Part 24 (2/2)
TO THE SAME
We parted on the mountains, as two streams From one clear spring pursue their several ways; And thy fleet course hath been through many a maze, In foreign lands, where silvery Padus gleams To that delicious sky, whose glowing beams Brightened the tresses that old Poets praise; Where Petrarch's patient love, and artful lays, And Ariosto's song of many themes, Moved the soft air. But I, a lazy brook, As close pent up within my native dell, Have crept along from nook to shady nook, Where flowrets blow, and whispering Naiads dwell.
Yet now we meet, that parted were so wide, O'er rough and smooth to travel side by side.
The contrast of instructive and enviable locomotion with refining but instructive meditation is not special and peculiar to these two, but general and universal. It was set down by Hartley Coleridge because he was the most meditative and refining of men.
What sort of literatesque types are fit to be described in the sort of literature called poetry, is a matter on which much might be written.
Mr. Arnold, some years since, put forth a theory that the art of poetry could only delineate _great actions_. But though, rightly interpreted and understood--using the word action so as to include high and sound activity in contemplation--this definition may suit the highest poetry, it certainly cannot be stretched to include many inferior sorts and even many good sorts. n.o.body in their senses would describe Gray's _Elegy_ as the delineation of a 'great action'; some kinds of mental contemplation may be energetic enough to deserve this name, but Gray would have been frightened at the very word. He loved scholar-like calm and quiet inaction; his very greatness depended on his _not_ acting, on his 'wise pa.s.siveness,' on his indulging the grave idleness which so well appreciates so much of human life. But the best answer--the _reductio ad absurdum_--of Mr. Arnold's doctrine, is the mutilation which it has caused him to make of his own writings.
It has forbidden him, he tells us, to reprint _Empedocles_--a poem undoubtedly containing defects and even excesses, but containing also these lines:
And yet what days were those, Parmenides!
When we were young, when we could number friends In all the Italian cities like ourselves, When with elated hearts we join'd your train, Ye Sun-born virgins! on the road of Truth.
Then we could still enjoy, then neither thought Nor outward things were clos'd and dead to us, But we receiv'd the shock of mighty thoughts On simple minds with a pure natural joy; And if the sacred load oppress'd our brain, We had the power to feel the pressure eas'd.
The brow unbound, the thoughts flow free again, In the delightful commerce of the world.
We had not lost our balance then, nor grown Thought's slaves and dead to every natural joy.
The smallest thing could give us pleasure then-- The sports of the country people; A flute note from the woods; Sunset over the sea: Seed-time and harvest; The reapers in the corn; The vinedresser in his vineyard; The village-girl at her wheel.
Fullness of life and power of feeling, ye Are for the happy, for the souls at ease, Who dwell on a firm basis of content.
But he who has outliv'd his prosperous days, But he, whose youth fell on a different world From that on which his exil'd age is thrown; Whose mind was fed on other food, was train'd By other rules than are in vogue to-day; Whose habit of thought is fix'd, who will not change, But in a world he loves not must subsist In ceaseless opposition, be the guard Of his own breast, fetter'd to what he guards, That the world win no mastery over him; Who has no friend, no fellow left, not one; Who has no minute's breathing s.p.a.ce allow'd To nurse his dwindling faculty of joy:-- Joy and the outward world must die to him As they are dead to me.
What freak of criticism can induce a man who has written such poetry as this, to discard it, and say it is not poetry? Mr. Arnold is privileged to speak of his own poems, but no other critic could speak so and not be laughed at.
We are disposed to believe that no very sharp definition can be given--at least in the present state of the critical art--of the boundary line between poetry and other sorts of imaginative delineation. Between the undoubted dominions of the two kinds there is a debateable land; everybody is agreed that the _Oedipus at Colonus_ _is_ poetry: every one is agreed that the wonderful appearance of Mrs.
Veal is _not_ poetry. But the exact line which separates grave novels in verse like _Aylmer's Field_ or _Enoch Arden_, from grave novels not in verse like _Silas Marner_ or _Adam Bede_, we own we cannot draw with any confidence. Nor, perhaps, is it very important; whether a narrative is thrown into verse or not certainly depends in part on the taste of the age, and in part on its mechanical helps. Verse is the only mechanical help to the memory in rude times, and there is little writing till a cheap something is found to write upon, and a cheap something to write with. Poetry--verse at least--is the literature of _all work_ in early ages; it is only later ages which write in what _they_ think a natural and simple prose. There are other casual influences in the matter too; but they are not material now. We need only say here that poetry, because it has a more marked rhythm than prose, must be more intense in meaning and more concise in style than prose. People expect a 'marked rhythm' to imply something worth marking; if it fails to do so they are disappointed. They are displeased at the visible waste of a powerful instrument; they call it 'doggerel,' and rightly call it, for the metrical expression of full thought and eager feeling--the burst of metre--incident to high imagination, should not be wasted on petty matters which prose does as well,--which it does better--which it suits by its very limpness and weakness, whose small changes it follows more easily, and to whose lowest details it can fully and without effort degrade itself. Verse, too, should be _more concise_, for long-continued rhythm tends to jade the mind, just as brief rhythm tends to attract the attention. Poetry should be memorable and emphatic, intense, and _soon over_.
The great divisions of poetry, and of all other literary art, arise from the different modes in which these _types_--these characteristic men, these characteristic feelings--may be variously described. There are three princ.i.p.al modes which we shall attempt to describe--the _pure_, which is sometimes, but not very wisely, called the cla.s.sical; the _ornate_, which is also unwisely called romantic; and the _grotesque_, which might be called the mediaeval. We will describe the nature of these a little. Criticism we know must be brief--not, like poetry, because its charm is too intense to be sustained--but on the contrary, because its interest is too weak to be prolonged; but elementary criticism, if an evil, is a necessary evil; a little while spent among the simple principles of art is the first condition, the absolute pre-requisite, for surely apprehending and wisely judging the complete embodiments and miscellaneous forms of actual literature.
The definition of _pure_ literature is that it describes the type in its simplicity, we mean, with the exact amount of accessory circ.u.mstance which is necessary to bring it before the mind in finished perfection, and _no more_ than that amount. The _type_ needs some accessories from its nature--a picturesque landscape does not consist wholly of picturesque features. There is a setting of surroundings--as the Americans would say, of _fixings_--without which the reality is not itself. By a traditional mode of speech, as soon as we see a picture in which a complete effect is produced by detail so rare and so harmonized as to escape us, we say 'how cla.s.sical'. The whole which is to be seen appears at once and through the detail, but the detail itself is not seen: we do not think of that which gives us the idea; we are absorbed in the idea itself. Just so in literature the pure art is that which works with the fewest strokes; the fewest, that is, for its purpose, for its aim is to call up and bring home to men an idea, a form, a character, and if that idea be twisted, that form be involved, that character perplexed, many strokes of literary art will be needful. Pure art does not mutilate its object: it represents it as fully as is possible with the slightest effort which is possible: it shrinks from no needful circ.u.mstances, as little as it inserts any which are needless. The precise peculiarity is not merely that no incidental circ.u.mstance is inserted which does not tell on the main design: no art is fit to be called _art_ which permits a stroke to be put in without an object; but that only the minimum of such circ.u.mstance is inserted at all. The form is sometimes said to be bare, the accessories are sometimes said to be invisible, because the appendages are so choice that the shape only is perceived.
The English literature undoubtedly contains much impure literature; impure in its style if not in its meaning: but it also contains one great, one nearly perfect, model of the pure style in the literary expression of typical _sentiment_; and one not perfect, but gigantic and close approximation to perfection in the pure delineation of objective character. Wordsworth, perhaps, comes as near to choice purity of style in sentiment as is possible; Milton, with exceptions and conditions to be explained, approaches perfection by the strenuous purity with which he depicts character.
A wit once said, that '_pretty_ women had more features than _beautiful_ women', and though the expression may be criticized, the meaning is correct. Pretty women seem to have a great number of attractive points, each of which attracts your attention, and each one of which you remember afterwards; yet these points have not _grown together_, their features have not linked themselves into a single inseparable whole. But a beautiful woman is a whole as she is; you no more take her to pieces than a Greek statue; she is not an aggregate of divisible charms, she is a charm in herself. Such ever is the dividing test of pure art; if you catch yourself admiring its details, it is defective; you ought to think of it as a single whole which you must remember, which you must admire, which somehow subdues you while you admire it, which is a 'possession' to you 'for ever'.
Of course no individual poem embodies this ideal perfectly; of course every human word and phrase has its imperfections, and if we choose an instance to ill.u.s.trate that ideal, the instance has scarcely a fair chance. By contrasting it with the ideal we suggest its imperfections; by protruding it as an example, we turn on its defectiveness the microscope of criticism. Yet these two sonnets of Wordsworth may be fitly read in this place, not because they are quite without faults, or because they are the very best examples of their kind of style; but because they are _luminous_ examples; the compactness of the sonnet and the gravity of the sentiment, hedging in the thoughts, restraining the fancy, and helping to maintain a singleness of expression:
THE TROSACHS.
There's not a nook within this solemn Pa.s.s, But were an apt Confessional for one Taught by his summer spent; his autumn gone, That Life is but a tale of morning gra.s.s Withered at eve. From scenes of art which chase That thought away, turn, and with watchful eyes Feed it 'mid Nature's old felicities, Rocks, rivers, and smooth lakes more clear than gla.s.s Untouched, unbreathed upon. Thrice happy guest, If from a golden perch of aspen spray (October's workmans.h.i.+p to rival May) The pensive warbler of the ruddy breast That moral teaches by a heaven-taught lay, Lulling the year, with all its cares, to rest!
COMPOSED UPON WESTMINSTER BRIDGE, SEPT. 3, 1802
Earth has not anything to show more fair: Dull would he be of soul who could pa.s.s by A sight so touching in its majesty: This city now doth, like a garment, wear The beauty of the morning; silent, bare.
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