Confessions of a Book-Lover

by Maurice Francis Egan

Each lover of poetry has his favourite poem and his favourite poet, and it has always seemed to me that one of the hardest tasks of the critic is to decide on the position of a poet among poets, or of a poet in relation to life. For myself, to speak modestly, I cannot see how I could condemn the taste of the man who thinks that Browning and Swinburne and Tennyson, and, in fact, nearly all the modern English poets, deserve to be classed indiscriminately together as "inspiring." And I cannot even scorn the man who declares that Tennyson is demodé because his heroines are in crinoline and conventional, and his mediæval knights cut out of pasteboard.

By comparison with the original of the "Idylls of the King" this statement seems to be true. Sir Thomas Malory's knights and ladies—by modern standards they would hardly be called "ladies"—do not bear the test of even the most elemental demands of modern taste. They are as different as the characters in Saxo Grammaticus's "Hamblet" are from those in Shakespeare's "Hamlet." But I may enjoy the smoothness of the "Idylls of the King," their bursts of exquisite lyricism, their cadences, and their impossibilities,

and at the same time read Sir Thomas Malory with delight. When I hear raptures over Browning and Swinburne, when people grow dithyrambic over John Masefield and Alfred Kreymborg and others new—chacun à son goût—I feel that by comparison with Francis Thompson, these poets are not rich. They are poor because they seem to leave out God; that is, the God of the Christians.

Swinburne could never be a real pagan, because he could not escape the shadow of the Crucifixion. Theocritus was a real pagan because he knew neither the sorrow of the Crucifixion nor the joy of the Resurrection. Keats was a lover of Greece, was ardent, inexpressibly beautiful, sensuously charming; but Keats could no more be a real Greek than Shakespeare, in "Julius Cæsar," could be a real Roman. Nor could Tennyson, nor Browning, nor William Morris, nor the Preraphaelites be really out of their time, for they could not understand the essentially religious qualities of the times into which they tried to project themselves.

If you compare the "Idylls" of Tennyson with those idylls of Theocritus he imitated, you easily see that his pictures are not even bad copies of the

originals; they are not even paraphrases—to turn again from painting to literature. They are fine in themselves, and the critics of the future, more reasonable than ours and less reactionary, will give them their true place. As for Browning, it is only necessary to read the Italian writers of the Renascence, to find how very modern he is in his poems that touch on that period. He is always modern. With all his efforts he cannot understand that mixture of paganism and Catholicism which made the Renascence possible. He seems to assume that the Catholic Church in the time of the Renascence produced men in whom paganism struggled with Christianity. The fact is that paganism had melted into Christianity and Christianity had given it a new light and a new form.

It was not difficult for an artist of the Renascence to look on a statuette of Leda and the Swan or Danaë and the Descent of Jupiter as a shower of gold, as prefiguring the Incarnation. There was nothing blasphemous in this pagan symbolism of a pagan prophecy of the birth of a God from a virgin. It does not follow that Browning is not powerfully beautiful and essentially poetical, even when he reads modern meanings impossibly into the life

of older days. Nevertheless, he is unsatisfactory, as almost all modern poets, when they interpret the past, are unsatisfactory. A great poet may look into his heart and write, but with Tennyson, with Browning, with Swinburne, one feels that very often they mistake the beating of their own hearts for the sound of the pulsations of the hearts of others.

Similarly, modern Christians who claim to be orthodox are sometimes shocked when they are told that Saint Peter, for example, did not believe that a man might not be both circumcised and baptized. According to a common belief, the two could not exist together among the converted Jews. And the modern man of letters seems to think that paganism and Christianity were at odds at all points. A deeper knowledge of the manifestations of religion, before the Reformation, would dissipate an illusion which spoils so much fine modern poetry.