Part 12 (1/2)

Matthew Arnold, in his essay on _The Function of Criticisave 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, so pre proceeded without having its proper data, without sufficient lish 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 stateh' means, of course, for Arnold, not that it lacked infor, ideas of a kind, but that it lacked 'criticism' And this means that it did not live and move freely in an atained 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 Gerland of our poets, the 'national glow of life and thought' that prevailed in the Athens of Pericles or the England of Elizabeth That happiest at in both countries But there was for Goethe 'a sort of equivalent for it in the coe body of Ger 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 e is the very unusual superiority of the iinative 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 ie has hardly an author to shoho 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 Lae It has no writers to compare with Bacon, Newton, Hume, Gibbon, Johnson, or Burke It is the tiard, 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 o 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 fro difference of quality;[2] while in the later periods, right down to the age of Wordsworth, the scientific literature quite holds its own, to say no inative Nor in the Gerap between the two that we find in England In respect of genius the philosophers, for exah 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 e turn to the poets thes, letters, and recorded conversation, and even to the critiques of Hazlitt, of Lae, we cannot reject it assuredly we read with adenius we reater abundance, I think, than in the poetry and criticism of Germany, if Goethe is excepted But the freedoe, the superiority to prejudice and caprice and fanaticism, the openness to ideas, the at, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, we do not find Can we iine any one of those four either inspired or imprisoned as Shelley was by the doctrines of Godwin?

Could any of thenificance 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 e's professed reason for not translating _Faust_?[3] Is it possible that a Gerenius of Byron or Wordsworth could have inhabited a arity as is opened to us by the brilliant letters of the for 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 ti 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 disappoint of the long poe ourselves how reat,'

we hesitate Beyond doubt there is great poetry in soreat whole Which of thereat 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; 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 reat poems, while others think this of _Prometheus Unbound_ and _The Cenci_ But if as to one or ment 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 e come to poems of smaller dines_, or _Adonas_, or _The Vision of Judgment_, or e read the lyrics To save time I will confine er that ienius which fails to reach full accoo 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 ain in a representative selection, it will not be the latest period, I think, that need fear the coinal 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 ood 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 shi+ne equally in the longer kinds of lyric And Mr Palgrave excluded the old ballads, but ade's _Love_ and Wordsworth's _Ruth_ (seven whole pages) And in any case we cannot judge by mere quantity' No; but still quantity , and the _Golden Treasury_ is a voluement, and taste It does, I think, leave the ireatest period in lyrical poetry And if Book I were swelled to the dimensions of Book IV, this iht even be deepened For the change would force into notice the comparative monotony of the thee of the thought and eht also convince us that, on the whole, this reater intensity of feeling, though on this point it is difficult to be sure, since we recognise what e, and are perhaps a little blind to those of a tie in lyrical poetry, even if it is not also a pre-enificant 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 disappoint 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 _Mar else of the tier poems cannot be classed with the best contes he attains that rank (2) Again, much of the most famous narrative poetry is seht 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 eht, will, rather than in scenes, events, actions, which express and re-act on e too far to say that in the most characteristic narrative poetry the balance of outward and inward is rarely attained[4] (3) The sa Byron's regular draotten; but _Heaven and Earth_, which is still alive, is largely composed of lyrics, and the first two acts of _Manfred_ are full of them

_Proh it has soes (usually undralory; 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 th 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 soe, and Keats are odes But the greatest of the lyrists, rote the Odes to Liberty and Naples and the West Wind, found the liht of fire' If _Lycidas_ and _L'Allegro_ and Spenser's _Epithalamion_ are lyrical poe shall be called lyrical which exceeds a certain length, _Adonas_ will be a lyrical elegy in fifty-five Spenserian stanzas, and the _Lines written aanean 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 hiuous and in other ways defective; but it will be adested, then, that the excellence of the lyrical poetry of Wordsworth's ti narratives and drain Just as it was inative substance of his mind in the 'objective' shape of a world of persons and actions ostensibly severed fros, 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, las of peace

The ht, in another sense of the word, be 'objective'

enough, a eneral human interest, not personal in any exclusive way; but it appeared in the for 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 'criticis ideas; he expressed ideas, and expressed theestions seem to be supported by other phenomena of the poetry

The 'subjective' spirit extends, , into er poems

This is obvious when it can plausibly be said, as in Byron's case, that the poet's one hero is hih its story or stories, displays the poet's favourite ideas and beliefs The _Excursion_ does this; th 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 forhteenth century form of satiric or so-called didactic reflection Yet reater poets, especially in their characteristic beginnings, show a strong tendency to reflective verse; Coleridge, for exas_, 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 Rooes straight to the objective forood and evil, was little affected by the spiritual upheaval of his time Those ere deeply affected by it, directly or indirectly, had theirafter, 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 beca within those appearances of nature, or actions of ination, which formed the ostensible subject of the poetry

Considered in this light, the following facts beconificant

Wordsworth, now about thirty, and the author offro poeht of They are good subjects, legendary and historical, stories of action, not at all theoretical[5] But it will not do: his mind 'turns recreant to her task' He has another hope, a 'favourite aspiration'

towards 'a philosophic song of Truth' But even this will not do; it is preh He must first tell the story of his ownpoeain, in the _Prelude_; and it is the story of the steps by which he came to see reality, Nature and Man, as the partial expression of the ideal, of an all-e Not till this is done can he proceed to the _Excursion_, which, together with umentation, contains pictures of particular reatest'; but it is not his history alone The first longer poem of Shelley which can be called mature was _Alastor_ And what is its subject? The subject of the _Prelude_; the story of a Poet's soul, and of the effect on it of the revelation of its ideal The first long poem of Keats was _Endy in Keats; he has been called, I think, an Elizabethan born out of due tiical story But it is by no means that alone The infection of his tiain the subject of the _Prelude_, the story of a poet's soul smitten by love of its ideal, the Principle of Beauty, and striving for union with it, for the 'wedding'

of the oodly universe in love and holy passion'

What, again, is the subject of _Epipsychidion_? The sa whos, far aloft In the clear golden prime of my youth's dawn

The poem is all about the search of the poet's soul for this ideal Being And the _Sensitive Plant_ is this soul, and the Lady of the Garden this Being, And _Prince Athanase_ is the sa would soon have appeared Is it not an astonishi+ng proof of Shelley's powers that the _Cenci_ was ever written?

Shelley, when he died, had half escaped--Keats, some ti inorld of the poet's soul and its shadowy adventures Could that well be the world of e call ereat poem'?

2

Let us review for athat, if our pleasure and glory in the poetry of Wordsworth's age is tinged with disappointment, this does not extend to the lyrical poetry; that the lyrical spirit, or, enerally, an inward or subjective tendency, shows itself in er works; and that their iest that the ate and its poetry, while doubtless it would have influenced favourably even the lyrics, and er works, could hardly have diminished the force of that tendency, and that thethis idea further, I propose to leave for a tie, to look beyond it, and to ask certain questions

First, granted that in that age the atmosphere of 'criticisland, howpoems were produced in Gerreat'?