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Title: The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism

Author: T. S. Eliot

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The Sacred Wood

“Intravit pinacothecam senex canus, exercitati vultus et qui videretur nescio
quid magnum promittere, sed cultu non proinde speciosus, et facile
appareret eum ex hac nota litteratum esse, quos odisse divites solent ... 'ego’
inquit 'poeta sum et ut spero, non humillimi spiritus, si modo coronis
aliquid credendum est, quas etiam ad immeritos deferre gratia solet.’”—
Petronius.
“I also like to dine on becaficas.”

The Sacred Wood
Essays On Poetry And Criticism
By

T. S. Eliot
Methuen & Co. Ltd.
36 Essex Street W.C.
London
1920

For
H. W. E.
“Tacuit Et Fecit”

Certain of these essays appeared, in the same or a more primitive form, in
The Times Literary Supplement, The Athenæum, Art and Letters, and The
Egoist. The author desires to express his obligation to the editors of these
periodicals.

INTRODUCTION

To anyone who is at all capable of experiencing the pleasures of justice, it is
gratifying to be able to make amends to a writer whom one has vaguely
depreciated for some years. The faults and foibles of Matthew Arnold are
no less evident to me now than twelve years ago, after my first admiration
for him; but I hope that now, on re-reading some of his prose with more
care, I can better appreciate his position. And what makes Arnold seem all
the more remarkable is, that if he were our exact contemporary, he would
find all his labour to perform again. A moderate number of persons have
engaged in what is called “critical” writing, but no conclusion is any more
solidly established than it was in 1865. In the first essay in the first Essays
in Criticism we read that

it has long seemed to me that the burst of creative activity in our
literature, through the first quarter of this century, had about it in fact
something premature; and that from this cause its productions are
doomed, most of them, in spite of the sanguine hopes which
accompanied and do still accompany them, to prove hardly more
lasting than the productions of far less splendid epochs. And this
prematureness comes from its having proceeded without having its
proper data, without sufficient material to work with. In other words,
the English 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 variety.

This judgment of the Romantic Generation has not, so far as I know, ever
been successfully controverted; and it has not, so far as I know, ever made
very much impression on popular opinion. Once a poet is accepted, his
reputation is seldom disturbed, for better or worse. So little impression has
Arnold’s opinion made, that his statement will probably be as true of the

first quarter of the twentieth century as it was of the nineteenth. A few
sentences later, Arnold articulates the nature of the malady:

In the Greece of Pindar and Sophocles, in the England of Shakespeare,
the poet lived in a current of ideas in the highest degree animating and
nourishing to the creative power; society was, in the fullest measure,
permeated by fresh thought, intelligent and alive; and this state of
things is the true basis for the creative power’s exercise, in this it finds
its data, its materials, truly ready for its hand; all the books and reading
in the world are only valuable as they are helps to this.

At this point Arnold is indicating the centre of interest and activity of the
critical intelligence; and it is at this perception, we may almost say, that
Arnold’s critical activity stopped. In a society in which the arts were
seriously studied, in which the art of writing was respected, Arnold might
have become a critic. How astonishing it would be, if a man like Arnold had
concerned himself with the art of the novel, had compared Thackeray with
Flaubert, had analysed the work of Dickens, had shown his contemporaries
exactly why the author of Amos Barton is a more serious writer than
Dickens, and why the author of La Chartreuse de Parma is more serious
than either? In Culture and Anarchy, in Literature and Dogma, Arnold was
not occupied so much in establishing a criticism as in attacking the
uncritical. The difference is that while in constructive work something can
be done, destructive work must incessantly be repeated; and furthermore
Arnold, in his destruction, went for game outside of the literary preserve
altogether, much of it political game untouched and inviolable by ideas.
This activity of Arnold’s we must regret; it might perhaps have been carried
on as effectively, if not quite so neatly, by some disciple (had there been
one) in an editorial position on a newspaper. Arnold is not to be blamed: he
wasted his strength, as men of superior ability sometimes do, because he
saw something to be done and no one else to do it. The temptation, to any
man who is interested in ideas and primarily in literature, to put literature
into the corner until he has cleaned up the whole country first, is almost
irresistible. Some persons, like Mr. Wells and Mr. Chesterton, have
succeeded so well in this latter profession of setting the house in order, and
have attracted so much more attention than Arnold, that we must conclude

that it is indeed their proper rôle, and that they have done well for
themselves in laying literature aside.
Not only is the critic tempted outside of criticism. The criticism proper
betrays such poverty of ideas and such atrophy of sensibility that men who
ought to preserve their critical ability for the improvement of their own
creative work are tempted into criticism. I do not intend from this the
usually silly inference that the “Creative” gift is “higher” than the critical.
When one creative mind is better than another, the reason often is that the
better is the more critical. But the great bulk of the work of criticism could
be done by minds of the second order, and it is just these minds of the
second order that are difficult to find. They are necessary for the rapid
circulation of ideas. The periodical press—the ideal literary periodical—is
an instrument of transport; and the literary periodical press is dependent
upon the existence of a sufficient number of second-order (I do not say
“second-rate,” the word is too derogatory) minds to supply its material.
These minds are necessary for that “current of ideas,” that “society
permeated by fresh thought,” of which Arnold speaks.
It is a perpetual heresy of English culture to believe that only the first-order
mind, the Genius, the Great Man, matters; that he is solitary, and produced
best in the least favourable environment, perhaps the Public School; and
that it is most likely a sign of inferiority that Paris can show so many minds
of the second order. If too much bad verse is published in London, it does
not occur to us to raise our standards, to do anything to educate the
poetasters; the remedy is, Kill them off. I quote from Mr. Edmund Gosse:[1]

Unless something is done to stem this flood of poetastry the art of verse
will become not merely superfluous, but ridiculous. Poetry is not a
formula which a thousand flappers and hobbledehoys ought to be able
to master in a week without any training, and the mere fact that it seems
to be now practised with such universal ease is enough to prove that
something has gone amiss with our standards.... This is all wrong, and
will lead us down into the abyss like so many Gadarene swine unless
we resist it.

We quite agree that poetry is not a formula. But what does Mr. Gosse
propose to do about it? If Mr. Gosse had found himself in the flood of

poetastry in the reign of Elizabeth, what would he have done about it?
would he have stemmed it? What exactly is this abyss? and if something
“has gone amiss with our standards,” is it wholly the fault of the younger
generation that it is aware of no authority that it must respect? It is part of
the business of the critic to preserve tradition—where a good tradition
exists. It is part of his business to see literature steadily and to see it whole;
and this is eminently to see it not as consecrated by time, but to see it
beyond time; to see the best work of our time and the best work of twenty-
five hundred years ago with the same eyes.[2] It is part of his business to
help the poetaster to understand his own limitations. The poetaster who
understands his own limitations will be one of our useful second-order
minds; a good minor poet (something which is very rare) or another good
critic. As for the first-order minds, when they happen, they will be none the
worse off for a “current of ideas”; the solitude with which they will always
and everywhere be invested is a very different thing from isolation, or a
monarchy of death.

Note.—I may commend as a model to critics who desire to correct
some of the poetical vagaries of the present age, the following passage
from a writer who cannot be accused of flaccid leniency, and the justice
of whose criticism must be acknowledged even by those who feel a
strong partiality toward the school of poets criticized:—
“Yet great labour, directed by great abilities, is never wholly lost; if
they frequently threw away their wit upon false conceits, they likewise
sometimes struck out unexpected truth: if their conceits were far-
fetched, they were often worth the carriage. To write on their plan, it
was at least necessary to read and think. No man could be born a
metaphysical poet, nor assume the dignity of a writer, by descriptions
copied from descriptions, by imitations borrowed from imitations, by
traditional imagery, and hereditary similes, by readiness of rhyme, and
volubility of syllables.
“In perusing the works of this race of authors, the mind is exercised
either by recollection or inquiry: something already learned is to be
retrieved, or something new is to be examined. If their greatness
seldom elevates, their acuteness often surprises; if the imagination is
not always gratified, at least the powers of reflection and comparison

are employed; and in the mass of materials which ingenious absurdity
has thrown together, genuine wit and useful knowledge may be
sometimes found buried perhaps in grossness of expression, but useful
to those who know their value; and such as, when they are expanded to
perspicuity, and polished to elegance, may give lustre to works which
have more propriety though less copiousness of sentiment.”—Johnson,
Life of Cowley.

Contents

Introduction ix

The Perfect Critic 1

Imperfect Critics—
Swinburne as Critic 15
A Romantic Aristocrat 22
The Local Flavour 29
A Note on the American Critic 34
The French Intelligence 39

Tradition and the Individual Talent 42

The Possibility of a Poetic Drama 54

Euripides and Professor Murray 64

Rhetoric and Poetic Drama 71

Notes on the Blank Verse of Christopher
Marlowe 78

Hamlet and His Problems 87

Ben Jonson 95

Phillip Massinger 112

Swinburne as Poet 131

Blake 137

Dante 144

The Perfect Critic

I

“Eriger en lois ses impressions personnelles, c’est le grand effort d’un
homme s’il est sincère.”—Lettres à l’Amazone.

Coleridge was perhaps the greatest of English critics, and in a sense the last.
After Coleridge we have Matthew Arnold; but Arnold—I think it will be
conceded—was rather a propagandist for criticism than a critic, a
popularizer rather than a creator of ideas. So long as this island remains an
island (and we are no nearer the Continent than were Arnold’s
contemporaries) the work of Arnold will be important; it is still a bridge
across the Channel, and it will always have been good sense. Since Arnold’s
attempt to correct his countrymen, English criticism has followed two
directions. When a distinguished critic observed recently, in a newspaper
article, that “poetry is the most highly organized form of intellectual
activity,” we were conscious that we were reading neither Coleridge nor
Arnold. Not only have the words “organized” and “activity,” occurring
together in this phrase, that familiar vague suggestion of the scientific
vocabulary which is characteristic of modern writing, but one asked
questions which Coleridge and Arnold would not have permitted one to ask.
How is it, for instance, that poetry is more “highly organized” than
astronomy, physics, or pure mathematics, which we imagine to be, in
relation to the scientist who practises them, “intellectual activity” of a pretty
highly organized type? “Mere strings of words,” our critic continues with
felicity and truth, “flung like dabs of paint across a blank canvas, may
awaken surprise ... but have no significance whatever in the history of
literature.” The phrases by which Arnold is best known may be inadequate,
they may assemble more doubts than they dispel, but they usually have
some meaning. And if a phrase like “the most highly organized form of
intellectual activity” is the highest organization of thought of which
contemporary criticism, in a distinguished representative, is capable, then,
we conclude, modern criticism is degenerate.
The verbal disease above noticed may be reserved for diagnosis by and by.
It is not a disease from which Mr. Arthur Symons (for the quotation was, of
course, not from Mr. Symons) notably suffers. Mr. Symons represents the

other tendency; he is a representative of what is always called “æsthetic
criticism” or “impressionistic criticism.” And it is this form of criticism
which I propose to examine at once. Mr. Symons, the critical successor of
Pater, and partly of Swinburne (I fancy that the phrase “sick or sorry” is the
common property of all three), is the “impressionistic critic.” He, if anyone,
would be said to expose a sensitive and cultivated mind—cultivated, that is,
by the accumulation of a considerable variety of impressions from all the
arts and several languages—before an “object”; and his criticism, if
anyone’s, would be said to exhibit to us, like the plate, the faithful record of
the impressions, more numerous or more refined than our own, upon a mind
more sensitive than our own. A record, we observe, which is also an
interpretation, a translation; for it must itself impose impressions upon us,
and these impressions are as much created as transmitted by the criticism. I
do not say at once that this is Mr. Symons; but it is the “impressionistic”
critic, and the impressionistic critic is supposed to be Mr. Symons.
At hand is a volume which we may test.[3] Ten of these thirteen essays deal
with single plays of Shakespeare, and it is therefore fair to take one of these
ten as a specimen of the book:

Antony and Cleopatra is the most wonderful, I think, of all
Shakespeare’s plays....

and Mr. Symons reflects that Cleopatra is the most wonderful of all women:

The queen who ends the dynasty of the Ptolemies has been the star of
poets, a malign star shedding baleful light, from Horace and Propertius
down to Victor Hugo; and it is not to poets only....

What, we ask, is this for? as a page on Cleopatra, and on her possible origin
in the dark lady of the Sonnets, unfolds itself. And we find, gradually, that
this is not an essay on a work of art or a work of intellect; but that Mr.
Symons is living through the play as one might live it through in the
theatre; recounting, commenting:

In her last days Cleopatra touches a certain elevation ... she would die a
thousand times, rather than live to be a mockery and a scorn in men’s

mouths ... she is a woman to the last ... so she dies ... the play ends with
a touch of grave pity ...

Presented in this rather unfair way, torn apart like the leaves of an artichoke,
the impressions of Mr. Symons come to resemble a common type of
popular literary lecture, in which the stories of plays or novels are retold,
the motives of the characters set forth, and the work of art therefore made
easier for the beginner. But this is not Mr. Symons’ reason for writing. The
reason why we find a similarity between his essay and this form of
education is that Antony and Cleopatra is a play with which we are pretty
well acquainted, and of which we have, therefore, our own impressions. We
can please ourselves with our own impressions of the characters and their
emotions; and we do not find the impressions of another person, however
sensitive, very significant. But if we can recall the time when we were
ignorant of the French symbolists, and met with The Symbolist Movement in
Literature, we remember that book as an introduction to wholly new
feelings, as a revelation. After we have read Verlaine and Laforgue and
Rimbaud and return to Mr. Symons’ book, we may find that our own
impressions dissent from his. The book has not, perhaps, a permanent value
for the one reader, but it has led to results of permanent importance for him.
The question is not whether Mr. Symons’ impressions are “true” or “false.”
So far as you can isolate the “impression,” the pure feeling, it is, of course,
neither true nor false. The point is that you never rest at the pure feeling;
you react in one of two ways, or, as I believe Mr. Symons does, in a mixture
of the two ways. The moment you try to put the impressions into words,
you either begin to analyse and construct, to “ériger en lois,” or you begin
to create something else. It is significant that Swinburne, by whose poetry
Mr. Symons may at one time have been influenced, is one man in his poetry
and a different man in his criticism; to this extent and in this respect only,
that he is satisfying a different impulse; he is criticizing, expounding,
arranging. You may say this is not the criticism of a critic, that it is
emotional, not intellectual—though of this there are two opinions, but it is
in the direction of analysis and construction, a beginning to “ériger en lois,”
and not in the direction of creation. So I infer that Swinburne found an
adequate outlet for the creative impulse in his poetry; and none of it was
forced back and out through his critical prose. The style of the latter is
essentially a prose style; and Mr. Symons’ prose is much more like

Swinburne’s poetry than it is like his prose. I imagine—though here one’s
thought is moving in almost complete darkness—that Mr. Symons is far
more disturbed, far more profoundly affected, by his reading than was
Swinburne, who responded rather by a violent and immediate and
comprehensive burst of admiration which may have left him internally
unchanged. The disturbance in Mr. Symons is almost, but not quite, to the
point of creating; the reading sometimes fecundates his emotions to produce
something new which is not criticism, but is not the expulsion, the ejection,
the birth of creativeness.
The type is not uncommon, although Mr. Symons is far superior to most of
the type. Some writers are essentially of the type that reacts in excess of the
stimulus, making something new out of the impressions, but suffer from a
defect of vitality or an obscure obstruction which prevents nature from
taking its course. Their sensibility alters the object, but never transforms it.
Their reaction is that of the ordinary emotional person developed to an
exceptional degree. For this ordinary emotional person, experiencing a
work of art, has a mixed critical and creative reaction. It is made up of
comment and opinion, and also new emotions which are vaguely applied to
his own life. The sentimental person, in whom a work of art arouses all
sorts of emotions which have nothing to do with that work of art whatever,
but are accidents of personal association, is an incomplete artist. For in an
artist these suggestions made by a work of art, which are purely personal,
become fused with a multitude of other suggestions from multitudinous
experience, and result in the production of a new object which is no longer
purely personal, because it is a work of art itself.
It would be rash to speculate, and is perhaps impossible to determine, what
is unfulfilled in Mr. Symons’ charming verse that overflows into his critical
prose. Certainly we may say that in Swinburne’s verse the circuit of
impression and expression is complete; and Swinburne was therefore able,
in his criticism, to be more a critic than Mr. Symons. This gives us an
intimation why the artist is—each within his own limitations—oftenest to
be depended upon as a critic; his criticism will be criticism, and not the
satisfaction of a suppressed creative wish—which, in most other persons, is
apt to interfere fatally.
Before considering what the proper critical reaction of artistic sensibility is,
how far criticism is “feeling” and how far “thought,” and what sort of

“thought” is permitted, it may be instructive to prod a little into that other
temperament, so different from Mr. Symons’, which issues in generalities
such as that quoted near the beginning of this article.

II

“L’écrivain de style abstrait est presque toujours un sentimental, du
moins un sensitif. L’écrivain artiste n’est presque jamais un
sentimental, et très rarement un sensitif”—Le Problème du Style.

The statement already quoted, that “poetry is the most highly organized
form of intellectual activity,” may be taken as a specimen of the abstract
style in criticism. The confused distinction which exists in most heads
between “abstract” and “concrete” is due not so much to a manifest fact of
the existence of two types of mind, an abstract and a concrete, as to the
existence of another type of mind, the verbal, or philosophic. I, of course,
do not imply any general condemnation of philosophy; I am, for the
moment, using the word “philosophic” to cover the unscientific ingredients
of philosophy; to cover, in fact, the greater part of the philosophic output of
the last hundred years. There are two ways in which a word may be
“abstract.” It may have (the word “activity,” for example) a meaning which
cannot be grasped by appeal to any of the senses; its apprehension may
require a deliberate suppression of analogies of visual or muscular
experience, which is none the less an effort of imagination. “Activity” will
mean for the trained scientist, if he employ the term, either nothing at all or
something still more exact than anything it suggests to us. If we are allowed
to accept certain remarks of Pascal and Mr. Bertrand Russell about
mathematics, we believe that the mathematician deals with objects—if he
will permit us to call them objects—which directly affect his sensibility.
And during a good part of history the philosopher endeavoured to deal with
objects which he believed to be of the same exactness as the
mathematician’s. Finally Hegel arrived, and if not perhaps the first, he was
certainly the most prodigious exponent of emotional systematization,
dealing with his emotions as if they were definite objects which had
aroused those emotions. His followers have as a rule taken for granted that
words have definite meanings, overlooking the tendency of words to
become indefinite emotions. (No one who had not witnessed the event
could imagine the conviction in the tone of Professor Eucken as he pounded
the table and exclaimed Was ist Geist? Geist ist ...) If verbalism were

confined to professional philosophers, no harm would be done. But their
corruption has extended very far. Compare a mediæval theologian or
mystic, compare a seventeenth-century preacher, with any “liberal” sermon
since Schleiermacher, and you will observe that words have changed their
meanings. What they have lost is definite, and what they have gained is
indefinite.
The vast accumulations of knowledge—or at least of information—
deposited by the nineteenth century have been responsible for an equally
vast ignorance. When there is so much to be known, when there are so
many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different
meanings, when every one knows a little about a great many things, it
becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what
he is talking about or not. And when we do not know, or when we do not
know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts. The
sentence so frequently quoted in this essay will serve for an example of this
process as well as any, and may be profitably contrasted with the opening
phrases of the Posterior Analytics. Not only all knowledge, but all feeling,
is in perception. The inventor of poetry as the most highly organized form
of intellectual activity was not engaged in perceiving when he composed
this definition; he had nothing to be aware of except his own emotion about
“poetry.” He was, in fact, absorbed in a very different “activity” not only
from that of Mr. Symons, but from that of Aristotle.
Aristotle is a person who has suffered from the adherence of persons who
must be regarded less as his disciples than as his sectaries. One must be
firmly distrustful of accepting Aristotle in a canonical spirit; this is to lose
the whole living force of him. He was primarily a man of not only
remarkable but universal intelligence; and universal intelligence means that
he could apply his intelligence to anything. The ordinary intelligence is
good only for certain classes of objects; a brilliant man of science, if he is
interested in poetry at all, may conceive grotesque judgments: like one poet
because he reminds him of himself, or another because he expresses
emotions which he admires; he may use art, in fact, as the outlet for the
egotism which is suppressed in his own speciality. But Aristotle had none of
these impure desires to satisfy; in whatever sphere of interest, he looked
solely and steadfastly at the object; in his short and broken treatise he
provides an eternal example—not of laws, or even of method, for there is

no method except to be very intelligent, but of intelligence itself swiftly
operating the analysis of sensation to the point of principle and definition.
It is far less Aristotle than Horace who has been the model for criticism up
to the nineteenth century. A precept, such as Horace or Boileau gives us, is
merely an unfinished analysis. It appears as a law, a rule, because it does
not appear in its most general form; it is empirical. When we understand
necessity, as Spinoza knew, we are free because we assent. The dogmatic
critic, who lays down a rule, who affirms a value, has left his labour
incomplete. Such statements may often be justifiable as a saving of time;
but in matters of great importance the critic must not coerce, and he must
not make judgments of worse and better. He must simply elucidate: the
reader will form the correct judgment for himself.
And again, the purely “technical” critic—the critic, that is, who writes to
expound some novelty or impart some lesson to practitioners of an art—can
be called a critic only in a narrow sense. He may be analysing perceptions
and the means for arousing perceptions, but his aim is limited and is not the
disinterested exercise of intelligence. The narrowness of the aim makes
easier the detection of the merit or feebleness of the work; even of these
writers there are very few—so that their “criticism” is of great importance
within its limits. So much suffices for Campion. Dryden is far more
disinterested; he displays much free intelligence; and yet even Dryden—or
any literary critic of the seventeenth century—is not quite a free mind,
compared, for instance, with such a mind as Rochefoucauld’s. There is
always a tendency to legislate rather than to inquire, to revise accepted
laws, even to overturn, but to reconstruct out of the same material. And the
free intelligence is that which is wholly devoted to inquiry.
Coleridge, again, whose natural abilities, and some of whose performances,
are probably more remarkable than those of any other modern critic, cannot
be estimated as an intelligence completely free. The nature of the restraint
in his case is quite different from that which limited the seventeenth-century
critics, and is much more personal. Coleridge’s metaphysical interest was
quite genuine, and was, like most metaphysical interest, an affair of his
emotions. But a literary critic should have no emotions except those
immediately provoked by a work of art—and these (as I have already
hinted) are, when valid, perhaps not to be called emotions at all. Coleridge
is apt to take leave of the data of criticism, and arouse the suspicion that he

has been diverted into a metaphysical hare-and-hounds. His end does not
always appear to be the return to the work of art with improved perception
and intensified, because more conscious, enjoyment; his centre of interest
changes, his feelings are impure. In the derogatory sense he is more
“philosophic” than Aristotle. For everything that Aristotle says illuminates
the literature which is the occasion for saying it; but Coleridge only now
and then. It is one more instance of the pernicious effect of emotion.
Aristotle had what is called the scientific mind—a mind which, as it is
rarely found among scientists except in fragments, might better be called
the intelligent mind. For there is no other intelligence than this, and so far
as artists and men of letters are intelligent (we may doubt whether the level
of intelligence among men of letters is as high as among men of science)
their intelligence is of this kind. Sainte-Beuve was a physiologist by
training; but it is probable that his mind, like that of the ordinary scientific
specialist, was limited in its interest, and that this was not, primarily, an
interest in art. If he was a critic, there is no doubt that he was a very good
one; but we may conclude that he earned some other name. Of all modern
critics, perhaps Remy de Gourmont had most of the general intelligence of
Aristotle. An amateur, though an excessively able amateur, in physiology,
he combined to a remarkable degree sensitiveness, erudition, sense of fact
and sense of history, and generalizing power.
We assume the gift of a superior sensibility. And for sensibility wide and
profound reading does not mean merely a more extended pasture. There is
not merely an increase of understanding, leaving the original acute
impression unchanged. The new impressions modify the impressions
received from the objects already known. An impression needs to be
constantly refreshed by new impressions in order that it may persist at all; it
needs to take its place in a system of impressions. And this system tends to
become articulate in a generalized statement of literary beauty.
There are, for instance, many scattered lines and tercets in the Divine
Comedy which are capable of transporting even a quite uninitiated reader,
just sufficiently acquainted with the roots of the language to decipher the
meaning, to an impression of overpowering beauty. This impression may be
so deep that no subsequent study and understanding will intensify it. But at
this point the impression is emotional; the reader in the ignorance which we
postulate is unable to distinguish the poetry from an emotional state aroused

in himself by the poetry, a state which may be merely an indulgence of his
own emotions. The poetry may be an accidental stimulus. The end of the
enjoyment of poetry is a pure contemplation from which all the accidents of
personal emotion are removed; thus we aim to see the object as it really is
and find a meaning for the words of Arnold. And without a labour which is
largely a labour of the intelligence, we are unable to attain that stage of
vision amor intellectualis Dei.
Such considerations, cast in this general form, may appear commonplaces.
But I believe that it is always opportune to call attention to the torpid
superstition that appreciation is one thing, and “intellectual” criticism
something else. Appreciation in popular psychology is one faculty, and
criticism another, an arid cleverness building theoretical scaffolds upon
one’s own perceptions or those of others. On the contrary, the true
generalization is not something superposed upon an accumulation of
perceptions; the perceptions do not, in a really appreciative mind,
accumulate as a mass, but form themselves as a structure; and criticism is
the statement in language of this structure; it is a development of sensibility.
The bad criticism, on the other hand, is that which is nothing but an
expression of emotion. And emotional people—such as stockbrokers,
politicians, men of science—and a few people who pride themselves on
being unemotional—detest or applaud great writers such as Spinoza or
Stendhal because of their “frigidity.”
The writer of the present essay once committed himself to the statement
that “The poetic critic is criticizing poetry in order to create poetry.” He is
now inclined to believe that the “historical” and the “philosophical” critics
had better be called historians and philosophers quite simply. As for the
rest, there are merely various degrees of intelligence. It is fatuous to say that
criticism is for the sake of “creation” or creation for the sake of criticism. It
is also fatuous to assume that there are ages of criticism and ages of
creativeness, as if by plunging ourselves into intellectual darkness we were
in better hope of finding spiritual light. The two directions of sensibility are
complementary; and as sensibility is rare, unpopular, and desirable, it is to
be expected that the critic and the creative artist should frequently be the
same person.

Imperfect Critics

Swinburne as Critic

Three conclusions at least issue from the perusal of Swinburne’s critical
essays: Swinburne had mastered his material, was more inward with the
Tudor-Stuart dramatists than any man of pure letters before or since; he is a
more reliable guide to them than Hazlitt, Coleridge, or Lamb; and his
perception of relative values is almost always correct. Against these merits
we may oppose two objections: the style is the prose style of Swinburne,
and the content is not, in an exact sense, criticism. The faults of style are, of
course, personal; the tumultuous outcry of adjectives, the headstrong rush
of undisciplined sentences, are the index to the impatience and perhaps
laziness of a disorderly mind. But the style has one positive merit: it allows
us to know that Swinburne was writing not to establish a critical reputation,
not to instruct a docile public, but as a poet his notes upon poets whom he
admired. And whatever our opinion of Swinburne’s verse, the notes upon
poets by a poet of Swinburne’s dimensions must be read with attention and
respect.
In saying that Swinburne’s essays have the value of notes of an important
poet upon important poets, we must place a check upon our expectancy. He
read everything, and he read with the single interest in finding literature.
The critics of the romantic period were pioneers, and exhibit the fallibility
of discoverers. The selections of Lamb are a successful effort of good taste,
but anyone who has referred to them after a thorough reading of any of the
poets included must have found that some of the best passages—which
must literally have stared Lamb in the face—are omitted, while sometimes
others of less value are included. Hazlitt, who committed himself to the
judgment that the Maid’s Tragedy is one of the poorest of Beaumont and
Fletcher’s plays, has no connected message to deliver. Coleridge’s remarks
—too few and scattered—have permanent truth; but on some of the greatest
names he passes no remark, and of some of the best plays was perhaps
ignorant or ill-informed. But compared with Swinburne, Coleridge writes
much more as a poet might be expected to write about poets. Of
Massinger’s verse Swinburne says:

It is more serviceable, more businesslike, more eloquently practical,
and more rhetorically effusive—but never effusive beyond the bounds
of effective rhetoric—than the style of any Shakespearean or of any
Jonsonian dramatist.

It is impossible to tell whether Webster would have found the style of
Massinger more “serviceable” than his own for the last act of the White
Devil, and indeed difficult to decide what “serviceable” here means; but it is
quite clear what Coleridge means when he says that Massinger’s style

is much more easily constructed [than Shakespeare’s], and may be
more successfully adopted by writers in the present day.

Coleridge is writing as a professional with his eye on the technique. I do not
know from what writing of Coleridge Swinburne draws the assertion that
“Massinger often deals in exaggerated passion,” but in the essay from
which Swinburne quotes elsewhere Coleridge merely speaks of the
“unnaturally irrational passions,” a phrase much more defensible. Upon the
whole, the two poets are in harmony upon the subject of Massinger; and
although Coleridge has said more in five pages, and said it more clearly,
than Swinburne in thirty-nine, the essay of Swinburne is by no means
otiose: it is more stimulating than Coleridge’s, and the stimulation is never
misleading. With all his superlatives, his judgment, if carefully scrutinized,
appears temperate and just.
With all his justness of judgment, however, Swinburne is an appreciator and
not a critic. In the whole range of literature covered, Swinburne makes
hardly more than two judgments which can be reversed or even questioned:
one, that Lyly is insignificant as a dramatist, and the other, that Shirley was
probably unaffected by Webster. The Cardinal is not a cast of the Duchess
of Malfi, certainly; but when Shirley wrote
the mist is risen, and there’s none
To steer my wandering bark. (Dies.)

he was probably affected by
My soul, like to a ship in a black storm,
Is driven, I know not whither.

Swinburne’s judgment is generally sound, his taste sensitive and
discriminating. And we cannot say that his thinking is faulty or perverse—
up to the point at which it is thinking. But Swinburne stops thinking just at
the moment when we are most zealous to go on. And this arrest, while it
does not vitiate his work, makes it an introduction rather than a statement.
We are aware, after the Contemporaries of Shakespeare and the Age of
Shakespeare and the books on Shakespeare and Jonson, that there is
something unsatisfactory in the way in which Swinburne was interested in
these people; we suspect that his interest was never articulately formulated
in his mind or consciously directed to any purpose. He makes his way, or
loses it, between two paths of definite direction. He might as a poet have
concentrated his attention upon the technical problems solved or tackled by
these men; he might have traced for us the development of blank verse from
Sackville to the mature Shakespeare, and its degeneration from Shakespeare
to Milton. Or he might have studied through the literature to the mind of
that century; he might, by dissection and analysis, have helped us to some
insight into the feeling and thought which we seem to have left so far away.
In either case, you would have had at least the excitement of following the
movements of an important mind groping towards important conclusions.
As it is, there are to be no conclusions, except that Elizabethan literature is
very great, and that you can have pleasure and even ecstasy from it, because
a sensitive poetic talent has had the experience. One is in risk of becoming
fatigued by a hubbub that does not march; the drum is beaten, but the
procession does not advance.
If, for example, Swinburne’s interest was in poetry, why devote an essay to
Brome? “The opening scene of the Sparagus Garden,” says Swinburne, “is
as happily humorous and as vividly natural as that of any more famous
comedy.” The scene is both humorous and natural. Brome deserves to be
more read than he is, and first of all to be more accessible than he is. But
Swinburne ought to suggest or imply (I do not say impose) a reason for
reading the Sparagus Garden or the Antipodes, more sufficient than any he
has provided. No doubt such reason could be found.
When it is a matter of pronouncing judgment between two poets,
Swinburne is almost unerring. He is certainly right in putting Webster above
Tourneur, Tourneur above Ford, and Ford above Shirley. He weighs
accurately the good and evil in Fletcher: he perceives the essential

theatricality, but his comparison of the Faithful Shepherdess with Comus is
a judgment no word of which can be improved upon:

The difference between this poem [i.e. the Faithful Shepherdess] and
Milton’s exquisitely imitative Comus is the difference between a rose
with a leaf or two faded or falling, but still fragrant and radiant, and the
faultless but scentless reproduction of a rose in academic wax for the
admiration and imitation of such craftsmen as must confine their
ambition to the laurels of a college or the plaudits of a school.

In the longest and most important essay in the Contemporaries of
Shakespeare, the essay on Chapman, there are many such sentences of
sound judgment forcibly expressed. The essay is the best we have on that
great poet. It communicates the sense of dignity and mass which we receive
from Chapman. But it also illustrates Swinburne’s infirmities. Swinburne
was not tormented by the restless desire to penetrate to the heart and
marrow of a poet, any more than he was tormented by the desire to render
the finest shades of difference and resemblance between several poets.
Chapman is a difficult author, as Swinburne says; he is far more difficult
than Jonson, to whom he bears only a superficial likeness. He is difficult
beyond his obscurity. He is difficult partly through his possession of a
quality comparatively deficient in Jonson, but which was nevertheless a
quality of the age. It is strange that Swinburne should have hinted at a
similarity to Jonson and not mentioned a far more striking affinity of
Chapman’s—that is, Donne. The man who wrote
Guise, O my lord, how shall I cast from me
The bands and coverts hindering me from thee?
The garment or the cover of the mind
The humane soul is; of the soul, the spirit
The proper robe is; of the spirit, the blood;
And of the blood, the body is the shroud:

and
Nothing is made of nought, of all things made,
Their abstract being a dream but of a shade,

is unquestionably kin to Donne. The quality in question is not peculiar to
Donne and Chapman. In common with the greatest—Marlowe, Webster,
Tourneur, and Shakespeare—they had a quality of sensuous thought, or of
thinking through the senses, or of the senses thinking, of which the exact
formula remains to be defined. If you look for it in Shelley or Beddoes,
both of whom in very different ways recaptured something of the
Elizabethan inspiration, you will not find it, though you may find other
qualities instead. There is a trace of it only in Keats, and, derived from a
different source, in Rossetti. You will not find it in the Duke of Gandia.
Swinburne’s essay would have been all the better if he had applied himself
to the solution of problems like this.
He did not apply himself to this sort of problem because this was not the
sort of problem that interested him. The author of Swinburne’s critical
essays is also the author of Swinburne’s verse: if you hold the opinion that
Swinburne was a very great poet, you can hardly deny him the title of a
great critic. There is the same curious mixture of qualities to produce
Swinburne’s own effect, resulting in the same blur, which only the vigour of
the colours fixes. His great merit as a critic is really one which, like many
signal virtues, can be stated so simply as to appear flat. It is that he was
sufficiently interested in his subject-matter and knew quite enough about it;
and this is a rare combination in English criticism. Our critics are often
interested in extracting something from their subject which is not fairly in
it. And it is because this elementary virtue is so rare that Swinburne must
take a very respectable place as a critic. Critics are often interested—but not
quite in the nominal subject, often in something a little beside the point;
they are often learned—but not quite to the point either. (Swinburne knew
some of the plays almost by heart.) Can this particular virtue at which we
have glanced be attributed to Walter Pater? or to Professor Bradley? or to
Swinburne’s editor?

A Romantic Aristocrat

It is impossible to overlook the merits of scholarship and criticism exhibited
by George Wyndham’s posthumous book, and it is impossible to deal with
the book purely on its merits of scholarship and criticism. To attempt to do
so would in the first place be unfair, as the book is a posthumous work, and
posthumous books demand some personal attention to their writers. This
book is a collection of essays and addresses, arranged in their present order
by Mr. Whibley; they were intended by their author to be remodelled into a
volume on “romantic literature”; they move from an ingenious search for
the date of the beginning of Romanticism, through the French and English
Renaissance, to Sir Walter Scott. In the second place, these essays represent
the literary work of a man who gained his chief distinction in political life.
In the third place, this man stands for a type, an English type. The type is
interesting and will probably become extinct. It is natural, therefore, that
our primary interest in the essays should be an interest in George Wyndham.
Mr. Charles Whibley, in an introduction the tone of which is well suited to
the matter, has several sentences which throw light on Wyndham’s
personality. What issues with surprising clearness from Mr. Whibley’s
sketch is the unity of Wyndham’s mind, the identity of his mind as it
engaged in apparently unrelated occupations. Wyndham left Eton for the
army; in barracks he “taught himself Italian, and filled his leisure with the
reading of history and poetry.” After this Coldstream culture there was a
campaign in Egypt; later, service in South Africa accompanied by a copy of
Virgil. There was a career in the Commons, a conspicuous career as Irish
Secretary. Finally, there was a career as a landowner—2400 acres. And
throughout these careers George Wyndham went on not only accumulating
books but reading them, and occasionally writing about them. He was a
man of character, a man of energy. Mr. Whibley is quite credible when he
says:

Literature was for him no parergon, no mere way of escape from
politics. If he was an amateur in feeling, he was a craftsman in
execution;

and, more significantly,

With the same zest that he read and discoursed upon A Winter’s Tale or
Troilus and Cressida, he rode to hounds, or threw himself with a kind
of fury into a “point to point,” or made a speech at the hustings, or sat
late in the night talking with a friend.

From these and other sentences we chart the mind of George Wyndham, and
the key to its topography is the fact that his literature and his politics and his
country life are one and the same thing. They are not in separate
compartments, they are one career. Together they made up his world:
literature, politics, riding to hounds. In the real world these things have
nothing to do with each other. But we cannot believe that George Wyndham
lived in the real world. And this is implied in Mr. Whibley’s remark that:

George Wyndham was by character and training a romantic. He looked
with wonder upon the world as upon a fairyland.

Here is the manifestation of type.
There must probably be conceded to history a few “many-sided” men.
Perhaps Leonardo da Vinci was such. George Wyndham was not a man on
the scale of Leonardo, and his writings give a very different effect from
Leonardo’s notebooks. Leonardo turned to art or science, and each was
what it was and not another thing. But Leonardo was Leonardo: he had no
father to speak of, he was hardly a citizen, and he had no stake in the
community. He lived in no fairyland, but his mind went out and became a
part of things. George Wyndham was Gentry. He was chivalrous, the world
was an adventure of himself. It is characteristic that on embarking as a
subaltern for Egypt he wrote enthusiastically:

I do not suppose that any expedition since the days of Roman governors
of provinces has started with such magnificence; we might have been
Antony going to Egypt in a purple-sailed galley.

This is precisely the spirit which animates his appreciation of the
Elizabethans and of Walter Scott; which guides him toward Hakluyt and
North. Wyndham was enthusiastic, he was a Romantic, he was an

Imperialist, and he was quite naturally a literary pupil of W. E. Henley.
Wyndham was a scholar, but his scholarship is incidental; he was a good
critic, within the range allowed him by his enthusiasms; but it is neither as
Scholar nor as Critic that we can criticize him. We can criticize his writings
only as the expression of this peculiar English type, the aristocrat, the
Imperialist, the Romantic, riding to hounds across his prose, looking with
wonder upon the world as upon a fairyland.
Because he belongs to this type, Wyndham wrote enthusiastically and well
about North’s Plutarch. The romance of the ancient world becomes more
romantic in the idiomatic prose of North; the heroes are not merely Greek
and Roman heroes, but Elizabethan heroes as well; the romantic fusion
allured Wyndham. The charms of North could not be expounded more
delightfully, more seductively, with more gusto, than they are in
Wyndham’s essay. He appreciates the battles, the torchlight, the “dead
sound” of drums, the white, worn face of Cicero in his flight peering from
his litter; he appreciates the sharp brusque phrase of North: “he roundly
trussed them up and hung them by their necks.” And Wyndham is learned.
Here, as in his essays on the Pléiade and Shakespeare, the man has read
everything, with a labour that only whets his enjoyment of the best. There
are two defects: a lack of balance and a lack of critical profundity. The lack
of balance peeps through Wyndham’s condemnation of an obviously
inferior translation of Plutarch: “He dedicated the superfluity of his leisure
to enjoyment, and used his Lamia,” says the bad translator. North: “he took
pleasure of Lamia.” Wyndham makes a set upon the bad translator. But he
forgets that “dedicated the superfluity of his leisure” is such a phrase as
Gibbon would have warmed to life and wit, and that a history, in the
modern sense, could not be written in the style of North. Wyndham forgets,
in short, that it is not, in the end, periods and traditions but individual men
who write great prose. For Wyndham is himself a period and a tradition.
The lack of balance is to be suspected elsewhere. Wyndham likes the best,
but he likes a good deal. There is no conclusive evidence that he realized all
the difference, the gulf of difference between lines like:
En l’an trentiesme de mon aage
Que toutes mes hontes j’ay beues;

and even the very best of Ronsard or Bellay, such as:

Le temps s’en va, le temps s’en va, madame;
Las! le temps, non, mais nous nous en allons
Et tost serons estendus sous la lame.

We should not gather from Wyndham’s essay that the Phœnix and Turtle is
a great poem, far finer than Venus and Adonis; but what he says about Venus
and Adonis is worth reading, for Wyndham is very sharp in perceiving the
neglected beauties of the second-rate. There is nothing to show the gulf of
difference between Shakespeare’s sonnets and those of any other
Elizabethan. Wyndham overrates Sidney, and in his references to
Elizabethan writings on the theory of poetry omits mention of the essay by
Campion, an abler and more daring though less common-sense study than
Daniel’s. He speaks a few words for Drayton, but has not noticed that the
only good lines (with the exception of one sonnet which may be an
accident) in Drayton’s dreary sequence of “Ideas” occur when Drayton
drops his costume for a moment and talks in terms of actuality:
Lastly, mine eyes amazedly have seen
Essex’ great fall; Tyrone his peace to gain;
The quiet end of that long-living queen;
The king’s fair entry, and our peace with Spain.

More important than the lack of balance is the lack of critical analysis.
Wyndham had, as was indicated, a gusto for the Elizabethans. His essay on
the Poems of Shakespeare contains an extraordinary amount of information.
There is some interesting gossip about Mary Fitton and a good anecdote of
Sir William Knollys. But Wyndham misses what is the cardinal point in
criticizing the Elizabethans: we cannot grasp them, understand them,
without some understanding of the pathology of rhetoric. Rhetoric, a
particular form of rhetoric, was endemic, it pervaded the whole organism;
the healthy as well as the morbid tissues were built up on it. We cannot
grapple with even the simplest and most conversational lines in Tudor and
early Stuart drama without having diagnosed the rhetoric in the sixteenth
and seventeenth-century mind. Even when we come across lines like:
There’s a plumber laying pipes in my guts, it scalds,

we must not allow ourselves to forget the rhetorical basis any more than
when we read:
Come, let us march against the powers of heaven
And set black streamers in the firmament
To signify the slaughter of the gods.

An understanding of Elizabethan rhetoric is as essential to the appreciation
of Elizabethan literature as an understanding of Victorian sentiment is
essential to the appreciation of Victorian literature and of George
Wyndham.
Wyndham was a Romantic; the only cure for Romanticism is to analyse it.
What is permanent and good in Romanticism is curiosity—
... l’ardore
Ch’ l’ ebbe a divenir del mondo esperto
E degli vizii umani e del valore—

a curiosity which recognizes that any life, if accurately and profoundly
penetrated, is interesting and always strange. Romanticism is a short cut to
the strangeness without the reality, and it leads its disciples only back upon
themselves. George Wyndham had curiosity, but he employed it
romantically, not to penetrate the real world, but to complete the varied
features of the world he made for himself. It would be of interest to
divagate from literature to politics and inquire to what extent Romanticism
is incorporate in Imperialism; to inquire to what extent Romanticism has
possessed the imagination of Imperialists, and to what extent it was made
use of by Disraeli. But this is quite another matter: there may be a good deal
to be said for Romanticism in life, there is no place for it in letters. Not that
we need conclude that a man of George Wyndham’s antecedents and
traditions must inevitably be a Romanticist writer. But this is the case when
such a man plants himself firmly in his awareness of caste, when he says
“The gentry must not abdicate.” In politics this may be an admirable
formula. It will not do in literature. The Arts insist that a man shall dispose
of all that he has, even of his family tree, and follow art alone. For they
require that a man be not a member of a family or of a caste or of a party or
of a coterie, but simply and solely himself. A man like Wyndham brings

several virtues into literature. But there is only one man better and more
uncommon than the patrician, and that is the Individual.

The Local Flavour

In a world which is chiefly occupied with the task of keeping up to date
with itself, it is a satisfaction to know that there is at least one man who has
not only read but enjoyed, and not only enjoyed but read, such authors as
Petronius and Herondas. That is Mr. Charles Whibley, and there are two
statements to make about him: that he is not a critic, and that he is
something which is almost as rare, if not quite as precious. He has
apparently read and enjoyed a great deal of English literature, and the part
of it that he has most enjoyed is the literature of the great ages, the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. We may opine that Mr. Whibley has not uttered a
single important original judgment upon any of this literature. On the other
hand, how many have done so? Mr. Whibley is not a critic of men or of
books; but he convinces us that if we read the books that he has read we
should find them as delightful as he has found them; and if we read them
we can form our own opinions. And if he has not the balance of the critic,
he has some other equipoise of his own. It is partly that his tastes are not
puritanical, that he can talk about Restoration dramatists and others without
apologizing for their “indecency”; it is partly his sense for the best local and
temporal flavours; it is partly his healthy appetite.
A combination of non-critical, rather than uncritical, qualities made Mr.
Whibley the most appropriate person in the world for the work by which he
is best known. We should be more grateful for the “Tudor Translations
Series” if we could find copies to be bought, and if we could afford to buy
them when we found them. But that is not Mr. Whibley’s fault. The
introductions which he wrote for some of the translators are all that such
introductions should be. His Urquhart’s Rabelais contains all the irrelevant
information about that writer which is what is wanted to stimulate a taste
for him. After reading the introduction, to read Urquhart was the only
pleasure in life. And therefore, in a country destitute of living criticism, Mr.
Whibley is a useful person: for the first thing is that English literature
should be read at all. The few people who talk intelligently about Stendhal
and Flaubert and James know this; but the larger number of people who
skim the conversation of the former do not know enough of English

literature to be even insular. There are two ways in which a writer may lead
us to profit by the work of dead writers. One is by isolating the essential, by
pointing out the most intense in various kinds and separating it from the
accidents of environment. This method is helpful only to the more
intelligent people, who are capable of a unique enjoyment of perfect
expression, and it concentrates on the very best in any art. The other
method, that of Mr. Whibley, is to communicate a taste for the period—and
for the best of the period so far as it is of that period. That is not very easy
either. For a pure journalist will not know any period well enough; a pure
dilettante will know it too egotistically, as a fashion of his own. Mr.
Whibley is really interested; and he has escaped, without any programme of
revolt, from the present century into those of Tudor and Stuart. He escapes,
and perhaps leads others, by virtue of a taste which is not exactly a literary
taste.
The “Tudor Translations” form part of a pronounced taste. Some are better
written than others. There is, of course, a world of difference—of which Mr.
Whibley is perhaps unaware—between even Florio and his original. The
French of Montaigne is a mature language, and the English of Florio’s
living translation is not. Montaigne could be translated into the English of
his time, but a similar work could not have been written in it. But as the
English language matured it lost something that Florio and all his inferior
colleagues had, and that they had in common with the language of
Montaigne. It was not only the language, but the time. The prose of that age
had life, a life to which later ages could not add, from which they could
only take away. You find the same life, the same abundance, in Montaigne
and Brantôme, the alteration in Rochefoucauld as in Hobbes, the
desiccation in the classic prose of both languages, in Voltaire and in
Gibbon. Only, the French was originally richer and more mature—already
in Joinville and Commines—and we have no prose to compare with
Montaigne and Rabelais. If Mr. Whibley had analysed this vitality, and told
us why Holland and Underdowne, Nashe and Martin Marprelate are still
worth reading, then he could have shown us how to recognize this quality
when it, or something like it, appears in our own lifetime. But Mr. Whibley
is not an analyst. His taste, even, becomes less certain as he fixes it on
individuals within his period. On Surrey’s blank verse he is feeble; he does
not even give Surrey the credit of having anticipated some of Tennyson’s
best effects. He has no praise for Golding, quite one of the best of the verse

translators; he apologizes for him by saying that Ovid demands no strength
or energy! There is strength and energy, at least, in Marlowe’s Amores. And
he omits mention of Gawain Douglas, who, though he wrote in Scots, was
surely a “Tudor” translator. Characteristically, Mr. Whibley praises
Chapman because

it gives proof of an abounding life, a quenchless energy. There is a
grandeur and spirit in Chapman’s rendering, not unworthy the
original....

This is commonplace, and it is uncritical. And a critic would not use so
careless a phrase as “Tasso’s masterpiece.” The essay on Congreve does not
add much to our understanding:

And so he set upon the boards a set of men and women of quick brains
and cynical humours, who talked with the brilliance and rapidity
wherewith the finished swordsman fences.

We have heard of this conversation like fencing before. And the suspicion is
in our breast that Mr. Whibley might admire George Meredith. The essay on
Ralegh gives still less. The reality of that pleasing pirate and monopolist has
escaped, and only the national hero is left. And yet Ralegh, and Swift, and
Congreve, and the underworld of sixteenth and seventeenth-century letters,
are somehow kept alive by what Mr. Whibley says of them.
Accordingly, Mr. Whibley does not disappear in the jungle of journalism
and false criticism; he deserves a “place upon the shelves” of those who
care for English literature. He has the first requisite of a critic: interest in his
subject, and ability to communicate an interest in it. His defects are both of
intellect and feeling. He has no dissociative faculty. There were very
definite vices and definite shortcomings and immaturities in the literature
he admires; and as he is not the person to tell us of the vices and
shortcomings, he is not the person to lay before us the work of absolutely
the finest quality. He exercises neither of the tools of the critic: comparison
and analysis. He has not the austerity of passion which can detect
unerringly the transition from work of eternal intensity to work that is
merely beautiful, and from work that is beautiful to work that is merely
charming. For the critic needs to be able not only to saturate himself in the

spirit and the fashion of a time—the local flavour—but also to separate
himself suddenly from it in appreciation of the highest creative work.
And he needs something else that Mr. Whibley lacks: a creative interest, a
focus upon the immediate future. The important critic is the person who is
absorbed in the present problems of art, and who wishes to bring the forces
of the past to bear upon the solution of these problems. If the critic consider
Congreve, for instance, he will have always at the back of his mind the
question: What has Congreve got that is pertinent to our dramatic art? Even
if he is solely engaged in trying to understand Congreve, this will make all
the difference: inasmuch as to understand anything is to understand from a
point of view. Most critics have some creative interest—it may be, instead
of an interest in any art, an interest (like Mr. Paul More’s) in morals. These
remarks were introduced only to assist in giving the books of Mr. Whibley a
place, a particular but unticketed place, neither with criticism, nor with
history, nor with plain journalism; and the trouble would not have been
taken if the books were not thought to be worth placing.

A Note on the American Critic

This gallery of critics is not intended to be in any sense complete. But
having dealt with three English writers of what may be called critical prose,
one’s mind becomes conscious of the fact that they have something in
common, and, trying to perceive more clearly what this community is, and
suspecting that it is a national quality, one is impelled to meditate upon the
strongest contrast possible. Hence these comments upon two American
critics and one French critic, which would not take exactly this form
without the contrast at which I have hinted.
Mr. Paul More is the author of a number of volumes which he perhaps
hopes will break the record of mass established by the complete works of
Sainte-Beuve. The comparison with Sainte-Beuve is by no means trivial, for
Mr. More, and Professor Irving Babbitt also, are admirers of the
voluminous Frenchman. Not only are they admirers, but their admiration is
perhaps a clue both to much of their merit and to some of their defects. In
the first place, both of these writers have given much more attention to
French criticism, to the study of French standards of writing and of thought,
than any of the notable English critics since Arnold; they are therefore
much nearer to the European current, although they exhibit faults which are
definitely transatlantic and which definitely keep them out of it. The French
influence is traceable in their devotion to ideas and their interest in
problems of art and life as problems which exist and can be handled apart
from their relations to the critic’s private temperament. With Swinburne, the
criticism of Elizabethan literature has the interest of a passion, it has the
interest for us of any writing by an intellectual man who is genuinely
moved by certain poetry. Swinburne’s intelligence is not defective, it is
impure. There are few ideas in Swinburne’s critical writings which stand
forth luminous with an independent life of their own, so true that one
forgets the author in the statement. Swinburne’s words must always be
referred back to Swinburne himself. And if literature is to Swinburne
merely a passion, we are tempted to say that to George Wyndham it was a
hobby, and to Mr. Whibley almost a charming showman’s show (we are
charmed by the urbanity of the showman). The two latter have gusto, but

gusto is no equivalent for taste; it depends too much upon the appetite and
the digestion of the feeder. And with one or two other writers, whom I have
not had occasion to discuss, literature is not so much a collection of
valuable porcelain as an institution—accepted, that is to say, with the same
gravity as the establishments of Church and State. That is, in other words,
the essentially uncritical attitude. In all of these attitudes the English critic
is the victim of his temperament. He may acquire great erudition, but
erudition easily becomes a hobby; it is useless unless it enables us to see
literature all round, to detach it from ourselves, to reach a state of pure
contemplation.
Now Mr. More and Mr. Babbitt have endeavoured to establish a criticism
which should be independent of temperament. This is in itself a
considerable merit. But at this point Mr. More particularly has been led
astray, oddly enough, by his guide Sainte-Beuve. Neither Mr. More nor
Sainte-Beuve is primarily interested in art. Of the latter M. Benda has well
observed that

on sait—et c’est certainement un des grands éléments de son succès—
combien d’études l’illustre critique consacre à des auteurs dont
l’importance littéraire est quasi nulle (femmes, magistrats, courtisans,
militaires), mais dont les écrits lui sont une occasion de pourtraiturer
une âme; combien volontiers, pour les maîtres, il s’attache à leurs
productions secondaires, notes, brouillons, lettres intimes, plutôt qu’à
leurs grandes œuvres, souvent beaucoup moins expressives, en effet, de
leur psychologie.

Mr. More is not, like Sainte-Beuve, primarily interested in psychology or in
human beings; Mr. More is primarily a moralist, which is a worthy and
serious thing to be. The trouble with Mr. More is that you cannot disperse a
theory or point of view of morals over a vast number of essays on a great
variety of important figures in literature, unless you can give some more
particular interest as well. Sainte-Beuve has his particularized interest in
human beings; another critic—say Remy de Gourmont—may have
something to say always about the art of a writer which will make our
enjoyment of that writer more conscious and more intelligent. But the pure
moralist in letters—the moralist is useful to the creator as well as the reader
of poetry—must be more concise, for we must have the pleasure of

inspecting the beauty of his structure. And here M. Julien Benda has a great
advantage over Mr. More; his thought may be less profound, but it has more
formal beauty.
Mr. Irving Babbitt, who shares so many of the ideals and opinions of Mr.
More that their names must be coupled, has expressed his thought more
abstractly and with more form, and is free from a mystical impulse which
occasionally gets out of Mr. More’s hand. He appears, more clearly than
Mr. More, and certainly more clearly than any critic of equal authority in
America or England, to perceive Europe as a whole; he has the
cosmopolitan mind and a tendency to seek the centre. His few books are
important, and would be more important if he preached of discipline in a
more disciplined style. Although he also is an admirer of Sainte-Beuve, he
would probably subscribe to this admirable paragraph of Othenin
d’Haussonville:[4]

Il y a une beauté littéraire, impersonnelle en quelque sorte, parfaitement
distincte de l’auteur lui-même et de son organisation, beauté qui a sa
raison d’être et ses lois, dont la critique est tenue de rendre compte. Et
si la critique considère cette tâche comme au-dessous d’elle, si c’est
affaire à la rhétorique et à ce que Sainte-Beuve appelle
dédaigneusement les Quintilien, alors la rhetorique a du bon et les
Quintilien ne sont pas à dédaigner.

There may be several critics in England who would applaud this notion;
there are very few who show any evidence of its apprehension in their
writings. But Mr. More and Mr. Babbitt, whatever their actual tastes, and
although they are not primarily occupied with art, are on the side of the
artist. And the side of the artist is not the side which in England is often
associated with critical writing. As Mr. More has pointed out in an
interesting essay, there is a vital weakness in Arnold’s definition of criticism
as “the disinterested endeavour to know the best that is known and thought
in the world, irrespectively of practice, politics, and everything of the kind.”
The “disinterested endeavour to know” is only a prerequisite of the critic,
and is not criticism, which may be the result of such an endeavour. Arnold
states the work of the critic merely in terms of the personal ideal, an ideal
for oneself—and an ideal for oneself is not disinterested. Here Arnold is the
Briton rather than the European.

Mr. More indicates his own attitude in praising those whom he elevates to
the position of masters of criticism:

If they deal much with the criticism of literature, this is because in
literature more manifestly than anywhere else life displays its infinitely
varied motives and results; and their practice is always to render
literature itself more consciously a criticism of life.

“Criticism of life” is a facile phrase, and at most only represents one aspect
of great literature, if it does not assign to the term “criticism” itself a
generality which robs it of precision. Mr. More has, it seems to me, in this
sentence just failed to put his finger on the right seriousness of great literary
art: the seriousness which we find in Villon’s Testament and which is
conspicuously absent from In Memoriam; or the seriousness which controls
Amos Barton and not The Mill on the Floss.
It is a pity that Mr. More does not write a little oftener about the great
literary artists, it is a pity that he takes the reputations of the world too
solemnly. This is probably due in part to remoteness in space from the
European centre. But it must be observed that English solemnity and
American solemnity are very different. I do not propose to analyse the
difference (it would be a valuable chapter in social history); the American
solemnity, it is enough to say, is more primitive, more academic, more like
that of the German professor. But it is not the fault of Mr. More or Mr.
Babbitt that the culture of ideas has only been able to survive in America in
the unfavourable atmosphere of the university.

The French Intelligence

As the inspection of types of English irresistibly provoked a glance at two
American critics, so the inspection of the latter leads our attention to the
French. M. Julien Benda has the formal beauty which the American critics
lack, and a close affinity to them in point of view. He restricts himself,
perhaps, to a narrower field of ideas, but within that field he manipulates
the ideas with a very exceptional cogency and clarity. To notice his last
book (Belphégor: essai sur l’esthétique de la présente société française)
would be to quote from it. M. Benda is not like Remy de Gourmont, the
critical consciousness of a generation, he could not supply the conscious
formulas of a sensibility in process of formation; he is rather the ideal
scavenger of the rubbish of our time. Much of his analysis of the decadence
of contemporary French society could be applied to London, although
differences are observable from his diagnosis.

Quant à la société en elle-même, on peut prévoir que ce soin qu’elle
met à éprouver de l’émoi par l’art, devenant cause à son tour, y rendra
la soif de ce plaisir de plus en plus intense, l’application a la satisfaire
de plus en plus jalouse et plus perfectionnée. On entrevoit le jour où la
bonne société française repudiera encore le peu qu’elle supporte
aujourd’hui d’idées et d’organisation dans l’art, et ne se passionera plus
que pour des gestes de comédiens, pour des impressions de femmes ou
d’enfants, pour des rugissements de lyriques, pour des extases de
fanatiques....

Almost the only person who has ever figured in England and attempted a
task at all similar to that of M. Benda is Matthew Arnold. Matthew Arnold
was intelligent, and by so much difference as the presence of one intelligent
man makes, our age is inferior to that of Arnold. But what an advantage a
man like M. Benda has over Arnold. It is not simply that he has a critical
tradition behind him, and that Arnold is using a language which constantly
tempts the user away from dispassionate exposition into sarcasm and
diatribe, a language less fitted for criticism than the English of the

eighteenth century. It is that the follies and stupidities of the French, no
matter how base, express themselves in the form of ideas—Bergsonism
itself is an intellectual construction, and the mondaines who attended
lectures at the College de France were in a sense using their minds. A man
of ideas needs ideas, or pseudo-ideas, to fight against. And Arnold lacked
the active resistance which is necessary to keep a mind at its sharpest.
A society in which a mind like M. Benda’s can exercise itself, and in which
there are persons like M. Benda, is one which facilitates the task of the
creative artist. M. Benda cannot be attached, like Gourmont, to any creative
group. He does not wholly partake in that “conscious creation of the field of
the present out of the past” which Mr. More considers to be part of the work
of the critic. But in analysing the maladies of the second-rate or corrupt
literature of the time he makes the labour of the creative artist lighter. The
Charles Louis Philippes of English literature are never done with, because
there is no one to kill their reputations; we still hear that George Meredith is
a master of prose, or even a profound philosopher. The creative artist in
England finds himself compelled, or at least tempted, to spend much of his
time and energy in criticism that he might reserve for the perfecting of his
proper work: simply because there is no one else to do it.

Tradition and the Individual Talent

I

In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally
apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to “the tradition” or
to “a tradition”; at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry
of So-and-so is “traditional” or even “too traditional.” Seldom, perhaps,
does the word appear except in a phrase of censure. If otherwise, it is
vaguely approbative, with the implication, as to the work approved, of some
pleasing archæological reconstruction. You can hardly make the word
agreeable to English ears without this comfortable reference to the
reassuring science of archæology.
Certainly the word is not likely to appear in our appreciations of living or
dead writers. Every nation, every race, has not only its own creative, but its
own critical turn of mind; and is even more oblivious of the shortcomings
and limitations of its critical habits than of those of its creative genius. We
know, or think we know, from the enormous mass of critical writing that
has appeared in the French language the critical method or habit of the
French; we only conclude (we are such unconscious people) that the French
are “more critical” than we, and sometimes even plume ourselves a little
with the fact, as if the French were the less spontaneous. Perhaps they are;
but we might remind ourselves that criticism is as inevitable as breathing,
and that we should be none the worse for articulating what passes in our
minds when we read a book and feel an emotion about it, for criticizing our
own minds in their work of criticism. One of the facts that might come to
light in this process is our tendency to insist, when we praise a poet, upon
those aspects of his work in which he least resembles anyone else. In these
aspects or parts of his work we pretend to find what is individual, what is
the peculiar essence of the man. We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s
difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we
endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed.
Whereas if we approach a poet without his prejudice we shall often find that
not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in
which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most
vigorously. And I do not mean the impressionable period of adolescence,
but the period of full maturity.

Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following
the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid
adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged. We
have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is
better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It
cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It
involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly
indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his
twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of
the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a
man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a
feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it
the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence
and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense
of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the
temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same
time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his
contemporaneity.
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His
significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead
poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for
contrast and comparison, among the dead. I mean this as a principle of
aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism. The necessity that he shall
conform, that he shall cohere, is not one-sided; what happens when a new
work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the
works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form an ideal order
among themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the
really new) work of art among them. The existing order is complete before
the new work arrives; for order to persist after the supervention of novelty,
the whole existing order must be, if ever so slightly, altered; and so the
relations, proportions, values of each work of art toward the whole are
readjusted; and this is conformity between the old and the new. Whoever
has approved this idea of order, of the form of European, of English
literature, will not find it preposterous that the past should be altered by the
present as much as the present is directed by the past. And the poet who is
aware of this will be aware of great difficulties and responsibilities.

In a peculiar sense he will be aware also that he must inevitably be judged
by the standards of the past. I say judged, not amputated, by them; not
judged to be as good as, or worse or better than, the dead; and certainly not
judged by the canons of dead critics. It is a judgment, a comparison, in
which two things are measured by each other. To conform merely would be
for the new work not really to conform at all; it would not be new, and
would therefore not be a work of art. And we do not quite say that the new
is more valuable because it fits in; but its fitting in is a test of its value—a
test, it is true, which can only be slowly and cautiously applied, for we are
none of us infallible judges of conformity. We say: it appears to conform,
and is perhaps individual, or it appears individual, and may conform; but
we are hardly likely to find that it is one and not the other.
To proceed to a more intelligible exposition of the relation of the poet to the
past: he can neither take the past as a lump, an indiscriminate bolus, nor can
he form himself wholly on one or two private admirations, nor can he form
himself wholly upon one preferred period. The first course is inadmissible,
the second is an important experience of youth, and the third is a pleasant
and highly desirable supplement. The poet must be very conscious of the
main current, which does not at all flow invariably through the most
distinguished reputations. He must be quite aware of the obvious fact that
art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same. He
must be aware that the mind of Europe—the mind of his own country—a
mind which he learns in time to be much more important than his own
private mind—is a mind which changes, and that this change is a
development which abandons nothing en route, which does not
superannuate either Shakespeare, or Homer, or the rock drawing of the
Magdalenian draughtsmen. That this development, refinement perhaps,
complication certainly, is not, from the point of view of the artist, any
improvement. Perhaps not even an improvement from the point of view of
the psychologist or not to the extent which we imagine; perhaps only in the
end based upon a complication in economics and machinery. But the
difference between the present and the past is that the conscious present is
an awareness of the past in a way and to an extent which the past’s
awareness of itself cannot show.
Some one said: “The dead writers are remote from us because we know so
much more than they did.” Precisely, and they are that which we know.

I am alive to a usual objection to what is clearly part of my programme for
the métier of poetry. The objection is that the doctrine requires a ridiculous
amount of erudition (pedantry), a claim which can be rejected by appeal to
the lives of poets in any pantheon. It will even be affirmed that much
learning deadens or perverts poetic sensibility. While, however, we persist
in believing that a poet ought to know as much as will not encroach upon
his necessary receptivity and necessary laziness, it is not desirable to
confine knowledge to whatever can be put into a useful shape for
examinations, drawing-rooms, or the still more pretentious modes of
publicity. Some can absorb knowledge, the more tardy must sweat for it.
Shakespeare acquired more essential history from Plutarch than most men
could from the whole British Museum. What is to be insisted upon is that
the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he
should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career.
What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to
something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual
self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.
There remains to define this process of depersonalization and its relation to
the sense of tradition. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to
approach the condition of science. I shall, therefore, invite you to consider,
as a suggestive analogy, the action which takes place when a bit of finely
filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and
sulphur dioxide.

II

Honest criticism and sensitive appreciation is directed not upon the poet but
upon the poetry. If we attend to the confused cries of the newspaper critics
and the susurrus of popular repetition that follows, we shall hear the names
of poets in great numbers; if we seek not Blue-book knowledge but the
enjoyment of poetry, and ask for a poem, we shall seldom find it. In the last
article I tried to point out the importance of the relation of the poem to other
poems by other authors, and suggested the conception of poetry as a living
whole of all the poetry that has ever been written. The other aspect of this
Impersonal theory of poetry is the relation of the poem to its author. And I
hinted, by an analogy, that the mind of the mature poet differs from that of
the immature one not precisely in any valuation of “personality,” not being
necessarily more interesting, or having “more to say,” but rather by being a
more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are
at liberty to enter into new combinations.
The analogy was that of the catalyst. When the two gases previously
mentioned are mixed in the presence of a filament of platinum, they form
sulphurous acid. This combination takes place only if the platinum is
present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum,
and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected; has remained inert, neutral,
and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly
or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the
more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man
who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind
digest and transmute the passions which are its material.
The experience, you will notice, the elements which enter the presence of
the transforming catalyst, are of two kinds: emotions and feelings. The
effect of a work of art upon the person who enjoys it is an experience
different in kind from any experience not of art. It may be formed out of
one emotion, or may be a combination of several; and various feelings,
inhering for the writer in particular words or phrases or images, may be
added to compose the final result. Or great poetry may be made without the
direct use of any emotion whatever: composed out of feelings solely. Canto

XV of the Inferno (Brunetto Latini) is a working up of the emotion evident
in the situation; but the effect, though single as that of any work of art, is
obtained by considerable complexity of detail. The last quatrain gives an
image, a feeling attaching to an image, which “came,” which did not
develop simply out of what precedes, but which was probably in suspension
in the poet’s mind until the proper combination arrived for it to add itself to.
The poet’s mind is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless
feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which
can unite to form a new compound are present together.
If you compare several representative passages of the greatest poetry you
see how great is the variety of types of combination, and also how
completely any semi-ethical criterion of “sublimity” misses the mark. For it
is not the “greatness,” the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but
the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which
the fusion takes place, that counts. The episode of Paolo and Francesca
employs a definite emotion, but the intensity of the poetry is something
quite different from whatever intensity in the supposed experience it may
give the impression of. It is no more intense, furthermore, than Canto
XXVI, the voyage of Ulysses, which has not the direct dependence upon an
emotion. Great variety is possible in the process of transmution of emotion:
the murder of Agamemnon, or the agony of Othello, gives an artistic effect
apparently closer to a possible original than the scenes from Dante. In the
Agamemnon, the artistic emotion approximates to the emotion of an actual
spectator; in Othello to the emotion of the protagonist himself. But the
difference between art and the event is always absolute; the combination
which is the murder of Agamemnon is probably as complex as that which is
the voyage of Ulysses. In either case there has been a fusion of elements.
The ode of Keats contains a number of feelings which have nothing
particular to do with the nightingale, but which the nightingale, partly,
perhaps, because of its attractive name, and partly because of its reputation,
served to bring together.
The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the
metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: for my meaning is,
that the poet has, not a “personality” to express, but a particular medium,
which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and
experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and

experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the
poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a
negligible part in the man, the personality.
I will quote a passage which is unfamiliar enough to be regarded with fresh
attention in the light—or darkness—of these observations:
And now methinks I could e’en chide myself
For doating on her beauty, though her death
Shall be revenged after no common action.
Does the silkworm expend her yellow labours
For thee? For thee does she undo herself?
Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships
For the poor benefit of a bewildering minute?
Why does yon fellow falsify highways,
And put his life between the judge’s lips,
To refine such a thing—keeps horse and men
To beat their valours for her?...

In this passage (as is evident if it is taken in its context) there is a
combination of positive and negative emotions: an intensely strong
attraction toward beauty and an equally intense fascination by the ugliness
which is contrasted with it and which destroys it. This balance of contrasted
emotion is in the dramatic situation to which the speech is pertinent, but
that situation alone is inadequate to it. This is, so to speak, the structural
emotion, provided by the drama. But the whole effect, the dominant tone, is
due to the fact that a number of floating feelings, having an affinity to this
emotion by no means superficially evident, have combined with it to give
us a new art emotion.
It is not in his personal emotions, the emotions provoked by particular
events in his life, that the poet is in any way remarkable or interesting. His
particular emotions may be simple, or crude, or flat. The emotion in his
poetry will be a very complex thing, but not with the complexity of the
emotions of people who have very complex or unusual emotions in life.
One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human
emotions to express: and in this search for novelty in the wrong place it
discovers the perverse. The business of the poet is not to find new emotions,
but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express
feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. And emotions which he has
never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him.

Consequently, we must believe that “emotion recollected in tranquillity” is
an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without
distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing
resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences
which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences
at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of
deliberation. These experiences are not “recollected,” and they finally unite
in an atmosphere which is “tranquil” only in that it is a passive attending
upon the event. Of course this is not quite the whole story. There is a great
deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and deliberate. In
fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious,
and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make
him “personal.” Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from
emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from
personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions
know what it means to want to escape from these things.

III

ὁ δὲ νοῦς ἴσως θειότερόν τι καὶ ἀπαθές ἐστιν
This essay proposes to halt at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism, and
confine itself to such practical conclusions as can be applied by the
responsible person interested in poetry. To divert interest from the poet to
the poetry is a laudable aim: for it would conduce to a juster estimation of
actual poetry, good and bad. There are many people who appreciate the
expression of sincere emotion in verse, and there is a smaller number of
people who can appreciate technical excellence. But very few know when
there is expression of significant emotion, emotion which has its life in the
poem and not in the history of the poet. The emotion of art is impersonal.
And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself
wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be
done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present
moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead, but of what
is already living.

The Possibility of a Poetic Drama

The questions—why there is no poetic drama to-day, how the stage has lost
all hold on literary art, why so many poetic plays are written which can only
be read, and read, if at all, without pleasure—have become insipid, almost
academic. The usual conclusion is either that “conditions” are too much for
us, or that we really prefer other types of literature, or simply that we are
uninspired. As for the last alternative, it is not to be entertained; as for the
second, what type do we prefer?; and as for the first, no one has ever shown
me “conditions,” except of the most superficial. The reasons for raising the
question again are first that the majority, perhaps, certainly a large number,
of poets hanker for the stage; and second, that a not negligible public
appears to want verse plays. Surely there is some legitimate craving, not
restricted to a few persons, which only the verse play can satisfy. And
surely the critical attitude is to attempt to analyse the conditions and the
other data. If there comes to light some conclusive obstacle, the
investigation should at least help us to turn our thoughts to more profitable
pursuits; and if there is not, we may hope to arrive eventually at some
statement of conditions which might be altered. Possibly we shall find that
our incapacity has a deeper source: the arts have at times flourished when
there was no drama; possibly we are incompetent altogether; in that case the
stage will be, not the seat, but at all events a symptom, of the malady.
From the point of view of literature, the drama is only one among several
poetic forms. The epic, the ballad, the chanson de geste, the forms of
Provence and of Tuscany, all found their perfection by serving particular
societies. The forms of Ovid, Catullus, Propertius, served a society
different, and in some respects more civilized, than any of these; and in the
society of Ovid the drama as a form of art was comparatively insignificant.
Nevertheless, the drama is perhaps the most permanent, is capable of
greater variation and of expressing more varied types of society, than any
other. It varied considerably in England alone; but when one day it was

discovered lifeless, subsequent forms which had enjoyed a transitory life
were dead too. I am not prepared to undertake the historical survey; but I
should say that the poetic drama’s autopsy was performed as much by
Charles Lamb as by anyone else. For a form is not wholly dead until it is
known to be; and Lamb, by exhuming the remains of dramatic life at its
fullest, brought a consciousness of the immense gap between present and
past. It was impossible to believe, after that, in a dramatic “tradition.” The
relation of Byron’s English Bards and the poems of Crabbe to the work of
Pope was a continuous tradition; but the relation of The Cenci to the great
English drama is almost that of a reconstruction to an original. By losing
tradition, we lose our hold on the present; but so far as there was any
dramatic tradition in Shelley’s day there was nothing worth the keeping.
There is all the difference between preservation and restoration.
The Elizabethan Age in England was able to absorb a great quantity of new
thoughts and new images, almost dispensing with tradition, because it had
this great form of its own which imposed itself on everything that came to
it. Consequently, the blank verse of their plays accomplished a subtlety and
consciousness, even an intellectual power, that no blank verse since has
developed or even repeated; elsewhere this age is crude, pedantic, or loutish
in comparison with its contemporary France or Italy. The nineteenth century
had a good many fresh impressions; but it had no form in which to confine
them. Two men, Wordsworth and Browning, hammered out forms for
themselves—personal forms, The Excursion, Sordello, The Ring and the
Book, Dramatic Monologues; but no man can invent a form, create a taste
for it, and perfect it too. Tennyson, who might unquestionably have been a
consummate master of minor forms, took to turning out large patterns on a
machine. As for Keats and Shelley, they were too young to be judged, and
they were trying one form after another.
These poets were certainly obliged to consume vast energy in this pursuit of
form, which could never lead to a wholly satisfying result. There has only
been one Dante; and, after all, Dante had the benefit of years of practice in
forms employed and altered by numbers of contemporaries and
predecessors; he did not waste the years of youth in metric invention; and
when he came to the Commedia he knew how to pillage right and left. To
have, given into one’s hands, a crude form, capable of indefinite refinement,
and to be the person to see the possibilities—Shakespeare was very

fortunate. And it is perhaps the craving for some such donnée which draws
us on toward the present mirage of poetic drama.
But it is now very questionable whether there are more than two or three in
the present generation who are capable, the least little bit, of benefiting by
such advantages were they given. At most two or three actually devote
themselves to this pursuit of form for which they have little or no public
recognition. To create a form is not merely to invent a shape, a rhyme or
rhythm. It is also the realization of the whole appropriate content of this
rhyme or rhythm. The sonnet of Shakespeare is not merely such and such a
pattern, but a precise way of thinking and feeling. The framework which
was provided for the Elizabethan dramatist was not merely blank verse and
the five-act play and the Elizabethan playhouse; it was not merely the plot
—for the poets incorporated, remodelled, adapted or invented, as occasion
suggested. It was also the half-formed ὑλή, the “temper of the age” (an
unsatisfactory phrase), a preparedness, a habit on the part of the public, to
respond to particular stimuli. There is a book to be written on the
commonplaces of any great dramatic period, the handling of Fate or Death,
the recurrence of mood, tone, situation. We should see then just how little
each poet had to do; only so much as would make a play his, only what was
really essential to make it different from anyone else’s. When there is this
economy of effort it is possible to have several, even many, good poets at
once. The great ages did not perhaps produce much more talent than ours;
but less talent was wasted.
Now in a formless age there is very little hope for the minor poet to do
anything worth doing; and when I say minor I mean very good poets
indeed: such as filled the Greek anthology and the Elizabethan song-books;
even a Herrick; but not merely second-rate poets, for Denham and Waller
have quite another importance, occupying points in the development of a
major form. When everything is set out for the minor poet to do, he may
quite frequently come upon some trouvaille, even in the drama: Peele and
Brome are examples. Under the present conditions, the minor poet has too
much to do. And this leads to another reason for the incompetence of our
time in poetic drama.
Permanent literature is always a presentation: either a presentation of
thought, or a presentation of feeling by a statement of events in human
action or objects in the external world. In earlier literature—to avoid the

word “classic”—we find both kinds, and sometimes, as in some of the
dialogues of Plato, exquisite combinations of both. Aristotle presents
thought, stripped to the essential structure, and he is a great writer. The
Agamemnon or Macbeth is equally a statement, but of events. They are as
much works of the “intellect” as the writings of Aristotle. There are more
recent works of art which have the same quality of intellect in common with
those of Æschylus and Shakespeare and Aristotle: Education Sentimentale
is one of them. Compare it with such a book as Vanity Fair and you will see
that the labour of the intellect consisted largely in a purification, in keeping
out a great deal that Thackeray allowed to remain in; in refraining from
reflection, in putting into the statement enough to make reflection
unnecessary. The case of Plato is still more illuminating. Take the
Theœtetus. In a few opening words Plato gives a scene, a personality, a
feeling, which colour the subsequent discourse but do not interfere with it:
the particular setting, and the abstruse theory of knowledge afterwards
developed, co-operate without confusion. Could any contemporary author
exhibit such control?
In the nineteenth century another mentality manifested itself It is evident in
a very able and brilliant poem, Goethe’s Faust. Marlowe’s Mephistopheles
is a simpler creature than Goethe’s. But at least Marlowe has, in a few
words, concentrated him into a statement. He is there, and (incidentally) he
renders Milton’s Satan superfluous. Goethe’s demon inevitably sends us
back to Goethe. He embodies a philosophy. A creation of art should not do
that: he should replace the philosophy. Goethe has not, that is to say,
sacrificed or consecrated his thought to make the drama; the drama is still a
means. And this type of mixed art has been repeated by men incomparably
smaller than Goethe. We have had one other remarkable work of this type:
Peer Gynt. And we have had the plays of M. Maeterlinck and M. Claudel.[5]
In the work of Maeterlinck and Claudel on the one hand, and those of M.
Bergson on the other, we have the mixture of the genres in which our age
delights. Every work of imagination must have a philosophy; and every
philosophy must be a work of art—how often have we heard that M.
Bergson is an artist! It is a boast of his disciples. It is what the word “art”
means to them that is the disputable point. Certain works of philosophy can
be called works of art: much of Aristotle and Plato, Spinoza, parts of Hume,
Mr. Bradley’s Principles of Logic, Mr. Russell’s essay on “Denoting”: clear

and beautifully formed thought. But this is not what the admirers of
Bergson, Claudel, or Maeterlinck (the philosophy of the latter is a little out
of date) mean. They mean precisely what is not clear, but what is an
emotional stimulus. And as a mixture of thought and of vision provides
more stimulus, by suggesting both, both clear thinking and clear statement
of particular objects must disappear.
The undigested “idea” or philosophy, the idea-emotion, is to be found also
in poetic dramas which are conscientious attempts to adapt a true structure,
Athenian or Elizabethan, to contemporary feeling. It appears sometimes as
the attempt to supply the defect of structure by an internal structure. “But
most important of all is the structure of the incidents. For Tragedy is an
imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in action,
and its end is a mode of action, not a quality.”[6]
We have on the one hand the “poetic” drama, imitation Greek, imitation
Elizabethan, or modern-philosophical, on the other the comedy of “ideas,”
from Shaw to Galsworthy, down to the ordinary social comedy. The most
ramshackle Guitry farce has some paltry idea or comment upon life put into
the mouth of one of the characters at the end. It is said that the stage can be
used for a variety of purposes, that in only one of them perhaps is it united
with literary art. A mute theatre is a possibility (I do not mean the cinema);
the ballet is an actuality (though under-nourished); opera is an institution;
but where you have “imitations of life” on the stage, with speech, the only
standard that we can allow is the standard of the work of art, aiming at the
same intensity at which poetry and the other forms of art aim. From that
point of view the Shavian drama is a hybrid as the Maeterlinckian drama is,
and we need express no surprise at their belonging to the same epoch. Both
philosophies are popularizations: the moment an idea has been transferred
from its pure state in order that it may become comprehensible to the
inferior intelligence it has lost contact with art. It can remain pure only by
being stated simply in the form of general truth, or by being transmuted, as
the attitude of Flaubert toward the small bourgeois is transformed in
Education Sentimentale. It has there become so identified with the reality
that you can no longer say what the idea is.
The essential is not, of course, that drama should be written in verse, or that
we should be able to extenuate our appreciation of broad farce by
occasionally attending a performance of a play of Euripides where

Professor Murray’s translation is sold at the door. The essential is to get
upon the stage this precise statement of life which is at the same time a
point of view, a world—a world which the author’s mind has subjected to a
complete process of simplification. I do not find that any drama which
“embodies a philosophy” of the author’s (like Faust) or which illustrates
any social theory (like Shaw’s) can possibly fulfil the requirements—
though a place might be left for Shaw if not for Goethe. And the world of
Ibsen and the world of Tchehov are not enough simplified, universal.
Finally, we must take into account the instability of any art—the drama,
music, dancing—which depends upon representation by performers. The
intervention of performers introduces a complication of economic
conditions which is in itself likely to be injurious. A struggle, more or less
unconscious, between the creator and the interpreter is almost inevitable.
The interest of a performer is almost certain to be centred in himself: a very
slight acquaintance with actors and musicians will testify. The performer is
interested not in form but in opportunities for virtuosity or in the
communication of his “personality”; the formlessness, the lack of
intellectual clarity and distinction in modern music, the great physical
stamina and physical training which it often requires, are perhaps signs of
the triumph of the performer. The consummation of the triumph of the actor
over the play is perhaps the productions of the Guitry.
The conflict is one which certainly cannot be terminated by the utter rout of
the actor profession. For one thing, the stage appeals to too many demands
besides the demand for art for that to be possible; and also we need,
unfortunately, something more than refined automatons. Occasionally
attempts have been made to “get around” the actor, to envelop him in
masks, to set up a few “conventions” for him to stumble over, or even to
develop little breeds of actors for some special Art drama. This meddling
with nature seldom succeeds; nature usually overcomes these obstacles.
Possibly the majority of attempts to confect a poetic drama have begun at
the wrong end; they have aimed at the small public which wants “poetry.”
(“Novices,” says Aristotle, “in the art attain to finish of diction and
precision of portraiture before they can construct the plot.”) The
Elizabethan drama was aimed at a public which wanted entertainment of a
crude sort, but would stand a good deal of poetry; our problem should be to
take a form of entertainment, and subject it to the process which would

leave it a form of art. Perhaps the music-hall comedian is the best material.
I am aware that this is a dangerous suggestion to make. For every person
who is likely to consider it seriously there are a dozen toymakers who
would leap to tickle æsthetic society into one more quiver and giggle of art
debauch. Very few treat art seriously. There are those who treat it solemnly,
and will continue to write poetic pastiches of Euripides and Shakespeare;
and there are others who treat it as a joke.

Euripides and Professor Murray

The recent appearance of Miss Sybil Thorndyke as Medea at the Holborn
Empire is an event which has a bearing upon three subjects of considerable
interest: the drama, the present standing of Greek literature, and the
importance of good contemporary translation. On the occasion on which I
was present the performance was certainly a success; the audience was
large, it was attentive, and its applause was long. Whether the success was
due to Euripides is uncertain; whether it was due to Professor Murray is not
proved; but that it was in considerable measure due to Miss Thorndyke
there is no doubt. To have held the centre of the stage for two hours in a rôle
which requires both extreme violence and restraint, a rôle which requires
simple force and subtle variation; to have sustained so difficult a rôle almost
without support; this was a legitimate success. The audience, or what could
be seen of it from one of the cheaper seats, was serious and respectful and
perhaps inclined to self-approval at having attended the performance of a
Greek play; but Miss Thorndyke’s acting might have held almost any
audience. It employed all the conventions, the theatricalities, of the modern
stage; yet her personality triumphed over not only Professor Murray’s verse
but her own training.
The question remains whether the production was a “work of art.” The rest
of the cast appeared slightly ill at ease; the nurse was quite a tolerable nurse
of the crone type; Jason was negative; the messenger was uncomfortable at
having to make such a long speech; and the refined Dalcroze chorus had
mellifluous voices which rendered their lyrics happily inaudible. All this
contributed toward the high-brow effect which is so depressing; and we
imagine that the actors of Athens, who had to speak clearly enough for
20,000 auditors to be able to criticize the versification, would have been
pelted with figs and olives had they mumbled so unintelligibly as most of
this troupe. But the Greek actor spoke in his own language, and our actors

were forced to speak in the language of Professor Gilbert Murray. So that
on the whole we may say that the performance was an interesting one.
I do not believe, however, that such performances will do very much to
rehabilitate Greek literature or our own, unless they stimulate a desire for
better translations. The serious auditors, many of whom I observed to be
like myself provided with Professor Murray’s eighteenpenny translation,
were probably not aware that Miss Thorndyke, in order to succeed as well
as she did, was really engaged in a struggle against the translator’s verse.
She triumphed over it by attracting our attention to her expression and tone
and making us neglect her words; and this, of course, was not the dramatic
method of Greek acting at its best. The English and Greek languages
remained where they were. But few persons realize that the Greek language
and the Latin language, and, therefore, we say, the English language, are
within our lifetime passing through a critical period. The Classics have,
during the latter part of the nineteenth century and up to the present
moment, lost their place as a pillar of the social and political system—such
as the Established Church still is. If they are to survive, to justify
themselves as literature, as an element in the European mind, as the
foundation for the literature we hope to create, they are very badly in need
of persons capable of expounding them. We need some one—not a member
of the Church of Rome, and perhaps preferably not a member of the Church
of England—to explain how vital a matter it is, if Aristotle may be said to
have been a moral pilot of Europe, whether we shall or shall not drop that
pilot. And we need a number of educated poets who shall at least have
opinions about Greek drama, and whether it is or is not of any use to us.
And it must be said that Professor Gilbert Murray is not the man for this.
Greek poetry will never have the slightest vitalizing effect upon English
poetry if it can only appear masquerading as a vulgar debasement of the
eminently personal idiom of Swinburne. These are strong words to use
against the most popular Hellenist of his time; but we must witness of
Professor Murray ere we die that these things are not otherwise but thus.
This is really a point of capital importance. That the most conspicuous
Greek propagandist of the day should almost habitually use two words
where the Greek language requires one, and where the English language
will provide him with one; that he should render σκιάν by “grey shadow”;
and that he should stretch the Greek brevity to fit the loose frame of

William Morris, and blur the Greek lyric to the fluid haze of Swinburne;
these are not faults of infinitesimal insignificance. The first great speech of
Medea Mr. Murray begins with:
Women of Corinth, I am come to show
My face, lest ye despise me....

We find in the Greek, ἑξῆλθον δόμων. “Show my face,” therefore, is Mr.
Murray’s gift.
This thing undreamed of, sudden from on high,
Hath sapped my soul: I dazzle where I stand,
The cup of all life shattered in my hand....

Again, we find that the Greek is:
ἐμοὶ δ’ ἄελπτον πρᾶγμα προσπεσὸν τόδε
ψυχὴν διέφθαρκ᾽· οἴχομαι δὲ καὶ βίου
χάριν μεθεῖσα κατθανεῖν χρηῄζω, φίλαι.

So, here are two striking phrases which we owe to Mr. Murray; it is he who
has sapped our soul and shattered the cup of all life for Euripides. And these
are only random examples.
οὐκ ἔστιν ἄλλη φρὴν μιαιφονωτέρα

becomes “no bloodier spirit between heaven and hell”! Surely we know that
Professor Murray is acquainted with “Sister Helen”? Professor Murray has
simply interposed between Euripides and ourselves a barrier more
impenetrable than the Greek language. We do not reproach him for
preferring, apparently, Euripides to Æschylus. But if he does, he should at
least appreciate Euripides. And it is inconceivable that anyone with a
genuine feeling for the sound of Greek verse should deliberately elect the
William Morris couplet, the Swinburne lyric, as a just equivalent.
As a poet, Mr. Murray is merely a very insignificant follower of the pre-
Raphaelite movement. As a Hellenist, he is very much of the present day,
and a very important figure in the day. This day began, in a sense, with
Tylor and a few German anthropologists; since then we have acquired

sociology and social psychology, we have watched the clinics of Ribot and
Janet, we have read books from Vienna and heard a discourse of Bergson; a
philosophy arose at Cambridge; social emancipation crawled abroad; our
historical knowledge has of course increased; and we have a curious
Freudian-social-mystical-rationalistic-higher-critical interpretation of the
Classics and what used to be called the Scriptures. I do not deny the very
great value of all work by scientists in their own departments, the great
interest also of this work in detail and in its consequences. Few books are
more fascinating than those of Miss Harrison, Mr. Cornford, or Mr. Cooke,
when they burrow in the origins of Greek myths and rites; M. Durkheim,
with his social consciousness, and M. Levy-Bruhl, with his Bororo Indians
who convince themselves that they are parroquets, are delightful writers. A
number of sciences have sprung up in an almost tropical exuberance which
undoubtedly excites our admiration, and the garden, not unnaturally, has
come to resemble a jungle. Such men as Tylor, and Robertson Smith, and
Wilhelm Wundt, who early fertilized the soil, would hardly recognize the
resulting vegetation; and indeed poor Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie was a
musty relic before it was translated.
All these events are useful and important in their phase, and they have
sensibly affected our attitude towards the Classics; and it is this phase of
classical study that Professor Murray—the friend and inspirer of Miss Jane
Harrison—represents. The Greek is no longer the awe-inspiring Belvedere
of Winckelmann, Goethe, and Schopenhauer, the figure of which Walter
Pater and Oscar Wilde offered us a slightly debased re-edition. And we
realize better how different—not how much more Olympian—were the
conditions of the Greek civilization from ours; and at the same time Mr.
Zimmern has shown us how the Greek dealt with analogous problems.
Incidentally we do not believe that a good English prose style can be
modelled upon Cicero, or Tacitus, or Thucydides. If Pindar bores us, we
admit it; we are not certain that Sappho was very much greater than
Catullus; we hold various opinions about Vergil; and we think more highly
of Petronius than our grandfathers did.
It is to be hoped that we may be grateful to Professor Murray and his
friends for what they have done, while we endeavour to neutralize Professor
Murray’s influence upon Greek literature and English language in his
translations by making better translations. The choruses from Euripides by

H. D. are, allowing for errors and even occasional omissions of difficult
passages, much nearer to both Greek and English than Mr. Murray’s. But H.
D. and the other poets of the “Poets’ Translation Series” have so far done no
more than pick up some of the more romantic crumbs of Greek literature;
none of them has yet shown himself competent to attack the Agamemnon. If
we are to digest the heavy food of historical and scientific knowledge that
we have eaten we must be prepared for much greater exertions. We need a
digestion which can assimilate both Homer and Flaubert. We need a careful
study of Renaissance Humanists and Translators, such as Mr. Pound has
begun. We need an eye which can see the past in its place with its definite
differences from the present, and yet so lively that it shall be as present to
us as the present. This is the creative eye; and it is because Professor
Murray has no creative instinct that he leaves Euripides quite dead.

“Rhetoric” and Poetic Drama

The death of Rostand is the disappearance of the poet whom, more than any
other in France, we treated as the exponent of “rhetoric,” thinking of
rhetoric as something recently out of fashion. And as we find ourselves
looking back rather tenderly upon the author of Cyrano we wonder what
this vice or quality is that is associated as plainly with Rostand’s merits as
with his defects. His rhetoric, at least, suited him at times so well, and so
much better than it suited a much greater poet, Baudelaire, who is at times
as rhetorical as Rostand. And we begin to suspect that the word is merely a
vague term of abuse for any style that is bad, that is so evidently bad or
second-rate that we do not recognize the necessity for greater precision in
the phrases we apply to it.
Our own Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry—in so nice a problem it is much
safer to stick to one’s own language—is repeatedly called “rhetorical.” It
had this and that notable quality, but, when we wish to admit that it had
defects, it is rhetorical. It had serious defects, even gross faults, but we
cannot be considered to have erased them from our language when we are
so unclear in our perception of what they are. The fact is that both
Elizabethan prose and Elizabethan poetry are written in a variety of styles
with a variety of vices. Is the style of Lyly, is Euphuism, rhetorical? In
contrast to the elder style of Ascham and Elyot which it assaults, it is a
clear, flowing, orderly and relatively pure style, with a systematic if
monotonous formula of antitheses and similes. Is the style of Nashe? A
tumid, flatulent, vigorous style very different from Lyly’s. Or it is perhaps
the strained and the mixed figures of speech in which Shakespeare indulged
himself. Or it is perhaps the careful declamation of Jonson. The word
simply cannot be used as synonymous with bad writing. The meanings
which it has been obliged to shoulder have been mostly opprobrious; but if
a precise meaning can be found for it this meaning may occasionally
represent a virtue. It is one of those words which it is the business of

criticism to dissect and reassemble. Let us avoid the assumption that
rhetoric is a vice of manner, and endeavour to find a rhetoric of substance
also, which is right because it issues from what it has to express.
At the present time there is a manifest preference for the “conversational”
in poetry—the style of “direct speech,” opposed to the “oratorical” and the
rhetorical; but if rhetoric is any convention of writing inappropriately
applied, this conversational style can and does become a rhetoric—or what
is supposed to be a conversational style, for it is often as remote from polite
discourse as well could be. Much of the second and third rate in American
vers libre is of this sort; and much of the second and third rate in English
Wordsworthianism. There is in fact no conversational or other form which
can be applied indiscriminately; if a writer wishes to give the effect of
speech he must positively give the effect of himself talking in his own
person or in one of his rôles; and if we are to express ourselves, our variety
of thoughts and feelings, on a variety of subjects with inevitable rightness,
we must adapt our manner to the moment with infinite variations.
Examination of the development of Elizabethan drama shows this progress
in adaptation, a development from monotony to variety, a progressive
refinement in the perception of the variations of feeling, and a progressive
elaboration of the means of expressing these variations. This drama is
admitted to have grown away from the rhetorical expression, the bombast
speeches, of Kyd and Marlowe to the subtle and dispersed utterance of
Shakespeare and Webster. But this apparent abandonment or outgrowth of
rhetoric is two things: it is partly an improvement in language and it is
partly progressive variation in feeling. There is, of course, a long distance
separating the furibund fluency of old Hieronimo and the broken words of
Lear. There is also a difference between the famous
Oh eyes no eyes, but fountains full of tears!
Oh life no life, but lively form of death!

and the superb “additions to Hieronimo.”[7]
We think of Shakespeare perhaps as the dramatist who concentrates
everything into a sentence, “Pray you undo this button,” or “Honest honest
Iago”; we forget that there is a rhetoric proper to Shakespeare at his best
period which is quite free from the genuine Shakespearean vices either of
the early period or the late. These passages are comparable to the best

bombast of Kyd or Marlowe, with a greater command of language and a
greater control of the emotion. The Spanish Tragedy is bombastic when it
descends to language which was only the trick of its age; Tamburlaine is
bombastic because it is monotonous, inflexible to the alterations of
emotion. The really fine rhetoric of Shakespeare occurs in situations where
a character in the play sees himself in a dramatic light:
Othello. And say, besides,—that in Aleppo once....

Coriolanus. If you have writ your annals true, ’tis there,
That like an eagle in a dovecote, I
Fluttered your Volscians in Corioli.
Alone I did it. Boy!

Timon. Come not to me again; but say to Athens,
Timon hath made his everlasting mansion
Upon the beachèd verge of the salt flood....

It occurs also once in Antony and Cleopatra, when Enobarbus is inspired to
see Cleopatra in this dramatic light:
The barge she sat in....

Shakespeare made fun of Marston, and Jonson made fun of Kyd. But in
Marston’s play the words were expressive of nothing; and Jonson was
criticizing the feeble and conceited language, not the emotion, not the
“oratory.” Jonson is as oratorical himself, and the moments when his
oratory succeeds are, I believe, the moments that conform to our formula.
Notably the speech of Sylla’s ghost in the induction to Catiline, and the
speech of Envy at the beginning of The Poetaster. These two figures are
contemplating their own dramatic importance, and quite properly. But in the
Senate speeches in Catiline, how tedious, how dusty! Here we are
spectators not of a play of characters, but of a play of forensic, exactly as if
we had been forced to attend the sitting itself. A speech in a play should
never appear to be intended to move us as it might conceivably move other
characters in the play, for it is essential that we should preserve our position
of spectators, and observe always from the outside though with complete
understanding. The scene in Julius Cæsar is right because the object of our
attention is not the speech of Antony (Bedeutung) but the effect of his
speech upon the mob, and Antony’s intention, his preparation and

consciousness of the effect. And in the rhetorical speeches from
Shakespeare which have been cited, we have this necessary advantage of a
new clue to the character, in noting the angle from which he views himself.
But when a character in a play makes a direct appeal to us, we are either the
victims of our own sentiment, or we are in the presence of a vicious
rhetoric.
These references ought to supply some evidence of the propriety of Cyrano
on Noses. Is not Cyrano exactly in this position of contemplating himself as
a romantic, a dramatic figure? This dramatic sense on the part of the
characters themselves is rare in modern drama. In sentimental drama it
appears in a degraded form, when we are evidently intended to accept the
character’s sentimental interpretation of himself. In plays of realism we
often find parts which are never allowed to be consciously dramatic, for
fear, perhaps, of their appearing less real. But in actual life, in many of
those situations in actual life which we enjoy consciously and keenly, we
are at times aware of ourselves in this way, and these moments are of very
great usefulness to dramatic verse. A very small part of acting is that which
takes place on the stage! Rostand had—whether he had anything else or not
—this dramatic sense, and it is what gives life to Cyrano. It is a sense which
is almost a sense of humour (for when anyone is conscious of himself as
acting, something like a sense of humour is present). It gives Rostand’s
characters—Cyrano at least—a gusto which is uncommon on the modern
stage. No doubt Rostand’s people play up to this too steadily. We recognize
that in the love scenes of Cyrano in the garden, for in Romeo and Juliet the
profounder dramatist shows his lovers melting into incoherent
unconsciousness of their isolated selves, shows the human soul in the
process of forgetting itself. Rostand could not do that; but in the particular
case of Cyrano on Noses, the character, the situation, the occasion were
perfectly suited and combined. The tirade generated by this combination is
not only genuinely and highly dramatic: it is possibly poetry also. If a writer
is incapable of composing such a scene as this, so much the worse for his
poetic drama.
Cyrano satisfies, as far as scenes like this can satisfy, the requirements of
poetic drama. It must take genuine and substantial human emotions, such
emotions as observation can confirm, typical emotions, and give them
artistic form; the degree of abstraction is a question for the method of each

author. In Shakespeare the form is determined in the unity of the whole, as
well as single scenes; it is something to attain this unity, as Rostand does, in
scenes if not the whole play. Not only as a dramatist, but as a poet, he is
superior to Maeterlinck, whose drama, in failing to be dramatic, fails also to
be poetic. Maeterlinck has a literary perception of the dramatic and a
literary perception of the poetic, and he joins the two; the two are not, as
sometimes they are in the work of Rostand, fused. His characters take no
conscious delight in their rôle—they are sentimental. With Rostand the
centre of gravity is in the expression of the emotion, not as with
Maeterlinck in the emotion which cannot be expressed. Some writers
appear to believe that emotions gain in intensity through being inarticulate.
Perhaps the emotions are not significant enough to endure full daylight.
In any case, we may take our choice: we may apply the term “rhetoric” to
the type of dramatic speech which I have instanced, and then we must admit
that it covers good as well as bad. Or we may choose to except this type of
speech from rhetoric. In that case we must say that rhetoric is any
adornment or inflation of speech which is not done for a particular effect
but for a general impressiveness. And in this case, too, we cannot allow the
term to cover all bad writing.

Some Notes on the Blank Verse of Christopher Marlowe

“Marloe was stabd with a dagger, and dyed swearing”

A more friendly critic, Mr. A. C. Swinburne, observes of this poet that “the
father of English tragedy and the creator of English blank verse was
therefore also the teacher and the guide of Shakespeare.” In this sentence
there are two misleading assumptions and two misleading conclusions. Kyd
has as good a title to the first honour as Marlowe; Surrey has a better title to
the second; and Shakespeare was not taught or guided by one of his
predecessors or contemporaries alone. The less questionable judgment is,
that Marlowe exercised a strong influence over later drama, though not
himself as great a dramatist as Kyd; that he introduced several new tones
into blank verse, and commenced the dissociative process which drew it
farther and farther away from the rhythms of rhymed verse; and that when
Shakespeare borrowed from him, which was pretty often at the beginning,
Shakespeare either made something inferior or something different.
The comparative study of English versification at various periods is a large
tract of unwritten history. To make a study of blank verse alone, would be to
elicit some curious conclusions. It would show, I believe, that blank verse
within Shakespeare’s lifetime was more highly developed, that it became
the vehicle of more varied and more intense art-emotions than it has ever
conveyed since; and that after the erection of the Chinese Wall of Milton,
blank verse has suffered not only arrest but retrogression. That the blank
verse of Tennyson, for example, a consummate master of this form in
certain applications, is cruder (not “rougher” or less perfect in technique)
than that of half a dozen contemporaries of Shakespeare; cruder, because
less capable of expressing complicated, subtle, and surprising emotions.
Every writer who has written any blank verse worth saving has produced
particular tones which his verse and no other’s is capable of rendering; and
we should keep this in mind when we talk about “influences” and

“indebtedness.” Shakespeare is “universal” (if you like) because he has
more of these tones than anyone else; but they are all out of the one man;
one man cannot be more than one man; there might have been six
Shakespeares at once without conflicting frontiers; and to say that
Shakespeare expressed nearly all human emotions, implying that he left
very little for anyone else, is a radical misunderstanding of art and the artist
—a misunderstanding which, even when explicitly rejected, may lead to our
neglecting the effort of attention necessary to discover the specific
properties of the verse of Shakespeare’s contemporaries. The development
of blank verse may be likened to the analysis of that astonishing industrial
product coal-tar. Marlowe’s verse is one of the earlier derivatives, but it
possesses properties which are not repeated in any of the analytic or
synthetic blank verses discovered somewhat later.
The “vices of style” of Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s age is a convenient
name for a number of vices, no one of which, perhaps, was shared by all of
the writers. It is pertinent, at least, to remark that Marlowe’s “rhetoric” is
not, or not characteristically, Shakespeare’s rhetoric; that Marlowe’s
rhetoric consists in a pretty simple huffe-snuffe bombast, while
Shakespeare’s is more exactly a vice of style, a tortured perverse ingenuity
of images which dissipates instead of concentrating the imagination, and
which may be due in part to influences by which Marlowe was untouched.
Next, we find that Marlowe’s vice is one which he was gradually
attenuating, and even, what is more miraculous, turning into a virtue. And
we find that this bard of torrential imagination recognized many of his best
bits (and those of one or two others), saved them, and reproduced them
more than once, almost invariably improving them in the process.
It is worth while noticing a few of these versions, because they indicate,
somewhat contrary to usual opinion, that Marlowe was a deliberate and
conscious workman. Mr. J. G. Robertson has spotted an interesting theft of
Marlowe’s from Spenser. Here is Spenser (Faery Queen, I. vii. 32):
Like to an almond tree y-mounted high
On top of green Selinis all alone,
With blossoms brave bedeckèd daintily;
Whose tender locks do tremble every one
At every little breath that under heaven is blown.

And here Marlowe (Tamburlaine, Part II. Act IV. sc. iii.):
Like to an almond tree y-mounted high
Upon the lofty and celestial mount
Of evergreen Selinus, quaintly deck’d
With blooms more white than Erycina’s brows,
Whose tender blossoms tremble every one
At every little breath that thorough heaven is blown.

This is interesting, not only as showing that Marlowe’s talent, like that of
most poets, was partly synthetic, but also because it seems to give a clue to
some particularly “lyric” effects found in Tamburlaine, not in Marlowe’s
other plays, and not, I believe, anywhere else. For example, the praise of
Zenocrate in Part II. Act. II. sc. iv.:
Now walk the angels on the walls of heaven,
As sentinels to warn th’ immortal souls
To entertain divine Zenocrate: etc.

This is not Spenser’s movement, but the influence of Spenser must be
present. There had been no great blank verse before Marlowe; but there was
the powerful presence of this great master of melody immediately
precedent; and the combination produced results which could not be
repeated. I do not think that it can be claimed that Peele had any influence
here.
The passage quoted from Spenser has a further interest. It will be noted that
the fourth line:
With blooms more white than Erycina’s brows

is Marlowe’s contribution. Compare this with these other lines of Marlowe:
So looks my love, shadowing in her brows

(Tamburlaine)

Like to the shadows of Pyramides

(Tamburlaine)

and the final and best version:
Shadowing more beauty in their airy brows
Than have the white breasts of the queen of love.

(Doctor Faustus)

and compare the whole set with Spenser again (F. Q.):
Upon her eyelids many graces sate
Under the shadow of her even brows,

a passage which Mr. Robertson says Spenser himself used in three other
places.
This economy is frequent in Marlowe. Within Tamburlaine it occurs in the
form of monotony, especially in the facile use of resonant names (e.g. the
recurrence of “Caspia” or “Caspian” with the same tone effect), a practice
in which Marlowe was followed by Milton, but which Marlowe himself
outgrew. Again,
Zenocrate, lovlier than the love of Jove,
Brighter than is the silver Rhodope,

is paralleled later by
Zenocrate, the lovliest maid alive,
Fairer than rocks of pearl and precious stone.

One line Marlowe remodels with triumphant success:
And set black streamers in the firmament

(Tamburlaine)

becomes
See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament!

(Doctor Faustus)

The verse accomplishments of Tamburlaine are notably two: Marlowe gets
into blank verse the melody of Spenser, and he gets a new driving power by
reinforcing the sentence period against the line period. The rapid long
sentence, running line into line, as in the famous soliloquies “Nature
compounded of four elements” and “What is beauty, saith my sufferings,
then?” marks the certain escape of blank verse from the rhymed couplet,
and from the elegiac or rather pastoral note of Surrey, to which Tennyson
returned. If you contrast these two soliloquies with the verse of Marlowe’s
greatest contemporary, Kyd—by no means a despicable versifier—you see
the importance of the innovation:
The one took sanctuary, and, being sent for out,
Was murdered in Southwark as he passed
To Greenwich, where the Lord Protector lay.
Black Will was burned in Flushing on a stage;
Green was hanged at Osbridge in Kent....

which is not really inferior to:
So these four abode
Within one house together; and as years
Went forward, Mary took another mate;
But Dora lived unmarried till her death.

(Tennyson, Dora)

In Faustus Marlowe went farther: he broke up the line, to a gain in
intensity, in the last soliloquy; and he developed a new and important
conversational tone in the dialogues of Faustus with the devil. Edward II.
has never lacked consideration: it is more desirable, in brief space, to
remark upon two plays, one of which has been misunderstood and the other
underrated. These are the Jew of Malta and Dido Queen of Carthage. Of the
first of these, it has always been said that the end, even the last two acts, are
unworthy of the first three. If one takes the Jew of Malta not as a tragedy, or
as a “tragedy of blood,” but as a farce, the concluding act becomes
intelligible; and if we attend with a careful ear to the versification, we find
that Marlowe develops a tone to suit this farce, and even perhaps that this
tone is his most powerful and mature tone. I say farce, but with the
enfeebled humour of our times the word is a misnomer; it is the farce of the
old English humour, the terribly serious, even savage comic humour, the

humour which spent its last breath on the decadent genius of Dickens. It has
nothing in common with J. M. Barrie, Captain Bairnsfather, or Punch. It is
the humour of that very serious (but very different) play, Volpone.
First, be thou void of these affections,
Compassion, love, vain hope, and heartless fear;
Be moved at nothing, see thou pity none ...
As for myself, I walk abroad o’ nights,
And kill sick people groaning under walls:
Sometimes I go about and poison wells ...

and the last words of Barabas complete this prodigious caricature:
But now begins th’ extremity of heat
To pinch me with intolerable pangs:
Die, life! fly, soul! tongue, curse thy fill, and die!

It is something which Shakespeare could not do, and which he could not
have understood.
Dido appears to be a hurried play, perhaps done to order with the Æneid in
front of him. But even here there is progress. The account of the sack of
Troy is in this newer style of Marlowe’s, this style which secures its
emphasis by always hesitating on the edge of caricature at the right
moment:
The Grecian soldiers, tir’d with ten years war,
Began to cry, “Let us unto our ships,
Troy is invincible, why stay we here?”...

By this, the camp was come unto the walls,
And through the breach did march into the streets,
Where, meeting with the rest, “Kill, kill!” they cried....

And after him, his band of Myrmidons,
With balls of wild-fire in their murdering paws ...

At last, the soldiers pull’d her by the heels,
And swung her howling in the empty air....

We saw Cassandra sprawling in the streets ...

This is not Vergil, or Shakespeare; it is pure Marlowe. By comparing the
whole speech with Clarence’s dream, in Richard III., one acquires a little

insight into the difference between Marlowe and Shakespeare:
What scourge for perjury
Can this dark monarchy afford false Clarence?

There, on the other hand, is what Marlowe’s style could not do; the phrase
has a concision which is almost classical, certainly Dantesque. Again, as
often with the Elizabethan dramatists, there are lines in Marlowe, besides
the many lines that Shakespeare adapted, that might have been written by
either:
If thou wilt stay,
Leap in mine arms; mine arms are open wide;
If not, turn from me, and I’ll turn from thee;
For though thou hast the heart to say farewell,
I have not power to stay thee.

But the direction in which Marlowe’s verse might have moved, had he not
“dyed swearing,” is quite un-Shakespearean, is toward this intense and
serious and indubitably great poetry, which, like some great painting and
sculpture, attains its effects by something not unlike caricature.

Hamlet and His Problems

Few critics have even admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem,
and Hamlet the character only secondary. And Hamlet the character has had
an especial temptation for that most dangerous type of critic: the critic with
a mind which is naturally of the creative order, but which through some
weakness in creative power exercises itself in criticism instead. These
minds often find in Hamlet a vicarious existence for their own artistic
realization. Such a mind had Goethe, who made of Hamlet a Werther; and
such had Coleridge, who made of Hamlet a Coleridge; and probably neither
of these men in writing about Hamlet remembered that his first business
was to study a work of art. The kind of criticism that Goethe and Coleridge
produced, in writing of Hamlet, is the most misleading kind possible. For
they both possessed unquestionable critical insight, and both make their
critical aberrations the more plausible by the substitution—of their own
Hamlet for Shakespeare’s—which their creative gift effects. We should be
thankful that Walter Pater did not fix his attention on this play.
Two recent writers, Mr. J. M. Robertson and Professor Stoll of the
University of Minnesota, have issued small books which can be praised for
moving in the other direction. Mr. Stoll performs a service in recalling to
our attention the labours of the critics of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries,[8] observing that

they knew less about psychology than more recent Hamlet critics, but
they were nearer in spirit to Shakespeare’s art; and as they insisted on
the importance of the effect of the whole rather than on the importance
of the leading character, they were nearer, in their old-fashioned way, to
the secret of dramatic art in general.

Qua work of art, the work of art cannot be interpreted; there is nothing to
interpret; we can only criticize it according to standards, in comparison to

other works of art; and for “interpretation” the chief task is the presentation
of relevant historical facts which the reader is not assumed to know. Mr.
Robertson points out, very pertinently, how critics have failed in their
“interpretation” of Hamlet by ignoring what ought to be very obvious: that
Hamlet is a stratification, that it represents the efforts of a series of men,
each making what he could out of the work of his predecessors. The Hamlet
of Shakespeare will appear to us very differently if, instead of treating the
whole action of the play as due to Shakespeare’s design, we perceive his
Hamlet to be superposed upon much cruder material which persists even in
the final form.
We know that there was an older play by Thomas Kyd, that extraordinary
dramatic (if not poetic) genius who was in all probability the author of two
plays so dissimilar as the Spanish Tragedy and Arden of Feversham; and
what this play was like we can guess from three clues: from the Spanish
Tragedy itself, from the tale of Belleforest upon which Kyd’s Hamlet must
have been based, and from a version acted in Germany in Shakespeare’s
lifetime which bears strong evidence of having been adapted from the
earlier, not from the later, play. From these three sources it is clear that in
the earlier play the motive was a revenge-motive simply; that the action or
delay is caused, as in the Spanish Tragedy, solely by the difficulty of
assassinating a monarch surrounded by guards; and that the “madness” of
Hamlet was feigned in order to escape suspicion, and successfully. In the
final play of Shakespeare, on the other hand, there is a motive which is
more important than that of revenge, and which explicitly “blunts” the
latter; the delay in revenge is unexplained on grounds of necessity or
expediency; and the effect of the “madness” is not to lull but to arouse the
king’s suspicion. The alteration is not complete enough, however, to be
convincing. Furthermore, there are verbal parallels so close to the Spanish
Tragedy as to leave no doubt that in places Shakespeare was merely
revising the text of Kyd. And finally there are unexplained scenes—the
Polonius-Laertes and the Polonius-Reynaldo scenes—for which there is
little excuse; these scenes are not in the verse style of Kyd, and not beyond
doubt in the style of Shakespeare. These Mr. Robertson believes to be
scenes in the original play of Kyd reworked by a third hand, perhaps
Chapman, before Shakespeare touched the play. And he concludes, with
very strong show of reason, that the original play of Kyd was, like certain
other revenge plays, in two parts of five acts each. The upshot of Mr.

Robertson’s examination is, we believe, irrefragable: that Shakespeare’s
Hamlet, so far as it is Shakespeare’s, is a play dealing with the effect of a
mother’s guilt upon her son, and that Shakespeare was unable to impose
this motive successfully upon the “intractable” material of the old play.
Of the intractability there can be no doubt. So far from being Shakespeare’s
masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure. In several ways
the play is puzzling, and disquieting as is none of the others. Of all the plays
it is the longest and is possibly the one on which Shakespeare spent most
pains; and yet he has left in it superfluous and inconsistent scenes which
even hasty revision should have noticed. The versification is variable. Lines
like
Look, the morn, in russet mantle clad,
Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastern hill,

are of the Shakespeare of Romeo and Juliet. The lines in Act V. sc. ii.,
Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep ...
Up from my cabin,
My sea-gown scarf’d about me, in the dark
Grop’d I to find out them: had my desire;
Finger’d their packet;

are of his quite mature. Both workmanship and thought are in an unstable
condition. We are surely justified in attributing the play, with that other
profoundly interesting play of “intractable” material and astonishing
versification, Measure for Measure, to a period of crisis, after which follow
the tragic successes which culminate in Coriolanus. Coriolanus may be not
as “interesting” as Hamlet, but it is, with Antony and Cleopatra,
Shakespeare’s most assured artistic success. And probably more people
have thought Hamlet a work of art because they found it interesting, than
have found it interesting because it is a work of art. It is the “Mona Lisa” of
literature.
The grounds of Hamlet’s failure are not immediately obvious. Mr.
Robertson is undoubtedly correct in concluding that the essential emotion
of the play is the feeling of a son towards a guilty mother:

[Hamlet’s] tone is that of one who has suffered tortures on the score of
his mother’s degradation.... The guilt of a mother is an almost
intolerable motive for drama, but it had to be maintained and
emphasized to supply a psychological solution, or rather a hint of one.

This, however, is by no means the whole story. It is not merely the “guilt of
a mother” that cannot be handled as Shakespeare handled the suspicion of
Othello, the infatuation of Antony, or the pride of Coriolanus. The subject
might conceivably have expanded into a tragedy like these, intelligible,
self-complete, in the sunlight. Hamlet, like the sonnets, is full of some stuff
that the writer could not drag to light, contemplate, or manipulate into art.
And when we search for this feeling, we find it, as in the sonnets, very
difficult to localize. You cannot point to it in the speeches; indeed, if you
examine the two famous soliloquies you see the versification of
Shakespeare, but a content which might be claimed by another, perhaps by
the author of the Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois, Act V. sc. i. We find
Shakespeare’s Hamlet not in the action, not in any quotations that we might
select, so much as in an unmistakable tone which is unmistakably not in the
earlier play.
The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an
“objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain
of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that
when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are
given, the emotion is immediately evoked. If you examine any of
Shakespeare’s more successful tragedies, you will find this exact
equivalence; you will find that the state of mind of Lady Macbeth walking
in her sleep has been communicated to you by a skilful accumulation of
imagined sensory impressions; the words of Macbeth on hearing of his
wife’s death strike us as if, given the sequence of events, these words were
automatically released by the last event in the series. The artistic
“inevitability” lies in this complete adequacy of the external to the emotion;
and this is precisely what is deficient in Hamlet. Hamlet (the man) is
dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of
the facts as they appear. And the supposed identity of Hamlet with his
author is genuine to this point: that Hamlet’s bafflement at the absence of
objective equivalent to his feelings is a prolongation of the bafflement of his
creator in the face of his artistic problem. Hamlet is up against the difficulty

that his disgust is occasioned by his mother, but that his mother is not an
adequate equivalent for it; his disgust envelops and exceeds her. It is thus a
feeling which he cannot understand; he cannot objectify it, and it therefore
remains to poison life and obstruct action. None of the possible actions can
satisfy it; and nothing that Shakespeare can do with the plot can express
Hamlet for him. And it must be noticed that the very nature of the données
of the problem precludes objective equivalence. To have heightened the
criminality of Gertrude would have been to provide the formula for a totally
different emotion in Hamlet; it is just because her character is so negative
and insignificant that she arouses in Hamlet the feeling which she is
incapable of representing.
The “madness” of Hamlet lay to Shakespeare’s hand; in the earlier play a
simple ruse, and to the end, we may presume, understood as a ruse by the
audience. For Shakespeare it is less than madness and more than feigned.
The levity of Hamlet, his repetition of phrase, his puns, are not part of a
deliberate plan of dissimulation, but a form of emotional relief. In the
character Hamlet it is the buffoonery of an emotion which can find no outlet
in action; in the dramatist it is the buffoonery of an emotion which he
cannot express in art. The intense feeling, ecstatic or terrible, without an
object or exceeding its object, is something which every person of
sensibility has known; it is doubtless a study to pathologists. It often occurs
in adolescence: the ordinary person puts these feelings to sleep, or trims
down his feeling to fit the business world; the artist keeps it alive by his
ability to intensify the world to his emotions. The Hamlet of Laforgue is an
adolescent; the Hamlet of Shakespeare is not, he has not that explanation
and excuse. We must simply admit that here Shakespeare tackled a problem
which proved too much for him. Why he attempted it at all is an insoluble
puzzle; under compulsion of what experience he attempted to express the
inexpressibly horrible, we cannot ever know. We need a great many facts in
his biography; and we should like to know whether, and when, and after or
at the same time as what personal experience, he read Montaigne, II. xii.,
Apologie de Raimond Sebond. We should have, finally, to know something
which is by hypothesis unknowable, for we assume it to be an experience
which, in the manner indicated, exceeded the facts. We should have to
understand things which Shakespeare did not understand himself.

Ben Jonson

The reputation of Jonson has been of the most deadly kind that can be
compelled upon the memory of a great poet. To be universally accepted; to
be damned by the praise that quenches all desire to read the book; to be
afflicted by the imputation of the virtues which excite the least pleasure;
and to be read only by historians and antiquaries—this is the most perfect
conspiracy of approval. For some generations the reputation of Jonson has
been carried rather as a liability than as an asset in the balance-sheet of
English literature. No critic has succeeded in making him appear
pleasurable or even interesting. Swinburne’s book on Jonson satisfies no
curiosity and stimulates no thought. For the critical study in the “Men of
Letters Series” by Mr. Gregory Smith there is a place; it satisfies curiosity,
it supplies many just observations, it provides valuable matter on the
neglected masques; it only fails to remodel the image of Jonson which is
settled in our minds. Probably the fault lies with several generations of our
poets. It is not that the value of poetry is only its value to living poets for
their own work; but appreciation is akin to creation, and true enjoyment of
poetry is related to the stirring of suggestion, the stimulus that a poet feels
in his enjoyment of other poetry. Jonson has provided no creative stimulus
for a very long time; consequently we must look back as far as Dryden—
precisely, a poetic practitioner who learned from Jonson—before we find a
living criticism of Jonson’s work.
Yet there are possibilities for Jonson even now. We have no difficulty in
seeing what brought him to this pass; how, in contrast, not with
Shakespeare, but with Marlowe, Webster, Donne, Beaumont, and Fletcher,
he has been paid out with reputation instead of enjoyment. He is no less a
poet than these men, but his poetry is of the surface. Poetry of the surface
cannot be understood without study; for to deal with the surface of life, as
Jonson dealt with it, is to deal so deliberately that we too must be
deliberate, in order to understand. Shakespeare, and smaller men also, are in

the end more difficult, but they offer something at the start to encourage the
student or to satisfy those who want nothing more; they are suggestive,
evocative, a phrase, a voice; they offer poetry in detail as well as in design.
So does Dante offer something, a phrase everywhere (tu se’ ombra ed
ombra vedi) even to readers who have no Italian; and Dante and
Shakespeare have poetry of design as well as of detail. But the polished
veneer of Jonson reflects only the lazy reader’s fatuity; unconscious does
not respond to unconscious; no swarms of inarticulate feelings are aroused.
The immediate appeal of Jonson is to the mind; his emotional tone is not in
the single verse, but in the design of the whole. But not many people are
capable of discovering for themselves the beauty which is only found after
labour; and Jonson’s industrious readers have been those whose interest was
historical and curious, and those who have thought that in discovering the
historical and curious interest they had discovered the artistic value as well.
When we say that Jonson requires study, we do not mean study of his
classical scholarship or of seventeenth-century manners. We mean
intelligent saturation in his work as a whole; we mean that in order to enjoy
him at all, we must get to the centre of his work and his temperament, and
that we must see him unbiased by time, as a contemporary. And to see him
as a contemporary does not so much require the power of putting ourselves
into seventeenth-century London as it requires the power of setting Jonson
in our London: a more difficult triumph of divination.
It is generally conceded that Jonson failed as a tragic dramatist; and it is
usually agreed that he failed because his genius was for satiric comedy and
because of the weight of pedantic learning with which he burdened his two
tragic failures. The second point marks an obvious error of detail; the first is
too crude a statement to be accepted; to say that he failed because his
genius was unsuited to tragedy is to tell us nothing at all. Jonson did not
write a good tragedy, but we can see no reason why he should not have
written one. If two plays so different as The Tempest and The Silent Woman
are both comedies, surely the category of tragedy could be made wide
enough to include something possible for Jonson to have done. But the
classification of tragedy and comedy, while it may be sufficient to mark the
distinction in a dramatic literature of more rigid form and treatment—it may
distinguish Aristophanes from Euripides—is not adequate to a drama of
such variations as the Elizabethans. Tragedy is a crude classification for
plays so different in their tone as Macbeth, The Jew of Malta, and The Witch

of Edmonton; and it does not help us much to say that The Merchant of
Venice and The Alchemist are comedies. Jonson had his own scale, his own
instrument. The merit which Catiline possesses is the same merit that is
exhibited more triumphantly in Volpone; Catiline fails, not because it is too
laboured and conscious, but because it is not conscious enough; because
Jonson in this play was not alert to his own idiom, not clear in his mind as
to what his temperament wanted him to do. In Catiline Jonson conforms, or
attempts to conform, to conventions; not to the conventions of antiquity,
which he had exquisitely under control, but to the conventions of tragico-
historical drama of his time. It is not the Latin erudition that sinks Catiline,
but the application of that erudition to a form which was not the proper
vehicle for the mind which had amassed the erudition.
If you look at Catiline—that dreary Pyrrhic victory of tragedy—you find
two passages to be successful: Act II. scene i, the dialogue of the political
ladies, and the Prologue of Sylla’s ghost. These two passages are genial.
The soliloquy of the ghost is a characteristic Jonson success in content and
in versification—
Dost thou not feel me, Rome? not yet! is night
So heavy on thee, and my weight so light?
Can Sylla’s ghost arise within thy walls,
Less threatening than an earthquake, the quick falls
Of thee and thine? Shake not the frighted heads
Of thy steep towers, or shrink to their first beds?
Or as their ruin the large Tyber fills,
Make that swell up, and drown thy seven proud hills?...

This is the learned, but also the creative, Jonson. Without concerning
himself with the character of Sulla, and in lines of invective, Jonson makes
Sylla’s ghost, while the words are spoken, a living and terrible force. The
words fall with as determined beat as if they were the will of the morose
Dictator himself. You may say: merely invective; but mere invective, even
if as superior to the clumsy fisticuffs of Marston and Hall as Jonson’s verse
is superior to theirs, would not create a living figure as Jonson has done in
this long tirade. And you may say: rhetoric; but if we are to call it “rhetoric”
we must subject that term to a closer dissection than any to which it is
accustomed. What Jonson has done here is not merely a fine speech. It is
the careful, precise filling in of a strong and simple outline, and at no point
does it overflow the outline; it is far more careful and precise in its

obedience to this outline than are many of the speeches in Tamburlaine. The
outline is not Sulla, for Sulla has nothing to do with it, but “Sylla’s ghost.”
The words may not be suitable to an historical Sulla, or to anybody in
history, but they are a perfect expression for “Sylla’s ghost.” You cannot say
they are rhetorical “because people do not talk like that,” you cannot call
them “verbiage”; they do not exhibit prolixity or redundancy or the other
vices in the rhetoric books; there is a definite artistic emotion which
demands expression at that length. The words themselves are mostly simple
words, the syntax is natural, the language austere rather than adorned.
Turning then to the induction of The Poetaster, we find another success of
the same kind—
Light, I salute thee, but with wounded nerves....

Men may not talk in that way, but the spirit of envy does, and in the words
of Jonson envy is a real and living person. It is not human life that informs
envy and Sylla’s ghost, but it is energy of which human life is only another
variety.
Returning to Catiline, we find that the best scene in the body of the play is
one which cannot be squeezed into a tragic frame, and which appears to
belong to satiric comedy. The scene between Fulvia and Galla and
Sempronia is a living scene in a wilderness of oratory. And as it recalls
other scenes—there is a suggestion of the college of ladies in The Silent
Woman—it looks like a comedy scene. And it appears to be satire.
They shall all give and pay well, that come here,
If they will have it; and that, jewels, pearl,
Plate, or round sums to buy these. I’m not taken
With a cob-swan or a high-mounting bull,
As foolish Leda and Europa were;
But the bright gold, with Danaë. For such price
I would endure a rough, harsh Jupiter,
Or ten such thundering gamesters, and refrain
To laugh at ’em, till they are gone, with my much suffering.

This scene is no more comedy than it is tragedy, and the “satire” is merely a
medium for the essential emotion. Jonson’s drama is only incidentally
satire, because it is only incidentally a criticism upon the actual world. It is
not satire in the way in which the work of Swift or the work of Molière may

be called satire: that is, it does not find its source in any precise emotional
attitude or precise intellectual criticism of the actual world. It is satire
perhaps as the work of Rabelais is satire; certainly not more so. The
important thing is that if fiction can be divided into creative fiction and
critical fiction, Jonson’s is creative. That he was a great critic, our first great
critic, does not affect this assertion. Every creator is also a critic; Jonson
was a conscious critic, but he was also conscious in his creations. Certainly,
one sense in which the term “critical” may be applied to fiction is a sense in
which the term might be used of a method antithetical to Jonson’s. It is the
method of Education Sentimentale. The characters of Jonson, of
Shakespeare, perhaps of all the greatest drama, are drawn in positive and
simple outlines. They may be filled in, and by Shakespeare they are filled
in, by much detail or many shifting aspects; but a clear and sharp and
simple form remains through these—though it would be hard to say in what
the clarity and sharpness and simplicity of Hamlet consists. But Frédéric
Moreau is not made in that way. He is constructed partly by negative
definition, built up by a great number of observations. We cannot isolate
him from the environment in which we find him; it may be an environment
which is or can be much universalized; nevertheless it, and the figure in it,
consist of very many observed particular facts, the actual world. Without
this world the figure dissolves. The ruling faculty is a critical perception, a
commentary upon experienced feeling and sensation. If this is true of
Flaubert, it is true in a higher degree of Molière than of Jonson. The broad
farcical lines of Molière may seem to be the same drawing as Jonson’s. But
Molière—say in Alceste or Monsieur Jourdain—is criticizing the actual; the
reference to the actual world is more direct. And having a more tenuous
reference, the work of Jonson is much less directly satirical.
This leads us to the question of Humours. Largely on the evidence of the
two Humour plays, it is sometimes assumed that Jonson is occupied with
types; typical exaggerations, or exaggerations of type. The Humour
definition, the expressed intention of Jonson, may be satisfactory for these
two plays. Every Man in his Humour is the first mature work of Jonson, and
the student of Jonson must study it; but it is not the play in which Jonson
found his genius: it is the last of his plays to read first. If one reads Volpone,
and after that re-reads the Jew of Malta; then returns to Jonson and reads
Bartholomew Fair, The Alchemist, Epicœne and The Devil is an Ass, and

finally Catiline, it is possible to arrive at a fair opinion of the poet and the
dramatist.
The Humour, even at the beginning, is not a type, as in Marston’s satire, but
a simplified and somewhat distorted individual with a typical mania. In the
later work, the Humour definition quite fails to account for the total effect
produced. The characters of Shakespeare are such as might exist in different
circumstances than those in which Shakespeare sets them. The latter appear
to be those which extract from the characters the most intense and
interesting realization; but that realization has not exhausted their
possibilities. Volpone’s life, on the other hand, is bounded by the scene in
which it is played; in fact, the life is the life of the scene and is derivatively
the life of Volpone; the life of the character is inseparable from the life of
the drama. This is not dependence upon a background, or upon a substratum
of fact. The emotional effect is single and simple. Whereas in Shakespeare
the effect is due to the way in which the characters act upon one another, in
Jonson it is given by the way in which the characters fit in with each other.
The artistic result of Volpone is not due to any effect that Volpone, Mosca,
Corvino, Corbaccio, Voltore have upon each other, but simply to their
combination into a whole. And these figures are not personifications of
passions; separately, they have not even that reality, they are constituents. It
is a similar indication of Jonson’s method that you can hardly pick out a
line of Jonson’s and say confidently that it is great poetry; but there are
many extended passages to which you cannot deny that honour.
I will have all my beds blown up, not stuft;
Down is too hard; and then, mine oval room
Fill’d with such pictures as Tiberius took
From Elephantis, and dull Aretine
But coldly imitated. Then, my glasses
Cut in more subtle angles, to disperse
And multiply the figures, as I walk....

Jonson is the legitimate heir of Marlowe. The man who wrote, in Volpone:
for thy love,
In varying figures, I would have contended
With the blue Proteus, or the hornèd flood....

and

See, a carbuncle
May put out both the eyes of our Saint Mark;
A diamond would have bought Lollia Paulina,
When she came in like star-light, hid with jewels....

is related to Marlowe as a poet; and if Marlowe is a poet, Jonson is also.
And, if Jonson’s comedy is a comedy of humours, then Marlowe’s tragedy,
a large part of it, is a tragedy of humours. But Jonson has too exclusively
been considered as the typical representative of a point of view toward
comedy. He has suffered from his great reputation as a critic and theorist,
from the effects of his intelligence. We have been taught to think of him as
the man, the dictator (confusedly in our minds with his later namesake), as
the literary politician impressing his views upon a generation; we are
offended by the constant reminder of his scholarship. We forget the comedy
in the humours, and the serious artist in the scholar. Jonson has suffered in
public opinion, as anyone must suffer who is forced to talk about his art.
If you examine the first hundred lines or more of Volpone the verse appears
to be in the manner of Marlowe, more deliberate, more mature, but without
Marlowe’s inspiration. It looks like mere “rhetoric,” certainly not “deeds
and language such as men do use”! It appears to us, in fact, forced and
flagitious bombast. That it is not “rhetoric,” or at least not vicious rhetoric,
we do not know until we are able to review the whole play. For the
consistent maintenance of this manner conveys in the end an effect not of
verbosity, but of bold, even shocking and terrifying directness. We have
difficulty in saying exactly what produces this simple and single effect. It is
not in any ordinary way due to management of intrigue. Jonson employs
immense dramatic constructive skill: it is not so much skill in plot as skill in
doing without a plot. He never manipulates as complicated a plot as that of
The Merchant of Venice; he has in his best plays nothing like the intrigue of
Restoration comedy. In Bartholomew Fair it is hardly a plot at all; the
marvel of the play is the bewildering rapid chaotic action of the fair; it is the
fair itself, not anything that happens to take place in the fair. In Volpone, or
The Alchemist, or The Silent Woman, the plot is enough to keep the players
in motion; it is rather an “action” than a plot. The plot does not hold the
play together; what holds the play together is a unity of inspiration that
radiates into plot and personages alike.

We have attempted to make more precise the sense in which it was said that
Jonson’s work is “of the surface”; carefully avoiding the word “superficial.”
For there is work contemporary with Jonson’s which is superficial in a
pejorative sense in which the word cannot be applied to Jonson—the work
of Beaumont and Fletcher. If we look at the work of Jonson’s great
contemporaries, Shakespeare, and also Donne and Webster and Tourneur
(and sometimes Middleton), have a depth, a third dimension, as Mr.
Gregory Smith rightly calls it, which Jonson’s work has not. Their words
have often a network of tentacular roots reaching down to the deepest
terrors and desires. Jonson’s most certainly have not; but in Beaumont and
Fletcher we may think that at times we find it. Looking closer, we discover
that the blossoms of Beaumont and Fletcher’s imagination draw no
sustenance from the soil, but are cut and slightly withered flowers stuck into
sand.
Wilt thou, hereafter, when they talk of me,
As thou shalt hear nothing but infamy,
Remember some of these things?...
I pray thee, do; for thou shalt never see me so again.

Hair woven in many a curious warp,
Able in endless error to enfold
The wandering soul;...

Detached from its context, this looks like the verse of the greater poets; just
as lines of Jonson, detached from their context, look like inflated or empty
fustian. But the evocative quality of the verse of Beaumont and Fletcher
depends upon a clever appeal to emotions and associations which they have
not themselves grasped; it is hollow. It is superficial with a vacuum behind
it; the superficies of Jonson is solid. It is what it is; it does not pretend to be
another thing. But it is so very conscious and deliberate that we must look
with eyes alert to the whole before we apprehend the significance of any
part. We cannot call a man’s work superficial when it is the creation of a
world; a man cannot be accused of dealing superficially with the world
which he himself has created; the superficies is the world. Jonson’s
characters conform to the logic of the emotions of their world. It is a world
like Lobatchevsky’s; the worlds created by artists like Jonson are like
systems of non-Euclidean geometry. They are not fancy, because they have

a logic of their own; and this logic illuminates the actual world, because it
gives us a new point of view from which to inspect it.
A writer of power and intelligence, Jonson endeavoured to promulgate, as a
formula and programme of reform, what he chose to do himself; and he not
unnaturally laid down in abstract theory what is in reality a personal point
of view. And it is in the end of no value to discuss Jonson’s theory and
practice unless we recognize and seize this point of view, which escapes the
formulæ, and which is what makes his plays worth reading. Jonson behaved
as the great creative mind that he was: he created his own world, a world
from which his followers, as well as the dramatists who were trying to do
something wholly different, are excluded. Remembering this, we turn to Mr.
Gregory Smith’s objection—that Jonson’s characters lack the third
dimension, have no life out of the theatrical existence in which they appear
—and demand an inquest. The objection implies that the characters are
purely the work of intellect, or the result of superficial observation of a
world which is faded or mildewed. It implies that the characters are lifeless.
But if we dig beneath the theory, beneath the observation, beneath the
deliberate drawing and the theatrical and dramatic elaboration, there is
discovered a kind of power, animating Volpone, Busy, Fitzdottrel, the
literary ladies of Epicœne, even Bobadil, which comes from below the
intellect, and for which no theory of humours will account. And it is the
same kind of power which vivifies Trimalchio, and Panurge, and some but
not all of the “comic” characters of Dickens. The fictive life of this kind is
not to be circumscribed by a reference to “comedy” or to “farce”; it is not
exactly the kind of life which informs the characters of Molière or that
which informs those of Marivaux—two writers who were, besides, doing
something quite different the one from the other. But it is something which
distinguishes Barabas from Shylock, Epicure Mammon from Falstaff,
Faustus from—if you will—Macbeth; Marlowe and Jonson from
Shakespeare and the Shakespearians, Webster, and Tourneur. It is not
merely Humours: for neither Volpone nor Mosca is a humour. No theory of
humours could account for Jonson’s best plays or the best characters in
them. We want to know at what point the comedy of humours passes into a
work of art, and why Jonson is not Brome.
The creation of a work of art, we will say the creation of a character in a
drama, consists in the process of transfusion of the personality, or, in a

deeper sense, the life, of the author into the character. This is a very
different matter from the orthodox creation in one’s own image. The ways
in which the passions and desires of the creator may be satisfied in the work
of art are complex and devious. In a painter they may take the form of a
predilection for certain colours, tones, or lightings; in a writer the original
impulse may be even more strangely transmuted. Now, we may say with
Mr. Gregory Smith that Falstaff or a score of Shakespeare’s characters have
a “third dimension” that Jonson’s have not. This will mean, not that
Shakespeare’s spring from the feelings or imagination and Jonson’s from
the intellect or invention; they have equally an emotional source; but that
Shakespeare’s represent a more complex tissue of feelings and desires, as
well as a more supple, a more susceptible temperament. Falstaff is not only
the roast Malmesbury ox with the pudding in his belly; he also “grows old,”
and, finally, his nose is as sharp as a pen. He was perhaps the satisfaction of
more, and of more complicated feelings; and perhaps he was, as the great
tragic characters must have been, the offspring of deeper, less apprehensible
feelings: deeper, but not necessarily stronger or more intense, than those of
Jonson. It is obvious that the spring of the difference is not the difference
between feeling and thought, or superior insight, superior perception, on the
part of Shakespeare, but his susceptibility to a greater range of emotion, and
emotion deeper and more obscure. But his characters are no more “alive”
than are the characters of Jonson.
The world they live in is a larger one. But small worlds—the worlds which
artists create—do not differ only in magnitude; if they are complete worlds,
drawn to scale in every part, they differ in kind also. And Jonson’s world
has this scale. His type of personality found its relief in something falling
under the category of burlesque or farce—though when you are dealing
with a unique world, like his, these terms fail to appease the desire for
definition. It is not, at all events, the farce of Molière: the latter is more
analytic, more an intellectual redistribution. It is not defined by the word
“satire.” Jonson poses as a satirist. But satire like Jonson’s is great in the
end not by hitting off its object, but by creating it; the satire is merely the
means which leads to the æsthetic result, the impulse which projects a new
world into a new orbit. In Every Man in his Humour there is a neat, a very
neat, comedy of humours. In discovering and proclaiming in this play the
new genre Jonson was simply recognizing, unconsciously, the route which
opened out in the proper direction for his instincts. His characters are and

remain, like Marlowe’s, simplified characters; but the simplification does
not consist in the dominance of a particular humour or monomania. That is
a very superficial account of it. The simplification consists largely in
reduction of detail, in the seizing of aspects relevant to the relief of an
emotional impulse which remains the same for that character, in making the
character conform to a particular setting. This stripping is essential to the
art, to which is also essential a flat distortion in the drawing; it is an art of
caricature, of great caricature, like Marlowe’s. It is a great caricature, which
is beautiful; and a great humour, which is serious. The “world” of Jonson is
sufficiently large; it is a world of poetic imagination; it is sombre. He did
not get the third dimension, but he was not trying to get it.
If we approach Jonson with less frozen awe of his learning, with a clearer
understanding of his “rhetoric” and its applications, if we grasp the fact that
the knowledge required of the reader is not archæology but knowledge of
Jonson, we can derive not only instruction in non Euclidean humanity—but
enjoyment. We can even apply him, be aware of him as a part of our literary
inheritance craving further expression. Of all the dramatists of his time,
Jonson is probably the one whom the present age would find the most
sympathetic, if it knew him. There is a brutality, a lack of sentiment, a
polished surface, a handling of large bold designs in brilliant colours, which
ought to attract about three thousand people in London and elsewhere. At
least, if we had a contemporary Shakespeare and a contemporary Jonson, it
would be the Jonson who would arouse the enthusiasm of the intelligentsia!
Though he is saturated in literature, he never sacrifices the theatrical
qualities—theatrical in the most favourable sense—to literature or to the
study of character. His work is a titanic show. But Jonson’s masques, an
important part of his work, are neglected; our flaccid culture lets shows and
literature fade, but prefers faded literature to faded shows. There are
hundreds of people who have read Comus to ten who have read the Masque
of Blackness. Comus contains fine poetry, and poetry exemplifying some
merits to which Jonson’s masque poetry cannot pretend. Nevertheless,
Comus is the death of the masque; it is the transition of a form of art—even
of a form which existed for but a short generation—into “literature,”
literature cast in a form which has lost its application. Even though Comus
was a masque at Ludlow Castle, Jonson had, what Milton came perhaps too
late to have, a sense for living art; his art was applied. The masques can still
be read, and with pleasure, by anyone who will take the trouble—a trouble

which in this part of Jonson is, indeed, a study of antiquities—to imagine
them in action, displayed with the music, costume, dances, and the scenery
of Inigo Jones. They are additional evidence that Jonson had a fine sense of
form, of the purpose for which a particular form is intended; evidence that
he was a literary artist even more than he was a man of letters.

Philip Massinger

I

Massinger has been more fortunately and more fairly judged than several of
his greater contemporaries. Three critics have done their best by him: the
notes of Coleridge exemplify Coleridge’s fragmentary and fine perceptions;
the essay of Leslie Stephen is a piece of formidable destructive analysis;
and the essay of Swinburne is Swinburne’s criticism at its best. None of
these, probably, has put Massinger finally and irrefutably into a place.
English criticism is inclined to argue or persuade rather than to state; and,
instead of forcing the subject to expose himself, these critics have left in
their work an undissolved residuum of their own good taste, which,
however impeccable, is something that requires our faith. The principles
which animate this taste remain unexplained. Mr. Cruickshank’s book is a
work of scholarship; and the advantage of good scholarship is that it
presents us with evidence which is an invitation to the critical faculty of the
reader: it bestows a method, rather than a judgment.
It is difficult—it is perhaps the supreme difficulty of criticism—to make the
facts generalize themselves; but Mr. Cruickshank at least presents us with
facts which are capable of generalization. This is a service of value; and it is
therefore wholly a compliment to the author to say that his appendices are
as valuable as the essay itself.
The sort of labour to which Mr. Cruickshank has devoted himself is one that
professed critics ought more willingly to undertake. It is an important part
of criticism, more important than any mere expression of opinion. To
understand Elizabethan drama it is necessary to study a dozen playwrights
at once, to dissect with all care the complex growth, to ponder collaboration
to the utmost line. Reading Shakespeare and several of his contemporaries
is pleasure enough, perhaps all the pleasure possible, for most. But if we
wish to consummate and refine this pleasure by understanding it, to distil
the last drop of it, to press and press the essence of each author, to apply
exact measurement to our own sensations, then we must compare; and we
cannot compare without parcelling the threads of authorship and influence.
We must employ Mr. Cruickshank’s method to examine Mr. Cruickshank’s

judgments; and perhaps the most important judgment to which he has
committed himself is this:—

Massinger, in his grasp of stagecraft, his flexible metre, his desire in the
sphere of ethics to exploit both vice and virtue, is typical of an age
which had much culture, but which, without being exactly corrupt,
lacked moral fibre.

Here, in fact, is our text: to elucidate this sentence would be to account for
Massinger. We begin vaguely with good taste, by a recognition that
Massinger is inferior: can we trace this inferiority, dissolve it, and have left
any element of merit?
We turn first to the parallel quotations from Massinger and Shakespeare
collocated by Mr. Cruickshank to make manifest Massinger’s indebtedness.
One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature
poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good
poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The
good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly
different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into
something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from
authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest. Chapman
borrowed from Seneca; Shakespeare and Webster from Montaigne. The two
great followers of Shakespeare, Webster and Tourneur, in their mature work
do not borrow from him; he is too close to them to be of use to them in this
way. Massinger, as Mr. Cruickshank shows, borrows from Shakespeare a
good deal. Let us profit by some of the quotations with which he has
provided us—
Massinger: Can I call back yesterday, with all their aids
That bow unto my sceptre? or restore
My mind to that tranquillity and peace
It then enjoyed?

Shakespeare: Not poppy, nor mandragora,
Nor all the drowsy syrops of the world
Shall ever medecine thee to that sweet sleep
Which thou owedst yesterday.

Massinger’s is a general rhetorical question, the language just and pure, but
colourless. Shakespeare’s has particular significance; and the adjective
“drowsy” and the verb “medecine” infuse a precise vigour. This is, on
Massinger’s part, an echo rather than an imitation or a plagiarism—the
basest, because least conscious form of borrowing. “Drowsy syrop” is a
condensation of meaning frequent in Shakespeare, but rare in Massinger.
Massinger: Thou didst not borrow of Vice her indirect,
Crooked, and abject means.

Shakespeare: God knows, my son,
By what by-paths and indirect crook’d ways
I met this crown.

Here, again, Massinger gives the general forensic statement, Shakespeare
the particular image. “Indirect crook’d” is forceful in Shakespeare; a mere
pleonasm in Massinger. “Crook’d ways” is a metaphor; Massinger’s phrase
only the ghost of a metaphor.
Massinger: And now, in the evening,
When thou shoud'st pass with honour to thy rest,
Wilt thou fall like a meteor?

Shakespeare: I shall fall
Like a bright exhalation in the evening,
And no man see me more.

Here the lines of Massinger have their own beauty. Still, a “bright
exhalation” appears to the eye and makes us catch our breath in the
evening; “meteor” is a dim simile; the word is worn.
Massinger: What you deliver to me shall be lock’d up
In a strong cabinet, of which you yourself
Shall keep the key.

Shakespeare: ’Tis in my memory locked,
And you yourself shall keep the key of it.

In the preceding passage Massinger had squeezed his simile to death, here
he drags it round the city at his heels; and how swift Shakespeare’s figure
is! We may add two more passages, not given by our commentator; here the
model is Webster. They occur on the same page, an artless confession.

Here he comes,
His nose held up; he hath something in the wind,

is hardly comparable to “the Cardinal lifts up his nose like a foul porpoise
before a storm,” and when we come upon
as tann’d galley-slaves
Pay such as do redeem them from the oar

it is unnecessary to turn up the great lines in the Duchess of Malfi.
Massinger fancied this galley-slave; for he comes with his oar again in the
Bondman—
Never did galley-slave shake off his chains,
Or looked on his redemption from the oar....

Now these are mature plays; and the Roman Actor (from which we have
drawn the two previous extracts) is said to have been the preferred play of
its author.
We may conclude directly from these quotations that Massinger’s feeling
for language had outstripped his feeling for things; that his eye and his
vocabulary were not in close co-operation. One of the greatest distinctions
of several of his elder contemporaries—we name Middleton, Webster,
Tourneur—is a gift for combining, for fusing into a single phrase, two or
more diverse impressions.
... in her strong toil of grace

of Shakespeare is such a fusion; the metaphor identifies itself with what
suggests it; the resultant is one and is unique—
Does the silk worm expend her yellow labours?...
Why does yon fellow falsify highways
And lays his life between the judge’s lips
To refine such a one? keeps horse and men
To beat their valours for her?

Let the common sewer take it from distinction....
Lust and forgetfulness have been amongst us....

These lines of Tourneur and of Middleton exhibit that perpetual slight
alteration of language, words perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden
combinations, meanings perpetually eingeschachtelt into meanings, which
evidences a very high development of the senses, a development of the
English language which we have perhaps never equalled. And, indeed, with
the end of Chapman, Middleton, Webster, Tourneur, Donne we end a period
when the intellect was immediately at the tips of the senses. Sensation
became word and the word was sensation. The next period is the period of
Milton (though still with a Marvell in it); and this period is initiated by
Massinger.
It is not that the word becomes less exact. Massinger is, in a wholly
eulogistic sense, choice and correct. And the decay of the senses is not
inconsistent with a greater sophistication of language. But every vital
development in language is a development of feeling as well. The verse of
Shakespeare and the major Shakespearian dramatists is an innovation of
this kind, a true mutation of species. The verse practised by Massinger is a
different verse from that of his predecessors; but it is not a development
based on, or resulting from, a new way of feeling. On the contrary, it seems
to lead us away from feeling altogether.
We mean that Massinger must be placed as much at the beginning of one
period as at the end of another. A certain Boyle, quoted by Mr. Cruickshank,
says that Milton’s blank verse owes much to the study of Massinger’s.

In the indefinable touches which make up the music of a verse [says
Boyle], in the artistic distribution of pauses, and in the unerring choice
and grouping of just those words which strike the ear as the perfection
of harmony, there are, if we leave Cyril Tourneur’s Atheist’s Tragedy
out of the question, only two masters in the drama, Shakespeare in his
latest period and Massinger.

This Boyle must have had a singular ear to have preferred Tourneur’s
apprentice work to his Revenger’s Tragedy, and one must think that he had
never glanced at Ford. But though the appraisal be ludicrous, the praise is
not undeserved. Mr. Cruickshank has given us an excellent example of
Massinger’s syntax—

What though my father
Writ man before he was so, and confirm’d it,
By numbering that day no part of his life
In which he did not service to his country;
Was he to be free therefore from the laws
And ceremonious form in your decrees?
Or else because he did as much as man
In those three memorable overthrows,
At Granson, Morat, Nancy, where his master,
The warlike Charalois, with whose misfortunes
I bear his name, lost treasure, men, and life,
To be excused from payment of those sums
Which (his own patrimony spent) his zeal
To serve his country forced him to take up!

It is impossible to deny the masterly construction of this passage; perhaps
there is not one living poet who could do the like. It is impossible to deny
the originality. The language is pure and correct, free from muddiness or
turbidity. Massinger does not confuse metaphors, or heap them one upon
another. He is lucid, though not easy. But if Massinger’s age, “without
being exactly corrupt, lacks moral fibre,” Massinger’s verse, without being
exactly corrupt, suffers from cerebral anæmia. To say that an involved style
is necessarily a bad style would be preposterous. But such a style should
follow the involutions of a mode of perceiving, registering, and digesting
impressions which is also involved. It is to be feared that the feeling of
Massinger is simple and overlaid with received ideas. Had Massinger had a
nervous system as refined as that of Middleton, Tourneur, Webster, or Ford,
his style would be a triumph. But such a nature was not at hand, and
Massinger precedes, not another Shakespeare, but Milton.
Massinger is, in fact, at a further remove from Shakespeare than that other
precursor of Milton—John Fletcher. Fletcher was above all an opportunist,
in his verse, in his momentary effects, never quite a pastiche; in his
structure ready to sacrifice everything to the single scene. To Fletcher,
because he was more intelligent, less will be forgiven. Fletcher had a
cunning guess at feelings, and betrayed them; Massinger was unconscious
and innocent. As an artisan of the theatre he is not inferior to Fletcher, and
his best tragedies have an honester unity than Bonduca. But the unity is
superficial. In the Roman Actor the development of parts is out of all
proportion to the central theme; in the Unnatural Combat, in spite of the
deft handling of suspense and the quick shift from climax to a new

suspense, the first part of the play is the hatred of Malefort for his son and
the second part is his passion for his daughter. It is theatrical skill, not an
artistic conscience arranging emotions, that holds the two parts together. In
the Duke of Milan the appearance of Sforza at the Court of his conqueror
only delays the action, or rather breaks the emotional rhythm. And we have
named three of Massinger’s best.
A dramatist who so skilfully welds together parts which have no reason for
being together, who fabricates plays so well knit and so remote from unity,
we should expect to exhibit the same synthetic cunning in character. Mr.
Cruickshank, Coleridge, and Leslie Stephen are pretty well agreed that
Massinger is no master of characterization. You can, in fact, put together
heterogeneous parts to form a lively play; but a character, to be living, must
be conceived from some emotional unity. A character is not to be composed
of scattered observations of human nature, but of parts which are felt
together. Hence it is that although Massinger’s failure to draw a moving
character is no greater than his failure to make a whole play, and probably
springs from the same defective sensitiveness, yet the failure in character is
more conspicuous and more disastrous. A “living” character is not
necessarily “true to life.” It is a person whom we can see and hear, whether
he be true or false to human nature as we know it. What the creator of
character needs is not so much knowledge of motives as keen sensibility;
the dramatist need not understand people; but he must be exceptionally
aware of them. This awareness was not given to Massinger. He inherits the
traditions of conduct, female chastity, hymeneal sanctity, the fashion of
honour, without either criticizing or informing them from his own
experience. In the earlier drama these conventions are merely a framework,
or an alloy necessary for working the metal; the metal itself consisted of
unique emotions resulting inevitably from the circumstances, resulting or
inhering as inevitably as the properties of a chemical compound.
Middleton’s heroine, for instance, in the Changeling, exclaims in the well-
known words—
Why, ’tis impossible thou canst be so wicked,
To shelter such a cunning cruelty
To make his death the murderer of my honour!

The word “honour” in such a situation is out of date, but the emotion of
Beatrice at that moment, given the conditions, is as permanent and
substantial as anything in human nature. The emotion of Othello in Act V. is
the emotion of a man who discovers that the worst part of his own soul has
been exploited by some one more clever than he; it is this emotion carried
by the writer to a very high degree of intensity. Even in so late and so
decayed a drama as that of Ford, the framework of emotions and morals of
the time is only the vehicle for statements of feeling which are unique and
imperishable: Ford’s and Ford’s only.
What may be considered corrupt or decadent in the morals of Massinger is
not an alteration or diminution in morals; it is simply the disappearance of
all the personal and real emotions which this morality supported and into
which it introduced a kind of order. As soon as the emotions disappear the
morality which ordered it appears hideous. Puritanism itself became
repulsive only when it appeared as the survival of a restraint after the
feelings which it restrained had gone. When Massinger’s ladies resist
temptation they do not appear to undergo any important emotion; they
merely know what is expected of them; they manifest themselves to us as
lubricious prudes. Any age has its conventions; and any age might appear
absurd when its conventions get into the hands of a man like Massinger—a
man, we mean, of so exceptionally superior a literary talent as Massinger’s,
and so paltry an imagination. The Elizabethan morality was an important
convention; important because it was not consciously of one social class
alone, because it provided a framework for emotions to which all classes
could respond, and it hindered no feeling. It was not hypocritical, and it did
not suppress; its dark corners are haunted by the ghosts of Mary Fitton and
perhaps greater. It is a subject which has not been sufficiently investigated.
Fletcher and Massinger rendered it ridiculous; not by not believing in it, but
because they were men of great talents who could not vivify it; because
they could not fit into it passionate, complete human characters.
The tragedy of Massinger is interesting chiefly according to the definition
given before; the highest degree of verbal excellence compatible with the
most rudimentary development of the senses. Massinger succeeds better in
something which is not tragedy; in the romantic comedy. A Very Woman
deserves all the praise that Swinburne, with his almost unerring gift for
selection, has bestowed upon it. The probable collaboration of Fletcher had

the happiest result; for certainly that admirable comic personage, the tipsy
Borachia, is handled with more humour than we expect of Massinger. It is a
play which would be enjoyable on the stage. The form, however, of
romantic comedy is itself inferior and decadent. There is an inflexibility
about the poetic drama which is by no means a matter of classical, or
neoclassical, or pseudo-classical law. The poetic drama might develop
forms highly different from those of Greece or England, India or Japan.
Conceded the utmost freedom, the romantic drama would yet remain
inferior. The poetic drama must have an emotional unity, let the emotion be
whatever you like. It must have a dominant tone; and if this be strong
enough, the most heterogeneous emotions may be made to reinforce it. The
romantic comedy is a skilful concoction of inconsistent emotion, a revue of
emotion. A Very Woman is surpassingly well plotted. The debility of
romantic drama does not depend upon extravagant setting, or preposterous
events, or inconceivable coincidences; all these might be found in a serious
tragedy or comedy. It consists in an internal incoherence of feelings, a
concatenation of emotions which signifies nothing.
From this type of play, so eloquent of emotional disorder, there was no
swing back of the pendulum. Changes never come by a simple reinfusion
into the form which the life has just left. The romantic drama was not a new
form. Massinger dealt not with emotions so much as with the social
abstractions of emotions, more generalized and therefore more quickly and
easily interchangeable within the confines of a single action. He was not
guided by direct communications through the nerves. Romantic drama
tended, accordingly, toward what is sometimes called the “typical,” but
which is not the truly typical; for the typical figure in a drama is always
particularized—an individual. The tendency of the romantic drama was
toward a form which continued it in removing its more conspicuous vices,
was toward a more severe external order. This form was the Heroic Drama.
We look into Dryden’s “Essay on Heroic Plays,” and we find that “love and
valour ought to be the subject of an heroic poem.” Massinger, in his
destruction of the old drama, had prepared the way for Dryden. The intellect
had perhaps exhausted the old conventions. It was not able to supply the
impoverishment of feeling.
Such are the reflections aroused by an examination of some of Massinger’s
plays in the light of Mr. Cruickshank’s statement that Massinger’s age “had

much culture, but, without being exactly corrupt, lacked moral fibre.” The
statement may be supported. In order to fit into our estimate of Massinger
the two admirable comedies—A New Way to Pay Old Debts and The City
Madam—a more extensive research would be required than is possible
within our limits.

II

Massinger’s tragedy may be summarized for the unprepared reader as being
very dreary. It is dreary, unless one is prepared by a somewhat extensive
knowledge of his livelier contemporaries to grasp without fatigue precisely
the elements in it which are capable of giving pleasure; or unless one is
incited by a curious interest in versification. In comedy, however,
Massinger was one of the few masters in the language. He was a master in a
comedy which is serious, even sombre; and in one aspect of it there are only
two names to mention with his: those of Marlowe and Jonson. In comedy,
as a matter of fact, a greater variety of methods were discovered and
employed than in tragedy. The method of Kyd, as developed by
Shakespeare, was the standard for English tragedy down to Otway and to
Shelley. But both individual temperament, and varying epochs, made more
play with comedy. The comedy of Lyly is one thing; that of Shakespeare,
followed by Beaumont and Fletcher, is another; and that of Middleton is a
third. And Massinger, while he has his own comedy, is nearer to Marlowe
and Jonson than to any of these.
Massinger was, in fact, as a comic writer, fortunate in the moment at which
he wrote. His comedy is transitional; but it happens to be one of those
transitions which contain some merit not anticipated by predecessors or
refined upon by later writers. The comedy of Jonson is nearer to caricature;
that of Middleton a more photographic delineation of low life. Massinger is
nearer to Restoration comedy, and more like his contemporary, Shirley, in
assuming a certain social level, certain distinctions of class, as a postulate
of his comedy. This resemblance to later comedy is also the important point
of difference between Massinger and earlier comedy. But Massinger’s
comedy differs just as widely from the comedy of manners proper; he is
closer to that in his romantic drama—in A Very Woman—than in A New
Way to Pay Old Debts; in his comedy his interest is not in the follies of
love-making or the absurdities of social pretence, but in the unmasking of
villainy. Just as the Old Comedy of Molière differs in principle from the
New Comedy of Marivaux, so the Old Comedy of Massinger differs from
the New Comedy of his contemporary Shirley. And as in France, so in
England, the more farcical comedy was the more serious. Massinger’s great

comic rogues, Sir Giles Overreach and Luke Frugal, are members of the
large English family which includes Barabas and Sir Epicure Mammon, and
from which Sir Tunbelly Clumsy claims descent.
What distinguishes Massinger from Marlowe and Jonson is in the main an
inferiority. The greatest comic characters of these two dramatists are slight
work in comparison with Shakespeare’s best—Falstaff has a third
dimension and Epicure Mammon has only two. But this slightness is part of
the nature of the art which Jonson practised, a smaller art than
Shakespeare’s. The inferiority of Massinger to Jonson is an inferiority, not
of one type of art to another, but within Jonson’s type. It is a simple
deficiency. Marlowe’s and Jonson’s comedies were a view of life; they
were, as great literature is, the transformation of a personality into a
personal work of art, their lifetime’s work, long or short. Massinger is not
simply a smaller personality: his personality hardly exists. He did not, out
of his own personality, build a world of art, as Shakespeare and Marlowe
and Jonson built.
In the fine pages which Remy de Gourmont devotes to Flaubert in his
Problème du Style, the great critic declares:

La vie est un dépouillement. Le but de l’activité propre de l’homme est
de nettoyer sa personnalité, de la laver de toutes les souillures qu’y
déposa l’éducation, de la dégager de toutes les empreintes qu’y
laissèrent nos admirations adolescentes;

and again:

Flaubert incorporait toute sa sensibilité à ses œuvres.... Hors de ses
livres, où il se transvasait goutte à goutte, jusqu’à la lie, Flaubert est
fort peu intéressant....

Of Shakespeare notably, of Jonson less, of Marlowe (and of Keats to the
term of life allowed him), one can say that they se transvasaient goutte à
goutte; and in England, which has produced a prodigious number of men of
genius and comparatively few works of art, there are not many writers of
whom one can say it. Certainly not of Massinger. A brilliant master of
technique, he was not, in this profound sense, an artist. And so we come to
inquire how, if this is so, he could have written two great comedies. We

shall probably be obliged to conclude that a large part of their excellence is,
in some way which should be defined, fortuitous; and that therefore they
are, however remarkable, not works of perfect art.
This objection raised by Leslie Stephen to Massinger’s method of revealing
a villain has great cogency; but I am inclined to believe that the cogency is
due to a somewhat different reason from that which Leslie Stephen assigns.
His statement is too apriorist to be quite trustworthy. There is no reason
why a comedy or tragedy villain should not declare himself, and in as long
a period as the author likes; but the sort of villain who may run on in this
way is a simple villain (simple not simpliste). Barabas and Volpone can
declare their character, because they have no inside; appearance and reality
are coincident; they are forces in particular directions. Massinger’s two
villains are not simple. Giles Overreach is essentially a great force directed
upon small objects; a great force, a small mind; the terror of a dozen
parishes instead of the conqueror of a world. The force is misapplied,
attenuated, thwarted, by the man’s vulgarity: he is a great man of the City,
without fear, but with the most abject awe of the aristocracy. He is
accordingly not simple, but a product of a certain civilization, and he is not
wholly conscious. His monologues are meant to be, not what he thinks he
is, but what he really is: and yet they are not the truth about him, and he
himself certainly does not know the truth. To declare himself, therefore, is
impossible.
Nay, when my ears are pierced with widows’ cries,
And undone orphans wash with tears my threshold,
I only think what ’tis to have my daughter
Right honourable; and ’tis a powerful charm
Makes me insensible of remorse, or pity,
Or the least sting of conscience.

This is the wrong note. Elsewhere we have the right:

Thou art a fool;
In being out of office, I am out of danger;
Where, if I were a justice, besides the trouble,
I might or out of wilfulness, or error,
Run myself finely into a praemunire,
And so become a prey to the informer,
No, I’ll have none of’t; ’tis enough I keep
Greedy at my devotion: so he serve
My purposes, let him hang, or damn, I care not....

And how well tuned, well modulated, here, the diction! The man is audible
and visible. But from passages like the first we may be permitted to infer
that Massinger was unconscious of trying to develop a different kind of
character from any that Marlowe or Jonson had invented.
Luke Frugal, in The City Madam, is not so great a character as Sir Giles
Overreach. But Luke Frugal just misses being almost the greatest of all
hypocrites. His humility in the first act of the play is more than half real.
The error in his portraiture is not the extravagant hocus-pocus of supposed
Indian necromancers by which he is so easily duped, but the premature
disclosure of villainy in his temptation of the two apprentices of his brother.
But for this, he would be a perfect chameleon of circumstance. Here, again,
we feel that Massinger was conscious only of inventing a rascal of the old
simpler farce type. But the play is not a farce, in the sense in which The Jew
of Malta, The Alchemist, Bartholomew Fair are farces. Massinger had not
the personality to create great farce, and he was too serious to invent trivial
farce. The ability to perform that slight distortion of all the elements in the
world of a play or a story, so that this world is complete in itself, which was
given to Marlowe and Jonson (and to Rabelais) and which is prerequisite to
great farce, was denied to Massinger. On the other hand, his temperament
was more closely related to theirs than to that of Shirley or the Restoration
wits. His two comedies therefore occupy a place by themselves. His ways
of thinking and feeling isolate him from both the Elizabethan and the later
Caroline mind. He might almost have been a great realist; he is killed by
conventions which were suitable for the preceding literary generation, but
not for his. Had Massinger been a greater man, a man of more intellectual
courage, the current of English literature immediately after him might have
taken a different course. The defect is precisely a defect of personality. He
is not, however, the only man of letters who, at the moment when a new

view of life is wanted, has looked at life through the eyes of his
predecessors, and only at manners through his own.

Swinburne as Poet

It is a question of some nicety to decide how much must be read of any
particular poet. And it is not a question merely of the size of the poet. There
are some poets whose every line has unique value. There are others who can
be taken by a few poems universally agreed upon. There are others who
need be read only in selections, but what selections are read will not very
much matter. Of Swinburne, we should like to have the Atalanta entire, and
a volume of selections which should certainly contain The Leper, Laus
Veneris, and The Triumph of Time. It ought to contain many more, but there
is perhaps no other single poem which it would be an error to omit. A
student of Swinburne will want to read one of the Stuart plays and dip into
Tristram of Lyonesse. But almost no one, to-day, will wish to read the whole
of Swinburne. It is not because Swinburne is voluminous; certain poets,
equally voluminous, must be read entire. The necessity and the difficulty of
a selection are due to the peculiar nature of Swinburne’s contribution,
which, it is hardly too much to say, is of a very different kind from that of
any other poet of equal reputation.
We may take it as undisputed that Swinburne did make a contribution; that
he did something that had not been done before, and that what he did will
not turn out to be a fraud. And from that we may proceed to inquire what
Swinburne’s contribution was, and why, whatever critical solvents we
employ to break down the structure of his verse, this contribution remains.
The test is this: agreed that we do not (and I think that the present
generation does not) greatly enjoy Swinburne, and agreed that (a more
serious condemnation) at one period of our lives we did enjoy him and now
no longer enjoy him; nevertheless, the words which we use to state our
grounds of dislike or indifference cannot be applied to Swinburne as they
can to bad poetry. The words of condemnation are words which express his
qualities. You may say “diffuse.” But the diffuseness is essential; had
Swinburne practised greater concentration his verse would be, not better in

the same kind, but a different thing. His diffuseness is one of his glories.
That so little material as appears to be employed in The Triumph of Time
should release such an amazing number of words, requires what there is no
reason to call anything but genius. You could not condense The Triumph of
Time. You could only leave out. And this would destroy the poem; though
no one stanza seems essential. Similarly, a considerable quantity—a volume
of selections—is necessary to give the quality of Swinburne although there
is perhaps no one poem essential in this selection.
If, then, we must be very careful in applying terms of censure, like
“diffuse,” we must be equally careful of praise. “The beauty of Swinburne’s
verse is the sound,” people say, explaining, “he had little visual
imagination.” I am inclined to think that the word “beauty” is hardly to be
used in connection with Swinburne’s verse at all; but in any case the beauty
or effect of sound is neither that of music nor that of poetry which can be
set to music. There is no reason why verse intended to be sung should not
present a sharp visual image or convey an important intellectual meaning,
for it supplements the music by another means of affecting the feelings.
What we get in Swinburne is an expression by sound, which could not
possibly associate itself with music. For what he gives is not images and
ideas and music, it is one thing with a curious mixture of suggestions of all
three.
Shall I come, if I swim? wide are the waves, you see;
Shall I come, if I fly, my dear Love, to thee?

This is Campion, and an example of the kind of music that is not to be
found in Swinburne. It is an arrangement and choice of words which has a
sound-value and at the same time a coherent comprehensible meaning, and
the two things—the musical value and meaning—are two things, not one.
But in Swinburne there is no pure beauty—no pure beauty of sound, or of
image, or of idea.

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved’s bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.

I quote from Shelley, because Shelley is supposed to be the master of
Swinburne; and because his song, like that of Campion, has what
Swinburne has not—a beauty of music and a beauty of content; and because
it is clearly and simply expressed, with only two adjectives. Now, in
Swinburne the meaning and the sound are one thing. He is concerned with
the meaning of the word in a peculiar way: he employs, or rather “works,”
the word’s meaning. And this is connected with an interesting fact about his
vocabulary: he uses the most general word, because his emotion is never
particular, never in direct line of vision, never focused; it is emotion
reinforced, not by intensification, but by expansion.
There lived a singer in France of old
By the tideless dolorous midland sea.
In a land of sand and ruin and gold
There shone one woman, and none but she.

You see that Provence is the merest point of diffusion here. Swinburne
defines the place by the most general word, which has for him its own
value. “Gold,” “ruin,” “dolorous”: it is not merely the sound that he wants,
but the vague associations of idea that the words give him. He has not his
eye on a particular place, as
Li ruscelletti che dei verdi colli
Del Casentin discendon giuso in Arno....

It is, in fact, the word that gives him the thrill, not the object. When you
take to pieces any verse of Swinburne, you find always that the object was
not there—only the word. Compare

Snowdrops that plead for pardon
And pine for fright

with the daffodils that come before the swallow dares. The snowdrop of
Swinburne disappears, the daffodil of Shakespeare remains. The swallow of
Shakespeare remains in the verse in Macbeth; the bird of Wordsworth
Breaking the silence of the seas

remains; the swallow of “Itylus” disappears. Compare, again, a chorus of
Atalanta with a chorus from Athenian tragedy. The chorus of Swinburne is
almost a parody of the Athenian: it is sententious, but it has not even the
significance of commonplace.
At least we witness of thee ere we die
That these things are not otherwise, but thus....

Before the beginning of years
There came to the making of man
Time with a gift of tears;
Grief with a glass that ran....

This is not merely “music”; it is effective because it appears to be a
tremendous statement, like statements made in our dreams; when we wake
up we find that the “glass that ran” would do better for time than for grief,
and that the gift of tears would be as appropriately bestowed by grief as by
time.
It might seem to be intimated, by what has been said, that the work of
Swinburne can be shown to be a sham, just as bad verse is a sham. It would
only be so if you could produce or suggest something that it pretends to be
and is not. The world of Swinburne does not depend upon some other world
which it simulates; it has the necessary completeness and self-sufficiency
for justification and permanence. It is impersonal, and no one else could
have made it. The deductions are true to the postulates. It is indestructible.
None of the obvious complaints that were or might have been brought to
bear upon the first Poems and Ballads holds good. The poetry is not
morbid, it is not erotic, it is not destructive. These are adjectives which can
be applied to the material, the human feelings, which in Swinburne’s case

do not exist. The morbidity is not of human feeling but of language.
Language in a healthy state presents the object, is so close to the object that
the two are identified.
They are identified in the verse of Swinburne solely because the object has
ceased to exist, because the meaning is merely the hallucination of
meaning, because language, uprooted, has adapted itself to an independent
life of atmospheric nourishment. In Swinburne, for example, we see the
word “weary” flourishing in this way independent of the particular and
actual weariness of flesh or spirit. The bad poet dwells partly in a world of
objects and partly in a world of words, and he never can get them to fit.
Only a man of genius could dwell so exclusively and consistently among
words as Swinburne. His language is not, like the language of bad poetry,
dead. It is very much alive, with this singular life of its own. But the
language which is more important to us is that which is struggling to digest
and express new objects, new groups of objects, new feelings, new aspects,
as, for instance, the prose of Mr. James Joyce or the earlier Conrad.

Blake

I

If one follows Blake’s mind through the several stages of his poetic
development it is impossible to regard him as a naïf, a wild man, a wild pet
for the supercultivated. The strangeness is evaporated, the peculiarity is
seen to be the peculiarity of all great poetry: something which is found (not
everywhere) in Homer and Æschylus and Dante and Villon, and profound
and concealed in the work of Shakespeare—and also in another form in
Montaigne and in Spinoza. It is merely a peculiar honesty, which, in a
world too frightened to be honest, is peculiarly terrifying. It is an honesty
against which the whole world conspires, because it is unpleasant. Blake’s
poetry has the unpleasantness of great poetry. Nothing that can be called
morbid or abnormal or perverse, none of the things which exemplify the
sickness of an epoch or a fashion, have this quality; only those things
which, by some extraordinary labour of simplification, exhibit the essential
sickness or strength of the human soul. And this honesty never exists
without great technical accomplishment. The question about Blake the man
is the question of the circumstances that concurred to permit this honesty in
his work, and what circumstances define its limitations. The favouring
conditions probably include these two: that, being early apprenticed to a
manual occupation, he was not compelled to acquire any other education in
literature than he wanted, or to acquire it for any other reason than that he
wanted it; and that, being a humble engraver, he had no journalistic-social
career open to him.
There was, that is to say, nothing to distract him from his interests or to
corrupt these interests: neither the ambitions of parents or wife, nor the
standards of society, nor the temptations of success; nor was he exposed to
imitation of himself or of anyone else. These circumstances—not his
supposed inspired and untaught spontaneity—are what make him innocent.
His early poems show what the poems of a boy of genius ought to show,
immense power of assimilation. Such early poems are not, as usually
supposed, crude attempts to do something beyond the boy’s capacity; they
are, in the case of a boy of real promise, more likely to be quite mature and
successful attempts to do something small. So with Blake, his early poems
are technically admirable, and their originality is in an occasional rhythm.

The verse of Edward III deserves study. But his affection for certain
Elizabethans is not so surprising as his affinity with the very best work of
his own century. He is very like Collins, he is very eighteenth century. The
poem Whether on Ida’s shady brow is eighteenth-century work; the
movement, the weight of it, the syntax, the choice of words—
The languid strings do scarcely move!
The sound is forc’d, the notes are few!

this is contemporary with Gray and Collins, it is the poetry of a language
which has undergone the discipline of prose. Blake up to twenty is
decidedly a traditional.
Blake’s beginnings as a poet, then, are as normal as the beginnings of
Shakespeare. His method of composition, in his mature work, is exactly like
that of other poets. He has an idea (a feeling, an image), he develops it by
accretion or expansion, alters his verse often, and hesitates often over the
final choice.[9] The idea, of course, simply comes, but upon arrival it is
subjected to prolonged manipulation. In the first phase Blake is concerned
with verbal beauty; in the second he becomes the apparent naïf, really the
mature intelligence. It is only when the ideas become more automatic, come
more freely and are less manipulated, that we begin to suspect their origin,
to suspect that they spring from a shallower source.
The Songs of Innocence and of Experience, and the poems from the
Rossetti manuscript, are the poems of a man with a profound interest in
human emotions, and a profound knowledge of them. The emotions are
presented in an extremely simplified, abstract form. This form is one
illustration of the eternal struggle of art against education, of the literary
artist against the continuous deterioration of language.
It is important that the artist should be highly educated in his own art; but
his education is one that is hindered rather than helped by the ordinary
processes of society which constitute education for the ordinary man. For
these processes consist largely in the acquisition of impersonal ideas which
obscure what we really are and feel, what we really want, and what really
excites our interest. It is of course not the actual information acquired, but
the conformity which the accumulation of knowledge is apt to impose, that
is harmful. Tennyson is a very fair example of a poet almost wholly

encrusted with parasitic opinion, almost wholly merged into his
environment. Blake, on the other hand, knew what interested him, and he
therefore presents only the essential, only, in fact, what can be presented,
and need not be explained. And because he was not distracted, or
frightened, or occupied in anything but exact statement, he understood. He
was naked, and saw man naked, and from the centre of his own crystal. To
him there was no more reason why Swedenborg should be absurd than
Locke. He accepted Swedenborg, and eventually rejected him, for reasons
of his own. He approached everything with a mind unclouded by current
opinions. There was nothing of the superior person about him. This makes
him terrifying.

II

But if there was nothing to distract him from sincerity there were, on the
other hand, the dangers to which the naked man is exposed. His philosophy,
like his visions, like his insight, like his technique, was his own. And
accordingly he was inclined to attach more importance to it than an artist
should; this is what makes him eccentric, and makes him inclined to
formlessness.
But most through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful harlot’s curse
Blasts the new-born infant’s tear,
And blights with plagues the marriage hearse,

is the naked vision;
Love seeketh only self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another’s loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite,

is the naked observation; and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is naked
philosophy, presented. But Blake’s occasional marriages of poetry and
philosophy are not so felicitous.
He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars.
General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer;
For Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized particulars....

One feels that the form is not well chosen. The borrowed philosophy of
Dante and Lucretius is perhaps not so interesting, but it injures their form
less. Blake did not have that more Mediterranean gift of form which knows
how to borrow as Dante borrowed his theory of the soul; he must needs
create a philosophy as well as a poetry. A similar formlessness attacks his
draughtsmanship. The fault is most evident, of course, in the longer poems
—or rather, the poems in which structure is important. You cannot create a
very large poem without introducing a more impersonal point of view, or

splitting it up into various personalities. But the weakness of the long
poems is certainly not that they are too visionary, too remote from the
world. It is that Blake did not see enough, became too much occupied with
ideas.
We have the same respect for Blake’s philosophy (and perhaps for that of
Samuel Butler) that we have for an ingenious piece of home-made
furniture: we admire the man who has put it together out of the odds and
ends about the house. England has produced a fair number of these
resourceful Robinson Crusoes; but we are not really so remote from the
Continent, or from our own past, as to be deprived of the advantages of
culture if we wish them.
We may speculate, for amusement, whether it would not have been
beneficial to the north of Europe generally, and to Britain in particular, to
have had a more continuous religious history. The local divinities of Italy
were not wholly exterminated by Christianity, and they were not reduced to
the dwarfish fate which fell upon our trolls and pixies. The latter, with the
major Saxon deities, were perhaps no great loss in themselves, but they left
an empty place; and perhaps our mythology was further impoverished by
the divorce from Rome. Milton’s celestial and infernal regions are large but
insufficiently furnished apartments filled by heavy conversation; and one
remarks about the Puritan mythology an historical thinness. And about
Blake’s supernatural territories, as about the supposed ideas that dwell
there, we cannot help commenting on a certain meanness of culture. They
illustrate the crankiness, the eccentricity, which frequently affects writers
outside of the Latin traditions, and which such a critic as Arnold should
certainly have rebuked. And they are not essential to Blake’s inspiration.
Blake was endowed with a capacity for considerable understanding of
human nature, with a remarkable and original sense of language and the
music of language, and a gift of hallucinated vision. Had these been
controlled by a respect for impersonal reason, for common sense, for the
objectivity of science, it would have been better for him. What his genius
required, and what it sadly lacked, was a framework of accepted and
traditional ideas which would have prevented him from indulging in a
philosophy of his own, and concentrated his attention upon the problems of
the poet. Confusion of thought, emotion, and vision is what we find in such
a work as Also Sprach Zarathustra; it is eminently not a Latin virtue. The

concentration resulting from a framework of mythology and theology and
philosophy is one of the reasons why Dante is a classic, and Blake only a
poet of genius. The fault is perhaps not with Blake himself, but with the
environment which failed to provide what such a poet needed; perhaps the
circumstances compelled him to fabricate, perhaps the poet required the
philosopher and mythologist; although the conscious Blake may have been
quite unconscious of the motives.

Dante

M. Paul Valéry, a writer for whom I have considerable respect, has placed in
his most recent statement upon poetry a paragraph which seems to me of
very doubtful validity. I have not seen the complete essay, and know the
quotation only as it appears in a critical notice in the Athenæum, July 23,
1920:

La philosophie, et même la morale tendirent à fuir les œuvres pour se
placer dans les réflexions qui les précèdent.... Parler aujourd’hui de
poésie philosophique (fût-ce en invoquant Alfred de Vigny, Leconte de
Lisle, et quelques autres), c’est naivement confondre des conditions et
des applications de l’esprit incompatibles entre elles. N’est-ce pas
oublier que le but de celui qui spécule est de fixer ou de créer une
notion—c’est-à-dire un pouvoir et un instrument de pouvoir, cependant
que le poète moderne essaie de produire en nous un état et de porter cet
état exceptionnel au point d’une jouissance parfaite....

It may be that I do M. Valéry an injustice which I must endeavour to repair
when I have the pleasure of reading his article entire. But the paragraph
gives the impression of more than one error of analysis. In the first place, it
suggests that conditions have changed, that “philosophical” poetry may
once have been permissible, but that (perhaps owing to the greater
specialization of the modern world) it is now intolerable. We are forced to
assume that what we do not like in our time was never good art, and that
what appears to us good was always so. If any ancient “philosophical”
poetry retains its value, a value which we fail to find in modern poetry of
the same type, we investigate on the assumption that we shall find some
difference to which the mere difference of date is irrelevant. But if it be
maintained that the older poetry has a “philosophic” element and a “poetic”
element which can be isolated, we have two tasks to perform. We must
show first in a particular case—our case is Dante—that the philosophy is

essential to the structure and that the structure is essential to the poetic
beauty of the parts; and we must show that the philosophy is employed in a
different form from that which it takes in admittedly unsuccessful
philosophical poems. And if M. Valéry is in error in his complete exorcism
of “philosophy,” perhaps the basis of the error is his apparently
commendatory interpretation of the effort of the modern poet, namely, that
the latter endeavours “to produce in us a state.”
The early philosophical poets, Parmenides and Empedocles, were
apparently persons of an impure philosophical inspiration. Neither their
predecessors nor their successors expressed themselves in verse;
Parmenides and Empedocles were persons who mingled with genuine
philosophical ability a good deal of the emotion of the founder of a second-
rate religious system. They were not interested exclusively in philosophy, or
religion, or poetry, but in something which was a mixture of all three; hence
their reputation as poets is low and as philosophers should be considerably
below Heraclitus, Zeno, Anaxagoras, or Democritus. The poem of Lucretius
is quite a different matter. For Lucretius was undoubtedly a poet. He
endeavours to expound a philosophical system, but with a different motive
from Parmenides or Empedocles, for this system is already in existence; he
is really endeavouring to find the concrete poetic equivalent for this system
—to find its complete equivalent in vision. Only, as he is an innovator in
this art, he wavers between philosophical poetry and philosophy. So we find
passages such as:

But the velocity of thunderbolts is great and their stroke powerful, and
they run through their course with a rapid descent, because the force
when aroused first in all cases collects itself in the clouds and.... Let us
now sing what causes the motion of the stars.... Of all these different
smells then which strike the nostrils one may reach to a much greater
distance than another....[10]

But Lucretius’ true tendency is to express an ordered vision of the life of
man, with great vigour of real poetic image and often acute observation.

quod petiere, premunt arte faciuntque dolorem
corporis et dentes inlidunt saepe labellis
osculaque adfligunt, quia non est pura voluptas
et stimuli subsunt qui instigant laedere id ipsum
quodcumque est, rabies unde illaec germina surgunt....

medio de fonte leporum
surgit amari aliquid quod in ipsis floribus angat....

nec procumbere humi prostratum et pandere palmas
ante deum delubra nec aras sanguine multo
spargere quadrupedum nec votis nectere vota,
sed mage pacata posse omnia mente tueri.

The philosophy which Lucretius tackled was not rich enough in variety of
feeling, applied itself to life too uniformly, to supply the material for a
wholly successful poem. It was incapable of complete expansion into pure
vision. But I must ask M. Valéry whether the “aim” of Lucretius’ poem was
“to fix or create a notion” or to fashion “an instrument of power.”
Without doubt, the effort of the philosopher proper, the man who is trying to
deal with ideas in themselves, and the effort of the poet, who may be trying
to realize ideas, cannot be carried on at the same time. But this is not to
deny that poetry can be in some sense philosophic. The poet can deal with
philosophic ideas, not as matter for argument, but as matter for inspection.
The original form of a philosophy cannot be poetic. But poetry can be
penetrated by a philosophic idea, it can deal with this idea when it has
reached the point of immediate acceptance, when it has become almost a
physical modification. If we divorced poetry and philosophy altogether, we
should bring a serious impeachment, not only against Dante, but against
most of Dante’s contemporaries.
Dante had the benefit of a mythology and a theology which had undergone
a more complete absorption into life than those of Lucretius. It is curious
that not only Dante’s detractors, like the Petrarch of Landor’s Pentameron
(if we may apply so strong a word to so amiable a character), but some of
his admirers, insist on the separation of Dante’s “poetry” and Dante’s
“teaching.” Sometimes the philosophy is confused with the allegory. The
philosophy is an ingredient, it is a part of Dante’s world just as it is a part of
life; the allegory is the scaffold on which the poem is built. An American

writer of a little primer of Dante, Mr. Henry Dwight Sidgwick, who desires
to improve our understanding of Dante as a “spiritual leader,” says:

To Dante this literal Hell was a secondary matter; so it is to us. He and
we are concerned with the allegory. That allegory is simple. Hell is the
absence of God.... If the reader begins with the consciousness that he is
reading about sin, spiritually understood, he never loses the thread, he
is never at a loss, never slips back into the literal signification.

Without stopping to question Mr. Sidgwick on the difference between literal
and spiritual sin, we may affirm that his remarks are misleading.
Undoubtedly the allegory is to be taken seriously, and certainly the Comedy
is in some way a “moral education.” The question is to find a formula for
the correspondence between the former and the latter, to decide whether the
moral value corresponds directly to the allegory. We can easily ascertain
what importance Dante assigned to allegorical method. In the Convivio we
are seriously informed that

the principal design [of the odes] is to lead men to knowledge and
virtue, as will be seen in the progress of the truth of them;

and we are also given the familiar four interpretations of an ode: literal,
allegorical, moral, and anagogical. And so distinguished a scholar as M.
Hauvette repeats again and again the phrase “didactique d’intention.” We
accept the allegory. Accepted, there are two usual ways of dealing with it.
One may, with Mr. Sidgwick, dwell upon its significance for the seeker of
“spiritual light,” or one may, with Landor, deplore the spiritual mechanics
and find the poet only in passages where he frees himself from his divine
purposes. With neither of these points of view can we concur. Mr. Sidgwick
magnifies the “preacher and prophet,” and presents Dante as a superior
Isaiah or Carlyle; Landor reserves the poet, reprehends the scheme, and
denounces the politics. Some of Landor’s errors are more palpable than Mr.
Sidgwick’s. He errs, in the first place, in judging Dante by the standards of
classical epic. Whatever the Comedy is, an epic it is not. M. Hauvette well
says:

Rechercher dans quelle mesure le poème se rapproche du genre
classique de l’épopée, et dans quelle mesure il s’en écarte, est un

exércice de rhétorique entièrement inutile, puisque Dante, à n’en pas
douter, n’a jamais eu l’intention de composer une action épique dans
les règles.

But we must define the framework of Dante’s poem from the result as well
as from the intention. The poem has not only a framework, but a form; and
even if the framework be allegorical, the form may be something else. The
examination of any episode in the Comedy ought to show that not merely
the allegorical interpretation or the didactic intention, but the emotional
significance itself, cannot be isolated from the rest of the poem. Landor
appears, for instance, to have misunderstood such a passage as the Paolo
and Francesca, by failing to perceive its relations:

In the midst of her punishment, Francesca, when she comes to the
tenderest part of her story, tells it with complacency and delight.

This is surely a false simplification. To have lost all recollected delight
would have been, for Francesca, either loss of humanity or relief from
damnation. The ecstasy, with the present thrill at the remembrance of it, is a
part of the torture. Francesca is neither stupefied nor reformed; she is
merely damned; and it is a part of damnation to experience desires that we
can no longer gratify. For in Dante’s Hell souls are not deadened, as they
mostly are in life; they are actually in the greatest torment of which each is
capable.
E il modo ancor m’offende.

It is curious that Mr. Sidgwick, whose approbation is at the opposite pole
from Landor’s, should have fallen into a similar error. He says:

In meeting [Ulysses], as in meeting Pier della Vigna and Brunetto
Latini, the preacher and the prophet are lost in the poet.

Here, again, is a false simplification. These passages have no digressive
beauty. The case of Brunetto is parallel to that of Francesca. The emotion of
the passage resides in Brunetto’s excellence in damnation—so admirable a
soul, and so perverse.

e parve de costoro
Quegli che vince e non colui che perde.

And I think that if Mr. Sidgwick had pondered the strange words of
Ulysses,
com’ altrui piacque,

he would not have said that the preacher and prophet are lost in the poet.
“Preacher” and “prophet” are odious terms; but what Mr. Sidgwick
designates by them is something which is certainly not “lost in the poet,”
but is part of the poet.
A variety of passages might illustrate the assertion that no emotion is
contemplated by Dante purely in and for itself. The emotion of the person,
or the emotion with which our attitude appropriately invests the person, is
never lost or diminished, is always preserved entire, but is modified by the
position assigned to the person in the eternal scheme, is coloured by the
atmosphere of that person’s residence in one of the three worlds. About
none of Dante’s characters is there that ambiguity which affects Milton’s
Lucifer. The damned preserve any degree of beauty or grandeur that ever
rightly pertained to them, and this intensifies and also justifies their
damnation. As Jason
Guarda quel grande che viene!
E per dolor non par lagrima spanda,
Quanto aspetto reale ancor ritiene!

The crime of Bertrand becomes more lurid; the vindictive Adamo acquires
greater ferocity, and the errors of Arnaut are corrected—
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina.

If the artistic emotion presented by any episode of the Comedy is dependent
upon the whole, we may proceed to inquire what the whole scheme is. The
usefulness of allegory and astronomy is obvious. A mechanical framework,
in a poem of so vast an ambit, was a necessity. As the centre of gravity of
emotions is more remote from a single human action, or a system of purely

human actions, than in drama or epic, so the framework has to be more
artificial and apparently more mechanical. It is not essential that the
allegory or the almost unintelligible astronomy should be understood—only
that its presence should be justified. The emotional structure within this
scaffold is what must be understood—the structure made possible by the
scaffold. This structure is an ordered scale of human emotions. Not,
necessarily, all human emotions; and in any case all the emotions are
limited, and also extended in significance by their place in the scheme.
But Dante’s is the most comprehensive, and the most ordered presentation
of emotions that has ever been made. Dante’s method of dealing with any
emotion may be contrasted, not so appositely with that of other “epic” poets
as with that of Shakespeare. Shakespeare takes a character apparently
controlled by a simple emotion, and analyses the character and the emotion
itself. The emotion is split up into constituents—and perhaps destroyed in
the process. The mind of Shakespeare was one of the most critical that has
ever existed. Dante, on the other hand, does not analyse the emotion so
much as he exhibits its relation to other emotions. You cannot, that is,
understand the Inferno without the Purgatorio and the Paradiso. “Dante,”
says Landor’s Petrarch, “is the great master of the disgusting.” That is true,
though Sophocles at least once approaches him. But a disgust like Dante’s
is no hypertrophy of a single reaction: it is completed and explained only by
the last canto of the Paradiso.
La forma universal di questo nodo
credo ch’io vidi, perchè più di largo
dicendo questo, mi sento ch’io godo.

The contemplation of the horrid or sordid or disgusting, by an artist, is the
necessary and negative aspect of the impulse toward the pursuit of beauty.
But not all succeed as did Dante in expressing the complete scale from
negative to positive. The negative is the more importunate.
The structure of emotions, for which the allegory is the necessary scaffold,
is complete from the most sensuous to the most intellectual and the most
spiritual. Dante gives a concrete presentation of the most elusive:

Pareva a me che nube ne coprisse
lucida, spessa, solida e polita,
quasi adamante che lo sol ferisse.

Per entro sè l’eterna margarita
ne recepette, com’ acqua recepe
raggio di luce, permanendo unita.

or
Nel suo aspetto tal dentro mi fei,
qual si fe’ Glauco nel gustar dell’ erba,
che il fe’ consorto in mar degli altri dei.[11]

Again, in the Purgatorio, for instance in Canto XVI and Canto XVIII, occur
passages of pure exposition of philosophy, the philosophy of Aristotle
strained through the schools.
Lo natural e sempre senza errore,
ma l’altro puote errar per malo obbietto,
o per poco o per troppo di vigore....

We are not here studying the philosophy, we see it, as part of the ordered
world. The aim of the poet is to state a vision, and no vision of life can be
complete which does not include the articulate formulation of life which
human minds make.
Onde convenne legge per fren porre....

It is one of the greatest merits of Dante’s poem that the vision is so nearly
complete; it is evidence of this greatness that the significance of any single
passage, of any of the passages that are selected as “poetry,” is incomplete
unless we ourselves apprehend the whole.
And Dante helps us to provide a criticism of M. Valéry’s “modern poet”
who attempts “to produce in us a state.” A state, in itself, is nothing
whatever.
M. Valéry’s account is quite in harmony with pragmatic doctrine, and with
the tendencies of such a work as William James’s Varieties of Religious
Experience. The mystical experience is supposed to be valuable because it

is a pleasant state of unique intensity. But the true mystic is not satisfied
merely by feeling, he must pretend at least that he sees, and the absorption
into the divine is only the necessary, if paradoxical, limit of this
contemplation. The poet does not aim to excite—that is not even a test of
his success—but to set something down; the state of the reader is merely
that reader’s particular mode of perceiving what the poet has caught in
words. Dante, more than any other poet, has succeeded in dealing with his
philosophy, not as a theory (in the modern and not the Greek sense of that
word) or as his own comment or reflection, but in terms of something
perceived. When most of our modern poets confine themselves to what they
had perceived, they produce for us, usually, only odds and ends of still life
and stage properties; but that does not imply so much that the method of
Dante is obsolete, as that our vision is perhaps comparatively restricted.

Note.—My friend the Abbé Laban has reproached me for attributing to
Landor, in this essay, sentiments which are merely the expression of his
dramatic figure Petrarch, and which imply rather Landor’s reproof of the
limitations of the historical Petrarch’s view of Dante, than the view of
Landor himself. The reader should therefore observe this correction of my
use of Landor’s honoured name.

Footnotes
1. Sunday Times, May 30, 1920.

2. Arnold, it must be admitted, gives us often the impression of seeing
the masters, whom he quotes, as canonical literature, rather than as
masters.

3. Studies in Elizabethan Drama. By Arthur Symons.

4. Revue des Deux Mondes, fevr. 1875, quoted by Benda, Belphégor, p.
140.

5. I should except The Dynasts. This gigantic panorama is hardly to be
called a success, but it is essentially an attempt to present a vision,
and “sacrifices” the philosophy to the vision, as all great dramas do.
Mr. Hardy has apprehended his matter as a poet and an artist.

6. Poetics, vi. 9. Butcher’s translation.

7. Of the authorship it can only be said that the lines are by some
admirer of Marlowe. This might well be Jonson.

8. I have never, by the way, seen a cogent refutation of Thomas Rymer’s
objections to Othello.

9. I do not know why M. Berger should say, without qualification, in his
William Blake: mysticisme et poésie, that “son respect pour l’esprit
qui soufflait en lui et qui dictait ses paroles l’empêchait de les
corriger jamais.” Dr. Sampson, in his Oxford edition of Blake, gives
us to understand that Blake believed much of his writing to be
automatic, but observes that Blake’s “meticulous care in composition
is everywhere apparent in the poems preserved in rough draft ...
alteration on alteration, rearrangement after rearrangement, deletions,
additions, and inversions....”

10. Munro’s translation, passim.

11. See E. Pound, The Spirit of Romance, p. 145.

Transcriber’s Notes:
Missing or obscured punctuation was corrected.
Typographical errors were silently corrected.
Spelling and hyphenation were made consistent when a predominant form
was found in this book; otherwise it was not changed.

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