The Bridling of Pegasus: Prose Papers on Poetry

by Alfred Austin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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