CHAPTER VMiscellaneous
The main trouble with all attempts at literary classification is that they are bound to exclude many intermediate types. Much of the most memorable English poetry is neither in a strict sense lyrical, nor philosophic, nor anything else than beautiful and shapely verse. No other literature is so rich as ours in quasi-lyrical poetry, such as the sonnets of Shakespeare and Wordsworth, Gray’sElegyand Keats’Odes. Future writers will doubtless invent other similar forms for their new purposes; but it would be a disastrous error to suppose that, because an art-form has once become classical, it therefore can no longer be used, exceptfor academic pastiche. No form is ever superannuated if it be the best possible vehicle for expressing a new artistic idea. A poet need be no more afraid of using the Shakespearian or Petrarchian sonnet, than a musician need be ashamed of composing a classical fugue, provided his inspiration be genuine; and its genuineness will not be obscured or destroyed by being cast into some old and well-tried mould. Indeed the most truly academic works are often those in which some ephemerally fashionable formula has been blindly adopted without being understood. The mental habits of poets are as various as those of scientists or politicians. Wordsworth, who far more than most poets drew his material from his own experience, was nevertheless inspired to invent his most felicitous work by such traditional forms as the sonnet or the common ballad stanza: hisOde to Dutyis exactly modelled on a metrical invention of Gray, and the patternof hisLeech-Gatherer, but for one slight variation, is the same as that of Shakespeare’sRape of Lucrece. On the other hand Walt Whitman spent many years laboriously floundering in search of a poetic method, and it was only late in life that his unconscious sense of form led him to write a few poems that are as perfect in design and as moving as any fragment of Alcman.
In every fertile and creative age of literature, it will generally be found that there were two main stimulating influences at work: in the first place naturalism, or an awakened sensitiveness to the suggestive beauty of the actual world; and secondly the fascination exercised by the masterpieces of earlier periods and alien cultures. By this I do not mean the direct inheritance of a poetic medium. Milton no doubt learnt his metrical technique from Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, but in everything else he owed far more to his loving study of Homer, Euripides,Virgil and the Bible. Thus too the spiritual presence of Homer is felt everywhere in the Greek lyrical and dramatic writers, and even in Theocritus; and thus emulous idolatry of Greek and Alexandrine masterpieces quickened into life all that was best in Latin poetry; while Virgil and Ovid in their turn became the schoolmasters of Dante and the Renaissance. The tyranny of Latin over English poetry only began to wane towards the end of the eighteenth century; then suddenly in Shelley and Keats, and later in Matthew Arnold, Swinburne, Mr. Bridges, and even Browning, the Hellenic spirit becomes a veritable Castalian fountain of inspiration. Now that the knowledge of Greek is likely to become a rare accomplishment, it is possible that its influence will die away as quickly as it flowered. Yet the imagination is sometimes kindled by translations even more potently than by scholarship, as is shown by the caseof Keats, who had small Latin and less Greek. And indeed, apart from our ever-growing interest in our own earlier literature, the most helpful and fertile impulse seems likely in the near future to come through translations of Oriental poetry, such as those by Mr. Waley and Mr. Nicholson. But from whatever direction the wind may blow, it will be the most imaginative artists who will first be sensitive to it, and the most skilful and discreet in the use they put it to. The lesser crowd will, as ever, follow their lead, until what was once a renovating breath of inspiration has become a stale and flatulent academicism.
Even if it be true, as I have suggested earlier in this essay, that poetry has ceased to be a great popular and social art, there will be no need to regret the change in so far as it may make it more easy for poets to disregard fashionable success, and so to retain their artistic integrity. Yet there are certaindangers to which they will become increasingly liable. An art which presupposes a select initiated audience, very quickly becomes over-precious, and, for all its refinement, essentially parochial. The best art will take nothing for granted in those to whom it is addressed, except artistic intelligence and that human nature which is common to us all. Poets whose idiom is not universal, but calculated for a cultured private coterie, write with the risk of swift oblivion, so soon as the tide of æsthetic caprice has turned. This is all the more regrettable, as such poetry is sometimes of great originality and beauty. The most frequent fault is obscurity, due either to an Alexandrine love of recondite allusions, or more often to an apparently studied neglect of transitions. A contempt for clarity has almost come to be regarded as an artistic virtue, rather than as a vice, or at best an occasionally inevitable evil. Nothing in truth can be more fundamentallyinartistic than needless obscurity. Poetry that is intellectually and emotionally complex, is certain in any case to be difficult enough; and the less a reader is called upon to make avoidable mental effort, the more convincingly will the essential context of a poem be communicated to his mind. The medium of poetry consists not merely of words, but of speech, that is of words, phrases and sentences in syntactic and logical relations to one another; and although these relations necessarily tend to be more emotional and less rational in poetry than in prose, because poetry is the more emotional medium, yet there are limits which it is dangerous to exceed. Much no doubt depends upon the nature of the subject-matter. A chorus of Aeschylus, or a soliloquy of Macbeth may be very difficult to analyse and construe satisfactorily; yet their general drift is usually clear enough. Cloudy vagueness or intricate subtlety may well benecessary and legitimate qualities of a poem; but all superfluous obscurity is æsthetically pure waste. Gerard Hopkins is a deplorable example of a poet of sincerity and genius, who damaged much of his best work by not being sufficiently aware of the nature of his instrument, which was the English language, or of his audience, who could only be educated English-speaking people. The admirers of such writers will often quite honestly deny that they find them unduly difficult. They probably forget how hard they have had to work in order to obtain their reward. The trouble is that the poet ought to have done the larger part of their work for them himself.
Whatever may be the destinies of English poetry, I do not think it is likely to achieve anything very remarkable until we have grown out of a doctrine or prejudice that is widely prevalent just now, that is to say our dislike and suspicion of rhetoric. Byrhetoric I mean the sum of all the artifices and habits of syntax, phrasing and diction which are necessary in order to sustain the movement and the structure of a poem that is designed on a large scale, or of a short poem of great emotional intensity. That may be a loose and unsatisfactory definition, but it is the best I can come by. Criticism nowadays seems to be mainly interested in lyrical poetry on a small scale; and this may account for the disfavour into which the very name of rhetoric has fallen: for it is true that short lyrics of a certain kind can afford to dispense with rhetoric, in the sense in which I am using the word. Yet if the European poets of the past, and their public, had been as shy of rhetoric as we are at present, it is certain that there would have been no Homer to begin with, still less an Aeschylus, a Milton, a Racine, or a Shelley. We might have produced poetry of exquisite charm and refinement, but its imaginativerange and vitality would probably have been as restricted as that of the Japanese, or of the later Chinese poets. If we compare in Mr. Waley’s translations the classical Tang poets with those earlier primitive writers, who were not yet afraid of composing on a fairly large scale, we shall then see what may be the fate of a literature that has grown ashamed of employing the breadth and energy of movement without which great poetry is impossible. Of course there has always been, and always will be, bad rhetoric, as well as good. The inferior imitators of Milton, for instance, used to impose upon their own commonplace poetic conceptions the whole stylistic apparatus which Milton had elaborated for the purpose of sustaining the enormous movement of his verse, and enriching its texture. Bad rhetoric is always stale rhetoric. “No bird,” as Blake says, “soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.”
But it is an ill wind that blows nobodyany good; and we may gratefully welcome this impatience of rhetoric, in so far as it serves to purify the air of that pestilential blight which is known as “poetic,” but would be more truthfully named “prosaic diction.” To quote Mr. Santayana, “when use has worn down a poetic phrase to its external import, and rendered it an indifferent symbol for a particular thing, that phrase has become prosaic. It has also become, by the same process, transparent and purely instrumental.” Poetry, when it is healthy and vigorous, is continually discarding such worn-out words and phrases, as being indeed no longer poetical enough for its purposes. It is the simpler, homelier words and idioms of everyday speech that carry with them most poetic suggestion. Not but what rare and far-fetched diction may not on fit occasions be ornamentally useful, or justify itself by its grandeur and impressiveness. Shakespeare knew his business when he wrote,“The multitudinous seas incarnadine”; but how thankful we should have been if succeeding poets had had the wisdom to refrain from debasing his coinage! Poetry need not be always simple, sensuous or passionate; but when it wishes to be decorative or extravagant, it will do well to remember the fable of the jay in peacock’s feathers, and grow novel and appropriate plumage of its own.
With regard to poetic inversion, there is bound to be great divergence both in practice and in critical taste. Swinburne considered Ben Jonson’s line, “But might I of Jove’s nectar sup,” to be an inexcusable blemish in an otherwise perfect masterpiece. Yet Jacobean readers would probably have found the order of the words sufficiently natural and unforced. It is true that since then there has been a considerable change in our linguistic sense, due in part to the long dominance of prose during the eighteenth century, and inpart to the waning influence of Latin. Nevertheless even now the best writers in their most genuinely poetic moments still assert for themselves, though within narrower limits, the licence of modifying the strict grammatical order. This surely is as it ought to be; for though a language like ours, which has shed most of its inflections, is compelled to have a more rigid word-order than an inflected language like Latin, yet emotional stress and the need for rhetorical emphasis will always, even in prose, tempt writers to violate the conventional rules, and still more in poetry, where the position of words and phrases in relation to the line is of such, paramount importance.