Part 8 (1/2)
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain, That has been, and may be again?
Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang As 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.
This is exquisite; and of the sort of exquisiteness that leads one, in private, and in uncritical colloquies, to fall, as the phrase runs, into ecstasies. But can it, with any regard to accuracy of speech, be described as ”powerful” work? We submit that it cannot. _Lear_ is powerful. The first six books of _Paradise Lost_ are powerful. The first four cantos of _Don Juan_ are powerful. The _Ode on Intimations of Immortality_ is powerful. But unless we are to lose ourselves in a labyrinth of critical confusion, we must no more allege or allow that _The Solitary Reaper_ is powerful, than we can affirm that _Where the Bee Sucks_ is powerful, that Milton's sonnet, _To the Nightingale_ is powerful, or that Byron's _She Walks in Beauty like the Night_ is powerful. They are all very beautiful; but that is another matter, and it will not do to confound totally different things.
How many lyrics, as perfect as the one we have quoted, has Wordsworth written? We can count but nine; and the most liberal computation could not extend them beyond twelve. To these would have to be added perhaps twice as many, very inferior to these, but still very beautiful, a certain number, but a very limited number, of first-rate sonnets, the Odes we have referred to, and detached lines and pa.s.sages from other poems, notably the pa.s.sage in the poem _On Revisiting Tintern Abbey_. The result would be about a third of the amount we ourselves should altogether extract from Wordsworth, and of which alone it could justly be said that some of it was powerful, and all of it was very beautiful work.
This is what, we venture to a.s.sert, remains, after rigid scrutiny, of ”the ampler body of powerful work” which Wordsworth has given us. These are the compositions which, according to Mr. Arnold, ”in real poetical achievement ... in power, in interest, in the qualities which give enduring freshness,” establish Wordsworth's superiority.
Now can this claim possibly be allowed, unless, as we have said, all previous canons of criticism, and all previous estimates of poetry are to be cast to the winds? If it is to be allowed, then schylus, Euripides, Sophocles, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, must come down from their pedestals, and be regarded by us with very different eyes from those with which we have hitherto scanned them. For what are the marks, what the qualities, which have distinguished these poets above their fellows, and by reason of which the world has extolled their genius? It is not merely for poetic diction, for tenderness of sentiment, for elevation of feeling, for apt simile, appropriate metaphor, illuminating imagery, and the play of fancy as exhibited in subordinate detail, that we estimate them as we do. Neither is it, as we have already pointed out, but as we must repeat, for detached pa.s.sages of sublimity, nor yet for short poems of exquisite beauty, that they have been a.s.signed the rank they occupy. They occupy that rank by reason of their great conceptions, by reason of their capacity to project long and comparatively complex poems dedicated to a lofty theme, and to conduct these through all their intricate windings from first to last, by employing all the arts, all the expedients, all the resources of Imagination, chief among which are Action, Invention, and Situation. To these, of course, must be added copious, elastic, and dignified language, melody, pathos, and just imagery; for, without these, a man is not a poet at all. These are the very instruments of his craft, the very credentials of his profession; and if he has these, no one will challenge his right to be called a poet. But, unless the higher qualities, the greater credentials are also his, he must be content with an inferior place, no matter how many beautiful or sublime things he may have said, and no matter how excellent the doctrines he may have taught. He has failed to show his mastery over the great materials, his familiarity with the great purposes, of his art. Wordsworth projected two long poems, _The Prelude_ and _The Excursion_; and, practically, these two are one. They are of portentous length; and that is their only claim to be considered great. They have no Action, no Situation, no Invention, no Characters.
They consist of pages upon pages, nay, of books upon books, of interminable talk, in which in reality Wordsworth himself is the only talker. Little of the talk is poetry. Much of it is, as Mr. Arnold says, ”abstract verbiage.” But we need not pursue the theme. Mr. Arnold candidly confesses that when Jeffrey said of _The Excursion_, ”this will never do,”
he was quite right.
Unquestionably, he was right; and he would still have been right, even had _The Excursion_ contained a far greater number of pa.s.sages of true poetry than it does. It will be an evil day for poetry, and for the readers of poetry, if it ever comes to be allowed that the sole or the main function of poetry is to _talk about_ things, and that a man can get himself accepted as a great poet by pursuing this course. Unfortunately, it was Wordsworth's theory that he could. It would be fatal if critics became of the same opinion. It is their bounden duty, on the contrary, to protest against such a theory. Wordsworth sets it down, in black and white, both in prose and verse, over and over again:
O Reader! had you in your mind Such stores as silent thought can bring, O gentle Reader! you will find A 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.
Here is the theory full-blown. The poet is not to tell the tale, the reader is to make it one, by thinking; and if he only thinks enough, he will find a tale in everything! Could anything be more grotesque, or more utterly opposed to any sane canon of the function of an author, and his relation to his readers? It is the business of the poet to tell the tale, and thereby to set the reader thinking; an altogether different process from the one here suggested. ”Wordsworthians against whom we must be upon our guard,” often cite the following stanza with admiration:
The moving accident is not my trade; To freeze the blood I have no ready arts: 'Tis my delight, alone in summer shade, To pipe a simple song for thinking hearts!
Have they forgotten the ”moving accidents by flood and field,” or do they not know whose trade it was to unfold a tale that
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood?
Piping a simple song for thinking hearts, is all very well. But it will not do to say, or to suggest, or to allow it to be inferred, that doing this makes a man as great a poet as doing what Wordsworth did not and plainly could not do. In the last book of _The Excursion_, he says:
Life, death, eternity! momentous themes Are they--and might demand a seraph's tongue, Were they not equal to their own support; And therefore no incompetence of mine Could do them wrong....
Ye wished for art and circ.u.mstance, that make The individual known and understood; And such as my best judgment could select From what the place afforded, could be given.
But _no_ subject is equal to its own support, where the poet is concerned, however it may be with the preacher and the moralist. The poet himself must support it. We _do_ wish for act and circ.u.mstance, in poetry; and when Wordsworth tells us that he has, in _The Excursion_, given us the best of these he can, we can only answer that this best is not enough, but wholly insufficient and inadequate.
That Mr. Arnold would deny all this, if put to him plainly, we do not believe. It is all the more to be regretted that he should have expressed himself in such a manner as to encourage others in forming judgments and holding opinions which imply affirmation to the contrary. When he quotes from Wordsworth the following lines,
Of truth, of grandeur, beauty, love, and hope, And melancholy fear subdued by faith, Of blessd consolation, in distress, Of moral strength and intellectual power, Of joy in widest commonalty spread,
and adds that ”here we have a poet intent on the best and master thing,”
and wishes us to infer Wordsworth's superiority from that fact, does he not perceive that he is not only misleading his readers, but flagrantly contradicting what he himself avers in the selfsame essay? Being ”intent”
on these subjects is not enough. A further question remains to be answered; viz. how has the poet dealt with them? Nowhere has Wordsworth dealt with them so completely, so ambitiously, so exhaustively, as in _The Excursion_. Yet what does Mr. Arnold say of it? He says that _The Excursion_ can never be a satisfactory work to the disinterested lover of poetry, and that much of it is ”a tissue of elevated but abstract verbiage, alien to the very nature of poetry.” It is plain, therefore, that being ”intent” even on ”the best and master thing” does not suffice.
The pa.s.sage Mr. Arnold quotes, leaving the incautious reader to infer that it _does_ suffice, is merely the
Life, death, eternity! momentous themes,
and their being ”equal to their own support” over again. Wordsworth is perpetually telling us that his subject is Man, and wishes us to infer that, the subject being great, what is written on it must be great.
Unfortunately, Man, with him, is like Love with the Scotch girl; it is Man ”in the abstract.” Shakespeare also treats of Man; but he treats of him _in men_, and Wordsworth does not. In fact, he communes. As M. Scherer says, he is a Solitary, a Contemplative. In a word, he is essentially, and before all things a subjective poet, and reader after reader has complained, and critic after critic has confessed, that to be subjective, not objective, to reflect instead of to act, to think rather than to narrate, is the bane of modern poetry, and the conclusive mark of the inferiority of so large a proportion of it.
Yet, this notwithstanding, Mr. Arnold tells us that Wordsworth ”deals with that in which life really consists”; and, not content with this, he actually goes on to declare that ”Wordsworth deals with more of life than they do”;--”they” being every English poet since Milton, and indeed every poet of every tongue since Milton, with the exception of Goethe! We can only say that such an a.s.sertion is astounding; the most startling paradox, indeed, we ever encountered in a criticism by a critic of authority. To argue upon it against Mr. Arnold is, happily, superfluous; for Mr. Arnold has antic.i.p.ated and categorically answered his own paradox. Let him open his own poems; let him turn to _Stanzas In Memory Of Obermann_, and let him read on until he comes to the following couplet:
But Wordsworth's eyes avert their ken, From half of human fate.