I was a poet, and I sang of that just son of Anchises, who came from Troy after proud Ilion was laid in ashes. But you—why do you return to worries of that sort! Why do you not ascend the delectable mountain, which is the principle and cause of all true happiness?
We must bear in mind, however, that the words are not the real words of Virgil, but words put into his mouth by Dante at a period when Dante himself was weary and sick to death of tanta noia, the annoyances and mortifications of political life, and had cast longing eyes upon the dilettoso monte. What real man of letters that ever ventured into the arid and somewhat vulgar domain of Party-politics has not felt the same feeling of revulsion, the same longing for the water-brooks? But, years after Dante wrote that passage, he strove, petitioned, and conspired to be allowed to return to Florence and its perpetual civic strife, and envied, as Byron makes him say, in The Prophecy of Dante:
... Every dove its nest and wings,
Which waft it where the Apennine look down
On Arno, till it perches, it may be,
Within my all inexorable town.
If the Crusades were not politics, we should have to narrow the meaning of the word very considerably; and if the Crusades were political, another Italian poet must be added to the list of those who have not disdained to draw inspiration from public affairs, Torquato Tasso, the author of Gerusalemme Liberata. And what are the first two lines of the Orlando Furioso?—
Le donne, i cavallier, l’arme, gli amori,
Le cortesie, l’audaci imprese, io canto.
L’audaci imprese! The loves of fair ladies were not enough for Ariosto, but with them he needs must blend the clash of arms and mighty enterprise. Both these poets were, in the phrase of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “unscrupulously epic,” and fused the red-hot lava of their time in the mould of their enduring verse. No one should need to be reminded that Chaucer was the friend of statesmen and the colleague of ambassadors. In him we find the two salient characteristics of all the best English poetry—a close observation and tender love of external nature, and a keen interest in the characters and doings of men; and, for this reason, he has often been hailed as the precursor of Shakespeare. The lofty symbolism of Spenser, and the unvarying elevation and dignity of his style, seem to place him rather remote from the common herd, and to make him, in a sense, a little less human than some might wish him to be. But in his writings he holds himself aloof from the vulgar no more than Dante does; and like Dante, he was a man of the world, and participated in the art of government and the administration of public affairs. The “poet of the poets” combined literature with politics.
The days of Burleigh were hardly days when the son of a provincial wool-stapler was likely to be much heard of in the domain of politics. But the historical plays of Shakespeare traverse a space of more than two hundred years, or from King John to Henry VIII., and could not have been written by one who did not combine with his unmatched poetic gifts a lively interest in the politics of his country. Shakespeare is the idol of us all, the only reproach I have ever heard addressed to him being that he was rather too aristocratic in his sympathies, and too Conservative in the non-Party sense, in his views; foibles which perhaps ought not to surprise us in one who had so intimate a knowledge of human nature, and so shrewd an appreciation of its strong and weak points. Nor was it an injury, but a distinct gain, to the prince of dramatic poets, that he should have been compelled to concern himself with the practical affairs of life, and to busy himself actively with the management of a theatre. The lament about his nature being subdued to what it worked in, may be taken as an ebullition of momentary weakness, even in that robust and manly temperament. Shakespeare was compounded of too many and too large elements to have been a poet only; and “art for art’s sake,” wrongly interpreted, could never have found lodgment in his wide sympathies, his capacious understanding, and his versatile imagination.
If Conservatism may, in a non-party sense, claim Shakespeare as an authority in its favour, in Milton, on the other hand, I suppose Liberalism again in a non-party sense would recognise a support. At any rate, Cromwell’s secretary was a keen politician, and even a passionate partisan. I have always thought the allusion made by Walter Scott to him in his Life of Dryden hasty and unfair. “Waller was awed into silence,” he says, “by the rigour of the puritanic spirit; and even the muse of Milton was scared from him by the clamour of religious and political controversy, and only returned, like a sincere friend, to cheer the adversity of one who had neglected her during his career of worldly importance.” A more recent writer seems to echo the same charge. “In 1641,” he says, “Milton stepped into the lists of controversy as a prose writer, beginning the series of works which, far more than his poetry, gave him his conspicuous public standing during his lifetime, and have doubtless bereaved the world of many an immortal verse which it would otherwise have to treasure.” That Milton’s controversial writings gave him more conspicuous public standing in his lifetime than his poetry is indisputable, and not to be wondered at. A man’s contemporaries would naturally rather have him useful than ornamental, provided he be useful on their side; and while persons whose opinions were furthered by his political writings were, as might have been expected, more interested in these than in poems from which they reaped no advantage, those people, on the other hand, to whom his political writings were obnoxious, felt themselves, as might also have been expected, but little disposed to extol, or even to read, his poetry. It may, perhaps, be taken as an absolute rule that a man of letters who takes a conspicuous interest in contemporary politics thereby debars himself to a considerable extent from literary popularity in his lifetime; a matter of little moment, however, since to every reflective mind contemporary popularity is no pledge of enduring fame, while contemporary neglect is not necessarily an omen of eternal oblivion. But it is quite another thing to affirm that men of letters who, like Milton, participate freely in the political controversies of their time “bereave the world of many an immortal verse,” or to insinuate, with Scott, that they desert the Muse for “a career of worldly importance,” and only remember its charms in the season of their adversity. I think any one who has read Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained will be of opinion that Milton wrote quite as much verse as was desirable, whether for our delectation or for his own fame. We see the appalling result of always writing verse and never doing anything else, in the portentous bulk bequeathed to us by even so eminent a poet as Wordsworth, of matter that his idolaters persist in asking the world to accept as a precious revelation, but which the world persists, and I cannot doubt will always persist, in regarding as verse that ought to have gone up the chimney. Matthew Arnold has, in current phrase, “boiled down” Wordsworth, in order to make him more palatable to general consumption; and he gives excellent reasons for having done so.
“In Wordsworth’s seven volumes,” he says, “the pieces of high merit are mingled with a mass of pieces very inferior to them: so inferior to them, that it seems wonderful how the same poet should have produced both. Work altogether inferior, work quite uninspired, flat and dull, is produced by him with evident unconsciousness of its defects, and he presents it to us with the same faith and seriousness as his best work.”
Even in the edition of Wordsworth’s poetry Matthew Arnold has given us, and which contains not a tenth of what Wordsworth published, he has himself exhibited a little too much “faith and seriousness” respecting what he has laboured to save from Lethe, and the “boiling down” process will have to be gone through again by somebody else. The tenth part will have to undergo the operation applied to the whole, and be itself reduced to another one-tenth. The corn must be winnowed by a yet finer sieve; all the chaff and husk must be blown away; and what then remains will be the fine fleur of poetry indeed. In a word, had Wordsworth, like Milton, devoted himself, at some season of his life, to public affairs, he would doubtless have written less verse, and possibly more poetry. Had Milton abstained altogether from politics, he would possibly have written more verse, but it is improbable that he would have written more poetry. What he wrote acquired strength, and even elevation, from his temporary contact with affairs and his judicious co-operation with the active interests of the State. “As the giant Antæus,” says Heine, “remained invincible in strength as long as he touched mother earth with his feet, and lost this power when Hercules lifted him into the air, so also is the poet strong and mighty as long as he does not abandon the firm ground of reality, but forfeits his power when he loses himself in the blue ether.” No doubt the poet must have his head in the air, and no ether need be too high or too rarefied for his imagination to breathe; but without a strong foothold of the ground he runs the risk of too often lapsing, as Matthew Arnold affirms Wordsworth constantly lapsed, into “abstract verbiage,” or of falling into intolerable puerilities.