I
MATTHEW ARNOLD will have it that the function of Poetry is the Criticism of Life; and the work of a poet will be important, according to him, only in so far as it throws light on human life and character. But in the work of all poets there is a kind of cream that may be skimmed off (provided that there is a cream, and that it was not all sky-blue wretchedness from the first); and when it has been so skimmed, one may say that the poetry is the cream, and the criticism of life the skim-milk. "Such and such a lyric, by so and so," says your poet or poetry-lover, "is of equal value with Hamlet or the Odyssey, all three being absolute in their beauty." "Gammon!" says your man of the world in letters; "there is the criticism of life to be thought of. How shall ten lines be equal to ten thousand?" Which is right? The second will get all the votes; which is no great argument, perhaps. The epic took longer in the writing; but one never knows what may lie behind the lyric. The didactic or philosophic poem, the work full of this criticism, will influence the thought of the world; and if thinking is to be the judge, it will win unquestionably. But the lyric will be singing itself through thousands of minds, in the sunshine, in the mines, over the washtub, heaven knows where: without noise, it will shed its brightness through a million eyes, its sweetness on a million tempers, its clearness and magic on a million imaginations. To the writer of the most perfect lyric, I am not sure that we do not owe as much gratitude as to the writer of the greatest epic or drama: I am almost positive that we owe him more than to the best writer of criticism of life; though it be a dozen lines against a dozen volumes.
Most of the English-writing poets have been also, and many of them mainly, philosophers; writing their thought in verse form, and perhaps sprinkling it from the spice-box of pure poetry, and perhaps not. Often and often we find stories or philosophic disquisitions in verse, that might have been told as well in prose; although it has been said rather wisely that nothing should have verse form that could be told honorably without metre. There is a class of idea that journeys leisurely and step by step through the mind; this should be reserved for prose. There are other classes that have the sweep and charge of cavalry, and you build epics and all heroic poetry of them; others that soar singing like the skylark, or that wander from bloom to bloom droning out a magical and honey-laden monody, secrets of a learning incomprehensible to the minds of men. These will be the right stuff for your pure lyrics, these bees and birds in the golden regions west of thought. Their revelations are more esoteric than philosophy; they home to deeper places.
But one cannot deal with all poetry or all life in one article; and it is the intention here to consider narrative poetry alone. Narrative poetry, when it is anything more than a ballad, is epic: and epic is heroic poetry; not by any convention, I believe, but in accordance with deep-seated law. There is room for nothing personal or limited here; for no dissection of personal characteristics, no consideration or criticism of problems of exterior life. Those things all belong to prose; poetry proclaims the actions and perceptions of the soul. Heroic or epic poetry tells of the soul as hero, warrior, redeemer; as Sigurd going out against Fafnir, Arthur ferried in a dark barge to The Island of the Apples; as Satan unconquered in the lake of flame; as Christ on Golgotha, or Prometheus on Caucasus. It has to show forth the glory, the indomitableness, the magnanimity of the soul, dwelling in those lofty regions and letting who will come to it for general strength and inspiration. It is the Mountain; it will not descend from itself for any Mohammed. For this reason is its aloofness, its tendency to concern itself with periods apparently in the far past, but really in the eternal. That atmosphere all narrative poetry must retain, under penalty of sinking into berhymed or bemetred prose; or into the ballad—which, indeed, can be good, at its best, but not supremely good. Yet how many stories there are, beautifully written in verse, which are neither epic in spirit nor ballad in form; which are, if the truth should be told, novels strayed from their proper fold of prose, valley wanderers by no means at home on the mountain.
One thinks, for example, of such a work as Mrs. Browning's Aurora Leigh. If she had only written it in prose! With that faultlessness of expression, that delicate insight and unerring justness of criticism which mark it, it would have become a classic; we should have said, "Why, this is a prose poem, a literary treasure among novels." But being in verse, it remains, however beautiful, only versified prose; and it is to be feared that we neglect it; to be feared, but hardly to be wondered at. If she had only written it in prose!
Or one thinks of nearly all Tennyson's narrative poetry. The aim, one feels, was nearly always criticism of life, the life of all these myriads of personalities; not poetry, which is the illumination of the hidden life of the soul. It was for this reason that Idylls of the King, although flaming up here and there with such poetry as has not been excelled in any known literature, perhaps—yet fails as a whole to be a great poem. The Nineteenth Century was too insistent, and the troubles and problems of the day. Milton, dealing with matters beyond the crystalline and the brink of time, achieved the epic; but even Milton, coming down to Eden, heaven, and the familiar things of dogmatic theology, attained only to be ... Well, well, all honor to him; he deserves that all that should be lost and forgotten. Poetry and personality cannot be blended; they are a veritable God and Mammon.
Then there are those charming stories of Tennyson's: Dora, Enoch Arden, Almer's Field, The Princess. He dignified them all with his own high gift of style; stamped on every line his own noble and melodious manner; adorned them all richly, and with consummate taste, with the best color of English rural life. Yet they remain essentially of the nature of prose; and we should not have been lured into thinking them poetry, but for the wonderful genius with which Tennyson handled them. The matter is the matter of the novel; and the style—what a wonderful style it is!—is rather the polished style that reflects light, the style of prose, than the white-hot luminosity of the genuine epic.
Let us take, for example, The Princess, perhaps the most romantic and beautiful of this series, the one it takes the greatest temerity to speak of as not really poetic. Its aim is to throw light on, or to consider, or discuss, a certain present-day problem, that of the "emancipation of women"; and who shall say that that might not be done in prose? Is poetry to throw no light on our modern problems, or on contemporary problems, then? Turn to your Milton for an answer: