Oxford Lectures on Poetry

2

Note A.

3

Note B.

4

What is here called ‘substance’ is what people generally mean when they use the word ‘subject’ and insist on the value of the subject. I am not arguing against this usage, or in favour of the usage which I have adopted for the sake of clearness. It does not matter which we employ, so long as we and others know what we mean. (I use ‘substance’ and ‘content’ indifferently.)

5

These remarks will hold good, mutatis mutandis, if by ‘substance’ is understood the ‘moral’ or the ‘idea’ of a poem, although perhaps in one instance out of five thousand this may be found in so many words in the poem.

6

On the other hand, the absence, or worse than absence, of style, in this sense, is a serious matter.

7

Note C.

8

This paragraph is criticized in Note D.

9

Note E.

10

Not that to Schiller ‘form’ meant mere style and versification.

11

Note F.

12

Note G.

13

In Schiller’s phrase, they have extirpated the mere ‘matter.’ We often say that they do this by dint of style. This is roughly true, but in strictness it means, as we have seen, not that they decorate the mere ‘matter’ with a mere ‘form,’ but that they produce a new content-form.

14

I have learned something from many discussions of this subject. In its outline the view I have taken is perhaps nearer to Hartmann’s than to any other.

15

Popular usage coincides roughly with this sense. Indeed, it can hardly be said to recognise the wider one at all. ‘Beauty’ and ‘beautiful,’ in that wider sense, are technical terms of Aesthetics. It is a misfortune that the language of Aesthetics should thus differ from the ordinary language of speech and literature; but the misfortune seems to be unavoidable, for there is no word in the ordinary language which means ‘whatever gives aesthetic satisfaction,’ and yet that idea must have a name in Aesthetics.

16

I do not mean to imply that in aesthetic apprehension itself we always, or generally, make conscious use of a standard or, indeed, think of greatness. But here we are reflecting on this apprehension.

17

Thus, it may be noticed, the sparrow’s size, which is the reverse of sublime, is yet indirectly essential to the sublimity of the sparrow.

18

The poet’s language here has done our analysis for us.

19

A word may be added here on a disputed point as to ‘spiritual’ sublimity. It has been held that intellect cannot be sublime; but surely in the teeth of facts. Not to speak of intellect as it appears in the sphere of practice, how can it be denied that the intellect of Aristotle or Shakespeare or Newton may produce the impression of sublimity? All that is true is, first, that the intellect must be apprehended imaginatively and not thought abstractly (otherwise it can produce no aesthetic impression), and, secondly, that it appears sublime in virtue not of its quality alone but of the quantity, or force, of that quality.

20

The same principle applies to other cases. If, for example, the desolation of a landscape is felt to be sublime, it is so not as the mere negation of life, verdure, etc., but as their active negation.

21

The reader will remember that in one sense of the question, Is there no more in the sublime than overwhelming greatness? this question must of course be answered in the affirmative. Sublimity is a mode of beauty: the sublime is not the overwhelmingly great, it is the beautiful which has overwhelming greatness; and it affects us through its whole nature, not by mere greatness.

22

I am warning the reader against a mistake which may arise from the complexity of aesthetic experience. We may make a broad distinction between ‘glad’ and ‘sad’ modes of beauty; but that does not coincide with the distinction of modes with which we are concerned in this lecture. What is lovely or ‘beautiful’ may be glad or sad, and so may what is grand or sublime.

23

In what follows I have spoken as if the two were always successive stages, and as if these always came in the same order. It is easier to make the matter quickly clear by taking this view, which also seemed to answer to my own experience. But I do not wish to commit myself to an opinion on the point, which is of minor importance. What is essential is to recognise the presence of the two ‘aspects’ or ‘stages,’ and to see that both are requisite to sublimity.

24

‘Ich fühlte mich so klein, so gross,’ says Faust, remembering the vision of the Erdgeist, whom he addresses as ‘Erhabener Geist.’ He was at once overwhelmed and uplifted.

25

At least if the ‘Vision’ is sublime its sublimity is not that of the original. We can ‘discern the form thereof’ distinctly enough.

26

To avoid complication I have passed by the case where we compare the sublime thing with another thing and find it much greater without finding it immeasurably great. Here the greatness, it appears to me, is still unmeasured. That is to say, we do not attempt to determine its amount, and if we did we should lose the impression of sublimity. We may say, perhaps, that it is ten, fifty, or a million times, as great; but these words no more represent mathematical calculations than Hamlet’s ‘forty thousand brothers.’

27

I am far from being satisfied with the ideas imperfectly expressed in the first and third of these Notes, but they require more consideration than I can give to them during the printing of the Second Edition. The reader is requested to take them as mere suggestions.

28

Hence a creature much less powerful than ourselves may, I suppose, be sublime, even from the mere point of view of vital energy. But I doubt if this is so in my own case. I have seen ‘magnificent’ or ‘glorious’ cocks and cats, but if I called them ‘sublime’ I should say rather more than I feel. I mention cocks, because Ruskin somewhere mentions a sublime cock; but I cannot find the passage, and this cock may have been sublime (if it really was so to Ruskin) from some other than ‘vital’ greatness.

29

See, primarily, Aesthetik, iii. 479-581, and especially 525-581. There is much in Aesthetik, i. 219-306, and a good deal in ii. 1-243, that bears on the subject. See also the section on Greek religion in Religionsphilosophie, ii. 96-156, especially 131-6, 152-6; and the references to the death of Socrates in Geschichte der Philosophie, ii. 81 ff., especially 102-5. The works so far cited all consist of posthumous redactions of lecture-notes. Among works published by Hegel himself, the early essay on ‘Naturrecht’ (Werke, i. 386 ff.), and Phaenomenologie d. Geistes, 320-348, 527-542, deal with or bear on Greek tragedy. See also Rechtsphilosophie, 196, note. There is a note on Wallenstein in Werke, xvii. 411-4. These references are to the second edition of the works cited, where there are two editions.

30

His theory of tragedy is connected with his view of the function of negation in the universe. No statement therefore which ignores his metaphysics and his philosophy of religion can be more than a fragmentary account of that theory.

31

I say ‘might,’ because Hegel himself in the Phaenomenologie uses those very terms ‘divine’ and ‘human law’ in reference to the Antigone.

32

See Note at end of lecture.

33

This interpretation of Hegel’s ‘abstract’ is more or less conjectural and doubtful.

34

Hegel’s meaning does not fully appear in the sentences here condensed. The ‘blessedness’ comes from the sense of greatness or beauty in the characters.

35

Hegel himself expressly guards against this misconception.

36

The same point may be put thus, in view of that dangerous word ‘personality.’ Our interest in Macbeth may be called interest in a personality; but it is not an interest in some bare form of self-consciousness, nor yet in a person in the legal sense, but in a personality full of matter. This matter is not an ethical or universal end, but it must in a sense be universal – human nature in a particular form – or it would not excite the horror, sympathy, and admiration it does excite. Nor, again, could it excite these feelings if it were not composed largely of qualities on which we set a high value.

37

In relation to both sides in the conflict (though it may not need to negate life in both). For the ultimate agent in the catastrophe is emphatically not the finite power of one side. It is beyond both, and, at any rate in relation to them, boundless.

38

The following pages reproduce the two concluding lectures of a short course on the Age of Wordsworth, given at Oxford in April, 1903, and intended specially for undergraduates in the School of English Language and Literature. A few passages from the other lectures appear elsewhere in this volume. On the subject of the course may I advise any reader who may need the advice to consult Professor Herford’s The Age of Wordsworth, a little book which is familiar to students of the history of English Literature, and the more admired the more they use it?

39

These statements, with the exception of the last, were chosen partly because they all say, with the most manifest seriousness, much the same thing that is said, with a touch of playful exaggeration, in The Tables Turned, where occurs that outrageous stanza about ‘one impulse from a vernal wood’ which Mr. Raleigh has well defended. When all fitting allowance has been made for the fact that these statements, and many like them, are ‘poetic,’ they ought to remain startling. Two of them – that from the story of Margaret (Excursion, I.), and that from the Ode, 1815 – were made less so, to the injury of the passages, by the Wordsworth of later days, who had forgotten what he felt, or yielded to the objections of others.

40

Goody Blake, to my mind, tries vainly to make the kind of impression overwhelmingly made by Coleridge’s Three Graves. The question as to the Anecdote for Fathers is not precisely whether it makes you laugh, but whether it makes you laugh at the poet, and in such a way that the end fails to restore your sobriety. The danger is in the lines,

And five times to the child I said,Why, Edward, tell me why?

The reiteration, with the struggle between the poet and his victim, is thoroughly Wordsworthian, and there are cases where it is managed with perfect success, as we shall see; but to me it has here the effect so delightfully reproduced in Through the Looking-glass (‘I’ll tell thee everything I can’).

41

Some remarks on We are seven are added in a note at the end of the lecture.

42

The phrases quoted in this paragraph are taken chiefly from Hazlitt and De Quincey.

43

The publication of the Excursion seems to have been postponed for financial reasons. One edition of a thousand copies sufficed the world for thirteen years.

44

Evening Voluntaries, iv. We know that he refers to Byron.

45

Poems on the Naming of Places, iv. Keats need not have been ashamed to write the last line.

46

‘’Tis past, that melancholy dream,’ – so he describes his sojourn in Germany.

47

Wordsworth’s Letter to Major-General Pasley (Prose Works, i.) contains an excellent statement both of his views on this duty and of his hostility to mere militarism.

48

I am writing of the years of the Napoleonic War. Later, he lost courage, as he himself said. But it is not true that he ever ceased to sympathise with the cause of national independence in Europe.

49

[This great line, as I am reminded, refers to the Welsh (Comus, 33); but it does not seem necessary to change the quotation.]

50

In saying that what Wordsworth could not bear was torpor, of course I do not mean that he could bear faithlessness, ingratitude, cruelty, and the like. He had no tolerance for such things, either in his poetry or in his life. ‘I could kick such a man across England with my naked foot,’ the old poet burst forth when he heard of a base action. This reminds one of Browning, whose antinomian morality was not so very unlike Wordsworth’s. And neither poet would have found it difficult to include the worst vices under the head of torpor or ‘the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin.’

51

The third quotation is from a speech by the Solitary (Excursion, vi.).

52

The second half of this sentence, true of the Wordsworth of the Excursion, is perhaps not quite true of his earlier mind.

53

This is just the opposite of the ‘wise passiveness’ of imaginative but unreflective feeling.

54

Nature.

55

I add here some notes which would have disturbed the lecture, but may be of use to the student of Wordsworth’s mind who cares to return to them.

The collocation of the last two quotations shows how, for Wordsworth, ‘the visionary power’ arises from, and testifies to, the mind’s infinity, and how the feeling of this is, or involves, or is united with, a feeling or idea of the infinite or ‘one mind,’ and of union with it. This connection of ideas (as to which I purposely use vague alternative terms, because I do not want to theorise the poet’s experience), is frequent or constant in Wordsworth, and it ought always to be borne in mind in regard to his language about ‘immortality’ or ‘eternity.’ His sense or consciousness of ‘immortality,’ that is to say, is at once a consciousness that he (in some sense of that word) is potentially infinite, and a consciousness that ‘he’ belongs to, is part of, is the home of, or is, an ‘active principle’ which is eternal, indivisible, and the ‘soul of all the worlds’ (cf. opening of Excursion, ix.). Whatever we may make of this connection of ideas, unless we realise it we shall remain entirely outside Wordsworth’s mind in passages like that just referred to, and in passages where he talks of ‘acts of immortality in Nature’s course,’ or says that to the Wanderer ‘all things among the mountains breathed immortality,’ or says that he has been unfolding ‘far-stretching views of immortality,’ though he may not appear to us to have touched in any way on the subject. Nature and Man (in one sense) are for Wordsworth ‘transitory,’ but Nature always and everywhere reveals ‘immortality,’ and Man (in another sense) is ‘immortal.’ Unquestionably for Wordsworth he is so. In what precise sense he is so for Wordsworth may not be discoverable, but the only chance of discovering it is to forget what we or anybody else, except Wordsworth, may mean by ‘man’ and ‘immortal,’ and to try to get into his mind.

There is an illuminating passage on ‘the visionary power’ and the mind’s infinity or immortality, in Prelude, ii.:

and hence, from the same source,Sublimer joy; for I would walk alone,Under the quiet stars, and at that timeHave felt whate’er there is of power in soundTo breathe an elevated mood, by formOr image unprofaned; and I would stand,If the night blackened with a coming storm,Beneath some rock, listening to notes that areThe ghostly language of the ancient earth,Or make their dim abode in distant winds.Thence did I drink the visionary power;And deem not profitless those fleeting moodsOf shadowy exultation: not for this,That they are kindred to our purer mindAnd intellectual life; but that the soul,Remembering how she felt, but what she feltRemembering not, retains an obscure senseOf possible sublimity, wheretoWith growing faculties she doth aspire,With faculties still growing, feeling stillThat whatsoever point they gain, they yetHave something to pursue.

An interesting point, worth fuller treatment, is the connection of this feeling of infinity and the endless passing of limits with Wordsworth’s love of wandering, wanderers, and high roads. See, for instance, Prelude, xiii., ‘Who doth not love to follow with his eye The windings of a public way?’ And compare the enchantment of the question, What, are you stepping westward?

’twas a soundOf something without place or bound.

56

Yes, it was the mountain echo, placed in Arnold’s selection, with his usual taste, next to the earlier poem To the Cuckoo.

57

This was Coleridge’s opinion.

58

Statements equally emphatic on this subject may be found in a passage quoted by Mrs. Shelley in a footnote to Shelley’s letter to John Gisborne, Nov. 16, 1819 (Letter XXX. in Mrs. Shelley’s edition). Cf. also Letter XXXIII. to Leigh Hunt, Nov. 1819.

59

I cannot find the passage or passages to which I referred in making this statement, and therefore I do not vouch for its accuracy. Cf. from the fragment Fiordispina,

The ardours of a vision which obscureThe very idol of its portraiture.

60

Cf. from the Preface to the Cenci: ‘I entirely agree with those modern critics who assert that, in order to move men to true sympathy, we must use the familiar language of men… But it must be the real language of men in general, and not that of any particular class to whose society the writer happens to belong.’

61

Preface to Prometheus Unbound.

62

I do not discuss the adequacy of Shelley’s position, or assert that he held it quite clearly or consistently. In support of my interpretation, of it I may refer to the Preface to the Cenci. There he repudiates the idea of making the dramatic exhibition of the story ‘subservient to what is vulgarly called a moral purpose,’ and, as the context shows, he identifies such a treatment of the story with the ‘enforcement’ of a ‘dogma.’

This passage has a further interest. The dogma which Shelley would not enforce in his tragedy was that ‘no person can truly be dishonoured by the act of another, and the fit return to make to the most enormous injuries is kindness and forbearance, and a resolution to convert the injurer from his dark passions by peace and love’; and accordingly he held that ‘if Beatrice had thought in this manner, she would have been wiser and better.’ How inexcusable then is the not uncommon criticism on the Cenci that he represents Beatrice as a perfect character and justifies her murder of ‘the injurer.’

Shelley’s position in the Defence, it may be added, is in total disagreement with his youthful doctrine and practice. In 1811 he wrote to Miss Hitchener, ‘My opinion is that all poetical beauty ought to be subordinate to the inculcated moral,’ and a large part of Queen Mab is frankly didactic. Even there, however, he reserved most of the formal instruction for the Notes, perceiving that ‘a poem very didactic is … very stupid.’

63

‘I consider poetry very subordinate to moral and political science,’ he says in a letter to Peacock, Jan. 1819.

64

And, I may add, the more it does this, so long as it does it imaginatively, the more does it satisfy imagination, and the greater is its poetic value.

65

The material of these pages belongs in part to the course mentioned on p. 99, and in part to a lecture given in November, 1905. They have in consequence defects which I have not found it possible to remove; and they also open questions too large and difficult for a single lecture. This is one reason why I have not referred to the prevalence of the novel in the nineteenth century, a prevalence which doubtless influenced both the character and the popularity of the long poems. I hope the reader will not gain from the lecture the false impression that the writer’s admiration for those poems is lukewarm, or that he has any tendency to reaction against the Romantic Revival of Wordsworth’s time.

66

This, and not the permanent value of the scientific product, is the point.

67

Table-talk, Feb. 16, 1833.

68

The narrative poems that satisfy most, because in their way they come nearest to perfection, will be found, I believe, to show this balance. Such, for instance, are The Eve of St. Agnes, Lamia, Michael, The Vision of Judgment, some of Crabbe’s tales. It does not follow, of course, that such poems must contain the greatest poetry. Crabbe, for example, was probably the best artist of the day in narrative; but he does not represent the full ideal spirit of the time.

69

See p. 110.

70

Demogorgon is an instance of such a figure.

71

This incongruity is not the only cause of the discomfort with which many lovers of Tennyson read parts of Arthur’s speech in that Idyll; but it is the main cause, and, unlike other defects, it lies in the plan of the story. It may be brought out further thus. So far as Arthur is merely the blameless king and representative of Conscience, the attitude of a judge which he assumes in the speech is appropriate, and, again, Lancelot’s treachery to him is intelligible and, however wrong, forgivable. But then this Arthur or Conscience could never be a satisfactory husband, and ought not to astound or shock us by uttering his recollections of past caresses. If, on the other hand, these utterances are appropriate, and if all along Lancelot and Guinevere have had no reason to regard Arthur as cold and wholly absorbed in his public duties, Lancelot has behaved not merely wrongly but abominably, and as the Lancelot of the Idylls could not have behaved. The truth is that Tennyson’s design requires Arthur to be at once perfectly ideal and completely human. And this is not imaginable.

Having written this criticism, I cannot refrain from adding that I think the depreciation of Tennyson’s genius now somewhat prevalent a mistake. I admire and love his poetry with all my heart, and regard him as considerably our greatest poet since the time of Wordsworth.

72

It is never to be forgotten, in comparing Goethe with the English poets, that he was twenty years older than Wordsworth and Coleridge, and forty years older than Byron and Shelley.

73

The reader will remember that he must take these paragraphs as an exaggerated presentment of a single, though essential, aspect of the poetry of the time, and of Shelley’s poetry in particular, and must supply the corrections and additions for himself. But I may beg him to observe that Godwin’s formulas are called sublime as well as ridiculous. Political Justice would never have fascinated such young men as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, unless a great truth had been falsified in it; and the inspiration of this truth can be felt all through the preposterous logical structure reared on its misapprehension.