Adventures in Criticism Part 14

Public Excursions in Verse.

The progress of this amusing epidemic may be traced in the _Times_.

It started mildly and decorously with the death of a politician. The writer of Lord Sherbrooke's obituary notice happened to remember and transcribe the rather flat epigram beginning--

"Here lie the bones of Robert Lowe, Where he's gone to I don't know...."

with Lowe's own Latin translation of the same. At once the _Times_ was flooded with other versions by people who remembered the lines more or less imperfectly, who had clung each to his own version since childhood, who doubted if the epigram were originally written on Lord Sherbrooke, who had seen it on an eighteenth-century tombstone in several parts of England, and so on. London Correspondents took up the game and carried it into the provincial press. Then country clergymen bustled up and tried to recall the exact rendering; while others who had never heard of the epigram waxed emulous and produced translations of their own, with the Latin of which the local compositor made sport after his kind. For weeks there continued quite a pretty rivalry among these decaying scholars.

The gentle thunders of this controversy had scarcely died down when the _Times_ quoted a four-lined epigram about Mr. Leech making a speech, and Mr. Parker making something darker that was dark enough without; and another respectable profession, which hitherto had remained cold, began to take fire and dispute with ardor. The Church, the Legislature, the Bar, were all excited by this time. They strained on the verge of surpa.s.sing feats, should the occasion be given. From men in this mood the occasion is rarely withheld. Lord Tennyson died.

He had written at Cambridge a prize poem on Timbuctoo. Somebody else, at Cambridge or elsewhere, had also written about Timbuctoo and a Ca.s.sowary that ate a missionary with his this and his that and his hymn-book too. Who was this somebody? Did he write it at Cambridge (home of poets)? And what were the "tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs," as Mr. Job Trotter would say, with which the missionary was eaten?

Poetry was in the air by this time. It would seem that those treasures which the great Laureate had kept close were by his death unlocked and spread over England, even to the most unexpected corners. "All have got the seed," and already a dozen gentlemen were busily growing the flower in the daily papers. It was not to be expected that our senators, barristers, stockbrokers, having proved their strength, would stop short at Timbuctoo and the Ca.s.sowary. Very soon a bold egregious wether jumped the fence into the Higher Criticism, and gave us a new and amazing interpretation of the culminating line in _Crossing the Bar_. The whole flock was quick upon his heels. "Allow me to remind the readers of your valuable paper that there are _two_ kinds of pilot" is the sentence that now catches our eyes as we open the _Times_. And according to the _Globe_ if you need a rhyme for orange you must use Blorenge. And the press exists to supply the real wants of the public.[A]

They talk of decadence. But who will deny the future to a race capable of producing, on the one hand, _Crossing the Bar_--and on the other, this comment upon it, signed "T.F.W." and sent to the _Times_ from Cambridge, October 27th, 1892?--

"... a poet so studious of fitness of language as Tennyson would hardly, I suspect, have thrown off such words on such an occasion haphazard. If the a.n.a.logy is to be inexorably criticised, may it not be urged that, having in his mind not the mere pa.s.sage 'o'er life's solemn main,' which we all are taking, with or without reflection, but the near approach to an unexplored ocean beyond it, he was mentally a.s.signing to the pilot in whom his confidence was fast the _status_ of the navigator of old days, the sailing-master, on whose knowledge and care crews and captains engaged in expeditions alike relied? Columbus himself married the daughter of such a man, _un piloto Italiano famoso navigante_.

Camoens makes the people of Mozambique offer Vasco da Gama a _piloto_ by whom his fleet shall be deftly (_sabiamente_) conducted across the Indian Ocean. In the following century (1520-30) Sebastian Cabot, then in the service of Spain, commanded a squadron which was to pa.s.s through the Straits of Magellan to the Moluccas, having been appointed by Charles V.

Grand Pilot of Castile. The French still call the mates of merchant vessels--that is, the officers who watch about, take charge of the deck--_pilotes_, and this designation is not impossibly reserved to them as representing the _pilote hauturier_ of former times, the scientific guide of s.h.i.+ps _dans la haute mer_, as distinguished from the _pilote cotier_, who simply hugged the sh.o.r.e. The last cla.s.s of pilot, it is almost superfluous to observe, is still with us and does take our s.h.i.+ps, inwards or outwards, across the bar, if there be one, and does no more. The _hauturier_ has long been replaced in all countries by the captain, and it must be within the experience of some of us that when outward bound the captain as often as not has been the last man to come on board. We did not meet him until the s.h.i.+p, which until his arrival was in the hands of the _cotier_, was well out of harbour. Then our _cotier_ left us."

Prodigious!

FOOTNOTES:

[A] Note, Oct. 21, 1893.--The nuisance revived again when Mr.

Nettles.h.i.+p the younger perished on Mont Blanc. And again, the friend of Lowe and Nettles.h.i.+p, the great Master of Balliol, had hardly gone to his grave before a dispute arose, not only concerning his parentage (about which any man might have certified himself at the smallest expense of time and trouble), but over an unusually pointless epigram that was made at Cambridge many years ago, and neither on him, nor on his father, but on an entirely different Jowett, _Semper ego auditor tantum?_--

If a funny "Cantab" write a dozen funny rhymes, Need a dozen "Cantabs" write about it to the _Times_?

Need they write, at any rate, a generation after, Stating cause and date of joke and reasons for their laughter?

THE POPULAR CONCEPTION OF A POET

June 24, 1893. March 4, 1804. In what respect Remarkable.

What seems to me chiefly remarkable in the popular conception of a Poet is its unlikeness to the truth. Misconception in this case has been flattered, I fear, by the poets themselves:--

"The poet in a golden Clime was born, With golden stars above; Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, The love of love.

He saw thro' life and death, thro' good and ill; He saw thro' his own soul.

The marvel of the Everlasting Will, An open scroll, Before him lay...."

I should be sorry to vex any poet's mind with my shallow wit; but this pa.s.sage always reminds me of the delusions of the respectable Glendower:--

"At my birth The frame and huge foundation of the earth Shak'd like a coward."

--and Hotspur's interpretation (slightly petulant, to be sure), "Why, so it would have done at the time if your mother's cat had but kittened, though you yourself had never been born." I protest that I reverence poetry and the poets: but at the risk of being warned off the holy ground as a "dark-browed sophist," must declare my plain opinion that the above account of the poet's birth and native gifts does not consist with fact.

Yet it consents with the popular notion, which you may find presented or implied month by month and week by week, in the reviews; and even day by day--for it has found its way into the newspapers. Critics have observed that considerable writers fall into two cla.s.ses--

Two lines of Poetic Development.

(1) Those who start with their heads full of great thoughts, and are from the first occupied rather with their matter than with the manner of expressing it.

(2) Those who begin with the love of expression and intent to be artists in words, _and come through expression to profound thought_.

The Popular Type.

Now, for some reason it is fas.h.i.+onable just now to account Cla.s.s 1 the more respectable; a judgment to which, considering that Virgil and Shakespeare belong to Cla.s.s 2, I refuse my a.s.sent. It is fas.h.i.+onable to construct an imaginary figure out of the characteristics of Cla.s.s 1, and set him up as the Typical Poet. The poet at whose nativity Tennyson a.s.sists in the above verses of course belongs to Cla.s.s 1. A babe so richly dowered can hardly help his matter overcrowding his style; at least, to start with.

But this is not all. A poet who starts with this tremendous equipment can hardly help being something too much for the generation in which he is born. Consequently, the Typical Poet is misunderstood by his contemporaries, and probably persecuted. In his own age his is a voice crying in the wilderness; in the wilderness he speeds the "viewless arrows of his thought"; which fly far, and take root as they strike earth, and blossom; and so Truth multiplies, and in the end (most likely after his death) the Typical Poet comes by his own.

Such is the popular conception of the Typical Poet, and I observe that it fascinates even educated people. I have in mind the recent unveiling of Mr. Onslow Ford's Sh.e.l.ley Memorial at University College, Oxford. Those who a.s.sisted at that ceremony were for the most part men and women of high culture. Excesses such as affable Members of Parliament commit when distributing school prizes or opening free public libraries were clearly out of the question. Yet even here, and almost within the shadow of Bodley's great library, speaker after speaker a.s.sumed as axiomatic this curious fallacy--that a Poet is necessarily a thinker in advance of his age, and therefore peculiarly liable to persecution at the hands of his contemporaries.

How supported by History.

But logic, I believe, still flourishes in Oxford; and induction still has its rules. Now, however many different persons Homer may have been, I cannot remember that one of him suffered martyrdom, or even discomfort, on account of his radical doctrine. I seem to remember that aechylus enjoyed the esteem of his fellow-citizens, sided with the old aristocratic party, and lived long enough to find his own tragedies considered archaic; that Sophocles, towards the end of a very prosperous life, was charged with senile decay and consequent inability to administer his estates--two infirmities which even his accusers did not seek to connect with advanced thinking; and that Euripides, though a technical innovator, stood hardly an inch ahead of the fas.h.i.+onable dialectic of his day, and suffered only from the ridicule of his comic contemporaries and the disdain of his wife--misfortunes incident to the most respectable. Pindar and Virgil were court favorites, repaying their patrons in golden song. Dante, indeed, suffered banishment; but his banishment was just a move in a political (or rather a family) game. Petrarch and Ariosto were not uncomfortable in their generations. Chaucer and Shakespeare lived happy lives and sang in the very key of their own times. Puritanism waited for its hour of triumph to produce its great poet, who lived unmolested when the hour of triumph pa.s.sed and that of reprisals succeeded. Racine was a royal pensioner; Goethe a chamberlain and the most admired figure of his time. Of course, if you hold that these poets one and all pale their ineffectual fires before the radiant Sh.e.l.ley, our argument must go a few steps farther back. I have instanced them as acknowledged kings of song.

The Case of Tennyson.

Tennyson was not persecuted. He was not (and more honor to him for his clearness) even misunderstood. I have never met with the contention that he stood an inch ahead of the thought of his time. As for seeing through death and life and his own soul, and having the marvel of the everlasting will spread before him like an open scroll,--well, to begin with, I doubt if these things ever happened to any man. Heaven surely has been, and is, more reticent than the verse implies. But if they ever happened, Tennyson most certainly was not the man they happened to. What Tennyson actually sang, till he taught himself to sing better, was:--

"Airy, fairy Lilian, Flitting fairy Lilian, When I ask her if she love me, Claps her tiny hands above me, Laughing all she can; She'll not tell me if she love me, Cruel little Lilian."

There is not much of the scorn of scorn, or the love of love, or the open scroll of the everlasting will, about _Cruel Little Lilian_. But there _is_ a distinct striving after style--a striving that, as everyone knows, ended in mastery: and through style Tennyson reached such heights of thought as he was capable of. To the end his thought remained inferior to his style: and to the end the two in him were separable, whereas in poets of the very first rank they are inseparable. But that towards the end his style lifted his thought to heights of which even _In Memoriam_ gave no promise cannot, I think, be questioned by any student of his collected works.

Tennyson belongs, if ever poet belonged, to Cla.s.s 2: and it is the prettiest irony of fate that, having unreasonably belauded Cla.s.s 1, he is now being found fault with for not conforming to the supposed requirements of that Cla.s.s. He, who spoke of the poet as of a seer "through life and death," is now charged with seeing but a short way beyond his own nose. The Rev. Stopford Brooke finds that he had little sympathy with the aspirations of the struggling poor; that he bore himself coldly towards the burning questions of the hour; that, in short, he stood anywhere but in advance of his age. As if plenty of people were not interested in these things! Why, I cannot step out into the street without running against somebody who is in advance of the times on some point or another.

Of Virgil and Shakespeare.

Virgil and Shakespeare were neither martyrs nor preachers despised in their generation. I have said that as poets they also belong to Cla.s.s 2. Will a champion of the Typical Poet (new style) dispute this, and argue that Virgil and Shakespeare, though they escaped persecution, yet began with matter that overweighted their style--with deep stuttered thoughts--in fine, with a Message to their Time? I think that view can hardly be maintained. We have the _Eclogues_ before the _aeneid_; and _The Comedy of Errors_ before _As You Like It_.

Expression comes first; and through expression, thought. These are the greatest names, or of the greatest: and they belong to Cla.s.s 2.

Of Milton.

Again, no English poetry is more thoroughly informed with thought than Milton's. Did he find big thoughts hustling within him for utterance?

And did he at an early age stutter in numbers till his oppressed soul found relief? And was it thus that he attained the glorious manner of

"Seasons return, but not to me returns Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn...."