I summon up remembrance of things past.
This, then, is the first value that we discover in Shakespeare’s use in that connection of the word “sessions”—an exact functioning of the poetic imagination. But over and above that there is yet another value, one that is not very easy to define in set terms, and one of which Shakespeare himself can hardly have been consciously aware. “Sessions,” as we now read the word, calls to our mind, as it did to his, a court of law with all its weighty circumstance; also, as we read it in the sonnet, we get precisely the effect of pure imaginative effort that Shakespeare got, or as much of it as is possible to our own faculty; but the word has also taken on a strange atmospheric significance, almost a shade of actual meaning that is beyond its original intention. In its strictly imaginative value alone, the word was one that might without offence have been more or less similarly used by one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries or early successors, even after his brilliant discovery of it in that context. Shakespeare’s choice of the word was entirely admirable for his imaginative purpose, but it was not so astonishing as to make it explicitly his own beyond the use of any other poet who wished to escape the charge of mere theft. But as time went on, the word, fixed there in its sonnet, underwent a spiritual evolution, that for practical purposes was complete in any case by the time Tennyson arrived, until it was in some sense of a newly acquired nature, and no longer safe for any poet’s handling. The word could not now be used in anything approaching the same context without calling up in the reader’s mind the whole dark and passionate background of Shakespeare’s sonnets. It has, in short, acquired a specifically literary association which is to say—although some critics would seem to overlook the fact—that it is the living witness of one of the supreme moments of human experience, but also that it has become so essential a part of that particular moment that it is now almost impossible to use it in the service of any other. And when Tennyson began to write he found a language that was strewn with words that had put on this dangerous nature, beautiful and often as it would appear irreplaceable words, yet now with calamity in their touch for the poet. To reject them was by no means the same thing as rejecting the false “poetic” inflation that had been the mark of Wordsworth’s attack. It meant that by now a new discipline of a very arduous and vigilant kind had become necessary in the practice of poetry. On every hand were admirable and seductive instruments the use of which was forbidden. If you were Keats you might privateer among the old poetry with profit, but his success in this matter was the adventure of lucky genius, not an example to be followed. Shakespeare could write
Not poppy nor mandragora
Nor all the drowsy syrups of this world ...
and Keats could find his Autumn sleeping
Drowsed with the fume of poppies ...
and be justified of his borrowing, but the exile from poetry of “drowsing” and “poppies” in company, which had at least been suggested by Shakespeare’s lines, was now in any case absolute. So that the poet’s craft is already complicated in two ways. If Tennyson in his verse wanted to recall the birds in spring, he could no longer rely for his effect upon some simple statement such as “the happy birds sang on the bough,” and further, in his elaborated image he had studiously to keep clear, for example, of
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang—
although the chances were that this superb and complex image would be insinuatingly persistent in his mind.
But these were not the only difficulties to be met in the management of diction. I have referred to Byron’s occasional “journalistic use of language.” Every now and again some one raises a false issue as between journalism and literature, suggesting that literature is arrogant in looking upon journalism as being less exalted than itself. It is the same kind of silly baiting as is sometimes indulged in between actors and dramatists, when it is indignantly suggested that it is an affront to the admirable art of Burbage to hold that it is, if the comparison must be made, on a lower creative plane than that of Shakespeare. Journalism, decently practised, can be as honourable and useful a profession as any other, and one to show natural gifts of taste and presentation to great advantage. But journalism is not literature, nor are its aims or methods those of literature. That literature often appears in the journals is beside the point. The essential condition of journalism is that it seeks either to report a fact or an event in terms that shall be immediately intelligible to the great mass of people, or to reflect an opinion from that mass in equally intelligible terms for the satisfaction of the individual units that make up that mass. Its business particularly is to accept and to report, and when it uses invention—which it must be allowed it often does—it is always invention of the wrong kind. To literature, on the other hand, fact and event mean nothing until they are related to an idea, or are seen in conjunction with character, or found to be useful for illuminating the experience of a particular temperament, and further, in precise contrast to journalism, literature seeks to reflect an individual opinion for the benefit or pleasure of the mass so far as the mass cares to take any notice of it. Thus “James Jones, a casual labourer, was yesterday convicted at the Clerkenwell Sessions of stealing a cigarette box, the property of Mr. Thomas Jackson, M. P., and was sentenced to one month’s hard labour” is journalism, while Mr. Galsworthy’s Silver Box is literature. Again, “To-day we celebrate the tercentenary of the death of one of the greatest of all Englishmen. We have sometimes been called a nation of shopkeepers, and yet no country is richer in her poets than England, and of these the acknowledged chief is William Shakespeare. Here was one who sounded the full gamut of human passions, and the universality of his genius has carried his fame into every quarter of the civilised globe. We honour not only Shakespeare, but ourselves in drinking to-day to the immortal memory of one whose work will endure as long as the English language is spoken”—is an example of journalism at its idlest, while Ben Jonson’s panegyric and Arnold’s sonnet, separated by two hundred and fifty years, are alike literature.