Once more from Christabel:—
“The maid, alas! her thoughts are gone,
She nothing sees—no sight but one!
The maid, devoid of guile and sin,
I know not how, in fearful wise,
So deeply had she drunken in
That look, those shrunken serpent eyes,
That all her features were resigned
To this sole image in her mind:
And passively did imitate
That look of dull and treacherous hate.”
What Wordsworth intended we have already heard from Coleridge, and Wordsworth confirms him. It was, says the Preface of 1802, “to present ordinary things to the mind in an unusual way.” In Wordsworth the miraculous inherent in the commonplace, but obscured by “the film of familiarity,” is restored to it. This translation is effected by the imagination, which is not fancy nor dreaming, as Wordsworth is careful to warn us, but that power by which we see things as they are. The authors of The Ancient Mariner and Simon Lee are justified in claiming a common object. It is to prove that the metaphysical in Shakespeare’s sense of the word interpenetrates the physical, and serves to make us see and feel it.
Poetry, if it is to be good for anything, must help us to live. It is to this we come at last in our criticism, and if it does not help us to live it may as well disappear, no matter what its fine qualities may be. The help to live, however, that is most wanted is not remedies against great sorrows. The chief obstacle to the enjoyment of life is its dulness and the weariness which invades us because there is nothing to be seen or done of any particular value. If the supernatural becomes natural and the natural becomes supernatural, the world regains its splendour and charm. Lines may be drawn from their predecessors to Coleridge and the Wordsworths, but the work they did was distinctly original, and renewed proof was given of the folly of despair even when fertility seems to be exhausted. There is always a hidden conduit open into an unknown region whence at any moment streams may rush and renew the desert with foliage and flowers.
The reviews which followed the publication of the Lyrical Ballads were nearly all unfavourable. Even Southey discovered nothing in The Ancient Mariner but “a Dutch attempt at German sublimity.” A certain learned pig thought it “the strangest story of a cock and bull that he ever saw on paper,” and not a single critic, not even the one or two who had any praise to offer, discerned the secret of the book. The publisher was so alarmed that he hastily sold his stock. Nevertheless Coleridge, Wordsworth, and his sister quietly went off to Germany without the least disturbance of their faith, and the Ballads are alive to this day.
SOME NOTES ON MILTON
Much of the criticism on Milton, if not hostile, is apologetic, and it is considered quite correct to say we “do not care” for him. Partly this indifference is due to his Nonconformity. The “superior” Englishman who makes a jest of the doctrines and ministers of the Established Church always pays homage to it because it is respectable, and sneers at Dissent. Another reason why Milton does not take his proper place is that his theme is a theology which for most people is no longer vital. A religious poem if it is to be deeply felt must embody a living faith. The great poems of antiquity are precious to us in proportion to our acceptance, now, as fact, of what they tell us about heaven and earth. There are only a few persons at present who perceive that in substance the account which was given in the seventeenth century of the relation between man and God is immortal and worthy of epic treatment. A thousand years hence a much better estimate of Milton will be possible than that which can be formed to-day. We attribute to him mechanic construction in dead material because it is dead to ourselves. Even Mr. Ruskin who was far too great not to recognise in part at least Milton’s claims, says that “Milton’s account of the most important event in his whole system of the universe, the fall of the angels, is evidently unbelievable to himself; and the more so, that it is wholly founded on, and in a great part spoiled and degraded from, Hesiod’s account of the decisive war of the younger gods with the Titans. The rest of his poem is a picturesque drama, in which every artifice of invention is visibly and consciously employed; not a single fact being for an instant conceived as tenable by any living faith” (Sesame and Lilies, section iii.).
Mr. Mark Pattison, quoting part of this passage, remarks with justice, “on the contrary, we shall not rightly apprehend either the poetry or the character of the poet until we feel that throughout Paradise Lost, as in Paradise Regained and Samson, Milton felt himself to be standing on the sure ground of fact and reality” (English Men of Letters—Milton, p. 186, ed. 1879).
St. Jude for ages had been sufficient authority for the angelic revolt, and in a sense it was a reasonable dogma, for although it did not explain the mystery of the origin of evil it pushed it a step further backwards, and without such a revolt the Christian scheme does not well hold together. So also with the entrance of the devil into the serpent. It is not expressly taught in any passage of the canonical Scriptures, but to the Church and to Milton it was as indisputable as the presence of sin in the world. Milton, I repeat, believed in the framework of his poem, and unless we can concede this to him we ought not to attempt to criticise him. He was impelled to turn his religion into poetry in order to bring it closer to him. The religion of every Christian if it is real is a poem. He pictures a background of Holy Land scenery, and he creates a Jesus who continually converses with him and reveals to him much more than is found in the fragmentary details of the Gospels. When Milton goes beyond his documents he does not imagine for the purpose of filling up: the additions are expression.
Milton belonged to that order of poets whom the finite does not satisfy. Like Wordsworth, but more eminently, he was “powerfully affected” only by that “which is conversant with or turns upon infinity,” and man is to him a being with such a relationship to infinity that Heaven and Hell contend over him. Every touch which sets forth the eternal glory of Heaven and the scarcely subordinate power of Hell magnifies him. Johnson, whose judgment on Milton is unsatisfactory because he will not deliver himself sufficiently to beauty which he must have recognised, nevertheless says of the Paradise Lost, that “its end is to raise the thoughts above sublunary cares,” and this is true. The other great epic poems worthy to be compared with Milton’s, the Iliad, Odyssey, Æneid, and Divine Comedy, all agree in representing man as an object of the deepest solicitude to the gods or God. Milton’s conception of God is higher than Homer’s, Virgil’s, or Dante’s, but the care of the Miltonic God for his offspring is greater, and the profound truth unaffected by Copernican discoveries and common to all these poets is therefore more impressive in Milton than in the others.