Questions at Issue

by Edmund Gosse

In recording this impression I desire nothing so little as to appear censorious. Even the external part of the funeral at Westminster seemed, as was said of the similar scene which was enacted there nearly two hundred years ago, "a well-conducted and uncommon public ceremony, where the philosopher can find nothing to condemn, nor the satirist to ridicule." But the contrast between the outside and the inside of the Abbey, a contrast which may possibly have been merely whimsical in itself, served for a parable of the condition of poetry in England as the burial of Tennyson has left it. If it be only the outworn body of this glorious man which we have relinquished to the safeguard of the Minster, gathered to his peers in the fulness of time, we have no serious ground for apprehension, nor, after the first painful moment, even for sorrow. His harvest is ripe, and we hold it in our granaries. The noble physical presence which has been the revered companion of three generations has, indeed, sunk at length:

Yet would we not disturb him from his tomb,

Thus sleeping in his Abbey's friendly shade,

And the rough waves of life for ever laid.

But what if this vast and sounding funeral should prove to have really been the entombment of English poetry? What if it should be the prestige of verse that we left behind us in the Abbey? That is a question which has issues far more serious than the death of any one man, no matter how majestic that man may be.

Poetry is not a democratic art. We are constantly being told by the flexible scribes who live to flatter the multitude that the truest poetry is that which speaks to the million, that moves the great heart of the masses. In his private consciousness no one knows better than the lettered man who writes such sentences that they are not true. Since the pastoral days in which poets made great verses for a little clan, it has never been true that poetry of the noblest kind was really appreciated by the masses. If we take the bulk of what are called educated people, but a very small proportion are genuinely fond of reading. Sift this minority, and but a minute residue of it will be found to be sincerely devoted to beautiful poetry. The genuine lovers of verse are so few that if they could be made the subject of a statistical report, we should probably be astounded at the smallness of their number. From the purely democratic point of view it is certain that they form a negligible quantity. They would produce no general effect at all if they were not surrounded by a very much larger number of persons who, without taste for poetry themselves, are yet traditionally impressed with its value, and treat it with conventional respect, buying it a little, frequently conversing about it, pressing to gaze at its famous professors, and competing for places beside the tombs of its prophets. The respect for poetry felt by these persons, although in itself unmeaning, is extremely valuable in its results. It supports the enthusiasm of the few who know and feel for themselves, and it radiates far and wide into the outer masses, whose darkness would otherwise be unreached by the very glimmer of these things.

There is no question, however, that the existence in prominent public honour of an art in its essence so aristocratic as poetry—that is to say, so dependent on the suffrages of a few thousand persons who happen to possess, in greater or lesser degree, certain peculiar qualities of mind and ear—is, at the present day, anomalous, and therefore perilous. All this beautiful pinnacled structure of the glory of verse, this splendid position of poetry at the summit of the civil ornaments of the Empire, is built of carven ice, and needs nothing but that the hot popular breath should be turned upon it to sink into so much water. It is kept standing there, flashing and sparkling before our eyes, by a succession of happy accidents. To speak rudely, it is kept there by an effort of bluff on the part of a small influential class.

In reflecting on these facts, I have found myself depressed and terrified at an ebullition of popularity which seems to have struck almost everybody else with extreme satisfaction. It has been very natural that the stupendous honour apparently done to Tennyson, not merely by the few who always valued him, but by the many who might be supposed to stand outside his influence, has been welcomed with delight and enthusiasm. But what is so sinister a circumstance is the excessive character of this exhibition. I think of the funeral of Wordsworth at Grasmere, only forty-two years ago, with a score of persons gathering quietly under the low wall that fenced them from the brawling Rotha; and I turn to the spectacle of the 12th, the vast black crowd in the street, the ten thousand persons refused admission to the Abbey, the whole enormous popular manifestation.[1] What does it mean? Is Tennyson, great as he is, a thousand times greater than Wordsworth? Has poetry, in forty years, risen at this ratio in the public estimation? The democracy, I fear, doth protest too much, and there is danger in this hollow reverence.

The danger takes this form. It may at any moment come to be held that the poet, were he the greatest that ever lived, was greater than poetry; the artist more interesting than his art. This was a peril unknown in ancient times. The plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries were scarcely more closely identified with the men who wrote them than Gothic cathedrals were with their architects. Cowley was the first English poet about whom much personal interest was felt outside the poetic class. Dryden is far more evident to us than the Elizabethans were, yet phantasmal by the side of Pope. Since the age of Anne an interest in the poet, as distinguished from his poetry, has steadily increased; the fashion for Byron, the posthumous curiosity in Shelley and Keats, are examples of the rapid growth of this individualisation in the present century. But since the death of Wordsworth it has taken colossal proportions, without, so far as can be observed, any parallel quickening of the taste for poetry itself. The result is that a very interesting or picturesque figure, if identified with poetry, may attract an amount of attention and admiration which is spurious as regards the poetry, and of no real significance. Tennyson had grown to be by far the most mysterious, august, and singular figure in English society. He represented poetry, and the world now expects its poets to be as picturesque, as aged, and as individual as he was, or else it will pay poetry no attention. I fear, to be brief, that the personal, as distinguished from the purely literary, distinction of Tennyson may strike, for the time being, a serious blow at the vitality of poetry in this country.