as it is to be discomposed by Mr. Masefield when he makes Saul Kane say
I’ll bloody him a bloody fix,
I’ll bloody burn his bloody ricks....
In this study of the substance of Victorian poetry, therefore, we will dismiss at once any suggestion that we are dealing with a period of intellectual adversity. Tennyson and the group of poets who represented in some degree or another Tennyson’s mood were neither keener nor duller in the wits than the poets of other ages, and since we go to poetry not for what we can learn from it, but for an invigoration of the mind towards the establishment of our own learning, it need not trouble us that Tennyson’s point of view happened in many ways to be one that is peculiarly antipathetic to our own.
Chapter II
Subjective and Objective Poetry—Narrative Poetry—Macaulay—Morris—Poetic Drama
There would seem to be two different kinds of material upon which the poetic faculty can be employed. The old distinction of subjective and objective has become loose in usage, as is the fate of all definitions, but it is not a bad one for working purposes. If in the discussion of æsthetics we begin to qualify our definitions too exactly we are apt to finish up in a world of unintelligible refinements. Words when used in argument have not the same quality and should not be expected to perform the same functions as they do in poetry, qualities and functions the nature of which has already been suggested. All modern moralising, for example, has tended towards the rejection of such plain words as good and bad. We no longer speak of a good man and a bad man as the Old Testament and Bunyan did, and we can show very good reasons for the rejection. Psychology has taught us that it is quite unsafe to call any one just good or bad and leave it at that, and it is one of the achievements of modern literary art, particularly in the drama and in fiction, to explore with great subtlety the gradations by which good and bad merge into each other in a single character. Nevertheless, after such analysis has exhausted itself with every ingenuity, there remain the words good and bad, and in the ordinary communication of ideas we do know, with more or less precision, what is meant when some one of normal intelligence tells us that so and so is a good man or a bad man. And so with such words as objective and subjective in the consideration of æsthetics. It is perfectly true to say that no subject matter controlled by a poet’s art can ever be wholly one or the other, but it is also true to say that if a narrative poem like The Lay of the Last Minstrel is spoken of as being objective in nature, and a philosophical self-analysis like The Prelude as being subjective, we know clearly enough what is meant. If we go further and say that in a work such as King Lear we get the two natures perfectly combined in one organism, we are still talking without wilful obscurity, and we are explaining in a rough and ready way, and yet in a way that is, perhaps, as good as any other, why it is that a work like King Lear shows poetry in its highest and most comprehensive exercise. It is not that The Lay of the Last Minstrel, in presenting a graphic pageant of life external to Scott’s own personal experience, has nothing of that experience woven into it, nor is it that The Prelude in its constant concern with Wordsworth’s own spiritual processes has no observation towers that look out on to the open road. But the external pageantry on the one hand and the self-analysis on the other are quite clearly the predominant motives of the respective poems, just as they are perfectly mated in King Lear, where there is at once everything of the vivid perception of a detached life that can be found in Scott, and everything of deep spiritual responsibility that can be found in Wordsworth, the one now transfigured by passion and the other lit by a new imaginative variety. With so much definition, therefore, the terms subjective and objective may be used for our present purposes.
Scott’s poems are the best examples in English of poetry that is purely, or almost purely, objective. And the neglect of more recent criticism has, I suspect, left them still in the possession of the affections of many readers. They are not only the best of their kind, they could not very well be better. The finer narrative art of Chaucer, suffused as it was by a much more personal contact with its content matter, stands really in æsthetic significance, apart from the question of individual genius, with the art that produced King Lear. In the Victorian age the art of Scott found its inheritors, and, although the schoolmasters have done their best to kill The Lays of Ancient Rome, Macaulay was no bad practitioner in a kind of which we are foolish to speak slightingly because it does not happen to be the highest. If we can forget the class-room and put prejudice aside, and keep our sense of values clear, there is something amiss with us if we do not thrill to passages, of which there are many in the Lays, such as
Then out spake brave Horatius,
The Captain of the Gate:
“To every man upon this earth