Oxford Lectures on Poetry

THE LONG POEM IN THE AGE OF WORDSWORTH 65

The poetry of the age of Wordsworth, we are all agreed, is one of the glories of our literature. It is surpassed, many would add, by the poetry of no other period except the Elizabethan. But it has obvious flaws, of which perhaps we are becoming more and more distinctly conscious now; and, apart from these definite defects, it also leaves with us, when we review it, a certain feeling of disappointment. It is great, we say to ourselves, but why is it not greater still? It shows a wonderful abundance of genius: why does it not show an equal accomplishment?

Matthew Arnold, in his essay on The Function of Criticism at the Present Time, gave an answer to this question. ‘It has long seemed to me,’ he wrote, ‘that the burst of creative activity in our literature, through the first quarter of this century, had about it, in fact, something premature… And this prematureness comes from its having proceeded without having its proper data, without sufficient materials 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 in variety.’ The statement that this poetry ‘did not know enough’ means, of course, for Arnold, not that it lacked information, reading, ideas of a kind, but that it lacked ‘criticism.’ And this means that it did not live and move freely in an atmosphere of the best available ideas, of ideas gained by a free, sincere, and continued effort, in theology, philosophy, history, science, to see things as they are. In such an atmosphere Goethe lived. There was not indeed in Goethe’s Germany, nor was there in the England of our poets, the ‘national glow of life and thought’ that prevailed in the Athens of Pericles or the England of Elizabeth. That happiest atmosphere for poetry was wanting in both countries. But there was for Goethe ‘a sort of equivalent for it in the complete culture and unfettered thinking of a large body of Germans,’ a culture produced by a many-sided learning and a long and widely-combined critical effort. It was this that our poets lacked.

Now, if this want existed, as Arnold affirms, it may not have had all the importance he ascribes to it, but considerable importance it must have had. And as to its existence there can hardly be a doubt. One of the most striking characteristics of Wordsworth’s age is the very unusual superiority of the imaginative literature to the scientific. I mean by the ‘scientific’ literature that of philosophy, theology, history, politics, economics, not only that of the sciences of Nature, which for our present purpose are perhaps the least important. In this kind of literature Wordsworth’s age has hardly an author to show who could for a moment be placed on a level with some five of the poets, with the novelists Scott and Jane Austen, or with the poetic critics Lamb, Hazlitt, and Coleridge. It has no writers to compare with Bacon, Newton, Hume, Gibbon, Johnson, or Burke. It is the time of Paley, Godwin, Stewart, Bentham, Mitford, Lingard, Coleridge the philosopher and theologian. These are names worthy of all respect, but they represent a literature quite definitely of the second rank. And this great disproportion between the two kinds of literature, we must observe, is a peculiar phenomenon. If we go back as far as the Elizabethan age we shall find no parallel to it. The one kind was doubtless superior to the other in Shakespeare’s time, possibly even in Milton’s; but Hooker and Bacon and Taylor and Clarendon and Hobbes are not separated from the best poets of their day by any startling difference of quality;66 while in the later periods, right down to the age of Wordsworth, the scientific literature quite holds its own, to say no more, with the imaginative. Nor in the Germany of Wordsworth’s own time is there that gap between the two that we find in England. In respect of genius the philosophers, for example, though none of them was the equal of Goethe, were as a body not at all inferior to the poets. The case of England in Wordsworth’s age is anomalous.

This peculiarity must be symptomatic, and it must have been influential. It confirms Arnold’s view that the intellectual atmosphere of the time was not of the best. If we think of the periodical literature – of the Quarterly and Edinburgh and Blackwood– we shall be still more inclined to assent to that view. And when we turn to the poets themselves, and especially to their prose writings, letters, and recorded conversation, and even to the critiques of Hazlitt, of Lamb, and of Coleridge, we cannot reject it. Assuredly we read with admiration, and the signs of native genius we meet with in abundance – in greater abundance, I think, than in the poetry and criticism of Germany, if Goethe is excepted. But the freedom of spirit, the knowledge, the superiority to prejudice and caprice and fanaticism, the openness to ideas, the atmosphere that is all about us when we read Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, we do not find. Can we imagine any one of those four either inspired or imprisoned as Shelley was by the doctrines of Godwin? Could any of them have seen in the French Revolution no more significance than Scott appears to have detected? How cramped are the attitudes, sympathetic or antipathetic, of nearly all our poets towards the Christian religion! Could anything be more borné than Coleridge’s professed reason for not translating Faust?67 Is it possible that a German poet with the genius of Byron or Wordsworth could have inhabited a mental world so small and so tainted with vulgarity as is opened to us by the brilliant letters of the former, or could have sunk, like the latter, to suggesting that the cholera was a divine condemnation of Catholic Emancipation and the Reform Bill?

But if we accept Arnold’s statement as to the intellectual atmosphere of the poetry of Wordsworth’s time, a question will remain. Was he right in regarding this atmosphere as the sole, or even as the chief, cause of the fact (if it is one) that the poetry does not fully correspond in greatness with the genius of the poets? And before we come to this question we must put another. Is the fact really as it has just been stated? I do not think so. The disappointment that we feel attends, it seems to me, mainly our reading of the long poems. Reviewing these in memory, and asking ourselves how many we can unreservedly call ‘great,’ we hesitate. Beyond doubt there is great poetry in some of them, fine poetry in many; but that does not make a great whole. Which of them is great as a whole? Not the Prelude or the Excursion, still less Endymion or The Revolt of Islam or Childe Harold, which hardly pretends to unity. Christabel, the wonderful fragment, is a fragment; so is Hyperion; Don Juan, also unfinished, becomes more discursive the further it proceeds, and in spirit is nowhere great. All the principal poets wrote dramas, or at least dramatic pieces; and some readers think that in Manfred, and still more certainly in Cain, we have great poems, while others think this of Prometheus Unbound and The Cenci. But if as to one or more of these we assent, is our judgment quite confident, and can we say that any of them satisfy us, like some works of earlier times? We are thus satisfied, it seems to me, only when we come to poems of smaller dimensions, like The Ancient Mariner, or The Eve of Saint Agnes, or Adonaïs, or The Vision of Judgment, or when we read the lyrics. To save time I will confine myself to the latter.

Within this sphere we have no longer that impression of genius which fails to reach full accomplishment. I would go further. No poet, of course, of Wordsworth’s age is the equal of Shakespeare or of Milton; and there are certain qualities, too, of lyrical verse in which the times of Shakespeare and of Milton are superior to that of Wordsworth. But if we take the better part of the lyrical poetry of these three periods in the mass, or again in a representative selection, it will not be the latest period, I think, that need fear the comparison. In the original edition of the Golden Treasury, Book I. (Wyatt to Shakespeare) occupies forty pages; Book II. (the rest of the seventeenth century) sixty-five; Book IV., which covers the very much shorter period from Wordsworth to Hood, close on a hundred and forty. ‘Book I.,’ perhaps most of us would say, ‘should be longer, and Book IV. a good deal shorter: some third-rate pieces are included in it, and Wordsworth is over-represented. And the Elizabethan poems are mostly quite short, while the Nineteenth Century poets shine equally in the longer kinds of lyric. And Mr. Palgrave excluded the old ballads, but admitted poems like Coleridge’s Love and Wordsworth’s Ruth (seven whole pages). And in any case we cannot judge by mere quantity.’ No; but still quantity must count for something, and the Golden Treasury is a volume excellent in selection, arrangement, and taste. It does, I think, leave the impression that the age of Wordsworth was our greatest period in lyrical poetry. And if Book I. were swelled to the dimensions of Book IV., this impression would not be materially altered; it might even be deepened. For the change would force into notice the comparative monotony of the themes of the earlier poetry, and the immensely wider range of the thought and emotion that attain expression in the later. It might also convince us that, on the whole, this more varied material is treated with a greater intensity of feeling, though on this point it is difficult to be sure, since we recognise what may be called the conventions of an earlier age, and are perhaps a little blind to those of a time near our own.

Now the eminence of Wordsworth’s age in lyrical poetry, even if it is not also a pre-eminence, is a significant fact. It may mean that the whole poetic spirit of the time was lyrical in tendency; and this may indirectly be a cause of that sense of disappointment which mingles with our admiration of the long poems. I will call attention, therefore, to two or three allied facts. (1) The longer poems of Campbell are already dead; he survives only in lyrics. This is also true of Moore. In spite of fine passages (and the battle in Marmion is in certain qualities superior to anything else of the time) Scott’s longer poems cannot be classed with the best contemporary poetry; but in some of his ballads and songs he attains that rank. (2) Again, much of the most famous narrative poetry is semi-lyrical in form, as a moment’s thought of Scott, Byron, and Coleridge will show. Some of it (for instance, several of Byron’s tales, or Wordsworth’s White Doe of Rylstone) is strongly tinged with the lyrical spirit. The centre of interest is inward. It is an interest in emotion, thought, will, rather than in scenes, events, actions, which express and re-act on emotions, thoughts, will. It would hardly be going too far to say that in the most characteristic narrative poetry the balance of outward and inward is rarely attained.68 (3) The same tendencies are visible in much of the dramatic writing. Byron’s regular dramas, for instance, if they ever lived, are almost forgotten; but Heaven and Earth, which is still alive, is largely composed of lyrics, and the first two acts of Manfred are full of them. Prometheus Unbound is called ‘a lyrical drama.’ Though it has some very fine and some very beautiful blank verse passages (usually undramatic), its lyrics are its glory; and this is even more the case with Hellas. It would be untrue to say that the comparative failure of most of the dramas of the time is principally due to the lyrical spirit, but many of them show it. (4) The strength of this spirit may be illustrated lastly by a curious fact. The ode is one of the longest and most ambitious forms of lyric, and some of the most famous poems of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats are odes. But the greatest of the lyrists, who wrote the Odes to Liberty and Naples and the West Wind, found the limits even of the ode too narrow for his ‘flight of fire.’ If Lycidas and L’Allegro and Spenser’s Epithalamion are lyrical poems, and if we are not arbitrarily to determine that nothing shall be called lyrical which exceeds a certain length, Adonaïs will be a lyrical elegy in fifty-five Spenserian stanzas, and the Lines written among the Euganean Hills and Epipsychidion will be lyrics consisting respectively of 370 and 600 lines.

It will however be agreed that in general a lyrical poem may be called short as compared with a narrative or drama. It is usual, further, to say that lyrical poetry is ‘subjective,’ since, instead of telling or representing a story of people, actions, and events, it expresses the thoughts and feelings of the poet himself. This statement is ambiguous and in other ways defective; but it will be admitted to have a basis in fact. It may be suggested, then, that the excellence of the lyrical poetry of Wordsworth’s time, and the imperfection of the long narratives and dramas, may have a common origin. Just as it was most natural to Homer or to Shakespeare to express the imaginative substance of his mind in the ‘objective’ shape of a world of persons and actions ostensibly severed from his own thoughts and feelings, so, perhaps, for some reason or reasons, it was most natural to the best poets of this later time to express that substance in the shape of impassioned reflections, aspirations, prophecies, laments, outcries of joy, murmurings of peace. The matter of these might, in another sense of the word, be ‘objective’ enough, a matter of general human interest, not personal in any exclusive way; but it appeared in the form of the poet’s thought and feeling. Just because he most easily expressed it thus, he succeeded less completely when he attempted the more objective form of utterance; and for the same reason it was especially important that he should be surrounded and penetrated by an atmosphere of wide, deep, and liberal ‘criticism.’ For he not only lived among ideas; he expressed ideas, and expressed them as ideas.

These suggestions seem to be supported by other phenomena of the poetry. The ‘subjective’ spirit extends, we saw, into many of the longer poems. This is obvious when it can plausibly be said, as in Byron’s case, that the poet’s one hero is himself. It appears in another way when the poem, through its story or stories, displays the poet’s favourite ideas and beliefs. The Excursion does this; most of Shelley’s longer poems do it. And the strength of this tendency may be seen in an apparent contradiction. One of the marks of the Romantic Revival is a disposition to substitute the more concrete and vivid forms of narrative and drama for the eighteenth century form of satiric or so-called didactic reflection. Yet most of the greater poets, especially in their characteristic beginnings, show a strong tendency to reflective verse; Coleridge, for example, in Religious Musings, Byron in the first two cantos of Childe Harold, Shelley in Queen Mab, and Keats in Sleep and Poetry. These are not, like the Pleasures of Memory and Pleasures of Hope, continuations of the traditional style; they are thoroughly Romantic; and yet they are reflective. Scott, indeed, goes straight to the objective forms; but then Scott, for good and evil, was little affected by the spiritual upheaval of his time. Those who were deeply affected by it, directly or indirectly, had their minds full of theoretic ideas. They were groping after, or were already inflamed by, some explicit view of life, and of life seen in relation to an ideal which it revealed or contradicted. And this view of life, at least at first, pressed for utterance in a more or less abstract shape, or became a sort of soul or second meaning within those appearances of nature, or actions of men, or figures and fantasies of youthful imagination, which formed the ostensible subject of the poetry.

Considered in this light, the following facts become very significant. Wordsworth, now about thirty, and the author of many characteristic lyrics, on returning from Germany and settling at Grasmere, begins to meditate a long poem. He tells us in the Prelude of the subjects he thought of. They are good subjects, legendary and historical, stories of action, not at all theoretical.69 But it will not do: his mind ‘turns recreant to her task.’ He has another hope, a ‘favourite aspiration’ towards ‘a philosophic song of Truth.’ But even this will not do; it is premature; even Truth (I venture to suggest) is not inward enough. He must first tell the story of his own mind: the subject of his long poem must be Poetry itself. He tells this story, to our great gain, in the Prelude; and it is the story of the steps by which he came to see reality, Nature and Man, as the partial expression of the ideal, of an all-embracing and perfect spiritual life or Being. Not till this is done can he proceed to the Excursion, which, together with much reflection and even argumentation, contains pictures of particular men.

‘This for our greatest’; but it is not his history alone. The first longer poem of Shelley which can be called mature was Alastor. And what is its subject? The subject of the Prelude; the story of a Poet’s soul, and of the effect on it of the revelation of its ideal. The first long poem of Keats was Endymion. The tendency to the concrete was strong in Keats; he has been called, I think, an Elizabethan born out of due time; and Endymion, like Venus and Adonis, is a mythological story. But it is by no means that alone. The infection of his time was in him. The further subject of Endymion is again the subject of the Prelude, the story of a poet’s soul smitten by love of its ideal, the Principle of Beauty, and striving for union with it, for the ‘wedding’ of the mind of man ‘with this goodly universe in love and holy passion.’ What, again, is the subject of Epipsychidion? The same.

The poem is all about the search of the poet’s soul for this ideal Being. And the Sensitive Plant is this soul, and the Lady of the Garden this Being, And Prince Athanase is the same soul, and if the poem had been continued the Being would soon have appeared. Is it not an astonishing proof of Shelley’s powers that the Cenci was ever written? Shelley, when he died, had half escaped – Keats, some time before he died, had quite escaped – from that bewitching inward world of the poet’s soul and its shadowy adventures. Could that well be the world of what we call emphatically a ‘great poem’?

Let us review for a moment the course of our discussion. I have been suggesting that, if our pleasure and glory in the poetry of Wordsworth’s age is tinged with disappointment, this does not extend to the lyrical poetry; that the lyrical spirit, or, more generally, an inward or subjective tendency, shows itself in many of the longer works; and that their imperfection is partly due to it. Now, let me suggest that the atmosphere of adequate ‘criticism’ which Arnold misses in the age and its poetry, while doubtless it would have influenced favourably even the lyrics, and much more the larger works, could hardly have diminished the force of that tendency, and that the main difficulty lay there. But, before developing this idea further, I propose to leave for a time the English poetry of Wordsworth’s age, to look beyond it, and to ask certain questions.

First, granted that in that age the atmosphere of ‘criticism’ was more favourable in Germany than in England, how many long poems were produced in Germany that we can call without hesitation or qualification ‘great’? Were any produced except by Goethe? And, if we admit (as I gladly do) that he produced several, was not the main reason simply that he was born with more poetic genius than any of his contemporaries, just as Dante and Shakespeare and Milton were? And again, with this native genius and his long laborious life, did he produce anything like as many great poems as might have been expected? And, if not, why not? I do not suggest that his general culture, so superior to that of his English contemporaries, did not help him; but are we sure that it did not also hinder him? And is it not also significant that, in spite of his love of new ideas, he felt an instinctive dread of the influence of philosophy, in the strict sense, as of something dangerous to the poetic modes of vision and creation?

Secondly, if we look beyond the first quarter of the century to the second and third, do we find in Europe a large number of those emphatically great poems, solid coherent structures of concrete imagination? It seems more than doubtful. To confine ourselves to English examples, is it not the case that Tennyson is primarily a lyrical poet, that the best of his longer poems, Maud and In Memoriam, are lyrical, and that the most ambitious, the narrative Idylls of the King, is, as a whole, not great? Is the Ring and the Book, however fine in parts, a great whole, or comparable as a whole with Andrea del Sarto or Rabbi ben Ezra? And is any one of Browning’s dramas a great play? What these questions suggest is that, while the difficulty about the long poem affects in an extreme degree the age of Wordsworth, it affects in some degree the time that follows. Its beginnings, too, are traceable before the nineteenth century. In fact it is connected with essential characteristics of modern poetry and art; and these characteristics are connected with the nature of modern life, and the position of the artist within that life. I wish to touch on this huge subject before returning to the age of Wordsworth.

Art, we may say, has become free, and, in a sense, universal. The poet is no longer the minstrel of king or nobles, nor even of a city or country. Literature, as Goethe foretold, becomes increasingly European, and more than European; and the poet, however national, is a citizen of the Republic of Letters. No class of subject, again, has any prerogative claim on him. Whatever, in any time or place, is human, whatever has been conceived as divine, whatever belongs even to external nature, he may choose, as it suits his bent or offers a promising material. The world is all before him; and it is a world which the increase of knowledge has made immensely wide and rich. His art, further, has asserted its independence. Its public exhibition must conform to the law; but otherwise it neither asks the approval nor submits to the control of any outward authority; and it is the handmaid of nothing. It claims a value for itself, as an expression of mind co-ordinate with other expressions, theoretic and practical; satisfying a need and serving a purpose that none of them can fulfil; subject only, as they too are subject, to the unity of human nature and human good. Finally, in respect of the methods of his art the poet claims and enjoys the same freedom. The practice of the past, the ‘rules’ of the past (if they existed or exist), are without authority for him. It is improbable beforehand that a violent breach with them will lead him to a real advance, just as it is improbable that such a breach with the morals or the science of his day will do so. But there is no certainty beforehand; and if he fails, he expects blame not because he innovates, but because he has failed by innovating.