. . . . Of all the senses [hearing] is the one which most readily and most largely lends itself to impassioned, emotional, or, as we otherwise name it, poetical or aesthetical feeling. The retiringness of the ear is one great cause of this. The mechanism of hearing does not obtrude itself. The conditions of sound are known only to a small fraction of mankind; and the great majority of us die without even faintly realizing that the chief vehicle of sound, the atmosphere, has any existence. Music thus comes to us we cannot tell whence or how; and the less we are reminded of the mechanical or formal appliances by which an art appeals to our emotions, the more surely and profoundly are they stirred by it. The nostril is the only organ of sense that can compare with the ear in this respect, but its range is far more limited. The eye is much less fortunately circumstanced. The threads of the canvas, the shape and carving of the picture-frame, the string that suspends it, the nail on which it hangs, and the wall behind it, all disturb our delight at a picture, as the stains on a piece of marble, and the tarnish on bronze, do our delight at sculpture. The substantial material in which the painter and sculptor must work, continually, and often harshly, force themselves upon the fleshly sense, and conflict with the purely emotional appreciation of their works. But music is never more delightful than when listened to in utter darkness, without obtrusion of the music-paper, or instrument, or performer; and whilst we forget that we have ears, and are content to be living souls floating in a sea of melodious sound. To be awaked from sleep by splendid music is to me the highest conceivable sensuous pleasure. A certain ethereality thus belongs pre-eminently to music, as it does in a lesser degree to fragrance. The most prosaic, formal, and utilitarian of mankind, for whom no other fine art has any charms, acknowledge the attractions of music. Alone of all the arts, it has suffered nothing from the intensely scientific and strongly utilitarian temper of modern times; and, even in the most faithless of recent epochs, music has thriven when every other aesthetic development was reduced to zero.
Whatever accordingly we envy the ancients, we need not envy them their music; they paid no such honor to the ear as we do; and it is remarkable that, at the deadest period of the last century, from the sleep of which nothing short of the French Revolution was sufficient to awake us, when only physical science was progressing, Handel and Haydn gave to us works which will be forgotten only when music of more amazing genius shall startle the world; and, in unbroken succession from their day, Mozart, Beethoven, Weber, Rossini, Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, and many more, have placed us, in the matter of music, in advance of all the earlier ages.
. . . The peculiar ethereality of music is doubtless one of the reasons why we so willingly believe that creatures of a higher order than ourselves are especially given to song; and accept, as most credible, the declaration that immortal beings find the only sufficient expression of their emotions in praise. It was a splendid theory of the ancient Pagan sages, that the whole visible heavens were melodious with a music, which gifted ears were privileged to hear, when star sang to star, and constellations rejoiced together. And it is a still grander belief of modern Christian men, that within the invisible heavens angels that excel in strength, and undying human spirits, never cease their immortal song. But apart from the sympathy which the imagination has with such a belief, it commends itself to our reason by an argument which none can disown, and which supplies the justification of that pre-eminent importance which, from the days of King David the Psalmist, to our own, has been attached to the musical part of public religious worship.
Music forms the universal language which, when all other languages were confounded, the confusion of Babel left unconfounded. The white man and the black man, the red man and the yellow man, can sing together, however difficult they may find it to be to talk to each other. And both sexes and all ages may thus express their emotions simultaneously; for, in virtue of the power of the ear to distinguish, side by side, those differing but concordant notes which make up harmony, there is not only room but demand for all the qualities of voice which childhood, adolescence, maturity, and old age supply. . . .
Notes
1. George Wilson, The Five Senses: Or, Gateways to Knowledge (Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blakiston, 1860).
2. Ibid., 5–8.
3. Ibid., 40–45, 50–61, 62–68.
4. Perhaps Wilson, following Horace’s decree, “Ut pictura poesis” (“As is painting, so is poetry”) considers Milton’s poetry as a kind of painting.
5. dulcimer: a trapezoid-shaped stringed instrument played with light wooden hammers
6. caeteris paribus: Latin, “all other things being equal”
7. Barthold George Niebuhr (1776–1831) was a Danish-German historian of ancient Rome; Wilson refers to a book about him by the Chevalier Bunsen and Professors Brandis and Loeball.
8. paviors: pavers
9. tow: short fibers of flax or hemp
10. Robert Burns (1759–1796), a Scottish poet widely regarded as a precursor of the Romantics.
Nineteenth-Century Poetics
This section is not intended to offer a comprehensive overview of the numerous (and often elaborate) theories of Victorian prosody. Instead, it provides a series of texts that articulate some of the abiding aesthetic concerns of the period, chosen both for their representative nature and their relevance to Meredith’s verse and its contemporary reception.
Each of these excerpts raises questions that shaped Meredith’s poetry: What is poetry’s purview? Are the ancients relevant to modern poets and readers? What role, if any, should the present play in contemporary poetry? How should poetry handle subjective and emotive experience? Is highly sensual poetry morally dangerous? Should poetry reflect things as they are or as they ought to be? The expansive and generous quality of Meredith’s literary tastes becomes clear when we realize that he offered no single answer to any of these questions. Instead, he experimented from poem to poem, and sometimes within poems, using poetic form, literary allusion, and contemporary subjects to develop a singularly provocative style. Meredith’s poetry thus seems bound to upset some, if not most, Victorian critics, who frequently linked moral value to compositional choices.
We begin with an excerpt from Arthur Henry Hallam’s review of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s first volume of poetry. One of the “high points of early Victorian criticism,” as Isobel Armstrong has noted, its analyses of the poetry of Tennyson, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth “resonate throughout the century.”1 The excerpt that follows focuses on Keats and Shelley, two second-generation Romantics whose legacies loom large over Victorian poetry. Many of the men and women who were labeled Spasmodists by the Victorian critical establishment were inspired by Keats and Shelley’s poetry of “sensation” (as Hallam calls it). While moral prejudices may prevent a reader from grasping the import of this kind of poetry, understanding it “is never physically impossible,” Hallam insists “because nature has placed in every man the simple elements, of which art is the sublimation.”
In his preface to his 1853 Poems, Matthew Arnold discusses what readers have in common with one another and with poets, though the essay’s central focus is the question of whether or not poets should draw their “subjects from matters of present import.” Arnold answers with a resounding “no.” Meredith’s answer to the question is more complicated. As is suggested by this volume’s title, the Modern Love poems contrast contemporary depictions of love with “ancient” and old-fashioned versions to explore the nature of modernity itself.
Arnold’s insistence that modern life is too bewildering to serve as a fit subject for poetry resonates with Massey’s critique of Spasmodism. The controversy surrounding Spasmodism helps explain the critical reaction to Meredith’s poetry. Peaking in the 1840s and 1850s, Spasmodic poetry was marked by a neo-Romantic sensibility, favoring emotion and rich imagery, often with a working-class bent.2 Early endorsers of the Spasmodic school included George Henry Lewes, who argued in 1853 that “one of the poet’s functions is that o
f beautifying and ennobling” feelings of passion or sensuousness. A poet, Lewes insisted, “only merits reprobation, when, by cynicism, irreverence, and insinuation, or conscious lubricity, he disgraces his office.”3 Gerald Massey’s 1858 essay on Spasmodism harkens back to the key concerns in Hallam’s essay and initially seems consonant with Lewes’s, defining the work of poetry as the translation of feeling into thought—a process that enables readers “to realise in thought what [they] may have once experienced in feeling.” Unlike Lewes, however, Massey faults the Spasmodists for being too self-absorbed. In his estimation, they fail to give their particular, subjective feelings and experiences an objective, timeless quality. Rather than seeking inspiration in “primal truths,” the Spasmodists, Massey claims, not only evidence a “willful delight in remote and involved thinking” and “abrupt and jerking mental movements,” but also prefer creating extravagant (but not necessarily intelligible) imagery and speculating “on bones and membranes, cells and blood-vessels.” By the time Modern Love was published, Massey’s view had taken hold: the charges of Spasmodism leveled at Meredith’s poetry were intended as insults, not compliments.
Henry James’s essay on Baudelaire, like Arnold’s “Preface” and Massey’s essay on the Spasmodists, addresses the question of poetic content, demonstrating that this issue remained a contested one through the latter half of the century. James’s essay ties the question of sensory detail to the concepts of truth and sincerity in fresh ways, criticizing Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal for addressing our senses rather than our “consciousness”: “evil for [Baudelaire] begins outside and not inside, and consists primarily of a great deal of lurid landscape and unclean furniture.”
And, finally, the excerpts by Gerard Manley Hopkins explicitly address the issue of obscurity and the question of how poetry communicates with readers. In his “Author’s Preface,” Hopkins discusses poetic rhythm as a means of making difficult poems more intelligible and looks to English medieval verse as well as Latin and Greek lyric for inspiration. These issues hover in the background of his letter to Robert Bridges regarding the clarity and force of the sonnet “Harry Ploughman.”
Notes
1. Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1996), 60.
2. For an overview of Spasmodic poetry, see Charles LaPorte and Jason Rudy’s “Spasmodic Poetry and Poetics,” Victorian Poetry 42, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 421–27.
3. George Henry Lewes, “Poems of Alexander Smith,” Westminster Review (April 1853): 271.
Arthur Henry Hallam, from “On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry” (1831)1
Arthur Henry Hallam (1811–1833) is now, perhaps, best known as the man whose death occasioned one of the Victorian period’s most powerful elegies: Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Before he died, however, Hallam was a promising poet and critic who planned to make a living at law. A love of poetry drew Tennyson and Hallam together while students at Cambridge. Tennyson’s first published volume of poems initially found few sympathetic readers among the critical establishment. No surprise, then, that Hallam’s review of the same volume begins by telling its readers to judge the book (and indeed all poetry) for themselves. In the excerpt that follows, Hallam articulates a set of criteria by which to adjudicate poetry—criteria that take as foundational the claim that poetic creation and understanding can be intellectual, moral, and physical.
. . . [Keats and Shelley] are both poets of sensation rather than reflection. Susceptible of the slightest impulse from external nature, their fine organs trembled into emotion at colours, and sounds, and movements, unperceived or unregarded by duller temperaments. Rich and clear were their perceptions of visible forms; full and deep their feelings of music. So vivid was the delight attending the simple exertions of eye and ear, that it became mingled more and more with their trains of active thought, and tended to absorb their whole being into the energy of sense. Other poets seek for images to illustrate their conceptions; these men had no need to seek; they lived in a world of images; for the most important and extensive portion of their life consisted in those emotions, which are immediately conversant with sensation. Like the hero of Goethe’s novel, they would hardly have been affected by what are called the pathetic parts of a book; but the merely beautiful passages, “those from which the spirit of the author looks clearly and mildly forth,”2 would have melted them to tears. Hence they are not descriptive; they are picturesque. They are not smooth and negatively harmonious; they are full of deep and varied melodies.
This powerful tendency of imagination to a life of immediate sympathy with the external universe, is not nearly so liable to false views of art as the opposite disposition of purely intellectual contemplation. For where beauty is constantly passing before “that inward eye, which is the bliss of solitude”;3 where the soul seeks it as a perpetual and necessary refreshment to the sources of activity and intuition; where all the other sacred ideas of our nature, the idea of good, the idea of perfection, the idea of truth, are habitually contemplated through the medium of this predominant mood, so that they assume its colour, and are subject to its peculiar laws—there is little danger that the ruling passion of the whole mind will cease to direct its creative operations, or the energetic principle of love for the beautiful sink, even for a brief period, to the level of a mere notion in the understanding. We do not deny that it is, on other accounts, dangerous for frail humanity to linger with fond attachment in the vicinity of sense. Minds of this description are especially liable to moral temptations, and upon them, more than any, it is incumbent to remember that their mission as men, which they share with all their fellow-beings, is of infinitely higher interest than their mission as artists, which they possess by rare and exclusive privilege. But it is obvious that, critically speaking, such temptations are of slight moment. Not the gross and evident passions of our nature, but the elevated and less separable desires are the dangerous enemies which misguide the poetic spirit in its attempts at self-cultivation.
That delicate sense of fitness, which grows with the growth of artist feelings, and strengthens with their strength, until it acquires a celerity4 and weight of decision hardly inferior to the correspondent judgments of conscience, is weakened by every indulgence of heterogeneous aspirations, however pure they may be, however lofty, however suitable to human nature. We are therefore decidedly of opinion that the heights and depths of art are most within the reach of those who have received from Nature the “fearful and wonderful”5 constitution we have described, whose poetry is a sort of magic, producing a number of impressions too multiplied, too minute, and too diversified to allow of our tracing them to their causes, because just such was the effect, even so boundless, and so bewildering, produced on their imaginations by the real appearance of Nature. These things being so, our friends of the new school6 had evidently much reason to recur to the maxim laid down by Mr. Wordsworth, and to appeal from the immediate judgments of lettered or unlettered contemporaries to the decision of a more equitable posterity. How should they be popular, whose senses told them a richer and ampler tale than most men could understand, and who constantly expressed, because they constantly felt, sentiments of exquisite pleasure or pain, which most men were not permitted to experience? The public very naturally derided them as visionaries, and gibbeted7 in terrorem8 those inaccuracies of diction, occasioned sometimes by the speed of their conceptions, sometimes by the inadequacy of language to their peculiar conditions of thought. But, it may be asked, does not this line of argument prove too much? Does it not prove that there is a barrier between these poets and all other persons, so strong and immovable, that, as has been said of the Supreme Essence, we must be themselves before we can understand them in the least? Not only are they not liable to sudden and vulgar estimation, but the lapse of ages, it seems, will not consolidate their fame, nor the suffrages of the wise few produce any impression, however remote or slowly matured, on the judgments of the incapacitated many. We answer, this is not
the import of our argument.
Undoubtedly the true poet addresses himself, in all his conceptions, to the common nature of us all. Art is a lofty tree, and may shoot up far beyond our grasp, but its roots are in daily life and experience. Every bosom contains the elements of those complex emotions which the artist feels, and every head can, to a certain extent, go over in itself the process of their combination, so as to understand his expressions and sympathize with his state. But this requires exertion; more or less, indeed, according to the difference of occasion, but always some degree of exertion. For since the emotions of the poet, during composition, follow a regular law of association, it follows that to accompany their progress up to the harmonious prospect of the whole, and to perceive the proper dependence of every step on that which preceded, it is absolutely necessary to start from the same point, i.e., clearly to apprehend that leading sentiment in the poet’s mind, by their conformity to which the host of suggestions are arranged. Now this requisite exertion is not willingly made by the large majority of readers. It is so easy to judge capriciously, and according to indolent impulse! For very many, therefore, it has become morally impossible to attain the author’s point of vision, on account of their habits, or their prejudices, or their circumstances; but it is never physically impossible, because nature has placed in every man the simple elements, of which art is the sublimation.9
Since then this demand on the reader for activity, when he wants to peruse his author in a luxurious passiveness, is the very thing that moves his bile, it is obvious that those writers will be always most popular, who require the least degree of exertion. Hence, whatever is mixed up with art, and appears under its semblance, is always more favourably regarded than art free and unalloyed. Hence, half the fashionable poems in the world are mere rhetoric, and half the remainder are perhaps not liked by the generality for their substantial merits. Hence, likewise, of the really pure compositions those are most universally agreeable, which take for their primary subject the usual passions of the heart, and deal with them in a simple state, without applying the transforming powers of high imagination. Love, friendship, ambition, religion, &c., are matters of daily experience, even amongst imaginative tempers. The forces of association, therefore, are ready to work in these directions, and little effort of will is necessary to follow the artist. For the same reason such subjects often excite a partial power of composition, which is no sign of a truly poetic organization. We are very far from wishing to depreciate this class of poems, whose influence is so extensive, and communicates so refined a pleasure. We contend only that the facility with which its impressions are communicated, is no proof of its elevation as a form of art, but rather the contrary. . . .
Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads Page 27
