PRINCIPLE IN ART RELIGIO POETJE AND OTHER ESSAYS THE READERS' LIBRARY Uniform with this Volume Avril. By HILAIRE BELLOC. Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance. Esto Perpetua. By H. BELLOC. Algerian Studies and Impressions. Men, Women, and Books: Res Judicatae. By AUGUSTINE BIRRELL. Complete in One Volume. Obiter Dicta. By AUGUSTINE BIRRELL. First and Second Series complete in One Volume. Memoirs of a Surrey Labourer. By GEORGE BOURNE. The Bettesworth Book. By GEORGE BOURNE. A Study of Four Poets. By STOPFORD A. BROOKE, LL.D. Essays on Clough, Arnold, Rossetti, and Morris. Studies in Poetry. By STOPFORD A. BROOKE, LL.D. Essays on Blake, Scott, Shelley, Keats, etc. Comparative Studies in Nursery Rhymes. By LINA ECKENSTEIN. Essays in a branch of Folk-lore. Italian Poets since Dante. Critical Essays. By W. EVERETT. Villa Rubein, and Other Stories. By JOHN GALSWORTHY. Faith, and Other Sketches. By R. B. CUNNINGHAMS GRAHAM. Progress, and Other Sketches. By R. B. CUNNINGHAMS GRAHAM. Success, and Other Sketches. By R. B. CUNNINGHAMS GRAHAM. Green Mansions. A Romance of the Tropical Forest. By W. H. HUDSON. The Purple Land. By W. H. HUDSON. A Crystal Age. A Romance of the Future. By W. H. HUDSON. The Heart of the Country. By FORD MADOX HUEFFER. The Soul of London. By FORD MADOX HUEFFER. The Spirit of the People. An Analysis of the English Mind. By FORD MADOX HUEFFER. After London Wild England. By RICHARD JEFFERIES. Amaryllis at the Fair. By RICHARD JEFFERIES. Bevis. The Story of a Boy. By RICHARD JEFFERIES. The Hills and the Vale. By RICHARD JEFFERIES. The Greatest Life. An Enquiry into the Foundations of Character. By GERALD LEIGHTON, M.D. St. Augustine and his Age. An Interpretation. By JOSEPH Between the Acts. By H. W. NEVINSON. Essays in Freedom. By H. W. NEVINSON. Parallel Paths. A Study of Biology, Ethics, and Art. By T. W. ROLLESTON. The Strenuous Life, and Other Essays. ByTnEODORE ROOSEVELT. English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century. By Sir LESLIE STEPHEN. Studies of a Biographer. First Series. By Sir LESLIE STEPHEN. Two Volumes. Studies of a Biographer. Second Series. By Sir LESLIE STEPHEN. Two Volumes. Interludes in Verse and Prose. By Sir GEORGE TREVELVAN Essays on Dante. By Dr. CARL WITTS. DUCKWORTH & CO., LONDON PRINCIPLE IN ART RELIGIO POET^E AND OTHER ESSAYS BY COVENTRY PATMORE LONDON: DUCKWORTH & CO. HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN First Published, 1889 ; Reprinted, 1890, 1898, 1912. New Edition, in One Volume, by permission of Messrs. George Bell and Sons, issued in the Readers' Library, 1913. PREFACE OME of these Essays have already appeared in the Fortnightly Review, the Edinburgh Review, the St. James's Gazette, or elsewhere. In the original issue the author had noted that "thoughts had sometimes been repeated, almost in the same words." In the rearrangement here adopted no attempt has been made to obviate this repetition, which may be even more conspicuous than in the original order ; but, " as these thoughts are mostly un- familiar and significant, readers will be none the worse for encountering them twice or even thrice. " Shortly before his death, Mr. Patmore had suggested a rearrangement for a new issue, which has been adopted and completed for this edition. A few correc- tions and omissions have also been made, the greater number of which were either marked or sanctioned by the author himself. The alterations not actually his own are few and of small importance. Some obvious mistakes in matters of fact, and 2063227 vi PREFACE some errors of punctuation, have been corrected ; here and there a word has been transposed where the original order was imperfect ; and one or two passages which seemed to have been written for an immediate purpose rather than for more permanent effect have been omitted. CONTENTS PRINCIPLE IN ART ESSAY PAGE I. PRINCIPLE IN ART ... i II. CHEERFULNESS IN LIFE AND ART . . .5 III. THE POINT OF REST IN ART . " - .10 IV. BAD MORALITY is BAD ART . . 15 V. EMOTIONAL ART . . . . .20 VI. PEACE IN LIFE AND ART . . . -25 VII. PATHOS . . . . . .30 VIII. POETICAL INTEGRITY . . . -35 IX. THE POETRY OF NEGATION , . .40 X. "DISTINCTION" . . . . -44 XI. KEATS . . , . . .60 XII. WHAT SHELLEY WAS . . . .66 XIII. BLAKE .74 XIV. ROSSETTI AS A POET . , , -79 XV. ARTHUR HUGH CLOUGH . . . .86 XVI. EMERSON . . . . .91 XVII. CRABBE AND SHELLEY . . - . .98 XVIII. A MODERN CLASSIC, WILLIAM BARNES . . 104 XIX. MRS. MEYNELL . . . . .118 XX. MADAME DE HAUTEFORT . . . . 129 XXI. A SPANISH NOVELETTE . . , . 156 XXII. ON OBSCURE BOOKS . . . .162 XXIII. SHALL SMITH HAVE A STATDE ? . . . 167 vii viii CONTENTS BSSAV GE XXIV. IDEAL AND MATERIAL GREATNESS IN ARCHI- TECTURE .... . i? 1 XXV. " OLD ENGLISH " ARCHITECTURE, ANCIENT AND MODERN ...... 177 XXVI. ARCHITECTURAL STYLES . . . .182 RELIGIO POET^E I. RELIGIO POET^E . .219 II. THE PRECURSOR ... 226 III. THE LANGUAGE OF RELIGION . . . 233 IV. ATTENTION . . . . . -244 V. CHRISTIANITY AN EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE . 250 VI. "A PEOPLE OF A STAMMERING TONGUE" . 257 VII. THE Bow SET IN THE CLOUD . . . 261 VIII. CHRISTIANITY AND "PROGRESS" . . . 266 IX. SIMPLICITY . . . . . .272 X. ANCIENT AND MODERN IDEAS OF PURITY . 275 XI. CONSCIENCE . . . . . .279 XII. REAL APPREHENSION . . . 282 XIII. SEERS, THINKERS, AND TALKERS . .'> . 289 XIV. POSSIBILITIES AND PERFORMANCES . . 298 XV. IMAGINATION . . . . . 303 XVI. THE LIMITATIONS OF GENIUS . . . 308 XVII. A "PESSIMIST" OUTLOOK . . . .312 XVIII. THOUGHTS ON KNOWLEDGE, OPINION, AND INE- QUALITY . . . . . -319 XIX. LOVE AND POETRY . . . .334 XX. THE WEAKER VESSEL .... 340 XXI. DIEU ET MA DAME . . . . 349 I PRINCIPLE IN ART IT is not true, though it has so often been asserted, that criticism is of no use or of little use to art. This notion prevails so widely only because among us at least criticism has not been criticism. To criticise is to judge ; to judge requires judicial qualifi- cation ; and this is quite a different thing from a natural sensitiveness to beauty, however much that sensitiveness may have become heightened by converse with refined and beautiful objects of nature and works of art. " Criticism," which has been the outcome only of such sensitiveness and such converse, may be, and often is, delightful reading, and is naturally far more popular than criticism which is truly judicial. The pseudo-criticism, of which we have had such floods during the past half-century, delights by sympathy with, and perhaps expansion of, our own sensations ; true criticism appeals to the intellect, and rebukes the reader as often as it does the artist for his ignorance and his mistakes. Such criticism may not be able to produce good art ; but bad art collapses at the con- tact of its breath, as the steam in the cylinder of an engine collapses on each admission of the spray of cold water ; and thus, although good criticism cannot pro- 2 PRINCIPLE IN ART duce art, it removes endless hindrances to its produc- tion, and tends to provide art with its chief motive- power, a public prepared to acknowledge it. The enunciation of a single principle has sometimes, almost at a blow, revolutionised not only the technical practice of an art, but the popular taste with regard to it. Strawberry Hill Gothic vanished like a nightmare when Pugin for the first time authoritatively asserted and proved that architectural decoration could never properly be an addition to constructive features, but only a fashioning of them. The truth was manifest at once to amateur as well as to architect ; and this one principle proves to have contained a power even of popular culture far greater than all the splendid "sym- pathetic " criticism which followed during the next fifty years. And it has done nothing but good, whereas the latter kind of writing, together with much good, has done much harm. Pugin's insight did not enable him to dis- cover the almost equally clear and simple principle which governs the special form of decoration that properly characterises each of the great styles of architecture. Therefore, while his law of constructional decoration compelled all succeeding " critics " to keep within its bounds, they were still free to give the rein to mere fancy as to the nature of the decoration itself; and this has been becoming worse and worse in proportion as critics and architects of genius, but of no principle, have departed from the dry tradition of decorative form which prevailed in Pugin's day, and which finds its orthodox expression in Parker's Glossary and the elementary works of Bloxam and Rickman. Sensi- tiveness or natural " taste," apart from principle, is, in PRINCIPLE IN ART 3 art, what love is apart from truth in morals. The stronger it is, the further it is likely to go wrong. Nothing can be more tenderly " felt " than a school of painting which is now much in favour ; but, for want of knowledge and masculine principle, it has come to delight in representing ugliness and corruption in place of health and beauty. Venus or Hebe becomes, in its hands, nothing but a Dame aux Camelias in the last stage of moral and physical deterioration. A few infallible and, when once uttered, self-evident principles would at once put a stop to this sort of representation among artists ; and the public would soon learn to be repelled by what now most attracts them, being thence- forward guided by a critical conscience, which is the condition of " good taste." There is little that is conclusive or fruitful in any of the criticism of the present day. The very name that it has chosen, " -/Esthetics," contains an implied ad- mission of its lack of virility or principle. We do not think of Lessing's Laocoon, which is one of the finest pieces of critical writing in the world, as belonging to " ^Esthetics " ; and, like it, the critical sayings of Goethe and Coleridge seem to appertain to a science deserving a nobler name a science in which truth stands first and feeling second, and of which the con- clusions are demonstrable and irreversible. A critic of the present day, in attempting to describe the differ- ence between the usual construction of a passage by Fletcher and that of one by Shakespeare, would beat helplessly about the bush, telling us many things about the different sorts of feelings awakened by the one and by the other, and concluding, and desiring to conclude, 4 PRINCIPLE IN ART nothing. Coleridge in a single sentence defines the difference, and establishes Shakespeare's immeasurable superiority with the clearness and finality of a mathe- matical statement; and the delight of the reader of Shakespeare is for ever heightened because it is less than before a zeal without knowledge. There already exists, in the writing and sayings of Aristotle, Hegel, Lessing, Goethe, and others, the greater part of the materials necessary for the forma- tion of a body of Institutes of Art which would super- sede and extinguish nearly all the desultory chatter which now passes for criticism, and which would go far to form a true and abiding popular taste one which could render some reason for its likings and dis- likings. The man, however, who could put such materials together and add such as are wanting does not live ; or at any rate he is not known. Hegel might have done it, had his artistic perception been as fine and strong as his intellect ; which would then have expressed its conclusions without the mist of obscurity in which, for nearly all readers, they are at present shrouded. In the meantime it would be well if the professed critic would remember that criticism is not the expression, however picturesque and glowing, of the faith that is in him, but the rendering of sound and intelligible reasons for that faith. II CHEERFULNESS IN LIFE AND ART EJOICE always : and again I say, Rejoice," says one of the highest authorities ; and a poet who is scarcely less infallible in psychological science writes A cheerful heart is what the Muses love. Dante shows Melancholy dismally punished in Purga- tory ; though his own interior gaiety of which a word by and by is so interior, and its outward aspect often so grim, that he is vulgarly considered to have himself been a sinner in this sort. Good art is nothing but a representation of life ; and that the good are gay is a commonplace, and one which, strange to say, is as generally disbelieved as it is, when rightly understood, undeniably true. The good and brave heart is always gay in this sense : that, although it may be afflicted and oppressed by its own misfortunes and those of others, it refuses in the darkest moment to consent to despondency ; and thus a habit of mind is formed which can discern in most of its own afflictions some cause for grave rejoicing, and can then infer at least a probability of such cause in cases where it cannot be discerned. Regarding thus cheerfully and hopefully 5 6 CHEERFULNESS IN LIFE AND ART its own sorrows, it is not over-troubled by those of others, however tender and helpful its sympathies may be. It is impossible to weep much for that in others which we should smile at in ourselves ; and when we see a soul writhing like a worm under what seems to us a small misfortune, our pity for its misery is much mitigated by contempt for its cowardice. A couple of generations ago most people would have opened their eyes wide at any one who should have thought remarks like these worth making. Such truth formed part of the universal tradition of civilisation and moral culture. But a wilful melancholy, and, the twin sign of corruption, a levity which acutely fears and sympathises with pains which are literally only skin-deep, have been increasing upon us of late in a most portentous way. The much- vaunted growth of " humanity " has been due to a softening rather of the brain than of the heart. Huge moral ill, the fact of national degradation, the prospect of national disaster, arouses less pain in the sym- pathetic hearts of humanitarians than the yelp of a poodle which has had its ear pinched. Men and times do not talk about the virtues they possess. Which is more inhuman : to punish with rack and wheel the treason which voluntarily sacrifices or jeopardises the welfare of millions, or to condone or ignore it for the sake of momentary ease? The England in which melancholy and levity are becom- ing prevalent habits is merry England no more. " The nation thou hast multiplied, but not increased the joy." And we are not the only nation which deserves this lamentation of the prophet. The CHEERFULNESS IN LIFE AND ART 7 growths of melancholy and levity are still more marked in France. In America, some traveller has remarked, " there is comfort everywhere, but no joy." America is accordingly the only country which has no art. It is, as I have said, a vulgar error to consider Dante a melancholy poet. In the whole range of art, joy is nowhere expressed so often and with such piercing sweetness as in the Paradise ; and it flashes occasionally through the dun atmosphere of the other parts of the poem. The Inferno is pervaded by the vigorous joy of the poet at beholding thoroughly bad people getting their deserts ; and the penances of Purgatory are contemplated by him with the grave pleasure which is often felt by the saner sort of persons, even in this world, under the sufferings they acknowledge to be the appropriate punishment of and purification from the sins they have fallen into. Shakespeare is the most cheerful of poets. We read his deepest tragedies without contracting even a momentary stain of melancholy, however many tears they may have drawn from us. Calderon flies among horrors and disasters on the wings of a bird of Para- dise, without any resulting incongruity ; and like things may be said of the greatest painters and musicians, until quite recent times. But since about the beginning of this century how many of our geniuses have mingled their songs with tears and sighs over " insoluble problems " and " mysteries of life " which have no existence for a man who is in his right senses and who minds his own business ; while the " scrannel pipes " of the smaller wits have been playing to the 8 CHEERFULNESS IN LIFE AND ART sorry Yankee tune of " There's nothing new, and there's nothing true, and it doesn't signify." Music has taken to imitate the wailing of lost spirits or the liveliness of the casino ; and the highest ambition of several of our best painters seems to have been to evoke a pathos from eternal gloom. This is false art, and represents a false life, or rather that which is not life at all ; for life is not only joyful, it is joy itself. Life, unhindered by the internal obstruction of vice or the outward obscurations of pain, sorrow, and anxiety, is pure and simple joy ; as we have most of us experienced during the few hours of our lives in which, the conscience being free, all bodily and external evils have been removed or are at least quiescent. And, though these glimpses of perfect sunshine are short and far between, the joy of life will not be wholly obscured to us by any external evil, provided the breast is clear of remorse, envy, dis- content, or any other habitually cherished sin. The opportunities and hindrances of joyful life are pretty fairly distributed among all classes and persons. God is just, and His mercy is over all His works. If gardens and parks are denied to the inhabitant of a city lane, his eye is so sharpened by its fasts that it can drink in its full share of the sweetness of nature from a flowering geranium or a pot of crocuses on his window-sill. There are really very few persons who have not enough to eat. Marriage is open almost equally to all, except, perhaps, the less wealthy members of the upper orders. None are without opportunities of joy and abundant reasons for gratitude : and the hindrances of joy are, if justly considered, CHEERFULNESS IN LIFE AND ART 9 only opportunities of acquiring new capacities for delight. In proportion as life becomes high and pure it becomes gay. The profound spiritualities of the Greek and Indian myths laugh for joy; and there are, perhaps, no passages of Scripture more fondly dwelt upon in the Roman Breviary than those which paint the gladness of the Uncreated Wisdom : " When he balanced the foundations of the earth, I was with him, forming all things : and was delighted every day, playing before him at all times, playing in the world : and my delight is to be with the children of men." Ill THE POINT OF REST IN ART S~~* OLERIDGE, who had little technical knowledge of v^/ any art but that in which, when he was himself, he supremely excelled poetry had nevertheless a deeper insight into the fundamental principles of art than any modern writer, with the sole exception of Goethe. And this is one of his many fruitful sayings: "All harmony is founded on a relation to rest on relative rest. Take a metallic plate and strew saad on it, sound an harmonic chord over the sand, and the grains will whirl about in circles and other geometrical figures, all, as it were, depending on some point of sand relatively at rest. Sound a discord, and every grain will whisk about without any order at all, in no figures, and with no point of rest." Without pretending to be able to trace this principle of rest to more than a very limited distance, and in a very few examples, I think it is worth notice in a time when art generally is characterised by a want of that repose which until recently has especially "marked the manners of the great." Look through the National Gallery, and few pictures will be found which would not add a grace of peace to the house they were hung in, no matter how wild the subject or passionate the THE POINT OF REST IN ART n motive. Step into an Academy Exhibition, and there will scarcely be discovered a dozen canvases in a thousand which, however skilful and in many respects admirable they may be, would not constitute points of wwrest, if they were in daily and hourly sight. It is the same with nearly all modern poetry, sculpture, and architecture ; and if it is not true of music, it is because music absolutely cannot exist without some reference to a point or points of rest, in keynote, funda- mental strain, or reiterated refrain. It might at first be supposed that, in a picture, this point should be that on which the eye should repose in order to bring the remainder into focal proportion ; and this is true with regard to those painters who paint on the theory that the eye is fixed, and not roving in its regard. But this theory has never been that of the greatest times of art. Crome's, Constable's, and Gainsborough's landscapes do not fade off from a certain point on which the eye is supposed to be fixed ; yet there will usually be found some point, generally quite insignificant in matter, on which, indeed, the eye does not necessarily fix itself, but to which it involuntarily returns for repose. The most noteworthy remark to be made about this point of rest is, that it is in itself not the most but the least interesting point in the whole work. It is the punctum indifferent to which all that is interesting is more or less unconsciously referred. In an elabo- rate landscape it may be as it is in one of Constable's the sawn-off end of a branch of a tree : or a piece of its root, as it is in one of Michael Angelo's pieces in the Sistine Chapel. In the Dresden " Madonna " of 12 THE POINT OF REST IN ART Raphael it is the heel of the Infant. No one who has not given some thought to the subject can have any idea of the value of these apparently insignificant points in the pictures in which they occur, unless he tries the experiment of doing away with them. Cover them from sight and, to a moderately sensitive and cultivated eye, the whole life of the picture will be found to have been lowered. In proportion to the extent and variety of points of interest in a painting or a poem the necessity for this point of rest seems to increase. In a lyric or idyll, or a painting with very few details, there is little need for it. It is accordingly in the most elaborate plays of Shakespeare that we find this device in its fullest value ; and it is from two or three of these that I shall draw my main illustrations of a little-noticed but very important principle of art. In King Lear it is by the character of Kent, in Romeo and Juliet by Friar Laurence, in Hamlet by Horatio, in OtMlo by Cassio, and in the Merchant of Venice by Bassanio, that the point of rest is supplied ; and this point being also in each case a point of vital comparison by which we measure and feel the relationships of all the other characters, it becomes an element of far higher value than when it is simply an, as it were, accidental point of repose, like the lopped branch in Constable's land- scape. Each of these five characters stands out of the stream of the main interest, and is additionally unimpressive in itself by reason of its absolute con- formity to reason and moral order, from which every other character in the play departs more or less. Thus Horatio is the exact punctum indi/erens between THE POINT OF REST IN ART 13 the opposite excesses of the characters of Hamlet and Laertes over-reasoning inaction and unreasoning action between which extremes the whole interest of the play vibrates. The unobtrusive character of Kent is, as it were, the eye of the tragic storm which rages round it ; and the departure, in various directions, of every character more or less from moderation, recti- tude, or sanity, is the more clearly understood or felt from our more or less conscious reference to him. So with the central and comparatively unimpressive characters in many other plays characters unim- pressive on account of their facing the exciting and trying circumstances of the drama with the regard of pure reason, justice, and virtue. Each of these characters is a peaceful focus radiating the calm of moral solution throughout all the difficulties and disasters of surrounding fate : a vital centre, which, like that of a great wheel, has little motion in itself, but which at once transmits and controls the fierce revolution of the circumference. It is obvious, as 1 have indicated, that a point of rest and comparison is necessary only when the objects and interests are many and more or less conflicting ; but the principle is sometimes at play in forms and works in which we should scarcely have expected to find it. An armlet, or even a finger-ring, gives every portion of the nude figure an increase of animation, unity, and repose. The artistic justifica- tion of the unmeaning " burthen " of many an old ballad may probably be found, at least in part, in the same principle ; as may also be that of the trick as old as poetry of occasionally repeating a line or 14 THE POINT OF REST IN ART phrase without any apparent purpose in the repe- tition. Of course the " point of rest " will not create harmony where as in most modern works its elements are absent ; but, where harmony exists, it will be strangely brought out and accentuated by this in itself often trifling, and sometimes, perhaps, even accidental accessory. The only point in the human body which is wholly without beauty, significance, or purpose in itself, which is merely the scar of its severance from the mother, is the eye of its entire loveliness, the point to which everything is referred for the key of its harmony. IV BAD MORALITY IS BAD ART BAD morality is not a necessary condition of good art ; on the contrary, bad morality is necessarily bad art, for art is human, but immorality inhuman. The " art " of the present generation is in great part more immoral than any that has preceded it in England. Modern English readers tolerate any amount of corruption, provided only the terms in which it is suggested be not " coarse " ; and novels and poems are read, understood, and talked about by young ladies which Rochester would have blushed to be found reading, and which Swift would have called indecent. The delicate indecency of so much modern art is partly due to deficiency of virility, which, in proportion to its strength, is naturally modest. In- decency is an endeavour to irritate sensations and appetites in the absence of natural passion ; and that which passes with so many for power and ardour is really impotence and coldness. On the other hand, the ban which these emasculate times have set upon plain-speaking would alone be well-nigh fatal to great art, even were there no other hindrances to it. The loss by the poet of the privilege of plain-speaking is equivalent to the loss of the string which Hermes 15 16 BAD MORALITY IS BAD ART added to Apollo's lute. A whole octave has been withdrawn from the means of expression. Take a single example. Perhaps two or three of lago's speeches are " coarser " than anything else in English poetry there is nothing more so in the Bible itself; but the splendour, purity, and solidity of the most splendid, pure, and solid of all dramas that were ever written, depend in very large measure on the way in which these qualities are heightened by those very For a good many years past the worth of the philosopher and poet has been measured by the width of his departure from the fundamental truth of humanity. But the orthodox truth of humanity is a perennially young and beautiful maiden, whose clothes, however, are liable to get out of fashion, and to bring upon her the appellation of " old frump " from those who are over-anxious to keep up with the Zeitgeist. The worthiest occupation of the true poet and philosopher in these days is to provide her with such new clothes as shall make her timely acceptable ; and happy is he who shall be found to have contributed even a ribbon or two towards the renovation of her wardrobe, which has of late years fallen so lamentably into decay. The poet, as a rule, should avoid religion altogether as a direct subject. Law, the rectitude of humanity, should be his only subject, as, from time immemorial, it has been the subject of true art, though many a true artist has done the Muse's will and knew it not. As all the music of verse arises, not from infraction, but inflection of the law of the set metre ; so the greatest BAD MORALITY IS BAD ART 17 poets have been those the modulus of whose verse has been most variously and delicately inflected, in cor- respondence with feelings and passions which are the inflections of moral law in their theme. Masculine law is always, however obscurely, the theme of the true poet ; the feeling, with the correspondent rhythm, is its feminine inflection, without which the law has no sensitive or poetic life. Art is thus constituted because it is the constitution of life, all the grace and sweetness of which arise from inflection of law, not from infraction of it, as bad men and bad poets fancy. Law puts a strain upon feeling and feeling responds with a strain upon law, but only such a strain as that with which the hand draws the music from the strings of the lyre. Furthermore, Aristotle says that the quality of poetic language is a continual slight novelty. It must needs be so, if poetry would perfectly express poetic feeling, which has also a continual slight novelty, being never alike in any two persons, or on any two occasions. In the highest poetry, like that of Milton, these three modes of inflection, metrical, linguistical, and moral, all chime together in praise of the true order of human life, or moral law. Where this is not recognised there is no good art. What are inflections when there is nothing to inflect ? You may get the wail of the ^olian harp, but not music. Are those great poets wrong, then the great dramatic poets, especially whose works abound with representations of infraction of law and its consequent disasters ? No. But there are two kinds of inflection and infraction of law : first, of the inner law, which is inflected when a man feels disposed to covet his c i8 BAD MORALITY IS BAD ART neighbour's wife and does not, and infracted when he does ; secondly, of the outer and vaster law of God's universal justice, which cannot be infracted, but only inflected, even by sin and disaster ; the law by which the man shall find it good that he has not followed his natural inclinations, and that by which the man who has so done shall be effectually convinced that the game was not worth the candle. It must be con- fessed that a large portion of the writings of the very best poets of the past and passing generation has been not art at all, since the one real theme of art has been absent. But it was not thus that yEschylus, Dante, Calderon, and Shakespeare understood "art." The old commonplace that " Art is essentially religious" is so far true as that the true order of human life is the command, and in part the revelation, of God ; but all direct allusion to Him may be as completely omitted as it is from the teaching of the Board School, and yet the art may remain " essentially religious." But the mere intention of the artist is not enough to make it so. When Homer and Milton invoked the muse they meant a reality. They asked for supernatural "grace," whereby they might inter- pret life and nature. " By grace divine, not otherwise, O Nature, are we thine," says Wordsworth. This gift, without which none can be a poet,, is essentially the same thing as that which makes the Saint. Only art is a superficies and life a solid; and the degree of grace which is enough to make a superficies divinely good and beautiful, may leave the solid unaffected. As we all know, a man may be a very good poet, and very little BAD MORALITY IS BAD ART 19 indeed of a Saint. Therefore, I trust that I shall not offend the shade of Shelley, and such of his living successors as feel Shelley's abhorrence of " men who pray," if I say that, notwithstanding their heretical notions of what art should be, there are passages in the works of some of them which distinctly prove that, while writing thus, they were " under the in- fluence of divine grace," of that supernatural spirit without which Nature is not really natural. It is to such passages, and such only, that they owe their claim to be called poets, not to those in which they have ignored or outraged law. In the very greatest poets, the standard of human law has been absolute sanctity. The keynote of this their theme is usually sounded by them with the utmost reserve and delicacy, especially by Shakespeare, but it is there ; and every poet the natural faculties of the poet being presupposed will be great in pro- portion to the strictness with which, in his moral ideal, he follows the counsels of perfection. V EMOTIONAL ART ON E of the most accomplished writers of the day, a Cambridge lecturer upon poetry, and himself no mean proficient in the art, speaks of poetry as " an art which appeals to the emotions and the emotions only." To what a pass have psychology and criticism come ! Poetry, the supreme and peculiar vocation of man, an art in which no woman has attained even the second degree of excellence, to be stigmatised, and that without any intention of affront, as essentially and absolutely feminine ! Poetry, in common with, but above all the arts, is the mind of man, the rational soul, using the female or sensitive soul, as its accidental or complementary means of expression ; persuasive music assisting commanding truth to convince not God's chosen, to whom truth is its own evidence and its own music but the Gentiles, to whom pure truth is bitter as hyssop, until, on the lips of the poet, they find it to be sweeter than honey. " The sweetness of the lips increaseth learning." But what is the sweet- ness of the lips without learning ? An alluring harlot, and Mr. Gosse's conception of the Muse ! And, alas, not his only, but mainly that of the time, as far as it has any clear conceptions about art at all. Music, EMOTIONAL ART 21 painting, poetry, all aspire to be praised as harlots, makers of appeals " to the emotions and the emotions only." Art, indeed, works most frequently and most fruitfully through such appeals ; but so far is such appeal from being its essence, that art, universally acknowledged to be of the very highest kind, some- times almost entirely dispenses with "emotion," and trusts for its effect to an almost purely intellectual expression of form or order in other words, of truth ; for truth and order are one, and the music of Handel, the poetry of ^Eschylus, and the architecture of the Parthenon are appeals to a sublime good sense which takes scarcely any account of "the emotions." But far be it from me to undervalue the emotions, by a due expression of which the " poet sage " becomes indeed the apostle of the Gentiles ; and by giving to which, in his life and work, their due place, he becomes in soul and act what man was made to be, namely, the image of God, who is described in the Orphic hymn as " a beautiful youth and a divine nymph." In proportion as a man, above all a poet, has in his constitution the " divine nymph," the " sensi- tive soul," so is the " beautiful youth," the "rational mind," great in its influential force ; provided that the masculine character holds itself always supreme over the feminine, which is really only sweet in so far as it is in subordination and obedience. I may go further, and say that no art can appeal " to the emotions only " with the faintest hope of even the base success it aspires to. The pathos of such art (and pathos is its great point) is wholly due to a more or less vivid ex- pression of a vague remorse at its divorce from truth 22 EMOTIONAL ART and order. The Dame aux Camelias sighs in all Verdi's music over her lost virtue, which, however, she shows no anxiety to recover, and the characteristic expression of the most recent and popular school of poetry and painting is a ray of the same sickly and in the most part hypocritical homage to virtue. Without some such homage, even the dying and super-sensitive body of " emotional " art loses the very faintest pre- tensions to the name of art, and becomes the confessed carrion of Offenbach's operas and the music hall. Atheism in art, as well as in life, has only to be pressed to its last consequences in order to become ridiculous, no less than disastrous; and the "ideal," in the absence of an idea or intellectual reality, becomes the " realism " of the brothel and the shambles. The advocate of art for " the emotions and the emotions only," cannot be brought to understand that the alternative is not " didactic " art, which is as much a contradiction in terms as his own notion of art is. Of great and beautiful things beauty and greatness are the only proofs and expressions ; and the ideas of the greatest artists are the morality of a sphere too pure and high for "didactic" teaching. The teaching of art is the suggestion far more convincing than asser- tion of an ethical science, the germs of which are to the mass of mankind incommunicable ; and the broad daylight of this teaching can be diffused only by those who live in and absorb the direct splendour of an unknown, and, to the generality, an unknowable sun. The mere ignoring of morality, which is what the more respectable of modern artists profess, will not lift them into the region of such teachers ; much less will the EMOTIONAL ART 23 denial of morality do so, as some modern artists seem to think. The Decalogue is not art, but it is the guide-post which points direct to where the source of art springs ; and it is now, as in the day when Numa and Moses made their laws : he is profane who presents to the gods the fruit of an unpruned vine ; that is, sensitive worship before the sensitive soul has been sanctified by habitual confession of and obedience to the rational ; and still worse than he who offers the Muses the " false fire" of his gross senses is he who heats the flesh-pots of Egypt with flames from the altar, and renders emotions, which were intended to make the mortal immortal, themselves the means and the subjects of corruption. Of all kinds of corruption, says St. Francis of Sales, the most malodorous is rotten lilies. By very far the largest proportion of" the emotions," namely, corporeal pleasures and pains, have no place at all in true art, unless, indeed, they may be occasion- ally and sparingly used as discords in the great harmony of the drama. Joy, and pathos of its privation, are the "pain" and "pleasure" of art, poetic "melan- choly " and " indignation " being the sigh of joy indefinitely delayed, and wroth at the obstruction of its good by evil. These form the main region of the lyric poet. But, as joy and pathos are higher than pleasure and pain, being concerned with the possession or privation of a real good, so in peace which is as much above joy as joy is above pleasure, and which can scarcely be called emotion, since it rests, as it were, in final good, the primum mobile, which is with- out motion we find ourselves in the region of " great " 24 EMOTIONAL ART art. Pleasure is an itch of the cold and corrupt flesh, and must end with corruption ; joy is the life of the natural and innocent breast, prophesying peace, but too full of desire to obtain it yet ; peace is the indwell- ing of God and the habitual possession of all our desires, and it is too grave and quiet even for a smile. This character of peace in art and life has some- times affected entire states of civilisation, hovering like an angel even in atmospheres profoundly tainted with impurities, and giving an involuntary greatness to the lives and works of men to whom its source was invisible; breathing through the veils of Eleusis the beauty of the glorified body into the marbles of Phidias, and guiding the brush of Titian and Raphael, and even the chisel of Cellini, by the hand of a spirit whose dwelling was the inmost sanctuary of the Temple. What then, it will be answered, shall be said of that poetry, some of it the most exquisite in the world, which seeks only to evoke an echo, in the reader's bosom, of human love ? This : That love if it be worthy of the name is the highest of virtues, as well as the sweetest of emotions. Nay, that it is the sweetest of emotions because it is the highest of vir- tues, ordering the whole being of man " strongly and sweetly " ; being in the brain confession of good ; in the heart, love for, and desire to sacrifice everything for the good of, its object ; in the senses, peace, purity, and ardour. VI PEACE IN LIFE AND ART IF we compare ancient with modern art, and the minds and manners of our far ancestors with the minds and manners of the present time, it can hardly fail to strike us that the predominant presence of peace in the former and its absence in the latter con- stitute the most characteristic difference. Peace, as it was held to be the last effect and reward of a faithful life, was regarded as the ideal expression of life in painting, sculpture, poetry, and architecture ; and accordingly the tranquil sphere of all the greatest of great art is scarcely troubled by a tear or a smile. This peace is no negative quality. It does not consist in the mere absence of disturbance by pain or pleasure. It is the peace of which St. Thomas says " perfect joy and peace are identical," and is the atmosphere of a region in which smiles and tears are alike imperti- nences. In such art the expression of pain and pleasure is never an end, as it almost always is with us moderns, but a means of glorifying that peace which is capable of supporting either without per- turbation. " Peace," says again the great writer above quoted, " is the tranquillity of order, and has its seat in the will." A word about this living order, 25 26 PEACE IN LIFE AND ART which all great art aspires to express. Each soul is created to become a beauty and felicity which is in a measure unique, and every one who has attained to a life upon his own lines desires to become more and more truly and manifestly this singular excellence and happiness for which he alone was born. This is his " ruling love," his individuality, the centre towards which his thoughts and actions gravitate, and about which his whole being revolves ; while this individual being again travels about that greater centre which gives a common unity and generosity to all individ- ualities. This double order has its exact analogue in that of the motions of the heavenly bodies, and is that by which alone the motions of souls are made heavenly. For the proof of this doctrine no one need go further than his conscience if he has one. If he has not, since there is no peace for the like of him, the discussion of its nature need not occupy his attention. This peace, which is the common character of all true art and of all true life, involves, in its fullest perfection, at once the complete subdual and the glorification of the senses, and the " ordering of all things strongly and sweetly from end to end." " Forth from the glittering spirit's peace And gaiety ineffable Stream to the heart delight and ease, As from an overflowing well ; And, orderly deriving thence Its pleasure perfect and allow'd, Bright with the spirit shines the sense, As with the sun a fleecy cloud." PEACE IN LIFE AND ART 27 It is sufficient, however, for the honour of art and life that peace should be dominant in the mind and will. Lessing observes that the dignity and repose of Greek tragedy is in no way disturbed by cries of grief and pain, too violent for modern art, because the tragedian makes it clear that these perturbations are only in the outer man, the stability of the interior being therefore illustrated rather than clouded by such demonstrations. In the Shakspearian tragedy the seat of this supreme expression is removed, for the most part, from the personality of the characters engaged, to the mind of the reader, reflecting that of the poet, who evolves peace from the conflict of interests and passions to which the predominance and victory of a single moral idea gives unity. That idea is never embodied in any single conspicuous character, though it is usually allowed an unobtrusive expression in some subordinate personality, in order to afford a clue to the " theme " of the whole harmony. Such theme-suggesting characters are, for example, the Friar in Romeo and Juliet, and Kent in King Lear, who represent and embody the law from which all the other characters depart more or less, with propor- tionate disaster to themselves. Delights and pleasures demand, no less than grief and pain, to be subordinated to peace, in order to become worthy of life and art. The cynicism and the corrupt melancholy of much of our modern life and art are the inevitable results of the desires being set upon delights and pleasures in which there is not peace. 28 PEACE IN LIFE AND ART The peace, which is " identical with perfect joy " in life and its expression in art, is also identical with purity, which is so far from being, as is commonly supposed, a negative quality, that it is the unimpeded ardour of ordered life in all its degrees, and is as necessary to the full delight of the senses as it is to the highest felicity of the spirit. Hence the greatest art, in which all things are " ordered sweetly " by essential peace, and in which pleasure is only the inevitable accident, is exceedingly bold. Its thoughts are naked and not ashamed ; and Botticelli, in his celestial " Venus " in the National Gallery, expresses, without raising a disorderly fancy, things which Titian, in his leering Venus of the stews, at Florence, is too " chaste " to hint. There are, probably, few persons who are so un- happy as not to have experienced a few moments in life during which they have drawn breath in a region in which pleasure and pain are discerned to be, in themselves, neither good nor evil, and even so much like each other that there is not much to choose between them. Those who have known such moments, and who preserve the memory of them as the standard of life, at least in desire, have alone the key to the comprehension of great art, or the possi- bility of approaching to it in execution. Such know- ledge so respected is the initial condition of that only true " style " which is the unique aspect of the indi- vidual soul to the absolute beauty and joy ; of that living " repose, which marks the manners of the great " in art, and which bears upon the stately move- ment of its eternal stream the passions, pains, and PEACE IN LIFE AND ART 29 pleasures of life like eddies which show the motion that is too great to be perturbed by them. For the time, at least, this quality, as I have said, has almost disappeared from art. It lingered in the best poetry, painting, and music of the last century and of the beginning of this. It was the ideal to which Goethe, Coleridge, Keats, and Wordsworth aspired, and in a few pieces attained. The gravity of Handel is sweet with it, and the sweetness of Mozart grave. Gainsborough, Crome, and Hogarth were more or less moved by it ; and we still judge art such of us as have any power of judgment by the standard of this glory, though we have lost the secret of its creation. VII PATHOS NEITHER Aristotle nor Hegel, the two great expositors of the relation of the emotions to art, has discussed the nature of that which is understood by moderns as " pathos." Aristotle has described in his Rhetoric, with the greatest acuteness and sensibility the conditions and modes of exciting pity. But pity includes much that is excluded by pathos ; and it may be useful to endeavour to ascertain what the limitations of the latter are, and what are its conditions in relation more particularly to art, in which it plays so important a part. Pity, then, differs from pathos in this : the latter is simply emotional, and reaches no higher than the sensitive nature ; though the sensitive nature, being dependent for its power and delicacy very much upon the cultivation of will and intellect, maybe indefinitely developed by these active factors of the soul. Pity is helpful and is not deadened or repelled by circum- stances which disgust the simply sensitive nature ; and its ardour so far consumes such obstacles to merely emotional sympathy, that the person who truly pities finds the field of pathos extended far beyond the 3 PATHOS 31 ordinary limits of the dainty passion which gives tears to the eyes of the selfish as well as the self-sacrificing. In an ideally perfect nature, indeed, pity and pathos, which is the feeling of pity, would be coextensive ; and the latter would demand for its condition the existence of the former, with some ground of actual reality to work beneficially upon. On the other hand, entire selfishness would destroy even the faintest capacity for discerning pathos in art or circumstance. In the great mass of men and women there is suffi- cient virtue of pity pity that would act if it had the opportunity to extend in them the feeling of pity, that is pathos, to a far larger range of circumstances than their active virtue would be competent to encounter, even if it had the chance. Suffering is of itself enough to stir pity ; for absolute wickedness, with the torment of which all wholesome minds would be quite content, cannot be certainly pre- dicated of any individual sufferer ; but pathos, whether in adrawing-room tale of delicate distress or in a tragedy of ^Eschylus or Shakespeare, requires that some obvious goodness, or beauty, or innocence, or heroism should be the subject of suffering, and that the circumstance or narration of it should have certain conditions of repose, contrast, and form. The range of pathos is immense, extending from the immolation of an Isaac or an Iphigenia to the death of a kitten that purrs and licks the hand about to drown it. Next to the fact of good- ness, beauty, innocence, or heroism in the sufferer, contrast is the chief factor in artistic pathos. The celestial sadness of Desdemona's death is immensely heightened by the black shadow of lago; and the 32 PATHOS singer of Fair Rosamund's sorrows knew the value of contrast when he sang Hard was the heart that gave the blow, Soft were those lips that bled. Every one knows how irresistible are a pretty woman's tears. Nought is there under heav'n's wide hollowness That moves more dear compassion of mind Than beauty brought to unworthy wretchedness. It is partly the contrast of beauty, which is the natural appanage of happiness, that renders her tears so pathetic ; but it is still more the way in which she is given to smiling through them. The author of the Rhetoric shows his usual incomparable subtilty of observation when he notes that a little good coming upon or in the midst of extremity of evil is a source of the sharpest pathos ; and when the shaft of a passion- ate female sorrow is feathered with beauty and pointed with a smile there is no heart that can refuse her her will. In absolute and uncontrolled suffering there is no pathos. Nothing in the Inferno has this quality except the passage of Paolo and Francesca, still embracing, through the fiery drift. It is the embrace that makes the pathos, " tempering extremities with extreme sweet," or at least with the memory of it. Our present sorrows generally owe their grace of pathos to their "crown," which is "remembering happier things." No one weeps in sympathy with the " base self-pitying tears " of Thersites, or with those of any whose grief is without some contrasting dignity of curb. Even a little child does not move us by its PATHOS 33 sorrow, when expressed by tears and cries, a tenth part so much as by the quivering lip of attempted self-control. A great and present evil, coupled with a distant and uncertain hope, is also a source of pathos ; if indeed it be not the same with that which Aristotle describes as arising from the sequence of exceeding ill and a little good. There is pathos in a departing pleasure, however small. It is the fact of sunset, not its colours which are the same as those at sunrise that constitutes its sadness ; and in mere darkness there may be fear and distress, but not pathos. There are few things so pathetic in literature as the story of the supper which Amelia, in Fielding's novel, had prepared for her husband, and to which he did not come, and that of Colonel Newcome becoming a Charterhouse pensioner. In each of these cases the pathos arises wholly from the contrast of noble reticence with a sorrow which has no direct expression. The same necessity for contrast renders reconciliations far more pathetic than quarrels, and the march to battle of an army to the sound of cheerful military music more able to draw tears than the spectacle of the battle itself. The soul of pathos, like that of wit, is brevity. Very few writers are sufficiently aware of this. Humour is cumulative and diffusive, as Shakespeare, Rabelais, and Dickens well knew ; but how many a good piece of pathos has been spoiled by the historian of Little Nell by an attempt to make too much of it ! A drop of citric acid will give poignancy to a feast ; but a draught of it ! Hence it is doubtful whether an English eye ever shed a tear over the Vita Nuova, D 34 PATHOS whatever an Italian may have done. Next to the patient endurance of heroism, the bewilderment of weakness is the most fruitful source of pathos. Hence the exquisitely touching points in A Pair of Blue Eyes, Two on a Tower, The Trumpet -Major, and other of Hardy's novels. Pathos is the luxury of grief ; and when it ceases to be other than a keen-edged pleasure it ceases to be pathos. Hence Tennyson's question in " Love and Duty," " Shall sharpest pathos blight us ?" involves a misunderstanding of the word; although his under- standing of the thing is well proved by such lyrics as " Tears, idle tears," and " O well for the fisherman's boy." Pleasure and beauty which may be said to be pleasure visible are without their highest perfec- tion if they are without a touch of pathos. This touch, indeed, accrues naturally to profound pleasure and to great beauty by the mere fact of the incon- gruity of their earthly surroundings and the sense of isolation, peril, and impermanence caused thereby. It is a doctrine of that inexhaustible and (except by Dante) almost unworked mine of poetry, Catholic theology, that the felicity of the angels and glorified saints and of God Himself would not be perfect with- out the edge of pathos, which it receives from the fall and reconciliation of man. Hence, on Holy Saturday the Church exclaims, " O felix culpa !" and hence " there is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth than over ninety and nine righteous who need no repentance." Sin, says St. Augustine, is the necessary shadow of heaven ; and pardon, says some other, is the highest light of its beatitude. VIII POETICAL INTEGRITY THE assertion that the value of the words of a poet does and ought to depend very much upon his personal character may seem, at the first glance, a violent paradox ; but it is demonstrably true. A wise or tender phrase in the mouth of a Byron or a Moore will be despised, where a commonplace of morality or affection in that of a Wordsworth or a Burns is re- spected. If the author of Don Juan had said that for him " the meanest flower that blows could give thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,' as he would have said had it occurred to him to do so, no one would have believed him ; it would have passed for a mere " poetical licence," and would have been excused as such and forgotten. Byron and Wordsworth have both declared in words of similar force and beauty that the sights and sounds of nature " haunted them like a passion." But the declaration is not consistent with what we know of Byron, and it is consistent with what we know of Wordsworth ; and in the one case it creates a like frame of mind in the reader, while in the other it passes like a melodious wind, leaving no impression. Now this mighty element of character resides, not in the poet's active 35 36 POETICAL INTEGRITY life, by which he is and ought to be socially judged, but in the spiritual consistency and integrity of his mind and heart, as it is to be inferred from the cumu- lative testimony of his words, which are, after all, the safest witnesses of what the man truly is. A man's actions although we are bound socially to judge him thereby may belie him : his words never. Out of his mouth shall the interior man be judged ; for the interior man is what he heartily desires to be, however miserably he may fail to bring his external life into correspondence with his desire ; and the words of the man will infallibly declare what he thus inwardly is, especially when, as in the case of the poet, the powers of language are so developed as to become the very glass of the soul, reflecting its purity and integrity, or its stains and insincerities, with a fidelity of which the writer himself is but imperfectly conscious. To a soundly trained mind there is no surer sign of shallowness and of interior corruption than that habitual predominance of form over formative energy, of splendour of language and imagery over human significance, which has so remarkably distinguished a great deal of the most widely praised poetry of the past eighty years. Much of this poetry has about as much relation to actual or imaginative reality as the transformation scene of a pantomime ; and much more called " descriptive " has so low a degree of significance and betrays so inhuman an absorption in the merest superficies of nature, that when the writer pretends to deal with those facts and phenomena of humanity which, directly or indirectly, are the main region of every true poet's song, he has to overcome POETICAL INTEGRITY 37 our sense that he is an habitual trifler before he can gain credit for sincerity, even when he is giving utter- ance to what may really be a passing strain of true poetic thought and feeling. A poet who is thus constantly occupied with the superficies of nature may probably attain to an accuracy and splendour of analytical description which has its value in its way, and which may, in certain transitory conditions of popular taste, raise him to the highest pinnacle of favour. But such poetry will be judged, in the end, by its human significance ; and the writer of it will have the fatal verdict of " heartless " recorded against him a verdict which even in the time of his favour is implicitly pronounced by the indifference with which his professions of human principle and feeling are received even by his admirers. The slightest touch of genuine humanity is of more actual and poetic value than all that is not human which the sun shines on. The interest of what is called " descriptive " or " representative" in real poetry and all real art is always human, or, in other words, " imaginative." A description by Wordsworth, Cole- ridge or Burns, a landscape by Crome, Gainsborough or Constable, is not merely nature, but nature re- flected in and giving expression to a true state of mind. The state of mind is the true subject, the natural phenomena the terms in which it is uttered ; and there has never been a greater critical fallacy than that con- tained in Mr. Ruskin's strictures on the "pathetic fallacy." Nature has no beauty or pathos (using the term in its widest sense) but that with which the mind invests it. Without the imaginative eye it is like a 38 POETICAL INTEGRITY flower in the dark, which is only beautiful as having in it a power of reflecting the colours of the light. The true light of nature is the human eye ; and if the light of the human eye is darkness, as it is in those who see nothing but surfaces, how great is that darkness ! The saying of Wordsworth concerning the Poet, that You must love him ere to you He will seem worthy of your love, which at first reading sounds very much like non- sense, is absolutely true. He must have won your credit and confidence in his words, by proofs of habitual veracity and sincerity, before you can so receive the words which come from his heart that they will move your own. If, in the utterance of what he offers to you as the cry or the deep longing of passion, you catch him busily noticing trifles for which very likely he gets praise " accurate observa- tion of nature " you will put him down as one who knows nothing of the passion he is pretending to express. If you detect him in the endeavour to say "fine things" in order to win your admiration for himself, instead of rendering his whole utterance a single true thing, which shall win your sympathy with the thought or feeling by which he declares himself to be dominated, the result will be the same ; as also it will be if you discover that the beauty of his words is obtained rather by the labour of polish than by the inward labour and true finish of passion. When, on the other hand, some familiarity with the poet's work POETICAL INTEGRITY 39 has assured you that, though his speech may be un- equal and sometimes inadequate, it is never false; that he has always something to say, even when he fails in saying it : then you will not only believe in and be moved by what he says well ; but when the form is sometimes imperfect you will be carried over such passages, as over thin ice, by the formative power of passion or feeling which quickens the whole ; although you would reject such passages with disgust were they found in the writing of a man in whose thoughts you know that the manner stands first and the matter second. IX THE POETRY OF NEGATION ~T)OETRY is essentially catholic and affirmative, deal- X ing only with the permanent facts of nature and humanity, and interested in the events and contro- versies of its own time only so far as they evolve manifestly abiding fruits. But the abiding fruits of such events and controversies are very rarely manifest until the turmoil in which they are produced has long since subsided ; and therefore poets, in all times before our own, have either allowed the present to drift un- heeded by, or have so handled its phenomena as to make them wholly subsidiary to and illustrative of matters of well-ascertained stability. The many occasional poems of pastimes, of which temporary incidents have been the subjects, in no way contradict this assertion in the main ; and the casual example of a poet like Dryden affords only the confirming excep- tion. Dryden was fond of protesting, especially when he was a Catholic ; and there is no doubt but that this habit added greatly to his popularity in his life- time, as it does to the favour in which some of the most distinguished of our modern poets are now held ; but all those points which probably constituted the high lights of Dryden's poetry to his contemporaries 4 o THE POETRY OF NEGATION 41 have suffered in course of tirtie a change like that which has come over the whites of many of Sir Joshua Reynold's pictures ; and it is much to be feared that a similar fate awaits a large proportion of what has been written by several of the best poets of the generation now passing away. Most of our recent poets, even while condemning political revolution, have shared in the ideas or feelings which are at the bottom of revolu- tions, a hope which the facts of nature do not justify, and a disbelief in what those facts do justify namely, the ineradicable character of moral evil with its circum- stantial consequences. The heart of the modern poet is, as a rule, always vibrating between the extremes of despondent grumbling at the present conditions and hasty and unreasonable aspirations for the improve- ment of his kind ; his tragedies and hymns of rejoicing are alike void of the dignity and repose which arise from a sound confession of the facts of humanity and a cheerful resignation to its imperfections ; and he whose true function is to stand aside as the tranquil seer too often now becomes the excited agent in matters which concern him least of all men, because of all men he is the least fitted to meddle with them. It is hard to say which is more wonderful the clear- ness of the true poet's vision for things when he is content with looking at them as they are, or his blind- ness when he fancies he can mend them. Famous statesmen have marvellously drivelled in verse, but not more marvellously than famous poets have drivelled in what pertains to statesmanship. It is scarcely without a feeling of amazement that a man of ordinary good sense contrasts the power of poetic vision in 42 THE POETRY OF NEGATION writers like Victor H ugo and Carlyle with the childish- ness of their judgments when they propose antidotes for evils which they so clearly see, but for which they do not see that there are no antidotes, but only pallia- tives. Looking for what they fancy may be, when their vocation is to proclaim with clearness that which is, one poet will shriek to us (for untruths cannot be sung) that all will be well when King Log is down and King Stork reigns in his stead ; another that Niagara may yet be dammed if country gentlemen will hire drill-sergeants to put their gardeners and farm-labourers through the goose-step ; another says the world will be saved if a few gentlemen and ladies, with nothing better to do, will take to playing at being their own domestics ; a fourth, in order to save morals, proposes their abolition ; a fifth proclaims that all will have good wages when there remains no one to pay them; a sixth discovers in the science of the future a sedative for human passions instead of a wider platform for their display ; and so on. Others, who have no patent medicines on hand, impotently grumble or rage at evils in which, if they looked steadily, they might discern the good of justice, or that of trial, or both (as great poets in past times always have done) ; and, instead of truly singing, they sob hysterical sympathy with such sufferings in others as, if they were their own, they either would bear or know that they ought to bear with equanimity. The statesman, the social reformer, the political economist, the natural philosopher, the alms-giver, the hospital visitor, the preacher, even the cynical THE POETRY OF NEGATION 43 humorist, has each his function, and each is rightly more or less negative ; but the function of the poet is clearly distinguished from all of these, and is higher though less obtrusive than any. It is simply affirma- tive of things which it greatly concerns men to know, but which they have either not discovered or have allowed to lapse into the death of commonplace. He alone has the power of revealing by his insight and magic words the undreamt-of mines of felicity which exist potentially for all in social relationships and affections. The inexhaustible glories of nature are a blank for many who are yet able to behold them reflected in his perceptions. His convincing song can persuade many to believe in, if they do not attain to taste as he, if indeed he be a poet, must have tasted the sweet and wholesome kernel which the rough shell of unmerited suffering conceals for those who are patient. And he can so contemplate the one real evil in the world as to give body and life and intelligibility to that last and sharpest cry of faith, " O felix culpa." The temptations which our time offers to the poet in order to induce him to forsake his own line are very great, and poets are human. The conceited present craves to have singers of its own, who will praise it, or at least abuse it ; and it pays them well for pandering to its self-consciousness, lavishing its best honours upon them as leaders of the " Liberal movement," and scoffing at those, as " behind their time," who stand apart and watch and help those abiding developments of humanity which advance " with the slow process of the suns." "DISTINCTION"* I HAVE been taken to task at great length and with great severity by the Spectator for having identified the