Some eminent Victorians: Personal recollections in the world of art and letters

by J. Comyns Carr

I remember Morris saying to me once that he did not much care for a story unless it was long, and although the statement perhaps was not intended to be taken literally, it bore witness to that element in his genius which led him to bury himself with unwearied delight in every smallest detail of the tale he had chosen to tell. Morris, I think, was not easy to know well. There was a certain rough shyness in his manner that kept him aloof from the initial advances of ordinary acquaintance, and it was only as an acquaintance that I knew him. But he must have had deeply lovable qualities to have become so endeared, as he was, to Burne-Jones. It was their custom for years to spend every Sunday morning together in Burne-Jones’s studio; and on the many occasions when Burne-Jones has spoken to me of him, I can recall no word of abatement from the deep and lasting affection in which he held his life-long friend.

The influence wielded by Mr. Swinburne over the younger men of his generation was of a widely different kind. That new music of which I have spoken, already announced in the Atalanta, and presented with even greater variety and exuberance of expression in the Poems and Ballads, set us all thinking. It seemed at the first as though music in its fullest sense had never before entered into the arena of poetry, and his inexhaustible invention of new metre and rhythmic phrasing set the mind in wonder for a while as to whether all that had gone before was not the mere preface to this final achievement. The immediate effect of the fluent melodies he could command was for the time, at least, to put earlier masters upon their trial, and it was not until the overpowering glamour of these earlier poems had passed that it was possible to reckon at their true worth his lasting claims as a poet.

I have always thought that Mr. Swinburne’s handling of language as a musical instrument raises an interesting question in regard to the relation of the arts. Of them all, music alone claims an absolute and independent position. Its appeal does not rely upon association, and demands no definable intellectual foundation. It stands in this way, even in its most primitive forms, as an example to all other arts, serving to remind them of what there is in each of the essential artistic quality; to remind them yet again of the inevitable danger that must be encountered when the artist adds to his natural burden the task of interpreting the changing ideals of life.

Of all the other arts literature, by reason of the intellectual material out of which it is moulded, stands at the farthest pole from music. Painting and sculpture have their own manifest laws and limitations, which may serve to remind their exponents of the peril which awaits their transgression, but literature, even in the supreme form of verse, must of necessity be exposed to dangers from which only the intuitive instinct of the artist can preserve it. Borrowing as by right from all the arts, and pressing into its service all that has been won in the region of form and colour to enforce its own message of the spirit, it is nevertheless inevitable that to music it must remain the heaviest debtor, for its chosen vehicle of rhythmic language approaches most nearly to the abstract instrument of the musician. And yet, I think, even in Mr. Swinburne’s highest triumphs in metrical expression, it is made manifest that the attempt directly to capture the kind of melody that in the last resort belongs to music alone, there lurks a peril that no artist, however gifted, can hope to escape.

It is not in any spirit of depreciation of Mr. Swinburne’s unchallenged gift, a gift which, in its kind, has perhaps never been surpassed in literature, that I have set down these stray thoughts upon the possible limits of music in verse. What I have said is rather intended to record an experience of changing taste in myself in the interval that has elapsed since the time when his earlier poems first captured my imagination. It has grown clearer to me as the years have passed that, even in poetry, only that music is enduring where the melody is subtly interwoven with passionate truth, and that the highest triumph of mere music, in so far as its effects are applicable to literature, must be won by constant cultivation of the simplest means of expression.

To the serious student of poetry such a conclusion may deservedly rank in the region of the accepted commonplace, but some of the utterances of our later-day critics yield at least an excuse for its recall. Not long ago I encountered in a seriously written review the astounding announcement that Oscar Wilde was the author of some of the most remarkable verse of the nineteenth century, and this is hardly an isolated instance of an endeavour that seems at the moment widely spread to make the pitiable disaster of poor Wilde’s career the occasion of the most deplorably exaggerated appreciation of his gifts as a writer.

I met Wilde very often in those earlier days, before he had begun to seek to win by personal eccentricity the attention which his literary talent had not secured, and I am bound to confess that, in the light of my later knowledge of the man and of his work, any attempt to set him in the front rank as a literary personality or a great literary influence seems to me in the highest degree ludicrous and grotesque.

In view of the terrible fate that overtook him, no one could desire to deal harshly at this time with his qualities as a man. That he had a certain charm of manner is undoubted, and that he possessed a measure of wit, as often imitative as original, need not be denied. But there is always a tendency in certain literary circles that lean towards decadence, to exaggerate the genius of those who are morally condemned. A tragic fate such as his, even in one less gifted, naturally tends in such minds to exalt his claims to artistic consideration. It is, at least to my thinking, only on such an assumption that any serious student of poetry, having read the “Ballad of Reading Gaol,” could ever be induced to rank Wilde as a poetic genius, or to consider the body of his work as a man of letters, with whatever luxuries of habiliment it may be offered to the world, as constituting an enduring claim to rank him among the higher influences of his time.

Wilde’s best work was unquestionably, I think, done for the stage, and here it may be conceded he struck out a path of his own. He had the sense of the theatre, a genuine instinct for those moments in the conflict of character to which the proper resources of the theatre can grant both added force and added refinement. It is not an uncommon assumption, especially among writers of fiction, that the drama by comparison is an art of coarse fibre, incapable, by reason of its limitations, of presenting the more intimate realities of character, or the more delicate shades of feeling. The truth is that each art has its own force, its own refinement, and cannot borrow them of another. What is perfectly achieved in one form remains incomparable, and for that very reason cannot in its completed form be appropriated by an art that has other triumphs and is subject to other laws and conditions. And it is here that the novelist so often breaks down in attempting to employ his own special methods in the service of the stage. Wilde made no such blunder. By constant study as well as by natural gift he knew well the arena in which he was working when he chose the vehicle of the drama. His wit has perhaps been over-praised; his epigrams so loudly acclaimed at the time bear the taint of modishness that seems to render them already old-fashioned. But his grip of the more serious situations in life, and his ability to exhibit and interpret them by means genuinely inherent in the resources at the disposal of the dramatist, are left beyond dispute.