What then, it will be asked, are the ancients to be our sole models? the ancients with their comparatively narrow range of experience, and their widely different circumstances? Not, certainly, that which is narrow in the ancients, nor that in which we can no longer sympathize. An action like the action of the Antigone of Sophocles, which turns upon the conflict between the heroine’s duty to her brother’s corpse and that to the laws of her country, is no longer one in which it is possible that we should feel a deep interest. I am speaking too, it will be remembered, not of the best sources of intellectual stimulus for the general reader, but of the best models of instruction for the individual writer. This last may certainly learn of the ancients, better than anywhere else, three things which it is vitally important for him to know:—the all-importance of the choice of a subject; the necessity of accurate construction; and the subordinate character of expression. He will learn from them how unspeakably superior is the effect of the one moral impression left by a great action treated as a whole, to the effect produced by the most striking single thought or by the happiest image. As he penetrates into the spirit of the great classical works, as he becomes gradually aware of their intense significance, their noble simplicity, and their calm pathos, he will be convinced that it is this effect, unity and profoundness of moral impression, at which the ancient Poets aimed; that it is this which constitutes the grandeur of their works, and which makes them immortal. He will desire to direct his own efforts towards producing the same effect. Above all, he will deliver himself from the jargon of modern criticism, and escape the danger of producing poetical works conceived in the spirit of the passing time, and which partake of its transitoriness.
The present age makes great claims upon us: we owe it service, it will not be satisfied without our admiration. I know not how it is, but their commerce with the ancients appears to me to produce, in those who constantly practise it, a steadying and composing effect upon their judgment, not of literary works only, but of men and events in general. They are like persons who have had a very weighty and impressive experience: they are more truly than others under the empire of facts, and more independent of the language current among those with whom they live. They wish neither to applaud nor to revile their age: they wish to know what it is, what it can give them, and whether this is what they want. What they want, they know very well; they want to educe and cultivate what is best and noblest in themselves: they know, too, that this is no easy task . . . and they ask themselves sincerely whether their age and its literature can assist them in the attempt. If they are endeavouring to practise any art, they remember the plain and simple proceedings of the old artists, who attained their grand results by penetrating themselves with some noble and significant action, not by inflating themselves with a belief in the preeminent importance and greatness of their own times. They do not talk of their mission, nor of interpreting their age, nor of the coming Poet; all this, they know, is the mere delirium of vanity; their business is not to praise their age, but to afford to the men who live in it the highest pleasure which they are capable of feeling. If asked to afford this by means of subjects drawn from the age itself, they ask what special fitness the present age has for supplying them: they are told that it is an era of progress, an age commissioned to carry out the great ideas of industrial development and social amelioration. They reply that with all this they can do nothing; that the elements they need for the exercise of their art are great actions, calculated powerfully and delightfully to affect what is permanent in the human soul; that so far as the present age can supply such actions, they will gladly make use of them; but that an age wanting in moral grandeur can with difficulty supply such, and an age of spiritual discomfort with difficulty be powerfully and delightfully affected by them.
A host of voices will indignantly rejoin that the present age is inferior to the past neither in moral grandeur nor in spiritual health. He who possesses the discipline I speak of will content himself with remembering the judgments passed upon the present age, in this respect, by the men of strongest head and widest culture whom it has produced; by Goethe and by Niebuhr.15 It will be sufficient for him that he knows the opinions held by these two great men respecting the present age and its literature; and that he feels assured in his own mind that their aims and demands upon life were such as he would wish, at any rate, his own to be; and their judgment as to what is impeding and disabling such as he may safely follow. He will not, however, maintain a hostile attitude towards the false pretensions of his age; he will content himself with not being overwhelmed by them. He will esteem himself fortunate if he can succeed in banishing from his mind all feelings of contradiction, and irritation, and impatience; in order to delight himself with the contemplation of some noble action of a heroic time, and to enable others, through his representation of it, to delight in it also.
I am far indeed from making any claim, for myself, that I possess this discipline; or for the following Poems, that they breathe its spirit. But I say, that in the sincere endeavour to learn and practise, amid the bewildering confusion of our times, what is sound and true in poetical art, I seemed to myself to find the only sure guidance, the only solid footing, among the ancients. They, at any rate, knew what they wanted in Art, and we do not. It is this uncertainty which is disheartening, and not hostile criticism. How often have I felt this when reading words of disparagement or of cavil:16 that it is the uncertainty as to what is really to be aimed at which makes our difficulty, not the dissatisfaction of the critic, who himself suffers from the same uncertainty. Non me tua turbida terrent Dicta: Dii me terrent, et Jupiter hostis.17
Two kinds of dilettanti, says Goethe, there are in poetry: he who neglects the indispensable mechanical part, and thinks he has done enough if he shows spirituality and feeling; and he who seeks to arrive at poetry merely by mechanism, in which he can acquire an artisan’s readiness, and is without soul and matter. And he adds, that the first does most harm to Art, and the last to himself. If we must be dilettanti: if it is impossible for us, under the circumstances amidst which we live, to think clearly, to feel nobly, and to delineate firmly: if we cannot attain to the mastery of the great artists—let us, at least, have so much respect for our Art as to prefer it to ourselves: let us not bewilder our successors: let us transmit to them the practice of Poetry, with its boundaries and wholesome regulative laws, under which excellent works may again, perhaps, at some future time, be produced, not yet fallen into oblivion through our neglect, not yet condemned and cancelled by the influence of their eternal enemy, Caprice.
Notes
1. Matthew Arnold, “Preface” in Poems (London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1853), ix–xix, xxi–xxxi.
2. [Arnold’s footnote:] In The Spectator, of April 2nd, 1853. The words quoted were not used with reference to poems of mine.
3. Achilles . . . Dido: primary characters of Homer’s Iliad, Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound and Oresteia, and Virgil’s Aeneid
4. “Hermann . . . Excursion”: names of poems by Goethe, Byron, Lamartine, and Wordsworth
5. For more on Arnold’s conception of “grand style,” see his On Translating Homer.
6. Each of these characters avenged the murder of a family member.
7. Persae: The Persians, a historical drama by Aeschylus
8. Polybius: Greek historian (ca. 200–118 B.C.)
9. Menander: Greek dramatist associated with the “New Comedy” (ca. 342–292 B.C.)
10. David Masson, “Theories of Poetry and a New Poet” North British Review 19 (1853): 338.
11. Faust: verse drama by Goethe
12. Decameron: a bawdy collection of tales by the fourteenth-century Italian, Giovanni Boccaccio
13. Mr. Hallam: Henry Hallam (1777–1859), historian and father to Arthur Henry Hallam
14. François Pierre Guillaume Guizot, an eighteenth-century French politician and orator
15. Niebuhr: See note 7 in excerpt from Wilson’s The Five Senses in “On the Senses
.”
16. cavil: trivial objection
17. Non me . . . hostis: “Your hot words do not frighten me. . . . The gods frighten me, and Jupiter as my enemy.” From Virgil’s Aeneid 12.894–95.
Gerald Massey, from “Poetry—The Spasmodists” (1858)1
Born in poverty, Gerald Massey (1828–1907) was a journalist, amateur Egyptologist, and public speaker known for his lectures on the arts and Christian socialism; he was also considered a Spasmodic poet by some. Although the poets whom Victorian critics tended to label as Spasmodists were considered extremely “modern,” their poetry was often described in terms that today might remind one of high Romanticism: it was marked by introspection, vivid sensory descriptions, striking imagery, and heightened (if sometimes morbid) emotions. In this essay, Massey uses the lingering influence of the Spasmodic school as an opportunity to advance a theory of poetic creation and poetic value grounded in reality, which recalls George Eliot’s theories of art. In fact, Massey attracted the attention of Eliot, who drew from his personal story for her novel Felix Holt.
There are two worlds in which human existence moves: the world of thought, and the world of feeling. The world of feeling is more or less common to all. The highest and the lowest can meet on this ground, and enter into this bond of human relationship. But it is different in the world of thought. Many cannot pass from the world of feeling into that of thought at will, and but few are fitted to translate their feeling into thought—which is the spiritual apparition of feeling—and thus reproduce any past experience in such shape as shall give pleasure to the beholder in the contemplation thereof. This is the work of the poet. He translates from the world of feeling into that of thought, and thus enables us to realise in thought what we may have once experienced in feeling. And often, when these reproductions are made by the greatest poets in their happiest moments, they seem quite familiar to us, because we have possessed them before in feeling, only we were unable to translate them into thought. When the poet has given us this new rendering of some old experience, it strikes us with the force of a greater reality than did that experience itself, when we were living it. Hence, we believe, has arisen one of the errors respecting the functions of the Imagination. We do not think that the poet adds to the reality, or transcends it in his translation of it, so much as that we ourselves are unaware of all that is contained in the reality, while we are passing through it in feeling. For this reason, while we are in a state of suffering, or enjoyment, we do not speculate upon it in thought; we live it in feeling. Indeed, the more perfect in feeling, the more unconscious are we in thought. But when, by the poet’s aid, we come to re-live this feeling in thought, every faculty we turn upon it is now alive with consciousness; and this secondary phase of joy or sorrow often appears more real than the first, because we obtain a conscious interpretation of much that we before experienced unconsciously.
For the time being, then, we shall look upon the poet as a translator of realities which do already exist, and only a creator so far as he shapes an artistic body through which the life is operative; because, by looking upon him in this light we shall be able to see all the more clearly how poetry is coloured by the age in which it is produced, and takes its tints from the various influences that surround it, quickening its life, fostering its strength, or stunting its growth. For not only is the poet a translator of the inner life of man, with its wonder world of thoughts and feelings—its unspeakable love and sorrow, its hopes and aspirations, temptations and lonely wrestlings, darings and doubts, grim passions and gentle affections, its smiles and tears—which, in their changeful lights or gloomy grandeur, play out the great drama of the human heart, but he also translates into his poetry and reflects for us the very spirit of his time. The poetry of every age and epoch comes to us with the likeness of that age or epoch stamped upon it, in features ranging from the heroic type of the noble Elizabethan time, to the sensual cast given by the Merry Monarch and his Circean Restoration.2 . . .
[Massey goes on to demonstrate his claim by describing poetry from the medieval period to the eighteenth century.]
In briefly noticing how the poet translates historical influences into poetry, we have now arrived at the great rebellion in poetry when Robert Burns3 strode in among the crowd of the self-enthroned, who sat trying to conjure up the spirit of beauty, by repeating the words of the grand magicians who had passed away, and carried the secret of their enchantment with them, and passed right through them, scattering their fluttering artificialities and sparkling shallownesses on his way back to unsophisticated Nature. With one or two wistful looks at Pope and Shenstone,4 he turned to the old ballads, with their sinewy strength, smiting tenderness, lilting music, and flashes of feeling. And Cowper,5 in England, went back all he could to the primal simplicities of Nature, for he had an out-of-doors heart; and when shut indoors from the garden, and fettered there so often by sickness, he would still feel his way back to the woods and fields, and the common human heart, which he touched with so natural a knack that it would be thought a rare feat of genius, had he not done it so easily.
Then came William Wordsworth, who said, Let us go back to Chaucer, sit down beside him and his darling daisy, and learn of him what wealth of meaning there is in the things that lie about our feet; what strength and savour there is in simple speech; and how the poet may rise, Antaeus-like,6 invincible in strength, so long as he keeps his footing on the common earth. It will do poetry good, said Wordsworth, to take it back, so that it may breathe in new life from the native air of its childhood. Here, then, was a special appeal made to external nature, as a means of getting fresh food for the inner life of man. And a comparatively new influence emanates from this appeal, which mingles largely with all subsequent poetry. Wordsworth becomes the great translator of this influence into his poetry; and after the first flush of the red-rising dawn of the French Revolution, which dazzled his young eyes also, has deepened into blood, he seeks to bring himself and his readers more and more under this influence, and to get further and further away from the sound of the strife, and the smoke of the conflict; because, instead of the Goddess Liberty coming with healing to the nations, he sees a wild Virago7 dancing round a guillotine, to the sound of the Carmagnole,8 in wet, red shoes; and he shrinks away, and seeks to dwell apart with a nature that is more beneficent and beautiful, in her grandeur of storm, or blessing of calm. And so, in comparative solitude, he falls back upon those elements which are the very ground-roots of poetry, and attains, in a confused and bewildering time, to that repose in which the bright particles of knowledge are slowly precipitated, and shaped into the larger growth and oneness of accumulated wisdom, instead of their being kept in constant whirl by many disturbing causes, and never becoming anything more than the bright particles of scattered knowledge.
The French Revolution had an incalculable influence in bringing forth the great band of poets that came into being, as it were, through the rents made by the outburst of that Revolution, and produced such a quickening motion of mind, as issued in a very budding and flowering-time of poetry. . . . Tennyson’s is the last song that rises up calmly, and rings out clearly with its melodious beauty, in spite of the pressure of our complex time, and the stress of its adverse influences. After him comes that deluge let loose upon us by what has been called the “Spasmodic School.”
Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads Page 29
