Modern Love and Poems of the English Roadside, with Poems and Ballads

by George Meredith

  We fancy there is more meaning and applicability in the name of “Spasmodic,” given to so much of the poetry which has been produced of late years, than the first givers of that name saw in it.9 It is frequently the special characteristic of a nickname, that it shall be too vague and intangible to be seized upon and proved to be false; and so it lives, just because it cannot be caught and put to death. Here, however, the name might be demonstrated as true to the nature. For what constitutes spasm, but weakness trying to be strong, and collapsing in the effort? And what result could be looked for more naturally, than that a good deal of current poetry should be spasmodic, if we carry on into the present time our consideration of the external causes that influence poetry? When the giants of genius shall free themselves from the Etna10 that now hides them, they may come and make it possible to transmute into poetry those influences which are at present only a hindrance to others, making their own new laws, and breaking old ones, surprising the whole world with most magical results; but, till then, poetry, in the hands of our present writers, is driven into narrower bounds, and left with more limited means of freeing itself. The greatest poetry always finds its main source of sustenance in a few common universal elements, which are to it what the elementary substances are to chemistry. It deals with simple powers. Trust, for example, we would call one of the simple powers of poetry. Doubt, on the contrary, we should call a compound, made up of perplexed thought and uncertain feeling; and, being a compound, it can be divided and destroyed. Now, many tendencies of the time are at war with the simple powers, and are in favour of the compounds. The out-flowing tides of feeling are checked and forced back upon the poet, so that he feels compelled to turn his eyes within in self-analysis, until, instead of living, he gets bewildered at the mystery of life, which he cannot solve, and dazzled with the new knowledge, which he cannot assimilate; instead of telling us what time it is by the face of the clock, he pores over the problem of the wheels, and for every gain of curious insight he loses some intuition of more precious value, until at length the conscious intellect is enthroned in the seat of that unconscious child-like spirit, in which all that is most human meets with what is most divine, even as the little children came near and were taken into the arms of Christ of old. Our spasmodists, in a great measure, are dealers in compounds. And not only are they driven out of the great poet’s path by force of many outward circumstances, and have not sufficient knowledge or grasp of the simple powers by which poetry is brought home to our business and bosoms, but, in some instances, they willfully turn from the simple powers to try their experiments with the compounds, and their only ambition appears to be how to puzzle us with the subtlety by which they can work for our perplexity and their remote result. Shelley, in the Cenci, says with great truth,

  It is a trick of this same family

  To analyse their own and other minds.

  Such self-anatomy shall teach the will

  Dangerous secrets, for it tempts our powers.11

  The first condition of being a poet, is to be a man speaking to men. He who is to image humanity, must at least be able to stand on a common level with it, and by his many sympathies enrich his special experience with all that is universal; thus losing the poverty of the individual in the wealth of the species. But it is the evident predilection of our spasmodists toward that “abstruse research” among morbid phenomena, which “tends to steal from his own nature all the natural man,” and the habit of their minds to move in the involution12 of thinking, instead of the evolution of thought. Also, it is their fatal fault to seek for that which is rare and peculiar, and to be afraid of that which is common, and timid of matter-of-fact and mere flesh and blood. If they do not do this intentionally, then so much the worse is it for the class of mind that is so limited and perverse as to take this direction instinctively. Either they seem not to share our ordinary feelings and plain humanities of thought and speech, or they cannot grasp ordinary realities; for the emotion to be sung, or the character to be painted, must have branched off far from the ordinary channel of human affairs, and run into an isolated and particular experience, before it is fitted for their poetic purpose. They refine upon reality till it becomes the faintest shadow, and only attempt to grasp it at the stage in which it cannot be laid hold of.

  Now, if a poet possesses his manhood in common with the rest of us, shares our thoughts and has feelings in tune, and has truly a genius for transmuting and translating these into poetic forms, he cannot keep too much on broad human grounds. The charm will be in the common human experience being rendered in his subtler light, and coloured in the prism of his own personality. If he have sufficient genius, it is in universal experience that he will find his greatest strength,—out of it he will draw the universal success; if he have not sufficient genius, then all the seeking in the world, or out of it, for that which is remote and uncommon, will be but of little avail in disguising his weakness. Our spasmodists appear to take for their text, and apply it at all times and in all places, the words of Ecclesiasticus, “A man’s mind is sometimes wont to tell him more than seven watchmen that sit above in an high tower.”13 They forget that this is only sometimes so, when the darkness of night shuts in the view, for example; and so they will not avail themselves of what the seven watchmen may see when the broad light of day lies on the land, and reveals the many features of the landscape. Hence their tendency to look with an introverted vision alone, instead of looking out with wide open eyes, and deriving advantage from the experience of others, as do the great objective writers. . . .

  The band of young poets who have come before the public during the last few years, have been called the “Spasmodic School,” though there is not oneness of principle in their efforts sufficient to give consistency to them, and bind the writers together in any educational brotherhood. Certainly they include almost every variety of spasm; but there are many spasmodic writers, in both prose and verse, beside those who have been denominated as the Spasmodic School. On the other hand, it would be somewhat difficult to point out any great master as the founder of this school. It appears to us that Robert Browning is, in a sense, one of the greatest spasmodists, so far as a wilful delight in remote and involved thinking, abrupt and jerking mental movements, and “pernickitieness”14 of expression, working, in the higher regions of genius, can constitute a spasmodist. And but for certain spasmodic peculiarities which seem inherent to Mrs. Browning, “Aurora Leigh” might have been the greatest poem of our time. In her case, the spasm is manifested in her sudden transitions from thought to thought and from thing to thing. Descending to a very low point for illustration, we might also undertake to show in “Bothwell”15 some of the meanest possible specimens of Surrey-sublime spasm; all the meaner, because it is the spasm of weakness collapsing, without having to bear any burthen of thought or feeling. Going back as far as Byron, we shall find the spasmodic element in a large portion of his poetry. . . .

  Following Byron, it appears to us that Lovell Beddoes16 brings other spasmodic influences into modern verse of a different kind. Beddoes has much in common with the recent revival in poetry, which is somewhat akin to the latter renaissance in painting and architecture, and in which the bacchante17 is often dearer than the saint. There is, too, more luxuriance of foliage and bloom on their trees than redundancy of fruit. He has the same love of colour, and fondness for all that is striking; he sets upon the banquet table the same rich feast of words, and his expression is mostly at the same pitch of extravagance. He also sprung into full blossom at an early period of youth, and went the way which other spasmodists have gone and are going; his spring blossoms fell in the frosts, and there was no autumn fruitage. His poetry largely possesses a quality which is, perhaps, the most common feature of our spasmodists—it is rich in imagery. This is natural enough for youth, which apprehends life mostly on the sensational side, and is more flowery and fleshly than spiritual. But it is well to note that this imaginal tendency, unless it be the youthful efflorescence of a mind that
is quite healthy and full of all manly vigour, is apt to sap the strength from maturer mental qualities, and let it run to waste in a rank luxuriance of undergrowth. . . .

  The peculiar nature of Beddoes’ mind, which appeared to swarm with morbid instincts, made his end in poetry a melancholy warning. He gradually lost what hold he had upon the warm, rich world of human life, fed with common human affections, and filled with common human sympathies, in pursuit of unnatural mental anatomy, and in search of those mysteries which death renders up in the dissecting-room. For he became an anatomist literally. The poet, no longer satisfied with the beautiful instrument breathing its music, would take it in pieces to see whence the music came, which was a secret death could not reveal. To adapt an image of James Montgomery,18 he sought to grasp in his own hand the dew-drop, which, when touched, at once loses all its sparkling grace, its shape of beauty, its light from heaven, and is merely a little water, having the one quality of wetness. The gift was taken from him, and died out of him utterly. And little marvel that this should be so: after reducing the ethereal fire to ashes, in search of a mere earthly discovery,—somewhat analogous perhaps to the accidental discovery of glass-making,—it was too much to have expected that the radiant Phoenix of poetry would ever soar again from these ashes, when the fire was willfully put out for so paltry a purpose. Beddoes, we say, became an anatomist; and is not this precisely what some of our recent writers in verse have become? They also are probing among the secrets of the skeleton which lies hidden beneath the rosy bloom of flesh, with speculations on bones and membranes, cells and blood-vessels. Oysterlike, they get their pearls from a state of disease. If we were asked to indicate the poem which has been most harmful, and has wrought most evil to the young poetic mind of our time, we should unhesitatingly point to “Festus.”19 Bailey’s poem is a vast work, in which egotism is the presiding principle, as it was in building that Babel of old. In going through it, the reader feels as though he were witnessing a series of grand pyrotechnic displays of gorgeous but evanescent brilliance, until his aching eyes are so dazzled, that he feels himself in “a land of darkness.”20 The writer’s object throughout appears to be to strike us blind rather than to illumine us, and to leave us breathless rather than breathing. And at last the difficulty of reading the poem becomes bewildering. . . .

  “Festus” is not, what it has so often been called, a great poem, because it is altogether wanting in the welding oneness that moulds the great works of imagination. There is no magnet of sufficient purpose passing through its glittering filings of the fancy, and gathering them up into fitting form. And when we use the word “filings” here, we do not do so merely in a figurative sense; for the truth is, that poems of the “Festus” order are principally made up of filings from other men’s works—hints and suggestions got while reading the writings of others, sometimes by reading between the lines, often by direct appropriation, however unconscious; thus making the result mainly a parasitic growth, based upon the beginnings of others, instead of an original creation, with the life that shapes into symmetry and oneness energetically running through it, from the lowest ground-root of strength with which it grasps the subject, to the topmost leaf wherewith it breaks into beauty. Here we shall find none of the suspended, poising strength, as of the mountainous repose which marks the climacteric expression of the highest powers in the world of mind, even as they are also the grandest expression of power in our physical world; for these can only be attained by the creative mind, that under the dominant idea moves with all its powers at once, each keeping proper place and perfect time, harmoniously to one great end. . . .

  “Festus” has also been fatally successful in leading astray, because all phenomena that cannot be explained by known laws open up at once a fresh field to work in; and so long as the phenomena cannot be classified, or the precise amount of their truth ascertained, there is but little fear of the sham and spurious imitation being known from what is true and real. This fact will account for much of the flying-off into space, which characterises recent verse, in order that it may avoid the verdict of an appeal to well-known laws, and not because the writers possess wings at will. If you cannot represent the world of reality, this plan of taking refuge in the impalpable affords a fine chance of fabricating a false world, which may float for a time as a beautiful bubble on the breath of those who puff it. False and futile, however, are all these attempts to create a world apart from that of human life, in which the poet shall be absolved from all known laws, and freed from ordinary conditions, in order that his idiosyncrasies may run riot without let or hindrance. Ordinary human beings cannot enter such a phantom world. Shut up in our house of the senses, with some half-a-dozen windows for outlooks into the infinite, we cannot follow, house and all, on pleasure-excursions into the spirit world, as “Festus” and others would have us, and mingle with its inhabitants on perfectly familiar terms. If Shakespeare, after mirroring so much of our human world so faithfully, had attempted to lead us into the invisible world, we might have followed with a firmer reliance. But he was all too wise, and left that for Milton to do, when God had laid the shadow on his outer eyes, and freed the inner from earthly scales, contenting himself with giving those hints that flash upon us in the high and mystic moods of thought. . . .

  We see no reason for going further into detail on the subject of the “Spasmodic School,” and we trust that some of our remarks may have gone near enough to the root of the matter, to obviate any necessity for our doing so. On the one hand, we can scarcely undertake to prescribe in the precise language of science for the specialties of the given disease, and the idiosyncrasies of the individual patients in each particular case; and, on the other, we have no wish to give an answer as ex cathedra.21 We urge a return to the lasting and true subject-matter of poetry, and a firmer reliance on primal truths; for it is this which has so often given fresh life to both poetry and painting in the past. Crowded as the ground may have been, there is still room for great poets to walk here. Anything that has in it a genuine human interest is sure to win its way to the heart, so irresistible is the touch of real truth. This is the vital and enduring element of the Dutch painters. Their genuine statement of truth is sufficient to keep alive their pictures, though that truth be never so obvious and commonplace. And this is why those books are so successful that treat of the coarser passions. They have in them a real human interest, because they make their appeal to feelings which do exist. We are not here arguing in favour of Dutch pictures or French novels, but for that reality which is the basis of all poetry, and that truth which is the basis of all beauty. As Realists, we do not forget that it is not in the vulgarity of common things, nor the mediocrity of average characters, nor the familiarity of familiar affairs, nor the everydayness of everyday lives, that the poetry consists,—not the commonnesses of a common man, but those universal powers and passions which he shares with heroes and martyrs, are the true subjects of poetry. Though we advocate that all beauty must be true, we are not responsible for the converse of the proposition, that assumes all truth therefore beautiful, and that, consequently, “twice two are four” constitutes poetry. Like the consecrated banner of a Cortez, wherein the enthusiastic churchman may see the cross, and the ambitious patriot the crown, but which, to the eyes of the rabble in their train, is merely a waving absolution, this cry for common sense, matter-of-fact, and everyday life, may be followed by some, not for the right in which it originates, but for the wrong to which it may be perverted; but if it be so, they can never arrive at results more lamentable than the crowd who have followed the formulas of “high art” and the “ideal.” And if poetry is to get home to us with its better influences, to hearten us in the struggles of life, beguile us of our glooms, take us gently from the dusty high-road, where we have borne the burden in the heat of the day, into the pastures where the grass is green and grateful to the tired feet, the air fragrant, and the shadows are refreshing, and draw us delicately up to loftier heights of being, we must have songs set
to the music of the faithful heart,—we must have poetry for men who work, and think, and suffer, and whose hearts would feel faint and their souls grow lean if they fed on such fleeting deliciousness and confectionary trifle as the spasmodists too frequently offer them,—we must have poetry in which natural emotions flow, real passions move, in clash and conflict—in which our higher aims and aspirations are represented, with all that reality of daily life which goes on around us, in its strength and sweetness, its sternness and softness, wearing the smiles of rejoicing, and weeping the bitter tears of pain—weaving the many-coloured woof of Time, and working out the hidden purposes of Him that “sitteth in the heavens.”22

  Notes

  1. Gerald Massey, “Poetry—The Spasmodists,” North British Review (February 1858): 232–33, 235–45, 249–50.

  2. Merry Monarch and his Circean Restoration: King Charles II (1630–1685) was known as the Merry Monarch. Exiled in 1649, he returned to the throne in 1660, an event known as the “Restoration.” “Circean” refers to the mythological enchantress Circe. Massey thus characterizes the period as dangerously seductive.

  3. Robert Burns (1759–1796), a Scottish poet widely regarded as a precursor of the Romantics.

  4. William Shenstone (1714–1763), an English nature poet.

  5. William Cowper (1731–1800), an English poet who is also considered to be a pioneering Romantic.

  6. Antaeus-like: In Greek mythology, Antaeus (son of Poseidon and Gaia) is a strong giant who became as weak as any mortal when his feet no longer touched the ground.