And made men sigh for pleasure.”
This brings us to another, and an important, point in which it is our misfortune to differ from Mr. Stedman. He regards poetry as an art. He treats it as such throughout this work; and as such he criticises it. Hence his criticism is almost exclusively technical; hence, too, it exhibits frequent inconsistencies. For example, amongst the properties he assigns to the highest poetry, which we have already quoted, he places spontaneity. By this term he means, we presume, a freedom from effort, the unbidden outflow of imagination, not the labored product of teaching and practice. But this is utterly inapplicable to art, which supposes instruction, clumsy first efforts, and perfection acquired only by years of toil. What there is of art in poetry is limited, or nearly so, to its expression; and even here the less there is of art, and the more of what Mr. Stedman means by spontaneity, the loftier and the more genuine the poetry. It is no praise but a depreciation
of Matthew Arnold’s or Tennyson’s poetry to trace the inspiration of one to Bion and Moschus and of the other to Theocritus. In good sooth, he does the laureate injustice in the far-fetched examples of imitation of Theocritus he ascribes to him. It is the blemish of nearly all our modern poetry that its expression is so labored, so technical. For this it is that, in the highest poetry, nearly all who have tried it have failed; none more signally than Tennyson in Queen Mary. One only has succeeded—Sir Aubrey de Vere. Another—whom, because he has so foully outraged the moral sense of all mankind, we prefer not to name until he has made reparation, and who, if he had not cast from him all sense of the beautiful and the true, might have been perhaps the greatest poet of the age—is as remarkable for the originality and unstudiedness of his expression as for the brilliance and fecundity of his imagination.
Mr. Stedman literally limits poetry to expression. In a passage at the side of which is the marginal index, “What constitutes a poet,” he writes: “Again, the grammarian’s statement is true, that poetry is a means of expression. A poet may differ from other men in having profounder emotions and clearer perceptions; but this is not for him to assume, nor a claim which they are swift to grant. The lines,
“Oh! many are the poets that are sown
By nature—men endowed with highest gifts,
The vision and the faculty divine,
Yet wanting the accomplishment of verse,”
imply that the recognized poet is one who gives voice, in expressive language, to the common thought and feeling which lie deeper than ordinary speech. He is the interpreter; moreover, he is the maker—an artist of the beautiful, the
inventor of harmonious numbers which shall be a lure and a repose.”