The Bridling of Pegasus: Prose Papers on Poetry

by Alfred Austin

I hope no one supposes that I am, even incidentally, intending to pronounce a sweeping and unqualified condemnation of the great movement known in history as the French Revolution. That would indeed be to be as narrow as the narrowest pessimist could possibly show himself. The French Revolution, as is probably the case with every great political, religious, or social movement, was in its action partly beneficial, partly detrimental. It abolished many monstrous abuses, it propounded afresh some long-neglected or violated truths; and it gave a vigorous impulse to human hope. But it was perhaps the most violent of all the great movements recorded in human annals. Accordingly, it destroyed over much, and it promised over much. In all probability, action and reaction are as nicely balanced in the intellectual and moral world as in the physical, and exaggerated hopes must have their equivalent in correlated and co-equal disappointment. I sometimes think that the nineteenth century now closed will be regarded in the fullness of time as a colossal egotist, that began by thinking somewhat too highly of itself, its prospects, its capacity, its performances, and ended by thinking somewhat too meanly of what I have called things in general, or those permanent conditions of man, life, and society, which no amount of Revolutions, French or otherwise, will avail to get rid of.

In truth, if I were asked to say briefly what Pessimism is, I should say it is disappointed Egotism; and the description will hold good, whether we apply it to an individual, to a community, or to an age.

For nothing is more remarkable in the writings of pessimistic poets than the attention they devote, and that they ask us to devote, to their own feelings. Far be it from me to deny that some very lovely and very valuable verse has been written by poets concerning their personal joys, sorrows, hopes, longings, and disappointments. But then it is verse which describes the joys, sorrows, hopes, longings, and disappointments common to the whole human race, and which every sensitive nature experiences at some time or another, in the course of chequered life, and which are peculiar to no particular age or generation, but the pathetic possession of all men, and all epochs. The verse to which I allude with less commendation, is the verse in which the writer seems to be occupied, and asking us to occupy ourselves, with exceptional states of suffering which appertain to him alone, or to him and the little esoteric circle of superior martyrs to which he belongs, and to some special period of history in which their lot is cast. The sorrows we entertain in common with others never lead to pessimism, they lead to pity, sympathy, pathos, to pious resignation, to courageous hope. I wish these privileged invalids would take to heart those noble lines of Wordsworth:

So once it would have been—’tis so no more—
I have submitted to a new control—
A power is gone which nothing can restore,
A deep distress hath humanized my soul!

I sometimes think these doleful bards have never had a really deep distress, that their very woe is fanciful, and that like the young gentleman in France of whom Arthur speaks in King John, they are as sad as night, only for wantonness. But far from being rebuked by critics for their sea-green melancholy, they have been hailed as true masters of song for scarcely any better reason than that they declare themselves to be utterly miserable, and life to be equally so. Indeed by some critics it has been raised into a literary canon, not only that all Poetry, to be of much account, must be written in the pathetic minor, but that the poets themselves, if we are to recognise them as endowed with true genius and real sacred fire, must be unhappy from the cradle to the grave. If they can die young, if they can go mad, or commit suicide, so much the better. Their credentials as great poets are then firmly established. Even a pathetic phrase has been invented to describe the natural and inevitable condition of such sacred persons, a phrase that must be well known to you—the Sorrows of Genius.

Therefore, in the really sacred name of Genius, of Literature, of Poetry, I protest against this pitiable, this mawkish, unmanly, unwholesome, and utterly untrue estimate both of poetry and poets. No first-rate poet ever went mad, or ever committed suicide, though one or two, no doubt, have happened to die comparatively young. It is utterly dishonouring to poets, it is utterly discrediting to men of genius, to represent them as feeble, whining, helpless, love-sick, life-sick invalids, galvanised from time to time into activity by a sort of metrical hysteria. Because Shelley has truly said that

Our sweetest songs are those which tell of saddest thought

—and because in Julian and Maddalo he has represented Byron as saying that men

... learn in suffering what they teach in song

—are we to conclude that sadness and suffering are the only things in life, the only things in it deserving of the poet’s music? No one will ever be a poet of much consequence who has not suffered, for, as Goethe finely says, he who never ate his bread in sorrow, knows not the Heavenly Powers. But, if our sweetest songs are those which tell of saddest thought, they are not necessarily our strongest or our greatest songs; and if we accept the assertion that men learn in suffering what they teach in song, do not let us forget the “learning” spoken of in the line. The poet, no doubt, has to learn by suffering, but having learnt, he has then, in my opinion, to help others not to be miserable, but to be happy.