Aspects of poetry : being lectures delivered at Oxford

Front matter

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REFERENCE LIBRARY OF HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

2 Park Street, Boston

Preface

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Tue following pages contain twelves Lectures se lected from those which I have delivered from the Chair of Poetry in Oxford during the last four years, some of which have already been published separately. To these have been added three Chapters (XI., XIL, XTII.), which were not delivered as Lectures in Oxford, but which are, by the kind permission of the Proprietor, reprinted from Good Words.

Some might, perhaps, expect to find in this book a systematic theory of poetry, and a consecutive course of Lectures. But the conditions of the Professorship, which require one Lecture to be delivered during each Academic term, render it difficult, even if it were on other grounds desirable, to preserve such continuity. The audiences which listen to these Lectures change from term to term; so that a course begun before one set of hearers would have to be continued before another, and completed before a third. This renders it almost a necessity that each Lecture should be, as far as possible, complete in itself.

As to the mode of treatment pursued, I have tried ta adapt it, as well as I could, to the varied character of my hearers. These consisted of Undergraduates, of v1 PREFACE.

Graduates, and of some who were of neither of these Among these last were not a few of those resident Gentlewomen, who now form a new and not unpleasing element in some Oxford Lecture-rooms. As my pre decessor in the Poetry Chair said in the Preface to his published Lectures, I felt it to be my duty, having found a large number of persons willing to listen, to do what I could to retain them. This seemed most likely to be done by treating the several subjects under review in a broad way, and by presenting their larger outlines, rather than by dwelling on refined subtleties or minute detaiis. On verbal criticism and scholastic erudition sufficient attention is bestowed in the various Lecture-rooms of the Colleges and of the University. It would seem to be a desirable variety, if, in one Lecture-room filled by a general audience, a different treatment were adopted.

For the rest, the Lectures, both as to the views they advance, and the way in which these views are expressed, must speak for themselves. No formal canons of criticisms have been here laid down, but the principles which underlie and the sentiments which animate the Lectures are, I trust, sufficiently apparent.

When I have been aware that I have derived a thought from another writer, I have tried to acknowledge it in the text. But it is a pleasure to record here, in a more explicit way, many obligations to the kindness of personal friends.

For information on the difficult Ossianie question, which I have tried to condense into a few plain para-

PREFACE. vil graphs, I have to thank Mr. W. F. Skene, D. C. L., author of Celtte Scotland, — that work of difficuk and original research, with which he has crowned the labor of his life. To Dr. Clerk of Kilmallie also, author ot the new translation of Ossian, I am indebted for ever ready help on the same subject, as well as for kind aid afforded, when I was translating the Gaelic of Duncan MaclIntyre’s poems.

In the Lecture on Virgil I have to acknowledge the free use I have made of the scholarly and suggestive work on Virgil by Professor Sellar; to whom too I owe my introduction to M. Gaston Boissier’s work entitled La Religion Romaine, from which I derived valuable assistance.

The Lecture on Cardinal Newman is, in my thoughts, specially associated with another college friend. Several of the passages I have cited in the course of this Lecture recall to me walks around Oxford, and evening talks in college rooms, during which I first heard them from the lips of the present Lord Coleridge. From him toe I have quite recently received some suggestions, which I have gladly embodied in the text.

Lastly, the late Dean Stanley, with his never-failing friendliness, took lively interest in these Lectures, and frequently talked with me over the subjects of them, before they were composed.

One occasion, the last on which I enjoyed his delightful society, will long live in my remembrance. I had paid a two days’ visit to him in his hospitable home ip the Deanery, in the early days of last March. I was

Vill PREFACE.

then meditating the Lecture on Carlyle; and on the second day of my visit we spoke a good deal about the subject, which interested him and me alike. He suggested several passages, in which Carlyle’s poetic power seemed to him conspicuous. On the last day of my visit, Saturday the 5th of March, while I was engaged in a hurried breakfast, before starting for the Scotch Express, he opened a book, Mr. Justice Stephen’s Lzderty, Equality, and Fraternity, and, in the dim light of the early morning, read aloud in his clear, impressive tones the passage I have quoted from Carlyle, which thus ends : — . “through mystery to mystery, from God and to Ged.”

These words were hardly uttered, when I had to rise and go. It was our last parting.

J. C. SHarrp.

Houstoun, September, 1881.

CHAPTER I PAGE fue Province oF PorETRY . A 3 . ° . : 1 CHAPTER II

CRITICISM AND CREATION : : e e ° 31 CHAPTER III.

THE SPIRITUAL SIDE OF POETRY . Ps ° ° ° e 56

CHAPTER IV.

Tue Porr A REVEALER . 4 a ~ . . e 82

CHAPTER V.

Portic STYLE In MopERN ENGLISH POETRY “ A - 104

CHAPTER VI.

Vrrcirt As A ReEvicious Port 2 ; - : 2 - 18

CHAPTER VII.

ScoTTISH SONG, AND BURNS . ‘ ° P : : . 164 x CONTENTS.

CHAPTER VIII.

PAGE

BHELLEY AS A Lyric POET . . - 8 a . - 194 CHAPTER IX.

THE PoETRY OF THE SCOTTISH HIGHLANDS. — OSSIAN - 219 CHAPTER X.

MoprErn GAELIC BARDS. — DUNCAN MACINTYRE . -. - 246

CHAPTER XI.

Tur THREE YARROWS . ; ; 4 ‘ “ ob pare CHAPTER XII.

THE WHITE DoE OF RYLSTONE . = ; : PA . 296

CHAPTER XIII.

Tue HomMERIC SPIRIT IN WALTER SCOTT . ‘ - 9828

CHAPTER XIV.

PRosE Ports. — THOMAS CARLYLE x « . « 849

CHAPTER XV.

Prosk Ports. — CARDINAL NEWMAN . hii, otaiie » 87

ASPECTS OF POETRY.

CHAPTER I.

THE PROVINCE OF POETRY.

Were I to begin my first Lecture from this Chair, -n which the kindness of the University has placed me, vy following an approved and time-honored usage, I might ask at the outset, What is Poetry? and try to answer the question either by falling back on some one of the old definitions, or by proposing a new one, or perhaps by even venturing on a theory of Poetry. But, as you are all, no doubt, more or less acquainted with the definitions and theories of the past, and probably - have not found much profit in them, you will, I believe, readily absolve me from any attempt to add one more to their number. For definitions do not really help us better to understand or appreciate subjects with which we have been long familiar, especially when they are, as poetry is, all life and spirit. As my friend the author of Rab and his Friends has well expressed it, “ It is with Poetry as with flowers and fruits. We would all rather have them and taste them than talk about them. It is a good thing to know about a lily, its scientific ins und outs, its botany, its archeology, even its anatomy and organic radicals; but it is a better thing to look at 1 the flowers themselves, and to consider how they grow.” So one would rather enjoy poetry than criticise it and liscuss its nature. But, as there is a time for studying the botany of flowers, as well as for enjoying their | beauty, there is a time also for dwelling on the nature and offices of poetry, and that time seems to have come to-day. |

I think I shall be able best to bring before you what I wish to say at present, if, approaching the subject in a concrete rather than in an abstract way, I endeavor at the outset to note some of the more prominent characteristics of the poetic nature, when that nature appears in its largest and most healthful manifestation.

In doing so I shall have to tread some well-worn ways, and to say things which have often been said before. But I shall willingly incur this risk. For my aim is not so much to say things that are new as things that are true. You will therefore bear with me, I hope, if I try to recall to your thoughts a few plain but primal truths regarding that which is most essential in the poetic nature, — truths which are apt to be forgotten amid the fashions of the hour, and to lie buried beneath heaps of superfine criticism.

One of the first characteristics of the genuine and healthy poetic nature is this, —it is rooted rather in the heart than in the head. Human-heartedness is the soil from which all its other gifts originally grow and ara continually fed. The true poet is not an eccentric creature, not a mere artist living only for art, not a dreamer or a dilettante, sipping the nectar of existence, while he keeps aloof from its deeper interests. He is, above ai things, a man among his fellow-men, with a heart that eats in sympathy with theirs, a heart not different from

THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. 3d

‘theirs, only larger, more open, more sensitive, more intense. It is the peculiar depth, intensity, and fineness of his emotional nature which kindles his intellect and inspires it with energy. He does not feel differently from other men, but he feels more. There is a larger field of things over which his feelings range, and in which he takes vivid interest. If, as we have been often told, sympathy is the secret of all insight, this holds especially true of poetic insight, which more than any other derives its power of seeing from sympathy with the object seen. ‘There is a kinship between the poetic eye and the’ thing it looks on, in virtue of which it penetrates. As the German poet says: — “‘If the eye had not been sunny, How could it look upon the sun ?”?

And herein lies one great distinction between the po: etic and the scientific treatment of things. The scientific man must keep his feelings under stern control, lest they intrude into his researches and color the dry light, in which alone Science desires to see its objects. The poet, on the other hand, — it is because his feelings inform and kindle his intellect that he sees into the life of things.

Some, perhaps, may recall the names of great poets, though not the greatest, who have fled habitually from human neighborhood, and dwelt apart in proud isolation. ‘ But this does not, I think, disprove the view that human-heartedness is the great background of the poet’s strength, for to the poets I speak of, their solitariness has been their misfortune, if not their fault. By some antowardness in their lot, or some malady of their time, ‘hey have been compelled to retire into themselves, and

© become lonely thinkers. If their isolation has added some intensity to their thoughts, it has, at the same time, narrowed the range of their vision, and diminished the breadth and permanence of their influence.

But this vivid human sympathy, though an essential condition or background of all great poetry, by no means belongs exclusively to the poet. Taking other forms, it is characteristic of all men who have deeply moved or greatly benefited their kind, —of St. Augustine, Luther, Howard, Clarkson, and Wilberforce, not less than of Homer, Shakespeare, and Walter Scott.

I must therefore pass on to points more distinctive of the poet, arid consider —

What is the object or material with which the poet deals.

What is the special power which he brings to bear on that object.

What is his true aim; what the function which he fulfils in human society.

The poet’s peculiar domain has generally been said to be Beauty ; and there is so much truth in this that, if the thing must be condensed into a single word, probably none better could be found. For it is one large part of the poet’s vocation to be a witness for the Beauty which is in the world around him and in human life. But this one word is too narrow to cover all the domain over which the poetic spirit ranges. It fits well that which attracts the poet in the face of nature, and is applicable to many forms of mental and moral excel- .ence, But there are other things which rightly win his regard, to which it cannot be applied without stretching it till it becomes meaningless. Therefore I should vather say that the whole range of existence, or any art of it, when imaginatively apprehended, seized on the side of its human interest, may be transfigured into poetry. There is nothing that exists, except things ignoble and mean, in which the true poet may not find himself at home, —in the open sights of nature, in the occult secrets of science, in the “quicquid agunt homines,” in men’s character and fortunes, in their actions and sufferings, their joys and sorrows, their past history, their present experience, their future destiny. All these lie open to him who has power to enter in, and, by might of imaginative insight, to possess them. And such is the kinship between man and all that exists that, as I have elsewhere said, “whenever the soul comes vividly in contact with any fact, truth, or existence, whenever it realizes and takes them home to itself with more than common intensity, out of that meeting of the soul and its object there arises a thrill of joy, a glow of emotion; and the expression of that glow, that thrill, is poetry.” But as each age modifies in some measure men’s conceptions of existence, and brings to light new aspects of life before undreamt of, so Poetry, which is the expression of these aspects, is ever changing, in sympathy with the changing consciousness of the race. A growth old as thought, but ever young, it alters its form, but renews its vitality, with each succeeding age.

As to the specific organ or mental gift through which poets work, every one knows that it is Imagination. But if asked what Imagination is, who can tell? If we turn to the psychologists, —the men who busy themselves with labelling and ticketing the mental faculties, -—they do not much help us. Scattered through the poets here and there, and in some writers on esthetic ‘abjects, notably in the works of Mr. Ruskin, we find thoughts which are more suggestive. Perhaps it is a thing to rejoice in that this marvellous faculty has hitherto baffled the analysts. For it would seem that when you have analyzed any vital entity down to its last elements, you have done your best to destroy it.

I may, however, observe in passing that the following seem to be some of the most prominent notes of the way in which Imagination works : —

To a man’s ordinary conceptions of things Imagination adds force, clearness, distinctness of outline, vividness of coloring.

Again, it seems to be a power intermediate between intellect and emotion, looking towards both, and partaking of the nature of both. In its highest form, it would seem to be based on ‘moral intensity.” The emotional and the intellectual in it act and react on each other, deep emotion kindling imagination, and expressing itself in imaginative form, while imaginative insight kindles and deepens emotion.

Closely connected with this is what some have called the penetrative, others the interpretative, power of Imagination. It is that subtle and mysterious gift, that intense intuition, which, piercing beneath all surface appearance, goes straight to the core of an object, enters where reasoning and peddling analysis are at fault, lays hold of the inner heart, the essential life, of a scene, a character, or a situation, and expresses it in a few immortal words. What is the secret of this penetrative glance, who shall say? It defies analysis. Neither the poet himself who puts it forth, nor the critic who exammes the result, can explain how it works, can lay his finger on the vital source of it. A line, a word, has Yashed the scene upon us, has made the character live

THE PROVINCE OF POETRY. tae efore uz; how, we know not, only the thing is done. And others, when they see it, exclaim, How true te nature this is! So like what I have often felt myself; only I could never express it! But the poet has expressed it, and this is what makes him an interpreter to men of their own unuttered experience. All great poets are full of this power. It is that by which Shakespeare read the inmost heart of man, Wordsworth of nature.

A further note of Imagination is that combining and harmonizing power, in virtue of which the poetic mind, guided by the eternal forms of beauty which inhabit it, out of a mass of incongruous materials drops those which are accidental and irrelevant, and selects those which suit its purpose, — those which bring out a given scene or character, — and combines them into a harmonious whole.

The last note I shall mention is what may be called the shaping or embodying power of Imagination, —I mean the power of clothing intellectual and spiritual conceptions in appropriate forms. ‘This is that which Shakespeare speaks of : —

“Imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown.’’

And conversely there is in Imagination a power which spiritualizes what is visible and corporeal, and fills it with a higher meaning than mere understanding dreams of. These two processes are seen at work in all great poets, the one or the other being stronger, according to the bent of each poet’s nature.

While Imagination, working in these and other ways, is the poet’s peculiar endowment, it is clear that for its beneficent operation there must be present an ample sange, a large store of maverial on which to work.

This it cannot create for itself. From other regions if must be gathered; from a wealth of mind in the poet himself, from large experience of life and = intimate knowledge of nature, from the exercise of his heart, his judgment, his reflection, indeed of his whole being, op all he has seen and felt. In fact, a great poet must be a man made wise by large experience, much feeling, and ‘deep reflection: above all, he must have a hold of the great central truth of things. When these many conditions are present, then and then only can his imagination work widely, benignly, and for all time; then only can the poet become a ‘* Serene creator of immortal things ”’

Imagination is not, as has sometimes been conceived, a faculty of falsehood or deception, calling up merely fictitious and fautastic views. It is preéminently a truthful and truth-seeing faculty, perceiving subtle aspects of truth, hidden relations, far-reaching analogies, which find no entranee to us by any other inlet. It is the power which vitalizes all knowledge; which makes the dead abstract and the dead concrete meet, and by their meeting live; which suffers not truth to dwell by itself in one compartment of the mind, but carries it home through our whole being, — understanding, affections, will.

This vivid insight, this quick, imaginative intuition, is accompanied by a delight in the object or truth beheld, —a glow of heart, “a white heat of emotion,” which is the proper condition of creation. The joy of Inagination in its own Vision, the thrill of delight, is one of the most exquisite moods man ever experiences,

Kmotion, then, from first to last inseparably attends ‘he exercise of Imagination, preéminently in him whe

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LHe FROVINCE OF POETRY.

treates, in a lesser degree in those who enjoy his creations.

In this aspect of poetry, as in some sense the immediate product of emotion, some have seen its necessary weakness and its limitation. Emotion, they say, belongs to youth, and must needs disappear before mature reason and ripe reflection. Time must dull feelings, however vivid, cool down passions, however fervid. How many poets have reiterated Byron’s lament, that

‘The early glow of thought declines in feeling’s dull decay’!

How much of the poetry of all ages is filled with passionate regrets for objects

“Too early lost, too hopelessly deplored’?!

No wonder, therefore, that strong men, who despise sentimentality, and will not spend their lives in bemoaning the inevitable, are wont, as they grow older, to ‘drop poetry of this kind, along with other youthful illusions. ‘The truth of this cannot be gainsaid. The poetry of regret may please youth, which has buoy ancy enough in itself to bear the weight of sadness uot its own. But those who have learnt by experience what real sorrow is have no strength to waste on imaginary sorrows. And if all poetry were of this character, it would be true enough that it contained no refreshment for toiling, suffering men.

But, not to speak of purely objective poets, there is mu great meditative poets a higher wisdom, a serener region, than that of imaginative regret. ‘There are poets who, after having experienced and depicted the tumults of the soul, after having felt and sung ‘he pain of unsatisfied desires, or uttered their vearning regret

‘‘ That things depart which never may return,””

have been able to retire within themselves, thence te contemplate the fever of excitement from a higher, more permanent region, and to illuminate, as has been said, transitory emotion “with the light of a calm, infinite world.” Such poets do not ignore the heartless things that are done in the world, but they forgive them ; the dark problems of existence they do not try to explain, but they make you feel that there is light behind, if we could but see it; the discords and dissonances of life are still there, but over them all they seem to shed a reconciling spirit. This serene wisdom, this large and luminous contemplation, absorbs into itself all conflict, passion, and regret, as the all-embracing blue of heaven holds the storms and clouds that momentarily sweep over it. It is seen in the “august repose” of Sophocles, when he prepares the calm close for the troubled day of the blind and exiled Theban king. It is seen in the spirit that pervades the Zempest, one of Shakespeare’s latest dramas, in which, to use his own words, he “takes part with his nobler reason against his fury,

and rises out of conflict and passion into a region of self-control and serenity. It is seen in Milton, when, amid the deep solitariness of his own blindness and forced inactivity, he is enabled to console himself with the thought,

‘*They also serve who only stand and wait.’’

It is seen in Wordsworth, he who, while feeling, as few have done, regret for a brightness gone which nothing could restore, was able to let all these experiences meli into his being, and enrich-it, till his soul became humanized by distress, and by the thoughts that spring out of human suffering. Poetry such as this stands the wear of life, and breathes a benediction even over its decline.

As to the aim which the poet sets before him, the end which poetry is meant to fulfil, what shall be said? Here the critics, ancient and modern, answer, almost with one voice, that the end is to give pleasure. Aristotle tells us that “it is the business of the tragic poet to give that pleasure which arises from pity and terror, through imitation.” Horace gives an alternative end in his |

and. he awards the palm to those poems which combine both ends, and at once elevate and please. ‘To take one sample from the moderns: Coleridge, in his definition of poetry, tells us that “a poem is a species of composition, opposed to science as having intellectual pleasure for its object or end,” and that its perfection is “ to communicate the greatest immediate pleasure from the parts compatible with the largest sum of pleasure on the whole.”

May I venture to differ from these great authorities, and to say that they seem to have mistaken that which is an inseparable accompaniment for that which is the main aim, the proper end of poetry? The impulse to poetic composition is, I believe, in the first instance, spontaneous, almost unconscious ; and where the inspiration, as we call it, is most strong and deep, there a conscious purpose is least present. When a poet is in the true creative mood, he is for the time possessed with love of the object, the truth, the vision which he sees, for its own sake, —is wholly absorbed in it; the desire fitly to express what he sees and feels is his one sufficient motive, and to attain to this expression is itself his end and his reward. While the inspiration is at its trongest, the thought of giving pleasure to others or o1 winning praise for himself is weakest. The intrinsic delight in his own vision, and in the act of expressing it, keeps all extrinsic aims, for a time at least, aloof. This might perhaps be a sufficient account of the poet’s aim in short lyrics and brief arrow-flights of song. But even in the richest poetic natures the inspiring heat cannot

always or long be maintained at its height,

‘¢ And tasks in hours of insight willed

In hours of gloom must be fulfilled.’’

Effort long sustained implies the presence of conscious purpose. Great poets cannot be conceived to have girded themselves to their longest, most deliberate efforts — Shakespeare to Hamlet, Milton to Paradise Lost — without reflecting what was to be the effect of their work on their fellow-men. It would hardly have satisfied them at such a time to have been told that their poems would add to men’s intellectual pleasures. ‘They would not have been content with any result short of this, — the assurance that their work would live to awaken those high sympathies in men, in the exercise of which they — themselves found their best satisfaction, and which, they well knew, ennoble every one who partakes of them. To appeal to the higher side of human nature, and to strengthen it, to come to its rescue, when it is overborue by worldliness and material interests, to support it by great truths, set forth in their most attractive form, — this is the only worthy aim, the adequate end, of all poetic endeavor. And this it does by expressing in beautiful form and melodious language the best thoughts and the noblest feelings which the spectacle of life awakens in the finest souls. This is the true office of poetry, which 1s the bloom of high thought, the efflorescence of noble emotion. No doubt these sympathies, once awakened

J yield a delight among the purest and noblest man can know; but to minister this pleasure is not the main end which the poet sets before himself, but is at most a subordinate object. ‘The true end is to awaken men to the divine side of things, to bear witness to the beauty that clothes the outer world, the nobility that lies hid, often obscured, in human souls, to call forth sympathy for neglected truths, for noble but oppressed persons, for downtrodden causes, and to make men feel that, through all outward beauty and all pure inward affection, God Himself is addressing them.

In this endeavor poetry makes common cause with all high things, — with right reason and true philosophy, with man’s moral intuitions and his religious aspirations. It combines its influence with all those benign tendencies which are working in the world for the melioration of man and the manifestation of the king dom of God. It is adding from age to age its own current to those great

‘*tides that are flowing Right onward to the eternal shore.”

But, if it has great allies, it has also powerful adver-| saries. ‘The worship of wealth and of all it gives, a materialistic philosophy which disbelieves in all knowledge unverifiable by the senses, luxury, empty display, worldliness, and cynicism, with these true poetry cannot dwell. In periods and in circles where these are paramount, the poet is discredited, his function as a witness to high truth is denied. If tolerated at all, he is degraded into a merely ornamental personage, a sayer of pretty things, a hanger-on of society and the great. Such is the only function which degenerate ages allow to him, and this is a function which only poets of baser metal will accept. The truly great poets in every age have felt the nobility of their calling, have perceived that their true function is not to amuse, or merely to. give delight, but to be witnesses for the ideal and spiritual side of things, to come to the help of the generous, the noble, and the true, against the mighty.

And, though some exceptions there have been, yet i. is true that the great majority of poets in all times have, according to their gifts, recognized this to be their proper aim, and fulfilled it. Therefore we say once more, in the words of one of the foremost of the brotherhood —