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Chapter XI
The Course of English Poetry 3
THE ELIZABETHAN drama is an expression of the stir of the life-spirit; at its best it has a great or strong, buoyant or rich or beautiful, passionately excessive or gloomily tenebrous force of vital poetry. The rest of the utterance of the time is full of the lyric joy, sweetness or emotion or moved and coloured self-description of the same spirit. There is much in it of curious and delighted thinking, but little of a high and firm intellectual value. Culture is still in its imaginative childhood and the thinking mind rather works for the curiosity and beauty of thought and even more for the curiosity and beauty of the mere expression of thought than for its light and its vision. The poetry which comes out of this mood is likely to have great charm and imaginative, emotional or descriptive appeal, but may very well miss that depth of profounder substance and that self-possessing plenitude of form which are the other and indispensable elements of a rounded artistic creation. Beauty of poetical expression abounds in an unstinted measure, but for the music of a deeper spirit or higher significance we have to wait; the attempt at it we get, but not often all the success of its presence. Spenser, the poet of second magnitude of the time, gives us in his work this beauty in its fullest abundance, but also the limited measure of that greater but not quite successful endeavour. The Faerie Queene is indeed a poem of unfailing imaginative charm and its two opening cantos are exquisite in execution; there is a stream of liquid harmony, of curiously opulent, yet finely tempered description, of fluid poetical phrase and minutely seen image. For these are Spenser's constant gifts, the native form of his genius which displays more of descriptive vision than of any larger creative power or narrative force. An inspired idea is worked out; a little too much lost in detail and in the diffusion of Page – 83 a wealthy prolixity, it still holds well together its rather difficult and entangling burden of symbols and forms and achieves in the end some accomplished totality of fine poetic effect. But if we read on after this fine opening and look at the poem as a whole, the effect intended fails, not because it happened to be left unfinished, nor even because the power in it is not equally sustained and is too evidently running thinner and thinner as it proceeds, but because it could not have come to a successful completion. Kalidasa's Birth of the War-God was left unfinished, or finished by a very inferior hand, yet even in the fragment there is already a masterly totality of effect; there is the sense of a great and admirable design. Virgil's Aeneid, though in a way finished, did not receive those last touches which sometimes make all the difference between perfection and the approach to it; and we feel too, not a failure of art, — for that is a defect which could never be alleged against Virgil, — but a relative thinning of the supporting power and inspiration. Still the consummate artistic intelligence of the poet has been so steadily at work, so complete from the very inception, it has so thought out and harmonised its idea from the beginning that a fine and firm total effect is given. But here there is a defect of the artistic intellect, a vice or insufficiency in its original power of harmonising construction, characteristic of the Elizabethan, almost of the English mind. Spenser's intention seems to have been to combine in his own way the success of Ariosto with the success of Dante. His work was to have been in its form a rich and beautiful romance; but it must be too at the same time a great interpretation by image and symbol, not here of the religious or spiritual, but of the ethical meaning of human life. A faery-tale and a vivid ethical symbol in one is his conception of his artistic task. That is a kind of combination difficult enough to execute, but capable of a great and beautiful effect in a master hand. But the Elizabethan intellectual direction runs always towards conceit and curious complication; it is unable to follow an idea for the sake of what is essential in it, but tangles it up in all sorts of turns and accessories: seizing on all manner of disparates, it tends to throw them together without any real fusion. Spenser in his idea and its Page – 84 execution fell a victim to all these defects of the intelligence. He has taken his intellectual scheme from his Hellenism, the virtues to be figured in typical human beings; but he has dressed it up with the obvious and trivial mediaeval ingenuity of the allegory. Nor is he satisfied with a simple form of this combination; he has an ambition of all-including representativeness which far exceeds his or perhaps any possible power of fusing creation. The turn of the allegory must be at once ethical, ecclesiastical and political in one fell complexity; his witch of Faery-land embodies Falsehood, the Roman Catholic Church and Mary Queen of Scots in an irritating and impossible jumble. The subject of a poem of this kind has to be the struggle of the powers of good and evil, but the human figures through whom it works out to its issues, cannot be merely the good or the evil, this or that virtue or vice; they should stand for them as their expressive opportunity of life, not merely as their allegorical body. Spenser, a great poet, is not blind to this elementary condition; but his tangled skein of allegory continually hampers the sounder conception, and the interpretative narration works itself out through the confused maze of its distracting elements which we are obliged to accept, not for their own interest or living force and appeal, but for the beauty of the poetic expression and description to which they give occasion. Besides this fault of the initial conception, there are defects in the execution. After a time at least the virtues and vices altogether lose their way in faery-land or they become mistily vague and negligible; and this, considering the idea of the poem, ought not to be, but certainly is a great relief to the reader. We are well contented to read the poem or, still better, each canto apart as a romance and leave the ulterior meaning to take care of itself; what was intended as a great ethical interpretative poem of the human soul, lives only as a beautiful series of romantic descriptions and incidents. We can see where the defect is if we make a comparison with the two greater poems of Greece and India which had an intention not altogether unsimilar, the Ramayana fusing something like a vast faery-tale with the story of an immense struggle between Page – 85 world-powers of good and evil, the Odyssey with its magic of romance and its story of the assertion of right and of domestic and personal virtue against unbridled licence and wrong in an epic encounter between these opposite forces. The Odyssey is a battle of human will and character supported by divine power against evil men and wrathful gods and adverse circumstance and the deaf opposition of the elements, and its scenes move with an easy inevitability between the lands of romance and the romance of actual human life; but nowhere does the poet lose in the wealth of incident and description either the harmonising aesthetic colour or the simple central idea. The Ramayana too is made up of first materials which belong to the world of faery romance; but, lifted into an epic greatness, they support easily a grandiose picture of the struggle of incarnate God and Titan, of a human culture expressing the highest order and range of ethical values with a giant empire of embattled anarchic force, egoistic violence and domination and lawless self-assertion. The whole is of a piece, and even in its enormous length and protracted detail there is a victorious simplicity, largeness and unity. The English poet loses himself in the outward, in romantic incident and description pursued by his imagination for their own sake. His idea is often too much and too visibly expressed, yet in the end finds no successful expression. Instead of relying upon the force of his deeper poetic idea to sustain him, he depends on intellectual device and parades his machinery. The thread of connection is wandering and confused. He achieves a diffuse and richly confused perplexity, not the unity of a living whole. These are the natural limitations of the Elizabethan age, and we have to note them with what may seem at first a disproportionate emphasis, because they are the key to the immediately following reaction of English poetry with its turn in Milton towards a severe and serious intellectual effort and discipline and its fall in Dryden and Pope to a manner which got away from the most prominent defects of the Elizabethan mind at the price of a complete and disastrous loss of all its great powers. English poetry before Milton had not passed through any training of the poetic and artistic intelligence; it had abounding energy and Page – 86 power, but no self-discipline of the idea. Except in Shakespeare it fails to construct; it at once loses and finds itself in a luxurious indulgence of its force, follows with a loose sweetness or a vehement buoyancy all its impulses good, bad or indifferent. Still what it does achieve, is unique and often superlative in its kind. It achieves an unsurpassed splendour of imaginative vitality and eager vision of the life spirit, and an unsurpassed intensity of poetical expression; life vents itself in speech, pours its lyric emotion, lavishes its intimate and intuitive description of itself in passionate detail, thinks aloud in a native utterance of poetry packed with expressive image or felicitous in directness. There is no other poetry which has in at all the same degree this achievement. This poetry is then great in achievement within the limits of its method and substance. That substance and method belong to the second step of the psychological gradations by which poetry becomes a more and more profound and subtle instrument of the self-expression of the human spirit. English poetry, I have remarked, follows the grades of this ascension with a singular fidelity of sequence. At first it was satisfied with only a primary superficial response to the most external appearances of life, its visible figures and incidents, its primary feelings and characteristics. To mirror these things clearly, justly, with a certain harmony of selection and a just sufficient transmutation in the personality and aesthetic temperament is enough for this earlier type of poetry, all the more easily satisfied because everything seen by the eye is fresh, interesting, stimulating, and the liveliness of the poetic impression replaces the necessity of subtlety or depth. Great poetry can be written in early times with this as its substantial method, but not afterwards when the race mind has begun to make an intenser and more inward response to life. It then becomes the resort of a secondary inspiration which is unable to rise to the full heights of poetic possibility. Or else, if this external method still persists as part of the outward manner of a more subjective creation, it is with a demand for more heightened effects and a more penetrating expression. The last was the demand and method of the Elizabethan age. Page – 87 In Elizabethan poetry the physical and external tendency still persists, but it is no longer sufficient to satisfy either the perceiving spirit or its creative force. Where it is most preserved, it still demands a more vehement response, strong colours, violent passions, exaggerated figures, out-of-the-way or crowding events. Life is still the Muse of this poetry, but it is a Life which demands to feel itself more and is already knocking or trying to knock at the gates of the deeper subjective being. And in all the best work of the time it has already got there, not very deep, but still enough to be initially subjective. Whatever Shakespeare may suggest, — a poet's critical theories are not always a just clue to his inspiration, — there is not here any true or exact holding up of a mirror to life and Nature, but instead a moved and excited reception and evocation. Life throws its impressions, but what seizes upon them is a greater and deeper life-power in the poet which is not satisfied with mirroring or just beautifully responding to what is cast upon it, but begins to throw up at once around them its own rich matter of receptive being and shaping force and so creates something new, something more personal, intimate, fuller of a first inner vision, emotion, passion of self-expression. This is the source of the new intensity; it is this impulse towards an utterance of the creative life-power within which drives towards the dramatic form and acts with such unexampled power in Shakespeare. At another extremity of the Elizabethan mind, in Spenser, it gets much farther away from the actuality of life; it takes the impressions of the surrounding physical world as hints only for a purely imaginative creation which seems to be truly drawn not from the life of earth, but from a more beautiful and harmonious life-scene that exists either within our own unplumbed depths or on other subtler vital or physical planes. This creation has an aim in it at things symbolic, otherwise revelatory, deeper down in the soul itself, and it tries to shadow them out through the magic of romance, since it cannot yet intimately seize and express them. Still even there the method of the utterance, if not altogether its aim, is the voice of Life lifting itself out into waves of word and colour and image and sheer beauty of sound. Imagination, thought, vision Page – 88 work with the emotional life-mind as their instrument or rather work in it as a medium, accepted as the very form of their being and the very force of their nature. Great poetry is the result, but there are other powers of the human consciousness which have not yet been mastered, and to get at these is the next immediate step of English poetry. The way it follows is to bring forward the intellect as its chief instrument; the thought-mind is no longer carried along in the wave of life, but detaches itself from it to observe and reflect upon it. At first there is an intermediate manner, that of Milton's early work and of the Carolean poets, in which something of the Elizabethan impulse, something of its intense imaginative sight or its charm of emotion, prolongs itself for a while, but is fast fading away under the stress of an increasing intellectuality, a strong dryness of the light of the reason and a growing hardness of form and concentrated narrowness of the observing eye. This movement rises on one side into the ripened classical perfection of Milton, and falls away on the other through Waller into the reaction in Dryden and Pope. Page –89 |