It is with regard to lyrics on a larger, more elaborate scale, that English poets have hitherto shown least ambition and enterprise. The Pindarics of Gray are a poor substitute for Pindar; while the Odes of Keats and Matthew Arnold’s Thyrsis and Scholar-Gipsy are elegiac rather than lyrical in mood and form. Shelley and Goethe, and at times Swinburne, have shown themselves to be more truly the successors of the greater Greek lyric poets; and if they be rightly understood, their example may yet bear fruit for our delight of altogether unimaginable quality. But the tendency of the moment seems to be towards poems on a small scale, of a somewhat anæmic delicacy, or else of an artful and piquant quaintness, rather than towards the sustained movement, and elaborate yet highly organised form, which is necessary for the greatest lyrical poetry.
Another province of literature, which we have seldom as yet attempted to make our own, is that of comic poetry. We have indeed had many and various comic writers of first-rate quality; but although, when they were so minded, Chaucer and Shakespeare and Byron could show themselves to be masters of comedy in verse, we have as yet had no Aristophanes, but have been obliged to content ourselves with the charming trivialities and vulgarities of a Gilbert. If only Ben Jonson, in addition to stage-craft, Gargantuan comic energy and Titanic eloquence, had been gifted with a particle of that fiery celestial ether, by which alone mortal art can become divine, then indeed perhaps.... But of what use are regrets? The future, not the past, is here our concern. And what a future might there not be for the comic genius who should be so fortunately inspired as to take the popular Farce, or even the theatrical Revue, and by giving it the life and the wings of poetry, so transform it from a poor ephemeral stage-hobby-horse into an immortal cloud-cruising Pegasus, or at least a serviceable Hippogryph! Thus sublimely mounted, what regions of the earth and sky might not such a Bellerophon explore? What monsters and Chimæras might he not torment and slay with the shafts of his lyrical ridicule? All that men and women say or think or do, would lie ready as fuel for his imagination to kindle at will, all our follies and fashions, vices and virtues, stupidities, cruelties, noble extravagances, religious and metaphysical dreams. If Socrates could afford to be a good-naturedly amused spectator of the Clouds, so might Freud of some Comedy of Dreams by our modern Aristophanes: and if he could not, why, so much the worse for him and his speculations. How wholesome too for our prominent statesmen and demagogues!—But alas, I am forgetting our Lord Chamberlain. We are not yet sufficiently enlightened to tolerate political caricature and Rabelaisian ribaldry upon our stage, and an English Knights or Lysistrata must remain, I fear, for the present a poet’s dream. Nevertheless, under a reasonably intelligent censorship, what Rabelais was for his age, an emancipated imaginative comedy might well be for our own, except that, whereas the Gallic genius has always expressed itself most naturally and completely in prose, ours would expand more congenially into poetry, which, for all its apparent limitations, should be, at its best, the more universal interpreter of the spirit of man, whether on the plane of tragedy or of comedy.
There is good reason for hoping that the problem of an adequate stage-performance of imaginative comedy would be less difficult to solve than it seems to be in the case of serious poetic drama. Actors are always more ready to understand and do justice to plays that are good fun as well as good literature. Mr. Bernard Shaw and Gilbert and Sullivan are apt to meet with better treatment at the hands of our producers and performers than Ibsen or Wagner. All the same even poetic tragedy should not be too lightly despaired of. If great plays can be written, someone sooner or later is likely to have the ambition and the intelligence to produce them worthily. Something of the kind seems to have happened at Glasgow, in the case of Mr. Gordon Bottomley’s verse plays. Let us hope, however cautiously, that what Scotland does to-day, England may at least begin to think of doing to-morrow. Meantime there is one wholesome lesson that poets may learn from the undoubted literary success of Mr. Bottomley’s Gruach and Lear’s Wife. It is continually being dinned into their ears by critics who should know better, that the time is now gone by when poets might borrow their material from a remote or legendary past; that a twentieth-century dramatist must deal only in twentieth-century themes if he hopes to reach the hearts of twentieth-century men and women, or to win the good graces of Georgian reviewers. And yet it is unquestionably true that in every period when poetic tragedy has flourished, mythical, legendary and historical subjects have been the rule, and contemporary themes the rare exceptions. Oedipus, Agamemnon and Pentheus were not fifth-century Athenians any more than Hamlet, Lear and Antony were Elizabethans, or Andromaque and Phèdre Parisiennes of the grand siècle. The artistic success of the Persae, Othello and Bajazet merely make this determined preference for archaic subject-matter seem the more remarkable. And yet none of these writers were mere literary antiquarians, but true children of their own age, to whose dramas we now look first, if we wish to understand the mentality and the moral standards of the populace that applauded them. Even Goethe, in the work that perhaps more than any other represents the complexity of modern ideas and aspirations, went back to a myth that was then two hundred years old. It would seem as though the poetic imagination, when it sets itself the most arduous of its tasks, that of alembicating tragic beauty from human misery and passion, welcomes the limitation of choice, the simplicity of atmosphere, the freedom from distracting contemporary preoccupations, which a remote theme brings with it. None the less Ibsen’s Brandt and Peer Gynt show how a modern, though scarcely a familiar world, may be made the background of true poetic tragedy; although in Peer Gynt the almost continued presence of the Comedic Muse, with her incurable modernity, tempers the difficulty of the problem. Thus, though it would be unreasonable to maintain that the Tragic Muse must be unable to live and breathe in the smoky atmosphere of our present-day world, it would be still more absurd to prohibit her escape into the purer clime of a legendary or historical past.
The case of narrative poetry is somewhat similar, yet with important differences. It is true that the Homeric heroes and the society in which they lived had long ceased to exist when the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed, and that most of the great epic and narrative writers, Virgil, Ariosto, Milton and Marlowe, preferred mythical or purely fantastic settings for their stories. Yet such a limitation would seem to be hardly so natural to narrative as to tragic poetry. For the quality of narrative being less intense and passionate, and its unity more loose, it is able to indulge copiously in decoration, description and digression, and so should be able to deal all the more effectively with the variegated modern scene. And yet, except for two sombre short stories in blank verse by Wordsworth, and Byron’s Don Juan, there has scarcely been any narrative, dealing with modern life and of first-rate poetical quality, since Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. This is perhaps because poets have not sufficiently realised that the telling of a story in verse instead of prose can only be justified when the sensuous and decorative beauty of the medium is continually maintained at the highest pitch. For whereas in the intense and tragic moments of drama exquisiteness and richness of texture may be unnecessary, or at times even a positive nuisance, bald and graceless verse narrative is always insupportable. Byron indeed atoned for much artistic unscrupulousness and slovenly workmanship by his unfailing energy and wit. But poets will have to take to heart the lesson of Chaucer’s scrupulous attention to beauty of texture, if they are to hold their own in rivalry with prose fiction. They will have also to be aware of the dangers of a too exclusive interest in analytical psychology. Narrative, when it ceases to narrate, very easily becomes a bore. Such writers as Proust and Henry James may have been able successfully to dispense with many of the functions of story-telling, by laboriously evolving a peculiar prose instrument of their own for the expression of psychological subtleties. But it is doubtful whether anything of the kind would be possible in verse, or, if possible, whether it would be readable. Yet for the direct presentation, serious or humoristic, of character, mood and emotion, verse in the hands of a master will always remain an instrument of supreme power.
There are certain other kinds of poetry, more or less akin to narrative, for which an interesting future may be predicted. The Victorians seem to have had a special predilection for the Dramatic Monologue, perhaps because they unconsciously felt their inability to cope with the problems of drama. Caliban upon Setebos and The Bishop orders his Tomb in St. Praxed’s Church are notable successes; but several of Browning’s experiments should be a warning of the danger of lengthiness and over-elaboration in a form that allows of very little narrative interest or dramatic contrast. Great and sustained beauty of language can alone justify a long poem of such a kind; and it is just in this respect that Browning was most deficient.
Another attractive sub-species of narrative poetry is the Dramatic Dialogue or Interlude, which has lately been successfully revived by Mr. Sturge Moore and Mr. Abercrombie. The great master of this form, as also of the Monologue, is Theocritus, whose Syracusan Women, Kyniska, Thyrsis, and Simaitha will always remain as a challenging inspiration to succeeding ages. The great range of his material within the narrow limits of his surviving work, and his marvellous blend of naturalism and poetry, should be peculiarly suggestive to a generation like our own, with its eagerness to find new paths, or rediscover old ones, to poetic freedom.
It would be presumptuous in one who is not himself a philosopher to speak with assurance about philosophic poetry: yet I shall venture upon some obvious reflections. Few would dispute that there has been only one specifically philosophical work which is also a great poem, the De Rerum Natura of Lucretius. But those of us who love it best will, if we are candid, admit that it contains vast tracts of scientific and metaphysical discussion, which even fervid and eloquent genius has not wholly succeeded in clothing with the vesture of poetry. It is true that, for those few who have the courage and wisdom to read them, these sections should have a very high value as parts of a sublime imaginative vision of the universe; and they also contain many scattered episodes of divine poetic loveliness. But the claim of Lucretius to rank among the world’s greatest writers will always rest upon those sections, such as the endings of his third, fourth and fifth books, where the material is already in its essence poetic, and gives scope to his supreme gift for sensuous description, or for passionate ethical discourse. It is to be feared that if a poet of equal genius with Lucretius were to take modern psychology, the physics of Einstein, or the philosophy of Mr. Russell as his subject-matter, with the intention of seriously expounding and not of merely poetising them, he would be unable to avoid similar desert tracts of unpoetical reasoning. But it is a narrow view which can deny that verse should ever be employed, unless the result be poetry. If an artist in language is able to set forth philosophic matter that is of great intrinsic interest more luminously and attractively in verse than could be done in prose (which is precisely what Lucretius did with the crabbed sentences of Epicurus), let us not grudge him the praise and gratitude that are his due. However, it seems unlikely that scientific philosophy will ever again inspire an expository treatise such as the De Rerum Natura. It might indeed enter as an all-pervading influence into some comprehensive epic design, just as religion and scholastic philosophy pervade the Divina Commedia. What is certain is that, as there have always been, so there always will be philosophically minded poets, and that they will discover for themselves what forms serve their purpose best.
The treatise, as a poetic form, would seem to be more suitable for subjects that are neither strictly philosophic, nor scientific. Yet though we have had our Seasons, Night Thoughts, and Sofas in plenty, Virgil’s Georgics remain still unrivalled. Why should not an ingenious and erudite poet take some such pregnant subject as Architecture, the Garden, or the Evolution of Religion, or if he have the knowledge and the boldness, Machinery, Medicine or Economics, and dispute Virgil’s supremacy in this field, as Virgil once did Hesiod’s? How fascinating would he not find the problem of wedding didactic and historical exposition to perfect loveliness of texture? What opportunities for description and reflection? And with what entrancing episodes, serious or playful, might he not delight our fancy?
Not the least noble, nor the least exacting of mistresses, is the Muse of Satire. “Facit indignatio versum,” said Juvenal. But alas, how fumbling a designer, how banal a metrician, how unscrupulous and inartistic a poetaster has Indignation generally proved herself to be. Few satires survive the ephemeral social follies that provoked them, because, being by nature parasites, when that which supported their growth decays and perishes, they too must perish, unless indeed they are rooted deeply in the unchanging soil of imagination and poetry. Truly great satire will always be very rare. It is still possible to read with delight Byron’s Vision of Judgment, and portions of his Age of Bronze; and there are passages in Pope and Dryden that fully deserve their reputation. But it is perhaps only in parts of the Divina Commedia, and in the last three hundred lines of the fourth book of Lucretius, and occasionally in Leopardi, that satire may be found mingled as the dominating element in poetry of the highest order. Its taste even there is bitter, but with the divine bitterness of passion and sincerity.
In the enchanted kingdom of fantasy and the mock-heroic, Pope’s Rape of the Lock and Lear’s poems still reign supreme. It is perhaps because they are ostensibly written for the delight of children, that The Owl and the Pussycat, The Dong, and the Quangle-Wangle have never, so far as I know, found their way into serious adult anthologies. Yet if we are really sincere in our quest for lyrical beauty, verbal euphony and metrical invention, we should not have tolerated without protest the absence of these poems from the Oxford Book of Verse, where they would more than hold their own in the company of Annabel Lee, The Lady of Shalott, and The Blessed Damozel.