English Critical Essays Part 26

Why may not dream, Or thought's day-gleam, Startle, yet cheer us?

Are such thoughts fetters, While faith disowns Dread of earth's tones, Recks but Heaven's call, And on the wall, Reads but Heaven's letters?

But if a poet is not sure whether presentiments are true or not true; if he wishes to leave his readers in doubt; if he wishes an atmosphere of indistinct illusion and of moving shadow, he must use the romantic style, the style of miscellaneous adjunct, the style 'which s.h.i.+rks, not meets' your intellect, the style which as you are scrutinizing disappears.

Nor is this all, or even the princ.i.p.al lesson, which _Enoch Arden_ may suggest to us, of the use of ornate art. That art is the appropriate art for an _unpleasing type_. Many of the characters of real life, if brought distinctly, prominently, and plainly before the mind, as they really are, if shown in their inner nature, their actual essence, are doubtless very unpleasant. They would be horrid to meet and horrid to think of. We fear it must be owned that Enoch Arden is this kind of person. A dirty sailor who did _not_ go home to his wife is not an agreeable being: a varnish must be put on him to make him s.h.i.+ne. It is true that he acts rightly; that he is very good. But such is human nature that it finds a little tameness in mere morality. Mere virtue belongs to a charity school-girl, and has a taint of the catechism.

All of us feel this, though most of us are too timid, too scrupulous, too anxious about the virtue of others, to speak out. We are ashamed of our nature in this respect, but it is not the less our nature. And if we look deeper into the matter there are many reasons why we should not be ashamed of it. The soul of man, and as we necessarily believe of beings greater than man, has many parts beside its moral part. It has an intellectual part, an artistic part, even a religious part, in which mere morals have no share. In Shakespeare or Goethe, even in Newton or Archimedes, there is much which will not be cut down to the shape of the commandments. They have thoughts, feelings, hopes--immortal thoughts and hopes--which have influenced the life of men, and the souls of men, ever since their age, but which the 'whole duty of man', the ethical compendium, does not recognize. Nothing is more unpleasant than a virtuous person with a mean mind. A highly developed moral nature joined to an undeveloped intellectual nature, an undeveloped artistic nature, and a very limited religious nature, is of necessity repulsive. It represents a bit of human nature--a good bit, of course, but a bit only--in disproportionate, unnatural, and revolting prominence; and, therefore, unless an artist use delicate care, we are offended. The dismal act of a squalid man needed many condiments to make it pleasant, and therefore Mr. Tennyson was right to mix them subtly and to use them freely.

A mere act of self-denial can indeed scarcely be pleasant upon paper.

An heroic struggle with an external adversary, even though it end in a defeat, may easily be made attractive. Human nature likes to see itself look grand, and it looks grand when it is making a brave struggle with foreign foes. But it does not look grand when it is divided against itself. An excellent person striving with temptation is a very admirable being in reality, but he is not a pleasant being in description. We hope he will win and overcome his temptation, but we feel that he would be a more interesting being, a higher being, if he had not felt that temptation so much. The poet must make the struggle great in order to make the self-denial virtuous, and if the struggle be too great, we are apt to feel some mixture of contempt.

The internal metaphysics of a divided nature are but an inferior subject for art, and if they are to be made attractive, much else must be combined with them. If the excellence of _Hamlet_ had depended on the ethical qualities of Hamlet, it would not have been the masterpiece of our literature. He acts virtuously of course, and kills the people he ought to kill, but Shakespeare knew that such goodness would not much interest the pit. He made him a handsome prince, and a puzzling meditative character; these secular qualities relieve his moral excellence, and so he becomes 'nice'. In proportion as an artist has to deal with types essentially imperfect, he must disguise their imperfections; he must acc.u.mulate around them as many first-rate accessories as may make his readers forget that they are themselves second-rate. The sudden _millionaires_ of the present day hope to disguise their social defects by buying old places, and hiding among aristocratic furniture; just so a great artist who has to deal with characters artistically imperfect will use an ornate style, will fit them into a scene where there is much else to look at.

For these reasons ornate art is within the limits as legitimate as pure art. It does what pure art could not do. The very excellence of pure art confines its employment. Precisely because it gives the best things by themselves and exactly as they are, it fails when it is necessary to describe inferior things among other things, with a list of enhancements and a crowd of accompaniments that in reality do not belong to it. Illusion, half belief, unpleasant types, imperfect types, are as much the proper sphere of ornate art, as an inferior landscape is the proper sphere for the true efficacy of moonlight. A really great landscape needs sunlight and bears sunlight; but moonlight is an equalizer of beauties; it gives a romantic unreality to what will not stand the bare truth. And just so does romantic art.

There is, however, a third kind of art which differs from these on the point in which they most resemble one another. Ornate art and pure art have this in common, that they paint the types of literature in as good perfection as they can. Ornate art, indeed, uses undue disguises and unreal enhancements; it does not confine itself to the best types; on the contrary it is its office to make the best of imperfect types and lame approximations; but ornate art, as much as pure art, catches its subject in the best light it can, takes the most developed aspect of it which it can find, and throws upon it the most congruous colours it can use. But grotesque art does just the contrary. It takes the type, so to say, _in difficulties_. It gives a representation of it in its minimum development, amid the circ.u.mstances least favourable to it, just while it is struggling with obstacles, just where it is enc.u.mbered with incongruities. It deals, to use the language of science, not with normal types but with abnormal specimens; to use the language of old philosophy, not with what nature is striving to be, but with what by some lapse she has happened to become.

This art works by contrast. It enables you to see, it makes you see, the perfect type by painting the opposite deviation. It shows you what ought to be by what ought not to be, when complete it reminds you of the perfect image, by showing you the distorted and imperfect image.

Of this art we possess in the present generation one prolific master.

Mr. Browning is an artist working by incongruity. Possibly hardly one of his most considerable efforts can be found which is not great because of its odd mixture. He puts together things which no one else would have put together, and produces on our minds a result which no one else would have produced, or tried to produce. His admirers may not like all we may have to say of him. But in our way we too are among his admirers. No one ever read him without seeing not only his great ability but his great _mind_. He not only possesses superficial useable talents, but the strong something, the inner secret something which uses them and controls them; he is great, not in mere accomplishments, but in himself. He has applied a hard strong intellect to real life; he has applied the same intellect to the problems of his age. He has striven to know what _is_: he has endeavoured not to be cheated by counterfeits, not to be infatuated with illusions. His heart is in what he says. He has battered his brain against his creed till he believes it. He has accomplishments too, the more effective because they are mixed. He is at once a student of mysticism, and a citizen of the world. He brings to the club sofa distinct visions of old creeds, intense images of strange thoughts: he takes to the bookish student tidings of wild Bohemia, and little traces of the _demi-monde_. He puts down what is good for the naughty and what is naughty for the good. Over women his easier writings exercise that imperious power which belongs to the writings of a great man of the world upon such matters. He knows women, and therefore they wish to know him. If we blame many of Browning's efforts, it is in the interest of art, and not from a wish to hurt or degrade him.

If we wanted to ill.u.s.trate the nature of grotesque art by an exaggerated instance we should have selected a poem which the chance of late publication brings us in this new volume. Mr. Browning has undertaken to describe what may be called _mind in difficulties_--mind set to make out the universe under the worst and hardest circ.u.mstances. He takes 'Caliban', not perhaps exactly Shakespeare's Caliban, but an a.n.a.logous and worse creature; a strong thinking power, but a nasty creature--a gross animal, uncontrolled and unelevated by any feeling of religion or duty. The delineation of him will show that Mr. Browning does not wish to take undue advantage of his readers by a choice of nice subjects.

'Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best, Flat on his belly in the pit's much mire, With elbows wide, fists clenched to prop his chin; And, while he kicks both feet in the cool slush, And feels about his spine small eft-things course, Run in and out each arm, and make him laugh; And while above his head a pompion-plant, Coating the cave-top as a brow its eye, Creeps down to touch and tickle hair and beard, And now a flower drops with a bee inside, And now a fruit to snap at, catch and crunch:

This pleasant creature proceeds to give his idea of the origin of the Universe, and it is as follows. Caliban speaks in the third person, and is of opinion that the maker of the Universe took to making it on account of his personal discomfort:

Setebos, Setebos, and Setebos!

'Thinketh, He dwelleth i' the cold o' the moon.

'Thinketh He made it, with the sun to match, But not the stars: the stars came otherwise; Only made clouds, winds, meteors, such as that: Also this isle, what lives, and grows thereon, And snaky sea which rounds and ends the same.

'Thinketh, it came of being ill at ease: He hated that He cannot change His cold, Nor cure its ache. 'Hath spied an icy fish That longed to 'scape the rock-stream where she lived, And thaw herself within the lukewarm brine O' the lazy sea her stream thrusts far amid, A crystal spike 'twixt two warm walls of wave; Only she ever sickened, found repulse At the other kind of water, not her life, (Green-dense and dim-delicious, bred o' the sun) Flounced back from bliss she was not born to breathe, And in her old bounds buried her despair, Hating and loving warmth alike: so He.

'Thinketh, He made thereat the sun, this isle, Trees and the fowls here, beast and creeping thing.

Yon otter, sleek-wet, black, lithe as a leech; Yon auk, one fire-eye, in a ball of foam, That floats and feeds; a certain badger brown He hath watched hunt with that slant white-wedge eye By moonlight; and the pie with the long tongue That p.r.i.c.ks deep into oakwarts for a worm, And says a plain word when she finds her prize, But will not eat the ants; the ants themselves That build a wall of seeds and settled stalks About their hole--He made all these and more, Made all we see, and us, in spite: how else?

It may seem perhaps to most readers that these lines are very difficult, and that they are unpleasant. And so they are. We quote them to ill.u.s.trate, not the _success_ of grotesque art, but the _nature_ of grotesque art. It shows the end at which this species of art aims, and if it fails, it is from over-boldness in the choice of a subject by the artist, or from the defects of its execution. A thinking faculty more in difficulties--a great type,--an inquisitive, searching intellect under more disagreeable conditions, with worse helps, more likely to find falsehood, less likely to find truth, can scarcely be imagined. Nor is the mere description of the thought at all bad: on the contrary, if we closely examine it, it is very clever.

Hardly any one could have ama.s.sed so many ideas at once nasty and suitable. But scarcely any readers--any casual readers--who are not of the sect of Mr. Browning's admirers will be able to examine it enough to appreciate it. From a defect, partly of subject, and partly of style, many of Mr. Browning's works make a demand upon the reader's zeal and sense of duty to which the nature of most readers is unequal.

They have on the turf the convenient expression 'staying power': some horses can hold on and others cannot. But hardly any reader not of especial and peculiar nature can hold on through such composition.

There is not enough of 'staying power' in human nature. One of his greatest admirers once owned to us that he seldom or never began a new poem without looking on in advance, and foreseeing with caution what length of intellectual adventure he was about to commence. Whoever will work hard at such poems will find much mind in them: they are a sort of quarry of ideas, but whoever goes there will find these ideas in such a jagged, ugly, useless shape that he can hardly bear them.

We are not judging Mr. Browning simply from a hasty recent production.

All poets are liable to misconceptions, and if such a piece as _Caliban upon Setebos_ were an isolated error, a venial and particular exception, we should have given it no prominence. We have put it forward because it just elucidates both our subject and the characteristics of Mr. Browning. But many other of his best known pieces do so almost equally; what several of his devotees think his best piece is quite enough ill.u.s.trative for anything we want. It appears that on Holy Cross day at Rome the Jews were obliged to listen to a Christian sermon in the hope of their conversion, though this is, according to Mr. Browning, what they really said when they came away:

Fee, faw, fum! bubble and squeak!

Blessedest Thursday's the fat of the week, Rumble and tumble, sleek and rough, Stinking and savoury, smug and gruff, Take the church-road, for the bell's due chime Gives us the summons--'t is sermon-time.

Boh, here's Barnabas! Job, that's you?

Up stumps Solomon--bustling too?

Shame, man! greedy beyond your years To handsel the bishop's shaving-shears?

Fair play's a jewel! leave friends in the lurch?

Stand on a line ere you start for the church.

Higgledy, piggledy, packed we lie, Rats in a hamper, swine in a stye, Wasps in a bottle, frogs in a sieve, Worms in a carcase, fleas in a sleeve.

Hist! square shoulders, settle your thumbs And buzz for the bishop--here he comes.

And after similar nice remarks for a church, the edified congregation concludes:

But now, while the scapegoats leave our flock, And the rest sit silent and count the clock, Since forced to muse the appointed time On these precious facts and truths sublime,-- Let us fitly employ it, under our breath, In saying Ben Ezra's Song of Death.

For Rabbi Ben Ezra, the night he died, Called sons and sons' sons to his side, And spoke, 'This world has been harsh and strange; Something is wrong: there needeth a change.

But what, or where? at the last, or first?

In one point only we sinned, at worst.

'The Lord will have mercy on Jacob yet, And again in his border see Israel set.

When Judah beholds Jerusalem, The stranger-seed shall be joined to them: To Jacob's House shall the Gentiles cleave, So the Prophet saith and his sons believe.

'Ay, the children of the chosen race Shall carry and bring them to their place: In the land of the Lord shall lead the same, Bondsmen and handmaids. Who shall blame When the slaves enslave, the oppressed ones o'er The oppressor triumph for evermore?

'G.o.d spoke, and gave us the word to keep, Bade never fold the hands nor sleep 'Mid a faithless world,--at watch and ward, Till Christ at the end relieve our guard.

By His servant Moses the watch was set: Though near upon c.o.c.k-crow, we keep it yet.

'Thou! if Thou wast He, who at mid-watch came, By the starlight, naming a dubious Name!

And if, too heavy with sleep--too rash With fear--O Thou, if that martyr-gash Fell on Thee coming to take Thine own, And we gave the Cross, when we owed the Throne--

'Thou art the Judge. We are bruised thus.

But, the judgement over, join sides with us!

Thine too is the cause! and not more Thine Than ours, is the work of these dogs and swine, Whose life laughs through and spits at their creed, Who maintain Thee in word, and defy Thee in deed!

'We withstood Christ then? be mindful how At least we withstand Barabbas now!

Was our outrage sore? But the worst we spared, To have called these--Christians, had we dared!

Let defiance to them pay mistrust of Thee, And Rome make amends for Calvary!

'By the torture, prolonged from age to age, By the infamy, Israel's heritage, By the Ghetto's plague, by the garb's disgrace, By the badge of shame, by the felon's place, By the branding-tool, the b.l.o.o.d.y whip, And the summons to Christian fellows.h.i.+p,--

'We boast our proof that at least the Jew Would wrest Christ's name from the Devil's crew.

Thy face took never so deep a shade But we fought them in it, G.o.d our aid!

A trophy to bear, as we march, Thy band, South, East, and on to the Pleasant Land!'

It is very natural that a poet whose wishes incline, or whose genius conducts him to a grotesque art, should be attracted towards mediaeval subjects. There is no age whose legends are so full of grotesque subjects, and no age where real life was so fit to suggest them. Then, more than at any other time, good principles have been under great hards.h.i.+ps. The vestiges of ancient civilization, the germs of modern civilization, the little remains of what had been, the small beginnings of what is, were buried under a c.u.mbrous ma.s.s of barbarism and cruelty. Good elements hidden in horrid accompaniments are the special theme of grotesque art, and these mediaeval life and legends afford more copiously than could have been furnished before Christianity gave its new elements of good, or since modern civilization has removed some few at least of the old elements of destruction. A _buried_ life like the spiritual mediaeval was Mr.

Browning's natural element, and he was right to be attracted by it.

His mistake has been, that he has not made it pleasant; that he has forced his art to topics on which no one could charm, or on which he, at any rate, could not; that on these occasions and in these poems he has failed in fascinating men and women of sane taste.

We say 'sane' because there is a most formidable and estimable _insane_ taste. The will has great though indirect power over the taste, just as it has over the belief. There are some horrid beliefs from which human nature revolts, from which at first it shrinks, to which, at first, no effort can force it. But if we fix the mind upon them they have a power over us just because of their natural offensiveness. They are like the sight of human blood: experienced soldiers tell us that at first men are sickened by the smell and newness of blood almost to death and fainting, but that as soon as they harden their hearts and stiffen their minds, as soon as they _will_ bear it, then comes an appet.i.te for slaughter, a tendency to gloat on carnage, to love blood, at least for the moment, with a deep eager love. It is a principle that if we put down a healthy instinctive aversion, nature avenges herself by creating an unhealthy insane attraction. For this reason the most earnest truth-seeking men fall into the worst delusions; they will not let their mind alone; they force it towards some ugly thing, which a crotchet of argument, a conceit of intellect recommends, and nature punishes their disregard of her warning by subjection to the ugly one, by belief in it. Just so the most industrious critics get the most admiration. They think it unjust to rest in their instinctive natural horror: they overcome it, and angry nature gives them over to ugly poems and marries them to detestable stanzas.

Mr. Browning possibly, and some of the worst of Mr. Browning's admirers certainly, will say that these grotesque objects exist in real life, and therefore they ought to be, at least may be, described in art. But though pleasure is not the end of poetry, pleasing is a condition of poetry. An exceptional monstrosity of horrid ugliness cannot be made pleasing, except it be made to suggest--to recall--the perfection, the beauty, from which it is a deviation. Perhaps in extreme cases no art is equal to this; but then such self-imposed problems should not be worked by the artist; these out-of-the-way and detestable subjects should be let alone by him. It is rather characteristic of Mr. Browning to neglect this rule. He is the most of a realist, and the least of an idealist of any poet we know. He evidently sympathizes with some part at least of Bishop Blougram's apology. Anyhow this world exists. 'There _is_ good wine--there _are_ pretty women--there _are_ comfortable benefices--there _is_ money, and it is pleasant to spend it. Accept the creed of your age and you get these, reject that creed and you lose them. And for what do you lose them? For a fancy creed of your own, which no one else will accept, which hardly any one will call a "creed", which most people will consider a sort of unbelief.' Again, Mr. Browning evidently loves what we may call the realism, the grotesque realism, of orthodox christianity. Many parts of it in which great divines have felt keen difficulties are quite pleasant to him. He must _see_ his religion, he must nave an 'object-lesson' in believing. He must have a creed that will _take_, which wins and holds the miscellaneous world, which stout men will heed, which nice women will adore. The spare moments of solitary religion--the 'obdurate questionings', the high 'instincts', the 'first affections', the 'shadowy recollections',

Which, do they what they may, Are yet the fountain-light of all our day-- Are yet a master-light of all our seeing;