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The Bridling of Pegasus: Prose Papers on Poetry
The Bridling of Pegasus: Prose Papers on Poetry
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The Bridling of Pegasus: Prose Papers on Poetry

Joint-stools were then created, on three legs,Upborne they stood: three legs upholding firmA mossy slab, in fashion square or round.At length a generation more refinedImproved the simple plan, made three legs four,Gave them a twisted form vermicularAnd o’er the seat with plenteous wadding stuffedInduced a splendid cover, green and blue,Yellow and red, of tapestry richly wrought,And woven close, or needlework sublime.

Perhaps you think this is a parody of Cowper. But I can assure you it is nothing of the kind. It was written by the poet himself; and in his abounding pages you will find hundreds of verses of this realistic and pedestrian character. But not Cowper alone, one much greater than Cowper, one who rose over and over again to the very heaven of poesy, Wordsworth himself, has likewise left hundreds, aye, thousands of verses, little better than the passage I have just read from Cowper, through the mistaken notion that kindly feeling, compassion for the poor and the patient, and sound moral sentiments, when expressed in verse, must result in poetry. There is no one here whose admiration of Wordsworth at his best can be greater than mine, but, in order to show you how the feminine note in poetry, the note of sympathy with the weak, the obscure, and the unfortunate, can even in the voice of a great master of poetry, lapse into verse utterly destitute of the soul and spirit of poetry, I will ask you to allow me to read you a portion of Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman:

And he is lean and he is sick;His body, dwindled and awry,Rests upon ankles swoln and thick;His legs are thin and dry.One prop he has, and only one,His Wife, an aged woman,Lives with him, near the waterfall,Upon the village Common.Oft, working by her husband’s side,Ruth does what Simon cannot do;For she, with scanty cause for pride,Is stouter of the two.And though you with your utmost skillFrom labour could not wean them,Alas! ’tis very little – allWhich they can do between them.O Reader! had you in your mindSuch stores as silent thought can bring,O gentle Reader! you would findA tale in everything.What more I have to say is short,And you must kindly take it:It is no tale; but, should you think,Perhaps a tale you’ll make it.

Is not that sorry stuff, regarded as poetry? Wordsworth here had the assistance of the music, not only of verse, but of rhyme; and with what a result! It is the feminine note of pity in its dotage, whereby we see that it is not enough to have a warm heart, to have tender feelings, to be full of sympathy for the suffering, and then to express them in verse. In the prose of conversation and of everyday life, kindly feeling is all well enough. But the Heavenly Muse will not place herself at our disposal so readily and cheaply. She is a very difficult lady, is the Heavenly Muse, not easily won, and never allowing you, if you want to remain in her good graces, to approach her, that is to say, in dressing gown and slippers. She is the noblest and most gracious lady in the world, and the best, the most refined, the most elevating of companions. Therefore you must come into her presence and win her favour, not with free-and-easy gait and in slovenly attire, but arrayed in your very best, and with courtly and deferential mien. When poets wrote of gods and goddesses, of mighty sieges, and of the foundation and fall of empires; when their theme was the madness of princes, and the tragic fate of kings, when their hero was Lucifer, Son of the Morning, nay, even when they discoursed of free will and fate, or of the drawing-room intrigues of persons to whom powder, patches, billets-doux were the chief things in existence, there was no need to remind them that their style must be as lofty, as dignified, as refined, or as finished as their subject. No doubt, they sometimes waxed stilted and fell into excess, whether in rhetoric or in conceits, but they never forgot themselves so far as to be slovenly or familiar. Stella, you know, said Swift could write beautifully about a broomstick. Possibly he could; but note the concession, that if a man writes, at least if he would write poetry, he must write beautifully. Both Cowper and Wordsworth set the example of writing verse that is not beautiful, though indeed Young in his Night Thoughts, and Thomson in The Seasons, had already done something of the same kind. But they have not the authority of Cowper, much less the authority of Wordsworth. Let who will be the authority for it, prosaic utterance in verse, realism in rhyme, no matter what the subject, is an incongruity that cannot be too severely condemned. A very large proportion of the verse of Crabbe, once so popular, but now, I fancy, but little read, is of little value, by reason of the presence of this defect. Yet while I indicate, and venture to reprove, the feebleness into which the feminine note in English poetry has too often declined and deteriorated, never let us forget that it has contributed lovely and immortal poetry to the language, poetry to be found in Wordsworth, poetry such as melts us almost to tears in Hood’s Song of the Shirt, or in Mrs. Barrett Browning’s The Cry of the Children. Horace, who was a great critic as well as a great poet, said long ago that it is extremely difficult to express oneself concerning ordinary everyday facts and feelings in a becoming and agreeable manner; and to do this in verse demands supreme genius. As a set-off to the example of feebleness I just now cited in Wordsworth, listen how, when the mood of inspiration is on him, he can see a Highland girl reaping in a field – surely an ordinary everyday sight – and threw around her the heavenly halo of the divinest poetry:

Behold her, single in the field,Yon solitary Highland Lass!Reaping and singing by herself;Stop here, or gently pass!Alone she cuts, and binds the grain,And sings a melancholy strain;O listen! for the Vale profoundIs overflowing with the sound.No Nightingale did ever chauntSo sweetly to reposing bandsOf Travellers in some shady haunt,Among Arabian sands:A voice so thrilling ne’er was heardIn spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,Breaking the silence of the seasAmong the farthest Hebrides.Will no one tell me what she sings?Perhaps the plaintive numbers flowFor old, unhappy, far-off things,And battles long ago:Or is it some more humble lay,Familiar matter of to-day?Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,That has been, and may be again?Whate’er the theme, the Maiden sangAs if her song could have no ending;I saw her singing at her work,And o’er the sickle bending; —I listened till I had my fill,And when I mounted up the hill,The music in my heart I bore,Long after it was heard no more.

But there is another manifestation of the feminine note in English poetry, distinct from, though doubtless akin to, the one we have been considering; a note which likewise was not heard in it till about a hundred years ago, but which has been heard very frequently since, and which seems at times to threaten to become its dominant and all-prevailing note, or at any rate the only one that is keenly listened to. Instead of the note of interest in and pity for others, it has become the note of interest in and pity either for oneself, or for one’s other self; a note so strongly personal and suggestive as to become egotistic and entirely self-regarding. This is the amatory or erotic note, which I think you will all recognise when I give it that designation; the note which appears to consider the love of the sexes as the only important thing in life, and certainly the only thing worth writing or singing about. More than two thousand years ago, a Greek poet wrote a lyric beginning, “I would fain sing of the heroes of the House of Atreus, I would fain chant the glories of the line of Cadmus; but my lyre refuses to sound any note save that of love.” In these days the poet who expressed that sentiment and acted on it would have a great many listeners; and no doubt Anacreon, too, had his audience in ancient Greece. But he was not ranked by them side by side with their great poets who did take the tragic story of the House of Atreus for their theme. It can only be when feminine influence is supreme in society and in literature, and when the feminine note in poetry has become, or threatens to become, paramount, that the sentiment and practice of Anacreon is viewed with approbation and favour. Byron has said in a well-known passage:

For love is of man’s life a thing apart;’Tis woman’s whole existence.

If I know anything about women, that is a gross exaggeration, unless in the term love be included love of parents, love of brothers and sisters, love of children, in a word, every form and manifestation of affection. Still it is not necessary to deny – indeed if it be true it is necessary to admit – that love, in the narrower if more intense signification of the word, does play a larger part in the lives, or at any rate in the imagination, of most women than it does in the lives and the imagination of most men; and it is not to be denied that practically all women, and a fair sprinkling of men, now take an almost exclusive interest in the amatory note in poetry. Nor let any one say that this was always so, and that poetry and poets have from time immemorial occupied themselves mainly with the passion of love. Indeed they have not done so. It would be to show an utter ignorance of the genius of Homer, of the great Greek dramatists, of Virgil, of Dante, of Spenser, of Shakespeare, of Milton, and of the temper of the times in which they lived, to say that they could sound only notes of love. They sounded these sometimes, but seldom and rarely, in comparison with their other and more masculine notes, and always in due subordination to these. I will not go so far as to say that they thought, with Napoleon, that love is the occupation of the idle, and the idleness of the occupied, but they knew that however absorbing for a season the passion of love as described by many poets and by nearly all modern novelists may be, it is a thing apart; and, as such, they dealt with it. They did not ignore its existence, or even its importance, but they did not exaggerate its existence and its importance, relatively to other interests, other occupations, other duties in life. It was because of the high fealty and allegiance which Spenser declared he owed to all womankind that he did not represent women as perpetually sighing or being sighed for by men. It was because Shakespeare had such absolute familiarity, not with this or that part of life, but with the whole of it, that even in Romeo and Juliet, in Othello, in Measure for Measure, and again in As You Like It, he represented the passion of love at work and in operation along with other sentiments and other passions; and, in the greater portion of his dramas either does not introduce it at all, or assigns to it a quite subordinate place. In Romeo and Juliet the brave Mercutio, the Tybalt “deaf to peace,” the garrulous nurse, the true apothecary, the comfortable Friar, as Juliet calls him, all these and more, have their exits and their entrances, and all, in turn, demand our attention. Romeo and Juliet is a love-drama indeed; but even in Romeo and Juliet, though love occupies the foremost place and plays the leading part, it stands in relation to other passions and other characters, and moves onward to its doom surrounded and accompanied by a medley of other circumstances and occurrences; just as true love, even the most engrossing, does in real life. The same just apprehension of life, the same observance of accurate proportion between the action of love and the action of other passions and other interests, may be observed in Othello. Othello is not represented merely as a man who is consumed and maddened by jealousy, but as a citizen and a soldier, encompassed by friends and enemies, and brought into contact, not with Desdemona and Iago alone, but with the Duke of Venice, with valiant Cassio, with witty Montano, with Brabantio, with Gratiano, in a word with people and things in general.

Neither would it be any more to the purpose to object that Herrick, that Suckling, that Lovelace, and other poets of the seventeenth century wrote love-lyrics by the score, with many of which I have no doubt you are acquainted, and some of which are very beautiful. For these, for the most part, were amatory exercises, not real breathing and burning love-poems; dainty works of art sometimes, but not sicklied o’er with the pale cast of amatory passion. They were seventeenth-century reminiscences of the conventional love-lyrics of the Troubadours of Provence, when there existed an imaginary court of Love and a host of imaginary lovers. Indeed, if I were asked what was the truest and most succinct note uttered by their English imitators, I think I should have to say that I seem to catch it most distinctly in the lines of Suckling beginning:

Why so pale and wan, fond lover?Prithee, why so pale?

– and ending with:

If of herself she will not love,Nothing can make her:The devil take her!

But we catch a very different amatory note, and that of the most personal and earnest kind, when the voice of Burns, and then the voice of Byron, were heard in English poetry. In Byron the note is almost always passionate. In Burns it is sometimes sentimental, sometimes jovial, sometimes humorous, sometimes frankly and offensively coarse. Many readers cannot do full justice to the North-Country dialect in the following lines, but the most Southern of accents could not quite spoil their simple beauty:

The westlin wind blaws loud an’ shrill;The night’s baith mirk and rainy, O;But I’ll get my plaid, an’ out I’ll steal,An’ owre the hills to Nannie, O.Her face is fair, her heart is true,As spotless as she’s bonnie, O:The op’ning gowan, wat wi’ dew,Nae purer is than Nannie, O.

That is one amatory, one feminine note in Burns. Here is another:

There’s nought but care on every han’,In every hour that passes, O;What signifies the life o’ man,An’ ’twere na for the lasses, O.Auld Nature swears the lovely dearsHer noblest work she classes, O:Her ’prentice han’ she tried on man,An’ then she made the lasses, O.

I have no fault to find with these lines. They express a profound and enduring truth; and, if they do so with some little exaggeration, they do it half humorously, and so protect themselves against criticism. But I really think – I hope you will not deem me unchivalrous in saying so – we have, during the present century, heard too much, both in poetry and in prose romance, as we are now hearing too much in newspapers and magazines, of “the lasses, O.” Not that we can hear too much of them in their relation to each other, to men, and to life. The “too much” I indicate is the too much of romantic love, that leaves no place for other emotions and other passions equally worthy, or relegates these to an inferior position and to a narrower territory. I should say that there is rather too much of the sentimental note in Byron, in Shelley, in Keats, just as I should say that there is not too much of it in Wordsworth or in Scott. To say this is not to decry Byron, Shelley, and Keats – what lover of poetry would dream of decrying such splendid poets as they? – but only to indicate a certain tendency against which I cannot help feeling it is well to be on our guard. The tendency of the times is to encourage writers, whether in prose or verse, to deal with this particular theme and to deal with it too frequently and too pertinaciously. Moreover, there is always a danger that a subject, in itself so delicate, should not be quite delicately handled, and indeed that it should be treated with indelicacy and grossness. That, too, unfortunately, has happened in verse; and when that happens, then I think the Heavenly Muse veils her face and weeps. It must have been through some dread of poetry thus dishonouring itself that Plato in his ideal Republic proposed that poets should be crowned with laurel, and then banished from the city. For my part, I would willingly see such poets banished from the city, but not crowned with laurel. No doubt Plato’s notion that poets should chant nothing but hymns to the Gods and praises of virtue is a little narrow and exacting, but if they are to sing songs worthy of themselves, and of mankind, they must be on the side of virtue and of the Gods. Hark with what perfect delicacy a masculine poet like Scott can deal with a feminine theme:

What though no rule of courtly graceTo measured mood had trained her pace,A foot more light, a step more trueNe’er from the heath-flower dashed the dew.Ev’n the light harebell raised its head,Elastic from her airy tread.What though upon her speech there hungThe accents of the mountain tongue?Those solemn sounds, so soft, so clear,The listener held his breath to hear.

That is how manly poets write and think of women. But they do not dwell over much on the theme; they do not harp on it; and when you turn the page, you read in a totally different key:

The fisherman forsook the strand,The swarthy smith took dirk and brand;With changëd cheer the mower blytheLeft in the half-cut swathe the scythe.The herds without a keeper strayed,The plough was in mid-furrow stayed.The falconer tossed his hawk away,The hunter left the stag at bay.Prompt at the signal of alarms,Each son of Albion rushed to arms.So swept the tumult and affrayAlong the margin of Achray.

Does it not remind you of the passage I quoted from Homer, where Hector says to Andromache, “Go! to your house, and see to your loom and distaff, but for war men will provide”? Scott, like Homer, observed the due proportion between love and life, giving love ample room, but not allotting it excessive space. If again one wants to hear how delicately, how worthily, how manfully, poets can write of love and of women, what can one do better than recall this perfect lyric of Wordsworth’s? —

Three years she grew in sun and shower,Then Nature said, “A lovelier flowerOn earth was never sown;This Child I to myself will take;She shall be mine, and I will makeA Lady of my own.“Myself will to my darling beBoth law and impulse: and with meThe Girl, in rock and plain,In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,Shall feel an overseeing powerTo kindle or restrain.“She shall be sportive as the FawnThat wild with glee across the lawnOr up the mountain springs;And hers shall be the breathing balm,And hers the silence and the calmOf mute insensate things.“The floating Clouds their state shall lendTo her; for her the willow bend;Nor shall she fail to seeEven in the motions of the StormGrace that shall mould the Maiden’s formBy silent sympathy.“The Stars of midnight shall be dearTo her; and she shall lean her earIn many a secret placeWhere Rivulets dance their wayward round,And beauty born of murmuring soundShall pass into her face.“And vital feelings of delightShall rear her form to stately height,Her virgin bosom swell;Such thoughts to Lucy I will giveWhile she and I together liveHere in this happy Dell.”Thus Nature spake – The work was done —How soon my Lucy’s race was run!She died, and left to meThis heath, this calm and quiet scene;The memory of what has been,And never more will be.

Neither should I like it to be supposed that I think Byron could not write on this same theme in the noblest manner. He did so frequently; he would not have been the great poet he is if he had not done so. Listen to this, for example:

She walks in beauty, like the nightOf cloudless climes and starry skies,And all that’s best of dark and lightMeet in her aspect and her eyes.Thus mellowed to that tender lightWhich Heaven to gaudy day denies.One shade the more, one ray the less,Had half impaired the nameless graceWhich waves in every raven tress,Or softly lightens o’er her face,Where thoughts serenely sweet expressHow pure, how dear, their dwelling place.And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,The smiles that win, the tints that glow,But tell of days in goodness spent,A mind at peace with all below,A heart whose love is innocent.

Women are honoured and exalted when they are sung of in that manner. They are neither honoured nor exalted, they are dishonoured and degraded, when they are represented, either in prose or verse, as consuming their days in morbid longings and sentimental regrets, and men are represented as having nothing to do save to stimulate or satisfy such feelings. What is written in prose is not here my theme. I am writing of poets and poetry, and of the readers of poetry. Novelists and novel-readers are a different and separate subject. But I may say in passing that poetry and the readers of poetry have suffered somewhat during the present generation from novels and novel-readers. A newer and narrower standard of human interest has been set up; and while the great bulk of readers have turned from poetry to prose romances, writers of verse have too frequently tried to compete with novelists, by treating love as the central interest and the main business of life. Homer did not think it such, neither did Virgil, nor Dante, nor Chaucer, nor Spenser, nor Shakespeare, nor Milton, and let us not think so. I urge every one, every now and again at least, to lay down the novel and open the poem: but let it be a poem that will enlarge one’s conception of life, that will help one to think loftily, and to feel nobly, will teach us that there is something more important to ourselves even than ourselves, something more important and deserving of attention than one’s own small griefs and own petty woes, the vast and varied drama of History, the boundless realm of the human imagination, and the tragic interests and pathetic struggles of mankind. We need not close our ear to the feminine note, but should not listen to it over much. The masculine note is necessarily dominant in life; and the note that is dominant in life should be dominant in literature, and, most of all, in poetry.

MILTON AND DANTE: A COMPARISON AND A CONTRAST

No celebrations in our time have been more serious, more scholarly, or more impressive, than the various gatherings, held during the year lately come to end, in commemoration of the three hundredth anniversary of the birth of Milton. The earliest was held, with peculiar appropriateness, at Christ College, Cambridge, in the month of June. In the hall of the college was given a dinner, presided over by the Master, who had gathered round him men holding high positions alike at Cambridge and Oxford, and poets, scholars, artists, historians, and essayists of true distinction. On this occasion an admirable eulogium of Milton was pronounced by Mr. Mackail. The dinner was succeeded by a representation of Comus in the theatre of the town, by the students of the University, with all the charm that usually accompanies the efforts of competent amateurs. With the advent of the exact date of the tercentenary the celebrations were many in number and interesting in variety, in which the members of the British Academy took a prominent part. On December 9 a musical celebration was held in the afternoon in the church of St. Mary-le-Bow, at which the Bishop of Ripon delivered an eloquent sermon; and at the same hour the writer of this paper gave a private lecture before the Dante Society, from the notes of which this article is expanded. In the evening he had the honour of attending and responding to the toast of Poetry, proposed by the Italian ambassador, at the banquet given by the Lord Mayor of London at the Mansion House, to the largest and most impressive gathering of men of eminence in letters, the arts, the drama, the law, and the Legislature, that has ever met in that spacious hall of traditionally magnificent hospitality. A week later a performance of Samson Agonistes was given in the Burlington Theatre before a large and representative audience. The more serious section of the daily press, moreover, allotted much space to reports of the celebrations in honour of Milton, the Times maintaining in this respect its best traditions.

No one, therefore, can say that the birth, the poetry and prose, the character and the career and the influence of Milton have not been solemnly celebrated by his countrymen. But it is necessary to add, in the interests of truth, that the celebrations were essentially and exclusively scholarly, and were hardly, if at all, shared in by the nation at large. The intellectual sympathies of the educated were warmly touched, but the heart of the British people was not reached.

Now let us turn – for the subject of this paper is not Milton alone, but Milton and Dante – to the sexcentenary of the birth of Dante in the city of Florence, the month and year of his birth having been May 1265. I had been spending the winter in the City of Flowers, and I could not leave it, in order to journey northward, till after the Dante Commemoration had been held. I shall never forget it. From dawn to dusk the entire Florentine people held joyous festival; and, with the coming of night, not only the entire city, its palaces, its bridges, its Duomo, its Palazzo Vecchio, that noblest symbol of civic liberty, but indeed all its thoroughfares and the banks of its river broke into lovely light produced by millions of little cressets filled with olive oil, and every villa round was similarly illuminated. The pavement of the famous square of the Uffizi Palace was boarded over; and overhead was spread a canvas covering dyed with the three Italian national colours. Thither thronged hundreds of peasant men and women, who danced and made merry till the early hours of the morning. At the Pagliano Theatre were given tableaux vivants representing the most famous episodes in the Divina Commedia, Ristori, Salvini, and Rossi reciting the corresponding passages from that immortal poem.