The point I wish to make is that a teacher can teach properly only poetry which he himself is capable of appreciating, and therefore literature is the most difficult of all subjects to teach, since it requires in the individual certain qualifications beyond the merely intellectual. For the lack of these qualifications, no brilliancy of intellect can compensate.
The teacher who knows a piece of poetry with his head only can never teach it as it ought to be taught. He may be able to repeat it word for word, he may know all about its history, its philology, its structure, but if he has not felt it, if he has not reproduced it sympathetically within himself, he cannot teach it. Similarly the student, unless he is capable of sympathizing with such emotions as are recorded in poetry, will be unable to get more than a head knowledge of it. If this power of sympathizing is present in ever so small a degree, it can be indefinitely developed under the inspiration of a good teacher.
What follows then? First, that a teacher who lacks the higher appreciation of literature can certainly never teach it to others, although probably thirty or forty per cent. of his pupils, more gifted than himself by Nature in this respect, will get an appreciation in spite of him. Secondly, that even supposing a teacher has this appreciation, it will be of little use to him, unless he has the power of communicating it to others, that is, of awakening in them sympathy with what he himself feels.
Assuming, then, that the teacher has this appreciation, what is the best way of communicating it? There are, perhaps, only two possible ways. One is by talking about the poem, by trying to describe its effect upon one; but the better and more effective way is by reading, by vocal interpretation. All literature, but especially poetry, is written not for the eye, but for the ear. Its appeal, then, should be made, not through the eye but through the ear. The sound of the words, not singly, but in groups, the rhythm, the intonation, all these give the atmosphere of a poem. Sound is to a poem what colour is to a picture. Get away from the printed word, the mere symbol; it means something for the head, it is true, but nothing for the heart until it is translated into sound.
The first thing a teacher of literature must do, then, is to learn to read. He need not take a course in elocution; stamping, gesticulating, waving his arms, shouting, whispering, hissing, and other tricks of the professional elocutionist will benefit him little; all that is necessary is that he should be able, by the intonation of his voice, to convey to his students the effect which a poem has made upon himself. Diligent practice, the subjection of the voice to the will—these are what he needs. The average man cannot hope to reach any very high degree of efficiency as a reader, but all that the teacher needs is to be able to read clearly, with a voice well controlled and capable of expressing various shades of emotion, with a good sense of rhythm and the grouping of vowel sounds.
The first thing, then, for one who would teach literature is to endeavour to reach at least that stage of vocal culture which I have described. Of course, a good deal may be done in the way of conveying appreciation of a poem by talking about it, but to talk about a poem well is almost as difficult as to read it well, and at the best is not nearly so effective.
Assuming that a man is equipped with these essentials, a true appreciation of literature and the power of communicating his appreciation to others, how is he to approach the teaching of a piece of literature?
The first thing he must do is to assimilate it thoroughly himself, to go over it again and again, to practise again and again the vocal interpretation of it, to be sure that he has caught the spirit not only of the whole, but of the smallest part, that no shade of meaning, however subtle, has escaped him.
"We must long inhale," says Corson, "the choral atmosphere of a work of genius before we attempt, if we attempt at all, any intellectual formulation of it; which formulation must necessarily be comparatively limited, because genius, as genius, is transcendental, and therefore outside the domain of the intellect."
Then, having assimilated it, let him go further and get a background for it. Let him know, if possible, its history, what suggested it, under what circumstances it was composed, its relation to other writings of the poet and of the age, what the best critics have said about it, and so on. Let him endeavour to neglect no scrap of information which will increase his own appreciation and understanding of the poem. When he has done all this, then, and not till then, is he ready to teach it. If he has plenty of time and a small class, he will probably begin by trying to find out how far his pupils have assimilated the spirit of the poem. His task is then to interpret the piece of literature, to try to give the student the impression it has made on him, what it means to him, what emotions it arouses in him. This is to be done by reading it, or, if the piece is long, by reading such parts of it as will form a connected whole, filling in with descriptive narrative. In many cases it will be necessary before attempting an interpretation to say a few words which will enable the pupil to listen to the reading in the proper frame of mind, and will create the proper atmosphere for him.
When the first impression has been made, the work has only just begun. Suppose one has hit the right keynote, that the class has caught the spirit of the poem; there will still be much of it which is unintelligible or misty to them.
Not realizing this, I used to make a mistake when I first began to teach. I thought it was necessary that the pupils should understand the poem in detail before they could get the general effect. I used, therefore, to begin by analysis, by pulling the poem to pieces, showing its structure, the order of ideas, the meaning of words, and when I thought everything was perfectly clear I would give the general effect, or very often would leave that to the students themselves. This was a fatal mistake. By going through the process of analysis first, I had rendered an appreciation of the piece as a whole ever so much more difficult; while if I had begun by trying to get the general effect, and had succeeded, no amount of analysis could have destroyed that first impression.
On this point Professor Corson says: "The spiritual appeals which are made by every form of art, be it in colour, in sound, in stone, in poetry, or whatever may be the medium employed, must be responded to directly, immediately (in the literal sense of the word), or not at all. Of course, the extent of the response may be indefinitely increased. But there must be, to begin with, a direct, immediate response, however limited it may be. There is no roundabout way to such appeals. The inductive method is not applicable to spiritual matters. The very wordinduction, is absurd, in connection with the spiritual. It belongs exclusively to the intellectual domain."
When the first impression has been made, then will come the analysis, and I am convinced that this analysing process is one which the student, especially the young student, cannot dispense with, and which is an exceedingly valuable mental training.
The analysis will include a treatment not only of the literary form of the poem, but a thorough study of its language, of the historical and literary allusions contained in it, of any images or metaphors which may be obscure, and, in fact, anything which will contribute to a better understanding of the poem as a whole. The teacher will now probably ask: "How far is this process of analysis to go? Must one study the philology of every word, must one analyse the metre of every poem?" I have already given the answer to these questions. I said that the analysis would include a study of anything whichwill contribute to the better understanding of the poem as a whole. There is the secret. The total effect must never be lost sight of. The metre is to be studied only to an extent which will enable the student to catch the rhythm and read the poem correctly for himself. Names and technicalities matter not a whit. He may never have heard of an iambic pentameter, or an anapaest, or a trochee, but as long as he grasps the rhythm and sees the relations of the various parts of the literary structure, he knows all that is necessary for a thorough appreciation of the poem as a whole. Similarly, the derivation of a word should never be given unless it helps to the better understanding of the sense of the wordas that word is used in the particular passage under discussion; otherwise the obtrusion of the etymology is simply an impertinence.
Some teachers make interpretation by paraphrase a prominent part of this analytical process; this should be avoided. It may be necessary sometimes to paraphrase difficult passages, but not one-tenth as often as most teachers and editors consider it necessary. A paraphrase is at best an inferior rendering, a substitution of something similar, but of a lower kind, often a substitution of the baldest prose for the highest poetry. "I pray thee avoid it." Some editors are over-fond of analysis; probably because they wish to show they are earning the money they get for editing. Let the poem, as far as possible, tell its own story in its own words.
When the analytic or discursive process has been completed, what remains? A return to the general. Having considered the poem in its parts, one now endeavours to reproduce the effect of the poem as a whole, but this time, if the analysis has been well done, the effect ought to be greatly heightened. The student will now see, not through a glass darkly, but will meet the poet face to face.
There are two things to be observed with regard to this process from the general, through the discursive, back to the general again. One is that the processes should, if possible, be kept separate; that one should keep, if possible, at the same level throughout any one lesson. This cannot be done if one changes from appreciation to analysis and back again on the same day. The second is that the analytic process is best left as far as possible to the student himself. I myself used to make the mistake of doing too much for the student; I used to try to analyse the poem thoroughly for him in class. I now think it better simply to point out difficulties and leave them to the student to solve, to suggest questions and leave them to the student to answer. The work may not be so thoroughly done, but the student receives a valuable stimulus which he would otherwise miss. I always give an opportunity for any difficulties which the student is unable to solve for himself to be brought to me.
LECTURE II
In my last lecture I tried to emphasize what I considered to be the most important objects of literary study,i.e., the appreciation of literature as art. I said that I thought it necessary that the teacher of English should have both a true appreciation of literature himself and the capacity for arousing appreciation in others. I pointed out that the teacher's first duty was to awaken in his students a response to the inner life or soul of the piece of literature with which he was dealing, that the best way of doing so was by a good vocal interpretation; and that it was therefore the duty of every teacher of English to learn to read well. I suggested that after the first response had been gained, there should come a thorough analysis, a study of form, structure, philology, and exact meaning, but that this process of analysis should be carried only so far as was necessary to a thorough appreciation of the work as a whole.
I now come to the question of how far a study of the history of literature is desirable for the ordinary student, I mean the student who does not desire to specialize in the subject.
Personally, I am a firm believer in the historical method of dealing with literature, not only because I think that a knowledge of the history of literature greatly heightens one's appreciation of literary works, but because I believe that many students, who would otherwise never do so, are by this method led to take an interest in, and so gradually acquire a taste for, literature.
Some books (using the wordbookin the sense of any literary work) are for all time—Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare; some books are for their own time only; some books are for their own time and a limited period afterwards. But whatever be the vitality of a book, no matter to which of these classes it belongs, there is no doubt that it belongs in the first instance to its own time, and cannot help being to some degree a reflection of the spirit of the age in which it was produced. This means that not only may the book be used as an historical document, as a means of catching the spirit of its age, but that, conversely, a study of the epoch at which it was produced cannot fail to illuminate to a greater or less degree the meaning of the book.
Critics like Taine and Sainte-Beuve looked on books as primarily historical documents. Behind the book one looked for the man, behind the man one found the innumerable circumstances which went to mould his personality. In this way of looking at things the individual becomes of comparatively small importance; he is interesting mainly because he is a type of his age; his book is interesting because it reveals the type.
Much can be said for this deterministic way of looking at literature, and some excellent results have been produced by Taine's style of criticism, but few critics of to-day would look on it with favour. To-day, the book is of primary importance; the man and the age are studied that they may throw light on the book. However exaggerated the historical method, as carried out by Taine, may appear, I think we must admit that in a modified form it may be of very great value.
We all know that a literary work is flavoured by the personality of the writer. From our experience as teachers we learn that we can read a personal document more sympathetically if we know who wrote it.
I have sometimes commenced to read an essay under the impression that it was written by a student A, and have been annoyed at certain ways of thinking and methods of expression that seemed to me forced and unnatural; I have turned to the back of the essay, seen the name of the writer, discovered my mistake, and re-read the essay with the personality of B instead of A at the back of my mind, and then the essay seemed to me to go smoothly, and to be characteristic of the writer.
Undoubtedly, the book takes a distinct and peculiar tinge from the personality of the author, and therefore to get the proper atmosphere, to read a book with thorough sympathy, we should find out all that we possibly can about the man who wrote it. Of course, the thing works both ways. We study the man that we may better appreciate his book; we study the book to find the man. How little can be done in some cases towards determining the personality of the man from his book is shown by the outstanding instance of Shakespeare. More than three hundred years' study of that marvellous book has entirely failed to reveal the personality of the author; upon that question critics are still in hopeless conflict.
Again, since the personality of a man is undoubtedly moulded, to a large extent, by his age and environment, we should go farther back still, and having studied our man, we should relate him to his age.
No writer is so individualistic that he can wholly escape the tinge of his epoch. I will venture to say that no one who has been accustomed to study literature by the historical method, and to recognize in books the contemporary flavour, would be likely to take, say, a piece of prose written in the first half of the seventeenth century for the product of the eighteenth or nineteenth century, or could possibly mistake a typical sixteenth-century lyric for a typical nineteenth-century one.
If we study our literature, then, historically as well as artistically, our books will be to us not only works of art, but something more; they will become linked to long trains of association, which will carry us out into the life and happiness and suffering of our fellow-men, and further still, out into the shock and sway of great world-movements, into the sphere where the Time-spirit weaves unceasingly the web of life.
Let me give you an example of how this way of treating literature can be carried out with even a junior class.
I have been studying with the Freshmen some of Goldsmith's poetry,The TravellerandThe Deserted Village. We first took the poems in themselves, studied them as works of art, read them, tried to get the spirit, then analysed and studied them in detail. We next went on to a study of the life of Goldsmith. We followed his strange and romantic career, followed him in his sufferings and struggles and triumphs, saw him in his weakness and in his strength. Further than that, we saw him in relation to his contemporaries. We became acquainted through him with the famous circle of which he was a member, the circle of wits and scholars that gathered round Johnson—Burke, Reynolds, Garrick, and the rest. We then learned something of the literary ideals of that school, and how they determined the form of Goldsmith's work. We saw, too, how Johnson and Goldsmith helped to set literature free from the bonds of patronage. We saw something of the politics and the social conditions of the age.
My claim is that, in consequence of that study, those students, when they return toThe TravellerandThe Deserted Villageto read them again for their own pleasure or to review them for their examination, will find their pleasure in them greatly enhanced by having at the back of their minds the personality of the author and the spirit of his time. Things that seemed stiff and pedantic to them before will be forgiven or passed over now, because they will know that they do not belong to Goldsmith himself, but are only a condition of his writing imposed on him by his age; they will appreciate better all those passages in which the kindliness and sympathy and generosity of the author are strongly marked, and finally they will feel hovering around these living documents not only the spirit of the dead author, but the spirit of the great old Doctor Johnson, with the spook of Boswell probably still in attendance, and all that noble and witty company who walked and talked on earth so many years ago.
I have heard people object to the study of the history of literature by young students on this ground—that it must mean to a large extent a memorizing of names and dates, a mere empty repetition of facts about works that have never been read.
To that objection I do not now attach very much weight, although at one time I did. In the first place, the study need not be a mere empty repetition. A skilful description of the contents of a work will give a student a very fair idea of its spirit and meaning, and often arouse in him a desire to read it for himself. In the second place, it is good for him that he should have the benefit of the experience of the most competent students and critics of English literature, so that he may know what is best worth reading, and so that when he comes to continue his studies for himself, if he ever does, he may spend his time to the best advantage. One does not object to studying the map of a country, even if there is no intention of visiting all the places marked thereon.
I would say, then, that the best plan with the young student who has had some elementary training in the appreciation of literature is to take some representative works of a particular period, and through a careful study of them in the way I have described, reach out and grasp the whole period in its essential features.
So much for the history of literature. Now to retrace our steps, and return to what I said in my first lecture about the method of attacking a particular literary work. I daresay it sounded simple and easy enough; first get your general effect, let the poem make its own impression as a unit, as a work of art; then will come your analysis, and then a return to the general.
But it is in the application of this simple principle to different kinds of literature that the teacher will find his greatest problems. Every new work will provide a new puzzle. How much need I say about this by way of introduction? What is the best way to present this? What illustrative extracts should I make from this? How much help should I give the student with this?
A teacher has to teach the First Book ofParadise Lost. He has three quarters of an hour or an hour to make his first impression; on that first impression may depend the whole success of his teaching. It is obvious that with young students it will not do to plunge straight into a reading of the poem; they must be prepared for the reading; an atmosphere must be created; they must come to the reading in a proper, receptive attitude. How much introduction is necessary?
Personally, I spend one whole hour talking about the poem. I point out as well as I can the plan of the whole poem, and how that plan is carried out, so as to get the relation of the First Book to the whole; I talk a little about epic poetry in general and what one is to expect from an epic poem; I point out the magnitude of Milton's task, the spirit in which he approached his work, the purpose and meaning of that work, and in every way I try to arouse an attitude of interest and expectancy.
The next day, I do not begin to take up Book I in fragments, but I give a reading designed to give the story of the whole book in a series of the most striking passages, strung together by connecting narrative.
We are now ready to study the poem analytically, and as we take up each part and dissect it, the students always have in view the relation of each part to the whole book, and, from the first lecture, to the whole poem.
How to teach a play of Shakespeare is a subject that might well demand a whole lecture to itself. Shakespeare is undoubtedly the best material for teaching literature that we have, and is suitable for all grades, from the lowest to the highest. Of course, I need scarcely say that the method of treatment and presentation for honour students will naturally differ entirely from that appropriate to beginners.
But there is one thing certain, that a play of Shakespeare, whether one teaches it to beginners or to advanced students, demands on the part of the teacher a most intense study. He must be soaked in it; he must be thoroughly familiar with it down to the smallest detail; he must have thought out the setting of every scene; he must have formed a clear conception of every character; he must have decided definitely the exact tone and emphasis with which every speech should be delivered; and lastly, he must decide how he may most effectively present it to his students.
But this, you will say, is putting too big a demand upon the teacher. It is a demand which few of us are able to fulfil, but I am convinced myself that every teacher should keep such an ideal in view, and work toward it patiently. I have been studyingHamletoff and on myself for ten years, I have been teaching it for four, and I am only just beginning to get some confidence about it now. I hope perhaps if I study it for ten years more to be able to teach it with some success.
The great actor Salvini studied the part of Lear for eight years before he made any attempt to commit it to memory.
Shakespeare is thus, in a sense, the most difficult of all authors to teach, for one can never exhaust him; in another sense he is the easiest, for even the poorest teacher cannot help making some effect with him. The latter fact, however, should not make us content with slovenly work.
In this connection I may say that I am convinced that the greatest aid to success on the part of the teacher of English literature is painstaking and exact study for himself—not to be content with something that will do, but to absorb and reabsorb the spirit of the best works, and never to be satisfied that he knows them well enough. The number of works that he can know thus thoroughly will be limited at first, but their range will be constantly increasing; and therefore the work that he will be compelled to do in a more or less imperfect fashion will be constantly decreasing.
As an example of how a single poem can be made sometimes to serve as an introduction to the whole of an author's work or to a large portion of it, let us take a very short and simple poem of Browning and see what can be made of it. Let me read to youA Woman's Last Word.
Probably this poem, like many of Browning's, produces at the first reading only a vague and indefinite impression, a sort of groping sensation, in short, a wonder as to what it is all about.
Let us analyse it. Whence did the difficulty arise? Evidently not from the language. It was from the fact that we did not know what went before; that from what is given us here, a mere scrap of experience, we had to construct the whole; and from the fact that we had to follow a sequence of thoughts suggested by circumstances unknown to us, instead of, as is usual in poetry, a series of actions or events which serve as a backbone or substructure for the thought.
Herein lie the two main difficulties of appreciating that large class of Browning poetry known under the heading,dramatic monologues.
They aredramaticbecause they are spoken not in the person of the author, but in that of some imaginary character, whose personality the author assumes, but they differ from drama, as it is generally understood, first, because they are monologues, not dialogues; secondly, the circumstances, occasions, and settings of the monologues, instead of being suggested at the outset, are only indicated from time to time, and have to be picked up as we go along; thirdly, we have to follow a sequence of thoughts without any help from accompanying events or actions; and lastly, we are given no information, except incidentally, as to what goes before and comes after.
In other dramatic monologues of Browning the problem becomes more complicated, first, from the fact that in most of them he attempts to reveal a character, not merely a psychological situation, as inA Woman's Last Word; secondly, from the extraordinary variety of the characters he attempts to present.
The characters into whose mouths Browning puts his poems are a very varied assortment. In one poem, perhaps, it is a Greek philosopher who speaks, in the next a modern English divine; now it is an Italian duke of the sixteenth century, and now an Italian patriot of the nineteenth century. Each of these personages has a definite atmosphere and a typical environment, and that atmosphere and environment we must construct for ourselves before we can appreciate the poem properly.
Take, for example, the two poems,Fra Lippo LippiandAndrea del Sarto. Each of these deals not only with the character and some of the history of an individual Italian painter, but sets forth in addition a particular phase in the development of Italian art, and at the same time gives us an insight into Browning's theory of art. To appreciate these poems, then, we must know something of the history of the historic personages who are represented as speaking, something of the Italy of their time; we must know in outline at least something of the history of Italian art, and have some knowledge of the technicalities of painting. Very many of Browning's poems are concerned with periods and personages about whom the ordinary reader knows nothing, hence the absolute need of some sort of a commentary, or of constant recourse to an encyclopaedia in reading him.
There is another difficulty connected with Browning's favourite form, the dramatic monologue. Most of these poems are only scraps of experience; we get no information, except by hints, of what has gone before; we are equally left to guess what comes after. The problem before us is something like that of reconstructing a whole conversation of which we have overheard only a small part.
Again, many of the poems do not describe a series of events, but only a series of thoughts or reflections. Hence there is nothing or very little to guide us in grasping the connection between the various parts of the poem, and many of the poems have to be read and re-read many times before the meaning begins to dawn on us.
InA Woman's Last Wordthere is not a single difficult phrase. The whole difficulty arises from the fact that it is a scrap, and from the fact that it is a series of thoughts without any action to thread them together and to make them definite.
Browning's poems are sometimes difficult to read because the ideas which he is expressing are profound and difficult to grasp; but far more often they are difficult because of his extraordinary way of expressing perfectly simple and easy ideas.
For example, here is a perfectly easy and obvious thought—that every day we see men winning money and reputation by mere imitation of some style that has caught the public taste, while the original inventor or discoverer of that style lives in obscurity and neglect. How does Browning express it?
Hobbs hints blue—straight he turtle eats,Nobbs prints blue—claret crowns his cup,Nokes outdares Stokes in azure feats—Both gorge. Who finished the murex up?What porridge had John Keats?
The point about the murex in this extract illustrates another difficulty with Browning, his assumption of knowledge on the part of his reader of all sorts of curious and out-of-the-way information. He is full of allusions to technical points in such things as painting, music, medicine, and classical scholarship which are as a rule known to only specialists in these particular subjects.
I might mention lastly in this connection a peculiarity of Browning's thought, namely, its tremendous rapidity. Let me illustrate. A beginner works out a problem in mathematics; he feels his way step by step; he puts down everything in order, and in going over the question we can follow easily every detail of the reasoning. A master mathematician confronted with the same problem would see his way from the beginning right through to the end; he would leave out half of the intermediate steps because to him they were quite obvious and not worth putting down, and when we came to look over his work we might completely fail to see how he had reached his conclusion.
So with Browning. Browning skips from thought to thought with great rapidity, leaving intermediate steps to be filled in by the intelligence of the reader. As Chesterton says, if Browning had to describe a quarrel between two men which culminated in one calling the other a liar and knocking him downstairs, he would probably do it something like this:
What then? You lie—and doormat below stairsTakes bump from back.
That is to say, he would be in such a hurry to get his man to the bottom of the stairs that he would leave out half of the intermediate steps.
I have given you this fairly full discussion as an example of how a rather difficult thing may be done, namely, how a single poem may sometimes be used to give an introduction to a poet and prepare a class for reading the remainder of his work.
Before I close let me give you a couple of things I have discovered about teaching which may be useful to you. First, it is more important to be physically fit than to be well prepared. If you feel well and look it, your class will be in good humour even if you are not well prepared. Be worried and tired, and your class will soon become worried and tired too. Secondly, it is better to teach too little than too much. Do not subject your class to mental indigestion. Thirdly, one should always try to appear interested. Lastly, one should never appear to be in a hurry. Nothing annoys a class more than to be rushed madly from point to point without a breathing space.
A paper given in 1911 to a Church Society that wishedguidance for literary study
In this poem Browning takes his subject from the midst of the Renaissance period in Italy, a period when the revival of classical learning was accompanied by a breakdown in the authority of the Church. The conventions of ages were swept away in a few years, and side by side with the new culture, scepticism, cynicism, robbery, lust, and murder prevailed in high places, even in the palaces of the Popes themselves. Under a thin veneer of culture, society became rotten to the core.
The wordFerraraat the head of the poem gives us the clue to the period. Ferrara is an ancient Italian town, and was at one time the seat of a powerful duchy. The ancient ducal palace still frowns down from its eminence upon the country around. The Duke of Ferrara at the period of our poem was one of the most powerful noblemen of Italy.
The speaker in this monologue is the Duke of Ferrara, a typical Renaissance product, cultured and cold and cruel. He is showing the picture of his late wife to an envoy from some Count or other who has sent to negotiate a marriage for his daughter with the widowed Duke.
The first thing to do with a poem like this is to make it live. We will read it.
The character we have represented here is one probably not uncommon at the period. The Duke is a man of intellect, imbued with the new culture, a critic and collector of art treasures. He combines with this appreciation of art, an utter selfishness and cynicism. His heart is incapable of tenderness or emotion. He has an immense pride in his rank and in his ancient name, and an impatience of anything that would derogate from his dignity.
Can you picture him, the polished old villain, as he stands before the picture of the girl he has cruelly done to death and points out its beauties with delicate jewelled finger? On his cultured but sensual features the critical appreciation of a connoisseur for the skill of the artist mingles with some recollection of and pride in the beauty of his former duchess; but of affection there is not a sign, of remorse not a trace.
He married a young girl who probably was contracted to him by her parents without having any voice in the matter. He bestows on her his name and rank, and in return demands—everything, her abject submission to his every whim, her complete indifference to everything and everybody but himself. It was too much. The poor girl could not crush all the humanity out of her heart, nor the vitality out of her body. The Duke saw, with cold disapproval, her fresh interest and pleasure in all around her, her delight in every attention that was offered her, her ever-ready smile. He wanted all these things for himself, and for nobody else. That smile must be for him alone. But unfortunately the Duchess liked whatever "she looked on, and her looks went everywhere," she had a kind word and glance for everybody.
This grew; I gave commands;Then all smiles stopped together.
In other words, he did away with her, had her murdered, an easy thing for a man of his power at this epoch. First, however, he had her portrait painted. If he could not have the Duchess all to himself, he could at least have her picture entirely his own,
... since none puts byThe curtain I have drawn for you, but I.
He is thinking now of marrying again. Some Count snaps at the bait, the chance of this magnificent alliance for his daughter. Better to kill her with his own hand than to let her pass into the clutches of the Duke. The Duke's object in showing the envoy the picture is probably partly to get the opportunity of letting him know in time what he expects from his wife, so that when the messenger returns he may warn his young lady to keep her smiles under strict control.
Notice how Browning indicates the attitude of the envoy. First he is struck by the marvellous face of the Duchess—
The depth and passion of its earnest glance.
At last he essays a word in her defence,
Who'd stoop to blameThis sort of trifling?
and when the Duke has finished, he sits a little stupefied at the revelation that has been made, and still gazing at the picture. Even when the Duke rises he does not stir, and the latter has to rouse him, a little impatiently, "Will't please you rise?"
To me the most striking thing about this poem is its suggestiveness. It suggests infinitely more than it expresses. It expresses merely a fragment of a conversation; it suggests a whole tragedy.
Browning has, in these few lines, with delicate and curious skill, given us first the Renaissance atmosphere, a mixture of culture and refinement, delight in art and beauty, with immorality and crime; he has suggested to us the characters of the two actors in the drama from which this poem is but a fragment, the polished and cynical Duke and the girl who is sacrificed to his position and wealth; he has even suggested the mixture of deference, loathing, and fear with which the envoy listens to the Duke's description. There are anatomists who from a single bone of any animal will construct the whole skeleton; and so from this scrap which Browning has here given us we can construct the complete drama.
The poem is, as I have remarked, typical of a whole class of Browning's poetry. These poems are usually calleddramatic monologues, but perhaps the title given to them by Stopford Brooke is on the whole more suggestive. He calls themimaginative representations.
These poems are, in the first place, the utterance of one person, at a single time, and in one place. Some individual is influenced or induced by some unusual opportunity or circumstance to reveal himself. The veil which conceals his inmost heart is lifted for a moment and we get a glimpse into its depths.
They have a certain dramatic element. Browning himself styled this poem adramatic romance. They are dramatic in that they are objective as regards the author; the poet is not uttering his own thoughts. The circumstances under which the monologue is spoken are usually dramatic (i.e., such as a playwright might choose to bring out some trait of character), the background, scenery, and even the action is vividly suggested, and there are usually subsidiary figures whose attitude towards the central actor is carefully indicated.
The chief point to notice about these poems is that the poet studies not merely an individual as such, the working out of passion in a single soul, but he takes that individual as a type of some special period, some phase of historical development, some special era of thought. It was Browning's way of using history for poetical purposes, and it was completely his own. This poem is not a very good example, because the personages and events described are not peculiar to any one epoch, but may occur wherever there are two people unhappily married. But even here we have in the Duke not only an intensely interesting, even if objectionable, type of human being, but the concentrated essence of a certain side of the Italian Renaissance.
Browning, in his series ofimaginative representationshas covered a big field.Artemis Prologuizer, Caliban on Setebos, The Bishop Orders his Tomb, Fra Lippo Lippi, A Death in the Desert, Cleon, and many others cover an immense range, from Greek mythology through early and late Renaissance down to the modern life of Europe. "The poet can place us with ease and truth at Corinth, Athens or Rome, in Paris, Vienna or London, and wherever we go with him we are at home." Scenery, character, time, place, and action are all suitably and harmoniously blended, the characters are vividly alive. The qualifications which Browning brought to these poems were, first, a wide historical knowledge, not so much of separate events as of the main trend of thought in a given period; an intense imaginative power; a wide knowledge of human nature; and last, but not least, in his Italian poems, a familiar acquaintance with "a multitude of small intimate details of the customs, clothing, architecture, popular dress, talk and scenery of the towns and country of Italy from the thirteenth century to modern times." The poem under consideration gives us only a glimpse of the skill with which Browning handles this particular type; but I hope it will be sufficient to induce those who are not acquainted with Browning's other work to study it further.
"O whither are you going,My friend, I'd fain be knowing,O whither are you goingWith that air of do-and-dare?O what the destinationOf your grim determination,Of your bloody resolutionAnd your fierce defiant stare?"
"I am going Christmas shopping,"Said the hero, freely moppingBeads of nervous perspirationFrom his broad and gallant brow,"I am going forth to-dayIn this bellicose arrayTo do my Christmas shopping,Or to perish in the fray."
*****
"O whence are you returning,My friend, I'd fain be learning,O whence are you returningWith that bloodstained weary air?With that battered shirt and collarAnd without a single dollar,And with piles of useless lumberThat would make a dustman stare?"
"I have done my Christmas shopping,"Said the hero, almost dropping,"You may send to fetch the doctor,Though I cannot pay his fee;My story is romantic,For the fight was fierce and frantic,And I bought a lot of articlesI didn't even see;But I've done my Christmas shopping(For I take a lot of stopping),I have done my Christmas shopping,And that's enough for me."
A paper read to the Faculty Club during thesession1911-12
What is Realism? Realism means what it says—truth to reality and fact. The realist expresses imaginative conceptions in terms of the actual world around him, in terms of the objects which he can see and describe accurately; the idealist gets away from fact, and creates an imaginative world which differs from the real.
The idealist who writes of love, talks about raptures and bliss and gates of heaven; the realist describes the wave of the girl's hair, the colour of her dress, the way in which the man stands and looks, and leaves the reader to supply the emotional background. The idealist who writes of death talks about ashes to ashes, dust to dust, the common goal of mortality, the gate of everlasting life; the realist describes the sick man's ghastly pallor, his wavering pulse, his gasping breath, the clock ticking out the minutes in the silence of the chamber of death.
A realist in fiction like Balzac or Flaubert or their imitator, Arnold Bennett, seems almost photographic in the accuracy of his descriptions; and yet so artistic is the selection of the details described that though we get the impression of absolute reality, the emotional atmosphere is often intense. Realism, when well done, is an admirable literary method, but it may and often does degenerate into a vice. In the hands of Zola it becomes a medium for the conveyance of sickening, sordid, or disgusting detail.
The kind of realism with which I wish to deal isrealism in poetry—the phrase seems almost a contradiction in terms—and I am taking for my purpose certain phases of the work of Wordsworth and Browning.
Wordsworth and Browning, two poets in many respects direct antitheses of one another, are not usually classed together in any way. There is, however, one class of poetry which Browning was the first to develop to a large extent, in which Wordsworth may be said to have been a pioneer; in fact, Browning actually succeeded in a kind of poetry of which Wordsworth barely saw the possibility. I do not mean to suggest that Browning was in any way a disciple or conscious imitator of Wordsworth; but that we see in full flower in Browning's poetry a certain artistic method of which in Wordsworth's poetry we can just perceive the germ.
The kind of poetry to which I refer is one which is frequent in Browning, and which, in fact, has often been regarded as not poetry at all—I mean such utterly unpretentious, prosaic, uncouth, rough, or at times even grotesque verse as we find in poems likeBishop Blougram's Apology, Mr. Sludge the Medium, Old Pictures in Florence, Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha, much ofThe Ring and the Book, and Browning's later work generally. Such verse produces the effect of an exact reproduction of the actual. It is so realistic that it seems at times lacking in art.
No work which is an exact, or nearly exact, reproduction of the actual can be a work of art. A work of art is based on man's experience of what is, but is always modified and altered by his conception of what ought to be.
It was here that Wordsworth failed. His realistic poetry is too close to the actual. The intensely realistic effect of Browning's poems is an illusion; otherwise his claim to be a poetic artist disappears in so far as these poems are concerned.
I wish to indicate the nature of these effects, and to inquire how far Browning was anticipated by Wordsworth.
Wordsworth was perhaps the chief representative of the Romantic School—the title given to the group of poets who dominated English Literature at the commencement of the nineteenth century. The spirit of the age to which their work gave expression was one of question and revolt, the spirit which found its most remarkable political expression in the French Revolution. Question of established beliefs, revolt against established rules and conventions, was the keynote of literary as well as of social and political life.
The attitude of the Romantic School is indicated by its name. Romance is that element in literature which appeals to the sense of the marvellous in man, which awakens his capacity for wonder. In the eighteenth century, under the régime of Pope and the Classical School, wonder had been dead. It was an age of acceptance and submission; acceptance of certain definite conventions, submission to certain fixed rules. Correctness was more desired than imagination, and polish than originality.
It was against the barren conventions and narrow outlook of the Classical School that Wordsworth and his fellows revolted. The spirit of wonder toward Nature and toward Man sprang into new life.
My meaning will be illustrated by the following lines:
A primrose by a river's brimA yellow primrose was to him,And it was nothing more.
They might have been written of Pope. What was the primrose to Wordsworth?
To me the meanest flower that blows can giveThoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
I do not wish, however, to talk to-night of Wordsworth's attitude towards Nature. It is with just two aspects of the Romantic Revolt that I have to deal, one relating to subject matter, the other to form.
The poet's eye in Shakespeare's time
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;And as imagination bodies forthThe forms of things unknown, the poet's penTurns them to shapes and gives to airy nothingA local habitation and a name.
With Pope, poetry was confined mainly to man as he exists in society, and was largely concerned with satirizing social defects; Wordsworth dealt with men as human beings, as mysterious manifestations of the infinite, creatures trailing clouds of glory, coming we know not whence, going we know not whither. To him, as to Burns, rank and station were nothing. Any human being, however humble, was worthy to be the poet's theme. He claimed for the misfortunes of Lucy Gray or the miserable mother, the Idiot Boy or Peter Bell, the same consideration as Sophocles for the sorrows of OEdipus and the lofty line of Thebes.
Gray, an eighteenth century poet in whom romantic tendencies are found, shows the same spirit in theElegywhen he writes of the humble dead who lie beneath the soil:
Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,Their homely joys, and destiny obscure;Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smileThe short and simple annals of the poor.
Wordsworth, then, enlarged the scope of poetry to include any human experience, however humble.
There was another side to Wordsworth's revolt. He revolted not only against the limitations of subject imposed on the poets by eighteenth-century ideals, but also against the limitations of form. Pope and his followers had been poets of practically a single metre, the heroic couplet. Their tricks, mannerisms, and phraseology had been exalted into apoetic diction, or, rather, jargon, by countless imitators, and poems written in any other style were not allowed admission to the best company. A field, for example, had to be either averdant meador agrassy sward, or it could not decently make its appearance in poetry. As late as the beginning of the nineteenth century a rainbow is to CampbellHeaven's ethereal bow, and a musket becomes, in poetical dress,a glittering tube. Wordsworth claimed for the poet the right of using the language of everyday life, plain, simple, and unadorned.
Such is a very brief and insufficient outline of the two main points in Wordsworth'spoetic theory, which were developed at great length by Wordsworth himself in his prefaces and by Coleridge in theBiographia Literaria.
It is to just one small part of Wordsworth'spoetic practicethat I wish to draw your attention. I mean certain studiously simple and realistic poems written in deliberate illustration of his theories. The first of them were published in the famousLyrical Balladsof 1798, a work which burst like a bombshell upon an astonished literary world, and aroused more scorn, indignation, and controversy than perhaps any other volume of poetry ever published.
TheLyrical Balladswas in the nature of a challenge. It contained an announcement of Wordsworth's new theories, together with illustrations of them by himself and Coleridge. Many of the poems were admirable, but in many others Wordsworth is at his worst.
A generation brought up in the principles of Pope and nourished on such verse asThe Pleasures of Hopecould not away with poems likeThe Idiot Boy, orAlice Fell, or evenWe Are Seven.
There is no doubt that Wordsworth went much too far in his zeal for the new theories, and was unfortunately without a sense of humour which might have saved him from absurdities. As an illustration of Wordsworth at his worst, let us takeThe Idiot Boy, one of the poems in theLyrical Ballads. The very outline of the plot would make the ghost of Pope rise in indignation from the grave. Old Susan Gale, a peasant woman, is very ill. Her neighbour, Betty Foy, comes to attend on her, accompanied by her only son, Johnny, an idiot. Susan gets worse, and the doctor must be sent for. Betty dare not leave her, and so the only alternative is to send the idiot boy to fetch him. I need not complete the story, but will quote a few stanzas from the poem:
But when the pony moved his legs,Oh! then for the poor idiot boy!For joy he cannot hold the bridle,For joy his head and heels are idle,He's idle all for very joy.
And Susan's growing worse and worse,And Betty's in a sad quandary;And then there's nobody to sayIf she must go, or she must stay!She's in a sad quandary.
"Oh Doctor! Doctor! where's my Johnny?""I'm here, what is't you want with me?""Oh sir! you know I'm Betty FoyAnd I have lost my poor dear boyYou know him—him you often see;
"He's not so wise as some folks be.""The Devil take his wisdom!" saidThe Doctor looking somewhat grim,"What, woman, should I know of him?"And grumbling, he went back to bed.
This from a poet who could writeThe Solitary ReaperorMilton, thou should'st be living at this hour, or such magnificent philosophical poetry as we find inThe Prelude, Tintern Abbey, andThe Excursion, where Wordsworth treats of
the mind of man,The haunt and the main region of my song;
or such splendid descriptive passages as are scattered everywhere through his works, visions worthy to rank with Shakespeare's
Cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces.
Other examples of Wordsworth's simple style are all too numerous, and may be found in such poems asPeter Bell, which relates the story of a tinker and a donkey (in parts an admirable poem),Alice Fell, which tells the sorrow of a little girl for her tattered cloak,The Brothers, andMichael. These are not, by any means, all bad; in fact, when Wordsworth can forget for a while that he is writing to illustrate a theory, flashes of his natural style break out, producing odd effects of incongruity. Some of the poems which appeared in theLyrical Balladsare admirable, such asHer Eyes are WildandThe Affliction of Margaret.
To us who have, since Wordsworth's time, been trained to a wider scope of appreciation in poetry, it will seem strange that even the worst of them should have aroused such adverse criticism, but even to us it is evident that Wordsworth in them is not at his best, that he is writing a style which is not natural to him. And yet it was these poems which, for a time, attracted most attention from Wordsworth's contemporaries, and prejudiced Byron, Horace Smith, Peacock, and many others against his greater poetry.
Wordsworth, though he failed in his attempt, had got hold of a true idea—that the most common things in life are pregnant with poetry, and that there are many subjects, not susceptible of ordinary poetical treatment, which may yet be handled in such a simple, unpretentious way as to retain their essential outlines, while the emotional element is subtly indicated rather than actually expressed. As a very ordinary landscape will be transformed into a thing of beauty under the rays of the setting sun, so commonplace subjects may take on a new appearance under the influence of the poet's imagination. Care must be taken, however, not to idealize too much. It would be impossible, for example, to lift such a subject asThe Idiot Boyinto the realm of the ideal.
Now if we turn to Browning, we find that he also deals with subjects of this kind. Let us consider his treatment of one or two of them. InThe Spanish Cloisterhe takes as his subject the mean and petty jealousy of one commonplace monk for another. Or, again, he takes a sick man, stretched on his death-bed, putting aside impatiently the ministrations of the parson, as his half-dazed thoughts go back to a rather sordid love affair which was yet the brightest spot in his past. Other examples areSludge the Medium, and the cynical and worldly Bishop Blougram endeavouring after dinner over the nuts and wine to justify his appearance of orthodoxy to Gigadibs, the scribbler and shallow rationalist:
So, you despise me, Mr. Gigadibs.No deprecation—nay, I beg you, sir!Beside 'tis our engagement: don't you know,I promised, if you'd watch a dinner out,We'd see truth dawn together?—truth that peepsOver the glass's edge when dinner's done,And body gets its sop and holds its noiseAnd leaves soul free a little. Now's the time—'Tis break of day! You do despise me then.And if I say, "despise me,"—never fear—I know you do not in a certain sense—Not in my arm-chair for example: here,I well imagine you respect my place(Status,entourage, worldly circumstance)Quite to its value—-very much indeed—Are up to the protesting eyes of youIn pride at being seated here for once—You'll turn it to such capital account!When somebody, through years and years to come,Hints of the bishop—names me—that's enough—"Blougram? I knew him"—(into it you slide)"Dined with him once, a Corpus Christi Day,All alone, we two—he's a clever man—And after dinner—why, the wine you know—Oh, there was wine, and good!—what with the wine...'Faith, we began upon all sorts of talk!He's no bad fellow, Blougram—he had seenSomething of mine he relished—some review—He's quite above their humbug in his heart,Half-said as much, indeed—the thing's his trade—I warrant, Blougram 's sceptical at times—How otherwise? I liked him, I confess!"Che ch'è, my dear sir, as we say at Rome,Don't you protest now! It's fair give and take;You have had your turn and spoken your home truths—The hand's mine now, and here you follow suit.
Could anything be more easy, conversational, realistic? And yet every now and then we find throughout the poem touches of the noblest poetry introduced so skilfully that there is no sense of incongruity. For example, the Bishop in the course of his argument says that absolute unbelief is just as impossible as absolute faith.
And now what are we? unbelievers both,Calm and complete, determinately fixedTo-day, to-morrow, and for ever, pray?You'll guarantee me that? Not so, I think.In no-wise! all we've gained is, that belief,As unbelief before, shakes us by fits,Confounds us like its predecessor. Where'sThe gain? how can we guard our unbelief?Make it bear fruit to us?—the problem here.Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch,A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death,A chorus-ending from Euripides—And that's enough for fifty hopes and fearsAs old and new at once as Nature's self,To rap and knock and enter in our soul,Take hands and dance there, a fantastic ring,Round the ancient idol, on his base again—The grand Perhaps! we look on helplessly—There the old misgivings, crooked questions are—This good God—what he could do, if he would,Would, if he could—then must have done long since:If so, when, where, and how? some way must be—Once feel about, and soon or late you hitSome sense, in which it might be, after all.Why not, "The Way, the Truth, the Life?"
Browning's love poetry does not properly enter into this discussion, since love is a common theme of poets, and this discussion deals with Browning's treatment of apparently unpoetical themes; but Browning's choice and treatment of situation in his love poems are so unusual as to bring them into the same class as his other realistic poems. Take as an example:
See, how she looks now, drestIn a sledging-cap and vest.'Tis a huge fur cloak—Like a reindeer's yokeFalls the lappet along the breast:Sleeves for her arms to rest,Or to hang, as my love likes best.
These few examples will serve to show that the essential principles of Browning's realism and Wordsworth's are the same. Browning, like Wordsworth, claimed for poetry a greater licence both in subject matter and in form, but he went farther than Wordsworth in both. Wordsworth took for his new subjects the humble joys and sorrows of the poor—but all was fish that came to Browning's net. Any psychological situation, any out-of-the-way corner of human experience, became in his hands matter for poetry. Then as to form, Wordsworth merely refrained from the conventional language of poetry, but Browning boldly used language that was frankly unpoetical—uncouth, unmusical, rough, rhyming grotesquely, accented outrageously. Perhaps his most important advance on Wordsworth was in the use of the dramatic form—nearly all Browning's poems of the sort described are dramatic monologues—for when the speaker is professedly not the poet, we are less inclined to find an incongruity in unpoetical language. Browning, by adopting the dramatic form, gets at things from the subjective point of view, from the inside. Wordsworth tried to describe them objectively from the point of view of a spectator.
Browning, then, practically discovered a new poetical form which enabled him to bring within the scope of poetical treatment subjects never so treated before. He found a new field for poetry and found new forms to suit it. He entered land which Wordsworth had only beheld from afar, and which, indeed, Wordsworth never could have entered.
Browning saw that familiar objects, everyday doings and sayings, commonplace happenings which seem to the ordinary observer prosaic and barren, are, to the poet, pregnant with underlying emotion.
Ordinary poetry deals with the obviously poetical things, or converts the everyday things of life into poetry by depriving them of some of their actuality. Browning contrives to give us things as they are, with all the harshness and crudeness of real life, and yet to make us feel the underlying element of poetry. About his most brutally realistic poem, there is a subtle atmosphere of emotion.
Browning, like Shakespeare, dares to place side by side the grotesque, the beautiful, the tragic, the ludicrous. He can do it by virtue of his unassuming form. Take, for example,Old Pictures in Florence. There we get the dirt of the old streets, the very must and smell of the second-hand dealer's stores, the filthy canvas and peeling fresco, but we get also the tragedy of the wronged Old Masters, and a noble conception of the development of art.
InBishop Blougramwe get the wine, the nuts, the plausible conversation, but we get also the spectacle, pregnant with emotional possibilities, of two human midgets in the presence of the Almighty, the one daring lightly to compound with his Maker, the other lightly to deny Him.
The value of this inquiry, if it have any value, is to show that those poetical forms which are often assumed to be due to a radical defect in Browning's work as poetry, were really a deliberate artistic method, deliberate in the sense that Carlyle's style is deliberate. The style, with both Carlyle and Browning, is indeed the man, but each had to find the style which would express him best. Carlyle, in his early work, wrote like Macaulay; Browning, in his early work, wrote like Shelley. And whenever Browning, in his later poems, met with a subject capable of conventional poetical treatment, he did not hesitate so to treat it.
I need only instance such poems asSaul, Abt Vogler, The Guardian Angel, andProspice. I shall quote the last of these poems:
Fear death?—to feel the fog in my throat,The mist in my face,When the snows begin, and the blasts denoteI am nearing the place,The power of the night, the press of the storm,The post of the foe;Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form,Yet the strong man must go;For the journey is done and the summit attained,And the barriers fall,Though a battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained,The reward of it all.I was ever a fighter, so—one fight more,The best and the last!I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forbore,And bade me creep past.No! let me taste the whole of it, fare like my peers,The heroes of old,Bear the brunt, in a minute pay glad life's arrearsOf pain, darkness, and cold.For sudden the worst turns the best to the brave,The black minute's at end,And the elements' rage, the fiend-voices that rave,Shall dwindle, shall blend,Shall change, shall become a peace out of pain,Then a light, then thy breast,O thou soul of my soul! I shall clasp thee again,And with God be at rest!
Can anyone after hearing that poem maintain that Browning was incapable, when he wished, of dispensing with eccentricities?
In conclusion, I should like to say that the subject I have been treating has nothing to do with the obscurity of Browning's poetry. His obscurity has nothing to do with his realism.
Incomplete notes of an Address to a Study Club
Three years ago, in July 1910, died John Millington Synge, Irish dramatist, whose name will probably be better known twenty years hence, perhaps one hundred and twenty years hence, than it is to-day.
Those who know Ireland only by hearsay, or from books, or even from the stage, will be slow at first to appreciate his work; but we who know and love the real Ireland, we, who have wandered through her glens and by her streams, and looked upon her wonderful skies, who have felt within ourselves her sadness, her mirth, and her poetry, must at once acknowledge that in the work of Synge the soul of Ireland has, for the first time, received adequate expression. In that small island, a green speck in the tumbling billows of the Atlantic, right in the heart of the barren conventionalism of modern civilization, there still remains, if one knows where to look for it, the Celtic spirit in all its original purity; there is still to be found a glamour and a mystery as fine as any that lingers on the shores of old Romance.
Many have found and felt these things, but they have been silent, for they have been restrained from speech by a sense that such things could not be interpreted in words. Synge was the first to find the medium by which they might be expressed. "He was a solitary, undemonstrative man," says his friend Yeats, "never asking pity, nor complaining, nor seeking sympathy; all folded up in brooding intellect, knowing nothing of new books and newspapers, reading the great masters alone; and he was but the more hated because he gave his country what it needed, an unmoved mind, where there is a perpetual last day, a trumpeting and coming up to judgment."
Thus, it seems to me, Synge will be slow in winning recognition from the masses of his countrymen. He saw them too clearly, and painted too accurate a portrait of them to be flattering; they recognize their weaknesses and are indignant, while they fail to see that he has painted also their fine poetical qualities, their romance, and their tenderness.
Again the same writer: "In Ireland, he loved only what was wild in its people and in the grey wintry sides of many glens." All the rest, all that one reasoned over, fought for, read of in leading articles, all that came from Education, all that came down from young Ireland—aroused in him little interest. Perhaps its only effect on him was to awaken in him first that irony which, once awakened, he turned upon the whole of life.
The scene of Synge's later literary work—the work which counts—was the Abbey Theatre, a small and unpretentious building, hidden away in a side street near the Dublin quays. Here is a central point for the Irish Dramatic Movement, a movement recognized by all competent critics as being one of the most significant things in modern literature. Lovers of literature of the present generation who have been walking in a vain shadow, groping their way uneasily amid realistic novels, paradoxical problem plays, pale poems, and epigrammatic essays, turn with relief to a literature which is realistic, and at the same time rich and poetical, and which shows unmistakable signs of real vitality.
At the Abbey Theatre one may see the peasant life of modern Ireland and hear the beautiful legends of her past portrayed by native actors, with a fidelity and a force which have never been surpassed on any stage. Their acting is a true "holding of the mirror up to Nature"—there are no stage tricks, no declamations, no poses, no sound and fury—the scene is perhaps the rude interior of a peasant cottage in some Irish village, or of a hut in some lonely glen, or the side of a windy hill or open field, where the sun shines and the air is mild and the breeze fresh and kindly. The figures that fill the scene bear no resemblance to the traditional buffoon, who, on most stages, is made to do duty for an Irishman; their speech is quite unlike the traditional brogue which is commonly supposed to be the medium of communication between Irish peasants; the characters represented are primitive but poetical, wild but noble; their dialogue is rich with humour and imagination, and is spoken with a charming and musical intonation. In the movements and words of the people we see on the stage, there is no appearance of acting; they talk easily and naturally, their gestures are few and altogether free from exaggeration or striving after effect. Their whole performance is simple and apparently without effort; and yet I have again and again been far more profoundly stirred by this unpretentious acting, I have had a far deeper sense of the tragedy and comedy and mystery of life in this little Abbey Theatre than I have ever received from the elaborate productions of the London stage.
The Irish National Theatre was founded in 1899 by W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, who, ever since its inception, have devoted their time and thought and work almost exclusively to perfecting this new drama. The result has amply justified their faithful labour. The Irish National Theatre has already given to the world an entirely original style of acting, a company of actors "unrivalled in the quality which they profess," and now known not only in Ireland, but all over Britain and America, and also several dramatists of extraordinary merit.
Of these dramatists Synge is undoubtedly the most remarkable. His production is small and extends over only a few years, but it is of a quality unknown in English literature since Elizabethan times. "It has been claimed for him," says Mr. Bickley, "that he is the greatest imaginative dramatist who has written English since Shakespeare, or at least since the Puritans closed the theatres in 1642." This claim may at first sight seem extravagant, especially to those who know the very limited range and quantity of Synge's work, but on reflection it is clear that if one admits that Synge is a great dramatist, one is forced also to admit that he is the first since Shakespeare. What have we had in drama since Shakespeare? A number of classical or pseudo-Shakespearean verse plays, most of them extremely dreary, from Addison to Swinburne, the brilliant but tawdry comedy of intrigue of the Restoration, the later eighteenth-century society comedy of Goldsmith and Sheridan, and the modern drawing-room dramas of Shaw and Wilde—to none of which the term great can properly be applied.
A study of the causes of the decay of the drama would be a most interesting one, but the topic is too large and too difficult to be attempted in a short paper. Suffice it to say, that Synge appeared to believe that the modern drama suffered from two main defects. Either it lacked reality, or it lacked poetry. The drama which was imaginative and poetical was alien from real life, the drama which attempted a realistic picture of life was flat and joyless and anaemic.
According to this idea two main things were necessary to a re-creation of the drama. First, the type of life in which there still remained some vigour, colour, and poetry; where convention had not crushed out all elemental emotions and produced a barren artificial uniformity; secondly, an artistic language by which that life might be expressed. Synge found both these requisites among the Irish peasantry of Connemara and the Aran Islands. In Mr. Bickley's books we learn how W. B. Yeats found Synge. Synge was then twenty-six. "He had wandered among people whose life is as picturesque as that of the Middle Ages, playing his fiddle to Italian sailors and listening to stories in Bavarian woods, but life had cast no light into his writings."