Chapter 16

When we were idlers with the loitering rills,The need of human love we little noted:Our love was nature; and the peace that floatedOn the white mist, and dwelt upon the hills,To sweet accord subdued our wayward wills:One soul was ours, one mind, one heart devoted,That, wisely doating, ask’d not why it doated,And ours the unknown joy, which knowing kills.But now I find, how dear thou wert to me;That man is more than half of nature’s treasure,Of that fair Beauty which no eye can see,Of that sweet music which no ear can measure;And now the streams may sing for others’ pleasure,The hills sleep on in their eternity.

In the great city we are met again,Where many souls there are, that breathe and die,Scarce knowing more of nature’s potency,Than what they learn from heat, or cold, or rain;The sad vicissitude of weary pain;—For busy man is lord of ear and eye,And what hath nature, but the vast, void sky,And the thronged river toiling to the main?Oh! say not so, for she shall have her partIn every smile, in every tear that falls,And she shall hide her in the secret heart,Where love persuades, and sterner duty calls:But worse it were than death, or sorrow’s smart,To live without a friend within these walls.

We parted on the mountains, as two streamsFrom one clear spring pursue their several ways;And thy fleet course hath been through many a maze,In foreign lands, where silvery Padus gleamsTo that delicious sky, whose glowing beamsBrightened the tresses that old Poets praise;Where Petrarch’s patient love, and artful lays,And Ariosto’s song of many themes,Moved the soft air. But I, a lazy brook,As close pent up within my native dell,Have crept along from nook to shady nook,Where flowrets blow, and whispering Naiads dwell.Yet now we meet, that parted were so wide,O’er rough and smooth to travel side by side.

The contrast of instructive and enviable locomotion with refining but instructive meditation is not special and peculiar to these two, but general and universal. It was set down by Hartley Coleridge because he was the most meditative and refining of men.

What sort of literatesque types are fit to be described in the sort of literature called poetry, is a matter on which much might be written. Mr. Arnold, some years since, put forth a theory that the art of poetry could only delineategreatactions. But though, rightly interpreted and understood—using the word action so as to include high and sound activity in contemplation—this definition may suit the highest poetry, it certainly cannot be stretched to include many inferior sorts and even many good sorts. Nobody in their senses would describe Gray’sElegyas the delineation of a ‘great action’; some kinds of mental contemplation may be energetic enough to deserve this name, but Gray would have been frightened at the very word. He loved scholar-like calm and quiet inaction; his very greatness depended on hisnotacting, on his ‘wise passiveness,’ on his indulging the grave idleness which so well appreciates so much of human life. But the best answer—thereductio ad absurdum—of Mr. Arnold’s doctrine, is the mutilation which it has caused him to make of his own writings. It has forbidden him, he tells us, to reprintEmpedocles—a poem undoubtedly containing defects and even excesses, but containing also these lines:

And yet what days were those, Parmenides!When we were young, when we could number friendsIn all the Italian cities like ourselves,When with elated hearts we join’d your train,Ye Sun-born virgins! on the road of Truth.Then we could still enjoy, then neither thoughtNor outward things were clos’d and dead to us,But we receiv’d the shock of mighty thoughtsOn simple minds with a pure natural joy;And if the sacred load oppress’d our brain,We had the power to feel the pressure eas’d.The brow unbound, the thoughts flow free again,In the delightful commerce of the world.We had not lost our balance then, nor grownThought’s slaves and dead to every natural joy.The smallest thing could give us pleasure then—The sports of the country people;A flute note from the woods;Sunset over the sea:Seed-time and harvest;The reapers in the corn;The vinedresser in his vineyard;The village-girl at her wheel.Fullness of life and power of feeling, yeAre for the happy, for the souls at ease,Who dwell on a firm basis of content.But he who has outliv’d his prosperous days,But he, whose youth fell on a different worldFrom that on which his exil’d age is thrown;Whose mind was fed on other food, was train’dBy other rules than are in vogue to-day;Whose habit of thought is fix’d, who will not change,But in a world he loves not must subsistIn ceaseless opposition, be the guardOf his own breast, fetter’d to what he guards,That the world win no mastery over him;Who has no friend, no fellow left, not one;Who has no minute’s breathing space allow’dTo nurse his dwindling faculty of joy:—Joy and the outward world must die to himAs they are dead to me.

What freak of criticism can induce a man who has written such poetry as this, to discard it, and say it is not poetry? Mr. Arnold is privileged to speak of his own poems, but no other critic could speak so and not be laughed at.

We are disposed to believe that no very sharp definition can be given—at least in the present state of the critical art—of the boundary line between poetry and other sorts of imaginative delineation. Between the undoubted dominions of the two kinds there is a debateable land; everybody is agreed that theOedipus at Colonusispoetry: every one is agreed that the wonderful appearance of Mrs. Veal isnotpoetry. But theexact line which separates grave novels in verse likeAylmer’s FieldorEnoch Arden, from grave novels not in verse likeSilas MarnerorAdam Bede, we own we cannot draw with any confidence. Nor, perhaps, is it very important; whether a narrative is thrown into verse or not certainly depends in part on the taste of the age, and in part on its mechanical helps. Verse is the only mechanical help to the memory in rude times, and there is little writing till a cheap something is found to write upon, and a cheap something to write with. Poetry—verse at least—is the literature ofall workin early ages; it is only later ages which write in whattheythink a natural and simple prose. There are other casual influences in the matter too; but they are not material now. We need only say here that poetry, because it has a more marked rhythm than prose, must be more intense in meaning and more concise in style than prose. People expect a ‘marked rhythm’ to imply something worth marking; if it fails to do so they are disappointed. They are displeased at the visible waste of a powerful instrument; they call it ‘doggerel,’ and rightly call it, for the metrical expression of full thought and eager feeling—the burst of metre—incident to high imagination, should not be wasted on petty matters which prose does as well,—which it does better—which it suits by its very limpness and weakness, whose small changes it follows more easily, and to whose lowest details it can fully and without effort degrade itself. Verse, too, should bemore concise, for long-continued rhythm tends to jade the mind, just as brief rhythm tends to attract the attention. Poetry shouldbe memorable and emphatic, intense, andsoon over.

The great divisions of poetry, and of all other literary art, arise from the different modes in which thesetypes—these characteristic men, these characteristic feelings—may be variously described. There are three principal modes which we shall attempt to describe—thepure, which is sometimes, but not very wisely, called the classical; theornate, which is also unwisely called romantic; and thegrotesque, which might be called the mediaeval. We will describe the nature of these a little. Criticism we know must be brief—not, like poetry, because its charm is too intense to be sustained—but on the contrary, because its interest is too weak to be prolonged; but elementary criticism, if an evil, is a necessary evil; a little while spent among the simple principles of art is the first condition, the absolute pre-requisite, for surely apprehending and wisely judging the complete embodiments and miscellaneous forms of actual literature.

The definition ofpureliterature is that it describes the type in its simplicity, we mean, with the exact amount of accessory circumstance which is necessary to bring it before the mind in finished perfection, andno morethan that amount. Thetypeneeds some accessories from its nature—a picturesque landscape does not consist wholly of picturesque features. There is a setting of surroundings—as the Americans would say, offixings—without which the reality is not itself. By a traditional mode of speech, as soon as we see a picture in which a complete effect is produced by detail so rare and so harmonized as to escape us, we say ‘how classical’. The whole which isto be seen appears at once and through the detail, but the detail itself is not seen: we do not think of that which gives us the idea; we are absorbed in the idea itself. Just so in literature the pure art is that which works with the fewest strokes; the fewest, that is, for its purpose, for its aim is to call up and bring home to men an idea, a form, a character, and if that idea be twisted, that form be involved, that character perplexed, many strokes of literary art will be needful. Pure art does not mutilate its object: it represents it as fully as is possible with the slightest effort which is possible: it shrinks from no needful circumstances, as little as it inserts any which are needless. The precise peculiarity is not merely that no incidental circumstance is inserted which does not tell on the main design: no art is fit to be calledartwhich permits a stroke to be put in without an object; but that only the minimum of such circumstance is inserted at all. The form is sometimes said to be bare, the accessories are sometimes said to be invisible, because the appendages are so choice that the shape only is perceived.

The English literature undoubtedly contains much impure literature; impure in its style if not in its meaning: but it also contains one great, one nearly perfect, model of the pure style in the literary expression of typicalsentiment; and one not perfect, but gigantic and close approximation to perfection in the pure delineation of objective character. Wordsworth, perhaps, comes as near to choice purity of style in sentiment as is possible; Milton, with exceptions and conditions to be explained, approaches perfectionby the strenuous purity with which he depicts character.

A wit once said, that ‘prettywomen had more features thanbeautifulwomen’, and though the expression may be criticized, the meaning is correct. Pretty women seem to have a great number of attractive points, each of which attracts your attention, and each one of which you remember afterwards; yet these points have notgrown together, their features have not linked themselves into a single inseparable whole. But a beautiful woman is a whole as she is; you no more take her to pieces than a Greek statue; she is not an aggregate of divisible charms, she is a charm in herself. Such ever is the dividing test of pure art; if you catch yourself admiring its details, it is defective; you ought to think of it as a single whole which you must remember, which you must admire, which somehow subdues you while you admire it, which is a ‘possession’ to you ‘for ever’.

Of course no individual poem embodies this ideal perfectly; of course every human word and phrase has its imperfections, and if we choose an instance to illustrate that ideal, the instance has scarcely a fair chance. By contrasting it with the ideal we suggest its imperfections; by protruding it as an example, we turn on its defectiveness the microscope of criticism. Yet these two sonnets of Wordsworth may be fitly read in this place, not because they are quite without faults, or because they are the very best examples of their kind of style; but because they areluminousexamples; the compactness of the sonnet and the gravity of the sentiment, hedging inthe thoughts, restraining the fancy, and helping to maintain a singleness of expression:

There’s not a nook within this solemn Pass,But were an apt Confessional for oneTaught by his summer spent; his autumn gone,That Life is but a tale of morning grassWithered at eve. From scenes of art which chaseThat thought away, turn, and with watchful eyesFeed it ’mid Nature’s old felicities,Rocks, rivers, and smooth lakes more clear than glassUntouched, unbreathed upon. Thrice happy guest,If from a golden perch of aspen spray(October’s workmanship to rival May)The pensive warbler of the ruddy breastThat moral teaches by a heaven-taught lay,Lulling the year, with all its cares, to rest!

Earth has not anything to show more fair:Dull would he be of soul who could pass byA sight so touching in its majesty:This city now doth, like a garment, wearThe beauty of the morning; silent, bare.Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lieOpen unto the fields and to the sky;All bright and open in the smokeless air.Never did sun more beautifully steepIn his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!The river glideth at his own sweet will:Dear God! The very houses seem asleep;And all that mighty heart is lying still!

Instances of barer style than this may easily be found, instances of colder style—few better instances of purer style. Not a single expression (the invocation in the concluding couplet of the second sonnet perhaps excepted) can be spared,yet not a single expression rivets the attention. If, indeed, we take out the phrase—

The city now doth like a garment wearThe beauty of the morning,

and the description of the brilliant yellow of autumn—

October’s workmanship to rival May,

they have independent value, but they are not noticed in the sonnet when we read it through; they fall into place there, and being in their place are not seen. The great subjects of the two sonnets, the religious aspect of beautiful but grave nature—the religious aspect of a city about to awaken and be alive, are the only ideas left in our mind. To Wordsworth has been vouchsafed the last grace of the self-denying artist; you think neither of him nor his style, but you cannot help thinking of—youmustrecall—the exact phrase, theverysentiment he wished.

Milton’s purity is more eager. In the most exciting parts of Wordsworth—and these sonnets are not very exciting—you always feel, you never forget, that what you have before you is the excitement of a recluse. There is nothing of the stir of life; nothing of thebrawlof the world. But Milton though always a scholar by trade, though solitary in old age, was through life intent on great affairs, lived close to great scenes, watched a revolution, and if not an actor in it, was at least secretary to the actors. He was familiar—by daily experience and habitual sympathy—with the earnest debate of arduous questions, on which the life and death of the speakers certainly depended, on which the weal or woe of the countryperhaps depended. He knew how profoundly the individual character of the speakers—their inner and real nature—modifies their opinion on such questions; he knew how surely that nature will appear in the expression of them. This great experience, fashioned by a fine imagination, gives to the debate of Satanic Council in Pandaemonium its reality and its life. It is a debate in the Long Parliament, and though thethemeofParadise Lostobliged Milton to side with the monarchical element in the universe, his old habits are often too much for him; and his real sympathy—the impetus and energy of his nature—side with the rebellious element. For the purposes of art this is much better—of a court, a poet can make but little; of a heaven he can make very little, but of a courtly heaven, such as Milton conceived, he can make nothing at all. The idea of a court and the idea of a heaven are so radically different, that a distinct combination of them is always grotesque and often ludicrous.Paradise Lost, as a whole, is radically tainted by a vicious principle. It professes to justify the ways of God to man, to account for sin and death, and it tells you that the whole originated in a political event; in a court squabble as to a particular act of patronage and the due or undue promotion of an eldest son. Satan may have been wrong, but on Milton’s theory he had anarguablecase at least. There was something arbitrary in the promotion; there were little symptoms of a job; inParadise Lostit is always clear that the devils are the weaker, but it is never clear that the angels are the better. Milton’s sympathy and his imagination slip back to the Puritan rebels whom he loved, and desert thecourtly angels whom he could not love although he praised. There is no wonder that Milton’s hell is better than his heaven, for he hated officials and he loved rebels, for he employs his genius below, and accumulates his pedantry above. On the great debate in Pandaemonium all his genius is concentrated. The question is very practical; it is, ‘What are we devils to do, now we have lost heaven?’ Satan who presides over and manipulates the assembly; Moloch

the fiercest spiritThat fought in Heaven, now fiercer by despair,

who wants to fight again; Belial, ‘the man of the world’, who does not want to fight any more; Mammon, who is for commencing an industrial career; Beelzebub, the official statesman,

deep on his front engravenDeliberation sat and Public care,

who, at Satan’s instance, proposes the invasion of earth—are as distinct as so many statues. Even Belial, ‘the man of the world’, the sort of man with whom Milton had least sympathy, is perfectly painted. An inferior artist would have made the actor who ‘counselled ignoble ease and peaceful sloth’, a degraded and ugly creature; but Milton knew better. He knew that low notions require a better garb than high notions. Human nature is not a high thing, but at least it has a high idea of itself; it will not accept mean maxims, unless they are gilded and made beautiful. A prophet in goatskin may cry, ‘Repent, repent’, but it takes ‘purple and fine linen’ to be able to say, ‘Continue in your sins’. The world vanquishes with itsspeciousness and its show, and the orator who is to persuade men to worldliness must have a share in them. Milton well knew this; after the warlike speech of the fierce Moloch he introduces a brighter and a more graceful spirit:

He ended frowning, and his look denouncedDesp’rate revenge, and battle dangerousTo less than Gods. On th’ other side up roseBelial, in act more graceful and humane:A fairer person lost not Heaven; he seem’dFor dignity composed and high exploit:But all was false and hollow, though his tongueDropt manna, and could make the worse appearThe better reason, to perplex and dashMaturest counsels: for his thoughts were low;To vice industrious, but to nobler deedsTim’rous and slothful: yet he pleased the ear,And with persuasive accent thus began:

He does not begin like a man with a strong case, but like a man with a weak case; he knows that the pride of human nature is irritated by mean advice, and though he may probably persuade men totakeit, he must carefully apologise forgivingit. Here, as elsewhere, though the formal address is to devils, the real address is to men: to the human nature which we know, not to the fictitious demonic nature we do not know:

I should be much for open war, O Peers!As not behind in hate, if what was urgedMain reason to persuade immediate war,Did not dissuade me most, and seem to castOminous conjecture on the whole success:When he who most excels in fact of arms,In what he counsels and in what excelsMistrustful, grounds his courage on despair,And utter dissolution, as the scopeOf all his aim, after some dire revenge.First, what revenge? The tow’rs of Heav’n are fill’dWith armed watch, that render all accessImpregnable; oft on the bord’ring deepEncamp their legions, or with obscure wingScout far and wide into the realm of night,Scorning surprise. Or could we break our wayBy force, and at our heels all hell should riseWith blackest insurrection, to confoundHeav’n’s purest light, yet our great Enemy,All incorruptible, would on his throneSit unpolluted, and th’ ethereal mouldIncapable of stain would soon expelHer mischief, and purge oft the baser fireVictorious. Thus repulsed, our final hopeIs flat despair. We must exasperateTh’ Almighty Victor to spend all his rage,And that must end us: that must be our cure,To be no more? Sad cure; for who would lose,Though full of pain, this intellectual being,Those thoughts that wander through eternity,To perish rather, swallow’d up and lostIn the wide womb of uncreated night,Devoid of sense and motion? And who knows,Let this be good, whether our angry FoeCan give it, or will ever? How he canIs doubtful; that he never will is sure.Will he, so wise, let loose at once his ireBelike through impotence, or unaware,To give his enemies their wish, and endThem in his anger, whom his anger savesTo punish endless? Wherefore cease we then?Say they who counsel war, we are decreed,Reserved, and destined, to eternal woe;Whatever doing, what can we suffer more,What can we suffer worse? Is this then worst,Thus sitting, thus consulting, thus in arms?

And so on.

Mr. Pitt knew this speech by heart, and Lord Macaulay has called it incomparable; and these judges of the oratorical art have well decided. A mean foreign policy cannot be better defended.Its sensibleness is effectually explained, and its tameness as much as possible disguised.

But we have not here to do with the excellence of Belial’s policy, but with the excellence of his speech; and with that speech in a peculiar manner. This speech, taken with the few lines of description with which Milton introduces them, embody, in as short a space as possible, with as much perfection as possible, the delineation of the type of character common at all times, dangerous in many times, sure to come to the surface in moments of difficulty, and never more dangerous than then. As Milton describes, it is one among severaltypicalcharacters which will ever have their place in great councils, which will ever be heard at important decisions, which are part of the characteristic and inalienable whole of this statesmanlike world. The debate in Pandaemonium is a debate among these typical characters at the greatest conceivable crisis, and with adjuncts of solemnity which no other situation could rival. It is the greatestclassicaltriumph, the highest achievement of the purestylein English literature; it is the greatest description of the highest and most typical characters with the most choice circumstances and in the fewest words.

It is not unremarkable that we should find in Milton and inParadise Lostthe best specimen of pure style. He was schoolmaster in a pedantic age, and there is nothing so unclassical—nothing so impure in style—as pedantry. The out-of-door conversational life of Athens was as opposed to bookish scholasticism as a life can be. The most perfect books have been written not by those who thought much of books, but by those who thoughtlittle, by those who were under the restraint of a sensitive talking world, to which books had contributed something, and a various eager life the rest. Milton is generally unclassical in spirit where he is learned, and naturally, because the purest poets do not overlay their conceptions with book knowledge, and the classical poets, having in comparison no books, were under little temptation to impair the purity of their style by the accumulation of their research. Over and above this, there is in Milton, and a little in Wordsworth also, one defect which is in the highest degree faulty and unclassical, which mars the effect and impairs the perfection of the pure style. There is a want ofspontaneity, and a sense of effort. It has been happily said that Plato’s words must havegrowninto their places. No one would say so of Milton or even of Wordsworth. About both of them there is a taint of duty; a vicious sense of the good man’s task. Things seem right where they are, but they seem to be put where they are.Flexibilityis essential to the consummate perfection of the pure style because the sensation of the poet’s efforts carries away our thoughts from his achievements. We are admiring his labours when we should be enjoying his words. But this is a defect in those two writers, not a defect in pure art. Of course it is more difficult to write in few words than to write in many; to take the best adjuncts, and those only, for what you have to say, instead of using all which comes to hand; itisan additional labour if you write verses in a morning, to spend the rest of the day inchoosing, or making those verses fewer. But a perfect artist in the pure style is as effortlessand as natural as in any style, perhaps is more so. Take the well-known lines:

There was a little lawny isletBy anemone and violet,Like mosaic, paven:And its roof was flowers and leavesWhich the summer’s breath enweaves,Where nor sun, nor showers, nor breeze,Pierce the pines and tallest trees,Each a gem engraven;—Girt by many an azure waveWith which the clouds and mountains paveA lake’s blue chasm.

Shelley had many merits and many defects. This is not the place for a complete or indeed foranyestimate of him. But one excellence is most evident. His words are as flexible as any words; the rhythm of some modulating air seems to move them into their place without a struggle by the poet and almost without his knowledge. This is the perfection of pure art, to embody typical conceptions in the choicest, the fewest accidents, to embody them so that each of these accidents may produce its full effect, and so to embody them without effort.

The extreme opposite to this pure art is what may be called ornate art. This species of art aims also at giving a delineation of the typical idea in its perfection and its fullness, but it aims at so doing in a manner most different. It wishes to surround the type with the greatest number of circumstances which it willbear. It works not by choice and selection, but by accumulation and aggregation. The idea is not, as in the pure style, presented with the least clothing which it willendure, but with the richest and most involved clothing that it will admit.

We are fortunate in not having to hunt out of past literature an illustrative specimen of the ornate style. Mr. Tennyson has just given one admirable in itself, and most characteristic of the defects and the merits of this style. The story of Enoch Arden, as he has enhanced and presented it, is a rich and splendid composite of imagery and illustration. Yet how simple that story is in itself. A sailor who sells fish, breaks his leg, gets dismal, gives up selling fish, goes to sea, is wrecked on a desert island, stays there some years, on his return finds his wife married to a miller, speaks to a landlady on the subject, and dies. Told in the pure and simple, the unadorned and classical style, this story would not have taken three pages, but Mr. Tennyson has been able to make it the principal—the largest tale in his new volume. He has done so only by giving to every event and incident in the volume an accompanying commentary. He tells a great deal about the torrid zone which a rough sailor like Enoch Arden certainly would not have perceived; and he gives to the fishing village, to which all the characters belong, a softness and a fascination which such villages scarcely possess in reality.

The description of the tropical island on which the sailor is thrown, is an absolute model of adorned art:

The mountain wooded to the peak, the lawnsAnd winding glades high up like ways to Heaven,The slender coco’s drooping crown of plumes,The lightning flash of insect and of bird,The lustre of the long convolvulusesThat coil’d around the stately stems, and ranEv’n to the limit of the land, the glowsAnd glories of the broad belt of the world,All these he saw; but what he fain had seenHe could not see, the kindly human face,Nor ever hear a kindly voice, but heardThe myriad shriek of wheeling ocean-fowl,The league-long roller thundering on the reef,The moving whisper of huge trees that branch’dAnd blossom’d in the zenith, or the sweepOf some precipitous rivulet to the wave,As down the shore he ranged, or all day longSat often in the seaward-gazing gorge,A shipwreck’d sailor, waiting for a sail:No sail from day to day, but every dayThe sunrise broken into scarlet shaftsAmong the palms and ferns and precipices;The blaze upon the waters to the east;The blaze upon his island overhead;The blaze upon the waters to the west;Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven,The hollower-bellowing ocean, and againThe scarlet shafts of sunrise—but no sail.

No expressive circumstance can be added to this description, no enhancing detail suggested. A much less happy instance is the description of Enoch’s life before he sailed:

While Enoch was abroad on wrathful seas,Or often journeying landward; for in truthEnoch’s white horse, and Enoch’s ocean spoilIn ocean-smelling osier, and his face,Rough-redden’d with a thousand winter gales,Not only to the market-cross were known,But in the leafy lanes behind the down,Far as the portal-warding lion-whelp,And peacock yew-tree of the lonely Hall,Whose Friday fare was Enoch’s ministering.

So much has not often been made of selling fish.

The essence of ornate art is in this manner to accumulate round the typical object, everythingwhich can be said about it, every associated thought that can be connected with it without impairing the essence of the delineation.

The first defect which strikes a student of ornate art—the first which arrests the mere reader of it—is what is called a want of simplicity. Nothing is described as it is, everything has about it an atmosphere ofsomething else. The combined and associated thoughts, though they set off and heighten particular ideas and aspects of the central conception, yet complicate it: a simple thing—‘a daisy by the river’s brim’—is never left by itself, something else is put with it; something not more connected with it than ‘lion-whelp’ and the ‘peacock yew-tree’ are with the ‘fresh fish for sale’ that Enoch carries past them. Even in the highest cases ornate art leaves upon a cultured and delicate taste, the conviction that it is not the highest art, that it is somehow excessive and over-rich, that it is not chaste in itself or chastening to the mind that sees it—that it is in an unexplained manner unsatisfactory, ‘a thing in which we feel there is some hidden want!’

That want is a want of ‘definition’. We must all know landscapes, river landscapes especially, which are in the highest sense beautiful, which when we first see them give us a delicate pleasure; which in some—and these the best cases—give even a gentle sense of surprise that such things should be so beautiful, and yet when we come to live in them, to spend even a few hours in them, we seem stifled and oppressed. On the other hand there are people to whom the sea-shore is a companion, an exhilaration; and not so much for thebrawl of the shore as for thelimitedvastness, the finite infinite of the ocean as they see it. Such people often come home braced and nerved, and if they spoke out the truth, would have only to say, ‘We have seen the horizon line’; if they were let alone indeed, they would gaze on it hour after hour, so great to them is the fascination, so full the sustaining calm, which they gain from that union of form and greatness. To a very inferior extent, but still, perhaps, to an extent which most people understand better, a common arch will have the same effect. A bridge completes a river landscape; if of the old and many-arched sort it regulates by a long series of defined forms the vague outline of wood and river which before had nothing to measure it; if of the new scientific sort it introduces still more strictly a geometrical element; it stiffens the scenery which was before too soft, too delicate, too vegetable. Just such is the effect of pure style in literary art. It calms by conciseness; while the ornate style leaves on the mind a mist of beauty, an excess of fascination, a complication of charm, the pure style leaves behind it the simple, defined, measured idea, as it is, and by itself. That which is chaste chastens; there is a poised energy—a state half thrill, and half tranquillity—which pure art gives, which no other can give; a pleasure justified as well as felt; an ennobled satisfaction at what ought to satisfy us, and must ennoble us.

Ornate art is to pure art what a painted statue is to an unpainted. It is impossible to deny that a touch of colourdoesbring out certain parts, does convey certain expressions, does heighten certain features, but it leaves on the work as a whole,a want, as we say, ‘of something’; a want of that inseparable chasteness which clings to simple sculpture, an impairing predominance of alluring details which impairs our satisfaction with our own satisfaction; which makes us doubt whether a higher being than ourselves will be satisfied even though we are so. In the very same manner, though therougeof ornate literature excites our eye, it also impairs our confidence.

Mr. Arnold has justly observed that this self-justifying, self-provingpurity of style, is commoner in ancient literature than in modern literature, and also that Shakespeare is not a great or an unmixed example of it. No one can say that he is. His works are full of undergrowth, are full of complexity, are not models of style; except by a miracle nothing in the Elizabethan age could be a model of style; the restraining taste of that age was feebler and more mistaken than that of any other equally great age. Shakespeare’s mind so teemed with creation that he required the most just, most forcible, most constant restraint from without. He most needed to be guided of poets, and he was the least and worst guided. As a whole no one can call his works finished models of the pure style, or of any style. But he has many passages of the most pure style, passages which could be easily cited if space served. And we must remember that the task which Shakespeare undertook was the most difficult which any poet has ever attempted, and that it is a task in which after a million efforts every other poet has failed. The Elizabethan drama—as Shakespeare has immortalized it—undertakes to delineate in five acts, under stage restrictions, and in mere dialogue,a whole list of dramatis personae, a set of characters enough for a modern novel, and with the distinctness of a modern novel. Shakespeare is not content to give two or three great characters in solitude and in dignity, like the classical dramatists; he wishes to give a wholepartyof characters in the play of life, and according to the nature of each. He would ‘hold the mirror up to nature’, not to catch a monarch in a tragic posture, but a whole group of characters engaged in many actions, intent on many purposes, thinking many thoughts. There is life enough, there is action enough, in single plays of Shakespeare to set up an ancient dramatist for a long career. And Shakespeare succeeded. His characters, takenen masse, and as a whole, are as well-known as any novelist’s characters; cultivated men know all about them, as young ladies know all about Mr. Trollope’s novels. But no other dramatist has succeeded in such an aim. No one else’s characters are staple people in English literature, hereditary people whom every one knows all about in every generation. The contemporary dramatists, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Marlowe, &c., had many merits, some of them were great men. But a critic must say of them the worst thing he has to say; ‘they were men who failed in their characteristic aim;’ they attempted to describe numerous sets of complicated characters, and they failed. No one of such characters, or hardly one, lives in common memory; the Faustus of Marlowe, a really great idea, is not remembered. They undertook to write what they could not write, five acts full of real characters, and in consequence, the fine individual things they conceived areforgotten by the mixed multitude, and known only to a few of the few. Of the Spanish theatre we cannot speak; but there are no such characters in any French tragedy: the whole aim of that tragedy forbade it. Goethe has added to literature a few great characters; he may be said almost to have added to literature the idea of ‘intellectual creation’,—the idea of describing great characters through the intellect; but he has not added to the common stock what Shakespeare added, a newmultitudeof men and women; and these not in simple attitudes, but amid the most complex parts of life, with all their various natures roused, mixed, and strained. The severest art must have allowed many details, much overflowing circumstance to a poet who undertook to describe what almost defies description. Pure art would havecommandedhim to use details lavishly, for only by a multiplicity of such could the required effect have been at all produced. Shakespeare could accomplish it, for his mind was aspring, an inexhaustible fountain of human nature, and it is no wonder that being compelled by the task of his time to let the fullness of his nature overflow, he sometimes let it overflow too much, and covered with erroneous conceits and superfluous images characters and conceptions which would have been far more justly, far more effectually, delineated with conciseness and simplicity. But there is an infinity of pure artinShakespeare, although there is a great deal else also.

It will be said, if ornate art be as you say, an inferior species or art, why should it ever be used? If pure art be the best sort of art, why should it not always be used?

The reason is this: literary art, as we just now explained, is concerned with literatesque characters in literatesque situations; and thebestart is concerned with themostliteratesque characters in themostliteratesque situations. Such are the subjects of pure art; it embodies with the fewest touches, and under the most select and choice circumstances, the highest conceptions; but it does not follow that only the best subjects are to be treated by art, and then only in the very best way. Human nature could not endure such a critical commandment as that, and it would be an erroneous criticism which gave it.Anyliteratesque character may be described in literature underanycircumstances which exhibit its literatesqueness.

The essence of pure art consists in its describing what is as it is, and this is very well for what can bear it, but there are many inferior things which will not bear it, and which nevertheless ought to be described in books. A certain kind of literature deals with illusions, and this kind of literature has given a colouring to the name romantic. A man of rare genius, and even of poetical genius, has gone so far as to make these illusions the true subject of poetry—almost the sole subject. ‘Without,’ says Father Newman, of one of his characters, ‘being himself a poet, he was in the season of poetry, in the sweet spring-time, when the year is most beautiful because it is new. Novelty was beauty to a heart so open and cheerful as his; not only because it was novelty, and had its proper charm as such, but because when we first see things, we see them in a gay confusion, which is a principal element of the poetical.As time goes on, and we number and sort and measure things,—as we gain views,—we advance towards philosophy and truth, but we recede from poetry.

‘When we ourselves were young, we once on a time walked on a hot summer-day from Oxford to Newington—a dull road, as any one who has gone it knows; yet it was new to us; and we protest to you, reader, believe it or not, laugh or not, as you will, to us it seemed on that occasion quite touchingly beautiful; and a soft melancholy came over us, of which the shadows fall even now, when we look back upon that dusty, weary journey. And why? because every object which met us was unknown and full of mystery. A tree or two in the distance seemed the beginning of a great wood, or park, stretching endlessly; a hill implied a vale beyond, with that vale’s history; the bye-lanes, with their green hedges, wound on and vanished, yet were not lost to the imagination. Such was our first journey; but when we had gone it several times, the mind refused to act, the scene ceased to enchant, stern reality alone remained; and we thought it one of the most tiresome, odious roads we ever had occasion to traverse.’

That is to say, that the function of the poet is to introduce a ‘gay confusion’, a rich medley which does not exist in the actual world—which perhaps could not exist in any world—but which would seem pretty if it did exist. Everyone who readsEnoch Ardenwill perceive that this notion of all poetry is exactly applicable to this one poem. Whatever be made of Enoch’s ‘Ocean spoil in ocean-smelling osier,’ of the ‘portal-warding lion-whelp,and peacock yew-tree’, every one knows that in himself Enoch could not have been charming. People who sell fish about the country (and that is what he did, though Mr. Tennyson won’t speak out, and wraps it up) never are beautiful. As Enoch was and must be coarse, in itself the poem must depend for its charm on a ‘gay confusion’—on a splendid accumulation of impossible accessories.

Mr. Tennyson knows this better than many of us—he knows the country world; he has proved it that no one living knows it better; he has painted with pure art—with art which describes what is a race perhaps more refined, more delicate, more conscientious, than the sailor—the ‘Northern Farmer’, and we all know what a splendid, what a living thing, he has made of it. He could, if he only would, have given us the ideal sailor in like manner—the ideal of the natural sailor we mean—the characteristic present man as he lives and is. But this he has not chosen. He has endeavoured to describe an exceptional sailor, at an exceptionally refined port, performing a graceful act, an act of relinquishment. And with this task before him, his profound taste taught him that ornate art was a necessary medium—was the sole effectual instrument—for his purpose. It was necessary for him if possible to abstract the mind from reality, to induce usnotto conceive or think of sailors as they are while we are reading of his sailors, but to think of what a person who did not know might fancy sailors to be. A casual traveller on the sea-shore, with the sensitive mood and the romantic imagination Mr. Newman has described, might fancy, would fancy, a seafaring village tobe like that. Accordingly, Mr. Tennyson has made it his aim to call off the stress of fancy from real life, to occupy it otherwise, to bury it with pretty accessories; to engage it on the ‘peacock yew-tree’, and the ‘portal-warding lion-whelp’. Nothing, too, can be more splendid than the description of the tropics as Mr. Tennyson delineates them, but a sailor would not have felt the tropics in that manner. The beauties of nature would not have so much occupied him. He would have known little of the scarlet shafts of sunrise and nothing of the long convolvuluses. As inRobinson Crusoe, his own petty contrivances and his small ailments would have been the principal subject to him. ‘For three years’, he might have said, ‘my back was bad, and then I put two pegs into a piece of drift wood and so made a chair, and after that it pleased God to send me a chill.’ In real life his piety would scarcely have gone beyond that.

It will indeed be said, that though the sailor had no words for, and even no explicit consciousness of the splendid details of the torrid zone, yet that he had, notwithstanding, a dim latent inexpressible conception of them: though he could not speak of them or describe them, yet they were much to him. And doubtless such is the case. Rude people are impressed by what is beautiful—deeply impressed—though they could not describe what they see, or what they feel. But what is absurd in Mr. Tennyson’s description—absurd when we abstract it from the gorgeous additions and ornaments with which Mr. Tennyson distracts us—is, that his hero feels nothing else but these great splendours. We hear nothing of the physicalailments, the rough devices, the low superstitions, which really would have been thefirstthings, the favourite and principal occupations of his mind. Just so when he gets home hemayhave had such fine sentiments, though it is odd, and hemayhave spoken of them to his landlady, though that is odder still—but it is incredible that his whole mind should be made up of fine sentiments. Beside those sweet feelings, if he had them, there must have been many more obvious, more prosaic, and some perhaps more healthy. Mr. Tennyson has shown a profound judgement in distracting us as he does. He has given us a classic delineation of the ‘Northern Farmer’ with no ornament at all—as bare a thing as can be—because he then wanted to describe a true type of real men: he has given us a sailor crowded all over with ornament and illustration, because he then wanted to describe an unreal type of fancied men, not sailors as they are, but sailors as they might be wished.

Another prominent element inEnoch Ardenis yet more suitable to, yet more requires the aid of, ornate art. Mr. Tennyson undertook to deal withhalf belief. The presentiments which Annie feels are exactly of that sort which everybody has felt, and which every one has half believed—which hardly any one has more than half believed. Almost every one, it has been said, would be angry if any one else reported that he believed in ghosts; yet hardly any one, when thinking by himself, wholly disbelieves them. Just so such presentiments as Mr. Tennyson depicts, impress the inner mind so much that the outer mind—the rational understanding—hardly likes to consider them nicely or to discuss them sceptically. For thesedubious themes an ornate or complex style is needful. Classical art speaks out what it has to say plainly and simply. Pure style cannot hesitate; it describes in concisest outline what is, as it is. If a poet really believes in presentiments he can speak out in pure style. One who could have been a poet—one of the few in any age of whom one can say certainly that they could have been, and have not been—has spoken thus:

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