The Bridling of Pegasus: Prose Papers on Poetry

The moving accident is not my trade;To freeze the blood I have no ready arts:’Tis my delight, alone in summer shade,To pipe a simple song for thinking hearts!

Have they forgotten the “moving accidents by flood and field,” or do they not know whose trade it was to unfold a tale that

Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood?

Piping a simple song for thinking hearts, is all very well. But it will not do to say, or to suggest, or to allow it to be inferred, that doing this makes a man as great a poet as doing what Wordsworth did not and plainly could not do. In the last book of The Excursion, he says:

Life, death, eternity! momentous themesAre they – and might demand a seraph’s tongue,Were they not equal to their own support;And therefore no incompetence of mineCould do them wrong…Ye wished for art and circumstance, that makeThe individual known and understood;And such as my best judgment could selectFrom what the place afforded, could be given.

But no subject is equal to its own support, where the poet is concerned, however it may be with the preacher and the moralist. The poet himself must support it. We do wish for act and circumstance, in poetry; and when Wordsworth tells us that he has, in The Excursion, given us the best of these he can, we can only answer that this best is not enough, but wholly insufficient and inadequate.

That Mr. Arnold would deny all this, if put to him plainly, we do not believe. It is all the more to be regretted that he should have expressed himself in such a manner as to encourage others in forming judgments and holding opinions which imply affirmation to the contrary. When he quotes from Wordsworth the following lines,

Of truth, of grandeur, beauty, love, and hope,And melancholy fear subdued by faith,Of blessëd consolation, in distress,Of moral strength and intellectual power,Of joy in widest commonalty spread,

and adds that “here we have a poet intent on the best and master thing,” and wishes us to infer Wordsworth’s superiority from that fact, does he not perceive that he is not only misleading his readers, but flagrantly contradicting what he himself avers in the selfsame essay? Being “intent” on these subjects is not enough. A further question remains to be answered; viz. how has the poet dealt with them? Nowhere has Wordsworth dealt with them so completely, so ambitiously, so exhaustively, as in The Excursion. Yet what does Mr. Arnold say of it? He says that The Excursion can never be a satisfactory work to the disinterested lover of poetry, and that much of it is “a tissue of elevated but abstract verbiage, alien to the very nature of poetry.” It is plain, therefore, that being “intent” even on “the best and master thing” does not suffice. The passage Mr. Arnold quotes, leaving the incautious reader to infer that it does suffice, is merely the

Life, death, eternity! momentous themes,

and their being “equal to their own support” over again. Wordsworth is perpetually telling us that his subject is Man, and wishes us to infer that, the subject being great, what is written on it must be great. Unfortunately, Man, with him, is like Love with the Scotch girl; it is Man “in the abstract.” Shakespeare also treats of Man; but he treats of him in men, and Wordsworth does not. In fact, he communes. As M. Scherer says, he is a Solitary, a Contemplative. In a word, he is essentially, and before all things a subjective poet, and reader after reader has complained, and critic after critic has confessed, that to be subjective, not objective, to reflect instead of to act, to think rather than to narrate, is the bane of modern poetry, and the conclusive mark of the inferiority of so large a proportion of it.

Yet, this notwithstanding, Mr. Arnold tells us that Wordsworth “deals with that in which life really consists”; and, not content with this, he actually goes on to declare that “Wordsworth deals with more of life than they do”; – “they” being every English poet since Milton, and indeed every poet of every tongue since Milton, with the exception of Goethe! We can only say that such an assertion is astounding; the most startling paradox, indeed, we ever encountered in a criticism by a critic of authority. To argue upon it against Mr. Arnold is, happily, superfluous; for Mr. Arnold has anticipated and categorically answered his own paradox. Let him open his own poems; let him turn to Stanzas In Memory Of Obermann, and let him read on until he comes to the following couplet:

But Wordsworth’s eyes avert their ken,From half of human fate.

Has he forgotten the passage? or would he now expunge it? Mr. Arnold the poet, and Mr. Arnold the critic, are evidently at issue. But we think no one will experience much difficulty in deciding which of two has “hit the nail on the head,” and whether it be sound criticism to affirm that Wordsworth deals with that in which life really consists, or sound criticism to affirm that with one half of life he does not deal at all. At any rate, these rival criticisms are not to be reconciled, and Mr. Arnold must elect between the two.

What is the first and broad conclusion to be drawn from all that has been said? It is this: that Wordsworth, as a poet, has treated great subjects with marked and striking inadequacy, and smaller subjects with marked and striking success. Now we submit that no man deserves to be called or considered a great poet who has not treated some great subject in a great manner. This is the mark, this is the test, of a great poet; and if we once surrender this distinction, this standard, we soon lose ourselves in hopeless critical confusion and entanglement. But no great subject can be greatly or adequately treated in poetry, save objectively, and with the help of action, passion, incident, of all the expedients, in fact, we have enumerated. It never can be treated adequately or greatly by merely writing about it. This is all that Wordsworth has done with his great subjects, with “truth, grandeur, beauty, love,” and the rest of them; and therefore, as far as great subjects are concerned, he has failed, and failed conspicuously. Where he has succeeded, and succeeded conspicuously, succeeded admirably, succeeded perfectly, is in smaller subjects, such as The Solitary Reaper, The Cuckoo, Three Years She Grew, and their companions. This is to have done much; but it is not to have left behind “an ample body of powerful work.” Much less is it to have left behind an “ampler” body of powerful work than every English poet since Milton, Byron included.

For what is the “ample body of powerful work” that Byron has left? If Byron had failed as completely as Wordsworth in the treatment of his larger themes, in a word, of his great subjects, then, in spite of much fine lyrical work in Byron, the palm would have to be adjudged to Wordsworth. But what critic of authority, who means to retain it, will come forward and assert that Byron has failed in the treatment of his larger themes, of his great subjects? Is Childe Harold a failure? Is Manfred a failure? Is Cain a failure? Is Don Juan a failure? We, like Mr. Arnold, can honestly say that though we “felt the expiring wave of Byron’s mighty influence,” we now “regard him, and have long regarded him, without illusion”; in fact, with just as little illusion as we regard Wordsworth, which is perhaps more than Mr. Arnold can yet say. We are unable to assert, with Scott, that, in Cain, “Byron has matched Milton on his own ground.” It would have been very wonderful if he had, as wonderful as if Virgil had matched Homer on Homer’s own ground. “Sero venientibus ossa”; or, as some one put it during the controversy between the respective merits of the Ancients and the Moderns, “The Ancients have stolen all our best ideas.” Besides, though Byron has not matched Milton on the ground Milton occupied first and pretty nigh exhausted, Byron has done many other things that Milton has not done. We are equally unable to say that Byron, “as various in composition as Shakespeare himself, has embraced every topic in human life”; though we strongly incline to think that a dispassionate and exhaustive survey would show him to be more various in composition, and to have embraced a greater number of topics appertaining to human life, than any poet, English or foreign, ancient or modern, except Shakespeare.1 Equally unable are we to accept the dictum of Goethe, which Mr. Arnold vainly endeavours to explain away, by trying to prove that Goethe did not mean what he certainly said, viz. that Byron “is in the main greater than any other English poet.”

Therefore, as we say, we look upon Byron without any illusion, and without any wish to extol him above his real rank, by calling on his behalf even such witnesses as Scott and Goethe. We look at his works with the same detachment and dispassionateness as we look at the Parthenon or on the Venus of Milo. But, so looking on them, looking on them not through any pet theories of our own, not with any moral, theological, or sectarian bias, but simply with the same “dispassionate-lover-of-poetry” eyes with which we look on Antigone, the Æneid, the Fairy Queen, or Faust, we find ourselves unable to resist the conclusion, that, like them, Childe Harold, Manfred, Cain, and Don Juan are great poems, are great themes, greatly treated. This is not to say that they are perfect, that they are in every way satisfactory. Is the Fairy Queen perfectly satisfactory? Is the Æneid perfectly satisfactory? No critic has ever found them so. Is the Iliad perfectly satisfactory? It would be very odd if it were, seeing that, as no one but Mr. Gladstone any longer doubts, it is the work, not of one poet, but of several poets. But when all has been urged against them that can be urged by the most judicial criticism, they remain great subjects greatly executed. In the same manner, so do Byron’s greater poems. Roughly and broadly speaking, they are satisfactory; whereas in no sense can The Prelude and The Excursion be said to be satisfactory. On the contrary, they are entirely unsatisfactory. In a word, of Byron’s larger works, it may be said that they will “do”; of Wordsworth’s, on the contrary, as Jeffrey said, and as Mr. Arnold himself allows, they “won’t.” That is the distinction; and it is an immense one.

Byron is not Shakespeare; for he lags considerably behind Shakespeare in Invention, Action, and Character, by dint of which, and in conjunction with which, the highest faculties of the poet are displayed. But a poet may lag considerably behind Shakespeare, and yet exhibit these in a conspicuous degree. It is in Character, no doubt, that Byron is more particularly weak, as compared with Shakespeare, though he is by no means so weak, in himself, and as compared with others, as people have come to assume, by hearing the point so superficially iterated. It is not that Byron cannot depict character; but he does not depict a sufficient number of characters. They are not numerous and various enough. When M. Scherer says that “Byron has treated hardly any subject but one – himself,” he is repeating the parrot-cry of very shallow people, and is doing little justice to his own powers as a critic. Indeed, had Shakespeare never lived, it is probable that it would never have occurred to any one to urge against Byron his deficiencies in this respect. It is because he is so great a poet, because he is so great in other respects, and because some critics have therefore inadvertently attempted to place him on a level with Shakespeare, that his inferiority in this particular suggested itself to those holding a juster view. Once suggested, it was harped upon, exaggerated, and, we may fairly say, has now been done to death. We presume, however, that no one would suggest that, even in the poetic presentation of Character, Byron, however inferior to certain other writers, is not immeasurably superior to Wordsworth, who never even attempted to portray Character.

When we turn from the consideration of the power shown by Byron in the presentation of Character, to his power shown in Action, Invention, and Situation, the account becomes a very different one. In brisk and rapid narrative, in striking incident, in prompt and perpetual movement – qualities in which not only is Wordsworth deficient, but of which he is absolutely devoid – Byron exhibits his true greatness as a poet. Even in the Tales, in The Giaour, The Bride of Abydos, The Corsair, The Siege of Corinth, The Prisoner of Chillon, which it has of late been the fashion, we had almost said the affectation, to depreciate, there is a stir, a “go,” a swift and swirling torrent of action, a current of animation, a full and foaming stream of narrative, a tumult and conflict of incident, which will never cease to be regarded as among the best, the highest, and the most indispensable elements of poetry, until we are all laid up in lavender, until we all take to moping and brooding over our own feelings, until we all confine ourselves to “smooth passions, smooth discourse, and joyous thought”; until we all become content

To sit without emotion, hope, or aim,In the loved presence of the cottage-fire.And listen to the flapping of the flame,Or kettle whispering its faint undersong.

Even if one confined oneself merely to Byron’s Tales, the assertion that Wordsworth “deals with more of life” than Byron, would be startling. Love, hatred, revenge, ambition, the rivalry of creeds, travel, fighting, fighting by land and fighting by sea, almost every passion, and every form of adventure, these are the “life” they deal with; and we submit that it is to deal with a considerable portion of it; with far more of life at any rate than Wordsworth deals with in the whole of his poems. Listen to his own confession:

And thus from day to day my little boatRocks in its harbour, lodging peaceably.

Now turn to Byron:

O’er the glad waters of the dark blue sea,Our thoughts as boundless, and our souls as free,Far as the breeze can bear, the billows foam,Survey our empire, and behold our home.These are our realms, no limit to their sway!

That is precisely the difference. The horizon of Byron is so much larger. Far from it being true that Wordsworth deals with more of life than Byron does, the precise opposite is the truth, that Byron deals with far more of life than Wordsworth does, if by life we mean the life of men, of men of action, of men of the world, and not the life, as M. Scherer says, of Solitaries, Contemplatives, and Recluses.

If we turn to Byron’s Dramas, to Sardanapalus, to The Two Foscari, to The Doge of Venice, no doubt we crave for yet more action, more incident, more situation, than Byron gives us. But we do so because Shakespeare has accustomed us to crave for more; and the craving has been intensified by the sensational character of modern novels and modern stage-plays. Nevertheless these are present, in no small amount, in the plays we have named; and whether people choose to consider the amount great or small, surely it is immeasurably greater than the amount of action, invention, and situation Wordsworth exhibits in any and every poem, of any and every kind, he ever wrote.

We have more than once mentioned Childe Harold, but we must refer to it once more and finally, in support and illustration of what we have been urging. The persons who are of opinion that Byron never treated any subject but himself, will perhaps likewise be of opinion that, in Childe Harold, Byron treats only of himself, and that it is a purely contemplative and subjective poem. A more superficial opinion could not well be held. In form contemplative, it is in substance a poem full of action, situation, and incident; in a word, it is a poem essentially and notably objective. It is the only poem, ostensibly contemplative, of which this can be said; and it assumes this complexion and character by dint of Byron’s own character, which was above all things active, and could not be content without action. In Childe Harold, Byron summons dead men and dead nations from their sepulchres, and makes them live and act again. He revivifies Athens, he resuscitates Rome. He makes Cicero breathe and burn; he makes the fallen columns and shattered pillars of the Forum as eloquent as Tully. Petrarch once more waters the tree that bears his lady’s name. The mountains find a tongue. Jura answers from her misty shroud. The lightning becomes a word. Rousseau tortures himself afresh; Gibbon afresh saps solemn creeds with solemn sneer; afresh Egeria visits Numa in the silence of the night, his breast to hers replying. Lake Leman woos, and kisses away the cries of the Rhone, as they awake. Then she reproves like a sister’s voice. The boats upon the lake are wings to waft us from distraction. The stars become the poetry of Heaven. Waterloo is fought before our very eyes. The defiles fatal to Roman rashness are again crowded with Numidian horse, and Hannibal and Thrasymene flash before our eyes. A soul is infused into the dead; a spirit is instilled into the mountains. The torrents talk; the sepulchres act. Movement never ceases, and the situation is perpetually shifting. Its incidents are almost the whole of History. In it we have – what M. Scherer justly says Wordsworth has not – the knowledge of the human heart which worldly experience gives, the interior drama of the passions which a man can describe well only on condition of having been their victim, and those general views upon History and society which are formed partly by study, partly by the practice of affairs. All this, too, we have, in the third and fourth cantos – for the first and second are very inferior – presented, in language, imagery, and music, of the noblest and most elevated kind; till, swelling, as an organ swells, before it closes, the poem concludes with that magnificent address to the Ocean, which rounds it off and completes it, even as the physical ocean rounds off and completes the physical earth. In no other poem that was ever written are Nature and man – not Man in the abstract, but men as they act, strive, feel, and suffer – so thoroughly interfused and interwoven; and they are interwoven and interfused as they are interwoven and interfused in actual life, not by men contemplating and talking, but by men doing and acting, in a word, by living. And if the reference be to men in general and life in general, and not to a particular sort of man living a particular sort of life away from other men, then we make bold to say, though in doing so we contradict Mr. Arnold roundly, that in Childe Harold alone there is “an ampler body of powerful work,” and that Childe Harold alone “deals with more of life,” than all Wordsworth’s poems, not even selected from, but taken in their integrity, without the diminution of a single passage or the omission of a single line.

At this point, Mr. Arnold steps in with a notable plea. It may be that much of what Wordsworth has written is trivial, and that still more of it is abstract verbiage, or doctrine we hear in church, perfectly true, but wanting in the sort of truth we require, poetic truth. It may also be that Wordsworth has written no one great poem, and that the poem he fancied to be great will not do, and can never be satisfactory to the disinterested lover of poetry. It may furthermore be the case that in Wordsworth’s poems we have to lament a deficiency, if not indeed a total absence of Action, Invention, Situation, and Character, and that he is only a Contemplative, a Recluse, a Solitary, analysing the sensations produced upon himself by dwelling upon mountains, woods, and waters. All this may be so. But, says Mr. Arnold, “Poetry is at bottom a criticism of life,” the greatness of a poet depends upon his criticism of life, and Wordsworth’s criticism of life is more complete, more powerful, and more sound, than that of any English poet since Milton, indeed than that of any poet since Milton, with the one exception of Goethe.

The great and the justly acquired authority of Mr. Arnold must not deter us from saying that to no canon of criticism upon poetry with which we are acquainted do so many objections present themselves. We suspect Mr. Arnold himself has discerned some of these since he first propounded it; for while in his Prefatory Essay upon Wordsworth he urges it with absolute confidence, in his Prefatory Essay on Byron he does so more hesitatingly, and exhibits more anxiety to explain it. But does he not explain it away, when he says, “We are not brought much on our way, I admit, towards an adequate definition of poetry as distinguished from prose by that truth”? Upon this point M. Scherer, an admirer, like ourselves, of both Wordsworth and Mr. Arnold, has some just observations:

Wordsworth seems to Mr. Arnold to have the qualities of poetic greatness, and Mr. Arnold accordingly defines these qualities. The great poet, in his opinion, is the one that expresses the most noble and the most profound idea, upon the nature of man, the one who has a philosophy of life, and who impresses it powerfully on the subjects which he treats. The definition, it will be perceived, is a little vague.

Mr. Arnold, we all know, is rather partial to vagueness, being of opinion that it is of the essence of Culture to be more or less vague, and that without a certain amount of vagueness there can be no sweetness and no light. We should be sorry to seem to say anything against those delightful characteristics, lest we should be supposed to be without them; and we hereby declare ourselves all in favour of our “consciousness playing about our stock notions,” even if those stock notions be sweetness and light themselves, with their accompanying charm of vagueness. But though, in all seriousness, what Swift calls sweetness and light are invaluable qualities, despite the partial vagueness they entail, yet when two poets are compared, and a definition of the main business and main essence of poetry is offered, in order that by it the relative greatness of the two may be tested, it is just as well that the definition should not be too vague, should be at any rate precise enough to afford the test desired. But what is the use of it if it does not “bring us much on our way”?

Unfortunately, Mr. Arnold’s theory of poetry being a criticism of life not only does not help us along our road, it tends to take us off our road. We regret we have not left ourselves space to deal with his theory at length, and can only hope we may have an opportunity of returning to it. But lest Mr. Arnold should be tempted to raise it to the dignity of a “stock notion,” and to bestow upon it the privilege of that faithful iteration which is bestowed upon “culture,” “sweetness and light,” “Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace,” which have a good deal more to say for themselves, we think it well to point out to him that, by averring poetry to be “a criticism of life,” he is giving a handle to the Philistines of criticism, and to the enemies of sweetness and light, which they may turn against him in a notable manner.

For whose “criticism of life”? Does he not perceive that he is enabling people to maintain, which unfortunately they are already only too disposed to do, that this poet is a great poet because they consider his criticism of life to be right and true, and that other poet to be not a great poet, or a much smaller poet, because they consider his criticism of life to be wrong and false? Why, this is the very pest and bane of English criticism upon poetry, and upon art generally; the criticism which in reality resolves itself into “I agree with this; I like that.” This is the criticism of sheer and unadulterated Philistinism, against which Mr. Arnold has been waging such excellent and needed war for several years. Nor, in spite of much vagueness, will it be possible for Mr. Arnold to escape from this consequence of his dictum that poetry is a criticism of life. For at last, after much that seems to us like beating about the bush, he goes straight to the point, and makes the fatal confession in plain words.

As compared with Leopardi, Wordsworth, though at many points less lucid, though far less a master of style, far less of an artist, gains so much by his criticism of life being, in certain matters of profound importance, healthful and true, whereas Leopardi’s pessimism is not, that the value of Wordsworth’s poetry, on the whole, stands higher for us, I think, than that of Leopardi’s, as it stands higher for us, I think, than that of any modern poetry except Goethe’s.