Classic Poem

The poetry of the age of Wordsworth, we are all agreed, is one of the
glories of our literature. It is surpassed, many would add, by the
poetry of no other period except the Elizabethan. But it has obvious
flaws, of which perhaps we are becoming more and more distinctly
conscious now; and, apart from these definite defects, it also leaves
with us, when we review it, a certain feeling of disappointment. It is
great, we say to ourselves, but why is it not greater still? It shows a
wonderful abundance of genius: why does it not show an equal
accomplishment?


1.

Matthew Arnold, in his essay on The Function of Criticism at the
Present Time, gave an answer to this question. 'It has long seemed to
me,' he wrote, 'that the burst of creative activity in our literature,
through the first quarter of this century, had about it, in fact,
something premature.... And this prematureness comes from its having
proceeded without having its proper data, without sufficient materials
to work with. In other words, the English poetry of the first quarter of
this century, with plenty of energy, plenty of creative force, did not
know enough. This makes Byron so empty of matter, Shelley so incoherent,
Wordsworth even, profound as he is, yet so wanting in completeness and
in variety.' The statement that this poetry 'did not know enough' means,
of course, for Arnold, not that it lacked information, reading, ideas of
a kind, but that it lacked 'criticism.' And this means that it did not
live and move freely in an atmosphere of the best available ideas, of
ideas gained by a free, sincere, and continued effort, in theology,
philosophy, history, science, to see things as they are. In such an
atmosphere Goethe lived. There was not indeed in Goethe's Germany, nor
was there in the England of our poets, the 'national glow of life and
thought' that prevailed in the Athens of Pericles or the England of
Elizabeth. That happiest atmosphere for poetry was wanting in both
countries. But there was for Goethe 'a sort of equivalent for it in the
complete culture and unfettered thinking of a large body of Germans,' a
culture produced by a many-sided learning and a long and widely-combined
critical effort. It was this that our poets lacked.

Now, if this want existed, as Arnold affirms, it may not have had all
the importance he ascribes to it, but considerable importance it must
have had. And as to its existence there can hardly be a doubt. One of
the most striking characteristics of Wordsworth's age is the very
unusual superiority of the imaginative literature to the scientific. I
mean by the 'scientific' literature that of philosophy, theology,
history, politics, economics, not only that of the sciences of Nature,
which for our present purpose are perhaps the least important. In this
kind of literature Wordsworth's age has hardly an author to show who
could for a moment be placed on a level with some five of the poets,
with the novelists Scott and Jane Austen, or with the poetic critics
Lamb, Hazlitt, and Coleridge. It has no writers to compare with Bacon,
Newton, Hume, Gibbon, Johnson, or Burke. It is the time of Paley,
Godwin, Stewart, Bentham, Mitford, Lingard, Coleridge the philosopher
and theologian. These are names worthy of all respect, but they
represent a literature quite definitely of the second rank. And this
great disproportion between the two kinds of literature, we must
observe, is a peculiar phenomenon. If we go back as far as the
Elizabethan age we shall find no parallel to it. The one kind was
doubtless superior to the other in Shakespeare's time, possibly even in
Milton's; but Hooker and Bacon and Taylor and Clarendon and Hobbes are
not separated from the best poets of their day by any startling
difference of quality; while in the later periods, right down to the
age of Wordsworth, the scientific literature quite holds its own, to say
no more, with the imaginative. Nor in the Germany of Wordsworth's own
time is there that gap between the two that we find in England. In
respect of genius the philosophers, for example, though none of them was
the equal of Goethe, were as a body not at all inferior to the poets.
The case of England in Wordsworth's age is anomalous.

This peculiarity must be symptomatic, and it must have been influential.
It confirms Arnold's view that the intellectual atmosphere of the time
was not of the best. If we think of the periodical literature--of the
Quarterly and Edinburgh and Blackwood--we shall be still more
inclined to assent to that view. And when we turn to the poets
themselves, and especially to their prose writings, letters, and
recorded conversation, and even to the critiques of Hazlitt, of Lamb,
and of Coleridge, we cannot reject it. Assuredly we read with
admiration, and the signs of native genius we meet with in abundance--in
greater abundance, I think, than in the poetry and criticism of Germany,
if Goethe is excepted. But the freedom of spirit, the knowledge, the
superiority to prejudice and caprice and fanaticism, the openness to
ideas, the atmosphere that is all about us when we read Lessing, Goethe,
Schiller, Heine, we do not find. Can we imagine any one of those four
either inspired or imprisoned as Shelley was by the doctrines of Godwin?
Could any of them have seen in the French Revolution no more
significance than Scott appears to have detected? How cramped are the
attitudes, sympathetic or antipathetic, of nearly all our poets towards
the Christian religion! Could anything be more borné than Coleridge's
professed reason for not translating Faust? Is it possible that a
German poet with the genius of Byron or Wordsworth could have inhabited
a mental world so small and so tainted with vulgarity as is opened to us
by the brilliant letters of the former, or could have sunk, like the
latter, to suggesting that the cholera was a divine condemnation of
Catholic Emancipation and the Reform Bill?

But if we accept Arnold's statement as to the intellectual atmosphere of
the poetry of Wordsworth's time, a question will remain. Was he right in
regarding this atmosphere as the sole, or even as the chief, cause of
the fact (if it is one) that the poetry does not fully correspond in
greatness with the genius of the poets? And before we come to this
question we must put another. Is the fact really as it has just been
stated? I do not think so. The disappointment that we feel attends, it
seems to me, mainly our reading of the long poems. Reviewing these in
memory, and asking ourselves how many we can unreservedly call 'great,'
we hesitate. Beyond doubt there is great poetry in some of them, fine
poetry in many; but that does not make a great whole. Which of them is
great as a whole? Not the Prelude or the Excursion, still less
Endymion or The Revolt of Islam or Childe Harold, which hardly
pretends to unity. Christabel, the wonderful fragment, is a fragment;
so is Hyperion; Don Juan, also unfinished, becomes more discursive
the further it proceeds, and in spirit is nowhere great. All the
principal poets wrote dramas, or at least dramatic pieces; and some
readers think that in Manfred, and still more certainly in Cain, we
have great poems, while others think this of Prometheus Unbound and
The Cenci. But if as to one or more of these we assent, is our
judgment quite confident, and can we say that any of them satisfy us,
like some works of earlier times? We are thus satisfied, it seems to me,
only when we come to poems of smaller dimensions, like The Ancient
Mariner, or The Eve of Saint Agnes, or Adonaïs, or The Vision of
Judgment, or when we read the lyrics. To save time I will confine
myself to the latter.

Within this sphere we have no longer that impression of genius which
fails to reach full accomplishment. I would go further. No poet, of
course, of Wordsworth's age is the equal of Shakespeare or of Milton;
and there are certain qualities, too, of lyrical verse in which the
times of Shakespeare and of Milton are superior to that of Wordsworth.
But if we take the better part of the lyrical poetry of these three
periods in the mass, or again in a representative selection, it will not
be the latest period, I think, that need fear the comparison. In the
original edition of the Golden Treasury, Book I. (Wyatt to
Shakespeare) occupies forty pages; Book II. (the rest of the seventeenth
century) sixty-five; Book IV., which covers the very much shorter
period from Wordsworth to Hood, close on a hundred and forty. 'Book
I.,' perhaps most of us would say, 'should be longer, and Book IV. a
good deal shorter: some third-rate pieces are included in it, and
Wordsworth is over-represented. And the Elizabethan poems are mostly
quite short, while the Nineteenth Century poets shine equally in the
longer kinds of lyric. And Mr. Palgrave excluded the old ballads, but
admitted poems like Coleridge's Love and Wordsworth's Ruth (seven
whole pages). And in any case we cannot judge by mere quantity.' No; but
still quantity must count for something, and the Golden Treasury is a
volume excellent in selection, arrangement, and taste. It does, I think,
leave the impression that the age of Wordsworth was our greatest period
in lyrical poetry. And if Book I. were swelled to the dimensions of Book
IV., this impression would not be materially altered; it might even be
deepened. For the change would force into notice the comparative
monotony of the themes of the earlier poetry, and the immensely wider
range of the thought and emotion that attain expression in the later. It
might also convince us that, on the whole, this more varied material is
treated with a greater intensity of feeling, though on this point it is
difficult to be sure, since we recognise what may be called the
conventions of an earlier age, and are perhaps a little blind to those
of a time near our own.

Now the eminence of Wordsworth's age in lyrical poetry, even if it is
not also a pre-eminence, is a significant fact. It may mean that the
whole poetic spirit of the time was lyrical in tendency; and this may
indirectly be a cause of that sense of disappointment which mingles with
our admiration of the long poems. I will call attention, therefore, to
two or three allied facts. (1) The longer poems of Campbell are already
dead; he survives only in lyrics. This is also true of Moore. In spite
of fine passages (and the battle in Marmion is in certain qualities
superior to anything else of the time) Scott's longer poems cannot be
classed with the best contemporary poetry; but in some of his ballads
and songs he attains that rank. (2) Again, much of the most famous
narrative poetry is semi-lyrical in form, as a moment's thought of
Scott, Byron, and Coleridge will show. Some of it (for instance, several
of Byron's tales, or Wordsworth's White Doe of Rylstone) is strongly
tinged with the lyrical spirit. The centre of interest is inward. It is
an interest in emotion, thought, will, rather than in scenes, events,
actions, which express and re-act on emotions, thoughts, will. It would
hardly be going too far to say that in the most characteristic narrative
poetry the balance of outward and inward is rarely attained. (3) The
same tendencies are visible in much of the dramatic writing. Byron's
regular dramas, for instance, if they ever lived, are almost forgotten;
but Heaven and Earth, which is still alive, is largely composed of
lyrics, and the first two acts of Manfred are full of them.
Prometheus Unbound is called 'a lyrical drama.' Though it has some
very fine and some very beautiful blank verse passages (usually
undramatic), its lyrics are its glory; and this is even more the case
with Hellas. It would be untrue to say that the comparative failure of
most of the dramas of the time is principally due to the lyrical spirit,
but many of them show it. (4) The strength of this spirit may be
illustrated lastly by a curious fact. The ode is one of the longest and
most ambitious forms of lyric, and some of the most famous poems of
Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats are odes. But the greatest of the
lyrists, who wrote the Odes to Liberty and Naples and the West Wind,
found the limits even of the ode too narrow for his 'flight of fire.' If
Lycidas and L'Allegro and Spenser's Epithalamion are lyrical
poems, and if we are not arbitrarily to determine that nothing shall be
called lyrical which exceeds a certain length, Adonaïs will be a
lyrical elegy in fifty-five Spenserian stanzas, and the Lines written
among the Euganean Hills and Epipsychidion will be lyrics consisting
respectively of 370 and 600 lines.

It will however be agreed that in general a lyrical poem may be called
short as compared with a narrative or drama. It is usual, further, to
say that lyrical poetry is 'subjective,' since, instead of telling or
representing a story of people, actions, and events, it expresses the
thoughts and feelings of the poet himself. This statement is ambiguous
and in other ways defective; but it will be admitted to have a basis in
fact. It may be suggested, then, that the excellence of the lyrical
poetry of Wordsworth's time, and the imperfection of the long narratives
and dramas, may have a common origin. Just as it was most natural to
Homer or to Shakespeare to express the imaginative substance of his mind
in the 'objective' shape of a world of persons and actions ostensibly
severed from his own thoughts and feelings, so, perhaps, for some reason
or reasons, it was most natural to the best poets of this later time to
express that substance in the shape of impassioned reflections,
aspirations, prophecies, laments, outcries of joy, murmurings of peace.
The matter of these might, in another sense of the word, be 'objective'
enough, a matter of general human interest, not personal in any
exclusive way; but it appeared in the form of the poet's thought and
feeling. Just because he most easily expressed it thus, he succeeded
less completely when he attempted the more objective form of utterance;
and for the same reason it was especially important that he should be
surrounded and penetrated by an atmosphere of wide, deep, and liberal
'criticism.' For he not only lived among ideas; he expressed ideas, and
expressed them as ideas.

These suggestions seem to be supported by other phenomena of the poetry.
The 'subjective' spirit extends, we saw, into many of the longer poems.
This is obvious when it can plausibly be said, as in Byron's case, that
the poet's one hero is himself. It appears in another way when the poem,
through its story or stories, displays the poet's favourite ideas and
beliefs. The Excursion does this; most of Shelley's longer poems do
it. And the strength of this tendency may be seen in an apparent
contradiction. One of the marks of the Romantic Revival is a disposition
to substitute the more concrete and vivid forms of narrative and drama
for the eighteenth century form of satiric or so-called didactic
reflection. Yet most of the greater poets, especially in their
characteristic beginnings, show a strong tendency to reflective verse;
Coleridge, for example, in Religious Musings, Byron in the first two
cantos of Childe Harold, Shelley in Queen Mab, and Keats in Sleep
and Poetry. These are not, like the Pleasures of Memory and
Pleasures of Hope, continuations of the traditional style; they are
thoroughly Romantic; and yet they are reflective. Scott, indeed, goes
straight to the objective forms; but then Scott, for good and evil, was
little affected by the spiritual upheaval of his time. Those who were
deeply affected by it, directly or indirectly, had their minds full of
theoretic ideas. They were groping after, or were already inflamed by,
some explicit view of life, and of life seen in relation to an ideal
which it revealed or contradicted. And this view of life, at least at
first, pressed for utterance in a more or less abstract shape, or
became a sort of soul or second meaning within those appearances of
nature, or actions of men, or figures and fantasies of youthful
imagination, which formed the ostensible subj