[6] "Ariadne Florentina," p. 31.
There is not, I suppose, in the English language a more "perfect" poem than "Lycidas." It purports to have been written in a single day, and its wholeness and unity and crystalline completeness
give good colour to the thought that it probably was so.
"Thus sang the uncouth swain to the oaks and rills,
While the still morn went out with sandals gray;
He touched the tender stops of various quills,
With eager thought warbling his Doric lay:
And now the sun had stretched out all the hills,
And now was dropt into the western bay:
At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue;
To-morrow, to fresh woods and pastures new."
Yet, regarding it, the delightful Charles Lamb writes:[7]—
[7] "A Saturday's Dinner."
"I had thought of the Lycidas as of a full-grown beauty,—as springing with all its parts absolute,—till, in evil hour, I was shown the original copy of it, together with the other minor poems of its author, in the library of Trinity, kept like something to be proud of. I wish they had thrown them in the Cam, or sent them, after the later cantos of Spenser, into the Irish Channel. How it staggered me to see the fine things in their ore!—interlined, corrected, as if their words were mortal, alterable, displaceable at pleasure; as if they might have been otherwise, and just as good; as if inspiration were made up of parts, and those fluctuating, successive,
indifferent! I will never go into the workshop of any great artist again, nor desire a sight of his picture, till it is fairly off the easel; no, not if Raphael were to be alive again, and painting another Galatea."
But the real truth of the case is that whatever "inspiration" may be, and whether or not "made up of parts," it, or man's spirit and will in all works of art, has to deal with things so made up; and not only so, but also as described by the other words here chosen: fluctuating, successive, and indifferent. You have to deal with the whole sum of things all at once; the possible material crowds around the artist's will, shifting, changing, presenting at all stages and in all details of a work of art, infinite and continual choice. "Nothing," we are told, "is single," but all things have relations with each other. How much more, then, is it true that every bit of glass in a window is the centre of such relations with its brother and sister pieces, and that nothing is final until all is finished? A work of art is like a battle; conflict after conflict, man[œ]uvre after man[œ]uvre, combination after combination.
The general does not pin himself down from the outset to one plan of tactics, but watches the field and moulds its issues to his will, according to the yielding or the resistance of the opposing forces, keeping all things solvent until the combinations of the strife have woven together into a soluble problem, upon which he can launch the final charge that shall bring him back with victory.