How thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves!
Again—thou hearest!
Eternal Passion!
Eternal Pain!
Instances could be multiplied: they abound in Arnold’s poetry. It is true that Arnold did, more perhaps than any other poet of his time, bring back into verse something of the hard, jade-like, quality in a phrase that was characteristic of Milton, and almost even more so of Donne, Vaughan and many seventeenth-century lyrists, in a smaller degree of Gray and Wordsworth, hardly attempted by Keats, and less by Tennyson. It was a quality, it may perhaps be said, borrowed by poetry from the great prose writers such as Jeremy Taylor and Thomas Browne and Izaak Walton. It is a subtle quality, one difficult to get at or define, a very attractive thing when well used, and yet a quality to which many good poets are indifferent. When Tennyson writes, “His captain’s ear has heard them boom Bellowing victory, bellowing doom,” and Browning “And yonder soft phial, the exquisite blue,” and Aubrey de Vere “while such perfect sound Fell from his bowstring,” and Poe “Lo, in yon brilliant window-niche,” and Longfellow “We can make our lives sublime,” and Browning again “There’s heaven above, and night by night, I look right through its gorgeous roof,” the words bellowing, exquisite, perfect, brilliant (though Poe very nearly justifies himself), sublime, and gorgeous are all words badly used in poetry, mere counters taken lazily from the fingered stock of prose.[14] It is precisely the poet’s business to translate such words as these into poetry, to recreate the things that they stand for in the looseness of common talk and not to take them over with all their imperfections on them. In conversation, even in written prose, they have their place and are well enough, but in poetry they won’t do—though most poets have blundered in this matter at one time or another. It is not a case of forbidding the poet simple and commonplace words; these he may use as often as he will, if he can use them with mastery. He may say the moon is bright, because that means something definite, but he may not say the moon is exquisite, because that does not mean anything definite at all. And he may not even say the moon is brilliant—or at least not with any safety—because brilliant only means bright, which is definite, plus a qualification which is quite indefinite; it pretends to say something more than bright, but leaves us uninformed as to what the something more is, and so becomes a pretentious word. If the poet wants to emphasise the brightness he can do so by means of an image, or even by saying very bright, if he can, as sometimes he can, beguile us into honouring the “very” by rhythmic cunning. But “brilliant” in poetry is inorganic. Sublime, bellowing, gorgeous and the rest of them belong to a large group of words that are over-specific or under-specific in meaning for poetry. “Bellowing” implies a very particular kind of loud noise, but that particularity is of no significance, and all that the word gives us in Tennyson’s verse over and above, say, “sounding,” is something that it is not worth while to give; it is too specific, so that in poetry it acquires a certain kind of fatuity. “Gorgeous,” on the other hand, is not specific enough. The margin of meaning in it beyond some such word as bright or starry or shining or, perhaps, encrusted, is something known only vaguely to each person as he uses it, and not communicated in any definite way by the word itself. “Gorgeous roof” means nothing, in the sense that it is poetry’s obligation to mean something, that is not accounted for by “starry roof.” The added meaning remains something secret to Browning. It is of no use in this connection to talk about poetry being “suggestive.” The suggestive power of poetry should be something that compels us to an effort of the mind that results in the creation of a clear-cut image, not something directing us into a world of vague sensations and guesswork.
Before proceeding to the next step in the analysis of the quality that I have claimed for Arnold, there is another group of words to be considered that might at first thought seem to be of the same kind as those just mentioned. Perhaps “magnificent” is as good an example as any. Why, it may be asked, should “magnificent” be suitable for poetic use if “gorgeous” is not? Clearly we are on very hazardous ground, but the way is, I think, none the less certain. We know that instinct has told the common practice of poetry to accept the one and to reject the other, and the instinct must have had some source in reason. Admitting that what we need in poetry is exact definition, it can, I think, be shown that there is this difference between the two words. “Gorgeous,” in itself, means (let us say) “splendid” plus some unknown degree of “splendour.” It is not a case of splendour of one kind plus—even though it be in an unknown degree—splendour of another. So that it depends for its very particularity upon a meaning that finally escapes us, and not even Milton with his “Gorgeous Tragedy” can quite subdue it to his art. But with “magnificent” this is not so. The meaning is still “splendid” (let us say) plus something, but the something is not now merely an undefined further quantity of “splendour.” It is, rather, a particular qualification of splendour which is derived from the context, and which, from the context, will nearly always be found to be imaginatively specific. Thus, when Wordsworth says—
Once did she hold the gorgeous East in fee ...
the figure of “the East” is hardly emphasised at all by “gorgeous.” “Splendid” alone would have done the work as well, and not have disturbed our sense of fitness by any pretentiousness. If Wordsworth, we feel, wanted to say more than that the East was splendid, to convey the distinguishing quality of that splendour, it was his business to do it somehow precisely, and not to evade his responsibility by using a word that, so far as qualification of “splendid” goes, leaves us in the air. And, from some subtle essence in its nature, the word “magnificent” would have served his turn. Had he said “the magnificent East,” we should—or so it seems decisively to my perception—have received the idea of “splendid” from the primary meaning of the epithet, which epithet would in turn have, by its peculiar evocative power, gathered to itself from the context the explicit kind of splendour of light and colour and jewelled opulence that we associate with the East. The word “magnificent,” in short, is an organic one in poetry, while “gorgeous” is not. When Browning speaks of “that pulse’s magnificent come-and-go,” we get the image of glowing health reinforced by the idea of a superb physical power and functioning, conveyed through the word “magnificent” in relation to “pulse.” “Splendid” here would have been measurably less significant, while “gorgeous”—if we may strain the word’s meaning for the purpose of illustration—would, in qualifying “splendid,” have weakened the impression instead of strengthening it. Again, as a last example, Sir William Watson in his Autumn has, within a few lines of each other—
At thy mute signal, leaf by golden leaf,
Crumbles the gorgeous year....