personal self-assertive inverted snobbery. If you have stuff in you, contrast the note of
With fingers weary and worn,
With eyelids heavy and red,
A woman sat, in unwomanly rags,
Plying her needle and thread
with the whine of Lady Clara Vere de Vere—
The grand old gardener and his wife
Laugh at the claims of long descent
—which is just
When Adam delved, and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?
—on the pianola. Observe, pray, that I am not comparing the poetic gift, in which (as in other gifts of the gods) Tennyson very greatly outweighted Hood. I am merely setting some poets against others and contrasting the degrees in which they exhibit social or political sensitiveness. We should all allow, probably, that Robert Browning was a greater poet and a stronger thinker than his wife: but probably deny to him the acute indignation against human misery, social wrong, political injustice, evinced by the authoress of The Cry of the Children or Casa Guidi Windows. Of the two friends, Matthew Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough, we should as probably admit Arnold to be the better poet as Clough to be the less occupied with his own soul, the more in vain attempt to save other men. So again among the Pre-Raphaelites Swinburne raves magnificently for the blood of tyrants: but when it came to lifting the oppressed, to throwing himself into the job, what a puff-ball was he beside William Morris who had announced himself as no more than “the idle singer of an empty day”!
One fishes in the night of deep sea pools:
For him the nets hang long and low,
Cork buoyed and strong: the silver gleaming schools
Come with the ebb and flow
Of universal tides, and all the channels glow.
Or holding with his hand the weighted line
He sounds the languors of the neaps,
Or feels what current of the springing brine
The cord divergent sweeps,
The throb of what great heart bestirs the middle deeps.
Thou also weavest meshes, fine and thin,
And leaguer’st all the forest ways:
But of that sea, and the great heart therein
Thou knowest nought: whole days
Thou toil’st, and hast thy end—good store of pies and jays.