The Bridling of Pegasus: Prose Papers on Poetry

by Alfred Austin

To sit without emotion, hope, or aim,
In the loved presence of the cottage-fire.
And listen to the flapping of the flame,
Or kettle whispering its faint undersong.

Even if one confined oneself merely to Byron’s Tales, the assertion that Wordsworth “deals with more of life” than Byron, would be startling. Love, hatred, revenge, ambition, the rivalry of creeds, travel, fighting, fighting by land and fighting by sea, almost every passion, and every form of adventure, these are the “life” they deal with; and we submit that it is to deal with a considerable portion of it; with far more of life at any rate than Wordsworth deals with in the whole of his poems. Listen to his own confession:

And thus from day to day my little boat
Rocks in its harbour, lodging peaceably.

Now turn to Byron:

O’er the glad waters of the dark blue sea,
Our thoughts as boundless, and our souls as free,
Far as the breeze can bear, the billows foam,
Survey our empire, and behold our home.
These are our realms, no limit to their sway!

That is precisely the difference. The horizon of Byron is so much larger. Far from it being true that Wordsworth deals with more of life than Byron does, the precise opposite is the truth, that Byron deals with far more of life than Wordsworth does, if by life we mean the life of men, of men of action, of men of the world, and not the life, as M. Scherer says, of Solitaries, Contemplatives, and Recluses.

If we turn to Byron’s Dramas, to Sardanapalus, to The Two Foscari, to The Doge of Venice, no doubt we crave for yet more action, more incident, more situation, than Byron gives us. But we do so because Shakespeare has accustomed us to crave for more; and the craving has been intensified by the sensational character of modern novels and modern stage-plays. Nevertheless these are present, in no small amount, in the plays we have named; and whether people choose to consider the amount great or small, surely it is immeasurably greater than the amount of action, invention, and situation Wordsworth exhibits in any and every poem, of any and every kind, he ever wrote.

We have more than once mentioned Childe Harold, but we must refer to it once more and finally, in support and illustration of what we have been urging. The persons who are of opinion that Byron never treated any subject but himself, will perhaps likewise be of opinion that, in Childe Harold, Byron treats only of himself, and that it is a purely contemplative and subjective poem. A more superficial opinion could not well be held. In form contemplative, it is in substance a poem full of action, situation, and incident; in a word, it is a poem essentially and notably objective. It is the only poem, ostensibly contemplative, of which this can be said; and it assumes this complexion and character by dint of Byron’s own character, which was above all things active, and could not be content without action. In Childe Harold, Byron summons dead men and dead nations from their sepulchres, and makes them live and act again. He revivifies Athens, he resuscitates Rome. He makes Cicero breathe and burn; he makes the fallen columns and shattered pillars of the Forum as eloquent as Tully. Petrarch once more waters the tree that bears his lady’s name. The mountains find a tongue. Jura answers from her misty shroud. The lightning becomes a word. Rousseau tortures himself afresh; Gibbon afresh saps solemn creeds with solemn sneer; afresh Egeria visits Numa in the silence of the night, his breast to hers replying. Lake Leman woos, and kisses away the cries of the Rhone, as they awake. Then she reproves like a sister’s voice. The boats upon the lake are wings to waft us from distraction. The stars become the poetry of Heaven. Waterloo is fought before our very eyes. The defiles fatal to Roman rashness are again crowded with Numidian horse, and Hannibal and Thrasymene flash before our eyes. A soul is infused into the dead; a spirit is instilled into the mountains. The torrents talk; the sepulchres act. Movement never ceases, and the situation is perpetually shifting. Its incidents are almost the whole of History. In it we have—what M. Scherer justly says Wordsworth has not—the knowledge of the human heart which worldly experience gives, the interior drama of the passions which a man can describe well only on condition of having been their victim, and those general views upon History and society which are formed partly by study, partly by the practice of affairs. All this, too, we have, in the third and fourth cantos—for the first and second are very inferior—presented, in language, imagery, and music, of the noblest and most elevated kind; till, swelling, as an organ swells, before it closes, the poem concludes with that magnificent address to the Ocean, which rounds it off and completes it, even as the physical ocean rounds off and completes the physical earth. In no other poem that was ever written are Nature and man—not Man in the abstract, but men as they act, strive, feel, and suffer—so thoroughly interfused and interwoven; and they are interwoven and interfused as they are interwoven and interfused in actual life, not by men contemplating and talking, but by men doing and acting, in a word, by living. And if the reference be to men in general and life in general, and not to a particular sort of man living a particular sort of life away from other men, then we make bold to say, though in doing so we contradict Mr. Arnold roundly, that in Childe Harold alone there is “an ampler body of powerful work,” and that Childe Harold alone “deals with more of life,” than all Wordsworth’s poems, not even selected from, but taken in their integrity, without the diminution of a single passage or the omission of a single line.

At this point, Mr. Arnold steps in with a notable plea. It may be that much of what Wordsworth has written is trivial, and that still more of it is abstract verbiage, or doctrine we hear in church, perfectly true, but wanting in the sort of truth we require, poetic truth. It may also be that Wordsworth has written no one great poem, and that the poem he fancied to be great will not do, and can never be satisfactory to the disinterested lover of poetry. It may furthermore be the case that in Wordsworth’s poems we have to lament a deficiency, if not indeed a total absence of Action, Invention, Situation, and Character, and that he is only a Contemplative, a Recluse, a Solitary, analysing the sensations produced upon himself by dwelling upon mountains, woods, and waters. All this may be so. But, says Mr. Arnold, “Poetry is at bottom a criticism of life,” the greatness of a poet depends upon his criticism of life, and Wordsworth’s criticism of life is more complete, more powerful, and more sound, than that of any English poet since Milton, indeed than that of any poet since Milton, with the one exception of Goethe.

The great and the justly acquired authority of Mr. Arnold must not deter us from saying that to no canon of criticism upon poetry with which we are acquainted do so many objections present themselves. We suspect Mr. Arnold himself has discerned some of these since he first propounded it; for while in his Prefatory Essay upon Wordsworth he urges it with absolute confidence, in his Prefatory Essay on Byron he does so more hesitatingly, and exhibits more anxiety to explain it. But does he not explain it away, when he says, “We are not brought much on our way, I admit, towards an adequate definition of poetry as distinguished from prose by that truth”? Upon this point M. Scherer, an admirer, like ourselves, of both Wordsworth and Mr. Arnold, has some just observations: