The same art that did gainA power, must it maintain.
The same art that did gainA power, must it maintain.
The same art that did gainA power, must it maintain.
The same art that did gain
A power, must it maintain.
Some danger to a partially established reputation is to be met with from the fickleness of public taste and the easy satiety of readers. If an imaginative writer has won the attention of the public by a vigorous and original picture of some unhackneyed scene of life which is thoroughly familiar to himself, he is apt to find himself on the horns of a dilemma. If he turns to a new class of subjects, the public which has already "placed" him as an authority on a particular subject, will be disappointed; on the other hand, if he sticks to his last, he runs the chance of fatiguing his readers and of exhausting his own impressions. For such an author, ultimate success probably lies on the side of courage. Hemust reject the temptation to indulge the public with what he knows it wants, and must boldly force it to like another and still unrecognised phase of his talent. He ought, however, to make very sure that he is right, and not his readers, before he insists upon a change. It is not every one who possesses the versatility of the first Lord Lytton, and can conquer new worlds under a pseudonym at the age of fifty. There are plenty of instances of men of letters who, weary of being praised for what they did well, have tried to force down the throats of the public what everybody but themselves could see was ill-done. I remember Hans Christian Andersen, in the last year of his life, telling me that the books he should really be remembered by were his dramas and his novels, not the fairy-stories that everybody persisted in making so much fuss about. He had gone through life without gaining the least skill in gauging his own strength or weakness. Andersen, however, was exceptionally uncritical; and the author who is not blinded by vanity can generally tell, before he reaches middle life, in what his real power consists.
Yet, when we sum up the whole question, we have to confess that we know very little about the causes which lead to the distribution of public praise.The wind of fame bloweth where it listeth, and we hear the sound of it without knowing whence it cometh. This, however, appears to be certain, that, except in the case of those rare authors of exceptionally sublime genius who conquer attention by their force of originality, a great deal more than mere cleverness in writing is needful to make a reputation. Sagacity in selection, tact in dealing with other people, suppleness of character, rapidity in appreciation, and adroitness in action—all these are qualities which go to the formation of a broad literary reputation. In these days an author must be wide awake, and he must take a vast deal of trouble. The age is gone by when he could sit against the wall and let the gooseberries fall into his mouth. The increased pressure of competition tells upon the literary career as much as upon any other branch of professional life, and the author who wishes to continue to succeed must keep his loins girded.
1889.
THE LIMITS OF REALISM IN FICTION
In the last new Parisian farce, by M. Sarcey's clever young son-in-law, there is a conscientious painter of the realistic school who is preparing for the Salon a very serious and abstruse production. The young lady of his heart says, at length: "It's rather a melancholy subject; I wonder you don't paint a sportsman, crossing a rustic bridge, and meeting a pretty girl." This is the climax, and the artist breaks off his relations with Young Lady No. 1. Toward the end of the play, while he is still at work on his picture, Young Lady No. 2 says: "If I were you, I should take another subject. Now, for instance, why don't you paint a pretty girl, crossing a rustic bridge, and met by a sportsman?"
This is really an allegory, whether M. Gandillot intends it or not. Thus have those charming, fresh, ingenuous, ignorant, and rather stupidyoung ladies, the English and American publics, received the attempts which novelists have made to introduce among them what is called, outside the Anglo-Saxon world, the experimental novel. The present writer is no defender of that class of fiction; least of all is he an exclusive defender of it; but he is tired to death of the criticism on both sides of the Atlantic, which refuses to see what the realists are, whither they are tending, and what position they are beginning to hold in the general evolution of imaginative literature. He is no great lover of what they produce, and most certainly does not delight in their excesses; but when they are advised to give up their studies and paint pretty girls on rustic bridges, he is almost stung into partisanship. The present essay will have no interest whatever for persons who approve of no more stringent investigation into conduct than Miss Yonge's, and enjoy no action nearer home than Zambeziland; but to those who have perceived that in almost every country in the world the novel of manners has been passing through a curious phase, it may possibly not be uninteresting to be called upon to inquire what the nature of that phase has been, and still more what is to be the outcome of it.
So far as the Anglo-Saxon world is concerned, the experimental or realistic novel is mainly to be studied in America, Russia, and France. It exists now in all the countries of the European Continent, but we know less about its manifestations there. It has had no direct development in England, except in the clever but imperfect stories of Mr. George Moore. Ten years ago the realistic novel, or at all events the naturalist school, out of which it proceeded, was just beginning to be talked about, and there was still a good deal of perplexity, outside Paris, as to its scope and as to the meaning of its name. Russia, still unexplored by the Vicomte de Vogüé and his disciples, was represented to western readers solely by Turgéneff, who was a great deal too romantic to be a pure naturalist. In America, where now almost every new writer of merit seems to be a realist, there was but one, Mr. Henry James, who, in 1877, had inaugurated the experimental novel in the English language, with hisAmerican. Mr. Howells, tending more and more in that direction, was to write on for several years before he should produce a thoroughly realistic novel.
Ten years ago, then, the very few people who take an interest in literary questions were lookingwith hope or apprehension, as the case might be, to Paris, and chiefly to the study of M. Zola. It was from the little villa at Médan that revelation on the subject of the coming novel was to be awaited; and in the autumn of 1880 the long-expected message came, in the shape of the grotesque, violent, and narrow, but extremely able volume of destructive and constructive criticism calledLe Roman Expérimental. People had complained that they did not know what M. Zola was driving at; that they could not recognise a "naturalistic" or "realistic" book when they saw it; that the "scientific method" in fiction, the "return to nature," "experimental observation" as the basis of a story, were mere phrases to them, vague and incomprehensible. The Sage of Médan determined to remove the objection and explain everything. He put his speaking-trumpet to his lips, and, disdaining to address the crassness of his countrymen, he shouted his system of rules and formulas to the Russian public, that all the world might hear.
In 1880 he had himself proceeded far. He had published the Rougon-Macquart series of his novels, as far asUne Page d'Amour. He has added since then six or seven novels to the bulk of his works, and he has published many forcible andfascinating and many repulsive pages. But since 1880 he has not altered his method or pushed on to any further development. He had already displayed his main qualities—his extraordinary mixture of versatility and monotony, his enduring force, his plentiful lack of taste, his cynical disdain for the weaknesses of men, his admirable constructive power, his inability to select the salient points in a vast mass of observations. He had already shown himself what I must take the liberty of saying that he appears to me to be—one of the leading men of genius in the second half of the nineteenth century, one of the strongest novelists of the world; and that in spite of faults so serious and so eradicable that they would have hopelessly wrecked a writer a little less overwhelming in strength and resource.
Zola seems to me to be the Vulcan among our later gods, afflicted with moral lameness from his birth, and coming to us sooty and brutal from the forge, yet as indisputably divine as any Mercury-Hawthorne or Apollo-Thackeray of the best of them. It is to Zola, and to Zola only, that the concentration of the scattered tendencies of naturalism is due. It is owing to him that the threads of Flaubert and Daudet, Dostoiefsky andTolstoi, Howells and Henry James can be drawn into anything like a single system. It is Zola who discovered a common measure for all these talents, and a formula wide enough and yet close enough to distinguish them from the outside world and bind them to one another. It is his doing that for ten years the experimental novel has flowed in a definite channel, and has not spread itself abroad in a thousand whimsical directions.
To a serious critic, then, who is not a partisan, but who sees how large a body of carefully composed fiction the naturalistic school has produced, it is of great importance to know what is the formula of M. Zola. He has defined it, one would think, clearly enough, but to see it intelligently repeated is rare indeed. It starts from the negation of fancy—not of imagination, as that word is used by the best Anglo-Saxon critics, but of fancy—the romantic and rhetorical elements that novelists have so largely used to embroider the home-spun fabric of experience with. It starts with the exclusion of all that is called "ideal," all that is not firmly based on the actual life of human beings, all, in short, that is grotesque, unreal, nebulous, or didactic. I do not understand Zola to condemn the romantic writers of the past; I do not think he has spokenof Dumaspêreor of George Sand as Mr. Howells has allowed himself to speak of Dickens. He has a phrase of contempt—richly deserved, it appears to me—for the childish evolution of Victor Hugo's plots, and in particular of that ofNotre Dame de Paris; but, on the whole, his aim is rather to determine the outlines of a new school than to attack the recognised masters of the past. If it be not so, it should be so; there is room in the Temple of Fame for all good writers, and it does not blast the laurels of Walter Scott that we are deeply moved by Dostoiefsky.
With Zola's theory of what the naturalistic novel should be, it seems impossible at first sight to quarrel. It is to be contemporary; it is to be founded on and limited by actual experience; it is to reject all empirical modes of awakening sympathy and interest; its aim is to place before its readers living beings, acting the comedy of life as naturally as possible. It is to trust to principles of action and to reject formulas of character; to cultivate the personal expression; to be analytical rather than lyrical; to paint men as they are, not as you think they should be. There is no harm in all this. There is not a word here that does not apply to the chiefs of one of the two greatparallel schools of English fiction. It is hard to conceive of a novelist whose work is more experimental than Richardson. Fielding is personal and analytical above all things. If France counts George Sand among its romanticists, we can point to a realist who is greater than she, in Jane Austen. There is not a word to be found in M. Zola's definitions of the experimental novel that is not fulfilled in the pages ofEmma; which is equivalent to saying that the most advanced realism may be practised by the most innocent as well as the most captivating of novelists. Miss Austen did not observe over a wide area, but within the circle of her experience she disguised nothing, neglected nothing, glossed over nothing. She is the perfection of the realistic ideal, and there ought to be a statue of her in the vestibule of the forthcoming Académie des Goncourts. Unfortunately, the lives of her later brethren have not been so sequestered as hers, and they, too, have thought it their duty to neglect nothing and to disguise nothing.
It is not necessary to repeat here the rougher charges which have been brought against the naturalist school in France—charges which in mitigated form have assailed their brethren in Russia andAmerica. On a carefully reasoned page in the copy of M. Zola's essayDu Romanwhich lies before me, one of those idiots who write in public books has scribbled the remark, "They see nothing in life but filth and crime." This ignoble wielder of the pencil but repeats what more ambitious critics have been saying in solemn terms for the last fifteen years. Even as regards Zola himself, as the author of the delicate comedy ofLa Conquête de Plassans, and the moving tragedy ofUne Page d'Amour, this charge is utterly false, and in respect of the other leaders it is simply preposterous. None the less, there are sides upon which the naturalistic novelists are open to serious criticism in practice. It is with no intention of underrating their eminent qualities that I suggest certain points at which, as it appears to me, their armour is conspicuously weak. There are limits to realism, and they seem to have been readily discovered by the realists themselves. These weak points are to be seen in the jointed harness of the strongest book that the school has yet produced in any country,Le Crime et le Châtiment.
When the ideas of Zola were first warmly taken up, about ten years ago, by the mostearnest and sympathetic writers who then were young, the theory of the experimental novel seemed unassailable, and the range within which it could be worked to advantage practically boundless. But the fallacies of practice remained to be experienced, and looking back upon what has been written by the leaders themselves, the places where the theory has broken down are patent. It may not be uninteresting to take up the leading dogmas of the naturalistic school, and to see what elements of failure, or, rather, what limitations to success, they contained. The outlook is very different in 1890 from what it was in 1880; and a vast number of exceedingly clever writers have laboured to no avail, if we are not able at the latter date to gain a wider perspective than could be obtained at the earlier one.
Ten years ago, most ardent and generous young authors, outside the frontiers of indifferent Albion, were fired with enthusiasm at the results to be achieved by naturalism in fiction. It was to be the Revealer and the Avenger. It was to display society as it is, and to wipe out all the hypocrisies of convention. It was to proceed from strength to strength. It was to place all imagination upon a scientific basis, and to open boundless vistasto sincere and courageous young novelists. We have seen with what ardent hope and confidence its principles were accepted by Mr. Howells. We have seen all the Latin races, in their coarser way, embrace and magnify the system. We have seen Zola, like a heavy father in high comedy, bless a budding generation of novel-writers, and prophesy that they will all proceed further than he along the road of truth and experiment. Yet the naturalistic school is really less advanced, less thorough, than it was ten years ago. Why is this?
It is doubtless because the strain and stress of production have brought to light those weak places in the formula which were not dreamed of. The first principle of the school was the exact reproduction of life. But life is wide, and it is elusive. All that the finest observer can do is to make a portrait of one corner of it. By the confession of the master-spirit himself, this portrait is not to be a photograph. It must be inspired by imagination, but sustained and confined by the experience of reality. It does not appear at first sight as though it should be difficult to attain this, but in point of fact it is found almost impossible to approach this species of perfection.The result of building up a long work on this principle is, I hardly know why, to produce the effect of a reflection in a convex mirror. The more accurately experimental some parts of the picture are, the more will the want of balance and proportion in other parts be felt. I will take at random two examples. No better work in the naturalistic direction has been done than is to be found in the beginning of M. Zola'sLa Joie de Vivre, or in the early part of the middle of Mr. James'sBostonians. The life in the melancholy Norman house upon the cliff, the life among the uncouth fanatic philanthropists in the American city, these are given with a reality, a brightness, a personal note which have an electrical effect upon the reader. But the remainder of each of these remarkable books, built up as they are with infinite toil by two of the most accomplished architects of fiction now living, leaves on the mind a sense of a strained reflection, of images blurred or malformed by a convexity of the mirror. As I have said, it is difficult to account for this, which is a feature of blight on almost every specimen of the experimental novel; but perhaps it can in a measure be accounted for by the inherent disproportionwhich exists between the small flat surface of a book and the vast arch of life which it undertakes to mirror, those studies being least liable to distortion which reflect the smallest section of life, and those in which ambitious masters endeavour to make us feel the mighty movements of populous cities and vast bodies of men being the most inevitably misshapen.
Another leading principle of the naturalists is the disinterested attitude of the narrator. He who tells the story must not act the part of Chorus, must not praise or blame, must have no favourites; in short, must not be a moralist but an anatomist. This excellent and theoretical law has been a snare in practice. The nations of continental Europe are not bound down by conventional laws to the same extent as we English are. The Anglo-Saxon race is now the only one that has not been touched by that pessimism of which the writings of Schopenhauer are the most prominent and popular exponent. This fact is too often overlooked when we scornfully ask why the foreign nations allow themselves so great a latitude in the discussion of moral subjects. It is partly, no doubt, because of our beautiful Protestant institutions; because we go to Sunday-schools and take a lively interest in the souls of other people; because,in short, we are all so virtuous and godly, that our novels are so prim and decent. But it is also partly because our hereditary dulness in perceiving delicate ethical distinctions has given the Anglo-Saxon race a tendency to slur over the dissonances between man and nature. This tendency does not exist among the Latin races, who run to the opposite extreme and exaggerate these discords. The consequence has been that they have, almost without exception, being betrayed by the disinterested attitude into a contemplation of crime and frailty (notoriously more interesting than innocence and virtue) which has given bystanders excuse for saying that these novelists are lovers of that which is evil. In the same way they have been tempted by the Rembrandtesque shadows of pain, dirt, and obloquy to overdash their canvases with the subfusc hues of sentiment. In a word, in trying to draw life evenly and draw it whole, they have introduced such a brutal want of tone as to render the portrait a caricature. The American realists, who were guarded by fashion from the Scylla of brutality, have not wholly escaped, on their side and for the same reason, the Charybdis of insipidity.
It would take us too far, and would require a constant reference to individual books, to trace the weaknesses of the realistic school of our own day.Human sentiment has revenged itself upon them for their rigid regulations and scientific formulas, by betraying them into faults the possibility of which they had not anticipated. But above all other causes of their limited and temporary influence, the most powerful has been the material character which their rules forced upon them, and their excess of positivism and precision. In eliminating the grotesque and the rhetorical they drove out more than they wished to lose; they pushed away with their scientific pitchfork the fantastic and intellectual elements. How utterly fatal this was may be seen, not in the leaders, who have preserved something of the reflected colour of the old romance, but in those earnest disciples who have pushed the theory to its extremity. In their sombre, grimy, and dreary studies in pathology, clinical bulletins of a soul dying of atrophy, we may see what the limits of realism are, and how impossible it is that human readers should much longer go on enjoying this sort of literary aliment.
If I have dwelt upon these limitations, however, it has not been to cast a stone at the naturalistic school. It has been rather with the object of clearing away some critical misconceptions about the future development of it. Anglo-Saxon criticism of the perambulating species might, perhaps, be persuadedto consider the realists with calmer judgment, if it looked upon them, not as a monstrous canker that was slowly spreading its mortal influence over the whole of literature, which it would presently overwhelm and destroy, but as a natural and timely growth, taking its due place in the succession of products, and bound, like other growths, to bud and blossom and decline. I venture to put forth the view that the novel of experiment has had its day; that it has been made the vehicle of some of the loftiest minds of our age; that it has produced a huge body of fiction, none of it perfect, perhaps, much of it bad, but much of it, also, exceedingly intelligent, vivid, sincere, and durable; and that it is now declining, to leave behind it a great memory, the prestige of persecution, and a library of books which every highly educated man in the future will be obliged to be familiar with.
It would be difficult, I think, for any one but a realistic novelist to overrate the good that realism in fiction has done. It has cleared the air of a thousand follies, has pricked a whole fleet of oratorical bubbles. Whatever comes next, we cannot return, in serious novels, to the inanities and impossibilities of the old "well-made" plot, to the children changed at nurse, to the madonnaheroine and the god-like hero, to the impossible virtues and melodramatic vices. In future, even those who sneer at realism and misrepresent it most wilfully, will be obliged to put in their effects in ways more in accord with veritable experience. The public has eaten of the apple of knowledge, and will not be satisfied with mere marionettes. There will still be novel-writers who address the gallery, and who will keep up the gaudy old convention and the clumsyFamily Heraldevolution, but they will no longer be distinguished people of genius. They will no longer sign themselves George Sand and Charles Dickens.
In the meantime, wherever I look I see the novel ripe for another reaction. The old leaders will not change. It is not to be expected that they will write otherwise than in the mode which has grown mature with them. But in France, among the younger men, every one is escaping from the realistic formula. The two young athletes for whom M. Zola predicted ten years ago an "experimental" career more profoundly scientific than his own, are realists no longer. M. Guy de Maupassant has become a psychologist, and M. Huysmans a mystic. M. Bourget, who set all the ladies dancing after his ingenious, musky books,never has been a realist; nor has Pierre Loti, in whom, with a fascinating freshness, the old exiled romanticism comes back with a laugh and a song. All points to a reaction in France; and in Russia, too, if what we hear is true, the next step will be one toward the mystical and the introspective. In America it would be rash for a foreigner to say what signs of change are evident. The time has hardly come when we look to America for the symptoms of literary initiative. But it is my conviction that the limits of realism have been reached; that no great writer who has not already adapted the experimental system will do so; and that we ought now to be on the outlook to welcome (and, of course, to persecute) a school of novelists with a totally new aim, part of whose formula must unquestionably be a concession to the human instinct for mystery and beauty.
1890.
IS VERSE IN DANGER?
We are passing through a period obviously unfavourable to the development of the art of poetry. A little while ago there was an outburst of popular appreciation of living verse, but this is now replaced, for the moment, by an almost ostentatious indifference. These alternations of curiosity and disdain deceive no one who looks at the history of literature with an eye which is at all philosophical. It is easy to say, as is commonly said, that they depend on the merit of the poetry which is being produced. But this is not always, or even often, the case. About twenty years ago a ferment of interest and enthusiasm was called forth, all over the English-speaking world, by the early writings of Mr. Swinburne and by those of the late Mr. Rossetti. This was deserved by the merit of those productions; but the disdain which, twenty years earlier,the verse of Mr. Robert Browning and Mr. Matthew Arnold had met with, cannot be so accounted for. It is wiser to admit that sons never look at life with their fathers' eyes, and that taste is subject to incessant and almost regular fluctuations. At the present moment, though men should sing with the voice of angels, the barbarian public would not listen, and a new Milton would probably be less warmly welcomed in 1890 than a Pomfret was two centuries ago or a Bowles was in 1790. Literary history shows that a demand for poetry does not always lead to a supply, and that a supply does not always command a market. He who doubts this fact may compare the success of Herrick with that of Erasmus Darwin.
The only reason for preluding a speculation on the future of the art of poetry with these remarks, is to clear the ground of any arguments based on the merely momentary condition of things. The eagerness or coldness of the public, the fertility or exhaustion of the poets, at this particular juncture, are elements of no real importance. If poetry is to continue to be one of the living arts of humanity, it does not matter an iota whether poetry is looked upon with contempt by the members of a single generation. If poetry is declining, and, as a matterof fact, is now moribund, the immense vogue of Tennyson at a slightly earlier period will take its place among the insignificant phenomena of a momentary reaction. The problem is a more serious one. It is this: Is poetry, in its very essence, an archaic and rudimentary form of expression, still galvanised into motion, indeed, by antiquarianism, but really obsolete and therefore to be cultivated only at the risk of affectation and insincerity; or is it an art capable of incessant renovation—a living organism which grows, on the whole, with the expansion of modern life? In other words, is the art of verse one which, like music or painting, delights and consoles us with a species of expression which can never be superseded, because it is in danger of no direct rivalry from a similar species; or was poetry merely the undeveloped, though in itself the extremely beautiful, infancy of a type which is now adult, and which has relinquished its charming puerilities for a mode of expression infinitely wider and of more practical utility? Sculptors, singers, painters must always exist; but need we have poets any longer, since the world has discovered how to say all it wants to say in prose? Will any one who has anything of importance to communicate be likely in the futureto express it through the medium of metrical language?
These questions are not to be dismissed with a smile. A large number of thoughtful persons at the present time are, undoubtedly, disposed to answer them in the affirmative, although a certain decency forbids them openly to say so. Plenty of clever people secretly regard the Muse as a distinguished old lady, of good family, who has been a beauty and a wit in her day, but who really rules only by sufferance in these years of her decline. They whisper that she is sinking into second childhood, that she repeats herself when she converses, and that she has exchanged her early liberal tastes for a love of what is puerile, ingenious, and "finikin." A great Parisian critic has just told us that each poet is read only by the other poets, and he gives as the reason that the art of verse has become so refined and so elaborate that it passes over the heads of the multitude. But may it not be that this refinement is only a decrepitude—the amusement of an old age that has sunk to the playing of more and more helplessly ingenious games of patience? That is what those hint who, more insidious by far than the open enemies of literature, suggest that poetry has hadits reign, its fascinating and imperial tyranny, and that it must now make way for the democracy of prose.
Probably there would have been no need to face this question, either in this generation or for many generations to come, if it had not been for a single circumstance. The great enemies of the poets of the present are the poets of the past, and the antiquarian spirit of the nineteenth century has made the cessation of the publication of fresh verse a possibility. The intellectual condition of our times differs from that of all preceding ages in no other point so much as in its attitude toward the writings of the dead. In those periods of renovation which have refreshed the literatures of the world, the tendency has always been to study some one class of deceased writers with affection. In English history, we have seen the romantic poets of Italy, the dramatists of Spain, the Latin satirists, and the German ballad-mongers, exercise, at successive moments, a vivid influence on English writers. But this study was mainly limited to those writers themselves, and did not extend to the circle of their readers; while even with the writers it never absorbed at a single moment the whole range of poetry. We may take one instance.Pope was the disciple of Horace and of the French Jesuits, of Dryden and of the conceit-creating school of Donne. But he was able to use Boileau and Crashaw so freely because he addressed a public that had never met with the first and had forgotten the second; and when he passed outside this narrow circle he was practically without a rival. To the class whom he addressed, Shakespeare and Milton were phantoms, Chaucer and Spenser not so much as names. The only doubt was whether Alexander Pope was man enough to arrest attention by the intrinsic merits of his poetry. If his verse was admitted to be good, his public were not distracted by a preference for other verse which they had known for a longer time.
This remained true until about a generation ago. The great romantic poets of the beginning of this century found the didactic and rhetorical verse-writers of the eighteenth century in possession of the field, but they found no one else there. Their action was of the nature of a revolt—a revolution so successful that it became constitutional. All that Wordsworth and Keats had to do was to prove their immediate predecessors to be unworthy of public attention, and when once they hadpersuaded the reading world that what they had to offer was more pleasing than what Young and Churchill and Darwin had offered, the revolution was complete. But, in order to draw attention to the merits of the proposed change, the romantic poets of the Georgian age pointed to the work of the writers of the Elizabethan age, whom they claimed as their natural predecessors—the old stock cast out at the Restoration and now reinstated. The public had entirely forgotten the works of these writers, except to some extent those of the dramatists, and it became necessary to reprint them. A whole galaxy of poetic stars was revealed when the cloud of prejudice was blown away, and a class of dangerous rivals to the modern poet was introduced.
The activity of the dead is now paramount, and threatens to paralyse original writing altogether. The revival of the old poets who were in direct sympathy with Keats and Wordsworth has extended far beyond the limits which those who inaugurated it desired to lay down. Every poetic writer of any age precedent to our own has now a chance of popularity, often a very much better chance than he possessed during his own lifetime. Scarcely a poet, from Chaucer downward, remains inedited.The imitative lyrist who, in a paroxysm of inspiration, wrote one good sonnet under the sway of James I., but was never recognised as a poet even by his friends, rejoices now in a portly quarto, and lives for the first time. The order of nature is reversed, and those who were only ghosts in the seventeenth century come back to us clothed in literary vitality.
In this great throng of resuscitated souls, all of whom have forfeited their copyright, how is the modern poet to exist? He has no longer to compete—as "his great forefathers did, from Homer down to Ben"—with the leading spirits of his own generation, but with the picked genius of the world. He writes an epic; Mr. Besant and the Society of Authors oblige him to "retain his rights," to "publish at a royalty," and to keep the rules of the game. But Milton has no rights and demands no royalty. The new poet composes lyrics and publishes them in a volume. They are sincere and ingenious; but why should the reader buy that volume, when he can get the best of Shelley and Coleridge, of Gray and Marvell, in a cheaper form inThe Golden Treasury? At every turn the thronging company of the ghosts impedes and disheartens the modern writer, and it is no wonderif the new Orpheus throws down his lyre in despair when the road to his desire is held by such an invincible army of spectres. In the golden age of the Renaissance an enthusiast is said to have offered up a manuscript by Martial every year, as a burnt sacrifice to Catullus, an author whom he distinctly preferred. The modern poet, if he were not afraid of popular censure, might make a yearly holocaust of editions of the British classics, in honour of the Genius of Poetry. There are many enemies of the art abroad, but among them all the most powerful and insidious are those of its own household. The poets of to-day might contrive to fish the murex up, and to eat turtle, if it were not for the intolerable rivalry of "souls of poets dead and gone."
On the whole, however, it is highly unlikely that the antiquarian passion of our age will last. Already it gives signs of wearing out, and it will probably be succeeded by a spirit of unreasonable intolerance of the past. Intellectual invention will not allow itself to be pinioned for ever by these soft and universal cords of tradition, each as slight as gossamer in itself, but overwhelming in the immense mass. As for the old poets, young verse-writers may note with glee that theserivals of theirs are being caught in the butterfly net of education, where they will soon find the attractive feathers rubbed off their wings. One by one they pass into text-books and are lost. Chaucer is done for, and so is Milton; Goldsmith is annotated, Scott is prepared for "local examinations," and even Byron, the loose, the ungrammatical, is edited as a school book. The noble army of extension lecturers will scarcely pause in their onward march. We shall see Wordsworth captured, Shelley boiled down for the use of babes, and Keats elaborately annotated, with his blunders in classical mythology exposed. The schoolmaster is the only friend the poet of the future dares to look to, for he alone has the power to destroy the loveliness and mystery which are the charm of the old poets. Even a second-rate verse-writer may hope to live by the side of an Elizabethan poet edited for the Clarendon Press.
This remedy may, however, be considered fantastic, and it would scarcely be wise to trust to it. There is, nevertheless, nothing ironical in the statement that an exaggerated attention paid to historical work leaves no time and no appetite for what contemporaries produce. The neglect of poetry is so widespread that if the very smallresiduum of love of verse is expended lavishly on the dead, the living are likely to come off badly indeed. The other arts, which can better defend themselves, are experiencing the same sense of being starved by the old masters. The bulk of the public neither buys books nor invests in pictures, nor orders statuary according to its own taste, but according to the fashion; and if the craze is antiquarian, we may produce Raphaels in dozens and Shelleys in shoals; they will have to subsist as the bears and the pelicans do.
Let us abandon ourselves, however, to the vain pleasure of prophesying. Let us suppose, for the humour of it, that what very young gentlemen call "the might of poesy" is sure to reassert itself, that the votaries of modern verse will always form a respectable minimum, and that some alteration in fashion will reduce the tyranny of antiquarianism to decent proportions. Admit that poetry, in whatever lamentable condition it may be at the present time, is eternal in its essence, and must offer the means of expression to certain admirable talents in each generation. What, then, is the form which we may reasonably expect it to take next? This is, surely, a harmless kind of speculation, and the moral certainty of being fooled bythe event need not restrain us from indulging in it. We will prophesy, although fully conscious of the wild predictions on the same subject current in England in 1580, 1650, and 1780, and in France in 1775 and 1825. We may be quite sure of one thing, that when the Marlowe or the André Chénier is coming, not a single critic will be expecting him. But in the meantime why show a front less courageous than that of the history-defying Zadkiel?
It is usually said, in hasty generalisation, that the poetry of the present age is unique in the extreme refinement of its exterior mechanism. Those who say this are not aware that the great poets whose virile simplicity and robust carelessness of detail they applaud—thus building tombs to prophets whom they have never worshipped—have, almost without exception, been scrupulously attentive to form. No modern writer has been so learned in rhythm as Milton, so faultless in rhyme-arrangement as Spenser. But what is true is that a care for form, and a considerable skill in the technical art of verse, have been acquired by writers of a lower order, and that this sort of perfection is no longer the hall-mark of a great master. We may expect it, therefore, to attract lessattention in the future; and although, assuredly, the bastard jargon of Walt Whitman, and kindred returns to sheer barbarism, will not be accepted, technical perfection will more and more be taken as a matter of course, as a portion of the poet's training which shall be as indispensable, and as little worthy of notice, as that a musician should read his notes correctly.
Less effort, therefore, is likely to be made, in the immediate future, to give pleasure by the manner of poetry, and more skill will be expended on the subject-matter. By this I do not understand that greater concession will be made than in the past to what may be called the didactic fallacy, the obstinate belief of some critics in the function of poetry as a teacher. The fact is certain that nothing is more obsolete than educational verse, the literary product which deliberately supplies information. We may see another Sappho; it is even conceivable that we might see another Homer; but a new Hesiod, never. Knowledge has grown to be far too complex, exact, and minute to be impressed upon the memory by the artifice of rhyme; and poetry had scarcely passed its infancy before it discovered that to stimulate, to impassion, to amuse, were the proper duties of an art which appeals to the emotions, and to the emotionsonly. The curious attempts, then, which have been made by poets of no mean talent to dedicate their verse to botany, to the Darwinian hypothesis, to the loves of the fossils, and to astronomical science, are not likely to be repeated, and if they should be repeated, they would scarcely attract much popular attention. Nor is the epic, on a large scale—that noble and cumbersome edifice with all its blank windows and corridors that lead to nothing—a species of poetic architecture which the immediate future can be expected to indulge in.
Leaving the negative for the positive, then, we may fancy that one or two probabilities loom before us. Poetry, if it exist at all, will deal, and probably to a greater degree than ever before, with those more frail and ephemeral shades of emotion which prose scarcely ventures to describe. The existence of a delicately organised human being is diversified by divisions and revulsions of sensation, ill-defined desires, gleams of intuition, and the whole gamut of spiritual notes descending from exultation to despair, none of which have ever been adequately treated except in the hieratic language of poetry. The most realistic novel, the closest psychological analysis in prose, does no more than skim the surface of thesoul; verse has the privilege of descending into its depths. In the future, lyrical poetry will probably grow less trivial and less conventional, at the risk of being less popular. It will interpret what prose dares not suggest. It will penetrate further into the complexity of human sensation, and, untroubled by the necessity of formulating a creed, a theory, or a story, will describe with delicate accuracy, and under a veil of artistic beauty, the amazing, the unfamiliar, and even the portentous phenomena which it encounters.
The social revolution or evolution which most sensible people are now convinced is imminent, will surely require a species of poetry to accompany its course and to celebrate its triumphs. If we could foresee what form this species will take, we should know all things. But we must believe that it will be democratic, and that to a degree at present unimaginable. The aristocratic tradition is still paramount in all art. Kings, princesses, and the symbols of chivalry are as essential to poetry, as we now conceive it, as roses, stars, or nightingales. The poet may be a pronounced socialist; he may be Mr. William Morris; but the oligarchic imagery pervades his work as completely as if he were a troubadour of the thirteenth century. It is difficultto understand what will be left if this romantic phraseology is destroyed, but it is still more difficult to believe that it can survive a complete social revolution.
A kind of poetry now scarcely cultivated at all may be expected to occupy the attention of the poets, whether socialism hastens or delays. What the Germans understand by epic verse—that is to say, short and highly finished studies in narrative—is a class of literature which offers unlimited opportunities. What may be done in this direction is indicated in France by the work of M. Coppée. In England and America we have at present nothing at all like it, the idyllic stories of Mr. Coventry Patmore presenting the closest parallel. The great danger which attends the writing of these narratives in English is the tendency to lose distinction of style, to become humorous in dealing with the grotesque and tame in describing the simple. Blank verse will be wholly eschewed by those who in the future sing the annals of the humble; they will feel that the strictest art and the most exquisite ornament of rhyme and metre will be required for the treatment of such narratives. M. Coppée himself, who records the adventures ofseamstresses and engine-drivers, of shipwrecked sailors and retail grocers, with such simplicity and moving pathos, has not his rival in all France for purity of phrase and for exquisite propriety of versification.
The modern interest in the drama, and the ever-growing desire to see literature once more wedded to the stage, will, it can hardly be doubted, lead to a revival of dramatic poetry. This will not, of course, have any relation to the feeble lycean plays of the hour—spectacular romances enshrined in ambling blank verse—but will, in its form and substance alike, offer entertainment to other organs than the eye. Probably the puritanic limitations which have so long cramped the English theatre will be removed, and British plays, while remaining civilised and decent, will once more deal with the realities of life and not with its conventions. Neither the funeral baked meats of the romantic English novel, nor the spiced and potted dainties of the French stage, will satisfy our playgoers when once we have strong and sincere playwrights of our own.
In religious verse something, and in philosophical verse much, remains to be done. Thewider hope has scarcely found a singer yet, and the deeper speculation has been very imperfectly and empirically celebrated by our poets. Whether love, the very central fountain of poetic inspiration in the past, can yield many fresh variations, remains to be seen. That passion will, however, in all probability be treated in the future less objectively and with a less obtrusive landscape background. The school which is now expiring has carried description, the consciousness of exterior forms and colours, the drapery and upholstery of nature, to its extreme limit. The next development of poetry is likely to be very bare and direct, unembroidered, perhaps even arid, in character. It will be experimental rather than descriptive, human rather than animal. So at least we vaguely conjecture. But whatever the issue may be, we may be confident that the art will retain that poignant charm over undeveloped minds, and that exquisite fascination, which for so many successive generations have made poetry the wisest and the fairest friend of youth.
1891.
TENNYSON—AND AFTER
As we filed slowly out of the Abbey on the afternoon of Wednesday, the 12th of October, 1892, there must have occurred to others, I think, as to myself, a whimsical and half-terrifying sense of the symbolic contrast between what we had left and what we emerged upon. Inside, the grey and vitreous atmosphere, the reverberations of music moaning somewhere out of sight, the bones and monuments of the noble dead, reverence, antiquity, beauty, rest. Outside, in the raw air, a tribe of hawkers urging upon the edges of a dense and inquisitive crowd a large sheet of pictures of the pursuit of a flea by a "lady," and more insidious salesmen doing a brisk trade in what they falsely pretended to be "Tennyson's last poem."
Next day we read in our newspapers affecting accounts of the emotion displayed by the vastcrowds outside the Abbey—horny hands dashing away the tear, seamstresses holding the "the little green volumes" to their faces to hide their agitation. Happy for those who could see these things with their fairy telescopes out of the garrets of Fleet Street. I, alas!—though I sought assiduously—could mark nothing of the kind. Entering the Abbey, conducted by courteous policemen through unparalleled masses of the curious, we distinguished patience, good behaviour, cheerful and untiring inquisitiveness, a certain obvious gratitude for an incomprehensible spectacle provided by the authorities, but nothing else. And leaving the Abbey, as I say, the impression was one almost sinister in its abrupt transition. Poetry, authority, the grace and dignity of life, seemed to have been left behind us for ever in that twilight where Tennyson was sleeping with Chaucer and with Dryden.
In recording this impression I desire nothing so little as to appear censorious. Even the external part of the funeral at Westminster seemed, as was said of the similar scene which was enacted there nearly two hundred years ago, "a well-conducted and uncommon public ceremony, where the philosopher can find nothing to condemn, northe satirist to ridicule." But the contrast between the outside and the inside of the Abbey, a contrast which may possibly have been merely whimsical in itself, served for a parable of the condition of poetry in England as the burial of Tennyson has left it. If it be only the outworn body of this glorious man which we have relinquished to the safeguard of the Minster, gathered to his peers in the fulness of time, we have no serious ground for apprehension, nor, after the first painful moment, even for sorrow. His harvest is ripe, and we hold it in our granaries. The noble physical presence which has been the revered companion of three generations has, indeed, sunk at length: