VII.—A Note on Elizabethan Plays

Self-recollection and reproof—Address to domestic happiness—Some account of myself—The vanity of many of the pursuits which are accounted wise—Justification of my censures—Divine illumination necessary to the most expert philosopher—The question, what is truth? answered by other questions—Domestic happiness addressed again—Few lovers of the country—My tame hare—Occupations of a retired gentleman in the garden—Pruning—Framing—Greenhouse—Sowing of flower-seeds—The country preferable to the town even in the winter—Reasons why it is deserted at that season—Ruinous effects of gaming and of expensive improvement—Book concludes with an apostrophe to the metropolis.

It is true that, in the intervals of addresses to domestic happiness and apostrophes to the metropolis, there is plenty of room here for Virgilian verse if Cowper had had the genius for it. Unfortunately, when he writes about his garden, he too often writes about it as prosaically as a contributor to a gardening paper. His description of the making of a hot frame is merely a blank-verse paraphrase of the commonest prose. First, he tells us:

The stable yields a stercoraceous heap,Impregnated with quick fermenting salts,And potent to resist the freezing blast;For, ere the beech and elm have cast their leaf,Deciduous, when now November darkChecks vegetation in the torpid plant,Expos’d to his cold breath, the task begins.Warily therefore, and with prudent heedHe seeks a favour’d spot; that where he buildsTh’ agglomerated pile his frame may frontThe sun’s meridian disk, and at the backEnjoy close shelter, wall, or reeds, or hedgeImpervious to the wind.

The stable yields a stercoraceous heap,

Impregnated with quick fermenting salts,

And potent to resist the freezing blast;

For, ere the beech and elm have cast their leaf,

Deciduous, when now November dark

Checks vegetation in the torpid plant,

Expos’d to his cold breath, the task begins.

Warily therefore, and with prudent heed

He seeks a favour’d spot; that where he builds

Th’ agglomerated pile his frame may front

The sun’s meridian disk, and at the back

Enjoy close shelter, wall, or reeds, or hedge

Impervious to the wind.

Having further prepared the ground:

Th’ uplifted frame, compact at every joint,And overlaid with clear translucent glass,He settles next upon the sloping mount,Whose sharp declivity shoots off secureFrom the dash’d pane the deluge as it falls.

Th’ uplifted frame, compact at every joint,

And overlaid with clear translucent glass,

He settles next upon the sloping mount,

Whose sharp declivity shoots off secure

From the dash’d pane the deluge as it falls.

The writing of blank verse puts the poet to the severest test, and Cowper does not survive the test. HadThe Taskbeen written in couplets he might have been forced to sharpen his wit by the necessity of rhyme. As it is, he is merely ponderous—a snail of imagination labouring under a heavy shell of eloquence. In the fragment calledYardley Oakhe undoubtedly achieved something worthier of a distant disciple of Milton. But I do not think he was ever sufficiently preoccupied with poetry to be a good poet. He had even ceased to read poetry by the time he began in earnest to write it. “I reckon it,” he wrote in 1781, “among my principal advantages, as a composer of verses, that I have not read an English poet these thirteen years, and but one these thirteen years.” So mild was his interest in his contemporaries that he had never heard Collins’s name till he read about him in Johnson’sLives of the Poets. Though descended from Donne—his mother was Anne Donne—he was apparently more interested in Churchill and Beattie than in him. His one great poetical master in English was Milton, Johnson’s disparagement of whom he resented with amusing vehemence. He was probably the least bookish poet who had ever had a classical education. He described himself in a letter to the Rev. Walter Bagot, in his later years, as “a poor man who has but twenty books in the world, and two of them are your brother Chester’s.” The passages I have quoted give, no doubt, an exaggerated impression of Cowper’s indifference to literature. His relish for such books as he enjoyed is proved in many of his letters. But he was incapable of such enthusiasm for the great things in literature as Keats showed, for instance, in his sonnet on Chapman’s Homer. Though Cowper, disgusted with Pope, took the extreme step of translating Homer into English verse, he enjoyed even Homer only with certain evangelical reservations. “I should not have chosen to have been the original author of such a business,” he declared, while he was translating the nineteenth book of theIliad, “even though all the Nine had stood at my elbow. Time has wonderful effects. We admire that in an ancient for which we should send a modern bard to Bedlam.” It is hardly to be wondered at that his translation of Homer has not survived, while his delightful translation of Vincent Bourne’sJackdawhas.

Cowper’s poetry, however, is to be praised, if for nothing else, because it played so great a part in giving the world a letter-writer of genius. It brought him one of the best of his correspondents, his cousin, Lady Hesketh, and it gave various other people a reason for keeping his letters. Had it not been for his fame as a poet his letters might never have been published, and we should have missed one of the most exquisite histories of small beer to be had outside the pages of Jane Austen. As a letter-writer he does not, I think, stand in the same rank as Horace Walpole and Charles Lamb. He has less wit and humour, and he mirrors less of the world. His letters, however, have an extraordinarily soothing charm. Cowper’s occupations amuse one, while his nature delights one. His letters, like Lamb’s, have a soul of goodness—not of mere virtue, but of goodness—and we know from his biography that in life he endured the severest test to which a good nature can be subjected. His treatment of Mrs. Unwin in the imbecile despotism of her old age was as fine in its way as Lamb’s treatment of his sister. Mrs. Unwin, who had supported Cowper through so many dark and suicidal hours, afterwards became palsied and lost her mental faculties. “Her character,” as Sir James Frazer writes in the introduction to his charming selection from the letters,22.Letters of William Cowper. Chosen and edited by J.G. Frazer. Two vols. Eversley Series. Macmillan. 12s. net.“underwent a great change, and she who for years had found all her happiness in ministering to her afflicted friend, and seemed to have no thought but for his welfare, now became querulous and exacting, forgetful of him and mindful, apparently, only of herself. Unable to move out of her chair without help, or to walk across the room unless supported by two people, her speech at times almost unintelligible, she deprived him of all his wonted exercises, both bodily and mental, as she did not choose that he should leave her for a moment, or even use a pen or a book, except when he read to her. To these demands he responded with all the devotion of gratitude and affection; he was assiduous in his attentions to her, but the strain told heavily on his strength.” To know all this does not modify our opinion of Cowper’s letters, except is so far as it strengthens it. It helps us, however, to explain to ourselves why we love them. We love them because, as surely as the writings of Shakespeare and Lamb, they are an expression of that sort of heroic gentleness which can endure the fires of the most devastating tragedy. Shakespeare finally revealed the strong sweetness of his nature inThe Tempest. Many people are inclined to over-estimateThe Tempestas poetry simply because it gives them so precious a clue to the character of his genius, and makes clear once more that the grand source and material of poetry is the infinite tenderness of the human heart. Cowper’s letters are a tiny thing beside Shakespeare’s plays. But the same light falls on them. They have an eighteenth-century restraint, and freedom from emotionalism and gush. But behind their chronicle of trifles, their small fancies, their little vanities, one is aware of an intensely loving and lovable personality. Cowper’s poem,To Mary, written to Mrs. Unwin in the days of her feebleness, is, to my mind, made commonplace by the odious reiteration of “my Mary!” at the end of every verse. Leave the “my Marys” out, however, and see how beautiful, as well as moving, a poem it becomes. Cowper was at one time on the point of marrying Mrs. Unwin, when an attack of madness prevented him. Later on Lady Austen apparently wished to marry him. He had an extraordinary gift for commanding the affections of those of both sexes who knew him. His friendship with the poet Hayley, then a rocket fallen to earth, towards the close of his life, reveals the lovableness of both men.

If we love Cowper, then, it is not only because of his little world, but because of his greatness of soul that stands in contrast to it. He is like one of those tiny pools among the rocks, left behind by the deep waters of ocean and reflecting the blue height of the sky. His most trivial actions acquire a pathos from what we know of theDe Profundisthat is behind them. When we read of the Olney household—“our snug parlour, one lady knitting, the other netting, and the gentleman winding worsted”—we feel that this marionette-show has some second and immortal significance. On another day, “one of the ladies has been playing a harpsichord, while I, with the other, have been playing at battledore and shuttlecock.” It is a game of cherubs, though of cherubs slightly unfeathered as a result of belonging to the pious English upper-middle classes. The poet, inclined to be fat, whose chief occupation in winter is “to walk ten times in a day from the fireside to his cucumber frame and back again,” is busy enough on a heavenly errand. With his pet hares, his goldfinches, his dog, his carpentry, his greenhouse—“Is not our greenhouse a cabinet of perfumes?”—his clergymen, his ladies, and his tasks, he is not only constantly amusing himself, but carrying on a secret battle, with all the terrors of Hell. He is, indeed, a pilgrim who struggles out of one slough of despond only to fall waist-deep into another. This strange creature who passed so much of his time writing such things asVerses written at Bath on Finding the Heel of a Shoe, Ode to Apollo on an Ink-glass almost dried in the Sun, Lines sent with Two Cockscombs to Miss Green, andOn the Death of Mrs. Throckmorton’s Bullfinch, stumbled along under a load of woe and repentance as terrible as any of the sorrows that we read of in the great tragedies. The last of his original poems,The Castaway, is an image of his utter hopelessness. As he lay dying in 1880 he was asked how he felt. He replied, “I feel unutterable despair.” To face damnation with the sweet unselfishness of William Cowper is a rare and saintly accomplishment. It gives him a place in the company of the beloved authors with men of far greater genius than himself—with Shakespeare and Lamb and Dickens.

Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch has, in one of his essays, expressed the opinion that of all the English poets “the one who, but for a stroke of madness, would have become our English Horace was William Cowper. He had the wit,” he added, “with the underlying moral seriousness.” As for the wit, I doubt it. Cowper had not the wit that inevitably hardens into “jewels five words long.” Laboriously as he sought after perfection in his verse, he was never a master of the Horatian phrase. Such phrases of his—and there are not many of them—as have passed into the common speech flash neither with wit nor with wisdom. Take the best-known of them:

“The cupsThat cheer but not inebriate;”“God made the country and man made the town;”“I am monarch of all I survey;”“Regions Cæsar never knew;” and“England, with all thy faults, I love thee still!”

“The cupsThat cheer but not inebriate;”

“The cups

That cheer but not inebriate;”

“God made the country and man made the town;”

“I am monarch of all I survey;”

“Regions Cæsar never knew;” and

“England, with all thy faults, I love thee still!”

This is lead for gold. Horace, it is true, must be judged as something more than an inventor of golden tags. But no man can hope to succeed Horace unless his lines and phrases are of the kind that naturally pass into golden tags. This, I know, is a matter not only of style but of temper. But it is in temper as much as in style that Cowper differs from Horace. Horace mixed on easy terms with the world. He enjoyed the same pleasures; he paid his respects to the same duties. He was a man of the world above all other poets. Cowper was in comparison a man of the parlour. His sensibilities would, I fancy, have driven him into retreat, even if he had been neither mad nor pious. He was the very opposite of a worldling. He was, as he said of himself in his early thirties, “of a very singular temper, and very unlike all the men that I have ever conversed with.” While claiming that he was not an absolute fool, he added: “If I was as fit for the next world as I am unfit for this—and God forbid I should speak it in vanity—I would not change conditions with any saint in Christendom.” Had Horace lived in the eighteenth century he would almost certainly have been a Deist. Cowper was very nearly a Methodist. The difference, indeed, between them is fundamental. Horace was a pig, though a charming one; Cowper was a pigeon.

This being so, it seems to me a mistake to regard Cowper as a Horacemanqué, instead of being content with his miraculous achievement as a letter-writer. It may well be that his sufferings, so far from destroying his real genius, harrowed and fertilized the soil in which it grew. He unquestionably was more ambitious for his verse than for his prose. He wrote his letters without labour, while he was never weary of using the file on his poems. “To touch and retouch,” he once wrote to the Rev. William Unwin, “is, though some writers boast of negligence, and others would be ashamed to show their foul copies, the secret of almost all good writing, especially in verse. I am never weary of it myself.” Even if we count him only a middling poet, however, this does not mean that all his fastidiousness of composition was wasted. He acquired in the workshop of verse the style that stood him in such good stead in the field of familiar prose. It is because of this hard-won ease of style that readers of English will never grow weary of that epistolary autobiography in which he recounts his maniacal fear that his food has been poisoned; his open-eyed wonder at balloons; the story of his mouse; the cure of the distention of his stomach by Lady Hesketh’s gingerbread; the pulling out of a tooth at the dinner-table unperceived by the other guests; his desire to thrash Dr. Johnson till his pension jingled in his pocket; and the mildly fascinated tastes to which he confesses in such a paragraph as:

I know no beast in England whose voice I do not account musical save and except always the braying of an ass. The notes of all our birds and fowls please me without one exception. I should not indeed think of keeping a goose in a cage, that I might hang him up in the parlour for the sake of his melody, but a goose upon a common, or in a farm-yard, is no bad performer.

Here he is no missfire rival of Horace or Milton or Prior, or any of the other poets. Here he has arrived at the perfection for which he was born. How much better he was fitted to be a letter-writer than a poet may be seen by anyone who compares his treatment of the same incidents in verse and in prose. There is, for instance, that charming letter about the escaped goldfinch, which is not spoiled for us even though we may take Blake’s view of caged birds:

I have two goldfinches, which in the summer occupy the greenhouse. A few days since, being employed in cleaning out their cages, I placed that which I had in hand upon the table, while the other hung against the wall; the windows and the doors stood wide open. I went to fill the fountain at the pump, and on my return was not a little surprised to find a goldfinch sitting on the top of the cage I had been cleaning, and singing to and kissing the goldfinch within. I approached him, and he discovered no fear; still nearer, and he discovered none. I advanced my hand towards him, and he took no notice of it. I seized him, and supposed I had caught a new bird, but casting my eye upon the other cage perceived my mistake. Its inhabitant, during my absence, had contrived to find an opening, where the wire had been a little bent, and made no other use of the escape it afforded him, than to salute his friend, and to converse with him more intimately than he had done before. I returned him to his proper mansion, but in vain. In less than a minute he had thrust his little person through the aperture again, and again perched upon his neighbour’s cage, kissing him, as at the first, and singing, as if transported with the fortunate adventure. I could not but respect such friendship, as for the sake of its gratification had twice declined an opportunity to be free, and consenting to their union, resolved that for the future one cage should hold them both. I am glad of such incidents; for at a pinch, and when I need entertainment, the versification of them serves to divert me….

Cowper’s “versification” of the incident is vapid compared to this. The incident of the viper and the kittens again, which he “versified” inThe Colubriad, is chronicled far more charmingly in the letters. His quiet prose gave him a vehicle for that intimacy of the heart and fancy which was the deepest need of his nature. He made a full confession of himself only to his friends. In one of his letters he compares himself, as he rises in the morning to “an infernal frog out of Acheron, covered with the ooze and mud of melancholy.” In his most ambitious verse he is a frog trying to blow himself out into a bull. It is the frog in him, not the intended bull, that makes friends with us to-day.

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Voltaire’s criticism of Shakespeare as rude and barbarous has only one fault. It does not fit Shakespeare. Shakespeare, however, is the single dramatist of his age to whom it is not in a measure applicable. “He was a savage,” said Voltaire, “who had imagination. He has written many happy lines; but his pieces can please only in London and in Canada.” Had this been said of Marlowe, or Chapman, or Jonson (despite his learning), or Cyril Tourneur, one might differ, but one would admit that perhaps there was something in it. Again, Voltaire’s boast that he had been the first to show the French “some pearls which I had found” in the “enormous dunghill” of Shakespeare’s plays was the sort of thing that might reasonably have been said by an anthologist who had made selections from Dekker or Beaumont and Fletcher or any dramatist writing under Elizabeth and James except William Shakespeare. One reads the average Elizabethan play in the certainty that the pearls will be few and the rubbish-heap practically five acts high. There are, perhaps, a dozen Elizabethan plays apart from Shakespeare’s that are as great as his third-best work. But there are noHamletsorLearsamong them. There are noMidsummer Night’s Dreams. There is not even aWinter’s Tale.

If Lamb, then, had boasted about what he had done for the Elizabethans in general in the terms used by Voltaire concerning himself and Shakespeare his claim would have been just. Lamb, however, was free from Voltaire’s vanity. He did not feel that he was shedding lustre on the Elizabethans as a patron: he regarded himself as a follower. Voltaire was infuriated by the suggestion that Shakespeare wrote better than himself; Lamb probably looked on even Cyril Tourneur as his superior. Lamb was in this as wide of the mark as Voltaire had been. His reverent praise has made famous among virgins and boys many an old dramatist who but for him would long ago have been thrown to the antiquaries, and have deserved it. Everyone goes to the Elizabethans at some time or another in the hope of coming on a long succession of sleeping beauties. The average man retires disappointed from the quest. He would have to be unusually open to suggestion not to be disappointed at the first reading of most of the plays. Many a man can read the Elizabethans with Charles Lamb’s enthusiasm, however, who never could have read them with his own.

One day, when Swinburne was looking over Mr. Gosse’s books, he took down Lamb’sSpecimens of the English Dramatic Poets, and, turning to Mr. Gosse, said, “That book taught me more than any other book in the world—that and the Bible.” Swinburne was a notorious borrower of other men’s enthusiasms. He borrowed republicanism from Landor and Mazzini, the Devil from Baudelaire, and the Elizabethans from Lamb. He had not, as Lamb had, Elizabethan blood in his veins. Lamb had the Elizabethan love of phrases that have cost a voyage of fancies discovered in a cave. Swinburne had none of this rich taste in speech. He used words riotously, but he did not use great words riotously. He was excitedly extravagant where Lamb was carefully extravagant. He often seemed to be bent chiefly on making a beautiful noise. Nor was this the only point on which he was opposed to Lamb and the Elizabethans. He differed fundamentally from them in his attitude to the spectacle of life. His mood was the mood not of a spectator but of a revivalist. He lectured his generation on the deadly virtues. He was far more anxious to shock the drawing-room than to entertain the bar-parlour. Lamb himself was little enough of a formal Puritan. He felt that the wings both of the virtues and the vices had been clipped by the descendants of the Puritans. He did not scold, however, but retired into the spectacle of another century. He wandered among old plays like an exile returning with devouring eyes to a dusty ancestral castle. Swinburne, for his part, cared little for seeing things and much for saying things. As a result, a great deal of his verse—and still more of his prose—has the heat of an argument rather than the warmth of life.

His posthumous book on the Elizabethans is liveliest when it is most argumentative. Swinburne is less amusing when he is exalting the Elizabethans than when he is cleaving the skull of a pet aversion. His style is an admirable one for faction-fighting, but is less suitable for intimate conversation. He writes in superlatives that give one the impression that he is furious about something or other even when he is being fairly sensible. His criticism has thus an air of being much more insane than it is. His estimates of Chapman and Richard Brome are both far more moderate and reasonable than appears at first reading. He out-Lambs Lamb in his appreciativeness; but one cannot accuse him of injudicious excess when he says of Brome:

Were he now alive, he would be a brilliant and able competitor in their own field of work and study with such admirable writers as Mrs. Oliphant and Mr. Norris.

Brome, I think, is better than this implies. Swinburne is not going many miles too far when he callsThe Antipodes“one of the most fanciful and delightful farces in the world.” It is a piece of poetic low comedy that will almost certainly entertain and delight any reader who goes to it expecting to be bored.

It is safe to say of most of the Elizabethan dramatists that the average reader must fulfil one of two conditions if he is not to be disappointed in them. He must not expect to find them giants on the Shakespeare scale. Better still, he must turn to them as to a continent or age of poetry rather than for the genius of separate plays. Of most of them it may be said that their age is greater than they—that they are glorified by their period rather than glorify it. They are figures in a golden and teeming landscape, and one moves among them under the spell of their noble circumstances.

They are less great individually than in the mass. If they are giants, few of them are giants who can stand on their own legs. They prop one another up. There are not more than a dozen Elizabethan plays that are individually worth a superlative, as a novel by Jane Austen or a sonnet by Wordsworth is. The Elizabethan lyrics are an immensely more precious possession than the plays. The best of the dramatists, indeed, were poets by destiny and dramatists by accident. It is conceivable that the greatest of them apart from Shakespeare—Marlowe and Jonson and Webster and Dekker—might have been greater writers if the English theatre had never existed. Shakespeare alone was as great in the theatre as in poetry. Jonson, perhaps, also came near being so.The Alchemistis a brilliant heavy-weight comedy, which one would hardly sacrifice even for another of Jonson’s songs. As for Dekker, on the other hand, much as one admires the excellent style in which he writes as well as the fine poetry and comedy which survive in his dialogue, hisSweet Contentis worth all the purely dramatic work he ever wrote.

One thing that differentiates the other Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists from Shakespeare is their comparative indifference to human nature. There is too much mechanical malice in their tragedies and too little of the passion that every man recognizes in his own breast. Even so good a play asThe Duchess of Malfiis marred by inadequacy of motive on the part of the duchess’s persecutors. Similarly, in Chapman’sBussy d’Ambois, the villains are simply a dramatist’s infernal machines. Shakespeare’s own plays contain numerous examples of inadequacy of motive—the casting-off of Cordelia by her father, for instance, and in part the revenge of Iago. But, if we accept the first act ofKing Learas an incident in a fairy-tale, the motive of the Passion of Lear in the other four acts is not only adequate out overwhelming.Othellobreaks free from mechanism of Plot in a similar way. Shakespeare as a writer of the fiction of human nature was as supreme among his contemporaries as was Gulliver among the Lilliputians.

Having recognized this, one can begin to enjoy the Elizabethan dramatists again. Lamb and Coleridge and Hazlitt found them lying flat, and it was natural that they should raise them up and set them affectionately on pedestals for the gaze of a too indifferent world. The modern reader, accustomed to seeing them on their pedestals, however, is tempted to wish that they were lying flat again. Most of the Elizabethans deserve neither fate. They should be left neither flat nor standing on separate pedestals, but leaning at an angle of about forty-five degrees—resting against the base of Shakespeare’s colossal statue.

Had Swinburne written of them all as imaginatively as he has written of Chapman, his interpretations, excessive though they often are, would have added to one’s enjoyment of them. HisChapmangives us a portrait of a character. Several of the chapters inContemporaries of Shakespeare, however, are, apart from the strong language, little more inspiring than the summaries of novels and plays in a school history of literature. Even Mr. Gosse himself, if I remember right, in hisLife of Swinburne, described one of the chapters as “unreadable.” The book as a whole is not that. But it unquestionably shows us some of the minor Elizabethans by fog rather than by the full light of day.

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There is—at least, there seems to be—more cant talked about poetry just now than at any previous time. Tartuffe is to-day not a priest but a poet—or a critic. Or, perhaps, Tartuffe is too lively a prototype for the curates of poetry who swarm in the world’s capitals at the present hour. There is a tendency in the followers of every art or craft to impose it on the world as a mystery of which the vulgar can know nothing. In medicine, as in bricklaying, there is a powerful trade union into which the members can retire as into a sanctuary of the initiate. In the same way, the theologians took possession of the temple of religion and refused admittance to laymen, except as a meek and awe-struck audience. This largely resulted from the Pharisaic instinct that assumes superiority over other men. Pharisaism is simply an Imperialism of the spirit—joyless and domineering. Religion is a communion of immortal souls. Pharisaism is a denial of this and an attempt to set up an oligarchy of superior persons. All the great religious reformations have been rebellions on the part of the immortal souls against the superior persons. Religion, the reformers have proclaimed, is the common possession of mankind. Christ came into the world not to afford a career to theological pedants, but that the mass of mankind might have life and might have it more abundantly.

Poetry is in constant danger of suffering the same fate as religion. In the great ages of poetry, poetry was what is called a popular subject. The greatest poets, both of Greece and of England, took their genius to that extremely popular institution, the theatre. They wrote not for pedants or any exclusive circle, but for mankind. They were, we have reason to believe, under no illusions as to the imperfections of mankind. But it was the best audience they could get, and represented more or less the same kind of world that they found in their own bosoms. It is a difficult thing to prove that the ordinary man can appreciate poetry, just as it is a difficult thing to prove that the ordinary man has an immortal soul. But the great poets, like the great saints, gave him the benefit of the doubt. If they had not, we should not have had the Greek drama or Shakespeare.

That they were right seems probable in view of the excellence of the poems and songs that survive among a peasantry that has not been de-educated in the schools. If the arts were not a natural inheritance of simple people, neither the Irish love-songs collected by Dr. Douglas Hyde nor the Irish music edited by Moore could have survived. I do not mean to suggest that any art can be kept alive without the aid of such specialists as the poet, the singer, and the musician; but neither can it be kept healthily alive without the popular audience. Tolstoy’s use of the unspoiled peasant as the test of art may lead to absurdities, if carried too far. But at least it is an error in the right direction. It is an affirmation of the fact that every man is potentially an artist just as Christianity is an affirmation of the fact that every man is potentially a saint. It is also an affirmation of the fact that art, like religion, makes its appeal to feelings which are shared by the mass of men rather than the feelings which are the exclusive possession of the few. Where Tolstoy made his chief mistake was in failing to see that the artistic sense, like the religious sense, is something that, so far from being born perfect, even in the unspoiled peasant, passes though stage after stage of labour and experience on the way to perfection. Every man is an artist in the seed: he is not an artist in the flower. He may pass all his life without ever coming to flower. The great artist, however, appeals to a universal potentiality of beauty. Tolstoy’s most astounding paradox cametonothing more than this—that art exists, not for the hundreds of people who are artists in name, but for the millions of people who are artists in embryo.

At the same time, there is no use in being too confident that the average man will ever be a poet, even in the sense of being a reader of poetry. All that one can ask is that the doors of literature shall be thrown open to him, as the doors of religion are in spite of the fact that he is not a perfect saint. The histories of literature and religion, it seems likely, both go back to a time in which men expressed their most rapturous emotions in dances. In time the inarticulate shouts of the dancers—Scottish dancers still utter those shouts, do they not?—gave place to rhythmic words. It may have been the genius of a single dancer that first broke into speech, but his genius consisted not so much in his separateness from the others as in his power to express what all the others felt. He was the prophet of a rapture that was theirs as much as his own.

Men learned to speak rhythmically, however, not merely in order to liberate their deepest emotions, but in order to remember things. Poetry has a double origin in joy and utility. The “Thirty days hath September” rhyme of the English child suggests the way in which men must have turned to verse in prehistoric times as a preservative of facts, of proverbial wisdom, of legend and narrative. Sir Henry Newbolt, I gather from hisNew Study of English Poetry, would deny the name of poetry to all verse that is not descended from the choric dance. In my opinion it is better to recognize the two lines, as of the father and the mother, in the pedigree of poetry. We find abundant traces of them not only in Hesiod and Virgil, but in Homer and Chaucer. The utility of form and the joy of form have in all these poets become inextricably united. The objection to most of the “free verse” that is being written to-day is that in form it is neither delightful nor memorable. The truth is, the memorableness of the writings of a man of genius becomes a part of their delight. If Pope is a delightful writer it is not merely because he expressed interesting opinions; it is because he threw most of the energies of his being into the task of making them memorable and gave them a heightened vitality by giving them rhymes. His satires andThe Rape of the Lockare, no doubt, better poetry than theEssay on Man, because he poured into them a still more vivid energy. But I doubt if there is any reasonable definition of poetry which would exclude even Pope the “essayist” from the circle of the poets. He was a puny poet, it may be, but poets were always, as they are to-day, of all shapes and sizes.

Unfortunately, “poetry,” like “religion,” is a word that we are almost bound to use in several senses. Sometimes we speak of “poetry” in contradistinction to prose: sometimes in contradistinction to bad poetry. Similarly, “religion” would in one sense include the Abode of Love as opposed to rationalism, and in another sense would exclude the Abode of Love as opposed to the religion of St. James. In a common-sense classification, it seems to me, poetry includes every kind of literature written in verse or in rhythms akin to verse. Sir Thomas Browne may have been more poetic than Erasmus Darwin, but in his best work he did not write poetry. Erasmus Darwin may have been more prosaic than Sir Thomas Browne, but in his most famous work he did not write prose. Sir Henry Newbolt will not permit a classification of this kind. For him poetry is an expression of intuitions—an emotional transfiguration of life—while prose is the expression of a scientific fact or a judgment. I doubt if this division is defensible. Everything that is literature is, in a sense, poetry as opposed to science; but both prose and poetry contain a great deal of work that is preponderantly the result of observation and judgment, as well as a great deal that is preponderantly imaginative. Poetry is a house of many mansions. It includes fine poetry and foolish poetry, noble poetry and base poetry. The chief duty of criticism is the praise—the infectious praise—of the greatest poetry. The critic has the right to demand not only a transfiguration of life, but a noble transfiguration of life. Swinburne transfigures life inAnactoriano less than Shakespeare transfigures it inKing Lear. But Swinburne’s is an ignoble, Shakespeare’s a noble transfiguration. Poetry may be divine or devilish, just as religion may be. Literary criticism is so timid of being accused of Puritanism that it is chary of admitting that there may be a Heaven and a Hell of poetic genius as well as of religious genius. The moralists go too far on the other side and are tempted to judge literature by its morality rather than by its genius. It seems more reasonable to conclude that it is possible to have a poet of genius who is nevertheless a false poet, just as it is possible to have a prophet of genius who is nevertheless a false prophet. The lover of literature will be interested in them all, but he will not finally be deceived into blindness to the fact that the greatest poets are spiritually and morally, as well as aesthetically, great. If Shakespeare is infinitely the greatest of the Elizabethans, it is not merely because he is imaginatively the greatest; it is also because he had a soul incomparably noble and generous. Sir Henry Newbolt deals in an interesting way with this ennoblement of life that is the mark of great poetry. He does not demand of poetry an orthodox code of morals, but he does contend that great poetry marches along the path that leads to abundance of life, and not to a feeble and degenerate egotism.

The greatest value of his book, however, lies in the fact that he treats poetry as a natural human activity, and that he sees that poetry must be able to meet the challenge to its right to exist. The extreme moralist would deny that it had a right to exist unless it could be proved to make men more moral. The hedonist is content if it only gives him pleasure. The greatest poets, however, do not accept the point of view either of the extreme moralist or of the hedonist. Poetry exists for the purpose of delivering us neither to good conduct nor to pleasure. It exists for the purpose of releasing the human spirit to sing, like a lark, above this scene of wonder, beauty and terror. It is consonant both with the world of good conduct and the world of pleasure, but its song is a voice and an enrichment of the earth, uttered on wings half-way between earth and heaven. Sir Henry Newbolt suggests that the reason why hymns almost always fail as poetry is that the writers of hymns turn their eyes away so resolutely from the earth we know to the world that is only a formula. Poetry, in his view, is a transfiguration of life heightened by the home-sickness of the spirit from a perfect world. But it must always use the life we live as the material of its joyous vision. It is born of our double attachment to Earth and to Paradise. There is no formula for absolute beauty, but the poet can praise the echo and reflection of it in the songs of the birds and the colours of the flowers. It is open to question whether

There is a fountain filled with blood

expresses the home-sickness of the spirit as yearningly as

And now my heart with pleasure fillsAnd dances with the daffodils.

And now my heart with pleasure fills

And dances with the daffodils.

There are many details on which one would like to join issue with Sir Henry Newbolt, but his main contentions are so suggestive, his sympathies so catholic and generous, that it seems hardly worth while arguing with him about questions of scansion or of the relation of Blake to contemporary politics, or of the evil of anthologies. His book is the reply of a capable and honest man of letters to the challenge uttered to poets by Keats inThe Fall of Hyperion, where Moneta demands:

What benfits canst thou, or all thy tribeTo the great world?

What benfits canst thou, or all thy tribe

To the great world?

and declares:

None can usurp this height …But those to whom the miseries of the worldAre misery, and will not let them rest.

None can usurp this height …

But those to whom the miseries of the world

Are misery, and will not let them rest.

Sir Henry Newbolt, like Sir Sidney Colvin, no doubt, would hold that here Keats dismisses too slightingly his own best work. But how noble is Keats’s dissatisfaction with himself! It is such noble dissatisfaction as this that distinguishes the great poets from the amateurs. Poetry and religion—the impulse is very much the same. The rest is but a parlour-game.

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So little is Edward Young read in these days that we have almost forgotten how wide was his influence in the eighteenth century. It was not merely that he was popular in England, where his satires,The Love of Fame, the Universal Passion, are said to have made him £3,000. He was also a power on the Continent. HisNight Thoughtswas translated not only into all the major languages, but into Portuguese, Swedish and Magyar. It was adopted as one of the heralds of the romantic movement in France. Even hisConjectures on Original Composition, written in 1759 in the form of a letter to Samuel Richardson, earned in foreign countries a fame that has lasted till our own day. A new edition of the German translation was published at Bonn so recently as 1910. In England there is no famous author more assiduously neglected. Not so much as a line is quoted from him inThe Oxford Book of English Verse. I recently turned up a fairly full anthology of eighteenth-century verse only to find that though it has room for Mallet and Ambrose Phillips and Picken, Young has not been allowed to contribute a purple patch even five lines long. I look round my own shelves, and they tell the same story. Small enough poets stand there in shivering neglect. Akenside, Churchill and Parnell have all been thought worth keeping. But not on the coldest, topmost shelf has space been found for Young. He scarcely survives even in popular quotations. The copy-books have perpetuated one line:

Procrastination is the thief of time.

Apart from that,Night Thoughtshave been swallowed up in an eternal night.

And certainly a study of the titles of his works will not encourage the average reader to go to him in search of treasures of the imagination. At the age of thirty, in 1713, he wrote aPoem on the Last Day, which he dedicated to Queen Anne. In the following year he wroteThe Force of Religion, or Vanquish’d Love, a poem about Lady Jane Grey, which he dedicated to the Countess of Salisbury. And no sooner was Queen Anne dead than he made haste to salute the rising sun in an epistleOn the Late Queen’s Death and His Majesty’s Accession to the Throne. Passing over a number of years, we find him, in 1730, publishing a so-called Pindaric ode,Imperium Pelagi; a Naval Lyric, in the preface to which he declares with characteristic italics: “Tradeis a verynoblesubject in itself; moreproperthan any for an Englishman; and particularlyseasonableat this juncture.” Add to this that he was the son of a dean, that he married the daughter of an earl, and that, other means of advancement having failed, he became a clergyman at the age of between forty and fifty, and the suggested portrait is that of a prudent hanger-on rather than a fiery man of genius. His prudence was rewarded with a pension of £200 a year, a Royal Chaplaincy, and the position (after George III.’s accession) of Clerk of the Closet to the Princess Dowager. In the opinion of Young himself, who lived till the age of 82, the reward was inadequate. At the age of 79, however, he had conquered his disappointment to a sufficient degree to write a poem onResignation.

Readers who, after a hasty glance at his biography, are inclined to look satirically on Young as a time-server, oily with the mediocrity of self-help, will have a pleasant surprise if they read hisConjectures on Original Compositionfor the first time. It is a bold and masculine essay on literary criticism, written in a style of quite brilliant, if old-fashioned, rhetoric. Mrs. Thrale said of it: “In theConjectures upon Original Composition… we shall perhaps read the wittiest piece of prose our whole language has to boast; yet from its over-twinkling, it seems too little gazed at and too little admired perhaps.” This is an exaggerated estimate. Dr. Johnson, who heard Young read theConjecturesat Richardson’s house, said that “he was surprised to find Young receive as novelties what he thought very common maxims.” If one tempers Mrs. Thrale’s enthusiasms and Dr. Johnson’s scorn, one will have a fairly just idea of the quality of Young’s book.

It is simply a shot fired with a good aim in the eternal war between authority and liberty in literature. This is a controversy for which, were men wise, there would be no need. We require in literature both the authority of tradition and the liberty of genius to such new conquests. Unfortunately, we cannot agree as to the proportions in which each of them is required. The French exaggerated the importance of tradition, and so gave us the classical drama of Racine and Corneille. Walt Whitman exaggerated the importance of liberty, and so gave usLeaves of Grass. In nearly all periods of literary energy, we find writers rushing to one or other of these extremes. Either they declare that the classics are perfect and cannot be surpassed but only imitated; or, like the Futurists, they want to burn the classics and release the spirit of man for new adventures. It is all a prolonged duel between reaction and revolution, and the wise man of genius doing his best, like a Liberal, to bring the two opponents to terms.

Much of the interest of Young’s book is due to the fact that in an age of reaction he came out on the revolutionary side. There was seldom a time at which the classics were more slavishly idolized and imitated. Miss Morley quotes from Pope the saying that “all that is left us is to recommend our productions by the imitation of the ancients.” Young threw all his eloquence on the opposite side. He uttered the bold paradox: “The less we copy the renowned ancients, we shall resemble them the more.” “Become a noble collateral,” he advised, “not a humble descendant from them. Let us build our compositions in the spirit, and in the taste, of the ancients, but not with their materials. Thus will they resemble the structures of Pericles at Athens, which Plutarch commends for having had an air of antiquity as soon as they were built.” He refuses to believe that the moderns are necessarily inferior to the ancients. If they are inferior, it is because they plagiarize from the ancients instead of emulating them. “If ancients and moderns,” he declares, “were no longer considered as masters, and pupils, but as hard-matched rivals for renown, then moderns, by the longevity of their labours, might one day become ancients themselves.”

He deplores the fact that Pope should have been so content to indenture his genius to the work of translation and imitation:

Though we stand much obliged to him for giving us an Homer, yet had he doubled our obligation by giving us—a Pope. He had a strong imagination and the true sublime? That granted, we might have had two Homers instead of one, if longer had been his life; for I heard the dying swan talk over an epic plan a few weeks before his decease.

For ourselves, we hold that Pope showed himself to be as original as needs be in his epistles to Martha Blount and Dr. Arbuthnot. None the less, the general philosophy of Young’s remarks is sound enough. We should reverence tradition in literature, but not superstitiously. Too much awe of the old masters may easily scare a modern into hiding his talent in a napkin. True, we are not in much danger of servitude to tradition in literature to-day. We no longer imitate the ancients; we only imitate each other. On the whole, we wish there was rather more sense of the tradition in contemporary writing. The danger of arbitrary egoism is quite as great as the danger of classicism. Luckily, Young, in stating the case against the classicists, has at the same time stated perfectly the case for familiarity with the classics. “It is,” he declares, “but a sort of noble contagion, from a general familiarity with their writings, and not by any particular sordid theft, that we can be the better for those who went before us,” However we may deride a servile classicism, we should always set out assuming the necessity of the “noble contagion for every man of letters.”

The truth is, the man of letters must in some way reconcile himself to the paradox that he is at once the acolyte and the rival of the ancients. Young is optimistic enough to believe that it is possible to surpass them. In the mechanic arts, he complains, men are always attempting to go beyond their predecessors; in the liberal arts, they merely try to follow them. The analogy between the continuous advance of science and a possible continuous advance in literature is perhaps, a misleading one. Professor Gilbert Murray, inReligio Grammatici, bases much of his argument on a denial that such an analogy should be drawn. Literary genius cannot be bequeathed and added to as a scientific discovery can. The modern poet does not stand on Shakespeare’s shoulders as the modern astronomer stands on Galileo’s shoulders. Scientific discovery is progressive. Literary genius, like religious genius, is a miracle less dependent on time. None the less, we may reasonably believe that literature, like science, has ever new worlds to conquer—that, even if Æschylus and Shakespeare cannot be surpassed, names as great as theirs may one day be added to the roll of literary fame. And this will be possible only if men in each generation are determined, in the words of Goldsmith, “bravely to shake off admiration, and, undazzled by the splendour of another’s reputation, to chalk out a path to fame for themselves, and boldly cultivate untried experiment.” Goldsmith wrote these words inThe Beein the same year in which Young’sConjectureswas published. I feel tolerably certain that he wrote them as a result of reading Young’s work. The reaction against traditionalism, however, was gathering general force by this time, and the desire to be original was beginning to oust the desire to copy. Both Young’s and Goldsmith’s essays are exceedingly interesting as anticipations of the romantic movement. Young was a true romantic when he wrote that Nature “brings us into the world all Originals—no two faces, no two minds, are just alike; but all bear evident marks of separation on them. Born Originals, how comes it to pass that we are Copies?” Genius, he thinks, is commoner than is sometimes supposed, if we would make use of it. His book is a plea for giving genius its head. He wants to see the modern writer, instead of tilling an exhausted soil, staking out a claim in the perfectly virgin field of his own experience. He cannot teach you to be a man of genius; he could not even teach himself to be one. But at least he lays down many of the right rules for the use of genius. His book marks a most interesting stage in the development of English literary criticism.

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There seems to be a definite connection between good writing and indolence. The men whom we call stylists have, most of them, been idlers. From Horace to Robert Louis Stevenson, nearly all have been pigs from the sty of Epicurus. They have not, to use an excellent Anglo-Irish word, “industered” like insects or millionaires. The greatest men, one must admit, have mostly been as punctual at their labours as the sun—as fiery and inexhaustible. But, then, one does not think of the greatest writers as stylists. They are so much more than that. The style of Shakespeare is infinitely more marvellous than the style of Gray. But one hardly thinks of style in presence of the sea or a range of mountains or in reading Shakespeare. His munificent and gorgeous genius was as far above style as the statesmanship of Pericles or the sanctity of Joan of Arc was above good manners. The world has not endorsed Ben Jonson’s retort to those who commended Shakespeare for never having “blotted out” a line: “Would he had blotted out a thousand!” We feel that so vast a genius is beyond the perfection of control we look for in a stylist. There may be badly-written scenes in Shakespeare, and pot-house jokes, and wordy hyperboles, but with all this there are enchanted continents left in him which we may continue to explore though we live to be a hundred.

The fact that the noble impatience of a Shakespeare is above our fault-finding, however, must not be used to disparage the lazy patience of good writing. An Æschylus or a Shakespeare, a Browning or a Dickens, conquers us with an abundance like nature’s. He feeds us out of a horn, of plenty. This, unfortunately, is possible only to writers of the first order. The others, when they attempt profusion, become fluent rather than abundant, facile of ink rather than generous of golden grain. Who does not agree with Pope that Dryden, though not Shakespeare, would have been a better poet if he had learned:

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