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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]

Footnote 1:

  _Sunday Times_, May 30, 1920.

    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.

Footnote 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.

    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

    “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:

Footnote 3:

  _Studies in Elizabethan Drama._ By Arthur Symons.

    _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]

Footnote 4:

  _Revue des Deux Mondes_, fevr. 1875, quoted by Benda, _Belphégor_, p.
  140.

    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

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.

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]

Footnote 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.

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]

Footnote 6:

  _Poetics_, vi. 9. Butcher’s translation.

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]

Footnote 7:

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

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_