Part 11 (1/2)

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If this, then, is the nature of Poetry in the widest sense, how does the poet, in the special sense, differ from other unusually creative souls?

Not essentially in the inspiration and general substance of his poetry, but in the kind of expression he gives to them In so far as he is a poet, his medium of expression, of course, is not virtue, or action, or law; poetry is one of the acts And, again, it differs froe We have now to see, therefore, what Shelley has to say of the fore

First, he clai the vehicles of artistic expression, on the ground that it is the most direct and also the ination instead of being siination; whereas any more material s in the material world, and this nature and these relations intervene between the artist's conception and his expression of it in the medium It is to the superiority of its vehicle that Shelley attributes the greater fame which poetry has always enjoyed as coets (if I may interpose a word of criticism) that the es over language, and that these perhaps counterbalance the inferiority which he notices He would also have found it difficult to show that language, on its physical side, is any ments And his idea that thebetween conception and expression is, to say the least, one-sided A sculptor, painter, or musician, would probably reply that it is only the qualities of his medium that enable him to express at all; that what he expresses is inseparable from the vehicle of expression; and that he has no conceptions which are not fro sculpturesque, pictorial, or musical It is true, no doubt, that his medium is an obstacle as well as a e

But to resuoes on to say, receives in poetry a peculiar for a perfection which is always an order, harmony, or rhythm, so it itself, as so much sound, _is_ an order, hare, which is not the proper vehicle for the

For Shelley, however, this e is not of necessity e which it reaches in beautiful prose, like that of Plato, the e, Shelley declares, is the ain advance to metre; and he admits that metrical form is convenient, popular, and preferable, especially in poetry containing reat poet tied down to it It is not essential, while measure is absolutely so For it is no e is ht in this measure mean little As sensitiveness to the order of the relations of sounds is always connected with sensitiveness to the order of the relations of thoughts, so also the harmony of the words is scarcely less indispensable than theirto the communication of the influence of poetry 'Hence,' says Shelley, 'the vanity of translation: it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible that you ht discover the formal principle of its colour and odour, as seek to transfuse fro words to coathon's speech in the _Symposium_![1] And is not all that Shelley says of the difference between e applicable, at least in soree, to the difference between e?

Could he really have supposed that metre is noof any account to the influence of poetry? But I will not criticise Let ht, and how significant, is Shelley's insistence on the importance of measure or rhythm No one could assert eneral substance of poetry with that of her kinds of philosophy And yet it would be difficult to go beyond the emphasis of his statement that the formal element (as he understood it) is indispensable to the effect of poetry

Shelley, however, nowhere considers this eleth He has no discussions, like those of Wordsworth and Coleridge, on diction He never says, with Keats, that he looks on fine phrases like a lover We hear of his deep-drawn sigh of satisfaction as he finished reading a passage of Hoh the meadows of Spenser, at some marvellous flower When in his letters he refers to any poe, he scarcely ever mentions particular lines or expressions; and we have no evidence that, like Coleridge and Keats, he was a curious student of metrical effects or the relations of vowel-sounds I doubt if all this is wholly accidental

Poetry was to him so essentially an effusion of aspiration, love and worshi+p, that we can i it almost an impiety to break up its unity even for purposes of study, and to give a separate attention to its means of utterance And what he does say on the subject confirms this ireat stress on inspiration; and his state, ree his own experience No poem, he asserts, however inspired it inal conception; for when coins, inspiration is already on the decline And so in a letter he speaks of the detail of execution destroying all wild and beautiful visions

Still, inspiration, if diminished by coreatest poets of his day whether it is not an error to assert that the finest passages of poetry are produced by labour and study Such toil he would restrict to those parts which connect the inspired passages, and he speaks with contes of the first line of the _Orlando Furioso_

He seeerate on this matter because in the _Defence_ his foe is cold reason and calculation Elsewhere he writesobscure as well as intense;[2] from which it would seem to follow that the feeble shadow, if darker, is at least ets, too, what is certainly the fact, that the poet in reshaping and correcting is able to revive in soree the fire of the first ireatest works cost him a severe labour not confined to the execution, while his s, if never so many as fifty-six in one line

Still, what he says is highly characteristic of his own practice in composition He allowed the rush of his ideas to have its ithout pausing to complete a troublesome line or to find a word that did not coaps and ses And the result answers to his theory Keats was right in telling hie, indeed, unlike Wordsworth's or Byron's, is, in his mature work, always that of a poet; we never hear hisvoice; but he is frequently diffuse and obscure, and even in fine passages his constructions are so metal rushes into the mould so vehemently that it overleaps the bounds and fails to find its way into all the little crevices But no poetry is more manifestly inspired, and even when it is plainly imperfect it is soed It has the rapture of the mystic, and that is too rare to lose Tennyson quaintly said of the hyo up into the air and burst' It is true: and, if we are to speak of poereat set piece of Homer or Shakespeare that illumines the whole sky; but, all the saht than the heavenward rush of a rocket, and it bursts at a height no other fire can reach

In addition to his praise of inspiration Shelley has some scattered remarks on another point which show the sae any approach to artifice, or any sign that the writer had a theory or systeht Keats's earlier poems faulty in this respect, and there is perhaps a reference to Wordsworth in the following sentence from the Preface to the _Revolt of Isla to mere words to divert the attention of the reader, fro, toto the rules of criticishts in what appeared to e A person familiar with nature, and with the most celebrated productions of the hu the instinct, with respect to selection of language, produced by that familiarity'[3] His own poetic style certainly corresponds with his intention It cannot give the kind of pleasure afforded by what eil's or Milton's; but, like the best writing of Shakespeare and Goethe, it is, with all its individuality, almost entirely free from mannerism and the other vices of self-consciousness, and appears to flow so directly froht that one is ashamed to admire it for itself This is equally so whether the appropriate style is iurative, or simple and even plain It is indeed in the latter case that Shelley wins his greatest, because ue part of _Julian and Maddalo_ he has succeeded re the style quite close to that of fa it nevertheless unmistakably poetic And the _Cenci_ is an example of a success less complete only because the probleic drama in the nineteenth or twentieth century should surely be, not to reproduce with modifications the style of Shakespeare, but to do what Shakespeare did--to idealise, without deserting, the language of contemporary speech Shelley in the _Cenci_ seems to me to have coeneral exposition If noe consider more closely what Shelley says of the substance of poetry, a question at once arises He may seem to think of poetry solely as the direct expression of perfection in soine its effect as sihted aspiration Much of his own poetry, too, is such an expression; and we understand e find hie in human character, and unveiled in Achilles, Hector, and Ulysses 'the truth and beauty of friendshi+p, patriotis devotion to an object' But poetry, it is obvious, is not wholly, perhaps not even mainly, of this kind What is to be said, on Shelley's theory, of his own s' that 'tell of saddest thought'? What of satire, of the epic of conflict and war, or of tragic exhibitions of violent and destructive passion? Does not his theory reflect the weakness of his own practice, his tendency to portray a thin and abstract ideal instead of interpreting the concrete detail of nature and life; and ought we not to oppose to it a theory which would consider poetry simply as a representation of fact?

To this last question I should answer No Shelley's theory, rightly understood, will take in, I think, everything really poetic And to a considerable extent he himself shows the way to meet these doubts He did not mean that the _immediate_ subject of poetry must be perfection in some form The poet, he says, can colour with the hues of the ideal everything he touches If so, heas he _can_ so colour it, and nothing would be excluded fros (if any such exist) in which no positive relation to the ideal, however indirect, can be shown or intimated Thus to take the instance of Shelley's melancholy lyrics, clearly the lament which arises from loss of the ideal, and mourns the evanescence of its visitations or the desolation of its absence, is indirectly an expression _of_ the ideal; and so on his theory is the sie Further, he hih the joy of poetry is often unalloyed, yet the pleasure of the 'highest portions of our being is frequently connected with the pain of the inferior,' that 'the pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself,' and that not sorrow only, but 'terror, anguish, despair itself, are often the chosen expressions of an approxiood' That, then, which appeals poetically to such painful eain be an indirect portrayal of the ideal; and it is clear, I think, that this was how Shelley in the _Defence_ regarded heroic and tragic poetry, whether narrative or dramatic, with its manifestly imperfect characters and its exhibition of conflict and wild passion He had, it is true, another and an unsatisfactory way of explaining the presence of these things in poetry; and I will refer to this in a edies represent the highest idealisms (his name for ideals) of passion and of power (not merely of virtue); and that in theuise of circuy which every one feels to be the internal type of all that he loves, admires, and would become' He writes of Milton's Satan in soedy from which he e, _Macbeth_; and he was inclined to think _King Lear_, which certainly is no direct portrait of perfection, the greatest drama in the world Lastly, in the Preface to his own _Cenci_ he truly says that, while the story is fearful and monstrous, 'the poetry which exists in these teates the pain of the conteards Count Cenci himself as a _poetic_ character, and therefore as in _some_ sense an expression of the ideal He does not further explain hisPerhaps it was that the perfection which poetry is to exhibit includes, together with those qualities which win our immediate and entire approval or sy the instruy, power and passion of the soul, though they may be perverted, are in themselves elements of perfection; and so, even in their perversion or their combination with moral deforly or horrible, but appeal through emotions predominantly painful to the same love of the ideal which is directly satisfied by pictures of goodness and beauty Now to these various considerations we shall wish to add others; but if we bear these in h, and must hold that the substance of poetry is never h its method of representation is sometimes more direct, sometimes more indirect

Nevertheless, he does not seem to have made his view quite clear to himself, or to hold to it consistently We are left with the impression, not merely that he personally preferred the direct method (as he was, of course, entitled to do), but that his use of it shows a certain weakness, and also that even in theory he unconsciously tends to regard it as the primary and proper ht the representation of ins of this He considered his own _Cenci_ as a poem inferior in kind to his other main works, even as a sort of accommodation to the public

With all his lected _Pron that he, any more than the world, are that the character of Cenci was a creation without a parallel in our poetry since the seventeenth century His enthusiass, and his failure to understand Michael Angelo, seem to show the same tendency He could not enjoy comedy: it seemed to him simply cruel: he did not perceive that to show the absurdity of the ilorify the perfect

And, as I mentioned just now, he wavers in his view of the representation of heroic and tragic imperfection We find in the Preface to _Proe notion that Prometheus is a more poetic character than Milton's Satan because he is free from Satan's imperfections, which are said to interfere with the interest And in the _Defence_ a sih they exhibit ideal virtues, are, he admits, imperfect Why, then, did Homer make thearded their vices (_eg_ revengefulness and deceitfulness) as virtues Holy had to conceal in the costuined; and, like Hohest class have chosen to exhibit the beauty of their conceptions in its naked truth and splendour' Now, this idea, to say nothing of its grotesque improbability in reference to Homer, and its probable baselessness in reference to most other poets, is quite inconsistent with that truer view of heroic and tragic character which was explained just now It is an example of Shelley's tendency to abstract idealism or spurious Platoniset at the One, the eternal Idea, in coe, decay, struggle, sorrow and evil, he would have reached the true object of poetry: as if the whole finite world were a mere mistake or illusion, the sheer opposite of the infinite One, and in no way or degree its manifestation Life, he says--

Life, like a dolass, Stains the white radiance of eternity;

but the other side, the fact that the et, by no means always, but in one, and that not the least inspired, of his moods This is the source of that thinness and shallowness of which his view of the world and of history is justly accused, a viehich all iratuitous, and everything and everybody as pure white or pitch black Hence also his ideals of good, whether as a character or as aas they do on abstraction from the mass of real existence, tend to lack body and individuality; and indeed, if the existence of theto their disappearance is that they should all be exactly alike and have as little character as possible But we th and weakness are closely allied, and it may be that the very abstractness of his ideal was a condition of that quivering intensity of aspiration towards it in which his poetry is unequalled We o for this to Hoo for it to Dante, we shall find, indeed, a mind far vaster than Shelley's, but also that dualism of which we complain in him, and the description of a heaven which, equally with Shelley's regenerated earth, is no place for mere mortality In any case, as we have seen, the weakness in his poetical practice, though it occasionally appears also as a defect in his poetical theory, forms no necessary part of it

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I pass to his views on a last point If the business of poetry is somehow to express ideal perfection, it may seem to follow that the poet should embody in his poems his beliefs about this perfection and the way to approach it, and should thus have a ard to Shelley this conclusion seems the more natural because his own poetry allows us to see clearly soress Yet alike in his Prefaces and in the _Defence_ he takes up ht neither to affect a ht and wrong 'Didactic poetry,' he declares, 'iscan be equally well expressed in prose that is not tedious and supererogatory in verse'[4] 'There was little danger,' he tells us in the _Defence_, 'that Homer or any of the eternal poets' should make a mistake in this reat, is less intense, as Euripides, Lucan, Tasso, Spenser, have frequently affected a moral aim, and the effect of their poetry is diree in which they compel us to advert to this purpose' These statements may appeal to us, but are they consistent with Shelley's main views of poetry? To answer this question we must observe what exactly it is that he means to condemn

Shelley was one of the few persons who can literally be said to _love_ their kind He held ly, too, that poetry does benefit men, and benefits them morally The moral purpose, then, to which he objects cannot well be a poet's general purpose of doing h his poetry--such a purpose, I mean, as he may cherish when he contemplates his life and his life's work And, indeed, it seems obvious that nobody with any huh some intellectual confusion Nor, secondly, does Shelleyof a particular poem with a view to a particular moral or practical effect; certainly, at least, if this was hisso to the portrayal of arded as one of the main functions of poetry, and in the very place where he says that didactic poetry is his abhorrence he also says, by way of contrast, that he has tried to familiarise the minds of his readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence It appears, therefore, that what he is really attacking is the atteive, in the strict sense, u, and more especially, I think, on controversial questions of the day An example would be Wordsworth's discourse on education at the end of the _Excursion_, a discourse of which Shelley, we know, had a very low opinion In short, his ene a moral effect, it is the appealintellect He says to the poet: By allmen; you are a man, and are bound to do so; but you are also a poet, and therefore your proper way of doing so is not by reasoning and preaching

His idea is of a piece with his general chaination, and it is quite consistent with his rounds_ of this position? They are not clearly set out, but we can trace several, and they are all solid Reasoning on moral subjects, moral philosophy, was by no means 'tedious' to Shelley; it seldom is to real poets He loved it, and (outside his _Defence_) he rated its value very high[6] But he thought it tedious and out of place in poetry, because it can be equally well expressed in 'une--much better expressed, one may venture to add You invent an art in order to effect by it a particular purpose which nothing else can effect as well How foolish, then, to use this art for a purpose better served by souiven to it by Shelley Secondly, Shelley remarks that a poet's own conceptions on moral subjects are usually those of his place and tiht to be eternal, or, as we say, of perain, seeood even when the poet, like Shelley hiainst orthodox moral opinion; for his heterodox opinions will equally show the marks of his place and time, and constitute a perishable element in his work