MODERN ENGLISH POETRY.
Mr. Stedman, the author of The Victorian Poets, appears to be a painstaking and conscientious writer. He has read with extraordinary industry all the poetry of the period to which his criticism is limited, including not a little which, if he deemed it his duty to study, it was not worth his while to name. He has brought to this study a highly, although we think not methodically, cultivated mind and a retentive memory. He has a remarkable fluency of diction, bordering occasionally on volubility, and a certain fecundity of illustration; but his words have at times a vagueness, not to say inaptness, of application which is not suggestive of clearness or depth of thought. His work, he will pardon us for thinking, is rather an “essay in” technical than “philosophical criticism.” He himself appears to be conscious of this; for he writes in his preface: “If my criticism seems more technical than is usual in a work of this kind, it is due, I think, to the fact that the technical refinement of the period has been so marked as to demand full recognition and analysis.” Furthermore, he informs us that he “has no theory of poetry”; and we must own that, in the absence of any theory of poetry, a philosophical criticism of it seems to us to be out of the question. The qualities he requires of it “are simplicity and freshness in work of all kinds, and, as the basis of persistent growth and of greatness in a masterpiece, simplicity and spontaneity, refined by art, exalted by imagination, and sustained by intellectual power”;
but does he understand what he means by this? We do not. Are we to understand that the only inseparable qualities, the only properties, of poetry which must characterize “work of all kinds”—by which we presume he means every real poetical production—are simplicity and freshness? What does he mean by simplicity? what by freshness? Does he refer these qualities to expression only? If so, what does he mean by “simplicity not being excluded from the Miltonic canon of poetry”?
In the higher efforts of poetry, he tells us, we must still have simplicity; but instead of freshness we are there to look for “spontaneity.” Are, then, “simplicity and spontaneity” the basis of persistent growth (we must own that even the meaning of this expression is hidden from us) and of “greatness in a masterpiece”? No; it must be “simplicity and spontaneity refined by art, exalted by imagination, and sustained by intellectual power.” But will not the simplicity, and most assuredly the spontaneity, disappear in the “artistic refinement”? Still more difficult is the idea of “simplicity and spontaneity exalted by imagination” being the “basis” of a poetical “masterpiece.” Poetry is the offspring of the imagination. Its excellence depends absolutely on the force and vigor of that intellectual power. There can be no poetry in its absence. And what other is imagination than intellectual power?
The poetic feeling we believe to be the echo of the soul to God in
the presence of all his works. It is the emotion—really rapture—which wells up within it at the contemplation of the sensible images in which he reveals portions of his beauty in every variety and combination of form, proportion, color, touch, scent, and sound. Let the poet stand alone by the long margin of the sea on a still summer day. What but it is that profound emotion of which he is so intensely conscious as he looks out upon the immense ocean in its still unrest, which the blue heavens only seem to limit because his power of vision can reach no further, and when he hears the mellow murmur of the wavelets as, rearing themselves in graceful curves, they fall in low whispers along the yellow sands, as if depositing some message from infinitude, and then rapidly withdraw?
What else is that indefinable transport, resembling, only in an infinitely inferior degree, the ecstasy of a saint, which holds in suspense all our faculties as, in the languid heat of summer-tide, we stand at the foot of craggy heights between which in distant ages some river has found for itself a channel; and, as we gaze into the impenetrable shade of the dense thickets which cover their sides, hear the distant sound of falling waters, and scent the fresh perfume of the breathing foliage, the river flowing past us at our feet, to be almost immediately hidden from our view by projecting headlands, covered, they too, with the living darkness of foliage crowding upon foliage, trees on trees?
The delightful trance into which the poetic soul is lulled by the beauty and truth of God speaking through even the least of his works defies analysis; but we may say of it with some confidence that the objects
that provoke it never weary of their charm. And wherefore? Because they do not obstruct the instinct of immortality, the yearning for infinitude, which is a passion within the soul of the poet, but is wholly absent from no one in whom God’s image is not quite effaced. On the contrary, their apparent endlessness, their want of boundary and definite outline, suggest infinitude, and awake the echoes of immortality from their profoundest depths, and minister to the deep yearning of the soul for something more lovely than aught of which it has been hitherto cognizant.
This it is which accounts for the immense superiority of Gothic to Grecian architecture—a superiority so complete as to elevate it into quite another sphere of beauty. The pleasure we experience at the sight of the highest efforts of a Greek architect is almost exclusively æsthetic, sensible, artistic. It is occasioned by sharpness of outline, grace of form, beauty of proportion. In these is the only poetry it can express; which can never, consequently, mount to sublimity. It can only be beautiful at best. It pleases the sense, but the soul—of the poet, at all events—soon wearies of them.
But the Gothic cathedral, with its soaring arches interlacing one another, its many naves, aisles, chapels, and recesses, its endless wealth of tracery and sculpture, its clustering pinnacles and spires pointing heavenwards, the deep shadows of its buttresses, and its many mounting roofs—in short, the utter absence of definiteness of outline, and its grandeur as well as grace of form and beauty of proportion—respond, and powerfully, to the soul’s craving for infinitude, impatience of limitation, and heart-yearning
for the infinitely Beautiful and True.
This poetic sense it is which causes all mere human pleasures so soon to pall upon us. For it is impossible for the human soul to experience any save a transient pleasure from aught less than the infinite and eternal. Life itself is not a pleasure, because we know it is passing away. If we believed we should be annihilated at death, the pain of life would be intolerable.
We hold, therefore, that this suggestiveness—which must not be confused with obscurity, an element antagonistic to poetry—must underlie every expression of poetry, whatever form it may take. A didactic poem is a contradiction in terms, although such a production may abound in poetical passages. It reminds one of the pictures one sees sometimes in which the painter represents with great accuracy a melon or grapes, a glass with wine in it, knives and forks, a loaf of bread, a cheese sometimes, not omitting the maggots, or a lobster tempts his brush—in short, anything which goes into the human mouth for bodily sustenance. Ordinary folk gape with wonder at the cleverness of the imitation; but there is no one so dull as to suppose that there is in it any of the poetry of art.
The visible creation is the expression of the divine Idea in it. It is impossible, consequently, that it should not express, in all its infinitude of forms, modes, color, scent, sound, etc., the truth and beauty of Him who conceived it. It would be contrary to reason to suppose that he sent it forth into objective existence as a mere toy for the amusement of his august creature, as we throw dissolving views of grotesque figures upon a
white surface for the amusement of children. It was to convey to us intimations of himself, as well as snatches of his happiness. The spherical form of the unnumbered worlds; the limited power of our visual organ, which can only see the beginnings of things; perpetual motion; sound and scent, which fail not when they are no longer within the reach of our senses; the revolution, in never-ending cycles, of years, seasons, weeks, and days; renewed life never failing to come forth from rest and repose—ay, even from death and corruption; imaginary horizons, vanishing distances, light prevailing over darkness; the thrill of awful pleasure with which the created soul of man apprehends this deep meaning of things—that spiritual instinct to which time is a pain, eternity a rapture—in all are mirrored, in every variety and form of grace and loveliness, as well as of unsightliness and horror, Infinitude, Immortality, God the infinitely lovable, because he is the infinitely Beautiful and True.
In proportion to the strength of this instinct is the excellence or inferiority of the poetic gift. From this must it draw all its highest inspirations. Poetry is, in fact, its advertent expression; and thus the poet is, like God—only, of course, after a secondary and imitative fashion—a creator (ποιητὴς). He avails himself of some of the illimitable wealth of imagery in which God has expressed, or given objective existence to, his own one but infinitely varied idea, and, by fresh combinations, throws them into really new forms or creations. Out of many examples that come to mind—for excellence in this is less uncommon than in the higher order of poetry, of which the crown and
lord of nature form the material—may be quoted the following creation of a midsummer noon in the Earthly Paradise, by Morris:
“Within the gardens once again they met,
That now the roses did well-nigh forget;
For hot July was drawing to an end,
And August came the fainting year to mend
With fruit and grain; so ‘neath the trellises,
Nigh blossomless, did they lie well at ease,
And watched the poppies burn across the grass,
And o’er the bindweed’s bell the brown bee pass,
Still murmuring of his gains. Windless and bright
The morn had been, to help their dear delight;
But heavy clouds, ere noon, grew round the sun,
And, half-way to the zenith, wild and dun
The sky grew, and the thunder growled afar;
But, ere the steely[76] clouds began their war,
A change there came, and, as by some great hand,
The clouds that hung in threatening o’er the land
Were drawn away; then a light wind arose
That shook the light stems of that flowery close,
And made men sigh for pleasure.”
This brings us to another, and an important, point in which it is our misfortune to differ from Mr. Stedman. He regards poetry as an art. He treats it as such throughout this work; and as such he criticises it. Hence his criticism is almost exclusively technical; hence, too, it exhibits frequent inconsistencies. For example, amongst the properties he assigns to the highest poetry, which we have already quoted, he places spontaneity. By this term he means, we presume, a freedom from effort, the unbidden outflow of imagination, not the labored product of teaching and practice. But this is utterly inapplicable to art, which supposes instruction, clumsy first efforts, and perfection acquired only by years of toil. What there is of art in poetry is limited, or nearly so, to its expression; and even here the less there is of art, and the more of what Mr. Stedman means by spontaneity, the loftier and the more genuine the poetry. It is no praise but a depreciation
of Matthew Arnold’s or Tennyson’s poetry to trace the inspiration of one to Bion and Moschus and of the other to Theocritus. In good sooth, he does the laureate injustice in the far-fetched examples of imitation of Theocritus he ascribes to him. It is the blemish of nearly all our modern poetry that its expression is so labored, so technical. For this it is that, in the highest poetry, nearly all who have tried it have failed; none more signally than Tennyson in Queen Mary. One only has succeeded—Sir Aubrey de Vere. Another—whom, because he has so foully outraged the moral sense of all mankind, we prefer not to name until he has made reparation, and who, if he had not cast from him all sense of the beautiful and the true, might have been perhaps the greatest poet of the age—is as remarkable for the originality and unstudiedness of his expression as for the brilliance and fecundity of his imagination.
Mr. Stedman literally limits poetry to expression. In a passage at the side of which is the marginal index, “What constitutes a poet,” he writes: “Again, the grammarian’s statement is true, that poetry is a means of expression. A poet may differ from other men in having profounder emotions and clearer perceptions; but this is not for him to assume, nor a claim which they are swift to grant. The lines,
“Oh! many are the poets that are sown
By nature—men endowed with highest gifts,
The vision and the faculty divine,
Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse,”
imply that the recognized poet is one who gives voice, in expressive language, to the common thought and feeling which lie deeper than ordinary speech. He is the interpreter; moreover, he is the maker—an artist of the beautiful, the
inventor of harmonious numbers which shall be a lure and a repose.”
It is clear from this unintelligible and self-contradicting passage that the writer has no theory of poetry. Yet in it he makes a very definite attempt to sketch such theory, although he before told us that he has none. What he means by it being “a grammarian’s statement” that “poetry is a means of expression” we know not. Had he asserted that poetry is the poet’s means of expression, we could have understood him without agreeing with him; but he identifies poetry with its expression. Say they must co-exist; but they are not identical. There is not a human soul without a body, nor a leaf without the sap of the tree; but great confusion would ensue from identifying the one with the other. He goes, however, even further than this. It seems to be his idea that no one can be a poet who does not write poetry. It is true he uses the term “recognized,” but he goes on to describe the poet as “an artist of the beautiful, the inventor of harmonious numbers.” But it is not necessary, for any one to be a poet, that he should be recognized as such. There are those who “want the acomplishment of verse” through the very intensity of the poetic gift. Their intuitions are so profound that language sinks under the task of conveying them; expression is overwhelmed. People never write more feebly than when under the influence of strong emotion. For this reason it is, too, that poetry may sometimes be improved by the travail of art, the less, however, in proportion to the inspiration of the poet. There are those, pre-eminently Shakspere, in whom the expression is nearly as inspired as the poetry.
Ingenium miserâ fortunatius arte
Credit, et excludit sanos Helicone Poëtas
Democritus.
In more than one passage Mr. Stedman approaches the truth about poetry, as when he says that “poets differ from other men in having profounder emotions and clearer perceptions”; and again when he writes: “Certain effects are suggested by nature; the poet discovers new combinations within the ground which these afford.” If for “effects” had been substituted “conceptions of the beautiful,” it would have been very near a sufficiently accurate description of the creative power of the poet; but he is hampered by his identification of poetry with its expression, and so, even here, substitutes “effects”—which really has no meaning in the context—for ideas. Poetry is the intuition of the Beautiful and True as expressed in nature and in man, not an analysis of its causes and effects. Not the least inspired of modern poets, Rossetti, has very exquisitely sung this theory of poetry in a sonnet on “St. Luke the Painter”:
“Scarcely at once she [Art] dared to rend the mist
Of devious symbols: but soon having wist
How sky-breadth and field-silence and this day
Are symbols also in some deeper way,
She looked through these to God, and was God’s priest.”
The fault of almost all the modern English poets is that they are too artistic. Certainly their poetry cannot be blamed as carmen quod non.
Multa dies et multa litura coercuit, atque
Perfectum decies non castigavit ad unguem.
But it makes too much display of labor. We admire its artistic skill, and that is its principal attraction. We feel that it is not nature which is hymning amidst so much art. The result of such obvious effort betrays the handicraft of the artisan rather than the inspiration of the poet. It is the Versailles fountains
instead of Niagara. It cannot be too much insisted on that poetry is not one of the fine arts. The greater number of modern English poets, however, treat it as such, as much as is possible with only the imagery of words for their material. They are disciples rather of Horace than of Democritus. There is plenty of labor and litura, and of verse perfectum decies ad unguem; of ingenium miserâ fortunatius arte but little. They surpass in mountain-labor the forgotten Lucilius, who in versu faciendo sæpe caput scabunt, vivos et rodunt ungues; but they have too little of “the sacred madness of the bards” for admission into Helicon. The reason is not far to seek. We notice a similar phenomenon in Greece when religious belief was forced to retire before scepticism and the prating sophists. To the sceptical temper of the age is undoubtedly owing the labor devoted to expression, which has done all it could to reduce poetry to an art. It has also occasioned a certain subjectivity, if we may use the word—a painful mental analysis—which is fatal to poetry.
Robert Browning is the greatest offender in this regard. So painfully intense, in truth, is his introspection that he pays far less attention to expression than his contemporaries. Cut off from the divine suggestiveness of nature by his hard materialism, he does nothing but think; and thinking poetically rather than syllogistically is an unamalgamation. Thought and expression are alike confused, rugged, and difficult. The reader, without even melody of rhythm to help him on, stumbles and gropes through intricate sentences, parentheses in parentheses, a startling image here and there; anon a whirring flight of poetry, or what resembles it; but
the wings soon droop, and the poet is on the earth again, or lower than the earth—anywhere but soaring heavenwards. He has in him the making of a poet. Had he the Catholic faith, his imagination would carry him to great heights and keep him there. He might have soared nigh to Shakspere. His talent is dramatic—which is to say, his poetic gift is of the highest order; but nature has no divine suggestiveness to him, the hollow shell whispers no eternity in his dull ear; for him man has no end, events no purpose; and inasmuch as man has a definite end, and a sublime one, to which events definitely contribute, he is not able to create men and women, a destiny, or destinies, in any of which should there be a living verisimilitude. A plot in which men, women, and children talk and act as men, women, and children do talk and act is out of his reach. His highest effort is the dramatic poem, in which, however, occur at times passages of great dramatic power, showing what he could have done had he not been a heathen.
Mr. Tennyson has been the subject of various articles in The Catholic World; but so markedly does he contrast with Browning, and so noteworthy is the different bias given to the poetry of each by the materialistic spirit of the age, that we cannot afford to pass him by here in complete silence.
We may look in vain in the poetry of the laureate for passages of dramatic force such as now and then light up the creaking, groaning poetry of Browning; but he never grovels, as the latter does very often indeed.
Tennyson has strong sympathy with the one faith, and, as one may think, a kind of supernatural bias in
its favor, or he too, like the author of Paracelsus and Bishop Blosegram’s Apology, might have used his poetry as a fantastic costume for crude psychological problems and for the mind-darkness of doubt. The distinguishing characteristic of his poetry is the exquisitely artistic finish of its expression. Every line shows signs of careful toil. His genius has been without doubt hampered by it. He is more artist than poet; and, as though conscious of this, he seems to claim inspiration by an affectation of oracular obscurity. Yet not unseldom the refined simplicity of word and phrase, the grace of imagery, and all the artistic brilliance of choicest ornament express poetry, although never of a very high order. An elegiac poem such as In Memoriam, of nearly seven hundred quatrains, however beautiful in expression, has “unreal” on the face of it; and that is fatal to its pretensions as a poem. Yet are there indications here and there of true poetic feeling.
Painful is it, and not without shame, to have a difference with all the world of criticism. But if we have reason, our fellow-critics will not disdain us; and if we have not, we throw the blame on our theory of poetry. But there is a modern poet—Rossetti—whom, on the whole, we must place on a higher pedestal than Tennyson. With an equal simplicity of word and phrase, a refinement of expression not inferior, he has the art, if it be the result of art, to conceal his art. It is true he has all the artistic finish of Tennyson—so much so that we cannot but feel that it is an artist who is singing to us; but the artist disappears in the poet. We must disenchant ourselves of the thrall of his poetry before we can criticise the artistic perfectness of its expression.
It is not only that, as Tennyson, he paints scenes of nature and human doings with consummate art; but, true poet that he is, he catches the very life of nature and it throbs within his verse. His soul echoes to the Beautiful and the True imaged in nature through all her modes and forms of color, scent, and sound; he reads their meaning; and when he reproduces them, as Mr. Stedman has it, “in different combinations,” they are as suggestive of those ideas of God as the very images of nature herself. Take, for example, the eleventh song in The House of Life—The Sea Limits:
“Consider the sea’s listless chime:
Time’s self it is made audible—
The murmur of the earth’s own shell.
Secret continuance sublime
Is the sea’s end: our sight may pass
No furlong further. Since time was
This sound hath told the lapse of time.
“No quiet, which is death’s—it hath
The mournfulness of ancient life
Enduring always at dull strife.
As the world’s heart of rest and wrath
Its painful pulse is in the sands
Lost utterly, the whole sky stands,
Gray and not known, along its path.
“Listen alone beside the sea,
Listen alone among the woods;
Those voices of twin solitudes
Shall have one sound alike to thee.
Hark where the murmurs of thronged men
Surge and sink back and surge again—
Still the one voice of wave and tree.
“Gather a shell from the strown beach
And listen at its lips: they sigh
The same desire and mystery,
The echo of the whole sea’s speech.
And all mankind is thus at heart
Not anything but what thou art:
And earth, sea, man, are all in each.”
This is poetry of the loftiest kind.
We cannot forbear quoting one more example of his “quality.” It is poetry which reaches near to Shakspere. “The poet of the world” himself might have thus grandly imaged lust—with more nervous terseness, may be; but the structure of dramatic numbers exacts that, and we do not yet know
that Mr. Rossetti is not equal to the drama.
“Like a toad within a stone
Seated while time crumbles on;
Which sits there since the earth was cursed
For man’s transgression at the first;
Which, living through all centuries,
Not once has seen the sun arise;
Whose life, to its cold circle charmed,
The earth’s whole summers have not warmed;
Which always, whitherso the stone
Be flung, sits there, deaf, blind, alone—
Ay, and shall not be driven out
Till that which shuts him round about
Break at the very Master’s stroke,
And the dust thereof vanish as smoke,
And the seed of man vanish as dust:
Even so within this world is lust.”
Thus much we have quoted in support of a criticism which will not be readily assented to by all. Our space does not admit of our quoting more. But we refer the reader to The Blessed Damozel as a gem not to be outshone; and, for dramatic power joined to the loftiest poetry, to A Last Confession.
Next after Rossetti, if at all after, comes William Morris. In the form and sound and bias of their numbers there is a close resemblance. The imaginings of the latter flow more profusely, perhaps because he does not tarry to spend so much care upon his art. Indeed, whilst the art of Rossetti is faultless in its way, a seldom blemish, like a minute blur in a diamond of the best water, may be detected in that of Morris, as the word “now” thrice in three successive quatrains, the word “golden” in five successive lines, in a scene, of almost tragic pathos, of Sir Galahad, a Christmas Mystery—the finest music he has smitten from the chords of no feeble instrument:
“Why not, O twisting knight, now he is dead?”
But amidst so much finish and faultlessness slight fallibilities like these are, as it were, a relief. The truth is, the artistic spirit in both, which (and no wonder) is all enamored of
mediæval art—art in those ages of faith when she appeared in forms of beauty as sublime as faultless—is too forgetful of the living, breathing, moving present. That they should drink in inspirations of the Beautiful and the True from the forms in which that most poetic age embodied them, is well; but the art—the poetic expression—was natural to that epoch; it is not natural to this. If this is made too conspicuous, as we think it is in both these poets, there is a risk of mannerism; and mannerism is an artistic blemish. The attempt to entice men away from the turbid and muddy torrent of sounding hap-hazard words, which, setting in from Johnson and Gibbon, has swollen into an inundation of all but sheer nonsense from the babbling tributaries of the cheap press, to the nervous grace of simple words and simple sentences and the suggestive imagery of pure nature, is a service to letters as well as art, for which alone they and Tennyson, and all the poets of that school, deserve to be crowned. But aught by which so profoundly artistic a renaissance is needlessly dissociated from the present should have been carefully eschewed. In the matter of words we do not think that such as “japes,” “dromond,” “whatso,” the substitution of the ending “head” for “hood” in words for which universal custom has decreed the former, and so on, are a needed revival of the obsolete. We think, too, that simplicity of grammatical construction has been pushed to the verge of affectation. Still, it is so artistically done, is so beautiful in itself, and evidences such a return of leal homage from hideousness to the rightful Beautiful and the True, that it goes against us to complain.
It is time that the appointment
of a poet-laureate should cease in England. It is an anachronism. It is almost an insult to the world of letters. These are not times in which people are likely to accept the criticism of the British crown or of the crown’s advisers as decisive of a poet’s merits. So, too, there is such a dearth of independent, trustworthy criticism, it has become such a follow-the-leader kind of business, that if the crown merely caps the opinion of the contemporary public, there is every chance of the wrong man being put in the wrong place. At any rate the appointment should not be limited to one. There should be “power to add to their number.” We have no hesitation in assigning a higher niche to either Rossetti or Morris than to Tennyson. In two respects Morris surpasses Rossetti. We have as yet from the latter no sustained efforts such as The Earthly Paradise of the former, and the poetic fire appears to be kindled in him with less effort. We are quite sure that it is in no spirit of challenge or rivalry that he takes Tennyson’s very own theme in The Defence of Guenevere, King Arthur’s Tomb, Sir Galahad, a Christmas Mystery, and The Chapel in Lyoness; but it is an involuntary expression of conscious power. In all the Idyls of the King there is not a passage of such vivid poetry as the following in The Defence of Guenevere:
“‘All I have said is truth, by Christ’s dear tears.’
She would not speak another word, but stood
Turned sideways, listening like a man who hears
“His brother’s trumpet sounding through the wood
Of his foe’s lances. She leaned eagerly,
And gave a slight spring sometimes, as she could
“At last hear something really; joyfully
Her cheek grew crimson, as the headlong speed
Of the roan charger drew all men to see.
The knight who came was Launcelot at good need.”
The poetry of the Idyls, glittering and charming as it may be, is cold
and pulseless by the side of King Arthur’s Tomb, a poem which rises to the utmost height of tragic pathos. The description of the remorse of Guenevere for merely ideas of disloyalty to her kingly husband which she had permitted herself to entertain, as well as of the satisfaction she made, is poetry in its noblest form, short of the drama. But we should never meet throughout all the poetry of Tennyson such blemishes as those we have already quoted, nor such as
“I tell myself a tale
That will not last beyond the whitewashed wall”
—an image which is beneath the dignity of poetry, whilst it rather dulls than quickens our idea of the fleeting nature of his tale; or
“… till the bell
Of her mouth on my cheek sent a delight
Through all my ways of being.…”
But for a poetry so lofty and so inspiring we can well afford to pay the penalty of a few blemishes.
We think that he shares with Tennyson, to a certain extent, the fault of obscurity—never, as Tennyson, in single passages, but in the design and end of entire pieces. We cannot suppose, for example, that he has not a definite end and purpose in The Earthly Paradise; but it is an immense defect that it must be very carefully studied in order even to conjecture one; that it does not readily occur, and still more that, study it as one may, he cannot feel quite sure he has conjectured rightly. And we feel this very serious defect the more keenly because in several of the separate portions of that poem we are afraid to trust ourselves implicitly to the poet; we dare not throw ourselves into his imagination, fearful whither it is to bear us. This is specially remarkable in Cupid
and Psyche. The subject startles us from the first. Gods and goddesses whose memory only remains as the long-passed-away images of falsehood instead of the Beautiful and the True, especially sensuous impersonations of impurity, are a subject which is calculated to scare rather than attract us. But we gain confidence as we read on. Had Byron sung of it, we should have luscious and sensuous imagery of base suggestiveness. Had it been the theme of a living poet, we should have had shameless obscenity. Our poet transfigures it into purity itself. Not an unchaste image shocks the soul. The whole subject is etherealized—we would say, if we felt quite sure of its purpose, even spiritualized. As we interpret it, the heathen myth, although used without stint, is, by the inimitable genius of the poet, stripped of all impure suggestiveness, and is even made a vehicle of exquisite beautifulness for conveying one of the most touching revelations of the great poem of humanity. Psyche (the soul) is represented to us undergoing by the power of divine love all sorrow, overcoming superhuman difficulties, succored always, when hope was well-nigh gone, by guardian angels, until,
“Led by the hand of Love, she took her way
Unto a vale beset with heavenly trees,
Where all the gathered gods and goddesses
Abode her coming; but when Psyche saw
The Father’s face, she, fainting with her awe,
Had fallen, but that Love’s arm held her up.
“Then brought the cup-bearer a golden cup
And gently set it in her slender hand,
And while in dread and wonder she did stand
The Father’s awful voice smote on her ear:
‘Drink now, O beautiful! and have no fear;
For with this draught shalt thou be born again,
And live for ever free from care and pain.’
“Then, pale as privet, took she heart to drink,
And therewithal most strange new thoughts did think,
And unknown feelings seized her, and there came
Sudden remembrance, vivid as a flame,
Of everything that she had done on earth,
Although it all seemed changed in weight and worth,
“Small things becoming great, and great things small;
And godlike pity touched her therewithal
For her old self, for sons of men that die;
And that sweet new-born immortality
Now with full love her rested spirit fed.
Then in that concourse did she lift her head,
And stood at last a very goddess there,
And all cried out at seeing her grown so fair.”
This is the inspiration of true poetry. Nothing at all approaching it can be found throughout the poetry of Tennyson.
In contrast to the soul led by divine love, the poet depicts her sisters devoured by envy and hatred, until, deceiving themselves the while with the dream that they too were objects of delight to divine love, the one having reached “the bare cliff’s rugged brow,” her end of life,
“She cried aloud, ‘O Love! receive me now,
Who am not all unworthy to be thine.’
And with that word her jewelled arms did shine
Outstretched beneath the moon, and with one breath
She sprang to meet the outstretched arms of Death,
The only god that waited for her there,
And in a gathered moment of despair
A hideous thing her trait’rous life did seem”;
and the other
“… rose, and, as she might,
Arrayed herself alone in that still night,
And so stole forth, and, making no delay,
Came to the rock a-nigh the dawn of day;
No warning there her sister’s spirit gave,
No doubt came nigh her the doomed soul to save,
But with a fever burning in her blood,
With glittering eyes and crimson cheeks, she stood
One moment on the brow, the while she cried,
‘Receive me, Love, chosen to be thy bride
From all the million women of the world!’
Then o’er the cliff her wicked limbs were hurled,
Nor has the language of the earth a name
For that surprise of terror and of shame.”
Can anything be grander than this imaged suicide of the evil human soul? And the glowing description of Psyche content to forget her father and her father’s house, and finding the fondest delight in sequestering herself alone with her divine Lover, whom she never sees, only whose voice she hears, is the most exquisite piece of poetic imagining
to be met with anywhere. But the poem deserves a criticism to itself.
We have here to pause. We had hoped to apply similar canons of criticism to others of our modern poets. We had selected Buchanan, Adelaide Procter, Matthew Arnold, Aubrey de Vere, and especially his father, whose mantle has descended on him. Sir Aubrey de Vere is the only one of the modern poets who has written a poem belonging to the highest order of poetry—Mary Tudor, a historical drama—which, although at a long distance from the dramas of “the poet of the world,” is the nearest to them that has been written since his day.
[76] This epithet, to our mind, is a blemish in a very beautiful creation. In the midst of lofty and suggestive natural imagery it abruptly sinks us to a vulgar matter-of-fact struggle of men at fisticuffs armed in the product of the blacksmith’s shop.