Part 4 (1/2)
In poetry the French Parna.s.sians created the most brilliant poetry that has, since Milton, been built upon erudition and impeccable art. Their leader, Leconte de Lisle, in the preface of his _Poemes antiques_ (1853), scornfully dismissed Romanticism as a second-hand, incoherent, and hybrid art, compounded of German mysticism, reverie, and Byron's stormy egoism. Sully Prudhomme addressed a sterner criticism to the shade of Alfred de Musset--the Oscar Wilde of the later Romantics[6]--who had never known the stress of thought, and had filled his poetry with light love and laughter and voluptuous despairs; the new poets were to be no such gay triflers, but workers at a forge, beating the glowing metal into shape, and singing as they toiled.[7] Carducci, too, derisively contrasts the 'moonlight' of Romanticism--cold and infructuous beams, proper for Gothic ruins and graveyards--with the benignant and fertilizing suns.h.i.+ne he sought to restore; for him, too, the poet is no indolent caroller, and no gardener to grow fragrant flowers for ladies, but a forge-worker with muscles of steel.[8] Among us, as usual, the divergence is less sharply marked; but when Browning calls Byron a 'flat fish', and Arnold sees the poet of _Prometheus_ appropriately pinnacled in the 'intense inane', they are expressing a kindred repugnance to a poetry wanting in intellectual substance and in clear-cut form.
If we turn from the negations of the anti-romantic revolt to consider what it actually sought and achieved in poetry, we find that its positive ideals, too, without being derived from science, reflect the temper of a scientific time. Thus the supreme gift of all the greater poets of this group was a superb vision of beauty, and of beauty--_pace_ Hogarth--there is no science. But their view of beauty was partly limited, partly fertilized and enriched, by the sources they discovered and the conditions they imposed, and both the discoveries and the limitations added something to the traditions and resources of poetry.
Thus:
(1) They exploited the aesthetic values to be had by knowledge. They pursued erudition and built their poetry upon erudition, not in the didactic way of the Augustans, but as a mine of poetic material and suggestion. Far more truly than Wordsworth's this poetry could claim to be the impa.s.sioned expression which is in the face of science; for Wordsworth's knowledge is a mystic insight wholly estranged from erudition; his celandine, his White Doe, belong to no fauna or flora.
When Leconte de Lisle, on the other hand, paints the albatross of the southern sea or the condor of the Andes, the eye of a pa.s.sionate explorer and observer has gone to the making of their exotic sublimity.
The strange regions of humanity, too, newly disclosed by comparative religion and mythology, he explores with cosmopolitan impartiality and imaginative penetration; carving, as in marble, the tragedy of Hjalmar's heart and Angentyr's sword, of Cain's doom, and Erinnyes never, like those of Aeschylus, appeased. The Romantics had loved to play with exotic suggestions; but the East of Hugo's _Orientales_ or Moore's _Lalla Rookh_ is merely a veneer; the poet of _Qain_ has heard the wild a.s.ses cry and seen the Syrian sun descend into the golden foam.
In the three commanding poets of our English mid-century, learning becomes no less evidently poetry's honoured and indispensable ally.
Tennyson studies nature like a naturalist, not like a mystic, and finds felicities of phrase poised, as it were, upon delicate observation. Man, too, in Browning, loses the vague aureole of Sh.e.l.leyan humanity, and becomes the Italian of the Renascence or the Arab doctor or the German musician, all alive but in their habits as they lived, and fas.h.i.+oned in a brain fed, like no other, on the Book of the histories of Souls.
Matthew Arnold more distinctively than either, and both for better and for worse, was the scholar-poet; among other things he was, with Heredia and Carducci, a master of the poetry of critical portraiture, which focusses in a few lines (_Sophocles_, _Rahel_, _Heine_, _Obermann Once More_) the meaning of a great career or of a complex age.
(2) In the elaboration of their vision of beauty from these enlarged sources, Leconte de Lisle and his followers demanded an impeccable artistry. 'A great poet', he said, 'and a flawless artist are convertible terms.' The Parna.s.sian precision rested on the postulate that, with sufficient resources of vocabulary and phrase, everything can be adequately expressed, the a.n.a.logue of the contemporary scientific conviction that, with sufficient resources of experiment and calculation, everything can be exhaustively explained. The pursuit of an objective calm, the repudiation of missionary ardour, of personal emotion, of the _cri du coeur_, of individual originality, involved the surrender of some of the glories of spontaneous song, but opened the way, for consummate artists such as these, to a profusion of undiscovered beauty, and to a peculiar grandeur not to be attained by the egoist. Leconte's temperament leads him to subjects which are already instinct with tragedy and thus in his hands a.s.sume this grandeur without effort. The power of sheer style to enn.o.ble is better seen in Sully Prudhomme's _tours de force_ of philosophic poetry--when he unfolds his ideas upon 'Justice' or 'Happiness', for instance, under the form of a debate where masterly resources of phrase and image are compelled to the service of a rigorous logic; or in the brief cameo-like pieces on 'Memory', 'Habit', 'Forms', and similar unpromising abstractions, most nearly paralleled in English by the quatrains of Mr.
William Watson. But the cameo comparison is still more aptly applied to the marvellously-chiselled sonnets of Heredia--monuments of a moment, as sculpture habitually is, but reaching out, as the finest sculpture does, to invisible horizons, and to the before and after--the old wooden guardian-G.o.d recalling his former career as a scarlet figure-head laughing at the laughter or fury of the waves; Antony seeing the flying s.h.i.+ps of Actium mirrored in the traitorous azure of Cleopatra's eyes.
In Italy the ideal of an austere simplicity and reserve, resting as it did on the immense prestige of Leopardi, a.s.serted itself even in the naturally exuberant and impetuous genius of Carducci. Without it we should not have had those reticences of an abounding nature, those economies of a spendthrift, which make him one of the first poets of the sonnet in the land of its origin, and one of the greatest writers of Odes among the 'barbarians'. With reason he declared in 1891, when most of his poetry had been written, that 'all the apparent contradictions in my work are resolved by the triple formula: in politics Italy before all, in aesthetics cla.s.sical poetry before all, in practice, frankness and force before all'. His two chief disciples, D'Annunzio and Pascoli, ant.i.thetical in almost all points, may be said to have divided his inheritance in this; Pascoli's Vergilian economy contrasting with the exuberance of D'Annunzio somewhat as with us the cla.s.sicism of the present poet-laureate with that of Swinburne. In Germany the Parna.s.sian reserve, concentration, and aristocratic exclusiveness was to reappear in the lyrical group of Stefan Georg.
(3) Finally, the Parna.s.sian poetry, like most contemporary science, was in varying degrees detached from and hostile to religion, and found some of its most vibrating notes in contemplating its empty universe. Leconte de Lisle offers the Stoic the last mournful joy of 'a heart seven-times steeped in the divine nothingness',[9] or calls him to 'that city of silence, the sepulchre of the vanished G.o.ds, the human heart, seat of dreams, where eternally ferments and perishes the illusory universe'.[10] Here, too, Leopardi had antic.i.p.ated him.
In the ebullient genius of Carducci and Swinburne this lofty disdain for theological illusions pa.s.ses into the fierce derision of the Ode to Satan and the militant paganism of the Sonnet to Luther, and the _Hymn to Man_. In Matthew Arnold it became a half-wistful resignation, the pensive retrospect of the Greek 'thinking of his own G.o.ds beside a fallen runic stone', or listening to the 'melancholy long withdrawing roar' of the tide of faith 'down the vast edges drear and naked s.h.i.+ngles of the world'; while in James Thomson resignation pa.s.sed into the unrelieved pessimism of the _City of Dreadful Night_. In all these poets, what was of moment for poetry was not, of course, the anti-theological or anti-clerical sentiment which marks them all, but the notes of sombre and terrible beauty which the contemplation of the pa.s.sing of the G.o.ds, and of man's faith in them, elicits from their art.
Yet the supreme figure, not only among those who share in the anti-Romantic reaction but among all the European poets of his time, was one who had in the heyday of youth led the Romantic vanguard--Victor Hugo. Leconte de Lisle never ceased to own him his master, and Hugo's genius had since his exile, in 1851, entered upon a phase in which a poetry such as the Parna.s.sian sought--objective, reticent, impersonal, technically consummate--was at least one of the strings of his many-chorded lyre. Three magnificent works--the very crown and flower of Hugo's production--belong to this decade, 1850-60,--the _Chatiments_, _Contemplations_, and _Legende des Siecles_. I said advisedly, one string in his lyre. Objective reticence is certainly not the virtue of the terrible indictment of 'Napoleon the Little'. On the other hand, the greatest qualities of Parna.s.sian poetry were exemplified in many splendid pieces of the other two works, together with a large benignity which their austere Stoicism rarely permits, and I shall take as ill.u.s.tration of the finest achievement of poetry in this whole first phase the closing stanzas of his famous _Boaz Endormi_ in the _Legende_, whose beauty even translation cannot wholly disguise. Our decasyllable is subst.i.tuted for the Alexandrine.[11]
'While thus he slumbered, Ruth, a Moabite, Lay at the feet of Boaz, her breast bare, Waiting, she knew not when, she knew not where, The sudden mystery of wakening light.
Boaz knew not that there a woman lay, Nor Ruth what G.o.d desired of her could tell; Fresh rose the perfume of the asphodel, And tender breathed the dusk on Galgala.
Nuptial, august, and solemn was the night, Angels no doubt were pa.s.sing on the wing, For now and then there floated glimmering As it might be an azure plume in flight.
The low breathing of Boaz mingled there With the soft murmur of the mossy rills.
It was the month when earth is debonnaire; The lilies were in flower upon the hills.
Night compa.s.sed Boaz' slumber and Ruth's dreams, The sheep-bells vaguely tinkled far and near; Infinite love breathed from the starry sphere; 'Twas the still hour when lions seek the streams.
Ur and Jerimedeth were all at rest; The stars enamelled the blue vault of sky; Amid those flowers of darkness in the west The crescent shone; and with half open eye
Ruth wondered, moveless, in her veils concealed, What heavenly reaper, when the day was done And harvest gathered in, had idly thrown That golden sickle on the starry field.'
II. DREAM AND SYMBOL
The rise of French symbolism towards the end of the 'seventies was a symptom of a changed temper of thought and feeling traceable in some degree throughout civilized Europe. Roughly, it marked the pa.s.sing of the confident and rather superficial security of the 'fifties into a vague unrest, a kind of troubled awe. As if existence altogether was a bigger, more mysterious, and intractable thing than was a.s.sumed, not so easily to be captured in the formulas of triumphant science, or mirrored and a.n.a.lysed by the most consummate literary art.
Political and social conditions contributed to the change. France stood on the morrow of a shattering catastrophe. The complacency of mid-Victorian England began to be disturbed by menaces from the workshops of industry. And it was precisely in triumphant Germany herself that revolutionary Socialism found, in Karl Marx, its first organizing mind and authoritative exponent. The millennium was not so near as it had seemed; the problems of society, instead of having been solved once for all, were only, it appeared, just coming into view.
In the secluded workshops of Thought, subtler changes were silently going on. The dazzling triumphs of physical science, which had led poetry itself to emulate the marble impa.s.sivity of the scientific temper, were undiminished; but they were seen in a new perspective, their authority ceased to be exclusive, the focus of interest was slowly s.h.i.+fting from the physical to the psychical world. Lange, writing the history of _Materialism_ in 1874, virtually performed its obsequies; and Tyndall's brilliant effort, in 1871, to equip primordial Matter with the 'promise and the potency' of mind, unconsciously confessed that its cause was lost. Psychology, after Fechner, steadily advanced in prestige and importance from the outlying circ.u.mference of the sciences to their very centre and core.
But it was not merely particular doctrines that lost ground; the scope and validity of scientific method itself began to be questioned. In the most varied fields of thought there set in that 'idealistic reaction against science' which has been described in one of the most penetrating books of our time. Most significant of all, science itself, in the person of Mach, and Pearson, has abandoned the claim to do more than provide descriptive formulas for phenomena the real nature of which is utterly beyond its power to discover.
Of this changed outlook the growth of Symbolism is the most significant literary expression. It was not confined to France, or to poetry. We know how the drama of Ibsen became charged with ulterior meanings as the fiery iconoclast pa.s.sed into the poet of insoluble and ineluctable doubt. But by the French symbolists it was pursued as a creed, as a religion. If the dominant poetry of the third quarter of the century reflected the prestige of science, the dominant poetry of the fourth reflected the idealistic reactions against it, and Villiers de l'Ile Adam, its founder, came forward proclaiming that 'Science was bankrupt'.